Coming tomorrow...The Horror! Nite Songs' Worst 50 Albums Ever

One of the best things about running your own music webzine is when you get positive feedback. It's always nice when bands get in touch to say "hey, thanks for covering our music on your blog" or readers feel moved enough to write in and say they enjoy my deranged scribblings. It genuinely makes you feel that you're doing something worthwhile and feel just that little bit better about life.

I mainly say this because I know that this one-off feature we're running on Nite Songs for the next week is probably going to upset some people. Doing a Worst Albums Ever article is always a risky business because, in the words of a musician friend of mine from back in the days when I used to write for Leeds Music Scene, "Opinions are like arseholes. Everybody's got one. And most people's are full of shit." If anything here over the next week offends you, please bear in mind that this is just my take on things - I'm fully aware that there may be some people out there who think that at least a few of the efforts in this list probably don't deserve it. And that's cool - as I've often said, it'd be a boring world if everyone agreed on everything.

So why, in that case, did I decide to do a 50 Worst Albums list at all? Well, again, I'm going to go back to my days writing for Leeds Music Scene and Sandman (and, to be honest, my first few years of writing for Bubblegum Slut and Pure Rawk as well). As anyone who remembers my writing style back then (and if so, you have a very good memory!) will know, back then I used to be a very gobby opinionated little shit who wasn't afraid of calling out under-par or over-hyped bands for being rubbish. As I've often said in Sounds From The Junkshop columns past, blame it on me being a big fan of the late great Steven Wells when I was learning my trade. Very occasionally it would get me into trouble* but often those bad reviews provided a useful purpose, namely that of letting off steam at the state of the music scene around you and your particular gripes with it. Again, going back to Swells, one of my favourite quotes of his was "Music journalists are the dungbeetles of rock. Without us, the whole system would collapse under the weight of its own excrement. Be grateful."

(* Quick side note - two memories stick out from those "hatchet job Andy" years, firstly getting a load of hatemail from Arctic Monkeys fans after describing one of their early EP's as "whiny drivel with all the glamour of the queue for a 50p battered saveloy deal at the local chippie" - which I still stand by incidentally - and secondly being hilariously threatened with actual violence by a group of eight stone dripping wet dreadful Motley Crue wannabes after I slagged their band off in a live review - word of advice kids, if your band act like dickheads on the night and start threatening the soundman for cutting you off one song early to stop the gig overrunning then you probably deserve any poison pen treatment you get) 

However, the fact is that with the internet bringing people closer together and print fanzines being an almost extinct breed these days, being negative about bands is something that it's a lot harder to get away with for us reviewers as leaving a negative comment on an article and persuading your fans to pile in takes a lot less effort than writing and posting a letter of complaint. Plus the cliché about us mellowing out as we grow older is probably true - as a man who's now in his early forties, I seem to have lost the appetite for picking fights with people unless they well and truly deserve it. These days if I receive a review CD or download which turns out to be terrible, I'll simply leave it alone and not review it unless I really feel strongly about how awful it is. It probably says a lot that I've only ever given one album less than 5/10 in 15 months of doing this blog (and the band in question may well be showing up in this list, natch). So I guess you could say that this is basically an excuse to let some good old fashioned poison pen venom out because, let's face it, us reviewers don't really get much of an opportunity to do that nowadays. In the immortal words of the great and good Carter USM "When progress moves so fast, it leaves us in the past with platform shoes and dinosaurs".

Over the next week, I'll be running through a list of what I consider to be the 50 worst albums that I've ever heard. There are, of course, some ground rules here. Firstly, I'm going to try and resist the temptation to fill the list with bands who are easy targets like, say, Coldplay or Nickelback or Falling In Reverse or Creed or Puddle of Mudd because, let's be honest, that's a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. And in any case, none of them would qualify for this list anyway as I've never listened to any of their albums all the way through for the simple reason that, from listening to the songs of theirs I've heard played on the radio, I know it wouldn't be for me (actually, that's not strictly true, I did listen to Coldplay's Parachutes way back in the day. I thought it was...well, average really - far from the best thing I'd heard but inoffensive enough to not be the worst either, it just didn’t move me either way).

Similarly, it'd be really easy to just stuff this list with awful nu-metal, frat-punk and early noughties nu-grunge albums but if I did that it'd make for an incredibly repetitive read so I've tried to sort of distil those scenes down into some of the very worst offenders that sum up everything that, to my mind, was terrible about that time in music. So the likes of Blink 182, My Chemical Toilet (cheap joke I know, I care not), Staind, Disturbed, Sum 41, Papa Roach, New Found Glory, Alien Ant Farm, Drowning Pool, Jimmy Eat World, Simple Plan, American Hi-Fi and Linkin Park can all officially breathe a sigh of relief at this point. Yes, they were unquestionably dreadful but there's others out there who represent far more egregious examples of the abominable scenes they were part of back in the day.

I've also, where at all possible, tried to avoid personal dislikes coming into it. A good example here being Radiohead, a band who I've personally never particularly liked and always found incredibly pretentious, boring and unlistenable. But I'll concede that there are those (mistaken imho) souls who consider them geniuses for this very reason and I'm willing to concede that this is music that I maybe just don't "get". For that reason they, along with a few others, fall into the category of something like - Album I don't like? Yes. Worst album ever? Not really.

I think the main theme that connects the vast majority of albums here is that they were either by bands with, prior to the offending effort coming out at least, fairly solid track records or bands who could and should have delivered so much more than they did in their brief shot at the big time. The overbearing theme here can probably be therefore summed up in three words - must try harder. Or maybe six - what the f**k were you thinking?

As you can imagine, writing this article has been a labour of love (or maybe that should be hate) as I've ended up revisiting several albums I remember thinking were terrible as a youngster. To be fair, a good few of them still were. But, to my surprise, there were a couple that held up slightly better than I was expecting or just weren't quite terrible enough to crack the Top 50 (well okay, Top 54 - there are a few cases in there where it was impossible to choose between two, or in one case three, albums as being an otherwise decent band’s worst!) See below for those who can consider themselves to have narrowly escaped... 

THE STROKES - "Is This It?" (2001)

So, January 2001. With Melody Maker having gone under, NME is now the only "indie" (in such terms as the thing still exists at this point anyway) weekly music paper and the first thing they do is start hyping the Strokes, five then-unheard-of NYC trustafarians (I mean one of 'em's dad owned a record company, go figure) to high heaven. I was in my final year at Keele at this point and still doing my radio show on KUBE and I remember being sent a promo of the lead-off single The Modern Age. I played it on the air on the show I did with a mate at this point and our reaction was "well, that sounded more like something that was half-finished than anything". The single did nothing and we had a laugh and reasoned that the NME had essentially discovered another Terris or Campag Velocet who'd simply be gone again in six months.

Except...it didn't really happen like that. Someone somewhere in the Big Apple (probably one or more of the band's families) had pumped too much money into this project for it to be allowed to fail and inevitably it did break through with the band scoring three Top 20 singles and a number one album. The thing is, even listening to Is This It? twenty years after the fact, I still don't get the hype. It alternately sounds like Blondie if they'd subbed Debbie Harry for a bloke with a three note vocal range or Duran Duran trying cover a load of early '80s Iggy Pop B-sides (and as we'll see later on this list, much as I actually don't mind Duran Duran, covers albums are something they REALLY shouldn't be allowed anywhere near). Even the best (and best known) song Last Nite essentially sounds like Lust For Life with all the simmering aggression drained right out of it.

Million dollar looks and ten cent tunes was what I used to joke about this band at the time yet people lapped this half-arsed bollocks up with a spoon. So in a way, Is This It? was a depressing moment of realisation for me in that it was the point where I realised that even cooler-than-thou indie kids can be just as easily hoodwinked by an average band who've hired a top drawer marketing and image consultant as any group of teenybopper Take That or Spice Girls fans. The great and good Pepsi Sheen on the Sleazegrinder website very pointedly remarked at the time "Yes, the Strokes look amazing...BUT THAT IS WHAT BIG MONEY WILL GET YOU!" I mean does anyone honestly believe that this band would have made any sort of commercial impact with this set of songs if they'd hailed from Luton and their dads had been hod carriers or mechanics?!

So why isn't it in the Top 50 given my obvious dislike of it then? To be honest, this is probably the album which caused me the biggest headache in deciding whether to include it on this list or not but eventually though I decided against it for two reasons - firstly, I'll grudgingly admit that as the above probably makes clear, I do have a pretty deep-seated dislike of this band which has arguably coloured my judgment of them down the years. And secondly, for all its faults, Is This It? did serve a purpose - in the inevitable major label feeding frenzy that followed, some genuinely good garage rock bands were allowed to slip through the crack in the wall that the Strokes (and the similarly tedious White Stripes) created and enjoy some chart success and press that was actually, you know, deserved. I'm talking bands like Danko Jones, the Hellacopters, the D4, the Donnas and several others. So I guess you could call this album the benchmark for being on the horror list in that most of what you'll read in the actual Top 50 didn't even have a beneficial side effect to its lack of quality...

SULTANS OF PING FC – “Casual Sex In The Cineplex” (1992)

You know how it is. When you're at school and nail your colours to the mast in terms of your musical taste, there's always one below-par band out of the musical group that you like who your mates who like other stuff will use as a stick to beat you and claim that the stuff you like is shit. The Sultans of Ping FC were very much mine, the mangy dog with a gimpy leg bringing up the back of the fraggle movement and Christ, did I suffer for liking the Wonder Stuff and the Senseless Things as a teenager because of them.

Hailing from Dublin the Sultans kind of piggy-backed on the whole fraggle thing and even notched a Top 30 hit off the back of it with You Talk Too Much (also their best song natch). Listening to said song was enough to persuade me to shell out for a copy of the album and...ooh, I really wished I hadn’t. Think Colin Hunt from The Fast Show trying to front an early '90s indie band with the requisite needlessly OTT yelpy "ooh, I'm mad me!" vocals and you wouldn't be a million miles off.

However, beyond that one hit and their signature tune Where's Me Jumper? being used as the theme tune to a Chris O'Dowd sitcom a couple of decades later, the Sultans didn't really make much of an impression on the music scene and would mercifully be gone by the mid-'90s. Hence my decision to leave them off the list after a bit of deliberation - firstly because I'll admit those teenage neuroses probably played a big part in my dislike of them and secondly because despite being pretty poor, they were generally fairly harmless overall.

BILLY IDOL - "Cyberpunk" (1993)

Roundly slated at the time, Cyberpunk became such a joke in the music press that it effectively put Billy Idol's career on ice for over a decade before he crashed back on the scene in full-roar style with 2005's excellent Devil's Playground album (which we covered in GDR - click the link). This though was an attempt at the dreaded concept album and was based around cyborgs taking over in the future or something and it's every bit as half-baked as it sounds. Yet somehow 25 years later it doesn't quite sound like the epic folly it once did, more like a very brave idea that unfortunately just didn't work - it's too long and all over the place musically. However, in amidst the chaos, ill-judged experimentalism and interludes, there's actually a few decent tunes in here such as Shock To The System even if that electro cover of the Velvet Underground's Heroin really wasn't the best idea he's ever had. So while it does tend to be a mainstay of a lot of "Worst Albums Ever" lists, Cyberpunk has narrowly missed the boat on this one.

TRANSVISION VAMP - "Little Magnets vs The Bubble Of Babble" (1991)

Another album that was roundly crucified at the time and pretty much torpedoed Transvision Vamp's career after two mega-sellers in 1988's Pop Art and 1989's Velveteen. The backlash against Wendy James and co had been building for a while at this point and when their comeback single I Just Wanna B With U (erm, word of advice, bad idea to phrase things like that unless you're Prince) flopped, the music press really did go in mercilessly on 'em. Yet, similar to Billy Idol's Cyberpunk above, listening to Little Magnets now, despite the terrible title, it doesn't seem half as awful as it did back then. Admittedly it's not as good as its better known predecessors but the likes of If Looks Could Kill (even if it is a blatantly obvious rip off of Honky Tonk Women) and the slinky Ain't No Rules are reasonable enough even if there's a few clunkers in there. So not brilliant then but equally it didn't deserve the vitriol it got. Although as we'll see later, Wendy doesn't entirely escape from this list unscathed...

AIRHEAD - “Boing!” (1991)

We've already talked about Airhead in the first SFTJ Footnotes column where I was pretty scathing about them - a "Madchester" band from Maidstone who basically sounded like a poppier Stone Roses with a singer doing the most ridiculous faux-Manc accent ever and I very nearly put this on the list - it was one of the first guitar band albums I ever bought in early '92 and found its way down to the local Oxfam after just a few months. However...I figured they'd suffered enough after my previous withering take on them and let's be honest, it's not like this album really made any sort of notable commercial impact anyway so we'll just let it pass silently into the annals of early '90s music.

INXS - "Elegantly Wasted" (1997)

Another one that mainly ended up under consideration for this list after I reviewed and slated it in the past - I think I ended up being given a copy of what would turn out to be INXS' last album in one of my first reviewing gigs as an 18-year-old and gave it an absolute kicking (it was one of the first reviews I remember doing where I really ended up going to town on how terrible I thought the album was and I think it's always stuck in my mind because of that). This would have been in the middle of Britpop about seven or eight years after the band's commercial peak and they honestly couldn't have sounded less relevant at this point if they'd tried.

Revisiting it now...weeeeellll, yeah, it's not great and certainly not a patch on the slinky funked up Kick or X but, deserving of a place on the Worst Albums Ever list? Probably not - more than anything, it just sounds like the same old INXS but with less decent tunes and much more filler on there. Plus the untimely passing of Michael Hutchence just a few months after this album came out kind of puts a bit of a sobering perspective on this one. It's certainly no classic but I think I can safely say that in the intervening 24 years of music reviewing that I've heard much much worse.

TIN MACHINE - “Tin Machine”/“Tin Machine II” (1989/1991)

Regretfully, and as much as I love the guy, there will be a Bowie album in this list - unfortunately when you've been around as long as the Thin White Duke was and changed your image as often as he did, logic dictates that you're gonna drop a clunker at some point. But, unlike a lot of worst album features, it's not gonna be Tin Machine. I mean, don't get me wrong, it certainly wasn't his finest hour but both of those albums have a few decent tunes each in amidst the less edifying moments - Under The God, Shopping For Girls and Goodbye Mr Ed have all held up well in my opinion. And seeing Reeves Gabrels trying to play his guitar with a lump of cheese when the band did You Belong In Rock 'n' Roll on TOTP causing Bowie to uncharacteristically lose it laughing mid-performance is still one of my favourite teenage memories of watching that programme - a genuinely nice moment where you actually get an ultra-rare glimpse of the human being behind the rock megastar which still makes me smile to this day. I mean, just for that, I can’t really induct Tin Machine into this particular hall of shame, sorry.

BIG COUNTRY - "Undercover" (2001)

As easy as it is to ridicule them, Big Country are a band I'll admit to having a soft spot for - their songs, especially In A Big Country and One Great Thing, kept me going at a very low point in my life and it's one of the truly heartbreaking twists of fate that Stuart Adamson, the man who wrote those stirring odes to trying to see hope in the future no matter how bad things are, ended up taking his own life because of his personal demons. This posthumous covers album though really isn't their finest moment - you can't argue with the choice of songs which include Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, David Bowie, Neil Young, Blue Oyster Cult and the Stones but the performances here are just so flat and lifeless that they could be from any Friday night pub covers band up and down the country.

I've left Undercover off the list partly because covers albums are really a bit of an easy beast to skewer unless they're really really awful (and make no mistake, there will be a couple of 'em in the list) but mainly because Adamson is a guy whose words were there to keep me going when I needed them most and I feel as though in all good conscience I can forgive him the odd misfire for that. Really though, the fact remains that Big Country could do so so much better than this.

MORRISSEY - "California Son" (2018)

Another below par covers album, California Son is the sound of Moz at his most half-arsed. The material here is weak and uninteresting, his voice sounds knackered frankly and the arrangements are well south of club-footed - the phrase "phoning it in" really does spring very readily to mind. This is another album which I originally put on the list but eventually it just lost out because, to be fair, I think a lot of my dislike of Morrissey these days comes from his repugnant political views which have seen him go from the poet of the sensitive outsiders to hateful far right apologist in recent years and it's probably fair to say it's coloured my judgment of him a bit of late. It's a real shame though because when Moz first made his 21st century comeback he did so with a couple of pretty decent efforts (You Are The Quarry and Ringleader of the Tormentors). However, the fact that he finds himself without a record deal in 2021 and that despite his attempts to blame everyone else for his misfortune, his fall from grace in recent years is very much of his own making is, I would say, probably punishment enough.

HAPPY MONDAYS - “Yes Please!” (1992)

It's a bit of a surprise that I've not really dealt with the Mondays in SFTJ in the past as they were probably my favourites out of the Madchester bands in my early teens. Seeing them saunter through the likes of Kinky Afro and Loose Fit on Top of the Pops back then, they just looked like the coolest motherfuckers on the planet, a band who were working class, in your face and didn't care who they upset. That downright filthy opening riff to God's Cop off of Pills, Thrills and Bellyaches still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end thirty years on.

By the time of Yes Please! though, it was pretty much all over bar the shouting - Shaun and Bez's very ill-advised homophobic comments in an NME interview and the band's drug problems spiralling completely out of control culminating in the infamous recording sessions in Barbados for this album where the group were sneaking out to sell the studio furniture for drug money in between laying takes down had effectively bust them beyond repair. When they came back with the decidedly underwhelming Stinkin' Thinkin' single, the omens weren't good yet despite the critical pasting it took in the press, I'd argue that Yes Please!, while nowhere near the quality of Pills... or its predecessor Bummed, isn't awful, it's just underwhelming and with the paranoid Sunshine And Love ("Bad vibes so moody when it should just move me/So gimme an Uzi and someone to use it/Who smiles?") and the sinister Angel ("If my head's been through a windscreen, why are all the eyeballs green?") they came up with two late-in-the-day classics. It's just a pity the rest of the album didn't quite measure up but overall it's far from the worst thing I've ever heard.

KEVIN ROWLAND - “My Beauty” (1999)

Now here's one that definitely IS ripe for critical re-evaluation. My Beauty was the final album on Creation records, a collection of covers from the former Dexy's Midnight Runners frontman a good decade plus after that group's final hit. It absolutely tanked, selling less than 1000 copies and Rowland was roundly panned in the press for wearing a dress and make-up on its cover not to mention being bottled off at the Reading and Leeds festivals that year (I was at the latter, it really wasn't pretty). The label shut its doors soon afterwards and My Beauty was presented as proof, along with other late era Creation follies like Mishka (a white guy with dreads playing sub-Finley Quaye reggae-pop, go figure) that Alan McGee had well and truly lost the plot. Yet listening to it now it's actually, dare I say it, quite good? The songs here were ones that kept Rowland going during his "nightmare" years of the early '90s when he was a homeless and bankrupt drug addict and the guy has such a powerful expressive voice that you can't help but feel a bit warmed by his take on Daydream Believer and The Long And Winding Road which are genuinely moving.

Rowland would dip his head back below the waves soon afterwards, finally resurfacing in 2010 with Dexys’ triumphant return One Day I'm Going To Soar. But My Beauty is anything but a regrettable mis-step or an aberration, rather it's a touching document of Rowland's journey back to health and is well deserving of a curiosity listen.

Right, the defence for the above rests m'lud. Now it's time to get our hands dirty and wade into the real heart of musical darkness. Join us tomorrow for part 1 of the journey...