The Horror! Nite Songs' Worst Albums Ever Part 2 (40-31)

PREVIOUSLY IN THIS COLUMN: Intro • Part 1 (50-41)

Yup, it's that time again. Grit your teeth and strap yourself in as we wander further into the depths of Nite Songs' Worst Albums Ever. You have been warned...

40. WENDY JAMES - "Now Ain't The Time For Your Tears" (1993)

I did warn you in the intro to this thing yesterday that although Transvision Vamp's critically derided but not actually that bad Little Magnets vs The Bubble of Babble album had missed out on this that Wendy James might not be so lucky. In the wake of TV's breakup following the Little Magnets album, Wendy announced that she would be collaborating with one of her heroes Elvis Costello on a new project which turned out to be the Now Ain't The Time For Your Tears album.

According to the rumours, Costello basically whacked all ten of the songs on this album out in the space of a weekend and oh boy, it shows. The likes of lead-off single London's Brilliant and Do You Know What I'm Saying? are real Costello-by-numbers stuff as if he's just waiting to pick up the PRS cheque afterwards. Really, the whole thing comes across as a lazy afterthought for both James and Costello, both of whom were and still are capable of much better, and it's not a surprise that it totally bombed. Wendy has, to her credit, made a comeback in recent years with a couple of solid albums in 2016's The Price Of The Ticket and last year's Queen High Straight which at least prove that she's still out there with something to say.

39. NO DOUBT - "Push And Shove" (2012)

So let me start by saying this - I actually like No Doubt. I mean, I think we all do a little bit. For all their occasional creative mis-steps down the years, Gwen Stefani and co added a much-needed female perspective to the fratboy-dominated world of pop-punk and the defiant Just A Girl and the tender Don't Speak remain great pop songs to this day and anyone who says otherwise is just plain wrong. I even didn't mind the group going full-on pop with 2001's Rock Steady as they actually managed to jump genres surprisingly well.

Aiming for the same trick twice after a decade away (with Gwen off pursuing a solo career) was always going to be risky though and Push And Shove was badly missing the mischievous streak that ran through its predecessor (and indeed all the band's best work) leaving it an over-produced husk of forgettable tunes and way too glossy production that sapped all the energy out of it. It tells you everything that despite the band appearing on The X Factor, then the number one show in Britain, to promote it, it still stiffed in the lower reaches of the Top 20 and shifted less than 7,000 copies in its first week. It remains the band's final album to date and I seriously hope history doesn't end up recording it as such because, for their '90s stuff alone, No Doubt deserve to be remembered much better than this.

38. THE ORDINARY BOYS - "How To Get Everything You Ever Wanted In Ten Easy Steps" (2006)

Oh the irony of that title. Perhaps in retrospect, Sam Preston wishes he'd called it Be Careful What You Wish For... When the Ordinary Boys made their breakthrough in 2004 with the Over The Counter Culture album, they were a harmless enough Smiths-inspired major label "indie" band and plugged away valiantly in the post-Libertines/Kaiser Chiefs landscape with a series of workmanlike singles. Then Preston went on Celebrity Big Brother (as we'll see, the OB's weren't the only group on this list essentially sunk by association with this programme) and became famous for his fling with model Chantelle Houghton (who was actually in the house as a non-celeb decoy). They quickly became tabloid fodder, the group's popularity skyrocketed on the back of the frankly awful Boys Will Be Boys single (which basically sounded as if it had been written to soundtrack an advert for Nuts or Zoo magazine) and it's safe to say that quality control was jettisoned somewhat.

How To Get Everything You Wanted In Ten Easy Steps was the sad result, a cynical hollow "one eye on the pay cheque" collection of disco-pop which bore little or no resemblance to the band's previous output and, while it performed respectably in the charts, saw their credibility well and truly shot. Band members started dropping like flies and, combined with a truly watch-through-your-fingers appearance by Preston on Never Mind The Buzzcocks where he ended up walking out after throwing a snit at presenter Simon Amstell's jibes about Houghton (by now his wife)'s autobiography, they quickly became a laughing stock and would have split by the end of the decade.

Preston has reformed the band in recent years and they've even collaborated on a tribute to the late great Ranking Roger from the Beat with his son Ranking Jr. I ended up hearing an interview with him on Scroobius Pip's podcast a few years ago where, to his credit, he generally came across as a self-aware and likeable guy who was very conscious of just how ridiculous things had got for him in the wake of his spell of reality TV infamy. But I suspect this particular album (or indeed this particular time period) isn't one that the band look back on with fondness.

37. BACKYARD BABIES - "Four By Four" (2016)

I did an SFTJ on the Backyards a couple of months ago where I was pretty gushing in my praise for them and Buckcherry converting me back to proper rock 'n' roll in the post-Britpop years. Unfortunately, following that initial flash of brilliance, their output would tail off somewhat quality-wise - after the knockout one-two of 1998's Total 13 and 2001's Making Enemies Is Good, the group were dropped by BMG after the latter ended up underselling. Its successor, 2004's Stockholm Syndrome didn't even get a UK release and when your correspondent finally tracked it down, it definitely felt like a poor relation to its predecessors with the tunes mostly verging on the anonymous side. 2006's People Like Us Like People Like Us was even worse with the tunes no better and poor production hampering things although they did manage to turn it around a bit for their 2008 self-titled swansong after which the band would drift off to other musical projects.

However, 2016 would bring a "comeback" album that really did feel like the sound of a band cynically phoning it in and taking advantage of the fact that they'd been away for a while to try and foist any old slop on their fans from the hackneyed Thirteen Or Bust and I'm On My Way To Save Your Rock 'n' Roll (unintentionally ironic titling alert!) to the truly hideous balladry of Bloody Tears. It all seemed to show that it was well and truly over for the Backyards so it was both a relief and a surprise when they actually followed this up with 2019's Sliver & Gold which, while not quite a full on return to form was at least comfortably the best thing they'd done since those halcyon days. So maybe there's hope for them yet.

36. BLACK SABBATH - "Forbidden" (1995)

It's safe to say that after Ronnie James Dio quit the band in the early '80s, Black Sabbath went through some lean times. By the middle of that decade, guitarist Tony Iommi was the sole remaining original member with a revolving door cast of whoever he could drag along. Yet as the decade neared its end, things appeared to be getting back on track with bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Vinny Appice back on board and a new singer Tony Martin who provided the necessary oomph up front.

However, by the mid-'90s, things were starting to go wrong again with Butler and Appice both leaving again to be replaced by the former Whitesnake rhythm section of Neil Murray and Cozy Powell. And then came Forbidden. The prospect of Sabbath linking up with rap-metal pioneers Body Count (guitarist Ernie C produces here and Ice T lends a rap to Illusion of Power) could, to be fair, have potentially been an unexpected triumph if the stars had aligned but the end result is unfortunately terrible. The aforementioned Illusion of Power just sounds like a Body Count B-side while elsewhere, poor tunes, poor production and poor performances all round make this comfortably the worst Sabbath album ever. Little wonder that afterwards, Iommi would clear out the entire line-up and reconcile with Ozzy Osbourne for the inevitable reunion tour.

35. W.A.S.P. - "Golgotha" (2015)

Another case of a poor album by a band who I'll generally stick up for. Lest there be any doubt, I used to love W.A.S.P. as a teenager - I mean, Chainsaw Charlie (Murders In The New Morgue) was the song that made my parents think I was converting to Satanism in that era and when I rediscovered them in my early twenties by virtue of the sheer no-fucks-given scumminess of the Helldorado album, it was pretty clear that they'd still got it. Hell, I could even forgive them for an ill-advised venture into industrial music on the Kill Fuck Die album.

What's decidedly less forgivable was Golgotha though which saw Blackie Lawless and co trading in their gleefully confrontational take on shock rock in favour of a set of limp AOR dirges which were closer to Bon Jovi than classic Alice Cooper (there's even a song called Last Runaway on here ferfexxake) with the turgid seven minute ballad Miss You being a particular low point. Similar to No Doubt above, Golgotha is W.A.S.P.'s final album to date at time of going to press - suffice to say I really hope that doesn't turn out to be the case and that the next one sees the band getting some much-needed bite back - Blackie and co deserve much better than to be remembered this way.

34. ANGELIC UPSTARTS - "Still From The Heart" (1982)

Another group who I've waxed lyrical about in Garbage Days Revisited, at their best such as on 1981's Two Million Voices and 1984's Last Tango In Moscow, the Upstarts were a much needed dose of ferocious left wing polemic against the injustices of Thatcher's Britain especially in the wake of their forebears the Clash increasingly spending more time Stateside than in their own country by this point. Unfortunately, 1982's Still From The Heart was a massive mis-step by the band, trading their aggressive approach for a messy watered-down synth-pop sound which was more akin to pre-goth Depeche Mode than Joe Strummer.

The angry lyrics were still there buried under the synths (as proved when they re-recorded I Stand Accused and the haunting Soldier for the Power Of The Press album a few years later) and there was the odd occasion where it almost worked such as the sinister reggae of Flames Of Brixton and the fierce Cry Wolf but the likes of the dreary Action Man, the totally anonymous Wasted (Loved By None) and the utter mess of Black Knights of the '80s really were a trial to listen to.

Thankfully the Upstarts would return to making the sort of music they'd made their names with on the following year's Reason Why? album but Still From The Heart was a mistake which their career arguably never recovered from commercially.

33. BABYSHAMBLES - "Down In Albion" (2005)

I'll be honest, Pete Doherty was always one of those musicians I wanted to like more than I did. The guy clearly knows his musical onions as evidenced by his often-declared love of the Clash and the Only Ones but somehow the Libertines, in my opinion, never quite managed to scale the heights they clearly aspired to with their albums often being sunk by poor production and Doherty's mumbled vocals. A real shame.

But even that pales compared to the utter mess that was Doherty's post-Libertines band Babyshambles. While his bandmate Carl Barat actually went on to make a decent record with the Dirty Pretty Things' Waterloo To Anywhere, Down In Albion was, in keeping with the band name, just a complete shambles. I remember hearing the dreadful single Killamangiro on some late night TV programme around this time with a couple of my then-bandmates and our general consensus was that it sounded like a bunch of smackheads trying to play Don't Turn Around by Aswad. Really not what the world needed. Elsewhere, most of the songs just sounded half finished as if the band were making things up on the fly and saying "yup, that'll do". I mean, Mick Jones from the Clash was on production duty here, you'd have thought he might at least weigh in with some sort of leadership to try and steer things but apparently not.

Babyshambles would last for a further two albums before Doherty would return to the Libertines. From what I've heard of him these days, he's now peacefully running a B&B in Margate, has largely gone clean from the drugs and, to his credit, eaten a fair bit of humble pie. But really, Down In Albion is proof that people with narcotics issues of the scale that Doherty had then really need someone there to guide them when it comes to making music.

32. DAVID BOWIE - "Never Let Me Down" (1987)

As we discussed on the intro here, much as I love Bowie, the guy's persona as a musical chameleon par excellence did lead to him making some serious mis-steps at various points during his career. Tin Machine would be too obvious plus, as per the intro, I always thought they weren't quite as bad as everyone said. So it was a choice between 1997's ill-advised drum and bass album Earthling and this and, to be fair, it was always gonna be Never Let Me Down, the sound of Bowie at his most depressingly generic.

It's safe to say that after Let's Dance, the '80s were not a good time for the former Ziggy Stardust - 1984's Tonight was pretty poor with its nadir being a well and truly dismal cover of God Only Knows but Never Let Me Down was far worse with the Duke appearing to be writing pastiches of other popular artists of the day only not doing them as well as the originals - there’s two below-par attempts to ape Prince (Day In Day Out and Zeroes) as well as a poor Lennon rip-off on the title track and a cover of his old mucker Iggy Pop’s Bang Bang which comes off like an attempt at copying Billy Idol and getting it very very wrong. I mean, sure, Bowie was always supremely skilled as a musical magpie but his genius was that he could take other people's influences and twist them into supremely fascinating new shapes. Here though he just sounds flat out of ideas and it would arguably be another eight years until his creative spark well and truly returned with 1995's under-rated Outside.

31. GENE SIMMONS - "A$$hole" (2004)

To be fair, as much as I like Kiss, even I would be the first to concede that they've dropped some pretty serious musical misfires in with their good stuff from the limp hair metal of 1985's Asylum through to ill-advised forays into grunge (1995's Carnival Of Souls) and prog (1982's infamous Music From The Elder). Indeed, this slot very nearly went to the band's decidedly underwhelming 1998 "reunion" album Psycho Circus (which, erm, featured Ace Frehley on three tracks and Peter Criss on one). Until someone reminded me of this.

To be fair, Gene Simmons doesn't have a great record when it comes to his solo output, his 1978 effort, released in tandem with the other three members of Kiss doing theirs, was only saved from the wooden spoon award out of the four by Peter Criss' being even worse but there's no getting around what a mess A$$hole is. The karaoke cover of the Prodigy's Firestarter actually just about carries itself through via sheer "what the feck?" syndrome but elsewhere, this album is a morass of Gene trying to blatantly copy the Beatles, Dylan and Zappa by turns but just sounding dull for most of it (with the honourable exception of the opening Sweet & Dirty Love which coincidentally enough is the most Kiss-like track on here) with the listless bar band blues of Whatever Turns You On (Turns Me On) being a particular low point.

Thankfully, Gene has yet to inflict another solo album on the world and his next recorded output would be back with Kiss for the unexpected and most welcome return to form that was 2009's Sonic Boom.

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Eek, it doesn't get any easier this, does it? Take a break, take a breather and we'll see you for part 3 of the list tomorrow...