Messthetics: The Flying Lizards, This Heat, The Raincoats, The Red Crayola, Young Marble Giants

In the autumn of 1979 The Flying Lizards' cover of "Money (That's What I Want)" took the avant-classical sound of 'prepared instruments' into the UK Top 5. The record's bass drum isn't a drum but a bass guitar being hit with a stick. The banjo-like piano sound was created by throwing an assortment of objects - rubber toys, a glass ashtray, a telephone directory, a cassette-recorder, sheet music - inside the piano. The distortion-overloaded guitar solo gesticulates wildly, like an overexcited man, and the backing vocals sound like tribesfolk chanting in the rain forest.

Originally co-written by Berry Gordy Jr, "Money" is probably most famous in its Beatles version. In this version, John Lennon's prole-on-the-make insolence thrills because the 'cynicism' (valuing material wealth over love) feels bracingly unsentimental and the song shakes with a working-class hunger and confidence that won't be contained. The Lizards' remake subverts The Beatles' subversion. All icily enunciated hauteur and blue-blooded sang-froid, singer Deborah Evans replaces Lennon's lusty rasp with the dead-eye disdain of the ruling class.

The Beatles - Money (That's What I Want) 1963


The Flying Lizards - Money (That's What I Want) 1979

On "24 Track Loop" - one of the highlights of This Heat's self-titled 1979 debut LP - they fed Charles Hayward's frantically funky drums through a device called the Harmonizer to create chiming and creaking tuned-percussion timbres that prophesy nineties jungle.

This Heat - 24 Track Loop 1979

Deceit, from 1981, was almost a concept album about nuclear Armageddon. 

Opener "Sleep" imagines power lulling people into apathy with consumerism and entertainment: 'a life cocooned in a routine of food'.

This Heat - Sleep 1981

The band also projected a ferocious sobriety via their image. Deceit's back cover shows the band - Hayward, bassist Gareth Williams and multi-instrumentalist Charles Bullen - dressed in ties and jackets, with short, neat haircuts and stern frowns on their faces.

The Raincoats sometimes addressed the 'big issues' - "Off Duty Trip", for instance, concerned a notorious rape trial of the day, in which the perpetrator was treated leniently by a judge to avoid damaging his military career.

The Raincoats - Off Duty Trip 1979

The Raincoats' second album, Odyshape, is post-punk that's been totally unrocked.

"Only Loved At Night", the album's stand-out track is like a gamelan music-box, the different patterns interlocking like intricate cogs. On this song, as with much of Odyshape, the group swapped instrumental roles (a common post-punk ruse to keep things fresh), with violinist Vicky Aspinall playing bass and bassist Gina Birch contributing drone guitar, while guitarist Ana da Silva produces wistful chimes from her kalimba, an African thumb-piano. Charles Hayward's clockwork percussion, added after the fact, is decorative, just one of many parallel pulses.

The Raincoats - Only Loved At Night 1981

Released on Rough Trade in 1981, The Red Crayola's Kangaroo? featured lyrics from conceptual art collective Art & Language that addressed various 'monstrosities' produced by the internal contradictions of bourgeois culture. 

There were also whimsically ornate exercises in Soviet suprarealist rock like "The Tractor Driver" and "The Milkmaid", humorous attempts, leader Mayo Thompson says, to imagine what 'a socialist song [would] sound like'.

The Red Crayola - The Tractor Driver 1981


The Red Crayola - The Milkmaid 1981

"Final Day" is perhaps Young Marble Giants' best and certainly their best-known song. To get the single-note whine that runs through the whole track and evokes what main songwriter Stuart Moxham calls 'the low-level dread' of living with the possibility of nuclear annihilation, he stuck a matchstick in one of the organ keys. But what's most chilling about "Final Day" is its brevity (just 1 minute and 39 seconds) and singer Alison Statton's fatalistic tone as she sings 'When the light goes out on the final day/We will all be gone having had our say'.

Young Marble Giants - Final Day 1980

The Slits - Cut

The most delightful element in the Slits' sound on Cut is the strange geometry of the clashing and overlapping vocals, as guitarist Albertine and bass player Pollitt weave around singer Ari Up's shrill, slightly sour warble. On the opener, "Instant Hit", the girls form a roundelay of haphazard harmonies that the singer describes as "a kind of 'Frère Jacques' thing". Albertine's lyrics to "Instant Hit" depict an unhealthily thin boy who "don't like himself very much/'cos he has set his self to self-destruct" - a barbed portrait that applied equally to Sid Vicious and Keith Levene, her junkie bandmates in the band Flowers of Romance.

The Slits - Instant Hit 1979

"So Tough", a frenetic pisstake of macho posturing, gives way to the doleful skank of "Spend, Spend, Spend", its sliding bass and brittle-nerved percussion perfectly complementing the lyric's sketch of a shopaholic vainly trying to "satisfy this empty feeling" with impulse purchases.

The Slits - So Tough 1979


The Slits - Spend, Spend, Spend 1979

"Shoplifting" turns "Spend, Spend, Spend" inside out: the first song's woman-as-consumerist dupe is transformed in the second's petty-thief-as-feminist rebel. Frantic punk reggae, "Shoplifting" surges into adrenalized overdrive as Ari Up, caught red-handed, yells "do the runner". The song climaxes with a shattering scream that mingles terror, glee, and relief at escaping the supermarket detective, a yowl that collapses into the giggled gasp, "I've pissed my knickers!"

The Slits - Shoplifting 1979

The fast songs on Cut are exhilarating - "Shoplifting", "Love Und Romance" (a romance-as-brain-death parody), and the single "Typical Girls" (a diatribe against un-Slitty females who "don't create, don't rebel" and whose heads are addled with women's-magazine-induced anxieties about "spots, fat, unnatural smells").

The Slits - Typical Girls 1979

The most emotionally haunting songs, though, are down-tempo and despondent in the mold of "Spend, Spend, Spend": "FM", "Ping Pong Affair" and "Newtown".

The last takes its name from towns built from scratch after the Second World War, some encircling London and designed to absorb the capital's population overflow, others built in the rural middle of nowhere. All of them, typically, started life as an architect's and urban planner's utopian vision before swiftly degenerating into characterless gridzones of anomie and despair. "Newtown" draws a disconcerting parallel between the normal citizens hooked on cultural tranquilizers like "televisiono" and "footballino", and the Slits' own bohemian peers zonked on illegal narcotics. On the track, Albertine's jittery scrape mimics the fleshcrawling ache of cold turkey.

The Slits - Newtown 1979

Withdrawal of an emotional kind inspired "Ping Pong Affair". Ari Up measures out the empty postbreakup evenings with masturbation ("Same old thing yeah I know/Everybody does it") and cigarettes.

The Slits - Ping Pong Affair 1979

Cut's famous cover photograph of the group as mud-smeared Amazons combines nostalgie de la boue with she-warrior defiance to jab the casual record shop browser right in the eye. Naked but for loincloths and war paint, the three Slits stand proudly bare breasted, outstaring the camera's gaze. Behind them you can see the wall of a picturesque cottage, brambles and roses clambering up the side as if to underline the "we're no delicate English roses and this is no come-hither look" stance. The cottage was Ridge Farm, the studio where Bovell produced Cut. Says Ari Up, "We got so into the countryside when we were doing the album, to the point of rolling around in the earth. So we decided to cover ourselves in mud and show that women could be sexy without dressing in a prescribed way. Sexy in a natural way, and naked without being pornographic".