Monday 9 January 2023

The Associates - "Sulk (40th Anniversary Edition) 1982/2022


I'm in a sulk.....there are no associates left. 
Rankine died peacefully a few days previously, which is ironic as Sulk is one of the least peaceful Pop records ever made.Its full of several kitchen sink's worth of suffocating Pop genius. There's so much going on that one needs a crowbar to get the album out of its high viz glossy,but nameless,package.
None of yer average pop consumers knew what The Associates looked like, hence the need for the annoying sticker that fucked up the garishly botanical cover,and was impossible to remove.
There are few stranger records than "Party Fears Two" or "Club Country" that entered the top ten of the UK Charts.Right Up there with PiL's "Death Disco" and "Flowers Of Romance" as the weirdest singles to both chart and appear on Top Of The Pops.Subversive moments both.The associates also got on Top of The Pops with "18 Carat Love Affair", using chocolate guitars,which melted as Alan Rankine mimed playing them,and got eventually eaten by the audience,including the Spare one....Pop eating itself in action.

I'm supposed to write something else aren't I?..but i've been drinking some hard medicine,and i've become lost listening to this work of genius.Food?...who needs it?
One of my few claims to fame by proxy, is that I had an aggressively jealous Scottish girlfriend,who came from Dundee/Glasgow,and went for a night out with Billy mcKenzie!?...a predictably crazy and wild night was had by all accounts.Although if I went for a night out with Billy Mckenzie i'm sure she would have been less generous,and i would have received a few glancing blows from the flying crockery heaved in my general direction.But.....
Of course "Sulk" is one of the greatest ,most perverse Pop Lp's ever made.And Bill remains one of the greatest vocal acrobats ever.
Rest in noisy peace Bill and Alan. This album is your epitaph.


Sulk:

CD1-1 Arrogance Gave Him Up
CD1-2 No
CD1-3 Bap De La Bap
CD1-4 Gloomy Sunday
CD1-5 Nude Spoons
CD1-6 Skipping
CD1-7 It's Better This Way
CD1-8 Party Fears Two
CD1-9 Club Country
CD1-10 Nothinginsomethingparticular

Outtakes, Monitor Mixes & Rarities:

CD2-1 Ulcragyceptimol - Demo
CD2-2 I Never Will - Demo
CD2-3 Club Country - Demo
CD2-4 Me, Myself And The Tragic Story - John Leckie Recording
CD2-5 Australia - John Leckie Recording
CD2-6 Skipping - Monitor Mix Instrumental
CD2-7 It's Better This Way - Monitor Mix
CD2-8 And Then I Read A Book - Alternative Version
CD2-9 Ulcragyceptimol - Alternative Version
CD2-10 It's Better This Way - Alternative Version
CD2-11 The Associate
CD2-12 A Girl Named Property
CD2-13 Grecian 2000
CD2-14 Party Fears Two - 7"
CD2-15 Club Country - 7"
CD2-16 18 Carat Love Affair
CD2-17 Love Hangover - Extended Version

Associates Live - The Peel Sessions:

CD3-1 Me, Myself and the Tragic Story
CD3-2 Nude Spoons
CD3-3 A Matter Of Gender
CD3-4 It's Better This Way
CD3-5 Ulcragyceptimol
CD3-6 Waiting for the Love Boat
CD3-7 Australia
CD3-8 Love Hangover
CD3-9 A Severe Case of Career Insecurity
Associates Live - Gigant, Apeldoorn 10/01/81
CD3-10 Arrogance Gave Him Up
CD3-11 A Matter Of Gender
CD3-12 Nude Spoons
CD3-13 Paper House
CD3-14 No
CD3-15 And Then I Read A Book
CD3-16 Gloomy Sunday
CD3-17 It's Better This Way
CD3-18 Skipping
CD3-19 Australia

14 comments:

badgerstump said...

oh for fuck's sake ...

40ish years ago i listened to them so much and bought a couple of their LPs. not a guilty secret, i just didn't tell anyone

i had plans for tonight but i'll be playing this instead

Richie Muster said...

Intimations of mortality. All my musical contemporaries are dying off; i can't be long off myself in that case. Best, then, to celebrate their lives and art, and listen joyously. The alternative? Dying in a broken country with no health service, basic services or functioning government. Let's face the music, and daaaance instead.

Viacomclosedmedown on youtube said...

Thank you for this new band input to my knowing. Your blog design and content are too cool also! I didn't know that archive dot org would archive and entire blog. I may do that with over 7000 rips at the DU blog and my second computer over 20 years finally hard crashed last weekend so I had to wipe the drive clean and reinstall using a 10 year old disk. I lost my windows 3.0 software in the crash as my back up was on another drive that wouldn't read. However, as my luck goes, I found last Sunday on Amazon UK 2 of the original software unopened and I'm sure those are the only left after 20 years. But am used to it as my Ortofon S-120 DJ stylus is no longer made but is the best out there for rippin' so I got the last two in the world on Ebay sitting in my safe waiting for present one to wear out in half a year. I tried one of the new 16 Gb super small external drives with solid state drive instead of mechanical but all the folders I moved to it don't show having any files! So I wrote off that $116 from Amazon and went and got the biggest of the tried and true rotating external drives in their biggest size of 14 Gb and going to back up all my WAV raw files of rips and of course my shuffle play folders of back up MP3 chronologically in 29 folders of 25 Gb or so that I like to play on random and then of course the zipped up MP3 with pictures documenting all parts of the vinyl or CD. Ha ha yes 'hard medicine' is what I get for 3 weeks waiting for an opening at my dentist with my painful cavity in constant pain unless I floss and gurgle with organic coconut oil or eat some fig/chocolate morsel to kill the bacteria pain and of course constantly dabbing it with clove. Hoping to hang in their 2 more weeks until they can fix it. Anyways thanks again. Nathin' Nuthin Sez sent me over.

Anonymous said...

Love the Associates, their first 3 records are all great. I always thought that they did not receive proper recognition here in the U.S. They are fantastic!

Thanks for the kind and accurate words about them.

XXOO

parmalee said...

I've got some curious deficits when it comes to knowledge of "classic rock". (Still have not heard a Led Zeppelin album in it's entirety.) And while I know who Jeff Beck is, of course, I honestly can't think of a single tune on which he played.

For a second, I thought he might have played on Cozy Powell's weird ass version of "Theme One", but, nope, no guitars on that--though Jack Bruce plays bass. In case anyone was wondering, it doesn't hold a candle to the VDGG version. Obviously.

parmalee said...

Whoops. I meant to post that in that other thread. Someone get on that--STAT!

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this, Johnny - big fan of the Associates since I was a Smash Hits reading school-kid when this stuff was originally released and I still revisit it fairly regularly nowadays, four hundred years later. I've bought Sulk three times already and really didn't want to cough up for it again so this is much appreciated. Ta.

Jonny Zchivago said...

@anonymous....yeah can't stop playng Associates this week.Was tempted to buy the French vinyl version of 'Sulk' the other week...which is better than the UK version with 'White Car in Germany' on it, plus the not so great "18 carat love Affair" and Love Hangover. 14 euro's they wanted.
I gave away my CD version to my sister in law for xmas.

Jonny Zchivago said...

parmalee....i played all of Les Zep 1 at the request of my brother, who reckons this is the only rock record that should have been made. I bought it in a job lot of vinyl,which was full of both delights and horror. It did have Neu 1 on Brain in there which paid for the lot.
Jeff Beck(?), why that would be "Hi-Ho Silver Lining".
Not too conversant on the subject of Jeff, but he always looked good,even in his 70's....he can be seen with the Yardbirds including himself and Jimmy Page in the very stylish movie "Blow Up" i think.

Hang The DJ said...

Fab band and thanks for this post and file. Talking of which... I hace the 2016 CD version but this has a lot of missing material. I've downloaded it but cannot open a "iTUNES MUSIC PLAYER" file. How do you do open the file?

Thank you!

Jonny Zchivago said...

hung DJ...no idea what you're talking about.
I think you open the file, which is a RAR file, you use a free RAR software ,which opens it and you open the files contained within by clicking on them and they should open in your iTunes if that's your preferred music program.
WinRAR is what i use by the way.
Or ask google.

Anonymous said...

Huge thanks for this. Great album... think I'll need to heat up the espresso machine!

Brian

Jonny Zchivago said...

Well Brian, Bill and Alan were quite partial to downing the odd jar of "Quiet Life" pills,which was an over the counter natural sleep remedy,to achieve an almost hallucinatory fuzzy feeling,quite the opposite to an expresso.This they kept in the "Fourth Drawer Down" in a desk at the recording studio....the title of their second album was it not? They were always making the unexpected turn,very much missed..

Anonymous said...

Checkout https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1qgxPTULM1DsugHeOKWMO8?si=G2n7yRxNTieAk-IJSGCNRA

Enjoy