Wednesday 18 December 2013

Various Artists - "Fast Product - Mutant Pop" (Virgin 1979)




A rather marvellous posthumous collection of Fast product tracks, released by Virgin after Bob Last sent his wards off to infiltrate the enemy and he formed Pop/Aural and Postcard.
Never in the field of human artistic conflict has a more perfect collection of singles and e.p. tracks been assembled in one place.
The peerless piss take of the clash's "White Riot" by the Mekons is enough to make any ex-public school folkie turned "punk rocker" blush with embarrassment.
The Scars début single is fantastically scratchy and future leaning. Subtle pointers to the forthcoming Postcard sound.They only went downhill from here.
As did The Human League, but Being Boiled has to be the greatest electronic pop single of all time?....discuss.
2.3 from Sheffield as the weak links here, but still great.(wasn't Adi Newton from Clock Dva in 2.3?
The Flowers were overlooked genius's.....check "After Dark", might have been a number one hit in a Parallel universe somewhere!
And of course ,The Gang Of Four....what can i say?

Track Listing:

Mekons
01. Never Been in a Riot
02. 32 Weeks
03. Where Were You

Scars
04. Adultery
05. Horror Show
 


The Human League 
06. Being Boiled
07. Circus of Death

2-3
08. All Time Low
09. Where to Know?

The Flowers
10. After Dark
11. Confessions

Gang of Four
12. Love Like Anthrax
13. Armalite Rifle
14. Damaged Goods

DOWNLOAD this mutant pop HERE!

4 comments:

neilc said...

Excellent post. Possibly THE great comp album of the era. (Along with Rough Trade's Wanna Buy A Bridge.)

Jonny Zchivago said...

Cheerrs Neil, now we await the "He's Dead Jim" re-posts, coming soon.

Graf Haufen said...

This is actually a slightly different compilation, called Mutant Pop 78/79.
It contains two tracks by The Flowers and omits two tracks by The Mekons.

The pics here on the blog are misleading.

A-Mfan said...

Thanks you. I'm looking forward to giving this a listen.