Chrome, or an incarnation of the band, caught last year playing "March of the Chrome Police" from their 1979 album Half Machine Lip Moves.

Thirty years on the music on that album and its 1978 precursor Alien Soundtracks still sounds raw and strange -- and this performance captures or at least recreates the fucked-up analog overload of the original. There was something mutated, messed up and dirty about these albums at the time I first heard them back in '79. Punk had devolved into New Wave at the time and although I still liked a lot of what was coming out everyone else seemed to like it too, so I was looking for something suitably off the map and noisy and Chrome met those requirements. Those two albums still sound like nothing else before or afterward.

I don't know much about the music Chrome produced after Half Machine Lip Moves. The follow-up got a lukewarm reception from whatever music rags I was reading at the time and I remember John Peel commenting after playing a track from it that he couldn't tell if it was any good or not. This sounds okay now but it seemed too clean and linear at the time.



Like Pere Ubu after Dub Housing (whose music headed into another direction entirely) they just didn't seem to fit in anywhere, especially when American punk made a resurgence soon after with bands like Black Flag, Minutemen and Husker Du, whose music was fast, blunt and to-the-point rather than fast, hallucinogenic and freaky. Years went by without me playing the albums or thinking about them. Maybe it was finally noticing there's a local Austin band called ST-37 who've been playing a rather familiar kind of stoner spacerock for a decade or two that reminded me...

49 issues of Sounds from 1979-80 went for $247.50 on eBay last month. I hope they came with a free MP3 of the Falls' "Printhead". I would have happily paid $24.75 for them. Sounds always gets overlooked when people look back at the rock magazines of that era, mainly because it was so unfocused and scrappy, trying to keep with every trend rather than going for the NME's precise party line approach. The contents listed in the eBay ad make you wonder how one weekly music paper could be so schizophrenic without exploding:

Nov 17, 1979 - Not Sensibles, Wild Horses, Wings Family Tree, Mod Manifesto, Skins, etc.

I used to buy Sounds as well as the NME back then, although Sounds was a bit of a guilty pleasure to balance the po-faced, dictatorial tone of the NME and not to be mentioned when you were having highminded debates about the Au-Pairs' stance on Northern Ireland. Sounds were just as likely to feature my favorite bands at the time but they'll be snuggled between Saxon and the Dolly Mixtures and not prefixed with quotes from Roland Barthes and JG Ballard. You'd read Sounds (or Snouds as we called it) on the bus or train and leave it there, whereas you would carefully file the NME away for future reference. Sounds was for the 95% of music that wasn't more important than life itself, the bands whose only merit were they had a cute female singer, or in some cases bands that were too far from the NME's earnest strictures at that time to get a mention like Fad Gadget or Throbbing Gristle. Sounds lost me when decent writers like Jon Savage made way for Gary Bushell and they started going downmarket, devoting more and more space to the crusty "punk's not dead" movement, then oi and the new wave of British heavy metal.

$247.50 for 49 issues though? That's about five bucks a piece. Someone must have really wanted them. It only cost 20p at the time. I suppose they're historical documents now, cultural artifacts of disaffected youth (division 2), best read to a soundtrack of bands no one remembers, not even bagrec....
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* No, really. 365 Days #337 - The London Nobody Knows (mp3s)