Uncle Sam - Letters From London

Every Christmas in Kerrang! all the writers would be asked to supply a list of their top 20 albums of the year. Ray Zell would rarely manage more than 10, and so discerning were his tastes that you could pretty much guarantee that the 7 or 8 albums he felt worth mentioning were ones that should be in your own collection.

One band he always raved about were Uncle Sam. Led by a milkman (seriously), Uncle Sam were very much the definition of a cult band, and Letters From London is the album everyone should hear, if not own (their second of three, all out of print but they can be picked on Ebay without breaking the bank). It's odd that it's never been reissued - after all if there's enough of a market for Soho Roses and Gunfire Dance to reissue their past recordings on CD then there must be one for Uncle Sam.

Dead Boys - Young, Loud And Snotty

For some reason track 2 on the Dead Boys' Young, Loud and Snotty has caused a lot of arguments amongst friends.

It all boils down to the opening lines in 'All This And More'. These days you can just look these things up on the interweb and bar the odd dubious versions some people submit (I've seen one website attribute 'Another Girl Another Planet' with the line 'I look cute and I don't care about it') these tend to be pretty reliable.

So if a certain Mark Carter has accessed this blog via the Swindon music forum I would like to take this opportunity to state once and for all that the line is not 'Can't understand what it's like to have sex with an idol'.

More recently though - and most bizarrely - my wife concluded that the lyrics were 'Can't understand what it's like to have sex with a maddo/(something something something) in front of baddo'.

The New York Dolls - One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This

I've previously mentioned here that I encountered a great deal of reluctance from friends to acknowledge the return of The New York Dolls in 2004. As a result very few of them bothered to buy their 2005 album One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This. And more fool them.

When the Dolls announced they were planning a new album I thought they might plunder Red Patent Leather or at least commit their version of 'Another Piece of my Heart' to tape (as performed at the Meltdown shows), so it was a surprise when they instead issued a full album of new material.

First and foremost there is little point comparing this album to either The New York Dolls or Too Much Too Soon, and not just because of the change in personnel. After all, 30 years have passed, recording methods have improved (it's no secret that the first two albums suffered production-wise), and even David Johansen's voice - although still clearly identifiable - has developed into even more of a drawl.

Perhaps a more straight rock & roll album than its predecessors (damn, what was that I said about comparisons ...), One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This initially didn't grab me but once on my MP3 player that all changed and it's very rare that I skip a song when they come up on shuffle. I can easily imagine songs like 'Gotta Get Away From Tommy' and 'Runnin' Around' taking their place in a live set next to 'Personality Crisis' et al, and with various guests lining up to pay their respects (Iggy on 'Gimme Luv And Turn On The Light', Michael Stipe on 'Dancing On The Lip Of A Volcano' this is a good an album than I could have ever wished for from a reformed Dolls.

Oddly the one song that most harks back to the 70s output - 'Rainbow Store', with its similarities to the Shangri-las 'Great Big Kiss', covered by the Dolls and later by Johnny Thunders on So Alone - is arguably the album's weakest.

So if you are guilty of ignoring this album then shame on you ....

See also:
Nina Antonia - The New York Dolls: Too Much Too Soon
Johnny Thunders - So Alone
Motorcycle Boy - Popsicle