Wonderful words by the ever erudite Adam Turner. 

Jason Boardman is a Mancunian institution, the host of numerous club nights stretching back over three decades, one half of Aficionado, crate digger, selector and since 2023 the man behind the record label Before I Die. Jason’s talent for turning up sounds you didn’t know you needed is making the imprint’s output absolutely essential. Last year he released an album by Nuremberg kosmische collective Konformer and this year the space dub of KlangKollektor. In the spring he unearthed a long lost post-punk/ dub single by c – three slices of otherworldly music from 1983, that he paired with new remixes from local talent Talking Drums and Synkro.

Now, hot on the heels of Khartomb’s early `80s collision of wired guitars and reggae rhythms comes a compilation album mining that seam further and deeper. No One’s Listening Anyway, the title of the 16 track album, may well be true in some of the cases; there are names here that might be familiar to the most committed post-punk dub explorers – APB say or Factory’s Swamp Children, while Skeet were affiliated to 2-Tone – but beyond that this is a selection of super obscure bands. Surface Mutants, Club Of Rome, The Four Kings, Sprout Head Rising, Sirons, and Bally O’Brien will ring few bells.

The DIY nature of these bands is key to their sound. The early 80s were a highly politicised time, where everything personal could be construed as political. Thatcher’s divide and conquer tactics, writ large in the Miner’s Strike and the ‘managed decline’ of industrial manufacturing, for some of Britain’s northern cities  consigned a generation of school leavers to the dole. Punk had sent the music scene into a spin a few years previously and those that took it through to its end, bought into what the Sex Pistols and the fanzine, Sniffing Glue, had said: “now form a band.” However, they also did a handbrake turn away from major labels. The Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch E.P. showed them that they could do it themselves. The DIY squat scene saw Scritti Politti publish the details of exactly how they recorded and costed their single Skank Bloc Bologna, down to the price of the labels at the centre of the records. Doing It Yourself was not just expedient. It was a philosophy. The sixteen songs on No One’s Listening Anyway are a doorway to that time and that scene, the principles, and the politics, not least the fusion of atonal, angular, largely white, post-punk with black bass culture and dub.

Bally O’Brien’s Tell Me Why The Tape Wobbles – spoken word over hissing percussion and a single lo-fi guitar – is a delightfully low key opener. Bally sounding like he’s recording into a lone mic and a 4-track in a cheap rented front room, heated by a two-bar fire and with 1960s curtains hanging raggedly over the bay window. He repeats the line, ‘tell me why the tape wobbles’, and the tape does indeed wobble. It’s followed by Anorexia’s trebly Inanimate Objects, which features Slits style drumming and flat chanted vocals. Breaking for a sax solo before the song thumps back in.

Methodishca Tune are slower, with a hint of reggae and some spindly, almost out of tune guitars that recall some of the contemporary U.S. bands like Minutemen. As with all of the tracks here the vocals are unaffected regional voices from British towns and suburbs. It’s as far away from the world of Top Of The Pops, Smash Hits, Frankie… and Wham! as you can get. I Wish I Wish by Sprout Head Rising is a dubby delight of backwards FX and echo, organ stabs, a reverb laced lyric and in the middle an alarm clock goes off – one of those that was inside a box, that stood up by being unfolded, and leant against itself. Something that had to be wound up each night, set for the morning that you had to get up to go and sign on.

The Four Kings’ Disgraceful Version kicks in with more echo and rim shots, reggae bass pushing it along and another reverbed vocal that seems to have been recorded in a completely different room, recalling the dubbier parts of The Clash’s Sandinista! but on a fraction of the budget. Originally released on the B-side of a 1980 single, pressed in France and out on the tiny Parole Records, it represents this album in microcosm. Four minutes of DIY creation by an obscure three piece, one of only three singles they released between 1978 and 1980. As fresh now in 2024 as it was in 1980, it’s also a terrific time capsule of alternative `80s Britain.

Swamp Children formed in Manchester in 1980, signed to Factory Records, and boasted future members of A Certain Ratio within their ranks (1). Their Call Me Honey can be found on one side of the Little Voices E.P. (2). The song was produced by Simon Topping – another future ACR member – while Cabaret Voltaire’s Stephen Malinder was in the chair for the flip. It’s a strange fusion of clipped funk, rubber basslines, and high pitched, half-sung vocals. Post-punk jazz funk.

Cathy La Crème’s 1980 single I Married A Cult Figure From Salford is a tribute of sorts to John Cooper Clarke, with funky bass and someone doing a damn fine impression of the man himself. The funk continues with Surface Mutants and the scratchy, wired Psalm Fifty Seven by 57^th Parallel. Khartomb’s King Skin is rough and ready – tape hiss, studio chatter, distant sounding drums and clipped guitar.

More obscure and long lost bands whizz by, short sharp blasts of untutored and instinctive music made on the cheap and without any considerations of commerciality – The Dealers, Group Therapy… – until we alight on The Sirons’ Cruise Missile Blues. Durutti Column’s Bruce Mitchell produced this final piece of early `80s Cold War dread.

NOTES

(1) Swamp Children included future ACR sax / clarinet man Tony Quigley and Martin Moscrop – Martin on drums as he is sometimes on stage with ACR when he’s not playing guitar or trumpet. The group eventually mutated into jazzers Kalima.
(2) Fac 49 if you’re interested in the Factory numbering system – these things matter to the Factory heads and yes, it takes one to know one.

Jason Boardman’s No-Ones Listening Anyway – UK DIY Post Punk & Dubs 1980-1984 (Volume 1) can be ordered directly from Caroline True Records. 

You can find more proper, on point, prose from Adam Turner over at his own brilliant blog, The Bagging Area. Adam is also part of the admin team at the mighty Flightpath Estate.

Skeet are also the subject of a brilliant retrospective on Efficient Space.