Wonderful words by the ever erudite Adam Turner.

Volume 1 of No-One’s Listening Anyway came out in 2024, a snapshot of obscure DIY and underground bands from the post-punk period, compiled by crate digger extraordinaire Jason Boardman. It contained 16 songs by 16 bands – some you might have heard of (Swamp Children, an ACR affiliated act on Factory), artists Jason has re-issued and had remixed for his Before I Die imprint (Khartoum) and some whose wired and spindly Cold War guitars and bass-heavy, home-studio dub you might be forgiven for having been previously hip to (Sprouthead Uprising, Surface Mutants). It was a postcard from the politically-charged early `80s. A lovingly compiled riposte to Thatcher and the dawning of her dole age.

Now Jason’s done it again, another volume, 16 more missives from the late `70s and early `80s that burrow further into the subculture – a treasure trove of wonderful band names and startling music: And The Native Hipsters, Airkraft, Laughter In The Garden, Blank Student and The Gist all feature, alongside some better known acts, such as The Flying Lizards and Dislocation Dance.

And The Native Hipsters open side 1 with There Goes Concord Again, a track recorded in someone’s bedroom on a Revox 4-track, the essence of DIY post-punk. A lone and very untutored voice, singing / speaking, recounting women going up a hill wearing red cardigans and pulling shopping baskets, stopping to notice supersonic flight in the skies high above them. A bass plays single notes and an atonal guitar picks away at the strings, climbing up the fretboard. ‘Perhaps nothing happens on the hill’, Blatt the vocalist wonders and the song matches the possible inertia. A tone poem of rudimentary, non-musical backing. Self expression and accessible technology. The song caught John Peel’s ear and this single, released on 7” in 1980, made number 5 on the independent chart after an initial home produced run of 500 45s, all wrapped in homemade sleeves cut from magazines, sold out. Dislocation Dance were a Mancunian indie-jazz outift, with trumpeter Andy Diagram on board (later of James, Pale Fountains and Mick Head’s Red Elastic Band). Their YOPS Course is minimal and almost chilled, but still with an edge. Piano, supper club drums, Diagram’s wandering trumpet and 3 or 4 voices simultaneously muttering. Like a proto-Stereolab or a minimal, weirder Saint Etienne maybe. Laughter In The Garden’s Clutching At Straws starts with found sounds – the clanks and clicks of machinery and industrial noise. Drums and an organ appear, and then a dub bassline straight outta early `80s Southampton. Sax and clarinet taking the lead, parping and diverting attention, while a stream of consciousness / cut up poetry outlines aspects of inner and outer life, circa 1982… and that’s just the first three tracks.

Other highlights include The Flying lizards’ Another Story – two and a half minutes of lo-fi experimental synth-funk, all scratchy racket and bumping bass. Siren, plinking guitar, abstract clatter, suddenly clicking in to Slits-esque place, “Breaking it down.. sticking a pin in your inflated ego”, the singer chants and in drifts a sax that could almost be from another record altogether.

Johnny G’s Miles & Miles was a b-side, the flip to something called The Hippy’s Graveyard. Recorded at a proper recording studio (mixed at Wessex, the home of London Calling no less) and released on Beggars Banquet, this fuses dub and synthpop, leaning more into the experimental echo as it goes. Percussion and high hats, distorted horns, heavy, heavy on the reverb and delay. Two minutes 45 seconds of `78 bottled.

There’s much more inside these 4 sides of vinyl. It’s a glimpse inside a vanished world. The Cold War dread of those decades past, however, has returned in the last few months. That sense that the world is out of control, and that the powerful / insane (hello Reagan, hello Trump) could tip us into the abyss at any moment. DIY post-punk was at least in part a response to the geopolitics of the time. It’s fitting then that Jason has unearthed more of these rough and ready transmissions, and dusted them off to shake up our own new dark days. Despite the collection’s defeatist title – no-one’s listening anyway – let’s hope that’s not the case.

Volume Two of Jason Boardman’s No-One’s Listening Anyway can be ordered directly from Caroline True.

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.