Great Lost Albums
Lo Fidelity Allstars
How To Operate With A Blown Mind (Skint, 1998)
The freshest forgotten albums of yesteryear. Not the usual fawned over suspects but albums that ‘net-trawlers and second hand record shop aficionados may come across and should snap up now.
This month Guy Oddy time-travels back a decade to the age of big beat…
It’s not so long ago that Kasabian were displaying the arrogance that is expected of new bands, by proclaiming that they had invented a new genre of music. This might broadly be described as marrying driving electronica with snarling punk rock attitude. To call this statement disingenuous to a number of English bands, stretching back to the late seventies, however, would be an understatement. Caberet Voltaire, Renegade Soundwave, Happy Mondays and the Lo Fidelity Allstars had all previously fused the menace of punk with hip-shaking dance music, in a manner that makes today’s “nu-rave” survivors seem a little bit polite for their own good.
Brighton’s Lo Fidelity Allstars, probably the least well-known of these combos, sprang out of the big beat scene of the mid-‘90s, displaying a menace that seemed somewhat out of keeping with Fatboy Slim’s attempt to revive ‘smiley culture’. This attitude, however, wasn’t the infantile bragging of American hip-hoppers like 50 Cent, but an altogether more British nastiness that had more in common with the Droogs of ‘A Clockwork Orange’. They also had the tunes to match it.
Making their presence known with the formidable singles ‘Disco Machine Gun’ and ‘Kool Roc Bass, the band bust onto the scene sporting names that seemed to suggest more than a slight a Wu Tang Clan influence: A One Man Crowd Called Gentile (bass), The Wrekked Train (vocals), The Albino Priest (decks and samples), Sheriff Jon Stone (keyboards), The Slammer (drums) and The Many Tentacles (engineering and keyboards). Bringing a much-needed snarl to a somewhat extended second (third or forth, even) summer of love, with outright stealing from hip-hop, techno, funk and punk, the Lo Fi’s looked set to be something special.
Unfortunately, their career was somewhat mercurial and they never truly lived up to their promise, as The Wrekked Train and Sheriff Jon Stone walked out of the band, mid-tour, after the release of their tour de force ‘How To Operate With A Blown Mind’. This ripped the guts out of the outfit, consigning all the survivors to the second division of electronica from then on.
‘How To Operate With A Blown Mind’ starts off with the ranting, poem-like, ‘Warming Up The Brain Farm’ that concludes with a snarling “Allstars taking over” and a sampled “Stick ‘em up, motherfucker” before the beat kicks in and all Hell is let loose. Sampling the likes of Paris and Sparky D, it sets the tone for the rest of the disc.
Taking in ‘Kool Roc Bass’ and ‘Disco Machine Gun’ (now renamed ‘Blisters On My Brain’ after a legal tussle with The Breeders, over an uncleared sample), hip-hop is successfully fused with a vocal style that often occupies similar territory to John Lydon/Rotten and Liam Gallaghe and an underlying acid house feel. This is party music with a bit of a disconcerting edge.
Where ‘How To Operate With A Blown Mind’ succeeds where so many electronica albums fail, however, is that it has true light and shade, and not just variations on a theme. So while the listener is treated to an almost straight-forward rocker, such as ‘Battle Flag’, things also calm down significantly with ‘Vision Incision’ and the spacey ‘Nightime Story’. The only unchanging aspect of the Lo Fi’s sound throughout is The Wrekked Train’s vocals, which mainly recall David Thewlis’ character in Mike Leigh’s 1993 film ‘Naked’.
For what is, at least nominally, a rock’n’roll album it’s refreshing that just about the only influence that ‘How To Operate With A Blown Mind’ seems to have borrowed from the mainstream rock world, is the structure of the album. Parallels with the Stones’ ‘Exile On Main Street’’s soundtrack to an alcohol and drug-fuelled night out are inescapable. ‘Warming Up The Brain Farm’ comes on like a statement of intent, before things really kick off then, towards the end, calm descends again although only in a passed-out-on-someone’s-sofa-with-a-half-smoked-fag-hanging-out-of-your-mouth kind of way.
‘How To Operate With A Blown Mind’ is a fantastic ride, but unfortunately it is one that the Lo Fidelity Allstars were doomed never to equal, never mind surpass. Once The Wrekked Train and Sheriff Jon Stone had left the fold, the rest of the band reverted to using their given names of Phil, Andy and the like. And after that it all just seemed a bit ordinary.
