Great Artist's Crapest Tunes

"LA" off the Fall's "This Nation's Saving Grace". Haven't really paid much attention to any of their post-1988 stuff, so there may have been worse recorded since.

The Kinks early R+B stuff is not to everyone's taste, and although I love most of it, there is plenty of filler. "Naggin Woman" from Kinda Kinks, however, is so utterly awful that even the most blinkered Kinks fans agree it's unlistenable.

The reason why? Dave Davies' vocals principally - the death rattle of a dehydrated meths drinker - but also the song, a feeble, mysogonistic whine. It was a cover though, not a Ray or Dave original, so at least that's something.

ARGH! Yes! I had to go and drag the record off the shelves and look up the name cause it's so crap I not only skip it, but have obliterated it from my memory. "I Believe It" by Spacemen3. It ruins what would otherwise be my *perfect* album, Playing With Fire. Oh, the wonkiness of the organ, the nasal tunelessness of the vocals, the annoyingness of the song.

That album is otherwise on my "favourite albums of all time" list but that song sticks out like a bombsite in a green and pleasant land. Ugh.

I am so bored this morning. Why did I quit my job? I'm supposed to be home painting or 4-tracking or doing something creative and not advertising or internet related, and what am I doing? Mucking about on the internet, as usual.

I've never understood why people don't like "L.A.". Even John Peel doesn't like "L.A."! I think it's a terrific song. I've never been to LA mind you, so maybe if I went I'd think it was a gross misrepresentation of a lovely town.

No, it's incredibly accurate, just only part of the story, that's all. It *is* a Mark E. Smith vision of things, after all. And yeah, I always liked it myself.

Easy choice for me -- the Cure's "Mint Car." What happens when dear Robert decides to do another perfectly summery hit a la "Just Like Heaven" only to come up with a cheap-ass knockoff. Only a small blemish on brilliance, though. ;-)

Great title though. Mint Car. MINT CAR!

The master must be Lou Reed - crappy albums by the bargain bin load. 'Sally Can't Dance', 'Growing up in Public', 'Rock and Roll Heart', 'The Bells', ‘Mistral’ - whole albums that even the most ardent fan wishes they’d never heard.

For me his most awful moments are when he lays into his own greatest songs. 'Live Take No Prisoners' is perhaps the best known example of this - if you haven't heard Lou mutilate 'Walk on the wild side' it’s a great listen-once experience. Live, Reed is spectacularly inconsistent 'Live in Italy' from 1984 is in many ways even worse than 'Prisoners' which is at least a sleazy shambles. Try Italy’s version of 'I'm waiting for my man' if you need convincing. If I remember correctly the NME gave this album a great review at the time but live albums are nearly always a regrettable mistake - a sort of guilty alliance between fan and artist, celebrating the way relationships easily slip from sense into obsession.

Unfortunately Lou Reed likes doing Velvet Underground covers. This is nearly always a mistake. Like Wordsworth returning to ‘The Prelude’ older Lou seems to misunderstand what his younger self was aiming at. For his first solo album, 'Lou Reed' ( recorded months before the sublime pop of 'Transformer'), he collected a bunch of session musicians together to trash some of his most delicate Velvets songs: 'I can't stand it', 'Walk and talk it' and 'Ride into the sun' are perhaps the crassest Velvets covers of all time - the true strength of these songs wouldn't be realised until the release of 'VU' and 'Another View'.

Perhaps that is the joy of Lou Reed’s solo career. The Velvets were such a great band that they could make anything Reed wrote sound brilliant. Without that prop he leaps from the astonishing to the absurd - often from track to track. It’s like charity shop shopping, you enjoy the good stuff because you found it yourself amongst the crap.

"Sally Cant Dance" is nowhere as bad the other 2 records mentioned. It's a sophisticated (ok, artificial) New York white funk record (ok, it's not James Brown at the Apollo) done by a lucid Lou ("Ennui" is lovely). Lou's stinking turkeys are too numerous to be all listed here, though... "The Original Wrapper", for fuck's sake!

Here's Peter Laughners take on Coney Island Baby:

This album made me so morose and depressed when I got the advance copy that I stayed drunk for three days. I didn't go to work. I had a horrible physical fight with my wife over a stupid bottle of 10 mg. Valiums. (She threw an ashtray, a brick, and a five foot candelabra at me, but I got her down and sat on her chest and beat her head on the wooden floor.) I called up the editor of this magazine (on my bill) and did virtually nothing but cough up phlegm in an alcoholic stupor for three hours, wishing somewhere in the back of my deadened brain that he could give me a clue as to why I should like this record. I came on to my sister-in-law "C'mon over and gimme head while I'm passed out." I cadged drinks off anyone who would come near me or let me into their apartments. I ended up the whole debacle passing out stone cold after puking and pissing myself at a band rehearsal, had to be kicked awake by my lead singer, was driven home by my long-suffering best friend and force fed by his old lady who could still find it in the boundless reaches of her good heart to smile on my absolutely incorrigible state of dissolution...I willed her all of my wordly goods before dropping six Valiums (and three vitamin B complexes, so I must've figured to wake up, or at least at the autopsy they would say my liver was OK). Well, wake up I did, after sleeping sixteen hours, and guess what was running through my head, along with the visual images of flaming metropolises and sinking ocean liners foaming and exploding in vast whirling vortexes of salt water...

Of all their music, there a few tracks on Def Leppard's Adrenalize which are worth shit musically. Its kind of a suprise considering what they did before.

Hey, Lou Reed's "The Bells" is choice. All of side 2 esp. - as good as any LP side he did that decade (except for maybe the last side of Metal Machine Music)... "Disco Mystic"? he's done far, FAR worse.

'Sally Can't Dance' = "New York white funk"? Hmmm now that's a familiar genre! This, remember is the album with "Billy", Lou's Gerry Raffertyesque answer to Rolf Harris's "two little boys"; and that's one of the more together tracks.

Thinking perhaps I had missed something I went back to it this evening.I agree with you Simon "Ennui" is lovely! But it sort of proves my point about the Oxfam shop side to Lou's back catalogue - you have to get past "Kill your sons" which hits new lows even by his standards...

Much of this album sounds like a weird precursor to Dire Straits.

"Door To Door" is quite substandard for Delia Derbyshire, I think. Not that it's *bad* or anything; it just sounds weird to hear her doing what is basically a 60s advertising jingle when she could fly so much further. Still constructed perfectly, though, but I suspect she'd regard it as mere hackwork, and I think she'd be right.

"Broken Chairs" ruins an otherwise perfect album (KEEP IT LIKE A SECRET) by Built to Spill (wasn't there a thread for that recently?). Luckily its the last track so you can just cut it and not worry about ruining album "continuity". 9 perfect tracks. What's this about 10 songs on that album? I don't hear it!!

"tokyo-a-go-go" is cheese.

Probably uniquely amongst posters 'ere, I really, REALLY like old genesis rekkids (EH nursery cryme, the lamb lies down on broadway etc - omigod! a progger!! Kill him!!!)

As you can probably imagine, I don't even *want* to get any further into this, it's probably not too hard to guess, though, is it?

think phil collins singing. Think "my bank balance is low, becuz I packed you via fax, oh lord"

gnnnnnnnn.....

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