BEYOND THE IMPLODE 3 - BRITISH AIRWAYS 0

(BTi Corps gearing up for the inevitable GOA TRANCE REVIVAL)

Hey honey-bunnies! Happy Valentines Week! Mwaaah! I'm all luvved up and ready to go. Oh, bollocks - listen, just do what I used to do every year. Go AWOL on the 13th. It's on a Sunday this year, isn't it? You know what that means, right? Your SO's pathetic parents will try to bully the two of you into popping round for Sunday lunch. Your SO will give in, and all your plans for making a mess in those spanking new Furry outfits you picked up at the local fetish fair will be straight out the window. Also, you'll have to deduct an hour, for going to church / mosque. As well as conserve your energy for Chinese New Year.

Oh, by the way, big shout out to the Saturday Golders Green synagogue posse. Yeah, I see you...driving round the back of Hodford Road, furtively parking your cars, and pretending you walked all the way from Temple Fortune...and on the sabbath!

They're still playing Scottish folk music in the Hindu temple, by the way.

But enough of this drivel - let's up n' man the LISTENING POST! I only bothered with individual tracks this time round.

A.B.H - "NERVES OF STEEL"

I wouldn't normally stick glue-sniffing RAC bands up here (("yeah, not much" - an ex-BTi reader)), but following our most esteemed cretin of a mayor's decision to piss £75k of London's budget up the wall on a 'USA Day', I'm really getting into this blast of thug rock: "Kentucky Fried Chicken and Coca-Cola / The Yanks are coming, they're taking over! / Reagan's hands around our neck / It's our nation he wants to wreck!"

Suffice to say, A.B.H weren't massive fans of our transatlantic cousins. Neither were the UK Left, actually. Luckily, A.B.H throw in an unrelated verse at the end, so you don't get confused, bemoaning: student bastards, the communists / trendy liberals, the multilateralists!, which actually sounds quite funny when he tries to cram in the last word in time to the beat.

Did you know - if you statistically collated everyone who ever bought a Skrewdriver LP, the breakdown would work like this: 45% neo-nazis; 35% the curious, intrigued by the group's reputation; 20% Lefties, who bought it to study the enemy ((and to secretly rock out to Back With A Bang when their comrades aren't looking)).

UPSETTERS - "RED HOT", "POPCORN", "CATCH THIS"

I don't really get many offers to clash fellow bloggers - I think they all grasp the difference between 'courageous' and 'kamikaze' - but, y'know what I was thinking the other day? If I ever did disgrace a DJ booth again, I'd probably just need to bring along a copy of the Upsetters' Eastwood Rides Again LP. You don't need anything else to kick-start a party - just slam both sides of this plastic bullet on the deck.

OH SURE, I'd draw flack from moaners, demanding to know how I could expect them to put up with "just one record" all night! Zip up, twatwaffles. If you can't have a good time repeatedly listening to Eastwood Rides Again, you don't deserve the epithet of RAVER. You're probably the kind of serial complainer who gets invited to a hearty Xmas dinner by your SO's parents - out of the pure, honest kindness of their hearts - and then whinges and bitches cos they didn't lay on any cheesy parsnips. Or those 'pigs in blakelocks' things.

The whole LP's sizzling, and boasts one of my favourite reggae front covers of all time, but I've been caning these three tracks the most recently. They're tough, stripped down, atypical (for the Upsetters) funk instrumentals. I know Lee Perry's kind of blasted in Blogworld, cos everyone remembers him playing to white sociology students with rasta hats in the 1990s, but sweet fucking Jah - could he make his musicians rock like bastards when he needed to.

I'm pretty sure some minor league trip hop / plunderphonics outfit filched the Red Hot bassline for a played-once-on-XFM-in-'97 single. And even that sounded brilliant. Cheers, Upsetters!

WILEY / CHEW FU - "TAKE THAT"

ANY tune that starts off sounding like a Flymo being violently ground into Boris Johnson's vacuous pusbag head is cool with me! Does Wiley actually say "Bedford nightclub" in this? ((NB - THAT BURNING SPEAR "COCKNEY WANKER" THING IS REAL, SO FUCK OFF)) Ask the History (Is Made At Night) Man - I reckon if this track had dropped in Mirage in 1993, there'd have been a curtain of Kilkenny drenching the dancefloor, as punters carrying those squeezy plastic pint glasses through the baying throng succumbed to the sweaty, human wave attack. And then everyone off to the kebab place opposite Bridge Street, to watch a Wonder Stuff fan rolling around under the tables, repeatedly sobbing, "Please, stop kicking me". What's Luton like now? I saw footage of the EDL demo and it just looked like most Friday evenings back in the old days.

GANG GANG DANCE - "DESERT STORM"

On the whole, the Gang Gang Dance album is so-so, but I played this track really loud on my earphones on the Metropolitan Line at Baker St the other week, and everybody in the carriage stared at me. OK, there were only four other people, but you get my drift.

Tussaud's is still doing a lot of business, isn't it? You'd think tourists'd have better things to waste their time and money on. I mean, most of the waxworks have nothing to do with London anyway. Is Britney still there? It's like flying all the way to Tokyo to gawp at a mannequin of Gordon Brown, or Alexa Chung, for ¥300,000. Gary Gilmore's not there anymore, allegedly. Some family, possibly Iberian, tapped me on the shoulder so I removed my earphones, and they asked me how to get to the wax factory. They'd all bought single Tube tickets as well. I really wanted to tell them to save their dosh. But shit, it's their biscuits, not mine. As they thanked me and headed for the opposite Exit to the one I'd pointed out, I re-jigged my iPod to the start of this track - and, for six minutes, I was again glad to be alive.

DILLINJA - "SOUTH SIDE" (RIFFIN' MIX)

There's this site called Zamzar where you can rip Youtube videos into MP3s, so I did it with this tune, which I literally hadn't heard for 16 years.

I know I'm fond of yelling "IF IT AIN'T RAGGA JUNGLE, IT AIN'T WORTH A FUCK!" into fellow bloggers' indignant faces, but this is different. If opening synth swoops could take a photo, this track would be every Camberwell skyline sunset in 1994. The tune still puts a shiver down my spine.

Dillinja used to be really good, then he got roped into all that moribund 'Intelligent Drum 'n Bass' codswallop. I guess ID'N'B is due a revival soon. Did you know that Photek's real name was Rupert? All the labels started monikering themselves stuff like Phuture Rationalizm or Channel Kognitiv - and, suddenly, everyone's SO's parents were inviting them round for Sunday dinner and putting on the LTJ Bukem 3LP set.

Sadly, the bass on the MP3 rip of South Side is so pitifully weak, I think I'm gonna have to brave the digital Hades of eBay to score a vinyl copy again.

GENERATION X - "KISS ME DEADLY"

Punks - tell me something. Why do you all hate Gen-X so much? Just because they were popular with Japanese schoolgirls before Japanese schoolgirls became 'cool'? They were the Suede of the Kings Road punk scene and Billy Idol is a gin-swigging nutcase with an IRA-supporting mum, who's done loads more zany shit than anyone else in the UK'76 crew, with an admirable (albeit illogical) absence of shame (that's Billy, not his ma...but who knows?)

I'd rather listen to the glorious Minder meets Christiane F psychodrama that's Kiss Me Deadly than anything by those boring powerpop gerbils Stiff Little Fingers - a band so devoid of original thought, they had to get a Daily Express hack to tell them how to dress, write half their songs for them and basically persuade them to become "the Ulster Clash" - right down to incorporating a lengthy, torturous white reggae workout halfway through Side 2 of their debut. I saw SLF in 2005 and they were toss. Jake Burns is just a bumbling old dad from a gravy advert and his interviews are fucking dross - So, we went into Rockfield for the third album...interestingly, it was the first time we'd recorded on 32-track...I used a Les Paul for the overdubs...we were tired of record company pressure and just wanted some time to... DIE, PERCHANCE?

The only person I've ever known who was fanatical about SLF turned out to be a grade-Z halfwit who once walked out of a pub without telling his SO he was going, because she was chatting to OTHER PEOPLE instead of clinging to his arm. He then sulked for a weekend and refused to answer her calls. He was especially put out by her selfishness, he later informed everyone, as he used to shower her with gifts on a weekly basis and sorted her out for lifts when her car broke down. She just didn't appreciate him! That's the kind of thing SLF sing about.

Said muppet also used to enjoy his steaks 'well done'. I know veggies won't get this, but that's about as low as you can go. What kind of tosspot has a 'well done' steak? Seriously, I have as little time for 'grown men' who fear blood on their chips as I have for people who suddenly swap their football teams in their 20s (which he also did).

As I suffered my way through that SLF set, you know who I HONESTLY wanted to see on stage? Who I'd have jumped right into the grunting mosh pit for, at the drop of a hand grenade? Yep...Generation X. Kiss Me Deadly is fucking amazing, and that's why it wins VALENTINES WEEK LISTENING POST.

And remember - your SO's parents reckon that their darling squirt could do MILES better than you - so don't get their goat by repeating any of this over the table.