Mo' Wack

Various Artists

Royalties Overdue

Mo' Wax

Melody Maker, June 18 1994

by Simon Reynolds

VARIOUS ARTISTS 
Headz 2 
(Mo Wax)
Village Voice, 1996 (remixed slightly for Faves of 1996)

by Simon Reynolds 


In the age of compilation gigantism, Headz 2 dramatically ups the ante. Mo 
Wax's latest anthology consists of not one but two separately sold double-CD's  (or two quadruple albums, boxed like Wagner's Parsifal), which contain nearly five-and-a-half hours of music spanning not just trip hop but leading innovators in drum & bass, techno, art-rap and electronica. Before I even saw these dauntingly oversize collections in the stores, I was put off by the air of hubris and self-congratulatory connoisseurship hanging over the project. When I saw them, the deluxe vinyl sets instantly reminded me of those calfskin-bound, gilt-inlaid editions of Dickens (sold through mail-order ads that appeal to "your unstinting pride"), which remain unread on the shelf but testify to an 
interest in being cultured. In Headz case, the word is subcultured. 

Despite their garish abstrakt covers, the vinyl Headz also resemble headstones, 
perhaps because Mo Wax supremo James Lavelle has herein constructed a kind of mausoleum of late '90s "cool". Appropriately, the music itself is sombre and 
subdued, mostly cleaving to the trip hop noir norm: torpid breakbeats, entropic 
sub-bass, dank dub reverb. (When it comes to non-junglistic breakbeats, give me the rowdy, rockist furore of the Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim and their amyl brethren, any day). The same Mo Wax kiss-of-def that resulted in Luke Vibert's only uninteresting release to date affects contributions from the likes of Danny Breaks, whose abandons his normal hyper-kinaesthetics for the idling headnooding tempo of "Science Fu Beats". (Perking the track up to 45 r.p.m improves this, and several other tracks, considerably). 

Mo Wax belong to what you might call the "good music society", or more 
precisely, they belong to a specific "good music society" which dates back to 
the "eclectic" list of influences on Massive Attack's "Blue Lines" (wherein PiL, 
Mahavishnu Orchestra, Isaac Hayes and Studio One coexisted in smug 
self-congratulation). The sensibility is pure fusion: "it's all music, man", 
"what kind of music don't I like? -- just bad music!". Every area of music has 
it own "good music society", its little cabal of cognoscenti, what Kevin Martin 
calls the "taste police": Junior Boys Own for deep house, Creation (in the late 
Eighties at least) for leather-trousered rock, Grand Royal for white American 
B-boyism. Each maintains a canon of cool, and as with all canons, what is 
excluded is as significant as what is included. What is excluded tends to be 
both the vibrantly vulgar and the genuinely extremist/out-there: neither The 
Sweet nor Stockhausen make it. (Although Pierre Henry, bizarrely, has been 
canonised --as a pioneer of E-Z listening alongside Jean-Jacques Perrey!!!).

Bonus hateration

The return of WANKLE 

(from Retromania blog)

I saw an early version of this James Lavelle doc at a festival a few years ago and what amazed me, first and foremost, was how many UNKLE albums there'd been.

The first was bad enough - so I guess I'd assumed that that would have been it

But no, no, they persisted after Psyence Fiction (yuk wot a title) -  there's something like FIVE subsequent UNKLE albums!

And what's worse is that they get increasingly rocky, involving such as Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age

Like Lavelle started buying into this really naff idea of rock rebellion and intensity and authenticity

Like a less tastefully executed version of the Death in Vegas approach - a studio assembled simulacrum of rock, without the actual rhythmic engine of band-energy powering it

I guess it shows the odd lingering prestige of rock - and especially the punk strand within rock - as the ultimate stand-in for rebellion and individuality, which continues to exert its thrall over people who've come up through hip hop or dance music, and whose creative procedures are radically different

For some reason deep in their hearts their burning desire seems to be to collaborate with Noel Gallagher (as with Goldie circa Saturnz Returnz on "Temper Temper") or Pete Doherty or somebody like that, despite being light-years ahead sonically of those guys.

Give this a butchers if you fancy a cringadelic experience

The other thing I gleaned from the doc - and Lavelle's embrace of rockism - was that he'd managed to convince himself that  being a curator really is the same as being a creator -  that's there's really nothing to writing songs, creating a distinctive band-sound, a band-voice.

All you need is some famous pals, and some connections - and taste, and attitude

Simply convening the ingredients would somehow generate vibe in itself, hey presto, through the magic of chutzpah

Wrong!

Hubris 101: not knowing your limits, the nature of what you are actually good at (in his case, arguably at any rate,  branding, packaging, spotting talent in others i.e. Shadow, Krush, building a buzz)





Yet despite this, UNKLE is still going - there's a new album out soon  -  The Road: Part II/Lost Highway -  a "filmic" affair whose cast includes the  Clash’s Mick Jones, Dhani Harrison, Editors’ frontman Tom Smith, The Duke Spirit’s Leila Moss, Mark Lanegan, Keaton Henson, Queens Of The Stone Age’s Jon Theodore and Troy Van Leeuwen, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds vocalist Ysée, Brian Eno collaborator Tessa Angus, producers Justin Stanley and Chris Goss,  BOC,  spoken-word contributions from legendary Scottish actor Brian Cox, and more

First single

Press release:

“Once you have walked the road, everything becomes clear,” says Elliott Power on the Prologue to the sixth album from genre-bending pioneers UNKLE. ‘The Road: Part II / Lost Highway’ is the sound of an artist forever in transit on life’s journey of discovery.

“My work has always had an eclectic essence and soundtrack-influence in its structure,” says Lavelle. “If you go through the back catalogue, there’s a continuity between the motion and the ambition of the sound. Ideally, you’re constantly collaging and sampling elements of what’s relevant at the time to create something new.

“Now, there’s a lot more freedom. When I first started, the walls between genres in front of you were a lot greater to climb. We’re at a much more open-minded and eclectic place with music now.”

"I started doing a show on Soho Radio last year, which made me think about playing records in a different way,” says Lavelle of his life after ‘Part I’. “It wasn’t about trying to make people dance in a nightclub. It was a breath of fresh air, and about playing a more eclectic mix. ‘The Road Part 2’ was made in the same way – it’s a mixtape and a journey. You’re in your car, starting in the day and driving into the night. The language of it was for it to be the ultimate road trip.

He continues: “It’s the mid-part of a trilogy. The first record is like you’re leaving home; you’re naive and trying to discover. There are elements of my early days in there, as well as a bit of everything since. There’s an optimism and excitement to it, as there was with me having to direct this project alone for the first time.

“This record is the journey. You’re on the road, out there in the world. There are let downs, highs, lows, love, loss and experiences. The third record to come is basically about coming home; wherever that may be."

With the album split into two acts each with a beginning, a middle and end, the trips from light to dark, from brute force to tenderness make for both the full arc of the adventure and suites to be enjoyed separately. It’s a bold, assured and confident collection – from the Americana of ‘Long Gone’, to the Kanye West ‘Black Skinhead’ - inspired ‘Nothing To Give’, the alt-orchestral rush of ‘Only You’ to the guitar-heavy mantra of ‘Crucifixion/A Prophet’ and the electronic child’s lullaby of ‘Sun (The)’ – via covers of ‘The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face’ made famous by Roberta Flack and the ‘guilty pleasure’ of the euphoric ‘Touch Me’ by Rui Da Silva. Helping to travel further down the myriad avenues of UNKLE’s sound are the full spectrum of collaborators and guests.

‘The Road: Part II/Lost Highway’ welcomes The Clash’s Mick Jones, Dhani Harrison, Editors’ frontman Tom Smith, The Duke Spirit’s Leila Moss, Mark Lanegan, Keaton Henson, Queens Of The Stone Age’s Jon Theodore and Troy Van Leeuwen, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds vocalist Ysée, Brian Eno collaborator Tessa Angus, producers Justin Stanley and Chris Goss,  BOC,  Philip Sheppard and artist John Isaac among others –  as well as spoken-word contributions from legendary Scottish actor Brian Cox (who used to be Lavelle’s landlord) and Stanley Kubrick’s widow Christiana, who leant her trust and voice to Lavelle following his acclaimed exhibition to the seminal director. The two names who crop up most throughout the record however are rising West London singer and producer Miink and experimental rapper Elliott Power.

“They’re just both so incredibly talented, and everything I love about London right now,” says Lavelle. “I’ve been playing a lot with going back to sampling and going back to certain aesthetics from when I was first buying records and DJing, then to mix that with something contemporary. They’ve helped me create this ‘Bladerunner meets London Soundsystem’ kind of vibe.”

But then, Lavelle has always been an artist as inspired by the past as he was racing towards the future.

“The way that things are now are what we were always doing with Mo’Wax,” says Lavelle. “The legacy was that we broke down barriers, took down everything culturally-lite and put it into something. Now street culture is the predominant visual culture of the world. It’s mad to think that Supreme is more popular and recognised than Louis Vuitton. Every major label and rapper is making sneakers and toys. At the time it was seen as vanity and gimmicky, but look at the way culture is now. That’s what we started.”

The striking artwork of the hooded knight that adorns the sleeve on 'Lost Highway' is by celebrated artist John Stark – renowned for drawing upon magical realism and using the more mystical elements of the past to reveal something profound about the present.

"It’s about the yin and yang, night and day, the rolling journey," says Lavelle of the artwork. "Here's a Ronin-like, lone warrior. It represents what it means for me to be going out into the world and finding myself."

KLF

The KLF

The Observer, April 7th 1991

by Simon Reynolds 

"We lurch a lot," says Bill Drummond of The KLF. "I've never followed a set path. There has only been this feeling of getting closer to something. A beckoning peak!"

Over the past four years, Drummond and his partner Jimmy Cauty have veered chaotically from mammoth success to dismal catastrophe, leaving a trail of half-completed projects and unrealised pipe dreams. Operating under a variety of cryptic names, they've been guided only by a loose philosophy that Drummond calls "zenarchy", based on improvisation, getting bored quickly, and moving on.

Drummond's active involvement in pop began in the late Seventies as guitarist in the Liverpudlian art-punk group Big In Japan, and a subsequent role as manager of Echo and The Bunnymen. Several years later, working as an A&R consultant for WEA Records, Drummond met a like mind in Cauty, and in 1987 the pair formed The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu, taking the name from a mythical anarchist secret society.

Their first single 'All You Need Is Love' quickly became notorious for its barefaced samples of the Beatles and Sam Fox, and a subsequent LP was withdrawn following an injunction instigated by Abba, in reprisal for samples from their 'Dancing Queen'.

In the summer of 1988, the duo reached Number One as The Timelords with their novelty hit 'Doctor In The Tardis', an annoying hybrid of Gary Glitter and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and documented the escapade in the book The Manual; How To Have A Number One The Easy Way.

Such stunts earned Drummond and Cauty the reputation of pranksters. For some they were heroic mischief-makers in the mould of Malcolm McLaren, for others merely an irritant in the gimmicky, self-publicising tradition of Jonathan King.

Drummond, now 37, sees it differently. "McLaren has a hunger for a public profile, whereas I think Jimmy and I shy away from that. We don't have a master plan, just impulses that we act upon. We've never set out to irritate but I know that we annoy people because we seem to be very knowing — simply because of all our experience in the business, we do know a lot more than a bunch of 19-year-olds who are completely instinctive and naive."

None the less, the duo rapidly grew sick of their reputation. "There was a point when we really only existed on the pages of the music papers. And we wanted out of it. We liked the idea of achieving something that had no irony and no reference points."

They drew inspiration from acid house and rave culture, which they found refreshing precisely because it was unmediated and unselfconscious. "The rave scene was a complete rejection of Eighties 'Style culture' mentality, which I always loathed because it was elitist and joyless. Acid house was all-embracing and inclusive, but like anything new, it quickly built up its own class structure and code. But then in 1989, when the big raves started along the orbital motorways, the scene opened up again."

Early in 1990, as The KLF, the duo released Chill Out, an album of beat-free "ambient house", designed as a soothing soundtrack to the crack-of-dawn come-down after all-night raves. Despite a record cover that spoofed Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother and samples that ranged from Fleetwood Mac's 'Albatross' to Acker Bilk, for many people Chill Out was the first time the duo had made music without having their tongue wedged in their collective cheek.

Towards the end of last year, The KLF had a huge hit with the manic techno-mantra 'What Time Is Love'. But any doubts that Drummond and Cauty were finally succeeding on their own musical merits were scotched in February when their '3AM Eternal' got to Number One, and their new album, The White Room, entered the Top Ten.

Despite their two Number One hits, The KLF are "perpetually broke", partly because they run their own record label and partly because of 'the never-ending saga' of their full-length movie The White Room. "We've spent £200,000 on it already, but we need £1.5 million to finish it," says Drummond ruefully. So they've released the soundtrack album first, and are waiting to "knock on doors to ask for money". In the meantime The KLF are determined to avoid a planned career. Says Drummond, "We prefer just to roam."

The KLF + Massive Attack

The New York Times, August 18th 1991

by Simon Reynolds

So volatile is the club scene that few artists have been able to make a career out of dance music, which is released mostly as singles. When dance groups do make an album, it usually consists of a few singles and a heap of filler.

But in the aftermath of Britain's "acid house" revolution — the psychedelic trance-dance music played on samplers, synthesizers and drum machines — a new breed of dance group has emerged, one that looks to the album format as an opportunity to explore its ideas. The last year has seen probing albums like 808 State's Ex:el, Bassomatic's Set the Controls for the Heart of the Bass and the Shamen's En-Tact.

Now Massive Attack's Blue Lines and the KLF's White Room suggest a breakthrough for dance music intended to be heard at home. They may even herald the return of the concept album, not seen in disco since the days of Earth, Wind and Fire. And after building a reputation in England — the KLF has had three hit singles, Massive Attack glowing reviews — the two groups are poised to conquer the United States.

Massive Attack's origins lie in an early 80's rap collective called the Wild Bunch, from Bristol, in England's West Country. The band's 1986 cover version of 'The Look of Love' is credited with influencing Soul II Soul's hybrid of funk, reggae and hip-hop. But because Massive Attack was slow to record its debut album, the group is regarded as a follower in Soul II Soul's shift toward a laid-back, contemplative dance sound. Blue Lines (Circa/Virgin America 2-91685; CD and cassette) takes this to the next phase.

Although Massive Attack uses house and hip-hop techniques like sampling, rapping and turntable-scratching, most of its songs are much slower than the club norm of 120 beats per minute; they range from about 90 beats per minute to a torpid 67. Dance records usually simulate the uproar of communal celebration, but Massive Attack's vibe is meditational rather than gregarious. The group has talked of its admiration for Pink Floyd, its desire to be considered primarily an album band and its reluctance to have its records categorized as dance music.

On the liner notes, Massive Attack pays tribute to the inspiration of such unlikely ancestors as the post-punk experimental group Public Image Limited, the jazz-rock cosmonauts the Mahavishnu Orchestra and fusioneers like Herbie Hancock. More predictably, Massive Attack cites Isaac Hayes, the pioneer of symphonic soul, and the legendary reggae production team Studio One.

Mr. Hayes's influence comes through on the epic 'Safe From Harm' and the mournfully sweeping, string-laden 'Unfinished Sympathy', both of which were hit singles in Britain. But Massive Attack's real originality lies in more tranquil tracks like 'One Love', with its mesmerizing clockwork rhythm and jazzy, electric-piano pulsations. The title track, 'Blue Lines', combines purring keyboards, a sleepwalking beat and a soft-spoken rap soliloquy that's far from the self-assertive bluster associated with hip-hop. As the rapper 3D declares, "No tension in my life/'Cause the way I deal is hazy."

On 'Daydreaming', 3D lets his mind drift on a stream of consciousness in which he refers to Robert De Niro and quotes from 'Fiddler on the Roof' and the Beatles, in between expounding an almost Zen Buddhist philosophy of sublime inertia. He talks of "living in my headphones," of floating like helium above the hyperactive "trouble and strife" of everyday life.

On the similarly mystical 'Hymn of the Big Wheel', Horace Andy's vocal is swathed in eddies of ethereal sound more appropriate to Brian Eno's production style than a dance record. Like the music of the cosmic rock groups that Massive Attack admires, its sound evokes interstellar imagery. But Blue Lines is really about being lost in inner space. This record is the dance-music equivalent of Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, a shift toward a more interior kind of music.

^^^^^^^^^^

The KLF flirts with the cosmic and the conceptual, but in a less lofty, more tongue-in-cheek fashion than Massive Attack. In the video for the single '3 A.M. Eternal' (which recently appeared in the Billboard Top 10), the KLF. is garbed in ceremonial robes and moves in formation as though enacting a religious rite. On the album The White Room (Arista AR8657; CD and cassette), the group mythologizes itself as a nomadic cult of outsiders on a vague quest. The obsession with secret societies dates back to the band's earlier incarnations.

The KLF's core members, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, met in 1987 and formed a rap group called the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (the Jamms), taking the name from a fictional anarchist organization said to have been fighting authority since the dawn of history. Later, they called themselves the Timelords, after another mysterious sect of warriors against evil, this time taken from the BBC's cult science fiction series Doctor Who.

As the Jamms and the Timelords, Mr. Drummond and Mr. Cauty were known principally as pranksters. Mr. Drummond described their philosophy as "zenarchy." Promoting their first single, 'All You Need Is Love', they daubed their logo on billboards throughout Central London. The Jamms' 1987 album had to be withdrawn after Abba, one of many groups sampled on the record, threatened legal action. As the Timelords, the duo scored a No. 1 hit in England with a novelty single called 'Doctorin' the Tardis'.

But Mr. Drummond and Mr. Cauty grew tired of their reputation as mischievous pop strategists. They decided that, in Mr. Drummond's words, "irony and reference points are the dark destroyers of great music." The duo longed to shed the British post-punk trait of having a master plan to, say, shock every grandmother in England. Inspired by the acid-house scene's lack of self-consciousness, they dedicated themselves to making serious trance-dance music. Renaming themselves the KLF. (it stands for the Kopyright Liberation Front, an allusion to their sampling problems), they recorded the febrile electro anthem 'What Time Is Love?'

Still, the group has never completely shed its playful side. Last year, it released Chill Out (Wax Trax 7155; all three formats), an album of "ambient house" — house music with the beat removed to leave a tranquilizing sound-bath for tired dancers. Aware of the album's affinity for the cosmic rock of the early 70's, they put a photograph of sheep grazing on the album cover — a reference to Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother. The joke is continued by another ambient group, the Orb, on its soon-to-be-released album Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld (Big Life/ Mercury 511034; CD and cassette), the cover of which spoofs Pink Floyd's Animals.

This year the KLF released The White Room, the soundtrack to its unfinished movie of the same title. On songs like 'Church of the KLF', the duo brings the mystical side of Britain's youth culture to consciousness. The song '3 A.M. Eternal' celebrates the feeling of having transcended time through spending a night in nonstop trance-dancing. Earlier this summer, the KLF. held a summer solstice party on the remote Scottish island of Jura, where the group and its guests dressed in yellow robes and burned a giant wicker man in imitation of a Celtic pagan ritual.

The KLF is simultaneously celebrating and mocking acid house's revival of the transcendental imagery of the hippie era. When the acid craze swept Britain in 1988, participants called it the "second summer of love." Album-oriented groups like Massive Attack and the KLF. suggest that the psychedelic dance revolution has now entered its progressive rock phase. So long as bands can avoid resurrecting the sterile monumentality and self-indulgence of groups like Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, this is a promising development.

Mo Wax compilations

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Royaltie$ Overdue

(Mo Wax) 
Melody Maker,1994

by Simon Reynolds

On the evidence of this sampler, the Mo Wax roster is

evenly divided between the brilliant and the bland. The best

stuff here--DJ Shadow, La Funk Mob, DJ Krush--is ambient hip

hop in the vein of Massive Attack and Tricky.  The rest tends

towards a tasteful but insipid composite of 'connoisseur'

musics (fusion, jazz-funk, rare groove), i.e.  precisely what

you'd associate with Straight No Chaser, the 'jazz'-zine that

Mo Wax boss James Lavelle writes for.

Nonetheless, the good parts of this curate's egg of a

comp are very tasty indeed.  The stand-out is DJ Shadow's 12

minute epic "Influx", a panoramic early '70s groovescape

whose sombre strings, lachrymose wah-wah and fusion flute are

like the missing link between The Temptations' "Papa Was a

Rollin' Stone" and Miles Davis' "He Loved Him Madly".

Ghostly shards of liberation rhetoric drift by on the breeze-

-"people's power", "it's only a matter of time", "FREEDOM"--

making "Influx" at once an elegy for the lost ideals of the

'60s and an allegory of today's slippin' into darkness vibe.

The best stuff on "Royalties Overdue" reimagines Miles

Davis circa "In A Silent Way" as a pioneer of ambient to rank

with Eno and King Tubby. The cold-sweat paranoia-funk of DJ

Krush's "Slow Chase" really implodes with a wah-wahed trumpet

solo worthy of Miles' 'lost in inner space' early '70s coke

phase.  (After this, Palm Skin's pointlessly accurate hip hop

cover of "In A Silent Way" can only seem pallid and polite).

Despite their nauseating name, La Funk Mob are smart enough

not to strive to sound like a live band (which is where other

Mo Waxers slip up).  Instead, on "La Doctoresse" and "Motor

Bass Get Phunked Up", this cyberfunk unit use the studio to

situate their piano vamps, horn-parps and percussion licks

throughout a honeycomb of dub-space.

As for the rest, the hashed-out, smooth-grooving fluency

reeks of the kind of self-congratulatory goateed twats who

once thought the sleevenotes on Style Council records were

cool. It's muzak that falls foul of the fallacy that 'mature'

= mellow. The Federation retread rare groove; Monday Michiru

is Sade, basically; DJ Takemura vibes-flavoured kitsch is

worthy of the late unlamented el label (whose Marden Hill

also feature here); Bubbatunes offer Digable Tunes B-sides

for all those who haven't yet figured out that gangsta is

where it's at.  Only RPM's groovy if scarcely groundbreaking

hip hop, reminiscent of Main Source, distinguishes itself.

Treasure the highpoints of "Royaltie$ Overdue", then,

but keep your finger poised on the remote so you can vault

over the troughs.


VARIOUS ARTISTS 
Headz 2 
(Mo Wax)
Village Voice, 1996 (remixed slightly for Faves of 1996)

by Simon Reynolds 


In the age of compilation gigantism, Headz 2 dramatically ups the ante. Mo 
Wax's latest anthology consists of not one but two separately sold double-CD's  (or two quadruple albums, boxed like Wagner's Parsifal), which contain nearly five-and-a-half hours of music spanning not just trip hop but leading innovators in drum & bass, techno, art-rap and electronica. Before I even saw these dauntingly oversize collections in the stores, I was put off by the air of hubris and self-congratulatory connoisseurship hanging over the project. When I saw them, the deluxe vinyl sets instantly reminded me of those calfskin-bound, gilt-inlaid editions of Dickens (sold through mail-order ads that appeal to "your unstinting pride"), which remain unread on the shelf but testify to an 
interest in being cultured. In Headz case, the word is subcultured. 

Despite their garish abstrakt covers, the vinyl Headz also resemble headstones, 
perhaps because Mo Wax supremo James Lavelle has herein constructed a kind of mausoleum of late '90s "cool". Appropriately, the music itself is sombre and 
subdued, mostly cleaving to the trip hop noir norm: torpid breakbeats, entropic 
sub-bass, dank dub reverb. (When it comes to non-junglistic breakbeats, give me the rowdy, rockist furore of the Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim and their amyl brethren, any day). The same Mo Wax kiss-of-def that resulted in Luke Vibert's only uninteresting release to date affects contributions from the likes of Danny Breaks, whose abandons his normal hyper-kinaesthetics for the idling headnooding tempo of "Science Fu Beats". (Perking the track up to 45 r.p.m improves this, and several other tracks, considerably). 

Mo Wax belong to what you might call the "good music society", or more 
precisely, they belong to a specific "good music society" which dates back to 
the "eclectic" list of influences on Massive Attack's "Blue Lines" (wherein PiL, 
Mahavishnu Orchestra, Isaac Hayes and Studio One coexisted in smug 
self-congratulation). The sensibility is pure fusion: "it's all music, man", 
"what kind of music don't I like? -- just bad music!". Every area of music has 
it own "good music society", its little cabal of cognoscenti, what Kevin Martin 
calls the "taste police": Junior Boys Own for deep house, Creation (in the late 
Eighties at least) for leather-trousered rock, Grand Royal for white American 
B-boyism. Each maintains a canon of cool, and as with all canons, what is 
excluded is as significant as what is included. What is excluded tends to be 
both the vibrantly vulgar and the genuinely extremist/out-there: neither The 
Sweet nor Stockhausen make it. (Although Pierre Henry, bizarrely, has been 
canonised --as a pioneer of E-Z listening alongside Jean-Jacques Perrey!!!).