things move around

“Concept albums”, particularly those proclaimed as such by the goons who come up with them, are not dissimilar to “conceptual art,” or “themed pubs.” The general gist is that a total lack of verve, inspiration or any sense of fun is mitigated by a Big Idea which will in theory tickle the intellectual g-spots of an artistically-neutered audience. Listening to them, one is supposed follow the same process as making them. They’re like rubics cubes - as a substitute for doing something entertaining, I’ll jerk with the squares until we all explode in a rapture of smug self-satisfied mensa-wank. The concept album is the Atkins Diet of music - denuded of carbohydrate, not so much a Ryvita-feast as a platter of great big oily haddock.

Of course, the heyday of the concept album was the 1970s. In a decade renowned for the ludicrous titles of its popular albums, the conceptuals led the way, with Yes’ effort Tales from Topographic Oceans raising the bar beyond piss-take to bona-fide urinary ram-raid. Marketed as a cure for acne and virginity, they swooped from the shelves, alighting in bedrooms across the land, to spread their dictum of artistic poverty and blind intellectual frotteurism. No band was immune from the disease; even previously spunky acts like The Who and, err, Jethro Tull pranced merrily down the conceptual cul-de-sac, renting their haloes out as bedpans to scrape together the production budget. Some of them were even quite good, just as every now and again you smoke a Marlboro Red and find it to contain a cheeky hint of ganja. Sgt Pepper is disqualified on the grounds of having some excellent distinct songs, even though it gets a bit dodgy on side 2, and Zappa is exempted on the grounds that he was a concept in his own right. But I’m prepared to accept The Wall as listenable, and Ziggy Stardust is, I suppose, not a bad way to alienate all your mates.

But that was the heyday, remember? The thing with the 70’s was, anything went (and so, thank god, did the 70s, although not before time). It’s boring and redundant to harp on about this decade as a pandora’s box of cultural atrocities - like slagging off Royal Ascot for having too many stupid hats.

Where it really gets interesting is 1980 onwards. Clearasil ™ has made it through clinical trials. Nonsense comes in cute little three-minute McNuggets. Becoming self-aware, like a hypnosis subject snapping out of their trance or that guy who woke up from a 19-year coma, it dawns on the record-buying populace that dancing your tits off is more fun than counting the syllables in the song titles. The likes of Rush and Yes press on regardless, finding a niche group of spiritual retards and people who think irony is chopping your own hand off, but generally, all is well. I’m going to skip forward 13 years now to get to the bullseye of this malodorous meditation; the minotaur at the centre of this labyrinthine rant.

Yes folks, in 1993, someone who may once have done a good pop song or two released into the unsuspecting pop ether an unparalleled eggy fart of a concept album, breathing unholy new life into the remains of a leprous, gangrenous genre. Just when we were thinking it had been slayed, the zombie-dragon was resurrected as a terrifying wraith of its former self, held together only by the cruel will of its malevolent creator. This traumatic, necromantic suspiration, which made no impression on the charts but malingers as a rancid footnote to an entire decade, was an album called “Cyberpunk”, and the twat responsible was called Billy (William to his mum) Idol:

Now, I can take a joke, even one at my own expense. That must be why I bought this album in the first place, since I have discounted the possibility that the spirit of Timothy Claypole is able to spontaneously take control of my body. And indeed, until I stupidly decided to listen to this much-too-long-player, I got a couple of sordid jollies from the artwork and preposterous liner-notes. But I had not reckoned with the horror of the recording itself; the same horror, perhaps, to which Kurtz alludes - the savage indifference to human endeavour and emotion, manifest as the soul-ravaging jungle of Instinct, through which no patang of Reason can hack a path.

Idol sets out, with a henchman by the name of Mark Younger-Smith (his name alone is enough to make you want to give him both barrels), to define a credo of the future, based entirely on the first paragraph of a Gibson novel he once misread through a haze of cracksmoke. He produces an album so evil that Armageddon has to be postponed - Satan’s legions are going to need another millenium’s hard training to live up to it. We kick off with “Wasteland”, which sees the Blonde Bomb-Crater regaling his unfortunate audience thus:

In VR land
The future of fun
Tell me what to do
In VR law
Computer crime
Um, so sublime
A fantasy scene
In my machine
Give me the secret of life

which, being kind, I suppose could be a reference to the Granada Studios Tour in Manchester. Meanwhile, what sounds like a digitised Shirrelles twitter “No religion” in the background, making like Beelzebub on your birdtable. It’s all downhill from here. “Shock to the System” manages to be more pant-shittingly awful than the L.A. Riots it eulogises (”say yeah, ain’t it irie”). “Power Junkie” inflicts a thousand psychological lashings on the offspring of those who listen to it, even unto the zillionth generation, with the couplet “Suck on my love meat / Now suck on my steed.” “I like to fight, I kill global oppression” slurs Idol on “Tomorrow People;” sadly Global Oppression has not yet taken the bait.

So, on the upside, there are the lyrics.

Needless to say, musically, “Cyberpunk” plumbs new depths of asininity. It’s the sort of music the Daleks would make had they taken their commands from Gary Glitter instead of Davros. It’s deep house sucking on the wizened dug of cock-rock. When all else fails, which it does all the time, Younger-Smith (for he is the true musical culprit) lobs an extended sample of Tibetan chanting or yowling cop-cars into the gut-churning brew, which only serves to bring home the terrible realisation that ultimately, this gaping, nauseous laceration of a concept album is a product of planet Earth, the same planet that we call our home, and possibly even of the human race, the same race you and I were once able to admit to membership of. In this way, “Cyberpunk,” once heard, sticks to your soul like chewing-gum in your pubes. There is no disowning it, no recantation, no renunciation and no absolution. There is no possibility of parole. “Cyberpunk” is a life-sentence, leaving its listeners praying for the mercy of an oblivion which is forever denied.

No matter how many times you go and see The Darkness.