Oliver!: Big Black - Il Duce (14 March 1992)

I'll add Steve Albini to the list of people that Peel backed from first record to last, even though Albini earned Peel's disapproval over the name of his first post Big Black band, Rapeman - more on that in the coming weeks hopefully.

I learnt about Big Black long before I heard a note of music from them.  Uncompromisingly brutal in their musical vision, and uncompromisingly cynical in their perception of the music business, I found myself hoping, "Jesus, if you're going to behave like that, you had better be  good at what you do".  Attitude will only get you so far, after all.  But the fact that Peel included their 1987 album, Songs About Fucking in a 1997 list of his 20 favourite albums suggested there was real meat on their bones, (although, as The Guardian admitted, had he been asked a week later, he may have produced an entirely different list).  But the evidence of my own ears sealed the deal.  A listen to a handful of tracks - "songs" seem disappointingly inadequate to describe Big Black's work - and I've been left with the thundering Cloverfield like riff(s) of Kerosene stuck in my head and bearing down like the Mother of All Bombs into my 10 favourite songs...er...tracks of all time.  To those who feel that, in 1985-86, Peel and his peers were panning for gold in gobs of spit when it came to finding interesting alternative guitar music, Big Black would have felt like a toxic burnt-out oasis in that desert.  The fact that Kerosene didn't feature in the 1986 Festive Fifty is enough to make me wish that Peel had stuck to his guns and dropped the whole thing after 1991.

Big Black were 5 years disbanded at the point that Peel played the title track of this 1985 EP, news which would have bummed me out had I learnt that in 1992.  Big Black were renowned for avoiding things like multi-formatting and broke off dealings with record labels who tried to do things without their knowledge or approval.  This strikes me as the act of a band who liked to give value for money to record buyers, and that feeling permeates Il Duce, which offers listeners 5 different openings in the space of the opening 100 seconds:
1) The moodiest sounding harmonium I've ever heard.  Only 12 seconds long, but making it clear that   this track starts in the lead up to a revolution that will not be bloodless.
2) The clicks and tricks of Roland - Big Black's faithful drum machine, though here it is supplemented by someone letting loose rimshots - like snipers taking up their positions.
3) That seasick guitar bass sound as the forces make their way through the street to their destination.
4) Hits and smacks of guitar chord - the sound of an occasional shot as the violence of the revolution begins to build up.
5) Finally, all out assault in the Big Black style, as the central riff is played out, while over the top of it, guitar strings are pulled, scraped, punched like tanks are rolling over them and firing off their mortars.

After that opening burst, relative serenity arrives as Il Duce begins his proclamations over that central riff and jackboot drum pattern.  There remains an ambiguity over whether the lyrics are told from the perspective of Mussolini himself, or from the perspective of a follower of his or an ordinary citizen.  That whole notion that Benito is the people and the people are Benito.  It's only by projecting that successfully that fascists get to shape the argument and now they're getting their platform in the media, they may get to shape a great deal more than just that.  Albini would have been guessing about this in 1985, but with Ronald Reagan having recently been re-elected with a landslide, he may have felt there were loose parallels.  Had he written the track in 2015, he could have taken his pick of contemporary settings to set it alongside.  Although the track calms down through the lyrical passages, it continues to be punctuated by bursts of guitar noise - the sound of executions and imprisonments.  While that final decisive drum beat sounds like a definite shutting off any dissent towards the new regime.

Video courtesy of ratherdroll.