I’m not normally a fan of videos where you see a record playing, but as this wouldn’t have been available for sharing before last month, I think it would be churlish to not use it.
Australian punk rock group, The Meanies, were not on my cultural radar 30 years ago. I don’t recall hearing Peel play anything by them in the 8 years I’ve been doing this blog either. Nevertheless, before putting this post together, I dutifully sat through a listen to their 1992 album, Come ‘N’ See before addressing the merits of their Cranium Croutons side project.
The Meanies were formed in Melbourne in 1989. In true punk rock style, they adopted aliases using various pop-culture references from the previous 20 years. All hail Ringo!, Jaws! and er…Link? As per the Ramones, they each took Meanie as a surname too. While none of their records quite had the same cultural impact as the Ramones, they have proved an astonishingly durable group, still gigging and releasing records up to the present day. Come ‘N’ See wouldn’t have made me into a rabid convert had I heard it when I was 16, but it does buck the trend of a lot of Ramones-influenced punk rock records in that its strongest tracks are in the second half of the record rather than the first half, which is a pretty neat trick to pull off when the listener is starting to worry that the initial burst of energy is going to sputter out.
An interesting feature of The Meanies’ style on Come ‘N’ See is that while the guitars come at the listener with CBGBs like intensity, the vocals are pitched somewhere between Sarah Records style feyness and Mono Men wannabe muscularity. Yet, most of the tracks feature a moment where the blue-eyed punk voices make a controlled attempt at Death metal growling. The effect is that of a mountain bear just reaching puberty, but neither is it a completely laughable affectation.
Link Meanie aka Lindsay McLennan decided to give free rein to his Death metal indulgences by recording a solo four track EP of Ramones covers called Ramonic Verses. In this instance, solo meant solo as he played all of the instruments himself. In order to reassure any Meanies fans who may have worried that this side project threatened the future of his band, he renamed himself Link Nastygraze and put the set out under the fabulously lurid name of Cranium Croutons. Furthermore, the EP was put out as a limited edition of 1000 copies. John Peel was sent number 209.
I actually think Peel played safe by airing the Cranium Croutons version of Blitzkreig Bop, which even with its slowed tempo and guttural vocals, still maintains a recognisable link with the original, not least via the untreated “Hey ho! Let’s go!” backing vocals. Link’s reworkings of Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment, I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend and Go Lil’ Camaro Go are far more radical and extreme, as you can hear from around 2:41 onwards. I suspect Peel may have felt that if he was going to use the record as a means of pointing listeners towards The Ramones, it was better to do it by playing a cover in which the inherent brilliance of the original still shines through. The other versions do more to showcase Link Meanie than they do the band he was supposedly honouring.
What’s Your Name? My favourite track from Come ‘N’ See.
Videos courtesy of holesinmyknees and VeraRabbit.
No comments:
Post a Comment