The Fire Engines
Lubricate Your Living Room

(Somewhere in Scotland at the end of the seventies)

It's all about noise, noise and excitement. Because noise, regardless of what they say, is a pretty cool thing. And excitement follows as a consequence.

Then of course there's noise and noise.

Metal, for example, strikes me as something for idiots. But many rock songs take you up there. And all the debasics know that; they wouldn't be debasics otherwise.

So, hey, everyone has their own type of excitement... mine at its peak is for certain clanging noises, like when in some Velvet stuff you imagine the musicians with welder's goggles... and besides the clanging, I like a certain obsessive and crazy groove like James Chance Contortions and the like...

Then, I like many things and, let's say, with the age of reason I gladly reached folk narcolepsy... And anyway, I've been through a lot of beautiful and strange places, no need to list them all.

But if I think about excitement, I think of the Velvet and the Contortions...

A wholly mental excitement, as rock hadn't anticipated the welder's goggles, nor wrapping oneself in a patchwork of unlistenability and chaos.

A sickly excitement, which is why it's been a lifetime that I'm not feeling very well.

These guys, in a sixteenth, have this stuff... and in addition, they have the still punk freshness of the early post-punk... and they have that supreme (SUPREME) amateurishness of absolute beginners...

Their record almost sounds like a live studio session, many tracks are instrumental and have that nice noise I explained... then there are some fabulous songs, including one that has always been in my punk post-punk jukebox: "Get up and use me"

Shrill shouts, obsessive rhythm, sharp guitars... and despite the chaos, an almost pop-like singability... the singer's mom, upon hearing it, said "you sing and play like the devil..."

And moms are almost always right...

No one paid attention to these guys, except for the usual John Peel... it's also true that between seventy-six and eighty-one or eighty-two, a couple of masterpieces were released every day, but still...

And anyway, these guys played concerts of no more than fifteen to twenty minutes... another proof that they had turned not being annoying into a science...

Enjoy listening...