When Iggy Pop sang “Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell” on The Stooges’ 1973 swan song Raw Power, he anticipated the anti-romantic punk era nihilism that was to see future Brexit fan John Lydon describe love as “two minutes and fifty-two seconds of squelching noises.” Fifty three years later Bristol’s immortal space-garage psychonauts The Heads may still be sculpting their sonic monuments with some of the same flint axes initially fashioned by The Stooges, but rather than being petty and personal, their disgust is profound and existential. For The Heads, on what they claim is their final album, our whole pretty place is going to Hell.
Housed in a sleeve depicting an oil rig that is tempest-tossed by exactly the sort of superstorm that fossil-fuel driven climate change is exacerbating, it’s difficult not to read this record, abstract and impenetrable as its wattle and daub wahwah workouts often are, as a despairing howl of defeated anger at the state of the planet. The pastiched biker-acid argot of old Heads album covers and song titles – headbanded hippie babes luxuriating in front of track listings with titles like Motorjam, Demon Spasm, etc. – are no longer appropriate to the job in hand. And if you needed any more proof of the artists’ intentions, The Heads’ head honcho Simon Price has pointed out that the album is released on the day of the vernal equinox.
But before the specifics, some background. I own every Heads CD going, and at the turn of the decade I started buying all their albums again on vinyl as The Heads’, and their offshoots’, works seemed too significant to lie alongside all those other small silver discs. Now I’m only At Last!, Reverberations Volume 1 and three 10” singles short of the full seventy eight record set. I may live alone with two cats but anyone who says I’ve wasted my life is patently wrong.
When it comes to my three decades of Heads fandom, respect and fear go hand in hand. In thirty years, I’ve only seen the band live twice, and Paul Allen’s similarly sonically aligned spin-off Anthroprophh once, and each time I’ve had to bail before the end as I could feel my ears, and my brain as it boiled between them, being damaged.
It’s not just the volume of The Heads in action. There’s something about the sheer intensity of The Heads’ sound, a chaotic Dionysian abandon tempered by a mathematical Apollonian rigour, like a lab-coated Neu attempting the 17-minute Stooges outtake of ‘L.A. Blues’ that Elektra found in the vaults at the turn of the century. It shouldn’t work. But it does.
The partnership of these opposing Apollonian and Dionysian forces has been deemed impossible by thinkers from Frederick Nietzsche onwards, with Camille Paglia maintaining the progress of civilisation was only made possible by the triumph of the Apollonian aspect. The ancient Greeks, however, considered the two to be inextricably entwined, and three thousand years since their civilisation first flourished, The Heads’ final album makes their discredited belief an undeniable reality.
After I wrote the sleeve notes for the 20th anniversary reissue of Under Sided, I was gifted a large black and white promotional photograph of The Heads looking every inch the classic sunglasses and those haircuts lost psychedelic band. But one of the group, it transpired, had drawn a massive ejaculating penis over the entire picture, the Dionysian and the Apollonian entangled again. I framed it and hung it above the washing machine all the same, where it reminds my clean clothes that the world they are about to enter is dirty.
In those sleeve notes I posited the idea that a generation of us had been raised on rumours in 1980s NME interviews, spread by Julian Cope or Mark E. Smith, of records of Krautrock mysticism and rare Detroit ur-punk that were unavailable to us in the pre-internet age. For us, The Heads were the band we had hoped would exist, but never quite did, made out of what we imagined all those things we had read about, but could rarely ever really hear, would have sounded like.
In the 80s we had taken some comfort from Spacemen 3 and Loop but, brilliant as both are, I don’t think they really knew how to rock, to put it bluntly, and sometimes their records seemed like studies in the styles they appropriated, Spacemen 3’s precisely poised studio creations becoming increasingly likely to dissolve on contact with air as the years passed.
The Heads, however, sounded telepathically attuned, like they lived in a Bedminster rehearsal room, the promise of their predecessors made flesh, and the vast majority of their commercially available catalogue is culled from practice jams that easily reach the benchmark required for release. (Indeed, The Heads’ rhythm section, drummer Wayne Maskell and bassist Hugo Morgan, were press-ganged into Loop when Robert Hampson reformed the band in 2013 and were exactly the engine room it needed). And Yourprettyplaceisgoingtohell is the culmination of over three decades of drill.
The album opens with ‘Hits Like A Dove’, a brutalist relative of The Stooges’ ‘Loose’ where pulsating guitars strafe the ears like those lasers that menace Catherine Zeta Jones in a high security vault in the Hollywood heist thriller Entrapment. The group have been toying with ‘Cardinal Fuzz’ for some years, and finally lay it to rest with Hawkwind-style echo chamber vocal declarations and skittering drum fills. ‘Can’t Stop The Rushing’ is a propulsive motorik pop song layered with snake-charming guitars. And ‘It’s About Time… And Space’ is the kind of side-long heavy psyche epic Heads fans hope for on every release. It’s great they’ve gifted us a near definitive one in their final outing.
‘On’ opens the second half of the album, boneshaking biker punk that dissolves into a gamelan chorale, reminiscent of Simon Price’s work as Kandodo. On ‘Snake Oil’, subliminal dissonant whispers leak through walls of vibrating noise. Paul Allen’s pastoral balalaika opens ‘Sunquaker’, a glimpse of a better world swiftly overwritten by an invocatory go-go booted boogie the Scandinavian shysters Goat would be proud of, before ‘Socially Awkward’ rises up like a dust devil in a sandstorm of cyclical eastern-tinged guitar parts, leaving the listener lost and delirious in a perfumed sonic souk.
‘Entropic Dissolution’ has the portentous vibe of the opening of Spinal Tap’s ‘Stonehenge’, and gives way to ‘Bullets Fly But No Bees’, which reads like a Heads rewrite of The Damned’s ‘New Rose’, not inappropriately, as Rat Scabies’ crew always had more in common with the Pink Fairies, and the cosmic pre-punk that informs The Heads generally, than they did with the earthbound street punk that was to follow in their wake.
The metronomic chiming of treble strings on ‘It’s All Over Now Sunshine’ suggest a countdown to environmental collapse, while my Slowdive-worshipping teenage kids would identify The Heads’ final contribution to the canon, the valedictory ‘Off’, as a shoegaze song, and I suppose it is, of sorts, its distant rising heat haze atmospherics an appropriate farewell. I will miss The Heads a great deal. In lockdown especially, their oblivion-on-demand workouts got me through some long nights.
When practitioners (I’m a stand-up comedian by trade) get asked to write criticism, they often end up trying to understand, if not exonerate, their own work by proxy. And when I write about The Heads, as I have many times before, I realise I am often writing about my own processes. I apologise in advance. That’s what happens when you commission a narcissistic minor celebrity to write about someone else.
But, like me, The Heads work solidly within a genre. They exist… or existed, I suppose, would be more correct now, sadly… identifiably in a tradition that encompasses proto-punk Detroit, Ladbroke Grove’s turn-of-the-70s head music, and bad trip psychedelia, and the safety rope of rock music is never too far away from even their most freaked-out freakouts. But for over three decades The Heads have brought Roadburn Festival-type rock fans, who might perhaps never pick up a Peter Brotzmann or an AMM album, perilously close to the realm of abstract sound and the transcendental moment, albeit framed by recognisable riffs and rhythms, carved out by The Heads with the humble tools – guitars, bass, drums and effects pedals – available to them.
Referenced artists
The Stooges
Feedback Loops: How The Who Turned Pop Into Self-Destructive Art
And I suppose that’s why I’m happy to be operating within the genre of the low art form of stand-up comedy. Because sometimes you can use the rules to make new forms and carry the otherwise unconvinced along with you to new places without them even realising. Some guy who just wanted something to get stoned to will hear Yourprettyplaceisgoingtohell and inadvertently experience a concept album about environmental collapse. Bummer, man!
Writing five years ago in the Under Sided box set, I believe it was I who said, “The sound of The Heads is a hybrid that has become an entity its own right. And it is impossible now to imagine a time before The Heads. And the point where they might have disappeared has long passed. It’s too late to stop now. And just when they think they are out, they get pulled back in. Instead The Heads are with us always, ancient mariners, traversing the stormy seas of super-dense psychedelia, the pungent albatross of their legendary status hanging from the collective neck, but worn so lightly it seems more like a silk-soft paisley cravat, but one made from meat and feathers.”
I’m not sure exactly what I meant now, but it seems I was wrong anyway, whatever it was. The Heads are coming to an end. And after this record there will be no more. But as career capstones go, Yourprettyplaceisgoingtohell is a hell of a way to go out, a great fuzzy “fuck you!” to us all for what we’ve done to the world, the band slamming the door in human civilisation’s collective face on the way out and riding off on great hogs of belching Harleys into the rapidly reddening horizon. They think it’s all over. It is now, sunshine.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of next year, and Stewart introduces a screening of the film The Memory Blocks, with the artists Andrew and Eden Kotting, at the Waterside in The Heads hometown of Bristol on March 28th.
