Jello Biafra is, or was, one of the guiding stars of my universe. I feel guilty that he’s fallen from my firmament. Although I love his records as dearly as I ever did, I’ve lost touch with what he’s done in the last ten years as i’ve become more and more of the chickenshit conformist he always warned me about. Perhaps I knew I wasn’t living up to his expectations. It’s not you Jello, it’s me. I’m sorry. I genuinely feel bad about it.

Biafra is most famous for his time as lead singer of San Francisco punks Dead Kennedys, but the musical collaborations and long string of solo spoken word albums were arguably even more powerful and, as it happens, more prescient about where we were all headed.

Biafra had his naysayers who considered him anywhere from a strident hectorer to a hysterical doom-monger. Neither were fair criticisms and now, the records he released around the turn of the 90s are very, very funny – they always were – very penetrating and, pretty much, very right.

Musically they are a varied bunch, although most share a desire to crack your skull open, but throughout runs Biafra’s amazing voice, an insistent cross between Daffy Duck and a Dalek. I suspect that music is primarily a means of delivery for Biafra. Each song carries a wild payload of hotwired facts and delirious conjecture. But when the musicians he’s with match the intensity of his singing, the results are spectacular.

1. Dead Kennedys – ‘Pull My Strings’ (Recorded live in 1980, Released 1987)

Pull My Strings is a song the Dead Kennedys only played once, on 25 March 1980. The organisers of the Bay Area Music Awards thought it would be great idea to invite some local punk rockers along to their bash to give a little credibility to the proceedings. Enter Jello Biafra, East Bay Ray, Klaus Fluoride and drummer Ted. The band rehearsed the song they were asked to perform, ‘California Uber Alles’ and when they took the stage that evening they cranked out the first few bars, then, having walked on stage wearing white shirts with black ’S’s painted on the front, they stopped playing and pulled around black ties to form dollar signs before telling the audience precisely what they thought of them. ‘Pull My Strings’ swerves into an evisceration of the New Wave scene which was getting into bed with the music industry, selling out the aggression and political bite that the Kennedys cherished in return for radio play.

Biafra believes in pranksterism as a political and social tactic and ‘Pull My Strings’ is the sound of someone taking his opportunity. When it would have been easier to do what was asked and scrabble a few inches up the greasy pole, Dead Kennedys rip into a pastiche of ‘My Sharona’ by crossover one-hit wonders The Knack before leading the audience in a singalong “Is my cock big enough? Is my brain small enough? For you to make me a star?”

Lard – ‘The Power of Lard’ (1989)

After Dead Kennedys split in 1986, amidst their prosecution (failed) for alleged obscenity, Biafra and members of Ministry formed Lard. ‘The Power of Lard’ is the lead-off track from their first EP. It blew my mind when it first came out and it still delivers a hell of a jolt. The band shifts from tribal pounding to a nervy skitter and finally into a piledriving industrial thrash whilst Biafra slices through with an electrifying sermon lurching from cultish entreaties “Lard is the Om! Lard is revolution!” to yuppie pastiche to twisted headlines from a degenerate culture. It’s a terrifying, overwhelming psychedelic whirlpool that never fails to suck me in.

Jello Biafra and D.O.A. – ‘Full Metal Jackoff’ (1990)

Whilst working on a film soundtrack Biafra collaborated with both DOA and NoMeansNo, in the process finding partners for his next two albums.

‘Last Scream of the Missing Neighbors’ is four direct chunks of steely speed punk plus a great cover of ‘We Gotta Get Out Of This Place’ and then, across the whole of side 2, ‘Full Metal Jackoff’. It’s Biafra’s widescreen epic (“Mein Kampf! The mini-series!”), spinning out from a black-windowed mobile crack lab circling the Washington DC Beltway to take in the whole of an America under an undeclared ‘Narco-Military’ dictatorship, slowly being crushed by the bootheel whilst drugs are pumped into the ghettos to pacify the poor, deliberately stoking poisonous sectarianism. It’s an astonishing achievement, a song genuinely worthy of a movie adaptation. DOA riff away, slowly ramping up the pressure over 14 minutes whilst Biafra paints the bleakest possible diorama, his voice no longer comic but chilling. The intensity builds and builds and builds and the end result is as thrilling as it is horrifying. By the closing chants of ‘Ollie for President – He’ll get things done!’ you’ll want to run and hide.

Jello Biafra and NoMeansNo – ‘Bruce’s Diary’ (1991)

The second spin-out collaboration was ‘The Sky Is Falling and I Want My Mommy’ recorded with existentialist provocateurs and Alternative Tentacles stalwarts NoMeansNo. The record is frenzied and hilarious by turns, from the Space Shuttle panic of the title track to the Wild West escapism of ‘Ride The Flume’ and on into the urban nightmare of ‘Chew’. ‘Bruce’s Diary’ is an out-of-step jazz-punk number told from the perspective of a spook spying on an entire population. It starts with surveillance

No one ever sees me/Yet I know all of you/ It’s sort of like a small town/When your whole lives are on my computer

then swerves into political and social control

A lethargic population/Is the key to our control/Who’d rather watch someone’s life on TV/Than participate in their own

Mentally they feel helpless/Physically they just give up/We priced the healthy food so high/They can only buy soda pop

A housebroken bee colony/That goes home after 5/Too burnt and glazed to threaten us/With purpose in their lives

And on it goes…

We melt you with acid rain/Keep you poor for economic gain/Convince you your biggest threat/Is drugs and terrorists

They don’t even have to be real/Just find a face, make up a crime/Run sensational headlines/Works every time!

The people must not realize/They are being manipulated/For them to be manipulated effectively

We give ’em things to worry about/Buying clothes and losing weight/Your lack of curiosity/Is the key to our success!

And of that sound familiar?

When this record came out, it sounded like hyperbolic and often hilarious exaggeration, so wild it was relatively easy to laugh off whilst fuelling the dismissive view that Biafra was a tin-hat-wearing conspiracy nut. Now, in an age where we accept that we are being spied upon by our own governments, we’re terrified of other people in case they want to kill us, we’re assailed by images of bodies and things we are supposed to want and told that consumer spending can be the key to economic progress, then let’s reflect that the of the words above only the reference to ‘acid rain’ sounds dated. This song was written in 1991 before we’d even heard of the internet.

Tumor Circus – ‘Take Me Back Or I’ll Drown Our Dog (Headlines)’ (1991)

Biafra’s collaboration with scuzzy sample wranglers Steel Pole Bath Tub was perhaps his most darkly persuasive in its sound. This rattling number stitches together genuine newspaper headlines into crazed non-sequiturs, constructing a cracked mirror to reflect the media’s complicit role in distracting the masses:

Designer beef/Surfing for Christ/Horse molester must be stopped/Police kill man to stop suicide/City burns, Party goes on!

Headlines! I wanna hear some/Good News! Even if it’s a lie/Scandal! For me to graze on/Entertain me tonight! 

Jello Biafra and Mojo Nixon – ‘Love Me I’m A Liberal’ (1994)

‘Prairie Home Invasion’ was, of all things, a country and western meets psychobilly album. It’s pretty great. Biafra is perhaps less direct, at least as concerned with creating an authentically bonkers american folk vibe as hitting his targets full on, but when he hits he scores. See the point blank pro-choice anthem ‘May The Fetus Be Aborted’.

My favourite track was always ‘Love Me I’m A Liberal’. Lyrically it’s a straight update of the Phil Ochs classic and credit for most of the best lines goes to Ochs, but it’s performed with such brio by Jello, Mojo and his band the Toadliquors that it raises a smile even as you realise it’s probably you he’s knifing in the front.

So there you have it. A terrible choice for Devon Record Club, where scabrous noise tends to fare badly and lyrics are the last thing we want to concentrate on. Nonetheless, Biafra is an important figure for me and whilst I wouldn’t have wanted to choose a specific album, Tom’s compilation theme gave me the perfect opportunity to share the Virus.

And hey, Biafra! We should get reacquainted.

Tom listened: Although we had carte blanche to choose whichever songs we liked, Rob’s chronological tour through Jello Biafra’s recordings was a stroke of genius. Not only did it allow me to become acquainted with the surprisingly eclectic discography of the Alternative Tentacles main man but also it allowed him to cherry pick from a vast array of music and, I suspect, in this case Rob used the opportunity to paint Jello in the best possible light. Songs were bright, exciting and refreshingly accessible, lyrics obviously irreverent and witty and it certainly helped to have Rob set the scene for each song so expertly. I thought Full Metal Jackoff in particular was exceptional and its 14 minutes fairly flew by in a rush of intense energy and ever more unhinged vocals.

As someone who had the required lone Dead Kennedys’ obsessive whilst in the sixth form (who seemed to hog the stereo and ‘treat’ us to Fresh Fruit and Rotting Vegetables as often as he could), I was particularly surprised at how unlike that most of the music Rob played us sounded.

A great idea for a future theme Rob, I can think of a few recording artists in my collection that could well benefit from similar treatment.

Graham Listened: As we went round the table with our choices, I have to say I was feeling initially nervy when we stopped at Rob’s turn each time. As time went past the sense of foreboding diminished and each track was more intriguing than the last.

I have avoided Mr Biafra since 1984 when the obligatory fellow 6th former in my year tried to convince me that the Dead Kennedys were the most important band in the world and forced me and many others to listen to their music. Sadly he became ostracized from the entire 6th form as his determination to convert us got stronger and stronger. Wonder what ever happened to him? Expect he formed a band.

Clearly someone who has important things to say and possibly good foresight into  the way the world is going/has turned out. ‘Full Metal Jackoff’ was brilliant and everything to do with the live performance and imagery of ‘Pull my strings’ was inspired.

Nick listened: Did one of those stupid Buzzfeed quizzes the other day about ‘which 80s hardcore shouty American underground rock dude are you’ and, because I ticked all the anti-capitalist answers rather than the drug hoover answers, I got Jello Biafra. I was way too young to know anything about The Dead Kennedys at the time, and they’ve not been an act I’ve sought out since for numerous reasons (being British, not being into much hardcore, etcetera), but I pretty much thoroughly enjoyed everything played on Rob’s list, and, moreover, agreed with it all ideologically pretty strongly. We could really do with more of his ilk now. Really.

‘Album of the year’, always a difficult one for me.  This year even more challenging given the record breaking 5 options I had to pick from. Hands down would be Hookworms, which Rob played earlier in the year. Nick inspired me with These New Puritans and The National, while I made a mistake with Boards of Canada. All this points to Tom not yet being forgiven for the stunt he pulled when introducing Al Green earlier this year.

I don’t own any other Arctic Monkey’s albums having never really felt the need. Liked the well known singles but never felt there was a substance that needed to be explored. But having heard extracts fom this I took the plunge and felt well rewarded. Being pretty transparent in my tastes, the first things that hit are the guitar licks of ‘Physical Graffiti’ era, cleaned up in a no need to ‘rock out’ way. The evidence for this being my daughter listening in the kitchen on her knees, in an an attempted power slide with her acoustic guitar gripped in a way which bodes well for NOW86 to be leaving her cd collection very shortly.

Mainly dirty, grubby style and lyrics but plenty of commercial appeal, which I am still a sucker for. Ends beautifully with John Cooper Clarke’s words on ‘I wanna be yours’, “And let me be the portable heater that you’ll get cold without”.

The Hookworms would make me want to be in a band if I was a teenager, the Arctic Monkeys just made an album I really liked.

The prospect of our ‘Album of the Year’ meeting for 2013 had been causing me some concern for some time. Come November I had precious few records that I could have realistically taken as my album of the year: Bill Callahan’s Dream River was probably at the top of my pile but we’ve already had our fill of Bill; not that you can ever have too much of him in my opinion, but it shows a certain lack of breadth to have three records by the same artist within the space of three years. And besides, it’s not as good as his previous two solo albums, or his last two (amazing) efforts as Smog. Other albums I have acquired from 2013 have largely been disappointing for me: Parquet Courts is a tired rehash of early Pavement, bafflingly revered for some inexplicable reason; Kurt Vile’s latest is some way off the brilliance of Smoke Ring being overlong and meandering; Phosphorescent’s Muchacho is pleasant enough but hardly album of the year material and John Grant’s Pale Green Ghosts starts off so strongly but peters out in its second half. To my mind the best record I had heard from 2013 was Rob’s Pinkunoizu thing but I could hardly bring that. Then, at the bum end of the year, as the forums began to gear themselves up to listmania (lisztomania?) I struck gold…twice.  One of the two albums I am saving for another meeting so more of that at a later date. The other is John Wizards’ self-tilted debut. Neither album made much (if any) impression on the album of the year lists. I guess I am just becoming ever more out of touch! But for sheer life affirming joyfulness John Wizards takes some beating.

Somewhat surprisingly, given the fact that our tastes share much common ground, my album of the year is kind of the polar opposite of Rob’s emptyset record. Whereas his record is all bright melodies and colour and…oh, hang on, I may have got that the wrong way round! Rob’s album is the absence of music, it’s the sound of what’s left when some alien species has beamed down to Earth and removed everything but heavy machinery. In contrast, John Wizards is crammed to overflowing with music. Ostensibly comprising of 15 ‘songs’, the album sounds more like 200 ideas spewing forth from a very active (ie hyperactive) brain. There’s so much going on on John Wizards’ debut that I find myself worrying about their sophomore effort already…not only will it be hard to match the genius of this album but surely they can’t have all that many ideas left? There are, after all, only so many permutations of notes on a scale and most of them have been used here! So I guess I should just enjoy it while it lasts, something that seems to happen that little bit more with each new listen.

Maybe it’s the mathematician in me, but I love albums like this. Albums which require work, that are like a puzzle, where it takes time just to work out where one song ends and another one starts and then to gradually realise that what sounded at first like a set of disconnected motifs actually do hang together as ‘songs’. Albums like A Wizard A True Star or Alien Lanes or Mark’s Keyboard Repair or, even, Smile which has recently (completely by coincidence) been my album of choice in the car and is slowly revealing its worth despite sounding abysmal during those early plays. But, unlike all of these records, John Wizards sounded glorious on a first listen. A glorious mess. There’s nothing really that jars, the way the songs develop, the movement between sections, is never abrupt and each part of every song could be fleshed out into a 15 minute jam and I would be quite happy to listen to it. And whilst Nick played us some Syrian wedding music that had just a whiff of Western production values detectable, John Wizards’ African roots ground the album in someplace unique but the African influence is subtle and used sparingly so that, whilst at times it sounds a bit like Junior Boys crossed with Ladysmith Black Mambazo at other times it might just sound like Junior Boys. It all adds up to something fresh and, to my mind, unique and highly addictive. The perfect antidote to those emptyset blues!

Rob listened: I spent a fruitless and frustrating couple of minutes this evening trying to describe ‘R Plus 7’ by Oneohtrix Point Never, another of my favourite records of 2013. It’s a dizzying blizzard of a thing, blinking from one stanza to another, apparently teleporting in and out of entirely different tracks. There’s no way on this earth that it should work, but it’s beautiful and moving. To some extent, I could have saved us all the bother had Tom gone first instead of last. I hadn’t heard of John Wizards before tonight, but, crudely put, it’s ‘R Plus 7’ played on real instruments rather than a laptop. Perhaps not quite so deliberate – there are flows and dissolves across the record, but ultimately both artists are getting away with an approach which should spell disaster, at least in part through their energy and attention to delicious detail. I loved it. If this is what a post-internet global music sounds like then for now it sounds pretty good.

Oh it looked so easy when Rob set the  theme  of a UK No:1 album. I sat firmly on my laurels having estimated 50 or so CD and vinyl albums to choose from after a quick scan of the possibilities. Then came the crunch of getting them together and making a choice. In a matter of minutes I proved to myself that I sat high on the “commercial whore index” by having a collection of stuff that I hadn’t played for years and certainly had no intention of playing at record club without body armour. Add to the mix some work issues requiring a prompt getaway, I opted for some novelty choices (what ever did happen to Terence Stoke-on-Trent D’arby?) which included the above. This was rescued from my parents record collection at some point in the late 90’s and is in pretty much the state of the thumbnail above.

Thinking we would only last a couple of tracks, we eventually finished up with the whole of side one as the precise, yet syrupy voice of Karen Carpenter began to wash over us. Growing up, Carpenters seemed a strange MoR/TV special/Pop type crossover that were to despised by any spotty youth taking music seriously. I taught my self to ignore them, which wasn’t easy given there huge radio and TV coverage in the 70’s. Little did I know that as a brother and sister, behind the scenes they were enduring drug and  lifestyle issues, a world away from their clean-cut image.

Not sure if some of these songs count as guilty pleasures or whether years of radio bombardment have just weakened my defences really. The arrangements are so crisp on ‘Weve only just begun’, ‘Ticket to ride’, ‘Rainy days and Mondays’, ‘Goodbye to Love’, Yesterday once more’, and Karen’s voice just eases you back in the chair.

Highlight of the abridged listen was a reminder of the nuts guitar solos midway and on the ‘outro’ of ‘Goodbye to Love’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nooeMrCws-A. Simply creams anything Richey Blackmore ever came up with!