Sunday 12 May 2013

The Razor Gang - (All I Want For Xmas Is A) Neutron Bomb 7" RG 01, 1982


If you spend as much time as we do in the bins and crates then you're au fait with the basic tenets of quantum record theory. The bit which does our heads in is Schrödinger's Record Paradox, first posited by our learned colleagues over at the Corroseum. It goes like this: an unknown record found in the racks is simultaneously good and bad, until it is forced to collapse into one state or the other. We do this by putting them in our small hadron collider, a circular device where we smash industrial diamond at high speeds (45 rpm to be exact) against the vinyl, and study the results intently, looking particularly for evidence of the elusive punk particle.

So there I was, stood in The Pitt record shop in the 1990s. All of a sudden the Geiger counter in my toolbelt started going fucking ballistic. I took off my gas mask (this was a Bob Gould shop after all) and before me sat the record pictured above. Razor Gang. 1982. Crude sleeve. Military imagery. Neutron Bomb. Drawing of a razor blade. I added up the quantum probabilities in my head and easily cracked 100%. I could almost taste the Nobel Prize.

I quickly hotfooted it past the racks fronted by Danny Graham and Mopsie Beans 12"s (sadly I'm not joking), paid and rushed back to the collider, then based in Surry Hills.

Insert sad slide whistle...

To cut a long story short, my disappointment was such that until I recently pulled it out of the Wallaby Beat powerpop section, admittedly not the most visited part of the archive, this probably hadn't seen action round here for fifteen years.

With that much water under the bridge, the A-side is not too bad at all. Like the Mansons, the direct lyrics and vocals override an overly poppy backing. The "happy Hammond" does add something, though recent comparisons to The Go Betweens' People Say are gilding the turd. The flipside? Let's just say there is no New Wave section in our archive.

(All I Want For Xmas Is A) Neutron Bomb [Download]


Video Dreams [Download]

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