You gotta love an LP with a trailer, surely?
Jobcentre Rejects: Ultra Rare NWOBHM 1978-1982, the name just trips off the tongue doesn’t it? welcome to the best of the many NWOBHM compilations I own.
I just love the acronym NWOBHM, there’s something fabulously unwieldy and daft, yet satisfying about the word. Not unlike the whole movement itself. I just love the idea that fired up by the mood of the times and the example of punk, Britain* exploded with a groundswell of local bands, pushing to get their voices heard, to get something, anything out there urgently to bypass all the traditional gatekeepers of the industry**.
Something Jobcentre Rejects gets so damn right is the parochial nature of NWOBHM, carefully listing where every band was from – that was important for a movement like this, it was partly about proving that good stuff happened outside London. Barnsley, Sheffield, Hastings, Grantham and Lancashire could all have a voice here, a horse in the NWOBHM stakes. Grantham-based Overdrive get 1537 bonus points for calling their own record label Boring Grantham Records.
The medium of choice was nearly always the 7″ single, because when you got together and rehearsed for a few weeks and the bass player sold his motorbike that’s what you could afford to cut. Unless you were actually there buying chunks of it up, like my metal uncle Alastair, the only sane, financially feasible means of sampling the glory and breadth of NWOBHM is via the carefully curated compilations.
Which brings us to, the brilliantly named, Jobcentre Rejects. A letter of love to NWOBHM from Sweden released in 2019 via On The Dole Records. Prompted by HMO, I picked this up one lunchtime at Probe Records in Liverpool, in a red vinyl edition limited to 300 copies with a badge and poster – basically everything that would appeal to a man of my maturity and thrust.
Jobcentre Rejects absolutely blew me away from the first listen, although admittedly Side 1 is far more loaded than Side 2. It is just relentless churning riff after riff after riff, what interests me most is twofold a) Just how close to the punk at the time almost all of this is b) How so much of it sounds like a sped-up Quo.
Proof? just sample, Liverpool’s NWOBHM contribution, Spider ‘Children Of The Street’, it’s absolutely relentless! Chuck Berry filtered through Status Quo and amphetamine sulphate, taken with the handclaps and chanting it could almost be off the previous year’s Sham 69 LP, The Adventures Of the Hersham Boys. Good times indeed!^
A real highlight for me is Stray ‘This One’s For You’. It’s an absolutely brilliant amped-up track, with real overtones of Thin Lizzy’s lyricism and melancholy; just an excellently written track. Stray are a bit of an exception here, the band had been going in one form or another since the late 60’s.
The most metallic track here is Overdrive ‘On The Run’, which has a touch of early Maiden and a soupçon of Ozzy^^. It’s brilliant hardcharging stuff, worthy like a lot here of a bigger audience. Ditto Frenzy ‘Thanx For Nuthin” and its’ great speedy-up, slowy-down sections and double ditto the frenzied ‘(Living On) English Booze’ by Metal Mirror.
Without going into every single track here, there is so much to enjoy on Jobcentre Rejects, a whole dole queue full. This LP just makes me smile, there’s a real charm and gawky naivety about all the music here and for a certain number of the bands this was all she wrote, one single, one shot and pfffft! Maybe the bass player, having sold his motorbike, decided to go back to college, they all got pissed off with the guitarist acting like a prima donna when they were only selling out the back room of the Docker’s Fist, or the singer got too big for his boots? more probably they all got tired of the farting drummer.
Jobcentre Rejects is such a well put together thing, the sleeve notes are as great as the track choices^* and the whole thing has been put together with such care, it is a pleasure to own. Plus you have to love the slightly crap front cover art.
Buy it, gift yourself some trivial joy; which is really not a trivial thing at all today. Predatür would approve:
989 Down.
PS: Like all good things, there’s a sequel*^:
*I would almost be correct writing ‘England’ there instead of Britain. Discuss.
**until the industry swooped, with the ruthless inevitability of predators, it was a damnably democratic movement too. Then financial/management clout began to tell, sheer bloody-mindedness, necessary luck and, hey, talent began to edge the successes ahead of the succasses.
^In the finest Scouse traditions Spider were nicked after making their debut LP for working and claiming the dole; real Boys From The Black Stuff.
^^is a soupçon a valid measurement of Ozzy, or can you only order him by the bucket load?
^*don’t make me tell you again how much I love sleeve notes! Just don’t!
*^which I bought in Glasgow on my birthday this year.
