Our greatest thinker and future of all humanity once wrote:
It would be a tiny bit of an exaggeration to say that ‘Babylon’ by Faster Pussycat smashed my world off its axis, it certainly altered its’ angle of rotation for a bit though. Tommy Vance played it on the Friday Rock Show; sandwiched between the usual humourless thrashers from Austria, classics and NWOBHM past-its ‘Babylon’ just sounded like a glitter bomb. Already a Def Jam devotee – I sat bolt upright in bed and stopped thinking about girls for about 3 minutes and thought that was exactly the way that rock and rap should be combined, entwined and, umm, sublimned. This was clearly the band that the late 20th Century had been waiting for. Even better none of my friends would ever had heard of them.
It would seem I wasn’t alone, welcome to the Backyard Babies Babylon, a 1999 single featuring chum-of-the-band Ginger Wildheart – credited as ‘Wildhearted Ginger’. It’s a ripper.
The Backyard Babies take the (im)pure gold of the Pussycat original and spread aggression and nastiness all over it, like a thick coating of, umm, sleazeberry jam. Babylon is given a far heavier base, some sound FX, more explicitly coketastic lyrics, meaner guitars and additional lyrics from ‘(You Gotta Fight) For Your Right (To Party)’. Add in Ginger’s spoken line at the end ‘Yeah, shut the fuck up’ and the whole is much gnarlier than the original and possibly even more adolescent.
Basically this sounds like the inside of my jeans smelled like in 1987 and I mean that in a good way. Possibly.
In a pure and just world this would have been the biggest selling single ever released by anyone, Wales would have seceded from the UK and become part of Sweden and the entirety of Belgium would have become a Backyard Babies themed theme park – ‘please mummy can we ride the Blitzkreig Loveshock-o-coaster again?’; Sadly, ’twas not to be. Reality is so infra dig, dontcha think.
The B-side is ‘Babylon (Idiot Fo’ Life Remix)’ by DJ Champain* and someone/something called Yod. I was ready to dismiss this without a hearing when I first got this, but I would have been very wrong – it very cleverly, creatively takes us full hip-hop. I particularly like the way they use the rhythm of the chorus here. Smart chaps, these.
My copy of Babylon is a 12″ single with delightfully tasteless cover art, a poster of said delightfully tasteless cover art, one etched side and the whole gizmo limited to 1000 copies.
1046 Down.
PS: What a bunch of sleazy wastrels! I like the chaos here:
*who tweaks his twozzle nut-nuts on the title cut, to great effect; apologies in advance if I get a little too technical for you here.
