Recently back in the world of the nitpicking inkies due to a series of long-overdue reissues on V2 - begging again the eternal question of why we have to wait until our champs die before their paymasters will allow their work the opportunity to be out there making new friends - Billy Mackenzie & Alan Rankine’s hypermanic irreverences have remained an important part of my world for years now, ever since their thoroughly bizarre tenure as pop titans back in the heady deelyboppered Di-fringed days of 1982. Observing the ethos of this site, I have to admit that Sulk (1982) is the one you should seek out if you remain a virgin to their queer charms, but have to profess an equal admiration for an earlier work which it has pained me to see damned with faint praise by certain doltish swine of late, the singles compilation Fourth Drawer Down, originally released on import around the turn of 81-82.

During 1981, speeding both literally and metaphorically & flushed with the impatience of youth, the Associates embarked on a guerilla campaign of single releases, tracks recorded as putative demos for other record companies then licensed to Situation 2 as actual releases. With a couple of oddities - a remix of a track from the previous year’s Bowie-tribute debut The Affectionate Punch & a cover of Simon Dupree’s Kites under the pseudonym 39 Lyon Street - the total came to seven gargantuan doublesided slabs of pure abandon within 10 months, the A-sides of five, along with three pertinent B-sides, constituting this collection. Allowing for certain sonic details which tie the material unmistakably to the indie-scmindie early eighties (& for a comparable reference, think here of some of the soundworld of Mr C’s own Wilder, the occasional drumsound or synthy business marring the picture but not scarring it irrevocably), the material gathered here has aged surprisingly well, retaining a goodly proportion of its initial kick and strangeness. The title referred to the location of bassist Michael Dempsey’s herbal relaxants, which the band would quaff for, as Mackenzie biographer Tom Doyle puts it, “a pleasant nightime buzz”. It’s a short & entirely appropriate leap of metaphor to describe these songs as drifting, edge-of-oblivion blooodrush phantasms.

There’s a whole untamed world in here, from the spoofing of the sucked-in cheeks and unfortunate teutonics of the more boneheaded likes of Spandau and Simple Minds on White Car In Germany, to the all-out sonic assault of Kitchen Person and The Associate, the former practically an advert for never touching cheap speed with its chattering teeth and howling echoed vocal, the latter a rollercoaster of an instrumental, culminating in a whole verse of Mackenzie’s piercing shrieking bleeding into feedback. The quieter moments are just as erratic, from the impenetrable cod-Bowie sci-fi visions of Q Quarters, with its Scooby Doo waves of something like theremin & a persistent cough serving as backing vocals for its final verse, to the spaghetti-western rereading of White Car which rounds things off on the original vinyl. The current reissue adds a few more tracks from the same time. The unreleased stuff I haven’t heard yet, but the extra B-sides include the instrumental Straw Towels, wherein Mackenzie & Rankine try to invent the Jesus & Mary Chain four years early, & the lunatic Blue Soap, a blues ballad heard from outside a bathroom, splashes, running water and plughole drainings all included.

What strikes you most at this distance is the simple fun and curiosity in the material. Mackenzie has long been lauded for his remarkable voice, an opera singer having a panic attack largely on these earlier tracks, before he settled down to crooning magnificently instead (the posthumous release Beyond The Sun showcasing just how touchingly torchy he could be if he felt like it), but it’s easy to overlook Rankine’s input, including a guitar sound that comes close to the nagging insistency of Keith Levene on the early PiL albums. By the time of Sulk, his guitar had achieved a sheetmetal veneer, & the production had become a remarkable wash of middleground, a shimmering miasma, individual instruments swimming in and out of focus, but on the singles collected here, he concentrates on a attack and cleanliness. This sort of control often appeared tightarsed in other early eighties groups, barely a week going by without some wispy nonce holding his guitar like a security blanket on TOTP, but the Associates had a certain edge to them that was beyond their peers - a feeling that they were only just reined-in, that they could go off in your face at any moment.

Being a compilation, it doesn’t hang together as a complete piece, being something you’re often better advised to dip in & out of, but beyond the near-masterwork of Sulk (a couple of tossed-off tracks preventing it being a stone-dead classic, but containing both Party Fears Two and Skipping, their paradigm moments), Fourth Drawer Down remains an entirely unique beast, all the better for the lack of constraint and second-guessing in its creation (this at a time when everything seemed second-guessed & intended merely to impress). And everything you may have heard about Mackenzie’s voice is all true, & then some.

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