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Josef K, Entomology

Josef K
Alexis Petridis
Thu 14 Dec 2006 19.03 EST

You could never argue that Entomology is untimely. Five years ago it would have been hard to give a lavishly-packaged Josef K compilation away - they were a band remembered only by the staunchest of indie devotees. The Edinburgh quartet's career lasted barely 18 months between 1979 and 1981, when they were perhaps the apotheosis of a certain kind of band that came in punk's wake: clad in baggy suits, rigorously opposed to the conventions of rock, playing a kind of scratchy white funk, incapable of wearing their intelligence lightly, lyrically obsessed with "the absurdity of being alive in a godless, vacuous universe", as singer Paul Haig later put it.

In the two decades following their demise, Josef K's influence was negligible: Johnny Marr was a fan, but you could hardly tell that from records he made with the Smiths. That, of course, was before the rise of the Rapture, Franz Ferdinand and the Futureheads, all of them audibly in thrall to Josef K. A torrent followed in the wake of those bands - the NME is still full of new scratchy punk-funk groups. Josef K have become one of the most influential bands in Britain, as Entomology's sleevenotes make clear, or rather, would make clear were they not the handiwork of journalist Paul Morley, writing, as ever, like a man being impersonated by satirist Craig Brown: "Lead singer Paul Haig was a ghostly hint of a non-existent mod Samuel Beckett who played double bass in 60s Paris for a visiting Sonny Rollins."

Early singles Radio Drill Time and the mournful It's Kinda Funny burned with a promise befitting the purple prose. It couldn't last. One thing post-punk bands loved was, to paraphrase an old Beyond the Fringe sketch, a big, futile gesture, designed to emphasise the disdain in which they held commercial success. The era abounds with deliberately static appearances on Top of the Pops and gigs played behind screens that rendered the artist invisible to the audience. Both actions had the pleasing side effect of allowing the bands involved to earnestly discuss Brechtian alienation techniques in interviews, earnestly discussing Brechtian alienation techniques being another thing that post-punk bands couldn't get enough of.

Nothing if not representative of their era, Josef K did Verfremdungseffekt in a big way, shunning speaking between songs in favour of playing pre-recorded announcements. Sadly denied the chance to show their contempt for the showbiz rigmarole of a Top of the Pops appearance because they weren't selling enough to warrant a Top of the Pops appearance in the first place, they had to find other means of self-sabotage. Having announced they would release only one album, they somehow contrived to release the wrong one. In late 1980, they recorded a perfectly serviceable debut, Sorry for Laughing, scrapped it, ditched some of the best songs, rerecorded the rest in a manner that rendered them virtually unlistenable, released those to terrible reviews and then broke up in ignominy. In retrospect, it's easy to laud wilfully awkward behaviour, particularly from the perspective of an era when most "alternative" artists are so painfully eager to please. But the reality of it is maddening, as evidenced by listening to the handful of tracks salvaged from the unreleased Sorry for Laughing, then those that actually saw the light of day on the solitary album released during Josef K's career, The Only Fun in Town. Despite the heartfelt music press belief that Josef K were bound for commercial success, it seems improbable that anything off the former album would have stormed the charts in late 1980: the top 10 was already overcrowded with dour examinations of man's endless struggle, including Ottowan's D.I.S.C.O, Bad Manners' Special Brew and Dennis Waterman's I Could Be So Good For You.

Nevertheless, the fabulous Endless Soul and the title track demonstrate Josef K's strength was the tension between their twitching rhythms, scouring guitars and doomy lyrics and their pop sensibility, found in the melodies Paul Haig crooned. It was a point made even more explicit by the equally wonderful subsequent single Chance Meeting, which pitched their tinny funk against shimmering autoharp and piano, but an innate pop sensibility was clearly felt to be insufficiently Brechtian and alienating: Sorry for Laughing's very title suggests a band that felt compelled to apologise for doing anything so frivolous as making a record with a tune. So The Only Fun in Town buried the melodies beneath a blizzard of scratchy guitars and reverb. The overall impression was of grey uniformity and missed opportunity. The infuriating memory of it causes even Paul Morley to break out in a rash of comprehensibility. "They sort of made it twice. Don't ask. Nearly everyone ignored Josef K, including, ultimately, Josef K themselves." But their time would come, just later than their devotees thought it would. However arcane they may once have seemed, the truth is that Entomology's highlights were too good to stay obscure forever.