Viva Dead Ponies 2CD

How do you like your music? utterly predictable, or "What the devil was that?" Which is to say, I personally rather enjoy being surprised by an album, and this one doesn't half keep you on your toes. It jumps around all over the place. Musically. For the most part it rocks; great quiet-bits-that-go-all-shouty-and-heavy, the way I know we all love. Plus a bit of opera, europop, and some other stuff that there aren't any good names for.
I'm a big soppy ol' fan of people like Chris Morris and Bill Hicks whose - what I'm afraid I'm going to have to call - Satirical darkness, seems to me to come from a deep desire to see people not be quite so stupid, and maybe aspire to something a little grander than the squalid state of right now. So it is with The Fatima Mansions: if the lyrics are black and cynical, and they are brilliantly so, then it's because of that Peter Cook style disappointment with the dullness of things.
I like to think.
Cathal Coughlan, the bloke what sang and wrote it. He's a card. Leaves you with lovely little pictures in your head. Try this on for size: "This unkempt ageing orphan and his helpless dying bride" tickled me it did. Hope you like it as much as I do, but don't blame me if you don't. Like my Mum used to say about olives stuffed with anchovies, "It's an aquired taste."

The world was very different when this album came out in 1990. Viva Dead Ponies was an explosive reaction to the stifling dullness which passed for the world of pop music. If only we knew then that those troughs were just the foothills before going on down to the permanent nadir in which we now find ourselves. Well, take a listen to this record and find a new old world poised on the brink of getting much, much worse. It's a glorious record, a firework festival of wit, anger, humour, rage and a rapier-sharp socio-political analysis that seems not to exist anywhere else these days. Some may find the synthesiser sounds a little cracked and weathered (but not as dated as the red blouson-style jacket the lead singer, Coughlan, favoured at this time). But! The energetic vocals veering from rage to heart-breaking tenderness and the slick guitar riffs will help accustom your ears to the sound of 1990. Cathal Coughlan has a very fine voice and it has a terrific range. "You're A Rose" is a song for jilted lovers everywhere. "A Pack Of Lies" is the most Irish-sounding song on the album and deals with the return of an Irish migrant, a ruined man returning to his indifferent homeland. True then, it is truer now. While the song was hugely ironic in 1990, the effect is magnified tenfold by the grotesque transformations wrought upon Ireland in the meantime. The title track really ought to have put the band in tremendous danger (for the same reasons that made Salman Rushdie a marked man) but no-one in the Finsbury mosque has been keeping up with Anglo-Irish pop-rock, apparently.

This is not a smooth album, not by any means, but the rage is controlled and moderated so that you're never reaching for the off-switch. It's easy to be "challenging" but seldom is it easy to be challenging and excellent. The Fatima Mansions were that and they were more.

Viva Dead Ponies is the only album I've ever bought twice on CD. Well, fair enough, you might say, since there is an additional 2nd CD "best of" included, this is not just a straight reissue. Well, yes, but then I had all those tracks too. So why did I buy this and why am I very glad I did? Good question, thanks for asking.

Well, there is one slight difference with VDP itself: the version of Chemical Cosh here is not the one from the original UK release of the album, but instead the much more muscular version recorded for the Hive EP (though I believe some later pressings of VDP may have also included it? By the way I hope you're taking notes, there will be questions later).

But I really bought this album in the fervent hope that VDP had been remastered. The original album was unquestionably a wonderful record but seriously marred by thin, weedy, lousy sound, as a result, presumably, of poor mastering or pressing (if CDs are indeed 'pressed', don't ask me).

Thankfully, although the current booklet/packaging makes no mention of it whatsoever, VDP, and the "best of" tracks, clearly have indeed been remastered (or reEQ'd, or something), and the uncredited technician responsible has done an excellent job. Plenty has been gained and nothing lost. Consequently, all the fantastic music on these 2 CDs now SOUNDS fantastic. Now as loud, full-bodied and rich sounding as it was surely intended to be, VDP roars out of your speakers, whereas previously it pretty much dribbled out. At times it's almost like listening to a completely different record.

As hinted earlier, the 2nd CD tracks have also been remasterd to the same high standard. The Valhalla Avenue tracks (originally also cursed with ropey sound) benefit most but even the Lost in the Former West selections sound better than before, and they sounded great to begin with.

Ok, so enough of this anally retentive sound quality stuff, what about the music? Well, I could write a thousand pages about the wonderful music on these CDs, but my fellow reviewers have raved long and hard already. Believe them, they are wise. Suffice to say that from the visceral rage and fury of Blues for Ceausescu, Angel's Delight, Look What I Stole for Us, Darling etc. to the desolate beauty of Behind the Moon or Wilderness on Time, this set contains some of the finest music you will ever hear. Those of my friends and acquaintances who sneer and mock at my claim that the Fatima Mansions were the greatest band of all time will soon find themselves subjected to these CDs. Oh yes. They'll thank me for it one day.

The Best of CD has been well compiled. Ok, personally I'd have tried to make room for Something Bad, The Day I Lost Everything, Ray of Hope, Stigmata and Brunceling's Song and would have probably eschewed You Won't Get Me Home, Nite Flights, Humiliate Me and the remix of The Loyaliser, great though they all are. But, overall, no real complaints.

Newcomers to the band should of course start here. Since no other Fatima Mansions records are currently commercially available they would probably be hard pressed to start anywhere else anyway. Which begs the obvious question: when is the band's entire back catalogue going to be made available? If and when that happens let's hope that it will all sound as good as this reissue.