This is the story of a once rather important band from back in the mists of time, who called themselves The Clash, thirty-six years of bitter disappointment, and their final redemption at the hands of a dedicated German super-fan.

It's 1985, and The Clash have just released their 6th album, called Cut The Crap.



This record, it turns out, is terrible. In fact, it's so bad that most sane people deem it to be unlistenable. This is an indisputable fact. It really is one of the worst records ever made. Their fanbase is mortified, and pretty soon after releasing this, their final album, this version of The Clash will call it quits and split up. The album is indeed so bad, it will go on to be excised from every official band discography for the next thirty-six years.
The world, however, continued to spin.

*Many years later Todd in the Shadows will make an amusing video about this album. If you are fortunate enough to never have heard Cut The Crap, then it's is a good watch for context...



Now I said that the world continued to spin, but for a small subsection of the global population, this was not strictly true.
For the next thirty-six years, fans of The Clash would spend a lot of time arguing about the possible merits of the Cut The Crap album.
This of course was a largely pointless exercise, because no matter how you tried to justify it, edit it, re-sequence the tracks, or even recompile it from demos, nothing could alter the one irrefutable fact that this was an unlistenable turd of a record.

Enter German fan of The Clash, Gerald Mann. 
For thirty-six years Mann had been irked by the album's unquestionable shitness, so one day he resolved to do something about it.
You see Mann is a musician, and he has technology at his disposal that can do some pretty clever things.
So what Mann did was this. He used this technology to isolate and strip Joe Strummer's vocal tracks out of the original album mix of Cut The Crap.
Now you're probably saying to yourself, gosh, that's pretty clever, but how does that change anything, and you'd be right, but that was just the first step in his masterplan.
You see, around the time The Clash released Cut The Crap back in 1985, they toured the album, and this tour is well-documented by numerous bootleg recordings.
Why is this important, you are probably now asking.
Well. The versions of the Cut The Crap songs that The Clash played on that tour were significantly different to the versions that are on the album. In fact, fans of the band have long pondered how this disparity occurred, because the live versions of the songs were actually not too shabby.
So what these ancient bootlegs did, was give Gerald Mann a template to work from.
Remember, Gerald Mann is a musician by trade.
So what Mann did next, was to meticulously learn every instrumental part of every song from the live versions, and build an entirely new version of Cut The Crap, by re-recording all the instruments and then re-combining Joe Strummer's vocal parts with the results...

...and the results...

...are actually pretty good!

After thirty-six years of unlistenable garbage, there now exists a completely new version of the album, now called Mohawk Revenge (after a logo on an old clash tour shirt from the period), and yes, it's actually pretty good!



Is it some sort of lost masterpiece then?
No.
But what it is, is an album that finally sounds like The Clash, and contains versions of the songs the way the band played them live, as opposed to the absolute drivel that ended up on the original record.

Me? I really like it. Like I say, it's no masterpiece. It's an album that was originally made by a band at the end of their shelf-life, and missing half of their founding members, but dammit! I like this! 
After thirty-six years, there is finally a version of this album that actually sounds like The Clash. And that's quite a thing.

Clash manager Bernie Rhodes godawful production job has finally been relegated to the dumpster of history.



Rejoice!

So where can I hear this "new" Clash album G?

Well, the whole thing is available to stream as a playlist on YouTube here...

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6ggjMklzIx0aCGDhE1FIS2HDu2WNLL17

Here is a taster...


to compare with the abomination that is the original version...



and the entire new version of the album can currently be downloaded in either MP3 or FLAC from Mann's HiDrive account here.

If any of this has piqued your curiosity, you can also read an interview with Gerald Mann, about how he achieved this miracle here. It's a good read.


And so ends our story for today. As a footnote though, I should just say, that I downloaded Mohawk Revenge a couple of days ago, and in the period since, I must have listened to it more times than I've listened to Cut The Crap in the last thirty-six years.
Sometimes all it takes is one man on a mission, armed with modern technology and a dream, to right the wrongs of the past. 

rejoice!

g.man

That is a truly remarkable endeavour.

Aye, as musical dumpster fires go, Cut The Crap was pretty much ground zero.

Aye, you do get some artifacts, but considering the mess the vocals were lifted from, and the genre and time period of the source, I think it gets away with it, where other restorations wouldn’t.

Although saying that I think I prefer people giving fucks to not.

Modest Mouse have a new album coming out in June

They've released a new song as a taster for it.

I liked that one song they did.

I like Modest Mouse. The Moon & Antarctica can be credited as one of the albums that got me into enjoying music beyond what was on the radio. Good News For People Who Love Bad News was a slick slice of indie poprock back in the day. They've never quite held an album together since then, but they've always been good for a few choice singles and songs.

File alongside The Shins for me (and half a dozen other bands I really liked) - they evoke fond memories of a golden era but I'm not familiar with their recent output.

Actually, get your ears round this one too. A lot of people think this was a split single, but it was one 15-minute long collaboration – Modest Mouse and 746-Hero writing and playing together on a song. This came out while I lived over there and was on heavy rotation in our studio.

(746-Hero are hugely underrated, for my money. One of the best indie bands from the Pacific Northwest.)

Gremill wrote:

They should be modest, they're fucking shit.

Hehehe

Every generation gets its own take on punk. And that’s a good thing. 

Here’s my take, which nobody asked for: This shit’s always been diverse, but only the biggest bands make it into the history books - so when the next gen discovers the music, they don’t get to see the diversity. Which lets them bring a burst of energy to establishing it all over again. And by ‘diversity’ I mean in musical style as well as in demographic of artists/fans.

I mean, here comes the crossover revival that nobody asked for. Soon to be followed by the comeback of nu-metal, to Yoss’s probable delight. I mean, look at the quote near the end of that article: “There’s a lot of like amazing talented young artists blending hip-hop, alternative, heavy rock, like, all that stuff, and I think that blend is where alternative is going.” - you could have lifted that verbatim from a similar article in an early-’90s issue of Kerrang.

poprock wrote:

Every generation gets its own take on punk. And that’s a good thing.  Here’s my take, which nobody asked for: This shit’s always been diverse, but only the biggest bands make it into the history books - so when the next gen discovers the music, they don’t get to see the diversity. Which lets them bring a burst of energy to establishing it all over again. And by ‘diversity’ I mean in musical style as well as in demographic of artists/fans. I mean, here comes the crossover revival that nobody asked for. Soon to be followed by the comeback of nu-metal, to Yoss’s probable delight. I mean, look at the quote near the end of that article: “There’s a lot of like amazing talented young artists blending hip-hop, alternative, heavy rock, like, all that stuff, and I think that blend is where alternative is going.” - you could have lifted that verbatim from a similar article in an early-’90s issue of Kerrang.

Spoiler:

The early ’90s was THIRTY YEARS AGO.

I did like them describing MySpace too:

One big distinction between the genre then and the genre now, though, is inclusivity, they said.

“Having this online space, a platform where anybody can join and say what the fuck they want to say, is really great because it just shows more representation and more people are being seen and validated,”

Ah Machine Gun Kelly. Got so destroyed by Eminem in a rap beef he literally switched genres.