By chance, today marks thirty years to the day since I started my side-line (it was never a career!) in writing about music. On 29-Sep 1996, I was on the guestlist for downset. at the LA2 in London, my first assignment on the music section of ROAR, the King’s College London student newspaper. I’d signed up at the Fresher’s Fair the previous week, and was very surprised indeed when I was collared outside the main KCL building on the Strand by the Music Editor, asking me to cover the gig.

Even more surprisingly, that first review was published, and I quickly got a taste for it. After leaving KCL (I dropped out, and never finished my degree after a tumultuous time to say the least), I took a bit of a break from writing, but picked it up again when a friend had a ‘zine that I began to contribute to, and then when I joined LiveJournal in 2003, I started again properly, and /amodelofcontrol.com popped into life in February 2004 to formalise things.

As I’ve noted before, the end is now coming after thirty years. At the end of March 2027, /amodelofcontrol.com will cease publishing new content, and become dormant as I prepare to archive it. It’s been a fun ride, for the most part, and I’ll talk more about my time running this site nearer the end.

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/amodelofcontrol.com now has a Patreon page, at this stage purely as a potential way of helping to cover the running costs of the site. There is absolutely no compulsion to do so: if you feel you can chuck a small amount to the site each month, that would be appreciated.

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In the meantime, let’s continue with the regular posting. /Tuesday Ten /653 is a companion to last week, and where that was “do”, this week it is “don’t”. Thanks to everyone who suggested a great set of songs.

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A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details above).

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/G.G.F.H.
/Dead Men Don’t Rape
/Disease

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A rare appearance here is of legendary US industrial group G.G.F.H., whose best-known song is the scorching Dead Men Don’t Rape. Musically a song perhaps of it’s time – the tinny electronics and heavy sample usage date it immediately – but the raging torrent of fury in the lyrics are still relevant, as Ghost offers their clear opinions on rapists and those who attack women, which the title of the song neatly sums up. My family had such a person, and they died pretty much alone and forgotten nearly thirty years ago after spending a few years in prison for their crimes.

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/Nine Inch Nails
/I Do Not Want This
/The Downward Spiral

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Putting the rage upfront this week, as we turn to one of my favourite albums (and the eighth track from it to feature over the near-twenty year span of the /Tuesday Ten series) – and indeed one of my favourite tracks from it. I also, somehow, saw NIN play this track live, just once, when I won tickets for Sonisphere Festival 2009 and saw NIN play something of an experimental set that split opinion at the time (it also included a vocalless version of the title track from The Downward Spiral too).

Even amid an album suffused with rage and self-loathing, this song is brutal: whole elements are distorted and treated to oblivion, Trent Reznor’s voice takes on about four different characters in his head, and then all hell breaks loose as the formidable chorus is unleashed.

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/Pitchshifter
/I Don’t Like It
/www.pitchshifter.com

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Another of my nineties favourites – and a band I’ve seen live more than any other – is Pitchshifter. They moved from Godflesh-aping grinding industrial to industrial-punk (at least in part because JS Clayden was destroying his voice doing the former) and along the way released www.pitchshifter.com, a game-changing release that saw them gain a presence in the US and perhaps widen their fanbase more than ever.

Much of the album was ahead of its time, and this song certainly was: a song seemingly about the forced obsolescence of technology that has only become more and more of a problem in the decades since. The song itself rolls and tumbles around Clayden’s characteristically sneering vocals, the drum programming perhaps is some of the best the band ever came up with.

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/Front 242
/Don’t Crash
/Politics Of Pressure EP

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One of the legendary EBM band’s greatest tracks – and naturally in the setlist of their final shows – this track comes from the pretty much flawless Politics of Pressure EP which accompanied/followed-up No Comment. Don’t Crash is a song of perhaps unexpected hope: a message to stay the course even when everything around you seems so, so fucked up – and with all the submarine references, is this a nod to Das Boot?

And while the beat is anchored by that mighty bass synth hook, the vocals from both Jean-Luc and Richard 23 are surprisingly melodic, a rare truly accessible song in their backcatalogue of searing EBM anthems.

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/Public Enemy
/Don’t Believe The Hype
/It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

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Public Enemy, at the end of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, were possibly the most important voice in rap music – and they certainly changed the game in being socially-conscious and calling for change without taking on a gangster persona. Their production methods made for complex, dense and sometimes overwhelming listens, while Chuck D mostly led the rapping with Flavor Flav as one of the greatest hype men (and sometimes taking the lead himself). On Don’t Believe The Hype, Chuck D leads a state of the world address, all the while reminding that Public Enemy can’t change the world alone, no matter what the authorities thought.

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/Red Snapper
/Wesley Don’t Surf
/Reeled and Skinned

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The only instrumental track I even considered for inclusion is this marvellous track by jazz-electronic fusioneers Red Snapper. From what is in some respects their first album, collecting their first three EPs as a ground-breaking whole, one of the most striking tracks on the release is Wesley Don’t Surf, a track that charges forward with an unstoppable momentum and is a great example of a collective in perfect lockstep as the track unfolds and swerves in unexpected directions.

As for who Wesley is, and why he don’t surf? I’ve no fucking idea.

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/Stabbing Westward
/I Don’t Believe
/Wither Blister Burn + Peel

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This much-loved Stabbing Westward album has recently been completely re-recorded and re-interpreted with varying results (it’s always difficult when a band put a new spin on some of your favourite albums, of course), and perhaps the reworking of the opening track takes a little of the sting of the track out (and increasing the tempo just a little bit).

The original is one of the gold standards in self-loathing, that’s for sure. Christopher Hall is deep in a pit of despair, not quite comprehending just how much he’s fucked up with a relationship that pretty much destroyed him.

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/Rage Against The Machine
/Settle For Nothing
/Rage Against The Machine

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“If we don’t take the action now / We settle for nothing later / Settle for nothing now / And we’ll settle for nothing later”
One of the lesser songs from the legendary RATM debut, perhaps – and the seventh of the ten tracks that I’ve now used in this series – but then, being on side one of an album that is otherwise all anthems…

It is a song that begins as little more than bass and Zack de la Rocha’s voice, giving voice to a disaffected youth whose broken home and difficult upbringing have led to him taking the wrong choices and ending up in jail. As the tension rises, the song gets louder and harder, before de la Rocha’s mantra above that is yet another song to remind that you must take personal responsibility for change, and if you don’t, the cycle of poverty and violence will only continue to consume.

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/The Dubliners
/Don’t Get Married
/25 Years Celebration

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While originally a song by English folk legend Leon Rosselson, the song is arguably better known for the version later recorded by Irish folk legends The Dubliners in 1987. Something of a bleak song about the passage of time in relationship, the advice from the song is for women not to marry and get tied down into a relationship where they will become subservient and have no future for themselves. Perhaps some of the references haven’t aged well – particularly the way the suggestion is made that forms of sex work may be better suited for any kind of future or wealth – mind…

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/Felix
/Don’t You Want Me

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We close this week with a belting piece of 1992 electronic music, a thundering house track that samples a remix of Jomanda’s similarly named Don’t You Want My Love, but strips away most of it for the seismic impact of that one refrain – particularly with that split second of silence that follows it, so that the equally brilliant synth hook can crash back into the mix with maximum impact. It was so far ahead of its time that it is hard house years before that became A Thing, and even in the two-minute video edit, it remains an astonishing piece of work.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, such a big hit changed the reclusive Felix’s life, enabling to become a DJ and producer full-time, and he’s still active to this day.