Barry Adamson

Oedipus Schmoedipus
Mute, 1996

An album named after Freud's Oedipal complex could only begin with a song about sex. On Barry Adamson's Oedipus Schmoedipus it's 'Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Pelvis', a play on the title of a famous Pink Floyd track, with Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker doing tongue-in-cheek guest vocals over Adamson's giant gospel-disco beat. The gangly Britpop singer groans and pants and pretends to be a devastating sex symbol while masturbating alone in a mess of "damp towels and asthma inhalers". "Can't you see what's on offer baby?" he bluffs. "Yeah baby, it's going cheap today/ And all the girls say, come on Jarv, can I be the first?/ You make us so hot we feel we're gonna burst!"

Adamson left his job as a graphic designer to join a punk rock band in the late 1970s. He was successful, sort of, and caught Howard Devoto on his way out of the Buzzcocks to form post-punk group Magazine. Adamson later played and collaborated with awfully-serious figures like Nick Cave, director David Lynch and experimental duo Pan Sonic. His solo records were never so po-faced as his colleagues', but never quite full of cheer either. They were a synthesis of his favourite sounds – punk, jazz, lounge crooners and especially film-noir soundtracks – with a strange mix of lascivious humour and sadism.

Adamson's first album, Moss Side Story, was a creepy, experimental jazz soundtrack to a fictitious film noir. Oedipus Schmoedipus kept on with the idea – the sultry 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' was later used in Lynch's film Lost Highway – but with more variation in sound and subject. Along with Cocker's cameo is one from Nick Cave, who appears on syrupy-sweet love song 'The Sweetest Embrace' with spiteful lyrics. "My desire for you is endless and I'll love you 'til we fall," Cave purrs to his lover, and then bluntly adds: "I just don't want you no more." It gets darkest on 'Business As Usual', where a series of deranged phone threats from an obsessed lover are set to drums and a few brittle, wiry strings. That Adamson can follow up something so evil with a sprightly little jazz number is impressive. Something tells me he's had a very interesting love life.

Panthers

Let's Get Serious
Dim Mak, 2003

I like songs about breaking up. It's not because my love life is turbulent, though I have had an "atom bomb" moment in the past – you know, when two people are attracted to each other like oncoming trains. I like break-up songs in the same way as songs about God, even though I'm not religious, and political hip-hop, even though I'm not black or particularly hard done by. I like all of these kinds of songs because they have passion.

Brooklyn band Panthers formed out of another group, Orchid and yada, yada, yada. In fact, I don't know much about them at all. Look them up on Wikipedia if you're interested. I only want to talk about one of their songs, 'Thank Me With Your Hands' – though the others aren't bad either. There are two types of break-up songs. Sad, softly-strummed odes to lovers lost and gigantic fireballs of emotion. This is quite emphatically the latter.

'Thank Me' is an average pop song played with amazing ferocity. It's loud, fast and dark. When the chorus kicks in, it's impressive if only as proof the band can play louder than during the first verse. Jayson Green's emotions flail about back and forth between anger and denial. "Let's not talk about it/ We never did, so why start now?/ Let's just go back to your place/ And not talk about it there," he sings in an utterly defeated voice. It's like watching someone dying of thirst struggle with a bottle of water they know is poisoned.

But that's got nothing on the last 90 seconds. The drumbeat gets heavier – you can actually hear the kit being hit harder – and both of the guitarists lose it. One of them sounds as if he's ripping strips of flesh off the thing while it screams. "STOP FUCKING!," Green howls. "Stop fucking with me and I'll stop fucking with you too!" All five musicians explode in a maelstrom of noise and it sounds like a fucking atom bomb. It's brilliant.

Public Enemy

Apocalypse 91
Def Jam / Columbia, 1991

The video was unequivocal. Rapper Chuck D sang in a room of men in red berets loading semi-automatic rifles and using human cut-outs for target practice. Black-and-white images of riots, giant attack dogs mauling black protestors and police removing likenesses of Martin Luther King, Jr and Rosa Parks from a public bus were contrasted with those shown in colour, of the red berets storming a government building, poisoning a senator and strapping a bomb to the Governor of Arizona's motorcade. It ended with a reenactment of King's assassination and a shot of Chuck D setting off a detonator.

In 1983, assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr became just the third person to be honoured with a US federal holiday – after George Washington and Christopher Columbus. Four years later, incoming Arizona Governor Evan Mecham overturned approval of the holiday in the state as his first act in office. 'By The Time I Get To Arizona' was Public Enemy's reply. It was a sonic juggernaut in three parts. The first had a pummelling beat like waves rising and crashing in a storm, overlaid with a gospel choir. The second used cut-ups of crowds screaming and a noise like an air-raid siren.

Public Enemy were already famous when they released Apocalypse 91 and the controversial single 'By The Time...'. Their earlier albums It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back and Fear Of A Black Planet had turned the group into unofficial media spokesmen for civil rights activism in the US. But Apocalypse 91 would be their last as a coherent group: one or two years later, the band went on hiatus due in part to Flavor Flav's drug use (the one who wore a clock) and they never hit the same highs again.

'By The Time...' was the band's swansong, at least for their "classic" period. A richer, heavier and more lyrically-pointed extension of their earlier work, it stands today as the best five minutes of political hip-hop on record. Arizona voted to celebrate MLK Day in 1992, after the song created a furore and the National Football League threatened to move the Super Bowl. Public Enemy continued to boycott the state until late last year.

New Order

Movement
Factory, 1981

New Order spent the first few years after Ian Curtis's death trying to find their own feet. Between the end of Joy Division and 'Blue Monday', the ridiculously-popular club hit they would be remembered for, the band released a string of singles that captured them in transition: 'Ceremony', a minimalist recording of a track they had played live with Curtis; the twitchy 'Everything's Gone Green' which foreshadowed their move to dance music; and perhaps the best, 'Temptation', an upbeat pop song with cooed backing vocals. With each single, Bernard Sumner's vocals got a little bit more confident, a little bit more him.

Movement, however, seemed almost like a throw-back. Released between the three singles, the album sounded like a synthesis of Joy Division and something else – a style not quite solid enough yet to be tangible. It's the most subdued record in either Joy Division or New Order's discography, with both Sumner and Peter Hook trying to recreate Ian Curtis's gloomy vocals without daring to emulate his passion or paranoia.

It was released a year and a half after Curtis's death in November 1981, overshadowed by the compilation of Joy Division's unfinished work and rarities Still put out just a few weeks earlier. There are few discernable choruses or regular song structures and the vocals are so muted that it sometimes sounds like an instrumental new wave record. But what it lacks in emphasis – or perhaps even originality, considering Curtis's posthumous influence – it makes up for in consistency. Unlike New Order's later patchy albums, everything on Movement seems to fit together. Its best moment is 'The Him', an ethereal track with a cascading drumbeat that eventually breaks into a howling mess.

Two decades after the fact, it feels apt that Movement was so utterly different to the band's singles of the time – and certainly to all those that followed. It's warmer and more human than anything Joy Division released and more detached than anything New Order went on to achieve. If Sumner and co. were the last great singles band, this is their most cohesive album – the introverted flipside of their commercial pop career.

Antony And The Johnsons

I Am A Bird Now
Secretly Canadian, 2005

The first time I heard artists like Bob Dylan and Nick Cave sing, I was too young to recognise anything peculiar about their voices. It's a wonderful thing to hear music like that for the first time – a feeling all pop fans wish they could revisit. Sadly, with the bastard by-products of experience, strange singers start to annoy as easily as amaze.

There's this moment on the opening track of I Am A Bird Now when the piano tumbles onto itself and teeters dangerously close to an enthusiastic rendition of 'Chopsticks'. It's a little childish and also quite thrilling, as if each note threatened to blow the whole act apart and expose it as some sort of second-grade joke. And the act does feel precarious. Antony's voice blends and eclipses all the usual clues of genre, race and gender, his music emulates early 20th-century blues, his dress takes inspiration from 1980s pop stars and his records come with the sanction of the New York art scene.

When the mainstream media took Antony to heart two years ago, it didn't feel quite right. It wasn't just Antony's injured vibrato that made him a star, nor that “Lou Reed thinks he’s cool” (as the Sydney Morning Herald felt it necessary to remind us). It was his penchant for drag and his blurred gender – could he be, possibly?, maybe! a transgender male – that proved alluring for journalists. It seemed as if writers had found Bowie all over again and were recycling their gender-bending stories like so many glass bottles and glam rockers.

At the time, I was so sick of the hype I almost threw I Am A Bird Now in the bin. It’s only recently I've listened to it again. I still don't think it’s as brilliant as most people claimed – the singer's exaggerated naivety pisses me off on at least every second track – but there are a few moments that are truly special. The best is 'Fistfull Of Love', a big-sounding track filled with horns and a momentum that makes you want to sing along in some warbled, half-made-up language. Antony lets his mutant voice run wild, and it gives you that feeling of hearing something totally new for the first time.