The Slits

Cut
Island, 1979

"Electrifying" is one of those dreadfully overused words hauled out at every opportunity to sell bands and their records (usually by writers on consignment and full-time publicists, who are responsible for wearing out most good words, rather irresponsibly if you ask me) and so it doesn't really mean what it should anymore, which is that facial twitch of a smile that pulls your cheeks back across your face without warning and comes with a flutter of nerves over the top of your brain like a tiny rain of pins and needles - that feeling you get when you hear a band that are just something else, and that I got last when I first heard post-punk band The Slits take apart the classic Motown track 'Heard It Through The Grapevine' and put it back together again as a demented disco-reggae floorkiller.

Like a lot of people my age, I was introduced to Marvin Gaye's version of 'Heard It Through The Grapevine' on the various copies of The Big Chill soundtrack that my parents wore out while I was growing up. It was a proper song, elegant and full-bodied, with so much heart, a premise so universal and a melody so infallible that it rose above petty concepts like taste to become one of those tracks I simply couldn't imagine being fucked with, which is of course exactly what The Slits did in 1979 by turning it into a dancefloor hit by humming the rhythm into a microphone and looping it, replacing the chorus with a hissed "I heard it through the ba-ss!line" in one spot and skipping a beat in another and, you know, just generally trampling all over the damn thing like it was a throwaway collection of hooks and words to be reorganised at whim by whoever had a passing interest in doing so. It was released as the B-side to their first single 'Typical Girls', which I don't imagine is particularly easy to track down anymore, but you can also find it tacked onto the latest reissue of their debut album Cut, along with the rest of their thrilling crimes against proper music that, sadly, I've run out of space to talk about. Check out the sample on 'Newtown' that sounds like a match being struck in slow motion.