The Smashing Pumpkins

Adore
EMI, 1998

In 1995 The Smashing Pumpkins released a bloated double album called Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness and became, at least for a year or two, the biggest rock band in the world. Older fans and critics chose sides over whether the album was brilliant or indulgent (it was without a doubt both) and more than a few hung up their Siamese Dream T-shirts because the group had allegedly "sold out". Mellon Collie sold in the millions, the videos for singles '1979', 'Tonight, Tonight' and 'Bullet With Butterfly Wings' were played to death and there were so many songs from the sessions still left over that they filled a five-disc, 33-song box set called The Aeroplane Flies High.

The band, led by Billy Corgan in his silver trousers and freshly shaved head, went on a world tour to capitalise on their success. What was meant to be a victory lap became the beginning of the end. Before a show at the Madison Square Garden in New York, touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin overdosed and died while shooting heroin with drummer Jimmy Chamberlain in a hotel room. Chamberlain was fired and the band resolved to go on with the show. Corgan later said it was the worst decision they'd ever made. Whether or not he was right, the band that came home from the tour was a very different creature indeed.

The first new song to be released after Mellon Collie, two years later in 1997, was a creepy electronic track called 'Eye' which appeared on the soundtrack to David Lynch's film Lost Highway alongside cuts from Marilyn Manson and Trent Reznor. It was followed by the first single from Mellon Collie's successor Adore, an album recorded with a rotating cast of guest drummers that did away entirely with the alternative rock format that had made the band famous. In the video clip to 'Ava Adore' Corgan sang in a full-length black outfit like a camp version of Nosferatu's Count Orlok, weaving in and out of scenes from asylums and porn movies. The rest of the album was a gorgeous but unusual mix of gothic orchestra-pop, haunting acoustic melodies and electronic sounds. It sold about one tenth of the copies its predecessor did and the band started to fall apart a few years later.

Ned's Atomic Dustbin

0.522
Sony, 1994

Ned's Atomic Dustbin were an indie rock band with two bassists who recorded their debut album God Fodder as teenagers in a town in central England. It was released on Sony's Furtive label and made an appearance in the charts thanks to the singles 'Kill Your Television' and 'Grey Cell Green' – the title of which was a faint reminder of the chorus from New Order's famous indie hit 'Temptation' a decade earlier ("Oh you've got green eyes/ Oh you've got blues eyes/ Oh you've got grey eyes"). It sounded like a mix between that song and the college rock records coming out of North America.

After God Fodder it was all downhill for the Neds. Their second album Are You Normal? was more of the same but without any memorable singles, and a bid to reinvent the band's sound a few years after that with the heavy techno and industrial beats of Brainbloodvolume failed to convert many new fans. Sony had hoped the band would prove as successful as their peers Pop Will Eat Itself, who hailed from the same town of Stourbridge, and so tried to squeeze a little more cash out of the first two albums by releasing the compilation 0.522.

Now compilations like this are usually utter garbage, and in a way 0.522 was no different. It contained pretty much nothing to excite fans beyond a reworking of the band's first single, 'Kill Your Remix', and a few outtakes and B-sides. It would have been entirely useless, were it not for the band deciding to embrace the commercial aesthetic and record two covers of trashy pop songs to spice things up a bit. And embrace it they did, kicking things off with a cover of The Bay City Rollers' kitschy 1976 hit 'Saturday Night'.

The second cover, and the highlight of the record, was Charlene's 1982 single 'I've Never Been To Me'. If you've never heard the original, imagine the least offensive thing you possibly can and then picture it through a soft-focus lens. The remake began with samples of a crowd cheering and a cry of "motherfucker!", before a thumping beat and rave club synths kicked in and got mixed up with distorted electric guitar and snippets of humorous film dialogue. It's the best dance hit of the 1990s that never was. If only they'd done that shit from the start, the Neds could have been bigger than the Happy Mondays.

X

At Home With You
Major, 1985

X are a band with a story, most likely exaggerated in parts and all the more amazing for being true in others, that old Australian rock fans enjoy recounting to each other and nobody else seems to have heard of. Those two facts are hardly coincidental, as the story is – with only minor variation – an explanation of X as the ultimate outsiders of local underground music history. Not punk, nor rock, nor for that matter anything else, more notorious than any other band at the time or since and probably the one most deserving of recognisable acclaim or inclusion in a hall of fame and the least likely to ever get it. "X stood alone," is the motto of this mythology and the one said to interviewers by members of the band almost as if they were speaking about something separate to themselves and outside of their control.

X came up with their name shortly before their first gig in Sydney in 1977, at a pub in Bondi they were never invited back to, by slashing a giant cross in red paint on a piece of newspaper and sticking it to the door of the hotel as a makeshift poster. At the time the band consisted of Steve Lucas, Ian Riley, Steve Cafiero and Ian Krahe, who the following year took heroin after a gig and died in his sleep. The other three continued to play and recorded the ferocious punk album X-Aspirations, gathering themselves a troublesome following of violent skinheads in the process. At one point, so the story goes, they were banned from 32 venues in Sydney and still managed to play regularly.

X split in 1980 and reformed a few years later, eventually settling in Melbourne where new drummer Cathy Green brought a looser style to their music and mediated the volatile relationship between Lucas and Rilen. She showed up to the first rehearsal to find both of them incoherently drunk. In 1985 the band recorded At Home With You, their second and more diverse album including the brilliant art-rock cut 'TV Glue' and slovenly punk track 'Degenerate Boy'. The trio continued to play music, and Rilen continued to drink people under the table, for the next two decades. In the preface to the 2005 reprint of Inner City Sound, Clinton Walker wrote: "As long as Ian Rilen's alive, after all, anything is possible!" He died of cancer in 2006.

The Good Life

Album Of The Year
Saddle Creek, 2004

This is one of the worst albums I own, a collection of forgettable minor-key songs about minor dramas with lazy lyrics like: "She said she'd never seen someone so lost/ I said I'd never felt so found." It's about a break-up – what else? – and combs over the minutiae of desperation and guilt in an American college town where boys and girls make love listening to Aimee Mann records before one of them cheats on the other with a bartender and pores over the betrayal like it was a puzzle; painted with a brush soaked in nostalgia and self-pity that leads the narrator to use far too many metaphors involving the change of seasons and dead leaves on trees. It is quite shockingly bad. I'm serious. I wouldn't recommend that anyone, ever, buy a copy of this album.

And yet when it comes on by accident, because the playlist runs over or by some unfortunate slip of the hand when I'm at home, drunk or alone, it ends up in the stereo, a sort of beautiful warm feeling washes over me and I feel quite, well, at home. It's because of his voice: that of Tim Kasher, the songwriter responsible for this crime against self-respect, who also happens to have written many brilliant songs with his other band Cursive. It's a pity that there is none of Kasher's usual wit about this record, for in the past he has always been the first to point out his inadequacies – often rather brutally – which makes his tendency towards indulgence much easier to swallow. "I'm not an artist/ I'm an asshole without a job," he reminded his fans on 'Entertainer', from the record just before this one.

But there are no humorous asides on this album, just an ugly slog of diary entry after diary entry about all the stupid things people do when they fall out of love. The music is no more eloquent than the words. I love especially that it is called Album Of The Year, surely a joke to begin with, but one which is given a particularly cruel punchline in light of just how awful it really is. I like it in the same way I like bad poetry and intimate letters from friends – because life is sometimes ugly, and songs are sometimes rubbish, but that doesn't mean you have to stop singing. Thank the stars for bad records, even if you turn them off half-way through.