Josef Ok e-book overview

‘By way of The Crack In The Wall : The Secret Historical past Of Josef Ok’

Johnnie Johnstone

(Jawbone books)

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Maybe THE best misplaced post-punk band, Josef Ok, have been so consumed by the longer term that they stop earlier than the previous caught up with them. This e-book by Johnnie Johnstone with a sometimes sensible intro from band fan Stewart Lee, captures that rush of concepts, depth and imaginative and prescient and the band’s thrilling quick ahead strategy that left behind one album that has develop into a byword and template of indie guitar risk. 

Josef Ok have been maybe the best band you could have could not have heard of. Their profession was as temporary and brief as their excellent hair. They have been outlined by what they weren’t, and so they defied Trad Rock to pave the way in which for a courageous new world that also sounds pressing to this present day. Their recorded output was one album of excellent guitar future pop that sounded prefer it was in a rush. They have been intense, good, stuffed with twitching linear vitality and a smooth trendy dynamic and have been one of many solutions to the numerous questions thrown up by post-punk. Their chiselled cool matched their sharp and angular music that was far too excellent to ever cross over from the fiercely impartial underground as a result of, as everybody kinda is aware of, pop perfection isn’t prime of the pops.

Popping out of Edinburgh in 1980 this was a band who knew what they weren’t and constructed a courageous new world out of what was left. The excessive velocity, excessive treble, held up excessive guitars have been the hallmark of their sound, and Paul Haig’s croon one way or the other turned all of it right into a post-punk pop. They have been wordy introverts lurking within the nook of the post-punk psyche with Kafka books stitched to their pockets and crammed their songs with a pointy IQ – and so they have been magnificent.

In that manifesto pop of the time they got here, they noticed, and so they conquered, after which they have been gone, leaving an instruction handbook on how one can make pristine, impatient, literate guitar pop/noise. Johnny Marr was listening; he was most likely at their July thirty first 1981 gig at Devilles in Manchester with me and about 50 others enthralled by the band’s completely cool and no encores, no extra sharp and angular set of songs. Franz Ferdinand up to date their aesthetic and turned it into hits. Huge Flame clearly poured over the only Josef Ok album and the Wedding ceremony Current have given them greater than a frantic nod through the years. 

Johnnie Johnstone’s e-book is the primary biog on the band and celebrates them and people temporary years when these things actually mattered. It’s an exciting learn of teenage desires and younger males with nice cheekbones and sharp fits, quoting Bowie, Bolan, Kafka, Subway Sect and the Supremes and altering the world with frantic machine gun chords. It tells the story of the band’s cool aesthetic which was honed down by their hometown Edinburgh music adventures and the way they kinda outlined the put up punk aesthetic.

It speaks to the previous band members and their champions like Paul Morley and Ian Rankin and captures that earnest however thrilling trip to post-punk modernism that infused the band and their Glasgow based mostly label Postcard Information run by its enigmatic boss Alan Horne. One of the vital completely realised indie labels that additionally launched Orange Juice and the Fireplace Engines below the banner of ‘the sound of younger Scotland’.

It is a superbly written testomony to one of many best bands that actually did ship on their manifesto. There was no watering down for the charts. There was no disappointing second album, and there have been no flaccid previous revivals or encores. 

Josef Ok really did depart a gorgeous corpse.

Josef Ok nonetheless feels of the second and the limitless now. 

Josef Ok was the star of a trial that was by no means accomplished.

Learn this e-book now for a snapshot of when this all actually mattered…