UV PØP – No Songs Tomorrow

John Kevin White was one of the more obscure cult figures to emerge from the 80s post-punk / early electronic scene in 1980s Sheffield. His sometime-band, sometime-solo project UV PØP (Ultra Violent Pop) first released their debut album No Songs Tomorrow in 1983 on Flowmotion Records, and quickly became a collector’s item among rare vinyl fiends and fans of pioneering electronic pop experiments. Given a deluxe repackaging and vinyl release in 2012 by the Brooklyn-based Sacred Bones Records and Mannequin Records, the new edition offers a new generation of fans a chance to discover the rich seam of digital / acoustic miserablism that White began by creating with this album.

Openers No Songs Tomorrow and Portrait contain prescient shades of the kind of reflective, narrative songwriting later practised by fellow Sheffielder Jarvis Cocker. The sublime, swaying melancholy of See You is haunting and sparse, backed with a simple drum machine beat and layered squalls of proto-shoegaze guitar. Psalm is a ghostly, skeletal piece of coldwave electronics-versus-spoken word, as White disavows organised religion. Things get weirder as the album unfolds, with the remorseless electro-punk of Sleep Don’t Talk, the sample-heavy, Talking Heads-influenced Commitment, the manic post-rock electronic freakout of Halfunkiddies, and the jazz-inflected freeform closer Four Minute Warning. It’s a thrillingly diverse, heavily experimental album which foreshadows a whole raft of classic British pop music, from late 80s incarnations of The Fall to Echo & The Bunnymen; from goth bands like Sisters of Mercy and Nitzer Ebb to electroclashers like Fischerspooner, and a convincing swath of 90s Britpop heroes too.