Pretties for you

I HAVEN’T checked or anything, but I’m willing to bet that the Pretties have cropped up in this top 100 list more than any other band.

Partly this is because it would have been too easy, and perhaps a tad obvious, to just fill the list with every single by The Beatles and The Kinks, which I could so easily have done. Partly, it is also because those Pretty Things singles just epitomise everything that strikes me as magical, immediate and (dare I say) fetishistic about singles in their classic seven-inch vinyl format.

Before you even get to the music, there’s the geometric elegance of that blue and silver Fontana label, with its lovely modernist European logo and its serial numbers with the stark simplicity of early car registration plates: Honey I Need is TF 537, fact fans.

I quite understand if you are exhibiting no signs of arousal at this revelation, but bear with me. Once you drop the needle on to, er, TF 537, you are met with a raucous, driving, hissing and outrageously reverberant stomper which sounds as though it was recorded in a crypt sited at the end of a wind tunnel.

It is, categorically, plugged directly into the source: almost mystical in the degree to which it channels the earthy essence of proper field-hollering blues... then straps a supercharger on to it. The track only really consists of acoustic 12-string guitar, harmonica, vocals, drums and ‘invisible’ bass, yet it rocks to a berserk degree.

Here, the Pretties really sound like the lank-haired, sociopathic reprobates which the papers assured us they were; prowling hedonists with no moral compass to speak of, scowling Easter Island golems who have been thrown out of more countries than you’ve passed out into hot dinners.

Honey I Need rushes at you like a train, and is gone almost as quickly. If you look at the vinyl single, the run-out groove occupies most of its surface. However, barely two minutes of complete and utter transcendence is substantially better than nothing...