The Apostles - Best Forgotten

Vital and uncompromising first-ever collection of material by north-east London composite, The Apostles, an anarcho/squat-punk adjacent outfit arranged around the activity of Andy Martin and featuring London Sound Survey's Ian Rawes. Trawl Discogs and you'll find a lengthy catalogue of more-or-less obscure tapes and LPs spanning almost a whole decade, though Best Forgotten focuses on their initial incarnation from 81-83, a period that speaks most instructively of both ideology and identity. The bones of DIY and lo-fi are clear as day here, but that's about the only thing that is - don't come here looking for fidelity, it even says so much on the back cover. No mind, because what we're here for is spontaneity and self-determination, as political as much as creative expression - the poetics of politics/the politics of poetics etc etc. Comparisons to Crass are inevitable, broadly sharing a time, place and cultural position, though musically you might wanna take a slightly sharper left turn into the avant garde. There's what sounds like a live rendition of an Alternative TV cover that closes the final side, and you could take that as a more accurate reflection of Martin's concerns (not to mention its reflections on queer identity), and as it goes could be straight off that Tall Dwarfs boxset, while elsewhere there's evidence of a share worldview with And the Native Hipsters, Sara Goes Pop, File Under Pop et al. In short, a great document of an alternative London that works as both self-contained time capsule and as a gesture towards the radical ideas and approaches that followed, in the UK and beyond.