These days, most people only pay attention to the British Top 40 when it's been hijacked by dullards trying to prove a point-- last week it was the battlefield for a protest at the late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's increasingly rose-tinted legacy. Yet it still contains a certain romantic allure among those who never stood a chance of getting in it. Art Brut's new greatest hits collection Top of the Pops (a two-disc set featuring a CD of B-sides and demos) is named after the defunct BBC TV rundown of the nation's favourite songs, an obsession of their ever-enthusiastic frontman Eddie Argos on which they never appeared. In typically shambolic fashion, they've only gone and forgotten to include their actual song "Top of the Pops", an early and live favourite that was always prefaced by a gleeful string of fibs about where the south London band were number one.
Presciently named after the French for "outsider art," Art Brut always shot just wide of the mark; had they been around 10 years earlier, they'd undoubtedly have been a fixture of the ITV network's "Chart Show Indie Chart"-- an earnest rival to "TOTP" that broadcast videos by bands like the Wedding Present (who released two singles volumes called Hit Parade) on Saturday mornings-- if not genuine Britpop bona fides. In a Pitchfork interview from 2009, Argos recalled seeing a copy of NME that asked, "Who's the new Jarvis Cocker?" "I thought, 'Fucking hell, some prick I bet.' And I opened it up and it was me. I was like, 'Oh fuck! Well, that's nice."
Just as British indie music was getting smart again after a fallow few years either side of the millennium, Art Brut's demeanor embraced indie's coziest, most cardigan-wearing past; Argos standing against all prevailing trends, trying to recreate the world of his youth. But their 2005 debut Bang Bang Rock & Roll was a near perfect, shabbily anthemic post-punk record that set out Argos' abundantly hilarious lyrical stock in trade: singing about how his relationships with music and ladies were as close as the "n" in "snog" and "song".
In among the declarations of romantic haplessness ("I've seen her naked twice!") was a rampant self-mythologizing streak so overstated it was as if Art Brut knew they could only ever fail, despite being stated with such bounding naivety and joyous conviction that they believed it would all come true. If only; Argos' benign, brilliant, Half Man Half Biscuit-indebted sense of humor evident on the Bang Bang Rock & Roll singles included here is something painfully lacking among young British indie bands today.
Art Brut were arguably obsessed with restoring a culture over individual success, which is lucky since their highest charting single went in like a bullet at number 41. Although one memorable scene in "Gilmore Girls" sees resident indie nut Lane Kim swear that "Formed a Band" should be the national anthem, Art Brut abjectly failed at bringing back the time Argos craved, or slowing the path of an increasingly compromised alternative music culture to the mainstream. But having committed themselves to failure after establishing such lofty goals in the first place, you'd think it wouldn't matter to them.
Unfortunately, at least in the narrative that Top of the Pops spins, everything that followed Bang Bang Rock & Roll did so with increasingly unbecoming shades of bitterness. They'd have been better off reissuing Bang Bang for a second time than opting to tell this glum take on events. The songs included here from 2007's EMI-released It's a Bit Complicated (where Jasper Future replaced Chris Chinchilla on guitar) wonder "what else can we do when the kids don't like it?" Argos experiments with and ultimately muddles his personal narratives, and when he wearily yells "punk rock ist nicht tot!" it sounds like the delusional cry of a man bent over punk's dying corpse; not the words of the bloke who once joyously belted, "MODERN ART! MAKES ME! WANT TO ROCK OUT!"
The malaise increases with 2009's Art Brut vs. Satan (a return to Cooking Vinyl/Downtown), produced by Frank Black, where Argos sings of his arrested development, unruly drinking problems, and shit summer jobs. He also now hates all the idiots that just can't appreciate good music: "If we can't change the world/ Let's at least get the charts right/ How can you sleep at night/ When nobody likes the music we write?/ Record-buying public, we hate them/ This is Art Brut vs. Satan," goes "Demons Out!", where the band start to sound like the tiresomely dogmatic Cribs. The Wakefield band's 2005 single "Hey Scenesters!" was a disdainful comment on the emergence of indie culture that Art Brut ran around celebrating like lunatics on "Formed a Band". Here, the distance between them shrinks depressingly.
The returns don't stop diminishing: Also produced by Frank Black, 2011's Brilliant! Tragic!'s "Axl Rose" sees Argos reduced to a cantankerous cipher: "The world is fucked, and you're an idiot/ Why don't you take a long look at my middle digit!" He makes hapless attempts at singing in a sinister whisper that suggests a stalker ogling his unwitting intented; the band are as convincingly vigorous as someone trying to pogo on a belly full of Sunday roast.
Two new numbers close CD1: "Arizona Bay" is named for a Bill Hicks album where he fantasized about L.A. falling "in the fucking ocean", thus destroying the fantasy explored in Bang Bang Rock & Roll's "Moving to L.A." Here, Argos is in the middle of an earthquake situation that reads like a less-than-subtle take on the band's dwindling career. Closer "We Make Pop Music" is the only song on Top of the Pops' main disc that hits a musically regretful note, playing out with an almost-epic middle-eight over which Argos desperately yells, "We make pop music! We make pop music!" (Though in a recent blogpost, Argos wrote, "I only like guitar music and everybody who disagrees with me is a cunt.")
With the release of Top of the Pops, Argos keeps insisting that Art Brut were a "classic rock" band all along, offering the fact that they've been on the cover of German Rolling Stone and posed naked in the NME as proof. In a sense (though not the one intended), he's right: Bang Bang Rock & Roll was an accidentally classic album that gave Art Brut an immediate legacy that they seemed to know they'd never top-- a fate that befalls classic rock bands obsessed with besting their best and blaming the rest rather than engaging with the culture around them.
