SLAPP HAPPY / HENRY COW: DESPERATE STRAIGHTS

The merger of ultra-serious Marxist collective Henry Cow and playfully subversive arty popsters Slapp Happy was one of the more unlikely artistic marriages of the 1970s. Predictably, the union soon foundered, but it did produce this wonderful album.

From the opening number, Some Questions About Hats, we seem to be in a Weimar era nightclub with Dagmar Krause, very much the star of this show, commanding the stage like Lotte Lenya's hip younger sister. The songs are concise and tuneful - at once irresistibly infectious and impeccably left-field. This is an emphatically European take on rock music with its roots in the songs of Brecht and Weill rather than Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley. Desperate Straights offers a clue as to what rock music might have sounded like had the USA not been a twentieth century imperial power.

Though most of the songs are written by Anthony Moore and Peter Blegvad from the Happy contingent they are given their distinctive artistic shape and personality by the brass and woodwind arrangements provided by Cow and assembled company. Krause sings these absurdist songs about hats and hermaphrodites with the fanatical conviction of a Kamikaze pilot. This stuff, to borrow a phrase Peter Hammill has often used to describe Van Der Graaf Generator, is 'serious fun'.

The divorce came following the next release - In Praise of Learning. Unhappy with the heavy political emphasis of the record, Moore and Blegvad split, with Krause opting to remain with Cow. But the singular avant-pop of Desperate Straights, as catchy as it is challenging, could only have been made by these two very different bands combining as one.