Melody Maker - Unknown Pleasures - 20 Great Lost Albums Rediscovered - # 12 See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang Yeah, City All Over! Go Ape Crazy!

This album sticks out in this particular series. It's the only one that sounds anything at all like this and the only one written by a woman, in this case Sharon O'Connell, a fairly damning indictment of the way things were in music journalism at that point in time. It came at the wrong time for me personally because I'm feeling pretty ropy personally health-wise and the last thing I want to do at the moment is listen through to a Bow Wow Wow album as it's pretty full tilt from start to finish. But I'll try to give it a fair crack of the whip. While I'm clear that regardless of whether I'm feeling a bit under the weather or as right as rain, ( forgive the use of cliche, I said I'm not at my best), I'm sure it will never sound like the best record ever made because it's not, I agree with O'Connell's assessment that Bow Wow Wow have never been given their full due and certainly not ceded the remotest bit of actual respect at the time or since. She argues that they deserve some.

So why has this never happened ? First and foremost because they're a Pop band. Take case one for the prosecution. Early in the Eighties, I remember watching two early evening BBC 2 programmes focused on live concerts from Sefton Park in Liverpool the first of local heroes Echo & the Bunnymen, the second of Bow Wow Wow. While I remember enjoying both it would have been clear that had I been asked which band I would have preferred to be in the Bunnymen would have won hands down. Because the Bunnymen were cool and Bow Wow Wow, whatever else they were, were certainly not that.

And just as they were not the Bunnymen, O'Connell accurately points out  that they were also not The Sex Pistols, the band who had occupied their original manager Malcolm McLaren's time before he directed his intention onto them. She goes on to suggest, accurately again, that a reason for this failure to gain mass critical approval might have been, as Jon Savage claimed: 'the Pistols said 'No so forcefully that the world had been forced to listen,' then Bow Wow Wow were certainly saying 'Yes!'  with hands greedily outstretched, demonstrating a kind of docility and an almost indecent positivism that were unthinkable just four years before.'

Bow Wow Wow didn't last long. Another album, and a very poor one at that and they were gone. They had a couple of respectably successful hit singles and made some dent in the American market, due largely to non-stop touring which wore them done and eventually broke them up. They've never really been accorded a critical reappraisal. But O'Connell applauds their exuberance. And so do I.