Recorded October–November 1978 Release date 2 March 1979 | Studio Pathway Sound Studios Label Deptford Fun City Records | |
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Released 2 March 1979 (1979-03-02) People also search for | ||
Vibing Up the Senile Man (Part One) is the second studio album by English rock band Alternative TV, released in March 1979 by record label Deptford Fun City. On this album, the band followed an even more experimental and avant-garde approach than on The Image Has Cracked (1978).
Contents
Recording
The album's tracks were all reportedly recorded in a single take.
Musical style
Regarding its musical style, Alternative TV frontman Mark Perry recalled: "There are free jazz influences; I'd got into the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Sun Ra [...] I'd moved into this house with an amazing music room – pianos, clarinets, you name it – and we'd always be picking up stuff from junk shops."
Reception
According to Simon Reynolds in Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, the album received a "uniformly hostile" response from reviewers upon its release. Trouser Press described the record as being "up the pseudo-avant creek without a paddle".
in his retrospective review of the album, Dean McFarlane of AllMusic noted: "On the second album of Alternative TV, Mark Perry and friends did to punk exactly what the movement had intended for the establishment. About-facing punk and turning it on its ear would be a difficult task in 1980, and while Alternative TV's peers headed down new wave paths or into commercialism [...] who would have expected a follow-up as avant-garde abstraction that challenges P.I.L's Second Edition for absolute left-field swing? With Genesis P-Orridge in the ranks, Vibing Up the Senile Man became closer to free improvisation and avant-garde jazz without a punk anthem in sight, and a dub edge to some of the tracks of the double LP suggest that Alternative TV had similar modernist aspirations to John Lydon's post-Sex Pistols project. Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa spring to mind as much as Pere Ubu and the Red Krayola, who were similarly exploring the avant-garde liberties of post-punk and disappointing the punks and record industry alike. What Vibing Up the Senile Man represents two decades later is a door opening on multi-faceted post-rock music – which draws on avant-garde, noise and jazz and arguably makes more sense in the context of year 2000 as a musical treasure much more than in 1980, when it seemed simply a spit in the eye to the industry that codified punk."
Legacy
Paul Hegarty, in Noise Music: A History, described the album as "forming the bridge into industrial music".
The record was placed at number 19 on Mojo's list of readers' choice of 50 "Weirdest Albums".
Personnel
Songs
1Release the Native
2Serpentine Gallery
3Poor Association