THE MISSION: “Salad Daze” (Strange Fruit)

MISSION. A band striving to be moral garbage on legs, but achieving all the charisma of a cheese roll. Mission. Fronted by a face like it’s been trodden on, sartorially resembling something summoned up at midnight in an Oxfam Shop explosion. And yes, these Dukes of Dork – Wayne Hussey, Simon Hinkler, Craig Adams and Mick Brown – take out a Hip-ectomy on the music too. It’s all here. From their first ever recordings.

Bare months before inking on the line with their debut label they did a Janice Long Show (recorded January 1986 and broadcast that February) with bloodless blueprint versions of Neil Young’s ‘Like A Hurricane’ which would double – ‘A’ for their first Indie No.1, and their own “Severina” destined for the first album. Barry Andrews was producing. But even in a studio that would make the Starship Enterprise look like a Ford Fiesta these Masters of the Comedy Universe would still come up with a sound as subtle as something dripping from Lemmy’s nostrils.

The second set of four tracks here come from their second session, also done for Ms Long and dated the following September, with two degutted covers this time. They do the Beatles’ excursion into the Tibetan Book Of The Dead, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, with Hussey’s expression-bypassed vocals barely compensated for by Hinkler’s fluidly rippling guitar; and they do Free’s paean to Paul Kossoff’s heroin habit, ‘Wishing Well’, robbed of its drama and reduced to turgid leaden tedium. By then they’d switched to Phonogram, lurched into the inky sleaze zone they’d always mistaken for stardom and become buffoons of excess in Rockism’s Fantasy League. All pose and no substance.

There are 14 ragged ‘Big Rock Myth’ tracks on Salad Daze from four separate Radio 1 sessions (Liz Kershaw providing ‘Deliverance’, a passable piano-led ‘Kingdom Come’, ‘Belief’ and ‘Grip Of Disease’, and a February 1990 Saturday Sequence donating an unplugged ‘Butterfly On A Wheel’ and ‘Bird Of Passage’) with the sound becoming progressively more mannered and epic, but not a jot more involving or inventive.

I knew Hinkler briefly when he was part of Artery, a strange Sheffield-based India band managed by Mission’s Tony Perrin. Artery specialised in oddly-constructed lyrically dense weirdness that’s still more intriguing and challenging to me than anything in the Mission catalogue.

“Say Goodbye to the Salad Daze” indeed.

• Andrew Darlington