Never Mind the Day-Glo Here's Rubella Ballet

Personnel: Zillah Minx (vocals); Sean Mowle, Pete Fender, Leda Baker, Steve Cashman, Tony Barber (guitar); Gem Stone, Rachel Minx (bass guitar); Sidation (drums).
Audio Remasterer: Sid Truelove.
A glorious collection that rounds up the very best of Rubella Ballet's mid-'80s output: a reminder to us all just how badly we needed the band at that time. England in general and punk in particular had turned a humorless gray by then, but you'd not have known that from catching sight of the Ballet, dressed up like the Sweet after a night out with Jackson Pollock, and sounding as savagely colorful as that description demands. Two full LPs, 1985's If and 1990's At the End of the Rainbow are included here, together with the singles "Arctic Flowers" and "42f," and the full 20-song feast is simply a riot of fun, hitting more highlights than most bands manage in their entire career, and dismissing, too, the popularly held belief that anarchopunk needed to be bad tempered to make its mark. This is the second anthology to emerge from the Rubella archive; Overground also covered the early years with Anarchy in the U.V. Taken together, they make the entire '80s seem a far happier place. ~ Dave Thompson