Alex Chilton

★★★★

Like Flies On Sherbert SUNDAZED. LP

Inaugural solo LP recorded over three nights in Memphis. Heavy drinking involved. On this 1979 solo debut, Alex Chilton tore up the rulebook he’d written with The Box Tops and Big Star and made an album that was messy and pitted with imperfections. It was the album’s producer Jim Dickinson who convinced Chilton to leave the mistakes in, so we hear mikes being dropped and tape hiss and false starts and chugging guitar, played by Dickinson, that’s so rudimentary it’s endearing, and Chilton fluffing lines but sounding like he doesn’t give a monkeys. “A positive statement about a period in my life that wasn’t positive,” he described it. The album chimed perfectly with punk’s DIY ethos and presaged indie pop’s shambling, and turned songs as disparate as KC And The Sunshine Band’s Boogie Shoes and Jimmy Newman’s Alligator Man into lo-fi outsider anthems.