Subway Sect

★★★★ Moments Like These GNU INC. DL/LP

A Subway-Clash of Vic Godard and Mick Jones? Back in late 2019, when MOJO went to a playback of this album, Vic Godard and producer Mick Jones said they’d actually finished it just 20 minutes earlier. Delayed by Covid, it still sounds freshly baked. The particular bond between band and producer (fellow ’76 punk campaigners, both acts were managed by volatile brain-reprogrammer Bernard Rhodes) make for sweet harmony, accommodating all of Vic’s oddities and punk-romantic angles in warm-sounding soul, Latin, funk and Radio 2-ready pop tunes. Time, fate and what success means inform the songs – the jaunty How High The Walls? finds Vic pondering dropping dead on-stage in his wavering, nasal croon – but for all the hard-won wisdom, cautionary tales and selfawareness, it’s heroically unjaded. Jones’s contributions, meanwhile, make it a candidate to join Ellen Foley’s Spirit Of St Louis or B.A.D’s No.10

Upping Street as a Clash-adjacent LP fans need to hear.