The British D.I.Y. scene that arose in the wake of punk had a weird relationship with mainstream pop, one that continues to this day: This compilation was originally supposed to be called Now That's What I Call DIY!, until Sony inspired its new name. The records compiled here by JD Twitch of the Scottish DJ duo Optimo weren't exactly a genre at the time, but they had an ideology in common. Punk rock's Pistols/Jam/Clash wave had made a lot of noise about overturning musical orthodoxy, but it was pretty much a single kind of noise. The D.I.Y. bands made it their business to overturn every received idea about songs and recordings: rehearsed harmoniousness, formal structures, polish of any kind. But they did like to dance, or at least bounce, and some of them liked tunes, too. None of the artists on [Cease & Desist] DIY! were ever, ever going to make it onto the charts--or so they figured at the time--but they wanted it to be known that they weren't rejecting pop values out of ignorance.
If you were looking for these sorts of records fifteen or twenty years ago, when anybody other than collectors still had them, you'd paw through 7-inch bins from which the Buzzcocks and Young Marble Giants singles had already been nabbed. The sound came almost exclusively from England in the years of this compilation's subtitle. Its record sleeves were predominantly monochrome, or black and white and pink, although silkscreened artwork (as with the sole release by Sara Goes Pop, from which "Sexy Terrorist" is taken here) was also acceptable. Uneven Letraset type, or handwritten band names and song titles, are a good sign; so are record labels with names like Fuck Off Records and It's War Boys, and what-were-they-thinking band names. The Spunky Onions' "How I Lost My Virginity", for instance, comes from their "split single" with the Ghettoberries, who were of course the same group.
Twitch's sequence bends the usual rules for scene compilations. It's not all obscure artists—Thomas Leer, whose electropop single "Private Plane" appears here, went on to be half of the super-slick new wave band Act. Instead of surveying as many bands as possible, it includes two different tracks by the cunningly named Distributors: "TV Me," a sort of answer song to the Normal's "T.V.O.D.", and a curdled dub piece called "Never Never". It even ventures a bit outside of its own time range: a 1984 album track by the 012 is gerrymandered in on the grounds that it was recorded in 1981.
All of those turn out to be fine decisions on Twitch's part, because [Cease & Desist] manages to pull together recordings by a bunch of desperately alienated artists into a remarkable, eye-opening and ingeniously sequenced album. It's arranged into four four-song suites (there's no CD version of the album, but there is a double LP), each with a distinct focus. The first side is four stone classics featuring piping-voiced women singers; three of its four bands are by splinter projects of the Homosexuals (whose 1978 "Hearts In Exile" single is a fountain from which a lot of this music springs).
In particular, "C'est Fab", a 1982 single credited to Nancy Sesay and the Melodaires—a Homosexuals-related group never heard from before or since—justifies this compilation's existence all by itself. It's a struggle for supremacy between a rhythm section that's trying to play crisp, bouncy funk and musicians who are doing their utmost to derail it (a singer squeaking uncertainly and out of tune at the very top of her range, an out-of-control trumpeter streaking through the studio, a male chorus with comedy accents, somebody dropping in cascades of fist-hammered dub piano). Everybody ends up winning.
That's followed by a set of tracks that use the materials of synth-pop to build weirder and more obsessive structures than the stuff that was starting to turn up on the charts. (The highlight there is Dorothy's "Softness", an uncanny, close-miked spoken piece whose backing band includes both Genesis P-Orridge and Alex Fergusson, shortly before they formed Psychic TV.) The album's third side begins with three pieces inspired by the messiest extremes of Jamaican dub--a huge influence on that generation of British musicians--and ends with a song that recalls dub more or less by accident: the slow, sneering 1978 single "Violence Grows", by a wobbly band of teenagers called "Fatal" Microbes, fronted by a monomaniacal-sounding then-14-year-old who went by the name Honey Bane. (By the end of 1981, she would have a legitimate UK Top 40 single of her own, "Turn Me On Turn Me Off".)
The final suite of [Cease & Desist] highlights the D.I.Y. scene's connections to the punk rock sound and ethos that made it possible. In another compilation's context, actually, the Fakes' "Look Out" and the Prats' "Disco Pope" would just seem like ineptly performed punk songs, which arguably they were. But the genius of D.I.Y. was that it made any bug a feature: these records' aesthetic framed every off-key vocal or mangled rhythm as a rebellion against the boredom of sonic orthodoxy, and they are never for an instant boring.
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