Artist: Alien Sex Fiend
Title: Bun Ho!
Format: 12" single
Label: Anagram
Catalogue Number: 12ANA45
Year of Release: 1988
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A - Bun Ho! (Cranium Mix)
B1 - Silver Machine
B2 - Satisfaction
B3 - Bun Ho! (Time Gentlemen Please)
I know samplers were pretty basic in 1988, but there's really no excuse for the pitifully elementary way in which sampler technology is deployed on this record. The A-side is just awful. A looped sample runs through its entire length, saying "Bun, Ho!, B-Bun-Bun, Ho!" where the Hos are on the 2nd and 4th beat in the bar. It's horrible. Add to this a casio beat, a boring synth bass-line, Nik Fiend's bad lyrics, and other samples seemingly chosen at random from whatever the band (I say band, but they were down to a couple for this new low point of musical history) were watching on telly that day. For example, a scouse child saying, "It's wicked", which I think was from an advert for milk or chocolate or both.
Not only are the lyrics facile, but also the last word of each line is sung about 5 octaves higher than the previous words, which is massively objectionable. When it was over, I vowed never to listen to it ever again. Which is a pity, because the remix that finishes the EP is almost exactly the same as the A-side. It differs only in being introduced by Nik saying "Time gentlemen, please", and has the kind of noise all over it that Tim Allen made to signify confusion in his role as Tim "The Toolman" Taylor in long-running (and syndicated in perpetuity) US sitcom Home Improvement.
Which leaves two tracks to dispense with. Silver Machine is, at best, quite a faithful cover version. Why anybody would want another version of Silver Machine sounding much like Hawkwind's version is a mystery. As is the reason I bought this godawful record in the first place. Why did I do it? It can't have been to be cool, or 'fit in'. It's possible that I wanted to be different, but all you had to do in a small British town in the mid-90s to be different was grow your hair. And if you're half an hour outside a small British town in a non-car-owning family, it's even easier to stand out.
Anyroad, Nik manages to ruin this cover version by holding his nose and making the kind of announcement that you would have heard on a plane in the good old days when you could smoke on them - would that be 1988? - something about fastening seatbelts and extinguishing all cigarettes, I'm not listening to it again to be able to quote verbatim. This ruins the song, because, as everybody knows, Silver Machine is about a motorbike, not an aeroplane. I could be kind and say this is perhaps aspirational, but when Nik sings "I've got a Silver Machine" and means a plane I think, "No you haven't, and making records like this ain't gonna get you one either". Idiot. Furthermore, in my (admittedly limited) experience, aeroplanes are white, not silver, with maybe a splash of colour on what I'm going to call the tailfin, which if I say it with enough authority, you might believe it's called that.
The cover of Satisfaction is only faithful to the original in the lyrics, and the way Nik is clearly doing his best Mick Jagger impression. Compared with the rest of the tracks, it's inoffensive. We'll leave it at that.
