Moore, Anthony: Flying Doesn't Help LP

40-plus years since its original release, the pop-punk-new wave inventions of Anthony Moore's Flying Doesn't Help are freshly remastered, blasting the sparkling, angular sounds into today with perfect vitality. After spending the early years of the '70s making experimental music first as a solo artist, then with Slapp Happy and Henry Cow, 1976's Out sessions had reinvigorated Anthony's youthful love of the naive pop melodies of pop radio, the undeniable excitement of songs. While Out ultimately went unreleased at the time, the iconoclasm clouding the late '70s air was addictive and transformative for Anthony. England seemed to be roiled as violently as it had been in counter-cultural days a decade earlier; the UK pop charts breathlessly reflected the changing spectrum with equal parts aging hippie and prog delicacies alongside new ascendant sounds: rough-hewn pub and punk rock, plus dub reggae and disco and ska and Stiff and Krautrock. This proved to be an ideal environment for Anthony to make records by exploring, as he puts it, the "deep connection between minimalism, repetition, working with tape and celluloid and forming the modules of a three minute pop song."