Tracklisting...

Dialling A Prayer (from Life In One Chord)
Burn It Up (from Blow)
Headwind (from Melt)
She Speeds (from Life In One Chord)
Down In Splendour (from Melt)
Let It Blow (from Blow)
If I Were You (from Blow)
Missing Presumed Drowned (from Melt)
Roller Ride (from Melt)
Sparkle That Shines (from Life In One Chord)
Bad Note For A Heart (from Melt)
Done (from Done)
APS (from Melt)
Cat Inna Can (from Blow)
Life In One Chord (from Hail)
Cast Stone (from Melt)

bonus disc:

APS - recorded Live at the Wireless (Triple J radio session)
Such A Daze - recorded Live at the Wireless (Triple J radio session)
Brittle - from Red Hot No Alternative album
sycamore - from the Cat Inna Can single
Skin To Wear (stripped back mix) - from the "Missing From Melt" promo CD

Liner notes by Andrew Mueller

It is one of rock'n'roll's most treasured myths. The band who make music  that sounds like it's being dictated from Olympus, but who can't make their rent from selling it. The band whose records are instantly proclaimed works of thundering genius by everyone who hears them, but who can't get those records onto the radio. The band whose members should, by the time they reach their 30s, be happily holed up in enormous mansions in the country, insane with syphilis and absinthe, and trying to decide whether to have the dolphinarium installed in the east or west wing while the world waits more anxiously for their new work than it does a formula for world peace or cure for all known disease. . . but who are, instead, quietly packing it all in, cobbling together some sort of career-spanning compilation of their songs and sighing patiently as another writer, or well-meaning fan, or combination of the two, wonders where it all went wrong. Straitjacket Fits were a rock'n'roll band from Dunedin, New Zealand, who deserved better.

The first thing I ever heard by Straitjacket Fits was the first track on the first record they released - the "Life In One Chord" EP - and it's the first cut on this compilation. More than a decade on, that song, "Dialling A Prayer", still sounds fresh, alive, inventive, a breathtakingly confident declaration of intent from a group who sound righteously convinced of their own greatness. It may have been Shayne Carter's intention, or it may be that I'm trying too hard, but it's a song as deceptively clever as it is arrestingly malevolent. The opening line ("You wind me up/Just to let me go") is a perfect summary of the dynamic between the the tense, simmering verses and the glorious harmonic eruption of the chorus.

Similarly, the images in the lyric were either extraordinarily deftly chosen or the most fortuitous happenstance: as Shayne sneered, accompanied by what might well be the only sarcastic finger-snaps ever recorded, that "I'm your teddy bear/I'm your living doll", he was neatly desecrating two of the most cloyingly cutesy love songs in the rock'n'roll canon. The chorus payoff, meanwhile ("It feels like I'm dialling a prayer/But no-one's there") was worthy of Leonard Cohen himself, the whole was sung like a young and moderately more splenetic Elvis Costello, and the guitars throughout were sufficiently menacing to make Wagner's "The Ride Of The Valkyries" sound, by comparison, approximately like "Daydream Believer".

As if that wasn't enough, there were three other songs on "Life In One Chord" that were as good - two of them, Shayne's awesome, vicious "She Speeds" and Andrew Brough's supernaturally gorgeous "Sparkle That Shines" are included here. When I first heard these songs, I reacted by writing torrents of hideously overwrought drivel for the Sydney street paper I worked for at the time. The only consolation, as I retrospectively contemplate the lurid purple prose I devoted to the nascent Fits, and cringe, is that I wasn't alone: all over the world, "Life In One Chord" got better reviews than Mother Theresa, generally phrased in terms that would have made Byron blush. The word was out; the fix was in. Straitjacket Fits were, surely, going to be bigger than Christmas.

Except that they weren't. Over the years, there have been only slightly fewer explanations advanced for this than for the Kennedy assassination. They included: the fact that, fine though the three albums "Hail", "Melt" and "Blow" were, they never quite succeeded in capturing what Straitjacket Fits could do live (though this, granted, would have been a feat akin to bottling fire); the inability of radio programmers to cope with the fact that a band could accomodate two such distinctive songwriters; the eventual problem that the band themselves had with accomodating two such distinctive songwriters (Brough left after "Melt"); Shayne's somewhat diffident approach to promotion (interviewing him could, on occasion, be a task comparable with extracting the rear molars from an unanaesthetised and hungry leopard); the possibility that their US label, Arista, having signed them, didn't really know what to do with them; the fundamental cloth-eared ignorance of the general public. It's probably fair to suggest that it was a combination of the aforementioned.

All of which is a shame, but not really important: rock'n'roll success should not be measured in units shifted, but in hearts ignited, minds invigorated and worlds turned upside down, and Straitjacket Fits racked up more than their share of these everywhere they went. In 1989, I saw them play twice at the Lansdowne Hotel in Sydney, an absurd L-shaped venue that might have held about, say, a dozen in any kind of comfort. At both those shows, there must have been 400 people in there.   The first of these two shows was the first thing I ever wrote about for a British music paper - my slightly hysterical despatch, which I don't recall in detail but which doubtless argued something to the effect that Straitjacket Fits could take the Horsemen of the Apocalypse at polo any day of the week arrived, unsolicited, at Melody Maker days after the paper had awarded Single Of The Week honours to "Life In One Chord". The second of these two shows was the night of my 21st birthday, and I'd still take it again over any of the other 28. I next saw Straitjacket Fits, for what turned out to be the last time, in 1991 when I flew from London to Sydney to interview them for Melody Maker. They were down to a three-piece by then, and they still wiped the stage with My Bloody Valentine. I remember thinking that night that Straitjacket Fits, however many of them there were, were the best band in the world. It's a possibility I still haven't ruled out.

There is, of course, some joy to be had from the fact that Shayne is still making music, singing with the familiar curled lip in front of the impressively feral-sounding Dimmer, and that Andrew seems to have found, in Bike, an appropriate vehicle - pun unintended, but unavoidable - for his lush pop instincts. Mostly, though, it remains only to hope that this collection will attract some of the reverent hindsight that is the very least Straitjacket Fits are due: we hope and expect that justice will be
blind, but it's always depressing when it gives the impression of being deaf as well. "Bad Note For A Heart", "Missing Presumed Drowned", "Down In Splendour", "If I Were You". . . six strings have rarely rung truer. Play it loud.

Andrew Mueller, London, September '98