The compilation · the catalogue item.
If You Can't Please Yourself You Can't Please Your Soul is the 1985 Some Bizzare various-artists compilation, assembled by the label's founder Stevo and issued with the original recordings licensed to EMI. Where a compilation such as The Elephant Table Album was a journalist's survey of a whole circuit, this is a label record: Some Bizzare gathering its own roster and contract-mates onto a single LP and, through the EMI arrangement, placing them in the racks beside the major-label pop catalogue. The sleeve frames it as a retrospective, a drawing-together of the label's acts at a point when several of them were at or near their commercial peak.
The line-up is the substance. The record opens with Foetus, the project of JG Thirlwell, and runs through Cabaret Voltaire, Test Dept, Marc Almond, Psychic TV, The The, Coil, Yello, Virginia Astley and Einstürzende Neubauten. Several of those acts have full entries in this archive, and the compilation is one of the places their paths visibly cross: the industrial and post-industrial wing of Some Bizzare (Cabaret Voltaire, Test Dept, Psychic TV, Coil, Neubauten) set beside the label's pop and art-pop side (Marc Almond, The The, Yello). The mixture is the label's own self-portrait, and it is a fuller one than any single release could give.
The compilation's value to this archive is as a document of a moment and a roster rather than as a record of singular influence, which is why I keep it at Tier II rather than alongside the foundational entries. Stevo's Some Bizzare was the imprint that carried a strand of the British underground into contact with the majors, and this LP is the clearest single picture of who that roster was in the mid-1980s. It is also, in plain terms, a way in: more than one listener has described arriving through a single familiar name and leaving with an attachment to Test Dept, Cabaret Voltaire, Coil and Psychic TV, and through them to Throbbing Gristle and the rest of the circuit. A compilation that works as an entry point is doing documentary work whatever its individual tracks amount to.
Citation. I hold If You Can't Please Yourself You Can't Please Your Soul at Tier II as a significant Some Bizzare label-compilation document of the mid-1980s. The cross-references across this archive are the in-scope contributors: the Coil track; the Cabaret Voltaire, Test Dept and Psychic TV contributions from the label's industrial wing; the Foetus contribution, at JG Thirlwell; and the Einstürzende Neubauten track. The record is held in the Audio department as a catalogue item, with the label itself documented at the Some Bizzare keep.
VAGO · c. the Anthropocene