It took way too long, but finally a CD reissue for
Major Accident's A Clockwork Legion allows the digital age to embrace the sheer brilliance of Darlington's finest sons. Originally released in 1982 as the band's second album, A Clockwork Legion continues its makers' obsession with Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange (both the novel and the movie), not through overt reference, but in spirit and via a world view that both shares and amplifies that personified by Alex de Large and his Droog gang. It's a difficult stance to maintain across one song, let alone a series of LPs, but
Major Accident pulled it off, both lyrically and via their absorption of the clockwork society's own musical influences. True, Beethoven and co. are not fed through squawking synths and electronics -- that would be too obvious. But the band's grasp of simple melodies that in turn translate into deathless pop is in effortless keeping with the sounds of the Korova Milk Bar, and if the themes to the songs are contrarily distant from anything one would normally associate with pop, then that only amplifies the societal dislocation that's at work here. Never truly lauded in their heyday; always operating just beneath the critical radar that dominated the early-'80s British music scene,
Major Accident have, for the most part, been forgotten by modern punk -- assuming it remembered them in the first place. [With its original ten songs appended by five period bonus tracks, this 2006 Captain Oi reissue should go a long way toward remedying that oversight. And, if it doesn't, then maybe the Droogs might want a word.] ~ Dave Thompson