Carbon/Silicon: 'The Last Post'

Former Clash guitar hero Mick Jones produced Babyshambles’ ‘Down In Albion’, a fact that may explain why Mick’s first proper outing in 12 years sounds like a collection of laptop demos. Accompanied by his pre-Clash London SS mate Tony James, the ideas are there, but most seem like pencil sketches for an as-yet unmade album: messy and buried under beats that might as well be default drum patterns on a cheap keyboard. For every sublime flutter of Mick’s sense of melody, there’s a crunching lyrical blunder to thwack it to Earth (“I wish we could see why we need so much stuff/I wish we could see enough is enough”). According to Jones, Carbon/Silicon was meant to be about “creating a proper grown-up group”. Instead, it flits between sentiments that try to summon the right-on spirit of ’77 and a slightly teenage musical naïvety.

Gavin Haynes