Make no mistake, CQ is an album out of time. Recorded in the summer of 1968, it represents a last hurrah for The Outsiders, enormously successful in their native Holland between 1965-67, but subsequently and suddenly out of kilter with popular taste. What was off-trend in ’68, however, seems uncannily prescient today.
For all that vocalist Wally Tax’s lyrics were surprisingly detailed and thoughtful, The Outsiders were hard-assed primitives. Misfit sounds like a hungover and surly Dick Dale, while the tolling, moaning guitars of the gaunt and forsaken title track, awash with reverb, like simply everything else in the mix, pretty much mint the surf noir genre. If you can listen to Wish You Were Here With Me Today without visualising black-and- white footage of “ton-up” bikers roaring away from a transport caff circa 1960, you’re a better man than any of us.
For the most part, it’s a thrillingly steroidal 13th Floor Elevators type of noise, proto-punk in its nihilistic raunch and positively avant-garde when it comes to the histrionic psychosis of Prisonsong and the speaker cone-ruining feedback coda and Dalek vocals of Doctor. This essential reissue is augmented with six tracks recorded live in December 1968 by radio station VPRO.
