Lo Fidelity Allstars ft. Pigeonhed – “Battleflag” (1997)

I’ve received what I would classify as an average human’s amount of gifts in my life, and most of them don’t hold a lot of emotional resonance. I’m not the biggest “stuff” guy around and I think the act is far more valuable than the object. Plus, you get older, you change, and your two month obsession as a 14-year old naturally fades with time.

However, I can think of four very specific gifts I have received in my life where the actual gift itself remains stamped in my mind as “excellent”. the Sega Genesis I got in 1992, the Sega Channel subscription my brother and I got (perhaps the most insanely generous thing I ever got in my life in retrospect), a stack of CDs I requested for Christmas (including such gems as System 2 by Microwaves and Maritime by Minotaur Shock), and most germane to the topic at hand, a CD burner.

I can’t really express how much that goddamn CD burner changed the direction of my life. I remember that despite my critical lack of mechanical engineering knowledge that persists to this day, I managed to install it into our family computer. Why I was allowed to even attempt this is mind boggling looking back at it, but it worked and I was off to the races immediately.

I made countless mix CDs over the next decade, but I kept running into the issue of what to include on them. This problem was exacerbated on two fronts. First and foremost, I needed to completely fill the 78 minutes of CD runtime. CDs cost money after all and leaving stuff blank felt like I hadn’t scratched my whole lottery ticket.

The other issue was what I refer to as “idiotic archiving”. I certainly filled out those shitty glossy paper track listing inserts that were included in the CD-R’s jewel case, but I also valued portability. I mostly listened to music in my car, so I had one of those CD books that would turn the back of your shit into a Spirograph of scuff marks. While some of those track listing sheets got transferred over, I’d lose them in the transfer process, put the CD back in the wrong place, drop a can of Josta on it, any number of things to ruin the process. As such, I forgot what I put on them all the time. It got especially hard when the issue became telling the difference between “CD Mix #14” and “The Arby’s Mix”.

So I was at a bit of a crossroads. I wanted to maximize my Aimster library’s capabilities by transferring it all onto CDs, but I was too dumb to do it right. My first move would be to add a bunch of sound clips to the CDs (yes, even before I got the soundboard on the podcast, I was that asshole). However, there were only so many Sifl and Olly clips to shove into an album, so I eventually defaulted to picking something I would never object to if it came on.

This is how “Battleflag” ended up on at least five mix CDs I made as a kid.

In retrospect, I think I picked a pretty good default option. As I alluded to earlier, my tastes have changed a lot since I was a kid, but my love for this song has never really wavered, even at my most obnoxiously hipster-ish. That’s because Big Beat electronica fucking rules, it always has, and this is one of the best songs in the genre.

But despite my long history with this song, I never really took a deep dive into Lo Fidelity Allstars. I didn’t even know who the Lo Fidelity Allstars were, per se. However, that can be forgiven in retrospect because the Lo Fidelity Allstars did one of my favorite things in music, which is needlessly obscuring their identities to add a sweet layer of enigmatic allure to their group. I absolutely love when a musical collective decides that they simply cannot be known by their government name for no other reason than “just because”. That’s how David Randall becomes “The Wrekked Train” and Martin Whiteman becomes “The Many Tentacles”. I was also 12 and a dumbass, which is another strong reason for not knowing more biographical info about these guys.

But underneath the incredibly shallow veneer of obfuscation that I couldn’t be bothered to scrape away for twenty years prior to writing this, the story of the Lo Fidelity Allstars is a fairly common one. A bunch of guys in Northern England moved to London, get noticed by some labels, and relocate to Brighton after signing with Big Beat stalwarts Skint Records. They strike paydirt immediately in the Big Beat gold rush with their debut album How to Operate with a Blown Mind, release a few more albums to diminishing returns as the Dennis Leary types of the world win the war of “Electronica vs. REAL MUSIC” in the public consciousness, and pack it in around 2009. All in all, a solid career with an all-time banger of a track.

I guess you could classify Lo Fidelity Allstars as a “one hit wonder” insofar as “Battleflag” is probably the first, second, third, and fourth thing you would talk about when discussing them. I was actually convinced that I had only heard one other song of theirs besides “Battleflag”, the perfectly fine “Blisters on My Brain”, but then I remembered that I absolutely ended up buying their album How to Operate so I wouldn’t keep putting “Battleflag on random mix CDs. Turns out, after listening to the album again, there was a reason for that. How to Operate is not a bad album by any means, but it is kinda unremarkable, especially compared to its contemporaries. After all, they were on Skint at the same time as Fatboy Slim, who dropped You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby the same year as How to Operate. Bit of a “you brought a knife to a gun fight” situation there.

All that said, I think “Battleflag” can go toe-to-toe with any song of the era. The song itself is a remix of a song of the same name by Seattle funk band Pigeonhed, and it must be said that this is a massive improvement over the original. I talked about it a lot on the Best Cover Songs podcast series, but there are so many covers that just cook the original and this remix does that as well. It transforms a half-assed Beck knockoff song that sounds like it was made to sell Levi’s 501 jeans into this malevolent beast of a track. It also has a pretty cool music video about blackmailing a guy over ILLICIT SEX or some shit.

Good stuff, y’all.