A reissue of a reissue, since this patrol through the Gang's debris originally appeared in 1990. If you own a copy of the 1998 box set 100 Flowers Bloom you won't need this, but it's a tolerable survey of what originally made the Gang great and of how they lost their Marxist-dialectic cutting edge as they moved along the biz conveyor belt.

Their first album, Entertainment!, went off under EMI's Manchester Square HQ like a blackout bomb, and songs from it haven't lost their power to thrill and startle. Only The Clash ever managed a similar fusion of molten instrumental attack and seething polemic, though the Gang's harnessing of cod-academic methodology to deconstruct issues like social conditioning and media brainwashing put them in a class of their own.

They were never so good again, though 1982's Songs of the Free rained down some accurate fire on the Falklands war. But the bizarre soft soul of Is It Love, from 1983's Hard, signalled game over.