It’s no big secret that before Split Enz became Tim and Neil Finn’s personal MOR hit machine, they were a seriously odd proposition. An alien pigpile of post-punk tropes, they were manic, but in a completely different way from XTC’s early spikiness; arty, but not even remotely in the same ballpark as PiL’s intimidating archness; zany, but never easy kitsch like the B-52s; melodic, but never in a simplistic way. They were unique, and in the middle of that extravagant mess stood one Philip Judd. This is him singing lead on “Sweet Dreams.”
 

 
Judd left that band for a spell in 1977, and again, for good, in 1978. After a time spent kicking around New Zealand producing and playing with various bands, including Aukland punk pioneers Suburban Reptiles and a project with lo-fi kiwi psych champ Chris Knox, Judd formed The Swingers with two fellow Suburban Reptiles refugees, drummer Buster Stiggs (replaced later by Ian Gilroy) and future Midnight Oil bassist Bones Hillman. Forsaking the artiness Judd had brought to bear on Enz, The Swingers favored a tight, hooky new-wave popcraft, upbeat yet seriously anxiety-ridden, not at all out of place in its time but amazingly durable in retrospect.

Their wonderful 1982 US debut, though it differs significantly from its 1981 Australian counterpart, opens with three amazing songs in a row, effectively crafting the kind of brilliant statement of purpose that can snare a receptive listener for life, making it all the more unfortunate that Counting The Beat got remaindered and deleted so swiftly after its release. It opens with their debut single, the catchy-as-chlamydia title track.
 

 
Check out the kinetic and rubbery bass line on track two, “It Ain’t What You Dance It’s The Way You Dance It.”
 

 
Next up is the song that generated US interest in the band to begin with, their appearance in the Aussie cult film “Starstruck,” the song “One Good Reason,” here with a bit of the film for good measure.
 

 
And because why the hell not, here’s an earlier, non-album version:
 

 
So there you go. The rest of the album is up to the same standard, and if every song had a video, I would have posted the whole damn thing. Now go spend some quality time in your favorite record store’s dollar bin and snag yourself a copy. Or if you’re lazy as hell, cripplingly germophobic, or otherwise averse to crate-digging, you could just spend way too much, ain’t none of my business.

Though big fame eluded Judd as ably as it found his former bandmates’ wedding slow-dance standards, he seemed to gambol pretty merrily through relative obscurity (in the USA that is; Down Under he remained a known figure), both solo and as the vocalist for Schnell Fenster, a group made up of Split Enz refugees who evidently flunked their Crowded House auditions. Sadly, he’s lately succumbed to a passel of mental and behavioral problems that run the gamut from merely unfortunate (alcoholism, bipolar disorder) to repellently unsavory (stalking underage girls in his neighborhood), and has, perhaps mercifully, become more or less a hermit, releasing no new musical work since 2008. But before his brain train left the station, he produced this admirably deft combination of Edwardian vaudeville whimsy, Beatlesque pop, and underground rock menace called “No One’s Best Man,” from 2006’s Mr Phudd and His Novelty Act.