Sire’s “Plundering the Vaults” reissue series got to the Rezillos in 1993, as if in karmic compensation for my first year of high school math homework. Sweating over the compass, protractor, and other cheap plastic tools of the geometer’s trade was almost pleasurable with Can’t Stand The Rezillos: The (Almost) Complete Rezillos set to ∞, turning my teenage bedroom into a future-retro outer-space dance party.

Formed in the mid-Seventies by Scottish art students, the Rezillos’ love for comic books, science fiction, and bygone fads reminded me of the B-52s, though the two sound nothing alike. When the Rezillos called themselves a “new-wave beat group,” I think it referred not just to the songs by the Dave Clark Five, Freddie and the Dreamers, and the Kinks in their repertoire, but also to their musical proficiency and well-rehearsed live show. Jo Callis, later of the Human League, wrote most of the Rezillos’ originals (one of which he took with him when he left, along with the rhythm section, to form Shake); his guitar and the incredible bass playing of William Mysterious (né Alastair Donaldson) on Can’t Stand the Rezillos set the group apart from punk and non-punk contemporaries alike. As the Rezillos’ first bassist, Dr. D. K. Smythe, writes of the band’s earliest shows:

In contrast to the laid-back, casual, self-indulgent ethos of rock bands in that era, we were slick, highly professional, well-rehearsed, and offered 60 minutes or so of frantic, non-stop fun rock looking back to the late 1950s.

 

The Rezillos c. 1977
 
Because I’ve spent so much time with the Sire CD over the last 25 years, its deficiencies are plain. Yes, it fit the studio album Can’t Stand the Rezillos, the masterpiece single “Destination Venus,” and the live album recorded at their farewell show, Mission Accomplished… But The Beat Goes On, on a single disc, but at what cost? I’ll tell you at what cost: by doing violence to one of the all-time great punk/wave songs, not once, but twice! In a blood orgy of rapacity, record men amputated the live version of “Destination Venus” that ended Mission Accomplished and sent the album out into the world mutilated. Worse yet, on the single version of “Destination Venus,” there was a maddening dropout at around 1:26. Imagine if the engineer had just decided to wipe his nose with the master tape a minute into “Sonic Reducer” or “I Got A Right.” For this, I paid the MSRP of $13.98? An outrageous and intolerable state of affairs!
 

 
At last, Cherry Red has done the Rezillos proud with a handsome two-CD set, Flying Saucer Attack: The Complete Recordings 1977-1979. In addition to righting the wrongs I have enumerated, it appends the single versions of “I Can’t Stand My Baby,” “(My Baby Does) Good Sculptures,” “Flying Saucer Attack” and “Top of the Pops,” all substantially different from the album tracks; plus the B-sides “20,000 Rezillos Under the Sea,” which is the William Tell Overture played as a surf instrumental with the honking lead sax of William Mysterious carrying the melody, and Lennon-McCartney’s “I Wanna Be Your Man”; plus a few other live and compilation tracks that have never appeared on CD before.

After the split with Callis, singers Fay Fife and Eugene Reynolds continued as the Revillos, who also attained Olympian heights now and then. Minus Callis and Mysterious, the Rezillos reunited in 2002, and released a second album, Zero, in 2015. Go see them when you can.

Flying Saucer Attack will be available on February 23 from Cherry Red and on March 2 from Amazon. Below, the Rezillos play “Top of the Pops” on Top of the Pops.
 

 
And here are Fay Fife and Eugene Reynolds on BBC’s ‘The Beat Room’: