The Shaggs are the last word in the peculiar niche of bands “so bad they’re good.” Or in this case, still bad – but cult favourites.

The guitars are out of tune, the drums are out of time, the vocals are flat, the lyrics don’t rhyme or scan, and the song structure seems to have been made up on the spot.

But there’s a charming naivety to it, much like the recordings of Daniel Johnson, though you’d be pushed to find the same melodic heart in the songs of The Shaggs. And yet…

While Rolling Stone asserted, with some justification, that the group’s 1969 debut Philosophy Of The World was the worst album ever recorded, both Frank Zappa and Kurt Cobain considered it one of their favourites – and Zappa once described The Shaggs as “better than The Beatles.”

The three New Hampshire sisters – Dot, Helen and Betty Wiggin – were forced to record it by their overbearing father, who had made them form a band because his mother (their grandmother) was a fortune teller who had predicted it.

Untroubled by their lack of discernible talent for any of the components of a rock’n’roll band, like singing, playing and songwriting, after three years of rehearsals and occasional Saturday night dances at their local town hall, he took them into a recording studio from which they emerged, 24 hours later, with their one and only album.

Obviously it was a complete flop, and 900 of the 1,000 copies pressed promptly disappeared, but somehow it became a cult sensation and the sisters reunited in 1999 for a comeback concert; now the album has been reissued and there is a forthcoming documentary about the sisters’ rise to anonymity

This is my favourite (I use the term loosely) from their collection of charmingly primitive songs on an album that finds them pondering the mysteries of the universe (Things I Wonder) and other big questions (Who Are Parents?). 

My Pal Foot Foot is a strangely poignant song about the sisters’ missing cat, putting it in a small songwriting niche alongside another of my (genuine) favourites, Out There In The Night, by The Only Ones.