Last Sunday evening I tortured myself by watching the Grammys. Mainstream rock and roll must really be dead if the best they could do is wheel out the Red Hot Chili Peppers who stumbled through some excruciating and dated sounding rap rock. And it would have been bad enough to sit through The Eagles playing Eagles songs, but when I had to sit through Carrie Underwood and Rascal Flatts doing Eagles songs badly and watch Smokey Robinson perform in women’s lingerie — well, let’s just say I was cleaning up the vomit for days.

Anyway, that’s all neither here nor there. I do, however macabre as it may sound, enjoy the In Memoriam segment, and as I was watching on Sunday night I had forgotten that the gods were cruel enough to take both Arthur Lee and Syd Barrett away in the same year. It brought to mind also the strange death of an Englishman born Adrian Nicolas Godley, known to a scant few music fans as Nikki Sudden. I stood there mesmerized, inexplicably waiting to see Nikki Sudden’s tousled Ron Wood-esque mop of hair, but of course he did not show up on the screen — an obvious credit to Sudden’s wonderfully strange legacy.

Ostensibly, Sudden died from complications having to do with drugs after playing a show in New York (he was only 49), though the cause of death is still not known. He left in his wake one of the most maddeningly diverse discographies, made up of both his bands — the seminal noisy and precocious post-punk combo, The Swell Maps and the leather and lace Dylanesque troubadours, The Jacobites — and his many disparate solo albums.

The Ragged School is not a proper album, in that it was put together for American audiences by Peter Jesperson’s Twin/Tone label, a la the Beatles’ Yesterday and Today. Ragged School is made up mainly of the Jacobites first album, which was self-titled, and the subsequent Robespierre’s Velvet Basement, both of which were reissued with reams of bonus tracks by Secretly Canadian (as is Ragged School, but I am reviewing the original twelve track album on Twin/Tone; the Secretly Canadian reissue has 22 tracks).

The only songs which do not appear on either of those first two albums are “Bethlehem Castle,” which was a holdover from Nikki Sudden’s solo album, The Bible Belt, and Nikki Sudden’s brief instrumental dalliance “Cheapside,” which appears solely on The Ragged School.