1970@50: JOHN LENNON/PLASTIC ONO BAND

A church bell tolls. Lennon comes in with the band, a soaring vocal over tolling piano chords. "Mother, you had me but I never had you ...." Then it's his father's turn and then his own as he pleads to his children not to follow him. Finally, he cries with increasing power until he is screaming. Mama don't go. Daddy come home. By the end of this section which is almost as long as the rest of the song, he is tearing his voice to shreds with elongated syllables firing up from the centre of his wounds. This is not a berserker Twist and Shout scream but it might have come from the same place, however undeclared. 

Lennon's first album of more conventional song writing after the dissolution of The Beatles continues in pursuit of confession, self-exposure and demon-hunting. And while it holds a range of musical textures and approaches it feels like a cohesive whole. Hold On breaks from its pleasing pentatonic strum to push at the edges of the sweetness. 

I Found Out spits out at fakes, hangers on, the drug of the great society in a serpentine hiss of a blues workout. Working Class Hero shows the drier and darker influence of Dylan than found on Help or Rubber Soul and continues the theme of the previous one. Isolation continues the tired feel of Hero and Lennon's light touch on the vocal belies the complexity of the melody. That's all to good effect when the prolongation of the word of the title appears. A breakout section strides in double tracked force like a pulpit-thumping sermon before settling back but only long enough for one last "I-i-i-i-so-laaaaaaaaa-shun!"

A Beatlesque piano canter begins Remember and a shouting vocal tightens the stomping pace. The chorus breaks the tension with a forceful singalong. Repeat until what sounds like a surprise joke about Guy Fawkes day but is more likely to refer to life's disastrous surprises as the powder keg explodes.

The fragile Love enters slowly on piano. The vocal is as naked and plain as on the White Album's Julia. What might have come across as a series of naïve statements is transferred through vulnerability into something raw and experiential. It's in these nooks and corners of this album where Lennon really takes the power of his craft to fruition. 

Well Well Well takes up the blues thread of I Found Out and tells of his new life away from the old moptop coterie where sex and food and revolution are things to do and sing. The chorus is the title repeated into a searing frenzy. Look at Me returns to the weary vocal of Love and Working Class Hero. He accompanies himself with the fingerstyle acoustic playing he favoured from the trip to India onwards (taught by Donovan Leitch, no less) There is the same spookiness he found in singing about his mother on Julia.

God begins as a soul figure on the piano and a sermonising introduction with a few lines about god being the concept we use to measure our pain before a pleading litany of disbelief as he strips himself of allegiances and creeds to arrive at his immediate locale of self and Yoko before some poignant words to Beatle fans offering them the tip to do the same thing themselves and ditch the pop idolising. The dream is, as it fully feels, over.

And then in a strange echo of Her Majesty on Abbey comes My Mummy's Dead recorded roughly and roughened further. A plain statement of pain. When first heard this sounds like a pointless defusing of the grandeur of the previous track but there is a real poignancy to its openness and simplicity. It's not simple as in elegant but sheer and unpadded. It jolts after God but it's meant to. 

Like a lot of these revisit blogs I get a better understanding of records I considered myself immune to. By having to describe them and as fairly as I can I hear more of their beauty and conviction than I started with. Here's another case. I still can't distinguish Well Well Well from I Found Out until I listen to them back to back. The possible archness of the call to "follow me" in Working Class Hero only seems to reveal itself when I'm listening but in memory seems always to feel ugly and narcissistic. The flatness of melody strikes me as being anti-Beatles until I take each song in turn and hear something quite the contrary. I will probably never love this album and it's not one I would choose to listen to without an ulterior motive but it remains a strong and convicted statement of how one of the most famous and best loved public figures on the planet found himself after leaving one of the most famous and beloved units of happiness manufacture. The demons in the shadows and the chest-bursting monsters were pursued, located and dealt with and the result is seldom other than violent and bloody. For that it deserves its exultation. I just almost never choose to listen to it.

The canonical opinion on this record is that it is raw and that its rawness is enough. Lennon's biography is essential to understanding it, goes another one. Maybe. Certainly, if you do know that it followed most of a decade of being at the top of the pop music food chain which nurtured some of the most forward thinking music of the rock era then poignancy of this stripped back approach released about a year after the most lavish Beatles album will not be lost on you. What gets in the way of that is the fact of the back to basics Let It Be, regardless of when it was recorded, was released only months before this. Nevertheless, the character of rawness is the one you hear about most. In fact you hear about it more than you hear about the music.

When Andrew Nichol taped me his import copy of it in about 1977 I took it home wanting it to be all of those things and I imagined something like Lennon's shoutier tracks on the White Album and maybe a few Because-like moments and maybe even an Across the Universe or two. Mother is a strong opening but after that I was really digging around as my attention drifted to whatever crap was going on in my school day life at the time. I wasn't particularly listening to lyrics because I seldom do, even now, so what I was hearing was a lot of samey blues riff guitar. At no point did it strike me as significant or even admirable that it sounded nothing like The Beatles. As a second generation (i.e. fanatical even through the punk wars) Beatles fan it sounded like a whimper. I already had Imagine and liked most of it but even with that the string arrangements bothered me as they sounded like organ chords and veered towards the kind of muzak he damns McCartney for making in How Do You Sleep. But it did have songs you could tell apart.

These days I still find this album unengaging. When it isn't musically bland it feels self serving rather than self fulfilling. I can say that for almost all of Lennon's solo output. I really did try to like it but liked it so little that I felt guilty for thinking that way when I heard of his murder. If this record is just the clear expression of someone at a significant chapter of his life then fine. If you feel affinity with it that's fine, too. 

Me, I didn't feel guilty at thinking ten years later that Double Fantasy was dull and its single Starting Over embarrassing. I also felt saddened that his hopeful message of revival was delivered in such a bland package. Sure, he was only singing about who he was and that's what he was doing with Plastic Ono Band but for me he never seemed more distant the closer he got to his self actualisation. Maybe it was the time but it wasn't mine and to me this just looked like someone who, having healed, walked away, a raw and ravaged showbiz turn smoking behind him.

1980@40

January 1980. 17 and hungover, I was staring down the failure of my Year 12 and my driving test. I had joked probably once too often and angrily about joining the army because my sister pleaded successfully with my Mum to pack me off to Hubbards for another tilt at Uni. Well, I didn't know anyone there so all the parties and crap I'd been doing instead of studying were off the table. If I could keep my head down for just one year.

I knew I'd done this to myself but I was still 17 so I blamed them for not telling me sooner. Still, I had a way out. So, Off I went on the great silver bird to Brisbane. My brother Michael picked me up from the airport and drove me, along with his wife and tiny child along the scenic route to Auchenflower where I'd call home for the next four and a bit years. Brisbane felt like a city. I liked how I could hear the people next door and how the streets were all undulating as though someone had come in and squeezed them into hills and valleys to make room for the new houses. Michael and Honora had visitors from overseas that afternoon. We had tea and cake and it felt grown up. Then, after the visitors left, Honora picked a fight with Michael which had such a ringing emotional violence to it I could only stand and gape. That happened almost every day I shared that house with them. 

Monday and admissions. Mum had again shown that she was better with the idea and the gesture than the admin so I had to work it out with the Principal, the wiry and wonderful Doc Squire. So I mostly brooded and smoked in the study room as the sounds of the classes murmured from the hallway of the dusty second floor of the old brick clump in Charlotte Street that Hubbards was. And I pondered all the wrong that I'd faced, all the smug academic monsters who succeeded at my expense who would regret every beaming smile once I rose in force with .... Oh that's the other thing, talented and trammelled, friendless in a new place and feeling my best stab at identity was through contrarianism I started calling myself a fascist. No, really.

Apart from the pure obscenity of it, here's what was wrong with that: I had no agenda. Nothing, that is, beyond a sense that I deserved the adoration of the despot. Gets sillier. At no time did I give up my disgust at the Bjelke Petersen regime in Queensland which was, with its politicised police force, all but a fascist state already. Nor did I give up any part of the fantasy that I would soon be a rock star (which was diametrically opposite to any goosestepping daydreams I was having). Also, the only way of becoming a fascist leader of any kind is to have a following and the only way of getting that is to appeal to the types who would do all the biffing necessary for the start of such a career and the only way of getting any of that sorted was to deal with such people in such a way that wouldn't end with my being binned in seconds of the attempt. Non-success at being a fascist is a failure I'll take any day. A year later I was comfortably absorbing the ways of the left which is where I have remained. In any case all that became moot. I got a social life and the blackshirt line was just a conversation starter, then a joke, then kind of nothing.

At the other end of it I had so successfully self-isolated that I had become a decent sort of student and was able to accommodate both books and parties. It was actually a pretty good life for a year. Then again, I was living with the most unsettled marriage I have ever experienced. When Honora wasn't tearing at my brother for having constant affairs (her imagination from what was probably a single slip-up on his part) she was targetting me for supposedly never doing any cleaning. She didn't do much herself but I figured if I took the worst job and did it perfectly on a weekly basis she'd fuck off and it worked. Every Saturday afternoon I'd clean the bathroom free of spots while Sounds played in the next room. If a song was good I'd stop scrubbing the loo and go and look. I had no player and all my records were back in Townsville. But there was 4ZZZ. And Night Moves was on the weekend for when I had to stay home and there was always something good on that. And that was the next thing I liked about 1980, the music was really good.

Because I've been doing the albums separately I'll just call the singles here.

The Vapors' Turning Japanese was a clever take on teenage angst that (despite the literal images of the vid was not about its title or chorus) while Major Matchbox's Rockabilly Rebel matched a slinky verse with an embarrassing football hooligan chorus, Split Enz kept their Neil Finn winning streak going with I Got You while Queen pleasantly surprised with their understated rockabilly Crazy Little Thing Called Love, John Lennon sounded like an old uncle with glory days stories in Starting Over and in Coming Up Paul MacCartney sounded like his cousin, John Foxx turned the aircon down to Arctic for Underpass with a video that looked like Ballardian sci-fi, I rolled the dial of all the stations in the study room downstairs to hear Ashes to Ashes again and almost got it on a personal rotation while swatting for exams, see also Psycho Chicken by the Fools which I can't listen to now but thought was hilarious then, like Xanadu Can't Stop the Music was put into the water supply and I wanted both boiled into the ether but Brass in Pocket by the Pretenders was fresh and bright and Space Invaders was the ugliest earworm of the year, He's my Number One was a song I only knew by the chorus because that's all I ever saw on Countdown when they'd play a little bit in the top ten montage but masterproggers Pink Floyd actually had a big hit with their stern ditty about school Another Brick in the Wall while Ghengis Khan thought Moscow was a place where every night night night there was laughter and every night night night there was love, while Blondie yelled out a banger about love for sale with Call Me from the movie American Gigolo which might well have been set in Funky Town, according to Lipps Inc but wasn't where you'd take a Holiday in Cambodia (that was schoolies week and HiC was one of the anthems of that particular fortnight) and Flowers did as much with We Can Get Together and before that with the intriguing and still strong I Can't Help Myself which was what U2 might have been thinking when they sang I Will Follow over one of the decades biggest and best guitar riffs and not to be outdone in the brightness stakes Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark mixed '50s kitsch with the atomic bomb in Enola Gay which was a B29 while the later model B52s dazzled with the whirling Private Idaho which is a state that might have had forests but they weren't anything like the forest in the Cure's A Forest while Siouxsie and the Banshees Happy House might have been in its very dark centre and if Madness plinked and cranked about school days in Baggy Trousers Talking Heads rose with the big spooky epic Once in a Lifetime and Joy Division chilled us all down with a whistling keyboard riff and a cry from the grave with Love Will Tear Us Apart.

And then there were exams in November. They were held in Cloudland, a big spring loaded ballroom where everyone from Glenn Miller to The Clash had or would play. And on the day of the last exam I crunched over the hail in the gutter as Mark pulled up in his car to ask if I needed a lift down to the Coast for Schoolies. Thumbs up and see ya later. Whatever that exam was I could only think of the end of the day. After a self-treat of a long neck of something beery I packed a bag in time for Mark to drop by and we headed for the freeway. The big leggo blocks of Surfers Paradise rose in the dusk in invitation.

We got to his family unit on the somethingth floor of a high rise on Broadbeach. We made pasta for dinner and I ogled the flats of the buildings across the road, open living rooms and money. We went out for a drink later just because. Not a rage but a start. The next days were parties in canal-land, the flat the girls were staying at, beach bonfires, walking through the streets of Mermaid Beach after Friday the 13th at the cinema as the news of the Balaclava Killer seeped into the airwaves. So much. I will never eat another Chiko roll but I will always remember Kaylene (but I'm meant to say that). 

Mark dropped by the flat to pick me up. I didn't want to go but my plane was that day. We drove back to Brisbane in the rain with Flowers and Tubeway Army on cassette. There was a card on my dresser. It was from a friend back in Townsville. Her common law husband had been shot. The front of the card was a cute watercolour of a wombat. The news and this picture drew a rising swell of nausea in me like that one drink too many after midnight when you're rolling around the lawn in the dark. It was Rik. I knew him well and liked him a lot. Dead. Not just dead. Murdered. I showered and tumbled into bed and slept till noon. 

Michael tried to get out of giving me a lift to the airport but I prevailed. The flight was easy. Mum picked me up at the airport and it was good to hear her chirping mundanity. Dad had built this thing and new people had moved into the rental house with my brother Greg (his former flatmates had kept their rent, which was meant to be paying me my allowance which meant that I really did go without food for a week) and Nita moved into Nanna's old place etc. etc. I threw my bags into my old room, went to the kitchen to fix a lemonade and vermouth, collapsed into a banana lounge by the pool and heard the song So Long by Fischer Z play from somewhere nearby. It wasn't the words, just the feel of the song. It got to me. I sipped, closed my eyes and wept for a few minutes. Parties. Home. Parties. At the end of January my little brother ran through the rain to fetch a big yellow envelope from the letterbox. It was for me. I'd got in to Griffith Uni. Summer.