1981@40: DARE - THE HUMAN LEAGUE

Breakups bring out our best and worst. All those resentments and bottled annoyances turn lovers into monsters, at least in each others eyes. Breakups of bands can show things both wonderful and embarrassing, as well. The Beatles went solo, all had nodding collaborators instead of internal competiton and nothing they produced came up to that standard. Peter Gabriel flew from prog rock into somewhere often dark and risky while his old bandmates eyed the Top 40. Morrisey took his lyrics and, surprisingly, his vocal melodies with him.

But when they splinter instead of split and die it can get odder still. Half of 10CC kept the cute while Godley and Creme branched out to bizarro world. Chris Bailey kept the Saints name while Ed Keupper took the sound of the later albums and developed it further. But there's none more strange than the case of The Human League. By 1980 and a level of success that might only ever register as ok, founders Martyn Ware and Craig Marsh left, agreeing to leave the name with the singer they had recruited, Phil Oakey. Oakey took the debts and label commitments and had to work out how to start a band with only a name. So he did but in doing so he lost a few anoraks and gained the rest of the world.

The Human League, like a lot of off centre outfits in the mid-'70s, took form from within a scene that was indistinguishable from an art collective. Ware and Marsh had an enthusiasm for electronics, computers and music and a great love of pop music. But, while they did incorporate the latter into their repetoire it never quite broke the surface. Getting Oakey in there helped the image with his looks strong voice and avant-hair. The two albums as the extended trio, Reproduction and Travelogue growl and drone with darkness and the kind of wit that time bombs rather than flaunts it in the moment. If Kraftwerk were Teuto-pop, Human League were from the moors and shadows of the North of England and sounded like a musical interpretation of J.G. Ballard (even creating the brilliant Zero as a Limit i tribute to Ballard's Crash). Even when they covered the ubercamp Glitter Band's Rock and Roll it sounded spidery and sinister. No one bums you out more than someone creative from the north of England.

So, in the months between the frowning Travelogue and Dare, Oakey made it out of the chrysalis with a record that looked like an issue of Vogue and sounded like a soft drink commercial. All of it was an essential part, from the androgynous image of Oakey's face on the front cover surrounded by noiseless white, to the font that disturbed the name by varying the size of the words and the album name, a single syllable which appeared to state the record's purpose as an all or nothing risk, this was an album of ground-up reconstruction. This extended to the band's ease into the realm of the pop video at a time when that medium was gaining its own auteurs, one of whom reproduced the cover art for the clip of Open Your Heart. Almost no one on earth between the ages of 15 and 25 did not own this record or at least a cassette of it. A rejuvenated Human League lifted the style of this album cover for a tour in the late '00s, near thirty years after its appearance in record shops.

So, all sorts of crap can be popular; is this any good?

The Things that Dreams are Made Of plunges into synth rifferama with splonking keyboard basses, screechy and ringhy high parts and Oakey's certain tones telling everyone to get off the couch and sieze the world. It's a thrill ride that yet manages to name check comedian Norman Wisdom and members of The Ramones. Open Your Heart softens things into a kind of teen opera that could also be a plea to love this new version of the band. It introduces the newly added female vocals in the chorus which can melt at twenty paces. Softer but not slower, the floating waves of electronic percussion and flute-like keyboards is still at a decent BPM, it's just the emotion left and it would have surprised anyone who knew the band in their Circus of Death days. 

The Sound of the Crowd is a dance number but it could be declaring a kind of collective obedience or lampooning it. Either way, the incorporation of the call and response with Oakey and new members Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley add to the intensity and bloom fully in the chanting chorus: "Get around town. Get around town. Where people look good and the music is loud." Kind of like a retake on Downtown but this has a minor key sternness and a strange marching rhythm that takes it out of that tradition. Third song in and what would seem like a lot of light pop is already revealing shadows and frowns. So, they might let you use their songs to sell your new bubblegum flavour but you won't just be getting the tunes. The old League had done ads but the irony blasted from the grooves. This approaches portfolio territory.

Darkness opens with drum machine less synth riffing and Phil heavily reverbed singing a wordless prologue. The song proper kicks the percussion into life and the rich electro bass and gorgeous riffing from the beginning returns. He's read a book which has left a disturbing impression and haunts him when the sun goes down and the shadows of the house darken. No reason to think that this is anything but a literal description, especially since the sounds of the synths and the timbres so clearly evoke the kind of music then being used for horror movie scores, most notably John Carpenter's own music for films like Halloween and The Fog. The punch to major for the first line of the chorus comes just in time to save the song from saturating the minor key tonality.

Do or Die starts with the programmed drums that had by that time become unremarkable and no barrier to punters judgement. A small explosive sound provides a kind of cymbal sound and a blippy organ tone gives a kind of strummed texture. Oakey comes in high in his range, describing someone whose power knocks out guard dogs just by being near and who can bring governments down. But the images of subversive action and intrigue are mixed with some darker sexual hints, the blend doing much of the talking. The chorus urges escape as well as risk. Again, this could easily be a case of Oakey thinking of what he has staked in the rebirth of his band. Will it be a punch or a punchline?

Side two opens with a stinging slow electronic reading of the theme from the movie Get Carter. No accompaniment, just the high pitched pierce of the one finger tune. It nevertheless perfectly precedes I Am the Law. A prologue that sounds like a gangster talking to the object of his affection and capture. The tone changes again with a deep thick drone for the chorus: "You know I am no stranger. I know rules are a bore. But just to keep you from danger I am the law." There is such a smooth malevolance here and it doesn't allow any kind of Alice Cooper camp, there is something distressing and powerful in the relationship and the fourfold repetition of the final chorus against the coagulating drones make it both magnetic and severe. It promises bad but you can't take your ears from it. The song ends on a high searing synth string section note which bends down sickly, is clipped and gives way to one of the saddest and most beautiful songs of the early '80s.

Seconds opens with a soothing drum pattern. A shifting delay setting adds some stuttering and the effect is bouyant, almost narcotic. A deep bass plays a two note figure before the string synth comes in with a four chord figure whose extra intervals like sixths and ninths render it both sparse and rich and a great sadness builds over the repetitions. Oakey's voice comes in, serious but delicate: "All day, hiding from the sun, waiting for the golden one." It's about an assassin whose life's blackest moment is building with unbearable intensity. The lines are spare, intoning over the wash of the irreparable grief that is about to find cause. A brief  jubilant figure rings out high on the keyboard before being hauled back into the rushing surface of the strings. "Your knuckles white as your fingers curl... the shot that was heard around the world ... for a second." And just before the intensity becomes too much we finally get to teh chorus: "It took seconds of your time to take his life. It took seconds." The weight of an irrevocable act of violence in a few words. A brief breakdown towards the end and the chorus with its reminder of the horror and fragility of the action repeats. A major factor in why this song works so well lies in the judgement of where to allow room for breath and where to overwhelm with emotion. The four chord figure is too powerful to play constantly without pushing the listener into numbness. So it is sometimes there and sometimes absent, perhaps like the waves of determination and doubt frying the brain of the killer who puts whoever it is in the crosshairs of his rifle. On that, this was less than a year after John Lennon's murder but the picture sleeve of the Love Action single (of which Seconds was the B-side) had photos of JFK. But really, it could be any such killing and all that's left is the lives affected by the one taken. This song has a sting but also clear compassion and its appearance on a record often recalled as a dumb-downed foppery from a once serious outfit. The thing is that as serious as the old band was it still would not have broken out as emotionally as this song does. Going  big and bright clearly has its advantages.

What's left is the pair of singles that have currency to this day.

The squirmy synths at the start of Love Action and the build up with synthesised wukka wukka guitars are alsmot the stuff of self parody but the vocal is clearly without irony as the arrangement takes on a kind of electro funk. The verses are a confession of sorts about the notion of love and where it leaves us, subscribers or clowns. The melody is the closest thing to bluesiness on the record, having a Motown suavity to it. The chorus is purpose-built catchy with a hooky lyric line and cool synth descending figure. What breaks this is the breathless declaration in the middle of the song where Phil (who has already namechecked himself in the second verse) comes out with some great lines: "I believe, I believe what the old man said though I know that there's no lord above .... I believe in truth but I lie a lot". To remember to be funny when you're being serious is part of that Northern expression I mentioned earlier. This resolves to chorus repeats until the fade with the stacatto disco riff sounding high as the synths swirl around like dancers. Born to be a hit single.

Don't You Want Me is like that only with a lot more drama as the dialogue between Oakey and a singer often assumed to be Sulley but was in fact an uncredited jobber. That sounds strange when you know that Sulley mimed it in the clip and it's so forward and expressive that doesn't fit as a session voice. The bouncy setting tells of a big shot (could be movies or music or maybe even modelling) who discovered the girl in a bar and made her a star and now she's at the top she's left him far ... behind. Each has a verse. He's all "don't be ungrateful" and she's "I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar. That much is true." The song resolves in the repeated chorus of the title. It's fun, it felt like a little more than an assembly line pop song but shot to the top like it was written in the Brill Building.

Another aspect of this reinvented Human League is the producer. By 1981 Martin Rushent had a few important notches on his holster. with the likes of The Buzzcocks and the first three Stranglers albums. He'd worked his way up from tea boy to producer over the '70s and at the dawn of the '80s he was increaingly interested in what the future might or should sound like with investments in gear like the new Linn drum machine and banks of the new synths on the block and went digital. Ex Buzzcock Pete Shelly released the Rushent produced Homosapien album with the title song leading as a single. If you don't know it Youtube it and bliss out in the textbook plate example of infectious synthpop that has been conceived of without reference to luminaries like Gary Numan or past masters like Kraftwerk. It drives on the same Autobahn but the engine is not about the medium and message it's just pop and as pure as it could be made. Taking a colleague's recommendation, he got the job of producing Dare.

The difference between this and what might have been a third album from the old lineup is that there was probably a lot less aruging. Between Rushent, Oakey and their collaborators the audio part of the band's reinvention was set to set what synth pop was in concrete. Phil could still take his concerns about the way of the world out for a drive but all of it (even the mighty melancholy of Seconds) still sounded and felt like pop music and was form fitted for dancing. New Order were soon to pursue the same territory along with a regiment of other lights and this became a defining characteristic of the era to the extent that the notion of guitar bands was growing visibly old.

There were three singles taken from the album which I remember feeling was a cash-in (not suspecting that at the end of the following decade acts like Moby and Massive Attack could licence every track of an album and still be cool). If it was it must at least felt like a sweet relief to Oakey to receive such success along with the attention after years as the darlings of a coterie of art students. And he and the personnel rose to the fame by looking like they were made out of marzipan icing in neon lurex, having started (or restarted) as a market-calling institution in waiting. For their part Heaven 17 did ok with songs both innovative and politically forceful (first single protested Ronald Reagan's election: Fascist Groove Thang) and they effortlessly adopted the dance-fever production that Oakey and Rushent almost patented. But, love or hate, Oakey and co's insistence on embracing the money and the fame was a lesson that stirred frowns from the post-punk punters but also a game plan for the likes of Ultravox (who'd also rejuvenated after an unresponsive '70s) or U2 (one of the few guitar bands allowed to be rock stars at the time). The whole question of selling out was made moot but not by the arrogance of a kid with a lucky break and funny hair who finally got to be a pop star but one who reserved his right to sing about what he wanted ... and some of that was love.

1981@40: WILDER - THE TEARDROP EXPLODES

Teardrop Explodes difficult second album broke them, well they broke soon after but this is the one that lost the benefit of the whole band's input and was more or less the product of front man Julian Cope and his closest collaborator, David Balfe on keyboards. That's the sombre stuff. The good news is that it outstrips the debut Killamanjaro by a country mile with an expanded pallet, compositional sophistication and variety within consistency. That might well have to do with the previous set of circumstances or not but of the two released under the band's name legitimately this is the one I listen to today.

A quirky drum pattern garnished with synth beeps and squelches and then lower keyboard piano. Cope comes in riding the rhythm with a swing. When the chorus hits about distant fire and elusive ecstasy the brass section, already familiar from the debut, kicks in and the jazzier side of this post-punk side opener is brought into focus. They might have led with the single with its sudden start on 10 and neo-psychedelia (of which more later) but Bent out of Shape sits comfortably at a halfway point between that and the aching ethereality of some of the other tracks, offering a mutual hand to both. It's a musing song, a song of morning shower revelations but one done with the coffee afterwards in mind. This is the new Teardrop Explodes, not always in yer face but not Music for Airports, either.

Colours Fly Away is a blast from the pervious year. Big split brass and sax sections punching out the riffs, Copey calling images of melee, chaos and disorder with the urgency of a witness. The contained hear change for the chorus and treated vocal provide a kind of meta-observation before we're back on the street and in the thick of it. One verse is sandwiched between a pair of gorgeous vocal harmony descents and it's the first time you notice the guitar which will almost exclusively in this album, be janglling through a chorus pedal. There is a force and sweetness to it that wasn't heard at all in the debut album and that it fits here and so effortlessly is further indication that this band has picked up a few lessons in the interim. The song ends on a few tough brass punches before Cope parachutes down in falsetto: "Colours fly awaaaaaaay."

Seven Views of Jerusalem enters slowly with electronic chirps, beeps, swipes and caws. A jaunty bass rises from this. Cope enters in fine head voice, describing more chaotic rack and ruin, claiming a miraculous kind of aloofness. Is it he who has a Biblical seven views of Jerusalem? The apocalyptic lyrics are sompletely at odds with the bouncy tracking, sweet vocals and lyrics but that seems to be the point. It's a way of describing the achievement of godhead or at least the discovery of it in oneself ... after a good dose of the resurgent lysergant that was flowing around him at the time. The chorus is a banded, ethereal falsetto, ascending in small steps from tonic to major third to fourth, not quite ecclesiastical but certainly monumental and ringing with marble resonance. The fade is on this figure and joined by wordless backing vocals in counterpoint. It's quirky but it shimmers and it's stiffly beautiful.

Pure Joy begins with a clean electric guitar chord riff. The verse starts with a high lead vocal and a galloping hihat. The urgency is relieved for a moment before theyu launch back into it and then hit the chorus which extends into a kind of Scott Walker popera musing. And then it ends. I always remember this song being about twice its length, probably because so much happens in its sub two minute running time. Falling Down Around Me is a laid back groove and soft vocal. There is a sense of bemusement at events as they happen around him, leaving him to wonder powerlessly. The song develops with a distant brass section and the ba-ba-bas Cope had been using since the first album. The gentleness of the track against the weight of the words create a sad resignation.

Ba-bas again but in a minor key and against an acoustic guitar. The Culture Bunker fills out with an insistent punchy rhythm, chorused guitars and a stern vocal from Cope. Images of war, air raids with V1 flying bombs. The chorus tells of leaving the safety of the bunker and a resentful response to the success of friends. The key to this is the line: "Waiting for the crucial three. Wondering what went wrong." The Crucial Three were Ian McCulloch, Pete Wylie and Cope himself.  The art school trio came to no more than teenage daydreams as such but each of them went on to international fame to varying degrees: Cope in Teardrop, McCulloch in Echo and the Bunnymen and Wylie in Wah! (which name seemed to change with every release). From this point it looks like parallel success but nothing works that way close up. McCulloch's success proved the biggest ane most durable than either of his perceived rivals which had to rankle, especially when the original grouping was made up of three frontmen (or at least men who wanted to be fronts). There is a sadness to the music which suggests weariness with the process of the pissing contest. This isn't a How Do You Sleep moment, more a Can't We All Just Get Along?

The old side one begins with a bang and the most joyous song the band ever did. Passionate Friend starts full band and vocal. After the full blast of the opening lines the band skips into a striding arrangement, emphasising the brightness of their parts, chorused guitars, '80s big bass and gated drums as Cope sings a shouting ode to someone he later described in an interview as, "just a girl." The chorus is delayed for two verses and an instrumental section that puts an electric sitar out front and introduces a shining classically flavoured brass section. When the chorus does come it's heralded by a pre-chorus of urgent happiness and then either disappoints or delights by being more ba-ba-ba vocalisations. But these are infectious and open the song on to the sunniest day on Earth. This song is a perfect example of using a late '60s influence without direct emulation. The catchy-cry repeats over jubilant trumpets as Cope quotes the melody of As Tears Go By before variations on the chorus tune into the fade.

In complete contrast Tiny Children's warm blanket of keyboards feels snug until Cope's vocal comes in at the top of his chest voice. The beautiful melody and Cope's control of it belie the strong melancholy. An emotional cataclysm has taken place and he can't ... Cope. Instead he's less coping than falling back into sensations of childhood but then is reminded that the thoughts of children can be epically violent and recriminating, especially when vengeful. Cope made no great secret that this was inspired by the unhappy dissolution of his marriage. It is such an intriguing take on the emotional racking that a breakup can create, no escape, even in the eiderdown and warm cocoa, everything, however briefly, will just end up hurting. I recall an interview with Cope where he metnioned Ian Curtis, then a year or so dead, as being a case of submission rather than fighting and how gross he found the idolisation of Curtis in the wake of his death.

A strident chorused guitar riff with a theremin-like portamento open Like Leila Kahled said. The song follows a straighforward rock song course without variation. Cope described it as a love song to the Palestinian hijacker because of her beauty but without knowing much about her life. I don't know how seriously I'd take that. Whether he liked the name and put it into a song lyric or there was a point about risk that he wanted to sing about. The song has a seize the day sense to it but it's minor key and almost sobering. Perhaps he was just using the name to emphasise the effects of taking any chance regardless of the damage it might cause.

... And the Fighting Takes Over begins with a chorused guitar riff but it's gentle and supported by buried echoing trumpets. When the vocal comes in the riff gets more complex. Another melancholy tune describing what feels like the same cataclysm of Tiny Children and its effect on communication, a series of ruptured attempts at peacemaking. Between each verse and in the fade out there is a beautiful interplay of the quiet trumpets and an organ line. The fade feels like the thought is being left where it landed and quietly abandoned.

If that wasn't enough, The Great Dominions begins with a heartbeat but it's harsh and rasping, the kind of sound reportedly heard by foetal ears during gestation. A gentle keyboard figure that sounds like a loop adds rhythm. Cope's vocal enters in head voice, in a trhowback to Tiny Children but here the concern has widened to concerns more global in nature but could still esily be the distortion of close viewing. A real string section plays what sound like keyboard chords. The drums are less keeping time than accentuating the grandeur, boomy, echoing and huge in the distance. Three verses of defeat and failed connection with images of violence and invasion with the anguished cry, "Mummy, I've been fighting again" ringing out in the chorus. The final chorus goes on twice the length of the first but instead of fading the song ends on the foetal heartbeat, rasping by itwself until it comes to a sudden stop. This is an album closer like When the Music's Over, A Day in the Life or Decades, gigantically epic with an expert use of aural space. Cope's dejection and the refusal of the music to build past its plateau or speed up keep the boundless landscape of it ranging. But if it's a landscape like the fade of Decades sounds like, it's not a sunset or noon, it's a deep dark night of a new moon giving the sense of its expanse without needing sight of it. A scary and magnificent song.

I have yet to read Cope's reputedly werid and wonderful book Head On about the days of this band and didn't want to before I wrote this as I wanted to keep my impressions from the time and the effect of the record over time relatively pure. As I've said on other articles like this one I don't regard the quality of timelessness as praise but a description of compliance with production methods or orthodoxy. Accessible this music might be but orthodox this album is not. It starts with a laid back psychedelic swing tune, follows with the first single and then adds new variations on melancholic perspectives with each track with convetions like fast followed by fast until a slow one brings relief. There is no attempt at balance in the sequence, rather, the notion of making an album feel balanced is flouted. Cope said that ditching some more typical uptempo songs in favour of the slower ones and shaking up the results made it sound wilder than the previous one, hence the title.

This record will always remind me of second year university, taking pleasure in the knowledge that the others who'd been in their teens in the '70s and preferred the richness of the sounds of the '60s were coming up in the music making streams, influenced but not copying the music that had inspired them. This is in stark contrast to bands from about five years later who augmented their fuzz wah riffs with paisley jackets and beads which was just revival. Wilder didn't need that. The times didn't call for it and preferred the stamp of originality for however brief a time. That's why this LP sings across the decades as loudly as it did in 1981. I'd end by saying more's the pity they didn't survive long after its release but this was a band in turmoil from the word go. That they were able to provide such epoch forming music is the wonder and the wildness of it.

1971@50: WHO'S NEXT - THE WHO

I've covered this here. The series it was part of was Unheard Classics, records in the margins of what I got into while forming my tastes. While I knew and loved the Who that I heard on Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy and a little later on A Quick One and Sell Out I didn't give much credence to the '70s Who. I can recall hearing Slip Kid from By Numbers and Who Are You on the radio when they were fresh. I heard bits of this in the '80s when someone had left a cassette of it at my place in Brisbane but it wasn't until the '00s that I bought a copy of the re-release with bonus tracks. So, I knew three songs: Baba O'Reilly, Behind Blue Eyes and Won't Get Fooled Again. I thought they were great but still prefered Boris the Spider.

Getting the full album and, with its liner notes, an understanding of its origins added meaning to the songs I heard, though I found no easy link betwen the Lifehouse story and Bargain or My Wife. I found most of the tracks more than listenable with the standouts remaining the ones I already knew. Then in 2015, planning the blog article, I walked around on my urban hikes taking it in and letting the whole sequence form and the album appeared. I always stopped after Fooled as I wanted to hear the original as released. 

So, while this might well contain a lot of the stadium rock cliches that were only newly minted back in 1971 and my still vigorous punk sensibilities fomr my own youth resisting them, I grew to admire this set. It makes a strange follow-up to Tommy which exists at a point between the psychedelia of Sell Out and the '70s rock of Who's Next. Most of Tommy is acoustic, at least the memory of it is and most of this seems arranged so Pete Townshend can leap and windmill his way around a massive stage. Getting past that, which is the real life lesson here, and simply listening to the passion of a band who were breaking through to their next phase as arena gods and still managing to sound honest and modest is humbling. Sometimes getting over a barrier is worth it if only to see how slight it was to begin with.

1971@40: LED ZEPPELIN/IV/FOURTH ALBUM/FOUR SYMBOLS/ZOSO/WHATEVER

I've already covered this one in my series on this band's records. That article is here. In that I go over how I came to hear the record and what it means to me personally. Also, I address the bullshit plagiarism courtcase over the guitar figure at the start of Stairway to Heaven. So, I won't be saying anything about them here beyond noting (as I couldn't at the time) that the case and later appeal were found in favour of Led Zeppelin and not the plaintiff (who was not the author of the piece in contention, anyway). So why Am I doing more than linking? Well, it goes somewhere towards completing the picture on the blog and as I noodle here there might be more to say.

I talk in the other article about how I came to discover Stairway to Heaven at my sister's prodding. The song that really hooked me, though, was the last one in the list. Track  4, side 2: When the Levee Breaks. From the apocalyptic drum opening to the final snarl of the electric 12 string this song still carries me along atop its thick and heavy current. Someone on a newsgroup a long time back said that whenever they heard this track they wanted to become this music. I know what that feels like. There is a new arrangement idea with every verse, a middle eight that arrives after a cinematic powerdown that then crashes into screaming life again with an impossibly high and powerful Robert plant vocal. Things panned left are then panned right. That Fender XII never sounds remotely like a '60s folk rock jangle, it's a mighty cloudbursting force. Slide that sounds both assured and diseased and the same goes for the harmonica playing. There is a full verse played before a note of it is sung and not a second of it feels too long. I was already aware of it but one night when my brother Stephen had the radio on in his room it came on and I heard it afresh and marvelled all over again.

This is the album that you can have and safely claim you know something of Led Zeppelin. Barnstorming rock, mystical ballads, poppy side steps, gentle acoustic numbers, eastern influenced riffs, the lot. It's also the one with a profile high enough even these decades after its fact that allows attacks from all sides by people who latch on to a popularly known artifact so they can appear wise about it. See also, Sergeant Pepper, Exile on Main Street, Dummy or Nevermind. That cultural placing alone can be offputting but then you really can just press play and smile as the warm up notes cluck to life just before Black Dog tears your ears off. This is joy.

1981@40: PLEASURE - GIRLS AT OUR BEST!

Punk sounded like it did because of where and when it happened. The way to push back against the marshmallowy goodness of mainstream culture with its uniform skivvies was to wear garbage bags and play like a reversing garbage truck. That still gets represented as songs made of multitracked barre chords and self-conciously ugly vocals but if you go and really dig around you'll find a lot outside of that Venn circle that was never going to overlap. The idea was the approach, not a checklist of traits that would render it as generic as all the other goofs. The point was that it didn't need to make that sense. So, The Buzzcocks wrote with tons of melody, The Normal didn't even use guitars, The Stranglers sounded like prog, and Girls at Our Best! just took what they wanted and didn't care what you thought of that. Then again, they had plenty of evidence to suggest that what they ended up giving was pretty much liked by everyone who heard it.

I first heard the singles and B-sides like Politics which 4ZZZ played until they ran out of tracks and just started again. It was a little like how everyone loved the Flying Lizards' version of Money and how it was described as low-technology by the duo themselves. Girls at Our Best! sounded like contemporary technology, rock band plus keyboards and vocals playing songs with choruses, bridges and verses, but they swept their grimacing concerns under a carpet of jollity and solid rock music. Jollity? How punk is that meant to be? See what I mean? So, when they brought out an album I was there.

Big drums playing a square drive, a guitar palm muted without discenrable pitch. "One two, go to, Pleasure City Avenue!" chants out Judy Evans with perfect diction. Then the band kicks into the bouncy verse and sounds like The Sex Pistols led by Joyce Grenfell. "Decorate the walls and doors and make them all look nice. Take the cat out for a walk and help it kill the mice!" Strong melody and a voice that could make parades of girl guides stand to attention and words that might have been thought up on the spot by a six year old. "This is Heaven. We are good as gold we won't grow old when we're told." If you sang that in a Johnny Rotten voice it would sound naff, someone trying to be all punk 'n' stuff. But this band had a secret weapon. Well, secret until the vocals started. 

Judy Evans was from Leeds like all the others in the band and spoke awl norwerthern, mind, and was known as Jo. But when she sang she became Judy and sounded posh, not middle class with a future in publicity and promotions, but to the manor born posh. Punk was all about sounding like yourself. Hearing kid's words with the attendant cruelty and bluntness of them, framed in a sweetened whimsy but belted out as though to an assembly of kids in blazers designed in 1895 is a throw off. You just don't expect it and it doesnt let up. Evans used two voices on GATB! recordings, this one and an odd, slightly off falsetto, usually in the middle eights. The middle eights were also stand-outs melodically form the rest of the songs, being in other keys or suddenly changed rhythms before folding back into the normal verse. The one for Pleasure contrasts completely from the rallying jolly hockeysticks of the verse and chorus, soaring above them in a kind of Rennaisance melody before sliding back down for another pep rally verse, warcry chorus and then a sudden stop. 

Before you can take a breath it's Too Big For Your Boots which starts like a show tune with bamming chords, one to a bar as Judy starts off with gleefully naive lyrics: "Iiiiiiii will take a chaaaahnce on an advaaaaahnce with some romaaaaahnce ...." before tumbing into a strident ragtime two four with the big loud guitar band joined by a jaunty honky tonk piano. I'm Beautiful Now adds an electric 12 string in a firm but not showy way, reinfocing riffs by adding an extra sheen, especially when the gorgeous coda vocal descent repeats over the Eloise-style chromatic figure.

Waterbed Babies brings back the slashing guitar figures but takes the expected  1 4 5 chord progression out of the scheme and replaces it with something outside of keys. Over pounding tomtoms Evans uses her movie-ghost falsetto: "Rollingon rubber just for the three of us..." as it heads to a great big full-throated thumping chorus: "Waterbabies in the sea. Watermelons are for tea..." A glade is cleared for the middle eight in which ringing bright guitar chords sound over a rolling snare as the flutey vocal slowly dives before splashing up into a new verse. Fun City Teenagers pushes through a pop template from the mid '60s and adds a Dixieland clarinet. £600,000 is a more typical 1980 post punk rush with low-mixed shouted vocals, steep rise and fall chorus but a baroque descent in the middle eight. 

Side two begins with the closest thing this album of sub four minute tracks has to an epic. Heaven opens with a big guitar fanfare in a minor mode. A coupled six and twelve string grinding sheen has the grandeur of an old movie suggesting the middle ages. A stately pavane pace but delivered in hard edged rock style works like a seige breaking machine as Judy sings stridently about being out of sorts with the world around her, sometimes narrating as a toy: "Wake me up, revive me with your memory. I am only someone when the children think of me. I cannot exist without some vanity. Bring me back to life because I need some junk." Her own backing vocals are choral but schoolishly so, which in their own way add to the larger scale of the arrangement. A bubbling synthesiser beeps and blips with the chords as the guitars thicken and plain out for the chorus, delayed by a verse, crashes through: "Will you get to heaven if you like a drive-in movie? Will you get to heaven if you run a TV station? Will you get to heaven with advance publiciteeeeeeeeee?" Another verse and chorus repeat before the space expands even further with a slowly building instrumental section held together by drums and big bright barre chords. The synths bubble and grind before becoming a kind of ghostly choir of howls and eerie ringing, rising through as the guitars tighten and smash toward the final double chorus which then ends on a comically high falsetto note by Evans and the synth. As varied as the tracklist has been so far nothing has prepared the first time listener for this. It's not a sudden departure or even out of character but its committment, force and melodic riches push it further out. A great side two opener.

China Blue follows, a kind of whimsical picture of a China town with glittering guitar arrangements, breezy verses and a playground style chanting chorus. The verses are told from the point of view of Europeans travelling east and being wonderstruck but there's also a love song buried in the bouncing colour about living in a palace and inviting another to come and see her everyday. And in the middle of that there is the curious middle eight: " Oh why am I so beautiful?" Even in the Judy Evans style of playground song/Girl Guide rally this might sound conceited but in the setting of the sheen and splendour it's much more of a general cry of joy. If you want to do the Necker cube boogie it might also be Jo Evans sick to death of the attention given her from outside the band because of her beauty. No interview, even in those anti-mainstream post punk days, neglected to mention her looks. It can't have gone without a fight at the record company that the band refused to put her image on the cover art. That is not necessarily a naive stance, given the times. Kim Wilde got so sick of being asked about her sex life that she started asking interviewers for details of theirs. And this cry of pure melody, the "I" curling down like a falling ribbon, seems to meet this in the coda. And then the song ends on a penny. Bampf!

If you knew the B-side Warm Girls which included the line that gave the band its name (Youtube it, it's wonderful) your ears will prick up on hearing the riff for Fast Boyfriends. A barnstorm of overdriven gutiars and bell like doublings of guitar and keyboards smashes in like a fanfare. Judy comes in with an offer to dance but warns him that it's not a long term offer. "I hope you don't think I'm a freak but I always have to fall - in- love - once - a week." The second couplet of the descending melody verse is carried by male voice backing vocals which give a psuedo classical tint to it. The chorus bounds out with more interplay between male and female, "Oh oh here we come, fast boyfriends" Over "friends" Judy peals."Twenty-fours to takeaway." "Oh oh, again and then. "Last four mintues then turn away."  The second verse is a series of girls who are living rapid and happy sex lives and the chorus lifts it even higher. A solo which like all the others neither shreds nor replays the melody leads with the same stuttered notes as the pre-chorus figure to a double chorus with a more complex vocal counterpoint. "Turn a-waaaaay." End. If this song doesn't remind you of your twenties I don't know what will. This number about a gleeful promiscuity told with female values (and, yes, written by Jo) can as easily be a protest as much as a hymn to hedonism.

She Flipped is the tale of a couple bound together by play which, if a little teasing, makes everything work. It's set in a kind of fairytale medieval castle where a jester has fun with his queen. Even then, there's a childlike perspective to it: "My elder brother he's an entertainer each day he has to go to court..." Those lines are sung over a solemn Rennaisance style ground of tremolo guitars, mounting bass and cymbals. After that introduction, you don't notice it happening, the band has accelerated to a clip and has been joined by a harpsichord which will be there for the duration. The next three minutes of pure joy are about pranks, tests and japes in what the younger sister sees as the world of courting where her hero brother wins against a drab world the attentions and then heart of his lady. The song is so bursting that the chorus is wordless, a big yelled da-daa-da-da-daa-da-da-da-daaaaaaah by the whole band which makes them suddenly sound like the Seekers on steroids. And then the instrumental break takes the promise of Heaven further with a full baroque workout of synth brass and strings counterpoint. And then because just going back to a verse or chorus would be drab the coda is new material, a falsetto chant: "Slip off your hose, your lips red and rosy, scarlet livery. Go out tonight, you walk on the other side, sexy chivalry. Buy me a shirt, take me on holiday, gentle rivalry" that gallops to the close, a sudden change of tempo with a slow minor figure on the harpsichord before Judy warns: "One day he'll get caught." Or is it court< like in the old anti-shoplifting ads? Doesn't really matter.

Goodbye to That Jazz starts with a spiky guitar riff that gives way to a happy melody about something like patriotism but it's a kind of Syd Barrett patriotism: "We will all applaud when the final curtain falls, wave our little flags. Standing up to pray to the soup of the day. I say goodbye to that jazz." This gives way to the kind of backspringing baroque movement we've already heard in She Flipped whereby a chord progression modulates per bar between major and minor (e.g. A minor to D-minor to G to C to F to A minor to E etc) that everyone who likes what they hear in Bach or Italian composers from the 18th century or even just others who discovered it and made use (like in California Dreaming). It's no more a lift of old music than a swift alternation between a fifth and a sixth is a lifr from Chuck Berry, but make use of it and you suggest instant J.S. Bach. Here is is delievered apace in a chorus that is somewhere between a travelogue and an appeal to worldwide solidarity against stuffy old regimes. The middle eight modifies this adding a chirpiness as Judy sings: "No traditions anymore, no time for Anne Boleyn..." before returning to the chorus and the first full band fade of the album (not counting the mini fade of the drums on  £600). Yet another sudden stop would have felt like a let down. The slow fade feels like a goodbye, the circus clopping slowly out of town. If you've been listening from the first track to now youre probably ready for a good lie down and a cup of tea, white with one.

And that was it, almost. GOAB! released one more single Go For Gold which sounded like a demo for the album. After a short and unhappy American East Coast tour the band dissipated nevermore to unite in the name. Everything they released charted in their native U.K. and their legacy was taken up and smothered in polish with the likes of Altered Images, Bow Wow Wow and the like which diluted so fully that by the other, more boring, end of the decade that the thread was barely visible in Fairground Attraction's Perfect or anything by the likes of the Housemartins. 

But Girls at Our Best don't deserve to be buried under the tide of twee that came after them. The band that responded to fellow loiner band Gang of Four writing a song called Entertainment about politics by writing a song called Politics about Entertainment is the same one that on these grooves puts group sex into a ditty about waterbed babies or being nice to a cat so it will kill mice. None of the bands in their wake could boast such complex and thoughtful guitar orchestrations, constantly melodic bass and still sound punk (or use clarinets and harpsichords and get away with it). That's before you get to the band's own  art which splattered Cultural Revolution imagery in the colours of Never Mind the Bollocks over both sides of  the cover. Uni Student flyer or what? GOAB! didn't line up behind Ultravox and Human League and go synth pop, there was still too much to say in rock. And then because the way they said it what came out wasn't the by then weary grind of punk but a steroidal shaking blast of joy that sustains, song after song, for two sides of an LP. Capping all that off is the persona of Judy. As Jo she was one of the characters of the local scene getting in amongst it bvut as Judy she found something that was all wrong to put to the slicing guitar attack of her band and press it hard until it worked. This effect, The Sex Pistols in Wonderland or The Famous Five Go to the Miner's Strike, still hits, it's still strange and grabbing. For me, that breathy shout at the start of Pleasure stretches a smile across my face that doesn't let up until I press stop or hear the whole thing. Which is why, along with the likes of Porcupine, Colossal Youth, Kaleidoscope, Prayers on Fire, Murmur or Evol and so many more, it is among my favourites of its decade and one I'll always have a copy of in some form. Right now, without it playing I'm mentally singing along:

Go to Toy Town with Taiwan

Welcome home to Pakistan

See my sister in Siam

Please to stay with me in Japan

We are in Ethiopia

Going out with Arabia

Stay the night in Bolivia

Entertaining in India

Goodbye to that jaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaz

1981@40: STILL - JOY DIVISION

The aftermath of the personal cataclysm of Joy Division felt like respectful silence but it was strange. The surviving members retooled the band, found a new member who wasn't an Ian Curtis-alike and began releasing outstanding new material. This album was released in October 1981 by which time New Order no longer needed the legacy to function. Their records will be given due attention later but this one from Joy Division remains an intriguing artefact. In spite of the opportunity to heighten sales by them this record contains none of the three singles that continued to be heard on alternative radio. The live recording (excluding the cover version) has historical moment as the band's final gig but it isn't particularly compelling beyond that, considering the bootlegs of better recorded and better played performances were doing business on mail order catalogues. Sheathed in a cold but grand, grey gatefold with Peter Saville's characteristic attention to balance and fonts it comes across as a dusty trophy room in a cathedral.

1988's Substance behaves like a compilation album with all the singles (and both sides) as well as flexidiscs, the Ideal for Living EP and stray deep cuts like Komakino. The cd and the double cassette (which is the one I had at the time) had a wealth of material that benefitted from a very canny curation. You could put it on and leave it on. Back in the early '80s I didn't know anyone who didn't skip on the studio sides of Still or played the live sides after hearing them once. A friend of mine at uni asked if I'd like to go halves in a deluxe copy of it. The deluxe aspect was the packaging: same gatefold but with a hard hessian bound cover, a fancier disc sleeve for each platter and a ribbon on the side. Looked beautiful but was really just more cover art for a record difficult to love.

So if it wasn't a "best of " or "Joy Division Live and Fatal!" what was it? A number of cuts from deep in the history but neither given context nor delivered chronologically. Some of these are extraordinary and others unremarkable. Fans (even secret ones like me) knew there was more in the coffers than this but this is what we got. Truly none of it had appeared on albums before so it was new to most of us and there was a kind of thrill in knowing we were listening to the last time they played live. What did it all mean? The wall of minimalist design would keep its mystery close but that just meant there would be a million versions of it, told into the early mornings from fan to fan. That's how you work a world.

That world might well have thrilled to drop the stylus on this record for the first time, hoping for something great. It was and remains great ... sort of. Exercise One starts with a choir of guitar feedback wailing and rising like the cries of prehistoric creatures emerging from a swamp. A brooding bass figure turns into a rhythm before the drums come in as the wailing swamp life caterwaul. The guitars change with the entry of the vocal, exchanging a terrified howl for a series of growling chords on the first of the bar as the progression rises to the minor third. Curtis comes in with a vocal line that ascends and descends the minor third with words of stress and inevitability. The machine like drums remain in a holding pattern. After two short verses the guitars now climb the same scale like intertwining snakes until the sudden stop. A little reverb trail and it's over in three minutes.

Ice Age starts all galloping drums and chromatic riffs. Curtis' buried vocal snarls of atrocities, bunkers and a future of sticks and stones. The message is typical of its time in that it imagines a future after the then almost inevitable nuclear holocaust. It's a punky shout of protest and sounds like it was done for the first EP. There'll be more on the timeline vs sound later.

If the wailing at the start of Exercise One evoked the beginning of life on Earth The Sound of Music begins with a trilling jungle call that sounds like a dinosaur calling across the savannah. Again the emotionless drum pattern 

Glass must be a star turn of one of the members in some way. Whether it's a bass lick or a drum fill, this undercooked guitar stab with overcooked vocals that make the lyric sound adolescent, made it on to this and the later Substance. A between projects thing that they threw away on a compilation and which should never have been heard of again but was. If I make it to whatever is playing it I'll skip this one.

The Only Mistake is what Joy Division probably sounded like to people who had only heard of them but not the records. An ominous ascending bass made out of notes of black tar climbs up through furiously fast high hats and a clanging guitar progression with a modal tone. Curtis comes in low, growling about making a mistake with a refrain about taking the strain. It works perfectly well as a kind of jar of concentrate but has none of the nuance or details of even the slammiest Unknown Pleasures track (which album it was left off). If I hear it, though I leave it on. End of side one.

Walked in Line roars into the kind of speed punk the band had started out with. Razor guitars and strident growling vocals. "They made it through the whole machine..." And then, like the marching that it suggests most of the song is a chanting of the title. For all it's wham bam punky energy there is that extra x ingredient that says it's the same band as Day of the Lords or Decades, a kind of tincture of despair as everyone pogos on the floor.

The Kill throws  us back to the pre Unknown Pleasures with slashing chords, grunting bass and speed drums. Like a top fuel version of Day of the Lords this pounder of a song aimed at a second person he can't take his eyes off but not from sweet, sweet love. He is acting from compulsion, a series of possibly brutal actions in the service of a person of deity who remains aloof and quiet. Is he adopting a persona or being autobiographical? As harsh as the arrangement is here the melody is strong, short phrases but adhered to. Replace the guitar with keyboards and tone the bass down and you've got something more like These Days or even a track from Movement.

Something Must Break bursts into a grinding push, a two note figure from a guitar that sounds multitracked and heavily treated, almost like an aggressive synthesiser. This would be as unlovable as Glass but for the genuine compulsion of the interplay between the guitar and vocal which keeps the tension high yet with more melodic force. The narrator cannot decide whether to be or not to be and instead of allowing this to be trite teen agnst, Curtis refreshes the choices but they always come back to the same place: "decide for me, please let me know..." "had thoughts for one, designs for both..." Other lines suggest godhead or at least a youthful fancy of it, terrifying lines from warfare and finally creepy image of a face in the window. Something did break.

Dead Souls begins with the machine in refuel, toms and snare idling mechanically as the guitar runs two note riffs up and down the strings. FInally, we build power and blast off with a crashing descent of chords and once in the air broaden the gutiar to thicker chords. After the next chorus the vocal finally starts with Curtis in full deep growl: "Someone take these dreams away..." When the chorus hits he yells at the end of each descent:"They keep calling me!" A second verse about ancient power and invasion and they are still calling him. After a brief instrumental (really just the chords again) he croons with the weight of a cathedral on his back:"Calling me, calling me.." And then another chorus and a playing out until a safe if sudden landing. A few minutes of brutal confidence in a rock song. They'd given it away to a magazine, on a B-side (the A was the gorgeous and freezing Atmosphere). If you ended up really only going back to one song of this record it was this one.

A stumbled start with a bum bass note and Sister Ray has lift off. The original by the Velvet Underground is a story of a party gone wrong set to a pedestrian two chord riff. What it has that none of its cover versions have is Lou Reed. Anyone can make that walking progression work in some way but if you don't have the acting chops to sound simultaneously as though you've lived this tale and are above it then yours is just going to sound like a cover. Ian Curtis struggles to get further than sounding like Friday night at the Pig and Whistle open mic. It stops ten minutes short of the Velvets take when you hear the audience and realise it was a live track.  "Wow," says Curtis. "You should hear our version of Louie Louie."  He and the audience might have been in the spirit but you'll be surprised if you listen to it more than once intentionally and it will be the first and last moment of levity in the band's output. We're about to go live momentously.

When a live recording is made days before one of the people you're hearing took their own life it has moment. When it's the aural focus and the writer of the strange bleark lyrics it holds your attention to ransom until you listen to every last note. And then what do you have but a live gig that despite its generally good audio quality and the committment of the playing and singing doesn't sound anywhere near as compelling as the records.

At its worst it sounds like a poor foldback mix where players or vocals sound forced because people can't hera their own parts. The vocals tend to sound the way they never do now, boomy like big grey clouds of lower mid range against the sound of the drums and amps. That said Morris' kit sounds full and separated, Bernard's guitar playing is clear and the songs do carry a feeling that they have formed as full statements rather than just words and chords that bad gigs are. The arrangements are different from the recorded versions when there is enough space for if not wild improvisation at least some thought put into the emotive atmosphere as in the already sparse Passover. As for keyboard heavy tracks it's down to the sounds Bernard can find. Isolation sounds like a live version of the record. Decades sounds like it was hung to dry just before it rained. Curtis is baerely audible and Hook's bass has no presence. Is this really from the same gig? Like Glass, Digital keeps popping up in posthumous releases even though it's made of very little more than attitude.

My vinyl copy of Still featured an unlisted performance of 24 Hours from Closer. I haven't hear that for a while and wasn't tempted to Youtube it in case it had been uploaded. I'll let my impression of it as rushed and atmosphere-free stand. It came in after New Dawn Fades and stole the thunder of that song after Curtis for once sounded clear and powerful. In the final shouted verse where he shoots up an octave and really means it, even improvising a little with a few lines.

The song in the live set that always gets me is the opener Ceremony. It was among the last songs with a Joy Division credit which means it was one of Curtis' last statements (along with the grinding nightmare lyric of In a Lonely Place). When the band regrouped after his death as New Order they led their singles with this song. Before I knew of the aurhorship I thought the song rang of hope and new beginnings. Well, it might have. The version here fades in because the very beginning wasn't recorded but, considering how faithfully the single versions (there were two) followed this arrangement this probably also started with the big boomy guitar arpeggio. There are no vocals until the final chorus. Curtis sounds strained and shouty but that also sounds like he can't hear himself well. This one gets me as it pretty clearly suggests that New Order's still future direction was towards dancey electronic pop with plenty of upbeat lyrics along with the bright music. There was, of course, also a lot of poignancy and they never quite abandoned the base melancholy. But here at the inadvertent end of their darker first incarnation is the joyous shout of hope: "Heaven knows it's got to be this time". Well, it was, just not the time any of us were thinking of.

So, this double record came out when most of the other sides were available, albeit rare. These included the then two singles which were given 12 inch spots permanently on the record shop shelves and a lot of bootlegs of varying quality. I had a live boot called A Xmas of Jox Division which was good once so it's pink vinyl self was put on show rather than on the turntable thereafter. A friend lent me a copy of the Warsaw album which was mostly tracks from the aborted RCA album. There were tracks scattered over singles and flexidisks and compilation albums. 

This official response to the call for more Joy Division was this highly selective set of songs from various sources that felt like that, as though they didn't belong on the same record. For all the solemnity of the mausoleum-like cover art this grab bag felt like very little. Dead Souls? Any day of the week but Glass? And what was with the cruddy version of Sister Ray? 

Recently, the Beatles' estate released a massive version of the White Album (yes, I know it's really called The Beatles, did you know that The Beatles referred to it as The White Album?) which included disc after disc of Beatles gold gathered from the famed and much bootlegged Esher demos and out takes. Everything seemed to be there. Everything, that is, except for the infamous twenty-seven minute version of Helter Skelter. Giles Martin reasoned that it was that or leave out twenty-seven minutes of what proved highly listenable alternative takes. He added that it wasn't half an hour of the proto-metal version but the draggy, glacial blues number that eventually was ramped up to the released take. Twenty-seven minutes of uninspired garbage that served as a counter-example of how to approach a song that was meant to excite. There's a long enough take like that on the set and you might not even make it through that once. It's just because it's rare and has been herad by few. See also the same band's instrumental Carnival of Light improvised  in the studio for a happening around the itme of Sgt Pepper. From descriptions of it as uninspired drones, murmurs, noises, coughs etc that might have worked superbly in the background while the guests were flying the lysergic carpet but I really have to interest in hearing it. But people want it.

So, instead of Atmosphere (which wasn't a widely available single at the time) or the Ideal for Living tracks (I've never known anyone with a copy of that EP) we get a cover of a song that really only suited the band that wrote it. Sister Ray is classic Velvet Underground and its epic, fuck you, two chord glory really only works when Lou Reed is talking about things that at least sound like he lived through them. Covers of it are like covers of Liza Minelli's Liza With a Zee (which Norman Gunston did as a good joke once). If it was an attempt at showing the dour, doom merchant Joy Division as party guys at heart it was successful at showing a dour, doom merchant band slug through an interminable two chord slog. We should hear your version of Louie Louie, Ian? Havent you just played that. Yet, if it hadn't been included someone, someone would have cried rip off.

The thing is that Still's incoherance feels more like a taunt than a celebration. Enter the sepulchre to find a few old photos and a video of someone's twenty-first where the guy no band wanted, grabs the mic for a three hour version of Wild Thing. The last gig has moment but only as the last gig, not as a performance. We looked at it and thought, oh ok, if that's really all there is... Really, wasn't the Ceremony/In a Lonely Place Single a better transition; the new band starts with the old band's last number? Would've thought.

Afterwards there was the magificent Substance which offered almost everything that wasn't on Still including the mighty singles and B-sides (if you got the cassette, like I did, or the CD which I picked up in an op shop), genuine curios like Komakino or hidden wonders like From Safety to Where (and fucking Glass ... AGAIN!) arranged with a sense of both chronology and merit. Too much. I listened to it solidly for weeks and then again when I got the CD as it was what Still should have been, a great album. After that came Permanent, a fine if pointless grab of album, single and stray tracks. After that came Heart and Soul which didn't quite live up to its promise of everything studio and the best of live but did a pretty good job. Finally, every time a Joy Division album gets released a new live recording surfaces in the bonus material. You can go chasing them and perhaps find real gold. It's your money.

It's hard to know what to say about Still at this remove. At first listen it probably sounds like a mess with a few good bits. It's hard to think of it reaching beyond its release date through the decades to tell new listeners of a band that forged their own path from well trodden tropes to climes eerie and new and approached their biggest statements with power that only the brave or foolish will display. It would be more like: well, there's some stuff but they were crap live.

But perhaps the damage is not so bad, thinking of those other releases that really do fill the gaps, and there are live recordings of good quality to turn the impression of the Still live tracks around. Perhaps the trouble is what this unfriendly record did to a fan base already drunk on mythology and fabrication. Clues in the live mix? Did the songs spell a message? The run-off groove had chicken feet on one side and the words "the chicken stops here" which were in reference to the Wener Herzog film Curtis had supposedly watched the night he hanged himself. No help from the words on the cover or the discs; you got what we gave you and that is all there is ... What otherwise? A bright red vinyl with dance mixes? The plain grey of the cover isn't just funereal, it looks like a muggy afternoon in Brisbane, where I first heard the record. They couldn't have just left it as the massive sunset landscape of the fadeout of Decades, there had to be the personal effects to pick up, the socks and jocks and cigarettes. Well, that's what you get.

1971@50: IMAGINE - JOHN LENNON

Ok, so you're first album of conventional songs has you screaming your lungs out about the pain of your life, fame and the world in general. Where do you go after that? A quiet fishing village on the Irish coast to settle with the love of your life and a ukulele? Sounds nice but you know what's nicer? Forming a set of songs at leisure to show you can still do everything the kids loved you for and move on as well. Imagine is that record and it goes from a gentle, heartfelt and godless prayer that would go on to achieve anthem status to a heartburn blues, a character assassination, a rant that is a much better rock song than it deserves to be, a big swamp of an anti war workout and more. Imagine is a carefully controlled variety show that sets its statements in radio friendly bites and throws a few bones to the album-centric serious rock market. At no time, even though some of the songs are from the era, does it sound like The Beatles. 

The title track of this album has acquired a sanctity that few songs achieve. Over a thickly echoing piano, broken chords and a small ascending link to complete the cycle, Lennon's voice, distant in its own cloud of echo, asks us to imagine life without the small earthbound concerns of nationalism, greed as well others brought down form their lofty places like religion and heaven. He knows he's being a dreamer but if everyone could share the dream the world could be one and free of its old binds. You can't fault the sentiment but until you can separate the song from the singer there's a credibility slide at the top of which is a rich and adored man being whistful.

If, however, you really can tear one from the other, the song's beauty lies in the plain naivete of its presentation. Really, just listen and imagine. The piano and voice are central but there's a very plain bass, sparse drums and strings doing little more than what a basic organ track might have done. It's the low artistry that offers welcome to any who will listen. If you are inclined to attack this aspect of it then you are attacking the message itself as it is inseparable from its packing, author aside. A simple dream for a tired and complex world. It still works.

Crippled Inside might sound like a parodic country song but for all the accented cliches in the arrangement it comes across as sincere. Do what you like to dress up your pain and frustration and pretend you love this masked life but you're still broken within. I find the honky tonk piano annoying in this one. It's one of the most authentic aspects and perhaps that's why: it shows up everyone else. You can wear a stetson and some boots but one thing you can't hide is your sneer when you're snide.

Jealous Guy enters on an icefloe of tinkling piano and thick strings. The vocal mleody has a kind of eastern finish to each line as it sinks into the arrangement. The narrator of the song is apologising to a lover he has hurt. He explains that he couldn't help himself, admits he's weak against his own anger and that he's just a jealous guy. Elvis Costello, in a memorable interview I read in the late '70s, explained that for all the song's tender feel it is being told from a position of power. Cant help it, I'm just jealous. Lennon originally wrote this as a kind of spiritual travelogue in the Beatles' retreat in India. Perhaps the sentiment in Child of Nature (as it was originally known) didn't convince him after the explosive end of that episode and he shelved it until he could find a more fitting use. The melody is quite yearning and aching which is emphasised by the verse that he whistles. There is point at which stark honesty might well be confused by listener for an unapologetic taunt of a victim. Could the sense that an abusive partner is trying to smooth things over so they'll be better from then on, just like all the other times be actually triggering? I don't know. It makes the bland string arragement of this track sinister, to me, a kind of vulnerability icing. I can zone out and receive the song's beauty but that's how I have to do it.

It's So Hard is a kind of constipated blues. Life's hard and then you die by your own hand or the world's. A big bursting sax from maestro King Curtis lifts things a little but, ironically, this is less convincing than the last time he tried a blues, in his cushioned palace of Beatledom, Yer Blues, which was a piss take, anyway. 

I Don't Wanna be a Soldier Mama starts with a beautifully distorted bend on the guitar before splashing into a vat of reverb with the rest of the band as John tells us of all the bad things he doesn't want to be like a soldier or a lawyer or a rich man or a poor man or a sailor or .... The crashing echo and metallic sound of the vocal give this one a kind of mystique but it's so repetitive (by intention) that you really have to just lie back in it and float.

Gimme Some Truth starts like a punch, straight in to the driving band, slide guitar, bass, rhythm electric along with Lennon's clear and alsmot reverb-free vocal which bites hard at "tight-lipped narrow minded mama's little chauvanists" among other deliciously invective word salad. The middle eight intensifies this by bashing into the fourth above as Lennon rasps his Eddie Cochrane voice: "No short haired yellow-bellied son of Tricky Dicky's gonna Mother Hubbard soft soap me". Bugger the lot of this lysing and spinning, just give him some truth. George Harrison takes a sweet but sharp slide solo which leads back into the middle eight. The grind and the power just make you want to listen to this all afternoon; it feels like every frustration you've ever had all at once is getting beaten up by the good older guy at school. This was originally a Beatles song. I only found that out in the last few years. There's a recording of the band going through the middle eight with Paul helping enthusiastically. It made more sense to be thinking it was one of the fresher tracks as it really packs more of a wallop than anything else on the record. Still, the realisation here, an old progression dragged out of an old songbook and it gets to sound this good. Possibly my favourite solo Lennon song.

With great judgement Oh My Love's almost spooky gentleness follows this onslaught. It's a needed drop in violence but a continuation of intensity. In terms that sound very much like Yoko's poetry, John feels the wind and sees the sky and for the first time his mind is wide open. Lennon's double tracked vocal is perfectly controlled and moves through the pentatonic melody in a glide. A dreamlike but tightly packed love song of nothing but sincerity. Piano, guitar (George is playing his Les Paul clean and its thick ringing adds a swooning eeriness), bass and voice. No Woolworths strings required nor any given. This is a tiny masterpiece with a gigantic statement.

I knew enough about the Beatles' story to understand on first listen that How Do You Sleep? is a savage character assasinaiton of his old partner in tunes Paul McCartney. References to Sgt Pepper, the Paul is Dead hoax, a lot of Paul song titles from then and the time, accusations of writing muzak and so on. The song with its unvarying structure of self call and response, charge after charge without right of reply plays like those revenge fantasies you might recall form childhood where you stand up and get 'em good and they just stand there and take it. The music is a growling bluesrock, mean as mustard and relentless. This is the one track where the strings work as you don't expect them against the hard guitar rock but their sinewy lines, (for once not just playing chords) add a cinematic weight to the harrangue. But, in the end, harrangue is what it is. Lennon later attempted to ameliorate it by saying that he was just using his anger to construct a song. Really? Songs don't just appear and live in this environment, they get arranged, and recorded with many takes, mixed and pressed on to records and packed into artwork for the world at large. If you put out a record on a whim and forget about it what does that say about your integrity as an artist? He sang it and he meant it. The story went that he heard Paul's song Too Many People and took it personally (and bloody how!). When McCartney responded, if he did, it was with Let Me Roll It. That sounds like no one but John (even down to the hard driven riff and the primal scream in the fade) but it's just a love song. This meant more to me as a teenager when I thought along those lines, vengeance for a trifle, but now I just try to enjoy the music of it.

How begins with a descending melody in the vocal followed by a pair of emphatic chords on the strings and reminds me of nothing more than what the same producer did to the song Long and Winding Road which was so damned by its writer. It doesn't sound like a subtle dig though (not after the last track). John wonders how he can go on when he feels so uncertain and disorientated. It's perfectly adequate and feels bigger than it should but has a consolidating middle eight and does its job. Lennon's vocal lifts the song above this lukewarm reception of mine as, again, he sounds completely sincere.

Oh Yoko might have been almost designed to rankle anti Yoko folk (who existed in their millions) as a ditty about the best revenge being living well. But again, it just sounds sincere as John's pleasant and happy voice rides above a kind of Dylanesque country shuffle. A blend of Onoesque imagery and Lennonesque word play and a junty good natured rhythm that rise to a joyful chorus that should sound embarrassing but never does. It's just so good natured that you might forget that the last time he closed an album off it was with the listless and exhausted My Mummy's Dead. The jaunty jalopy of Oh Yoko jingles all the way to the fade and we're all happy. 

Lennon was famously fickle about his own work, damning it one day and casting thunderbolts of self-praise the next. Some of the better known quotes from him about Imagine were complaints that he allowed to be too sugar coated. The worst of the string arrangements do carry it closer to supermarket muzak than they should; there is no irony to them when they flab out the sound in songs like Jealous Guy and Imagine itself. Not just George Martin but anyone who took the job of preparing string accompaniment to these tunes who wasn't already just doing what he was told would have produced something less anodyne. Compare the masterful, living strings on Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left to the muzak of the orchestrations on Bryter Later. It wasn't just John Lennon who suffered but my feeling is that he was complicit, perhaps insisting on the approach being simple and simple equalling honest. I don't know that much but I always note them and have to pretend they're keyboards which is how they seem to be written.

Outside of arrangements a major affliction in this record is the energy-draining reverb that some tracks are subjected to. I am not of the anti-reverb synod and have no respect for it or any blinkered thinking about music production but Soldier and Imagine, among others, are hampered by it. The title track about the possibility of world peace andits singer sounds small and distant. The snarling attack on accepting a place in the rat race, Soldier, sounds like a jam in the next room.

Imagine is the album Lennon presented after his personal demons were dealt with in the previous one. Here he resumed his place in the world and sang to it of peace, regrets for cruelty, rejection of its social demands and finally love and it works as two sides of music as well as a suite of songs. Less compact than the previous one but more outreaching for all that. Of the two it's the one I'm more likely to listen to.

This article was informed by my own experiences with the LP as I owned it in the late '70s as well as the recent Complete Collection box set. The LP was bought at Ken Herford's import shop around the corner from my place and was a US pressing with quadraphonic capability. The stereo system my father built for the main entertainment room had four large speakers but they presented the same stereo image back and front as a kind of basic surround sound. Quadraphonic playing required special equipment which I nor anyone I ever knew had. that said the sound of this deep dish vinyl filled the room with warmth and sparkle. The blu-ray disc that comes with the box set blows that completely out of the water with an intimate immersion that makes you feel like you are lying on the floor as the music is being recorded.

I didn't wholly like the album as a mid teen. I liked the melodic numbers, found Soldier an impenetrable mess and thought It's So Hard sounded like a pisstake and How sounded like muzak. While I skipped tracks on every album I had these were songs I never bothered with more than once. The most played pair of songs were Gimme Some Truth and Oh My Love which I delight in to this day. The LP came with an outsize poster of Lennon at a white piano. It went on the wall of my room. When I moved from Townsville for good and distributed a lot of my '70s albums to people who might wanted them more than I ever would again, I kept Imagine. When the Complete Collection appeared I hesitated and decided against buying it but then saw it at a massive dicount and figured I'd get it for the blu-ray alone. 

The blu-ray features a warm, immersive surround mix of the album, keeping parts of the arragements in place within the  expanded field. There are no gimmick moments of saxes flying around the room or vocals taking turns in different speakers. This adds to the sense of moment and presence and the audio qulaity is never less than warm and pleasing. I was curious to try the offered quadrasonic (used to be called quadraphonic) mix that I was never able to hear the first time and can report that it's almost as involving as the 5.1. If anything it's noticeably more trebley, lacking roundness in the bass and the punchier parts of the drum kit but it is taken from the master prepared for vinyl so it wouldn't have the bass capability of hi res digital to begin with.

As to the content beyond the album itself there is a great mass of it: raw studio mixes, elements mixes which highlight different aspects of the tracks like the strings, out-takes, soundscapes that combine contemporary interviews with working versions of the songs as well as representations of the various stages of the singles from the time like Happy Xmas (War is Over). I would recommend against trying to swallow everything on offer here all at once; the repetition factor alone will exhaust you. I'd recommend for picking out sequences as the trackorder of the album is kept to whatever state the songs are in. If I have a favourite moment of the extra material it is the double tracked vocal of Oh My Love. For some reason Lennon and/or Spector chose against the exact doubling developed at Abbey Road for Beatles recordings and tried it the old way. Lennon's pitch is flawless and his nuance so closely matched it's breathtaking yet no one could do this exactly and the surrounding instruments mask much of it; hearing both in isolation, the eastern flavoured melody sung with such a studied care sends shivers up the spine.  

This box set is a wonder. You pretty much get the deepest dive any member of the general voting public is ever going to get into the origins, gestation and fruition of this record. And that's before you get to the heavy bound book. Want to know about Imagine and also the processes the ex-Beatle was going through to make this statement shell out for this box. It looks beautiful and sounds like a dream.

1981@40: ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES IN THE DAK - ARCHITECTURE AND MORALITY

A skittish racket that could be a fusebox arcing or someone drumming with chopsticks on laminex. A hiss wells up. Before you can work out what anything is, the rhythm of rhe noise is carried into drums and acoustic guitar. A screaming synth line fades in as Andy McCluskey's wailing vocal comes in, anguished. The first time I heard this song I thought it was the Cure, so close is McCluskey's vocal to Robert Smith and even the chorus: "Oh my god what have I done this time?" While the lyric is abstract as will be the case in most of the words on this album, the chorus suggests nuclear apocalypse. The world in fact was only two years away from one that almost happened. My comparison with Smith is not the kind of lazy thinking that informs the worst of criticism; I think the tone of voice is intentional; yelling with a Cure-like angst was more in line with the widely held fear of sudden annihilation that dragged everything down at the time and words to that effect sounded better than the more melodic vodcal parts on the rest of the album. Not a pisstake or a copy but a recognition.

In fact, the very next track couldn't be further from the opener with the gentle floating synths of She's Leaving. A  dramatic pair of notes and a snare hit and we're drifting on Kraftwek arpeggios and synth choirs. McCluskey's vocal is smooth and creamy as he describes a woman's disillusionment with her relationship. A perfect example of UK synthpop: dynamic and despite being quite high bpm feels dreamy and slow. A dark keyboard bass drone grind below the final lines as they are repeated with sadness: "The more we learn the less we know".

Sounvenir was the first single and the vocal is taken by the other one (sorry, Paul Humphreys) after a genre-marking vocal melody played on a bell like synth tone. Humphrey's much slighter voice lists the things that have consumed his life like creative work and however much he progresses his feelings still remain. It's a pleasant wafting afternoon third glass of riesling when you're twenty type of song and neither offends nor draws attention.

Sealand seems like it's going to be an instrumental. Keyboards interplay often dissonantly before they coalesce, incorporating the outliers in a more complex harmony while the gently descending motif gathers strength. There is a cinematic quality to it reinforced by the dynamics and space. Eventually, we do get a vocal which, in it's entirety (the phrases sparse and stretched): "Sealand, forget a friend, she'll not leave there again. Mother, sister at home. These I'd value so." A heartbeat electro kick drum guides us into more gentle swirls of keyboards when suddenly a clanging noise like hammering or an engine clunks in time momentarily before fading into an even more ethereal outro. Is this about the world war two sea fort that became the sovereign principality ourside British waters because of pirate radio? McCluskey has reported denied this (and the lyric doesn't help either way)

The oddity at the centre of this album is its most engaging passage as the old disc is flipped for side two and two songs about or inspired by or created within cooee of the notion of Joan of Arc take up almost half of the vinyl side (but that's not a memory as I never had the vinyl of this, just a cassette and more recently a cd). 

Joan of Arc begins with a falsetto note held by breath and a long delay. McCluskey comes in with a Brian Wilsonish melody that is soon borne on electrodrums and string synth. When the real drums kick in the arrangement is like a synthpop reading of Sloop John B, comlplete with glockenspiel. A drumless interlude is broken by a soaring third verse an octave higher. The song ends with the band retreating as the now choral echoed vocal is joined by another as they gently close. Joan of Arc as a kind of California Girl.

What I always think is a crossfade is actually just a new track. A jarring chord on a mellotron is followed by another on an organ. And again. Then a speedy waltz advances with a military accent. Mellotron strings whine out the vocal melody which McCluskey takes up: "If Joan of Arc had a heart would she give it as a gift to such as me...." The mellotron changes key oddly but then it's clear why: McCluskey can't make it high enough to go an octave over it. So it's less than that but still very comfortably airborne. Back in the home key the strings bear us on their floating crest as the drums beat a warlike march. Fade.

I know people who found this doubling up annoying: why write two slight things about the same person? Well, they're different statements. Bother are romantic of sorts but seem to be from different narrators, first a feisty teenaged fan who thought his confused love/worship of the figure was returned, if cruelly and then a more mature voice singing a lament: "she cared so much she offered up her body to the grave." 

I had this on tape until recently and remember my cassette was always half wound so it would be near this mini song cycle. The only other OMD artefact I had was the 45 of Enola Gay. I remember feeling very superior, confident that I was the only one in any room who knew that it was about the plane that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima as everyone else bopped along to the infectious, dancey hit. The song meaning was actually pretty common knowledge but until I understood that I felt a thrill in knowing that it was a party favourite about a cataclysm, there was an eerie tingle to that. The Joan of Arc songs are like that but grown up. They are serious, taut and shaped exactly as they need to be, fitting so perfectly they feel crossfaded in the recollection. Beautiful.

A light beeping melody. Choral aahs on the mellotron. A quacking Farfisa organ progression. The piece forms and builds with synth drums, hammering and tool sounds over an engine like pulse. Discordant ghosts of phrases from the electrical field. The scale is grand but dark. The edifice of sound, the building feels like an office block or a Ballardian hi-rise estate tower. The title track does seem to express its name. As with Gary Numan, OMD learned the lessons of Kraftwerk when it came to instrumentals: treat them like atmosphere, set the scene the rest will follow. This is a small but welcome wonder on the home stretch.

Georgia couldn't be more contrasting with its bright and pealing synth riff and electro percussion. A shouted upbeat vocal. The boppy splendour conceals a lyric of separation. "Dancing in the rings of the western world. Blindfolds on but we don't care." A sudden turn into a whining replay of the chords without the arpeggio shows us how a simply change in presentation of the same music can alter its entire mood. A gunshot and it's done.

A beautiful sobriety ends the album with The Beginning and the End. A bittersweet keyboard introduction gives way to a jangling guitar arpeggio. McCluskey's voice is a smooth, breathy croon as he sings about the beginning and the end with the kind of modal melody we have heard throughout the album. His voice shifts seamlessly into his glassy falsetto as the the gentle synthesiser wash moves below into the fade.

The thing that lifts bands of any genre above the main is always character. As far as synth pop went there are few that do this: Numan had his paranoid sci-fi cityscapes, Soft Cell found the conduit to soul shouting, John Foxx went full Ballard and the Human League were soon to make the biggest shift from big bleak swathes to pop that went down like dessert. OMD from their World War II name to Enola Gay to the aching intensity of the Joan of Arc songs brought history. Not just in the personalising of watching Jeanne leave them in the field or Enola Gay as a big sky mumma whose kiss will never fade away as the mushroom cloud expands. The other kind of history they bring is to establish a frank admission of Karftwerk's influence before moving off in many different paths, adding more cinematic atmosphere and a joyous songcraft that led all the way back to the Zombies or the Beatles.

The result is an album that sounds like 1981 in a glass, this sip sparkles, that one warms and all of it reminds me of the brutalist '70s buildings of Griffith Uni, late nights with 4ZZZ finishing assignments longhand and those first few steps into the dimly lit hall of a party. Sealand cured my hangovers and Maid of Ornleans almost always brought me just short of tears. A series of welcome memories that don't have to be nostalgic.