1973 @ 50: QUEEN

There are many ways to tell the world you have arrived as a band. In the age of the LP this only ever happens in hindsight but it can still be fun to think about. Paul counting in the first Beatles album. Jimmy Page's hammering powerchords opened Led Zep 1. Queen starts with a gallop. But it's a fade in.

Keep Yourself Alive starts with a chugalugging, heavily phased palm muted chord, joined by a flashy riff, louder, closer until the band's all there and they ramp it up to a fourth above. A brief clearing of the stage. Freddie comes in with a growl both rough and melodic. It's a litany of experiences. He was told million times, the sold a million mirrors, he ate a million dinners, he loved a million women etc.  The chorus bursts into the major key with a call and response of the title. What might at first sound like a corporate hippy anthem of try and try again carries a shade more darkness in the suggestion of the great opposition that the whole cosmos might as well be pushing back with. It's a fun and fast rock song with show off playing (Brian May modestly but firmly demonstrating his guitar arranging skills and tone shaping in the solo and Roger Taylor getting a micro solo on the drums) but also a statement of defiance. They're singing to the listener from their own experience (and a little hubris: their trial and error is nothing on Bowie's). 

Doing Alright is a legacy of the pre-Queen band Smile. Mercury takes the vocal to a liminal space between head voice and falsetto before the rest of the vocal members and multitracking come in with glorious harmonies. The mood and rhythm break with a diversion into a kind of sunny Latin shuffle which escalates into a crunching electric riff and metal version of the whimsy. Back in first verse land it's all light melancholy and sweets. Big riff breaks in again for a solo on top before a clean finish on the chorus. At one point this might well have been a song Brian May sang in the shower but by the time it got to the second track of Queen's debut disc it is presented as a showcase of harmonies, sudden turns and virtuoso guitar playing.

Having begun with something single-worthy, then the school concert intro to the band, they move on to a number that would only ever be an album track. Great King Rat starts with a crunchy minor key riff that opens up with a reverby acoustic and distant lead vocal. The creation of space and light in the arrangement and production is impressive when you consider that the modal tonality and motion of the lyric could have most easily be squeezed down into a kind of sea shanty. Here it is widescreen cinema. The subject of the song might be a gangster or just some wideboy Mr Sin who lived hard and played deadly. The chorus includes a corruption of the Old King Cole rhyme, giving it more intrigue and atmosphere. And then the middle section (too long and distinct to be a middle eight) which crashes and changes to a major mode as Freddy sings like a herald with lines from GKR's life about being a bad guy to get ahead (pretty much the opposite sentiment to the opening track). This ends with a trailing wordless vocal and patted acoustic guitar moment before we crash back into the last verse, guitar solo (ending in a burst of studio applause) and final chorus that ends with a fade out on a tom tom roll.

My Fairy King closes the first side with the kind of showcasing we've already heard in Doing Alright but bigger and wider. Rhythm changes, new melodic material , instrumental workouts, more of Brian May's wind quintet guitar tone, some impressive piano performance and lots and lots and lots of harmonies. It's easy to dismiss a track like this as showing off but it's worth recalling a few things about the time, also. 1973 might well be associated with glam rock but it is also a time when the prog bands were gigantic enough to have their live gear moved in road trains with the name of each member emblazoned on the the roof of the semitrailers. To stand out in this environment and avoid any possible charge of cashing in on camp or glam you needed to show that you could not only arrange like a 19th century composer but play every note perfectly AND provide a kind of mythos for any characterisation you included in the lyrics. If this had ever been a simple singalong it quickly got the Queen treatment. The great apotheosis of this, Bohemian Rhapsody, would not appear for a few albums and years on and by its time was prepared and recorded by a band with some rapidly acquired discipline. Until then, the world got things like this which, as calculated as it had been, sound mostly like a mess, as though Andrew Lloyd Weber threw an uncooperative rock opera out the window and went back to the drawing board. Beautiful vocals and fine playing but also very astutely placed at the end of a side of vinyl.

Side two begins with Liar. which begins with a drum pattern that the song proper when it begins ignores for a more Who-like powerchord workout made for the kind of venues where the band wanted to headline. A little calm then Freddy comes in with lines from a confession which are answered by the choir calling "liar!" The point at which Freddie wails, "nobody believes me!" and it's a small milestone. All good singers have one thing in common; they make every vocal about themselves. You might be the most proficient, have the most unassailable falsetto, be able to shatter wine glasses with your highest chest voice note, but if you can't make something, whether written for you or you found under a caravan, sound like you, then you don't get to join the greats. Sometimes this is self-fulfilling like Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan who only ever could sound like themselves and only every sang their own lines. Mostly it's the preserve of the tiny few. When Freddie complains that nobody belieeeeves him (I'm hearing it in his scansion as I type) it comes straight from him. By the time we get to the Oh Sinnerman call and response he finally sounds like the Freddie Mercury we would know and love, not just a skilled vocalist. Perhaps it also had to do with the enhanced tightness of the arrangement on this song which never strays too far from its own path in stark contrast to the previous track. It's as though they started on side one as a good band learning their trade and became Queen on side two.

The Night Comes Down begins with a gorgeous acoustic guitar workout. After a quick flourish from the Brian May orchestra, the vocals start with a refreshing acoustic vamp. Freddie's vocal takes us through a nostalgic trek before the choir enters with the chorus, plain but delicious. Plain, does what it says on the tin but it's a good tin. Brian May song and lovely for all that. It ends with a dazzling Brian multi-geetar serenade.

And bumps right into a thing that would be a feature of every Queen album until Jazz, the Roger Taylor rocker. John Deacon, on bass, was the only one who didn't sing lead vocals. Brian May did but not for a while. That left Freddie Mercury whose command of his voice had no equals on the face of the earth. So Roger went the other way and tried for a mix of Ozzie Osbourne and Robert Plant. Modern Times Rock and Roll charges like a mad bull for less than two minutes and doesn't waste a nanosecond. the breathless charge of it presaged the kind of full throttle of early punk. I bet no early punk acknowledged this, though.

The other thing that Brian May did was big metal songs. Son and Daughter is one of those, combining a big sinewy riff, crunching verse chords and a big bright chorus. The narrator complains about societal roles and the futility of pushing back against it. Why the chorus about wanting someone to be a woman? Maybe, after all that struggle he wanted love and sex to be simple. Absolutely no idea. Probably just sounded good sung. The guitar workout at the end is especially refulgent, casting more aural light than any so far on the record.

Jesus establishes a slamming two chord figure over which Freddie sings a fairly straight account of the fame of Christ. It's impassioned, serious and thoroughly hooky. Freddie wasn't remotely Christian but I tend to think he knew his audiences were acquainted with the bible story and probably admired the legend of the prophet, his power and adoration as a kind of bronze age rock star. This song features the kind of double speed instrumental section known and loved by numberless garage rockers but, considering the skill of the guitar playing, it's painstaking tonal setup and leaning toward atmosphere rather than chops it resembles most closely the Jeff Beck period Yardbirds. It's a stunning act of rock guitarism which yet gives way to a straight reading of the final verse and chorus which ends acapella until the fade.

The final track is an instrumental preview of the early single The Seven Seas of Rhye (fully realised on the following album) and is a softened anti climax after Jesus but pleasant for all that.

I didn't know this album until after I had my first Queen album A Night at the Opera. I'd heard Bohemian Rhapsody in the school holidays between '75 and '76. First week back at school, after hearing everyone else had heard it, too, a casually occurent wish was fulfilled when the video was on Countdown. It was as good as I remembered it. A few weeks later I bought my US pressing from Ken Herfords Import Records around the corner and luxuriated.

 And then, as every teenaged kid does, I had to get the rest of them. From memory, it was II then this one, then Sheer Heart Attack by which time the sequel to Opera, A Day at the Races, had come out. So, while I didn't hear them all at once it was in a squashed time period and they all pretty much blended ... except for this one. As the inadvertent effect was of a band sounding as though they worked toward and finally achieved their own sound in the space of one album, it felt like a first effort, the scene in the movie (of any rock biopic) where someone knocks something over, comes up with a phrase of future import, stumbles on a riff or whatnot and the rest is hysteria. 

But it was more like the opposite; the band had moved from this self-imposed image to the next, taking on players and singers (like Freddie) until at this point in their career they recorded these songs and struck upon their personality and sound. One of the things that is very notable. here, is that, for all the feeling around on the first side, there is a consistency that does form and a tone, character and weight that will take them to choose their strengths and present in sharper focus with each new effort. This is what happened with Queen. It wasn't the soaring development of a Beatles but for the first decade at least, no flab or filler either (ok, the John Deacon songs but a few of those were massive hits). And there was enough in the tank for the band that got to worldwide number one with a novelty single and only got stronger from that point. While they're clearly serious about their work in this first record it will always, after what followed, sound like workshopping rather than worldbeating. That said, find any rock band that wouldn't be proud enough of this to feel that they could just stop here.

PLEASE PLEASE ME @ 60

"One two three FOUR!" And we slam into I Saw Her Standing There in full rock and roll strength, starting with an original from the stage repertoire, an original that they played in Hamburg (albeit at a late stage). The chunky rhythm and bass drums that flail out from solid time to flourishes, the surfy lead and gleaming harmonies under a full throated MacCartney vocal. Ends on a full stop. An exhilarating introduction: world meet Beatles, Beatles, world.

(This one was written when McCartney was only just twenty and had a seventeen year old girlfriend. Don't beat that up to be anything predatory or age inappropriate because it isn't.)

Misery was intended for Helen Shapiro who would have done it more than justice. A big embracing vocal opening featuring the toolbox: melisma, tight sub-screaming Lennon voice and a charming transition from minor to major in the chorus keep it in the recollection.

Anna (Go With Him), Chains, Boys. Beatles cover versions are generally more interesting for what they reveal about their influences than as interpretations. It's almost true that the originals on this album are like homework after learning the covers. That's about the same as any band that starts writing its own material. Playing industrially long sets and keeping your job on stage is persuasive; learn it or die. Add astute, observation and high musicality (and not a little internal competition) and you get this band. All of these are competent rock cover versions of songs from the soul and Motown realms but any post-Beatles ears are going to be hankering for originals, however derivative. The addition of wailing blues harp o'er head does, however make a difference and gives the songs a Merseybeat touch.

Ask Me Why is one such and it's almost entirely forgettable. There are dynamics, scansion changes and a well wrought middle eight but it just doesn't lift above apprentice level.

Please Please Me is a triumph for the nascent relationship that the band struck up with their producer George Martin. Conceived as a Roy Orbison thumper like Running Scared or In Dreams, Martin suggested they speed it up. They did and made it their own thing. A harmonica riff adds a bright wail to the guitar figure. The vocal harmonies are classic Lennon McCartney with John singing the descending line while Paul stays on the high note, each line ending with a surprise ascension in the rhythm guitar. A tight call and response chorus that blooms into a falsetto title line. All present and correct. This is why people not only caught on but made it the band's first number one.

Love Me Do was their first single and is a great illustration on the difference between influence and copying. If they'd stuck to the plan of writing an Everly Brothers number they would have incorporated more of those country harmonies and thought more about the separation of the verse and chorus. Instead, they sang and played it until it sounded like themselves. It's stripped back. Harmonica riff, glistening harmonies, cool middle eight that works both sung and done on harmonica and a stop start chorus that drives it into memory. All acoustic, too. Not bad.

PS I Love You is a pleasant wafting song of romantic longing with Paul singing in his grownup voice (until the end where he sings fill lines in his rock voice). The arrangement and choruses with the vocal harmonies come off as more staid than the songs of the first side but the gamechanger chords and the strange hushed solemnity make it a quiet kind of standout.

Baby it's You starts with the sha la la la las of the previous era and for all the energy keeping it aloft it sounds and feels like filler.

Do You Want to Know a Secret begins with George's vocal in cod flamenco mode with a showbiz slow mo introduction in a minor key. This quickly turns into a slow trotting sweet address to a girlfriend. The chorus (which is not the title line) ends with an off pitch falsetto which marks the fade out, producing winces.

A Taste of Honey a big showbiz reverb slow intro with big harmonies continues through the modal folky waltz with Paul being a grownup again. This is a gem from the days of the Hamburg lifestyle gigs. The middle eight changes time signature before launching into the call and response ending. It's the most effectively melancholy song (cover or not) on the record. Even if overdrenched in reverb and erring on the off-broadway side of things it does foreshadow McCartney's future penchant for quiet sadness. Three years later it would be the genuinely affecting For No One and the ice cold wrench of Eleanor Rigby. Three years.

There's a Place is one of the least celebrated early Beatles songs and that's a pity as it's a gem and it's interesting. After a brief harmonica riff the mid paced rocker features almost exclusively John and Paul harmonies until the middle eight. While there are lines about an assumed object of affection the main point is that the narrator of the song seems happiest when withdrawn into his own mind. The lines about no sad tomorrows and there being no sorrow in his mind sound like over-protestation when that's the place he goes when he wants to escape things just like that. No chorus as such but the ending insistent on the title phrase repeats to the fade with more melancholy harmonica tells us there's always one place to run.

Twist and Shout proves that while most of the covers were a mix of tribute, songcraft recognition and filler, they could make some of their choices their own. While I knew as a much younger fan that this was not their song, I still cannot hear the Top Notes or the Isley Brothers versions because this one is in the way. A big clunking riff circles around C F G like a steam era machine starting up. Lennon's throat tearing berserker vocal rips holes in the wallpaper as the others repeat his lines in gleaming harmony. After a little guitar harmonising the next hook appears with the harmonies forming a chord and get so high they start screaming the last verse gets stuck on the instantly sexual "well shake it shake it shake i, baby, now!" before the triad once again builds up to a climax and then comes to a sighing rest. 

If the opening track promised good times we've just heard where they lead. This is Lennon's response to McCartney's workout in Standing There and the two contain what only have to be some songs. The fact that it is better than that makes this a debut to remember. Except that people don't.

This and the next one released in the first year of Beatlemania are eclipsed by the monster singles the band released as a priority and still form the main touchpoint of revisits to the first era of the band. It's true that the two earliest singles are on the record (including their first number one) and they're good pop songs, they don't have quite the force or invention of a She Love's You or I Want to Hold Your Hand.

This album sounds like the albums of any band of the time, almost an afterthought between the singles rather than the other way around. The band that would, more than any other demonstrate the value of albums to make larger statements began like all the others because who could know? But if you go through from this to mid point at Rubber Soul you will know from the simpler more rushed affair that this is that the seeds will sprout into a dazzling garden. Then embark on the rest of the trek with the callback on Revolver, the sinister, druggy count in to the opening track, and you'll know that, while their own past never dragged them, they were thankful of it.

Listening notes: I chose the CD from the Beatles in Mono box from 2009 as it remains the best way to hear this. 

1983@40 : SWEET DREAMS (ARE MADE OF THIS) - EURYTHMICS

It must have been January that I heard it because I know I first saw the video in February. The song has a quiet epic feel to it, opposing tinkly electronics with atmospheric grunts and a big vocal with a varying delay and reverb. Over a drum machine kick the soundscape is restless and prying like a audience of town gossips witnessing an orgy. The vocal melody, supported by distant, sweet backing vocals, is central and modal, now plunging into the lower register now squeezing into psychedelic dissonance in the higher. Love is a Stranger, it's like addiction, a kidnapper, a seducer, or anything that takes and changes you, assuming different forms with their own effects until you, too, are transformed. The video is highly cinematic from the time that all of them were but this one delivered a kind of career building canniness that many were not. The duo both appear in various roles and costumes but the focus is on the cool beauty of singer Annie Lennox as she first sings to camera from the back of a limousine in a flouncy wig then in more of a dominatrix in a white tiled room that could be a bathroom or torture chamber, then as something more like herself with short Bowie hair, slowly removing leather gloves, androgynous in a pinstripe suit, writhing in a mass of 35 mm film. Finally, as the Thinner White Duke, she moves robotically in mirror shades beside the Chauffeur Dave Stewart, and stares down the lens.

When I head this on the radio it sounded like it was being told reverse shot, by the victim or affected, not the perp. I never heard it that way after seeing the clip. That effect is what sealed the deal on the Eurythmics, state ambiguity in no uncertain terms and keep the pop hooks coming. It was at the end of a relatively short road but one that had already involved a few drastic changes. As The Tourists, Stewart and Lennox were part of a '60s influenced power pop unit with a few respectable chart toppers to their name. Sensing the change in the wind they left to form the duo with this name but basically the same sound but with more quirk. By the time this album came around, they were possessed of their own recording studio and banks of new electronics. Their debut In the Garden sounds very old hat by comparison.

So, I'm spending a lot of time on this song on an album that contains ten. Well, for starters, as songs go, the rest of the first side is filler. Well, that's how it sounds until you listen to the next side and understand that that was where they kept the real songs. Alternatively, the first side is for dancing and the other one for listening. But we can't have everything in formula, can we, because side two begins with one of the most durable dance numbers from its era.

Sweet Dreams begins with one of the hookiest synth riffs in all pop music. You could play it on guitar but it would only sound right through the envelopes and filters of a fat toned '80s keyboard. The vocals, Lennox on thick self-harmonies but a strong stern lead line out the front really just repeats a chorus verse and kind of middle eight from go to whoa. It's a little like the person who lived through Love is a Stranger, older and worn, giving advice to a younger potential victim. "Some of them wat to use you. Some of them want to be used by you,"  as well as, "hold your head up (moving on).."

The video is far more conventional for its time. Lennox in full Bowie in a suit mode sings to camera as though delivering a business presentation while Stewart types at a computer as though playing the riff. When the instrumental comes up they frolic in a pasture with cellos and cows (hey, it was the '80s, man!). Repeat. It's not the invention of this but its confidence that grabbed everyone who saw it and then heard it on the dancefloor or the radio and fancied they heard more depth and variation in the lyrics than the song has. That, too, feels intentional. The song clocks in at about three and a half minutes, still on the longer side of the average top 40 number and most of it repeats the first thirty seconds mechanically.

This LP was released with a cousin video for the dawning of the age of home video with these clips and some live performances. That wasn't entirely revolutionary; Blondie had done it a few years earlier with videodiscs, but this time it was in a format that everybody had. Unlike the second bite of power pop previously, this one was made to sell and dominate. 

And that's why you get real songs on side two. Jennifer starts with the sounds of the seaside. The synths kick in  but you're not meant to dance along to this eerie ballad about a suicide. It could be a ghost story but it doesn't have to be. What it is is a mix of beautiful and unsettling. I miss that about early '80s pop, that it could completely ditch the boy/girl narrative and step quietly down the dark stairs with horror movie musical boxes tinkling away among the cobwebs.

This is the House is a kind of Talking Heads vignette about a burnt down house that starts with a few lines in Spanish. Somebody told Me is a fullthroated vocal workout over a soul brass riff on the lower end of the keyboards. This City Never Sleeps is a sombre reflection on a culture of isolation and resistance to stimulus. Brooding and deliberate, it steps on to the fade before a brief backwards message (from Dave Stewart, not Satan). Big and sad but it can afford to be at the end of this album that blends fun times steppin' out with the same kind of spooky big town songs on The Tourists deep cuts. 

Sweet Dreams is what happens when a reinvention is both calculated and fully embraced as a new strategy into a careerist lifestyle. The Eurythmics, from this point on, were free to dictate what they released, its musical style, video representation and what it was about. See also 1981's Dare from the Human League where the decision to join instead of futilely resist proved to be the right one. 

After this The Eurythmics could earn a living and be courted by a fickle music press on MTV or on the stage of a stadium. And if  they developed very, very little in the years that followed they were consistent and, most poignantly of all, prepared for a future that bands around them who stuck to their own cred rather than look beyond the old tribal ways and were surprised by the slowly exploding failure that changes in the environment, market, youth culture, etc. were to deliver to them. 

This album heard again now only approaches ineffectuality in that its pre-EDM dance numbers sound neo-retro-new-old rather than compelling in themselves. The singles that start each side are still immediate and strong. For a singles band that fit perfectly into the new multimedia demands of their era without hesitation, they endure.