My 1983

Got the Sunlander back to Brisbane earlier than normal with a grab of new songs written on keyboard. One of them had such an odd chord progression that I still need to write it down before I can play it again. Greg wanted to record a few of the ones we'd demo-ed before the break in 8-track. He'd been inspired by witnessing This Five Minutes record there over the holidays. We kept in touch via letters. Try doing that now. 

Also, he was going to go to Sydney with Tex Deadly and the Dum Dums. It had only been two months but I'd never heard of this band that featured both Wadley brothers. That's probably not true as it would've been mentioned in despatches. Anyway, in a development that would never cause a problem now (or even a few months later) Ian had just started a job at the Public Service and couldn't go. I was asked to stand in on guitar for the Sydney gigs. 

Practices for days learning both the Dum Dums set and the Gatekeepers songs for Basement. Exhausting but exciting. Basement was like a daydream breaking into reality. The recording quality was astounding to me, better than I imagined it could be. Some lessons: don't record guitars with reverb going in; if you think you have a choral vocal arrangement listen very hard to the practice tapes before wasting studio time on an embarrassingly bad recording. We redid Keeper of the Gate twice, the third time got it right ... ish.

After a fine suburban dinner, we packed into the van to get us to Sydney. A non-fatal drive. We checked into the Burnley in Kings Cross, feeling like veterans o' the punk wars. Walking around the Cross zapped our little minds with its surround sound music, arrays of sex workers and unsleeping street life. The first gig at the Southern Cross had a blowout by the support band so we, minus Greg Perkins, went on as the Gatekeepers in our first live show. We played big venues like the Trade Union and smaller cooler ones like Stranded with acts like The Johnnies, Hoodoo Gurus and The Scientists. Sydney audiences loved Greg Perkins in a way that none dared love anyone on stage in Brisbane. That was a window to the future. What a week and a bit that was.

I don't remember being expected to stay in the band but at the time Uni was more important to me than playing in a band whose music I wasn't a fan of, so when I was dropped off back in Brisbane at Griffith Uni in the middle of O-week, I felt nary a conflict. What I did have was a tape of the four songs we'd done at Basement and an academic year to get done.

Getting back home was good as I found out that my brother and his difficult family had decamped to Townsville so he could do his hospital internship. For the whole year. It was just me and Stephen who'd come down to finish his law degree. That gave me another problem but one disaster at a time. Unpacking that evening was like floating in an oxygen enhanced meditation chamber and being allowed to scream.

Third year was fine, really. Most of us had binged on the attractive film electives and were left only with history and politics electives. That was a slog but there was still a bunch of good stuff to do and discover. I liked Uni and I was good at it. Bob Hawke had led Labor to victory in the Federal election which was a blast after almost a decade of coalition bullshit. Closer to home, the Nationals won the State election in their own right and, for all we knew, would be in power until the end of time. Bummer.

Before he left for Sydney with the Dum Dums, Greg had put the song Susan Burn on to a cart at 4ZZZ and I woke one morning with it blaring on my clock radio. Living the holy Mangrovian dream, my friends. People I didn't know knew that song. After a few months, Greg returned to Brisbane. This had been announced in Time Off with a captioned photo that said he was coming back to join the Gatekeppers (sic). 

We started gigging and hit a steep learning curve about practicing and playing our instruments properly. After some yucky gigs we got better (enough for one uni crony who had seen one of the bad ones to approach me after a good one with a grin and, "well, Pete, ya did good"). This led to more recording, at the 8-track home studio of a friend of the Wadleys. This, plus a live track, made up what would be our Cosmic St cassette album (don't scoff, it was normal in that scene and, besides, however much of an exaggeration it might have been, it did get into the RAM independent top 10 ... for a week).

The band didn't impinge on study to my memory. Both seemed balanced, even with the busier social calendar that the former brought. I kept writing new stuff and at one point rigged up a pair of cassette players to do some primitive multitracking.

I finished up the year and the B.A. quite easily, without the rush of the disrupted previous year and far more confidence that I'd ever had of emerging with some decent results (I was that dick that would whinge loudly in the common room if he only got a pass). So, at some point in November of 1983. I took the bus back to the city and another to Auchenflower for the last time. At breakup drinks (Queens Hotel, the big one with the high ceilings) I thought I was having an acid flashback but was most likely just very pissed. Whatever we were feeling about it, we'd all got through three years of university at least a little the wiser but more importantly, the more fortunate for the free education of the time, for the post punk ethic of openness to exploration and bags of daydreams we'd need to grow out of.

But this summary should be about the music of the time. It's gone on longer than usual this time as I was making music as well as listening to it. So here are the singles I recall:

The big one was Blue Monday. The galloping drum machine intro and delayed entrance of the vocal with a great filling electronics made it both a dance-stravaganza and a troubling accusatory song that some thought was about the Falklands War and others a Swedish student suicide pact. You could dance and grieve at the same time. Australiana was a comedy bit that heralded a rash of other comedy records. I didn't love it but liked the idea of that charting. I and friends ridiculed Redgum's Vietnam song I was Only 19 little suspecting how genuinely affecting we would find it decades later. Prince continued on the scene with the iconic 1999 which, like almost everything else he released, interested not me. She Blinded Me With Science by Thomas Dolby annoyed me. Human League's Fascination had a great chorus and a goofy verse. Soweto was infectious and glorious until you thought about the by line and had to wince. The Eurythmics came out of the cocoon of their old power pop origins to fly high with a triumph of electro pop that resonates down the decades. The Clash were disintegrating fast and Rock the Casbah was proof. Kajagoogoo's Too shy was meant to be sexy but sounded more like the Blitz version of Playschool. Rio by Druan Duran had them push through to stadium star status and well beyond my interest. Wall of Voodoo burst out of the margins with another one for the ages with the propelled Mexican Radio. Tears for Fears gave us a emotive chunk of greatness with Mad World (yes, the original is still better than the movies version). UB40 covered Neil Diamond's Red Red Wine and made it into a poignant mini drama. The Cutter by Echo and the Bunnymen ruled its niche and influenced all. The Call released their hit The Walls Came Down which featured a wannabe David Byrne vocal and a wordless sung hook that ran up and down a major third. The Violent Femmes brought out the spare and impressive Gone Daddy Gone which won them fans. Madness ditched the ska beat for a '60s cover It Must be Love which was ok. Culture Club's boring Do You Really Want to Hurt Me was followed by the far superior Church of the Poisoned Mind. The Stray Cats' Stray Cat Strut was and is a jazzy marvel. INXS came out with The One Thing which was a variation on Subterranean Homesick Blues and took them further from their quirky origins closer to the big rooms. And that's all I recall. No, wait, there's one more.

The song I love possibly the most of anything that came out in 1983 was one that people mostly seemed to revile. There are people born decades after its release that have inherited their parents' distaste for the track. When I heard the opening riff of Safety Dance gleaming out of a car radio, with its bold modal tonality and fun vocals I had found the song of the year for me. I still adore it.

So that's it for then.  Happy News Year to Youse.

1983 @ 40: POWER, CORRUPTION AND LIES - NEW ORDER

Power, Corruption and Lies took New Order further into their emerging identity as a dance band with an edge. If that sounds dismissive and trivialising, it shouldn't. The band had struggled to put some distance between their illustrious early years. The first single even had the Joy Division by line and the album Movement felt like music that couldn't quite come unstuck from the last thing the band had done. The singles were the thing. Procession, Everything's Gone Green, Temptation and the stunner Blue Monday moved solidly into dance music, as much in stylistic debt to Georgio Moroder as Kraftwerk. When the next album came around, even if every other interview they did brought the old band back up, anyone with a persistent longing had to admit they had left that station.

Age of Consent's bright and catchy bass riff and keyboard patterns light up the room. Even Bernard's words about a failure of communication in a relationship sounded happy if you didn't listen to the lyric. And, yes, you could tap your toes or do the hip shake jerk all afternoon. If the funereal We All Stand bring back memories of Closer the arrangement is still sparser and lighter than it would have been. The mood is eerie rather than depressing. The Village brings back the brightness. "Our love is like the flowers," sings Bernard over busy and happy rhythms and textures that were fast becoming signature, guitar and keyboard tickles.

Notably absent from the production is the legendary figure of Martin Hannett. What he would have made of any of this is the stuff of guesses. The band took charge of production. When the joy of The Village fades into the mostly rhythmic introduction to 5 8 6 we can't imagine the old team adding atmosphere. This fades into the main body of the song which emerges from a low rumble into a busy electronic shuffle that sounds like someone tinkered a little with the Blue Monday midi programming. This, like all the songs on the old side one, allows textures and moods to speak more forwardly than individual songs and that plays perfectly well, even with the slower moments.

Side two brings us the open window on a summer day of Your Silent Face which begins with a synthesiser pattern so effortless and soothing you feel as though you're floating when it comes on. This opens on to a huge electronic strings chord progression that feels like a royal procession. Bernard's thinner melodica (haunting on In a Lonely Place) pleases. His vocal is calm and mid range. The strange lyrics report an experience that has left someone either apathetic or traumatised but beyond communication. At first the line, "why don't you piss off," sounds contemptuous, a cheap joke at the end of a hard won lyric. But the more I hear it the less I think it's the song's narrator and more the one who had the dark experience. This might belie the beauty of the musical arrangement (the closest, incidentally, that they ever got to sounding like Kraftwerk) but whatever personal motivation for the words the tension between the weary voice and the sublime grandeur of the music always compels me to either stop what I'm doing and give it all the attention I have or stop it and play it when I can listen only to it.

Ultraviolence plays like a disco march without the keyboards. The lyrics seem to bear the title out for once, with imagery of assault and consoling advice to move past a traumatic memory. The impersonality of the arrangement and subdued vocal add a creepy air and feel like a memory that encases the one recalling. gives me the shivers every time I hear it.

Ecstasy is mostly instrumental with a processed, robotic voice chanting something unintelligible as well as a lot of whispering. The strident dance groove is like  5 8 6 and might as well evoke a intoxication as just plain ol' dancing. 

The album ends on Leave Me Alone which has the now familiar New Order interplay between a big loping chorused bass and plinking guitar riff on the high frets that so many bands o'er the globe lifted wholesale. Bernard's words are melancholy, evoking failure of communication. To an exhausted person, everyone looks weary. Still, there's a lovely intrigue about: "but for these last few days, leave me alone." 

As with Movement you could  go through the words and the way the music sounds and make a case for the continued haunting of Ian Curtis over this band. It would be years before they could be heard in their own right. However, this time the band offered a constantly developing approach that would take them to moments of inspiring greatness. If this record sounds a little too much like mood over songwriting it might simply be a desire to sound as candid as they could. Peter Saville's artwork is a triumph, a lush painting of a bouquet interrupted by digital coding, keeping things both beautiful and always a little disturbing. 

And that works well by being subtle. This was not the new band's Unknown Pleasures, it was the state of things as they were. As with Movement, they left the big hit single off the album so it couldn't diminish what was there. What was there was something shared by other significant artists at the end of the free wheeling post punk years before so much of it was absorbed by a hungry mainstream. There was enough beauty here for a few car commercials, for sure, but too much murky shade for the big bucks world. Ok, so the next single after this was one song mixed four times which did not feel like fan service in 1983. But if you had this LP that might have given you a secret smile.

PUBLIC IMAGE FIRST ISSUE @ 45

A boomy bass wanders in space before a distant scream brings a drum roll and a big spacy pattern filled with heavily treated guitar playing what sounds like a metalwork shop with saws and the kind of tools you don't want to share a room with. More screams before Lydon comes in with lines about boredom, change and the repeated refrain, "I wish I could die." This might be Lydon's disgust with the scene he and his former cohorts did so much to make. The old punks (meaning those veterans form a very short lived scene) clung to what had become cultural traditions. The call to arms of British punk turned out to be more of a fanfare for the expansion and exploration of post-punk. Electronica, industrial, dub, and anything else that worked. That was the real revolution. Lydon's final words after nine minutes of oppressive dirge are spoken like a doctor pronouncing cause of death: Terminal boredom.

Religion is a spoken word track. Lydon rails against religion with a series of attacks. Religion II is the same with some expansions and a three chord grind like the opening track. I clearly recall how thrilling this was, hearing someone take aim like this. Then, perhaps less than a few listens later, it sounded like the poem that the Year 11 malcontent couldn't get into the school paper. The musical version packs more punch.

Annalisa begins with a bass and drums groove as substantial as a soul workout. Keith Levene's guitar, as effect laden as any of the other tracks (probably a combination of ring modulation and chorusing, but I'm guessing) gives more settled form to the rhythm, adding more of an offset. Lydon's vocals are high and whining but very effective. The song is the story of Annaliese Michel whose religiously extreme parents took her neurological condition for demonic possession and effectively tortured her to death. The song is not aired for shock value like the previous one, there's real compassion in there, even if it can be difficult to detect at first.

Side two begins with the anthem of the year. Public Image begins in steps. A bass playing quavers alternating between first and fifth. Drums enter with a slapping snare as Lydon repeats "Allo, Allo..."  before hte guitar comes in with a ascending progression which sets off ignition with a laugh from Lydon. Levene's riffing on this song is epochal. Huge fanfare-like figures of two note patterns that sounded in 1978 that you would never be able to learn them by ear. After John McKay's sabre slashing style on The Banshees' debut album, this sounded like it was imagined in widescreen. Lydon's verses could be about his former manager Malcolm McClaren or just as easily about Sex Pistols fans, railing against the scene's expectations and misrepresentations. Here, he claims his own, singing with neither the sneer nor the snarl of his Pistols vocals, hitting the notes he needs and sounding in total control. The chorus is the title, an elongation of the vowels as Levene's new fanfare rides the rhythm section like waves. A classic of the past fifty years and beyond. It never fails to excite me.

Low Life is like a shrill retelling of Public Image. More directly about McClaren, the "bourgeoisie anarchist". While there is none of the awe-inspiring musicality of the previous song, this packs its punch in clear terms. Lydon's vocals are clear but low in the mix. There are a few echoes of Steve Jones Major third descents in the guitar in the chorus for good measure.

An echoed slag-gather. The band comes in all at once for Attack with another Pistols like chord progression. Like Low Life the mix is kept low. Lydon's vocals are even more buried and drenched in delay. The attacks of the title refer more to those received buy Lydon, this new band and the one he was cast from. Judges, ministers, press, and anyone else are targeted in a series of J'accuse tirades. the song ends in a brief shambles.

Fodderstompf. What to say? Tinkling piano. Bass and drums play what sounds like contemporary disco. Keith Levene was absent so no guitar. After a few taunts like, "be bland, be boring." Jah Wobble and John  Lydon are at the mic rambling in high shrieking Monty Python voices. Lydon at one point intones, "we only wanted to finish the album with the minimum amount of effort which we are now doing very successfully." This goes for almost eight minutes. The first time you hear it, it's funny. It doesn't survive the first listen. "We only wanted to be loved," is screamed repeatedly and forms a chant or chorus or whatever your mood at the time makes of it. The drummer, Jim Walker describes feeling angry every time he hears mention of the track, let alone the track itself. He just hears Jah Wobble and John Lydon ripping off their fans. Something like that means that the track will have its devotees as well as detractors. Me? My mood decides.

In the very early '80s the bass player of the band I was in saw the cover among my records and asked: "Did you buy this because of the single?" He meant Public Image and his grin told he had, too, and then lived through the rest of it. Yes, I had. It was played on local commercial station 4TO who had been surprising in some of their staff's support of the edgier music coming from the U.K. at the time. I thought it sounded marvellous. It felt like Lydon was really moving on rather than getting bogged down and ther result was that from what I considered greatness he had burst into flames of inspiration. I was sixteen.

So I went down to the import record shop around the corner (Ken Hurford's Inport Records) and asked about it. They neither had it nor had heard of it so I ordered it. I was called a week later. I was surprised as I assumed it was coming in from the U.K. It was on the Australian Wizard label (as the Pistols had been). It was on translucent green vinyl.

I played Public Image about five times in a row, mostly buried in headphones to live inside that gigantic fanfare. Then I turned it over and heard the rest, right up to Fodderstompf. Fodderstompf, at least to a sixteen year old Pistols fan who was expecting the ascension from the greatness of Never Mind the Bollocks to even greater wonders, fucked the whole canvas up. The endless dirge of Theme passed by without effort because, once you knew it, you knew that it wasn't trying to be a snappy pop song but an atmosphere. Religion caught me at the right age but I'd skip the spoken word part. The rest I liked but missed the rallying cries of No Future or Pretty Vacant and I only wanted them brought into the greatness of Public Image. That wasn't the band on this record, though, nor on any after it.

Things got better; Metal Box and Flowers of Romance were classics of the post punk aeon. But this angry, contrary, mess of a record stopped everyone who might have rallied. And if they listened to the words, rallied in the best way by using it as inspiration. Having your trust thrown back in your face like a bucket of beery piss was not going to do that. Whose would? Well, it changed. The following year saw the release of The Great Rock and Roll Swindle which had fun moments but also a lot of prognosticative bullshit as well. We had to wait until Metal Box for PiL, as they started calling themselves. In the meantime the sounds from good radio stations ironed out the need for heroic band names and titles and could swathe us in the sounds of discontent that were by turns violent and breathtakingly beautiful. This was a speed bump, however inadvertently, but speed bumps are there to keep us alive and ready for more roads. So, maybe they did waste seven minutes of our time sounding like high school Monty Python kids at three a.m., maybe we needed the pause.

THE SCREAM - SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES @ 45

It's right there in the first few minutes of the album. A lone bass note gently slides downward. A guitar figure, unresolved, descends, falling through the dark. Percussion. A distant woman's voice wailing. There's two of them. Nothing's quite at the same level. Pure isn't so much an instrumental as an aural movie trailer, the genre madness horror. It's 1978, most albums released under the flag of punk start with big bashing guitars and sloganeering vocals. This band, composed of people on the scene from the word go, are going for atmosphere and it makes them stand out. It also makes them a little scary.

Jigsaw Feeling fades in after a brief silence, a chromatic riff with the guitar riff high on the fretboard, building until it reaches altitude when Siouxsie barges in with her bludgeoning voice. It's all wrong - pitchy and unbalanced - but it's perfect for the song, overbearing, harsh, punitive. "My brain is out of my hand, there's nothing to prevent, the impulse is quite meaningless in a cerebral non-event." The last syllable is punched out, percussive. You can hear the barre chords on the guitar now and they behave the way you'd expect a punk band but it's the descant lines, the metallic slashing overhead that will account for the band's guitar sound for this and the next album. It's not chaotic sonic flailing, there's a clear skill and direction to it, but it's troubling, violent but psychologically violent. As Siouxsie's voice punches about a shattered mental state, the bright stinging of John McKay's guitar is her equal. After the spooky opening, this is a torment ... and it appeal is strong and instant. 

Overground also fades in but it takes longer and keeps the tension from breaking into a barre chord assault. It's a strident Flamenco rhythm in the guitar which breaks the expected four on the floor of rock (let alone punk). Siouxsie comes in plaintively, worried about having to appear conventional to others. It's not what you'd call characteristic but it's worth remembering that bands off the mains of the time had to bend backwards for a foot in the door of a record company. Not everybody pranced around like the Sex Pistols, getting attention for swearing and spitting. The calibre of the music on this disc, the seriousness of purpose indicates that whatever they were like at parties, this band was looking to express their independence from their own peers. Not superiority, really more independence, the freedom to explore how they would, regardless of canons of behaviour that had already formed around them as to how a punk band should and sound and how they should act. Instead of pretending they weren't doing it they wrote an unignorable song about it which features hesitant guitar screeches between verses that suggest the danger of it. It's less the amped up football chants of Sham 69 than the exploratory noise of The Kinks or Who of the previous generation. Towards the end of the song, rather than bring it to a crescendo, they just intesify, Siouxsie doubling on the vocals, harmonising with herself but also getting mixed down as though polished into normality. Bold move, no guarantee the listeners would get it.

Carcass follows with a kind of reassuring familiarity. It's an early one and sounds it, a smashing descending guitar riff, a wailing vocal and insistent drums, it's tough nut punk all the way through even to the chorus: "Be a carcass, be a dead pork. Limblessly in love!" A sexually frustrated butcher dismembers the object of his affection, heightening his arousal as never before. It might sound like New Rose but the story could be straight out of The Painted Bird. We end on a field recording of snorting pigs.

The same brooding bass presence as the start of Pure. It's sliced up by the atonal guitar blades. Siouxsie begins the words and we realise, holy fuck it's a Beatles song. Her voice climbs through the ascending opening lines, twice by which time the band has picked up speed and her voice is a full throated wail. The chorus is robbed of the descending guitar line of the original but Siouxsie blares out an odd imitation "helter skelter, nananananananana!" The band charges through to the next chorus and then ends on the same doubling of the opening lines, climbing up through the noise. But this time it cuts abruptly as though it's fallen and crashed to the ground. The Banshees would revisit the Beatles again as a much changed band for 1983's Dear Pridence. It was from the same album but was not the same kind of cover version. Helter Skelter trades the screaming distortion of the White Album original and puts it by the other tracks in the dark. Dear Prudence was given a kind of post punk psychedelia, phasing and big production and a video shot in Venice with lots of dayglo colour distortion. It's the statement of an established band, comfortably flaunting an influence. Helter Skelter here is an experiment, a dare, brash young punks gatecrashing a Fab Four classic (well the song's Manson connotations didn't hurt).  End of side one.

Side two starts with the big sound of full barre chords through a phaser. This quickly turns into a more chunky rhythm as the band and Siouxsie come in. The vocals are in close harmony and kept in a block low in the mix. "I am just a vision on your t - v - screen. Just something conjured form a dream." Even the fame of the still small punk club scene led people to typify the band, particularly Siouxsie herself and as tv appearances and positive press increased, the richly imaged singer attracted attention from all quarters. "My limbs are like palm trees swaying in the breeze. My body's an oasis to drink from as you please." The sense of cultural predation was felt deeply. The spiky rhythm of the track with its pummelling tom toms, the compressed howl of the vocals and the lashing guitar tell us how angrily.

Metal Postcard (Mittageisen) begins with a threatening march rhythm on the toms and bass. The guitar comes in with sharp dissonant bends like staccato siren blasts before settling into the kind of chord riff that would sound like Black Sabbath if it were played on the lower strings. Up there on the higher frets it sounds more machine-like and cold. Siouxsie comes in with images of families dining on metal, workers saving metal for later as a chorus declares, "metal is tough, metal will sheen, metal will rule in my master scheme". This strange scenario is an image of fascism. The band had received aggressive responses to the inclusion of oppressive symbology like swastika armbands, however ironically or just provocatively they were worn. Siouxsie based the the lyric on work by Wimar-era collage artist John Heartfield whose surrealist anti-Nazi work (and his own Anglicisation of his name from Johan Herzfeld) put him afoul of the brownshirts and on the right side of history. The Banshees evocation of Heartfield was even released in German translation in Germany and made it to an equal best double A side in the U.K. (the other side Love in a Void won the airplay, though). It might not have assuaged the detractors (but not even the later song Israel could do that, however much of a classic of the era it became) but it stands as clear testament to the power of a band that could tighten its politics so forcefully and still produce a compelling rock song. As with most of the lyrics on this album there is an unsettling play between the nursery and the dystopian nightmare.

Nicotine Stain is plummets back to Ur punk the way that Carcass did, slamming powerchord riffs and yelling. It's all above ground this time as Siouxsie tears through smoking addiction. This applies to all other nasty habits, of course, which is a dangerous thing for potential rock stars to do, considering how many take the overcalming approach to tour stress. However, making it about cigarettes rather than heroin keeps the habitual nature of it in focus. Anyone can write a slamming anthem about smack (Lour Reed already did the depressing one about it). 

Suburban Relapse starts with stark dissonant guitar chords high on the fretboard. They come in from different speakers, left-right-left-right, stark and uncomfortably bright. The bass enters softly. The drums hit a bar of tom toms, four on the beat and no more, until the rhythm fills out, this time he's using the snare. The tense cacophony tightens and breaks into a grinding progression laced with a cutting sax riff. Then Siouxsie comes in, the words already sub-hysterical: "I''m sorry that I hit you but my striiiiiiiing snapped .... I'm I'm sorry I disturbed your caaaaaaaat nap!" The lines themselves stretching until they snap. Every other line, almost, is like that, stretch, with wailing notes drawing out into tight, dangerous lengths before the violence of the last syllable. The band moves around the vocals, speeding here, slowing there around the cyclonic voice as the song swells into a massive fist of intensity before coming to an end as orgasmic as it is brutal: "Re-lapse! Re-lapse! Re-lapse! howling against the punching of the band.

The Banshees did this a few times in their initial career and it's something worth noting here, almost at the end of the record: they sound live. Suburban Relapse, like all the other songs (except the opening instrumental), benefitted from being part of their live sets for about a year. By the time they got to the studio, the arrangements were in place, including the dynamics and developmental passages. The band was ready to explore familiar territory in the unfamiliarity of the recording environment. Suburban Relapse, though, sounds entirely live. Like The Lord's Prayer on the next album or Voodoo Dolly on Ju Ju (also made after the songs had been played live extensively), Relapse feels organically arranged and dependent on how well the band was playing during one take. Young producer Steve Lillywhite gave the band all the air they needed to get this done, tweaking only when necessary for the production. This, and the band being ready to do it this way, created one of the truest documents of a celebrated live band finding their sea legs in the sterility of the studio.

Where Lillywhite did come in handy were moments like Pure where something formless was given form and established the signature for the whole album in minutes, like an opera overture. Another such is the closing song Switch. This is a carefully managed piece in which the arrangement follows the strange lyric about professionals changing their vocations, taking characteristics of the opposite world view: priests become scientists but keep their religion which contaminates their results; scientists become religious which pretty much leads to the same disastrous ends: the authorities of society and culture render themselves into dystopic tyrants. At the time this felt like weird science fiction, an update on Orwell and Huxley and a response to some of the more adventurous moments on the BBC like The Guardians or 1990, or (thought I didn't know it at the time) J.G. Ballard.

In a well judged break from the previous track's sturm und drang, Switch begins with a clean electric guitar playing a minor chord in arpeggio. The unexpected texture of this, both calming and worrying (it has a horror movie score feel to it). The band comes in with Siouxsie with lines about different lives and categories merging. The band gets insistent until it pauses for the line: "watch the muscles twitch for a brand new switch." On that word the band takes on a higher gear to move the darker passage of the tale. At the end of the first new phase verse the rhythm suddenly sparses out with hard echo on the guitar slashing out high chords and the drums (more unusual snare from drummer Morris) as we hear about the doctor whose treatments become religious. Then it's back to the galloping band as a vicar who tries science cannot shake the constraints of religion. We end as gently as we began with the clean arpeggio as the people stop and protest in revolt before an apocalyptic event which might be a terror attack leaves body parts beyond redemption. "They're dying to switch." Finally, after the cataclysm, a slight hammer-on note on the guitar. End.

What felt like fanciful sci-fi in 1978 sounds normal now. There's a YouTube clip of Jordan Peterson claiming a credits list of qualifications well beyond his genuine ones, anything that might lend credence to his highly influential word salad. The song also describes the kind of post-truth world we are continually told we live in. Steve Bannon helping to win the election for the monster Trump famously declared his strategy to be, "fill the zone with shit." This has been adopted in Australia and some of that has circled back to places like the U.K. whose recently aired refugee policy was almost verbatim that of the troglodyte Coalition from the past decade. Then there's the mass of bullshit that rose from lockdowns and resulted in a self-proclaimed freedom movement which held rallies where libertarians marched alongside uncloaked neo-nazis. "Watch the muscles twitch ..."

Ok, so this is another long and ranty album article. But listening again, and more closely than I have for decades, has brought me back to how powerful its statements, how artful its execution and how arch its presentation. The Clash gave us some handy political slogans. Never Mind the Bollocks gave us the gobbing attitude. Damned Damned Damned gave us pogo-ing speedy fun. But The Scream gave us something altogether different. This album is often cited as the source point of post-punk, the more adventurous branching of U.K. musicians into new territories, eschewing the already canonical boundaries punk was forming for itself. There remains a fearless quality to the music of the very late '70s to the early '80s by which influences as diverse as Lee Scratch Perry and Stockhausen, Neu and The Beach Boys could be cooked up in the same pot. Just before all that, The Scream gave us a view into a world where the subject matter wasn't shocking but unnerving and to the credit of its producer, the band who already knew their material was left to express it, needing only technical assistance.

Even the cover art. The title, which might lead punters to thinking of Edvard Munch, was buried in the concept. People swimming under water in a pool. It's not the band, as I used to think, but a group of models in their teens, their colourless pallor accentuated by lights from above. There is nothing salacious about it, they really are kids in a pool. But they are in a place where it is impossible to scream, where a scream would only be attempted by the most severe of shocks, silent and self-annihilating. It's something that occurs only after looking at it while the record plays and then only after a few times. This was an image without band member mugshots or obvious statements.

As for that image, this was the band that did the most to suggest what the coming sub genre of Goth would look and feel like. And it was a new angle entirely. Screaming Lord Sutch had fun with the ghastly and grotesque but knew it was showbiz. Black Sabbath felt a little closer but veered towards their own sub genre. Alice Cooper was all frogs and snails and staged beheadings like a Vegas show. But this was different. American Debbie Harry's tough New York talk was glossed over by the media who preferred her cute and a little edgy. But this record that turned Sue from Bromley into Siouxsie Sioux from your holy, bloody nightmares didn't go for any of that. 

The Pistols song Bodies left me shaking when I first heard it, there's almost a shock per verse in it. The songs on The Scream take time to do that, multiple listens. The sound is clear, if strange at first: John McKay's severe sabre like guitar figures weren't like anything around them (until Keith Levene, or The Edge but he was helped by Steve Lillywhite). Kenny Morris' insistence on every part of the kit except for the rock-defining snare put him one further out than Paul Cook in the Pistols (another gleeful tom-er). Steve Severin was not a bass virtuoso but what he did worked as well as Geezer Butler has for Sabbath (and he got nimbler as the years progessed). 

And then there's Siouxsie, never have I cared less about a singer's wobbly pitch when the sheer overriding force of her expression comes in. A different vocalist would have left this record in the honourable mention stack but Siouxsie's vocal hurricane that can let you feel the coolness of its eye is a compulsion. Of her era it is she and John Lydon who sit at the top of the heap as far as personal might and influence, bludgeoning out from the speakers into the nervous systems of anyone listening. They are, of course both in the big tv moment where the Pistols swear at the drunken old Bill Grundy that pushed the term punk rock from a fanzine scene into the tabloids. Steve Jones does most of the swearing but Lydon is quietly seething. Siouxsie, to the rear with bandmate Steve Severin and the Selecter's Pauline Black looks like a prototype of herself, Westwoodian half-skinhead, half Weimar art-beast and chunky makeup. But she looks more like the scenester that she had been before she got in front of a mic and grievously assaulted The Lord's Prayer. Give that a little under a year and some aesthetic reinforcement and she is an icon feeding the fires, on T-shirts to this day with her spiky fright hair and Cleopatra eyes, recognisable across decades. Add but moments of her caterwauling command and roughshod poetry of unease and you'll have another fan. This is one of my favourite albums.

Listening notes: There's a lesson in this. I had a cassette back in the '70s which was replaced with an U.K. pressing of the LP. For this article I began by listening to the 2006 Deluxe Edition CD. Then, by chance, I found a copy of the 1989 CD in my work cupboard (I'd taken it in with a stack of others to help during the drudge bits of the day). With knowledge of the effects of the loudness war on the CD, I took it home and listened. It was immediately more airy than the later Deluxe which I was able to prove by comparing the waves of the same song from each. While there were clear dynamics to the 2006 master, the '89 instance was quieter but had far more separation of sound, particularly in the details of the drums (often the first victim of brickwalling masters). The 1989 master was in fact the original plus some boosting of both top and bottom not permissible for vinyl reproduction. It was from the brief glory days between CDs given exhausted old masters and the overcompression that has plagued digital music presentation since the mid-'90s. It is a perfect-sounding CD that proves the superiority over vinyl (more dynamic range and no noise) and its day has largely gone. Have any CDs from the late '80s to the mid'90s? Keep them. That beautiful sound is what we've lost in competition and the numbskulled vinyl revival. Thank you, thank you, ladies and gentlemen,.