THE ROLLING STONES @ 60

It might be hard for anyone born from the '70s onward to imagine forming a band and releasing an album almost entirely composed of covers. Also, the cover versions on the album were concentrated on a particular niche of music from the recent past. Imagine getting together to not just play covers of Black Midi or Slowdive but to populate your first record with their songs. But then, I'm already using concepts long abandoned and it's hard for me to imagine any musical ensemble bothering with the antique paths of showbiz given the kind of tesseract that music in public has become. But, even thinking within the old box, why would five lean and hip young players waste their first LP on a bunch of oldies? I mean, even The Beatles had wedged a big serve of originals in their first one. Was it just their live set without the audience?

When approaching the writing of this entry, I baulked, knowing that I would have to describe a kind of music for which I have very little empathy and that it was being played by people who hadn't earned anything like the privilege to play it. Blues, rhythm and blues (with the original meaning), soul, all those flashes of true life poetry and groove that rang defiantly through the white bread mask from sea to shining sea, all that had the weight of history in every note. Keith Richards' schoolboy acne seemed to defy any attempt at credibility this playlist might have offered. But I'm getting a few things wrong here and that's what this article will be about.

So, take the opening track. Route 66. From Nat King Cole's breezy jazz source point, through Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters' swing take, to Chuck Berry's early rocking walk-through, the song does propel. The Stones' version is all hormonal raunch, taking its cues from Berry but tearing at its fabric to a highway gear. The piano and guitar of Chuck's version are assumed by the dual guitar lineup which doesn't cruise so much as careen, violating the white line and growling forward. Jagger starts with Berry's wry delivery but loses it as he seems to recall how he'd started to shape it in front of a crowd in a breathless and sweating London pub. Keith injects a big dollop of Chuck Berry figures than Chuck himself put into his own cover. If you'd been eighteen and got to one of those gigs, you're head would be shaking like a demon in Jacob's Ladder, too. Does it still have that effect? No, of course not; the decade it was helping to lift from the blandness of its locale's '50s would front up with ever more demolishing approaches to the R&B model. But, also, crucially, it doesn't sound like the purists playing Leadbelly at the campus jazz club either. It sounds like beer and dancing and whooping and sex. Just put the punters back in.

I Just Want to Make Love to You had been done by both Muddy Waters and Etta James with hard, stomping urgency. James's version using the brass riff from Man With the Golden Arm, adding major steam. The Stones rip the song's clothes off with a horny velocity. It almost has a Bo Diddley chug but it's too fast for that. Jagger screams over the spiking speed of the guitars and rhythm section heading straight for the crucial intersection. Brian Jones adds a wailing blues harp, daring to approach Little Walter's turn on Muddy's take. He doesn't get there but everyone else does.

Honest I Do sees the band stepping back from the rush of the first two tracks to try a blues ballad. Jimmy Reed's original is a 6/8 plea with a pained, begging vocal. Here, perhaps, there is a stumbling moment. Will they or won't they fall on their faces. The sound is live without the audience and Jagger sounds uncertain of himself. It gradually warms up (helped by Jagger's harmonica) just in time for the fade out. It's really not a patch on Reed's but the effort is noted. 

Mona is a song by Bo Diddley which he wrote in libidinous celebration of an older exotic dancer. The original recording says a lot in the simplicity of its arrangement and the sheer determination of its performance. Bo runs his guitar through heavy amp tremolo and bashes out his trademark five accent beat until it sounds like machinery with a few bolts loose, pumping on but so wobblingly that it might explosively dismantle at any moment and it keeps on heating up. Under this, without bass or drums, is an echoed foot tap or shakers. Over all of this is his searing bellow calling out from the audience, from his daydreams and his night: Heeeeeeeey, Mona! To listen to it now you might puzzle at it even being called rock and roll but the charging genital roar of it and steady onslaught should set you straight. Bo is so impatient to get it finished he plays his chord solos without any other instrumental accompaniment, he just switches into it. What The Stones add is a drum kit and a bass. If Diddley was clear in his intentions and seemingly roaring from the most basic ingredients, this take wanted to leave no doubt, forcing the door kicking beat of it from beneath and both guitarists crashing the stuttering chords as one big engine. Jagger over the top of this doesn't out do Bo but by this stage he doesn't need to. It's a tribute with a raw youthful punch. 

Now I've Got a Witness is an original of sorts. It's credited to Nanker Phelge, the joke name the band gave to group compositions. It is a barely organised jam on the Marvin Gaye hit Can I Get a Witness with the chunk-chunk chunk-chunk chunk-chunk chunkachunk rise and fall to the 7th. It's an instrumental workout lifted by Brian Jones's harmonica wail and a conpspicuous organ workout. It's the kind of thing you can imagine going down great at a gig. It does feel too long even at two and a half minutes but it's not hard to live through. Keith Richards' solo presages a lot of his '60s breakouts. Even Bill gets a few bars with the bass up front. You can almost hear Jagger announcing the lineup: "... on drums ... !" 

Little by Little is another cover. This time is the Nanker Phelge boys joined by the luminary Phil Spector. It's a decent R&B workout and earns its place at the end of side one and on the B-side of Not Fade Away. It owes a lot to Jimmy Reed's Shame Shame Shame but not enough to call it a ripoff. Effectively, it follows from the previous track and might well have been kindled in the same session. Both Gene Pitney and Phil Spector were there at some of the sessions which is a testament to teenaged manager Andrew Loog Oldham's unbridled networking and songs like this would only have been encouraged. It keeps the vibe up.

I'm a King Bee is a loping blues with a knowing Jagger vocal and a sliding bass figure that propels. Good solos on guitar (Jones) and blues harp (Jagger). It's a rejig of Slim Harpo's original including the looby bass ejaculations (but here done on a fretted electric rather than an upright). The sneaking pace adds a sly kind of strut to the narrator's confident insistence and his wish to come inside. For all its lifting of the arrangement it brings a youngster's sense of mission. This is kind of the opposite of older folk getting to the mic with You're Sixteen, You're Beautiful and You're Mine, claiming musical quality before anyone has asked. It not so much ages Jagger's vocal performance as adds a worrying worldliness. Great track.

Carol is a Chuck Berry workout done a lot more urgently with the signature Berry lead licks played breathlessly. Berry's original might sound oddly casual in pace and tone but the story of it is about a boy and girl growing into a grown up scene as he takes her to a hip club to dance. Neither of them can dance but both can "dance". It's a happy song of learning respect along with the good times and is worth hundreds of nostalgic teen coming of ages movies. The Stones turn it into a hormone raid but that would have been how it sounded to them.

Tell Me (You're Coming Back) is the album's only Jagger-Richard original (the terminal S to Keith's surname was extracted in a now bizarre effort to link him to the then super popular Cliff Richard). It begins with a gentle figure on the 12 string acoustic. Jagger comes in at the low end of his range with a plaintive line of wanting his girl back, knowing that he's difficult to be with and other too-late confessions, before launching into the chorus with a demand for her to tell him she's coming back. Short of outright gaslighting, this kind of lyric is a one way trip to bad things and its author's, as young as they were and living in the era of strutting blues and youth running wild, knew the machismo of the words. When I first heard this, over ten years after its release, it felt like arrogance. Musically, it is poignant and the wide arrangement with dramatic booms and cymbals at crucial points and the glistening acoustic guitar in the verse and the muted electrics in the chorus, charm. But this is someone demanding a relationship on his terms and is delivered without a breath of irony. To understand is not to forgive.

Can I Get a Witness begins like the Marvin Gaye original with a bright piano figure, tambourine, slight drums and group singing. This is a stripped back version from its model and, oddly, brings the song back to its gospel, Southern Baptist, sources. Gaye's original is a big stately strut which builds with choruses and brass to a moment of pop glory. To call The Stones's version diminished is to miss how it would have sounded live. A lot of the keyboards on this record were provided by the original member who didn't make it into the cover art or liner notes, Ian Stewart. Too dowdy to be shown with the slender street kids around him (arf arf) his playing nevertheless followed them into the studio until his death in 1985, choosing to be part of it, however out of the spotlight for his career. The driving piano here, left unaccompanied by guitar or bass, is perhaps the earliest tribute to his resolve. It's not a solo spot but it can't happen without him and his input is left essential.

You Can Make it if You Try, Gene Allison's torchy hymn of encouragement, feels the most out of any of the covers like this particular band is putting its personality on a standard. Allison's uplifting vocal workout needs only percussion and organ to carry it, such is its power and assurance. The Stones put the whole band to work and Jagger climbs above the cool kid approach to his lead this time. He can't do Allison so he only does himself. The inadvertently ethereal wordless backing vocals were not aided by the members of the Hollies who turned up for other songs but by the band themselves as an unintentional presage of future singles.

Rufus Thomas' Walking the Dog was a wry blues stroll that blended nursery rhyme lines with other kinds of lines. The arching 7th note riff comes in after a pretty big intro of the opening of the wedding march. The Stones would have been aware of this and might have been thinking of it, if only to mask the more recent Merseybeat stomping version by The Dennisons. The Stones's version is conspicuously cooler and lower key, adding nuance where The Dennisons went Palladium size. It's a poignantly downsized reading given as though to say, it goes more like this. That didn't stop Brian Jones adding whistles and even backing vocals. It's a fitting end to this set as it struts its way off with a promise of more.

I had no idea I would have this much to write about this record. I, too, long considered it the kind of covers showreel for the band's live career. Listening to it again and, having read Andrew Loog Oldham's two autobiographies, I had to reconsider. The Stones were established in the local circuit and had a following that warranted a record contract. Oldham, the kind of dilettante who used his frustrations from being unmusical to project on to this group, gave a lot of legitimate guidance to them and shaped a band to rival the biggest name in showbiz by appearing to be its opposite. The Beatles and the Stones were personal friends by this point and it was George Harrison who pushed the Stones's name into Decca's ear after that label had embarrassed itself for all eternity by rejecting The Beatles. All Oldham had to do was insist on a kind of arms race, Soviet vs USA, Officer Dibble vs Top Cat, Beatles vs Stones. It worked perfectly.

Take the cover art. With the Beatles had featured the fabs in monochrome half light without their characteristic smiles. Hard Day's Night blew this up by emulating contact strips of multiple expressions. The cover of The Stones's debut went one step further. The band, flanked by Jagger on the right and the blonde mop of Brian Jones on the left, are lighted, light and dark, with brooding expressions against a soft gradient that goes from black to a lighter blue downwards. No uniforms, everyone either suited or tieless (Brian doesn't even have a jacket). It the fabs balanced out in their public personae, this band didn't, they were less controllable. Then, for Oldham's masterstroke, the band's name does not appear on the front cover. The only concession to convention is the Decca logo top right corner. Dig? They don't care if you haven't heard of them, they're going to play anyway and if you don't like it, move on.  

Also, if you want to understand why people bought into the hype of Beatles vs Stones at the time, go and listen to the originals of these covers (YouTube makes this easy). The source points are different and the intended result follows that direction. In the Beatles' debut, Please Please Me, the big bright originals traded side space with covers of anything from the previous decade's R&B, girl groups and show tunes reframed into the kind of Merseybeat rock that made the originals had to distinguish. They came in sounding like showbiz. None of it conveyed the dues paying development of months in Hamburg and then back in Liverpool because the polishing that George Martin effected made all that sound as though the band was ready to be loved by the citizenry of the Greater Milky Way. 

The Rolling Stones is a record that is happy to lurk in the shadows of the London alleys, lugging in and out of pubs not designed for rock bands, of clubs poky and dripping where you could shake your head or stay unmovingly cool and smoking at the edges. You didn't have to know about The Beatles chunging between strip shows in Germany, in sweaty leather to enjoy the embrace of their early records, but you couldn't argue your way out of the sly, wry learned from records scholarship that winked and frowned from the stage or the record player as these standards groped their way out into the light.

It would take The Stones years before they shook cover-heavy albums (they still record them). Once they hit the charts (with a Beatles song) they launched into a mass of singles that repeatedly fill an unending string of compilation albums, each worthy of turning the volume up. But it began here, organically, savvily, with something between youthful push and reverence for the magic in the dark of the margins.

REPLICAS @ 45

The first few seconds of this album contains the universe of its artist's approach for the first part of his career. A curly modal figure sounds high on the keyboard of a synthesiser. It's joined by a staccato beat on rock instruments. It drops a tone for a few plays then returns as the vocal enters. A high register, thin and cold, sings of a strange crisis. He can't recognise his own photograph. He might be speaking to himself or to some form of other, perhaps a doppelganger. And the last line of each verse states the title: Me, I Disconnect From You. The song ends on a big rock chord but the opening riff decays and slows to a quiet stop.

As the  album progresses, the machine like precision of the arrangements, the reedy vocals and the icy scenarios of the lyrics, we feel the theme surfacing. A dystopian sci-fi world of androids and humans with a mounting alienation and nihilism spreading through the nightscape. While the songs have the quality of cinematic scenes and suggestions of narratives within themselves, they can also break out and refer to each other until the world takes form. 

Are 'Friends' Electric bursts on stage as a stadium sized factory of synthesised architecture. A grounding riff pumps a pattern of fifths as a descant sounds a partial seventh. When the cold, thin vocal appears it's delivering half of a conversation between a character and his home delivery replica sex worker. The only problem is that the human has begun to extend his feelings beyond the replica's function and it's starting to feel like love with all the pain and alienation that can entail. The massive grinding arrangement pauses for a kind of middle eight with bright keyboards circling around sevenths and the vocals change to spoken word. It hurts and he's lonely. This gives way to a soaring, blissful restatement of the circular figure but higher on the scale. When the factory grind reappears it feels like more of the same of this isolation. A shorter verse features the title and the aching realisation: "and now I've no one to love". After another middle eight ("I don't think I mean anything to you") we leave on a fade with the melody of the "no one to love" repeating to silence. 

This extraordinary sci-fi dystopia story was released as a single and made it, without a singalong chorus to number one. The song is a weighty downer but anyone who heard it at the time with an inclination to the new and the unusual heard electronic music that bore no resemblance to familiar forms the way Kraftwerk's later '70s work did. Are "Friends" Electric is closer kin to Donna Summer's barnstorming trance I Feel Love than Autobahn or Trans Europe Express. And this includes the other factor that Gary Numan persisted with in his initial run of success: rock instrumentation. It was cold and spiky rather than cock rock overdrive but it was rock music. The guitars, drum kit and bass are all audible along with the electronics but they are not dominant, there is no sense that the synthesisers are a red faced gimmick and there is nothing of the gymnastics of prog rock: the united front of rock band with committed synthesis is presented with full power. It felt like a first. It had precedents galore but this lean fusion had not been heard before. It was cinematically compelling and offered a credible path out of the dust of punk's crushing demise.

The Machman begins with a guitar riff that sounds like a routine genre figure until the vocals and synths arrive. The replica's encounters with the living are cryptic and paranoid in an urban nightscape. Praying to the Aliens does something different again by  preferring an electric piano with a slapback echo (which always reminds me of Bowie's We Are The Dead from Diamond Dogs) which creates a nervous energy. More technoir with statements about sexual identity and function without a clear speaker position. The stuttered Rhodes figure constantly flits around the arrangement as confusion swells. While the sense of concept album is clear throughout the record, it's application is often reduced to a kind of stream of consciousness account, not intended to further a narrative but continue the flow with a disjointed scene like both of these. If this album were a movie it would be Blade Runner as directed by Zulawski.

Then we come to the big one. I can recall speeding along the South East Freeway in a friend's car, seeing the towers of the Gold Coast form on the horizon in 1980 as the booming knells of Down in the Park rolled out of the speakers. It put me into the movie and until the next person spoke I was speeding towards intrigue. Big tolling notes on bass, synth and electric piano form a seven note sequence. A shiny descanting synth figure comes in. Another night scape. The vocal comes in after two iterations calling out images and statements that are picked up like litter on the set. The War, rape machine, a friend called Five. It's a walk through of an underworld of brutal entertainments that can leave their human participants dead. The verses are sung over the nearly unchanging ground of the opening figure but there are bright and flowery inserts which add more modal melodic material with a carnival feel. After each of these the main theme is played out as a slow, heartrending instrumental in the synthesised strings. Most of the imagery made it on to the album art, with Numan, platinum blonde and pale, standing like a mannequin in a dimly lit room as his reflection looks at him in a way not possible with the angles. Another man (probably from Are "Friends" Electric) is looking through the window. In the distance outside, a neon arch forms the letters The Park. After the storm of the main song has passed we're left with a repeating figure from the relief section that finally, lands with a big droning bass from below. A perfect side closer, by now you are immersed in the world.

Side two starts with a grumpy rock figure in the guitars. It even starts with a drumstick count in. There's a synth drone to add some texture and colour but this is the Tubeway Army as they thought of themselves to begin with. The driving overdriven riffs continue the album's pattern of playing persistently between vocals, often just insisting on a single chord. Where in Johnny B. Goode or even Breathe, this carries the mood whether rocking or dreamlike. On this album and throughout Gary Numan's earlier years, spare bars of guitar band sound more like an idling machine, grunting at attention for the next use. The vocals sing a quite  bright melody that leads to a chorus of the title. The kind of entertainment of the Park is seen up close with live sex and violence with generous dollops of surveillance. And with this comes the understated flow on effect of the indifference to the humans at the results of the brutality. All that in an upbeat rocker.

The title track takes us back to the cinematic magnitude of Down in the Park and "Friends". A bass throb plays a constant heartbeart while banks of humming and groaning synthesisers form a bed for a lyric about isolation. The narrator walks outside through crowds of nameless figures. There is a sense of shame in his non-conformity. He turns on the crowd but at best they treat him with the caution of crowds faced with irregularity, violence, delusion, and smile nervously. When the police arrive, he pleads guilty but is allowed to walk away. Between the verses the synthesis blooms to a poignant figure that is both cold and heartrending, as though a machine were trying to emote or a human was trying to be mechanical. The song ends as the heartbeat slows and a persistent howl falls into reverberation.

It Must Have Been Years starts with the same instrumentation playing the heartbeat but this is quickly obscured by loud riffy rock with nary a keyboard present. The vocal is the most rock like of the whole album. The warmer approach to the arrangement tells us that the observer of the stagnation he's describing is not a machman. However, the verses are like a day in the life of a machman sex worker. This one is either at the end of their career or in such a state of intense overuse that they are headed for landfill. Is the title/chorus a passing but repeated occuring thought that the figure at the centre has lost track of time but figures their career had begun wholecloth years before. The sole instance of a guitar solo is as frantic as the rest of the song and heightens the sense of panic before ending on a downward bend before vanishing. Just another spasm hitting its shelf life. I used to get annoyed at the rock of that solo. How could it belong in such a richly new field, sounding like some schoolkid ace guitar player  with a Gibson copy and a fuzz pedal. Really, it works. It does sound like the playing of a young musician aiming to impress but it also expresses the emotional content of the song. In an album that was met with criticism for its apparent coldness, these few seconds of flashing lead guitar spike and give the lie.

When the Machines Rock a chirpy synthesiser workout that breaks for a grandeur as big as the factory floor. I Nearly Married a Human begins as a druggy version of the synth line of the opening song but adds textures like an emulated drop and ripple effect as well a small number of motifs for development with the electrodrums coming in in sections. The music develops between the two figures with bright hazes of swells and piercing glissandi. This sounds like it started as an afternoon's noodling on the keyboard but Numan takes it well beyond that. Add an evocative title and the rest is up to you, a romatnic montage between two figures before the penny drops and all we are left with is the fading two element rhythm. And in the end the data you give is equal to the data you live.

Replicas gave a younger audience what Bowie had started but kept going until cities rose from its grooves and an adventure of sadness and action awaited. As punk's bonfire was settling into ash and the suits were trying to replace its figures with newer, easier to control units, we knew we could do much worse than listen to this. Gary Numan said he was in a music shop one day and walked past a synthesiser. He stopped and pressed a key. It had been set up with a fat bass sound that resonated through the building. In that moment all the things he'd been thinking about as he walked under the clouds and the towers, all the books of crashes, high rises and dreaming androids bloomed before him. The mechanical punk of Tubeway Army gave way to something that sounded like those ideas and felt as big as a tower block.

I didn't get all the words and I was in Townsville where the rain meant monsoons and smelt of mangoes and mosquitos and I still got it. And that was just as I'd got the thrill of seeing the Saints and the Sex Pistols on tv a few years earlier. This was different but it came from the same place. Music seemed to be changing every month until you stood back and realised it was just getting wider. This record was one that clung to me, though. I still have no hesitation in calling it one of the best of its era. And driving back from the Coast to Brisbane with the rain stinging my eyes while I pushed my head out the passenger window for as long as I could, the song was thunderous in the car and I was yelling the chorus:

You are in my vision!

You are in my vision!

Listening notes: I walked around with this in earbuds, hearing the hi-res download but at home listened to a late '90s CD with extra tracks. Both versions are free of the brickwalling compression of the loudness wars and have a joyous, dynamic clarity.

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT @ 60

CLAANNG! It starts movie the record and it seizes ears. Those two seconds of clamour, like a steel gate being broken open, have been tortured under audio microscopes for decades. The verdicts vary but tend to land around an F9 (F chord with an added G note). But it's not just an F9, anyone could do that, it's a group effort. George on his 12 string playing the whole six courses with the G on the top on the high E. John  plays on an acoustic. Paul is playing a D on his bass and George Martin some inversion of F on the piano. There's even a pinched cymbal for the toppermost of the poppermost frequencies. It's like the whole band crushed into a cube which then explodes.

It never repeats. It doesn't have time. John comes in with the vocal; "it's been a haaard daaay's night..." joined by the band on the fourth syllable. From that point that wrought steel of the insisted note that climbs to the sharp blue note ("workeeeeeng") hooked everyone who heard it. This is followed in the forward momentum by the rolling climb ("but when I get home to you ...") to the modified blue note phrase in perfect completion. The middle eight breaks ranks with the G major tonality of the verse by literalising the key signature and playing B minor instead of major for the modulation to E minor. Um, ok, that's getting yawny, isn't it? Ok, it's a slight deviation but an important one as it smooths over the dramatics of the minor key to keep the bluesy attack going. It's a song of happy wife happy life that a man in his mid-twenties might imagine with the sexual rewards packed into words like ok and alright which might feel vapid now were it not for the force of the song. The solo breaks out cinematically a movie theme riff made with piano and varispeed 12 string (George eventually did play the speedy bits at the peak of the phrase live but for the recording he needed to play them slower). The song ends on an even more elongated vowel stretched over a single note and the sweet surprise of a pretty jingling phrase that works with the fret position George was playing for the opening chord, as though by this stage, after all that conjugal exhaustion it's now a ringing fragment.

I Should Have Known Better is a big bright love song that starts with a sweet harmonica figure and continues with a verse that features the same note elongation as the title track. The minor key middle eight is so streamlined it doesn't quite sound minor. George comes in with the band's new secret weapon, the Rickenbacker 360/12, playing a ringing verse melody and ending on a chiming G 6th. For me, it's standard Beatles fare and if I listen to the record, I'll leave it on. Besides, it's completely overshadowed by what came before it and what's just around the corner.

If I Fell starts with a Lennon vocal over strummed acoustic guitar. Then the harmonies kick in and it takes over the heads of anyone who hears it. The silvery close harmonies of this ballad of adoration are meltingly beautiful. Any comparisons with other contemporary harmony masters like The Everly Brothers or The Beach Boys fall away as the chord progression stretches the key of D major beyond showtune sophistication they were already familiar with. Then, when the middle eight comes up it's like another warp into a parallel key. I can remember scarcely believing the beauty of this song that wasn't the kind of big shouty pop rock I knew their early singles were, it just took things somewhere else. (Aside: in the stereo version the second middle eight seems to end with McCartney's voice breaking. After decades of thinking this it was revealed to be an erroneous move on the faders. The mono version of the exact same recording doesn't have it.)

George's vocal is up next with a throwaway written for him by John and Paul. It's fun with a kind of cod Spanish nightclub feel sneaking in through the Mersey beat. 

And I Love Her is a Paul ballad in a minor key with a haunting reverby vocal and some tasteful classical guitar support from George. While you can still hear the influences of Bandstand balladeers of the time the song escapes the cheesiness that might envelope it through the seriousness of the vocal and a strong transition from the middle eight to the following verse where the stern minor chords return. If the contemporary production wasn't out in such force it might have been pleasantly spooky.

Tell Me Why gets us back to big and shouty and works fine but I'd never put it on just to hear it in isolation. 

Can't Buy Me Love closes the old side one in a bluesy shuffle by Paul with something like his Long Tall Sally scream. It was a single and has a decent enough anti materialistic message, preferring love over the trinkets of love. A big stomper to end the side.

That's important. In the U.K. you turned the disc over and heard a bunch of other new Beatles songs. In the U.S. you heard session muso versions of side one songs as instrumentals. The Beatles are not playing on the tracks and they do sound listless and note-hittingly perfect. This Capitol label trickery didn't start nor end with this and it was the same on the next soundtrack LP for Help. Utter ripoff.

Side two of the real LP kicks off with a loud snare crack before Anytime at All burst forth. The chorus opens with shouty harmonies of the title phrase but then the verse changes. It's Lennon solo and in several takes so his alternate lines can come in before he could properly finish the previous phrase. Considering the double tracking going on (from the previous album on) whereby individual vocalists would do two vocals matched as exactly as possible to beef up the sound of the voice, the overlapping lines meant that some fairly fancy work was happening in the studio. I don't know if they ever tried it live but it would have been possible for McCartney to fill in the alternate lines. It's an engaging romantic rocker with a lot of close mic-ed piano playing closely with the 12 string.

I'll Cry Instead is a shuffling sour grapes number by Lennon with a sneering vocal that is belied the lyric. He'd like to do all sorts of things since he lost his girl but he can't so he'll cry instead. It's not a big ironic twist but it comes across as a self effacing smile (unlike a similar later Run For You Life which just gets more problematic as the years go by). 

Things We Said Today is McCartney being a clever dick with chord progressions but also delivering an engaging love song with a melancholy minor key verse and brightly harmonious part B. Then the middle eight bangs in and it just stops behaving like it's in any key with a coolcat melodic diversion that leads easily into the next verse. George's triplet minor chords in the intro, breaks and fade are something we haven't heard before on a Beatles record. It's a quiet but important innovation. I can thoroughly recommend the live version of this (Eight Days a Week soundtrack CD) which those triplets are ringing and that far away from being power chords and the big yelping intros to the middle eights. This version feels tame by comparison but it shares some eeriness with And I Love Her.

When I Get Home is a big shouting stomper like Tell Me Why, only shoutier and stompier. I sometimes skip it. 

You Can't Do That is an unsmiling replay of I'll Cry Instead. A bluesy figure on the 12 string opens the cowbell clunking shuffle in which Lennon as a jealous lover is berating his partner non stop for two and a half intense minutes. It was the B-side of the title track as a single. Viv Albertine describes the intensity of first hearing it in her great Clothes Music Boys, feeling a song as a whole body experience in a way that approaches alarm. While there's no violence threatened the tone in the powerful Lennon vocal contains no forgiveness.

And then, as a closer, the yearning I'll Be Back comes in with acoustic guitars and a close harmony chorus that starts minor but ends major. The verses are John in aching mode, stretching the vowels to breaking and falling back into the melancholy chorus. Even with the early '60s boxed in production the pain is audible and the phrases have the beauty of the best folk music. Beautiful.

The major achievement of this set, aside from the quality of the music itself, was that it was the first album wholly written by the band (and the only one consisting of solely Lennon McCartney songs). No rock band had done that yet. It was put together while on tour over six months of 1964 and in anticipation of the accompanying film. While most of the side one songs get a look in in the movie at various moments, the film is a concentrated comedic depiction of life at that unimaginable fame peak so a lot of the tunes get lost in the flow (though And I Love Her and If I Fell are given what amount to proto performance videos). But, after the accelerating times they were getting through, to fill two sides of an LP with untried material of entirely original composition is extraordinary. 

There has recently been a kind of shift among younger fans of the band to hold this higher than the usually lauded last five albums. Part of that is youthful perversity (like mine when I championed Revolver over the likes of Abbey Road) but part of it is from the unignorable feat of thirteen songs with really only two filler tracks (that some are now affecting). Take the context of the scheduling and film away and you still have a strong two sides of vinyl record, packaged with a kind of decorated contact sheet of publicity photos where the band are pulling faces. It's a mild effect now but in the days when the smiles on record covers had to be painted on, it would have come across as endearingly cheeky. And that's what this is, as soaring as some of its music is and as clearly indicating of the near future's greatness, this is a cheeky record that seems to be mugging at the world's camera and saying: "go on, then, do better."

ARMED FORCES - ELVIS COSTELLO AND THE ATTRACTIONS @ 45

The first three Elvis Costello albums begin with vocals. "Now that your picture's in the paper...," on Aim, "I don't wanna kiss you, I don't wanna touch ..." on Model and on Armed Forces it's, "Oh I just don't know where to begin." After that begins my decline in being the uber Costello fan that I was. I find My Aim is True almost unlistenable with its cool 'n' breezy day west coast feel. The songs are there but the arrangements make me wince. This Year's Model showed how good the songs were by dressing them up in trimmer power pop threads. And then there's Armed Forces which is the Everest peak of that first phase. After that, I like this moment or that but very seldom a whole record. Yes, I know his writing got deeper and more grown up but I still prefer the angry little brat of the first three. I just listened to the whole thing again for this and I wasn't just singing along, I was grimacing and sneering along. That's how good this record is.

After that choked "Oh-oh-oh I -" the band bashes in for the syllable "just" and it's on. Where the previous platter sported a skeletal approach to arrangement, shrill Farfisa chords and spiky guitar lines and spat out lyrics, Accidents Will Happen establishes a developed sound whereby when there isn't a particular figure or effect, the backing returns to a wall of boom. Grand piano nudges the organ off the stage (though it's still around), Bruce Thomas' heavenly melodic bass lines are even further forward, and Pete Thomas' drums are by turns crisp or clever. If anything, Elvis' trademark Fender Jazzmaster is absent through much of it. What this brings to this vindictive song about a collapsed relationship is a strange grandeur. It's rushed but stately but has lines like, "There's so many fish in the sea that rise up in the sweat and smoke like mercury ..." The guilty, "I know what I've done," ends the song with a sudden coda swinging between major and minor as voices in harmony repeat, "I know, I know...." Costello wasn't writing about my late adolescent hormonal investigations but, b'crikey, it felt like it.

I don't recall seeing the video for this song until a year or so later and can't remember it being on Countdown. It's a little postmodern marvel, mixing animation loops of the band with more industrial style cartoons of the scenes of accidents in the workplace and the home, often featuring graphs and trajectory illustrations. The final choir of "I know" plays under a wire frame portrait of Costello being drawn repeatedly along with a readout of statistics. The stuff of sci-fi noir in the decade to come. YouTube it.

Senior Service (junior dissatisfaction) retreads the odd drum pattern from Chelsea but soon settles into a vocal heavy piece about seething upward mobility. From the menacing whisper of the chorus to the echo-drenched verses about wanting what the guy one notch up has. I knew at the time from an interview that Senior Service was the brand of cigarette smoked by producer Nick Lowe.

Oliver's Army barges in with a piano figure that sounds like steel drums and plays a '50s inspired pop melody. This was inspired by sight of startlingly young British soldiers in Belfast. The verses are increasingly sinister, going from a bureaucrat's jaded views on military recruitment to an increasingly ugly manipulator, appealing to racism and fear in the young and dispossessed. The chorus is the bit that everybody sang along to, not quite realising that the Cromwellian army it sang of was there to oppress and control local populations. The song was a hit here and accompanied by a cinematic clip of the pale band in a tropical setting. "And I would rather be anywhere else than here today." Everyone at school in my military town tapped their toes and sang along.

Big boys continues the wall of boom but adds dynamics. In a voice that's one defeat away from a whimper Costello sings, "I am starting to function." An organ note plays and stays. "In the usual way. Everything's so provocative. Very , very temporary. I shalle walk." On "walk" the thunder enters with massed chords and big tom toms and a loping bass note that feels like it's being thrown from a height at the start of every  bar. After a verse with new melodic material we go back to the big steps of the bass lope and thunder toms. The narrator (also, characteristically in a Costello song from this time, the second person lines) sees himself as inadequate. He lists his absent qualities and failure with women in some pretty pop passages. This album was a training ground for the songwriters of the '80s and allowed them statements that would never chart set in radio friendly sugarpop. On the one hand you'll want to sing along with the melismatic "so" of the chorus. On the other he's spitting out the words of an embittered Lothario. The song turns again, now in sympathy with the woman he rejected because she accepted him. He just needs the strength to cross her off the list and walk on like the big boys. They will reject him as a try hard and he will have to move on, around and around in the cycle of self-loathing. A dark song. It ends on an instrumental fade of the loping bass (which offers some impressive parting flourishes. On and on and on.

Green Shirt offers respite with its harpsichord delicacy and lightly throbbing synthesised bass. The sudden snare interjections punctuate rather than jolt as Costello almost whispers lyrics that blur newsreaders with clerical staff of a totalitarian regime and something like a phone sex line. Rather than a series of concrete predictions, Costello is pushing back against a kind of corporate commodification of society. The news anchor is as alluring as the workers on the phone lines as they coo streamlined lies and glosses. All the colours of situations are turned to black and white and the brass buttons of the military shirt as the calming voice of the administration guides us to the entertainments. One of my favourite couplets in the song does have a predictive tint: "Better send a begging letter to the big investigation. Who put these fingerprints on my imagination?" How's that for a preview of the post-truth culture? Shout to Steve Naïve on the keyboards whose Farfisa delivers more nuance and creepy tentacles that a string section could.

Party Girl is a song that I needed to hear more than the others to get into. Like all the material on the album, it's layered and complex. The song starts with an epic feel, guitar arpeggios spread out in a kind of saddening fanfare before Costello comes in. On the surface, he's telling her that she shouldn't condemn herself as being a mere party girl but he's also getting seduced by the power that gives him. And amid the gentle assurances of her individuality he tells her that he could give her anything but time. Ouch! "Starts like fascination. Ends up like trance." he says over a few fretless bass slides that are the musical equivalent of cute raised eyebrows. This gives way to a brief but lovely piano interlude before the next verse where Costello ups the word play with lines about being the guilty party girl. The final admonition, I could give you anything but time is stretched, as though hesitant before, on the word time, the song ends in a passionate coda that could be from Abbey Road. Costello yells: Give you anything but -" and the harmonies answer, "time" over a bursting dam of emotion. This is the most unexpected turn of the record, containing less self-consciously clever lines and served up with music that suits it more than conforms to the rest of the album.

The old side two starts with Goon Squad and a big figure that effectively combines grand piano with guitar. It sounds like spy theme. The lyric is a letter home by what at first seems like a soldier but unravels so it could apply to any kind of organisation based on a hierarchy. In a kind of switched perspective to Oliver's Army, the boy who answered the recruitment call is discovering that none of the promises have come true and that, rather than advancing up the ranks, he's been relegated to the lowest of the thugs. The almighty boom of the track continues until a brief break in the arrangement with Costello's voice EQ-ed paper thin and Bruce Thomas' playing fills the void with impressively busy runs along the scale. A plunge back into the nightmare of the situation roars to the fade under which Steve Naïve plays sinister spindly dissonance on the keyboards.

Busy Bodies starts all at once with the booming wall including a big keyboard wash and jangling guitar arpeggios. Wall o' boom. The vocal melody rises with each line smooth until it stops for lines of commentary, short sung lines with staccato responses on the organ. "Everybody's" Dit dit dit dit. "getting meaner" dit dit dit "busy bodies" dit dit dit dit "Caught in the concertina." Then it launches back into the boom of another verse. This song builds like a tide, wave after wave of verses where sex and corporate competition blur. There are sections but no breaks, no middle eights or solos, just a forward moving mass of populating and competition served up with the sweetness and substance of pudding. The final word is like an admission of inevitability as the last chords sound under a Beach Boys like falsetto figure, a completely unexpected, delicious treat.

Sunday's Best is another constant force but this time a sinister waltz. "Times are tough for English babies. Send the army and the navy..." Costello raids the tabloids for material but not the Schoolgirl Sex Serenade for Septuagenarian headlines. He plunges into the personal ads and editorials the winking, whispering pages of aspiration, lewdness and hatred. The 3/4 grind suggests the fairground, comedy and thinking that's loopy in both senses. Costello builds, phrase by phrase, the mind of the root-system of the culture of his time which included the ascent of Margaret Thatcher, Mary Whitehouse and the National Front, his voice going from a prurient stage whisper to a barely contained hysterical yelp for the chorus: "Standing in your socks and vest. Better get it off your chest. Every day is just like the rest but Sunday's best." Perversion and piety, church and smut, all blending to the mud grey that all plasticine rods eventually become. Everyone knows but no one recognises anyone. We fade out with a sharply sarcastic waltz figure on the guitar and I realise again that this is one of the few songs on the album that would sound identical live and here in the studio, the band is that good.

Moods for Moderns is the closest the album comes to something more typical of its time, a post punk snarl, the type dismissively termed new wave by DJ's who saw it as a too hard basket and pronounced it with a sneer. A series of images from relationships is shoehorned into a quirky dissonant groove and skittish rhythm with organ stabs and whispers for the verses and harsh snappy harmonies for the choruses. The commodification of sex or romance feels like fast food or a heightened service industry as partners change partners like the season's new clothes. "Soon you'll belong to someone else and I will be your stranger just pretending."

Chemistry Class has the most stately and broad arrangements in which one line has a big sounding piano arpeggio and the next is held up by momentous tom toms. This can be reversed but the procession of them is what keeps our attention. The vocal is mostly plaintive in the verses and quietly arch in the chorus, it sounds world weary, knowing, describing something for the hundredth time. The narrator is witnessing yet another sexual encounter that will end in another emptying breakup. The working title for the album was Emotional Fascism. The phrase appears on the artwork. Armed Forces was chosen as a more media friendly title but the first applies to most of the songs here and nowhere more than this and the following tracks which make it more explicit. The chemistry on show here is attraction but it gets sinister as he asks, "are you ready for the final solution?" This might refer to the genetic mix of sexual activity or the chemistry of the brain, but it alludes to the holocaust. Seldom has a more violent word play been delivered with such creepy awe. The alternating piano and drums accompaniment to the verse lines which had started so yearningly quickly takes on something more humanly percussive. The song fades on an instrumental repetition of the final lines of the chorus with a pulsing effect on the guitar that suggests machinery that perhaps is scanning for the next case; the musical beauty of the song itself ingested by the engine.

Two Little Hitlers surprises by launching into a sunny pop reggae arrangement. On the surface of it it's another relationship song featuring trademark wordplay and this time a kind of happy go lucky resignation to the inevitable conflict emerging from coupling. You could see it as a kind of summary of the whole album where love and sex and conflict and cruelty bash against each other. By this point the conflict has escalated to a struggle of wills and ends with an echo of General McArthur's vow following a defeat: "I will return." This phrase which ends the chorus but also repeats into the fade is accompanied by what sounds like a deliberate lift of the Rebel Rebel lift. I say deliberate as it's only half the riff, just enough for the knowing to acknowledge. 

The first three Costello albums had signature artwork. Aim's Buddy Holly like man in a suit and a guitar by way of introduction. Model's more aggressive stare from behind a camera. Finally, the set that promised emotional fascism, a herd of elephants with the leader looking to stampede the viewer. The rear cover of the Australian release had the US front cover, a stylised face surrounded by action painting drips and splatters and a splattery title and band name in yellow over it. This got confusing when seeing it presented as the front cover in music press ads etc. The local edition opened on the right side which confirmed the elephants as the front cover. I liked the collision of art styles and the violence of the writing on the rear cover but I was always more intrigued by what was inside.

The inner sleeve featured the term emotional fascism on both sides and on each part of the phrase, "our place or yours?" The photo on one side was the band in front of an English suburban house and the reverse was of Costello apparently collapsed on the diving board of a swimming pool while another figure is underwater, perhaps dead. Around the photos is a series of rectangles, red on one side and yellow on the other. The red ones have the song titles and band member names and the yellow ones are the names of home decoration colours (like White White). The abstraction of this reminded me of all those Pink Floyd and 10CC Hipgnosis covers where every second one had images so removed by abstraction that the meaning was anyone's guess. This looked like the band was out of place (Elvis was wearing a suit to the pool) or oppressively in place. From my sprawling Queenslander house in Townsville the middle class two storey place looked compact and comfortable. The band in their tight fitting noo wave suits with white sneakers do not look like they live there. It was clearly ironic but also like hearing localised jokes in British tv comedies that meant nothing to you but still sounded funny.

It gave the record a modernity that knew it had to do better than depict opulence by contrast with social commentary. The house, if out of the reach of most Britons of the time, unremarkable in its design, feigning larger manses rather than being them. The pool does suggest wealth but it is a place of accidents and bad endings, the kind of thing the tabloids of Sunday's Best would delight in. Like the images of mundane consumerism in the inner sleeve of Model, this acknowledgement of consumerist aspiration and my appreciation of it felt like I was invited into the club who had the eyes to see. Hey, a seventeen year old doesn't need much to cry rebellion.

However the rebellion here was gratifying. This was probably the first new record I pushed on everyone I could. If it was at a party I went to, I made sure I put it on, twice at least. I made cassettes for classmates and made friends listen to it when it came out, pointing out every bit of irony or arch pun as they came up, not trusting them to hear it themselves. Better still, girls liked it. The kind of girls who could talk about more than the same bullshit boys were meant to spout, in fact, the very kind of real people under the surface of Party Girl. Well, that didn't do me all that much good but I had conversations that shoulds coulda woulda that I still recall with others who needed a little intoxication and less encouragement, whose observations sounded like newspaper columnists and whose jokes drew years of world experience from the ether. All just kids like me, of course, but in those moments ...

Armed Forces served all this up with a sound big and brash. There was no apology for the expansion of the approach, none was needed. Rather than a slick sellout improvement this felt like real development. There is a lot of fine trickery and key manipulation going on in the compositions and the band was clearly peaking with some strong imaginative and emotionally punchy playing. What I didn't know was that this would be the end of the first phase. The second and onward would push me further than further from Elvis Costello. He got more sophisticated as the albums came out, even writing for string quartets and with the great Burt Bacharach. But never again would he release another album songs that, banger after banger, described what I was observing with my own eyes and feeling with my own nerves in my last year of High School. I enjoyed High School, well, I enjoyed the years, but the more you enjoy anything at that age the closer you get to feeling the heat of its hazards. I was lucky to have good older siblings for those public moments that my shyness might have prohibited, and records like this for all the other moments where I and the walls of my room had to work it out between us.