1967 at 50: THE WHO SELLOUT

It was the first Who album I heard. The first real one. The only other thing I had was the compilation Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy which had come out between Tommy and Who's Next, or between the most they were as a '60s band and the stadium act they became. The comp wasn't what I expected of the band. It swung between proto raunch and twee with a lot of falsetto harmonies. The version of Pinball Wizard (ahem, the original) didn't seem a patch on the one from the movie of Tommy by Elton John. But I did like I Can See for Miles. When I made a cassette of the LP for Wayne at school he brought back his own for me. The album was called Sellout and it was from before Tommy. It had I Can See For Miles on it. Wayne said the whole album was a kind of joke concept, a piss take on commercial radio. I was in. Over chocolate ice cream after school, I let it run all the way through.

A blast of brass and a choir through a modulation effect intones Monday. Blast. Tuesday .... and so on. And then from the silence comes the trumpet of the Apocalypse fading in with a single droning note before the drums kick in and the band crashes to life. Someone (see below) sings about disorientation and going to Armenia City in the Sky as the churning rock drives around him and the trumpet (is it a backward guitar or Entwistle on the French horn?). Pure energy and light.

Rising through the fade are the same cybermen choir as at the beginning. It adds a sinister bent to thing until it plays out as a jingle for "wonderful Radio London. Whoopee."

If you know the Who well enough to try and guess who sings lead in the track be apprised that it is not Keith Moon singing the kind of falsetto he used on the previous album's I Need You. It's the song's co-author Speedy Keen. If you look him up you might stop at the information that he was Pete Townshend's chauffeur. Well, he was also an aspirant songwriter and this was his hell of a break. You'll also hear him on Thunderclap Newman's massive one-off hit Something in the Air.

This isn't trivia; it has a lot to do with the way this album presents itself. First, there's the radio format. Sell Out is a homage and a piss take on the pirate radio stations that were boarding and pillaging the audiences who would otherwise have been doled out tiny morsels of new rock music at a time when the form in the UK was undergoing an explosive upsurge in creativity and innovation the like of which has never been seen again (and was barely imaginable before). It's a celebration but it's a cheeky one. The Radio London ads are genuine and the band do their own and it can be difficult to tell if the first bars of a track are going to be about love or deodorant. One of the consequences of this is that the band itself, surfacing and submerging with the ads, sacrifices its identity. It's no accident that the singer is hard to pick from the opening track. This is radio. It's a rock record. But it's radio. They are the same. Why? Because The Who Sell Out. It's like the Beatles giving one of their most adventurous albums the dismissive title of Revolver and then pretended they weren't even the Beatles but Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Who are going a step further and daring you to buy something that admits it's just more product. The cover art has already told you that, though. Two band members per side in mock ad photo shots with the kind of square-but-there copy about the person and the product. No false fake advertising here.

A real trumpet (Entwistle) barps out a brass band tune as Moon tattoos along beneath. "Wot's for tea, mum?" a high kid's voice that could be anyone in the band. Theme again but with more arrangement. "What's for tea, darling?" intones a posh voice that might be Townshend. Theme with even more arrangement. "Darling, I said what's for tea?" Theme, bigger. "Wass fer tea, dawghtah?" comes a depraved old man voice that could only be Keith Moon. The brass band is by this time massive with trills and booming kettle drums right up to the chorus of "Heinz Baked Beans." It's still funny.

A droning male voice choir from a chaving cream ad: "more music more music more music more music."

Maryanne With the Shaky Hands crashes in but turns out to be an acoustic number somewhere between the Everly Brothers and D.H. Lawrence. If it were in a different language it would sound like a pretty love song instead of a smutty one about a girl who gives handjobs.

A bashing workout on the drumkit with the name Premier Drums! chanted.

A big brassy intro is hijacked by a wobble and stylus scratching.

Odorono begins like a proper Who song with steely clunking chords and a supple descant on the guitar. Townshend comes in like a boy soprano, singing about a cabaret singer who tries to impress a handsome regular and does until he leans in for a kiss. He begs off and beats a retreat. She should've used Odorono. It works much better as a song than a joke with a lovely extension ("she'd seen him there" "it ended there") the second one with a perfectly judged choir behind it. Still, when you can throw material like that away ...

A lovely clear female vocal that sounds like its owner is singing in a mink stole over lush strings: "It's smoooooooth sailing with the highly successful sound of wonderful Radio London."

Tattoo starts straight away, jammed up against the choral ending of Odorono but abruptly different with a spidery acoustic figure (doubled with a rich electric guitar through Vox amp tremolo) that uses fretted and open strings, ingeniously playing an F twice but making it sound like two different chords, which descends and just gets more interesting as it lands on a Bb 9th. Daltrey, himself in choirboy mode, sings of a boy who decides, along with his brother, to get a tattoo to become a man. Their dad beats one because his says "mother" and their mum beats the other for getting a naked woman. The narrator goes through life believing in the power of his tattoos and even marries a tattooed woman. A slighter social commentary than many from Townshend but, considering how the guy in the song is so committed to his individuality, the tale of triumph over trivia works. Plus, it's a winner of a song that the band kept in their live repertoire into the stadium era.

A choir plagally intones: "Radio London reminds you, go to the church of your choice."

As the last note is out the staggered bright guitar riff of Our Love Was starts its chiming descent. The singing of the title over this but not the full chorus that will be also sound like a commercial. But it's a mid-pacer about the rocky waves of love with a doubled guitar riff that first goes down the dark steps but then winds back on itself as the chorus soars along with the lyrics. There's a gorgeous acapella breakout chorus of "love love love long" stretches over the band crashing in again as Townshend glides back in with the verse. Then that gets another boost with a clean slide solo (on the mono original) or a big screamy Jeff Beck sonic missle (on the stereo version). Each verse is differently arranged but not for show. Whether it's a Beach Boys choir or Entwistle's French horn filling the space under the chorus as it sustains to a real ache the new texture feels like an extension rather than flash. It's sheer brilliance, actually.

A quick mashed garble of station ID ending in a huge American male voice: "BIG L." The band provides the winking beer ad "speak easy, drink easy, pull easy" and then the second of two ads that actually got them products from the names dropped in the jingles (see also Premier Drums). "Hold you group together with Rotosound strings."

And then the first song on the album that sounds individual. I Can See For Miles. The band crashes in with huge raunchy chords, epic drums and Entwistle's giant bass. There is a massive landscape before us. Daltrey comes in: "I know you've deceived me now here's a surprise. I know that you have 'cause there's magic in my eyes. I can see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles." The last line seems to lift like an airliner as the chords and vocal harmonies rise through a kind of minor scale complicated by 9ths and 4ths. It sounds as mysterious as Eight Miles High but it just keeps ascending as the the vengeful jilted boy at its centre reaches the clouds. This is a massive rock number for a band that hadn't really got as rough and tough since their first album. The folklore has it that Paul MacCartney read an interview with Townshend who was boasting that the band had just recorded their nastiest, dirtiest track yet. Paul's response was Helter Skelter. Does that really work? The timeline puts about a year between a prerelease interview of a 1967 album and a 1968 Beatles recording session. Maybe Paul just kept it on ice. In any case.

A plinky country band fades in before John Entwistle tells us about the Charles Atlas course with (giant reverb) "DYNAMIC TENSION" will turn you ... into .... (his Boris the Spider growl) "a beast of a man!"

A plonking piano starts I Can't Reach You which settles into a mid-paced rocker with lean clean guitar lines and a Townshend vocal. I always thought it was about an old man and a young woman but now that I finally refer to the lyric it seems more about a failure to connect as a list of differences rolls out, leading to a middle eight in which it finally gets physical but his mind tears them apart. The gentle pace and boy-choir of the final line of each chorus (very Tommy, have a listen). Listened to with this in mind there is a real sense of exhaustion that comes through the pastel candy of the arrangement.

John Entwistle leads the band in another of the originally produced ads. This one is an acne cream and is always funny.

Relax starts with an organ and then glides down into a hippy hymn about relaxing and sharing. Like the opening track it comes close to outright psychedelia. Not much more to say about it from here except I's always surprised to hear it appear after decades of being familiar with it and it's always a pleasant surprise. Groovy.

In Silas Stingy John Entwistle pulls another from his pirate's chest of romper room gothic. The miser man of the title, tormented by the children of the neighbourhood spends so much money protecting his fortune that he goes broke. A funny story but the delivery and descriptions are the key. Over Hammer movie organ Entwistle declares in clipped radio acting: Once upon a time there lived an old miser man by the name of Silas Stingy. He carried all his money in a little black box." Then the Shepherd's Bush choir kicks in with traded lines: "with a big padlock, which was heavy as a rock. All the little kids would shout when Silas was about." Then they go into a lovely round: "Money money money bags (money money money bags) there goes mingy stingy." Two different middle eights and more choruses later and you've got a song so far out of the flow it fits perfectly. I know, I know, Tommy and all but I really wish John Entwistle had written a stage musical at this point. He was blazing.

Straight into Sunrise and some lovely Bossa Nova acoustic from Townshend as his helium falsetto intones with a strong first line: "You take away the breath I was keeping for sunrise." At first the crush like admiration he has for the other makes it seem like another song to her. Then (I should check this) this might well be around the time of discovering Meher Baba and the beginning of his devotional life.While I care not for any religious conviction I am impressed by Townshend's scene setting. It's so cinematic. Big and beautiful sunrise but the sense of the infinite beyond it both dejects him and sends him soaring above the droopy old skinly shape he was. Because it can so easily hide behind a love song he can lend a sense of powerful awe and serve both. It does make me turn back to I Can't Reach You and think on't again.

Rael bursts to life with clashing cymbals and a falsetto choir (if you listen to the stereo version you'll hear Townshend struggling unpleasantly with his pitch). The story is about the red chins in their millions invading Rael home of the narrator's religion. Nothing devotional about this one, it's an odd imaginary scenario whereby the godless Chinese (Red Chins ... erm....) invade the holy land and stir the latter into defensive action. But things take an interesting turn when the narrator says that as the odds are stacked against him doing his best with almost guarantee his failure. He then ponders desertion, giving instructions to a captain to look for signs he will leave to let everyone know whether he shall return or has fled. The several sections that suggest different scenes of characters reminded the contemporary listener of the mini opera from the previous album, A Quick One. Today's audient will receive a first run at Tommy with the big bass and kettle drums of the theme from that opera's tracks Sparks and the Underture. While Rael is never less than listenable it suffers from its own context in place between the brash modernist rockers thrashing out a tale of infidelity and the massive vision of the cosmos inside a traumatised boy who rises to Messianic glory. Rael feels both heavily worked on and unfinished. At nearly six minutes of precious LP side, that's going to be it's own skip recommendation.

Finally, if you leave some of the versions going you'll hear the band or part thereof looped as they say "track records" until it fades. A joke on The Beatles, their own new record label and the phenomenon of cracked records.

The pirate radio concept weakens after a few tracks and as the band take over the kitsch of this with their own ads it starts sounding like the follow-up to A Quick One rather than a blastin' new concept album for the modern world (pop and postpop as pop). The comparison song against song does not favour Sell Out. There is nothing as strong as So Sad About Us or Whiskey Man. The attempted excursion into epic pop loses its identity and settles into an uncompelling instrumental, having none of the violence, musicality or tightness of the previous one. Even within the concept of sellling out and making a record that sounded like commercial radio works uneasily between coyness and satire. And the irritatingly muddy production leaves it well behind the crispness of the previous album and those of its contemporaries like Sgt Pepper or Something Else by the Kinks (which I'll get to soon enough in this series). The overall effect, if listened to as a concept, is patchy at best but mostly a long winded failure winding down from fun to incomprehensible sludge.

However, listen to it as a set of songs and you'll probably enjoy the hell out of it. The great songs (I Can See for Miles or Tattoo) work in or out of context and the flow is fun with the silly mix of real and fake ads. There is an easily visible progression from A Quick One, particularly regarding the humour of it, and from itself forward to Tommy. The Who finally broke through to the USA in this year and they grew as a live unit with an ever increasing audience, one so large that only something as massive as a Tommy or Who's Next would satisfy. This album has its cultists and I can see why but knowing the power of what was still an outstanding singles band versus a toe-testing albums group The Who Sell Out hangs in the breeze made by the albums either side of it, swaying to each and occasionally touching but never quite folding in with them.



Listening notes:
My first hearing of this for years was on a home taped cassette. I later bought a copy of the twinned Sell Out and A Quick One as a double LP. Then when the mid-'90s CD remaster came out with extra tracks and the the two CD Deluxe package with a mono mix and more extra tracks. Most recently, I've got the legal Hi-Res Download of the mono mix which makes the most sense as a package; it's tight and solid and all the ads are in the right places. I frequently checked the stereo from the Deluxe set as there are some arrangement differences (including a completely different guitar solo in Our Love Was). Of these I would recommend the mono in 24 bit 96 kHz as it's the purest (non-compressed) representation you'll get of the original. Try the vinyl if you prefer the noise with the music. Otherwise the Deluxe CD set will deliver fine results.

1987 at 30

UK pop was getting twee. The strain in the early decade that brought us Altered Images and Haircut 100 rose like a Phoenix from the ashes of the post punk world. So, instead of new edges emerging from the creamy blandness of always triumphant pop we got The Housemartins and Stock Aitken and Waterman. I was working at a theatre in Fitzroy, earning ok pay and enjoying myself and, for the first time since I was about 12, the year didn't have much of a soundtrack to it. Really, looking back changes that impression but I left the year thinking of my life rather than its records: parties at houses with walls of mirror tiles, perms that would look like wigs either side of the timeline, Moet et Chandon Petite Liqueur at McCoppins, taking a girlfriend to see Blue Velvet at Hoyts, going decidedly solo to Eraserhead at the Valhalla and then with everyone to River's Edge, but also finding Darconville's Cat and Joysprick at the local library and then pretty much admitting it and giving up on the mighty mess of the novel I was trying to write (but really only redrafting passages of it until they were incomprehensible). 

LPs:

Strangeways Here We Come/The Smiths - To me the Smiths were a bland outfit with witty lyrics and the occasional strong song. I could make a great album out of half of each of Queen is Dead and the debut and the single How Soon is Now. This one I remember enjoying until it finished and then leaving my memory until I was in the next situation in which someone played it. Then, same thing.

The Joshua Tree/U2 - We got a new flatmate at the start of the year and I took up with her. It went from brilliant to dejection regularly and eventually just splodged out to indifference. She was a fan of U2 but you should also know that she was also a serious fan of a lot of other stuff of genuinely complex and difficult music. By this time every new U2 album sounded like the previous one. Like this did.

Within the Realm of a Dying Sun/Dead Can Dance - With their Factory Records style cover art and big, spooky musicality I couldn't help but love what I heard. One of the few acts I still eagerly listen to now. This one's a corker.

George Best/The Wedding Present - It sounded British, original yet part of its time despite being surrounded by an increasingly flavourless UK pop scene. You put it on and left it on. Two New Zealander brothers who were friends of the house accused the whole album of ripping off every Flying Nun band that ever existed. Only made me like Flying Nun bands more.

Talullah/The Go Betweens - If the single Right Here and its "smiley studio in Sydney" video was any indication (and it was) we were headed for a Go Betweens that would never come up with anything like a Stop Before You Say It again. Tallulah was nice and often engaging but from a much changed band. They still had some fine work ahead of them. The chorus of Bye Bye Pride remains one of my favourites of any pop song with its spine tingling vocal harmony. It reminds me of parties in St Kilda that we went to more dressed up than ever and also the last ones we ever crashed and how that made us feel old in our mid twenties. Ok, so I probably like it but I'm with its critics but I stand on the outer of them as the GoBs shouldn't have tried to sound like a Postcard band in the late '80s.

Document/REM - It was the following year's Green that bade me part ways with REM, an interesting band because they transcended their heavily derivative sound by being both interesting and American. I liked this one when it came out. I was out on Smith St on a Friday night, drinking with the irrepressible Mark Brooke. We stopped in at Leedin Records and I was surprised and delighted to find the new REM album. I had heard nothing about it. We got beer and went back to my share house which I blasted with this. Finest Worksong bashes out on track 1 and the rest keeps that up until side 2 slowly loses puff. A year later Green took even less time to wear off. After that it was lip service for a few years before I realised I didn't care about a band that had received a fair whack of my devotions. I still dig it but now it's more as a time capsule than music without day.

Locust Abortion Technician/Butthole Surfers - I wasn't just resistant to American bands getting cool I was resentful that all that guitar rock we thought we'd shamed to death in the punk wars just came back, cut its hair and did it all again and it was all American. It wasn't just outright horrible like Jason and the Scorchers, a lot of the times it was regurgitated Hendrix played against heaviness like The Butthole Surfers. I've already admitted to liking REM during this time but did so knowing that they were not only not challenging anything but feathering their own future stadiums. So, because I was so sniffy about American bands I came to them song by song (or via an unlabelled cassette as with Sonic Youth). One such was this album. From the designed to disturb title compounded by the cover art with the clowns and the tiny dog, it looked as contrived as you could get and still stop short of the mainstream. But, bit by bit, I softened enough to get a tape of this one. And I liked it. Whereas the rock revival had the Cure sound like Hendrix and REM sound like the Archies, Butthole Surfers grabbed samples from the radio, metal stomp riffs or wailing acid rock solos and somehow it all fulfilled the bright and creepy title and cover art. No one ever mentions this band when they talk about those others from Seattle in the 90s whose own sensibilities grew from this very creative mischief. I still prefer this.

Sister/Sonic Youth - The girl who was into U2 was also into Sonic Youth but that was after she moved in. She introduced the rest of the house to Evol so we all got into Sister when it was released. Now, I don't think it really stands. There are some great tracks like Schizophrenia or Cotton Crown but too much of it feels like filler these days.

Through the Looking Glass/Siouxsie and the Banshees - strange notion that a well established band should do a whole record of covers. While I appreciated how none of the approaches were remotely like the originals I had, by this time, lowered my expectations of almost every band I'd loved at the beginning of the decade.

Singles of Note:

Prince's Sign of the Times almost completely ripped off Donavon's Hurdy Gurdy Man but no one was allowed to say that.

That Petrol Emotion's Big Decision was a corker but featured the strange effect of the obscuring of its message by the indecipherable lyric (its author contrasted it with his previous band The Undertones' It's Gonna Happen as that had just been a "wee pop song").

It's Immaterial's dreamy swing time Rope still enchants even though the naivete of the lyric still jars this non-lyrics listener. I bought the single as it reminded me of the best of the keyboard heavy daze o' the early '80s

New Order's True Faith carried its bittersweet tale of childhood fascination on a tide of massive e-kick and snare, a cool croon from Bernard and a chorus that melts hearts.

Kylie's Locomotion was tolerated as it seemed tokenistic. She joined fellow Neighbour in a Funicello/Fabian retread that seemed quieter than the soft imagery of the video. Even Craig MacLachlan had a shot with another cover from the '60s. Kylie would just go back to neighbours, splice up with Jason and all would be forgiven. I was in my mid-20s and retained the naivete that nothing came of really mediocre things. Then, there was Confide in Me but that was over a decade later.

Eric B. & Rakim's Paid in Full had everything a hip hop record should have, vintage voice samples ("journey into sound" is still something I say when not saying anything else), that old school kick + snare + jazzy high hat + slithering bass and compelling vocal. Ofra Haza, sampled here, got an international career out of it, too. Hip hop's brief glory in the mid to late '80s on the mainstream charts now looks like a fad for novelty singles. Here, as in its native USA, it found its level where it was most needed, among the voiceless and the frowning. Of course there were poseurs, skinny white boys with reversed baseball caps who only reminded me of people with glue mohawks earlier in the decade. Every scene has these but for a brief time they were eclipsed by things like this. Pump up the volume pump up the volume pump up the volume pump up the volume ...

Tone Loc showed that it not only wouldn't be all good but was never going to be with Funky Cold Medina. If there had been a danger of rap getting sold as novelty party records this would be exhibit A along with Morris Minor and the Majors' Stutter Rap. Still, we loved it at three a.m. on Rage and renamed any mixed drink after the one in the title. Errrngh errngh ern ern er-erngh!

Fairground Attraction provided anyone who still looked to the UK for inspiration that it wasn't going to happen. Per-er-er-er-fect sounded like Steely Dan unplugged but was thought of highly. It made me wince.

1967 at 50: PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN - PINK FLOYD

Some time in the late seventies I got mum to impulse buy a book called Rock Life. It was a series of articles about some of the more towering figures of British rock. Vintage 1973 it featured ex Beatles (and only John and Paul) and focused on the central figures of big acts like Pete Townshend or Ray Davies. While not deep it was a great primer for me to go hunting for records. I was aware of most of the bands but it being the time and I being my age the spectre of Pink Floyd was one of the chapters I left to last (see also Van Morrison). When I did it was to encounter the most sustained description of Syd Barrett I'd come across. He was loopy, unpredictable and left a great mark. There was a photo of him with the band. They were lined up on bleachers at different heights like a school photo. It was a rare picture of the five piece that included Dave Gilmour. Syd was miles away, eyes like the black coals in Crazy Diamond, hair so unkempt it looked like it had matted in the shape the wind had blown it. He looked dangerous, infectious, as though his gaze alone would afflict you. I wanted to be that.

As with Revolver I found a copy of Piper at the Gates of Dawn among the collections of friends of siblings. Christmas holidays 1978-9. A mild summer that tasted of scotch and dry and sounded like Elvis Costello. As that might suggest, the afternoon I put it on and listened in headphones in the rumpus room downstairs is golden with nostalgia. I'll end that here.

Astonomie Dominie opens with what sounds like mission control radio voices (but are really band members unless Houston employed an unmistakably Cambridge plum voice at some point in the psychedelic era) that give way to the lift off of palm muted bass and guitar. A wash of vocal harmonies adds light as a choir of Barrettian word play suggests interplanetary travel. A big chromatic riff descends with a strangely merged organ and vocal falsetto. The instrumental centre of the song assumes its station smoothly without sounding like a solo that will last an average three zone bus trip. But there really are no solos here as much as lightly explored textures. Imagine an English Beach Boys (the accents are uncompromisingly non-American) from the Smile era.

Lucifer Sam is the coolest song ever written to a cat with a spy movie guitar riff. Syd's Fender Esquire tones are really beautiful on this one, clean but hot, chiming and ringing. The vocals are close harmony but there's no esoterica like the last song, it's all London rock and roll. And under all the banging and ringing there's a strange warm flutey part that might be an organ or even a mellotron.

Matilda Mother begins with a white light organ note beaming through a descending bass line which comes to a soft landing as Syd's vocal starts, a single note insisting over a descent telling what sounds like a children's bedtime story about a king who ruled a land. The harmony chorus comes in with the child's plea, "oh, mother, tell me more". But then a sour double time minor figure coupled in the vocal asks why she leaves him. From here we swing between the wonder in the child's mind (including huge fantastical landscapes in the instrumental section) and the corner of dejection between story time and dreams with only the nightlight for cheer against the dark. Seekers of the early signs of Syd's affliction might find riches here but it's really pretty straightforward and imaginative rather than deranged.

A dissonant drone on the organ begins Flaming like an electric engine. Syd chirps in with the whimsy of a Cambridge riverside picnic and answered by a loopy recorder. Playfully spying on a friend he sings of the joy of hiding and watching but then we're travelling by telephone and screaming through the starlit sky as his daydreams send him soaring. This song, beginning as electrically as it does surprises us by letting a clean wide acoustic guitar provide the bedrock. The winsome, cheeky melody returns after an instrumental section of tacked pianos and electro manipulation, ever rising. Pure psychedelic charm.

Pow R Toc H starts with a muffled thump answered by a bass and series of vocal sounds like ch-ch or a falsetto-ed doy-doy and settles into a brisk jazz workout which intensifies into something more jammy and psychedelic. I don't skip it anymore but I'd never go straight to it.

Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk bangs in with a beat band chordy rock backing to a call and response vocal of a whispered "doctor doctor" and series of thin harmony vocals saying things like "gold is red". The organ comes in and meanders. Some whispered vocals here and there. Don't skip this either, mostly. Roger Waters' first byline for the band. Well, he made up for it.

Interstellar Overdrive bashes straight into the big descending riff, repeating it until its exhausted then intentionally collapsing into a series of more spacey passages. Clearly an adaptation of a longer live workout that is suggested by the recording without too much insistence, leaving it feeling half baked rather than condensed. Unless I'm really concentrating on something I'm doing while listening, I'll skip this one.

The tick tock rhythm and octave used more effectively in the later See Emily Play starts the Gnome before Syd enters in children's lit mode, somewhere posher than Ray Davies in bucolic operation. Twee but gets away with it. It's Syd.

Chapter 24 couches Syd's voice in oboes and other orchestral intruments as he guides us through the i-ching. Rick Wright's keyboards take up the oboe as Syd's vocals get expanded by masses of reverb. Strong melody and lovely harmonies allow me to forget the cod mysticism (a tautology for me).

A click clack start with an oboe floating in the air around the harvest bonfire as Syd comes in with a serpentine melody fleshed out with slightly creepy descriptions of a scarecrow that a child might offer. The fadeout features a beautiful acoustic twelve string figure enriched by bowed basses and an ever more buoyant oboe. A miniature of pure beauty.

"I've got a bike, you can ride if you like..." Syd channels his prepubescent self at the moment of awakening as these big happy declarations over the clashing and hammering alternate with the half spoken: "you're the kind of girl who fits in with my world. I'll get you anything, everything if you want thing." This is delivered over a loopy theremin either rising or falling the way that crazy people in cartoons or thrillers sound. Finally, after verses about gingerbread men, a mouse called Gerald the finale is about a room filled with musical tunes most of which are clockwork. Then we suddenly plunge into that very thing with clicks and tocks , hammering, chimes, tools, a whole workshop of hitting and ringing which is overcome by a rising loop of something that could be a squeeze toy sound, bird call or a sped up voice that sounds more sinister with every repetition until it, too, fades. Actually, it sounds very similar in character to the run out groove loop of Sgt Pepper which was being recorded in the next studio at the time by Norman Smith's old boss George Martin.

Smith did a lot to curb the band's live act from taking over, directing them through take after take of numbers like Interstellar Overdrive that would work as a recording. Here's the problem, though: a side of that would have sounded like Pink Floyd the way their audience knew them, trippy and exploring, but a recognition and pursuit of Barrett's melodic gifts and strange childlike lyrics presented something far more accessible and individual. The record doesn't recover from the the tension of these contrary forces. Syd's vocal songs sound like he's backed by a band rather than a band in total (unlike the comparable Kinks) and the jamming sections never quite lift off which editing in post might have allowed. The epic promised by Astronomy Domine with its radio calls and surge into outer space is not sustained.

So, why do I still like the album? Well, while I've never quite got to the point of listening to the ones I'd skip with renewed vigour I can let the whole thing happen now. More pointedly, I will dive into the sequences of Syd-centric numbers which are psychedelic by association rather than at core. But that's it for me, an album of good bits between dull ones. Norman Smith seemed to find a path to working with the band more effectively as evinced by the singles See Emily Play and Apples and Oranges and the post Barrett albums Saucer Full of Secrets and Ummagumma. Until then there was this uneasy collision between the band as a practicing unit and a backdrop to its singer which prevent it from the cohesion that the band would soon be pursuing without fear or favour.

Syd's story is better known now than it was and the band's tale is part of rock dinosaur legend. Speculation about a version of history where he continued contributing is answered easily by Jugband Blues and the solo albums which, while often inspiring, can terrify by their unfocused wandering. Whatever Syd's condition was that separated him from the rest of the world his messy exit continued for years of decreasingly effective creative attempts. The rest of the band recruited an old friend who joined them in the stratosphere. Before that there was this awkward child who could recite Wind in the Willows as thought he'd written it himself but also who could stare at his shoes for whole afternoons without noticing how cold it had become.

1967 at 50: SGT PEPPER's LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND - THE BEATLES

It was fifty years ago today ... at the beginning of two months ago as I write. My memories of this one have nothing to do with its initial release. The closest I can come is the fragmented recollection of looking at the gatefold of the members of the band and thinking that Ringo was the one with the glasses. I only knew his name because it sounded like a cartoon character.

I can't even swear I heard the record at the time. Too young. My memory of this as a new release is a family memory, not a personal one: my Aunt Sandy returned from a year of nursing in the U.K. and presented my eldest brother with a copy of the record. Laminated, glossy cardboard sleeve and lots of colour and big bold sound. But that's almost hearsay. I remember seeing my sister lower her head in a kind of prayer at some news on the radio around the same time. Same thing. That was when Prime Minister Harold Holt went missing forever off Cheviot Beach in 1967. Sgt Pepper and I don't go back that far as friends. That happened later.

When my brother Michael descended upon the house for his uni holidays he brought his entourage and a few crates of LPs. One afternoon when I was drawing in the rumpus room he came in and put Sgt Pepper on to test the stereo system Dad had finished making that year. Dad had had made to enormous cabinets for the front speaker but also had another two speakers mounted on the rear wall just under the ceiling. Michael had the notion that this made it quadraphonic. When the first lead guitar lashes out in the opening song he grinned and pointed to the rear. That was all the proof I needed: Sgt Pepper was great because the Beatles had invented quadraphonic sound and made an album of great songs to prove it. I listened to all those aural textures and the strong central voices and harmonies, the great range of styles, and knew that all of modern rock music had started there the way that modern history starts with the French Revolution.

You see what I mean? I knew nothing about the band or their history and already I was making things up about them. This is what a dangerous little learning does; you like something so you make mythology for it. Michael also had Magical Mystery Tour with him and the White Album. The latter scared me a little with its horror soundscapes and songs about cannibalistic pigs but Magical Mystery Tour plugged straight into the nervous system of a kid whose only musical love was classical but needed prodding if he was to survive the impending rack of high school. The Beatles to me were from the get go as sophisticated as they were in 1967 and, for all I knew, always had been (I heard the earlier stuff a lot later). I got through the door of rock music with an instant credentials.

That wasn't the door to any kind of credibility with the natives of my age, though. Countdown and a lot of pretending saw to that until I realised that it didn't really matter what I liked as long as it wasn't classical (which I never gave up). This made me tolerate the adolescent mainstream rather than gleefully involve myself in it but that meant that liking The Beatles put me both outside (which I was used to and still happy about) and deep inside. What all that meant was that I was in touch with a classic, something from a former generation but also outside of time. Its reputation by the mid seventies put it at the apex of all rock albums. I just so happened to like it.

So, to me any nostalgia from hearing the album had no flowers in its hair, it wore a blue and grey school uniform, drew music fuelled dreamscapes in pencil and marvelled at his sisters singing along to A Day in the Life and getting the perfectly pitched note at the end of the line "nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Loooooooooooords." So it was never the big groundbreaking edifice of music for me but a record I loved and judged others by. I heard it in Queen's A Night at the Opera (well, any Queen album from the seventies) and disappointed that there wasn't more of it in Skyhooks' Living in the 70s.

I've had a few copies. I bought it as a U.S. pressing on Apple from Ken Hurford's import records around the corner. It didn't have the weird loop at the end and it was on the wrong label but it did have the gatefold and the cutout sheet (the local edition was a single sleeve). Until the following year's Never Mind The Bollocks finally got released it was my most played album. Then I bought an original mono edition for 99 cents at the Record Market in Brisbane (the guy checked the price ticket a few times but had to sell it to me for that. I didn't quite appreciate mono at the time so I gave it to a friend for helping me with some recordings in the eighties just before I left Brisbane. I bought the CD which was the only Beatles reissue to have a slip cover and booklet. Of the remasters in 2009 I bought both the stereo albums as hi-res flacs on the usb stick lodged inside the little aluminium apple and the mono box set. And this year I also bought the super deluxe box set with Giles Martin's more contemporary mix with centred bass, drums, and lead vocals, discs of sessions and outtakes, the mono mix and surround mixes on dvd and blu-ray. At some point in the future when we add to our music collections by tapping our temples and ramming our heads into media walls so that the downloads of our choice transfer to the microchip in our cerebral cortices I'll probably get a version of Pepper in that format, as well.

But Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is an album, a record by a pop group. When you remove the hype you have thirteen songs that delight or not. They delight me, still, as a whole sequence and as individual songs. The effect of the whole album is exhilarating with its great range of textures and colours, from the chorus of Lucy in the Sky through the eerie drones of Within You Without You to the delicate vocals and cataclysm of A Day in the Life.

Because I heard it closely for the first time in the seventies the sound of the tampuras buzzing through so many of the tracks I assumed was a synthesiser. Same went for the big flitty chaos at the end of Mr Kite. It didn't sound like a normal rock band but so much of it sound like records from the time of my discovery of it rather than its own. It didn't occur to me until I found out much more about the time of its creation that it was a groundbreaking album (and a very good one).

But hype and a tireless promotional machine have ways of rendering criticism meaningless and celebratory accounts into formless gushes. So, I won't be talking track by track or going into any detail for this one. If a new edition is released there will be millions of words prepared in advance to once again describe the sounds and songs. It's one of the easiest albums to get to hear and is best heard for oneself.

I will say that Giles Martin's contemporary stereo mix is impressive and respectful, if it does approach loudness war excess in the mastered image. The original mono is still the strongest indicator of what the first listeners heard and remains the closest to the band's intention. The surround mixes are also impressive by restraint. My copy of the boxed super deluxe set of the 50th Anniversary version arrived in time for an anniversary play but the week was busy and exhausting. At the end of it, tired unto collapse I had no wish to go out and remembered the blu-ray with the hi-res 5.1 mixes. I put the disc in, staggered to the couch, buried my body under the doona and lowered into a dozing haze as the orchestra tuned up and the restless audience shuffled. The first big electric chords clanged out and the stinging lead licks followed and MacCartney's excited scream welcomed me to the show. And I joined in falling beneath or surfacing into its warm colourful flow. Yep, don't care at all for the nay sayers neighing: this is a great record.

1967 at 50: DAVID BOWIE

You love David Bowie, don't you? Of course, you do. Everyone does. But I'd bet out of all his albums in your collection you don't have this one. You might even look at the cover and then the track list and think it's a compilation of his early quirky songs. Read on.

It gets you from the off with a bright, folky oboe motif with handclaps. Bowie's natural London tones tell us the funny but sad tale of grown up child Uncle Arthur whose attempt to escape from his mother's dominance into happy wedlock is thwarted because his new bride isn't his mum. A British kitchen sink film in two minutes and seven seconds. Sell me a Coat is a kind Disneyfied Paint it Black with a gorgeous orchestral arrangement. Rubber Band is all Edwardian music hall about a romantic oneupmanship. You could easily transpose it to the Carnaby St world of rock stars in old military uniforms of the swinging London where Bowie lived and traded but I don't think we're even that deep here. Love You Till Tuesday is an impossibly cute note to a girl that she could have him all to herself for a limited time only if she played her cards right (he might even extend it to Wednesday). He's the Dandy of Ray Davies' song but doesn't need to be told he's alright.

These first four songs do what a pop album in 1967 was required to do, engage with stories and lure with a kind of musical open architecture whereby a harpsichord might sit in a mix beside a fuzzed up Stratocaster. The big invaders had reset the rules about albums in the previous years, Revolver, Aftermath, Face to Face, A Quick One and more; if you wanted to put a hit single in the first track and the rest of the two sides with a lot of Chuck Berry covers you were no longer going to be noticed. The password was sophistication. That's what you get here. Maybe too much.

There is a Happy Land is a dreamy evocation of the space created in childhood where the grownups may not go. We Are Hungry Men is a kind of Future Shock set to a rock backing with Bowie in a number of dramatic roles including news readers, German accented tyrants, a would-be messiah and his followers. It has moments of clear portent but not of the future of the West as much as Bowie's own, looking ahead to similar but better crafted pieces like Running Gun Blues or Saviour Machine (and then the personae of Ziggy or the Thin White Duke). It shoots itself in the foot with the campy voices and jokey thrust which are completely at odds with the more earnest passages. But it's interesting. When I Live My Dream closes the old side one with a ballad which is lovely but a little mothballed even for its time. What it does is extend Bowie's stylistic range into the grand sweep of future tracks like Sweet Thing or Wild is the Wind.

Little Bombadier opens with lush strings playing a waltz. The title character, traumatised by war retreats into childhood and plays with children as though he was another child, gets warned off by plainclothes cops and flees the scene. Bowie is more in stride with this one as his Weimar cabaret approach and straighter arrangement allow the song to grow into itself rather than sound like someone doing musical tricks. Silly Boy Blue's heralding trumpets tell of a novitiate Tibetan monk whose sense that he is the reincarnation of  a master gets him into constant trouble. Come and Buy Toys is a straight folk strum (with some very lovely acoustic finger style guitar playing) contrasting the abandon of childhood with the child's future working on the land. Although he never pursued the feel of it further than this the seriousness of the song and deceptive simplicity of the performance look ahead to the album he would better build upon in a few years' time.

Join the Gang is a regression to the winking social satire of the first side with a roll call of swinging Londoners. It's energetic and funny ... the first time. She's Got Medals is the kind of Cockney rocker the Small Faces made their own. Here, the story of a transsexual who goes to war is marred by a few too many cor blimey asides and knowing winks which is a great pity as the music is a brilliant moving rocker that could've gone somewhere. Maid of Bond Street offers the hollowness of fame wed with dissatisfaction in a Twiggy like model. It's a jazzy waltz with some fancy vocal hoofing but also some real pain. Please, Mr Grave Digger is sung without musical accompaniment but set deeply in a soundscape of wet weather and cracking twigs underfoot. A murderer returns to the grave of the child he molested and murdered. Confessing to the grave digger, he must then remove the new witness into a grave of his own. The fade has him mumbling to himself about the cold he's caught and various other fragments. And that's it, that's the way the album ends.

His erstwhile manager, Ken Pitt, was keen to develop Bowie away from his earlier mod R&B attempts on the charts and fame and steer him into a more generalist entertainer like Anthony Newley. That is what's behind the massive swings in style and tone that tear this album from its potential shelf mates like A Quick One or Face to Face. While Ray Davies might go from ragging the Carnabitian army with a rollicking mockery to the poignancy of Waterloo Sunset, or the Who from Boris the Spider to So Sad About Us, Bowie here, in debuting the new name in his first long player, feels like he's trying to cover every possibility as a master of whichever style he comes across. At its best the results point us to his future career as a songwriter of high power but at its worst he hides his light under bushels of Christmas novelty song mediocrity.

Is that harsh? No, it's disappointed. Bowie's strengths are clear from track to track but his eager youth and managerial myopia made this album sound like an over keen audition tape for an Anthony Newley warm up act. It's harder to take this set when you recognise its clear signs of things to come. When he emerged two years later with an album also eponymously titled (as though attempting to obscure the first) but better known as Space Oddity it was as a much more confident artist whose London accent sounded natural rather than self-protective and whose songs found more solid setting for their range of mood and imagination. If the darkness of We Are Hungry Men was smothered in wincing cuteness it was to find release in the eerie epic Cygnet Commitee or the horror in space of Space Oddity both of which function as songs first and then as plots.

But, let's be fair. There are songs on the debut that stand now, as much as anything from the late '60s. Bowie collaborated on the arrangements of this first set of wholly original material. That's like the way he taught himself piano to write the songs on Hunky Dory. Bowie's first full decade of success, ending in 1980, is witness to the power of career concentration and the willingness to explore and learn whatever was needed for the next one so that each of them emerged both signature and distinct from the previous one. In this album he changed his name by borrowing from an adventurer who had given his name to a knife and told the world he was ready. Yes, it's hampered by aesthetic guesses which can be so off that they embarrass but it's also in line with its times (perhaps too much: it's birth as a retail item was troubled by the coincidental release of Sergeant Pepper).

Put it this way, you know those people who affect flamboyance in their dress and manner but turn out to be flatly conventional in their opinions? Well, this album is the opposite of that. The goofy showbiz and pearly king swagger conceal stories with depth about stress, crime, reincarnation, death, superficiality and the dark side of fame. This is from a twenty year old who had come to understand that his attempts to be a Jagger-like figure were doomed as long as there was a real Jagger, who saw a song in every news report or morning walk and carved them finished out of sheer imagination. And he did it outside of the mainstream in that he did it alone. What we should be hearing among the Cockney and the goofy sound effects is the emergence of an artist and a star. It flopped. He didn't. Ten years later he captivated the world with a story about a couple kissing at the Berlin Wall. And he ended his days with farewells that crossed dimensions and entered massive landscapes. This box of novelties and winks wasn't the first time he was driven by imagination but it was the first time he could show us how it worked. So, if you come across it, let it play and see that at work.

1977 at 40: Metamorphosis

"Does anyone remember laughter?"

At the beginning of 1977 I was hanging out to see The Song Remains the Same at the cinema and waiting for the new Queen album but there was another thread winding its way from the twine: I'd seen the Weekend Magazine story on punk in London and the bits of the Anarchy in the UK video haunted me. 1976 ended with a marathon two hour Countdown that went through the year's hits. It was low on the chart but the clip was played in full. John Paul Young quipped to Molly that the singer had a future playing the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

That separated me from John Paul Young's tribe of oldies forever. He had just looked popstar age before that but at that moment he might as well have been forty-eight. Gone. But there was no way I could get to hear the Sex Pistols as the single had already been deleted (I had expected it to be in the 45s bin at Palings and could take my time about getting a copy). There were no follow ups and might not be. There had just been that moment, as far as I could tell. I was haunted. Meantime there was everything else.

By the end of the year a few albums (mentioned below) caught my senses and then, finally, on the day of the election that sank the cause of progressive politics in Australia until the following decade, there was the beautifully ugly cover of Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols in the normal LP shelves. No brown paper bag, just there like Boston or Bad Company, another record. She didn't know it but my grandmother (who had sent me to town to buy my own Christmas present - I was fifteen and that's the way it worked) was about to pay for the record that changed me. That was the summer. I went in as an adolescent grub and emerged as a greater spotted moth.

"Noooooooooo future! Noooooooooo future! Noooooooooo future for you!"

Albums:

Low - David Bowie

I was confused by Sound and Vision and was ready to write Bowie off as lost to disco (because of Young Americans and some tracks on Station to Station). I had a friend tape this rather than buy it myself. The first side seemed like a lot of chimey nothing but the first half of the second side sounded like the best and darkest sci-fi movie ever (and then there was Star Wars at the end of the year which might have had a chance if it weren't for everything else I encountered in the ten months leading up to it). I made a tape of the tape which reversed the sides (it was on a C90) and listened that way.






The Clash

I bought this at the Big W down the road. Mine (long gone) had a black and white only cover and later ones had the ripped margins in olive green (a bit like the colour-reversed Never Mind the Bollocks art). There's a lot to fire up a teenager here but it sounded so thin and localised that I had to imagine my empathy. The start of a seldom interrupted indifference I felt for the band. I appreciated the sentiment and a handful of songs to come. For a while it was the only LP I had that sounded like what I took for punk.






Damned Damned Damned

Had a cassette but got tired of it. I don't know why but it felt like a good start that the band didn't know how to maintain. I could leave it on but didn't care if I left the room while it was going.











TransEurope Express - Kraftwerk

I did like the sci-fi sound of this, a mix of cold German precision and spooky atmospheres and large lovely electronic landscapes. Had it on cassette.











Peter Gabriel

The first of what would be four self-titled albums from the ex-Genesis tonsils intrigued me as the reviewers seemed to be spooked by it. I hadn't consciously heard a bar of Genesis at that stage and nudged them into the shelf already stuffed with the likes of Jethro Tull, Yes and ELP and the like. The spook was that it sounded like a rebirth with none of the great technoflash (a RAM magazine coinage created in absence of the prevalent term Prog which came later). I was hooked enough from the video to the second single Modern Love in which he thrashed about in a Rollerball uniform on a shopping mall escalator, removing his mask only to sing the middle eight with his face in shadow where it wasn't obscured by hair. The song itself I still like. It's a big barre chord rock song with a great vocal that rests somewhere between a metal scream and a Greg Lake posh tenor. Nothing on the rest of the album lived up to it but moments like Moribund the Burgermeister or Humdrum gave enough for me to buy the next one without hearing it first. Also, it led me to investigate Genesis but I didn't pursue it after a few real tries.


The Idiot - Iggy Pop

Heard this more at the Uni parties my older siblings would take me to in the following year but I knew about it before then as it was always brought up in connection with Bowie's album Low.












Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl/Star Club

Any new Beatles was manna for the second generation fan. Of the two live Beatles albums released in 1977 this was the best sounding but least interesting. The Star Club album was the reverse of that. The cover art had magnified black on white type which made it look like a bootleg and photos of the punters that felt authentic (the screaming girls in the art of the Bowl album looked very '70s) and for the first play it sounded hard and punchy. But then if I tried to play it again I could only do it for isolated tracks. I friend of mine had a few boots of bands like Led Zeppelin and gave me tapes which is why I never bothered with them.





Deceptive Bends - 10CC

I'd been a fan of this band's cleverness and talents with catchy pop with subversive lyrics, a kind of Romper Room Frank Zappa (whom I reviled). This was the first album after the darker minded pair, Lol Creme and Kevin Godley, exited for more interesting territory. The wit is still there and the epic Feel the Benefit continues to have some power but I can't now easily say why I listened to this so much in this year. Wouldn't now.







News of the World - Queen

Almost the redemption of Day at the Races and its patchy form filling, News of the World brought us the football anthem We Are The Champions with its "nah nah nanah naaah" chorus but also the funny response to punk Sheer Heart Attack and the stompin' We Will Rock You. But by the end of 1977 it seemed like a missed boat. I bought a friend's copy at a discount and played it a little but it just couldn't compete with the rude noise I had aligned with in the meantime. Oh, and this was the one on which they stopped boasting how they didn't use synthesisers and those were in pretty full force through a lot of it. Good a point as any to give up on a band you once liked.


Rattus Norvegicus - The Stranglers

I hated what I took to be a group of middle-aged prog rockers with shorter haircuts and slightly shorter keyboard solos passing themselves off as punk because they wrote songs about rude things. I guiltily loved some of the arrangements but in my defence it's because the better of them (Get a Grip on Yourself) sounded like a distillate of '60s psychedelia. Also, they were one of those bands whose fans matched them for baseless obnoxiousness: a Stranglers fan was almost invariably a massive fuckwit (and almost always older).






ABBA the Album

I had long abandoned ABBA (most of my acquaintance cast themselves adrift after Fernando was poured into the drinking water and we all got sick) but this album did contain I'm a Marionette which remains pleasantly unnerving (in the best way, I'm not being sarcastic). Otherwise by this stage it sounded a little too homogenised for this punter. Also, this was tied in to the movie which seemed too cute and teeny even if I had any interest left.









Talking Heads '77

I only heard Psycho Killer from this set until the following year and only very recently owned the album. I like it now but can't say if I would have then.












My Aim is True - Elvis Costello

A lot of folk cite this as one of the great debut albums but I only bought it after the third one and then from completeness. I liked less than half (I know, missing a joke there but I'm serious) of the tracks and found the Californian soft rock approach irritating (well, the band did go on to back Huey Lewis!) I'll admit that the songwriting didn't change that much between albums as much as the arrangements, the great Attractions washed the songs clean of the plodding Americana with beautiful garagey power, sounding far more like my late '70s. That said, I can listen to Alison and Watching the Detectives (on the Australian release) any day of the week.


Rumours - Fleetwood Mac

My pre-punk hatred for this and the other main Nicks/Buckingham Fleetwood Mac albums stems from my brother playing his cassette of them ceaselessly for weeks. My Queenslander house featured walls that stopped short of the ceiling (to promote airflow) so I didn't miss a beat. There's merit in the writing, production and singing here but there's about the same amount in anything by the Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan or the Eagles and I was already finding those acts excessive and aurally indigestible. This album was to rise in the estimation of twenty-somethings decades later but so did anything by ELO. That didn't make me want to reassess but I heard it again many times and still found it horrible.

Heroes - David Bowie

If I could only like half of Low I'll have to admit I didn't like this beyond the big title song until the year after when it started feeling like it fit. Spiky arrangements, screaming choruses that seemed to go nowhere for a long time, instrumentals that felt more like film music. I now like about half of it but do and did dig Bowie's outsider/insider look on the cover.







Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols

From the moment I saw them on Weekend Magazine before the seven o'clock news one Sunday I was waiting for this album. This anticipation (almost a year in construction) was not just met but rewarded with excess. A life changer to which I've already devoted three long posts. My most-played record for the remainder of the decade.

The only other album I can think of that had anything like the same impact on the way I listened to music and how alligned I felt to it was Portishead's Dummy almost twenty years later. But Bollocks was the deadly frisbee and the shield against which I felt strong as well as apart. That felt very, very good.


Singles:

Baracuda - Heart: A galloping assault with a soaring vocal about .... an attack? Kind of sounded like a sex song but could have been about someone very nasty. The chugalug was lifted from Led Zeppelin's Achilles' Last Stand from the previous year's Presence album but served very well at the centre of a short form single. Kudos for making a clean guitar tone sound like metal and for the abrupt ending.

I Feel Love - Donna Summer: One of the greatest pop singles ever. Essayed elsewhere on this blog. Couldn't make this list without it.

The Way That You Do It - Pussyfoot: A time-travelling Spice Girl rolled this one out in a clip I can't remember as it was replaced by the lame "live" one at the Countdown Studios the night she hosted. Ooh na na hia ooh na na hia hia indeed. This was too easy to hate but too persistent to ignore. Pop music was the rug under the feet of this novelty dirge and it was about to get pulled. Then about five years later it was back under big hair and synthesisers with squelching presets.

Don't Cry for Me Argentina - Julie Covington: Sung by the tough girl from the Rock Follies the hit from Evita made a persistent appearance in the Countdown top ten. The video was shown only once. It was a series of stills of Covington in a long and shear white dress in a white room standing or sitting on the floor, looking serious. I liked the Latin sound of the melody and the halting opera of it but didn't get a copy. I think I liked the idea that something so slow and un-rock could be filling the singles bins at Palings.

Rockaria - ELO: At first I thought this was funny, like everyone else but it really wore out its welcome quickly and when the kids who always caught up last caught up with this you had to get tortured all over again when they told you how clever it was. It was a rock song with a soprano in the breaks.

Jet Airliner - Steve Miller Band: Even back then I knew this was a kind of by-the-numbers soft rock but I loved the clean rhythm guitar tone and singer-songwriter vocal. Kraft processed cheddar and tasted just as satisfying to the undeveloped pallet.

I Go to Rio - Peter Allen: The grinning Broadway cabaret monster whose video was one of the most embarrassing things on television that year had a mega hit with this chirpy clunking slice of Hell from our parents' area of responsibility. He banged at a white piano and stripped down to the singlet. If you're thinking proto-G.G.Allin stop it now.

God Save the Queen - The Sex Pistols: I kept missing this. It was never on Countdown but it was on Sounds but Sounds was a lot of interviews with cabaret has beens and I often skipped it. Every time I did, though, they played something good. I didn't see the clip until I saw it in context in the Great Rock n Roll Swindle years later. This also meant I didn't hear it until I bought the album at the end of the year. We ogled the photo of the A&M signing outside Buckingham Palace reprinted in RAM magazine. That would have to do.

Lucille - Kenny Rogers: "You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille. With four hundred children and a cop in the field." Indeed she had. Kenny Rogers would have a string of nu-country hits in the years to come. At least one of which was made into a tv movie (Coward of the County) after the hits dried up. He makes this list because I heard that Mr Rouse had been walking across the quad at school once when one of his Woolworths shoes disintegrated. He had (on good authority) said: "you picked a fine time to leave me, loose heel."

Don't Stop - Fleetwood Mac: Crap then and crap now.

Don't Give Up on Us - David Soul: Hutch crooned his way through a ballad that sounded like it came from four years before. There was another one called Silver Lady later which had him do a bullseye Bryan Ferry. There was no jealousy response single from Starsky.

Nothing Stays the Same Forever - Hush: The out of time glam band went from boorish football choruses to this quite interesting atmospheric number. For a band with no ideas beyond pub rock they really got something here. Never did again, though.

Don't Fall in Love - The Ferrets: This just appeared paranormally one Sunday evening on Countdown. We didn't know where it was from or who they were but it was really, really good. Some of the cheek of the mid '70s pubrock made good but also a quirky leanness and nerve enough for us to declare it new wave (a protean term then which, before it came to be spoken with an obligatory sneer, could sound quite thoughtful and discerning). A genuine classic of the era.

Living Next Door to Alice - Smokie: Another band like Racey who seemed to emerge from the clubs of Northern England to present the world with a series of A&R prescribed songs that became hits until they stopped a few years later. The singer had a croaky voice  and a sort of grown out Rod Stewart perm. He still had both by 1980 when he had his last wheeze in a duet with Suzie Quatro. Everyone finds each other.

Blue Jeans  - Skyhooks: The great sharpened satirists of Horror Movie and Ego is Not a Dirty Word sang a little country song about fashion or denim or something but I'd stopped listening to them by then.

In the Flesh - Blondie: Released the year after its host album, the A and B sides were flipped when Countdown played the B side and it blazed the local ears. There was a '50s feel to it but the lyrics were grown-up and Debbie Harry's delivery and appearance in the clip wiped every other note played on the show that evening. Everyone was talking about it at school the next day. The band was aligned to punk even though they came across more as '60s revivalists at the time but it was still thrilling to have something from the margins in the charts. They toured and their career (however brief) ascended.

Mull of Kintyre - Wings: Pleasant enough folk waltz but I bought it for the White Album style b-side Girls School which still rocks fine!

Pretty Vacant - The Sex Pistols: This one was played on Countdown as they couldn't ignore them at that stage. The video was as cold as a London December and as exciting as hell. It was hard and shouty and perfect. A year of pop music dissolved under its force.

And there it was, what the previous year had joined no band put asunder. I started the Christmas holidays in 1977 getting slowly tired of Queen's News of the World and ached for the Sex Pistols album. When that was in my hands the world changed. Everything I'd taken with thanks from older siblings fell away like old skin. The freedom of it made me listen more closely to those things I kept (selected Beatles, Stones, Who, Yardbirds) and meet the new, violent attack of punk as it hit. Everything was re-evaluated, everything was open to thought if not deed and the world of the straights with their Saturday Night Fever mainstream installment plans softened into the blur of the background. I'd long given up on trying to fit in with them but now knew that I didn't want their protected lack of imagination, their common as muck sense nor cared about their shallow judgement. I didn't have the safety pins in my nostrils nor the glue in my hair and I never uttered the words at the time (because it was the kind of crap that grownups said) but I was a punk.

1967 at 50: THE VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO

Bullshit is power. An idiot I once shared a house with was convinced that the word nice meant ugly but interesting. I was aware of the meme but he cited a dictionary as the source. He was the type of cardboard cutout stylist whose sense of reality is entirely dependent on a quilt of fragmented nonsense concocted by his peers. Someone high in the society of scale thought something up or just repeated it then it took its place beside gravity or Pythagoras' theorem as a piece of the knowable universe. Nice has never meant ugly but interesting outside a small group for a limited time period but my co-renter believed it was acceptable usage. He was in a quandary once after someone had described him as nice. He even devised a short anecdotal conversation helper around the incident, which ended with: "ugly but interesting. Hmm." I haven't seen him for about a decade and neither know nor care if he still thinks this but if he doesn't the turning point would have involved some humiliation from someone higher in his order. If he still has some sway it probably hasn't happened and he thinks "ugly but interesting" every time he hears the word nice and smiles enough for you to know it's to himself.

Brian Eno said, "The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band." He didn't mean it literally nor had to. The journalist he was speaking to and the readers of the published interview knew well enough that all he meant was that the record was influential. He was right and still is. The figure he quotes might well be accurate but the point is the impact, the resonance. The album has resurfaced many times over the decades as newer waves of musicians cite their influences. None of them need be lying but when the quote's echoes sound now it's more like: only two hundred people bought the LP but all of them formed bands. Only the very feeble will redistribute these tracks in the hope that their immediate social scaffolding will collapse into the shape of a rock band. But the sense of Eno's genuinely witty remark is easily forgotten when the surface of the soundbite gets such a gleam. Few outside of VU fans ever seem to mention the output that followed despite any riches it holds (which is a fair bit, by the way)

Why? Well, there is the music, which I'll get to, but there is also the deathless cache of avant gardism lead by the Andy Warhol brand and working all the way down to guttersnipes dying from heroin cut with bleach in dark alleys: it has edge. It is about people who had edge and it is by them, as well. For devil's advocacy I'll mention a recent putdown of the album that claimed that outside of a few tracks of inspired collaboration John Cale's contribution came across as indulgent noise and Lou Reed's as Brill Building hackery. So, edge or bratty fluke? More bullshit. Nevertheless, to dismiss the sub-cultural context of the Warhol environment and the enthusiasm of the young drivers of the band leaves the picture undeveloped. I think the set of songs stands by itself but when you do add the influences that made the whole package it deserves a decently yelled "wow!" But first the songs.

Sunday Morning would confuse any first-time listener who is listening to hear an avant-roque record. A celeste tinkles through the arpeggio of the progression while a picked bass dive bombs down to the tonic and the band and vocals enter with Lou Reed in wistful sweetness. Any charges of pop-to-order can be laid here as, by the sound alone, it could have been written for the Monkees or Petula Clark. An easy gliding rhythm with a cor anglais accentuating the fourth and na-na-na-na backing vocals that float on waves of reverb provide a pop ballad hobby kit. Drill down to the lyrics, though, and the picture changes. The narrator is pursued by his wasted years, phantoms created by self-consciousness or paranoia dog the footsteps and call from the crowds. Not even safe on a drowsy Sunday morning.

If you didn't think that was intentional just keep listening. Waiting For the Man plunges us straight into the thumping monotony of the title as the chords tonic to fourth repeat on the lower keys of a piano as guitars whine scratchily like mosquitoes to each side. Reed comes in with a very different vocal describing what, at least at the time, most of a life of chemical dependency consists of.  He fends off the aggression of the locals in the black neighbourhood who think he's cruising for sex and cringes as he waits because, as Reed well knew from reading Burroughs if not from his own experience (and Lou was an tertiary level reader), that you always have to wait. Finally, the dealer turns up, there's an excruciating walk to the apartment, a quick taste, the nexus and then the hasty exit. It will all happen tomorrow but that's not now. The cleverness of this song, the oppressive shiftless throbbing, the slight but annoying guitars and the tone of the narrator who professes coolness while feeling the hatred or burdensome indifference of everyone around him because if he doesn't feel that he's just another white-boy junkie who'll wake up one morning hairless and middle-aged and still craving or die near the garbage bins out the back, the cleverness is that we feel the warmth of the pose and understand the fear it masks. Reed the writer understood this, that it was so and that you would know, and knew that the lately cute rock medium was the perfect palate for it. Add the rest of the band as they were and you get this. Writing this just then has made me wonder if this album itself with its self-aware drama and characterisation isn't the first rock opera, however undeclared. I don't think that's an important thought (rock operas had influence but were doomed to give way to the eternally returning pop song package model albums that rise to counter every sustained attempt to lift rock music) but it's a diverting one.

Femme Fatale surfaces from the silence between tracks as a late night bossa nova with a pair of major 7th chords played on electric guitars. The treble is rolled off as though they are meant to sound like nylon string guitars but there is a quite clear admission that they are not. Nico's heavily accented droopy voice enters quietly before surprising with a strong voice for the second line, "she's going to break your heart in two," before falling back to the sexy whisper, "it's true". But the whisper isn't sexy, it's just where it would be sexy if Astrud Gilberto were singing it. From Nico it has the sound of a friend delivering hard truths to a broken-hearted other in a smoky three a.m. room. The song is all Lou Reed, a mix of charming melody and biting commentary: "You're written in her book? You're number thirty-seven take a look." And the chorus breaks out with a strong full voice from the lead and a response chorus that sounds like cartoon ravens in the next room. And here's something again. Is this mockery of pop harmonies accidental as it is in early Rolling Stones recordings or intentional. I ask as the lead out of the chorus is accompanied by guitars that are clearly out of tune even though they are being played on the same strings as the verse parts? The band resented the imposition of the model and hangaround by mentor Andy Warhol. Is this their protest? Is it a kind of comment on mainstream pop, adding dissonance to an otherwise sweetly tuneful song? Is it just poor quality control on the part of the band or their nominal but largely absent producer Andy Warhol? I'd veer toward the latter. Even so, none of that can spoil the gentle strength of the song.

The drone and grind of Venus in Furs rises like a theatre curtain and the stage is thick with red light. Even at low volume it sounds loud. The band, bass, drums and rattling guitar haul the riff up a hill before it rolls back down and they have to start again, all the while overseen by the sting of a droning viola. Reed enters without his street cred to describe the scenes from Sascher-Masoch (whose novel gives the song its title and characters) When he tells us in the middle eight that he is weary and could sleep four thousand years it sounds real. Otherwise, his higher register guides us through the scenes of domination, humiliation and pain as Severin takes his punishing pleasure. This is one of the tracks on the album to feature Reed's Ostrich guitar, an electric guitar whose strings are all tuned to a single note at whichever octave is closest to the standard tuning (the E's down a tone, for example, but the B up a minor third). The name is from Reed's Brill building days when he used a guitar with that tuning on a identikit dance song called The Ostrich. This can do a few things but here it emphasises the drone while allowing a multi-octave strumming of the riff as it rises and falls. It's aided and abetted by John Cale's viola part which drones but also puts in a rhythmic screech like it's giving orders. As well it might; the overall burdensome force has a nearly hypnotic power over the listener. This is broken by the two middle eights which surge into the relative major as Reed sings about his weariness and the viola plays long insistent fifths. And then, each time it falls back down the slope and had to be rolled back up. A reiteration of the opening verse closes the vocal - "strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart" - before the grind intensifies with the guitar playing and ugly but beautiful mandolin tremolo but down on the lower frets so that it starts sounding like a jackhammer. And Severin hits the floor and begs for more.

Many years ago I was sitting in what was then the Carlton Hotel's big high ceilinged bar (Queens Street in Brisbane) with another musician. There was table serivce and a guy playing pop standards on a jazz box.  He threw in something from The Beatles' Revolver album which I thought was strange and we got to talking about the music of that time and the Velvet Underground came up. I think that was because some of the songs like Femme Fatale had a jazzy guitar feel to them. In a lull he looked up from his drink and said, "isn't Venus in Furs a scary song?" I thought about it. I'd just come out of a couple of years guiding my band through various Eastern and Arabic modes. Drones in songs were something I was known for to a degree. So, when I heard the song mentioned that's what I thought of first but his quiet exclamation carried enough awe it compelled me to reassess. I recalled how Reed breaks his icy observational tone in one verse and sounds much more like an observer. "Taste the whip now bleeeeeeeeeed for me." He finishes the line with a giggle. He's in the audience, at one of the peep holes, his tongue out at the pain, the degradation, the welts and the blood. He's not just the power with the cat o' nine tails, he's the customer. Yes it is. It's a scary song.

Run Run Run hits the groove in a gallop. Apart from the switch to the fourth in the chorus it's all on the tonic. Chunga chunga chunga chunga. At first it's garagey but conventional enough. The verses are about kids getting kicks and then kicking the bucket. That's the life chosen then that's life. Live fast etc. The thing is there's no moral curation unless it's what at that time would have been unthinkable: advocacy. This is not a roll call of the wicked or even a service for the innocent unknowing youth, it's an honour roll. You gotta run run run run run take a drag or two. Run run run run run Gypsy Death and you. Trouble is with this the honour roll doesn't sound like Fanfare for the Common Man. No middle eights, no riffs, no Brill building chops. Just the gallop to the end with a lot of feedback and scratchy tremolo.

All Tomorrow's Parties begins before you realise it's started. A slow, solemn ascent through a major scale, what the basses would be doing in an orchestral version but pizzicato. And then it falls and as it lands back on D, Maureen Tucker's hammer hits the kettle drum (actually a normal kick with a lot of reverb), a quick breath out of time. On four comes the extraordinary piano part devised by Cale of hemisemidemiquavers for four hands playing through the changes. For a long time I thought this was a tape loop but the changes really do happen. That loop would have stretched a few Manhattan blocks. And then the voice.

If Nico sounded whispered and crooned through Femme Fatale she turns the fog horn of her lower range for zero visibility conditions and rolls out a vocal so grand and so cold that it almost obscures the beauty of Reed's melody. The song has a modal tonality, like something from the middle ages. You could imagine it sung by monks. Nico's hard note delivery (actually two deliveries but we'll get to that) forms a solid structure around which we gather and ogle. The monument strikes us with awe and fear as we see the contemporary Cinderella crouching in the shadows until she goes to the ball in scrounged and tattered finery. But the ball is not in fairyland but darkest Manhattan. Nothing to wear for the poor girl, Thursday's child and Sunday's clown who cries behind the door. There is a sneer in the words but Nico's performance presses it out of sight as, week after week, the girl in the song gets further away from the centre of the party but more dependent on it. The death march drum thunders on, the glittering rain of the prepared piano moves like a slow machine and the guitars (combined Ostrich clang and electric 12 string chime) provide the compromised grandeur. The procession continues without seamingly without cease. But stop it must and does, abruptly with a final brittle tremolo flourish. End.

The '80s CD release of the album featured a treat in the form of a mix of this song with a single vocal. Nico's voice on the initial (and almost every other) release is double tracked in the custom of the '60s. Producers would get vocalists to repeat a take as exactly as possible to add body to the sound. While this practice petered out with advances in recording technology by the mid '60s it was still used. The problem is that no to takes are ever going to match exactly. A syllable here or consonant there will always be out. Masters of the approach like the Beatles double tracked so closely that it sounds like expertly managed echo. Nico, never quite comfortable with her vocals until she shed the world's disdain and made strengths of her flaws (of all the ex VU crew her solo efforts are my favourite), was put through the double tracking mill for this song. The result is double the mournfulness and size. There are frequent mismatches but they only serve to indicate the size of the voice. That said, if you're interested, track down an early CD release or Youtube the single vocal version. It will immediately appeal for the sleeker line of the vocal. It isn't better, the original double tracked take still gives us more of what we need, but it is a relief.

The old side two provides no such relief. Heroin begins with a strummed single note (Ostrich guitar) and another clean (and normally tuned) one filling out the chords on the higher strings. This goes for ten listless bars before the rhythm takes form between the two and they diverge between playing a swirling arpeggio and the same grounded chords (C-F) and we notice John Cale's viola creeping in with a drone on C (infrequently thickened with a G). Lou Reed's vocal enters the scene before you notice. "I ....... don't know ...... just where I'm going .... "  A few bars later and "but I ...... gonna try for the kingdom if I can cause it makes me feel I'm a man when I put a spike into my vein ..." And everything under and around his drifitng voice begins to speed up. The voice takes energy from this and seems to rise into the light from the dark corner of the room where it began. He feels just like Jesus' son. But "I guess I just don't know. I guess that I just don't know." This is the pattern of the song for the next five minutes: the junkie rises slowly from his torpor through connection and euphoria and into the vision splendid before admitting he doesn't know, isn't sure, can't do anything. Far from repetitive, though, Heroin describes a slow pulsing arc in which the narrator climbs through great ecstasy, each time a little higher and, thanks to Reed's brilliance as a lyricist, believably into a kind of plateau of confidence bolstered by a band rising in increasingly powerful waves of energy and near edible noise that strains until you can't tell the difference between the pain of feedback or the sublime dissonance of the viola, just like the junkie in the middle. He doesn't know. He doesn't know, can't know, won't know, shan't know, beyond knowing as his screaming nervous system variously lifts and drops him. "And thank your god that I'm not aware. And thank god that I just don't care. And I guess I just don't know. And I guess I just don't know...." The bright drone of the viola and the chiming of the guitars slow to a stop, a tiny growl of a chord and it's over. It's where the narrator of Waiting for the Man went when he made his excuses and left and every day after that. By the end the drone could be that of a choir at his funeral.

A bright chord riff stops and starts before bashing into something between a country song and a beat band from the shady side of the street. It's the closest thing on the album to a conventional mid-sixties rock song. A call and response verse with Reed hitting a streetwise sneer and the band in falsetto behind him with a charming ramshackle chord solo some tight playing for once. At first it seems like a misogynist snarl but the "better hit her" line increasingly feels like a taunt to the kind of affected street-level machismo that has brought the woman in the song to this pass. She only falls for the worst ("not just any guy" has a severe ring here), suffers, gets up and falls again. As sordid and dejecting as it is this is a song about a survivor. She is not everywoman, just one and one that comes through, neither spitfire nor victim. I feel an odd kinship between this and Ray Davies' Dandy from the year before where the gadabout for all his shallowness and hedonism is alright in that 1960s hip way. Reed says it too in the fade. "Aw, she's alright."

I'll Be Your Mirror begins with sweet clean electric guitars and a brighter rhythm than Femme Fatale. Nico enters with her deep boom singing a melody that I could imagine Petula Clark or Lulu cooing. There's even a playfully lilting second section to the verses that strengthens the sugar. But this is a song about reassurance in the face of self despair. Is it some fragile Warholian model or just a teenager? It could be anyone but the thing that reaches out to me is that it sounds sincere. "Please put down your hands," she sings to someone who is not warding off a threat nor putting up their dooks but hiding their face. This goes sour at the end of the chirpy chorus when the palm-muted guitars come in with a sprightly rhythm, an audible microtone out of tune, so distinctly wrong that it could only have been intentional. Who knows? It grates. It grates every time I hear it but I know it's going to sound like that and I just let it happen. Intentional or not the dissonance adds to the darkness the guardian angel narrator seeks to clear and that works.

Black Angel's Death Song starts looming guitar under a squeaky viola pattern. Reed's Dyalnesque sneer tells of adventurous but dark choices in a nightmare landscape bloody with violence and gore. While there's a lot here from the literary memory of the English major there's also cinema but it isn't Panic in Needle Park is Bunuel and Bergman at their most fantastical and bleak. Apart from some loud hisses between verses the arrangement keeps to the guitar/viola duo for the entirety and peters out rather than fades or cleanly finishes. This has not been the junkie parade of Run Run Run, it's about the weight of life decisions and, dressed in the language of a ragged epic, bears witness rather than celebrates. It's the song of an angel, not a Gomorrahan.

European Son begins like any other of the rockier songs on the record but quickly spreads out into concrete noise and directionless noodling. Fans of the album often skip it or call it filler or indulgent but those charges only stick if it's offered as a track like the others. My feeling is that, while it might well have come from the kind of jam everyone gets into at the time but can't listen to afterwards thrown on as the last track, it's there as noise, it's meant to be annoying. Anyone who has listened to it in earnest hoping to glean the spirit of free rock a la Ornette Coleman are advised to fast forward to Reed's Metal Machine Music variously dismissed as garbage or defended as genius by Reed himself (it famously got under the skin of critic Lester Bangs who led a crusade against it) Me, it depends. I'll leave it on if it doesn't intrude on what I'm doing (it's the best sex music at twenty but the worst at forty but I was thinking more like washing dishes or the vacuuming) but there are examples in the temporal neighbourhood that outdo it for obnoxiousness like the Stooges' LA Blues or the decades-later hidden track of game noises on Beck's Odelay. Oddly, even though it stands outside of period the timid chaos of it puts it right back. Your choice.

Well, then, after the epics, the junk, the feedback and the cool, what does this album do outside of fulfilling its own cool? For starters it's cool was only very closely local. A handful of gigs outside of the Warhol wings and no radio play added up to no hits nor much attention. The attention came later, after the band had diluted its membership and then parted ways. Then, everyone had been there at the time and that's where the bullshit started. But bullshit is power and can sell itself on the whiff alone and does. The good news here is that this album rises above it. The sprawling mess of Latin beats, funeral drums, debased folk, drones and crafted noise is held together by songs strong enough to be recognisable covered in any genre (well, ok, maybe not European Son) because they are made of real stuff. You can leave the heroin chic, the avant-models, the strung-out cool and the affected sneers and you'll still have a good record. This is a good record despite the unintentionally poor production (accentuated by the moments of decent engineering that also happen) and not because of it. It's a marvel of band-inspiring craft and earsplitting clashes. It's Stockhausen meets the Everly Brothers. There is nothing like it that spans with such ease Revolver-era Beatles and Throbbing Gristle. All of the above but it's still just good.


Listening Notes: Exclusively, as a reference for this article, I used the hi-res master of the 45th anniversary release, bought as a download online. You could scratch around for a original Verve vinyl copy but if you wanted to hear what it sounded like as a mastered sequence the 24 bit 96 kHz is the one to choose. On the other hand this album will never be improved by higher audio presentation as the original production is mired in a series of bad engineering decisions from the time of its production. It will either sound like the Velvets with extra noise (authographic!) or pristine but poorly produced. Up to you.