ARMED FORCES - ELVIS COSTELLO AND THE ATTRACTIONS @ 45

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My 1983

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PUBLIC IMAGE FIRST ISSUE @ 45

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE SCREAM - SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES @ 45

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: WITH THE BEATLES @ 60

The Beatles created their own reputation problem. At the time it would only have looked like progress. As they became more adventurous and expansive with their music they cast a fog over the plainer fare that had made the girl fans scream like jet engines. The only people who get the curve are those who were there at the start and had no alternative or those after them who started at the beginning and went on. But who does that? We're in for another stab at the market with the release of rejigged Red and Blue compilations. I would bet a silk pyjama that the latter days Blue set with the new single will win out. I'm not negating the early music but am confident that the later output that redefined pop forever will continue to be favoured by a mixed generational market that prefers its songs with a touch of sophistication. For me, that's wasteful; the instantly catchy shouters like She Loves You or Ticket to Ride are much closer to the Shake it Offs or Blue Jeans of nowayears.

But back in 1963, The Beatles came to their second LP. Between the release of the first in the same year and the Christmas market end, they had become famous enough for the term Beatlemania to need coining. The singles were coming fast: Please Please Me, From Me to You, She Loves You and I Want to Hold Your Hand were all number ones and a frenzied live schedule would have made the spectre of doing an album yet another climb. But they did it and managed to take the game forward. 

Before the Beatles, pop artists didn't have to wow anyone with twelve inch discs. Please Please Me itself is a polished extension of the band's live set. Just under half of it is cover versions. It was meant to be a kind of placeholder ahead of the next megahit or close-by live gig. The next album only had to do that: fun cover versions and, if lucky, a few shiny new ones that, if not tight enough for singles would make good singalongs. In other words an album was a job of work, not a delivery device for a concept. So, does it sound like work?

It Won't Be Long kicks off with Lennon shouting the title in the first chorus and trading yeahs with Paul. The stage clears for the verse which doesn't behave conventionally at all. The E to C progression is jarring if it weren't for the vocal melody that makes sense of it and the rich descending guitar run between lines. The middle eight descends chromatically with some busy counterpoint between lead and backing vocals. Hell, even the chorus outro goes from A to A diminished to E. The whole thing finishes with what feels a touch corny with a slowed final line of the chorus but there's been so much on the plate to begin with that it works.

All I've Got to Do starts with a strummed augmented chord before Lennon's vocal comes in in Smokey Robinson mode. "When-ever I-i-i-i-iyiyi, want you around, yeah." A thin soul shuffle starts beneath him. He's telling his girl that he controls her. All he has to do is call her on the phone or whisper the words she wants to hear. But the chorus equalises that. The same goes for him. Considering the late night feel of the verse and Lennon's rasp-edged delivery, the case for the reverse never quite convinces. The song ends on a hummed verse vocal to the fade which has always sounded to me like the first verse was the point of the song and the turnabout chorus the ruse. It's nevertheless, far from the I love you love everything is true love image of the singles. Even a b-side would have been too naked a spot for it. Effectively it's Lennon after groupies, Lennon beyond his own marriage, sketching some of the dark between moments of public charm and domestic presence. I've always found it a sinister song.

All My Loving is a McCartney pacey rocker that starts in top gear with a melody that expresses his characteristic classical symmetry - this much up, so this much down. The harmonies are silvery. George Harrison's country solo is perky and perfect. Paul's bass is propulsive power walk. However, the feature that really makes this one pop is Lennon's uncharacteristic triplet chords. He's the one playing the bright, clean diddly diddly diddly guitar all the way through. It's not Chet Atkins but the sheer force and consistency of it that testifies to those thousands of hours from Hamburg to Liverpool to London is a humble kind of hubris. Look, Ma, both hands, and it's perfect for the song.

Lifer Beatle fans are down on Don't Bother Me but I think that's just conformity to the George as latecomer narrative. The song starts at speed with the guitar figure from the middle eight but quickly gets into the soaring verse. The progression has a folky minor mode feel to it but done as a beat band number it moves along with a stop start at every dour chorus where the Vox amp tremolo growls beneath the warning of the words. The middle eight goes even higher and finishes the point: my true love has dumped me but that doesn't mean I want you hanging around my door. He's singing the pain of his breakup (which he admits is his fault) to another girl who's making herself available. It's not unheard of for a teen rocker, there were plenty of pretty boy one hit wonders in the US who took songs like this to the big screen but none so dark and moody as this.

Little Child is an original that sounds like a cover. The harmonica blasts and bright chorus sound like they come from the spares and unfinished folder. The line about being so sad and lonely sounds, for all its campy pathos, taunting. I live through this one rather than listen to it.

Till There Was You begins like an elevated wedding reception band when the bass player steps up and does his spotlight ballad. Yeah, I know, the bass player is Paul McCartney but the sense of the moment they do the standard is palpable. It's a show tune from The Music Man. Paul over enunciates every line in the fruitbasket setting, in case you were in danger of missing how special the moment is. George Harrison's acoustic solo, however, is a highlight, sprightly dancing around the busy progression. This is a great shower song. I still occassionally croon out my pale imitation of Macca's vocal as the mighty warm jet nourishes my back but I'll deliver the last line of each verse like a defeated cartoon villain: "Till there was YOU!" It's a leftover from the live set that they were still doing (and did at the Royal Command Performance in front of the crowned heads of Soho). If you gave it too much thought you might wonder if they'd be still doing this one if fame had never happened and they were an old wedding reception band.

Please Mister Postman bangs out of the gate in high stride with shouts and drive. Another cover and done with great energy. I first knew this as a Carpenters song. They were going off this version rather than the Marvelettes' big production with the bold and creamy vocals. For the Beatles, it's just something else from the set to fill out the LP side. It's fine.

Side two starts with George's Chuck Berry showcase and his charmingly flubbed lead intro takes us into a classic rock shuffle. It's ok but George's immovably English vocal has none of the original's archness. Then again, his unaffected voice yet carries more authenticity (if none of the force) that a Mick Jagger or Eric Burdon would bring to British Berry covers. He sounds, especially when he's reproducing the original solo with its deft upward bends, like a fan which has more to do with what the song is about than the more purist takes happening around him. If the whole thing feels too laboratory fresh it's on George Martin who was still new to all this rock 'n' roll nonsense and didn't get the sweat of it. This is another live set number brought into the studio and taken into stadiums where it regained the beads of effort. Here it sounds like a perfectly constructed Ikea rock classic.

Hold Me Tight is much maligned. It comes in like a proto Glitter Band with a big chunka chunka guitar grind. The sweet close harmonies trade time with Paul's ballad voice but things start going wrong from the off. As it never was outside of this instance, Paul's vocal is just off pitch. It recovers every time but falls out again and again. The middle eight in intentionally out of key for dramatics. It's a good switch but McCartney can't leap down to it without stumbling as he lands and delivers some of the unintentionally quirky singing of his decades long career. This goes right up to the clean finish where he's trying for a jazzy finish but just sounds like he can't hear the backing track. For me, I love the energy and the floppy vocal. It's the closest thing on the record to a live recording, especially the chunging guitar attack.

You really Got a Hold on Me is another cover from the live show and, while arranged to add more texture (particularly piano) and featuring a gymnastic Lennon vocal, it crawls along the floor like the last song of the last set when the waiters are clearing the tables and staff are showing up with brooms. Smokey Robinson, it's not.

I Wanna Be Your Man is fun for its energy and bitchiness. It's the song Lennon and McCartney gave to The Rolling Stones to serve as their first hit. The Stones took it into their own territory and acquitted themselves of the charge of accepting charity. The Beatles gave it to Ringo to sing and stormed through it in not a second over two minutes. Ringo shouts a good vocal and the wobble wobble guitar rock underneath lifts it up and keeps it over shoulder height. I never skip it. But what a fucking joke.

Devil in Her Heart is George giving us another song from the set. The gender of the title was changed from the Donays' original but the arrangement was all early Beatles. George cannot come close to Yvonne Vemee's power or yearning, sounding more like a blazer-school prefect on speech night. Look, I don't want to be so mean but this is The Beatles. I know it was just their second album and might have been their last for all they knew but listen to the strength of the originals on this LP and how far they've come from those on Please Please Me. To mire themselves in a soggy intermission between powerful music makers and their cover band beginnings feels like such a waste. No, they weren't going to wait another month to fill both sides with new originals, the business demanded outstanding songs for the sides of singles and the albums could feature this kind of tokenism with sharing lead vocals but this goofy treading on a recent classic to use up space feels wasteful.

Not a Second Time is a Lennon led assembly line early Beatles outing, heavily influenced by the Motown and girl group hits the band was so enamoured of. It's fine. This is the song that the critic William Mann compared to Mahler and spoke of Aeolian cadences, drawing public mirth from the band themselves for the bombast of it. It's an ok song written and performed in emulation of other musicians that the band admired.

The album closes with Money (That's What I Want). This bluesy screamer was offered as the Twist and Shout of  the record. While its subject matter and sleaze prohibit it from the horny glory of that one, it's still an impressive performance with grimacing piano riffs and lashing vocals. When it comes to its clean finish and John's final insistent, "that's what I want," we feel as though we've been through something. The valleys of near goodness or teetering failure are forgiven. Actually, there is a flaw in this track and it's worth a listen. At the 1:29 mark as the piano riff is playing out one of the guitars starts playing the fifth of the twelve bar finish but the rest of them keep on the tonic chord. Someone was off with the fairies. It's quickly rectified and the song doesn't come close to collapse but it's a fun moment of vulnerability.

Again, it's crucial to remember that this record was made at a time when albums weren't the kind of statements they would become. It was a kind of substitute live set with lacquered edges that could be played over and over without the risk of saturation the way singles got. But even so the band's minders and stylists were also at work. Where the first album's cover shot gave the sense that the band lived in a council estate, leaning over the rail of the somethingth floor of a tower block, the cover of With the Beatles was all minimalist pop art. 

A moody band portrait in high contrast black and white, strange figure arrangement with Ringo being a knight's move away from John against a solid black background. No one, not even Paul, is smiling. Whatever this was, it wasn't the usual showbiz commodifying. It did make them commodities but snipped the marionette strings that would normally have been allowed free display. The band looked like they owned themselves. The lads had, of course, had plenty of involvement with the Exi art students of Hamburg like Astrid Kircher and Klaus Voormann. (Actually - sidebar - try to imagine The Beatles without this encounter that would have smashed artsy experimentation with fun. Google some publicity shots of bands like The Searchers or The Honeycombs for suggestions.) While the photo was not of their design (it's Robert Freeman's) it's not something that would have been out of sorts with their experience. It was pop art for pop music. Admittedly, modernist cover art was already a staple of jazz and even exotica artists but this was yet another of The Beatles' baby steps toward the status as high avant garde conventionalists. It's a corker of a cover. The Australian one that I had in the seventies still hadn't caught up, being a reproduction of the local version with the big goopy heads floating around in the dark and a Gilligan's Island font in purple for the title. Ah well, my mini LP from the Mono box set puts it right.

However much I've dismissed some of the content of this record I cannot deny its importance to pop music history. At the time to the band and their fans it was the latest long player and if things held out they could do another. But other plans were afoot that made With the Beatles particularly significant. It was the last of their albums before they conquered the Earth as the biggest band in the world. Months after its release, The Beatles visited the USA, a vision on tv that rang a million cash register bells. They returned and kept returning to ever greater success and wealth generation, touring, releasing a movie and eclipsing any pop star before them. 

While we might listen to this and raise our eyebrows at the quaintness of the pub rock cover versions among the self penned marvels, it's worth putting some perspective in there. After this, America got hold of them and, however much they retained what Englishness they might claim they would be adopted across the Atlantic as honorary sons, but on American terms. After a few small labels had mishandled their releases, Capitol took charge and Americanised the records. Until Pepper, the US versions were remarkably different and more numerous to cash in (more albums with fewer tracks). All that. But one of these worked a treat. Meet the Beatles took the essence of the cover art and packed the sides with upbeat numbers, favouring singles and rockers. It's constant energy (even Till There Was You sounds up). I can't help feel that the strength and blazing success of that rejig was a major influence on the solidity of the next album A Hard Day's Night. It wasn't just packed with upbeat numbers it was the first to be wholly written by the band themselves and has them in the most consistently exciting form until Rubber Soul. Weirdly, the US release of the album only featured side one of the UK one, side two in America was godawful instrumental versions of the songs played by session musicians (not even based on the Beatles' own backing tracks). 

Until then, this set of songs with the band staring into the future as sexy young explorers was the new offering. Without declaring it, the set does have a kind of theme but one only really visible in context: make it and you get more originals, go bust and go back to the pub repertoire and maybe settle with a house, family and plumbing business, gathering on the weekends to relive those old Chuck Berry sizzlers. Well, even without America, that wouldn't have been overnight but, with it, this would look like the distant Earth in the rear window of the rocket. 

DARK SIDE OF THE MOON @ 50

We had a copy at home. It was in the cabinet beneath the turntable in the stereo system that my dad built for us. The system was a massive 3 in 1 (turntable, radio, cassette deck) and was a triumph of Dad's skills with carpentry and electronics. Two massive speakers in the front and two more mounted to the walls at the rear of the rumpus room. I thought that made it quadraphonic, just adding a couple of speakers, but it was only the same stereo field as the front. It did sound big, though. There were LPs in that cabinet that proved how big the sound was and how cleverly done stereo records could be (mostly synthesiser cover versions of classical and pop songs with a lot of panning effects) with cover art that looked like stills from sci-fi tv shows. Oh, Pink Floyd. Right.

So, you would think that, growing up marvelling at big sounding stereo that could be played as big as you liked in a place far enough away from the neighbours that no one would complain, that a record celebrated for the brilliance of its execution would be a local hit. I can honestly say that, even though the album had seemed to have been there for the balance of time, I had never heard it. This was in the mid '70s when the album was only about three years old but that was as long as I'd got into rock music from a bigot-grade love of classical music. So we should have been friends. I'd forced myself into rock music after I started high school for survival reasons and, while I could happily sit through Countdown every weekend, my itch for something more developed sent me back to the late '60s for inspiration.

I could claim that I found out that Pink Floyd had a crazy genius at the helm in the psychedelic era whom they cast out to become a stadium monolith was the reason for not choosing to listen to the record but I'd be lying. It was just that little bit out of my scope, enough to join The Faces, Slade, Humble Pie, Canned Heat and a host of others in the deaf spot shelf. Also, none of my elders talked about them. That made me wonder where this copy had come from. I could think of one brother and one sister who might have left it there but neither of those ever mentioned it or anything else about Pink Floyd. Had my father bought it to demonstrate the strength of his homebuilt marvel? He might have heard about its audio excellence which would have appealed to him but all that stuff about the futility of the salary man in the modern world really wouldn't have had him singing along after toking on a blunt. Dad barely drank alcohol and had given up cigarettes before I was born, so it wasn't him, either. I wondered if it just appeared in record collections everywhere through spooring.

Once, I gave it the stylus sampler routine. I'd get the record rolling and drop the needle gently for a few seconds of every track to see if anything stood out. There was some jangle, droning synthesisers, saxes and a woman screaming. Not for me. No, this is not a fair test of anything. I'd done the same thing to my brother Michael's copy of the White Album and declared it dull before a few kids at school found it in their family collections and started whisper campaigns that led me straight to it. Dark Side of the Moon didn't have that demographic. That would have to wait until those kids were old enough to beg their own tokes off their more worldly siblings and hail the disc as a religious experience. That was after punk happened and I wasn't going to ask a hippy for directions to anywhere.

To the end of high school and beyond it through university in a different town, the album was jeered as the work of dinosaurs. A music press that acted younger than its age and the kind of taunting that happened among musicians in the local band scene effectively barred the record from the curious listener under the age of twenty-five. So, after decades of ignoring it but enjoying other Pink Floyd albums like Meddle, I Napstered Dark Side and then bought it on CD for real. Then I bought the SACD to have it in surround sound and listened to it on something like a monthly basis. More recently, I bought the Blu-Ray with the Atmos mix. The higher res you get with this one, the more deluxe it gets. Not just as a demonstration of sumptuous audio but as a deathless concept album, one of the few that works as well as it did to its original listeners (let alone one that worked well at all). And it goes like this:

A heartbeat approaches through the dark. Other sounds slide in around it in the stereo field. Running footfalls, clockwork bells and whirrs, a thick synthesiser doing doppler passes, metallic clinks and clanks and then over a reversed piano chord, a woman screaming with escalating horror. The cacophony rages until ...

The heavenly arpeggiated chords of David Gilmour's Stratocaster, heavily phased, burst in and bring us to the surface of the opening song and as we float upon the easy motion he sings: Breathe, breath in the air. Don't be afraid to care..." Sounds nice until the lyric moves us towards the difference between experiencing life and merely living it with the promise of an early grave. The song alternates between the buoyant verse and a slightly more strident chorus but if you're not paying attention, it will just feel like opiation. And that is the album in short. Some songs match the aggression lyrics to music but most of it mixes smooth fluidity with thoughts of struggle, insanity and death.

On the Run is an instrumental but really more of a soundscape. The running feet and shortness of breath cross the sound field as that travelling synthesiser growls back and forth until it sounds like vehicles, helicopters or aeroplanes. Underneath a busy electronic bubbling persists, constant, urgent. The heartbeat reappears with laughter and what could be a distant gale or bombing. A final pass of the electronic plane sounds like it's swooping in aggression. Then the near silence after the shock.

Ticking is interrupted by a loud burst of clanging, bells and tolls as timepieces announce the next concept. Then a series of gigantic bass notes. Two notes on the Strat's low E string supported by Waters' Precision bass and synthesis, a massive tolling bell. An electric piano answers these high on the board until the bluesy shouting rocker starts with Gilmour in big voice declaiming the futility of time. A chorus calms it down with Rick Wright's clean and clear vocals. This works well until you realise, again, that both musical sides are saying the same thing. the last line before the briefly reprised Breathe is "the time has gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say" which still grinds, especially as it's sung in Wright's gentle voice, so easy on the ear.

Wright is the initial star of the next track, The Great Gig in the Sky which begins with a spacey piano figure, joined by an easy bass and Gilmour's ethereal lap steel (and another of the many spoken word recordings, this time about fear of death) which rises as the piano intensifies, the drums begin and the track's real star emerges in the form of Clare Torry's vocals. These wordless improvisations almost seem to go through the five stages of grief until they just sound like bargaining and fear, impassioned, pitch perfect but also raw and penetrating, Torry rises to the unbounded scream of horror heard in the opening overture. Now, in context, it sounds both more musical and unrestrained. After this, and a woman's voice telling us that she said she didn't fear death, Torry's vocal falls and assumes the TS Eliot whimper appropriate to this album as the piano eases to softness and silence. End of side one.

A strident musique concrete rhythm sequence opens the second side with sound of coins jingling, money bags dropping, cash registers ringing. an old adding machine rattling, all in a tight loop. When the thick picked bass comes in you get that something's been wrong from the off. Though the riff is bluesy, this is no four on the four twelve bar. The verses of this song are played in 7/8. It flows but try dancing to it. Gilmour's vocal is shouted and cool, giving a jivey ode of hatred to greed. Because he couldn't play his solo in that time signature, Gilmour interpolated a 4/4 section and filled it with first a fiery turn and then a dry, more sobering staccato finish before the sax gets a blasting go and then, in an old Yardbirds gallop it finds its way back to the 7/8 verse. The tracks fade begins more voice samples in, including the woman from Great Gig (Naomi Watts's mother, btw) talking about a fight she got in. And then something even more violent from one of their roadies.

This retreating storm gives way to soothing organ chords and more of Gilmour's headache-curing broken chords. This is joined by a jazzier and bereezier sax than on Money. Gilmour comes in with his voice on calm to sing about Us and Them. It's a meditation on lifelong futility and the depression that can build around that to ease pain by smothering. The chorus sections are harder and fuller but mixed distant to allow for both a tonal difference and ease of transition. Also, their relative quietness expresses the kind of emotional compression. While they prevent the song from being all comfortable numbness you could turn yourself off at a few points and float like you did with Breathe.

A final distraught chorus breaks to reveal Any Colour You Like, a gorgeous synthesiser improvisation by Wright that does in a few minutes what the likes of fellow proggers Genesis or ELP would have taken a side to play. Gilmour takes over in a kind of staccato non-solo, a kind of funk for the mental facility. Wright re-enters to save the track from dementia with more of the beautiful synth from the opening.

The track calms to the guitar arpeggio of Brain Damage (D to G7 but it sounds like major to minor) lilting before Waters comes in with his indefatigably English voice to tell us that the lunatic is on the grass. After a chorus that gives us the album title in a line the insistent guitar figure returns with another spooky vocal augmented by a demented laugh (by Naomi Watts's father, btw). The next chorus is bigger and benefits from Clare Torry's second appearance. An instrumental verse with voice samples and more of the last tracks lovely synth and, also wordless, another chorus and we're straight into the album's coda, Eclipse. The full band in chorus, with Torry and lists of life experiences as packages ("all that you love and all the you hate") are drawn as one into the lunar eclipse of the madness of the whole damn thing. We lead out on the heartbeat that led us in and the Irish doorman from Abbey Road Studios who tells us that there's no dark side of the moon as it's all dark. Boom-boom boom-boom boom-boom.

By which time, if you have, as you should, listened to this all the way through without a break, you are left stunned with a strange elation that, after all this sorry observation you share the planet with this music. What helps you out there is the same thing would have helped out way back in 1973: the facelessness of Pink Floyd. The poster that came with the original LP included photos of all four members but they were of little help. They were swathed in stage lights, clear featured but really just a quartet of long haired blokes. This was Ziggy Stardust's time, flamboyance reigned and the glittering divas of the new rock paraded through tours, generating uncountable glamour photos. Even the prog rockers, like Genesis with their million costume changes or ELP with E's literally inflammable performances or Yes's medieval electric splendour, were joining in. Pink Floyd walked on stage in jeans an T-shirts and let the lights do the magic. It would've been like crowding around to hear the record with thousands of others all at once. They might as well have been their own roadies.

What this means is that when you heard a Floyd record it was really just you and the music and the increasingly sharp observations of life, the universe and the rest of it. While there was warmth and humanity to all of it, however angry it could get, it wasn't served up as Mick Jagger's strut or Ozzie Osborne's demonism, it was just a suite of songs about real things delivered with clear definition and care. This is why you can listen as freshly in 2023 as the first fans did fifty years ago. The statements still stick. Sure, no one plays blues based guitar solos like that any more but those things only prevent this music from the kiss of death that comes with being written off as timeless. It is the '70s quality of the record that lets us marvel. It is the failure of the world to improve beyond these accusations that sober the listener. That's why when you hear the latest attempt by a subsequently formed band to emulate this statement they will just sound like they're playing musical dressups.

Where does that put Roger Waters' re-recording of the album with the voice of the accumulated wisdom of the decades. It puts it with Roger Waters, he can do what he wants with what he has. The only thing he won't be able to do is eclipse this.

But I don't want to end with a downer. If you are reading this while still young, please take the time to find a continuous sequence of this whole album, whether on vinyl, legit download, streaming or any physical medium. Take the time and take care to sit in front of it in the dark. It's less than an hour of your life and you will thank yourself for the act of it. And then, you can get up and go for a round of dodgeball for all I care because it's less this particular record than any like it that can compel you to stop and listen and think about your life. It's not the only one, it's just one of the best.

Listening notes: to really get into this before writing, I immersed myself in the recently released standalone blu-ray with a Dolby Atmos mix which is completely sumptuous. For more local references to moments like fades or moments of voice material. I played sections of the original stereo mix form the '90s CD. This album is pretty much everywhere so you have no excuse.