1967 at 50: THE DOORS

The Clown Princes of Flower Power share a joke.

The creepiest scene in the movie Shivers is when the female lead in a moment of crisis is telling a dream she had. Her voice is measured as she recounts meeting an repulsive old man who seduces her by assuring her that everything anyone ever does is sexual:

"..That even dying is an act of eroticism. That talking is sexual. That breathing is sexual. That even to physically exist is sexual. And I believe him, and we make love beautifully."

When we see it for the first time we understand that it is the parasite in her system speaking through her going through its laboratory-designed mechanism of seduction. We've seen the parasite raw. It resembles both a liver fluke and a turd and is transferred orally. But what we see is the face of a beautiful young woman and hear her cooing voice curling around the next victim like a swirl of cigarette smoke. We feel the danger ... and ache to be part of it.

The Doors had had a few years experience honing their stagecraft in the venues of Los Angeles by the time they got into a studio to record their first album. They had found how best to contain some numbers until they could fit anywhere and they had expanded some tiny romantic ballads into epics that could inspire, terrify or both. All that was needed was to get it down on tape. Oh, and the same stuff that would make that Cronenberg movie scene so eerie and alluring eight years later: performance, pure performance from internal forces that could make the infected rage after being delivered with a kiss.

I had picked up a retail cassette copy of Morrison Hotel in an op shop. It was just the tape, no case or inlay. I bothered as I had read two longish pieces about the legend of Jim Morrison in some of the music mags I read. This was late '70s so, with the deconstructive assault of punk all but tattooed on my arm, I found the admiration from writers who might have been as old as the unimaginable twenty-five suspect; they were praising him like a pagan demigod without conveying what it was that bade them so. Why? Well, the music was hard to get to. You could dig around the op shops, ask around in case your school friends had them in the older siblings' collections, or you could sit in front of 4TO on a Sunday morning when they were in golden oldies mode and wait. And then you'd just hear Light My Fire.

Ok, I'd heard Light My Fire and liked it but the whole funeral pyre schtick seemed as contrived as a theatre restaurant vampire. I'd read the lyric to The End in Endless Circle, a creative writing textbook from early high school. The lines didn't seem to relate to each other, had few rhymes and splodged into babble. Then when I put Morrison Hotel on and the initial ran na nan na nan na nannerly riff started up I almost turned it off and tossed it in the bin. I had spent hours, perhaps days, in the meagre fields of '60s pop music archeology in the mid '70s, esacaping the oaf rock of Hush and Rose Tattoo only to find this yobbo party from back in the era of gold and adventure. I let it run and smirked at the line about the future being uncertain and the end being always near, a token bit of Rimbaud (a name I knew from those articles about Morrison) and lived through the fade of blues rock cliche.

There are stellar moments on Morrison Hotel but it's so patchy that getting to them on a cassette was too much like hard labour. The tape got shelved. End of story. Light My Fire was a good song. Enough.

Cut to 1980. Having missed the start at the cinema I got home to Townsville for the Christmas holidays and persuaded Dad to see Apocalypse Now at the drive-in. The setting is important. It was North Queensland in December, hot and humid. Throughout the screening a gentle drizzle drummed on the car roof, military helicopters throbbed overhead, visible as black shadows against the purple overcast. The movie begins without credits. Where they would have been is a visual overture. A tropical beach hemmed by a thick dark green forest. The intense glare seems to phase in and out of focus just as it does to look on a Townsville beach. Choppers in slow motion cross the screen like circling predators. And swelling through this familiar visual atmosphere, tinkling at first and then swirling and snaking along a clean Gibson SG's fretboard, the drums and a keyboard base adding cicadas and throbbing temples to the mix, it comes. The choppers file past again, close to the forest and as the vocals start - This is the end, beautiful friend - a huge sash of napalm flashes and spreads along the foliage making the heat hellish and pressing the breath from every nearby lung. And, yes, these were the words that looked so amateurish and try-hard on the page. Now, here, they sounded like the Grim Reaper channeling Sinatra. I have never known a better matched of movie scene to sourced music. That's still the gold standard.

Ok, so now I needed to hear The Doors.

If the star had got a bit of retouching in the '70s by the early '80s it was unignorable. Getting to Uni with my Brisbane op shop radar honed and hearing the albums and the post-midnight drones about the greatness of the Doors my information calorie count went on assault. Then there were the rereleases and it all came home. First of the rank was the debut, the one with that song on it.

I took my reissue copy home the next Christmas holidays where it played beneath the screams from the pool outside the rumpus room or, more gently, crooned through moonlight with friends and liquor after hours as we chatted, wading or hanging from the edge rather than splashing. If you put it on after Joy Division (I only had the second album at that stage) you noted the connection and if you put it on after the B52s you cooled down into it and, given the circumstance or luck, seduced. Blues shouting, chanting rock choruses, smooth trip-outs, Brecht-Weill cabaret numbers and that big gluey epic capping it off. It was 1981. The Russians were blowing up Afghanistan, the Americans were getting antsy and the creepy phrase Cold War Two blared its way into news commentary. A war mongering B-movie star who would describe the USSR as the Evil Empire was in the White House and his best mate, Maggie Thatcher was pressing the UK into the dirt of the gutter. The wrong fingers were too close to the big buttons. The Doors, played fourteen years after first release, just felt like home.

But is it any good?

The cover was a warning. The name of the band was the album and the soon to be iconic art nouveau font loom large but larger still is the great big face of Jim Morrison, beautiful and frowning like a young Lord Byron takes up a full half of the cover. The half of his face is in shadow and that's where you'll find a group portrait of the other three, the people who made the most sound on the record, posed like a group from a framing shop sample photo. The back cover is more egalitarian but that's the back. Was that a compromise (like the censored lyrics) by a band eager to get their first album out? What little I knew of the band and their personalities (though I could guess at Morrison's) seemed at odds. A band that insisted all original songs be accredited to the whole band let's this EDDIE and the Cruisers look be the one? That would never happen now without annotated self-aware irony. But, no, whether they liked it or not, the great stick-it-to-the-man Doors let the record company do the talking on that one (they'd have a chance to reverse that image on Ed Sullivan soon after).

Anyway, so I dropped the needle in the groove. And ...

Side 1 begins with a Latin sizzle on the ride cymbal and what sounds like a Fender bass pretending to be a tuba but is really a Rhodes piano bass. Hang on, need some explanation, here.

I'm basing this article on my listening of the original mix as heard on an '80s reissue. This means that I'll be thinking of that mix and edit rather than the magnificent hi-res digital one released in 2007 by Rhino. Normally, I wouldn't go into it too much but there are real differences here. First, the recent releases of the back catalogue are full remixes and edits from the ground up (where possible) and presented as the kind of remasters that would be done on a contemporary album with the capabilities of digital audio and modern sound systems. This means (IMHO) that they not only sound better than when they were on vinyl but you get to hear what the editing job on the original didn't deliver (missing lyrics, for example) and something more like the band would have released if allowed. I'll be referring to the differences where significant but for the most part my guide will be the 1967 presentation.

Why put that there instead of at the end in a Listening Notes section? Well, the bass riff on the Rhodes bass piano is important. The sound isn't like a bass guitar, it's like something else entirely. Keyboardist Ray Manzarek, a whizz on the ivories and a solid thinker on tone, made up for the bass player that the band chose to do without by playing one of these (here's a demo) adding a unique sound on the bottom end but also doing so with a classically-trained verve (if you think classical players don't have verve you need to listen to more classical music): his bass playing is great. However, if you compare the original mix with the more recent revisit you will hear great big Fender basses in some of the songs in the latter that the earlier mix buried (possibly to blur the difference with the keyboard bass). The piano bass was the sound of the live lower end of this band and as a hyped up and polished version of the live show on this album, that's important to know. Anyway ...

Ray plays a jazzy arpeggio on the piano bass and introduces us to the fuzzy but boomy sound of the live band's nether lands. All through the album it rises beneath the crisp top and dominates, giving the listener a ride on the back of a seamonster at midnight: smooth but murky and dangerous. First big lesson from the first few bars of the first album: it's not all Jim. So ...

Latin sizzle and big boom bass. Robbie Kreiger comes in on his Gibson SG, lightly distorted it is almost indistinguishable from the bass but playing a counter figure, note against note. Then the voice, urgent high but muscular: The day destroys the night, the night divides the day. Try to run try to hide. And then, screamed: Break on through to the other side, break on through to the other side, yeah! The low rumble, the expansive sizzle on the percussion (John Densmore is listed on the album credits as percussionist, not drummer), the zapping guitar and the bellowing voice put me into a landscape of hills shaken by a storm. I was already associating the band with cinema from Apocalypse Now but this made a movie of its own. The tortured hills had no gothic heroine nor anything supernatural but they were spooky. Separated from this only by an imagined glass door, I slid it to one side and entered the storm. Jim's recalling nights of pushing the boundaries with his companion (could be drugs, could be bigger, could be drugs and something bigger) when the acid was legal and the dark of L.A. summer nights endless. The original mix truncated a repeated cry of "she get high!" to "she get -" which, not knowing otherwise, sounded like he was pushed to the brink of his description by the power of the memory and couldn't finish the picture. The freed "she get high" is almost a disappointment to hear in the new mix but that's what he sang to the mic in the Studio and to the other girls with islands in their arms and countries in their eyes at the Whisky and the Kaleidoscope.

Soul Kitchen begins with a more pedestrian figure on the organ, staccato chords, sharp and white. the piano bass comes walking in underneath. The snare kicks the drums in and Robbie's Gibson, more vigorous up the fret board, bends through a tight funk lick. Then Morrison: Well, the clock says it's time to go now ... the cars crawl past all stuffed with eyes, streetlamps share their hollow glow ... still one place to go ... This is the same couple from the song before but after a few too many nights on the other side, lying exhausted, waking up for sex and top-ups, sharing cigarettes by the infernal red light of a sign through the window. The sensual weariness gives way to a screaming chorus that settles (and this is where the first bass guitar is smuggled in) A spirited solo by Krieger sounds as tired in this setting.

I never lived like that. There were episodes here and there, some stretched into weeks or months but never a life. No one lives like it, they just remember it that way. But when you're fifteen, hormonally insane, and can't tell the difference between your orgasms and the ones you hear on records, you think you're going to live like this, tangled in the sheets with an other whose fingers talk in secret alphabets in places where it's always closing time. The song ends without a reprise of the chorus which lets you know it's not just another pop song but suggests with the "all night, all night ..." groan that, exhausting as it gets, there's more. One final bellowed repeat and the song ends, looking out on the dark between the tracks.

Then we get something like the other side. Morrison starts with a rising figure, crooned: Before you slip into unconsciousness I'd like to have another kiss, another flashing taste of bliss, another kiss ..."
The melody steps down as it reaches up and a gentle keyboard and guitar ebb and flow swells around. What starts as a lullaby becomes a series of shared memories, continuing desires and, after a gorgeous piano solo, a shouting vision of the ship of the title, filled with a thousand girls and a thousand thrills and so a million ways to spend your time, a boy's own spectre of masturbatory abandon. But, then, "when we get back I'll drop a line." He'll write a letter? He'll dose himself with a mass of LSD? It's gone from romantic to self-pleasing to fleeing the scene. For years I thought the last line was "jump the line" meaning, to me, absconding, having taken his fill. Dunno, but this first indication that the band is much more than a set of three-chord blues shouts raises the stakes well above the already impressive introduction. The tone is hedonistic but the mood is dreamy and veers to the melancholic. Ships dock, perhaps delight, but always move on. Or they sink. I know better but I would love to think that this was the Doors' answer to the Seekers' Morningtown Ride.

Twentieth Century Fox is one I still think of as filler but it's short and welcome in the sequence. I'd never pick it out to listen by itself. It starts with a guitar lick that sounds cliched now but probably signalled hard rock then, curly and bluesy. Jim variously admires and dismisses a local godess of the scene. But is she? She's got the world locked up inside a plastic box. Her moniker might mean that she's a corporate identity, a big poster image with all enticing synthetic genitalia. Maybe that's just a tv set or the notion of the mass media (as it was termed then) and its home in the band's native L.A. Up to you. Either way, it's pretty clever. The original mix of this is chunky with edges softened by the suppressed highs that plague this record but the 2007 remix pushes a giant picked Fender bass centre stage and makes it a monster rocker. When it comes up I'll wait for that bass to come in. Not the original sound but yummy.

Alabama Song is a Brecht/Weill standard that starts with Ray Manzarek combining Piano Bass with the Vox organ in a clipped un-rock 2/4 beat (oom-pah oom-pah oom-pah). "Show me the way to the next whisky bar, oh don't ask why ..." The change of mood and pace is abrupt and dramatic. The band fall into the Teutonic Wemar thump under words of desperation and depravity with a similarly abrupt change to 4/4  for the chorus which swings whimsically by contrast. And in comes the Marxophone sounding like a big clanging street piano. Because this is done with such intentional coldness it clears the table of the campiness that contemporary rockers added to pastiches of the jazz age (e.g. Little Miss Queen of Darkness by the Kinks or the soon-to-come When I'm 64 by the Beatles). It feels more like the band reaching back and finding something akin to their present.

A sharp snare hit launches Light My Fire and Manzarek plunges into his Bach-like intro, sounding both old world and innovative at once. The arrangement spaces out underneath the vocals in a kind of big spooky jazz vamp. This one is almost too familiar to talk about. It's the song that many people use as a Doors signifier. Well, it's all there: the bright garage organ, a mix of jazz and psychedelia without ever blanding into fusion, a love song that mixes imagery of groovy romance with funeral pyres, a great Morrison vocal that goes from a Sinatra croon to a violent scream. All I'll say here is that the sheer sexiness of the groove in the verses with the band in fine slinky form (Robbie Krieger's finger-style chording on the clean SG working perfectly with Densmore's restless shuffling) allow what might have been a slightly shadowy bubblegum song into an epic. Apart from Mazarek's plodding and overlong keyboard outing which never quite feels like a solo the flow of the track reaches a strong median between live abandon and studio crafting. Krieger's fluid and beautiful soo enters the lull after Manzarek's excursion and feels like a new act in the story rather than a token guitar solo. Stately and grand at first, it eventually joins the mob on the street and yanks some time-challenging stutters out which are taken up by the band to a conclusion that needs to end in the Bach riff and the big screamed repeat of the second verse and the refulgent final chorus where the sky itself is burning. One last baroque riff and exeunt omnes. End of Side One.

Side Two opens with the most serious attempt at a straight electric blues number. It's a cover of a Willie Dixon's Back Door Man and is magnificent, enough to compel this blues infidel to listen eagerly every time. A thudding bass on the A, shrill organ riff, cold but driven, and Jim yelping like a dog. "Ahm a BACK - DOOR - MAY-EN!" It's a growling threat on the make through the streets, predatory but pointedly consensual. This hunter doesn't hit, he seduces. His biggest boast outside of his rampant virility is the creation of cuckolds. The title might suggest a preference for anal but should be taken more literally. He steals into other men's houses and takes what they assume the marriage vows have secured them. Whether Morrison identifies or aspires is difficult to tell what he does is play a role. While there were white blues bands aplenty at the time and cabaret acts like Classics IV whose publicity shots had the singer in a werewolf mask, The Doors approached their blues performances as character pieces. Not character pieces like a VCA grad auditioning for neighbours but a Brando in full immersion. Right up to Crawling King Snake, Jim sounds like he's testifying rather than evoking. And the band is playing without the academic reverence which turned me off white blues to begin with but something more like the lunging emotion that emerged and set after nights of band/audience give and take. Of note, again, is Krieger's guitar playing, stabs, bends and muted rhythm. If his solo is a touch more ordinary than on other songs in the list his rhythm playing makes up.

I Looked at You is a basic proposition. We spy each other, mutually attract and it's on. No turning back. That's the gist of the lyric. The music goes from a brisk trot to a storming chorus. If it weren't for the force that renders the plainness of the lyric into a real urgency this one might sit beside Twentieth Century Fox as a filler but, starting from silence and jetting to the final orgasmic yeahs, it fills the formula of a generic rock song well but takes it further by removing the valentine card images.

A falling sigh on the slide guitar opens The End of the Night. After a tiny pause the organ meets the fall with a rising figure. The two fuse in a single phrase rising and falling like water. "Take the highway to the end of the night .... take a journey to the bright midnight." Slow and eerie, this is the albums most cinematic song. Drawing from Blake and Celine as well as his own stock of boundary-pushing alienation, Morrison tells us what it's like to be on the outer edge irrevocably and by choice. The slow arrangement ebbs and flows around his vocal as a whimpering slide solo emerges from the gloom which ends in an ominous snare roll before Morrison re-enters screaming the lines again. Some are born to bliss and some are born to the end of the night. The language is a lot plainer than in other Morrison lyrics and the statement feels genuine as a result. The croon followed by the shout is already typical at this stage in the album but in this number there's a conviction to it that doesn't feel like acting (which, of course, might mean that it's the only real acted one).

Take it as it Comes starts with everyone in a brisk gallop. "Time to live, time to lie ..." At first it's like an answer to the Byrds' cover of Turn Turn Turn but Ecclesiastes is not on the menu here. The smooth energetic rocker with a fast but highly colourful keyboard solo from Ray variously croons and shouts about the good stuff you can see if you slow down. It's not everything in its season but, hold back and take everything you can. I often confuse this with I Looked at You but this is a much fuller piece and includes a lovely stripped back final verse where an arpeggio on the bass dominates under the vocal before the final chorus storms back in. As this is an album fresh from live performances this song like all of them ends cleanly rather than in a fade which is more typical of the era. The elongated final line "move - ing ... way ... too ... faaaaast!" screams home and everything ends with the dying of a crash cymbal.

Which brings us back to do. The downward glissando on the guitar and the whispering cymbals. The haze of organ and Jim comes in: This is the end, beautiful friend.

I'm back in the car with Dad as the drizzle on the roof thickens the tropical air and the opening of Apocalypse Now fades in on the drive-in screen, real choppers throbbing overhead. I'm listening to it for the first time as an album track a year later, again in Townsville, an afternoon scotch and dry in one hand, its ice cubes liquefying rapidly. The shrieks of children from the pool are muted by the splash of dive bombing other kids. I'm at any number of University parties in cooler Brisbane where this song always ends up on the turntable among the Birthday Party, Banshees, Bauhaus and anything else. I'm somewhere with a guitar noodling around the D chord, gently hammering on the D from the C#, trying to work out how Krieger had done it, not suspecting he played all of the Doors guitar parts without a pick, a Flamenco player's fingertips guessing at sitar style without quite making it from chords to raga. Later, Melbourne, another summer night. Rain. All of that, every time.

The interplay of the instrumentalists carried cleanly from the stage show. The song had started as two verses of melancholia, boy bids farewell to girl. After year of playing that the middle grows so big it's almost the whole set, a spooky epic of Oedipal murder and transformation. The guitar coils and uncoils, slithering here and rising to a scream there with Krieger's perfect control of his amp's breaking point. Densmore avoiding the snare, preferring the hiss of cymbals and thunder of the tom toms. Manzarek grounding on the Piano Bass, avoiding the third so Robbie could change from major to minor at will. The organ variously fluid, shimmering like heatwaves or freezing into block chords. And there was Jim, sometimes centre stage sometimes darting around it, finding the shadows and the spotlight, peering through the cracks in the walls at the killer who woke before dawn. I know, I'm getting carried away but I just put it on for reference and had to stop typing just to listen again with my eyes closed. This is one the great moments of my listening life, as arresting as my first hearing of Mozart's 40th symphony and its terrifying counterpoint (my first fandom was for classical). And while the band went on to do it longer, better, funnier or scarier live I had no idea of that. All I knew was that it happened like this in the recording studio once. I also had an inkling that it had got that way by being played to ragged perfection in dark and sweaty clubs which brings us back to do, again.

This is a live album the way that Please Please Me was: it came from the clubs. While the Beatles debut is as clean as you'd expect, the rumble and danger is under the surface, only perceptible in the promise. The Doors is a record from the other end of the same decade when more was allowed, from a Los Angeles that housed all the dangers of Hamburg and many nightmares beyond it.

So, yeah, it's good.

The overriding sense from my first hearing of the album (well, every one up until 2007) was a kind of cowl of cloud smothering the high end. The bass is everpresent but it's the lower mids that dominate from the guitar to the vocals. Only John Densmore's snare and cymbals cut through and then not always. The strange thing is that it feels intentional, as though cutting the treble that would make it pop out on contemporary radio and record players would draw the fans in to turn it up, dim the lights and listen harder. On the systems I first used to hear it in the 80s the lack of brightness was a frustration. There was nothing to bring the sound into the younger ear without cost. You can't remove reverb once it's there and you can't add treble once it's gone. I wondered if the distant storm of the sound was meant for the relaxed and intoxicated. The CD release didn't improve things as it only presented a cleaner version of the mud. I bought the box set Perception eagerly in the late '00s as I read it was a remix from the ground up. Also, I was and remain a sucker for rejigging the '60s to surround sound. The box contained both DVD-Audio and CDs. I still have it and still trot it out. Really, you won't hear a spookier rendering of The End or Riders On the Storm outside of it.

The newer mixes, overseen by original engineer Bruce Botnick, were a promise delivered. All the extra bits censored ("She get -" was back to "She get HIGH!" and all the naughty words and orgasmic breathing and grunting were back in The End). And EVERYTHING sounded more defined. All the bits deemed naughty were restored. She got HIIIIGH! and the Oedipal consummation over the freakout in The End was back in (as it had been when used in Apocalypse Now, mind you). Mostly, for me, though, the Fender bass has been moved up. It's presence in Twentieth Century Fox takes that clever filler and makes it welcome in the sequence. The cool arpeggiated chunky line in Take it As it Comes drives like a mofo and the contemporary ear is delighted to hear the range from this rich low end to some crisp highs. It's not the original mix (which also had some draggy pitch problems) but listen to the thudding, bass enhanced opening to Back Door Man and dare to disagree.

The Doors established themselves in the venues of a Los Angeles of tough rooms and nascent hippydom that accepted anything alternative to a tired mainstream culture. Like the best courtships, the band offered its audience something that felt friendly and too hot to hold at the same time. The mix was some stunning musicianship that was saved from flavourless perfection by the gleeful taunting chaos of a frontman who knew his Baudelaire from his Bo Diddley* and just how much sex his every blink communicated. If you're put off by that thought and consider a glancing acquaintance with Jim Morrison tells you all you need to know about the band, give this one some air. It really does make sense when you hear it.



* This joke borrowed from monologue Scanlon by Barry Oakley which, I saw around the same time I first heard this album, at La Boite Theatre down the road from where I lived.

1966 turns 50: Revolver, The Beatles

Over some coughs and rustling a mutter counts to four and then two. After the 80s remasters you can hear the "or" just before the music starts as "four". It sounds like three in the morning. The studio air is thick with cigarette smoke. The lights are low but their hue is greasy and worn, not romantic. Then Taxman slaps to life with a complex rhythm made of a tight bond between bass and drums and a slicing Gibson SG slashing out the chord figure. It's taken decades and the suggestion of a Beatle expert on a podcast to make me realise that this beginning is an upgrade on how The Beatles started their first album only three years before. One, two, three, four and bam! This is Revolver and there's always something new.

Paul's count-in on the first album was all lust pop, the four a scream of ignition for the clanging guitar engine that burst to life. George's close-mic mutter has a sinister feel to it and isn't the real count in anyway. It's 1966, three years of Beatlemania have pushed these twenty somethings into a very strange adulthood and now the Quiet One sounds like he's discretely spruiking a burlesque plus show. That gives way to a hard rock song about tax.

Some context is called for here. I didn't hear this album in 1966 but the late 70s. There was a tide of Beatles reissues in the mid 70s which made it as a trickle to Townsville in 76. Revolver wasn't among them. I knew it was an album that had appeared before Sgt Pepper (which had never gone out of print) but like Rubber Soul it was impossible to find. This made it mysterious and to my BBC thriller mind this made it irresistable. What was on it?  Sight of a mail order record club ad in an old copy of Playboy or Esquire listed Eleanor Rigby and Yellow Submarine. That, I knew had been a single and concluded that it would also have Paperback Writer and Rain, too. This was shaping up. The magazine thumbnail of the cover featured a negative image of what I would later learn was the cover. This meant that the faces of the Beatles looked like something from a sci-fi movie. Wow, more to this than teases the eye, I thought. Soon, it was the great forgotten masterpiece of dark energy that the colour and commerciality of Pepper had conveniently eclipsed. I took my favourite bands very seriously as a 13 year old.

While I did get a copy in 1977 as part of the 70s reissues the first time I heard the whole thing was when my sister borrowed a copy from one of her friends. It was an original pressing. It was mono. This almost put me off as all I knew of stereo or mono was that mono was old. Beggars and choosers. I ran down to the rumpus room, picked out a radio cassette of hits and future memories, set up the dub and let it happen.

As Taxman slashed to life I explored the cover. Four heads rendered in pen and ink, crammed together, looking in different directions. The eyes weren't drawn but cut and pasted from photographs. This gave off a strange air as though they'd let a fan design the cover. The same sister who accessed the record for me (thanks to Penny Johnson, btw) used to lead us in collage sessions with Clag, scissors and Mum's old She magazines. Under her guidance a kind of contained psychosis took form as we mixed 'n' matched anything we could cut neatly, and filled pages of scrapbooks with monsters made of lobsters and Prince Charles, pinstriped bankers and microwave meals etc.

This record cover was like that only more controlled the real eyes looking out of the pen and ink heads bore an odd hostility which I felt but couldn't name. Smaller photo Beatles were pasted around the heads, popping out of spaghettish hair or spewing out of the ink lines in lumpy photographic boluses. In the centre of all four heads small drawn figures of the four seemed to be walking through this strange scene looking variously lost, arch, aloof or ... well George's eyes were blacked out. While most of the 12 X 12 square was filled with this un-flower-powered black and white confrontation the left side between the heads of Paul and Ringo was almost entirely white. Had it not been finished? I would come to know the value of negative space in art but when I saw it there it looked like it was meant to puzzle or disturb. I returned to it repeatedly as the album played.

The Taxman backing vocals started sounding like the same 7th chord as in the Batman theme song and then the weird guitar solo snaked out of the speakers, sharp and wriggling and almost over before it began before the chorus came back in with bright harmonies sung through a frown. Paul's tight bass riff funked in exact step with the drumming and was joined an octave above by that Gibson playing the same figure. "And my advice for those who die. Declare the pennies on your eyes." "I'm the taxman and you're working for no one but me." What? Bloody hell.

I didn't hear the Beatles albums in sequence but a decade after their release in something like reverse order. We had a copy of Abbey Road in the record stack and I'd bought my own Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour and then the White Album. The same sister's boyfriend later that year would lend me his original copy of Rubber Soul. So, the notion of the Beatles singing about dark or nasty things wasn't new to me but, working out the timeline, what was new was how early it had started. I'd never owned the popular Red and Green compilations but I did have a couple of 60s era ones with the singles from 62 to 65. Taken as a whole, you could trace the development in those from Love me Do to Day Tripper but this stuff coming out of the stereo was almost absurdly advanced.

After Taxman slithered into its fade out with another guitar solo (later learned it was the same one just collaged on to the end, and that it was Paul not George who played it) the light rain sound of the groove between songs gave way to harsh staccato strings and urgent harmonies. "Aaaaaah look at all the lonely people!" Eleanor Rigby sounds like endlessly rainy streets and cold winter afternoons as the highly compact tales of loneliness are  sung in a tone of a court reporter, unaffected, matter of fact. That's not often pointed out when this song comes up. Normally, there is mention of the strident Bernard Hermann string arrangement, no rock instruments and the theme of the song but no one ever seems to talk about how coldly McCartney sings the verses. Like the anti-vibrato stance he took with the strings in yesterday he strips the emotion out of this song and cools it down to a kind of horror tale. As a kid, only very barely aware of all the lyrics I was disturbed that Eleanor wore a face that she kept in a jar by the door. I also got one sequence wrong and mixed up the wedding with the phrase "no one was saved". That froze me if I thought about the song. This is before you get to the Psycho-soundtrack string section and the strident pace of a song that might easily have been a sentimental ballad. Hearing it afresh in 1977 felt like finding the grail on an archeological dig. I didn't wonder how the first listeners heard this back in '66 I was hearing it like that now.

I'm Only Sleeping begins with a six string strum and Lennon digs in with a monotone over changing chords played on slow acoustics. It's not a double bass but sounds like it. Then snaking through the ooh-ooh-ooh backing harmonies and John's softened snarl come coils of backwards guitar sounding eastern but also like nothing else. There's even a backwards solo that suggests the sensory warping of the dream state. The narrator of the song just wants to stay in bed and walk through the great open cosmos he finds behind his eyes. The song ends with a whole snake pit of slithering backwards guitar lines.

So, that's a sharp edged rock song about tax, a baroque severity about loneliness and a trippy song about dreaming. Not a She Loves You in earshot. This was already happening in previous albums but not to the same commitment as here. These are the opening tracks meant to grab the screaming hordes. They do grab but there's something eerie about each one. This does sit well enough in its times with things like The Kinks' Dead End Street, The Who's Substitute, The Stones' Paint it Black or 19th Nervous Breakdown all hits. But these were the Fabs, the moptops, the teenybopper's delight and here they were opening an album with subject matter that looked the other way as though trying to ignore the human jet engine behind them. Dylan reportedly looked up after hearing it and said: I get it, they don't want to be cute anymore. It was the music, as well. None of this sounded even like the steps forward on the previous album, it sounded like exploration. There was more.

Love You To begins with sitar glissandi far more authentic than the twanged echo of the vocal melody in Norwegian Wood. The rag is played through, the percussion (including tablas) roars into gear with a mix of tambura and distorted electric barre chords and a volume pedal. George's song is a series of couplets that don't always seem to belong. Sometimes it's about love and lust when you want it with whomever is nearby and sometimes it's about false hearted people. Whether it was George just throwing lines together or building up a picture I always hear this as a sinister memory. Maybe it's the force of the backing against his laconic vocal.

Five songs in and we finally get a love song. Paul's Here, There and Everywhere is a gorgeous jazz chord progression on shining electric guitars. Paul's vocal is the opposite of Eleanor Rigby, delicate and emotive, sung on the bridge between head voice and falsetto. Lush harmonies form a bed on the floor as sunlight floods in through the skylight. And then in the middle eight there's a strange chromatic figure Harrison plays on the electric. It fits but it's also quite sharp like a surf rock or spy movie riff. When it passes we return to that sunlit floor and finally to a circular repeat of the title and a couple of rich gleaming chords from the jazz ballad encyclopedia.

Yes, now it's Yellow Submarine with Ringo singing what became a kids' party song with more than a few flat notes with only a strummed acoustic to act as a safety net. It's naff and feels too long. But then I'll still take it over the kind of rock classique covers they were still playing live. And, really, there's a lot of fun happening in the studio that makes it through the speakers. This first hearing of it in context with all the heavier songs around it lent it a kind of in joke darkness. I don't hear that anymore but it was good to imagine at the time.

She Said She Said slides to life with a pair of electrics just at amp breakup for that extra jangle and sustain. A cool Lennon vocal relates a weird conversation the kind of which he would have had in the predawn world of swinging London club land. It was, in fact, derived from a conversation he's had with Peter Fonda about the latter's childhood near death experience. Lennon adapted it with a Lewis Carroll whimsy. The harmonies soar, a tiny organ note pierces the mix like tinnitus and the bass booms ahead (Harrison playing after McCartney had stormed out of the session) all of it twists together into colour and texture. It sounded like a perfect '60s rock song which is to say it sounded better than anything I was hearing on the radio at the time. I still love this song and will happily play it as the only track from the album.

Side 2 starts with a chunky piano plodding along like a cartoon bear. A snare roll and the bright harmonies of Good Day Sunshine burst in. Paul sings an easy mooded number of being in love on a sunny day with the heat of the road burning his feet while he and his girl head for the shade of the park. Little to see here but it's so nice and, like everything else so far, sounds like nothing they had done before.

And Your Bird Can Sing matches a complex guitar duet with dynamic harmonies on the lush side of Beach Boy and a song about being there for someone who's still in thrall to her riches and privileges.

For No One is McCartney again extending the kind of narrative song he was revelling in at the time (the single around the album but not on it was his Paperback Writer). In this case he sings about a couple whose relationship has dissolved, they are adrift, go about their routines, empty of all thought beyond a series of self delusions about the other, crying tears for no one. The instrumental descent is played on a clavichord. Slight electric bass and drumming and some chordal extensions on a piano fill this out but everything is kept minimal. And then one verse is only half as long as the others and into the space comes a figure on the French horn that is both light and because of that quite grave giving the whole song the feel of a film score. All in two minutes and two seconds!

Dr Robert starts with George's SG at amp breakup playing a sharp syncopated two chord rhythm. Lennon comes in low with the opening lines about ringing his friend. The harmonies come in after that and the song mixes imagery of public health and very private and privileged health as the Doctor of the title will pick up you if you're feeling down before a blissed-out middle eight where the guitars ring like bells over a shimmering organ chord and heavenly harmonies: Well, well, well, you're feeling fine. Well, well, well he'll make you..." The main song bashes in again and then another medicated section before the shuffle to the end. The song fades but you can hear the full end without listening too hard. Many fans of the band and this album dismiss this one as filler but I like the way it bridges the beat band sound that made them famous and the coming expansion of the sound and the exploration that was already taking place on the same album. It's two and a quarter minutes long, leave it on.

George's unprecedented third song, I Want to Tell You, begins with a fade in of an arpeggio chord on the Stratocaster he got during Rubber Soul. The timing of the riff is strange and only kind of fits the snare beat tha comes in under it. Once the band kicks in with a four on the floor shuffle centred around Paul on an out of tune piano we only hear it at the end of the chorus. George sings about the difficulties of communication in a state of confusion. Could be lysergic but just as easily could be social as the daily life of the swinging Londoners around them was getting tougher to unpack. A jolly rhythm belies this but the close harmonies accentuate it, finding their apex in the line at the end of the chorus: I've got time. At the end of the song the phrase is repeated until it unravels into the three vocalists trying out some Indian style scales as the strange arpeggio from the intro plays below it to the fade.

Got to Get You Into My Life blasts to life with a brass section straight out of the soul train, supplied by touring mates Sounds Incorporated. McCartney's tune climbs by thirds until the last words of the verse lines which go a full octave over that as the bass thumps on the ONE, a G which he keeps even though the brass ends on an F. The chorus waits until the end of the second verse and is entirely composed of the title phrase. Then it's back into it. but it's not just a three verse two veg. After the chorus there's a single chord break when the guitars finally appear. Instead of them reclaiming it as a standard rock song they are there to add texture and jangle on the lower strings, almost droning like a tambura. The last verse is all shouted in the upper octave as the brass section follows in the same range. Everything lifts as Paul screams some ad libs and the brass screams along with him to the fade. The band had long been associated with black artists from the US but if they covered them there was always a shortfall. Here they used the influence, the thing that got them about the soul records in the first place, and followed that. Is it echt funk? Doesn't need to be, it's the Fabs finding a new road and that's always good. McCartney, decades after he might have, confessed that it was not a song to a girl but to the cannabis that he'd come to use as others used wine, every single day of his life.

And then after that there is the track that everyone points to for being the raddest. They have just heard a whole album of innovative rock music from a band who didn't have to do anything more complicated than repeat their last successes until the well dried up. Nevertheless, Tomorrow Never Knows took pride of place as the closing track, forcing attention away from the rest. When I played the mono vinyl on that morning in early '77 this was the one that put every other backward tape or sitar or music concrete suggested in the rest of the album into context. They all seemed to head to this one.

The snarling drone of a tambura if lifted by Ringo's strange back to front rhythm and Paul's bass insisting on a C high on the fretboard. Then something like seagulls rise in the mix and then John comes in with the opener. If taxmen and lonely people seemed strange subjects for the world's greatest boy band then try this: "Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream. It is not dying. It is not dying." The tune plays the notes of a major chord like a bugle call, adding to the confusion. It doesn't sound remotely as Indian as the drone at the start. Then there's a break as something which still sounds unearthly happens. A kind of folk dance made out of scraps of orchestral music, woodwinds and brass uncoiling from under some almost screaming chords. It fits but it sticks out. But it fits. When John comes back in his voice is squeezed by a Leslie speaker and sounds like he's at the end of a long tunnel with more of the same in the lyrics. "Ignorance and hate may mourn the dead." And the seagulls screech overhead, again and again. A loud backwards guitar solo. More seagulls. "So play the game existence to the end of the beginning, of the beginning, of the beginning..." sings John at the other end of the void, fading into the chaos of sound, the orchestral stabs playing like fills. At the very end of the fade, ever more weirdly, a bar room piano plays some honky tonk chords into the silence at the end of the groove.

If there had been anything as boldly unapologetic yet also still recognisable and enjoyable pop music from the distance I first heard this I didn't know of it. Punk was already breaking through but this almost forgotten album by the biggest band in history was telling me that I shouldn't just be chasing the three chord distortion and slogan choruses from the desolate London of 1977. That felt the best but what if there could be more exploration after the reset finished? This was the record that told not only me that it was possible but necessary. It didn't mean that post punk bands needed to sound like the Beatles from a decade before but that they should race past the new standard before it blanded into a genre like any other (which it did and quickly).

Listening notes: This is mostly based on my first full hearing of the album as an original 1966 vinyl LP. That's a memory. The more immediate source was the 2009 remastered mono box set copy on cd in accordance with the original's mono mix. This, the closest you'll get to hearing what the band wanted has a lot of detail left off the stereo mix (which was considered a kind of luxury item as far as their fanbase went).

This was the album made as the band were acting on their instincts to stop touring and start exploring. That's important as, more than anything else until Let it Be it was a full band recording, the treasure at the end of months of intense idea sharing and playing. After it there were albums with more sophisticated arrangements and daring moves but they were also the work of a band that was less a creative unit than a series of recombined backings for individual members. Revolver is what a creative and collaborative peak sounds like. The single before it was Paperback Writer/Rain a powerful paring of daring with plain rock songs given unprecedented treatment (extra bass on one and backwards recording on the other) and the one after was Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever, the sound of a new era.

The album was eclipsed by its successor, Sgt. Pepper for decades and while that basked in the light until mention of it became a cliche it wasn't until the US market got the '80s CD release with the original track list intact (it had originally been released there minus some key tracks) that the relation of the two albums was reversed and Revolver began to top the lists. This is good and bad.

It's good because it means that the album takes it's well earned place at the top (at least of thinking about the Beatles) but it's bad because this makes it a target of every contrarian bore who thinks it signals the need to champion Please Please Me or Freddie and the Dreamers. For my part I heard something made in 1966 which made me go looking around for anything else I could find from the year. What I learned was that Revolver hadn't been made in a vacuum of unguided genius but was very much a part of the scene it seemed to lead. There was so much I found from the mid '60s that inspired with its daring and style and so much I longed for a smidgen of that to appear in my own time. If it didn't happen it would be up to me or anyone else who wanted their lives enhanced by culture as rich.

That week of holiday wasn't just that album. I was also going through the Queen back catalogue. One morning I was blissing out to Sheer Heart Attack, second last track, side two, She Makes Me with its giant drums and acoustic chords and celestial harmonies. My sister who had organised the loan of Revolver from her friend heard it and called down from the kitchen that the Beatles album had to go back to Penny soon. She'd mistaken Queen for the Fabs.

So, there it is, a pop music monolith like the one in Space Odyssey, come down among mortals to lead them to the next development. Well, it did a lot of inspiring and well beyond its time but, take that on board or not, care about it or not, it's still a good record, not just an important one, an engaging one, an intensely musical one, a fun one.

1966 at 50: Simon and Garfunkels' Sounds of Silence

I can't remember how young I was but I was watching it on a black and white tv. The screen was rounded like a bloated rectangle and the image was really just light burning out of a dark blue gloom. Two men at a microphone. A little plink of guitars and then the song:

And the doctor smells his friends....

That's what I heard. It bothered me a little that it made no sense with the rest of the song but I had an image of a man in a white coat opening his apartment door to his dinner guests and running his head up and down their coats, sniffing. The air of my home was restless with absurdism, it seemed to hang in the light like static charges ready to spark and whizz your hair up like a clown. There was nothing weird to me about a doctor who smelled his friends and it didn't faze me that someone had written a song about it. It took me decades of dismissing Paul Simon's real lyrics for their preciousness and English teacher smugness. That they were presented with such an earth-inheriting meekness made me only hate them more. Then, not too long ago, I just listened to the stuff again.

The middle bit I missed just then was how Mr Cook, my year 12 English teacher taught the Simon and Garfunkel Bookends album as poetry. It was a different album, Bookends, but I saw a little more of what the duo had to offer. Then again, this was in 1979 and my most played album for more than a year an a half was Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols. I doubt this LP would have made a deeper impression than that gentle and deep river of song.

What did change me was seeing The Graduate on tv when I was at Uni. It was one of those movies like Casablanca or Cabaret that seem to ride on a buzz decades after the end of their shelf life. There's a lot of Simon and Garfunkel in the movie and they were the nominal score providers. But it's the final shot, the freeze frame when Dustin and Katherine are smiling at the back of the bus and Sounds of Silence comes on. An opening arpeggio, the first few lines (long corrected from fetishistic doctors and their friends) coolly intoned and then the band kicks in. It was the first time I'd noticed that bit.

There are a few faltering moments when the electric backing feels a little out of time but there's a good reason for that. The song had appeared on the duo's debut, the self-consciously titled Wednesday Morning 3 AM, in an acoustic version. Producer Tom Wilson, took that and slapped the wrecking crew on to it behind the artists' backs and released it as a  folk rock single. That was the hit.
Why? Because adding a jangly Danelectro, a thumping Fender bass and drumkit to the shimmering eeriness of the song with its neon gods and prophets' words on subway walls and the chilling flourescent shimmer of its vocal harmonies would not be matched for alien singalong value until the Byrds' Eight Miles High a few months later.

No acoustic version of this song has ever had the forward momentum of this electrified one and as an album opener, the combination of the perfectly matched voices, pre-psychedelic rock arrangement and the lyric compel. The pair had been performing together from the age of eleven, school pantos, school dances, anything. Simon wrote a song for them at thirteen (the lyric sheet with chords are in the Library of Congress) and together or apart, they both gravitated and here, on this consolidating disc and the power of a rock sound behind them it must have felt like the closing of the circle. Sounds of Silence isn't just a pretty song with poetic words, it's an arrival.

Then, after the bright solemnity of that we get all perky with Leaves that are Green. A shiny harpsichord and acoustic guitar over a gang of shakers and scrapers. It sounds like a radio ad from the time until, instead of a thick Madison Avenue voice speaking about deodorant in comes Paul Simon with his soft tenor delivering the kind of line that normally has me stopping a song summarily. "I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song. I'm twenty-two now...." For me it's like song titles with the word song in them. It. Isn't. Clever. Not even back in 1966. Paul Simon at his twee-est does this (the line about real estate here in my bag in America also makes me wince) and it can make it hard for me to keep listening. But in preparation for this blog post I kept the song going and just listened. Happily, after the opening self-referential lines, the number settles into a lovely ditty. Beyond it being a boy/girl song I don't know what it's about but I don't skip it when it turns up.

Blessed churns with clean electric guitars with exotic sounding string bends. The voices come in in high head voice singing a mix of The New Colossus, the sermon on the mount and Christ's cry of despair from the cross. From shouts in perfect fifths to fluid descents to major thirds this arrangement is a marvel of religious ambiguity. Blessed are the best and worst except for Paul, wandering alone around Soho in the dead of night, knowing he has lived too much in seclusion. This is the closest that this vocal harmony powerhouse ever really got to sounding like their jangly contemporaries The Byrds but this is almost the opposite of the latter's then recent Turn Turn Turn with its affirmation of cosmic equilibrium. The narrator here is seething with rage and at no more fierce a point than when the deceptively controlled harmony about being forsaken rolls in with light and ice.

Kathy's Song begins with a finger style arpeggio on an acoustic guitar. Simon's vulnerable high vocal enters with a series of halting lines of sheer worship for the woman of the title. There is pain rather than ache in his voice. She is distant, an ocean away and his longing racks him. The intensity of his thoughts (she is the only truth he has ever known) shift this from a plain love song into territory more eerie and forbidding to these ears. There is something important that has been left unrequited here and he sings across that abyss knowing that it is unbridgeable. This is as scary as anything Ian Curtis or Michael Gira wrote in the name of relationships. A guitar and a soft slow wail of anguish. Know the feeling ... well, I have known the feeling.

Somewhere They Can't Find Me starts with an urgent arpeggio on an acoustic before Simon comes in with his desperate story of fleeing the side of his lover to escape the law after he robbed a store. On the run, creeping down the alleyway to the sounds of a rock band and a jazzy early morning muted trumpet, he bolts away from his sanctuary, the memory of his moment of destruction in hot pursuit. Great piece of work with some soaring harmonies.

Anji is a guitar piece he picked up while living in the U.K. Written by famous folky Davey Graham it sounds exactly like the guitar figure in Somewhere they can't find me. Perhaps this was a way of crediting Graham after Simon pinched the piece for his own song (itself a re-write of one of his own earlier songs). If nothing else it highlights Simon's guitar skills which are considerable throughout the album. Far from the bedsit songwriter he might seem to be, he shows his years of craft and performance in some pretty fine picking.

Richard Cory starts with Duane Eddy bends on bass strings and a shuffling rock beat. Simon comes in with his take on the poem by Edward Arlington Robinson about a local king among men who surprises everyone with a violent suicide. Simon adds two things that lift it from a poem with chords. He sings from the point of view of a commoner, coveting Cory's life from the factory floor as he describes the rich man's lifestyle, wishing to be him. The second addition is that after the line about the bullet through the head the narrator's chorus bashes back in. He still wishes he could be Richard Cory. If that doesn't send a chill you're not listening.

A Most Peculiar Man starts with a gentle guitar figure on the fourth with an organ beneath it emphasising the fourth. The pair come in in close harmony and a sweet melody about a loner in a boarding house who, on the other end of the scale to Richard Cory, also commits suicide. But this is a gentler method, gas from the stove and sleep. Most peculiar only because he wasn't another neighbourhood drone seething through a daily grimace of politeness and internal stress. Is his suicide due to this? Was his nonconformity a refusal or incapacity? All we have is the judgement of the neighbours who are happy enough extending the futility of his life beyond the grave. A lovely blend of grimness and shimmering beauty.

April Come She Will is Art Garfunkel's sole spot unaccompanied at the microphone. His perfect pitch and diction carry his angelic vocal tone through Simon's embellished folk rhyme about the tangling of seasons with the stages of young love, from the freshness of spring to the desolation of winter. This might have been the kind of precious folk song that drove Bluto in Animal House to tear a guitar form the arms of a folky at a party and smash it to pieces against a wall. It's kept from that by the vulnerability of the vocal and the space around it. A memento mori.

We've Got a Groovy Thing Going with its fuzzy Rhodes piano and beat group rhythm. The pair sing the entire thing in harmony. The trumpet from Somewhere They Can't Find Me comes back in and adds a little class to what is in effect a try hard piece meant to show they can rock out. Everything about it works but while I don't skip it I don't celebrate it either.

I Am a Rock is the album's other classic. Referring to John Donne's short poem on the importance of belonging this seems to be boasting the diametric opposite until the final lines when the narrator's comfort is an icy one. Starting with a flashy acoustic figure Simon enters with a couple of lines about the winter's day  before the drums crash in and the pair sing in unison before breaking off into gorgeous dynamic harmony as the band around them swells into bravado with an ingenious emulation of a mandolin on the electric guitar after the chorus. Three verses of this thrilling affirmation of individuality fall back to the opening's solo guitar flurry and Simon's rueful admission that his narrator has given up all joy of belonging as well as its pain and continues into the freeze.

While the act is called Simon and Garfunkel this record is almost wholly Paul Simon's show. It does need Garfunkel's voice to prevent it from sinking into uniformity. Simon's songwriting and playing are a good counter example to anyone (like myself) who might need reassurance that the '60s folk scene produced Bob Dylan and a lot of precious whingers. These songs have strength and drama and for each sweet sheaf of vocal glory there is a memento mori lurking in the lower corner where the dog might sit in a Renaissance portrait. The story of its making is one of patchwork and shoehorning but it doesn't sound like it. What it does sound like is the early venture that showed what would work and then what worked so well it broke them apart. But here, for about forty minutes is the first excitement rendered practical with experience. If nothing else, this album is a song-cycle of experience.

Listening notes: This is based on the high resolution remaster download of 2014.

1976 at 40

At the beginning of 1976 there was Queen and David Bowie. I was trying to find something else contemporary that worked for me but kept going back to the music and style of the previous decade which still felt more exciting than the runkerchunker boogie rock and emerging disco splodge. At the end of 1976 I was a punk rocker after seeing a ten minute story on the Sex Pistols on Weekend Magazine.

David Bowie - Station to Station
The first Bowie album I bought new. It sounded odd as the gang at school were pooling their Bowies so that we had them all on cassette or LP. This was unlike anything around it, even considering I was hearing the albums 69-76 all at once. Bowie was the element that kept me from despairing that any contemporary rock music would fail against that of the previous decade which I was heavily investigating. This sounded 70s with its brutal grooves, Gregorian funk, giant ballads and worrying 60s glottal backing vocals. It took a while but it became indispensable. Still a wonder. Not bad for an album Bowie professed to have forgotten making.

The Beatles - Rock n Roll Music
A compilation of oldies but important as it offered a look at a major musical influence focusing on their rockier output. It was patchy (lots of covers  and b-sides offered as LP firsts) but true to its title. More importantly, it got us all talking and learning. I knew a lot of them anyway but the bulk approach gave us a concentrate to mix in with our listening and the flavour was rich. We were hearing a lot of this for the first time.

Queen - A Day at the Races
After the sheer joy and rush of the previous, market-busting A Night at the Opera this felt very patchy. A Slade-like rocker, Love of My Life's creepy stalker brother, a lost Beatles coo-fest, campy waltzes, metal history lessons, a big gay gospel hymn, a typically great Roger Taylor rocker, and a Freddie ballad. I could leave it on but, even at fourteen, tuned out for a lot of it, keeping a Queen-sounding carpet of tone in the ether.

The Rolling Stones - Black and Blue
I liked this later. At the time I thought they were just old bods and didn't care. There was a huge Rolling Stones poster in a classroom at school where a huge head of Mick Jagger was superimposed over a group shot of the rest of the band. That just drove me further away. Later that year I bought a compilation of their early to mid 60s singles and was completely wowed. But the band on the record didn't seem to be the same one in the poster. Have enjoyed this album of extended second guitar auditions since borrowing a copy in the 80s. Probably the last full length Stones LP I like.

Led Zeppelin - Presence
This unloveable album of cold but bright guitar tone and a desperate sounding Robert Plant has some real highlights. The epic of Achilles' Last Stand and the bouncy Hots on for Nowhere are real pleasures. The rest of it is largely heard in context rather than track by track. At the time I liked more of it than I do now and, as the only Zep album I bought new, assigned a place of prominence. It was a kind of ticket into musical sophistication, especially since I heard it before the siblings who'd guided me to the band.

Wings - At the Speed of Sound
An exercise in band democracy flopped like every other band's similar attempt. Some fine work (Beware My Love, which I wanted as the next James Bond theme) but so much dreck. This is what convinced me that the ex-Beatles weren't The Beatles.

Blondie - Blondie
Unknown until the following year's In The Flesh whose Australian success gave the band it's first hit anywhere. Side one is brash, exciting and delicious. More experimental Side two fizzles too often but contains deathless gems like Rip Her to Shreds and Rifle Range. Restless powerpop with all the New York attitude you can eat in Harry's characterisations.

The Eagles - Hotel California
I'll admit to liking the title track when I first heard it and then begrudgingly liking New Kid in Town but when a schoolmate lent me the disc I only really noticed those two, pricked up my ears for Life in the Fast Lane but then got lost in all the flavourless custard of the rest of it. More recently, a friend lent me his copy of the DVD-Audio version with a 1 hi-res 5.1 mix, praising the quality of the playing and audio. That's about as far as I could get into it. With all the revisionism around late 70s soft rock like this band or the Nicks/Buckingham Fleetwood Mac and the unconvincing claims of ironic old bland equalling new edge this one has probably long been adopted by the hipster core. They can have each other.

The Ramones - The Ramones
I didn't have this until much later but was aware of it and had heard some tracks. Just before new of the Sex Pistols it wasn't called punk rock nor carried the stigma in mainstream radio. It reminded me of the Saints except it seemed to have a lower IQ. I was soon to learn that the last part of that was image. One of the most influential rock sounds around to this day.

Instead of a 10th album I'll remember singles. These show pretty clearly how this year changed a few perspectives:

Ted Mulry Gang - Crazy: Terrific tightly arranged rock song with a Beatlesque vocal and harmonies. Still like it.

Supernaut - I Like it Both Ways: This song about bisexuality caused the regulation number of sniggers in the classroom but everybody loved it.

The Angels - Am I Ever Going to See Your Face Again: A great rocker with a melancholy mood which not even the evolved crowd chorus comeback can ruin for me. In a year an a bit they were repackaged as a kind of punk act (words chosen carefully there) but they revisited this song a few times.

Heart - Magic Man: A cool and spooky rhythm with a phased guitar glissando and a vocal that went from a whisper to a solid wail. They had more in them but I lost interest after the second LP.

Split Enz - Late Last Night: I loved the song Maybe from the year before with its Beatlesque vocals and odd key change in the chorus. Late Last Night was like a mini cabaret show (not that I knew that at the time but the potted palms in the video seemed to suggest that)

Cliff Richard - Devil Woman: Cliff was from before my time and I put him in the same place as anything from the 50s like Elvis or cheesy teen movies. This had a kind of horror movie vibe and a chorus with a metal progression played clean which I liked for its strangeness.

Bohemian Rhapsody: As varied as a rock opera and as intriguing with amazing instrumental pyrotechnics and heavenly vocals. Still one of the best singles ever.

The Saints - (I'm) Stranded: Didn't know to call it punk rock at the time, just loved the force of it, the big buzzsaw guitars and that compelling me-first vocal. Never found a copy in a shop.

Boston - More Than a Feeling: Every cliche of 60s influenced 70s pop and pushed a few bridges further. Pure joy. Anyone who says they hate this song is a liar.

Sex Pistols - Anarchy in the U.K.: From a brief airing on Weekend Magazine and then a single one on the end of year Countdown this was the one that got me signing on to the noise that was to come. Nowhere in shops at the time, I had to wait until the album came out the next year (what an endless wait that was) but then it blew me away all over again.

Damned - New Rose: Heard it in the year that followed on a flexi disc that came with a RAM magazine edition. Neanderthal rock at its biggest and best.

The Blue Oyster Cult - Don't Fear the Reaper: From the dark 60s guitar arpeggio to the Gregorian harmonies and the horror movie words I longed to hear this on the radio. I finally found the single and played it till it was raw. Still a favourite. Still glad I didn't buy the album at the time as nothing on it came close to this.

1966 at 50: The Who's A Quick One (While He's Away)

As with some of the other examples here the wake of the Beatles' success strengthened the idea that recording artists should also be writers. This created a divide between acts whose albums reproduced their live shows and those that increasingly exposed a gap between stage and studio by pursuing their own statements. As the Kinks left their handful of R&B covers behind them with Face to Face and the Yardbirds struggled to strike a medium between the two worlds, The Who, also addressed the issue but in the strangest way out of all them.

Each member was to contribute two songs each. This management-led move almost worked and it is both a strength and weakness of this album. Pete Towshend had penned almost all of the debut album the previous year and, while the results are mixed, offered a set that could stand on its own. Now, with success and pop-business concepts bidding their public view the band as riding the ratrace, it was time to expand beyond the rock band mold and play the conventions rather than the reverse.

The cover says it all, here. A richly coloured cartoon of the band bursts out of their panel and into the darkness around it, titles emitting in huge goopy letters from each member. The basic field is solid black. The band name and much smaller title are given in a plain, sobering font. And there they are, refulgent, spilling into the universe, each with his own cry of detonation. Well, that's how the marketing went and it's persistent in the mythology to this day and probably beyond. The Who weren't just a rock and roll band they were rock and roll, barely controlled chaos amid the shards of guitar bodies and kicked in drum heads, amphetamine punchups and bombast. And this was the one where they were each king for a track. Let the noise begin.

And it might have.

The Who were, in fact, more of a functioning oligarchy than an anarchic free-for-all. Pete Townshend was at the helm with his songwriting and directing but his ear was taken by a management team who got him and knew how to guide him. If the Beatles had made the grade in matching suits and then the Rolling Stones replaced that with their cooler designer label effect The Who drove right into the pop art shopfront and plundered the colour and post-modern appropriation and took the stage like a dayglo commercial break and burst into fragments of autodestruction. Though many saw the Sex Pistols as the inheritors of this the big difference was that the Townshend/Lambert/Stamp team actually did the kind of things that Malcolm McClaren only claimed in table talk. So, giving each of these ponced up yobs their own soapbox was bound to implode. Well, it doesn't.

Run Run Run opens with a blasting 2/4 swing of power chords and busy drums. It's messy but groovy. Daltrey sings on the downbeat about someone trying to outrun a plague of bad luck. A lovely few minutes of thrash, tough leads and cooing harmonies in the chorus. Great mid '60s hard rock. It's the sole Townshend song on the old Side One.

Boris the Spider smashes to life and introduces us to the realm of John Entwistle, classical soloist level bass player and imagineer of strange portraits in music. A big dirty bass descent through the semitones ends in a scattering of amp tremolo from Townshend as though the note shattered on contact with the floor. Entwistle sings in unison with his proto-metal bassline. He sees a small spider which gives him the creeps so he kills it with a book and grinds it into the floor. End of story. If you're terrified of spiders you're laughing with him. If you aren't you're laughing at him and his quaking anxiety. The chorus replays the opening chromatic descent as Entwistle matches the bass notes in a cartoon horror voice so low it sounds like a purr. The Ox claimed to have written this one in twenty minutes after a pub conversation with fellow bass icon Bill Wyman. It was to follow him for decades begging to be sung until he wrote a song to replace it as its notes would have worn through to transparency by that time. But for me it never grows old and so never has to hope it dies. In there among all the Purple People Eaters, Alley Oops and Hands of the Rippers, Boris hangs on above, clinging to a tiny silken thread.

I Need You. The legend goes like this: Keith Moon thought The Beatles used a secret language to talk about him. The lyrics are all paranoid in clubland as Keith moves around the coloured social circles being embraced with insincerity and threatened with hatchets. Mostly it's a light rock excursion lifted by a harpsichord adding some wit and an instrumental section that begins with a scouser talking about Rorge and Jingo. Beach Boys fan Keith sings mostly in falsetto which is what he would contribute to the band's harmonies. How much of this is Townshend lending a compositional hand or simply providing a lot of guidance is unknown and usually goes without comment in memoirs but I find it hard to credit the writer of this not champing at the bit to contribute more. Let's credit it a Moon since no one else seems to differ and leave it. In the album sequencing it forms a further change in texture after the opening two blasts and has a great aching chorus.

The Ox re-enters with another tale of crazy. Later, when Pete had the task of writing too close to his own bones songs for Tommy about child abuse and bullying he had to give them to John. Entwistle gave him Uncle Ernie and Cousin Kevin which are driven by genuine horror. It was thus from Entwistle not so much being fearless in looking at the abyss but detached from it that some plain descriptions and good rhymes set in unnerving chromatic melodies became so powerful. (Youtube the movie versions of these songs and you'll hear why as they are heightened by cinema where the originals from the album are left subtle.) In Whisky Man the narrator enjoys a friendship with the title character who only comes out when they drink which is nearly all the time. His doctors cry hallucination but he keeps drinking with his friend. When they take him to his padded cell his worry is that Whiskey Man will waste away and die. Finally, the first lines are revisited so he seems to be back drinking and chatting with the W. Man. Has he broken out or just gone further into delusion? The chunky rock is kept thick but light and features not the first but the best so far of Entwistle's brass talents, a French Horn solo that works beyond novelty value. It's musical and atmospheric. It would point to more and better. The final line of vocals ends with Townshend playing a sparkling clean riff around the open D which keen listeners will recognise from the next album's Rael and more pervasively throughout Tommy. Here, if you know that, it has the feel of someone trying out a pattern and trying it anywhere it might work. When you go back and listen to almost any of the early Who recordings it's easy to hear how much of Tommy came from musical scrapbooks. I think this is the first instance of this riff outside of the opera, though.

Roger Daltrey only finished one song in time and where the other one might have gone they placed a cover. Heatwave harks back to the band's R&B roots with a joyous Martha and the Vandellas number done here as thrashing rock with a perceptible swing. The mono original brings the piano to the fore which will be a revelation to anyone better used to the power chord version on the stereo mix.

The US release of the album replaced this with the single Happy Jack (and gave the title to the whole album) and common wisdom applauds this. So would I except for two things: Heatwave forms a bright and spirited farewell to the Motown swing of the mod scene they had outgrown and fits in the flow, and; the end of side one was an even more blasting drum workout.

Cobwebs and Strange begins as a short arc melody played on the penny whistle by Townshend and soon lopes around into near chaos as he is joined trombone by Datlrey, trumpet by Entwistle and, of course the nominal author, Keith on drums. It's a crashing drums piece with some pesky instrumentation in the way. But while neither a solo nor a gathered and concentrated outing it gets old quickly. On the end of Side One it can either run its course while you go and check the letterbox or you can lift the needle and flip the record. In the digital realm you let it play for fifteen seconds and click on skip. Maybe Happy Jack could have gone here.

The old Side Two begins with a bounce as a country flavoured bounce takes us into Don't Look Away. A confident vocal from Daltrey courses over a 2/4 cantering beat of tidy drums, acoustic guitar and picked bass. Over his voice comes Townshend's descant which reminds any of us who has forgotten how strong The Who's vocal harmonies could be. The descants in this song are notably nothing like the kind of harmonies found on records by those better known for vocal blocks like the Beatles, Byrds, Beach Boys or the Hollies. There is less concern with them to form chords than for the vocals to be fixed in the arrangement. Whether matching the lyric word for word or providing wordless support they feel like other instruments. In this case they tighten in toward the chorus with its gorgeous modal setting of the word of the title. The sudden brilliance of this washes over a sombre modified chord that forms something like a 9th. What might read like a teen angst ditty becomes a Gregorian lament .. beat group format. My favourite underrated Who cut.

If Townshend had only one song on Side One he dominates Side Two with all but one short track not of his authorship. Roger Daltrey's sole writing credit on the album (and for most of The Who's career) is the tiny but interesting See My Way. If there's any profundity in the lyric it's deep within the mind of its author as it reads unambiguously like a my way or the hy way ultimatum. After a brief ba-ba-da-ba-da vocal introduction we drive straight into a kind of modified Buddy Holly gallop as the narrator lets his girl know he's really only interested in hearing himself played back to him (I can find no trace of irony in this as there might be in a Lennon lyric) and as such might easily remind us of a lot of the taunting statements on the Stones' Aftermath album earlier the same year. The vocal is sprightly and the Daltrey/Townshend vocal interplay even tighter than on the previous track and its's more varied, going from the ba-ba fanfare at the start through light descant to full falsetto glory. Moon chugalugs on the tom toms delivering big crash cymbal moments and some unexpected but highly effective French horn playing that acts percussively, giving us a kind of Townshend style rhythm solo in pure smoothness. This would survive long without the nutrition of the album tracks around it but in place it provides just under two minutes of bouncy fun with a delightful message of committed narcissism.

So Sad About Us. When bands try to recreate the excitement of their live sound in the studio they all too often get lost in the atmospherics or pare things back too far in the name of authenticity. Long Tall Sally is not the most inspiring of Beatle tracks but the backing was done in a single take and pounds with energy and great abandon in the solos while some of Shel Talmy's worst efforts left songs shrieking under too much reverb until they drowned. The Who played a perfectly orchestrated teen anthem like a make or break audition that showed off the players' individuality and interdependence. It sounds like the studio but so hotly that you want to get in front of them live urgently.

Bass and drums work in lock step like timpani before Townshend thrashes through his chord riff, lifted with modfications from Needles and Pins to become a fanfare. Enwistle and Moon lift this to their shoulders as the choir sings the fanfare in la-las. Bam! The chorus eases the tension with long harmonies in high head voice which give way to the urgent minor key verse before kicking the door down for another chorus. And this just tightens until it is driven beyond words to a machine like chorus of la-las which gets cranked up another gear before bursting into the chorus again. Finally, the brakes are hit and we hear the aftershock of wordless vocals and the engines of the rhythm section crunching to a perfect stop. All the power pop of the '70s and beyond was born here in this apotheosis. This and stations leading to it like I Can't Explain and The Kids Are Alright are my go-to examples of why I think British rock music completely eclipsed its American inspiration.

Then we close on A Quick One, the longest track on the record. Kit Lambert was always on Townshend's case about breaking boundaries and orchestra conductor's son Kit kept pushing his protege toward opera. Not Italian histrionics nor the week long horned helmeted other kind but something that came from t-shirts with POW! printed on them, Beatle boots and purple hearts, of working class London in the war and beyond. Townshend cobbled some scraps together and complied.

A big a capella barbershop chorus tells that her man's been gone for longer than he should. A light guitar figure curls upward from a major third to a fifth before the band kicks in and a tough voiced Daltrey talks about all the available women in the town made vulnerable by the war. A chorus of joyous oooohs carries his lead as the band cruises on. A sudden stop and a full 12 string fanfare very similar to So Sad About Us begins stridently and Townshend as a messenger or civil servant cheers the wife up with what might as well be an offical lie about her man being late rather than dead or missing in action. This is cut short by a few crashing chords that give way to a sneaky sounding arpeggio, palm muted and spidery. The voice of the predator from the first part comes in an identifies himself as Iva the Engine Driver who brings sweets and treats and easy seduction. As he starts to get his way the band speeds up and he repeats his tune but lets it grow into more of a threat as the others chime in on choral vocals, mixing a Beach Boys sweetness in with the sleazing carnality. This crashes to a close as we imagine what is happening. It gives way to a cowboy lope on the guitar and bass and a very restrained Moon clopping and teasing the ride cymbal. It's the husband singing as the horses take him forward that he'll soon be home. We mosey on with this for a while until it is suddenly interrupted by some sharp chords and arresting vocal harmonies - fourths, ninths rubbing shoulders with minors - repeating what sounds like "Dane" or "daing!" Your guess = my guess. After a breath that Townshend open D rings and moves to an open G in stately fashion before the band comes in at a gallop and the choir sings "cello cello cello cello...." (because they didn't get the planned cello to play the part). Over this, Townshend in calmer voice plays the returning husband numb but thawing with joy as he runs to the arms of his wife amid the glorious harmonies (and a riff that could have served as the hook of a single). And then a dramatic pause as Townshend as the wife confesses the infidelity with Iva the Engine Driver, a matter of fact single note per line, a fall to describe her fall and a collapse at the finish. Underneath this (almost like the child to come) the D riff from Tommy slowly rises to life and hubby says, "you are forgiven." This repeats over a growing falsetto choir to a purely liturgical plagal end but then bashes back in as everyone is forgiven as Pete speaks it under the final chords.

The war, loneliness, sexual predation, reconciliation and forgiveness and for the first time something transcending mere pop arrangement toward complex orchestration. And this was all playable live. And to the extent that the falsehood of their performance of it kept the airing of Rock and Roll Circus from release for decades due to the supposed envy of the hosting Rolling Stones (it was licencing disputes, in fact, because it always is). At 9:05 the track is a few minutes shy of the 11:35 that the Stones used for the playout of their 1966 set Aftermath but it feels much shorter. There is no soloing or exploration of grooves, no jamming; there is drama, characters, dialogue and restless scenery and costume changes as roles progress and the story unfolds on the stage. As such it speeds by and goes down like dessert. It is to my mind more focussed and immediate than the more complex suite that Brian Wilson was beginning at the time (and would only be allowed to finish decades later) or The Beatles blockbuster album to come. It is certainly superior as a sustained work to The Who's own Rael song cycle on 1967's Sellout. The durable themes and their access give it the kind of moment they would not each again until 1969's Tommy and by that time they were soaring.

It's not all wonder n invention, though, as we turn an ear to the production and have to deal with something important. Having wrested themselves from the ravages of Shel Talmy (which deal held up the reissue of the first album for decades) they were free to fly into the celestium of minute to minute innovation. Instead of that they let Kit Lambert produce. While his engineer keeps the recording free of unintentional clipping there is nothing between Kit and the compressor to make the ride cymbals sound like steam engines and the guitars either too big or small. Too much reverb here and too flat there. Almost none of this sounds intentional but rather like amphetamine inspired instructions followed to the letter. Sellout suffered from all of this, too, the bizarre moment-squashing levels and weirdly stodgy vocal tone. His intentions might well have been to celebrate new ideas with new sonics but any innovative ideas he might have had were well above his ability to command them. The difference between this and other manager-producer confusions like Andrew Loog Oldham and teams like the one at EMI at the time can be heard in how Rubber Soul still sounds fresh and A Quick One sounds like the mid '60s. Tommy has it's problems but is generally free of them and it's tempting to think that the band had learned lessons that eluded its mentor. By the era-change album Who's Next Lambert was set adrift and the production shifts to the band itself and the steady hand of Glyn Johns and production standards that remain standard. Back in '66 this album was made to excite 1966 and only a few years later its listeners would have to listen through that filter.

Nevertheless, this is a statement of a band from rock music's second stage where it grew beyond adolescent hedonism and explored the observations that its newfound cultural power endowed. In the great change year of 1966 when songs about suicide, middle class drug dependence, social status, loneliness, genetic shopping, self-empowerment and the great black space of possibility rumoured to exist beyond the workaday world all made the top ten A Quick One (While He's Away) just added more flavour and punch. A tip top result for a second platter.



Listening notes: I used the most recent high resolution remaster from one of the online hi-res audio stores. Very clear and deep sound that would be a great deal better than the original vinyl and certainly superior to the '80s reissue vinyl that I used to own.

1986 at 30: Ten Albums from the Decade that turned Fab into Drab

1986 and my first full year of living in Melbourne where I have now spent most of my life. If I heard of new music it was through the subscriber FM stations like 3PBS and 3RRR and the Age's Friday supplement the E.G. I might have bought a Juke or a RAM or NME but they'd long dropped from my list of habits. I was going to more live gigs in Melbourne than I had in my last two years of Brisbane and felt pretty well served by a culture that still harboured its own alternative. Going from one uninteresting casual job to the next I was mostly on the dole, trying to write the great Australian novel before officialdom or age caught up with me.

Once I'd finished the first draft of the book a started rewriting it and within weeks I was immersed in a thickening swamp of self-aware cleverness that the elements of the story became indistinguishable from the in-jokes. That was just the first chapter which I was still working on three years later. I attempted to read it a few years back and saw that I'd spent all that time refining some truly deluxe garbage. But at the time, strolling out on a sunny Fitzroy afternoon, bumping into someone good on Brunswick Street and going for a drink with them or just a coffee at Marios made all that go away ... until I sat down in front of the manuscript again.

While I still listened out for music I found it discouraging how formerly interesting bands went from Alternative Music to OzRock, absorbed by the syrup-dipping mainstream. Everyone moves on and should but the equation of The Models with Mondo Rock was horrible to watch. It was as though we'd just been told we'd won the change while the lardy lords of commercial FM radio polished up the world of Safeway Punk. I remember a little later seeing Ross Hannaford playing reggae with a three piece while his old band-mate Ross Wilson on tv blathered out some more dad rock with the word bop in the title.

I noticed two trends in the mid eighties that saddened me: a general blanding out of musical substance in bands that were highly celebrated and a return of the dominance of guitar rock. The encouraging signs in the early decade that music was moving free of the old templates with the adoption of electronics and dub were visible long enough to be smeared by power chords once again. Inevitable, I guess, but still a pity.

REM - Life's Rich Pageant
If you didn't know what was happening this album sounded like a streamlining of the band's approach. From the big guitar punch of Begin the Begin to the ultra pop of the cover version of Superman everything felt a little heightened and clearer than before. You could make out pretty much everything Michael Stipe sang and the song structures felt more classic. Peter Buck's guitar was set to stadium because that's where the band wanted to get to. The follow up, the also highly enjoyable Document, made it clear that this wasn't a progression but an abandonment. REM threw away its mysteries and roadside charm. They got rich and famous but also more predictable and less interesting. This one can be left on when it's put on but it always reminds me of when I wondered, in my early twenties, if I was getting too old to care about new bands. That would take over a decade to really kick in but this is where it started to really crack.

The Smiths - The Queen is Dead
I hated the Smiths for the irony in the pose and the pose anyway. I hated them for the blandness of their guitarist's muzak tones and Morrissey's over reliance on a few melodic tricks. I hated the cleverness of the lyrics and the screaming self-importance of all of it. But boy did I love the first three songs on this record. I softened to them after that, while never actually warming, and gave How Soon is Now a bow. They were one album away from disintegration and I didn't care. My flatmate Tracey loved them. Well, we at least shared REM records.

Sonic Youth - Evol
Flatmate Miriam was a drummer and came home from practice one night with a cassette of a unidentified band. She played it over and over in her room and to us. We took to it, too. The atmospherics, the soundscapes between songs, the cinematic textures and vocals that went from conspiratorial whispers to screams. I bought the LP and loved the endless groove at the end of each side. I also bought records previous and some to follow but loved none of those. I loved this one and still do.

Elvis Costello - Blood and Chocolate
I'd left Elvis C to himself after the ho hum of Trust, happily returning for the much better Imperial Bedroom but only temporarily, and it wasn't until a friend whose faith was stronger alerted me to some of the great gems in the C-ster's current bag. I can still leave this one on but I also still hang out for Tokyo Storm Warning and I Want You.

The Fall - Bend Sinister
A friend was heavily into the Fall and lent me a handful of cassettes. This was my favourite. It's still a put on and leave on.

Coil - Horse Rotorvator
The hardness of the commentary in the music and voice in this set is magnetic. My standout is Ostia for its beautiful vocal and sheer severe eerieness. Lists of demons, Marc Almond lashing his tongue around some gleeful debauchery. And somehow it's also mostly beautiful. Beyond its release date it's still fresh.

Go Betweens - Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express
As the GOBs sound got bigger they also got closer to the airy pop that they made in their final years. I still saw them when I could and they were always a breezy pleasure live. I liked Spring Rain and a few others but didn't get into this one. After this I enjoyed them almost as though they were another band. Aren't they allowed to develop? Yep, but they are also allowed to go beyond my interest. I probably wouldn't put this on today. Maybe I should, though, just to see.

Husker Du - Candy Apple Grey
I could hear the song craft but winced every time a song started with a wash of distortion pedal blah. A few songs have acoustic guitar and one has piano but this punk-a-decade-late sound wore me down. I still like Don't Want to Know. This could be a could candidate for a Nouvelle Vague style reinterpretation.

New Order - Brotherhood
The only band I liked who could get away with overproduction. Side one was like the earlier band, the slightly sunnier outgrowth from Joy Division. Side two was more like the band that did Blue Monday but lusher and more complex. Bizarre Love Triangle is still brilliant. The last song, Every Second Counts starts as a jokey take on Lou Reed but builds beautifully to a distorted mass which then gets stuck like an old LP. A friend of mine referred to this as "the Lou Reed album" because of the first half of this one track. He still characterises people that way to this day which makes him like a a character in a New Order song.

Hunters and Collectors - Human Frailty
Led by the glorious irony-free pop of Throw Your Arms Around Me, this album was the first step away from the giant clank and chant of the earlier incarnation of the band and toward the tv lights of OzRock. The choruses turned up within the first minute of each song put down as a potential single and, while there was still enough leisure in the observation and some luscious ensemble brass playing it would be the last Hunnas album I'd care about at all. Pity, as I had just moved to their homebase of Melbourne and no longer had to wait a year between their gigs. They were still good to see live but nothing can erase the earliest shows I saw where they turned the quite ritzy surrounds of the New York Hotel into a soundscape of jungle sweat and joyous chanting. I bought the 7 inch of Throw but that was it.