1980@40: TRAVELOGUE - THE HUMAN LEAGUE

As the '70s turned into the '80s electronic bands were rare enough to be easily identifiable from each other and then as a group from forebears like Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. One of the things that became a signature for each was how it approached percussion. Tubeway Army used a conventional drum kit. Spandau Ballet favoured a clean drum machine. Human League's second album begins with a statement of independence from this with a bravura explosion of percussion from keyboards to distorted real drums and solid synthesiser rhythms that verge from harmonic to outright sawing crashes. This, above all, is not the sound of rock.

Phil Oakey's sub operatic tenor provides the melody with clipped diction and soaring lines as the storm rages around him. The Black Hit of Space with its aggressive electronics and robotic singing could tick all the boxes needed for a parody song. In fact, the song is often thought to be a dig at the success of Gary Numan which, if true, is telling: not only giving them a handy us against them stance but doing so with a groovy opener. The video mixes a mash of contemporary news footage with the band miming the song in a studio setting. No one moves more than their performative requirements. There is no drum kit or any rock instrumentation. The band look more like laboratory staff. Oakey is quietly freakish with the one side short one side long hair cut. He glares into the lens. This is not the sci-fi of Replicas or Architecture and Morality. As with their first, Reproduction, The Human League favoured a future is now look and sound.

Mick Ronson's Only After Dark perhaps began the odd trend of synth acts to come who would reset older standards or rock songs in electronica. Again the percussion borders on tonal rhythm and it is difficult to distinguish the two. Oakey's vocal gymnastics provide a warmer centre than the previous track.

Life Kills slams into gear from the off with a pumping electric kick, snatches of buzzing keyboard and even brass section sounding garnishes. Oakey's multitracked vocals approach the the football chant of the band's version of Rock and Roll. It's a brilliant tidy example of what electronic pop could be.

Dreams of Leaving sets a cinematic stage with harsh explosive noise over a pretty sequence and a kind of bagpipe melody. Oakey's vocal is breathy and rushed as he relates a first person tale of escaping the oppression of South Africa. This fades into a a kind of sample and hold pool of beeps with dark echoey waves behind it before a vigorous metallic rhythm. The epic setting returns with a verse telling of the difficulties of the new land as the swell of synthesisers rises, thickens and swirls around him.

Toyota City is an instrumental of marimba like patterns, distant whistling and a kind of Celtic tonality. A Crow and a Baby is the closest thing to a rock song on the album with metallic riffing and clear verses and choruses. A dark Aesop fable for today. The Touchables is positively accessible with sweet riffs and big choruses, presaging not only New Order and the Human League of Dare but the general feel of synthpop in the two years to follow.

Gordon's Gin begins as an eerie instrumental but develops into a thickly electronic version of the drink's tv jingle. This is Youtube-able and is already synth heavy and disco thumping. This one adds a little harshness, like the throat burn of a straight shot.

Being Boiled splashes straight into a mix of electronics and big string section riffage before settling into a strident rockist onslaught with sharp synths and synthesised handclaps. Oakey's vocal is strong as he rails against sericulture, the making of silk which involves the death by boiling of the silk forming larvae of the silkworms. The rhythm track of this number is a clear indication of how synth pop could readily provide a form of disco that could be dark and free of dags. It's pretty where disco went until, emerging from the cocoon of the rest of the '80s, it emerged as techno. The closing track WXJL Tonight plays as a conventional pop epic about radio stations turning robotic with automation and the erosion of the humanity they are meant to be serving. Oakey ends with a larynx stretching high chorus that rises from some beautiful vocoder vocals.

A perfectly repeatable platter, Travelogue makes up with increased arranging skill what it misses in intrigue and drama so rich on Reproduction. The band would split down the middle just after its release. While Heaven 17 proceeded to charge into politics and the tougher side of the sound and garner a respectable string of hits, the remaining Human League were about to fully embrace some of the tightest and joyous synthpop of their era. The next album under their name was the incomparable Dare, a thing of bright fashion lighting on the cover art and massive pop anthems on the disc. The darkness of the first two LPs almost completely erased.

But before that happened this was recorded as the next statement of a musical act intent on exploring the possibilities of post-rock sound, embracing the cinematic and literary shadows they found. There were acts much harsher along these lines like Throbbing Gristle but The Human League sought an accessible path to a more interesting kind of pop. That they ended up being two distinct sides of that as two different bands is perhaps unfortunate but in a culture that was absorbing the old rebellion of punk and once again awarding mass success to the stronger competitors this division was probably inevitable. Until that happened some of the most durably interesting music of the time was made. This is part of that.

1980@40: FREEDOM OF CHOICE - DEVO

Having conquered a whole stratum of the submainstream system with an array of records and difficult videos, Devo, along with Talking Heads and Pere Ubu, were showing as much of the world as they could reach that American rock music could sing differently from the ice-cream cocaine hell that was Steely Dan, The Eagles and Billy Joel. By the time this one came along, Devo's assault was concentrated that the songs, while perfectly individual, were hard to tell apart. That was intentional. Devo's brief was to use uniformity in art to crack the surface of it in the culture.

Every song is a tightly machined unit of guitar rock laced with the synthesiser sound de jour, each one coming in between two and three and a half minutes. Like the frozen berry pullaparts you could get at the supermarket to make that 10pm work night a little special you could do the lot of pick sections as needed. That's why this album has the sense of being a long suite of statements rather than a dynamic flow of moments weighted accordingly.

That is almost true. In fact, the Mothersbaughs were sharp songwriters with a good ear for hooks. So, while this album is like a small chrome berry pullapart there are some songs that make compilation albums despite never being singles. The massive title track with its great doubletracked vocals and guitar assault emerges from an assembly lined thunder on electric tom toms. Freedom from choice is what you want. This was a single. So was Whip It. Bizarrely, this shout against the coming storm of Reaganomics with its disturbing video of distorted Americana went top 40. Gates of Steel bursts into the light as a brilliant keyboard fanfare lifted by guitar wash from below. The steely vocals describe the human lot (half a goon and half a god) recalling Beatle's choruses as much as the hard nosed authority from above already looming on the horizon. It's a masterpiece.

So, while I thought it best not to go track by track in agreement with the intended uniformity of the record it's worth noting the efforts of any vision-led band who are too good to quite appear machine perfect and break into a very tough and sweating invention. Devo, by the nature of that vision, were not long for continuation beyond the point of repetition but even that suited them. A million compilations with unvarying tracklistings later and The Rolling Stones are simply still on the market in bitesize units. Devo's built-in endurance gives us a futureproofed perfection. Beat that, Eagles.

1970@50: LET IT BE - THE BEATLES

"I dig a pygmy by Charles Hawtrey and the Deaf Aids. Phase One in which Doris gets her oats." The metallic voice is John Lennon's. He's goofing about waiting for a take to start. There's a lot of that on this record, the slickest band in the world letting their increasingly long hair down and pumping out some laid back rock and roll. But it's artifice. The interjections were inserted from hours of tape of listless jams or failed takes to give the impression of spontaneity. I didn't know that when I first heard it, I thought it was an album with a band in informal mode. If anything, it gave them impression that they were being sophisticated by presenting themselves so relaxed.

The first song, Two of Us, is a bouncy acoustic number with close harmonies and a whimsical lyric. A middle eight, stronger than the rest of the song, comes out of nowhere and then they head back down the sunny country road. Dig a Pony begins with a false start before launching into one of Lennon's time signature shifting specials, nonsense lyrics before a heartfelt declaration of love in the chorus which only seems to fit.

Across the Universe begins a gentle strum before floating into one of Lennon's finest softer songs. More timeshifting and a smooth vocal. This is the track that introduces the extras provided by rescue producer Phil Spector. He puts a choir into the chorus and it works beautifully. George's I Me Mine blasts into an expansive waltz with a high warbling vocal for the minor key verse and a boogieing chorus in 4/4. Dig it rises from the silence as John yells impromptu names over a chugging beat before it fades back out with a little joke about the track to come in a joking falsetto: "Now we'd like to do Hark, the Angels Come."

Let it Be announces its gravitas from its opening piano chords, broad and stately. McCartney's vocal has lost its cute and he's sounding self-conscious and important. The track's a good one, though. Spector's choir and brass section add needed texture and the album version of Harrison's solo is killer. Then, because this is all about goofiness as well as serious Beatle music, the side ends with an old Scouse street ballad that falls apart in seconds.

Side two begins with a big sounding guitar arpeggio and McCartney's strong vocal on I've Got a Feeling which swings in big angles, breaks into a deliciously screamed middle eight, mixes a Lennon throwaway chant with McCartney's closing verse. More goofing about afterwards. One After 909 comes from the band's prehistory and slams in as a kind of smooth rocker, aided by Billy Preston's electric piano. Then it stops. More goofy cries and asides.

The Long and Winding Road expands almost immediately from a gentle opening with vocal and piano to a Vegas style extravaganza with brass, strings and choir. McCartney famously disliked Spector's arrangement but the truth is that it fits this big ballad with its big gaps and big starts. It's actually difficult to imagine McCartney leaving it as a plain band performance when he seems to be building space for orchestral interjections into the basic track. Strikes me that his distaste had more to do with the arrangement simply being someone else's. I've never enjoyed the song. Even listening as an increasingly wowed second generation Beatles fan at 13 I thought this sounded like Glen Campbell.

For You Blue is a tinkly  blues with a happy vocal and a light love song lyric. Harrison consciously wanted it to be a jolly use of a genre given to fate and personal doom. Well, he did just that but I'll still skip the track.

The album's sole moment of greatness from those sessions comes at the end when a smattering of chat suddenly starts in on the thumping intro to Get Back, a rocker that moves forward like a lorrie and is blessed with good soloing and vocals, managing some deft stops and starts and ending with a good joke about passing an audition.

However contrived, the record sounds like the last statement of a band who chose to go out on a humble note, as bare as they'd begun, rather than a mammoth epic of virtuosity. Well, but for timing that is the thing that did happen. Abbey Road was recorded and released as the final Beatles album and it was a peak of their writing, arrangement and production. And then this thing came back from an abandoned project, released along with a film about a band collapsing in on itself.

Well, Peter Jackson is in the process of rewriting that history in a reconstruction from the footage in the vaults and will make that available for the film's anniversary later this year. The LP might well also get the kind of deluxe treatment that the three previous releases got. I'll see the movie and I'll buy the super gaduper release of the album. But I'll also kick myself to doing so.

I heard this record in the holidays between 1975 and 1976. It was one of the mass of discs my brother Michael  brought with him for his holidays and I was able to give myself a swift education in the Beatles in reverse order from this one back to Sgt Pepper. I did like the engaged feel of  Let it Be but didn't care about half of the songs so always played it as a skipper record. Moving backwards through Abbey Road, White Album, Magical Mystery Tour and Pepper I quickly gathered an appreciation for what I liked about music in general, having only that year broadened from a classical only taste. This record, though, lent a kind of worldliness to the listener, an invitation to a session rather than an audience with the lords of music.

I saw the movie at a cinema and found it dull and formless. That tainted the record even more. When I learned about the editing needed to make it appear spontaneous I shrugged as it didn't surprise me. I soon grew to see it as an aftermath document rather than an album in its own right and when Let it Be Naked was released in the 90s I didn't shell out for it and wasn't impressed when I did hear it. The way I heard it just before when preparing to write this was lifted by the quality of the 2009 remaster in hi res and it passed pleasantly without taxing or annoying me.

But when you look at it in the context of its time, with the varying quality of the solo members' output and the easier reach to the efforts of artists ready to emerge into a new decade with what I always find an unpleasant resort to the blues scales and moaning vocals of boomer rock, Let it Be fits perfectly, slotting into a kind of music that if the Beatles had pursued it might have rendered them as toneless, dressed down and rote as their very best had all but destroyed. That's there in some of the records with their happy saxes and '70s radio friendliness. The Beatles got dull. They joined the '70s when not being dull required the kind of drive that seemed beneath them. And that it what drove me back to discovering the '60s and its freshness. Let it Be had to happen and there was never a more potent example of a device to extract fans from the old days and turf them into the new ones. It's not a bad album but it the was the first in years that wasn't great.

1970@50: MCCARTNEY - PAUL MCCARTNEY

Starting off with hand percussion and acoustic guitar and a familiar rock tenor going through what sound like an off the cuff ditty to his wife. It ends with a self-conscious giggle. The next song has a more adept folky figure and Paul's Let it Be voice where he's going for something more contemporary. Valentine Day is a shambling rock instrumental that goes longer than it needs.

Every Night is the first thing that sounds like a song. Deft shifting between major and minor. Paul's voice is more natural and his welcome falsetto rides atop a pleasant strumming folky acoustic wash. It's lovely. Hot as Sun is a throwback instrumental with a melody you can easily hear McCartney singing. Bright clean guitars and cooling organ tones. Again, lovely. It is interrupted by the kind of spooky sounds (glasses ringing from fingertips running around their rims) that Pink Floyd were filling whole sides with. Lest this should scare everyone away there's a quick snatch of something jaunty with a vocal that enters and exits in seconds.

Junk is a gentle strummed number with acoustic guitar and glockenspiel with a lovely minor key verse and sustained chord chorus as a junkyard's pieces are listed. The choruses are a brief sad dialogue between the shop and the yard. Really very beautiful. Man We Was Lonely is a bouncy country song with bright harmonies, minor key verses (one instrumental with well played slide guitar) an echoey arpeggio outro and it's end of side one.

Side Two begins  with Oo You, a gleaming guitar riff and and a bright, inflected rock vocal. There's a good energy to the verses and the falsetto choruses really drive while it's kept impressively lean. Momma Miss America is a loose 12 bar with a two chord figure on guitar, piano and a meaty bass line. This breaks down and rises again as a riffy guitar figure which repeats rather than develops. Paul is telling us he can play rock guitar. This ends.

Teddy Boy is another of the few finished songs. A gentle strumming figure under a light vocal tells a tale about a boy who feels betrayed by the loss of his father and the appearance of a step father. He goes off by himself dreaming of protecting his mother. A lovely chorus blends a descending chord pattern with a rising backing vocal that might be either Paul or Linda or both. A sadder instrumental version of Junk follows with a piano playing the vocal melody. The falsetto sections give it a strong sense of cinema score. A small block of beautiful music that feels crafted and ready.

Maybe I'm Amazed begins with broad piano chords that announce something importance. McCartney enters in full rock tenor with a pleading vocal to his lover this breaks into a lovely screaming section which gives way to a richly melodic guitar solo which gives way to the screaming section repeat that folds back down to the opening pointed vocal of the opening verse which bursts into an instrumental section founded on a huge organ chord. The solo repeats, augmented by the chromatic climbs on the piano bass notes. The fade is slow but satisfying. This is the album's centrepiece and is the one real moment that convinces that he had the strength to raise something to the quality of his recently ended Beatle years. A small epic of vulnerability confessed through great power.

Kreen Akore matches meaningless drum tracks with David Gilmour guitar, multi-tracked choirs, more guitar, an organ bass note, more drumming exercises, a runner's breathing comes in. More Floydish organ and guitar wailing. Not bad but better when Pink Floyd did it.

To anyone who heard this at the time, hoping that the hero of Abbey Road was going to give the world a monument to polished invention this album could only have been a letdown. Not only because the point of Abbey Road was that it sounded like the last real group effort by a band that had grown so prodigiously inventive that they could no longer be held under the one name. And as Paul seemed the one more together and outgoing, surely he would keep the competitive flag aloft. But no.

What they got was a holiday songbook with offcuts and off-the-cuffs slapped on to two sides like a holiday cook would do. The best of these suggest McCartney's innate power with melody and structure but the worst, like the opener and most of the attempted rock instrumentals, approach being embarrassing. Who expected more of Ringo than the friend-supported wince of Sentimental Journey but, really, was it too much for the Mr Music of the band to come up with more than these rags and the odd hint of old greatness? Well, you have to think about that.

Of all of them, Paul's sense of the rug-pull would have weighed the worst. John and Yoko went off gallivanting and frightening the horses forging records that worked through their audacity as much as their content. George had a more earnest chat with Phil Spector who had been given the worst job with the Let it Be project but could offer the newly emerging songwriter a big ground-up musical wealth. Even Ringo did ok. But in each case the other three did something Paul seemingly couldn't bring himself to do, work with other people, with friends like Eric Clapton or Klaus Voorman.  They even worked with each other again, this time free of the constraints of the iconic Beatle context. Paul sneered at this chumminess and did everything himself.

No one stopped him releasing unlistenable instrumentals or goofy love notes to his wife. The best two shorter complete songs, Junk and Teddy Boy, were Beatles era songs anyway. The rest sounds competent but uncommitted. Except for Maybe I'm Amazed. Was it perversity? I don't know but if that had been released as a single he could have had the biggest post Beatle hit out of all of them. But no. It feels as though he's taking his ball back home to kick it against the wall rather than let those guys play. This record came with his public announcement about leaving the band and a self-penned "interview" protesting that he was over it all and moving ahead. But if this was moving ahead it had better be done with a rear vision mirror as he seemed audibly to be devolving.

Time has not been kind to this record. The cover art of Linda's photos of him enjoying the bearded lifestyle post-fame is fun but the sounds that came from its grooves were those of exhaustion, a flat end of inspiration. What did he make of albums like the lush and strong All Things Must Pass, the lean and eviscerating Plastic Ono Band, or even Ringo's chart topping and compelling It Don't Come Easy? Whatever he thought his withholding of the best song on this album just feels like pique. Perhaps he just did need the time off. The next album, which pointed clearly to how the ensuing decade would play for him, was the opposite of this. Nothing on that is as strong as the strongest one on this but he would learn that success in his thirties would not need the headlong charge it took in his twenties. Maybe that's it, this is his moment of saying to himself: right, you've got one record to panic and then you have to start working.

1980@40: SEVENTEEN SECONDS - THE CURE

An undercurrent of synthesised rhythm is squashed by a piano moving through a slightly eastern flavoured motif. It's short and repeated, broken only by a flanged guitar butting in. Eventually, a distant whining appears. It could be a human cry, an animal or an instrument. The piece ends with what sometimes sounds like muttered speech but on examination is the tail end of that synth rhythm decaying through an echo. It's called A Reflection. That might be a thought, what you see in a mirror or a puddle, or repetition like echo.

A brisk rhythm track with a bright clean guitar figure pealing above like a surf tune. Smith comes in with his signature crying tone. So far it could be from the debut album but the instrumental passages reveal that the view of the arrangement of a recorded song has risen to avian level; the songs have moved more into the realm of scoring rather than just cherry picking from jams and putting that together. Even if that was what happened it doesn't sound like it, it sounds arranged. Along with their mates from Bromley, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure at their best would follow this, adding a strong sense of cinema to their records. The lyric is the kind of self-gravitating vacuum of teenage relationships. The title and final line are taken from a U.K. tv institution Play for Today which typically dramatised stories from the lower end of the social strata in a kitchen sink style. I'd see them now and then in the '70s and loved how stark and often defiantly anti-enjoyable they were. Here, it's both sincere and ironic.

Secrets begins with the palm-muted flanged guitar and bass so close in tone that they frequently intersect. The chugging persists beneath a lyric of longing for an exhausted affair sung both in a distant reverby wail and a close up and dry murmur. Two brief verses of impressions and the  obsession chugs on. This approach in the instrumental track would speak for most of the band's output for the next four or so years when they broke out of it. But for now the pattern that could be used cheaply to evoke early '80s post punk lived here.

In Your House doctors the formula to an arpeggio on the (still flanged) guitar against a forward moving but groovy rhythm section. Robert Smith's vocal is again buried to allow the ambience to prevail. He tells of moving around the second person's house, changing the time and pretending to swim while drowning. Is he a ghost or does he just feel like one? The drums play out, machine-like, until the end.

You can find transcriptions of what Robert Smith is saying at various places online but until someone did that all you could tell was that someone was talking. It sounded like they were relating something like an event but it was too difficult to say. A tinkling piano playing octaves through a delay. The distant speech. a few guitar slices. A drum machine or a drummer playing kick+snare without variation. Wormy, squiggling sounds on a guitar low in the mix and the constant motif of tonic+semitone up+tonic+semitone down repeats before it falls into a rapid kickdrum decaying through an echo. The foreground tells you to worry and you do because you will never understand what the witness is saying. Minimalist mystery theatre.

The Final Sound opens the old side two with a waltz-time figure on the piano that sounds like a derelict house before the tape itself screws up and it stops.

When the dark harsh synth riff emerges from the shadows and the chorused guitar riff picks out an unresolved figure we are entering classic territory. The band already had a few songs well enough known to even peripheral fans to render them singalongs (my brother at the time delighted more than anyone else around him in singing "burn like a tyre in Cardwell") but A Forest was the epic that sealed it.  The drum machine starts with the basic kick and snare tone augmented by a kind of hi hat whisper. The bass fortifies the synth figure and the guitar chug emerges from the riff. Smith again comes in low in the mix. A verse about seeing a girl or not gives way to a change in the guitar chug tonality over the constant of the bass and synth. Another verse. Same. The final verse sings the frustration of a dream where you are denied what you want until you wake up and want to get back into the dream. "Again and again and again and again..." A new guitar figure soars until the drums and bass pare down to a heartbeat. The guitar lifts ever higher  but fragments (never had modulation effects been so expressive) and dissipates into the dark. One last progression by the bass and it, too, falls and rolls away into an echo.

M surprises by sounding like a brighter throwback to the first album, a pacey two chord riff on acoustic guitars and a straightforward 4/4 push. As a film buff I always thought this was about the Fritz Lang proto noir but M stands for Smith's beloved Mary, eventual wife. Still, if a love song it's happy with its spot in the shadows as the obscure lyric both admires and fears the subject who attracts him but daunts him with powers he doesn't understand. In other words, while not conventionally romantic it's an accurate description of the thoughts of someone in love. It's not all sunshine and kisses, folks, it can be paranoia, anxiety and despair as well: sometimes they just all feel the same.

At night begins with a spacey drum sound and distorted bass that sound like Joy Division's first album are augmented with a sax-like keyboard figure that removes that impression. Smith's distant vocals have a Latin descent to them. At the end of the verses the same ascending two chord riff is joined by a chorused guitar. The second verse gets an extra fuzz bass even further into the foreground. And the lyrics; is he a stalker? He stands alone in the icy night while someone else sleeps in a safe bed. He suggests that someone has to be there in the solitude, in the dark. Someone must be there. The gaps are where this story plays and something unlovely and cold lives there. The buzz of a synth and a distant processed guitar that sounds like a dog barking falls to silence.

The usual minimalist drums are joined by another chorused guitar playing minor chord figures. The bass fills the gap as the figure is repeated.  The bass picks up with semi-quavers before a more synchopated groove. Smith comes in. A dry vocal much further up front than any so far on the record. The final thoughts of a suicide? The disappointment of anyone still young and learning how flimsy even the best things are and could collapse in as little as seventeen seconds. The wish never came true and the girl starts to sing. The girl might be the end ("the opera ain't over ...") Whatever it is, that time interval is seen as a measure of life. Is it bleeding out? Something is going on after the thoughts end. The guitar chords finish and the drum pattern, now dry and closer, leaves us with a final couple of beats before the silence. End.

To read this you might think I'm describing some massive goth fest but really the thing that strikes me more now than when I first heard this album (when fresh in 1980) is how understated it is. The Cure, along with the Banshees and Bauhaus etc., went on to upscale their images until the big black hair monster overtook the look and T-shirts sold in their millions. But for the moment it was a band who'd already shown their skills and were already moving on to produce music that was too strong to forget but also too difficult for the mainstream. If you YouTube the video for A Forest you'll see what I mean here. It's a long song without a chorus and the band whose hair is neat and short wear jumpers rather than capes. Smith frequently fills the screen, lipsynching straight down the camera, keeping his expression plain. Images of forests dissolve in and out of view but mostly it's just the band playing. This is definitive post punk as it eschews the marketing image of flamboyance for something everyday while the music speaks for itself; a reaction against the plastic glued up spikes and torn jeans.

It wouldn't last but didn't have to. Smith and co. grew into what would soon be called goth and embraced that for a few very successful years before moving on again. The freshness, cheek and invention would wear out as it always does. Until that started, though, there was this set of pieces that feel coherent enough to identify with but without the grandiose overstatement of a '70s concept album. It's why it still works. Yes, its chorused guitar tones and telephone vocals and drum machines scream early '80s, regardless of how many hipsters copy them and cry postmodernism, it's not the datedness of the sound but the essence of the feeling. It's from the doom of the early X life under the nuclear apocalypse and it's time stamped. That said, I don't consider the notion that period-specific culture is any the less for that character. I've heard too many defences in the name of timelessness made in the name of things whose blandness and conventionality should have them all but shunned by their decade of origin. If flavourless garbage like Steely Dan or ELO are timeless I'll take dated any day. This is from 1980, sounds like it, and it sounds good now. If you've been young and felt, you've felt this.

1980@40: GLASS HOUSES - BILLY JOEL

What's this shit doing here? I know, I started so well with some strong pioneering albums from the margins o' the post punk fangledangle. Why this mainstream crud? Because there's a time-bound memory attached to it and now that I hear it again I'm struck by something.

The songs? They're ok as structures; the chords flow and the transitions between verses, choruses and middle eights are smooth. And they do have the personality supplement that any accomplished songwriter will bring. Take the arrangements away and they're recognisable and playable.

The production? Well, you could hear this and easily think it was a kind of boomer-retro with no difficulty at all. Everything sits where it should and no information is lost.

Are you just saying it's bland or mediocre? Well, yes and no. Honestly, lesser songsmiths would be happy with any one of these tracks and boast of them. No, everything falls into place and the message needs no repetition. He's making it do what it says on the label.

What then? Hard to pinpoint but there's a kind of overhanging sneer to it that can't be ignored. It's there in the Stones riffing of the opening track with the polished-out Jagger vocal. Everyone still likes the Stones, don't they? Well, the Stones I liked back there at seventeen was the great singles band of the '60s. In 1980, releasing albums patched from spare sessions left off previous records, the Stones didn't seem to like the Stones that much. But Billy Joel is banking on you liking his version of it.

The next track is packed with lots of goodness from a producer (Phil Ramone) who knew that a cute backing vocal hook that sounded like it was coming from an old phone sounded NOW! Oh, and the chunky palm muted guitar and bellying echo vocals of any Cars track from the time helped. This is Billy in New Wave mode.

Don't Ask Me Why is a Paul McCartney pastiche with a perky acoustic guitar spring. Still Rock and Roll to Me plays on both sides of the street with nods to the Elvis of where it all began and the snotty thrashing rockabilly of the Stray Cats. He's out of style but it's still rock and roll to him. The big drunk-uncle sax solo sounds like a taunt. Hey, punk, I was already there. All for Leyna begins with a chorused piano and pedal distorted guitar and quirky rhythm section. It sounded and sounds still like Toto.

I Don't Want to Be Alone doesn't just sound like Elvis Costello even down to the white knuckle pre-chorus transition but also puts EC's most used phrase in the title. It's so obviously pastiched it sounds like a pisstake. But it isn't. It seems to dare anyone younger in his audience to point it out so he can come back with how long he'd been sweating at this game before that brat came along.

Sleeping with the Television On has that syncopated quirky perky rhythm that still makes me wince. You Are the One at least sounds like something from a Billy Joel album. It's perfectly judged, well delivered and sounds sincere. I wonder if Close to the Borderline is Billy's garbled version of something like Television. Finally, Through the Long Night begins with a late '60s pop French horn riff and a perfectly pleasant twisty melody and another British Invasion vocal (think Odessey era Zombies).

End.

This album emerged after a mass of interviews in the late '70s that always seemed to include how Billy hated the ugliness of the punks' music but felt triumphant at being more of a success. This  outing has the feel of a begrudging acceptance. That it's too bland and too late doesn't seem to bother him. And why should it? He was right. The punks lost and the great tide of pitch perfect professionalism just kept swelling. The longer game was in fact still happening deep below the current and learning that it didn't need the stadium or the major deal as "local" always felt more exciting and intimate.

But there's a dark shadow to this record and it falls on me.

In 1980 I was sent down to Brisbane to buff up my high school results so I could get into Uni. Not getting into Uni was not on. Fine with me, more opportunity to have fun and find stuff out. The place that all my kind were sent to if we hadn't said our prayers was called Hubbard's. What they did was add supplements to your crappy subjects and push you through to getting the numbers you needed. This wasn't generally for medicine or law, mind you (but one fellow alumnus o' mine was heading into medicine through this very avenue). Anyway, we were poor little rich kids who had to behave for a year before entering the better class of opportunity at the end of at least an Arts degree.

A few of us took a month or two to gravitate but we did and found some good company. Really, the schoolwork was routine and a lot more serious than any of us were used to but we knew the stakes now so we did get into it. But at close of play each week we had fun. And with the connections we had we still partied. This time we also studied but we still partied. And we all got through.

Maybe. One who probably didn't was Tusk. I'm calling him that because that was an album he probably liked. I have no evidence of this, I'm just making it up, but read on.

Tusk was tall and good looking but couldn't make that work. He said little and when he did it came out as labour, a kind of cleft palate struggle that always just sounded uncomfortable. He skulked in company, hanging around the back as though he was in a school class photo, and had to be drawn to join in. Well, I can be like that, too (take me out of adoring company and I shrink into dowdy wordless failure), but I'd look at him and think, you've got everything, why are you like this?

The other thing is that he clung. If we'd been more mature seventeen year olds we would have understood this and extended some support. Instead, we used him. He drove us around the city when we'd be getting into the booze or the parties or whatever and invited us not only into his home but into the high rise unit his parents owned on the Coast. There was no hatred here. I would shy from even calling it contempt. It was more like the guy in the band who owns the van. He did at least get opportunities out of it, if success continued to elude him.

Ok, so why...? Well, for almost that entire year, if you got into his car as we all did he would stab the cassette player with his car copy of Glass Houses. If the trip was long enough we would hear it from minute zero to the very end. We knew the lyrics and arrangements and so well that a bar or two out of context could send any of us rigid with mocking laughter. The other thing was that it was never at normal car volume but at a windscreen vibrating roar. It was as though Tusk thought massive volume stood in for cultural power, that the might of this ghastly smugness only needed to be set on 10 to become Never Mind the Bollocks. It's cringing uncoolness blasted into us and formed a kind of ticket price for Tusk's inner sanctum.

Billy Joel sounds like he's thinking of what his '80s are going to be like. The way he's doing that is by trying to sound like the cooler records from the late '70s. You can hear the cogs turning when so much of it veers toward the new songwriter he thinks is closest to him in terms of craft, Elvis Costello. He ditched that as soon as he realised that it wasn't going to be so tough to hold on to the various teams in suburbia and the ageing boomers and used this self-conscious step to get a lot leaner. Did I care about that? No. I wouldn't have cared about this but for Tusk and his deafening car sound system through which this thing blasted for months.

As much as we winced or sniggered about it, I do recall feeling smug about my favourite music changing this ogre from the mainstream. Even down to the cover art with him in his zip-up and still-rock-and-roll sneakers, about to hurl a rock into the glass walls of a designer mansion somewhere that I didn't care about in North America (which I also didn't care about) it screamed shopping centres and wrestlemania. To his credit, Joel does own this. Apart from that one Elvis Costello clone, he presents himself unmistakably.

As for Tusk. He drove me down to Schoolie's Week on the Coast after exams. Other members of his family came by and we were less than welcome so I hooked on to the caravan of closer friends who had turned up and went to hang out at Kaye's place at Mermaid Beach for the rest of the week. I lived on beer, blackberry nip and Chiko rolls and regretted it with pain. He picked me up for a lift back to Brisbane. It was raining heavily on the freeway. I tried to get a Tubeway Army cassette going but the tape was damaged and had no top end. He took it out and put a Smokie compilation on. (It's not that long a drive.) And then he saw me off at the airport. Everyone else was still down there. I shook his hand with a smile and headed to my gate, knowing I would never lay eyes on him again.

I had the feeling he'd do ok. He'd get into uni or go and join his family in their business or something and make all the right decisions. And he'd probably be genuinely happy about it, more consistently than me and for longer. He could even boast a real flirtation with the wild side, hanging around with the Brisbane punks (all middle class of us) in his days o' youth. I know how writerly this is sounding, roping him to his favourite record and the desperation of its author but, really, he still comes out better than Billy Joel because, for all Joel's foraging and grasping at cool, Tusk wasn't listening to it because he thought he had to or had to be known to listen the way the rest of us did with our records, he listened because he liked it. And because that makes him far less of a conspicuous consumer than any of the rest of us cadging lifts off him he could probably hear it again now and smile warmly at the memory. As for me I listened to all of it again for this article on YouTube and forgot early tracks by the time I had to describe them. Was I just transported by a residual distaste back forty years? The idea that that might count as nostalgia just sent a shiver through me.

1980@40: THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS

UK and Australian cover.

 This is the kind of album a band makes when they've developed a good following as a live unit and have fans who know songs by title. They are exciting on stage and a good gig leaves a buzz. Then they get picked up by a record company, go into the studio and produce a very clear image of their creative output and realise that it's a lot of vibe surrounding one great song.

The Pyschedelic Furs were far from one hit wonders. Their chart success bore them for a good half decade which is more than most bands get. They had a distinctive sound and a singer whose voice could not be mistaken for anyone else and enough force behind the songwriting to keep hitting. And they started interestingly, adding a sax that shoehorned bebop melodics into a four on the floor rock beat and extended the post punk force into atmosphere. X Ray Spex had done something similar with the same instrument a few years before but this was a real development. So, wouldn't their debut be that kind that pops out so that whatever else they do they will always have this? You'd think.

I'm not doing a track by track on this one because when you listen to the songs as constructions of lyrics, melodies, verses and choruses most of them don't amount to much and then when you credit the production for adding so much more then that first point glares out even more. India takes too long to build from silence into song and that's the first track. Fall's chanting verses offer a little relief by being different but the next song is much like the one before it and I keep recalling going to any number of gigs where I recognised the name of the band from seeing posters around the neighbourhood, finally seeing them and thinking they were ok but I couldn't tell one song from the next.

There's a lyrics issue here that adds to the wrong side of the signature/samey issue. I remember reading a letter in RAM in the late '70s listing every instance of the phrase "I don't want to" in Elvis Costello's This Year's Model album. There seemed to be hundreds; the letter took up most of the letters page. This album does the same for "stupid". I think it's in every single track. It makes me think that Butler liked it in one song and just kept putting it in, not knowing which were going to make it through and then didn't bother to alter anything for the recording where it is glaring. It's an adolescent word in the context of rock lyrics and drags everything into a feeling of something unfinished.

The other problem here is production. Steve Lillywhite had established his approach in the late '70s twiddling the knobs for the likes of XTC and The Banshees. His approach sounds reasonable enough: enhance the live set so that it sounds like a record, adding whatever studio magic to set it in its time. The only bands whose identity survived this were those with the strongest personalities to begin with (e.g. U2 or Siouxsie). This record sounds like the next job. It's good but it's also mark hitting and time serving. So you get a host of flanged guitars, gated drums and a live style mix where the rasping voice of Richard Butler is often barely on the surface of the sound.

Also, it gets the best song out of the way too quickly. After India which doesn't feel like it means anything more than a chord progression workout and a rant, the big drums and brooding bass kick in with a slow deliberate gait. A heavily flanged guitar fades in with an arpeggio on the 9th. The Sax breathes a smokey agreement with the guitar and Butler comes in with a series of surrealistic vingettes. This grooves into a hypnotic swing and then the chorus knocks down the door with a lower profile than you'd expect and more breathy vocals, "sister of mine, home again" as a wave of flanging rises like a sense of panic. See, I don't care if this doesn't mean anything it's compelling. The video clip I remember seeing on Night Moves while I was sweeping the floor of the loungeroom (do you remember where you were? well, such was my life) and stopped. A mimed band performance in cold monochrome, the band are dressed sharply but not in any ostentatious uniform. Butler wears a Bogart trenchcoat and sings without facial expression, moving lightly as he delivers. This is intercut with pans and tracks of monumental sculptures at such close range that some of them look like they're alive. It's a beautiful blend of strange noir imagery and movement with music both elegant and doom-laden; a perfect dirge for the nascent '80s with their minutes to midnight nuclear clock and social identity removal.

It was on the strength of Sister Europe that I asked a friend to cassette the album for me. I listened to it once through and then just wound it back to that song whenever I put it in. I bought a vinyl copy of the US version of the album with the black and white '60s-looking cover. It had a slightly different tracklist, not that I noticed as I still only played Sister Europe. And then most recently I listened to a download of it in hi-res. It's clearer now what work went into trying to make the songs both distinct and add up to a whole but the best song so fully outclasses every other that the rest falls flat again. What they needed was a push into the songs. That happened and brilliantly. But that's a tale for 1981@40.

US cover