THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE @ 45

If you've heard Cars from this album (and hours of hits and memories radio), you already know this record's sonic pallet: a crunching rhythm clanks below an ethereal screaming synthesiser playing a cooling modal motif overhead. Between the two, the voice of Gary Numan, melodic in shape but emotionally flat. Repeated listens will distinguish one arrangement from the next and the emotion in the vocal will advance. But it will take those listens.

For brevity, I'm going to refer to the rhythm tracks of this album as the machine. This will alleviate having to repeat the description of the beds of almost every song on this record. So one song gives way to another and the machine is already working. That kind of thing.

Airlane

A slight wisp high on the synthesiser and the machine starts with a clanking rhythm track with the wisp becoming an industrial scream overhead. The motif is altered here and there and several gear shifts and turns but the process keeps working. This is tinned Gary Numan and is as luscious as it is cold. Not just emotionally static, physically cold, as though the aircon has been turned a degree too low. It's an instrumental but with this artist there is no tokenism to it as there would be with any other rock artist. Well, maybe that should read any other rock artist before him. This album opener from the last year of the '70s, released on the brink of the term post punk gaining currency in the consumer base, is of a time when the demarcation between mainstream and alternative was essential. Here is an instrumental told in bold strokes by an artist that, be the stadium ever so big, was not going to ask his audience if they felt alright, or if they could clap their hands (mind you, some of these tracks almost force you to do that). If you are not with this record by the end of its few minutes' duration, you might as well take it off and try something else. When this asks you in, it will lock the door behind you.

Metal

The machine kicks into operation. A hammering synth snare. Then the whole floor, bass, kit and rhythm, starts. Numan comes in as an android. It observes the ways of his engineers as they fit its circuitry and polish his outer finish. A solid synth wail rises and spread. "Picture this, if I could make the change, I'd love to pull the wires from the wall..." Perhaps his assemblers are aware of its aspirational daydreams. The song stops developing after the last line about confusing love with need. And then a solid electronic drone plays over and then through the closing rhythm. No more riffs for this operative. It's all down to the process completing. That's what this sounds like. A quick scare of a thought and then it's back to the assembly and programming. And the process just continues.

Complex

The formula is put on hold for this one. A viscous soup of electric slides and piano, the filters on the synthesiser frequently teeter into distortion. And then a mighty figure rises in the keyboards and a voice we'll hear again on the record, viola. The figure is intense, heartrending is a way difficult to define. The vocal has a familiar broken dejection with halting lines about betrayal and isolation. With the perfect blend of bowed strings and synthesised string sections, Numan's plaintive voice and the big space created around it, this remains the most beautiful and affecting track he has ever done.

 

Films

A drum pattern is joined by a perky bass rhythm before the scream riff enters, expanding the scale to airliner hangar size. The vocals enter with a statements of approval or disapproval about elements of cinema like the film itself, the actors etc. but reverses it with paranoid utterances about being exposed. We're not talking movies so much as living as though we move through our own or, even worse, someone else's. As the ugly beautiful synth riff soars and takes control we are yet again in a song-borne world where one change of perspective in a line will alter our own movement through a song. One of the most epically industrial of Numan tracks.

M.E.

Numan's vocal is the highest on the album or anything on Replicas or the self-titled debut. Clear, clean notes that describe arcs of melodic phrases. The lines are brief: "And M.E. I eat dust!" "I'll only fade away and I hate to fade alone." The title is an abbreviation of Mechanical Engineering. The suggested narrative is an old sci-fi staple in which a massive computer fixes humanity's problems by getting rid of the humans. The riff will be known to more recent generations as sampled by Basement Jaxx in Where's Your Head At? Here, it is one of the machine tracks, driving down as the warm lower synthesisers rise around it. And then, unexpectedly, in a reiteration after the first vocals, the riff is augmented by plucked viola strings, one of the woodiest and most human-like sounds available, adding a blunt texture but also a real fingertip on string. In a later instrumental passage the viola adds Celtic trills and melismas to the phrase adding a palpable yearning to the sound. The electronic keyboards rise to a height of modal figuring as the machine gears up again, alone, screaming over the wasteland. 

Tracks

A pealing piano figure underlaid with a gurgling synth bass. Numan comes in with a few lines before the machine bursts into gear, the drums catch up and the beat assumes a chug beneath a synth wailing the opening piano figure. In full force, the vocals tell of a swap between the narrator and an older person who then can experience both the past and present. The vocal for the full band body of the song is almost as high as M.E. and just as plaintive. It sounds like the experiment was a disaster. And perhaps time itself remains to witness, ending as a trickling piano arpeggio played high and softly. 

Observer

This is almost entirely instrumental as a high flying keyboard scream flies over and around the parts of the machine as it works and crunches. In this case the figure in the lower instruments is so close to the break figure in Cars that I still think it's an extended album version of that song starting up. But the synth scream flies in and it's its own number. After an intro that goes for half the track it's a surprise to hear the vocal come in. A plain lyric about people watching might, in the right context, be a sinister confession but all we have is the setting of 

Conversation

The riff is built around a brief trill and feels like it's going to be the same all through. When the vocals start it is a series of clipped statements referring to the failure of communication through incapacity. Is Numan referring to his Asperger's? The lines are stubbornly brief and the breaks between them increasingly elaborate, with a deal of warmth added through the violin and viola. The music, the invention internally is busier than his verbal communication could ever be until it swamps the words with a tide of swoonable synthesis soaring above the machines. This is more an acknowledgement of the condition than a cure but its depiction is oddly glorious, controlled, owned.

Cars

People whose parents weren't born when this was released as a single know this song. It gets everywhere, movies, commercials, daytime radio, clubs and deep inside remixes. In 1979 it screamed through the airwaves with a weird grooviness built of machine perfect playing and simple but commanding motifs. If we'd been wowed into silence by Donna Summer's I Feel Love and then shivered at side two of Bowie's Low, we might have just made it past the industrial architecture of Are Friends Electric but nothing prepared us for this hymn to the car as a place to isolate oneself from everyone else as it coursed through the night with lights as white as the elongated keyboards howling above the machine. If it came on the radio as you were getting yourself to a party, your night immediately felt important, not just fun.

Engineers

A theatrical snare roll settles into a locomotive rattle as the machine grunts and clunks. Numan sings high of his and his colleagues' lot as they maintain the lifestyle of the world from a system of conveyor belts underground. "All that we know is hate and machinery. We're engineers." It's the final track and ends as uniform as the opening instrumental. The main riff is more complex than usual and thickens over the top of the machine until that continues  to a finish on the snare drum and a wet, electronic sprinkler. End.

The cover art is of its time but out of time. A reimagined Magritte painting replaces the glowing head of the suited man at the table with Numan's own, eye makeup intact but now in a 1930s style double breasted suit. He sits looking with a worried face at a small pyramid that glows from the top down. The album is one of exploration of the theme of humans and technology dealing with each other in the world to come already beginning as he recorded. Taking inspiration from cinema, Phillip K. Dick and industrial advertising, he filtered his inspirations through his first year of fame with Asperger's. The title is Freud's concept of the Id's drive for self gratification and the forces (largely internal) that seek to prevent its expression.

This record took me a long time to really fold myself into. I picked out the more melodically pleasing tracks and let the others fade into disuse, at first. But then, all I had was a cassette copy so I'd put it on for study and it worked its way. I came to a few conclusions about it, especially in light of knowing it's Tubeway Army predecessor, Replicas.

If you are unused to these sounds and find them quaint and samey you should pause for thought. Yes, this album finds a formula and sticks to it as though the system that it supports would collapse without perfect observance. And you might think, that's not much to build a creative project on. Then, all you will need to do is find an album by an old blues master. It's not the difference between those classic guitar tones and chord progressions played organically that you should be hearing, it's the adherence to a grammar that must be maintained for the music to be blues. Same thing. 

Gary Numan did not emerge from Kraftwerk. Even the cinematic soundscapes of Tangerine Dream could not claim him. Gary Numan came from punk. The self-titled Tubeway Army debut features sparse synthesisers, usually helping out around the rhythm guitars and bass as texture. By the time Replicas was released the guitars were ditched and the approach sealed. Icy screams of synthesis screamed in flight overhead as a factory filled with perfectly maintained automation clanked, hummed and manufactured on the floor below, in a wash of blinding antiseptic fluorescence. Gary Numan made this setting and walked  through it, comfortably at home. 

Here and there he daydreams like any assembly worker, of being a machine himself, just cognisant enough to know he is a robot, or someone altogether more fleshly who prefers the protection of a synthesised skin. Stepping from the thick barre chord riffs of the first album through to this muscular and industrially tooled world building Gary Numan made himself instantly recognisable to the decades to come, needing only know that adventurous listeners of the future would pause and understand.

Listening notes: I listened to the superb hi-res flac downloaded from a online retail outlet. No loudness war compression, here, just the big airy white light soundscapes of the original vision. However, I got a lot of background from the booklet in the 1998 rerelease from Beggar's Banquet. I've found out that the mix on all CD releases of this album are unsullied by loudness mixing so, any you can find will sound very good.

QUEEN II @ 50

Second albums are always interesting. Flop or flight the effort put in alone compels. The number of one and done bands supports this. Can we easily imagine a second real Sex Pistols record or a follow up to Colossal Youth? Even if it is easy it is not always fun. Imagining a megastar band that collapsed after their first album and you have a forgotten Beatles, Rolling Stones and many, many more. All those bands who make it through the great filter of rock stardom get a toast with something bubby and a stab at immortality. So, how did Queen do?

The opening track Procession does a lot of the talking in answer. It's an instrumental made of a kick drum and layers of guitars played in ways they normally are not. Brian May makes his guitars sound like brass instruments and organs. Mostly this is done through volume swells to remove the sharp sound of a pick on a string. Also, he puts the signal through heavy distortion which adds a lot of sustain. We're not meant to think it's actually a procession band, we're meant to marvel at the ingenuity. And here's the thing: it's way more than smart, the music in Procession is emotive. If we're in for prog rock on this LP it will be as we've never experienced it before. It's almost over before it begins but it ends with the figure that the next song will progress to.

A slight mist of guitar beeps from the end of the track leads us to Freddie Mercury's piano arpeggio which ends with a giant power chord. A galloping guitar opens to another aural vista and Mercury's pure vocals in high register begin the direct contact with the audience. "A word in your ear from father to son". This gives way to the verse that will repeat around excursions into celestial vocal harmonies and hard metal workouts and impassioned pleas. The band is throwing everything they have at the wall and creating something far more focussed and deliberate than anything on their debut. By the time Mercury sings in falsetto, "the air you breathe I live to give you"  you'll be welling up. If this is metal it has never been so poignant, if it is prog it has never been this affecting. A choral chant and hard rock backing play to the fade. A high flute like guitar triad fades up.

And then that is joined by a series of weeping glissandi on the same tone introduce White Queen (As it Began). A deep acoustic strums chords under the vocal which is gentle but melancholy. After an opening lament the song begins with a glacial arpeggio played through a flanger. A courtier's account of waiting for the queen of the title progresses confessorially until a mass of glittering harmonies end the verse before a harder, impassioned restatement of the opening phrases thunders out. A sitar like solo later and the passion reignites with an outburst of new melodic material and more orchestral guitar before a final choral outburst and a gentle coda with only voice and acoustic guitar. If you know your Pre-Raphaelite painting this is what one might sound like.

Unlike the three previous tracks Some Day One Day has a clean beginning with sprightly acoustic chords and a vocal from Brian May who supports his pleasant but lower tier vocal with more guitar arrangements in a love song of polite longing. Faint praise? Well we've just had two of the bands most impressive recordings to that time in their career. The nice number is thoroughly enjoyable without ever wafting into filler territory.

Another clean start for the Roger Taylor song The Loser in the End whose crashing drums tighten to the opening line, "Mama's got a problem ..." in mighty metal voice. It's so powerful we don't have time to acknowledge that the guitars supporting it are almost entirely acousitc. There's plenty of brash stadium rock to follow and it feels almost a relief for the band just to rock out to one of Roger's barnstormers. Mind you, the lyric about sparing a thought for the mums left behind by their hedonistic kids is poignant despite the Zeppish strut.

While the first side was almost all Brian May's songs, the second is entirely given over to Freddie's flights and showstoppers. Ogre Battle begins with a partially backwards playing of the song's final moments before smashing into one of the most authentic speed metal guitar workouts before the eighties adopted the approach. If the choral harmonies of the previous side leaned toward the sublime these scream out like side characters from Dante's Inferno. Freddie leads us through a folkloric episode  of breathless speed and imagery. It ends in partial reverse as it started and the wind effects are cut into by a persistent ticking which brings us to...

The Fairyfeller's Master Stroke which starts with a manic minor key chordal figure on a harpsichord before the big Queen choir and guitar orchestra kicks in. Then it's full steam medievalism of the kind in Richard Dadd's painting which gave the song its title. The song is not just a catalogue of the odd characters in the picture but a big, rich, bombastic celebration of their Tolkeinesque community. We end on a rushed harmonised final description as a trio of chords gives way to ...

Nevermore begins with a grand piano arpeggio that bears Freddie's mock melancholy song of love and loss with some big harmonies sounding operatically and trading speaker positions. Big and gorgeous if slight by comparison but you would never skip it.

A clean start for The March of the Black Queen on piano with some guitar stings before an explosion into harmony and the rest is not going behave. While the six minute opus changes every few seconds there is enough grounding repetition to keep the constant vocal and instrumental pyrotechnics on course rather than have it collapse under its own weight. If anything this is the parent of the more disciplined Bohemian Rhapsody and it is not hard to think that the later top 40 epic would have reached its clean lines and clipped humour without this near free for all earlier. Its final chord gives way to ...

The ringing acoustic guitars of Funny How Love Is with a throat lacerating high vocal by Freddie form the equivalent of Some Day One Day on the previous side (more on such soon). It's joyful and ringing with perfect voices and a constant shuffling rhythm, neither claiming higher purpose nor needing to. 

The Seven Seas of Rhye bangs in with the same kind of energetic piano figure the Elton John would use the following year to make the Who's Pinball Wizard his own. A powerchord later and the galloping number rushes into the most conventional mid-seventies radio song on the record. The lyric is the same kind of play upon character types that went into most of the songs on this side so while it might be of its time it's not Tiger Feet or Come and be in My Gang unless you can imagine those redone by Noel Coward. And then it ends in a crash that is immediately swamped by a pub singalong version of I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside. It conventionality bringing the unconventionality of the rest of the record into sharp focus ... and with a smile. This was the band's first charting single.

The debut album had charted within the top 40 but not spectacularly. Queen II was begun very shortly after the delayed debut LP and, by the band's insistence, under easier conditions (extended studio rather than the borrowed minutes and offcuts of other bands like the first one). With loosened belts and a set of songs they were eager to experiment with, Queen managed to make a far more orderly and signature work instead of getting lazier with it. They gave their record company a long player like no other on the market and a top ten charter (number five, below such giants as Band on the Run and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road!). Queen had arrived and distinctly on their own terms. From Brian May's extra ordinary guitar orchestrations, vocal harmonies to floor their contemporaries and songs that ranged from sublime to infectiously insane, the band was set and in such a profound way that they got through the onslaught of punk with barely a scratch. This album and its success gave them that.

It would have been late 1976. The song Bohemian Rhapsody had wowed everyone of us over the Christmas holidays and drove us to buy our own copies of the album without bothering with the cassette undermarket. It was straight to the LP with the cover art, lyrics and winking comments about Bechstein debauchery and nobody playing synthesisers. Owning the artefact by this band that had shown up underneath the elder sibling canon and who were ours to cherish, was to feel like starting on the ground floor of Coca Cola or space travel.

But it wasn't quite the ground floor, it was the band's fourth album. Over the months from the beginning of 1976 to its end and beyond, I looked for, found and bought all of the earlier ones, in order of discovery. Queen, the debut, was all British rock goodness, if uneven and occasionally messy. Sheer Heart Attack was accomplished and presented the formula for future Queen albums. But Queen II was different. When I bought the U.K. copy from Ken Hurford's Import Records around the corner, I had to wait to hear it as we were in between styli at the big four speaker (but not quadrophonic) hifi Dad had built. That was maybe at the end of the day when he got back from work. Until then I took it over to Nanna's to pore over while digging into pikelets with cream and cumquat marmalade and tea with lemon served in glass. Alright, alright, I just thought you might like the detail.

So, there was the cover. Black on the outside with the band members heads in chiaroscuro lighting just like the opening of the Bohemian Rhapsody video. The title, an art nouveau font in white in a corner, carried over in style to the rear cover which listed the tracks over a more elaborate coat of arms featuring a swan, fairies, lions and other heraldic inventions which looked medieval as imagined by the late nineteenth century. Also, the sides weren't simply one and two but Side White and Side Black. Opening the gatefold showed the band posed in the same kind of rough diamond arrangement but entirely in white (and the drummer and bass player in reverse places which would have them the same as the front cover if you could see through it).  The other half of the gatefold was a repeat of the back only, black on white with various production notes and the statement: "And nobody played the synthesiser ... again."

Dad got home with the stylus and I put the disc on, poring over the lyrics and marvelling at the sounds. As a kid whose first fandom was classical and previous, the record spoke to me directly, it's virtuosity and imagination was like reading the best of kids books from when I was much younger. Like those, it gave me pictures and daydreams.

OCEAN RAIN - ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN @ 40

The opening chords of track one tell a lot of the story. They're played with acoustic guitars. Second sign is the cheerful figure in the string section. When Ian McCulloch enters with his vocal he's almost audibly smiling. For all the forward motion of the previous album's plunge into anthemic showstoppers and gloomy philosophy, there was little success to be had. Times were changing and the initial bleakness of the decade in rock music was being replaced with lightness. It was all in how you did it. The Banshees went briefly psychedelic with Dreamhouse and by the time you get The Cure singing about caterpillars and the top ten was filled with squeaky clean synth duos whose videos were all endless white backgrounds and spotless image. The scousers of doom stood up to the challenge and created a joyous feast that even they would dine at.

Silver's light-spreading strings, McCulloch's powerhouse tenor declared the skies blue and his hands untied as the rising wordless backing voices gave way to a refrain so melodic that it had to be kept to la-la-las. They did it: the song is a doorburst of happiness and not a second of it doesn't sound like the band that asked it they were the half of half and half or were they the half that was whole and pleaded to be spared the cutter. And it doesn't let up.

The epic scale strings and acoustics continue but on a Phil Spectorish epic scale. What starts sounding like more Porcupine darkness turns with the vocals into a quite romantic mess of imagery conflating sex and drugs with rock and roll. "Take me internally, forever yours, nocturnal me.

Crystal Days sounds like a major key version of Porcupine's White Devil. McCulloch sings high and pure about looking for hope and hoping it's you. A brief feedback solo gives way to an almost cartoonish '60s interlude on the middle strings. 

Yo Yo Man follows with a revisit to flamenco land like Nocturnal Me (and repeats its three time rhythm). It's the closest thing so far to the old Bunnymen with images of flames, snow, bones and prayers but it's again in a major key and the  keyboard instrumental at the song's centre adds a Brian Wilson like fairy tale whimsy. When the flamenco strut returns it is with the kind of development with layered vocal lines and a drifting band track before ending on a strident string figure and a droning hum.

Thorn of Crowns comes across as a showcase of the eastern flavours the band had explored on the previous LP as well as furthering the bright clean guitar riffing they'd always taken to triumph. This one was given some working out live and in the studio but never quite takes off. McCulloch's random screeching and shouting feel uninspired and space filling. By the time his impassioned vocals are given over to a list of vegetables you know this one was destined to be the album's hamburger helper. Whatever thinking might have gone into it, this end of side one piece sounds like the kind of Doors-inspired meander that a lot of the '60s influenced bands of the time were trying out (and almost always failing at).

Side two starts with one of the era's stone cold classic anthems. The deathless Killing Moon begins with a tense atonal riff and what sounds like a flub on the guitar but through repetition proves a feature. A tidal drift under the band, aided with a spooky reverbed figure high on the piano keyboard introduces the verse with McCulloch delivering a heartfelt vocal romantic in both senses. This lovelorn scenario happens in the rich blues of a storybook illustration. A brief instrumental led my Will Sergeant's electric 12 string on the lower strings adds drama before the final verse and the first of many farewell choruses in which McCulloch approaches the aching lines about fate variously in higher registers, near spoken word and finally in the full tenor mode that made him his generation's greatest male rock vocalist. The chorus repeats as the voice sinks into the distance and the fade overwhelms it. A point of interest here is how the verses and choruses of this arrangement are played almost identically, with the whammy bar waves and string section rises etc. One thing this band could boast from the first album on was that they never played the parts of the songs the same way. There was always a completely different way to end a chorus or get into a new verse and the middle eights were always offered with great dynamics (all of that can be heard in The Cutter but it's generally how they did it). It feels that the melodic material and emotional commitment to the song kept the riches of the arrangement (the strings are utterly gorgeous) were best left as was. Then again, seldom has a reflection about death felt so much like a love song, so maybe the straight and narrow course had to prevail.

Seven Seas begins with approaching acoustics and electric 12 string before kicking into the verse with crashing piano chords and a propulsive and lithe bass figure. After some lines about tears and happy cavemen the chorus belts into its rising refrain with a glorious intro on tubular bells that lifts an already appealing song into the celestium. The theme of the words is about change, heading from constrains to the open waters of choice and challenge. After a Byrdsy 12 string solo the passionate vocal-ed middle eight sings of burning bridges and smashing mirrors. And then we don't mind that the rest is almost all choruses because they are so infectious.

A three chord organ riff and cinematic piano flourish starts My Kingdom. The words are of conflict, of arguments intense and intimate told with figures of warfare. The electric 12 string in this one is used to clever effect as an intensifier approaching a chorus. The track is the only one on the record to have a distorted guitar solo but, while it gets close to stadium rock manages to stay nice. The stuttering chorus might remind us of the C-c-c-c-cucumber of Thorn of Crowns but here the melodic payoff makes the lines richer and it feels rhythmic rather than dramatic (as it was in My Generation). The trail out solo has some nasty phrases passing between parties as another refrain (ten a penny) comes up like an old drinking song.

The album closes with the title track. This time, unlike Porcupine's massive dirge, Ocean Rain is a gentle arrangement. A pendulous bass swings with the light percussion to suggest the motion of waves. McCulloch comes in weary and observes that he's all at sea again. The verse at first seems simply to be repeated a few times for the entire song but through some subtle substitution whereby you becomes I and your becomes my etc., a world is built around the sadness of the situation. The strings play their most affecting parts on any of the songs on the album, a light statement of a minor third falling to the tonic for the chorus. Before we can really take in the momentum that has been building we are in full crashing tide by the end and McCulloch in full voice: "Screaming from beneath the waves".  The lull and easy beauty of the opening has given way to the widest ranging dynamic movement on the album. It might have felt lulling and consoling but by the end it's a scream of pain but also of acceptance. And then the gentler restatement of the chorus leaves us with its difficult message as the song comes to a clean end. 

"All hands on Deck at Dawn,

Sailing to sadder shores

Your port in my heavy storm

Harbours the blackest thoughts."

Echo and the Bunnymen continued for a few years longer before breaking up. There have been subsequent reunions and tours but their legacy is firmly placed in four albums that describe an arc of discovery and commitment to power of invention executed with energy of youth and a clarity beyond their years. They are also one of those bands made of solid contributors and collaborators who understood that while you could repeat the lessons of the past it could provide lessons for the future with some restraint and mindfulness that different times called for different measures. The brilliant string arrangements on this record (and the previous one) are far from the big lush washes of the likes of ABC and are better sculpted into the sound and force of a rock band ready for change but loyal to their post punk culture. They contributed to the style and texture of that culture and this record was the apotheosis of that contribution.

Listening notes: I chose the recent  hi-res download of Ocean Rain which appeared a few years back on a few of the online hi-res retailers. Beautiful sound.

LODGER @ 45

Why I had this but not the previous two Bowie albums on vinyl is illustrative of how I used to think as a record buyer when I was a teenager. I cared less for the first than the second side of Low and I didn't want to buy a record only play half of it. Heroes kind of made sense all the way through but for any album to call itself after its most accessible track and have the rest sounding like finished failed experiments was not one I'd want on anything but cassette. But it wasn't just the music. I loved the covers of both of those albums. Low looked mysterious and sci-fi. Heroes looked at strong as its title. But I missed the joke in the first (low profile, for those who can't picture it) and didn't get the point of the second. So, I was fine with home-taped cassettes. But Lodger had a weird cover and I liked all the songs I heard off it beforehand. It was only vaguely known as the Berlin Trilogy at the time so there was no sense of urgency in collecting all three.

The myth that MTV likes to sell is that the music video was invented for it. Countdown had been playing them for over half a decade before. Bowie did something different with Lodger in that he made a few clips for songs, whether they were singles or not, and let them loose on to the world's tv. DJ, Boys Keep Swinging and Look Back in Anger all had scripted short films to accompany them that featured Bowie and others miming the lyrics, pretending to play or just being in scenes. It was like seeing different trailers for the same movie. So, why this album rather than the others? It suckered me better than the others.

Fantastic Voyage begins with a few bongo beats that, if they'd been on a record only one year later, would have been a drum machine. The song is a mix of the Bowie Ballad (Word on a Wing, Sweet Thing) and a few distinct rhythm styles from languid, breezy exotica to a kind of soft '50s rock (like TVC15). As the coconut fronds sway by the beach we're treated to a lyric, in Bowie's romantic croon, that's all ineluctable downer, depression, prolonged youth, cold war missiles, and the need to get it all down. The oddly laidback melancholy is a fitting opener by an artist who always aced the first track of his albums. 

Bowie had recently shaken his fear of flying and had spent a lot of the two years between the last albums and this one, jet setting to any corner he could find that he'd heard of but never been to. And this is a record (in two senses) of his discovery of the world on the map, not just the one made of gigs, hustles, media and tours. He became a tourist and wanted the world to know about it. But this isn't just traveller's tales over port and dessert, it's Bowie's.

And as the pianos and bongos of the ballad fade into silence, we're ready for another. Then, we get punched in the head with a weird percussive figure on drums and the lowest piano keys. It's in 4/4 but feels more like something that a drummer would come up with to show off. Bowie's double tracked vocal tears in without a breath at more words per second than you can understand on the first few listens (the LP came with printed lyrics) and it's all panic and paranoia against a slow moving background where no one cares if you are stranded or not, which heightens the anxiety. The narrator plans or hallucinates becoming part of the mythology of the bushland before a gear change introduces a chorus of hellos and goodbyes in the local dialect. These become a chant that takes over the middle and end of the song and might be either the fleeting nature of travel or getting stuck in local daily life forever. If we were lulled by the ballad, we're now wide awake.

Move On starts in a gallop of drums and chorused guitars as Bowie sings quite plainly about his itchy feet. A looser, more romantic section is backed with gorgeous wordless vocals that sound as exotic as the trimmings of the previous two songs. Bowie in contemporary interview revealed that this feature came about after he mistakenly threaded All the Young Dudes back to front and was struck by the yearning sound of the chorus running backwards. I only recently heard this proven and it's extraordinary. A stirring anthem of running westward with the sun.

Yassassin (Long Live) is reggae through Turkish pop music. The title provides its own translation in the brackets. The song with call and response choruses and a halting verse and bridge speaks of migration, perhaps from Turkiye to German cities as Geistarbeiten but it could equally be just from country to city. The shift is disruptive and there is a need for reference points as a heavily middle-eastern violin part snakes through the rhythm. This song always worked best for me in the North Queensland heat where I really got to know the feel of it.

Side one ends with jaunty anthem to jaunting, Red Sails. A truncation of the old standard Red Sails in the Sunset, this is Son of Move On as the even more pumping band keep Bowie aloft as he tries out different ways of doing the refrain between the pentatonic verse melody. Adrian Belew drops in for a note scattering solo (and then the Fripp-like feedback at the end: never worked out if this was an ebow or not, they were around at the time). So, whether the thunder ocean or Island are yelled out or smoothed to a lulling harmony, the octave leaps of the guitars and bass and Bowie's crowd rousing cries lead us on beyond the horizon with a flourish of sheer joy.

DJ opens side two with a a strident bass and piano being smeared in processed guitar and electric violin. When Bowie's vocal comes in - "I'm home. Lost my job. And incurably ill" - the person that immediately springs to mind is David Byrne whose high strung staccato style had been intriguing anyone listening under the radar at the time. Eno had just produced Fear of Music for Talking Heads (the opening track of which had an Afro Funk feel that Eno would have brought with him here as one of Bowie's chief participants).  The DJ, here, is a club spinner rather than a radio host. Bowie heard of such a one getting fired for allowing a few seconds of silence between records which sounded weird and dystopic. The video for the track is a mix of Bowie strolling the streets of Manhattan and in a studio destroying turntables and audio equipment. Adrian Belew's solo was the result of him being played the song without vocals. It is a thrilling mash of wails, tritone sirens and some creamy melodics. Belew recorded six takes all of which were kept and switched between as though switching channels and hearing different solos on the same song. The bridge is a slow and tense meditation on the perception of time when in crisis and ends with an anguished plea for recognition. He is what he plays.

Look Back in Anger is another gallop with rich instrumentation and Bowie harmonising with himself is his operatic voice. The chorus comes in with a Beatlesque backing vocal ("waiting so long") which he interrupts with an impassioned singing of the title. The video shows him in a stylised bohemian artist loft at one of his own paintings. The more he looks at it and tinkers with the brush the more smudged and daubed with paint his face becomes. The overall feel has a kind of action sequence urgency with a chunky funky guitar solo and some French horn colouring. Another moment of eclecticism in this wandering set, and a very tasty morsel it is.

Boys Keep Swinging is a joke that's still funny. With a Heroes like backing (players switching from their normal instruments) Bowie again takes on his Euro opera boom to bellow out the advantages of being a lad. It has a kind of Cabaret swagger and a similar call and response chorus but one very different in tone from the previous track. It works through the sheer boastfulness, no one could think like this (until you meet one). The video is a forward step and only makes the song funnier. Bowie starts out alone on a small stage, making Jagger moves at the mic. Then it cuts for the choruses to a trio of female backing vocalists (including one that looks like an ancient bluestocking) who are all Bowie in very convincing drag. This is presented straight, as a meta joke. MTV be buggered, Bowie had music video down in the late '60s.

And then there's this. Repetition is the strangest song in any of Bowie's '70s tracklists. Think about that as you read it. Bowie had just given the world two of his most experimental works ever, and all of his albums from the 1970s had had darker, weirder corners, but this one wins. Remember, I'm not saying it's an oddball song (it is) but its place, even in an album this restlessly eclectic, is so ill-fitting. But that's why it works.

First, the subject matter had never been addressed by Bowie and wasn't a favourite topic in rock music: domestic violence. Johnny, working class and feeling trammelled by life, comes home from work, probably tanked, and verbally and then physically assaults his wife. The arrangement is a sparse rock band with a loping bass and siren like figures played on a slide guitar which destabilise the situation, keeping it constantly tense. 

Aside from a few lines sung as Johnny, Bowie keeps his vocal low and quiet, observational as he moves through one of his most genuinely poetic lyrics: "he'll get home around seven, cause the Chevy's real old. And he could have had a Cadillac if the school had taught him right." The lines seem to scoop up the daily antipathy right up to the only line with a vocal harmony, and it's almost murmured and in a low register: "But the space in her eyes shows through."  And then the camera slowly cranes away from the scene as we first hear Johnny's thought, "and he could've married Anne with the blue silk blouse," and then the observer's quiet insistence, "shows through..." That it comes close to breaking out but never does tightens the skin around it, keeping its horror protected. This song has actually been covered a few times, most poignantly by the post punk band The Au Pairs who didn't copy the arrangement but kept the quiet, matter of fact approach to the vocals and the effect is the same, a troubling mix of sadness and spookiness.

Red Money closes the album. It's a repurposing of the track Bowie worked on with Iggy Pop for The Idiot. There's some added instrumentation and effects but it's the self same track with different lyrics and vocal melody. There's more of a funk edge to this go around, carrying on the tradition of earlier funk landscapes like Fame, The Secret Life of Arabia. It's also something of a presage for his '80s career with its funk and pop sensibilities. It begins with a glittery chord progression that calls Fame to mind and then settles in for a funk workout that also looks forward to the album that ushered Talking Heads into their '80s and wider appeal, Remain in Light. Bowie ends by moving forward and standing still all at once.

This is the last Bowie album I love whole. It's one of the few I bought when it was released (though I had cassettes of a few) and this is the one that felt like mine rather than to a previous generation. I think you're meant to put the cut off at the next one, Scary Monsters, blithely ignoring the rest. I tend to think that, as mighty as the best of that one are, they just don't add up the way this one does. I played this next to Elvis Costello, The Sex Pistols, and all the '60s stuff I was increasingly getting into and it fitted perfectly. So did Low and Station to Station. I remember studying for my Grade 12 exams with it (and coffee and a few select brands of cigarette), turning it up or down according to my attention span and need for void-filling when the energy fell below zero. 

And then I moved down to Brisbane to polish my crappy results up to University level and took a few cassettes but no records (the new place didn't have a system) and listened to the radio and watched Sounds, Nightmoves and Countdown. Then, at the end of the year, I returned to Townsville for the Xmas holidays and caught up with people by getting them around. I put this LP on with every visit and got even more out of it by virtue of hearing beneath the conversation (eventually, I would test albums by hearing them while doing housework; they can really get through that way). It has come to mean that time, the second tier listening sessions under voices, and the continual discoveries of the holidays for me. And it's still a good occasional listen, and all the way through every time.

DIAMOND DOGS @ 50

Lot going on, here.

A weird, gluey wolf howl gives way to a synthesised cityscape. The apocalypse has happened and the broken streets are alive with mutants. Bowie's cold voice narrates. A Burroughs-like description of loose animals and panic-stricken peoploids eking what life they can. Any day now, he says, the year of the Diamond Dogs.

This sci-fi horror scene is swept aside by the sound of a crowd at a rock gig and a voice through a PA says: "This ain't rock and roll, this is genocide!" Before we can quite work out what he said (I first thought it was "... this is David Bowie" pronounced like bow bow wow) a stretchy riff raunches up which turns into a laidback Stonesy groove. And here we meet the likes of Halloween Jack who lives in a scraper and takes the sliding rope when the lift's out. It might be the ashes after Armageddon but that's no reason to stop partying. At some point it occurs that you could hear Lou Reed singing this.

Once that settled, something occurred to me for the first time since I started listening to this record that has never been far from me since the '70s: the first of its two self-estranging sides is not so much a tribute as a mossy ruin of Bowie's use of the Velvet Underground influence. It had been there from Hunky Dory but that had been more or less open and detectable. This is like finding someone's fan scrapbook waterlogged in a forest. The stories of the characters are suggested and the Dalek call and response chorus packs a lot of Reed's mannerisms but the music is stadium rock and the tension between the two never lets the song quite rest into its groove. Even as the big multi-tracked guitars of the chorus grind, it never quite gels. This is intentional, though. The world being described sounds like this when it's music, snatches of definition here and there but mostly wobbly, warped phantasms. The song plays out with a clear quote of the fade of Brown Sugar (even Bowie's sax is lifting Bobby Keys's lick).

But when it ends it flows without pause into the long Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing suite. A brooding bed of mellotron, synthesis and distorted guitar rises and floats as Bowie's uncharacteristically deep voiced opening lines speak of sex of opportunity. An aging bad boy roams the streets, gets struck by guilt and trashes his room as Bowie's vocal soars and plummets. A piano appears from the shadow to sound discordantly before leaving abruptly and big flutes out of range coo like air con generators. Moments that approach glory where Bowie breaks into a kind of torchy ecstasy break up and fall.

The next phase, Candidate, is entered without a break. It starts with the line "I'll make you a deal like any other candidate". This candidate is not running for office, he's being cruised. Bowie assumes a singspiel position, talking here, singing there and the world weary ghost of Lou Reed rises again. I'm not making a shallow comparison, here, this song doesn't sound like Reed but Reed is haunting it through a distant mentorship. Lines like "having so much fun" "one makes you wish that you'd never been seen" actually do have a Reed-like manner but they're thrown bones, this is much more of a spooky homage to a spirit, one that feels like it haunts him.

Candidate picks up the rock pace as the dirty decadence runs on and through it there is the suggestion that the fragile dusty old-before-his-time roue has found love, or something very like it. In the final rushing confession at the end of the scene he wants them to go out together (as in jumping into the river holding hands, not partying). Whatever actually happens there the reprise of the Sweet Thing chorus seems to call the exhausted flesh parade to an end and the narrator tries again for an escalating moment of passion but this time it doesn't fail. "It's got claws, it's got me, it's got yoooooooooou." That last word becomes a lofty falsetto note lifted high into the light. Perhaps, he really has found love, in however grimy a setting. But then the mood shifts again as the languidly moving flutes and guitar noise find a beat with a piano bass, thumping to a mass of swells and feedback until the abrupt stop.

At this point, I need to spend some words on a major detail of this record. Bowie played guitar. Not the usual glittering twelve string acoustic of all the albums from Space Oddity on but an electric through an amp getting overdriven to teetering levels. With the Spiders disbanded and Mick Ronson off on a solo project, Bowie went into doing it himself. Characteristically, he prepared with a lot of playing and practice and acquaintance with the kind of sounds he had loved from Ronson, to Hendrix to Townshend and anyone else drifting by. His playing on side one of this record has often been described as amateurish but I find it compelling, atmospheric, and deliciously uncontrolled. The noise and slash performance under the outro of Sweet Thing feels like someone taming a runaway factory machine and rejigging it on the run for another purpose. The whole of side one up to that point has been a showcase of this, part show off but much more exploratory. By the end of this experience Bowie not only could play avant-guitar himself but knew first hand how to teach others to play it for him.

This doesn't just reflect on what we've just heard, it kicks it into the next room. Without a break Sweet Thing gives up for Rebel Rebel, the most famous song on the album and one of the most famous guitar riffs in history. The riff, played on a fuzz tone guitar using near dissonance as it plays an E over a D chord before running down to the B of the E chord, the melody borrowing notes from the scales of each chord just before time. It gives the initial run a bittersweet 9th harmony and the final trio's fall to the next chord a 7th. It never quite feels like that's going on, though as the expanded scale its working with (two adjacent major keys almost at once) as the effect is so arresting. Often missed is how guest Alan Parker is playing the chords beneath, supporting the openness of the harmonic structure.

Parker finished the riff. Bowie played the figure he sings and left a gap before starting again. Parker added the three note fall A-G#-D that perfects the end of the loop and drives it seamlessly into the next iteration and when you hear it you want it to go forever. In 1977 the song was only three years old but if you were fourteen those three years felt like a generation. None of us had heard it before but that guitar sound, the snakey way it curled into your ears and got a room in your brain. Someone id-ed it as Bowie but no one had a title. You just wanted it to go for the rest of the day. A month later I bought the changesonebowie compilation album (which is a corker) and failed to hear the song, track after track. Then I turned it over and hoped Diamond Dogs was it but no. Then, finally, using the kind of seamless link the original album does with Sweet Thing and Rebel, they did it with Diamond Dogs, straight into it and the riff ground up, shiny, juicy, tangy and endless. I got up and danced around the rumpus room.

And that's just the riff. The vocal line also had an ache to it. It's a teen love song with androgyny and liberty and youth. One verse two iterations plenty of choruses and an extended fadeout with vocals improvised around the theme. It's an idea that doesn't need depth or too many new lines, those few do it all and when they all come back in a jumble and then seem to reconstitute into a new declaration it takes the stuttering mod or My Generation into apotheosis: "you're a juvenile success because your face is a mess." Whether Bowie wrote all that out or he just went for it doesn't matter, that's what came out. You're young and turning into anyone you want for as long as you want as long as you're out there and everything's working your way. It might be really happening, it might be the refulgent fantasy of a kid staring at the wall on a Friday night, as long as the thoughts are there like that.

Rebel Rebel doesn't fit in with the rest of the album until you start using your imagination and that's a big part of its strength on this record. We've just been through some adults-only times, in and out of cars and clubs and shadows. When we break back into the teens we see a star among them so completely themselves that none shall define them. It's a flash of purity in the gloom. It's much needed, considering what is to come. Rebel Rebel, which seemed built for a long fade comes to an abrupt halt with a big clunking low piano note. Silence. The world is about to change.

Side two starts with big soul chords on the piano. The gap between this progression and its next iteration is filled with the kind of noisy distorted guitar bolus that Bowie had perfected on Sweet Thing. After that the blue-eyed soul of Rock and Roll With Me rolls out, broad and easy, with a vocal that tells of a love. The love may be the Rebel of the end of side one but there are images of fame and commerce mixed in. After a torchy transition, the chorus lifts us away and aloft from all these mean and earthly thoughts as the title phrase which might as well be about music as sex but is more a general abandon to the love and drugginess of the love. He's out of breath but holding on and with a lunge he goes through an escape hatch to be forever in the entwining realm of the chorus. This and Rebel Rebel are often picked out as anomalies on the record, songs that hark back to the Ziggyverse. But they could, without too much stretching, be the last hurrah for the kind of decadent indulgence before the foggy curtain to follow falls.

We Are The Dead comes next. It's a direct quote from George Orwell and it's time to mention the ill-fated origins of this album. It was 1974 and Bowie was interested in doing a take on 1984, Orwell's influential dystopia whose title served as a kid of editorial curse at perceived government control or a culture encroaching on individual freedoms. This heated up to a furnace in the '80s until 1984 happened and was kind of fun. But in the mid '70s, looking around the blocs and the state of things a persistent fear swelled around notions of the future. Bowie had a large salad of ideas for theatrical musicals, sometimes one on Ziggy, sometimes one based on Burroughs, and then there was the big one, 1984. Orwell's widow nixed the idea of any adaptation of her husbands works while she walked the earth (which she left in 1980). This explains the Michael Radford film of it released in the year itself but it didn't help David B. in 1974.

He had the material of the decadent prequel and then some songs for the Orwell story proper. That's (some stretching, here) effectively what Diamond Dogs is. Big sloppy rock and gloom on the first side and the hard Orwellian world on the second. All of the songs are tighter here, machined to perfect interlocking parts and function without need of too much supervision. After the last gasp of human ardour has ended in a fading distorted spike, we all go down together.

We Are The Dead starts with a Rhodes piano playing the chords through slap back echo, a cold and concrete sound. At first it's a skittish figure, music on tip toes and looking over its shoulder. Then the depressing circular figure of the verse sounds. A long and pained sigh joins up to the next as though in answer to the feisty electric patch of the song before. The vocal is delivered a breath short of weeping and chilled with fear as Winston Smith at first wonders about Julia who just might feel the same as him. This work afternoon fantasy expands but not with a big note like the ones in Sweet Thing. Bowie breaks out but to a whisper as though the thought crime itself must be imagined as inaudible. A series of Burroughsian images of torment and mayhem, hinting also at Jacques Brel, in the kind of moment that Winston feels like yelling obscenities at the top of his lungs. The second verse sees him together with Julia and their doomed affair, hoping against experience that their love will mean something after them. This gives way to another nightmarish tapestry of images before the last words they say to each other before getting hauled off to the Ministry of Love (i.e. torture) "we are the dead" repeat in ever colder reiteration. Finally, the whimper, the verse progression plays out one final time and finishes in a sigh of exhaustion.

An urgent piano figure is joined by Theme from Shaft guitar (thank, Alan Parker) but the sex is absent. It feels like someone is being chased. The vocals are pressing and morph into an epic scale chorus. It sounds like a perfect opening number for a Broadway show about its title, 1984. You can see the frantic dance number under blue-grey lights. "Bewaaaare the savage jaw of nineteen eighty foooooour!" Images of helplessness and paranoia. The song ends with the year repeated with increasing exasperation until nothing is left but an insistent dissonant two note figure to the fade.

Choirs and a distant trumpet herald the arrival of Big Brother. Both on the mellotron, they are played initially for authenticity but soon take on intentionally artificial performance, as though the fakery of them will only serve the package. The package is Big Brother, introduced with a swollen opening speech before tightening to a military stridency. Then it's the chorus about how we want someone to save, to shame us, a brave Apollo, we want Big Brother. Bowie sings the song of the demagogue but one schooled in the eternal self-producing hype of the totalitarian. There is a brief, gentle and doomed moment of protest in falsetto with acoustic guitar but it is swamped like a tidal wave with a return to the chorus because now that's all that matters. 

But even this is subject to its own constriction. The character Syme in the novel speaks with self-accusing vigour about the delight he takes in reducing language as he edits the Newspeak dictionary. Good now is opposed by ungood. Better and best become plus good and double plus good. After the final affirmation "we want you, Big Brother," we fall into a  rock groove (more solid electric playing from Bowie) which becomes a chant simply of "brother" elongated "Broth-er" and hurried by busy encouragement. This goes until it can go no more and finally ends in an echoed truncation to a fade: "brah brah brah brah brah..."

I bought my copy in 1977 at a time when anyone else like me was really just waiting until the Sex Pistols finally came out with their record. It's three year gap between release and my hearing it was enormous in the Bowie universe. We'd had the odd-bod soul of Young Americans and the chilly funk of Station to Station and then the strange landscapes of Low and stranger ones of Heroes. It was these last two that Diamond Dogs bore the closest resemblance. Low did the opposite with the sides and started with short pop numbers and when to the great beyond on side two. Ziggy had started with an impending apocalypse and formed up to a rock star tightness. Diamond Dogs began outside of the book it had started out emulating; Halloween Jack's dissolute waste city formed up for the crisp dictatorship of the second side. If I'm honest, I preferred it to Low but mainly because I didn't think much of the side one songs (Warszawa onward sounded beautiful and cinematic). Side one of Dogs was grown up and darkly alluring. The demagogue side was familiar to anyone young and even ethereally politicised who lived with the spectre of the Bjelke-Petersen government in Queensland. Diamond Dogs felt close to where I lived.

Of all the great run of '70s Bowie albums this is the one I return to with the same zest as I do Station to Station (which holds place as the first one I bought when still new). Bowie's frustrations at his thwarted ambitions produced this industrial strength lemonade, a suite of decadence that went further than when he was playing at it and a big punching critique sung in warning to a people who didn't understand where they were heading. Emerging, a very few years later from a mist of milk, capsicum and cocaine after Station to Station, he had his own moment that would see him cancelled in a second today (you can Google this) but it was a glitch and one that now forms more of a career curio. What he did do all the way back in 1974 was describe in deathless detail how bad it can get when we stop caring how it is. If you're new to it, listen. If you have listened, listen again. It's a lesson you can sing over and again.

THE ROLLING STONES @ 60

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REPLICAS @ 45

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are in my vision!

You are in my vision!

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