THE BEATLES' HELP @ 60

Retrospection tells stories that were not known to the participants at the time. A backward look compels the stories, though. Until The Beatles reached the end of 1965 their albums were received with approval but the arrival of Rubber Soul put them at a level of importance among critics that has never been reversed. That lead up does tell a story though: two LPs of live sets cleansed in the studio with audible peaks in the originals, a fully original set to go with a movie that presents a new integrated sound, a mixed bag that industrial pressure had squeezed out and now this one, their fifth, that went with another movie. It looks like a staggered climb from influences to influence, from the tangible club band to stardom and here, now, in this one, a sustained push at the formulae to breaking point. 

It gives the first wave of records a sense of motivation. It's almost nonsense, though, made up by people like me. The band was building on the success it had established and through sheer application they responded to a continual positive feedback to sharpen their focus. The wonder of it is that it worked. Most bands were happy with the strike rate of something like Beatles for Sale, a handful of bangers and proven covers. There are covers on this one but by now they feel alien.

The originals stun. The title track kicks off with a shout, putting what might have been a middle eight as the introduction, an audible cry for help. The cry gets higher each time until it's pushed into falsetto. A deft, rapid arpeggio brings it down as the song moves forward with a confession in Lennon's tight rasp about being aggressively independent until he in confronted with his need for others. As with the opening, there is a call and response as he trades his strong lead with a gentler backing from George and Paul who anticipate his lines. The counterpoint of it, as though thoughts compelled the outward statements, works because of the texture of the voices as much as the weave of melodies. The chorus lifts to urgency as Harrison's low strings guitar figures step down between Lennon's vocal lines. A third verse strips the backing down to acoustic guitar and lead vocal, picked up halfway through by the rest of the band, leading to the final chorus and falsetto finish. Lennon later said that the song really was a confession of need. There is nothing fanciful about the claim. All of the track's musicality suggests it in under two and a half minutes.

Next up is Paul's The Night Before which begins with the first appearance of electric piano on a Beatles song. The chords rise until MacCartney's soaring vocal reaches to a note that glides down and blends with smooth harmonies in an infectious melodic figure. The middle eight is more of a shuffle but ends with a Paul flex as he screams the high end of, "it makes me wanna cryyyyyyyy". He plays the lead guitar in the break and at the end in this one (as well as two others) and it sounds like its doubled with either the electric piano or another guitar. This one is all flavour and scope. The second Anthology compilation of the '90s included an outtake from these sessions called That Means a Lot. Distinct from this melodically, it carried the larger production sound to Phil Spector density. It was given to PJ Proby who did it brilliantly but I wish it had made it on to side two of Help. Anyway...

Up third is You've Got to Hide Your Love Away and a vision of the future. Lennon sings a song of wounds. The first lines are gentle but for the next, the voice hardens until, after a folky descent, the chorus rises to a shout. Repeat and end with an unusual double flute playing of the verse melody. That acoustic sound, like whispering guitars, bugged me for years until I realised it was a combination of Harrison playing at standard pitch, Lennon playing a 12 string capo-ed, and, if you listen carefully, a ride cymbal played with almost imperceptible lightness. But the elephant here is Bob Dylan. Dylan had met and befriended The Beatles the year before and his growing influence on the entirety of western pop music extended into the Beatle citadel. The previous album's I'm a Loser was a great first take but this one uses influence more cannily, the way they'd gone to write an Everly Brothers song with Love Me Do and ended up sounding like themselves. I'm a Loser sounds like that but Hide Your Love sounds more like a hard absorption. It's going to be there until Donovan teaches them finger picking. There is an urban legend that this one is a veiled tribute to manager Brian Epstein's closeted gayness to which I say, "who knows?". The chorus could easily point to that but it could also be a hooded confession about straying from marital fidelity (hey, Norwegian Wood was just around the corner). It's pleasant to think it's a nod to Brian, I'll admit.

George Harrison had progressed from covers and Lennon and MacCartney numbers given to him to produce his own songs and they were gearing up. I Need You starts with a guitar figure made plaintive through a volume pedal. Against a country canter, George sings a confession of pain and vulnerability in the face of rejection. With the movement through the relative minor and showbiz changes, this one reaches back to an earlier Beatles aesthetic but it's never unwelcome in the sequence.

Another Girl finds Paul again trying for a Spectorish density with a busy blues shuffle and a message of young adulthood spite. But is it? He's saying his ex was fine but this new one is so much better. As this is delivered to a second person (the ex) it rings like a long groovy thumbed nose, not just flexing but cruel. The melody carries on from the more modal, non-diatonic style of The Night Before but sticks to its limits (very like Can't Buy Me Love) until the middle eight which broadens out and surprises with shifts between major and minor. Paul plays lead but it's mostly illformed and noodly. The production is big on reverb and bass boom. A bitchy but enjoyable number.

I used to dislike You're Going to Lose That Girl, mainly for what I took as a reliance on old '50s formulae. But the more I hear it, how deftly it moves between the warnings in the verse where Lennon shows how he can make a vowel sound percussive ("if you don't take her OUT tonight") in a harsh but solidly melodic tone and then singing the word lose in purest falsetto. This makes the transition to the middle eights creamy with a melismatic curl for the ages. The harmonies of the other two in call and response throughout with a complication in the bridge is bliss and the final collision of the falsetto and harmonies just makes you want to hear it again. Rubber Soul really is just down the road.

Ticket to Ride begins with a fanfare-like figure on George's 12 string before the drums roll in like a panzer division with the bass and rhythm guitar hitting the one and an anticipated three in the bar along with the kick drum. Lennon comes in solo for the first two lines before MacCartney brings the magic with a high chest voice descant. The middle eight adopts a shuffle beat which makes the giant twanging verse rhythm all the more lumbering when it returns. Paul plays lead again but with much more tasteful figures that serve the transition between parts. The song ends on a new vocal motif, "my baby don't care". This is the end of side one and all the new Beatle songs played in the movie which were shot like music videos and are probably the best way to watch the movie if seen as a string.

In the U.S. a flip of the LP led to a side of deft but unengaging out of context orchestrations of Beatle songs by George Martin. This was a step up from the American Hard Day's Night LP which featured the same kind of thing but played as session musicians as a fake beat band playing robotic instrumental covers.

The U.K. original album is a different beast, kicking off with Ringo's cover of the Buck Owens' Act Naturally. This fits with the movies and Ringo's self-effacing charm. George provides expert licks on the Gretsch and Paul adopts a Southern twang for his harmonies. If you know the original, this will sound like a pub cover played in lab conditions. Owens has a real nuance to his vocals that added a pathos to the lyric of a guy got lucky in his career but knows it's not because of talent. He also had the efforts of his lead guitarist, Telecaster maestro Don Rich who provided the note perfect harmonies which Paul is emulating. The deep twang solo is done twice here but only needs to happen once in the original so that its mock seriousness stands out and keeps the joke alive. It's a decent enough cover but, like many, if you know the swaggering and good natured original you'll miss so much of it, here.

It's Only Love is one of my favourite Lennon melodies and a song he regarded as an embarrassment. It's chromatic lilt and vocal tone shift for the chorus always win me over. It's a kind of companion to You've Got to Hide Your Love Away but there are reasons why that is on side one and this on side two. Vox amp tremolo is used to great effect on the electric figures and, as it's two electrics playing (one without tremolo) it sounds a little wobbly, like future chorus pedal. 

George's second song on the album is a cheerful country number that opens with some George Martin bar room piano. An electric piano forms what would have been an electric rhythm. The verses and harmonies have a distinctly folky feel. I can imagine The Seekers doing this one. The pair in the lyrics tease each other but always make up. That's about it. George's solo is all Chet Atkins and enters and exits in seconds as the summer holiday middle eight takes over and a verse and chorus take it to the end.

Tell Me What You See is a kind of Latin work out as far as The Beatles ever got. It's perky and sweet with MacCartney taking solo lines from the bright harmony verses. It's almost never mentioned on its own but its amiability and shift in the vocal texture make it a keeper for me. Another significant use of electric piano seal the deal.

I've Just Seen a Face is a perky acoustic folky gallop by Paul. Beginning with a dizzy rising guitar figure, Paul jumps right in with a quick vocal of love at first sight and a chorus that probably had open mic nights at folk clubs deafen with juggernaut whole crowd singalongs.

What might surprise anyone who comes across this album is that Yesterday is buried here on the second side. MacCartney is intensely proud of this song. He delights in relating how he dreamed the melody, scarcely believing he could have composed it. It was the first one of his notorious sale jobs from among his songs that the rest of the band suffered for. It is, apart from George Martin's string arrangement, just Paul on acoustic guitar and vocal. As a lyric it's all longing and regret, astutely describing the lost lover as believing in the past to a near religious extent. Musically, it is a very well turned melody with a pleading bridge and heartfelt vocal. The band did not want to push this gentle ballad and it ended here as the second last song. It went on to be one of the most covered songs in all history so, let 'em stew on that. I marvel that this perfectly modulated vocal was done on the same afternoon as the larynx-annihilating I'm Down.

Finally, like with Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby on the last LP, we end with a rock classic cover. Dizzy Miss Lizzy bangs and screams and wails its way to the end of the album. I suspect it's here as Lennon didn't have that extra song and wanted to follow Yesterday with something irreverent and gutter level. I have no supporting data for that, it's just a whimsical guess. I say it as I hate this song and wish it had been left off the record in favour of That Means a Lot. But that's just me.

Help feels like it's struggling to break free of the early career records with new instrumentation like electric piano, flutes and bowed strings as well as guitar and amp effects, and a musical expansion that allows country and folk in without irony. Paul particularly is gathering strength as a composer and has his eye on using production to add texture and character. George is showing real promise as singer and songwriter. And Ringo's drumming continues to delight with its nuance and subtlety.

For all that, though, remember those hindsight stories, it plays more as a closed chapter on the band that took it to Shea Stadium for the biggest concert in the constellation. If they'd stopped there this album would be as revered as Abbey Road is now. As it is, you have to move the heavy curtain of Rubber Soul aside to get a look at it, against encouragement. As an LP, still before the album format was the currency for rock artists, this one doesn't just have bangers but makes sense from track to track, weakening on the second side. A final bow to influences in the two covers and the stage is set for The Beatles as THE band. I wonder, if fans at the time hearing Rubber Soul winced a little at the insistent sophistication and just wanted the old pop band back.

Listening notes: I usually listen to this as a mono mix from the 2009 releases but this time added a playthrough of the 1965 stereo mix which does lift proceedings enough to prefer it. Unavailable nowehere on earth.

THE BYRDS' MR TAMBOURINE MAN @ 60

It starts so slightly but it sounds like a wave. A jangling riff rings, joined by a bass that slides up the neck, a tambourine shakes and as the drums rattle in the sound is overwhelmed by harmonies so pure and filled with light that they sound like they were singing in Florence in the 16th century. A clue to the source material comes in after the chorus as Jim McGuinn (also playing the Rickenbacker 12 string) enters with his best Dylan voice. A single verse from the many in the original is sung before the chorus re-enters with its brilliance and Bach style symmetry is evoked before the opening riff and bass slide play unto the fade. What had been an aching ode to a wandering life of discovery and daily adventure became as tightly packaged as a tin of beans and as remote from the legumes in the pods. It was like a tv commercial of a Dylan song. Dylan loved it. You could dance to it. It's meteoric chart performance brought him income he didn't have to work for. If Dylan's original was poetic and poignant, this one was all teen marketing, playing back the tasty bits with extra sugar in bite size form. Also, it's completely beautiful as music and sounds so much of its time that the charm and exquisite textures reach across decades to delight anyone who hears it. 

It got me in the mid '70s when I was foraging around for '60s sounds because the radio was almost entirely crud. It was on a compilation record from the middle of that decade. There were all sorts of stuff on the sides but The Byrd doing Mr Tambourine Man soared out past the crackles and surface hiss and filled the room. So, I liked the Byrds.

It was halfway through the following decade when I found my own copy. Like The Kinks, The Byrds back catalogue was slow to make it through to reissues. I snapped this one up as soon as I found a reprint in a shop. I was surprised when I got it home and put it on.

After the title track opens the album we plunge straight into the Gene Clark original Feel a Whole Lot Better with its hyped up 12 string riff lifted from The Searchers' Needles and Pins. It's a good contrast within a limited pallet that makes the album feel like it is going places. A slight change in tempo brings the pace down for the cool of Dylan's Spanish Harlem Incident. Again, the band shift the song into the teen market with a constant jangling guitar and bright harmonies. You Won't have to Cry is a Clark/McGuinn co-write and follows a more Beatlesque path, adding enough distinction to warrant its strident presentation.

It's Here Without You that stops the traffic, though. The minor key riff and tight harmonies move with a sombre purpose that suggest (without remotely sounding like) Gregorian chant. The middle eight breaks out within the arrangement of harmony forward vocals, ending on a major interval before returning to the quiet pain of the verse melody in a shift that still sends shivers. It's a small masterpiece that would inform a strand of melancholic songs that the band would excel in despite the overall leanings (and record company) pushing them toward happier sounds. When Gene Clark left a few albums on, he took songs like this away and the remaining writers in the band had to follow the template.

The Bells of Rhymney is a soaring rendition of a Welsh folk song, revived by Pete Seeger and taken into the celestium of folk rock greatness. This arrangement has the honour of inspiring George Harrison (who had inspired McGuinn to take up the 12 string Rickenbacker) to pinch it with a little modification for one of his songs on Rubber Soul, If I Needed Someone. The final moments are a wordless vocal climb against the 12 string flow, an ascension.

Side two starts with Dylan's All I Really Want to Do and, while it feels more perfunctory than Mr Tambourine Man, it yet keeps the band in touch with what was making them famous. Another sombre Gene Clark number I Knew I'd Want You dispenses with the band's now signature initial riff, plunging straight into the band with vocal harmonies. The rise at the end of the middle eight when David Crosby climbs in falsetto over the unison vocals of McGuinn and Clark is pure shimmering joy.

Jackie De Shannon's Don't Doubt Yourself, Babe follows with a kind of Bo Diddley jangle and perky folk rock that ends up sounding like the Byrds doing a school trip singalong. Chimes of Freedom is another Dylan workout and joins All I Really Want to Do in the band's second-tier Bob covers. We'll Meet Again is the kind of thing the Byrds would try on the next album with their goofy cover of Oh Susannah, an awkward attempt at making an old standard into a groovy beat band rocker. It falls flat on its face. It's not as embarrassing as Oh Susannah but if it ever worked, the effectiveness was locked in a dark room back in 1965.

That said, this is one of the most indicative debut albums of its era, not only presaging the next three LPs in character and tone but reaching beyond the band's abandonment of the cute kings-of-jingle-jangle role as they explored deeper expression. For me, hearing it after a few others, I was surprised to find out how playable it was. The only really icky moment is the final track and that's not a difficult skip. Their sound is one of its decade's central points of gravity, influencing all other rock bands at some point, even the one they took their inspiration from. The title track and Clark number I Knew I'd Want You were backed by the Wrecking Crew with McGuinn on his signature 12 string and the three vocalists at the mic. The rest, however, is all the band that took it on tour.

To listen to this LP is to engage with a rare moment when a group that formed from an idea of what a rock band was coincided with the ideas of an A&R department of a record company. From the bright and joyous electric 12 that lifts all the songs to the cathedral like harmonies (Clark and McGuinn in unison and Crosby descanting) were a source point that not even The Beatles quite found (they repaid the good turn on Rain which, in the best style, didn't copy The Byrds, just showed their influence). All the tiny details gathered in a happy weave that proved stronger than the simple sum of parts and conquered the ears and sensibilities of a generation. Do yourself a favour.

THE GO-BETWEENS' SPRING HILL FAIR @ 40

Bachelor Kisses opens the album. It was a single and was the most mass market that they'd ever sounded. That's not a slight but it's been used as one. If anything, that's the problem with this album rather than anything coming from within the band or the content; the perception of others made what to my ears was a continuation into a big blaring sell out. Recent listening proves me right, I think.

Bachelor Kisses is a mid-'80s commercial sound but its warmth is not bland nor of the sugary pop of the charts of the time. The chorus has a cheekily inserted bar of 2/4 which makes it sound out of time, especially in a chorus. You hear it first and think it's a glitch but there it goes again in the repeat. The gentle arpeggiated chords and smooth synthesiser of the introduction lead us to think of anything from the time but there's a heart to it that remains uncommon. Oddly enough, when I first heard this on radio it wasn't pre-announced. I thought it was New Order. I can imagine the New Order of Low Life covering this without remark to this day. For me, that makes it all the more sumptuous.

Five Words starts stridently out of the gate with big bright guitars. Robert Forster's vocal is declarative and almost at odds with the smoothness of the folky guitar splash of the arrangement. Is it about a birth to death of a Catholic and a renunciation by someone who is leaving the fold? Don't know, it's like finding an old photo with a caption only partially legible on the back. 

By The Old Way Out I notice a slickness in the rhythm section that wasn't there in Send Me a Lullaby and Before Hollywood. I don't mean tight, I mean slick. It sounds played for real but that at some point there was a click track that everyone had to put up with. This is the first track that sounds more manufactured. There is a glam rock football chant to the chorus, especially at the iteration when it's vocals to a tom tom pattern. That said, it doesn't jar at this point, it's just noticeable.

You've Never Lived has more of an older band chord crunch. Forster's vocals are more emphatic than in Five Words. I'm no lyric maestro as far as interpretation goes but the sense of a series of flaws and breaks in communication seem to be flowing here as though something that has ended has done so in confusion. For a song so concerned with a lack of order there is a surprisingly conventional guitar solo, the type of which this band (along with every other post-punk outfit) would have rejected very shortly before.

Part Company begins with a guitar figure that sounds like we've interrupted it half way through something. Then over a signature guitar swell, Forster sings a kind of personal autopsy report for a deceased intimacy, the repetition of the title phrase coming back like a difficult truth knocking at any ideas of smoothing out the rough thoughts. Is there a theremin in there toward the end? If so, nice use.

Slow Slow Music begins with a bass funk riff, joined by a skittish funk guitar figure. McLennan comes in in full voice, yelling across the room, hammering a single note until the ends of the lines. The tension loosens for the chorus. three verses and choruses about chaos at the end of a relationship and the comfort of music.

A leisurely guitar figure starts my favourite track of the set, Draining the Pool for You. A disastrous relationship told in images of decadence or even film noir stories. A double stopped solo and the vocal melody both hark back to my all time GoBs favourite, Stop Before You Say It. Gorgeous.

River of Money begins as a soundtracky band with a distorted tremolo guitar that might remind you of a live track or the bit in a Doors song when ... Ah, McLennan is talking over it, narrating a tale of a relationship escape as told by the one left behind. A gated drum slams, changing only with the more obsessive passage of recalled promises. Even more noir than Draining the Pool. 

Unkind and Unwise begins as a solid guitar groove. McLennan's smooth vocal. As in a few tracks, here, vocals sung by the main vocalist overlap in pre-chorus moments (here, also, panned extremely) as though the singer's thoughts are manifesting. A short and pleasant one.

Man O' Land to Girl O' Sea is a brisker guitar rocker. Forster's exasperated vocal tells of a breakup spinning out of control. A calming few guitar chords in the middle lead to another guitar solo, expressive and minimal, unlike the one previously mentioned. It goes longer than you'd expect but is dramatic rather than indulgent. The final choruses and verses are more fraught as the song heads to a fadeout.

I wonder how much of the meh this album generates among fans is due to the troubles of its production. The producer they'd worked with on Before Hollywood approached this one with a honed pop sensibility. He used click tracks and then gated the played drums until they sound audibly compressed. The times were not good for individualistic expression as they had been in the five or so years of post punk leading up. Guitar bands were increasingly treated by producers as substitute synth pop cuties and things that were better a little loose in any kind of rock like drums became strict and regimented; perfect timing and heavily controlled tones. 

This is not to say that the gated drums or mainstream guitar solos make this a bad album. First, I don't think it is a bad album. It is made up of songs decent to durable and well performed. Second, the playing is good when it warms up and that's in every song. The tales of stress, ill feeling and resentment after the producer gave the band a sense of being bound. I know a lot of the stories about the recording of the White Album and most of them are ugly or sour but when I put it on as I still do regularly, I only hear music that pleases me. 

Some of the songs here feel as oppressive as their subject matter but so do Your Turn My Turn or Stop Before You Say It. If it means they made an album that was meant to turn them into something they were not then this bold sounding LP also brought them closer to the edge of the stage. Am I bothered by the gated snares? Not really. That aspect to rock music which followed a fashion that was always going to feel dated is also audible in Echo and the Bunnymen's last great album (Ocean Rain) as well as R.E.M. unfairly under represented second album Reckoning. Producers wouldn't take that off the agenda until well after Spring Hill Fair came out. It was gone from the Go-Betweens by the next album. It's more of a time capsule than anything now and, at its worst, represents a moment when the band tried on an aesthetic costume that didn't quite fit. They still had the songs and would have many more.

REM'S RECKONING @ 40

This was the first REM vinyl I owned. I'd had Murmur on home taped cassette but didn't even know the song titles. I bought a second hand copy from Skinny's in Brisbane (Queens Arcade?) in early 1985, after a Rockarena special on the band. I put it on as soon as I got home. I very soon learned that, like Murmur, you didn't pore over the lyrics because, when you could actually understand the words, they were so abstract you let them glide by, hoping at some point to get them. Mainly it was the jingling '60s country rock that appealed. Guitars set to hot clean and a growling vocalist whose melodism had instant appeal.

I'll pick out some highlights for this but prefer to leave an impression that the album is a whole experience that offers listening pleasure without great commitment. The record felt like a lingering Brisbane summer and I even think I mixed up a lime cordial to go with it. The wash of plinky Rickenbacker guitar riffing, solid drums and bass that did a little more than it needed to. That's all it had to do.

The second track Seven Chinese Brothers was the one that caught me. A bright upward moving riff with a breezy vocal give way to a chorus that feels much bigger than the rest of the song. So. Central Rain brings the Rickenbacker 12 string electric with a minor key riff. The movement is country rock with a chorus of "sorry" repeated. This was the only clip on Rockarena that had the band playing. Later it emerged that they didn't like mimed videos and this one had live vocals.

Pretty Persuasion is more 12 string jangle, a huge gated drum and fluid tag team vocals of words that defy interpretation but that is an essential of the band's mystique and one they gave up on finding wide success. The song works as an overall sound workout and seems happy to fill your ears with joyous sound. Time After Time introduces different textures like autoharp and takes a more dramatically paced motion.

Side two is almost all sound over meaning but something happens in the pause for the song Camera where Stipe is singing quite clearly over a bass led backing. The chorus lifts with a chorused guitar and a mournful declaration: "Alone in a crowd, a bartered lantern borrowed. If I'm to be your camera, who will be your face?" The arrangement keeps to a live sparseness until the final chorus when Stipe raises the melody on the repeat, as though his grief is breaking free of the duties of a singer and into the real of eulogy. He sounds like he's resisting tears. As it happens, the lyric remembers Stipe's friend Carol Levy, a photographer who died young and violently in a car accident. I didn't need to know that, the genuineness of the emotion is too plain to dismiss. A work of great beauty that is like, if anything, a continuation of the gem of Murmur, Perfect Circle, a lament for lost childhood.

This should have been the album closer but we get two fine chiming bright songs I often used to skip because I didn't want the spell of Camera to be spoiled.

I recall this album strongly as being part of the soundtrack to quitting Brisbane, Queensland, my childhood, and the beginning of my young adulthood. Melbourne felt far more grown up and offered its own challenges. Thankfully, I didn't go politically loopy as I had the last time I moved to a new city without knowing anyone. I did wade through some undiagnosed depression for a few years but the new town brought new adventures and culture. Through that, I would happily return to the sense of happy discovery in second hand record shops and put this LP on, especially when it got warm and sunny. And then, in a strange short-term nostalgia, I would feel pleasantly reset and get on with whatever waited in the next few minutes.

Listening notes: I don't play vinyl anymore so my return listen for this one was done with the splendid hi-res download from HD-Tracks. It's clean, clear and doesn't point to itself as a digitisation (i.e. loudness wars)

MY 1984

Photo by Ian Wadley of 7 Bongalonga Close Westfarce SW666

The New Year's Eve bashes were dominated by dystopian themed parties. I went to one but it just made me want to get back into the band and more music. I signed on the dole and saved a little, living free at the family home before heading down on one of the last Sunlander trips I'd make. The train got into Roma St in the morning and I got a cab home. Stephen was in high spirits. If '83 had begun with the nightmare family absent, '84 started with them completely evacuated. They really were no more. Day one, we both put the work in, scrubbing the grime and memories from the house. I even put the Halleluiah chorus on as we went through the living room.

I didn't give myself any time to miss Uni. There was Greg to call about the new songs I'd finished up north and demoes to organise. Greg had moved out to the Northside, quite close by. It would be easier than before to get some demos worked out. We started practicing at his place. Most of the old set was dropped and my medieval influenced stuff was moving in, along with more Arabic flavours. Lots of promise.

Stephen's friends from wild days in Townsville moved down and in and for about five months it was pretty fine with an uptick in coffee quality, communal meals and long and winding conversations. I caught up with a lot of the reading I wanted to do now that Uni no longer ruled that aspect. I haunted the CBD bookshops on dole day and always came home with something. Same with music, I raided the Record Market in Queen St and built up a revival of my first love, classical and prior. Finally, I started writing fiction. The idea was to write my way into being a film director. Well, my course hadn't been a practical one in either sense. Everything felt good.

Greg and I demoed a lot of new songs one weekend on 4-track with Margot and Liz participating, making them the only recordings of the whole 1983 line up ever done. Later, I can't recall when but it was over a couple of colder nights, we went to Basement and did about eight of them. And then the band suffered a soft collapse with everyone drifting away and leaving me with another post band dearth like the one in 1982. Well, I still had the writing and that's what I concentrated on for the rest of the year. This is around the same time as the departure of the main couple in the house, a troubling visit by an old school friend. After that, Stephen's prank of removing the valves of the ancient tv proved successful and it never worked again. The mood with the remaining householders slowdived.

I stopped going to the kind of gigs I had gone to but the local scene was on the turn, anyway with a bland professionalism infiltrating the venues and dance clubs sprouting up. Punk had become thrash and lost my interest. What had been anti-rock fell into a kind of boofy bossa nova as well meaning bores like The Style Council began to exert an influence. 

Ray Parker's Ghostbusters was a movie theme, audio merch that started early and lifted the rhythm and riff from M's Pop Muzik from five years before but it worked like a charm as did the catchy shriek of Cindy Lauper's Girls Just Want to Have Fun as Stevie Wonder lulled us to sleep with the long distance lullaby I Just Called to Say I Love You which was only marginally more exciting that the duet Islands in the Stream from Kenny Rogers  and Dolly Parton from which we might have woken with Pat Benatar's Love is a Battlefield as Lionel Richie set off red flags of all nations with his tender and queasy Hello and INXS reminded us that they had started releasing the same song under different titles until the end of the band with their Original Sin and Frankie Goes to Hollywood followed suit with their Two Tribes thumper and Nena pretended she was Debbie Harry with a song about Luftballons and Prince's When Doves Cry sounded like everything else he brought out as Tina Turner asked what Love had to Do With It and Wham tried going all Motown with Wake Me Up Before You Go Go before the real singer left and bade us listen to a Careless Whisper and Kenny Loggins felt all Footloose which was another movie tie in to let us know that the culture was made of more bubbles than icecream and if we wanted to wait for the next development in post-punk we were only having ourselves on as it had been swallowed whole by the mainstream and sold for scrap in Heinz commercials. The transitions to a return of rock bands were beginning even on stations like 4ZZZ as there seemed to be no more need for dub exploration. We were growing into careers after uni, or acted like we were, and the parties became more theme and catering, two things that the best of the past five years had been decidedly un. My favourite single of the year was Echo and the Bunnymen's The Killing Moon. That really means it was the only single I liked that year. The Laughing Clown's magnificent Eternally Yours was hard to count as it had kind of come out at the end of the previous year. Then again, it's hard to remember the music of a year when your favourite radio station seemed to buy in the main blob and my brother's prank of sabotaging the tv left us without Countdown for months. Sure, first world problems but the horrifying smother of the mainstream kept spreading until even the funk was wearing a white T-shirt and the punk was some bands started calling themselves (which was a joke when punk lived).

I asked around for people who might be interested in joining the Gatekeepers but what point when you don't have a phone and aren't even going to gigs? I had one extended chat with a potential keyboard player who seemed so uninterested that to this day I have no idea why she turned up at all. I lent her some Ravi Shankar records and she returned one but replaced the other with a pan pipes album. That's funny now but at the time I wanted to slowly poison her.

I wrote short stories. A lot of them. I didn't send any away as I knew myself better than that and concentrated on finishing a book of linked tales like James Joyce's Dubliners. It passed the time but gave me a project. I missed Uni but knew that doing honours or a masters would just be putting things off longer for little. I read a lot and watched a lot of movies in the overnight marathons that the commercial stations used to put on. I learned to love the Marx Brothers and Jacques Tati, the stories of Franz Kafka, Camus' The Outsider, and a stack more. Getting back into classical and earlier music was a pleasure. Whenever I looked up from whatever writing I was doing I seemed to be getting absorbed into the great nothing of the culture. The Michael Radford film of 1984 felt like home.

I went to Townsville for my final family Christmas but that bothered me less than what I would be returning to. I had to do something. It took a while but I did. Anyway, that's for next year.

This is the view from my room in the house at Bangalla St
Auchenflower, the only place I lived in Brisbane. I don't
remember taking the photo and can't recall how I came to 
have a copy. It would be from the first five years of the '80s.

SKYHOOKS' LIVING IN THE SEVENTIES @ 50

This was one of the first rock albums I owned. I got it about one and a half years after its release. It was a Christmas present from my sister Marina. I was thirteen and in duty bound, played it on a loop for days afterwards. We had a stereo with a few headphone jacks, so it could've been worse. I already knew the title track and loved its satirical cheek. The hit single Horror Movie was also a good catchup and felt equally smart, allowing anyone who liked it the claim of urban sophisticate. I thought, for a bit, that all rock music aspired to this kind of wit.

Let's backtrack. I was a classical music fan. If I stretched the boundaries of that it was to reach backwards into the Renaissance and before, not forward into rock music. Then I went to high school, turned thirteen and had to sign up for adolescence. A crash course with the local top 40 station revealed enough to go on, and when I graduated to Countdown on the weekends it was easier to identify taxonomy and call characteristics. I ended up liking quite a lot of it and armed with the zeal of the convert, pursued in earnest.

Skyhooks won me because all that wit was offered with music that had the same kind of smarts. The arrangements easily qualified, with their intricacy, as counterpoint. It wasn't Bach but it worked. On Countdown (already into their second year of chart dominance) they were weird. Drag and makeup and glitter but the music was a mix of tough and complicated, like someone who had started out classical but set themselves in rock music to join in. So, familiar.

Skyhooks' publicly deadly foes were the poppier Sherbet who were unabashed radio fodder. I liked some of their stuff but none of it quite broke through to me the same way that the Hooks' spikiness always did. Soon, I had removed the colour poster of them in the TV Times (thanks, Nanna!) and folded it back into the album sleeve. Hooked.

The album starts with the title track. A bold upward slide ends with a surf rock rhythm and Shirley Strachan's strong scream: "I feel a little crazy. I feel a bit strange. Like I'm in a payphone without any change..." The forward force takes breaks with what I would find out were things like synths and wah pedals. Every note is audible but nothing has that overly clean session musician nakedness. It sounds composed and arranged but also live tested.

Whatever Happened to the Revolution begins as a Doorsy blues but then the opening joke: Whatever happened to the revolution? We all got stoned and drifted away..." I took this to my limited impressions of the Gough Whitlam dismissal and even vaguer ones of the anti-Vietnam War protests.

At thirteen, in the deep north, I thought Balwyn in Balwyn Calling was a girl's name, not an outer suburb that suggested the inner city cool was threatened by a literal callback from yobville. I had no idea at all of any of this. To be fair, not knowing the Melbourne geography, my eldest brother didn't know either. So, ha!

Horror Movie starts with a synthesised creepy intro that moves into a confident funk. The punchline is that all the mayhem and bloodshed of the verses are describing the nightly TV news. Agreeing with this with a sagacity borrowed from older siblings gave me an air of grown up cynicism, at least in the mirror as I played along with the tennis raquet guitar.

You Just Like Me Cause I'm Good in Bed is a rocker that does what it says in the title with a side order of the pickup scene of the place and time.

Carlton (Lygon St Limbo) is a bright rock song about the inner city neighbourhood that I knew about from Homicide and Division 4. An elongated chorus warns to check how real the dealers are. An abrupt change repeats the Horror Movie funk riff as Shirley leads the rest in something more like an urban trible chant. The down and dirty suggestion of the lifestyle gave me daydreams but much later, after I'd moved to Melbourne and drank lattes at the University Cafe and pots of Carlton on Lygon St at the University Hotel (Uni of Melbourne is in the adjoining Parkville) this was not only on the jukebox but you didn't stay there for more than two pots without hearing it. I'd look out the window and imagine what it looked like a decade earlier. Change the flares for drainpipes and the hippy hair for shorn back and sides. No, it didn't quite work but it was fun finally being there and hearing the song in situ.

Toorak Cowboy is of the tradition of The Kinks' Dedicated Follower of Fashion and other digs at youthful affluence and small L liberalism. It's even done in the same country pickin' style. this is localised to highlight the cringey sophistication of the rich playboy buying everything he claims to be. The namechecks of south of Yarra neighbourhoods would have added a sting to the lyrics. Toorak was another place name I knew as the opulent big money village of Melbourne. Still is.

Smut is guitarist Red Symonds' turn at the mic and the only song on the album not by bassist Greg Macainsh. It's a bouncy narration of a purposed visit to a porn cinema. A minor key chorus shares lines between Red and Shirley. Then it's gleefully back to the mechanics of concealed masturbation in the dark. Shirley's middle eight, "better get a grip on yourself, you better pull yourself together" drips with contemporary slang. The harmonised oohlalaas sing us out as the lead guitar goes very sweet. This fits perfectly in the '70s context where it felt daring. Weirdly, with porn mainstreamed by the internet and its consumption de rigeur, this one probably comes across as quaint.

Hey What's the Matter is a rocky taunt at faux malcontents. You can't have your dope and smoke it, too. Crikey, was I living or what? I was and in the '70s.

Motorcycle Bitch is the female equivalent of Toorak Cowboy except there's more commitment to the object's lifestyle.

So, it's pretty much all bangers and even the cartoony cover art isn't rendered embarrassingly cute out of its context, being so frankly done. Ross Wilson is an unsung hero of the album, keeping everything cleanly lined but energetic as producer. His own experience as provocateur in front of Daddy Cool (Skyhooks creative ancestors) primed him for the role on this and the next few platters.

This was the only Skyhooks LP I owned. I liked seeing them on Countdown and always paid attention but was never quite reached after that. Maybe I got sick of this one album and didn't see much of a development. Maybe, the year to come with its discovery of the wonders of Queen and catching up with David Bowie's career through the cassette underground and the endlessly rewarding archaeology of the sixties beyond The Beatles. It was something. I honoured them by listening. 

Skyhooks didn't survive the changes to come with strength. Red Symonds left for a career as a TV curmudgeon. The album after him had an American producer and sounded a lot more guitar heavy (Women in Uniform was good musically, though). When Shirley left and they opted for a distinctly different vocalist, they released a song about Queensland as a police state which appealed until the lines about the girls being sweet and juicy and underage ruined everything. And they thought they were being so punk. It didn't fly even back then. The Angels, oldie mouldy cover band who cut their hair and reinvented themselves as near-punks, really did cut it with Take a Long Line as far as standing up to the bad years of Brisbane. No smirking jokes needed. Times change quickly.

So, was it the commentary or the fun of the songs that sold them? Hard to know and it's strange that Macainsh over a very few years failed so self-defeatingly to read the room. An attempted revival in the '80s  gave them a kind of novelty single that I can't say I've all the way through once. It wasn't the jokes or the rocking with Skyhooks, it was the times. In the mid '70s they felt fresh and taunting but by decade's end that suddenly felt try-hard. Punk did a lot of damage before it turned the gun on itself and bands like Skyhooks were clearly collateral casualties. Then again, the sheer invention and commitment of this debut blaster insists on your attention and, even with the loudest of its creaking jokes, works a treat.

BLONDIE'S EAT TO THE BEAT @ 45

Two bars of count-in a snare roll and Dreaming explodes with a collision of '60s girl group kitsch and late '70s archness. Debbie Harry enters in high style with a full throated melodic shout about a chance meeting and the wonder of living as though dreaming. The middle eight gears up the pace enough for her "whoo!" in between lines. Three minutes of sheer pop bliss with just enough poignancy to make it last for decades and beyond. One of my favourite songs of its era.

The Hardest Part is a revisit of the kind of attempted funk there in the first album onwards but this time polished to a bubblegum naffness. Harry's strident vocal adds more pressure but its neither a tough rocker nor a campy disco workout. It's almost as though they were listening with the next track. Union City Blue is a retread of Dreaming but with less energy.

Shayla adds a gleam to a magical realist story of an ordinary life transported by imagination. While it might have flubbed down into the previous track's routine, there is just enough sparkle to save it between the whimsy of the lyric, the loping low string guitar and easy pace. Eat to the Beat sounds like a pastiche of British punk with mixed messages about masturbation and snacking.

Accidents Never Happen is like something from the band's best Plastic Letters, with an intriguing minor key cool and a smoky vocal. The synthesisers and machine perfect rim shots complete the image of a band who can be witty, compelling and rock out all at once. Die Young Stay Pretty is in joke reggae. Slow Motion features a vocal bathed in reverb which is at odds with the rest of the album in a song that doesn't quite know where it's meant to be.

Atomic is where it shifts. It's an electro-disco workout in celebration of teen lust that doesn't let up. This is the Blondie of X-Offender and Heart of Glass as well as Picture This, with its face pressed hard against the port hole to the '80s. It is pop perfection and points to one of their purest pop triumphs, the following year's Call Me.

Sound-A-Sleep revisits Fade Away and Radiate from Parallel Lines and forms a pleasant lullaby with a few slightly spiky images thrown in. I could listen to it anytime. Victor is the kind of glam stomper that Adam and the Ants and ten Pole Tudor were about to own. It's fun but I wouldn't make a bee line to it. Living in the Real World is another punk pastiche but sounds like the kind of song that American film makers of the following decade would drop into a teen romance to give it a hip, young punky ambience. End.

Eat to the Beat, even with its highlights, is a sheer drop into the kind of pop flirtation that didn't just help the bank balance but removed the band from the roll call. No one at this time except the most hardened and industrial reviled the pure pop heights that Blondie could soar to but when it started sounding like high-life cabaret instead of compelled fun. That said, they knew what they were doing.

After the success of Parallel Lines they stuck with producer Mike Chapman who took them further into the kind of tough edged pop he'd mastered with Nicki Chinn in the '70s with the likes of The Sweet and Suzi Quattro. Parallel Lines runs out of fuel on its second side like most Blondie albums but the parade of bangers on the first side and the mega hit Heart of Glass wiping the table of side two makes things feel balanced. Eat to the Beat is better balanced but it's also blander. The highlights are rule-proving exceptions.

Blondie produced and released a video album of every track, embracing the future while its choice of form was still uncertain. Nevertheless, it was forward looking and showed the band's determination to break through and stay on top. Well, better a blander Blondie than a Cryogenic Eagles, eh? That was never the choice, though. As U.S. pop culture in the early '80s consumed the riskier post punk from the U.K. it had been defused at customs and was open for copying by people who wouldn't have thought of it in the first place. The rest was the maintenance of position by those who were already there and anyone who sounded enough like them. Billy Joel released his big Noo Wave album the following year and it probably enjoys a warm nostalgia among its fans. I hate it unreservedly. It wasn't Blondie who made Billy Joel do that terrible thing, it was more his anxiety that they might have been the future, them, teh Ramones and all that Talking Heads weirdo stuff.

I recall it the way I recall most Blondie albums, as a series of singles on Countdown. They had power and rang out over the crowds at high school parties I went to. It was fun and sounded like it. The University parties I also went to never put this on the turntable. Those parties were a mix of late boomer picks from punk and environs, less fun (sometimes outright embarrassing) but held more interesting conversations and more songs about buildings and food.

As if we needed it, Eat to the Beat reminded us that Blondie was an American band and on a path to establishment like almost all of the others. There's no sin in that but it comes at a cost. Eat to the Beat is a record by a band unprepared for that.