KINKS @ 60

A brief tuggle of guitars and drums and the band bashes into Beautiful Delilah. The guitars are hot but clean. It's the vocal that sounds overloaded, a constant rasping growl that could be a young buck's inner monologue or that of some aging lech looking where he shouldn't. This unmelodic assault stretches time for its mere two minutes and wraps around your ears like fine grain sandpaper. That's what most of this album is going to be. It is the sound of a sustained wince.

Not only does this band that has originals on offer, start with a cover of a Chuck Berry song but it's not even frontman Ray Davies singing but his brother Dave. You can tell when, for all his torn tonsil rawness, his "r" that sounds like a "w" plonks him right back down to London and not Tennessee. It really screams ersatz. When the originals turn up, they are just like that with the name Davies on the by line. It sounds like the grubbing square-spectacled record execs of the U.K. scooped up anyone under twenty-five who looked good in a suit and could at least hold an electric guitar, kicked them into a studio and gave them an hour to make a record. 

That, I emphasise, is how it sounds. Stand back, make sure you're not hungover (as this music will punish you in that state), think a little more historically, and you might well hear something you didn't at first, the beginnings of greatness, looking here more like a larval stage of a buzzing insect than a rock band but forming, all the same, right in front of you.

Yes, most of these two sides are rusty, clanking covers and soundalikes. Yes, Shel Talmy had a lot to learn about record production. Yes, this is not a patch on what was to come. No, this was not the last anyone would hear of The Kinks and for good reasons.

I'm going to be selective about the tracks I'll describe on this one as most of them are made of the same adjectives and I don't want to put either of us through that. However, I'd like you to consider what people who bought long playing records back in the '60s expected of them and how they made their way into daily lives.

The music discs that mattered the most in the early '60s were singles, seven inch vinyl platters with one song per side that got played on the radio. These were where bands put anything they called art, the big statements that failed or succeeded which meant the band did either. The Kinks had already flopped with a (with hindsight) horrible version of Long Tall Sally and an under appreciated original called You Still Want Me. The reason this album was made on the Pye label's shilling was the breakthrough of the third single, which we'll get to.

What that meant was that if the singles proved the band to be viable in the market, they go to do an album. What most of them did was a version of their live set. And that is where you get to why this record is so rasping and ugly: this is what The Kinks sounded like live. If you bought it, you bought it for a sound that could get a party dancing to the slamming beats and cut-through vocals of R&B standards. If the originals didn't stop anyone dancing, that was more of a proof of concept than anything. Repeat.

Follow the various threads through to 1965 to find out how albums became something more than this by the mid '60s and you'll see how the LP became an attempted art form. Before then, it was a long ad for live shows or live shows you were too young for.

Also, none of these emulations are slavish recreations of originals. The later '60s were plagued with blues purists whose museumish covers attempted authenticity only to sound more irritatingly British. In the early '60s these bands found their own feet by doing the songs the way they worked at the pubs. 

Then you get to the end of side one and the single that made the difference. If Long tall Sally was weirdly reserved (compare it to the Beatles' screamfest) and You Still Want Me second rate Beatles, You Really Got Me was an explosion.

It starts with a snarling two chord riff, mean as mustard and unstoppable. The emphasis changes as soon as the band kicks in but it's still going. Ray's vocal comes in slyly but changes into earnest with the first rising chord change. A chorus of humming voices starts up and the momentum gathers, hitting the ceiling repeatedly when it leaps up a fourth for the chorus, a raucous shouting of the title three pounding times before a brief relief with a chord one tone down before everything starts again. The next time that happens Dave Davies' solo scratches its way in, scurrying around the room and hissing dissonantly. Back for the verse with a distant piano and the chorus finished with four bamming barre chords. End of side one.

Amp distortion had only ever been accidental on British recordings until that moment when Dave put a little amp through a bigger amp so the stressed output valves of the first one blare out to the mics in front of the second. That's a fuzz pedal by longer means. You can find overdrive on blues records and select  rockabilly sides but even The Beatles only seemed to get to its outer edge (listen to Misery on Please Please Me), remaining hot clean rather than blasting. Dave Davies gets it monstrous, making it huge when matched by the bass. Even now, after decades of evermore refined guitar overdrive, this scratchy early step still thrills. When I went to see Ray Davies and band (not The Kinks) play the Palais down here in Melbourne there were very young ushers dancing to this in the aisles, getting up and into the song's celebration of everything good about being young and ready.

More of the covers and clones populate the second side so the party can just keep going. That is until the penultimate track comes up and we can with hindsight, understand one of Ray Davies' strains as a songsmith at its beginning. Stop Your Sobbing. Ray starts before the band. "it is time for you to stop all of your sobbing". When they come in on the word sobbing it becomes a kind of beatgroup ballad led by Ray's melancholy plea. A second part of the verse calls the others in before Ray repeats the title with a non verbal extension on the last syllable. It feels like whatever began with You Really Got Me has ended crushingly and his narrator is fronting up with a kind of tough aloofness but knows it's a see through mask. The change for the middle eight with its admission that he really wants to hold her and conquer her sadness and would if it weren't too late. The music of this section is, however small its scale, momentus, showing what drama can come from a slight rhythm change and plainer chords. So it's on to the fade and the next one who really gets him. Repeat. The sense of this inevitability is the other side of swinging London, the one that happens in all those kitchen sink epics of the East End and Ray knows it.

From this song came the serious pausing for thought audible in See My Friends, Waterloo Sunset, Days, Shangri-La and so many many more. The page representing The Kinks in the Nik Cohn and Guy Peellaert picture book Rock Dreams, after the louche fantasies of The Beatles, Elvis and the Stones, is a back street of London at night. Ray stands beside a woman with a pram, they are both looking at the viewer. Stop your sobbing, there's more.

The album plays out with what was the last song favourite of every R&B combo in the greater city of London. Got Love if You Want it was the cue for a rave up jam and experiments with dynamics. That's what happens here. What's up next? Oh, there's this new one from The Yardbirds!

Think of these two pinnacles on this LP. Let them stay visible over the duty-bound live set chestnuts that make the mood, remember that, equipment limitations aside (Abbey Road this wasn't) these two sides of songs were pretty much exactly what The Kinks wanted out of their first LP, something you could dance to and keep dancing to. Most bands, if they got as far as this, put it out, split up and lived on memories. If you revisit this you will start noticing the vocal arrangements, use of piano, growing awareness of why songs work, and get a sense that Ray Davies knew the music his friends could make and took it there.

BEATLES FOR SALE @ 60

Ok, so you're in the biggest band in the known Milky Way and you began the year getting bigger by cracking America, getting a future-proof movie done and the first all original LP. Time for a break. Sorry, gotta keep it up because tomorrow all that news will be wrapping fish and chips. Right, so in the middle of interminable world tours, loss of sleep, finding out if you can actually have too much sex, playing the same set day after day to crowds who scream too loudly to hear a note and your record company wants another worldwide hit single and an album. Easy. Just cancel some of the dates and make some room on the timeline for songcraft and more learning studio magic.

Sorry, the tours are top priority. Ok, we'll tour. Sorry, the records are top priority. So, they write in hotel rooms and record when they get back to the U.K. and at some point there's enough for an LP. The Australian release of this record was reissued in 1977 along with all the pre-Pepper albums and the cover art was a repeat of the local original: a photo of each member at a concert, playing their instruments against a canary yellow background. They look like they're having a blast. The original UK Parlophone release, however, is more like reality. Against a cold season woodland backdrop, the four lads are rugged up against the chill and they look like they haven't slept in years. Even Paul looks ordinary. On the back, it's the same but from a high angle. There's a gatefold with the characteristically daggy blurb and some touring photos, one live and one posed. All of it says one thing: we're famous but we're tired.

The thing is, that's not what you hear. Lennon's voice starts No Reply and it's in full definition. There's a rasp but it's style rather than exhaustion. "This happened once before..." On the last syllable the band come in with John's acoustic strumming out the front. The narrator knows that his object is home and that when he calls, her flatmates lie about her being out. He's seen her. The verses are descending melodies which vary from angry to weary but end with solid harmony flashes of passion before calming to an adaptation of the opening tune. The middle eight carries on the tradition taken very high on Hard Day's Night in that they are melodic and harmonic showcases that could only be at that part of the song. In this one ("If I were him...") the Lennon McCartney interplay is stunning. It only happens once and feels more dramatic for that. The son ends on the anguished repeat of the title in harmony blasts. We could be unkind and call this an ode to stalking but, more genuinely, it's a perfect understanding of the sense of powerlessness felt by the rejected one and the fade of his futility is touching.

I'm a Loser begins with those words sung in bright harmony through three different intervals before the line, " and I'm not what I appear to be," leads into the Dylanesque masochism of the song. The lines tying it to losing a love to someone more adept at it seem there to seal the Beatles deal on it but the body of the number is self accusation and pain. The melody is sweet but Lennon's vocal is raw. Paul's high harmony soften the piece a little but it's mind is made up. Harrison is appealing in this one with a range of country licks bending out of his big clean Gretsch. 

Baby's in Black changes the time signature to a waltz. A twanging figure from George and they're straight into the harmonies. An acoustic rustle underneath and electric bends above a fairly busy tom tom-led performance from Ringo. The melody is quite playful and sweet for a song about a woman who is either in mourning or dressing like a black card and forbidding communication. The middle eight of this song is so delicious that it has to come back after the solo where Paul's soaring descant drives the lyrics: "Oh how long will it take, till she sees the mistake..." The final verse features an opening of the bed track with deft work on ride cymbals as Harrison plays the lowest notes he can and putting the Bigsby whammy bar to great effect. Short and utterly delectable.

And that's it, almost. The rest is covers done with varying skill and effect as well as some fine originals that feel dropped in at random. Rock and Roll Music is an energetic Chuck Berry number that's fine but outstays its welcome. Mr. Moonlight starts with a magnificent introductory scream from Lennon before it descends into the kind of guff that home organ salesmen would trot out to nail the sale. Kansas City is big and perky and feels like McCartney's replacement for the bellowing scream of Long Tall Sally only in another song. Buddy Holly's Words of Love does benefit from some colling harmonies. Ringo gets to go all Carl Perkins with Honey Don't which George garnishes with some plunky rockabilly twangs. He gets the last word with a second Perkins standard featuring some vocal delay that was dated even for then but some fine chiming guitar licks.

This is all Hamburg and Cavern fare. Six out of fourteen songs on a fourth album that followed one of only originals. It smacks of desperation. While the rest of the originals are not up to the standard of that mighty opening hat trick, they're still pretty good. I'll Follow the Sun is a gentle whimsical Paul. Eight Days a Week is big Beatles jangle and harmony (another fine middle eight). Every Little Thing has real charm (love the tympanum in the chorus) but it runs out quickly. I Don't Want to Spoil the Party is a good stab at a kind of commercial Nashville toe tapper with another story of being on the outer (did ever such creatively and socially rich kids cry so poor?) What You're Doing is ok but feels last minute and undercooked. Eight originals but only three break through. These sessions were when the band also recorded the single I Feel Fine with its opening feedback and heavily doctored blues riff (well beyond what some people report as plagiarism), latin drumming, and business-meaning vocals. But they didn't like putting singles on albums. Why? The U.S, record company Capitol not only doubled up on the singles, they shortened the running time of each record so they could release more with the same price tag. I like the U.K. better, too, but if any Beatles album could have done with the concurrent singles on the LP it's this one.

Then again, neither I Feel Fine nor the b-side She's a Woman make a good fit on Beatles for Sale, even if you scrap Mr. Moonlight and, maybe, Everybody's Trying to be my Baby, it would sound as force-meat as the American albums (Meet the Beatles is a solid exception to this, just to say). What we got was almost the end of the early stage show. The next album, Help, added two more but these were well part of the stadium Beatles set, however goofy they sounded beside the other songs on that album.

Beatles for Sale does one thing well, though, it advances the scope of the bands recorded sound. There is a lot more space around the core of each of these songs. They are also more dynamic in the arrangements, allowing for a relief from the big shouty choruses and bluster so that John's lines about trying to telephone in No Reply after the huge middle eight sound like he's exhausted. This aids the song immeasurably: if it had just been played at the same intensity all through and Lennon had sung the lines like that it would have sounded like a bad take. As it is, it draws us in to the centre of the character's crushing sadness ... in a light and boppy Beatles song.

I used to skip when really listening to this one when I first got it. The covers felt old and stodgy and seemed to rub themselves off against the frailer of the originals. The sleeve art with its loud yellow field and old style photos of the band also felt a little senior. Where A Hard Day's Night pounds confidence and creativity, jingling with twelve strings and sophisticated vocal harmony, Beatles for Sale feels like a step over a cliff edge. The best songs here point to the next step which, at the end of the following year would sound as joyous as Rubber Soul and leave the old band back in the beer-stinking bar where the covers should have stayed. Could a couple of strong EPs been put out instead? Not when the album cost more per unit and the monster single compelled its purchase. Whatever other qualities that might now allow us to prise this disc from its commercial purposes, there is one thing it does tell us: it says, "we're shagged out but still moving. Keep listening."

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.