Rolling Stones: The First Big Three: #3 THEIR SATANIC MAJESTIES REQUEST

So, here we are at the end of this mini series. It's been a joy to shed a little more light on these neglected platters. Listening note: almost forgot this as it's become so much the norm for me. All three of these albums were heard for this writing in their hi resolution digital masters made available on the 2002 SACDs. To date, this the fullest and best format I've used to listen to this music. Sorry if you thought the photos used for illustrations I've put up here but I'm just not a fan of vinyl.

The first thing to deal with here is the charge that this one was a carbon copy of Sgt Pepper. Actually, I won't yet. I'll end with that.


This one was started just after the previous one was released in February 1967 but it didn't appear until December of that year. Between times there were drug busts, trials, setbacks, bloated social lives that found their way into the cogs and gears of the band's machinery. Andrew Loog Oldham, himself a force of barely controlled chaos, gave up in disgust and walked out of the studio and the band as a whole. Ruddlerless and wasted, the band somehow got this out. For decades Satanic Majesties has been regarded as a failure that should have gone unreleased, the year 1967 serving as a period of trial from which they emerged as the progenitors of the BIG FOUR. With that in mind you could also see the album as the rock bottom from which they rose to greatness. Me? I like it enough to leave on because the worst tracks are still interesting and the best are sensational.

Another reason this album is considered an annoyance is the notion that acid wasn't the Stones' drug and that the smoke and the speed of the first few could give way to the coke and the smack of the BIG FOUR and we'd all be happy. It's a kind of detour into shallow faddism before the band could find its feet and place in history. I think it was a record plagued by administrative ill health which yet revealed inspiration and delight. Again, this is one I can just leave on once it's playing. That's the album test passed for me.

The Stones made it to the end of their worst year of the 60s with a statement that felt like it had taken some knocks. They yet had the time for some good jokes and spectacular setpieces. The single that this album is closest to is the double whammy of We Love You and Dandelion. The first is related to the drug busts and trials that almost closed the shop for good. It is big and as dark as the prison corridor where it audibly begins. A quick piano figure rolls over a cliff to a huge expanse of accusation and relief. A heavy backing grinds and thunders below some ethereal harmonies that are audibly aided by Lennon and McCartney. Dandelion is sheer joy, jumping about on a spring day in a field in sheer drunkening freedom as harpsichords and Beach Boy vocal shimmers proclaim the return of the sun. Nothing but light and beauty, there. And then, much later, came the album.

Sing This All Together. The rot's there from the start. Maybe it's a sneer or a joke. The piano equivalent of a disembodied floating head appears centre stage as a chordal figure plays out like someone very drunk trying to remember a Rachmaninoff theme. This is interrupted by a big dissonant blare from the brass section. Encore but then with no regard for observing the tempo the song just begins with a ragger chanting room full of spiritually enlightened drunks signing about singing together to see where they've all come from as they thump piano keys, tinkle wine glasses and strum fifths on DI-ed electric guitars. Jagger, in much higher headvoice than sounds comfortable, whines in with lines about different "pictures of us" that evoke anything from a lot of parties to travels to lands far and flung for the acid and ravaged. Instead of a solo there's a long clinking, creaking central instrumental section that sounds like a yak-drawn caravan clopping and ringing its way through a mountain pass. Then the singing comes back and then it's cut short by another blare from the brass which collapses.

But it's good. It's good because the Stones sound like they're having fun with the subcultural pretensions at the same time as fulfilling them. It's also good because this is a Stones track but it sounds like Stockhausen's demo tapes. It's serious but not at serious as Pepper. It's fun and more fun than Pepper. And it sounds good.

Citadel. Without a gap Keith hammers a gigantic barre chord riff from his painted Les Paul Custom through tremolo with the intensity knob on ten. E-A-D-E. Then the whole band bashes into the song. Jagger, almost as buried as he was in 19th Nervous Breakdown or Standing in the Shadow lopes over the beautiful noise of it, talking about landing in New York like a crusader. The flags fly dollar bills. The shiny metal cars move through woods of steel and glass. Oh, Candy and Cathy, hope you both are well. Please come see me in the Citadel. An imaginative take on modern travel when you're destination is an expensive hotel room filled with Babylon. A reed instrument whines a luscious line through the metal of the verse chords, adding something oddly epic. The girl's names in the chorus are punctuated by the piercing ring like an anvil or closely mic-ed finger bells. The solo barre chords that play through once before each verse at one point miss a chord. It's probably editing but someone left it in. It sounds like the song is too powerful for itself and has to recover and get back on its feet. No one ever seems to mention this number but it's one of the fiercest and most infectious rock songs the band ever recorded.

In Another Land. A brittle harpsichord and descending cello figure strides boldly before relaxing and we get not Jagger but Bill Wyman singing through Keith's tremolo amp from Citadel about wandering around an acid trip as the sounds of fairyland roll out before him. This is one of those songs that have their own colour palettes with the vermillions, golds and blues of the cover art moving across it like air paint. The melody is really lovely for all of Wyman's evident lack of confidence singing it. The chorus bashes in with a gang of strong vocalists (including Jagger and an audible-once-you-know-he's-there Steve Marriot). Wyman's lead vocal while hitting the notes with ease is a little too Ees Lunnon to really convince but that works for me as an installed flaw. I wish Mick had sung it but it offers variety and the textures are too pleasant to dislike it because he didn't. Delicious.

2000 Man. It wasn't until this was on cd that I realised the snoring that seemed to start it off on the LP was actually the last bit of the previous track. It makes sense but I still like the whimsy of putting the snores there (with a little bit of Gomper in the background). I liked to think it was Brian, again adding something unusual. Now I have to think it was Bill.

A lovely folksy figure on a bright acoustic plays the initial melody. Jagger supplies the tune when the guitar has finished with it. It's the year 2000 and the narrator is detached and confused, controlled by the technology that surrounds him before the song kicks into the Oh, Daddy chant with a middle 8 buried in there somewhere about youth and age. Despite the small melodic payback in this larger section there's plenty to ride on including a compelling guitar chug beneath a rich organ wash instead of a solo. We end on the original tune, grander, sadder, as the sustain 4th figure travels further away into the galaxy beyond the fade.


Sing This All Together (See What Happens). Flutes on the mellotron remind us of the intro to Strawberry Fields Forever before. Someone coughs. People talk and laugh in the background. "Where's that joint?" asks someone and we jump into more DI guitars playing the brass riff of the opening number. More clinky percussion and mellotron and we begin to understand that this is pretty much all we're going to get out of this track, jammy guitars and sound effects. It's like the dream that Aftermath's Going Home would have if songs themselves could dream. Jagger frequently shrieks and screams like a higher primate the way he would a year later on Sympathy for the Devil. Tempos and time signatures change because they can. Chants fade in and out. Wordless vocals, ecstatic or murmured appear and vanish. The brass section is still being paid so they hang around and blare now and then. If you leave it on and relax it works fine as a soundscape. If you are waiting for the snatch of chorus at the end you are going to be driven to fury. And, yes, there is a  Sgt Pepper joke just before the the oscilattor and shortwave woooooos kick in for the fade. I shouldn't but I really like this track

She's a Rainbow. A carny shouts over the crowd to spin a wheel. A quick fade and the piano figure starts, hesitant at first but soon straight into a gorgeous foretelling of the vocal melody with arpeggios played in the higher register. If you've already noticed how strong the keyboard playing on this album is you already have felt the benefit of adding session maestro Nicky Hopkins into the mix. The first of many collaborations with the band, his work brings light to the entire piece. Here more than anywhere else. Once the initial theme is established Charlie kicks the band into the pounding verse about a girl who comes in  colours all around. Acid and sex in constant collision. With the sparkling high piano, glittering strings from future Led Zep bassist John Paul Jones, the odd little girl harmonies in the backing vocals and the barely contained stream of consciousness inspired lyric this song is like the best boiled lolly you've ever had, near fatally sweet but almost sexually tangy at the same time. The Beach Boys might have sounded richer and more ethereal but their music never smells of anything to me. If you know the particular aroma you can sniff here it will make you smile.

The Lantern. Ominous distant bells. High Leslied organ and acoustic guitar playing a blues figure. A shimmer of electric guitar through tremolo. Hopkins' piano almost like cocktail jazz beneath. Jagger's clear but soft voice emerges from a cloud of octave and fifth harmonies for each line.

The story is out of Tennyson, Lefanu or Poe. Lovers make a pact that whoever dies first contacts the other from beyond the grave. He asks her to bear light for him to see her, whether awake or asleep. The block harmony of the word "please" shimmers like a chandelier. Both spooky and warming and expertly mixing blues tonality with classical orchestration (a beautiful soft figure on the horns stands in for the first few lines of the last verse as the lady appears) and romantic narrative poetry. No one ever seems to remember this song in the back catalogue. They are ripping themselves off if they skip it, though.

Gomper. Organ. Tremolo flutes, tablas, an electric 12 string and sitar in tandem. The props room ws empty while this one was being recorded. Vocal harmonies from some distant clime describe a scene of flowers by a lake. A beautiful woman swims to the shore and dries off in the sun. The jamming takes over and eventually finishes. Sounds like pseudy porridge but it's actually quite beautiful. If anything or anyone else comes to mind here it is not the Beatles but the Pink Floyd of Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Not a rip off, just simliar territory.

2000 Light Years from Home. I like all of this album but it is dominated by three indestructible numbers: Citadel, She's a Rainbow and this one. Citadel reshot a modern city as though seen by someone from ancient history. She's a Rainbow mixed its psychedelia with the sex all too often left out of the monastic weirdness more typical of the sub genre. 2000 Light Years adds a kind of whispered horror to the romance of space travel, a kind of journey that Moebius might illustrate or Jodorowski direct (part of the team at the centre of a failed attempt on Dune, in fact).

Backwards piano chords loom from darkness. Someone plays the piano strings like a cembalo, randomly, dissonantly as more backwards chords fly in gravity-free. A muted picked bass plays a chunky statement of the tonality. A rude knocking from the drums, slipstream ride cymbal and it's take off as Jagger breathes the progress in a very economical lyric. Mellotron strings shimmer like the speeding starfield. We keep getting further away. Between 600 and 1000 light years there is an instrumental break with a guitar so distorted its chords are beyond identification. They  discharge rather than play like bursts of rocket fuel. A shimmer of echo tail passes from one side to the next like a comet. We land somewhere and everything rests (the mellotron sighs to a stop). A radio whine or a theremin wails out of control while the bass riff from the start gets things working again and we're off again on Bell flight 14 for a rendezvous on Aldeberan with its green desert sand. Now we're 2000 Light Years from home which means we are never going back. The vocals are further away, stronger but reverbed and down in the mix. The announcement, made a few times is followed by more of the creepy struck piano strings, warped distorted guitar bends, accents on the toms and a dissipating mellotron. Whatever the narrator now sees is wondrous and terrifying. A quiet waft of echo tail crosses the stereo image and fades like the dying signal.


On With the Show. A doorman informs what I always see as a bowler hatted city worker of the delights in the club. "Yes sir, they're naked and they dance." A cool jazzy riff from Keith's Les Paul and Jagger is the MC, welcoming the audience through a megaphone. A breakdown  returns to the sinister classicalism of the verse but with Jagger in full voice, a lot closer, assuring the patrons that if they get too pissed during the naughty show and are beyond paying for the delights beyond closing time that the club will look after the cab. Then it's back to the MC with the megaphone. The tone is niether satirical nor judgemental here. Rather, there is an opportunity taken with the kind of London club of the song's physical setting. If Back Street Girl was a kitchen sink movie then this one was made by Hammer. It might even be a goodbye to the club scene that now, beyond its youth had become a closed meat market or more understandably for these men in their mid twenties, boring and predictable. The song ends but the piano keeps up the boogie woogie until it too, has to shut its covers and leave. End.

So, is this an ersatz Sgt Pepper? Yes and no. Mostly no.

Remember that outside of what the teen mags would have their readership believe the Beatles and the Stones were friends. They were the closest in fame levels and the only ones who could release anything and get it close to number one if not at the very top. And camped on the twin mountains of the height of 60s rock fame they almost only heard each other. "So who are you getting do your cover? Michael Cooper? We'll give him a go, too, then." They went to the same parties and recording sessions (which could be the same thing) and shared everything they could. Beyond touring, they formed the most exclusive club in the cultural world, a kind of pop culture Illuminati. If one did something the other was going to have a taste, too.

Nik Cohn had this relation perfectly. While the Beatles were perceived to balance each other out from the motherable Ringo to the ascerbic John the Stones didn't balance they were nasty heavy, shook off the matching suits and glared at their audiences. If you take Sgt Pepper with its Good Morning Good Morning to add sour to its Lovely Rita then you can expect Satanic Majesties to follow the dissonant opening number (featuring John and Paul on rowdy, un-fabslike backing vocals) with its even weirder formless reprise at the end of the side. If the Lantern was long so was the chirpy jam with a mini song in it that came straight after. Sgt Pepper was the Beatles 1967 album. Satanic Majesties was the Stones'. That's really it. The Beatles put a doll in a Stones fan jumper. The Stones imposed tiny copies of the Beatles from the Pepper gatefold in the decor and costumes of the SM cover.

But there's something else. If you play both albums together you might get the impression that you are listening to the apex of the summer of love's pop music. The real picture is that the groundswell of newer and younger acts had made it to their own studios and staged their own psychedelic happenings by the truckload. From the accessible like the Move or Syd's Pink Floyd to the obscure, avant garde and dangerous from the realm where being a force in the local underground scene and being a local star could be indistinguishable. The Captain Beefhearts, Arthur Browns or even the rapidly rising Jimi Hendrix were assuming the centre of the performing world that the two at the top of the oligarchy were directly threatened by. The rivalry felt at the top of the mountain didn't just go horizontally and the response to it had more panic than magisterial confidence.

Rolling Stones: The First Big Three: #2 BETWEEN THE BUTTONS

If Aftermath was a celebration of the arrival of the band in the Swinging London aristocracy Between the Buttons is life looked the morning after. The glasses and bottles piled like bombing rubble, unfamiliar bodies slumbered naked in some beds as the warmth of hasty exiting bodies faded from other beds, a lot of promises made at three a.m. formed like patchwork quilts on the dawn walk home. They were still at court and it was still fun but there was business, a lot of business and all of it had to be documented.

The Beatles had stopped touring because they could. They locked themselves in at Abbey Road and worked on translating the sounds from outer space that they would polish for the coming year. The Stones also eased out of their live shows, playing the last contracts and settling in for the trappings of majesty before getting hounded by the constabulary in 1967. This album was recorded in the last half of 66 and came out in January 67.

Where it stands in the ether around the compilation track listings is the bit where they get to Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow. Compare it to the one preceding Aftermath and something interesting happens. Paint it Black (I refuse to put the stupid comma in) is a lean, mean and spooky chant of grief. For all its sitar lines, extra bass and Gregorian modality it's something the fabs would never have done. It's a rock song that sounds like it was first performed in 1458. As such it has more to say to Black Sabbath than the mop tops.

But Shadow, Shadow is different. If you listen very hard you will discern the basic track that might have begun as a kind of romping rockabilly two beat stinger like 19th Nervous Breakdown but by the time the production and extra and extra and extra arrangement ideas got to it it was like a gigantic tenement block only just held together by the rats in the walls and the gaffer tape on the corners outside. Snatches of brass sections blare out from the party on the twentieth floor. Bodies fall about (maybe that's what's left of the drum track). You don't want to know what's happening on some floors, however much fun they sound like they're having. A quiet middle eight goes wonky after the strange request: "tell me a story of how you adore me". Then it's back to the rattling filthy well of reverb and the shaking of the walls until the collapse beyond the time signature in the last few moments. A few death throes and then the dust cloud rises. It's like nothing before or since by the band and, catchy though it can be, seems to have visited from a deep Lovecraftian well somewhere in the alley by the Ab Lib Club.

If the compilation is in chronological order you'll head on to Ruby Tuesday and Let's Spend the Night Together, released at around the same time as Between the Buttons, very early in 67. The first is one of the few moments of fascination the band had with classical music. Piano arpeggios swing gently beneath Brian's butterfly recorders as Mick croons about one of the beautiful loonies that seem to spontaneously generate wherever creative scenes form. That's Keith on the bow and Bill on the fingerboard of a double bass (seriously). And Charlie comes crashing in for the choruses. Night is only slightly hotter than Ruby with a babadaba backing vocal somewhere between the Beach Boys and Motown and Jagger sounding younger and more honestly lustful than at any time in the first few years of worldly blues affectation. There are no guitar parts for these songs by this two-guitar line up. A gorgeous double A-side that leads us into..

Yesterday's Papers starts with an odd syncopation on the drums that tells us a couple of things: Charlie's insisted on his jazz roots and: Charlie's found his toms (no, really found his toms; they are all over this record). The bass is huge and then the gentle vocal comes in over a flutter of vibes. It's rock. It's jazz. It's neither. There is guitar. It's fuzzed and tremolo but tiny, only emerging for an eensy chord break that doesn't qualify as a solo but provides a perfect textural change at just the right time. The dismissiveness in the title reminds us of Out of Time but the odd frenetic bustle underneath makes us think of movie themes from the time, especially with the decidedly unrock 6ths and 9ths in the call and response vocals. Quite a lot of this album feels like we're at the movies, come to think of it.

In My Obsession Jagger plays a young man who, weary of the easy ways of the scene, tries some more vintage sophistication by pursuing an older woman. She plays him like he's played the dolly birds until he's a nervous freak. There is an odd stop start structure to this one which resumes from each verse with the same Taxman style part and slidey bass riff. Wyman uses his home made fretless and overdrives it for sustain rather than raunch. The effect is of a strange wave-like foundation that can change from drone to rhythm on a beat. Again, a tiny guitar presence chunking out some chords before it's gone. The vocals complete an already out-of-stones experience. Jagger's in good voice with some bluesy shouting but in the second part of the verse the harmonies are high and minor key, each verse is capped by a strange varying Eastern harmony around the fifth. The song wears out its welcome after two verses and goes for another two but that's what being the victim of this stalker might well feel like. The idea is to give his state of mind which works but musically, I always stop digging it after two.

Soft as they feel in Stones terms the first two tracks feel like a storm as the fragile beauty of the arpeggio acoustic guitar and finger cymbals play the main chord progression. Jagger comes in near the top of his head-voice, singing the reverse situation of My Obsession. The rich married man from the City cautions his Back Street Girl to be discrete. Stanley Baker in a bowler hat and pinstripes opposite a devastated and devastating Judy Geeson (Google, ye sluggards! Google!). This is Lady Jane as a kitchen sink movie. The politeness of the vocal is the grimace beneath the stiff upper lip as the filigree waltz is burgeoned with an accordion or harmonium (they can sound identical in a given range). Don't call my wife. Don't call. He even tries the class divide. There is no approval of what's going on here but there is more than a little enjoyment of carrying it off. The classical-flavoured arpeggios trickle off down the grey cobblestones of the lane behind girl's council house as our hero steals away to the Jaguar he's parked two streets away. Roll credits.

Connection is a swinging bright rock song about touring and the business. Airports, searches, TB shots. This is why they gave it up for club land and the studio. Again, the guitar is a garnish on the side of the plate as the piano does the driving. In the outer reaches of the fade you can hear the kind of babadaba vocals from Night.

Then we're somewhere else again. A BIG church organ riff rolls with the drums and bass into a brisk waltz as Jagger unironically worships the woman at the centre who is less a piece across the room at the club than the centre of his life. He wonders at her inner strength and is reduced to a childlike warmth when She Smiled Sweetly and said don't worry. No guitar here, either.

Cool Calm & Collected begins with more of the piano we've been hearing so much but this time it's straight out of the musical and pub singalong. Exceptions to this scheme is that the melody and chord structure steps out of the diatonic pen and then for the Eastern sounding chorus Brian gets his dulcimer out of the case and adds more chime and tang before horsing around with snatches of folk or show tunes before the next verse crashes in. A kazoo solo after the second verse comes and goes nowhere and soon we're noticing that the song is slowly getting faster. And then after the third verse it starts cantering and galloping and blithering on to the big too fast to play anymore and collapses into exhaustion. She's so affected. Cool, calm, collected. The icy scene queen is too fast for everyone. Who shall try shall finish with his face in the dust. There's a cheek to the vocal that feels like the opposite of the sneering in the petulant parts of Aftermath but here the sneer is from a position of control. He's telling someone else not to go there but enjoys the show when they do. No guitar.

End of Side One

All Sold Out opens with quavers on the toms and plunges into a big loping chord progression that circles with a big bass and lower register piano. Keith's having fun with a fuzz pedal. Jagger jumps around with the chords as the backing vox stab in with heyheys which could be like soul or bubblegum. Minor key chorus, scratchy solo and then a really big outro on the piano that kicks into rock mode with the bass fuzz guitar and heyheys. Again, it strikes me as a movie theme. A crane shot glides down from the second floor in the west end of London. Everyone's wearing paisely and ruffles. Hywell Bennett fakes a smile at a dollybird and then turns to the audience as his face relaxes back into its malconent scowl. The title Sold Out appears in blinding yellow, the font is the loopy vulgar one that is now probably called Groove. The rolling progression and the great idea to play it on the bass end of the piano really compel this song. You always want it to be louder, though, denser and bigger. Still, when it's on I turn it up.

Please Go Home. After a couple of industrial chords driving a Fender or Vox amp tremolo we tumble straight into a solid Bo Diddley sutter. That's Brian on guitar and it's the toughest sound on the album so far and when Jagger comes in it's with a short but melodic phrase which ends in the title phrase in long descending fifths with the word home splattering into tape echo. Keith comes in with a whining Eastern flavoured mini drone at the end of each vocal phrase. Charlie is all tribal toms and cymbals. Brian's on an oscillator which I thought was a theremin but which like someone playing with a radio (which brings us back to doh!). It's irritating at first, cutting through with it's hard electronic whistle. This adds a strangeness to the song's already urgent impulse. The lyric is yet another boy to girl putdown.

Who's Been Sleeping Here? Folky acoustic and poppy vocal that falls into a series of Dylanesque lists to a big chorus with that ubiquitous piano and a Bobbish harmonica. Keith puts some tasty volume pedal roars in under the niceness of the acoustics. The solo and fade look forward to the longer sections in the later Beggar's Banquet. The title tells you the whole song, really, except that it's more role playing rather than directly experiential.

Complicated. Fuzz drone and piano shuffle with a wordless backing vocal that has a kind of Eastern Europe vibe. Charlie punishes those toms. Jagger's serious vocal about a woman whose independence disturbs him. Then again by the time he gets to the title line at the end of the verse he's resigned. Keith ups the ante on the chanting, adding a third above which sounds both bubblegum and avant garde. A strange small scale song but served with great flavour.

Miss Amanda Jones. With the Chuck Berry overdrive on 11 this starts out as an odd throwback but quickly joins the rest of the album with its big keyboards and change to the minor for the middle 8. A girl from a good family plays around the scene as her prospects and marriageability take a hit with each kick. The satire has the gentleness of both the nouveau worldly and the aspirant. The middle 8s caution rather than taunt. This is a prototype for the more jetset portraits from the BIG FOUR but here it's dressed for the Scotch of St James rather than the L.A. Riot House.

Something Happened to Me Yesterday. A big mash of old time dance bands and a vaudeville swagger. Jagger changes roles from rock star, country whiner, and dance band band leader as he sings about the same experience that he and everyone he called acquaintance was talking about. Lysergic Acid Diathilemide 26 hit everyone in his scene in the year this was recorded and this song cleverly eschews the more typical far out psychedelia of Eight Miles High, White Rabbit or Tomorrow Never Knows and chooses to sound more like something from their parents' generation. The jazz band with its wailing saxes and burping tubas is both Rainy Day Women and Dead End Street but not Got to Get You Into My Life. The narrator like the experience but recognises its strength and the need for caution in talking about it, thus expressing the joy and paranoia and commenting on it at the same time. Keith comes in with his first shared lead vocal duties in the second section of the verses referring to Jagger's character in the third person. Jagger closes the song and album with a spoken outro which is a total pisstake. He refers to their producer (Andrew Loog Oldham) as Reg Thorpe and finishes up with a London bobby's "Evenin' all" as the band leads the dance into the fade. It's a good joke.

Jagger didn't wait too long to trash the album, affecting only Back Street Girl as salvageable. He complained that Oldham's ambitious production, involving so many 4-track bounce-downs, buried the force of the ideas until it sounded soft and flavourless. I beg to differ about the result. The Stones would never make another album like it though it's position forms a clear bridge between the darker pop of Aftermath and the whacko psychedelia of Satanic Majesties. Taken out of that context, Between the Buttons is a delight from go to whoa, offering a wealth of textures in new instrumentation, the courage to abandon the two guitar onslaught so central to their sound for glissandi on the vibes or organ and piano where the guitars would have been. Jagger explores the possibilities of his role further than he ever had and continues with the sturdy melodism already established with the previous album and the singles around both. It's a real achievement.

As is the cover art. They are huddled in a park at about eight on a freezing winter morning. These guys have been up all night and are so zapped they probably won't be heading to bed any time soon unless it's more of whatever happened to them yesterday. Only Brian smiles, burying himself in his heavy coat and scarf, haggard and ancient, he is either crazy from sleep deprivation or has found the joke that the others are too tired to see. Neither band name nor album title are in clear evidence until you look at Charlie's buttons which are tiny. They look as though they've lived through everything Jagger has sung about in the dozen songs in the set. A dozen movie concetrates of life of fleeting privileged mega-hedonism and its consequences. Here is a briefly lucid portrait. The blur of the photo's periphery is soon to eat into their faces and bodies. This wasn't offered as a concept album but boy does it play with a few.

Rolling Stones: The First Big Three: #1 AFTERMATH

It's always the big four, Banquet to Exile, as though that's all they ever did. After that it's dilution into stadium autopilot and before it's all ersatz Beatles. New Stones compilation albums appear almost annually, churning out the same old masters with a few shakes from the more recent stuff that will be inoffensive if unwelcome. But nothing of the song sets that The Stones offered in the first era.

Couple of reasons for this. Singles were the statements. Albums were for the fans who were ok with the filler after the hits on side one. This was hard to appreciate if you started buying records in the mid 70s when albums were presented with inordinate reverence. New Queen album? Let us pray.

The reason that the first extended listen to the Rolling Stones I ever had was the 60s comp High Tide Green Grass was that nothing before Beggar's Banquet was in the shops. It was a revelation. Not only was the charge of Beatle copying point-missing but as soon as I experienced the hifi mixes of Satisfaction, Paint it Black or Get Off Of My Cloud it was irrelevant. Later, I learned that none of those songs made it on to the albums of their time and was stunned.

But it just wasn't done that way in the UK in the 60s as the assumption was that anyone who shelled out for the LP already had the 45. I can't imagine record companies in the 70s tolerating that notion let alone now but there it was. So, what was on the forbidden sides that never made it on to the greatest hits sets?

I wouldn't know until the 80s. Punk made a lot of little differences. Rather than cause a youth revolution (the deepening world of post punk did something more like that) it made people think twice about the difference between what they heard on the radio and what they could find in the record shops. The back catalogues of the big names were reissued in original format and compilations served as degustations for everything under the radar. So, it was Pebbles Vol. 7 and The Soft Parade, Nuggets and The Madcap Laughs. And as an early 80s undergrad in a heavily late 60s influenced band I first came to hear Aftermath, Between the Buttons and Their Satanic Majesties Request.

Here is a mini series on those three albums, may they be neglected no more .... by the people who read this blog.

AFTERMATH

 

From the get go there is something wrong. From Jagger's vocal it's clearly The Stones but it sounds like the Kinks. It's not a love song or even a sex song. It's a satire. A bored housewife staggers through her upwardly mobile somatic days with the aid of doses of speed in Mother's Little Helper. If the Leslied guitar and sitar seem at odds with the Cockney knees-up there is a cultural fit as they are as faddish as the furniture. And then there's the fishmarket Oi as a finish.

Someone (I wish it had been me) pointed out that Stupid Girl sounds mostly like what a little brother would sneer behind his sister's back rather than a clubland court jester jibing a crowned dollybird. The softness of the rock with its acoustic guitars and chunky Hammond organ provide more new textures for the band.

Lady Jane begins more beautifully than any Stones song to date had a right to be. Acoustic guitar that sounds like a harp broken by a glittering dulcimer playing the vocal melody. When Jagger enters stage left he sounds like an Elizabethan courtier but sings it straight.  From halfway through things get more impossibly gorgeous with a harpsichord taking over the arpeggios from the guitar. Some read Henry VIII into the lyric but to me it just sounded like a swinging London stud settling down (perhaps to satisfy the conditions of his inheritance; Swinging London was a privileged pursuit).

Under My Thumb plays a Motown riff on marimbas as the (barely) grown up version of the kid in Stupid Girl has taken control of his girl. As studly as it sounds there is a melancholy to this number. The subjection he has achieved is loveless and I've always heard a kind of self-punishment in the lyric and the vocal, as though the relationship will only be regulated by the approval of the jilted party. It's not meant to but it reminds me of Anthony Quinn and Guillietta Massina in La Strada.

Doncha Bother Me is a kind of proof that this is the same band as the previous albums and singles, A-merican blues learned through style. Doesn't float my boat but, oddly the jam that follows kind of does with all its moods and textures. Going Home is like the kind of thing the Doors would soon specialise in o'er the ocean, minus the Blake and Nietzsche lyrics. It goes for over ten minutes but I always leave it on.

Flight 505 begins with Stu on barrel house piano. A joke reference to Satisfaction and we're into a routine Stones groove with some added fuzz bass and the first of the kind of hot afternoon country laze that they'd get more into in the big four. If Flight 505 had some country in it High and Dry loses itself deep in them woods with a 12 string Leadbelly riff and Jagger adding a few too many yeps to convince us he's totally comfortable with the rootsiness of it. A less self consciously cool vocal might have driven the track into richness. As it is it's a good enough listen with a nagging lack.

Out of Time brings the marimba back for a figure that sounds more like Mozart-era opera. A kind of lounge version of the Lady Jane Story that tells a penitent bitchface that the singer has moved on. There is far more gloat here than in Under My Thumb but the sheer texture of Jagger's intentionally polite vocal, the woodblocks, plaintive distant backing vocals are too delicious for me to care too much. It's a little like chomping down on a gourmet soft centre chocolate called Fuck You, Fatso. I should say that this version does last a verse too long and I prefer the strident string section version done as a demo for Chris Farlowe (it's on a few compilations).

It's Not Easy is a kind of apology for the perceptible misogyny of a lot of what has preceded it. A straight up boogie says it's hard to cope with life once your baby leaves you because you've been an ignorant pig. Sits well in the set but I wouldn't seek it on its own.

I Am Waiting is as gorgeous as Lady Jane but darker for being mysterious. They're waiting but won't say for what or why. The singers of the band perform a close low register harmony as the dulcimer chimes in the back like a glittering second-hand. The mystery and the constant understatement give this one a real beauty. Could be waiting for death or just the acid to come on. Not declared so it still works.

Take It Or Leave It is the kind of strident but contained ballad that the Walker Brothers were riding on and the Bee Gees soon would. But the angelic harmonies here aren't the stuff of the Wilson brothers, having much more Sam Cooke or Smokie Robinson in them. Odd to hear The Stones attempting (and getting away with) this kind of thing but there it is. Almost never returned to but smooth and effective.

Think. More of that big fuzz bass. More soul influence mixed with more of the Kinks effortless style bending pragmatism. Sounds good in passing. What To Do ends the set with more Sam Cooke stylings with delicious high harmonies and contemporary boredom. That's the last word from one of the biggest bands in the world at the time. Did they think no one would make it that far in the album? It's filler but it's funny and has a few flavoursome moments and then it's silence.

Before Aftermath Stones albums were almost entirely cover versions and delivered in a hard edged white boy R&B. Aftermath was much more like the singles of the time but delved deeper into what contemporary pop music was offering. But if anything is ruling the songs and their sound here it is the lifestyle. Aftermath is a document of Swinging London from the point of view of its creamy top. for all the cor blimey Kinksian bompf of Mother's Little Helper the target is the curses of the young bourgeois matron rather than anyone on Dead End Street. The cool lounge druggy cruise of the marimbas of Out Of Time or the ornate David Bailey directed gorgeousness of Lady Jane are from the cultural aristocracy who might well have danced to Route 66 but sounded much more like I Am Waiting.

The Stones were growing into their roles in the lifestyle and the colours, textures and declarations here are a studied step up from nouveau riche price-tagged culture. No scrumming around on the street for good times here, it's all the premature world weariness of the aesthete. It's the candour of Norwegian Wood without the naughtiness. It's the Eurobanity of Michelle without the self-importance. In fact, on that kind of thing, if you want a junction between the two giants it would be Drive My Car which, with a very little stretching, either band could have done and which serves as both an infectious bright rock song which tells a pretty funny joke.

Aftermath, above all, for me is the late night slice of this privilege where the pleasures of sophistication can sour into the puerility at youth's insistence. The characterisations in these songs were a development from the strutting or plaintive jilted bluesmen borrowed from the first stage of the career and while those offered a starting point the Aftermath songs took on life as they feel life drawn, the day to enviably busy and adoring day of rock stars at the top of the world who yet can find drama to motivate words and music. I don't think any of this was design as it feels so much more like unwitting compulsion. This album is Swinging London because it had to be.

Top 10 Albums 19032014

Becoming X - Sneaker Pimps: It had to happen. As the Bristol crews who innovated trip hop into existence took their places at the top of the non-rock non-dance pyramids smaller outfits jumped up for attention, appropriating the new synthesis into what were otherwise good but generic rock songs. The best of these was Sneaker Pimps, a Hartlepool duo who realised that the fastest way of getting noticed with all that great cinematica they were cooking up was to get a sassy femme fatale in front of the mic. Kelli Dayton was all smirk and smoulder giving the earnestness of the Year 12 sex of the lyrics a real sense of autobiography. By turns shrewish (Spin Spin Sugar) girlish (6 Underground) or late night beautiful like Neneh Cherry (Post Modern Sleaze) Dayton played all the characters but remained recognisably herself. The musical set dressing remains impressive. Procressed beats blend with raw ones, guitar through tap dances of pedals play over double bass and a city's worth of murmurs, car screeches and atmosphere lays the ground on the street and in the gushing filth below it. And it goes down like dessert. They fired her after the first album, prefering the wobbly vocal stylings of one of the duo. No, I've never heard anything after the debut all the way through either.

The Great Annihilator - Swans: After the debacle of Bill Laswell turning them into icecream Swans recovered with two of their most convincing post brut era pieces yet. Great Annihilator stretched the new textures of Love of Life and White Light into the great cinema of what would be two more studio albums and a swag of pulverising live sets. The brutality has been sculpted into real music noir. After an exuberant intrumental fades with a loop of children laughing which grows odd with repetition I Am the Sun seems to lunge from a vaccuum only to be sucked violently back in, eventually featuring what almost sounds like a gang of schoolkids repeating Gira's chaotic manifesto.
Elsewhere the delicate and eerie Blood Promise tells of something we probably don't want to know about in the kind of epic background I imagine Roy Batty heard when he was at the Orion Gate. Celebrity Lifestyle drives like the hit single it wasn't allowed to be. My Buried Child pits a breathy horny 6/8 ryhthm against a terrifying description of the sexual act. Killing for Company is a dirge in horror and understanding of serial killer Dennis Nilsen which takes on one of the saddest and scariest choral passages I've heard in a rock song. This is a long album and I usually take a break after the uplifting instrumental Warm with its insistent fourths and girlish la-la vocal from Jarboe. Even with an intermission this is a long and varied album that feels all of a piece and it's one of Swans' most accomplished and accessible.

Nouvelle Vague: Mid-noughties and the listening was stale as last year's hot cross buns. Rock was cut by the metre and poured out in a huge textureless mass from the likes of JJJ all day and everyday. Bands sped down increasingly silly vortices of self definition and created ever more meaningless categories. The thing was to throw your hands up like you were hailing a taxi and just call the lot post-modern and get some more coronas from the bar. Then came Nouvelle Vague. They were French which made the name funnier still. Nouvelle Vague was the term applied to the iconoclastic young directors emerging in France in the late fifties who created new aesthetics from a field of broken rules. In English it means New Wave which was the term appropriated from the above application and applied to the music emerging from the British punk movement which not only challenged the same dinosaurs that punk did but punk itself. New Wave in Portugese is Bossa Nova, the dance craze of the fifties which tore up the floors of the world's clubs with its easy mood and heavy suggestion. So, why not find the musicality in 70s/80s British New Wave classics and do them Bossa Nova style. The French aspect is already there a couple of times over. Two middle aged Parisian clubbers amassed a choir's worth of comely filles de croogne to handle the likes of Joy Division and the Dead Kennedys and guess what? It works a treat. Apart from a smattering of jokey takes the experiment reveals not just the musical nature of the old Brit songs but adds a cool cinema to them, creating a set of cover versions that outdo the entire back catalogue of 90s tribute albums by daring to respect the music through reinvention. This beautiful album was scorned by a lot of people of my vintage who remembered the originals and thought it was a long pisstake. Nothing of the sort. It's just music. Don't believe me? Listen to the original and the NV versions of In a Manner of Speaking. Both carry their beauty and sadness to different effect, like two differently staged Shakespeare plays neither needs to be definitive. A masterpiece.

Twilight - Handsome Family: From the thick rock of Snow White Diner and its view of heart rending murder suicide from a clacking cafe to the eerie lilt about atrocity of Passenger Pigeons the jaunt of All the TV's in Town with its psychotics in the park and planes streaming silently above the genuinely chilling ghost story of Cold Cold Cold the weird hymn of I Know You Are There to .. well to all the rest of it Brett Sparks' haunting croon and Texan twang intoning Rennie Sparks' extraordinary lyrics (which can go from laugh out loud funny to heartstopping in the same song) take us to the America of Diane Arbus and Cormack McCarthy and whatever alarming thing Rennie made of seeing a catepillar that morning. There is no contemporary country music like the Handsome Family. It has an address but no nation, mental states but no sentimental ones, the warmth of church singing and the breathless despair of abandonment. Never have steel guitars, banjos or Lone Star voices made my hair stand on end like this.

The Suburbs - Arcade Fire: I resisted this when it came out but the more I heard of it the more I wanted it. A set of songs from amiable to serious and affecting tell the tale of a war in the west. The good part about that is that you never need to know that but if you do you'll be glad you found out. the mood is a kind of Alan Parsons Project without the drivel. You have heard all of these textures before but unlike most post 80s rock bands here the derivation is defeated by the style and invention applied to it.



big hits. [high tide and green grass] - The Rolling Stones: The overhang of Fabs vs Stones favoured the former in my household growing up. Both bands were absent from my primary memory, turning up only in the hits and memories moments of local radio and the memories of elder siblings. One day I got home from school and bummed around as usual with the radio on when an incredible rock song burst out of the afterschool dross. It drove with a constant engine, howled and groaned, noisy but compelling. My only thought was that I was ever in a rock band we would have to sound like that. Luckily it was back announced as 19th Nervous Breakdown. Cut to the week of my birthday that year. My sister Anita took me to Ken Hurfords Imports around the corner where I found this compilation in US quality deep dish vinyl. Nita asked gravely if I really wanted that one and I insisted. I got it home, put it on and blissed out.

From the mid 60s this compilation pushes the band as prime rockers growing out of their roots, alternating the roar of a Paint it Black with the Beatley strings of As Tears Go By. But most of what's on show is big driving harder pop, huge guitar tone, tireless lead voice from the young Jagger whose contempt for the world around him is only challenged by his desire for its affection. For the first time on a proper stereo (ie not the transistor radio in my room) I heard Satisfaction, Get Off Of My Cloud, The Last Time and the mighty 19th Nervous Breakdown in full force. It seems strange now to think of the Stones reputation prior to the big four albums as that of Beatle copyists. Yes there are exotic instruments here and there and an adherence to pop song craft but the sitar of Paint it Black is nothing like the one in Norwegian Wood, the Fabs didn't appropriate Dylan the way the Stones do with Satisfaction and they would never have allowed something like Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby to fall into such beautiful chaos as it does. Before they were the greatest rock band in the world they a tight, clever and essential one with only the biggest band in the world keeping them from the top. If you only ever get one compilation of the Rolling Stones, try this. It will keep coming back and never outstay its welcome.

Wilder - The Teardrop Explodes: While I found most of what I heard of this Liverpool outfit uninteresting this album brought what I did like about them to the fore and provided not tracks I'd like with a begrudging favour but ones that stopped me in my tracks. The best thing I noticed was the abandonment of the white boy funk in the rhythm section and short repetitive vocal melodies that made them barely distinguishable from Echo and the Bunnymen (who did that better). The retention of Julian Cope's whimsical melancholy also serves and what we get is a mix of glorious Summer of Love joy and expansion in Passionate Friend, Syd Barrett in quiet post shock lucidity in Tiny Children or the epic Copey in full magnificence with The Great Dominions which begins with a heartbeat which surrenders to a looped synth and distant clean guitar and emphatic tympani and Cope singing at the top of his game about something very serious and hopeless: Mummy I've been fighting again.... Great psychedelia nods to the 60s rather than stealing from it and sounds necessary to its own time. Well, this did but stretches to this one and well beyond.

Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - The Beatles: This one used to be the Citizen Kane of rock albums, topping best-of lists without apparent examination. Eventually the title vanished from critics' lists and listeners' polls and common taste shifted from it to its predecessor, Revolver. Proportionally, Revolver is a bigger leap from what came before it than Sgt. Pepper.

Nevertheless what Revolver doesn't have to the same degree is Pepper's sense of moment. Even the opening of the sounds of a big important gig at the Albert Hall. The audience fades up. The orchestra tunes. Suddenly the band, sounding more epic than ever before with a guitar onslaught hammering a big progression with just enough breakup to sound unmistakably rocky but too gigantic to just be another pop outfit. Paul's vocal soars over a tide of screaming audience (lifted from one of the Hollywood Bowl gigs recorded a few years before). The chorus blares out like a fanfare over a big brass arrangment which sound both fustian and archly contemporary. Paul comes back to announce the next song and it starts without a gap.

Everything sounds bigger and more colourful than ever before. If they'd been heading towards albums being more important to them and concentrating on the possibilities of the recording studio as a compositional aid they made it here. It just sounds so mighty that the more modest pop of the band before it seems to dissolve. I can't quite imagine how it would have sounded to anyone who got hooked on She Loves You only four years before having this majesty coming out of the speakers.

And it doesn't stop. Some of the best lead and ensemble vocals they ever did finish the complexities of the recordings like gold leaf. Beneath them is a world of texture and colour that is not always easy to identify but always intriguing. Holding all of it up like marble columns is McCartney's bass that favours clear lines that are both thumping and sprightly. They keep the sense of the band through the most adventurous arrangements and add an odd stateliness to the album.

The other sense not forgotten here but heightened is that of fun. This platter moves. Where all the major UK psychedelia outings got bogged down here and there with directionless experimentation you get singalongs and a whole new world of invention. Best album ever? Who cares? This works. And keeps working.

Diamond Dogs - David Bowie: Alan Yentob's unwittingly effective documentary about Bowie, Cracked Actor was done at the time where the Ziggy block was dismantling into the Young Americans/Thin White Duke block and we got to see a transitional form (also it led to the casting of Div in The Man Who Fell to Earth). Here was discussed a very little of the pre-Ziggy time and concentrated on the new metamorphosis (scenes of the recording of Young Americans are pretty exciting in retrospect). The one album that seemed only represented by a few screenshots and a demonstration of cut-up method (after the fact) was this one and to this day it's the 70s original Bowie work that people need reminding of, one step above Pinups. But I was intrigued as I found the cover frightening and heard that it was a real move on from Ziggyworld, however much it still looked like Zig. There were two of its tracks on the magnificent changesonebowie compilation which nailed it. I needed the whole thing.

Late 1977 I took the gatefold sleeve home from Chandlers and shivered a little at the opening wolf wail and the scary phased voice telling us about the devastated city in the year of the Diamond Dogs. Title track with the audience sound and the yelled intro: "This ain't rock and roll, this is genocide" which I always heard as "this is David Bowie" (Bow rhyming with Now). But instead of the sharp bright riff of Rebel Rebel coming off that song everything sank beneath the sleazy rock of the title track to a decadance so present you can feel it stick to the soles of your shoes. The Sweet Thing mini-cycle takes us into some nihilistic hedonism and some of Bowie's most impressive vocals, going from a subterranean rumble in the opening couplet to the anguished Vegas tenor of the verse before it all freezes back down to the shivering chorus. A brief change of pace different enough to get its own name (Candidate) speaks of deals more fevered and troublingly organised sexual community before collapsing back down to the sleaze of the opening passages with some diseased sax notes and a pulsing beat on the piano, taken up by the bass and drums and smeared with delicious guitar distortion and THAT'S where the Rebel Rebel riff comes in, shining like sunshine after a nuclear winter, pur bright teenage trash with a two note riff that you just have to keep licking and a vocal of troubled young ones. Sixteen year olds can live in this song without coming out for days.

Side 2 on the vinyl starts the cycle of what remained of Bowie's project of making a musical version of George Orwell's 1984 (the album was recorded in 1974). It's fragmented but it works. Rock and Roll With Me is like a celebration of Winston and Julia abandoning themselves to each other away from the constant surveillance. We Are the Dead directly quotes the novel and tells in whimpers and whispers about the love that if uttered resulted in torture. 1984 comes on like the theme from Shaft and recalls the excitement of the revolution that led to the boot on the human face world of O'Brien and Room 101. Big Brother begins like totalitarian architecture but after the slogans freezes into a hate week chant that can only end in a repetition to a fade.

Unlike concept albums from the time like Genesis' Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Lou Reed's Berlin or the later War of the Worlds, Diamond Dogs brought to its tales of devastation, decadance and despair under opression a kind of British realism that felt cinematic and experienced. That's it, unlike Gabriel crooning about the slipper men or Lou snarling (or the completely bloody awful Jeff Wayne effort) Diamond Dogs sounds lived in and unlike all those others you can listen to all of it at once without skipping. Given the material I can think of no higher accolade.

 The Serpent's Egg - Dead Can Dance: Before I heard this album in the 80s I thought the only music that ever approached this was thrown at the screens of the then fashionable sword and sorcery film genre. This came from landscapes darker than Tolkein and more gloriously luminous than the first chapter of a sci-fi dytopia, The Serpent's Egg arrests the ear from its first seconds and leaves the listener both exhausted and craving more. Brendan Perry's strongly masculine vocals can be let down by his attempt to impress intellectually which is why Lisa Gerrard's Amazonian warrior singing works better in the setting for its glossolalian sonority which allows you to more fully imagine what delights or nightmares have inspired this powerful and seductive music. Never gets old and won't sound old in hundreds of years.

Peter Gabriel's Peter Gabriel (the Third One): I Liked Him When He Was a Fugitive

 Genesis were before my time but I tried to get into them after finding out that the guy who did this video used to be their singer.

I liked it because while it was mainstream rock it was funny and imaginative. Great chunky riff and no guitar solo to ruin it. When I found out he'd just knocked off from leading a big prog rock dinosaur band I was even more impressed.

I didn't get the album that song was on as I heard it was stylistically all over the place. The next album came out the year after and I tried that, hearing it was more disciplined and less commercial. It was. None of it sounded like prog. It was stark and depressing. The synths sounded like Brian Eno rather than Emerson Lake and Palmer and the guitar was subdued power chords and the weird little whines of Robert Fripp (who indeed played on it). I played it on a mild spring evening and when it came to the gentle but troubling Mother of Violence I heard the lawn sprinklers hiss outside and the two sounds combined in an eerie blend. I haven't been tempted to listen to the album since those days but the memory is a pleasant one.

I did eventually get the first album and apart from a very few tracks the thing was unlistenably over produced. There's a little block harmony that stabs out of Slowburn: "but don't get me wrong (aaaah!) I'll be strong" that could have come from a Toto song. It was 1978 and the punk statutes were still in force. That had fallen away like baby fat on the second one. So it looked at least like the guy had learned a thing or two.

Two years after that I was in Brisbane living with my brother's psycho marriage and keeping to myself, writing handwritten letters to my friends back home about how horrible the world had turned. I'd send and receive about two per week. My favourites came from my old friend Win who matched my cartoon versions of events with his own and our absurdist humour gave a lot of comfort. One phrase he wrote I remember really bolstering my resolve went: "why does your sister in law scream about the price of eggs when she doesn't even eat them." That really was a comfort. And it was Win who sent one of the best things I've ever got in the post. It wasn't a letter but came in a chunkier padded bag.

I tore it open. A cassette. I didn't even check the writing on it before it was in the player while I read the letter. He'd remembered my birthday. It was June and so colder than normal. I made one of my long black Prince of Wales teas and hunched on my bed with the letter and the sound.

The first track had this big clunking percussion which sounded like someone moving a piano down a staircase. Whistles in the dark and an oafish whispered vocal. "I am the intruder..." it breathed. It was creepier than any movie I'd ever seen and sounded like it came from one. What?

Peter Gabriel's third album was just called Peter Gabriel same as the first and second. I thought that was cheeky. I'd already seen the vid for his single Games Without Frontiers which I thought was great. The video for it showed the same kind of imagination as Modern Love a few years before, mixing a kind of setpiece in the dinner party where the uppercrust guests talked to each other in complete ignorance of PG ranting into their ears and images from It's a Knockout which the song referenced in conjunction with the late Cold War politics it targeted. No Self Control was intense, a fevered vocal over restless marimbas. Kate Bush screamed in the distance and in the big noisy chorus. Family Snapshot was a shifting interior monologue about Lee Harvey Oswald.

Quite a lot of it was a slightly edgy reading of the predigested post punk that other old guarders were doing. The standout tracks were well above this and, apart from the puzzling muzak sax solo of Start, I happily left the whole thing on as it kept the screaming futile arguments that were happening outside my bedroom door. I hadn't brought any of my records down and there was nothing to play them on anyway and on the tough love $25/week my parents gave me to live on I wasn't about to buy any discs or player. I was alone.

Actually, I wasn't alone. While school had started feeling stark and unfriendly I quickly folded in and was part of its social realm within a month. At home, my brother's marriage involved a screaming match every morning and that was just the adults. My brother and his wife hated each other. The child between them somehow made it through this (a lot of assumptions there). My sister in law is  the most contentious person I have ever met. She fought with everybody and violently. She constantly accused my brother of keeping money from her (probably true) and reminding him of an affair so constantly you'd think he was still deep in it (definitely untrue) and anything else she could think of. The only reasons she stopped fighting with the other brother who lived there were because he fought back harder and eventually fell off Mount Coot-Tha on his oversized motorbike. For an upper middle class family that all sounds quite white trash, doesn't it? Well, it felt like it, too.

When it came my turn to own some blame she staged a situation...

I've written the account of this twice and I was shaking both times. All I say is that this incident ended in false witness, accusation and (most difficult for me to relive) my acquiesence. Now I step back and think of it, the lesson from it is never to accept undue blame, especially not to placate anyone. Also, all I really need to recall is that, years later, in a different location far from where I was, her neglect led to something far far worse. The solid, unbending hatred I feel for her knows that she has to live with that other thing. FOR. EV. ER.

So Win's letters were a great comfort. And when I and the others around me at school thawed out I rightly found comfort in the world beyond the walls and grew to enjoy my first year out of home. But there within those confines, that voice that told of torture and inner violence felt more like home than the place where I slept.

I saw Win every holiday. At one point he was even thinking of moving in. Those plans went fuzzy and were dropped (Dad's stern response to this was almost a relief after what I had grown used to) but we stayed friends and partied when we met.

And then the contact stopped. By the end of Uni the only time I'd see anyone from Townsville was when I went back up for Christmas and I recall even the letters trailing off. The year after uni was mostly a fun share house situation. We even got to know the girl sharehouse next door. It was like a sitcom. There were conflicts (see the post about the Capella Correlli) but mostly it was creative, productive and fun. And then one day I got a telegram which chilled me a little.

I threw it out decades ago so I'll have to paraphrase: "Arriving Saturday 8pm Cindy Lauper stop"

I didn't know anyone who would joke like that. At the end of my B.A. I was a self-designed sophisticate and except for the reprobates I shared with everone else I knew was a self-designed sophisticate, too. The lot of us were so incapable of unscripted humour that we would shudder at such an incursion.

So I ignored it.

Come Saturday, deep into a night of drinking and jamming and jibing and stuff we heard a thudding on the stairs and watched expectantly as the door opened and Win entered, alsmost collapsing under the weight of the ton of luggage he variously held or had tied to his body. He gathered himself and found a chair.

All of us knew Win, he was deeply set into the social whirl of the contemporary deep north. But no one had seen him for a while. We looked at him in silence and he looked back at us. We'd had a string of transient northerners through the place for months. They were all travellers and few stayed longer than a couple of days. Two weeks later, Win was still there staring out in front of him like a possum in a torch beam, saying weird things.

And he was getting taken by my brother (another one) at any opportunity that involved a night out or drinking. I carefully avoided joining them. Stephen was incapable of restraint once he'd been allowed to do something and was impossible to deal with. Meanwhile, Win was bleeding out.

At one point I wanted to show my old friend the second hand record shop I went to if only to see a little of the same spark we'd shared at school when we'd been awed by a musical discovery. He seemed so fragile it was hard to do anything with him. He perked a little at the Record Market, picking up a few old imports. Then when I went to the bank he tried to get money out of me, something completely invented. It wasn't much, a token of the plunder Stephen had conned (not itself amounting to a fortune but significant at our shared scale).

I tried to reason with Win but there was nothing in his dead blue eyes that suggested he was aware of it. He was just transferring one sin to someone else because ... well, because. I acquiesced and took him to the White Chairs for a drink so we could cool down about it. While I was at the bar he murmured something that I took to mean he'd find a table but when I turned around with the beer he was gone. (Remember that stuff about the life lesson of never accepting undue blame? It works if you aren't crushed by the sadness of the situation.)When I got back home he was out the back with the others, talking with more spirit than he'd shown all that time. When housemate Rick came in I told him what had happened and he said Win hadn't mentioned it. Finally, toward evening as I was changing the record Win came up, handed me my money back and said: "sorry, I was in a bad mood."

I accepted the note in silence. A day later he announced he'd be moving on, with a forced smile as though sharing our relief. He came back a week later and moved back in, having never asked once if he could move in at all. If you're young enough you will close something like this with cruelty. That's what we did. Rick and I went about the pasta ritual, chopping and preparing, boiling water and nurturing oil, bay leaf, mince, olives etc into a rich red sauce. This we did in front of Win who by now was reduced to barking out odd non sequiturs between great chasm-like stares. He sat at the table while we jibed each other and listened to whatever was blaring from the stereo. As planned we doled out the pasta between the two of us and in showy ignorance took it out to my balcony to eat.

Twenty minutes later he was packing his junk into a taxi and out of our lives.


A year later I was going to the shop and happened to look behind me and saw a figure come down the ski ramp curve of my street. A young male. He stopped as though he had seen me and though he was too far away he seemed to be looking at me.  I turned and continued but couldn't shake it and checked again. Again he stopped. I turned back for home and waited by the mail box for Win to catch up.

"How about a coffee?" I asked.

"That's what I'm here for."

None of the others were there which made it easier. He sat at the table while I put the coffee on. We said nothing at all while the drip filter bubbled and rasped. Our eyes met a couple of times and there was a sense that there was nothing to say but this was without tension. We just recognised it. Finally, he did speak.

"I left a few things here. Could I pick them up?"

"Of course!" I said too loudly and got up too quickly.

We went into the middle bedroom where he'd been but it was empty. I then took him downstairs to the room under the house in case they'd been put there. I tried the cupboard but found nothing. When I looked up he had gone.

My sister later commented on this, saying that it sounded as though he'd been profoundly hurt somewhere along the line and it made me think beyond the initial memory of his odd tense staring and silence. I went and found the tape and played it to the end.

That cassette of the Gabriel album was too short for one side. It ran out halfway through the seemingly inconsequential Lead a Normal Life and never got to Biko, the anthem most people remember it for. For me, though, the quiet whimper of the end of the tape feels like the legacy of its time as I experienced it: big and loud and troubling and then a sigh and then silence. A bed of marimbas, cooler and comforting this time play a pleasant cooing figure. Gabriel's voice enters: "It's nice here -" and the tape cuts out. No resolution, no anthem of defiance to follow, just the bright gold of Brisbane afternoon light and "it's nice here".  I gazed at the wall for a few seconds, flipped the tape out of the player and dropped it in the bin.

Top 10 110214

Kaleidoscope - Siouxsie and the Banshees: You're meant nominate the first album, The Scream, if any Banshees title makes the list. It's mix of punk snottiness and musical sophistication packed the punch of the attendant blend of the London of John Webster and the 1976 garbage strike. But to my ear, this third effort found the band free of the uniform but still pressing forward into what would soon be known as goth but for the moment went happily unclassified. Leslied guitars piping a minor key birdsong, distant whistling and the slightly offpitch humming and oddly busy drumming that built Happy House didn't seem to come from anywhere but scary movies. Siouxsie's lonely owl hoot and curlew whistle take us into the fade and a night that will feel eternal. That's just the first four minutes. Tenant broods, hi hats and dark bassy synth. Hybrid begins with an air of resignation, leading somewhere difficult, wounded saxophone trading off note wails with Siouxsie. I have never stopped to find out what this is about but it always fills me with the same sadness as anything crushing and inevitable. Christine with a humming bass and crisp acoustic guitar and another saddening vocal from Sioux from another dark room in a movie. Desert Kisses floats on heavy waves of synth and processed guitar, Siouxsie sighing through another tale of wrong. Red Light freezes its pornography rooms with a steady dark stepping, the rhythm aided by the click and wheeze of a camera motor wind and the vocal rising from a Dietrich croon to an angered wail. Neither before nor since did this unit come up with anything so accomplished, so unsettlingly light and nasty, so arresting and so saddening.

In a Silent Way - Miles Davis: At the other end of the 60s Miles and a new crew play one song per side. Delicious grooves by restless percussion and keyboards and Miles coming in like Gideon distant but gigantic. Sudden edits take us from moments of exhaustion to bright new paths. It's long and at some point it just ends but it always still feels like too little. An inspiration for the great local improv trio The Necks. No surprises there.

The Necks - Drive By: Thinking of the last one made me think of this one. Gently insistent percussion brings a softly rising bass to the surface and a languid piano figure follows. It all changes without you noticing. Spoken word samples mutter into either channel and then fall back beneath the swell. You can either concentrate on it or let it bear you as you drift. Both work.

 



Quasimodo's Dream - The Reels: Australian post punk was as rich a vein of exploration as the sounds coming from the U.K. There was no uniform nor primer, you did what you were inspired to. This second album from the demons of Dubbo remains not just their best but the apex of the Australian scene. From the bright pop of Colourful Clothes through the breezy instrumental Smokey Dawson Show to the mighty architectural beauty and epic melancholy of the title track, nothing else comes close.

 

Remain in Light - Talking Heads: I'm still a little afraid of The Overload, the landscape sized stasis and severe drone of the vocals coupled with the disjointed lyric give it the same unnerving feel as looking at one of De Chirico's night landscapes. I have always found funk easy to resist but here it's frozen solid and put to a travelogue of other influences and mental states in the lyrics. From the spooky desperate monologue of Listening Wind to the joyous estrangement of Once in a Lifetime. One to leave on.

 

Ocean Rain - Echo and the Bunnymen: After their first three platters of operatic doom the Rabbitohs came up with their most varied set yet. The Spector-scaled Killing Moon starts off with a delicious arch chorus and continues through smooth pop thills like Silver or Seven Seas to the epic title track whose melody alone somehow evokes every atmospheric seastory I've ever read. Their last great one is a more durable than the angst of the others which can get cloying and bratty. Here it's great writing, playing and singing.

Second Annual Report - Throbbing Gristle: I knew about musique concrete, John Cage and the whole avant gardist shower but nothing prepared me for the cheek and violence of TG. Synthesisers dub effects and terrifying monologues that actually seem to cause pain. Unpleasant listening but it opened doors.

Magical Mystery Tour - The Beatles: In which the fabs manage to sound both exploratory and firmly mainstream. Over a busy bed of twirling tape manipulations, radio broadcasts and whatever else they came across the Beatles deliver a set of perfectly contemporary pop songs about going on trips, Lewis Carol's walrus, being lost, flying and the village schizophrenic. The production is thick and orchestral and always on the verge of trippy. Usually unsung tracks Flying (great instrumental of big guitars through amp tremolo, organ and mellotron) and George's three in the morning slow-down ode to perdition Blue Jay Way. The original side two was all singles and b-sides but what singles and b-sides. Huge, brash Hello Goodbye, the flavoursome drugdrag of Strawberry Fields, the dazzling city morning of Penny Lane, the cool and funny Baby You're a Rich Man and the big summer anthem of All You Need is Love. Nothing says 1967 in swinging London so much as this except maybe The Stones' Satanic Majesties.

Blue Wonder Power Milk - Hooverphonic: I bought the debut of this Belgian duo plus changable singer in 97 because I wanted more Portishead until the next Portishead. I got one song which was a clear tribute and a host of others which went off in a completely different direction. This second album ought to suffer from the transition from one vocalist to the next but that ends up as one of its strengths. Some tracks have Lisje on lead tonsils, others have the incoming Geike and the rest are voiced by the lads themselves in a kind of whispering Fleming learning Anglais. This serves to present the set as a unified front of high pop sensibility and melancholy cinema. Battersea's lush strings and helium vocal singing images of a breakup administered by a dark manipulator who terrifies the narrator. One Way Ride glitters with synthesisers from old stereo demonstration records, a cor anglais from a 50s muzak LP and a whispered vocal. Someone is puzzled. Dictionary starts with the bell like keys of a two chord figure from a suspense film. Vocals are whispered but fresh rather than sinister. Club Montepulciano  breezes cool and drunken with cocktail names and characters so relaxing they fall asleep. And more. The mood shifts. The vocals change. The lyrics are range from naive to plaintive and you start to feel like you're watching the best French language movie ever made as Jeunet, Godard, Besson and Chabrol take turns at seducing you from the screen. Out Of Tune has a breathy wonder that I remember afresh every time I hear it and Eden's French horn figure melts my ears long enough for Geike to enter with her big sexy breathy sadness. I can never get sick of this album.

In The Aeroplane Over the Sea - Neutral Milk Hotel: I shouldn't like this album. It's made by a band around a magnetic central figure who are the type who change instruments every song when they play live just so you get to hear how crappy they can sound when they want to. But there is a strange confluence of eccentricity, melodism and eclectictricity in the approach to these songs which, when you listen to the words can make you cry or shiver. Jeff Mangum's writing, while his melodies return too often to the same figures, is like the best of David Lynch's imagery, short of total whimsy but long dropped overcontrol. From the opening track that sounds like a warm nostalgic thing until you notice lines about mum driving forks into dad's chest. The quiet and sinister O Comely, swinging between major and minor without formal modulation, the lines crammed with syllables as though turned musical from a rambling confession, Mangum's frequent springs to the height of his treble stave is like Syd Barrett without the affectation. "Your father made foetuses with flesh licking ladies ... smelling of semen all under the garden was all that you were needing ..." And through the album's obligatory Anne Frank reference we get to the coda: "Goldaline my dear we will fold and freeze  together far away from here there is sun and spring and green forever but now we move to feel
for ourselves inside some strangers stomach place your body here let your skin begin to blend itself with mine." Holy fuck! But somehow this album continues to comfort me. I have absolutely no idea why.