David Bowie Is... Exhibition review

I haven't met many famous people. The times I have were mostly accidents. There just seemed no possibility that the experience of anyone whose work I revered could come up to the work itself. I no more cared about their marital status than I did that of anyone in my street. So, why was I going to spend money and time on a day off to go and see not a famous person but his artefacts, boots, guitar picks, hankies. I am not that kind of fan.

Bowie was the one who took me out of the porridge of 70s mainstream with music that was as imaginative in sound as its stories were in concept. Halfway through the 70s there seemed a huge backlog and a few of us at school cobbled it together by the meagre few LPs available through record shops and the proto file sharing of cassettes. I wore out my music receptors numb with a tape of Ziggy Stardust one August holidays and still can't listen to it without psyching myself up. A predawn hearing of the spooky title track of Aladin Sane - "battle cries and champagne just in time for sunrise" - will always be with me. I passed the man who sold the world upon the stair and kept myself from the gaze of the Thin White Duke. I puzzled at the identity of the Bewlay Brothers and floated in the thick red air around Warszawa. I caught up around Station to Station but had the experience of all that went before it almost all at once. It was more like a film career than a music catalogue and by that I don't just mean movie star but auteur director. Bowie's world was the stuff of nightmare and glittering dream, the Hans Christian Andersen for the collapsing industrial landscape. I was a fan of that. So what was I doing going to gawp at the great man's shoelaces and bus tickets?

Well, first up, it's not all little bits. After you get your lanyard wifi player and headset and get immediately immersed in the soundscape of narration, Bowie interviews, vintage broadcasting that build an aural image of the man's origins. Before you get to the old wartime ration cards and kids comics the first exhibit is just outside the entrance. It's one of the iconic costumes, a striped vinyl bodysuit with the legs flattened and stretched to something between a cowboy and a sumo wrestler, contradicted by the supposedly slimming black and white lines. It stopped me.

First, Bowie is tall. I had assumed that this bastard who was good at everything he tried in public (except film acting) should by the balance of the universe be short. He really shouldn't have everything. But there it was, even as rolled out like the wylie coyote after yet another of his devices backfired on him, the costume of a tall, thin man. Second, he roamed a stage heated like a convection oven with massive lighting for hours at a time in this vinyl death trap. That's a lot of dedication for someone sold as a pop star.

And then once in, the immersion thickened and intensified. The childhood years were represented by the minutiae of the quotidian. This is where the little things are kept, the cards and tickets, but woven into them are signs that the kid that used these things had stars in his eyes and the will to light them in others. I was surprised to find myself fascinated.

As the young David Jones reaches adolescence and early attempts at breaking into public life there are vinyl 45s, publicity shots, letters to and between agents, managers and record company offices. One letter marks the name change from Jones to Bowie. It was to clear him of confusion with the singer from the Monkees. History guffaws at that now but then ...

Then the mime training begins and there video and testimony from Lindsay Kemp and it soon becomes clear that the costumes on mannequins, endless sketches for stage setups and gear, ideas on paper about cover art reveal just to what extent Bowie was involved in his own design. He might not have built the fascinating stage model for the proposed Orwell show but you can see his storyboard-like sketches that have a clear aesthetic unity to them. This is where my attention goes from interested to rivetted.

Basic but accurate charts for the string parts in Space Oddity, letters to collaborators, and lyric sheets on lined paper which, even those with a lot of edits indents and verse lines perfectly in line and the most legible cursive script I've seen since school. Of course this has been chosen for presentation and even those examples (like the wonderful two page draft of Heroes) which have extensive changes and notes-to-self express the kind of perspicacity I can recall abandoning in anything creative of my own back in my twenties. Bowie's sense of moment at his own creations comes through with less narcissism than industry; the guy worked at everything.

This concept is at the very centre of this exhibition. For all the costumes (and there are many, many costumes) and the lipstick-stained tissue (there's your hanky) the artefacts on the risers that show stations of the creative process and the determination (I include Brian Eno's oblique strategy cards as using them was a concrete decision) and deliberation in getting these things from notion to execution piece together the story of the guy who gave us a decade of solid work that retains its freshness, that can still delight and engage and frighten and fascinate.

Leaving the show, back out in the cooling spring weather, I didn't feel like listening to Bowie, I felt like drawing and playing, making new music.

Brian Eno's EMS Snythi, used on Low. There's a note from him
to Bowie suggesting that he make a few mistakes with it. It's one of the
last exhibits in the main gallery. The fact of it and the spirit
of the note left me gawping.

Unheard #3: THE WHO: WHO'S NEXT

The Who came true. When I was able to hear them for real, with the needle on the groove with the volume up, everything I liked about rock music was right there. The drums pummelled, the guitar slashed and bludgeoned, the vocals cut or screamed and the bass held everything up like an oil rig base and it all moved like an F111. It was the mid 70s, I had a compilation called Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy composed entirely of 60s tracks: I Can't Explain, The Kids are Alright, My Generation; everything kicked the speakers down and bumped everyone's shoulders on the way in. There was nothing like it on the radio ... except for oldies. It had the kind of sensual violence this thirteen year old craved. Because it was bigger and better it felt younger and newer. I was hooked.

A school friend's sister had a few first release albums from the 60s and taped The Who Sell Out for me. It was a puzzle. I Can See For Miles was on it and a few other greats like Tattoo and Armenia City in the Sky. There was a lot of fun with radio jingles but so much of the album sounded soft and poppy. Wayne didn't bring in the cover art which would have cleared up a few things but my first listen was a dissapointment. The album starts with bravado but loses puff and deflates for the second half. Though I now think more highly of it, I still think Sell Out is a little less than the sum of its parts.

I approached Tommy through this but more immediately through the movie and soundtrack album which had beefed and candied it up for the 70s, Townshend's synth orchestras blazing louder than his power chords. While I liked the dark mysteries of it at the time I couldn't quite let the whole thing play at one sitting and ended up playing the fun tracks.

Later, when I'd moved to Brisbane and evidence of my brother's and others' collections lay around the house in odd places as though hidden by addicts, I found a cassette of Who's Next. It was wound to somewhere in the middle of the tape. I put it in and heard some tracks that sounded soft or quirky (Going Mobile), took it out and didn't bother with it again. Post punk was on the radio, it wove into the exciting politics of dissent during the Bjelke Petersen years and some goofy little ditty like the one I heard was a loser out of the gate.

In the 90s with a steady income I began retracing steps and picking up stray threads from eras I only knew incompletely or not at all. Come payday, I'd grab something current, something pre-classical and a classique de roque. The remasters of the Byrds back catalogue were mighty and followed by The Kinks and The Who. I snapped up A Quick One and Sell Out without a second thought and then came to this one. It was affordable and I'd learned in the interim that it was considered their best 70s album. So I got it, too.

I'd heard the more famous numbers from it by this time but never up close. The overall sound was meatier, beatier, bigger and bouncier than anything from the 60s. The opener, Baba O'Riley breaks into a big deep stadium rock anthem and its refrain of "teenage wasteland" sounded contrived and embarrassing at first. As the tracks moved on it occured to me the same way that post Syd Pink Floyd still does, it sounded older. I played it through, heard the bonus tracks and packed it up again.

But when I came to consider it among the candidates for the continuation of this series I had acquired a hi res version and put it on to see if a minty new mastering would make a difference. And it did.

Baba O'Riley starts with a sound that's still weird, a kind of skidding diddlydiddle figure on a keyboard which sounds like a tapeloop until you realise that it's also going through slow paced changes. It's being played as recorded. There is a curly abruptness to it that sounds like classical Indian music but it's as electronic as Switched on Bach. It's joyful and skittish but alien and troubling.

A piano comes in and makes sense of the changes by making them obvious. I-V-IV/F-C-Bb, a rock and roll staple but here in this exotic setting massive and heralding. Moon's drums kick in, restless and ready and when Daltrey bellows his opening line "Out here in the fields I fight for my meals" John Entwistle's giant bass joins the procession, grounding it but driving it on in unison with the piano; this is not the strut and raunch of My Generation it's sheer grandeur, massive, architectural. Townshend's powerchords roar along with the three chord pattern, making the waves tidal.

And then it subsides settling gently into the restless deedling which is now more a texture than a motif. Over this comes Townshend's choir boy tenor: "don't cry, don't raise your eye, it's only teenage wasteland." This, the sound alone, alsmost despite the words, can still choke me up.
And then BAM it's back into the anthem, propelled but still comfortable enough with its own power to make a stately progress, now Entwistle and Moon tense rather than relax into their respective virtuosities and the procession spreads and continues. Really, it could do one more verse and easily fade from here. But there's another lull for a bright fanfaring solo and the big chorus again. And then a development section with the diddlydiddle and the trumpet like guitar ushering in a gypsy viola which plays from a slow snakey figure to a frantic Romany knees up with Moon and Entwistle driving it on to a sudden stop.  And it's "what just happened?"

The title is a compound of the song's influences Townshend's spiritual leader Meher Baba and avant garde composer Terry Riley. The track before you know that is already impressive with its easy gravity shifts and rangey aural pallette. But once you do know that unlike any of his contemporaries' statements of spiritual affiliation Townshend took his to the stratosphere; unlike those other dabblings in avantgardism that put a backwards recording here and musique concrete there Townshend used the electronics of Terry Riley in a way that no one, prog rockers included, had applied them to rock music before. And then it still emerges as rock music, uncompromised, enriched. Hearing this in 1971 would have been like hearing Tomorrow Never Knows in '66, Venus in Furs in '67 or Whole Lotta Love in '69. It's the sound of exploration and discovery. And it's still rock music.

The soft riverside strummed acoustic guitars and moaning backwards electric at the beginning of Bargain promise a strange relief from the previous onslaught but this kicks into a huge powerchord driven anthem of spiritual commitment that is written loosely enough to apply to a lover if religion turns you off (as it does me). And I mean commitment: "to win you I'd stand naked, stoned and stabbed. I call that a bargain, the best I've ever had."  Daltrey's soaring scream, repeating that last line seems to leave the atmosphere as his earthly self begins the devotion anew back on earth. After two verses we're back to the opening langour and Townshend's choir boy confession changes the mood but not the music, deepening the central thought. A brief wail of synthesisers low in the mix glides down to the last verse, same as the first which fades into a jammy vamp before falling back into the riverbank reverie again which in turn is wedded to the rockier elements by first Moon's drums, Entwistle's bass and Townshend's guitar. Yes, you can have the violence of the rock song but you also get the meditation. We end cleanly on a gentle shining acoustic guitar. Even after Tommy and its complexity this is a step beyond.

What can appear as restlessness in the arrangements emerges as sophistication as the music provides setting for the lyrics that goes well beyond the bash through the verse progression, bash through the chorus, thrill with the guitar solo and take the bridge to the end and fade. Townshend's lessons in orchestration from his reading and the influence of co-manager Kit Lambert (son of composer and English classical champion Constant Lambert) had come to the point where, just in time for the '70s, a song on an album was as important as any other; they had to flow in sequence and make a whole and to really serve the message of each and all, the music had to respond to it, not just hammer it in.

So, even Love Ain't for Keeping whose title might suggest promiscuity is actually about sharing love with the rest of humanity and manages to be a Moon driven rocker even when the guitar doesn't rise above an acoustic (with a solo straight out of a merrie Pentangle album) and is carried along by a light-filled choir. Song is Over starts like a plaintive show tune but soars to the stadium cumulus at the first chorus. The minimalist one chord thrash instrumentals of The Kids Are Alright or I'm a Boy have become breakout sections with rolling piano and distant synthesisers ringing like string section. The final couplet about the note pure and easy like a breath rippling by sung in the distance by Daltrey over a guitarless trio sounds like a finale. There's a point to that which I'll get to. Getting in Tune is another show tune that rocks out in the chorus and returns to the Broadway spotlight for the reprised opening verse. It's easy to forget that the two last songs (which are easy to confuse until you know the album better) were separated by an LP side.

The epic scale they are played on would fatigue from evenness were it not for John Entwistle's My Wife. Entwistle contributed some of the most enjoyable numbers to the Who's repetoire with their gothic comedy just this side of parody like Boris the Spider, Whiskey Man or Heaven and Hell. When moments that Townshend couldn't bring himself to write for Tommy came up he gave them to the Ox who gave us the paedophilic Uncle Ernie and psychopathic Cousin Kevin. Here he turns a fight he had with his wife into a kind of violent Rom Com with tanks and machine guns. It rocks along, giving us just the right amount of jarring interruption to his spiritually enlightened band leader's ponderings to give the album some necessary breadth. And humour. Going Mobile has grown on me but mainly because its arrangement takes it from cute to accomplished in a very short while.

And then we get to one of the most extraordinary closing sequence of any of the albums of its time.

Behind Blue Eyes with its serious minor key acoustic arpeggios and dead eyed confession lyrics and delivery from Daltrey travels from the lonely grey of the opening verse to the second backed by a shimmering but heavy choir to the rage of the middle eight and then a slow decompressing half verse in closing. There is nothing of the skittish invention of the tracks that surround it because the gravity of the plea at its centre is too strong for that.

Then, with musical links to both its predecessor and the album's opener comes one of the band's most quoted and appropriated anthems, Won't Get Fooled Again. As we began with the squiddlydiddly innovation of Baba O'Riley we start here with a more momentous keyboard figure. Like the opener, it's an organ filtered through a synthesiser (particularly the sample and hold function which squeezes a signal through random frequencies that it picks up from a reference source like white noise). It kind of sounds like an organ played with a wah pedal but the beep-beep insistence seems to bode something big and heavy. There's less delay in getting to that as the whole band come in with powerchords, Moonie drumming and big Ox bass. Daltrey comes in with a bright vocal whose melody is flavoured by blues inflections and a fanfare. Unlike other larger songs on this set there is no trade in vocal sections between Daltrey and Tonwshend who appears in harmonies but no lead vocals. This would be a call to arms except that for all its monster gig bravado it is more a humble beg for awareness which, given its setting in such a rampaging rocker, is quite sobering. After a lengthy powerchord monster rally the whole thing quiets to the wahing keyboard like a mass thought taking form. The drums kick in for a big full band onslaught over which Daltrey screams wordlessly and then cautions: "meet the new boss. Same as the old boss." And then we are left with a little raunchy sweeping up and a final instrumental grunt. With that The Who begin the 1970s.

And it sounds like it. Arrangements are broader with more space. The recording quality is stellar by comparison with previous efforts. The entire album feels more coherent that the rock opera that preceded it. The use of motifs is much subtler. There is a suggestion of coherence in the lyrics as well even if an overall narrative is missing. But between the still 60s-sounding Tommy and this there sounds like a gap of about five years. What happened?

Tommy itself happened. The rock opera sprawled inside the head of a boy traumatised into insensibility and brought him to a godlike fulfillment all of which was arranged modestly to enable the band to play it on stage as an instrumental trio and vocalist. Ambition within means. But then they toured it and their audience bred like a virus into an uncountable mass worldwide. And the gigs just got bigger and bigger.  The dawning sun hit their eye as they began See Me Feel Me at Woodstock and all lay before them with a "take me" sign glued to its forehead.

As, Townshend's head swelled with this success and his conscience chided him with the new spirituality his ideas became so big and incomprehensible that not even he could communicate to the others. He dreamed of a world so oppressed by its own technology that its citizens were imprisoned in VR suits, soma-ed out with entertainment. Somewhere was the notion that breaking through to reality could reveal that everything was resolvable within a single note whereupon everyone who heard it vanished into eternal higher consciousness.

Mentor Kit Lambert, feeling useless and unloved after his Tommy screenplay was rejected, drifted into a formless cloud of opiates, offering his protege no guidance. In the end were the songs. Pete could at least do those. These were the best. They only hint at the story, include a few leitmotifs as Tommy had (and would even more when Townshend reworked it for the Kenn Russell film) but they stood and stand as a coherent set of statements about emotion, maturity and spirituality as nothing the band had done could approach. And, more, they were ready for the decade of the stadium tour.

Once you know about the Lifehouse project and the factors that led to its failure it's hard not to see this album as a kind of patch to cover Lifehouse's absence. Townshend wanted to extend the merging of band with audience by involving them in the creation of the album and film that Lifehouse was intended to be. The synthesiser aided arpeggiation that runs through Baba O'Riley like its DNA sequence was meant to be altered every time they played it live by taking the vital statistics of a randomly selected audience member and plugging them into the synthesiser. The band set up at the Young Vic Theatre in London to this end and played before

This was a major advance in the band's approach and sound but it's also true that it was the template for the rest of the decade's output, at least until Moon's death in 1978. If future albums felt different it was mainly due to their being more of what Who's Next was. Even Quadrophenia, the next  major Townshend canvas, is more an extension of the belt-loosening of arrangements, absorption of electronic sources and expanded lyrics that was there in this one. The arpeggiating synthesiser and sections of Who Are You are a direct descendant of Baba O'Riley.

This is not to say that the band peaked too early in their second stage but rather that they found their idiom and continued with it. Who's Next's contemporaries were similarly heralds for the decade to come. Sticky Fingers continued the groove that the Stones' had found with Beggar's Banquet and Let it Bleed. The Kinks kept riding the concept disc until one contract stipulated that Davies not attempt another. Beatles solo albums either sounded like Abbey Road outtakes or succumbed to the lack of intra-band conflict and grew progressively bland. With the false clarity of hindsight it seems obvious that all the major rock bands of the '60s would adopt or invent a '70s sound if they were to survive. The Who didn't know it yet but Who's Next brought them into the era of massed swaying bic lighters and multitudinous singalongs. Taken as individual instances this and each subsequent Who album until Who Are You either equal or bravely emulate this peak. It's just that none best it.

I would have rejected it if I'd heard Who's Next just after that compilation I bought in my teens. There's nothing as young and dumb and bursting with cum as I Can't Explain or The Kids Are Alright in any of its minutes. I remember Quadrophenia being offered to my ears at a session when my stoned older brother and a friend decided to induct me into great rock music after I'd shown such promise in hooking up to Zeppelin. I didn't even take it out of the sleeve and wouldn't hear it for another three decades. What I really wanted with rock music would snarl out of the tv at the end of the following year when the Sex Pistols starred in a four minute curio on Weekend Magazine.

Now, after a few faltering attempts at it, I revere Who's Next. It's widescreen optimism and worldly detail sing to me. After many listens I still love the rock band's adoption of electronics which was far more advanced than any of the supersonic virtuosity of the prog rock gods of the time. I love hearing the germ of the stadium singalong and the contrary forces of skyward creative ambition and the humility of a band that was always at heart a tough and committed rock act. Now I can hear the stuttering mod in the supersized crowd as well as the power chord. So, yeah, after all that, it's good.

Top Ten Albums 11/05/2015

ABBA:

From the bouncy flouncy Mamma Mia to the hands-off strut of So Long this album is a wall to wall monument to the apex of pop music as it was in the mid-seventies. The second language lyrics, while keeping to the contemporary top forty formula, occasionally reach the borders and gaze across them. But it's the whole package of what pours into your ears that counts here and it's constantly gorgeous with classically-trained arrangements that seem to both deepen the songs and tighten them for the pubescent target buyer. There's a LOT going on but it never feels cluttered or too busy. And then there are the vocals, whether cascading in massive chorus like Hey Hey Helen, poignant and solo like S.O.S. or the whole gamut like Mamma Mia, the double barreled force of the two A's pull you into the big bright centre like the sirens of the glitz eon that they were. And then there's S.O.S. a pop song that goes from aching loss to bopbop chorus to the huge grieving loneliness of the after-chorus ("when you're gone..."). Perfect pop as gracefully aged as The Supremes or the Beatles. Ok, maybe Bjorn should have left his lead vocal tracks for a solo effort. See also Benny's Intermezzo No. 1. Still, none of these break the flow to any serious degree. Even the cover art works: so much of this era's big rock bands crassing out with opulence this might have joined them but here it just looks like just rewards. Wish I'd heard it when I was a kid!

Kaleidoscope/Siouxie and The Banshees:

After two powerful proto-goth excursions with the first recording lineup, The Banshees continued, replacing the ship jumping guitarist and drummer with percussion master Budgie and what would become a string of guest guitarists including The Cure's Robert Smith. For this outing it was Magazine's John McGeoch who brought his sax along as well. While the Siouxie Sioux wail and bellow are still there to link this to the previous there is an added whisper delivered with a confidence to assure you that this is not the white hat team. There is a sense of standing back from the canvas and starting over here with synthesisers, acoustic guitars and reeds added. In fact there is very little of the punk guitar onslaught that drove the first two as, overall, brute force has been replaced with creeping intrigue and the moods of psychological horror movies. Happy House, Tenant, Christine tell of the danger in the walls. Hybrid is one of the most gruelling life-on-the-road dirges ever but it's also strangely beautiful. The big weird dune scape of Desert Kisses with its rising and falling wash of flanged guitars and slowly swinging drums is frozen to interplanetary levels by La Sioux's vocals which travel from a weary confession to a soaring falsetto. Red Light clicks and tolls darkly, telling of a day in a pornographer's studio (a sampled camera motor wind adding a chill of its own as part of the rhythm) as a single insistent minor figure belts on. It really wasn't all Flocks of Seagulls back then, y'know.

Quasimodo's Dream/The Reels:

This shouldn't have worked. None of The Reels' albums should have worked but all of them did. Wall to wall synthesisers might put it on the shelf along with the rest of the second wave synth pop pretenders except that all of this playing, whether it is or not, sounds live rather than programmed. There is an edginess to this you won't feel when listening to those others as the sheer song craft isn't reliant on the sonic setting. All of the vocal songs could be performed pleasurably on zithers if need be. The other thing is the melancholy. From the massive mindscape of the title track to the bouncy For All We Know these soul and jazz tinged pieces speak of a daily grind that won't be solved with a few singalongs (Dubbo Go Go might offer a clue or two) but there are moments on this platter that suggest maybe it could. The self-contradictions flow on and never were they more worrying while still being fun.

Damien: Omen II: A Black Mass/Jerry Goldsmith:

I don't often include film soundtrack albums which is a shame as I've been listening to them for decades. A far more effective accompaniment to creative work than most other kinds of music, film scores primarily emote, which is just what you need when writing or drawing.

Jerry Goldsmith had already demonstrated his greatness many times over but his choice during the first Omen film was to use the sound of the Catholic liturgy and put Hail Satan in instead of Ave Maria. That album doesn't work so well for listening as it's constantly getting interrupted by schmaltzier fare. Omen II, is no such beast (nyuck nyuck). It hits the ground at a gallop, using a pumping ostenato from Carl Orff and a menacing wail from the choir. And then, after the opening credits music it just keeps going, whispering, screaming, howling, even cawing like a raven here and there. Distinct from both the Gothery of 60s horror music and the nursery tinkle of the era of The Exorcist and Suspiria this is film music writ so large that it compels whole new movies when you listen with closed eyes. It's never pretty but, boy does it motivate.

White Album/The Beatles:

Been listening to this a lot lately as I'm finishing an album and this is one of my touchstones (yes, I do have more recent ones but this is timeless). I first heard it as a teenager and, while I had an idea about the fractious state the band was in and the common wisdom that it was a group of track of each fab backed by the others, it just sounded like a great album. It sill does. From the chunky parodic Back in the USSR to the big concrete miasma of Revolution #9 what I still hear is constant invention and rock music bliss. Simply one ot the best.



The Pearl/Harold Budd and Brian Eno:

As effortlessly beautiful as the second Ambient album from the same partnership. This time, while we start with emulations of nature, birdcalls and sunshine on water, darker clouds begin moving slowly overhead until by the end you're in the part of the horror movie where you don't know if you're safe or right next to the monster and if you and the monster are separate things. An important recommendation I can make for this album is that for a tract of slow instrumentals this one feels too short.





Twilight/The Handsome Family:

When the singing half of the husband and wife team that make up the Handsome Family objected to the label alt country he went further than just insisting they were country pure and simple he cited these as some of his favourite country albums: Beggar's Banquet, Rubber Soul. Add this expansiveness to the dreamy and sometimes nightmarish lyrics his wife supplies and you've got why the Handsome Family would work before you've heard a note. They don't care about their place on the genre spectrum, they express and it's usually with a a twang. Twilight kicks off with the big slow rock sound of Snow White Diner in which the irritated narrator gradually relaxes into the clattering environment after initially resisting it as a vehicular murder-infanticide has happened outside and two deaf women are laughing too loud at their own jokes. Cold, Cold Cold tells a genuinely spooky ghost story. The rest is a weave of hymns, dirges or upbeat hoedowns all of which hit you sideways yet still sound like the best country music you've heard since the greats of the seventies except none of that, mighty though it be, is ever about invisible birds or contains accurate descriptions of bipolar episodes.

In the Aeroplane over the Sea/Neutral Milk Hotel:

In a simliar vein to the Handsome Family, Neutral Milk Hotel mixes things up and keeps the narration strange and head turning. Images of domestic torture or the quite literally seedy end of sex mulch up with shivering descriptions of the Nazi death camps (there is a strong Anne Frank theme running through) and magnificent redemptive visions. Musically we wander in and out of a kind of late nineties indy folk with distorted acoustic guitars, the brass section from Satanic Majesties, a bagpipe instrumental (which is really rousing) and on and on. At the centre is Jeff Mangum's mind and voice variously twanging like a teenager from Alabama and wailing at the highest edge of his range like Syd Barret. The central epic O Comely starts out sounding like stream of consciousness but soon takes shape at the edge of our worries and grief, using impressions rather than hard statements, and takes us down to the bottom of a garden of borrowed light where the earth is always damp and abused. And it's fun. I can't pin down why, but it's fun.

Colossal Youth/Young Marble Giants:

Still one of the freshest albums and one of the few that is never unwelcome in my ears. Fifteen tiny pleas, life lessons and declarations of strength set to musical cameos that, while sounding naive, are never twee. Searching for Mr Right and Brand-New-Life tear hearts out yest Alison Statton's delivery never lifts above a hesitant coo. The spare arrangements seem to emerge from the pitch black surrounding the serious young band on the cover. Why does this work so well? I'll leave that as a recommendation.




Bach: the Greatest Hits Album/Various:

Yes, the whole packaging concept has the scream of early seventies and a desperate bid to get groovy young things to dig J.S.B. But I wasn't a groovy young thing, I was a snobbish pubescent git who had destroyed the first LP he ever bought because he hadn't realised it was two sides of classical music with a drumkit (I bent the vinyl until it broke and buried it under the herb garden near the incinerator where I threw the pieces of the torn sleeve). This broke all the bounds of decency with orchestrations of organ works, piano performances of works written for harpsichord and tracks from Wendy (then Walter) Carlos' synthesiser arrangements. It took the first few seconds of the symphony orchestra playing the famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor for me to re-evaluate on the fly. Not my favourite version but the sheer ingenuity of how the arranger had assigned different voices for the range of a pipe organ and find all the colours anew completely disarmed me. The Carlos Switched On Bach versions of things like the sprightly third movement of the 3rd Brandenburg Concerto brought the dizzying counterpoint of that extraordinary music to life all over again. And the piano pieces?" Shoulda said. Glenn Gould. Bach not only lived beyond the original presentation, he thrived and grew. Later, as listened with a keen interest to the results of the growing purism in the performance and recording of baroque music I couldn't help remembering that this adventure (which didn't need a drumkit so sound fresh) opened my mind more widely than the often staid archeological efforts of the Gobels and Hogwoods could ever offer. It was a greatest hits because it was made for fans.

Top Ten Albums redux 20042015

This Year's Model: Elvis Costello and the Attractions

Short blunt punches of power pop. A great lyricist who still preferred musical effect over preciousness in delivery. Didn't always understand the lines but got the songs every time.










Revolver: The Beatles

Before Revolver it was fun and showbiz. After Revolver it was self-indulgence. Revolver was the sound of confidence spiced with invention and all four members on full.










Mezzanine: Massive Attack
The great monument of trip hop, and its final big statement, stretches out like a Stalin era housing project in which there is something different going on in every room. Gigantic and moody, restlessly inventive and perfecty listenable.










Evol: Sonic Youth
A flatmate was given this by a fellow band member and couldn't stop playing it. It spoored to the rest of the house before we knew who it was. I bought the LP and left it on for about ten minutes after the last song, not realising it was an eternal groove as though it was being born and taking over the room.








The Scream: Siouxsie and the Banshees

One of the great debuts. The band started as a gaggle of scenesters getting up at gigs to make noise but transmogrified into a real band with its own sound that influenced new bands worldwide in the same year. Solid songs about alienation, addiction (and not the by-then-cliched heroin but nicotine) and urban darkness and the guts or the cheek to include a Beatles cover at the height of punk. Followers started leading. This is what it sounds like.






Diamond Dogs: David Bowie

He spent a year stretching himself beyond his laurels working on a musical about Orwell's 1984 only to find, when he asked, that the author's estate forbade it. The old side two contains the directly Orwellian material and it's great but feels a little too fragmented (with good reason). The first side is kind of like the crashing decadence that led to the totalitarianism (ie the real work of the project, in other words). Twenty plus minutes of pure sci fi cinema that didn't reflect anything around it.






Colossal Youth: Young Marble Giants

Quietly plaintive songs that mix real pain with absurdism and wrapped in tiny parcels shouldn't please anyone but this has for decades. An album that stays on once it's on.











Nouvelle Vague

I enjoyed folk of my generation getting upset about this, thinking that it was a pisstake on the sacred ground of the post punk era. The joke did go three ways (Nouvelle Vague is French for New Wave and Bossa Nova) but it was pretty much kept to the band name. The execution brought out the musical essence in songs from a time when that quality was being very publicly downplayed by the cultural leaders. The best of it aches along with the spirit of the originals and its success is that the musical difference is transcended.





Loveless: My Bloody Valentine

Pure force of invention born of a very short run up that changed what guitar bands sounded like for a decade. Silken textures emerge from the gutters and the meteorological roars and the flow, torn and viscous though it gets, continues. It's possible that the music here can generate dreams.









Fever Ray

In 2009 I went foraging for recent music that would support the talk after the screening on my film nights in Collingwood. I needed something that added to the hubbub but also sounded good in the gaps. As soon as I had my first proper listen I considered it far too good for that and soon after knew that I needed something far too good. Great electronic music from half of The Knife that travels from spooky to grand and back beyond spooky to lightlessly troubling.

Led Zeppelin: a personal history: LED ZEPPELIN III

If you can't be new be personal. From most angles there's not much point to writing anything about Led Zeppelin thirty-five years after they ceased to exist. I don't remember them as a series of events in the greater world; they'd released most of their albums by the time I listened to any of them. I remember the name as one you needed to know in the seventies. And I recall the way I met the albums as I heard them: from blinding joy to mumbled indifference, they were part of my teens and if anything is part of your teens the fun is in holding back the nostalgia and getting to the raw nerves of memory. I can't entirely promise the latter as some memories related to LZ are for my sealed section but I'll go as far as I'm able.

This began as a single post and a series of pithy recollections and descriptions but as the memories emerged each one demanded its own entry (and out door).

The first day of school holidays, 1975. The whole week was overcast and muggy but it was exciting to have made it through the first year of high school. My brother came home from uni with his usual campaign forces of girlfriends, hangers on and every single record he'd bought that year. Even at thirteen it was buzzy being around him. Even his arrival felt central: the van or station wagon he was travelling in spluttered into the large driveway and went coughing into the grounds, stopping underneath the African tulip tree. The doors opened and the group emerged, jaded from travel and cramped. They might as well have been returning from service in the Crimea. Michael, then a cross between a Cossack and George Harrison from the cover of Let it Be, loosed his bags and cases from the straps on the roof and the back and distributed these among his fellows to carry in. I took the guitar in its case and left it in the rumpus room.

After some untidy planning the whole party slammed back into the van and headed somewhere better for their by now shared nervous system. I went into the rumpus room and looked at the records. On top was this. The big balloony writing of the band and album number was set amid the clutter of what looked like a kid's scrapbook. Faces peered through the die cut holes in the cardboard and when you saw that there was a wheel inside this front part of the sleeve and turned it you could see other faces. Inside was the same collage of odd pictures and on the back a high contrast group photo, also a collage. It seemed to be about all the ideas that went through the minds of the band while they thought up and played this music.

Hearing a song on the radio was different to listening on the stereo because the DJs always talked over the start and end. You heard everything on a record. I had heard The Immigrant Song on the radio and remembered it for the piercing berserker scream that started it. But it didn't start that way. Just before the music is a strange sound like breath getting faster and faster. It sounds electric, like the sound in the speakers before the sound is put through them. It was as though the speakers themselves were getting excited by the music before it started. And then the band comes in with that octave riff and it's like touching electricity. I made my way to the couch, lay down and closed my eyes with the berserker scream cutting through the fading evening light. The chugging of the guitar and bass in unison are so powerful that they become confused with Viking longships and weapons in my head. The smashing tremolo chords that lead to the first lines of the verse about coming from the land of the ice and snow are like the tides torn the longship bows. Repeat. We end on a kind of looped assault of the octave riff with a descending wordless vocal pattern which sounds like the winds of Thor. Ok, I wouldn't think that now but at thirteen...

Distant speech and a false start on an acoustic guitar. Then the guitar starts and sounds bright and rubbery at the same time (I'd soon find out it's tuned weirdly down to a very slack C chord) and a strange riff that plays between the major and minor third before a breathless staccato open chord figure. And then massive dark clouds obscure the sun as the strings appear. Plant comes in with a sheet metal cutter voice as the mournful eastern string section (is it a mellotron?) grinds around him like the hurdgy gurdy of the apocalypse. It seems to be about the value of friendship in a life wasted "looking for what you knew" or the ideal love. The setting makes it one of the heaviest songs on the album yet there's not even a clean electric guitar and the bass is all in the string section and the only drums are tablas. As I listen for the first time the overcast day that it's been seems to have become the way the sky will be forever. And then with a pained downward falling scream from Plant a synthesiser wows down like a plane in freefall.

A frenetic guitar figure starts over the crossfade. Plant comes in half talking: "her face is cracked from smiling from all the fears that she's been hiding and it seems that pretty soon everybody's gonna know." The band and riff kick in under the last word and Plant comes back in in full high workshop scream. It always struck me as being about a village victimising a woman as an outsider or witch. The joyful chorus sounds like one of the lynch mob gleefully celebrating being in the promised land. I've only recently found out that Plant was writing his impressions of New York City but, boy, does it sound dark to me. The restless force of the band under the vocal only intensifies this. None of this lets up, smouldering all through the fade as the train it mentions pulls out of the station and the ostracising mob keep rejoicing.

Listening again now (to the 2014 remaster on the better-than-vinyl high resolution download) I marvel at how Page's arrangement and production could get. The busy funk-rock guitar figure is heard simultaneously dirty and clean as he played through two mic-ed up amps one running cool and the other hot. The result is that you can hear every note of the riff and also feel the disorder of it in overdrive; something's wrong but something's right. When the other full band driving riff comes in it is a very hot clean signal. Again, everything is audible in the mix and, odd for a rock record from 1970, the bass is allowed a huge presence which helps both ground and drive the song. While this might seem fairly standard now, the idea of taking pieces away rather than piling them on - less is more, in effect - could make for a heavier rock song was fairly novel at that time. Compare it to a contemporary Black Sabbath album. Big riffs and dark tritonal melodics but none of the power of this one song that kept itself the right side of mud.

After the calm between tracks comes a gentle clean electric guitar noodles around the minor. When the bass, organ and drums come in they swing heavily but keep their peace until Page sets fire to it, slams into overdrive for a screaming solo which tears at the air until it falls back down exhausted. This is going to be a song about pain. Plant comes in quietly and wearily with a line about working from seven to eleven every night. It didn't occur to me that if those hours were all contained in the set "every night" then that's only a four hour day so what's he whinging about? I just assumed he meant seven in the morning and finished just before midnight. A long day. He calls it a drag and the rest of the song is about that and the fact that since he's been loving her he's started to lose his mind. Well, it's a blues, it doesn't have to be John Donne.

This is another example of Jimmy Page keeping a tight rein on how a song turned out as, while there is a lot of improv throughout there are clear stages of development from the tragic opening which starts as a gentle sadness before bursting into tears, the vocal which does the same kind of thing, the next verse in which the vocal is louder but also more distant and the final assault which is all out. The constant sense of dynamics, the shifting of the intensity and volume which enhance the anger and sadness of the piece, is the result of a band at the height of its powers as a live act and a producer's ear for making it work in the studio. Go and look at how breathtaking they were on stage in the Albert Hall concert on the Led Zeppelin DVD and you won't wonder so much at finding out that the essence of this album track was recorded in a single take. That Page gave it polish here but let it burst into refulgence there is a testament to his skill as a producer.

The song ends in a collapsing improv around the last chord and features Page alternating between two frets as though he wanted a whammy bar. That's not a cheap shot, really, as it sounds like something that's rocking back and forth after it's been hit. I'll just register my fandom of Page as a Les Paul player. This album, which features the highest acoustic:electric song ratio of the band's career is virtually an ad for the Gibson Les Paul. The emotional range is entirely in the player, of course (I have a Les Paul and I don't sound like this) but the tonal spectrum, even with the range of amps and mic-ing techniques on show, is really what Gibson's flagship is all about, ease of touch for maximum output.

I'm making a point about this because it's not always to be expected. If you go into any music shop with a lot of guitars on the walls you'll see a lot of teenagers plugging this kind of humbucker guitar into a pedal and then an amp and going all wheedly wheedly on the air around them, note perfect renditions delivered  with tone perfect pedal settings available as presets on the equipment. But guitarist/producers like Jimmy Page understood that a clean electric guitar singal can sound bigger than a distorted one and a careful blend of the two can add drama and dynamics. So, Since I've Been Loving You can start out like B.B. King at one in the morning and catch fire in a stadium-scaled burst of napalm a few seconds later before catching its breath again. A lot of Les Paul players on the carpet at the shop seem to think it's an extension of a pedal. Very few LP-slingers seem to know how rangey and emotive this axe can get.

Take Out on the Tiles, for example. The last track on side one starts with a riff that feels like an avalanche. Again, we've got a few amps going at once, some hotter than others but the articulation of the cleaner signal is the one that bears the power. The bass is the thing that is slightly distorted, if anything. The guitar is set to the honking sound of the combined pickups on the Les Paul which is more noticeable clean than driven and clear here. It sounds like a tsunami through a drainpipe. Strangely, Bonzo's drums, while tight, are light and playful, never filling the gaps in the riff and singing the same way twice. Plant screams about going about happy-go-lucky and that all he needs is all his girl's love. But with rock music this big and pummeling you don't care that much about the words. A similar stuttering figure to the one in Immigrant song plays under the fade. End of side one.

I had dozed through some of this the first time. I had a whole year of high school on my feet and needed the rest but all of it kind of got through because when I listened to it again I knew all of it. The dozing state birthed a lot of dreamlike imagery and from the notion of the vikings in Immigrant Song, the shot down plane at the end of Friends and the outcast images of Celebration Day I remember a whole movie's worth of

That year a mix of peer group pressure and an admission of what it was doing to my body I traded my old classical affinity in for rock music. Michael's boxes of discs were like a big porn stash. I took one out and put it on and listened, dozing on the couch. Not a lot of dozing. The Immigrant Song smacks out with its spiky engine, the berserker scream soars above it and it's on. Through the strange acoustic but heavy Friends, the frenetic Celebration Day, Since I've Been Loving You's epic pain and Out On the Tiles big bruising riff and scream of intimidating joy, side one completely had me. I couldn't follow it, not even with side two until the next day.

We didn't see Michael again until later the next day. First day of holidays, I ran down to the rumpus room -

I might have mentioned this elsewhere but what we called the rumpus room was actually a separate building to the house, about the size of a backyard bungalow with the main dining table, piano, two organs and four speaker (but not quadrophonic) hi fi system as well as the tv, two recliners and two three seater couches and you could still see the carpet. I would bet Mum had wanted to call it the dining room or whatever one called the large public area of the house (living room, lounge but I suspect she had wanted more formality to it). I remember being babysat in there which suggests that I don't remember it being named. It wasn't, at any rate, a little room littered with toys and cushions for the kids to play in.

 - ran down to the rumpus room to listen to side one again and then side two and do some drawing. I think everybody discovers at some point the value of listening to new music while doing something else. It really sinks in and the varying levels of concentration can bring details out that would not be so discernible with dedicated attention. Also, if it's something like drawing that you're doing you allow yourself to get influenced by the moods you're getting from the sound.

Side one ran the range from brash to frightening to tragic to thunderous, all feeling even stronger than the first time. Side two was different. I had to start a new drawing, something in the eighteenth century. Gallows Pole starts with a rainy day acoustic strumming of A to A minor. Plant comes in dramatically crushed and weary: "Hangman, Hangman, hold it a little while..." He asks his friends to bribe the hangman to keep him from the gallows pole. The friends speak in his scream. First chorus bursts into life with an G-A-G-A pattern, bright mandolins and a banjo at a galloping pace. He asks his sister. Nothing works. The hangman laughs and pulls the lever. End. Well, not quite. What the band does with this folk song (it rightly gets a "traditional arr." credit to Page and Plant) is a very genuine trademarking. The folk roots are audible throughout the song but the drumming and Plant's extraordinary vocal playing are pure Zeppelin. And then at the fade out (or final freak out as it goes for what feels like half the track) we get Page playing what frequently sounds like a country fiddle on the Les Paul through a fuzz box, an intensified metalgrass vamp on the chord progression and, just as we're about to fade out completely, a high and screaming note on a real fiddle that turns out to be Plant's voice. That last bit still gets me even after decades. Perhaps that's what falling through the scaffold into Hell sounds like.

Tangerine's whispered sad twelve-string acoustic strums are a false start. A slight count-in and the real progression begins, a gorgeous minor mode with the vocal melody packed into it. Plant sings with a choked sadness about summer days and how the hours bring him pain. A brief bedroom guitarist's C-G-A minor arpeggio (which we'll also hear in Stairway to Heaven) and the drums and bass come in under the chorus. And there, through Plant's silvery self harmonising, is a pedal steel lacing through the words like sobs. We end the chorus on a lovely unresolved 4th. the second verse feels even sadder and can't even go on beyond the thought that even if she doesn't remember days like these he does. Then the world explodes into a howling wind of pain as Page's Jeff Beck-ed Les Paul through a fuzz box, played with a slide takes over the galaxy. Giant waves of grief howl out through the light of the stars. It grows bigger and gets higher and bursts like a supernova at the highest note it can reach. I catch my breath as the pre-chorus chords sound out beneath this blinding light and the chorus returns. Same luscious shining fourth at the end but instead of another verse or a repeat of the chorus unto a fade we get a rhythmic strum around D on the guitar which insists until the drums, bass and pedal steel play around it and leads to a soft falling modal cadence, resolving in a major, creamed up with a steel chord.

Michael, introducing me to playing Zeppelin guitar by going along with the record, played the solo on his acoustic without a slide and broke the high E string at the last note. He laughed a young man's laugh but I just saw the event.

That's the Way keeps the acoustic guitars to a whisper all the way through. They're tuned to a G chord and the riffs depend on that. John Paul Jones's mandolin keeps the accents low on the song's horizon. Another very beautiful pedal steel chorus wails and cries in the distance. Plant sings a heartfelt song about the end of childhood friendship and all that the parting means as the song's narrator moves on to join the grown up world and leaves his friend the dreamer behind. Towards the end of this song we also get a more developed Plant and Plant choir forming intervals as folky as the guitars.

Some time that year I was visited on a Saturday afternoon by someone I hadn't seen for years. Raymond and I were the fastest friends of anyone we knew for two years. Too many memories but two I'll not forget for their power in my memory: when I got him around to Nana's for her pikelets with cumquat marmalade and Russian tea she paid him too much attention the tone of which I knew, even at eleven, was patronising and then when we left hissed at me never to bring him around again (Raymond was Chinese Australian) and; he was sent home from the huge and miasmic celebration my parents held for my brother Greg's wedding (a member each from one big Russian family and one big German family) but that was a family issue rather than racism.

Still, that kind of thing (along with all the explosive emotional events that childhood friends are prey to) stays in the mind. I can't remember how or why we drifted (a change in schools will usually do it) but by high school, by the time he came around again, we had nothing but memories. By that I mean that the sight of him drew a kind of embarrassment from me reserved for cousins from the bad side of the family. He asked if I still made model planes and I tried to answer nicely but it came out as something like, "what? No, not for ages."

I have something far more cringing to admit, here. Instead of explaining that I was more into music I almost asked him if he liked the George Baker Selection whose hit La Paloma Blanca might well have been on the Countdown repeat that Raymond's visit interrupted. I thought to ask the question because the bass player in the band was Asian. I'm cringing as I type this and to this day cannot listen to that song. I think I did ask him if he liked Skyhooks but he didn't know what I meant.

He glanced at the ground and smiled and said, "I'd better go." I said, "ok," and off he went. What this reminds me of now is the visit I talk about in the post on Peter Gabriel III only not creepy. It was sad. I felt no compulsion to reach out to this other who for a short time had been the most important person in my life that I wasn't related to. There was nothing there. This song still reminds me of Raymond and the sad memory always comes first. As the last chords play, they are preceded by a reverse reverb which feels like it's sweeping dust from the doorstep.

Bron-Y-Aur begins with a tickling figure on the acousitc which streamlines into a blues chord riff before Bonzo clods in with a giant thump, supported by Jonesy on the double bass. Plant harmonises with himself a jaunty jig about his pet dog. The feel is natural and this song always gets left on unlike In Through the Out Door's excruciatingly forced Hot Dog. This is fun.

Then came the last track which I was warned about. None of the Zeppelin scholars who bore my surname spoke of it with anything but distaste. After a startling repetitive wail that sounds like a car alarm from the steam eon but is probably a distorted loop of a fraction of one of Plant's screams. It's immediately followed by an acoustic slide playing a coarse cut blues riff that ends in an octave wail. Plant screams about a no-good woman in a voice far too big for the guitar which makes him sound like he's yelling from down the road. Eventually, he's heard in calmer voice through a tremolo. Eventually he ends, Page ends and the song whimpers in closing. I had no scholarship regarding the blues. That was about to change but I have never quite warmed to it as music. This might be because the seventies I grew up in was dominated by bastardisations and dilutions of it and all I could hear through that filthy veil was crap like The Bump or Life in the Fast Lane. These days I can hear more experimentation in this track and the intensity calling through. Then, I raced to lift the needle before it started.

Repeat at least daily for a week. Fill up a new sketchpad.

I probably stopped drawing historical scenes around then. In fact, while I didn't stop drawing I drew less for the hell of it. I got more into writing and once I'd started on guitar took that up more or less permanently. Everything seemed to be changing. I missed out on seeing Monty Python and the Holy Grail when it came out in December (but saw it in time to quote it at school) but did see Ken Russell's Lisztomania which features a scene I had as a trump card for anyone who'd seen Jaws. The appeal of Lisztomania was to do with Tommy. It was Ken Russell's follow up and carried Roger Daltrey from the former film to this one. A highly stylised biography of the Hungarian composer reset as a 19th century rock star one scene features Daltrey crawling through the vagina of his Russian patroness with an erection the size of a torpedo with faeries of the forest dancing around it. That was both difficult and triumphant to describe to the girls in art class and reminded me of a detail I've left out here from hearing Immigrant Song in full for the first time. Grade 9 was good.

Led Zeppelin: a personal history: LED ZEPPELIN II

It rained all summer and it stank. The house I grew up in had been a homestead and, though a most of the land had been sold, it was surrounded by a green belt at least fifty metres from house to hedge, most of which was vegetation. Everything grows on everything in Townsville and then, it's seed dispatched, dies and rots. And then it stinks. The stink was so unstoppable it had to be mentally and emotionally filed under X for Xmas holidays. That way it became a pleasant pungency.

I  gazed up at the thick grey sky, hoped there wouldn't be a cyclone and did stuff. I played piano, drew, and started teaching myself guitar. Nita gave me her old nylon string after I'd started splanging away at Michael's steel string. The nylon string was easy on the fingers but Led Zeppelin III had taken its toll and just as long track morning joggers imagine themselves running marathons I pretended I was playing a big Les Paul plugged into a stack of Marshall Amps as I rasped my fingernails on a Zep riff.

I still drew to III but the Zeppelin songbook got me exploring and I found Michael's copy of II and sat down in front of the stereo in the rumpus room, put the big bulgy seventies headphones on, and dropped the needle.

A cough followed by the harshest guitar riff I've ever heard. It stutters and then holds its thrusting pattern for a little too long when the bass  comes in and it's the biggest, toughest and most engorged riff in the known universe. I can't believe music can be this powerful. Plant enters in full scream: you need coo-ool-in'! And then only at the end of the first verse do the drums come in with a deliberate stumble for chorus. Wanna whole lotta love. Each line of the chorus is followed by a thick descending slide on the guitar which sounds like another Stuka peeling off the squadron for its deadly dive. They could do this for a fortnight non stop, as far as I'm concerned but what happens is strange. Everything falls into a big bright space of whispering ride cymbals, what sounds like a cello through a fuzzbox (it's a theremin through a fuzz box) and Plant in the distance screaming in free fall as orgasmic uhs bloom around him. they seem to bear him up as he returns with a gigantic scream: LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE! The drums re-enter with a life or death urgency and BAM BAM! Page's guitar solo would sound tiny out of context, it's so thin and scratchy but here it just feels like scratches. And then after some more wildcat action Bonzo brings to the home stretch with the same quavers on the snare and the full riff thrusts back in and then stops again for Robert to blast forth with: "You neeeeeeeed yeah ...." And the cry builds from a quiet whine to a gigantic wail: LOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE! Back in the riff which seems to be bigger every time you hear it. Wanna whole lotta love? Stukas peel off, bank and dive. Wanna whole lotta love? Badambam Ungh Ungh Ungh! Plant screams close and distantly about back doors and hey and oh and hey and yeah before Plant dives into the sea and resurfaces with a whale cry through a fuzzbox. More orgasmic ohs before the scream of a dying planet signals the end of the fade. Done.

As a dictionary reader I knew the word orgasm and its meaning. I also knew the thing (I was still only thirteen but, then again, I was thirteen) but didn't know it as the score in a team sport. Nevertheless, the intensity and power of Whole Lotta Love roughs up the first timer and arrests the experienced.

Can they follow that with something even bigger? No need. The need is relief. The drawback and cloudy exhalation comes in the form of a gentle Plant vocal: "and if I say to you tomorrow". It's an early morning, groggy croon over a light jazz group. Then suddenly it's tight, heavy and hard as the floor as the band from the last song kicks in with a slicing riff a screaming vocal. Repeat. Calm with choir. Page on a steel guitar plays a cool island ditty before the chorus kicks and he makes that steel scream. Verse and chorus, in more psychedelic mode and slicing chorus. Calm. Page bashes out some chords through an echo and Plant improvs another chorus s the new riff barks beneath. Fade.

The Lemon Song doesn't sound like a flavour. I had almost no musical scholarship outside of classical and only a vague understanding of the roots of rock music. I had an idea of what blues was because it related to jazz and I was acquainted with jazz because in the winter of the year I turned twelve I was obsessed by the theme from the movie The Sting and could kind of play it (Greg said that he retired one night to the sounds of my meat tenderiser on ivory version of it and woke to the same the next morning). There was enough blues on III to give me an idea of what it sounded like and Michael was informative. So....

The riff has slid out from under a gong and slithers up the scale before being hissed back down by some scratchy wildcat guitar. The drums whisper and breathe below and between them one of John Paul Jones's best bass improvs simmers and sidles. Plant comes in with operatic pain: "I should have quit you, long time ago!"And it grinds on that way, all lordy woman and hey and oh until it breaks into the big bright chord based solo before sleazing down again and then Plant gets into the reason that quitting hasn't happened. Thirteen year olds might be ignorant of the great buffet of sexual practice but all of them have a sexual response, however frustrated or self-medicating. And all of them will understand something of what Plant is on about when he intones: "the way you squeeze my lemon I'll fall right out of bed." While I enjoyed the power and the nuance of this one it was a track I left on as atmosphere rather than enjoyed. I was unaware of the generous plundering of the blues catalogue it was and probably wouldn't have cared if I had. There's a lot of Killing Floor in this track. There's also a mass of added material added by the band. Howlin' Wolf/Chester Burnett's publishers threw a lawyer at them and now he is co-credited with authorship. Made it your own, boys, but still not nice.

Thank You floats in from the golden horizon on a blanket of electric twelve string. The drums kick in as an announcement and then a calm. Plant almost whispers the devotion to his lover as Jones gently plays church-like organ chords below. Drums. Acoustic and more twelve string for the chorus and then a bigger acoustic force for the middle eight about little drops of rain. A lovely acousitc solo. Back to the organ and verse with added light twelve string cascades. After a reprise of the opening lines we end on a calm and beautiful fade led by the organ and supported by subtle twelve string chords. It returns briefly from the vanishing point to end on a lovely golden chord. I loved this song. I have since hard many like it and curbed my excitement whenever I've stumbled on the chord pattern. This song at least adds a lot of different material like a much needed minor key section and a middle eight that doesn't rely on the verse. But all that is obscured by decades of songs that should have broken this template by at least one out of place chord. But no.

Side two starts with a riff that feels like it was just made up when they rolled the tape. There's a note too many but as soon as the band kicks in it hardens to order. A big, dark riff of bends and stutters on the Gibson. A very front and centre distorted bass that for once sounds big rather than the trebley blech you usually get and a big screamed vocal from Plant. She done him wrong. Doesn't pretend to be Desiderata. In the middle there's a great shredding solo in Page's best scratchy Les Paul. It's really solo; It's just him. A lovely little glitch as he gets really fiddly and scratchy. The high hats get impatient behind him and he finds a chord riff to break back in and when everyone else joins the solo is more conventional but no less sweet for its rapid fire and raunch. Plant does another iron foundry vocal verse and ends on his screaming the title Heartbreaker until the entire force is suddenly cut off, in the middle of the word. Silence. Inertia.

Plant starts the next one: "with a purple umb-er-ella and a fifty cent hat." Page brings in a delicious riff played on a very hot but clean twelve string that could have easily worked on a big distorted Lester but sounded better this way. Living Loving Maid rollicks on with clever shifts in when the expected riff comes in and a solo that gets away with being cheeky without being goofy. Fun.

Ramble On starts with feather light acoustics, fretless bass and pedal steel as Plant croons a tale of restless travel. this is broken by a big rocky chorus. A beautiful short multitracked guitar solo gives way to the last verse which nods to the band's relationship with J.R.R. Tolkein. We end on the rocking chorus and a lot of double tracked improv from Plant to the fade.

Moby Dick starts with a beautiful scratchy twelve bar riff with some tasty wildcat scratches from Page in the gaps. Then it stops for an extended drum solo that sounds like someone pottering around in the kitchen until you bring the cup of tea you've just brewed back into the room for the recap of the riff and the end. Sorry, Bonzo is one of my favourite drummers but I've only ever listened to this entire track once and that's because I was distracted. There are very very few cases of overlong soloing on the Zeppelin studio albums. There are plenty of epics live but that was the arena and they were welcomed by the thousands who came to witness. This is as close as Zep got to the kind of Emerson Lake and Palmer bullshit that so many seventies bands got into. Listen to Bonzo's Montreaux on the posthumous Coda album and you can hear the same drummer work through real ideas in a percussion only track (not even a riff) after a decade of world leading musicianship. This, though, is and will only ever be filler.

Bring it On Home sounds like but isn't another wholesale lift from a bluesman. Over an acoustic 6th strum Plant sings in a bizarre blackface before the thing kicks into a violent guitar riff and the band bashes into something more typically Zeppelin. The end is similar to the begining. A few lines about bringing it on home to you over the acoustic and a final cheeky harmonica tweet and we're done. The publisher of the Sonny Boy Williamson song of the same name (you can't copyright titles, by the way) saw dollars falling from the sky because of the last two lines of lyrics. Lyrics. Look, fine, if they take someone else's stuff and attribute it to themselves then fair cop but boy does the bullshit flow once it's started.

In any case, I seldom made it to this part of the album at the time and seldom do now. Led Zeppelin II ends for me with Living Loving Maid. I did like the lines about Golem and Mordor in Ramble On but this thing sounded so formless to me at that age. I loved the force and scale of the bigger numbers and the dynamics of all of it. That things like Thank You could come between The cock o' the walk Lemon Song and the cockier o' the walkier Heartbreaker and that What is and What Should Never Be, Ramble On and Bring it on Home had such startling changes mid song with all of this still sounding like the same band impressed me. The mid-seventies pop on the radio had none of these qualities. Only anomalies like ABBA's SOS or the soon to be heard Bohemian Rhapsody seemed audible after this.

So what is often written off as ball walking at the stadium level still expresses the original intention of blends of light and heavy, light and dark, hard and soft, violent and tender. If II still feels a little incomplete for me it's because I was beyond comprehending it on those Xmas Holidays when I overplayed it while drawing murder scenes in period costume in the rumpus room.

Only a year had seen the casting off of my squadrons of Airfix models and shelves of war comics. I still read, voraciously, but it was the strain of novel devouring I'd started at ten that I kept up. There were a few I had on the go during those hols but at their centre was Dumas' The Three Musketeers unabridged. At night the ABC had started showing the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes and the atmosphere of these while it stormed outside was strong and dark. I roasted peanuts as a kind of olde worlde thing to go with the Musketeers but this kind of thing was giving way to the gravity of everything at the core of things like Led Zeppelin II. Those hols also brought me the later Beatles albums and I thrilled at Magical Mystery Tour and listened with a shiver to Strawberry Fields Forever. I still do but then, lurking over their shoulder with a knowing smirk was The Lemon Song, unfocussed as yet but present, odorous and waiting.

Led Zeppelin: a personal history: FOURTH ALBUM/ZoSo/LED ZEPPELIN VI/FOUR/UNTITLED

Whatever you end up calling it (most people say Led Zeppelin four as it's easiest and still accurate) this is the hardest one to approach as it is such an icon of its age and for hard rock records throughout the era. So, I'll begin with how I came to know it.

My sister went to a folk club on Sunday nights. She joined things. If it wasn't a roomful of people older than her growling, "er-lye in the mornin'" then it was the anti-pollution gang who held pickets and protests and made banners. If it wasn't either of those it was something as it had been ballet or horse riding and would be theatre groups at uni. Nita was popular and liked belonging. For a while this looked ok to me, as well, as it seemed to offer a short cut to a kind of fame, extreme locality notwithstanding. But, as time has demanded I admit, joining is not my forte. I think Nita liked the leadership opportunities. She got to know just enough about medieval and Renaissance culture to buy just enough of the right records to be able to settle into a world of unicorn headdresses and armour while drawing those very things in pen and ink in the rumpus room.

I was happy to join in these sessions as I drew compulsively (my scenes were from the eighteenth century or The Great War) and I came to know and enjoy Pentangle and the more scholarly early music group records she found and bought. This extended my classical-only tastes and I was soon allowing things like The Incredible String Band or the more orchestral Moody Blues albums in. And then one day Nita thought I might get along with one particular song. It started as an instantly appealing acoustic guitar apreggio and then a recorder section, a sound I had grown to adore, played a beautiful accompaniment which rose and flew like a choir. And then between the clicks of the well played groove the vocals started and I was heading for my room until the song was over. I had fled.

Some context: I was afraid of rock music. It was on the radio all the time and there was plenty on tv. There were two strains to this. The first is forgivable considering my age: I thought of it as an inevitable gateway to a blueskinned death from a heroin overdose. Yes, there were stations to this but that was at the end of all of them. This terrified me. The second was that I thought of rock music as a reduction of musical form to the level of the boofhead; the music of the mob and the sport; it was the din of joining, the kind of belonging I had already witnessed in the nightmarish drawings of Kathe Kollwitz and Georg Grosz. Not for me.

Later, when the rumpus room was clear I went down and found the record which was only a few covers down from the top of the stack Nita had left out. I am compulsively attracted to that which I fear. At this age (about eleven) I also inhale ghost stories. I didn't believe in ghosts but the stories gave me nightmares. I'd swear off them until I found another anthology. Similarly, I had at least to hear the introduction of that song again. It wasn't hard to find by the needle dipping method whereby you sample tiny amounts of LP tracks by dropping the needle on them for seconds at a time before, the tone arm handle still in your hand, you whip it back off and try another. Then again, the guitar arpeggio shining out of the dark of the vinyl surface made brighter by the pure white light of the recorders. The click click of the surface damage heralded the entrance of the vocals and, grimacing, I let it go on for a few lines before the needle came off again. I went away to think about all of this.

If you only know one Led Zeppelin song you will have worked out I am writing about Stairway to Heaven. I didn't meet it as a rock classic but as an object of terror.

It didn't convert me, I would have washed it away with Mozart that afternoon, but it was there if ever I needed it. The very name Led Zeppelin carried a kind of horror for me as I imagined bombing raids, death and mayhem. I put the strange ripped looking cover back in the vertical shelves under the turntable and left it there.

High school meant a lot of changes including a circumstantial enforcement of the need to negotiate with the herd. Seeing how my affection for classical music changed my social status from aloof twit to leper I started listening to 4TO and watching Countdown. Most of it was passable and some risible and dire but Sherbert's Life is for Living with its octave leaping chromatic riff mixed with vocal harmonies caught me as did Fox on the Run's hard front and suggestion of something creepy under its stiff choruses. Hush looked like hippos in tutus and ACDC was footballer music (still is, as far as I'm concerned). I had changed one obsession for another and rather than one of the gang I was a know-it-all twit but I could live with that as it meant that the leprosy cleared up.

There was so little I actually liked in the charts at the time that I had to reach back a generation and a half to the 60s. Beatles, then Stones, then Who, then Yardbirds came to me. Wayne Fallon, the other most musical kid at school, and I formed a cabal around the Beatles. This was great because the friendship was a strong one and he was both popular and aloof, the association proved fruitful. I was promoted to having my retorts to the herd heard. They didn't always win the moment but they met the air.

When the Beatles waned a tad (it took months) the next step for me was Zeppelin. I'd already immersed myself in II and III and it was long past time to get that grey green sleeve out from under the turntable and blast the rumpus room walls with it. Well, that copy really had been loved. I got a fresh one from Chandler's and put that on.

I didn't rush to Stairway to Heaven. The thing that really drove me to it was hearing not it but the final track played in full on the radio one night. I sat back from my homework and let it bellow through from my brother's room. After that I had to have it.

Needle on side one. The dull click of the drop and the low frequency presence that precedes the sound. Black Dog. There's a strange clucking sound like a machine warming up. Plant opens with a scream: "Hey hey, Mama, said the way you move. Gonna make you sweat. Gonna make you groove." Less than a breath later the band crashes in with one of rock's most iconic barnstormer riffs. A few more of these and a strange calm wordless harmony the middle 8 kicks in with solid chords and a screaming vocal that seems too high and aggressive to be true. When the voice and band response kick back in there's a shift to the fifth that gets stuck and then goes back to the tonic with a timing glitch that is very hard to work out. It doesn't seem to be about anything but a screaming concupiscent id but that's not such a bed job if you can get it. Decades later a flatmate shared her altered lyrics to this one: "I don't know but I been told, a three legged woman aint got no hole." I struggle not to hear that now.

Rock and Roll. Every band in the seventies had a song called Rock and Roll. There was meant to be a distinction between Rock and Roll and Rock. Rock was meant to be the progressive heavier end of Guitar Band World. A seventies band called a song Rock and Roll to do a fifties style twelve bar with seventies style excess. It was a joke but, if done well, it could also be listenable. Zeppelin's take is blistering. A huffing drum intro is broken by a guitar riff on the third and seventh and when Plant comes screaming in with, "Been a long time since I rock and rolled," you know it's not going to let up. Page and Jones provide a huge sustained power figure between the drums and the vocals and the stop start end of every verse gets funnier and tenser each time. Goofy made strong.

After this loud start we fade into the light tinkle of mandolins for The Battle of Evermore, a folky evocation of Tolkein's Lord of the Rings. Plant's in his very appealing head voice register and sings a lovely modal tune about the Queen of Light. Then fading in from under his voice is the pure light of Sandy Denny's, clear and cooling: "dance in the dark of night..." There is a constant interplay between the voices with Plant easily matching Denny's notes and blending them as enjoyably as he did decades later with Alison Kraus. If you were lulled into thinking that this would be a limping acoustic number you would be surprised and delighted to hear the way Plant incorporates his signature scream and how Denny matches that without breaking a sweat. I don't love this song but I'll leave it on if its starts if only for the vocal interplay.

Then the acoustic arpeggio starts and we're back at the stairway. I had heard it before this new copy and at that stage loved it, feeling it transcended its hippy dippy beginnings to form a contemporary paean to nature and life in the universe. Also, I loved the clever way that the vocal melody stayed essentially the same even though the chords under it went from a melancholy minor key progression to an epic major key one. I loved the electric twelve string that played through most of it up to the fanfare that turned into the solo that gave way to the hard screaming rock of the coda which left the solo plaintive voice for the song's final phrase. Now for some elephant shooting.

There is a lawsuit being brought by the survivors of Randy California to claim co-credit and of course money from Led Zeppelin. This stems from a perceived similarity between the opening minor chords of the first section of Stairway to Heaven and a song by Spirit called Taurus.

Here are some facts:

Zeppelin shared a bill with Spirit in the late 60s while touring America and while not definite it is quite likely that Page heard the Spirit track.

Both songs feature a progression in A minor that features a descent by semitones from A to F. The tempo and scansion of the changes is the same up to a point though the arpeggios are not.

Both songs feature a section that ventures into the relative major key of C.

However:

The two songs use of the A minor descent resolve completely differently. Page goes from F major to A minor. Spirit goes from A minor down the scale to F, D major, A minor G major. Thus.

Spirit's venture into C takes an appealing but very basic route and does not resemble Stairway to Heaven's major key sections to any damning extent.

Most of Stairway to Heaven is in the progression that starts with C major.

Taurus is an instrumental but contains none of the material that comprises Plant's vocal melody.

The contested section accounts for seven seconds of a ten second sequence. The sequence is played five times in the space of two and a quarter minutes and is never repeated after that in Stairway to Heaven which then goes to the major key sequence, the fanfare and coda which account for the six remaining minutes. So eight minutes plus for the whole thing and the incompletely similar progression times five adds up to thirty-five seconds ... out of eight minutes.

Sorry, there's more: descending by semitones while a single minor chord is playing is an old composition technique which was not invented by Randy California. Go and listen to My Funny Valentine or a very large number of songs from the jazz age to hear what I mean. Led Zeppelin are charged with lifting a song that only resembles theirs in a seconds-long section that many other people had also used before. I cry bullshit.

If you can, load both pieces into a multitrack sound editor (Audacity is free), line them up so the minor chord progressions start at the same time and see how quickly it gets discordant. If you still think, after hearing that, that there's plagiarism going on it's probably because you like the idea.

The problem is complicated by the history of this band who wrongly attributed other people's songs to themselves from their very first album. In most of those cases what they added was immense but in all cases where the derivation is substantial the act of claiming the music was wrong. There are details here and there on other albums but these thin to insignificance as soon as the band begins writing for itself full time and establishing its compositional personality. Really, when you get down to accusations of plagiarism based on the use of a few well worn blues phrases you're at the bottom of the barrel.

Oh, the guy at the centre of this who had decades to bring his own lawsuit died in 1997. May he rest in peace, if his old bandmates will let him.

Here's the thing about this for me. While I can live through this song with pleasure these days I really have no remaining affection for it. Some pleasant textures and tones come through but it isn't the anthem it was.

Side two.

A thick sounding Fender Rhodes piano plays a bell like phrase long enough to absorb before Page reinforces it with a fuzzed up Les Paul and Bonzo smashes in. The vocals are a multitracked Plant in odd harmony. A kind of  brighter chorus section ensues with some fine screamy vocals. The forward motion is deliciously relentless. Page takes a multitracked guitar solo that is both joyful and brief. It seems to be about a drug bust or maybe just the kind of post-hippy culture the band found in America in the late 60s. Plant ends over the verse groove through a tremolo and fadeout with a lovely phrase in high scream: "I really don't o-ow o-ow o-ow...."

Four Sticks has elements that I really like: experimental song structure; a textural mix going from metal riffing to sudden string sections and open chord acoustic guitar. A screaming Plant is mixed low and grabs of strange lyrics like crying pines and owls and rivers running dry. There's a dark panic running through the entire piece. The mix of rock riff and eastern sounding washes creates a tension. Something strange and horrifying has befallen the song's narrator and the forces of a dark nature are on his tail. I just wish I liked it better.

Going to California couldn't be more different from this or the song that follows it. A gentle arpeggio guitar starts before a bright and folky mandolin comes in with a major key figure. Plant folds himself out of the music with a tail of travel both physical and metaphyiscal. He ends one verse with the lowest note I've heard from him. Then the bridge turns minor and pained as Plant's vocal shoots several octaves up to deliver a kind of nightmare sequence where the wrath of the gods has nose bleed that floods the land and he cries out for a lifeline. Back in folky major key land (though on a tuned-down acoustic guitar which makes it sound a little strange) and he's still on his quest for a woman who's never been born. He tells himself it's not as hard, hard, hard as it seems in a pained high voice. Fade out in a light choral sunset. I like rather than love but I leave it on and enjoy it if I hear it.

The next song is the last and the one I knew warranted the purchase of my own copy, a fresh and crackle free one. When the Levee Breaks starts with the biggest drum sound in history. If you set a film of a levee breaking in slow motion you would want this music to go with it. The power and destructive force are only widened and worsened when the bluesy grind comes in after two bars. The giant drums continue beneath it like the cracking earth. A harmonica wails in pain overhead like a bird witnessing the end of the world. The blues grind gives way to a major mode but equally strong upward progression. After a breath's pause, Plant comes in with a low scream about the levee breaking and life ending. Suddenly, a complete change happens when all the chords all turn major and Page comes in with a thick and enormous slide figure before Plant in a beautiful scream delivers
a soaring and oddly jubilant middle eight which then plummets back to the grind again. After another pause he starts the last verse with despair: "Cryin' won't help ya, prayin' won't do ya no good..." When we get back to the major figure it very strangely fits in with the bluesy grind. Bonzo's rolls and crashes get more apocalyptic and powerful as the inundation gorges on, Plant screaming from the sky above and the harmonica wailing in futile prayer. As the destruction moves forward there is an unbalancing shift in the panning of major instrument streams as they flow from left to right and back again like the tide that is consuming the land, glacial, stoppable. Finally, we end with a straining metal slide and harmonica wail before a single babble on electric guitar (similar to the opening warm up sounds) and it's just us and the flooded land. Man, if Kashmir weren't so great this would be my favourite Zeppelin song.

I read someone on an ol' time usenet group say that when he listened to Levee he wanted to become the music and I know what he meant. The force coupled with the huge textural banquet make this an irresistible piece. But that goes for the entire album because the main feature of this album is range: we start and end with maximum force but between those points we take a long and eventful journey through landscapes urban and distant, identifiable and mystical. All the way to the apocalypse it's a fun ride that might well have served as a last album of a band that reached a peak unmatched by any of their rivals.

John Paul Jones said that after this album no one compared them to Black Sabbath. Many consider it to be the band's apex. For me it's one peak before the next two albums which form their own peaks. After that, the band's problems mounted and affected its output with increasing impact resulting in two mediocre discs and an outdated and sloppy live double. For most of the first year of my being into rock music of any sort this was the latest Zeppelin album known to me. I hadn't heard the earliest but from II to III to IV there was a clear line of progress in the sound and sophistication of the music and presentation. On that...

Led Zeppelin II has a jokey confidence to its cover which well compliments the contents and the brash mix of cock rock and exploration. Led Zeppelin features a heavily treated image of the exploding Hindenberg and the music is appropriately massive and incendiary. The second album's cover art repeats the image but it's highly abstracted, a white negative image of the shape emerging in the background from a fiery golden explosion. III blended pop idolatry with a kind of folky utility which is what you got inside.

IV's cover is a gatefold. The image on the front is of a wall with the paper cracked and peeling. In the centre is a framed picture of an old man bending severely under the weight of a huge bundle of sticks. Folding it out reveals that the wall is from a party demolished house and the view past it is of a lush garden, houses of a similar era to the one at the front and in the distance a massive towerblock which bears a sinister character as though everyone's future will be marching toward the veiwers and crushing them if they don't join it. The greenish khaki overcast affecting the whole image adds to the sickness of the thought.

The reverse view, folded out, is a drawing of a hermit holding a lantern at the top of a rocky peak. In the distance is a village and, when you find him far below, is a young pilgrim climbing toward the sage. The Jimmy Page fantasy sequence from The Song Remains the Same film is an enactment of this scene (possibly why it's the only one that works). It's an intriguing picture. It has little direct relevance to anything on the album but makes sense if you know the band's career by this third year of existence into the top spot globally, largely through American tours might point to a kind of pilgrimage. The band were right to leave it unexplained though. They had nothing if not mystique.

Inside is a khaki paper sleeve. On one side is a track list and acknowledgements as well as four odd looking symbols. The font is very olde worlde, all alchemy and candle wax. On the other side the lyric of Stairway to Heaven is printed in that font. There is an old engraving in the lower left corner of a Durer-like image of a scholar with a book. Neither title nor attribution appear here. When you take the record out of the sleeve the Atlantic label bears only the name of the band and the four symbols from the inner sleeve.

In a few of these posts I've gone on about all the Hipgnosis cover art and how dated I find it but in this case there's a real thing going on. After the third album's Led Zep for teens scrapbook wheel and the ever hostile music press chided them for sailing on hype the band decided to package the next one with no hype at all. No mug shots, no band name, no title, just a mysterious sleeve, strange centrepiece drawing, a quartet of symbols and the name only on the record label. No hype at all.

Well, the record company made sure that no one walked past it and plastered the media with the fact of the cover's plainness and low profile approach until that built into its own hype and the band were slugged with a charge of arrogant pretension. Can't win. Then again, I bet they felt like abject losers when the sales figures rolled in and the next mega tour of the USA started. But both are true: it's very daring and very hypey. The sense of solid mystique crafting is impossible to ignore.

Ok, so it's grade nine and I'm still thirteen. Wayne Fallon, Peter Broadstock and I have made it through the school gate undetected. We're not wagging it, it's lunch time, but you're meant to stay on the grounds. We're heading to the milk bar a few blocks away for hot chips. Wayne smirks when I call the guy behind the counter "sir" as though he was a teacher. We stroll back to school, heading for the cover of the trees near J-Block. But when we reach the gate something's different. I can't remember when it started or what stopped it but for a while we were allowed to play records in the music room and put them through the PA. Mostly this was girl crap like Billy Don't Be a Hero or Afternoon Delight but today its: "hey hey, mama, said the way you move ..." It's Black Dog. It's BIG BAD BLOODY BLACK DOG. The riff kicks in with the drums and guitars and screaming voice and it's like the stone tablets of the elders falling to the ground. It's like - It's like nothing I can form a thought about because we're already running towards it. It's so loud. It's like they're playing live. The whole eastern oval is being assaulted by this giant music. When we get to the music block we get a good position right between the tannoys. The big black tide of sound hits us. I notice without gawping that Dora Earl and her friend Jan Carstairs are here, too. They're sitting on the steps of H-Block and can see us. And there we are, dipping our hands into our paper parcels, eating contraband chips that everyone can see as the biggest music in the solar system is turning the air into stone. None of us know it but this is almost as good as girls.