1967 at 50: THE BEATLES - MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR

The return of my brother at the end of 1975 changed my life. Not the person as much as the suitcase of records he brought with him (along with an adoring entourage). The year I made the sacrifice of adopting teen culture and adding rock music to the things that were mine was mostly fed with Countdown and local radio. That changed immediately. That afternoon I broke the stillness in the wake of Michael's gang heading off to some neighbourhood hedonism by immersing myself in Led Zeppelin III. I've already described that in the article about that album. But the other golden vein he brought was Beatles and one of the first things I did was find this album.

It must have been the cover with its bright yellows and reds, harlequin stars and the band in animal costumes. Taking it out of the sleeve protector it fell open to reveal the storybook in the gatefold. As I pored over the photographs of the Beatles on the bus, in uniform, as facepainted wizards, I put the disc on and listened as I read the odd text illustrated with odder cartoons. And the trip burst forth.

Roll up roll up for the Magical Mystery Tour! Step right this way!

A big brassy opening gives way to the brassy harmonies singing roll up rollup for the Mystery Tour. Everything drives forward, the big piano chords, the cantering drumming and variations in the shouting exclamations. Less than three minutes of sheer joy. But then it ends on a strange melancholy piano fading through a kind of jazz groove.

The mood continues for the next song, Paul's Fool on the Hill with its tale of an outsider who's happy to be strange regardless of the mockery of the straight world. Paul's vocal can sound strained at times but the sincerity of the song is commanding. Odd textures and colours, branting baritone harmonicas, electronic swishes and a rude off pitch recorder add a schoolyard touch to it. I didn't need the illustrations to show me the scene of this one, lowered myself into it and watched, feeling like the weirdo in the title, home.

Flying is the most underrated Beatles song. It's an instrumental and short but it starts with big electric guitars with amp tremolo that take you up and lift you to the sky. A gentle acoustic playing thirds gleams over this and then we're under way. Organs, oboes and eventually the band's voices play the lovely upwardly moving theme. The motion is smooth and shimmering, a perfect summer day's flight. It ends in what I would soon learn was a mellotron playing odd phrases which like the end of the title track seem to just emerge from underneath the track.

Blue Jay Way. A bright organ chord. A swirling eastern melody meanders over. George's mournful vocal immersed in a flanger continues the tune as a giant bass thumps underneath. There's a gap between verse and chorus which stays in  the east as George moans "please don't be long". Phased drums and backing vocals and grief stricken cellos drive this one through a kind of lysergic sludge. I had never heard atmosphere like this in any music. It's both sinister and sad, alone in the kind of night we had in Townsville when the single sheet of cloud was lighted to a purple mud by the suburban lights and the air thickened with the humidity.

A bouncing singalong by Paul is next with Your Mother Should Know. Clear and beautiful vocal harmonies and a minor key with a break on the piano and organ that had the sound of something from a mystery movie. It doesn't stick around but it's solid and strangely moody, ending on a vocal chord with a groaning tambura trailing out.

Next came the one that scared me: I am the Walrus. A few bars of broken chords on an electric piano are swamped by a thick string section playing another eastern sounding motif. Some rattats on the snare and everyone's in with the same kind of thumping machine as on Blue Jay Way. But John's vocal is acidic, distorted like a fuzz guitar as he spits out strange lines: "I am he as you are he and you are me and we are all together. See how they run like pigs from a gun. See how they fly. I'm crying ..." The momentum grinds on as though the nonsense of the words have the most earnest meaning. The second "I'm crying" is repeated in a lightly broken falsetto which sounds like he really is crying. Second chorus shuts down as a variant of the opening string figure plays druggedly over a small cacophony of laughter and goonish talking. The middle eight is about rain and sunshine and is drawn back into the chorus. The final verse takes the images further into disgust and violence and when the final chorus is trudged through the fade out driven by the violins scraping upwards, a semitone at a time until it seems they can no longer hold the rhythm and grind down into long single notes until they reach the top of their gamut. Meanwhile a group of monsters start chanting something like hop frog hop frog everybody's hop frog over and over and then other voices, spoken start bleeding in talking about burial and murder. Until you know that that last detail was a BBC performance of King Lear and the chant was "got one got one everybody's got one" the fade out sounds like the ghastly fulfilment of all the words before it which to my suggestive mind might well have been a black magic spell. I actually worried about that and wondered if that's what got me listening to it again and again.

This brings us to the end of the sequence as originally released in the UK as a double single with the booklet in a gatefold in a miniature version of the one that came out in the US and I was playing here. The US release for once actually went one better than the UK one. Side two was made up of the non album singles of that year and is rich from first to last.

Bashing straight into Hello Goodbye, Paul's big bright tenor rides on shining piano chords and swishing percussion. The band comes in with a solid electric guitar arrangement, massive kick drum sound, phased backing vocals, a strange druggy sounding string section and blasts of delay on the vocals. Not much to the lyric. I say this and you say the opposite. The song ends then bursts into a coda with a nonsense chant that sounds Hawaiian. Pure joy.

If I am the Walrus scared me Strawberry Fields continued to terrify me with its dreamlike slow motion and dark sounding vocal. It was at once tangy sweet and unsettling. The words seemed similar to the Fool on the Hill where the narrator was happy to hide away in a treehouse in a place where there was nothing to get hung about. I took hung to mean hanged. And then there was the fade out with the wobbly dissonant flutes and black thunderous drums and the murmuring words at the end. My sister Marina whoalso returned to the fold for those holidays told me that Strawberry Fields was a brand of LSD which soon after intrigued me but then just worried me. And the murmuring at the end under the weird flutes was John telling us he'd buried Paul. Then out came the Paul is Dead clues which fascinated and creeped me out. The bulk of the song was irresistable musically but I always lifted the needle before the horror of the fade out could start.

Penny Lane like Hello Goodbye starts with the vocal straight away. This was one I knew from before and loved to hear with its big glittering brass section and Bach trumpet. The loping bassline, bright vocal and gleaming harmonies catch me to this day. The textures that could vary from the trail of a bell or vibrating wine glasses fused into a whole that seemed discovered under marble rather than built. I strongly appreciated the classical connections.

Baby You're a Rich Man start with a chugalug rhythm and a strange oboe twiddling wriggly melody. The harmonies of the vocal are in falsetto and trade with Lennon's fuller lead vocal and the football shout of the chorus. The song seemed to be about what life was like as a famous person who could get or do anything they wanted. Didn't really leave an impression but I never skipped it.

All You Need is Love, on the other hand, I would put on to hear it by itself. Beginning with a rousing brass section playing La Marsellaise the band sing Love love love over a harpsichord and lower strings. John's vocal is half spoken and speaks of inevitability and the order of things before shouting All you need is love. A tiny guitar solo plays the verse melody and the chorus again. The last verse and chorus are eventually swamped by a mounting series of interpolations that add a crowd to the fadeout chant ot Love is all you need, from Paul yelling "everybody" singing the chorus of She Loves You, the saxes playing Glenn Miller riffs and a sense of barely contained but happy chaos.

I had to listen many times before I started appreciating just how much thinking and work had gone into these tracks. In those months where I heard a lot of The Beatles and Led Zeppelin in one go, without any sense of timeline forced me to approach all of it as music, rather than music made by famous people the way it came across on Countdown. All of this consolidated in my head and joined what I knew of J.S. Bach, Mozart or Elgar. This is what, I assumed, the Beatles had began with, these orchestrations and intricate textures and colours. I also assumed (Hey, I was thirteen and listening to rock music closely for the first time) that they played all the instruments or used synthesisers. I had the same absurd confidence in the cure-all power of electronic instruments as some people have in plastic surgery, believing they could solve any problem in their field. Later when I heard the early Beatles I was able to marvel all over again how they'd developed so rapidly.

Until then I had the odd naive booklet with its strange druggy cartoons and the full colour pages of a movie that I expected was like any movie I saw at the cinema with plotting and acting and, in this case, singing and playing. Over the years I read enough to learn that it was poorly regarded and it wasn't until decades later that I saw it on VHS with a near constant wince of embarrassment as the band demonstrated repeatedly as though it had been planned as torture, how they had no idea of how to make a film. Yes, I suckered up and bought the blu-ray with its high def image and sound and I'm softer on the film than I was and am happy to leave it on while I draw until the songs happen.

But it was this album rather than Sargent Pepper that convinced me of The Beatles' musical power and suggested a creative bar placed high. A few months after that I was won over by Queen's A Night at the Opera which, it struck me, was made to the same standards of musicianship and composition and cohesion that Magical Mystery Tour had (despite itself, as I was to learn) and continued the timeline of making records to that industrial standard. And then two years later I was jammed into the big angry noise of punk. but even then, while I was soon to donate my Zeppelin and similar albums to my brother on leaving Townsville I kept all the Beatles ones and when those appeared in new technological packages (CD and then the remasters) I always bought this one first.

1967 at 50: DISRAELI GEARS CREAM

If you learned how to play guitar enough to play along to records in the '70s you knew about blues. Well, you knew about three chords in twelve bars that just kept circling around until the song ended. What you didn't know about were names like Robert Johnson or Howlin' Woolf because no one around you had any records by them because no one else knew about them either. What you played along to was pasty dialled boys from the south of England who did the three chord thang as though they'd come up with it. If you looked at the names in the brackets by the titles you saw a lot of difference and noticed that the few brackets that held names you knew belonged to some of the people on the record sleeve. You also knew that those songs sounded the same as the ones by the strangers. Later, when everything widened out, you might hear the real thing and if you weren't as disappointed with it as you were that wine didn't taste like strong cordial you are lying or you are rare. If you heard that stuff first it would have been different: Led Zeppelin's heavier take, The Stones' more opiod one or Hendrix's interstellar one would have sounded like exploration and Willie Dixon like a pioneer. But it didn't happen that way.

I first knew Cream as a band name only and it took years to finally hear the music. Eric Clapton in the mid-'70s was already a household god and you were meant to speak his name reverently even though at that time he just sounded old and flavourless to you. So when I borrowed Disraeli Gears from my brother Greg to see where the reputation came from I was gobsmacked.

A quick unceremonious titter on the drums and the razor sharp riffs of Clapton's overdriven Gibson with another lead overdubbed from the wailing corner of the fretboard. And it's Clapton's own falsetto that changes everything. I had heard at that stage too many hearty throated shouters sounding like note perfect eisteddfod acts and assumed all white blues was like that. In fact, I thought they all sounded like Jack Bruce from the few Cream songs I had heard on the radio. But Clapton keeps it in the eerie register of his lead licks, howling about a girl possessed by a wicked Strange Brew of forces. For once the coldness of white boy blues finds its purpose as a kind of whimper of fear like a dark ages monk seeing the demon in every village girl. Not siding with the monk but I can hear what he sees.

Sunshine of Your Love thrusts into gear as a distorted riff, scaffolded on the drums and given a banshee wail on the lead guitar. Jack Bruce's clear masculine vocal singing rises about his own dawn approach to the vessel of his lust. Clapton comes in, almost identical except that it becomes easy to tell Bruce's higher skill from his, and the two trade lines, seemingly about the same girl. A little poetry here but really it only has to sound and feel like sex itself. Here enters Ginger Baker's drumming which goes well against the norm by putting great expression on the toms and letting the odd breath through as the "waiting so long" lines tighten their grip. Clapton's howling solo appears from the shadows, not a million notes but a few well chosen and made of indestructible tone.

World of Pain kicks straight in without a riff but with a barely breaking guitar tone playing chords that seem to slowly shimmer. In fact it's a mix of very slight chord picking on the rhythm and restrained twanky wah on the lead, feeling both heavy and buoyant at once. Clapton's vocal in mournful through the lyric about trees in a stifling city and moves through a dirge of isolation in a pitiless world. Jack Bruce comes in for the chorus with a falsetto that has a strange church like sonority. Again the solo, slight and elegant emerges rather than storming in is almost indistinguishable from the vocals. The fade is similarly busy but stately, a procession of subdued wails and a kind of restless march on the tom toms.

Dance the Night Away kind of sounds like a latin seduction song but the words and instrumentation take a more psychedelic turn. For starters Clapton starts with the band on an electric twelve string (in fact a Fender XII) with a gorgeous minor key arpeggio. Jack Bruce joins in with Clapton in a falsetto harmony vocal for the rest of the song. But instead of seduction it's a kind of self-annihilation piece. After love oblivion which rings in with a strange tremolo solo from Clapton that ricochet's off the Byrds more recent outings and seems to soar through the grey heavens the narrator is imagining, like a mandolin possessed by Syd Barrett. Baker's drums again provide a tidal rise and fall without resort to stock fills or too much simple time playing. We lift with the song and if we listen we wonder why we should. But we do.

Next up is, we have to admit it, is the Ringo song. Blue Condition is a hardworking electric blues track that even I would happily hear  rather than just leave on but there's something in the way. Ginger Baker's vocal drags the entire exercise down through the floorboards. It's not his Lunnon accen'. You want to hear that working listen to the Kinks or the Small Faces. It's that he sounds as though he could'n care less about what always sounds like a well considered lyric. And he was the writer. He can't even sing his own blues. One of the extended releases of this album includes Clapton's vocal but while it is much more engaging it still falls. Maybe Ginger sang it at a practice, suggested it to Eric who didn't want to overdo it so perpetuated the absent mood of the vocal for evermore. Perhaps it's also how anyone who ever covers it also performs it. I suppose there are valid arguments for why it should be such an affectless drone but all I hear is a powerful electric blues betrayed by what sounds like indifference.

The old side two begins with restless wah wah chords  an ominous bass figure and a snakepit swirl of ride cymbals. Jack Bruce's dramatic room temperature vocal starts us off with images of legend and epic. Trhen the band kicks the door down with a weaponised wah wah descent from Clapton in unison with the bass. Over this ground Bruce's huge manly vocal lifts an octave as the band drives hard below. Repeat. That might seem dismissive given the classic status of this track but really with a band at such a peak repeating really means doing it more intensely on the next go. That's what happens here, artist Martin Sharp's Homeric lyric about Odysseus and the sirens, and travel and the epic of a life led boldly. Sharp designed the cover for the album, a psychedelic collage of mugshots, wings and fantastic creatures whose looks border between legendary and sinister. Sharp had the lyric which he showed to Clapton at the pub. Clapton folded it up, took it home and this song came forth. Still one of my favourites from the era with its urgent wah wah, big vocal and Bakers unconventional drumming.

SWLABR crashes to life with a riff made of bass in unison with an extremely distorted guitar. The tight riffing and rhythm and Bruce's wailing vocal charge to the stop/starts where he brings the psychedelic sexuality of the verses to a head with the dadaist image of a painting with a moustache or a rainbow with a beard. Is it sex? Is it tripping on acid? Is it sex while tripping on acid? With all the edibly crunchy guitar sounds and tongue-out vocal, do you care? Just turn it up.

We're Going Wrong begins with a slightly distorted electric 12 string playing a four chord sequence of immediate solemnity as Baker plays something between a funeral march and a medieval basse dance on the toms. Bruce comes in shifting from head voice to falsetto with a lament so plainly stated it feels like raw experience. Near the halfway mark Clapton enters with a banshee wail solo with his famous woman tone, a distorted guitar sound played high on the fretboard in emulation of a woman singing, in this case a woman singing a funeral dirge. It continues when Bruce's vocal returns, even more plaintive and hurt in full falsetto, answering his cries with its own pain until it seems too intense to continue and the song is brought to an end with a oddly out of place blues riff played in unison by bass and guitar as Baker puts the track to bed with some whispering cymbals.

Outside Woman Blues is a Clapton-penned blues in emulation of his influences. The lordy woman lyric is elevated by some judgement of the possessive and adulterous man at the centre. Otherwise, it's really a showcase for Clapton's layered guitars, heavily distorted but playing unison thirds and fifths in soloing and the strong riff of the piece. The song ends with a deftly rendered groan that could have come off any of the records he was so inspired by. Is it Clapton himself? Jack Bruce? It's Eric's vocal for the rest of the song but the styling is so studied and precise it's hard to say.

Take it Back is standard runkachunkasplunka boogie with harmonica and Clapton's wailing tone (and more electric 12 playing rhythm). An audience makes itself heard but sounds like it's in the studio. The rollicking gait of the piece obscures its anti conscription  message. Musically unloved by me but I'll leave it on.

Mother's Lament rounds off one of the most innovative electric blues records of its era with a throwaway joke song with wincabley forced Cockney accents, barber shop harmonies, carefully sloppy and pub piano playing. When I was a kid I loved this bit and would often play it again. These days I'll only leave it playing if I'm doing the washing up or something that would make it difficult to switch it off.

This was a peak for the power trio and the result of a timeline of decision and indesicion, and trial and error, that managed to find them concentrating on providing a record of their strengths as a musical unit aside from their spectacular live shows. Instead of following the culture by insisting on writing everything themselves they collaborated with anyone who brought good things to the table and fashioned songs that could exist without their playing and arrangements. Jimi Hendrix's debut album suffered from shortcomings in composition that, while absent from subsequent releases, makes Are You Experienced a lesser beast today than Electric Ladyland. But Cream found their own path in a kind of open architecture and an appreciation of the difference between what makes a good show and a good album. This record still sounds very, very fresh.

1967 at 50: SOMETHING ELSE BY THE KINKS

Studio chatter in the background ("this is the master") Dave Davies murmurs, "nice and smooth".  A backwards count-in over backwards high hat and the song begins. "Fa fa fa fa fa fa fa faaaah." The first thing you notice is the dramatic lift in audio quality. Pianos sound full, the guitars have rounded tone and sit perfectly in the mix as do all the vocals (though they can get a little drowned at times). The contextual mini soundscape that opens the whole album seems to telling us to pay attention as we're really doing it this time. And do it they do.

Something Else marks the exit of Shel Talmy and the entrance of Ray Davies as producer. If you want to mark the difference just listen to the first two tracks. David Watts (by Ray) has the full sound of a record of its time and the single Death of a Clown (by Shel) sounds a strangled and overdriven. As promised in the previous set, Face to Face, the band stand strongly behind Ray Davies, his ever improving songwriting and, unlike almost all the other releases I've written about for 1967, the result is that the record sounds like a band is playing it. Yes, there's a harpsichord here and processed vocals there but there's a real wholeness in the sound that offers a kind of honesty when compared to the likes of Pepper or Sell Out. Those are great albums but this is a very true one, as well.

David Watts bops along with schoolboy cheek, shouted "Oi"s,  clicketty rhtyhm guitars, rich piano and some really fine singing. Watts is the head boy at the school, an overachiever making his path straight from the prefecture to Oxbridge to a law firm and the House of Commons. Ray wishes he could be like David Watts but it's pure unrefined sarcasm: David Watts has it all and just keeps getting it without any come uppance because those of his "pure and noble breed" never get one of those. We all want what David Watts has but we're all glad we'll never be him, as well. This rollicking joyful hymn of hate is infection supreme with its viral "fa fa fa fa" chorus that sounds like a posh stutter or just some vocable you might hear among the small talk at an occasion.

As the knees up fades to silence we hear out of the dark a echoed piano so sad that it's hard to believe it's playing a major scale. It gets almost to the end of its phrase before an acoustic guitar crashes a chord riff down to the start of the song. Released as a solo single by Dave Davies, Death of a Clown has always impressed me with its singalong energy and effortlessly dark atmospherics. From the schoolgirl la la las of Rasa Davies to the bass glissando on the piano in the verse about the fortune teller to the light handed reverb and sparse band track this one works every time. I'll admit it might be difficult to acquire a taste for Dave's strained Dylanesque vocal but that too will happen. Both raucous and eerie a miniature masterpiece.

The envy in Two Sisters is not the glorious sour grapes of David Watts but as delicate and poignant as the harpsichord intro courtesy of Nicky "Session Man" Hopkins. It's really just a vamp on one minor chord but its twin identifiers of old order and sadness are unmistakable. Single and sensational Sylvilla looks into her mirror in her luxury flat while across town Percilla looks into her washing machine and thinks of her jealousy of Sylvilla's freedom. Percilla feels imprisioned by her life. In frustration she casts off the things that have come to identify her as a wife and mother and the homebody sister, the dirty dishes and women's magazines go into the bin, giving her some elation and a taste of long gone freedom. Then in a vision of what matters to her the most she understands what is really valuable to her and her jealousy vanishes. Many is the commentary that has this song as a veiled account of Ray Davies' own envy of his brother's cock of the walk lifestyle in Swinging London and even if it's no more than fancy on our part it still carries a sting. Ray was able to write his own seething jealousy into a pair of characters so lifelike you could cast them (Hannah Gordon as the prim Percilla and Suzie Kendall as the wild and vain Sylvilla). It's a British '60s new wave film packed into a few minutes and commands a warm smile.

No Return folds a dark slice of grief into a gentle bossa nova with minimal arrangement, high hats on the kit, shakers, bass and a single acoustic pulsing quietly. The narrator lost his first love and now can only think that she has gone. He has friends but feels isolated without any way back, encased in silence. While the similarly themed See My Friends from a few years prior sounds as despairing as its subject with an insistent drone of constant loss this gives us an almost playful contrast between the late night cocktail throb of the music and the emptiness of the emotion in the lyric. The lines end on ninths or sixths leaving an open sound as the harrowing certainty of the realisation repeats. Open and closed. Open and closed. Exactly how a bad breakup can leave you.

Harry Rag brings us back to the musical hall Kinks wiv a knees up ode to lighting up a gasper. Not much more to it than that: let the world do its worst as long I've a ciggie to get through it. A bright and loud snare rolls a marching pattern under the grind of minor key guitars and thumping bass landing somewhere between Kurt Weill and a chorus line of Pearly Kings. Utterly enjoyable every time.

Tin Soldier Man looks forward to the more arch style of later albums as a pentatonic melody borne on a redcoat brass band describe uniformity, the basic unit of the rat race, a middle class functionary who might as well be clockwork. I don't get much more out of it than this as the points keep coming around but the playing is great chunky Kinks with a cheeky vocal from Ray. We'd hear this developed more in later songs like Victoria which sound more confident but this is a fine start.

Situations Vacant looks back to the satirical tales of the previous album. Suzy and Johnny are happy enough with their lot until his mother bears down on him to improve himself which he does by leaving his lifelong job to look for something in the City until he and Suzy are ruined and separated and Johnny's mother's real ambition is realised. Lovely thunderous guitar from Dave and the band in strong form lift this side closer way above filler. Ray keeps chucking in little jazzy or showtune style moments like the coda to this song, something else he'd develop more fully in the following year's masterpiece and onward.

Side two opens with the flipside of the Death of a Clown single, Dave Davies' Love Me till the Sun Shines. A catchy chorus and loping beat keep this one rolling. He doesn't care what she does as long as she does what it says in the title. Some nice diversions in the middle eight but this one doesn't have to break ground or dig deep, it's about joy.

Lazy Old Sun begins like a typical Kinks mid-pace rocker but this plummets south from the second line onwards. The summer is overcast or rainy and Ray's getting antsy for  some beams. It's the production and arrangement that do the shining, though. A low growling slide guitar carries the strummed acoustic up the odd chord progression as the middle lines of the verse caterwaul almost atonally from low in the mix, sounding like the fast slow warping of a citizen under the influence of that nasty lysergic stuff. This crawls to a ninth note over a minor chord like a horror movie score and then everything plays the same way for the second verse after a jarringly conventional middle eight. My favourite lines are from the second verse: "When I was young my world was three foot seven inches tall. When you were young there wasn't any world at all." Dissonant trumpets and musical viscosity take this far out of what anyone might have expected of The Kinks and close to Syd's Pink Floyd and certainly what The Beatles were getting up to with the Magical Mystery Tour numbers. It is the only thing on the album that sounds like it comes from its milestone year. As such it jars for the first few listens until its form emerges to the repeat listener and starts feeling like a song (see also the plunge into raving psychedelia that is Mind Gardens on The Byrds' Younger Than Yesterday). Persist and reap rewards.

Afternoon Tea starts out like filler but goes the slightest step over that with a compelling call and response chorus. Boy tells of a girl he used to share routines with. These form the focus of his memories and longing for her. A strident 2/4 beat keeps it just shy of Dixieland as the big melancholy chorus belts out the title.

Funny Face is Dave's third outing on the album and starts with a disjointed rhythm which breaks into a hard 2/4 and a building snare gallop to the chorus and a strange falsetto second section. It sounds like nothing so much as The Kinks trying on a Pet Sounds Beach Boys groove with odd beats and shimmering angelic vocals. It doesn't quite get there but doesn't outstay its welcome either. But, wait a minute: "smudged mascara and pill-shaped eyes" "the doctors won't let me see her"? What is this song about? He's trying to visit her in hospital but can't get past the frosted glass window to see her. Suicide attempt? Plastic surgery? Domestic violence? The music has such a winsome Brian Wilson or Turtles light to it but there's some real nastiness going on in the lyric as though someone didn't tell the director that the murder investigation movie wasn't meant to be a comedy. The effect of the offset is interesting but it still troubles.

Birdsong and Ray comes in over a piano, both pulsing out a single note toll before this suddenly turns into a suave but sad '30s croon about the narrator's lady departing for a yachting holiday in Greece while he flubs about without purpose. It would have some parallels with Davies' own circumstances but it feels more like a jokey take on the trivial problems of the uppercrust. The lovely introduction that sounds like a welcome to a new season soon turns into a feeble voiced complaint.

But at last we come to one of Ray Davies' single song masterpieces. The echoey guitars descend impossibly form a C down to below their range (really using a single guitar note, descending keyboard in a rudimentary application of the shepherd tone) at the bottom of the steps is the instantly appealing pentatonic melody on the guitars encased in that spidery echo, joined by a fresh acoustic guitar bashing out the chords. Ray comes in with Rasa in a slow descant behind him. "Dirty old river must you keep rolling flowing into the night..." The narrator sits at the window of his flat and looks out on the street at dusk near Waterloo Station. He picks people out in the crowd like Terry and Julie who meet outside the tube station on Friday nights. He himself is a shut in, telling himself he has no wish to join the throng and that as long as he can gaze on Waterloo Sunset he is in paradise. Whether we believe him or think he protests too much we can't deny the joy of the stream of his observations and the bursting light of the middle eight "Chilly chilly is the evening time. Waterloo sunset's fine" with its higher vocal, splashes of falsetto harmonies and crashing guitar chords and its fluent transition back to the verse. The closed circuit of the song emphasises the observer's isolation but also his insistence on his contentment. It's sad but it's happy and as soon as it falls into the ringing piano chords and overlapping harmonies in the fade you want to hear it again.

Something Else didn't do well. It emerged in a scene that blazed with paisley and singing rainbows. One record smashed baroque orchestras against sitars while another mixed delta blues with musique concrete. The Beatles soared into the stratosphere with their satin Victoriana pressure suits while Brian Wilson went steadily psycho trying to record the sound of flames. And there were the Kinks who ventured a little out of their playpen but mainly delivered on their promise to make accessible music played by a band you could see at a pub. They just didn't invest and it cost them.

I first heard this album in the 2000s. Apart from the tracks that always made it to the compilation sets I had no idea what to expect. The artwork is of  its time with its art nouveau decorative font and circular portraits of each band member and the title uses a then-current phrase to mean special (I can vaguely remember a tv music/variety show called Something Else which even to my just post toddler mind seemed hokey) as well serving as a self-effacing joke.

That said, this was a progression, it's not like they did an LP of You Really Got Me clones, not only had the songwriting moved forward but the production quality had significantly improved, it was a 1967 album. Ray Davies, though he expressed regret at his production decisions here, proved a good helmsman and in control of his band's sound to everyone's benefit. The singles included here are stellar and even the more closeted experiments make it through and between those there is a flow of good music played well. Why the flop? Who knows? The fabs had got to the point where they could retire from playing live and release an album instead of a tour. The Kinks still had to slog, were still banned from America (which looked good at home as well as improved chances overseas).

From this perspective it sits comfortably between Face to Face with its rumbles of expansion and Village Green with its all out appeal assault on pretty much everyone who hears it. It stands as is but I like to hear Swinging London the way it was on a Monday morning as the tube stations were opening and the market concrete was being hosed down. Tin soldiers jostle on the footpaths, getting to jobs to pay for their tv licences, navvies thanked providence for the existence of Harry rags, Sylvilla and Percilla thought about giving each other a ring, people think about their last breakups which they dream of washing away at the pub, and onward to Friday evening where the throng gathers and moves like a dogless herd outside Waterloo Station over the dirty old Thames, and London's cycle grinds to the end of another week's turn. If there was anyone who might take me through this I would insist it were Ray Davies and crew. And so they did.





Listening notes: I bought this first on CD, a reissue with bonus tracks but for this post I listened exclusively to the remaster from 2011 included in the Kinks in Mono box set. Clean and solid audio quality that sounds a little better than the original vinyl would have. Recommended.

1967 at 50: STRANGE DAYS - THE DOORS

With the debut soaring, supported by a tour and an iconic hit single The Doors entered into the phase that their inheritors in the '70s would know as the difficult second album. But this set fed a culture ravenous for new edges and it was from a band still working through their initial material. Between these two forces you get pure substance with a lot of style. After the rainy day hallucinations and smoggy blues of the first album, this one opens a window on to a nightscape fresh and biting. If you only knew a few of the hits and wanted to try an album, you should start with this one; it's the most consistent and solid they ever got.

Out of the murk comes a tiny Leslied organ snaking down steps into a room filled with a band playing a big minor key groove. As with the first album there is a thick toned Fender bass playing a ground and this time Densmore is matching its arpeggios with thumping tom toms to make a pumping floor both tough and easy. Jim comes in with the title of the song and the whole album: "Strange Days have found us...." His voice seems to come from two different places; one up close and the other from a '60s sci-fi movie set (it's actually the original vocal fed through a Moog synth). His voice is stern and weird at once as he describes bodies exhausted from decadence, presided over by grinning hostesses, abused, confused and used. We run from the day to a strange night of stone. I don't think that stone is druggy. This is a landscape of hedonism and race riots, the America of 'Nam and assassination. The Doors never were a band for flower power.

A jazzy bass figure is joined by a bright arpeggiated pattern on the guitar, coyly shifting on its feet from one minor chord to another as a wolf in leather biker pants sidles up. Whispering percussion enters just before Morrison with his croon:"You're lost, little girl." She's lost but she knows what to do. What that is is not stated but we can guess. A fluid slide solo from Kreiger lifts the middle section with a flirtatious smile and it all repeats. That's all there is to it except that the tension suggested by being lost but knowing the way out celebrated by the croon that might have started as Sinatra-like but which Morrison made his own.

An all-out blues riff from Kreiger, some tack piano from Manzarek, bass and kit and we're in. "Love me two times BAY...beh. Love me twice today...." This is the only track on the album I feel like skipping, though I'll always leave it running. I'm just not really into the rant-na-nana blues that this is in. Granted, there are some great interventions that stop it from the kind of scholarly blandness of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with a huffing stuttered rhythm in the chorus and, yes really, a harpsichord solo that comes in like gangbusters. Not much to it Jim's horny and wants you to know and, you know, tomorrow never comes.

A keyboard figure like the first track starts out Unhappy Girl but this time it climbs before falling again, joined by a piano and featuring a few out of 4/4 bar experiences before the band kicks in with Jim singing about an unhappy girl whose trapped in a prison she made for herself, the opposite of the lost little girl a few tracks back. A short song but a good one for hearing what the band did to create texture, allowing every instrument in a busy arrangement to be heard equally well. Morrison refrains from landing on each verse in a higher intensity for this one, preferring the effect of restraint on the song, he is curiously easy about the girl dying in her own prison. It becomes unsettling.

Winds, backwards echo-ed pianos on dark waves. "WHEN THE STILL SEA CONSPIRES AN ARMOUR!" Horse Lattitudes is all sound effects like screams and thrashing as Morrison yells the words. The story is that he saw an image of a sailing ship throwing horses overboard and wrote the words compulsively. Some commentary claims the opening lines are from Nostradamus. All I know is that I don't really care as the imagery is so strong and the delivery so nightmarish that I never have a problem leaving this on. I imagine a lot of listeners find this jarring, an unwelcome break in the flow but I love how it tears the already quite edgy pop music apart without context or claim of greater concept. It's just there. Also, anyone who thinks that Jim Morrison's poetry was a lot of well turned non-sequiturs might consider how all of these images make internal sense. I can't think of a more effective description of a drowned horse than "stiff green gallop".

A big clean piano announces the tango rhythm of Moonlight Drive. The drums kick in along with Kreiger's spooky slide bites, glowing in the groove. "Let's swim to the moon, uh huh, let's climb through the tide..." Morrison is not the wise debaucher of Lost Little Girl or the cold observer of Unhappy Girl, here, he's the one who offers his hand with a smirk of conspiracy, inviting adventure. There's a strut here but it's a joyful one. His voice rises with each verse until, with the band crashing and wailing around him, he's screaming as he watches her glide. The sophistication in the rhythm, Kreiger's whinnying slide solo and the building force give this three-minuter the feel of something more epic. This was, according to lore, the song that Morrison sang shyly to Manzarek on Venice Beach and fired Ray up so much that it germinated the band. It was held over from the first album and finds its place here very satisfyingly at the end of side one. It fades with the band still firing and Jim murmuring about the oceanside and getting real tight. While there is something a little late '60s about all the other tracks so far this one stands outside of more localised pop history the same way that Hey Jude or Sympathy for the Devil do, focused beyond fashion or its own time.

Side Two begins with the Brecht number. The Whisky Bar song of the first album proved so inspired and popular (and fitting) that they did another for this album except this time they wrote their own. People are Strange starts with a descent through D minor, cheekily missing the second last note to play a fluid 2/4 minor progression on the old Gibson SG as Jim croons: "People are strange, when you're a stranger. Faces look ugly when you're alone." This section and the chorus (though both could be choruses) which starts, "when you're strange faces come out of the rain" are repeated without any development in the lyrics but we get a guitar and then piano solo both of which are full of the gallows-life swagger that Bert and Burt used to stuff the Threepenny Opera fuller than a Thanksgivin' toikey. And it's delicious, strutting and raising more than one big frothy glass to loneliness and obscurity in a cold and hating world. Wonder how that went down at the corner of Haight and Ashbury (actually, probably really well, considering the accounts of anyone who didn't go there for the acid).

Then it's back to dirty sexy R&B. Mine Eyes Have Seen You. This would merge in my memory with Love Me Two Times as a track that just goes past rather than draws me in but it does have its charms like the riff made by a piano and guitar flirting with each other teasingly until Jim comes in repeating the title. He goes from a croon to a big blues shout ending each verse telling of his compulsion on seeing beauty. There's almost no restraint here, he could go all night but there are two images that yet let real poetry in: the fade talks about photographing her soul, memorizing her alleys on an endless roll which draw a lot from the L.A. of fame, flashbulbs and disposal as much as his own screaming lust, and the other image is something that also haunted cyberpunk writer: television skies. Mine eyes see a field of spiky black antennae poking into a low cast sheet of purple grey cloud. It's another piece in the image I have of this album's songs set in a warm overcast night.

An icy minor key arpeggio rings in downward steps as I Can't See Your Face in My Mind begins like a fall of pearls against smoked glass. Morrison croons the title twice over this figure, sounding like he is just discovering this absence. The band kicks in quietly slinky over the more whimsical "carnival dogs" lines but then returns in a consoling mood with a repeat of the opening figure. On so on alternating icy narcissism and a haunting self-doubt strange to him before this moment as he "can't seem to find the the right lie." In the end he tells her he won't need her picture until they say goodbye. This is a disturbing song, at once musically beautiful and emotionally eerie. Used, she is a ghost to him, faceless unless he is given a reminder. She did leave an impression - he's shocked out of doling out one of his lines - but it's not her image, it's something more profound, dark and consuming. The Lothario brought low by one of his casualties. And there he is after the goodbye, in the dark, alone.

A strident mechanical chop of organ chords begins the album's epic. The Doors ended their albums with these so often that it's easier to count the omissions. Waiting for the Sun broke up its Celebration of the Lizard suite into smaller songs (restored in more recent rereleases) but did put the long and judging Five to One which just qualifies. Morrison Hotel just doesn't have one. I'm counting Riders On the Storm as, even though it doesn't have a spoken monologue or breakdown as its length and musical scale qualifies it. On Strange Days it's the showstopper older than the one of the debut (The End): When the Music's Over.

The band comes in after a few Morrisonian encouragements and we strut a little like this with Manzarek's keyboard getting antsy and stuttery, goaded by a restless hihat. Finally, Jim screams and the rest pour out a big noise, Ray doing the same kind of octave bass as on The End using the Fender Rhodes bass keyboard. And Krieger comes up from the depths with a prehistoric growl from his SG and an amp driven so hard the notes are constant and droning, like keyboard pedals. A higher one of these seems to morph into a single organ note that holds over the groove a cleaner guitar settles into a pentatonic noodle on the middle strings and the song begins.

"When the music's over," sings Jim with a kind of relaxed urgency, "when the music's over turn out the light." A sudden build to a tidal roar with Jim screaming over it about dancing on fire with some great momentum from the music which then courses into a screaming banshee version of the earlier growling section, with Krieger's multitracked overdriven guitars sounding like tortured ghosts (it was about half a decade before the e-bow made that tone easy, here, as with Hendrix, it took a lot of work).

After the second storm settles Jim starts in with the monologue. Unlike the one in The End this is mostly sung over Manzarek's thumping keyboard bass and icy organ fills sliced up by Krieger's surly blues vamping. There's no Oedipal section here and the images are a lot freer, fragments, the vision of a prisoner taunted by a girl in the window, the ravaged Sister Earth stabbed in the side of the dawn and a weird voiced mob who want the world. The instrumental bed is not the slinky raga licks of The End but spiky and unfriendly. We're walking through a benighted cityscape, eyes alert to the shadows and the corners, fearsome but beautiful in its alienness. We climb to another screaming tide of sound and then a calm for the last chorus which itself builds to a screaming climax, raging against the dying of the light (or maybe it's the apocalypse, hard to tell). "Un-til the end. Un-til the ... EEEEEEEEND!!!!"

What gets me about this song is how it can easily sound contrived and overdone if you don't think about it as a live piece which is how it was developed and written. See also, The End and both of these are in contrast with the surrealist workout of the later Soft Parade which more artfully passes through lutes and harpsichords, cocktail jazz before getting down and dirty with a blues groove. That sounds contrived (love it, though) but this one sounds controlled for drama. What I mean by that is that the band could get away with all kinds of sloppiness live as long as that core was intact, the stroll through the end times but in the studio it had to work without that context. Isolated, I'm not sure it does, featuring so much of the studied bad boy and well baked psyche rock but if the context is only the rest of the album it's plenty to let this showcase of a strong band fronted by a real poet (good? bad? the poetry rings genuine) and a great sense of aural cinema.

Whether you buy into the legend of Jim or find it the same as I find Nick Cave (not a fan) you can still hold it at arm's length and luxuriate in a set like this for being true to its vision and finding so many honest ways to support it (through musicianship, showmanship and fiery youthful imagination). Though no one declared this a concept album it works as one as we stroll, humming along, from Venice to Mulholland, through the Summer of Love except this is what is looked like and how it felt at three a.m. For its violence of vision and sheer playing muscle this will always be my favourite Doors album.

1967 at 50: THE WHO SELLOUT

It was the first Who album I heard. The first real one. The only other thing I had was the compilation Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy which had come out between Tommy and Who's Next, or between the most they were as a '60s band and the stadium act they became. The comp wasn't what I expected of the band. It swung between proto raunch and twee with a lot of falsetto harmonies. The version of Pinball Wizard (ahem, the original) didn't seem a patch on the one from the movie of Tommy by Elton John. But I did like I Can See for Miles. When I made a cassette of the LP for Wayne at school he brought back his own for me. The album was called Sellout and it was from before Tommy. It had I Can See For Miles on it. Wayne said the whole album was a kind of joke concept, a piss take on commercial radio. I was in. Over chocolate ice cream after school, I let it run all the way through.

A blast of brass and a choir through a modulation effect intones Monday. Blast. Tuesday .... and so on. And then from the silence comes the trumpet of the Apocalypse fading in with a single droning note before the drums kick in and the band crashes to life. Someone (see below) sings about disorientation and going to Armenia City in the Sky as the churning rock drives around him and the trumpet (is it a backward guitar or Entwistle on the French horn?). Pure energy and light.

Rising through the fade are the same cybermen choir as at the beginning. It adds a sinister bent to thing until it plays out as a jingle for "wonderful Radio London. Whoopee."

If you know the Who well enough to try and guess who sings lead in the track be apprised that it is not Keith Moon singing the kind of falsetto he used on the previous album's I Need You. It's the song's co-author Speedy Keen. If you look him up you might stop at the information that he was Pete Townshend's chauffeur. Well, he was also an aspirant songwriter and this was his hell of a break. You'll also hear him on Thunderclap Newman's massive one-off hit Something in the Air.

This isn't trivia; it has a lot to do with the way this album presents itself. First, there's the radio format. Sell Out is a homage and a piss take on the pirate radio stations that were boarding and pillaging the audiences who would otherwise have been doled out tiny morsels of new rock music at a time when the form in the UK was undergoing an explosive upsurge in creativity and innovation the like of which has never been seen again (and was barely imaginable before). It's a celebration but it's a cheeky one. The Radio London ads are genuine and the band do their own and it can be difficult to tell if the first bars of a track are going to be about love or deodorant. One of the consequences of this is that the band itself, surfacing and submerging with the ads, sacrifices its identity. It's no accident that the singer is hard to pick from the opening track. This is radio. It's a rock record. But it's radio. They are the same. Why? Because The Who Sell Out. It's like the Beatles giving one of their most adventurous albums the dismissive title of Revolver and then pretended they weren't even the Beatles but Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Who are going a step further and daring you to buy something that admits it's just more product. The cover art has already told you that, though. Two band members per side in mock ad photo shots with the kind of square-but-there copy about the person and the product. No false fake advertising here.

A real trumpet (Entwistle) barps out a brass band tune as Moon tattoos along beneath. "Wot's for tea, mum?" a high kid's voice that could be anyone in the band. Theme again but with more arrangement. "What's for tea, darling?" intones a posh voice that might be Townshend. Theme with even more arrangement. "Darling, I said what's for tea?" Theme, bigger. "Wass fer tea, dawghtah?" comes a depraved old man voice that could only be Keith Moon. The brass band is by this time massive with trills and booming kettle drums right up to the chorus of "Heinz Baked Beans." It's still funny.

A droning male voice choir from a chaving cream ad: "more music more music more music more music."

Maryanne With the Shaky Hands crashes in but turns out to be an acoustic number somewhere between the Everly Brothers and D.H. Lawrence. If it were in a different language it would sound like a pretty love song instead of a smutty one about a girl who gives handjobs.

A bashing workout on the drumkit with the name Premier Drums! chanted.

A big brassy intro is hijacked by a wobble and stylus scratching.

Odorono begins like a proper Who song with steely clunking chords and a supple descant on the guitar. Townshend comes in like a boy soprano, singing about a cabaret singer who tries to impress a handsome regular and does until he leans in for a kiss. He begs off and beats a retreat. She should've used Odorono. It works much better as a song than a joke with a lovely extension ("she'd seen him there" "it ended there") the second one with a perfectly judged choir behind it. Still, when you can throw material like that away ...

A lovely clear female vocal that sounds like its owner is singing in a mink stole over lush strings: "It's smoooooooth sailing with the highly successful sound of wonderful Radio London."

Tattoo starts straight away, jammed up against the choral ending of Odorono but abruptly different with a spidery acoustic figure (doubled with a rich electric guitar through Vox amp tremolo) that uses fretted and open strings, ingeniously playing an F twice but making it sound like two different chords, which descends and just gets more interesting as it lands on a Bb 9th. Daltrey, himself in choirboy mode, sings of a boy who decides, along with his brother, to get a tattoo to become a man. Their dad beats one because his says "mother" and their mum beats the other for getting a naked woman. The narrator goes through life believing in the power of his tattoos and even marries a tattooed woman. A slighter social commentary than many from Townshend but, considering how the guy in the song is so committed to his individuality, the tale of triumph over trivia works. Plus, it's a winner of a song that the band kept in their live repertoire into the stadium era.

A choir plagally intones: "Radio London reminds you, go to the church of your choice."

As the last note is out the staggered bright guitar riff of Our Love Was starts its chiming descent. The singing of the title over this but not the full chorus that will be also sound like a commercial. But it's a mid-pacer about the rocky waves of love with a doubled guitar riff that first goes down the dark steps but then winds back on itself as the chorus soars along with the lyrics. There's a gorgeous acapella breakout chorus of "love love love long" stretches over the band crashing in again as Townshend glides back in with the verse. Then that gets another boost with a clean slide solo (on the mono original) or a big screamy Jeff Beck sonic missle (on the stereo version). Each verse is differently arranged but not for show. Whether it's a Beach Boys choir or Entwistle's French horn filling the space under the chorus as it sustains to a real ache the new texture feels like an extension rather than flash. It's sheer brilliance, actually.

A quick mashed garble of station ID ending in a huge American male voice: "BIG L." The band provides the winking beer ad "speak easy, drink easy, pull easy" and then the second of two ads that actually got them products from the names dropped in the jingles (see also Premier Drums). "Hold you group together with Rotosound strings."

And then the first song on the album that sounds individual. I Can See For Miles. The band crashes in with huge raunchy chords, epic drums and Entwistle's giant bass. There is a massive landscape before us. Daltrey comes in: "I know you've deceived me now here's a surprise. I know that you have 'cause there's magic in my eyes. I can see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles." The last line seems to lift like an airliner as the chords and vocal harmonies rise through a kind of minor scale complicated by 9ths and 4ths. It sounds as mysterious as Eight Miles High but it just keeps ascending as the the vengeful jilted boy at its centre reaches the clouds. This is a massive rock number for a band that hadn't really got as rough and tough since their first album. The folklore has it that Paul MacCartney read an interview with Townshend who was boasting that the band had just recorded their nastiest, dirtiest track yet. Paul's response was Helter Skelter. Does that really work? The timeline puts about a year between a prerelease interview of a 1967 album and a 1968 Beatles recording session. Maybe Paul just kept it on ice. In any case.

A plinky country band fades in before John Entwistle tells us about the Charles Atlas course with (giant reverb) "DYNAMIC TENSION" will turn you ... into .... (his Boris the Spider growl) "a beast of a man!"

A plonking piano starts I Can't Reach You which settles into a mid-paced rocker with lean clean guitar lines and a Townshend vocal. I always thought it was about an old man and a young woman but now that I finally refer to the lyric it seems more about a failure to connect as a list of differences rolls out, leading to a middle eight in which it finally gets physical but his mind tears them apart. The gentle pace and boy-choir of the final line of each chorus (very Tommy, have a listen). Listened to with this in mind there is a real sense of exhaustion that comes through the pastel candy of the arrangement.

John Entwistle leads the band in another of the originally produced ads. This one is an acne cream and is always funny.

Relax starts with an organ and then glides down into a hippy hymn about relaxing and sharing. Like the opening track it comes close to outright psychedelia. Not much more to say about it from here except I's always surprised to hear it appear after decades of being familiar with it and it's always a pleasant surprise. Groovy.

In Silas Stingy John Entwistle pulls another from his pirate's chest of romper room gothic. The miser man of the title, tormented by the children of the neighbourhood spends so much money protecting his fortune that he goes broke. A funny story but the delivery and descriptions are the key. Over Hammer movie organ Entwistle declares in clipped radio acting: Once upon a time there lived an old miser man by the name of Silas Stingy. He carried all his money in a little black box." Then the Shepherd's Bush choir kicks in with traded lines: "with a big padlock, which was heavy as a rock. All the little kids would shout when Silas was about." Then they go into a lovely round: "Money money money bags (money money money bags) there goes mingy stingy." Two different middle eights and more choruses later and you've got a song so far out of the flow it fits perfectly. I know, I know, Tommy and all but I really wish John Entwistle had written a stage musical at this point. He was blazing.

Straight into Sunrise and some lovely Bossa Nova acoustic from Townshend as his helium falsetto intones with a strong first line: "You take away the breath I was keeping for sunrise." At first the crush like admiration he has for the other makes it seem like another song to her. Then (I should check this) this might well be around the time of discovering Meher Baba and the beginning of his devotional life.While I care not for any religious conviction I am impressed by Townshend's scene setting. It's so cinematic. Big and beautiful sunrise but the sense of the infinite beyond it both dejects him and sends him soaring above the droopy old skinly shape he was. Because it can so easily hide behind a love song he can lend a sense of powerful awe and serve both. It does make me turn back to I Can't Reach You and think on't again.

Rael bursts to life with clashing cymbals and a falsetto choir (if you listen to the stereo version you'll hear Townshend struggling unpleasantly with his pitch). The story is about the red chins in their millions invading Rael home of the narrator's religion. Nothing devotional about this one, it's an odd imaginary scenario whereby the godless Chinese (Red Chins ... erm....) invade the holy land and stir the latter into defensive action. But things take an interesting turn when the narrator says that as the odds are stacked against him doing his best with almost guarantee his failure. He then ponders desertion, giving instructions to a captain to look for signs he will leave to let everyone know whether he shall return or has fled. The several sections that suggest different scenes of characters reminded the contemporary listener of the mini opera from the previous album, A Quick One. Today's audient will receive a first run at Tommy with the big bass and kettle drums of the theme from that opera's tracks Sparks and the Underture. While Rael is never less than listenable it suffers from its own context in place between the brash modernist rockers thrashing out a tale of infidelity and the massive vision of the cosmos inside a traumatised boy who rises to Messianic glory. Rael feels both heavily worked on and unfinished. At nearly six minutes of precious LP side, that's going to be it's own skip recommendation.

Finally, if you leave some of the versions going you'll hear the band or part thereof looped as they say "track records" until it fades. A joke on The Beatles, their own new record label and the phenomenon of cracked records.

The pirate radio concept weakens after a few tracks and as the band take over the kitsch of this with their own ads it starts sounding like the follow-up to A Quick One rather than a blastin' new concept album for the modern world (pop and postpop as pop). The comparison song against song does not favour Sell Out. There is nothing as strong as So Sad About Us or Whiskey Man. The attempted excursion into epic pop loses its identity and settles into an uncompelling instrumental, having none of the violence, musicality or tightness of the previous one. Even within the concept of sellling out and making a record that sounded like commercial radio works uneasily between coyness and satire. And the irritatingly muddy production leaves it well behind the crispness of the previous album and those of its contemporaries like Sgt Pepper or Something Else by the Kinks (which I'll get to soon enough in this series). The overall effect, if listened to as a concept, is patchy at best but mostly a long winded failure winding down from fun to incomprehensible sludge.

However, listen to it as a set of songs and you'll probably enjoy the hell out of it. The great songs (I Can See for Miles or Tattoo) work in or out of context and the flow is fun with the silly mix of real and fake ads. There is an easily visible progression from A Quick One, particularly regarding the humour of it, and from itself forward to Tommy. The Who finally broke through to the USA in this year and they grew as a live unit with an ever increasing audience, one so large that only something as massive as a Tommy or Who's Next would satisfy. This album has its cultists and I can see why but knowing the power of what was still an outstanding singles band versus a toe-testing albums group The Who Sell Out hangs in the breeze made by the albums either side of it, swaying to each and occasionally touching but never quite folding in with them.



Listening notes:
My first hearing of this for years was on a home taped cassette. I later bought a copy of the twinned Sell Out and A Quick One as a double LP. Then when the mid-'90s CD remaster came out with extra tracks and the the two CD Deluxe package with a mono mix and more extra tracks. Most recently, I've got the legal Hi-Res Download of the mono mix which makes the most sense as a package; it's tight and solid and all the ads are in the right places. I frequently checked the stereo from the Deluxe set as there are some arrangement differences (including a completely different guitar solo in Our Love Was). Of these I would recommend the mono in 24 bit 96 kHz as it's the purest (non-compressed) representation you'll get of the original. Try the vinyl if you prefer the noise with the music. Otherwise the Deluxe CD set will deliver fine results.

1987 at 30

UK pop was getting twee. The strain in the early decade that brought us Altered Images and Haircut 100 rose like a Phoenix from the ashes of the post punk world. So, instead of new edges emerging from the creamy blandness of always triumphant pop we got The Housemartins and Stock Aitken and Waterman. I was working at a theatre in Fitzroy, earning ok pay and enjoying myself and, for the first time since I was about 12, the year didn't have much of a soundtrack to it. Really, looking back changes that impression but I left the year thinking of my life rather than its records: parties at houses with walls of mirror tiles, perms that would look like wigs either side of the timeline, Moet et Chandon Petite Liqueur at McCoppins, taking a girlfriend to see Blue Velvet at Hoyts, going decidedly solo to Eraserhead at the Valhalla and then with everyone to River's Edge, but also finding Darconville's Cat and Joysprick at the local library and then pretty much admitting it and giving up on the mighty mess of the novel I was trying to write (but really only redrafting passages of it until they were incomprehensible). 

LPs:

Strangeways Here We Come/The Smiths - To me the Smiths were a bland outfit with witty lyrics and the occasional strong song. I could make a great album out of half of each of Queen is Dead and the debut and the single How Soon is Now. This one I remember enjoying until it finished and then leaving my memory until I was in the next situation in which someone played it. Then, same thing.

The Joshua Tree/U2 - We got a new flatmate at the start of the year and I took up with her. It went from brilliant to dejection regularly and eventually just splodged out to indifference. She was a fan of U2 but you should also know that she was also a serious fan of a lot of other stuff of genuinely complex and difficult music. By this time every new U2 album sounded like the previous one. Like this did.

Within the Realm of a Dying Sun/Dead Can Dance - With their Factory Records style cover art and big, spooky musicality I couldn't help but love what I heard. One of the few acts I still eagerly listen to now. This one's a corker.

George Best/The Wedding Present - It sounded British, original yet part of its time despite being surrounded by an increasingly flavourless UK pop scene. You put it on and left it on. Two New Zealander brothers who were friends of the house accused the whole album of ripping off every Flying Nun band that ever existed. Only made me like Flying Nun bands more.

Talullah/The Go Betweens - If the single Right Here and its "smiley studio in Sydney" video was any indication (and it was) we were headed for a Go Betweens that would never come up with anything like a Stop Before You Say It again. Tallulah was nice and often engaging but from a much changed band. They still had some fine work ahead of them. The chorus of Bye Bye Pride remains one of my favourites of any pop song with its spine tingling vocal harmony. It reminds me of parties in St Kilda that we went to more dressed up than ever and also the last ones we ever crashed and how that made us feel old in our mid twenties. Ok, so I probably like it but I'm with its critics but I stand on the outer of them as the GoBs shouldn't have tried to sound like a Postcard band in the late '80s.

Document/REM - It was the following year's Green that bade me part ways with REM, an interesting band because they transcended their heavily derivative sound by being both interesting and American. I liked this one when it came out. I was out on Smith St on a Friday night, drinking with the irrepressible Mark Brooke. We stopped in at Leedin Records and I was surprised and delighted to find the new REM album. I had heard nothing about it. We got beer and went back to my share house which I blasted with this. Finest Worksong bashes out on track 1 and the rest keeps that up until side 2 slowly loses puff. A year later Green took even less time to wear off. After that it was lip service for a few years before I realised I didn't care about a band that had received a fair whack of my devotions. I still dig it but now it's more as a time capsule than music without day.

Locust Abortion Technician/Butthole Surfers - I wasn't just resistant to American bands getting cool I was resentful that all that guitar rock we thought we'd shamed to death in the punk wars just came back, cut its hair and did it all again and it was all American. It wasn't just outright horrible like Jason and the Scorchers, a lot of the times it was regurgitated Hendrix played against heaviness like The Butthole Surfers. I've already admitted to liking REM during this time but did so knowing that they were not only not challenging anything but feathering their own future stadiums. So, because I was so sniffy about American bands I came to them song by song (or via an unlabelled cassette as with Sonic Youth). One such was this album. From the designed to disturb title compounded by the cover art with the clowns and the tiny dog, it looked as contrived as you could get and still stop short of the mainstream. But, bit by bit, I softened enough to get a tape of this one. And I liked it. Whereas the rock revival had the Cure sound like Hendrix and REM sound like the Archies, Butthole Surfers grabbed samples from the radio, metal stomp riffs or wailing acid rock solos and somehow it all fulfilled the bright and creepy title and cover art. No one ever mentions this band when they talk about those others from Seattle in the 90s whose own sensibilities grew from this very creative mischief. I still prefer this.

Sister/Sonic Youth - The girl who was into U2 was also into Sonic Youth but that was after she moved in. She introduced the rest of the house to Evol so we all got into Sister when it was released. Now, I don't think it really stands. There are some great tracks like Schizophrenia or Cotton Crown but too much of it feels like filler these days.

Through the Looking Glass/Siouxsie and the Banshees - strange notion that a well established band should do a whole record of covers. While I appreciated how none of the approaches were remotely like the originals I had, by this time, lowered my expectations of almost every band I'd loved at the beginning of the decade.

Singles of Note:

Prince's Sign of the Times almost completely ripped off Donavon's Hurdy Gurdy Man but no one was allowed to say that.

That Petrol Emotion's Big Decision was a corker but featured the strange effect of the obscuring of its message by the indecipherable lyric (its author contrasted it with his previous band The Undertones' It's Gonna Happen as that had just been a "wee pop song").

It's Immaterial's dreamy swing time Rope still enchants even though the naivete of the lyric still jars this non-lyrics listener. I bought the single as it reminded me of the best of the keyboard heavy daze o' the early '80s

New Order's True Faith carried its bittersweet tale of childhood fascination on a tide of massive e-kick and snare, a cool croon from Bernard and a chorus that melts hearts.

Kylie's Locomotion was tolerated as it seemed tokenistic. She joined fellow Neighbour in a Funicello/Fabian retread that seemed quieter than the soft imagery of the video. Even Craig MacLachlan had a shot with another cover from the '60s. Kylie would just go back to neighbours, splice up with Jason and all would be forgiven. I was in my mid-20s and retained the naivete that nothing came of really mediocre things. Then, there was Confide in Me but that was over a decade later.

Eric B. & Rakim's Paid in Full had everything a hip hop record should have, vintage voice samples ("journey into sound" is still something I say when not saying anything else), that old school kick + snare + jazzy high hat + slithering bass and compelling vocal. Ofra Haza, sampled here, got an international career out of it, too. Hip hop's brief glory in the mid to late '80s on the mainstream charts now looks like a fad for novelty singles. Here, as in its native USA, it found its level where it was most needed, among the voiceless and the frowning. Of course there were poseurs, skinny white boys with reversed baseball caps who only reminded me of people with glue mohawks earlier in the decade. Every scene has these but for a brief time they were eclipsed by things like this. Pump up the volume pump up the volume pump up the volume pump up the volume ...

Tone Loc showed that it not only wouldn't be all good but was never going to be with Funky Cold Medina. If there had been a danger of rap getting sold as novelty party records this would be exhibit A along with Morris Minor and the Majors' Stutter Rap. Still, we loved it at three a.m. on Rage and renamed any mixed drink after the one in the title. Errrngh errngh ern ern er-erngh!

Fairground Attraction provided anyone who still looked to the UK for inspiration that it wasn't going to happen. Per-er-er-er-fect sounded like Steely Dan unplugged but was thought of highly. It made me wince.

1967 at 50: PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN - PINK FLOYD

Some time in the late seventies I got mum to impulse buy a book called Rock Life. It was a series of articles about some of the more towering figures of British rock. Vintage 1973 it featured ex Beatles (and only John and Paul) and focused on the central figures of big acts like Pete Townshend or Ray Davies. While not deep it was a great primer for me to go hunting for records. I was aware of most of the bands but it being the time and I being my age the spectre of Pink Floyd was one of the chapters I left to last (see also Van Morrison). When I did it was to encounter the most sustained description of Syd Barrett I'd come across. He was loopy, unpredictable and left a great mark. There was a photo of him with the band. They were lined up on bleachers at different heights like a school photo. It was a rare picture of the five piece that included Dave Gilmour. Syd was miles away, eyes like the black coals in Crazy Diamond, hair so unkempt it looked like it had matted in the shape the wind had blown it. He looked dangerous, infectious, as though his gaze alone would afflict you. I wanted to be that.

As with Revolver I found a copy of Piper at the Gates of Dawn among the collections of friends of siblings. Christmas holidays 1978-9. A mild summer that tasted of scotch and dry and sounded like Elvis Costello. As that might suggest, the afternoon I put it on and listened in headphones in the rumpus room downstairs is golden with nostalgia. I'll end that here.

Astonomie Dominie opens with what sounds like mission control radio voices (but are really band members unless Houston employed an unmistakably Cambridge plum voice at some point in the psychedelic era) that give way to the lift off of palm muted bass and guitar. A wash of vocal harmonies adds light as a choir of Barrettian word play suggests interplanetary travel. A big chromatic riff descends with a strangely merged organ and vocal falsetto. The instrumental centre of the song assumes its station smoothly without sounding like a solo that will last an average three zone bus trip. But there really are no solos here as much as lightly explored textures. Imagine an English Beach Boys (the accents are uncompromisingly non-American) from the Smile era.

Lucifer Sam is the coolest song ever written to a cat with a spy movie guitar riff. Syd's Fender Esquire tones are really beautiful on this one, clean but hot, chiming and ringing. The vocals are close harmony but there's no esoterica like the last song, it's all London rock and roll. And under all the banging and ringing there's a strange warm flutey part that might be an organ or even a mellotron.

Matilda Mother begins with a white light organ note beaming through a descending bass line which comes to a soft landing as Syd's vocal starts, a single note insisting over a descent telling what sounds like a children's bedtime story about a king who ruled a land. The harmony chorus comes in with the child's plea, "oh, mother, tell me more". But then a sour double time minor figure coupled in the vocal asks why she leaves him. From here we swing between the wonder in the child's mind (including huge fantastical landscapes in the instrumental section) and the corner of dejection between story time and dreams with only the nightlight for cheer against the dark. Seekers of the early signs of Syd's affliction might find riches here but it's really pretty straightforward and imaginative rather than deranged.

A dissonant drone on the organ begins Flaming like an electric engine. Syd chirps in with the whimsy of a Cambridge riverside picnic and answered by a loopy recorder. Playfully spying on a friend he sings of the joy of hiding and watching but then we're travelling by telephone and screaming through the starlit sky as his daydreams send him soaring. This song, beginning as electrically as it does surprises us by letting a clean wide acoustic guitar provide the bedrock. The winsome, cheeky melody returns after an instrumental section of tacked pianos and electro manipulation, ever rising. Pure psychedelic charm.

Pow R Toc H starts with a muffled thump answered by a bass and series of vocal sounds like ch-ch or a falsetto-ed doy-doy and settles into a brisk jazz workout which intensifies into something more jammy and psychedelic. I don't skip it anymore but I'd never go straight to it.

Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk bangs in with a beat band chordy rock backing to a call and response vocal of a whispered "doctor doctor" and series of thin harmony vocals saying things like "gold is red". The organ comes in and meanders. Some whispered vocals here and there. Don't skip this either, mostly. Roger Waters' first byline for the band. Well, he made up for it.

Interstellar Overdrive bashes straight into the big descending riff, repeating it until its exhausted then intentionally collapsing into a series of more spacey passages. Clearly an adaptation of a longer live workout that is suggested by the recording without too much insistence, leaving it feeling half baked rather than condensed. Unless I'm really concentrating on something I'm doing while listening, I'll skip this one.

The tick tock rhythm and octave used more effectively in the later See Emily Play starts the Gnome before Syd enters in children's lit mode, somewhere posher than Ray Davies in bucolic operation. Twee but gets away with it. It's Syd.

Chapter 24 couches Syd's voice in oboes and other orchestral intruments as he guides us through the i-ching. Rick Wright's keyboards take up the oboe as Syd's vocals get expanded by masses of reverb. Strong melody and lovely harmonies allow me to forget the cod mysticism (a tautology for me).

A click clack start with an oboe floating in the air around the harvest bonfire as Syd comes in with a serpentine melody fleshed out with slightly creepy descriptions of a scarecrow that a child might offer. The fadeout features a beautiful acoustic twelve string figure enriched by bowed basses and an ever more buoyant oboe. A miniature of pure beauty.

"I've got a bike, you can ride if you like..." Syd channels his prepubescent self at the moment of awakening as these big happy declarations over the clashing and hammering alternate with the half spoken: "you're the kind of girl who fits in with my world. I'll get you anything, everything if you want thing." This is delivered over a loopy theremin either rising or falling the way that crazy people in cartoons or thrillers sound. Finally, after verses about gingerbread men, a mouse called Gerald the finale is about a room filled with musical tunes most of which are clockwork. Then we suddenly plunge into that very thing with clicks and tocks , hammering, chimes, tools, a whole workshop of hitting and ringing which is overcome by a rising loop of something that could be a squeeze toy sound, bird call or a sped up voice that sounds more sinister with every repetition until it, too, fades. Actually, it sounds very similar in character to the run out groove loop of Sgt Pepper which was being recorded in the next studio at the time by Norman Smith's old boss George Martin.

Smith did a lot to curb the band's live act from taking over, directing them through take after take of numbers like Interstellar Overdrive that would work as a recording. Here's the problem, though: a side of that would have sounded like Pink Floyd the way their audience knew them, trippy and exploring, but a recognition and pursuit of Barrett's melodic gifts and strange childlike lyrics presented something far more accessible and individual. The record doesn't recover from the the tension of these contrary forces. Syd's vocal songs sound like he's backed by a band rather than a band in total (unlike the comparable Kinks) and the jamming sections never quite lift off which editing in post might have allowed. The epic promised by Astronomy Domine with its radio calls and surge into outer space is not sustained.

So, why do I still like the album? Well, while I've never quite got to the point of listening to the ones I'd skip with renewed vigour I can let the whole thing happen now. More pointedly, I will dive into the sequences of Syd-centric numbers which are psychedelic by association rather than at core. But that's it for me, an album of good bits between dull ones. Norman Smith seemed to find a path to working with the band more effectively as evinced by the singles See Emily Play and Apples and Oranges and the post Barrett albums Saucer Full of Secrets and Ummagumma. Until then there was this uneasy collision between the band as a practicing unit and a backdrop to its singer which prevent it from the cohesion that the band would soon be pursuing without fear or favour.

Syd's story is better known now than it was and the band's tale is part of rock dinosaur legend. Speculation about a version of history where he continued contributing is answered easily by Jugband Blues and the solo albums which, while often inspiring, can terrify by their unfocused wandering. Whatever Syd's condition was that separated him from the rest of the world his messy exit continued for years of decreasingly effective creative attempts. The rest of the band recruited an old friend who joined them in the stratosphere. Before that there was this awkward child who could recite Wind in the Willows as thought he'd written it himself but also who could stare at his shoes for whole afternoons without noticing how cold it had become.

1967 at 50: SGT PEPPER's LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND - THE BEATLES

It was fifty years ago today ... at the beginning of two months ago as I write. My memories of this one have nothing to do with its initial release. The closest I can come is the fragmented recollection of looking at the gatefold of the members of the band and thinking that Ringo was the one with the glasses. I only knew his name because it sounded like a cartoon character.

I can't even swear I heard the record at the time. Too young. My memory of this as a new release is a family memory, not a personal one: my Aunt Sandy returned from a year of nursing in the U.K. and presented my eldest brother with a copy of the record. Laminated, glossy cardboard sleeve and lots of colour and big bold sound. But that's almost hearsay. I remember seeing my sister lower her head in a kind of prayer at some news on the radio around the same time. Same thing. That was when Prime Minister Harold Holt went missing forever off Cheviot Beach in 1967. Sgt Pepper and I don't go back that far as friends. That happened later.

When my brother Michael descended upon the house for his uni holidays he brought his entourage and a few crates of LPs. One afternoon when I was drawing in the rumpus room he came in and put Sgt Pepper on to test the stereo system Dad had finished making that year. Dad had had made to enormous cabinets for the front speaker but also had another two speakers mounted on the rear wall just under the ceiling. Michael had the notion that this made it quadraphonic. When the first lead guitar lashes out in the opening song he grinned and pointed to the rear. That was all the proof I needed: Sgt Pepper was great because the Beatles had invented quadraphonic sound and made an album of great songs to prove it. I listened to all those aural textures and the strong central voices and harmonies, the great range of styles, and knew that all of modern rock music had started there the way that modern history starts with the French Revolution.

You see what I mean? I knew nothing about the band or their history and already I was making things up about them. This is what a dangerous little learning does; you like something so you make mythology for it. Michael also had Magical Mystery Tour with him and the White Album. The latter scared me a little with its horror soundscapes and songs about cannibalistic pigs but Magical Mystery Tour plugged straight into the nervous system of a kid whose only musical love was classical but needed prodding if he was to survive the impending rack of high school. The Beatles to me were from the get go as sophisticated as they were in 1967 and, for all I knew, always had been (I heard the earlier stuff a lot later). I got through the door of rock music with an instant credentials.

That wasn't the door to any kind of credibility with the natives of my age, though. Countdown and a lot of pretending saw to that until I realised that it didn't really matter what I liked as long as it wasn't classical (which I never gave up). This made me tolerate the adolescent mainstream rather than gleefully involve myself in it but that meant that liking The Beatles put me both outside (which I was used to and still happy about) and deep inside. What all that meant was that I was in touch with a classic, something from a former generation but also outside of time. Its reputation by the mid seventies put it at the apex of all rock albums. I just so happened to like it.

So, to me any nostalgia from hearing the album had no flowers in its hair, it wore a blue and grey school uniform, drew music fuelled dreamscapes in pencil and marvelled at his sisters singing along to A Day in the Life and getting the perfectly pitched note at the end of the line "nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Loooooooooooords." So it was never the big groundbreaking edifice of music for me but a record I loved and judged others by. I heard it in Queen's A Night at the Opera (well, any Queen album from the seventies) and disappointed that there wasn't more of it in Skyhooks' Living in the 70s.

I've had a few copies. I bought it as a U.S. pressing on Apple from Ken Hurford's import records around the corner. It didn't have the weird loop at the end and it was on the wrong label but it did have the gatefold and the cutout sheet (the local edition was a single sleeve). Until the following year's Never Mind The Bollocks finally got released it was my most played album. Then I bought an original mono edition for 99 cents at the Record Market in Brisbane (the guy checked the price ticket a few times but had to sell it to me for that. I didn't quite appreciate mono at the time so I gave it to a friend for helping me with some recordings in the eighties just before I left Brisbane. I bought the CD which was the only Beatles reissue to have a slip cover and booklet. Of the remasters in 2009 I bought both the stereo albums as hi-res flacs on the usb stick lodged inside the little aluminium apple and the mono box set. And this year I also bought the super deluxe box set with Giles Martin's more contemporary mix with centred bass, drums, and lead vocals, discs of sessions and outtakes, the mono mix and surround mixes on dvd and blu-ray. At some point in the future when we add to our music collections by tapping our temples and ramming our heads into media walls so that the downloads of our choice transfer to the microchip in our cerebral cortices I'll probably get a version of Pepper in that format, as well.

But Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is an album, a record by a pop group. When you remove the hype you have thirteen songs that delight or not. They delight me, still, as a whole sequence and as individual songs. The effect of the whole album is exhilarating with its great range of textures and colours, from the chorus of Lucy in the Sky through the eerie drones of Within You Without You to the delicate vocals and cataclysm of A Day in the Life.

Because I heard it closely for the first time in the seventies the sound of the tampuras buzzing through so many of the tracks I assumed was a synthesiser. Same went for the big flitty chaos at the end of Mr Kite. It didn't sound like a normal rock band but so much of it sound like records from the time of my discovery of it rather than its own. It didn't occur to me until I found out much more about the time of its creation that it was a groundbreaking album (and a very good one).

But hype and a tireless promotional machine have ways of rendering criticism meaningless and celebratory accounts into formless gushes. So, I won't be talking track by track or going into any detail for this one. If a new edition is released there will be millions of words prepared in advance to once again describe the sounds and songs. It's one of the easiest albums to get to hear and is best heard for oneself.

I will say that Giles Martin's contemporary stereo mix is impressive and respectful, if it does approach loudness war excess in the mastered image. The original mono is still the strongest indicator of what the first listeners heard and remains the closest to the band's intention. The surround mixes are also impressive by restraint. My copy of the boxed super deluxe set of the 50th Anniversary version arrived in time for an anniversary play but the week was busy and exhausting. At the end of it, tired unto collapse I had no wish to go out and remembered the blu-ray with the hi-res 5.1 mixes. I put the disc in, staggered to the couch, buried my body under the doona and lowered into a dozing haze as the orchestra tuned up and the restless audience shuffled. The first big electric chords clanged out and the stinging lead licks followed and MacCartney's excited scream welcomed me to the show. And I joined in falling beneath or surfacing into its warm colourful flow. Yep, don't care at all for the nay sayers neighing: this is a great record.