1977 at 40: Metamorphosis

"Does anyone remember laughter?"

At the beginning of 1977 I was hanging out to see The Song Remains the Same at the cinema and waiting for the new Queen album but there was another thread winding its way from the twine: I'd seen the Weekend Magazine story on punk in London and the bits of the Anarchy in the UK video haunted me. 1976 ended with a marathon two hour Countdown that went through the year's hits. It was low on the chart but the clip was played in full. John Paul Young quipped to Molly that the singer had a future playing the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

That separated me from John Paul Young's tribe of oldies forever. He had just looked popstar age before that but at that moment he might as well have been forty-eight. Gone. But there was no way I could get to hear the Sex Pistols as the single had already been deleted (I had expected it to be in the 45s bin at Palings and could take my time about getting a copy). There were no follow ups and might not be. There had just been that moment, as far as I could tell. I was haunted. Meantime there was everything else.

By the end of the year a few albums (mentioned below) caught my senses and then, finally, on the day of the election that sank the cause of progressive politics in Australia until the following decade, there was the beautifully ugly cover of Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols in the normal LP shelves. No brown paper bag, just there like Boston or Bad Company, another record. She didn't know it but my grandmother (who had sent me to town to buy my own Christmas present - I was fifteen and that's the way it worked) was about to pay for the record that changed me. That was the summer. I went in as an adolescent grub and emerged as a greater spotted moth.

"Noooooooooo future! Noooooooooo future! Noooooooooo future for you!"

Albums:

Low - David Bowie

I was confused by Sound and Vision and was ready to write Bowie off as lost to disco (because of Young Americans and some tracks on Station to Station). I had a friend tape this rather than buy it myself. The first side seemed like a lot of chimey nothing but the first half of the second side sounded like the best and darkest sci-fi movie ever (and then there was Star Wars at the end of the year which might have had a chance if it weren't for everything else I encountered in the ten months leading up to it). I made a tape of the tape which reversed the sides (it was on a C90) and listened that way.






The Clash

I bought this at the Big W down the road. Mine (long gone) had a black and white only cover and later ones had the ripped margins in olive green (a bit like the colour-reversed Never Mind the Bollocks art). There's a lot to fire up a teenager here but it sounded so thin and localised that I had to imagine my empathy. The start of a seldom interrupted indifference I felt for the band. I appreciated the sentiment and a handful of songs to come. For a while it was the only LP I had that sounded like what I took for punk.






Damned Damned Damned

Had a cassette but got tired of it. I don't know why but it felt like a good start that the band didn't know how to maintain. I could leave it on but didn't care if I left the room while it was going.











TransEurope Express - Kraftwerk

I did like the sci-fi sound of this, a mix of cold German precision and spooky atmospheres and large lovely electronic landscapes. Had it on cassette.











Peter Gabriel

The first of what would be four self-titled albums from the ex-Genesis tonsils intrigued me as the reviewers seemed to be spooked by it. I hadn't consciously heard a bar of Genesis at that stage and nudged them into the shelf already stuffed with the likes of Jethro Tull, Yes and ELP and the like. The spook was that it sounded like a rebirth with none of the great technoflash (a RAM magazine coinage created in absence of the prevalent term Prog which came later). I was hooked enough from the video to the second single Modern Love in which he thrashed about in a Rollerball uniform on a shopping mall escalator, removing his mask only to sing the middle eight with his face in shadow where it wasn't obscured by hair. The song itself I still like. It's a big barre chord rock song with a great vocal that rests somewhere between a metal scream and a Greg Lake posh tenor. Nothing on the rest of the album lived up to it but moments like Moribund the Burgermeister or Humdrum gave enough for me to buy the next one without hearing it first. Also, it led me to investigate Genesis but I didn't pursue it after a few real tries.


The Idiot - Iggy Pop

Heard this more at the Uni parties my older siblings would take me to in the following year but I knew about it before then as it was always brought up in connection with Bowie's album Low.












Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl/Star Club

Any new Beatles was manna for the second generation fan. Of the two live Beatles albums released in 1977 this was the best sounding but least interesting. The Star Club album was the reverse of that. The cover art had magnified black on white type which made it look like a bootleg and photos of the punters that felt authentic (the screaming girls in the art of the Bowl album looked very '70s) and for the first play it sounded hard and punchy. But then if I tried to play it again I could only do it for isolated tracks. I friend of mine had a few boots of bands like Led Zeppelin and gave me tapes which is why I never bothered with them.





Deceptive Bends - 10CC

I'd been a fan of this band's cleverness and talents with catchy pop with subversive lyrics, a kind of Romper Room Frank Zappa (whom I reviled). This was the first album after the darker minded pair, Lol Creme and Kevin Godley, exited for more interesting territory. The wit is still there and the epic Feel the Benefit continues to have some power but I can't now easily say why I listened to this so much in this year. Wouldn't now.







News of the World - Queen

Almost the redemption of Day at the Races and its patchy form filling, News of the World brought us the football anthem We Are The Champions with its "nah nah nanah naaah" chorus but also the funny response to punk Sheer Heart Attack and the stompin' We Will Rock You. But by the end of 1977 it seemed like a missed boat. I bought a friend's copy at a discount and played it a little but it just couldn't compete with the rude noise I had aligned with in the meantime. Oh, and this was the one on which they stopped boasting how they didn't use synthesisers and those were in pretty full force through a lot of it. Good a point as any to give up on a band you once liked.


Rattus Norvegicus - The Stranglers

I hated what I took to be a group of middle-aged prog rockers with shorter haircuts and slightly shorter keyboard solos passing themselves off as punk because they wrote songs about rude things. I guiltily loved some of the arrangements but in my defence it's because the better of them (Get a Grip on Yourself) sounded like a distillate of '60s psychedelia. Also, they were one of those bands whose fans matched them for baseless obnoxiousness: a Stranglers fan was almost invariably a massive fuckwit (and almost always older).






ABBA the Album

I had long abandoned ABBA (most of my acquaintance cast themselves adrift after Fernando was poured into the drinking water and we all got sick) but this album did contain I'm a Marionette which remains pleasantly unnerving (in the best way, I'm not being sarcastic). Otherwise by this stage it sounded a little too homogenised for this punter. Also, this was tied in to the movie which seemed too cute and teeny even if I had any interest left.









Talking Heads '77

I only heard Psycho Killer from this set until the following year and only very recently owned the album. I like it now but can't say if I would have then.












My Aim is True - Elvis Costello

A lot of folk cite this as one of the great debut albums but I only bought it after the third one and then from completeness. I liked less than half (I know, missing a joke there but I'm serious) of the tracks and found the Californian soft rock approach irritating (well, the band did go on to back Huey Lewis!) I'll admit that the songwriting didn't change that much between albums as much as the arrangements, the great Attractions washed the songs clean of the plodding Americana with beautiful garagey power, sounding far more like my late '70s. That said, I can listen to Alison and Watching the Detectives (on the Australian release) any day of the week.


Rumours - Fleetwood Mac

My pre-punk hatred for this and the other main Nicks/Buckingham Fleetwood Mac albums stems from my brother playing his cassette of them ceaselessly for weeks. My Queenslander house featured walls that stopped short of the ceiling (to promote airflow) so I didn't miss a beat. There's merit in the writing, production and singing here but there's about the same amount in anything by the Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan or the Eagles and I was already finding those acts excessive and aurally indigestible. This album was to rise in the estimation of twenty-somethings decades later but so did anything by ELO. That didn't make me want to reassess but I heard it again many times and still found it horrible.

Heroes - David Bowie

If I could only like half of Low I'll have to admit I didn't like this beyond the big title song until the year after when it started feeling like it fit. Spiky arrangements, screaming choruses that seemed to go nowhere for a long time, instrumentals that felt more like film music. I now like about half of it but do and did dig Bowie's outsider/insider look on the cover.







Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols

From the moment I saw them on Weekend Magazine before the seven o'clock news one Sunday I was waiting for this album. This anticipation (almost a year in construction) was not just met but rewarded with excess. A life changer to which I've already devoted three long posts. My most-played record for the remainder of the decade.

The only other album I can think of that had anything like the same impact on the way I listened to music and how alligned I felt to it was Portishead's Dummy almost twenty years later. But Bollocks was the deadly frisbee and the shield against which I felt strong as well as apart. That felt very, very good.


Singles:

Baracuda - Heart: A galloping assault with a soaring vocal about .... an attack? Kind of sounded like a sex song but could have been about someone very nasty. The chugalug was lifted from Led Zeppelin's Achilles' Last Stand from the previous year's Presence album but served very well at the centre of a short form single. Kudos for making a clean guitar tone sound like metal and for the abrupt ending.

I Feel Love - Donna Summer: One of the greatest pop singles ever. Essayed elsewhere on this blog. Couldn't make this list without it.

The Way That You Do It - Pussyfoot: A time-travelling Spice Girl rolled this one out in a clip I can't remember as it was replaced by the lame "live" one at the Countdown Studios the night she hosted. Ooh na na hia ooh na na hia hia indeed. This was too easy to hate but too persistent to ignore. Pop music was the rug under the feet of this novelty dirge and it was about to get pulled. Then about five years later it was back under big hair and synthesisers with squelching presets.

Don't Cry for Me Argentina - Julie Covington: Sung by the tough girl from the Rock Follies the hit from Evita made a persistent appearance in the Countdown top ten. The video was shown only once. It was a series of stills of Covington in a long and shear white dress in a white room standing or sitting on the floor, looking serious. I liked the Latin sound of the melody and the halting opera of it but didn't get a copy. I think I liked the idea that something so slow and un-rock could be filling the singles bins at Palings.

Rockaria - ELO: At first I thought this was funny, like everyone else but it really wore out its welcome quickly and when the kids who always caught up last caught up with this you had to get tortured all over again when they told you how clever it was. It was a rock song with a soprano in the breaks.

Jet Airliner - Steve Miller Band: Even back then I knew this was a kind of by-the-numbers soft rock but I loved the clean rhythm guitar tone and singer-songwriter vocal. Kraft processed cheddar and tasted just as satisfying to the undeveloped pallet.

I Go to Rio - Peter Allen: The grinning Broadway cabaret monster whose video was one of the most embarrassing things on television that year had a mega hit with this chirpy clunking slice of Hell from our parents' area of responsibility. He banged at a white piano and stripped down to the singlet. If you're thinking proto-G.G.Allin stop it now.

God Save the Queen - The Sex Pistols: I kept missing this. It was never on Countdown but it was on Sounds but Sounds was a lot of interviews with cabaret has beens and I often skipped it. Every time I did, though, they played something good. I didn't see the clip until I saw it in context in the Great Rock n Roll Swindle years later. This also meant I didn't hear it until I bought the album at the end of the year. We ogled the photo of the A&M signing outside Buckingham Palace reprinted in RAM magazine. That would have to do.

Lucille - Kenny Rogers: "You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille. With four hundred children and a cop in the field." Indeed she had. Kenny Rogers would have a string of nu-country hits in the years to come. At least one of which was made into a tv movie (Coward of the County) after the hits dried up. He makes this list because I heard that Mr Rouse had been walking across the quad at school once when one of his Woolworths shoes disintegrated. He had (on good authority) said: "you picked a fine time to leave me, loose heel."

Don't Stop - Fleetwood Mac: Crap then and crap now.

Don't Give Up on Us - David Soul: Hutch crooned his way through a ballad that sounded like it came from four years before. There was another one called Silver Lady later which had him do a bullseye Bryan Ferry. There was no jealousy response single from Starsky.

Nothing Stays the Same Forever - Hush: The out of time glam band went from boorish football choruses to this quite interesting atmospheric number. For a band with no ideas beyond pub rock they really got something here. Never did again, though.

Don't Fall in Love - The Ferrets: This just appeared paranormally one Sunday evening on Countdown. We didn't know where it was from or who they were but it was really, really good. Some of the cheek of the mid '70s pubrock made good but also a quirky leanness and nerve enough for us to declare it new wave (a protean term then which, before it came to be spoken with an obligatory sneer, could sound quite thoughtful and discerning). A genuine classic of the era.

Living Next Door to Alice - Smokie: Another band like Racey who seemed to emerge from the clubs of Northern England to present the world with a series of A&R prescribed songs that became hits until they stopped a few years later. The singer had a croaky voice  and a sort of grown out Rod Stewart perm. He still had both by 1980 when he had his last wheeze in a duet with Suzie Quatro. Everyone finds each other.

Blue Jeans  - Skyhooks: The great sharpened satirists of Horror Movie and Ego is Not a Dirty Word sang a little country song about fashion or denim or something but I'd stopped listening to them by then.

In the Flesh - Blondie: Released the year after its host album, the A and B sides were flipped when Countdown played the B side and it blazed the local ears. There was a '50s feel to it but the lyrics were grown-up and Debbie Harry's delivery and appearance in the clip wiped every other note played on the show that evening. Everyone was talking about it at school the next day. The band was aligned to punk even though they came across more as '60s revivalists at the time but it was still thrilling to have something from the margins in the charts. They toured and their career (however brief) ascended.

Mull of Kintyre - Wings: Pleasant enough folk waltz but I bought it for the White Album style b-side Girls School which still rocks fine!

Pretty Vacant - The Sex Pistols: This one was played on Countdown as they couldn't ignore them at that stage. The video was as cold as a London December and as exciting as hell. It was hard and shouty and perfect. A year of pop music dissolved under its force.

And there it was, what the previous year had joined no band put asunder. I started the Christmas holidays in 1977 getting slowly tired of Queen's News of the World and ached for the Sex Pistols album. When that was in my hands the world changed. Everything I'd taken with thanks from older siblings fell away like old skin. The freedom of it made me listen more closely to those things I kept (selected Beatles, Stones, Who, Yardbirds) and meet the new, violent attack of punk as it hit. Everything was re-evaluated, everything was open to thought if not deed and the world of the straights with their Saturday Night Fever mainstream installment plans softened into the blur of the background. I'd long given up on trying to fit in with them but now knew that I didn't want their protected lack of imagination, their common as muck sense nor cared about their shallow judgement. I didn't have the safety pins in my nostrils nor the glue in my hair and I never uttered the words at the time (because it was the kind of crap that grownups said) but I was a punk.