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.