1978 at 40

1978 and I went to my last softdrinks only school party ever and would soon add university parties to the social calendar where the music was better and the general scene a major lift. The few of us who fell into the thrall of the new music coming out of the UK and starting in our own land were about to get a feast of what we liked about the year before. The Sex Pistols disintegrated after a disastrous tour of America. By the end of the year Johnny was in PiL and all was forgiven. I cut my hair shorter every other month. My brother Greg joked that it was growing back into my skull. I was so punk I got Mum to buy me a leather jacket for my birthday. It was a Brando style, double breasted and I could wear it for about two hours per year in Townsville. The NME had more to say about the music I wanted to learn about and, late as it always was there, I bought each one for the next few years. Of course the charts were still dominated by streamlined baby-boomer rock and novelty songs but there was an undercurrent that a very few of us could hear beneath the blah. Things just seemed to change shape every few months. I went to Brisbane for the August holidays and wanted to stay there. By the Christmas holidays I lived in an extra corridor of the perceivable world where it was always a kind of hybrid of London and Transylvania, played a Maton Flamingo as raucously as I good through an old transistor amp and a Companion fuzz box and started writing my own songs.

THIS YEAR'S MODEL - ELVIS COSTELLO AND THE ATTRACTIONS

A revelation! I've never reconciled with My Aim is True. Apart from a few standouts I find its plinky plonky West Coast proto yacht rock indigestible. Yet, when I listen to its successor which I consider magnificent, I have to concede that if The Shamrocks (who became Huey Lewis' News) of the first album played on it it might have sounded indistinguishable from the first. Then again, if he'd had The Attractions on the first one it might have been as good as this. As it is I still think of This Year's Model as EC's debut album and My Aim is True as a kind of demo disc. Anyway ...

The Australian release on Radar included Watching the Detectives which hadn't appeared on any LP in the UK. I was glad of it as I remember thinking that if the rest of My Aim is True had resembled it I  would have liked it better. A spidery reggae with a spine tingling organ drilling through it as a lungless vocal mixed images about a girl more interested in the movie on tv than mucking around and the kidnapping case on the screen. 

But that was at the end of side one. The whole record starts with EC spitting out the first line before the rest of the band comes in. No Action, This Year's Girl, The Beat, Pump it Up, the songs sped past with constantly nasty observations about fashion victims and alpha males. A reader's letter to RAM once listed every statement on the album that began "I don't want..." It was massive. The record started with the phrase. There was even a whole song with that in the title. 

Through all this there was a lot of great playing. If this was punk (it was being called New Wave as a pointless distinction) it wasn't Never Mind the Bollocks with its ten tonne guitar band onslaught. This was furious with different textures, screaming organ chords, skeletal guitar lines, a very serious rhythm section with a master bass player who could play tunes like McCartney but thud and stone out like Aston Barrett. It was part film noir and part bubblegum and the refusal to resolve the two created a constant tension which might have been unbearable if it weren't for the fact that you could sing along loudly to every chorus. If the Pistols gave me strength to be myself this record dressed that up and sharp. If I think of 1978 I think of this record.

THE KICK INSIDE - KATE BUSH

Once the hormonal storm subsided at sight of the videos for Wuthering Heights on Countdown I bought the single and then the album. In the midst of punk this only claimed to be songs. Neither overcomplex and hippy like Joni Mitchell nor too gentle and accessible like Al Stewart, The Kick Inside went to strange dreamscapes and cinematic realms while somehow staying firmly on the grass of the green and pleasant land. The musicianship was exemplary and the arrangements intriguing. Wuthering Heights had her sounding like a ghost that thought it was still alive but Man With the Child in his eyes was delivered well beyond her tender age. If anything, she reminded me of the Bowie of Aladdin Sane or Diamond Dogs. In the end she was herself which is why she was also impossible to ignore. 

PUBLIC IMAGE 1ST EDITION

I was so excited at hearing the single Public Image, how it leaped beyond the Sex Pistols sound and how that band was only represented that year by the album of demos, practices and novelty tracks and couldn't compete. Swindle only really made sense as a movie soundtrack. It was fun but wore off. PiL's debut, however was the opposite. Public Image was pure magnificence, a soaring modal guitar figure and Johnny singing his  heart out, sounding ever more determined and real. The rest of the album was a chore until you learned to leave it on and let it get to you. Aside from the single every track seemed designed to irritate in some way. Eventually, all the fun I found in Swindle was eclipsed by this set. The best was to come. I ordered a copy through the local import shop. It was on clear green tinted vinyl and the plastic film finish on the cover art was blistered in a weird way, looking like rivulets running down the front. The woman at the shop tried to flatten them with a coin but that was futile so I got a dollar off the price.

ARE WE NOT MEN? - DEVO

Better loved by the people at the Uni parties I went to than by me this nevertheless grew on me. I think I was bothered by how conventional it sounded once you took the image away. But even I could not resist the speed up of Gut Feeling or the Great call and response of Uncontrollable Urge.

WHO ARE YOU? - THE WHO

This is where I parted company with the band. I quite like the title track which was a single and had a clip that was played on Countdown but hearing the rest of it was a constant deflation. I had spoiled myself with a compilation of their early singles and a cassette of Sell Out and nothing here stood up to those.

GERM FREE ADOLESCENTS - X RAY SPEX

Oddly this was given a track by track playthrough and discussion on local commercial station 4TO and it frustrated me that I could never find a copy locally. I got one in Brisbane much later in the year. Still listen to this one.

MAN MACHINE - KRAFTWERK

Another favourite of the local alt.unistudent. If I appreciated Krafwerk it was through the explanations of someone a crucial five years older than me. Love it now, though.

GIVE 'EM ENOUGH ROPE - THE CLASH

As soon as Never Mind the Bollocks came out I stopped listening to The Clash's debut album. I heard this one at parties and never bothered to get a copy.

THE MODERN DANCE - PERE UBU


A Uni Party disc. Another one that crawled back in the years after. Haven't heard it for yonks but it's welcome when I do.

OUTLANDOS D'AMOR - THE POLICE
The video for Roxanne came out of nowhere on Countdown one Sunday. I didn't quite get what they were doing with the reggae which seemed a lot starker than the fuller sound I was familiar with. I loved the harmonies in the chorus, though. Never had the album but thought I'd give it a mention.

AMBIENT 1 MUSIC FOR AIRPORTS - BRIAN ENO

Another one for the uni crowd but not a party album. It took me two decades to give this a proper spin. I would use it as intro music before my film nights as its beautiful cathedral ambience set a relaxed mood.

ANOTHER MUSIC IN A DIFFERENT KITCHEN - THE BUZZOCKS

I heard this more at uni than at the time but loved the punk aggression blended with high melodism and distinctive vocals. And in the north Queensland of the late '70s hearing "I hate fast cars" was a glass of cool cordial.

THE SCREAM - SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES

One of the great debuts and albums of any kind from the rock era. Late night sounds and muffled offscreen drama surrounding thundering drums and slashing guitar all beneath the ghostly wail of one the most expressive and signature vocalists of this year and the next decade. One of those records you think you've heard too often until you put it on again and you listen to the end. 

PARALLEL LINES - BLONDIE

The third disc from the New York sass-squashers began with a run of great power pop but after that it was a sheer drop into filler and the album version of Heart of Glass which went for a whole afternoon (I'd never quite loved it in the first place). The previous set, Plastic Letters, still gets my vote as their best but the one after this was a lot less dependent on a hit single for its identity. The follow up had much better songs and a higher substance to filler ratio but the end started here. They knew they were a pop band and it injured them.

MORE SONGS ABOUT BUILDINGS AND FOOD

Heard tracks here and there and probably the whole album at Uni parties. It just made an impression. I liked rather than loved them and but for the next two albums (including the epoch-making Remain in Light) might have only just remembered them.









BAT OUT OF HELL - MEATLOAF
I liked the big voice but the whole rock and teen mythology felt older than Grease. The normal kids at school loved this one. I had to tape it (and the entire soundtrack album for Saturday Night Fever) for a friend (didn't bother with my own copy) and he went away with a tape of The Kick Inside. Lose-Win.

SOME GIRLS -THE ROLLING STONES

I had the year before bought the album Goats Head Soup which I still like and the year before that I got a '60s compilation which started a lifelong fandom of the British Invasion era of the singles band. This one was from the heart of their initial stadium band era and I could take or leave it. Miss You was fun and I had a friend who loved the whole platter but all I could think about was that I could have bought a copy from the local K-Mart which had the original cover art with the movie stars on it (replaced after a lawsuit by pictures of the band).




SINGLES!

Hit Me With Your Rhythm stick made a performing monkey out of me as I'd do the vocal before Biology class over a period of months. Pump it Up cured the golden oldie laid back bore of the first album and made the '60s sound like the future. The clip with the geeky one doing the stagger walk in a suit stolen from a scarecrow sold me on so much. No One is Innocent had me on the fallen angel Johnny's side so I thought the first spin was fun before being too good for it. The flip, Sid's My Way was more my stuff. Forever Autumn sounded enough like the Moody Blues to be enjoyable but it was from a concept album so embarrassing it was played to us in the English class as art. Warm Ride was an old sounding song with a great dynamic vocal. Dreadlock Holiday was a fine soundtrack song for a funny clip. Rasputin was so goofy that it never failed to stir a young drunk to the dance floor under the house to try the Russian kick dance and land on his bum bruise to be. Khe San worked as a modern day bush ballad but was also the first sign that Cold Chisel were nothing like the rip snorter that journalists who had seen them live had promised. It sounded like new country. It was fine and probably deserved to be bogan anthem #1. Sultans of Swing sounded like JJ Cale with Segovia on a Strat. Full boomer groove but I loved it. I Can't Stand the Rain popped, clicked and raged behind a barnstorming vocal and an arrangement that changed under every verse: beautiful. Werewolves of London: performing monkey time for me again. Best Friend's Girl sounded like everything on the crumbling Super Hits LPs in the rumpus room which was fine with me. Because the Night began and ended my fandom of Patti Smith. Take a Long Line had an old jug band cut their hair and dress punque. Cheesy n eeesy but it worked better than when the Stranglers did the same thing. Miss You was the Stones doing disco and we all knew the spoken bit before Economics. Baker St still thrills with a quiet slice of life and a murdering sax hook. Ca Plane Pour Moi was and is laughable bullshit but catchy enough to transcend the language barrier. Turn the Beat Around sounded like a kind of Masonic chant for performance at Studio 54, dancey and creepy all at once. Every 1's a Winner won and again proved that as punk as anyone got, Hot Chocolate could still make it through.

Here's the thing about these two photos of me: the one at the top was taken by someone else 

and the one at the bottom was taken by me. Which one am I smiling in?