1980@40: THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS

UK and Australian cover.

 This is the kind of album a band makes when they've developed a good following as a live unit and have fans who know songs by title. They are exciting on stage and a good gig leaves a buzz. Then they get picked up by a record company, go into the studio and produce a very clear image of their creative output and realise that it's a lot of vibe surrounding one great song.

The Pyschedelic Furs were far from one hit wonders. Their chart success bore them for a good half decade which is more than most bands get. They had a distinctive sound and a singer whose voice could not be mistaken for anyone else and enough force behind the songwriting to keep hitting. And they started interestingly, adding a sax that shoehorned bebop melodics into a four on the floor rock beat and extended the post punk force into atmosphere. X Ray Spex had done something similar with the same instrument a few years before but this was a real development. So, wouldn't their debut be that kind that pops out so that whatever else they do they will always have this? You'd think.

I'm not doing a track by track on this one because when you listen to the songs as constructions of lyrics, melodies, verses and choruses most of them don't amount to much and then when you credit the production for adding so much more then that first point glares out even more. India takes too long to build from silence into song and that's the first track. Fall's chanting verses offer a little relief by being different but the next song is much like the one before it and I keep recalling going to any number of gigs where I recognised the name of the band from seeing posters around the neighbourhood, finally seeing them and thinking they were ok but I couldn't tell one song from the next.

There's a lyrics issue here that adds to the wrong side of the signature/samey issue. I remember reading a letter in RAM in the late '70s listing every instance of the phrase "I don't want to" in Elvis Costello's This Year's Model album. There seemed to be hundreds; the letter took up most of the letters page. This album does the same for "stupid". I think it's in every single track. It makes me think that Butler liked it in one song and just kept putting it in, not knowing which were going to make it through and then didn't bother to alter anything for the recording where it is glaring. It's an adolescent word in the context of rock lyrics and drags everything into a feeling of something unfinished.

The other problem here is production. Steve Lillywhite had established his approach in the late '70s twiddling the knobs for the likes of XTC and The Banshees. His approach sounds reasonable enough: enhance the live set so that it sounds like a record, adding whatever studio magic to set it in its time. The only bands whose identity survived this were those with the strongest personalities to begin with (e.g. U2 or Siouxsie). This record sounds like the next job. It's good but it's also mark hitting and time serving. So you get a host of flanged guitars, gated drums and a live style mix where the rasping voice of Richard Butler is often barely on the surface of the sound.

Also, it gets the best song out of the way too quickly. After India which doesn't feel like it means anything more than a chord progression workout and a rant, the big drums and brooding bass kick in with a slow deliberate gait. A heavily flanged guitar fades in with an arpeggio on the 9th. The Sax breathes a smokey agreement with the guitar and Butler comes in with a series of surrealistic vingettes. This grooves into a hypnotic swing and then the chorus knocks down the door with a lower profile than you'd expect and more breathy vocals, "sister of mine, home again" as a wave of flanging rises like a sense of panic. See, I don't care if this doesn't mean anything it's compelling. The video clip I remember seeing on Night Moves while I was sweeping the floor of the loungeroom (do you remember where you were? well, such was my life) and stopped. A mimed band performance in cold monochrome, the band are dressed sharply but not in any ostentatious uniform. Butler wears a Bogart trenchcoat and sings without facial expression, moving lightly as he delivers. This is intercut with pans and tracks of monumental sculptures at such close range that some of them look like they're alive. It's a beautiful blend of strange noir imagery and movement with music both elegant and doom-laden; a perfect dirge for the nascent '80s with their minutes to midnight nuclear clock and social identity removal.

It was on the strength of Sister Europe that I asked a friend to cassette the album for me. I listened to it once through and then just wound it back to that song whenever I put it in. I bought a vinyl copy of the US version of the album with the black and white '60s-looking cover. It had a slightly different tracklist, not that I noticed as I still only played Sister Europe. And then most recently I listened to a download of it in hi-res. It's clearer now what work went into trying to make the songs both distinct and add up to a whole but the best song so fully outclasses every other that the rest falls flat again. What they needed was a push into the songs. That happened and brilliantly. But that's a tale for 1981@40.

US cover

1980@40: GET HAPPY - ELVIS COSTELLO AND THE ATTRACTIONS

This took me by surprise and not in a good way. I came back from Brisbane and found a copy in the local export record shop. I was a massive fan of the previous two albums (the debut not so much) and had heard nothing about this one. Rather than trying to work that out I bought it and slammed it on the turntable. And slowly sank.

I didn't get it at all. It starts off with a pop as the two-beat Love for Tender has punch and melody. Then it deflates as Opportunity seems to just plod to a namby pamby chorus without ever taking off. The Imposter has vocals but no words I can make out. Secondary Modern has a twiddly riff and stays under the wire. And so on. There are so many songs that it's impossible to think of the album as being anything but a big mess. A few plays later I start to get it. And it makes sense.

EC had already been doing this kind of thing. My Aim is True had a number of songs in a rock vein that strayed too close to California smooth for my liking but This Year's Model blasted all of that away with a garage pop veneer over a tough contemporary rhythm section and then Armed Forces took all that to the peak with more elaborate arrangements and expanded textures and themes. Really if I imagined something from Aim as done like something from the next two I'd hear Elvis Costello, I just didn't like the plinky generic studio playing of Aim. Get Happy was a little like going back to zero and starting from a different landscape. This one was more of a '60s soul feel but filtered through what the band could do by themselves.

Nick Lowe's producer note on the rear cover explained that the technology had improved enough for the cramming of tracks at the end of sides was no longer a problem. When you have twenty songs on an old LP there really is a need to explain that. If you bought a generalist compilation from the time (I had one of '60s hits) the audio quality just started diving from the middle of the disc onward. But if Nick Lowe wasn't lying I heard the same thing here. I'd say it was clarity getting muddy but it wasn't a clear sound to begin with. The production was so mid-range that it was virtually impossible to hold on to anything. That's before you get to the songs themselves which were no longer written with the violent archness of the previous albums and were softened with a broadening of subject matter. The songwriter I admired most from this time whose songs could make you choke as though you'd got a chicken bone stuck in your throat was now just serving up gristle.

There were moments of greatness that the worst production couldn't conceal. New Amsterdam is creamy and beautiful with a little crunch in the thoughts. Clowntime is Over rejuvenates an old timey melodic style into something important and compelling. Motel Matches gives us a new kind of country lament that is set somewhere between midnight and four in the morning and the magnificent Riot Act fills the ear and makes the mind swoon.

I made a tape of the songs I liked and took that back to Brisbane, leaving the rest of the album behind as a kind of sepulchre. Bye bye, EC, thanks for the inspiration.

It wasn't until the very late '90s when I bought a fairly good turntable from a friend that I put it on again. Different record. I could hear through the stodgy production, illjudged vocal harmonies (which sounded like football chanters trying to be the Beach Boys) and all that soul style which I've never warmed to. I heard the songs. Opportunity had real breadth and sadness, Possession a grandeur. I still didn't like everything I heard but at least this time I was hearing it. A few duds out of a list of twenty? I'll take those odds.

Then when the remastered CD versions appeared I restocked everything up to this one (article on Trust will come later) which carried the conceit a step further by having thirty tracks (B-sides including his demo of Girls Talk and a lot of outtakes). With the production boosted to take advantage of the great headroom of digital it sounded alive. More recently the hi-res download took that a step further still and is my preferred presentation of the record. The boom is still there, as it was intended, but now there's real bass and crisp highs that convey pure pleasure.

But before that I had the vinyl and the newer turntable and listened that first night of getting all the old discs out of boxes and felt warm (not audio warm which is a bullshit concept, I mean emotionally warm). Motel Matches came on and took me to my most recent fling. It had been my turn to get dumped (in those days it was almost even whether it was me or the other calling it quits) and the poignancy played straight into my self-pity, pouring into it like vodka from the freezer. I got my guitar on the bed and worked the song out and sang a whispered version as the night was getting on. It wasn't until I finished playing that I realised I had taken the trouble to work out someone else's song and go for a drive in it the way I hadn't done in many many years, the way I'd only done when I thought of songs as puzzle boxes whose beautiful secrets could be found through a little listening, reason and work. And it wasn't hard to recall that out of all the songs I had be-fanned in my grumpy, needy teens the ones I most longed to decipher, open and luxuriate in were Elvis Costello's. And here was the last of the puzzle boxes that I attempted. It had taken decades for me to get beyond the unlovely coating but when I did I saw the riches there straight away.

1970@50: BLACK SABBATH

Rain falls. Distant thunder. A church bell. Then Baam Baaam Baaaaaaaam! A tide of solid metal guitar tone blares from a G to the tritone C#. This erases the thunder you were just hearing. It's better than thunder. It's a horror movie scene. Ozzy Osbourne enters with a cry of terror, describing an unearthly scene of death and the devil. The reason this works so well across the decades for all its hokey imagery is that the band is taking its time to let the atmosphere sink in. They are happy to let a chord ring until you get it, happy to linger on a syllable until you know it comes from the pain of fear.  You are there in the clearing in the woods with something unbelievably malevolent around you and there's no escape. Towards the end, when they're confident you're in, does the gallop begin and the song reach for its dynamics. And then, amid the riffing, snakey bends and feedback howls you start thinking of Jeff Beck and then the band finishes on a tight slicing beat that drove Beck's Bolero. Welcome to the world, Heavy Metal.

A note here. Why say this here rather than for Led Zeppelin or any of a handful of other candidates? Zep were two albums in by the release of this one and rang with gigantic riffs and vocals from an iron foundry. However, they were also about expansion and exploration (the name itself refers to something both heavy and light) and were soon to release an album that was about half fully acoustic and folky (the next album had extensive acoustic numbers and the one after that had funky workouts, jazz rock solos and reggae). Deep Purple would continue veering towards a kind of heavy prog. While Sabbath showed they weren't just about the crunch even on this one their sheer commitment to the aesthetic of the gothic. Even a song that starts with a lute is aimed at the dark outside. I have no doubt the band thought of their music simply as rock, perhaps with a theatrical edge but rock all the same. But their remaining career has lived up to the promise of this first statement.

The Wizard starts with the kind of lonely train station blues harp figure that British Invasion bands wore like a badge of entry for the decade just gone. When the band comes in it fuses with the metal chord riff. After a lot of shuffling and bashing the vocal part of the song begins with a melody that wouldn't be out of place in an old Yardbird's cover version of a Howlin' Wolf number. Really? Isn't this against the rules? Well, they are only just being made as we listen. Chief rivals to the throne, Led Zeppelin were doing the same but never seemed bothered by how close they were to their roots. One and a half songs into Sabbath's debut and this already sounds old fashioned.

A very easy two chord groove that borders on jazz starts Behind the Wall of Sleep before a bluesy ascending riff starts the verse and is answered by an equally bluesy vocal that pans around the sound stage. The intensity of sleep states recall the H.P. Lovecraft story paraphrased in the title, including sleep paralysis and its terrors. A rocking instrumental takes us through to morning where all returns to sunlight and ease.

A meandering bass walk with a wah-wah pedal fades up, strolls around, realises it's in the wrong room and leaves again. The iconic modal riff of N.I.B. growls until the band kicks in behind it in full power. Ozzy sings with a stinging wail that though many doubt his love it is genuine and hers must also be real for this deal to work. Oh, his name is Lucifer, please take his hand. the genius of this is to present from within a dark and strident musical armour Satan is powerless without the will of the other. You don't have to believe in any of the pageantry to understand the abusive folie a deux to this. I don't know if they meant anything more than the devil meets the girl at the crossroads or how the flower children were being seduced (the Manson trials were still fresh news) but the force of the song allows much reframing. With instrumental workouts that sound like movie scores and Ozzy in great voice this will always sound ready and new.

Evil Woman struts around, proving that a cover version can be more vital than an original as long as you are willing to drag it into your own workspace and fashion it there. If it's less remarkable than the originals around it it at least doesn't beg you to skip it.

Lute and jews harp open Sleeping Village. Ozzy's vocal is dramatic but the words are pleasant. It's an intriguing juxtaposition. The band comes in after these very few lines and proceeds to a structured jam. This loses me, frankly but I'll have to give them the discipline in this rushed extended session for bringing what would have been a show stopper on stage into something at least listenable.

This moves seamlessly into Warning which is set in a swirl of Hendrix-style psychedelia. The words and vocal melody are all Britrock blues that you would have been hearing in Free, Led Zeppelin etc around you. Tony Iommi's guitar showcasing here verges into the samey territory that all those bands could. The one thing that Zeppelin had throughout their recording career was knowing the line between what they were expected to do on stage and what wouldn't be tolerable on record. Page's solos and instrumental breaks were mostly kept brief. Grand soloing was for live shows. That said, the guitar playing here is very fine. It's just that in context, in a crowd that included Page, Beck, Clapton, Hendrix and Peter Green this sounds more routine than impressive.

But what I'm missing here is that this is a kind of Please Please Me for the other end of the decade. This record was set down in less than one day and the overdubs (vocal doubling and a lot of guitar layering) not that long. The band was playing their stage show. If the recording lays bare how influenced they were by their peers, moments like the eerie guitar moaning in the dark of the end of Warning and all the original riffage and dynamics also show how well the band knew the emotional journey's of their songs and could steer them as musicians in control of their own power.

The cover art might well scream hokey now after generations of metal and goth record sleeves tried to go further but it works still for being understated. A green faced woman in black stands by a pond near an old farm house. It could be now or 1465. The problem lies in the inner gatefold with the band name in a font that looks enough like the kind of Art Deco era branding that was more fashionable on albums where the band shots are in grassy fields at magic hour. It really doesn't look like the band you'd expect. I wondered about this and Googled the font. There is one developed later that bears the band's name. I found a generator and typed in Daisy Maisy Love Bomb Band and it looked like this:

Anyway, the other thing on the inner cover is a wireframe inverted cross filled with a prose poem with imagery taken from the photograph. It's all atmospherics and Year 10 poetics about birds being silent from singing of too much terror. It was written by the photographer's assistant and comes so close to saying nothing with a lot of words that it's almost forgettable but I can't help wondering if it felt so try hard back in 1970.

This is an extraordinary debut from a band whose influence would govern what would come to be known as metal and well beyond that. I'll get to that in more detail when I write up the album that followed, Paranoid, later in the year as there's more to say from that context. But for this moment in rock music I can only dip me lid for a band who crafted their way out of endless blues workouts in pubs and school dances into self-generating folklore.

1980@40: END OF THE CENTURY - THE RAMONES

When I first heard about this one my first thought was "why did they bother?" My thinking went along these lines: if bands like The Sex Pistols and the Saints had the grace to give up when the going was still good why couldn't The Ramones. Yes, there are many fragile assumptions in there but when you filter the sentiment through the kind of fatigue anyone who was looking for newness in 1980 was feeling. If they were still just doing the ol' cartoon punk of the late '70s wouldn't that just sound ... ol'? If they were going to move on like The Clash did would they have the chops? Then the name Phil Spector came up as producer and I thought, "hmm".

After a sound effects introduction goes a little too long and ends in a DJ calling the next track for the Ramones over what sounds like the opening drums to Blitzkrieg Bop we kick into a full stereo mix of it with a chant borrowed from that song but re-purposed. Actually sound pretty good so far but then the massed saxophones of Greater Brooklyn kick in and you think, hmmm. And then in the verse the Archies' organist comes in. Yes, it's meant to evoke the auld times but the Ramones were already doing that (find out what Chris Bailey said about the supposed closeness in sounds between The Ramones and The Saints). What this actually sounds more like is the stuck-in-rut arrangement that Spector was plastering anything he worked on in the 70s. He'd already turned ex-Beatle records into muddy messes with great farting saxophone choirs and kicked them adrift on the sea of embarrassment. He's doing the same thing here. Then again, he's not cheesing up The Ramones as much as exposing what was already there (save some of the sharper lyrics of the first records that we're going to miss here). Oh, if you think I'm blaming saxophones for this compare this loud jacket approach with the aerodynamic gale that The Saints used on Know Your Product two years earlier. No bloody comparison.

Affected crashes in with steroidal tom toms under buzzsaw guitars and a sax drone. We're in a minor key and Joey is trying for some more dynamics in his vocals. He gets them but it also starts sounding like the J. Geils Band. A slide solo followed by a picked one prevent this track from sounding like anything but the standard U.S. radio fodder from the time. Well, there really were people out there turning music into gold and it's happening right here, as long as you don't mind changing your definition of gold.

Danny Says: A Beach Boys figure on acoustic guitars and dulcimers arpeggiate a chord bright and Joey comes out with more lyrics of nostalgia. The song builds pleasantly. Do I want The Ramones pleasant, though? Just enough '60s kitsch with a slight bed of more contemporary overdriven guitar. Yeah, pleasant. See, when Blondie did stuff like this (and they did a lot of it) it always had an intentionally uneasy blend of sincerity and archness that worked because you could either turn one of those understandings off and enjoy it for that or just have both course in through your ears. This gets neither of them and goes instead for the kind of Huey Lewis middle ground that would grow and facially wrinkle into yacht rock by the mid '80s.

Chinese Rock at least sounds like The Ramones but by now even that has a nostalgic feel to it. So we've got drug addiction and power chords but the sheen of the production continues to steer the band into AM radio friendliness. I think I'm missing the humour.

Same for Let's Go.

There's some humour here but it's sounding locker room rather than us-and-them, the way it used to. Ouch, does that mean I'm consumed by my own nostalgia? I guess so. Alright, why's that, then? Sigh.

Look, I'm not going to go through, track by track, and crap on the rest of this record as I think it deserves to be. I turned away from the band when I heard it and am not surprised on a re-listen to agree with my seventeen year old self.

This is something that affects all art. Keep going with your established style and your risk stagnation. Try something new and you risk your fan base. Experiment wildly you could lose everything. In each case if your brand isn't cast in iron from the hobs of hell you will lose. David Bowie got away with all of those . Closer to the street, The Clash did, too, but they had to make it a novelty (double and even triple albums sold for single LP prices). The Ramones had delivered a batch of burning singles and decent albums for over four years before this one and were better known than bought. Who knows why that was?

They looked right for their market with a lingering '70s look that was out of sorts with the spikier fashions of their UK counterparts but this worked for them. It worked because they looked normal but sounded tough and brash with a cartoony humour that could bear real fangs. Maybe that just takes too much nuance on the part of fans in the age of Eye of The Tiger. What happened here was that they went for the next level of working band with bigger gigs and wide airplay. It's easy to judge, then and now, but, really, if you want to keep the band going because anything's better than wages and maybe even have a mass audience dig your sounds then maybe you should take the king's shilling and join the others.

But here's where I think I might be wrong. I turned back to the '60s for inspiration until punk came by and delivered it by the truckload. Before that I gorged myself on bands like The Beatles who changed significantly with every release. If that becomes a value then not only would I dislike Rod Stewart or Bruce Springsteen for always sounding the same but I'd expect significant change from punk and post punk, too. I didn't know then that bands like U2 or Garbage would happily make the same album for their whole career and only get bigger. Bollocks was the final real Sex Pistols album which I had to admit a few years later was a good thing because it allowed PiL out of the cage. What did I expect of The Ramones? Well, listen to the first three Saints albums, maybe that. But maybe that was beyond them. If so, why not admit it and quit? Well, this record was a real hit. That's why.

The Ramones did bounce back and worked hard for deserved success. While I was never a massive fan I enjoyed them being there and crunching out dark jokes. Maybe the point where this was not enough was the same one for the band: joke's over, we got bills to pay. Can't argue with that but when I hear the big drunk-uncle version of an old Ronettes song with the string arrangement kept over from that one by the same arranger it doesn't sound like a joke anymore: it sounds popular. Bowie would do the same for me with Let's Dance, a few years later and (not that he noticed) we parted company until the very end.

In these days when Good Charlotte look like tough guys with studs and pancreatic studs but sound like a Vegas show who cares? Well, I think we all should. It's not obsessive fan-projection to expect the artists that inspire you to at least try to continue to be themselves. A few awkward growth spurts here and there are fine as long as we know they're ok. We should treasure a little naivete with this. If we don't then everyone does everything and just looks and sounds like everyone else. I hate this record now as I did then and see so reason to forgive it. Naive? Yes. Did it feel good to write? You bet.

1980@40: METAMATIC - JOHN FOXX

Tone-deaf people will compare this to Gary Numan. They're hearing the synthesiser riffs and alloyed vocals and maybe the lyrics about alienation and weird sci-fi phrases like He's a Liquid but what they are not hearing is the music. There really is little to link them apart from how they fish in the same tonal pond at glancing moments but Foxx was a veteran of cheerless post punk, having fronted the first lineup of Ultravox: he had his own groove. Also, he had his own musicality which bears little resemblance with Numan's. Gary's is a tightly focused modal palette that produces atmospheres both sweet and eerie and backs them with an ever increasing army of rock instrumentation. Foxx starts out with dissonance, twelve tone difficulty and keeps his settings in the Britain around him, the newly Thatchered deep freeze of eroding civil rights and erasure of communities. Musically, he's much closer to the Human League of the time ... but not really.

Plaza begins with a thickly textured string synth riff that is far more Bernard Hermmann than Gary Numan. Beneath it a steady ticking of a drum machine and the only trad rock instrument on the record, an electric bass. Foxx starts the verses with a wail, "In the plaaazah!" and describes a series of surrealistic visions like JG Ballard describing a De Chirico painting. A more muttered verse tells of smoked glass and meeting strangers. Like much of the rest of this album the mood is agoraphobic and paranoid.

He's a Liquid opens with a sweeping string synth riff less, chromatic and severe than Plaza's and soon settles into a gentle but cold electro funk as Foxx's harsh murmur describes a strange erotic meeting between a man and a woman which might be something culty or parasitical. The ambiguity blends well with the cinematic atmosphere.

A growling rumble begins the single Underpass. A determinedly non acoustic bass kick clunks. The mighty riff wails out like a shortcircuited siren. Fragmented images. Someone can't quite finish thoughts. Memories appear like torn notepad pages. A severely flanged scrape punctuates as a bass thumps a ground that would be reggae if it weren't so gelid. A frozen but irresistible song. Doesn't matter what it means, if you don't feel it it is about you. The video for this song is a classic of its time. Foxx moves through a fluorescent-lit underpass or transport platform where lost looking children cling to each other, emotionless musicians play hi-tek keyboards, people make secret gestures to each other in the shadows and the concrete freeways encroach on the landscape. It looks like it's set in a British sci-fi show of the time with freezing video colours. YouTube it (just make sure it's the original 1980 one, he redid it but not so well).

Metal Beat rolls out like a machine-composed Latin dance ballad but, again, it's toned down to Arctic temperatures as a series of brusque commands like mechanically misinterpreted dance calls bark out. A low but distinct more human voice sings along with the chorus. It might be the programmer or just someone recalling the directions. It goes on past the point where we get it but that might itself be the point.

No One Driving is the first track that sounds like a pop song of its time with a full throated vocal and longer melodic phrases that fit together in anticipation of the chorus which repeats the title. As with the rest of the record, this is electronic plus electric but the parts sound more like they originated in traditional rock parts like rhythm guitar, piano, drums etc. As an exercise, I imagined a dull success story band from the '70s (Toto, say) doing this with overworn synth sounds and that session musician overdrive sound on the guitar. It worked, except that Toto would never have imagined something as icky and unsettling as the subject matter of a slowly collapsing world.

The old side two begins with a number as strident as No One Driving but with the accessible melodism with the same kind of dissonant vocal harmonies as in Underpass. Big synth riffs and even a caterwauling solo. New Kind of Man is the strange tale of a film star who walks out of the screen. He traverses time and feels young but controlled. He reenters the frame forever changed with a kind of longing looping in the back of his mind.

Flanged scrapes and a siren-like glissando on a saw wave. A melancholy mezzo-synth weeps through the severe stacked vocals as they list details of what sounds like an intentional disappearance. Lieutenant 030 is on the case but can only find the most cryptic clues. There is a strong sense of the Phillip K. Dicks going on and this hard edged lament feels like a prelude to the film version of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Blade Runner, that was two years into the future.

A sequenced conga beat through a ring modulator throbs beneath a chromatic synth figure. Tidal Wave progresses through a series of sketched scenarios which might be a real tidal wave or a personal cataclysm interrupting a relationship. Communication is lost but just goes by his window.

The closer Touch and Go begins with an almost jaunty bass and drum and squonking synths. Foxx is again in full voice as he takes us through a busy jumble of images that sound like they're from a European holiday resort as seen by a long serving/suffering staffer or perhaps even the resort itself. It's the observation of fun rather than the fun itself.

This is an unfriendly record. In the air of 40 years distance it sounds like it was made to fail. There's a point to all of that and it has to do with the sense of alienation in a society shedding a shrieking metal skin of industrialisation and not quite knowing what it was expected to do then. Faceless authority was stuffing the dole queues with displaced people who were installed in debt circles like hamster wheels and a great cloud of nuclear doom moved in between the sunlight and the earth for anyone who thought to change their position. The eighties began with the ideals of the sixties grown so buckled and torn it could only look like scrap metal and the voices like the searing novelists of dystopian sci-fi were reading like social science.

Gary Numan had already taken a tincture of Kraftwerk and Berlin-era Bowie to fashion a more populist science fiction and made it his own in a very short time. John Foxx emerged from a band that itself emerged from an ailing prog rock tradition and were yet to discover how to sustain it. Foxx's solo venture was a violent push away from those conventions and offer something new enough yet just barely familiar enough to be taken by the market. But while Numan made his myxolidian synth figures so identical to each other that they became signatures Foxx's more cinematic and broader melodic pallet could only sound samey by comparison. Too often a track will start that is too reminiscent of the previous one. Does this make it bad? No, but it does suggest that the more adventurous ambition that Metamatic expresses was doomed to be harder to pull off. Even the Great Bowie himself couldn't sustain the same kind of thing as the mostly stark and alienating Heroes followed Low's great landscapes and nu-pop charm.

So, no, it's not a faux Gary Numan album and it's not a replay of Heroes but very much itself. It's of its time in a deeper way that the shallow listener might consider (well, there're those synths and electric drums, y'know...)  because it tries to dig into the skin of its own time and find the great grey freeze beneath the shouting hit songs, gleam-toothed game show hosts and hard-mouthed political leaders. See also, rather, The Human League, themselves pressing for the value of a long cold look. Foxx, in this context is another piece of the jigsaw but he's one with a decisive detail on it.

REPOST for series 1980@40: COLOSSAL YOUTH - YOUNG MARBLE GIANTS

This is one of the first posts I wrote for this blog and really has an essential place in this series: You Can find it here.

1980@40: The PRETENDERS

A yell from the distance and the band kicks in for a few bars for really kicking in with a streamlined punk groove as a voice that's seen the worst and best sings about a tough lover. She can't or doesn't have to finish what he makes her wanna as the band bash into a figure like Holidays in the Sun. It's like the Sex Pistols with Mae West on vocals. The ecstasy collides with a kind of dread until they can no longer be separated. It's late 1979 and the album will be released in early 1980. A crucial few years between punk's self-administered demise and the reconstructed rock of the next decade and this band has both covered. Even the breakdown section with the guys sounding nervous on backing singing the title as if they were at peepholes while Chrissie Hynde's supervixen continues the tale does this, taking everything into the kind of cinema that was coming out of Europe at the time and earlier. Precious is a song of transgression.

The Phone Call starts with a grinding two chord riff playing over the sound of an old rotary phone being dialled and the beeps of an engaged signal. When the riff changes to a crashing chord pattern the beeps speed up, timed to fit the music. Hynde comes in either extremely panned or double tracked so that her voice sounds the way a threatened person might hear it. Apart from the last lines of each verse the vocal is spoken, delivered in a low conspiratorial tone before letting loose with a yell about the need for caution. Is it to a field agent, someone who thinks their life is like a Le Carre novel? The song, having flitted between non-rock time signatures for extra edginess, ends in a hang up and the beeps of a dead line.

Up The Neck begins with an off sounding bright guitar figure from outside of the 4/4 standard that relaxes into a decent rock song about more of the kind of co-dependent/narcissistic tough love from Precious but scarier.

Tattooed Love Boys begins with a jangling fanfare on lightly chorused guitar over a chugging adaptation of the Bo Diddley beat. That frantic tension played by an expert rhythm section keeps this song's difficult patterns going while Hynde comes in with a far more darker extension of the rough sex of Precious. Hynde has since explained that it was an account of a sexual assault at the hands of a biker gang when she was a lot younger an more reckless. While the idiosyncratic rock groove suggests a rapid confusion the false ending in the middle which breaks into an instrumental section before the story resumes. It gets no better but her anger at the memory is tooled quite perfectly into the sudden final lines involving a threat of disfigurement and a strong assertion and then BAM! over. "You are that!"

Space Invader is an instrumental that moves well and has enough material to interest for its brief run time and sounds like a music cue for a procedural montage in an action film and indeed served so in an episode of The Sopranos decades later. It ends with a moosh of video game sounds.

The Wait begins with a punk chord riff that knows you want it to be a predictable count of four or eight between bursts but adds one extra which throws everyone off every time. Hynde come in with a rhythmic chant that, for all its Elvis Costello spitting, is utterly unintelligible. I never knew what any of those lines were until I looked them up online for this article. There's a bit where she sings "my baby" but that's all I got until now. But that only counts to the urgency of the song which is about a kid finding his own amusements, left to himself. Lots of fun in pool halls and pinball parlours but the kid ends up each night crashing in late or just staring up at the streetlight, unloved to the point of stasis. There is nothing but the kind of violence in the rest of his day to offer any pushback that might instruct instead of harden. Pete Farndon plays a great runaway bassline in the choruses and Honeyman Scott gives us a wild screaming cacophony for a solo amidst the crunching riffage.

Stop Your Sobbing is dedicated to the other side of this band as far as its songwriting prowess and tributes go. It's a cover of a Kinks song (produced as the B-side of Kid by Nick Lowe) and, while it registers lower in volume that the surrounding tracks, demonstrates that a band who love the song they are covering will probably produce some magic. It's not just advances in recording technology that come into play here, it's arrangement with a gorgeous jangling guitar wash and spacey rhythm section and performance as Hynde delivers a powered nuance that adds great meaning to what might well sound like a trite lyric (but wasn't when The Kinks did it either) but is really a heartfelt plea.

Kid begins with a Rockpile-style '60s rock ballad shuffle and low string figure before Hynde comes in with the most sustained use of her trademark tremolo so far. If there was nuance before in her stories of debauched co-dependence here it is the shifting weight of parental accountability vs a plea for understanding by the parent. Hynde revealed that the lyric was about a child who discovers his mother is a sex worker. Hynde's role as the parent is given such a sense of patience and love despite all that it stings to listen to. And that's before you get to the crashing middle eight and lament of its simply stated message. This lifts a little, enough for the extraordinary turn of James Honeyman Scott whose short but dazzling solo ends in a tribute to George Harrison as he rounds of the sinuous ringing with a pure bell like harmonic. Beautiful.

Private Life enters, relaxing into a three-in-the-morning light reggae as a woman tells her married lover that he is no longer worth the trouble. A male falsetto backing behind the chorus tells him to stop lying. Hynde's delivery is a sophisticated sick and tired as she doesn't let him get a word in and leaves him to the night and his narcissism. It's creepy in the best way which was equalled if not bettered by Grace Jones who brought her own autobiography to it. Assured and gently deadly.

Brass in Pocket starts with a flourish of clean chorused guitar then kicks into a light strutting walk as Hynde lists what she has and is. She has money, a confidence that feels new, new dance moves and the will to use everything she has to get noticed. No solos or breaks, just the chant of a young woman who is determined to find the centre of the stage and win. Maybe it's the influence of the video that went with it but I also hear a lot of wishfulness here, the solid rhythm and airy playing are supporting a series of claims made in front of a mirror while she's getting dressed to hit the clubs. In the video she's a waitress at an English caff. She delivers a tea to a guy sleeping it off at a table and takes it back with a sigh. Three likely lads played by the rest of the band come in. She takes their order with a clear hope on her face which drops when their girlfriends arrive. She watches as they leave, the car disappearing down the street as her gaze follow through the window for the final wordless vocals to the bookended guitar flourish. It's more about what she wants than what she'll get but for now she at least knows how to start, how to look, how to dance and attract. Not tonight? Meh, there's always next weekend.

Lovers of Today begins with a gentle descending arpeggio on the guitar as Hynde begins in a gently plaintive voice. The song builds to a guitar arrangement that Mick Ronson or Brian May might have imagined, orchestral but also rocky. The vocal melody falls and lifts, moving unpredictably through the chords. It's a kind of punk Jacques Brel and appropriately so for its description of male vulnerability. Never has Hynde's lachrymal tremolo been so appropriately used. She can stretch a wordless vocal phrase out with it and sear through hearts. This beautifully saddening torch ballad doesn't waste a moment of its time on the record, even to the point of Hynde's defiant assertion, "no, I'll never feel like a man in a man's world" in the fade.

Mystery Achievement starts with bars of straight 4/4 bashing on the drums which could be the Glitter Band until Hynde comes in with some lush vocalisation. The bass starts a modal circle and the guitar chords on the beat. The verse is a yearning for a breakthrough but it's a yearning of youth (I'm already twenty and still not famous!) which, despite the protestations of the verse, extends into the chorus where she is obsessed by the lack of recognition and adoration. In the hands of most other bands this would sound poncy and cute but The Pretenders make it urgent but anchored by the everyday. In the middle of the song we get bars and bars of the bass grind before the guitar lifts us only to a more frustrated state. The outro is a rising guitar and bass figure storming under Hynde's vocalising. building to a crunch. They decided against using the last track like a b-side.

Boldly clean guitars with tasteful use of chorus. Strong articulate bass. Clear drums. Highly characterful vocals from a central figure with a clear strong identity. You could say all of that about The Smiths except where The Pretenders were brash and flavoursome with their musical decisions as a rule and The Smiths were mostly bland to the taste despite some moments of greatness (and I really do mean moments: not a single album is strong all the way through).  Brass in Pocket is like a future Smiths song without the posturing million extra syllables, a kind of female How Soon is Now minus the precious boy's self-pity. The Pretenders offer here a source point for a major stream of the decade's rock music.

Even if they hadn't done that, though, they were able to construct a rock record that sounded and felt like it had been lived personally and not always pleasantly, a record that remembered why British punk still means more to future generations of fifteen year olds than the punk from anywhere else and a record that proved progression from that jagged rock music neither have to throw the guitars away or turn them up higher. This is the sound of a band who didn't just hone their craft in the sticky carpet pubs and turn up but could work comensally with a producer like Chris Thomas (see also the Beatles and the Sex Pistols) to fashion a great album, not just a first album. Here begins 1980.