1980@40: FREEDOM OF CHOICE - DEVO

Having conquered a whole stratum of the submainstream system with an array of records and difficult videos, Devo, along with Talking Heads and Pere Ubu, were showing as much of the world as they could reach that American rock music could sing differently from the ice-cream cocaine hell that was Steely Dan, The Eagles and Billy Joel. By the time this one came along, Devo's assault was concentrated that the songs, while perfectly individual, were hard to tell apart. That was intentional. Devo's brief was to use uniformity in art to crack the surface of it in the culture.

Every song is a tightly machined unit of guitar rock laced with the synthesiser sound de jour, each one coming in between two and three and a half minutes. Like the frozen berry pullaparts you could get at the supermarket to make that 10pm work night a little special you could do the lot of pick sections as needed. That's why this album has the sense of being a long suite of statements rather than a dynamic flow of moments weighted accordingly.

That is almost true. In fact, the Mothersbaughs were sharp songwriters with a good ear for hooks. So, while this album is like a small chrome berry pullapart there are some songs that make compilation albums despite never being singles. The massive title track with its great doubletracked vocals and guitar assault emerges from an assembly lined thunder on electric tom toms. Freedom from choice is what you want. This was a single. So was Whip It. Bizarrely, this shout against the coming storm of Reaganomics with its disturbing video of distorted Americana went top 40. Gates of Steel bursts into the light as a brilliant keyboard fanfare lifted by guitar wash from below. The steely vocals describe the human lot (half a goon and half a god) recalling Beatle's choruses as much as the hard nosed authority from above already looming on the horizon. It's a masterpiece.

So, while I thought it best not to go track by track in agreement with the intended uniformity of the record it's worth noting the efforts of any vision-led band who are too good to quite appear machine perfect and break into a very tough and sweating invention. Devo, by the nature of that vision, were not long for continuation beyond the point of repetition but even that suited them. A million compilations with unvarying tracklistings later and The Rolling Stones are simply still on the market in bitesize units. Devo's built-in endurance gives us a futureproofed perfection. Beat that, Eagles.

1970@50: LET IT BE - THE BEATLES

"I dig a pygmy by Charles Hawtrey and the Deaf Aids. Phase One in which Doris gets her oats." The metallic voice is John Lennon's. He's goofing about waiting for a take to start. There's a lot of that on this record, the slickest band in the world letting their increasingly long hair down and pumping out some laid back rock and roll. But it's artifice. The interjections were inserted from hours of tape of listless jams or failed takes to give the impression of spontaneity. I didn't know that when I first heard it, I thought it was an album with a band in informal mode. If anything, it gave them impression that they were being sophisticated by presenting themselves so relaxed.

The first song, Two of Us, is a bouncy acoustic number with close harmonies and a whimsical lyric. A middle eight, stronger than the rest of the song, comes out of nowhere and then they head back down the sunny country road. Dig a Pony begins with a false start before launching into one of Lennon's time signature shifting specials, nonsense lyrics before a heartfelt declaration of love in the chorus which only seems to fit.

Across the Universe begins a gentle strum before floating into one of Lennon's finest softer songs. More timeshifting and a smooth vocal. This is the track that introduces the extras provided by rescue producer Phil Spector. He puts a choir into the chorus and it works beautifully. George's I Me Mine blasts into an expansive waltz with a high warbling vocal for the minor key verse and a boogieing chorus in 4/4. Dig it rises from the silence as John yells impromptu names over a chugging beat before it fades back out with a little joke about the track to come in a joking falsetto: "Now we'd like to do Hark, the Angels Come."

Let it Be announces its gravitas from its opening piano chords, broad and stately. McCartney's vocal has lost its cute and he's sounding self-conscious and important. The track's a good one, though. Spector's choir and brass section add needed texture and the album version of Harrison's solo is killer. Then, because this is all about goofiness as well as serious Beatle music, the side ends with an old Scouse street ballad that falls apart in seconds.

Side two begins with a big sounding guitar arpeggio and McCartney's strong vocal on I've Got a Feeling which swings in big angles, breaks into a deliciously screamed middle eight, mixes a Lennon throwaway chant with McCartney's closing verse. More goofing about afterwards. One After 909 comes from the band's prehistory and slams in as a kind of smooth rocker, aided by Billy Preston's electric piano. Then it stops. More goofy cries and asides.

The Long and Winding Road expands almost immediately from a gentle opening with vocal and piano to a Vegas style extravaganza with brass, strings and choir. McCartney famously disliked Spector's arrangement but the truth is that it fits this big ballad with its big gaps and big starts. It's actually difficult to imagine McCartney leaving it as a plain band performance when he seems to be building space for orchestral interjections into the basic track. Strikes me that his distaste had more to do with the arrangement simply being someone else's. I've never enjoyed the song. Even listening as an increasingly wowed second generation Beatles fan at 13 I thought this sounded like Glen Campbell.

For You Blue is a tinkly  blues with a happy vocal and a light love song lyric. Harrison consciously wanted it to be a jolly use of a genre given to fate and personal doom. Well, he did just that but I'll still skip the track.

The album's sole moment of greatness from those sessions comes at the end when a smattering of chat suddenly starts in on the thumping intro to Get Back, a rocker that moves forward like a lorrie and is blessed with good soloing and vocals, managing some deft stops and starts and ending with a good joke about passing an audition.

However contrived, the record sounds like the last statement of a band who chose to go out on a humble note, as bare as they'd begun, rather than a mammoth epic of virtuosity. Well, but for timing that is the thing that did happen. Abbey Road was recorded and released as the final Beatles album and it was a peak of their writing, arrangement and production. And then this thing came back from an abandoned project, released along with a film about a band collapsing in on itself.

Well, Peter Jackson is in the process of rewriting that history in a reconstruction from the footage in the vaults and will make that available for the film's anniversary later this year. The LP might well also get the kind of deluxe treatment that the three previous releases got. I'll see the movie and I'll buy the super gaduper release of the album. But I'll also kick myself to doing so.

I heard this record in the holidays between 1975 and 1976. It was one of the mass of discs my brother Michael  brought with him for his holidays and I was able to give myself a swift education in the Beatles in reverse order from this one back to Sgt Pepper. I did like the engaged feel of  Let it Be but didn't care about half of the songs so always played it as a skipper record. Moving backwards through Abbey Road, White Album, Magical Mystery Tour and Pepper I quickly gathered an appreciation for what I liked about music in general, having only that year broadened from a classical only taste. This record, though, lent a kind of worldliness to the listener, an invitation to a session rather than an audience with the lords of music.

I saw the movie at a cinema and found it dull and formless. That tainted the record even more. When I learned about the editing needed to make it appear spontaneous I shrugged as it didn't surprise me. I soon grew to see it as an aftermath document rather than an album in its own right and when Let it Be Naked was released in the 90s I didn't shell out for it and wasn't impressed when I did hear it. The way I heard it just before when preparing to write this was lifted by the quality of the 2009 remaster in hi res and it passed pleasantly without taxing or annoying me.

But when you look at it in the context of its time, with the varying quality of the solo members' output and the easier reach to the efforts of artists ready to emerge into a new decade with what I always find an unpleasant resort to the blues scales and moaning vocals of boomer rock, Let it Be fits perfectly, slotting into a kind of music that if the Beatles had pursued it might have rendered them as toneless, dressed down and rote as their very best had all but destroyed. That's there in some of the records with their happy saxes and '70s radio friendliness. The Beatles got dull. They joined the '70s when not being dull required the kind of drive that seemed beneath them. And that it what drove me back to discovering the '60s and its freshness. Let it Be had to happen and there was never a more potent example of a device to extract fans from the old days and turf them into the new ones. It's not a bad album but it the was the first in years that wasn't great.