L.A. WOMAN @ 50

This album of grooves, slinks and late night croons could not have served better for the exit of Jim Morrison from his band. After the uninspiring flatness of Morrison Hotel the band regathered in strength to lay down the funkier side of blues with some good wordsmithing from Jimbo. For all its jamminess the record is distinguished by a tight discipline in the playing and leanness in the arrangements. It sounds like they care about it again.

So The Changeling starts things off with a confident soul strut and an odd manifesto about someone who is everywhere and nowhere, observing, feeding and reporting, eventually as omnipresent as the air itself. Love Her Madly fires out bright and chopping, an expression of lust that is leering and clean at the same time. Been Down So Long is a hard bashing blues stomp of hard times and jail at the end of them. Cars Hiss By My Window is a brooding blues with slithering licks and a step or two into the cinema off the corridor into a room where a cold girl will kill you in the dark. Jim wails at one point and it sounds like one of Robbie's wah wah solos. Dark and stark and lazy and deadly.

L.A. Woman is the first of the two side-ending epics that had become more or less formula with Doors albums. This open chorded jazz rock workout which is all energy and streetlight drives. It's a kind of Morrison take on Elvis' Viva Las Vegas but instead of wishing there were more than twenty-fours hours in a day the singer has long lost count and there are just moments and sometimes sleep. The lady in the lyrics is easily blurred between a human and a city of them. And through the nightscape comes the strange chant that set the band's own Paul-is-dead style folklore. The anagram Mr Mojo Risin is repeated from a break to become a rallying "risin' risin'!" People whose days were long units of speculation considered this forensic evidence that Morrison was alive (and living in  Africa for some reason, ask them). All that said this big excited workout does feel like a goodbye.

L'America begins with a proto-metal riff that builds to tell the tale of European invaders with the eerie croaking cry about returning like the gentle rain. Hyacinth House let's us take a break from the blues with a bright clean electric guitar figure that includes the vocal melody whose word evoke Greek legend and perhaps Morrison's exhaustion from rock stardom. A witty sidebar into Chopin from Ray's organ solo seems only inspired by the main tune rather than any commentary on the material but it's too charming not to work. Crawling King Snake is a glacial blues, a cover of a mean as mustard John Lee Hooker number. 

The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat) thumps out in hard landscape of strutting blues beneath Morrison's declaiming vocal that describes a vision of outsider life. It's not utopian nor religious but heavy with life-affirming ritual. Lest this should sound a tad hippyish in leaning toward the pagan side of the street it's a world that has ditched all gods and is ready for a kind of freeform anarchy, crawling from the swamps through civilisation to a new world that is sometimes hedonistic and pleasuresome and sometimes plain terrifying.

We're almost there but there are things about this album which illustrate why I'm not doing the seventies as years the way I did the sixties on this blog. We are entering a time which I not only didn't experience first hand as a fan of these bands but didn't encounter later the way I did to the '60s acts. This means that I had to more aggressively look up bands I had little to no knowledge of and then when I heard them almost zero enthusiasm for. This era was marked by a few forces that I do not enjoy like prog and blues forward rock that really took over most of the scene. Prog rock frankly embarrasses me. The first music I was an active fan of was European Classical and the likes of Yes, Genesis and Emerson Lake and Palmer made it sound like an old uncle trying to be hip. And blues ... Well, this might sound strange but blues with me is like an old James Bond movie: once I found it magnetic and compelling but as soon as I went past it it got so samey and flat I could never go back. For anyone who has any interest in where a lot of rock music came from you need to get acquainted with blues. It's not the only point of origin but it informs almost everything that followed. It just leaves me cold, now.

So, while there is much to admire about L.A. Woman as a record its insistence on blues scales and playing all but beg me to resist it. It's a record so single-minded that it feels designed to be heard as a single suite of songs but I cannot easily listen without skipping. I just don't like blues. See also funk or prog. This album has all of that and, while it does pass through a good range of moods, cinematic and literary it doesn't play for me like a single work the way that Strange Days does. All bands must move forward but we don't have to follow them. All this said, we're about to hear the last track and it's one I'll never tire of.

Sounds of rain in a forest, distant thunder. Bass, and electric piano emerge and are joined by the guitar and drums. The groove is tight but low key, moving forward automotively. The vocals appear strangely, buried, the main voice bolstered by a whisper in unison: Riders on the storm, riders on the storm, into this house we're born, into this world we're thrown. There's a killer on the road but that's not the spookiest thing about the song. There's a sickly blend of melancholy and danger, a kind of resignation to existential threat that lives in the shadows or just comes down with the rain, there in nature and the city. When he tells the girl that she's got to love her man, Morrison is pleading for the continuation of the human race. Maybe, he's just observing the endless continuation of life in spite of the lethal dangers surrounding it. It's LA in the early 70s, LA after Manson and it's no fun any more. Ray Manzarek's tinkling Rhodes piano suggests rain but just as easily evokes futility. Morrison ends repeating the line of the title, whether the riders are from Revelation or just everyone alive going with the storm. With a few outgoing thunder claps in the next county he exits stage left, never to return.

The Doors are a strange case. If you get into them enough to listen to the records more than once each you will know effortlessly that the band really was a unit, despite the dominance of the 27 Club member. Even on the first LP his face is gigantic by comparison and his voice, reaching from the croon to a scream, and the words, letting the darkness between the hedonistic lines ooze out, so it's forgivable to consider the band his. But the music is that of a band of musicians who had come to understand each other intimately, bringing their own expertise to the arrangements. It really wasn't just Jim and the others.

But then, after this set he quit and decamped to Paris. The band kept the name and produced two further albums in two more years. They would have sought Morrison's voice for the first, Other Voices, but he died before that could happen so they went ahead. Two years later, after a second LP as a trio they admitted it and disbanded. From our perspective we might feel like shaking them and telling them to stop or at least change the name but we weren't there and it's easy to forget that from their perspective they were the same musicians who brought the sound to the years of greatness, just minus the guy who sang and wrote the words (and not all of them). But years? If you've ever got behind a mic and had as little as a drop of encouragement from an audience you will harbour the ghost of that adrenalin until you die. The three-piece Doors played Carnegie Hall and filled it. They'd gone ahead with shows when the Jimster was too wobbly to rub two syllables together. Manzarek had a pretty strong Jagger like voice. It's clear to us but to them, then, the clarity showed them the same old road.

The comparison closer to my time is with Joy Division. How could you go on without the guy who wrote words that inspired a generation so? Well, not easily but their sound was already changing and the new one was working. Change the name and stop pretending you were the same and go on as a new band. No one expects the old one anymore. That's exaggerated, of course, but that is the longer view and does describe the progression. It seems so obvious to us that The Doors should have done this and set an example. And we're annoyed that the fade of Riders On the Storm is not the end of The Doors and that two records that mixed well played but unexciting jazz rock and novelty numbers (like that bloody Mosquito number sung in brown-face!) stubbornly remain after everyone else has left.

Like everyone who really did get into rock music I worshipped my share of idols. Morrison I knew about form a few articles that happened while punk had started and I was curious about them as, like the Velvet Underground, they were decidedly non-hippy. There was a bleakness and snarl to them that put them closer to punk than all the likes of Steely Dan, the Doobies, The Eagles and whoever else plagued the punk years with their hell of numbing perfection. When Apocalypse Now began with The End which I heard for the first time in that context, I needed to know more. The Doors back catalogue (minus Other Voices and Full Circle) made it back into the shops and we gave them a second life. While I never quite worshipped Morrison I found him frequently inspiring. Then I read No One Here Gets Out Alive and was pretty much turned off rock hero worship forever (that book is toxic!). 

But the better legacy remains and I recall without need of nostalgia a morning of drizzle in Townsville, cane toads croaking in rhythm in the wet, the quiet stink of rotting gardens and mould, when Riders On the Storm crept out of the radio and sounded like where I was. I didn't catch the words so much as understood them, someone, somewhere, knew, like I did at all of fourteen or so, that something was wrong in the world, something would always be wrong with the world.

1981@40: COROBOREE - SPLIT ENZ

Choruses soar from tense verses with a tight reign kept on minor tonality and it's a new Split Enz album. At this distance it's difficult to tell how much self-reflection there was in starting the follow up to their worldwide breakthrough with a song called Hard Act to Follow.  True Colours showed the band either catching up to the shifts in the culture or perhaps finding the reverse. Either way, the sophomore effort after the reset shows a struggle to do more than stay put. That might be a strange observation to make considering the presence of two Neil Finn penned hits but that's the problem, they don't just stand out as obvious singles; they are the only two songs on the album you recall after hearing it.

That doesn't mean there aren't strong melodies or good ideas here it's just that the rest of the record feels like album tracks and b-sides. That it's buried under contemporary modern production only accentuates this. To my mind it feels rushed, the production barely concealing a lack of finish in the writing. Two more Eddie Rayner instrumentals that sound like chase scenes in cop shows. A song that mentions dancing that has a verse over a chugalug  backing and a call and response chorus form fitted for a blue light disco. Tim Finn's attempt at developing the sublime I Hope I Never in Ghost Girl oddly leaves out the eeriness and everything gets served up with side dishes of sequenced synths. This is a producer's album rather than a band's and it would get worse along those lines and let anyone who had worried that the tidier lines of the visual image and absorption of top ten style were heralding the end of the Enz keep worrying.

But emerging from this troubling anti-entropic push towards order by the old merchants of chaos is a pair of songs that became the singles, having no opposing candidates. History Never Repeats slashes into life with a fanfare of chorused guitars over a rumble and the chorus beginning before the drums. There's a freefall to it but the band comes in for the verse with a rhythm that pounds and shrieks and the choruses just keep getting bigger to the point that the block harmonies that come out of a short guitar break threaten to sound like the hell of ELO or The Eagles until the last verse bashes them aside. One more chorus and powerchord fade out and you've got a 1981 hit single. Repeatability maximum.

One Step Ahead was released in advance of the album and then trusted enough to go on as track 2. A strange descending figure on the bass and palm muted guitar. Neil Finn enters with a near whispered plea about his girl gaming on the edge of danger and its kept hushed and spooky with muted keyboards and vocals that don't quite break out with the rest of the band to the point that a wordless verse of la-las feels like going down a corridor in a horror movie. At no point is this anything but pure commercial pop music. It never plays it for spooky camp but never gives up its suggestion of danger. 

If you were listening years later as I am now you might well think it was the sound of Neill Finn bracing himself for the exit at the end of the darkened hallway. That would happen a few albums on as Split Enz drifted ever further from the quirk that made the anti guitar solo in I See Red such fun. Neil Finn would stretch himself with nothing but credibility when he formed Crowded House for songs not bound by a tradition he had come late to. By the time the new band were claiming world wide high chart positions only the voice sounded the same, the craft had expanded, not with the times, just for better times.

This is not to bury Split Enz as they had years yet before they ran aground. Time and Tide had some superb moments on it. Tim Finn's solo effort (which sounded like the AOR numbers on Enz albums) was also a hit. But the sound Neil's restless invention here, set in an increasingly radio friendly loss of flavour is telling. The world doesn't know it but they are waiting for his escape. Until then there were tours, interviews, videos and the whole shower of malarky for an act in which he was a tenant who dreamt of owning his own home.

1981@40 - SOLID GOLD - GANG OF FOUR

There were a few factors in the change I went through from right to left in my politics. First, the right side ultimately failed to convince me, it just felt like something. Second, actually finding out what the left stood for allowed my affinities with it to appear in sharp focus. Third, the culture of Brisbane in the early 1980s tended to polarise the mind the more that mind engaged with it. All of those led me to records like this. They declared themselves but dismantled the sloganeering machine, showed how hard it was to affect any kind of politics and stick with it but kept at it anyway. Gang of Four made The Clash look childlike.

I'm not dismissing The Clash, there, they were forging ahead and very much fighting the good fight but they did keep the slogans. They were expanding their musical horizons but it sounded more like dilettantism to me. The razor wire textures and and minimalism of Gang of Four felt like a relief. 

Paralysed. A spiky guitar figure and spoken vocal. Unemployed and reduced to stasis as the rest of the world chases prizes. The stark description of the ejected worker unable to regain his feet is chilling. "I was good at what I did," he says numbly as the spikes rattle around him. What We All Want - a doctored Bo Diddley riff with an overdriven guitar snaking over it. Less a groove than a machine like chug ensues. "Could I be happy with something else? I need something to fill my time." Rather than the inertia of the laid-off worker in Paralysed, this narrator wants to escape the futility of the society and his part in the workforce that powers it. But it looks like hobby-level pointlessness is the only alternative. Why Theory blends a dissonant disco groove with a hint of dub. You could drown it all in gin or think about what you do.

If I Could Keep it For Myself and Outside the Trains Don't Run on Time both follow the path with the repurposed disco slashing we began with but it's less repetitive than committed. The first of the two features one of the album's most melodic verses as a confusing encounter is recalled (or is it something more sinister?) The next track refers to the boast of Mussolini that he made the trains run on time. A domestic despot muses on the sagging of discipline he sees wherever he looks and swells with anger over the compulsion to order. The final word is the title, yelled both from his frustration and the glee of anyone who sees his impotent rage. It's easy to forget the resurgence of The National Front in the UK as well as the great divisive gloom of the Thatcher years as they began. You could dance to this (I did) but you had to pay it some thought to do it.

A series of field recordings punctuate Cheeseburger with sounds of wait staff and customers as a lorry driver's thoughts, frenzied from caffeine make him question what he is doing with his life, producing wages for himself and greater profits for the nameless few who own his vehicle, as he stops in anywhere he can find for the worst food in the world. The song comes to a hard stop. And then a series of thumps and scrapes of guitar strings sound like he's trying to start an engine that doesn't want to go. Some murmured directions. End. See also, his life. This reminds me thematically of the eerie Listening Wind on Talking Heads' Remain in Light except for the setting, England's green unpleasant land.

The Republic starts with sharp guitars before launching into the haranguing vocal describing the education of the privileged, grinding through years of aloofness to greater society. "Better take smaller chances and bugger the consequences." In the Ditch takes us closer to the street level where people keep to their houses as though waiting for the two minute warning about a nuclear strike. But this is a description of a general lifestyle. "Show me a ditch and I'll dive in it." A Hole in the Wallet lists conservative values of female education. The near future of the dread caused by Thatcher's win was here and was already feeling like it.

He'd send in the army starts with percussion that sounds like either weapons being cocked or whips in use. Staccato guitar slices harden the sound. The band come in bludgeoning form. The vocals go from full unison chanting, dialogue-style asides and the declaiming style of much of this set. A break that is not a dance break recreates the the violence of the opening with the whips and grinding guitar stabs. "She pays him back in the bedroom, one step down from her leader. Obeys or is punished like he obeys his bosses." The stifling oppression could be a brutalising army career or domestic violence or a vicious circle composed of the two. A sudden end. End of side two.

The thing about Gang of Four for me was that they sounded more committed than The Clash (who were learning to play and losing their touch) and less contrived than The Jam (who were working out how to sound like Revolver-era Beatles) but their seriousness was not burdened by  a ham fist. Everything still had that bedroom to gig rawness and for all the strident parade ground chanting they never stooped to sloganeering unless it was in irony. Listening now and hearing the transparency of the arrangements, the anti-rock chopping of the guitar and the funk rhythm section reminds me of how exact and pure this was then, as though there was nothing but an instant collective agreement between the members on what had to be said and what was to be done. It reminds me, too, of why I liked this and didn't like Midnight Oil's pared down prog rock approach which did stumble into slogans. Gang of Four kept their music angry, precise, unlovely and accusing. Whether it's the absence of star members or the defiance of singalongs  or maybe just the insistence on the content over the show this band shed all rock and roll traits as the times only absorbed that. But there wasn't nothing left after that. You could dance to this. You could think to it. You could dance and think to it. Even the funk was free of bullshit.

1981@40: MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS - DAVID BYRNE AND BRIAN ENO

The opening track of Talking Heads' 1979 album Fear of Music is called I Zimbra and has a lot to answer for. Either that or it created a lot of debt. A stubborn African influenced rhythm precedes a guitar figure that contains nary a skerrick of rock phrasing. The vocals are a chant and are from a Dadaist poem and are composed of sonorous gobbledegook. A little over three minutes, the track yet feels epic. It was a product of the band's increasing affinity with the popular but critically snubbed disco. I Zimbra is often cited as the doorway to the band's gigantically-scaled fourth album Remain in Light. The album in question here, though, came between the two and deserves a barge more credit than it gets.

On the surface of it the record sounds like a holiday project as bandleader David Byrne and producer of the previous two Talking Heads albums got together for some fun with funk and tape manipulation. An uncomfortable amount of rock journalism from the time congratulated the pair for having discovered Africa, referring to the great musical debt they owed to that continent from top to bottom. It was released after Remain in Light because of the extensive clearance of the vocal recordings used. That was the other thing: all the tracks were musical but instead of either Byrne or Eno fronting the mic, it was what the world would come to easily identify as samples that provided the tonsil work. From Lebanese shepherds, pop stars from old Asia Minor, and screaming preachers to crewcutted DJs and exorcists, the record gave us slap after slap in the face through the culture shock alone.

But why? Throbbing Gristle had years on this with their variously funny and terrifying use of found sound. Yeah, but you could dance to this and people did. What about hip hop? The masters of the turntable had been leaving them gaping on the dancefloor from the mid '70s. Well, in that pre-web world you had to know about the stuff and the elevation of your profile did more for you than the quality or originality of your stuff. Not that Byrne and Eno were sponging towards a Bethlehem of mediocrity, Bush of Ghosts is mighty, it's just that the average punter had so little background at the time. Hip hop was on the verge of worldwide breakthrough. The tapeloopers like TG would not quite surface as so much of what they did was attack but the blend of dance and trigger exploded at the other end of the decade, rising from the ashes of rock as a developable medium. Anyway....

So, when America is Waiting strutted out of the speakers in early '81 it felt strange, alluring and worrying at the same time. Why did he keep saying that? The funk 101 orchestra behind it just kept grooving on. Until you hear it a few times the album is really just that with a few breaks in pace and technique but those three and a half minutes pretty much say it for the approach. But then that's like saying seen one jet engine, seen 'em all. However deeply derivative this was (and, considering who was doing it, it was clearly a lift in approach) the discipline of putting it all in one place and releasing it under the pedigree of proven innovators guaranteed it a place on campus radio and in the stacks of uni students in share houses. This brash boy's own experimental funk was played at almost every party I went to for most of the year.

So, while nothing from it was going to get mimed on Countdown (or even subjected to the robot moves of the Countdown Dancers) it was preceded by the album it facilitated, Remain in Light, which had a hit single with a video that still looks good. The elastic management of moods and tone add up to a record that rewards the repeated listen with depth and range however samey the initial impression is. Borrowed, certainly, but also way-clearing.

I'm resisting description of individual tracks here as there is too much to describe. Instead of that I'll suggest you get in front of it if you haven't before and if you have do it again. despite the old chorused bass and vintage electronica the thing stands.

I came down to Brisbane after the break in Townsville with a clock radio my Dad bought me. He was pleased that I'd got into uni and concerned about me missing classes. I did use it. One setting was the alarm which didn't have a volume control so sounded like a foghorn in your ear and was unignorable by anyone else you lived with. The other setting was radio and it had an FM switch. Until I left for Melbourne years later that dial was set to either 4ZZZ or 4PBS. Nothing else.

Early in the academic year I had an 8.30 tutorial. In first year these were invaluable classes as you got to discuss any issues about the course and were great for picking up information about what you needed for assignments or seminars etc. To get to this appointment I needed to get the 37 bus into town and time it to minimise the wait for the long ride out to the campus. I had a choice of two buses that left from stops that were blocks away from each other so, if I missed one I had to think about how to get to the next one. All that travel time (over an hour each way) meant that I had to be showered, fed and out the door by a tidy 7.00 to get the bus on Milton Road. That meant I woke to whatever was playing at 4ZZZ at dawn. One morning it was Eno and Byrne's The Jezebel Spirit.

It was back announced as including the voice of an unidentified New York exorcist. The combination of the pre-dawn dark, the coldly confident funk groove, and the sinister sound of the voice which variously calls, whispers and, worst of all, laughs mixed in with what sounds like the huffing breath of a possessed woman. It was on my mind for weeks. 

The thing was, though, that like every such thing (Eraserhead, Throbbing Gristle and the film The Exorcist) I was attracted to it. Attracted the same way I'd been at eleven when I'd borrow tomes of collected ghost stories from the local library. I never genuinely believed in such things but the scare from them, the creeping threat of them beckoned me. The funk and the darkness in one track bled into the others. Regiment was played a lot on ZZZ for some reason and I got another spook for the mix of shepherd's call and Talking Heads style groove. The enigma of it beckoned. I'm still like this. I was so drawn to Gaspar Noe's severe film Irreversible that I spoiled it for myself just to make sure I wasn't going to see anything too bad (that was the last time I did that although I almost did it a few years later with the mighty and incomparable Martyrs).

I never owned a copy of this at the time. The one I did get was different but I was unaware why until I read the wikipedia entry for the record. The track Qu'ran which features readings from the holy book was removed following protest and replaced with Very Very Hungry. While this is less than a pure experience as far as the intent of the artists it does carry the advantage of being a much better track. If you want a copy with the original tracks you can haunt second hand vinyl shops or the first CD release. If not, just grab a current release and Youtube the missing track. Feeling adventurous? Find a download of the multitracks of two of the songs and make you own mix, for legals!

That last bit, using the available tech to make a point along with the one about free use (Creative Commons) goes not just to the music on this record but the cover art. The great Peter Saville, knee deep in mockups for Factory Records cut shapes out of gels, stuck them to a video monitor and pointed a camera at that, creating visual feedback. Swish and moderne, what? Well, it was. 

But here's the thing: like so much of the best of this era (or any) My Life in the Bush of Ghosts for all its innovation and aesthetic daring, sounds like the year of its release. It sounds like 1981. It was one thing in a population of things that heralded a new age of expression that bent technology for its purposes and broke into more discovery. That, like all moments of discovery, just gets absorbed by the market before the next flareup from the gutters and that's what makes it timeless (not the music or the approach, just the repeated history of its fate). A greater and more objective value that puts this disc beside The Whitle Album, Joy Divisions' Closer, or Nevermind, is durability. It's still good.

1981@40: DB'S STANDS FOR DECIBELS

Straight in with b right guitar riffs and acoustic splashes under a high and loud vocal in Black and White and the dB's announce they're here. And then pretty much bungle it. The dissonant harmonies of Dynamite are intentional and difficult to get through. And so on. Really, and so on. It's either power pop with a self-imposed limp or carefully recreated influences like the Pet Sounds Beach Boys on She's Not Worried or the odd rewrite of While My Guitar Gently Weeps in Bad Reputation. The other side is post punk quirk like Wire or XTC. And there's a mass of bratty anti-pop that decades later seems puzzling and pointless.

It's not as though the band has no strength, they're clearly a unit bound with some serious songcraft. It's just that they subvert every track as though they didn't want it too pretty. And the problem with that is that they just don't that far to show this but too far to realise their own riches. Aside from all the clear influences on show here the most profound is that of career contrarian Alex Chilton who never seemed so happy as when he was crapping on his own achievements and daring you to ask for an agenda. The problem with that is that I don't care about this record the same way that I never cared about anything Chilton did outside of a few moments of objectively brilliant inspiration.

So, why don't I just chill and let the guys have their way: it was 1981, fer god's sake? Because it's now 2021 and even only a year or so later I would judge this one harshly on the strength of the follow up Repercussion which is a masterpiece. If I'm still doing this stuff next year, I'll be covering that one and mentioning that I still happily listen to the whole thing without any nostalgia at all. I tried again to leave Stands for Decibels on for an album-length walk this morning and winced for about forty minutes.

The nostalgia on board here is a weird one. I'm not recalling fun times with the record but the attitude of subverting the hooky pop song formula by having only one chorus or making the middle eight go for almost all the song. And so on. When I'd take something like that to any of the bands I was in it might have been tried but every single one done in that spirit was either dropped without further mention or scrapped for parts. In the dB's debut you get a whole two sides of that with the most frustrating glimpses of the power that's being smothered by adolescence. Might have sounded tough live, lads, but in the studio it comes across as petulance rather than exuberance. No, it's not The Records but it ain't Foetus either.

To me it's the sound of a band who are pleasing their friends and is yet another testimony of the addage: good taste is the chief enemy of creativity. It's always important to recall that bands like this are part of a scene and theirs was the cooler traps of ol' Manhattan. Were they trying not to sound like The Cars? Hard to know with Americans. It did take a while for the darker threads to show (though they were already gigging as No Wavers) so maybe this one had to happen if only to exorcise the sydrome. And then they created a durable wonder. Must have heard this one once too often.

1981@40: TRUST - ELVIS COSTELLO

If Get Happy marked my fandom of this songwriter hitting the breaks, Trust might have been the RACQ coming along with some jump leads. That didn't happen. Why? Foremost, it was a release that happened when my income was extremely limited and admitted no cavalier record buying. Also, it was only sporadically played on 4ZZZ. Oh, and even when its clips were on TV in shows like Sounds they failed to lift my spirits. Even Get Happy had some instant winners but this one sounded difficult. To my mind it felt like him saying, you know all that escalating appeal of rich pop music with king hitting lyrics? Well I think I'll go back to the spiky and unappealing style of My Aim is True.

Take Clubland, the lead single and opening track. It sounded like a higher-fi track from Get Happy, all buried lead vocal and tremulous Hammond organ. Could be about the local scene, organised crime, or even about the clubs the title and chorus say it's about. All the vocal slithering and occasional confidential asides tie up in a big chorus with a jubilant guitar hook. Sounds very mysterious but I didn't have the energy to go on the trail. Lovers Walk comes in with a stuttering stride. The vocal yells out associations with the word lovers. Could be about something could be a list of word associations like the lesser tracks of Get Happy. The quirk in the rhythm keeps me at bay so my caring would have to exceed it. Never happened.

You'll Never Be a Man starts all at once with a strolling rhythm and clear vocal but in such a musically bland package that I don't care what the confronting title means. Pretty Words takes us right back to Get Happy with its late night vocals and band that just seem to be playing the chords rather than the song. Strict Time rams the awkward rhythm of Lovers Walk with a little engagement in the chorus vocal arrangement. Luxembourg bashes in with a rockabilly echo in the vocal but a assaultive rhythm but again it suffers from a directionless arrangement. Watch Your Step ends the old side one with a Hammond-led Motown groove. The confidential vocal is well out front without a degree of reverb. Words of excess and warning. The pleasantest musical experience on the record so far.

The subdued funk of New Lace Sleeves promises a little more of the Armed Forces brightness. The vocal is a little more gymnastic and ranges from a kind of Scott Walker to EC's own Smokey Robinson take. The lyric is intriguing and for once the quirk in the rhythm feels inspired instead of last ditch. From a Whisper to a Scream adds the melodic lollies of Squeeze. Costello even shares the mic with Glenn Tillbrook from said London based popsters. Not a bar wasted. Different Finger's Nashville bompiness points to Elvis' George Jones obsession which would plunge him into an all covers/all country album later in the year which I can't yet imagine covering here. White Knuckles bashes in with a full band and candy vocal melody. The Stax influence of the previous set returns yet again. It's ok but like more than a few tracks here adds bars and lines that strike as unwelcome.

Rachmaninoff chords on the piano start Shot with his Own Gun. Costello's tune rolls down and allows the rhythm to speed and drag like a show tune. Just EC and piano here and a dark minor key pallet. This is another future indicator that would see him working with the likes of Bacharach and The Brodsky Quartet. For all that, it's a welcome rather than an irritating change. Fish 'n' Chip Paper claps along with the rest of the albums moments of progressing from Get Happy. The quirky burlesque solos in the middle make their point and then it's more of the same. But then things change.

A reggae bass over an acoustic guitar and sober vocal and no percussion but a tambourine as Costello tells of an intrigue which ends in tragedy too early in the predawn. The chorus "But it's easier to say I love you and yours sincerely, I suppose. All little sisters like to try on big sister's clothes" is delivered with such a saddened witness that it almost makes me forget the annoyance of most of this record. It's a cinematic miniature, a kind of despairing whispered revisit to Armed Forces' Party Girl, as though he were checking in with that doomed figure.

The sound is richer than the previous one and everyone's in fine form. So what's wrong? A lot of albums can be left on through the filler and the missteps. The problem here is that there are no real missteps and no filler. All of this is intentional and offered in sincerity. I just don't like most of it. This is a breakup coffee and as with the worst of them it's a matter of saying, "it's not you it's me."

I'd see the future efforts around the traps as we still went to the same parties but it was only now and then and I wasn't always moved by even the best I saw. To this day I can't quite grow beyond albums two and three. The only reason I like Imperial Bedroom as much as I do is because it reminds me of Armed Forces. I appreciate his work with the legends and the seriously talented but I seldom stick around to the end. It's not him ...