1981@40: QUASIMODO'S DREAM - THE REELS

There's more history to this one than there will be with any of the others in this series. A lot of this has to do with the point of the sticker on the sleeve. It's from the band and informs us that the single According to My Heart is included because at the record company's insistence. For whatever reasons lay behind this the original LP is not what the artists had in mind. I knew that much about that one song when I bought the album as a new record and was aware of the band's spiky opinions on the culture that surrounded them. Vocalist and co-writer of all of the songs and spokesspike Dave Mason at a gig around this time held up a thong (flip flop for any non-Australian readers) and said,"this is what most Australians think when they hear the word soul." From the defiantly shrinkwrapped image as a synth pop unit in the very late '70s through their first releases, The Reels did not conform, not even to the unmainstream freeforall of post punk. They would release an album on the muzak and nostalgia label K-Tel of schmaltzy covers without a breath of an admission of irony. It was called Beautiful. They wanted you to love their music, they just didn't want you hanging around once you'd bought it. And then there was Quasimodo's Dream.

Afore I get into it I'm just going to point out that the track order I'm representing here is the original. The CD release changes the order and I'll be addressing that later but for now I'll be talking about the way I heard the record initially and for decades afterward.

From the silence there approaches what sounds like an old rustbucket car wheezing and creaking toward us. For All We Know is only synth pop in a technical sense (so to speak) but this track has no sense of automation. A bedrock of interlocking arpeggios that lean toward a kind of brass band from a Tom Baker Dr Who episode cranks up. It's the vocals that sound programmed. A sprightly melody sung in unison which separates out to lead and backing vocals for the chorus starts out so crisply that you suspect electronics but it really is just the singing of a very well disciplined band. As for the lyric, no strong idea and a mondegreen: do you control your thoughts, do you really have free will? And the chorus has always sounded like: "Haven't got a heart, haven't got a hope, haven't got a weirdo." Sorry, folks, but if you don't print them on the sleeve or allow them to be transcribed on the net we just have to guess.

And then it's quiet again just long enough for the sound of the notes from Popcorn falling gently from the sky as a low key droning vocal motif loops like a distant choir. Dave Mason enters with a melody as silky and melancholy as the first few bars, musing the blues on love and fame. And then comes that chorus: "I never wanted to be in Quasimodo's dream. Shall I beg the ringmaster please find another me?" That's not necessarily about being Quasimodo, of course, but just part of his dream. It could be about despite or low status, about a mass of horny men whose hearts were more monstrous than how they saw the old bell ringer. It might more simply be a yearning for peace after feeling the worst of attention. Whatever, it has pulled the song's teller down to the earth. After two spare verses the rest is atmosphere and quiet sadness that rolls into mesmerism. There's a beautiful and eerie video for this song. Greatness.

The bouncy, clean and bright According to My Heart springs to life after the fade of the title track. The band put what looked like a sticker (but it was just printed) that stated that the song was only on the album at the insistence of the record company on the inner sleeve. A few things to think about there. The inner sleeve on both sides is mostly a long list of acknowledgements and thank-yous ranging from people who helped the record get recorded and produced etc to puppets and favourite figures from history. The "sticker" is printed at an angle on both sides of the sleeve. If the record company had forced them to put the single on the album they also agreed to the disclaimer. If that's just a joke it's a lot of trouble to go to for such a slight one. Is it an arch means of drawing attention to the song (a cover version of an ol' country number)? The song itself doesn't seem to care. It just skips along at a canter and fades.

After the News bounces in with even brighter pings and tingles. Mason's spirited vocal asks us what we'll do after the news. We in the post-tv world might wonder what the particular news was but the darker and more immediate meaning here is about how we switched off after dinner and joined the transmission drone of prime time soaps and endless commercials. Or will we choose to emote, in whatever way suits? Will we jump in the air or quieten to a pallid silence? The news might be about war or a celebration. Will we at least engage with the tidings instead of deflate and plug in? Typical of this band this is served with a contradictory sheen so smiley that we are tempted to tap toes along with the beat and sing along as though it's Happy Birthday or a jingle for antacids.

In case we still have any breath after this Colourful Clothes zaps and buzzes to life with the energy of a skipping chant. The verse is all whydja go and break my heart with voices in unison. Then a pre-chorus bridge splits the voices into a dizzying harmony that tastes like it's made of sherbet powder. The chorus is the title phrase followed by some call and response whoa-whoas. Second verse same as the first but then a big raga rock line snakes up from below before an instrumental verse, that pre-chorus loopiness and the chanting chorus again, as before sounding like a lot less fun than the bouncing music. If you noticed the tv ads of the time or went to parties that looked like them, the neon rush of hair and fabric might have given you the bad kind of rush. That's what I heard here and still do. Then again, I bought out whole racks of op shops because the material was black.

Shout and Deliver continues the bells and chimes of the keyboard sounds but slows it down to sober as the minor key layers of vocals overlap in the minor. "Shout and deliver. Don't run away..." Be here, be loud, the future is yours to write. It's poignant that this was a single, something you might turn up when it came on Countdown. This band that called out to you to engage, not just with them but with everything around were keeping their message clear and insistent, not just slow-dancable. The vocal arrangements to this one border on Eastern Europe and in their own way remind us of the sparse and delicate beauty of the title track.

Side two changes things. The title track has already drowned in melancholy but Dubbo Go Go just takes us downward. Against an initial flurry of chimes an accent so broad that the two words it pronounces ("Australia calling") sound less motivated by humour than by fury. A large cranking machine of fuzzed guitar riffs, heavily off-accent rhythms that make it sound drunk and angry to the extent of paralysis. Over this comes Mason's bittersweet vocal describing his home town in terms that remind me of Peter Carey writing about the Bacchus Marsh of his childhood, with precision and naked chills. "YOu all it very saleable. I call it social dyssentry." And the chanting chorus with its modal fanfare melodics tells us to dance on our way out: "Dubbo go go go go ..." The longest and most depressing track on the album was done while the band were clearly on the rise to a creditable career and might have left the experience of the town as so much waste matter behind them. This is not a case of whingeing about coming from a small town, it sounds like a voodoo curse.

In complete contrast comes the trotting Smokey Dawson Show, atop the clopping synth percussion comes a lovely wordless vocal and electro trumpet tune that comes from a different part of medieval Europe than the chorus of Dubbo Go Go. I use to play this for a breezy little breather. Smokey Dawson was a bright mooded singing cowboy in Australia whose radio and tv appearances were designed to delight with anodyne thoughts and tunes and did. So does this. It's lovely.

Depression comes out of the shadows as a restless electro beat and chanting style vocal from a number of  voices. The title is used both emotionally and economically as a future dystopia is evoked. Rather than anger that might be suggested by the violence of the rhythm there is a sadness to it as from a witness to horror who is powerless to intervene.

Rupert Murdoch is a naive electropop instrumental that was either named after as a joke or has an obscure connection with the media Goliath. A synth flute tweets over a thudding machine like throb. Then, in less than a minute and a half, it's over.

Kitchen Man is a sign of things to come. Almost completely synthesised, this Bacharach style plaintive ballad in which Mason's narrator in a voice that is both perfectly pitched and tired as hell sings of the length and labour of his days in a kind of role reversal. Is this a precursor of the men's movement whingeing as soon at the first point of redressed balance or is it a comment on it? The music and performance is genuinely moving and lyric so free of safe word winks that it's almost impossible to tell. My choice is for irony, that this is the lament of a man who is finally finding out about his wife's daily work and crying unfair. Mason plays it straight which only adds to the ceaseless beauty of the song's motion, melody and the inspired choice to use a fretless bass to stand in for a lower brass section that Bacharach might have used here. Beautiful and troubling as the best this band could offer.

Ohira Tour is a group chant that sounds like a commercial for the Japanese industrial leader with chunky pentatonic koto-like synths. It's three seconds short of a minute. Cancer crawls from the dark between tracks  with varispeed spoken word (mostly the title) the same Bacarach fretless playing a theme before the amelodical chant of the title begins, surrounded by squeaks, squelches, shrieks and a host of electronic sounds. A speeded up voice spells the title word and then it fades, bringing the album to a strange close. The end of the story happens the way it seemed to be happening to every member of the population of the soon to be post-industrial world.

This was not declared to be a concept album at the time but you could be forgiven for thinking it was one. Mega money is scary, people on the ground suffer at its hands as they are corporatised, pushed into consumerist hives with canned culture. But while these themes are on clear show here this is not an electrobusker's protest set. The difference involves knowing a little about the time of its creation and those who created it.

Australia at the end of the '70s and the beginning of the '80s was a time of political stifling from above wherein a kind of Kingswood Country notion of an old Australia was still being peddled. The increasingly public influence of Japanese purchasing power was making the old ANZACs (real and imagined) restless and Murdoch media was starting to rule life on the planet. It was flight or go back to Dubbo and play covers at the local pub or try to change it one bored child at a time. 

Band like Midnight Oil dealt with this by fashioning stadium-filling music with sloganeering choruses that were as catchy as Vegemite commercials. The Reels were not like them. More contrarian than counter culture, Mason and the crew had found a musical niche by which to bitch and didn't care if it sounded more personal than communal. When you consider how arch Ohira Tour is or difficult to read Kitchen Man what you are left with is how you get on with the sound of it all. And there's ther other thing; in the year of synth pop this synth heavy record does not line up with the likes of Visage or Ultravox, reframing the old pop formulae with different instruments, nor does it approach the sci-fi bleakness of early Human League, Gary Numan or John Foxx: The Reels simply do The Reels.

It took decades for this album to appear on CD. I don't know the story of this but it might well have had to do with the problems of getting very old magnetic Tape to play nice after a long time dormant (it takes baking ... in an oven). When it did appear ten years ago the sound quality was refreshingly high and the digi-pack appealing in that it resumed the original LP's idiosyncratic packaging. It also featured a completely different track order.

The rerelease begins with the title track and ends with Kitchen Man. All the media theme tracks are put together like a medley (though not crossfaded). Strangest of all, the track that caused the band to include a permanent sticker (really part of the inner sleeve design) remains on the album. No one thought to remove According to My Heart (or the "sticker"). A change of mind or intensified joke? History will decide, if Dave Mason doesn't do that at some point himself. That's what it will take.

But all that means that this magnificent set of songs remains as vital as it did forty years ago and its intentionally eye fingering cover art is there to continue to annoy. Annoy it does and in the best way, this album offers its anger and pique set in music to delight, irritate or profoundly seduce. And surrounded by all this frenetic business is the song that will always make me ache for rainy Sunday mornings with dark shadows and glistening rain: 

Shall I beg the ringmaster please find another me. 

Oh I never wanted to be in Quasimodo's Dream.

1981@40: JUJU - SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES

Kaleidoscope had risen from the ashes and surprised everyone with its strength. A band cut in half had grown new limbs and ways to use them and fashioned a record that not only screamed survival but opened doors that the old gang would have struggled to approach. It stopped them getting stale too early. That's why JuJu sounds like it does: it's different from Kaleidoscope.

Instead of the acoustic guitar chord that started Kaleidoscope and let us know that album was not going to be like anything we'd heard from the band, we begin with a heavily chorused multitracked Les Paul rolling out a circular fanfare from a planet without a sun. The bass below it broods with the root notes. And then Siouxsie comes in wailing:

From the cradle bars comes a beckoning voice. 

It sends you spinning. You have no choice.

Before we've taken that in the song suddenly gallops. A double tracked acoustic played like its slicing through the light. A brief respite as the electrics drone around the chord and the verse resumes and repeats. Laughter cracking through the walls. Nightmares and shadows. With the second "you have no choice" wailed an octave higher and much louder the two elements collide and the chorus gallops as the chant about a rag doll dance explodes and trails into the title word caterwauling out over the dizzying band. "And don't forget if your elders forget to say their prayers." Her voice raises to a weird anger: "take them by the legs and throw them down the stairs!" like the leader of a child cult. 

And something happens that shouldn't work as it's so obvious but it's delivered with such violence that we're carried along. Budgie, who has already been showing us why he's in the band ramps everything up and pummels the toms down and up the guitar fanfare. They're not only falling down the stairs but breaking every bone in their bodies. Then the toys are going beserk and the laught cracks through the walls again. and the chorus rushes and the title wails. Finally the chant is corrupted so that the words rag doll and dance are elongated to twice their size and a chorus of the bewitched responds, "we are entranced" as though they really are as the frenzy of the dark speeds on to a final, "dance dance dance" before the staircase tom toms bang everything to a sudden cut to a black screen. A four minute, thirteen second horror movie and that's only track one.

Into the Light begins with a strange rhythm on the tom toms which is joined by chorused bass and spiky guitar. Sioux's vocal goes from close to very distant and wailing. The sequence of verse and chorus repeats before ending on a swirling chant of the title. Is it a take on near death experiences, perhaps just the states that intoxication can deliver. On one hand its restless rhythm doesn't allow ease but it does get hooky.

Arabian Knights starts with a chugging bass beneath underwater guitar chords and a throbbing drum pattern which builds with each verse. The early verses are almost obscure, the vocals low and processed before the big spooky refrain: "I heard a rumour. What have you done to her?" The falling chorus describes the disappointment of a grown up discovering the reality of a childhood ideal.. A mid section  lashes with goading calls adn those giant tom toms. And then everything gets ramped up to eleven for the final verse where the vocals about babymachines and veils and orifices are pushed to centre stage where they can't be ignored and the chugging of the opening bass figure is now a cavalry charge. But the anger must break as the futility of eradicating it sets in and we are left with the call about the rumours which echo on themselves and collapse in an aural confusion.

Halloween races with searing guitar sounds and a forward compulsion. Images of trick or treating and the after dark festivities are not those of costume shops but of the then recently begun slasher series of the same title. But then there's something else going on here. As the song speeds along it creates the sense that the narrator is breaking from their familiar reality and confronting an ugly alienation. What was fun in childhood now seems hollow and meaningless, a ritual long drained of its purpose. There is such a drive to the song and such a strange effect from the nagging guitar riffs that it feels more dramatic than it should be. 

Monitor starts with yet another strange rhythm, this time with an eastern influence as the guitars, so distorted they sound like percussion instruments begin a nagging crunch that rises by a semitone at the fourth measure only to return to the tonic for the next. This is it throughout with only changes in the vocal range and bass parts to suggest harmonic development. And that's only for form's sake as the point of the song is something become so repetitive that it spreads out into mundanity. The origin of the lyric that seems to describe a murder or a snuff movie is that a block of flats set up CCTV monitors so that residents could check on what was going on outside and the residents became viewers of this to the cost of their previous television habits, with crimes both petty and grave were followed in real time. Siouxsie wails: 

Then the victim stared up

Looked strangely at the screen

As if her pain was our fault

But that's .... entertainment

The old side two begins with a sluggish chorus guitar wash back in 4/4 land minor to dominant, thumping back and forth between them as the pulse thickens and spreads out like tar jelly. A creepy vocal tells of a nightly visitor, perhaps demonic who is narrating a series of violent assaults with the inclusive cry: Fuck the mothers, kill the others. Fuck the others, kill the mothers. Peter Sutcliffe had been arrested only months before the album but his infamy had preceeded this by years in his tabloid persona as the Yorkshire Ripper. The claustrophobic arrangement allows only for a constant abstract narration. Even the outbursts of multitracked overdriven guitars and wailing voices cannot break the membrane and consequently feel like explosions of impotent rage. The night shift sisters are not nurses but sex workers, each a potential victim. Before you know that this song can seem like the aural equivalent of a Count Floyd sketch (apart from the chorus) but once you do the notion will stay with you and the song will sound like a terrifying walk through a lightless brain.

Sin in My Heart is a constant gallop and shouted lyric consisting mostly of the tiel. This seems to be about BDSM and is told from the female perspective, a scream of contempt and fulfilment. Head Cut is a series of images of something that might be a mask or the head of a murder victim told by the murderer surrounded by slamming percussion and slashing guitars. Both of these songs have the feel of songs that were taken as good diea starters, packed into arrangements and left that way without the development that might have turned them into stronger songs. 

A creepy echoing feedback rises over a brooding bass pulse. Siouxsie comes in with a whisper about a succubus infesting a victim and draining his energy and life. While the surface is about a demon it is no stretch to imagine this as a narcissistic partner, substance abusing parent, or any of the interpersonal horrors the world throws upon us. The whole band is working this theme and keeps a high tension almost unberable with the steady pulse. Siouxsie gets a little more powerful with every verse until the solid steel wails that are great cries of something between agony and triumph. And then moment by moment things start to break away. The stuttered feedback guitar wanders and the drums get fractured and jungle like and the great bass begins to pound as the narrator can only yell or whisper to listen. Finally at a crashing violent climax the battle is over and the voice returns to a mocking calm: she's your little voodoo dolly. Dark. Cut to end titles. The movie is over and like a lot of '80s horror tales, the sequel is set up with the quiet resurgence of the monster.

Kaleidoscope had been a successful experiment. There was an openness to the arrangement approach to go along with a shift from the song structures of the first two records. Acoustic guitars, reed instruments and a decidedly non-synthpop use of electronics. Like most of their post punk peers they had turned down the volume and turned up the atmosphere. Ju Ju is effectively a failure to develop from that point. Its attack is to return to the big dark sounds from before and work on that, like the last one didn't matter or never happened. 

Part of the problem here (I hasten to add that this is my problem) is that these songs were almost entirely aired as part of live sets on tour. Voodoo Dolly benefits greatly from sounding live in the studio but that's not my point. What I mean is that, as with all rock musicians, if soemone discovers a guitar pedal they will use it for the next month or so unceasingly, playing everything through it as though it were THE tonal breakthrough. When they put the pedal away after that flurry it might end up at the bottom of the case. Same goes for playing techniques and anything that can be filed under fads. Ju Ju sounds like it was done with all the fads in place and ready to filter every song. It sounds like it was rehearsed and recorded rather than composed and arranged and crafted. One or two songs with unconventional rhythmic treatment is remarkable for a rock album but when so many are repeated rather than built upon it feels like the flavour of the month.

If you ask almost any indy musician these days about what they want in a good album a lot of them will find a way of saying uniformity. There is an affectation (running for over a decade) that an album should sound like it was recorded in one time with one musical vision. The problem is that most of these just end up fatiguing the ear with the same structures, playing and even song length. While the wildness of Voodoo Dolly differs strongly from the formality of Spellbound they both present their ideas with great force but when you get to the underdeveloped ones like Head Cut or Halloween they sound like filler, only thinly veiled by their similarity to the tracks surrounding them. The shame of it is that Ju Ju has so much in the way of good ideas but so little attention was given to forming how they might be best applied to create a big dark masterpiece. Of the four so far in the career of the band this is the album where I'll skip tracks. It's the only one that feels padded.

I wonder what a new, young listener thinks of the theatrics of Voodoo Dolly or Night Shift. Would they wonder how something so strongly stated it sounds like theatre restaurant was ever taken seriously. Well, recall that we'd just been through a decade that painted denialist smiles on everything while the movies were tearing them off and everyone just old enough to make records were catching up with the latter. So the Banshees, The Cure and soon Bauhaus were yodelling on about vampires, funerals and crying and it felt like a way of coping with a nuclear annhilation threat that was warming up all over again and seemed minutes away every day. These proto goths weren't into escapism but abstraction. The Voodoo Dolly could easily be about alcoholism or abusive relationships. Writing about a real life monster was a way of dealing with his nightmarish crimes. Siouxsie's Neffertiti eyes and spiky black hive weren't showbiz persona but what she wore on the High Street. I think that's something to miss: is it really more genuine of a '90s hard rocker to scream primally because his jeans werer bought threadbare? He would have worn those on the street, too. Maybe what I'm missing about the era of Ju Ju is the way that personal style declared an allegiance to the freedom of the margins rather than sought approval of a stadium. Did that look like a kid in a Witch's hat playing trick or treat? Yeah, but so what, it felt like you weren't letting the times push you around so much.

Following the footsteps of a rag doll dance we are entranced.

Entranced entranced entranced and dance dance dance.