My 1982

I tried for a kind of miscoloured '80s gig poster look for this
but all I got was this after a few worse attempts.

So, I got off the Sunlander at Roma St Station in February with a suitcase stuffed with new clothes and a bag of photographic prints of The Pits. Days later I was out of The Pits. It wasn't because of the photos. When that happens and you're still a teenager it's disturbingly similar to a breakup, the communication dries up and you're dropped. While I felt like writing a plea to Amnesty International I let it run out of steam (for the entire year whinging about it but I did it) and set in for more uni. I went to see Hunters and Collectors at the New York Hotel which was incredible. They came out like the staff of an assembly line and wowed us with tribal industrial for over an hour. That, at least, felt like a good start.

I was out but not empty handed, with a sheaf of songs that grew by one a fortnight or so and plenty of drive to start my own band. I was about to find out how hard that is when the aim is not fun with friends but a career. If you're part of the scene you really only have to know who's available. If you're unknown, as I was, you're asking people to buy into something with no enticement. Even the worst cults put work into sweetening. It's uphill, especially if you're juggling something like uni. So, I did both, getting interest from other players who promptly forgot the conversation. At least uni was easy.

My brother Michael had driven down from Townsville in the Holden Statesman that Dad had given him with my Maton Flamingo in the boot. I even had an electric to use for whatever came my way (never got an amp for it, though).

The year came with a big sink hole in second semester due to the Commonwealth Games. Griffith provided a stadium and extensive housing for the athletes. We all had to go and play while that happened. I went out to the Darling Downs to play a bit part in a short feature directed by one of the staff at Griffith, an experience both stimulating and ugly (maybe in another blog) and came back ready to assault the library again. Gigs, movies, parties, nights at the pub. More conversations about joining my then nameless band and more forgetting.

Greg, a member of The Pits, liked my songs. He knew someone who had a 4-track reel to reel. Before I went off to Towoomba we got together at his parents' place to put down about six songs. The result, taken objectively was a near formless mess but to us it was a blueprint for future greatness if a deal looser than we imagined it done well. So I rode off into the west and pretended to be a local yokel. One thing I will say about that experience is that I discovered an old Rolling Stones album near the record player in the livingroom of the farmhouse where we stayed. I became an utter fan of Let it Bleed and probably played it at least once a day for two weeks. One of the first things I did when I got back to Brisbane was find a second hand copy at the Record Market for about $2.

There was still time to play around a little until uni started again so I went back on the warpath to find willing helpers for the nameless band that had ... a few songs. About three abortive practices later it looked hopeless but I figured once the real people were found it would fall into place. Because of an incident getting stood up for what was meant to be a band related conference at the White Chairs pub (aka the Cartlon Elizabeth St bar) I wrote a song called Running Late which, at a later date, a friend asked about thus: "is that song autobiographical because it sounds like it's about the biggest loser of all time?"

I'd missed about a month of demos because of the movie jaunt but counted myself lucky to have been removed from temptation, considering the severity of the police response. I know I should be more heroic about that but the sense of blinding havoc that was still building from the Commonwealth Games Act and the State of Emergency Act was getting under my skin. So, like a lot of people I knew, I sipped on the now legendary Games Special lager from XXXX (made down the road from me in the Castlemaine brewery which illumined the sky with hell-red neon by night) and went to gigs in what was emerging as a new gigging scene in more or less permanent venues. I know that that looks like a see-through bandaid after how I began but the conflict is still hard to unravel.

I convinced Dad to fund a series of night courses in Cinematography which was a massive waste of time and money but felt like I was doing something practical. I had continuous fantasies of future film productions, seen behind my eyelids as slick mainstream movies with an edge. I wrote two one act plays which I thought were ok but the one that was rejected by the university theatre society/group/ensemble/drinking club was treated unfairly. Added to my continued failure to form a band and people (including the substance-free bigshot in the theatre society/etc) kept assuming I'd been thrown out of The Pits (I had but they didn't have to assume that). Anyway....

Meantime, there was a ton of music and I've covered a fair bit of that here. Some significant releases proved impossible to experience again (though, some online resources continued to surprise me). I remember a sense of the music being in transition, still as raw as punk but increasingly drawing from sound beyond the realm o' roque and then beyond the twentieth century itself (which suited me as it's how I began as a music fan). The Teardrop Explodes and Siouxsie and the Banshees led the way into a psychedelia that wasn't dependent on '60s iconography but found new paths to the sweetly strange. 

Numberless acts appeared in the waves of 4ZZZ's signal, many noisy, some intriguing, all, in some way, compelling for being so determinedly of their own kind. I think of nights spent listening to such sounds while forming the arguments of essays and feeling the strange wafting like vapour from the speakers of my clock radio to where my thoughts were taking shape, splintering and splicing. And it wasn't just ZZZ. I started listening to some of the richer shows on 4EB. The Lebanese and Turkish shows were regular appointments along with the Egyptian show. The Indian hours were disappointingly poppy, being largely from what became known as Bollywood but if I found the show I'd leave it on. Everything went into the mix. 

By late November I handed in the last paper of the year and headed over to Greg's to do more of the recording, ending with a Birthday Party parody as a 4ZZZ subscription ad (they hated it and said no, thankfully) and a song called The Keeper of the Gate. I don't remember if that came before the band name Gatekeepers but that was also a term bandied in the media strain of my second year studies and I liked how it sounded psychedelic era but had a quite heavy meaning which was like the songs themselves with chirpy, boppy, upbeat sounds but lyrics about scapegoating, social cannibalism (still don't know what that is but it sounded "crucial" at the time), forced marriages and marriage breakdowns und so weiter und so weiter. Whichever it was, the band now had a name and, um, just needed members. Meantime, I had a cassette of over ten recordings to play to folk up north for their bedazzlement and helpless admiration (many were kind).

The UK had had a weird war which I was wondering if it would include the loss of some of the younger breeders from the royal family and, after a year of anticipation and resistance, the Acts that gave the Brisbane cops even more powers were not going to be repealed any time soon and the following year's election loomed with foreboding that we'd have another government of the people who had taken down Gough Whitlam. I'd get back to all that. So I headed north to instruct all and sundry of the wisdom of the ways of Marxism because no one had ever known about that before me.

Until then, there were familiar faces up in Townsville, playing bass and writing some tunes for a local theatre group production and the best New Years Eve celebration to date, on Magnetic Island. I haven't done the usual roll call of hits 'n' memories. There were a lot of them, sweet 'n' bubbly pop tunes that moved us all further away from the monolith o' rock. But the more I investigated things in the margins and from different cultures it felt more like a big tasty blend. It felt like we were winning from under the radar but that's what it's like when you're twenty years old, you win because you think you win.

1982 @ 40: CHRONIC TOWN - REM

Clean jangly chord riff and energetic drumming joined by a vocal that doesn't seem to complete its lines with any comprehension. But none of that is as much the point as how it all gels and works. The voice is the same kind of riffing instrument as the guitar and as percussive as the kit at the back. Wolves, Lower is the title but the closest we get to it in the lyrics is the phrase wolves at the door. It's all bright '60s and Byrdsy but it has no interest in messages clearer than tangy ear candy for the young folk. At the same time, it feels alternative, not top 40 pop.

Gardening at Night is the same kind of thing. A descending guitar riff is descanted by a vocal that seems to have its top sheared off. The title does appear in the verses and choruses but to what purpose? meanwhile we have a bed of changing textures within the brief of the pleasant wash. Carnival of Sorts (Box Cars) adds minor key tonality to the line up and a more skittish rhythm. The interplay between lead and backing vocals creates more of the appeal. Flip sides and 1,000,000 brings more of a casual white funk vibe and a rougher edged vocal. "I could live a million years." Stumble returns us to the busy bright clean chord arpeggios we began with. 

What does it mean? In an era when the most obscure industrial acts were taking pains to render their intents clear, however abstract their affectation, this band that sounded like a home demo version of The Monkees trying to be The Byrds didn't seem to have a syllable of a message. The cover art of the 12 inch mini-LP was a blue tinted closeup of a gargoyle with a band pic on the rear. They look young and fresh but unremarkable.

But the thing about this disc is your projection as a listener. If you want, you can put it on and leave it on and just groove to the candy choruses and sugary riffs without a further thought. Or, you could look at the obscurantist song titles and imagine what they meant. Phrases like "gentlemen don't get caught" could mean that getting caught is for chumps or the elite never pay for anything they do. There are things like this in every track. It almost seems to be a band created to be enjoyable with the worst P.A.s imaginable.

An interview in RAM from the time (or a little later after the LP murmur) had them from the U.S. south (Georgia) and a university town (Athens). They were on I.R.S. a label started by the drummer of The Police and his brother which already featured The Go-Gos, so they came with indy credentials.

I didn't have a copy of this record until years later, nor even had a tape of it from someone else's stacks. I noted the gargoyle on the cover and, while I liked it, wondered if they weren't just a small label version of a hair metal band. But I did hear some of this played on 4ZZZ and recall getting caught in the high flavour jangle which then gave way to whatever that announcer was putting on. It was back announced. I knew what r.e.m. sleep was and the notion of the abbreviation as a band name gave it a psychedelic tone which I was compelled by.

Little did I or anyone know, though, was that this band would not only crash through at an indy level with their debut longplay, Murmur, the following year but that it would be one of the ways you could be a guitar band with honour in that anti-rock environment, but that, as they ditched that and moved more and more back into solid concrete convention and played stadiums only with big clearly annunciated songs that would make Midnight Oil blush.

All bands who pursue their own paths must develop and change and the idea that this must be along the same lines as their beginnings is a massive fallacy. You might lose thousands of early fans when you tour the big rooms but you gain millions and that's what happened with REM. Did they get worse with fame? Not really, more that they just ditched all the things that gave them the spark of originality that pricked up all our ears. I saw them after that point when they toured the Green album in 88 and 89. It was at Festival Hall and they were supported by The Go-Betweens. That band had tried to make a similar leap and produced some essential and appealing music but never broke through to much more than this kind of spot or smaller scale tours that they would continue with. The headliners vocally congratulated them on their set before launching into their own with Pop Song 89 a song intended as irony but really only offered a token.

Once upon a time, though, they made records as sweet as cola but as intriguing as a shot of golden spirit that you might have with it on a hot day. That's what this record sounds like.

1972 @ 50: TRANSFORMER: LOU REED

Vicious was suggested by Andy Warhol who, when asked by Reed what he meant, replied: "You know, vicious. I hit you with a flower." That gave Reed his opening lines and one of the funniest and most compelling rock songs he would write and perform. A Velvets style chord riff jumps down and up and down like a restless cat as Mick Ronson delivers screeching lead bursts on his heavily distorted Les Paul. Reed digs into someone who thinks themself hot and tough and urban, all attitude and surface tension but not a patch on the hustlers and trans folk of a later track. The fun of this one is a smirk along with Lou's put down. If you've ever seen an awkward or outright confrontational interview with Reed this song might remind you of it.

Andy's Chest rolls out gently like it's being made up on the spot. "If I could be anything in this world that flew, I would be a bat and come swooping after you." It's like a song for kids but by The Velvet Underground. A light electric guitar and bass plod along below. When the second verse starts the rest of the band come in and it reminds me of nothing so much as the backing track of almost anything from The Man Who Sold the World. Well, the band is almost the same and this is the point at which I need to introduce the producers of this record: David Bowie and Mick Ronson. Bowie was already an admirer of Reed, going back to the Velvets days and Mick had become Bowie's indispensable collaborator, shining through on a heavily individual electric guitar tone, courtesy his venerable Les Paul Custom, various distortion pedals and usually a big Marshall amp. Not only does the band sound like Bowie's, as soon as the baaaaaa baaaaaa ba ba ba ba ba baaaaa backing vocals come in, the sense that Reed is benefitting from the deluxe crest of session players and if there was anything you already liked about Bowie you will like about this record.

Perfect Day.An expanse of piano chords in a minor key but so expansive that it sounds warm rather than sad. A list of pain-killing activities of a loving couple are recounted from a life that sounds comfortable. The chorus swings into the major and everything just gets better. The phrase "you keep me hanging on" is not the complaint from the Motown song but a note of deep gratitude. Why? The second verse, sung in a more choked voice, says what Reed really means when the key line appears: " You made me forget myself. I thought I was someone else, someone good." He has been playing a fantasy to himself. All the Hallmark movie tones, the lingering phrasing that seems to taste the words as though they were the experiences themselves, are just masking the person he knows he is. After a gentle afternoon shower of instrumental drama we close on a coda, all but whispered and in the major: "you're going to reap just what you sow." It repeats until the soft conclusion shuts it down on a lonely figure who spent every last atom of good he ever had. This song is among those that get rolled out when an emotional occasion beckons, as wistfully joyous. I've played it at a wedding for the groom to sing and the guests around us joined in for the chorus. I kept my expression blank. (What's next, Love Will Tear Us Apart?) This remains one of Reed's finest moments where he wasn't shy of creating sincere beauty, even to the point of playing down its thorns.

Hangin' 'Round is a boogie with a glam rock mix of blues accents and 6th chord grind as Reed introduces a list of eccentric socialites whose quirks both amuse and bore Reed. Are they really still hanging around doing all those things? 

Walk on the Wild Side starts and maintains a gentle shiuffle, Bowie style 12 string rhythmic strumming as the signature twin basses play the long looping hook. Reed is almost talking as he recounts the tales of local characters who transformed themselves in personal metamorphoses from their unsympathetic beginnings to a New York demi monde that welcomed them. These modern folk figures, all based on people Reed knew well from the scene around Andy Warhol are not just survivors but stars; they have come through ordeal and emerged in triumph. Reed sings quietly from the sidelines. The freaked out hedonism of Sister Ray and nightmarish world of Lady Godiva's Operation are distant recollections. Their best-revenge good living is celebrated here in one of Reed's most enduring statements. And, lest we forget, it's a ton of fun.

Make Up is a Velvets-reminiscent second person address with an odd mix of strummy electric guitar and tuba. Reed's portraying a crossdresser in matter of fact terms that might have felt adolescently provocative at the time but for the defiant chant of, "we're coming out."

Satellite of Love starts all at once, a piano-led ballad observes a sex magnet who gets around and just keeps going. Reed confessed this song to be about his own jealousy, watching from afar a figure whose power he could not claim and get away with it. If anything was Bowie-ish before this track this arrangement wipes the floor. The falsetto bom bom boms in the chorus and then the mighty wolf howl in the coda bring this close to being a Bowie song that Reed was guesting on.

Wagon Wheel starts with more of the glam rock but comes to a sudden stop so Lou can kneel in an empty church and confess to a painted wooden Jesus. Back on the wagon we keep up with the rockiness. Lou is zonked or just high on an occasion but he seems on the verge of collapse. But danger is just part of it all. He pleads for a hand to stop him rolling over and going before he's ready.

New York Telephone Conversation is a 2/4 piano vamp with electric bass. Gossip, night life, social life, what to wear and who to care? Bowie descants Reeds almost spoken vocal, sometimes in perfect pitch but when necessary more dissonant, whispering like wasps for the lines about scuttlebutt. It's zingy but it's fun.

I'm So Free is bright rock and roll with percussive backing vocals. The narrator is skipping along the pavement carefree, drugfree, responsibility-free and everything he's celebrating starts to sound like he got there through helping hands less sympathetic than the ones in Wagon Wheel but from richer bodies. Is he a prodigal hippy back in the fold? A reformed junkie? Wherever he's been all he seems to have learned is not to go there again but nothing of why or how he got there in the first place. It's not exactly denial but the zinger is that he will probably never live to regret the strain he gave to others. Mick Ronson's decidedly sour lead bends in the joyous coda provide a kind of witness to its shallow triumph.

Goodnight Ladies. Another tuba bomping on with a slow 2/4 from the days of jazz in the Big Easy. When we hit the verse a toodleydoo clarinet rises behind him like a last call at a bar. Soon enough we have a trumpet wailing along. It's the kind of lament of loneliness belied by the philosophical acceptance of the tone and the sweet beauty of the music that is made to be played live in bars filled with smoke and shots of rye. If we're paying attention as we smirk at the tv dinners or appointment with the late night news we might catch the quote from made Ophelia in Hamlet as she bids adieu to the court and makes her way to her suicide in the river. See ya.

By the time I heard this I was much more familiar with Bowie who seemed to be both historical and present. I knew he'd produced it and that it had come out the same year as Ziggy Stardust. Those facts were unremarkable when hearing the arrangements here but the portraits of the human marginalia here feel more intimate and lived than anything about moving like tigers on Vaseline. The thing that struck me first when I played it all the way through the first time was how much older Reed seemed than Bowie. 

There were only five years (!) between them but Reed's experience weighed so much more heavily on his invention than Bowie's. Unlike the attempts at conventional and then whacky character-based pop that led to the 1967 debut under the Bowie name, Reed had already lived the material with his tribe that had informed the first Velvet Underground record and when the noise breaks out in Black Angel's Death Song and European Son they are already saying no to the honest world. When Transformer came along to be recorded Bowie bestowed Reed's archness and daggers with tinsel and grease, offering a blanket of brightest pop music to throw over the darkest of Reed's observations and the corrosion of his humour.

This was Lour Reed's second solo album. The first is self-titled. It's ok. There are some great songs like Ocean but there's a problem. It's been arranged and produced by thought trains that led to the singer songwriter end of the top forty, the Jackson Browns or Albert Hammonds. Whether it's a Stonesy groove (Walk it and Talk it even borrows and mortgages Keith Richards' riff from Brown Sugar). That was the day but this sounds less like its time that that of musicians who'd earned that kind of identikit rock to play for the balance of their careers. Bowie added fun so if the tone was camp it would have extra mince or if cinematic and tragic it could swell into a landscape of sound to make the hardest swoon. Bowie read Reed in a way that bypassed a hipster knowledge of the charts and what the adult oriented radio was playing and played the record right into where the kids lived.

From that experience, Reed never turned back. He'd already done much to break the mould of what rock bands should sound like and that first disc slotted him right back into the machine. You might have noticed the debut and nodded but you could love this album the way you loved White Light/White Heat and the teens who liked the snappy choruses and singalongs could love it, too. And it was still Lou Reed, the same Lou Reed who subverted the sombreness of Lady Godiva's Operation with intervening anti-pop interjections or took a side of an LP to describe a debauched party, but also a Lou Reed who stood up from the Rolling Stone photo shoot as a has been on page 20 and walked into the kind of stardom he could only fantasise about back in the bad days.

Transformer doesn't just describe the characters in these songs, it is a fanfare announcing a new career which Reed maintained credibly to the last. What are friends for, eh?

1982 @ 40: A KISS IN THE DREAMHOUSE - SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES

A bass riff pulses out through a heavy chorus effect while a bright cloud of synthesis billows around it. Some drum fills but not a complete bar create tension. Siouxsie comes in with almost a whisper. The images of chest full of eels and usual skin and throwing a thorny idea of sex and you get a body horror love song. The Cronenberg-led sub-genre hadn't yet been given that name but here it is in pop song form, driving with a tireless momentum. 

After Cascade, Green Fingers gives us a weird sounding recorder with a figure somewhere between Green Man folk and Arabic modes. A Raga-rock guitar figure starts and Siouxsie enters with a a bright vocal about a woman who can make anything grow. The story of it was inspired by an episode of the Rod Serling run Night Gallery about a woman who avenges herself against a greedy land developer using magic. Like Cascade and most of this record the feel is psychedelia but this is not prancing around the lilies summer of love psych-rock but something more born of the horrors of the late cold war which was still feeling like seconds to midnight: less Woodstock than Xtro.

Obsession uses the delay with only the slightest original attack on a relentless guitar figure, slicing out a two chord toll as Siouxsie's building series of impressions and almost diaristic lists of the actions of someone increasingly surrendering to their idolisation and impulses. There's a break in the middle where the arrangement blooms into an aching string section figure. But this just winds back down to the pressing whispers, grinding and tolling bells of the stalking horror scenario. 

For contrast She's a Carnival bursts right in with a descending guitar chord figure that brings back earlier incarnations of the band with a punkier sound. The vocals come in about what might be a carnival curio or a dazzling scenester with Syd Barrett style melodies and harmonies. The song creates a whirlwind of tone, clashing the tuneful sweetness with the razor wire of the band and then finishes with an accelerating circus organ.

Circle appropriately starts off with a hard looping synth figure. Siouxsie comes in with tales of circular behaviour like child abuse, teenage pregnancy as the drums slap in with a punishing waltz time rhythm. Everything keeps going round like a wormy cat chasing its tale. Cycle of life, yes, but it's happening in the gutters and the clubs and the subways and the darkness.

Side two starts with Melt, an expansive 6/8 swing with cymbals and mandolins. Another sex song but this ethereal call and response number leaves out the eels in the chest for cuffs and pain and no one's talking about safe words. The falsetto repetitions of Siouxsie's mezzo lead add to the breathiness of a situation that suggests penthouse apartments and soft lights and secret rooms with hooks in the walls. Even the arrangement with its booming splendour feels like it cost Andorra's national debt. Decadence costs more than money, here, though, and seldom more beautifully.

Painted Bird takes its cue from Jerzy Kosinski's grim novel of World War II Poland of the same title but spreading out the imagery to include any attack on beauty from motives of impotent anger. The lines about losing our sorrow. This gets a little lost in the rock-non-rock arrangement. Perhaps the idea was to get people to read it (assuming they could get through it). It's the closest this album gets to filler but it does fill in the best way.

Cocoon takes into Siouxsie's head from deep in an acid trip and we go in to the sexy bomp of a fretless bass riff. Warm sheets melt and writhing worms as a tide of tinkling, whispering and wobbling rises and falls around her. At one point the forces gather for the lucid declaration: "Waiting to loose the bandages. Waiting for new appendages." Cronenberg much? More than anything the band did Cocoon sounds more like the Siouxsie/Budgie side hustle The Creatures with its un-rock swing and absence of guitar chords and great waves of atmosphere.

Slowdive closes things with a squeaky start on the strings that cries down into a big bamming 4/4 slam. Siouxsie continues the jazziness of her vocals on most of the album. Her own backing vocals join her for the chant of the title but most of this is a delirious confusion of dancing and sex with a rhythm section and screeching strings sounding like an old bed in carnal motion as well as the building tension of attraction and fulfilment. It fades because no one wants it to stop.

With cover art straight out of the kind of Klimt picture posted on numberless student walls at the time, and a determined push the confounding of the physical world with shifting abstraction, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse remains one of the band's most powerful statements and caps off all the development from The Scream in the punk days to there in the precarious early '80s when the tension from waiting for the air raid sirens found its way onto the dancefloor and into the bedroom. The Dreamhouse of the title referred to a Hollywood brothel where clients could pay for time with lookalikes. A kiss there would be deliciously forbidden but also resonate with exploitation and the worst of human motives.

Psychedelia was lifting out of the history books in the early '80s. This was a generation who turned on its mainstream with a fistful of punk. Before that they were the ones who bypassed the Buck's Fizzes and Eagles by raiding the op shops for Syd Barrett, Jeff Beck era Yardbirds, Magical Mystery Tour Beatles, Satanic Majesty Stones. They bought or taped the Nuggets and Pebbles compilations which lightened the task of finding the Green Fuzz single at flea markets. They reached further back and rediscovered the power of baroque concertos and further back still with the modality of renaissance madrigals and medieval monks. Reissues of early Pink Floyd and Syd's solo albums as well as the Doors' back catalogue flooded the senses with everything that the twelve-bar boogie white boy blues had pasted over. By the time post punk took on enough form to call it that, there was a music underground that was pushing upwards.

Some of these songs began life in the Ju Ju sessions but between that album and this came the single Fireworks with its real cello section playing the riff in a song that is sometimes violent and sometimes more basely sexual. By the time this album was in the works the near industrial live sound of Ju Ju was upgraded to using the London Symphony Orchestra as session players. And if that weren't sufficiently of the time that rejected the thrusting rock that filled stadiums there is a major wind back on conventional rock arrangement (not an abandonment but the statement is clear) and Siouxsie's vocals are often as far back in the mix as the stranger of major player songs from the late '60s like Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby Standing in the Shadow or Over Under Sideways Down. The chosen tonalities stray well from the normal diatonic and embrace the modes of the dark ages or just progressions thrown together as a kind of anti-craft.

It's because of this, the mix of innovation and call backs from centuries before that this solidly psychedelic record does not just sound like a rehash of Piper at the Gates of Dawn or Strange Days. It's confusion of sex and horror, beauty and cruelty, now and then that makes this album great. I know I harp on this but here we have a textbook example of why sounding determinedly of your time is the best thing to do. Think on't: take those Rococo trills out of Mozart; you'd still have genius but you'd miss the trills.

1982@40: WORLD OF STONE - HUNTERS AND COLLECTORS

A quietly menacing bass drone on a synth. Crisp woodblocks clack a steady 4/4. Eventually a clean and spiky funk riff on a guitar appears. Strange warbles and clashes bring a bass in but it's not a normal rock bass. It's notes feel like hammer blows. They're forged from steel. Soon we're pounding through a breathlessly hot jungle as a tortured voice calls out about loping walks, monkeys and caretaker's home. It might be a zoo. It might be an imperial expedition through a great screeching morass. Whatever it is there's danger there and the bare protection from it. "Semi-detached in a world of stone" and suddenly the track breaks into a searing grind with clanking bass below and screaming organ overhead. The pattern holds. No guitar solos or middle eights, just the big machine of song slashing through the foliage.

Flip it and you get Watcher, a much busier groove with more plinky funk riffs. More strained vocals. An aging surburbanite growling at his tv. The backing vocals invite you to come and see him in his display case of a home. There's a vague preacher vibe like Once in a Lifetime but, despite the funk that might unite them, this has an anguished energy and none of the designer weirdness of David Byrne and co. Thump thump thump. Come and see the watcher.

Lastly there's the one that would really dig in when the band was mentioned. Loinclothing has a brighter riff that can recall the Andrea True Connection's More More More disco smash from the previous decade. There's no shame or self-consciousness to it, probably more than a little defiance. There's also a ton of Krautrock in the ancestry. Mostly, though, this is the sound of a band breaking through influence and sounding like themselves. The bass takes the gloves off and pounds with its knuckles. The big modal calls of the verse sing ropes of imagery: cowboys toe tapping, howls of distant pleasure, worms feeding, hay, rag and bone man before the big chanting chorus breaks out with a massed cry of ... Loincloth? Plastic? Placemats? 

This is one I only had as a cassette from someone else's record. While some of the lyrics are clear, I have not one sausagey notion of what they are calling in the chorus. It sounds essential to the song but the song is imagery rather than narrative or confession. In the end I liked not knowing. It could have been Latin or Old Sumerian but it sounded like they meant it. The combination of obscure meaning and earnestness or even ceremonial joy had a shiver of horror. Jungle holocausts from Deep River. Like the best nightmares, especially those known to soft little city dwellers like me, it was not knowing that kept us looking over our shoulders.

January 1982 and I'd just come back from my two months of Uni holidays up in the tropics. First term of second year wouldn't be starting for a couple of weeks. I lugged my baggage back up to my room, cleared out the miasma of baby clothes and other detritus that my brother and his wife would use my room for in my absence, and unpacked to a much needed dose of 4ZZZ. World of Stone came on. In the stinky humid air of a late Brisbane summer, the sounds of the jungles of horror movies rose and got right into me. I turned it up and listened. Who the hell was this?

I listened to the end of the bracket for the back announcement. Hunters and Collectors. From Melbourne. Playing at the New York on Sunday night. It was Friday. I finished unpacking, making mental notes. Melbourne. Like The Birthday Party and Models. Wow. It didn't surprise me once I knew. That big clangy bass and the non-rock spread of the funk were a fit for place. I was about to call around to see who was going when my brother in law Roger came by to invite me to it. Perfect.

The New York in Queen St was a depression era building with a deco name plate built in to the façade as well the the name York. The semi circle portico bore the renaming to New York. I can't remember when it became a venue but had already been there a few times (possibly The Birthday Party and the Laughing Clowns). It was the place for interstate bands from the alternative margin or international acts that got played on ZZZ. It was the best venue in town. The sound was always big and clear and the bands played on an elevated stage so far above any of our heads that you had to be standing right behind a giant not to see them. There was a mezzanine with table service.

Hunters and Collectors emerged, looking like the roadies, all singlets and jeans ripped by lifting and days and nights on the rig. There were about twenty-seven of them; a rock band core plus a workshop of percussion on bin lids, gas cylinders and hub caps. They made a big noise but it was cleanly defined and deliberate, turning the venue into a great big sweaty pagan church. No cacophony, no mess, just a solid mass of orchestrated rage and wonder. I caught up with a lot of people I'd been missing but we didn't so a lot of talking.

Hunters and Collectors felt new and of the moment and for the moment seemed incapable of buying into the top ten with a cute chorus and a riff. That would change but it would take years. Getting to the crafted hard pop numbers that Mark Seymour at the helm started to churn out was a lengthy process that involved a painful untangling of ties to the dark night time bonfires they'd started with. But for a band whose sense of purpose ensured them the ears of any passer by with hooks that took forever to happen after a lot of scary declamation, they were matchless. Most of the dearly years stand solid now but that first long fast spinner with the uncomfortably off cover art will please now as uncompromisingly as it did then. Classic in the best sense.

1982 @ 40: THE BLURRED CRUSADE - THE CHURCH

A stereo-ed tom tom intro brings in the sound of a 12 string guitar led-band playing the chords in a jangle of arpeggios before a brief respite in a reverberant major barre chord. Steve Kilbey's deep voice is out front but sitting comfortably in the centre, filling it, as he intones a series of images that sound better than they mean much against a delicious guitar rock soup. A delayed chorus breaks the song into suspension: "I'm almost with you. I can sense it. Wait for me." And that's almost all you need to know about this album.

Almost. From the nylon string guitar solo to the range of textures that, while distinct, always feel of a piece with all the others. The Church spent the months between their credible debut and their follow up learning dynamics on the road, honing the songwriting and learning to work with producers and engineers to arrive at this remarkable accomplishment. Everything sounds like it belongs on an album that has been thought about. But it's also warm and engagingly melodic throughout.

If the over extended intro to When You Were Mine gets irritating from the second listen you know at least that it will resolve into a mighty psychedelic riff, Kilbey's assured vocal and imagistic lyrics that suggest a love that survives many lifetimes, big drumming and atmosphere. If Marty  Wilson-Piper's vocal on Field of Mars starts out swallowed the growing force of the music bears it on a tidal shift to a big plaintive call by the end.

Interlude gives us a break with its slower walking pace but intrigues with the woman's voice that speaks the first line of the verses as Kilbey sings them. Secret Corners seems to be a comparatively plain side ender but brings out a big finish.

Side two starts with a whimsical joke about letting inspiration in when it comes knocking before the rich acoustic rock of Just for You which surprises with an instrumental section led by a harpsichord. If A Fire Burns and To Be In Your Eyes feel like filler by this stage they are eclipsed by the epic You Took which ranges from soft but urgent harmonics on the bass and big guitar landscapes, hushed verses that play like cinematic dialogue and further adventures in guitary invention. By the time you get to the quiet finale of Don't Look Back, you feel like your watching the credits of a movie you'll tell everyone about.

Part of this is the work of a band reigning in their tendency to get songs out of jamming and finding arrangements that either took the length they gave them or demanded more compact packaging in the '60s-influenced singles they came to master. From the burdensome replaying of sections of Unguarded Moment which can make it a chore they go to leaving out those bits of information you can note and recall and move on. The effect is constant progression that even raises the lesser tracks to the standard of the whole.

The mix of pounding percussion and big guitars that surround a large and present vocal comes courtesy of producer Bob Clearmountain whose experience with the likes of Springsteen and The Rolling Stones as well as a lot of musicianship of his own delivered one of the most accomplished sounding records on the Australian scene in an era when we were still forgiving unimaginative arrangements and production for being real.

I was one of those folk and to this day maintain my post punk preference for interesting over professional. I still prefer the ramshackle passion of Neutral Milk Hotel to anything off the overproduced Nevermind or the Garbage debut. But The Church got away with the slickness because it sounded like they meant it. Where Of Skins and Heart works as a decent power pop platter it feels incomplete, undercooked, in need of edits on the tape but also on the songcraft and arrangement. Blurred Crusade sounds like it was born that way.

I was a sucker for the band from the time I saw the clip for Unguarded Moment on Sounds or Countdown. The paisley and the coolness, the double Strat attack (that would soon morph into Rickenbacker 12 and Strat) Steve Harley vocals and high harmonies just won. They played Brisbane a couple of times in 81 and 82 but every time I tried to get to see them they blew out, the venue doling out the money back to the upsidedown smiling fans. It felt like we'd never see them. Maybe they couldn't actually play and were really just miming it all. Whatever. Guff appeals when you're young and pissed off. 

I finally did see them and more than once. The first was just after Blurred Crusade and they were fine. Not necessarily the band that broke the bank at Monte Carlo but good. They didn't sound like the record because the record was production and more production that any of us were used to with an Australian act. Dig the extra emphasis Kilbey put on his Brit roots in his singing and interviews. No one blamed him. It was a monocultural world out there and any difference was a relief.

What mattered was the music and it was rich and dynamic. The solos weren't cock rock pyrotechnics, they felt right the way they were and added to the weave. The lyrics didn't seem to mean anything but they sounded good and you could project whatever you cared to upon them. They looked '60s but not so '60s that they forbade themselves more contemporary tones in sound and couture. If you knew your Australian city stereotypes they also weren't things. Based in (but not from) Sydney they sounded nothing like Sunnyboys, The Hitmen or any of that Stoogey Detroit grunge. They weren't Melbourne with all that nasty theatre of coolty, tribal noise and dyed black locks. They certainly weren't Brisbane. They were just The Church.

Between their first album and this had come a double EP which loudly announced the course the band would nurture into bloom on this album. And then, having established themselves as revivers of the jingle jangle, changed course again (but only slightly) and would continue taking small side steps from the last thing: less Please Please Me to Sgt Pepper than Turn Turn Turn to Fifth Dimension. By the end of the '80s, while still recognisable in sound and vision, they had shifted from the easy path of Byrdsian gleam to the larger scope from tracks like You Took or Is This Where You Live, producing barnstormers like Tantalised and their global hit Under the Milky Way.

Until then, the look and sound worked a treat. As a young media student who saw things multiple times at the cinema, I dragged my sister and her husband to a screening of Starstruck which was supported by a short of two Blurred Crusade songs (Almost With You and You Took). They were all naff knights in armour, crystal balls, tarot cards and mystic lakeside settings but they were on a cinema screen, shot like a movie with giant sound. It was better than the movie.

This didn't alter the fact of so many other outfits providing music that was far more innovative and successful in offering alternatives to the old groaning freighter of rock music. It didn't raise the possibility of having more conventional rock music lift to those heights to make a tight and lasting union of creativity. The Church stuck to proven guns and fashioned an easier career out of being dependable. At the time that did look like they were being left doing the dogpaddle while less lucrative music was forging ahead. What remains now is the fact of the the sheer craft and confidence that reaches out beyond the judgement of fan-aged purists. Simply this: good songs stand and albums made of them will always taste good.

1982@40: HEX ENDUCTION HOUR - THE FALL

There are some records that you remember as being weird top heavy miasmas, constantly balancing a mass of cacophony on a unicycle and somehow managing to keep moving forward. A kind of reverse effect of this happened when I'd heard The Birthday Party's single Release the Bats. It sounded so overcooked and chaotic that I laughed before I admired it as though seeing a revered stage actor gesturing and projecting too much. Then, as one friend correctly pointed out, you heard it again and realised it was actually a song. The Fall's Hex Induction Hour felt like an airborne disaster the first few times I heard it and that's how it came down to me until that same friend got into them big time and I heard it again and was almost disappointed to find how well played it was. But that's the issue with bands whose singers themselves appear to be driven by chaos, the more he snarls and sneers his abstract insults the more dangerous they look behind him and when they look dangerous they sound dangerous.

But, really, after a few bars of ramshackle take up of the rhythm and bass riff, the opener, The Classical starts rocking like everything around it. And The Fall, track by track, start sounding like a band. It's the same band (almost) as on the first three. Riffs on loud but clean guitars, non-rock drumming and bass that is either melodic or indistinguishable from the tom toms. This time, someone opened a window and all that is clear ... er.

"I've never felt better in my life," they sing with nasal sarcasm at the end of a harangue born of a four chord progression that hammers on. Because of that insistence on the progression it takes on a kind of drunken take on Sympathy for the Devil (different chords, I hasten to add) with a spiteful omission of the chorus. A big acidic rant at consumerism or the advertising that fuels it or even the buying habit that has replaced culture. Maybe even a shambling restatement of The Saints' Know Your Product. The thing is, that, for all its teetering chaos, The Classical is compelling and even catchy. 

If you remember the early Fall records rather than listen to them now the sheer riffy rock of it might surprise you. Yes, there's a lot of the legacy of German avant-rockers in all first wave Fall but even those volk knew the power of compulsion. Faust's reverse taunt track Krautrock is an onslaught on a single chord but it's engaging as anything a stadium rock act of its time ever produced.

Jawbone and the Air Rifle bangs in the four on floor rock that the band did happily. Smith's narrated account is a strange horror story of an impotent middle aged man who takes his anger out on the local rabbits (he's referred to in the song as rabbit killer). He takes a chip out of a mausoleum, waking the local curse and deteriorates thereafter, hallucinating pagan imagery. His appetite for the meat he used to hunt vanished he settles into a slow death by starvation. The last section is told against a slower minor-key vamp before the jolly jig riff that has served as a chorus throughout the song.

Hip Priest begins with guitar harmonics, a jazzy ride cymbal taps out 6/8 rhythm, slow modal guitars and Smith singing a falsetto figure: "He is not appreciated." Occasional small outbreaks of chords and bass resettle into the slow shuffle until the oddly folky 6/8 roll picks up and sticks with the groove. The unappreciated is the self-appointed pontiff rock writer from Sounds or the NME, whose word can kill careers, whose ear is only sought when the seeker is well past it. A terminally spitting indictment of the profession but delivered with calm deliberation. Deadly.

Fortress/Deer Park is a garage chordy riff taken to dissonance after an intro that uses the same cute plinky Casio rhythm as Trio used on their still funny minimalist hit Da Da Da. Images of the ugly end of nights out and touring alternate with the plea: "Have you been to the English Deer Park? It's a large type artist ranch..." Anywhere that produces some cool thing gets stretched into hallowed ground. The Fall were from Manchester which, by that time, was the place where he, Ian Curtis, walked. The litany towards the end about people being disappointed by their own preconceptions about bands they go to see still makes me laugh.

Mere Pseud Mag Ed pits Smith against a spiky guitar and drums grind as he verbally slaps the face of society magazines with their ostentation and pretence. Little more to say on it really, does what it says on the cover.

Winter, on the other hand, is an epic with a weird depressing story and was so long that they had to put it over two sides, end of A, beginning of B. Weekend had done this on La Variete with the instrumental  A Life in the Day. Neither that nor this were joined when released on a CD which would have allowed both as a single one, but, yeah that would have gone against what they were to begin with. I'll treat both Winter (Hostel Maxi) and Winter 2 as one song. A pedestrian rhythm with a bass insisting on a low note however it might briefly stray. A clean guitar lashing high chords. Eventually a Casio organ adding spare highlights. It's not easy to make all the lyrics out without assistance but there is a story there. The local mad kid goes about his day, challenging passers by with odd declarations as an alcoholic variously gets over his hangovers or waits in the library until the pub opens again. One winters day the kid walks past the drunk's place at the moment that the drunk's soul leaves him and flies out the window into the kid. Then the drunk says to the bewildered recipient some heart wrenching words: "I just looked around and my youth, it was sold." Courtesy winter. Thing is, this song is compelling. It's a kind of walking drone but it's also mesmerising. You have to listen to the entire thing. If you had the record, you had to get up and turn it over. I can imagine the ghost of Mark E. Smith giggling at the sight of that, especially at the snake-oil buyers who think vinyl is the newly resurrected true church of music appreciation.

Just Step S'ways starts with the best riff The Fall ever recorded. It rises through a modal/raga influenced scale and falls back with a pair of finalising downward notes. You just want to hear it over and over which is why they play it that way. Now and then there's a big loud break but the riff comes back which is kind of the opposite of the plea of the lyric which goes: "Just step sideways out from this world, today." But this is less about smelling roses than wrapping your scarf around your nose to keep out the perfumed aircon of the culture. If this hadn't been The Fall but U2 or The Police this riff would have been the centrepiece of a stadium stormer. It's much better as it is-uh.

Who Makes the Nazis starts with a yell of its title that gives way to a circular riff on guitar and bass with guitar harmonics and a half time drum pattern. Eventually, an oafish drooling wordless backing vocal comes in under the lyric which repeats the question and answers itself with elements of the culture like TV commentators or superb Smithian images like "motels like three split-level mirages". Smith played a voice recording from a Dictaphone right into the mic, letting it distort to add noise but also to invoke the kind of loud hailer politics the lyric addresses.

Iceland was recorded in Iceland after a small number of gigs the band played in Reykjavik. Smith murmurs an intro over a curious blend of ukulele and vamping piano. Viking imagery of runes and battle. But this is Mark E. Smith so he also recounts a moment when he slipped on the floor of a cafe and was annoyed that no one seemed to bat an eyelid. The colourful non-sequiturs run by with the refrain of getting humbled in Iceland (that pratfall in the cafe gave him a useful image for this one). This is much more a personal thing with me than it will be a generally accepted impression but the constant bouncing rhythm on acoustic instruments and the far more serious drumming, right to the gentle détente to the clean finish, this one reminds me of the instrumental version of Sing This All Together on the Rolling Stones Satanic Majesties record. I don't think they are copying it (if anything it just sounds like an idea that came out of a jam, but the association is a pleasing one. A little oasis before the end.

The end comes in the form of the longest song on the album, And This Day. A stamping and fractured 6/8 beat on the drums and an insistent minor figure on the bass are garnished by a distorted organ as Smith declares stress in a long, long string of images of travel and claustrophobia, of isolation and paranoia. Is it about touring? If it is it's about as far from Helen Wheels as you could get. The instrumental passages do not change the onslaught of the imposing rhythm and its interventions but add bursting stars of feedback and the organ can take on a strange similarity to a choir. When Smith comes back in with the the chanted title his voice is flush with the wash of the instruments. It's exhausting but exhilarating; the bump as the airliner's tyres touch the tarmac at the home airport. There's no fade, just a dissipation and end. That's the album.

People should still be listening to The Fall. They could take the easy way in with a compilation of the mid and late '80s singles which can get very catchy but, really, what they need to do is find one of the first eight or so albums, the earlier the better, and listen to them until the music and the words feel familiar. They will, and it should only take a few listens. All eras of pop music have surfaces that look glassy and still and all of those eras have undercurrents and shards where music like this is made. The post punk era was longer than punk but was absorbed like everything else eventually, was a moment when music like this was appreciated deeply. I don't mean millions of people bought it, I mean those who did and went to the gigs did so to feel something beyond their ken. This is not limited to the early '80s, you can find it now, new, but a dose of this approach that does not care if you like it, has no American-style eyes on the prize and was from a time when the push against that kind of showbiz felt like it was winning. It wasn't and it lost like all the other challenges. That failure gives us bullshit like The Good Charlotte whose publicity was all tatts and piercings but who sounded like mid-'80s MoR.

 I didn't even have this one on cassette but I loved hearing The Fall on radio. More than The Birthday Party or Foetus or ... or anyone else, the Smith brigade of modular line-ups with the rockiest anti-rock on the face of the deep cut through everything else, shaming its listeners for being fans of anything else. Whatever flight you took to OMD skies or submarine to Joy Division oceanic trenches you could always get back home with The Fall. The best bit was that wasn't because they told it like it was but mixed that with wild dream logic dadaism and mighty riffing goodness. And none of it had the self-consciously weirdo vibe of an Oingo Boingo or Classix Nouveau (that's a cheap shot but it was fun to type). If you play or write songs and get plugged into a YouTube course on do-nots and always lists, listen to The Fall and it will be more relieving than a bowel prep laxative. You won't want to sound like them but you might feel like sounding like yourself.

Revolver Revolved: the 2022 Super Deluxe release

I've already written about the importance of this album to me and described the songs here. This post is about the 2022 issue of the various new mixes, bonus tracks and packages of The Beatles' centre of gravity moment between superpop flight and the stratospheric orbits: Revolver from 1966. Yes, I'm sick of the hype, too, but as soon as I got back into this one through listening to the new tracks the experience was refreshed and I'm back.

This will take the following form: track by track notes of the new stereo mix, notes on the bonus session tracks of the super deluxe edition, thoughts on the presentation of the mono original and whatever else I didn't get to say here. The atmos mix mostly presents the songs as settled expanded stereo with very little gimmickry. I'll only add notes about it where there is more to say than that.

So, the songs:

STEREO

A mixed bag but I note that the same kind of thing has happened here as on the Pepper and partial White Album mixes in that the levels and features of the original mono mix have been kept but are just now in stereo. That said, this didn't seem dogmatic in those releases (you need the "blisters on my fingers" shout at the end of Helter Skelter which the original mono omitted). Overall, a robust effort that is friendly to headphone listening and speakers alike.

Taxman

This sets the standard of the new stereo as it centres everything we expect, bass, drums and vocals. McCartney's funky bassline provides an engine room and Harrison's stabbing chords hit at precisely the same time as the snare. The double tracked Harrison vocal is solid and the weedly wobbly guitar solo is a little more of an imp. What crowns this arrangement, though, is the vocal harmonies, which open windows to great light.

Eleanor Rigby

The silvery harmonies and crunching strings work superbly well in the more modern stereo here. McCartney's ice cold vocal doesn't suffer from the glitch of the initial stereo mix and jump channels but is allowed to recount the quiet horror of the lives in the song at the centre of the field. 

I'm Only Sleeping

The big breezy dream of this one glides with thumping bass, cool harmonies and the same backwards guitar parts as the mono mix (i.e. more of them).

Love You To

Another great one for vocal harmonies which in this song add a kind of chanting gravity. The indian instruments have more complexity and the volume swell of the distorted guitar reinforce the drone of the tambura, adding a modernity to the song.

Here, There and Everywhere

Vocal harmonies lifted much higher than the early mixes but I don't mind as they are so shimmeringly beautiful. For the first time I think that the chromatic guitar figure in the middle eight is actually a 12 string. It's far more subdued than anything from the Hard Day's Night jangle, possibly on the neck pickup instead of the usual heavily compressed bridge from that sound.

Yellow Submarine

If you thought Ringo's pitch was wince-inducingly off in this number you will not be pleased to hear that no pitch control was harmed in the making of this film. There he is, a couple of hairs flat of the higher notes until the others come in with the harmonies for the chorus. More sound effects that, on the original mono mix, were meant to be light and cute but are now unignorable. 

She Said She Said

I was looking forward to this one and have to say it's a let down. The song remains as lovely and airy as ever but the panning is so wide that it leaves the centre too open and all that rocking dialogue between the bass and great Ringo performance has been made more polite than it should be. See also the surround mix of Helter Skelter on the White Album reissue which bizarrely played down the bristling Bass VI track that added such force. It's nice to hear it without the distortion that always bothered my ears but this goes too far.

Good Day Sunshine

The piano really has some air around it. The sound of it is so rich. The effect overall is a blend of a piano and an electric guitar with the tone down at zero which adds a lot of punch to the jauntiness of the song. It's an example of the new mix revealing detail that also threatens the structure and force of the original idea. Still, it's a pleasure to hear.

And Your Bird Can Sing

As with all the vocal harmony forward songs this benefits from the airy expansion. The other famous aspect of this one is the dual guitar lines. This feature lifted the staid 12 string progression of the first arrangement and was a progression from the unison solo in the previous album's Nowhere Man where two Strats played as trebly as they could get through the progression and ended on a famous and sublime harmonic. Here the parts are harmonised and a lot busier and would have been murder to learn and get right. To my knowledge this time it's George and Paul playing them.

For No One

A full stage is struck between the piano and clavichord with McCartney's vocal plaintive in the centre, the opposite of the coldness of his delivery in Eleanor Rigby. You might notice the slight percussion  more as well as the bass. The French horn croons with an oddly mournful sweetness. This really benefits from the new mix approach.

Dr Robert

The stereo expansion reveals just how gloriously tight the band could get. Improved bass hits the kick drum beats while the guitar stabs match the snare to perfection. Even the arpeggiating jangly guitar which isn't required to fall in so exactly is precise. 

I Want to Tell You

A lovely expanded stereo stage allows this strange one from George to really breathe. Bright light harmonies lift it even better than the closely grouped effect of the contemporary mix.

Got to Get You Into My Life

The brass is big and bold and clean. One thing I only registered as a kind of boom between verses is now more definitely the guitar with pulsing down strokes. 

Tomorrow Never Knows

This is the one that really benefits from a revised stereo mix as the triumphantly weird sounds and effects work well moving around a central bass drums and vocal to create a kind of trippy space. 

SESSIONS

I won't go through these track by track. There are a fair few callbacks to the second Anthology Box for tracks like the early versions of Tomorrow Never Knows and Got to Get You into My Life, the giggling take of And Your Bird Can Sing. There is a lot of perfunctory representation of the tracks as songs in development or arrangements in the making but there are some standouts.

I loved hearing the discussion between George Martin, the string players and Paul McCartney about the use of vibrato in Eleanor Rigby. Also, the difference in effect between the legato arpeggio at the beginning and the severe staccato of the released version. The now famous scrap of Lennon singing an early sketch that would become Yellow Submarine which has him sounding (in theme and voice) more like his Plastic Ono Band persona. George's acoustic tryout of Love You To with Paul on harmonies shows a level of experimentation that didn't make it through (particularly with Paul's harmony which ends up gilding a lily). The backing track of Rain will make you stop anything you are doing. It's the original speed but sounds accelerated (especially McCartney's gymnastic bass playing). Probably the most notable inclusion is Got to Get You into My Life with an overdriven guitar playing the brass parts. It's left quite skeletal and would have needed something extra (which it got at the expense of the guitars) but it recalls how Keith Richards, trying to beef up the sound of Satisfaction put on the now famous fuzz pedal riff where he imagined a brass section. 

This section of the larger release can get tiresome with repetition of material and sketch-level attempts but it does provide good access to a band that was breaking well out of the outer shell to make music that did not depend on being played live.

ATMOS

Overall, this is a further expansion to the stereo mix. As on the better Atmos presentations of recent years like Plastic Ono Band or Let it Be, there is almost no gimmickry: the instrument positions are established and kept according to an imagined floorplan. But this is Revolver with its sound effects and backwards instruments and all that malarky. Where warranted, the Beatles' own creative expansions have been followed.

If you can imagine a more immersive stereo experience with the occasional liberty, you've got it. I'll single out the vocal harmonies which shine more strongly than on any other mix, sound effects like those in Yellow Submarine are given the gimmicky status around the stage as they might (see also the instrumental/tape clip segment in Mr Kite on Pepper) and the more lysergically inspired ones in Tomorrow Never Knows fly around the stage like glowing seagulls or fidgeting orchestra sections. The latter has some of the most pleasurable creative panning for a psychedelic piece I've experienced. Lennon's calling vocal, first clear and clean and then more strange and sinister through the Leslie speaker declaims the meditation as sprites and spectres fly around him.  

I took some pains to get in front of this mix as it has only been released to streaming. Not all streaming services allow Dolby Atmos to my setup. Android TV and Samsung soundbar both with built-in Dolby Atmos. The only service I could find that allowed it was Tidal. It just worked.

MONO

If you want to hear Revolver as The Beatles imagined and intended you need to hear it in mono. Mono doesn't mean dull or boxed in, it just means all the music comes out on one channel and so has been subjected to painstaking tone shaping and compression so that it sounds balanced and clear. Why bother with it in 2022? Purism be damned, for starters, couldn't care less, but put the mono on through speakers, move away from them and it won't even occur to you. You're hearing a band at its peak whose sound has been nourished by one of the great record producers and engineering teams available. It's a great record with a lot of punchy rock, popping orchestration, weird soundscapes and always compelling vocals. That's the way most people heard it to begin with and they were stopped in their tracks by the invention, the cheek and the strangeness. On that, the mix itself is different, with some extra parts or effects that didn't make it on to the stereo mix.

It's how I first heard it (a sister's friend had an original mono copy at a time before the reissue was available in the late 70s) and am always content with. Why mono, now, though, in 2022? Because of the abovementioned but also because you might gain some extra insight on how production and arrangement work together to create that odd sense of space when only one channel is available. The stabbing rhythm guitar of Taxman, the Psycho strings of Eleanor Rigby, the snakey guitar riff of She Said She Said, the big brass of Got to Get You Into My Life, the sweetness of the French horn in For No One, and so on, all come through with such clarity and position that your brain makes spatial sense of it and assigns physical spaces for the sounds.

And the history of it shouldn't be dismissed. In 1966 mono was as normal as DVD was until Blu-Ray in the 2000s. Why get a new machine just to hear it from one more speaker? Both the equipment and the records were more expensive with stereo which seemed to be only for tossers with money better spent on life in general. And they who thought so back then weren't entirely silly considering how absurd a lot of the stereo mixing was then. If you listen to original stereo mixes of any Beatles disc until the White Album you'd best not do it with headphones as the extreme panning (voices in one channel and instruments in the other) with give you a headache.

The mono mix here is taken directly from the original master without any extra EQ or compression. In fact, if you look at the wave of any of the tracks you'll see that it's very pleasantly undulating within a narrow range, not brick walled up to the extreme. If you hear it digitally, you are hearing the cleanest it is going to be. If you are listening on the vinyl release it has only gone through analogue paths (I have no interest in the LP version of this but that tidbit is worth a mention). 

EP

Paperback Writer and Rain formed the sides of one of two singles the band released at this time (the other being uncharacteristic album tracks Yellow Submarine and Eleanor Rigby). Both of these songs are among the finest of the band's singles for a few reasons. Neither has a young love theme and both rock in ways unusual for the time. Paperback Writer occasioned the innovation of a massive diaphragmed microphone (an inverted speaker) to cope with the extra bass the band wanted. Rain was recorded a full tone higher than the released version as they wanted the sound to be heavier than usual. The EP section of the Super Deluxe release has the original mono single mixes and a new stereo mix for each. The mono originals are tight and rocky and untouched. The stereo mixes are pleasantly drier of reverb than more recent attempts to excite them into the world of now. Both sound great.

WHICH VERSION DID I BUY?

The Super Deluxe but as a purchased download, not a physical box set. Look around for an online hi-res store as there are a few good deals happening. 

While initially excited by news that one of my most beloved records was to get the same wonderful treatment as the later albums, I was crestfallen to learn of the bizarre decision to leave the Blu-Ray disc out of the Super Deluxe box. It might have followed the example of the others with a hi-res presentation of at least the stereo and mono mixes as well as a surround mix. That would have sealed the deal on my buying the box but without that one disc it became an overpriced lower-resolution version with a book. The only reason I'd bother with it in the future is if it were to be discounted by about 50%. So, I did what I normally do apart from the box, and buy a download of the whole thing at higher resolution to put on my various devices have been happy to listen that way.

If a Blu-Ray were to appear with these features or even just the surround mix, I'd get that but I suspect that the longer game of keeping it to subscription services means that fans will be expected to pay for it repeatedly which answers to the unnecessary extra income for the representatives of the biggest music act in history. It saddens me as it would be something that many people could accessibly enjoy but has been kept relatively exclusive. This was not Giles Martin's nor Sam Okell's decision but the corporation that manages the material. Maybe it's just an overstatement on my part but it breaks the legacy of value that the band began with.

Speaking of value, one of the lamest brained decisions in the release was to match the CD and vinyl versions disc for disc. CDs can hold a mass more than an old LP but there must have been the concern in these days of analogue as snake oil that drove this utter bullshit. It was the same with the Let it Be Super Deluxe. The EP tracks could have been put on a sessions CD which would have left ample room for a Blu-Ray. Not to be and for the worst reasons.

EPILOGUE

This record was a grail for me. I'd seen it in a vintage ad in an old magazine. For some reason they showed the cover in negative and listed the titles only of the single (Eleanor Rigby and Yellow Submarine). At the time, there was no reissue of this one. Pepper was never out of print, along with all of the albums from it to Let it Be. The main Beatles records everyone else seemed to have were the compilations generally known as the Red and Blue albums. But I wanted the originals. There seemed to be a kind of parental caution against pursuing them, as though the music would release the wolves of the mountains and lay waste the greater Townsville municipal area.

My sister Anita's closest friend was Penny and in her family's record collection was discovered a copy, after I'd brought it up in conversation, of the original mono mix of Revolver. Penny happily lent it to me for taping. I held it for many minutes, examining the strange cartoon collage cover and the cover where the band in stark black and white were all wearing glasses and smiling at each other rather than outward to their fans. The background of the photograph is utterly lightless and gave off a sense of sinister invention. 

Then I had to put it on and listen. This was May Holidays 1976 so I had the whole morning to hear and hear again the music on this disc, the harsh satire of Taxman, the pitiless description of loneliness that followed, the breezy but oddly unsettling ode to staying in bed, George's dark mooded song of sexual opportunity, Paul's spooky ballad of ubiquity, Ringo's goofy kid's song, the acerbic John song about tripping and the things people say, Paul's goodtime summer song, the odd one about birds and possessions, Paul's heartfelt breakup number, the snappy one about the feelgood doctor, George's mini epic with the teetering pitch about uncertain communication, Paul's big brassy love song and the words from our sponsor, The Tibetan Book of the Dead that featured vocal manipulation, imps, goblins and sprites of sound flew out of the darkness where the guitars were so disorientated they played backwards, as John's sharp voice got sharper still with processing before it all collapsed into chaos.

I had never heard a record like it. It made me not want to be a rock star but a composer. As it was in mono (I had no idea how precious that mix was) it played perfectly in the cruddy old tape player I used to listen in my room. And there, with the curtains closed against the light and heat, I heard it many times as though falling into a meditative rite, and wondered how I might try, just try to do something as bold.

There's just one more thing. 

People make a lot of the bare three year gap between the first album, Please Please Me, and Revolver, considering it astonishing that a band could develop so quickly, but it's really not that simple. Yes, PPM was recorded within twenty four hours of studio time in 1963 and Revolver for much longer in 1966, but it's not just three albums, it's not just three years and it's not just some godlike talents casting gifts of music down from a mountaintop. It's two and a bit years in Hamburg learning their instruments, performance and stamina in an often hostile environment and getting skins of iron. It's four years of playing to increasingly massive audiences, getting wealthy and feted by circles of privilege and influence. All of those years saw the development of the creative and social motion within the band including legendarily tough competitive filtration of material and ideas. It's all those years being fed with the most innovative culture that could be served them in their social holiness, the youthful urge to press on to newer and more interesting means of expression, and the permanently blank cheque that a savvy record company gave them to get in and play. Yes, it was as basic as Love Me Do back in the uniform collarless suit days but by 1966, The Beatles were the most privileged musicians on the face of the earth with no barriers to new cultural experience nor any forces outside the band to prevent them from doing exactly what they wanted. Revolver is the culmination of that, its celebration and boast. It is the big bang from which the cosmos of ever more expansive riches flowed, until they collapsed and went their own ways. Yes, there was good music from them before this album but there hadn't been a record by them that tried so much to the extent that you have to think of the tracks that are plain rock songs rather than expansions of the pallet or outright innovations. After this one the greatness was assumed, expected. All that in thirty six minutes of playing time.

1972@50: DAVID BOWIE - THE RISE AND FALL OF ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS

The procession arrives slowly, crisp footfalls on the snare drum and, as it gets closer, the kick playing a pulse between it and the snare. When it reaches us, a huge, bright acoustic chord rings across all six strings as Bowie enters to tell his tale. The news is out: Earth has five years of life left before its destruction from an unidentified force. Chaos fuels desperation in the city and a groundswell of violence begins to simmer as the narrator falls in love at first sight with someone he sees in an ice cream parlour. He declares his love as the chorus follows the same '50s progression, bursting into life with a call and response between backing vocals and Bowie's impassioned lead. A bolt of sci-fi horror has become a teen anthem and, for a moment at least, things seem beautiful again. Well, they would if we weren't being continually reminded by droning voices that we're on a clock. The strings light up like fireworks and the whole city is singing it until they can no longer whereby the drums softly pull their retreat.

Soul Love begins as a more sprightly acoustic number with a vaguely latin beat. Until you read the lyric it sounds like an innocuous filler there to put the word love into an LP side. But it does go to strange places. A mother grieves over her son the soldier, the intensity of young love to the complicated love that religion preaches without always practicing. And the chorus, a tugging electric barre chord fest and higher vocal, sings of love as a mass of contradictions. It's bizarre until you consider that it's the observations of a starman, Ziggy, who understands romantic love and a kind of universal variant but understands the limits. Love is not loving the same way that a painting of a pipe is not, itself, a pipe. These are the observations of a stranger noting what the doomed earthlings might only know as mundane. The song fades on a lazy swinging playthough of the verse as instrumental.

Moonage Daydream bashes to life as a pair of industrial strength power chords. "I'm an alligator," Bowie wails and keeps up the imagery of dreams and fantasies as the tone changes from the love of the last track to big grinding sex. A near contemporary review I remember from the late '70s looked back to this song as being cobbled by a bag of cliches from the bubblegum sci-fi tradition: space face, 'lectric eye, ray gun etc. But what Bowie is doing here has much more to do with Ziggy coping with sex. And not just sex, but big, explosive carnality that might as easily eviscerate as transport its players to ecstasy. Two verses and many choruses take us there, at least to watch and listen as Mick Ronson's screaming solo soars and his orchestral arrangements spread out in glittering splendour. The song was good enough to serve as a capsule for Bowie's decades of fame and invention in one of the most powerful documents of his life. Not bad for cheesy imagery.

The gentle strum and airy vocal of Starman takes wing with drums, close voice and arresting chord progression, going from shared teenaged intrigue to a soaring rocket of a chorus in which Bowie leaps an octave between the syllables star and man. The guitar riff that leads from the chorus is like a fanfare of joy. Ziggy has come down and only the kids know about it, keeping their treasurable knowledge to themselves as they end on the same fanfare as before but now it's sung across the teens of the world as they join the party.

It Ain't Easy was taken from the bin of Hunky Dory but you wouldn't know it. From the strident, protest march, strum of the acoustic and harpsichord and the bluesy vocal that give way to the giant chorus this piece is made of a lot of work. It's a cover, so while it might feel like a good side closer musically, its lyric has no purpose built through line. Then again, as a tale of grinding work to get to the top of the fame mountain it fits fine and works in the sequence. It's the end of side one and Ziggy is a real rock star glorying in his celebrity but not without a knowing wince of the temptations of corruption.

Flip to the old side two and we finally get to see Ziggy on stage. A gentle lilting piano figure gives way to a sweeping chord like a parting theatre curtain. It's being told in the third person. It's being told by a fan. Ziggy transfixes his small first audience into a collective swoon with songs of darkness and disgrace and dismay and disgrace again. There is a rushing climax before the final chorus where Bowie swoops down through a falsetto arc and sings: "how I sighed when they asked if I knew his name." Like other songs on this set, this one is repurposed from a grab bag of songs either unrecorded or unreleased (at least under his own name). Lady Stardust originally bore the title He was Alright (for Marc) and was Bowie's hymn to the pioneering star. Adding "lady" to the title and the character was Bowie's cheek but it is also central to the self-othering of the Ziggy persona. Is he a she a he or what? Do we care now? It's better that we don't care and instead celebrate the range and diversity. But fifty years ago under the overcast sky of the high street the ambiguity bore real power, power to disgust, certainly, to a culture that had turned fab pop into cock rock, but also power to defy every newsreader, columnist, mum, dad, and steel capped bovver boy outside the glittering walls of the venue. Once inside, the great ugly shrivels to invisibility.

Star begins with growling power chords and percussive piano that's less trad rock than Velvet Undergbround. It sounds like one of the Spiders rather than Ziggy as he lists earthly friends and their fates variously as joining the army, starving at home (as an artist, a junkie, both?), turning the the world or going into politics. But the narrator of the song knows that he wants to become a rock star. He could make a transformation or play a wild mutation, could do with the money and everything else a teenager in the '70s might dream is an achievable end. The urgent music of the stripped back rock band is cleanly lined and solid before the wistful finale where a big slide guitar figure comes back down on him. It might be the the bummer of reality or how seriously he's taking it as he ends with two bluesy repeats of the words "rock and roll star" and then as the post song fade he speaks: "just watch me now." At the end of an extremely busy '60s and the beginning of the stadium rock world of the '70s, the dream would have felt gigantic.

A fuel injected version of the Eddie Cochrane riff (bending from the fret below for one and half bars followed by two lashing chords, repeat). Things are getting fast. The band is playing and touring and reaping the wild booty o' the road. The stage whisper chorus is comes in close after the echoing tin of the verses and urges the band to hang on to themselves despite the sensual blitzkreig charging at them. This was another song Bowie wrote before the Ziggy project. Google Arnold Corns (there's stuff on YouTube, as well). The guitar figure's insistence creates drama from contemporary listeners who were also hearing the retooling of classic rock by glammers like Marc Bolan or The Sweet. It also unwittingly presages the barnstorming style of the punks four or so years later.

And then after the rise comes the fall. Ziggy Stardust begins with a fanfare figure played by Mick Ronson on his overdriven Gibson as it falls from a blod G chord to a trill on D and a loping downward motion back to G. It stops all the urgency of the last two tracks as Bowie takes the mic for the story of the star. "Ziggy played guitar, jamming good with Weird and Gilly and the Spiders from Mars...." After all that jamming he was the one bagging all the attention, the press, the groupies, the eyes and ears of the planet. Everyone else just got jealous. The grandeur is cut by a slashing descent as the others plot and grumble. Ziggy plays for time and jibes, knowing he's the star. But in the second darker passage it says "when the kids had killed the man they had to break up the band" while the chord descent thunders. Are the kids the rest of the band or the fans? To my mind the mass adoration kills the star's uniqueness, his glamour and mystique, so that he just becomes another strumming junkie sold on the packaging of pimple cream. The killing is told in the sour section of the song and always sounds dark and severe. We go out on the fanfare again, at least there was that, before it ends with an aching repeat of the first line: "Ziggy plaaaaaayed guitar." Whatever was great about it has gone.

After the elegy, if we are still following the story, the next one wrenches us from our silence with the same kind of rock as the early songs on this side except that now it's bigger, much bigger, stadium sized. Life as a superstar is a blur of the big three which are coming in floods (in more ways than one). "Hey man..." the nagging vocal won't leave him alone as the big guitar riff goes from A to a very cool F which is never where you expect before opening wide on a classic bluesrock chorus "don't lean on me, man..." Bowie's own quote about Suffragette City has to do with the opening apocalyptic prediction, the kids are post rock and roll and go on the rampage for everything they want. To me, it's the aftermath of the post-glamour star touring city after city, getting zonked on anything on offer, playing again, drowning in sex and attention, day after day after day, like the closing minutes of the song as the A-F progression goes on and on, joined by an insistent sax riff, comes to a false ending before gearing up again and rushing to big slipped stop with one last screech: "suffragette!"

The silence hasn't quite set in before the gentle strumming of Rock and Roll Suicide begins. "Time takes a cigarette. Puts it in your mouth." Bowie's voice has aged the way anyone does when they've lived a whole life in a year. As the song builds and Ziggy's thousand kilometre stare burns holes in the hotel wall, a jangling arpeggio on a clean guitar joined by a sax, the urgency of the pathos takes solid form until he can't even stand the thought of daylight (those lines about the day breaking and hurrying home always made me think of a movie vampire). As we build and rise the narrator who has been describing Ziggy's fragility starts talking straight to him, screaming for him to stand, hold his hands, and walk because he's (and a dark chorus appears behind him for it) he's won-der-ful. A string section we've hardly noticed appearing swells with the pleading voice until, after a thunderous climax, it has the last word in a quiet and short major chord. Has Ziggy made it? The brevity and suddenness of that last sound might mean either. Don't know? Well, you'll just have to go back to the start and listen to all of it again.

Which is what I did. August holidays 1977, hogging Dad's recliner in the family room, playing that tape over and over again. Sometimes I played along, with the nylon string piece of junk my sister had offloaded on to me when she got a better one, and learned the easier songs but mostly I just stretched back and took it in. Between about six of us at school we had the major records by Bowie and completed the list with some home taping. Ziggy was an oldie by this time, Bowie was already on to Station to Station and about to get weirder still. I didn't know much about that, yet, and in the meantime there was this mix of familiar, even homely, rock music and ideas and characters that felt yummy and dangerous.

From the grime and dust of the city streets of Five Years to the frail vampire of Suicide I followed Ziggy the Starman down to an earth that swallowed him up like dessert ... then crapped him out. The dread and the wonder weave an intriguing picture: rock stars get everything their fans want for themselves, the sex and the drugs and the rock and the roll. In the tropical winter of 1977, with punk already making it seem easier, anyone of us could get there. Bowie even looked punky on the cover when I finally got the LP; not bin bag and safety pins punky but of his own tribe and ready for whatever he could get.

Would there have been a punk rock without Ziggy Stardust? I think so. So much of it had to do with what happened when the boil of Britain's grinding fortunes in the '70s was popped and the rockstar dream looked fake. But I can say that the search and destroy of Ziggy paved the way for whatever we were calling (I'm) Stranded or Anarchy in the UK. It prepared me so that when punk turned up on the pages and the waves I knew it was where I was and I embraced it. And as I closed my eyes, held my breath and felt the world changing around me, even in this little, personal way, at that small and sluggish pace, the secrets that darted around in the sounds of a great record, the grinning whispers that grownups could never pick up, spoke to me directly and they said: welcome.

Then again, this is a record we're talking about. Yes, it's one of the greats from one of the greatest's extraordinary decade-long roll, but just a record. After that holiday fortnight, I had played it so often, rubbed its neuronal receptor so raw, that it takes conscious thought, even now, to play again. When I do it is with pleasure but the sense of thrill I still get from my very favourite records is not part of that. We all grow up and find our own special ways of being boring. It doesn't have to be anything imposing or even irritating to others but it always, when noticed, strikes anyone who has known any of us for years, as a choice towards comfort and safety. I can still hear the glide of the wink in these sounds today but I think I've chosen against the wink.

Listening notes: I strolled around with the flacs of the legit download of the Five Years set from early last decade and sat myself before the wide and beautiful surrounds of the multi-channel SACD from the decade before. I really will never regress to vinyl.

1982@40: LUST IN THE DUST - XERO

1982. Xero had a record out. A real vinyl disc. So what? Time and place. If Brisbane had a record industry it produced a very few artefacts of painfully hard won self-financed singles among the mess of truck driver custom pressings and the David Jones Staff Choir Xmas albums. Brisbane bands back then released anything longer than two songs on cassette and dressed it up in single-sized artwork in lunch bags so they wouldn't turn invisible in the shops' cassette racks. They might have coughed up all the money themselves but it was out through a real label (Sydney's M Squared) and was filed among its kind in the grown up LP stacks. Xero (sometimes Xiro or Zero) had done the cassette thing a couple of times the previous year but here was their posterity-ready playable on all good turntables (and plenty of shot ones, just quietly). A real record!

Also understand that this was from a dark hour in the live music timeline. Things were starting to turn but what I found when I came to live in Brisbane (from Townsville) in 1980 the pubs rang with the fresh young  sounds of jukeboxes or racing stations. The traditional home of bands without industry management (who had that then?) and accessible to anyone who could pay the two buck cover and at least convincingly lie about their age, were giving bands the black card. It felt like there was a ban on them. So what bands I saw (and was in) did was hire halls or vacant shopfronts and these were all shut down by cops (see also, parties with bands except bands that played Khe San).

While I did get to see Xero live it was difficult to do regularly. What I and everyone else in the margin of the mainstream in Brisbane did was hear them and other locals on 4ZZZ. One of the pleasing effects this had on the flow of music from the FM band was that all of it sounded like it could have come from anywhere. The Go-Betweens record a single in Scotland and it sounded like them down the road. Big dub grooves rubbed shoulders with cassette compilations from anywhere. And that is how I came to hear at least two of the tracks on this record and they sounded sensational.

So I bussed into Adelaide St and came back with the record in a plastic Rockinghorse bag, and looked at the cover. My Silver three-in-one was nestled in my old room's wardrobe back up in Townsville and wouldn't be coming down south for another year. I could take it to a friend's and tape, of course, but for now I decided to leave it until the Uni holidays and play it among the cane toads and coconut palms o'er the Tropic of Capricorn. Until then, there was the cover.

I took it out of the plastic sheath and discovered that it was a long sheet of cardboard, glossy on one side, folded in half to look like an LP cover. I figured getting a tabbed and glued cover was one expense too far. That aside, it looked great, from the distressed Egyptian tomb statues on the front, the handwritten band name and title and the industrial looking bed of tiny squares on the rear, the high contrast band mugshots, handwritten track titles and fonted statements like "This record contains no hit singles" it felt perfect. "Technical stupidity and Big Ideas: XERO. Technical assistance and Big Mouth: Colin Bloxsom." A thank you to Xero shareholders told of begging and borrowing between the conception and the release. This cover art by band member John E. testified not only to the cheeky modernism of it but the trouble it took to create. These are things that major label cover art conceals to give the impression that superstar bands' records are magically produced acts of charity with recommended retail donation stickers. This cover felt like it was from a community.

Then, after handing in my last assignment for the year which had been disrupted by the Commonwealth Games (Griffith's student housing served as Games staff and athlete units) I booked a sitter berth on the Sunlander and headed north. Then, once the shambly shuffle of Christmas holiday organisation and all the phone calls to herald my return to the tropics were done with, I was able to pour myself a cheeky rum 'n' coke and put the record on.

The Girls starts with a stuttered beat on kick and tom toms. Heavily treated guitar comes in with squeals and whines and a bass plays a descending slap progression. A woman's voice also steps downward, singing of stying in the safety of your own home, watching tv. Then it's "watching what's happening to yourself on tv." And then the feminist chant against male violence calls to reclaim the night.

Crazy Eddie turns what feels like a noodling acoustic chord progression but, after a big compressed crash launches into a droning drive as the male vocal tells of travel or escape with a middle eastern flavour in the melody. The chorus cryptically intones (female voice): "Crazy Eddie what did you do? Poor Delores, she never knew." Repeat, except it doesn't quite repeat as the arrangement and playing intensify. It's a trip. Good to listen to but maybe not to live.

The Misfits starts with a belching slap bass figure and proceeds to a funk groove thickened by organ chords. The woman's voice (I should start using the names, as they're on the cover art and I know them, anyway), Irena's voice reads out lists of imagery which don't quite flow but that seems deliberate: "Dead tiger in the kitchen. There's an Arab in the bath reading Goldilocks." "Facts, facts, relevant facts." And again but again it doesn't repeat so much as run the same thing through which changes it.

Flip!

Love and Anarchy starts with a wordless vocal in a minor mode over a nervous speedy tango. The vocal melody takes up the Latin feel in  a warbling minor key. A bright synth riff breaks the verses and then ends the song with a pronounced deceleration to a clean stop. No lyric sheet but the title is taken from Lilliana Cavani's dark comedy of desperation politics and romance. 

Every Kiddy Gets a Prize begins with a galloping snare and a dislodged James Bond chromatic figure. Two male voices trade lines, take up the Bond figure but are rhythmically across it. The lines end in a  falsetto descant over the keyboard, giving it a kind of vintage sci-fi feel. On cue we then get a quote from Telstar, just enough to let us recognise it before it vanishes. An unintelligible declamation sounds beneath the falsetto figure before the track ends with a kind of self disintegration.

The Surrendering opens with an expansive drum pattern which seems to pour down slowly in sheets. A big murky minor key riff on guitar bass and keyboards crawls out from the dark. Irena follows the melody with an operatic vibrato mixed low through a wall of reverb. The chorus is in two parts, a high major third pattern that ends in a monotone on the final word: "The tempest is calling him away." Then over a lamenting progression the chant: "Living with the very fear of change." It's played and sung first twice in minor then twice again in minor. The whole sequence of verse to chorus repeats ending with a spoken outro and a lumbering stop. 

I opened my eyes and took another sip and smiled.

Broken beats, droning keyboards, vocals that either wailed or murmured, observations and stories; none of it sounded like anything around it but it sounded like 1982. This leads me to a point I've ranted on too much but is worth repeating here. It is not just important to sound like your times but preferable than to affect timelessness. Timelessness in rock music really only refers to a set of production standards struck in the late '60s and early '70s that have been maintained since by the mainstream. But instead of being timeless, the parade of mainstream rock since then and up to today and beyond really only evokes the era of stadium rock. It implies that this normal setting sound carries with it the desire to attain stadium status. Bands in Brisbane at this time did not think this way. True they knew their squeaky, honky and spiky music would never be heard at Madison Square Garden (or even Lang Park) but it's also that they didn't aspire to it. Saying that there are no hit singles on your record is a joke but it's also a plain statement.

Also, sounding like something was recorded in 1982 is different from saying that it's meant to sound like 1982. As synthy or slap bassy as this record gets it never brings to mind bands in dayglo lurex, blacklight bow ties or fringes gelled up in hair tsunamis, it just sounds like music made then and for as long as it would be listened to for pleasure. That goes for other releases from the time like The Reels' Quasimodo's Dream or the Go-Betweens' Send Me a Lullaby. Also, this music didn't come from nowhere and was definitely not made in imitation of anyone. However their name was spelled, Xero had formed over half a decade before and had changed over the years, in personnel and musicality, developing along their own timeline. They have a hefty history before this which I won't go into because I don't know it very well. They didn't form in 1982 to sound like Flock of Seagulls. Lust in the Dust is neither the apex of their output nor just something they knocked together, it was the statement they made in 1982.

And that leads me to something you won't hear on this platter: rock music. No guitar solos or even a ringing barre chord anywhere. Some of the keyboards sound expensive but a lot of them could just be played on cheap Casios. Some of the songs have clear and definite structures but others seem to be patched together or allowed to wander. The point is that each track is a moment to be visited, occupied and left for the next, from the fevered flight of Crazy Eddie to the twilight jungles sprawling around The Surrendering.

To be anti-rock in Brisbane at that time was not a pose, it was a stance. In a city that so ferociously guarded its monoculture, the choice to stand outside of that was a lifestyle decision meant the difference between walking freely through your streets and getting decked by smart casual yobbos who thought your pants needed more flare. I and a group of friends were thrown out of a pub the following year because our hair was too short! The music on this disc didn't have to use any sloganeering about any of this as the fact of it, there forever on black vinyl, with the suggestion of the campaign to get it recorded, pressed and in shops told on the back cover a clear if implicit statement of defiance. 

I remember one night crossing King George Square on my way to the bus home and hearing a twangy caw from behind: "Yuz had a fight with a Lawnmower, mate?"  I kept going, tightening internally. He repeated the taunt in reference to my haircut, a George Orwell special that I used to get every two weeks at a barber behind a newsagent in Edward Street. He caught up with me and I saw him. At least twice my size with the kind of leering grin I knew too well. "Are ya a punk rocker?" he asked. For a second I was in a vortex of indecision (and laughter because calling anyone punk in 1982 was like calling them a rapscallion or a mastodon)  but I righted myself, flashed him a grin and said, "er, yeah." Satisfied with his insight he cranked himself into third and cantered up the steps to the Ann Street footpath. I'm painting that with a light brush but for a moment I really was terrified. Brisbane was not a place to advertise being at odds with its beer commercial culture. In some way, to some degree, you could feel that every day. 

More pleasantly, back in Townsville for the holidays, I put this record on as the big overcast sweltering night pressed down and the smell of dead fronds and alcohol rose to meet it. And I wafted with the incoming tide of the drums and bassy swell of The Surrendering and, for a few minutes that felt like the best half-dreaming states I felt warm, and not from the humidity.