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.