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.