My 1983

Got the Sunlander back to Brisbane earlier than normal with a grab of new songs written on keyboard. One of them had such an odd chord progression that I still need to write it down before I can play it again. Greg wanted to record a few of the ones we'd demo-ed before the break in 8-track. He'd been inspired by witnessing This Five Minutes record there over the holidays. We kept in touch via letters. Try doing that now. 

Also, he was going to go to Sydney with Tex Deadly and the Dum Dums. It had only been two months but I'd never heard of this band that featured both Wadley brothers. That's probably not true as it would've been mentioned in despatches. Anyway, in a development that would never cause a problem now (or even a few months later) Ian had just started a job at the Public Service and couldn't go. I was asked to stand in on guitar for the Sydney gigs. 

Practices for days learning both the Dum Dums set and the Gatekeepers songs for Basement. Exhausting but exciting. Basement was like a daydream breaking into reality. The recording quality was astounding to me, better than I imagined it could be. Some lessons: don't record guitars with reverb going in; if you think you have a choral vocal arrangement listen very hard to the practice tapes before wasting studio time on an embarrassingly bad recording. We redid Keeper of the Gate twice, the third time got it right ... ish.

After a fine suburban dinner, we packed into the van to get us to Sydney. A non-fatal drive. We checked into the Burnley in Kings Cross, feeling like veterans o' the punk wars. Walking around the Cross zapped our little minds with its surround sound music, arrays of sex workers and unsleeping street life. The first gig at the Southern Cross had a blowout by the support band so we, minus Greg Perkins, went on as the Gatekeepers in our first live show. We played big venues like the Trade Union and smaller cooler ones like Stranded with acts like The Johnnies, Hoodoo Gurus and The Scientists. Sydney audiences loved Greg Perkins in a way that none dared love anyone on stage in Brisbane. That was a window to the future. What a week and a bit that was.

I don't remember being expected to stay in the band but at the time Uni was more important to me than playing in a band whose music I wasn't a fan of, so when I was dropped off back in Brisbane at Griffith Uni in the middle of O-week, I felt nary a conflict. What I did have was a tape of the four songs we'd done at Basement and an academic year to get done.

Getting back home was good as I found out that my brother and his difficult family had decamped to Townsville so he could do his hospital internship. For the whole year. It was just me and Stephen who'd come down to finish his law degree. That gave me another problem but one disaster at a time. Unpacking that evening was like floating in an oxygen enhanced meditation chamber and being allowed to scream.

Third year was fine, really. Most of us had binged on the attractive film electives and were left only with history and politics electives. That was a slog but there was still a bunch of good stuff to do and discover. I liked Uni and I was good at it. Bob Hawke had led Labor to victory in the Federal election which was a blast after almost a decade of coalition bullshit. Closer to home, the Nationals won the State election in their own right and, for all we knew, would be in power until the end of time. Bummer.

Before he left for Sydney with the Dum Dums, Greg had put the song Susan Burn on to a cart at 4ZZZ and I woke one morning with it blaring on my clock radio. Living the holy Mangrovian dream, my friends. People I didn't know knew that song. After a few months, Greg returned to Brisbane. This had been announced in Time Off with a captioned photo that said he was coming back to join the Gatekeppers (sic). 

We started gigging and hit a steep learning curve about practicing and playing our instruments properly. After some yucky gigs we got better (enough for one uni crony who had seen one of the bad ones to approach me after a good one with a grin and, "well, Pete, ya did good"). This led to more recording, at the 8-track home studio of a friend of the Wadleys. This, plus a live track, made up what would be our Cosmic St cassette album (don't scoff, it was normal in that scene and, besides, however much of an exaggeration it might have been, it did get into the RAM independent top 10 ... for a week).

The band didn't impinge on study to my memory. Both seemed balanced, even with the busier social calendar that the former brought. I kept writing new stuff and at one point rigged up a pair of cassette players to do some primitive multitracking.

I finished up the year and the B.A. quite easily, without the rush of the disrupted previous year and far more confidence that I'd ever had of emerging with some decent results (I was that dick that would whinge loudly in the common room if he only got a pass). So, at some point in November of 1983. I took the bus back to the city and another to Auchenflower for the last time. At breakup drinks (Queens Hotel, the big one with the high ceilings) I thought I was having an acid flashback but was most likely just very pissed. Whatever we were feeling about it, we'd all got through three years of university at least a little the wiser but more importantly, the more fortunate for the free education of the time, for the post punk ethic of openness to exploration and bags of daydreams we'd need to grow out of.

But this summary should be about the music of the time. It's gone on longer than usual this time as I was making music as well as listening to it. So here are the singles I recall:

The big one was Blue Monday. The galloping drum machine intro and delayed entrance of the vocal with a great filling electronics made it both a dance-stravaganza and a troubling accusatory song that some thought was about the Falklands War and others a Swedish student suicide pact. You could dance and grieve at the same time. Australiana was a comedy bit that heralded a rash of other comedy records. I didn't love it but liked the idea of that charting. I and friends ridiculed Redgum's Vietnam song I was Only 19 little suspecting how genuinely affecting we would find it decades later. Prince continued on the scene with the iconic 1999 which, like almost everything else he released, interested not me. She Blinded Me With Science by Thomas Dolby annoyed me. Human League's Fascination had a great chorus and a goofy verse. Soweto was infectious and glorious until you thought about the by line and had to wince. The Eurythmics came out of the cocoon of their old power pop origins to fly high with a triumph of electro pop that resonates down the decades. The Clash were disintegrating fast and Rock the Casbah was proof. Kajagoogoo's Too shy was meant to be sexy but sounded more like the Blitz version of Playschool. Rio by Druan Duran had them push through to stadium star status and well beyond my interest. Wall of Voodoo burst out of the margins with another one for the ages with the propelled Mexican Radio. Tears for Fears gave us a emotive chunk of greatness with Mad World (yes, the original is still better than the movies version). UB40 covered Neil Diamond's Red Red Wine and made it into a poignant mini drama. The Cutter by Echo and the Bunnymen ruled its niche and influenced all. The Call released their hit The Walls Came Down which featured a wannabe David Byrne vocal and a wordless sung hook that ran up and down a major third. The Violent Femmes brought out the spare and impressive Gone Daddy Gone which won them fans. Madness ditched the ska beat for a '60s cover It Must be Love which was ok. Culture Club's boring Do You Really Want to Hurt Me was followed by the far superior Church of the Poisoned Mind. The Stray Cats' Stray Cat Strut was and is a jazzy marvel. INXS came out with The One Thing which was a variation on Subterranean Homesick Blues and took them further from their quirky origins closer to the big rooms. And that's all I recall. No, wait, there's one more.

The song I love possibly the most of anything that came out in 1983 was one that people mostly seemed to revile. There are people born decades after its release that have inherited their parents' distaste for the track. When I heard the opening riff of Safety Dance gleaming out of a car radio, with its bold modal tonality and fun vocals I had found the song of the year for me. I still adore it.

So that's it for then.  Happy News Year to Youse.

1983 @ 40: POWER, CORRUPTION AND LIES - NEW ORDER

Power, Corruption and Lies took New Order further into their emerging identity as a dance band with an edge. If that sounds dismissive and trivialising, it shouldn't. The band had struggled to put some distance between their illustrious early years. The first single even had the Joy Division by line and the album Movement felt like music that couldn't quite come unstuck from the last thing the band had done. The singles were the thing. Procession, Everything's Gone Green, Temptation and the stunner Blue Monday moved solidly into dance music, as much in stylistic debt to Georgio Moroder as Kraftwerk. When the next album came around, even if every other interview they did brought the old band back up, anyone with a persistent longing had to admit they had left that station.

Age of Consent's bright and catchy bass riff and keyboard patterns light up the room. Even Bernard's words about a failure of communication in a relationship sounded happy if you didn't listen to the lyric. And, yes, you could tap your toes or do the hip shake jerk all afternoon. If the funereal We All Stand bring back memories of Closer the arrangement is still sparser and lighter than it would have been. The mood is eerie rather than depressing. The Village brings back the brightness. "Our love is like the flowers," sings Bernard over busy and happy rhythms and textures that were fast becoming signature, guitar and keyboard tickles.

Notably absent from the production is the legendary figure of Martin Hannett. What he would have made of any of this is the stuff of guesses. The band took charge of production. When the joy of The Village fades into the mostly rhythmic introduction to 5 8 6 we can't imagine the old team adding atmosphere. This fades into the main body of the song which emerges from a low rumble into a busy electronic shuffle that sounds like someone tinkered a little with the Blue Monday midi programming. This, like all the songs on the old side one, allows textures and moods to speak more forwardly than individual songs and that plays perfectly well, even with the slower moments.

Side two brings us the open window on a summer day of Your Silent Face which begins with a synthesiser pattern so effortless and soothing you feel as though you're floating when it comes on. This opens on to a huge electronic strings chord progression that feels like a royal procession. Bernard's thinner melodica (haunting on In a Lonely Place) pleases. His vocal is calm and mid range. The strange lyrics report an experience that has left someone either apathetic or traumatised but beyond communication. At first the line, "why don't you piss off," sounds contemptuous, a cheap joke at the end of a hard won lyric. But the more I hear it the less I think it's the song's narrator and more the one who had the dark experience. This might belie the beauty of the musical arrangement (the closest, incidentally, that they ever got to sounding like Kraftwerk) but whatever personal motivation for the words the tension between the weary voice and the sublime grandeur of the music always compels me to either stop what I'm doing and give it all the attention I have or stop it and play it when I can listen only to it.

Ultraviolence plays like a disco march without the keyboards. The lyrics seem to bear the title out for once, with imagery of assault and consoling advice to move past a traumatic memory. The impersonality of the arrangement and subdued vocal add a creepy air and feel like a memory that encases the one recalling. gives me the shivers every time I hear it.

Ecstasy is mostly instrumental with a processed, robotic voice chanting something unintelligible as well as a lot of whispering. The strident dance groove is like  5 8 6 and might as well evoke a intoxication as just plain ol' dancing. 

The album ends on Leave Me Alone which has the now familiar New Order interplay between a big loping chorused bass and plinking guitar riff on the high frets that so many bands o'er the globe lifted wholesale. Bernard's words are melancholy, evoking failure of communication. To an exhausted person, everyone looks weary. Still, there's a lovely intrigue about: "but for these last few days, leave me alone." 

As with Movement you could  go through the words and the way the music sounds and make a case for the continued haunting of Ian Curtis over this band. It would be years before they could be heard in their own right. However, this time the band offered a constantly developing approach that would take them to moments of inspiring greatness. If this record sounds a little too much like mood over songwriting it might simply be a desire to sound as candid as they could. Peter Saville's artwork is a triumph, a lush painting of a bouquet interrupted by digital coding, keeping things both beautiful and always a little disturbing. 

And that works well by being subtle. This was not the new band's Unknown Pleasures, it was the state of things as they were. As with Movement, they left the big hit single off the album so it couldn't diminish what was there. What was there was something shared by other significant artists at the end of the free wheeling post punk years before so much of it was absorbed by a hungry mainstream. There was enough beauty here for a few car commercials, for sure, but too much murky shade for the big bucks world. Ok, so the next single after this was one song mixed four times which did not feel like fan service in 1983. But if you had this LP that might have given you a secret smile.

PUBLIC IMAGE FIRST ISSUE @ 45

A boomy bass wanders in space before a distant scream brings a drum roll and a big spacy pattern filled with heavily treated guitar playing what sounds like a metalwork shop with saws and the kind of tools you don't want to share a room with. More screams before Lydon comes in with lines about boredom, change and the repeated refrain, "I wish I could die." This might be Lydon's disgust with the scene he and his former cohorts did so much to make. The old punks (meaning those veterans form a very short lived scene) clung to what had become cultural traditions. The call to arms of British punk turned out to be more of a fanfare for the expansion and exploration of post-punk. Electronica, industrial, dub, and anything else that worked. That was the real revolution. Lydon's final words after nine minutes of oppressive dirge are spoken like a doctor pronouncing cause of death: Terminal boredom.

Religion is a spoken word track. Lydon rails against religion with a series of attacks. Religion II is the same with some expansions and a three chord grind like the opening track. I clearly recall how thrilling this was, hearing someone take aim like this. Then, perhaps less than a few listens later, it sounded like the poem that the Year 11 malcontent couldn't get into the school paper. The musical version packs more punch.

Annalisa begins with a bass and drums groove as substantial as a soul workout. Keith Levene's guitar, as effect laden as any of the other tracks (probably a combination of ring modulation and chorusing, but I'm guessing) gives more settled form to the rhythm, adding more of an offset. Lydon's vocals are high and whining but very effective. The song is the story of Annaliese Michel whose religiously extreme parents took her neurological condition for demonic possession and effectively tortured her to death. The song is not aired for shock value like the previous one, there's real compassion in there, even if it can be difficult to detect at first.

Side two begins with the anthem of the year. Public Image begins in steps. A bass playing quavers alternating between first and fifth. Drums enter with a slapping snare as Lydon repeats "Allo, Allo..."  before hte guitar comes in with a ascending progression which sets off ignition with a laugh from Lydon. Levene's riffing on this song is epochal. Huge fanfare-like figures of two note patterns that sounded in 1978 that you would never be able to learn them by ear. After John McKay's sabre slashing style on The Banshees' debut album, this sounded like it was imagined in widescreen. Lydon's verses could be about his former manager Malcolm McClaren or just as easily about Sex Pistols fans, railing against the scene's expectations and misrepresentations. Here, he claims his own, singing with neither the sneer nor the snarl of his Pistols vocals, hitting the notes he needs and sounding in total control. The chorus is the title, an elongation of the vowels as Levene's new fanfare rides the rhythm section like waves. A classic of the past fifty years and beyond. It never fails to excite me.

Low Life is like a shrill retelling of Public Image. More directly about McClaren, the "bourgeoisie anarchist". While there is none of the awe-inspiring musicality of the previous song, this packs its punch in clear terms. Lydon's vocals are clear but low in the mix. There are a few echoes of Steve Jones Major third descents in the guitar in the chorus for good measure.

An echoed slag-gather. The band comes in all at once for Attack with another Pistols like chord progression. Like Low Life the mix is kept low. Lydon's vocals are even more buried and drenched in delay. The attacks of the title refer more to those received buy Lydon, this new band and the one he was cast from. Judges, ministers, press, and anyone else are targeted in a series of J'accuse tirades. the song ends in a brief shambles.

Fodderstompf. What to say? Tinkling piano. Bass and drums play what sounds like contemporary disco. Keith Levene was absent so no guitar. After a few taunts like, "be bland, be boring." Jah Wobble and John  Lydon are at the mic rambling in high shrieking Monty Python voices. Lydon at one point intones, "we only wanted to finish the album with the minimum amount of effort which we are now doing very successfully." This goes for almost eight minutes. The first time you hear it, it's funny. It doesn't survive the first listen. "We only wanted to be loved," is screamed repeatedly and forms a chant or chorus or whatever your mood at the time makes of it. The drummer, Jim Walker describes feeling angry every time he hears mention of the track, let alone the track itself. He just hears Jah Wobble and John Lydon ripping off their fans. Something like that means that the track will have its devotees as well as detractors. Me? My mood decides.

In the very early '80s the bass player of the band I was in saw the cover among my records and asked: "Did you buy this because of the single?" He meant Public Image and his grin told he had, too, and then lived through the rest of it. Yes, I had. It was played on local commercial station 4TO who had been surprising in some of their staff's support of the edgier music coming from the U.K. at the time. I thought it sounded marvellous. It felt like Lydon was really moving on rather than getting bogged down and ther result was that from what I considered greatness he had burst into flames of inspiration. I was sixteen.

So I went down to the import record shop around the corner (Ken Hurford's Inport Records) and asked about it. They neither had it nor had heard of it so I ordered it. I was called a week later. I was surprised as I assumed it was coming in from the U.K. It was on the Australian Wizard label (as the Pistols had been). It was on translucent green vinyl.

I played Public Image about five times in a row, mostly buried in headphones to live inside that gigantic fanfare. Then I turned it over and heard the rest, right up to Fodderstompf. Fodderstompf, at least to a sixteen year old Pistols fan who was expecting the ascension from the greatness of Never Mind the Bollocks to even greater wonders, fucked the whole canvas up. The endless dirge of Theme passed by without effort because, once you knew it, you knew that it wasn't trying to be a snappy pop song but an atmosphere. Religion caught me at the right age but I'd skip the spoken word part. The rest I liked but missed the rallying cries of No Future or Pretty Vacant and I only wanted them brought into the greatness of Public Image. That wasn't the band on this record, though, nor on any after it.

Things got better; Metal Box and Flowers of Romance were classics of the post punk aeon. But this angry, contrary, mess of a record stopped everyone who might have rallied. And if they listened to the words, rallied in the best way by using it as inspiration. Having your trust thrown back in your face like a bucket of beery piss was not going to do that. Whose would? Well, it changed. The following year saw the release of The Great Rock and Roll Swindle which had fun moments but also a lot of prognosticative bullshit as well. We had to wait until Metal Box for PiL, as they started calling themselves. In the meantime the sounds from good radio stations ironed out the need for heroic band names and titles and could swathe us in the sounds of discontent that were by turns violent and breathtakingly beautiful. This was a speed bump, however inadvertently, but speed bumps are there to keep us alive and ready for more roads. So, maybe they did waste seven minutes of our time sounding like high school Monty Python kids at three a.m., maybe we needed the pause.

THE SCREAM - SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES @ 45

It's right there in the first few minutes of the album. A lone bass note gently slides downward. A guitar figure, unresolved, descends, falling through the dark. Percussion. A distant woman's voice wailing. There's two of them. Nothing's quite at the same level. Pure isn't so much an instrumental as an aural movie trailer, the genre madness horror. It's 1978, most albums released under the flag of punk start with big bashing guitars and sloganeering vocals. This band, composed of people on the scene from the word go, are going for atmosphere and it makes them stand out. It also makes them a little scary.

Jigsaw Feeling fades in after a brief silence, a chromatic riff with the guitar riff high on the fretboard, building until it reaches altitude when Siouxsie barges in with her bludgeoning voice. It's all wrong - pitchy and unbalanced - but it's perfect for the song, overbearing, harsh, punitive. "My brain is out of my hand, there's nothing to prevent, the impulse is quite meaningless in a cerebral non-event." The last syllable is punched out, percussive. You can hear the barre chords on the guitar now and they behave the way you'd expect a punk band but it's the descant lines, the metallic slashing overhead that will account for the band's guitar sound for this and the next album. It's not chaotic sonic flailing, there's a clear skill and direction to it, but it's troubling, violent but psychologically violent. As Siouxsie's voice punches about a shattered mental state, the bright stinging of John McKay's guitar is her equal. After the spooky opening, this is a torment ... and it appeal is strong and instant. 

Overground also fades in but it takes longer and keeps the tension from breaking into a barre chord assault. It's a strident Flamenco rhythm in the guitar which breaks the expected four on the floor of rock (let alone punk). Siouxsie comes in plaintively, worried about having to appear conventional to others. It's not what you'd call characteristic but it's worth remembering that bands off the mains of the time had to bend backwards for a foot in the door of a record company. Not everybody pranced around like the Sex Pistols, getting attention for swearing and spitting. The calibre of the music on this disc, the seriousness of purpose indicates that whatever they were like at parties, this band was looking to express their independence from their own peers. Not superiority, really more independence, the freedom to explore how they would, regardless of canons of behaviour that had already formed around them as to how a punk band should and sound and how they should act. Instead of pretending they weren't doing it they wrote an unignorable song about it which features hesitant guitar screeches between verses that suggest the danger of it. It's less the amped up football chants of Sham 69 than the exploratory noise of The Kinks or Who of the previous generation. Towards the end of the song, rather than bring it to a crescendo, they just intesify, Siouxsie doubling on the vocals, harmonising with herself but also getting mixed down as though polished into normality. Bold move, no guarantee the listeners would get it.

Carcass follows with a kind of reassuring familiarity. It's an early one and sounds it, a smashing descending guitar riff, a wailing vocal and insistent drums, it's tough nut punk all the way through even to the chorus: "Be a carcass, be a dead pork. Limblessly in love!" A sexually frustrated butcher dismembers the object of his affection, heightening his arousal as never before. It might sound like New Rose but the story could be straight out of The Painted Bird. We end on a field recording of snorting pigs.

The same brooding bass presence as the start of Pure. It's sliced up by the atonal guitar blades. Siouxsie begins the words and we realise, holy fuck it's a Beatles song. Her voice climbs through the ascending opening lines, twice by which time the band has picked up speed and her voice is a full throated wail. The chorus is robbed of the descending guitar line of the original but Siouxsie blares out an odd imitation "helter skelter, nananananananana!" The band charges through to the next chorus and then ends on the same doubling of the opening lines, climbing up through the noise. But this time it cuts abruptly as though it's fallen and crashed to the ground. The Banshees would revisit the Beatles again as a much changed band for 1983's Dear Pridence. It was from the same album but was not the same kind of cover version. Helter Skelter trades the screaming distortion of the White Album original and puts it by the other tracks in the dark. Dear Prudence was given a kind of post punk psychedelia, phasing and big production and a video shot in Venice with lots of dayglo colour distortion. It's the statement of an established band, comfortably flaunting an influence. Helter Skelter here is an experiment, a dare, brash young punks gatecrashing a Fab Four classic (well the song's Manson connotations didn't hurt).  End of side one.

Side two starts with the big sound of full barre chords through a phaser. This quickly turns into a more chunky rhythm as the band and Siouxsie come in. The vocals are in close harmony and kept in a block low in the mix. "I am just a vision on your t - v - screen. Just something conjured form a dream." Even the fame of the still small punk club scene led people to typify the band, particularly Siouxsie herself and as tv appearances and positive press increased, the richly imaged singer attracted attention from all quarters. "My limbs are like palm trees swaying in the breeze. My body's an oasis to drink from as you please." The sense of cultural predation was felt deeply. The spiky rhythm of the track with its pummelling tom toms, the compressed howl of the vocals and the lashing guitar tell us how angrily.

Metal Postcard (Mittageisen) begins with a threatening march rhythm on the toms and bass. The guitar comes in with sharp dissonant bends like staccato siren blasts before settling into the kind of chord riff that would sound like Black Sabbath if it were played on the lower strings. Up there on the higher frets it sounds more machine-like and cold. Siouxsie comes in with images of families dining on metal, workers saving metal for later as a chorus declares, "metal is tough, metal will sheen, metal will rule in my master scheme". This strange scenario is an image of fascism. The band had received aggressive responses to the inclusion of oppressive symbology like swastika armbands, however ironically or just provocatively they were worn. Siouxsie based the the lyric on work by Wimar-era collage artist John Heartfield whose surrealist anti-Nazi work (and his own Anglicisation of his name from Johan Herzfeld) put him afoul of the brownshirts and on the right side of history. The Banshees evocation of Heartfield was even released in German translation in Germany and made it to an equal best double A side in the U.K. (the other side Love in a Void won the airplay, though). It might not have assuaged the detractors (but not even the later song Israel could do that, however much of a classic of the era it became) but it stands as clear testament to the power of a band that could tighten its politics so forcefully and still produce a compelling rock song. As with most of the lyrics on this album there is an unsettling play between the nursery and the dystopian nightmare.

Nicotine Stain is plummets back to Ur punk the way that Carcass did, slamming powerchord riffs and yelling. It's all above ground this time as Siouxsie tears through smoking addiction. This applies to all other nasty habits, of course, which is a dangerous thing for potential rock stars to do, considering how many take the overcalming approach to tour stress. However, making it about cigarettes rather than heroin keeps the habitual nature of it in focus. Anyone can write a slamming anthem about smack (Lour Reed already did the depressing one about it). 

Suburban Relapse starts with stark dissonant guitar chords high on the fretboard. They come in from different speakers, left-right-left-right, stark and uncomfortably bright. The bass enters softly. The drums hit a bar of tom toms, four on the beat and no more, until the rhythm fills out, this time he's using the snare. The tense cacophony tightens and breaks into a grinding progression laced with a cutting sax riff. Then Siouxsie comes in, the words already sub-hysterical: "I''m sorry that I hit you but my striiiiiiiing snapped .... I'm I'm sorry I disturbed your caaaaaaaat nap!" The lines themselves stretching until they snap. Every other line, almost, is like that, stretch, with wailing notes drawing out into tight, dangerous lengths before the violence of the last syllable. The band moves around the vocals, speeding here, slowing there around the cyclonic voice as the song swells into a massive fist of intensity before coming to an end as orgasmic as it is brutal: "Re-lapse! Re-lapse! Re-lapse! howling against the punching of the band.

The Banshees did this a few times in their initial career and it's something worth noting here, almost at the end of the record: they sound live. Suburban Relapse, like all the other songs (except the opening instrumental), benefitted from being part of their live sets for about a year. By the time they got to the studio, the arrangements were in place, including the dynamics and developmental passages. The band was ready to explore familiar territory in the unfamiliarity of the recording environment. Suburban Relapse, though, sounds entirely live. Like The Lord's Prayer on the next album or Voodoo Dolly on Ju Ju (also made after the songs had been played live extensively), Relapse feels organically arranged and dependent on how well the band was playing during one take. Young producer Steve Lillywhite gave the band all the air they needed to get this done, tweaking only when necessary for the production. This, and the band being ready to do it this way, created one of the truest documents of a celebrated live band finding their sea legs in the sterility of the studio.

Where Lillywhite did come in handy were moments like Pure where something formless was given form and established the signature for the whole album in minutes, like an opera overture. Another such is the closing song Switch. This is a carefully managed piece in which the arrangement follows the strange lyric about professionals changing their vocations, taking characteristics of the opposite world view: priests become scientists but keep their religion which contaminates their results; scientists become religious which pretty much leads to the same disastrous ends: the authorities of society and culture render themselves into dystopic tyrants. At the time this felt like weird science fiction, an update on Orwell and Huxley and a response to some of the more adventurous moments on the BBC like The Guardians or 1990, or (thought I didn't know it at the time) J.G. Ballard.

In a well judged break from the previous track's sturm und drang, Switch begins with a clean electric guitar playing a minor chord in arpeggio. The unexpected texture of this, both calming and worrying (it has a horror movie score feel to it). The band comes in with Siouxsie with lines about different lives and categories merging. The band gets insistent until it pauses for the line: "watch the muscles twitch for a brand new switch." On that word the band takes on a higher gear to move the darker passage of the tale. At the end of the first new phase verse the rhythm suddenly sparses out with hard echo on the guitar slashing out high chords and the drums (more unusual snare from drummer Morris) as we hear about the doctor whose treatments become religious. Then it's back to the galloping band as a vicar who tries science cannot shake the constraints of religion. We end as gently as we began with the clean arpeggio as the people stop and protest in revolt before an apocalyptic event which might be a terror attack leaves body parts beyond redemption. "They're dying to switch." Finally, after the cataclysm, a slight hammer-on note on the guitar. End.

What felt like fanciful sci-fi in 1978 sounds normal now. There's a YouTube clip of Jordan Peterson claiming a credits list of qualifications well beyond his genuine ones, anything that might lend credence to his highly influential word salad. The song also describes the kind of post-truth world we are continually told we live in. Steve Bannon helping to win the election for the monster Trump famously declared his strategy to be, "fill the zone with shit." This has been adopted in Australia and some of that has circled back to places like the U.K. whose recently aired refugee policy was almost verbatim that of the troglodyte Coalition from the past decade. Then there's the mass of bullshit that rose from lockdowns and resulted in a self-proclaimed freedom movement which held rallies where libertarians marched alongside uncloaked neo-nazis. "Watch the muscles twitch ..."

Ok, so this is another long and ranty album article. But listening again, and more closely than I have for decades, has brought me back to how powerful its statements, how artful its execution and how arch its presentation. The Clash gave us some handy political slogans. Never Mind the Bollocks gave us the gobbing attitude. Damned Damned Damned gave us pogo-ing speedy fun. But The Scream gave us something altogether different. This album is often cited as the source point of post-punk, the more adventurous branching of U.K. musicians into new territories, eschewing the already canonical boundaries punk was forming for itself. There remains a fearless quality to the music of the very late '70s to the early '80s by which influences as diverse as Lee Scratch Perry and Stockhausen, Neu and The Beach Boys could be cooked up in the same pot. Just before all that, The Scream gave us a view into a world where the subject matter wasn't shocking but unnerving and to the credit of its producer, the band who already knew their material was left to express it, needing only technical assistance.

Even the cover art. The title, which might lead punters to thinking of Edvard Munch, was buried in the concept. People swimming under water in a pool. It's not the band, as I used to think, but a group of models in their teens, their colourless pallor accentuated by lights from above. There is nothing salacious about it, they really are kids in a pool. But they are in a place where it is impossible to scream, where a scream would only be attempted by the most severe of shocks, silent and self-annihilating. It's something that occurs only after looking at it while the record plays and then only after a few times. This was an image without band member mugshots or obvious statements.

As for that image, this was the band that did the most to suggest what the coming sub genre of Goth would look and feel like. And it was a new angle entirely. Screaming Lord Sutch had fun with the ghastly and grotesque but knew it was showbiz. Black Sabbath felt a little closer but veered towards their own sub genre. Alice Cooper was all frogs and snails and staged beheadings like a Vegas show. But this was different. American Debbie Harry's tough New York talk was glossed over by the media who preferred her cute and a little edgy. But this record that turned Sue from Bromley into Siouxsie Sioux from your holy, bloody nightmares didn't go for any of that. 

The Pistols song Bodies left me shaking when I first heard it, there's almost a shock per verse in it. The songs on The Scream take time to do that, multiple listens. The sound is clear, if strange at first: John McKay's severe sabre like guitar figures weren't like anything around them (until Keith Levene, or The Edge but he was helped by Steve Lillywhite). Kenny Morris' insistence on every part of the kit except for the rock-defining snare put him one further out than Paul Cook in the Pistols (another gleeful tom-er). Steve Severin was not a bass virtuoso but what he did worked as well as Geezer Butler has for Sabbath (and he got nimbler as the years progessed). 

And then there's Siouxsie, never have I cared less about a singer's wobbly pitch when the sheer overriding force of her expression comes in. A different vocalist would have left this record in the honourable mention stack but Siouxsie's vocal hurricane that can let you feel the coolness of its eye is a compulsion. Of her era it is she and John Lydon who sit at the top of the heap as far as personal might and influence, bludgeoning out from the speakers into the nervous systems of anyone listening. They are, of course both in the big tv moment where the Pistols swear at the drunken old Bill Grundy that pushed the term punk rock from a fanzine scene into the tabloids. Steve Jones does most of the swearing but Lydon is quietly seething. Siouxsie, to the rear with bandmate Steve Severin and the Selecter's Pauline Black looks like a prototype of herself, Westwoodian half-skinhead, half Weimar art-beast and chunky makeup. But she looks more like the scenester that she had been before she got in front of a mic and grievously assaulted The Lord's Prayer. Give that a little under a year and some aesthetic reinforcement and she is an icon feeding the fires, on T-shirts to this day with her spiky fright hair and Cleopatra eyes, recognisable across decades. Add but moments of her caterwauling command and roughshod poetry of unease and you'll have another fan. This is one of my favourite albums.

Listening notes: There's a lesson in this. I had a cassette back in the '70s which was replaced with an U.K. pressing of the LP. For this article I began by listening to the 2006 Deluxe Edition CD. Then, by chance, I found a copy of the 1989 CD in my work cupboard (I'd taken it in with a stack of others to help during the drudge bits of the day). With knowledge of the effects of the loudness war on the CD, I took it home and listened. It was immediately more airy than the later Deluxe which I was able to prove by comparing the waves of the same song from each. While there were clear dynamics to the 2006 master, the '89 instance was quieter but had far more separation of sound, particularly in the details of the drums (often the first victim of brickwalling masters). The 1989 master was in fact the original plus some boosting of both top and bottom not permissible for vinyl reproduction. It was from the brief glory days between CDs given exhausted old masters and the overcompression that has plagued digital music presentation since the mid-'90s. It is a perfect-sounding CD that proves the superiority over vinyl (more dynamic range and no noise) and its day has largely gone. Have any CDs from the late '80s to the mid'90s? Keep them. That beautiful sound is what we've lost in competition and the numbskulled vinyl revival. Thank you, thank you, ladies and gentlemen,.

Review: WITH THE BEATLES @ 60

The Beatles created their own reputation problem. At the time it would only have looked like progress. As they became more adventurous and expansive with their music they cast a fog over the plainer fare that had made the girl fans scream like jet engines. The only people who get the curve are those who were there at the start and had no alternative or those after them who started at the beginning and went on. But who does that? We're in for another stab at the market with the release of rejigged Red and Blue compilations. I would bet a silk pyjama that the latter days Blue set with the new single will win out. I'm not negating the early music but am confident that the later output that redefined pop forever will continue to be favoured by a mixed generational market that prefers its songs with a touch of sophistication. For me, that's wasteful; the instantly catchy shouters like She Loves You or Ticket to Ride are much closer to the Shake it Offs or Blue Jeans of nowayears.

But back in 1963, The Beatles came to their second LP. Between the release of the first in the same year and the Christmas market end, they had become famous enough for the term Beatlemania to need coining. The singles were coming fast: Please Please Me, From Me to You, She Loves You and I Want to Hold Your Hand were all number ones and a frenzied live schedule would have made the spectre of doing an album yet another climb. But they did it and managed to take the game forward. 

Before the Beatles, pop artists didn't have to wow anyone with twelve inch discs. Please Please Me itself is a polished extension of the band's live set. Just under half of it is cover versions. It was meant to be a kind of placeholder ahead of the next megahit or close-by live gig. The next album only had to do that: fun cover versions and, if lucky, a few shiny new ones that, if not tight enough for singles would make good singalongs. In other words an album was a job of work, not a delivery device for a concept. So, does it sound like work?

It Won't Be Long kicks off with Lennon shouting the title in the first chorus and trading yeahs with Paul. The stage clears for the verse which doesn't behave conventionally at all. The E to C progression is jarring if it weren't for the vocal melody that makes sense of it and the rich descending guitar run between lines. The middle eight descends chromatically with some busy counterpoint between lead and backing vocals. Hell, even the chorus outro goes from A to A diminished to E. The whole thing finishes with what feels a touch corny with a slowed final line of the chorus but there's been so much on the plate to begin with that it works.

All I've Got to Do starts with a strummed augmented chord before Lennon's vocal comes in in Smokey Robinson mode. "When-ever I-i-i-i-iyiyi, want you around, yeah." A thin soul shuffle starts beneath him. He's telling his girl that he controls her. All he has to do is call her on the phone or whisper the words she wants to hear. But the chorus equalises that. The same goes for him. Considering the late night feel of the verse and Lennon's rasp-edged delivery, the case for the reverse never quite convinces. The song ends on a hummed verse vocal to the fade which has always sounded to me like the first verse was the point of the song and the turnabout chorus the ruse. It's nevertheless, far from the I love you love everything is true love image of the singles. Even a b-side would have been too naked a spot for it. Effectively it's Lennon after groupies, Lennon beyond his own marriage, sketching some of the dark between moments of public charm and domestic presence. I've always found it a sinister song.

All My Loving is a McCartney pacey rocker that starts in top gear with a melody that expresses his characteristic classical symmetry - this much up, so this much down. The harmonies are silvery. George Harrison's country solo is perky and perfect. Paul's bass is propulsive power walk. However, the feature that really makes this one pop is Lennon's uncharacteristic triplet chords. He's the one playing the bright, clean diddly diddly diddly guitar all the way through. It's not Chet Atkins but the sheer force and consistency of it that testifies to those thousands of hours from Hamburg to Liverpool to London is a humble kind of hubris. Look, Ma, both hands, and it's perfect for the song.

Lifer Beatle fans are down on Don't Bother Me but I think that's just conformity to the George as latecomer narrative. The song starts at speed with the guitar figure from the middle eight but quickly gets into the soaring verse. The progression has a folky minor mode feel to it but done as a beat band number it moves along with a stop start at every dour chorus where the Vox amp tremolo growls beneath the warning of the words. The middle eight goes even higher and finishes the point: my true love has dumped me but that doesn't mean I want you hanging around my door. He's singing the pain of his breakup (which he admits is his fault) to another girl who's making herself available. It's not unheard of for a teen rocker, there were plenty of pretty boy one hit wonders in the US who took songs like this to the big screen but none so dark and moody as this.

Little Child is an original that sounds like a cover. The harmonica blasts and bright chorus sound like they come from the spares and unfinished folder. The line about being so sad and lonely sounds, for all its campy pathos, taunting. I live through this one rather than listen to it.

Till There Was You begins like an elevated wedding reception band when the bass player steps up and does his spotlight ballad. Yeah, I know, the bass player is Paul McCartney but the sense of the moment they do the standard is palpable. It's a show tune from The Music Man. Paul over enunciates every line in the fruitbasket setting, in case you were in danger of missing how special the moment is. George Harrison's acoustic solo, however, is a highlight, sprightly dancing around the busy progression. This is a great shower song. I still occassionally croon out my pale imitation of Macca's vocal as the mighty warm jet nourishes my back but I'll deliver the last line of each verse like a defeated cartoon villain: "Till there was YOU!" It's a leftover from the live set that they were still doing (and did at the Royal Command Performance in front of the crowned heads of Soho). If you gave it too much thought you might wonder if they'd be still doing this one if fame had never happened and they were an old wedding reception band.

Please Mister Postman bangs out of the gate in high stride with shouts and drive. Another cover and done with great energy. I first knew this as a Carpenters song. They were going off this version rather than the Marvelettes' big production with the bold and creamy vocals. For the Beatles, it's just something else from the set to fill out the LP side. It's fine.

Side two starts with George's Chuck Berry showcase and his charmingly flubbed lead intro takes us into a classic rock shuffle. It's ok but George's immovably English vocal has none of the original's archness. Then again, his unaffected voice yet carries more authenticity (if none of the force) that a Mick Jagger or Eric Burdon would bring to British Berry covers. He sounds, especially when he's reproducing the original solo with its deft upward bends, like a fan which has more to do with what the song is about than the more purist takes happening around him. If the whole thing feels too laboratory fresh it's on George Martin who was still new to all this rock 'n' roll nonsense and didn't get the sweat of it. This is another live set number brought into the studio and taken into stadiums where it regained the beads of effort. Here it sounds like a perfectly constructed Ikea rock classic.

Hold Me Tight is much maligned. It comes in like a proto Glitter Band with a big chunka chunka guitar grind. The sweet close harmonies trade time with Paul's ballad voice but things start going wrong from the off. As it never was outside of this instance, Paul's vocal is just off pitch. It recovers every time but falls out again and again. The middle eight in intentionally out of key for dramatics. It's a good switch but McCartney can't leap down to it without stumbling as he lands and delivers some of the unintentionally quirky singing of his decades long career. This goes right up to the clean finish where he's trying for a jazzy finish but just sounds like he can't hear the backing track. For me, I love the energy and the floppy vocal. It's the closest thing on the record to a live recording, especially the chunging guitar attack.

You really Got a Hold on Me is another cover from the live show and, while arranged to add more texture (particularly piano) and featuring a gymnastic Lennon vocal, it crawls along the floor like the last song of the last set when the waiters are clearing the tables and staff are showing up with brooms. Smokey Robinson, it's not.

I Wanna Be Your Man is fun for its energy and bitchiness. It's the song Lennon and McCartney gave to The Rolling Stones to serve as their first hit. The Stones took it into their own territory and acquitted themselves of the charge of accepting charity. The Beatles gave it to Ringo to sing and stormed through it in not a second over two minutes. Ringo shouts a good vocal and the wobble wobble guitar rock underneath lifts it up and keeps it over shoulder height. I never skip it. But what a fucking joke.

Devil in Her Heart is George giving us another song from the set. The gender of the title was changed from the Donays' original but the arrangement was all early Beatles. George cannot come close to Yvonne Vemee's power or yearning, sounding more like a blazer-school prefect on speech night. Look, I don't want to be so mean but this is The Beatles. I know it was just their second album and might have been their last for all they knew but listen to the strength of the originals on this LP and how far they've come from those on Please Please Me. To mire themselves in a soggy intermission between powerful music makers and their cover band beginnings feels like such a waste. No, they weren't going to wait another month to fill both sides with new originals, the business demanded outstanding songs for the sides of singles and the albums could feature this kind of tokenism with sharing lead vocals but this goofy treading on a recent classic to use up space feels wasteful.

Not a Second Time is a Lennon led assembly line early Beatles outing, heavily influenced by the Motown and girl group hits the band was so enamoured of. It's fine. This is the song that the critic William Mann compared to Mahler and spoke of Aeolian cadences, drawing public mirth from the band themselves for the bombast of it. It's an ok song written and performed in emulation of other musicians that the band admired.

The album closes with Money (That's What I Want). This bluesy screamer was offered as the Twist and Shout of  the record. While its subject matter and sleaze prohibit it from the horny glory of that one, it's still an impressive performance with grimacing piano riffs and lashing vocals. When it comes to its clean finish and John's final insistent, "that's what I want," we feel as though we've been through something. The valleys of near goodness or teetering failure are forgiven. Actually, there is a flaw in this track and it's worth a listen. At the 1:29 mark as the piano riff is playing out one of the guitars starts playing the fifth of the twelve bar finish but the rest of them keep on the tonic chord. Someone was off with the fairies. It's quickly rectified and the song doesn't come close to collapse but it's a fun moment of vulnerability.

Again, it's crucial to remember that this record was made at a time when albums weren't the kind of statements they would become. It was a kind of substitute live set with lacquered edges that could be played over and over without the risk of saturation the way singles got. But even so the band's minders and stylists were also at work. Where the first album's cover shot gave the sense that the band lived in a council estate, leaning over the rail of the somethingth floor of a tower block, the cover of With the Beatles was all minimalist pop art. 

A moody band portrait in high contrast black and white, strange figure arrangement with Ringo being a knight's move away from John against a solid black background. No one, not even Paul, is smiling. Whatever this was, it wasn't the usual showbiz commodifying. It did make them commodities but snipped the marionette strings that would normally have been allowed free display. The band looked like they owned themselves. The lads had, of course, had plenty of involvement with the Exi art students of Hamburg like Astrid Kircher and Klaus Voormann. (Actually - sidebar - try to imagine The Beatles without this encounter that would have smashed artsy experimentation with fun. Google some publicity shots of bands like The Searchers or The Honeycombs for suggestions.) While the photo was not of their design (it's Robert Freeman's) it's not something that would have been out of sorts with their experience. It was pop art for pop music. Admittedly, modernist cover art was already a staple of jazz and even exotica artists but this was yet another of The Beatles' baby steps toward the status as high avant garde conventionalists. It's a corker of a cover. The Australian one that I had in the seventies still hadn't caught up, being a reproduction of the local version with the big goopy heads floating around in the dark and a Gilligan's Island font in purple for the title. Ah well, my mini LP from the Mono box set puts it right.

However much I've dismissed some of the content of this record I cannot deny its importance to pop music history. At the time to the band and their fans it was the latest long player and if things held out they could do another. But other plans were afoot that made With the Beatles particularly significant. It was the last of their albums before they conquered the Earth as the biggest band in the world. Months after its release, The Beatles visited the USA, a vision on tv that rang a million cash register bells. They returned and kept returning to ever greater success and wealth generation, touring, releasing a movie and eclipsing any pop star before them. 

While we might listen to this and raise our eyebrows at the quaintness of the pub rock cover versions among the self penned marvels, it's worth putting some perspective in there. After this, America got hold of them and, however much they retained what Englishness they might claim they would be adopted across the Atlantic as honorary sons, but on American terms. After a few small labels had mishandled their releases, Capitol took charge and Americanised the records. Until Pepper, the US versions were remarkably different and more numerous to cash in (more albums with fewer tracks). All that. But one of these worked a treat. Meet the Beatles took the essence of the cover art and packed the sides with upbeat numbers, favouring singles and rockers. It's constant energy (even Till There Was You sounds up). I can't help feel that the strength and blazing success of that rejig was a major influence on the solidity of the next album A Hard Day's Night. It wasn't just packed with upbeat numbers it was the first to be wholly written by the band themselves and has them in the most consistently exciting form until Rubber Soul. Weirdly, the US release of the album only featured side one of the UK one, side two in America was godawful instrumental versions of the songs played by session musicians (not even based on the Beatles' own backing tracks). 

Until then, this set of songs with the band staring into the future as sexy young explorers was the new offering. Without declaring it, the set does have a kind of theme but one only really visible in context: make it and you get more originals, go bust and go back to the pub repertoire and maybe settle with a house, family and plumbing business, gathering on the weekends to relive those old Chuck Berry sizzlers. Well, even without America, that wouldn't have been overnight but, with it, this would look like the distant Earth in the rear window of the rocket. 

DARK SIDE OF THE MOON @ 50

We had a copy at home. It was in the cabinet beneath the turntable in the stereo system that my dad built for us. The system was a massive 3 in 1 (turntable, radio, cassette deck) and was a triumph of Dad's skills with carpentry and electronics. Two massive speakers in the front and two more mounted to the walls at the rear of the rumpus room. I thought that made it quadraphonic, just adding a couple of speakers, but it was only the same stereo field as the front. It did sound big, though. There were LPs in that cabinet that proved how big the sound was and how cleverly done stereo records could be (mostly synthesiser cover versions of classical and pop songs with a lot of panning effects) with cover art that looked like stills from sci-fi tv shows. Oh, Pink Floyd. Right.

So, you would think that, growing up marvelling at big sounding stereo that could be played as big as you liked in a place far enough away from the neighbours that no one would complain, that a record celebrated for the brilliance of its execution would be a local hit. I can honestly say that, even though the album had seemed to have been there for the balance of time, I had never heard it. This was in the mid '70s when the album was only about three years old but that was as long as I'd got into rock music from a bigot-grade love of classical music. So we should have been friends. I'd forced myself into rock music after I started high school for survival reasons and, while I could happily sit through Countdown every weekend, my itch for something more developed sent me back to the late '60s for inspiration.

I could claim that I found out that Pink Floyd had a crazy genius at the helm in the psychedelic era whom they cast out to become a stadium monolith was the reason for not choosing to listen to the record but I'd be lying. It was just that little bit out of my scope, enough to join The Faces, Slade, Humble Pie, Canned Heat and a host of others in the deaf spot shelf. Also, none of my elders talked about them. That made me wonder where this copy had come from. I could think of one brother and one sister who might have left it there but neither of those ever mentioned it or anything else about Pink Floyd. Had my father bought it to demonstrate the strength of his homebuilt marvel? He might have heard about its audio excellence which would have appealed to him but all that stuff about the futility of the salary man in the modern world really wouldn't have had him singing along after toking on a blunt. Dad barely drank alcohol and had given up cigarettes before I was born, so it wasn't him, either. I wondered if it just appeared in record collections everywhere through spooring.

Once, I gave it the stylus sampler routine. I'd get the record rolling and drop the needle gently for a few seconds of every track to see if anything stood out. There was some jangle, droning synthesisers, saxes and a woman screaming. Not for me. No, this is not a fair test of anything. I'd done the same thing to my brother Michael's copy of the White Album and declared it dull before a few kids at school found it in their family collections and started whisper campaigns that led me straight to it. Dark Side of the Moon didn't have that demographic. That would have to wait until those kids were old enough to beg their own tokes off their more worldly siblings and hail the disc as a religious experience. That was after punk happened and I wasn't going to ask a hippy for directions to anywhere.

To the end of high school and beyond it through university in a different town, the album was jeered as the work of dinosaurs. A music press that acted younger than its age and the kind of taunting that happened among musicians in the local band scene effectively barred the record from the curious listener under the age of twenty-five. So, after decades of ignoring it but enjoying other Pink Floyd albums like Meddle, I Napstered Dark Side and then bought it on CD for real. Then I bought the SACD to have it in surround sound and listened to it on something like a monthly basis. More recently, I bought the Blu-Ray with the Atmos mix. The higher res you get with this one, the more deluxe it gets. Not just as a demonstration of sumptuous audio but as a deathless concept album, one of the few that works as well as it did to its original listeners (let alone one that worked well at all). And it goes like this:

A heartbeat approaches through the dark. Other sounds slide in around it in the stereo field. Running footfalls, clockwork bells and whirrs, a thick synthesiser doing doppler passes, metallic clinks and clanks and then over a reversed piano chord, a woman screaming with escalating horror. The cacophony rages until ...

The heavenly arpeggiated chords of David Gilmour's Stratocaster, heavily phased, burst in and bring us to the surface of the opening song and as we float upon the easy motion he sings: Breathe, breath in the air. Don't be afraid to care..." Sounds nice until the lyric moves us towards the difference between experiencing life and merely living it with the promise of an early grave. The song alternates between the buoyant verse and a slightly more strident chorus but if you're not paying attention, it will just feel like opiation. And that is the album in short. Some songs match the aggression lyrics to music but most of it mixes smooth fluidity with thoughts of struggle, insanity and death.

On the Run is an instrumental but really more of a soundscape. The running feet and shortness of breath cross the sound field as that travelling synthesiser growls back and forth until it sounds like vehicles, helicopters or aeroplanes. Underneath a busy electronic bubbling persists, constant, urgent. The heartbeat reappears with laughter and what could be a distant gale or bombing. A final pass of the electronic plane sounds like it's swooping in aggression. Then the near silence after the shock.

Ticking is interrupted by a loud burst of clanging, bells and tolls as timepieces announce the next concept. Then a series of gigantic bass notes. Two notes on the Strat's low E string supported by Waters' Precision bass and synthesis, a massive tolling bell. An electric piano answers these high on the board until the bluesy shouting rocker starts with Gilmour in big voice declaiming the futility of time. A chorus calms it down with Rick Wright's clean and clear vocals. This works well until you realise, again, that both musical sides are saying the same thing. the last line before the briefly reprised Breathe is "the time has gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say" which still grinds, especially as it's sung in Wright's gentle voice, so easy on the ear.

Wright is the initial star of the next track, The Great Gig in the Sky which begins with a spacey piano figure, joined by an easy bass and Gilmour's ethereal lap steel (and another of the many spoken word recordings, this time about fear of death) which rises as the piano intensifies, the drums begin and the track's real star emerges in the form of Clare Torry's vocals. These wordless improvisations almost seem to go through the five stages of grief until they just sound like bargaining and fear, impassioned, pitch perfect but also raw and penetrating, Torry rises to the unbounded scream of horror heard in the opening overture. Now, in context, it sounds both more musical and unrestrained. After this, and a woman's voice telling us that she said she didn't fear death, Torry's vocal falls and assumes the TS Eliot whimper appropriate to this album as the piano eases to softness and silence. End of side one.

A strident musique concrete rhythm sequence opens the second side with sound of coins jingling, money bags dropping, cash registers ringing. an old adding machine rattling, all in a tight loop. When the thick picked bass comes in you get that something's been wrong from the off. Though the riff is bluesy, this is no four on the four twelve bar. The verses of this song are played in 7/8. It flows but try dancing to it. Gilmour's vocal is shouted and cool, giving a jivey ode of hatred to greed. Because he couldn't play his solo in that time signature, Gilmour interpolated a 4/4 section and filled it with first a fiery turn and then a dry, more sobering staccato finish before the sax gets a blasting go and then, in an old Yardbirds gallop it finds its way back to the 7/8 verse. The tracks fade begins more voice samples in, including the woman from Great Gig (Naomi Watts's mother, btw) talking about a fight she got in. And then something even more violent from one of their roadies.

This retreating storm gives way to soothing organ chords and more of Gilmour's headache-curing broken chords. This is joined by a jazzier and bereezier sax than on Money. Gilmour comes in with his voice on calm to sing about Us and Them. It's a meditation on lifelong futility and the depression that can build around that to ease pain by smothering. The chorus sections are harder and fuller but mixed distant to allow for both a tonal difference and ease of transition. Also, their relative quietness expresses the kind of emotional compression. While they prevent the song from being all comfortable numbness you could turn yourself off at a few points and float like you did with Breathe.

A final distraught chorus breaks to reveal Any Colour You Like, a gorgeous synthesiser improvisation by Wright that does in a few minutes what the likes of fellow proggers Genesis or ELP would have taken a side to play. Gilmour takes over in a kind of staccato non-solo, a kind of funk for the mental facility. Wright re-enters to save the track from dementia with more of the beautiful synth from the opening.

The track calms to the guitar arpeggio of Brain Damage (D to G7 but it sounds like major to minor) lilting before Waters comes in with his indefatigably English voice to tell us that the lunatic is on the grass. After a chorus that gives us the album title in a line the insistent guitar figure returns with another spooky vocal augmented by a demented laugh (by Naomi Watts's father, btw). The next chorus is bigger and benefits from Clare Torry's second appearance. An instrumental verse with voice samples and more of the last tracks lovely synth and, also wordless, another chorus and we're straight into the album's coda, Eclipse. The full band in chorus, with Torry and lists of life experiences as packages ("all that you love and all the you hate") are drawn as one into the lunar eclipse of the madness of the whole damn thing. We lead out on the heartbeat that led us in and the Irish doorman from Abbey Road Studios who tells us that there's no dark side of the moon as it's all dark. Boom-boom boom-boom boom-boom.

By which time, if you have, as you should, listened to this all the way through without a break, you are left stunned with a strange elation that, after all this sorry observation you share the planet with this music. What helps you out there is the same thing would have helped out way back in 1973: the facelessness of Pink Floyd. The poster that came with the original LP included photos of all four members but they were of little help. They were swathed in stage lights, clear featured but really just a quartet of long haired blokes. This was Ziggy Stardust's time, flamboyance reigned and the glittering divas of the new rock paraded through tours, generating uncountable glamour photos. Even the prog rockers, like Genesis with their million costume changes or ELP with E's literally inflammable performances or Yes's medieval electric splendour, were joining in. Pink Floyd walked on stage in jeans an T-shirts and let the lights do the magic. It would've been like crowding around to hear the record with thousands of others all at once. They might as well have been their own roadies.

What this means is that when you heard a Floyd record it was really just you and the music and the increasingly sharp observations of life, the universe and the rest of it. While there was warmth and humanity to all of it, however angry it could get, it wasn't served up as Mick Jagger's strut or Ozzie Osborne's demonism, it was just a suite of songs about real things delivered with clear definition and care. This is why you can listen as freshly in 2023 as the first fans did fifty years ago. The statements still stick. Sure, no one plays blues based guitar solos like that any more but those things only prevent this music from the kiss of death that comes with being written off as timeless. It is the '70s quality of the record that lets us marvel. It is the failure of the world to improve beyond these accusations that sober the listener. That's why when you hear the latest attempt by a subsequently formed band to emulate this statement they will just sound like they're playing musical dressups.

Where does that put Roger Waters' re-recording of the album with the voice of the accumulated wisdom of the decades. It puts it with Roger Waters, he can do what he wants with what he has. The only thing he won't be able to do is eclipse this.

But I don't want to end with a downer. If you are reading this while still young, please take the time to find a continuous sequence of this whole album, whether on vinyl, legit download, streaming or any physical medium. Take the time and take care to sit in front of it in the dark. It's less than an hour of your life and you will thank yourself for the act of it. And then, you can get up and go for a round of dodgeball for all I care because it's less this particular record than any like it that can compel you to stop and listen and think about your life. It's not the only one, it's just one of the best.

Listening notes: to really get into this before writing, I immersed myself in the recently released standalone blu-ray with a Dolby Atmos mix which is completely sumptuous. For more local references to moments like fades or moments of voice material. I played sections of the original stereo mix form the '90s CD. This album is pretty much everywhere so you have no excuse.

1983 @ 40: MURMUR - REM

After a few muffled percussive beats a snare counts in four and suddenly the whole band is playing with the vocal. The words are mumbled and they might not even be words. It's a kind of growl. The music itself is something that was rising through the wash at the end of the harder phase of post punk with its tape manipulation and effects heavy guitar playing. It sounded like a contemporary band playing old '60s numbers the only way they knew how, in a grinding 4/4 thrust. The thing is, while this sounded '60s in spirit it was nothing like the roll call of bands going the easy route by copying everything they heard on the Nuggets and Pebbles records. It sounded candid, free of showbiz. You listened to this and didn't imagine the band in paisley Nehru jackets as most of the Sydney revivalists dressed. It was rock but didn't sound like showbiz. It wasn't punk revivalism either; if you could make out anything the singer was growling, it didn't sound like a slogan. "Radio Free Europe. Radio Free Europe." Ok ... and?

We didn't know it, then, but guitar bands were about to change because of this one and the strange thing about that was that, in who knows how long, the ones doing the changing were American. After decades of U.K. acts redefining what guitar bands were this mob who sounded like a slicked up version of the kids making a racket under the house down your street. Out of key system chord progressions, infectious riffs and clean electric 12 arpeggios and singing by the Cookie Monster who could only manage fragments in the verses before breaking out into slogans that weren't, int the choruses. After Murmur, all guitar bands that weren't trying to break into the cokesnorting major label realm sounded like REM, here grungy and rough, there sweet and jangling and most often both at once. 

Pilgrimage fades in with piano notes under Michael Stipe singing in full voice before the arpeggio laden verse rolls into a an expanding chorus, elongated chants take over from the bitsy vocals of the verse before exploding into a massive beat beat beat beat chorus. Laughing adds a feel that might remind anyone into American 60s bands of The Byrds in their country years. Acoustic guitar broken chords with punched piano chords for accents.

Talk About the Passion comes on with a big bold major key guitar riff, then a smooth voiced Stipe croons as well as he is able and cruises on to the title line chorus and the effect is a smooth power pop drive with a joyous Rickenbacker 12 prechorus. Moral Kiosk continues the pattern of percussive verses, stretched progressions to the chorus that turns everything giant by suggesting distance.

Perfect Circle slows things down with a complex piano figure as Stipe strikes a mournful tone. There is a heavily affecting chorus which suggests someone noticing a passage of human life rolling past and realising there is no changing it. If the previous rocking tracks had prepared you for more sharp candy this one stops everything. It's the same band but in a mood they haven't shown you yet, something outside of the garage, something that seems to have been filmed in 35 mm at magic hour. They would repeat this contact with the sublime in the next album with Camera which took it even further but here we're hearing it for the first time. This is the band that showed it could sound only like itself when the forces aligned. It ends on a fade and takes the old side one with it. 

Catapult continues the thump and jingle of the first side, sounding a little more like their mini LP debut. See also Sitting Still brings back the Byrdsy arpeggio on the 6 string Rickenbacker but brings the fuller guitar muscle for the chorus. 9-9 adds some arty harmonics to the verses (like Gang of Four playing Mr Tambourine Man) before a grinding slow/fast chorus. Shaking Through brings the country back and upping the melodic touchpoints. We Walk plays with an archaic chord progression but subverts it by cutting it short of completion. Sounds of thunder (tape-warped billard balls, in fact) punctuate proceedings. West of the Fields closes the album with what buy that stage sounds a touch tired and end of project. It makes the same indy rock sense but there's nothing compelling to it that would drive you to listen to it in isolation.

If I've pond skipped the songs on this album where on another I would have examined each one it's because this early phase of REM was all about style. While there is a constant pallet of variation going on from song to song it's not pushed to late '60s levels where a confectionary She's a Rainbow gives way to the proto metal of Citadel. It sounds like the band elevated from their practice room tapes into full production by a producer who knew well to empahsise their best without putting it into costume. 

I say that because so many of the '60s-ologists of the early '80s, the ones I mentioned in the paisley fancy dress, pursued the sound. REM didn't. They liked the song structures and guitar styles but there's no bubblegum organ blasts or borrowed nostalgia here. In this, more closely resemble The Church (who did wear paisley, btw) who added the weight of their own abstractions to music that went down like dessert but revealed more the more it was played. To a modern listener Murmur might strike them as the kind of thing AI would serve up if prompted to create a '60s album from all the Pebbles and Nuggets albums and every bubblegum single released between 1967 and 1969; there's an eerie tribute without reverence feel to it.

REM would go on to change with successive albums up to their jumping ship from indy IRS to WEA for 1988's Green. By that stage the albums began pursuing a formula with a big rock opening, some ponderous mid tempo rock, an affecting ballad and some unabashed bubblegum rock with the kind of wah wah solos completely absent from their LP debut. The big breakthrough which took them from alternative radio to stadiums also dropped them into the showbiz box they began way outside of. They were, in fact, more like all those early '80s moptop bands who began with the aggressive copying. By then, the singer who had refused to appear to sing the lyrics in the videos, insisting on performing a live vocal, had become Michael Stipe, spokesmodel of a generation. 

Back in 1983, REM were still unknown to most of the world, working with producers Mitch Easter and Don Dixon who guided them to radio friendly sheen while keeping their intentions in hard definition. The big piano figure of Perfect Circle was played on a whiny hand held Casio by drummer Bill Berry on stage and the band expected that to be the way of it in the studio. The producers prevailed. We got a cavernous and beautiful track but we never heard something that might have persisted through a ridiculous pathos to a triumphantly small and humble conviction. As melting as I find the song as it is, I can't help but feel that it was the first step in the stroll toward conventionality for a band whose fragile relationship with that value would break with irrevocable certainty. So it goes ...

1983 @ 40: BEFORE HOLLYWOOD - THE GO-BETWEENS

So, the new GoBs album was due out some time and anyone who cared about that wasn't saying a thing because no one else was. Did everyone really like Send Me a Lullaby? I did but I knew those who went quiet when the title came up. Is any of this true? It's an exaggeration. I was at Uni and I cared more about getting a High Distinction for a seminar paper I was writing about The Dismissal. But, yeah, we still cared about the Go-Betweens, and we wanted them to get on. Was there a feeling that they were owned by their Brisbane fans? Well, the Brisbane fans were used to getting their DIY gigs shut down by the special constables in overalls and skinhead haircuts; they wanted the Go-Betweens to be safe if they were to be successful. If that meant outside then so be it.

And then Cattle and Cane was on Countdown. And then everyone (of an ilk) in Brisbane wanted them forever. And then the LP was in shops. They'd done it in the U.K. If you got it from a shop that had it you probably got the one on Stunn. If you got it from Rockinghorse or Skinny's it was probably on Rough Trade, the enthusiast-led label that brought The Young Marble Giants to the world. I had it on a cassette taped from someone I knew at Uni. Supposedly, the sound of the Rough Trade pressing was superior. Mine sounded like a cassette.

The overseas production only enhanced the band's standing locally. It meant they were progressing and heading upward where we wanted them. They could still be on Triple Zed, they just might be playing in Zagreb that night. They added Robert Vickers on bass after the recording (he's in the Cattle and Cane video, miming Grant's bass part) and could get a fuller sound as a four piece. Everything was right. So we chucked it on the turntable.

A Bad Debt Follows You launches the record with a quirk of the band. A bass figure recorded flat is joined by a guitar figure, awash in amp reverb. A wash of Vox organ and strident drums. Grant Mclennan comes in with a Hispanic minor melody in an urgent voice. A complicated relationship of promises and betrayals. While the song started in a clear 4/4 but we keep getting extended bars. I didn't do any counting to report on which ones where but I know that what I register first was how dramatic it makes it.

Two Steps Step Out takes the timing way past what it was in the opener. Stops, starts, extra bar spare parts. But what it sounds like is a busy power pop song with clean guitars and vocals that range from conspiratorial hints to spacey choruses and a theme of restlessness. For all the little rhythmic asides and wrong footing in the bridge, the song is so engaging it feels as easy as bubblegum but there's way more beneath.

Robert Forster's first composition on the record is the title track. Before Hollywood begins with multitracked clean guitars and bass playing partly in unison which adds power and purpose to the descending riff. A series of pleas that build on the opening demand, "make me last". It's abstract and on the colder side but it's romantic for all that. The chorus adds an easier melody with lines ending on prolonged phrases, including the lovely: "we'll film ourselves in history and chrome." And then: "It's thunder town they'll do what they can to hold you down."

And then, after three urgent power pop bangers the record takes a turn, and not for the last time. 

Dusty in Here less a song of mourning than a reflection of absence. McLennan wrote it about his father who died when Grant was a child. It is a series of statements that are not streamlined to form a pop song but separated. A new verse could easily start at the end of the previous bar but it starts from stasis each time which gives the declarations a eulogistic solidity. Ten or so years later, Michael Gira did this same thing with the Swans' song God Damn the Sun and it reminded me of this. Each verse builds a monument, block by block. There's a grandeur to it but there is an ache to the grandeur. Hearing it now it gets to me deeply and reminds me of how I took the news of my own father's death. It wasn't a flood of memories, good or bad, nor a list of things I should've said. Rather, it was a series of sensations that appeared when I lay down in the dark and let the thoughts come. No single articulate statement came from this, and the impressions whether loving or sore, felt as real as I could make them; distant and often vague, the sense of it felt right.

The bass supports the melody. The guitar is heavily reverbed and sparse. This time they are joined by a piano, also very verby. In the space between the verses and Grant's own unaffected vocal is centre and far out front. No drums. Just atmosphere. And it's not hard to mentally look up while listening and see the haze in the light of the door at the top of the stairs. 

Ask is a more conventional indy rock sound of the time with hot clean guitars playing a chord riff. Bass plays the riff under the vocal in the verses with the guitar subdued. A gleefully off key chord at the end of the chorus brings thing back to convention but then everything breaks down and gets drumless and quiet. It starts up again and then falls into this strange, uncooperative gentle guitar and unfinished sentences. This time there's a little ride cymbal creeping in before the last statement of the riff and all it over for the side. "Don't shut it. Don't shut it. Don't you care?"

Side two begins with three stark acoustic notes played in unison on bass and guitar. This sets it with kick and high hat in support. The vocal comes in with the three note motif, recalling images of childhood. By the the wordless chorus we've gone through a few time changes (again, I'm not counting, some might be long). This is Cattle and Cane. Its gentle interplay and vocals along with verses made of images of a life as the guitar arrangement lifts in complexity but still feels light. After an instrumental break in this blooming mode Robert Forster delivers a short monologue of how he recalls the same but in the end he knew where he was, alone and so at home. This leads to a slowly ascending modal figure in the ethereal choir of the chorus repeating. If, by this time, you aren't floating over fields of cattle and fields of cane you will never get this song, one of the most sublimely beautiful of its era.

You can't dance to Cattle and Cane. After books and interviews have explained it to me, McLennan wrote according to the way he felt the song should go. Robert went along with that and when Lindy sat down behind it she possibly sighed and thought, "here we go," but found a way into it, whatever the time signature and supported it. And supported it in a way that wasn't just find a place for the kick and just sizzle the high hats or just keep playing, whatever it does, like Bonzo in Black Dog. The drumming is the real finish of this number, the most awkward time shifts feel right and the sighing of the ride takes it right into all our warm afternoons.

You can't dance to it but they put it on Countdown. I used to think it was a Countdown Studios special, done by people who thought a song about growing up in Queensland should be all Akubras, boots and barns. But it was made independently. Countdown played it (it really did seem to fit into the dressed set video that the show would do). The lighting is magic hour, the barns slatted walls, the hay and the band miming as well as anyone in an indy video did. Perfect for the show but also perfect for the dreamy warmth of the song. It worked on tv (Countdown was pretty influential) but it failed to play on radio outside of the community and subscriber stations (aka alternative radio). It just didn't fly on the air. Then again, nor did Passionate Friend or The Back of Love, Fireworks or Back of Love. The failed singles would not only make a great mix tape I've shoved so many of them together in a flac folder on my phone that it goes for hours. In this out of sorts era where the worst of post punk was absorbed by the mainstream to sell water crackers, the best languished in the shadows, to be loved unreservedly for evermore.

By Chance has Robert Forster in hard 4/4 and dual guitars variously riffing or arpeggiating in an edible tone soup. Relationships are long lists of questions and assertions but most of all hazard. 

The jazziness of As Long as That emphasises the retreat from rock forms with a figure of bass and drums before so much as a breath of vocals. Smooth close vocals trade the mic with reverby distant lines (courtesy of lines being sung by each of the vocalists). "Were you born or just conceived?" What might sound, with the strident vocals and minor tonality, to be recriminative, a love gone sour song, is really is more of an expression of awe at how this other person is bringing the sensations of the world into intimidating focus. "Think of someone and double it. That's what I did." Is this about Lindy Morrison, then partner of writer Forster? That takes on different meanings at different times. What is left is the statement of someone describing intimacy as though it were a psychedelic experience. 

On My Block features clean bright guitars and a vocal that goes from a taunting verse to a smoother chorus. Trouble with a tryst at the local decaying manor house? Even an abstraction of the wholesale destruction of older architecture in Brisbane at the time? Can't say. It reminds me of Summer in Brisbane.

That Way adds a Hammond-ish organ sound to provide some cream under the guitars and vocals. It sounds like a band moving to its next step, touring, travelling, more writing and recording, all climbing the Atlantic to adventure. That way. Bands present and future like The End and Dies Pretty in the keyboard sounds and busy pace, it's a solid "let's go!"

And they kind of did and they kind of didn't. For me, The Go-Betweens are what I said about Cattle and Cane: greatness isn't always rewarded but it endures. I mentioned Young Marble Giants before and for me to do so when talking about another band is an accolade. The two bands do not sound like each other but they are alike in how they will commit to investigating the details of what they observe around them and how their nerves respond. This might rise to a strident statement but more typically is kept tightly packaged in an appealing wrapper for the adventurous listener to discover. While I like some of these songs less than others (you'll be able to tell that by the level of detail I give them here) I never tire of listening to this record. 

I can say that of Colossal Youth, The White Album, Dummy, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea or Murmur. The edge that Before Hollywood gets is due to my proximity to the manger we were all away in, back in the Bjelke Petersen '80s when being in a band that didn't have a double denim set of covers was a chargeable offence, when standing in the shadows of the blaring LoveYouBrisbane blitzkrieg was to be choosing personal safety over a life of self-shrivelling conformity. I always seem to end up overstating all this but the memory of it always lies in wait for recurrence and springs in attack when I go past again. Is it really proportionate to lump this on to a little indy album with skeletal arrangements, quiet vocals and abstract lyrics? Well, yeah, because, in the weirdest way, to this fan at least, that felt more durably resistant than any sloganeering loudmouths who only ever punched at the bars of the cage and left. If you ever liked this album but haven't listened to it for years, give it another spin. It'll feel like an old fiend who hasn't changed a hair, knocking on your door. All you have to do is open it again.

JOY DIVISION - SUBSTANCE @ 35

Joy Division didn't put their singles on their albums. Even on Still, the typically perverse collection of outtakes, obscurities and live tracks there were no studio Transmissions, Atmospheres nor any loves tearing anyone apart. In the years following the end time you could get those songs on 12 inch discs with all new cover art and in enhanced audio but if you wanted them all gathered on an LP you were out of luck.

Two things: New Order wanted to move on and everything they wanted to release had been released. Problem: New Order had to answer questions about Joy Division at every interview they did and that wasn't helped by the burgeoning bootleg market that seemed to find something fresh in the attic every few months. Zine-quality books on the band appeared in the dustier corners of indy record shops that detailed (sometimes accurately) all sorts of releases made on forgotten compilations, tossed on to flexidiscs and given to Euro Magazines or sent to radio stations as non retail playlist fodder. And then there was the erroneously titled Warsaw LP. It wasn't finished before it was abandoned so there was plenty of room for old tracks from the early EP and other sources. And it was delivered on discs so untroubled by quality control that they were afflicted with shrieks and jumps.

Joy Division's legacy started at the two impeccable albums, those extraordinary singles, an unpleasantly patchy compilation and a trove of utter shit. By then, everyone who knew knew that there was a treasure waiting for anyone who billed up for some remastering and a decent release. I mean, the band's sudden and early demise made them prime material for bootleggers. Worse, if you got to hear the best of it, the lousy sound of the overpriced discs would make the toughest of us cry.

And so it was that in 1988, whatever was left of Factory Records released Substance on to a world whose margins included a multigenerational ready made fanbase. The LP  was a tight package, ending with the band's most famous song Love Will Tear Us Apart. The CD and cassette versions, however, bore seven other tracks. This was wrapped up in new and characteristically mystique-heavy artwork by Peter Saville whose efforts for Factory releases and posters gave a generation the same kind of stylistic template as Hipgnosis did for the previous one. I had the double cassette and it was beautiful.

When you opened it and chucked it on there was more and more and more.

"3 - 5 - 0 - 1 - 2 - 5 - GO!" yells a young strident Mancunian and the down flowing guitar and bass riff plunge us into action as the solid drumming builds to open the door on the raw vocal which delivers statements from a figure duped by power into servitude and brutality. The title Warsaw serves the context and we do the rest. More dynamics than the punk rock it otherwise resembles with a break here and a sense of dramatic cadence. It's not a masterpiece but nor is it cod Sex Pistols or second hand Clash.

Leaders of Men comes in with brooding bass and drums that are joined by a serpentine dark guitar figure and, as rough as it is, we are getting a much clearer indication of the band to come. If there were real arrangement dynamics in Warsaw this one leaves it in the dust. Brief statements over chugging guitar make way for a solidly developing melody and end in a rasping minor key fanfare. Towards the end there is a new progression that adds even more urgency and gravity.

These tracks amounted to half of the first EP, Ideal for Living and I could scarcely believe how good they were sounding, considering the means they were made with and the reputation that the initial 7 inch release was reputed to have very poor sound. So, not only were we getting what felt like pristine presentations we were getting them from the start. (Yes, I know there are earlier tracks on the Warsaw bootlegs but this was from a full genuine release.) I would have settled for the crappiest of garage punk but these were real songs.

And then before anyone could ask if there ever had been a studio version of Digital it started up. This one was one of the live tracks on Still and while it was impassioned and hard it didn't seem to amount to much. The studio recording doesn't either and misses out on the drive of the live  version but hearing it alone was like having an old debt repaid. That's what it sounded like.

Autosuggestion begins with crackles, clicks and buzzes as a slow bass figure persists as the delayed drums start. "Heeeeeere, everything is by design..." A distant clicking guitar plays a kind of stuttered drone or breaks out into distorted chords while around it other guitar tracks variously feedback or play harmonics. It's a big grey ambienceas a figure in the centre of it is deciding whether to leave or stay. Curtis' lyric is not making it easy, on one hand encouraging and on the other frowningly suggesting, "lose some sleep and say you tried." This last phrase becomes the taunting chant as Curtis revs his vocal up to a constant yell as the guitar gets as angry while the bass and drums, eerily remain calm and constant. It ends with a few echoing clicks.

The side (on LP and cassette) closes with the mini epic Transmission, the band's first real single. A brief synthetic chord which might as easily be a processed choir is interrupted by Peter Hook's rapid thudding on the bass. It drops a tone and goes back up and starts again. Drums come in with the guitar playing a two note figure which leaps up a fourth and then back down to the E-string. After a tiny respite the bass reaches up to the vocal intro: "Radio. Live transmission. Radio Live transmission." And then the verse begins: "Listen to the silence, let it ring on." A doomed relationship is described. The last line of the first stanza gave Curtis' wife Deborah the title of her memoir of him: Touching from a Distance. Second stanza, "we could go on as though nothing was wrong," leads to the chorus which on first hearing seems unrelated to the situation in the verses. But then it's a lot darker when you understand that the advice he's giving is to forget about all the tough stuff like the emotion and the life and dance dance dance dance to the radio, keep a tight seal on everything actual until it collapses while the automatic responses kick in. After the second chorus, which is screamed by Curtis, the big force of it winds down like an exhausted machine into a large blurring drone, a few snare hits for the final kicking moments.

Side two starts with the version of She's Lost Control from the B-side of the Atmosphere single (it was the A-side in the US!). The rhythm and bass line are the same but the temperature has been lowered to Arctic conditions. Instead of the swirling delay around the vocal it's more of a slapback, almost rockabilly setting like singing in an empty metal barrel. The guitar growls low in the mix and eventually gets swamped by keyboard arpeggios with a middle eastern flavour. It is stark and unfriendly but compelling.

Incubation sounds like the jam the band got into after they finished the previous track. It's mostly a thumping monotone bass and slightly riffing guitar. No words of vocals, just an oddly compelling forward motion.

Dead Souls, the original B-side of Atmosphere when it was given to a French Magazine on a flexidisc sounds as welcome as it did on Still, a strong, articulate rock song with a catchy riff and chorus. "Someone take these dreams away..." Images of oppression, conquest and cruelty call out to him as the chorus progression descends like a squadron of tanks.

The huge icy fog of Atmosphere follows with its cloudy keyboards and thundering tom toms. "Walk in silence. Don't walk away in silence..." Curtis croons a helpless plea to a departing other who is retreating and continuing. Nothing will change. There is no real chorus but a few instrumental breaks begun with a rise and fall, glittering flourish and synth strings playing a two note motif over a first to fourth chord change. These glorious moments feel ecstatic despite the situation of the lyrics. Curtis even starts the next verse a third higher as though more hopeful. Then, after another break the clamorous middle eight barges in with anger: "People like you find it easy, aching to see, walking on air..." This is a view from a window to a desolate world of cruelty and persistent rebuilding. "Don't walk away." The song ends on a break where all the subtle fourths swell up or sing distantly until the full end which feels like an earlier line suggests: set down with due care. The spell of this song always catches me and I can attend to nothing else when I hear it.

A chugging clean electric guitar is joined by a triplet chord played on an acoustic 12 string. The interplay of the two and the drums speeds to a crashing introduction of the theme played high on the synth strings. The motif is also sung in the chorus and played on bass in the verses. "When routine bites hard and ambitions are low ..." Ian Curtis croons under the reported influence of Frank Sinatra, using the power in his lower range without the strain he'd put into the early punky numbers. The arrangement is delicate with the frame of the drums up front supporting skeletal guitar single string strumming, simple modal keyboard movement and constant poignant insistence on the bass. Love Will Tear Us Apart is a perfect pop song. Line it up on a jukebox and people will dance. Listen to it in a dark room and climb down into a personal hell. There is, along with most of the other Joy Division songs about relationships, no warmth or hope here and there won't be in any sung lines but the main melodic motif is so bright and the fade insists on a figure lifted from And Then He Kissed Me and feels like better days. But this is after bad tastes in the mouth, bad things cried out in sleep, failings and static emotions and the plain observation that this, like all other attempts at love, will divide and keep dividing. The fragility of the arrangement almost dares the listener to remove any component and watch as it collapses. Joy Division's best known song is a musical description of the claimed truth of its lyric.

That is where the original LP ended. If you had the money for a player and bought the CD or, like me, the double cassette, you'd also get the following. I'll be describing the tracklist on the download package from an online retailer which adds two further tracks. I'll note them as they come up.

First is the remaining pair of tracks from the Ideal for Living EP. No Love Lost begins with a similar long instrumental introduction beginning with Krautrock drums and brooding bass. The guitar comes in with a sparse riff  ending in a tremulous single note attack before turning into barre chord swashes. Repeat then slam into the main punky chord riff. Curtis enters with a strained shout with images from the novel that gave the band its name, House of Dolls. Between the first and second verses there is a spoken word passage which sounds like it might be from the book but wasn't in the translation I read in the 2020 lockdowns (and finally, as I'd found it at an op shop back in the late '80s and always gave it a pass when choosing a next book). This is the same with the different version that appeared on the Warsaw bootleg which has a different again spoken word verse. It presents as harsh punk but there's a lot of gloomy ambience and drama.

Failures, on the other hand is four on the floor punk with the same strained vocal and crashing barre chords with high energy drumming and guitar rifferama between verses. A guitar solo screams out briefly before the second half and that will happen again to the fade. Moments of responsibility through history that only get hard and repeat despite the knowledge of all the failure that lead to them and continues. For all the callow crude textures and force to these EP tracks there is a clear indication of things to come, especially with the Unknown Pleasures album only two years and a genius producer away. The sense of story, setting, atmosphere and dynamics are right here at the start.

Next we get the song that I always zone out to if I can't easily skip it. Glass has all the hallmarks of Joy Division from Martin Hannett producing them onward, modal riffs, a severe Curtis vocal and lyric. A series of instructions lead to a screamed order to do it again and again and again. This is in the Digital camp for me in that it is musically charmless, amelodic and dragging. It's childish in its obviousness in a way that none of the raw and unformed Ideal for Living tracks are. The band clearly found great value in it to put it here as well as on Still but it has never improved to these ears.

From Safety to Where was one of the grail Joy Divison recordings. The haunting bassline, highly creative guitar scaping and assured Curtis vocal put it clearly in the Unknown Pleasures era and the clear stamp of Martin Hannett building a world of boomy percussion and distant cries from instruments. The singer feels lost but is assured that everything has been taken care of. It's the kind of cardigan wearing sci-fi that the BBC was churning out that, for all its dowdy looks, could create horror by the dullest and subtlest of means. Like Glass, it has all the Hannett-era elements of this band but unlike Glass, I'll not only turn it up if I hear it but go to it especially. 

Novelty is the song Peter Hook wrote by himself and entered the band's repertoire early on. It was also tried out in the RCA sessions that were compiled for the Warsaw bootleg. This is the Hannett-produced version that appeared on the B-side of the first single, Transmission. It's a much more conventional rock song from the era. After a grinding minor key ascent which is not used again in the song the main chord progression. The chorus slightly modifies this progression and it's played under the solos but everything is close enough to sound as though a single structure is repeating throughout. The lyrics are a kind of taunt to a second person who has taken on a superior air but is due for a fall. It's exactly the kind of song you'd write in your late teens about someone in particular who, when the band takes it and turns it into a part of the set, fades into the recycle bin of history. Like all Joy Division B-sides, it's a corker.

Komakino sounds distinctly like the music on the second album Closer. The guitar starts up a staccato riff that would be funky if it weren't dressed in downward thrusting bass and Steve Morris machine man drums. Think Colony or Atrocity Exhibition off Closer. The lyric is an expansion of another failed romance but set this way in the machine like arrangement it becomes a kind of final diary entry in a long epistolary horror story. "This is the hour when the mysteries emerge..." is the opening line. My favourite, though, is the eerie, "The shadow that stood by the side of the road always reminds me of you." This was the A-side of a flexidisc single given to a magazine. My copy was an Italian 7 inch promotional copy for radio. The song grind on to the bitter end with interplay between the bass and the tattooing tom toms into a clean ending rather than a fade. One of my favourite of the "new" tracks on the compilation.

The B-side was two instrumentals. We've covered Incubation above and the last one was As You Said. Both instrumentals. Incubation is a few minutes of unrelenting force. As You Said, which made its official release debut on the download version of this compilation (meaning it wasn't on the CD or cassette) is a drum loop and a Steve Morris rhythm augmented with some gleaming synthesiser play. It goes nowhere but is perfectly listenable for all that.

These Days I had known from have the Love Will Tear Us Apart 7 inch at the start of the '80s. It sounds like the future of the band. A frenetic treated guitar doodles into the light and supported by echoey drums and a a rolling down bass line. Curtis comes in without his lower mids in a determinedly harsh but clean vocal with lines about training to be ruthless for these days. Skeletal instrumental sections are suddenly enriched with a high warbling synthesiser in a break which, ingeniously gets superimposed on to the final verse, giving the song a cinematic heft and lifting the feel into intrigue and joy. They really didn't waste B-sides. This also sound very Closer era.

The other addition to the online version is the earlier recording of Love Will Tear Us Apart. This appeared on the 12 inch version of the single (with the tombstone angel cover) but it never made much of an impression. The arrangement is essentially the same but not played with as much conviction as the 7 inch release. The quote riff of the end hasn't been discovered yet. Curtis' vocal is also very different and it sounds as though he's trying too hard to incorporate the Sinatra style with almost every line rushed in its second half. The fully described melody weighs heavier and sounds far more poignant, as though, after experimentation they found that what they'd begun with was already right. Still, it's worth having and the song is so indestructible that you can hear it twice in the same compilation without feeling fatigued by it. 

This is were I would point anyone curious about the seminal band. It will tell them where they had started with the unrefined punk that yet demonstrated a taste for exploration and then the realisation of that potential as the musicality found its momentum in a brief but astounding and heavily influential career. If our imagined new listener wanted to go further they have two extraordinary albums by a band recognisably the same but advanced beyond expectations in the space of a single year. This record attests to that. Later compilations that mix album tracks with singles and obscurites lack the force of this and the gargantuan Heart and Soul box is long out of print and costs over a thousand dollars. Get this and move on to the albums and reach out to Still for a few further obscurites that will by that stage pretty much delight.

I began drafting this with a personal account of how I stood with this band but it grew so long and floppy I ditched it. Here's the short version. I was intrigued by Love Will Tear Us Apart and bought the single in 1980. I met fans of the band whose fancies and theories about them were so whacked out and overly serious I met them with ridicule. Ideation chic indeed!. After Uni I bought second hand copies of the three LPs available, Unknown Pleasures, Still and Closer and chowed down on them now that the goopy fans were out of the picture. A few years later I skipped Brisbane for Melbourne and took up the cause, finding more articulate fans and became almost the kind of fan I'd already made fun of. At some point I let this fade and just enjoyed the music. I listen to Joy Division to this day and this collection is both a sentimental favourite as it felt like new stuff long after the band had gone and it was good stuff. It was better than that. Still came out less than a year after the band's existence. It was shrouded in grief. Substance came out seven years after, and after seven years of New Order. It felt like a celebration.