BLONDIE'S EAT TO THE BEAT @ 45

Two bars of count-in a snare roll and Dreaming explodes with a collision of '60s girl group kitsch and late '70s archness. Debbie Harry enters in high style with a full throated melodic shout about a chance meeting and the wonder of living as though dreaming. The middle eight gears up the pace enough for her "whoo!" in between lines. Three minutes of sheer pop bliss with just enough poignancy to make it last for decades and beyond. One of my favourite songs of its era.

The Hardest Part is a revisit of the kind of attempted funk there in the first album onwards but this time polished to a bubblegum naffness. Harry's strident vocal adds more pressure but its neither a tough rocker nor a campy disco workout. It's almost as though they were listening with the next track. Union City Blue is a retread of Dreaming but with less energy.

Shayla adds a gleam to a magical realist story of an ordinary life transported by imagination. While it might have flubbed down into the previous track's routine, there is just enough sparkle to save it between the whimsy of the lyric, the loping low string guitar and easy pace. Eat to the Beat sounds like a pastiche of British punk with mixed messages about masturbation and snacking.

Accidents Never Happen is like something from the band's best Plastic Letters, with an intriguing minor key cool and a smoky vocal. The synthesisers and machine perfect rim shots complete the image of a band who can be witty, compelling and rock out all at once. Die Young Stay Pretty is in joke reggae. Slow Motion features a vocal bathed in reverb which is at odds with the rest of the album in a song that doesn't quite know where it's meant to be.

Atomic is where it shifts. It's an electro-disco workout in celebration of teen lust that doesn't let up. This is the Blondie of X-Offender and Heart of Glass as well as Picture This, with its face pressed hard against the port hole to the '80s. It is pop perfection and points to one of their purest pop triumphs, the following year's Call Me.

Sound-A-Sleep revisits Fade Away and Radiate from Parallel Lines and forms a pleasant lullaby with a few slightly spiky images thrown in. I could listen to it anytime. Victor is the kind of glam stomper that Adam and the Ants and ten Pole Tudor were about to own. It's fun but I wouldn't make a bee line to it. Living in the Real World is another punk pastiche but sounds like the kind of song that American film makers of the following decade would drop into a teen romance to give it a hip, young punky ambience. End.

Eat to the Beat, even with its highlights, is a sheer drop into the kind of pop flirtation that didn't just help the bank balance but removed the band from the roll call. No one at this time except the most hardened and industrial reviled the pure pop heights that Blondie could soar to but when it started sounding like high-life cabaret instead of compelled fun. That said, they knew what they were doing.

After the success of Parallel Lines they stuck with producer Mike Chapman who took them further into the kind of tough edged pop he'd mastered with Nicki Chinn in the '70s with the likes of The Sweet and Suzi Quattro. Parallel Lines runs out of fuel on its second side like most Blondie albums but the parade of bangers on the first side and the mega hit Heart of Glass wiping the table of side two makes things feel balanced. Eat to the Beat is better balanced but it's also blander. The highlights are rule-proving exceptions.

Blondie produced and released a video album of every track, embracing the future while its choice of form was still uncertain. Nevertheless, it was forward looking and showed the band's determination to break through and stay on top. Well, better a blander Blondie than a Cryogenic Eagles, eh? That was never the choice, though. As U.S. pop culture in the early '80s consumed the riskier post punk from the U.K. it had been defused at customs and was open for copying by people who wouldn't have thought of it in the first place. The rest was the maintenance of position by those who were already there and anyone who sounded enough like them. Billy Joel released his big Noo Wave album the following year and it probably enjoys a warm nostalgia among its fans. I hate it unreservedly. It wasn't Blondie who made Billy Joel do that terrible thing, it was more his anxiety that they might have been the future, them, teh Ramones and all that Talking Heads weirdo stuff.

I recall it the way I recall most Blondie albums, as a series of singles on Countdown. They had power and rang out over the crowds at high school parties I went to. It was fun and sounded like it. The University parties I also went to never put this on the turntable. Those parties were a mix of late boomer picks from punk and environs, less fun (sometimes outright embarrassing) but held more interesting conversations and more songs about buildings and food.

As if we needed it, Eat to the Beat reminded us that Blondie was an American band and on a path to establishment like almost all of the others. There's no sin in that but it comes at a cost. Eat to the Beat is a record by a band unprepared for that.

THE LAMB LIES DOWN ON BROADWAY @ 50

This record is why I swore off prog rock. It's not because it's a bad album, on the contrary. It's one of the few cases where ambition is served well by execution and there is a lot of really good expressive music on it and, as bizarre as the story gets, there is even a kind of cohesion. The problem is that I never heard a prog album, before or since that came close to it. Every time I went to investigate an act like Emerson Lake and Palmer or Yes, I came away wondering what I'd heard and caring less and less as the hours passed. This one, though, haunted me.

A school friend passed it on for me to tape and I listened to it, pondering the bizarre images on the Hipgnosis sleeve and read Peter Gabriel's short story version in the gatefold and found it intriguing enough to make a slightly edited C-90. I left out the Eno collaboration The Waiting Room as it scared the hell out of me. And then I'd listen to the first side of the tape until a month or two and taped over it with something from the radio. Not the fairest of receptions but my most played album from this time was still Never Mind the Bollocks. Anyway ...

If you are unfamiliar with the record, it's a rock opera along the lines of The Who's Tommy or Quadrophenia or the Kinks early '70s concept albums. Genesis had already done side-long tracks made of discrete musical sections that formed whole narratives but this was a long and complex story over four sides of vinyl. The band worked on the music while singer and chief lyricist Peter Gabriel wrote the words and then a version of the story in prose for the album gatefold sleeve. 

So, what's the story? Rael, young Manhattan tough guy, has a weird epiphany of seeing the thing in the title, a lamb lying down on the Great White Way. It plunges him into an unreal world in which he encounters caves, assembly lines with humans as the products, sex instruction, human/serpent hybrids, a colony of sex-repressed castrated mutants and so on, all the while pursuing his brother John and leading to a big revelation that is either bleeding obvious or baffling. There's a lot more detail to it than that but, like most rock operas, most of the narrative dots joined only in the mind of the lyricist and left off the musical work itself.

A lot of this gets weird and yucky and can be traced beyond Gabriel's own imagination to one of the things that zapped it: Allejandro Jodorowski's surrealist mythic western El Topo. Gabriel saw this fresh in the early '70s and came away with a ton of wow, determined to make a similarly potent statement in his own idiom.

So, how did he do? Pretty well up to the end of side two. After that, the ideas thin out and the music loses a lot of its shape before a big finale saves the day. Kind of. Gabriel and his wife had a lot to deal with on the troubling experience of the birth of his first child. You can look that one up. Also, famed director William Friedkin, fresh from extraordinary success with The Exorcist, wanted to write a movie with him. After the promising start on Lamb, Gabriel was torn away from the task for a crucial time as the band got down to writing the music, forbidden to write lyrics themselves (which ban they had eventually to violate to finish the damn thing).

So, after all that, how's the music? Really good, as it happens. From the forward charge of the title track, through some crafty surrealistic imagery and a good band at their best, the sense that something rich and strange is unfolding before running low on power and going weird and cute when it should be still powering.

There is too much here to go track by track and some of it is transitional instrumentals. The opening piano figure is a harker to the band's 20th century orchestral music but the rocking body of the opening song is a look ahead. When the band choose against their old style wasteful noodling and concentrate on the purpose of each song, they triumph. The big surging wave of Fly on a Windshield is magnificent. The Carpet Crawlers is an ethereal joy. Then again, the goofy guitar solo in Counting out Time is as embarrassing as all jokes attempted by prog rockers. The closing track which is a kind of celebration of the universality in the individual is so perky and obnoxious it sounds like a game show theme. 

It's when the band find newer expressions like the odd time and queasy heaviness of the keyboard riff of Back in NYC with its robot voices and dark lyrics that we can see and hear them progressing beyond the pastoral, satirical, mythical concerns of their career to this point. This is about the alienness of a single mind and the often disturbing landscapes it conjures. For the first time, their musical virtuosity takes a back seat to the drama of the concept. Except when it doesn't and, without direction, they fall back into the old wheedling improv. That's why this can never be a perfect album, despite its impressive highlights.

The tour that followed was hampered by the kind of staging with film effects and complicated costumes that might have deserved a place in a contemporary Spinal Tap movie. For this and a book's worth of reasons, Peter Gabriel hung up his fox mask and fled, forming a solo career after a few years' rest to found a career that took him as high as that of the band he'd left behind.

That band went increasingly into the centre of the mainstream, shedding members to other careers or time out for solo projects, and doing a lot of the ruling of the middle with increasingly flavourless pop music. Complicating everything, new vocalist and incumbent drummer Phil Collins started his own solo career while remaining in the band. Everyone was having success and a happy ever after.

That's kind of the problem, though. All the prog rockers turned into standard radio rotation versions of what they'd been. However tiresome I found them, they had begun in the spirit of exploration and taken that to various peaks. The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway was one such but its peak concealed the sheer drop on the other side and when things changed they did what everyone else did and churned out the kind of hits that Patrick Bateman eulogised in American Psycho. See also The Wall, a few years later. There's no compelling Pink Floyd after it.

What-ifs are as futile as single disc track listings of The White Album. What would Genesis have made of Games Without Frontiers what would Gabriel have added to '80s Genesis? With Lamb we see what a band of fine players and solid compositional minds could do to make themselves more interesting. But life got in the way. Punching the clock felt a lot easier. So it should, maybe.

Listening notes: I chose the legit hi res download from an online shop. There's an issue with this, though. There are several effects that were on the original pressings that must have been added at mastering as they are no longer in evidence in subsequent releases. You can seek these out on YouTube - significantly Back in NYC, The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging, and The Colony of Slippermen - which is worth doing if you are interested in the record. Or you could hunt down an original vinyl copy, assuming you can afford to.

SUPERTRAMP'S CRIME OF THE CENTURY @ 50

School begins with an atmospheric blues harp wail and picks up a kind of English country garden funk as a thin voice talks about being at school and having to face bullying and conformity. It's a little like a track from Animals years ahead of that one. Bloody Well Right mixes statements of futility about having opinions with some mild metal and funny call and response choruses. These songs, and there will be more, never just start with a chord progression and follow the verse chorus pattern but have evocative intros, instrumental sections and shift musical genres abruptly.

Hide in Your Shell is an epic plea by the Roger Hodgson for the one he loves to open and trust and risk the worst of life and begin living it. It has the same plinking electric piano as the more famous song from this album (we'll get there) but its gentle lead verse vocals and pitch perfect stacked harmonies in the chorus lift it high. Asylum is more on the Randy Newman road as Rick Davies takes his American approach to music and delivers a shuffling power ballad about mental fragility. It opens to a huge showband finish and a tinkling piano playing off into the dark. And that is the old familiar end of side one after four songs.

The peppermint icecream bright Dreamer begins side two with Hodgson's headvoice vocals seemingly taunting someone for their absent-headed ways. A Townshendish bubbling middle section turns this around until the momentum builds to a gloriously shambling reiteration of the opening. I came home from piano lessons one day and saw this on Countdown and marvelled that this deliriously sweet music was possible. It would be years before I heard anything by The Beach Boys so this was a first. Love it to this day.

Davies is back for Rudy and what seems like a continuation of Asylum. The title character feels unseen and disconnected. A galloping orchestral middle section lets the music say more than the lyrics as both Davies and Hodgson trade lines about needing to toughen up. It's Davies epic to match Hodgson's Hide in Your Shell and works fine.

If Everyone was Listening takes the figure about the world as a stage from Shakespeare. It begins as a torchy plaintive ballad but goes all stagey, heavy with blows against the empire of modern life. I don't know how much meaning that sentence has but it does fit in with this song. The song works but it's one that happens when you leave it on rather than one that you head for when playing the record.

The title track is also stagey but there's more of an epic rock opera feel to it. Davies sings out in the dark to his own piano before big bass choirs join him. Big instrumental sections bolster what is a much shorter lyric than I remember. The second section is an elongated fade over a persistent piano figure which goes from a minor chord to its sixth below as orchestral instruments, guitar, sax and synthesis snake around it. It's perfectly well handled and doesn't outstay a second of its welcome.

Supertramp are only remembered by hits and memories radio stations, when someone picks up a 12 string acoustic and starts playing Give a Little Bit, and for providing the songs for ads. That sounds like a slight but it isn't. It means, apart from anything, that they made music with an instant appeal that leaves out any considerations of its original context. Songs like Dreamer could be from next week. That doesn't mean it was forward looking but that artists that consider themselves baroque pop or Wilsonian always end up sounding like Supertramp.

And not just Supertramp. They are in a margin that has not existed for decades and is a little hard to imagine now. They're not alone. These not quite pop or rock or prog outfits like 10CC, Roxy Music, Ace, ELO or Queen adopt anything that helps finish their song arrangements and sounds enough like the other tracks on an album to give them the appearance of being bands rather than songwriters with regular session musicians. Let Genesis, Pink Floyd, Emerson Lake and Palmer noodle and concept away on album charts and in stadiums, the Supertramp stratum could deliver hit singles and LPs with Hipgnosis cover art and a decent place in the AOR charts. No one was surprised if they made concept albums or gathered songs and you could leave their records on without getting up to skip tracks.

It wasn't just absorption. These acts took heart from the dawn of the age of the rock album in the late '60s when royalty bombed the culture with psychedelic opera, scrapbooks of their daily lives or the heavy ambition of a Tommy or S.F. Sorrow. Fans expected things of albums at this time. Whether it was the next two sides of Status Quo headbanging or Bowie's new sophisticated phase, they waited for statements with mindbending cover art and lyric sheets.

This was the band's breakthrough, fuelled by hits in the singles charts the world over and whoever did buy the first two albums had waited not just for this new statement but the success that followed it. This was a reward and more, being coherent and tastefully neat in the distribution of its ideas. At school, it was one of the records that engendered a lot of home taping and, along with Bowie and Led Zeppelin, joined the currency of the cassette swap market. I never owned this one on vinyl but when it recently came up on one of my usual HD online stores I shelled out for it and revisit it now and then with pleasure.

While I sounded like I was dismissing this band and their ilk up there, really, the point I was trying to get to was how when we lost this group of album orientated rock practitioners, we lost a lot of what an album could be. From punk onwards, rock albums began to sound samey all the way through and a value arose that a band should sound present a uniform sound from song to song and that exploration beyond that was all sorts of anathema. That's a pity as it makes a band's identity more pronounced than the music it presents and the music becomes a kind of brand power offering. The chopping and changing according to what a song needs that records in the tradition of this one sound like the songs are compositions, expressions of joys and shocks of living. So, I can snicker at this platter for its flared bombast here and there, but really, it still sounds like the kind of thing I would have waited for rather than just accepted when it arrived.

20 JAZZ FUNK GREATS by THROBBING GRISTLE @ 45

A friend at school told me that his mother had bought him a record to cheer him up on a sick day. It had THE BEATLES splashed across the cover but if you looked a lot closer there was fine print that said: The Ripoffs Play ...  Industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle get the joke out of the way quickly. The cover is all K-Tel: the four piece stand on the lush green grass near a cliff edge dressed a notch below smart casual but look all the more ordinary for all that. The opening track is the title song, 20 Jazz Funk Greats.

It begins as a kind of dinky synthesised dub track and continues with breathy yeahs and oohs while a very dub sounding trumpet honks through an echo until it's sinister. The idea was to lure some payday music fan to spend money on what looked like a record for the makeout den that would end up being harsh and depressing, about as erotic as the location on the cover. That grassy scene was (perhaps still is) one of the most notorious suicide spots in the world.

It gives its name to the title of the next track, an electronic atmosphere of foghorns and seagulls field-recorded or synthesised. This is a track that is meant to evoke the forbidding legend of the place but until you know that, it's a pleasant electronic drone.

Still Walking is a clicky electronic rhythm with phasing and panning effects as dissonant squeals stutters  sound out as a number of voices speak lines gently, as though sleep talking. Tanith is an instrumental of synthesised bass and glassy ethereal wafts along with more squeaky electronics. It could be from a sci-fi mystery tv show from the time.

The first track to feature written lyrics and a prominently mixed vocal. Genesis P. Orridge recites ideas about interpersonal manipulation with tape echo. Exotica begins with submarine groans and lazily played pentatonic celesta ringing lightly. Apart from the explosion near the end, it's a gentle, if a little eerie soundscape.

Hot on the Heels of Love thumps and fritters after Krafwerk's contemporary electronica with Cosi Fanny Tutti's breathy lyrics expressing a mix of erotic and troubling: "hot on the heels of love, I'm waiting for help from above". 

Persuasion starts with a ticking like a clock. A deep synthesised bass figure rings. Female screams that might be laughs or joyous, processed with delays and ring modulators and distortion. This is not just a replay of the first side's Convincing People. Genesis' dour droning voice narrates a monologue to a woman, attempting to get her to pose for pornographic photographs. It's relentless and sinister, a playing of manipulation of one by another. Gen's vocal occasionally rises to something like a blues influenced melody but mostly he keeps it down at a confidential level. The scenario is of someone used to doing this. It ends on the same ticking that began it.

And then Walkabout is constantly pleasant synthesiser instrumental using arpeggiation and string sounds. You keep waiting for something off to surface but it just keeps on track. Karftwerk were masters of this and their influence rules this track. It's the placing, though, between the ugly Persuasion and the next one.

A weird synth grind is joined by Genesis screaming into a delay, distant. What a Day. It hasn't been a good day and the violent-mooded voice wants you to know it. The idea might have been an oppressive slog but the brightness of the echoing voice and grounding electronica make it kind of hooky.

Six Six Sixties begins with the kind of guitar tone and riff that Sonic Youth would later base an entire career on, distorted and restless. Genesis recites a series of statements about the hazards of being alive, on the planet, in the universe. Genesis' claim is that he wrote the words down during a Ouija board session. They come across as cryptic rather than forbidding but the seance context adds an eeriness to them and the fact that the statement is not completed but, ending on the word "just" feels as though it was interrupted before the big advice could be given. A chance encounter with a spirit that had the answer but didn't or couldn't give it. The guitar fades. End of album.

This was the first fully studio-based record the band produced after two of mixed recordings and it feels a lot more coherent. But it's easy to get Throbbing Gristle wrong. People hear the term industrial and get an idea of the sound of factories and powerplants but the term had more to do with the level and commitment to the production of the material. The mission was confrontation and challenge and the first two LPs being both studio and live significantly remove the work from the bubble to the public area into performance rather than just statement.

20 Jazz Funk Greats changes this by being studio bound and intentionally contrived, without the spontaneity of the live arena with its give and take condition. This is what the group sounded like when no one was looking. From the joke of the title, cover art and opening track the progression is to insert the album under the skin of the listener rather than pummel them with slogans or the calibre of taunting confrontations that stuck to the industrial designation later (particularly when it was American).

That's why this album reaches more confidently over decades than the other early Throbbing Gristle releases which are, in a provocateur sense, more fun. It sounds like the kind of thoughts that occur in the morning of a week of news fatigue, that glimpse of the way the worst minds work and the logic of power consolidation. If you're unfamiliar, through youth or contemporary unawareness, this platter might strike you with a big so what. 

That thought reminds me of the time I read Lester Bangs's reaction to a Sex Pistols T-shirt that featured a boy with a hard on. Bangs was utterly outraged and concreted over the ick of it by trying to outdo it with a vision of a stadium of people having sex. He didn't leave it there, it was an admission that the simpler image on the T-shirt was effective because it transferred the intention of the thing: don't get offended by an erection, worry about the power that put the picture there. 

It's about drinking when you're shown the way to the water. No one has to tell you this is something bad, you need to work that out yourself. It didn't help Throbbing Gristle that their members performed in pornography, gave themselves nicknames like Sleazy but if you hadn't got it when you heard all the punk names like Rotten, Scabies or Vicious you probably wouldn't this time, either.

Peter Christopherson had worked for the monarchs of '70s cover art Hipgnosis, working on Wings's LP art Venus and Mars. He called in a favour and arranged for the use of Paul MacCartney's 16 track recorder to make this album. This is a lot less ironic if you listen to the last track on the Beatles' Revolver album with MacCartney's refulgent tapeloops squealing throughout and Ringo's trancey drumming. In fact, it's more of a creative descendant than a fun true life joke. It's still funny, though, and for reasons that make this album a landmark.

PiL's METAL BOX @ 45

The first track is called Albatross. Bass notes as thick as any dub track pulse and are joined by a solid drum pattern peppered with snare fills. High guitar squeaks and noodles sound constant and discordant. Lydon comes in on one side of the stereo image, subdued, singing fragments of a limited range melody. The lines are about albatrosses and an unbearable second person, sowing seeds of discontent, running away and killing the spirit of '68. This was an improv track concocted in the studio but the lines suggest unfinished business with the self-proclaimed manipulator of The Sex Pistols, Malcolm McClaren. The stabs on the first album were clearly not sufficient. The bird is the bringer of ill-fortune from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner whose narrator roams the earth, repeating his story of woe. The situationist students of the May '68 revolt in Paris provided McClaren with more non-comic stan-up material than Lydon found digestible. Sure, this ten minute long dirge might well have been off the cuff but Lydon was never shy of opining and if it fit then it was chosen. As significant is the same kind of outsize grind on an idee fixe might remind us of Theme that opened the first album but this time it is not an onslaught but quiet and relentless, clear to the point of being spacey. The lines float back past our ears the thoughts that stop us from sleeping, murmurs of worry.

Memories picks up the pace with wobbly flanged guitar and Lydon's voice in a more familiar reedy whine. This suddenly changes as thought someone  opened the mix's window. Repeat. Lydon's vocal takes on a kind of unschooled Islamic call to prayer. Lines of doubt and self accusation continue as the mix goes in and out of definition and the squealy electric Flamenco figure warbles onward. Swan Lake had been released as the single Death Disco. The drum pattern is authentically late '70s disco. Lydon wails about his helplessness to cope with his mother's drawn out death. Levene plays figures around the Tchaikovsky ballet theme as the vocal rises to a tireless scream and ghostly wails appear in the distance. The fade has a strange effect in that what sounds like a looped sample of synthesised strings starts at a loud note before toning down, out of rhythm with the rest of the song. Want to suggest something that's out of your control? Make it cross your rhythm patterns whenever it wants to.

Poptones is my favourite track on the album. It starts mid-phrase as the bass and drums provide a bedrock and the guitar plays increasingly hypnotic arpeggiated chords high on the fretboard. Lydon uses his attacking voice  to narrate a story from the news about a woman suffering assault after being driven to the country. The detail the victim recalled clearly was that the radio was playing what she described as poptones. Lydon's lyrics are fragmented but build a picture of chilling violence while the music keeps flowing, the guitar figure adds an eerie beauty to the atrocity. Careering has Levene on the synth instead of a guitar and he plays dissonant horror movie chords as Lydon's lyric tells of a gunman in Northern Ireland who lives as a suited city worker in London. A rugged bass and drums punch courses beneath the horrifying juxtaposition. "A face is raining across the border..."

No Birds takes its title from Keats's eerie poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci in which a knight is tempted by a supernatural beauty only to find himself enveloped in evil. Here the effect is transposed to what looks like suburbia. "This could be heaven, shallow spreads of ordered lawns..." But the more he describes it the more plainly static and breathless it appears. Graveyard begins, giving us the same dub groove with spiky guitar that speaks for the album in general But this time it's an instrumental. Levene's shining discords dance above the bedrock like bratty ghosts.

The Suit adds to a short bass figure repeated throughout, a series of snide taunts at conformity to a conventional life where if it's consumable it's good and vice versa. Lydon's vocal is more of a chant, the outsider kid smirking at the playground games and powerplays with observations that rise and fall through his cigarette smoke. Bad Baby pits a fractured drum pattern against an energetic bass groove and Levene's piercing horror synths as Lydon in a creepy high voice mixes the every day in the housing estate with the harrowing image of a baby abandoned in a car park. Everyone who sees it tells themself to ignore it until it vanishes. 

Socialist is an upbeat workout of beeping synthesisers with a bass groove. Chant begins with ragged guitar and a downmixed chanting of words love, war, fear, hate. Lydon's vocal snakes above it, distorted sneer. "It's not important. It's not worth a mention in the Guardian."  And then he repeats the word chant under the screaming guitar wash. After that study in sour, Radio 4's big warm synth strings wash feels almost sarcastic. Is this what you wanted after all that, it seems to ask. No drums but the bass is busy beneath, spodging around. It sounds improvised and left as is. And guess what, it's really lovely.

Unless you bought the later double vinyl Second Edition release, the bustling uniformity might be hard to take. Designer Dennis Morris' packaging was intended as a taunt to user friendly pop music delivery. The album was released as three twelve inch forty-fives which were stuffed tightly into a metal container that resembled a cine film cannister. The cans were hard to open and the discs were hard to get out without damage. Worse still, the metal used for the case was intended to rust and deteriorate over time and did. Propaganda by deed? Well, I never saw an original copy but I remember how funny I found the idea. The punk wars had failed but in the wake a new critical music was emerging with intent to disrupt and challenge, sometimes with a gleaming smile and sometimes with a guttural curse. Metal Box dissed its own market with this beautiful monstrosity. I wonder if anyone in that fevered era thought to keep their copy safe from its own intended doom?

When the conventional gatefold album came out and followed on from the debut with the title Second Edition, more people heard the music and experienced the one-song band from before was actually making music you could get into. It was a different deal to have to change the disc over and then the disc itself to hear the whole thing and then just to change four times. That strikes me as being a more benign measure. Take it in smaller doses, make each side special enough to go through those (mostly) two songs and think about them. My CD (yes, with a mini metal box which, yes, is rusting) presents everything in one long string and anyone who heard it first like this (I had it on a C-90 cassette, at first) will have come away exhausted. The smaller doses work a lot better. As I listened for this blog I began to split up the old side listings separately. That's when this record makes sense.

Metal Box is often given the accolade of being the apex of post punk. I don't find lists of cultural artefacts that interesting but I don't know if I'd agree, entirely. The anti-consumerist paradox of the packaging is gloriously of its time and the music is a strong consolidation of the tatters of the debut album. However, when you move beyond the purity of the concept, it's the album that it should have been. The big spacey concerns of Albatross tell us that we're in for something more seriously crafted and that is what we get.

Lydon has clearly moved on even as far as to put himself to one side of the stereo field or low in the mix to accommodate the overall project. Keith Levene joined the spiky discord brigade of difficult guitarists like The Banshees' John McKay and Gang of Four's Andy Gill in fashioning a post-rock sound that begged for development after its first few forays. This album of many drummers benefits from diversity and also from Jah Wobble's grounding bass work. It is a great work but to elevate it above a field of similarly great works misses the point, the assured and cool anonymity of it that graced the best of music for about five bristlingly rich years of musical exploration. Yes, it all got swallowed into the big mainstream whale but for that time when you could be scary without pretending you were a vampire, classical without faux-poshness, and music first without the music press, things changed enough to carry into the future and left plenty of archaeology for the curious listeners of nowdays. For the prickly contrarians who made this record, that's a pleasing feat that never has to sell out. 

SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES' JOIN HANDS @ 45

The difficult in the term difficult second album usually refers to the problem of coming up with the quality of material in weeks that had taken a lifetime to make the first batch. I know too many counter examples of that to consider it anything but subjective. Closer, This Year's Model, Plastic Letters, Reckoning, A Quick One all shape up as impressive platters bursting with creative energy. The Banshees second go was difficult in other ways. First, it's a lot spikier and less user-friendly than The Scream. Second, it is the abrupt end of Banshees Mark 1. Whatever they went on to, they would never sound like this again.

Poppy Day starts a loud bright bell. Then a guitar rasps high on the fretboard from a cloud of distortion. The drums enter, sounding like a Joy Division song. When Siouxsie enters, she's low in the mix and wailing at the top of her voice.  The lyric is a call from the graves of soldiers who fell at Flanders. Buying a poppy is meant to remind us of heroism but this is more like a cry from a zombie movie. At two minutes, it won't test your attention span and its brevity through the harshness of the execution brings an extra layer of eeriness. It's an indication that the darker sides of The Scream are about to crawl up out of the earth an dominate this one. And that's what happens.

Regal Zone carries the war history theme, the title referring to the unaffected state of warmongering monarchs who can gaze out upon the carnage with impunity. Even the site of a sculpted soldier depicted in mid writhe before death leaves their bright portraits untouched. The guitar, again distorted through effects, punches at the air while the band plough through an unusual beat and a rasping saxophone plays above. Siouxsie's wail is mixed higher but is making melodic shapes as much as singing lyrics. A cry of outraged description as much as vindication.

Placebo Effect could have been written much more recently with its references to alternative medicine and characterising it as a mass of bullshit. A strange guitar effect similar to the one in Wire's I am the Fly starts with an insistent chord riff. Siouxsie begins closer to her speaking voice about dodgy alt.medicine procedures as McKay's guitar settles into the slashing style of the first album with more conventional reinforcement in lower octaves. Siouxsie wails above the grind and swirl to the repetition of the title until the guitar returns to its abrasive opening figure. A proto stab at a voodoo doll of future mass conjobs. Pretty impressive for a band later considered the mothership of goth.

After the triple bash of the opening songs Icon slows things down for its introduction of quietly menacing muted chords playing under sighing ride cymbals. Siouxsie comes in with a confessional tone and the surreal observation of her eyes lifting or falling in the sky, religious lies or diversions. And then there is the initial calm refrain of the chorus: "Icons feed the fires, icons falling from the spires." And then the pace picks up as McKay's pealing guitar plays the chord progression in a dirty jingle as Siouxsie raises her voice to a wail for the first full verse: "Those words hang like vicious spittle dribbling from the tongue. Close your eyes to your lies force feed more pious meat." The language turns abstract but the voice beseeches. Steve Severin, author of this one, has said it was inspired by middle eastern religious figures that danced themselves into frenzies that allowed them to withstand pain and proved it with physical tests (the lines about skewers apply here) but he took it further to ponder religious fervour and its motivations. The song is a marvel of suspension, stretching a bright, modal harmonic pattern beneath a vocal that travels and then soars. When the middle eight arrives, calling ecstatically for the guilt to be golden, and Siouxsie's lung-testing elongated notes, the celebration of the music and the horrors of the words, creepily, weave instead of disrupting each other. The closing din of Siouxsie's wail and McKay's slicing chord frenzy bring things to an abrupt end. I always feel like putting it on again but I always know better.

Premature Burial begins with volume swells on the guitar, a series of two chords repeating, until the band comes in with a thudding grind. Siouxsie's voice comes in at full strength, describing the condition of the title (lifted from an Edgar Allen Poe story) as her character tries to claw her way out of her coffin and back into the world, aided by chanting that might as easily be voodoo or Christian. She supplies her own backing vocals in the form of wordless rises and falls beneath her lead lines. The song grumbles forward like a tank, aggravated until the lines about sisters and brothers are augmented by a hellish baritone choir and the usual tom-heavy drumming until the grey skinned progression retreats back to the volume swells into the distance. In the same way that Bauhaus' later Bela Lugosi's Dead did, The Banshees push this into a pisstake ("oh what a bloody shame") but it's one that never quite erases the big doomy power of the bed track.

Side two starts with the phlanging rush of McKay's guitar sounding more machine like as it runs from the minor tonic to the fifth, supported by the bass, drums and bells in a big proto goth wash that is called Playground Twist. As the lines mix images of childhood play and grownups loping around drunk at parties there is a strange swinging vertigo to the number, aided by its 3/4 time and relentless metallic rush. A melodic but dizzy sax solo mixes it up even more. "You can drown when you're shallow, you can drown, drown droooooooowen, drooooooowen.!" 

If Playground Twist took us to kitchen sink horror movies Mother/Oh Mein Papa lures us into a dark house filled with familial severity and abuse. A musical box plays the old standard Oh Mein Papa as it winds down Siouxsie sings on one side of the stereo about how she longs to please her mother who watches over her and on the other side how oppressive her mother's disapproval and authority suffocates her.  A final visit to the English lyrics of the original, sung feckless, exhausted. The spring winds down and the energy drains with the final chime.

The Lord's Prayer is a kind of tribute to the band's origins. When Siouxsie and various Bromley Contingent cronies mounted their first stage with Sid Vicious on drums and future Ant Marco Pironi, they made a lot of barre chord din while Siouxsie wailed the words to the Lord's Prayer and anything else she could think of until it ended somehow. That's what we get here for the last half of side one; grinding punk with growling chords, thudding bass and toms with Siouxsie caterwauling overhead. The sole qualification this track has for the status of epic is it's fourteen minute plus length. While it's not as one-and-done as PiL's Fodderstompf, it does test its listeners. While it's frequently funny ("you'll never - get - to heaven ... not even if you're good!") and this lineup of the band can play its way into listenability with little effort. Here, only two years after that first performance, it does outstay its welcome like someone who repeats a joke rather than stay quiet or willingly retreat into the crowd. Well, I bet the first time was a blast.

But we come to the other meaning of the difficult second album: after this one, the band changed. Kenny Morris and John McKay fled the band in the middle of a tour after a botched gesture at an in-store promo disgusted them (the management had run out of copies of this LP and were mistakenly selling promo copies to fans). There is no coming back from desertion when a young band in that culture needed to be tight knit. Then, however mistaken the reason (which they admitted much later) there is no cleaning up sell-out corruption. At that point, the band that had formed from pub-going mates and had a bash on stage once but honed their craft to the extent that they were effortlessly the equivalent of the likes of PiL or The Clash, were never to be more.

To their credit, when Siouxsie and fellow remain-er Steve Severin decided to carry on at any cost, they did so with an eye to how this came about and a path of committed exploration. They found a whizbang drummer in Budgie but changed their guitarists every album or so and recooked their sound around its persistent marks (mainly Siouxsie's voice) and gave the world of goth to come an origin story. So, yes, for two solid records, a band with a sabre like approach to forging forward with great integrity accepted a challenge to a reinvention by necessity that gave them a far longer life than their titanic contemporaries. Me, I like almost all of it (and The Creatures afterwards) but if I didn't, I'd still have the first brace of discs that ends with the yell, "this prayer goes on and on!" and a final dissipating stutter of guitar distortion. That's how it happens. 

UNKNOWN PLEASURES @ 45

I didn't have this LP in 1979. The only Joy Division record I owned until 1984 was the Love Will Tear Us Apart seven inch. As for the band, I laughed at them but this was really about their fans, the people who would tell you at parties after midnight that you could hear Ian Curtis' epilepsy in his vocals. They seemed like a hobbyist death cult. Still, the name and the album title and the black leather look cardstock of the cover and the white inner sleeve blended strangely with the gloom and force of the music and I pushed them away because I feared what would happen if I didn't.

If I recall this album rather than play it, I think of it as samey, track after track of gloomy slow guitar rock. It takes a listen to remind me of the varying textures and moods and that the songs are quite distinct from each other. I think that's the artwork. Black, leathery cardstock with a small spiky diagram and a white inner sleeve with a creepy negative photo of a hand at a door on one side. Even the label was enigmatic: both sides repeat the cover image but one is white on black and the other is black on white and they aren't just sides one and two but outside and inside. If there is something being communicated it isn't being open about it. It was as though it had beamed in from another dimension.

In 1979, when cover art was still a matter of brash punky images against the airbrushed mainstream, this was edgy. A band that had emerged from the punk scene and considered itself a punk outfit was hitting the record shops with mystique. Had we not fought in the punk wars to rid the world of such Hipgnosis blare? If you're going to go around in a T-shirt that says I hate Pink Floyd, you should probably avoid the enigmatic on the old record sleeves. 

The problem is that Peter Saville's cover design for this record says everything visual about this record that you need to know before you've heard a note. The cow on Atom Heart Mother might well have been an inspiration of opportunity that worked because that's what was put there. The Unknown Pleasures cover looked like manual for something you didn't want to know about. It was forbidding. No rock album cover since Never Mind the Bollocks served the music on the disc more aptly than this one.

And the music? The band had already had a stab at some of these tracks and had produced an EP. These sides, for all their promise, were raw and recognisably punky. In a series of now famous decisions, producer Martin Hannett effectively future proofed the songs, taking them from overdrive and vocal snarl to a kind of cinema.

Disorder starts with palpitating drums and a picked loping bassline before the two-note pattern guitar comes in like a siren before the vocals begin talking about looking for a guide to help him cope with normal life. He has the spirit less the feeling but needs the feeling. This is one that can easily be imagined as an outright punk attack. Here it is more mildly paced and spacey. The voice that builds from a mumble to a cry (as it does in many of these songs) is in the centre set in warm reverb.

Day of the Lords cranks things down to glacial pacing. A guitar and bass figure rise menacingly through the minor scale before crashing deep and dark, the bass finishes the full figure with what at first sounds like major third to tonic but falls back down to the shadows around the minor. Curtis is central and darker with lines about a room and associated images of atrocities, warfare, torture and deadly competition before asking where it will end as a shrieking synthesiser calls out and floats above. The final verse is an octave up and repeats the opening verse ending with the question, "where will it end?" in a scream. This grinding atmosphere of nights of crime against humanity is what many people who have heard Joy Division think of when they hear the band name, a sound that couldn't be reasoned with and preferred skulking in the dark at the party.

Candidate comes slowly out of the shadows with a reverby drum pattern, slow and splashy. It's joine by a bass with a modal figure. Curtis comes in strongly but also heavily reverbed, the guitar making distant and barely tonal punctuation points around it, squeals, croons, metallic processes. "Forced by the pressure, the territory's marred, not longer the pleasure, I've since lost the heart..." Whatever the relationship was it is now beyond negotiation. The end, as the warped guitar wanders around in the dark like a stumbling ghost, is a repeat of the plea, "I tried to get to you."

Insight begins with what sounds like someone getting punched in the guts by a car door before a ride cymbal intro gives way to another descending bass line. Curtis' voice is phased or phlanged. A lyric of disappointment at one's own youth. A middle section sounds like a blast of video game laser effects before a calm return to the verse. This ends with the repeated claim, "I'm not afraid anymore," as the track closes with another burst of laser fighting.

New Dawn Fades is one of the band's most celebrated and covered songs. It's also one of their most forbidding being a statement of defeat. Spacey drums and a descending bass line lead to a big present guitar line that moves upward before finding its place in one of Bernard Sumner's signature two-note patterns. Curtis comes in as the guitar changes to a spooky but pretty arpeggio down the scale. He sounds full voiced but exhausted. After a brief instrumental respite playing through the progression twice the vocal returns an octave higher but more angry and desperate than anything else on the side. By the time he wails about them waiting for him in futility, Bernard is playing his own two-note figure higher on the fretboard and returns to a much higher iteration of the opening growling scale before he leaves it to the bass s it rushes to capitulation and the last few bars of the drums. End of side one.

She's Lost Control starts as a drum pattern that seems to start halfway through before one of the band's most famous bass riffs comes in with a crooning tone. Curtis' vocals are anything but crooning, describing a woman having a seizure but she's not just helplessly flailing on the floor. The source point for this song was something that Curtis saw in real life. He had epilepsy himself but the horrors he's describing here are not just about a medical condition but a general force that the woman in the song finds is wrenching her away from life into an inner chaos. She talks to the song's narrator, explains and corrects him. Whatever he witnessed on that occasion took him to further imagined states. To leave it at the seizure undercuts the lyricist's creativity (which is where those first gen JD fans used to leave me cold). The guitar doesn't appear in the arrangement until the end of the first verse when it clanks up through the minor scale. When the bass re-enters with its cooing riff there is a clear sense that for the woman in the song, this thing accosting her feels like it's taking forever, just repeating when she allows it. "And walked upon the edge of no escape and laughed I've lost control."

There's a version recorded later which ended up on the b-side of the Atmosphere single. It's cold as hell and ends with a wall of searing keyboards. I never worked out why they re-recorded it like that. It's from the same session as an instrumental that feels like it continued or emerged from the older song so it might only have been that. There's a mumbled coda that's all but unintelligible. What interests me about it is that for all its stripped back emotion, it only sounds crueller than the Unknown Pleasures version which scrubs up a lot warmer, despite the nightmare of its situation.

Shadowplay is one of the older songs on the record. The version on the Warsaw album is punkier and has a higher pitched Curtis vocal. Here, Martin Hannett has tamed the snotty edge that made it sound like too many other hopefuls and gave it gravitas. When the band kicks in from the slashing ride cymbal and bass hook it's crunching rather than thudding and Curtis' vocal has more confidence and character. Assassins, secret rooms and more despair. Bernard's guitar rises to the end of the track, insisting on single notes played high before a final chord.

Wilderness begins with a gymnastic bass lope before settling into a guitar grind. The singer has travelled far and wide and reports what sound like religious atrocities. A high two-note guitar figure sounds white against a black background. The second verse calls out more misery.

Interzone. A snarling chord riff and a distant scream start this rocker with its call and response vocal. Peter Hook takes the first vocal and Curtis responds, often repeating the initial line. This is another of the songs that sounds like it would be at home as a punk number. Images of violence that might well exist in the title's source, William Burroughs setting for some of Naked Lunch. This was one of the songs the band wrote in the studio when some of the tracks were dropped form the album (another was Candidate) and was very vaguely based on Keith Hudson's Turn the Heater On. 

I Remember Nothing swells up as a formless electronic drone, blostered by a spacey drum pattern, big picked bass notes, more synth and a clicking muted guitar. Suddenly a shattering of glass. Curtis comes in already at ten with the main refrain: "Weeeeeeeee were strangers ... for way too long." Alienation, violence, gaps between people filled with frozen air. The outro continues the drone, spiking, thudding and clanking with more noises of slamming and crashing in a spacious reverb. A few final moments of violence as metal collides with walls and floors. End.

My 1984 had been enjoyable, the complete antithesis of homelife from my undergraduate years with my brother's bad marriage. While that circumstance was good for driving me into my studies and music it wasn't good to come home to. Then that ended and all but myself and another brother were left the next year. I was still able to spend a little money every dole cheque on records and books and Joy Division were among those catch up bands whose records I bought. 

I found this at Skinny's for about $2 and spent the next week living in it. Closer came soon after and then Still. I didn't become one of the uberfans that I'd ridiculed until a few years on and I still can't quite work out why that happened. But back in '85 when the fragments of the previous year's enjoyable lifestyle eventually blew away, I was left feeling flat and the big gloomy notion that that was all my life would be. After three years of ecstatic cultural blitzkrieg it was the path to the mainstream and colourless conformity. I was still writing short fiction and had some ambitions there but no one makes money out of that. In the gap between hanging on to the fun of the early eighties as the mid point was about to click over and absorbing into the Brisbane streetscapes and the revitalising move to Melbourne, Unknown Pleasures made a kind of sense to me. Not a self pitying wallow but a kind of recognisable cultural filter, something that told me I wasn't like the rank and file and could still get something expressive done. 

You give up on such things when you understand how your best efforts cannot match your ambitions. There's no shame in that but unless you have something to break your fall you're going to have a harder time of it. Unknown Pleasures was one of a number of records that gave me that break. Now, if I see the cover image on a T-shirt worn by someone too young to know what it means, I let it pass. And however absurd and self-embarrassing the more extreme fandom redrew them I forgive it all, knowing I once had the judgement to allow a couple of sides of music, a guide to take me by the hand, to keep me from a quiet surrender.

Listening notes: I took the bold and clean hi-res downloads from either Pro Studio Masters or HD-Tracks to guide this post. Utter bliss and not loudness-warred.

KINKS @ 60

A brief tuggle of guitars and drums and the band bashes into Beautiful Delilah. The guitars are hot but clean. It's the vocal that sounds overloaded, a constant rasping growl that could be a young buck's inner monologue or that of some aging lech looking where he shouldn't. This unmelodic assault stretches time for its mere two minutes and wraps around your ears like fine grain sandpaper. That's what most of this album is going to be. It is the sound of a sustained wince.

Not only does this band that has originals on offer, start with a cover of a Chuck Berry song but it's not even frontman Ray Davies singing but his brother Dave. You can tell when, for all his torn tonsil rawness, his "r" that sounds like a "w" plonks him right back down to London and not Tennessee. It really screams ersatz. When the originals turn up, they are just like that with the name Davies on the by line. It sounds like the grubbing square-spectacled record execs of the U.K. scooped up anyone under twenty-five who looked good in a suit and could at least hold an electric guitar, kicked them into a studio and gave them an hour to make a record. 

That, I emphasise, is how it sounds. Stand back, make sure you're not hungover (as this music will punish you in that state), think a little more historically, and you might well hear something you didn't at first, the beginnings of greatness, looking here more like a larval stage of a buzzing insect than a rock band but forming, all the same, right in front of you.

Yes, most of these two sides are rusty, clanking covers and soundalikes. Yes, Shel Talmy had a lot to learn about record production. Yes, this is not a patch on what was to come. No, this was not the last anyone would hear of The Kinks and for good reasons.

I'm going to be selective about the tracks I'll describe on this one as most of them are made of the same adjectives and I don't want to put either of us through that. However, I'd like you to consider what people who bought long playing records back in the '60s expected of them and how they made their way into daily lives.

The music discs that mattered the most in the early '60s were singles, seven inch vinyl platters with one song per side that got played on the radio. These were where bands put anything they called art, the big statements that failed or succeeded which meant the band did either. The Kinks had already flopped with a (with hindsight) horrible version of Long Tall Sally and an under appreciated original called You Still Want Me. The reason this album was made on the Pye label's shilling was the breakthrough of the third single, which we'll get to.

What that meant was that if the singles proved the band to be viable in the market, they go to do an album. What most of them did was a version of their live set. And that is where you get to why this record is so rasping and ugly: this is what The Kinks sounded like live. If you bought it, you bought it for a sound that could get a party dancing to the slamming beats and cut-through vocals of R&B standards. If the originals didn't stop anyone dancing, that was more of a proof of concept than anything. Repeat.

Follow the various threads through to 1965 to find out how albums became something more than this by the mid '60s and you'll see how the LP became an attempted art form. Before then, it was a long ad for live shows or live shows you were too young for.

Also, none of these emulations are slavish recreations of originals. The later '60s were plagued with blues purists whose museumish covers attempted authenticity only to sound more irritatingly British. In the early '60s these bands found their own feet by doing the songs the way they worked at the pubs. 

Then you get to the end of side one and the single that made the difference. If Long tall Sally was weirdly reserved (compare it to the Beatles' screamfest) and You Still Want Me second rate Beatles, You Really Got Me was an explosion.

It starts with a snarling two chord riff, mean as mustard and unstoppable. The emphasis changes as soon as the band kicks in but it's still going. Ray's vocal comes in slyly but changes into earnest with the first rising chord change. A chorus of humming voices starts up and the momentum gathers, hitting the ceiling repeatedly when it leaps up a fourth for the chorus, a raucous shouting of the title three pounding times before a brief relief with a chord one tone down before everything starts again. The next time that happens Dave Davies' solo scratches its way in, scurrying around the room and hissing dissonantly. Back for the verse with a distant piano and the chorus finished with four bamming barre chords. End of side one.

Amp distortion had only ever been accidental on British recordings until that moment when Dave put a little amp through a bigger amp so the stressed output valves of the first one blare out to the mics in front of the second. That's a fuzz pedal by longer means. You can find overdrive on blues records and select  rockabilly sides but even The Beatles only seemed to get to its outer edge (listen to Misery on Please Please Me), remaining hot clean rather than blasting. Dave Davies gets it monstrous, making it huge when matched by the bass. Even now, after decades of evermore refined guitar overdrive, this scratchy early step still thrills. When I went to see Ray Davies and band (not The Kinks) play the Palais down here in Melbourne there were very young ushers dancing to this in the aisles, getting up and into the song's celebration of everything good about being young and ready.

More of the covers and clones populate the second side so the party can just keep going. That is until the penultimate track comes up and we can with hindsight, understand one of Ray Davies' strains as a songsmith at its beginning. Stop Your Sobbing. Ray starts before the band. "it is time for you to stop all of your sobbing". When they come in on the word sobbing it becomes a kind of beatgroup ballad led by Ray's melancholy plea. A second part of the verse calls the others in before Ray repeats the title with a non verbal extension on the last syllable. It feels like whatever began with You Really Got Me has ended crushingly and his narrator is fronting up with a kind of tough aloofness but knows it's a see through mask. The change for the middle eight with its admission that he really wants to hold her and conquer her sadness and would if it weren't too late. The music of this section is, however small its scale, momentus, showing what drama can come from a slight rhythm change and plainer chords. So it's on to the fade and the next one who really gets him. Repeat. The sense of this inevitability is the other side of swinging London, the one that happens in all those kitchen sink epics of the East End and Ray knows it.

From this song came the serious pausing for thought audible in See My Friends, Waterloo Sunset, Days, Shangri-La and so many many more. The page representing The Kinks in the Nik Cohn and Guy Peellaert picture book Rock Dreams, after the louche fantasies of The Beatles, Elvis and the Stones, is a back street of London at night. Ray stands beside a woman with a pram, they are both looking at the viewer. Stop your sobbing, there's more.

The album plays out with what was the last song favourite of every R&B combo in the greater city of London. Got Love if You Want it was the cue for a rave up jam and experiments with dynamics. That's what happens here. What's up next? Oh, there's this new one from The Yardbirds!

Think of these two pinnacles on this LP. Let them stay visible over the duty-bound live set chestnuts that make the mood, remember that, equipment limitations aside (Abbey Road this wasn't) these two sides of songs were pretty much exactly what The Kinks wanted out of their first LP, something you could dance to and keep dancing to. Most bands, if they got as far as this, put it out, split up and lived on memories. If you revisit this you will start noticing the vocal arrangements, use of piano, growing awareness of why songs work, and get a sense that Ray Davies knew the music his friends could make and took it there.

BEATLES FOR SALE @ 60

Ok, so you're in the biggest band in the known Milky Way and you began the year getting bigger by cracking America, getting a future-proof movie done and the first all original LP. Time for a break. Sorry, gotta keep it up because tomorrow all that news will be wrapping fish and chips. Right, so in the middle of interminable world tours, loss of sleep, finding out if you can actually have too much sex, playing the same set day after day to crowds who scream too loudly to hear a note and your record company wants another worldwide hit single and an album. Easy. Just cancel some of the dates and make some room on the timeline for songcraft and more learning studio magic.

Sorry, the tours are top priority. Ok, we'll tour. Sorry, the records are top priority. So, they write in hotel rooms and record when they get back to the U.K. and at some point there's enough for an LP. The Australian release of this record was reissued in 1977 along with all the pre-Pepper albums and the cover art was a repeat of the local original: a photo of each member at a concert, playing their instruments against a canary yellow background. They look like they're having a blast. The original UK Parlophone release, however, is more like reality. Against a cold season woodland backdrop, the four lads are rugged up against the chill and they look like they haven't slept in years. Even Paul looks ordinary. On the back, it's the same but from a high angle. There's a gatefold with the characteristically daggy blurb and some touring photos, one live and one posed. All of it says one thing: we're famous but we're tired.

The thing is, that's not what you hear. Lennon's voice starts No Reply and it's in full definition. There's a rasp but it's style rather than exhaustion. "This happened once before..." On the last syllable the band come in with John's acoustic strumming out the front. The narrator knows that his object is home and that when he calls, her flatmates lie about her being out. He's seen her. The verses are descending melodies which vary from angry to weary but end with solid harmony flashes of passion before calming to an adaptation of the opening tune. The middle eight carries on the tradition taken very high on Hard Day's Night in that they are melodic and harmonic showcases that could only be at that part of the song. In this one ("If I were him...") the Lennon McCartney interplay is stunning. It only happens once and feels more dramatic for that. The son ends on the anguished repeat of the title in harmony blasts. We could be unkind and call this an ode to stalking but, more genuinely, it's a perfect understanding of the sense of powerlessness felt by the rejected one and the fade of his futility is touching.

I'm a Loser begins with those words sung in bright harmony through three different intervals before the line, " and I'm not what I appear to be," leads into the Dylanesque masochism of the song. The lines tying it to losing a love to someone more adept at it seem there to seal the Beatles deal on it but the body of the number is self accusation and pain. The melody is sweet but Lennon's vocal is raw. Paul's high harmony soften the piece a little but it's mind is made up. Harrison is appealing in this one with a range of country licks bending out of his big clean Gretsch. 

Baby's in Black changes the time signature to a waltz. A twanging figure from George and they're straight into the harmonies. An acoustic rustle underneath and electric bends above a fairly busy tom tom-led performance from Ringo. The melody is quite playful and sweet for a song about a woman who is either in mourning or dressing like a black card and forbidding communication. The middle eight of this song is so delicious that it has to come back after the solo where Paul's soaring descant drives the lyrics: "Oh how long will it take, till she sees the mistake..." The final verse features an opening of the bed track with deft work on ride cymbals as Harrison plays the lowest notes he can and putting the Bigsby whammy bar to great effect. Short and utterly delectable.

And that's it, almost. The rest is covers done with varying skill and effect as well as some fine originals that feel dropped in at random. Rock and Roll Music is an energetic Chuck Berry number that's fine but outstays its welcome. Mr. Moonlight starts with a magnificent introductory scream from Lennon before it descends into the kind of guff that home organ salesmen would trot out to nail the sale. Kansas City is big and perky and feels like McCartney's replacement for the bellowing scream of Long Tall Sally only in another song. Buddy Holly's Words of Love does benefit from some cooling harmonies. Ringo gets to go all Carl Perkins with Honey Don't which George garnishes with some plunky rockabilly twangs. He gets the last word with a second Perkins standard featuring some vocal delay that was dated even for then but some fine chiming guitar licks.

This is all Hamburg and Cavern fare. Six out of fourteen songs on a fourth album that followed one of only originals. It smacks of desperation. While the rest of the originals are not up to the standard of that mighty opening hat trick, they're still pretty good. I'll Follow the Sun is a gentle whimsical Paul. Eight Days a Week is big Beatles jangle and harmony (another fine middle eight). Every Little Thing has real charm (love the tympanum in the chorus) but it runs out quickly. I Don't Want to Spoil the Party is a good stab at a kind of commercial Nashville toe tapper with another story of being on the outer (did ever such creatively and socially rich kids cry so poor?) What You're Doing is ok but feels last minute and undercooked. Eight originals but only three break through. These sessions were when the band also recorded the single I Feel Fine with its opening feedback and heavily doctored blues riff (well beyond what some people report as plagiarism), latin drumming, and business-meaning vocals. But they didn't like putting singles on albums. Why? The U.S, record company Capitol not only doubled up on the singles, they shortened the running time of each record so they could release more with the same price tag. I like the U.K. better, too, but if any Beatles album could have done with the concurrent singles on the LP it's this one.

Then again, neither I Feel Fine nor the b-side She's a Woman make a good fit on Beatles for Sale, even if you scrap Mr. Moonlight and, maybe, Everybody's Trying to be my Baby, it would sound as force-meat as the American albums (Meet the Beatles is a solid exception to this, just to say). What we got was almost the end of the early stage show. The next album, Help, added two more but these were well part of the stadium Beatles set, however goofy they sounded beside the other songs on that album.

Beatles for Sale does one thing well, though, it advances the scope of the bands recorded sound. There is a lot more space around the core of each of these songs. They are also more dynamic in the arrangements, allowing for a relief from the big shouty choruses and bluster so that John's lines about trying to telephone in No Reply after the huge middle eight sound like he's exhausted. This aids the song immeasurably: if it had just been played at the same intensity all through and Lennon had sung the lines like that it would have sounded like a bad take. As it is, it draws us in to the centre of the character's crushing sadness ... in a light and boppy Beatles song.

I used to skip a lot when listening to this one when I first got it. The covers felt old and stodgy and seemed to rub themselves off against the frailer of the originals. The sleeve art with its loud yellow field and old style photos of the band also felt a little senior. Where A Hard Day's Night pounds confidence and creativity, jingling with twelve strings and sophisticated vocal harmony, Beatles for Sale feels like a step over a cliff edge. The best songs here point to the next step which, at the end of the following year would sound as joyous as Rubber Soul and leave the old band back in the beer-stinking bar where the covers should have stayed. Could a couple of strong EPs been put out instead? Not when the album cost more per unit and the monster single compelled its purchase. Whatever other qualities that might now allow us to prise this disc from its commercial purposes, there is one thing it does tell us: it says, "we're shagged out but still moving. Keep listening."

THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE @ 45

If you've heard Cars from this album (and hours of hits and memories radio), you already know this record's sonic pallet: a crunching rhythm clanks below an ethereal screaming synthesiser playing a cooling modal motif overhead. Between the two, the voice of Gary Numan, melodic in shape but emotionally flat. Repeated listens will distinguish one arrangement from the next and the emotion in the vocal will advance. But it will take those listens.

For brevity, I'm going to refer to the rhythm tracks of this album as the machine. This will alleviate having to repeat the description of the beds of almost every song on this record. So one song gives way to another and the machine is already working. That kind of thing.

Airlane

A slight wisp high on the synthesiser and the machine starts with a clanking rhythm track with the wisp becoming an industrial scream overhead. The motif is altered here and there and several gear shifts and turns but the process keeps working. This is tinned Gary Numan and is as luscious as it is cold. Not just emotionally static, physically cold, as though the aircon has been turned a degree too low. It's an instrumental but with this artist there is no tokenism to it as there would be with any other rock artist. Well, maybe that should read any other rock artist before him. This album opener from the last year of the '70s, released on the brink of the term post punk gaining currency in the consumer base, is of a time when the demarcation between mainstream and alternative was essential. Here is an instrumental told in bold strokes by an artist that, be the stadium ever so big, was not going to ask his audience if they felt alright, or if they could clap their hands (mind you, some of these tracks almost force you to do that). If you are not with this record by the end of its few minutes' duration, you might as well take it off and try something else. When this asks you in, it will lock the door behind you.

Metal

The machine kicks into operation. A hammering synth snare. Then the whole floor, bass, kit and rhythm, starts. Numan comes in as an android. It observes the ways of his engineers as they fit its circuitry and polish his outer finish. A solid synth wail rises and spread. "Picture this, if I could make the change, I'd love to pull the wires from the wall..." Perhaps his assemblers are aware of its aspirational daydreams. The song stops developing after the last line about confusing love with need. And then a solid electronic drone plays over and then through the closing rhythm. No more riffs for this operative. It's all down to the process completing. That's what this sounds like. A quick scare of a thought and then it's back to the assembly and programming. And the process just continues.

Complex

The formula is put on hold for this one. A viscous soup of electric slides and piano, the filters on the synthesiser frequently teeter into distortion. And then a mighty figure rises in the keyboards and a voice we'll hear again on the record, viola. The figure is intense, heartrending is a way difficult to define. The vocal has a familiar broken dejection with halting lines about betrayal and isolation. With the perfect blend of bowed strings and synthesised string sections, Numan's plaintive voice and the big space created around it, this remains the most beautiful and affecting track he has ever done.

 

Films

A drum pattern is joined by a perky bass rhythm before the scream riff enters, expanding the scale to airliner hangar size. The vocals enter with a statements of approval or disapproval about elements of cinema like the film itself, the actors etc. but reverses it with paranoid utterances about being exposed. We're not talking movies so much as living as though we move through our own or, even worse, someone else's. As the ugly beautiful synth riff soars and takes control we are yet again in a song-borne world where one change of perspective in a line will alter our own movement through a song. One of the most epically industrial of Numan tracks.

M.E.

Numan's vocal is the highest on the album or anything on Replicas or the self-titled debut. Clear, clean notes that describe arcs of melodic phrases. The lines are brief: "And M.E. I eat dust!" "I'll only fade away and I hate to fade alone." The title is an abbreviation of Mechanical Engineering. The suggested narrative is an old sci-fi staple in which a massive computer fixes humanity's problems by getting rid of the humans. The riff will be known to more recent generations as sampled by Basement Jaxx in Where's Your Head At? Here, it is one of the machine tracks, driving down as the warm lower synthesisers rise around it. And then, unexpectedly, in a reiteration after the first vocals, the riff is augmented by plucked viola strings, one of the woodiest and most human-like sounds available, adding a blunt texture but also a real fingertip on string. In a later instrumental passage the viola adds Celtic trills and melismas to the phrase adding a palpable yearning to the sound. The electronic keyboards rise to a height of modal figuring as the machine gears up again, alone, screaming over the wasteland. 

Tracks

A pealing piano figure underlaid with a gurgling synth bass. Numan comes in with a few lines before the machine bursts into gear, the drums catch up and the beat assumes a chug beneath a synth wailing the opening piano figure. In full force, the vocals tell of a swap between the narrator and an older person who then can experience both the past and present. The vocal for the full band body of the song is almost as high as M.E. and just as plaintive. It sounds like the experiment was a disaster. And perhaps time itself remains to witness, ending as a trickling piano arpeggio played high and softly. 

Observer

This is almost entirely instrumental as a high flying keyboard scream flies over and around the parts of the machine as it works and crunches. In this case the figure in the lower instruments is so close to the break figure in Cars that I still think it's an extended album version of that song starting up. But the synth scream flies in and it's its own number. After an intro that goes for half the track it's a surprise to hear the vocal come in. A plain lyric about people watching might, in the right context, be a sinister confession but all we have is the setting of 

Conversation

The riff is built around a brief trill and feels like it's going to be the same all through. When the vocals start it is a series of clipped statements referring to the failure of communication through incapacity. Is Numan referring to his Asperger's? The lines are stubbornly brief and the breaks between them increasingly elaborate, with a deal of warmth added through the violin and viola. The music, the invention internally is busier than his verbal communication could ever be until it swamps the words with a tide of swoonable synthesis soaring above the machines. This is more an acknowledgement of the condition than a cure but its depiction is oddly glorious, controlled, owned.

Cars

People whose parents weren't born when this was released as a single know this song. It gets everywhere, movies, commercials, daytime radio, clubs and deep inside remixes. In 1979 it screamed through the airwaves with a weird grooviness built of machine perfect playing and simple but commanding motifs. If we'd been wowed into silence by Donna Summer's I Feel Love and then shivered at side two of Bowie's Low, we might have just made it past the industrial architecture of Are Friends Electric but nothing prepared us for this hymn to the car as a place to isolate oneself from everyone else as it coursed through the night with lights as white as the elongated keyboards howling above the machine. If it came on the radio as you were getting yourself to a party, your night immediately felt important, not just fun.

Engineers

A theatrical snare roll settles into a locomotive rattle as the machine grunts and clunks. Numan sings high of his and his colleagues' lot as they maintain the lifestyle of the world from a system of conveyor belts underground. "All that we know is hate and machinery. We're engineers." It's the final track and ends as uniform as the opening instrumental. The main riff is more complex than usual and thickens over the top of the machine until that continues  to a finish on the snare drum and a wet, electronic sprinkler. End.

The cover art is of its time but out of time. A reimagined Magritte painting replaces the glowing head of the suited man at the table with Numan's own, eye makeup intact but now in a 1930s style double breasted suit. He sits looking with a worried face at a small pyramid that glows from the top down. The album is one of exploration of the theme of humans and technology dealing with each other in the world to come already beginning as he recorded. Taking inspiration from cinema, Phillip K. Dick and industrial advertising, he filtered his inspirations through his first year of fame with Asperger's. The title is Freud's concept of the Id's drive for self gratification and the forces (largely internal) that seek to prevent its expression.

This record took me a long time to really fold myself into. I picked out the more melodically pleasing tracks and let the others fade into disuse, at first. But then, all I had was a cassette copy so I'd put it on for study and it worked its way. I came to a few conclusions about it, especially in light of knowing it's Tubeway Army predecessor, Replicas.

If you are unused to these sounds and find them quaint and samey you should pause for thought. Yes, this album finds a formula and sticks to it as though the system that it supports would collapse without perfect observance. And you might think, that's not much to build a creative project on. Then, all you will need to do is find an album by an old blues master. It's not the difference between those classic guitar tones and chord progressions played organically that you should be hearing, it's the adherence to a grammar that must be maintained for the music to be blues. Same thing. 

Gary Numan did not emerge from Kraftwerk. Even the cinematic soundscapes of Tangerine Dream could not claim him. Gary Numan came from punk. The self-titled Tubeway Army debut features sparse synthesisers, usually helping out around the rhythm guitars and bass as texture. By the time Replicas was released the guitars were ditched and the approach sealed. Icy screams of synthesis screamed in flight overhead as a factory filled with perfectly maintained automation clanked, hummed and manufactured on the floor below, in a wash of blinding antiseptic fluorescence. Gary Numan made this setting and walked  through it, comfortably at home. 

Here and there he daydreams like any assembly worker, of being a machine himself, just cognisant enough to know he is a robot, or someone altogether more fleshly who prefers the protection of a synthesised skin. Stepping from the thick barre chord riffs of the first album through to this muscular and industrially tooled world building Gary Numan made himself instantly recognisable to the decades to come, needing only know that adventurous listeners of the future would pause and understand.

Listening notes: I listened to the superb hi-res flac downloaded from a online retail outlet. No loudness war compression, here, just the big airy white light soundscapes of the original vision. However, I got a lot of background from the booklet in the 1998 rerelease from Beggar's Banquet. I've found out that the mix on all CD releases of this album are unsullied by loudness mixing so, any you can find will sound very good.

QUEEN II @ 50

Second albums are always interesting. Flop or flight the effort put in alone compels. The number of one and done bands supports this. Can we easily imagine a second real Sex Pistols record or a follow up to Colossal Youth? Even if it is easy it is not always fun. Imagining a megastar band that collapsed after their first album and you have a forgotten Beatles, Rolling Stones and many, many more. All those bands who make it through the great filter of rock stardom get a toast with something bubby and a stab at immortality. So, how did Queen do?

The opening track Procession does a lot of the talking in answer. It's an instrumental made of a kick drum and layers of guitars played in ways they normally are not. Brian May makes his guitars sound like brass instruments and organs. Mostly this is done through volume swells to remove the sharp sound of a pick on a string. Also, he puts the signal through heavy distortion which adds a lot of sustain. We're not meant to think it's actually a procession band, we're meant to marvel at the ingenuity. And here's the thing: it's way more than smart, the music in Procession is emotive. If we're in for prog rock on this LP it will be as we've never experienced it before. It's almost over before it begins but it ends with the figure that the next song will progress to.

A slight mist of guitar beeps from the end of the track leads us to Freddie Mercury's piano arpeggio which ends with a giant power chord. A galloping guitar opens to another aural vista and Mercury's pure vocals in high register begin the direct contact with the audience. "A word in your ear from father to son". This gives way to the verse that will repeat around excursions into celestial vocal harmonies and hard metal workouts and impassioned pleas. The band is throwing everything they have at the wall and creating something far more focussed and deliberate than anything on their debut. By the time Mercury sings in falsetto, "the air you breathe I live to give you"  you'll be welling up. If this is metal it has never been so poignant, if it is prog it has never been this affecting. A choral chant and hard rock backing play to the fade. A high flute like guitar triad fades up.

And then that is joined by a series of weeping glissandi on the same tone introduce White Queen (As it Began). A deep acoustic strums chords under the vocal which is gentle but melancholy. After an opening lament the song begins with a glacial arpeggio played through a flanger. A courtier's account of waiting for the queen of the title progresses confessorially until a mass of glittering harmonies end the verse before a harder, impassioned restatement of the opening phrases thunders out. A sitar like solo later and the passion reignites with an outburst of new melodic material and more orchestral guitar before a final choral outburst and a gentle coda with only voice and acoustic guitar. If you know your Pre-Raphaelite painting this is what one might sound like.

Unlike the three previous tracks Some Day One Day has a clean beginning with sprightly acoustic chords and a vocal from Brian May who supports his pleasant but lower tier vocal with more guitar arrangements in a love song of polite longing. Faint praise? Well we've just had two of the bands most impressive recordings to that time in their career. The nice number is thoroughly enjoyable without ever wafting into filler territory.

Another clean start for the Roger Taylor song The Loser in the End whose crashing drums tighten to the opening line, "Mama's got a problem ..." in mighty metal voice. It's so powerful we don't have time to acknowledge that the guitars supporting it are almost entirely acousitc. There's plenty of brash stadium rock to follow and it feels almost a relief for the band just to rock out to one of Roger's barnstormers. Mind you, the lyric about sparing a thought for the mums left behind by their hedonistic kids is poignant despite the Zeppish strut.

While the first side was almost all Brian May's songs, the second is entirely given over to Freddie's flights and showstoppers. Ogre Battle begins with a partially backwards playing of the song's final moments before smashing into one of the most authentic speed metal guitar workouts before the eighties adopted the approach. If the choral harmonies of the previous side leaned toward the sublime these scream out like side characters from Dante's Inferno. Freddie leads us through a folkloric episode  of breathless speed and imagery. It ends in partial reverse as it started and the wind effects are cut into by a persistent ticking which brings us to...

The Fairyfeller's Master Stroke which starts with a manic minor key chordal figure on a harpsichord before the big Queen choir and guitar orchestra kicks in. Then it's full steam medievalism of the kind in Richard Dadd's painting which gave the song its title. The song is not just a catalogue of the odd characters in the picture but a big, rich, bombastic celebration of their Tolkeinesque community. We end on a rushed harmonised final description as a trio of chords gives way to ...

Nevermore begins with a grand piano arpeggio that bears Freddie's mock melancholy song of love and loss with some big harmonies sounding operatically and trading speaker positions. Big and gorgeous if slight by comparison but you would never skip it.

A clean start for The March of the Black Queen on piano with some guitar stings before an explosion into harmony and the rest is not going behave. While the six minute opus changes every few seconds there is enough grounding repetition to keep the constant vocal and instrumental pyrotechnics on course rather than have it collapse under its own weight. If anything this is the parent of the more disciplined Bohemian Rhapsody and it is not hard to think that the later top 40 epic would have reached its clean lines and clipped humour without this near free for all earlier. Its final chord gives way to ...

The ringing acoustic guitars of Funny How Love Is with a throat lacerating high vocal by Freddie form the equivalent of Some Day One Day on the previous side (more on such soon). It's joyful and ringing with perfect voices and a constant shuffling rhythm, neither claiming higher purpose nor needing to. 

The Seven Seas of Rhye bangs in with the same kind of energetic piano figure the Elton John would use the following year to make the Who's Pinball Wizard his own. A powerchord later and the galloping number rushes into the most conventional mid-seventies radio song on the record. The lyric is the same kind of play upon character types that went into most of the songs on this side so while it might be of its time it's not Tiger Feet or Come and be in My Gang unless you can imagine those redone by Noel Coward. And then it ends in a crash that is immediately swamped by a pub singalong version of I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside. It conventionality bringing the unconventionality of the rest of the record into sharp focus ... and with a smile. This was the band's first charting single.

The debut album had charted within the top 40 but not spectacularly. Queen II was begun very shortly after the delayed debut LP and, by the band's insistence, under easier conditions (extended studio rather than the borrowed minutes and offcuts of other bands like the first one). With loosened belts and a set of songs they were eager to experiment with, Queen managed to make a far more orderly and signature work instead of getting lazier with it. They gave their record company a long player like no other on the market and a top ten charter (number five, below such giants as Band on the Run and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road!). Queen had arrived and distinctly on their own terms. From Brian May's extra ordinary guitar orchestrations, vocal harmonies to floor their contemporaries and songs that ranged from sublime to infectiously insane, the band was set and in such a profound way that they got through the onslaught of punk with barely a scratch. This album and its success gave them that.

It would have been late 1976. The song Bohemian Rhapsody had wowed everyone of us over the Christmas holidays and drove us to buy our own copies of the album without bothering with the cassette undermarket. It was straight to the LP with the cover art, lyrics and winking comments about Bechstein debauchery and nobody playing synthesisers. Owning the artefact by this band that had shown up underneath the elder sibling canon and who were ours to cherish, was to feel like starting on the ground floor of Coca Cola or space travel.

But it wasn't quite the ground floor, it was the band's fourth album. Over the months from the beginning of 1976 to its end and beyond, I looked for, found and bought all of the earlier ones, in order of discovery. Queen, the debut, was all British rock goodness, if uneven and occasionally messy. Sheer Heart Attack was accomplished and presented the formula for future Queen albums. But Queen II was different. When I bought the U.K. copy from Ken Hurford's Import Records around the corner, I had to wait to hear it as we were in between styli at the big four speaker (but not quadrophonic) hifi Dad had built. That was maybe at the end of the day when he got back from work. Until then I took it over to Nanna's to pore over while digging into pikelets with cream and cumquat marmalade and tea with lemon served in glass. Alright, alright, I just thought you might like the detail.

So, there was the cover. Black on the outside with the band members heads in chiaroscuro lighting just like the opening of the Bohemian Rhapsody video. The title, an art nouveau font in white in a corner, carried over in style to the rear cover which listed the tracks over a more elaborate coat of arms featuring a swan, fairies, lions and other heraldic inventions which looked medieval as imagined by the late nineteenth century. Also, the sides weren't simply one and two but Side White and Side Black. Opening the gatefold showed the band posed in the same kind of rough diamond arrangement but entirely in white (and the drummer and bass player in reverse places which would have them the same as the front cover if you could see through it).  The other half of the gatefold was a repeat of the back only, black on white with various production notes and the statement: "And nobody played the synthesiser ... again."

Dad got home with the stylus and I put the disc on, poring over the lyrics and marvelling at the sounds. As a kid whose first fandom was classical and previous, the record spoke to me directly, it's virtuosity and imagination was like reading the best of kids books from when I was much younger. Like those, it gave me pictures and daydreams.