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.