My 1985

View from my balcony at Bangalla St Auchenflower, taken 1985

In January I boarded the Sunlander to Brisbane for the last time. I didn't mark the occasion with any particular note as I didn't realise that the rail service would be retired and I wouldn't set foot in Townsville again for almost four decades. I tried not to think of the reduced purpose there was of my staying in the Auchenflower place or even Brisbane. I felt directionless. No uni, no band. Things were going to change.

Everyone had moved out except my brother who didn't bother with the rent any longer as he had no justification and knew I could just move out. He hadn't stopped being a dick. That was for life. The quieter house felt good in that it was peaceful but also empty. Everyone else had moved out to get away from Stephen. Fair enough.

I kept writing the book and tried to keep in touch with the people I knew at Uni. I kept writing songs though I had no idea what I'd do with them.

Over the enxt months, my parents would come down to work on the house and be somewhere else. I think both had retired and were wondering if they wanted to sell the place or even move into it. It worried me. I was still kicking the can down the road. Dad would get to work on the things that needed attention. I woke to the thunder of his hammer on the roof. He replaced the boring white door with a carved one and fixed the wobbly front steps and everything that could got painted. I did the balcony outside my room.

The songs I'd written were burning a hole in my creative pockets. I went to the cinema one evening and Greg spotted me from the street. After catching up I asked him if he'd be into helping out with them. He was keen. We practiced a few and organised with Pat Ridgewell to use his 4-track reel to reel studio under his house in Taringa. They worked as well as they were going to and we took tapes away. 

Margot came over one day and announced she was moving to Melbourne for a job at Latrobe Uni. Would I be interested in starting a share house with her? Dad stepped up his hints about how intolerable life at number 24 was going to get including me giving up my room. I had to move out somewhere. Melbourne sounded great so, after a lot less dithering in the conversation, I said yes and, after she left, I started planning it.

I bought three teachests through the Trading Post and filled them with books and everything else I was taking. (check diaries for dates)

As to music, I still listened to 4ZZZ and 4EB. I kept up with whatever TV brought news (Rockarena was a favourite) but I felt a decreasing affinity with what was appearing on them. I noted REM but was puzzled as to The Smiths' popularity (still am). A vein of electronic music was thickening and heating to enter the culture but it left me cold. At twenty-three, I was feeling old. I was listening to the songs I'd done at Pat's place as though they were golden oldies.

Then again there were some songs to note.

Live it Up had Mental as Anything joining the OzRock battalions, crossing lines that didn't seem visible anymore. Would I Lie to You continued Eurhytmics' regugitation of Sweet Dreams. Walking on Sunshine sounded like it came from the late '70s. Like a Virgin and 1999 proved I was right in my indifference to both Prince and Madonna. She Sells Sanctuary did sound good with its big riff and old school rock vocals. In Between Days made the Cure sound like New Order and I didn't get why. Nick Cave's Tupelo was intriguing but not played enough. Echo and the Bunnymen brought out no albums but the great single (especially as a 12 inch) in Bring on the Dancing Horses. Talking Heads seemed like they were just being absorbed by the mainstream with things like Road to Nowhere. Simple Minds did someone else's song for a movie and it was a stunner (Don't You Forget About Me). We Are The World was a lousy song in comparision to the U.K. one for the same cause but it was easier to sing the chorus and got to more people. I started watching Live Aid but woke up when it was over. Remember that crack about The Smiths? I did like How Soon is Now. Bittersweet was the Hoodoo Gurus best. 

Dire Straights did an oafish song called Money for Nothing and I have cause to recall it. I was, by September, ready to the trek south to Melbourne. I called my father who was happy for me, venturing away from the family dependency. When I asked him for money he made the usual noises about having none but asked how much. I said $500. He laughed warmly and told me how to take receipt of it through the bank. I knew I should have asked for more.

The bus left frorm Queen St. Stephen and a few of the people form the '84 house saw me off. And off I was. The bus took over a day to reach Melbourne and that's how long I had to listen to the first two tracks of the Dire Straits album Brothers in Arms which begins with Money for Fucking Nothing. Two yobbos who spoke in grunts and mumbles in the seat in front of me were the perps. They even mentioned that they were headed for North Melbourne which is where my friend James lived. I lived a few uneasy hours imagining them seeing me on the street. I hate those two songs to this day.

But then we crossed the Victorian border and charged along to the outskirts. The city's older look beguiled me adn I couldn't stop beaming. Finally, we taxied into the terminal in a massive spring downpour. James appeared at my shoulder as I got my luggage. We embraced and he drove me to his place where I'd be staying for a while as Margot and I went house hunting on the weekends. He reminded me that I owed him a bottle of bourbon which we picked on the way. We drank. A lot. And at one point we walked to Carlton where I had my first Melbourne coffee. It was cold and rainy and it felt like a city. I was home.

THE BEATLES' RUBBER SOUL @ 60

The sharp treble of the opening riff of this album tells us about the album we're about to hear. Cheeky bluesy bends lead into a loping circular riff on the guitars and bass. The vocals are strict parallel fifths and resist easy identification of which of your favourite Beatles is singing. This is a proto-funk workout and you're being asked to dance as sleazily to it as you can. The chorus brings in more swagger with a piano filling in with a rise and fall to and from a seventh. A boy is told by a girl that she wants to be a movie star and the quickest he can get is to offer to be her chauffeur. She accepts, even though, in the killer final verse, that she doesn't even have a car. Across the decades, that's still funny.

But while it's not what you would call a career change into comedy, it fulfils the notion growing in the culture that an album can be a multifaceted statement from performers who could do the lot. The Beach Boys had already released their Party! album, a set of covers (including Beatle songs) with chatter and laughter flown in during the mix. Drive My Car isn't quite that but it was pointing to something that they had an increasing lean toward: variety. It was a Fabs song, no question, but its "beep beep yeah" ultrapop harmonies were both moderne and showbiz.

Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) changes things immediately with a gentle acoustic strum and a beguiling melody which Lennon then obliges by singing. "I once had a girl or should I say she once had me." I wonder what the contemporary listener made of the strange bright twanging of George Harrison's sitar as it echoed Lennon's vocal lines. The lyric, like the previous one, is a narrative. He wanders home with a woman from a club or a party, they drink wine and chat until the morning but she makes it clear that he's not welcome in her bed. The next morning he burns the fancy wood of the title to burn the place down. It's not quite the joke of Drive My Car and its subtlety is snide. It took a schoolfriend of mine to suggest the meaning of the last line before anything like it occured to me.

You Won't See Me Feels different from anything earlier. The piano and organ are pushed forward and rhythmic and the guitars are small scratchy bites in the distance. A very active bass holds the ballast as the chords go up the stairs, back down and back up with a sturdy forward motion. The song also speeds up as it goes along. It's a Paul song, one of his disgruntled boyfriend numbers (The Night Before, Another Girl etc.) but it moves like a gleaming diary. It's melodic, cool, bright with doowop harmonies but he's telling her to act her age. It's meant as a quirk-of-love number but just comes across as a report by a contractor. It might be softer in texture and more cuddly but really, it's not that far from what Gang of Four made of the same theme.

Nowhere Man starts with three-part harmony. They would die before the admission but it's an approach for more expected of The Hollies (more on them in a bit) with the vocals pressed into glittering light as chords. John's bright lament speaks of a man without purpose or form, a hollow vessel. Lennon claimed this as a self-description but it could easily apply to any of the bright young things they collided with in Swinging London Clubland. He understands this all too well and appends, "isn't he a bit like you and me?" The middle eight sees the vocals bifurcate between Lennon's gentle croon and the others applying more of the doowop goodness. The guitar solo is actually a dual attack, two of the new Stratocasters with as much treble as was permitted by the International Ear Safety Commission as Lennon's and Harrison's guitars, already on the piercing bridge pickups were put through several channels in series to defeat everything under 1khz and advance everything above. I'm guessing about that but if you know the song, you know. The beautiful arpeggiated figure ends on a triplet down to the lowest G and is capped a silver bell like harmonic, one of the gentler innovations by the band. The final repeated line of, "making all his nowhere plans for nobody" is topped by MacCartney way above everyone. Ten years later, Queen would sign their names to this approach.

George had two numbers on Help and he has two here but there's a difference. While the Help songs are fine examples of mid-'60s they pretty much just take their place on their sides. Rubber Soul was already proving to be a major shift and the third songwriter needed more to compete with. His first was this, Think For Yourself. A thick fuzzbass leads chromatically from G to Am. Dm to Bb and so on. George didn't know the rules and just threw the chords together because they sounded good that way. It's why his debut Don't Bother Me is more lively and driven than either of the Help songs which were written more conventionally. Think For Yourself seems to constantly change its footing yet stays solid. The chorus ("do what you wanna do ...") has a James Bond ring to it and punches home the message to do what it says in the title instead of flailing into destruction. If You Won't See Me was coldly bitchy, this is brutal. George's droning solo vocal set in bright harmony backing helps the medicine go down.

The Word is more contemporary funk with a more controlled but still complicated guitar/bass figure than Drive My Car. A falsetto harmony tells us to hear the word that's so fine, it's sunshine, it's the word love. Lennon's solo verses sound like confessions of life before and after knowing the word before the others come in. While I can appreciate the proto hippy message, and the music which is sublime, this always sounds like a commercial to me. I never skip it but I never play it for its own sake.

Michelle rounds off side one with a thick Eurovision croon from Paul that, with his characteristic deft handling of minor chords, has a beguiling dusk by the sea romance to it rather than the IloveYouloveEverybody'sTruelove boy girl songs they made themselves famous with. It features a curly guitar solo with the tone knob all the way to zero for a continental jazzy touch. I'm saying all this but the thing is beautiful.

Side two opens with the Ringo number. As with the cover version of Act Naturally on Help, this original (Lennon, McCartney and Starkey who said he contributed about five words) has a pop country flavour. Big bright harmony choruses with solo vocal verses and a few downmixed asides to help the hoedown gallop. It's ok. 

Girl, on the other hand, isn't ok. Musically, it's outstanding: finely honed progressions and light strumming with a slow folk feel as Lennon recounts his tale of unrequited devotion. The middle eight shifts up a few steps with an intense minor passage as the backing vocals sing the word tit rythmically in falsetto. The chorus of, "ah girl," is puctuated with the kind of loud inhalations that would have otherwise been edited from the mix. They sound like long tokes by a broken lover telling his lot. Surprising us with a kind of Greek folk passage at the end of dual guitars plucked like bozoukis that takes us far further in thatn we expected to go before lightening back up for the chorus to fade.

I'm Looking Through You is another Paul as aggrieved boyfriend but this time it's a jaunty folksy number that screams into mid-decade pop for the chorus. Ringo reputedly taps on a matchbox for the rhythm. The trebly guitar from most of the rest of the album is back. A middle eight sounds like Paul doing folk the way he did bluegrass in I've Just Seen a Face. It's songs like this, though, that, as they push the band forward through contemporary pop to heights, where it's important to recall that these songs were penned by twenty-somethings whose burgeoning control of their lives could get shirtfronted by their still developing emotions. "And you're down there!" screams Paul.

In My Life is one of the most poignant Beatles songs. So many of the tricks of the trade the writers had so far amassed are here including perfect placement of minor to major juxtapositions so that they just sound natural rather than overly dramatic, judicious use of harmony vocal and double tracked solo lines. For such an aching and gentle song it's suprising to hear only electric guitars and played so sparsely and exactly. George Martin's celebrated faux Elizabethan solo (achieved by playing at one speed and inserting it at another)  charms wihout effort and the repeated  guitar figure that plays with the translucent thirds is gorgeous. Is this a young person projecting himself into age or just one discovering a premature nostalgia? On the surface it's a love song that lists the treasures of memory as little compared to his current love. This works prefectly well but there's a lurking doubt working. Lennon's final bare falsetto of the refrain can send shivers. 

Wait is a leftover from the Help sessions and added as filler. It's fine with a lot of good volume pedal, harmonies and guitar rtones but its stop/start structure still bothers me. It feels like it never quite takes off.

George's second serving, If I Needed Somone, is a shimmering display of harmony and the last whole song 12 string showcase he would present. He happily confessed that he adapted the main riff from The Byrd's Bells of Rhymney but after the opening few notes the two figure diverge. The song is George solo for standout lines but mostly the same kind of tight and bright harmonies we've been getting this outing. Lyrically it's like a nice version of Don't Bother Me, assuring the girl he'll let her know and first if he ever finds himself lonely and miserable. I wouldn't buy that either but it does at least have thering of honesty. (The Hollies released this as a single the same day as Rubber Soul was released. It charted respectably but George, while accepting the first charting of any song he wrote, and the royalties that followed, called the recording rubbish, as though done by session musicians. A public spat ensued. It's a fine recording of an arrangement near identical to the one here.)

Last and worst is John's Run For Your Life, one of the many from his Beatles catalogue that he largely disowned. You can hear why. An aggressive acoustic strum is joined by the band (including a riff on that wicked Strat bridge pickup). It's a great folk rock groove. But then the words kick in. "I'd rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man..." This line is lifted from the rock standard Baby Let's Play House, recorded by Elvis and Buddy Holly, but the rest of it is Lennon playing around with that notion and just going on. The chorus makes the threat of murder sound like a sea shanty. It even got to me as a fifteen year old when I heard it. My head shot up as its violence rolled on. I made up a persona for the narrator. That helped. It was hard to relate the singer of In My Life with this psycho. Even to the fade and the end of the album where he's riffing on the word now, it's a committed act. 

I first heard this courtesy of my sister's boyfriend back in the mid-'70s. Before it, I'd heard all the later albums and had a few compilations of the earlier material. This was the first opportunity to hear all the songs I knew in context with all those I hadn't heard. I listened through headphones while my family were watching the Saturday movie on TV. I looked into the strange warped image of the band on the cover, stretched, a forest behind them and the joke title in big, orange, boopy '60s lettering. The faces are confident, four young blokes on top of the world. That's what the record sounded like, too.

I wondered, if I was ever going to be a rock star if I'd have the opportunity to make a statement like this: I've arrived, take this. The music was a mix of instantly appealing pop with glittering harmonies and arrangements that breathed with jangling electricity and warm timber surfaces. The songs were either about slight things or jokes, or very deep issues with one song after another feeling like a statement. Then a Vox organ stab and fiddly treble guitar lick would come in and it would again just sound like pop from the '60s.

Later, when I had all the initial sequence of studio albums I was able to make a comparison. There is a clear line of development and dare on the timeline. Then when the bigger sounding songs from Help give way to these if feels like all the others were public prototypes. It would be another year or so until I heard its successor (now that I think of it) which immediately won me over. If Rubber Soul is Revolver's younvger, callow self, it yet is a couple of sides of engagement that, heard, are not forgotten. And if Revolver made me think of a dark and alluring movie, Rubber Soul feels like the makers of great pop songs who had more than an hour to spare to do something more with the routine. Of all that came before, this one is the first that seems like a latest album. There were no singles in the U.K. from it but they did bring out the mighty double-A Day Tripper and We Can Work it Out. I have to work hard to imagine what it felt like to hear this and wonder what would follow.

Listening notes: I chose the version on the Mono box set as it sounds the most like the one I first heard and is the mix that the band themselves approved. The sound on the CD is stellar. Also, this brings me to the end of Beatles blogs as I've come full circle, staring with Revolver in 2016, picking up Please Please Me on in 2023. Now I'm here. It's been invigorating considering these records again after letting them get so familiar. I'd reommend it.

FAD GADGET'S FIRESIDE FAVOURITES @ 45

Fad Gadget was Frank Tovey. Fad Gadget looked like a band live or on the liner notes of LPs but all of it came out of Frank's mind and vision. This wasn't unusual in the days of the bur between band or core of acts like The The or Soft Cell who were centred around single thinkers or performers. Visage used the medium of the music video (which was NOT invented by MTV!) to present less a group or solo artist than an entity composed of a team. Frank fitted into that milieu unremarkably, chugging out the vinyl and busily getting on stage with a mix of live music and performance art. But while we know Soft Cell for Tainted Love and Visage for Fade to Grey, and we might remember Throbbing Gristle as an attitude and a stunt approach to live performance, but Fad Gadget always take a few thoughts past the name.

That's not the fault of the work on the records. Fireside Favourites bristles and grooves with electronica that sounds of its time and the songs themselves are a strong blend of punk sneer and the starker kind of thinking then emergent of dark commentary. Really, if you want a good bingo card of post punk, you couldn't do better. On that alone, I'd recommend this as a worthy listen. But there is more than that on offrer.

Pedestrian is driven (nyuck nyuck) by a circular riff on a spiky synth snarl. The progress of humanity through its transport is still held back by the need to get around on your feet but those who choose to do that are told to wait at the stoplights or face annihilation. You can dance to this.

State of the Nation has that discoish vaguely Middle Eastern lope. A brooding organ plays under Tovey's dark snarl. "Life begins when you're ready to face it" is a great line but it's virtually buried in an aside.

Salt Lake City Sunday is an unrelenting harang against the religious organisation, rhyming repent with "they want your ten percent" When he comes to rail against the practice of posthumous conversion it's: "Leave my ancestors to rot in their graves." It's important to remember that a lot of the acrid darkness of these electronic doomsters of this time were happy to interrupt their program to take the piss. It didn't diminish the darker meaning even slightly. If anything, it enhanced it by resufing to give in to over-earnest  whinging which would have earned the ridicule of others.

Coitus Interruptus is an unsmiling description of the marketing of sex as a leisure industry set to a robotic backing. and slowly fading with a series of absurdist sexual grunts, barks and bellows under a gothic organ solo.

Fireside Favourites begins with a synth brass swagger that sounds like Shirley Bassey doing a Bond theme backed by Coil. It's all Tom Jones seduction filtered through a deadpan disgust until Frank starts noticing the nuclear holocaust has begun and the pair canoodling in front of the fire are actually burning to ashes from a missle strike. Good times. Good times ...

Newsreel combines drum machine, real bass guitar and screeching keyboards with Tovey's report on media practices getting so intrusive as to insert mics into wounds to record the sound of death. There's more and worse as the precussion breaks down into a fractured march as the news teams and platoons begin to merge.

Insecticide begins with weird distorted cries. A minimal synth backing takes up as Tovey with a wobbling vocal effect recounts the life of an insect in a human home, driven to smashing its own brains out from the human response to it.

The Box is a rewrite of the single Back to Nature is the closest thing on the record to a rock song. Frank's thin vocal describes a premature burial. Is it figurative, though? "Let me out!" in the first verse becomes, "Let us out!"

The Arch of the Aorta is mostly instrumental and is a good contribution to the era's scattered vocal free or mostly vocal free mood masterpieces like The Cure's All Cats Are Grey or Devo's Gut Feeling. It's not clear that Tovey's repetition of the title phrase is looped or just performed. Other voices might be sourced from found material or performed but the gleeful cold against hot melody and voice material approach ticks about three numbers of that bingo card I imagined before. Pure British post punk and loving it.

Some friends in the '80s, looked though my record collection and found the Birthday Party's Junkyard which I was borrowing to tape. It was a few years old but one of them picked it up as though it were a nursery favourite. "We used to clean the house to this," he said with a warm grin. See, I never owned this album either. I knew the name of the act (and assumed it was a band) and would have easily heard a fair few of the tracks played on 4ZZZ. But I wouldn't have heard it at parties. And it makes me wonder how you would have listened back i' the day. In headphones while the family watched the news? Dancing in the lounge of a sharehouse by the light of the bathroom off the hall? Studying? 

It's not that it's bad music, on the contrary, but there's a homogeneity made of the approach to the arragnements and textures and the declarations of the lyrics that pits a dark, dim view without the shouted slogans of a Midnight Oil nor the creaminess of a Dare-era Human League. There are effective ventures into abstract experssion all through but it's not the scarifying tracks of Throbbing Gristle. Beside names such as these, Fad Gadget appears to fade but they shouldn't. It's important to remember how much post punk mixed an elevated professionalism with self-discovered innovation. It got more bizarre and confronting but a lot easier to digest. While Gary Numan was monotoning about cars and androids, Frank Tovey was reading the newspaper back in a voice that didn't let go of you, it's just that his stuff sounded home made, as though he saw something while getting a carton of milk from the shop and rolled the tape the moment he got back in.

So, what do we do with Fad Gadget? His statements were as strong as any of his contemporaries and his approach that gathered found sound as well as picking up on what was then a burgeoning electronica and even with PR manageer wet-dream looks that could have had him as a pin up in a few seconds of exposure, he might have stormed it in. That he seemed easy enough bound in spider web costumes, moving as a mime while the march of the synthesisers droned around him is testament enough that his final bingo number, wsas the thing that set him in his underfame, was that he was in this for the gig, not the acclaim. Maybe that's it, however punk and then post punk we might have got, we still demanded our favourites be popular AND true to themselves. That's human enough but the second part is all we should ever ask. That's what Frank Tovey gave us.

Listening notes: I never had this on vinyl nor even on a cassette dub. As I pieced it together from YouTube clips and then failed to find a hard copy, I bought a download at CD resolution. Audio quality pristine. 

NEW ORDER'S LOW LIFE @ 40

A rapid fire snare intro leads to a full band assault, topped with the same melodica that helped us grind through In a Lonely Place. But the grind has left, replaced with a bouncing energy and sweet lead vocal. The story of the song is the surprise return of a soldier to a wife who's been told he's been killed in action. 

Next is Perfect Kiss. Some deft electronics before the riff bursts in and the story of a self-destructive friend and his tragic end could be about Ian Curtis or the litany of deaths reported from AIDS in the mid-80s. The chorus about believing in a land of love and a land above have a frail religiosity to them, rendering the rest of the tale sombre. The perfect kiss of the title is declared the kiss of death in the final line. This is supported by a structure that goes from a bright dance arrangement in the verses to a more intense chord backing for the choruses and then a passionate rushing chase with the opening riff developed. By this time New Order were releasing their singles on the albums but adding the value of different mixes or even perofmances. The twelve inch single version of Perfect Kiss adds a zoo of extra effects both naturally recorded and electronically created and it extends the rushing conclusion to an orgasmic effect, playing it again and again until a final descent in the bass and a baby's cry. We don't get that here (you can hear it on the Substance album) but the song, even constrained, still yields power.

The video of this song (directed by Jonathon Demme) was presented as the bend playing it in a studio which, right or wrong, was convincing. Around the room there were doors with frosted windows. In one of those a silouhuette of a short haired man was lightly moving to the rhythm. This was widely believed to refer to Ian Curtis, as a tip of the hat by some accounts or an outright ghost caught on camera by others. 

This Time of Night used to be announced by Bernard Sumner at live shows as Pumped Full of Drugs. A strident electro arrangement with a mournful lead vocal by Bernard whose using the lower end of his range. It tells of a destructive relationship wherein the love that began it has dried to a husk and the rest is mechanical routine. The second half of the song, under an insistent keyboard figure, is a lengthy plea from the victim to the abuser to cease but this is couched in a crippling co-dependance. It fades without conclusion.

Sunrise starts with a thick, dark, and slow figure on the synthesiser. Peter Hook's bass riff enters with urgency, bringing the rest of the band in with a galloping rush. Large dramatic chords bring thunder between the verses. The pained lyric tells of an authority who might hear every petition given them but refuses to respond. Is this a path to atheism through personal agony. Perhaps it's another abusive relationship. The cruciality and pace of the teller's frustration continue in the instrumental conclusion, itself ending with a fragmented guitar delay. A whimper not a bang. End of side one.

Elegia is an instrumental that could be a horror movie theme. Minor key arpeggios creep up from the silence. A chorused guitar provides a counter figure. The arrangement thickens and progresses through different expressions of the same ground like a Baroque chiccone. It does outstay its welcome if you're waiting for a vocal but it's a fine side opener on an album dedicated to making grave statements through bright and shining electronics.

Sooner Than You Think is a story from touring. The arrangment is more big electronics and small guitar skirmishes. Is it a road romance gone wrong or, more generally, impressions of the culture and lifestyle of the country being toured? Possibly the least affecting track on the album.

Subculture begins with a beautiful cinematic riff in a harpsichord-like synth voice. Over a Georgio Morroder-style synth bass throb, Bernard coos lines about walking in the dark, talking in his sleep, solitude and social life. "What do I get out of this?" he asks. "I always try. I always miss." This could be the lament of every Joy Division fan who went to a party in the '80s. It's a compelling song that is never allowed to burst into histrionics to sound self-tragic. This was a single, though, and the twelve inch was a massive overproudction of this version with female backing vocals played on a sampler and big instrumental breaks. I like bits of both but, for the honesty in the lyric, I would always prefer this one on the album with its plainer telling. It really does feel like its under the culture.

Face Up crashes in with the kind of blinding brightness that the band would charge into headlong from here onward. In a Lonely Place gets a whole line to itself in this song about about a breakup. "Oh I cannnot bear the thought of you." That line isn't as negating as it first appears. After the disintegration of a relationship the very thought of the other can be agonising while any of the initial love is morphing from passion to torture. The song appropriately ends on a fade and points to the rest of the band's initial career.

To listen to the first few New Order albums is to take a moment wondering how they got from one to the next without a smoother transition. From Movement's Martin Hannet-dominated helming that made it sound like Closer II rather than the new start the band were trying for to the piping melodica at the start of this set there seems only the vaguest continuity. The thing to glue them aurally together is to listen to the singles which do speak of more gradual changes, making a smoother curve. From the Joy Division accredited Ceremony/In a Lonely Place, though Everything's Gone Green, Blue Monday, Cofusion and Thieves Like Us, we get a band neither abandoning their initial dark punk attitude nor jealously preserving it. There is a clear progression in the trek from guitar based rock to the heavy electronics of the mid-80s. This would later form a rift but for now, the band had found a sound of its own.

Peter Saville was still directing the band's cover art and, here, broke with his own tradition of concept-laden work to a more conventional representation of the band with photos created with a Polaroid camera. It was the only time the likenesses of the band had appeared on their cover art and, typically, it was unconventional (if appropriate). Percussionist Steve Morris was the first face you saw and keyboardist Gillian Gilbert was the last, Hooky and Bernard went inside. This was alterable with tracing paper and adjustable photographs (maybe I'm confusing that with the CD release, I never had this on vinyl).

By the mid-80s, fans and casual listeners alike could expect change within a slow curve from New Order. If anyone still asked them in interviews about Ian Curtis they would reduce their responses and move on to the next question. Low Life took them beyond even the contrary pull of things like Blue Monday which seemed to harbour the same dour concerns as anything from Joy Division but was clear about forging ahead with the technology. The songs feel more crafted and the overall brightness of the music never gets too samey (as it threatened to do on the previous set Power Corruption and Lies). It was the sound of a band with a past who only wanted to talk about the future. 

OUT OF OUR HEADS - THE ROLLING STONES @ 60

A slash of guitar opens fire with a sharply falling riff. As if it wasn't heard, it happens again. Jagger comes in with the rest of the band and they're off, swinging and loping around like a holy rolling preacher and his congregation except it's all about a girl and the pitch is already manic with the band rushing along with the shout of the vocal and the big thunderous guitar slowly guiding the whole show. When the backing vocals turn up they are somewhere between sweet doo wop and the snotty backing calls of The Yardbirds or The Who. If anything, this sounds like it comes from over ten years later, with the same amphetamine boost that drove The Dickies' crazy version of The Banana Splits. The original by Sonny Bono (yeah, that one) and Roddy Jackson was by Larry Williams who was one of the great early rock shouters and his take is a fine example of solid R&B. This time, instead of adapting a favourite, The Stones push it right out of its own envelope in a cover as tearing as the Fabs' version of Twist and Shout. If you didn't know This was The Rolling Stones, you'd think it was '70s punk. If they had done nothing else, they had learned how to start an album by getting everyone up to do the speed  and whisky frolic. All that in one and a half minutes!

And then you get Mercy Mercy and Hitchhike which is how they used to do covers. They're both fine, and if you're inclined toward the sound, you'll leave them playing. There's the big boom guitar that they'd been perfecting the big dual guitar arrangement started with the likes of It's All Over Now.

That's How Strong My Love Is is a cover of Otis Redding's torchy soul ballad, done with those big guitars and a forward momentum and a heartfelt Jagger vocal.Things mellow down for Sam Cooke's Good Times which the band delivers with a smooth sheen held up by strong bass and band-wide vocals. The arrangement puts rock instruments in where Cooke's original is more orchestral and creamy. It's more a tribute than the reinvention that the opening track.

The side ends with one of the few originals, Gotta Get Away. Bright guitars and a lower fuzzed out one sounding like a brass section and the band getting laid back, Jagger comes in with a plaintive and melodic tune about a breakup that really does sound like the last time.

Side two opens with Chuck Berry's Talkin' About You. The Stones ditch the frantic Berry pacing, opening with a precursor to the big Keith chord riff and getting on down the road with sleaze and intent. This is a band that doesn't suspect it's going to sound like a bigger and meaner version of this in about three years.

Cry to Me is not given with Solomon Burke's gymnastic vocals but something more reserved. It's a strong take with high emotion and good use of the twin guitars and backing vocals but, at best, it's a fine attempt at adding the swinging London cool to the storm of the original. It's the Stones pleasing a crowd. See also the net track We Got a Good Thing Goin'. It's there to let everyone know how the band could keep a venue warm.

Heart of Stone is next and completely outclasses most of the covers on this LP by showing how to learn lessons and still sound like yourself. A tight 6/8 lament with a snarl, this one uses the sinuous guitars of The Last Time and the baritone arpeggios of It's All Over Now, Jagger's increased emotional and vocal range, finally convincing falsettos in the backing and a stirring climb to the chorus that just makes you want more. One of the best early originals. 

The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man is attributed to Naker Phelge, the whole-band credit given to joke numbers like We Want the Stones on the "live" album. That sells it short, though, as it's a fine and funny mockery of the hangers-on of the Amercian style of the burgeoning rock music industry like this one with his toupee and seeya sucker suit whose too cheap to save a dime for the bus but full of his own merit and essence.

I'm Free builds on a fluid bed of tremolo guitars and a vocal approach that nods through an original to the glories they's just been playing to soul and R&B on this record. It's a worthy original but it's overshadowed. 

This is the band that had already released The Last Time and (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction, pillars of riff rock that shake the walls of guitar shops to this day. A quick look (don't even listen) at any compilation of early Stones material and you'll understand that the prominence given to singles left their early albums emaciated. The Beatles third album was all Lennon-MacCartney originals and screamed global success. Out of our Heads feels pedestrian by comparison. Two years of US tours, mayhem and rampaging success and the result is so resolutely OK?

WIth their chief rivals on a roll that would go many years and through so many creative ceilings, no one could pretend that albums were the stocking fillers of the rock world. While the band's singles would continue to rip holes in the sky, it would be nearly half a year of waiting until their own first home grown killer LP. It's almost as though they were watching the clock with this. It's all prefectly stated and includes some inspired moments but against their rivals in chief and up and comers like The Kinks and The Who ripping ahead with their own recordings it feels like treading water.

Then again, this also is probably due to static management as much as it is to low creativity. Wunderkind Andrew Loog Oldham wasn't the only manager of the band. There was a lot of old showbiz stasis happening to all the music making in the U.K. industry. Oldham's flair with the directions of the singles and his slavish devotion to Spectorism certainly pushed the stunning list of bangers the band released on 45rpm and, himself, probably considered the LP a second thought. Rubber Soul and Pet Sounds were on the horizon to change everyone's mind on that idea. Meanwhile, there were these kinds of albums that reminded fans of the clubs and pubs and promised hints of the new and, as long as they looked as good on the sleeves, provided some cool decor to the batch pad of swinging London. 

THE BYRDS' TURN TURN TURN @ 60

If you tell someone that a band made the same album a few times in a row you will risk turning them off before you get any further. Well, I'll risk it this way: The Byrds made the same album five times, they just it better each time. While sounding unmistakably like themselves, especially when trying to sound like others, the songcraft and musicianship were constantly enriched. They are one of the signatures of '60s rock to the extent that the insertion of anything from their first five albums into a movie soundtrack will do more for the setting than millions of dollars worth of art direction. They were also one of those bands that only seemed to be on compilation albums for a long stretch. They seemed to have survived entirely on Dylan covers before fading into hits 'n' memories radio. That's what I thought until I heard this, their second, album.

To be a recording artist up to the early '60s meant you got art directed, hair and clothes, and told to sing this musical gimmick that some old man had written. When the nova event happened with The Beatles hitting the U.S. (i.e. the galactic) market, everyone wanted their music made by the people who wrote it. Add the instant cool of a young Bob Dylan and you could throw out all that lovey dove malarky and get some real statements out in the open. That's all fine if you were Dylan or The Beatles but most aspiring chart toppers weren't. 

This meant that those charts were stuffed with cover versions. Even the Fabs put covers on  their first albums to fill them out. So, when young folkie session man Jim McGuinn and friends went and saw A Hard Day's Night, everything fell into place. Some of that art direction and rock instrumentation later and his band made of friends and people who looked good in a bouffant started churning out the kind of cover versions that no one else was doing. Dylan's Mr Tambourine Man went from his quietly stabbing acoustic number to The Byrds' glorious cathedral of chime and choir. In 1965 that was like doing a metal take on Elliot Smith now. Like seeing any trope's origins, it seemed cliched until you knew.

So when the band went front and centre with their take on Pete Seeger's setting of lines from Ecclesiastes it mattered. I welcome you to YouTube versions by Pete Seeger and Judy Collins where you'll hear beautiful and elegant renditions of this perfectly constructed song. When you then hear the first track on this album with its impossibly thick and clean electric 12 string fanfare and solemn but shining vocal harmonies you will know the transportation of it. This is not a crass rock 'n' roll joke on the oldies, it's a strident celebration in a rock setting. Turn Turn Turn opens the window with a deal more force than anything on their impressive first LP through both the band's pluck in trying it on and the sheer perfection they achieve. If Judy Collins' melting solo rendition sobered you up, this new take could be the mental metronome to Vietnam War protests. Along with moments like The Beatles doing Twist and Shout or The Stones' Little Red Rooster, The Byrds Turn Turn Turn improved on and consolidated what they'd proved was their eternal contribution from the previous outing. 

Two important techniques are at work, here.  The first is the upped ante of putting dual 12 string parts in the arrangement. If the instrument's qualities made a difference in the first album, two at once broadened and reinforced huge swell of it. During the solo where McGuinn is playing a rapid claw hammer arpeggio of the changes against the melody ringing out in front the music is elevating. The other is that they got better at their own harmony scheme. This is simpler than you'd think. Two vocalists sang in precise unision, taking the song's melody. David Crosby added a descant, often improvised which lent a kind of organ chord effect to the vocals. While this approach can stifle creativity on the fly by being too regular, here it sounds spontaneous and free. This is one of the great cover versions. A lot of people think it's an original from the confidence and execution. It almost is. 

After this a bright bluesy riff  propels the whole band into a brief open string drone before the vocals come in, urgent and cool. It Won't Be Wrong is a throwback to early McGuinn songwriting but it fits in this treatment that establishes the uniformity of the music overall as busy, bright and, whether fast or slow, solid and centred. This one is all early Beatles with harmonies clearly schooled in the John low and Paul high approach. The return to the base key after choruses and bridge is a precursor of the same technique they'd use later in Eight Miles High, a gripping establishment of mode.

Set You Free This Time surprises with its mature sounding vocal and country inflections. It's one of the moments like Here Without You on the debut, that shows how confident a songwriter Gene Clark was. He takes the vocal, introducing a clearly distinct voice after the opening two choral performances. It's a more grown up look at a relationship song, as well, with the narrator recalling the early signs of trouble in the solo sections and the other's regret and pleas in the harmony second part of the verses which end with the title. The sense of heartbreak is palable and feels as strange in this album as the lead-heavy I Come and Stand at Every Door does in the following set.Because of that, I used to skip this one (as a teen listener) until experiences like it happened to me. Now, I find it beautifully sober.

Lay Down Your Weary Tune opens with the band in full voice and instrumentation for the large scaled chorus. This is broken by McGuinn's solo vocals for the verses. Like Mr Tambourine Man, the band is expanding a Dylan original to cinematic breadth with the unvarying melody pressing on like a march across an epic landscape. I will never tire of hearing this song.

And again a big sound is followed by an intimate one. He Was a Friend of Mine is led by McGuinn's acoustic arpeggios with the same clawhammer picking he used on the solo section of Turn Turn Turn. Like the title track, this is an adaptation of an existing tune, a folk song in mourning for a fallen comrade. McGuinn overlayed the sentiment with a statement of grief after the Kennedy Assassination. The shiummering harmonies' solemnity are timeless.

Side two begins with The World Turns All Around Her and it springs up with the trademark 12 string riff (the intro adds a little grinning swagger) and bright harmonies. It moves at a clip but the Clark original is about a boy pondering his mistakes in his broken relationship and pleas the new boyfriend be more devoted than he was. The middle eight which tells of his understanding of what he effectively threw away is a mster stroke of songwriting, allowing a pause and shift in feel and key before the final verse springs back into the compromised elation of the music. I will choose this as a single selection quite habitually.

Anyone who made anything of the shift to country rock years after this couldn't have heard this record with side one's country ballad and the hymn-like homily of Satisfied Mind. The solemn unision singing breaks out for the chorus when Crosby's descant soars high overhead. A joy.

If You're Gone is another Clark original and the lead is taken by him. The lyric is a series of propositions beginning with the word 'if". After a series of these conditional statements about the effect of the other he is singing to, the final two lines spook me out:  'If I love you I might never know your name. If you're gone then there is nothing that remains." Instrumentation is sparse but that is to aid the placing of the extraordinary backing vocals which are wordless hums forming organ-like chords. It's as strange as hearing a Yardbirds compilation album where Hang On Sloopy gives way to the Gregorian Still I'm Sad. It's quiet but heartfelt and unforgettable.

The second Dylan cover is The Times They are a Changin' and it gets the by now standard Burds treatment, making Dylan's voice in the darkness version danceable and radio friendly. McGuinn again lends his Dylan party impression to the solo lines before the other two vocalists chime in with harmonies. Not remarkable but not a skip either.

Wait and See is a McGuinn/Crosby collaboration and is superior filler with a lyric about seeing a hot girl. It's couched in brilliant harmonies and rich Rickebacker chimes and is over before it's begun.

So far, this sophomore effort comprises a consolidation of the great start of Mr Tambourine Man, expanding the band's musicianship (particularly the vocal arrangements) and songwriting powers in a carefully helmed quality management by the producer Terry Melcher. This sounds even more like the product of a tightly co-ordinated band that sound distinctive and pleasurable whether expressing sadness or sprightly energy. Then theres the last track.

Ending the last album with a kind of tongue in cheek version of a wartime oldie verged on embarrassing but was saved by an earnest approach that made it work. They try to do that again with Oh Susannah. The Stephen Foster classic from the previous century was known to anyone who'd had to sing it in music class in the American education system. It was a pretty good fit for the band that was clearly happy to embrace genuine folk tunes and filter them through harmony-laden rock. So, why oh why did they decide to do this one as a joke? We get the whole verse and chorus melody played out on the 12 string with cute little tinkles and bumps from Mike Clarke on the drums and then gthe band comes in for a romping vocal version. Repeat twice, including the excruciating 12 string melody. It's the sound of a band at rehearsal thinking they're being funny by doing an inappropriate version of an oldie or a softy (like a black metal cover of a Carpenters song). This kind of shit is only ever funny at the time and should never be recorded and heard again. If We'll Meet Again worked despite the humour and kept short of cringe, Oh Susannah on Turn Turn Turn bolts right into the centre of a grimacing faux pas. It means that the celebrations end with the plastered uncle who thinks his strangled rendition of My Way is a scream while the catering staff quietly clean up the tables with their eyes lowered.

The refreshed CD release of this from the mid-'90s features a number of extra tracks, including a decent cover of It's All Over Now, Baby Blue and a banging original The Day Walk (Never Before), both of which would closed the record in strength. Even the unfinished instrumental Stranger in a Strange Land would have done that. But no, this self-concious joke that is longer than everything else on the album apart from the title track, destroys this otherwise strong offering's chances of being thought of as a perfect advance from the debut.

I first heard this album when I was fifteen. A school friend had it at home as part of his elder siblings' collection and he taped it for me. It played me through that middle year period very easily, the heights of its invention, ringing electric guitar (which I didn't know was a 12 string, and angelic voices merged perfectly with the chirps of the cicadas out in the yard under the sun. The Byrds were one of the select bands I pursued when the great reissue revival of the early '80s brought us rereleases of The Kinks, The Who, The Doors and so on on new vinyl so we didn't have to rely on finding good copies at op shops. The 1996 CD was pure pleasure (apart from that one dud) and I fell into the joys of the album all over again with stunning presence and detail. 

Turn Turn Turn was a band tightening up everything that had worked for them on their debut release and presenting the thing they didn't have for that, experience. The sound is decisive and the songs, old or new, are strong. They might have kept that up for the rest of the decade without adverse criticism. What would happen, though, was further exploration. Call it acid, if you like, but add a lesson-learning disastrous tour of the UK and the restlessness of any young group of artists who need to find new paths. Not everyone did that as fast as The Beatles but this transitional effort opened the door on to years' more progression done with style and, curiously enough, honour.

Listening notes: I chose the1996 rerelease for this blog as its clarity, depth and presence exceed the vinyl rerelease of the '80s which I also had. As far as I know, this is still available. Before I forget, I should mention that this will be my final Byrds anniversary article as I've already done the remaining titles to the end of the '60s by them, having started in 2016 with the one on Fifth Dimension.

THE KINK KONTROVERSY @ 60

Strutting guitar riff and lead interplay honk out a blues workout as Dave Davies takes the lead vocal on Milk Cow Blues. It's a version of a standard so removed of most the versions the band would have heard that it qualifies as a rewrite. It's more of a record starter than an outright song and it's there at the front telling everyone at the party that The Kinks have come to play.

Ring the Bells tugs everything down with its acoustic guitar and laid back Ray vocal. It's a quiet celebration of being in love. Ray makes it sound like he woke up at half past three in the morning to reassure himself. The melancholy audible through the sentiment and the arrangement has already appeared on other Kinks records and it's gleaming the surface here.

Gotta Get the First Plane Home introduces a kind of playing Dave Davies would keep using throughout the '60s. It's a clunking staccato, just below amp breakup and palm muted, every note knocks at the next one. It's so good he starts the next song the same way, using the same beginning note. The song is a routine, gettin' back to my baby lyric and fills the time. Same goes for the next one When I See that Girl of Mine except that lines after the initial couplet of the verses stray from the R&B formula into the kind of extension Ray Davies would keep using ("I don't care if it rains or shines") whereby the melodic material reaches out beyond expectations and delivers more tension for the upcoming chorus.

I Am Free is a 6/8 rock waltz of the kind that The Stones were already mastering. Even the guitar interplay is Stonesy with strumming here and biting stabs there. Dave takes another lead. It's pleasant enough and the change in time signature is welcome.

And then the album wakes up. Till the End of the Day blasts to life as a trio of full barre chords crashes down to the open E. "Baby, I feel good, from the moment I rise..." It's a kind of reworking of the early days' chord riffs with new DNA injected. Everything is bright and speedy. The rock band is surrounded by a swarm of extra percussion and it gallops with the energy of the best weekend. Of their surrounding singles and most of this album, this is the song that kids would be getting their threads right for parties, dates, clubs and the whole world of the hungry night. Solid walls of shining harmonies, guitar punches and the pure momentum keep this one hurtling right up to the final four chord crash at the end as the tension between major and minor resolves into a slowly oscillating minor chord. And then you want to hear it again.

Side two. The World Keeps Going Round kicks into life as a kind of Spector wall of sound number if it had been recorded in a garage. Big distorted piano, drums and bass. If there's an electric guitar in there, it's so closely mixed with the piano that it's indistinguishable. Ray comes in with balancing lines: "You worry 'bout the rain. The rain keeps falling just the same." Then the obligatory romance line about breakup before the title line in the chorus resets the knowable cosmos. And then you get this: "What's the use of worrying cause you'll die alone?" Pure Ray Davies bleakness in a song that lopes and crashes like a drunk getting in before dawn. It might sound like bus stop philosophy like "plenty of fish in the sea" but there's a frown to the chorus that prevents any platitudinal warmth from spoiling it. This is the Kinks of See My Friends, their single from the middle of the year, a constant memento mori among the colours of Carnaby Street.

I'm On an Island starts with a strident acoustic chord progression and Davies in as close to the strange calypso accent he would persist with fo rthe next two decades on assorted titles. He's on an island but can't escape. His girl left him and he has nowhere to run. He's the only one on the island. He wouldn't be anywhere else if only she was there with him. This island is much more like the one in John Donne's poem. The approach is comical but it's the same message as See My Friends: being alone and young and abandoned is bleak. There's a perfomative quirk that might have come from playing it live or even just in front of the mic when they recorded it. After the refrain which ends on a held high note he starts the next verse as though out of breath and it sounds like he has been repeating the phrase to himself and anyone who'd hear incessantly: "I'm - on - an - islan'." It's not the first joke song The Kinks did (and certainly wouldn't be the last) but it's the most neatly presented one. A few months afterwards we'd get Dedicated Follower of Fashion and a sub tradtition in the band would be forever with them.

Then you get the anthem so much on the other side of Till the End of the Day that it was its B-side. Where Have all the Good Times Gone? opens with a sledgehammer version of the same chord progression as Till. Instead of the amphetamine rush of that song it's a crashing comedown as Ray whines over a steady rock grind that things are on the downswing. As the song progresses, it's clear how clever this lyric is by unfurling the guilt the previous generation want the new one to feel for taking all their new toys for granted, the delicious freedoms of the night clubs and the culture they were making, and then giving it fifty lashes of sarcasm. The good times haven't gone anywhere, they're here, now and swinging like the rest of London. The pummelling rock of the song feels like a bummer but the clear message is about kicking the downs and jumping into it. It doesn't rush to life like Till the End of the Day but the chorus with its low whinge bvy Ray and high, exuberant descant by Dave let any who will get the joke.

And then you get three songs, just when you thought the record had made its last statement. It's Too Late cunningly mixes a rock progression on acoustic instead of electric with a country melody. Girl regrets her breakup but he's no longer in the mood. What's in store for me matches a stinging 2/4 beat with a boy girl romance plea from Dave. You Can't Win is Ray in snarling mode pretty much just restating the title in different ways.

I've lumped all those together because, as listenable as they are, they cannot match the power of Good Times with its giant scale and strange exubrance. That was the song that should have closed the album, making a perfect compliment to Till the End of the Day on side one. After the big final chord of Good Times it feels like waiting for the post credit sequence in a 2020s film that never comes.

The package was a good one, however. The cover art showed a white background with four unconventional band member shots tha gave way to a large picture of Dave Davies caught with motion blur banging out a power chord on his hollowbody Guild. While the album suffers from the sense of being recorded before its original songs were fully baked, the standouts form peaks and tell listeners of the time that there was more to come. 

Listening notes: I strolled around or sat and listened to this as a high resolution download I'd bought from an online shop. It's in mono, not compressed and all of the wincing Shel Talmy production decisions jab at the ear but it is the cleanest version of what appeared on vinyl at the time that you can get. 

GARY NUMAN'S TELEKON @ 45

Fluid synths issue a cry in the dark (twice to give it meaning). A jabbing bass ground stabs until a drum fill brings in the steam rolling main keyboard riff, a minor arpeggio descending over the full band's grunting rhythm. The voice comes in after four of them, dry, sharp, tired. "And what if God's dead? We must have done something wrong." That's when you notice that this song's arrangement sounds like it wants to be a strut but it's about a self image of disintegration, the parts that might rise and stride are hanging aloof in the dark. "This wreckage I call me," he continues, "would like to frame your voice". Nothing's coming together and when the big riff from the start comes back in, the voice raises in a chant of farewell. I thought it was, "I can't hear you" but the album's lyrics sheet puts some Japanese characters there. He's singing, "I'm leaving you." A few words requesting erasure and more choruses to a brief fade into the blackness between tracks and there it is: the machine is winding down.

This is the fourth album led by Gary Numan and the second to bear his name as artist. It's also the third to get him a number one. Between the last and this he had been touring, finding himself in the bizarre position (as all rapidly rising stars find) of needing to be a jukebox of songs he'd barely finished. After slogging in local bands and setting up recordings and pub scale gigs, he was famous and famous for his strange desaturated world building words and music that placed him somewhere between the weird downer moods of northerners like The Human League and Joy Division and the emerging New Romantics with their more cinematic poptronica.

Dark and broody bass line dressed in then fashionable a chorus effect doubles a synth in a creep around a chord progression. When the lighter synth riff appears we get percussion that sounds like it came from a Sounds Latin LP found in an op shop. There's a lot of that on this album. It's an oddity that might sound to modern listeners as though the great monarch of electronic misery scapes discovered the percussion buttons on a home organ. What it really is is a broadening of the sound pallet. By this record, anyone who wasn't into him dismissed Gary Numan as rewriting his first songs over and again and this is often based on the kind of synthesiser arrangements he had pioneered. If you do that for a few years and then pop in some shakers and claves for expansion, the attacks come from the other side and ridicule the progression. No wins.

Anyway, Aircrash Brueau features this fresh percussive stock along with a more aggressive introduction of rock guitars. The learning curve for the listener is a gentle one, here, as it is set into one of Numan's character narrated songs. The ghost of a military pilot killed on a mission who returns to save other pilots from crashing. The same kind of strangely perfect blend of viola and synth play a breakout section that soars like the safest flight you've ever been on. The song ends with the more brooding bass and electronics of the intro. 

Telekon is a mid paced synth and bass led arrangement. The fragmented lyrics are like a diary written under distress. Is he singing "you end in reel one" or "you and the real one" in the chorus? It's hard to tell. Either way, that and the repeated unfinished description, "you are -" leave an icy impression as the wailing keyboards wind around the utterance like bandages. Numan has described this period and these songs as being the product of a neurologically troubling time as he tried to place himself in the context of a fame he always found difficult.

 Remind Me to Smile starts like Heart of Glass but quickly dispells the impression with a dark rising figure on the keyboards. "Reconsider fame. I need new reasons. This is detention. It's not fun at all."  It ends on a call and response chant of  snippets from touring, playing being in the spotlight: "Crawl crawl in love. I dive so clean. Toys toys so far. Boys boys you are..."

Sleep by Windows puts the new clear bass with the warm synth phrases centre. He addresses his fans and not for the last time. They can confess all the like to him, bare their schoolkid horrors and share their dejection but he cannot love them and asks if they at least dream. There is a cry of anguish towards the end: "We are just sound. We are just noise. We are all here to lie. Do you dream?" No answer. It's back to normal.

The old side two opens with the the energetic and almost screamed I'm an Agent. The rock attack is frontal as the lines speed by in a call to send in a series of measures to help an unnamed crisis. The pounding spectacular track provides us with a bang after the darkness of the first side. As soon as we start paying attention to the lyric, things aren't necessarily rock normal as the individual lines read more like overheard commands and threats than a string of thoughts. It begins to feel like a memory of a sensual assault.

I Dream of Wires begins with a kind of abstract cut up of synth sounds that could be emulating an animal. A throbbing ground takes over with a sly keyboard riff hovering over it. Numan's weary voice enters with a chromatic melody telling us that he's the last one with the skills to control the automated hell that life has become. He dreams of wires because the user friendly oppression does its best to obscure the working, leaving the leisured zombies powerless. From the second verse on, he's an octave higher crying out against more of the man machine wailing around him. Toward the end a most unmechanical sound, whistling, takes up the riff as though in defiance. The track ends with an upward flourish on the lead synth.

I Remember I Was Vapour begins with an instantly pleasing interplay of all the new and typical elements playing together, synths, percussion, piano. "There's nothing here but us." "Remember, I ahve memories. Remember, I need to forget." Generous instrumental passages spread out and more expansive synth settings come out of the circuit boards in play.

Please Push No More. The title says all you need to know. A gentle piano figure is joined by Numan's more emotive and closest vocal yet. In a moment of relative clarity, he tells of images of intrusion, ridicule and demand and, finally, exhaustion. The chorus is the title and takes the melody of the opening piano figure, a plea. A fragile piano improvisation ends the track with electronic sounds that could be whale song. If it were not the product of an oppressed mind only thinking about serenity it would be the most beautiful thing Numan ever did, right down to the lingering last piano notes and sea creature croon at the end.

The Joy Circuit starts with bowed strings and synths. Acoustic drums, piano and bass guitar provide a thumping ground. After an assured first verse, the track collapses into rhythm free textures of strings and electronics. It starts again before collapsing again. You get the pattern. "Show me the new way. Love it, love it. It's so unusual but all I find is a reason to die. A reason to die." The energy strikes up again to the fade and even picks up tempo to the fade. Where will this lead?

Most immediately, it led to Numan touring the record and staging big concerts which he was considering to be his last, exposing him to the kind of pressure and public exposure he had so poignantly addressed in this record. That the cold and heavy mini epics of Are Friends Electric and Films that he was obliged to perform would have felt like relief when he needed to bare himself with this album's statements would have sealed the deal with a bow of irony for him.

For my part I remember lying in the back of a car as it sped toward the Gold Coast, looking up at the street lights as they sped past and the single I Die You Die came on the radio and someone in the front turned it up. The chugging electric guitar and screaming synths put a thrill and a chill in me all at once. I was young, ready and being delivered to the party of a girl at school whose land developer father was throwing for her eighteenth. I wasn't particularly into her but it was light years away from the sad and emotionally violent home life I had at the time (a sibling and his torn marriage) and that's where I needed to be. A new Gary Numan track that was both rocking and eerie was just the tonic.

That song was on the Australian release of the LP as the final track. It wasn't on the UK version, not that I knew. The purpose of this (and the omission of the other single We Are Glass and the bizarrely chosen On Broadway cover) seemed to suggest that the pop music direction of the single was not a fit for such a sombre album filled with farewells. You get all of that on later CD releases and official download versions but, like most extra tracks, these songs corrupt the statement of Telekon. They're all pretty good numbers but they don't have that ending on the fading of the Joy Circuit to get us thinking. 

Gary Numan closed the door for a spell as his record company put out live sets. He reemerged the following year with Dance and kept going. The initial fan base had, meanwhile, moved on to blitz and proto goth. He had a job ahead of him to rebuild his public but he never quite got to. Subsequent releases have been perfectly fine but nothing beyond Telekon matched the level of reception with the cry of restraint so perfectly or strangely. Apart from being a good listen and even better travel companion, Telekon is the kind of confession that feels like rthe conversation you have at a party with someone who becomes a lifelong acquaintance, neither close friend nor face in the crowd, just someone you were glad to have met and will always stop and talk to when you see them again.

TALKING HEADS' REMAIN IN LIGHT @ 45

I read in the late '70s Talking Heads described as a bubblegum Velvet Underground and still think that was only because a journalist saw their band photos. The band did three albums of guitar based pop with quirk and then they did this which changed their image from independent and odd to eerie, intense and unpredictable. There are other things contributing to that from the time but this LP changed the band as it entered global visibility. One side of intense emotionless funk followed by a continuous winding down until there was nothing left and the centre was missing. Taken as a whole, it felt like the band was burning white on re-entry and slowly parachuting to the end of the world. The cuteness, whatever there had been, was gone.

I'll touch only lightly on the history surrounding the record and musical direction as that is amply documented elsewhere and more deeply than I can do here. More, I want to provide a listening map for people like myself who mischaracterised it when new and never quite changed their impression. This, too, will be light; this is, after all just the next record that the band made, not a major manifesto.

That said, it was also a kind of therapy. The band was taking a break at the beginning of the year and the rhythm section (married couple Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz) were starting to feel like David Byrne's backing band. With the breezy new influences (see below) in the air, the band regrouped in Nassau and started from grooves rather than Byrne's lyrics. When they struck on something that worked, they learned it and played it to song lengths, preferring groove over traditional songwriting. Notable is the difference between this and jamming. The band was in effect sampling itself in this process. It is the sound of a group reinventing itself in repetition, bar by bar. This record saved the band from itself; not just a new direction, a cure.

Like any record by a working band this record had a precedent. The opening track on Fear of Music, it's immediate predecessor, is called I Zimbra and is a solid funk groove with African flavours and a strident chanting group vocal. The chanting is from a Dadaist text. It is the test flight for half of Remain in Light. This was Brian Eno's third outing as producer. He and David Byrne had collaborated on the strange industrial-Afrobeat record My Life in the Bush of Ghosts which also used the strident funk base, this time for a number of voice samples that took so long to clear that it was released after Remain in Light, though finished before. So, when Remain in Light appeared, heralded by the video for Once in a Lifetime from the weird end of the quirk spectrum, it would have felt like a perfected experiment. And it was, except that the sound and its unsettling effects followed the band into the next studio album and two live albums until they emerged with the quirky pop of Little Creatures and just kept getting smoother. But people still think of this album when they hear the band's name.

In an age of iconic record covers this sleeve was typical in its unsettling appearance. The front featured the heads of the band masked by a deliberately messy smearing of red. The band name in big white font on the top strip inverted the letters A. The title was the same on the bottom strip but smaller. This kind of taunting ugliness was typical of a time when independent artists were flouting the fame machine (regardless of how they were also chasing its goodies). The rear cover was of a flight of four world war two US military fighters above a mountain landscape, discoloured by polarisation (so the original blue was now red). It had a doomed feel, as though it were the planes of Flight 19 that vanished over the Bermuda Triangle. Neither side seemed to have a lot ot do with the music but their extension of it added the kind of grimy strangeness that made the perfect meaninglessness of recently deposed monarchs of record covers Hipgnosis look forever dated. This was also one of the first high profile computer-designed record covers.

I'm going to impose a scheme on this album. This is partly because the track sequencing itself suggests it but also the mid point, Once in a Lifetime, morphs from the sound of the first side into the more typical Talking Heads sound before grinding down to the unexpected finale. I also need to establish the base uniformity of the first side to avoid repeating myself in describing it. All three of the long tracks are built from a machine-perfect funk bed, feature David Byrne's atonal vocals in patterned statements, slow modal chants, and a mass of incidental noises, keyboard textures and some of guest guitarist Adrian Belew's most adventurous explorations.

Side one can immerse you or leave you feeling that every song sounds the same. I resist funk as a style of music. I am aware that it is dance music and its point is to provide a warm ground for that, but I dance like a drunkard and am left with music that I just want to push until it moves. That puts me among the second group. Until I lay back and let the thing work on me, all of side one sounded like a single track with two strange gaps. So, that's how I'm going to treat it here. 

Born Under Punches adds an insistent high pitched chromatic riff that might be processed guitar or someone punishing a set of steel drums. Among the clicking guitars and odd slap bass stabs. Byrne rants in a high nervous voice about his hands and being a government man, protesting a little too much. A gentle backing chant rises behind him about wanting to breathe and the heat going on. Crosseyed and Painless gives us a growling Byrne vocal about shape and shapelessness. He's panicking and doubting himself. The breezy chant behind him caution against the power of facts. The Great Curve gives us more uncertainty as teh world proves impossible to grasp as the figure of a dancer seems to both answer his queries and confound him more as the chant proves more complex and layered than anything else on the side. A squealing solo from Belew reminds us that we're at the end of the '70s and he did such a bang up job on Bowie's Lodger the year before. As the punching brass section comes in the chant returns to the notion of the dancer, the world moving on a woman's hips. The driving chant takes us to the end of the side and, if we've been listening as it's asked us, we feel as though we've lived through something important. Another monster Belew solo takes us into the fade. 

And it's odd that such a cold, impersonal take on what was traditionally a hot invitation to life has engaged us. This is not the funk of Fela Kuti or James Brown, nor was it the kind of academic reading you might expect of a gaggle of art school punks to produce. It had two effects: the realm of white music opened to the riches of the rhythms like never before, producing the likes of Heaven 17 and Josef K and: the realm of white music clutched at funk and made a gleaming junkyard of white T-shirt crap out of it for the next half decade. No one quite got it. The band kept at it in epic live shows with overpopulated stages, an intensified studio album and a movie for most of the ten years that followed. So, I guess it worked. 

Once in a Lifetime starts the flip with a bright and punchy backing that still bears the funk grooves of the first side but there's a real shift. The bass slams short staccato figures beneath the bubbling keyboard. For the first time on the album, the backing features a stucture of chord shifts and more of a verse chorus scheme .Byrne comes in with a series of propositions that he developed from hearing evangelical preachers. "And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack..." The chorus is similar to the earlier chanting except that it's a lot sunnier and easier to singalong to. The video, choreogrpahed by Toni Basil, is a standout of its time with a constant feed of video effects including Byrne in a suit against an infinite white background or mixed into an aquamarine liquid that could be through a microscope slide or the ocean. The version on the record is longer, featuring a manipulated middle section where Byrne is musing about the water in the sea. The sermon has gone from a question of where the parishoners' lives have taken them to something a lot trippier. But the reason this strange mini epic ruled its day's airwaves and still gets people on to the floors and yelling in their cars is that it's damnably catchy. After albums of mainstream denying shadow manufacture, Talking Heads had a hit on their hands. I still wonder what people who bought the album thinking it was a cute dancey ditty thought when they started at side one.

Nevertheless, the rest of the record plays like the old band upgraded. They can still cope with some funk but remember when they wrote rock songs. As stars of the post punk scene, they weren't about to turn prog. The call from Africa was too loud to try and sound like Miles Davis covering Shostakovich.

Houses in Motion is the closest thing to anything on side one. The funk starts up but it's a lot sparser and Byrne's vocal is world weary and a little paranoid. The choruses are more formal than before but don't feel as much like chanting. An Arabic break from Adrian Belew sounds so alien that it feels generated by electro mechanical sounds (but is his Roland guitar synth). 

Seen and Not Seen is less like funk than like a lot of the emerging British electronic acts like Cabaret Voltaire or the pre-Dare Human League. Byrne based the stilted vocal presentation on the testimony of John Dean at the Watergate hearings, someone being tightrope careful about the statements he made. A bright electronic descant, coupled with a Byrne backing mumbling melodically. The lyric about a man reimagining his face the way a character from Jorge Luis Borges or J.G. Ballard might, does not admit of a chorus and comes as goes like a floating idea that fades back into the dark of the vinyl.

Listening Wind is almost shocking in its departure from the scheme with percussion that could be either or both exotic and electronic. Belew's eerie guitar electronics howl around the bed track. Byrne's quiet vocal tells of a terrorist named Mohjik who assembles and delivers a bomb to an American settlement in the Middle East or North Africa. The tone of this neither condemns him nor condones the invaders but invests a heavy melancholy on the story. The pattern of the verses is an opening couplet describing Mohjik's actions, a triplet of lines about his thoughts which end abruptly before giving way to the mournful chorus about the wind in his heart and the dust in his head. The situation is grave and heart rending as we see he feels trapped by history.

The Overload takes things further down and might even be set after the war resulting from Listening Wind. A dark drone groans constantly as Belew provides the sound of helicopters growling around the soundstage. An organ beeps insistently. Howls and chirps sound out at the edges. I always see a wasted land turned into a desert by bombing. Byrne's vocal is either doubled or choursed, as close as he gets to a baritone range. The melody has a Gregorian feel to it, modal and moaning. A series of statements that don't always flow prevent the song from cohesion, suggesting that this is a world beyond it. A weak signal, a collapse, the removal of the insides and other troubling images alternate with possible reasons for the change like changes in weather or a condition of mercy before more declarations of massive scale damage: A gentle collapsing of every surface. We travel on the quiet road. The overload. The fade takes its time, numbing unchanging, a stasis before a final cataclysm that feels like it is only growing for every second it doesn't happen.

There is a story about this and it's the kind of story that should be true, regardless of its veracity. It goes like this: the band had read about Joy Division, the music described in journalism, but had never heard the music itself, so decided to write and record their guess at how it sounded. I find it hard to believe that A bunch of New Yorkers so deep in the scene would never have come across both of the band's albums. The song that The Overload most resembles is the last track on Unknown Pleasures, I Remember Nothing. It, too is a constant dark drone with a vocal that alternates between anger and a defeated moan. Sounds of shattering glass and other atmospherics that wander around the stereo image as well as stabs from a distorted bass fill the room with a revisit to an interpersonal atrocity, perhaps one that wore on without getting worse or better.

In The Overload the line about the missing centre reminds me of Yeats's poem The Second Coming: Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold". It gives the scene a dangerous fragility and the conversants knowing little more than that they continue to live, setting off along the road to wherever it takes. I first heard the entire album early the next year, at the on-campus digs of a Uni friend. We were all afternoon drunk and sedate in the Brisbane warmth when the funky record we were listening to started to slow down. I had assumed it was just us, the talk decelerating into fragments, the taste of beer or rum and the thick smell of marijuana smoke taking their measure. And then it ground to the droning stasis of The Overload and the mournful observation: The centre is missing. Mine host, still with enough energy for it, sprang up. He crossed the floor and lifted the needle. Stark silence. We were grateful. "That's enough of that." I think he might have put on The Clash or something and their pre-cringe stab at rap The Magnificent Seven. I don't know if my timing's right on that but whatever it was, it sounded busy and hip without getting all blitzy. Against every impulse I had, I wanted to hear The Overload again.

KINDA KINKS @ 60

The Kinks returned from a tour of Asia. Ray had new songs and the label needed more product. The band piled into the studio with Shel Talmy and slapped their second album down. It's an interesting platter with a sizeable gap between hastily conceived numbers, odd covers and a clear emerging voice.

The opening blast of Look for Me Baby and Got My Feet on the Ground do the work of beat bands at the time by keeping everyone dancing. The second has Dave Davies a car length out front with a high energy rasp as the band keeps time almost inaudibly below.

It's the third track that stands up and takes the spotlight. It's a heavily influenced folk number with a kind of Latin shuffle and complex acoustic guitar arpeggio figure. This is what Pentangle wanted to sound like at the other end of the decade. Ray Davies' vocal is a little more stretched than on the rock numbers. Nothing in the World Can Stop Me Worrying About that Girl. You can hear the cousinship of the R&B the band made their own in the clubs and parties of the newly swinging London but this has a melancholy cool that would be heard again on this album and to this day from Davies. Brother Dave provides a muscular electric reinforcement but it's Ray's quiet, exacting tone that rules here.

The first of two covers sees Dave's return to the mic. Nagging Woman is a rock version of Jimmy Anderson's menacing blues from the previous decade. Dave sounds a lot younger, whiter and petulant. Remember, covers weren't just filler to the British bands that put them on their early LPs, they were picked from the live sets and offered as cred. The problem was that any band with burgeoning writing talents was going to feel the squeeze of having their covers sound like local copies as the new blood rose. Wonder Where My Baby is Tonight is not quite that. It's a piano led 2/4 knees up with a jealousy theme. Perfectly amiable. But it's the side closer it where the show stops as everyone forgets to sip their drinks and has to listen.

Tired of Waiting For You is the kind of undeclared exotica that the band was pulling out of their hat that made them, however new to public attention, influencers of their world. A plinky arpeggio moves between two chords a tone apart. Dave's guitar emphasises the drone-like feel an octave lower with a hot clean growl. The bass and drums are sparse as Ray's voice takes the centre with a rising figure in the melody. The repetition in the lyrics and the melodic scheme show that a great rock song really doesn't need to be Shakespeare or Mozart to work. "So tired, tired of waiting, tired of waiting for you." His voice almost cracks every time he finishes that chorus, it's the only thing the narrator can think of. He recalls that he's lonely but his love, who's also aware of that, shows him the contempt that will keep the bond both durable and ill. And then Ray shows what he can do with a middle eight. The song falls into recess as he sings with a pained gentleness, "it's your life and you can do what you want. Do what you like but please don't keep me waiting." He's just telling her what she needs to do to keep him there. Repeat. The song ends on a clean finish: a fadeout might have hammered the point but it wasn't necessary. Ray Davies wasn't just showing his sensitive side, he was playing a role that left him vulnerable, a character in someone else's story. All that in two and a half minutes.

Side Two opens with the other cover. This is really not the joyous magnificence of Martha and the Vandellas' Dancing in the Street. Just as their early take on Long Tall Sally was only ever going to be overshadowed by The Beatles' explosive version, the band didn't have the sheer force to approach the big music of the better known take. If the backing had been used for a new original it would have been more impressive. 

The next song is almost that. Don't Ever Change begins with the same broad rhythm section and guitar power but takes it into something more like Merseybeat with Beatley melismas in the verses. But the choruses add a saddening touch and then we get another Ray middle eight which comes out of nowhere to drag real emotion out of the identikit pop filler. "Don't ever cha-ange," he sings in an aching descent. When he repeats the line it's from the shadows behind the sweetness of the verses. It's all teen stuff, asking her never to leave him but its a plea from the heart, from someone railing at the injustice of love and the cruelty of the bond. The thing is that, as ill fitting as it is against the boppy body of the thing, it fits, the reverse, tear stained side of it is there to hear. The next time this comes up it's resolved more conventionally, but we know what we've heard.

Come On Now is an energetic rocker with a solid riff from Dave and a shouting vocal with some party-like backing vocals from the band and Ray's wife Rasa. It's just under two minutes of swinging London joy.

So Long is where that kind of songwriting meets the folk of the previous side. A highly accomplished acoustic arpeggiated figure on an acoustic provides sturdy ground for Ray's arresting chorus and rise/fall verse melody. Wonder Where from side one was not a fluke. This band could fashion it and throw it at the wall with the best. They'd already shown how they could rock with the punishing early singles. Now, Ray was clearly showing skills beyond the shouty beat band image they were shaking from.

You Shouldn't Be Sad is another perky love rocker with a more Motown sophistication thrown in. 

Something Better Beginning begins with proof that you should never record guitar with too much amp reverb. Dave's figure might have been a fanfare like motif but has to be obscured until it's wrapped in tinfoil from a chocolate wrapper. The song has a Drifters lilt but the work given to a full vocal arrangement and, bad guitar tone aside, feels like a finished project rather than filler for the last track. The title and chorus phrase hints at the wit and economy to come. It sounds like a young man demanding the newly sparked good time turn into a happening thing but the logic of the chorus itself is more humble and vulnerable: "Is it the start of another heartbreaker or something better beginning."

So, success around the traps, in the charts, exotic tours had strengthened this band from a kind of one hit novelty to an act of clear promise. Davies has remarked on the record that it was the product of a lot of squabbling with Talmy insisting on a raw sound where Ray wanted to develop into new textures (clearly evident in the acoustic numbers but generally true of the songcraft, here). The singles from this time include Set Me Free and the eternal See My Friends as well as the razor satire Well Respected Man. 

This was the year that Rubber Soul turned bands long players into statements to hang on and that movement was already happening in the lower ranks. This is no Rubber Soul but the rapidly maturing voice of one of his lifetime's finest songsmiths is gaining impressive definition. The Kinks are one of those bands whose reissues came decades after their deletion, building a new and devoted fanbase. Mostly, you had to find a good singles compilation with one or two deeper cuts like Hermans Hermits or The Zombies. It took earnest effort on the part of fans of  the power of great rock music but it worked. The good thing is that we heard it all at once and the bad is that we heard the early efforts without the context of having waited for them to be released one by one. It means they can sound a little ragged. the cure for that is, as it ever shall be, listening.