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.