1980@40: ICEHOUSE/FLOWERS/FLOWERS/ICEHOUSE

I saw this band before I knew who they were. A massive line up at Festival Hall that included XTC, Magazine and a pre-fame INXS. Flowers, as they were then, took the stage with a thick crisp mix and a fashionably static performance style. Singer Iva Davies proved gymnastically adept. He sounded like Marc Bolan when they did a T-Rex cover and Bowie when they did one of his. At first I thought that was pretty good but this was in the era of DIY style and behaving like a cover band made the band lose points. The songs were catchy enough but that note perfect vocal sampling had to go.

I thought very little of them after that until the video for I Can't Help Myself appeared on Sounds one afternoon. The band setup in a big concrete multi-level carpark and synched through the song. I loved how the chorus was delayed with a brief guitar instrumental and seemed to be about the dangerous side of mental illness. The charts at that stage offered far fewer love songs than most of the years of the '70s: Enola Gay was about the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, Underpass was about a kind of Ballardian isolation, Counting the Beat was about masturbation, and so on. This joined the stream but did so with a singable chorus and a staccato keyboard hook in the verse. So, no more Bowie vocal party tricks, then.

Cut to Schoolie's Week 1980. I was staying at a friend's family unit high above Broadbeach. Through the floor to ceiling windows you could see all the other cells, expensively dimly lit, each one a screenshot from the kind of neo noir film we'd be seeing in cinemas around the corner of the opening of the decade. We went to late night bars for drinks and pre-dawn cafes for toasted sandwiches after the drinks. We went to parties where no one was unwelcome. The endless beergardens in the afternoon and whatever you could get away with after sundown. We slept when we had to, regardless of the position of the sun. It was overcast for the second half of the week and it didn't bother us at all. Two songs will always bring that back for me. Holiday in Cambodia and We Can Get Together. After I made a tactical move to another flat on Mermaid Beach I heard the album that the second one came from. And in the middle of a loud night of drunken girls and boys I listened and liked what I heard.

You think the volume's too low at first. A single bass note on the synth coils out of the dark for a little too long until the vocal comes in with a strings like figure on the keyboards. "It's always cold inside the icehouse. Though the rivers never freeze ..." There's also a girl waiting outside waiting for a boy who'll never come. The Devil lives inside the icehouse, at least that's what the old folks say. As the parts of the verse develop the keyboard figure adapts to the chord changes and the bass keeps barrelling on. A pause for each chorus, a single line: there's no love in side the icehouse. This big lightless nightmare of a song moves slower than a funeral cortege until the palm muted chugging guitars push it into the territory of a tank battle. The images flash and soar into life.

Next came the song I mentioned before. A chunky electronic chug gives way to a shiny hot lead riff and a power chord announces the singer. "There must be something we can talk about..." And ends the verse with the first half of the chorus. The repeated plea, "No matter what your friends say, don't go too far..." Could have been written for us except that we really did need our friends to stop us (and they did, just quietly). The song was all teen fear, the fear that becomes indistinguishable from excitement and turns a night sky into a tide of wishes and the lights below it a ragged map. There's a great lust in the middle of it as there's a great lust at every party every night where everyone's well under twenty and changing like a chameleon as often as they have to get whatever it is they need. But it's also 1980 and three years of punk and punk-influenced pop have taken adolescent courtship from oafish rock unchanged since the '50s to this blend of angsty hesitation and bursting will. And at the end, finally with a high climatic sustained wordless vocal note beneath the chorus is the explosive refrain: WE CAN GET TOGETHER! And then, because it's still 1980, it finishes with chit chat and a rounded chord.

And that's what most of the album turns into, two streams of electronics and anthemic rock. The single after that was Walls which had a cinematic video to it. They attracted a lot of attention at the Countdown Awards and mimed Icehouse from within a wireframed neon cube. Whether it was a single or not the song Sister was on Countdown more than once. And the rest is success with a sharp ear for a hooky chorus enough to fill a good sized compilation album.

These aren't the only good songs on this first one and very few feel like filler. A disco version of Can't Help Myself didn't impress me but at least it was a different one. Nothing to Do was Iva back to his old cover version days in a Lou Reed mode. Pretty standard if enjoyable fare that helped my first Christmas holidays back in Townsville that bit more fun. What lifted it above standard was that sense of cinema it offered so boldly. No surprise in learning later that the producer was Cameron Allen, a film composer whose score for the political thriller Heatwave could do with a contemporary release.

But the thing about Flowers was that, regardless of how the band started it very soon became a group with a line up that changed around Iva Davies. A look through the songs credits on the record sleeve have him in every one and mostly solo compositions. As much as Tubeway Army really had just been Gary Numan and players so this band was Iva and friends. Oh, and it feels like they went in one way and came out another during my holidays but what had been a band called Flowers became the same band called Icehouse. Considering the font on the cover art no change was necessary, just now the album was called Flowers by a band called Icehouse. And when the Oz Rock wave flowed into the commercial FM stations in the decade to come there was no real way of using that much image to tell them apart from Australian Crawl or Mondo Rock. The songs were still better than those others' but that's where they moved and lived ever after.

So, while Flowers were never cool they appealed with the same crossover ease as the mainstreaming Split Enz were at the time, even going to rival that band's egg Crowded House with honours. I am the last to whinge about bands selling out but quick to point out that some were not doing so but reaching stated ambitions. See also The Police or The Pretenders. No shame in that. But I recall as though it were art directed by my own nostalgia, the pleasure of qualifying my affection for a hooky single, a Street Cafe or Great Southern Land, without ever needing to commit to fandom. It was a smirking nod across the picket line and felt as good as all smirks do. But now, with facial muscles that need to do more to show less I can listen to the songs and briefly run back out into the night of the Gold Coast canals and jump into the shadows before anyone sees me.

1980@40: TRUE COLOURS - SPLIT ENZ

 

Muffled voices, instruments warming up and suddenly a punky barre chord buzzes out with tight but light drumming. Tim Finn's urgent vocal does easy local gymnastics around a deceptively simple melody when the verse ends with the cry of the title: Shark Attack! Add momentum for each verse and race on. A brief break to add some orchestral drama and then an impossibly rapid piano solo before the last verse flies past to the fade. Split Enz have burst through the door and let us know that they made it into the '80s, leaner and meaner and are ready for their closeup.

Proof? Neil Finn takes the mic after an introduction on still fashionable palm muted chords. Neil's vocal is more fluid and warmer than big brother's and his way with a vocal melody and songcraft are going to win him more a-sides and take the band further away from their prog rock cabaret than they'd so far dared go. I Got You is all hooks and charm. A keyboard solo with a quirky turn away from the main progression pays tribute to both the old prog and the new wave at the same time. The song is pure joy.

And so is the rest of it, from the punchy rage of What's the Matter With You? to the quavering comic book figure of Nobody Takes Me Seriously Anyway, the soaring instrumental Choral Sea, the classically strong I Hope I Never. This set in its sleeve of spiky, Dutch tilted artwork and compressed production is a manual of assimilation that couldn't be approached as the generational kin like Billy Joel tried to do with some yelps and palm muting. With Split Enz the cultural exchange rate felt like dollar for dollar. Very slight shifts to their look but such a paring of their arrangements and songcraft made them indistinguishable from bands much younger making bigger splashes.

Neil Finn's influence cannot be underestimated here as he emerged as the kid brother that could and continued to prove his chartability in future singles like One Step Ahead and History Never Repeats. Brother Tim, no slouch himself, seemed outclassed and perhaps it wouldn't be until Neil's Crowded House years that he could break from the constraints. Until then, his fast, snappy songs that had fewer quirks than hooks sounded like everything else on the top 40.

But what did this mean? The next LP sounded much like this and the one after was more expansive with real orchestras and folk instruments and had a kind of concept to it. The direction suggested the kind of development that the boomers who ran the big radio stations and the record companies that fed them would recognise as orthodox; a little Beatles never hurt anybody, after all? Back in the land of the long white cloud the mighty mice of the Flying Nun label were producing miniature wonders for the ages with the likes of The Clean and The Chills aided and accessorised by the great Chris Knox who seemed to do what he did for the love of it. As the Enz grew and broadened they must have felt this pinch and even sting. In Australia, The Go Betweens were still quirky and low key and Nick Cave returned to Melbourne with a better defined bad boy saunter that you didn't have to believe for a second to enjoy it. Where could Split Enz go after they had finally cracked the code of charting in the new, short haired video arcade of post punk? They went boomer because the boomers finally gave them the money they'd been starving for over the decade just gone and cared to starve no more. They were selling to fans half a decade younger than their first fans had been and that's how you build a consumer base.

Until then, this disc, forty plus minutes of joyous hard edged pop that you will still like and sing along to forty years later, still stands. If you don't know any of the context that's all you need to hear. The band that had gone from obscurist art rock to teenybopper without ever going through a cool phase could at least write a good song and fill two sides of vinyl with them.

I'm saying all this as I didn't have this record at the time and a little later picked up the singles second hand as they worked so solidly well. My face might redden to admit that I turned my nose up at them for being oldies while really enjoying the songs. Well, I was seventeen and you're allowed to be as shallow as the bounds of human interchange will permit. Finally hearing the record after decades of all but forgetting it had been released was a strange experience as it felt old and familiar and unheard at the same time. But I still play it now because there are songs because there are songs because there are songs.

1980@40: SCARY MONSTERS - DAVID BOWIE

 

So much had happened. The great morphing wave had taken us from the barre chording slaughter of punk through the sourcandy Brighton rock of post punk, industrial, ska, dub on the mainstream that it looked like nothing in particular was in fashion. As I headed to eighteen and nominal adulthood I started thinking that all that was just as well as it might be time to ditch the idea of fashion altogether. Fact was I wasn't good at playing it to begin with and it wasn't for years before I could look back and understand that that was fashion. There would soon be clubs where the punters dressed like 18th century Venetian court jesters and bands that got on stage in the plainest drab they could get from the supermarket. We didn't even have a patois; there was no rad or cool or square or gnarly to us and we called what we liked good. Then the clip for Ashes to Ashes was played on Countdown and I thought for the first time in at least a year: I wonder what David Bowie will do now?

The last one, Lodger, was a track by track departure from the big sci-fi landscapes of Low and the harsh and sharded night of Heroes. It even had some fun along the grooves. And it was eclectic but it was eclectic in a Bowie way, unlike when Billy Joel tried to get all new wave that year and only made himself look older than everyone. And then in 1980 he turns up again in a clip that looked like a hard sci-fi tv show and music that didn't try to be anything but good. And because he always knew how to cast, nascent star of the London Blitz Steve Strange was there beside him in surrealistic costume. Bowie was trying and trying hard but in his case it worked. The video and song were thrilling.

We get to the start of the opener It's No Game with the sound of someone fast winding a cassette, turning it over and winding it more. A messy count-in and we plunge into a big noise of Robert Fripp guitar which sounds like a synthesiser here but a rhinoceros there. A sassy woman speaks something in Japanese before Bowie comes in with a vocal that sounds like he's been in the drunk tank for three hours. Desperate screams and imagery of street conflict. Where? Kabul? Iran? U.K.? Anywhere and everywhere. It's as though he spent a day with wall to wall news broadcasts and forced his way out of a locked door. In the end as it's coming to a crashing stop Fripp keeps up his metal monster noodling until Bowie yells at him twice to shut up.

Up the Hill Backwards comes from a highly ordered opposite. Lower key vocals sing the lyric in unison. I always think of lines of athletes in uniform tracksuits singing this with hands on hearts. No major breaks, just a few verses of everyone in line and agreeing. After a decade of great dynamism as an artist and celebrating the disruption of punk while providing his own appropriately different one Bowie watched this settle into genre, into homogeneity which is the point at which any youth revolt is absorbed by the mainstream. So, it sounds healthy and could sell boxes of cereal or flavoured milk. He met the new brash mainstream with subtlety.

The title track bashes to after a brief electronic drone with screaming guitar and oafish glottal gulps. Bowie comes in multitracked and in low Cockney. The chorus adds a microsecond delay giving it an unnerving plastic sound. A long but screaming guitar noodle ends satisfyingly with a double chorus. We leave on a wordless hum-along to the fade. It's rock and roll but it doesn't even have slogans anymore just impulses. 

Ashes to Ashes opens with arpeggios that could be keyboards or guitar or both, warbling through chorus pedals. We hear the sound before the notes but when we hear them we hear a deeply melancholy fanfare. Bowie starts in falsetto: "Do you remember a guy that's been, in such an early song?" References to his first significant hit song Space Oddity and its lead character Major Tom are woven deeply through the lyric but as we relax into a descending progression and a series of stream of consciousness images, backed by a spoken choral vocal, we are lowered into the hole in the ground as the funeral rites are murmured above. This song is a floating wilderness that drifts from gentle reminiscence to distant operatic roars against an arrangement that's very hard to pin down beyond its narcosis. It's sleepy, it's dreamy and second by second it just seems to get sadder. But it's transient, less an end than a farewell. Bowie's using the turn of a nine to a zero as a chance to reboot. The gentle chant "My mother said to get things done you better not mess with Major Tom" steers us slowly out of the melancholy, through the sci-fi landscape of the the video. R.I.P. Let's get this party started.

So we do. Fashion. A few bars of something undefined turns into another thick rock song with a deep funk ground. The vocals again are multitracked, striding through images of political strong arm tactics and style identity. Lots of warping Fripp guitar. The modal oohs of the verse bring back Golden Years but the looseness of that one has been clipped into uniformity. The easy trip of the mid '70s is now the tightly wrought kit of the New Romantic and the New Right. Bowie's not taking sides, here, not even to the extent of a Thin White Duke, he's just watching and reporting. Fashion is fun but it's also deadly serious. By now it's clear he's not giving us another persona, the music itself is doing that, but preparing for an ascension elsewhere. Where? Far above this organising leisure politics, for one thing. He keeps climbing as the voices below chant the sounds of style: fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fashion.

A little feedback gives way to a sweeter Fripp guitar line and a descant. Bowie's in gymnastic mode but the feel of it is the kind of rolling ballad he's been doing since Aladdin Sane, with a forward pushing momentum. But instead of romantic tales of love and travel Teenage Wildlife is more like a celebration of seeing genuine style and individuality in the kind of herd that Fashion was describing. The noodly guitar stretches into Heroes-like legato wails as the calls to the teenage wildlife ascend to jungle howls like fanfares.

Scream Like a Baby opens in strength, telling of hospitals and paddy wagons, life under arrest and in restraints. If the previous song toasted individuality this is aggrieved to see it punished with force. The hard beats and low-mixed rock arrangement push the notion of fun from our minds as Bowie's pained vocal seems to ask us what we would do.

Kingdom Come is a cover of a Tom Verlaine song. Narrator is a prisoner, confused which is how he got there but he just needs a day far away and then a night and he just keeps breaking the rocks in hard labour until the end of the world. Like Sam in the previous song, he's defiant and determined to get to relief and freedom when (in a twist) the kingdom comes. Why this as a cover, especially when Bowie was on such a roll? I think it's a gesture of generosity and an admission that the rising generation might well be getting it right. The arrangement is very little changed form Verlaine's solo album original (it wasn't a Televsion number) in another gesture of solidarity.

Because You're Young begins in the muted chords of the era with a pinched urgent riff. Bowie's vocal falls to the cod operatic he started with the 1969 self titled album and this is one of the few songs on the set that sounds like it could have been on an earlier platter like Diamond Dogs or Station to Station. Not to denigrate it for that but the call back feels strange in this record of newness. The words are intriguing, though. "It's love back to front and no sides." Like the severely short haircuts of the electronic musicians this seems to leave no mystique to the face but rather a taunt to question its contrast. Psychodelicate girls and metal faced boys. Is it about one of his own encounters? Bowie is seldom if ever that straight up but there is a real yearning to the screaming litany of millions of starts, dreams and everything else.

The closer is the opener but without the screaming. Everything is clean. His vocal feels resigned, the old master debaucher on his throne, more like Lou Reed than Bowie he reaches for the snifter of cognac at the table, gives it a swirl with a look in and puts it back without drinking. He's tired and and can't tell drunkenness from inspiration at this time of night but he's ready to go and will be fine when he gets there. Where? Not here, for one thing.

A frantic clicking like typing or something. It fades. End.

November 1980 and I'm studying for exams in the room downstairs, away from the tension of the troubled marriage in the main house. That marriage began with trouble and never got through it so it just repeats there, blow and counter blow. Down here I've got a good big coffee and my texts, and the radio has three or so stations on the AM band I can switch between to hear any of three high rotation numbers. One is Don't Stand So Close, by the Police because I like the movement and the harmonies. Two is Psycho Chicken by the Fools, a clunking parody of Talking Heads' Psycho Killer that I find funny no matter how many times I hear it. And three is Ashes to Ashes. I manage over hours to hear each one about three times and I never forget a fact that I read that night which is just as well as the next day I'll be sitting in the big bright cavern of Cloudland answering questions about Economics. By the time I get to bed I'm hearing an ersatz David Byrne talk about supply and demand of chicken meat and then I dream of white faced clowns on posterised seashores.

Then exams, breathe out, Schoolie's Week, good stuff, bad stuff, and then it's up to Townsville where I finally can't hear my brother and his wife. School friend Wayne visits in the afternoon with a copy of the album. We smoke, chat, drink rum and listen. We were too young to be into Bowie at the start and had to catch up through the jungle drum market of home cassettes. He was a hero for more than one day. Everything was changing. We were legally adults which took the burr off the alcohol a little but it still worked. And, as neither of us were looking, we missed seeing Bowie climb up to the stage of the biggest stadium he could find where he pumped out hits that were ready for the turntables of the most brutal AM playlists. For a bit, at least, though, he was still down here with us, letting us know we were fine. And then he was gone.

1980@40: ALPHABRAVOCHARLIEDELTAECHOFOXTROTGOLF: MODELS

21 Hz rises from the silence as a dusty rhythm. It's like a big wide desolate landscape. I ran it through a spectrum analysis and found there was a dip in the 21 Hz range but a big shelf around 50 Hz (which is past inaudible to human ears) so it wasn't a highlighted frequency that inspired this (unless something is happening at 21 Hz that they put in for the hell of it. Wow, how to ruin an opening track. Thought I'd check it, just in case.

So begins the first LP by Models, a Melbourne band who, along with a few significant cohorts, established a shaky bridge over the ravine between the mainstream and the threatening, many-visaged theatre of post punk. They begin with the atmosphere of an electronic band but they riff in the next track like a rock band. The guitar playing the riff is not overdriven but clean and thick. Strategic Air Command, starting like a jet fighter rising into the blue and the strangled vocals of Sean Kelly gravelling out a short phrase verse melody before the backing vocals burst in: bombs away, that's ok, error in your favour. The phrasing of early computing and automated service. The language is military but it's about a "mock-up" plane. He's trying to entice someone into his lair. There he is the Air Vice Marshall. This odd take on mating from 1980 could be a gamer's anthem from 2020. That's reach.

Two People Per Sq. Km is gutteral verse, singing sax, spiky guitar and bass on a real workout. The existential perils of a place with massively more land than people. A thick, syntheised intrumental break and the chanted chorus: Dancing makes me seasick. Next, a big, bright synth riff and sharp chordy guitar with the kind of quirky love song heads to a half spoken chorus: she pulled the pin on me. 

A galloping bass is joined by a stilted spaghetti western guitar riff in Twice removed. This stops abruptly at the verse which is almost a chant but set to a kind of battered Latin beat. Synth and organ dissonance, seared by more sax. A taut low string guitar riff through a chorus would recall the Cure if not for its arch wink. An staccato organ progression as bright as an ice cream commercial starts Pate Pedestrian and an insistent piano rising figure support the words about his feet getting hot on the spot and that he's a pate pedestrian. Models are from Melbourne and know enough of those to write a song about them. It's an end of side song so it just gets left on rather than chosen first.

A rushing tomtom and big synth arpeggio. Kelly comes in with a few growled lines before the whole band chants: You cheat on her she cheats on you. Kissing Around Corners. A sublime keyboard ascension then repeat. If this were the halved Human League to come this song would have neo disco pretensions but this is pure fun, stopping here and there for a kind of John Carpenter movie synth break before plunging back into the thick pop bliss.

All Stop has a finger clicking 2/4 strut with a skeletal echoed guitar over a bass on full treble. Compelling but it's hard to get a grip on the lyric. Is it about working in advertising? War fottage on tv? A middle section features a panning chopper rattle. It ends on more skeletor guitar, a hummed repetition of the title and a fade. Uncontrollable Boy is an unruly Bossa Nova with Telstar organ. He's unruly himself as the song gives way to a rock instrumental which feels stiff by comparison and the shambling Latin groove is welcome back.

Young Rodents asks us into a shadow with a big bass arpeggio and dirty alley sax. "Plays like a cat, he's a cute little boy." A creepy middle section resigns that they will have to kill them. Somewhere between the scratchers of Hamelin and the future Birthday Party dirge Nick the Stripper lies this strange, unnerving dream. No less a worry is the next track. Hans Stand: A War Record. A fade in of marimbas. Kelly's strangled voice enters gently, telling Hans to clean the church. The title tells where Hans has come from. It fades almost before it's begun. 

And then, the albums master track, the one I heard in my head all the way from Brisbane to Melbourne on a Bus so loud with a yobbo's blaring cassette of the new Dire Straits album that my memory of the Model's track had to struggle. But it won.

Happy Birthday IBM starts without a breath as a bass on the edge of overdrive plays a stuttered two note figure then down a tone. Drums then guitar. Then the mighty synth melody descending in staccato slices into the nervous systems of every one who hears it. "Happy Birthday!" chants the band. "Happy Birthday IBM". An effortless major key squiggle on the keyboards and repeat. But this is Models so you don't repetition until you've tried it a few different ways in the same song. A break restarts with slices of guitar and a cartoony low register synth riff as a big deep voice expands the IBM abbreviation. Chorus chant fades into a ring modulated tom tom and industrial hiss.

There had been plenty of songs about computers and by the early '80s the theme felt weary. Even the strong Mi-Sex charter Computer Games felt a little naff for all its nu-wave force. But this didn't mention computers. It mentioned their maker. And it used them in sequencing. And it suggested the brutalist music they could make and turn us into without a single line about how impersonal they were. And it was fun. The corporate anthem feel to the chorus really is infectious. You can't get away with a single listen without at least wanting to sing in perfect unison with it.

With the strength of sticking to a constant instrumental pallet, some burgeoning songcraft poking through the alt.rock aloofness and a non-gothic delight in the darker corners of the city, Models made me think of Melbourne years before I got there. I saw them a few times and they were good but at the time I wanted them to sound like the spiky, quirky records they made. Then again, as I was to discover, the city of their birth left its stamp on them as much as it did to all its musical children. Part cabaret, part grand guignol Models added a blue-grey smudge to a canvas that just kept getting busier and darker...and more fun.

1980@40: KALEIDOSCOPE - SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES

When the guitarist and drummer from the lineup of the previous two albums fled mid-tour in a panic this band might have collapsed. The bad about that is that the band lost a guitarist with good ideas. The good is that the creative force of the music and what it sought to express stuck around. Siouxsie and Steve Severin showed that the darker, cinematic moods of The Scream and Join Hands were not only freer to take the helm but refrained from overstating the gothic. They also made good choices of replacements. Budgie, who'd been in the Slits, not only stuck with the band but married the singer and brought a richer percussive pallet to the music. John McGeoch came in on guitar from Magazine. These were people with style and ideas, not just hired guns. What that meant was that the third album sounded fresh but familiar.

Happy House mixed heavily processed guitar with the pulsing toms, chorused bass and full throated vocals. That's the formula for the next few albums and expresses the dependable sound of Siouxsie and the Banshees. For the song itself there is an icy riff, distant whistling and a shivery falsetto, all on different melodies. The verses themselves are controlled explosions, strident declamations of ironic protest. The happy house is a horror house. The wails, cries and force are bound but powerful, growling in chains.

Tenant brings in the hitherto unfamiliar sound of electronics to the band's sound. Budgie sets up a busy high hat ticking, occasionally run through a ring modulator. The bass guitar is so flanged that it sounds like a keyboard. The guitar is chorused and muted and distant. And there throughout, a frowning lower register synthesiser. Siouxsie comes in with sparse images of isolation in high density housing and paranoia. "The plaster falls and a body reels .... softly" Stops, starts, whispers and more falsetto coos. It's like putting your head into a Francis Bacon painting and listening to the sounds in the room. 

Trophy starts with the more familiar attack of straightforward snare drums and spiky distorted guitars and Sioux alternating between a cold croon and a wail. But here the rhythmic pattern is a 4/4 with extra bars wedged in to stop it sounding too rock. 

Hybrid has an insistent snare roll, ropey guitar figure, languid sax. It is a kind of hallucinatory account of exhausting touring. Everybody's weary but the thing is that this never drags. It wasn't just McKay and Morris that felt the strain of the previous year's touring. Severin and Sioux were ordered bed rest and tranquilisers by their doctors. Here the mix of grind and sweet jazzy sax melodies express the collision of physical wastage and sublime rewards of working for all that fame.

Clockface is a near instrumental with a forceful rock (thought the guitatr is still well distant). Siouxsie's insistent whoa whoas provide the riff. Perhaps continuing the exhaustion theme of the previous track, even the most energetic song on the side is too difficult for lyrics.

Lunar Camel starts with thick keyboards and drum machine like tones as Soiuxsie enters with a light and breathy whimsy about travel in a dreamlike landscape. This comes as close as the band would get for years to the pleasurable side of intoxication. A blend of childlike playfulness and a worrying darkness beneath. It and the side end on a deep bass drone, chunky muted flanged guitars.

Side two kicks off with the understated acoustic strum and murmur of Christine, a deceptively gentle response to a reading of The Three Faces of Eve about multiple personality disorder. "She tries not to shatter kaleidoscope style ..." "Now she's in purple, now she's a turtle, disintegrating." It's the lightness, the ease of the vocal and the false laid-back bed track that push the disturbance forward, here. Christine's swings and changes happen in the space of a breath. This was a hit single (backed by the decidedly less restrained Eve White) and those were the days.

Desert Kisses rises like a wave of subdubed guitar and forward keyboards. Budgie is keeping time with an off/on approach to high hat figure. Siouxsie's vocal follows the rise through the minor scale with images of isolation, a troubled affair between sand and sea that ends in a letting go or resignation as she sinks down to a personal oblivion. The blend of sexy minor key and pitiable middle eight creates a sense of hopelessness on an epic scale.

Red Light uses a similar minor figure on the synth as Desert Kisses but it's more circular, inescapable. A pornographic photo studio during a shoot. "as the aperture shuts, too much exposure." 

The riff keeps circling. Siouxsie comes in with a variously tired groan or wild wail until the final repetition of "when you see the red light wincing" when she gets mixed to the back and the march of the riff gains strength. Light and heavy all at once.

Paradise Place kicks off at full speed with a tide of fuzzed guitar, vocal wail and the now signature falsetto coos. Cut rate cosmetic surgery. Lots of bad things sliced and reformed in the Hollywood Hills. The guitar of this one reminds me of Keith Levene's playing on the first two PiL albums, down in the mix but razor sharp and gnashing. It's Steve Jones ex Sex Pistol, in fact. The progression plays out sharply to the fade under coos that now sound tragic.

Skin begins with hesitant beeps and clinks but soon takes on a paranoid wail and cacophony as Sioux rails at fur wearing. More Jones guitar, this time a subdued palm muted chord progression. After a final vocal assault the track deconstructs, one part at a time until only the beeps and trills remain. Album over.

Kaleidoscope saw a punk band adapt to losing half its limbs and emerging as a more adventurous and cinematic unit. The songs still have a bratty edge to them but in every case are more refined as new power is discovered in the quieter corners of invention. During the stress hiatus Severin and Sioux extended their pallets by taking up synthesisers and guitar, finding new musical expression in unfamiliar territory. This is to be expected in young artists when forced into invention from necessity: things out of your control? Pick something up and find the notes. This makes the album much better than a resumption: it doesn't sound like a broken original patched up with session players, it sounds like a new band. 

1980@40: CROCODILES - ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN

A rising cloud of beeps and distant howls gives way to a guitar groove that could equally be The Modern Lovers or the Byrds putting a little edge on the 12 string. The drummer is happy to use the whole kit. The bass is note clear and airy. The vocal pushes out from New Wave quirk to near operatic warbling. Short melodic phrases over a two chord groove and major gear shifts in arrangements. Going Up clues you into almost everything you need to know about Echo and the Bunnymen. "If we should pull the plugs out on all history..."

Stars are Stars adds a sparse but firm piano line for drama. The arrangement is sparse and moody but driven. McCulloch's vocal stretches from the declaiming of the opener to a looser attitude that feels more like the account of an eyewitness. Pride adds some very New Wave palm muted guitars but then some very un-post punk double stopping, the added dynamics of a guitarless verse.

Monkeys starts with a punchy guitar assault then launches into a world wise comment on the selfishness of humans and a warbling chorus of "Qui ment?" Who's lying? The opening chordy riff squeezes into a fiery ground in the background. Crocodiles starts in full gear with McCulloch showing how much Elvis lurks in his vocal. It's not an impersonation, it just sits so easily in the pocket of the rockabilly on speed backing which soon sharpens to razor slashing chords as McCulloch's rocker vocal breaks into an exasperated shout. There is a kind of wireframe drawing against black background to it.

Flip it and side two opens with one of the era's most iconic riffs, the bright pendulum of Rescue. High on the fretboard, easy to learn in minutes and played through one of the effects of the era, a chorus pedal. McCulloch comes in with his short phrased declamation. And then the chorus explodes with an improbably mix of desperation and charm: "Woooon't you come on down to my rescue?" Third verse with an industrially strong bass backing and no guitar. Final chorus blast and then heads to the fade as a vocal round. Who the hell did that in 1980? And the self aware lyrics that ask if you can tell it in a song. And the plunging descent of the chorus that begs us down but lifts us at the same time. One of the great singles of the whole post punk epoque (steady, this won't all be gush).

Villiers Terrace bangs up with the full band  at once, augmented by a piano. An unrelenting account of hedonistic panic as people chew on carpet, mixing up the medicine. A haze of nights in the dark of house parties, purple lights, over rummed punch and drugs that look different but all feel the same. The forward thrust stops the weariness of the lyric from taking route and conveys the exhaustion as well as the euphoria. Pictures on my wall departs from the concentrated lyric and band arrangement, allowing more space for the images and moods. Wailing verses of impressions of faces and places rushing by and the chorus grinds about the things about to fail: "pictures on my wall about to swing and fall." More extensive keyboards in this track with searing string synths add a cinematic tone but also betray it as of its time.

All that Jazz presents a tough but crisp groove. "Where the hell have you been?" It's easy to forget that between the escalated threat of nuclear annihilation and the rise of the uniformed hard right in the UK that everyone was just going to parties in the early '80s. The litany of fear in this lyric delivered in a repeated downward minor figure leads inexorably to the final lines: "See you at the barricades, babe. See you when the lights go low, Joe. Hear you when the wheels turn round. See you when the sky turns black."

Happy Death Men. With jungle toms, a Krautrock bass pulse and a jazz piano tinkle straight out of Bowie's Alladin Sane, McCulloch sings a melody somewhere between a clapping song and Claire De Lune. The band keep tight and forceful and are joined by a brass barrage in a break. "Happy death men polish and shine." This is less National Front skinheads than the War Pigs in boardrooms and parliamentary chambers. After a shouted coda from McCulloch, the brass, chaotic piano are driven by  feverish drums, distant wordless vocal lament into the fade. A tiny call back sounds briefly and then silence.

Ian McCulloch had been in a band called the Crucial Three. The other two were Julian Cope who formed Teardrop Explodes and Pete Wylie who formed the band that went under several names all of which contained the word Wah! It's an odd historical tidbit as a trio of future leaders sounds like a disaster. It proved to be. And then the varying fates of the three and how they scrub up now. Echo and the Bunnymen win the durability race with four hit albums and many top forty singles and plenty of touring. Cope heads Teardrop Explodes until his own forces of gravity leave him the sole member. Wylie had trouble keeping his flock for a single album. All produced great moments but only Cope has really continued with any lasting presence beyond this era.

Echo and the Bunnymen presented an impressive big sound at a time when rock bands were having to reassess what that description meant. They fronted up with accessible songs and a musical clarity few could match at the time. They were all clean lines and contained drama but provided more dynamics than most of their field. Apart from some great stirring choruses they relied on McCulloch's charismatic vocal style to divert the listener from the sameyness of almost every verse. Think of it: if you just sang the verses of these songs and later ones like The Cutter or The Killing Moon would be able to tell them apart? And then if you are pressing the verses into a generic melody is it because of a need to highlight lyrcs over tunes? Maybe, if the lyrics were more strident instead of the richly abstract litanies and declamations we get. Oddly enough, that leaves the big choruses which do differ and the grooves of each number. If it weren't for the determination of the band to create ever changing dynamics to the songs there wouldn't be a lot to report.

But there is much to report with this band. In history they figure less visibly than cohorts like the Banshees, the Cure or Joy Division despite offering plenty in the way of new approaches to rock music. Unlike The Psychedlic Furs who took a few LPs to grow into their sound and presentation or the other Crucial Three descendants whose short and stormy careers offered courses in how-not-to do it, Echo and the Bunnymen persevered and maintained. Was it the unremarkable eponymous album that came years after the first big four that left their legacy difficult to access? Do their determinedly anti-stadium rock clean lines and solo free guitar assaults put them too awkwardly to one side of the stage that otherwise clamours with processed guitars and songs of self destruction? This band is clearly the inspiration for masses among their own immediate wake but if a Bunnymenesque outfit surfaced after that the influence note was long past. That's a pity because this album and a few to come gave us a solid alternative to the old guard's posturing and the worst excesses of the new.

1980@40: CLOSER - JOY DIVISION

A rapid pattern on the tom toms sounds like a Renaissance courtly reel but there's something cold and industrial about it, something machine-like. It's joined by a blast of something that sounds like a jackhammer and crawling from underneath it is a quiet electric bass. A metallic wail like a workshop saw warbles. The voice comes in, detached, observing. A list of organised scenarios of pain, violence and oppression follows and the voice becomes the carnival barker: "This is the way. Come inside". And sometimes, quieter, almost a whisper, simply:"this is the way." The tonality has a minor feel about it but never mounts a resolution with a dominant major. It is, in fact, modal. While this was kept on the previous album to vocal melodies, it now controls the music from start to finish. Given the right instruments and a very little time, you could play this whole record's songs as a song cycle from the 1400s. .Translate the lyrics into French or Latin and no one would know the difference. That it's being played on rock instruments with an edge of industrial and electronic music lays a cowl of icy deliberation over the set. As dark as Unknown Pleasures got it doesn't approach the sheer impersonal scariness of Closer.

Well, that was Atrocity Exhibition, track one. It took its title from J.G.Ballard, a writer of the concrete fantastical, and its imagery from a wide ranging look at human history. The track's arrangement and production feel both heavy and light and while it feels on the long side, the song never drags. There's just too much compulsion created between the voice at the centre of the thuds and sharp edges of the music around it.

Isolation begins with what sounds like a drum machine pushed to the edge of clipping distortion. An energetic bass figure boosts it before bight flashing chords on a keyboard play a kind of fanfare. A synth introduces a sticky descending riff before the vocal enters, distant, couched in metallic reverb. The narrator suffers from a socially crippling sense of inferiority to the id monsters around him, diving down to the plea to his mother to believe he's done his best but is ashamed of the person he is. Finally, he sings of the beauty he feels he is alone in seeing, knowing it's the one quality he has. The song ends with his repeated call of "isolation!" and crashes in a brief bright echo.

In Passover the crisis the narrator was expecting is not given a name but doesn't need to be. It has more to do with the recognition that the order we expect in our lives is a thin veneer of unreality, masking the destruction and survival competition beneath. The title does have a quite direct relevance to the lyric as the line' "left with a mark on the door" refers to an instruction to the chosen to identify themselves with a mark in blood on the doors of their houses so that the great divine vengeance machine will spare them. Perhaps the celebration of Passover was explained to Ian Curtis and he stretched the relevance out to all of humanity. The song takes the form of a continuous declamation of violence and failure and is set in a gentler rhythm than the opening tracks with what sounds like a real drum kit, growling bass and the same kind of electronic wailing on the guitar as the opening track which takes breaks in lieu of choruses. A hymn to resignation.

Slicing guitar chords, again heavily processed, supported by a big boomy bass, play a pattern that sounds like it isn't in 4/4 (but it is). The bass falls in with the drums that leave enough out of the bar to make the time signature sound off but are played so forcefully that the repetition drives the song into order. In the breaks the guitar plays the closest thing to a blues influenced figure but it's drawn out so much that it falls back into modal territory. Curtis vocal follows this falling figure through the song's length until he breaks out at the end with the final lines. A decaying marriage, a child's memories of separation, surgery, coercion and a chant of religious finality: the words don't feel to be recounting any specific thing but rather the experience of being taken over by circumstances or just stronger people. The line that always chills me in this song is: "as he lays asleep she takes him in her arms. Some things I have to do though I don't mean you harm." The sense of entrapment is constant and violently supported.

A Means to an End is the kind of title that gives the shallower of fans a clue to the notion that the whole album is Ian Curtis' suicide note. While the beat of the massive chromatic descent sounds like disco, the downward force quashes that. It's a pounding, earthbreaking assault. Curtis comes in with a voice EQ-ed to a telephonic thinness. Images of a strong kinship broken by betrayal. "I always looked to you," is replaced by, "I put my trust in you" which words end the song, impassioned until the repetition exhausts them. It ends on an artificial and sudden fall in pitch as Martin Hannett physically turned the speed dial down, slowly at first and then abruptly for the final note. End of side one.

If the first side of the old LP was a cry against injustice, violence and betrayal, side two, though it can get violent, is more about resolve. A gentle minor figure in the bass is joined by a tight drum pattern and a spooky distant electronic wave and then a an insistent and understated guitar figure. Curtis enters with a gentle vocal that seems to float in a bubble of reverb. Instead of the railing against the weight of human ill this statement, almost entirely unchanging for nearly six minutes closes with a shrug about existential meaninglessness of approaching the chaos of living with an even handed view. And in the end: "heart and soul, one will burn." The skeletal guitar plays a minor descent on insistent repeat before giving in to the bass, drums and distant howling of the synth.

Twenty Four Hours begins with one of those riffs that drive you nuts guessing the time signature but even where the bar begins. A bass figure rises through a modal scale, descends and rises again, resting on a syncopated drum pattern, accentuated by muted guitar with heavy reverb. This plays a few times until the bass begins to fill the bar and the drums and guitar thicken and hasten into a full bodied grind on the riff. Curtis comes in, reverby and trebly, describing a galloping failure as the band charges around him. This suddenly switches back to the gentleness of the opening and the narrator's plea for time to understand more of his life rounds in the anger of watching destiny slip away as the band again gears into full strength. This keeps happening, growling disappointment and quiet reflective moments that end in anger. "I looked beyond the day in hand. There's nothing there at all." The song returns to the figures of the opening but with a fragile, glassy guitar low in the mix playing a swirling figure until the hard finish.

The final two songs on the record carry such strength that they characterise it for people who have heard so often they could dream it. When I think of Closer I imagine the cover art (on which more later) and a kind of coldness to the music that was wilder and devastating on the previous album. And I think of extended keyboard use. But apart from a few moments on side two and the shortest song on side one, the keyboards are almost entirely contained in these two songs. To many, the whole album closer sounds like them and it takes a replay to remind them of how most of it is a conventional rock band on tracks (however out of step the songs themselves, their melodic schemes etc were)

The Eternal begins with what always sounds to me like cicadas and lawn sprinklers on a hot day. It's a synth noise generator using a rapid oscillation. Soon a big bass guitar begins a circular chromatic descent until a mournful piano figure enters along with a choir-like keyboard sound and sparse roomy drums over a thudding heartbeat. The narrator describes a procession and something like a wake but is himself unable to do more than recognise the failure as he witnesses it. The last line puts these events passing before him on the same footing as the sight of leaves falling from trees.  The song plays out with the hissing lawn rising in the mix as the delicate piano figure tinkles above and is brought to a soft, careful landing.

This band was a self-avowed thrashing punk outfit only the year before.

Decades begins with a sharp crochet, pause, double quaver rhythm in big reverb. A thick chunky palm muted bass plays a minor modal figure once before a tide of bright keyboards comes in with stuttered chords alternating between the old folky minor chord to major below it. Curits' vocal is way out front, more trebly than the previous song's mournful clarity but with a melody almost identical in shape and scansion. Again, the theme is one of oppression, a closing of doors to freedom as the young men of the first line (they could easily be soldiers but it feels more universal, despite the gendering) The verse stops abruptly as a keyboard drone sounds and then is built to an almost Latin groove as Curtis intones with a gentle grief: "where have they been?" This stays on the Latin-influenced rhythm and stays there for the second, final and shorter verse where the door is not just closed but slammed in their face. This gives way to a massive enriched repeat of the first chorus break as wide sunlit vistas of sound thunder out. After two mighty soundings of the main chords of the chorus n synthesised strings the rhythm returns with the question, "where have they been?" and then spreads out to a majestic repeat of the chorus descent until the sunlight fades and all is no more.

For an album that starts with a jackhammer this record comes a long way to provide such a strangely uplifting landscape as a closer (geddit?) It's important to remember how varied this album is and at how much variance it is from the band's preceding statements. A scattering of hard punk sides that reached the sublime heights of the first album. The single Transmission which sounds like the bridge that it is to their best known song, Love Will Tear Us Apart and then to Closer is a journey of feverish development from adolescent rage to this measured, serious and often frightening testimony.

Like Love Will Tear Us Apart, Closer was a posthumous release. Only one and a bit months after Ian Curtis took his own life the record that launched a million pouting twenty-somethings on their own journeys to the end of the darkness was itself launched. The band, still in the throes of hard line punk, considered Martin Hannett's extraordinary production a let down but seem to have changed their minds about it in the intervening years. There's a good interview with Steve Morris where he remembers how disappointed he was with Hannett's production but then laughs as he admits that Hannett "future-proofed" it. This puts things into a strange place for band and fans alike. Do we go with the original vision of the composers and players or give in to the bullying bastard in the control room? Well, it's not hard to resolve. Just listen to how the modal scales they lit upon as an expected part of their ongoing development and how that stretches back centuries to much older music. It's easy to imagine something of what Martin Hannett heard when the songs were played to him.

I didn't know any of this as a recently of age 18 year old getting through a repeat of his senior year of high school. I was having fun. I did buy the 7 inch of Love Will Tear Us Apart but the songs they played on 4ZZZ from Closer sounded a little too scary for me. Intriguing and attractively so, yes, but still scary. It wasn't until I finished uni and passed through all those others at the pub and parties with their Unknown Pleasures T-shirts and reverently whispered "secret" legends of Curtis' last minutes of life. Was it legend or real about the local boy who hanged himself in solidarity? People hang themselves for a lot of reasons but they usually have a lot more problems than liking a few songs before they do. A close friend at uni wanted to buy the box set, cloth bound edition of the even more posthumous compilation Still and asked me if I'd like go halves as it was so expensive. I declined but refrained from letting him know that I thought what he was asking was bullshit.

But after uni I was free in a way I never had been before. True, I was still living in a house my parents owned but the tempestuous marriage of my brother had left the building and a whole new crew of people moved in and, for a good few months, created a pretty happy place. I started writing fiction and got back into reading it after years of solid texts. My band continued long enough to do some more recording. I was still in my early twenties and knew it.

And then I came across cheap second hand copies of the Joy Division records and bought all of them. I'd been returning to my original musical love of anything written before the nineteenth century but these platters with their mysterious cover art reached out beyond all the lies and legends. What was the music like outside of those few tracks on the radio?

Closer was the first one I bought. I played it solidly for a week. My brother, also a flatmate, hated the record, calling it concentration camp music but all I heard was a rough but genuine poetry and heavy musical exploration. From the crunching first track to the spreading illuminated plain of the last moments, this set of despairing complaints and shrugged resignation completely captured me. I got worse before I got better, too. I moved down to Melbourne where you not only could wear black all the time but had to as part of the local by laws and no one scoffed if you listened to funeral boogie like Joy Division.

I no longer buy into the legend. Books and movies later the story is more straightforward (if no less tragic) and the music still powerful. And as to the power of cover art, Peter Saville's work for Factory records is well remembered for its striking originality and apposition of the music. I still think of Unknown Pleasures music as black and Closer's as white and sepulchral. Indeed, those images have so long been kit that undergrads decades later wear the shirt without knowing the band or their central importance to a decade with a beginning unequalled for innovation and convention breaking. Their loss.

To me, now, I listen with neither nostalgia nor denial. The music itself remains as strong as it started. Some odd clumsiness in the wording that used to annoy me (very Brit expressions like "sat" instead of sitting) have long moved beyond issue. If there is any good-old-days to this it's more in how I finally put the discs on to the turntable an unfashionable few years after the fact of the band's life and proved to myself how very wrong I'd been about them. A few years on from that I learned the same lesson about not judging bands by their fans when The Smiths attained subcultural godhead. The difference is that I was right to cry "naked" to The Smiths  and I'm still right about about Joy Division.

1980@40: FREEDOM OF CHOICE - DEVO

Having conquered a whole stratum of the submainstream system with an array of records and difficult videos, Devo, along with Talking Heads and Pere Ubu, were showing as much of the world as they could reach that American rock music could sing differently from the ice-cream cocaine hell that was Steely Dan, The Eagles and Billy Joel. By the time this one came along, Devo's assault was concentrated that the songs, while perfectly individual, were hard to tell apart. That was intentional. Devo's brief was to use uniformity in art to crack the surface of it in the culture.

Every song is a tightly machined unit of guitar rock laced with the synthesiser sound de jour, each one coming in between two and three and a half minutes. Like the frozen berry pullaparts you could get at the supermarket to make that 10pm work night a little special you could do the lot of pick sections as needed. That's why this album has the sense of being a long suite of statements rather than a dynamic flow of moments weighted accordingly.

That is almost true. In fact, the Mothersbaughs were sharp songwriters with a good ear for hooks. So, while this album is like a small chrome berry pullapart there are some songs that make compilation albums despite never being singles. The massive title track with its great doubletracked vocals and guitar assault emerges from an assembly lined thunder on electric tom toms. Freedom from choice is what you want. This was a single. So was Whip It. Bizarrely, this shout against the coming storm of Reaganomics with its disturbing video of distorted Americana went top 40. Gates of Steel bursts into the light as a brilliant keyboard fanfare lifted by guitar wash from below. The steely vocals describe the human lot (half a goon and half a god) recalling Beatle's choruses as much as the hard nosed authority from above already looming on the horizon. It's a masterpiece.

So, while I thought it best not to go track by track in agreement with the intended uniformity of the record it's worth noting the efforts of any vision-led band who are too good to quite appear machine perfect and break into a very tough and sweating invention. Devo, by the nature of that vision, were not long for continuation beyond the point of repetition but even that suited them. A million compilations with unvarying tracklistings later and The Rolling Stones are simply still on the market in bitesize units. Devo's built-in endurance gives us a futureproofed perfection. Beat that, Eagles.

1980@40: SEVENTEEN SECONDS - THE CURE

An undercurrent of synthesised rhythm is squashed by a piano moving through a slightly eastern flavoured motif. It's short and repeated, broken only by a flanged guitar butting in. Eventually, a distant whining appears. It could be a human cry, an animal or an instrument. The piece ends with what sometimes sounds like muttered speech but on examination is the tail end of that synth rhythm decaying through an echo. It's called A Reflection. That might be a thought, what you see in a mirror or a puddle, or repetition like echo.

A brisk rhythm track with a bright clean guitar figure pealing above like a surf tune. Smith comes in with his signature crying tone. So far it could be from the debut album but the instrumental passages reveal that the view of the arrangement of a recorded song has risen to avian level; the songs have moved more into the realm of scoring rather than just cherry picking from jams and putting that together. Even if that was what happened it doesn't sound like it, it sounds arranged. Along with their mates from Bromley, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure at their best would follow this, adding a strong sense of cinema to their records. The lyric is the kind of self-gravitating vacuum of teenage relationships. The title and final line are taken from a U.K. tv institution Play for Today which typically dramatised stories from the lower end of the social strata in a kitchen sink style. I'd see them now and then in the '70s and loved how stark and often defiantly anti-enjoyable they were. Here, it's both sincere and ironic.

Secrets begins with the palm-muted flanged guitar and bass so close in tone that they frequently intersect. The chugging persists beneath a lyric of longing for an exhausted affair sung both in a distant reverby wail and a close up and dry murmur. Two brief verses of impressions and the  obsession chugs on. This approach in the instrumental track would speak for most of the band's output for the next four or so years when they broke out of it. But for now the pattern that could be used cheaply to evoke early '80s post punk lived here.

In Your House doctors the formula to an arpeggio on the (still flanged) guitar against a forward moving but groovy rhythm section. Robert Smith's vocal is again buried to allow the ambience to prevail. He tells of moving around the second person's house, changing the time and pretending to swim while drowning. Is he a ghost or does he just feel like one? The drums play out, machine-like, until the end.

You can find transcriptions of what Robert Smith is saying at various places online but until someone did that all you could tell was that someone was talking. It sounded like they were relating something like an event but it was too difficult to say. A tinkling piano playing octaves through a delay. The distant speech. a few guitar slices. A drum machine or a drummer playing kick+snare without variation. Wormy, squiggling sounds on a guitar low in the mix and the constant motif of tonic+semitone up+tonic+semitone down repeats before it falls into a rapid kickdrum decaying through an echo. The foreground tells you to worry and you do because you will never understand what the witness is saying. Minimalist mystery theatre.

The Final Sound opens the old side two with a waltz-time figure on the piano that sounds like a derelict house before the tape itself screws up and it stops.

When the dark harsh synth riff emerges from the shadows and the chorused guitar riff picks out an unresolved figure we are entering classic territory. The band already had a few songs well enough known to even peripheral fans to render them singalongs (my brother at the time delighted more than anyone else around him in singing "burn like a tyre in Cardwell") but A Forest was the epic that sealed it.  The drum machine starts with the basic kick and snare tone augmented by a kind of hi hat whisper. The bass fortifies the synth figure and the guitar chug emerges from the riff. Smith again comes in low in the mix. A verse about seeing a girl or not gives way to a change in the guitar chug tonality over the constant of the bass and synth. Another verse. Same. The final verse sings the frustration of a dream where you are denied what you want until you wake up and want to get back into the dream. "Again and again and again and again..." A new guitar figure soars until the drums and bass pare down to a heartbeat. The guitar lifts ever higher  but fragments (never had modulation effects been so expressive) and dissipates into the dark. One last progression by the bass and it, too, falls and rolls away into an echo.

M surprises by sounding like a brighter throwback to the first album, a pacey two chord riff on acoustic guitars and a straightforward 4/4 push. As a film buff I always thought this was about the Fritz Lang proto noir but M stands for Smith's beloved Mary, eventual wife. Still, if a love song it's happy with its spot in the shadows as the obscure lyric both admires and fears the subject who attracts him but daunts him with powers he doesn't understand. In other words, while not conventionally romantic it's an accurate description of the thoughts of someone in love. It's not all sunshine and kisses, folks, it can be paranoia, anxiety and despair as well: sometimes they just all feel the same.

At night begins with a spacey drum sound and distorted bass that sound like Joy Division's first album are augmented with a sax-like keyboard figure that removes that impression. Smith's distant vocals have a Latin descent to them. At the end of the verses the same ascending two chord riff is joined by a chorused guitar. The second verse gets an extra fuzz bass even further into the foreground. And the lyrics; is he a stalker? He stands alone in the icy night while someone else sleeps in a safe bed. He suggests that someone has to be there in the solitude, in the dark. Someone must be there. The gaps are where this story plays and something unlovely and cold lives there. The buzz of a synth and a distant processed guitar that sounds like a dog barking falls to silence.

The usual minimalist drums are joined by another chorused guitar playing minor chord figures. The bass fills the gap as the figure is repeated.  The bass picks up with semi-quavers before a more synchopated groove. Smith comes in. A dry vocal much further up front than any so far on the record. The final thoughts of a suicide? The disappointment of anyone still young and learning how flimsy even the best things are and could collapse in as little as seventeen seconds. The wish never came true and the girl starts to sing. The girl might be the end ("the opera ain't over ...") Whatever it is, that time interval is seen as a measure of life. Is it bleeding out? Something is going on after the thoughts end. The guitar chords finish and the drum pattern, now dry and closer, leaves us with a final couple of beats before the silence. End.

To read this you might think I'm describing some massive goth fest but really the thing that strikes me more now than when I first heard this album (when fresh in 1980) is how understated it is. The Cure, along with the Banshees and Bauhaus etc., went on to upscale their images until the big black hair monster overtook the look and T-shirts sold in their millions. But for the moment it was a band who'd already shown their skills and were already moving on to produce music that was too strong to forget but also too difficult for the mainstream. If you YouTube the video for A Forest you'll see what I mean here. It's a long song without a chorus and the band whose hair is neat and short wear jumpers rather than capes. Smith frequently fills the screen, lipsynching straight down the camera, keeping his expression plain. Images of forests dissolve in and out of view but mostly it's just the band playing. This is definitive post punk as it eschews the marketing image of flamboyance for something everyday while the music speaks for itself; a reaction against the plastic glued up spikes and torn jeans.

It wouldn't last but didn't have to. Smith and co. grew into what would soon be called goth and embraced that for a few very successful years before moving on again. The freshness, cheek and invention would wear out as it always does. Until that started, though, there was this set of pieces that feel coherent enough to identify with but without the grandiose overstatement of a '70s concept album. It's why it still works. Yes, its chorused guitar tones and telephone vocals and drum machines scream early '80s, regardless of how many hipsters copy them and cry postmodernism, it's not the datedness of the sound but the essence of the feeling. It's from the doom of the early X life under the nuclear apocalypse and it's time stamped. That said, I don't consider the notion that period-specific culture is any the less for that character. I've heard too many defences in the name of timelessness made in the name of things whose blandness and conventionality should have them all but shunned by their decade of origin. If flavourless garbage like Steely Dan or ELO are timeless I'll take dated any day. This is from 1980, sounds like it, and it sounds good now. If you've been young and felt, you've felt this.

1980@40: GLASS HOUSES - BILLY JOEL

What's this shit doing here? I know, I started so well with some strong pioneering albums from the margins o' the post punk fangledangle. Why this mainstream crud? Because there's a time-bound memory attached to it and now that I hear it again I'm struck by something.

The songs? They're ok as structures; the chords flow and the transitions between verses, choruses and middle eights are smooth. And they do have the personality supplement that any accomplished songwriter will bring. Take the arrangements away and they're recognisable and playable.

The production? Well, you could hear this and easily think it was a kind of boomer-retro with no difficulty at all. Everything sits where it should and no information is lost.

Are you just saying it's bland or mediocre? Well, yes and no. Honestly, lesser songsmiths would be happy with any one of these tracks and boast of them. No, everything falls into place and the message needs no repetition. He's making it do what it says on the label.

What then? Hard to pinpoint but there's a kind of overhanging sneer to it that can't be ignored. It's there in the Stones riffing of the opening track with the polished-out Jagger vocal. Everyone still likes the Stones, don't they? Well, the Stones I liked back there at seventeen was the great singles band of the '60s. In 1980, releasing albums patched from spare sessions left off previous records, the Stones didn't seem to like the Stones that much. But Billy Joel is banking on you liking his version of it.

The next track is packed with lots of goodness from a producer (Phil Ramone) who knew that a cute backing vocal hook that sounded like it was coming from an old phone sounded NOW! Oh, and the chunky palm muted guitar and bellying echo vocals of any Cars track from the time helped. This is Billy in New Wave mode.

Don't Ask Me Why is a Paul McCartney pastiche with a perky acoustic guitar spring. Still Rock and Roll to Me plays on both sides of the street with nods to the Elvis of where it all began and the snotty thrashing rockabilly of the Stray Cats. He's out of style but it's still rock and roll to him. The big drunk-uncle sax solo sounds like a taunt. Hey, punk, I was already there. All for Leyna begins with a chorused piano and pedal distorted guitar and quirky rhythm section. It sounded and sounds still like Toto.

I Don't Want to Be Alone doesn't just sound like Elvis Costello even down to the white knuckle pre-chorus transition but also puts EC's most used phrase in the title. It's so obviously pastiched it sounds like a pisstake. But it isn't. It seems to dare anyone younger in his audience to point it out so he can come back with how long he'd been sweating at this game before that brat came along.

Sleeping with the Television On has that syncopated quirky perky rhythm that still makes me wince. You Are the One at least sounds like something from a Billy Joel album. It's perfectly judged, well delivered and sounds sincere. I wonder if Close to the Borderline is Billy's garbled version of something like Television. Finally, Through the Long Night begins with a late '60s pop French horn riff and a perfectly pleasant twisty melody and another British Invasion vocal (think Odessey era Zombies).

End.

This album emerged after a mass of interviews in the late '70s that always seemed to include how Billy hated the ugliness of the punks' music but felt triumphant at being more of a success. This  outing has the feel of a begrudging acceptance. That it's too bland and too late doesn't seem to bother him. And why should it? He was right. The punks lost and the great tide of pitch perfect professionalism just kept swelling. The longer game was in fact still happening deep below the current and learning that it didn't need the stadium or the major deal as "local" always felt more exciting and intimate.

But there's a dark shadow to this record and it falls on me.

In 1980 I was sent down to Brisbane to buff up my high school results so I could get into Uni. Not getting into Uni was not on. Fine with me, more opportunity to have fun and find stuff out. The place that all my kind were sent to if we hadn't said our prayers was called Hubbard's. What they did was add supplements to your crappy subjects and push you through to getting the numbers you needed. This wasn't generally for medicine or law, mind you (but one fellow alumnus o' mine was heading into medicine through this very avenue). Anyway, we were poor little rich kids who had to behave for a year before entering the better class of opportunity at the end of at least an Arts degree.

A few of us took a month or two to gravitate but we did and found some good company. Really, the schoolwork was routine and a lot more serious than any of us were used to but we knew the stakes now so we did get into it. But at close of play each week we had fun. And with the connections we had we still partied. This time we also studied but we still partied. And we all got through.

Maybe. One who probably didn't was Tusk. I'm calling him that because that was an album he probably liked. I have no evidence of this, I'm just making it up, but read on.

Tusk was tall and good looking but couldn't make that work. He said little and when he did it came out as labour, a kind of cleft palate struggle that always just sounded uncomfortable. He skulked in company, hanging around the back as though he was in a school class photo, and had to be drawn to join in. Well, I can be like that, too (take me out of adoring company and I shrink into dowdy wordless failure), but I'd look at him and think, you've got everything, why are you like this?

The other thing is that he clung. If we'd been more mature seventeen year olds we would have understood this and extended some support. Instead, we used him. He drove us around the city when we'd be getting into the booze or the parties or whatever and invited us not only into his home but into the high rise unit his parents owned on the Coast. There was no hatred here. I would shy from even calling it contempt. It was more like the guy in the band who owns the van. He did at least get opportunities out of it, if success continued to elude him.

Ok, so why...? Well, for almost that entire year, if you got into his car as we all did he would stab the cassette player with his car copy of Glass Houses. If the trip was long enough we would hear it from minute zero to the very end. We knew the lyrics and arrangements and so well that a bar or two out of context could send any of us rigid with mocking laughter. The other thing was that it was never at normal car volume but at a windscreen vibrating roar. It was as though Tusk thought massive volume stood in for cultural power, that the might of this ghastly smugness only needed to be set on 10 to become Never Mind the Bollocks. It's cringing uncoolness blasted into us and formed a kind of ticket price for Tusk's inner sanctum.

Billy Joel sounds like he's thinking of what his '80s are going to be like. The way he's doing that is by trying to sound like the cooler records from the late '70s. You can hear the cogs turning when so much of it veers toward the new songwriter he thinks is closest to him in terms of craft, Elvis Costello. He ditched that as soon as he realised that it wasn't going to be so tough to hold on to the various teams in suburbia and the ageing boomers and used this self-conscious step to get a lot leaner. Did I care about that? No. I wouldn't have cared about this but for Tusk and his deafening car sound system through which this thing blasted for months.

As much as we winced or sniggered about it, I do recall feeling smug about my favourite music changing this ogre from the mainstream. Even down to the cover art with him in his zip-up and still-rock-and-roll sneakers, about to hurl a rock into the glass walls of a designer mansion somewhere that I didn't care about in North America (which I also didn't care about) it screamed shopping centres and wrestlemania. To his credit, Joel does own this. Apart from that one Elvis Costello clone, he presents himself unmistakably.

As for Tusk. He drove me down to Schoolie's Week on the Coast after exams. Other members of his family came by and we were less than welcome so I hooked on to the caravan of closer friends who had turned up and went to hang out at Kaye's place at Mermaid Beach for the rest of the week. I lived on beer, blackberry nip and Chiko rolls and regretted it with pain. He picked me up for a lift back to Brisbane. It was raining heavily on the freeway. I tried to get a Tubeway Army cassette going but the tape was damaged and had no top end. He took it out and put a Smokie compilation on. (It's not that long a drive.) And then he saw me off at the airport. Everyone else was still down there. I shook his hand with a smile and headed to my gate, knowing I would never lay eyes on him again.

I had the feeling he'd do ok. He'd get into uni or go and join his family in their business or something and make all the right decisions. And he'd probably be genuinely happy about it, more consistently than me and for longer. He could even boast a real flirtation with the wild side, hanging around with the Brisbane punks (all middle class of us) in his days o' youth. I know how writerly this is sounding, roping him to his favourite record and the desperation of its author but, really, he still comes out better than Billy Joel because, for all Joel's foraging and grasping at cool, Tusk wasn't listening to it because he thought he had to or had to be known to listen the way the rest of us did with our records, he listened because he liked it. And because that makes him far less of a conspicuous consumer than any of the rest of us cadging lifts off him he could probably hear it again now and smile warmly at the memory. As for me I listened to all of it again for this article on YouTube and forgot early tracks by the time I had to describe them. Was I just transported by a residual distaste back forty years? The idea that that might count as nostalgia just sent a shiver through me.

1980@40: THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS

UK and Australian cover.

 This is the kind of album a band makes when they've developed a good following as a live unit and have fans who know songs by title. They are exciting on stage and a good gig leaves a buzz. Then they get picked up by a record company, go into the studio and produce a very clear image of their creative output and realise that it's a lot of vibe surrounding one great song.

The Pyschedelic Furs were far from one hit wonders. Their chart success bore them for a good half decade which is more than most bands get. They had a distinctive sound and a singer whose voice could not be mistaken for anyone else and enough force behind the songwriting to keep hitting. And they started interestingly, adding a sax that shoehorned bebop melodics into a four on the floor rock beat and extended the post punk force into atmosphere. X Ray Spex had done something similar with the same instrument a few years before but this was a real development. So, wouldn't their debut be that kind that pops out so that whatever else they do they will always have this? You'd think.

I'm not doing a track by track on this one because when you listen to the songs as constructions of lyrics, melodies, verses and choruses most of them don't amount to much and then when you credit the production for adding so much more then that first point glares out even more. India takes too long to build from silence into song and that's the first track. Fall's chanting verses offer a little relief by being different but the next song is much like the one before it and I keep recalling going to any number of gigs where I recognised the name of the band from seeing posters around the neighbourhood, finally seeing them and thinking they were ok but I couldn't tell one song from the next.

There's a lyrics issue here that adds to the wrong side of the signature/samey issue. I remember reading a letter in RAM in the late '70s listing every instance of the phrase "I don't want to" in Elvis Costello's This Year's Model album. There seemed to be hundreds; the letter took up most of the letters page. This album does the same for "stupid". I think it's in every single track. It makes me think that Butler liked it in one song and just kept putting it in, not knowing which were going to make it through and then didn't bother to alter anything for the recording where it is glaring. It's an adolescent word in the context of rock lyrics and drags everything into a feeling of something unfinished.

The other problem here is production. Steve Lillywhite had established his approach in the late '70s twiddling the knobs for the likes of XTC and The Banshees. His approach sounds reasonable enough: enhance the live set so that it sounds like a record, adding whatever studio magic to set it in its time. The only bands whose identity survived this were those with the strongest personalities to begin with (e.g. U2 or Siouxsie). This record sounds like the next job. It's good but it's also mark hitting and time serving. So you get a host of flanged guitars, gated drums and a live style mix where the rasping voice of Richard Butler is often barely on the surface of the sound.

Also, it gets the best song out of the way too quickly. After India which doesn't feel like it means anything more than a chord progression workout and a rant, the big drums and brooding bass kick in with a slow deliberate gait. A heavily flanged guitar fades in with an arpeggio on the 9th. The Sax breathes a smokey agreement with the guitar and Butler comes in with a series of surrealistic vingettes. This grooves into a hypnotic swing and then the chorus knocks down the door with a lower profile than you'd expect and more breathy vocals, "sister of mine, home again" as a wave of flanging rises like a sense of panic. See, I don't care if this doesn't mean anything it's compelling. The video clip I remember seeing on Night Moves while I was sweeping the floor of the loungeroom (do you remember where you were? well, such was my life) and stopped. A mimed band performance in cold monochrome, the band are dressed sharply but not in any ostentatious uniform. Butler wears a Bogart trenchcoat and sings without facial expression, moving lightly as he delivers. This is intercut with pans and tracks of monumental sculptures at such close range that some of them look like they're alive. It's a beautiful blend of strange noir imagery and movement with music both elegant and doom-laden; a perfect dirge for the nascent '80s with their minutes to midnight nuclear clock and social identity removal.

It was on the strength of Sister Europe that I asked a friend to cassette the album for me. I listened to it once through and then just wound it back to that song whenever I put it in. I bought a vinyl copy of the US version of the album with the black and white '60s-looking cover. It had a slightly different tracklist, not that I noticed as I still only played Sister Europe. And then most recently I listened to a download of it in hi-res. It's clearer now what work went into trying to make the songs both distinct and add up to a whole but the best song so fully outclasses every other that the rest falls flat again. What they needed was a push into the songs. That happened and brilliantly. But that's a tale for 1981@40.

US cover

1980@40: GET HAPPY - ELVIS COSTELLO AND THE ATTRACTIONS

This took me by surprise and not in a good way. I came back from Brisbane and found a copy in the local export record shop. I was a massive fan of the previous two albums (the debut not so much) and had heard nothing about this one. Rather than trying to work that out I bought it and slammed it on the turntable. And slowly sank.

I didn't get it at all. It starts off with a pop as the two-beat Love for Tender has punch and melody. Then it deflates as Opportunity seems to just plod to a namby pamby chorus without ever taking off. The Imposter has vocals but no words I can make out. Secondary Modern has a twiddly riff and stays under the wire. And so on. There are so many songs that it's impossible to think of the album as being anything but a big mess. A few plays later I start to get it. And it makes sense.

EC had already been doing this kind of thing. My Aim is True had a number of songs in a rock vein that strayed too close to California smooth for my liking but This Year's Model blasted all of that away with a garage pop veneer over a tough contemporary rhythm section and then Armed Forces took all that to the peak with more elaborate arrangements and expanded textures and themes. Really if I imagined something from Aim as done like something from the next two I'd hear Elvis Costello, I just didn't like the plinky generic studio playing of Aim. Get Happy was a little like going back to zero and starting from a different landscape. This one was more of a '60s soul feel but filtered through what the band could do by themselves.

Nick Lowe's producer note on the rear cover explained that the technology had improved enough for the cramming of tracks at the end of sides was no longer a problem. When you have twenty songs on an old LP there really is a need to explain that. If you bought a generalist compilation from the time (I had one of '60s hits) the audio quality just started diving from the middle of the disc onward. But if Nick Lowe wasn't lying I heard the same thing here. I'd say it was clarity getting muddy but it wasn't a clear sound to begin with. The production was so mid-range that it was virtually impossible to hold on to anything. That's before you get to the songs themselves which were no longer written with the violent archness of the previous albums and were softened with a broadening of subject matter. The songwriter I admired most from this time whose songs could make you choke as though you'd got a chicken bone stuck in your throat was now just serving up gristle.

There were moments of greatness that the worst production couldn't conceal. New Amsterdam is creamy and beautiful with a little crunch in the thoughts. Clowntime is Over rejuvenates an old timey melodic style into something important and compelling. Motel Matches gives us a new kind of country lament that is set somewhere between midnight and four in the morning and the magnificent Riot Act fills the ear and makes the mind swoon.

I made a tape of the songs I liked and took that back to Brisbane, leaving the rest of the album behind as a kind of sepulchre. Bye bye, EC, thanks for the inspiration.

It wasn't until the very late '90s when I bought a fairly good turntable from a friend that I put it on again. Different record. I could hear through the stodgy production, illjudged vocal harmonies (which sounded like football chanters trying to be the Beach Boys) and all that soul style which I've never warmed to. I heard the songs. Opportunity had real breadth and sadness, Possession a grandeur. I still didn't like everything I heard but at least this time I was hearing it. A few duds out of a list of twenty? I'll take those odds.

Then when the remastered CD versions appeared I restocked everything up to this one (article on Trust will come later) which carried the conceit a step further by having thirty tracks (B-sides including his demo of Girls Talk and a lot of outtakes). With the production boosted to take advantage of the great headroom of digital it sounded alive. More recently the hi-res download took that a step further still and is my preferred presentation of the record. The boom is still there, as it was intended, but now there's real bass and crisp highs that convey pure pleasure.

But before that I had the vinyl and the newer turntable and listened that first night of getting all the old discs out of boxes and felt warm (not audio warm which is a bullshit concept, I mean emotionally warm). Motel Matches came on and took me to my most recent fling. It had been my turn to get dumped (in those days it was almost even whether it was me or the other calling it quits) and the poignancy played straight into my self-pity, pouring into it like vodka from the freezer. I got my guitar on the bed and worked the song out and sang a whispered version as the night was getting on. It wasn't until I finished playing that I realised I had taken the trouble to work out someone else's song and go for a drive in it the way I hadn't done in many many years, the way I'd only done when I thought of songs as puzzle boxes whose beautiful secrets could be found through a little listening, reason and work. And it wasn't hard to recall that out of all the songs I had be-fanned in my grumpy, needy teens the ones I most longed to decipher, open and luxuriate in were Elvis Costello's. And here was the last of the puzzle boxes that I attempted. It had taken decades for me to get beyond the unlovely coating but when I did I saw the riches there straight away.