My 1981

I was in. Griffith University BA course with the Society and the Media strain (all the subjects had names that could have been the titles of Pelican paperbacks). Everything got organised in days and with the last plane ticket my parents would buy for me I headed back down to Brisbane with a book budget and the future. Dad had bought me a clock radio with FM. I would have 4ZZZ all to myself when I wanted. I had moved into the larger room with the balcony in the last months of 1980 and was happy to  keep that going. Looking good.

O-week was exciting. Politics, alternative culture and lectures in the kind of theatres I'd only seen in movies. The Laughing Clowns played the refectory at lunchtime. I tripped out a little at the grinding drone of Collapse Board while looking at an extreme Christian sect's comic from the book of Revelation. A guy started chatting while I was reading in the glass walled reading room near the lecture theatres. His name was also Peter and we had a bit in common. He lived in the housing village and I soon was meeting his cronies and flatmates at some fun nights there. I cannot remember how it happened but he asked if I'd like to play bass in his band The Pits. That didn't take a lot of thought.

I found I was pretty good at University, breezing through the assignments and tutorials, enjoying the grown-up feel of speaking as articulately as possible on subjects I cared about. It was a lot easier to join tables and conversations in the common room over biscuits and coffee. If I'd started the previous year coping with isolation through a mangled right wingism that swiftly faded into nothing about the time I started reading and listening about things left of the divide and finding a more interesting and welcoming home for my thoughts there.

I practiced with The Pits well enough to be asked in and we played a gig in the Valley soon after. The set seemed to be over in three minutes, the first time I'd played in front of an audience. Peter chatted to Lindy Morrison who pretended to have remembered and liked my song Lights Out from the set we played. She was sipping vodka from a cologne bottle. Johnny Zero played a set on guitar with a didgeridoo player and a drum machine. I plodded at a piano backstage and a bloke dressed like someone into ska came up and chatted about using real pianos on stage. I can't remember how many people I met that night but it seemed like I'd stepped into a themepark for the post punque generation of Yesterdayland. I was so very bloody happy.

At home the psychodrama of my brother's marriage continued but it was easier to ignore or at worst, navigate around. I retreated to the room under the house where I could listen to ZZZ and work on assignments. The two things still weave themselves into the one fabric in my memory, academic thinking and music from the frontiers of creativity. Foucault and Throbbing Gristle. The ideas in the books and reams of photocopied extracts and so much that was crawling and growling out of that clock radio were soon all but indistinguishable to me. 

The circle that had formed at Hubbards dispersed after the first few reunions back from holidays. We were all going to different places, some deferring for a year for travel or work and others still not bothering to go on to uni. I remember one of them turning up at Griffith one lunch time and my newer cronies snubbed him. I had only seen my own curve in slow detail and didn't get how far I'd gone from him. We didn't strike anything up beyond a greeting, didn't even have lunch together.

There weren't many but I started buying records again. Chief among these was the debut of The Go Gos, Beauty and the Beat which I bought from Rockinghorse the same visit I first heard it. That story will get its own article but I recall that buying it was important as it was the first contemporary LP I'd bought since high school in Townsville. I had a swag of singles in my luggage as well but that album was 

No schoolies week. No assassinated Beatles. No murdered friends. Just a credit for the whole year and a ticket for a 1st class sitter in the Sunlander north. I don't remember the trip beyond dozing through most of it and smiling at a Californian who was asking about being able to see kangaroos from the train windows.

Now the music. I've done a bunch o' album articles but now - Singles!

Counting the Beat began with palm mutes on a harmonic, burst into a bass forward two beat thump and ended with a chant that everybody sang. la dadada la dadada la dadada la dadada. Infection followed.

It started as a kind of failed count-in. Clicketty click went the sticks and the bawming guitars and yelling voice sang of Ant Music

Love is Essential by Local Heroes SW9 hasn't made it across the decades but should have. Acoustic guitar arpeggios taken over by synth strings and a plaintive unaffected vocal it might have been the year's Love Will Tear Us Apart but for the elephant in the room of that one and that it just never travelled. Also, history has been neglectful to them; it's very very hard to find out anything about them. I once saw a copy of an SW9 album at the Record Market a few years later and decided against getting it, even though it had this song on it because it had another song called Hippy Street. Such as I was.

Marching Feet was the odd follow up to the sombre Lady Love by Melbourne electro rock synth band MEO 245. This was different. A zippy synth arpeggio which persisted through the chord changes as the guitar band part of it went through a Chuck Berry progression until the chorus took everything back to the mid '60s for a melodic pre-chorus before the big statement. It works the same way old bubblegum songs like Chewy Chewy still work, old values but everfresh style.

With Love Song Scots rockers Simple Minds gave the world the large scale nu-pop where the great rumbling backing could be either guitar or keyboards and the chanting choruses sounded like speakers at totatlitarian rallies. See also Spandau Ballet from the previous year. 

Spellbound was one of the Banshees strongest offerings ever. A massive circular guitar riff, frantic acoustic playing and thunderous drumming buoyed up Siouxsie Sioux's career-best wailing. The video was all nightmares and horror movies but almost anything might have done. The strangely aloof snarl of it mixed with its own violence and caterwauling chorus. Then there's the bit where, at the bidding of the vocal, something or someone gets thrown down the stairs. Stately guitar figures play over the frenzy and then it suddenly stops. And you just want to hear it again.

XL Capris' World War 3 might now sound like just another nuclear threat ditty for the pile but it works as a palm-mute-and-harmonies plea recording of its time (and its endless white background video). Only a cliche from a distance. The threat was real, regardless of how literally it was stated.

I'm in Love With a German Film Star showed The Passions could go from a quirky, spiky indy sound to a lush, arch wonder that seemed to float and squeeze like an erotic dream: "I'm in love. I'm in loooove. I'm in loooove....."

Down Under, Men at Work's competition-shrinking anthem managed to celebrate being Australian without a breath of patriotism to sour it. Compare and contrast the Texas DJ who rewrote it as Down Yonder (which only sounded subnationalistically chauvinistic). Later driven into the earth by a lawsuit over a five note figure on the flute. It had a hookline on a FLUTE! A funny pisstake video about Australian tourists that charms to this day (or would if it wasn't contradicted by nearly a decade of regressive politics but you can't have everything). 

Turn Me Loose was the year on the charts' embarrassing moment of overdrinking before vomitng on the host. The clip put bandanas on the backburner until Guns 'n' Roses over a decade later (who were welcome to it as they might as well have been Loverboy's children). Like punk never happened. Actually, like post punk wasn't happening.

Tainted Love bamped out with a bullseye synthetic orchestra, '60s garage band BVs and a mighty lead voice. Whether it's filling the sticky carpet dance floors of share house parties in 1981 or drowning out the whoops on hens nights it still sounds contemporary.

Ultravox had fallen off my radar in the late '70s when John Foxx jumped ship and produced something compelling and fresh. The band hired Midge Ure from the Rich Kids for mic duties and the result was Vienna. The clip told you everything with its recreation of nineteenth century intrigue among the rich and powerful and the chorus phrase, "this means nothing to me." I can't remember whose place it was but I was part of a small group that briefly landed in a share house where a bearded older buy saw the clip on Nightmoves and said, "Ultravox? They're just the new wave Eagles." I was young enough to think he was trying to appeal everyone in the room who was younger and sniggered lightly. Still ....

I Want to Be Free yelled Toyah as she trashed wedding cakes and tea settings while a pair of official types/parents/teachers/older people in sci-fi conservative fashions looked on unimpressed from above. Even at the time, at that age, I was too old for the message. See also, the previous year's Kids in America which this effectively replaced. Lots of synth strings and cymbals. Not offensively try-hard but not much more than tokenistic either.

The Pretenders showed in the debut album that they were bringing a lot to the table, offering a take on rock music that neither pretended it was new nor remodelled tradition. Message of Love with its slashing chorused guitar, hectoring vocal and a middle 8 change to a gallop, won the heart of everyone who heard it. Tough and tender at once. A classic. ONly sorry I didn't get around to writing about their second album (no time)

The Dugites from Perth had a cute little hit with a cute little clip called In Your Car the year before but surprised everyone with Waiting, a synth pop marvel that went from tinkling consolation to soaring pain as the yearning exploded before suddenly stopping and then falling into a bizarre key change that only made it expand. Still a masterpiece.

New Toy Lene Lovich bipped and bopped through more noo wave quirk but it sounded fine and the clip was straight out of Repulsion. A tick of approval.

Boys in Town - The first salvo in the Divynls' campaign to conquer the Australian charts carried a strong message delivered with a compelling attitude and contemporary rock substance. I didn't love this one but kept my ear out for future statements. Some of which were superb.

Devo's Beauitiful World took them further into the synth pop realm they had helped to forge with a bittersweet irony between the driving riff in the music and the self-contradiction in the lyric. The clip's power lay in the increasing mash of America kitsch and horror as cold war novelty acts rubbed shoulders with the Klan and the nuclear threat. Catchy in more ways than one.

Primary - The Cure. a breathless chugging nightmare that made the charts. A reason to bend a saulte to the whole year.

Bette Davis' Eyes was a song by a woman who looked like a contemporary movie star, all platinum bouffant and long black dress, surrounded by art directed punque style people who danced like robots with geared joints. That was the video. Remember, in Australia at least, we saw the video before we heard the song (from the late 70s, as it happens). A refrain on the synth broken by a raspy vocal about a local debaucher. Thing is, the whole thing sounded like Bruce Springsteen had written it. Making a pro blush? Really? It was like hearing your father say the word lesbian. Uni friend Nicola got it right, even though she couldn't make it through the statement witnout laughing: Kim Carnes is America's idea of New Romantics. Everyone else laughed, too.

Under Pressure mourned the great murdered man but it just sounded like a formless mess to me.

Blitz anthem No.1 Fade to Grey gives us a little cooling drop of synthesis before the big saw wave riff bursts in and it's a mix of ethereal whispers, warbles on lonely platforms and a big eerie chorus. Steve Strange, the doorman of the Blitz club called in all his favours and got most of Ultravox behind him. Only this wasn't Steve from down the Elephant and Castle's vanity singalong. Along with a constantly shifting identity and black background video and deathless groove, this is a classic writ in marble.

Pretty in Pink took Psychedlic Furs from a meandering first effort with a single good song to an all killer no filler album featuring this bona fide song for the ages. Break it down to its pieces and you've got a '60s style song about a girl but add the arrangement, production and attitude of a band that's found its sound and stride and here it is, a big, head-buzzing monster of world weariness with a lead vocal that's been keel hauled on the hull of a tobacco freighter. The great bash of the two note figure before the chorus hurts like a funeral toll.

Fascist Groove Thang - Synth funk politics with serious vocals. Worked. The other half of the old band was busy doing Vogue cover pop.

This Ole House -  did almost as much for the rockabilly revival as the Stray Cats and was daggy enough to have a much great reach.

Unguarded Moment - The Curch sounded more weighed down that their inspirations from the '60s but felt newer for it.

Alone With You - Sunnyboys' prayer to teenage angst hit its spot and went out the door at the right moment, a prefect rock statement.

Our Lips Are Sealed chugged out of the radio like a motorised curtain letting the sunlight in. 

Homosapien had Pete Shelley banned for the entendre in the title (and refrain). Despite the plinky keyboards it sounded tougher than the Buzzcocks. The candyshop arrangment and production came courtesy of the most celebrated producer of the era, 1981's own Martin Rushent who was in everything but a bath. You think of the early '80s as the time of tingly synthesisers and endless, directionless 12 inch mixes and you are thinking of Martin Rushent. He'd already made headway with the likes of The Stranglers.

Screaming Jets seemed to be only months too late to be taken seriously. Would anyone have cared that much without the Peter Gabriel harmonies, though? One thing about this was that Johnny Warman announcing the different parts of the song (probably a guide vocal they liked) which launched far too many wincing moments at band practices ("chorus" and someone would do the chorus from this song) Clip was acceptably goofy for the time.

Never Say Never -Romeo's Void's cry was a kind of Gang of Four number with world wise snarling girl on top. 

Release the Bats exploded in jungle drums and exasperated screams, hilarious in its extremity before you heard it a few times and realised that it was a song, after all, not just a few minutes of chaos. Cute Elvis channeling, though. Didn't sound like any birthday party I ever went to.

Ceremony's cooing fanfare set the funeral barge of Ian Curtis on to the waves in a fiery celebration (but if you turned the record over it felt like his wake up call in Hell)

Too Fast for You - The Church's double EP offered five new songs that tightened up everything that was good about the debut album and left everything that wasn't on the cutting room floor. From the brightness of the title track to the gorgeous flow of Sisters the band was gettng ready for the apex of their first stage, the following year's album The Blurred Crusade. A beautiful package.

And we went out singing to the Teardrop Explodes and their Passionate Friend: ba ba baa baba ba baa ba ba ba ba baba ba ba ba ba baa....

It was drama free. I booked a 1st class sitter to Townsville on the Sunlander and cruised along the landscape as it went from southern verdance to curtains of sugar cane and thence to Townsville. A girl from Melbourne asked me what I was reading (Coming Up for Air by George Orwell) and we struck up. And then it was hometown station, mum on the platform, Aitkenvale and a couple of months of the good life. There were people with games. I had stories to tell.

The Importance of 1981

The thing is that 1981 is not just another year of pop culture, of songs great and naff, of op shop fashions and fanzines. 1981 is a year of fulfillment. The punk to post-punk transition is as debated as the starting point of Generation X (a punk era term, btw) but it doesn't really matter when it happened as much as that it did. By 1981 it had happened. What happened?

Well, you could get on on stage at Bingo Pete's in the valley and play a digeridoo with a drum machine and that would be a gig. You turned the radio up when you heard a weird spoken word piece about a fish in a glass paperweight set to uneasy sounding tapeloops of phrases that might be synthesised or just vocals. And you loved when the act/group/entity that had done it advertised themselves as being available for weddings, parties and alternative English lessons. ZZZ's new music show could have something played on hammers and doorways or a bothersome hybrid of metal and indy and it would still be acceptable. 1981 was where anything at all went but none of it was expected to be professional.

Professional. That was the word my Dad used to describe the tape my band released as an album in 1983. I still smart at the faux pas. "Very professional" In 1981 professional meant the worst of everything, it meant giving up and paying big bucks for note perfect gigs or movies that flattered young adults by inviting them into a previous generation's idea of acceptable humour and drama.

In 1981 Release the Bats was released as a single. That's something that its vocalist, Nick Cave would not dream of doing now or even a few years later. 1981, even more profoundly than 1977, was where the us and the them divided. 

Of course, I'm telling this from the point of view of someone who was 18 years old in 1981 and at 18 you think you've invented everything or at least reinvented it enough to find the real value of it. I don't deny my nostalgia, here, but nor do I deny my plain memory. And what I remember is that the way of living I and people like myself, surrounded by the great lotto-headed straight world around me, rejected the idea itself that being in tune was good.

1981@40: IN THE GARDEN - EURYTHMICS

This is a chrysalis. Before it there is punk and then new wave guitar rock. After it there is one of the reigning voices in electronic pop. Listening to this album is like watching a film of the caterpillar metamorphosing in real time. You just want to reach in and give it a push.

Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox planned leaving their band The Tourists while on tour (in Wagga, as it happens). What they had in mind was a more adventurous duo where they could write their own material and make it sound anyway they wanted. They named it after an old style of exercise and dropped the article (Eurythmics, not The Eurythmics, this was the '80s) and then with a satchel of song ideas went to Connie Plank and recorded this.

When you know that they were fleeing a rigidly structured band dominated by a single songwriter the record's eclecictism makes sense but the limits of its range don't. While there is a sprinkling of electronics over most of it this set sounds very like The Tourists with guitar orchestras, shimmering vocal harmonies and big bright choruses. What's left after that is songs that sound like they need the synthpop treatment but are just getting more guitar band if mixed with a little Kraut rock.The opening trio of tracks.

English Summer starts out all chorus pedal guitars and harmonies with a melting chorus but it could have been a Tourists song. Belinda definitely could have been Tourists. It's the best song on the album: massed bright guitars with shimmering harmonies and a gorgeous melody. But then the coda, a refrain of "close your eyes" is repeated over the kind of melismatic wailing that Lennox seemed to have discovered in the studio. There was a little of it in The Tourists but that was pretty whereas this is Olympic. It's the first thing on the album that is a recognisable trope of the superstar version of the band. Take Me to Your Heart has the kind of repeated minor key phrase that they would support so effectively on later hits like Sweet Dreams (also with a lot of improv wailing) and Here Comes the Rain Again. The only problem with that is that the arrangement is a guitar band and makes dull and listless what might have been insistent and compelling with synthesis. Here it sounds like the first demo recorded with a drum machine and the most basic of guitar/bass parts. I know it's meant to invoke Krautrock but surrounded by clear '60s style it has no life of its own. It needs the Sweet Dreams treatment. The slight keyboard riff does not make up for the absence. These statements can be made about the rest of the record: it's either still in new wave power pop mode or it's feeling around cautiously for something new. 

That said, there are good songs here and the album is easily enjoyable without being wrung by retrospective judgements. It's frustrating that Your Time Will Come is a glorious chorus wasted a quirky verse. But then Belinda is four minutes of aural bliss, whatever the music genre. She's Invisible Now is keyboard driven but with 2020 hindsight sounds like something St Etienne or Pulp would produce deep in the following decade. That just means it sounds like the '60s with modern synthesisers. But then the closer Revenge combines a classically influenced vocal melody with disco drumming (thank you, Blondie's Clem Burke) and bass and a mix of un-rock blips on guitar with masses of delay and modulation effects. If it were more upfront it might have sat well on the following year's breakthrough.

This record is a cocoon but cocoon's are interesting. Pop music was going through one of its most profound changes in 1981. Punk's return to basics was leading not to more guitar rock but a breakdown of it. The possibilities of accessible electronics had already shown that the power of rock music could be emulated without the cultural politics of guitar heros or swaggering singers and the sounds themselves could come from the inner core of Jupiter and still make the charts. Human League had already changed from the doom boy bedroom electronica into the light of pop stardom without a single pluck of a string. See also Ultravox and New Order's emergence from Joy Division. For a while there it really did look like the outmoded guitar band unit had given way to a night sky of winking possibility. Then, a few years later up and coming teenagers still liked playing power chords and guitars came back. It would take until trip hop in the mid '90s to issue another challenge but nothing ever dislodged the old convention and still hasn't.

So, Eurythmics were foraging around, trying to replace the order of The Tourists with a launching pad and really only churning out the same kind of thing. It would take some touring (with a backing tape system they carried in a horse trailer) and their own studio to emerge the next year as one of the most enduring acts from this era of musical metamorphosis. With sharper, trimmed looks and even sharper songs that pushed their way through crowds of hopefuls the duo began to lead. They might have started by effectively swallowing their own voices and ideas but it's not hard to hear that they had the parts for their new identity right here, sometimes buried under old school rock but sometimes taking wing.

1981@40: SUNNYBOYS

The sound of it was coming through early in the year. I never owned the first EP, the one on Phantom, and to this day I've never seen a copy, but I did hear it. Not knowing The Doors very well at that stage I thought Alone with You might have been from the same sessions as Love Her Madly. ZZZ was caning it. The sound was '60s but there was a freshness in the approach and, though there was no obvious similarilty, it had the same enthusiasm for what made great '60s garage music great as the second and third albums by Elvis Costello and the Attractions. Plain guitar band arrangements with a compelling lead vocal and a lean to the minor key in the melodies. Good enough for me. 

I noted the name. and when I saw it on the bill of a Griffith Uni gig I went to that. They were as good as the record's promises, loud, tight and forceful. I even thought it was funny when Jeremy Oxley giggled into the mic and said, "this one's called Happy University Student". Not remotely funny now but the moment made it gold and that's the point of the Sunnyboys and their lingering legacy to anyone who wants to reignite guitar band rock with an eye to that attention-grabbing something: make your moments pay. They did. I stayed over at a friend's flat at the housing village (getting to and from Griffith was an epic) and as we strolled around the next day I picked up an unmarked poster for the gig. It was a massive black and white and orange cartoon of a mod girl grinning at a striped shirted boy with a sun symbol for a head. The background was orange with tiny white outlined triangles. It was a stunner. Well, I say picked up but what I mean is that I asked my friend if he'd ask the hippy at the cafe near the Hub if I could have it. HO, rock and roll! Anyway.

The Sunnyboys were there in the air all through the year. New singles on the radio and more gigs and then a mimed performance on Countdown for the touchdown which for a band that had formed only a year before was like being showered with precious metals. The EP had had a beefed up remix and they had been scooped up by Mushroom (so it was now a 12 inch with better sound). I bought the picture sleeve single with The Church's double EP Too Fast For You on the same day from Rockinghorse (now THAT was a double bill!). And then finally toward the end of the year there was the first LP.

My memory will fault me here but I recall two different releases of the album happening. As the DJ said, one fothe new fans and one for the true fans. Both covers were identical apart from the background colour (one blue like the current CD release) and the other yellow. And I theeeeenk the yellow one came with a cassette which included the song Tomorrow Will be Fine. I can find no direct evidence of this online but would be interested to know if anybody has the alternative version or even just knows about it because that's the one I wanted and could never find (vanished form the shelves before I could get to it. And that's why I never had my own copy until the expanded CD release (which does have those extra tracks). Anyway, jonesing nostalgia aside, the album. (Edit: the cassette was an alternative release of the single Happy Man, not an adjunct to the album. The yellow cover edition omitted Happy Man but included the otherwise unreleased Tell Me What You Say. These tracks, along with the two b-sides of Alone With You are on the CD rerelease of the debut. Right, breathe out.)

Anyway, jonesing aside, the album. 

I'll pull a few tracks out of the stream for this instead of trying a track by track. Why? Well, despite this being one of the most engaging and listenable records of any time in rock music history it is drawn from a narrow pallette of arrangement resources and the chief songwriter, while highly effective at it, drinks from a small pool of melodic ideas. Before any one of you go at me for dismissing the record, my point is that this is one of the things that make it a great set and make the commitment that band and producer had to the fore. It's just that as verbal desctiptions of songs you'd be getting a lot of repetition (maybe my own well is a tad shallow when it comes to guitar rock).

Just as Richard Gottehrer was able to lift The Go-Gos into a firm edged 1981 guitar band sound through his experience with everything from '60s girl groups to the Ramones, so Australian rock legend Lobby Lloyd took much expertise and little strain to tighten everything about the young band in front of him. They were already an indentifiable live unit with a following based on a lot of gigs around NSW and were clearly in it for real. If Lloyd had seen parades of Dunning-Kruger hopefuls file past his throne with eager popping eyes and nothing else what he saw in Sunnyboys was a band that needed next to nothing to get them the attention of a nation.

The galloping descent of the first few seconds (I Can't talk to You) is only temporarily relieved  by some punching full band chords before Oxley's deep and melodic vocal comes in urgently. Lloyd layers the guitar attack on the downward plunge with feedback (or Ebow?) as well as some multi-tracked parts but instead of sounding processed it just sound powerful. He and the band know that the live version will not be as rich as this but this is a band that uses the moment more than most and that will fill the gap. Trouble in My Brain breaks the powerchord panzas with a plinky pressing figure high on the fretboard of a decidedly undistorted Stratocaster. After pleading for a few bars it lies softly down with a tiny strum. When the chords do kick in they are joined by a gentle piano. Oxley's vocal comes in and is also joined with light wordless vocal harmonies. Each track, however recognisably from the same pen is showing the record developing beyond that showcase of the live set that many bands make the mistake of insisting on.

Gone is distinguished not just by the slower pace but the bass riff that opens it. When the drums come in so does a big organ wash. Oxley's first verse is anguished  but assured. He delays the chorus with a chord prgression that lets the organ add some space and then some beautiful Fender tones. The next verse does let the tension break with the chorus, a lament of melissma and melancholy. The guitar solo is the exact type that was still verboten in the Brisbane band scene but done so convincingly here, and so musically that it passes. The last verse suprises by being sung as harmony and an octave lower before the soaring chorus resumes.

Happy Man starts with some choppy chords and one of Oxley's characteristic minor key variations with a major key bridge. The difference here is that the chorus is tight and serious. A singable solo guitar instrumental played in several parts gives way to a more conventional pentatonic wail but then dives straight back into the chorus. A perfect single of its time. Alone With You follows and if you're not listening closely you might mix it up with Happy Man. It was the first of the two to be released but as it comes next on the LP it loses out by using the same progression for the verses. The chorus saves it from being too samey but maybe this was a good reason to get the yellow version of the record. That said, Alone With You was the song I first heard from the band and I had the single of it and to this day it's the song I associate with the band more than any other. Also, I wrote my own songs at the time (or tried to) and seldom ever bothered to work out any contemporary ones. I did know this one, though (even the words!)

Let You Go is the closest the set gets to an epic. Big chords and a sinewy lead figure brings us to the confessional vocal. Another delayed chorus allows some story through and adds power to the chorus we've been waiting for. He's come to a decision about his relationship and it hurts to understand that he's not as important to her as he had believed. So what? Well, he was only recently still a teenager and however quotidian it might appear to any of us now that kind of cirumstance can weigh a younger mind down more than the notion of the Earth's eventual heat death. More guitar pryotechnics and an increasingly screamed chorus lets us konw the pain. I'm Shakin' combines the more intricate guitar work of Trouble, the big Kinks style grinding progressions and urgent vocals but then adds a whistled riff. Whistled! As the song gets well underway a curious choral moment gives way to a garage organ and intensifying organ and guitar  build. Then the whistling returns. After it's over we get a brief run through of the oopening downward gallop until it fades in less than twenty seconds.

At the end of this record you will have heard the band at the best they have sounded to date and know what to expect if you go to see them. What strikes me, listening today, is how easy this sounds despite what I know of music production and song arrangements and how much work needs to be put into things as easy sounding as second guitar parts. It sounds easy for the same reason that so many of the '60s-based bands following from this one sounded mangled or clumsy or, at worst try hard: an astute producer. Lobby Lloyd isn't just getting someone in or organ for a few songs, he's guiding the judgement of a band who've only heard themselves through cruddy desk recordings of live gigs in what might as well be sheep sheds. He's getting the band as close as he can to what they are hearing in their heads when they play the songs. 

He has noticed how they quieten down in this one or try singing differently for this verse. He's finishing what they started and he'st stopping at that point. Jeremy Oxley would break out of the limited melodic range he had as a composer with the very next album and go to many finer plains but his trust in his producer was the great reward of this album. Even with the limitation of musical range each of these songs are distinct from each other. This doesn't just help the listener get through the whole thing at one sitting (and it is an album you can leave on) but it puts the standouts like Gone or Let You Go on something like display risers of their own.

Sunnyboys bridged a gap between the already-old Radio Birdman and the mass of bands that rose like a flood in Sydney who, packing their copies of Pebbles and Nuggets, bought up all the Paisley they could find at the markets and plugged their speed-driven inspirations into fuzzwah pedals that the Electric Prunes had advertised. All of those gathered for a fun scene that lasted a year or so but now instead of them there are still Sunnyboys.

 

1981@40: BEAUTY AND THE BEAT - THE GO-GOS

I knew nothing about The Go-Gos when I bought this record. Well, ZZZ was playing the acerbic This Town and dark power pop Lust to Love but Our Lips are Sealed hadn't been on Countdown yet and no one was writing about them in the usual rags. Then I had my epiphany experience in Rocking Horse records at the end of 1981, written up here. I didn't have a record player where I lived so I had to wait until I got back to Townsville to hear the whole thing. 

Meantime, A week and a bit, I had the wit of the cover art with the glamour shots on the back and the "ugly" beauty treatment band portrait on the front. Regardless of how the members thought of themselves relative to their L.A. punk scene roots, bands with women were still subject to glamourisation. The punk wars had won some headway (The Slits, The Passions, The Raincoats, The Au Pairs) but they weren't American so The Go-Gos made a statement in their record cover that, be it ever so subversive, still had to acknowledge the showbiz way. When I did get back up to the family seat in the tropical gateway of Townsville I was able to put the disc on for the first time and listen to the whole thing. At that point the cover could have been birdshit white for all I cared as the music was so strong.

What became the single led the set. Our Lips Are Sealed began with a simple but compulsive 4/4 on the drums. A palm-muted bass and guitar joined in, running down a three chord riff. A high clear ringing lead guitar figure came in like a bell. Belinda Carlisle enters with a voice both sweet and on the verge of breaking into anger. Everyone's gossiping but she holds firm and responds to dirt with silence. For the first two short verses the A-G-D progression is cut from pop tradition and done so energetically that it's magnetic. But then, all of these are major chords, it goes up a minor third, back down one, then up ... 

I'll just cite the chords: F - D - Bb - E - A - D. That comes out of nowhere. Those chords gloriously don't belong in the same progression, at least not then. It's not even using a relative minor. They must have just sounded good when Jane Weidlin wrote it. What I didn't know until the following year in an interview in Juke or summat was that she wrote it with Terry Hall from The Specials/Fun Boy Three. They had a fling while The Go-Gos toured with The Specials. Hall sent Weidlin the lyrics and she did the rest. In the documentary she accounts for the weird chord shifts as the work of a young unschooled songwriter. To me it's the work of a natural songwriter finding the drama and emotion in the movement of chords, wanting to get away from the humdrum of the A-G-D of the verse which, compelling as they make it here, cannot escape its traditions, until the chorus (usually where the reverse happens and the tension is dissipated by the big bright scheme that gets us all listening). Dig? The chorus is where it tightens winding up until the title phrase at the end. The middle eight is heralded by a lessening in the arrangement with a bass led riff and Weidlin's own nitrous oxide vocal lulls the other figure in the song. Back into the verse (I'm shivering a little just recalling it) she uses this as the descant to the verse. And THEN the tension of the chorus happens again. After a few reiterations of the big major key title phrase we end clean, feeling like we've had (I'm quoting a review about a Richard Brautigan book) just the right amount of icecream on a hot day.

While I'll here I'll mention the video which, by the time I'm back in Townsville, was on Countdown every episode until it had to be when it got into the top ten. A lot less slick than music videos were getting, the home video look gives it a school project commitment that a glitzier piece would have missed. The band get into Carlisle's groovy red car and drive to a lingerie shop and then to a fountain where they dance and frolic as they mime the song. This is intercut with what is either a small venue gig or a practice where they are gong through the song. My half-decade older brother in law reported it to me as being sexist and demeaning, amping up the girlyness of the band but all I saw was an extension of the joke on the album cover: all dolled up in their street clothes in the car but more seriously in their stage gear for the performance scenes. It flips the bird on anyone saying they were bought up by the industry money and were playing along. They actually looked in complete control in a way that contemporaries like Loverboy never did.

How Much More plays a little more pedestrian but still has a surprise in the chorus after an impressive stretch of a single note over rising progression. If the the band is marking time here, Carlisle's power lifts it. And then there are some more inventive vocal harmonies that don't need to be there but gladden with their presence. Tonite hikes up the pace with a high droning guitar riff. Carlisle shows again how a clipped vocal delivery with conviction trashes all other attempts of superteen rock. More good vocal arrangement but this never sounded as strong as the best on the record.

Lust to Love crawls in with a palm muted guitar figure climbing like a spider through a minor mode. Carlisle comes in with an acidic confession of social power ambushed by real emotions. Suddenly the whole band kicks in with clean power chords for the prechorus which blasts into a glorious chorus with  contrary motion between chords and vocal melody, a hooking central section and a power dash to the minor chord in the finish. Carlisle's controlled insistence on the strength of the melody is supported by a wordless descent through the minor tonality in the backing vocals. Repeat. Send in a clear and clean solo which can be sung and return to the cinematic base of the spidery riff and bitterwseet voice of young experience audibly aging. The highpoint.

This Town probably shouldn't have been put right after Lust to Love as it starts with a similar rapid palm muting figure. Then again it's clearly distinct and something jollier like Can't Stop the World might have robbed Lust of its intensity. When I first heard This Town I thought it was the B52s. That skeletal chunking rhythm with the spy movie guitar riff. Ominous. Carlisle's catty lead vocal is quickly thickened with close harmony. Before the verse feels over the chorus comes at the other end of a shining harmony ascent through the minor scale. A guitar solo after two verse/choruses is more of an instrumental break, rhythmic and brooding, world-building rather than band beating. It leads straight back into the chorus, now more glamourous than earlier. The words are a collision of images: "we're all dreamers, we're all whores" and in the chorus "this town is our town, it is so glamourous". Come and join in but stay away, it's ours. There's a sternness to it that suggests the writers were both part of and spurned by a scene that tastes, chews and spits out.

Side two and We Got the Beat. My eye popping first hearing in Rocking Horse is in the account linked to above but basically it's this. Toward the end of the year, I was bumming around Brisbane until I got the train up to Townsville for the holidays. I stopped in at Rocking Horse records in Adelaide St. Even if you didn't have a particular thing you were looking for you'd find something. The staff were constantly visited by friends or regulars so regular they were on first name basis with the people behind the counter. A lot of the records in the stacks were import copies with better vinyl and cover art quality than the local product or just the only copies, there being no local release. I used to start anywhere where no one else was looking and just keep flipping until I found something. I was doing that when some changed the record from whatever had been on to side two of Beauty and the Beat. Then I had the EXPERIENCE. 

All that means is that the song We Got the Beat hit me with its thunderous energy, brilliantly orchestrated arrangement of a rock band augmented only by a piano. The momentum of the verses and the sudden widening of the choruses as the vocal went up and the chords plummeted down like a rollercoaster. The guitar solo was like a fuel injection, running through the scale until with a cymbal crash the key changed and it felt twice as big. Then on to the final verse and chorus and then the coda call and response before the chant over the driving riff led to an abrupt stop which felt like whiplash. I still listen to this song when I want to energy with big vocal interplay. It's the reason I bought this album.

Fading Fast is like a welcome pause from the energy of the previous track. A quiet arpeggio on a clean electric guitar. Carlisle comes in serious and clipped: "You thought that I was on your side..." Someone needs to be told to leave in plain terms. The lyric is just that, no puns or street talk, just plain statements. What makes up the rest is a forward driving solemnity that doesn't seem to belong in a teen anthem but here it is. The chorus doesn't include the title, it's a reinforcement of the verse and is in the unrelieved minor with a similar modal movement in the final lines of each stanza. But then, after a verse-long guitar instrumental, we get a thrid section which is as close to major tonality as we'll get here. It involves some very fine complex vocal arrangements in which Carlisle and Weidlin sing overlapping lines that reinforce the other and end with the title line, "you're fading fast out of my memory" back in minor territory. The song ends with two of these in a row and a repeat of the title line and a clean stop.

Automatic begins with a backwards note on a bass or a piano that gives way to a steady drum pattern and then a bass and guitar lopping figure whose repetition and modal tonality give it a mystery movie feel. Carlisle comes in with the most emotionally ranging vocal on the disc, describing unconnected sex in a sharp rise to the minor third in each line." Angles sharp clash together, Time and consciousness sever." When the circular motif in the guitars and bass is not rolling on there are gaps that end in backwards echo or are filled with the drums playing perfect time. A verse towards the end has two vocals sing lines from different verses in call and response and then the riff is picked up and plays into the fade, no relief, no end.

The album ends on what might be considered fillers or side two songs but they're fun for all that. You Can't Walk in Your Sleep (If You Can't Sleep) a good joke for the chorus in a song about insomnia. Skidmarks on My Heart matches a big drum pattern with powerchords and a good progression with a screeching lead vocal of frustration with a full harmony chorus "Oh skidmarks on the my heart. You've got me in fifth. You're bruning rubber like my love". A great surf guitar solo and doo-doo backing vocals and back to the big chorus. Kathy Valentine's only composition Can't Stop the World has a post punk treatment of of a Shirelles style boy girl song with a big 1-4-5 chorus and descending last line. A dual guitar break sounds like a Buddy Holly workout that adds energy and splits after one iteration. Great fun.

The Go-Gos had come from a punk scene that was taking leaves from the spikier UK well, political and critical here and there but quickly consolidating into the same kind of cultural rulebook that all scenes establish. So, when with a few lineup changes due to differences between what they'd started to do and what they wanted to grow into, the band found their feet in the kind of grindy pop rock on this record. Jane Wiedlin and Charlotte Caffey had established themselves as a sturdy songwriting partnership, buidling muscles in structure, harmony and wit. But if you see the clip from Ugh a Music War of them doing We Got the Beat you might notice they don'd just lack a little polish but the arrangement feels a little hollow (even though it has more backing vocals than the recorded one). Enter Richard Gottehrer.

Gottehrer was a generation older than the band but he had some serious credentials as regards what they might do to crash through. He was Brill Building and went on to produce as well as write. My Boyfriend's Back, I Want Candy and Hang on Sloopy are all his. And then into the late '70s he understood the undercurrents and produced The Ramones, Blondie and Talking Heads. By the time The Go-Gos came past his desk he was on it. He kept their stage energy but highlighted their melody, keeping the guitars mostly clean and ringing instead of the then overdone distortion on every song. He brought out more of the vocal sophistication already there to finish these tracks with some of the finest voice work on any rock record of this time (the backings and harmonies are really that good). He found the concentrate within the band and created one of the strongest and most durable debut albums of the rock era.

So, after Mum tapped me on the shoulder on the platform at Townsville station and I rode back to Aitkenvale and I debriefed my first big year of Uni, I retired to the rumpus room where the smaller kids and their cronies dive bombed in the pool across the patio, and put this record on. I found a beer in the downstairs fridge and then I put the record on again.

1981@40: PiL - FLOWERS OF ROMANCE

A thin rattle swings between the channels until the big gated drum sound starts and Lydon's tremulous wailing begins. There are breaks and synthesised interpolations but this screaming harrangue. He sings as a religious extremist heading for action, over-focussed, increasingly dangerous. Four Enclosed Walls. The sparseness of the arrangement, violence of the drums and insistence of the vocal make this one unnerving every time.

Wobbly drums, an insistent chromatic figure on the synthesiser and a tiny clean electric guitar make this sound more like a Birthday Party song. Lydon's sneering vocal is about a an attempted seduction of him by a rock journalist. Eventually, he just says,"right, I'm finihsed" and leaves the track. The guitar gets spindly and spikey and eventually just ends on a noodle.

Phenagen begins with a honking drone and a distant clicking percussion. A meandering figure on something like a hammered dulcimer adds a medieval tone. Lydon's vocal is, like all of them on this album a repeated short melodic phrase with little variation. Phenergan is a strong antihistimine that can be used as a sleeping pill. the narrator of this song has rendered himself barely extant through various forms of opiation. Low piano notes, backward guitar and more of that damn kick drum. A reprise of the last line of snarling ennui brings the dulcimer back before an abrupt end on the kick.

The title track begins with yet more of the snareless drum kit, a high ghostly distant vocal, a string drone with some formless high string bowing. Lydon sings of a relationship in the death spiral. "I'll take the furniture. Start all over again." The violin surfaces for a Turkish sounding circular riff before the song  heads, droning and kicking to the end. The lyrics seem unambiguous but put in the setting of the strange hopeless headache that the rest of the song constructs the breakup feels a lot darker than the usual.

Under the House is a horror movie score with jungle drums. Big boomy echoes of slowed vocals and frequent deep choirs as a Lydon vocal, near buried in the mix, chants about seeing a ghost and a kind of claustrophobia and evil that takes over the building. Lydon did claim to have seen a ghost at the Manor recording studios where the band stayed at the offered rooms and spent a week failing to record all but one of the songs used here. Described as a time of frustration and failure by Lydon and guitarist Levene, the accounts include imagery of shadows and people seen in empty rooms and there is a sense of being haunted by gthe frustrations and anger of unfulfilled lives. Quietly and constantly terrifying. A friend at the time said of this track: "that's not a song, that's evil." He was smiling but only just.

Hymie's Him really was intended for the score of a horror movie. Michael Wadleigh had approached Keith Levene to provide a score for his film Wolfen, wanting an urban jungle. That means more of the same drums we've already had but with sound effects and synthesised brass and woodwind playing very cinematic brief chordal figures over the percussion. It wasn't used for the film but it became a great opener for side two of the album.

Restless drums over a huge booming synth drone. Lydon is buried in the mix. Very high vocal as narrator sneers at people trying to get in and the neighbours complaining about the noise. After lists of statements as to why the people knocking should feel ashamed the droning chant keep banging the door insists on a single note. An experience of constant breathless irritation. Lydon's house was besieged by fans who would knock and yell through the letter slot or even camp on the steps outside. This is what he thought of them. It's one of the longer tracks on the record for a reason, the band and their producer found the means to bring this grinding situation to musical life to be compelling but as unlovely as its inspiration.

Go Back has the usual intense drums joined by synthesiser in a chromatic figure eventually joined by Keith Levene at his most spiky on guitar. The lyrics are a kind of political companion piece to Four Enclosed Walls as neo-nazis rap out their mindless chants of the good days to come. If they forget history maybe this time they won't have to repeat the failures and just head for the glory. The flat voiced repetition: don't ever look back, good days ahead. The loopy keyboard riff plays the constantly crazy marching song. Obsession. Horrible. Effective.

Francis Massacre refers to the Irish prison Mountjoy and the prisoner Francis Moran who was doing life for murder. A sprightly but still dark drum pattern bangs on as Lydon wails about keeping out of jail and piano keys are randomly slided or plonked. At the end there is the same guitar sound Bowie got at the end of the marathon Sweet Thing on Diamond Dogs, a kind of sheet metal crashing and stressing. That's how the album ends.

This album heralds the transition of the band from working unit to the various and varying lineups that Lydon put together as the sole original member. Before it was the promise of a musical unit that could come from a ragged debut that mixed filler bullshit with brilliance to an unassailable masterpiece and credible live album to this document of pain and fear.

The change is clear in the first track. There's no bass. Jah Wobble has gone and his contribution not only will be absent from this record but there will be bass only two of the tracks. After this album the instrument was relegated to its standard position in rock bands, back near the drums, leave the personality at home. Until then for PiL's audience there was this big dark monument to a few public phenomena and causes for concern but also a virtual charge sheet of everything tearing at the band's weak spots which would leave them as a brand with a face; the very thing they had originally attacked.

But, think of it, while it's true that this is the end of the group as a cooperative thinking unit it's still pretty effective. Their front covers went from a parody of glossy society magazine photos to a metal can that was intended to rust, to weird representations of the members as cartoon monsters, to someone else. The latter was Jeannette Lee who handled their video art. She managed their extended presence at their gigs but also went on to be a mover and shaker of alternative music at the prestigious Rought Trade label. For this album, she looks like the flamenco dancer from Psycho. It's still funny.

If you liked Metal Box for its cohesion and confident dark mooded anger and its rich arrangements this one might have turned you off, made you fidget waiting for the bass or guitar to break out but it never deviates beyond a few details from the migraine of assaulting percussion, stressed noise and vocals that all seem to end up as endless chants. It's either best taken in as a single relentless run, a song cycle of spite or song by song on different days. It rewards both saturation and quest.

Some might comment on the strange baton passing with this record. The gated and harmonised drum sound is straight out of Peter Gabriel's third album (same engineer) and was adopted buy Flowers' producer by Phil Collins for his next one. So, either the two ex prog rockers were still not talking to each other or only found the joke of this out later but it still fuels the fanciful sillyness that PiL gained some respectablity if only as a conduit to the sound of '80s drums. It's much better than that.

This is the kind of thing that was on alternative radio forty years ago and joined the stream of tape loops, industrial soundscapes that promised to thrill us with new worlds we could find in our own heads, the kind of personal cinema we could make that had nothing to do with the sagging conventions of rock music. Billy Joel thought he was making a new wave album the year before with Glass Houses but just made another Billy Joel album. He must have thought a little edge could get him there but if he'd heard this he would have woken up screaming in the night. That is why the likes of Lydon and Levene were clearly still doing the right thing by their public in this set. While I personally didn't love this record at the time I did enjoy the worlds it offered and, a little at a time, I grew to appreciate its depth and focus and would think of it whenever the old flag about rock being dead was hauled up at the wrong end of parties at the time. Of course rock should have been dead by this time. But none of us counted on the thrill of powerchords for those younger even than we were. However, for a while, just a little while, this was one of those records that gave us hope.

1981@40: COMPUTER WORLD - KRAFTWERK

Having influenced every last purveyor of synth pop Kraftwerk themselves emerged to make a few statements on the world as they saw it and as, if it but knew it, it would see itself. Computer dating, home computers, consumerism, the wired state and money and more sat at the centre of their inspirations and while pop bands trying to be hip about it really plundered '60s spy-fi tv and movies and, at worst, cautioned a world of Countdown viewers about the dangers of becoming a number. The difference between them and Kraftwerk was that Kraftwerk actually used and understood computers, crunched their own numbers and let anyone who'd listen that if they themselves didn't start doing just that then they would be the numbers to be crushed. Oddly, in the last decade before the computerless homes, they seemed to have missed the boat.

In 1981 mentioning computers in song lyrics felt done. That was mostly due to those ones I started with, the popsters with ditties about tyrannical machine overlords, impersonal number identities or surveillance. To be Kraftwerk and call your album Computer World after Computer Games had blazed up the pop parade seemed as naff as it could get and it easily could have seemed that influencers of Bowie, Gary Numan and Eurodisco now looked as saurian as Led Zeppelin. The cover was a hard yellow picture of the band's heads appearing in the monitor of a blocky old computer terminal. Elsewhere they staffed the industrial looking machines of an unpronouncable German electro brain, in plastic toupees and robot expressions. Very Devo.

But not even Devo came close to the nightmare of the future that Kraftwerk were proposing. Yes, the synth-o-march of the title track bagged entities like Interpol and the FBI into a forbidding list of corporate identities and chants of "business, numbers, money, people" and then, "crime, travel, communication, entertainment. The arrangement was subdued and murky in opposition to the sound of Man Machine and certainly Trans-Europe Express. It sounded like music lit by a burglar's torch.  Apart from the luminous riff that sounded more like a company jingle than a pop hook the music tramped like a battalion of sanitised officeworkers, not faceless mercentile robots but everyday white collars, pretty people who counted your cash or refused your dole payment, the world, in fact, as it was. Kraftwerk aren't warning us against a bleak future but describing where we were.

Pocket Calculator's riff sounds the most like a lot of the UK synthpop that surrounded the record. It's the kind of bright and boppy major key figure that could easily be imagined on a guitar as a synth. Around it the electronics squeak, snarl, pop and snap. The narrator is the operator of his pocket calculator, adding subtracting etc. as well as pushing the little tune button. But what feels like an optimistic jingle about portable technology is more about the pervasion of it. Little calculators weren't new at the time (I'd had several at school in the seventies) and were long normalised as a means of quick number work. It's the numbers that are going to work, here, as their users increasingly depend on them. The instrumental outro suggests the spread of this relationship, it's toy upbeat smile increasingly sinister.

Next we hear from those numbers themselves, beginning with a wobbly robot voice German chanting from one to four. We also hear the count in Japanese, English, Italian, and Russian. There's a percussion track but the synth is chromatic, almost as random as a sample and hold setting but clearly intentional. It is the sound of numbers working around us, in the circuitry, through the phone lines, in the shadows and obscure corners of our daily administration. It merges into the restatement of the title track as a quieter but more assured instrumental. No words needed. The effect has taken and our world is different and will not think to turn back.

The old side two begins with what in 1981 felt like overstatement as a lonely citizen uses computers to connect. He calls a number for a data date. How virtual that might be is up to your imagination. The same blend of clavinet harshness and ringing high keyboards in this modal music intensifies the bleakness of the image. The vocals, as with most of them on this album, are renedered a step back from hard clairty by going through a delay with a very short, metallic echo. The human voice doesn't come a lot colder than this. Most ot the track is instrumental as the imagined ritual plays out as part of the new way of living. It is quietly crushing.

Home Computer's riff is the darkest one on this dark record. Thick, staccato bass sliced from somewhere in the minor scale and repeated in a pulse. There is a brighter sounding counter riff, opened up to an major arpeggio, but it isn't there to provide light. "I program my home computer, beam myself into the future." That's the lyric. And you get four of those. Mostly it's the blunt bass riff, here and there descanted bya higher keyboard or interupted by the prettier counter theme. If there are games on this home computer they are relegated to breaks; you go to work and you come home to more work. And that's it forever. A rising bubbly figure adds another phase but it just sound like more programming. The by now typical second half or so of instrumental features the third rising figure punctuated by harsh electronic snares and a stylised phone ring.

It's More Fun To Compute is the final stage as the robotic user chants the title as a harsh distant electronic scream on the synth sounds. Riffs or musical themes are liberally recycled from the previous track to emphasise the transformation that has happened in the digital cocoon. There is a lugubrious restatement of the Home Computer theme on a legato string-style synth and the effect is of lamentation. We have reached this point because we couldn't turn back or stop when there was newness to make us better. Finally (after four of its six minutes of instrumental) the percussion ceases and we are left drifting in the dark with the lament. End.

So, in 1981, the idea of Kraftwek doing this was an, "oh. come on." Wasn't that just like Queen doing their punk song back in '77? But that's nothing like the album Kraftwerk produced as soon as you listened to it. The cover art showed them as mannequin-like servants of the machine and the songs were about teh absorption of humanity into digital information flow but there was not the slightest sigh of gimmick to be had. If anything, they scaled the electronics down to concentrate on delivering a message where the form of the lyrics and structure of the arrangements said more than videos of them bouncing around in sci-fi costumes. This wasn't about doing the robot on Space Station Alpha it was about life in 1981. It was dark and achingly melancholy. We weren't becoming machines, just getting used to serving them.

I think there's less to be had from asking how well they predicted the future, point for point, than in considering how the culture at first absorbed the notion to the point of becoming indistinguishable from it. This is not all bad - human connection is the same as it was with the internet (just heavily amplified) - but when it is bad it is scary. And that's way before you get to the dark web. The trust in the con has also been amplified and scammers have long worked on the same principles as the advertising industry. We buy the scam with the knowledge of the scam; even if we don't respond to it there is pleasure in acknowledging the attempt. As for sex, it went from text-only spontaneous erotica, to torrid IRC autopornography, to online porn entering the mainstream and dating sites hanging galleries of personal fiction with endless variety. And the more we think of ourselves as being at the controls the deeper inside the great buzzing and beeping control box we are. If Kraftwerk didn't quite get the details right a mere twenty years before it changed then who among us shall point the finger?

Back in 1981 the outfit that let the world know that pop music did not have to be an amped up 60s rock band but could continue to innovate and provide powerful scores for the times released a statement that gently wiped the fashion for pop futurism aside and told us to beware. We weren't going to beware. It was too much fun dancing like Robbie the Robot or turning the other way and pretending that clunky indy rock kept us safely outside the system. But there is no such place as outside the system. That's why there is no sci-fi to Computer World but plenty of social realism. Its message like its music might have been too dour and genuine for us then, and now too open to ridicule as a kind of missed guess but it's accurate, then and now accurate.  While they still had plenty to say this still feels to me like the last stand before they themselves joined in. They already had been the robots with the models in the hall of mirrors and celebrated sparkling days on space age trains. One pause is perhaps all they needed to tell us, one last time, that while me might not be able to change what was to become of us we might learn to live it our own way.

1981@40: MOVEMENT - NEW ORDER

So, your band did well locally and in a very short time amassed a nationwide following which followed you through a rapid musical development and then,just as you were about to conquer America which was waiting for you, your singer takes his ball back and you can't play anymore, well you don't feel like it on the day. Led Zeppelin had disbanded after their drummer left (for similar reasons) and the trio left behind in Joy Division were still young and well liked as musicians which would have let them walk into any band they wanted without a scratch on JD's legacy. Instead they did something right. Well, a few things, actually. First they chose to continue under a different name. Second, instead of holding a tv competition show for a new singer, they each tried out and settled on one. Third, they got a new member to fill out guitar and keyboard duties. So, no Doug Yule's Velvet Underground or INXS as a self-cover band with a singer from tv. They played Joy Division's dates in the U.S., released a mighty single to finish off the official Joy Division legacy (kinda) and then wrote and recorded Movement.

This record did not have that good a reputation when fresh. If you listened to it the right way (so to speak) it was watery JoyDivision with a guy who couldn't sing. While the next LP Power Corruption and Lies and even singles released after Movement were more confident statements of where the band was headed, Movement gets left as a completist's album the way Still was for Joy Division. That's a pity as Movement shows a band finding their own way at their own pace and finding that the pace of the way is as fast as it was between Unknown Pleasures and Closer. They are the same musicians, after all. It's not like Smokie decided to ditch the AOR hits and get all angsty. Some of this does sound a little like Closer II but careful listening will reveal the forward march in every track.

The first thing new listeners heard from this metamorphosed version of their favourite band was not the jackhammers and medieval drumming of Atrocity Exhibition but a lone guitar, a little wobbly from a chorus pedal playing a brisk downward figure but not a crushing minor third. The drums and bass pick it up and the second guitar adds seom swirling overdriven arpeggios. The vocal is by Peter Hook but at this stage it might have been either of the other two as it's pushed back to sit among the other instruments, only just a little over them for clarity. Fans had already heard the upbeat major key sound of Ceremony as it's own single and about half of it live on Still. But where that sounded expansive of the previous sound this sound bright with a fanfare like riff high on the fretboard and infectious danceable rhythm. The words are addressed to a second person and describe an act of finality but also an attitude of resumption. It's like a statement to anyone who needed to hear it that the new name and sound were from the same people and, no, they werent going to try and get away with pretending it didn't happen.

But then things do go down. Truth begins with a gentle odd beat on a drum machine that is joined by a melodica, the reedy schoolkid blown keyboard that would feature in the band's music for years to come. Here it is playing a lamenting figure on a minor third and down modally to a tone below.  It's Bernard's voice as it will be for almost all the songs on the record. It's a strange day and he feels isolated from everyone he sees as he walks along outside. An instrumental section brings the familiar sound of overdriven guitars that sound like machines. A song of mourning? Hard not to think it.

An echoey synth and bass with a thumping kick drum and machine percussion, Senses takes on a kind of funk that was tried in Komakino by the old band. Two brief verses with abstract images and the refirain, no reason ever was given. The funk workout continues but it's not a boogie party with the synth drone of death rising from the depths and the brittle guitar duel not sounding like Chic. Eventually, the downward motion prevails and repeats until it halts in a swirling cloud of synthesis.

Very similar territory is navigated for Chosen Time with the funk more regimented into a machine like briskness. Sumner's frail vocal narrates a figure helpless to understand what has happened to his friend. I think this is unambiguously about Curtis. The jammy workthrough of the riff ends in the same kind of arcade game synthesised splatter as Insight from Unknown Pleasures. 

Over on side two, I.C.B. begins with a much grimmer lone guitar riff that is more quickly backed with a stamping kick drum and then insistent bass riff. Bernard's thin voice is fragile, barely above a whisper, as he sings strings of abstraction that add up to a sense of helplessness again. Two verses, a riff workout and an end with more of the Insight game beeps and squeals. Then, after the band has stopped a soft bass note has been left on as a kind of gentle counter. The title might well stand for Ice Cream Brontosaurus but probably does stand for Ian Curits' Burial. The melancholy created by the vocal, soft as thoughts while riding in a car to a cemetery, and the constrasting force of the music build a cloudy day of conflicting emotions. It's a song of resignation and always gets straight to me.

The Him is the most elaborate arrangement on the album, shifting from the quiet bass riff of the opening, through the introductory keyboard and muted trumpet, the controlled harmonised vocals and then the raging banshee wail of the instrumental sections. It's not elaborate because of any complex counterpoint (it's one riff all the way through and a three-note one) but the emotive passages which range from the ominous to the intense to the great howling instrumental sections after each verse, the second delayed as a cinematic synth drone ramps up the tension before an even more violent playing of the distant screaming synth section storms in. Bernard is left with the final words of the song, which is seeped in images of guilt and religion: "I'm so tired. I'm so tired...." Seldom has emotional exhaustion felt so satisfying. This song was the only thing that worked after the worst break up of my life happened. I was almost levitating listening to it.

Doubts Even Here. People without depth will say this song sounds like something from Closer and leave it at that. A few bars of military tom toms march until the meltingly beautiful figure of contrary motion begins on the keyboards. This will be almost the entirety of the song's harmonic structure, a procession of insistent epic of the strings and a building interplay between the bass and guitars both tightens and expands. Three verses of imagery that might well be Hook's statement of grief but also contain anger which could apply to a world beyond that. And then something happens at the end. Hook sings a three note melody rising to a minor third as the harmonic structure changes from modal to diatonic. Instead of the lower voice returning to C it falls to A which changes the emotional tone immediately from the worrying intensity of the verses to something more grinding and tragic. Also, as this is happening we hear new member Gillian Gilbert speaking. Sometimes in collision with Hook's singing and sometimes between lines. It can be very difficult to work it out. I don't really want to do this as the mystery of it adds so much to the emotional weight of the song. Then again, when I found this out it adds to it. Gillian is reciting the seventy-seventh Psalm which is an odd piece of work that goes like this:

I was dazed and I could not speak.

My thoughts went back to times long past.

I remembered forgotten years.

All night long, I was in deep distress.

As I lay thinking, my spirit was sunk in deep despair.

Will the Lord reject us for evermore and never again show favour?

Has his unfailing love now failed us utterly?

Must his promise time and again be unfullfilled?

Has God forgotten to be gracious?

Has he in anger withheld his mercies?

But then, O Lord, I call to mind thy deeds.

I recall thy wonderful acts in times gone by.

Weirdly, if you read this while listening to the song her voice seems to sound completely clear.

Denial closes the album with more heavy tom toms, churning guitars and a faceless vocal from Bernard with words about a failure to communicate or perhaps even to understand and act in prevention. "It's just something I know. The answer's not there. It comes and it goes and it frightens me." And then, finally: "time worked so well upon us, inside of me, inside my soul." The intensity ends only when the song does and it does so suddenly without lingering. Album over.

Of course the death of their friend by suicide was going to affect them deeply and find its way into their music. The effect of this is strange considering where this band had come from. While Ian Curtis with his stormcloud of a voice was absent from the sound and replaced by voices that often sounded cowed by self consciousness and thick emotion his death dominated their first long statement. Recall that, apart from anything else, they were writing about someone who was distinct from the one the fans thought they knew, distinct even from the one they believed they themselves knew. Recall, too, that these were people in their early twenties who were channelling into their skill an event of crushing impact with a perplexing origin and a series of increasingly complex shockwaves into the culture. 

But this is not a concept album, not, at any rate, the way that The Wall was a concept album. It's still poignant to think that in the midst of the bizarre cult-like mourning of Ian Curtis from the groundswell the band's own compulsion to make statements like this found a setting in a changing sound. As rapidly as they were developing it's notable how little this record resembles Joy Division. What it does sound like is a transformation the ex Joy Division go into the studio and come out as New Order. That's far deeper a change than the band that created Ceremony which even bore the Joy Division byline on the label. None of their records, their albums or their epic 12 inch singles sounded anything like this again. So, there they were at the station, talked about the only thing they could talk about, and when the train came they got on and never came back. 

1981@40: FIRE OF LOVE - THE GUN CLUB

It wasn't all synthesisers. Filtering through post punk from the late '70s and growing into lavish blooms came things like this album. They were American and like the punk bands that were based on the UK innovation of that notion they got it all wrong. But getting it wrong is how you discover things and what The Gun Club was that the music behind all that 12 bar style that bedroom guitarists find contains worlds of shadow, sex and power. Once established, terms like psychobilly and cowpunk were stuck on bands like this which lumped them all together. If you heard this in 1981 as a young honky you might have picked the influences of all the Pebbles and Nuggets albums that made the demimonde of garage rock of the '60s available in easy packages. But the two advantages the Gun Club had were a scholarly awareness of the legacy and the bottle to push it onstage and wear it.

Ringing and raging guitars from screeching riffs to earthquakes of barrechords under some of the most committed and dangerous sounding vocals of its time, Fire of Love burst out of the speakers and into the darkened living rooms of numberless parties. Frenzied, sexy and threatening, The Gun Club made with the blues like no one had since the time of the originals. And everyone loved them. Everyone except for me.

Eleven tracks of rock assault and it's over. And for me, outside of that context of young bodies and nervous systems like my own gyrating in the dark, they just sounded old. Every track with its lines about dressing like an Elvis from hell or preaching the devil's music or voodoo or whatever else also informed the cover art, sounded, to me, like a revival of Creedence. It was effective but did we really need it? Well, maybe so. The sole track that sounds a little different from all the others on this record is Jack on Fire, a nasty song about a nasty piece of work that uses the dynamics of the rest of the album to a real effect. Told in a jazzy 2/4 stride, it's cool cat strut works a treat. Then it's back to the old folks at home on speed.

That said, I hated psychobilly, cowpunk and whatever anyone wanted to call it that week. Partly, I'll admit that this is because I didn't get it and wanted all my new music to be a mix of big scary electronica and modified '60s psyche-pop. But it was more than that. I felt threatened by the look. What I mean by that was the skeletally skinny boys with nothing but front and wild grins who lanked around the scene picking up and waking in new beds the year round. Well, that's what I thought. I wanted everyone to find my short back and sides north of England austerity to be irresistible because ... well, I didn't actually have a reason. But the cowpunks were like every single other type that works scenes for their own rewards and will get into anything at all that works. The music is not the point, understanding that it's worth something in the market is. And that is where post punk snobs like I was will always lose and deserve to: we made ourselves into far worse relics than any of the cowpunks or rockabilly diehards ever could because at least they could drop everything and flail while we stood against the walls trying to get people talking about Syd Barrett.

I also hated the bands that blossomed from this branch. Their releases were cute and the videos like jeans commercials and when you saw them live they sounded like pub rock cover bands. It was yet another occasion where musical proficiency (because ALL of them played perfectly) could mean so very little. The music itself was nothing like the image. Anyway, I need to stop ranting about this as it's an embarrassing confession and one few would care about.

The point as far as this article goes is how this record stands up at forty years of age. Well, it doesn't. There is no point in my doing a track by track account when they all sound essentially the same and, from the height of decades, feels try hard. The problem is that as soon as something new gets the spotlight like synth pop, dub, EDM or Trip Hop there will be a gang of neanderthals ready willing and able to turn their pubrock chops into more roots rock and roll with the same bastard cliches from the'50s as this crew. I understand why. I would, given the choice and my youth back, far prefer my chances of fleeting happiness in a sweaty rock gig than in a freezing basement listening to tapeloops among a lot of other enthusiasts in overcoats. I still hate this, though, and I hate every attempt at killing off real invention with ever more flavoursome cliches. But that might just mean I hate the world. Well, sometimes I do.

1981@40: DARE - THE HUMAN LEAGUE

Breakups bring out our best and worst. All those resentments and bottled annoyances turn lovers into monsters, at least in each others eyes. Breakups of bands can show things both wonderful and embarrassing, as well. The Beatles went solo, all had nodding collaborators instead of internal competiton and nothing they produced came up to that standard. Peter Gabriel flew from prog rock into somewhere often dark and risky while his old bandmates eyed the Top 40. Morrisey took his lyrics and, surprisingly, his vocal melodies with him.

But when they splinter instead of split and die it can get odder still. Half of 10CC kept the cute while Godley and Creme branched out to bizarro world. Chris Bailey kept the Saints name while Ed Keupper took the sound of the later albums and developed it further. But there's none more strange than the case of The Human League. By 1980 and a level of success that might only ever register as ok, founders Martyn Ware and Craig Marsh left, agreeing to leave the name with the singer they had recruited, Phil Oakey. Oakey took the debts and label commitments and had to work out how to start a band with only a name. So he did but in doing so he lost a few anoraks and gained the rest of the world.

The Human League, like a lot of off centre outfits in the mid-'70s, took form from within a scene that was indistinguishable from an art collective. Ware and Marsh had an enthusiasm for electronics, computers and music and a great love of pop music. But, while they did incorporate the latter into their repetoire it never quite broke the surface. Getting Oakey in there helped the image with his looks strong voice and avant-hair. The two albums as the extended trio, Reproduction and Travelogue growl and drone with darkness and the kind of wit that time bombs rather than flaunts it in the moment. If Kraftwerk were Teuto-pop, Human League were from the moors and shadows of the North of England and sounded like a musical interpretation of J.G. Ballard (even creating the brilliant Zero as a Limit i tribute to Ballard's Crash). Even when they covered the ubercamp Glitter Band's Rock and Roll it sounded spidery and sinister. No one bums you out more than someone creative from the north of England.

So, in the months between the frowning Travelogue and Dare, Oakey made it out of the chrysalis with a record that looked like an issue of Vogue and sounded like a soft drink commercial. All of it was an essential part, from the androgynous image of Oakey's face on the front cover surrounded by noiseless white, to the font that disturbed the name by varying the size of the words and the album name, a single syllable which appeared to state the record's purpose as an all or nothing risk, this was an album of ground-up reconstruction. This extended to the band's ease into the realm of the pop video at a time when that medium was gaining its own auteurs, one of whom reproduced the cover art for the clip of Open Your Heart. Almost no one on earth between the ages of 15 and 25 did not own this record or at least a cassette of it. A rejuvenated Human League lifted the style of this album cover for a tour in the late '00s, near thirty years after its appearance in record shops.

So, all sorts of crap can be popular; is this any good?

The Things that Dreams are Made Of plunges into synth rifferama with splonking keyboard basses, screechy and ringhy high parts and Oakey's certain tones telling everyone to get off the couch and sieze the world. It's a thrill ride that yet manages to name check comedian Norman Wisdom and members of The Ramones. Open Your Heart softens things into a kind of teen opera that could also be a plea to love this new version of the band. It introduces the newly added female vocals in the chorus which can melt at twenty paces. Softer but not slower, the floating waves of electronic percussion and flute-like keyboards is still at a decent BPM, it's just the emotion left and it would have surprised anyone who knew the band in their Circus of Death days. 

The Sound of the Crowd is a dance number but it could be declaring a kind of collective obedience or lampooning it. Either way, the incorporation of the call and response with Oakey and new members Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley add to the intensity and bloom fully in the chanting chorus: "Get around town. Get around town. Where people look good and the music is loud." Kind of like a retake on Downtown but this has a minor key sternness and a strange marching rhythm that takes it out of that tradition. Third song in and what would seem like a lot of light pop is already revealing shadows and frowns. So, they might let you use their songs to sell your new bubblegum flavour but you won't just be getting the tunes. The old League had done ads but the irony blasted from the grooves. This approaches portfolio territory.

Darkness opens with drum machine less synth riffing and Phil heavily reverbed singing a wordless prologue. The song proper kicks the percussion into life and the rich electro bass and gorgeous riffing from the beginning returns. He's read a book which has left a disturbing impression and haunts him when the sun goes down and the shadows of the house darken. No reason to think that this is anything but a literal description, especially since the sounds of the synths and the timbres so clearly evoke the kind of music then being used for horror movie scores, most notably John Carpenter's own music for films like Halloween and The Fog. The punch to major for the first line of the chorus comes just in time to save the song from saturating the minor key tonality.

Do or Die starts with the programmed drums that had by that time become unremarkable and no barrier to punters judgement. A small explosive sound provides a kind of cymbal sound and a blippy organ tone gives a kind of strummed texture. Oakey comes in high in his range, describing someone whose power knocks out guard dogs just by being near and who can bring governments down. But the images of subversive action and intrigue are mixed with some darker sexual hints, the blend doing much of the talking. The chorus urges escape as well as risk. Again, this could easily be a case of Oakey thinking of what he has staked in the rebirth of his band. Will it be a punch or a punchline?

Side two opens with a stinging slow electronic reading of the theme from the movie Get Carter. No accompaniment, just the high pitched pierce of the one finger tune. It nevertheless perfectly precedes I Am the Law. A prologue that sounds like a gangster talking to the object of his affection and capture. The tone changes again with a deep thick drone for the chorus: "You know I am no stranger. I know rules are a bore. But just to keep you from danger I am the law." There is such a smooth malevolance here and it doesn't allow any kind of Alice Cooper camp, there is something distressing and powerful in the relationship and the fourfold repetition of the final chorus against the coagulating drones make it both magnetic and severe. It promises bad but you can't take your ears from it. The song ends on a high searing synth string section note which bends down sickly, is clipped and gives way to one of the saddest and most beautiful songs of the early '80s.

Seconds opens with a soothing drum pattern. A shifting delay setting adds some stuttering and the effect is bouyant, almost narcotic. A deep bass plays a two note figure before the string synth comes in with a four chord figure whose extra intervals like sixths and ninths render it both sparse and rich and a great sadness builds over the repetitions. Oakey's voice comes in, serious but delicate: "All day, hiding from the sun, waiting for the golden one." It's about an assassin whose life's blackest moment is building with unbearable intensity. The lines are spare, intoning over the wash of the irreparable grief that is about to find cause. A brief  jubilant figure rings out high on the keyboard before being hauled back into the rushing surface of the strings. "Your knuckles white as your fingers curl... the shot that was heard around the world ... for a second." And just before the intensity becomes too much we finally get to teh chorus: "It took seconds of your time to take his life. It took seconds." The weight of an irrevocable act of violence in a few words. A brief breakdown towards the end and the chorus with its reminder of the horror and fragility of the action repeats. A major factor in why this song works so well lies in the judgement of where to allow room for breath and where to overwhelm with emotion. The four chord figure is too powerful to play constantly without pushing the listener into numbness. So it is sometimes there and sometimes absent, perhaps like the waves of determination and doubt frying the brain of the killer who puts whoever it is in the crosshairs of his rifle. On that, this was less than a year after John Lennon's murder but the picture sleeve of the Love Action single (of which Seconds was the B-side) had photos of JFK. But really, it could be any such killing and all that's left is the lives affected by the one taken. This song has a sting but also clear compassion and its appearance on a record often recalled as a dumb-downed foppery from a once serious outfit. The thing is that as serious as the old band was it still would not have broken out as emotionally as this song does. Going  big and bright clearly has its advantages.

What's left is the pair of singles that have currency to this day.

The squirmy synths at the start of Love Action and the build up with synthesised wukka wukka guitars are alsmot the stuff of self parody but the vocal is clearly without irony as the arrangement takes on a kind of electro funk. The verses are a confession of sorts about the notion of love and where it leaves us, subscribers or clowns. The melody is the closest thing to bluesiness on the record, having a Motown suavity to it. The chorus is purpose-built catchy with a hooky lyric line and cool synth descending figure. What breaks this is the breathless declaration in the middle of the song where Phil (who has already namechecked himself in the second verse) comes out with some great lines: "I believe, I believe what the old man said though I know that there's no lord above .... I believe in truth but I lie a lot". To remember to be funny when you're being serious is part of that Northern expression I mentioned earlier. This resolves to chorus repeats until the fade with the stacatto disco riff sounding high as the synths swirl around like dancers. Born to be a hit single.

Don't You Want Me is like that only with a lot more drama as the dialogue between Oakey and a singer often assumed to be Sulley but was in fact an uncredited jobber. That sounds strange when you know that Sulley mimed it in the clip and it's so forward and expressive that doesn't fit as a session voice. The bouncy setting tells of a big shot (could be movies or music or maybe even modelling) who discovered the girl in a bar and made her a star and now she's at the top she's left him far ... behind. Each has a verse. He's all "don't be ungrateful" and she's "I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar. That much is true." The song resolves in the repeated chorus of the title. It's fun, it felt like a little more than an assembly line pop song but shot to the top like it was written in the Brill Building.

Another aspect of this reinvented Human League is the producer. By 1981 Martin Rushent had a few important notches on his holster. with the likes of The Buzzcocks and the first three Stranglers albums. He'd worked his way up from tea boy to producer over the '70s and at the dawn of the '80s he was increaingly interested in what the future might or should sound like with investments in gear like the new Linn drum machine and banks of the new synths on the block and went digital. Ex Buzzcock Pete Shelly released the Rushent produced Homosapien album with the title song leading as a single. If you don't know it Youtube it and bliss out in the textbook plate example of infectious synthpop that has been conceived of without reference to luminaries like Gary Numan or past masters like Kraftwerk. It drives on the same Autobahn but the engine is not about the medium and message it's just pop and as pure as it could be made. Taking a colleague's recommendation, he got the job of producing Dare.

The difference between this and what might have been a third album from the old lineup is that there was probably a lot less aruging. Between Rushent, Oakey and their collaborators the audio part of the band's reinvention was set to set what synth pop was in concrete. Phil could still take his concerns about the way of the world out for a drive but all of it (even the mighty melancholy of Seconds) still sounded and felt like pop music and was form fitted for dancing. New Order were soon to pursue the same territory along with a regiment of other lights and this became a defining characteristic of the era to the extent that the notion of guitar bands was growing visibly old.

There were three singles taken from the album which I remember feeling was a cash-in (not suspecting that at the end of the following decade acts like Moby and Massive Attack could licence every track of an album and still be cool). If it was it must at least felt like a sweet relief to Oakey to receive such success along with the attention after years as the darlings of a coterie of art students. And he and the personnel rose to the fame by looking like they were made out of marzipan icing in neon lurex, having started (or restarted) as a market-calling institution in waiting. For their part Heaven 17 did ok with songs both innovative and politically forceful (first single protested Ronald Reagan's election: Fascist Groove Thang) and they effortlessly adopted the dance-fever production that Oakey and Rushent almost patented. But, love or hate, Oakey and co's insistence on embracing the money and the fame was a lesson that stirred frowns from the post-punk punters but also a game plan for the likes of Ultravox (who'd also rejuvenated after an unresponsive '70s) or U2 (one of the few guitar bands allowed to be rock stars at the time). The whole question of selling out was made moot but not by the arrogance of a kid with a lucky break and funny hair who finally got to be a pop star but one who reserved his right to sing about what he wanted ... and some of that was love.