1982 @ 40: CHRONIC TOWN - REM

Clean jangly chord riff and energetic drumming joined by a vocal that doesn't seem to complete its lines with any comprehension. But none of that is as much the point as how it all gels and works. The voice is the same kind of riffing instrument as the guitar and as percussive as the kit at the back. Wolves, Lower is the title but the closest we get to it in the lyrics is the phrase wolves at the door. It's all bright '60s and Byrdsy but it has no interest in messages clearer than tangy ear candy for the young folk. At the same time, it feels alternative, not top 40 pop.

Gardening at Night is the same kind of thing. A descending guitar riff is descanted by a vocal that seems to have its top sheared off. The title does appear in the verses and choruses but to what purpose? meanwhile we have a bed of changing textures within the brief of the pleasant wash. Carnival of Sorts (Box Cars) adds minor key tonality to the line up and a more skittish rhythm. The interplay between lead and backing vocals creates more of the appeal. Flip sides and 1,000,000 brings more of a casual white funk vibe and a rougher edged vocal. "I could live a million years." Stumble returns us to the busy bright clean chord arpeggios we began with. 

What does it mean? In an era when the most obscure industrial acts were taking pains to render their intents clear, however abstract their affectation, this band that sounded like a home demo version of The Monkees trying to be The Byrds didn't seem to have a syllable of a message. The cover art of the 12 inch mini-LP was a blue tinted closeup of a gargoyle with a band pic on the rear. They look young and fresh but unremarkable.

But the thing about this disc is your projection as a listener. If you want, you can put it on and leave it on and just groove to the candy choruses and sugary riffs without a further thought. Or, you could look at the obscurantist song titles and imagine what they meant. Phrases like "gentlemen don't get caught" could mean that getting caught is for chumps or the elite never pay for anything they do. There are things like this in every track. It almost seems to be a band created to be enjoyable with the worst P.A.s imaginable.

An interview in RAM from the time (or a little later after the LP murmur) had them from the U.S. south (Georgia) and a university town (Athens). They were on I.R.S. a label started by the drummer of The Police and his brother which already featured The Go-Gos, so they came with indy credentials.

I didn't have a copy of this record until years later, nor even had a tape of it from someone else's stacks. I noted the gargoyle on the cover and, while I liked it, wondered if they weren't just a small label version of a hair metal band. But I did hear some of this played on 4ZZZ and recall getting caught in the high flavour jangle which then gave way to whatever that announcer was putting on. It was back announced. I knew what r.e.m. sleep was and the notion of the abbreviation as a band name gave it a psychedelic tone which I was compelled by.

Little did I or anyone know, though, was that this band would not only crash through at an indy level with their debut longplay, Murmur, the following year but that it would be one of the ways you could be a guitar band with honour in that anti-rock environment, but that, as they ditched that and moved more and more back into solid concrete convention and played stadiums only with big clearly annunciated songs that would make Midnight Oil blush.

All bands who pursue their own paths must develop and change and the idea that this must be along the same lines as their beginnings is a massive fallacy. You might lose thousands of early fans when you tour the big rooms but you gain millions and that's what happened with REM. Did they get worse with fame? Not really, more that they just ditched all the things that gave them the spark of originality that pricked up all our ears. I saw them after that point when they toured the Green album in 88 and 89. It was at Festival Hall and they were supported by The Go-Betweens. That band had tried to make a similar leap and produced some essential and appealing music but never broke through to much more than this kind of spot or smaller scale tours that they would continue with. The headliners vocally congratulated them on their set before launching into their own with Pop Song 89 a song intended as irony but really only offered a token.

Once upon a time, though, they made records as sweet as cola but as intriguing as a shot of golden spirit that you might have with it on a hot day. That's what this record sounds like.

1982 @ 40: A KISS IN THE DREAMHOUSE - SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES

A bass riff pulses out through a heavy chorus effect while a bright cloud of synthesis billows around it. Some drum fills but not a complete bar create tension. Siouxsie comes in with almost a whisper. The images of chest full of eels and usual skin and throwing a thorny idea of sex and you get a body horror love song. The Cronenberg-led sub-genre hadn't yet been given that name but here it is in pop song form, driving with a tireless momentum. 

After Cascade, Green Fingers gives us a weird sounding recorder with a figure somewhere between Green Man folk and Arabic modes. A Raga-rock guitar figure starts and Siouxsie enters with a a bright vocal about a woman who can make anything grow. The story of it was inspired by an episode of the Rod Serling run Night Gallery about a woman who avenges herself against a greedy land developer using magic. Like Cascade and most of this record the feel is psychedelia but this is not prancing around the lilies summer of love psych-rock but something more born of the horrors of the late cold war which was still feeling like seconds to midnight: less Woodstock than Xtro.

Obsession uses the delay with only the slightest original attack on a relentless guitar figure, slicing out a two chord toll as Siouxsie's building series of impressions and almost diaristic lists of the actions of someone increasingly surrendering to their idolisation and impulses. There's a break in the middle where the arrangement blooms into an aching string section figure. But this just winds back down to the pressing whispers, grinding and tolling bells of the stalking horror scenario. 

For contrast She's a Carnival bursts right in with a descending guitar chord figure that brings back earlier incarnations of the band with a punkier sound. The vocals come in about what might be a carnival curio or a dazzling scenester with Syd Barrett style melodies and harmonies. The song creates a whirlwind of tone, clashing the tuneful sweetness with the razor wire of the band and then finishes with an accelerating circus organ.

Circle appropriately starts off with a hard looping synth figure. Siouxsie comes in with tales of circular behaviour like child abuse, teenage pregnancy as the drums slap in with a punishing waltz time rhythm. Everything keeps going round like a wormy cat chasing its tale. Cycle of life, yes, but it's happening in the gutters and the clubs and the subways and the darkness.

Side two starts with Melt, an expansive 6/8 swing with cymbals and mandolins. Another sex song but this ethereal call and response number leaves out the eels in the chest for cuffs and pain and no one's talking about safe words. The falsetto repetitions of Siouxsie's mezzo lead add to the breathiness of a situation that suggests penthouse apartments and soft lights and secret rooms with hooks in the walls. Even the arrangement with its booming splendour feels like it cost Andorra's national debt. Decadence costs more than money, here, though, and seldom more beautifully.

Painted Bird takes its cue from Jerzy Kosinski's grim novel of World War II Poland of the same title but spreading out the imagery to include any attack on beauty from motives of impotent anger. The lines about losing our sorrow. This gets a little lost in the rock-non-rock arrangement. Perhaps the idea was to get people to read it (assuming they could get through it). It's the closest this album gets to filler but it does fill in the best way.

Cocoon takes into Siouxsie's head from deep in an acid trip and we go in to the sexy bomp of a fretless bass riff. Warm sheets melt and writhing worms as a tide of tinkling, whispering and wobbling rises and falls around her. At one point the forces gather for the lucid declaration: "Waiting to loose the bandages. Waiting for new appendages." Cronenberg much? More than anything the band did Cocoon sounds more like the Siouxsie/Budgie side hustle The Creatures with its un-rock swing and absence of guitar chords and great waves of atmosphere.

Slowdive closes things with a squeaky start on the strings that cries down into a big bamming 4/4 slam. Siouxsie continues the jazziness of her vocals on most of the album. Her own backing vocals join her for the chant of the title but most of this is a delirious confusion of dancing and sex with a rhythm section and screeching strings sounding like an old bed in carnal motion as well as the building tension of attraction and fulfilment. It fades because no one wants it to stop.

With cover art straight out of the kind of Klimt picture posted on numberless student walls at the time, and a determined push the confounding of the physical world with shifting abstraction, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse remains one of the band's most powerful statements and caps off all the development from The Scream in the punk days to there in the precarious early '80s when the tension from waiting for the air raid sirens found its way onto the dancefloor and into the bedroom. The Dreamhouse of the title referred to a Hollywood brothel where clients could pay for time with lookalikes. A kiss there would be deliciously forbidden but also resonate with exploitation and the worst of human motives.

Psychedelia was lifting out of the history books in the early '80s. This was a generation who turned on its mainstream with a fistful of punk. Before that they were the ones who bypassed the Buck's Fizzes and Eagles by raiding the op shops for Syd Barrett, Jeff Beck era Yardbirds, Magical Mystery Tour Beatles, Satanic Majesty Stones. They bought or taped the Nuggets and Pebbles compilations which lightened the task of finding the Green Fuzz single at flea markets. They reached further back and rediscovered the power of baroque concertos and further back still with the modality of renaissance madrigals and medieval monks. Reissues of early Pink Floyd and Syd's solo albums as well as the Doors' back catalogue flooded the senses with everything that the twelve-bar boogie white boy blues had pasted over. By the time post punk took on enough form to call it that, there was a music underground that was pushing upwards.

Some of these songs began life in the Ju Ju sessions but between that album and this came the single Fireworks with its real cello section playing the riff in a song that is sometimes violent and sometimes more basely sexual. By the time this album was in the works the near industrial live sound of Ju Ju was upgraded to using the London Symphony Orchestra as session players. And if that weren't sufficiently of the time that rejected the thrusting rock that filled stadiums there is a major wind back on conventional rock arrangement (not an abandonment but the statement is clear) and Siouxsie's vocals are often as far back in the mix as the stranger of major player songs from the late '60s like Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby Standing in the Shadow or Over Under Sideways Down. The chosen tonalities stray well from the normal diatonic and embrace the modes of the dark ages or just progressions thrown together as a kind of anti-craft.

It's because of this, the mix of innovation and call backs from centuries before that this solidly psychedelic record does not just sound like a rehash of Piper at the Gates of Dawn or Strange Days. It's confusion of sex and horror, beauty and cruelty, now and then that makes this album great. I know I harp on this but here we have a textbook example of why sounding determinedly of your time is the best thing to do. Think on't: take those Rococo trills out of Mozart; you'd still have genius but you'd miss the trills.

1982@40: WORLD OF STONE - HUNTERS AND COLLECTORS

A quietly menacing bass drone on a synth. Crisp woodblocks clack a steady 4/4. Eventually a clean and spiky funk riff on a guitar appears. Strange warbles and clashes bring a bass in but it's not a normal rock bass. It's notes feel like hammer blows. They're forged from steel. Soon we're pounding through a breathlessly hot jungle as a tortured voice calls out about loping walks, monkeys and caretaker's home. It might be a zoo. It might be an imperial expedition through a great screeching morass. Whatever it is there's danger there and the bare protection from it. "Semi-detached in a world of stone" and suddenly the track breaks into a searing grind with clanking bass below and screaming organ overhead. The pattern holds. No guitar solos or middle eights, just the big machine of song slashing through the foliage.

Flip it and you get Watcher, a much busier groove with more plinky funk riffs. More strained vocals. An aging surburbanite growling at his tv. The backing vocals invite you to come and see him in his display case of a home. There's a vague preacher vibe like Once in a Lifetime but, despite the funk that might unite them, this has an anguished energy and none of the designer weirdness of David Byrne and co. Thump thump thump. Come and see the watcher.

Lastly there's the one that would really dig in when the band was mentioned. Loinclothing has a brighter riff that can recall the Andrea True Connection's More More More disco smash from the previous decade. There's no shame or self-consciousness to it, probably more than a little defiance. There's also a ton of Krautrock in the ancestry. Mostly, though, this is the sound of a band breaking through influence and sounding like themselves. The bass takes the gloves off and pounds with its knuckles. The big modal calls of the verse sing ropes of imagery: cowboys toe tapping, howls of distant pleasure, worms feeding, hay, rag and bone man before the big chanting chorus breaks out with a massed cry of ... Loincloth? Plastic? Placemats? 

This is one I only had as a cassette from someone else's record. While some of the lyrics are clear, I have not one sausagey notion of what they are calling in the chorus. It sounds essential to the song but the song is imagery rather than narrative or confession. In the end I liked not knowing. It could have been Latin or Old Sumerian but it sounded like they meant it. The combination of obscure meaning and earnestness or even ceremonial joy had a shiver of horror. Jungle holocausts from Deep River. Like the best nightmares, especially those known to soft little city dwellers like me, it was not knowing that kept us looking over our shoulders.

January 1982 and I'd just come back from my two months of Uni holidays up in the tropics. First term of second year wouldn't be starting for a couple of weeks. I lugged my baggage back up to my room, cleared out the miasma of baby clothes and other detritus that my brother and his wife would use my room for in my absence, and unpacked to a much needed dose of 4ZZZ. World of Stone came on. In the stinky humid air of a late Brisbane summer, the sounds of the jungles of horror movies rose and got right into me. I turned it up and listened. Who the hell was this?

I listened to the end of the bracket for the back announcement. Hunters and Collectors. From Melbourne. Playing at the New York on Sunday night. It was Friday. I finished unpacking, making mental notes. Melbourne. Like The Birthday Party and Models. Wow. It didn't surprise me once I knew. That big clangy bass and the non-rock spread of the funk were a fit for place. I was about to call around to see who was going when my brother in law Roger came by to invite me to it. Perfect.

The New York in Queen St was a depression era building with a deco name plate built in to the façade as well the the name York. The semi circle portico bore the renaming to New York. I can't remember when it became a venue but had already been there a few times (possibly The Birthday Party and the Laughing Clowns). It was the place for interstate bands from the alternative margin or international acts that got played on ZZZ. It was the best venue in town. The sound was always big and clear and the bands played on an elevated stage so far above any of our heads that you had to be standing right behind a giant not to see them. There was a mezzanine with table service.

Hunters and Collectors emerged, looking like the roadies, all singlets and jeans ripped by lifting and days and nights on the rig. There were about twenty-seven of them; a rock band core plus a workshop of percussion on bin lids, gas cylinders and hub caps. They made a big noise but it was cleanly defined and deliberate, turning the venue into a great big sweaty pagan church. No cacophony, no mess, just a solid mass of orchestrated rage and wonder. I caught up with a lot of people I'd been missing but we didn't so a lot of talking.

Hunters and Collectors felt new and of the moment and for the moment seemed incapable of buying into the top ten with a cute chorus and a riff. That would change but it would take years. Getting to the crafted hard pop numbers that Mark Seymour at the helm started to churn out was a lengthy process that involved a painful untangling of ties to the dark night time bonfires they'd started with. But for a band whose sense of purpose ensured them the ears of any passer by with hooks that took forever to happen after a lot of scary declamation, they were matchless. Most of the dearly years stand solid now but that first long fast spinner with the uncomfortably off cover art will please now as uncompromisingly as it did then. Classic in the best sense.

1982 @ 40: THE BLURRED CRUSADE - THE CHURCH

A stereo-ed tom tom intro brings in the sound of a 12 string guitar led-band playing the chords in a jangle of arpeggios before a brief respite in a reverberant major barre chord. Steve Kilbey's deep voice is out front but sitting comfortably in the centre, filling it, as he intones a series of images that sound better than they mean much against a delicious guitar rock soup. A delayed chorus breaks the song into suspension: "I'm almost with you. I can sense it. Wait for me." And that's almost all you need to know about this album.

Almost. From the nylon string guitar solo to the range of textures that, while distinct, always feel of a piece with all the others. The Church spent the months between their credible debut and their follow up learning dynamics on the road, honing the songwriting and learning to work with producers and engineers to arrive at this remarkable accomplishment. Everything sounds like it belongs on an album that has been thought about. But it's also warm and engagingly melodic throughout.

If the over extended intro to When You Were Mine gets irritating from the second listen you know at least that it will resolve into a mighty psychedelic riff, Kilbey's assured vocal and imagistic lyrics that suggest a love that survives many lifetimes, big drumming and atmosphere. If Marty  Wilson-Piper's vocal on Field of Mars starts out swallowed the growing force of the music bears it on a tidal shift to a big plaintive call by the end.

Interlude gives us a break with its slower walking pace but intrigues with the woman's voice that speaks the first line of the verses as Kilbey sings them. Secret Corners seems to be a comparatively plain side ender but brings out a big finish.

Side two starts with a whimsical joke about letting inspiration in when it comes knocking before the rich acoustic rock of Just for You which surprises with an instrumental section led by a harpsichord. If A Fire Burns and To Be In Your Eyes feel like filler by this stage they are eclipsed by the epic You Took which ranges from soft but urgent harmonics on the bass and big guitar landscapes, hushed verses that play like cinematic dialogue and further adventures in guitary invention. By the time you get to the quiet finale of Don't Look Back, you feel like your watching the credits of a movie you'll tell everyone about.

Part of this is the work of a band reigning in their tendency to get songs out of jamming and finding arrangements that either took the length they gave them or demanded more compact packaging in the '60s-influenced singles they came to master. From the burdensome replaying of sections of Unguarded Moment which can make it a chore they go to leaving out those bits of information you can note and recall and move on. The effect is constant progression that even raises the lesser tracks to the standard of the whole.

The mix of pounding percussion and big guitars that surround a large and present vocal comes courtesy of producer Bob Clearmountain whose experience with the likes of Springsteen and The Rolling Stones as well as a lot of musicianship of his own delivered one of the most accomplished sounding records on the Australian scene in an era when we were still forgiving unimaginative arrangements and production for being real.

I was one of those folk and to this day maintain my post punk preference for interesting over professional. I still prefer the ramshackle passion of Neutral Milk Hotel to anything off the overproduced Nevermind or the Garbage debut. But The Church got away with the slickness because it sounded like they meant it. Where Of Skins and Heart works as a decent power pop platter it feels incomplete, undercooked, in need of edits on the tape but also on the songcraft and arrangement. Blurred Crusade sounds like it was born that way.

I was a sucker for the band from the time I saw the clip for Unguarded Moment on Sounds or Countdown. The paisley and the coolness, the double Strat attack (that would soon morph into Rickenbacker 12 and Strat) Steve Harley vocals and high harmonies just won. They played Brisbane a couple of times in 81 and 82 but every time I tried to get to see them they blew out, the venue doling out the money back to the upsidedown smiling fans. It felt like we'd never see them. Maybe they couldn't actually play and were really just miming it all. Whatever. Guff appeals when you're young and pissed off. 

I finally did see them and more than once. The first was just after Blurred Crusade and they were fine. Not necessarily the band that broke the bank at Monte Carlo but good. They didn't sound like the record because the record was production and more production that any of us were used to with an Australian act. Dig the extra emphasis Kilbey put on his Brit roots in his singing and interviews. No one blamed him. It was a monocultural world out there and any difference was a relief.

What mattered was the music and it was rich and dynamic. The solos weren't cock rock pyrotechnics, they felt right the way they were and added to the weave. The lyrics didn't seem to mean anything but they sounded good and you could project whatever you cared to upon them. They looked '60s but not so '60s that they forbade themselves more contemporary tones in sound and couture. If you knew your Australian city stereotypes they also weren't things. Based in (but not from) Sydney they sounded nothing like Sunnyboys, The Hitmen or any of that Stoogey Detroit grunge. They weren't Melbourne with all that nasty theatre of coolty, tribal noise and dyed black locks. They certainly weren't Brisbane. They were just The Church.

Between their first album and this had come a double EP which loudly announced the course the band would nurture into bloom on this album. And then, having established themselves as revivers of the jingle jangle, changed course again (but only slightly) and would continue taking small side steps from the last thing: less Please Please Me to Sgt Pepper than Turn Turn Turn to Fifth Dimension. By the end of the '80s, while still recognisable in sound and vision, they had shifted from the easy path of Byrdsian gleam to the larger scope from tracks like You Took or Is This Where You Live, producing barnstormers like Tantalised and their global hit Under the Milky Way.

Until then, the look and sound worked a treat. As a young media student who saw things multiple times at the cinema, I dragged my sister and her husband to a screening of Starstruck which was supported by a short of two Blurred Crusade songs (Almost With You and You Took). They were all naff knights in armour, crystal balls, tarot cards and mystic lakeside settings but they were on a cinema screen, shot like a movie with giant sound. It was better than the movie.

This didn't alter the fact of so many other outfits providing music that was far more innovative and successful in offering alternatives to the old groaning freighter of rock music. It didn't raise the possibility of having more conventional rock music lift to those heights to make a tight and lasting union of creativity. The Church stuck to proven guns and fashioned an easier career out of being dependable. At the time that did look like they were being left doing the dogpaddle while less lucrative music was forging ahead. What remains now is the fact of the the sheer craft and confidence that reaches out beyond the judgement of fan-aged purists. Simply this: good songs stand and albums made of them will always taste good.

1982@40: HEX ENDUCTION HOUR - THE FALL

There are some records that you remember as being weird top heavy miasmas, constantly balancing a mass of cacophony on a unicycle and somehow managing to keep moving forward. A kind of reverse effect of this happened when I'd heard The Birthday Party's single Release the Bats. It sounded so overcooked and chaotic that I laughed before I admired it as though seeing a revered stage actor gesturing and projecting too much. Then, as one friend correctly pointed out, you heard it again and realised it was actually a song. The Fall's Hex Induction Hour felt like an airborne disaster the first few times I heard it and that's how it came down to me until that same friend got into them big time and I heard it again and was almost disappointed to find how well played it was. But that's the issue with bands whose singers themselves appear to be driven by chaos, the more he snarls and sneers his abstract insults the more dangerous they look behind him and when they look dangerous they sound dangerous.

But, really, after a few bars of ramshackle take up of the rhythm and bass riff, the opener, The Classical starts rocking like everything around it. And The Fall, track by track, start sounding like a band. It's the same band (almost) as on the first three. Riffs on loud but clean guitars, non-rock drumming and bass that is either melodic or indistinguishable from the tom toms. This time, someone opened a window and all that is clear ... er.

"I've never felt better in my life," they sing with nasal sarcasm at the end of a harangue born of a four chord progression that hammers on. Because of that insistence on the progression it takes on a kind of drunken take on Sympathy for the Devil (different chords, I hasten to add) with a spiteful omission of the chorus. A big acidic rant at consumerism or the advertising that fuels it or even the buying habit that has replaced culture. Maybe even a shambling restatement of The Saints' Know Your Product. The thing is, that, for all its teetering chaos, The Classical is compelling and even catchy. 

If you remember the early Fall records rather than listen to them now the sheer riffy rock of it might surprise you. Yes, there's a lot of the legacy of German avant-rockers in all first wave Fall but even those volk knew the power of compulsion. Faust's reverse taunt track Krautrock is an onslaught on a single chord but it's engaging as anything a stadium rock act of its time ever produced.

Jawbone and the Air Rifle bangs in the four on floor rock that the band did happily. Smith's narrated account is a strange horror story of an impotent middle aged man who takes his anger out on the local rabbits (he's referred to in the song as rabbit killer). He takes a chip out of a mausoleum, waking the local curse and deteriorates thereafter, hallucinating pagan imagery. His appetite for the meat he used to hunt vanished he settles into a slow death by starvation. The last section is told against a slower minor-key vamp before the jolly jig riff that has served as a chorus throughout the song.

Hip Priest begins with guitar harmonics, a jazzy ride cymbal taps out 6/8 rhythm, slow modal guitars and Smith singing a falsetto figure: "He is not appreciated." Occasional small outbreaks of chords and bass resettle into the slow shuffle until the oddly folky 6/8 roll picks up and sticks with the groove. The unappreciated is the self-appointed pontiff rock writer from Sounds or the NME, whose word can kill careers, whose ear is only sought when the seeker is well past it. A terminally spitting indictment of the profession but delivered with calm deliberation. Deadly.

Fortress/Deer Park is a garage chordy riff taken to dissonance after an intro that uses the same cute plinky Casio rhythm as Trio used on their still funny minimalist hit Da Da Da. Images of the ugly end of nights out and touring alternate with the plea: "Have you been to the English Deer Park? It's a large type artist ranch..." Anywhere that produces some cool thing gets stretched into hallowed ground. The Fall were from Manchester which, by that time, was the place where he, Ian Curtis, walked. The litany towards the end about people being disappointed by their own preconceptions about bands they go to see still makes me laugh.

Mere Pseud Mag Ed pits Smith against a spiky guitar and drums grind as he verbally slaps the face of society magazines with their ostentation and pretence. Little more to say on it really, does what it says on the cover.

Winter, on the other hand, is an epic with a weird depressing story and was so long that they had to put it over two sides, end of A, beginning of B. Weekend had done this on La Variete with the instrumental  A Life in the Day. Neither that nor this were joined when released on a CD which would have allowed both as a single one, but, yeah that would have gone against what they were to begin with. I'll treat both Winter (Hostel Maxi) and Winter 2 as one song. A pedestrian rhythm with a bass insisting on a low note however it might briefly stray. A clean guitar lashing high chords. Eventually a Casio organ adding spare highlights. It's not easy to make all the lyrics out without assistance but there is a story there. The local mad kid goes about his day, challenging passers by with odd declarations as an alcoholic variously gets over his hangovers or waits in the library until the pub opens again. One winters day the kid walks past the drunk's place at the moment that the drunk's soul leaves him and flies out the window into the kid. Then the drunk says to the bewildered recipient some heart wrenching words: "I just looked around and my youth, it was sold." Courtesy winter. Thing is, this song is compelling. It's a kind of walking drone but it's also mesmerising. You have to listen to the entire thing. If you had the record, you had to get up and turn it over. I can imagine the ghost of Mark E. Smith giggling at the sight of that, especially at the snake-oil buyers who think vinyl is the newly resurrected true church of music appreciation.

Just Step S'ways starts with the best riff The Fall ever recorded. It rises through a modal/raga influenced scale and falls back with a pair of finalising downward notes. You just want to hear it over and over which is why they play it that way. Now and then there's a big loud break but the riff comes back which is kind of the opposite of the plea of the lyric which goes: "Just step sideways out from this world, today." But this is less about smelling roses than wrapping your scarf around your nose to keep out the perfumed aircon of the culture. If this hadn't been The Fall but U2 or The Police this riff would have been the centrepiece of a stadium stormer. It's much better as it is-uh.

Who Makes the Nazis starts with a yell of its title that gives way to a circular riff on guitar and bass with guitar harmonics and a half time drum pattern. Eventually, an oafish drooling wordless backing vocal comes in under the lyric which repeats the question and answers itself with elements of the culture like TV commentators or superb Smithian images like "motels like three split-level mirages". Smith played a voice recording from a Dictaphone right into the mic, letting it distort to add noise but also to invoke the kind of loud hailer politics the lyric addresses.

Iceland was recorded in Iceland after a small number of gigs the band played in Reykjavik. Smith murmurs an intro over a curious blend of ukulele and vamping piano. Viking imagery of runes and battle. But this is Mark E. Smith so he also recounts a moment when he slipped on the floor of a cafe and was annoyed that no one seemed to bat an eyelid. The colourful non-sequiturs run by with the refrain of getting humbled in Iceland (that pratfall in the cafe gave him a useful image for this one). This is much more a personal thing with me than it will be a generally accepted impression but the constant bouncing rhythm on acoustic instruments and the far more serious drumming, right to the gentle détente to the clean finish, this one reminds me of the instrumental version of Sing This All Together on the Rolling Stones Satanic Majesties record. I don't think they are copying it (if anything it just sounds like an idea that came out of a jam, but the association is a pleasing one. A little oasis before the end.

The end comes in the form of the longest song on the album, And This Day. A stamping and fractured 6/8 beat on the drums and an insistent minor figure on the bass are garnished by a distorted organ as Smith declares stress in a long, long string of images of travel and claustrophobia, of isolation and paranoia. Is it about touring? If it is it's about as far from Helen Wheels as you could get. The instrumental passages do not change the onslaught of the imposing rhythm and its interventions but add bursting stars of feedback and the organ can take on a strange similarity to a choir. When Smith comes back in with the the chanted title his voice is flush with the wash of the instruments. It's exhausting but exhilarating; the bump as the airliner's tyres touch the tarmac at the home airport. There's no fade, just a dissipation and end. That's the album.

People should still be listening to The Fall. They could take the easy way in with a compilation of the mid and late '80s singles which can get very catchy but, really, what they need to do is find one of the first eight or so albums, the earlier the better, and listen to them until the music and the words feel familiar. They will, and it should only take a few listens. All eras of pop music have surfaces that look glassy and still and all of those eras have undercurrents and shards where music like this is made. The post punk era was longer than punk but was absorbed like everything else eventually, was a moment when music like this was appreciated deeply. I don't mean millions of people bought it, I mean those who did and went to the gigs did so to feel something beyond their ken. This is not limited to the early '80s, you can find it now, new, but a dose of this approach that does not care if you like it, has no American-style eyes on the prize and was from a time when the push against that kind of showbiz felt like it was winning. It wasn't and it lost like all the other challenges. That failure gives us bullshit like The Good Charlotte whose publicity was all tatts and piercings but who sounded like mid-'80s MoR.

 I didn't even have this one on cassette but I loved hearing The Fall on radio. More than The Birthday Party or Foetus or ... or anyone else, the Smith brigade of modular line-ups with the rockiest anti-rock on the face of the deep cut through everything else, shaming its listeners for being fans of anything else. Whatever flight you took to OMD skies or submarine to Joy Division oceanic trenches you could always get back home with The Fall. The best bit was that wasn't because they told it like it was but mixed that with wild dream logic dadaism and mighty riffing goodness. And none of it had the self-consciously weirdo vibe of an Oingo Boingo or Classix Nouveau (that's a cheap shot but it was fun to type). If you play or write songs and get plugged into a YouTube course on do-nots and always lists, listen to The Fall and it will be more relieving than a bowel prep laxative. You won't want to sound like them but you might feel like sounding like yourself.

1982@40: LUST IN THE DUST - XERO

1982. Xero had a record out. A real vinyl disc. So what? Time and place. If Brisbane had a record industry it produced a very few artefacts of painfully hard won self-financed singles among the mess of truck driver custom pressings and the David Jones Staff Choir Xmas albums. Brisbane bands back then released anything longer than two songs on cassette and dressed it up in single-sized artwork in lunch bags so they wouldn't turn invisible in the shops' cassette racks. They might have coughed up all the money themselves but it was out through a real label (Sydney's M Squared) and was filed among its kind in the grown up LP stacks. Xero (sometimes Xiro or Zero) had done the cassette thing a couple of times the previous year but here was their posterity-ready playable on all good turntables (and plenty of shot ones, just quietly). A real record!

Also understand that this was from a dark hour in the live music timeline. Things were starting to turn but what I found when I came to live in Brisbane (from Townsville) in 1980 the pubs rang with the fresh young  sounds of jukeboxes or racing stations. The traditional home of bands without industry management (who had that then?) and accessible to anyone who could pay the two buck cover and at least convincingly lie about their age, were giving bands the black card. It felt like there was a ban on them. So what bands I saw (and was in) did was hire halls or vacant shopfronts and these were all shut down by cops (see also, parties with bands except bands that played Khe San).

While I did get to see Xero live it was difficult to do regularly. What I and everyone else in the margin of the mainstream in Brisbane did was hear them and other locals on 4ZZZ. One of the pleasing effects this had on the flow of music from the FM band was that all of it sounded like it could have come from anywhere. The Go-Betweens record a single in Scotland and it sounded like them down the road. Big dub grooves rubbed shoulders with cassette compilations from anywhere. And that is how I came to hear at least two of the tracks on this record and they sounded sensational.

So I bussed into Adelaide St and came back with the record in a plastic Rockinghorse bag, and looked at the cover. My Silver three-in-one was nestled in my old room's wardrobe back up in Townsville and wouldn't be coming down south for another year. I could take it to a friend's and tape, of course, but for now I decided to leave it until the Uni holidays and play it among the cane toads and coconut palms o'er the Tropic of Capricorn. Until then, there was the cover.

I took it out of the plastic sheath and discovered that it was a long sheet of cardboard, glossy on one side, folded in half to look like an LP cover. I figured getting a tabbed and glued cover was one expense too far. That aside, it looked great, from the distressed Egyptian tomb statues on the front, the handwritten band name and title and the industrial looking bed of tiny squares on the rear, the high contrast band mugshots, handwritten track titles and fonted statements like "This record contains no hit singles" it felt perfect. "Technical stupidity and Big Ideas: XERO. Technical assistance and Big Mouth: Colin Bloxsom." A thank you to Xero shareholders told of begging and borrowing between the conception and the release. This cover art by band member John E. testified not only to the cheeky modernism of it but the trouble it took to create. These are things that major label cover art conceals to give the impression that superstar bands' records are magically produced acts of charity with recommended retail donation stickers. This cover felt like it was from a community.

Then, after handing in my last assignment for the year which had been disrupted by the Commonwealth Games (Griffith's student housing served as Games staff and athlete units) I booked a sitter berth on the Sunlander and headed north. Then, once the shambly shuffle of Christmas holiday organisation and all the phone calls to herald my return to the tropics were done with, I was able to pour myself a cheeky rum 'n' coke and put the record on.

The Girls starts with a stuttered beat on kick and tom toms. Heavily treated guitar comes in with squeals and whines and a bass plays a descending slap progression. A woman's voice also steps downward, singing of stying in the safety of your own home, watching tv. Then it's "watching what's happening to yourself on tv." And then the feminist chant against male violence calls to reclaim the night.

Crazy Eddie turns what feels like a noodling acoustic chord progression but, after a big compressed crash launches into a droning drive as the male vocal tells of travel or escape with a middle eastern flavour in the melody. The chorus cryptically intones (female voice): "Crazy Eddie what did you do? Poor Delores, she never knew." Repeat, except it doesn't quite repeat as the arrangement and playing intensify. It's a trip. Good to listen to but maybe not to live.

The Misfits starts with a belching slap bass figure and proceeds to a funk groove thickened by organ chords. The woman's voice (I should start using the names, as they're on the cover art and I know them, anyway), Irena's voice reads out lists of imagery which don't quite flow but that seems deliberate: "Dead tiger in the kitchen. There's an Arab in the bath reading Goldilocks." "Facts, facts, relevant facts." And again but again it doesn't repeat so much as run the same thing through which changes it.

Flip!

Love and Anarchy starts with a wordless vocal in a minor mode over a nervous speedy tango. The vocal melody takes up the Latin feel in  a warbling minor key. A bright synth riff breaks the verses and then ends the song with a pronounced deceleration to a clean stop. No lyric sheet but the title is taken from Lilliana Cavani's dark comedy of desperation politics and romance. 

Every Kiddy Gets a Prize begins with a galloping snare and a dislodged James Bond chromatic figure. Two male voices trade lines, take up the Bond figure but are rhythmically across it. The lines end in a  falsetto descant over the keyboard, giving it a kind of vintage sci-fi feel. On cue we then get a quote from Telstar, just enough to let us recognise it before it vanishes. An unintelligible declamation sounds beneath the falsetto figure before the track ends with a kind of self disintegration.

The Surrendering opens with an expansive drum pattern which seems to pour down slowly in sheets. A big murky minor key riff on guitar bass and keyboards crawls out from the dark. Irena follows the melody with an operatic vibrato mixed low through a wall of reverb. The chorus is in two parts, a high major third pattern that ends in a monotone on the final word: "The tempest is calling him away." Then over a lamenting progression the chant: "Living with the very fear of change." It's played and sung first twice in minor then twice again in minor. The whole sequence of verse to chorus repeats ending with a spoken outro and a lumbering stop. 

I opened my eyes and took another sip and smiled.

Broken beats, droning keyboards, vocals that either wailed or murmured, observations and stories; none of it sounded like anything around it but it sounded like 1982. This leads me to a point I've ranted on too much but is worth repeating here. It is not just important to sound like your times but preferable than to affect timelessness. Timelessness in rock music really only refers to a set of production standards struck in the late '60s and early '70s that have been maintained since by the mainstream. But instead of being timeless, the parade of mainstream rock since then and up to today and beyond really only evokes the era of stadium rock. It implies that this normal setting sound carries with it the desire to attain stadium status. Bands in Brisbane at this time did not think this way. True they knew their squeaky, honky and spiky music would never be heard at Madison Square Garden (or even Lang Park) but it's also that they didn't aspire to it. Saying that there are no hit singles on your record is a joke but it's also a plain statement.

Also, sounding like something was recorded in 1982 is different from saying that it's meant to sound like 1982. As synthy or slap bassy as this record gets it never brings to mind bands in dayglo lurex, blacklight bow ties or fringes gelled up in hair tsunamis, it just sounds like music made then and for as long as it would be listened to for pleasure. That goes for other releases from the time like The Reels' Quasimodo's Dream or the Go-Betweens' Send Me a Lullaby. Also, this music didn't come from nowhere and was definitely not made in imitation of anyone. However their name was spelled, Xero had formed over half a decade before and had changed over the years, in personnel and musicality, developing along their own timeline. They have a hefty history before this which I won't go into because I don't know it very well. They didn't form in 1982 to sound like Flock of Seagulls. Lust in the Dust is neither the apex of their output nor just something they knocked together, it was the statement they made in 1982.

And that leads me to something you won't hear on this platter: rock music. No guitar solos or even a ringing barre chord anywhere. Some of the keyboards sound expensive but a lot of them could just be played on cheap Casios. Some of the songs have clear and definite structures but others seem to be patched together or allowed to wander. The point is that each track is a moment to be visited, occupied and left for the next, from the fevered flight of Crazy Eddie to the twilight jungles sprawling around The Surrendering.

To be anti-rock in Brisbane at that time was not a pose, it was a stance. In a city that so ferociously guarded its monoculture, the choice to stand outside of that was a lifestyle decision meant the difference between walking freely through your streets and getting decked by smart casual yobbos who thought your pants needed more flare. I and a group of friends were thrown out of a pub the following year because our hair was too short! The music on this disc didn't have to use any sloganeering about any of this as the fact of it, there forever on black vinyl, with the suggestion of the campaign to get it recorded, pressed and in shops told on the back cover a clear if implicit statement of defiance. 

I remember one night crossing King George Square on my way to the bus home and hearing a twangy caw from behind: "Yuz had a fight with a Lawnmower, mate?"  I kept going, tightening internally. He repeated the taunt in reference to my haircut, a George Orwell special that I used to get every two weeks at a barber behind a newsagent in Edward Street. He caught up with me and I saw him. At least twice my size with the kind of leering grin I knew too well. "Are ya a punk rocker?" he asked. For a second I was in a vortex of indecision (and laughter because calling anyone punk in 1982 was like calling them a rapscallion or a mastodon)  but I righted myself, flashed him a grin and said, "er, yeah." Satisfied with his insight he cranked himself into third and cantered up the steps to the Ann Street footpath. I'm painting that with a light brush but for a moment I really was terrified. Brisbane was not a place to advertise being at odds with its beer commercial culture. In some way, to some degree, you could feel that every day. 

More pleasantly, back in Townsville for the holidays, I put this record on as the big overcast sweltering night pressed down and the smell of dead fronds and alcohol rose to meet it. And I wafted with the incoming tide of the drums and bassy swell of The Surrendering and, for a few minutes that felt like the best half-dreaming states I felt warm, and not from the humidity.

1982@40: PORNOGRAPHY - THE CURE

So, what is it about Pornography, The Cure's fourth platter? Sounds like classic early Cure with a string of good songs but seems impossible to remember after you've played it?

Bands develop through mutation. They start with something signature that, in exhausting it, changes as each phase gives way to the next and the process, looked at over time later, constant morphing, a twisted monstrosity. Joy Division seemed to metamorphose from Unknown Pleasures to Closer but the lineage still looks misshapen and ugly, the transformation has taken work and feels like it.

The Cure are strange here. From Three Imaginary Boys to Seventeen Seconds to Faith to Pornography I hear less the constant difficult birth of other bands than a steady intensification of one approach over time. You can easily trace the melodic patterns just of the vocal parts from Fire in Cairo to 100 Years but where the first is studiously spare, almost arid, the latter is dense and swollen. It's almost as though someone steadily poured a vat of cornflour into the music. Pornography is the monster version of Three Imaginary Boys. Afterwards, things changed: more light, more variety, more air, more success. Until then there was this.

I've put myself to a test here. I'm writing this one from memory. A little cheating has happened in that I've listened to it about five times in full over the last week. While I can recall the insistent whirling riff of the opening track and the aural break by the slower paced Siamese Twins to the backwards voice on the final and title track the rest just sounds like what an A.I. would create if programmed to make a Cure album.

The modal, minor tonality, the non rock drumming (is there a single snare hit in the whole record?) and the anguished vocals all fit the profile. There's even a single, Hanging Garden, but in context, it retreats into the texture. Compare and contrast the other single from this time that didn't make the album: Charlotte Sometimes. It feels like a classic, bigger than anything before with both space and intensity and a haunting refrain ("sometimes I dream"). I wonder if I'd notice it if it had been on the LP.

So far, all this sounds like a hatchet job. However, what is emerging as I write this is that, in being a kind of distillation of the band's music from the beginning to this point, it serves as a kind of intentional no-brainer. If you hear it you cannot argue that there's less craft on show. The production feels nothing but deliberate, vocals are variously out front or buried, the guitars and keyboards continue their rockless exploration, and so on. It just doesn't reward a close listen.

At the time it was released I'd heard a few tracks on 4ZZZ and was happy to hear another Cure record was in the offing. I was over someone's place for tea and biscuits one afternoon and noted the Curey music under our voices and gaffed, "can't wait to hear their new one." Um. "This is the new one," said mine host. While that was a decent joke on me he wasn't smirking in the slightest. And then he said something stranger still, for a Cure fan: "It's a bit Cure-ish, isn't it?"

And that's it, it's less Cure than Cure-ish. 

The other side of this is that when you put it on and go about your dailies it really sinks in. It's an album of album music the same way that Exile on Main Street or the White Album. You don't put Pornography on to hear The Figurehead, you put it on when you're in a Cure mood. This is apt and actually pretty useful, when you think about it. Apart from anything else it fits the history, the band were getting exhausted, physically and creatively and this record was meant to punish. It was meant to be Phil Spector in Hell, an angry note to themselves and all their fans: you want more? Take this!

The thing is that when you do listen over your shoulder while your doing your dishes or taking an urban hike, it comes to life as a living film score. It's the gloom of the early '80s for the ages. In comparison, you can get to name every track on Closer or Travelogue but Pornography is like the drunkest black light party you ever went to; there's no song by song, it's just an interminable corridor of bodies, noise and screams. But that's why it's good.

1982@40: AMBIENT 4 - ON LAND - BRIAN ENO

A booming drone. It might be a synthesiser or something found and processed. The high pitched whining rhythm over it sounds like mosquitoes. There is a slow moving melodic figure on a keyboard that seems to deteriorate. Sounds are hard to differentiate. There is no guiding light of central harmony or tone. As a listener you are lost and by the time the squirmy figures emerge to take a look at you before retreating back into the cave and dripping pools you are in a darkness that holds mystery but no real danger. Ghosts, perhaps, but your only harm would come from yourself. Just don't, at any cost, turn it off before the whole record finishes.

The first three Ambient albums, whether collaborative or solo made suggestions for the music of mood and atmosphere and all kept, however strangely, to notions like musical motif and definition of voice (e.g. piano or synthesiser). This final outing all but abandons this, only very occasionally providing a line of tone shifting in time that might otherwise be called a melody. But the point of these is to add further texture and mood. The record is about exploration, slow exploration, the kind of sortie done in the dark on your back with his recommended three speaker system. 

Bubbling mud fields here, the echoes of beaches long swallowed by the sea there, lantern marshes and unfamiliar winds. There is development on recognisable musical grounds but it takes the whole album to hear it. No songs, no vocals (the little girl's voice in Shadow is a processed muted trumpet) but so very much personal vision and genuine composition. If you think of spiky dance tracks when you hear the term electronic music locate a copy of this and live with it without pausing until the end.

I expected to have some fun describing what I see when I listen but it's different every time and wouldn't be what you see. Find it and listen to it while doing the dishes or go all in and lie on the floor with the lights off. You might not agree that this is some of the finest music made since electric recording began but you will have to admit it has something you don't get from other music, something fascinating and compelling.

If you wonder why you think you've heard all of it before you might cast you mind over some of the more strangely scored films you've seen since the '90s from which time this kind of goulash of natural sounds and big twisting subterranean drones made it into almost every horror movie that didn't have an orchestral score. It works beautifully as an ingredient in cinematic creepiness but more generally, weirdness, the confronting experience of nature itself. Seee, I'm doing it again, I'm recalling distant lights and purple grey skies and desert canyons. But no, if you want to go on this journey you need your own mind to guide you.

Some of the finest music made since electric recording began.

1982@40: REPERCUSSION - THE dB'S

Two chords on a guitar so chorused it sounds like a temple bell. Straight into the vocal about the girl whose mother can't let go. The melody of the first few syllables of each verse line is one note held stubbornly against steadily changing chords which adds a cinematic urgency. The song eases out a little: "Run back to your mother..." but then squeezes back in for another verse and then the chorus, a call and response done through delay. "Think (think) for yourself, don't let her live for you." Instead of a fourth verse there's a quietly sung scene of her sneaking back into her room as her mother in silent judgement prepares her for bed. An extended chorus takes us out and under the last chords a whisper, something like, "forget your maaaaa."

Three minutes of epic powerpop, harmonies, complex but tight band parts and songcraft that borrows not only from the great mid-60s phases of The Stones, Beatles and Kinks but current arthouse cinema that shows the sicker side of teen. Three minutes of knock me down sound and the dB's go from an arid debut album to their peak. I still can't listen to Stands for Decibels but I still listen to Repercussion.

Oh, before going on I should point out that I'm going to be talking about the Australian release with the different track order that starts with the above-described Happenstance and ends with I Feel Good (Today). I do not know what made the record company change the song order but with it this album approaches perfection. For the record (nyuck nyuck) I did listen to the original order but wasn't convinced by it. So, the Australian sequence it shall be.

After Happenstance toured the entire cosmos of this record in one song it's time to relax and follow some colours by themselves. We Were Happy There begins with a giant thumping vamp tanged by a plaintive vocal. The chorus rides low until it rises to a big title scream. Living a Lie bashes in with brass and strident beat. Another clear voiced melody line borne of ethereal aaaahs as the serious minor key strut parades on. It's hard to bring a thing like this off without falling into cliche but it's done so straight that it works.

The joke titled From a Window to a Screen gives us a latin feel with exotic percussion, vibes and distant reverbed harmonies that roll in like waves. A White Album style picked bass prevents it from floating away on its own lightness and, by providing a centre, lets us listen to the core rather than have it wash to either side. Ask for Jill breaks the spell with a jazz tinged rhythm and busy vocal line. Light harmonies and bouncy arrangement kept this side of cute and lyrics about dealing with record companies ending with a spoken 1/2 phone conversation that ends in, "yeah, I'll hold." Amplifier ends the old side one and is an sustained joke using a developed Bo Diddley beat in a story of a breakup that ends with a tragicomic suicide after his ex took his prized amplifier. That this amiable but unremarkable number was chosen as the lead single from a record that is bursting with compelling songs. Was it the cool of perversity by a young band? Not a bad song, just why a single?

Side two opens with the rushing bright guitar riff of Neverland. Each line of the verse ends with an intricate drum figure that seems to change time signature but is just syncopation. It adds a kind of show tune complexity to an arrangement that starts by promising to be a four on the floor '60s pop moment. A call and response chorus also changes things up by having the response in falsetto. Storm Warning is a tango done garageband style with a clear vocal warning the second person about giving in to things that make them a loser. A clever middle eight rolls out dismissive ideas of heaven and hell before a harmonised verse and chorus take us to an outro on a synth or Latin flute-like voice and ends on a cha cha cha. The wit of this one is never allowed to exceed the music.

Ups and Downs is three minutes of pop pleasure describing a manipulative relationship sinking under cuteness. Nothing is Wrong is one of those euphoric sounding stoned shimmers that bands that formed because of The Velvet Underground added to their repetoire to include some old-before-their-time world weariness. There's also a breezy Pink Floyd ambience but more than past influences this song is exactly like a strain of future rock bands. American bands of the '90s and beyond have built entire careers on this kind of languid lament. Here, it brings a welcome change of pace and feel, having a broader emotional horizon than all the intrigue and petulance that has gone before it on the album. In fact, it's difference from all the other tracks is the very thing that makes it feel like an album, a song cycle where all the tracks are in the right place (even if the version I'm hearing is a revision). In Spain starts with a whining guitar figure high on the E string and moves into a rapid '60s bad mood song about a girl's manipulation. As the closest thing to any song here sounding like it came from the first album it's also the closest this record gets to having a filler track.

And the best is last. I Feel Good (Today) starts with a few crisp cymbals and an modal acoustic figure with a backwards guitar snaking through. A quiet vocal sings a short melodic phrase that will persist over chord changes. It is soon joined by glorious harmonies. A jaunty middle eight ends in a shining harmony descent. The song resumes after a brief acoustic arpeggio and then just keeps developing and changing around the same short melodic phrase. Stops, starts, adding textures here more backwards guitars there and what sounds like a tribute to the pyschedelic explorations on albums like Revolver, Smiley Smile, The Who Sellout or The Electric Prunes ends back in the lap of this band that continued to bring the best of that lost spirit back on to the turntable. When the album is played with the Australian sequence it has come full circle from the aggressively mid-60s in the '80s Happenstance to the big floating cloud that is its closing number. Ending on a slowly descending guitar figure to mirror the folky introduction and a final whimper not a bang acoustic chord and we're there.

The reason why I find this band's debut unlistenable and this one a glory for the ages is not because the songs are prettier and more conventional, it's because the contrarian brashness has been discarded in favour of the band's strengths. Stands for Decibels is the record of a band that want to sound contemporary but won't actually go to Birthday Party lengths to prove it. Repercussion is by a band that admits its songwriting is strong and can support that with arrangements that prevent the '60s influences from overpowering the statements. This was at a time when younger bands that had spent their teen years investigating the more interesting sounds of the previous generation until punk came along to save them from being retro-nerds. Having both those forces active allowed the punch of one to trim the whimsy of the other. This didn't always work. The worst of these outfits grew their hair and wore paisley on their album art and sounded like the Blues Magoos. The best sounded like themselves, using what they liked from the old stuff their own way. As '60s as they could come off, The dB's always sounded mostly just like themselves. This record is a triumph of that endeavour.

1982@40: SEND ME A LULLABY - THE GO-BETWEENS

Your first meeting with this album will be an unpleasant one. You've heard good things and met the band as singles but when you approach them in public like this with everyone around you don't get as far as, "hi" before the snub. You really got on with those songs but now you're getting their back as they fabricate conversation with anyone as long as it isn't you. But then the more you see them out and about you realise they just have a way and, really, a lot of what they have to share is pretty good. They were always like that. You just didn't see it.

I'd come back from the usual months of living free between first and second year Uni to two records that caught me. One was the Hunters and Collectors EP and the other was this, The Go-Betweens' first full record. There was a hefty build up for an indy band. Interviews on 4ZZZ and in the local press. They were high enough profile for RAM or Juke but for little more than five hundred words at the most. Not yet two page interviews.

And there was that title. One friend hated it as it sounded soft and mushy but I thought that was the point. Mass market labels like K-Tel would regularly bring out discs with titles like this, brimming with thin masters of oldies gathered in a theme. The Reels would release a whole album of soft core covers very deliberately on K-Tel this same year and it outsold their stone cold classic Quasimodo's Dream to an embarrassing degree. I remember hearing the ZZZ interview where The Go-Betweens said they had wanted an Australian sound to it (might have been when the "striped sunlight" phrase emerged) and they wanted a K-Tel-like title. No one was gabbing on about irony or juxtaposition but things were changing rapidly from the outright one-to-one correspondance of punk to the contrary motion of the early '80s. So, Send me a Lullaby it was.

And, yes, at first listening it was spiky, contrary and hard to love. But what did I or any of us expect. The GoBs were royalty by default. By default as, in the marked absence of The Saints there was no one left among the many bands gigging or trying to gig who could or wanted to lead anything. The Go-Betweens were the sole outfit that had consistently released real records on actual vinyl. They'd even recorded overseas with cool people like Orange Juice. But the timeline of style didn't seem to make much sense: boppy Lee Remick, rich pop of People Say, sparser than a baby's moustache I Need Two Heads, richer sparser on Your Turn My Turn. The gigs sounded the same as ever, a three piece at an acoustically unfriendly venue. No one had any idea of what the first album would be like. So, it was a surprise. What do you call a birthday present that's useful for something you're not into yet?

The release day came up and the interview for it was the sound of Robert and Grant (don't remember Lindy getting much of a word in though her contribution is essential) and then the sound of the spiky, petulant non-rock tracks from the record. The one thing they could claim is that they were working on their own terms at a time when that mattered more than sounding like the big parade. You could, if you were shallow, seek similarities in this record and those of other artists from the time and before but, really, any of them will be a stretch or so superficial you might as well say, "well both use chords". Really, the importance of this record to the band but also to a city quietly proud of them was that it was done without dressing up like the zeitgeist. It meant that they were more likely to influence than repeat influences and influence they did. And they did it in Melbourne, culturally as far away from Brisbane as could be got, with the Birthday Party's producer and James Freud on sax. And they didn't sound like anyone associated with those figures nor even anyone from Melbourne. They just sounded like themselves.

But we don't start spiky. One Thing Can Hold Us emerges from the black of the vinyl with a gentle wafting two chord figure. A languid vocal from Grant McLennan until the more sprightly full band sections where he's singing an octave higher. The drums come in rudely and stay that way until the return to the lazy current of the verse. Ghostly guitar figures come and go. Reverb here but not there. A couple or an individual and a quality are at odds but they are of one piece. Despite the moments of near-miss intensity, this is a spooky opening.

People Know begins with a blast of squeaky sax that could have been on a Laughing Clowns track. It's jazz but not smokey cocktail, 3 a.m. jazz, but blaring impish and discordant jazz. And then it's a guitar trio playing a rock song ... of sorts. Robert Forster's introduction to the mic on the album is cool urgency. Meetings and places and age on faces in a town without trains. A busy shuffling rhythm with guitars so clean and well interlinked that they seem like a single guitar track. Images. We get enough to complete our own picture and no more.

Midnight to Neon sounds like a typical basic guitar song from the time but Forster sounds paranoid and the drumming is at odds with the rest of the band. Still can't work out why it works. Careless stars with a bright chord fanfare and a relaxed vocal. An appealing guitar break goes from a lyrical figure to an odd funk workout and ends in a sparse verse which itself gives way to a fractured arrangement. "Clumsy me and you broke something and we don't know what to do."

All About Strength is all about strength and has the same kind of stop/start approach to the magnificent Stop Before You Say It (b-side of I Need Two Heads) but  ends on the kind of chanted vocal repeat that almost brings the song into conventionality but then a staggered detail brings it to an abrupt end. Ride is another where a normal sounding song gets some spiky dissonance released into its channels, going from smooth and cruisy to open and soaring to strident and funky. Reverb and distance go on a fairground ride. "Dragged down on a reef. Your inner self shall leave you for someone else." This is not a pub singalong, it's busy and flitting, and it is intriguing.

Grant McLennan's Hold Your Horses rises brightly with jangling guitar breaks that are supported or follow quirky drumming. Same writer and singer's It Could Be Anyone finishes the original record. Grant's accusing description of a heavily vulnerable figure whose irresolution makes him both easily shattered and impossible to break. It develops from a chinging chord progression and earnest vocal to a much broadened guitar field and, finally, because that's a little too nice, a chant with a chicken squawk guitar figure beneath it.

And just where have we all been after this? A bratty and difficult set of recordings that now lull now slap in the face, none of them quite settling on either effect. Even the track listing gets in on it. The recently established mini album form had just consolidated as a six song 12 inch 45rpm showcase that would never outstay its welcome. This record is 33 1/3 and is only eight songs long but most of them are only about two mintues each which keeps the overall running time well short of the usual forty-five minutes.

And the soundscape of constant change, reverb that shows up and gets turned off as suddenly, all guitars recorded clean; and the drums often panned so extremely they lose their rhythmic function. Is this the most contrarian record since Public Image Ltd's debut? No, it's more contrarian. Nothing in the many textures that a rock trio can achieve is allowed to settle for longer than it takes to register them. They are playing within their means but there is no suggestion that they'd play any other way. Apart from admitting defeat and declaring that this record just sounds like The Go-Betweens there is one thing ensuring integrity, here: the songs.

As I said earlier, this band and this record had an influence. No, there wasn't a sudden outbreak of sparsely arranged songs with complex rhythmic schemes but, for a while there,  because the GoBs were from our neighbourhoods and were conquering real records, the bands that were playing really seemed to take this in and step back on the guitar solos and crunch. This didn't last because it never does. Give it a minute and some kid who thinks he's a teacher will come along with a four on the floor and a powerchord and watch as everyone just gets back in line. But for a moment, there ...

Forster and McLennan have kept their statements abstract but also brief, a paring of approaches that allows more than a second look. There are crises of trust and identity, cinematic scenes from contemporary rural Australia that veer between Westerns and horror movies and all set in a restless bed. The sleeplessness of Brisbane nights to a creative mind sounds like this. That's why it takes a few listens; you need to relax and stop thinking too literally about what you should be hearing and listen to what you are hearing. Until you do that you can't get this record, it will just sound like a mess. It just takes a good committed few encounters, just like those people you get to know just enough to want to know more but never meet again. Well, you can here.

Listening notes: Be aware that different releases of this album have different track listings. The most likely version you'll find available on CD adds four tracks including the single Your Turn My Turn. For this article I rearranged the order to match the original for accuracy but the expanded album is listenable to the same effect. My copy was part of the six album set released as a box of micro-LP discs with reduced original cover art. If you find this set the audio quality is very good and this first one is the only album with a different track order than the original (if that's wrong I'll edit this). 

I'd recommend listening a few times to the original track listing. If you have it on CD you can program it (but who does?) or similarly, rearrange the songs, putting the extras last and stop at It Could Be Anyone.

The Missing Link LP had the following track listing:

1 One Thng Can Hold Us

2 People Know

3 Midnight to Neon

4 Careless

5 All About Strength

6 Ride

7 Hold Your Horses

8 It Could Be Anyone