THE BEATLES' HELP @ 60

Retrospection tells stories that were not known to the participants at the time. A backward look compels the stories, though. Until The Beatles reached the end of 1965 their albums were received with approval but the arrival of Rubber Soul put them at a level of importance among critics that has never been reversed. That lead up does tell a story though: two LPs of live sets cleansed in the studio with audible peaks in the originals, a fully original set to go with a movie that presents a new integrated sound, a mixed bag that industrial pressure had squeezed out and now this one, their fifth, that went with another movie. It looks like a staggered climb from influences to influence, from the tangible club band to stardom and here, now, in this one, a sustained push at the formulae to breaking point. 

It gives the first wave of records a sense of motivation. It's almost nonsense, though, made up by people like me. The band was building on the success it had established and through sheer application they responded to a continual positive feedback to sharpen their focus. The wonder of it is that it worked. Most bands were happy with the strike rate of something like Beatles for Sale, a handful of bangers and proven covers. There are covers on this one but by now they feel alien.

The originals stun. The title track kicks off with a shout, putting what might have been a middle eight as the introduction, an audible cry for help. The cry gets higher each time until it's pushed into falsetto. A deft, rapid arpeggio brings it down as the song moves forward with a confession in Lennon's tight rasp about being aggressively independent until he in confronted with his need for others. As with the opening, there is a call and response as he trades his strong lead with a gentler backing from George and Paul who anticipate his lines. The counterpoint of it, as though thoughts compelled the outward statements, works because of the texture of the voices as much as the weave of melodies. The chorus lifts to urgency as Harrison's low strings guitar figures step down between Lennon's vocal lines. A third verse strips the backing down to acoustic guitar and lead vocal, picked up halfway through by the rest of the band, leading to the final chorus and falsetto finish. Lennon later said that the song really was a confession of need. There is nothing fanciful about the claim. All of the track's musicality suggests it in under two and a half minutes.

Next up is Paul's The Night Before which begins with the first appearance of electric piano on a Beatles song. The chords rise until MacCartney's soaring vocal reaches to a note that glides down and blends with smooth harmonies in an infectious melodic figure. The middle eight is more of a shuffle but ends with a Paul flex as he screams the high end of, "it makes me wanna cryyyyyyyy". He plays the lead guitar in the break and at the end in this one (as well as two others) and it sounds like its doubled with either the electric piano or another guitar. This one is all flavour and scope. The second Anthology compilation of the '90s included an outtake from these sessions called That Means a Lot. Distinct from this melodically, it carried the larger production sound to Phil Spector density. It was given to PJ Proby who did it brilliantly but I wish it had made it on to side two of Help. Anyway...

Up third is You've Got to Hide Your Love Away and a vision of the future. Lennon sings a song of wounds. The first lines are gentle but for the next, the voice hardens until, after a folky descent, the chorus rises to a shout. Repeat and end with an unusual double flute playing of the verse melody. That acoustic sound, like whispering guitars, bugged me for years until I realised it was a combination of Harrison playing at standard pitch, Lennon playing a 12 string capo-ed, and, if you listen carefully, a ride cymbal played with almost imperceptible lightness. But the elephant here is Bob Dylan. Dylan had met and befriended The Beatles the year before and his growing influence on the entirety of western pop music extended into the Beatle citadel. The previous album's I'm a Loser was a great first take but this one uses influence more cannily, the way they'd gone to write an Everly Brothers song with Love Me Do and ended up sounding like themselves. I'm a Loser sounds like that but Hide Your Love sounds more like a hard absorption. It's going to be there until Donovan teaches them finger picking. There is an urban legend that this one is a veiled tribute to manager Brian Epstein's closeted gayness to which I say, "who knows?". The chorus could easily point to that but it could also be a hooded confession about straying from marital fidelity (hey, Norwegian Wood was just around the corner). It's pleasant to think it's a nod to Brian, I'll admit.

George Harrison had progressed from covers and Lennon and MacCartney numbers given to him to produce his own songs and they were gearing up. I Need You starts with a guitar figure made plaintive through a volume pedal. Against a country canter, George sings a confession of pain and vulnerability in the face of rejection. With the movement through the relative minor and showbiz changes, this one reaches back to an earlier Beatles aesthetic but it's never unwelcome in the sequence.

Another Girl finds Paul again trying for a Spectorish density with a busy blues shuffle and a message of young adulthood spite. But is it? He's saying his ex was fine but this new one is so much better. As this is delivered to a second person (the ex) it rings like a long groovy thumbed nose, not just flexing but cruel. The melody carries on from the more modal, non-diatonic style of The Night Before but sticks to its limits (very like Can't Buy Me Love) until the middle eight which broadens out and surprises with shifts between major and minor. Paul plays lead but it's mostly illformed and noodly. The production is big on reverb and bass boom. A bitchy but enjoyable number.

I used to dislike You're Going to Lose That Girl, mainly for what I took as a reliance on old '50s formulae. But the more I hear it, how deftly it moves between the warnings in the verse where Lennon shows how he can make a vowel sound percussive ("if you don't take her OUT tonight") in a harsh but solidly melodic tone and then singing the word lose in purest falsetto. This makes the transition to the middle eights creamy with a melismatic curl for the ages. The harmonies of the other two in call and response throughout with a complication in the bridge is bliss and the final collision of the falsetto and harmonies just makes you want to hear it again. Rubber Soul really is just down the road.

Ticket to Ride begins with a fanfare-like figure on George's 12 string before the drums roll in like a panzer division with the bass and rhythm guitar hitting the one and an anticipated three in the bar along with the kick drum. Lennon comes in solo for the first two lines before MacCartney brings the magic with a high chest voice descant. The middle eight adopts a shuffle beat which makes the giant twanging verse rhythm all the more lumbering when it returns. Paul plays lead again but with much more tasteful figures that serve the transition between parts. The song ends on a new vocal motif, "my baby don't care". This is the end of side one and all the new Beatle songs played in the movie which were shot like music videos and are probably the best way to watch the movie if seen as a string.

In the U.S. a flip of the LP led to a side of deft but unengaging out of context orchestrations of Beatle songs by George Martin. This was a step up from the American Hard Day's Night LP which featured the same kind of thing but played as session musicians as a fake beat band playing robotic instrumental covers.

The U.K. original album is a different beast, kicking off with Ringo's cover of the Buck Owens' Act Naturally. This fits with the movies and Ringo's self-effacing charm. George provides expert licks on the Gretsch and Paul adopts a Southern twang for his harmonies. If you know the original, this will sound like a pub cover played in lab conditions. Owens has a real nuance to his vocals that added a pathos to the lyric of a guy got lucky in his career but knows it's not because of talent. He also had the efforts of his lead guitarist, Telecaster maestro Don Rich who provided the note perfect harmonies which Paul is emulating. The deep twang solo is done twice here but only needs to happen once in the original so that its mock seriousness stands out and keeps the joke alive. It's a decent enough cover but, like many, if you know the swaggering and good natured original you'll miss so much of it, here.

It's Only Love is one of my favourite Lennon melodies and a song he regarded as an embarrassment. It's chromatic lilt and vocal tone shift for the chorus always win me over. It's a kind of companion to You've Got to Hide Your Love Away but there are reasons why that is on side one and this on side two. Vox amp tremolo is used to great effect on the electric figures and, as it's two electrics playing (one without tremolo) it sounds a little wobbly, like future chorus pedal. 

George's second song on the album is a cheerful country number that opens with some George Martin bar room piano. An electric piano forms what would have been an electric rhythm. The verses and harmonies have a distinctly folky feel. I can imagine The Seekers doing this one. The pair in the lyrics tease each other but always make up. That's about it. George's solo is all Chet Atkins and enters and exits in seconds as the summer holiday middle eight takes over and a verse and chorus take it to the end.

Tell Me What You See is a kind of Latin work out as far as The Beatles ever got. It's perky and sweet with MacCartney taking solo lines from the bright harmony verses. It's almost never mentioned on its own but its amiability and shift in the vocal texture make it a keeper for me. Another significant use of electric piano seal the deal.

I've Just Seen a Face is a perky acoustic folky gallop by Paul. Beginning with a dizzy rising guitar figure, Paul jumps right in with a quick vocal of love at first sight and a chorus that probably had open mic nights at folk clubs deafen with juggernaut whole crowd singalongs.

What might surprise anyone who comes across this album is that Yesterday is buried here on the second side. MacCartney is intensely proud of this song. He delights in relating how he dreamed the melody, scarcely believing he could have composed it. It was the first one of his notorious sale jobs from among his songs that the rest of the band suffered for. It is, apart from George Martin's string arrangement, just Paul on acoustic guitar and vocal. As a lyric it's all longing and regret, astutely describing the lost lover as believing in the past to a near religious extent. Musically, it is a very well turned melody with a pleading bridge and heartfelt vocal. The band did not want to push this gentle ballad and it ended here as the second last song. It went on to be one of the most covered songs in all history so, let 'em stew on that. I marvel that this perfectly modulated vocal was done on the same afternoon as the larynx-annihilating I'm Down.

Finally, like with Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby on the last LP, we end with a rock classic cover. Dizzy Miss Lizzy bangs and screams and wails its way to the end of the album. I suspect it's here as Lennon didn't have that extra song and wanted to follow Yesterday with something irreverent and gutter level. I have no supporting data for that, it's just a whimsical guess. I say it as I hate this song and wish it had been left off the record in favour of That Means a Lot. But that's just me.

Help feels like it's struggling to break free of the early career records with new instrumentation like electric piano, flutes and bowed strings as well as guitar and amp effects, and a musical expansion that allows country and folk in without irony. Paul particularly is gathering strength as a composer and has his eye on using production to add texture and character. George is showing real promise as singer and songwriter. And Ringo's drumming continues to delight with its nuance and subtlety.

For all that, though, remember those hindsight stories, it plays more as a closed chapter on the band that took it to Shea Stadium for the biggest concert in the constellation. If they'd stopped there this album would be as revered as Abbey Road is now. As it is, you have to move the heavy curtain of Rubber Soul aside to get a look at it, against encouragement. As an LP, still before the album format was the currency for rock artists, this one doesn't just have bangers but makes sense from track to track, weakening on the second side. A final bow to influences in the two covers and the stage is set for The Beatles as THE band. I wonder, if fans at the time hearing Rubber Soul winced a little at the insistent sophistication and just wanted the old pop band back.

Listening notes: I usually listen to this as a mono mix from the 2009 releases but this time added a playthrough of the 1965 stereo mix which does lift proceedings enough to prefer it. Unavailable nowehere on earth.

THE BYRDS' MR TAMBOURINE MAN @ 60

It starts so slightly but it sounds like a wave. A jangling riff rings, joined by a bass that slides up the neck, a tambourine shakes and as the drums rattle in the sound is overwhelmed by harmonies so pure and filled with light that they sound like they were singing in Florence in the 16th century. A clue to the source material comes in after the chorus as Jim McGuinn (also playing the Rickenbacker 12 string) enters with his best Dylan voice. A single verse from the many in the original is sung before the chorus re-enters with its brilliance and Bach style symmetry is evoked before the opening riff and bass slide play unto the fade. What had been an aching ode to a wandering life of discovery and daily adventure became as tightly packaged as a tin of beans and as remote from the legumes in the pods. It was like a tv commercial of a Dylan song. Dylan loved it. You could dance to it. It's meteoric chart performance brought him income he didn't have to work for. If Dylan's original was poetic and poignant, this one was all teen marketing, playing back the tasty bits with extra sugar in bite size form. Also, it's completely beautiful as music and sounds so much of its time that the charm and exquisite textures reach across decades to delight anyone who hears it. 

It got me in the mid '70s when I was foraging around for '60s sounds because the radio was almost entirely crud. It was on a compilation record from the middle of that decade. There were all sorts of stuff on the sides but The Byrd doing Mr Tambourine Man soared out past the crackles and surface hiss and filled the room. So, I liked the Byrds.

It was halfway through the following decade when I found my own copy. Like The Kinks, The Byrds back catalogue was slow to make it through to reissues. I snapped this one up as soon as I found a reprint in a shop. I was surprised when I got it home and put it on.

After the title track opens the album we plunge straight into the Gene Clark original Feel a Whole Lot Better with its hyped up 12 string riff lifted from The Searchers' Needles and Pins. It's a good contrast within a limited pallet that makes the album feel like it is going places. A slight change in tempo brings the pace down for the cool of Dylan's Spanish Harlem Incident. Again, the band shift the song into the teen market with a constant jangling guitar and bright harmonies. You Won't have to Cry is a Clark/McGuinn co-write and follows a more Beatlesque path, adding enough distinction to warrant its strident presentation.

It's Here Without You that stops the traffic, though. The minor key riff and tight harmonies move with a sombre purpose that suggest (without remotely sounding like) Gregorian chant. The middle eight breaks out within the arrangement of harmony forward vocals, ending on a major interval before returning to the quiet pain of the verse melody in a shift that still sends shivers. It's a small masterpiece that would inform a strand of melancholic songs that the band would excel in despite the overall leanings (and record company) pushing them toward happier sounds. When Gene Clark left a few albums on, he took songs like this away and the remaining writers in the band had to follow the template.

The Bells of Rhymney is a soaring rendition of a Welsh folk song, revived by Pete Seeger and taken into the celestium of folk rock greatness. This arrangement has the honour of inspiring George Harrison (who had inspired McGuinn to take up the 12 string Rickenbacker) to pinch it with a little modification for one of his songs on Rubber Soul, If I Needed Someone. The final moments are a wordless vocal climb against the 12 string flow, an ascension.

Side two starts with Dylan's All I Really Want to Do and, while it feels more perfunctory than Mr Tambourine Man, it yet keeps the band in touch with what was making them famous. Another sombre Gene Clark number I Knew I'd Want You dispenses with the band's now signature initial riff, plunging straight into the band with vocal harmonies. The rise at the end of the middle eight when David Crosby climbs in falsetto over the unison vocals of McGuinn and Clark is pure shimmering joy.

Jackie De Shannon's Don't Doubt Yourself, Babe follows with a kind of Bo Diddley jangle and perky folk rock that ends up sounding like the Byrds doing a school trip singalong. Chimes of Freedom is another Dylan workout and joins All I Really Want to Do in the band's second-tier Bob covers. We'll Meet Again is the kind of thing the Byrds would try on the next album with their goofy cover of Oh Susannah, an awkward attempt at making an old standard into a groovy beat band rocker. It falls flat on its face. It's not as embarrassing as Oh Susannah but if it ever worked, the effectiveness was locked in a dark room back in 1965.

That said, this is one of the most indicative debut albums of its era, not only presaging the next three LPs in character and tone but reaching beyond the band's abandonment of the cute kings-of-jingle-jangle role as they explored deeper expression. For me, hearing it after a few others, I was surprised to find out how playable it was. The only really icky moment is the final track and that's not a difficult skip. Their sound is one of its decade's central points of gravity, influencing all other rock bands at some point, even the one they took their inspiration from. The title track and Clark number I Knew I'd Want You were backed by the Wrecking Crew with McGuinn on his signature 12 string and the three vocalists at the mic. The rest, however, is all the band that took it on tour.

To listen to this LP is to engage with a rare moment when a group that formed from an idea of what a rock band was coincided with the ideas of an A&R department of a record company. From the bright and joyous electric 12 that lifts all the songs to the cathedral like harmonies (Clark and McGuinn in unison and Crosby descanting) were a source point that not even The Beatles quite found (they repaid the good turn on Rain which, in the best style, didn't copy The Byrds, just showed their influence). All the tiny details gathered in a happy weave that proved stronger than the simple sum of parts and conquered the ears and sensibilities of a generation. Do yourself a favour.

THE GO-BETWEENS' SPRING HILL FAIR @ 40

Bachelor Kisses opens the album. It was a single and was the most mass market that they'd ever sounded. That's not a slight but it's been used as one. If anything, that's the problem with this album rather than anything coming from within the band or the content; the perception of others made what to my ears was a continuation into a big blaring sell out. Recent listening proves me right, I think.

Bachelor Kisses is a mid-'80s commercial sound but its warmth is not bland nor of the sugary pop of the charts of the time. The chorus has a cheekily inserted bar of 2/4 which makes it sound out of time, especially in a chorus. You hear it first and think it's a glitch but there it goes again in the repeat. The gentle arpeggiated chords and smooth synthesiser of the introduction lead us to think of anything from the time but there's a heart to it that remains uncommon. Oddly enough, when I first heard this on radio it wasn't pre-announced. I thought it was New Order. I can imagine the New Order of Low Life covering this without remark to this day. For me, that makes it all the more sumptuous.

Five Words starts stridently out of the gate with big bright guitars. Robert Forster's vocal is declarative and almost at odds with the smoothness of the folky guitar splash of the arrangement. Is it about a birth to death of a Catholic and a renunciation by someone who is leaving the fold? Don't know, it's like finding an old photo with a caption only partially legible on the back. 

By The Old Way Out I notice a slickness in the rhythm section that wasn't there in Send Me a Lullaby and Before Hollywood. I don't mean tight, I mean slick. It sounds played for real but that at some point there was a click track that everyone had to put up with. This is the first track that sounds more manufactured. There is a glam rock football chant to the chorus, especially at the iteration when it's vocals to a tom tom pattern. That said, it doesn't jar at this point, it's just noticeable.

You've Never Lived has more of an older band chord crunch. Forster's vocals are more emphatic than in Five Words. I'm no lyric maestro as far as interpretation goes but the sense of a series of flaws and breaks in communication seem to be flowing here as though something that has ended has done so in confusion. For a song so concerned with a lack of order there is a surprisingly conventional guitar solo, the type of which this band (along with every other post-punk outfit) would have rejected very shortly before.

Part Company begins with a guitar figure that sounds like we've interrupted it half way through something. Then over a signature guitar swell, Forster sings a kind of personal autopsy report for a deceased intimacy, the repetition of the title phrase coming back like a difficult truth knocking at any ideas of smoothing out the rough thoughts. Is there a theremin in there toward the end? If so, nice use.

Slow Slow Music begins with a bass funk riff, joined by a skittish funk guitar figure. McLennan comes in in full voice, yelling across the room, hammering a single note until the ends of the lines. The tension loosens for the chorus. three verses and choruses about chaos at the end of a relationship and the comfort of music.

A leisurely guitar figure starts my favourite track of the set, Draining the Pool for You. A disastrous relationship told in images of decadence or even film noir stories. A double stopped solo and the vocal melody both hark back to my all time GoBs favourite, Stop Before You Say It. Gorgeous.

River of Money begins as a soundtracky band with a distorted tremolo guitar that might remind you of a live track or the bit in a Doors song when ... Ah, McLennan is talking over it, narrating a tale of a relationship escape as told by the one left behind. A gated drum slams, changing only with the more obsessive passage of recalled promises. Even more noir than Draining the Pool. 

Unkind and Unwise begins as a solid guitar groove. McLennan's smooth vocal. As in a few tracks, here, vocals sung by the main vocalist overlap in pre-chorus moments (here, also, panned extremely) as though the singer's thoughts are manifesting. A short and pleasant one.

Man O' Land to Girl O' Sea is a brisker guitar rocker. Forster's exasperated vocal tells of a breakup spinning out of control. A calming few guitar chords in the middle lead to another guitar solo, expressive and minimal, unlike the one previously mentioned. It goes longer than you'd expect but is dramatic rather than indulgent. The final choruses and verses are more fraught as the song heads to a fadeout.

I wonder how much of the meh this album generates among fans is due to the troubles of its production. The producer they'd worked with on Before Hollywood approached this one with a honed pop sensibility. He used click tracks and then gated the played drums until they sound audibly compressed. The times were not good for individualistic expression as they had been in the five or so years of post punk leading up. Guitar bands were increasingly treated by producers as substitute synth pop cuties and things that were better a little loose in any kind of rock like drums became strict and regimented; perfect timing and heavily controlled tones. 

This is not to say that the gated drums or mainstream guitar solos make this a bad album. First, I don't think it is a bad album. It is made up of songs decent to durable and well performed. Second, the playing is good when it warms up and that's in every song. The tales of stress, ill feeling and resentment after the producer gave the band a sense of being bound. I know a lot of the stories about the recording of the White Album and most of them are ugly or sour but when I put it on as I still do regularly, I only hear music that pleases me. 

Some of the songs here feel as oppressive as their subject matter but so do Your Turn My Turn or Stop Before You Say It. If it means they made an album that was meant to turn them into something they were not then this bold sounding LP also brought them closer to the edge of the stage. Am I bothered by the gated snares? Not really. That aspect to rock music which followed a fashion that was always going to feel dated is also audible in Echo and the Bunnymen's last great album (Ocean Rain) as well as R.E.M. unfairly under represented second album Reckoning. Producers wouldn't take that off the agenda until well after Spring Hill Fair came out. It was gone from the Go-Betweens by the next album. It's more of a time capsule than anything now and, at its worst, represents a moment when the band tried on an aesthetic costume that didn't quite fit. They still had the songs and would have many more.

REM'S RECKONING @ 40

This was the first REM vinyl I owned. I'd had Murmur on home taped cassette but didn't even know the song titles. I bought a second hand copy from Skinny's in Brisbane (Queens Arcade?) in early 1985, after a Rockarena special on the band. I put it on as soon as I got home. I very soon learned that, like Murmur, you didn't pore over the lyrics because, when you could actually understand the words, they were so abstract you let them glide by, hoping at some point to get them. Mainly it was the jingling '60s country rock that appealed. Guitars set to hot clean and a growling vocalist whose melodism had instant appeal.

I'll pick out some highlights for this but prefer to leave an impression that the album is a whole experience that offers listening pleasure without great commitment. The record felt like a lingering Brisbane summer and I even think I mixed up a lime cordial to go with it. The wash of plinky Rickenbacker guitar riffing, solid drums and bass that did a little more than it needed to. That's all it had to do.

The second track Seven Chinese Brothers was the one that caught me. A bright upward moving riff with a breezy vocal give way to a chorus that feels much bigger than the rest of the song. So. Central Rain brings the Rickenbacker 12 string electric with a minor key riff. The movement is country rock with a chorus of "sorry" repeated. This was the only clip on Rockarena that had the band playing. Later it emerged that they didn't like mimed videos and this one had live vocals.

Pretty Persuasion is more 12 string jangle, a huge gated drum and fluid tag team vocals of words that defy interpretation but that is an essential of the band's mystique and one they gave up on finding wide success. The song works as an overall sound workout and seems happy to fill your ears with joyous sound. Time After Time introduces different textures like autoharp and takes a more dramatically paced motion.

Side two is almost all sound over meaning but something happens in the pause for the song Camera where Stipe is singing quite clearly over a bass led backing. The chorus lifts with a chorused guitar and a mournful declaration: "Alone in a crowd, a bartered lantern borrowed. If I'm to be your camera, who will be your face?" The arrangement keeps to a live sparseness until the final chorus when Stipe raises the melody on the repeat, as though his grief is breaking free of the duties of a singer and into the real of eulogy. He sounds like he's resisting tears. As it happens, the lyric remembers Stipe's friend Carol Levy, a photographer who died young and violently in a car accident. I didn't need to know that, the genuineness of the emotion is too plain to dismiss. A work of great beauty that is like, if anything, a continuation of the gem of Murmur, Perfect Circle, a lament for lost childhood.

This should have been the album closer but we get two fine chiming bright songs I often used to skip because I didn't want the spell of Camera to be spoiled.

I recall this album strongly as being part of the soundtrack to quitting Brisbane, Queensland, my childhood, and the beginning of my young adulthood. Melbourne felt far more grown up and offered its own challenges. Thankfully, I didn't go politically loopy as I had the last time I moved to a new city without knowing anyone. I did wade through some undiagnosed depression for a few years but the new town brought new adventures and culture. Through that, I would happily return to the sense of happy discovery in second hand record shops and put this LP on, especially when it got warm and sunny. And then, in a strange short-term nostalgia, I would feel pleasantly reset and get on with whatever waited in the next few minutes.

Listening notes: I don't play vinyl anymore so my return listen for this one was done with the splendid hi-res download from HD-Tracks. It's clean, clear and doesn't point to itself as a digitisation (i.e. loudness wars)

QUEEN II @ 50

Second albums are always interesting. Flop or flight the effort put in alone compels. The number of one and done bands supports this. Can we easily imagine a second real Sex Pistols record or a follow up to Colossal Youth? Even if it is easy it is not always fun. Imagining a megastar band that collapsed after their first album and you have a forgotten Beatles, Rolling Stones and many, many more. All those bands who make it through the great filter of rock stardom get a toast with something bubby and a stab at immortality. So, how did Queen do?

The opening track Procession does a lot of the talking in answer. It's an instrumental made of a kick drum and layers of guitars played in ways they normally are not. Brian May makes his guitars sound like brass instruments and organs. Mostly this is done through volume swells to remove the sharp sound of a pick on a string. Also, he puts the signal through heavy distortion which adds a lot of sustain. We're not meant to think it's actually a procession band, we're meant to marvel at the ingenuity. And here's the thing: it's way more than smart, the music in Procession is emotive. If we're in for prog rock on this LP it will be as we've never experienced it before. It's almost over before it begins but it ends with the figure that the next song will progress to.

A slight mist of guitar beeps from the end of the track leads us to Freddie Mercury's piano arpeggio which ends with a giant power chord. A galloping guitar opens to another aural vista and Mercury's pure vocals in high register begin the direct contact with the audience. "A word in your ear from father to son". This gives way to the verse that will repeat around excursions into celestial vocal harmonies and hard metal workouts and impassioned pleas. The band is throwing everything they have at the wall and creating something far more focussed and deliberate than anything on their debut. By the time Mercury sings in falsetto, "the air you breathe I live to give you"  you'll be welling up. If this is metal it has never been so poignant, if it is prog it has never been this affecting. A choral chant and hard rock backing play to the fade. A high flute like guitar triad fades up.

And then that is joined by a series of weeping glissandi on the same tone introduce White Queen (As it Began). A deep acoustic strums chords under the vocal which is gentle but melancholy. After an opening lament the song begins with a glacial arpeggio played through a flanger. A courtier's account of waiting for the queen of the title progresses confessorially until a mass of glittering harmonies end the verse before a harder, impassioned restatement of the opening phrases thunders out. A sitar like solo later and the passion reignites with an outburst of new melodic material and more orchestral guitar before a final choral outburst and a gentle coda with only voice and acoustic guitar. If you know your Pre-Raphaelite painting this is what one might sound like.

Unlike the three previous tracks Some Day One Day has a clean beginning with sprightly acoustic chords and a vocal from Brian May who supports his pleasant but lower tier vocal with more guitar arrangements in a love song of polite longing. Faint praise? Well we've just had two of the bands most impressive recordings to that time in their career. The nice number is thoroughly enjoyable without ever wafting into filler territory.

Another clean start for the Roger Taylor song The Loser in the End whose crashing drums tighten to the opening line, "Mama's got a problem ..." in mighty metal voice. It's so powerful we don't have time to acknowledge that the guitars supporting it are almost entirely acousitc. There's plenty of brash stadium rock to follow and it feels almost a relief for the band just to rock out to one of Roger's barnstormers. Mind you, the lyric about sparing a thought for the mums left behind by their hedonistic kids is poignant despite the Zeppish strut.

While the first side was almost all Brian May's songs, the second is entirely given over to Freddie's flights and showstoppers. Ogre Battle begins with a partially backwards playing of the song's final moments before smashing into one of the most authentic speed metal guitar workouts before the eighties adopted the approach. If the choral harmonies of the previous side leaned toward the sublime these scream out like side characters from Dante's Inferno. Freddie leads us through a folkloric episode  of breathless speed and imagery. It ends in partial reverse as it started and the wind effects are cut into by a persistent ticking which brings us to...

The Fairyfeller's Master Stroke which starts with a manic minor key chordal figure on a harpsichord before the big Queen choir and guitar orchestra kicks in. Then it's full steam medievalism of the kind in Richard Dadd's painting which gave the song its title. The song is not just a catalogue of the odd characters in the picture but a big, rich, bombastic celebration of their Tolkeinesque community. We end on a rushed harmonised final description as a trio of chords gives way to ...

Nevermore begins with a grand piano arpeggio that bears Freddie's mock melancholy song of love and loss with some big harmonies sounding operatically and trading speaker positions. Big and gorgeous if slight by comparison but you would never skip it.

A clean start for The March of the Black Queen on piano with some guitar stings before an explosion into harmony and the rest is not going behave. While the six minute opus changes every few seconds there is enough grounding repetition to keep the constant vocal and instrumental pyrotechnics on course rather than have it collapse under its own weight. If anything this is the parent of the more disciplined Bohemian Rhapsody and it is not hard to think that the later top 40 epic would have reached its clean lines and clipped humour without this near free for all earlier. Its final chord gives way to ...

The ringing acoustic guitars of Funny How Love Is with a throat lacerating high vocal by Freddie form the equivalent of Some Day One Day on the previous side (more on such soon). It's joyful and ringing with perfect voices and a constant shuffling rhythm, neither claiming higher purpose nor needing to. 

The Seven Seas of Rhye bangs in with the same kind of energetic piano figure the Elton John would use the following year to make the Who's Pinball Wizard his own. A powerchord later and the galloping number rushes into the most conventional mid-seventies radio song on the record. The lyric is the same kind of play upon character types that went into most of the songs on this side so while it might be of its time it's not Tiger Feet or Come and be in My Gang unless you can imagine those redone by Noel Coward. And then it ends in a crash that is immediately swamped by a pub singalong version of I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside. It conventionality bringing the unconventionality of the rest of the record into sharp focus ... and with a smile. This was the band's first charting single.

The debut album had charted within the top 40 but not spectacularly. Queen II was begun very shortly after the delayed debut LP and, by the band's insistence, under easier conditions (extended studio rather than the borrowed minutes and offcuts of other bands like the first one). With loosened belts and a set of songs they were eager to experiment with, Queen managed to make a far more orderly and signature work instead of getting lazier with it. They gave their record company a long player like no other on the market and a top ten charter (number five, below such giants as Band on the Run and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road!). Queen had arrived and distinctly on their own terms. From Brian May's extra ordinary guitar orchestrations, vocal harmonies to floor their contemporaries and songs that ranged from sublime to infectiously insane, the band was set and in such a profound way that they got through the onslaught of punk with barely a scratch. This album and its success gave them that.

It would have been late 1976. The song Bohemian Rhapsody had wowed everyone of us over the Christmas holidays and drove us to buy our own copies of the album without bothering with the cassette undermarket. It was straight to the LP with the cover art, lyrics and winking comments about Bechstein debauchery and nobody playing synthesisers. Owning the artefact by this band that had shown up underneath the elder sibling canon and who were ours to cherish, was to feel like starting on the ground floor of Coca Cola or space travel.

But it wasn't quite the ground floor, it was the band's fourth album. Over the months from the beginning of 1976 to its end and beyond, I looked for, found and bought all of the earlier ones, in order of discovery. Queen, the debut, was all British rock goodness, if uneven and occasionally messy. Sheer Heart Attack was accomplished and presented the formula for future Queen albums. But Queen II was different. When I bought the U.K. copy from Ken Hurford's Import Records around the corner, I had to wait to hear it as we were in between styli at the big four speaker (but not quadrophonic) hifi Dad had built. That was maybe at the end of the day when he got back from work. Until then I took it over to Nanna's to pore over while digging into pikelets with cream and cumquat marmalade and tea with lemon served in glass. Alright, alright, I just thought you might like the detail.

So, there was the cover. Black on the outside with the band members heads in chiaroscuro lighting just like the opening of the Bohemian Rhapsody video. The title, an art nouveau font in white in a corner, carried over in style to the rear cover which listed the tracks over a more elaborate coat of arms featuring a swan, fairies, lions and other heraldic inventions which looked medieval as imagined by the late nineteenth century. Also, the sides weren't simply one and two but Side White and Side Black. Opening the gatefold showed the band posed in the same kind of rough diamond arrangement but entirely in white (and the drummer and bass player in reverse places which would have them the same as the front cover if you could see through it).  The other half of the gatefold was a repeat of the back only, black on white with various production notes and the statement: "And nobody played the synthesiser ... again."

Dad got home with the stylus and I put the disc on, poring over the lyrics and marvelling at the sounds. As a kid whose first fandom was classical and previous, the record spoke to me directly, it's virtuosity and imagination was like reading the best of kids books from when I was much younger. Like those, it gave me pictures and daydreams.