REPLICAS @ 45

The first few seconds of this album contains the universe of its artist's approach for the first part of his career. A curly modal figure sounds high on the keyboard of a synthesiser. It's joined by a staccato beat on rock instruments. It drops a tone for a few plays then returns as the vocal enters. A high register, thin and cold, sings of a strange crisis. He can't recognise his own photograph. He might be speaking to himself or to some form of other, perhaps a doppelganger. And the last line of each verse states the title: Me, I Disconnect From You. The song ends on a big rock chord but the opening riff decays and slows to a quiet stop.

As the  album progresses, the machine like precision of the arrangements, the reedy vocals and the icy scenarios of the lyrics, we feel the theme surfacing. A dystopian sci-fi world of androids and humans with a mounting alienation and nihilism spreading through the nightscape. While the songs have the quality of cinematic scenes and suggestions of narratives within themselves, they can also break out and refer to each other until the world takes form. 

Are 'Friends' Electric bursts on stage as a stadium sized factory of synthesised architecture. A grounding riff pumps a pattern of fifths as a descant sounds a partial seventh. When the cold, thin vocal appears it's delivering half of a conversation between a character and his home delivery replica sex worker. The only problem is that the human has begun to extend his feelings beyond the replica's function and it's starting to feel like love with all the pain and alienation that can entail. The massive grinding arrangement pauses for a kind of middle eight with bright keyboards circling around sevenths and the vocals change to spoken word. It hurts and he's lonely. This gives way to a soaring, blissful restatement of the circular figure but higher on the scale. When the factory grind reappears it feels like more of the same of this isolation. A shorter verse features the title and the aching realisation: "and now I've no one to love". After another middle eight ("I don't think I mean anything to you") we leave on a fade with the melody of the "no one to love" repeating to silence. 

This extraordinary sci-fi dystopia story was released as a single and made it, without a singalong chorus to number one. The song is a weighty downer but anyone who heard it at the time with an inclination to the new and the unusual heard electronic music that bore no resemblance to familiar forms the way Kraftwerk's later '70s work did. Are "Friends" Electric is closer kin to Donna Summer's barnstorming trance I Feel Love than Autobahn or Trans Europe Express. And this includes the other factor that Gary Numan persisted with in his initial run of success: rock instrumentation. It was cold and spiky rather than cock rock overdrive but it was rock music. The guitars, drum kit and bass are all audible along with the electronics but they are not dominant, there is no sense that the synthesisers are a red faced gimmick and there is nothing of the gymnastics of prog rock: the united front of rock band with committed synthesis is presented with full power. It felt like a first. It had precedents galore but this lean fusion had not been heard before. It was cinematically compelling and offered a credible path out of the dust of punk's crushing demise.

The Machman begins with a guitar riff that sounds like a routine genre figure until the vocals and synths arrive. The replica's encounters with the living are cryptic and paranoid in an urban nightscape. Praying to the Aliens does something different again by  preferring an electric piano with a slapback echo (which always reminds me of Bowie's We Are The Dead from Diamond Dogs) which creates a nervous energy. More technoir with statements about sexual identity and function without a clear speaker position. The stuttered Rhodes figure constantly flits around the arrangement as confusion swells. While the sense of concept album is clear throughout the record, it's application is often reduced to a kind of stream of consciousness account, not intended to further a narrative but continue the flow with a disjointed scene like both of these. If this album were a movie it would be Blade Runner as directed by Zulawski.

Then we come to the big one. I can recall speeding along the South East Freeway in a friend's car, seeing the towers of the Gold Coast form on the horizon in 1980 as the booming knells of Down in the Park rolled out of the speakers. It put me into the movie and until the next person spoke I was speeding towards intrigue. Big tolling notes on bass, synth and electric piano form a seven note sequence. A shiny descanting synth figure comes in. Another night scape. The vocal comes in after two iterations calling out images and statements that are picked up like litter on the set. The War, rape machine, a friend called Five. It's a walk through of an underworld of brutal entertainments that can leave their human participants dead. The verses are sung over the nearly unchanging ground of the opening figure but there are bright and flowery inserts which add more modal melodic material with a carnival feel. After each of these the main theme is played out as a slow, heartrending instrumental in the synthesised strings. Most of the imagery made it on to the album art, with Numan, platinum blonde and pale, standing like a mannequin in a dimly lit room as his reflection looks at him in a way not possible with the angles. Another man (probably from Are "Friends" Electric) is looking through the window. In the distance outside, a neon arch forms the letters The Park. After the storm of the main song has passed we're left with a repeating figure from the relief section that finally, lands with a big droning bass from below. A perfect side closer, by now you are immersed in the world.

Side two starts with a grumpy rock figure in the guitars. It even starts with a drumstick count in. There's a synth drone to add some texture and colour but this is the Tubeway Army as they thought of themselves to begin with. The driving overdriven riffs continue the album's pattern of playing persistently between vocals, often just insisting on a single chord. Where in Johnny B. Goode or even Breathe, this carries the mood whether rocking or dreamlike. On this album and throughout Gary Numan's earlier years, spare bars of guitar band sound more like an idling machine, grunting at attention for the next use. The vocals sing a quite  bright melody that leads to a chorus of the title. The kind of entertainment of the Park is seen up close with live sex and violence with generous dollops of surveillance. And with this comes the understated flow on effect of the indifference to the humans at the results of the brutality. All that in an upbeat rocker.

The title track takes us back to the cinematic magnitude of Down in the Park and "Friends". A bass throb plays a constant heartbeart while banks of humming and groaning synthesisers form a bed for a lyric about isolation. The narrator walks outside through crowds of nameless figures. There is a sense of shame in his non-conformity. He turns on the crowd but at best they treat him with the caution of crowds faced with irregularity, violence, delusion, and smile nervously. When the police arrive, he pleads guilty but is allowed to walk away. Between the verses the synthesis blooms to a poignant figure that is both cold and heartrending, as though a machine were trying to emote or a human was trying to be mechanical. The song ends as the heartbeat slows and a persistent howl falls into reverberation.

It Must Have Been Years starts with the same instrumentation playing the heartbeat but this is quickly obscured by loud riffy rock with nary a keyboard present. The vocal is the most rock like of the whole album. The warmer approach to the arrangement tells us that the observer of the stagnation he's describing is not a machman. However, the verses are like a day in the life of a machman sex worker. This one is either at the end of their career or in such a state of intense overuse that they are headed for landfill. Is the title/chorus a passing but repeated occuring thought that the figure at the centre has lost track of time but figures their career had begun wholecloth years before. The sole instance of a guitar solo is as frantic as the rest of the song and heightens the sense of panic before ending on a downward bend before vanishing. Just another spasm hitting its shelf life. I used to get annoyed at the rock of that solo. How could it belong in such a richly new field, sounding like some schoolkid ace guitar player  with a Gibson copy and a fuzz pedal. Really, it works. It does sound like the playing of a young musician aiming to impress but it also expresses the emotional content of the song. In an album that was met with criticism for its apparent coldness, these few seconds of flashing lead guitar spike and give the lie.

When the Machines Rock a chirpy synthesiser workout that breaks for a grandeur as big as the factory floor. I Nearly Married a Human begins as a druggy version of the synth line of the opening song but adds textures like an emulated drop and ripple effect as well a small number of motifs for development with the electrodrums coming in in sections. The music develops between the two figures with bright hazes of swells and piercing glissandi. This sounds like it started as an afternoon's noodling on the keyboard but Numan takes it well beyond that. Add an evocative title and the rest is up to you, a romatnic montage between two figures before the penny drops and all we are left with is the fading two element rhythm. And in the end the data you give is equal to the data you live.

Replicas gave a younger audience what Bowie had started but kept going until cities rose from its grooves and an adventure of sadness and action awaited. As punk's bonfire was settling into ash and the suits were trying to replace its figures with newer, easier to control units, we knew we could do much worse than listen to this. Gary Numan said he was in a music shop one day and walked past a synthesiser. He stopped and pressed a key. It had been set up with a fat bass sound that resonated through the building. In that moment all the things he'd been thinking about as he walked under the clouds and the towers, all the books of crashes, high rises and dreaming androids bloomed before him. The mechanical punk of Tubeway Army gave way to something that sounded like those ideas and felt as big as a tower block.

I didn't get all the words and I was in Townsville where the rain meant monsoons and smelt of mangoes and mosquitos and I still got it. And that was just as I'd got the thrill of seeing the Saints and the Sex Pistols on tv a few years earlier. This was different but it came from the same place. Music seemed to be changing every month until you stood back and realised it was just getting wider. This record was one that clung to me, though. I still have no hesitation in calling it one of the best of its era. And driving back from the Coast to Brisbane with the rain stinging my eyes while I pushed my head out the passenger window for as long as I could, the song was thunderous in the car and I was yelling the chorus:

You are in my vision!

You are in my vision!

Listening notes: I walked around with this in earbuds, hearing the hi-res download but at home listened to a late '90s CD with extra tracks. Both versions are free of the brickwalling compression of the loudness wars and have a joyous, dynamic clarity.

1970@50: JOHN LENNON/PLASTIC ONO BAND

A church bell tolls. Lennon comes in with the band, a soaring vocal over tolling piano chords. "Mother, you had me but I never had you ...." Then it's his father's turn and then his own as he pleads to his children not to follow him. Finally, he cries with increasing power until he is screaming. Mama don't go. Daddy come home. By the end of this section which is almost as long as the rest of the song, he is tearing his voice to shreds with elongated syllables firing up from the centre of his wounds. This is not a berserker Twist and Shout scream but it might have come from the same place, however undeclared. 

Lennon's first album of more conventional song writing after the dissolution of The Beatles continues in pursuit of confession, self-exposure and demon-hunting. And while it holds a range of musical textures and approaches it feels like a cohesive whole. Hold On breaks from its pleasing pentatonic strum to push at the edges of the sweetness. 

I Found Out spits out at fakes, hangers on, the drug of the great society in a serpentine hiss of a blues workout. Working Class Hero shows the drier and darker influence of Dylan than found on Help or Rubber Soul and continues the theme of the previous one. Isolation continues the tired feel of Hero and Lennon's light touch on the vocal belies the complexity of the melody. That's all to good effect when the prolongation of the word of the title appears. A breakout section strides in double tracked force like a pulpit-thumping sermon before settling back but only long enough for one last "I-i-i-i-so-laaaaaaaaa-shun!"

A Beatlesque piano canter begins Remember and a shouting vocal tightens the stomping pace. The chorus breaks the tension with a forceful singalong. Repeat until what sounds like a surprise joke about Guy Fawkes day but is more likely to refer to life's disastrous surprises as the powder keg explodes.

The fragile Love enters slowly on piano. The vocal is as naked and plain as on the White Album's Julia. What might have come across as a series of naïve statements is transferred through vulnerability into something raw and experiential. It's in these nooks and corners of this album where Lennon really takes the power of his craft to fruition. 

Well Well Well takes up the blues thread of I Found Out and tells of his new life away from the old moptop coterie where sex and food and revolution are things to do and sing. The chorus is the title repeated into a searing frenzy. Look at Me returns to the weary vocal of Love and Working Class Hero. He accompanies himself with the fingerstyle acoustic playing he favoured from the trip to India onwards (taught by Donovan Leitch, no less) There is the same spookiness he found in singing about his mother on Julia.

God begins as a soul figure on the piano and a sermonising introduction with a few lines about god being the concept we use to measure our pain before a pleading litany of disbelief as he strips himself of allegiances and creeds to arrive at his immediate locale of self and Yoko before some poignant words to Beatle fans offering them the tip to do the same thing themselves and ditch the pop idolising. The dream is, as it fully feels, over.

And then in a strange echo of Her Majesty on Abbey comes My Mummy's Dead recorded roughly and roughened further. A plain statement of pain. When first heard this sounds like a pointless defusing of the grandeur of the previous track but there is a real poignancy to its openness and simplicity. It's not simple as in elegant but sheer and unpadded. It jolts after God but it's meant to. 

Like a lot of these revisit blogs I get a better understanding of records I considered myself immune to. By having to describe them and as fairly as I can I hear more of their beauty and conviction than I started with. Here's another case. I still can't distinguish Well Well Well from I Found Out until I listen to them back to back. The possible archness of the call to "follow me" in Working Class Hero only seems to reveal itself when I'm listening but in memory seems always to feel ugly and narcissistic. The flatness of melody strikes me as being anti-Beatles until I take each song in turn and hear something quite the contrary. I will probably never love this album and it's not one I would choose to listen to without an ulterior motive but it remains a strong and convicted statement of how one of the most famous and best loved public figures on the planet found himself after leaving one of the most famous and beloved units of happiness manufacture. The demons in the shadows and the chest-bursting monsters were pursued, located and dealt with and the result is seldom other than violent and bloody. For that it deserves its exultation. I just almost never choose to listen to it.

The canonical opinion on this record is that it is raw and that its rawness is enough. Lennon's biography is essential to understanding it, goes another one. Maybe. Certainly, if you do know that it followed most of a decade of being at the top of the pop music food chain which nurtured some of the most forward thinking music of the rock era then poignancy of this stripped back approach released about a year after the most lavish Beatles album will not be lost on you. What gets in the way of that is the fact of the back to basics Let It Be, regardless of when it was recorded, was released only months before this. Nevertheless, the character of rawness is the one you hear about most. In fact you hear about it more than you hear about the music.

When Andrew Nichol taped me his import copy of it in about 1977 I took it home wanting it to be all of those things and I imagined something like Lennon's shoutier tracks on the White Album and maybe a few Because-like moments and maybe even an Across the Universe or two. Mother is a strong opening but after that I was really digging around as my attention drifted to whatever crap was going on in my school day life at the time. I wasn't particularly listening to lyrics because I seldom do, even now, so what I was hearing was a lot of samey blues riff guitar. At no point did it strike me as significant or even admirable that it sounded nothing like The Beatles. As a second generation (i.e. fanatical even through the punk wars) Beatles fan it sounded like a whimper. I already had Imagine and liked most of it but even with that the string arrangements bothered me as they sounded like organ chords and veered towards the kind of muzak he damns McCartney for making in How Do You Sleep. But it did have songs you could tell apart.

These days I still find this album unengaging. When it isn't musically bland it feels self serving rather than self fulfilling. I can say that for almost all of Lennon's solo output. I really did try to like it but liked it so little that I felt guilty for thinking that way when I heard of his murder. If this record is just the clear expression of someone at a significant chapter of his life then fine. If you feel affinity with it that's fine, too. 

Me, I didn't feel guilty at thinking ten years later that Double Fantasy was dull and its single Starting Over embarrassing. I also felt saddened that his hopeful message of revival was delivered in such a bland package. Sure, he was only singing about who he was and that's what he was doing with Plastic Ono Band but for me he never seemed more distant the closer he got to his self actualisation. Maybe it was the time but it wasn't mine and to me this just looked like someone who, having healed, walked away, a raw and ravaged showbiz turn smoking behind him.

1980@40: ICEHOUSE/FLOWERS/FLOWERS/ICEHOUSE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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