Love Songs #7: Hit : YUMMY YUMMY YUMMY - THE OHIO EXPRESS

Bubblegum was a strange thing. The cynicism of it was standard enough: after a decade of simplistic pop being bought by the shipping container load by tweens the suits knew that you could throw the whole band loyalty out the window as long as you supplied enough of sugar-beat goodness. No one over twelve was allowed in there. You had to dance like a tantrum and sing along like in music class. But the thing was that it didn't just make good business sense, it worked emotionally.

When I say bubblegum, I don't just mean pop music or even sugary pop music as such. I mean the lab-designed units sprayed over the nations of the world from herculean crop dusters of inhalable media. As in a dystopic sci-fi movie from the time (late sixties) the spooring only affected the younger population and fired them on to great feats of .... well, much the same as before except they bought a lot of records that previous band/brand loyalty might have impeded.

It was a sub industry that preferred the one hit wonder, such constant newness did it promise. Yesterday's 1910 Fruitgum Company was today's Ohio Express. While some of these bands actually existed none of them really had to as it was the same crew of session players who did the recordings, anyway. Except for the voice. They needed the voice. So when Johnny Varongo (real name: Edward Harris (not his real name)) was spirited away from his photogenic garage band it was only for a few afternoons while he got the vocal right.

If there were Johns Pauls Georges and Ringos they were limited to the confines of the great tween zine tide in which the band photos might well have been shopped versions of a single Ur photo and only those whacky names could distinguish them from each other. But even if that didn't work there really wasn't much of a barrier between what came out of the candy coloured pvc portable record players and the tv where shows like The Archies, The Monkees and The Banana Splits, Whacky Races, Cool McCool, Scooby Doo etc etc blended into one red food dye #134 fuelled happiness circuit. Bubblegum was a way of plugging in and consuming from an early age and, as such, was as much a gateway drug as the cartoons to the consumerist conformity that was and remains rock music. A few years later things like rum and coke made the initially vile tasting alcohol attractive.

That said, it still worked. So what if it introduced a generation to the next mass consumerism, that is still the chief means of expressing social mobility on the planet until the great anti-con revolution that will never happen. But underneath the big smothering blanket of buy there remained a kind of sincerity. Even cartoon characters have to win you in some way. It might be pure pragmatism but none of these would have sold a unit without remembering the way children think and feel, especially when they're about to shunted into adolescence.

For starters here we have the initial crunch of palm muted guitars: chunkchunkchunkchunk. This gets a bigger boost on more guitars and a piano sforzando which intensifies the crunch. And then we break on through to the syrup centre with a raspberry flavoured vocal: "Yummy yummy yummy I've got love in my tummy and I feel like a lovin' you..." Goes straight to the nerve centre when all those crushes and wobbly feelings take on the ineluctable might of Sucrose Prime which bursts in and floods through to every cell, equalising inside with outside. And, kinda like sugar, kinda like spices, it just keeps reinforcing with falsetto harmonies are not the micro chorales of The Beach Boys but better, cleaner, simpler, more direct an injection. And then, not even a token solo we leap a full tone for the last verse, elevating something that was already pretty high: yummy yummy yummy. And end on the refrain that doesn't have words because they're just not needed - ba ba bababa ba ba bababa ba ba - as the sweet rasp cuts through like a new flavour. Hey, that's only two and a half minutes, exactly as long as it takes to get through one raspberry splozodrop! Solution? Have another one. Now!

If you're eleven years old and you feel love you spend half the time enjoying the hit and half denying that you feel anything. When I was eleven it was Diane. When I was twelve it was Veronica. The very thought of these girls ran through me like a charge. I rode to school on a bike drawn to them like a tram cable. And when I was there across the desk from them I acted like a five year old, spitting out petulant disdain and wisecracks. Once I saw Mark Robinson talk smoothly to Veronica and her positive and easy response brought me to the brink of morbidity with jealousy. Coulda done with a hit like this but it was years past the era. Sherbert or Skyhooks? Do me a favour.

But those chugging guitars and spun sugar vocals would have been the treat. Something else that seldom gets admitted is how much bubblegum informed punk. Everyone's ready to press the buzzer and yell Stooges or New York Dolls but few remember or admit that the backings of these cartoony lozenges took the best bits of contemporary hard rock to stabilise the sweetness and more directly informed The Ramones or Stiff Little Fingers. It wasn't just gooey gooey chewy chewy but plenty of crunch as well. If you fell from the preteen crush you might have loved the eviscerating intensity of Merry Clayton's solo vocal in Gimme Shelter but you had to listen to about four minutes of build up. Bubblegum started at the build up and only needed to get a little higher and they didn't sing about nasty stuff like "raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaape and murder" but stuff you understood.

Understanding is the key notion here. Just as confectioners understand that we want our sugar administered in the right kind of package by proportion of sweet to sour, of squirty syrup to hard shell crunch and if the balance is wrong they go out of business. They know that their client is the human nervous system and once comprehended, is a client forever. This song like the best of bubblegum temporarily stabilises the wobbling heart of the tween with the force of a hospital dose. When that's over repeat:

chunkchunkchunkchunkCRUNCHchunkchunkchunkchunkCRUNCHchunkchunkCRUNCHchunkchunkCRUNCHCRUNCHCRUNCHCRUNCHCRUNCH: yummyyummyummyI'vegotloveinmytummy

Try Buy!

AGAIN!

Love Songs #6: Desolation: WEEPING - THROBBING GRISTLE

Cosey left Gen for Chris. Gen took every pill he could find and woke up in Casualty. All of them played on this.

A hammered dulcimer plonks hesitantly until it finds the melodic figure and then repeats it with mutations until the end. Under this a squeaky atonal violin drones inconsistently. Gen's vocal comes into a room that sounds like its bare stipped boards lit by a single incandescent bulb. The voice hangs in the yellow light, hovering above as it describes the body on the floor, draining. "You didn't see me on the floor weeping..."

Once past the intentional irritants of the arrangement we know we've all been here. This is the room where rejection presents as a physical pain. The chest tightens, the throat constricts and the self negation spreads into the system. The floor feels like home but even that is temporary as the universe itself, element by element falling away, soon declares its hostility and activates its anitbodies against you. You do not belong here.

A surprisingly little time later the memory of it is only painful to recall aloud because it's embarrassing. Time enough after that we know what we felt was real for those hours and days, all that self-punishing shock. We don't learn that much from it (we'll get there more than one more time each) but we'll remember it.

Throbbing Gristle began as an anarchoperformanceart collective blasting their installations with musique concrete that really sounded like it was made of concrete. The innocuous buildings on their label art were from photos of the death camp gas chambers. Noise and disturbance. Confrontation. So why this visit to the same place that Frankie Valli and Miley Cyrus went? Couldn't have been the money.

Actually, it's just more of that noise and confrontation. If they are going to go on about Zyklon B Zombies then they are almost duty bound to turn the cameras on themselves. When I say duty I really do mean something like military compulsion. The air when politics meets art on a speed date gets severely rigid very rapidly. The sense of mission, suddenly engorged, is compulsive and unstoppable. But here beneath the artless clomping and mosquito drones is something that really does sound like tenderness. What mission now? Well, there are a few things happening at once.

First, the wracking of self-annihilation is clear and supported by every sound we hear. The report back from a moment of desolate loneliness is form-perfect; not a semi-colon out of place, foolscap pages typed and carbon-ed and presented in a spotless manila folder: Effects of "Romantic" Rejection Upon Collective Staff and Recommendations.

Then there's the confrontation of the fans or at least any who expect the stone face of the agit-prop-ers to remain unshattered. There is no escaping the plain vulnerability of it. Even We! You won't hear anything like it from fellow Mr Nasty of the North Mark E. Smith from the same era. And it isn't a matter of this-is-as-close-to-tender-as-they-got, it's tender. Eerie and frozen, yes, but tender. There is no accident that the great disturbers themselves offered this. In context, it could not fail to unsettle the hardest of fans and wipe the sneer off the face of the tartest detractor.

Finally the stillness. It's knocked around by words or sounds always returns to inertia. Each increasingly pathetic wish for his rejector to witness him cries out as though the futility of it might be changed by this, as though the sight of his tears might draw some of her own, alter her body chemistry at the molecular level and supply her cells with saturated love again. Not only can this never happen but it shouldn't. He's not thinking that, though, the withdrawal is too still strong and he (and we with him) doesn't see that the closest he could get would be staged and lifeless. For now, he's on repeat, looping the same distress signal until the battery drains. They'll sweep what's left of him out when the neighbours complain about the stench and Cosey will hear of it and hurl herself off an obsidian cliff into the crashing breakers below.

Except that he'll just wake up and get on with it like we all do. Now, that's confrontation. And, fuck, does it haunt us.

Love Songs #5: Bashin' the Fashion: WRECKING BALL - MILEY CYRUS

The pop song trope for the last decade and a bit has been a verse melody built on sizeable interval leaps. So you go A up to E down to G# up to E down to F# up to F# etc. This is nothing new. Listen to a lot of fifties doo wop and teen rock and hear how little variation there is in the tension around the C - A minor - F (or D minor) - G progression. We hear a lot of it now and think everyone's writing the same song but it's just the same process and it's as old as formalised western music itself. If there's an ageist slant on this it's most likely to centre on this, as though pop songs in the good ol' days were Bach fugues and now we're down to endless loops of Three Blind Mice. The other objection might be that no one seems to have moved on from mindless pop o' yore: that the kids today aren't as bad as disappointing. Both views are of course utopian bullshit and should be met as such.

Why begin with such apology? Because all the mud slung at Miley Cyrus for her racy (by the average classroom standard) dance routines that make the good folk go "whoa!" and frighten the horses. Yeah, like David Bowie never happened. These are the same people who were fired up at the thrill of seeing punk ridiculed on TV in the late seventies, the early X-ers who still believe that they fought on barricades until the Man relented and the world was safe from vacuous culture. I'm from that generation and know, when cutting through the nostalgia, that that war was a failure, that its subculture was just absorbed in the maw of Mammon and all the bitter politics were spat out like a snake spits out an eggshell. Today, it's nothing for a Good Charlotte to look all tatts and piercings but sound like Toto (which they do) and kind of thought of as punk. It's nice to have the memories but the cause is the stuff of archaeology now.

The reason that there will always be plain and simple money spinning pop is the same one as that which explains why rock guitarists still think that an overdrive pedal makes them blackhatted badguys: formula, persistent regurgitated regulated formula. Which brings us back to Do.

Wrecking Ball begins with this leaping chirp of a melody the same as countless other pop songs. There's a second section for relief in the relative tonality and then there's the great BIG chorus in which the title is repeated a couple of times in the formulaic 4th to major 3rd. A middle eight establishes some thinking space where the least hyperbolic thoughts in the lyric are aired and then back into the chorus and then end.

But here's my real problem with Wrecking Ball: it's good. It's really good. From the leapy first lines and the fiddly little autotune flourishes (that have been de rigeur since Cher made us wonder what we heard back in the terrible summer of '98) to the massive explosion of the chorus that features a kick that really does have the aural feel of a wrecking ball and Miley's tone perfect anguished teen operatics, this is massive pop. It not only should be celebrated but already has been by every kid who's mimed it into the shampoo bottle in front of the bathroom mirror.

Pop doesn't need brains; it only requires processed emotion. The worst of it saturates and stays in its era along with all the couture and hairdos that need a generation's ridicule to re-emerge from dormancy. Wrecking Ball will remain firm because through all its slick production and observance of praxis it sounds like she means what she's singing. Only just in her twenties when it was handed to her by a committee of Ro-Men she obviously felt the heart-in-mouth pain of the powerlessness of a dissolving teenage romance from recent memory. I'm guessing at that and I'm happy to assume it was her rather than the direction of a producer because the voice wails about "breaking your walls" and then sings "but you wrecked me" in an aching broken glottal stutter that ends the chorus in choking tears: "you wre-eh-eh-ecked me!".

Everyone has felt like this. Everyone who went to those first high school parties the parents cut the cord and let the kids drink. There never was one that didn't end with a demolished heart screaming pain through a scrum of friends in the bathroom, the hallway of under the streetlamp outside. Amid the chundering first drinkers and grunting chat-ups these tiny screaming arias were sung. Whether these were wails or swallowed honking sobs there was always a tidal cascade of human pain before its target had the armour to fend it. That's what the chorus sounds like. Tellingly, there is no fade (they are a tad old school, anyway); after the final wash of anguish the great sound subsides, leaving only a gentle electronic sigh that loops. That fades but it does in real life.

The director's cut of the video is telling. The official or first release clip is quite routine alternating between Cyrus miming directly to camera in white underwear and images of walls bursting from a wrecking ball (sometimes with the singer riding it and some of those naked) and Cyrus playing with a sledge hammer like it's a giant hard on. But high profile and controversial photographer Terry Richardson recut it to fix tightly on Cyrus' head so that it almost fills the screen.

The infinite white background could be a cosmetics shoot or a human sized steriliser. Cyrus' face is almost blue from it, the eyes accentuating it and the dark magenta of the lips proving it by their breach. Tears bead from her eyes. There is even a slight nasal trail. The single shot allows her no escape from us.

We see her flub some lip synch and we remember that she hasn't just been doing videos for years but practically grew up in front of the camera. The transition of the second verse to the chorus is even odder as she stops altogether. This is meant to enhance the impression that we are watching a single continuous take (they coulda used a dissolve and gotta way with it) and even though it only happens so that Miley can emote the big chorus it sill looks like she's overcome. It's these moments, and there are others, that give the impression that this is the real image, the one beneath the tongue-poking, crotch-rubbing panto of the public image, the tear breaking through the clown makeup. It's just more public image but, boy, do we suck it up.

After the single credit, white chalk-board cursive on a black field, we get a micro showreel with Richardson and Cyrus, goofing around and, yep, here comes that tongue as she makes a face. Cut!

But the resonance hums on. The pity still whimpers through the blitzkrieg. We've felt that for real. We remember it.

Love Songs #4: Brilliance in the Dark: OUR LIPS ARE SEALED - THE GO GOS

A bright four four thump on the drums for two bars then a very 80s chugalug of palm-muted electrics which play a little off each others tuning like a light chorus pedal. A very articulate bass joins in over a quiet but solid organ wash. So far it sounds like a song from the year before, Fischer-Z's So Long (which deserves its own post); same beat and sequence of instrument entrances on the soundstage. But then you know it isn't as instead of the pained strangled tenor of So Long we get a angelic arpeggio high on the fretboard, clean and pealing. And we're in.

Belinda Carlisle's cut glass soars above this like a dove in a Renaissance painting talking to her lover about the rumours and fabrications that surround them. Well, those no-lifes would say that, wouldn't they? The great void around us can return to the primordial swamp for all we care as we are refulgent star system beyond it. So let them talk. Bugger 'em. Our lips are sealed.

The chugging tri-chord drive is typical of its time and the pez-candy 60s sweet but sharp is also very post-punque-pop but there's more and better than this going on here. First, Carlisle's vocal is so crisp and tightly wrapped around the words that in moments when she lets it break it's like seeing a crystal vase with a scratch. She might sound and look like a cheerleader but this is someone who has survived pain. Now, the whole grimy swell of gossip and slurring of the herd greys out into a gibbering fade.

Chorus: up to the minor third (played as a bold major) back down to the tonic like Beethoven's Fifth (really, same key, too) then right out of whack to a flattened fifth, a ninth and then back to D. "Pay no mind to what they say, it doesn't matter anyway."  That statement is sung in choir, defiantly out of the song's scheme but fitting perfectly within it. "Hey hey hey", in sheer joy, "our lips are sealed." This will often just slam in without a pre-chorus as though she has to tell him to be strong.

The middle eight floats in with a holding pattern on the bass and choirgirl falsetto descends through a beam, cradles his head with light and sings: "hush my darling. Don't you cry. Quiet angel, forget their lies." A mini snare roll and the final verse bursts back into light with the words of the first verse descanted by the angelic call from the middle eight gleaming through, echoing the verse lines. And then two choruses in a row which bear the chant of the title on their force. Never has worldliness sounded so fresh and life-affirming. This is pop supreme, as tiny as a note passed in class and as big as high school.

The Go Gos emerged from the L.A. punk scene at the end of the seventies with a good enough live reputation to swing a support spot for The mighty Specials on their first U.S. tour. Specials' vocalist Terry Hall and Go Gos guitarist Jane Wiedlin found each other but had to keep it secret as both were in other long term things. This song was the child.

Terry Hall did a version of it later with his post Specials minimalist outfit Fun Boy Three. It's a sombre outing emphasising the fragility of the situation; Hall's delicate tenor calling out over a wash of fifths in the wordless backing vocals, electro drums and sparse piano and, towards the end, a quiet funk figure on a guitar. At the time you were meant to prefer it for its sparseness and anti-pop dourness but really that's more from the Go Gos' original having crossed from their indyness to charting band (and probably because everyone was sick of it by then). I liked the difference but will never prefer it over the original.

The Go Gos were picked up by The Police-related indy label IRS at this time who funded their first album and got Blondie producer Richard Gottehrer behind the desk. Bratty and distrustful of the music industry they nevertheless put in a solid album which still sounds fast and new and toured it. The cover reversed the push to glamour that the record company wanted by putting the bubble bath pictures on the back and an ugly-palette desaturated picture of the band wrapped in towels with face cream on and called it Beauty and the Beat. With their punk credentials (Carlisle had been in the legendarily obscure Germs for about a fortnight) IRS of course allowed all this as it was funny and it worked either way.

The band were disdainful of music videos at the dawn of MTV (we knew about them here locally and from the UK through Countdown which was wall to wall with them from the mid seventies) but IRS insisted. The result is odd. Shots of the band miming it in a practice room would have done it but cut through this is the band as Valley girls riding through the town and shopping for lingerie and then splashing around in a fountain. Belinda Carlisle occasionally looks like she'd rather shrink into the upholstery of the car which with a lead vocalist is like hearing a guitarist asking a mixer to turn it down. For all their reservations about falling into the machine with a song commercial it still works. There's nothing punk about it but in those post years the term itself had as much cred as saying ballsy or raunchy. It looks like they're a working band who can do the hokey kokey with the organisation to get their songs to the world. At the very worst they come off as goofy but that only works seeing it now.

For me it's late 1981, getting the LP at Rockinghorse in Brisbane and packing it in my luggage for the journey north on the Sunlander for the Uni summer holidays, escaping my brother's slice of hell marriage for two months of laze and parties in sunny Townsville. Among the Gang of Four, Joy Division and Talking Heads, this burst through the Monsoon rain to light the splashing tempest in the pool by the patio. Now and then in the brilliance of the joy there was the poignancy and real ache that scraped the blinding clouds that felt like the danger of being nineteen and free. More than the cinema gloom of Echo and the Bunnymen or Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark it was this and the rest of the album that tapped me on the shoulder.

Love Songs #3: Dissolution: I CAN'T SEE YOUR FACE IN MY MIND - THE DOORS

Crystalline arpeggios descend through the minor scale on a marimba and creamy electric guitar against a huge black space. Morrison croons the title twice in a gentle croon. He's breaking up with her, asks her not to cry and, whether he tells her or just thinks it, struggles to remember what she looks like.

He won't need her picture until they say goodbye. Meantime, the lines of the face he perhaps all too briefly loved are being consumed by carnival dogs. These aren't the lines of age but the defining shape of her face. Carnival dogs? Well, it's Jim Morrison who in the same lyric mentions insanity's horse adorning the sky and later in the album. But I don't think this is a high school poet image as it has a real potency. I see scavenger mutts wolfing down her image. He's young and loved by multitudes. Everything's a carnival and when its dogs see his lover's face unattended they go for it. When he looks back he just sees darkness, the brief bright flashes of the chords not helping.

The music is extra smooth here, the brittleness of the marimba offset by Robbie Krieger's rich slide on the Gibson. The drums whisper only when the chorus needs a little support. Mostly, it's Jim and the same croon he used on Crystal Ship that breaks a little here and there for texture before returning to cold cold satin.

And it is cold. He is worried that he can't see her but the worry is about the faculty of imagining, not her. Her shelf life up, her last commercial over, he's already somewhere else right there in the same room. This, eerily, is the voice of the alpha, he no longer cares for her because his physical system is losing that capacity. Beneath the charm of the lights and the winner's unconscious skill at dissembling care there is the great sucking void that salivates for its next fill. And it all sounds so silky.

But that is just how the doling of pain feels to the victor in this: I'll put some extra work in because I'm good at this. Then, well at least I've got the photo.

The Doors were a rangey outfit, covering warfare down to the micro-personal, expressing this with music both mature and fun (seldom has serious musical scholarship sounded so much like a party) and over it the voice that ran from whispers to almighty screams. They were as much at odds with their flower power era as the Velvet Underground on the other coast except The Doors had hits and played huge venues which they filled. That was always going to make a difference but the seriousness and self awareness evident in so much of their output can be both inspiring and confronting.

In this one the disturbance comes from it being impossible to tell how much Morrison is describing his own wall-eyed sexual cruelty and how much he is just letting go and have it describe itself. The song comes and goes without banging or whimpering, the shiny black libido swims away and the lone and level darkness flows eternally.

Love Songs #2: Disconnect: UNSENT LETTER - MACHINE GUN FELLATIO

With a name that made you smirk or wince when you spoke it, this electro-burlesque act from the noughties plastered the laddish triple J waves with guaranteed airplay numbers about rootin', tokin, snortin' and partayin'. So how come this? How come, from under the tide of motherfuckers on motorcycles and pussy towns this eerie tale of ghosted love emerged and took it place among the filth and japes?

Well, the answer's easy: Matt Ford can write a good song and forced this one into the ready made context of the band rather than sell it through a solo identity with the extra admin and PR bullshit that that would entail. Apart from everything else it stopped everyone who was a fan or all the naughtiness in their tracks when they heard it and so profoundly moved them that they almost forgot about 99% of the band's material.

In backgrounding this post I went through some online resources and found out that Ford co-wrote the big spooky epic pop song No Aphrodisiac for the Whitlams. I had no idea that was so but if he wrote this one the surprise of it dwindles rapidly.

Unsent Letter is a song of a man seeking contact after disconnection. He's broken up with a woman and now when he tries to talk to her he can't get past the weather. She doesn't hang up but there's nothing left there on the line. So he imagines himself driving around with a pair of girls. Nothing else matters or doesn't, though. He gives things up, starts others with no effect. At every turn, his thoughts and daydreams or ambitions return to her silence and his frustration at having created that. Even when he admits the part he played there is no resolution; it's just too engaging going over it again and again.

It's important that he suggests that he was the one who ended it. Without that this might just be another wallow. Here he knows he has made a mistake and because she can never be present at his best, most eloquent and pithy after-the-fact pleas all he can do is polish them further and move on ... but it's just too engaging going over it again.

The song doesn't start so much as lift in a slight breeze. Quiet wukkawukka guitar chords are raised by a synthetic tom tom without which they would just return to the dust. Ford's quiet voice begins with the line about trying to talk. A clanking like a train at a crossing appears briefly and a deep synth note swells like a cue in a horror movie. This is taken by an electric bass and a Rhodes piano on its slowest tremolo setting, lending a seasick wobble, and a light drum kit plays a skeletal shuffle for the chorus about driving around.

Then we get back to the inertia of the opening but bolstered by the bass and the drums. The guitar does not now or at any other time in the song, break out of its tiny insistence. The second chorus adds an organ which swells and then fades under the first line of the next verse. Then inertia again as the bass coaxes the guitar to keep aloft. Some whispered backwards percussion and another chorus with the organ returning but with an funereal solemnity. It takes the solo after the last chorus which falls back to inerita before fading out on the mournful figure. Silence.

While some double tracking appears to alter the vocal texture this is a solo vocal, one man against himself and the frayed mess around him, singing with minimal to no reverb, as his words, though they briefly rise to inspiration, keep falling to the floor. And nothing resolves. The song he wrote for her (this one) has only just been finished and joins the other unsent letters addressed to her care of someone somewhere better. The girls in the car with him are either ghosts of her or revenge bimbos but either way they are made of neurones and synapses, not flesh and blood.

The insistent regret that drives this song with its minor key harping reminiscent of folk music or timeless blues that circles around and could keep doing so well after lights out. It's gently paced but it's intense as this sadness is not self-pity but self-torture.

We have all gone through breakups and felt variously well-rid of people or cruelly used by them but there is always that one we never quite shake, the one we threw away. This is the one who appears in the shadows at every new time to remind us of what we had and will never have again and that WE were the ones who made sure of that. And, as we formulate again a replay of the last argument where we win, we remember that this is true, that  our one shot at the great dream of a lifelong love was something we chose to annihilate.

We might have felt threatened by the intimacy or desolate that it didn't feel like it was enough. Whatever it was we are now greatly empowered by the experience and will just keep learning ... except it was us, we did that, we crushed someone because we weakened. The real one probably recovered and has long moved on to "something better" and can't take any contact with us past the weather. But, and this is where it really gets eerie, they are not the one we miss or the one we "talk" to when we can't do anything else. We talk to the ghost.

The video of this song from the time at first made me wince. It came at the end of a decade of serial killer chic at the movies and on tv. That genre's characteristic look and feel seemed force fed into the imagery, private operating rooms and confused looking women being taken by a man (played by the vocalist) while the palette desaturates and the angles and editing do the herky jerky. But the clip goes into far more interesting territory as the woman he's dressing up like a victim plays the comatose real one he's injured (take your pick of car accident, domestic violence or maybe just leave it at metaphor), eventually sitting beside her inert body on the hospital bed as the entire room begins to shake and shudder as though it's moving along a road.

Love Songs #1 Ache: ONLY LONELY - DIVINYLS

Divinyls poured out of the funnel of their record company as a kind of pre-mix new wave act but just as no one identified as punk then no one smeared themselves with its softer epithet. The term was a joke, a dad-in-a-cardigan stab at hipness, and no one under thirty would say it without a smirk or a sarcastic twang. Divinyls, of course, weren't so much a new wave band as a band. They dressed theatrically in their videos and their songs clicked into AM radio playlists like Lego pieces.

For me, their overproduced rock sound and reliance on sweet guitar hooks turned me off. And then there was the singer. Chrissy Amphlett's turn as the female answer to Angus Young was astute and proved durable. Miming on Countdown or flailing on stage, she tore it up as the eternal schoolgirl, the first one to blow perfect smokerings at the bike shed and make much more of it than shaping of exhaled fumes. Publicly, the brat child of pop royalty and senior administration, Amphlett played 19th Nervous Breakdown from the point of view of its target, living and playing unto peril and dependency, a thick moppy fringe hiding a pair of eyes you knew could turn you to stone if she showed them.

But there was also the side she would only allow us to glimpse and while it could be sentimental, it wasn't warm and fuzzy. That was the briefly sounding harmonic that had me thinking twice about her while the rest of me dismissed her band and their output as costumed-up Oz Rock. My favourite song of theirs is Good Die Young and it would be here except that the loss that it tells of and wails with is not about love.

Chrissy Amphlett's voice was like no other. It morphed from girlish naiveté to the rasp of a crazy old lady in the same line. The transition was effortless as though her throat was wired to a distortion pedal. And while a lot of pop music production still removes the breaths Amphlett's are deliberately left in adding a constant urgency, some inhalations sounded more like wheezes. Her vowels were defiantly Australian and when scraping into the rasping madwoman tone created a startling disconnect between her fresh beauty and some old boiler screaming at the kids riding bikes on the footpaths. It was hard to tell how contrived this was: on the one hand there was the uniform which could have been a dirty old manager's idea of the sex sell or a wearable irony before it was cool; on the other hand Amphlett seemed so earnest, her dancing more like the shakes and flails of hyperactivity than raunch. If it was contrived that was only polish after the fact. It seemed a product of a condition, something she was, if not natural then inevitable.

Only Lonely, recorded for the film of Helen Garner's Monkey Grip, shattered my dismissal of the band who were sold as new wave but sounded like the old 70s. Shattered because for all its guitar track trowelling it did something extremely effective. On the one hand the bright wall o' guitars chimes like churchbells on speed, Amphlett's chanting verses, which would be choruses in a lesser song, use a chirpy almost calypso melody to tell us how lonely she is. She likes morning but can only feel lonely when the sun goes down. Even in the arms of a lover she feels lonely and apologises for it helplessly.

This is the crush of every day and it rings with the urgency of youth and rasps with the desperation of experience, sometimes in the same line, Amplett's turning of a phrase transferred her effortlessly between the schoolgirl and the cranky old hen with the cats. For every bird call springing up to the third there's a sob down a semitone, welling in the minor until the lush descent of the guitars come down to pick it up again. The chorus bashes in with cooing falsettos and Amphlett's torn voice pleading to get involved.

Chrissie Amphlett was a beautiful woman. She became a rock diva in the space of a very few hit singles. But look at the clip I've linked above and count how many times you see her face in light. Go and find the video for the first hit song, Boys in Town. Even back then there's a conscious effort to play down the sexiness of her school uniform. But here she's backlit, her face a dark shape in the frame of her mop of hair. It's an impression, almost negative space. This is not the video done on film which has much more light and air, more 80s, if you will. This one is less the 80s of hot pink hair and yellow jeans than the 80s that came after the sweaty old 70s when for a few years at least the brashest of pop music shied from sex like the schoolgirl who didn't smoke from the disco medallioned monster eyeing her off from across the room. In the record company video she's a singer in a rock band; the Countdown (!) clip she's a scream in the darkness.

I think it's unwise to align songwriter or singer too closely to their life when a song lyric is most likely a distillation of experience rather than a direct report of it. Then again, we happily attribute a Jim Morrison or Kurt Cobain with near divine inspiration from personal trauma why not Amphlett who was pretty open about her own. And why sniff at her and McEntee's wish to keep all of that wrapped up in contemporary pop? It works, it still works. Let that stand.

This is the girl who try as she might can never connect with those she does gets close enough to hold, whose desperate eyes scare her dates who tell her to wait. That middle eight used to annoy me and seemed to be an uncorrected line written by the male of the songwriting partnership. Now, the more I hear it the truer it rings for this character Amphlett has assumed. And here she is, singing from the void that was once a girl, her face a blur, her hopeful springing melody cracking with failure.

This is essentially the same message as the Smiths' How Soon is Now and while there is much to love about that song there is really none of the scream through the bars of Only Lonely whose gleaming fresh guitar rock cannot conceal the real deal. I prefer it the way I prefer Good Die Young to The Smiths' Suffer Little Children (a bigger stretch, admittedly, but while we're down there...): the sombreness of Morrissey's lament for the victims of murder doesn't go as far as Amphlett's broken anger and pain for the missing person for me. The tight sustains of the chords and insistence of the chorus which seems to fall from the verses breaks into my chest cavity every time I hear it. Same goes for Only Lonely. To my knowledge, while the band and their central creative partnership delivered nothing as powerful as these again this pair of songs shall stand for the rest of my imaginable life as the essence of pop music's power at its best and that is the glimpse of what always seems to lie behind the joys of love, the ache that burns to pain ... and can get you singing along like a kid on a school excursion bus.