1998 at 20

The year began with the kind of job I was holding down all decade became a career. I strode into the open plan floor which was bright with the spectacle of the Old Court Building through the windows. The job itself was good and only got better. I was still working a walk away from my job. I flirted with vegetarianism successfully enough for it to eventually take the lion's share of my diet. The previous year's smoking quit continued until it was effortless (not a single cigarette since October 1997) Homelife was troubled by two flatmates I like so little I contemplated moving out and leaving it to them but then one of them left and we got a good one. I started my second anthology comic which was about anger and so given to its theme in practice it became a largely incomprehensible mess. The year ended with the funnest fling I'd had in many a year. And the music was good.


MEZZANINE - MASSIVE ATTACK:

The strongest set by the outfit that partially invented the sole source of pop music innovation of its time, trip hop. There are standout tracks like Teardrop and Rising Son but the idea is to put the album on, press play (for authenticity's sake it should be a CD in a digipak), lie back in the dark and absorb. From ethereal whispers to machinery to Jimmy Page style metal guitar and gigantic bass this is a trek through the heaven and hell of the ekkied-up late '90s. The Apotheosis of its year and probably its decade. Still a favourite. Still played.







BLUE WONDER POWER MILK-HOOVERPHONIC:

My favourite find of the year before followed up the frequently compelling debut with something that moved away from the Bristol triphop they'd begun with and across the channel to the continent to work on their own stream of Europop. They were between lead female vocalists and when none were available the two composers provided pitched gutteral whispers. But as the tracks progress the full throated joy of Geike Aarnet's silken voice surfaces and spreads across the gorgeous strings and beats. It wove together much better than the previous one and augured well for the future. Though it was later I can never forget the joy of strolling around Lake Burley Griffin on a lunch break at a conference listening to a loop of Eden with its plaintive French horn figure, yearning guitars and brokenhearted vocal. Spring sunlight had never felt so cooling.

BIG CALM - MORCHEEBA:

Possibly the last album I bought from hearing it in a record shop. The gorgeous opening track, The Sea would have been good enough to get the album for alone but every single track plays somewhere between triphop, delta blues and great European cinema. The finale, the brooding horror movie setpiece of the title track might have fallen flat on its face with the rapper eventually just repeating the band name but the drive of the riff and momentum rise above it. Another still played album.








VERSION 2.0 - GARBAGE:

Someone had to do it and quickly. The internet was galloping toward the mainstream and studios were increasingly places where software apps out gunned tape so the nerdspeak of calling the improvement version 2.0 fit. It would never fit again without an increasingly feeble irony. Well, it was a good listen the first time. The best tracks after that were stripped down mixes on B-sides like the quieter Medication which should have been how the whole album sounded. When they weren't trying to rock up techno it was really more of the same, more version 1.5 beta. I still have this one but don't revisit it.






MOON SAFARI - AIR:

We all piled into De Los Santos on Brunswick St after seeing the wonderful Dark City at Hoyts one Saturday night. Fresh from the exhilarating film we sipped whatever we were affecting at the time (with me it was Fangelico) and this album came on the system. I asked what it was and bought a copy the next day. Still a winning mix of lounge and electronica. Beautiful moods all the way through.










YOU'VE COME A LONG WAY BABY - FLAT BOY SLIM:

One of those discs that everybody had, played for a month and never played again. Hooky and clever but saturated.
















IN THE AEROPLANE OVER THE SEA - NEUTRAL MILK HOTEL:

Discovered this a little later than its release date. A winding journey through singer songwriter ditties and epics that can chill and exult in the same verse. There are other recordings by Jeff Mangum and co (whatever co he happens to have assembled) but nothing reaches these heights. Brass sections that appear underneath lines where you never expected to hear them, a singing saw and a writer who can take you from high pitched joy to pulling your coat more securely around you.








THROUGH THE TREES - THE HANDSOME FAMILY:

Also heard a little later than the release date. I was at a band practice and someone handed me a cd that had come with a magazine. It was called Alt Country and had about twenty tracks of then current acts trying the old genre. I listened to all of it but really only heard the first track. "That's why people OD on pills or jump from the Golden Gate bridge. Anything to feel weightless again." Sung in a solid bass voice at the top of its range over a slowly thumping country backing, the song reached into my spine and held on. I Napstered the entire album and then bought it when I found a copy online. And then I made sure I saw them every time they came out. Husband and wife duo, Brett and Rennie Sparks create liminal country feasts where the dark and the gleams often look the same. Ethereal and filling all at once. A lot of country can be stark and chilling but this is eerie.

1968 at 50: A SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS - PINK FLOYD

Calling a famous band's album transitional is almost a guarantee that most fans will drop it after a single listen, if that. We want to hear all of our favourite music at full strength. Some, like New Order's Movement or Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy can get repatriated by the fanbase over time. But Pink Floyd, who really only made transitional albums between Piper and Meddle seem doomed to a section of its timeline as lost years. If you listen from Piper onwards you will hear nothing but continuity building to a clear development. Then again, when you have and then suddenly don't have one of rock history's great human enigmas that can kind of get in the way. So, this is a post-Syd album (even though he's on it) in a way that Obscured by Clouds or Atom Heart Mother aren't. Until that's dealt with the record gets slotted into the post Morrison Doors albums as a curio for the completist. But there's a lot more here than that.

Let There be More Light opens with a pacy R&B guitar riff weirded by a chromatic organ wash. It settles into a half pace thud before Waters enters with his soft vocals in a chant that breaks into a more panic-ed acid rock blast. And back and on. It's a sci-fi story of an alien race descending on earth to inspire us to evolve. After a namecheck of the Beatle's Lucy the track continues to a fairly formless instrumental fade that cannot peak.

Remember a Day features Syd on slide which adds worlds of atmosphere. Ex-Beatles engineer Norman Smith, returning to produce from Piper provides the tom tom thump that Nick Mason couldn't arrive at which lends a solid loping quality. A cinematic piano part is gently lowered on top by Rick Wright who also lends his smooth and airy vocal to this song about childrens' play and imagination. This is the song from the album that appeared on the Relics compilation and, until the record rose from its obscurity as half of a twofer (A Nice Pair) to a decades later release in its own right, was the sole evidence of the set. The eerie beauty of it promised an album composed entirely of it but it's the only moment like it here.

Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun begins with a murmuring bass line, ceremonial tom toms, vibraphone and a near whispered vocal fro mWaters. The cryptic lyric suggests a kind of legendary link between the ancient world and space travel (but really it might as well just be nice phrases following each other). There's no real development to this one but the atmospherics from the continued interplay of the organ, bass and whispered repetition of the phrase "the heart of the sun" give it a dark and pleasing flow. This is the only track that all five members played on. That doesn't mean they were all there at the same session (it was recorded between Piper and this one with Syd and finished off with Gilmour).

Corporal Clegg bursts to life as a guitar heavy dose of psychedelia mixing yelling guitars and a theatrically nasty lead vocal (Nick Mason in his only sung vocal in the band's recording output). The irony of wartime heroism and the personal devastation it wrought in families is typical of the themes of late '60s Britpop where the creative controls had been given to the bands themselves instead of their management. We go from Clegg's pathetic achievement to a choral presentation of his mother's gin-soaked pride to a kazoo-heavy knees-up. Overlong but well played and mark-hitting.

 The title track begins after you've given up listening for it and then lifts into a sci-fi landscape of chromatic organ shimmers and low level noise. This fades under a rising tribal tom tom onslaught which brings its own atonal soundscape. That folds under a lengthy choral and wonky noise fest which closes with a major third. This might have been avant-rock but it was already well behind progressions in orchestral music like Stockhausen's or the freer jazz movements and, even within the greater rock area, already snagged by the like of Zappa and Beefheart. For all that it's an easy twelve minutes of atmosphere  created by well engineered recording. Like Interstellar Overdrive on the debut this was a kind of mid point between the jamming live shows and the freedom of the studio. If the tale it told had no plot that wasn't going to stop the band revisiting this territory and would take years and albums until the sublime Echoes on 1971's Meddle established the strengths of blending explorative textures with confident musicianship. For now it was the bit of the album where the tab you took on side one kicked in and every squeak and thrung made perfect sense.

See Saw shimmers with jazz chords, piano, vibes, mellotron, the big late '60s bass and guitar. Rick Wright's pleasant lead vocals (like Syd in a torpor). Siblings growing up and drifting apart after the closeness of the realm of the family. Occasional jazzy interventions in the rhythm never jar and the flow is maintained. While the lyric lifts it above a mood piece the swamp of audio effects like flanging, tremolo and massive reverb keep this one in the late '60s never to emerge. You can hear the way to great gig in the sky but it's too buried in its times.

And now we must address it, the Effervescing Elephant in the room. Jugband Blues is the only obvious indication that Syd Barrett was still there. From its stark opening with guitar and echoey vocals, through a thumping refrain to a real Salvation Army band and back down to a fragmented mess this is a capsule of Syd's progress from the cheery wit of the opening about him being there but not being there to rhymes that sound like he's making them up on the spot. Then there's a brief wistful moment where he seems lost and then there's a ragged jolly bit about not caring and then the Salvation Army band comes in with a splodgy refrain and then there's a wandering psychedelic dissonance which ends as though cut with a scapel. After a little silence the acoustic guitar drifts back in with Syd asking questions and ending on: "And what exactly is a joke." He's not smiling. He means it. Does that make it funny? We're left with silence. Nothing like the self appreciative calls and laughter that would interlard the White Album later in the year which told listeners that everyone should be in on it. But here it's nothing, the same silence that Syd heard the evening that the rest of the band decided not to pick him up on the way to the gig.

And then it's over and the wild-eyed scarecrow with the fright wig has left the building, stumbling without direction into forty years of night. Actually, Syd heads off back to his Chelsea loft and paints. And strums chords and writes lyrics, recording two LPs that veer from brilliance to distintegration before he heads back home to Cambridge and his family who help him manage his schizophrenia. The rest of the band, to their eternal credit, ensure that he is looked after financially, getting a guernsey on every Floyd compilation album and royalties from his songs they still play live. Invaded by journalists and then knuckle-headed fans who are quick with cameras but slow with learning about privacy he goes to the shop and makes bizarre furniture in his house and then dies at sixty, affluent and voluntarily obscure. The record label keeps releasing legacy-violating albums of outtakes and failures from the Black Lagoon but anyone who loves a bit of Syd leaves them in the shop.

After that The Pink Floyd becomes just Pink Floyd and they get into it, experimenting and carving off everything that fails until you get to Meddle's crafted songs and epic and then the one that hangs them on the stars of the firmament, Dark Side, after which time they will be able to endure the ridicule of the punks and indifference of the post punks and receive visits from the newly curious for evermore. But for a moment here there was real conflict and through a couple of LP sides of assured psychedelia you can hear the instant of severance, the cracking of execution and the silence that made the promise.

1968 at 50: ODESSEY AND ORACLE - THE ZOMBIES

There was a shadow in my awareness of music as I crossed from twelve to thirteen. I was a classical fan and heard most of any other music as noise, the stuff that got through the way that the juddering grind of roadworks can get through a poorly insulated cinema. But some did get through and when they did it was sneaky. I noticed them less as music than glimpsed scenes. The cold doom of Riders of the Storm whispered out of the Sunday morning oldies radio, showing me murderous hitchhikers and sweet families on a rainy afternoon drive. And one morning it was A song called Time of the Season. A chilly Latin beat and a kind of ghostly overlapping vocal of seduction. Not a sexy seduction but a sleazy one.

What's your name? Who's your daddy? Is he rich? Is he rich like me?

I knew the song was old but not how old. I didn't imagine a band in flower power kaftans but a single wax faced destroyer with slicked back hair and a close-fitting suit. He emerged from the shade of the terrace with a jaded smile and folded himself under the skin of the pretty young woman standing alone there. He would consume her from the inside out in the muted light of his chic apartment and rest, exhausted, recharging for the next one.

I think I got the image from the guy on the cover art of Frank Zappa's Weasles Ripped My Flesh, a record whose atonality and jazziness scared me. I don't know why I associated the character in the Zombies song with that image but it happened. Thereafter, the zombies had a cache for the sinister borne entirely of a casual misassociation of mine. So, when the hits 'n' memories station played She's Not There or Tell Her No they came from the dark end of the stage. That's before you get to the band name.

Decades later I picked up a cheapo CD compilation which opened the image out to reveal a British invasion sound stirred with a little jazz and even some classical influences. I'd also picked up the repute that their troubled magnum opus might have rivalled Sgt Pepper for breakthroughs. The comp had a few tracks from the album so, finally, in the teens of the 21st century, I found a copy.

Care of Cell 44 I already knew and enjoyed but here it was in context as an album opener. A few plinks of tack piano and were strolling through a typical late '60s four on the floor sunny day song. Then the title occurs to you and you start listening to the words. Colin Blunstone's grownup choirboy tenor lights above the jaunty Britpop and the chorus bursts out of a humming vocal quartet into a brilliant high spot with harmonies but Penny Lane this ain't. He's talking about his girl who's getting out of prison today. It's not so much the prison aspect but the driving optimism of the performance without so much as a glance at the elephant there in the corner: in prison for what? I'm biased, I suppose, but given the era my thoughts hurtle straight to Mary Bell (Google is thy friend and sage). And, of course, is it even a prison?

A Rose for Emily takes the tacks out of the piano. Blunstone pipes in with the tale of a lady whose roses nurtured the love of everyone who picked them but never received one herself. Loveless from youth to death, her pride protecting her from love's pain, Emily has lived entirely for the distant pleasure of other people. The chamber choir and piano arrangement and sweetness of the melody belie that, while this does not have the nightmarish storm of an Eleanor Rigby, this song does not let up in its recounting of human futility. It's sad but it's also severe. There's a real need for all that Mozartian pez candy in the harmonies.

Maybe After He's Gone begins with a minor key vocal melody countered with a descending bass that bursts into a bright chorus featuring the title. The plaintive verses insist on the narrator's memories of a love, the minor descent telling us of their futility. The chorus is all hope and choral backing vocals ... but still futile. After a stark, simpler-backed admission of dark loneliness the chorus repeats with diminishing backing finally ending in an acapella call and response that sounds like his own voice just repeating his futility.

Beechwood Park comes in with a very similar counterpoint but with a gentler mix of organ and guitar through a Leslie speaker. Blunstone's chalky tenor leads us through verses of beautiful memories that end in the the dark in Beechwood Park. A major key middle eight tells of his compulsion to return to the memories before the chorus circles back with the distance of the time. He's longing but enjoys the melancholy without descending into the madness of morbid jealousy of the previous song. Bittersweet, not just bitter.

Brief Candles leads a vocal with a gentle but richly melodic line on the piano with the voice doubles. A man resists the truth of the need for the affair to end as the woman telling him this tenses at the table and tries to work out how to exit. The chorus speaks for both identically as they think of themselves as the brief candles of Macbeth's soliloquy. A beautiful song with a chorus that rouses even though it shouldn't. The verses, incidentally, are sung by the three different vocalists in the band. Blunstone's chalky choir tenor is easy to pick but the others are difficult to tell from him. Telling.

The old side one ends with the first of two epics left to close LP sides. Hung Up on a Dream begins with a key-stretching piano intro. The band swell behind it until a cymbal crash gets us under way. It can be easy to forget how steadily rocking this song is, given the ethereal choiring and Summer of Love fantasising it goes into. The chalky tenor enters describing a world made flowers, vibrations and neon. He understands that he might well just be hung up on the dream and it's easy to forget, as he was barging in past you that he is remembering this, not predicting it. With its cinematic climaxes and restarts, lush with thick Mellotron string sections, gleaming clean electric guitars and otherworldly backing vocals it soars and spreads more like proto-proggers the Moody Blues than anyone else. But lingering on the mind of the listener as the angelic aahs and crashing cymbals play us to the final trailing Mellotron chord that the dreamer will never regain the ecstasy of the dream. The silence at the end of side one is thick with the most gorgeous despair you will hear in a 60s album.

Side two kicks off with a Mellotron flute piece a little sweeter than the one that drew life from the Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever. But that's  ok as we've cleared all that darkness of the first side and we're back in the late '60s. A beautiful wassailing chorus bursts into bright counterpoint singing of a girl's beauty in the different seasons. The solo vocal verses observe her a little more cynically as she walks by with the accessories of adulthood like Dolly Bird dresses and diamonds. We proceed through seasons that bloom in variations of the opening chorus and the verses age and sage her until the final one starts under water with the piano playing a strange offbeat until both make their way from the right channel to the middle as the charges of ephemerality are again drowned by the carol singers who blithely sing the seasons on until the last word is heard on the flutes that began us.

I Want Her She Wants Me is every band's choice of the fusion of now and then, the harpsichord. But this isn't the blues soloing of Ray Manzarek on Love Me Two Times, it's a far more comfy arpeggio rolling over the bass and drums. Blunstone coos his story of an uncertain love exploding into the joy of mutuality. A little minor key reminder that all was not always well and we're back with such confidence that we end with countless affirmations of the title. Two minutes and fifty seconds of bliss.

This Will be Our Year features Blunstone singing sweetly over thumping Beatlesque piano. A brass section comes in for what sounds like the best pub singalong of 1968 (before Hey Jude came out, that is, so there wasn't a lot of time). The handclapping last drinks is brought down by Blunstone's persistently melancholic vocal timbre but lifted by his riffing on the opportunities given him by the fruity chord progression. It sounds like a closer but there will be more.

And stranger. With a grinding frown straight out of the first side The Butcher's Tale (Western Front 1914) starts with a harmonium vamp that feels like trying to walk in mud while every step sucks your foot into the void. Some eerie booms and echoes enclose the chords before the vocals enter, sour and tired but with the perfect diction of someone whose voice must be heard. Bassist Chris White sang this song of his penning after failing to get Blunstone to do it. The performance is perfect, plaintive and angered drawn from the best of Brecht and Weill soaring to a heart rending cry of the shaking that all who face such horror must suffer. Rod Argent's harmonium part mixes the grinding that anything more energetic that one chord per bar makes of the instrument (generally powered by foot pumps) and a J.S. Bach like grandeur.

Too grim? Well now it's back over the channel to Swinging London to a four-on-floor flurry of parties and happenings where the roll call of names choirs out under the chorus as Blunstone's vigorous but pure tenor repeats the chorus: they are friends of mine, friends of mine. The second verse has a angelic descant like the one in Dream but it's much chirpier. It starts it charts  it ends.

Which brings us back to Do.

Dundun Dun ts ahh. Dundun Dun ts ahh. Time of the Season announces its sexiness before the first line. What could be an arch hedonist's sigh at the sight of beauty in the dark or the daunting thrill of a corridor to adventures over voting age announces that we're in for something fresh and strange. It is both stately and depraved. Blunstone's vocal enters wearing a cape, announcing that it is "the time of the season when love runs high". And a line or two, to "let me try with pleasured hands." The song shifts to the next step on the grand staircase to talk with harmonies flashing of the sun and promised lands until the massed angels of the band's vocalists converge in mighty blinding chords to sing: IT's the TIME of the SEE-EA-SON for LOVE ING. After a breath the opening tomtom and breath resumes but the vocal field changes. Blunstone's lines are countered by Argent or White, sometimes echoing them, sometimes predicting them. We do not know if the demon is centre stage or on the shoulder. This is the verse I remembered from childhood about who's your daddy and is he rich. The ringmaster of the rites has blended with the crowd enough to lure prey into the shadows. "Has he taken any time to show you what you need to live?" the questions slithering around each other until the steps to the chorus are met again and again the host of light reminds us that it's the time of the season. Instead of another verse we get a Hammond B3 solo so jazzy that it qualifies as sinful in a rock song. The second verse repeats as that is the one that finds the most success in the dark. Steps up to the chorus and then another solo plays us out. If the summer of love is being invoked here it is not the one felt in California. This is Belle Epoque not Bel Air. Less Leary than leery. Less Ashbury than Crowley. Good stock not Woodstock.

But there's the thing. As brilliant as this and all the other songs on this set are they do not add up to a cohesive whole. This album was recorded after the fabs had left the building with Sergeant Pepper in the vault. But where Pepper still feels like a concept album despite the concept being dropped early in the piece, Odessey and Oracle doesn't, despite a high cohesion in style between songs and a clear thematic vein running through most of the two sides. Why?

First, it was a year out of time. Recorded in 1967 (it really was recorded just after Sgt Pepper) but released in 1968, it's tack piano, harpsichords and novelty arrangements eclipsed the inventiveness of the songcraft by sounding like last year. The Fabs themselves would end the year with a double LP clad in an almost featureless white cover. Odessey's Carnaby St cutout and paisley artwork would have looked like an album with the word punk in the title in 1978. Listening now, none of this matters. The songs are good and set in deathless arrangements that neither embarrass with self-conscious psychedelic styling nor feel bloated by a lack of ideas. The album would not find its audience for decades. In the so retro it's new stakes, the mellotron strings and verby harmonies sound as now as Polyphonic Spree. There's no shame about an album being unloved in its own time. Odessey joins such wonders as The Pretty Things' SF Sorrow and Big Star's Sister Lovers, Nick Drake's Pink Moon on that shelf (among many others).

The album was also the soundtrack to the band's disintegration. The songwriters worked on new material (included on 2000s re-releases of Odessey) and were persuaded to contribute to a new LP under the Zombies name but it fell to earth. This is astounding when listening to the set with its riches and engaging themes and authentic golden age production and arrangements. But at least it is here and we can again let it fold around us with the strange warmth of its pessimism and the great flinty wonder of the most worldly choirboy who ever lived. If this has eluded you so far, choose it before something better known and judge them by it. Drink it in and enjoy the vengeance of it.

1968 at 50: WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT - THE VELVET UNDERGOUND

This is the difficult second album but not in the usual sense. The Velvet Underground had no trouble extending the path of the first set, they just took another. It's difficult because it doesn't behave like the last one. Same voices, same playing and same kind of songs but all offered with such a confidence as to seem like a new band. It sounds like the band you suspect were there all along, just free of the oppressive inexperience that almost killed the first record. If the Velvet Underground and Nico was the album that bought by a hundred people who all started bands, White Light/White Heat is the one that reached across the decades and gave a new sound and attitude to the future. It's hard to love but impossible to forget.

The title track starts with everyone at once, a continued blast of four on the floor piano vamp with increasingly noisy rock instruments and a reversed call and response: White light - White light going and messing up my mind. If you played it with the same lineup as I Get Around you might let the attitude and subject matter slide. The two part harmonies are on pitch. The rhythm section is solid. Lou Reed sounds like he might as well be calling a dance from the early 60s with a name like The Spud or The Bangarang but he's talking about the chaos of mainlining speed and he takes us through the thrill of its threats with a constant sense of teetering. Around him, the backing vocals and band close in like the caving senses of the speed freak. Eventually Cale's bass barges into the centre of the mix and does a stuttering riff that has to keep finding its footing but keeps punching until everything quietly collapses. If My Generation was a sped up mod this is the next day in a diary entry of a whole life.

The first thing that you notice about The Gift, especially if you listen with headphones, is that the talking on one side and the music on the other. If you had any hope of the two channels merging into a warm natural stereo mix, forget it. Forget, also, any idea that Cale's solid Welsh coo is going to lift into melody. This means that if you aren't ready to commit to hearing John Cale read out a short story for a lengthy eight or so minutes you should probably skip this one. No, you shouldn't. Just as the headlight-eyed opening track was crucial to the force of this album so this defiantly wrong track is, too.

It's Lou Reed's piece, the tale of a drab boy who is inspired to post himself to the woman he thinks is waiting for him states away. College is over for the year and she has gone back to Wisconsin. The thought of her giving in to any Neanderthal with a will is unbearable so he packs himself up with padding and provisions ("it'd be as good as going tourist") and off he goes. Meanwhile, over in Milwaukee, Marsha Bronson gets a visit from her friend Sheila and they talk idly about their sex lives. The package arrives and ... Seriously, if you've never heard this track I'm not going to spoil a horrifying and funny ending.

The music at first sound like any cruddy jam you've been in where no one wants to stand out and everyone metaphorically bows their heads and gazes at the carpet. But give it more of a listen and you'll hear it's far more concerted an effort. There's a dispassionate grind to it that lends a sort of contempt, a kind of icky confidence. The music's happy enough walking us through but when it's done it's done and you don't get conversation, ok?

This is supposedly Cale's first reading of the story and I've no reason to think otherwise. It is strange to hear such a sneering New Yorker tale intoned like Mr Davies from down the dell. But that's the point. This ain't Under Milk Wood. The alien accent reading out Waldo's nebbish thoughts seems ok but things get screwy as soon as the dialogue between the women starts. Not so, strange, I guess. Lou Reed was always a good writer, a sharp wit and a keen observer of the life around him and his way with speech patterns never abandoned him. It's so strong it reaches through Cale's thick Welsh cooing. The final deadly statement is met with the shrugging end of the music on the other side. The first time you hear this you swear it will be the last. But it won't be.

If The Gift was too much you might want to pretend the next track was being sung in Portuguese or Urdu. Lady Godiva's Operation begins with a gentle modal figure on a very slightly overdriven guitar. Cale again enters but singing this time. His voice is melodic but he sings each phrase as though describing something he's holding between thumb and forefinger but sounding world weary at the same time. In fact he kind of sounds like Nico. The gentle modal tune extends beyond where you would expect and gets no relief form a chorus. The more times you hear it the creepier it gets because you now know what's coming.

The first half of the lyric seems to describe a Lady Godiva as less the serious protester of the middle ages than a local temptress taunting the straight world with an effortless seductive power. The second part is the operation and seems to be a lobotomy which is by no means completely clear. There is a suggestion that the libido of the title character, with repeated listening less of the historical figure (but the confusion is intentional) than a contemporary seductive transsexual. The operation seems a botched lobotomy but it's not that simple either. Is the "great, great decision" the doctor makes one of where and what to cut? This is a song where reading lots of listeners' personal interpretations gets seriously spooky. My favourite is a ghastly one. Lady Godiva was considered a threat to the local boys. When she went in for her sex change the surgeon did as he was bribed and gave her a lobotomy instead. More simply, it might be a lobotomy from the off, her family responding to the era's somewhat medieval approach to sexual difference with draconian psychiatry and then surgery. There are some images of the shaved headed patient who "once was screaming". In the narration of the song the patient wakes on the operating table through sloppy anaethesis, interrupts the doctor who kills with his scalpel. From local radiant celebrity to tortured corpse. Lightless days.

The band plays gently but the guitars and Cale's downmixed viola are brightly distorted. There's an unnerving mix of sweetness and factory-like noise that holds together. As with The Gift, this is not a jam session. Same with the vocals. When the tone of the story changes from wistful admiration to the stark horror of the operating theatre Cale's cooing control is disrupted by Lou Reed's hard American accent speaking as much as singing, sometimes sounding like he's reading out a note to a listener in another room. And worse: towards the end, about the 4:40 mark while Cale is making the hissing sound like a respirator there is a whisper. It's almost completely buried but you can hear it in headphones: a voice, a few times, moves around the stereo image saying, "you're not a girl." This uncomfortable nightmare does not rest easy because its subject cannot.

In case, after the Gift and Lady Godiva's operation, you were ready to lift the needle and quietly replace the disc in its inner sleeve, nevermore to remove it, side one ends with a gentle Latin figure on a clean electric guitar that sounds for all the world like it had been lying around from the first album (though it's a little stiffer, nyuck nyuck). Here She Comes Now retains this gentle gleam as Reed half whispers variations on "if she ever comes now" over the constant floating bossa nova.It could be a sedated resetting of waiting for the man or even the effect of waiting for the rush but it works at its most obvious level as a song about working someone gradually toward orgasm. The giver's own impatience mounts but that's all part of it. The woman seems unresponsive, made out of wood, but he keeps going. But this is not a Doors song and we don't get the money chords. The lulling ebb and flow of the setup just continues to the fade with Reed stuttering the lines in frustration.

Side two blasts straight into I Heard Her Call My Name. The opening is chaotic with Reed's amp on 11 and the tortured signal screaming with too much pain to steady itself. Other instruments are clattering or roaring without any real coherence. Reed repeats the main line from the previous number but chucks in a few troublesome phrases like "gone gone gone". He's ready. His eyes are wide open. It is both literally and figuratively the flipside of Here She Comes Now. The girl plummets into uncontrollable orgasm.

But then it settles into a rough but structured rock song with a call and response like the title track and things get odd. By what he's saying it sounds like he's hearing her call his name not in sexual ecstasy but from beyond the grave or, just maybe, from beyond the point of death but still on the bed. Finally he tells us that his mind split open. More uncontrolled guitar screaming in the breaks and a repeat of the only conventional verse with the garage band style backing vocals singing the title phrase. Is it a memory, a directly recalled moment of orgasm, or maybe just a moment of genuine sudden grief that feels as strong as this without stopping to pick up any softening nostalgia.

Reed's wild playing could sound to today's listener like a mid-life crisis guy in the guitar shop trying to do Hendrix or someone who didn't have a clue but there's a lot more going on here. The unmeasured opening chaos lets us know that the more ordered verse is only part of this track's expression and serves as a couple of visits to dry land while the screaming miasma of the rest of the universe blows around it like a cyclone. Reed isn't trying to mock or emulate the emerging guitar heroes of the day like Hendrix or Clapton, he's found an approach to guitar playing that meets his notions as a composer and arranger. This isn't the more studious opposition of a Frank Zappa where (to my ears, anyway) the subversion has class clown scrawled all over it (early Mothers, at least) it has a far more situationist feel to it and is yet another cue for future generations. Listen to any Sonic Youth from the '80s and feel the familiarity.

Sister Ray is too often given a dismissive wave of a hand, usually to do with its length. At seventeen minutes it's the only other track on side two. Again, the grinding backing (two chords and two chords only) is not a jam in any sense, though its members are free to come in and noise off however they might. As with most of this album's songs this one is about the account, the story Lou Reed tells and directs with mise en scene of raucous but steady garage grind. Though it can feel like it with Cale's left hand parts on the organ or the chugging low string barre chords, there is no bass guitar on this track; the session is a one off, the way jazz was done (until Miles made Silent Way but that's another story). But this ain't jazz.

Reed tells the story of an aborted orgy with local characters, drag queens and sailors. It's told from a few viewpoints like a Rashamon imagined by Hubert Selby. A central event of a drugfucked partier taking out a gun and shooting one of the sailors comes circling back around as does a variation on the response which is not horror but might be shock as someone always says to the shooter that they shouldn't do that as it stains the carpet. Unlike Operation where a pair of voices were used to disrupt a single narration, Sister Ray keeps it all with Reed as he plays several characters per verse (see what I did there?) without annoucement. Refrains help like the one about him trying to fit up some heroin but failing to get his vein while getting a blow job. But he couldn't hit it sideways just like Sister Ray said. It's funny, queasy, sleazy and horrifying by turns and sometimes all at once. It's earnest and it's funny as the sordid tale loops around the way it would in memory while the growl, crashing and grinding goes on like the traffic out the window.

When I first heard this song in the '70s it was out of context, on a compilation that mixed and matched the first three albums. Because of this it just came on out of nowhere and in them auld vinyl days it meant that I'd really want to hear the other song on that side (it was a double LP) to put it on. So I didn't. Much later with the 45th Anniversary hi-res download I was able to hear the whole sequence of the album in one go. I dreaded doing this as my memories of its notorious tracks haunted me but I started doing what I do for all these blogposts: I put it on my phone, went out for an hour long walk and let it come to me.

This always freshens well worn music and debugs less familiar tracts. It took about three of those walks but it got there and I got it. Sister Ray finally sounded like it was at home and the album finally sounded like the big dark obelisk of sound and blackened cinema that it is. And this time I heard, through appreciating the integration of the ideas, a band at its serious best, exploratory and unforgiving. I will always love the first album with its trophy hall of dirges, sweet and sour takeaways, grimness and cheek but White Light/White Heat works better, more like a song cycle than a bunch of songs. It's better produced, more deliberately arranged, more solid in the playing and tougher in the writing. There is no cute sixties-ness about it and it doesn't sound like the metal that grew out of blues at the end of its year. Even the cover was out of time. It was Andy again but instead of a big colourful wink it was a subdued image, hard to see in the shadows (but always seen once seen), black on black, a skull on an arm in a field of black. Hindsight might suggest to you the artwork of Peter Saville at that later Factory and the art he put on the arresting covers of Joy Division or Durutti Column around a decade later. Here in 1969 it might have felt like a postal delivery from the future.

The Velvet Underground released five albums in their initial series of incarnations and they were distinguished from each other by their similarities (even the last one which is really a misnamed solo album by a non-original member). Their differences draw them into a block that testifies to internal strife (a similar "then there were three" sequence that the Byrds were going through) but for me White Light is the only one that feels like a band is making it and at a time that compounded late nights with too much talk and drugs and lunches where all the nightmares and whimsy became articulate and performable. Maybe that's why it's ghosts haunt the future in the grooves of Jonathon Richman, Kevin Shields, Lee Rinaldo and too many more. I've chosen individuals rather than band names there, not because I think those bands were only those people but to give a name to each to renew the perception, to get us arguing again, to get us listening to this kind of record again, to get us grumpy and creative. We owe and the fun is in the paying.

1968 at 50: THE BYRDS - THE NOTORIOUS BYRD BROTHERS

Towards the end of 1967 The Byrds were a different band from the one that recorded the final original line up album 5D. And different again from the one that had recorded the more consistent Younger Than Yesterday. By the end of recording this one the quartet would be a duo looking at a very uncertain future. Gene Clark was long gone but David Crosby was getting restless and unpredictable. Clark was briefly asked back but left soon after. Crosby was fired, never to return outside of much later revivals. The drummer Mike Clarke was sacked, asked back and sacked again. A bonus track on the 1997 remaster CD bears witness to the cranky state that band had got to as Mike Clark runs the gauntlet of McGuinn, Crosby and Hillman and their tripartite wit as he consistently fails to please. All that, more, and the band still managed to created their slickest and most convincing development yet. I prefer the early ones, however flawed and bitsy, but I can't go past Brothers for the pleasurable wholeness and sheer joy it offers.

Artificial Energy starts with a stutter on the snare and a full brass section before the band comes in with guitars and vocal harmonies. But something's wrong. The brass is clear as a bell but sounds like it's playing down the street, not a part of the whole arrangement even though it's constant force is keeping an otherwise fairly standard rock tune bouyant. The song is about being so sped up on amphetamines that you only find out you've committed murder during your come down. Bum. Mer.
The story takes us from the elation of the come on to the worst of the plunge down. So, what at first might seem a bizarre mixing decision gains some weight as a canny trope to suggest the out of body fog that a big speedy time can give. The end features the kind of druggy frown of a bad time with a little feedback that seems to drag itself under a rock.

Goin' Back is The Byrds we knew were still in there under the crazy trumpets and words of the opener. But again it's a strangely muted version. The vocals are low in the mix, however full bodied and like on the previous two albums there is no big pop riff on the Rickenbacker to announce it. It's a cool and laid back ode to returning to the energy of childhood imagination by the great Carole King and Gerry Goffin and the Byrds glide through it as though in pennance for the decadence of Artificial Energy. A first listen might have it sounding bland and over light, a regression even (Crosby thought it was) but, really, it's pitched at a perfect level and it's mix of characteristic 12 string chime, block harmonies and Brian Wilson like glockenspiel lead us warmly into the rest of the album. Whether you think it's really going back or a gentle way forward no Byrds fan can keep the door shut as the final gorgeous three part la-la-la chorus glitters into the light.

A gentle ground of clean chiming guitars, low bass note and insistent high hat begins Natural Harmony and for a moment you relax into the thought of a gentle hippy ballad. Indeed the first droning vocal lines "falling through, me and you" seem to support that. Suddenly the voices take flight and there's something wrong. The voices sound a little phased, a kind of underwater distortion. The next iteration reveals a distant whining under the vocals and then when the next section starts with a droning tambura under the voices you stop and realise that it's actually a very early synthesiser. Multi-tracked as all synths in 1968 were monophonic, the effect is intended, overflowing, treacly yet firm and Eastern. Listening now, you might be forgiven a shrug but this is among the first uses of synthesis on a rock record. As such we are hearing a prototype of electronic arrangement and must listen closer. The song is a hippy ballad but instead of the backwards guitars or tapeloops, the wahwah pedals or fuzzboxes of other bands (or even this one in earlier incarnations) the miracle machine of Bob Moog has entered the studio to stay. The usage adds colour and texture but no gimmick. The following decade would render this cliche but here it is innovation and present in our ears at a lot of time and effort. An early Moog filled a room and took an expert to get any sound out of it. Listen to the track. It sounds effortless and natural. Hillman's songwriting has also come many leaps from the bland country rock of his samey numbers on Younger Than Yesterday. And yet this collective forward lurch is kept tightly packed in a song that really only feels (on first hearing) like a conduit between those that sandwich it. Further listens reveal riches.

A segue with a strident ride cymbal flows into Draft Morning. One of David Crosby's long melodic phrase songs without choruses, the voices come in over a gentle rolling guitar /bass figure, only slightly above the backing. Smooth lines and creamy harmonies belie the grievous lyric about being called up for service in the heavily unpopular Vietnam War. The break in the middle is not a solo but an emulated battle with the horn section from the opening track playing military stabs, explosions and gunfire. This fades as the rolling figure returns and the final verse ends in a question which suggests the narrator's resistance. The fade is led by the 12 string playing bugle arpeggios and a gentle la la harmony given the same kind of phasing treatment as the previous song. The lyric really only runs to three sentences yet the song feels full. McGuinn and Hillman worked on this number after Crosby's departure, giving themselves co-writing credits and further alienating them from the already distant Crosby. For all that the song flows easily from those before it and adds a dignified solemnity to the sequence.

Wasn't Born to Follow sounds like it could have come from any of the first three albums with its cantering pace, chiming Rickenbacker and unison vocals. But again something seems a little strange. There is a very slow phase cycle affecting the bass and guitars (a lap steel and a Telecaster join in). The solo section plunges into heavy phasing with a squealing series of 12 string bends and the band sounding like they are playing through a jet engine. A smooth transition takes us up out of this for the final verse which sounds like the old Byrds again but then the playout is distinctly country with a twangy Telecaster kicking up the chord progression (is it James Burton? he's one of the session men listed) before it all ends with the clump of a snare drum. This is the second Goffin/King track on the album and the fact that it sounds like one of the band's originals from an early album testifies to what they always brought to their cover versions. This is so appealing it always feels a verse too short. It feels perfect placed in the soundtrack of Easy Rider with its forward motion and easy vocals.

Get to You begins with a lap steel pouring cream over a 5/4 rhythm. The string section takes on a drunken loping quality. The vocals are one to one harmony and the lyric tells the story of a flight to London to get to the you of the title. The chorus of "that's a little better" squeezes the vocals into the distance and filters them through a phaser as the percussion intensifies. In the third verse the narrator reveals that it's taken twenty years to get there which throws in a little intrigue. Is it sci fi or a projection into the future? One of the briefly returning Gene Clark contributions with McGuinn though the original credit went to Chris Hillman and McGuinn.

Change is Now begins with a bass droning under a bright guitar arpeggio. The hushed harmonies  come in with a cathedral like solemnity before a brief country chorus and an electronic solo section which sounds like a heavily treated 12 string and a backwards one over the same drone. The chant like verse returns and lifts to the same Nashville chorus with brighter vocals and a tweedling lap steel. We end with the hushed chant telling us that the fear is gone. A deceptively plain message of peace.

Old John Robertson starts with a bugle arpeggio on the 12 string but then blasts off into a brisk two beat country. Old style Byrds harmonies  but with a constant chiming steel. When the title character's wife dies there is a sudden incursion by a string section with a beautiful brisk but still sorrowful figure. Back into the song the phasing is back and stays as the song tells the tale of how this now lonely man was ridiculed without anyone asking for the truth of his life as fear kept them out. A kind of Simon and Garfunkel pathos number but with a cowboy band on acid. All this under two minutes.

Tribal Gathering settles into another 5/4 jazz groove. A busy vocal melody delivers images of angels and butterflies and crowds of happy people. Instrumental breaks scream with electronics and drones. Another verse and another psychedelic break. End. This is what happens when a young David Crosby and a young Chris Hillman write a song together. It's just over two minutes and it's gone from gentle jazz to freakout twice.

Weird synthesised warbling gives way to a gentle harmony vocal about the carefree life under the ocean wave in Dolphin Smile. Another wailing droning break with a thudding funereal drum. Another gorgeous verse and it fades into tinkling and glistening.

Full Sci Fi synthesis for the backing of Space Odyssey. A loping waltz time with sea shanty style melody in the vocals and a solemn fuzz guitar. The seagoing balladry is in fact about space voyages and takes more than a leaf out of Arthur C. Clarke's story The Sentinel. Stanley Kubrick would release his epic 2001: A Space Odyssey later the same year. McGuinn would continue to approach science fiction for his inspiration but this sombre piece about a mysterious pyramid on the moon and it appearing to have waited for an evolved species to find it probably finds its highest expression, there at the apex of the strange object in the song. With a pace and gravity that recalls the dark plea of 5D's I Come and Stand at Every Door we can hear how seriously he took the notions he sang of.

While it can often feel so light that it passed by without leaving a trace Notorious Byrd Borthers yet makes a strong and cohesive statement of its times, of the fear of war and the rewards of peace and hope, always hope. But while those sentiments might remind us of the scriptural references of the earlier Turn Turn Turn the theme here is progression. Twin forces of traditional country voices and the electronica that was turning the most basic of songs into wailing otherworldly things weave together to give us an album both recognisable as The Byrds and suggestive of a very different group. Even the sameness of the instrumental breaks with their drones, feedback and wailing set in gentle vocal harmonies and the rolling chimes of the electric 12 string, and the often unbroken sequencing  suggest that the instrumentals are windows on to a swiftly passing landscape of uncharted worlds.

And then there were two. Soon enough there would be only one but McGuinn soldiered on, taking the name into country, hard rock, gospel and finally a kind of grinding early seventies rock that felt like the ship had run aground. Until then there was this lift from the blandness of the previous set that showed how very much could be done when the lineup grew chaotic and tempestuous. It sounds like an album, not a fight.

1967 at 50: THE BEATLES - MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR

The return of my brother at the end of 1975 changed my life. Not the person as much as the suitcase of records he brought with him (along with an adoring entourage). The year I made the sacrifice of adopting teen culture and adding rock music to the things that were mine was mostly fed with Countdown and local radio. That changed immediately. That afternoon I broke the stillness in the wake of Michael's gang heading off to some neighbourhood hedonism by immersing myself in Led Zeppelin III. I've already described that in the article about that album. But the other golden vein he brought was Beatles and one of the first things I did was find this album.

It must have been the cover with its bright yellows and reds, harlequin stars and the band in animal costumes. Taking it out of the sleeve protector it fell open to reveal the storybook in the gatefold. As I pored over the photographs of the Beatles on the bus, in uniform, as facepainted wizards, I put the disc on and listened as I read the odd text illustrated with odder cartoons. And the trip burst forth.

Roll up roll up for the Magical Mystery Tour! Step right this way!

A big brassy opening gives way to the brassy harmonies singing roll up rollup for the Mystery Tour. Everything drives forward, the big piano chords, the cantering drumming and variations in the shouting exclamations. Less than three minutes of sheer joy. But then it ends on a strange melancholy piano fading through a kind of jazz groove.

The mood continues for the next song, Paul's Fool on the Hill with its tale of an outsider who's happy to be strange regardless of the mockery of the straight world. Paul's vocal can sound strained at times but the sincerity of the song is commanding. Odd textures and colours, branting baritone harmonicas, electronic swishes and a rude off pitch recorder add a schoolyard touch to it. I didn't need the illustrations to show me the scene of this one, lowered myself into it and watched, feeling like the weirdo in the title, home.

Flying is the most underrated Beatles song. It's an instrumental and short but it starts with big electric guitars with amp tremolo that take you up and lift you to the sky. A gentle acoustic playing thirds gleams over this and then we're under way. Organs, oboes and eventually the band's voices play the lovely upwardly moving theme. The motion is smooth and shimmering, a perfect summer day's flight. It ends in what I would soon learn was a mellotron playing odd phrases which like the end of the title track seem to just emerge from underneath the track.

Blue Jay Way. A bright organ chord. A swirling eastern melody meanders over. George's mournful vocal immersed in a flanger continues the tune as a giant bass thumps underneath. There's a gap between verse and chorus which stays in  the east as George moans "please don't be long". Phased drums and backing vocals and grief stricken cellos drive this one through a kind of lysergic sludge. I had never heard atmosphere like this in any music. It's both sinister and sad, alone in the kind of night we had in Townsville when the single sheet of cloud was lighted to a purple mud by the suburban lights and the air thickened with the humidity.

A bouncing singalong by Paul is next with Your Mother Should Know. Clear and beautiful vocal harmonies and a minor key with a break on the piano and organ that had the sound of something from a mystery movie. It doesn't stick around but it's solid and strangely moody, ending on a vocal chord with a groaning tambura trailing out.

Next came the one that scared me: I am the Walrus. A few bars of broken chords on an electric piano are swamped by a thick string section playing another eastern sounding motif. Some rattats on the snare and everyone's in with the same kind of thumping machine as on Blue Jay Way. But John's vocal is acidic, distorted like a fuzz guitar as he spits out strange lines: "I am he as you are he and you are me and we are all together. See how they run like pigs from a gun. See how they fly. I'm crying ..." The momentum grinds on as though the nonsense of the words have the most earnest meaning. The second "I'm crying" is repeated in a lightly broken falsetto which sounds like he really is crying. Second chorus shuts down as a variant of the opening string figure plays druggedly over a small cacophony of laughter and goonish talking. The middle eight is about rain and sunshine and is drawn back into the chorus. The final verse takes the images further into disgust and violence and when the final chorus is trudged through the fade out driven by the violins scraping upwards, a semitone at a time until it seems they can no longer hold the rhythm and grind down into long single notes until they reach the top of their gamut. Meanwhile a group of monsters start chanting something like hop frog hop frog everybody's hop frog over and over and then other voices, spoken start bleeding in talking about burial and murder. Until you know that that last detail was a BBC performance of King Lear and the chant was "got one got one everybody's got one" the fade out sounds like the ghastly fulfilment of all the words before it which to my suggestive mind might well have been a black magic spell. I actually worried about that and wondered if that's what got me listening to it again and again.

This brings us to the end of the sequence as originally released in the UK as a double single with the booklet in a gatefold in a miniature version of the one that came out in the US and I was playing here. The US release for once actually went one better than the UK one. Side two was made up of the non album singles of that year and is rich from first to last.

Bashing straight into Hello Goodbye, Paul's big bright tenor rides on shining piano chords and swishing percussion. The band comes in with a solid electric guitar arrangement, massive kick drum sound, phased backing vocals, a strange druggy sounding string section and blasts of delay on the vocals. Not much to the lyric. I say this and you say the opposite. The song ends then bursts into a coda with a nonsense chant that sounds Hawaiian. Pure joy.

If I am the Walrus scared me Strawberry Fields continued to terrify me with its dreamlike slow motion and dark sounding vocal. It was at once tangy sweet and unsettling. The words seemed similar to the Fool on the Hill where the narrator was happy to hide away in a treehouse in a place where there was nothing to get hung about. I took hung to mean hanged. And then there was the fade out with the wobbly dissonant flutes and black thunderous drums and the murmuring words at the end. My sister Marina whoalso returned to the fold for those holidays told me that Strawberry Fields was a brand of LSD which soon after intrigued me but then just worried me. And the murmuring at the end under the weird flutes was John telling us he'd buried Paul. Then out came the Paul is Dead clues which fascinated and creeped me out. The bulk of the song was irresistable musically but I always lifted the needle before the horror of the fade out could start.

Penny Lane like Hello Goodbye starts with the vocal straight away. This was one I knew from before and loved to hear with its big glittering brass section and Bach trumpet. The loping bassline, bright vocal and gleaming harmonies catch me to this day. The textures that could vary from the trail of a bell or vibrating wine glasses fused into a whole that seemed discovered under marble rather than built. I strongly appreciated the classical connections.

Baby You're a Rich Man start with a chugalug rhythm and a strange oboe twiddling wriggly melody. The harmonies of the vocal are in falsetto and trade with Lennon's fuller lead vocal and the football shout of the chorus. The song seemed to be about what life was like as a famous person who could get or do anything they wanted. Didn't really leave an impression but I never skipped it.

All You Need is Love, on the other hand, I would put on to hear it by itself. Beginning with a rousing brass section playing La Marsellaise the band sing Love love love over a harpsichord and lower strings. John's vocal is half spoken and speaks of inevitability and the order of things before shouting All you need is love. A tiny guitar solo plays the verse melody and the chorus again. The last verse and chorus are eventually swamped by a mounting series of interpolations that add a crowd to the fadeout chant ot Love is all you need, from Paul yelling "everybody" singing the chorus of She Loves You, the saxes playing Glenn Miller riffs and a sense of barely contained but happy chaos.

I had to listen many times before I started appreciating just how much thinking and work had gone into these tracks. In those months where I heard a lot of The Beatles and Led Zeppelin in one go, without any sense of timeline forced me to approach all of it as music, rather than music made by famous people the way it came across on Countdown. All of this consolidated in my head and joined what I knew of J.S. Bach, Mozart or Elgar. This is what, I assumed, the Beatles had began with, these orchestrations and intricate textures and colours. I also assumed (Hey, I was thirteen and listening to rock music closely for the first time) that they played all the instruments or used synthesisers. I had the same absurd confidence in the cure-all power of electronic instruments as some people have in plastic surgery, believing they could solve any problem in their field. Later when I heard the early Beatles I was able to marvel all over again how they'd developed so rapidly.

Until then I had the odd naive booklet with its strange druggy cartoons and the full colour pages of a movie that I expected was like any movie I saw at the cinema with plotting and acting and, in this case, singing and playing. Over the years I read enough to learn that it was poorly regarded and it wasn't until decades later that I saw it on VHS with a near constant wince of embarrassment as the band demonstrated repeatedly as though it had been planned as torture, how they had no idea of how to make a film. Yes, I suckered up and bought the blu-ray with its high def image and sound and I'm softer on the film than I was and am happy to leave it on while I draw until the songs happen.

But it was this album rather than Sargent Pepper that convinced me of The Beatles' musical power and suggested a creative bar placed high. A few months after that I was won over by Queen's A Night at the Opera which, it struck me, was made to the same standards of musicianship and composition and cohesion that Magical Mystery Tour had (despite itself, as I was to learn) and continued the timeline of making records to that industrial standard. And then two years later I was jammed into the big angry noise of punk. but even then, while I was soon to donate my Zeppelin and similar albums to my brother on leaving Townsville I kept all the Beatles ones and when those appeared in new technological packages (CD and then the remasters) I always bought this one first.

1967 at 50: DISRAELI GEARS CREAM

If you learned how to play guitar enough to play along to records in the '70s you knew about blues. Well, you knew about three chords in twelve bars that just kept circling around until the song ended. What you didn't know about were names like Robert Johnson or Howlin' Woolf because no one around you had any records by them because no one else knew about them either. What you played along to was pasty dialled boys from the south of England who did the three chord thang as though they'd come up with it. If you looked at the names in the brackets by the titles you saw a lot of difference and noticed that the few brackets that held names you knew belonged to some of the people on the record sleeve. You also knew that those songs sounded the same as the ones by the strangers. Later, when everything widened out, you might hear the real thing and if you weren't as disappointed with it as you were that wine didn't taste like strong cordial you are lying or you are rare. If you heard that stuff first it would have been different: Led Zeppelin's heavier take, The Stones' more opiod one or Hendrix's interstellar one would have sounded like exploration and Willie Dixon like a pioneer. But it didn't happen that way.

I first knew Cream as a band name only and it took years to finally hear the music. Eric Clapton in the mid-'70s was already a household god and you were meant to speak his name reverently even though at that time he just sounded old and flavourless to you. So when I borrowed Disraeli Gears from my brother Greg to see where the reputation came from I was gobsmacked.

A quick unceremonious titter on the drums and the razor sharp riffs of Clapton's overdriven Gibson with another lead overdubbed from the wailing corner of the fretboard. And it's Clapton's own falsetto that changes everything. I had heard at that stage too many hearty throated shouters sounding like note perfect eisteddfod acts and assumed all white blues was like that. In fact, I thought they all sounded like Jack Bruce from the few Cream songs I had heard on the radio. But Clapton keeps it in the eerie register of his lead licks, howling about a girl possessed by a wicked Strange Brew of forces. For once the coldness of white boy blues finds its purpose as a kind of whimper of fear like a dark ages monk seeing the demon in every village girl. Not siding with the monk but I can hear what he sees.

Sunshine of Your Love thrusts into gear as a distorted riff, scaffolded on the drums and given a banshee wail on the lead guitar. Jack Bruce's clear masculine vocal singing rises about his own dawn approach to the vessel of his lust. Clapton comes in, almost identical except that it becomes easy to tell Bruce's higher skill from his, and the two trade lines, seemingly about the same girl. A little poetry here but really it only has to sound and feel like sex itself. Here enters Ginger Baker's drumming which goes well against the norm by putting great expression on the toms and letting the odd breath through as the "waiting so long" lines tighten their grip. Clapton's howling solo appears from the shadows, not a million notes but a few well chosen and made of indestructible tone.

World of Pain kicks straight in without a riff but with a barely breaking guitar tone playing chords that seem to slowly shimmer. In fact it's a mix of very slight chord picking on the rhythm and restrained twanky wah on the lead, feeling both heavy and buoyant at once. Clapton's vocal in mournful through the lyric about trees in a stifling city and moves through a dirge of isolation in a pitiless world. Jack Bruce comes in for the chorus with a falsetto that has a strange church like sonority. Again the solo, slight and elegant emerges rather than storming in is almost indistinguishable from the vocals. The fade is similarly busy but stately, a procession of subdued wails and a kind of restless march on the tom toms.

Dance the Night Away kind of sounds like a latin seduction song but the words and instrumentation take a more psychedelic turn. For starters Clapton starts with the band on an electric twelve string (in fact a Fender XII) with a gorgeous minor key arpeggio. Jack Bruce joins in with Clapton in a falsetto harmony vocal for the rest of the song. But instead of seduction it's a kind of self-annihilation piece. After love oblivion which rings in with a strange tremolo solo from Clapton that ricochet's off the Byrds more recent outings and seems to soar through the grey heavens the narrator is imagining, like a mandolin possessed by Syd Barrett. Baker's drums again provide a tidal rise and fall without resort to stock fills or too much simple time playing. We lift with the song and if we listen we wonder why we should. But we do.

Next up is, we have to admit it, is the Ringo song. Blue Condition is a hardworking electric blues track that even I would happily hear  rather than just leave on but there's something in the way. Ginger Baker's vocal drags the entire exercise down through the floorboards. It's not his Lunnon accen'. You want to hear that working listen to the Kinks or the Small Faces. It's that he sounds as though he could'n care less about what always sounds like a well considered lyric. And he was the writer. He can't even sing his own blues. One of the extended releases of this album includes Clapton's vocal but while it is much more engaging it still falls. Maybe Ginger sang it at a practice, suggested it to Eric who didn't want to overdo it so perpetuated the absent mood of the vocal for evermore. Perhaps it's also how anyone who ever covers it also performs it. I suppose there are valid arguments for why it should be such an affectless drone but all I hear is a powerful electric blues betrayed by what sounds like indifference.

The old side two begins with restless wah wah chords  an ominous bass figure and a snakepit swirl of ride cymbals. Jack Bruce's dramatic room temperature vocal starts us off with images of legend and epic. Trhen the band kicks the door down with a weaponised wah wah descent from Clapton in unison with the bass. Over this ground Bruce's huge manly vocal lifts an octave as the band drives hard below. Repeat. That might seem dismissive given the classic status of this track but really with a band at such a peak repeating really means doing it more intensely on the next go. That's what happens here, artist Martin Sharp's Homeric lyric about Odysseus and the sirens, and travel and the epic of a life led boldly. Sharp designed the cover for the album, a psychedelic collage of mugshots, wings and fantastic creatures whose looks border between legendary and sinister. Sharp had the lyric which he showed to Clapton at the pub. Clapton folded it up, took it home and this song came forth. Still one of my favourites from the era with its urgent wah wah, big vocal and Bakers unconventional drumming.

SWLABR crashes to life with a riff made of bass in unison with an extremely distorted guitar. The tight riffing and rhythm and Bruce's wailing vocal charge to the stop/starts where he brings the psychedelic sexuality of the verses to a head with the dadaist image of a painting with a moustache or a rainbow with a beard. Is it sex? Is it tripping on acid? Is it sex while tripping on acid? With all the edibly crunchy guitar sounds and tongue-out vocal, do you care? Just turn it up.

We're Going Wrong begins with a slightly distorted electric 12 string playing a four chord sequence of immediate solemnity as Baker plays something between a funeral march and a medieval basse dance on the toms. Bruce comes in shifting from head voice to falsetto with a lament so plainly stated it feels like raw experience. Near the halfway mark Clapton enters with a banshee wail solo with his famous woman tone, a distorted guitar sound played high on the fretboard in emulation of a woman singing, in this case a woman singing a funeral dirge. It continues when Bruce's vocal returns, even more plaintive and hurt in full falsetto, answering his cries with its own pain until it seems too intense to continue and the song is brought to an end with a oddly out of place blues riff played in unison by bass and guitar as Baker puts the track to bed with some whispering cymbals.

Outside Woman Blues is a Clapton-penned blues in emulation of his influences. The lordy woman lyric is elevated by some judgement of the possessive and adulterous man at the centre. Otherwise, it's really a showcase for Clapton's layered guitars, heavily distorted but playing unison thirds and fifths in soloing and the strong riff of the piece. The song ends with a deftly rendered groan that could have come off any of the records he was so inspired by. Is it Clapton himself? Jack Bruce? It's Eric's vocal for the rest of the song but the styling is so studied and precise it's hard to say.

Take it Back is standard runkachunkasplunka boogie with harmonica and Clapton's wailing tone (and more electric 12 playing rhythm). An audience makes itself heard but sounds like it's in the studio. The rollicking gait of the piece obscures its anti conscription  message. Musically unloved by me but I'll leave it on.

Mother's Lament rounds off one of the most innovative electric blues records of its era with a throwaway joke song with wincabley forced Cockney accents, barber shop harmonies, carefully sloppy and pub piano playing. When I was a kid I loved this bit and would often play it again. These days I'll only leave it playing if I'm doing the washing up or something that would make it difficult to switch it off.

This was a peak for the power trio and the result of a timeline of decision and indesicion, and trial and error, that managed to find them concentrating on providing a record of their strengths as a musical unit aside from their spectacular live shows. Instead of following the culture by insisting on writing everything themselves they collaborated with anyone who brought good things to the table and fashioned songs that could exist without their playing and arrangements. Jimi Hendrix's debut album suffered from shortcomings in composition that, while absent from subsequent releases, makes Are You Experienced a lesser beast today than Electric Ladyland. But Cream found their own path in a kind of open architecture and an appreciation of the difference between what makes a good show and a good album. This record still sounds very, very fresh.