1970@50: PARANOID - BLACK SABBATH

A brash, dark minor power chord on the guitar falls to the major below it in the kind of Dorian mode resolution that we like so much from medieval music right up to sea shanties. Here, though, there's a sadness to it, a drag in more than one sense. The bass and drums are keeping it buoyant but the melancholy is intensifying. At the fourth chordal knell an air raid siren fades up and fits the time (perhaps the players were timing themselves to it) and it blends perfectly. But it's just getting sadder.  All this and the song is less than 40 seconds into it. The siren doesn't feel like a goofy effect the way that the Foley effects were used by the Beach Boys. This is not a novelty song. The siren sounds like it's part of the music. Suddenly the guitar changes to a rapid two chord blast and Ozzy Osbourne comes in singing about the War Pigs of the title. His voice is solid, concentrated, and his own, somewhere between Richard the Third as voiced by Olivier and Screaming Lord Sutch. Then again, it's really just Ozzy by now, any derivation has been stripped away by gigging and the pace of living. The generals gather like witches at black masses, the politicians flee to the safety of bunkers and the poor put the uniforms on and walk into the bullets and the bombs. Not subtle enough for you? They're singing about warfare or what war is made of. Subtlety be damned. This is the thing about Black Sabbath at their best (and this album ranks among their very best). The groove toughens into a four on the floor metal groove as the song moves into its third phase. Yet another chord riff leads to a modal solo which rises into rapid double tracked business as the drums keep a solid ground and the aggressively picked bass provides both thump and melody. A sudden return to the first verse form as the picture develops. The third chord riff enters again and gives way to a more arpeggiated form which swoops down the scale before moving into a melodic fulfilment of the opening groove and then another double tracked solo. Finally the arpeggio resumes and speeds up artificially (via pitch control) to a final bash. We have travelled through a monochrome landscape of mass annihilation and, weirdly, it feels good.

The title track which was released as a single begins with a swift riff on the seventh before finding a chugging modal chord riff. Ozzy sings about losing his mind. A harsh beauty of crunching guitar tone, thickened by bass and hardened by drums beneath a syllable spitting caterwaul. It's metal but it's also proto punk without knowing it. It's a creation and performance extraordinary for compressing what would be known as heavy metal into a radio friendly chunk of clinical insanity that musically presaged UK punk by over half a decade and just kept punching.

Planet Caravan then surprises us with its gentle clean guitar arpeggios, conga drums and finger bass. Ozzy sings through a flanger about travelling through the cosmos in yet another medieval scale. The feel is a soft but intense jazz like the jamming of a psychedelic outfit but in context gathers some black light poster gravity. A a subdued but lyrical solo demonstrates to anyone listening that this band is not limited to headbanging. A jazz piano adds some harmonic ground. The thing with this track is that it doesn't sound out of place for as much as a bar. Anyone who wrote Sabbath off as Neanderthal Rock wasn't allowed to after this one.

Then again. A punching kick drum. The guitar comes in with a withering power chord bending downwards. An entire chord on a Gibson SG without a whammy bar. Dedication! Ozzy enters with his voice extremely modulated to sound robotic which is still scary: I AM IRON MAN! And then one of the greatest riffs in all rock music grinds out rising through a modal minor to an overdriven rapid alternation of chords (this Tony Iommi doesn't just have chops he's inventing them for generations). The vocal follows the riff exactly, in Osbourne's most compelling wail. The bass, too, is going along. The result is power. Pure bloody power. A strange figure is described by passers by who wonder about the metal man who has suddenly appeared in their midst. There's a problem. He's become this iron monster from time travel gone horribly wrong. He returned to warn the earth of the apocalypse but his appearance is so weird that he is shunned and then spurned. His cataclysmic revenge becomes the Armageddon he saw.  A development section shows that the band were not stingy on the riffs and they kick into a workout before hitting base with a reiteration of the verse riff. The finale, depicting in pure riffage is an aural picture of the apocalypse which blends surf rock galloping on the bass, loose but restless cymbals, feverish soloing rising to a final da-da-da! ending.

Electric Funeral grinds up with a thick riff voiced with a wah-wah pedal pressed more slowly than usual which gives it an otherworldly sound as the pattern rises and falls through a chromatic sequence. Ozzy comes in with the others as the verse melody tightens the chromatic phrase to give the words a sense of chanted description. A nuclear apocalypse flashes the earth to waste. The gear changes to hi-speed  and Ozzy's is in a higher scream with more accounts of the devastation. And the sole off moment in the song happens as someone else snarls "Electric Funeral" four times. This almost ruins the whole song. Ozzy's lyrics are already on the edge of overstatment and then this guy comes on stage in a skeleton costume and starts telling you why it's scary. It's the metal equivalent to the ba-ba-baaahs at the end of the instrumental section in God Only Knows. In both cases they were doing so well. The opening riff grinds back after a breath. The final verse describes a strange version of the end of Revelation where a mechanical god rules over the wasted earth as the damned fall to cramped cells in the inferno. Fade.

Hand of Doom creeps up slowly with a cinematic bass figure, joined by drums. Ozzy comes in before the guitar, addressing someone who is facing his own death. The guitar slams in, in unison with the bass and Ozzy climbs an octave. Back to the quieter mode. A list of wartime weapons offered as solutions but now the thought of them causes despair and everything shrivels down to opiates. Push the needle in. Guitar slams back in. But it isn't much more than any entertainment. A brief return to the quiet opening before the band kicks in with a high energy riff. Ozzy comes in in high voice, chastising the subject for the self anihilation. Acid is added to the mix and brings colours and other reality-masking distractions. He's burning at both ends. A double tracked solo joins him on his haze before climaxing. The ominous bass riff re-enters. Ozzy describes a living corpse, exhausted by narcosis and suicidal leisure. "Now you're gonna die." The quiet bass figure slowly takes us back into the dark.

This song is why Black Sabbath continued to find greatness beyond their initial success. There is a real poetry to the splicing of military culture, progressive industrialisation and the resort to drugs to shut both out. Osbourne's inspiration had come from accounts of U.S. soldiers traumatised by service in the Vietnam war who picked up opiate and lysergic lifestyles which became whole lives on their return. The musical dynamics of this track, the shadow heavy room of its quiet and deliberate description to the searing rage of its breakout verses, give us the same disciplined power that drove The Stones' Midnight Rambler or The Doors' When the Music's Over. Here, though, it just feels more real.

Rat Salad is an instrumental that sounds like a rejected instrumental section from another track. Either that or a jam turned into a showcase for the guitar and drums as both get extensive solos. It's not quite formless but has little to say and spends minutes of side filling time saying it.

Fairies Wear Boots begins with a palm-muted figure which gives way to another modal guitar riff which gives way to some high soloing and chord riffage before settling into a metal groove. Ozzy tells a tale of seeing a fairy dancing with a dwarf. Oh, the fairy was wearing boots. He takes his story to a doctor who tells him to lay off the drugs. This is a veiled account of Ozzy getting beaten up by skin heads who took opportunity to lay into a hippy. The song acquits itself as a pedestrian rocker but,despite a solid performance and iron-throated vocal, it feels like the last track on an album which it indeed is. The soloing drives off into the night of the fade.

The modal guitar figures can be heard at the other end of the decade in Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures album. The force of vocal against hard guitar rock contributed to all of Henry Rollins' career. The dynamics in Hand of Doom can be heard in the study notes of Jane's Addiction's marvellous Three Days. All of the Northwest American bands of the '90s cut the lineage points between themselves and Black Sabbath, leaving no ambiguity about influences, whether they were lyrical or musical. Black Sabbath's descendants are among the peaks of the rock music in the decades that followed their early releases and Paranoid, even more than the eponymous debut, gave that world a field manual on music as a channel of fury against the nodders and the toed-lines that always seem to reform after every upset. That's why we, punks who smirked at them, needed Black Sabbath.

1980@40: KALEIDOSCOPE - SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES

When the guitarist and drummer from the lineup of the previous two albums fled mid-tour in a panic this band might have collapsed. The bad about that is that the band lost a guitarist with good ideas. The good is that the creative force of the music and what it sought to express stuck around. Siouxsie and Steve Severin showed that the darker, cinematic moods of The Scream and Join Hands were not only freer to take the helm but refrained from overstating the gothic. They also made good choices of replacements. Budgie, who'd been in the Slits, not only stuck with the band but married the singer and brought a richer percussive pallet to the music. John McGeoch came in on guitar from Magazine. These were people with style and ideas, not just hired guns. What that meant was that the third album sounded fresh but familiar.

Happy House mixed heavily processed guitar with the pulsing toms, chorused bass and full throated vocals. That's the formula for the next few albums and expresses the dependable sound of Siouxsie and the Banshees. For the song itself there is an icy riff, distant whistling and a shivery falsetto, all on different melodies. The verses themselves are controlled explosions, strident declamations of ironic protest. The happy house is a horror house. The wails, cries and force are bound but powerful, growling in chains.

Tenant brings in the hitherto unfamiliar sound of electronics to the band's sound. Budgie sets up a busy high hat ticking, occasionally run through a ring modulator. The bass guitar is so flanged that it sounds like a keyboard. The guitar is chorused and muted and distant. And there throughout, a frowning lower register synthesiser. Siouxsie comes in with sparse images of isolation in high density housing and paranoia. "The plaster falls and a body reels .... softly" Stops, starts, whispers and more falsetto coos. It's like putting your head into a Francis Bacon painting and listening to the sounds in the room. 

Trophy starts with the more familiar attack of straightforward snare drums and spiky distorted guitars and Sioux alternating between a cold croon and a wail. But here the rhythmic pattern is a 4/4 with extra bars wedged in to stop it sounding too rock. 

Hybrid has an insistent snare roll, ropey guitar figure, languid sax. It is a kind of hallucinatory account of exhausting touring. Everybody's weary but the thing is that this never drags. It wasn't just McKay and Morris that felt the strain of the previous year's touring. Severin and Sioux were ordered bed rest and tranquilisers by their doctors. Here the mix of grind and sweet jazzy sax melodies express the collision of physical wastage and sublime rewards of working for all that fame.

Clockface is a near instrumental with a forceful rock (thought the guitatr is still well distant). Siouxsie's insistent whoa whoas provide the riff. Perhaps continuing the exhaustion theme of the previous track, even the most energetic song on the side is too difficult for lyrics.

Lunar Camel starts with thick keyboards and drum machine like tones as Soiuxsie enters with a light and breathy whimsy about travel in a dreamlike landscape. This comes as close as the band would get for years to the pleasurable side of intoxication. A blend of childlike playfulness and a worrying darkness beneath. It and the side end on a deep bass drone, chunky muted flanged guitars.

Side two kicks off with the understated acoustic strum and murmur of Christine, a deceptively gentle response to a reading of The Three Faces of Eve about multiple personality disorder. "She tries not to shatter kaleidoscope style ..." "Now she's in purple, now she's a turtle, disintegrating." It's the lightness, the ease of the vocal and the false laid-back bed track that push the disturbance forward, here. Christine's swings and changes happen in the space of a breath. This was a hit single (backed by the decidedly less restrained Eve White) and those were the days.

Desert Kisses rises like a wave of subdubed guitar and forward keyboards. Budgie is keeping time with an off/on approach to high hat figure. Siouxsie's vocal follows the rise through the minor scale with images of isolation, a troubled affair between sand and sea that ends in a letting go or resignation as she sinks down to a personal oblivion. The blend of sexy minor key and pitiable middle eight creates a sense of hopelessness on an epic scale.

Red Light uses a similar minor figure on the synth as Desert Kisses but it's more circular, inescapable. A pornographic photo studio during a shoot. "as the aperture shuts, too much exposure." 

The riff keeps circling. Siouxsie comes in with a variously tired groan or wild wail until the final repetition of "when you see the red light wincing" when she gets mixed to the back and the march of the riff gains strength. Light and heavy all at once.

Paradise Place kicks off at full speed with a tide of fuzzed guitar, vocal wail and the now signature falsetto coos. Cut rate cosmetic surgery. Lots of bad things sliced and reformed in the Hollywood Hills. The guitar of this one reminds me of Keith Levene's playing on the first two PiL albums, down in the mix but razor sharp and gnashing. It's Steve Jones ex Sex Pistol, in fact. The progression plays out sharply to the fade under coos that now sound tragic.

Skin begins with hesitant beeps and clinks but soon takes on a paranoid wail and cacophony as Sioux rails at fur wearing. More Jones guitar, this time a subdued palm muted chord progression. After a final vocal assault the track deconstructs, one part at a time until only the beeps and trills remain. Album over.

Kaleidoscope saw a punk band adapt to losing half its limbs and emerging as a more adventurous and cinematic unit. The songs still have a bratty edge to them but in every case are more refined as new power is discovered in the quieter corners of invention. During the stress hiatus Severin and Sioux extended their pallets by taking up synthesisers and guitar, finding new musical expression in unfamiliar territory. This is to be expected in young artists when forced into invention from necessity: things out of your control? Pick something up and find the notes. This makes the album much better than a resumption: it doesn't sound like a broken original patched up with session players, it sounds like a new band. 

1980@40: CROCODILES - ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN

A rising cloud of beeps and distant howls gives way to a guitar groove that could equally be The Modern Lovers or the Byrds putting a little edge on the 12 string. The drummer is happy to use the whole kit. The bass is note clear and airy. The vocal pushes out from New Wave quirk to near operatic warbling. Short melodic phrases over a two chord groove and major gear shifts in arrangements. Going Up clues you into almost everything you need to know about Echo and the Bunnymen. "If we should pull the plugs out on all history..."

Stars are Stars adds a sparse but firm piano line for drama. The arrangement is sparse and moody but driven. McCulloch's vocal stretches from the declaiming of the opener to a looser attitude that feels more like the account of an eyewitness. Pride adds some very New Wave palm muted guitars but then some very un-post punk double stopping, the added dynamics of a guitarless verse.

Monkeys starts with a punchy guitar assault then launches into a world wise comment on the selfishness of humans and a warbling chorus of "Qui ment?" Who's lying? The opening chordy riff squeezes into a fiery ground in the background. Crocodiles starts in full gear with McCulloch showing how much Elvis lurks in his vocal. It's not an impersonation, it just sits so easily in the pocket of the rockabilly on speed backing which soon sharpens to razor slashing chords as McCulloch's rocker vocal breaks into an exasperated shout. There is a kind of wireframe drawing against black background to it.

Flip it and side two opens with one of the era's most iconic riffs, the bright pendulum of Rescue. High on the fretboard, easy to learn in minutes and played through one of the effects of the era, a chorus pedal. McCulloch comes in with his short phrased declamation. And then the chorus explodes with an improbably mix of desperation and charm: "Woooon't you come on down to my rescue?" Third verse with an industrially strong bass backing and no guitar. Final chorus blast and then heads to the fade as a vocal round. Who the hell did that in 1980? And the self aware lyrics that ask if you can tell it in a song. And the plunging descent of the chorus that begs us down but lifts us at the same time. One of the great singles of the whole post punk epoque (steady, this won't all be gush).

Villiers Terrace bangs up with the full band  at once, augmented by a piano. An unrelenting account of hedonistic panic as people chew on carpet, mixing up the medicine. A haze of nights in the dark of house parties, purple lights, over rummed punch and drugs that look different but all feel the same. The forward thrust stops the weariness of the lyric from taking route and conveys the exhaustion as well as the euphoria. Pictures on my wall departs from the concentrated lyric and band arrangement, allowing more space for the images and moods. Wailing verses of impressions of faces and places rushing by and the chorus grinds about the things about to fail: "pictures on my wall about to swing and fall." More extensive keyboards in this track with searing string synths add a cinematic tone but also betray it as of its time.

All that Jazz presents a tough but crisp groove. "Where the hell have you been?" It's easy to forget that between the escalated threat of nuclear annihilation and the rise of the uniformed hard right in the UK that everyone was just going to parties in the early '80s. The litany of fear in this lyric delivered in a repeated downward minor figure leads inexorably to the final lines: "See you at the barricades, babe. See you when the lights go low, Joe. Hear you when the wheels turn round. See you when the sky turns black."

Happy Death Men. With jungle toms, a Krautrock bass pulse and a jazz piano tinkle straight out of Bowie's Alladin Sane, McCulloch sings a melody somewhere between a clapping song and Claire De Lune. The band keep tight and forceful and are joined by a brass barrage in a break. "Happy death men polish and shine." This is less National Front skinheads than the War Pigs in boardrooms and parliamentary chambers. After a shouted coda from McCulloch, the brass, chaotic piano are driven by  feverish drums, distant wordless vocal lament into the fade. A tiny call back sounds briefly and then silence.

Ian McCulloch had been in a band called the Crucial Three. The other two were Julian Cope who formed Teardrop Explodes and Pete Wylie who formed the band that went under several names all of which contained the word Wah! It's an odd historical tidbit as a trio of future leaders sounds like a disaster. It proved to be. And then the varying fates of the three and how they scrub up now. Echo and the Bunnymen win the durability race with four hit albums and many top forty singles and plenty of touring. Cope heads Teardrop Explodes until his own forces of gravity leave him the sole member. Wylie had trouble keeping his flock for a single album. All produced great moments but only Cope has really continued with any lasting presence beyond this era.

Echo and the Bunnymen presented an impressive big sound at a time when rock bands were having to reassess what that description meant. They fronted up with accessible songs and a musical clarity few could match at the time. They were all clean lines and contained drama but provided more dynamics than most of their field. Apart from some great stirring choruses they relied on McCulloch's charismatic vocal style to divert the listener from the sameyness of almost every verse. Think of it: if you just sang the verses of these songs and later ones like The Cutter or The Killing Moon would be able to tell them apart? And then if you are pressing the verses into a generic melody is it because of a need to highlight lyrcs over tunes? Maybe, if the lyrics were more strident instead of the richly abstract litanies and declamations we get. Oddly enough, that leaves the big choruses which do differ and the grooves of each number. If it weren't for the determination of the band to create ever changing dynamics to the songs there wouldn't be a lot to report.

But there is much to report with this band. In history they figure less visibly than cohorts like the Banshees, the Cure or Joy Division despite offering plenty in the way of new approaches to rock music. Unlike The Psychedlic Furs who took a few LPs to grow into their sound and presentation or the other Crucial Three descendants whose short and stormy careers offered courses in how-not-to do it, Echo and the Bunnymen persevered and maintained. Was it the unremarkable eponymous album that came years after the first big four that left their legacy difficult to access? Do their determinedly anti-stadium rock clean lines and solo free guitar assaults put them too awkwardly to one side of the stage that otherwise clamours with processed guitars and songs of self destruction? This band is clearly the inspiration for masses among their own immediate wake but if a Bunnymenesque outfit surfaced after that the influence note was long past. That's a pity because this album and a few to come gave us a solid alternative to the old guard's posturing and the worst excesses of the new.

1980@40: CLOSER - JOY DIVISION

A rapid pattern on the tom toms sounds like a Renaissance courtly reel but there's something cold and industrial about it, something machine-like. It's joined by a blast of something that sounds like a jackhammer and crawling from underneath it is a quiet electric bass. A metallic wail like a workshop saw warbles. The voice comes in, detached, observing. A list of organised scenarios of pain, violence and oppression follows and the voice becomes the carnival barker: "This is the way. Come inside". And sometimes, quieter, almost a whisper, simply:"this is the way." The tonality has a minor feel about it but never mounts a resolution with a dominant major. It is, in fact, modal. While this was kept on the previous album to vocal melodies, it now controls the music from start to finish. Given the right instruments and a very little time, you could play this whole record's songs as a song cycle from the 1400s. .Translate the lyrics into French or Latin and no one would know the difference. That it's being played on rock instruments with an edge of industrial and electronic music lays a cowl of icy deliberation over the set. As dark as Unknown Pleasures got it doesn't approach the sheer impersonal scariness of Closer.

Well, that was Atrocity Exhibition, track one. It took its title from J.G.Ballard, a writer of the concrete fantastical, and its imagery from a wide ranging look at human history. The track's arrangement and production feel both heavy and light and while it feels on the long side, the song never drags. There's just too much compulsion created between the voice at the centre of the thuds and sharp edges of the music around it.

Isolation begins with what sounds like a drum machine pushed to the edge of clipping distortion. An energetic bass figure boosts it before bight flashing chords on a keyboard play a kind of fanfare. A synth introduces a sticky descending riff before the vocal enters, distant, couched in metallic reverb. The narrator suffers from a socially crippling sense of inferiority to the id monsters around him, diving down to the plea to his mother to believe he's done his best but is ashamed of the person he is. Finally, he sings of the beauty he feels he is alone in seeing, knowing it's the one quality he has. The song ends with his repeated call of "isolation!" and crashes in a brief bright echo.

In Passover the crisis the narrator was expecting is not given a name but doesn't need to be. It has more to do with the recognition that the order we expect in our lives is a thin veneer of unreality, masking the destruction and survival competition beneath. The title does have a quite direct relevance to the lyric as the line' "left with a mark on the door" refers to an instruction to the chosen to identify themselves with a mark in blood on the doors of their houses so that the great divine vengeance machine will spare them. Perhaps the celebration of Passover was explained to Ian Curtis and he stretched the relevance out to all of humanity. The song takes the form of a continuous declamation of violence and failure and is set in a gentler rhythm than the opening tracks with what sounds like a real drum kit, growling bass and the same kind of electronic wailing on the guitar as the opening track which takes breaks in lieu of choruses. A hymn to resignation.

Slicing guitar chords, again heavily processed, supported by a big boomy bass, play a pattern that sounds like it isn't in 4/4 (but it is). The bass falls in with the drums that leave enough out of the bar to make the time signature sound off but are played so forcefully that the repetition drives the song into order. In the breaks the guitar plays the closest thing to a blues influenced figure but it's drawn out so much that it falls back into modal territory. Curtis vocal follows this falling figure through the song's length until he breaks out at the end with the final lines. A decaying marriage, a child's memories of separation, surgery, coercion and a chant of religious finality: the words don't feel to be recounting any specific thing but rather the experience of being taken over by circumstances or just stronger people. The line that always chills me in this song is: "as he lays asleep she takes him in her arms. Some things I have to do though I don't mean you harm." The sense of entrapment is constant and violently supported.

A Means to an End is the kind of title that gives the shallower of fans a clue to the notion that the whole album is Ian Curtis' suicide note. While the beat of the massive chromatic descent sounds like disco, the downward force quashes that. It's a pounding, earthbreaking assault. Curtis comes in with a voice EQ-ed to a telephonic thinness. Images of a strong kinship broken by betrayal. "I always looked to you," is replaced by, "I put my trust in you" which words end the song, impassioned until the repetition exhausts them. It ends on an artificial and sudden fall in pitch as Martin Hannett physically turned the speed dial down, slowly at first and then abruptly for the final note. End of side one.

If the first side of the old LP was a cry against injustice, violence and betrayal, side two, though it can get violent, is more about resolve. A gentle minor figure in the bass is joined by a tight drum pattern and a spooky distant electronic wave and then a an insistent and understated guitar figure. Curtis enters with a gentle vocal that seems to float in a bubble of reverb. Instead of the railing against the weight of human ill this statement, almost entirely unchanging for nearly six minutes closes with a shrug about existential meaninglessness of approaching the chaos of living with an even handed view. And in the end: "heart and soul, one will burn." The skeletal guitar plays a minor descent on insistent repeat before giving in to the bass, drums and distant howling of the synth.

Twenty Four Hours begins with one of those riffs that drive you nuts guessing the time signature but even where the bar begins. A bass figure rises through a modal scale, descends and rises again, resting on a syncopated drum pattern, accentuated by muted guitar with heavy reverb. This plays a few times until the bass begins to fill the bar and the drums and guitar thicken and hasten into a full bodied grind on the riff. Curtis comes in, reverby and trebly, describing a galloping failure as the band charges around him. This suddenly switches back to the gentleness of the opening and the narrator's plea for time to understand more of his life rounds in the anger of watching destiny slip away as the band again gears into full strength. This keeps happening, growling disappointment and quiet reflective moments that end in anger. "I looked beyond the day in hand. There's nothing there at all." The song returns to the figures of the opening but with a fragile, glassy guitar low in the mix playing a swirling figure until the hard finish.

The final two songs on the record carry such strength that they characterise it for people who have heard so often they could dream it. When I think of Closer I imagine the cover art (on which more later) and a kind of coldness to the music that was wilder and devastating on the previous album. And I think of extended keyboard use. But apart from a few moments on side two and the shortest song on side one, the keyboards are almost entirely contained in these two songs. To many, the whole album closer sounds like them and it takes a replay to remind them of how most of it is a conventional rock band on tracks (however out of step the songs themselves, their melodic schemes etc were)

The Eternal begins with what always sounds to me like cicadas and lawn sprinklers on a hot day. It's a synth noise generator using a rapid oscillation. Soon a big bass guitar begins a circular chromatic descent until a mournful piano figure enters along with a choir-like keyboard sound and sparse roomy drums over a thudding heartbeat. The narrator describes a procession and something like a wake but is himself unable to do more than recognise the failure as he witnesses it. The last line puts these events passing before him on the same footing as the sight of leaves falling from trees.  The song plays out with the hissing lawn rising in the mix as the delicate piano figure tinkles above and is brought to a soft, careful landing.

This band was a self-avowed thrashing punk outfit only the year before.

Decades begins with a sharp crochet, pause, double quaver rhythm in big reverb. A thick chunky palm muted bass plays a minor modal figure once before a tide of bright keyboards comes in with stuttered chords alternating between the old folky minor chord to major below it. Curits' vocal is way out front, more trebly than the previous song's mournful clarity but with a melody almost identical in shape and scansion. Again, the theme is one of oppression, a closing of doors to freedom as the young men of the first line (they could easily be soldiers but it feels more universal, despite the gendering) The verse stops abruptly as a keyboard drone sounds and then is built to an almost Latin groove as Curtis intones with a gentle grief: "where have they been?" This stays on the Latin-influenced rhythm and stays there for the second, final and shorter verse where the door is not just closed but slammed in their face. This gives way to a massive enriched repeat of the first chorus break as wide sunlit vistas of sound thunder out. After two mighty soundings of the main chords of the chorus n synthesised strings the rhythm returns with the question, "where have they been?" and then spreads out to a majestic repeat of the chorus descent until the sunlight fades and all is no more.

For an album that starts with a jackhammer this record comes a long way to provide such a strangely uplifting landscape as a closer (geddit?) It's important to remember how varied this album is and at how much variance it is from the band's preceding statements. A scattering of hard punk sides that reached the sublime heights of the first album. The single Transmission which sounds like the bridge that it is to their best known song, Love Will Tear Us Apart and then to Closer is a journey of feverish development from adolescent rage to this measured, serious and often frightening testimony.

Like Love Will Tear Us Apart, Closer was a posthumous release. Only one and a bit months after Ian Curtis took his own life the record that launched a million pouting twenty-somethings on their own journeys to the end of the darkness was itself launched. The band, still in the throes of hard line punk, considered Martin Hannett's extraordinary production a let down but seem to have changed their minds about it in the intervening years. There's a good interview with Steve Morris where he remembers how disappointed he was with Hannett's production but then laughs as he admits that Hannett "future-proofed" it. This puts things into a strange place for band and fans alike. Do we go with the original vision of the composers and players or give in to the bullying bastard in the control room? Well, it's not hard to resolve. Just listen to how the modal scales they lit upon as an expected part of their ongoing development and how that stretches back centuries to much older music. It's easy to imagine something of what Martin Hannett heard when the songs were played to him.

I didn't know any of this as a recently of age 18 year old getting through a repeat of his senior year of high school. I was having fun. I did buy the 7 inch of Love Will Tear Us Apart but the songs they played on 4ZZZ from Closer sounded a little too scary for me. Intriguing and attractively so, yes, but still scary. It wasn't until I finished uni and passed through all those others at the pub and parties with their Unknown Pleasures T-shirts and reverently whispered "secret" legends of Curtis' last minutes of life. Was it legend or real about the local boy who hanged himself in solidarity? People hang themselves for a lot of reasons but they usually have a lot more problems than liking a few songs before they do. A close friend at uni wanted to buy the box set, cloth bound edition of the even more posthumous compilation Still and asked me if I'd like go halves as it was so expensive. I declined but refrained from letting him know that I thought what he was asking was bullshit.

But after uni I was free in a way I never had been before. True, I was still living in a house my parents owned but the tempestuous marriage of my brother had left the building and a whole new crew of people moved in and, for a good few months, created a pretty happy place. I started writing fiction and got back into reading it after years of solid texts. My band continued long enough to do some more recording. I was still in my early twenties and knew it.

And then I came across cheap second hand copies of the Joy Division records and bought all of them. I'd been returning to my original musical love of anything written before the nineteenth century but these platters with their mysterious cover art reached out beyond all the lies and legends. What was the music like outside of those few tracks on the radio?

Closer was the first one I bought. I played it solidly for a week. My brother, also a flatmate, hated the record, calling it concentration camp music but all I heard was a rough but genuine poetry and heavy musical exploration. From the crunching first track to the spreading illuminated plain of the last moments, this set of despairing complaints and shrugged resignation completely captured me. I got worse before I got better, too. I moved down to Melbourne where you not only could wear black all the time but had to as part of the local by laws and no one scoffed if you listened to funeral boogie like Joy Division.

I no longer buy into the legend. Books and movies later the story is more straightforward (if no less tragic) and the music still powerful. And as to the power of cover art, Peter Saville's work for Factory records is well remembered for its striking originality and apposition of the music. I still think of Unknown Pleasures music as black and Closer's as white and sepulchral. Indeed, those images have so long been kit that undergrads decades later wear the shirt without knowing the band or their central importance to a decade with a beginning unequalled for innovation and convention breaking. Their loss.

To me, now, I listen with neither nostalgia nor denial. The music itself remains as strong as it started. Some odd clumsiness in the wording that used to annoy me (very Brit expressions like "sat" instead of sitting) have long moved beyond issue. If there is any good-old-days to this it's more in how I finally put the discs on to the turntable an unfashionable few years after the fact of the band's life and proved to myself how very wrong I'd been about them. A few years on from that I learned the same lesson about not judging bands by their fans when The Smiths attained subcultural godhead. The difference is that I was right to cry "naked" to The Smiths  and I'm still right about about Joy Division.

1980@40: TRAVELOGUE - THE HUMAN LEAGUE

As the '70s turned into the '80s electronic bands were rare enough to be easily identifiable from each other and then as a group from forebears like Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. One of the things that became a signature for each was how it approached percussion. Tubeway Army used a conventional drum kit. Spandau Ballet favoured a clean drum machine. Human League's second album begins with a statement of independence from this with a bravura explosion of percussion from keyboards to distorted real drums and solid synthesiser rhythms that verge from harmonic to outright sawing crashes. This, above all, is not the sound of rock.

Phil Oakey's sub operatic tenor provides the melody with clipped diction and soaring lines as the storm rages around him. The Black Hit of Space with its aggressive electronics and robotic singing could tick all the boxes needed for a parody song. In fact, the song is often thought to be a dig at the success of Gary Numan which, if true, is telling: not only giving them a handy us against them stance but doing so with a groovy opener. The video mixes a mash of contemporary news footage with the band miming the song in a studio setting. No one moves more than their performative requirements. There is no drum kit or any rock instrumentation. The band look more like laboratory staff. Oakey is quietly freakish with the one side short one side long hair cut. He glares into the lens. This is not the sci-fi of Replicas or Architecture and Morality. As with their first, Reproduction, The Human League favoured a future is now look and sound.

Mick Ronson's Only After Dark perhaps began the odd trend of synth acts to come who would reset older standards or rock songs in electronica. Again the percussion borders on tonal rhythm and it is difficult to distinguish the two. Oakey's vocal gymnastics provide a warmer centre than the previous track.

Life Kills slams into gear from the off with a pumping electric kick, snatches of buzzing keyboard and even brass section sounding garnishes. Oakey's multitracked vocals approach the the football chant of the band's version of Rock and Roll. It's a brilliant tidy example of what electronic pop could be.

Dreams of Leaving sets a cinematic stage with harsh explosive noise over a pretty sequence and a kind of bagpipe melody. Oakey's vocal is breathy and rushed as he relates a first person tale of escaping the oppression of South Africa. This fades into a a kind of sample and hold pool of beeps with dark echoey waves behind it before a vigorous metallic rhythm. The epic setting returns with a verse telling of the difficulties of the new land as the swell of synthesisers rises, thickens and swirls around him.

Toyota City is an instrumental of marimba like patterns, distant whistling and a kind of Celtic tonality. A Crow and a Baby is the closest thing to a rock song on the album with metallic riffing and clear verses and choruses. A dark Aesop fable for today. The Touchables is positively accessible with sweet riffs and big choruses, presaging not only New Order and the Human League of Dare but the general feel of synthpop in the two years to follow.

Gordon's Gin begins as an eerie instrumental but develops into a thickly electronic version of the drink's tv jingle. This is Youtube-able and is already synth heavy and disco thumping. This one adds a little harshness, like the throat burn of a straight shot.

Being Boiled splashes straight into a mix of electronics and big string section riffage before settling into a strident rockist onslaught with sharp synths and synthesised handclaps. Oakey's vocal is strong as he rails against sericulture, the making of silk which involves the death by boiling of the silk forming larvae of the silkworms. The rhythm track of this number is a clear indication of how synth pop could readily provide a form of disco that could be dark and free of dags. It's pretty where disco went until, emerging from the cocoon of the rest of the '80s, it emerged as techno. The closing track WXJL Tonight plays as a conventional pop epic about radio stations turning robotic with automation and the erosion of the humanity they are meant to be serving. Oakey ends with a larynx stretching high chorus that rises from some beautiful vocoder vocals.

A perfectly repeatable platter, Travelogue makes up with increased arranging skill what it misses in intrigue and drama so rich on Reproduction. The band would split down the middle just after its release. While Heaven 17 proceeded to charge into politics and the tougher side of the sound and garner a respectable string of hits, the remaining Human League were about to fully embrace some of the tightest and joyous synthpop of their era. The next album under their name was the incomparable Dare, a thing of bright fashion lighting on the cover art and massive pop anthems on the disc. The darkness of the first two LPs almost completely erased.

But before that happened this was recorded as the next statement of a musical act intent on exploring the possibilities of post-rock sound, embracing the cinematic and literary shadows they found. There were acts much harsher along these lines like Throbbing Gristle but The Human League sought an accessible path to a more interesting kind of pop. That they ended up being two distinct sides of that as two different bands is perhaps unfortunate but in a culture that was absorbing the old rebellion of punk and once again awarding mass success to the stronger competitors this division was probably inevitable. Until that happened some of the most durably interesting music of the time was made. This is part of that.

1980@40: FREEDOM OF CHOICE - DEVO

Having conquered a whole stratum of the submainstream system with an array of records and difficult videos, Devo, along with Talking Heads and Pere Ubu, were showing as much of the world as they could reach that American rock music could sing differently from the ice-cream cocaine hell that was Steely Dan, The Eagles and Billy Joel. By the time this one came along, Devo's assault was concentrated that the songs, while perfectly individual, were hard to tell apart. That was intentional. Devo's brief was to use uniformity in art to crack the surface of it in the culture.

Every song is a tightly machined unit of guitar rock laced with the synthesiser sound de jour, each one coming in between two and three and a half minutes. Like the frozen berry pullaparts you could get at the supermarket to make that 10pm work night a little special you could do the lot of pick sections as needed. That's why this album has the sense of being a long suite of statements rather than a dynamic flow of moments weighted accordingly.

That is almost true. In fact, the Mothersbaughs were sharp songwriters with a good ear for hooks. So, while this album is like a small chrome berry pullapart there are some songs that make compilation albums despite never being singles. The massive title track with its great doubletracked vocals and guitar assault emerges from an assembly lined thunder on electric tom toms. Freedom from choice is what you want. This was a single. So was Whip It. Bizarrely, this shout against the coming storm of Reaganomics with its disturbing video of distorted Americana went top 40. Gates of Steel bursts into the light as a brilliant keyboard fanfare lifted by guitar wash from below. The steely vocals describe the human lot (half a goon and half a god) recalling Beatle's choruses as much as the hard nosed authority from above already looming on the horizon. It's a masterpiece.

So, while I thought it best not to go track by track in agreement with the intended uniformity of the record it's worth noting the efforts of any vision-led band who are too good to quite appear machine perfect and break into a very tough and sweating invention. Devo, by the nature of that vision, were not long for continuation beyond the point of repetition but even that suited them. A million compilations with unvarying tracklistings later and The Rolling Stones are simply still on the market in bitesize units. Devo's built-in endurance gives us a futureproofed perfection. Beat that, Eagles.

1970@50: LET IT BE - THE BEATLES

"I dig a pygmy by Charles Hawtrey and the Deaf Aids. Phase One in which Doris gets her oats." The metallic voice is John Lennon's. He's goofing about waiting for a take to start. There's a lot of that on this record, the slickest band in the world letting their increasingly long hair down and pumping out some laid back rock and roll. But it's artifice. The interjections were inserted from hours of tape of listless jams or failed takes to give the impression of spontaneity. I didn't know that when I first heard it, I thought it was an album with a band in informal mode. If anything, it gave them impression that they were being sophisticated by presenting themselves so relaxed.

The first song, Two of Us, is a bouncy acoustic number with close harmonies and a whimsical lyric. A middle eight, stronger than the rest of the song, comes out of nowhere and then they head back down the sunny country road. Dig a Pony begins with a false start before launching into one of Lennon's time signature shifting specials, nonsense lyrics before a heartfelt declaration of love in the chorus which only seems to fit.

Across the Universe begins a gentle strum before floating into one of Lennon's finest softer songs. More timeshifting and a smooth vocal. This is the track that introduces the extras provided by rescue producer Phil Spector. He puts a choir into the chorus and it works beautifully. George's I Me Mine blasts into an expansive waltz with a high warbling vocal for the minor key verse and a boogieing chorus in 4/4. Dig it rises from the silence as John yells impromptu names over a chugging beat before it fades back out with a little joke about the track to come in a joking falsetto: "Now we'd like to do Hark, the Angels Come."

Let it Be announces its gravitas from its opening piano chords, broad and stately. McCartney's vocal has lost its cute and he's sounding self-conscious and important. The track's a good one, though. Spector's choir and brass section add needed texture and the album version of Harrison's solo is killer. Then, because this is all about goofiness as well as serious Beatle music, the side ends with an old Scouse street ballad that falls apart in seconds.

Side two begins with a big sounding guitar arpeggio and McCartney's strong vocal on I've Got a Feeling which swings in big angles, breaks into a deliciously screamed middle eight, mixes a Lennon throwaway chant with McCartney's closing verse. More goofing about afterwards. One After 909 comes from the band's prehistory and slams in as a kind of smooth rocker, aided by Billy Preston's electric piano. Then it stops. More goofy cries and asides.

The Long and Winding Road expands almost immediately from a gentle opening with vocal and piano to a Vegas style extravaganza with brass, strings and choir. McCartney famously disliked Spector's arrangement but the truth is that it fits this big ballad with its big gaps and big starts. It's actually difficult to imagine McCartney leaving it as a plain band performance when he seems to be building space for orchestral interjections into the basic track. Strikes me that his distaste had more to do with the arrangement simply being someone else's. I've never enjoyed the song. Even listening as an increasingly wowed second generation Beatles fan at 13 I thought this sounded like Glen Campbell.

For You Blue is a tinkly  blues with a happy vocal and a light love song lyric. Harrison consciously wanted it to be a jolly use of a genre given to fate and personal doom. Well, he did just that but I'll still skip the track.

The album's sole moment of greatness from those sessions comes at the end when a smattering of chat suddenly starts in on the thumping intro to Get Back, a rocker that moves forward like a lorrie and is blessed with good soloing and vocals, managing some deft stops and starts and ending with a good joke about passing an audition.

However contrived, the record sounds like the last statement of a band who chose to go out on a humble note, as bare as they'd begun, rather than a mammoth epic of virtuosity. Well, but for timing that is the thing that did happen. Abbey Road was recorded and released as the final Beatles album and it was a peak of their writing, arrangement and production. And then this thing came back from an abandoned project, released along with a film about a band collapsing in on itself.

Well, Peter Jackson is in the process of rewriting that history in a reconstruction from the footage in the vaults and will make that available for the film's anniversary later this year. The LP might well also get the kind of deluxe treatment that the three previous releases got. I'll see the movie and I'll buy the super gaduper release of the album. But I'll also kick myself to doing so.

I heard this record in the holidays between 1975 and 1976. It was one of the mass of discs my brother Michael  brought with him for his holidays and I was able to give myself a swift education in the Beatles in reverse order from this one back to Sgt Pepper. I did like the engaged feel of  Let it Be but didn't care about half of the songs so always played it as a skipper record. Moving backwards through Abbey Road, White Album, Magical Mystery Tour and Pepper I quickly gathered an appreciation for what I liked about music in general, having only that year broadened from a classical only taste. This record, though, lent a kind of worldliness to the listener, an invitation to a session rather than an audience with the lords of music.

I saw the movie at a cinema and found it dull and formless. That tainted the record even more. When I learned about the editing needed to make it appear spontaneous I shrugged as it didn't surprise me. I soon grew to see it as an aftermath document rather than an album in its own right and when Let it Be Naked was released in the 90s I didn't shell out for it and wasn't impressed when I did hear it. The way I heard it just before when preparing to write this was lifted by the quality of the 2009 remaster in hi res and it passed pleasantly without taxing or annoying me.

But when you look at it in the context of its time, with the varying quality of the solo members' output and the easier reach to the efforts of artists ready to emerge into a new decade with what I always find an unpleasant resort to the blues scales and moaning vocals of boomer rock, Let it Be fits perfectly, slotting into a kind of music that if the Beatles had pursued it might have rendered them as toneless, dressed down and rote as their very best had all but destroyed. That's there in some of the records with their happy saxes and '70s radio friendliness. The Beatles got dull. They joined the '70s when not being dull required the kind of drive that seemed beneath them. And that it what drove me back to discovering the '60s and its freshness. Let it Be had to happen and there was never a more potent example of a device to extract fans from the old days and turf them into the new ones. It's not a bad album but it the was the first in years that wasn't great.