1980@40: TRUE COLOURS - SPLIT ENZ

 

Muffled voices, instruments warming up and suddenly a punky barre chord buzzes out with tight but light drumming. Tim Finn's urgent vocal does easy local gymnastics around a deceptively simple melody when the verse ends with the cry of the title: Shark Attack! Add momentum for each verse and race on. A brief break to add some orchestral drama and then an impossibly rapid piano solo before the last verse flies past to the fade. Split Enz have burst through the door and let us know that they made it into the '80s, leaner and meaner and are ready for their closeup.

Proof? Neil Finn takes the mic after an introduction on still fashionable palm muted chords. Neil's vocal is more fluid and warmer than big brother's and his way with a vocal melody and songcraft are going to win him more a-sides and take the band further away from their prog rock cabaret than they'd so far dared go. I Got You is all hooks and charm. A keyboard solo with a quirky turn away from the main progression pays tribute to both the old prog and the new wave at the same time. The song is pure joy.

And so is the rest of it, from the punchy rage of What's the Matter With You? to the quavering comic book figure of Nobody Takes Me Seriously Anyway, the soaring instrumental Choral Sea, the classically strong I Hope I Never. This set in its sleeve of spiky, Dutch tilted artwork and compressed production is a manual of assimilation that couldn't be approached as the generational kin like Billy Joel tried to do with some yelps and palm muting. With Split Enz the cultural exchange rate felt like dollar for dollar. Very slight shifts to their look but such a paring of their arrangements and songcraft made them indistinguishable from bands much younger making bigger splashes.

Neil Finn's influence cannot be underestimated here as he emerged as the kid brother that could and continued to prove his chartability in future singles like One Step Ahead and History Never Repeats. Brother Tim, no slouch himself, seemed outclassed and perhaps it wouldn't be until Neil's Crowded House years that he could break from the constraints. Until then, his fast, snappy songs that had fewer quirks than hooks sounded like everything else on the top 40.

But what did this mean? The next LP sounded much like this and the one after was more expansive with real orchestras and folk instruments and had a kind of concept to it. The direction suggested the kind of development that the boomers who ran the big radio stations and the record companies that fed them would recognise as orthodox; a little Beatles never hurt anybody, after all? Back in the land of the long white cloud the mighty mice of the Flying Nun label were producing miniature wonders for the ages with the likes of The Clean and The Chills aided and accessorised by the great Chris Knox who seemed to do what he did for the love of it. As the Enz grew and broadened they must have felt this pinch and even sting. In Australia, The Go Betweens were still quirky and low key and Nick Cave returned to Melbourne with a better defined bad boy saunter that you didn't have to believe for a second to enjoy it. Where could Split Enz go after they had finally cracked the code of charting in the new, short haired video arcade of post punk? They went boomer because the boomers finally gave them the money they'd been starving for over the decade just gone and cared to starve no more. They were selling to fans half a decade younger than their first fans had been and that's how you build a consumer base.

Until then, this disc, forty plus minutes of joyous hard edged pop that you will still like and sing along to forty years later, still stands. If you don't know any of the context that's all you need to hear. The band that had gone from obscurist art rock to teenybopper without ever going through a cool phase could at least write a good song and fill two sides of vinyl with them.

I'm saying all this as I didn't have this record at the time and a little later picked up the singles second hand as they worked so solidly well. My face might redden to admit that I turned my nose up at them for being oldies while really enjoying the songs. Well, I was seventeen and you're allowed to be as shallow as the bounds of human interchange will permit. Finally hearing the record after decades of all but forgetting it had been released was a strange experience as it felt old and familiar and unheard at the same time. But I still play it now because there are songs because there are songs because there are songs.

1980@40: SCARY MONSTERS - DAVID BOWIE

 

So much had happened. The great morphing wave had taken us from the barre chording slaughter of punk through the sourcandy Brighton rock of post punk, industrial, ska, dub on the mainstream that it looked like nothing in particular was in fashion. As I headed to eighteen and nominal adulthood I started thinking that all that was just as well as it might be time to ditch the idea of fashion altogether. Fact was I wasn't good at playing it to begin with and it wasn't for years before I could look back and understand that that was fashion. There would soon be clubs where the punters dressed like 18th century Venetian court jesters and bands that got on stage in the plainest drab they could get from the supermarket. We didn't even have a patois; there was no rad or cool or square or gnarly to us and we called what we liked good. Then the clip for Ashes to Ashes was played on Countdown and I thought for the first time in at least a year: I wonder what David Bowie will do now?

The last one, Lodger, was a track by track departure from the big sci-fi landscapes of Low and the harsh and sharded night of Heroes. It even had some fun along the grooves. And it was eclectic but it was eclectic in a Bowie way, unlike when Billy Joel tried to get all new wave that year and only made himself look older than everyone. And then in 1980 he turns up again in a clip that looked like a hard sci-fi tv show and music that didn't try to be anything but good. And because he always knew how to cast, nascent star of the London Blitz Steve Strange was there beside him in surrealistic costume. Bowie was trying and trying hard but in his case it worked. The video and song were thrilling.

We get to the start of the opener It's No Game with the sound of someone fast winding a cassette, turning it over and winding it more. A messy count-in and we plunge into a big noise of Robert Fripp guitar which sounds like a synthesiser here but a rhinoceros there. A sassy woman speaks something in Japanese before Bowie comes in with a vocal that sounds like he's been in the drunk tank for three hours. Desperate screams and imagery of street conflict. Where? Kabul? Iran? U.K.? Anywhere and everywhere. It's as though he spent a day with wall to wall news broadcasts and forced his way out of a locked door. In the end as it's coming to a crashing stop Fripp keeps up his metal monster noodling until Bowie yells at him twice to shut up.

Up the Hill Backwards comes from a highly ordered opposite. Lower key vocals sing the lyric in unison. I always think of lines of athletes in uniform tracksuits singing this with hands on hearts. No major breaks, just a few verses of everyone in line and agreeing. After a decade of great dynamism as an artist and celebrating the disruption of punk while providing his own appropriately different one Bowie watched this settle into genre, into homogeneity which is the point at which any youth revolt is absorbed by the mainstream. So, it sounds healthy and could sell boxes of cereal or flavoured milk. He met the new brash mainstream with subtlety.

The title track bashes to after a brief electronic drone with screaming guitar and oafish glottal gulps. Bowie comes in multitracked and in low Cockney. The chorus adds a microsecond delay giving it an unnerving plastic sound. A long but screaming guitar noodle ends satisfyingly with a double chorus. We leave on a wordless hum-along to the fade. It's rock and roll but it doesn't even have slogans anymore just impulses. 

Ashes to Ashes opens with arpeggios that could be keyboards or guitar or both, warbling through chorus pedals. We hear the sound before the notes but when we hear them we hear a deeply melancholy fanfare. Bowie starts in falsetto: "Do you remember a guy that's been, in such an early song?" References to his first significant hit song Space Oddity and its lead character Major Tom are woven deeply through the lyric but as we relax into a descending progression and a series of stream of consciousness images, backed by a spoken choral vocal, we are lowered into the hole in the ground as the funeral rites are murmured above. This song is a floating wilderness that drifts from gentle reminiscence to distant operatic roars against an arrangement that's very hard to pin down beyond its narcosis. It's sleepy, it's dreamy and second by second it just seems to get sadder. But it's transient, less an end than a farewell. Bowie's using the turn of a nine to a zero as a chance to reboot. The gentle chant "My mother said to get things done you better not mess with Major Tom" steers us slowly out of the melancholy, through the sci-fi landscape of the the video. R.I.P. Let's get this party started.

So we do. Fashion. A few bars of something undefined turns into another thick rock song with a deep funk ground. The vocals again are multitracked, striding through images of political strong arm tactics and style identity. Lots of warping Fripp guitar. The modal oohs of the verse bring back Golden Years but the looseness of that one has been clipped into uniformity. The easy trip of the mid '70s is now the tightly wrought kit of the New Romantic and the New Right. Bowie's not taking sides, here, not even to the extent of a Thin White Duke, he's just watching and reporting. Fashion is fun but it's also deadly serious. By now it's clear he's not giving us another persona, the music itself is doing that, but preparing for an ascension elsewhere. Where? Far above this organising leisure politics, for one thing. He keeps climbing as the voices below chant the sounds of style: fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fashion.

A little feedback gives way to a sweeter Fripp guitar line and a descant. Bowie's in gymnastic mode but the feel of it is the kind of rolling ballad he's been doing since Aladdin Sane, with a forward pushing momentum. But instead of romantic tales of love and travel Teenage Wildlife is more like a celebration of seeing genuine style and individuality in the kind of herd that Fashion was describing. The noodly guitar stretches into Heroes-like legato wails as the calls to the teenage wildlife ascend to jungle howls like fanfares.

Scream Like a Baby opens in strength, telling of hospitals and paddy wagons, life under arrest and in restraints. If the previous song toasted individuality this is aggrieved to see it punished with force. The hard beats and low-mixed rock arrangement push the notion of fun from our minds as Bowie's pained vocal seems to ask us what we would do.

Kingdom Come is a cover of a Tom Verlaine song. Narrator is a prisoner, confused which is how he got there but he just needs a day far away and then a night and he just keeps breaking the rocks in hard labour until the end of the world. Like Sam in the previous song, he's defiant and determined to get to relief and freedom when (in a twist) the kingdom comes. Why this as a cover, especially when Bowie was on such a roll? I think it's a gesture of generosity and an admission that the rising generation might well be getting it right. The arrangement is very little changed form Verlaine's solo album original (it wasn't a Televsion number) in another gesture of solidarity.

Because You're Young begins in the muted chords of the era with a pinched urgent riff. Bowie's vocal falls to the cod operatic he started with the 1969 self titled album and this is one of the few songs on the set that sounds like it could have been on an earlier platter like Diamond Dogs or Station to Station. Not to denigrate it for that but the call back feels strange in this record of newness. The words are intriguing, though. "It's love back to front and no sides." Like the severely short haircuts of the electronic musicians this seems to leave no mystique to the face but rather a taunt to question its contrast. Psychodelicate girls and metal faced boys. Is it about one of his own encounters? Bowie is seldom if ever that straight up but there is a real yearning to the screaming litany of millions of starts, dreams and everything else.

The closer is the opener but without the screaming. Everything is clean. His vocal feels resigned, the old master debaucher on his throne, more like Lou Reed than Bowie he reaches for the snifter of cognac at the table, gives it a swirl with a look in and puts it back without drinking. He's tired and and can't tell drunkenness from inspiration at this time of night but he's ready to go and will be fine when he gets there. Where? Not here, for one thing.

A frantic clicking like typing or something. It fades. End.

November 1980 and I'm studying for exams in the room downstairs, away from the tension of the troubled marriage in the main house. That marriage began with trouble and never got through it so it just repeats there, blow and counter blow. Down here I've got a good big coffee and my texts, and the radio has three or so stations on the AM band I can switch between to hear any of three high rotation numbers. One is Don't Stand So Close, by the Police because I like the movement and the harmonies. Two is Psycho Chicken by the Fools, a clunking parody of Talking Heads' Psycho Killer that I find funny no matter how many times I hear it. And three is Ashes to Ashes. I manage over hours to hear each one about three times and I never forget a fact that I read that night which is just as well as the next day I'll be sitting in the big bright cavern of Cloudland answering questions about Economics. By the time I get to bed I'm hearing an ersatz David Byrne talk about supply and demand of chicken meat and then I dream of white faced clowns on posterised seashores.

Then exams, breathe out, Schoolie's Week, good stuff, bad stuff, and then it's up to Townsville where I finally can't hear my brother and his wife. School friend Wayne visits in the afternoon with a copy of the album. We smoke, chat, drink rum and listen. We were too young to be into Bowie at the start and had to catch up through the jungle drum market of home cassettes. He was a hero for more than one day. Everything was changing. We were legally adults which took the burr off the alcohol a little but it still worked. And, as neither of us were looking, we missed seeing Bowie climb up to the stage of the biggest stadium he could find where he pumped out hits that were ready for the turntables of the most brutal AM playlists. For a bit, at least, though, he was still down here with us, letting us know we were fine. And then he was gone.

1980@40: ALPHABRAVOCHARLIEDELTAECHOFOXTROTGOLF: MODELS

21 Hz rises from the silence as a dusty rhythm. It's like a big wide desolate landscape. I ran it through a spectrum analysis and found there was a dip in the 21 Hz range but a big shelf around 50 Hz (which is past inaudible to human ears) so it wasn't a highlighted frequency that inspired this (unless something is happening at 21 Hz that they put in for the hell of it. Wow, how to ruin an opening track. Thought I'd check it, just in case.

So begins the first LP by Models, a Melbourne band who, along with a few significant cohorts, established a shaky bridge over the ravine between the mainstream and the threatening, many-visaged theatre of post punk. They begin with the atmosphere of an electronic band but they riff in the next track like a rock band. The guitar playing the riff is not overdriven but clean and thick. Strategic Air Command, starting like a jet fighter rising into the blue and the strangled vocals of Sean Kelly gravelling out a short phrase verse melody before the backing vocals burst in: bombs away, that's ok, error in your favour. The phrasing of early computing and automated service. The language is military but it's about a "mock-up" plane. He's trying to entice someone into his lair. There he is the Air Vice Marshall. This odd take on mating from 1980 could be a gamer's anthem from 2020. That's reach.

Two People Per Sq. Km is gutteral verse, singing sax, spiky guitar and bass on a real workout. The existential perils of a place with massively more land than people. A thick, syntheised intrumental break and the chanted chorus: Dancing makes me seasick. Next, a big, bright synth riff and sharp chordy guitar with the kind of quirky love song heads to a half spoken chorus: she pulled the pin on me. 

A galloping bass is joined by a stilted spaghetti western guitar riff in Twice removed. This stops abruptly at the verse which is almost a chant but set to a kind of battered Latin beat. Synth and organ dissonance, seared by more sax. A taut low string guitar riff through a chorus would recall the Cure if not for its arch wink. An staccato organ progression as bright as an ice cream commercial starts Pate Pedestrian and an insistent piano rising figure support the words about his feet getting hot on the spot and that he's a pate pedestrian. Models are from Melbourne and know enough of those to write a song about them. It's an end of side song so it just gets left on rather than chosen first.

A rushing tomtom and big synth arpeggio. Kelly comes in with a few growled lines before the whole band chants: You cheat on her she cheats on you. Kissing Around Corners. A sublime keyboard ascension then repeat. If this were the halved Human League to come this song would have neo disco pretensions but this is pure fun, stopping here and there for a kind of John Carpenter movie synth break before plunging back into the thick pop bliss.

All Stop has a finger clicking 2/4 strut with a skeletal echoed guitar over a bass on full treble. Compelling but it's hard to get a grip on the lyric. Is it about working in advertising? War fottage on tv? A middle section features a panning chopper rattle. It ends on more skeletor guitar, a hummed repetition of the title and a fade. Uncontrollable Boy is an unruly Bossa Nova with Telstar organ. He's unruly himself as the song gives way to a rock instrumental which feels stiff by comparison and the shambling Latin groove is welcome back.

Young Rodents asks us into a shadow with a big bass arpeggio and dirty alley sax. "Plays like a cat, he's a cute little boy." A creepy middle section resigns that they will have to kill them. Somewhere between the scratchers of Hamelin and the future Birthday Party dirge Nick the Stripper lies this strange, unnerving dream. No less a worry is the next track. Hans Stand: A War Record. A fade in of marimbas. Kelly's strangled voice enters gently, telling Hans to clean the church. The title tells where Hans has come from. It fades almost before it's begun. 

And then, the albums master track, the one I heard in my head all the way from Brisbane to Melbourne on a Bus so loud with a yobbo's blaring cassette of the new Dire Straits album that my memory of the Model's track had to struggle. But it won.

Happy Birthday IBM starts without a breath as a bass on the edge of overdrive plays a stuttered two note figure then down a tone. Drums then guitar. Then the mighty synth melody descending in staccato slices into the nervous systems of every one who hears it. "Happy Birthday!" chants the band. "Happy Birthday IBM". An effortless major key squiggle on the keyboards and repeat. But this is Models so you don't repetition until you've tried it a few different ways in the same song. A break restarts with slices of guitar and a cartoony low register synth riff as a big deep voice expands the IBM abbreviation. Chorus chant fades into a ring modulated tom tom and industrial hiss.

There had been plenty of songs about computers and by the early '80s the theme felt weary. Even the strong Mi-Sex charter Computer Games felt a little naff for all its nu-wave force. But this didn't mention computers. It mentioned their maker. And it used them in sequencing. And it suggested the brutalist music they could make and turn us into without a single line about how impersonal they were. And it was fun. The corporate anthem feel to the chorus really is infectious. You can't get away with a single listen without at least wanting to sing in perfect unison with it.

With the strength of sticking to a constant instrumental pallet, some burgeoning songcraft poking through the alt.rock aloofness and a non-gothic delight in the darker corners of the city, Models made me think of Melbourne years before I got there. I saw them a few times and they were good but at the time I wanted them to sound like the spiky, quirky records they made. Then again, as I was to discover, the city of their birth left its stamp on them as much as it did to all its musical children. Part cabaret, part grand guignol Models added a blue-grey smudge to a canvas that just kept getting busier and darker...and more fun.

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.