1981@40: DB'S STANDS FOR DECIBELS

Straight in with b right guitar riffs and acoustic splashes under a high and loud vocal in Black and White and the dB's announce they're here. And then pretty much bungle it. The dissonant harmonies of Dynamite are intentional and difficult to get through. And so on. Really, and so on. It's either power pop with a self-imposed limp or carefully recreated influences like the Pet Sounds Beach Boys on She's Not Worried or the odd rewrite of While My Guitar Gently Weeps in Bad Reputation. The other side is post punk quirk like Wire or XTC. And there's a mass of bratty anti-pop that decades later seems puzzling and pointless.

It's not as though the band has no strength, they're clearly a unit bound with some serious songcraft. It's just that they subvert every track as though they didn't want it too pretty. And the problem with that is that they just don't that far to show this but too far to realise their own riches. Aside from all the clear influences on show here the most profound is that of career contrarian Alex Chilton who never seemed so happy as when he was crapping on his own achievements and daring you to ask for an agenda. The problem with that is that I don't care about this record the same way that I never cared about anything Chilton did outside of a few moments of objectively brilliant inspiration.

So, why don't I just chill and let the guys have their way: it was 1981, fer god's sake? Because it's now 2021 and even only a year or so later I would judge this one harshly on the strength of the follow up Repercussion which is a masterpiece. If I'm still doing this stuff next year, I'll be covering that one and mentioning that I still happily listen to the whole thing without any nostalgia at all. I tried again to leave Stands for Decibels on for an album-length walk this morning and winced for about forty minutes.

The nostalgia on board here is a weird one. I'm not recalling fun times with the record but the attitude of subverting the hooky pop song formula by having only one chorus or making the middle eight go for almost all the song. And so on. When I'd take something like that to any of the bands I was in it might have been tried but every single one done in that spirit was either dropped without further mention or scrapped for parts. In the dB's debut you get a whole two sides of that with the most frustrating glimpses of the power that's being smothered by adolescence. Might have sounded tough live, lads, but in the studio it comes across as petulance rather than exuberance. No, it's not The Records but it ain't Foetus either.

To me it's the sound of a band who are pleasing their friends and is yet another testimony of the addage: good taste is the chief enemy of creativity. It's always important to recall that bands like this are part of a scene and theirs was the cooler traps of ol' Manhattan. Were they trying not to sound like The Cars? Hard to know with Americans. It did take a while for the darker threads to show (though they were already gigging as No Wavers) so maybe this one had to happen if only to exorcise the sydrome. And then they created a durable wonder. Must have heard this one once too often.

1981@40: TRUST - ELVIS COSTELLO

If Get Happy marked my fandom of this songwriter hitting the breaks, Trust might have been the RACQ coming along with some jump leads. That didn't happen. Why? Foremost, it was a release that happened when my income was extremely limited and admitted no cavalier record buying. Also, it was only sporadically played on 4ZZZ. Oh, and even when its clips were on TV in shows like Sounds they failed to lift my spirits. Even Get Happy had some instant winners but this one sounded difficult. To my mind it felt like him saying, you know all that escalating appeal of rich pop music with king hitting lyrics? Well I think I'll go back to the spiky and unappealing style of My Aim is True.

Take Clubland, the lead single and opening track. It sounded like a higher-fi track from Get Happy, all buried lead vocal and tremulous Hammond organ. Could be about the local scene, organised crime, or even about the clubs the title and chorus say it's about. All the vocal slithering and occasional confidential asides tie up in a big chorus with a jubilant guitar hook. Sounds very mysterious but I didn't have the energy to go on the trail. Lovers Walk comes in with a stuttering stride. The vocal yells out associations with the word lovers. Could be about something could be a list of word associations like the lesser tracks of Get Happy. The quirk in the rhythm keeps me at bay so my caring would have to exceed it. Never happened.

You'll Never Be a Man starts all at once with a strolling rhythm and clear vocal but in such a musically bland package that I don't care what the confronting title means. Pretty Words takes us right back to Get Happy with its late night vocals and band that just seem to be playing the chords rather than the song. Strict Time rams the awkward rhythm of Lovers Walk with a little engagement in the chorus vocal arrangement. Luxembourg bashes in with a rockabilly echo in the vocal but a assaultive rhythm but again it suffers from a directionless arrangement. Watch Your Step ends the old side one with a Hammond-led Motown groove. The confidential vocal is well out front without a degree of reverb. Words of excess and warning. The pleasantest musical experience on the record so far.

The subdued funk of New Lace Sleeves promises a little more of the Armed Forces brightness. The vocal is a little more gymnastic and ranges from a kind of Scott Walker to EC's own Smokey Robinson take. The lyric is intriguing and for once the quirk in the rhythm feels inspired instead of last ditch. From a Whisper to a Scream adds the melodic lollies of Squeeze. Costello even shares the mic with Glenn Tillbrook from said London based popsters. Not a bar wasted. Different Finger's Nashville bompiness points to Elvis' George Jones obsession which would plunge him into an all covers/all country album later in the year which I can't yet imagine covering here. White Knuckles bashes in with a full band and candy vocal melody. The Stax influence of the previous set returns yet again. It's ok but like more than a few tracks here adds bars and lines that strike as unwelcome.

Rachmaninoff chords on the piano start Shot with his Own Gun. Costello's tune rolls down and allows the rhythm to speed and drag like a show tune. Just EC and piano here and a dark minor key pallet. This is another future indicator that would see him working with the likes of Bacharach and The Brodsky Quartet. For all that, it's a welcome rather than an irritating change. Fish 'n' Chip Paper claps along with the rest of the albums moments of progressing from Get Happy. The quirky burlesque solos in the middle make their point and then it's more of the same. But then things change.

A reggae bass over an acoustic guitar and sober vocal and no percussion but a tambourine as Costello tells of an intrigue which ends in tragedy too early in the predawn. The chorus "But it's easier to say I love you and yours sincerely, I suppose. All little sisters like to try on big sister's clothes" is delivered with such a saddened witness that it almost makes me forget the annoyance of most of this record. It's a cinematic miniature, a kind of despairing whispered revisit to Armed Forces' Party Girl, as though he were checking in with that doomed figure.

The sound is richer than the previous one and everyone's in fine form. So what's wrong? A lot of albums can be left on through the filler and the missteps. The problem here is that there are no real missteps and no filler. All of this is intentional and offered in sincerity. I just don't like most of it. This is a breakup coffee and as with the worst of them it's a matter of saying, "it's not you it's me."

I'd see the future efforts around the traps as we still went to the same parties but it was only now and then and I wasn't always moved by even the best I saw. To this day I can't quite grow beyond albums two and three. The only reason I like Imperial Bedroom as much as I do is because it reminds me of Armed Forces. I appreciate his work with the legends and the seriously talented but I seldom stick around to the end. It's not him ...

1970@50: JOHN LENNON/PLASTIC ONO BAND

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1980@40

January 1980. 17 and hungover, I was staring down the failure of my Year 12 and my driving test. I had joked probably once too often and angrily about joining the army because my sister pleaded successfully with my Mum to pack me off to Hubbards for another tilt at Uni. Well, I didn't know anyone there so all the parties and crap I'd been doing instead of studying were off the table. If I could keep my head down for just one year.

I knew I'd done this to myself but I was still 17 so I blamed them for not telling me sooner. Still, I had a way out. So, Off I went on the great silver bird to Brisbane. My brother Michael picked me up from the airport and drove me, along with his wife and tiny child along the scenic route to Auchenflower where I'd call home for the next four and a bit years. Brisbane felt like a city. I liked how I could hear the people next door and how the streets were all undulating as though someone had come in and squeezed them into hills and valleys to make room for the new houses. Michael and Honora had visitors from overseas that afternoon. We had tea and cake and it felt grown up. Then, after the visitors left, Honora picked a fight with Michael which had such a ringing emotional violence to it I could only stand and gape. That happened almost every day I shared that house with them. 

Monday and admissions. Mum had again shown that she was better with the idea and the gesture than the admin so I had to work it out with the Principal, the wiry and wonderful Doc Squire. So I mostly brooded and smoked in the study room as the sounds of the classes murmured from the hallway of the dusty second floor of the old brick clump in Charlotte Street that Hubbards was. And I pondered all the wrong that I'd faced, all the smug academic monsters who succeeded at my expense who would regret every beaming smile once I rose in force with .... Oh that's the other thing, talented and trammelled, friendless in a new place and feeling my best stab at identity was through contrarianism I started calling myself a fascist. No, really.

Apart from the pure obscenity of it, here's what was wrong with that: I had no agenda. Nothing, that is, beyond a sense that I deserved the adoration of the despot. Gets sillier. At no time did I give up my disgust at the Bjelke Petersen regime in Queensland which was, with its politicised police force, all but a fascist state already. Nor did I give up any part of the fantasy that I would soon be a rock star (which was diametrically opposite to any goosestepping daydreams I was having). Also, the only way of becoming a fascist leader of any kind is to have a following and the only way of getting that is to appeal to the types who would do all the biffing necessary for the start of such a career and the only way of getting any of that sorted was to deal with such people in such a way that wouldn't end with my being binned in seconds of the attempt. Non-success at being a fascist is a failure I'll take any day. A year later I was comfortably absorbing the ways of the left which is where I have remained. In any case all that became moot. I got a social life and the blackshirt line was just a conversation starter, then a joke, then kind of nothing.

At the other end of it I had so successfully self-isolated that I had become a decent sort of student and was able to accommodate both books and parties. It was actually a pretty good life for a year. Then again, I was living with the most unsettled marriage I have ever experienced. When Honora wasn't tearing at my brother for having constant affairs (her imagination from what was probably a single slip-up on his part) she was targetting me for supposedly never doing any cleaning. She didn't do much herself but I figured if I took the worst job and did it perfectly on a weekly basis she'd fuck off and it worked. Every Saturday afternoon I'd clean the bathroom free of spots while Sounds played in the next room. If a song was good I'd stop scrubbing the loo and go and look. I had no player and all my records were back in Townsville. But there was 4ZZZ. And Night Moves was on the weekend for when I had to stay home and there was always something good on that. And that was the next thing I liked about 1980, the music was really good.

Because I've been doing the albums separately I'll just call the singles here.

The Vapors' Turning Japanese was a clever take on teenage angst that (despite the literal images of the vid was not about its title or chorus) while Major Matchbox's Rockabilly Rebel matched a slinky verse with an embarrassing football hooligan chorus, Split Enz kept their Neil Finn winning streak going with I Got You while Queen pleasantly surprised with their understated rockabilly Crazy Little Thing Called Love, John Lennon sounded like an old uncle with glory days stories in Starting Over and in Coming Up Paul MacCartney sounded like his cousin, John Foxx turned the aircon down to Arctic for Underpass with a video that looked like Ballardian sci-fi, I rolled the dial of all the stations in the study room downstairs to hear Ashes to Ashes again and almost got it on a personal rotation while swatting for exams, see also Psycho Chicken by the Fools which I can't listen to now but thought was hilarious then, like Xanadu Can't Stop the Music was put into the water supply and I wanted both boiled into the ether but Brass in Pocket by the Pretenders was fresh and bright and Space Invaders was the ugliest earworm of the year, He's my Number One was a song I only knew by the chorus because that's all I ever saw on Countdown when they'd play a little bit in the top ten montage but masterproggers Pink Floyd actually had a big hit with their stern ditty about school Another Brick in the Wall while Ghengis Khan thought Moscow was a place where every night night night there was laughter and every night night night there was love, while Blondie yelled out a banger about love for sale with Call Me from the movie American Gigolo which might well have been set in Funky Town, according to Lipps Inc but wasn't where you'd take a Holiday in Cambodia (that was schoolies week and HiC was one of the anthems of that particular fortnight) and Flowers did as much with We Can Get Together and before that with the intriguing and still strong I Can't Help Myself which was what U2 might have been thinking when they sang I Will Follow over one of the decades biggest and best guitar riffs and not to be outdone in the brightness stakes Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark mixed '50s kitsch with the atomic bomb in Enola Gay which was a B29 while the later model B52s dazzled with the whirling Private Idaho which is a state that might have had forests but they weren't anything like the forest in the Cure's A Forest while Siouxsie and the Banshees Happy House might have been in its very dark centre and if Madness plinked and cranked about school days in Baggy Trousers Talking Heads rose with the big spooky epic Once in a Lifetime and Joy Division chilled us all down with a whistling keyboard riff and a cry from the grave with Love Will Tear Us Apart.

And then there were exams in November. They were held in Cloudland, a big spring loaded ballroom where everyone from Glenn Miller to The Clash had or would play. And on the day of the last exam I crunched over the hail in the gutter as Mark pulled up in his car to ask if I needed a lift down to the Coast for Schoolies. Thumbs up and see ya later. Whatever that exam was I could only think of the end of the day. After a self-treat of a long neck of something beery I packed a bag in time for Mark to drop by and we headed for the freeway. The big leggo blocks of Surfers Paradise rose in the dusk in invitation.

We got to his family unit on the somethingth floor of a high rise on Broadbeach. We made pasta for dinner and I ogled the flats of the buildings across the road, open living rooms and money. We went out for a drink later just because. Not a rage but a start. The next days were parties in canal-land, the flat the girls were staying at, beach bonfires, walking through the streets of Mermaid Beach after Friday the 13th at the cinema as the news of the Balaclava Killer seeped into the airwaves. So much. I will never eat another Chiko roll but I will always remember Kaylene (but I'm meant to say that). 

Mark dropped by the flat to pick me up. I didn't want to go but my plane was that day. We drove back to Brisbane in the rain with Flowers and Tubeway Army on cassette. There was a card on my dresser. It was from a friend back in Townsville. Her common law husband had been shot. The front of the card was a cute watercolour of a wombat. The news and this picture drew a rising swell of nausea in me like that one drink too many after midnight when you're rolling around the lawn in the dark. It was Rik. I knew him well and liked him a lot. Dead. Not just dead. Murdered. I showered and tumbled into bed and slept till noon. 

Michael tried to get out of giving me a lift to the airport but I prevailed. The flight was easy. Mum picked me up at the airport and it was good to hear her chirping mundanity. Dad had built this thing and new people had moved into the rental house with my brother Greg (his former flatmates had kept their rent, which was meant to be paying me my allowance which meant that I really did go without food for a week) and Nita moved into Nanna's old place etc. etc. I threw my bags into my old room, went to the kitchen to fix a lemonade and vermouth, collapsed into a banana lounge by the pool and heard the song So Long by Fischer Z play from somewhere nearby. It wasn't the words, just the feel of the song. It got to me. I sipped, closed my eyes and wept for a few minutes. Parties. Home. Parties. At the end of January my little brother ran through the rain to fetch a big yellow envelope from the letterbox. It was for me. I'd got in to Griffith Uni. Summer.

1970@50: ALL THINGS MUST PASS - GEORGE HARRISON

Harrison left the White Album back in London, wandered until he found a bunk in Bob Dylan's cabin where The Band were throwing ideas around and making music that breathed. His song notebook grew heavy and he made his way back. He strode into Apple to the news of yet another movie, this time about them getting back to basics and playing live again. The last movie was a cartoon and the one before it was a disaster and this new scene felt like the old one: formula and work. He offered some songs which were variously knocked back or ridiculed.

The next album was a big production. He had two of its best songs and one of those was his first A-side. It was a lavish business and probably felt good because final. I'm making that up but what he did after that is instructive. He went on the road, not with The Beatles but with friends and just played music again. He hung around musicians and felt like getting them all together and so he did. If anything out of any of the four of them said solo outpouring it was this, a mammoth six sides of vinyl with everything in those notebooks plus the other thing the old outfit never seemed to do, jam.

And if Phil Spector had annoyed Paul with the heavenly choirs on Long and Winding Road he had spliced a tight and better-lengthed I Me Mine and George had always been a fan of the big Philly Sound, anyway. And so it was that Phil and his eighty tambourines, three drummers and eighty-six piece orchestra got the gig of dambuster to George's pent up creations. 

I'd Have You Anytime doesn't sound Beatley at all. A slow wafting love song that sounded ... grown up. The big massed acoustic strum starts My Sweet Lord which takes a well judged verse and a bit before getting fatter and deeper with a call and response vocal of genuine exultation. Also on this track, a hit single (and future lawsuit), was the sweet Stratocaster silding that would become the artist's signature for the rest of his career. A crunchy electric riff gives way to an infinity piece band. A buried vocal has yet the strength that Harrison found at the top of his range. Wah Wah does use the effect of its title but also refers to a headache and a certain moptop that bandmate John would also refer to the following year in less bright and poppy terms. The arrangement is a big mess like so many of the tracks here but this one at least chucks a few surprise 7th chords in for texture and extra fun. the Version One version of Isn't it a Pity has the pumping vamp that would feed many a future track from George and John. It's a straight read with that kind of rising progression that every singer songwriter was learning how to use for a whole career. It might also bring later Pink Floyd to mind. The orchestration sounds like Phil Spector rather than George Martin and you understand that this late Beatles style song has been taken to a deliberately different shop.

A cheeky descending fuzz guitar figure sounds twice before the Phil Spector Cosmos Orchestra comes in with the catering. That said, What is Life is a well fashioned pop number with a searching lyric characteristic of Harrison since Rubber Soul. If Not For You is a Dylan cover but one done from a personal acquaintance with the author. He's not trying to impress Mr Caustic by sounding like him or doing the Turtles/Byrds quanglewangle. It's presented in a restrained, laid back arrangement which actually does sound like a band. Harrison's vocal is full throated and melodious. A delightful breather of a track. Behind that Locked Door shows Harrison in a convincing country mood, adding side swiping chord changes that would have had him run out of Nashville after one verse. But it's a lovely effort, flowing on well from the intimacy of the Dylan song.

Let it Down begins in a canyon of sound but settles into a gentle phasey groove, Harrison cooing into pleasant 9ths. Run of the Mill passes by without incident more than a mention of Dylan's influence. Beware of Darkness lifts with tasteful interplay between acoustic and electric, a dramatic chord progression and expressive vocal. One of Harrison's best, this was allowed to keep to a plain atmosphere and only benefits from the restraint. Apple Scruffs does sound like it was meant to impress Dylan with Bob's aimless harp wailing and a whimsical tune and lyric about hangers on. Don't care about it.

Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp (Let it Roll) starts with an ethereal muffled guitar descent through a minor progression bolstered by meaty piano and solid drums. Harrison seems to be telling a story here but the ambience with its frequent quiet fairytale breaks give it a mystery courted at the time by the likes of Genesis and the proggers. A lovely oddity. Awaiting on You All is such a botched wall of sound effort that it ends up sounding like a late '60s Tang commercial. Not for me.

All things Must Pass rounds off the old side three. A beautiful philosophical ballad rejected by the Beatles (though they did try it). The minor change in the chorus as the languid title phrase sounds. It's very tempting to imagine this treated by the other three and George Martin. It would sound like side one of Abbey Road with less of the cliches of Spector's orchestration. Surprisingly, it ends hard where you might expect a long fade. This is the one moment where you can hear a kind of bitterness in his approach to the new circumstances. It's there in the otherness of the arrangement. To me he's saying, well, you lot didn't want it. Still, an indestructible piece.

By the side four things are filling out under the listener's exhaustion. I Dig Love begins with a kind of horror movie chromatic descent/ascent with a vocal that intones the title tirelessly before giving into the refuge of a kind of blues progression for the chorus (with the same words). But then there's Art of Dying, launching with a few big wah wah squeals before it takes off into a Bond anthem on good Hamburg seagoing speed. He had this number around the time of Revolver but you probably shouldn't know that until after you hear it or you'll start wishing it had been done then instead of here where it gets buried under the sods and turf of Spectorvision. That really is a pity. Then it fades. Then Isn't it a Pity (version Two) starts. It's a starker approach with echoey guitar and percussion falling around the vocal which convinces better for being more restrained. It does go on, though. Hear Me Lord bursts in with a minor key progression. The prayer of the lyric is delivered in a sincere voice. Again, the sheer density of the piece keeps itself at arm's length. This track is entirely in step with its time but reminds me of too much that came after it where a grinding minor key blues with earnest vocal preached or beseeched and left me cold as a tuckshop doughnut. Sorry, not for me.

But that ends the songs of the first two discs. Then the reality of the three disc magnitude deflates into perspective as you gradually understand that a full extra disc is really only going to be like Hear Me Lord but without vocals. Endless vamps and sax solos, organ outings here and there. Johnny's Birthday interrupts for a brief naff joke before we fall arse backwards into another jam. At least they did admit that's what they were. Anyway, more music for parties in movies where zonked out girls say things like "oh, get with it, you square." I Remember Jeep begins with a surprise visit by the synthesiser that lent such colour to Abbey Road as it rises in a high white tide before fading into a perky, directionless twelve bar workout. Thanks for the Pepperoni (a title that dares you to think it won't be a pointless instrumental) begins with a Chuck Berry fuzzy intro and speeds to nowehere for another five minutes and that's it.

But for all the waste of vinyl of the last disc the good thing I can say about All Things Must Pass is that it really does sound like someone so happy to be free that he can't wait until the real songs are over tgo get out the beer and beach towels and head for the sand. As with the other's first post-Beatles records it's a strange business trying to think of how they would have sounded to fans at the time. Abbey Road was a grand effort, taking them to the peak of the massive sound they had been climbing towards but then Let It Be sounded like it was recorded in a bike shed. 

Ringo produced some outstanding singles but his albums embarrassed the other three. Paul made a record at home and chucked at least one bona fide classic from the studio which he didn't release as a single. John was about to get raw and shouty and very basic but also very pro. But here was the quiet one blasting out from under the tablecloth with a massive show of strength, joy and genuine if odd religious light. No one's album is perfect but no one expected this two fisted red hot go at that very thing. You might have wondered if George hadn't been the stifled one, the spark below the louder flames. Just for a while, at least.

1970@50: THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD - DAVID BOWIE

 

If his 1969 album (various titles: it's the one with Space Oddity) showed an artist emerging into definition as a songwriter his follow up was the first indication that he was going to make moves on his image and sound. With 2020 hindsight it looks like a bold game plan but the thing Bowie picked up between his eclectic 1967 eponymous debut and his rebooted eponymous debut two years later was that a committed record was a better bet. So, on the 1969 one he sounds like one singer songwriter with a band behind him and two sides of whatever he had that had srpouted out of the now tired folk rock genre. Then he made a metal album.

The Man Who Sold the World is the same kind of songs, if more brutal, arranged with even less variation than the previous platter. This album is also the first one on which Bowie worked with the great Mick Ronson, rock guitarist extraordinaire and deft arranger. With a folder bursting with dark themed lyrics and very finished songs the pair set to creating Bowie's blackest record until Diamond Dogs.

The epic Width of a Circle opens with tremulous feedback and a snakey descending guitar riff, joined in cruisey fashion by the band until it grunts into gear as a hard rock groove. Bowie's vocal is the high nasal rock shine he would affect well into the Ziggy Years before abandoning it from Young Americans onward. Immediately, we lose the whole metal goodness of the track and understand that this one doesn't want to play normal. The lyric itself is a kind of debauched pilgrim's progress, taking the narrator from a personal trek of self discovery and self-loathing to a S&M encounter with god or a demon (it's hard to tell) in a second section driven by a more conventional boogie rock growl. There's a kind of ascent into apotheosis in the wordless repeat of the opening figure. Someone's risen.

All the Madmen begins with a quiet fumble on the acoustic which soon articulates as a real chord figure. It's joined by an eerie low profile feedback. We're in Hammer Horror territory. Bowie's vocal is his "other" voice, the one he'd use on half of the next album and all of Ziggy; a kind of comb and tissue paper buzzing tone, kind of camp but also a real character each time. "Day after day, they send my friends away to mansions cold and gray to the far side of town where the thin men stalk the streets and the sane stay underground." The Paul McCartney of Eleanor Rigby would have maimed and killed for that compact narrative. Immediately, the landscape is grim and that's just a few lines. Add a loopy recorder and some robust Les Paul chording and then a shreiking synthesiser and you have a nightmare to beat the band. Except that you can sing along to it because this is Bowie and he never forgets to bring a tune. A horror movie in a song. It wont' be the last. Important to note, this was inspired by Bowie (maybe we should say David Jones for this) visiting his half brother Terry, who was confined in care with schizophrenia. Bowie took his frustration out in song and here it is, pounding at us as we join in the chorus. Getting a vibe yet? "Zane zane zane, ouvre le chien!" Nor do I but I am getting the vibe.

Black Country Rock might seem to those of us who read biographies to refer to the twin hard rock influencers of 1970, Led Zep and Sabbath but the odd thing here is that the vocal is a strangely bitchy take on his friend and rival Marc Bolan. The song might conceivably have been a T-Rex number but Bowie's mordant vibrato and boomy rock revival chords tell of a curious jab. Good song, though.

After All is the song I played the same hour I heard of Bowie's death. How many times had I lain in a teenage dark listening to its earthward dragging waltz with the bowster whispering his Nietzschean lines and demented cockney choirs intoning: Oh By Jingo! Countless. The end of the first side in the old money was a sharp left turn from the arrogance of the hard rock of the rest of the side. It's like we stopped in the middle of the wake and remembered the corpse on the table. There in the great dark that bore this song's idea is the line: won't someone invite them, they're just taller children. It cut me to my ashen blood. A kind of sea dirge for the funeral march of all time. I love it every time I listen and it never gets old.

Side two starts with a simple three chord strum that ends in a surprise tympanum boom. A sinister feedback lingers in the background. Bowie's buzzy voice comes in with a tale about a war veteran who is so used to killing that he can't tell the difference between war and civilian life. Running Gun Blues. It snaps to the moment the tympanum is replaced by the crispest snare drum in recording history. The song doesn't go much further than that but doesn't have to. Why? because Bowie has learned something.

He's learned, since the often complex stories of the first album lost him an audience and the more searching narratives of the second did the same, that with music it's better if you don't sing the whole story. It's better if you let the music help out. Between the last and this, apart from anything else, the mighty Tommy was released which did just that. Townshend understood that opera is a mesh of meaning, one piece in the words, another in the tune and the orchestration and another still in the implied action. The Man Who Sold the World is Bowie's post-Tommy record. and it remains one of his most tightly coherent. 

Take the next one. Saviour Machine. It's pretty much the story of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Computer goes mad. Bowie narrates a little exposition and then it's over to the computer cam for the rest. It comes from the dark of the vinyl between the tracks in a busy 5/4 gallop but settles into a 6/8 canter as we hear about President Joe and his dream of a digital King Solomon who then finds its life is too easy and decides to rustle up some spice with social chaos. A big spitting synthesiser solo in the middle tells you all you need to know. It might ruin the mood to say that the melody of the break is the same as the opening of the Cilla Black chestnut You're My World but life's tough.

She Shook Me Cold starts with a few grimacing Hendrix style wah wah twirls before the dam bursts into a world of tritonal grunge as Bowie almost vomits his vocal about a debauchee who meets his hedonistic match and can't quite recover. A middle section breaks out the back story but he's met his match and the point at which he admits his defeat and servitude is the moment that takes this way out of a Sabbath soundalike. "She don't know I crave her so" is a screech of anguish that ends in a few seconds of tight breathing before the final verse kicks in like the first. As I've pointed out in the articles on Sabbath's first two platters in this series, they were far from a metal chug machine but Bowie's take adds a moment of tension that is pure cinema that they never got to.

The title track begins with a pleasant Latin shuffle which is taken over by a phased-out Bowie who tells a weird tale of meeting a stranger on the stair who tells him that his life has left him spare. Has he sold the world in the literal sense, to an alien race? Or has he sold his potential, his reality for the fury of the chase to sex, drugs, rock and roll, power, fame, expertise....? It's hard to tell but we are left as spooked as the narrator, especially in the fade which keeps the Latin side-to-side going but adds an epic wordless choir as the song seems to sink slowly into a vortex. If you speak to a later X-er you'll hear them think of it as a Nirvana song. I wonder, though, did Cobain find something familiar in its brief depths that his fans could only guess at, something lightless and endless that he saw in awe and sought to touch, at least once?

The Supermen is a closing track that will surprise no one who reads a Bowie biography but spooked me. It's earth-bowel drums and prehistoric male choirs mixed with a crunchy Les Paul and Bowie's buzzy voice tell of rites and conflicts of the ubermensch. Extremely effective use of limited resources turn this song which might have come off as petulant and silly into a tiny epic of imagination. the final words are in the Ziggy voice and reach to the dark heights: "So Softly a supergod dies."

This is the second Bowie album I owned on vinyl. It disappointed me. I bought it the same day as I bought the Who compilation Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy which also disappointed me. I wanted the Who to have been stadium-ready deafening rockers from the start but they sounded like The Beatles. I had read that this Bowie album was a "real explosion into heavy metal" but it seemed so noncey. It was months before, listening to both, that I came to understand how writers found things in music that were hard to sing to and defied all dancing but cut through the packaging plastic and into the sharp and jolting electricity within. I came to that and finally felt reverence. And then punk happened and I woke up in the late '70s.

Listening notes: for this article I listened to the incredible 2015 remaster as a hi-res download. Vinyl can never compete. My late '70s copy had the RCA packaging with the NME article on the back and the Ziggy era front cover. It created a very different impression from the original one.

1970@50: LOADED - THE VELVET UNDERGROUND

And then there were three. And Doug Yule. Same as the previous except drummer Mo Tucker left to have a baby. All songs by Lou Reed and four lead vocals by Yule. If you don't want to look it up, Doug Yule sounds like a younger Lou Reed. Three years at the top of the hip world and the bottom of the charts had taken their toll. The previous record had used the absence of John Cale's avant gardism to present a cleaner sound and this one was meant to be the pop breakthrough. The title not only referred to being intoxicated but also Loaded with hits.

Who Loves the Sun? begins with a sweet Yule vocal and Mammas and Pappas backing vocals. There's an edit towards the end that's so rude it sounds like a hard tape splice where the band falls into a Beach Boys style a cappella break before resuming. Whatever the intention this mostly appealingly sugary number sounds like something from half a decade before. That and the jolting vocal break make it sound like the most sneering attempt at writing commercially imaginable.

It tinkles and jangles into a fade that gives way to one of the most iconic of all Velvet Underground Songs and one that would effectively be the source point of Reed's career beyond the band. While a few of the lines lifted from the lyric might promise drugs and cross dressing this is more of a Diane Arbus photo rendered in song and has more to say to the hippies ridiculing the squares of the previous generation that those pre boomers have life in them, didn't invent sex or hedonism either but got there before the flower children. Reed has and eats his cake with this one. Sounds risque but it's not what you think. The editing of the track on the first release of this album leaves out a bridge and an ecstatic choral coda and Reed often cites it among the reasons why he upped and left before it was in the shops. What remains is a fabulously catchy song that pays the patient listener with depth that it pretends it doesn't have.

Rock & Roll treads path already familiar and would continue to be as a band puts the term Rock and Roll into a title or a chorus, mentions teenagers and the radio. This one adds a circular chord progression. The major reason this doesn't sound dated to me is that the formula was in place for decades and seemed to stretch into my adulthood. Or is it that this kind of boomer anthem was as go-to as a Chuck Berry knockoff is to every single garage band that ever practiced under the house or in a bedroom? History will decide.

It's here that I'll stop going track by track and say that the first impression I had of this record has never been superseded by a closer listen later. The concept of making a record stuffed with hits condemned it to sounding of its time and once you've done that you fall behind the times. In the interest of full disclosure I find most of the rock music released between 1969 and 1976 grating and regressive and, while this album is by no means a poor effort it sounds more like that kind of rock music than any of the three previous VU albums. 

Exceptions are New Age that could fit comfortably on any solo Lou Reed album form the '70s, I Found a Reason and Sweet Nuthin' which continue the gospel influences that helped make the third album so strong. These don't sound like Boomers on the Radio but they do hark back to the days of a better band.

So was it the further dissipation of the membership, the influence of new and straight-minded members/musicians, weariness with the game of it, that makes this one sound like a contract filler rather than a statement by a group? All and none, probably. The next studio album to bear the band's name was effectively a Doug Yule solo effort and, while it's a perfectly creditable set of songs, it is mired in that flavourless swamp that was most of early '70s rock. When Reed left for his solo career he redesigned himself faster than Bowie for a little while until settling on a premature rock sage role with records like Berlin. And when it came to do the live album mandatory for all successful rock acts of the '70s (even The Beatles had a couple of posthumous live discs) Rock 'n' Roll Animal it was unusually a single album and featured an almost all Velvet Underground set list.

Many fans of the band put this at the end of the studio albums and have no issue with its sound or writing, thinking of it as a kind of cynical progression. Me, I can listen to it but almost always stop it near the end of the old side one. I keep wanting to listen to Transformer or Berlin. But this record also poses questions along the lines of the ship of Theseus. Huh? Well, Theseus had a ship and over the years it had all of its parts replaced. Was it still the ship of Theseus? Was the Velvet Underground of Loaded the same one as the Banana album? Decidedly not but closer to the self-titled one. But the self-titled one was a set of heavily crafted pieces that continued the raw emotional shocks of the earliest recordings which survive as ghosts of the afternoon on Loaded. If "and Nico" is a warehouse apartment with the windows blacked out Loaded has them all smashed in. The sunlight's blaring in but it's just not the same place.