1981@40: TALK TALK TALK - THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS

"The one who insists he was first in the line is the last to remember her name."

After the rushed and self consciousness of the debut the second Psychedelic Furs album starts with a bang. Dumb Waiter bursts open with a climbing sax riff over the full band boom. Richard Butler comes in, his signature rasp listing demands that end in a chorus of paranoia. The fog of beautiful loping rock music rolls over a slight variation of the same scenario, ending with a solo on ebow and a gently fragmented ending.

Before you have the time to wonder if they've blown it all on the first song, Pretty in Pink bams in with a mix of powerchords and clean jangle. Caroline goes about her life used and abused by a string of boys who joke about her after using her. This social hell is ameliorated by her fantasy life which keeps her thinking she's actually popular and universally loved. The fast rolling verses tell of this queasy disconnect as she moves from one encounter to the next, gathering a kind of sniggering ridicule from the boys. Then choruses open this up with great power as a two-note figure insists itself against the thunder of the bass and drums. 

This harrangue of socio-sexual life is one of the songs of the year. Sung through a grimace at the centre of the storm of rock music that is both conventional (chord progression) and convention baiting (arrangement and production). I had the single with the picture sleeve featuring stills of the band in what looks like a gothic film set, a man at a darkened window, a fireplace, chequered floor tiles and so on. That seemed perfect. Not that the song was gothic, it was firmly set in a current first world urban environment, but that it was cinematic. The stills look like they're from a video from the time but I don't remember one and can't find one now that isnt related to the John Hughes movie which was five years after and point missing, according to Richard Butler. Nevertheless, the song and its presentation struck me as heavily cinematic. The song was a renewed kitchen sink film in miniature, a kind of Up the Junction for the Britain of Thatcher, a social lassez faire wherein the wolves always win. The abrupt gear change at the end features a spoken coda. It's more fragments and begins, "Caroline lies on the table screaming..." Seldom has a rock song embraced both pop sweetness and snarling indictments in the same spot.

I Just Wanna Sleep With You is more of the same sneering delivery of images as in the previous two numbers but here there is a deliberate paring of melody to one iteration of the title in the chorus, the rest is declaimed in a kind of mock wonder or worldly snarl. But to keep the value up it's as different from the last one as the last one was from the opener. The whole band work through the verses and choruses with some bright descending guitar figures but the song is in 2/4 which prevents any monotony from continuous mid paced common time. Also, when rock bands use 2/4 it's usually with a big emphasis on the second of the bar but this is just played as though it's a normal rock song and the effect is of a griming down of what is often a jazzy or bright time signature. After a brief sax outro the song fades rapidly as if to tell us it has done what it came to do, as businesslike as the world of its lyric.

The whole band starts on a smooth rolling wave of sound and Butler comes in with a weary tone. The chorus tightens up with a strident four on the floor and relaxes again for the verses wavelike wash. A cocktail smooth sax solo doesn't feel out of place as it riffs on the verse melody and then over a suddenly thin chorus progressoin before the whole band returns to the swirling motion. The final chorus is bolstered by a hevily processed bass before a hard finish. "There's demonstrations and demonstrations ..." It's a kind of protest fatigue being described at a time when the phenomenon if not the term was taxing anyone affected by Thatcherism's steady demolition of ordinary life. Are we witnessing the birth, or at least the gestation of the yuppy? "Talk about yourself again. Talk about the rain again. No tears, no colours..."

Mr Jones flies into its distorted guitar assault which sounds like the kind of two chord machine that Joy Division was getting into between the first and second albums. Butler's entrance makes it Psychedlic Furs. A Dylanesque harrangue> Mr Jones, the kind of middle class everyman whose bowler hatted blandness in public is matched by a starched perversion behind the door of his home and castle. It's none too nice in there but it is the way of the future. Just a heads up. The bitchiness of the riff shrieking out with high fret guitar and screaming sax above the factory perfect rhythm track tells everyone who hears it to try and make sure Mr Jones never votes again.

The old side two begins for the first time on the album with a song similar to the previous one. A big tom tom thumping bash of a band rhythm. It's a kind of nastier Pretty in Pink with its two note chorus riff  and plain one line chorus: "Into you like a train". If anything it's the reverse shot of that earlier song with Caroline's lovers rasping disclaiming any deep involvement to the  point where he outright states: "if you believe that anyone like me within a song would try and change it all then you have been put on". 

It Goes On starts loud with a crunching wah wah chord riff over the storming band. A distant high guitar line sounds more epic and somehow there's no contradiction. There's a surpising middle bit made of bass and drums for bars and bars bvefore the wah wah guitar  joins and the sax skrunks until everything soars for the chorus before one last verse and chorus and end. The lyric tells of a numbing swirl of hedonism spinning to the point where pain and joy are indistiguishable and routine and the wheel of it rolls on continually, forceful yet greatly less impassioned than the song that describes it. 

So Run Down begins with a swinging 6/8 on the tom toms which at first sounds like an irregular signature. The band's entrance makes sense of it. Butler's vocal yells out more of the same frenzied young life of a lot of the songs on this set but there's a persistent and troubling spectre of the media recording it and plyain git back as marketing. It's over vbefore it begins but that's the point. One last roll on the toms and out.

All of this and Nothing begins with cool water acoustic guitars playing an arpeggio with a sax wailing in the distant reverb. and a chiunky bass offering ground. This fades. A rude chorused guitar riff starts the vocal section as Butler lists a series of images from a life. Pictures, notes, memories. Someone's gone. For good or just somewhere else? No telling that but the chorus' line that "you didn't leave me anything that I can understand" is a tidy and troubling way of putting how profoundly disturbing sudden departures can be. The acoustic opening returns and plays on until joined by that picked bass and then the main electric riff on guitar with punctuating sax gives it context. But then the full band version of that gentle, pensive opening just gets thicker and more complicated until there's nothing left but to fade it.

The closing song, She is Mine, comes it with an easy beat and a bright riff. Butler's vocal is soft and rueful as he reflects on a relationship that might only have been an encounter. He's apologetic to the point where he's ashamed but, seeing the same kind of peopl he is around him just keep playing it the same way there's not that much to regret beyond what might, by regretting itself, lift him from it. The chorus has a countermelody with lines that answer the lead vocal and it is there where the title is heard, partly ironic, partly longing.  A hard stop with a lingering ring of a clean guitar chord. End.

This is the sound of a band that understands that its rapid fame might be fleeting. Everything is tighter and the production sound is a very respectable straddling of radiophonic and post punk force. More than that they (perhaps they and their producer) have learned the power of making each song its own world. Same players. Very similar subject matter each time. However, nothing that follows the one before sounds like it. The debut gave us a mass of potential but too little sense of event, too many of the songs shared too much and it began to sound like an over earnest recording of their live set. Talk Talk Talk sees them leaner but richer, giving just the right amojunt of distinction to each statement to let us know they want us to listen. But that's just the attitude. The music itself is honed and so strongly arranged that it feels like the vagueness of the first one was shyness and this is what they really were like. The Pyschedelic Furs would stick out the decade with a string of decent hits, enough for a filler-free compilation but this is where they made an album of the kind that all that boomer audience and industry never gave the milieu credit for, they made a monument that sounded like its times but still sings true.

1981@40: HEAVEN UP HERE - ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN

Two things about Echo and the Bunnymen: Ian McCulloch was operatic, not just big-voiced, if you wanted to sound like him you needed lessons which none of the main copyists took; this band took the job of arrangement with gravity so that no two choruses sounded the same nor ended the same way, even down to the most fragile pop numbers. Both of those are why Bunnymen albums always begin with epic journeys that only took a few minutes and why their 12 inch mixes, unlike those of any of their colleagues, were worth listening to and having. Echo and the Bunnymen were about what happened between the whisper and the thunderstorm.

If the debut Crocodiles was a brash, rushing diary of lifestyle it also showed that the band knew its craft and if you get hear nothing else from it you will hear dynamics. A reduced verse here or a piano there, you only knew that the next time that chorus came around it was not going to be identical to the last one. This is intensified for Heaven Up Here and while the extended instrumentation is largely absent the guitar layering and arrangements are consistently stunning. This has gone down in band history as guitarist Will Sargent's album as he is credited with rousing the band into rehearsals and arrangements so that the next album would not be a replay of the first. This saves the album. The songs are good and the production is astute but the sheer vision of the arrangements and discipline in their playing lift this mixed set into a unified experience.

Show of Strength starts like surf rock with swinging drums and twin clean guitars playing a vaguely Arabic scale. The vocals come in over this with a familiar style of a single short melodic phrase with slight variations before the chorus rips the carpet out from under its feet with a key change and extra force. The recovery bars following are thickened with an ebow on the lower strings before the next verse which adds a jangling clean guitar in one channel and scratchy rhtyhm in the other. After the next chorus  the guitars all but disappear until come in again with two versions of the scratchy rhythm. Full band for the next chorus and then a big mix of ebow and heavily distorted menacing guitar phrases. Only then do we notice McCulloch's vocal melody has changed and the ebow is howling like a banshee in the distance. And then the band fades while the vocals persist, front and centre: "Hey, I came in right on cue. One is me and one is you." Intimidating confidence has led to a precarious state in which the social gambler doesn't dare let the front down for fear of collapse. And then as the band vanishes there is only the voice in the head, repeating the phrase. It's only a movie. It's only me.

Restless warped voices, rustling and a thick electric buzz and then we're suddenly into the verse with an urgent rhythm and near whispered vocal. A skeletal guitar riff under it changes into a high whining ring as McCulloch goes up an octave. Finally, the chorus breaks out in full voice: "This is the one for the money, this is the one for the trees, this is the one called Heaven and this is the one for me." Chancing against the norms and the taboos but in this case it's not always for coolness' sake; there is a distinct sense of animal gratification here and it's at odds with the rational ovbservation. "They've got it and I had some. I couldn't handle it ... but I had some." Do it to say you've done it. This might burn off with the passing of youth but this expression of that urgent trophyism is quietly unsettling. The blend in the title of jolly old team spirit and the pursuit of cool just adds to that.

Over the Wall starts with a busy ground of percussion and guitar before a guitar/synth riff enters, gigantic and distant. A few muttered lines over apparently random snare hits before the explosion into the chorus which trails into a machine gun like chopping high on the fretboard.  The next chorus ends in a thicked version of the opening groove with a heavier pattern on the tom toms, a quote from Walking in the Rain while indistinct voice speak from a burial under the mix. The toms transfer to the snare, more gunnning guitar before it settles into a lone guitar riffing. When the band comes back in it is with force that begins to dissipate almost immediately with more quotes from teen anthems growing more roomy and delayed. "Hold me tight .... to the logical limit." Collapse into a drum machine version of the opening rhythm and synthesised winds. The unspoken solutions to problems are obscured by local one of addiction or affliction and finally because they are inaudible. Walking in the rain to get rid of but then celebrate his misery. The later near quote of a pop song is less self-aware. Around those please and above the muttering below the mix are guitar motifs that are almost pop song quotes but nothing quite connects. The clarity begins and returns with the epic riff of the chorus and the rallying cry of the title that is accompanied by the caveat: "watch us fall". The logical limit?

It Was a Pleasure comes up as a strangled funk workout as McCulloch, so compressed and processed it sounds like someone else, details a list of behavioural traits and characteristics of two players in a relationship that keep them from enjoying their time. It's static and repetitious just like the problem and ends with the Kafkaesque: "Failure to do so will result in the failure."  Frustration in a groove number. Dancing really is like standing still only faster.

A Promise starts with a two chord grind that the band had made their own from the off. McCulloch comes in in high register. Promises made and dispensed leading to a big chant of the title wet with reverb as a light ringing guitar figure. There's light on the waves as they sail off with bright singing of self-delusion.

The old side two begins with the title track. More funky chopped guitar and whammy bar riffs. Drinking and partying and more drinking. BIg yelling choruses and troubled verses, breaks into shining clean guitar riffs. Imprecations to the forces of alcohol and burning intoxication. Dr Faustus is assured that he is better in hell than in this swirling, sickening "heaven". Bass workouts and more funky dances before the last word, "sip" leaves us standing tiptoed on the edge of a cliff with only the reverb trail to cushion the fall.

Another two chord grind. McCulloch comes in like Bowie singing Brel, husky and desperate. A deep synth flute is the first of the non rock instruments on the album. "My life's the disease." A sudden change to a kind of robot staccato and the vocals are alienated with backwards echo and chorusing, from beyond the hole in the earth: "If you get yours from heaven don't waste it." Fade.

A heavy and relentless Steve Morris style tom tom pattern joined only by pan pipes. McCulloch sings in a weary mid voice that he is flying and won't come down again. All his colours turn to clouds. The guitar comes in after this, acoustic, strummed chords as the pipes soar above it, descending through a mournful minor mode. An echoey chant of zimnbo sound like a ritual. Verse two sings of cards played with difficulty and then a box that burns nicely. The sparseness is enriched by a lonely ebow line as McCulloch wails into his own fade about the nicely burning box as the zimbo chant rises until everything fades to silence. McCulloch, a difficult interview at the best of times, took pains to explain that this song refered to holding on to things, people or ideas, etc. beyond their passing. For me, it is so heavily melancholy that, whether it's correct or not, I think of the then recently disceased Ian Curtis. The setting has such a Joy Division like beauty and finality to it. If it was good enough for the Cure to write Primary, and U2 to do A Day Without Me, among a mass of undeclared tributes, I can indulge myself with this one, too.

No Dark Things starts with Chordy grind with clean guitar chords and a slightly Arabic low string guitar riff. McCulloch sings mid voice. Images of ritual cleansing left open and vague. A choppy kind of anti funk guitar break. Then McCulloch in operatic wail, perhaps in the voice of the cleanser, with the darkly funny line: "You must learn to distinguish error from my bait." Another guitar chord break but it turns into s chord grind, again clean and shiny tone. More novice from the adept about a member of their own or just someone trying it out who is no longer buying it. "We have no dark things .. just some heads and a wish. Something to scream about." The phrase no dark things in increased echo repeats into the busy and bright working band like a chant less believed than trusted.

Turquoise Days begins with a subdued grind and fragmented lines of strange reassurance. We've got a problem but come on over. This is a bookend verse which repeats after a long litany of clarification. "It's not for love. it's not for war. Just hands clasped together." But that takes a strange turn when god and guns are inserted and "it's not" becomes "if not for" and what began as certainty changes into force based on a vague conviction. It's like the mutations of a virus as it attacks its host gradually adding pain and debilitation until all that is clearly felt is response as anger or violence. Then the bookend returns with its odd mix of decadent abandon and willing self-deception. Along the way we get a decent Bunnymen verse with central section's burgeoning force, enlivening and operatic vocals. The full band plus more guitars in glorious takeoff.

All I Want fades in with a gallop of twin skeletal guitar rhythms, marimba and bass and drums in lockstep. As the pattern proceeds we get to know that this creates a kindo f pulse by which the song grows from a thin core and blows out into a bulge for the entire time, no solos or sections beyond changes from verse to chorus and an overall broadening. Whatever life the narrator has led it has come to something out of a Samuel Beckett monologue with sparse statements that seem to stack into little towers of a series of days grown frail and affectless. The chorus "All I love is all I love. All I want is all I want" roars but we soon return to a skittish catalogue of simply described moments. In the end: "Got the hands to hold the key." The track skitters off into the dark.

Not with a bang but with a whimper, as The Hollow Men says at the end about the end. The more I hear this whole album the more it makes me think that it's a more concentrated and serious look at the youth abandon of Crocodiles. The same writers have noticed more around the events and figures, things in the shadows, harmonics of worry in the inspirational accounts. While the terror of The Cure's Faith, the horror of The Banshee's JuJu are replaced by a brighter musical pallet the concerns are kindred. If you didn't pick up the words of this record there is a chance that you might take it for pop on the serious side rather than a gloom fest but a little close listening reveals that the setting might be shiny but the gems are rough and speckled.

It's also worth noting that listening now in 2021 that Heaven Up Here at 40 years old strikes first as a rock album without a sliver of masculine posturing; there is nothing of the stadium about this frequently mighty and charging music. A lot of the guitar tones are clean and McCulloch's giant voice, while it can rasp, never breaks into the Paul Rogers/strutting scream. There's plenty of sex in the lines and sounds but none of it is boastful or laddish. 1981 was a year when the notion of anti-rock was continuing its spread across independent music, whether it was called new wave or post punk, and its practitioners were either abandoning it for a cock-free pop (not a slur, btw) outright noise or, like here, finding means of using the old vocabulary for new poetry. Add the gloom of the nuclear threat, the darkness of Thatcher and Reagan politics, and you have a kind of self-examination that feels necessary rather than narcissistic: if we are the omega generation then who are we?

To listen to Heaven Up Here forty years later it first of all does sound like rock and rock that could fill a stadium and it might strike the new listener at how the subjects of the songs are not more hedonistic but questioning of that as a musical value. In my work from home routine for the past year and a half I have found how useful genres like vaporwave or darkwave are for providing a audio background that is neither too anodyne for enjoyment nor obnoxiously brash. YOutube videos of enless dark drones are given static artworks of memento mori images and in many cases the more obviously fabricated the better as they only need to remind rather than suggest. This music works very well but it is the very kind of thing I would have scoffed at if it was suggested in 1981 that it was the future of darkly motivated rock music. But here in the list so far and with more to come I am revisiting music that is both its own kind of rock music and a curative antedote to the cock rock of the decade it had just escaped. And after decades of ironic (and some not so ironic) returns to the worst impulses this can again sound fresh and simply given.

 

1981@40: FAITH - THE CURE

The Holy Hour is a description of the loss of faith. An ominous flanged bass riff is held up by a percussion that might as well be electronic as played by hand. A humming synth string motif moans. The guitars come in clean playing chords in an easy counter ryhthm. Smith's vocal is high and buried. A spare hand it given to the statements of the narrator's gradual but complete alienation from religion. His "wordless scream at ancient power breaks against stone..." He cannot join even the closest of his loved ones in the church. It's just a building which he softly leaves in the manner of one gently exiting a scene of someone else's private pain.

Then, in case you thought this was going to be a Debbie downer record, a few choppy flange chords and we're galloping along with the single Primary. A battery of twin basses (one a Fender VI) warped with the modulation effects that would illustrate the band's signature sound for the next few releases creates a tough dark restless motion. Images of the innocence of children and the awkward horror of a first love. The final lines include the primary colours in their images as Smith wails that the children of the first verse are still dreaming. Smith has dedicated this song to the recently suicidal Ian Curtis whose own crushing observations had fashioned the previous year's Closer which variously raged and whispered its way into the nervous systems of a generation. More generally Smith has spoken of the song coming from thoughts of dying young and staying innocent and going further to the notion that murder might be seen as a gift. No, that doesn't mean that Robert Smith wanted everyone to come along to a Cure gig armed: this was a moment when such statements were made to strengthen the line beyond which blared the grinning perfect teeth of the mainstream. The song hovered below the top 40 but everyone who went to their increasingly large gigs knew it. 

Other Voices opens with a standard drum pattern and a distant guitar shimmer that is taken over by a front and centre picked bass with a chunky riff. Wails in the distance before Smith comes in with the lead vocal. The narrator, abandoned, lives with desertion and eight million people, belittled by inner voices, recalls intimacy but it's ghostly, insubstantial, perhaps imaginary. "Change your mind. You're always wrong." Smith has a way of singing words like wrong that makes them sound simultaneously like self-pity and candid observation. In a way this could be the sequel to Killing an Arab as it reminds me of the same book. The way I described Albert Camus' novel The Outsider (L'etranger) is that it made me understand that all those other voices of greater society were right and would only ever be right and that I, in keeping my distance from them, was always going to be wrong. The thing is that I liked being wrong.

All Cats are Grey. A solid but easy rhythm is joined by a solemn but very easy synthesiser moan playing the same kind of modal scale heard throughout this album. A breezy, floating momentum takes over. Smith's vocal is distant. It seems to be the monologue of a corpse. It might simply be an allegory of depression or a genuinely imagined experience of death. The long-drawn beauty of the keyboards and gentle bearing of the drums fades. End of side one.

A grand swathe of synth strings, big bass and spacey drums might remind today's listeners of the Twin Peaks theme. Another buried Robert Smith vocal tells of the Funeral Party. Smith has explained that this is about his experience of the death of his grandparents. He watches and thinks of them from childhood, into maturity and then as the pale figures they are in death. As with most of the rest of the album, the structure is established with very little variation but the dynamics come through in the weight of the lyrics and vocal performance, creating a sense of inevitability. 

Doubt comes on like Primary the Sequel with galloping bass, slashing guitars and a near identical vocal melody. This is not from want of inspiration. If anything it's an admitted other side of the earlier song, describing a violent rage against the other (a lover, himself?) Well, while it doesn't hold up as a literal account, the title plays fair by telling us of the scale and context of the violence that drives him to repeat "knowing I'll murder you again." While there is so much imagery in this album taken from religion very little of it is offered as a direct commentary of it, used instead for the riches it provides as metaphor. The most violent song on an album called Faith is a song called Doubt, it's opposite. Here the doubt doesn't so much prevent action as haunt the one who has acted. Less Hamlet than Raskolnikov.

And then Faith continues the sound of inevitability with a steady slow pattern, solid bass riff and flanged six string. Smith is less buried than he is for most of the album. If anything, it is the stylistic recap of the whole set as it finally comes to rest on the overall title and theme. The lyric is typically a mix of clear imagery and obtuse statement. The unignorable line about raping children might be a literal reference to the darkest corners of organised fiath but, more typically it might be htere to get our attention to its violence and horror. The narrator rejects the traditions, the pageantry and ritual as so much dressing and leaves with nothing left but faith but the clear suggestion is that it is not faith in robes, crosses, stars or crescents but that which remains from denial of them and it doesn't sound like faith in a deity.

It was in 1981, in Britain as here in Australia, an unreamarkable thing to be an atheist. Indeed, the only people you met who made anything of it were those who reached it through oppressive experience. The Cure's use of the iconography of a child's view of religion does include commentary on the dark puzzles of the culture of the church finds a wealthier vein in taking its difficulties into the unforgiving daylight. Self-examination, the dangers of relationships, the paralysing doubt and violent response to it are all observable in the everyday, the horror of banality, the banality of horror.

And that's the thing here: you could listen to this now, never having heard it before, and easily conclude that it was the whingeing of precious emos, a symphony of snowflakes who had nothing more to add than cries of "death be mine!" But I only need to breifly repeat that this music arose from a world in real terror of its own annihilation by a cataclysmic nuclear final act. I'm not saying that they had no choice but to sound gloomy but that the great field of the mainstream was smiling as though nothing was was wrong. If the personal was, as the phrase went then, political this was and remains a political statement, no less than seomthing like Closer or Colossal Youth. Could they have lightened up just for one or two tracks? Well, you go back there with Bucks Fizz being waterboarded down your throat and try it: you're going to sound as bleak as you can get. 

This is a source point for what became goth along with The Banshees and Bauhaus and very few others.. If it seems a little childishly extreme in its negativity, give it enough listens to hear it fully and you'll hear a lot more than the application of black eyeliner. Recall, too, that all the cliches of horror movies themselves had source points and blaming Halloween for having a monster that keeps getting back up is to blame the invention, not its copies. Until Bauhaus adopted something closer to theatricality (which The Damned had also done but that was more theatre-restauranticality) this music was really just considered contemporary and I will happily attest that it fit perfectly into party tapes and radio play. There would definitely have been some who sat in dark rooms shivering at the sound but I didn't know any (and that is still pretty hard to do in Queensland).

Forty years have left this record a free standing artefact. Like my favourites from most eras this one sounds of its time and reaches without effort into our own. This is not because of any feature that marks it as a clear ancestor of more recent far (the programmed drums and guitar effects forbid that) but because of the humanity at the centre of its every moment. Faith is a record of people on a quest to know what they are and will report their findings whether it makes them look naive or jaded. It's also a rewarding listen because it's good and it's honest.

1981@40: QUASIMODO'S DREAM - THE REELS

There's more history to this one than there will be with any of the others in this series. A lot of this has to do with the point of the sticker on the sleeve. It's from the band and informs us that the single According to My Heart is included because at the record company's insistence. For whatever reasons lay behind this the original LP is not what the artists had in mind. I knew that much about that one song when I bought the album as a new record and was aware of the band's spiky opinions on the culture that surrounded them. Vocalist and co-writer of all of the songs and spokesspike Dave Mason at a gig around this time held up a thong (flip flop for any non-Australian readers) and said,"this is what most Australians think when they hear the word soul." From the defiantly shrinkwrapped image as a synth pop unit in the very late '70s through their first releases, The Reels did not conform, not even to the unmainstream freeforall of post punk. They would release an album on the muzak and nostalgia label K-Tel of schmaltzy covers without a breath of an admission of irony. It was called Beautiful. They wanted you to love their music, they just didn't want you hanging around once you'd bought it. And then there was Quasimodo's Dream.

Afore I get into it I'm just going to point out that the track order I'm representing here is the original. The CD release changes the order and I'll be addressing that later but for now I'll be talking about the way I heard the record initially and for decades afterward.

From the silence there approaches what sounds like an old rustbucket car wheezing and creaking toward us. For All We Know is only synth pop in a technical sense (so to speak) but this track has no sense of automation. A bedrock of interlocking arpeggios that lean toward a kind of brass band from a Tom Baker Dr Who episode cranks up. It's the vocals that sound programmed. A sprightly melody sung in unison which separates out to lead and backing vocals for the chorus starts out so crisply that you suspect electronics but it really is just the singing of a very well disciplined band. As for the lyric, no strong idea and a mondegreen: do you control your thoughts, do you really have free will? And the chorus has always sounded like: "Haven't got a heart, haven't got a hope, haven't got a weirdo." Sorry, folks, but if you don't print them on the sleeve or allow them to be transcribed on the net we just have to guess.

And then it's quiet again just long enough for the sound of the notes from Popcorn falling gently from the sky as a low key droning vocal motif loops like a distant choir. Dave Mason enters with a melody as silky and melancholy as the first few bars, musing the blues on love and fame. And then comes that chorus: "I never wanted to be in Quasimodo's dream. Shall I beg the ringmaster please find another me?" That's not necessarily about being Quasimodo, of course, but just part of his dream. It could be about despite or low status, about a mass of horny men whose hearts were more monstrous than how they saw the old bell ringer. It might more simply be a yearning for peace after feeling the worst of attention. Whatever, it has pulled the song's teller down to the earth. After two spare verses the rest is atmosphere and quiet sadness that rolls into mesmerism. There's a beautiful and eerie video for this song. Greatness.

The bouncy, clean and bright According to My Heart springs to life after the fade of the title track. The band put what looked like a sticker (but it was just printed) that stated that the song was only on the album at the insistence of the record company on the inner sleeve. A few things to think about there. The inner sleeve on both sides is mostly a long list of acknowledgements and thank-yous ranging from people who helped the record get recorded and produced etc to puppets and favourite figures from history. The "sticker" is printed at an angle on both sides of the sleeve. If the record company had forced them to put the single on the album they also agreed to the disclaimer. If that's just a joke it's a lot of trouble to go to for such a slight one. Is it an arch means of drawing attention to the song (a cover version of an ol' country number)? The song itself doesn't seem to care. It just skips along at a canter and fades.

After the News bounces in with even brighter pings and tingles. Mason's spirited vocal asks us what we'll do after the news. We in the post-tv world might wonder what the particular news was but the darker and more immediate meaning here is about how we switched off after dinner and joined the transmission drone of prime time soaps and endless commercials. Or will we choose to emote, in whatever way suits? Will we jump in the air or quieten to a pallid silence? The news might be about war or a celebration. Will we at least engage with the tidings instead of deflate and plug in? Typical of this band this is served with a contradictory sheen so smiley that we are tempted to tap toes along with the beat and sing along as though it's Happy Birthday or a jingle for antacids.

In case we still have any breath after this Colourful Clothes zaps and buzzes to life with the energy of a skipping chant. The verse is all whydja go and break my heart with voices in unison. Then a pre-chorus bridge splits the voices into a dizzying harmony that tastes like it's made of sherbet powder. The chorus is the title phrase followed by some call and response whoa-whoas. Second verse same as the first but then a big raga rock line snakes up from below before an instrumental verse, that pre-chorus loopiness and the chanting chorus again, as before sounding like a lot less fun than the bouncing music. If you noticed the tv ads of the time or went to parties that looked like them, the neon rush of hair and fabric might have given you the bad kind of rush. That's what I heard here and still do. Then again, I bought out whole racks of op shops because the material was black.

Shout and Deliver continues the bells and chimes of the keyboard sounds but slows it down to sober as the minor key layers of vocals overlap in the minor. "Shout and deliver. Don't run away..." Be here, be loud, the future is yours to write. It's poignant that this was a single, something you might turn up when it came on Countdown. This band that called out to you to engage, not just with them but with everything around were keeping their message clear and insistent, not just slow-dancable. The vocal arrangements to this one border on Eastern Europe and in their own way remind us of the sparse and delicate beauty of the title track.

Side two changes things. The title track has already drowned in melancholy but Dubbo Go Go just takes us downward. Against an initial flurry of chimes an accent so broad that the two words it pronounces ("Australia calling") sound less motivated by humour than by fury. A large cranking machine of fuzzed guitar riffs, heavily off-accent rhythms that make it sound drunk and angry to the extent of paralysis. Over this comes Mason's bittersweet vocal describing his home town in terms that remind me of Peter Carey writing about the Bacchus Marsh of his childhood, with precision and naked chills. "YOu all it very saleable. I call it social dyssentry." And the chanting chorus with its modal fanfare melodics tells us to dance on our way out: "Dubbo go go go go ..." The longest and most depressing track on the album was done while the band were clearly on the rise to a creditable career and might have left the experience of the town as so much waste matter behind them. This is not a case of whingeing about coming from a small town, it sounds like a voodoo curse.

In complete contrast comes the trotting Smokey Dawson Show, atop the clopping synth percussion comes a lovely wordless vocal and electro trumpet tune that comes from a different part of medieval Europe than the chorus of Dubbo Go Go. I use to play this for a breezy little breather. Smokey Dawson was a bright mooded singing cowboy in Australia whose radio and tv appearances were designed to delight with anodyne thoughts and tunes and did. So does this. It's lovely.

Depression comes out of the shadows as a restless electro beat and chanting style vocal from a number of  voices. The title is used both emotionally and economically as a future dystopia is evoked. Rather than anger that might be suggested by the violence of the rhythm there is a sadness to it as from a witness to horror who is powerless to intervene.

Rupert Murdoch is a naive electropop instrumental that was either named after as a joke or has an obscure connection with the media Goliath. A synth flute tweets over a thudding machine like throb. Then, in less than a minute and a half, it's over.

Kitchen Man is a sign of things to come. Almost completely synthesised, this Bacharach style plaintive ballad in which Mason's narrator in a voice that is both perfectly pitched and tired as hell sings of the length and labour of his days in a kind of role reversal. Is this a precursor of the men's movement whingeing as soon at the first point of redressed balance or is it a comment on it? The music and performance is genuinely moving and lyric so free of safe word winks that it's almost impossible to tell. My choice is for irony, that this is the lament of a man who is finally finding out about his wife's daily work and crying unfair. Mason plays it straight which only adds to the ceaseless beauty of the song's motion, melody and the inspired choice to use a fretless bass to stand in for a lower brass section that Bacharach might have used here. Beautiful and troubling as the best this band could offer.

Ohira Tour is a group chant that sounds like a commercial for the Japanese industrial leader with chunky pentatonic koto-like synths. It's three seconds short of a minute. Cancer crawls from the dark between tracks  with varispeed spoken word (mostly the title) the same Bacarach fretless playing a theme before the amelodical chant of the title begins, surrounded by squeaks, squelches, shrieks and a host of electronic sounds. A speeded up voice spells the title word and then it fades, bringing the album to a strange close. The end of the story happens the way it seemed to be happening to every member of the population of the soon to be post-industrial world.

This was not declared to be a concept album at the time but you could be forgiven for thinking it was one. Mega money is scary, people on the ground suffer at its hands as they are corporatised, pushed into consumerist hives with canned culture. But while these themes are on clear show here this is not an electrobusker's protest set. The difference involves knowing a little about the time of its creation and those who created it.

Australia at the end of the '70s and the beginning of the '80s was a time of political stifling from above wherein a kind of Kingswood Country notion of an old Australia was still being peddled. The increasingly public influence of Japanese purchasing power was making the old ANZACs (real and imagined) restless and Murdoch media was starting to rule life on the planet. It was flight or go back to Dubbo and play covers at the local pub or try to change it one bored child at a time. 

Band like Midnight Oil dealt with this by fashioning stadium-filling music with sloganeering choruses that were as catchy as Vegemite commercials. The Reels were not like them. More contrarian than counter culture, Mason and the crew had found a musical niche by which to bitch and didn't care if it sounded more personal than communal. When you consider how arch Ohira Tour is or difficult to read Kitchen Man what you are left with is how you get on with the sound of it all. And there's ther other thing; in the year of synth pop this synth heavy record does not line up with the likes of Visage or Ultravox, reframing the old pop formulae with different instruments, nor does it approach the sci-fi bleakness of early Human League, Gary Numan or John Foxx: The Reels simply do The Reels.

It took decades for this album to appear on CD. I don't know the story of this but it might well have had to do with the problems of getting very old magnetic Tape to play nice after a long time dormant (it takes baking ... in an oven). When it did appear ten years ago the sound quality was refreshingly high and the digi-pack appealing in that it resumed the original LP's idiosyncratic packaging. It also featured a completely different track order.

The rerelease begins with the title track and ends with Kitchen Man. All the media theme tracks are put together like a medley (though not crossfaded). Strangest of all, the track that caused the band to include a permanent sticker (really part of the inner sleeve design) remains on the album. No one thought to remove According to My Heart (or the "sticker"). A change of mind or intensified joke? History will decide, if Dave Mason doesn't do that at some point himself. That's what it will take.

But all that means that this magnificent set of songs remains as vital as it did forty years ago and its intentionally eye fingering cover art is there to continue to annoy. Annoy it does and in the best way, this album offers its anger and pique set in music to delight, irritate or profoundly seduce. And surrounded by all this frenetic business is the song that will always make me ache for rainy Sunday mornings with dark shadows and glistening rain: 

Shall I beg the ringmaster please find another me. 

Oh I never wanted to be in Quasimodo's Dream.

1981@40: JUJU - SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES

Kaleidoscope had risen from the ashes and surprised everyone with its strength. A band cut in half had grown new limbs and ways to use them and fashioned a record that not only screamed survival but opened doors that the old gang would have struggled to approach. It stopped them getting stale too early. That's why JuJu sounds like it does: it's different from Kaleidoscope.

Instead of the acoustic guitar chord that started Kaleidoscope and let us know that album was not going to be like anything we'd heard from the band, we begin with a heavily chorused multitracked Les Paul rolling out a circular fanfare from a planet without a sun. The bass below it broods with the root notes. And then Siouxsie comes in wailing:

From the cradle bars comes a beckoning voice. 

It sends you spinning. You have no choice.

Before we've taken that in the song suddenly gallops. A double tracked acoustic played like its slicing through the light. A brief respite as the electrics drone around the chord and the verse resumes and repeats. Laughter cracking through the walls. Nightmares and shadows. With the second "you have no choice" wailed an octave higher and much louder the two elements collide and the chorus gallops as the chant about a rag doll dance explodes and trails into the title word caterwauling out over the dizzying band. "And don't forget if your elders forget to say their prayers." Her voice raises to a weird anger: "take them by the legs and throw them down the stairs!" like the leader of a child cult. 

And something happens that shouldn't work as it's so obvious but it's delivered with such violence that we're carried along. Budgie, who has already been showing us why he's in the band ramps everything up and pummels the toms down and up the guitar fanfare. They're not only falling down the stairs but breaking every bone in their bodies. Then the toys are going beserk and the laught cracks through the walls again. and the chorus rushes and the title wails. Finally the chant is corrupted so that the words rag doll and dance are elongated to twice their size and a chorus of the bewitched responds, "we are entranced" as though they really are as the frenzy of the dark speeds on to a final, "dance dance dance" before the staircase tom toms bang everything to a sudden cut to a black screen. A four minute, thirteen second horror movie and that's only track one.

Into the Light begins with a strange rhythm on the tom toms which is joined by chorused bass and spiky guitar. Sioux's vocal goes from close to very distant and wailing. The sequence of verse and chorus repeats before ending on a swirling chant of the title. Is it a take on near death experiences, perhaps just the states that intoxication can deliver. On one hand its restless rhythm doesn't allow ease but it does get hooky.

Arabian Knights starts with a chugging bass beneath underwater guitar chords and a throbbing drum pattern which builds with each verse. The early verses are almost obscure, the vocals low and processed before the big spooky refrain: "I heard a rumour. What have you done to her?" The falling chorus describes the disappointment of a grown up discovering the reality of a childhood ideal.. A mid section  lashes with goading calls adn those giant tom toms. And then everything gets ramped up to eleven for the final verse where the vocals about babymachines and veils and orifices are pushed to centre stage where they can't be ignored and the chugging of the opening bass figure is now a cavalry charge. But the anger must break as the futility of eradicating it sets in and we are left with the call about the rumours which echo on themselves and collapse in an aural confusion.

Halloween races with searing guitar sounds and a forward compulsion. Images of trick or treating and the after dark festivities are not those of costume shops but of the then recently begun slasher series of the same title. But then there's something else going on here. As the song speeds along it creates the sense that the narrator is breaking from their familiar reality and confronting an ugly alienation. What was fun in childhood now seems hollow and meaningless, a ritual long drained of its purpose. There is such a drive to the song and such a strange effect from the nagging guitar riffs that it feels more dramatic than it should be. 

Monitor starts with yet another strange rhythm, this time with an eastern influence as the guitars, so distorted they sound like percussion instruments begin a nagging crunch that rises by a semitone at the fourth measure only to return to the tonic for the next. This is it throughout with only changes in the vocal range and bass parts to suggest harmonic development. And that's only for form's sake as the point of the song is something become so repetitive that it spreads out into mundanity. The origin of the lyric that seems to describe a murder or a snuff movie is that a block of flats set up CCTV monitors so that residents could check on what was going on outside and the residents became viewers of this to the cost of their previous television habits, with crimes both petty and grave were followed in real time. Siouxsie wails: 

Then the victim stared up

Looked strangely at the screen

As if her pain was our fault

But that's .... entertainment

The old side two begins with a sluggish chorus guitar wash back in 4/4 land minor to dominant, thumping back and forth between them as the pulse thickens and spreads out like tar jelly. A creepy vocal tells of a nightly visitor, perhaps demonic who is narrating a series of violent assaults with the inclusive cry: Fuck the mothers, kill the others. Fuck the others, kill the mothers. Peter Sutcliffe had been arrested only months before the album but his infamy had preceeded this by years in his tabloid persona as the Yorkshire Ripper. The claustrophobic arrangement allows only for a constant abstract narration. Even the outbursts of multitracked overdriven guitars and wailing voices cannot break the membrane and consequently feel like explosions of impotent rage. The night shift sisters are not nurses but sex workers, each a potential victim. Before you know that this song can seem like the aural equivalent of a Count Floyd sketch (apart from the chorus) but once you do the notion will stay with you and the song will sound like a terrifying walk through a lightless brain.

Sin in My Heart is a constant gallop and shouted lyric consisting mostly of the tiel. This seems to be about BDSM and is told from the female perspective, a scream of contempt and fulfilment. Head Cut is a series of images of something that might be a mask or the head of a murder victim told by the murderer surrounded by slamming percussion and slashing guitars. Both of these songs have the feel of songs that were taken as good diea starters, packed into arrangements and left that way without the development that might have turned them into stronger songs. 

A creepy echoing feedback rises over a brooding bass pulse. Siouxsie comes in with a whisper about a succubus infesting a victim and draining his energy and life. While the surface is about a demon it is no stretch to imagine this as a narcissistic partner, substance abusing parent, or any of the interpersonal horrors the world throws upon us. The whole band is working this theme and keeps a high tension almost unberable with the steady pulse. Siouxsie gets a little more powerful with every verse until the solid steel wails that are great cries of something between agony and triumph. And then moment by moment things start to break away. The stuttered feedback guitar wanders and the drums get fractured and jungle like and the great bass begins to pound as the narrator can only yell or whisper to listen. Finally at a crashing violent climax the battle is over and the voice returns to a mocking calm: she's your little voodoo dolly. Dark. Cut to end titles. The movie is over and like a lot of '80s horror tales, the sequel is set up with the quiet resurgence of the monster.

Kaleidoscope had been a successful experiment. There was an openness to the arrangement approach to go along with a shift from the song structures of the first two records. Acoustic guitars, reed instruments and a decidedly non-synthpop use of electronics. Like most of their post punk peers they had turned down the volume and turned up the atmosphere. Ju Ju is effectively a failure to develop from that point. Its attack is to return to the big dark sounds from before and work on that, like the last one didn't matter or never happened. 

Part of the problem here (I hasten to add that this is my problem) is that these songs were almost entirely aired as part of live sets on tour. Voodoo Dolly benefits greatly from sounding live in the studio but that's not my point. What I mean is that, as with all rock musicians, if soemone discovers a guitar pedal they will use it for the next month or so unceasingly, playing everything through it as though it were THE tonal breakthrough. When they put the pedal away after that flurry it might end up at the bottom of the case. Same goes for playing techniques and anything that can be filed under fads. Ju Ju sounds like it was done with all the fads in place and ready to filter every song. It sounds like it was rehearsed and recorded rather than composed and arranged and crafted. One or two songs with unconventional rhythmic treatment is remarkable for a rock album but when so many are repeated rather than built upon it feels like the flavour of the month.

If you ask almost any indy musician these days about what they want in a good album a lot of them will find a way of saying uniformity. There is an affectation (running for over a decade) that an album should sound like it was recorded in one time with one musical vision. The problem is that most of these just end up fatiguing the ear with the same structures, playing and even song length. While the wildness of Voodoo Dolly differs strongly from the formality of Spellbound they both present their ideas with great force but when you get to the underdeveloped ones like Head Cut or Halloween they sound like filler, only thinly veiled by their similarity to the tracks surrounding them. The shame of it is that Ju Ju has so much in the way of good ideas but so little attention was given to forming how they might be best applied to create a big dark masterpiece. Of the four so far in the career of the band this is the album where I'll skip tracks. It's the only one that feels padded.

I wonder what a new, young listener thinks of the theatrics of Voodoo Dolly or Night Shift. Would they wonder how something so strongly stated it sounds like theatre restaurant was ever taken seriously. Well, recall that we'd just been through a decade that painted denialist smiles on everything while the movies were tearing them off and everyone just old enough to make records were catching up with the latter. So the Banshees, The Cure and soon Bauhaus were yodelling on about vampires, funerals and crying and it felt like a way of coping with a nuclear annhilation threat that was warming up all over again and seemed minutes away every day. These proto goths weren't into escapism but abstraction. The Voodoo Dolly could easily be about alcoholism or abusive relationships. Writing about a real life monster was a way of dealing with his nightmarish crimes. Siouxsie's Neffertiti eyes and spiky black hive weren't showbiz persona but what she wore on the High Street. I think that's something to miss: is it really more genuine of a '90s hard rocker to scream primally because his jeans werer bought threadbare? He would have worn those on the street, too. Maybe what I'm missing about the era of Ju Ju is the way that personal style declared an allegiance to the freedom of the margins rather than sought approval of a stadium. Did that look like a kid in a Witch's hat playing trick or treat? Yeah, but so what, it felt like you weren't letting the times push you around so much.

Following the footsteps of a rag doll dance we are entranced.

Entranced entranced entranced and dance dance dance.

1971@50: PAUL AND LINDA MCCARTNEY - RAM

About a year after releasing the most surprisingly bitsy ex-Beatle album Paul McCartney brought this more studio slick effort to the public, roping Linda in for the byline. Where McCartney had him in the garden shed, pasting musical  polaroids in with glimpses of grandeur, Ram lines everything up like a real record as if to say it was him behind the woolly beard, after all. 

I didn't own a copy of this record in the '70s. In fact my solo Beatle collection was pretty slight. It wasn't hard to find a copy I just had a wincing response to seeing it that mentally sounded like Nah! See also, Red Rose Speedway and Wings Wildlife. The only ones I had of Paul's were Band on the Run and Venus and Mars. Some great tracks in there but ... My first copy was a hi-res download from an online retailer. I'd walk around with it in my ears and see if I liked it.

Too Many People: By which Paul remembers the value of starting strong. Acoustic guitars and both clean and dirty electrics, rangy vocal with cool water harmonies and falsetto lines and melody as appealing as a perfect lamington with a cup of perfect tea. This is the Paul of Abbey Road rather than the hermit of Kreen Akrore. There's even a note of protest in the words (which would be taken by his old co-writer somewhat personally but that's for when I get to Imagine) which adds a little heft but, really, the message here is that he is back and ready to roll. And roll he does. 

3 Legs: Except he shouldn't do it this way. McCartney blues is not what I want to hear, especially when the pointless lyrics don't earn the musical hue. A call and response acoustic stomp that at best I can tolerate in passing. This is the first sign that he's getting indulged rather than encouraged.

Ram On: Noodley piano, some studio patter and a ukulele comes in with a real vocal in a minor key. This builds to a gentle band arrangement. Goes nowhere but is very easy on the ears.

Dear Boy: If the previous track had a nod or two to late '60s Beach Boys this is an outright wink to the kind of texture and rhythmic play of a Surf's Up or Heroes and Villains. A strident Rhodes vamp and a busy melody soon joined by a choir of beautifully arranged harmonies. Aimed at Linda's first husband rather than Lennon, this one, too, was taken personally by the latter. The frenetic pace and purpose of the song is breaks for breath as a rattling lead guitar solo sounds before a rich choral fade. Utterly marvellous.

Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey: This is as Beatlesque as the album gets with recollections of the Abbey Road medley. A plaintive vocal starts with the rest of the band. We're so sorry, Uncle Albert. For what? Well, this is Paul putting the words on last so you're going to have to stop caring. A phone voice verse in a posh accent still makes me smile: "we're so sorry, Uncle Albert, but we haven't done a bloody thing all day...." The melancholy turns jaunty without a real break. A silly flugel horn tune is overtaken by a screaming chorus and early Fabs style clean guitar progression. A nonsense verse about Admiral Halsey, a falsetto something then back to the flugel horn, the big chorus before a coda and fade. It's hard to call this track a masterpiece despite the obvious love of craft and rich melodic content and mood mapping but the words are meaningless rather than slight and, though this doesn't really get in the way, seem to undercut the music. Oh, did I say fade? I meant crossfade as a few ugly guitar squawks lead us to ...

Smile Away: If blues isn't Paul's thing he's out to hammer that home with a big clumsy balls out rocker which brings back the Beach Boys salute with Bula BVs and what sounds like lyrics made up during a jam version that through insistence (or lack of resistance) made it on the album. Could be worse is the best I'm giving it. But, honestly, considering the scale of Uncle Albert which should have put it at the end of the old side one, why put this on the end?

Heart of the Country: A good strong acoustic strut where the jazz influences fit well. This makes me wonder if he adapted the White Album sliver Can You Take Me Back was nagging as this melodically and rhythmically. Lovely.

Monkberry Moon Delight: And then there's this. A strong strident minor key thumper with stupid words and a vocal pushed into what sounds like self parody. Those two elements ruin this number. Listen to this and the later 1985 when he got the combination right and compare. I have to pretend it's a guest vocalist. I think he's trying for a kind of Cab Calloway in the voice. It's completely at odds with the smoother BVs. Goes on.

Eat at Home: A domestic life plea which might also be a thinly veiled sexual invitation is set in a pleasant soft rock pool. The Buddy Holly style symmetrical melody is delivered in a pleasing mid range vocal. While not ground breaking, it's a smiler.

Long Haired Lady: In which Linda gets a few solo lines demanding relationship commitment. The scale starts big here with a massed acoustic guitars and brass arrangement adding breadth. What sounds initially like a plea for respect in a relationship soon turns into a quirky but sincere sounding love song that stretches into a Hey Jude coda with fanfare trumpets, a stronger restatement of the Linda lines before a final verse and then more Hey Jude fade. Easy listening but intentionally so.

Ram On: A messy but fun reprise of the side one fun mess.

Back Seat of My Car: Broody guitars support Paul's melancholy vocal about a plan of personal freedom with his love. This is a clear invocation of what he loved about the Beach Boys at their most polished. Brian Wilson's rapid changes, chanting BVs, silky lead vocals lead up to a far more McCartney-style minor key chorus of "we believe that we can't be wrong". A sudden jaunty break smooths out again and leads back to the chorus and a big finish. This is the most like the decade to come (not just for McCartney) that the album reaches and it is appropriately at the end of the sequence as though gazing out over the waves or into the sky towards whatever the new times hold.

This record feels like McCartney really did get out of bed and concentrate on getting a record done. He and Linda even went to America to do it and due to that and a number of other value changes and shifts produced a record that didn't sound like a broken rock star in a shed but a composer's expression. While I can never love some of these tracks the whole thing makes sense and carries the feel of music made for a public. 

Personally, I think that if I had bought a copy of this as a teenager I would have listened to all of it once before skipping on every further outing (which I did, admittedly, on most albums at the time) but the relief of having a record that sounded like it cared what I thought of it would have remained. I would graduate to preferring records made without that care but it was warmth that would have taken me then.

There's a vague meme some folk are circulating that this is the prototype indie pop album and it needs to stop. That only goes in one direction and one only. If someone comes up with a means to fashion the exact textures of an old thing nowadays they are copying the past and only copying the past. Paul was not telling the future. Any attempt by people who don't understand or care about the difference between influence and mechanical reproduction is doomed to exposure or, worse, snivelling sychophancy. So, if you are in your twenties or maybe late teens and you come across a listen to Ram, you are hearing the past, whatever you think of it. Instead, consider how that past has been plundered by people who got there a little ahead of you and made records that sounded like they were done in 1971 and are treated as reverently as if they'd come from then. Consider indulging that rather than exalting it. Thank you, thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

Plastic Ono Band Revisited: Too versions?

I've already done the autobiographical thingy about this album and if you want to read that it's here. In short, I've never warmed to it. Then this came out, a box set with hours o' material to listen to if you really love the thing. Well, I don't but I have been increasingly fascinated by it as a whole statement and these expanded releases at their best can really set things in context. So, does this?

First, what's in the box? Six CDs of the remastered album, outtakes, demos, studio takes in various states of completion, all the rags that eventually were placed and trimmed before the record was given to the world. A hardcover book with masses of photos and interview material to give context to the songwriting, recording and the place of the album in its moment of history. And a second sleeve with two Blu-Rays that have everything on the CDs plus the studio jams that became a lot of the companion Yoko Ono: Plastic Ono Band.

There's a distinct difference here between this packaging of the later Beatles albums that have come out in fiftieth anniversary boxes and it's a significant one. On the Abbey Road box we get a number of discs that feature the other shots taken of the iconic zebra crossing photo and it's easy to see the point as the alternative photos are on the covers of discs with alternative versions, out takes, and whatever else that, like the particular photo didn't make it on to the album. 

The Plastic Ono Band box contains a number of iterations of the original cover without a pixel's difference. Every sleeve has the same photo. There's also a point to this. Lennon's purpose was minimalism: low production of a small band and the least arrangement necessary to keep the mystique at a minimum and the communication front and centre. It also reflects the sequencing of the music which is the tracklist in album order regardless of its state of completion or recording date. Starting with the new master we get the entire set as demos, developing tracks, raw studio mixes and so on. Oh, also, the three singles from the time get the treatment, too: Give Peace a Chance, Cold Turkey and Instant Karma. A lot of material but formed into digestible courses.

I pretty much shelled out for the two hi-res discs. The finished album is presented in stereo, 5.1 (96 and 192 khz 24 bit!) and the more expansive Dolby Atmos (lesser bit rate but a world of great newness). The rest of the material on the two Blu-Rays is entirely in stereo but at those celestially high sample rates. 

From Mother to My Mummy's Dead, the original album in Atmos is swoonable. When you get a movie in this audio format you usually get a lot of directional presence (helicopters landing, bullets richocheting etc) but here the object based sound design is used to create a larger ambient stage. The voice is in the centre with other instruments in the typically trio setup and the room reverb filling out the rest of the channels. It's a kind of stereo deluxe. The early days of remixing classic rock in surround featured a lot of gimmick thinking with guitars circling around the way they never do but here we just get to be in the room with the music. If anything the overall sound is beefier than before which will bother a lot of purists but it is a higher resolution presentation than it ever was and it's not pretending to be anything else. Thoughtfully executed, it is a marvel.

And then it's all the other versions. All of them are worth at least one listen but many hipsters happening on this set will nod sagely at reverb free vocals on Instant Karma or a plainer mix than Phil Spector administered. There is a lot to enjoy in the evolution and elements sequences and the demos and raw performances bring a lot of moment to the experience. I usually find going through these preparatory or forensic versions interesting the first time and most of these fall into that box. None is better than the released version but many hold charm as musical diary entries. Of all of them my favourite is an early take on Mother with guitar and amp tremolo which is delivered with a quieter and more poignant vocal. At the other end of the album sequence there were exactly two takes of My Mummy's Dead. They were done at the same occasion by the same method, Lennon singing along to his guitar into a cassette recorder. They are all but indistinguishable from each other, do not allow more than EQ or compression. Despite this either one or the other will appear at the end of the tracklist whether it's demo, evolution, elements, raw studio, or whatever else. Given the generous real estate of Blu-Ray this can't be called a waste of space but the only reason they are there is because that's how the original album ends and the concept of presenting that and the three singles in order needed to be fulfilled. 

The jam tracks are mostly misnamed, being the kind of idle cover versions you might remember from the Let it Be sessions. Elvis here a number of other early rockers there. Two early drafts of Imagine's I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier are worth a listen as they goe from a kind of flavourless Blood on the Tracks canter to the more effective blues take which led to the album track. Some moments are too fleeting to get the titles they receive in the sequence: I've Got a Feeling is really a few strums of the chord sequence; Get Back is a brief guitar noodle. The longer take of Lost John is worth repeat listening and the banter can be funny but that's what you get when you put jams on (see also the third disc of All Things Must Pass, though that's a lot slicker). 

The most value beyond the original album and singles sequence, though comes at the end when the bedrock jams (actual jams) are laid down for the Yoko companion album. Not all of it was used and then not always recognisably but these really are worth the listen. If you thought that Yoko Ono was only capable of ice pick wailing over tokenistic rock playing get in front of these. There is that wailing but there's a lot more as well and it's articulate and purposed, sounding more disciplined and committed than the designation  of live studio jam would suggest. It is what we get instead of the Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band album. I can say that I've listened to these tracks (they're only on the Blu-Ray) more than the jams or out takes. 

The book is a handsome hardcover with strong photographic content. There are chapters on Janov's primal scream therapy which informed the shape of the music, lyrics and performance of the record, chapters on individual tracks taken from various interview sources including some more recent recollections of participants. Information on the recording process and a very handy mix map of the surround material. It's more, in other words, than a glorified brochure.

I bought this set and bought into it because, despite the distaste I had for the album, the record haunted me (and I had the money) and whether it was hearing it in such high resolution, in surround, or just as clearly and fully as it is presented here I have changed my mind. Where I thought of it as a musically mediocre showbiz turn in the guise of a cry of pain and triumph it now meets me as an authentic statement made from serious needs and presents as a cohesive punch. I still don't love Well Well Well or I Found Out and still have trouble recalling them as distinct from each other they now sit well in the sequence. What once was a bin of narcissistic whinging now, finally, feels like communication.