1981@40: PLEASURE - GIRLS AT OUR BEST!

Punk sounded like it did because of where and when it happened. The way to push back against the marshmallowy goodness of mainstream culture with its uniform skivvies was to wear garbage bags and play like a reversing garbage truck. That still gets represented as songs made of multitracked barre chords and self-conciously ugly vocals but if you go and really dig around you'll find a lot outside of that Venn circle that was never going to overlap. The idea was the approach, not a checklist of traits that would render it as generic as all the other goofs. The point was that it didn't need to make that sense. So, The Buzzcocks wrote with tons of melody, The Normal didn't even use guitars, The Stranglers sounded like prog, and Girls at Our Best! just took what they wanted and didn't care what you thought of that. Then again, they had plenty of evidence to suggest that what they ended up giving was pretty much liked by everyone who heard it.

I first heard the singles and B-sides like Politics which 4ZZZ played until they ran out of tracks and just started again. It was a little like how everyone loved the Flying Lizards' version of Money and how it was described as low-technology by the duo themselves. Girls at Our Best! sounded like contemporary technology, rock band plus keyboards and vocals playing songs with choruses, bridges and verses, but they swept their grimacing concerns under a carpet of jollity and solid rock music. Jollity? How punk is that meant to be? See what I mean? So, when they brought out an album I was there.

Big drums playing a square drive, a guitar palm muted without discenrable pitch. "One two, go to, Pleasure City Avenue!" chants out Judy Evans with perfect diction. Then the band kicks into the bouncy verse and sounds like The Sex Pistols led by Joyce Grenfell. "Decorate the walls and doors and make them all look nice. Take the cat out for a walk and help it kill the mice!" Strong melody and a voice that could make parades of girl guides stand to attention and words that might have been thought up on the spot by a six year old. "This is Heaven. We are good as gold we won't grow old when we're told." If you sang that in a Johnny Rotten voice it would sound naff, someone trying to be all punk 'n' stuff. But this band had a secret weapon. Well, secret until the vocals started. 

Judy Evans was from Leeds like all the others in the band and spoke awl norwerthern, mind, and was known as Jo. But when she sang she became Judy and sounded posh, not middle class with a future in publicity and promotions, but to the manor born posh. Punk was all about sounding like yourself. Hearing kid's words with the attendant cruelty and bluntness of them, framed in a sweetened whimsy but belted out as though to an assembly of kids in blazers designed in 1895 is a throw off. You just don't expect it and it doesnt let up. Evans used two voices on GATB! recordings, this one and an odd, slightly off falsetto, usually in the middle eights. The middle eights were also stand-outs melodically form the rest of the songs, being in other keys or suddenly changed rhythms before folding back into the normal verse. The one for Pleasure contrasts completely from the rallying jolly hockeysticks of the verse and chorus, soaring above them in a kind of Rennaisance melody before sliding back down for another pep rally verse, warcry chorus and then a sudden stop. 

Before you can take a breath it's Too Big For Your Boots which starts like a show tune with bamming chords, one to a bar as Judy starts off with gleefully naive lyrics: "Iiiiiiii will take a chaaaahnce on an advaaaaahnce with some romaaaaahnce ...." before tumbing into a strident ragtime two four with the big loud guitar band joined by a jaunty honky tonk piano. I'm Beautiful Now adds an electric 12 string in a firm but not showy way, reinfocing riffs by adding an extra sheen, especially when the gorgeous coda vocal descent repeats over the Eloise-style chromatic figure.

Waterbed Babies brings back the slashing guitar figures but takes the expected  1 4 5 chord progression out of the scheme and replaces it with something outside of keys. Over pounding tomtoms Evans uses her movie-ghost falsetto: "Rollingon rubber just for the three of us..." as it heads to a great big full-throated thumping chorus: "Waterbabies in the sea. Watermelons are for tea..." A glade is cleared for the middle eight in which ringing bright guitar chords sound over a rolling snare as the flutey vocal slowly dives before splashing up into a new verse. Fun City Teenagers pushes through a pop template from the mid '60s and adds a Dixieland clarinet. £600,000 is a more typical 1980 post punk rush with low-mixed shouted vocals, steep rise and fall chorus but a baroque descent in the middle eight. 

Side two begins with the closest thing this album of sub four minute tracks has to an epic. Heaven opens with a big guitar fanfare in a minor mode. A coupled six and twelve string grinding sheen has the grandeur of an old movie suggesting the middle ages. A stately pavane pace but delivered in hard edged rock style works like a seige breaking machine as Judy sings stridently about being out of sorts with the world around her, sometimes narrating as a toy: "Wake me up, revive me with your memory. I am only someone when the children think of me. I cannot exist without some vanity. Bring me back to life because I need some junk." Her own backing vocals are choral but schoolishly so, which in their own way add to the larger scale of the arrangement. A bubbling synthesiser beeps and blips with the chords as the guitars thicken and plain out for the chorus, delayed by a verse, crashes through: "Will you get to heaven if you like a drive-in movie? Will you get to heaven if you run a TV station? Will you get to heaven with advance publiciteeeeeeeeee?" Another verse and chorus repeat before the space expands even further with a slowly building instrumental section held together by drums and big bright barre chords. The synths bubble and grind before becoming a kind of ghostly choir of howls and eerie ringing, rising through as the guitars tighten and smash toward the final double chorus which then ends on a comically high falsetto note by Evans and the synth. As varied as the tracklist has been so far nothing has prepared the first time listener for this. It's not a sudden departure or even out of character but its committment, force and melodic riches push it further out. A great side two opener.

China Blue follows, a kind of whimsical picture of a China town with glittering guitar arrangements, breezy verses and a playground style chanting chorus. The verses are told from the point of view of Europeans travelling east and being wonderstruck but there's also a love song buried in the bouncing colour about living in a palace and inviting another to come and see her everyday. And in the middle of that there is the curious middle eight: " Oh why am I so beautiful?" Even in the Judy Evans style of playground song/Girl Guide rally this might sound conceited but in the setting of the sheen and splendour it's much more of a general cry of joy. If you want to do the Necker cube boogie it might also be Jo Evans sick to death of the attention given her from outside the band because of her beauty. No interview, even in those anti-mainstream post punk days, neglected to mention her looks. It can't have gone without a fight at the record company that the band refused to put her image on the cover art. That is not necessarily a naive stance, given the times. Kim Wilde got so sick of being asked about her sex life that she started asking interviewers for details of theirs. And this cry of pure melody, the "I" curling down like a falling ribbon, seems to meet this in the coda. And then the song ends on a penny. Bampf!

If you knew the B-side Warm Girls which included the line that gave the band its name (Youtube it, it's wonderful) your ears will prick up on hearing the riff for Fast Boyfriends. A barnstorm of overdriven gutiars and bell like doublings of guitar and keyboards smashes in like a fanfare. Judy comes in with an offer to dance but warns him that it's not a long term offer. "I hope you don't think I'm a freak but I always have to fall - in- love - once - a week." The second couplet of the descending melody verse is carried by male voice backing vocals which give a psuedo classical tint to it. The chorus bounds out with more interplay between male and female, "Oh oh here we come, fast boyfriends" Over "friends" Judy peals."Twenty-fours to takeaway." "Oh oh, again and then. "Last four mintues then turn away."  The second verse is a series of girls who are living rapid and happy sex lives and the chorus lifts it even higher. A solo which like all the others neither shreds nor replays the melody leads with the same stuttered notes as the pre-chorus figure to a double chorus with a more complex vocal counterpoint. "Turn a-waaaaay." End. If this song doesn't remind you of your twenties I don't know what will. This number about a gleeful promiscuity told with female values (and, yes, written by Jo) can as easily be a protest as much as a hymn to hedonism.

She Flipped is the tale of a couple bound together by play which, if a little teasing, makes everything work. It's set in a kind of fairytale medieval castle where a jester has fun with his queen. Even then, there's a childlike perspective to it: "My elder brother he's an entertainer each day he has to go to court..." Those lines are sung over a solemn Rennaisance style ground of tremolo guitars, mounting bass and cymbals. After that introduction, you don't notice it happening, the band has accelerated to a clip and has been joined by a harpsichord which will be there for the duration. The next three minutes of pure joy are about pranks, tests and japes in what the younger sister sees as the world of courting where her hero brother wins against a drab world the attentions and then heart of his lady. The song is so bursting that the chorus is wordless, a big yelled da-daa-da-da-daa-da-da-da-daaaaaaah by the whole band which makes them suddenly sound like the Seekers on steroids. And then the instrumental break takes the promise of Heaven further with a full baroque workout of synth brass and strings counterpoint. And then because just going back to a verse or chorus would be drab the coda is new material, a falsetto chant: "Slip off your hose, your lips red and rosy, scarlet livery. Go out tonight, you walk on the other side, sexy chivalry. Buy me a shirt, take me on holiday, gentle rivalry" that gallops to the close, a sudden change of tempo with a slow minor figure on the harpsichord before Judy warns: "One day he'll get caught." Or is it court< like in the old anti-shoplifting ads? Doesn't really matter.

Goodbye to That Jazz starts with a spiky guitar riff that gives way to a happy melody about something like patriotism but it's a kind of Syd Barrett patriotism: "We will all applaud when the final curtain falls, wave our little flags. Standing up to pray to the soup of the day. I say goodbye to that jazz." This gives way to the kind of backspringing baroque movement we've already heard in She Flipped whereby a chord progression modulates per bar between major and minor (e.g. A minor to D-minor to G to C to F to A minor to E etc) that everyone who likes what they hear in Bach or Italian composers from the 18th century or even just others who discovered it and made use (like in California Dreaming). It's no more a lift of old music than a swift alternation between a fifth and a sixth is a lifr from Chuck Berry, but make use of it and you suggest instant J.S. Bach. Here is is delievered apace in a chorus that is somewhere between a travelogue and an appeal to worldwide solidarity against stuffy old regimes. The middle eight modifies this adding a chirpiness as Judy sings: "No traditions anymore, no time for Anne Boleyn..." before returning to the chorus and the first full band fade of the album (not counting the mini fade of the drums on  £600). Yet another sudden stop would have felt like a let down. The slow fade feels like a goodbye, the circus clopping slowly out of town. If you've been listening from the first track to now youre probably ready for a good lie down and a cup of tea, white with one.

And that was it, almost. GOAB! released one more single Go For Gold which sounded like a demo for the album. After a short and unhappy American East Coast tour the band dissipated nevermore to unite in the name. Everything they released charted in their native U.K. and their legacy was taken up and smothered in polish with the likes of Altered Images, Bow Wow Wow and the like which diluted so fully that by the other, more boring, end of the decade that the thread was barely visible in Fairground Attraction's Perfect or anything by the likes of the Housemartins. 

But Girls at Our Best don't deserve to be buried under the tide of twee that came after them. The band that responded to fellow loiner band Gang of Four writing a song called Entertainment about politics by writing a song called Politics about Entertainment is the same one that on these grooves puts group sex into a ditty about waterbed babies or being nice to a cat so it will kill mice. None of the bands in their wake could boast such complex and thoughtful guitar orchestrations, constantly melodic bass and still sound punk (or use clarinets and harpsichords and get away with it). That's before you get to the band's own  art which splattered Cultural Revolution imagery in the colours of Never Mind the Bollocks over both sides of  the cover. Uni Student flyer or what? GOAB! didn't line up behind Ultravox and Human League and go synth pop, there was still too much to say in rock. And then because the way they said it what came out wasn't the by then weary grind of punk but a steroidal shaking blast of joy that sustains, song after song, for two sides of an LP. Capping all that off is the persona of Judy. As Jo she was one of the characters of the local scene getting in amongst it bvut as Judy she found something that was all wrong to put to the slicing guitar attack of her band and press it hard until it worked. This effect, The Sex Pistols in Wonderland or The Famous Five Go to the Miner's Strike, still hits, it's still strange and grabbing. For me, that breathy shout at the start of Pleasure stretches a smile across my face that doesn't let up until I press stop or hear the whole thing. Which is why, along with the likes of Porcupine, Colossal Youth, Kaleidoscope, Prayers on Fire, Murmur or Evol and so many more, it is among my favourites of its decade and one I'll always have a copy of in some form. Right now, without it playing I'm mentally singing along:

Go to Toy Town with Taiwan

Welcome home to Pakistan

See my sister in Siam

Please to stay with me in Japan

We are in Ethiopia

Going out with Arabia

Stay the night in Bolivia

Entertaining in India

Goodbye to that jaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaz

1981@40: STILL - JOY DIVISION

The aftermath of the personal cataclysm of Joy Division felt like respectful silence but it was strange. The surviving members retooled the band, found a new member who wasn't an Ian Curtis-alike and began releasing outstanding new material. This album was released in October 1981 by which time New Order no longer needed the legacy to function. Their records will be given due attention later but this one from Joy Division remains an intriguing artefact. In spite of the opportunity to heighten sales by them this record contains none of the three singles that continued to be heard on alternative radio. The live recording (excluding the cover version) has historical moment as the band's final gig but it isn't particularly compelling beyond that, considering the bootlegs of better recorded and better played performances were doing business on mail order catalogues. Sheathed in a cold but grand, grey gatefold with Peter Saville's characteristic attention to balance and fonts it comes across as a dusty trophy room in a cathedral.

1988's Substance behaves like a compilation album with all the singles (and both sides) as well as flexidiscs, the Ideal for Living EP and stray deep cuts like Komakino. The cd and the double cassette (which is the one I had at the time) had a wealth of material that benefitted from a very canny curation. You could put it on and leave it on. Back in the early '80s I didn't know anyone who didn't skip on the studio sides of Still or played the live sides after hearing them once. A friend of mine at uni asked if I'd like to go halves in a deluxe copy of it. The deluxe aspect was the packaging: same gatefold but with a hard hessian bound cover, a fancier disc sleeve for each platter and a ribbon on the side. Looked beautiful but was really just more cover art for a record difficult to love.

So if it wasn't a "best of " or "Joy Division Live and Fatal!" what was it? A number of cuts from deep in the history but neither given context nor delivered chronologically. Some of these are extraordinary and others unremarkable. Fans (even secret ones like me) knew there was more in the coffers than this but this is what we got. Truly none of it had appeared on albums before so it was new to most of us and there was a kind of thrill in knowing we were listening to the last time they played live. What did it all mean? The wall of minimalist design would keep its mystery close but that just meant there would be a million versions of it, told into the early mornings from fan to fan. That's how you work a world.

That world might well have thrilled to drop the stylus on this record for the first time, hoping for something great. It was and remains great ... sort of. Exercise One starts with a choir of guitar feedback wailing and rising like the cries of prehistoric creatures emerging from a swamp. A brooding bass figure turns into a rhythm before the drums come in as the wailing swamp life caterwaul. The guitars change with the entry of the vocal, exchanging a terrified howl for a series of growling chords on the first of the bar as the progression rises to the minor third. Curtis comes in with a vocal line that ascends and descends the minor third with words of stress and inevitability. The machine like drums remain in a holding pattern. After two short verses the guitars now climb the same scale like intertwining snakes until the sudden stop. A little reverb trail and it's over in three minutes.

Ice Age starts all galloping drums and chromatic riffs. Curtis' buried vocal snarls of atrocities, bunkers and a future of sticks and stones. The message is typical of its time in that it imagines a future after the then almost inevitable nuclear holocaust. It's a punky shout of protest and sounds like it was done for the first EP. There'll be more on the timeline vs sound later.

If the wailing at the start of Exercise One evoked the beginning of life on Earth The Sound of Music begins with a trilling jungle call that sounds like a dinosaur calling across the savannah. Again the emotionless drum pattern 

Glass must be a star turn of one of the members in some way. Whether it's a bass lick or a drum fill, this undercooked guitar stab with overcooked vocals that make the lyric sound adolescent, made it on to this and the later Substance. A between projects thing that they threw away on a compilation and which should never have been heard of again but was. If I make it to whatever is playing it I'll skip this one.

The Only Mistake is what Joy Division probably sounded like to people who had only heard of them but not the records. An ominous ascending bass made out of notes of black tar climbs up through furiously fast high hats and a clanging guitar progression with a modal tone. Curtis comes in low, growling about making a mistake with a refrain about taking the strain. It works perfectly well as a kind of jar of concentrate but has none of the nuance or details of even the slammiest Unknown Pleasures track (which album it was left off). If I hear it, though I leave it on. End of side one.

Walked in Line roars into the kind of speed punk the band had started out with. Razor guitars and strident growling vocals. "They made it through the whole machine..." And then, like the marching that it suggests most of the song is a chanting of the title. For all it's wham bam punky energy there is that extra x ingredient that says it's the same band as Day of the Lords or Decades, a kind of tincture of despair as everyone pogos on the floor.

The Kill throws  us back to the pre Unknown Pleasures with slashing chords, grunting bass and speed drums. Like a top fuel version of Day of the Lords this pounder of a song aimed at a second person he can't take his eyes off but not from sweet, sweet love. He is acting from compulsion, a series of possibly brutal actions in the service of a person of deity who remains aloof and quiet. Is he adopting a persona or being autobiographical? As harsh as the arrangement is here the melody is strong, short phrases but adhered to. Replace the guitar with keyboards and tone the bass down and you've got something more like These Days or even a track from Movement.

Something Must Break bursts into a grinding push, a two note figure from a guitar that sounds multitracked and heavily treated, almost like an aggressive synthesiser. This would be as unlovable as Glass but for the genuine compulsion of the interplay between the guitar and vocal which keeps the tension high yet with more melodic force. The narrator cannot decide whether to be or not to be and instead of allowing this to be trite teen agnst, Curtis refreshes the choices but they always come back to the same place: "decide for me, please let me know..." "had thoughts for one, designs for both..." Other lines suggest godhead or at least a youthful fancy of it, terrifying lines from warfare and finally creepy image of a face in the window. Something did break.

Dead Souls begins with the machine in refuel, toms and snare idling mechanically as the guitar runs two note riffs up and down the strings. FInally, we build power and blast off with a crashing descent of chords and once in the air broaden the gutiar to thicker chords. After the next chorus the vocal finally starts with Curtis in full deep growl: "Someone take these dreams away..." When the chorus hits he yells at the end of each descent:"They keep calling me!" A second verse about ancient power and invasion and they are still calling him. After a brief instrumental (really just the chords again) he croons with the weight of a cathedral on his back:"Calling me, calling me.." And then another chorus and a playing out until a safe if sudden landing. A few minutes of brutal confidence in a rock song. They'd given it away to a magazine, on a B-side (the A was the gorgeous and freezing Atmosphere). If you ended up really only going back to one song of this record it was this one.

A stumbled start with a bum bass note and Sister Ray has lift off. The original by the Velvet Underground is a story of a party gone wrong set to a pedestrian two chord riff. What it has that none of its cover versions have is Lou Reed. Anyone can make that walking progression work in some way but if you don't have the acting chops to sound simultaneously as though you've lived this tale and are above it then yours is just going to sound like a cover. Ian Curtis struggles to get further than sounding like Friday night at the Pig and Whistle open mic. It stops ten minutes short of the Velvets take when you hear the audience and realise it was a live track.  "Wow," says Curtis. "You should hear our version of Louie Louie."  He and the audience might have been in the spirit but you'll be surprised if you listen to it more than once intentionally and it will be the first and last moment of levity in the band's output. We're about to go live momentously.

When a live recording is made days before one of the people you're hearing took their own life it has moment. When it's the aural focus and the writer of the strange bleark lyrics it holds your attention to ransom until you listen to every last note. And then what do you have but a live gig that despite its generally good audio quality and the committment of the playing and singing doesn't sound anywhere near as compelling as the records.

At its worst it sounds like a poor foldback mix where players or vocals sound forced because people can't hera their own parts. The vocals tend to sound the way they never do now, boomy like big grey clouds of lower mid range against the sound of the drums and amps. That said Morris' kit sounds full and separated, Bernard's guitar playing is clear and the songs do carry a feeling that they have formed as full statements rather than just words and chords that bad gigs are. The arrangements are different from the recorded versions when there is enough space for if not wild improvisation at least some thought put into the emotive atmosphere as in the already sparse Passover. As for keyboard heavy tracks it's down to the sounds Bernard can find. Isolation sounds like a live version of the record. Decades sounds like it was hung to dry just before it rained. Curtis is baerely audible and Hook's bass has no presence. Is this really from the same gig? Like Glass, Digital keeps popping up in posthumous releases even though it's made of very little more than attitude.

My vinyl copy of Still featured an unlisted performance of 24 Hours from Closer. I haven't hear that for a while and wasn't tempted to Youtube it in case it had been uploaded. I'll let my impression of it as rushed and atmosphere-free stand. It came in after New Dawn Fades and stole the thunder of that song after Curtis for once sounded clear and powerful. In the final shouted verse where he shoots up an octave and really means it, even improvising a little with a few lines.

The song in the live set that always gets me is the opener Ceremony. It was among the last songs with a Joy Division credit which means it was one of Curtis' last statements (along with the grinding nightmare lyric of In a Lonely Place). When the band regrouped after his death as New Order they led their singles with this song. Before I knew of the aurhorship I thought the song rang of hope and new beginnings. Well, it might have. The version here fades in because the very beginning wasn't recorded but, considering how faithfully the single versions (there were two) followed this arrangement this probably also started with the big boomy guitar arpeggio. There are no vocals until the final chorus. Curtis sounds strained and shouty but that also sounds like he can't hear himself well. This one gets me as it pretty clearly suggests that New Order's still future direction was towards dancey electronic pop with plenty of upbeat lyrics along with the bright music. There was, of course, also a lot of poignancy and they never quite abandoned the base melancholy. But here at the inadvertent end of their darker first incarnation is the joyous shout of hope: "Heaven knows it's got to be this time". Well, it was, just not the time any of us were thinking of.

So, this double record came out when most of the other sides were available, albeit rare. These included the then two singles which were given 12 inch spots permanently on the record shop shelves and a lot of bootlegs of varying quality. I had a live boot called A Xmas of Jox Division which was good once so it's pink vinyl self was put on show rather than on the turntable thereafter. A friend lent me a copy of the Warsaw album which was mostly tracks from the aborted RCA album. There were tracks scattered over singles and flexidisks and compilation albums. 

This official response to the call for more Joy Division was this highly selective set of songs from various sources that felt like that, as though they didn't belong on the same record. For all the solemnity of the mausoleum-like cover art this grab bag felt like very little. Dead Souls? Any day of the week but Glass? And what was with the cruddy version of Sister Ray? 

Recently, the Beatles' estate released a massive version of the White Album (yes, I know it's really called The Beatles, did you know that The Beatles referred to it as The White Album?) which included disc after disc of Beatles gold gathered from the famed and much bootlegged Esher demos and out takes. Everything seemed to be there. Everything, that is, except for the infamous twenty-seven minute version of Helter Skelter. Giles Martin reasoned that it was that or leave out twenty-seven minutes of what proved highly listenable alternative takes. He added that it wasn't half an hour of the proto-metal version but the draggy, glacial blues number that eventually was ramped up to the released take. Twenty-seven minutes of uninspired garbage that served as a counter-example of how to approach a song that was meant to excite. There's a long enough take like that on the set and you might not even make it through that once. It's just because it's rare and has been herad by few. See also the same band's instrumental Carnival of Light improvised  in the studio for a happening around the itme of Sgt Pepper. From descriptions of it as uninspired drones, murmurs, noises, coughs etc that might have worked superbly in the background while the guests were flying the lysergic carpet but I really have to interest in hearing it. But people want it.

So, instead of Atmosphere (which wasn't a widely available single at the time) or the Ideal for Living tracks (I've never known anyone with a copy of that EP) we get a cover of a song that really only suited the band that wrote it. Sister Ray is classic Velvet Underground and its epic, fuck you, two chord glory really only works when Lou Reed is talking about things that at least sound like he lived through them. Covers of it are like covers of Liza Minelli's Liza With a Zee (which Norman Gunston did as a good joke once). If it was an attempt at showing the dour, doom merchant Joy Division as party guys at heart it was successful at showing a dour, doom merchant band slug through an interminable two chord slog. We should hear your version of Louie Louie, Ian? Havent you just played that. Yet, if it hadn't been included someone, someone would have cried rip off.

The thing is that Still's incoherance feels more like a taunt than a celebration. Enter the sepulchre to find a few old photos and a video of someone's twenty-first where the guy no band wanted, grabs the mic for a three hour version of Wild Thing. The last gig has moment but only as the last gig, not as a performance. We looked at it and thought, oh ok, if that's really all there is... Really, wasn't the Ceremony/In a Lonely Place Single a better transition; the new band starts with the old band's last number? Would've thought.

Afterwards there was the magificent Substance which offered almost everything that wasn't on Still including the mighty singles and B-sides (if you got the cassette, like I did, or the CD which I picked up in an op shop), genuine curios like Komakino or hidden wonders like From Safety to Where (and fucking Glass ... AGAIN!) arranged with a sense of both chronology and merit. Too much. I listened to it solidly for weeks and then again when I got the CD as it was what Still should have been, a great album. After that came Permanent, a fine if pointless grab of album, single and stray tracks. After that came Heart and Soul which didn't quite live up to its promise of everything studio and the best of live but did a pretty good job. Finally, every time a Joy Division album gets released a new live recording surfaces in the bonus material. You can go chasing them and perhaps find real gold. It's your money.

It's hard to know what to say about Still at this remove. At first listen it probably sounds like a mess with a few good bits. It's hard to think of it reaching beyond its release date through the decades to tell new listeners of a band that forged their own path from well trodden tropes to climes eerie and new and approached their biggest statements with power that only the brave or foolish will display. It would be more like: well, there's some stuff but they were crap live.

But perhaps the damage is not so bad, thinking of those other releases that really do fill the gaps, and there are live recordings of good quality to turn the impression of the Still live tracks around. Perhaps the trouble is what this unfriendly record did to a fan base already drunk on mythology and fabrication. Clues in the live mix? Did the songs spell a message? The run-off groove had chicken feet on one side and the words "the chicken stops here" which were in reference to the Wener Herzog film Curtis had supposedly watched the night he hanged himself. No help from the words on the cover or the discs; you got what we gave you and that is all there is ... What otherwise? A bright red vinyl with dance mixes? The plain grey of the cover isn't just funereal, it looks like a muggy afternoon in Brisbane, where I first heard the record. They couldn't have just left it as the massive sunset landscape of the fadeout of Decades, there had to be the personal effects to pick up, the socks and jocks and cigarettes. Well, that's what you get.

1971@50: IMAGINE - JOHN LENNON

Ok, so you're first album of conventional songs has you screaming your lungs out about the pain of your life, fame and the world in general. Where do you go after that? A quiet fishing village on the Irish coast to settle with the love of your life and a ukulele? Sounds nice but you know what's nicer? Forming a set of songs at leisure to show you can still do everything the kids loved you for and move on as well. Imagine is that record and it goes from a gentle, heartfelt and godless prayer that would go on to achieve anthem status to a heartburn blues, a character assassination, a rant that is a much better rock song than it deserves to be, a big swamp of an anti war workout and more. Imagine is a carefully controlled variety show that sets its statements in radio friendly bites and throws a few bones to the album-centric serious rock market. At no time, even though some of the songs are from the era, does it sound like The Beatles. 

The title track of this album has acquired a sanctity that few songs achieve. Over a thickly echoing piano, broken chords and a small ascending link to complete the cycle, Lennon's voice, distant in its own cloud of echo, asks us to imagine life without the small earthbound concerns of nationalism, greed as well others brought down form their lofty places like religion and heaven. He knows he's being a dreamer but if everyone could share the dream the world could be one and free of its old binds. You can't fault the sentiment but until you can separate the song from the singer there's a credibility slide at the top of which is a rich and adored man being whistful.

If, however, you really can tear one from the other, the song's beauty lies in the plain naivete of its presentation. Really, just listen and imagine. The piano and voice are central but there's a very plain bass, sparse drums and strings doing little more than what a basic organ track might have done. It's the low artistry that offers welcome to any who will listen. If you are inclined to attack this aspect of it then you are attacking the message itself as it is inseparable from its packing, author aside. A simple dream for a tired and complex world. It still works.

Crippled Inside might sound like a parodic country song but for all the accented cliches in the arrangement it comes across as sincere. Do what you like to dress up your pain and frustration and pretend you love this masked life but you're still broken within. I find the honky tonk piano annoying in this one. It's one of the most authentic aspects and perhaps that's why: it shows up everyone else. You can wear a stetson and some boots but one thing you can't hide is your sneer when you're snide.

Jealous Guy enters on an icefloe of tinkling piano and thick strings. The vocal mleody has a kind of eastern finish to each line as it sinks into the arrangement. The narrator of the song is apologising to a lover he has hurt. He explains that he couldn't help himself, admits he's weak against his own anger and that he's just a jealous guy. Elvis Costello, in a memorable interview I read in the late '70s, explained that for all the song's tender feel it is being told from a position of power. Cant help it, I'm just jealous. Lennon originally wrote this as a kind of spiritual travelogue in the Beatles' retreat in India. Perhaps the sentiment in Child of Nature (as it was originally known) didn't convince him after the explosive end of that episode and he shelved it until he could find a more fitting use. The melody is quite yearning and aching which is emphasised by the verse that he whistles. There is point at which stark honesty might well be confused by listener for an unapologetic taunt of a victim. Could the sense that an abusive partner is trying to smooth things over so they'll be better from then on, just like all the other times be actually triggering? I don't know. It makes the bland string arragement of this track sinister, to me, a kind of vulnerability icing. I can zone out and receive the song's beauty but that's how I have to do it.

It's So Hard is a kind of constipated blues. Life's hard and then you die by your own hand or the world's. A big bursting sax from maestro King Curtis lifts things a little but, ironically, this is less convincing than the last time he tried a blues, in his cushioned palace of Beatledom, Yer Blues, which was a piss take, anyway. 

I Don't Wanna be a Soldier Mama starts with a beautifully distorted bend on the guitar before splashing into a vat of reverb with the rest of the band as John tells us of all the bad things he doesn't want to be like a soldier or a lawyer or a rich man or a poor man or a sailor or .... The crashing echo and metallic sound of the vocal give this one a kind of mystique but it's so repetitive (by intention) that you really have to just lie back in it and float.

Gimme Some Truth starts like a punch, straight in to the driving band, slide guitar, bass, rhythm electric along with Lennon's clear and alsmot reverb-free vocal which bites hard at "tight-lipped narrow minded mama's little chauvanists" among other deliciously invective word salad. The middle eight intensifies this by bashing into the fourth above as Lennon rasps his Eddie Cochrane voice: "No short haired yellow-bellied son of Tricky Dicky's gonna Mother Hubbard soft soap me". Bugger the lot of this lysing and spinning, just give him some truth. George Harrison takes a sweet but sharp slide solo which leads back into the middle eight. The grind and the power just make you want to listen to this all afternoon; it feels like every frustration you've ever had all at once is getting beaten up by the good older guy at school. This was originally a Beatles song. I only found that out in the last few years. There's a recording of the band going through the middle eight with Paul helping enthusiastically. It made more sense to be thinking it was one of the fresher tracks as it really packs more of a wallop than anything else on the record. Still, the realisation here, an old progression dragged out of an old songbook and it gets to sound this good. Possibly my favourite solo Lennon song.

With great judgement Oh My Love's almost spooky gentleness follows this onslaught. It's a needed drop in violence but a continuation of intensity. In terms that sound very much like Yoko's poetry, John feels the wind and sees the sky and for the first time his mind is wide open. Lennon's double tracked vocal is perfectly controlled and moves through the pentatonic melody in a glide. A dreamlike but tightly packed love song of nothing but sincerity. Piano, guitar (George is playing his Les Paul clean and its thick ringing adds a swooning eeriness), bass and voice. No Woolworths strings required nor any given. This is a tiny masterpiece with a gigantic statement.

I knew enough about the Beatles' story to understand on first listen that How Do You Sleep? is a savage character assasinaiton of his old partner in tunes Paul McCartney. References to Sgt Pepper, the Paul is Dead hoax, a lot of Paul song titles from then and the time, accusations of writing muzak and so on. The song with its unvarying structure of self call and response, charge after charge without right of reply plays like those revenge fantasies you might recall form childhood where you stand up and get 'em good and they just stand there and take it. The music is a growling bluesrock, mean as mustard and relentless. This is the one track where the strings work as you don't expect them against the hard guitar rock but their sinewy lines, (for once not just playing chords) add a cinematic weight to the harrangue. But, in the end, harrangue is what it is. Lennon later attempted to ameliorate it by saying that he was just using his anger to construct a song. Really? Songs don't just appear and live in this environment, they get arranged, and recorded with many takes, mixed and pressed on to records and packed into artwork for the world at large. If you put out a record on a whim and forget about it what does that say about your integrity as an artist? He sang it and he meant it. The story went that he heard Paul's song Too Many People and took it personally (and bloody how!). When McCartney responded, if he did, it was with Let Me Roll It. That sounds like no one but John (even down to the hard driven riff and the primal scream in the fade) but it's just a love song. This meant more to me as a teenager when I thought along those lines, vengeance for a trifle, but now I just try to enjoy the music of it.

How begins with a descending melody in the vocal followed by a pair of emphatic chords on the strings and reminds me of nothing more than what the same producer did to the song Long and Winding Road which was so damned by its writer. It doesn't sound like a subtle dig though (not after the last track). John wonders how he can go on when he feels so uncertain and disorientated. It's perfectly adequate and feels bigger than it should but has a consolidating middle eight and does its job. Lennon's vocal lifts the song above this lukewarm reception of mine as, again, he sounds completely sincere.

Oh Yoko might have been almost designed to rankle anti Yoko folk (who existed in their millions) as a ditty about the best revenge being living well. But again, it just sounds sincere as John's pleasant and happy voice rides above a kind of Dylanesque country shuffle. A blend of Onoesque imagery and Lennonesque word play and a junty good natured rhythm that rise to a joyful chorus that should sound embarrassing but never does. It's just so good natured that you might forget that the last time he closed an album off it was with the listless and exhausted My Mummy's Dead. The jaunty jalopy of Oh Yoko jingles all the way to the fade and we're all happy. 

Lennon was famously fickle about his own work, damning it one day and casting thunderbolts of self-praise the next. Some of the better known quotes from him about Imagine were complaints that he allowed to be too sugar coated. The worst of the string arrangements do carry it closer to supermarket muzak than they should; there is no irony to them when they flab out the sound in songs like Jealous Guy and Imagine itself. Not just George Martin but anyone who took the job of preparing string accompaniment to these tunes who wasn't already just doing what he was told would have produced something less anodyne. Compare the masterful, living strings on Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left to the muzak of the orchestrations on Bryter Later. It wasn't just John Lennon who suffered but my feeling is that he was complicit, perhaps insisting on the approach being simple and simple equalling honest. I don't know that much but I always note them and have to pretend they're keyboards which is how they seem to be written.

Outside of arrangements a major affliction in this record is the energy-draining reverb that some tracks are subjected to. I am not of the anti-reverb synod and have no respect for it or any blinkered thinking about music production but Soldier and Imagine, among others, are hampered by it. The title track about the possibility of world peace andits singer sounds small and distant. The snarling attack on accepting a place in the rat race, Soldier, sounds like a jam in the next room.

Imagine is the album Lennon presented after his personal demons were dealt with in the previous one. Here he resumed his place in the world and sang to it of peace, regrets for cruelty, rejection of its social demands and finally love and it works as two sides of music as well as a suite of songs. Less compact than the previous one but more outreaching for all that. Of the two it's the one I'm more likely to listen to.

This article was informed by my own experiences with the LP as I owned it in the late '70s as well as the recent Complete Collection box set. The LP was bought at Ken Herford's import shop around the corner from my place and was a US pressing with quadraphonic capability. The stereo system my father built for the main entertainment room had four large speakers but they presented the same stereo image back and front as a kind of basic surround sound. Quadraphonic playing required special equipment which I nor anyone I ever knew had. that said the sound of this deep dish vinyl filled the room with warmth and sparkle. The blu-ray disc that comes with the box set blows that completely out of the water with an intimate immersion that makes you feel like you are lying on the floor as the music is being recorded.

I didn't wholly like the album as a mid teen. I liked the melodic numbers, found Soldier an impenetrable mess and thought It's So Hard sounded like a pisstake and How sounded like muzak. While I skipped tracks on every album I had these were songs I never bothered with more than once. The most played pair of songs were Gimme Some Truth and Oh My Love which I delight in to this day. The LP came with an outsize poster of Lennon at a white piano. It went on the wall of my room. When I moved from Townsville for good and distributed a lot of my '70s albums to people who might wanted them more than I ever would again, I kept Imagine. When the Complete Collection appeared I hesitated and decided against buying it but then saw it at a massive dicount and figured I'd get it for the blu-ray alone. 

The blu-ray features a warm, immersive surround mix of the album, keeping parts of the arragements in place within the  expanded field. There are no gimmick moments of saxes flying around the room or vocals taking turns in different speakers. This adds to the sense of moment and presence and the audio qulaity is never less than warm and pleasing. I was curious to try the offered quadrasonic (used to be called quadraphonic) mix that I was never able to hear the first time and can report that it's almost as involving as the 5.1. If anything it's noticeably more trebley, lacking roundness in the bass and the punchier parts of the drum kit but it is taken from the master prepared for vinyl so it wouldn't have the bass capability of hi res digital to begin with.

As to the content beyond the album itself there is a great mass of it: raw studio mixes, elements mixes which highlight different aspects of the tracks like the strings, out-takes, soundscapes that combine contemporary interviews with working versions of the songs as well as representations of the various stages of the singles from the time like Happy Xmas (War is Over). I would recommend against trying to swallow everything on offer here all at once; the repetition factor alone will exhaust you. I'd recommend for picking out sequences as the trackorder of the album is kept to whatever state the songs are in. If I have a favourite moment of the extra material it is the double tracked vocal of Oh My Love. For some reason Lennon and/or Spector chose against the exact doubling developed at Abbey Road for Beatles recordings and tried it the old way. Lennon's pitch is flawless and his nuance so closely matched it's breathtaking yet no one could do this exactly and the surrounding instruments mask much of it; hearing both in isolation, the eastern flavoured melody sung with such a studied care sends shivers up the spine.  

This box set is a wonder. You pretty much get the deepest dive any member of the general voting public is ever going to get into the origins, gestation and fruition of this record. And that's before you get to the heavy bound book. Want to know about Imagine and also the processes the ex-Beatle was going through to make this statement shell out for this box. It looks beautiful and sounds like a dream.

1981@40: ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES IN THE DAK - ARCHITECTURE AND MORALITY

A skittish racket that could be a fusebox arcing or someone drumming with chopsticks on laminex. A hiss wells up. Before you can work out what anything is, the rhythm of rhe noise is carried into drums and acoustic guitar. A screaming synth line fades in as Andy McCluskey's wailing vocal comes in, anguished. The first time I heard this song I thought it was the Cure, so close is McCluskey's vocal to Robert Smith and even the chorus: "Oh my god what have I done this time?" While the lyric is abstract as will be the case in most of the words on this album, the chorus suggests nuclear apocalypse. The world in fact was only two years away from one that almost happened. My comparison with Smith is not the kind of lazy thinking that informs the worst of criticism; I think the tone of voice is intentional; yelling with a Cure-like angst was more in line with the widely held fear of sudden annihilation that dragged everything down at the time and words to that effect sounded better than the more melodic vodcal parts on the rest of the album. Not a pisstake or a copy but a recognition.

In fact, the very next track couldn't be further from the opener with the gentle floating synths of She's Leaving. A  dramatic pair of notes and a snare hit and we're drifting on Kraftwek arpeggios and synth choirs. McCluskey's vocal is smooth and creamy as he describes a woman's disillusionment with her relationship. A perfect example of UK synthpop: dynamic and despite being quite high bpm feels dreamy and slow. A dark keyboard bass drone grind below the final lines as they are repeated with sadness: "The more we learn the less we know".

Sounvenir was the first single and the vocal is taken by the other one (sorry, Paul Humphreys) after a genre-marking vocal melody played on a bell like synth tone. Humphrey's much slighter voice lists the things that have consumed his life like creative work and however much he progresses his feelings still remain. It's a pleasant wafting afternoon third glass of riesling when you're twenty type of song and neither offends nor draws attention.

Sealand seems like it's going to be an instrumental. Keyboards interplay often dissonantly before they coalesce, incorporating the outliers in a more complex harmony while the gently descending motif gathers strength. There is a cinematic quality to it reinforced by the dynamics and space. Eventually, we do get a vocal which, in it's entirety (the phrases sparse and stretched): "Sealand, forget a friend, she'll not leave there again. Mother, sister at home. These I'd value so." A heartbeat electro kick drum guides us into more gentle swirls of keyboards when suddenly a clanging noise like hammering or an engine clunks in time momentarily before fading into an even more ethereal outro. Is this about the world war two sea fort that became the sovereign principality ourside British waters because of pirate radio? McCluskey has reported denied this (and the lyric doesn't help either way)

The oddity at the centre of this album is its most engaging passage as the old disc is flipped for side two and two songs about or inspired by or created within cooee of the notion of Joan of Arc take up almost half of the vinyl side (but that's not a memory as I never had the vinyl of this, just a cassette and more recently a cd). 

Joan of Arc begins with a falsetto note held by breath and a long delay. McCluskey comes in with a Brian Wilsonish melody that is soon borne on electrodrums and string synth. When the real drums kick in the arrangement is like a synthpop reading of Sloop John B, comlplete with glockenspiel. A drumless interlude is broken by a soaring third verse an octave higher. The song ends with the band retreating as the now choral echoed vocal is joined by another as they gently close. Joan of Arc as a kind of California Girl.

What I always think is a crossfade is actually just a new track. A jarring chord on a mellotron is followed by another on an organ. And again. Then a speedy waltz advances with a military accent. Mellotron strings whine out the vocal melody which McCluskey takes up: "If Joan of Arc had a heart would she give it as a gift to such as me...." The mellotron changes key oddly but then it's clear why: McCluskey can't make it high enough to go an octave over it. So it's less than that but still very comfortably airborne. Back in the home key the strings bear us on their floating crest as the drums beat a warlike march. Fade.

I know people who found this doubling up annoying: why write two slight things about the same person? Well, they're different statements. Bother are romantic of sorts but seem to be from different narrators, first a feisty teenaged fan who thought his confused love/worship of the figure was returned, if cruelly and then a more mature voice singing a lament: "she cared so much she offered up her body to the grave." 

I had this on tape until recently and remember my cassette was always half wound so it would be near this mini song cycle. The only other OMD artefact I had was the 45 of Enola Gay. I remember feeling very superior, confident that I was the only one in any room who knew that it was about the plane that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima as everyone else bopped along to the infectious, dancey hit. The song meaning was actually pretty common knowledge but until I understood that I felt a thrill in knowing that it was a party favourite about a cataclysm, there was an eerie tingle to that. The Joan of Arc songs are like that but grown up. They are serious, taut and shaped exactly as they need to be, fitting so perfectly they feel crossfaded in the recollection. Beautiful.

A light beeping melody. Choral aahs on the mellotron. A quacking Farfisa organ progression. The piece forms and builds with synth drums, hammering and tool sounds over an engine like pulse. Discordant ghosts of phrases from the electrical field. The scale is grand but dark. The edifice of sound, the building feels like an office block or a Ballardian hi-rise estate tower. The title track does seem to express its name. As with Gary Numan, OMD learned the lessons of Kraftwerk when it came to instrumentals: treat them like atmosphere, set the scene the rest will follow. This is a small but welcome wonder on the home stretch.

Georgia couldn't be more contrasting with its bright and pealing synth riff and electro percussion. A shouted upbeat vocal. The boppy splendour conceals a lyric of separation. "Dancing in the rings of the western world. Blindfolds on but we don't care." A sudden turn into a whining replay of the chords without the arpeggio shows us how a simply change in presentation of the same music can alter its entire mood. A gunshot and it's done.

A beautiful sobriety ends the album with The Beginning and the End. A bittersweet keyboard introduction gives way to a jangling guitar arpeggio. McCluskey's voice is a smooth, breathy croon as he sings about the beginning and the end with the kind of modal melody we have heard throughout the album. His voice shifts seamlessly into his glassy falsetto as the the gentle synthesiser wash moves below into the fade.

The thing that lifts bands of any genre above the main is always character. As far as synth pop went there are few that do this: Numan had his paranoid sci-fi cityscapes, Soft Cell found the conduit to soul shouting, John Foxx went full Ballard and the Human League were soon to make the biggest shift from big bleak swathes to pop that went down like dessert. OMD from their World War II name to Enola Gay to the aching intensity of the Joan of Arc songs brought history. Not just in the personalising of watching Jeanne leave them in the field or Enola Gay as a big sky mumma whose kiss will never fade away as the mushroom cloud expands. The other kind of history they bring is to establish a frank admission of Karftwerk's influence before moving off in many different paths, adding more cinematic atmosphere and a joyous songcraft that led all the way back to the Zombies or the Beatles.

The result is an album that sounds like 1981 in a glass, this sip sparkles, that one warms and all of it reminds me of the brutalist '70s buildings of Griffith Uni, late nights with 4ZZZ finishing assignments longhand and those first few steps into the dimly lit hall of a party. Sealand cured my hangovers and Maid of Ornleans almost always brought me just short of tears. A series of welcome memories that don't have to be nostalgic.

1981@40: MODELS - CUT LUNCH

The late '70s saw the faddish return of the EP and the institution of the 12 inch single which had slipped off the club DJ's turntable into livingrooms. And in the early '80s to the end of the decade there was the mini-album. These were typically 6 tracks long and the idea was that they were a concentration of what an act was doing, all killer no filler. More typically, they were like EPs with filler. Models broke the mould right out of the gate by releasing this as a 10 inch, 33 1/3. Whether they intended or not Cut Lunch serves as a tidy bridge between the alt-pop of Alphabravo... and the soon to follow Local and/or General LPs. 

Bright and bouncy numbers ringing with keyboards and processed guitars but with gutteral lead vocals and song structures that didn't have to pretend to be singles fill the grooves, here. Atlantic Romantic and Two Cabs to the Toucan standout as catchy but there's always that grab back in either the lyrics or strangled singing where more chart-conscious bands would have gone down the UK synthpop crooner route. What we get here is contempt for that but also a more accessible presentation of part of the live set at the time. But this is a contempt that feels like fun; it's bratty but played with discipline as though there should be no chance that the sneer would be missed.

Models would climb to the mid '80s more or less on their own terms with their more jagged edges finding an easy accomodation in the charting Pleasure of Your Company at a time when the market had time for the more difficult stuff. After that everything smoothed to mid decade coola and goon morass. But until then there was a band called Models who were visible above the already high shoulders of the Melbourne scene who, like their cohorts The Birthday Party, Hunters and Collectors etc had the profile and committment to tour nationally at least and fill venues with wit, attitude that told the crowd beyond the edge of the stage that everyone in the room was part of a history that wouldn't repeat. This clanging, squeaking, whirling and growling pair of sides made sure of that. It's still fun.

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.