1981@40: BEAUTY AND THE BEAT - THE GO-GOS

I knew nothing about The Go-Gos when I bought this record. Well, ZZZ was playing the acerbic This Town and dark power pop Lust to Love but Our Lips are Sealed hadn't been on Countdown yet and no one was writing about them in the usual rags. Then I had my epiphany experience in Rocking Horse records at the end of 1981, written up here. I didn't have a record player where I lived so I had to wait until I got back to Townsville to hear the whole thing. 

Meantime, A week and a bit, I had the wit of the cover art with the glamour shots on the back and the "ugly" beauty treatment band portrait on the front. Regardless of how the members thought of themselves relative to their L.A. punk scene roots, bands with women were still subject to glamourisation. The punk wars had won some headway (The Slits, The Passions, The Raincoats, The Au Pairs) but they weren't American so The Go-Gos made a statement in their record cover that, be it ever so subversive, still had to acknowledge the showbiz way. When I did get back up to the family seat in the tropical gateway of Townsville I was able to put the disc on for the first time and listen to the whole thing. At that point the cover could have been birdshit white for all I cared as the music was so strong.

What became the single led the set. Our Lips Are Sealed began with a simple but compulsive 4/4 on the drums. A palm-muted bass and guitar joined in, running down a three chord riff. A high clear ringing lead guitar figure came in like a bell. Belinda Carlisle enters with a voice both sweet and on the verge of breaking into anger. Everyone's gossiping but she holds firm and responds to dirt with silence. For the first two short verses the A-G-D progression is cut from pop tradition and done so energetically that it's magnetic. But then, all of these are major chords, it goes up a minor third, back down one, then up ... 

I'll just cite the chords: F - D - Bb - E - A - D. That comes out of nowhere. Those chords gloriously don't belong in the same progression, at least not then. It's not even using a relative minor. They must have just sounded good when Jane Weidlin wrote it. What I didn't know until the following year in an interview in Juke or summat was that she wrote it with Terry Hall from The Specials/Fun Boy Three. They had a fling while The Go-Gos toured with The Specials. Hall sent Weidlin the lyrics and she did the rest. In the documentary she accounts for the weird chord shifts as the work of a young unschooled songwriter. To me it's the work of a natural songwriter finding the drama and emotion in the movement of chords, wanting to get away from the humdrum of the A-G-D of the verse which, compelling as they make it here, cannot escape its traditions, until the chorus (usually where the reverse happens and the tension is dissipated by the big bright scheme that gets us all listening). Dig? The chorus is where it tightens winding up until the title phrase at the end. The middle eight is heralded by a lessening in the arrangement with a bass led riff and Weidlin's own nitrous oxide vocal lulls the other figure in the song. Back into the verse (I'm shivering a little just recalling it) she uses this as the descant to the verse. And THEN the tension of the chorus happens again. After a few reiterations of the big major key title phrase we end clean, feeling like we've had (I'm quoting a review about a Richard Brautigan book) just the right amount of icecream on a hot day.

While I'll here I'll mention the video which, by the time I'm back in Townsville, was on Countdown every episode until it had to be when it got into the top ten. A lot less slick than music videos were getting, the home video look gives it a school project commitment that a glitzier piece would have missed. The band get into Carlisle's groovy red car and drive to a lingerie shop and then to a fountain where they dance and frolic as they mime the song. This is intercut with what is either a small venue gig or a practice where they are gong through the song. My half-decade older brother in law reported it to me as being sexist and demeaning, amping up the girlyness of the band but all I saw was an extension of the joke on the album cover: all dolled up in their street clothes in the car but more seriously in their stage gear for the performance scenes. It flips the bird on anyone saying they were bought up by the industry money and were playing along. They actually looked in complete control in a way that contemporaries like Loverboy never did.

How Much More plays a little more pedestrian but still has a surprise in the chorus after an impressive stretch of a single note over rising progression. If the the band is marking time here, Carlisle's power lifts it. And then there are some more inventive vocal harmonies that don't need to be there but gladden with their presence. Tonite hikes up the pace with a high droning guitar riff. Carlisle shows again how a clipped vocal delivery with conviction trashes all other attempts of superteen rock. More good vocal arrangement but this never sounded as strong as the best on the record.

Lust to Love crawls in with a palm muted guitar figure climbing like a spider through a minor mode. Carlisle comes in with an acidic confession of social power ambushed by real emotions. Suddenly the whole band kicks in with clean power chords for the prechorus which blasts into a glorious chorus with  contrary motion between chords and vocal melody, a hooking central section and a power dash to the minor chord in the finish. Carlisle's controlled insistence on the strength of the melody is supported by a wordless descent through the minor tonality in the backing vocals. Repeat. Send in a clear and clean solo which can be sung and return to the cinematic base of the spidery riff and bitterwseet voice of young experience audibly aging. The highpoint.

This Town probably shouldn't have been put right after Lust to Love as it starts with a similar rapid palm muting figure. Then again it's clearly distinct and something jollier like Can't Stop the World might have robbed Lust of its intensity. When I first heard This Town I thought it was the B52s. That skeletal chunking rhythm with the spy movie guitar riff. Ominous. Carlisle's catty lead vocal is quickly thickened with close harmony. Before the verse feels over the chorus comes at the other end of a shining harmony ascent through the minor scale. A guitar solo after two verse/choruses is more of an instrumental break, rhythmic and brooding, world-building rather than band beating. It leads straight back into the chorus, now more glamourous than earlier. The words are a collision of images: "we're all dreamers, we're all whores" and in the chorus "this town is our town, it is so glamourous". Come and join in but stay away, it's ours. There's a sternness to it that suggests the writers were both part of and spurned by a scene that tastes, chews and spits out.

Side two and We Got the Beat. My eye popping first hearing in Rocking Horse is in the account linked to above but basically it's this. Toward the end of the year, I was bumming around Brisbane until I got the train up to Townsville for the holidays. I stopped in at Rocking Horse records in Adelaide St. Even if you didn't have a particular thing you were looking for you'd find something. The staff were constantly visited by friends or regulars so regular they were on first name basis with the people behind the counter. A lot of the records in the stacks were import copies with better vinyl and cover art quality than the local product or just the only copies, there being no local release. I used to start anywhere where no one else was looking and just keep flipping until I found something. I was doing that when some changed the record from whatever had been on to side two of Beauty and the Beat. Then I had the EXPERIENCE. 

All that means is that the song We Got the Beat hit me with its thunderous energy, brilliantly orchestrated arrangement of a rock band augmented only by a piano. The momentum of the verses and the sudden widening of the choruses as the vocal went up and the chords plummeted down like a rollercoaster. The guitar solo was like a fuel injection, running through the scale until with a cymbal crash the key changed and it felt twice as big. Then on to the final verse and chorus and then the coda call and response before the chant over the driving riff led to an abrupt stop which felt like whiplash. I still listen to this song when I want to energy with big vocal interplay. It's the reason I bought this album.

Fading Fast is like a welcome pause from the energy of the previous track. A quiet arpeggio on a clean electric guitar. Carlisle comes in serious and clipped: "You thought that I was on your side..." Someone needs to be told to leave in plain terms. The lyric is just that, no puns or street talk, just plain statements. What makes up the rest is a forward driving solemnity that doesn't seem to belong in a teen anthem but here it is. The chorus doesn't include the title, it's a reinforcement of the verse and is in the unrelieved minor with a similar modal movement in the final lines of each stanza. But then, after a verse-long guitar instrumental, we get a thrid section which is as close to major tonality as we'll get here. It involves some very fine complex vocal arrangements in which Carlisle and Weidlin sing overlapping lines that reinforce the other and end with the title line, "you're fading fast out of my memory" back in minor territory. The song ends with two of these in a row and a repeat of the title line and a clean stop.

Automatic begins with a backwards note on a bass or a piano that gives way to a steady drum pattern and then a bass and guitar lopping figure whose repetition and modal tonality give it a mystery movie feel. Carlisle comes in with the most emotionally ranging vocal on the disc, describing unconnected sex in a sharp rise to the minor third in each line." Angles sharp clash together, Time and consciousness sever." When the circular motif in the guitars and bass is not rolling on there are gaps that end in backwards echo or are filled with the drums playing perfect time. A verse towards the end has two vocals sing lines from different verses in call and response and then the riff is picked up and plays into the fade, no relief, no end.

The album ends on what might be considered fillers or side two songs but they're fun for all that. You Can't Walk in Your Sleep (If You Can't Sleep) a good joke for the chorus in a song about insomnia. Skidmarks on My Heart matches a big drum pattern with powerchords and a good progression with a screeching lead vocal of frustration with a full harmony chorus "Oh skidmarks on the my heart. You've got me in fifth. You're bruning rubber like my love". A great surf guitar solo and doo-doo backing vocals and back to the big chorus. Kathy Valentine's only composition Can't Stop the World has a post punk treatment of of a Shirelles style boy girl song with a big 1-4-5 chorus and descending last line. A dual guitar break sounds like a Buddy Holly workout that adds energy and splits after one iteration. Great fun.

The Go-Gos had come from a punk scene that was taking leaves from the spikier UK well, political and critical here and there but quickly consolidating into the same kind of cultural rulebook that all scenes establish. So, when with a few lineup changes due to differences between what they'd started to do and what they wanted to grow into, the band found their feet in the kind of grindy pop rock on this record. Jane Wiedlin and Charlotte Caffey had established themselves as a sturdy songwriting partnership, buidling muscles in structure, harmony and wit. But if you see the clip from Ugh a Music War of them doing We Got the Beat you might notice they don'd just lack a little polish but the arrangement feels a little hollow (even though it has more backing vocals than the recorded one). Enter Richard Gottehrer.

Gottehrer was a generation older than the band but he had some serious credentials as regards what they might do to crash through. He was Brill Building and went on to produce as well as write. My Boyfriend's Back, I Want Candy and Hang on Sloopy are all his. And then into the late '70s he understood the undercurrents and produced The Ramones, Blondie and Talking Heads. By the time The Go-Gos came past his desk he was on it. He kept their stage energy but highlighted their melody, keeping the guitars mostly clean and ringing instead of the then overdone distortion on every song. He brought out more of the vocal sophistication already there to finish these tracks with some of the finest voice work on any rock record of this time (the backings and harmonies are really that good). He found the concentrate within the band and created one of the strongest and most durable debut albums of the rock era.

So, after Mum tapped me on the shoulder on the platform at Townsville station and I rode back to Aitkenvale and I debriefed my first big year of Uni, I retired to the rumpus room where the smaller kids and their cronies dive bombed in the pool across the patio, and put this record on. I found a beer in the downstairs fridge and then I put the record on again.

1981@40: PiL - FLOWERS OF ROMANCE

A thin rattle swings between the channels until the big gated drum sound starts and Lydon's tremulous wailing begins. There are breaks and synthesised interpolations but this screaming harrangue. He sings as a religious extremist heading for action, over-focussed, increasingly dangerous. Four Enclosed Walls. The sparseness of the arrangement, violence of the drums and insistence of the vocal make this one unnerving every time.

Wobbly drums, an insistent chromatic figure on the synthesiser and a tiny clean electric guitar make this sound more like a Birthday Party song. Lydon's sneering vocal is about a an attempted seduction of him by a rock journalist. Eventually, he just says,"right, I'm finihsed" and leaves the track. The guitar gets spindly and spikey and eventually just ends on a noodle.

Phenagen begins with a honking drone and a distant clicking percussion. A meandering figure on something like a hammered dulcimer adds a medieval tone. Lydon's vocal is, like all of them on this album a repeated short melodic phrase with little variation. Phenergan is a strong antihistimine that can be used as a sleeping pill. the narrator of this song has rendered himself barely extant through various forms of opiation. Low piano notes, backward guitar and more of that damn kick drum. A reprise of the last line of snarling ennui brings the dulcimer back before an abrupt end on the kick.

The title track begins with yet more of the snareless drum kit, a high ghostly distant vocal, a string drone with some formless high string bowing. Lydon sings of a relationship in the death spiral. "I'll take the furniture. Start all over again." The violin surfaces for a Turkish sounding circular riff before the song  heads, droning and kicking to the end. The lyrics seem unambiguous but put in the setting of the strange hopeless headache that the rest of the song constructs the breakup feels a lot darker than the usual.

Under the House is a horror movie score with jungle drums. Big boomy echoes of slowed vocals and frequent deep choirs as a Lydon vocal, near buried in the mix, chants about seeing a ghost and a kind of claustrophobia and evil that takes over the building. Lydon did claim to have seen a ghost at the Manor recording studios where the band stayed at the offered rooms and spent a week failing to record all but one of the songs used here. Described as a time of frustration and failure by Lydon and guitarist Levene, the accounts include imagery of shadows and people seen in empty rooms and there is a sense of being haunted by gthe frustrations and anger of unfulfilled lives. Quietly and constantly terrifying. A friend at the time said of this track: "that's not a song, that's evil." He was smiling but only just.

Hymie's Him really was intended for the score of a horror movie. Michael Wadleigh had approached Keith Levene to provide a score for his film Wolfen, wanting an urban jungle. That means more of the same drums we've already had but with sound effects and synthesised brass and woodwind playing very cinematic brief chordal figures over the percussion. It wasn't used for the film but it became a great opener for side two of the album.

Restless drums over a huge booming synth drone. Lydon is buried in the mix. Very high vocal as narrator sneers at people trying to get in and the neighbours complaining about the noise. After lists of statements as to why the people knocking should feel ashamed the droning chant keep banging the door insists on a single note. An experience of constant breathless irritation. Lydon's house was besieged by fans who would knock and yell through the letter slot or even camp on the steps outside. This is what he thought of them. It's one of the longer tracks on the record for a reason, the band and their producer found the means to bring this grinding situation to musical life to be compelling but as unlovely as its inspiration.

Go Back has the usual intense drums joined by synthesiser in a chromatic figure eventually joined by Keith Levene at his most spiky on guitar. The lyrics are a kind of political companion piece to Four Enclosed Walls as neo-nazis rap out their mindless chants of the good days to come. If they forget history maybe this time they won't have to repeat the failures and just head for the glory. The flat voiced repetition: don't ever look back, good days ahead. The loopy keyboard riff plays the constantly crazy marching song. Obsession. Horrible. Effective.

Francis Massacre refers to the Irish prison Mountjoy and the prisoner Francis Moran who was doing life for murder. A sprightly but still dark drum pattern bangs on as Lydon wails about keeping out of jail and piano keys are randomly slided or plonked. At the end there is the same guitar sound Bowie got at the end of the marathon Sweet Thing on Diamond Dogs, a kind of sheet metal crashing and stressing. That's how the album ends.

This album heralds the transition of the band from working unit to the various and varying lineups that Lydon put together as the sole original member. Before it was the promise of a musical unit that could come from a ragged debut that mixed filler bullshit with brilliance to an unassailable masterpiece and credible live album to this document of pain and fear.

The change is clear in the first track. There's no bass. Jah Wobble has gone and his contribution not only will be absent from this record but there will be bass only two of the tracks. After this album the instrument was relegated to its standard position in rock bands, back near the drums, leave the personality at home. Until then for PiL's audience there was this big dark monument to a few public phenomena and causes for concern but also a virtual charge sheet of everything tearing at the band's weak spots which would leave them as a brand with a face; the very thing they had originally attacked.

But, think of it, while it's true that this is the end of the group as a cooperative thinking unit it's still pretty effective. Their front covers went from a parody of glossy society magazine photos to a metal can that was intended to rust, to weird representations of the members as cartoon monsters, to someone else. The latter was Jeannette Lee who handled their video art. She managed their extended presence at their gigs but also went on to be a mover and shaker of alternative music at the prestigious Rought Trade label. For this album, she looks like the flamenco dancer from Psycho. It's still funny.

If you liked Metal Box for its cohesion and confident dark mooded anger and its rich arrangements this one might have turned you off, made you fidget waiting for the bass or guitar to break out but it never deviates beyond a few details from the migraine of assaulting percussion, stressed noise and vocals that all seem to end up as endless chants. It's either best taken in as a single relentless run, a song cycle of spite or song by song on different days. It rewards both saturation and quest.

Some might comment on the strange baton passing with this record. The gated and harmonised drum sound is straight out of Peter Gabriel's third album (same engineer) and was adopted buy Flowers' producer by Phil Collins for his next one. So, either the two ex prog rockers were still not talking to each other or only found the joke of this out later but it still fuels the fanciful sillyness that PiL gained some respectablity if only as a conduit to the sound of '80s drums. It's much better than that.

This is the kind of thing that was on alternative radio forty years ago and joined the stream of tape loops, industrial soundscapes that promised to thrill us with new worlds we could find in our own heads, the kind of personal cinema we could make that had nothing to do with the sagging conventions of rock music. Billy Joel thought he was making a new wave album the year before with Glass Houses but just made another Billy Joel album. He must have thought a little edge could get him there but if he'd heard this he would have woken up screaming in the night. That is why the likes of Lydon and Levene were clearly still doing the right thing by their public in this set. While I personally didn't love this record at the time I did enjoy the worlds it offered and, a little at a time, I grew to appreciate its depth and focus and would think of it whenever the old flag about rock being dead was hauled up at the wrong end of parties at the time. Of course rock should have been dead by this time. But none of us counted on the thrill of powerchords for those younger even than we were. However, for a while, just a little while, this was one of those records that gave us hope.

1971@50 : STICKY FINGERS - THE ROLLING STONES

Fresh from both the downer of the Allen Klein takeover and the triumphs of touring on a scale they'd never quite done in the '60s, The Rolling Stones continued to refine the attack and image of the previous two studio discs but also to declare themselves reborn, free of bad guys in suits and the unit-producing assembly line they wanted of their acts. Klein still owned everything from before this and proved ineluctable. So, the band repackaged themselves as the biggest indy act in the world, struck their own record label and began again. This is that band's first statement.

The hammer on anvil punch of the opening chords of Brown Sugar say this clearly. It's the kind of grinding groove that they'd been building since 19th Nervous Breakdown and Jumping Jack Flash but here it's meaner, a fat punch that crawls on strong legs to a dark grind with a tale intended to offend. Images of slavery, abuse and assault in almost every line. That much is not ambiguous. On the other hand, Jagger at his best is an arch lyricist and here at the dawn of the jet set incarnation of the group would have delighted in mixing up the imagery. But was it such a coup to get into the top 40 with a song so risque? If you take it as an extension of the sexual licence worn at the time to signify cultural enlightenment then, sure, stick it to the wowsers. But slavery. I am under no impression that Jagger advocated the violence depicted in the words but that he chose to use the imagery. Set any of that in the Belgian Congo and watch that wry grin go the way of the Dodo. Is it more like the movies Drum or Mandingo, then? No, because, as much as they pandered to that icky eagerness in their audiences both films were careful to clarify the distance between their purposes and those of their characters. But I don't think Jagger is trying to play both sides as much as play a character. He's no more a slaver here than he was Satan in Sympathy for the Devil. It feels far more like the same provocation as in Midnight Rambler which went as far as quoting Albert de Salvo's confession. Brown Sugar veers more towards the schoolboy snigger, though. So, does a verse that's more about his own sexual adventures cleanse it all? Not if the rest of it stops you listening. Maybe it's one of those songs that you can pretend is being sung in another language. That is a mighty Keith-led rock groove, after all. Up to you.

Sway begins with the rock band equivalent of a boulder falling from an outcrop. A big guitar bash on a blues scale before settling into a rolling guitar progression and Jagger's vocal entering soon after. A compelling lament for the narrator's life bound to his pleasures and those of departed friends. That old demon life has got him in its sway. The immediate contrast between the nudging wink of Brown Sugar and this compounds Sway's sincerity. To cap that Mick Taylor delivers a soaring solo of a kind that had never been part of a Stones song it plays into the fade as the memories of assignations and addictions swell in the distance. If you'd just heard Brown Sugar you might shrug at the attempt at bad boy posturing but if you listen long enough to hear this it will be like standing back from the frame to see the picture as it really is.

I said cap in that last paragraph. Well, I shouldn't have. It diminishes the power of Wild Horses with its impossibly gentle strum and the sound of Jagger's five hundred year old voice. He loves her though she puts him through hell and this he comes to understand is from her own suffering. The guitar interplay, two acoustics (one with Nashville tuning which sounds like a 12 string ... but isn't) waft like breezes as Jagger's heartfelt singing rises between them. Mick Taylor's electric playing is a lot gentler than in Sway but no less poignant for that. By the time the whole band has joined it feels like an intensification rather than simply added instruments. One of the Stones' most moving pieces.

Two laments in a row so it's time for something rockier. A dual guitar attack of crunchy riff on one side and a more fluid electric clean on the other. Boy lusts after girl and is trying to get into her house. No, not more assault, this one feels more a give and take consensuality with real wry humour from Jagger. The final harmony chorus is proof that this band did do a lot of that whicdh gets overshadowed by the cock rock bravado but here it's clear and shiny and powerful. The groove develops into a loose jam with softly jangling guitars and Bobby Keys's asphalt heatwave sax taken over by Taylor's slinky Les Paul playing. If anything gthey did in their first decade approached straight up jazz it's this song's coda. Actually, there's more than a nod to Miles's In a Slient Way.

You Got to Move is all sliding dobro and and humid delta afternoons. Jagger isn't quite singing in blackface here (the way he sang early country outings all houn' dawg) and rather than plain appropriation sounds more celebratory. It closes side one and encouraged anyone listening to go and find out more about this blues thang (even if almost all of them just got up to turn it over).

Side two opens with more provocation. Bitch begins as a full band riff and a growling vocal. The narrator is drunk, hungry and restless and that's about it except the joke of it is not that the woman he's singing to is a bitch, it's love itself that torments and drags him in. A full horns and brass onslaught of the riff is impressive and then the dual guitar workout that it becomes the extended fade of shouts, blasts and grinding chords. Not subtle nor was meant to be.

I Got the Blues opens in big Memphis style with a huge double guitar arpeggio with rising brass as Jagger gives a big performance at the mic. This is the closest the band get to anything of their early albums but this outing is bigger and richer and more sophisticated, almost as though this is what they heard in their heads as the well-meaning Andrew Oldham puzzled over how to get the sound bigger. Here, the magnitude comes from the space between the guitar band, the sad brass chorus and Billy Preston's effortlessly soulful keyboards.

Sister Morphine is as creepy as the title sounds. The narrator whine's about his strung out pain from his hospital bed. The opiating nurse never comes around enough, ever. The doctor has no face but doesn't need one. This song is all disorder. After all the big production of the rest of the album  this song starts so quietly it sounds like studio chatter. Slide guitars are as much effects as instruments. The reverb comes and goes as the pain builds or subsides and the mix is kept tantalisingly uneven; all the bits you want loud are buried and the constant pleading of the junkie is forever. The workout to fade is with a snidely insistent slide (courtesy of Ry Cooder) and a tinny piano rattles with a tight , disorientating echo to the fade. In addition to the usual Jagger/Richards credit we see the extra name and life experience of Marianne Faithful whose life was not the happiest at the time of writing (which was during the previous album but works here).

Dead Flowers begins with the same arch country sound that songs like Country Honk or Factory Girl but, while the humour is still there it's far more attuned to the kind of traditions it evokes. The girl thinks she's too good for him, keeping him pining while she slums it among the actvists and bohemians. It's ok for her to keep sending him the dead flowers. He won't forget to put roses on her grave. For the first time the Nashville feel is approached without self-consciousness (although the references to smack instead of Bud do add a little of that). Fun.

The thing to know about Moonlight Mile if you're unfamiliar with this record is that (like Sawy) this is a guitar led song that was done without Keith. Keith was not fit for duty for those (though he did sing backing on Sway) so Mick Taylor stepped in with this shimmery wonder with its pentatonic melodies, easy acousting strum and whimsical lyrics of travel under open skies. This was a jam at the end of weeks of Jagger noodling the Eastern toned figure on an acoustic guitar. The album's only string section enters without sounding inappropriate for a moment and manages to be both lush and restrained. More of an atmosphere than a song but a lovely breezy way to close.

With the two ground breakers Beggar's Banquet and Let it Bleed behind them, a refreshed career in front of crowds massively bigger than anything in their initial touring years and a reputation for being naughty tramps in lurex The Rolling Stones came to this thrid chapter in the big four albums that came to define them despite the decade they'd already fashioned. After this, every one of their albums would follow the pattern with varying degrees of conviction and this is the moment that seems to have felt exactly right.

While Banquet and Bleed both feature more adventurous approaches there is an overall arc discernable when listening to these records in chronological order. By the time Sticky Fingers comes along the production is of the strength that added to the standard of all high profile act's releases at this time and is still considered standard. And this is what is really meant when people who revere these records mean when they describe them as timeless: they aren't out of time as much as occurant at the time when this presentation was consolidated. This is the thing that gets to me when I think of listening to this record and it's the one that will bid me scroll to something else. The slickness of sound that stretched over the decades (do not kid yourself that the nineties added anything more than better electronics) is here in these grooves and there to stay. It's also in The Eagles, the couples version of Fleetwood Mac, The Doobie Brothers, Meatloaf and anyone else whose records sounded perfect before they sounded compelling. I'm not blaming the Stones or this record, just saying, this is when they, too, bought in. You can stretch that easily to the Andy Warhol cover that made the title so champagne risque.

But after all that goes through my mind, if I go ahead and choose it, I listen to the end, from the atrocity of Brown Sugar to the painkilling float of the last song's fade. It works. It waits there, whether or not you pick it, and will pour into your ears and reward you the same as the first time. 

1981@40: COMPUTER WORLD - KRAFTWERK

Having influenced every last purveyor of synth pop Kraftwerk themselves emerged to make a few statements on the world as they saw it and as, if it but knew it, it would see itself. Computer dating, home computers, consumerism, the wired state and money and more sat at the centre of their inspirations and while pop bands trying to be hip about it really plundered '60s spy-fi tv and movies and, at worst, cautioned a world of Countdown viewers about the dangers of becoming a number. The difference between them and Kraftwerk was that Kraftwerk actually used and understood computers, crunched their own numbers and let anyone who'd listen that if they themselves didn't start doing just that then they would be the numbers to be crushed. Oddly, in the last decade before the computerless homes, they seemed to have missed the boat.

In 1981 mentioning computers in song lyrics felt done. That was mostly due to those ones I started with, the popsters with ditties about tyrannical machine overlords, impersonal number identities or surveillance. To be Kraftwerk and call your album Computer World after Computer Games had blazed up the pop parade seemed as naff as it could get and it easily could have seemed that influencers of Bowie, Gary Numan and Eurodisco now looked as saurian as Led Zeppelin. The cover was a hard yellow picture of the band's heads appearing in the monitor of a blocky old computer terminal. Elsewhere they staffed the industrial looking machines of an unpronouncable German electro brain, in plastic toupees and robot expressions. Very Devo.

But not even Devo came close to the nightmare of the future that Kraftwerk were proposing. Yes, the synth-o-march of the title track bagged entities like Interpol and the FBI into a forbidding list of corporate identities and chants of "business, numbers, money, people" and then, "crime, travel, communication, entertainment. The arrangement was subdued and murky in opposition to the sound of Man Machine and certainly Trans-Europe Express. It sounded like music lit by a burglar's torch.  Apart from the luminous riff that sounded more like a company jingle than a pop hook the music tramped like a battalion of sanitised officeworkers, not faceless mercentile robots but everyday white collars, pretty people who counted your cash or refused your dole payment, the world, in fact, as it was. Kraftwerk aren't warning us against a bleak future but describing where we were.

Pocket Calculator's riff sounds the most like a lot of the UK synthpop that surrounded the record. It's the kind of bright and boppy major key figure that could easily be imagined on a guitar as a synth. Around it the electronics squeak, snarl, pop and snap. The narrator is the operator of his pocket calculator, adding subtracting etc. as well as pushing the little tune button. But what feels like an optimistic jingle about portable technology is more about the pervasion of it. Little calculators weren't new at the time (I'd had several at school in the seventies) and were long normalised as a means of quick number work. It's the numbers that are going to work, here, as their users increasingly depend on them. The instrumental outro suggests the spread of this relationship, it's toy upbeat smile increasingly sinister.

Next we hear from those numbers themselves, beginning with a wobbly robot voice German chanting from one to four. We also hear the count in Japanese, English, Italian, and Russian. There's a percussion track but the synth is chromatic, almost as random as a sample and hold setting but clearly intentional. It is the sound of numbers working around us, in the circuitry, through the phone lines, in the shadows and obscure corners of our daily administration. It merges into the restatement of the title track as a quieter but more assured instrumental. No words needed. The effect has taken and our world is different and will not think to turn back.

The old side two begins with what in 1981 felt like overstatement as a lonely citizen uses computers to connect. He calls a number for a data date. How virtual that might be is up to your imagination. The same blend of clavinet harshness and ringing high keyboards in this modal music intensifies the bleakness of the image. The vocals, as with most of them on this album, are renedered a step back from hard clairty by going through a delay with a very short, metallic echo. The human voice doesn't come a lot colder than this. Most ot the track is instrumental as the imagined ritual plays out as part of the new way of living. It is quietly crushing.

Home Computer's riff is the darkest one on this dark record. Thick, staccato bass sliced from somewhere in the minor scale and repeated in a pulse. There is a brighter sounding counter riff, opened up to an major arpeggio, but it isn't there to provide light. "I program my home computer, beam myself into the future." That's the lyric. And you get four of those. Mostly it's the blunt bass riff, here and there descanted bya higher keyboard or interupted by the prettier counter theme. If there are games on this home computer they are relegated to breaks; you go to work and you come home to more work. And that's it forever. A rising bubbly figure adds another phase but it just sound like more programming. The by now typical second half or so of instrumental features the third rising figure punctuated by harsh electronic snares and a stylised phone ring.

It's More Fun To Compute is the final stage as the robotic user chants the title as a harsh distant electronic scream on the synth sounds. Riffs or musical themes are liberally recycled from the previous track to emphasise the transformation that has happened in the digital cocoon. There is a lugubrious restatement of the Home Computer theme on a legato string-style synth and the effect is of lamentation. We have reached this point because we couldn't turn back or stop when there was newness to make us better. Finally (after four of its six minutes of instrumental) the percussion ceases and we are left drifting in the dark with the lament. End.

So, in 1981, the idea of Kraftwek doing this was an, "oh. come on." Wasn't that just like Queen doing their punk song back in '77? But that's nothing like the album Kraftwerk produced as soon as you listened to it. The cover art showed them as mannequin-like servants of the machine and the songs were about teh absorption of humanity into digital information flow but there was not the slightest sigh of gimmick to be had. If anything, they scaled the electronics down to concentrate on delivering a message where the form of the lyrics and structure of the arrangements said more than videos of them bouncing around in sci-fi costumes. This wasn't about doing the robot on Space Station Alpha it was about life in 1981. It was dark and achingly melancholy. We weren't becoming machines, just getting used to serving them.

I think there's less to be had from asking how well they predicted the future, point for point, than in considering how the culture at first absorbed the notion to the point of becoming indistinguishable from it. This is not all bad - human connection is the same as it was with the internet (just heavily amplified) - but when it is bad it is scary. And that's way before you get to the dark web. The trust in the con has also been amplified and scammers have long worked on the same principles as the advertising industry. We buy the scam with the knowledge of the scam; even if we don't respond to it there is pleasure in acknowledging the attempt. As for sex, it went from text-only spontaneous erotica, to torrid IRC autopornography, to online porn entering the mainstream and dating sites hanging galleries of personal fiction with endless variety. And the more we think of ourselves as being at the controls the deeper inside the great buzzing and beeping control box we are. If Kraftwerk didn't quite get the details right a mere twenty years before it changed then who among us shall point the finger?

Back in 1981 the outfit that let the world know that pop music did not have to be an amped up 60s rock band but could continue to innovate and provide powerful scores for the times released a statement that gently wiped the fashion for pop futurism aside and told us to beware. We weren't going to beware. It was too much fun dancing like Robbie the Robot or turning the other way and pretending that clunky indy rock kept us safely outside the system. But there is no such place as outside the system. That's why there is no sci-fi to Computer World but plenty of social realism. Its message like its music might have been too dour and genuine for us then, and now too open to ridicule as a kind of missed guess but it's accurate, then and now accurate.  While they still had plenty to say this still feels to me like the last stand before they themselves joined in. They already had been the robots with the models in the hall of mirrors and celebrated sparkling days on space age trains. One pause is perhaps all they needed to tell us, one last time, that while me might not be able to change what was to become of us we might learn to live it our own way.

1981@40: MOVEMENT - NEW ORDER

So, your band did well locally and in a very short time amassed a nationwide following which followed you through a rapid musical development and then,just as you were about to conquer America which was waiting for you, your singer takes his ball back and you can't play anymore, well you don't feel like it on the day. Led Zeppelin had disbanded after their drummer left (for similar reasons) and the trio left behind in Joy Division were still young and well liked as musicians which would have let them walk into any band they wanted without a scratch on JD's legacy. Instead they did something right. Well, a few things, actually. First they chose to continue under a different name. Second, instead of holding a tv competition show for a new singer, they each tried out and settled on one. Third, they got a new member to fill out guitar and keyboard duties. So, no Doug Yule's Velvet Underground or INXS as a self-cover band with a singer from tv. They played Joy Division's dates in the U.S., released a mighty single to finish off the official Joy Division legacy (kinda) and then wrote and recorded Movement.

This record did not have that good a reputation when fresh. If you listened to it the right way (so to speak) it was watery JoyDivision with a guy who couldn't sing. While the next LP Power Corruption and Lies and even singles released after Movement were more confident statements of where the band was headed, Movement gets left as a completist's album the way Still was for Joy Division. That's a pity as Movement shows a band finding their own way at their own pace and finding that the pace of the way is as fast as it was between Unknown Pleasures and Closer. They are the same musicians, after all. It's not like Smokie decided to ditch the AOR hits and get all angsty. Some of this does sound a little like Closer II but careful listening will reveal the forward march in every track.

The first thing new listeners heard from this metamorphosed version of their favourite band was not the jackhammers and medieval drumming of Atrocity Exhibition but a lone guitar, a little wobbly from a chorus pedal playing a brisk downward figure but not a crushing minor third. The drums and bass pick it up and the second guitar adds seom swirling overdriven arpeggios. The vocal is by Peter Hook but at this stage it might have been either of the other two as it's pushed back to sit among the other instruments, only just a little over them for clarity. Fans had already heard the upbeat major key sound of Ceremony as it's own single and about half of it live on Still. But where that sounded expansive of the previous sound this sound bright with a fanfare like riff high on the fretboard and infectious danceable rhythm. The words are addressed to a second person and describe an act of finality but also an attitude of resumption. It's like a statement to anyone who needed to hear it that the new name and sound were from the same people and, no, they werent going to try and get away with pretending it didn't happen.

But then things do go down. Truth begins with a gentle odd beat on a drum machine that is joined by a melodica, the reedy schoolkid blown keyboard that would feature in the band's music for years to come. Here it is playing a lamenting figure on a minor third and down modally to a tone below.  It's Bernard's voice as it will be for almost all the songs on the record. It's a strange day and he feels isolated from everyone he sees as he walks along outside. An instrumental section brings the familiar sound of overdriven guitars that sound like machines. A song of mourning? Hard not to think it.

An echoey synth and bass with a thumping kick drum and machine percussion, Senses takes on a kind of funk that was tried in Komakino by the old band. Two brief verses with abstract images and the refirain, no reason ever was given. The funk workout continues but it's not a boogie party with the synth drone of death rising from the depths and the brittle guitar duel not sounding like Chic. Eventually, the downward motion prevails and repeats until it halts in a swirling cloud of synthesis.

Very similar territory is navigated for Chosen Time with the funk more regimented into a machine like briskness. Sumner's frail vocal narrates a figure helpless to understand what has happened to his friend. I think this is unambiguously about Curtis. The jammy workthrough of the riff ends in the same kind of arcade game synthesised splatter as Insight from Unknown Pleasures. 

Over on side two, I.C.B. begins with a much grimmer lone guitar riff that is more quickly backed with a stamping kick drum and then insistent bass riff. Bernard's thin voice is fragile, barely above a whisper, as he sings strings of abstraction that add up to a sense of helplessness again. Two verses, a riff workout and an end with more of the Insight game beeps and squeals. Then, after the band has stopped a soft bass note has been left on as a kind of gentle counter. The title might well stand for Ice Cream Brontosaurus but probably does stand for Ian Curits' Burial. The melancholy created by the vocal, soft as thoughts while riding in a car to a cemetery, and the constrasting force of the music build a cloudy day of conflicting emotions. It's a song of resignation and always gets straight to me.

The Him is the most elaborate arrangement on the album, shifting from the quiet bass riff of the opening, through the introductory keyboard and muted trumpet, the controlled harmonised vocals and then the raging banshee wail of the instrumental sections. It's not elaborate because of any complex counterpoint (it's one riff all the way through and a three-note one) but the emotive passages which range from the ominous to the intense to the great howling instrumental sections after each verse, the second delayed as a cinematic synth drone ramps up the tension before an even more violent playing of the distant screaming synth section storms in. Bernard is left with the final words of the song, which is seeped in images of guilt and religion: "I'm so tired. I'm so tired...." Seldom has emotional exhaustion felt so satisfying. This song was the only thing that worked after the worst break up of my life happened. I was almost levitating listening to it.

Doubts Even Here. People without depth will say this song sounds like something from Closer and leave it at that. A few bars of military tom toms march until the meltingly beautiful figure of contrary motion begins on the keyboards. This will be almost the entirety of the song's harmonic structure, a procession of insistent epic of the strings and a building interplay between the bass and guitars both tightens and expands. Three verses of imagery that might well be Hook's statement of grief but also contain anger which could apply to a world beyond that. And then something happens at the end. Hook sings a three note melody rising to a minor third as the harmonic structure changes from modal to diatonic. Instead of the lower voice returning to C it falls to A which changes the emotional tone immediately from the worrying intensity of the verses to something more grinding and tragic. Also, as this is happening we hear new member Gillian Gilbert speaking. Sometimes in collision with Hook's singing and sometimes between lines. It can be very difficult to work it out. I don't really want to do this as the mystery of it adds so much to the emotional weight of the song. Then again, when I found this out it adds to it. Gillian is reciting the seventy-seventh Psalm which is an odd piece of work that goes like this:

I was dazed and I could not speak.

My thoughts went back to times long past.

I remembered forgotten years.

All night long, I was in deep distress.

As I lay thinking, my spirit was sunk in deep despair.

Will the Lord reject us for evermore and never again show favour?

Has his unfailing love now failed us utterly?

Must his promise time and again be unfullfilled?

Has God forgotten to be gracious?

Has he in anger withheld his mercies?

But then, O Lord, I call to mind thy deeds.

I recall thy wonderful acts in times gone by.

Weirdly, if you read this while listening to the song her voice seems to sound completely clear.

Denial closes the album with more heavy tom toms, churning guitars and a faceless vocal from Bernard with words about a failure to communicate or perhaps even to understand and act in prevention. "It's just something I know. The answer's not there. It comes and it goes and it frightens me." And then, finally: "time worked so well upon us, inside of me, inside my soul." The intensity ends only when the song does and it does so suddenly without lingering. Album over.

Of course the death of their friend by suicide was going to affect them deeply and find its way into their music. The effect of this is strange considering where this band had come from. While Ian Curtis with his stormcloud of a voice was absent from the sound and replaced by voices that often sounded cowed by self consciousness and thick emotion his death dominated their first long statement. Recall that, apart from anything else, they were writing about someone who was distinct from the one the fans thought they knew, distinct even from the one they believed they themselves knew. Recall, too, that these were people in their early twenties who were channelling into their skill an event of crushing impact with a perplexing origin and a series of increasingly complex shockwaves into the culture. 

But this is not a concept album, not, at any rate, the way that The Wall was a concept album. It's still poignant to think that in the midst of the bizarre cult-like mourning of Ian Curtis from the groundswell the band's own compulsion to make statements like this found a setting in a changing sound. As rapidly as they were developing it's notable how little this record resembles Joy Division. What it does sound like is a transformation the ex Joy Division go into the studio and come out as New Order. That's far deeper a change than the band that created Ceremony which even bore the Joy Division byline on the label. None of their records, their albums or their epic 12 inch singles sounded anything like this again. So, there they were at the station, talked about the only thing they could talk about, and when the train came they got on and never came back. 

LET IT BE SUPER DELUXE (5 CD + 1 Blu-Ray)

About a year too late but it got here, The Beatles final album release from the original sequence has been given the same treatment as Pepper, White Album and Abbey Road. There are a few surprises but mainly this was the set that I expected to be a labour of worship for the sifting duties alone. Untold hours of tape of the band rehearsing, getting distracted by jams and occasionally reforming into a musical unit to deliver some songs old school. The version of Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues on Anthology 3 sounded so tired it was painful and the tracklists of old bootlegs from these sessions never quite enticed me as they seemed packed with stuff like that. So, props to the crew who presented this ... kinda.

My anniversary take on the record can be found here. The six hour extravaganza retooling of the filmed material is still to appear as of this writing and, while I have never been fond of the movie, record, stretch of time in the band's history, I'll be subscribing to the Disney channel to see it ... a few times. Lifelong tragique, sorry. But enough about me, what do I think about this presentation?

Five CDs and a Blu-Ray housed in mini-LP covers and set in a gatefold cardboard holder which is easy to handle, the discs slide out without labour and are returned to the slots without drama. The book is hard cover and on good glossy stock (there'll be more in the separately available Get Back book). All of this slides into a solid cardstock black case with die cut holes for the faces o' the Fabs. Though a lot more limited, you can do a Physical Graffiti by putting the black and white pics of the disc folder in those holes for a super arty look. And then change it back and so on every few songs as the tracks play on. The days aint gettin' any shorter. Anyway, a really lovely physical package. Now the content.

The Blu-Ray

The Spector album in three presentations: Stereo and DTS Master Audio 5.1 in 24 bit/96 Khz and Dolby Atmos at 24 bit/48 khz. The stereo in hi-res allows little more light or air into the mix but on your home system will feel full and present. The DTS is extremely crisp, not needles in the ear crisp but delivered with such breathtaking precision and range, such clear lines on everything to horn sections, choirs or the shiny notes of acoustic guitars that you could really just stop with it there. But go to the next step: the Dolby Atmos might disappoint for a few bars because it feels a lot less detailed, less crisp than the DTS. It also sounds more gathered to the centre. This is not because of the lower sampling rate (any more than anyone can genuinely hear the difference between one 44.1000th of a second sample from the next) it's a lower rate because it has more to do. Not fly around the room like the sound in a movie but to stay put and put you right at the heart of the music and, whether it's the rustling guitars  and close harmonies of Two of Us or the soaring solo in Let it Be or the choirs and brass of Long and Winding Road, it gives you the same sensation of being in the perfect spot at a prefectly mixed gig. Vocals reach out, the tom toms propel, the kick ... kicks. You are there with the band and you feel loved. Ok, alright, but it is a beautiful way of presenting multichannel music. Long gone are the days of the Doors on DVD-Audio where the guitar riff of L'America flew around the room for no reason whatsoever. You've got the best seat in the house and the music is breathing in front of you. 

Oh, almost forgot, they have finally got the menus right. Sounds trivial but what I mean is that when you put this into your Blu-Ray player you get a menu that, while it does start with a toned down title track, asks you how you want to hear it INSTEAD of just playing the thing, leaving you to scramble around your remote trying to get that cursor in the right place to choose the right format by which time at least some of the vibe has crumbled. This one let's you decide first. Completely different experience which erases a sore point on all the other hi-res digital releases. This one waits for you. You choose. You sit back and bliss out. Heaven.

The Book

Hardcover with good photos and content on every page including brief memoirs and a handy track by gtrack article with recording sheets, lyrics in biro on lined paper, and the story behind the songs and recording. Paul writes a fuming note to Allen Klein about Spector's orchestral arrangements that ends: "Don't ever do it again." There's less to it than there was to the books for Pepper or the White Album but there was a lot more to cover for them. This makes a pleasing companion to the music and is worth looking through while listening. I know that sounds like something from a 1969 EMI catalogue but it's accurate.

Recommendation: If you just want the album with the new mix could I suggest that you find a online retailer that has hi-res downloads with a non-lossy compression format? Flac is the file type I use but there are others. It's not just the higher resolution as a benefit (really CD quality is better than most of us can physically hear) but the dynamic range. I took a look at the CD files in a wave editor and all of them are compressed to the wall. The loudness wars have unfortunately not finished. This can contribute to a fatiguing experience, the music might well feel a little breathless. All the hi-res download versions offer good dynamic range which makes the music feel a lot more natural.

CD1 The original album, kinda

The new mix of the album follows the trend from the Sgt Pepper rerelease by beefing up the bass and gathering things that were extremely panned toward the centre. This doesn't create mono but serves, with an eye on the compressor and EQ, to warm everything up and allow for a more realistic sense of space. It's a robust, contemporary sounding album. If you didn't already now, the arrangements follow Phil Spector's presentation from 1970 so Paul is still strolling along the winding road with a heavenly choir o'erhead and the one on Across the Universe is still there. I Me Mine is the same extended edit and Get Back still ends the album with the joke about the audition. Unless you prefer the thinner sound of the original this will delight.

CD2 Get Back - Apple Sessions

I know a fair bit about the band but I'm not going to take the tonka toy home on Mastermind with a Beatles speciality. That said I have a feeling from some of the chit chat here that some of these tracks are from the initial time at Twickenham Studios. Does it bother me? Not on your nelly. It's a lot of takes and aborted attempts at new songs mixed in with whimsical cover versions and chat. Will you listen to it mofre than once? How much ironing do you have to do?

CD3 Get Back - Rehearsals and Apple Jams

The most immediate value lies in the noodling versions of later tracks from Abbey Road as well as solo careers. Paul helps John with the middle eight of Gimme Some Truth and both John and Paul help George with the opening line of Something. All things Must Pass sounds like it's being tried out at the same time as the band and studio staff or film crew are lunking around making tea and lifting furniture. In the midst of the noise Paul joins George in a shimmering harmony of the chorus of All Things and seems to like it so much he's still singing it after the jam. There is a jammy song with Billy Preston on lead vocals that is worth hearing if only for how he kind of wipes the floor with the kind of thing they were leaning toward on songs like Don't Let Me Down.This might have been the spot to put the wonderful version of Besame Mucho that they do in the original film. But no. 

CD4 Get Back LP - 1969 Glyn Johns Mix

This is one of the many drafts of the album under its working title submitted to the band by engineer Glyn Johns. If you read the accounts of this you have to wonder how prissy The Beatles had to be to just keep knocking him back when he was already forging ahead as a producer in his own right and not someone who'd knowingly push bad solutions. You can read about the in-fighting and egos all you want but the real political contest you need to be aware of is that between the band and Glyn Johns who was left to guess how to present the hours of failure and ear-numbing shambles. Hotshot or not he wasn't in the position to go and thicken everything up and apply the audio polyfilla until it was slick and unrecogniseable. They'd said they were going back to the basics, warts and all, as nature intended but they weren't ready for how thin and unpolished it was sounding and would sound as a record if released. The original cover art (reproduced for this set) was a recreation of the debut album Please Please Me with the band shot from below, leaning over the rails of the landing at the EMI building, only years later with much longer hair and new style. With that in mind pretty much anything Johns offered would have driven to the bone the difference between the bright energy of the first album and the ragged op shop version of the band on this new one.

Johns opens with a live and tougher version of One After 909 which does provide a good link to the old days as it was an abandoned number from the early years. The Let it Be version has none of its drive or Harrison's stinging Telecaster lead and becomes a completely redeemed number for me (I still skip it on Let it Be). Also, it ends with the audition joke that was put at the end of Get Back with which it has been most closely associated. The rest is a lot less spectacular with a sloppy jam edited together of oldies and a chorus of the next track. I hate Don't Let Me Down, the chorus is repetitive and interminable and the song never develops. Even the middle eight is nothing special and the whole thing is played at a glacial pace, preceded by too much banter and larking. A lacklustre Dig a Pony follows with a loose band who sound tired and a Lennon who is uncharacteristically off pitch. I've Got a Feeling is the take that appeared on Anthology 3 and is ok but hs none of the dynamics or force of the Let it Be version. Get Back seems to have been tirelessly practiced as it always sounds good. Yes, it's a simple song but the arrangement is a thing of elegance. Here again. Very slight talky bit from Paul in this one. For You Blue shows that George had some decent chops as an acoustic player. Johns keeps it low and detailed. While I never liked this one the difference in the mix alone allows a few listens. Teddy Boy which Paul cleaned, pressed and presented on his solo debut the year after. While its not as sabotaged as severely here as the Anthology 3 version you still have to strain a little to get a feel for what became a modest but lovely McCartney number. Lennon's square dance calling is kept to the end and is thankfully lower in the mix (sorry, but it only ever comes across as bitchy).  A slower Two of Us with less energy follows. Maggie Mae is the same as the one on Let it Be. There is more Dig It than on Let it Be if that's what you wanted. Let it Be itself is more or less the single version with the leslied guitar solo that could never compete with the revised one Harrison tore out for the released album. The Long and Winding Road has more space than both Spector's and subsequent orchestra and choir free versions but it still sounds like a run through than a song. And with a a curio version of the outro of Get Back the album that would be comes to a final fade.

Johns has steered a cautious course through the stated intention and what quality he could discover in a Sargasso sea of tape. He keeps the feel live with a lot of banter so that it sounds like a working band but not so over-professional as to come across like Beach Boys similar attempts which were all but scripted. The other side of the coin is that he had to keep the edits inconspicuous and so needed to let more of the original tape run without flown in vocals from this take or a bass track from that. In fulfilling The Beatles wishes he was effectively forced to offer them two sides of comparitive garbage and the fault was clearly theirs. That slick and cheeky Please Please Me mockup was looking dodgier by the day.

If this had been released before the monumental Abbey Road (whose slickness and rich production pretty much stands for what is considered timelessness in a rock record) this dragging artefact might have remained a completist's must-have, one step above side two of the Yellow Submarine soundtrack. But all of these discs with their mix of songs that remained in a low development state and others that got through the filter to the glories of Abbey Road and early solo albums does give pause as to why some of them did get left behind. McCartney has been happy to play Let it Be or Get Back in his live sets for many years now. Across the Universe was chucked in through a lack of material from Lennon, having already been recorded and committed to a charity album, never to be quite done again seriously, despite its durable beauty. It was Phil Spector's skill that made I Me Mine a real album track, Harrison apparently just left it as this tiny moment of potential. It begins to look like a messy room after a bully boy kid has gone through it and taken all the good toys.

So, it was never going to work in that way. See also the grander plans for the live gig that was meant to be the culmination of the film. Greece? The Sahara? It took a few years and Pink Floyd to get that one done right but they weren't The Beatles at the end of a long and grinding decade. they went to the roof of the building they were in, played a few numbers and packed up. This was not going to cut it as a document of those times anymore than an accurate depiction of a battle will necessarily come off as anti war. But it really is nice to have.

The EP (and what it isn't)

Four more iterations of tracks from the album in their single forms. This is the contraversial platter. Both Sgt Pepper and the White Album had their great expectations that were dashed on release day. We didn't get a Carnival of Light nor the 27 minute version of Helter Skelter. And now we don't get the complete rooftop concert. Long bootlegged and of great significance to fans is the gig the band did actually do at the end of the movie and the last time the four of them played live under their name. It's gold and it's not here. But let's think about that.

The set list includes three Get Backs, two I've Got a Feelings, two Don't Let Me Downs (aaaaargh!) and one each of One After 909 and Dig a Pony. If you've ever seen the original film you might have a Mandella effect memory of it being a lot richer than that. But that's what the content is and the only changes that can be made are abbreviations. Wouldn't it still be good, repetitions or not, just to listen to what people in the streets were hearing on the day? You bet and I'd probably give it more than a few spins. And, look, if you're going to give us the whole soporific Glyn Johns album couldn't you at least shell this out?

Well, that discounts any concern about low quality: this album's place in history depends on its listeners knowing it was meant to be raw and unscented. Spector's cosmetics don't quite put a lie to that as so much of the banter and surrounding atmosphere were retained. So why not a warts and all rooftop concert? 

Well, let's go back to those other examples for a second. Carnival of Light by the accounts of folk like Beatles scholar Mark Lewisohn is a formless soundscape of mumbles, bangs, echoes, shouts, feedback etc., starting nowhere and going back there repeatedly for what must seem like forever. Do I want to hear it? Sure but I bet I wouldn't return to it. The Beatles were great at sweetening and garnishing their songs with the noise and moment of avante gardism but when they attempted to start and stay there results were mixed (then again, if I listen to the White Album I won't skip Revolution #9). As for the 27 minute Helter Skelter it's best to read up on it in books like Lewisohn's Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. First, it's not a long version of the one on the White Album. There were only two complete takes of that and both are on the Super Deluxe of that album. No, it's the listless attempted blues (on the SD but also in a shorter edit on Anthology 2) which broke down into jamming and a rendition of Blue Moon and whatever was in the air that day. It's not hard to play something for that long and get carried away with the mood of it but go and listen to the slow take again and see how long you last. On the other hand the White Album SD did include the glorious Esher demos which are compelling and feel like a real part of the tapestry. 

My point is that the projected precentage of people who would pay for these alleged holy grails would shrink rapidly as soon as they were tabled as real propositions. The other Beatles themselves opposed McCartney when he campaigned to include Carnival of Light in Anthology 2. He had a book coming out that depicted him as the real avante gardist and this Macca-led freakout would sweeten the performance of the page turner. You really don't have to be that cynical to understand that.

The other thing is that the mammoth documentary is yet to come. It will almost certainly be supported by a blu-ray or even 4K physical release which is where the Rooftop gig might find a place. This would feel like fan milking on a global scale and is absolutely not beyond the likes of the benefactors of the Beatle legacy/merchandise/product. Why put everything out when a little bending of the context makes it yet another dollar spinner? Nothing personal, it's just business.

For me, I'd like it here. Among the exhausting reiterations of the same material the context alone would give it compulsion. They gear up on a cold morning. Warm up with a few run throughs, play some songs and get shut down. This is the way the world ends. And then Abbey Road. Just makes sense to me.

There was a deluxe version of the original album with a box and a book and an LP. I've only ever seen pictures of these but it's worth a thought. The LP came out after the one really recorded last which was Abbey Road with its joyous but saddening note of farewell. The outpriced special ed of Let it Be was soon replaced with a single sleeve record which is how I bought it and most others knew it. That packaging seemed a little more honest about what was to meet the listener, a record by a band who sounded relaxed enough to goof around, and a few good songs. As it had come out later than the real series finale I, like many, thought of it as the exhausted end of a gigantic career. A bit of reading fixed that (when the books appeared) but the impression presists to this day that it's the last corporeal statement of The Beatles. This is one ofthe dangers sewn into the fabric of the fragile idea of reducing greatness to humility without a clear direction. There is no direction to Let it Be which is why it's so bitsy and contains more than its share of numbers that anyone can express disdain for without pushback from lifelong fans. So, now here it is again, in a big expensive box whose handsomeness is savagely belied by the often crunching failure inside. And here I am again, a contemporary tragic, shelling out for the biggest and best set of the many it comes in, whingeing about the omissions. But then, I'll sit in the dark, choose the Atmos mix and cosy up whenever it gets good. Because it does, always, eventually get good.

1981@40: FIRE OF LOVE - THE GUN CLUB

It wasn't all synthesisers. Filtering through post punk from the late '70s and growing into lavish blooms came things like this album. They were American and like the punk bands that were based on the UK innovation of that notion they got it all wrong. But getting it wrong is how you discover things and what The Gun Club was that the music behind all that 12 bar style that bedroom guitarists find contains worlds of shadow, sex and power. Once established, terms like psychobilly and cowpunk were stuck on bands like this which lumped them all together. If you heard this in 1981 as a young honky you might have picked the influences of all the Pebbles and Nuggets albums that made the demimonde of garage rock of the '60s available in easy packages. But the two advantages the Gun Club had were a scholarly awareness of the legacy and the bottle to push it onstage and wear it.

Ringing and raging guitars from screeching riffs to earthquakes of barrechords under some of the most committed and dangerous sounding vocals of its time, Fire of Love burst out of the speakers and into the darkened living rooms of numberless parties. Frenzied, sexy and threatening, The Gun Club made with the blues like no one had since the time of the originals. And everyone loved them. Everyone except for me.

Eleven tracks of rock assault and it's over. And for me, outside of that context of young bodies and nervous systems like my own gyrating in the dark, they just sounded old. Every track with its lines about dressing like an Elvis from hell or preaching the devil's music or voodoo or whatever else also informed the cover art, sounded, to me, like a revival of Creedence. It was effective but did we really need it? Well, maybe so. The sole track that sounds a little different from all the others on this record is Jack on Fire, a nasty song about a nasty piece of work that uses the dynamics of the rest of the album to a real effect. Told in a jazzy 2/4 stride, it's cool cat strut works a treat. Then it's back to the old folks at home on speed.

That said, I hated psychobilly, cowpunk and whatever anyone wanted to call it that week. Partly, I'll admit that this is because I didn't get it and wanted all my new music to be a mix of big scary electronica and modified '60s psyche-pop. But it was more than that. I felt threatened by the look. What I mean by that was the skeletally skinny boys with nothing but front and wild grins who lanked around the scene picking up and waking in new beds the year round. Well, that's what I thought. I wanted everyone to find my short back and sides north of England austerity to be irresistible because ... well, I didn't actually have a reason. But the cowpunks were like every single other type that works scenes for their own rewards and will get into anything at all that works. The music is not the point, understanding that it's worth something in the market is. And that is where post punk snobs like I was will always lose and deserve to: we made ourselves into far worse relics than any of the cowpunks or rockabilly diehards ever could because at least they could drop everything and flail while we stood against the walls trying to get people talking about Syd Barrett.

I also hated the bands that blossomed from this branch. Their releases were cute and the videos like jeans commercials and when you saw them live they sounded like pub rock cover bands. It was yet another occasion where musical proficiency (because ALL of them played perfectly) could mean so very little. The music itself was nothing like the image. Anyway, I need to stop ranting about this as it's an embarrassing confession and one few would care about.

The point as far as this article goes is how this record stands up at forty years of age. Well, it doesn't. There is no point in my doing a track by track account when they all sound essentially the same and, from the height of decades, feels try hard. The problem is that as soon as something new gets the spotlight like synth pop, dub, EDM or Trip Hop there will be a gang of neanderthals ready willing and able to turn their pubrock chops into more roots rock and roll with the same bastard cliches from the'50s as this crew. I understand why. I would, given the choice and my youth back, far prefer my chances of fleeting happiness in a sweaty rock gig than in a freezing basement listening to tapeloops among a lot of other enthusiasts in overcoats. I still hate this, though, and I hate every attempt at killing off real invention with ever more flavoursome cliches. But that might just mean I hate the world. Well, sometimes I do.