1983 @ 40: FEAST - THE CREATURES

A loud tremulous wail gives way to the whispers of a beach, wind and waves. Wind chimes. A conch shell horn. A vocal that sounds like it hasn't slept in days rises to address someone whose life is draining from them. Has she killed them. Are they at the final stages of a curse? The eerie atmosphere made stranger with the pun of the title Morning Dawning finds its point of optimum effect and establishes a stasis. And then - "the mourning is over. I still can't look into your eyes - the song retreats into the dark of the jungle and disappears.

Inoa'Ole is a chant in round of Hawaiian indigenous voices in warbling tones as glass ringing pierces the sound. When the booming drums enter with Siouxsie's wordless vocal trying more modal figures the chanting subsides but continues. The title line appears infrequently. Like much of this album it's in the atmosphere, a gently called dance on a creepy predawn.

Ice House begins with a vocal over a steady thumped drum. The voice keeps to its original pace as the drumming builds into an even pattern. Images of incest and erotica blur into promises of the preserving powers of ice. The lyric is derived from a John Bowen teleplay which was served up by the BBC in their tradition of horror stories for Christmas. Siouxsie's words are an abstraction rather than a description of the plot and emphasise the unsettling obsessive turn of the plot. The song ends with sounds of munching food.

Dancing on Glass strikes up a brisk 2/4 rhythm. A organ shimmers in the distance. Siouxsie's vocal is the same kind of jazz age swing as the single Right Now. Images of wilful damage and decadence by moonlight as the windows are smashed and their shattered remains danced upon. Again, Budgie's rhythm is unmasked by guitars in this decidedly un-rock outing.

Geko begins with the sounds of the jungle as Siouxsie whispers the opening lines. A marimba clomps the main chord progression in what it the first song on the album to have any kind of riff. Variously screaming, talking or hissing the spoken verses, Siouxsie breaks into the infectious chorus. The atmosphere of humidity and insect bites. The chorus only has to mean its images: Panoramic banana, a passionfruit samba. Pale skin is itching, a tropical fever. This ended the old side one with the closest thing to pop music fun on the whole record.

Side two begins with Sky Train and that begins with very busy drumming which would sound mechanical but is just expertly written and performed to interact with echo. If the idea is to emulate train motion clicking on the tracks its goes beyond the call and delivers an image of an unstoppable Hell Express. Siouxsie wails in multitracked rhapsodies around and through the onslaught.

Festival of Colours begins with more Hawaiian chanting soon descanted by Siouxsie singing in local dialect before switching back to English. The festival is a rite involving the scattering of coloured powder like ochre. While the music, again heavily percussive builds to an enjoyable plateau there are some listeners who might have wondered if it weren't just the musical equivalent of a silde night.

Miss the Girl is a response to J.G. Ballard's novel Crash which described upwardly mobile urbanites who pursue automotive impact as an extension of sexual pleasure. The marimbas strike an ominous figure as Siouxsie's dispassionate vocal sings of violence as a car is pitted against a human body. Not quite as frozen as The Normal's Warm Leatherette (also based on Crash), the track nevertheless explores the effect of witnessing violence though the eyes of one exhausted by it. This might have seemed a strange choice as a single but it is one of the only ones here that has the components of a pop song and is the closest the duo get to sounding like their band of origin, The Banshees. It got to 21 which ain't nothing.

A Strutting Rooster plunges deep into relentless heavy percussion with drums and marimba parts often blending into each other as Siouxsie chants in multitracked harmony. Is it as simple as the sight of a bird or is there the darker suggestion of cockfighting. Ambient effects rise and fall. Marketplace voices as Siouxsie's phrases are played like samples.

Flesh starts with sharp breath which might be sexual or hefty inhalation of lines of drugs. Siouxsie narrates a spoken word description of a high life party as we start to hear the sounds of merriment and socialising. A loud strident chant breaks out like a chorus but isn't placed like one: Piggy squeals and donkey brays at a sober party Doggy barks and horsey neighs try to shock the party. Light marimbas keep time with a barely discernible figure as percussion which sounds random goes in and out of focus. Images of violent cinema in production and editing. The time would be right for the pair to have seen and been affected by Cannibal Holocaust. It reminds me of the Banshees' song Monitor off JuJu with its lines about screen violence and the blurring of audience and onscreen victim. The party sounds swell up and everyone joins in the chant about Piggy squeals until it dissipates as though this was a recording of a drugged up bash gone hellishly wrong.

Siouxsie and Budgie last recorded under the Creatures name two years before with the EP Wild Things. Made as a kind of holiday project the set had turned out good enough to release and when the Banshees next took a break Siouxsie and Budgie set to again. Throwing the dart at a map and travelling to where it hit, Hawaii. They used the freshness of the unfamiliar locale to make field recordings and construct songs around rhythms and chanting provided by The Lamalani Hula Academy Hawaiian Chanters. 

Budgie's drum setup was not a kit but a collection of percussion instruments that were played separately in arrangements that frequently had him composing and playing with far greater sophistication than he was able as the Banshees' drummer. There are no high hats or cymbals or snare drums here. This guitar, bass and keyboard free record is an extension to the path away from conventional rock music that the Banshees had already been treading, at least experimentally, since the Kaleidoscope LP, Budgie's first record with the band as one of its most creative additions.

For her part Siouxsie continues to write like the lyricist of the Banshees but takes things a little further toward chanting and vocal motif, enjoying the luxury afforded by the creative detour this recording offered. As her voice must stand in for what the music abandoned (rock instruments) she is more on attention here than any time since the first Creatures release. So, you still get blank faced descriptions of darkness and violence but here it can as easily sound like a whisper as much as a scream.

The Creatures have proved to be one of the rare out of band experiences that worked and kept working in exploratory mode as the Banshees of the late '80s and '90s moved steadily toward the middle. There is a clear sense on this record that they both felt relief at being able to avoid the pressures of expectations that would meet every Banshees album thereafter. The results might have the unfortunate effect of allowing auld post-punkers like me use of this record as evidence that we, alone among all generations, had the coolest and most sustained resistance to the cock rock overground. But the other side of that is that this energetic and invigorating music is there for the discovery of anyone of any vintage to use as a spur to their own creativity. Creativity is what this album is made of and adventure is how it sounds. The rest is up to the listener.

Listening notes. I still have my vinyl copy of Feast but it was so used and beaten by my younger self that I went back to the CD A Bestiary of The Creatures which compiles the first EP and the songs from the single Right Now. It's a great package with a strong remaster and comes with my earnest recommendation. 

1983 @ 40: FILTH - SWANS

Swans were a problem from the start. 

Filth starts, continues and ends with a one approach: pulverise, repeat. There are basses, electric guitars, drums and vocals but not a crumb of rock music. There are chants where choruses would be but it isn't glam, either. So what does it sound like? Construction works across the road. Hammering, screaming drills and saws, yelling, the motion of powerful things that make other things move or shatter. Two sides of an LP or a seemingly endless grind of industry and tormenting cries for about forty-five minutes.

Who'd want to listen to that? Well, a lot of it has to do with when it was made. It's the early '80s and the music still rising from the ashes of punk is proving more progressive than the likes of ELP ever were. And transgressive. These songs are about domination, abuse, rape, subjugation and more. This music, highly disciplined for all its apparent chaos, is meant to feel like that. The band name was chosen from an observation that swans showed magnificent  outward beauty that concealed a brutal temprament. By extension, lift the veneer of civilisation and you'll find the same thing with humans. 

There are no explanations of any of this on the album art, you just have to find it out for yourself. If you can make it through the first track with its ugly, gurgling basses and thrashing drums almost drowning out the vocal that issues instructions for living as an unfeeling macho with the final twist of "come back for more!" Blackout confuses the meanings of a loss of power with a drugged loss of consciousness. Weakling, which sounds like a sheet metal processing plant, continues: "I don't feel pain. I never escape. I'm under the bed. I'm licking the floor." The surrounding whines and groans bash away until the victim narrator can only bellow, "this isn't real ... not ... real ... not ... real ... not ... real..." As twisted as The Birthday Party ever got there was usually some scrap of conventional musicality to help the medicine go down. Swans who apocryphally threatened a punter with violence for dancing to them, were good at making it clear that they were not going to come to you but the other way around. 

This is a rare case where comparisons with their peers works, simply because it was a time when a band like this had peers that also defied labelling. Swans got a fair few labels slapped on them: no wave, industrial, gothic, noise, dark romantic, and so on but all of that just peeled off. Like The Birthday Party, Throbbing Gristle, Foetus and so on, Swans were best described as their own thing. This was important at a time when post punk was showing clear signs of morphing into conventionality. It wasn't important to take an objectionable stance as a protest, though, it was important because there was still too much to say that needed to be said without compromise. Acts like these were never going to have massive global followings so it was crucial to keep the message clear of unnecessary sweeteners.

Filth offers nothing by way of sweetening. The drumming is 4/4 with few embellishments that might make it personable. The guitar is playing intervals but the effect is more of sheets of noise responding like one of the components of an assembly line. The basses (usually two at once) are the closest the band get to riffing but the figures are short and as perfectly repeated as possible. The vocals are the same kind of haranguing bellow with the only variation being that some tracks feature a delivery more like natural speech. You wouldn't call it singing. Its character is more like commands or taunts. There is no melody. In case you do get too much into it there are even moments that rob you of finding pleasure in it like the sudden stop in Freak which waits for a little too long to resume (and that's the shortest track). There is differentiation between tracks but it's from this one having a riff like structure and the next one being more of a storm. 

If that suggests chaos to you then you should know that every track on this album sounds like the result of immense preparation and perfection. This is not the work of whimsical free jazz jammers. The tracks are statements with lines in plain language packed tightly into musical presentations that admit of no distractions like melody or groove. If you aren't familiar with this record (or anything by Swans for the next five or so studio releases) you might conceivably be thinking of early Hunters and Collectors but, as harsh as that could get it still followed conventional rock formatting with riffs and melodic vocals (however primal they could get). This record and its immediate successors was directly reflective of the band's live performances and is effectively presented as a set in polished form. As such, it is executed to the same level of intimidating commitment to form. Seldom has a band from a rock context been so toughly military.

It's worth a note to describe the arc of the band from this point to now as it's illustrative of that commitment in whatever form they chose. After the first few releases (they have brought out a lot of live records) and some portents of future directions with instrumentation like brass sections or piano, that Swans changed tack several times. A lot of this had to do with the recruitment of Jarboe who brought her hefty musicality into the storm and stress bedrock, adding a classicism that, by its jarring opposition, could prove effectively eerie. Towards the end of the '80s with albums like Children of God and White Light at the Edge of Infinity the band became almost unrecognisably melodic and lyrical. This reached its head with the very smooth Burning World before roughing back down for the final two albums, by which time they were falling back on over a decade's worth of praxis and experimentation. After a long hiatus, Gira gathered different musicians (but included stalwart Norman Westberg on guitar who debuted on Filth) and released albums with mammoth tracks that harked back to the hammering early days but extended the range. 

I only saw Swans once, back in 2011. They played at Melbourne's Forum with the inspired choice of The Necks as support. The set was long and began with an unattended feedback drone that lasted for about ten minutes before anyone got to the stage. The rest of it was powerful and loud enough to be the first concert of my life that made me use earbuds. The audience was very mixed generation and I recall the alarming sight of a guy who looked about twenty loping in a kind of dance right beside one of the big bass bins that might have been doing as much to make him move as his own muscles. At one point Gira bellowed the phrase, "Jesus come down!" three times. It was so loud it felt like it was pushing all the air out of the room. The Forum is a magnificent building used for music as well as a cinema (it's original purpose) but during the '90s for a few years it was a Christian revival centre when last a phrase like that would have been heard within its walls. A friend who was there spoke for me when he said that, although he couldn't remember the details of much of the songs it was the best gig he'd ever been to. After that I got more of the early Swans records in a way that I'd only just appreciated before.

Swans are an experience rather than a songbook, however many songs from their later years are genuinely memorable. To hear them again is to recall or be informed that movements that challenge and change norms can seem to bloom brightest when threatened with absorption or defeat. If the drive behind this music was from the same kind of ultra-masculine machismo that they appear to oppose then it's also worth noting that the thing that the passing years leaves is the opposition.

1983 @ 40: PORCUPINE - ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN

After more than a year of touring and very little contact through the media the usual rumours of split ups circulated about Echo and the Bunnymen. Fellow Liverpudlians Teardrop Explodes had similarly fallen off the local radar and they had actually collapsed, never to regroup. The Birthday Party were no longer. As far as innovative rock music went, it was looking like the triumph by default of the synth duos. While I didn't have any objection to that but the idea that rock music was going out just at a time when it was convincingly washing itself of the cock rock cliches and making guitar band music relevant in the wake of punk. And then The Bunnymen released Porcupine.

The Cutter starts with a violin played Indian style, a wildly microtonal figure along the lines of the Beatles' use of Indian melody. It sawed into being with a strong motion, bending with portamenti at the top of the phrase and diving down again before the band crashes in with a clear and hard '80s bass tone. Ian McCulloch enters with a growl. "We're on the seventh floor, brewing alternatives ..." He hikes it up to the chorus for "spare us the cutter" before soaring with the second part "conquering myself until I see another hurt approaching. Say we will say we can. Not just another drop in the ocean. The opening riff repeats over the crisp gated drums and that nifty bass. Second verse but the melody is changed stepping down from the fourth through the major scale: "Come to the free for all with sellotape and knives ..."  The chorus punches back in but instead of ending with the riff again everything bursts into widescreen with what sounds like the massed pipes of McGlaggen playing a solid modal figure. McCulloch croons low over this about a happy loss as a big contrapuntal figure on guitar and strings plays against the reeds. Another chorus that leads to a break with the bass riff before yet another brief melody on the vocals "watch the fingers close when the hands are cold" Actually, that should be "coooooooooooold" as he sings the syllable over the second explosion of the third section in one of his characteristically operatic held notes. And it's in that voice, over the strings and guitars that he sings the happy loss part but an octave higher. If you aren't already doing a frantic rain dance by this point then the good folk of Flock of Seagulls are over there. This avalanche of pure joy repeats and comes to a clean finish and you already need to hear it again.

Well, they were not only still together but stronger than ever with an opening song that did everything they did best, rangy vocals, quirky but expressive guitar playing, catchy melody and a sense dynamics that made every verse and chorus different, propelling the song into hyperspace. The Cutter is one of my favourite songs of its time. It made 1983 feel like its own year the way that 1977 felt like Pretty Vacant or 1982 felt like World of Stone. Nothing beat it in its year.

Back of Love keeps the pace at heart attack with a shining, clipped two chord riff high on the fretboard from Will Sergeant who's already impressed with his work in The Cutter. This distinctive chopping continues under the verse until the bursting chorus adds layers, one more frenetic and another more stately. McCulloch's voice rides over the energy with an angsty tone in a tune along the modal lines of something like On Broadway before soaring to the ceiling for the chorus. "We're taking advantage of breaking the back of love." There's something else creeping in here that will keep surfacing across the album. McCulloch talked about the songs explaining the opposites within him. "I'm on the chopping block chopping off my stopping thought. Self doubt and selfism were the cheapest things I ever bought. Whether he's rasping intimately into the mic, bellowing his big tenor in the chorus or seeming to choke on his own words towards the end, his performance combines the intensity of a live gig with the precision of the studio. Again this is a band that know the power of development within each song and this one, while not as gawpingly varied as The Cutter still can't outstay its welcome as each listen surprises you again with a detail thrown in that separates verses from choruses and iterations from each other.

My White Devil takes it all down with a slow and ominous opening. A triplet bass figure and distant guitar feedback build a cinematic scene, that bass stuttering between points over the white wails. We're given a brief literary history of John Webster whose The White Devil gave this song its title before the song kicks into a more cruisy rock groove that either of its predecessors. A descending guitar figure suggests more Eastern influence with its sitar-like hammer on pattern. It's unclear to me that McCulloch's lyric is derived from Webster's stark work but The White Devil does contain a scene of fatal betrayal in which a dying character speaks of his confusion at facing death. "Change in the nether. Do I get the choice? Chance it forever. When do we get the spoils" suggests a similar state.

Clay approaches from the distance with metallic groans bending downward by the time it gets there it's a rapid machine, all stuttering clanks and low saws. McCulloch comes in with a cheerful melody that's almost boppy but the words say otherwise: "Am I the half of half and half or am I the half that's whole?" The scission is back, one side looking at the other and either not recognising it or just not liking what it sees. "When I was the Cain, you were the Abel." It begins with this mix of dark guitar rock and bright vocals and keeps coursing that way until the sinewy guitars start slithering around the chords and the voice finds new puzzles of duality, groaning here, sighing there and then, of course soaring to the heights of his voice. It's happy and angry but doesn't sound like any rock and roll that happened before it. Ratting tom toms supported by that solid bass with the guitars either hammering in the distance like stressed sheets of steel or screaming through saws. "When I came apart I was made of sand. When you fell apart clay crumbled in my hands." He sings it in a low rasp for the last pass before hitting the operatics again, pausing for the line about Cain and Abel before one final celestial declaration before the sudden end, the clanks falling into the distance.

Porcupine starts with drums that sound like slowed down cat o' nine tail lashes. A big reverby acoustic guitar strums rapidly like a flamenco figure that doesn't finish. High electrics whine in descent. The mood is minor. McCulloch starts in big throat mode with an angsty lament that feels epic. "There is no comparison between things about to happen. Missing the point of our mission, will we become misshapen?" A fall into another pendulum of minor chord to fifth and the voice is closer. This is kept longer than usual for a song by this band as the huge, icy atmosphere envelopes. There's an instrumental section in a slightly lighter mode with bells and lower strings that ends in a beautiful breath as the harmonic ground is reset for the return of the lament, it reverses the order of the parts with the high melody overlapping and taking over the more closeted one. And then with a bright chord we're moving. The drums pick up and the song begins to gallop. Big clean electric chords. The vocal comes in, muttering and growling at first, unintelligible wherever we were it's different now, fleeing, flying escaping. Soon McCulloch is wailing above it, suffering or elated, it's hard to tell. Will Sergeant's guitar squeaks and screeches rise as the song fades to the end of the side and McCulloch is finally comprehensible as he screams: "I'm beginning to see the light."

Side two starts with a gentle acoustic arpeggio which quickly kicks in to an energetic arrangement that harks back to The Cutter with Eastern portamentos in the lower strings and sitar-like guitar figures. A thrilling forceful ride. "What if no one's calling? God, then, must be falling." Heads Will Roll. No idea but it works.

Then we come to the album's speedbump. Ripeness is all clean funk and the suggestion of raga-like rock but it's wrong. I'm not sure if it's the lack of the orchestration or the plainness of the guitar band arrangement but this one lays the formula too bare and it falls flat. It feels like bits of the other songs thrown together to sound like an Echo and the Bunnymen song. McCulloch even does the soaring vocal bit on time.

Here's the thing, not just about this band but a lot of them. Like quite a few lyricists that wrote their own vocal parts, McCulloch at this stage is either caught unawares in his own formula or simply sticks with what he knows. Ripeness repeats the list-like pattern of most Echo and the Bunnymen songs. You could almost put any of the following lines in any opening verse in the three albums up to this one: "If I said, I'd lost my way", "We're on the seventh floor, brewing alternatives", "Where am I going? Where have I been?", "The man at the back has a question" and so on. The craft comes in how the songs open up and introduce more melodic material over expanding arrangements. If you take most of that away and you don't do enough work to make the next one stand on its own you get filler. Ripeness isn't so bad, in and of itself, it's just that it's set among jewels.

Like Higher Hell. A a worrying distant guitar figure with a deliberately unresolved 9th interval. McCulloch's opening verse obeys the figure described above but the chorus and growing swell of keyboards and strings beneath prevent it from sounding rote. And the chorus takes us right to the heart: "Just like my lower heaven, you know so well, my higher hell." Long, atmospheric action sequences bring us back to the doom and weave together until the vocal round of the extended fade. A satisfying dirge.

A gymnastic bass figure brings us into Gods Will be Gods as the drums play time and a melodica noodles brightly. A few opening lines and we're galloping. Momentum builds as the extended verses play to bright motion on the guitars. McCulloch plays with the modal melody of the verse figure. What sounds like a backwards guitar break (but could be delay plus volume pedal) introduces huge chorused open chords and the speed keeps up. "Gods will be gods but my god forgot I was made out of skin." And then, before you get too comfortable, it cuts out.

Bluer Skies starts with the relaxing sound of low tide. Electronic percussion slaps to life over a chunky bass. The verse is another list but breaks into a beautiful high voiced chorus. Repeat until the second chorus which is lifted by a three-note keyboard figure. Repeat but the verses are more withdrawn, weary. "I know belief is in your eyes. We can't believe in blind light." "I'm counting on your heavy heart to keep me from falling apart." Fade on the organ riff until the tide comes back in.

Ok so, this has been long, longer than I'd planned. It's just that this album keeps coming back and in a way that few from its time come back. The Cutter was a single and came with a video that mixed the band miming the song in a practice room with lo-fi back projection intercut with footage from the cover shoot done in Iceland. It was both performative and oddly cinematic at a time when music videos were growing so overblown that their scene's sound effects were louder than the music (YouTube Union of the Snake by Duran Duran for proof) but this brought the music itself front and centre. They were nothing like the grand images in my head when I heard the song but they didn't detract from it. The thrilling newness and energy of it began the year for me. It might sound feeble triumph now but it felt like the year was in good hands.

I was in third year university and good at it. I'd run out of the cinema electives and was forced to take subjects from modern history and contemporary culture. Most of these were ok but apart from the main study areas the year was down to hitting my marks and saying my lines, grabbing a distinction where I could. It gave me pause to take the music in more fully and what I noticed was that the fury of invention that post punk had been releasing was being decisively absorbed by the mainstream. There was plenty of good culture below the radar but as only the crowd-friendliest was going to hit the surface and get taken up, the best of it was destined once more for the obscurity of the bottom of the flow.

I was twenty and in this year I filled in for a guitarist in Brisbane band's first Sydney gigs, formed my own band, did studio recordings, played live and was played on the radio. It was effectively my indy music career in a single year (not an unusual trajectory). I changed nothing but had great fun trying. Backed by this kind of greatness that showed bands that were unquestionably rock but well beyond the creaking strains of blues rock influences could produce such worlds on sides of vinyl. It felt comfortable. That's not the word you should be using about such a post punk powerhouse of a record but all I mean by it is that I and anyone who wanted to continue looking beyond the cock rock revival that was waking back up in the venues and on the media could keep turning their lab tests into songs. It wasn't going to last but he best stuff never does.

BJORK - DEBUT @ 30

When flatmate Tracey brought back from a UK holiday the Sugarcubes album at the end of 1988 we heard a lot of it. Spikey guitar band rock that mostly sounded a few years old. Good, but old. What didn't sound old was the voice. That sounded unearthly, high and screeching here, cool and reedy there but always exactly pitched and emotionally accurate. Along with The Wedding Present's album Life's Too Good became the sound of summer at my place. This pretty much ceased as soon as we saw the follow up single a few months on when MTV played it. It was ok. Nice video. And that was it for the Sugarcubes.

Cut to 1993, first library job of many and walking to work through the Carlton Gardens with what I wanted to be the next James Bond theme in my head. I'd switch stations just to catch it and I hadn't done that since studying for year 12 exams when I needed to hear Ashes to Ashes as much as possible. It was a big serious sound, a riff played on timpani drums with a hissing electro hi hat swishing behind it like a sprinkler system. And then the voice, same one as The Sugarcubes album, in great form, climbing into the rhythm like a pilot into a cockpit, quietly, assured, getting comfortable and then raging. "If you ever get close to a human ..." I couldn't shake it. The bursts of energy and dynamic control that let it reduce before the next wave with the big screech wailing over the crests and that constant grave rumble of the orchestral drums.

See, at thirty-one I thought I'd outgrown new music. The last thing I'd liked was My Bloody Valentine's Loveless and Swans' White Light at the Edge of Infinity. I was still resisting acid house and everything that came to be called EDM because that just wasn't my drug. All that sludgy pop locally and from the U.K. at the end of the '80s and into the '90s very quickly boiled down into homogeneous goo. None of those West Coast bands were getting through to me (I liked them later, sorta, as I'd already been fifteen and there was no rush at twice that). But this, this was doing something.

Holy! What a breath! After the barnstorming Human Behaviour we get the skittish and jazzy doof and clang of riffs and electrokicks. She sings of going around town, alone in a crowd, her voice quiet and intimate against the bold arrangement. And then the chorus kicks in and she's crying because she needs, cares for, feels you, a vocal line so tooled it would sound like a reed instrument were it not in the hard longing in the voice. At the end her desperation has her at this pitch in the verse and chorus alike. The mix of jaunty music and tough feeling will describe most of the rest of the album.

But that's the point, this first outing beyond the confines of a rock band saw Bjork cast a wide net past the fishing limits of rock music and find grooves to suit moods of any kind from any strain as long as they aren't from the exhausted well of rock music. As I listen again to that perfect sound of the CD I'm reminded of why post punk initially binned the 4/4 crunch of rock, however briefly. Just for a few big winters we got sounds from the outer reaches of dub, musique concrete, even further reaching into classical and hard bop. The vacation was a rich one, if not intended as a fun escape, and here, when the world again needed something like it, Bjork takes us somewhere like it. Now it's cheekily informed by the sounds of the clubs, of smoky jazz or funky soulful Hammond bites and bips. And a kind of updated Tiki comes forward, as organic as the island decor and as busy as the multitude of insect populations zapping and buzzing around. 

Venus as a Boy lilts like a boat, clunking with Arabic fills on the strings and it's dreamy and sexy and floating. In wicked mode Bjork finds a companion at a party on the ordinary side and they flee to find their own fun out between the boats under the moon. At one point she opens a door and slams it shut so the dance thuds are muffled as she sharpens her invitation to archness. It's a gimmick but it works every time. "There's more to life than this," she winks and it's been arranged at the right time so what might have descended into backing vocals chanting that phrase. There's something like it but it's kept low in the mix as her voice soars above, never falling into cliche. The sounds of the partiers hub bubble through to the crossfade into what might be the side closer (but I've only ever known this as a CD or higher), her harp led languid cover of Like Someone in Love turns everything down to the 6 a.m. end of the night of the previous track. From breathy realisation to understanding in cool, full voice, she plays the scene to perfection.

What would have been the old side two introduces what comes across as the diary of a love story. It's a sandwich of belting numbers around a trilogy of love ballads and ends with a dreamy jazz coda. It's not announced in any way but there are clear indicators in the record's architecture that, instead of a standard side two of fillers and maybe another single, we get a legit song cycle.

Big Time Sensuality starts with a skittish jazz organ like something off In a Silent Way. This is set into a pumping electro kit. This should sound skeletal and would except for Bjork's vocal which comes in blazing: "I can feel something. It's about to happen. It's coming up". The melodic phrases are short and strengthened to bold major thirds. If you wanted to score this for an orchestra you'd have to have a brass section for this one vocal; its insistence and solidity would demand it. But this is Bjork who gave us some of the most adventurous vocal gymnastics since Yoko Ono, so, freed even from the outer edge of rock band conventionality with the Sugarcubes. She is giving us everything else that the spare arrangement cannot and it's as huge and excited as love at first sight.

One Day begins the trilogy of love and longing. A varispeed vocal which sounds like baby squeaks over a distant synth sequence. Bjork comes in with a bright vocal which climbs its melody from whimsy to full throated yearning. Light electronic orchestration supports the vocal, variously solid and airy. A trombone solo appears with a modal figure before Bjork cuts back in with the yearning "I can feel it" motif. She provides her own choir of distant backing: "one day, one daaay..." as though it's echoing through the landscape. The fade subsides with the trombone figure.

Aeroplane dives into an updated form of exotica, the fifties '50s and '60s lounge music by the likes of Martin Denny and Les Baxter. Your e-Mai Tai will be accompanied by clicking percussion, jungle sounds, bird calls, vibraphone and bubuhbaahs on the backing vocals while Bjork vocalises a notch above where she was on the previous track.

Come To Me seems to gather the previous two tracks and add a little. A bass figure with a buoyant echoing bass figure and synthesised steel guitar. The voodoo reef backing vocals are back. The vocal soars higher than both of the previous songs and lifts the song into clear passion. exotica and electronica blend and blur the boundaries as Bjork's voice seems to swim and then rise form the swell into a massive clear blue sky. "You know that I adore you. You know that I loooooooove you."

This trio of songs play a deft game of progressing from the last one and identifying with each other so closely that it's easy to remember a line from one as being part of another. I haven't tested this but they are probably in the same key and share a bpm. It's a song cycle rather than three songs on the second side of a record. The quality of each belies the musical skid row that the space in the overall sequence if reserved for. 

Violently Happy closes the internal sequence with more experimentation. Bjork begins with a grand descending declaration: "Since I met you this small town hasn't got room for my big feelings". The pulsing rhythm swelling beneath is all first wave techno with an insistent throb. Bjork proceeds to demonstrate that you can have all the doof doof of acid house and what was yet to be called EDM and still have a clear ranging organic centre to it. Her muscular vocal is the equivalent of the feeling of the best dancing you think you've ever done while you're still doing it. It's an affirmation of all the longing, devotional secular prayers of the rest of the cycle from Big Time Sensuality and it sounds like an ecstatic surrender.

Instead of closing there, though, the album ends with a complex harmonic jazz chorus of saxophones with  Bjork more quietly affirming the simple contentment of a way of living that promises adventure yet offers constant comfort. It's not all cosy, those saxes are really working the dissonance underneath the dreamy lines about diving and weighing anchor. She's home, happy and alive. 

This was my first CD. I didn't even have a CD player. They were beyond my means on a part time job. I had to choose between having a player or having something to play when I got it. Also, the record was new and there was a thrill in making this my first. I could wait for the player while I slowly built up my home stereo after the death of the three in one I'd inherited from Nanna in the '70s. I'd seen the discs up close before so the newness was a little curbed but still this was special. 

If the square of cover art was greatly shrunken from an old LP the designers had been clever enough to maximise the portrait of Bjork on the cover. It's monochrome but tinted with the greyish olive hue that dominates the rest of the artwork. Bjork, head to chest, with straggly hair that makes her look fresh from the shower or an all-nighter in Reykjavik, looks out quietly from behind an arch of hands flattened together, not in prayer but more like the anticipation of someone else's reaction. This is what I've come up with. Hope you like it. The extra comforable cashmere jumper is in contrast to the tiny offputting dots on the lower eyelashes which give off the sense of rave culture or something more sci-fi. There is neither artist name nor album title.

On the rear cover in a plain font Debut. Outgunning it massively from beneath is her name with alien lettering, a slanting oval and a triple umlaut over the name's sole vowel. Even smaller than the album title, the tracklist slants backwards; numbers, titles and running times. This might not be the first time for this but the phenomenon in the '90s and '00s of music acts bringing in their tracks in at around the same length is on display here. Was that in response to the excesses of the '70s and '80s? Maybe but I think it has a lot more to do with the twin forces of songcraft and danceability. Acknowledgments inside and more sci-fi design with a wide ribbed wall that could be out of Alien or A Space Odyssey. Inside the case, the disc was matt black, the artist name's off-world font repeated from the back cover.

I taped it at a friend's place. Another visitor thought I was strange for making the decision to get the music before the player even though I was demonstrating in front of her why that wasn't going to be a problem. The tape was only ever temporary and I knew I'd get more discs soon enough and when a better job came up all would be ready. There was that extra thrill of the change of decade and modus vivendi, too. I wouldn't have a home computer for another year and then it wouldn't be hooked up to the world. I affected a coolness about this, assuring friends that I did all my surfing at work and left it at the door while I still read books and played tapes at home like a Luddite. Really, I just wanted everything upgraded and faster and better and everything the new tech offered. Meanwhile I tapped away at short fiction (even won a local contest with a story which afforded me a futon - '90s).

But the thing I really luxuriated in was a return to the excitement of getting the real version of that good moment on the radio when something grabs at you from the speakers and holds on tight. I walked to work for a whole year with the serious orchestral drumming of Human Behaviour pounding in my memory. And now, here it was, in full thumping glory. And there was the rest, the tiny textures the arrangements that stretched from arch bebop to doofing sweatfests. And all, each and every one of them, were songs. It was there on TV with the videos by Michele Gondry for the singles. Boy did she know the right people.

Well, she hung in the right crowds. Most of the production is by Nellee Hooper, a maven of Bristol's Wild Bunch along with Tricky and the gang who'd soon form as Massive Attack. At her insistence, he brought the acid house into the studio to meet her songs. And it scrubbed and whined and barked to life around the voice that had thrilled us so well in front of the Sugarcubes but, now, free of the rock band, against a big canvas of new, soared into the clouds or fell back to just beside our ears to console, whisper and taunt.

What I did know is that, over the speedbump of thirty, I needed no more rock music in my ears, at least for a while. That's why I got around to the Nirvanas and Soundgardens later as, for all the talent there, they just sounded regressive. It wasn't necessarily that I wanted progressive, I just didn't want the repackaged old. This album gathered everything I wanted to know more about in contemporary music. I was still young enough for the clubs and went to parties where you really could zone out and take the music in. So it wasn't just me getting creaky and gravitating to the jazz cellar. Rock wasn't too loud for me, then, it was too creaky and done. This, with its perfect playability over three decades (I have the DVD-A, as well but listened to the CD for this first) gives me a nostalgia that has less to do with grief for dead hours than a reacquaintance with the joy I still feel on hearing it.

What I didn't know was that Bjork's Debut formed the best inroad imaginable to the strain I did follow in that decade, the one just around the corner that, like the best passing trends, like psychedelia or punk or ambient, it sounded of its time but never got old: trip hop. This wasn't that, that was still being invented in the clubs of Bristol, but this felt as fresh, as sexy and as creepy, as right time and night time as My Funny Valentine, Blue Monday, or Baby it's Cold Outside. Three decades on and it's still as fresh as this morning's coffee.

Listening notes: Yes, I did put the old CD on to hear this again. Still sounds exactly as it should. I also lay down in front of the DVD-Audio I bought some time in the '00s and heard it again in big spacey surround with a woofer for those doofs and timpani. That one also has a few of the videos that Michel Gondry at al made for the singles which bring big smiles. 

1973 @ 50: QUEEN

There are many ways to tell the world you have arrived as a band. In the age of the LP this only ever happens in hindsight but it can still be fun to think about. Paul counting in the first Beatles album. Jimmy Page's hammering powerchords opened Led Zep 1. Queen starts with a gallop. But it's a fade in.

Keep Yourself Alive starts with a chugalugging, heavily phased palm muted chord, joined by a flashy riff, louder, closer until the band's all there and they ramp it up to a fourth above. A brief clearing of the stage. Freddie comes in with a growl both rough and melodic. It's a litany of experiences. He was told million times, the sold a million mirrors, he ate a million dinners, he loved a million women etc.  The chorus bursts into the major key with a call and response of the title. What might at first sound like a corporate hippy anthem of try and try again carries a shade more darkness in the suggestion of the great opposition that the whole cosmos might as well be pushing back with. It's a fun and fast rock song with show off playing (Brian May modestly but firmly demonstrating his guitar arranging skills and tone shaping in the solo and Roger Taylor getting a micro solo on the drums) but also a statement of defiance. They're singing to the listener from their own experience (and a little hubris: their trial and error is nothing on Bowie's). 

Doing Alright is a legacy of the pre-Queen band Smile. Mercury takes the vocal to a liminal space between head voice and falsetto before the rest of the vocal members and multitracking come in with glorious harmonies. The mood and rhythm break with a diversion into a kind of sunny Latin shuffle which escalates into a crunching electric riff and metal version of the whimsy. Back in first verse land it's all light melancholy and sweets. Big riff breaks in again for a solo on top before a clean finish on the chorus. At one point this might well have been a song Brian May sang in the shower but by the time it got to the second track of Queen's debut disc it is presented as a showcase of harmonies, sudden turns and virtuoso guitar playing.

Having begun with something single-worthy, then the school concert intro to the band, they move on to a number that would only ever be an album track. Great King Rat starts with a crunchy minor key riff that opens up with a reverby acoustic and distant lead vocal. The creation of space and light in the arrangement and production is impressive when you consider that the modal tonality and motion of the lyric could have most easily be squeezed down into a kind of sea shanty. Here it is widescreen cinema. The subject of the song might be a gangster or just some wideboy Mr Sin who lived hard and played deadly. The chorus includes a corruption of the Old King Cole rhyme, giving it more intrigue and atmosphere. And then the middle section (too long and distinct to be a middle eight) which crashes and changes to a major mode as Freddy sings like a herald with lines from GKR's life about being a bad guy to get ahead (pretty much the opposite sentiment to the opening track). This ends with a trailing wordless vocal and patted acoustic guitar moment before we crash back into the last verse, guitar solo (ending in a burst of studio applause) and final chorus that ends with a fade out on a tom tom roll.

My Fairy King closes the first side with the kind of showcasing we've already heard in Doing Alright but bigger and wider. Rhythm changes, new melodic material , instrumental workouts, more of Brian May's wind quintet guitar tone, some impressive piano performance and lots and lots and lots of harmonies. It's easy to dismiss a track like this as showing off but it's worth recalling a few things about the time, also. 1973 might well be associated with glam rock but it is also a time when the prog bands were gigantic enough to have their live gear moved in road trains with the name of each member emblazoned on the the roof of the semitrailers. To stand out in this environment and avoid any possible charge of cashing in on camp or glam you needed to show that you could not only arrange like a 19th century composer but play every note perfectly AND provide a kind of mythos for any characterisation you included in the lyrics. If this had ever been a simple singalong it quickly got the Queen treatment. The great apotheosis of this, Bohemian Rhapsody, would not appear for a few albums and years on and by its time was prepared and recorded by a band with some rapidly acquired discipline. Until then, the world got things like this which, as calculated as it had been, sound mostly like a mess, as though Andrew Lloyd Weber threw an uncooperative rock opera out the window and went back to the drawing board. Beautiful vocals and fine playing but also very astutely placed at the end of a side of vinyl.

Side two begins with Liar. which begins with a drum pattern that the song proper when it begins ignores for a more Who-like powerchord workout made for the kind of venues where the band wanted to headline. A little calm then Freddy comes in with lines from a confession which are answered by the choir calling "liar!" The point at which Freddie wails, "nobody believes me!" and it's a small milestone. All good singers have one thing in common; they make every vocal about themselves. You might be the most proficient, have the most unassailable falsetto, be able to shatter wine glasses with your highest chest voice note, but if you can't make something, whether written for you or you found under a caravan, sound like you, then you don't get to join the greats. Sometimes this is self-fulfilling like Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan who only ever could sound like themselves and only every sang their own lines. Mostly it's the preserve of the tiny few. When Freddie complains that nobody belieeeeves him (I'm hearing it in his scansion as I type) it comes straight from him. By the time we get to the Oh Sinnerman call and response he finally sounds like the Freddie Mercury we would know and love, not just a skilled vocalist. Perhaps it also had to do with the enhanced tightness of the arrangement on this song which never strays too far from its own path in stark contrast to the previous track. It's as though they started on side one as a good band learning their trade and became Queen on side two.

The Night Comes Down begins with a gorgeous acoustic guitar workout. After a quick flourish from the Brian May orchestra, the vocals start with a refreshing acoustic vamp. Freddie's vocal takes us through a nostalgic trek before the choir enters with the chorus, plain but delicious. Plain, does what it says on the tin but it's a good tin. Brian May song and lovely for all that. It ends with a dazzling Brian multi-geetar serenade.

And bumps right into a thing that would be a feature of every Queen album until Jazz, the Roger Taylor rocker. John Deacon, on bass, was the only one who didn't sing lead vocals. Brian May did but not for a while. That left Freddie Mercury whose command of his voice had no equals on the face of the earth. So Roger went the other way and tried for a mix of Ozzie Osbourne and Robert Plant. Modern Times Rock and Roll charges like a mad bull for less than two minutes and doesn't waste a nanosecond. the breathless charge of it presaged the kind of full throttle of early punk. I bet no early punk acknowledged this, though.

The other thing that Brian May did was big metal songs. Son and Daughter is one of those, combining a big sinewy riff, crunching verse chords and a big bright chorus. The narrator complains about societal roles and the futility of pushing back against it. Why the chorus about wanting someone to be a woman? Maybe, after all that struggle he wanted love and sex to be simple. Absolutely no idea. Probably just sounded good sung. The guitar workout at the end is especially refulgent, casting more aural light than any so far on the record.

Jesus establishes a slamming two chord figure over which Freddie sings a fairly straight account of the fame of Christ. It's impassioned, serious and thoroughly hooky. Freddie wasn't remotely Christian but I tend to think he knew his audiences were acquainted with the bible story and probably admired the legend of the prophet, his power and adoration as a kind of bronze age rock star. This song features the kind of double speed instrumental section known and loved by numberless garage rockers but, considering the skill of the guitar playing, it's painstaking tonal setup and leaning toward atmosphere rather than chops it resembles most closely the Jeff Beck period Yardbirds. It's a stunning act of rock guitarism which yet gives way to a straight reading of the final verse and chorus which ends acapella until the fade.

The final track is an instrumental preview of the early single The Seven Seas of Rhye (fully realised on the following album) and is a softened anti climax after Jesus but pleasant for all that.

I didn't know this album until after I had my first Queen album A Night at the Opera. I'd heard Bohemian Rhapsody in the school holidays between '75 and '76. First week back at school, after hearing everyone else had heard it, too, a casually occurent wish was fulfilled when the video was on Countdown. It was as good as I remembered it. A few weeks later I bought my US pressing from Ken Herfords Import Records around the corner and luxuriated.

 And then, as every teenaged kid does, I had to get the rest of them. From memory, it was II then this one, then Sheer Heart Attack by which time the sequel to Opera, A Day at the Races, had come out. So, while I didn't hear them all at once it was in a squashed time period and they all pretty much blended ... except for this one. As the inadvertent effect was of a band sounding as though they worked toward and finally achieved their own sound in the space of one album, it felt like a first effort, the scene in the movie (of any rock biopic) where someone knocks something over, comes up with a phrase of future import, stumbles on a riff or whatnot and the rest is hysteria. 

But it was more like the opposite; the band had moved from this self-imposed image to the next, taking on players and singers (like Freddie) until at this point in their career they recorded these songs and struck upon their personality and sound. One of the things that is very notable. here, is that, for all the feeling around on the first side, there is a consistency that does form and a tone, character and weight that will take them to choose their strengths and present in sharper focus with each new effort. This is what happened with Queen. It wasn't the soaring development of a Beatles but for the first decade at least, no flab or filler either (ok, the John Deacon songs but a few of those were massive hits). And there was enough in the tank for the band that got to worldwide number one with a novelty single and only got stronger from that point. While they're clearly serious about their work in this first record it will always, after what followed, sound like workshopping rather than worldbeating. That said, find any rock band that wouldn't be proud enough of this to feel that they could just stop here.

PLEASE PLEASE ME @ 60

"One two three FOUR!" And we slam into I Saw Her Standing There in full rock and roll strength, starting with an original from the stage repertoire, an original that they played in Hamburg (albeit at a late stage). The chunky rhythm and bass drums that flail out from solid time to flourishes, the surfy lead and gleaming harmonies under a full throated MacCartney vocal. Ends on a full stop. An exhilarating introduction: world meet Beatles, Beatles, world.

(This one was written when McCartney was only just twenty and had a seventeen year old girlfriend. Don't beat that up to be anything predatory or age inappropriate because it isn't.)

Misery was intended for Helen Shapiro who would have done it more than justice. A big embracing vocal opening featuring the toolbox: melisma, tight sub-screaming Lennon voice and a charming transition from minor to major in the chorus keep it in the recollection.

Anna (Go With Him), Chains, Boys. Beatles cover versions are generally more interesting for what they reveal about their influences than as interpretations. It's almost true that the originals on this album are like homework after learning the covers. That's about the same as any band that starts writing its own material. Playing industrially long sets and keeping your job on stage is persuasive; learn it or die. Add astute, observation and high musicality (and not a little internal competition) and you get this band. All of these are competent rock cover versions of songs from the soul and Motown realms but any post-Beatles ears are going to be hankering for originals, however derivative. The addition of wailing blues harp o'er head does, however make a difference and gives the songs a Merseybeat touch.

Ask Me Why is one such and it's almost entirely forgettable. There are dynamics, scansion changes and a well wrought middle eight but it just doesn't lift above apprentice level.

Please Please Me is a triumph for the nascent relationship that the band struck up with their producer George Martin. Conceived as a Roy Orbison thumper like Running Scared or In Dreams, Martin suggested they speed it up. They did and made it their own thing. A harmonica riff adds a bright wail to the guitar figure. The vocal harmonies are classic Lennon McCartney with John singing the descending line while Paul stays on the high note, each line ending with a surprise ascension in the rhythm guitar. A tight call and response chorus that blooms into a falsetto title line. All present and correct. This is why people not only caught on but made it the band's first number one.

Love Me Do was their first single and is a great illustration on the difference between influence and copying. If they'd stuck to the plan of writing an Everly Brothers number they would have incorporated more of those country harmonies and thought more about the separation of the verse and chorus. Instead, they sang and played it until it sounded like themselves. It's stripped back. Harmonica riff, glistening harmonies, cool middle eight that works both sung and done on harmonica and a stop start chorus that drives it into memory. All acoustic, too. Not bad.

PS I Love You is a pleasant wafting song of romantic longing with Paul singing in his grownup voice (until the end where he sings fill lines in his rock voice). The arrangement and choruses with the vocal harmonies come off as more staid than the songs of the first side but the gamechanger chords and the strange hushed solemnity make it a quiet kind of standout.

Baby it's You starts with the sha la la la las of the previous era and for all the energy keeping it aloft it sounds and feels like filler.

Do You Want to Know a Secret begins with George's vocal in cod flamenco mode with a showbiz slow mo introduction in a minor key. This quickly turns into a slow trotting sweet address to a girlfriend. The chorus (which is not the title line) ends with an off pitch falsetto which marks the fade out, producing winces.

A Taste of Honey a big showbiz reverb slow intro with big harmonies continues through the modal folky waltz with Paul being a grownup again. This is a gem from the days of the Hamburg lifestyle gigs. The middle eight changes time signature before launching into the call and response ending. It's the most effectively melancholy song (cover or not) on the record. Even if overdrenched in reverb and erring on the off-broadway side of things it does foreshadow McCartney's future penchant for quiet sadness. Three years later it would be the genuinely affecting For No One and the ice cold wrench of Eleanor Rigby. Three years.

There's a Place is one of the least celebrated early Beatles songs and that's a pity as it's a gem and it's interesting. After a brief harmonica riff the mid paced rocker features almost exclusively John and Paul harmonies until the middle eight. While there are lines about an assumed object of affection the main point is that the narrator of the song seems happiest when withdrawn into his own mind. The lines about no sad tomorrows and there being no sorrow in his mind sound like over-protestation when that's the place he goes when he wants to escape things just like that. No chorus as such but the ending insistent on the title phrase repeats to the fade with more melancholy harmonica tells us there's always one place to run.

Twist and Shout proves that while most of the covers were a mix of tribute, songcraft recognition and filler, they could make some of their choices their own. While I knew as a much younger fan that this was not their song, I still cannot hear the Top Notes or the Isley Brothers versions because this one is in the way. A big clunking riff circles around C F G like a steam era machine starting up. Lennon's throat tearing berserker vocal rips holes in the wallpaper as the others repeat his lines in gleaming harmony. After a little guitar harmonising the next hook appears with the harmonies forming a chord and get so high they start screaming the last verse gets stuck on the instantly sexual "well shake it shake it shake i, baby, now!" before the triad once again builds up to a climax and then comes to a sighing rest. 

If the opening track promised good times we've just heard where they lead. This is Lennon's response to McCartney's workout in Standing There and the two contain what only have to be some songs. The fact that it is better than that makes this a debut to remember. Except that people don't.

This and the next one released in the first year of Beatlemania are eclipsed by the monster singles the band released as a priority and still form the main touchpoint of revisits to the first era of the band. It's true that the two earliest singles are on the record (including their first number one) and they're good pop songs, they don't have quite the force or invention of a She Love's You or I Want to Hold Your Hand.

This album sounds like the albums of any band of the time, almost an afterthought between the singles rather than the other way around. The band that would, more than any other demonstrate the value of albums to make larger statements began like all the others because who could know? But if you go through from this to mid point at Rubber Soul you will know from the simpler more rushed affair that this is that the seeds will sprout into a dazzling garden. Then embark on the rest of the trek with the callback on Revolver, the sinister, druggy count in to the opening track, and you'll know that, while their own past never dragged them, they were thankful of it.

Listening notes: I chose the CD from the Beatles in Mono box from 2009 as it remains the best way to hear this. 

1983@40 : SWEET DREAMS (ARE MADE OF THIS) - EURYTHMICS

It must have been January that I heard it because I know I first saw the video in February. The song has a quiet epic feel to it, opposing tinkly electronics with atmospheric grunts and a big vocal with a varying delay and reverb. Over a drum machine kick the soundscape is restless and prying like a audience of town gossips witnessing an orgy. The vocal melody, supported by distant, sweet backing vocals, is central and modal, now plunging into the lower register now squeezing into psychedelic dissonance in the higher. Love is a Stranger, it's like addiction, a kidnapper, a seducer, or anything that takes and changes you, assuming different forms with their own effects until you, too, are transformed. The video is highly cinematic from the time that all of them were but this one delivered a kind of career building canniness that many were not. The duo both appear in various roles and costumes but the focus is on the cool beauty of singer Annie Lennox as she first sings to camera from the back of a limousine in a flouncy wig then in more of a dominatrix in a white tiled room that could be a bathroom or torture chamber, then as something more like herself with short Bowie hair, slowly removing leather gloves, androgynous in a pinstripe suit, writhing in a mass of 35 mm film. Finally, as the Thinner White Duke, she moves robotically in mirror shades beside the Chauffeur Dave Stewart, and stares down the lens.

When I head this on the radio it sounded like it was being told reverse shot, by the victim or affected, not the perp. I never heard it that way after seeing the clip. That effect is what sealed the deal on the Eurythmics, state ambiguity in no uncertain terms and keep the pop hooks coming. It was at the end of a relatively short road but one that had already involved a few drastic changes. As The Tourists, Stewart and Lennox were part of a '60s influenced power pop unit with a few respectable chart toppers to their name. Sensing the change in the wind they left to form the duo with this name but basically the same sound but with more quirk. By the time this album came around, they were possessed of their own recording studio and banks of new electronics. Their debut In the Garden sounds very old hat by comparison.

So, I'm spending a lot of time on this song on an album that contains ten. Well, for starters, as songs go, the rest of the first side is filler. Well, that's how it sounds until you listen to the next side and understand that that was where they kept the real songs. Alternatively, the first side is for dancing and the other one for listening. But we can't have everything in formula, can we, because side two begins with one of the most durable dance numbers from its era.

Sweet Dreams begins with one of the hookiest synth riffs in all pop music. You could play it on guitar but it would only sound right through the envelopes and filters of a fat toned '80s keyboard. The vocals, Lennox on thick self-harmonies but a strong stern lead line out the front really just repeats a chorus verse and kind of middle eight from go to whoa. It's a little like the person who lived through Love is a Stranger, older and worn, giving advice to a younger potential victim. "Some of them wat to use you. Some of them want to be used by you,"  as well as, "hold your head up (moving on).."

The video is far more conventional for its time. Lennox in full Bowie in a suit mode sings to camera as though delivering a business presentation while Stewart types at a computer as though playing the riff. When the instrumental comes up they frolic in a pasture with cellos and cows (hey, it was the '80s, man!). Repeat. It's not the invention of this but its confidence that grabbed everyone who saw it and then heard it on the dancefloor or the radio and fancied they heard more depth and variation in the lyrics than the song has. That, too, feels intentional. The song clocks in at about three and a half minutes, still on the longer side of the average top 40 number and most of it repeats the first thirty seconds mechanically.

This LP was released with a cousin video for the dawning of the age of home video with these clips and some live performances. That wasn't entirely revolutionary; Blondie had done it a few years earlier with videodiscs, but this time it was in a format that everybody had. Unlike the second bite of power pop previously, this one was made to sell and dominate. 

And that's why you get real songs on side two. Jennifer starts with the sounds of the seaside. The synths kick in  but you're not meant to dance along to this eerie ballad about a suicide. It could be a ghost story but it doesn't have to be. What it is is a mix of beautiful and unsettling. I miss that about early '80s pop, that it could completely ditch the boy/girl narrative and step quietly down the dark stairs with horror movie musical boxes tinkling away among the cobwebs.

This is the House is a kind of Talking Heads vignette about a burnt down house that starts with a few lines in Spanish. Somebody told Me is a fullthroated vocal workout over a soul brass riff on the lower end of the keyboards. This City Never Sleeps is a sombre reflection on a culture of isolation and resistance to stimulus. Brooding and deliberate, it steps on to the fade before a brief backwards message (from Dave Stewart, not Satan). Big and sad but it can afford to be at the end of this album that blends fun times steppin' out with the same kind of spooky big town songs on The Tourists deep cuts. 

Sweet Dreams is what happens when a reinvention is both calculated and fully embraced as a new strategy into a careerist lifestyle. The Eurythmics, from this point on, were free to dictate what they released, its musical style, video representation and what it was about. See also 1981's Dare from the Human League where the decision to join instead of futilely resist proved to be the right one. 

After this The Eurythmics could earn a living and be courted by a fickle music press on MTV or on the stage of a stadium. And if  they developed very, very little in the years that followed they were consistent and, most poignantly of all, prepared for a future that bands around them who stuck to their own cred rather than look beyond the old tribal ways and were surprised by the slowly exploding failure that changes in the environment, market, youth culture, etc. were to deliver to them. 

This album heard again now only approaches ineffectuality in that its pre-EDM dance numbers sound neo-retro-new-old rather than compelling in themselves. The singles that start each side are still immediate and strong. For a singles band that fit perfectly into the new multimedia demands of their era without hesitation, they endure.