MY 1984

Photo by Ian Wadley of 7 Bongalonga Close Westfarce SW666

The New Year's Eve bashes were dominated by dystopian themed parties. I went to one but it just made me want to get back into the band and more music. I signed on the dole and saved a little, living free at the family home before heading down on one of the last Sunlander trips I'd make. The train got into Roma St in the morning and I got a cab home. Stephen was in high spirits. If '83 had begun with the nightmare family absent, '84 started with them completely evacuated. They really were no more. Day one, we both put the work in, scrubbing the grime and memories from the house. I even put the Halleluiah chorus on as we went through the living room.

I didn't give myself any time to miss Uni. There was Greg to call about the new songs I'd finished up north and demoes to organise. Greg had moved out to the Northside, quite close by. It would be easier than before to get some demos worked out. We started practicing at his place. Most of the old set was dropped and my medieval influenced stuff was moving in, along with more Arabic flavours. Lots of promise.

Stephen's friends from wild days in Townsville moved down and in and for about five months it was pretty fine with an uptick in coffee quality, communal meals and long and winding conversations. I caught up with a lot of the reading I wanted to do now that Uni no longer ruled that aspect. I haunted the CBD bookshops on dole day and always came home with something. Same with music, I raided the Record Market in Queen St and built up a revival of my first love, classical and prior. Finally, I started writing fiction. The idea was to write my way into being a film director. Well, my course hadn't been a practical one in either sense. Everything felt good.

Greg and I demoed a lot of new songs one weekend on 4-track with Margot and Liz participating, making them the only recordings of the whole 1983 line up ever done. Later, I can't recall when but it was over a couple of colder nights, we went to Basement and did about eight of them. And then the band suffered a soft collapse with everyone drifting away and leaving me with another post band dearth like the one in 1982. Well, I still had the writing and that's what I concentrated on for the rest of the year. This is around the same time as the departure of the main couple in the house, a troubling visit by an old school friend. After that, Stephen's prank of removing the valves of the ancient tv proved successful and it never worked again. The mood with the remaining householders slowdived.

I stopped going to the kind of gigs I had gone to but the local scene was on the turn, anyway with a bland professionalism infiltrating the venues and dance clubs sprouting up. Punk had become thrash and lost my interest. What had been anti-rock fell into a kind of boofy bossa nova as well meaning bores like The Style Council began to exert an influence. 

Ray Parker's Ghostbusters was a movie theme, audio merch that started early and lifted the rhythm and riff from M's Pop Muzik from five years before but it worked like a charm as did the catchy shriek of Cindy Lauper's Girls Just Want to Have Fun as Stevie Wonder lulled us to sleep with the long distance lullaby I Just Called to Say I Love You which was only marginally more exciting that the duet Islands in the Stream from Kenny Rogers  and Dolly Parton from which we might have woken with Pat Benatar's Love is a Battlefield as Lionel Richie set off red flags of all nations with his tender and queasy Hello and INXS reminded us that they had started releasing the same song under different titles until the end of the band with their Original Sin and Frankie Goes to Hollywood followed suit with their Two Tribes thumper and Nena pretended she was Debbie Harry with a song about Luftballons and Prince's When Doves Cry sounded like everything else he brought out as Tina Turner asked what Love had to Do With It and Wham tried going all Motown with Wake Me Up Before You Go Go before the real singer left and bade us listen to a Careless Whisper and Kenny Loggins felt all Footloose which was another movie tie in to let us know that the culture was made of more bubbles than icecream and if we wanted to wait for the next development in post-punk we were only having ourselves on as it had been swallowed whole by the mainstream and sold for scrap in Heinz commercials. The transitions to a return of rock bands were beginning even on stations like 4ZZZ as there seemed to be no more need for dub exploration. We were growing into careers after uni, or acted like we were, and the parties became more theme and catering, two things that the best of the past five years had been decidedly un. My favourite single of the year was Echo and the Bunnymen's The Killing Moon. That really means it was the only single I liked that year. The Laughing Clown's magnificent Eternally Yours was hard to count as it had kind of come out at the end of the previous year. Then again, it's hard to remember the music of a year when your favourite radio station seemed to buy in the main blob and my brother's prank of sabotaging the tv left us without Countdown for months. Sure, first world problems but the horrifying smother of the mainstream kept spreading until even the funk was wearing a white T-shirt and the punk was some bands started calling themselves (which was a joke when punk lived).

I asked around for people who might be interested in joining the Gatekeepers but what point when you don't have a phone and aren't even going to gigs? I had one extended chat with a potential keyboard player who seemed so uninterested that to this day I have no idea why she turned up at all. I lent her some Ravi Shankar records and she returned one but replaced the other with a pan pipes album. That's funny now but at the time I wanted to slowly poison her.

I wrote short stories. A lot of them. I didn't send any away as I knew myself better than that and concentrated on finishing a book of linked tales like James Joyce's Dubliners. It passed the time but gave me a project. I missed Uni but knew that doing honours or a masters would just be putting things off longer for little. I read a lot and watched a lot of movies in the overnight marathons that the commercial stations used to put on. I learned to love the Marx Brothers and Jacques Tati, the stories of Franz Kafka, Camus' The Outsider, and a stack more. Getting back into classical and earlier music was a pleasure. Whenever I looked up from whatever writing I was doing I seemed to be getting absorbed into the great nothing of the culture. The Michael Radford film of 1984 felt like home.

I went to Townsville for my final family Christmas but that bothered me less than what I would be returning to. I had to do something. It took a while but I did. Anyway, that's for next year.

This is the view from my room in the house at Bangalla St
Auchenflower, the only place I lived in Brisbane. I don't
remember taking the photo and can't recall how I came to 
have a copy. It would be from the first five years of the '80s.

SKYHOOKS' LIVING IN THE SEVENTIES @ 50

This was one of the first rock albums I owned. I got it about one and a half years after its release. It was a Christmas present from my sister Marina. I was thirteen and in duty bound, played it on a loop for days afterwards. We had a stereo with a few headphone jacks, so it could've been worse. I already knew the title track and loved its satirical cheek. The hit single Horror Movie was also a good catchup and felt equally smart, allowing anyone who liked it the claim of urban sophisticate. I thought, for a bit, that all rock music aspired to this kind of wit.

Let's backtrack. I was a classical music fan. If I stretched the boundaries of that it was to reach backwards into the Renaissance and before, not forward into rock music. Then I went to high school, turned thirteen and had to sign up for adolescence. A crash course with the local top 40 station revealed enough to go on, and when I graduated to Countdown on the weekends it was easier to identify taxonomy and call characteristics. I ended up liking quite a lot of it and armed with the zeal of the convert, pursued in earnest.

Skyhooks won me because all that wit was offered with music that had the same kind of smarts. The arrangements easily qualified, with their intricacy, as counterpoint. It wasn't Bach but it worked. On Countdown (already into their second year of chart dominance) they were weird. Drag and makeup and glitter but the music was a mix of tough and complicated, like someone who had started out classical but set themselves in rock music to join in. So, familiar.

Skyhooks' publicly deadly foes were the poppier Sherbet who were unabashed radio fodder. I liked some of their stuff but none of it quite broke through to me the same way that the Hooks' spikiness always did. Soon, I had removed the colour poster of them in the TV Times (thanks, Nanna!) and folded it back into the album sleeve. Hooked.

The album starts with the title track. A bold upward slide ends with a surf rock rhythm and Shirley Strachan's strong scream: "I feel a little crazy. I feel a bit strange. Like I'm in a payphone without any change..." The forward force takes breaks with what I would find out were things like synths and wah pedals. Every note is audible but nothing has that overly clean session musician nakedness. It sounds composed and arranged but also live tested.

Whatever Happened to the Revolution begins as a Doorsy blues but then the opening joke: Whatever happened to the revolution? We all got stoned and drifted away..." I took this to my limited impressions of the Gough Whitlam dismissal and even vaguer ones of the anti-Vietnam War protests.

At thirteen, in the deep north, I thought Balwyn in Balwyn Calling was a girl's name, not an outer suburb that suggested the inner city cool was threatened by a literal callback from yobville. I had no idea at all of any of this. To be fair, not knowing the Melbourne geography, my eldest brother didn't know either. So, ha!

Horror Movie starts with a synthesised creepy intro that moves into a confident funk. The punchline is that all the mayhem and bloodshed of the verses are describing the nightly TV news. Agreeing with this with a sagacity borrowed from older siblings gave me an air of grown up cynicism, at least in the mirror as I played along with the tennis raquet guitar.

You Just Like Me Cause I'm Good in Bed is a rocker that does what it says in the title with a side order of the pickup scene of the place and time.

Carlton (Lygon St Limbo) is a bright rock song about the inner city neighbourhood that I knew about from Homicide and Division 4. An elongated chorus warns to check how real the dealers are. An abrupt change repeats the Horror Movie funk riff as Shirley leads the rest in something more like an urban trible chant. The down and dirty suggestion of the lifestyle gave me daydreams but much later, after I'd moved to Melbourne and drank lattes at the University Cafe and pots of Carlton on Lygon St at the University Hotel (Uni of Melbourne is in the adjoining Parkville) this was not only on the jukebox but you didn't stay there for more than two pots without hearing it. I'd look out the window and imagine what it looked like a decade earlier. Change the flares for drainpipes and the hippy hair for shorn back and sides. No, it didn't quite work but it was fun finally being there and hearing the song in situ.

Toorak Cowboy is of the tradition of The Kinks' Dedicated Follower of Fashion and other digs at youthful affluence and small L liberalism. It's even done in the same country pickin' style. this is localised to highlight the cringey sophistication of the rich playboy buying everything he claims to be. The namechecks of south of Yarra neighbourhoods would have added a sting to the lyrics. Toorak was another place name I knew as the opulent big money village of Melbourne. Still is.

Smut is guitarist Red Symonds' turn at the mic and the only song on the album not by bassist Greg Macainsh. It's a bouncy narration of a purposed visit to a porn cinema. A minor key chorus shares lines between Red and Shirley. Then it's gleefully back to the mechanics of concealed masturbation in the dark. Shirley's middle eight, "better get a grip on yourself, you better pull yourself together" drips with contemporary slang. The harmonised oohlalaas sing us out as the lead guitar goes very sweet. This fits perfectly in the '70s context where it felt daring. Weirdly, with porn mainstreamed by the internet and its consumption de rigeur, this one probably comes across as quaint.

Hey What's the Matter is a rocky taunt at faux malcontents. You can't have your dope and smoke it, too. Crikey, was I living or what? I was and in the '70s.

Motorcycle Bitch is the female equivalent of Toorak Cowboy except there's more commitment to the object's lifestyle.

So, it's pretty much all bangers and even the cartoony cover art isn't rendered embarrassingly cute out of its context, being so frankly done. Ross Wilson is an unsung hero of the album, keeping everything cleanly lined but energetic as producer. His own experience as provocateur in front of Daddy Cool (Skyhooks creative ancestors) primed him for the role on this and the next few platters.

This was the only Skyhooks LP I owned. I liked seeing them on Countdown and always paid attention but was never quite reached after that. Maybe I got sick of this one album and didn't see much of a development. Maybe, the year to come with its discovery of the wonders of Queen and catching up with David Bowie's career through the cassette underground and the endlessly rewarding archaeology of the sixties beyond The Beatles. It was something. I honoured them by listening. 

Skyhooks didn't survive the changes to come with strength. Red Symonds left for a career as a TV curmudgeon. The album after him had an American producer and sounded a lot more guitar heavy (Women in Uniform was good musically, though). When Shirley left and they opted for a distinctly different vocalist, they released a song about Queensland as a police state which appealed until the lines about the girls being sweet and juicy and underage ruined everything. And they thought they were being so punk. It didn't fly even back then. The Angels, oldie mouldy cover band who cut their hair and reinvented themselves as near-punks, really did cut it with Take a Long Line as far as standing up to the bad years of Brisbane. No smirking jokes needed. Times change quickly.

So, was it the commentary or the fun of the songs that sold them? Hard to know and it's strange that Macainsh over a very few years failed so self-defeatingly to read the room. An attempted revival in the '80s  gave them a kind of novelty single that I can't say I've all the way through once. It wasn't the jokes or the rocking with Skyhooks, it was the times. In the mid '70s they felt fresh and taunting but by decade's end that suddenly felt try-hard. Punk did a lot of damage before it turned the gun on itself and bands like Skyhooks were clearly collateral casualties. Then again, the sheer invention and commitment of this debut blaster insists on your attention and, even with the loudest of its creaking jokes, works a treat.

BLONDIE'S EAT TO THE BEAT @ 45

Two bars of count-in a snare roll and Dreaming explodes with a collision of '60s girl group kitsch and late '70s archness. Debbie Harry enters in high style with a full throated melodic shout about a chance meeting and the wonder of living as though dreaming. The middle eight gears up the pace enough for her "whoo!" in between lines. Three minutes of sheer pop bliss with just enough poignancy to make it last for decades and beyond. One of my favourite songs of its era.

The Hardest Part is a revisit of the kind of attempted funk there in the first album onwards but this time polished to a bubblegum naffness. Harry's strident vocal adds more pressure but its neither a tough rocker nor a campy disco workout. It's almost as though they were listening with the next track. Union City Blue is a retread of Dreaming but with less energy.

Shayla adds a gleam to a magical realist story of an ordinary life transported by imagination. While it might have flubbed down into the previous track's routine, there is just enough sparkle to save it between the whimsy of the lyric, the loping low string guitar and easy pace. Eat to the Beat sounds like a pastiche of British punk with mixed messages about masturbation and snacking.

Accidents Never Happen is like something from the band's best Plastic Letters, with an intriguing minor key cool and a smoky vocal. The synthesisers and machine perfect rim shots complete the image of a band who can be witty, compelling and rock out all at once. Die Young Stay Pretty is in joke reggae. Slow Motion features a vocal bathed in reverb which is at odds with the rest of the album in a song that doesn't quite know where it's meant to be.

Atomic is where it shifts. It's an electro-disco workout in celebration of teen lust that doesn't let up. This is the Blondie of X-Offender and Heart of Glass as well as Picture This, with its face pressed hard against the port hole to the '80s. It is pop perfection and points to one of their purest pop triumphs, the following year's Call Me.

Sound-A-Sleep revisits Fade Away and Radiate from Parallel Lines and forms a pleasant lullaby with a few slightly spiky images thrown in. I could listen to it anytime. Victor is the kind of glam stomper that Adam and the Ants and ten Pole Tudor were about to own. It's fun but I wouldn't make a bee line to it. Living in the Real World is another punk pastiche but sounds like the kind of song that American film makers of the following decade would drop into a teen romance to give it a hip, young punky ambience. End.

Eat to the Beat, even with its highlights, is a sheer drop into the kind of pop flirtation that didn't just help the bank balance but removed the band from the roll call. No one at this time except the most hardened and industrial reviled the pure pop heights that Blondie could soar to but when it started sounding like high-life cabaret instead of compelled fun. That said, they knew what they were doing.

After the success of Parallel Lines they stuck with producer Mike Chapman who took them further into the kind of tough edged pop he'd mastered with Nicki Chinn in the '70s with the likes of The Sweet and Suzi Quattro. Parallel Lines runs out of fuel on its second side like most Blondie albums but the parade of bangers on the first side and the mega hit Heart of Glass wiping the table of side two makes things feel balanced. Eat to the Beat is better balanced but it's also blander. The highlights are rule-proving exceptions.

Blondie produced and released a video album of every track, embracing the future while its choice of form was still uncertain. Nevertheless, it was forward looking and showed the band's determination to break through and stay on top. Well, better a blander Blondie than a Cryogenic Eagles, eh? That was never the choice, though. As U.S. pop culture in the early '80s consumed the riskier post punk from the U.K. it had been defused at customs and was open for copying by people who wouldn't have thought of it in the first place. The rest was the maintenance of position by those who were already there and anyone who sounded enough like them. Billy Joel released his big Noo Wave album the following year and it probably enjoys a warm nostalgia among its fans. I hate it unreservedly. It wasn't Blondie who made Billy Joel do that terrible thing, it was more his anxiety that they might have been the future, them, teh Ramones and all that Talking Heads weirdo stuff.

I recall it the way I recall most Blondie albums, as a series of singles on Countdown. They had power and rang out over the crowds at high school parties I went to. It was fun and sounded like it. The University parties I also went to never put this on the turntable. Those parties were a mix of late boomer picks from punk and environs, less fun (sometimes outright embarrassing) but held more interesting conversations and more songs about buildings and food.

As if we needed it, Eat to the Beat reminded us that Blondie was an American band and on a path to establishment like almost all of the others. There's no sin in that but it comes at a cost. Eat to the Beat is a record by a band unprepared for that.

THE LAMB LIES DOWN ON BROADWAY @ 50

This record is why I swore off prog rock. It's not because it's a bad album, on the contrary. It's one of the few cases where ambition is served well by execution and there is a lot of really good expressive music on it and, as bizarre as the story gets, there is even a kind of cohesion. The problem is that I never heard a prog album, before or since that came close to it. Every time I went to investigate an act like Emerson Lake and Palmer or Yes, I came away wondering what I'd heard and caring less and less as the hours passed. This one, though, haunted me.

A school friend passed it on for me to tape and I listened to it, pondering the bizarre images on the Hipgnosis sleeve and read Peter Gabriel's short story version in the gatefold and found it intriguing enough to make a slightly edited C-90. I left out the Eno collaboration The Waiting Room as it scared the hell out of me. And then I'd listen to the first side of the tape until a month or two and taped over it with something from the radio. Not the fairest of receptions but my most played album from this time was still Never Mind the Bollocks. Anyway ...

If you are unfamiliar with the record, it's a rock opera along the lines of The Who's Tommy or Quadrophenia or the Kinks early '70s concept albums. Genesis had already done side-long tracks made of discrete musical sections that formed whole narratives but this was a long and complex story over four sides of vinyl. The band worked on the music while singer and chief lyricist Peter Gabriel wrote the words and then a version of the story in prose for the album gatefold sleeve. 

So, what's the story? Rael, young Manhattan tough guy, has a weird epiphany of seeing the thing in the title, a lamb lying down on the Great White Way. It plunges him into an unreal world in which he encounters caves, assembly lines with humans as the products, sex instruction, human/serpent hybrids, a colony of sex-repressed castrated mutants and so on, all the while pursuing his brother John and leading to a big revelation that is either bleeding obvious or baffling. There's a lot more detail to it than that but, like most rock operas, most of the narrative dots joined only in the mind of the lyricist and left off the musical work itself.

A lot of this gets weird and yucky and can be traced beyond Gabriel's own imagination to one of the things that zapped it: Allejandro Jodorowski's surrealist mythic western El Topo. Gabriel saw this fresh in the early '70s and came away with a ton of wow, determined to make a similarly potent statement in his own idiom.

So, how did he do? Pretty well up to the end of side two. After that, the ideas thin out and the music loses a lot of its shape before a big finale saves the day. Kind of. Gabriel and his wife had a lot to deal with on the troubling experience of the birth of his first child. You can look that one up. Also, famed director William Friedkin, fresh from extraordinary success with The Exorcist, wanted to write a movie with him. After the promising start on Lamb, Gabriel was torn away from the task for a crucial time as the band got down to writing the music, forbidden to write lyrics themselves (which ban they had eventually to violate to finish the damn thing).

So, after all that, how's the music? Really good, as it happens. From the forward charge of the title track, through some crafty surrealistic imagery and a good band at their best, the sense that something rich and strange is unfolding before running low on power and going weird and cute when it should be still powering.

There is too much here to go track by track and some of it is transitional instrumentals. The opening piano figure is a harker to the band's 20th century orchestral music but the rocking body of the opening song is a look ahead. When the band choose against their old style wasteful noodling and concentrate on the purpose of each song, they triumph. The big surging wave of Fly on a Windshield is magnificent. The Carpet Crawlers is an ethereal joy. Then again, the goofy guitar solo in Counting out Time is as embarrassing as all jokes attempted by prog rockers. The closing track which is a kind of celebration of the universality in the individual is so perky and obnoxious it sounds like a game show theme. 

It's when the band find newer expressions like the odd time and queasy heaviness of the keyboard riff of Back in NYC with its robot voices and dark lyrics that we can see and hear them progressing beyond the pastoral, satirical, mythical concerns of their career to this point. This is about the alienness of a single mind and the often disturbing landscapes it conjures. For the first time, their musical virtuosity takes a back seat to the drama of the concept. Except when it doesn't and, without direction, they fall back into the old wheedling improv. That's why this can never be a perfect album, despite its impressive highlights.

The tour that followed was hampered by the kind of staging with film effects and complicated costumes that might have deserved a place in a contemporary Spinal Tap movie. For this and a book's worth of reasons, Peter Gabriel hung up his fox mask and fled, forming a solo career after a few years' rest to found a career that took him as high as that of the band he'd left behind.

That band went increasingly into the centre of the mainstream, shedding members to other careers or time out for solo projects, and doing a lot of the ruling of the middle with increasingly flavourless pop music. Complicating everything, new vocalist and incumbent drummer Phil Collins started his own solo career while remaining in the band. Everyone was having success and a happy ever after.

That's kind of the problem, though. All the prog rockers turned into standard radio rotation versions of what they'd been. However tiresome I found them, they had begun in the spirit of exploration and taken that to various peaks. The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway was one such but its peak concealed the sheer drop on the other side and when things changed they did what everyone else did and churned out the kind of hits that Patrick Bateman eulogised in American Psycho. See also The Wall, a few years later. There's no compelling Pink Floyd after it.

What-ifs are as futile as single disc track listings of The White Album. What would Genesis have made of Games Without Frontiers what would Gabriel have added to '80s Genesis? With Lamb we see what a band of fine players and solid compositional minds could do to make themselves more interesting. But life got in the way. Punching the clock felt a lot easier. So it should, maybe.

Listening notes: I chose the legit hi res download from an online shop. There's an issue with this, though. There are several effects that were on the original pressings that must have been added at mastering as they are no longer in evidence in subsequent releases. You can seek these out on YouTube - significantly Back in NYC, The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging, and The Colony of Slippermen - which is worth doing if you are interested in the record. Or you could hunt down an original vinyl copy, assuming you can afford to.

SUPERTRAMP'S CRIME OF THE CENTURY @ 50

School begins with an atmospheric blues harp wail and picks up a kind of English country garden funk as a thin voice talks about being at school and having to face bullying and conformity. It's a little like a track from Animals years ahead of that one. Bloody Well Right mixes statements of futility about having opinions with some mild metal and funny call and response choruses. These songs, and there will be more, never just start with a chord progression and follow the verse chorus pattern but have evocative intros, instrumental sections and shift musical genres abruptly.

Hide in Your Shell is an epic plea by the Roger Hodgson for the one he loves to open and trust and risk the worst of life and begin living it. It has the same plinking electric piano as the more famous song from this album (we'll get there) but its gentle lead verse vocals and pitch perfect stacked harmonies in the chorus lift it high. Asylum is more on the Randy Newman road as Rick Davies takes his American approach to music and delivers a shuffling power ballad about mental fragility. It opens to a huge showband finish and a tinkling piano playing off into the dark. And that is the old familiar end of side one after four songs.

The peppermint icecream bright Dreamer begins side two with Hodgson's headvoice vocals seemingly taunting someone for their absent-headed ways. A Townshendish bubbling middle section turns this around until the momentum builds to a gloriously shambling reiteration of the opening. I came home from piano lessons one day and saw this on Countdown and marvelled that this deliriously sweet music was possible. It would be years before I heard anything by The Beach Boys so this was a first. Love it to this day.

Davies is back for Rudy and what seems like a continuation of Asylum. The title character feels unseen and disconnected. A galloping orchestral middle section lets the music say more than the lyrics as both Davies and Hodgson trade lines about needing to toughen up. It's Davies epic to match Hodgson's Hide in Your Shell and works fine.

If Everyone was Listening takes the figure about the world as a stage from Shakespeare. It begins as a torchy plaintive ballad but goes all stagey, heavy with blows against the empire of modern life. I don't know how much meaning that sentence has but it does fit in with this song. The song works but it's one that happens when you leave it on rather than one that you head for when playing the record.

The title track is also stagey but there's more of an epic rock opera feel to it. Davies sings out in the dark to his own piano before big bass choirs join him. Big instrumental sections bolster what is a much shorter lyric than I remember. The second section is an elongated fade over a persistent piano figure which goes from a minor chord to its sixth below as orchestral instruments, guitar, sax and synthesis snake around it. It's perfectly well handled and doesn't outstay a second of its welcome.

Supertramp are only remembered by hits and memories radio stations, when someone picks up a 12 string acoustic and starts playing Give a Little Bit, and for providing the songs for ads. That sounds like a slight but it isn't. It means, apart from anything, that they made music with an instant appeal that leaves out any considerations of its original context. Songs like Dreamer could be from next week. That doesn't mean it was forward looking but that artists that consider themselves baroque pop or Wilsonian always end up sounding like Supertramp.

And not just Supertramp. They are in a margin that has not existed for decades and is a little hard to imagine now. They're not alone. These not quite pop or rock or prog outfits like 10CC, Roxy Music, Ace, ELO or Queen adopt anything that helps finish their song arrangements and sounds enough like the other tracks on an album to give them the appearance of being bands rather than songwriters with regular session musicians. Let Genesis, Pink Floyd, Emerson Lake and Palmer noodle and concept away on album charts and in stadiums, the Supertramp stratum could deliver hit singles and LPs with Hipgnosis cover art and a decent place in the AOR charts. No one was surprised if they made concept albums or gathered songs and you could leave their records on without getting up to skip tracks.

It wasn't just absorption. These acts took heart from the dawn of the age of the rock album in the late '60s when royalty bombed the culture with psychedelic opera, scrapbooks of their daily lives or the heavy ambition of a Tommy or S.F. Sorrow. Fans expected things of albums at this time. Whether it was the next two sides of Status Quo headbanging or Bowie's new sophisticated phase, they waited for statements with mindbending cover art and lyric sheets.

This was the band's breakthrough, fuelled by hits in the singles charts the world over and whoever did buy the first two albums had waited not just for this new statement but the success that followed it. This was a reward and more, being coherent and tastefully neat in the distribution of its ideas. At school, it was one of the records that engendered a lot of home taping and, along with Bowie and Led Zeppelin, joined the currency of the cassette swap market. I never owned this one on vinyl but when it recently came up on one of my usual HD online stores I shelled out for it and revisit it now and then with pleasure.

While I sounded like I was dismissing this band and their ilk up there, really, the point I was trying to get to was how when we lost this group of album orientated rock practitioners, we lost a lot of what an album could be. From punk onwards, rock albums began to sound samey all the way through and a value arose that a band should sound present a uniform sound from song to song and that exploration beyond that was all sorts of anathema. That's a pity as it makes a band's identity more pronounced than the music it presents and the music becomes a kind of brand power offering. The chopping and changing according to what a song needs that records in the tradition of this one sound like the songs are compositions, expressions of joys and shocks of living. So, I can snicker at this platter for its flared bombast here and there, but really, it still sounds like the kind of thing I would have waited for rather than just accepted when it arrived.

20 JAZZ FUNK GREATS by THROBBING GRISTLE @ 45

A friend at school told me that his mother had bought him a record to cheer him up on a sick day. It had THE BEATLES splashed across the cover but if you looked a lot closer there was fine print that said: The Ripoffs Play ...  Industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle get the joke out of the way quickly. The cover is all K-Tel: the four piece stand on the lush green grass near a cliff edge dressed a notch below smart casual but look all the more ordinary for all that. The opening track is the title song, 20 Jazz Funk Greats.

It begins as a kind of dinky synthesised dub track and continues with breathy yeahs and oohs while a very dub sounding trumpet honks through an echo until it's sinister. The idea was to lure some payday music fan to spend money on what looked like a record for the makeout den that would end up being harsh and depressing, about as erotic as the location on the cover. That grassy scene was (perhaps still is) one of the most notorious suicide spots in the world.

It gives its name to the title of the next track, an electronic atmosphere of foghorns and seagulls field-recorded or synthesised. This is a track that is meant to evoke the forbidding legend of the place but until you know that, it's a pleasant electronic drone.

Still Walking is a clicky electronic rhythm with phasing and panning effects as dissonant squeals stutters  sound out as a number of voices speak lines gently, as though sleep talking. Tanith is an instrumental of synthesised bass and glassy ethereal wafts along with more squeaky electronics. It could be from a sci-fi mystery tv show from the time.

The first track to feature written lyrics and a prominently mixed vocal. Genesis P. Orridge recites ideas about interpersonal manipulation with tape echo. Exotica begins with submarine groans and lazily played pentatonic celesta ringing lightly. Apart from the explosion near the end, it's a gentle, if a little eerie soundscape.

Hot on the Heels of Love thumps and fritters after Krafwerk's contemporary electronica with Cosi Fanny Tutti's breathy lyrics expressing a mix of erotic and troubling: "hot on the heels of love, I'm waiting for help from above". 

Persuasion starts with a ticking like a clock. A deep synthesised bass figure rings. Female screams that might be laughs or joyous, processed with delays and ring modulators and distortion. This is not just a replay of the first side's Convincing People. Genesis' dour droning voice narrates a monologue to a woman, attempting to get her to pose for pornographic photographs. It's relentless and sinister, a playing of manipulation of one by another. Gen's vocal occasionally rises to something like a blues influenced melody but mostly he keeps it down at a confidential level. The scenario is of someone used to doing this. It ends on the same ticking that began it.

And then Walkabout is constantly pleasant synthesiser instrumental using arpeggiation and string sounds. You keep waiting for something off to surface but it just keeps on track. Karftwerk were masters of this and their influence rules this track. It's the placing, though, between the ugly Persuasion and the next one.

A weird synth grind is joined by Genesis screaming into a delay, distant. What a Day. It hasn't been a good day and the violent-mooded voice wants you to know it. The idea might have been an oppressive slog but the brightness of the echoing voice and grounding electronica make it kind of hooky.

Six Six Sixties begins with the kind of guitar tone and riff that Sonic Youth would later base an entire career on, distorted and restless. Genesis recites a series of statements about the hazards of being alive, on the planet, in the universe. Genesis' claim is that he wrote the words down during a Ouija board session. They come across as cryptic rather than forbidding but the seance context adds an eeriness to them and the fact that the statement is not completed but, ending on the word "just" feels as though it was interrupted before the big advice could be given. A chance encounter with a spirit that had the answer but didn't or couldn't give it. The guitar fades. End of album.

This was the first fully studio-based record the band produced after two of mixed recordings and it feels a lot more coherent. But it's easy to get Throbbing Gristle wrong. People hear the term industrial and get an idea of the sound of factories and powerplants but the term had more to do with the level and commitment to the production of the material. The mission was confrontation and challenge and the first two LPs being both studio and live significantly remove the work from the bubble to the public area into performance rather than just statement.

20 Jazz Funk Greats changes this by being studio bound and intentionally contrived, without the spontaneity of the live arena with its give and take condition. This is what the group sounded like when no one was looking. From the joke of the title, cover art and opening track the progression is to insert the album under the skin of the listener rather than pummel them with slogans or the calibre of taunting confrontations that stuck to the industrial designation later (particularly when it was American).

That's why this album reaches more confidently over decades than the other early Throbbing Gristle releases which are, in a provocateur sense, more fun. It sounds like the kind of thoughts that occur in the morning of a week of news fatigue, that glimpse of the way the worst minds work and the logic of power consolidation. If you're unfamiliar, through youth or contemporary unawareness, this platter might strike you with a big so what. 

That thought reminds me of the time I read Lester Bangs's reaction to a Sex Pistols T-shirt that featured a boy with a hard on. Bangs was utterly outraged and concreted over the ick of it by trying to outdo it with a vision of a stadium of people having sex. He didn't leave it there, it was an admission that the simpler image on the T-shirt was effective because it transferred the intention of the thing: don't get offended by an erection, worry about the power that put the picture there. 

It's about drinking when you're shown the way to the water. No one has to tell you this is something bad, you need to work that out yourself. It didn't help Throbbing Gristle that their members performed in pornography, gave themselves nicknames like Sleazy but if you hadn't got it when you heard all the punk names like Rotten, Scabies or Vicious you probably wouldn't this time, either.

Peter Christopherson had worked for the monarchs of '70s cover art Hipgnosis, working on Wings's LP art Venus and Mars. He called in a favour and arranged for the use of Paul MacCartney's 16 track recorder to make this album. This is a lot less ironic if you listen to the last track on the Beatles' Revolver album with MacCartney's refulgent tapeloops squealing throughout and Ringo's trancey drumming. In fact, it's more of a creative descendant than a fun true life joke. It's still funny, though, and for reasons that make this album a landmark.

PiL's METAL BOX @ 45

The first track is called Albatross. Bass notes as thick as any dub track pulse and are joined by a solid drum pattern peppered with snare fills. High guitar squeaks and noodles sound constant and discordant. Lydon comes in on one side of the stereo image, subdued, singing fragments of a limited range melody. The lines are about albatrosses and an unbearable second person, sowing seeds of discontent, running away and killing the spirit of '68. This was an improv track concocted in the studio but the lines suggest unfinished business with the self-proclaimed manipulator of The Sex Pistols, Malcolm McClaren. The stabs on the first album were clearly not sufficient. The bird is the bringer of ill-fortune from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner whose narrator roams the earth, repeating his story of woe. The situationist students of the May '68 revolt in Paris provided McClaren with more non-comic stan-up material than Lydon found digestible. Sure, this ten minute long dirge might well have been off the cuff but Lydon was never shy of opining and if it fit then it was chosen. As significant is the same kind of outsize grind on an idee fixe might remind us of Theme that opened the first album but this time it is not an onslaught but quiet and relentless, clear to the point of being spacey. The lines float back past our ears the thoughts that stop us from sleeping, murmurs of worry.

Memories picks up the pace with wobbly flanged guitar and Lydon's voice in a more familiar reedy whine. This suddenly changes as thought someone  opened the mix's window. Repeat. Lydon's vocal takes on a kind of unschooled Islamic call to prayer. Lines of doubt and self accusation continue as the mix goes in and out of definition and the squealy electric Flamenco figure warbles onward. Swan Lake had been released as the single Death Disco. The drum pattern is authentically late '70s disco. Lydon wails about his helplessness to cope with his mother's drawn out death. Levene plays figures around the Tchaikovsky ballet theme as the vocal rises to a tireless scream and ghostly wails appear in the distance. The fade has a strange effect in that what sounds like a looped sample of synthesised strings starts at a loud note before toning down, out of rhythm with the rest of the song. Want to suggest something that's out of your control? Make it cross your rhythm patterns whenever it wants to.

Poptones is my favourite track on the album. It starts mid-phrase as the bass and drums provide a bedrock and the guitar plays increasingly hypnotic arpeggiated chords high on the fretboard. Lydon uses his attacking voice  to narrate a story from the news about a woman suffering assault after being driven to the country. The detail the victim recalled clearly was that the radio was playing what she described as poptones. Lydon's lyrics are fragmented but build a picture of chilling violence while the music keeps flowing, the guitar figure adds an eerie beauty to the atrocity. Careering has Levene on the synth instead of a guitar and he plays dissonant horror movie chords as Lydon's lyric tells of a gunman in Northern Ireland who lives as a suited city worker in London. A rugged bass and drums punch courses beneath the horrifying juxtaposition. "A face is raining across the border..."

No Birds takes its title from Keats's eerie poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci in which a knight is tempted by a supernatural beauty only to find himself enveloped in evil. Here the effect is transposed to what looks like suburbia. "This could be heaven, shallow spreads of ordered lawns..." But the more he describes it the more plainly static and breathless it appears. Graveyard begins, giving us the same dub groove with spiky guitar that speaks for the album in general But this time it's an instrumental. Levene's shining discords dance above the bedrock like bratty ghosts.

The Suit adds to a short bass figure repeated throughout, a series of snide taunts at conformity to a conventional life where if it's consumable it's good and vice versa. Lydon's vocal is more of a chant, the outsider kid smirking at the playground games and powerplays with observations that rise and fall through his cigarette smoke. Bad Baby pits a fractured drum pattern against an energetic bass groove and Levene's piercing horror synths as Lydon in a creepy high voice mixes the every day in the housing estate with the harrowing image of a baby abandoned in a car park. Everyone who sees it tells themself to ignore it until it vanishes. 

Socialist is an upbeat workout of beeping synthesisers with a bass groove. Chant begins with ragged guitar and a downmixed chanting of words love, war, fear, hate. Lydon's vocal snakes above it, distorted sneer. "It's not important. It's not worth a mention in the Guardian."  And then he repeats the word chant under the screaming guitar wash. After that study in sour, Radio 4's big warm synth strings wash feels almost sarcastic. Is this what you wanted after all that, it seems to ask. No drums but the bass is busy beneath, spodging around. It sounds improvised and left as is. And guess what, it's really lovely.

Unless you bought the later double vinyl Second Edition release, the bustling uniformity might be hard to take. Designer Dennis Morris' packaging was intended as a taunt to user friendly pop music delivery. The album was released as three twelve inch forty-fives which were stuffed tightly into a metal container that resembled a cine film cannister. The cans were hard to open and the discs were hard to get out without damage. Worse still, the metal used for the case was intended to rust and deteriorate over time and did. Propaganda by deed? Well, I never saw an original copy but I remember how funny I found the idea. The punk wars had failed but in the wake a new critical music was emerging with intent to disrupt and challenge, sometimes with a gleaming smile and sometimes with a guttural curse. Metal Box dissed its own market with this beautiful monstrosity. I wonder if anyone in that fevered era thought to keep their copy safe from its own intended doom?

When the conventional gatefold album came out and followed on from the debut with the title Second Edition, more people heard the music and experienced the one-song band from before was actually making music you could get into. It was a different deal to have to change the disc over and then the disc itself to hear the whole thing and then just to change four times. That strikes me as being a more benign measure. Take it in smaller doses, make each side special enough to go through those (mostly) two songs and think about them. My CD (yes, with a mini metal box which, yes, is rusting) presents everything in one long string and anyone who heard it first like this (I had it on a C-90 cassette, at first) will have come away exhausted. The smaller doses work a lot better. As I listened for this blog I began to split up the old side listings separately. That's when this record makes sense.

Metal Box is often given the accolade of being the apex of post punk. I don't find lists of cultural artefacts that interesting but I don't know if I'd agree, entirely. The anti-consumerist paradox of the packaging is gloriously of its time and the music is a strong consolidation of the tatters of the debut album. However, when you move beyond the purity of the concept, it's the album that it should have been. The big spacey concerns of Albatross tell us that we're in for something more seriously crafted and that is what we get.

Lydon has clearly moved on even as far as to put himself to one side of the stereo field or low in the mix to accommodate the overall project. Keith Levene joined the spiky discord brigade of difficult guitarists like The Banshees' John McKay and Gang of Four's Andy Gill in fashioning a post-rock sound that begged for development after its first few forays. This album of many drummers benefits from diversity and also from Jah Wobble's grounding bass work. It is a great work but to elevate it above a field of similarly great works misses the point, the assured and cool anonymity of it that graced the best of music for about five bristlingly rich years of musical exploration. Yes, it all got swallowed into the big mainstream whale but for that time when you could be scary without pretending you were a vampire, classical without faux-poshness, and music first without the music press, things changed enough to carry into the future and left plenty of archaeology for the curious listeners of nowdays. For the prickly contrarians who made this record, that's a pleasing feat that never has to sell out.