The Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols: Part 2: The Spinning

The great big G-chord is being hammered like an engine bursting to life, descends through F E D and C and rests, growling on a lower G as a pure London voice yells RIGHT ... NOW. Then it's on. That voice like sheer blinding anger and Old Man Steptoe grabbed me by the throat and didn't let go. Iiiiiiiii am an antichrist, I am an anarchyste! The band below this voice which seemed to soar above any human body it might have belonged to chugs and slashes like an invasion force. Again, with every good song ever, it's only minutes long but it feels like I'm swimming around in it for hours. This is not as good as I remembered, it is impossibly better.

Dissssstroooy!

Ok, track 1. Seventeen. The tracks on the back are jumbled so I have to look at the label (not on Virgin, disappointingly, but Wizard, must have been a local licencing thing). A stutter on the drums and then a crashing big bent note. Johnny comes in aiming at someone. "You're only twenty nine!" A constant sneer at some middle class fat head who's a lazy sod which is the chorus: "I'm a lazy sod, I'm a lazy sod, I'm a lazy sod. I'm so laaaaazeeeey!" The anger is so unsmiling it's funny. Then Anarchy again. G-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-geeeeeeee!

Then BAM! Weirdly, a distant falsetto whoop like an opera singer in a jungle. It rings out over a clutch of raspberries before the grinding minor chord progression starts cutting in. 60s garage rock riff C Bb Eb C. A mission in a submarine but also watery love (with a huge sudden gush of overdriven guitar) and a great big chorus: Submiiiiiiiiision! It's also the only time Rotten does anything other than his spitting diction Cockney when he pronounces can't as cairnt, like an American. When he does it it doesn't sound like he's joining the convention as it's too sarcastic. Any few seconds of interview footage (which I'd seen in fair abundance by that time) told you that his sarcasm could cut reinforced concrete. I get the cunnilingus ref (fifteen year old schoolboy) but didn't get what it was donig in an album that gobbed so constantly at the culture around it. Oh ....

Pretty Vacant. Already knew it from tv. It was a mimed performance clip (Rotten misses a line at one point or the shot of him was put it regardless of its contradiction) but it felt like watching my team win. This loud through the stereo it's like being in a winning army. The menacing string skipping intro drones. The drums kick in but they're toms not snare hits. It's a gallop. The bass comes in with the first power chord and then there's Johnny snarling out the big fuck you to his detractors. We're so pretty we're so pretty va-cunt. Slam! And we don't caaaaaaaaaaaaaare! If Anarchy was an ecstasy this is another bite. It thrills through me.

New York still feels like a filler and I didn't get it until I read about it later in an interview.  Big and powerful but I pass through it. Still not a favourite.

EMI is powerful and bloody funny. A huge charging football stadium chant of searing spite. "...stupid fools who stand in line LIKE! EMI" Goooodbyyyyyyye, A&M raspberry. That was the end of the album but to me it's still just the end of side one. FLIP!

Jackboots on gravel. Guitar chords slice through before the band kicks in with the riff that sounds both heavy and jolly. I dowanna holiday inna sun! I wanna go to the new Belsun (I thought it was the Nouvelle Sun)! I wanna see some H-history now I gotta reason a bad economy! Now I gotta reason now I gotta reason now I gotta reason and I'm still waiting now I gotta reason to be waiteeeng The Berlin Wall!.... I didn't ask for sunshine and I got world war three. I'm lookin' over the wall AND THEY'RE LOOKING AT MEEEE! Now I gotta reason ..... Under the refrain about the reason the word Reason sounds like a herd of pissed yobbos goading ... another herd of pissed yobbos. After a blazing one note solo Rotten comes back "claustrophobiaaah there's too much paranoia". It's a big screaming nightmare with some distrubing order under the chaos and in its own way, while I'm throwing my fifteen year old self around the room, it's quite chilling. But wait...

A chromatic punch and growl that could be from a Sabbath song, slow and violent. And then suddenly it's going at a million kph. "She was a girl from Birmingham. She just had an abortion. She was a case of insanity. Her name was Pauline (I heard "Polly" for years) and she lived in a tree." Woah! Even as an embryonic leftie at that age I was pro-choice (and wasn't everyone under twenty-five?). The sheer violence of this one stopped me funning about and sit down with my eyes wide. "Bodyyyyyyy I'm not an animal!" A messy solo bit where Rotten is snarling about not being a loss of protein while the football crowd chant that they're not animals and I'm plastered to the back of the seat. Then there's a pause which just explodes into the kind of bludgeoning swearing I've never heard in music before. "FUCK THIS AND FUCK THAT FUCK IT ALL AND FUCK THE LITTLE BRRRRRATTTTT!" It's as though I've just seen someone have their arms hacked off. All they need to do for the rest of the song is gibber and power chord; the noise of it says more than a single further line. I'm sweating. I know it's summer in Townsville but I'm sweating from this. I've just been shocked by a rock song, a form already ageing by my first birthday. But here's the thing: I like it. Well, like... As I was being pushed around by it I felt a real thrill, a sick mix of anger and surrender. There had been no music at all before this moment that had approached that kind of power over me. I had to hear it again but I had to be ready.

A very thin distorted guitar crunches through an ascending barre chord riff and we're straight into No Feelings. The contempt is so childishly angry it's funny and in any case after what I've just been through it may as well be ABBA.

Liar begins with a mighty chugging on guitar and bass and climbs to a sawtooth vibrato: "Yoooooooou're in sus-pen-sion ... you're a liar" There are too many riffs already familiar that this just sounds like offcuts. It's easy to live through but I still don't care if I miss out on it today. Same with New York. I wonder now if they were both late in the recording or writing as they have more dynamics and arrangement about them. Hmm.

God Save the Queen. This one I missed on the few occasions it was played on tv. It wasn't played on the radio. So this was the first time for me. An oversized Eddie Cochrane riff settles to a chug as Rotten gleefully tears strips off Her Maj. As with abortion I was anti-monarchy and assumed everyone else my age thought the same. So all the stuff about all crimes are paid and potential H bomb sounded good to me but then the outro came up which finally sealed the deal for me. I didn't care about White Riots or anything happening at the Hammersmith Odeon or Down in the Tube Station at Midnight but before the song was over at first hearing I was shouting along with the football crowd in the coda: "NOOOOOOOO FUTURE NOOOOOOO FUTURE NOOOOOOO FUTURE NO FUTURE for you ......!"  Yep, where do I sign?

Problems is like No Feelings after that but still thrillingly angry with the deliciously intentional irritation of the repeated "problem problem problem" that extends beyond the backing. That was it, the end of what I thought was side two. I'd just spent about forty-five minutes with some of the most intense and shocking musical violence I'd ever known and I was shaking from shock and pleasure.

Yes, I was in. "And me only fifteen"... ;)

The Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols: Part 1: The Turning

Mark Hillman was a dick. He was a dick at high school when I knew him and though I have been spared all contact him since I have every conviction that he is still a dick and so shall a dick remain until the fall of his last sigh. I typed this not in anger but in description.

Mark Hillman was of clearly demonstrable intelligence. There is no requirement for a dick to be dullwitted. Many dicks rest on their intelligence to express their essential dickness. Really, what makes a dick a dick is the compulsion to attack anyone outside of the cushioned norm that has been prepared for them. They ridicule rather than examine. Now when you talking digs at breatharianiswm, astrology or creationism it's a matter of rational compulsion. Ridicule of The Sex Pistols, on the other hand, when it's happening back in 1977 by someone who at 16 sounds like he's fifty, is a saddening old-before-time unwitting confession.

Mark Hillman not only considered it sufficiently witty to pack all of his ridicule of the Sex Pistols by singing the word anarchy like a country cousin who'd downed too many Bundy and cokes: airnaaarcheee. He finished that with a smirk of sincere self-congratulation. That's all he had and he would drone it out and aim it at me whenever he thought of something unconventional or even just from current youth culture. To him my frame held all sourgrapes-subversion and horse-frightening quackery imaginable and his attack on the topic of punk rock was that: annnnnaaaaaarcheeee. There was no comeback to this that would reach its target with any effect, so tight was his grip on the lifeline of conformity.

While at first this angered me it didn't take long for me to feel saddened by it. I couldn't imagine him, lodged within his grey and sexless padding ever receiving a surprising cultural experience with pleasure. Not too long after that, as my confidence of my conviction that punk was the only legit alignment for anyone of my age and dissatisfaction with the mainstream, I wore Mark Hillman's jibes as a pinless badge of honour. There was a reason it took some time.

At the beginning of the Christmas holidays 1976 I sat in front of Weekend Magazine after the Sunday ABC news. Weekend Magazine was a kind of soft news showcase of curios from around the world. Something visually poetic about saffron gathering or the last steam trains in sugar cane farming were typical. My brother Stephen was watching with me and our eldest, Greg, wandered in. If there were any other stories on that edition of the show I have forgotten them because what I saw didn't so much change my life as make me aware of what it should be.

The story included a few firsts and each of them had the three of us reacting differently. Stephen and Greg guffawed at the concepts (though Greg did like the music). I was rapt. Punk rock. Sex Pistols. Johnny Rotten. All of that threw switches in my brain that had never been thrown before. The term sounded as good as a mammoth Jimmy Page riff chopped and replayed like fists hitting a wall (didn't know what sampling was then). Calling your band The Sex Pistols was beautifully childish and angry in a way that a fourteen year old could not just understand but instantly identify with. Johnny Rotten (at that stage both brothers were guffawing almost louder than the commentary) was more of that, like giving the forks to a statue of Captain Cook. And the outlandish audience looked as deliciously threatening as the sound playing under the story.

A clip from the video for Anarchy in the UK was featured unhampered by commentary was the last hook. The music was as good as everything else. In those five or so minutes I had been set free from mainstream culture and even the slightly exploratory diversion from it that Greg could provide. What I was seeing was the dimension I would seek to live in from that point on. While that became ever more figurative as time wore on the start it gave me away from the main track is a point that has never left me: if you don't like the big game make your own.

I spent the rest of the evening wondering how I could get that record. The full clip was played on the 1976 Top 50 hosted by Molly Meldrum and an assortment of local popsters. As with every song that captivates this one felt like I was living in it and though it only went for a few minutes it felt like I was playing around in it for hours. When I surfaced I barely heard Molly advise his electorate to buy the single as the band had been dropped from the label and would soon disappear from the shops. It had disappeared from Townsville shops but that's because it never entered them. I was reading RAM every fortnight and knew about mail order. I'd even taped some of the cruddy Led Zeppelin bootlegs that Win had bought that way but it never occured to me to buy a copy that way. In the 80s I saw a copy at a shop going for $40. I'd snap it up now for that price but not then. So what I had to do if I wanted to hear it again was wait for the album.

It was almost a year later that Never Mind the Bollocks came out and it was a tough wait. Some things helped like the debuts of the Damned, Clash and Jam. It felt exciting reading the interviews with Johnny Rotten in the NME. The photo of the Pistols signing the A&M contract outside Buckingham Palace with Sid giving the forks to someone out of shot was a thrill, a real one. There were sharp looking barbarians at the gates  and I wanted them to smash through the solid vinyl weatherboard portals of the big boring empire where I lived. There was shouting through the walls and torchlight glowing over them. The  mighty flavourless architectural monoliths of of-of-of prog rock and the lardy California drone would fall with a deafening crash, cut down by the searing noise of us.

I felt, really felt, that I had been granted a kind of cultural liberty by this, that school, its uniforms and uniformity, the great grey ridicule of the old-at-heart Mark Hillmans were just earthly constraints. I didn't smear my hair with Airfix glue or pierce my nose with a safety pin because by the time those things got to me they were uniform, too. Almost in reaction to this (I'm stretching the point here but not too far) my look if look I had grew more 60s except that every time I cut my hair it got shorter. Airnaaarchaay! Fuck you, Mark Hillman, you belong to yesterday where you probably still are .... I will admit, here, that yesterday is still winning. Anyway ...

God Save the Queen came out with its thrilling pub yobbo coda of noooooooooo fewchuh! and the tide just rose. By Pretty Vacant I was bursting. We needed that album. Now!

And then towards the end of the year my brother Michael gave me a lift into town. He was going to vote in what was to be the last election involving great reformer Gough Whitlam. I told him to do the right thing (he frowned in acknowledgement) and, clutching eight of my Nanna's dollars went off to buy her Christmas present from me, a copy of Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols. I had wanted it to be under the counter or at least in plain wrap but it was there at Palings, loud pink and yellow cover blaring, under S.

Michael wasn't impressed with this as he drove us back home. He got on the phone and went somewhere. I went to the rumpus room, lifted the lid on the turntable bay, unsheathed the record, checked the track listing on each side, and dropped it on to the platter.

To this day I still think of Side 2 as Side 1 because the song I wanted to start with was the second track on Side 2. It had been a year since I heard it last and that had been on tv. Was it anywhere near as good as that here in the rumpus room with its ear pummeling stereo? I lifted the needle and aimed it at the gap between tracks one and two and turned the volume up.

Commonality: The Breeders' Safrari

His name was Brian, he was my flatmate and he was what Americans call very needy.  If you let minutes pass without acknowledging him he'd find a way of thieving your attention. Once he established what that took he'd work on the formula until it was effortless. Over time this meant that all communication with him was predicated on the sarcasm or ridicule of his response. This way he was able to extract himself from household duties and any judgement against him arising from his neglect. Until...

One morning I stopped at his door (on my way downstairs) on hearing the most curious sound I'd heard him make. It was a little like the horsey laugh he'd insert at any moment where he felt self-conscious or was attempting to some blame due him, a mirthless stuttering falsetto. This was different. It was more drawn out and rose and fell in a more laboured pattern. It took me half way through my shower to realise he had been sobbing. Correction: he had wanted to sound like he'd been sobbing. He'd wanted me to hear it.

I let it go. Something had happened but his way of living reduced my concern for him to practical matters only. When he joined me in the lounge for some idle tv I let him get to it himself. Eventually it did, after a commercial break but I was more interested in the coffee and halva I had than what was on. Without looking away from the screen he told me that a friend of his had had a difficult labour which had resulted in the baby being strangled by its own umbilical cord. This would devastate the coldest heart and it got to me for a moment until I realised he was saying it to have an impact. It might have been partially true but I had too many memories of him trivialising the suffering of others by fabricating details to aggravate the story. Also, I could only remember how repellent his attempts were at sounding like he cared. I knew him far too well to consider that the pity he expressed was sucking inward; he wanted it all to himself. I afforded him a serious look and took another sip.

Towards the end of the day he understood he'd reached the limit of my sympathy for his emotional panhandling and he suggested Scrabble, one of the few things we shared. He volunteered to make pasta for dinner and we played while it cooked.

Like most highly affected people Brian confused the concepts of a large vocabulary with a vocabulary of large words. This materialist approach to language can lead to odd values. He discovered that pulchritude meant beauty and inserted it whenever he could, as though practicing until it sounded natural. (I'm of the type who thinks love and hate are big words and infinitesimal is a tiny one.) Also, like brinkmanshipping vocabularists, Brian delighted in correcting others' pronunciation and usage. Until I realised his proficiency in this stopped short of looking anything up in the dictionary but going with whatever the conversations (eg. the notion that cute means "ugly but interesting") decided I'd acquiesce for form's sake. After I'd heard him use "acrimonious" to mean its opposite repeatedly I curbed my usual concern in the hope that someone nastier than I would one day ridicule him for it.

But Scrabble is a numbers game using words and not the other way around. It can only improve your vocabulary if you encounter words you hadn't known. A large vocab is useful to begin with but really a general command of the language will set you up with decent chances as long as you are observant and can add. That's what Brian was good at, calculation. But, boy, was he good at it. I don't think I won a single game in the course of two years.

During this time we didn't have a stereo and would borrow ghetto blasters from anyone who could spare them. When we played Scrabble I had no objection to his putting on either of two cassettes: a mishmash of 50s commentary, novelty pop songs and Negativeland-style subversions of same and; a tape made from a cd that had come with a magazine. This last was mostly then current exponents of the new derivation-heavy rock bands and passed by in anodyne pleasantness. But one track stopped both of us. We'd actually stop playing, turn it up and listen.

A hit of a chord, some feedback and a sudden wall of multiracked guitars and then as suddenly a sparse few bars of the drums playing time and a wispy female vocal singing aah. Another wall of big distortion. Repeat. It was like the Pixies great lost demo. In fact it was the Breeders featuring an ex-Pixie. Getting past the big wall to the eerie spaces of the song and back through the wall took both of us to different but equally compelling places and on that day I witnessed the one moment that softened my congealing revulsion for Brian. Perhaps I'd heard the steam push the saucepan lid in the kitchen or just noticed the sound of the boiling water but I looked up. Brian's arms formed an arc that held his head perfectly still, a palm flattened on each temple. His eyes were down. He was crying silently.

As the song closed I got up from the table and went in to check the food.

Places in Sound: Portishead's Dummy

It was February 1997 and there was a heatwave. I was in my usual job slump between academic years and eagerly accepted a simple cataloguing gig at a clinic in Box Hill. It was the longest daily commute I've ever done. The lion's share of an hour in a train each way. It took me deep into suburbia. The train station was underneath a huge shopping complex. I liked that this different job was really different in those ways, not just same stuff in a building a few blocks away from the last job.

The work if dull was easy and air conditioned. I smoked then and going out for a puff every hour or so meant stepping into heat so strong you met it with a shiver like standing near a bonfire. An admin staffer took me aside and explained that a man smoking and pacing outside a family planning centre was not a good advertisement so I went to the fire escape and talked with some of the doctors and nurses and learned more about terminations than I'd ever asked.

I was having some trouble finding some form in a play I was trying to write when I finally got round to watching a documentary about Robert Crumb I'd taped from the ABC. The morning after that I stopped at the shopping centre news agent and bought a sketch pad, pencils, rubber and sharpener. Instead of just smoking during the breaks and lunch I started drawing the troublesome story and it started working as pictures. The next point of trouble with it is that it wasn't any good so I started another one. By the end of the week I had a short comic.

At the end of the first week I was best man at a friend's wedding which broke things up but the heatwave ground on. Trains were cancelled due to the danger of overheated tracks. When the trains did turn up their windows had been opened and by the end of the day were like fan forced ovens. Forty-plus minutes of that and the swelter at Flinders St Station is a relief. On the way home one afternoon I stopped at the complex's record shop and did something I'd kept putting off and bought a copy of Dummy.

Train heat home. I was filling a small jug with ice and water and trying to do something clever by putting a fan heater with the heat turned off just above it. It was good if you put your hand into the air stream but failed beyond that throw. Eventually, I was so plagued by images of electricity generation in the La Trobe Valley that I just kept the room closed tight against the desert heat and sweltered, sipping on ice water. Then I put this album on.

From the first big boomy chords of the Fender Rhodes piano you know you can relax. By that I don't mean ease back on your pillow and close your lids with a big Mantovani beam. A few crow like turntable scratches and a big tom turbulance and we're on. A thin voice, female tells of a heartbreak or trauma but keeps the facts of the case to herself. A skeletal finger or two of tremolo guitar and theremin reinforce the secrecy, telling us it's there but refusing us entry. So we have to start imagining. Imagination on that level of intensity takes work, concentration. Soon, the heat is something that happens to someone else. So, before I know it, from those first cucumber cool arpeggios, I'm relaxing.

A sampled or real cembalo jangles over the big picked bass intro of Sour Times, like a John Barry scored spy movie from the 60s. Nobody loves me. It's true ... not like you do. The girl who always gets it in the third act of a Le Carre or Deighton tale is singing this. We still don't know what it's about which means we have to make our own pictures and they are not fun but explode with style.

After this song I can't reliably name any titles except for It's a Fire and the final two. The association of title to song works differently on this album to most. When you first learn that Led Zep's Black Dog is called that you don't forget because there is no obviously relation between it and the sexrock words of it or its massive cathedral of riff. The jarring difference between title and sound aids the recollection. But the titles of Dummy's songs like Roads, Numb or Strangers could equally apply to any of the tracks. I remember It's a Fire because the song opens with those words and I was obsessed with it for days. Glory Box I remember because it was the famous one from the album and Biscuit probably because it came before Glory Box. But the others are so vaguely related to their music as to suggest the titles were the last thing added to them and only when the cover art needed them.

But the titles don't shed any light on the meanings or themes of the songs any more than the lyrics themselves which contain no clear definition. If they did they'd just be songs. This is not an album of songs as much as atmospheres with entrances and exits. Some form tableaux and others have their own movement but few behave like pop songs with melodic tension in the verses broken by elating choruses. There's nothing to be gained by matching up song to title; this is more a muted freak show or ghost train: you pay and enter and later emerge, chilled, wiser.

I choose the term atmospheres carefully. I have a few of my own that can occur to me like real memories. They are event free but groan with mood, a collection of images and sensations that almost stand in for real settings where things appropriate to their moods took place. One is a kind of large European manor house in grounds so expansive that it is probably rural. It is very green. The air is cool to the point of chill. The light is bright overcast. Someone has got out of a large black car in the long gravel driveway. There is a sense that some family event is happening at the house, perhaps outdoors, invisibly on the other side of the house. There is a sizeable copse of trees in front of the house. That's where I am, watching without intent. I'm choosing not to go and join the festivities.

I recently thought to draw this and in planning the picture I reversed its construction and identified it part by part. It's an assembly of moods, memories direct and indirect. My first memory is from infancy. I'm lying on a blanket at a picnic in a shady park. There's a kind of event going on around me. I recall the sound of bagpipes which would have been military (my hometown remains one of the largest military centres in the country). It's cool and green. The mood of mystery movie comes from mystery movies I saw while young but also from any number of images from the kind of urban sophisticate magazines my mother subscirbed to. From this and a range of other sensations I have built a kind of fantasy memory setting. The mood has a sense of intrigue but no negative emotion.

The other notable setting has even less definite place to it but its mood is stronger. The entire thing is set beneath a thick, unbroken cloud cover. It's cold. I see tall tin windmills, abandoned wooden buildings, wastelands, lonely country roads harsh with crow caws, wire fences. I hear distant effects of wind, loose metal banging, blown foliage. The images have colour but it is that of new, wet mud. There is a formless malevolance here, something that never takes action but much that has. There has been cruelty and torture here.

This is easily disassembled by direct memory of the farmland and country around Townsville and the weather is typical turn of the year wet. The fear and malevolance arise from the atrocity case that affected the entire district when I was a boy. Look up the MacKay girls case along with Arthur Stanley Brown and you'll find the details. A double rape and murder of children left ineptly re-clothed in a ditch outside the city. It's hard even today to think of this locale and its muddy colour without that phantom reappearing. This is where I went when I first heard Dummy. Even now, so long after that first hearing and further experiences of the album as part of the urbanity toolbox of its time, I cannot avoid that setting. It's behind every door, through every window.

Dummy's scenes can gather like collages of instruments like It's a Fire or just pump away like machines as you walk past them. When there are riffs they sound sampled, clipped from other magazines and pasted. Other sample material is warped and stretched or squashed into a higher pitch so that it can sound like wild shadowy animals or exotic birdlife. Old Fender Rhodes electric piano, blackfaced Fender amp tremolo on skeletal guitar lines from the heart of espionage, string sections bursting into the room which might or might not be synthesised or especially recorded, muted trumpets from old jazz; a treasurehouse of musical scraps reassembled for the eeriest show on the carnival midway. Through it all Beth Gibbons wails, whispers, croons and coos fragments of messages or old letters, some of them sound like they've been found at crime or suicide scenes.

Despite this, and the mental landscape I described before, Dummy is not a gloomy or dour musically. Coming near the beginnings of trip hop and from its geographical centre of Bristol, U.K. it helped forge the musical approach of a generation and was as de rigeur to the young innercity consumer as Tricky's Maxinequay just before it and Sinatra's Songs for Swingin' Lovers had decades before.

Trip hop was the U.K.'s answer to the backings to American hip hop. For over a decade the rappers were backed by some of the most inventive approach to musical construction since the asoprtion by psychedelia of the experiments of Stockhausen, Harry Partch and John Cage. Electronically centred, its pallets were effectively infinite; from metal to bebop to classical to exotic, nothing was beyond the reach of a hip hop record and they took us of journeys to distant suns. And that's before you get to all that pesky rapping.

The Brit response was similar to when U.K. bands took blues and rock and added classical, music hall, noise and musique concrete in the 60s. Ditch the non-applicable gansterism and politics and put melody on the top of it. And slow it down, what is this, a washing machine convention? Trip hop is a Euro distillation of an American agression, a process which inevitably adds the melancholy that the local weather alone demands. Dummy outdid Massive Attack and Tricky at their own game by adding settings that would only have diminished by overdefinition. What was left was doggedly pursued whimsy held in check by Gibbons' often brittle abstractions delivered with either icy detatchment or what feels like accurately remembered pain and fear.

A friend of mine said it well once when he described hearing Portishead over his shoulder at pubs, venues and parties but not up close. That's the difference. When you do lie back and step inside this album it wastes no time in taking control. You are not always led where you would willingly go if spruiked in at various points in the middle of the walk-through but when you enter into their dingy light and shadow you emerge feeling a little braver. There is much scarier music than this but little of it has so much cinema and so little theatre as this. There's the difference. It's a movie set in a carnival show not the show itself. The latex monsters in fluid filled jars, the leering hybrids in straw and tableaux of cruelty are experienced at a remove which might involve more substantial monstrosity at the next cut.

Dummy is one of the most evocative albums I have ever heard. It has the power of an Eraserhead and the musicality of the record box in the best op shop in the world. No music outside of something that has known the suffering of a Shostakovich or the starscapes of a Nick Drake comes close to forcing its evocations upon its listeners as this. It never fails me, even when I don't willingly start its tour from the opening blue grey Fender Rhodes to the sudden dubby echo of Gibbons yelling this is the beginning of forever and ever near the very end as the even bigger drum sound leads over an abyss. It so completely outstripped its many imitators that not even Portishead could recapture its exact blend in their increasingly sparse following catalogue. With the kind of mercy that it never displays itself, Dummy is one of a kind.

Masterclass with Bread and Jam: THE KINKS FILE

In 1978 the only thing I knew about The Kinks was a chapter in a years old book about British pop and that leader Ray Davies was acting like an embittered has-been: he upturned his table in a nightclub when the act on stage played a version of Tired of Waiting for You, taking the title as a snipe about him being a has been. The book chapter mixed an admiration for his work with a condemnation of what was then considered his downward spiral into alcohol. Then two things happened.

The first was Van Halen's cover version of You Really Got Me, their hit debut in Australia. I heard the tail end on the radio and thought I was hearing the original for the first time and couldn't believe how contemporary it sounded. Then I saw the clip of Zepellin wannabes and looked through them into the song which bashed its way with primal rage.

The second thing that happened was a clip of The Kinks doing their new single Sleepwalker on Countdown. Same kind of chunky chord guitar assault but with a vocal far more compelling than the cover version of YRGM. Something had to be done.

Win came to the rescue with an old compilation from his sister's collection which he taped for me.

The compression on the TEAC tape deck in the rumpus room really pumped the old recordings and the opening snarl of You Really Got Me burst out. And then when the weird guitar riff scanscion changes with the entry of the vocals and everything is locked into the new rhythm this relatively tiny production feels enormous. Nothing else I'd heard from that early in the 60s had anything like that power. Early 60s? It trumped the Van Halen version, making it sound like Cracker Night in a one ute town.

The compilation was a frustrating one, probably a mix of whatever was easily to hand and relatively licence free to use on release. There were great moments but also bewileringly naff ones. I needed more.

But if the Beatles back catalogue had been hard to find a few years before the Kinks' was impossible. You couldn't even find the more recent ones apart from Sleepwalker. I didn't get Sleepwalker, even though it was well written up everywhere because I didn't want the single to be a fluke and wanted to start at the beginning. I knew even then that I probably wouldn't have got into the Beatles if I'd only heard Wings or Walls and Bridges. And one day it happened.

I went into town with Mum and splintered off as usual to haunt the record shops. There in Palings I found The Kinks File, fresh as the morning's bread. It was a double with every single they'd released in the UK in the 60s. It was about nine dollars. I had three on me. I must have expected to find nothing of interest. After we got back home I raided my cash I nagged Mum to take me back into town. Mine!

That night Mum stopped me for a peculiar moment, hinting, as I worked out later, that she thought I'd been going back for drugs. If she'd been observant she would've noticed the record in my hands (encased in its period-correct  Palings paper bag) that contained something far more dangerous than THC.

It was a yardwork free Saturday and (with Stephen at Uni in Brisbane) I had the rumpus room to myself. On went the disc, down went the needle.

The Kinks' version of Long Tall Sally is history's worst. Regardless of how you rate the Beatles you'd have to agree that their version of the Little Richard number eclipses the original and can only be helpfully described as blistering. The Kinks' first single is a strange murmured version, the kind of thing a hipster duo would do now and succeed with. I have only heard it in its entirety in the last two years as it was part of the Kinks in Mono box set, failing to make even the multi disc compilations in the meantime. The unignorable fact of it is that The Kinks could not have been unaware of the fabs' version when they did their own. And then they went ahead with it. A lifelong conundrum.

After that this compilation fulfils the following requirements of compilation albums: it's instructive, it's compelling, it's fun.

My first impressions:

1. The production standards plummet below George Martin's work for the Beatles. At first this feels cheap but as the sides progress it assumes its own flavour. As soon as the brash opening of You Really Got Me stutters to life more and more intention appears in the smaller scale scene.

(On this pressing the sound was tinny and hollow. It fed back if I turned it up. If this had been almost any band but the Kinks it would have been the end of my fandom. Anyone who bangs on about the innate superiority of the vinyl experience should give these discs a spin. Bad mastering always equals bad listening, vinyl, cd, cassette, wax cylinder or stone tape. If you see this auctioned for a lot of money, go and find a recent remastered cd compilation and thank me later.)

2. After the embarrassing misstep of Long Tall Sally Ray Davies completes a lightning practical course in Beatlesque songcraft. Then, when You Really Got Me happens and Tired of Waiting For You soon after he has cleared his apprenticeship and breaks his own path, a lonely one until following generations do what I'm doing. Where he goes often sounds easy but there is a great deal of heft involved in creating that impression, heft we never feel and only know if we work out the songs ourselves and see what's inside them. There be wonders there.

3. Even the jubilant highs of Till the End of the Day or Everybody's Going to be Happy have the same sober melancholy as Well Respected Man or Waterloo Sunset. The middle eight of Set Me Free has a kind of psychotic beauty. "I don't want no one if I can't have you to myself..." is the kind of thing everyone who's ever been fourteen has felt but Ray's delivery is barely controlled, wide-eyed and experienced. You don't want to know what he will do (including to himself) if she says no. See My Friends has been endlessly debated to even accomodate gayness but, really, it still eludes easy definition beyond a longing far more naked than you'd expect from a mid 60s beat band. By the time you hit Shangri-La you are swept on a wave of deep sadness that is both elating and dangerously high.



4. After all the partying and boy/girl Friday night drama Ray Davies cared about what was around him. It's funny in Dedicated Follower of Fashion. It isn't in Well Respected Man, a minor key Cockney two-step observation of a ruling class predator in city clothing. In Dead End Street it goes from spirit of the blitz false cheer to a football chant of DEAD END! DEAD END! "What are we living for? Two roomed apartment on the second floor." That melancholy seethes with anger and almost before we know it this song feels like watching something grim starring Albert Finney. Waterloo Sunset takes down a long set of stone steps to show us a quite beautiful city scene observed, in case we should forget, by someone who protests that he doesn't need any friends. Everyone else in 1967 is turning into a hippy. And then there's Shangri-La again: "The little man who gets the train got a mortgage hanging over his head but he's too scared to complain cause he's conditioned that way." And the new estates keep rolling out, the lavatories have been moved inside along with everything else. Outside is just for show.

5. The Kinks are English. Not like Herman's Hermits or Steve Marriot's "'Ow's your bird's lumbago?" They are English like Graeme Greene, Alfred Hitchcock, Joyce Grenfell, Charles Dickens and Christmas Panto. They might have been stirred up by American rock and RnB but they put it in a council flat and let it dream of country gardens. They are reason No.1 why the British reinvention of American rock music in the 60s outstripped the original for decades.

If, like me, you found yourself in the middle of a Kinks compilation in the late 70s and at all inclined towards your own musical adventures you knew you were in class when you listened, an intensely practical class with the best, funniest and sharpest teacher in the system.

The Dark Inside the Sunshine: The Beatles' White Album

This one is so deeply engraved into my life as a listener that it's hard to know what to say and leave out. I can't put it off any longer so I'll just start somewhere.

My sister came back from a holiday in Brisbane bearing even more sophistication than normal and related with typical precision all the things that had happened there, all that she had touched and now possessed as worldliness. Also, she tabled a Darrell Lee Walnut log, mandatory purchase for anyone of us who went to Brisbane as a kind of proof that they'd been there. But she also had a strange story.

She'd heard a record that wasn't music so much as a collage of horror. Car crashes, crackling fires, people laughing at a funeral and a voice surfacing from the chaos repeating the words: number nine number nine number nine. The friend she'd stayed with had played it to her and spent the entire night talking about the codes in the record, how it referred to a death and was used by a family of murderers. What was it called? "Revolution 9", said Nita. I had a sudden image of a grainy black and white picture of a man screaming. That, to my mind, was the record cover. That night, as a way of protecting myself from the thought of it, I slept on the floor in the my sister's room. She was now immune from power of the record and could pass the immunity on. I couldn't sleep. At one point she turned over and in her sleep counted on the fingers of one hand and said something I couldn't make out but must have been a spell. Revolution 9 had been in the room that night. It had broken in and moved around in the dark.

A few years later when I was thirteen my brother Michael came by from one of his mystery treks (mysterious because I never asked and preferred to leave formless and intriguing) and brought a swag of LPs he'd picked up on his travels. Bowie, Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, and lots of Beatles. My own record buying was still almost a year off and the only thing like this collection had moved out with siblings like Michael, Greg and Rina. What was left was a small lineup of compilations and worn grooved classics from the antiquity of a few years back. But here was Sgt Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, Abbey Road and another one which I had to look at a few times to work out.

It was a double but opened from the top. The gatefold was a shiny laminated carboard of creamy white and there, when you looked properly, the words The Beatles appeared embossed at a careless angle. I wondered if Michael had bought this at a discount because of this fault. The sheaths were black paper. The thick vinyl of the discs bore the Apple label. Opening the gatefold only increased my foreboding. There were pictures of each Beatle but they looked dishevelled and criminal. The songs, too, had weird titles like Back in the USSR, Happiness is a Warm Gun, Cry Baby Cry, Glass Onion, Yer Blues, Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey. In the middle of all that there was Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da. That was the only title I recognised and it was a bouncy little number. It's presence in the list of kooky sounding titles seemed sinister as though we were meant to be lured into this dark place through this tiny morsel of familiarity. It looked like bait. And there, at the bottom of the list of green lettered words was Revolution 9. I almost threw the the record across the room. The chirpy Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da was the stranger with the lolly that let the intruder whose friends were killers and the dead waiting in the dark of the black shrouds around the discs. I put the album back in the pile and even left the room.

But the album was still there, compacted darkness in the light, giving the spirit of murder space in my house. It was like having a snake in the walls.

And I was angry. They were The Beatles. They did fun songs about firemen and yellow submarines. this album seemed like an unmasking of an evil that had fooled the world for years. Later, during those Christmas holidays I went down to the rumpus room and played through the album in tiny sampling touches with the stylus. There were no visible gaps between the tracks. This was the only way to do it safely. I must have inadvertantly missed every single hook on the first side. What I was getting sounded bland and anti-commercial. One night I set up a tape dub with the big TEAC deck and got about the first five or so of the second side. Michael left for university that week and took everything with him. I was robbed of my moment of courage.

The songs I had on tape (Martha My Dear to Piggies) were a lot better than my sampling had made out but they still creeped me out. Martha was a great song with a catchy piano part but went wrong in the middle eight. I'm So Tired seemed pointless but suspicious for all that. Blackbird sounded lonely and nocturnal. Piggies sounded sweet. The words were clearly satirical and the last line about the pigs eating their bacon sent shivers through me. I know it flowed from the satire but the thought felt violent and hating. I listened to the tape to work out the Martha My Dear intro but left the rest silent on the tape.

There were too many gaps in my guessing at the piano part for Martha and I gave up trying it. There was a lot of other music to get into in the meantime. There was the mighty and awesome Queen as well as anything new by Split Enz and the great tide of mid 70s pop that could laze like the worst of the previous decade on worn-through riffs and nothing lyrics (youtube The Bump by Kenny; yes a song about a particular dance but check it!) or a goldilocks mix of rock edge and pure sugary icing like Sailor's Glass of Champagne, any single by TMG or Steve Harley's Make Me Smile. But the Beatles weren't going away.

Someone, maybe in Allen Klein's office, maybe Klein himself if he still had any power over the back catalogue, realised that enough time had past to address a whole new pocket-moneyed generation of potential Beatle fans and began releasing old stock not seen in the shops for half a decade or more. A few pre Pepper albums appeared including early compilations but the big one that year was a double called The Beatles Rock and Roll Music. It had a gatefold and typically 70s cover art in that it was a realistic painting of the band in the early 60s on the front and the title looked like a neon sign. On the back was a rear view including a reversed neon sign. In the gatefold was a grab of imagery from the American 50s: a big car, a glass of Coke and maybe a hot dog. I think the idea was that the Beatles brought the 60s to the 50s but it was more likely to be the fifties nostalgia tide that was rising at the time with Happy Days and American Graffiti etc., all that boomer beware stuff. Win bought the first copy of this and lent it around for taping which we all did.

The first disc is early rockers including a lot of cover versions. Fantastic on the first few listens as it filled in the origins episodes on a lot of the music on the air even then. Hearing these Chuck Berry and Little Richard numbers through the ears of The Beatles meant I knew both without needing to hear the originals but also hearing them in ACDC, Hush, Sherbert, Skyhooks, Slade etc etc. But I couldn't relate to this for very long even if it was still around. It seemed as distant to me as Elvis whose early hits were the aural equivalent to op shop kitsch (which had to wait for decades for redemption).

The second disc ground on its first side in much the same way but ended on the single version of Revolution. This was built on old stuff but had typical Beatle intrusions (like the "an-y-how" chords which are classical in movement) and a berserk beginning of insanely distorted guitars and a scream I thought was a baby's (which made it weird and scary to me). Side four...

When I got to side four I was still in my school clothes because I'd been going over the first disc again and again. The rest of the present clan were watching tv after dinner and I was kneeling at the stereo with a pair of German headphones clamped on my head. Back in the USSR was fun but again so oldie that it fatigued rather than delighted. And then it changed.

A sudden scratchy insistent snarl on a distorted guitar, not the controlled fuzz tone of a T Rex but something wilder like a puma screech. The voice (Paul's) came in with a voice that sounded like he was on a rack, the high strings chord stretching below him, down as he went higher. When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide when I turn and I go for a RIDE and I get to the bottom and I see you  AGAAAAAAAAAIN YEAH YEAH YEAH! Suddenly there's a panzer division charging up from the lower depths, clanking, smashing, grinding. Paul keeps screaming beserker. I can't believe the force of it. My mouth is open and my eyes are wide. I hide behind my hands as it charges into my ears. HELTER SKELTER (sharp descending scale on the guitar) HELTER SKELTER (the falling figure again). Paul keeps screaming about breaking you and coming down fast. The noise rages on. Weirdly shimmery Beatle harmonies start up they don't fit well which just makes it worse. Squeals, screams, a big chunky bass, sounds of metal being stressed and breaking, chaos. The ending falls slowly apart but COMES BACK AGAIN with the sound of more twisting steel beams and heavy things falling. Finally the last screeching fall before Ringo screams, "I'VE GOT BLISTERS ON MY FINGERS!"

The next song starts but I reach into the player and lift the needle to get some silence. I can't speak or communicate what I have just experienced. My father is watching some UK comedy or cop show and Mum is in the next chair doing the same. Nita who might have had a word, is busy with some homework. Stephen?  Never. I put the needle back to the start of the track and live through it again. I have a notion about this.

I don't tape the album but return it to Win the next day with thanks. Win has older siblings who are as much music fans as mine. I ask him if there's a copy of the Beatles double album at his place, the one with the white cover. He says he'll check. That night I actually dream I have a copy of it. There are no copies in the local shops. It wouldn't be particularly expensive it's just not around.

The next day Win tells me he found his sister's copy and played it over dinner. Did he, did he get to Revolution 9? No, just the first side. What was that like? Every song was good.

Same dream more or less. I had a copy of the album. It was in a dark wooden box. The wood was stained like an antique. This wasn't a copy but a single artefact. If someone else had it then it meant that I couldn't. I went down to the rumpus room which was filled with yellow light and took the album out of the box and moved the discs in a circular motion before putting each on. The music sounded preclassical, Gregorian but played on clarinets and oboes. When I wake and remember that I don't have a copy of the album I feel a genuine pain, an aching lack.

Win tells me the whole family had the album on while dinner was on and they were setting the table. He laughed as he described Revolution 9, pronouncing it noine. Number noine, number noine? The upward inflection at the end making it sound goofy and Australian. The more he and Peter Broadbent giggle over it the more I know that it got to them, too, and they are just playing at pretending it didn't. I also feel envy. They have lived through it and I have not. I need my own copy.

For the next few weeks I go into town with Mum and try the record shops. Chandlers, Palings, others I've forgotten. Everyone has the Red and Blue albums, the old compilations that were somehow supposed to fulfil the need when every song on them is out of context. The White Album, even though I have never heard it in full, is a single artefact dangerous to break up. Look what happened when Helter Skelter got free on Rock and Roll Music. I would have to have the whole thing with me.

Meantime there were the new ones Sailor, Kenny, Ted Mulry Gang, Queen released the stupid Best Friend song off Opera, and Countdown's every precious second stumbled and screamed onward at the weekend. Then, towards the August holidays it was there in Chandlers, encased in a sleeve protector, white and shiny with the name embossed. $7.99 Mine. It was murder waiting for Mum to return to the car and the sun even then in the alleged late winter was pitiless. The record did, in fact warp a little while I waited.

Home! I put it on side one and felt the approaching jet engine take me up. Slam! Been away so long I hardly knew the place... Back in the USSR sounded routine on the compilation but here it was like being in the middle of the engine room. But - and -  It skipped. It started skipping and kept skipping. Dad noticed, came in and examined the disc. He showed me the side on view, how it was warped and how that was that. I realised this had pretty much been my doing when I'd leaned it against the car. It was shady but Townsville shady. Dad went back out to his expert futility in the yard. I put the record back on the platter and adjusted the counterweight on the stylus. Heavy for heavy. Then it behaved, Back in the USSR played flawlessly. If Dad heard that he probably frowned and shrugged.

Dear Prudence was purely beautiful. Sunny days and daisy chains with a big chunky bassline skipping down like a giant woodsprite and an intriguing guitar line with an insistence on a high string. Glass Onion shatters the gentle fade of Prudence with a tight chunky crunch. The words other song titles in them and then there's a sudden change at the end from rock to a shivery string section. It sounded like code. Ob-La-Di in this context adds to the tension because its cheer feels like a ploy. Wild Honey Pie after it sounds insane with its big loopy twangs and screaming. Bungalow Bill starts with classical guitar and then a football chorus and then a psychedelic verse in another time signature that seems both nursery rhyme and sinister. Gently Weeps comes on big with space and sadness. The lead guitar really does cry. A slight high George vocal shimmers over the solid band playing. There is nothing innocent, chirpy or fun about Happiness is a Warm Gun. The guitar arpeggio at the start is from a mystery movie and the vocals have a troubling coldness. Then the fuzz guitar frank Zappa section about the mother superior and the doowop fade out with the sexual innuendo and snare/gunshot at the end brought it to the end. That was only side one.

I went through side two impatiently. It was a group of songs I was largely familiar with and they went from strong to formless and bland. Julia had a jump in it which I didn't care about. Strange for me to think that now but I did then. I just wanted to get to side 3. When you don't want to hear Blackbird it seems to go for hours.

A big thunderous tom roll and hot dual guitar riff and we're into Birthday. Not much to it but it's fun and thickly rocking. Someone in the distance counts in Yer Blues and the darkness of the album returns. A snarling riff and dry and desperate vocal. He feels so lonely he could die. I knew that from the Elvis song. There it still sounded dark but here it came from the depths. Mother Nature's Son is lovely. Over twanged acoustic guitar (must be Paul) and subtle brass section. Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me and My Monkey. Slamming rock song with silly lyrics and a great little bass hook in the outro. Sexy Sadie opens with a piano progression made brittle by slapback echo. Cool vocal from John in front of sweet fabs harmonies. Somone done him wrong. Probably a groupie. (Supposedly changed from Maharishi, learnt much later.) Fade out with a beautiful falsetto improv by John. Then there's a few spiky notes on the distorted guitar. Snarl and seethe. I know what this is. Refer to the description above. No difference except this time it's louder and through the speakers. HELTER SKELTER! dununununun HELTER SKELTER! dununununununun and then straight after Ringo screams about his blisters the gentlest song on the album starts with a sad finger style figure on the acousitc. George and probably Paul almost whispering the harmonies. He's lost someone. It feels like about four in the morning. Whoever it is is gone forever and all he can do is pretend he can see her. A big middle eight just sounds like more pain. Something like a tree creaking and falling, a swelling organ chord and weird almost eastern falsetto. If it was late night before now it will never be day again. Has he hanged himself? Something has happened.

A cold Milo. Quickly!

Side 4 begins with the druggy sleeptalking version of Revolution which had been so manic on the compilation album. Bedroom acoustic playing a blues figure. "Take two." Lazy bright distorted Chuck Berry intro on the electric and we're in the middle of a big and spacy room with the voices and sounds tired but happy. Even then I imagined it filled with pot smoke. I like it but it's weird and assume it was the second version because I heard the fast one first. Honey Pie plods along but I like the clarinet-like guitar that I was surprised to find out John played. It reminded me of the way Brian May used his guitar tone to suggest other instruments. In fact (again, heard it first) Honey Pie reminded me of the ragtime songs on Night at the Opera. Savoy Truffle starts snipey and mean and ends that way. Never outstays its welcome and is welcome after Honey Pie. Cry Baby Cry smooths along like Sexy Sadie but gets bigger and spacier as it goes. Nursery nonsense could be code.

Then we get one of the creepiest moments on the record. A steady fingerstyle minor chord on an acoustic, like the rawhide riff. Paul sings in falsetto. Can you take me back where I come from? Can you take me back? It sounds like someone's ghost. It walks off without finishing the thought but seems ready to wail in the darkness. Fade.

Before I know it a restless swell of sounds rises and Number nine, number nine? Sounds like a BBC announcer. Whoa! I leap to the stereo and lift the needle. I can't do it, yet. It's daylight but there's no one around like there was with Helter Skelter the first time. I have to work my way. It was months before I heard Goodnight, the final song because there were no track divisions and I couldn't risk hearing any sound from the intruder.

Familiarity ironed out most of the dark spots and I got a Beatles songbook for my birthday which let me inside the songs. Nothing demystifies music more than playing it. We grew close, that album and I. Also, it had weathered its eight years of life far better than other albums considered milestones like Sgt Pepper or Led Zeppelin IV. The White Album sounded as normal and current as A Night at the Opera; the rock was hard edged, the campy ragtime as campy and even the jokes sounded natural and un-showbiz. To this day, despite the sharper innovations of Revolver or Magical Mystery Tour, the White Album feels fresher than the music that surrounded my first hearing it. English pop was still very goofy, coming out of glam (which I am still glad I missed) but hovering in a kind of novelty stasis. American music was unthinkable with its Eagles and Doobie Brothers blandness. The White Album had not been surpassed with its one side of tight packed songs, second of looser tries, third of consolidated adventure and fourth of looking at the universe through the horror of its atoms. That's how I thought of it and have had no need of replacing it as a standard for how a matured artist's album should present itself.

Meanwhile there was still IT. The monster of the fourth side. It lived, coiled in the stack in the rumpus room ready to rise and strike.

My sister Marina visited from Brisbane, bringing her hard won sophistication with her. Over mint tea we talked about the Beatles and she filled me in on as many of the creepy Paul-is-dead clues on the later albums. This cover (we spent a long time with Sgt Pepper), that song and then finally we had to get to the great cavern of Revolution 9. Well, I at least had a guide.

After Paul's ghost song an inaudible conversation and a few piano notes comes the chorus: number nine number nine number nine... looping and then folding itself back into the mix. A rough cut collage of patches of orchestral music. Some very sinister sounding speech which sounds like John. More looped orchestras, backwards guitar, breath, shouting, a baby, a screamed "right", a choir, more creepy scouse talking, car horns,piano yoko's voice, arabic chanting, random spoken phrases, screamingcreepyvoicecrashingbackwardsmusicnumberninenumberninenumbernineaahahhhahaahhhhcrashnoisecreepyvoicenumberninenumberninegunfirechoir Yoko's voice. "if you become naked" protesters, "hold the line hold the line!" soccer fans? "block that kick, block that kick!"

Syrupy strings slop out of the speakers before Ringo sings Goodnight which has no presence at all. I'm wide eyed and open mouthed but it's not the same as the first listen to Helter Skelter. We had a history of World War II in our home library which had a picture I had to struggle to look at. It was taken in the Buchenwald concentration camp. One of the stripe-clad inmates with a skull like starved face was kneeling over another, lying on the ground dying. The hard black and white of the image accentuated each crag and hollow of suffering on their faces. There was no hope in the situation. The photo had been taken by one of the liberating soldiers but liberty could not stop the flow of needless death right away. There had to be more leaking out of the light into darkness until it could be fixed. The sight of the photo was like being slapped in the eyes. Rightly or wrongly, the sensation of hearing Revolution 9 for the first time was the same.

There was nothing I could control about it, nothing that made sense to me. It felt like having a nightmare replayed. I needed to address it but Rina was on a roll in spooking me so just kept on with the secret signs of death and the great unravelled order that lay just beneath the surface of this record. Also, the darkness that was imported into its grooves by fans. She told me about Charles Manson and his murder hippies. The killings and the trial. I got out into the air of the August holidays and rode around on my bike for a while. Flashez would be on soon and Mike Meade would make me smile.

The album is still one of my favourites and when new formats or presentations of The Beatles come up it's always the first one I'll get. (Of the 2009 remasters I bought the usb stick in the little green apple for the stereo set and the box set of the mono which had the White Album exact down to the poster and the black disc sheaths.) It's a collection that I've since learned was the result of deep divisions in the band and at best was each with the others as a backing band. But while John sings Julia with himself it's a poignant song that blends the influences of his mother and Yoko. While the big boonjy country for kids' tv rhythm track of Don't Pass Me By still sounds like the others insulting Ringo it still sounds like a band. And at its tightest and toughest it's what rock music can sound like when it doesn't care when it's played or for whom.

The rest of the August holidays turned a few things. I had been tuning my guitar to open E minor (add one fingertip to get a major on every barre) and started learning how rock music was put together by listening and playing along. Wings released a massive double album and the 1966 Got To Get You Into My Life was released in the US and became a top 40 hit. All music I heard now had a standard for measurement and I became aware of how attracted I was to the things that I feared, how imagination will spring to life when gaps in knowledge prove troublesome, how music alone can do what it does.

By the end of the year when the world provided me with the next step (the Weekend Magazine soft news story on punk rock) I was eager for it and not too long after when the more audacious campaigns into undiscovered sound appeared from the realm of post punk I went back to the White Album and Revolution 9 became a favourite. No, an inspiration.

The Young Person's Guide to Grownedupness: Queen's A Night at the Opera

Why do I always remember it being winter? There was so much in the radio downstairs that poured out over the Christmas holidays and the month leading up to school that thickened the air with new sound that I would just sit in front of the big stereo in the rumpus room and breathe it in. Mostly I'd draw. Stills from imagined period dramas, Louis the Sun King or the trenches of Flanders. But it would have been constantly humid, shrill with mosquitoes and the belching rhythm of cane toads. It would have been boiling hot all day long.

Maybe it's that I used to listen a lot at night and the memory of the light suggests cooler temperatures (Townsville doesn't really have a winter, just a lessening of summer). Maybe it's the idea that sophistication is something that happens far from places like North Queensland where the winter seems permanent and its imposition of intellectual rigour compulsory. Around me, regardless of the arch artsiness of my elder siblings and their cronies, my parents' social circle, the flat tropical stasis hissed on, compressing the least wish of the slightest fancy to take wing.

There were no new inventions when I was thirteen. There was a tv show called The Inventors but that was all ratchets and advanced can openers. The real, ethereal spirit of the new and conquering idea was gone and we were doomed to lives on endless treadmills. Even the new music was old, the cardboard of its covers scuffed and the grooves within neglected.

I waged war on this and could because we had a sizeable stock of 78 records with old jazz and classical fare that I unearthed and played. I looked into aural canyons of huge symphonies and delighted in the final raspberry-like hiss of the hihat at the end of a ragtime song. I even used Dad's old reel to reel mono to create a radio play about gangsters set in the 20s, using these treasures and my magic with accents (the character called Gus was referred to as Gush).

A year after that I was familiar with Abbey Road and the Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed and began to expect that level of purpose in the songs I heard on the radio. If they didn't have that then they had to provide something in its place like a riff, melody or big chorus. I would listen to just enough lyrics to imagine stories in the songs of artistes whose primary function as artistes was to make a living out of their Iloveyouloveshelovesheloves lamingtons of sound. I didn't understand this at the time and considered a song on the radio to be a statement of something that the singer had discovered and needed to communicate to everyone else.

That doesn't really describe the average mid seventies pop song at all well. I found this out over months that felt like years. But there were enough anomalies to suggest that there was some signal in the noise. I remember hearing the deep male voice choir of one of the songs off Rick Wakeman's KIng Arthur album. They sounded like the dark ages but gave way to the gooey notes of a synthesiser and someone shouting a challenge to someone else. High drama but as I never heard it again (to this day, in fact) I had to let it pass. The song Slip Kid by the Who had some real drama in it about a new English civil war (I think). These were among a small selection of pickings in the weeds of the field, a few growths plump with drama. Music, even pop music, could be more than moonjunelovedove. It could be serious. And then I heard it.

What caught me was the acapella harmonies. These weren't like the ye olde voices in the Rick Wakeman track. They were airy and light and somehow a lot bigger, like a barbershop quartet in a bright white sci-fi setting. Something sad has happened. Anyway the wind blows doesn't really matter to me. The last words were repeated twice and they reached into the clouds. A slow arpeggio back and forth like a man swinging on a noose. Mama, Just killed a man ... Oh. His voice sounds like he's crying. He has to go, to leave us all behind and face he truth. Then soaring: Mamaaaaaaaaa ooooooh.... Higher still, falsetto: Carry on carry on ... and then almost mumbled as though nothing really happened.

Then we're at the trial. Strident marching piano chords. And then everything goes nuts like Gilbert and Sullivan on speed. I see a little silhouetto of a man. Scaramouche scaramouche will you do the fandango? Gilbert and Sullivan as imagined by Edward Lear. The nonsense syllables, whether they referred to anything or not sounded like scuttlebutt, pleading and judgement, Punch and Judy at the Old Bailey. There was even an impossibly high note for the finish: For me for me for meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Then we plummet into Slade like hard rock with a big wrenching riff. All that gentleness and silliness is now stadium shouting. So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye...  Just gotta get right out of here....

Then we are lifted by a fluid melodic guitar solo that sounds like a clarinet. And then the crying voice returns to plead that nothing really matters to him and the echo of fortune behind him: anwyay the wind blows....

Huh? How many songs had I just heard then? There was a barbershop quartet, a ballad, a mock opera, a rock song and the end of a ballad. In a near once-in-a-lifetime experience the DJ actually back announced. "That was Queen with Bohemian Rhapsody. It's a warm 25 in the city tonight..."

What? Queen? Bohemian? Did they take Hungarian Rhapsody and turn it into a pop song? How much Brahms did I know anyway? What did I just hear?

They didn't play it again all summer. I virtually rewrote it from the ground up trying to remember it. I told my sister about it and she assured me that I meant Quintessence who were always being shortened to Quin. There was no such band as Queen. It was probably illegal to call yourself that anyway. Go wash out your nasty little ears and listen to the radio properly. When I got back to school in February I asked around. Had anyone else heard it? Everyone had. What did they know about the song? The band? Nothing.

That Friday the shorter edition of Countdown was on for all the back-to-schools. I watched it at Nanna's. I hoped and hoped and - It was the second clip they played. I don't remember any other clip from the show. The barbershop opening was four heads in darkness and horror movie lighting. The ballad part looked like a live act. The big block harmonies and warbling from the operatic part used video feedback like the audio echo. Everything was being thrown at the studio wall. Actually, to be honest, even though it gets celebrated as being revolutionary the video for Bohemian Rhapsody looked like the wonky effects of any Dr Who episode. But what did I care about that when the song was there in front of me. They looked like a real rock band and peformed this minor but genuine miracle before me. The show was repeated on Saturday mornings so I watched it in the rumpus room tv at home in colour. Not much difference but the sound was better. At school we bickered over who did the funny bits better.

The news of the album arrived and I was the first on my block. A UK pressing with good thick cardboard on the cover from Ken Hurford's Import Records round the corner. I'd ruined the home stereo (I'm assuming that but I think I was just there when it happened) so that it didn't play both channels so I went next door to Nanna's and lowered the needle of her wartime victrola or whatever it was on to this pristine deep dish vinyl. Nita was there, too, having also been impressed. Nanna was happy for me to do this as she had declared the video listenable and obviously the work of serious young men (we're talking about Freddie Mercury, here, but we didn't know that then).

I liked the liner notes. No synthesisers, they said. Wow! Brian played a toy koto on one track (looked it up, well koto) and Freddie was responsible for the Bechstein debauchery. "Bechstein," Nanna snorted, as though I should have known, "is a piano." I had known what debauchery was.

Anyway, we heard the Bechstein first, glistening in like a Russian Debussy before some cellos and screeching echo guitar broke in with a horror movie moment which gave way to a stern piano vamp, irritated as though piqued at having been interrupted like that. Then after a sudden block harmony Freddie comes in angrily with Death on Two Legs and it's the best Bond theme ever (well, should've been). Everything's out in the open: a hard knuckled rhythm section, big harmonies, serpentine rockstar guitar, those elastic vocals that could growl underground and suddenly soar. And the piano, all the way through. It sounded like a real one. Not like the big 'verby pianos in ballads but like the ones in piano concertos. No synthesisers? Who'd need them?

Without a breath we go from hatred and anger to the kind of goopy tinkley thing the Beatles seemed to throw in that sounded like the twenties. Freddie through a megaphone and the big choir and Brian's dixieland jazzband made out of fuzz guitar which stopped me sudden. No synthesisers!

No breathing allowed as the engine noise splutters and roars and another voice screams that he's in love with his car. It's heavy and funny.

A breath and then - Ok, first dud out of four. John Deacon's You're My Best Friend comes on like the big thing in the papier mache costume in the kid's show that everyone says they like the best out of sympathy alone. It's a big boulder headed nong of a thing that I never played in full unless I was drawing and couldn't be bothered getting up to skip. Even the solo sounded like it was taking the piss. Where were we?

A spacey acoustic guitar shug with a sci-fi choir turns into 39, a folk stomper about interplanetary travel which also involves time travel. Different voice again. Guitarist, the one who played the toy koto. Great little short story. Sounds like The Seekers. Wonder if they ever covered.

Sweet Lady comes on like a Slade grind. Freddie even sounds a bit like Noddy. Rock song. Feels like the first one on the album. Straight after another one of those diddlydiddlydee ragtime thingies. End of side one.

Icy winds blow across the groove in side two. Plinky notes blow past and fall. That'd be the toy koto. A gentle harmony in the minor with mystical mien ends with a bang of cymbal, block harmony and marches in a doomladen crunch descanted by distant feedback. Freddie is serious again, the tune from somewhere in the 1490s and a story of prophecy and apocalypse. Metal big and heavy. Like Sabbath except that it keeps putting things from a deeper knowledge of music. The first chorus ends where you expect it will but the next ends somewhere else. These people didn't just come up with the riff, play it for an hour and put a solo over it, they affined it with a much earlier European tradition and orchestrated it around the idea of the lyric. But it doesn't sound like prog it sounds like metal. No synthesisers. And Brian May's signature rhythm tone is incredible, sounding both processed and natural (I wonder if there's some clean tone mixed in).  The middle is all acapella and echoplex but again it's complex harmonies and, oddly enough, cinema. This is a song in widescreen. (When my father did perform the few seconds of soldering that repaired the home stereo I made him test it with this song. He admitted that the middle section gave him "the willies".) And then BAM! back into metal and a big angry multitracked guitar tide from Brian May who sounds by this first listen's stage like no one else in particular. Another verse and chorus and some more guitar fury and then. But still I hear and still I dare not laugh at the mad man. BAM! We ease out on the wind and a gentle sad acoustic piece which ends in the same key as the next song. Well, ends, segues.

Love of My Life sounds like a parlour song. Not much to say beyond declaring its beauty. Brian May's solo (strange to call them that when they are all so layered) now sounds like a string quartet. And harp. Good Company another dixieland but one of Brian's. All thump and uke with barbershop harmonies. Another story this time about a lifetime love gone wrong. The closest they get to Beatlesque. We go out on another Brian setpiece, this time a whole jazz band which really sounds like a jazzband.

Bohemian Rhapsody. Already described but in context the opening vocal quartet continues the vocal texture of Good Company before breaking its own ground. After it where further? Home. The fat lady has sung. We stand for the national anthem ('nother Brian May wonder).

We are silent at this point. Wow! No words. I'm exhausted. Put it on again! Now!

These were sounds that were not bestowed by an older siblilng. They hadn't existed at the beginning of the previous year. I had found these sounds. This comedy and tragedy, this campy foppish foolery and grim cataclysm, this big goofy fun, this sarcasm, this fun. This was mine and up to me to share.

There was more.

I kept hearing for a while people around my age and a little younger air how long it took before they knew Freddie was gay. That's table talk. Look, if you were a teenager in the mid 70s when Queen broke through and didn't at least suspect that Freddie Mercury was gay then the naivete that descended through geological time and resulted in you might well convey an adaptive advantage but it saddens me to even think of it. As one of a family of overliterate, management class but Whitlam voting, secular minded, high flying yet pragmatic bourgeoise one of the worst sins that I, even at thirteen, could committ was to show a lack of worldliness. So when Nita smirked to me that Freddie was gay I shrugged and said, "sure".

We weren't exceptional. Everyone I knew at school who had an opinion knew as well and there was no great crsis of conscience from knowing it on the one hand and still using "poofter" as the worst air dagger you could aim at a fellow boy (if a girl said it you'd be ready for counselling). While I couldn't articulate the difference at the time I knew the feeling of it. And while it isn't true to say that if not for Freddie we would've stayed less tolerant with all the queer jokes from Dick Emery, Dave Allen, The Two Ronnies and Benny choking the airwaves nightly forcing it down. But with Freddie there was no shame to it: I mean our shame, shame to admit it shame to associate. If Freddie was gay the big thing about it was not that we cared but that he didn't care.

If you loved Freddie (and only the earlier cro magnons among us refused to) you didn't care either. And when it came to knowing real live people in your vicinity who were also gay it didn't matter then either. Put up against the greatness of things like this album and the ease of its pulverising virtuosity, the Ronnies and the Dicks looked old and numb. We didn't wipe homophobia out by singing along to Seaside Rendezvous but we emerged from our own adolescence without it. That, in large part, was Freddie Mercury who does not deserve the sticky museum label of genius because genius is never this much fun.

Gay? Of course he was fucking gay. I didn't know he was Indian!