I didn't know about the Pretty Things. Bowie included two razorwire versions of their R&B originals which were highlights on his patchy Pinups album. When I moved to Melbourne in the mid 80s a friend lent me a copy of a PT compilation and I loved it: lean and mean blues based youthful machismo one bootprint dirtier than the early Stones and more disciplined than the Yardbirds.
But by my mid teens musical growth spurt (yes, I know how that sounds) the Pretty Things, like the Zombies, the Animals and the Troggs were in the deep shadow cast by the giants of their era. Unearthing the Kinks had taught me to scrounge through that shadow and I did hungrily but if the Kinks' original albums (ie not compilations) had been hard to find the Pretty Things might as well have been clients of Orwell's Ministry of Information. Even Bowie's mini revival on Pinups felt more like a memory of a great party than a pair of covers.
And then some time in the mid 90s I read a column (I think in the Age) that claimed that the PTs' SF Sorrow was the real first rock opera, preceeding the Who's Tommy by over a year. Ok, I thought, my carreerist income allows me this kind of investigation, let's find it and be wonderstruck. But it was nowhere to be found and I let the thread drop.
A few months back I spied a thumbnail in Youtube of the PTs playing a song from the fabled set on a tv show from the time. I played the clip.
Private Sorrow. There was a goofy mime in whiteface to one side but all I took in was the brilliant use of rhythm guitar and mellotron recorders to forge a military motif that absorbs the more cliched ratatat on the snare to create something more urgent and troubling. Through this is woven a fragile melody that could have gambolled above any of the era's pyschedelic sides but here is worrying for the lilt and lightness it uses to turn the entire piece spooky. A song about war becomes spooky. Why?
Well, using the kind of more poetic imagery of the pop music expansion in effect at the time we learn that Private Sorrow finds he can daydream in the trench as the twisted metal and bullets are flying through the air. Does this mean he gets through everything or does it mean that he becomes one of the killed or MIA listed in the emulated radio broadcast in the fade out (they are, as one theory pointed out, getting close to his surname)? There is no hamfisted irony you might expect from this, it's just left eerily unexplained.
So thanks to the magic of Youtube I found the entire album in hi-res available for my listening pleasure.
SF Sorrow is Born in a pacy and witty narrative bolstered by a bass vs acoustic interlock. Very 60s. There's even trumpety splendour, mellotrony strings and slide guitar standing in for sitar and big block harmonies. Bracelets of Fingers begins with acapella harmonies that Queen might have listened to closely, having more of a jazzy feel that anything Beatlesque. The song seems to combine childlike wonder with emerging sexuality. More exotica but it's kept trim. She Says Good Morning sees SF graduate from self amusement to engagement with the other sex. He's growing up. Just in time to get drafted into World War One. Private Sorrow ("seashells whistle let your mind drift awaaaay").
And then comes the song which still has little musical appeal for me but lifted the exercise from an unremarkable if well imagined rock buildungsroman into something far more intriguing. More messes of wah wah guitar cross cut with glacial block harmonies but the story is haunting. To write it out it sounds like a joke but the gravity of it and how that dominates the rest of the album lets us leave that behind. After the war Sorrow goes to America and sends for the she who said good morning to join him. She does. In the Hindenberg. He gets a glimpse of her before the zeppelin bursts into a gigantic airborne inferno. The rest of the album (i.e. three quarters of it) is about SF's grief, ageing and death.
The song Death has a beautiful vocal melody and a bass refrain from the pits of grief. A character borrowed from Haitian folklore (why?) chides Sorrow for wallowing and advises him not to waste his life but SF can see nothing but the girl he's lost and turns away from the help. Led on a mystical journey into something like the afterlife or a really big grey acid trip he emerges embittered, unstrusting and jaded, waiting for death as the Loneliest Person in the World.
This is where a feature that didn't make it on to the grooves of the album comes in handy. The songs were originally supplemented by narration which, though as poetical as the lyrics, does give a lot of context and form to the cycle. Baron Saturday leads Sorrow to the Well of Destiny where he is confronted with "the most painful sight of all". The theory that SF died in battle and spends the rest of the story denying that until he in confronted with it takes wing here and suggests that this is not simply the most downer of records released in the fade of flower power but something altogether more serious and troubled. In the age of acquarius the suggestion that self-awareness might be more like torture than grooviness would have gone down like the balloon in the fifth track, in mighty flames. Not such a mystery, then, about why this album was effectively buried for so long.
Inevitable Comparison with Tommy:
A comment common to a lot of the commentary on this point has it that SF Sorrow looks backwards to the psychedelia just closing the door on its way out where Tommy looks forward to the swelling world of prog rock to come. I don't think either of those is a good fit.
SF Sorrow is hampered by the excesses of producer Norman Smith who had forged such splendour for Pink Floyd's Piper at the Gates of Dawn but had through the same means made the follow up sound so dated. SF Sorrow has the over production bursting at the seams to the extent that if a new listener decades later likes it it is because they have listened through the wall of the stale approach.
Tommy by contrast was written and arranged for live performance by a rock band with three instrumentalists. It is lean on instrumentation and economical in its use of motifs. When the question of what is happening inside Tommy's head comes up we get a sudden experience of the extreme self-reference of a sense-deprived boy with a chorus of the closing prayer ("Listening to you I get the music ..."). And Tommy has sung monologue and dialogue rather than the figurative language of SF Sorrow. There are no torn velvet skies here but plenty of plain sentences. You have to work out that Bracelets of Fingers is largely about masturbation but there's no mistaking what Uncle Ernie is doing to Tommy. This is not a quality judgement I'm making here just a reflection on the different approaches. Neither Tommy nor SF Sorrow are much like a classical opera (though both were chiefly inspired by it) but Tommy gets much closer.
Actually, if you want a more accurate comparison between SF Sorrow and something that came later try The Wall, it's much closer to the mood and purpose than the outward looking Tommy.
But in the end it's the listening that decides. SF Sorrow was released the same week as The White Album and Beggar's Banquet. Beside those two and the recently released Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society SF Sorrow sounds like last year as those three bands pared back to lean protein in the wake of excess (ok, maybe not the Kinks).
This is a pity because it means that SF Sorrow's champions tend to be the wankers who will always claim the more obscure choice as the better because of its obscurity and then sell it as though they'd recorded it themselves. The album is made of all sorts of good things which will reward an adventurous listener many times over with musical riches in abundance and an appealingly chilling core which only improves with each listen. Curious? Look it up and listen.
If the excessive antique vibe of it puts you off Youtube the 1998 staging of it which includes the narration or the recent tribute to it Sorrow's Children. But if you do either of those, please go back to the original. You'll be glad you did.
PS: I forgot to add that another album closer to SF Sorrow than Tommy is Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Both involve a mystical journey through a great dark world of introspection backed by arrangements and production that date them too clearly to their eras (SF with departing psychedelia and Lamb with exhausting latter day prog rock). SF Sorrow, says it more neatly and so maintains it interest a lot easier. Anyway ...
Ambient 1 Music for Airports - Brian Eno: A series of sparse piano and mellotron themes loop until they start going out of synch and providing chance harmonies. After a few iterations (all of which sound like their own tracks) we are treated to a beautiful warm synthesiser version. I used to walk home after a night visiting friends or float away on it while the endone put some neural distance between me and my post op leg in 2012 and these days whenever I need to concentrate. I never get sick of it.
