1987 at 30

UK pop was getting twee. The strain in the early decade that brought us Altered Images and Haircut 100 rose like a Phoenix from the ashes of the post punk world. So, instead of new edges emerging from the creamy blandness of always triumphant pop we got The Housemartins and Stock Aitken and Waterman. I was working at a theatre in Fitzroy, earning ok pay and enjoying myself and, for the first time since I was about 12, the year didn't have much of a soundtrack to it. Really, looking back changes that impression but I left the year thinking of my life rather than its records: parties at houses with walls of mirror tiles, perms that would look like wigs either side of the timeline, Moet et Chandon Petite Liqueur at McCoppins, taking a girlfriend to see Blue Velvet at Hoyts, going decidedly solo to Eraserhead at the Valhalla and then with everyone to River's Edge, but also finding Darconville's Cat and Joysprick at the local library and then pretty much admitting it and giving up on the mighty mess of the novel I was trying to write (but really only redrafting passages of it until they were incomprehensible). 

LPs:

Strangeways Here We Come/The Smiths - To me the Smiths were a bland outfit with witty lyrics and the occasional strong song. I could make a great album out of half of each of Queen is Dead and the debut and the single How Soon is Now. This one I remember enjoying until it finished and then leaving my memory until I was in the next situation in which someone played it. Then, same thing.

The Joshua Tree/U2 - We got a new flatmate at the start of the year and I took up with her. It went from brilliant to dejection regularly and eventually just splodged out to indifference. She was a fan of U2 but you should also know that she was also a serious fan of a lot of other stuff of genuinely complex and difficult music. By this time every new U2 album sounded like the previous one. Like this did.

Within the Realm of a Dying Sun/Dead Can Dance - With their Factory Records style cover art and big, spooky musicality I couldn't help but love what I heard. One of the few acts I still eagerly listen to now. This one's a corker.

George Best/The Wedding Present - It sounded British, original yet part of its time despite being surrounded by an increasingly flavourless UK pop scene. You put it on and left it on. Two New Zealander brothers who were friends of the house accused the whole album of ripping off every Flying Nun band that ever existed. Only made me like Flying Nun bands more.

Talullah/The Go Betweens - If the single Right Here and its "smiley studio in Sydney" video was any indication (and it was) we were headed for a Go Betweens that would never come up with anything like a Stop Before You Say It again. Tallulah was nice and often engaging but from a much changed band. They still had some fine work ahead of them. The chorus of Bye Bye Pride remains one of my favourites of any pop song with its spine tingling vocal harmony. It reminds me of parties in St Kilda that we went to more dressed up than ever and also the last ones we ever crashed and how that made us feel old in our mid twenties. Ok, so I probably like it but I'm with its critics but I stand on the outer of them as the GoBs shouldn't have tried to sound like a Postcard band in the late '80s.

Document/REM - It was the following year's Green that bade me part ways with REM, an interesting band because they transcended their heavily derivative sound by being both interesting and American. I liked this one when it came out. I was out on Smith St on a Friday night, drinking with the irrepressible Mark Brooke. We stopped in at Leedin Records and I was surprised and delighted to find the new REM album. I had heard nothing about it. We got beer and went back to my share house which I blasted with this. Finest Worksong bashes out on track 1 and the rest keeps that up until side 2 slowly loses puff. A year later Green took even less time to wear off. After that it was lip service for a few years before I realised I didn't care about a band that had received a fair whack of my devotions. I still dig it but now it's more as a time capsule than music without day.

Locust Abortion Technician/Butthole Surfers - I wasn't just resistant to American bands getting cool I was resentful that all that guitar rock we thought we'd shamed to death in the punk wars just came back, cut its hair and did it all again and it was all American. It wasn't just outright horrible like Jason and the Scorchers, a lot of the times it was regurgitated Hendrix played against heaviness like The Butthole Surfers. I've already admitted to liking REM during this time but did so knowing that they were not only not challenging anything but feathering their own future stadiums. So, because I was so sniffy about American bands I came to them song by song (or via an unlabelled cassette as with Sonic Youth). One such was this album. From the designed to disturb title compounded by the cover art with the clowns and the tiny dog, it looked as contrived as you could get and still stop short of the mainstream. But, bit by bit, I softened enough to get a tape of this one. And I liked it. Whereas the rock revival had the Cure sound like Hendrix and REM sound like the Archies, Butthole Surfers grabbed samples from the radio, metal stomp riffs or wailing acid rock solos and somehow it all fulfilled the bright and creepy title and cover art. No one ever mentions this band when they talk about those others from Seattle in the 90s whose own sensibilities grew from this very creative mischief. I still prefer this.

Sister/Sonic Youth - The girl who was into U2 was also into Sonic Youth but that was after she moved in. She introduced the rest of the house to Evol so we all got into Sister when it was released. Now, I don't think it really stands. There are some great tracks like Schizophrenia or Cotton Crown but too much of it feels like filler these days.

Through the Looking Glass/Siouxsie and the Banshees - strange notion that a well established band should do a whole record of covers. While I appreciated how none of the approaches were remotely like the originals I had, by this time, lowered my expectations of almost every band I'd loved at the beginning of the decade.

Singles of Note:

Prince's Sign of the Times almost completely ripped off Donavon's Hurdy Gurdy Man but no one was allowed to say that.

That Petrol Emotion's Big Decision was a corker but featured the strange effect of the obscuring of its message by the indecipherable lyric (its author contrasted it with his previous band The Undertones' It's Gonna Happen as that had just been a "wee pop song").

It's Immaterial's dreamy swing time Rope still enchants even though the naivete of the lyric still jars this non-lyrics listener. I bought the single as it reminded me of the best of the keyboard heavy daze o' the early '80s

New Order's True Faith carried its bittersweet tale of childhood fascination on a tide of massive e-kick and snare, a cool croon from Bernard and a chorus that melts hearts.

Kylie's Locomotion was tolerated as it seemed tokenistic. She joined fellow Neighbour in a Funicello/Fabian retread that seemed quieter than the soft imagery of the video. Even Craig MacLachlan had a shot with another cover from the '60s. Kylie would just go back to neighbours, splice up with Jason and all would be forgiven. I was in my mid-20s and retained the naivete that nothing came of really mediocre things. Then, there was Confide in Me but that was over a decade later.

Eric B. & Rakim's Paid in Full had everything a hip hop record should have, vintage voice samples ("journey into sound" is still something I say when not saying anything else), that old school kick + snare + jazzy high hat + slithering bass and compelling vocal. Ofra Haza, sampled here, got an international career out of it, too. Hip hop's brief glory in the mid to late '80s on the mainstream charts now looks like a fad for novelty singles. Here, as in its native USA, it found its level where it was most needed, among the voiceless and the frowning. Of course there were poseurs, skinny white boys with reversed baseball caps who only reminded me of people with glue mohawks earlier in the decade. Every scene has these but for a brief time they were eclipsed by things like this. Pump up the volume pump up the volume pump up the volume pump up the volume ...

Tone Loc showed that it not only wouldn't be all good but was never going to be with Funky Cold Medina. If there had been a danger of rap getting sold as novelty party records this would be exhibit A along with Morris Minor and the Majors' Stutter Rap. Still, we loved it at three a.m. on Rage and renamed any mixed drink after the one in the title. Errrngh errngh ern ern er-erngh!

Fairground Attraction provided anyone who still looked to the UK for inspiration that it wasn't going to happen. Per-er-er-er-fect sounded like Steely Dan unplugged but was thought of highly. It made me wince.

1967 at 50: PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN - PINK FLOYD

Some time in the late seventies I got mum to impulse buy a book called Rock Life. It was a series of articles about some of the more towering figures of British rock. Vintage 1973 it featured ex Beatles (and only John and Paul) and focused on the central figures of big acts like Pete Townshend or Ray Davies. While not deep it was a great primer for me to go hunting for records. I was aware of most of the bands but it being the time and I being my age the spectre of Pink Floyd was one of the chapters I left to last (see also Van Morrison). When I did it was to encounter the most sustained description of Syd Barrett I'd come across. He was loopy, unpredictable and left a great mark. There was a photo of him with the band. They were lined up on bleachers at different heights like a school photo. It was a rare picture of the five piece that included Dave Gilmour. Syd was miles away, eyes like the black coals in Crazy Diamond, hair so unkempt it looked like it had matted in the shape the wind had blown it. He looked dangerous, infectious, as though his gaze alone would afflict you. I wanted to be that.

As with Revolver I found a copy of Piper at the Gates of Dawn among the collections of friends of siblings. Christmas holidays 1978-9. A mild summer that tasted of scotch and dry and sounded like Elvis Costello. As that might suggest, the afternoon I put it on and listened in headphones in the rumpus room downstairs is golden with nostalgia. I'll end that here.

Astonomie Dominie opens with what sounds like mission control radio voices (but are really band members unless Houston employed an unmistakably Cambridge plum voice at some point in the psychedelic era) that give way to the lift off of palm muted bass and guitar. A wash of vocal harmonies adds light as a choir of Barrettian word play suggests interplanetary travel. A big chromatic riff descends with a strangely merged organ and vocal falsetto. The instrumental centre of the song assumes its station smoothly without sounding like a solo that will last an average three zone bus trip. But there really are no solos here as much as lightly explored textures. Imagine an English Beach Boys (the accents are uncompromisingly non-American) from the Smile era.

Lucifer Sam is the coolest song ever written to a cat with a spy movie guitar riff. Syd's Fender Esquire tones are really beautiful on this one, clean but hot, chiming and ringing. The vocals are close harmony but there's no esoterica like the last song, it's all London rock and roll. And under all the banging and ringing there's a strange warm flutey part that might be an organ or even a mellotron.

Matilda Mother begins with a white light organ note beaming through a descending bass line which comes to a soft landing as Syd's vocal starts, a single note insisting over a descent telling what sounds like a children's bedtime story about a king who ruled a land. The harmony chorus comes in with the child's plea, "oh, mother, tell me more". But then a sour double time minor figure coupled in the vocal asks why she leaves him. From here we swing between the wonder in the child's mind (including huge fantastical landscapes in the instrumental section) and the corner of dejection between story time and dreams with only the nightlight for cheer against the dark. Seekers of the early signs of Syd's affliction might find riches here but it's really pretty straightforward and imaginative rather than deranged.

A dissonant drone on the organ begins Flaming like an electric engine. Syd chirps in with the whimsy of a Cambridge riverside picnic and answered by a loopy recorder. Playfully spying on a friend he sings of the joy of hiding and watching but then we're travelling by telephone and screaming through the starlit sky as his daydreams send him soaring. This song, beginning as electrically as it does surprises us by letting a clean wide acoustic guitar provide the bedrock. The winsome, cheeky melody returns after an instrumental section of tacked pianos and electro manipulation, ever rising. Pure psychedelic charm.

Pow R Toc H starts with a muffled thump answered by a bass and series of vocal sounds like ch-ch or a falsetto-ed doy-doy and settles into a brisk jazz workout which intensifies into something more jammy and psychedelic. I don't skip it anymore but I'd never go straight to it.

Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk bangs in with a beat band chordy rock backing to a call and response vocal of a whispered "doctor doctor" and series of thin harmony vocals saying things like "gold is red". The organ comes in and meanders. Some whispered vocals here and there. Don't skip this either, mostly. Roger Waters' first byline for the band. Well, he made up for it.

Interstellar Overdrive bashes straight into the big descending riff, repeating it until its exhausted then intentionally collapsing into a series of more spacey passages. Clearly an adaptation of a longer live workout that is suggested by the recording without too much insistence, leaving it feeling half baked rather than condensed. Unless I'm really concentrating on something I'm doing while listening, I'll skip this one.

The tick tock rhythm and octave used more effectively in the later See Emily Play starts the Gnome before Syd enters in children's lit mode, somewhere posher than Ray Davies in bucolic operation. Twee but gets away with it. It's Syd.

Chapter 24 couches Syd's voice in oboes and other orchestral intruments as he guides us through the i-ching. Rick Wright's keyboards take up the oboe as Syd's vocals get expanded by masses of reverb. Strong melody and lovely harmonies allow me to forget the cod mysticism (a tautology for me).

A click clack start with an oboe floating in the air around the harvest bonfire as Syd comes in with a serpentine melody fleshed out with slightly creepy descriptions of a scarecrow that a child might offer. The fadeout features a beautiful acoustic twelve string figure enriched by bowed basses and an ever more buoyant oboe. A miniature of pure beauty.

"I've got a bike, you can ride if you like..." Syd channels his prepubescent self at the moment of awakening as these big happy declarations over the clashing and hammering alternate with the half spoken: "you're the kind of girl who fits in with my world. I'll get you anything, everything if you want thing." This is delivered over a loopy theremin either rising or falling the way that crazy people in cartoons or thrillers sound. Finally, after verses about gingerbread men, a mouse called Gerald the finale is about a room filled with musical tunes most of which are clockwork. Then we suddenly plunge into that very thing with clicks and tocks , hammering, chimes, tools, a whole workshop of hitting and ringing which is overcome by a rising loop of something that could be a squeeze toy sound, bird call or a sped up voice that sounds more sinister with every repetition until it, too, fades. Actually, it sounds very similar in character to the run out groove loop of Sgt Pepper which was being recorded in the next studio at the time by Norman Smith's old boss George Martin.

Smith did a lot to curb the band's live act from taking over, directing them through take after take of numbers like Interstellar Overdrive that would work as a recording. Here's the problem, though: a side of that would have sounded like Pink Floyd the way their audience knew them, trippy and exploring, but a recognition and pursuit of Barrett's melodic gifts and strange childlike lyrics presented something far more accessible and individual. The record doesn't recover from the the tension of these contrary forces. Syd's vocal songs sound like he's backed by a band rather than a band in total (unlike the comparable Kinks) and the jamming sections never quite lift off which editing in post might have allowed. The epic promised by Astronomy Domine with its radio calls and surge into outer space is not sustained.

So, why do I still like the album? Well, while I've never quite got to the point of listening to the ones I'd skip with renewed vigour I can let the whole thing happen now. More pointedly, I will dive into the sequences of Syd-centric numbers which are psychedelic by association rather than at core. But that's it for me, an album of good bits between dull ones. Norman Smith seemed to find a path to working with the band more effectively as evinced by the singles See Emily Play and Apples and Oranges and the post Barrett albums Saucer Full of Secrets and Ummagumma. Until then there was this uneasy collision between the band as a practicing unit and a backdrop to its singer which prevent it from the cohesion that the band would soon be pursuing without fear or favour.

Syd's story is better known now than it was and the band's tale is part of rock dinosaur legend. Speculation about a version of history where he continued contributing is answered easily by Jugband Blues and the solo albums which, while often inspiring, can terrify by their unfocused wandering. Whatever Syd's condition was that separated him from the rest of the world his messy exit continued for years of decreasingly effective creative attempts. The rest of the band recruited an old friend who joined them in the stratosphere. Before that there was this awkward child who could recite Wind in the Willows as thought he'd written it himself but also who could stare at his shoes for whole afternoons without noticing how cold it had become.

1967 at 50: SGT PEPPER's LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND - THE BEATLES

It was fifty years ago today ... at the beginning of two months ago as I write. My memories of this one have nothing to do with its initial release. The closest I can come is the fragmented recollection of looking at the gatefold of the members of the band and thinking that Ringo was the one with the glasses. I only knew his name because it sounded like a cartoon character.

I can't even swear I heard the record at the time. Too young. My memory of this as a new release is a family memory, not a personal one: my Aunt Sandy returned from a year of nursing in the U.K. and presented my eldest brother with a copy of the record. Laminated, glossy cardboard sleeve and lots of colour and big bold sound. But that's almost hearsay. I remember seeing my sister lower her head in a kind of prayer at some news on the radio around the same time. Same thing. That was when Prime Minister Harold Holt went missing forever off Cheviot Beach in 1967. Sgt Pepper and I don't go back that far as friends. That happened later.

When my brother Michael descended upon the house for his uni holidays he brought his entourage and a few crates of LPs. One afternoon when I was drawing in the rumpus room he came in and put Sgt Pepper on to test the stereo system Dad had finished making that year. Dad had had made to enormous cabinets for the front speaker but also had another two speakers mounted on the rear wall just under the ceiling. Michael had the notion that this made it quadraphonic. When the first lead guitar lashes out in the opening song he grinned and pointed to the rear. That was all the proof I needed: Sgt Pepper was great because the Beatles had invented quadraphonic sound and made an album of great songs to prove it. I listened to all those aural textures and the strong central voices and harmonies, the great range of styles, and knew that all of modern rock music had started there the way that modern history starts with the French Revolution.

You see what I mean? I knew nothing about the band or their history and already I was making things up about them. This is what a dangerous little learning does; you like something so you make mythology for it. Michael also had Magical Mystery Tour with him and the White Album. The latter scared me a little with its horror soundscapes and songs about cannibalistic pigs but Magical Mystery Tour plugged straight into the nervous system of a kid whose only musical love was classical but needed prodding if he was to survive the impending rack of high school. The Beatles to me were from the get go as sophisticated as they were in 1967 and, for all I knew, always had been (I heard the earlier stuff a lot later). I got through the door of rock music with an instant credentials.

That wasn't the door to any kind of credibility with the natives of my age, though. Countdown and a lot of pretending saw to that until I realised that it didn't really matter what I liked as long as it wasn't classical (which I never gave up). This made me tolerate the adolescent mainstream rather than gleefully involve myself in it but that meant that liking The Beatles put me both outside (which I was used to and still happy about) and deep inside. What all that meant was that I was in touch with a classic, something from a former generation but also outside of time. Its reputation by the mid seventies put it at the apex of all rock albums. I just so happened to like it.

So, to me any nostalgia from hearing the album had no flowers in its hair, it wore a blue and grey school uniform, drew music fuelled dreamscapes in pencil and marvelled at his sisters singing along to A Day in the Life and getting the perfectly pitched note at the end of the line "nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Loooooooooooords." So it was never the big groundbreaking edifice of music for me but a record I loved and judged others by. I heard it in Queen's A Night at the Opera (well, any Queen album from the seventies) and disappointed that there wasn't more of it in Skyhooks' Living in the 70s.

I've had a few copies. I bought it as a U.S. pressing on Apple from Ken Hurford's import records around the corner. It didn't have the weird loop at the end and it was on the wrong label but it did have the gatefold and the cutout sheet (the local edition was a single sleeve). Until the following year's Never Mind The Bollocks finally got released it was my most played album. Then I bought an original mono edition for 99 cents at the Record Market in Brisbane (the guy checked the price ticket a few times but had to sell it to me for that. I didn't quite appreciate mono at the time so I gave it to a friend for helping me with some recordings in the eighties just before I left Brisbane. I bought the CD which was the only Beatles reissue to have a slip cover and booklet. Of the remasters in 2009 I bought both the stereo albums as hi-res flacs on the usb stick lodged inside the little aluminium apple and the mono box set. And this year I also bought the super deluxe box set with Giles Martin's more contemporary mix with centred bass, drums, and lead vocals, discs of sessions and outtakes, the mono mix and surround mixes on dvd and blu-ray. At some point in the future when we add to our music collections by tapping our temples and ramming our heads into media walls so that the downloads of our choice transfer to the microchip in our cerebral cortices I'll probably get a version of Pepper in that format, as well.

But Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is an album, a record by a pop group. When you remove the hype you have thirteen songs that delight or not. They delight me, still, as a whole sequence and as individual songs. The effect of the whole album is exhilarating with its great range of textures and colours, from the chorus of Lucy in the Sky through the eerie drones of Within You Without You to the delicate vocals and cataclysm of A Day in the Life.

Because I heard it closely for the first time in the seventies the sound of the tampuras buzzing through so many of the tracks I assumed was a synthesiser. Same went for the big flitty chaos at the end of Mr Kite. It didn't sound like a normal rock band but so much of it sound like records from the time of my discovery of it rather than its own. It didn't occur to me until I found out much more about the time of its creation that it was a groundbreaking album (and a very good one).

But hype and a tireless promotional machine have ways of rendering criticism meaningless and celebratory accounts into formless gushes. So, I won't be talking track by track or going into any detail for this one. If a new edition is released there will be millions of words prepared in advance to once again describe the sounds and songs. It's one of the easiest albums to get to hear and is best heard for oneself.

I will say that Giles Martin's contemporary stereo mix is impressive and respectful, if it does approach loudness war excess in the mastered image. The original mono is still the strongest indicator of what the first listeners heard and remains the closest to the band's intention. The surround mixes are also impressive by restraint. My copy of the boxed super deluxe set of the 50th Anniversary version arrived in time for an anniversary play but the week was busy and exhausting. At the end of it, tired unto collapse I had no wish to go out and remembered the blu-ray with the hi-res 5.1 mixes. I put the disc in, staggered to the couch, buried my body under the doona and lowered into a dozing haze as the orchestra tuned up and the restless audience shuffled. The first big electric chords clanged out and the stinging lead licks followed and MacCartney's excited scream welcomed me to the show. And I joined in falling beneath or surfacing into its warm colourful flow. Yep, don't care at all for the nay sayers neighing: this is a great record.

1967 at 50: DAVID BOWIE

You love David Bowie, don't you? Of course, you do. Everyone does. But I'd bet out of all his albums in your collection you don't have this one. You might even look at the cover and then the track list and think it's a compilation of his early quirky songs. Read on.

It gets you from the off with a bright, folky oboe motif with handclaps. Bowie's natural London tones tell us the funny but sad tale of grown up child Uncle Arthur whose attempt to escape from his mother's dominance into happy wedlock is thwarted because his new bride isn't his mum. A British kitchen sink film in two minutes and seven seconds. Sell me a Coat is a kind Disneyfied Paint it Black with a gorgeous orchestral arrangement. Rubber Band is all Edwardian music hall about a romantic oneupmanship. You could easily transpose it to the Carnaby St world of rock stars in old military uniforms of the swinging London where Bowie lived and traded but I don't think we're even that deep here. Love You Till Tuesday is an impossibly cute note to a girl that she could have him all to herself for a limited time only if she played her cards right (he might even extend it to Wednesday). He's the Dandy of Ray Davies' song but doesn't need to be told he's alright.

These first four songs do what a pop album in 1967 was required to do, engage with stories and lure with a kind of musical open architecture whereby a harpsichord might sit in a mix beside a fuzzed up Stratocaster. The big invaders had reset the rules about albums in the previous years, Revolver, Aftermath, Face to Face, A Quick One and more; if you wanted to put a hit single in the first track and the rest of the two sides with a lot of Chuck Berry covers you were no longer going to be noticed. The password was sophistication. That's what you get here. Maybe too much.

There is a Happy Land is a dreamy evocation of the space created in childhood where the grownups may not go. We Are Hungry Men is a kind of Future Shock set to a rock backing with Bowie in a number of dramatic roles including news readers, German accented tyrants, a would-be messiah and his followers. It has moments of clear portent but not of the future of the West as much as Bowie's own, looking ahead to similar but better crafted pieces like Running Gun Blues or Saviour Machine (and then the personae of Ziggy or the Thin White Duke). It shoots itself in the foot with the campy voices and jokey thrust which are completely at odds with the more earnest passages. But it's interesting. When I Live My Dream closes the old side one with a ballad which is lovely but a little mothballed even for its time. What it does is extend Bowie's stylistic range into the grand sweep of future tracks like Sweet Thing or Wild is the Wind.

Little Bombadier opens with lush strings playing a waltz. The title character, traumatised by war retreats into childhood and plays with children as though he was another child, gets warned off by plainclothes cops and flees the scene. Bowie is more in stride with this one as his Weimar cabaret approach and straighter arrangement allow the song to grow into itself rather than sound like someone doing musical tricks. Silly Boy Blue's heralding trumpets tell of a novitiate Tibetan monk whose sense that he is the reincarnation of  a master gets him into constant trouble. Come and Buy Toys is a straight folk strum (with some very lovely acoustic finger style guitar playing) contrasting the abandon of childhood with the child's future working on the land. Although he never pursued the feel of it further than this the seriousness of the song and deceptive simplicity of the performance look ahead to the album he would better build upon in a few years' time.

Join the Gang is a regression to the winking social satire of the first side with a roll call of swinging Londoners. It's energetic and funny ... the first time. She's Got Medals is the kind of Cockney rocker the Small Faces made their own. Here, the story of a transsexual who goes to war is marred by a few too many cor blimey asides and knowing winks which is a great pity as the music is a brilliant moving rocker that could've gone somewhere. Maid of Bond Street offers the hollowness of fame wed with dissatisfaction in a Twiggy like model. It's a jazzy waltz with some fancy vocal hoofing but also some real pain. Please, Mr Grave Digger is sung without musical accompaniment but set deeply in a soundscape of wet weather and cracking twigs underfoot. A murderer returns to the grave of the child he molested and murdered. Confessing to the grave digger, he must then remove the new witness into a grave of his own. The fade has him mumbling to himself about the cold he's caught and various other fragments. And that's it, that's the way the album ends.

His erstwhile manager, Ken Pitt, was keen to develop Bowie away from his earlier mod R&B attempts on the charts and fame and steer him into a more generalist entertainer like Anthony Newley. That is what's behind the massive swings in style and tone that tear this album from its potential shelf mates like A Quick One or Face to Face. While Ray Davies might go from ragging the Carnabitian army with a rollicking mockery to the poignancy of Waterloo Sunset, or the Who from Boris the Spider to So Sad About Us, Bowie here, in debuting the new name in his first long player, feels like he's trying to cover every possibility as a master of whichever style he comes across. At its best the results point us to his future career as a songwriter of high power but at its worst he hides his light under bushels of Christmas novelty song mediocrity.

Is that harsh? No, it's disappointed. Bowie's strengths are clear from track to track but his eager youth and managerial myopia made this album sound like an over keen audition tape for an Anthony Newley warm up act. It's harder to take this set when you recognise its clear signs of things to come. When he emerged two years later with an album also eponymously titled (as though attempting to obscure the first) but better known as Space Oddity it was as a much more confident artist whose London accent sounded natural rather than self-protective and whose songs found more solid setting for their range of mood and imagination. If the darkness of We Are Hungry Men was smothered in wincing cuteness it was to find release in the eerie epic Cygnet Commitee or the horror in space of Space Oddity both of which function as songs first and then as plots.

But, let's be fair. There are songs on the debut that stand now, as much as anything from the late '60s. Bowie collaborated on the arrangements of this first set of wholly original material. That's like the way he taught himself piano to write the songs on Hunky Dory. Bowie's first full decade of success, ending in 1980, is witness to the power of career concentration and the willingness to explore and learn whatever was needed for the next one so that each of them emerged both signature and distinct from the previous one. In this album he changed his name by borrowing from an adventurer who had given his name to a knife and told the world he was ready. Yes, it's hampered by aesthetic guesses which can be so off that they embarrass but it's also in line with its times (perhaps too much: it's birth as a retail item was troubled by the coincidental release of Sergeant Pepper).

Put it this way, you know those people who affect flamboyance in their dress and manner but turn out to be flatly conventional in their opinions? Well, this album is the opposite of that. The goofy showbiz and pearly king swagger conceal stories with depth about stress, crime, reincarnation, death, superficiality and the dark side of fame. This is from a twenty year old who had come to understand that his attempts to be a Jagger-like figure were doomed as long as there was a real Jagger, who saw a song in every news report or morning walk and carved them finished out of sheer imagination. And he did it outside of the mainstream in that he did it alone. What we should be hearing among the Cockney and the goofy sound effects is the emergence of an artist and a star. It flopped. He didn't. Ten years later he captivated the world with a story about a couple kissing at the Berlin Wall. And he ended his days with farewells that crossed dimensions and entered massive landscapes. This box of novelties and winks wasn't the first time he was driven by imagination but it was the first time he could show us how it worked. So, if you come across it, let it play and see that at work.

1977 at 40: Metamorphosis

"Does anyone remember laughter?"

At the beginning of 1977 I was hanging out to see The Song Remains the Same at the cinema and waiting for the new Queen album but there was another thread winding its way from the twine: I'd seen the Weekend Magazine story on punk in London and the bits of the Anarchy in the UK video haunted me. 1976 ended with a marathon two hour Countdown that went through the year's hits. It was low on the chart but the clip was played in full. John Paul Young quipped to Molly that the singer had a future playing the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

That separated me from John Paul Young's tribe of oldies forever. He had just looked popstar age before that but at that moment he might as well have been forty-eight. Gone. But there was no way I could get to hear the Sex Pistols as the single had already been deleted (I had expected it to be in the 45s bin at Palings and could take my time about getting a copy). There were no follow ups and might not be. There had just been that moment, as far as I could tell. I was haunted. Meantime there was everything else.

By the end of the year a few albums (mentioned below) caught my senses and then, finally, on the day of the election that sank the cause of progressive politics in Australia until the following decade, there was the beautifully ugly cover of Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols in the normal LP shelves. No brown paper bag, just there like Boston or Bad Company, another record. She didn't know it but my grandmother (who had sent me to town to buy my own Christmas present - I was fifteen and that's the way it worked) was about to pay for the record that changed me. That was the summer. I went in as an adolescent grub and emerged as a greater spotted moth.

"Noooooooooo future! Noooooooooo future! Noooooooooo future for you!"

Albums:

Low - David Bowie

I was confused by Sound and Vision and was ready to write Bowie off as lost to disco (because of Young Americans and some tracks on Station to Station). I had a friend tape this rather than buy it myself. The first side seemed like a lot of chimey nothing but the first half of the second side sounded like the best and darkest sci-fi movie ever (and then there was Star Wars at the end of the year which might have had a chance if it weren't for everything else I encountered in the ten months leading up to it). I made a tape of the tape which reversed the sides (it was on a C90) and listened that way.






The Clash

I bought this at the Big W down the road. Mine (long gone) had a black and white only cover and later ones had the ripped margins in olive green (a bit like the colour-reversed Never Mind the Bollocks art). There's a lot to fire up a teenager here but it sounded so thin and localised that I had to imagine my empathy. The start of a seldom interrupted indifference I felt for the band. I appreciated the sentiment and a handful of songs to come. For a while it was the only LP I had that sounded like what I took for punk.






Damned Damned Damned

Had a cassette but got tired of it. I don't know why but it felt like a good start that the band didn't know how to maintain. I could leave it on but didn't care if I left the room while it was going.











TransEurope Express - Kraftwerk

I did like the sci-fi sound of this, a mix of cold German precision and spooky atmospheres and large lovely electronic landscapes. Had it on cassette.











Peter Gabriel

The first of what would be four self-titled albums from the ex-Genesis tonsils intrigued me as the reviewers seemed to be spooked by it. I hadn't consciously heard a bar of Genesis at that stage and nudged them into the shelf already stuffed with the likes of Jethro Tull, Yes and ELP and the like. The spook was that it sounded like a rebirth with none of the great technoflash (a RAM magazine coinage created in absence of the prevalent term Prog which came later). I was hooked enough from the video to the second single Modern Love in which he thrashed about in a Rollerball uniform on a shopping mall escalator, removing his mask only to sing the middle eight with his face in shadow where it wasn't obscured by hair. The song itself I still like. It's a big barre chord rock song with a great vocal that rests somewhere between a metal scream and a Greg Lake posh tenor. Nothing on the rest of the album lived up to it but moments like Moribund the Burgermeister or Humdrum gave enough for me to buy the next one without hearing it first. Also, it led me to investigate Genesis but I didn't pursue it after a few real tries.


The Idiot - Iggy Pop

Heard this more at the Uni parties my older siblings would take me to in the following year but I knew about it before then as it was always brought up in connection with Bowie's album Low.












Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl/Star Club

Any new Beatles was manna for the second generation fan. Of the two live Beatles albums released in 1977 this was the best sounding but least interesting. The Star Club album was the reverse of that. The cover art had magnified black on white type which made it look like a bootleg and photos of the punters that felt authentic (the screaming girls in the art of the Bowl album looked very '70s) and for the first play it sounded hard and punchy. But then if I tried to play it again I could only do it for isolated tracks. I friend of mine had a few boots of bands like Led Zeppelin and gave me tapes which is why I never bothered with them.





Deceptive Bends - 10CC

I'd been a fan of this band's cleverness and talents with catchy pop with subversive lyrics, a kind of Romper Room Frank Zappa (whom I reviled). This was the first album after the darker minded pair, Lol Creme and Kevin Godley, exited for more interesting territory. The wit is still there and the epic Feel the Benefit continues to have some power but I can't now easily say why I listened to this so much in this year. Wouldn't now.







News of the World - Queen

Almost the redemption of Day at the Races and its patchy form filling, News of the World brought us the football anthem We Are The Champions with its "nah nah nanah naaah" chorus but also the funny response to punk Sheer Heart Attack and the stompin' We Will Rock You. But by the end of 1977 it seemed like a missed boat. I bought a friend's copy at a discount and played it a little but it just couldn't compete with the rude noise I had aligned with in the meantime. Oh, and this was the one on which they stopped boasting how they didn't use synthesisers and those were in pretty full force through a lot of it. Good a point as any to give up on a band you once liked.


Rattus Norvegicus - The Stranglers

I hated what I took to be a group of middle-aged prog rockers with shorter haircuts and slightly shorter keyboard solos passing themselves off as punk because they wrote songs about rude things. I guiltily loved some of the arrangements but in my defence it's because the better of them (Get a Grip on Yourself) sounded like a distillate of '60s psychedelia. Also, they were one of those bands whose fans matched them for baseless obnoxiousness: a Stranglers fan was almost invariably a massive fuckwit (and almost always older).






ABBA the Album

I had long abandoned ABBA (most of my acquaintance cast themselves adrift after Fernando was poured into the drinking water and we all got sick) but this album did contain I'm a Marionette which remains pleasantly unnerving (in the best way, I'm not being sarcastic). Otherwise by this stage it sounded a little too homogenised for this punter. Also, this was tied in to the movie which seemed too cute and teeny even if I had any interest left.









Talking Heads '77

I only heard Psycho Killer from this set until the following year and only very recently owned the album. I like it now but can't say if I would have then.












My Aim is True - Elvis Costello

A lot of folk cite this as one of the great debut albums but I only bought it after the third one and then from completeness. I liked less than half (I know, missing a joke there but I'm serious) of the tracks and found the Californian soft rock approach irritating (well, the band did go on to back Huey Lewis!) I'll admit that the songwriting didn't change that much between albums as much as the arrangements, the great Attractions washed the songs clean of the plodding Americana with beautiful garagey power, sounding far more like my late '70s. That said, I can listen to Alison and Watching the Detectives (on the Australian release) any day of the week.


Rumours - Fleetwood Mac

My pre-punk hatred for this and the other main Nicks/Buckingham Fleetwood Mac albums stems from my brother playing his cassette of them ceaselessly for weeks. My Queenslander house featured walls that stopped short of the ceiling (to promote airflow) so I didn't miss a beat. There's merit in the writing, production and singing here but there's about the same amount in anything by the Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan or the Eagles and I was already finding those acts excessive and aurally indigestible. This album was to rise in the estimation of twenty-somethings decades later but so did anything by ELO. That didn't make me want to reassess but I heard it again many times and still found it horrible.

Heroes - David Bowie

If I could only like half of Low I'll have to admit I didn't like this beyond the big title song until the year after when it started feeling like it fit. Spiky arrangements, screaming choruses that seemed to go nowhere for a long time, instrumentals that felt more like film music. I now like about half of it but do and did dig Bowie's outsider/insider look on the cover.







Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols

From the moment I saw them on Weekend Magazine before the seven o'clock news one Sunday I was waiting for this album. This anticipation (almost a year in construction) was not just met but rewarded with excess. A life changer to which I've already devoted three long posts. My most-played record for the remainder of the decade.

The only other album I can think of that had anything like the same impact on the way I listened to music and how alligned I felt to it was Portishead's Dummy almost twenty years later. But Bollocks was the deadly frisbee and the shield against which I felt strong as well as apart. That felt very, very good.


Singles:

Baracuda - Heart: A galloping assault with a soaring vocal about .... an attack? Kind of sounded like a sex song but could have been about someone very nasty. The chugalug was lifted from Led Zeppelin's Achilles' Last Stand from the previous year's Presence album but served very well at the centre of a short form single. Kudos for making a clean guitar tone sound like metal and for the abrupt ending.

I Feel Love - Donna Summer: One of the greatest pop singles ever. Essayed elsewhere on this blog. Couldn't make this list without it.

The Way That You Do It - Pussyfoot: A time-travelling Spice Girl rolled this one out in a clip I can't remember as it was replaced by the lame "live" one at the Countdown Studios the night she hosted. Ooh na na hia ooh na na hia hia indeed. This was too easy to hate but too persistent to ignore. Pop music was the rug under the feet of this novelty dirge and it was about to get pulled. Then about five years later it was back under big hair and synthesisers with squelching presets.

Don't Cry for Me Argentina - Julie Covington: Sung by the tough girl from the Rock Follies the hit from Evita made a persistent appearance in the Countdown top ten. The video was shown only once. It was a series of stills of Covington in a long and shear white dress in a white room standing or sitting on the floor, looking serious. I liked the Latin sound of the melody and the halting opera of it but didn't get a copy. I think I liked the idea that something so slow and un-rock could be filling the singles bins at Palings.

Rockaria - ELO: At first I thought this was funny, like everyone else but it really wore out its welcome quickly and when the kids who always caught up last caught up with this you had to get tortured all over again when they told you how clever it was. It was a rock song with a soprano in the breaks.

Jet Airliner - Steve Miller Band: Even back then I knew this was a kind of by-the-numbers soft rock but I loved the clean rhythm guitar tone and singer-songwriter vocal. Kraft processed cheddar and tasted just as satisfying to the undeveloped pallet.

I Go to Rio - Peter Allen: The grinning Broadway cabaret monster whose video was one of the most embarrassing things on television that year had a mega hit with this chirpy clunking slice of Hell from our parents' area of responsibility. He banged at a white piano and stripped down to the singlet. If you're thinking proto-G.G.Allin stop it now.

God Save the Queen - The Sex Pistols: I kept missing this. It was never on Countdown but it was on Sounds but Sounds was a lot of interviews with cabaret has beens and I often skipped it. Every time I did, though, they played something good. I didn't see the clip until I saw it in context in the Great Rock n Roll Swindle years later. This also meant I didn't hear it until I bought the album at the end of the year. We ogled the photo of the A&M signing outside Buckingham Palace reprinted in RAM magazine. That would have to do.

Lucille - Kenny Rogers: "You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille. With four hundred children and a cop in the field." Indeed she had. Kenny Rogers would have a string of nu-country hits in the years to come. At least one of which was made into a tv movie (Coward of the County) after the hits dried up. He makes this list because I heard that Mr Rouse had been walking across the quad at school once when one of his Woolworths shoes disintegrated. He had (on good authority) said: "you picked a fine time to leave me, loose heel."

Don't Stop - Fleetwood Mac: Crap then and crap now.

Don't Give Up on Us - David Soul: Hutch crooned his way through a ballad that sounded like it came from four years before. There was another one called Silver Lady later which had him do a bullseye Bryan Ferry. There was no jealousy response single from Starsky.

Nothing Stays the Same Forever - Hush: The out of time glam band went from boorish football choruses to this quite interesting atmospheric number. For a band with no ideas beyond pub rock they really got something here. Never did again, though.

Don't Fall in Love - The Ferrets: This just appeared paranormally one Sunday evening on Countdown. We didn't know where it was from or who they were but it was really, really good. Some of the cheek of the mid '70s pubrock made good but also a quirky leanness and nerve enough for us to declare it new wave (a protean term then which, before it came to be spoken with an obligatory sneer, could sound quite thoughtful and discerning). A genuine classic of the era.

Living Next Door to Alice - Smokie: Another band like Racey who seemed to emerge from the clubs of Northern England to present the world with a series of A&R prescribed songs that became hits until they stopped a few years later. The singer had a croaky voice  and a sort of grown out Rod Stewart perm. He still had both by 1980 when he had his last wheeze in a duet with Suzie Quatro. Everyone finds each other.

Blue Jeans  - Skyhooks: The great sharpened satirists of Horror Movie and Ego is Not a Dirty Word sang a little country song about fashion or denim or something but I'd stopped listening to them by then.

In the Flesh - Blondie: Released the year after its host album, the A and B sides were flipped when Countdown played the B side and it blazed the local ears. There was a '50s feel to it but the lyrics were grown-up and Debbie Harry's delivery and appearance in the clip wiped every other note played on the show that evening. Everyone was talking about it at school the next day. The band was aligned to punk even though they came across more as '60s revivalists at the time but it was still thrilling to have something from the margins in the charts. They toured and their career (however brief) ascended.

Mull of Kintyre - Wings: Pleasant enough folk waltz but I bought it for the White Album style b-side Girls School which still rocks fine!

Pretty Vacant - The Sex Pistols: This one was played on Countdown as they couldn't ignore them at that stage. The video was as cold as a London December and as exciting as hell. It was hard and shouty and perfect. A year of pop music dissolved under its force.

And there it was, what the previous year had joined no band put asunder. I started the Christmas holidays in 1977 getting slowly tired of Queen's News of the World and ached for the Sex Pistols album. When that was in my hands the world changed. Everything I'd taken with thanks from older siblings fell away like old skin. The freedom of it made me listen more closely to those things I kept (selected Beatles, Stones, Who, Yardbirds) and meet the new, violent attack of punk as it hit. Everything was re-evaluated, everything was open to thought if not deed and the world of the straights with their Saturday Night Fever mainstream installment plans softened into the blur of the background. I'd long given up on trying to fit in with them but now knew that I didn't want their protected lack of imagination, their common as muck sense nor cared about their shallow judgement. I didn't have the safety pins in my nostrils nor the glue in my hair and I never uttered the words at the time (because it was the kind of crap that grownups said) but I was a punk.

1967 at 50: THE VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO

Bullshit is power. An idiot I once shared a house with was convinced that the word nice meant ugly but interesting. I was aware of the meme but he cited a dictionary as the source. He was the type of cardboard cutout stylist whose sense of reality is entirely dependent on a quilt of fragmented nonsense concocted by his peers. Someone high in the society of scale thought something up or just repeated it then it took its place beside gravity or Pythagoras' theorem as a piece of the knowable universe. Nice has never meant ugly but interesting outside a small group for a limited time period but my co-renter believed it was acceptable usage. He was in a quandary once after someone had described him as nice. He even devised a short anecdotal conversation helper around the incident, which ended with: "ugly but interesting. Hmm." I haven't seen him for about a decade and neither know nor care if he still thinks this but if he doesn't the turning point would have involved some humiliation from someone higher in his order. If he still has some sway it probably hasn't happened and he thinks "ugly but interesting" every time he hears the word nice and smiles enough for you to know it's to himself.

Brian Eno said, "The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band." He didn't mean it literally nor had to. The journalist he was speaking to and the readers of the published interview knew well enough that all he meant was that the record was influential. He was right and still is. The figure he quotes might well be accurate but the point is the impact, the resonance. The album has resurfaced many times over the decades as newer waves of musicians cite their influences. None of them need be lying but when the quote's echoes sound now it's more like: only two hundred people bought the LP but all of them formed bands. Only the very feeble will redistribute these tracks in the hope that their immediate social scaffolding will collapse into the shape of a rock band. But the sense of Eno's genuinely witty remark is easily forgotten when the surface of the soundbite gets such a gleam. Few outside of VU fans ever seem to mention the output that followed despite any riches it holds (which is a fair bit, by the way)

Why? Well, there is the music, which I'll get to, but there is also the deathless cache of avant gardism lead by the Andy Warhol brand and working all the way down to guttersnipes dying from heroin cut with bleach in dark alleys: it has edge. It is about people who had edge and it is by them, as well. For devil's advocacy I'll mention a recent putdown of the album that claimed that outside of a few tracks of inspired collaboration John Cale's contribution came across as indulgent noise and Lou Reed's as Brill Building hackery. So, edge or bratty fluke? More bullshit. Nevertheless, to dismiss the sub-cultural context of the Warhol environment and the enthusiasm of the young drivers of the band leaves the picture undeveloped. I think the set of songs stands by itself but when you do add the influences that made the whole package it deserves a decently yelled "wow!" But first the songs.

Sunday Morning would confuse any first-time listener who is listening to hear an avant-roque record. A celeste tinkles through the arpeggio of the progression while a picked bass dive bombs down to the tonic and the band and vocals enter with Lou Reed in wistful sweetness. Any charges of pop-to-order can be laid here as, by the sound alone, it could have been written for the Monkees or Petula Clark. An easy gliding rhythm with a cor anglais accentuating the fourth and na-na-na-na backing vocals that float on waves of reverb provide a pop ballad hobby kit. Drill down to the lyrics, though, and the picture changes. The narrator is pursued by his wasted years, phantoms created by self-consciousness or paranoia dog the footsteps and call from the crowds. Not even safe on a drowsy Sunday morning.

If you didn't think that was intentional just keep listening. Waiting For the Man plunges us straight into the thumping monotony of the title as the chords tonic to fourth repeat on the lower keys of a piano as guitars whine scratchily like mosquitoes to each side. Reed comes in with a very different vocal describing what, at least at the time, most of a life of chemical dependency consists of.  He fends off the aggression of the locals in the black neighbourhood who think he's cruising for sex and cringes as he waits because, as Reed well knew from reading Burroughs if not from his own experience (and Lou was an tertiary level reader), that you always have to wait. Finally, the dealer turns up, there's an excruciating walk to the apartment, a quick taste, the nexus and then the hasty exit. It will all happen tomorrow but that's not now. The cleverness of this song, the oppressive shiftless throbbing, the slight but annoying guitars and the tone of the narrator who professes coolness while feeling the hatred or burdensome indifference of everyone around him because if he doesn't feel that he's just another white-boy junkie who'll wake up one morning hairless and middle-aged and still craving or die near the garbage bins out the back, the cleverness is that we feel the warmth of the pose and understand the fear it masks. Reed the writer understood this, that it was so and that you would know, and knew that the lately cute rock medium was the perfect palate for it. Add the rest of the band as they were and you get this. Writing this just then has made me wonder if this album itself with its self-aware drama and characterisation isn't the first rock opera, however undeclared. I don't think that's an important thought (rock operas had influence but were doomed to give way to the eternally returning pop song package model albums that rise to counter every sustained attempt to lift rock music) but it's a diverting one.

Femme Fatale surfaces from the silence between tracks as a late night bossa nova with a pair of major 7th chords played on electric guitars. The treble is rolled off as though they are meant to sound like nylon string guitars but there is a quite clear admission that they are not. Nico's heavily accented droopy voice enters quietly before surprising with a strong voice for the second line, "she's going to break your heart in two," before falling back to the sexy whisper, "it's true". But the whisper isn't sexy, it's just where it would be sexy if Astrud Gilberto were singing it. From Nico it has the sound of a friend delivering hard truths to a broken-hearted other in a smoky three a.m. room. The song is all Lou Reed, a mix of charming melody and biting commentary: "You're written in her book? You're number thirty-seven take a look." And the chorus breaks out with a strong full voice from the lead and a response chorus that sounds like cartoon ravens in the next room. And here's something again. Is this mockery of pop harmonies accidental as it is in early Rolling Stones recordings or intentional. I ask as the lead out of the chorus is accompanied by guitars that are clearly out of tune even though they are being played on the same strings as the verse parts? The band resented the imposition of the model and hangaround by mentor Andy Warhol. Is this their protest? Is it a kind of comment on mainstream pop, adding dissonance to an otherwise sweetly tuneful song? Is it just poor quality control on the part of the band or their nominal but largely absent producer Andy Warhol? I'd veer toward the latter. Even so, none of that can spoil the gentle strength of the song.

The drone and grind of Venus in Furs rises like a theatre curtain and the stage is thick with red light. Even at low volume it sounds loud. The band, bass, drums and rattling guitar haul the riff up a hill before it rolls back down and they have to start again, all the while overseen by the sting of a droning viola. Reed enters without his street cred to describe the scenes from Sascher-Masoch (whose novel gives the song its title and characters) When he tells us in the middle eight that he is weary and could sleep four thousand years it sounds real. Otherwise, his higher register guides us through the scenes of domination, humiliation and pain as Severin takes his punishing pleasure. This is one of the tracks on the album to feature Reed's Ostrich guitar, an electric guitar whose strings are all tuned to a single note at whichever octave is closest to the standard tuning (the E's down a tone, for example, but the B up a minor third). The name is from Reed's Brill building days when he used a guitar with that tuning on a identikit dance song called The Ostrich. This can do a few things but here it emphasises the drone while allowing a multi-octave strumming of the riff as it rises and falls. It's aided and abetted by John Cale's viola part which drones but also puts in a rhythmic screech like it's giving orders. As well it might; the overall burdensome force has a nearly hypnotic power over the listener. This is broken by the two middle eights which surge into the relative major as Reed sings about his weariness and the viola plays long insistent fifths. And then, each time it falls back down the slope and had to be rolled back up. A reiteration of the opening verse closes the vocal - "strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart" - before the grind intensifies with the guitar playing and ugly but beautiful mandolin tremolo but down on the lower frets so that it starts sounding like a jackhammer. And Severin hits the floor and begs for more.

Many years ago I was sitting in what was then the Carlton Hotel's big high ceilinged bar (Queens Street in Brisbane) with another musician. There was table serivce and a guy playing pop standards on a jazz box.  He threw in something from The Beatles' Revolver album which I thought was strange and we got to talking about the music of that time and the Velvet Underground came up. I think that was because some of the songs like Femme Fatale had a jazzy guitar feel to them. In a lull he looked up from his drink and said, "isn't Venus in Furs a scary song?" I thought about it. I'd just come out of a couple of years guiding my band through various Eastern and Arabic modes. Drones in songs were something I was known for to a degree. So, when I heard the song mentioned that's what I thought of first but his quiet exclamation carried enough awe it compelled me to reassess. I recalled how Reed breaks his icy observational tone in one verse and sounds much more like an observer. "Taste the whip now bleeeeeeeeeed for me." He finishes the line with a giggle. He's in the audience, at one of the peep holes, his tongue out at the pain, the degradation, the welts and the blood. He's not just the power with the cat o' nine tails, he's the customer. Yes it is. It's a scary song.

Run Run Run hits the groove in a gallop. Apart from the switch to the fourth in the chorus it's all on the tonic. Chunga chunga chunga chunga. At first it's garagey but conventional enough. The verses are about kids getting kicks and then kicking the bucket. That's the life chosen then that's life. Live fast etc. The thing is there's no moral curation unless it's what at that time would have been unthinkable: advocacy. This is not a roll call of the wicked or even a service for the innocent unknowing youth, it's an honour roll. You gotta run run run run run take a drag or two. Run run run run run Gypsy Death and you. Trouble is with this the honour roll doesn't sound like Fanfare for the Common Man. No middle eights, no riffs, no Brill building chops. Just the gallop to the end with a lot of feedback and scratchy tremolo.

All Tomorrow's Parties begins before you realise it's started. A slow, solemn ascent through a major scale, what the basses would be doing in an orchestral version but pizzicato. And then it falls and as it lands back on D, Maureen Tucker's hammer hits the kettle drum (actually a normal kick with a lot of reverb), a quick breath out of time. On four comes the extraordinary piano part devised by Cale of hemisemidemiquavers for four hands playing through the changes. For a long time I thought this was a tape loop but the changes really do happen. That loop would have stretched a few Manhattan blocks. And then the voice.

If Nico sounded whispered and crooned through Femme Fatale she turns the fog horn of her lower range for zero visibility conditions and rolls out a vocal so grand and so cold that it almost obscures the beauty of Reed's melody. The song has a modal tonality, like something from the middle ages. You could imagine it sung by monks. Nico's hard note delivery (actually two deliveries but we'll get to that) forms a solid structure around which we gather and ogle. The monument strikes us with awe and fear as we see the contemporary Cinderella crouching in the shadows until she goes to the ball in scrounged and tattered finery. But the ball is not in fairyland but darkest Manhattan. Nothing to wear for the poor girl, Thursday's child and Sunday's clown who cries behind the door. There is a sneer in the words but Nico's performance presses it out of sight as, week after week, the girl in the song gets further away from the centre of the party but more dependent on it. The death march drum thunders on, the glittering rain of the prepared piano moves like a slow machine and the guitars (combined Ostrich clang and electric 12 string chime) provide the compromised grandeur. The procession continues without seamingly without cease. But stop it must and does, abruptly with a final brittle tremolo flourish. End.

The '80s CD release of the album featured a treat in the form of a mix of this song with a single vocal. Nico's voice on the initial (and almost every other) release is double tracked in the custom of the '60s. Producers would get vocalists to repeat a take as exactly as possible to add body to the sound. While this practice petered out with advances in recording technology by the mid '60s it was still used. The problem is that no to takes are ever going to match exactly. A syllable here or consonant there will always be out. Masters of the approach like the Beatles double tracked so closely that it sounds like expertly managed echo. Nico, never quite comfortable with her vocals until she shed the world's disdain and made strengths of her flaws (of all the ex VU crew her solo efforts are my favourite), was put through the double tracking mill for this song. The result is double the mournfulness and size. There are frequent mismatches but they only serve to indicate the size of the voice. That said, if you're interested, track down an early CD release or Youtube the single vocal version. It will immediately appeal for the sleeker line of the vocal. It isn't better, the original double tracked take still gives us more of what we need, but it is a relief.

The old side two provides no such relief. Heroin begins with a strummed single note (Ostrich guitar) and another clean (and normally tuned) one filling out the chords on the higher strings. This goes for ten listless bars before the rhythm takes form between the two and they diverge between playing a swirling arpeggio and the same grounded chords (C-F) and we notice John Cale's viola creeping in with a drone on C (infrequently thickened with a G). Lou Reed's vocal enters the scene before you notice. "I ....... don't know ...... just where I'm going .... "  A few bars later and "but I ...... gonna try for the kingdom if I can cause it makes me feel I'm a man when I put a spike into my vein ..." And everything under and around his drifitng voice begins to speed up. The voice takes energy from this and seems to rise into the light from the dark corner of the room where it began. He feels just like Jesus' son. But "I guess I just don't know. I guess that I just don't know." This is the pattern of the song for the next five minutes: the junkie rises slowly from his torpor through connection and euphoria and into the vision splendid before admitting he doesn't know, isn't sure, can't do anything. Far from repetitive, though, Heroin describes a slow pulsing arc in which the narrator climbs through great ecstasy, each time a little higher and, thanks to Reed's brilliance as a lyricist, believably into a kind of plateau of confidence bolstered by a band rising in increasingly powerful waves of energy and near edible noise that strains until you can't tell the difference between the pain of feedback or the sublime dissonance of the viola, just like the junkie in the middle. He doesn't know. He doesn't know, can't know, won't know, shan't know, beyond knowing as his screaming nervous system variously lifts and drops him. "And thank your god that I'm not aware. And thank god that I just don't care. And I guess I just don't know. And I guess I just don't know...." The bright drone of the viola and the chiming of the guitars slow to a stop, a tiny growl of a chord and it's over. It's where the narrator of Waiting for the Man went when he made his excuses and left and every day after that. By the end the drone could be that of a choir at his funeral.

A bright chord riff stops and starts before bashing into something between a country song and a beat band from the shady side of the street. It's the closest thing on the album to a conventional mid-sixties rock song. A call and response verse with Reed hitting a streetwise sneer and the band in falsetto behind him with a charming ramshackle chord solo some tight playing for once. At first it seems like a misogynist snarl but the "better hit her" line increasingly feels like a taunt to the kind of affected street-level machismo that has brought the woman in the song to this pass. She only falls for the worst ("not just any guy" has a severe ring here), suffers, gets up and falls again. As sordid and dejecting as it is this is a song about a survivor. She is not everywoman, just one and one that comes through, neither spitfire nor victim. I feel an odd kinship between this and Ray Davies' Dandy from the year before where the gadabout for all his shallowness and hedonism is alright in that 1960s hip way. Reed says it too in the fade. "Aw, she's alright."

I'll Be Your Mirror begins with sweet clean electric guitars and a brighter rhythm than Femme Fatale. Nico enters with her deep boom singing a melody that I could imagine Petula Clark or Lulu cooing. There's even a playfully lilting second section to the verses that strengthens the sugar. But this is a song about reassurance in the face of self despair. Is it some fragile Warholian model or just a teenager? It could be anyone but the thing that reaches out to me is that it sounds sincere. "Please put down your hands," she sings to someone who is not warding off a threat nor putting up their dooks but hiding their face. This goes sour at the end of the chirpy chorus when the palm-muted guitars come in with a sprightly rhythm, an audible microtone out of tune, so distinctly wrong that it could only have been intentional. Who knows? It grates. It grates every time I hear it but I know it's going to sound like that and I just let it happen. Intentional or not the dissonance adds to the darkness the guardian angel narrator seeks to clear and that works.

Black Angel's Death Song starts looming guitar under a squeaky viola pattern. Reed's Dyalnesque sneer tells of adventurous but dark choices in a nightmare landscape bloody with violence and gore. While there's a lot here from the literary memory of the English major there's also cinema but it isn't Panic in Needle Park is Bunuel and Bergman at their most fantastical and bleak. Apart from some loud hisses between verses the arrangement keeps to the guitar/viola duo for the entirety and peters out rather than fades or cleanly finishes. This has not been the junkie parade of Run Run Run, it's about the weight of life decisions and, dressed in the language of a ragged epic, bears witness rather than celebrates. It's the song of an angel, not a Gomorrahan.

European Son begins like any other of the rockier songs on the record but quickly spreads out into concrete noise and directionless noodling. Fans of the album often skip it or call it filler or indulgent but those charges only stick if it's offered as a track like the others. My feeling is that, while it might well have come from the kind of jam everyone gets into at the time but can't listen to afterwards thrown on as the last track, it's there as noise, it's meant to be annoying. Anyone who has listened to it in earnest hoping to glean the spirit of free rock a la Ornette Coleman are advised to fast forward to Reed's Metal Machine Music variously dismissed as garbage or defended as genius by Reed himself (it famously got under the skin of critic Lester Bangs who led a crusade against it) Me, it depends. I'll leave it on if it doesn't intrude on what I'm doing (it's the best sex music at twenty but the worst at forty but I was thinking more like washing dishes or the vacuuming) but there are examples in the temporal neighbourhood that outdo it for obnoxiousness like the Stooges' LA Blues or the decades-later hidden track of game noises on Beck's Odelay. Oddly, even though it stands outside of period the timid chaos of it puts it right back. Your choice.

Well, then, after the epics, the junk, the feedback and the cool, what does this album do outside of fulfilling its own cool? For starters it's cool was only very closely local. A handful of gigs outside of the Warhol wings and no radio play added up to no hits nor much attention. The attention came later, after the band had diluted its membership and then parted ways. Then, everyone had been there at the time and that's where the bullshit started. But bullshit is power and can sell itself on the whiff alone and does. The good news here is that this album rises above it. The sprawling mess of Latin beats, funeral drums, debased folk, drones and crafted noise is held together by songs strong enough to be recognisable covered in any genre (well, ok, maybe not European Son) because they are made of real stuff. You can leave the heroin chic, the avant-models, the strung-out cool and the affected sneers and you'll still have a good record. This is a good record despite the unintentionally poor production (accentuated by the moments of decent engineering that also happen) and not because of it. It's a marvel of band-inspiring craft and earsplitting clashes. It's Stockhausen meets the Everly Brothers. There is nothing like it that spans with such ease Revolver-era Beatles and Throbbing Gristle. All of the above but it's still just good.


Listening Notes: Exclusively, as a reference for this article, I used the hi-res master of the 45th anniversary release, bought as a download online. You could scratch around for a original Verve vinyl copy but if you wanted to hear what it sounded like as a mastered sequence the 24 bit 96 kHz is the one to choose. On the other hand this album will never be improved by higher audio presentation as the original production is mired in a series of bad engineering decisions from the time of its production. It will either sound like the Velvets with extra noise (authographic!) or pristine but poorly produced. Up to you.

1967 at 50: YOUNGER THAN YESTERDAY - THE BYRDS

For a fourth album this sounds a lot like a difficult second. In a sense it is, though. It is their second after the departure of previous chief originals writer Gene Clarke and his voice. It's a second album also in the sense that it differs far more from its immediate precursor (5D Fifth Dimension) than the first two did. It's a set that features both the familiar and the experimental, enriching some of the best ideas of the previous albums and catering to the formula for the fans. From the crazy Crosby cauldron of Mind Gardens to the as old as yesterday Dylan cover with a rich 12 string intro, this disc sounds like musicians who want to go ahead but eat the mass appeal, too.

So, start with a track that mixes cynicism with idealism like So You Want to be a Rock and Roll Star.
An arpeggiated two chord figure on the 12 string let's you know who this is. Add some amp breakup (so console clipping) to that instrument of purity and you get the old band with a new attitude. When the harmonies come in (no lead vocals with this one) they are more distant than we're used to, thin and compressed they sit in a pocket of the mix rather than ride on its surface like they did in Turn Turn Turn. This is a song about the same kind of self awareness that made those things an issue to fans and the rock press alike. The title is taken from the kind of do it yourself manual that middle America was buying to help build its garden sheds or improve its job prospects.  "So you want to be a rock and roll star .. Just get an electric guitar and learn how to play..." But the joke of it sours quickly with, "sell your soul to the company who are waiting there to sell plastic ware." Bypass the passion for music and go straight to the fame, the sex and the money. This is from a band who had raked in more than their share of all of that and then witnessed what a fickle public could do, especially when guided by a still very conservative media. The song is rough and as processed as smooth peanut butter but they want you to know that they are on top of this and put in some delicious Latin lead playing on the Rickenbacker and an livelier trumpet (Hugh Masekela!) to sharpen things up. The real sound of a stadium of girls screaming stands in for half a verse and if you have the 5D album in mind it might remind you of the song about the Lear jet it ended on. A tiny epic of attitude and incorrigible musicality from players who know you understand. That's a good start.

So why wind things back by three or so years to the next one? Chris Hillman's Have You Seen Her Face with its big opening riff (not on a 12 string, admittedly) and Merseybeat tune and Tambourine Man harmonies is the kind of California cool song about a girl that the last album pretty much erased. Yet here it is. The band rocks with some fine mid-60s grit in the guitar tone to contrast the Gregorian harmonies and it passes by very pleasantly.

CTA 102 was a radio source from a quasar that engendered speculation that it might be evidence of alien civilisations in deep space. Written by McGuinn and Troubadour regular, roadie and guru of the weird and the wonderful Bob Hippard. Together the pair latched on to the notion that their song might reach the citizens of CTA 102, setting it in a radio-friendly Byrds harmony jangle that might be launched via Earth waves to the great Cosmos. A clear next step from 5D's Mr Spaceman the song takes a turn for the strange when the instrumental section is wifully ditressed to sound like a distant radio signal over which we hear some strange sped up vocals which could be backwards (they aren't, it's McGuinn and Crosby speaking gibberish) to invoke the aliens commenting on the Byrds song. The blend of slight major key pop with a big scary idea gets beyond the cuteness of the presentation but only just. Still, it's a step ahead.

Renaissance Fair begins with a lovely gleaming arpeggio on the Rickenbacker which forms the ground for a slightly overdriven chord figure. Translucent harmonies sing of olde worlde costumes and market stalls at one of the Renaissance revival events that became regular events with the hippies and the folkies. The singers think they are in a dream of the days o' old and, to be fair, a Renaissance fair in the '60s prior to the inevitable commercialisation might well have looked, felt and smelled as though everyone was partying like it was 1467. Sonorous word pictures of the stalls and the vibe are told in a deft Crosbian blend of medieval and jazz intervals and some lovely melisma on the vowels. If it was another band from the time I'd be in a swoon. Here, it glides by lightly and goes, pointing to Crosby's near future in CSNY which is to say beyond my interest.

Chris Hillman's next number Time Between plunges into contemporary Nashville with a leaf or two from new folk rock outside of the Byrds' own brand of it. Hillman's is creditable, given that he's not trying to trowel it on as a country number. The real revelation here is his fluid Telecaster playing which twangs and bends with the best of them. A pleasant song about a long distance relationship.

Pleasant is the word for most of the album so far and it's a let down after the opening broadsides of the first two sets and the bold self effacing experimentation of the previous one. Which is why we have to wait almost a whole side to get to the second great song of this LP. David Crosby's Everybody's Been Burned begins with a spooky 12 string arpeggio travelling through chords complicated by 9ths and fourths as it climbs and gently falls through a minor key. It could be the theme song of a mystery and indeed seems to find an intrigue of its own. The title and first line promise a song sung in sympathy to someone damaged from a relationship but it just doesn't go there. Crosby's pure tenor takes us through some cold observations about the futility of loving and even just trying to love. "I know that door that shuts just before you get to the dream..." This eerie line gives way to a gentle 12 string solo that begins lyrical but seems to get stuck halfway as though its stuttered staccato phrase cannot or should not be finished. The second and final verse sings about the impossibility of seeking love by turning, running or hiding and then, quite chillingly ends with: "So I guess instead I'll love you." The rolling 6th and 9th chords press on into the fade. It's like a first draft of Love the One You're With as imagined by Charles Manson.

The old side two begins with a strong rock song, Hillman's first really good one on the album, Thoughts and Words. An urgent descent through the minor  on the 12 string and a six finishes with an aching drawn-out grind on the E sus 4. Hillman enters with a mournful tone, descending with the chords, and lyrics about his love for a woman taking him over before the tight high harmony of the chorus and  its surprise: "I thought I was on top of it all!" The second verse gives way to a swirl of two backwards acoustic guitars that add a weirdness to the situation. A final verse staves of repetition by including Crosby's descant response to Hillman's lines into the final chorus and closing vortex of backwards playing to the final chord. While the chorus seems a tad worn compared to the rest of the song it does fit and shows us that Hillman could be more than the providore of album filler.

When I first heard Mind Gardens I made a conscious decision to soldier through it so that I would never have to hear it again. So, formless, pointless and hippy the song and its creator, David Crosby seem to vanish into the void of their own arseholes. Lots of backwards guitars and meaningless musings in a meandering mess of a melody. Listening to it for this post had me kicking down each pillar of that dismissal. First, it does have form. Crosby's wandering improvisations on the tune can distract from that but they too carry beauty (particularly the line "but when the sun came" with its beautiful Indian melisma on the last word) and adorn the central modal tune that climbs out of the dark rich Celtic musical soil where Crosby found it. His strong tenor tells a tale of overprotection before wisdom arrives with a lesson about trust from nature. It's a fable and doesn't need assignment to a more mundane story (it could apply to romantic love, parenthood, or even, gosh-darn, gardening). It has become my favourite track on the album.

My Back Pages starts with a compromise, a chord progression repeats without being moulded into a bright 12 string riff or having the song just start. When I first heard the album and knew its place in the sequence I winced a little and wondered why the band went backwards this way. It's an even tamer Dylan cover than any they had already done and, with its rousing chorus and McGuinn's Dylanesque lead vocal and then big, ringy Rickenbacker solo, it has the feel of a management call or even the band themselves voting for a single for the old fans. The experience of the Dylan-free but controversy-plagued 5D and the banning of the masterpiece single Eight Miles High, the Byrds could be forgiven for bashing out a bit of the old tried and true. Coming after the most startlingly original song they'd ever done and dumping the listener into cliche drive feels like surrender to the very forces they castigate in the bold opening track.

Chris Hillman was to expand his songwriting abilities considerably from the next album on but on this breakout set where he provides four new originals to an albums sequence and adds another lead vocal to the range he has only really been able to distinguish himself with one. Thoughts and Words is more in line with where the band were moving but still retained some marks of earlier periods of pop music. The Girl With No Name is a song I confuse in memory with Time Between and Have You Seen Her Face. They are all country flavoured songs constructed according to prescription and played sung with a checklist precision that says to me: well all the notes are right, what more do you want? Plenty, actually but that can wait until Notorious Byrd Brothers.

Strident slightly-overdriven guitars bash out the opening chords of Heatwave until you realise that it's a new recording of the song Why from the previous year. This was apparently included at David Crosby's insistence. I'll echo the title here. The band already had a good swag of new material on hand, some of it more impressive than this but they chose to end their entry in the most game-changing year of the decade with the b-side of an old single that flopped. And then the new version strips the previous outing by removing most of the distinctive bending 12 string soloing that engendered the term raga rock to apply to at least two years of progressive rock music. It's still a decent Byrds song but now it sounds like the begrudging compliance with a tantrum.

You might have guessed that this is not my favourite Byrds album. I won't offer any what-ifs to suggest how it might have been improved. Chris Hillman's songs irritate me but if you don't have those you might not have a host of splendid ones in the years to come. It was good to be pleasantly surprised by Mind Gardens which I'd written off as hippy timewasting. But more than Fifth Dimension's production being plagued by the loss of a major contributor Younger Than Yesterday's  set reveals the effects of that gap and they are not good. If I were old enough to have bought this album on first release I would have played it once all the way through and then only returned to it for individual tracks. Even now, walking around and listening determinedly to the whole sequence, often daily, my impression is of some real tries at finding the new with the old strengths and falling back to routine as though exhausted. Perhaps it would take David Crosby becoming so unbearable that freedom from him became the spur. Whatever it was, the band, already limping, would yet find some greatness as they continued to develop and progress even to the point of sound unrecognisably different from the Byrds of the first album but in a way that disturbs rather than inspires.