1970@50: MORRISON HOTEL - THE DOORS

In the turbulent wake of the Miami incident ("ya wanna see my prick?") The Doors were looking down the barrel of a live circuit that didn't want them. The court case was dragging and Jim wasn't winning anymore. He was getting smashed and swaggering to a decreasing circle of worship. That's seen as the reason the band abandoned the extended arrangements of the coldly received Soft Parade and get back down and dirty to a basic blues rock. The good news is that their personality as a music unit would never quite allow that so we didn't get the oppressive scholarship of the Claptons or Mayalls but the bad news is that they almost lost all the diversity of what made moments like Spanish Caravan or The End so great. The result is an album made of old and new recordings that never feels cohesive with great parts constantly getting elbowed out by what sounds like filler. As I'll say later, my first impression of this album was not a good one. How does it scrub up to a more recent spin?

Roadhouse Blues: This loses me from the first notes as a distorted guitar sounds out a ranting blues riff that's picked by the band with a tack piano. Morrison comes in shouting about driving safely and adds some existentialist shading. But, while it's played with real passion and becomes a muscular workout I just can't stand this song. The only reason I listened to it recently was to write this.

Waiting for the Sun, by contrast, is one of my favourite Doors numbers. The whole band starts at the same time. Sighing ride cymbals, slide guitar, tic tack bass and eerie organ shimmers move together in a slow cinematic descent. Morrison's broken croon enters with lines about how beautiful he finds summer, addressed to someone offstage. There's a sudden big swag of brass that bursts in at the end of each line. The chorus kicks in with an intensity that eases back into the next verse. The following chorus adds another repeat of the title as the brass and band intensify to a powerful extended middle eight that insists on the word "waiting" and continues to gain momentum until the final octave doubled vocal: "waiting for you to tell me what went wrong". This might normally but to a solo but everything tightens and quietens as Jim croons, extending the syllables: "this is the strangest life I've ever known." And then screams in encouragement as the band and the brass hammer out the riff in the verse. One final verse and chorus and extended final line finished with a hammering final bolt of brass.

It's magnificent and when I first heard this (on a cassette given to me) I understood what baby boomer journalists had meant when they talked about the power and the sex of the band. I marvelled at how different it was in arrangement and force from anything else on the album and learned, much later, that it had been carried over from the album that bore it's name. Later, still I learned that it was part of the Celebration of the Lizard suite intended for that record. Again later, I heard the live and then the studio recording of that on the re-releases where it works much better than here.

You Make Me Real begins with a nimble blues figure on piano. The band bashes in with a complimentary riff and Jim bellows about a girl. The difference is in the title. Jim feels fake or insubstantial, maybe fame and the adoration of masses have wasted him. But when he's with this 'un his flesh and blood gain body and he plunges in with roaring virility. All good except that it's such macho blues rock that I usually skip it.

Peace Frog begins as a kind of hot bitumen funk riff and commits to the chanting feel of the opening. All the lines begin with the word blood until a spoken section over a spooky breakdown tells of the child Jim absorbing the spirits of a carload of dead native Americans who'd been in an accident that the Morrison family had driven past on a highway. The funk workout resumes with some double tracked Morrison and lifts the album up almost as high as Waiting for the Sun. It ends on a crashing major chord which starts Blue Sunday.

Blue Sunday is a pretty straight love ballad with a Spanish flavour. Morrison's crooning of the simple but heartfelt lyric is set in languid clean electric guitar, shimmering organ and slinky drums as well as a loping bass. I could easily listen to this by itself.

Ship of Fools is a perky gospel tinged number with an apocalyptic theme and a classically influenced middle eight about a figure called Mr Goodtrips who sounds like the Pied Piper of Armageddon. The band swings back into the rave up southern church music to the fade out. The humour of this one is so instantly appealing I always leave it on after Blue Sunday.

Land Ho! kicks in with a jaunty strut down the scale as Morrison strides in with a tale of the sailing men of his family and the women who loved them. A brief middle section parts the curtains of family legend, wades out into the minor in a change that sounds like the band is used to doing this live, and a few lines about the solemnity of sea venturing ends in an imagined toll. A gap of a breath before Jim yells: "Land ho!" and the big strut resumes with Morrison bellowing out a drinking song back on shore to the fade.

The Spy opens with a slinky slide figure, supported by tack piano, snakey bass and jazzy drums as Morrison croons a blues lyric as the spy in the house of love who knows everything about the girl he's singing to including where she goes, her dreams and her deepest secret fear. One verse three times, each travelling from a feline sneak to a powerchording chorus. This possibly features Jim's lowest recorded note.

Queen of the Highway lifts like discarded wrapper from the asphalt as a tale of a girl who falls for a monster in black leather, a kind of folk tale for the Easy Rider generation. The next verses, though, do something interesting by suggesting a lineage as the children of the biker and the supergirl respond to their own wildness. The music is more soul influenced than bluesy with tasteful electric piano and supportive bass guitar (these new masters really redress the balance on the myth of no plucked bass on Doors records) and characterful guitar from Krieger. Despite the hints of modern paganism or nihilism or Dionysism or etc-ism in the story this pleasant number lilts rather than rocks or slinks. Neither Wild Child nor The End but I do leave it on.

Indian Summer is a gentle declaration of love that drifts and shimmers like a mirage at the end of a highway. It's an old recording from before the first album but is as welcome a change of texture and temperature as a glass of cold water on a hot day.

Maggie McGill is a sharp edged walking blues that tells of finding relief where you can from the disasters of living. If you do this and go down to Tangy (or Tangent) town at least the people there know how to get it on. The last verse offers the strange lines about someone being the illegitimate son of a rock and roll star. Outside of whatever Frank Zappa and confederates were up to, this might be the first comment on the consequences of the decade gone and its near religious acceptance of rock music as godhead with numberless bastard children rolling out of rock and roll cars each worshipped at a decreasingly small circle of influence as their volume rises. It ends with Morrison growling that he's just an old blues man watching it all and has been forever. That might well have been the last we heard from him and it would have made a fitting final statement ... from the twenty-six year old malcontent.

I was dreading this. It's albums like this that made me think I should just finish the @50 series at the close of the '60s. The late '60s and early '70s are a time when I really have to think in exceptions. This is from the perspective of someone who wasn't into the music as it happened but discovered it at least half a decade late and the motive for the discovery was a dissatisfaction with the music of the mid to late '70s. The stripping back process that followed psychedelia and gave rise to waves of rootsiness, prog rock, heavy metal, barely identifiable strutting macho 12 bars, country rock, jazz-rock ended in a pop music that sounded perfected and old. It's why when I went back to listen to glam rock I had to except David Bowie, and Led Zeppelin from metal, and so on. It's why I can find nothing of interest in anything by The Band, The Faces, Rod Stewart, Emerson Lake and Palmer, and many many more. Partly it's because I'm not feeling the reaction they express and partly because the push of punk and post punk wiped them out before I was tempted to give any of them a fair trial. This is the first Doors album in the Morrison sequence that I don't really care about. It was also the first one I heard.

My sister's boyfriend was a luthier. He once lent me a 1966 Stratocaster for a week which blew my head off. He was a good musician and a knowledgeable one (my sister picked for musicality, apart from anything else). We had many enlightening chats about rock music and at one point he gave me a commercial cassette of Morrison Hotel that he'd picked up in an op shop sortie. There was a journalism-led revival of the cult of Morrison at the time and I'd devoured the mythology. He came across as a poet who wrote with a quill dipped in dark matter and sang by night for a rock and roll band. At first I quite liked the strut of Roadhouse Blues but found the rant na rant na rant rant na riff annoying and posey. It was Waiting for the Sun that got me with its lyrics from the dawn of paganism and thunder on the horizon scenery. I barely registered any of the other tracks they were all too bluesy and musically uninteresting to me.

When the Doors revival hit my peer group, aided hugely by The End playing over the opening of the cult epic Apocalypse Now, I took my time in getting a reissue of Morrison Hotel but it was the only legit place to go for Waiting for the Sun so at the halfway mark of the '80s I found a second hand copy. I listened to all of it. No change. Still just that one. I bought the DVD-Audio set of all the Morrison Doors albums (if you still don't know, there were two made after his exit) which had this sounding splendid in surround sound but even the best audio quality could not lift the drabber tiles of this patchy platter to the heights of its few great moments. And then there's L.A. Woman! Maybe I won't keep this up longer than this year.

1970@50: THE MADCAP LAUGHS - SYD BARRETT

It's a shambles of barely finished scraps, false starts and unintentionally drifting rhythm and lyric lines that either hang in the air or die with the breath that formed them, a complete mess that any reasonable artist or producer should have been too ashamed to release. Release? Wiped, more like, with an industrial magnet. Thankfully, it was recorded by Syd Barrett who, effectively was his own producer (see below for explanation of this) so we have it all the way down the decades. I was influenced by this album before I'd heard a note of it.

Why? Because I read about Syd Barrett and what I read bore no resemblance to his old band Pink Floyd. Liking Pink Floyd took decades. For a while back in the late '70s my favourite '60s music was psychedelia. Starting with the Beatles offerings I foraged where I could to find more. Not easy then and where I was (Townsville) where if you found anything it was second hand and so virtually by chance. But a friend of my sister had a copy of the first Pink Floyd album and that, coupled with what I knew of his strange, wild ways was enough. It was three years before I heard this disc but I was already a fan of it.

A slinky slide into an open E chord opens Terrapin in just enough time before Syd comes in with a voice that could not have come from anywhere but upper middle class England. "I really love you and I mean you." A familiar A-G-E  from Arnold Layne and the years of blues that had inspired him and we repeat. "The star above you crystal blue." A light electric guitar provides a dozy accompaniment as though stirring from a snooze on a long warm afternoon. Declarations of love blend with a description of  animal freedom, under the water with the sun streaming through. An instrumental verse so laid back it just sound as though Syd forgot to sing. Bridge again. Repeat last verse end on a strum which speeds up just before the cut off. A breezy song of simple pleasures.

No Good Trying stumbles through the door and only just manages to keep its feet. The deep Syd voice comes in urbane and assured despite his staggering. She shouldn't bother with any of her elaborate disguises or personae or anything else she wants to pretend; he will know. Syd's acoustic is all but buried, mostly audible by the pick sound. Around him a psychedelic band thunders, the drummer struggling to provide a backbeat. It's the drum fills that make it sound so unstable. The band was brought in later (most of Soft Machine) and they struggle. Syd isn't keeping time so beats are added to some bars and lost from others. A stinging organ note after the first verse brings everything together for a moment but once it's gone we're back to the shambles.

Love You is a rollicking ball of cute as Syd tells of an extended flirtation. It sounds like his Fender playing unplugged but mic-ed up rather than an acoustic. Tack piano like the one on Bike. The tempo is kept well enough and it's upbeat so the band doesn't have as much to fight against. Syd is almost disciplined here so his word jams work rhythmically. This would convey the experience felt by a fashionable young thing being approached by a beauteous alpha boy who talked like a Lewis Carroll poem and whose eyes made her the most important woman in the room. But that was before and while this sounds like Syd at the time, I mean afterwards, there's a sadness to it which makes each winking moment grind with a kind of void horror.

No Man's Land starts with a electric cranking before bursting into full psychrock with what reads like a scary trip as the band grinds around him. Guitar tone breaks, drums machine-gun and a big bass drives everything from underneath. A brief pair of verses about a kind of compressing horror before an instrumental verse plunges on. Syd speaks something under the music, calmly, saying a lot but to whom and what about? There's a strange creepiness to it. The song comes to a halt with a jamming looseness but the point has been made and made decisively.

Dark Globe is a solo performance, just Syd and his acoustic guitar. Syd pleads with the memory of a departed lover to remember him after a traumatic parting which he likens to a physical collapse. Some lines that sound like words salad ("I'm only a person whose armbands beat on his hands hang tall") start sounding more like private meanings than nonsense on every listen after, perhaps only she would understand. Two verses of identical form (well, as identical as Syd wanted them) reach to a wailing beg: "Won't you miss me? Wouldn't you miss me at all." His voice almost breaks near the top of its range. She isn't just a memory to him, she's there in his mind's eye, in the room, gazing back. She doesn't even need to shake her head. It's not just Syd playing for the emotion rather than the time signature here. He's pounding the strings as he soars to his prayer person to person or person to apparition. The recording is clean and airy around the glittering storm. It's no wonder that it was left like this. No backing band would do anything but steal from it. It's left, a spiking glow in the dark studio, wondrous, beautfiul, but too frightening to approach.

Here I Go is the kind of pretty boy cute number that Donovan had made his own. Like Donovan, Syd could put a little sting in the tail or just be playful but here he lets a little of the nightmare out in the opening lines: "she said a big band is far better than you." The last three words descend the steps to the lowest of his range as though he's asking her down to a cellar with the lights off. But then it strips to life with a kind of jaunty shuffle as he meets another girl who, though she's not so groovy, at least likes him and it's all hunky dory by the end. A side-ending song. Anyone who whinges about how a decent recording with top notch musicians would have made this one a classic should know or remind themselves that this airy anodyne fluff was one of the few done WITH a band. It wasn't all No Man's Land.

A big acoustic chopping chord is answered on the off beat by a big clean electric chord and we're off. The drums, bass and guitars build a kind of moving cubby house moving with wobbly steps forward as Captain Syd calls out orders and reports on strange sightings from the crow's nest. "Please leave us here, close our eyes to the octopus ride." Aaah. All the swirly shifting images makes sense. The octopus here is a kind of real octopus but also one of those big whirling fairground rides, spinning and lifting. If Syd's timing and its relationship with a post hoc backing band hadn't existed it would have been necessary to invent it. This song wants you disorientated and out of sorts. It could be a bad trip with dragons and scattered needles or everything that went through your head as a kid on a ride trying not to explode with nausea. A strange barely controlled quiet moment happens but it's about being lost in the wood. Isn't it good? Isn't it bad? We gear up again for full speed and the ride begins anew, giving us the title for the whole album: "well, the madcap laughs at the man on the water ..." Eventually Syd is left to respond to one pendulous line with another. They don't need clear meaning, they just need to stave off the great collapse. "Please leave us here, close our eyes to the Octopus ride." And the song trails off to a soft, if abrupt, finish.

Golden Hair emerges slowly out of the dark with a modal melody fashioned some time around 1346. An organ drone smoulders quietly as a cymbal is played expertly for atmosphere. At magic hour the sound of her singing draws him into the pool of her light and he begs her to appear, not to join him down there, just to give sight. Syd's beautiful setting of James Joyce's poem brings it to warm life and remembers to include the eye-widening eeriness of love. Utterly enchanting.

Long Gone begins with single strings playing the vocal melody in a corvine minor key. Syd comes in a the bottom of his range but soon soars to the top of his voice, harmonising with himself as the organ moves to the front to hold him up. That three times but not really as what he is telling a story. I think of it as what happened when the narrator of Golden Hair did break through and break into her room. She was long gone, either physically absent, comatose, or deep in madness, aloof and beyond anyone's love. The louder verses wail with fear but always fall back to the weary statement of her absence. Scary song.

She Took a Long Cold Look opens straightaway with those words. It's another solo Syd and guitar (and his lyric sheet when he turns it over halfway through the song) as his strumming plays a non-swinging pair of chords as he describes someone who does not love him or is difficult to love. She likes to  be "extreme just to be extreme" like "a broken pier on a wavy sea". He descends into a kind of trippy introspection and finds that he can breathe even as the water streams over him as he sees only the sky.

Feel seems to be a series of images with something trying to push through them. Another solo effort it sounds like a run through rather than anything finished as he tries cadences here or finding his place there, either attempting to placate the microphone before him or unaware of it. "Alright," he says after the last chord. Alright, let's finish it later or alright, that'll do?

If It's In You begins with a false start as he loses his pitch on a high winding wail. He talks to the producer and starts again. It's no better but he's committed now and goes on. There are clear verses in this but they are made of fragments and images that feel like the barest of sketches. He tries for an Indian influenced mellisma on the word thinking, stops and starts frequently and ends somewhere.

Late Night brings all this back to form. We start with a band in place as a slide swoops up and the down like a golden pendulum. A atmosphere is peaceful and contemplative. The verse only slightly disturbs this with a tighter pace. In a downward tumbling melody Syd describes a lost love and pains of separation but does so with the recall of moments of togetherness with some bringing the kind of passion that must be kept to a whisper or a longing for a kind of childlike innocence. The choruses rise in a gentle pain: "inside me I feel alone and unreal and the way you kiss will always be a very special thing to be." The faster pace trails off and rests in the opening figure of the slide rising and falling, the night around it offering sleep and dreams.

So, what's the deal, here? If you got into Syd Barrett through his Pink Floyd output with its tighlty constructed singles and jammy but directed psychedelic album tracks you might have expected more of that, perhaps more folky, given the absence of the band. But if there was an Arnold Layne there was also an Apples and Oranges. If there was a Lucifer Sam there was a Jugband Blues. Things just don't work out the way we prefer them.

Syd was certainly troubled but the range here from the high form of the last track to the mess of the one before it speak less of a chaotic mind than a highly active one. The difference between the two numbers might not be a good day versus a bad one or Syd with or without his medication but that they were both released regarless of readiness. Some early commentators on this record considered its release to be an act of cruelty.

Would this sound better if he'd worked with a band and taken a group of people familiar with the material into the studio to soar to greater heights than with the old band? Maybe, but I doubt it. Partly, Syd was just like that. If John Lennon dropped or added a beat here or there in songs like Across the Universe or All You Need is Love he had a supportive group and astute producer to either correct or accomodate it. The jamming aesthetic that Floyd would keep to for many an album after he left were not just tolerant of his wandering musicality but encouraged it. It's more a case that this record at its clearest presents that artist without embellishment, mind going fast, fishing around for chords or ways to get the thoughts out while the studio clock was ticking, partially indulged and partially dismissed by the producers exhausted by it. This is why I said at the start that he was producing himself as each case of the roll call that eventually included his old band mates: everyone eventually had to fold themselves around what was happening in front of the mic.

Me, I don't think the worst of this is charming or original but painful. Then again, the best of it wears its chaos on its sleeve and thrives in the results, cranking and crashing around an uncertain terrain without a care. Whether he was insane or more creative than even he had control over he was able to front up with some songs that only those who came after would sound like. (When I finally got a copy while at University I was so obssessed with this record and its creator that I would slur "see ya later" into "SydBarrett" to see if anyone would notice.)

David Bowie's albums from this time, The Man Who Sold the World and Hunky Dory plunder the aesthetic. They are more disciplined by a massive order but were made in admiration of this moment of melee. Bowie's false start and chat to the producer at the beginning of Andy Warhol on Hunky Dory is a direct tribute to Syd (to the point of it being a lift from the start of If It's In You). When paying tribute to the bands of his youth in the Pinups album, his recreation of the madness that was See Emily Play is one of the rare rock covers that reaches the spirit of its original. And ask yourself who comes to mind when you hear Long Gone or Octopus? It's just that it works the other way around. And it might not have been just Syd but after this album Bowie dropped that Anthony Newley "'ow's ya farver" London from his vocals and started sounding more like himself.

As to the rest it's fair to say that like the Velvet Underground or The Stooges or indeed Bowie, anyone at the beginning of a creative life who hears this album will be influenced by it, will want to sing about toadstools and lightning like they've just come from Devonshire tea, will want to wrest free of the cover band rigidity of repeating instead of renovating, will want, through this most other of artists, to become themselves.

1969@50: LET IT BLEED: THE ROLLING STONES

A plinking guitar figure. It's gentle but the sustain note quietly insists on urgency as it repeats down the scale, C# B A. The drums slide in from the second play and between the two a snake of guitar bends high on the board, waking. A distant falsetto ooh sounds a lament. The band crashes in with bass, extra guitar on the chords but the falsetto is still quiet and the snaking lead guitar confidently intensifying until it strangles around the rhythm for the start of the storm. Jagger comes in from kilometres away, singing of disaster looming and threatening his very life. And then the chorus, female and powerful but still distant bursts into the chant: War, children. It's just a shot away, just a shot away. A brief respite is messed up with some fiery blasts of bluesharp before a big bold guitar break takes over and then, oddly crawls down into the mix to slither. But then with a distant yell from Jagger Merry Clayton screams the centrepiece: "Rape! Murder! It's just a shot away, just a shot away!" Three times and on the third it's so urgent and pained her voice breaks on the word shot and then splinters for the last cry of murder. The storm continues and Jagger, much closer than before sings of love being just a kiss away. The last words are taken up by the women and repeated before they fall under the waves of thunder which rolls and bashes until the fade, moving on to new ground.

Just as Sympathy for the Devil was a revelation to any of its first listeners that the band thought of as the second in command of the British invasion had bloomed into something quite other to how it started, Gimme Shelter took that further. There are reasons for this and one is the transition that was happening between guitarists. Brian was on the floor and got in some maracas for one song and some auto harp on another before being picked up and carried back to Pooh Corner. Mick Taylor, fresh and almost illegally young, entered for only two album tracks and then didn't play in the style that would characterise his contribution to such acclaim in future efforts.

So, with Brian completely out of the picture and the new boy not yet given a defined role, the Jagger/Richards takeover was sealed. This is the first Glimmer Twins commanded production in a way that the previous one was like a refinement of the then current state with all the pop influences discarded. So, while it was fine to kick Beggar's Banquet off with something from the dawn of humanity, the follow up needed to rage as the band had never before. There are some precedents, of course; Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby and Citadel but the chaos of the first was unsustainable and force of the second too beginner to base a sound on. As it's almost entirely Keith on guitar here it's his hot clean tone that dominates and the sinewed textures of the lead lines in Gimme Shelter and further explorations that will colour these songs more than anything else. The big four (Beggars through to Exile) are thought to consolidate the Stones sound to the effect that anything they have tried since is not just judged by those records but discernably slight departures from them. If there had been nothing Beatlesque about Beggar's Banquet, Let it Bleed is the sound of a great muscularity shambling to the stage and dominance.

After the storm a gentle acoustic arpeggio introduces Love in Vain. It is joined by a solid hot slide guitar, brushed drums and bass. Jagger's vocal is plaintive and full throated after its burial alive in the opening track. But there's a problem. On original pressings of this album the song was credited to Jagger-Richards. It's since been recognised as the work of Ur bluesman Robert Johnson. This happened on the previous LP with Prodigal Son. It was happening a lot in Zeppelin-ville, too. Things would catch up but for now... The version, let's say, is a good one, though, slow as a hot afternoon and pining.

Country Honk is an acoustic rendition of Honky Tonk Women which was recorded as a single during these sessions (and features Mick Taylor in full flight as a lucid and lyrical guitar maestro). Here, starting with street sounds, car horns and studio chatter, a shambolic singalong shines with impromptu good humour.

Live With Me begins with a classic Keith bass line and kicks quickly into a lean rock song. I used to skip this one as what I could get from the lyrics seemed too play dough macho. Much later, finally reading them, I keep it on when I listen. "I got nasty habits," sings Mick. I bet you do. Hold forth. "I take tea at three." Yes, it's actually much more of a piss take at themselves and their reputation. Even the lines about the maid and footman later on have a kind of knockabout whimsy. Even the faux in faux decadence is camp and wide eyed. It's also the first track that sax guy Bobby Keys added his own dialogue and to great effect.

A swampy slide intro gives way to a big strummed chord progression for the title track. The slide will re-enter throughout, adding great texture to the message and the humour of the song. Is it Ry Cooder? He's officially on mandolin and there are stories ... I don't care either way but I do know that the voice of it fits what Keith was establishing already in the sound. The lyric is mainly a series of statements about needing the equivalent of shoulders to cry on that stretch into sex and drugs and rock and roll for six verses with Jagger finally calling: "you can come all over me." It's a massive washing tide of knowing flowing over the exhausted bodies of the fast living and the victims altogether and, while it is delivered in clear humour carries a lot of weight.

Flip the disc and after a few chugging electric notes like a key igniting an engine Midnight Rambler begins to strut from the speakers with a confidence made of a solid bass line, steady drums and stinging guitar as Jagger delivers the manifesto of a career criminal. The second verse intensifies this before a sudden stop. The guitars rise and fall in slippery waves until Jagger intones, "well, you heard about the Boston - " THUMP! He's just revealed which bad guy he's talking about. After a few more lines of slapping musical violence the grind behind him rises and swells as he tells us how he could be everywhere, in your hallway, on your stair. Reaching breaking point, the band push back into the rock blues groove of the first two verses  as Jagger continues with the criminal's arrogant snarling confession until it's too much for even him and he stops in a kind of stuttered climax.

I first heard this full album in 1982 and had been well versed in all manner of theatrical rock music as well as the more violent aspects of punk, and late '60s rock. Nothing of that was as intense or quite as powerful as this epic. And it wasn't like Dazed and Confused or In a Gadda Da Vida. There were no flashy solos, let alone overlong ones. There were, however, instrumental passages that felt more like scenes of sleazy night life from movies yet to be conceived by the like of Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola. The seriousness and assumption of character is more akin to mid-'70s Bowie than anything on a Sabbath record. The haze of wilful evil in this track still gets to me. Jagger on all four. Richards on texture and mood and the will to do it all with just three chords.

You Got the Silver is Richards' debut as a lead vocalist. More edible slide in the intro before Keith's much feebler voice comes in with the first hesitant lines of a straightforward love song that circles around a three chord honky tonk workout. But there are dynamics, it doesn't just begin, go and finish. The first lines are couched in a kind of shy admiration and wrapped in the sinewy electric slide before the rise of confidence brings a robust celebration out of him and the band. It's not a lot of song but it works.

Monkey Man begins with one of the most intriguing instrumental introductions the band or anyone of their contemporaries did. A piano glistens with a rising arpeggio over an ominous organ playing minor chords, pulsating bass and funky chord descent on guitar. This kicks into gear, the guitar switching to a more ragged rock attack before Jagger belts in lines about desperation and decadence as the guitar blasts and breaks back into the frenetic figure. A gorgeous instrumental break in a major mode plays the guitar against an octave slide figure and more glittering piano before Jagger comes back in, screaming about being a monkey. It's a kind of Jumping Jack Flash revisited with the sophistication that jet setting and a return to touring bestowed. It takes a few listens to mean much but once it gets to you it's there forever.

And then we come to one of the saddest and most achingly beautiful anthems of this anthem-heavy year. As they never had nor ever would again, The Rolling Stones begin with a choir. Not, a soul church congregation nor a battery of mighty women like on Gimme Shelter but a classical choir. It sounds funny to hear the high boys voices at first as they sing Jagger's lines about an old flame making a connection, with perfect pitch and clipped diction but the second listen on gives it the sadness it began with. A gentle acoustic strum rises as the choir finishes and Jagger comes in with a world weary voice with lines about women to meet, old friends who share time (and what they get from the Chelsea drugstore) and stories about other friends, of protests in the streets of the turbulent late '60s all of which fall into the refrain that while you can't always get what you want, if you try sometime you can get what you need. Trite? Only if read on a page without the music. The music rise in force to massiveness but it's not like the storm of Gimme Shelter, it's both merciful with building and cleansing choirs, raindrop piano figures, filling organ chords and soaring vocals. The old decade is grinding to a close. Everyone's a little scarred and torn, everyone's exhausted, everyone can't go on but the next ten are around the corner and everyone has to. As the storm of Gimme Shelter roared over the distance the great earthly heaven of this greatly forgiving song takes us with it into the peace it leaves behind. What a way to end the '60s not with the Fabs cooing about love and peace but the bad guys who had finally found their bad and a kind of sagacity as well. "you get what you neeeeeeeeeed!"

1969@50: What I Missed

I was alive in 1969 but was unaware of almost every record I've written about from then this year in the series 1969@50. I was still under ten and if I liked any pop music at all it was something cute they played on the radio. A year and a bit later I discovered the world of classical through an ABC radio show called Sunday Morning Concert. That tied in with my fascination of previous centuries and drawing scenes from them. My point is that none of these albums were on my radar at the time. The ones I've featured were mostly heard well after their release (in some cases decades) and they are the ones that have stuck with me and which I still listen to. Here are some I'd marked as candidates but could not stir myself into celebrating. That doesn't make them bad records just short of my taste or ones that have too few tracks I love. Anyway...

BAYOU COUNTRY: Creedence Clearwater Revival - This is one the other side of the mass of material from the late '60s/early'70s that I can't get into for a number of reasons but mainly related to a reliance on a blues-rock vocabulary that I am alienated by. This band improved immensely and swiftly in subsequent releases with John Fogerty proving a mighty writer, singer and guitarist but that was in the future.

KICK OUT THE JAMS: MC5 - I didn't hear this one until a few years ago though I was apprised of the band's place in rock history from my teens. A friend's sister had a copy of the album High Times which contained one great song (Over and Over) and a lot of blues-rock workouts that left me cold. This debut is boldly a live album intended to pass along the excitement of an MC5 show with its haranguing between song calls to action and a hard rock set that ends in a fashionably Eastern-influenced jam. When I reformatted my cds and gave most of the hard copies away to friends or donated them locally, I just added this to the pile without making flacs, never thinking to revisit it. It's not that it's dated with its "sisters and brothers!" yells, it's just not my kind of music, regardless of how stirring it might have been to witness. They did the right thing by their fans, I'm just not among their fans.

IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING: King Crimson - The title track is good but I can't get into the rest of it.

UNCLE MEAT: The Mothers of Invention - Sigh. This is one of the most exhausting records I've ever tried to listen to. I am defeated.

TROUT MASK REPLICA: Captain Beefheart - Of all the avant rock I was aware of like this or anything by Frank Zappa, my resistance to this stems from the feeling I get that it is done less from musicality than a need to be anti-conventional. It just sounds cold to me. Contrast that with the following decade's Residents who did seem to put music of conviction in the blend of recording as event and showbiz.

A SALTY DOG: Procol Harum - Like The Band, The Faces, Jeff Beck Group and many others from the turn of this decade I find it too hard to connect with the music. I wonder if it's because they start from a part of the reimagined blues timeline that left me cold. I will give this one points for committing to its overall feel and trying to stretch a little beyond this but I struggled to listen all the way through and couldn't have done it justice in a fuller write-up.

GOODBYE: Cream - For me it was one great album and a lot of extended blues-rock. Sorry, it's just a deaf spot for me. All of Disraeli Gears and about three tracks off Wheels of Fire and I need to declare myself an infidel.

IN A SILENT WAY: Miles Davis - Utterly sublime workouts of poignant melodies by a jazz supergroup on the verge of inventing jazz/rock fusion but avoiding everything that tainted that genre with overly rarefied noodling and nerve-defying complexity. This is a solid favourite of mine which I enjoy quite frequently in an SACD in 5.1. It's beautiful but it's hard to describe.

THE GILDED PALACE OF SIN: The Flying Burrito Brothers - Good album but by flac-ed copy left the best song (Sin City) only half complete. I kept trying to remember where I'd seen the CD but it never turned up and by the time I went to write up the next one the time was past. Perhaps I'll write it up as an unheard classic on its own.

SONGS FROM A ROOM: Leonard Cohen - This would really take too long a run up for me to do justice to and every time I tried I kept getting lost. I'll feature the early Cohen canon in a dedicated article later.

ON THE THRESHOLD OF A DREAM: The Moody Blues -  great childhood favourite and important to my own musical development but missed the date. Perhaps an article about what seems to be an unjustly forgotten band of innovators.

SCOTT 4: I know. How could I? He's got everything I like including a lean towards cinema rather than rock. I immersed myself in the record for a few weeks and emerged with only a few tracks to return to and the sense of a single approach to arrangement that quickly got on my nerves. I love, however, Boy Child and The Rhymes of a Woman.

UMMUGUMMA: Pink Floyd. For a long time this set was a punk joke, chiefly for the endless instrumentals with titles that ended with phrases like  "... and grooving with a Pict." When I finally attempted to listen I gave up well before the halfway mark and never returned. I've really got into this bands stuff from before and after but this and some of the earlier seventies records just don't connect and I think I'm still right about that (the same way I was right to find The Stranglers ghastly old yobs with occasionally good songs).

There are probably more.

1969@50: BALLAD OF EASY RIDER - THE BYRDS

A bright and easy arpeggio on an acoustic guitar with a swell of a string section rising. McGuinn's vocal enters with the lines about the river flowing and things going where they will. This retake of the Byrds newer contribution to Dennis Hopper's groundbreaking film Easy Rider is a lift from the sombre one in the film and on the soundtrack album. The band went with the decision to strengthen their link with the runaway success of the movie, leading with this track and giving the whole album its title. But this did not sustain. No further tracks have any direct relevance to the film apart from having a distinctly American flavour with revisits to the country rock of the album before the previous one.

It's not just the identity of the record to the movie. Unlike Dr Byrds where McGuinn insisted on flying the Byrds flag by taking every lead vocal, the singing is shared and the sole original founding member is even absent from three of the tracks altogether. How thinly can you stretch a well known musical entity before it warps beyond recognition or snaps entirely?

Fido contributed by and sung by soon to depart bassist John York is pleasant enough with some fine guitaring from Clarence White and a drum solo that doesn't get too boring. A swaying rhythm swings between the first and fourth chords until it ends.

Oil In My Lamp provides something like a progression in that its harmony put it pleasantly between the old Byrds and Baptist church sangin'. The song is a hymn associated with the early years of school but here actually compels with a commitment to the the brightness of the plagal motion of the tune and the strength of the vocals. It is entirely harmonised but the clearest voice is drummer Gene Parsons.

Tulsa County is a tasteful country cover with some fine bending guitar slinging, a strong McGuinn vocal, sweet harmonies that work for being a lot less formal and blocky than the trademark Byrds harmonies, fiddle and gentle Nashville lilt.

Jack Tar The Sailor begins with some lovely atmospherics on the guitar, settles into a kind of mid Atlantic folk with McGuinn supposedly trying a British accent to go with the origin of the song. McGuinn knew what he was going for and would have felt emboldened by the emerging of the brash folk fusion of UK acts like Steeleye Span, Pentangle and Fairport Convention. The trouble is that he just sound like he's pretending to be about ninety-seven years old. The the bands efforts create a genuinely beautiful setting but the vocal just makes every good thing drag like a corpse across a pub floor.

Jesus is Just Alright begins with very tasty minor key country rock guitars. The harmony vocals are blocky and eerily reminiscent of the style of close-to-home success of Crosby Stills Nash and Young. And then it ends.

It's All Over Now, Baby Blue rises as a country flavoured dirge that takes forever to finish the title line at the end of the chorus. They had done a more folk-rock take during the Turn Turn Turn sessions which might have struck them at the time as more of the same but plays far better than this interminable outing.

There Must be Someone I can Turn To sounds sincere, authentic and like the cover version it is. It's good but should it be here? McGuinn absent.

Gunga Din begins with a superbly bright and difficult acoustic arpeggio. A gentle country rock motion tells a tale of sad disappointment and societal rejection. Lovely nimble fingered Telecaster work in the outro. Nothing to complain about, really.

The Woody Guthrie cover Deportee is full country or as close as they close on Sweetheart. Is it bitchy to suggest that McGuinn's vocal sounds like a mix of Chris Hillman and Gram Parsons? Great song, though.

The final track is Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins and reinstates the earlier tradition on Byrds albums of a goofy closing track. After a reconstruction of the Houston countdown Roger comes in with an acoustic guitar and gentle harmonium with a few lines that are over before they've begun.

You can put this album on and leave it on. It's what a Byrds album sounds like when the band is a version that more resembles the ship of Theseus and the repaired beams and masts, for all their faithfulness to the original design, stick out. The half-arsed cover art which McGuinn infamously hated for its corny warped typeface and bizarrely contrary image of a biker who looked more like the rednecks at the end of the movie than the freedom-seeking hippy of the movie. And the shortfalling insistence on the link with the movie that runs out after the first track doesn't help. Not even the barely coherent liner notes by Easy Rider star Peter Fonda can help.

This is an album that begs the faint praise it often draws. Not all bands produce at their best album after album. The Byrds had more than their share of upsets and reversals of fortune that, when seen with clear hindsight, would puzzle the staunchest fan as to why they bothered with the strongest debate held by just when they should have split and found new careers. I'm not a fan of Sweetheart of the Rodeo. I think it's bland and pandering rather than bold. The return to exploratory rock afterward with Dr Byrds was better but then it was followed by this. And there was both good and dire to follow but no further sheer brilliance. McGuinn's relative aloofness from the project had a lot to do with the ongoing saga of the mooted musical Gene Tryp which he envisaged would spring him off to a new and bigger career. This album's lack of force beyond the level of elevated muzak bears witness to its central figure's distance from the centre. Ah well ...

1969@50: DAVID BOWIE

A gently strummed acoustic guitar fades up alternating between C and E Minor. A picked electric bass joins and a vibraphone swells up and then light drums. Bowie's vocal enters harmonising with itself and something's changed since the last record. The sci-fi story is unsurprising from someone who sang about all those grave diggers and messiahs to the starving and it wouldn't be the last. No, its the quality of his voice. It's a little broken, damaged. The 1967 album of the same title had him chopping and changing with each track as though the next voice he put on might be the gold. The only thing left of that here is the London lilt: that he would never abandon.

After the whispered countdown behind the vocals, Major Tom lifts off, wonders at the sight of his home moving into the distance. Something goes wrong and his ship is set to drift away from the earth forever as he contemplates his complete isolation in a tin can far above the world. A mellotron string section (thank you, Rick Wakeman) and glissandi on the stylophone and more spacey vibraphone and sparse drumming work for a song that seems to float in zero G the way its protagonist does.

Bowie would phase out his quaint weird tales over the next few albums and was already beginning on this album with songs that feel far more personal than any he'd released. The President Joes with the Running Gun Blues and Supermen to come would drift off into the dark matter the same as Major Tom while our Div explored the benefits of narrating as though from experience.

Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed gives us a promising title but begins as though it's going to be a sensitive ballad with sawshy acoustic guitars and a gentle vocal. Before you know it the gears crank up and it starts a kind of Bo Diddly shuffle with a full band and becomes a kind of Dylan/Velvets rant. He's a poor hippy and she's the daughter of riches, craning her neck to see him from the height of her window. But he's dangerous and sexy and he draws her attention (though her own attraction to him makes her sick). It drags into a jammy chord progression of guitars and blues harp until it ends.

Don't sit down is a joke that came out of a jam session that should have been erased. It's a little like seeing an interview with the stars of a new whacky comedy gad about and then cringing when you see the trailer. Anwyay...

Letter to Hermione is a gentle, sensitive ballad about a lost love that still burns in the spurned narrator. It's personal (and autobiographical, by the way) and heartfelt if a little precious. After the previous track, its discipline and melodic performance are welcome.

Cygnet Committee begins in stately fashion with Bowie chugging an acoustic guitar as the pieces of a roack band seem to wake around him (some of them backwards). The sense of an epic is clear and lifts as we hear the initial lines about a kind of exhausted love. Something tells you it isn't about a boy and girl but an individual and a population. The song deftly progresses through a set structure a few times but never quite feels like it as a lot of thought has been given to dynamics and momentum. The narrator is at times a fallen messiah or cult leader and at others just another hippy pressed into fatigue by the futility of trying to generate mass creativity. At one point slogans like All you Need is Love and Kick Out the Jams are directly quoted. The age is at its end and it's a mess. Musically, it is heavily influenced by Jacques Brel's creepier moments like My Death but it sounds like much more than a copy. It sounds like someone who has found a genuine path from influence through inspiration to originality. Space Oddity aside, this is the first song on this album that sounds like a lot of the decade to follow will sound in terms of its boldness, scale and sense of progression. By the time the drums find the bolero beat under Bowie's increasingly impassioned plea for life he has well and truly arrived ... as himself.

Janine, which would have opened side two of the original vinyl, seems a straighforward bright boy/girl song with a catchy chorus and guitar riff. He holds off being open with her, feeling it might be too much. By the time you get to lines like, "but if you take an axe to me you'll kill another man," we are in a place darker and more dangerous than bohemian Chelsea in the still Swinging Big Smoke.

An Occasional Dream begins as a quite jolly whimsy with bright acoustic guitars bearing a light vocal. An electric bass comes in, then drums, and then a hippy dippy flute section. The song describes an old affair with real longing, leading to the chorus which plays broad and stately. It's beautiful but sounds like a doomed version of Bowie and I can never remember more than the chorus.

Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud emerges as another acoustic ballad but soon transforms through extra orchestration, developed structure and vocal performance into what, for all the world, sounds like a show tune. The people of a small village imprison the wild eyed boy who has come preaching love and communion with nature. He is brought to deliverance by his mystical home and the villagers seem to turn toward him. But having already made their decision to hang him the villagers get flattened by the bouldering rage of Freecloud. Once back home the boy kicks pebbles off the clouds in shrugging disgust. There are several sections and the orchestral arrangement builds through them. And one of the things that happens is a shift from Bowie's usual voice, familiar from the first full LP  to the strong stage-ready wail that would serve him through Ziggy to Diamond Dogs. We're hearing the first of many epics that, though they shifted from Broadway to the rock theatre he would begin to develop as a main approach from the next album onward. Bowie liked the song so much (there's more than a little autobiographical allegory happening in it) that he put it in the set of his last gig as Ziggy, years later.

God Knows I'm Good begins with lush acoustic chords. Bowie comes in with a straightforward vocal about an impoverished old woman caught shoplifting. As the shoppers and staff close in judgementally and the woman collapses she intones the title phrase which is also the chorus. That Bowie narrates this from a first person perspective is notable as he didn't really pursue this avenue, moving on to explore storytelling from deeper within his characters. It's not a bad song and the chorus is compelling but it is rendered near colourless by the peaks of the songs either side.

Memory of a Free Festival is announced after Bowie asks the producer if he should. He describes in a plain melody a joyous occasion of music, drugs and love which seems to have included a mutually acceptable alien abduction. The arrangement begins with a simple harmonium which holds Bowie's invoking tone well. The slow chant, whether solo or choral has a pleasing build: Sun machine  is coming down and we're gonna have a party, uh huh...

I think I've been clear about my bias here. This is the Bowie of the golden shoulder length perm of Dylan-worshipping hippies. The look and lifestyle might well have suited him but its time was gone by this set. The new one emerging from beneath it was far more exciting. Taking the goofy novelty songs he was happy to do the last time but blending them with compelling stories gave us Space Oddity which still sounds fresh. Cygnet Committee, with a little work, could have been on Diamond Dogs or Station to Station. Most of the rest falls between the world he was leaving and the one he was planning. That one, the one that produced a decade of brash and inventive greatness, could dazzle even when it misstepped.

Tony Visconti, near lifelong producer and arranger was here for all but Space Oddity which he felt was gimmicky. Undersung when other collaborators were around like Brian Eno (still incorrectly assumed by many to have been the producer of Low), Visconti proved a fine arranger and sound production thinker. The peaks of this record have the sound of a great artist forming and emerging from the artistic suicide of pleasing a peer group and that sound has a lot to do with the musicality and coaching of Tony Visconti.

When this album was rereleased it was with a Ziggy-era photo on the cover, IBM font and named after the opening track. You could feel the embarrassment just holding it. As for Bowie himself, next stop was a rock outing that approached metal, and after that a poppier effort which showed more clearly than anything how far he had come from sensitive new age laments to intense epics like Life on Mars or deceptively gentle malefactions like Quicksand. Bowie was turning a little to such greatness in this album but he had a skin or two to shed before he could. That is also the sound you hear here, and not for the last time.

1969@50: BASKET OF LIGHT - PENTANGLE

A tricksy dual guitar figure is anchored by a double bass the band kicks into a smooth groove before the light-bearing voice of Jacqui McShee sounds a bright modal tune about getting away from it all, whose chorus is wordless: ba duppa doodah. The next verse has her providing her own descant vocal before a middle eight moves to the minor and creates a lot of space. The bass anchor returns for the last verse and we end symmetrically with the intro. This is not folk rock. And it's not prog, either. Prog would have made the odd number time signature imposing. Pentangle make it seem effortless. If anything, it's folk jazz. Worst nightmare? Give me a minute.

Once I Had a Sweetheart begins with a gentle rocking motion between acoustic guitar and bowed bass. Jacqui comes in with the title as first line. Congas and non-rock percussion enter and the song builds. No middle eight nor gear-changing chorus, just the ghostly nightmare of a lost love sung sweetly. Then an instrumental takes over and we notice that we've already been hearing a tambura drone. We notice that because the sitar comes in with a poignant solo that sounds like longing. When The vocal re-enters for the final verse it is set deep in ethereal harmony, the final line "after I'm gone" echoing into the fade.

Springtime Promises begins with a guitar figure in a similarly jazzy mode to the opening track and proceeds to sound like the most conventional song so far. Sung by its co-composer Bert Jansch, it tells of the change of the seasons both literally and figuratively as people respond to their own changes. Busy but light percussion and Danny Thompson's masterful bass playing match Jansch's acoustic mastery.

Lyke Wake Dirge freezes from the first with a Gregorian whispered three part harmony telling of the soul's journey from the darkness of death through purgatory. If it sounds old with all them thees and mayests it should. Even though its refrain of "and Christ receive thy soul" is every fourth line that is considered an interpolation of a pre-Christian funeral dirge. We are going way back in time. This is a little like ghost stories for me: I don't believe but I still like the eeriness. It sounded like a spell and not a good one.

Train Song continues the jazzy course of Light Flight and Springtime Promises with a rhythm suggestive of locomotion in the guitar and McShee's scat song descant. Jansch's vocal about the pain of leaving his love has an exhausted pain in it. The descant pouring over it in a breakdown feeling like balm. The lyric contains the album title and compares love to a kind of surreal trap. The track and side end with Thompson bowing his bass with a stuttering spiccato that rises through to an uneasry harmonic that might suggest a retreating train whistle or a troubling idea of a soul rising into dissipation.

Hunting song begins with a delicate and creepy glockenspiel and a percussive double bass played high on the fingerboard. Jacqui comes in with a tale as a traveller who sees a medieval hunting party with a Revelation-like ten kings and queens. After a brief instrumental break the vocal melody begins phase B with a cascading variation of the first section with the double bass edibly echoing the vocal descents. The narrator, at a low emotional ebb witnesses a scene between two of the hunting party and then we hear their dialogue, Jacqui as the lady and Bert Jansch as the knight. She has a magic horn which compels the truth. She means it as a gift for the king. The knight has a jape in mind, though. Another busy but delicious acoustic instrumental and then we are into section C with a more stately melody. The traveller reaches a castle where the lord and lady are bidding farewell to each other as he heads off battle. Before we have taken note of it we have been propelled by a rhythm section of bass and congas. The medieval setting has become almost Latin jazz. This comes to a head and returns to 1232 with a gorgeous and wordless round of male and female voices in a  minor mode. Bert takes up the end of the story as the warrior returns to find his life undone by the magic horn with its fatal truth. Jacqui assumes the final lines as the traveller or perhaps something more omniscient to pronounce a death by dark arts.

This song is set in a terrifying pre-Raphaelite painting where medieval figures seem to wander in woods made of dark matter. See my earlier comment about ghost stories. I think I had read Alan Garner's folk horror novel The Owl Service not too long before hearing this. I fuse them both in my memory. There is both a luxury in the music and a coldness in the tale that tie a knot of scowling horror. I loved and was scared by this song.

The folky jazz of Sally Go Round the Roses serves a pallet cleanser after the epic Hunting Song. The arrangement loosens the pulse of the Jaynettes version. The vocals come and go, interweaving like someone haunted by thoughts that cannot be shaken. This might be a lazy afternoon shot at an oldie but it still gets to me.

The Cuckoo brings the glockenspiel back out of the prop room to add an iciness to the traditional song about constant birds and deceitful lovers. After an instrumental featuring some tasty acoustic guitar and bass interplay the song repeats with the verses in reversed order. That made me think of the use of reversed actions in spells and - Maybe The Owl Service was still on my mind.

House Carpenter begins with a banjo and Jacqui singing the first lines about marrying below her station. Bert Jansch comes in as a smarmy tempter. The woman leaves her young family for adventure on the ocean wave. The ship goes down and she drowns longing for her simple life, her husband and children. And then she stands in front of bright hills which she takes for heaven until disabused by her tempter who explains that it's actually hell. The band below gains breadth with tambura, sitar, bass and drums. The final scene in hell is delivered acapella by McShee before her last yearning futility sinks into a tide of banjo and sitar which play to the fade.

Much later, when I was able to piece it together, I marvelled at how producer Shel Talmy who had made The Kinks and The Who sound so boxy had developed in a very few years to produce this wonder of blended styles. There is just nothing wrong with this production.

I heard this album in the holidays that divided primary from high school. It was a different kind of graduation. My sister Anita who was into all things medieval borrowed a copy from her friend Penny (whose collection also boasted the best cast recording of Jesus Christ Superstar and an original mono Revolver) and we listened to it in the rumpus room as the sky dripped monsoonal tears without.

It was olde worldey enough for me to tolerate and never got too close to rock music for me to worry about impurity. And its tales of dark deeds set in imaginative arrangements with frequently breathtaking vocal arrangements captured my Hammer horror mind. I drew pictures of ancient intrigue, death beds haunted by masked figures bearing candle sticks.

The music itself bore such character as offered mystery with every play. The hillbilly twang here, eastern drone there and some of the most intricate guitar interplay were a revelation. I was slowly coming around to the idea that there was some music made after the eighteenth century that I could like (and some of the source material here predated that limit by centuries itself).

Also, both Anita and I shared a surprised smile at hearing the very first track of this record. Light Flight was the theme of a great little UK series about three young women sharing a house at the end of Swinging London. You can Youtube it but if you do you might struggle through the pacing and theatrical dialogue and performances but at the time it felt grown up. The theme version is shorter, unaccompanied and has different words but the connection was thrilling.

I bought my own copy in the eighties when I saw it had been re-issued on vinyl. More recently, I got it as a DVD-Audio with a big surround mix. It still works as music without nostalgia. I can't hear an old Sherbet or even a Queen song without opening a room in the mid seventies wing of my recollection. But this ba bu budoodah opens a window and sunlight and fresh air come in.