1971@50: PAUL AND LINDA MCCARTNEY - RAM

About a year after releasing the most surprisingly bitsy ex-Beatle album Paul McCartney brought this more studio slick effort to the public, roping Linda in for the byline. Where McCartney had him in the garden shed, pasting musical  polaroids in with glimpses of grandeur, Ram lines everything up like a real record as if to say it was him behind the woolly beard, after all. 

I didn't own a copy of this record in the '70s. In fact my solo Beatle collection was pretty slight. It wasn't hard to find a copy I just had a wincing response to seeing it that mentally sounded like Nah! See also, Red Rose Speedway and Wings Wildlife. The only ones I had of Paul's were Band on the Run and Venus and Mars. Some great tracks in there but ... My first copy was a hi-res download from an online retailer. I'd walk around with it in my ears and see if I liked it.

Too Many People: By which Paul remembers the value of starting strong. Acoustic guitars and both clean and dirty electrics, rangy vocal with cool water harmonies and falsetto lines and melody as appealing as a perfect lamington with a cup of perfect tea. This is the Paul of Abbey Road rather than the hermit of Kreen Akrore. There's even a note of protest in the words (which would be taken by his old co-writer somewhat personally but that's for when I get to Imagine) which adds a little heft but, really, the message here is that he is back and ready to roll. And roll he does. 

3 Legs: Except he shouldn't do it this way. McCartney blues is not what I want to hear, especially when the pointless lyrics don't earn the musical hue. A call and response acoustic stomp that at best I can tolerate in passing. This is the first sign that he's getting indulged rather than encouraged.

Ram On: Noodley piano, some studio patter and a ukulele comes in with a real vocal in a minor key. This builds to a gentle band arrangement. Goes nowhere but is very easy on the ears.

Dear Boy: If the previous track had a nod or two to late '60s Beach Boys this is an outright wink to the kind of texture and rhythmic play of a Surf's Up or Heroes and Villains. A strident Rhodes vamp and a busy melody soon joined by a choir of beautifully arranged harmonies. Aimed at Linda's first husband rather than Lennon, this one, too, was taken personally by the latter. The frenetic pace and purpose of the song is breaks for breath as a rattling lead guitar solo sounds before a rich choral fade. Utterly marvellous.

Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey: This is as Beatlesque as the album gets with recollections of the Abbey Road medley. A plaintive vocal starts with the rest of the band. We're so sorry, Uncle Albert. For what? Well, this is Paul putting the words on last so you're going to have to stop caring. A phone voice verse in a posh accent still makes me smile: "we're so sorry, Uncle Albert, but we haven't done a bloody thing all day...." The melancholy turns jaunty without a real break. A silly flugel horn tune is overtaken by a screaming chorus and early Fabs style clean guitar progression. A nonsense verse about Admiral Halsey, a falsetto something then back to the flugel horn, the big chorus before a coda and fade. It's hard to call this track a masterpiece despite the obvious love of craft and rich melodic content and mood mapping but the words are meaningless rather than slight and, though this doesn't really get in the way, seem to undercut the music. Oh, did I say fade? I meant crossfade as a few ugly guitar squawks lead us to ...

Smile Away: If blues isn't Paul's thing he's out to hammer that home with a big clumsy balls out rocker which brings back the Beach Boys salute with Bula BVs and what sounds like lyrics made up during a jam version that through insistence (or lack of resistance) made it on the album. Could be worse is the best I'm giving it. But, honestly, considering the scale of Uncle Albert which should have put it at the end of the old side one, why put this on the end?

Heart of the Country: A good strong acoustic strut where the jazz influences fit well. This makes me wonder if he adapted the White Album sliver Can You Take Me Back was nagging as this melodically and rhythmically. Lovely.

Monkberry Moon Delight: And then there's this. A strong strident minor key thumper with stupid words and a vocal pushed into what sounds like self parody. Those two elements ruin this number. Listen to this and the later 1985 when he got the combination right and compare. I have to pretend it's a guest vocalist. I think he's trying for a kind of Cab Calloway in the voice. It's completely at odds with the smoother BVs. Goes on.

Eat at Home: A domestic life plea which might also be a thinly veiled sexual invitation is set in a pleasant soft rock pool. The Buddy Holly style symmetrical melody is delivered in a pleasing mid range vocal. While not ground breaking, it's a smiler.

Long Haired Lady: In which Linda gets a few solo lines demanding relationship commitment. The scale starts big here with a massed acoustic guitars and brass arrangement adding breadth. What sounds initially like a plea for respect in a relationship soon turns into a quirky but sincere sounding love song that stretches into a Hey Jude coda with fanfare trumpets, a stronger restatement of the Linda lines before a final verse and then more Hey Jude fade. Easy listening but intentionally so.

Ram On: A messy but fun reprise of the side one fun mess.

Back Seat of My Car: Broody guitars support Paul's melancholy vocal about a plan of personal freedom with his love. This is a clear invocation of what he loved about the Beach Boys at their most polished. Brian Wilson's rapid changes, chanting BVs, silky lead vocals lead up to a far more McCartney-style minor key chorus of "we believe that we can't be wrong". A sudden jaunty break smooths out again and leads back to the chorus and a big finish. This is the most like the decade to come (not just for McCartney) that the album reaches and it is appropriately at the end of the sequence as though gazing out over the waves or into the sky towards whatever the new times hold.

This record feels like McCartney really did get out of bed and concentrate on getting a record done. He and Linda even went to America to do it and due to that and a number of other value changes and shifts produced a record that didn't sound like a broken rock star in a shed but a composer's expression. While I can never love some of these tracks the whole thing makes sense and carries the feel of music made for a public. 

Personally, I think that if I had bought a copy of this as a teenager I would have listened to all of it once before skipping on every further outing (which I did, admittedly, on most albums at the time) but the relief of having a record that sounded like it cared what I thought of it would have remained. I would graduate to preferring records made without that care but it was warmth that would have taken me then.

There's a vague meme some folk are circulating that this is the prototype indie pop album and it needs to stop. That only goes in one direction and one only. If someone comes up with a means to fashion the exact textures of an old thing nowadays they are copying the past and only copying the past. Paul was not telling the future. Any attempt by people who don't understand or care about the difference between influence and mechanical reproduction is doomed to exposure or, worse, snivelling sychophancy. So, if you are in your twenties or maybe late teens and you come across a listen to Ram, you are hearing the past, whatever you think of it. Instead, consider how that past has been plundered by people who got there a little ahead of you and made records that sounded like they were done in 1971 and are treated as reverently as if they'd come from then. Consider indulging that rather than exalting it. Thank you, thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

Plastic Ono Band Revisited: Too versions?

I've already done the autobiographical thingy about this album and if you want to read that it's here. In short, I've never warmed to it. Then this came out, a box set with hours o' material to listen to if you really love the thing. Well, I don't but I have been increasingly fascinated by it as a whole statement and these expanded releases at their best can really set things in context. So, does this?

First, what's in the box? Six CDs of the remastered album, outtakes, demos, studio takes in various states of completion, all the rags that eventually were placed and trimmed before the record was given to the world. A hardcover book with masses of photos and interview material to give context to the songwriting, recording and the place of the album in its moment of history. And a second sleeve with two Blu-Rays that have everything on the CDs plus the studio jams that became a lot of the companion Yoko Ono: Plastic Ono Band.

There's a distinct difference here between this packaging of the later Beatles albums that have come out in fiftieth anniversary boxes and it's a significant one. On the Abbey Road box we get a number of discs that feature the other shots taken of the iconic zebra crossing photo and it's easy to see the point as the alternative photos are on the covers of discs with alternative versions, out takes, and whatever else that, like the particular photo didn't make it on to the album. 

The Plastic Ono Band box contains a number of iterations of the original cover without a pixel's difference. Every sleeve has the same photo. There's also a point to this. Lennon's purpose was minimalism: low production of a small band and the least arrangement necessary to keep the mystique at a minimum and the communication front and centre. It also reflects the sequencing of the music which is the tracklist in album order regardless of its state of completion or recording date. Starting with the new master we get the entire set as demos, developing tracks, raw studio mixes and so on. Oh, also, the three singles from the time get the treatment, too: Give Peace a Chance, Cold Turkey and Instant Karma. A lot of material but formed into digestible courses.

I pretty much shelled out for the two hi-res discs. The finished album is presented in stereo, 5.1 (96 and 192 khz 24 bit!) and the more expansive Dolby Atmos (lesser bit rate but a world of great newness). The rest of the material on the two Blu-Rays is entirely in stereo but at those celestially high sample rates. 

From Mother to My Mummy's Dead, the original album in Atmos is swoonable. When you get a movie in this audio format you usually get a lot of directional presence (helicopters landing, bullets richocheting etc) but here the object based sound design is used to create a larger ambient stage. The voice is in the centre with other instruments in the typically trio setup and the room reverb filling out the rest of the channels. It's a kind of stereo deluxe. The early days of remixing classic rock in surround featured a lot of gimmick thinking with guitars circling around the way they never do but here we just get to be in the room with the music. If anything the overall sound is beefier than before which will bother a lot of purists but it is a higher resolution presentation than it ever was and it's not pretending to be anything else. Thoughtfully executed, it is a marvel.

And then it's all the other versions. All of them are worth at least one listen but many hipsters happening on this set will nod sagely at reverb free vocals on Instant Karma or a plainer mix than Phil Spector administered. There is a lot to enjoy in the evolution and elements sequences and the demos and raw performances bring a lot of moment to the experience. I usually find going through these preparatory or forensic versions interesting the first time and most of these fall into that box. None is better than the released version but many hold charm as musical diary entries. Of all of them my favourite is an early take on Mother with guitar and amp tremolo which is delivered with a quieter and more poignant vocal. At the other end of the album sequence there were exactly two takes of My Mummy's Dead. They were done at the same occasion by the same method, Lennon singing along to his guitar into a cassette recorder. They are all but indistinguishable from each other, do not allow more than EQ or compression. Despite this either one or the other will appear at the end of the tracklist whether it's demo, evolution, elements, raw studio, or whatever else. Given the generous real estate of Blu-Ray this can't be called a waste of space but the only reason they are there is because that's how the original album ends and the concept of presenting that and the three singles in order needed to be fulfilled. 

The jam tracks are mostly misnamed, being the kind of idle cover versions you might remember from the Let it Be sessions. Elvis here a number of other early rockers there. Two early drafts of Imagine's I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier are worth a listen as they goe from a kind of flavourless Blood on the Tracks canter to the more effective blues take which led to the album track. Some moments are too fleeting to get the titles they receive in the sequence: I've Got a Feeling is really a few strums of the chord sequence; Get Back is a brief guitar noodle. The longer take of Lost John is worth repeat listening and the banter can be funny but that's what you get when you put jams on (see also the third disc of All Things Must Pass, though that's a lot slicker). 

The most value beyond the original album and singles sequence, though comes at the end when the bedrock jams (actual jams) are laid down for the Yoko companion album. Not all of it was used and then not always recognisably but these really are worth the listen. If you thought that Yoko Ono was only capable of ice pick wailing over tokenistic rock playing get in front of these. There is that wailing but there's a lot more as well and it's articulate and purposed, sounding more disciplined and committed than the designation  of live studio jam would suggest. It is what we get instead of the Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band album. I can say that I've listened to these tracks (they're only on the Blu-Ray) more than the jams or out takes. 

The book is a handsome hardcover with strong photographic content. There are chapters on Janov's primal scream therapy which informed the shape of the music, lyrics and performance of the record, chapters on individual tracks taken from various interview sources including some more recent recollections of participants. Information on the recording process and a very handy mix map of the surround material. It's more, in other words, than a glorified brochure.

I bought this set and bought into it because, despite the distaste I had for the album, the record haunted me (and I had the money) and whether it was hearing it in such high resolution, in surround, or just as clearly and fully as it is presented here I have changed my mind. Where I thought of it as a musically mediocre showbiz turn in the guise of a cry of pain and triumph it now meets me as an authentic statement made from serious needs and presents as a cohesive punch. I still don't love Well Well Well or I Found Out and still have trouble recalling them as distinct from each other they now sit well in the sequence. What once was a bin of narcissistic whinging now, finally, feels like communication. 

1981@40: OF SKINS AND HEART - THE CHURCH

A pair of barre chords, clean but hot ring out and repeat until the band enters to provide foundation and reinforcement. Steve Kilbey's first lines which contain the album's title force the centre of gravity with what would become one of the most recognisable voices in Australian music. Most of it could be form-fit power pop but there's some odd backing vocals which, though sung, sound like a jumble of a crowd in time and pitch. "Such strange things you say." This band would continue with this theme, too, with Kilbey's sculpted abstractions floating over what would grow increasingly to be a neo-pscyhedelia. All that in four minutes? Well, there's a lot of clear hindsight which covers the rest of the record.

Chrome Injury keeps it up with bright guitar breaks and chunky palm-muting. More forceful harmonies both in blocks and backing vocals extend the textural range but we're still in Boomtown Rats/Records style powerpop. The sense that a band with passable songs met producers who crammed them into a new wave packing case. It's not bad at all. It's very listenable but it's also like almost everything else on the radio which is the main problem. The last one of these I did for this blog was Prayers on Fire which sounded like nothing on the radio. I made a big thing of how filmsy a value timelessness is when regarding music of significance or power. I've just remembered another dimension. This music works and worked then because it had a sound form a time when most things like it also sounded fine, the aesthetic itself is dependable. So, is it unremarkable just because it's sounds like 1981? Well, no, it is remarkable because better writing that offers peaks makes its best stand out. We're about to hear the biggest single the band released.

The Unguarded Moment starts with overdriven guitars swirling around a colourful figure. The band kicks in with a clear lead riff before the vocals start. Same deadpan but melodic tone over chugging muted guitars that break into swells of chords and then the pre-chorus line and the line of the chorus surprise with a clear ringing descant vocal soaring above the Kilbey foghorn and we're in the land of the hit single. If you listen today you might find the arrangement over reliant on needless repetition but there's a solid attitude and clear sense of narrator in the songs that wipes out all lingering on how the words are nicer sounding than substantial. "So deep, deep without a meaning." Steve Kilbey was asked the following year if he would mind if someone else in the band came up with a song that was deep without a meaning. He said that, frankly he wouldn't want to be in a band playing other people's songs. We were ready for boycott him (for about five and a half minutes) but he was right. He wasn't the sole songwriter in the band nor even the only lead vocalist but the stoner minstrel character he created for the rest of the decade remains one of the most immediate public personae that anyone of his peers produced. That put him on the same rung as Nick Cave (and both of them well above the old school pouting of a Michael Hutchence). Long after this hit could be found in op shops the sound of bright guitars around the voice that lived somewhere between Geezer Gangster and Bob Geldof you knew you were listening to The Church. After a soaring vocal coda and tasteful solo the riffs leave the song in symmetrical order. End. And you want to hear it again.

And so it goes. Little stands out  but it doesn't have to. An edible feast of swirls, chunks, textures and tunes. You can leave it on. The single stands out but mostly because its craft is superior. The rest doesn't sound like filler as much as the sound of the times (remember, that's a good thing) But then something happens.

A mellotron track of male choral voices with a bass playing harmonics. Kilbey's voice comes in well under this as though it's approaching on the path to the front door. A lithe guitar begins a raga rock figure as the vocal gets closer. Another guitar plays a tinkling arpeggio in the distance. A constant series of declared images (deep but low meaning) ends with the question of the title: Is This Where You Live? The band picks up substance and drive for further verses. From this point until the dismantling ending the song could be any of the others but that the power pop section is just a passage in a setting of something genuinely grand lifts the entire thing up to where the single was feeling so lonely. Too long to be a single by itself, it's the album's epic which would become an obligatory feature of most of the band's '80s output. It's a joy.

The rest is a trio of songs that, like those that follow Unguarded Moment, serves perfectly well to round out the album as a document of what a feisty guitar pop record sounded like back in '81. If it sounds like it's calculated for that effect it's probably best to put most of the blame on the producers but if you do don't forget to celebrate these points of identity and recall how their trails were still being felt decades later when new guitar pop bands were being celebrated for ... something ... when really they were couching their songs in sounds that while once current and vital had become serviceable for conemtporary use. Yes, there is a big slice of late '60s psychedelia (they are on Parlophone!) in this record but it's not slavishly applied, it's rather allowed to influence. I can imagine Steve Kilbey singing a perfect Syd Barret cover I just never heard him do it.

1981@40: PRAYERS ON FIRE - THE BIRTHDAY PARTY (and why sounding dated is a good thing)

I was up in Townsville on holiday around Christmas when I read that The Boys Next Door had changed their name to The Birthday Party and were touring with The Go Betweens. I thought the name change was an odd choice and, as a Pinter-file, mused that it was from the play of the same name. Ok, I thought, I wondered if it would be reflected in their music. The Door Door album was so perfectly power pop with quirks and this development felt like they were moving into something harder and starker. I filed the news mentally and went about my day. Wait until they had an album out.

Should point out here that the band's transition included an album with both band names each of which you could choose as a title. This is distinct from Icehouse by Flowers becoming Flowers by Icehouse as that was in response to naming conflicts with another act. Boys Next Door went into the album as that but released it as The Birthday Party. News like this, travelling very slow at the time I considered Prayers on Fire to be the first Birthday Party album. Just a quirk of my memory.

The record was released in April 1981 but I was first aware of it form a review in the fanzine X-Change. The reviewer was so cowed by having to describe the album he wrote it as a fiction, an abortive short story about the neighbourhood bad kid whose childhood atrocities put him off limits to all others by their parents. Not only could I relate to that (from one of the good kids' perspective) but that the LP had forced the gleefully non-professional reviewer away from trying to be reserved and objective made me want to hear the thing.

I didn't have a record player that worked. I was still living with the screaming injuries that made up my brother's marriage and fatherhood (no, the kids weren't hurt and the injuries were pyschological but there was a lot of screaming) so I probably didn't need this album in my life. Nevertheless, in the way you will, I found myself noticing tracks form it played on ZZZ and eventually found someone to tape a copy for me.

Zoo Music Girl starts with galloping tom toms and ugly bass, slightly broken, before a thin whining of a guitar figure on the higher strings comes in like a mosquito when you're trying to sleep. The punchy vocals chant the title until the screaming double voiced lead vocal comes in over a sudden tempo change which feels like waking into a gale. The lyrics are aggressive and nonsensical, masochistic, pleading, Elvising and grunting. A brass section bleats low behind it. It might be closer to Charles Mingus waking from a nightmare but what it isn't is rock. The term tribal would soon get batted around when this or that band sounded less like Visage than the middle act of King Kong and it was used of this an a few other tracks on this record but it doesn't fit. There's no ritual here. There's plenty of sex and violence, as there always would be with The Birthday Party, but it's more like fun in a dark room than a sacrifice to the tiki gods. So, oddly, for all its over the top force and pose, it does not come across as contrived. It actually sounds clear and raw.

Cry adds distorted John Lee Hooker riffs to murmuring backing vocals and a tortured shouting lead. Capers dives into Brecht Weill territory and comes up sounding like the weirdest circus act you've ever seen. Two swift and engaging numbers with a sprightly step and pleasantly macabre tone. Sounds like a fun ride, doesn't it.

Well, a raked open chord lets loose a brooding bass figure and we're in Nick the Stripper's world. Everything rises from the swamp. The drums push up and it's no 4/4 rockin' role. "Insect!" snarls the voice and repeats until it turns into "incest". A detective movie brass figure bams out and Cave's growl slithers to the surface: "Niiiiiiiick the stripper, hideous to the eye." A sleazy horror tale swirls around the room as the guitars float and snarl. Nick the stripper dances on all fours. He's a fat little insect. Here we go again. Rowland Howard takes a brief meandering solo that loses itself in the sweat the first time but, energised, returns busier and darker until the end. Everything about the song is uneven, the solos coming in like voyeurs and leaving, the brass figure just turning up here and there. You can waste your time picking out influences but for intent and motion nothing has sounded like this before.

Ho Ho kicks in with drums and an ironic feeling guitar figure that is minor but sounds chromatic. Rowland Howard's vocal is more subdued than Cave's but more melodic for that. He sounds exhausted but it's more like playing a role than real fatigue. The pirate yo ho ho call bumps the lines about sick winds to build a picture of a ship adrift. What kind of ship? Who's at the helm? We might not want to know.

A sizzling wash of ultra fuzz pedal white noise is kicked in by a guitar and bass riff, another non rock time signature and a Nick Cave vocal that variously barks and screams. Figure of Fun is a first person evisceration of the kind of moribund fan of this band as well as contemporaries like the Cure, Bauhaus or Joy Division. Morose and rejected but persistently declaiming that he (almost certainly gendered in this case) doesn't need the approval of the crowd, money, love, sex or anything that they compete for. If the concept of the sigma male had been current back then this song would have been his anthem. A decade and a bit  on, Henry Rollins would bark out his own lashing in Low Self Opinion. That the Brithday Party targeted so many of their own fans at the time puts them in the same set while appearing to sing from the cool team. Post modern much?

A massive noir movie bass riff, solidified with low piano keys and big tom toms begins King Ink. A sneering descending riff on the guitar enters and leaves and enters again. Meanwhile King Ink lumbers though the dark, stinking, self-loathing but powerful, a threat composed of a void of doubt and violence. The band give him form and a kind of scaffolding to move across with punchy riffing and force. Abstract but no less frightening for that.

A Dead Song brings back the jungle telegraph drums, adding screeching guitar as well as a rising/falling chromatic riff that could be from a surf rock number. Cave wails, distraught and ugly, in confusion. Is it religion or just an all pervading despair? The dance comes to an end with a cried "thou shalt not" and "the end".

A dark bass slumping riff and a screeching sax on the top with jazzy drums. Yard. Cave caterwauls over the swamp water. The narrator is sitting "father's hole" which could be his corpse or his grave. It feels like Wise Blood the musical that never hit Broadway with a big chaser of New Orleans blues. "Hands and feet. Knobbly knees. Yard. Yard" Maybe imprisoned in the yard or finally emerging from it. The riff shuffles to a clean finish but there is no end for this character.

Dull Day, appropriately enough, begins in more or less standard rock fashion with a chord progression. Cave comes in with two small verses about someone who feels little other than irritation at his surrounds. Even in the abstract when he cuts his feet on the pieces of coloured light that have broken after falling on the floor. In the second his head is a night club but it gives him no pleasure so that he insists that any comers cut in. He withdraws and gets drunk. I can't help thinking that this Boys Next Door sounding song inspired a look through the mirror to produce Figure of Fun. The Birthday Party were like that themselves as regards their earlier incarnation which extended beyond a band name to create a new ethos. Having them both on the same LP says that to me.

A chromatic riff played on the lower piano keys in a strident Brecht/Weill strut. A sax joins in with a chromatic descant as Cave tells of trying to kill something with a hammer. Nothing's working, though, and when he tries to kill it in bed but the nuns in his head rise and beat him up from inside. He ends by saying that "it's just you and me, girl. You and me and the fat." The last word (which Cave knew was Australian slang for erection) is repeated with increasing quizzicality as the stride of the song and the album come to an anticlimactic end.

Most of these songs are three minutes or less. If it weren't for the defiantly ugly layout of the album cover art you might have picked this one up in the racks of a record shop and thought it promised a power pop band. But if you played it not even the accessibility of Dull Day would have supported that misapprehension. This platter from the days of Visage and Duran Duran did not conform to the kind of thing that was charting. And that leads me to why this album is important and also why it is important that it be regarded in its time lest the kiss of death of the judgement "timeless" be slimed upon it. 

This album is firmly in the realm of post punk. For starters there is no one thing it sounds like. You can see viscera and offal of Brecht and Weill as well as hear the menace of the Stooges and a lot of blues anger pushed very little into the space between melody and noise. But none of those things matter as much as its coherence: it was made by a band at that time. So what was the time?

It was Human League when they were still dark and strange (and made the opposite journey to the Boys/Party), the lightless quirkiness of Snakefinger and the sheer terror of the guided found sound of Throbbing Gristle. Even a lot of things that did chart like The Cure or Siouxsie and the Banshees played on the shady side of the street. But influence is only lateral to its time with cover bands, whatever stirred the Birthday Party had stirred long before and when taken as a whole was rendered by absorption unrecognisable. This, is the fat, screaming spirit of post punk, a label so surrendered that it was only ever adopted in hindsight and contains so much diversity that the U.S. variant of it, No Wave, fits much better. The Birthday Party fall and remain post punk.

But lest you should think I'm damning with faint praise let me open up the ceremonial brass section by declaring that this clear association with time and place elevate the band higher than pretty much anything deemed timeless. The free for all contributions from this album's forebears blend until they just sound like The Birthday Party in 1981. I'm not talking about this kind of reverb or that production standard but the attitude that brought songs like these to soundscapes like these: that a group of musicians mixed it up with theatrics and wild abstractions regardless of whether it tied in with the broader culture around them. 

And that's the other thing, if anything like this album were to be made today it would be in tribute. The past thirty years have seen the notion of market forces survive the physical record industry to the effect that playground law rules more strictly than it ever did which means that everyone just sounds like the bullies. A friend of mine who participates in panels that judge new songwriters told me he'd lost count of how many times the C-A minor-F-G chord progression was turning up. There were of course commercial forces in 1981 that pushed an aesthetic on to industry success and the mainstream of course absorbed even the spikiest of post punk so it could be slipped easily into a Pepsi commercial. But, when the market itself changed from the ground up as it has, commercialism and creative will are seen as indistinguishable. When Prayers on Fire was released they were never in the same sentence.

It's important that this record is from 1981, from before rock music's innovation nestled into its quiet death in the '90s. In an era when everyone can be kind of famous fewer than ever stand up to leave for their own chambers and do as they would. You didn't have to know about the band as personalities to understand this, a listen to a cassetted copy was enough for me. Take a look at a promo shot of Good Charlotte and then try and reconcile that with any of their tracks which never sound anything but mainstream. 

When I first heard the single Release the Bats from the end of 1981 I thought it sounded so extreme that I laughed. I'd scream the first lines when out with friends as a kind of rallying cry to the kind of person in Figure of Fun. But then I heard it a few more times. A friend said, it's great until you really listen and realise it's an actual song. The greatness of this moment of The Birthday Party is that you never had to make that realisation. It was just there if you wanted it.

L.A. WOMAN @ 50

This album of grooves, slinks and late night croons could not have served better for the exit of Jim Morrison from his band. After the uninspiring flatness of Morrison Hotel the band regathered in strength to lay down the funkier side of blues with some good wordsmithing from Jimbo. For all its jamminess the record is distinguished by a tight discipline in the playing and leanness in the arrangements. It sounds like they care about it again.

So The Changeling starts things off with a confident soul strut and an odd manifesto about someone who is everywhere and nowhere, observing, feeding and reporting, eventually as omnipresent as the air itself. Love Her Madly fires out bright and chopping, an expression of lust that is leering and clean at the same time. Been Down So Long is a hard bashing blues stomp of hard times and jail at the end of them. Cars Hiss By My Window is a brooding blues with slithering licks and a step or two into the cinema off the corridor into a room where a cold girl will kill you in the dark. Jim wails at one point and it sounds like one of Robbie's wah wah solos. Dark and stark and lazy and deadly.

L.A. Woman is the first of the two side-ending epics that had become more or less formula with Doors albums. This open chorded jazz rock workout which is all energy and streetlight drives. It's a kind of Morrison take on Elvis' Viva Las Vegas but instead of wishing there were more than twenty-fours hours in a day the singer has long lost count and there are just moments and sometimes sleep. The lady in the lyrics is easily blurred between a human and a city of them. And through the nightscape comes the strange chant that set the band's own Paul-is-dead style folklore. The anagram Mr Mojo Risin is repeated from a break to become a rallying "risin' risin'!" People whose days were long units of speculation considered this forensic evidence that Morrison was alive (and living in  Africa for some reason, ask them). All that said this big excited workout does feel like a goodbye.

L'America begins with a proto-metal riff that builds to tell the tale of European invaders with the eerie croaking cry about returning like the gentle rain. Hyacinth House let's us take a break from the blues with a bright clean electric guitar figure that includes the vocal melody whose word evoke Greek legend and perhaps Morrison's exhaustion from rock stardom. A witty sidebar into Chopin from Ray's organ solo seems only inspired by the main tune rather than any commentary on the material but it's too charming not to work. Crawling King Snake is a glacial blues, a cover of a mean as mustard John Lee Hooker number. 

The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat) thumps out in hard landscape of strutting blues beneath Morrison's declaiming vocal that describes a vision of outsider life. It's not utopian nor religious but heavy with life-affirming ritual. Lest this should sound a tad hippyish in leaning toward the pagan side of the street it's a world that has ditched all gods and is ready for a kind of freeform anarchy, crawling from the swamps through civilisation to a new world that is sometimes hedonistic and pleasuresome and sometimes plain terrifying.

We're almost there but there are things about this album which illustrate why I'm not doing the seventies as years the way I did the sixties on this blog. We are entering a time which I not only didn't experience first hand as a fan of these bands but didn't encounter later the way I did to the '60s acts. This means that I had to more aggressively look up bands I had little to no knowledge of and then when I heard them almost zero enthusiasm for. This era was marked by a few forces that I do not enjoy like prog and blues forward rock that really took over most of the scene. Prog rock frankly embarrasses me. The first music I was an active fan of was European Classical and the likes of Yes, Genesis and Emerson Lake and Palmer made it sound like an old uncle trying to be hip. And blues ... Well, this might sound strange but blues with me is like an old James Bond movie: once I found it magnetic and compelling but as soon as I went past it it got so samey and flat I could never go back. For anyone who has any interest in where a lot of rock music came from you need to get acquainted with blues. It's not the only point of origin but it informs almost everything that followed. It just leaves me cold, now.

So, while there is much to admire about L.A. Woman as a record its insistence on blues scales and playing all but beg me to resist it. It's a record so single-minded that it feels designed to be heard as a single suite of songs but I cannot easily listen without skipping. I just don't like blues. See also funk or prog. This album has all of that and, while it does pass through a good range of moods, cinematic and literary it doesn't play for me like a single work the way that Strange Days does. All bands must move forward but we don't have to follow them. All this said, we're about to hear the last track and it's one I'll never tire of.

Sounds of rain in a forest, distant thunder. Bass, and electric piano emerge and are joined by the guitar and drums. The groove is tight but low key, moving forward automotively. The vocals appear strangely, buried, the main voice bolstered by a whisper in unison: Riders on the storm, riders on the storm, into this house we're born, into this world we're thrown. There's a killer on the road but that's not the spookiest thing about the song. There's a sickly blend of melancholy and danger, a kind of resignation to existential threat that lives in the shadows or just comes down with the rain, there in nature and the city. When he tells the girl that she's got to love her man, Morrison is pleading for the continuation of the human race. Maybe, he's just observing the endless continuation of life in spite of the lethal dangers surrounding it. It's LA in the early 70s, LA after Manson and it's no fun any more. Ray Manzarek's tinkling Rhodes piano suggests rain but just as easily evokes futility. Morrison ends repeating the line of the title, whether the riders are from Revelation or just everyone alive going with the storm. With a few outgoing thunder claps in the next county he exits stage left, never to return.

The Doors are a strange case. If you get into them enough to listen to the records more than once each you will know effortlessly that the band really was a unit, despite the dominance of the 27 Club member. Even on the first LP his face is gigantic by comparison and his voice, reaching from the croon to a scream, and the words, letting the darkness between the hedonistic lines ooze out, so it's forgivable to consider the band his. But the music is that of a band of musicians who had come to understand each other intimately, bringing their own expertise to the arrangements. It really wasn't just Jim and the others.

But then, after this set he quit and decamped to Paris. The band kept the name and produced two further albums in two more years. They would have sought Morrison's voice for the first, Other Voices, but he died before that could happen so they went ahead. Two years later, after a second LP as a trio they admitted it and disbanded. From our perspective we might feel like shaking them and telling them to stop or at least change the name but we weren't there and it's easy to forget that from their perspective they were the same musicians who brought the sound to the years of greatness, just minus the guy who sang and wrote the words (and not all of them). But years? If you've ever got behind a mic and had as little as a drop of encouragement from an audience you will harbour the ghost of that adrenalin until you die. The three-piece Doors played Carnegie Hall and filled it. They'd gone ahead with shows when the Jimster was too wobbly to rub two syllables together. Manzarek had a pretty strong Jagger like voice. It's clear to us but to them, then, the clarity showed them the same old road.

The comparison closer to my time is with Joy Division. How could you go on without the guy who wrote words that inspired a generation so? Well, not easily but their sound was already changing and the new one was working. Change the name and stop pretending you were the same and go on as a new band. No one expects the old one anymore. That's exaggerated, of course, but that is the longer view and does describe the progression. It seems so obvious to us that The Doors should have done this and set an example. And we're annoyed that the fade of Riders On the Storm is not the end of The Doors and that two records that mixed well played but unexciting jazz rock and novelty numbers (like that bloody Mosquito number sung in brown-face!) stubbornly remain after everyone else has left.

Like everyone who really did get into rock music I worshipped my share of idols. Morrison I knew about form a few articles that happened while punk had started and I was curious about them as, like the Velvet Underground, they were decidedly non-hippy. There was a bleakness and snarl to them that put them closer to punk than all the likes of Steely Dan, the Doobies, The Eagles and whoever else plagued the punk years with their hell of numbing perfection. When Apocalypse Now began with The End which I heard for the first time in that context, I needed to know more. The Doors back catalogue (minus Other Voices and Full Circle) made it back into the shops and we gave them a second life. While I never quite worshipped Morrison I found him frequently inspiring. Then I read No One Here Gets Out Alive and was pretty much turned off rock hero worship forever (that book is toxic!). 

But the better legacy remains and I recall without need of nostalgia a morning of drizzle in Townsville, cane toads croaking in rhythm in the wet, the quiet stink of rotting gardens and mould, when Riders On the Storm crept out of the radio and sounded like where I was. I didn't catch the words so much as understood them, someone, somewhere, knew, like I did at all of fourteen or so, that something was wrong in the world, something would always be wrong with the world.

1981@40: COROBOREE - SPLIT ENZ

Choruses soar from tense verses with a tight reign kept on minor tonality and it's a new Split Enz album. At this distance it's difficult to tell how much self-reflection there was in starting the follow up to their worldwide breakthrough with a song called Hard Act to Follow.  True Colours showed the band either catching up to the shifts in the culture or perhaps finding the reverse. Either way, the sophomore effort after the reset shows a struggle to do more than stay put. That might be a strange observation to make considering the presence of two Neil Finn penned hits but that's the problem, they don't just stand out as obvious singles; they are the only two songs on the album you recall after hearing it.

That doesn't mean there aren't strong melodies or good ideas here it's just that the rest of the record feels like album tracks and b-sides. That it's buried under contemporary modern production only accentuates this. To my mind it feels rushed, the production barely concealing a lack of finish in the writing. Two more Eddie Rayner instrumentals that sound like chase scenes in cop shows. A song that mentions dancing that has a verse over a chugalug  backing and a call and response chorus form fitted for a blue light disco. Tim Finn's attempt at developing the sublime I Hope I Never in Ghost Girl oddly leaves out the eeriness and everything gets served up with side dishes of sequenced synths. This is a producer's album rather than a band's and it would get worse along those lines and let anyone who had worried that the tidier lines of the visual image and absorption of top ten style were heralding the end of the Enz keep worrying.

But emerging from this troubling anti-entropic push towards order by the old merchants of chaos is a pair of songs that became the singles, having no opposing candidates. History Never Repeats slashes into life with a fanfare of chorused guitars over a rumble and the chorus beginning before the drums. There's a freefall to it but the band comes in for the verse with a rhythm that pounds and shrieks and the choruses just keep getting bigger to the point that the block harmonies that come out of a short guitar break threaten to sound like the hell of ELO or The Eagles until the last verse bashes them aside. One more chorus and powerchord fade out and you've got a 1981 hit single. Repeatability maximum.

One Step Ahead was released in advance of the album and then trusted enough to go on as track 2. A strange descending figure on the bass and palm muted guitar. Neil Finn enters with a near whispered plea about his girl gaming on the edge of danger and its kept hushed and spooky with muted keyboards and vocals that don't quite break out with the rest of the band to the point that a wordless verse of la-las feels like going down a corridor in a horror movie. At no point is this anything but pure commercial pop music. It never plays it for spooky camp but never gives up its suggestion of danger. 

If you were listening years later as I am now you might well think it was the sound of Neill Finn bracing himself for the exit at the end of the darkened hallway. That would happen a few albums on as Split Enz drifted ever further from the quirk that made the anti guitar solo in I See Red such fun. Neil Finn would stretch himself with nothing but credibility when he formed Crowded House for songs not bound by a tradition he had come late to. By the time the new band were claiming world wide high chart positions only the voice sounded the same, the craft had expanded, not with the times, just for better times.

This is not to bury Split Enz as they had years yet before they ran aground. Time and Tide had some superb moments on it. Tim Finn's solo effort (which sounded like the AOR numbers on Enz albums) was also a hit. But the sound Neil's restless invention here, set in an increasingly radio friendly loss of flavour is telling. The world doesn't know it but they are waiting for his escape. Until then there were tours, interviews, videos and the whole shower of malarky for an act in which he was a tenant who dreamt of owning his own home.

1981@40 - SOLID GOLD - GANG OF FOUR

There were a few factors in the change I went through from right to left in my politics. First, the right side ultimately failed to convince me, it just felt like something. Second, actually finding out what the left stood for allowed my affinities with it to appear in sharp focus. Third, the culture of Brisbane in the early 1980s tended to polarise the mind the more that mind engaged with it. All of those led me to records like this. They declared themselves but dismantled the sloganeering machine, showed how hard it was to affect any kind of politics and stick with it but kept at it anyway. Gang of Four made The Clash look childlike.

I'm not dismissing The Clash, there, they were forging ahead and very much fighting the good fight but they did keep the slogans. They were expanding their musical horizons but it sounded more like dilettantism to me. The razor wire textures and and minimalism of Gang of Four felt like a relief. 

Paralysed. A spiky guitar figure and spoken vocal. Unemployed and reduced to stasis as the rest of the world chases prizes. The stark description of the ejected worker unable to regain his feet is chilling. "I was good at what I did," he says numbly as the spikes rattle around him. What We All Want - a doctored Bo Diddley riff with an overdriven guitar snaking over it. Less a groove than a machine like chug ensues. "Could I be happy with something else? I need something to fill my time." Rather than the inertia of the laid-off worker in Paralysed, this narrator wants to escape the futility of the society and his part in the workforce that powers it. But it looks like hobby-level pointlessness is the only alternative. Why Theory blends a dissonant disco groove with a hint of dub. You could drown it all in gin or think about what you do.

If I Could Keep it For Myself and Outside the Trains Don't Run on Time both follow the path with the repurposed disco slashing we began with but it's less repetitive than committed. The first of the two features one of the album's most melodic verses as a confusing encounter is recalled (or is it something more sinister?) The next track refers to the boast of Mussolini that he made the trains run on time. A domestic despot muses on the sagging of discipline he sees wherever he looks and swells with anger over the compulsion to order. The final word is the title, yelled both from his frustration and the glee of anyone who sees his impotent rage. It's easy to forget the resurgence of The National Front in the UK as well as the great divisive gloom of the Thatcher years as they began. You could dance to this (I did) but you had to pay it some thought to do it.

A series of field recordings punctuate Cheeseburger with sounds of wait staff and customers as a lorry driver's thoughts, frenzied from caffeine make him question what he is doing with his life, producing wages for himself and greater profits for the nameless few who own his vehicle, as he stops in anywhere he can find for the worst food in the world. The song comes to a hard stop. And then a series of thumps and scrapes of guitar strings sound like he's trying to start an engine that doesn't want to go. Some murmured directions. End. See also, his life. This reminds me thematically of the eerie Listening Wind on Talking Heads' Remain in Light except for the setting, England's green unpleasant land.

The Republic starts with sharp guitars before launching into the haranguing vocal describing the education of the privileged, grinding through years of aloofness to greater society. "Better take smaller chances and bugger the consequences." In the Ditch takes us closer to the street level where people keep to their houses as though waiting for the two minute warning about a nuclear strike. But this is a description of a general lifestyle. "Show me a ditch and I'll dive in it." A Hole in the Wallet lists conservative values of female education. The near future of the dread caused by Thatcher's win was here and was already feeling like it.

He'd send in the army starts with percussion that sounds like either weapons being cocked or whips in use. Staccato guitar slices harden the sound. The band come in bludgeoning form. The vocals go from full unison chanting, dialogue-style asides and the declaiming style of much of this set. A break that is not a dance break recreates the the violence of the opening with the whips and grinding guitar stabs. "She pays him back in the bedroom, one step down from her leader. Obeys or is punished like he obeys his bosses." The stifling oppression could be a brutalising army career or domestic violence or a vicious circle composed of the two. A sudden end. End of side two.

The thing about Gang of Four for me was that they sounded more committed than The Clash (who were learning to play and losing their touch) and less contrived than The Jam (who were working out how to sound like Revolver-era Beatles) but their seriousness was not burdened by  a ham fist. Everything still had that bedroom to gig rawness and for all the strident parade ground chanting they never stooped to sloganeering unless it was in irony. Listening now and hearing the transparency of the arrangements, the anti-rock chopping of the guitar and the funk rhythm section reminds me of how exact and pure this was then, as though there was nothing but an instant collective agreement between the members on what had to be said and what was to be done. It reminds me, too, of why I liked this and didn't like Midnight Oil's pared down prog rock approach which did stumble into slogans. Gang of Four kept their music angry, precise, unlovely and accusing. Whether it's the absence of star members or the defiance of singalongs  or maybe just the insistence on the content over the show this band shed all rock and roll traits as the times only absorbed that. But there wasn't nothing left after that. You could dance to this. You could think to it. You could dance and think to it. Even the funk was free of bullshit.