Aladdin Sane @ 50

Big guitar chords introduce a groove that would have been at home on Exile on Main Street from the year before. It's also a kind of Velvet Underground vibe if they'd been a stadium band. Bowie had long admired that band and had produced Lou Reed's breakthrough Transformer album the year before. If that's starting to sound like a party then it should as it's the setting for the lyric which is a series of images of something wild and fun happening at Shaky's. 

Another thing going on here is that Bowie is giving a kind of expressionistic portrayal throughout the album of the 1972 tour of the U.S. Watch that Man is related to Bowie's experience of seeing the New York Dolls in NYC and the after parties that we on the footpath must rely on imagination to picture. Tracks on the album were assigned cities. 

The infamous aspect of Watch that Man, though, is not the decadence on show but how hard it is to hear about it. Bowie's vocal is so well buried he sounds like he's coming through the amp mics. This was a mistake and it was sent back for correction but when the mix with the upfront vocal came back they went with the first one. If you're still thinking of the Stones this is not so off the track as a lot of the rockers on Exile have Jagger's vocals way down in the mix. The Stones even had a history of it going back to things like 19th Nervous Breakdown. Watch that Man does sound like a mistake though. When I first heard it (Christmas morning 1977) I thought the stereo had dropped a channel or maybe the record had a pressing error. But, nope, in that frustratingly lo-infomation world there was just no easy way of finding out until you got back to school and asked around. 

But when you got used to it the levels started making sense. Little Ziggy/David/Aladdin lost in the Big Apple as the party just gets crazy.

After the big party we turn and face the strange with the title track. Aladdin Sane (1913, 1938, 197?) begins with a tolling piano chord against a featherlight jazzy bossa nova. Bowie's vocal is tinged with fatigue as though the party of the first track has left him wasted. He recalls images of high life with a sense of impending doom. The first two years in the title's brackets are just prior to world wars and the question mark left after the contemporary date hangs on eerily. "Who'll love Aladdin Sane? Battlecries and champagne just in time for sunrise," Bowie whoops over the chorus. And then the full power of the secret weapon of this album is unleashed in a long apocalyptic solo of violent dissonance and chiming open harmony. Mike Garson brought, at Bowie's insistence, his avant-jazz piano to the record and it hangs over or gathers the music together almost continuously. The two chord grind of the chorus is straight out of On Broadway which gets a reference in the fading vocal but the wandering solo builds storms of trouble before calming for the reminder, calming but never too far from the spooky aura of the song. And then ends on a self effacing doddly plop.

Moving to Seattle-Phoenix for Drive-In Saturday and we're in 50's doo-wop land and imagining a future of poured out phones and watching old movies on video (a term that existed at the time but not in common parlance) as they try to rekindle sexual behaviour that an unnamed cataclysm has reduced to memory. Bowie was scared of flying at the time (Aladdin Sane was written on a ship) so he was driven or took the train. At one point, he spied a clump of huge silvery domes and imagined them as post-nuclear attack living quarters and wondered what the life would be like in them. Not that he knew it then but the scenario in Drive-In Saturday was close to his character's bored reality in The Man Who Fell to Earth a few years on. The song ends with a growing tide of vocals slowly flooding down as the title repeats and covers everything.

Panic in Detroit breaks in with a Bo Diddley rhythm and a very un-Bo Diddley chord progression (similar to the A-F in Suffragette City). Bowie's vocal is ansiety-ridden as he recounts a story of street violence and its aftermath when all order is crumbling and the city itself seems to consume itself. This is a Motor City where the cars are sleep at traffic lights. The source of most of this was the figure from Detroit whom Bowie would be spending a lot of time and creativy energy: Iggy Pop (ok, he's from Ann Arbor but it's close). The lengthy fade has the compelling riff charging on while Mick Ronson teases, screams and whines from his Les Paul and Bowie's yelps grow distant and echoed.

The old side one ends with Cracked Actor who's all spent stardom and flat sleaze. The entirely appropriately Stonesy grind of heavy distortion and feedback introduces Bowie's harranguing vocal which tells in the first person of what the faded movie star does with his post glitz years. It's the closest thing musically to the Ziggy album but its tone is forbidding and grimacing. We're in Los Angeles in the 1970s, filled with old idols hiding behind the curtains with their tongues out, Goats Head Soup meets Sunset Boulevard.

Side two starts with Mike Garson playing a strident Jacques Brel figure before Bowie's theatrical voice comes in with a flourish about time's claim on all, great and small, angel or devil he doesn't care. And when the grand guignol creeping stops the whole band bashes in and the voice stretches into anguish. It might only be about waiting to go on stage as seconds elongate. The next verse gets us back to the stage with a few lines about screeeeaming with boredom before Ronson's inspired guitar scream warbles down the semitones like a theremin in an old horror movie. Another chorus and the wordless la las take us out but instead of fadnng we get the last word given, as it must here, to time itself, yelling its own name. We are in New Orleans.

The Prettiest Star  plays like all those cod Victorian music hall takes from the late '60s by the likes of The Kinks, The Beatles and The Zombies but done as a Mick Ronson rocker. It's 2/4 flapper rhythm sways along as we hear of a love whose absence drives ruefulness. The song's own prettiness is undercut by Bowie's vocal which sounds spent.

The cover of Let's Spend the Night Together is one I didn't skip this time only because I needed to report on the whole album. From the crashing ugliness of Garsons discords that distort the Stones riff to Bowie's strangling vocal that throws most of the original melody out the window. There's a breakdown section where he speaks of a kind of teen rebel sexuality that ends in prehistoric grunts from Mick Ronson's guitar before everything dives back into the pill popping energy. All of this is intentional, clearly, but it just doesn't convince me. It comes across more as a kind of dare to listeners to revile his ravaging of a classic. It's like the worst of the tracks on the Pin Ups covers album where, instead of working with what was there to begin with, he has taken the conscious route to piss off the old guard. I guess that's it, for me: it's juvenile.

Back in New York we get to the most iconic track on the record, the one that people who have never heard the album will know, The Jean Genie. Against a hard blues riff Bowie variously croons and Jaggerishly hectors about a figure part human part reptile. Instead of Iggy's stories, it's Iggy himself or a world-built version of him, slinking or rampaging through the city from subway to skyscraper. The strutting talking blues is utterly infectious in the verse and breaks out excitingly for the chorus. The guitar/harmonica tremolo one note solo recalls the nastier moments of the '60s Who or Yardbrids and here just doubles up the intensity. A hard rock masterpiece.

We might have ended there but there's one more thing to say and its in the wider European context that yet does not feel like home. Garson's introduction is all flash and show but when Bowie's yearning croon starts the piano holds it aloft with a gorgeous constant glittering arpeggio. Ronson's layered guitars come in for the chorus which concludes with a John Barry semitone switch for that extra moment of danger. It's a love affair which is all silky sex and expensive fragrance, champagne and bottomless credit cards. But she will be your living end, the yearn of aftermath will haunt your days just as the James Bond figure in the guitars and piano do. A moment of purest musical seduction.

Seduction is the undeclared theme of the whole album which is a kind of expressionistic recall of the Ziggy Stardust the year before. It doesn't end with Rock and Roll Suicide because it's based on lived rather than imagined experience. Most of it is about the America Bowie saw opening up to him, its highest and shiniest and its darkest and most violent. It gave him nights of constant compelling pleasure and moments of cold terror and that's what we have here. It's less coherent than Ziggy as a musical song cycle but that's a symptom of its true life source. As Conrad said of Heart of Darkness, it's experience pushed a little, very little. 

I don't often mention the cover art of these records I write about but this one rates a paragraph at least. The iconic strength of this cover is such that all you have to do to evoke the spirit of David Bowie in anything you present is to put it in a copper mullet and draw a lighting flash across its face. It's could be a cartoon character or an office coffee mug but it will say Bowie even to people who know nothing else of the artist. People who have never heard this album or know its title, recognise the imagery and its meaning of flamboyant stardom. The cover was a gatefold and the middle image was a full body photo from the same session in which Bowie is looking beyond the camera's gaze into the lights, two stylised flashes behind him and his body transforming from skin tone to a silver spray on coat that removes his genital package and fades before we see his feet. The back cover is a pen and ink outline of the front with the song titles and credits. The inner sleeve has the lyrics and more multi coloured flashes. If the cover of Ziggy described a rising rock star in the back streets of a rainy London, this conveyed him into the infinite white of the starship he expected would take him to the cosmos.

It's strange how I and quite a few fellow Bowie fans can forget this album when listing their favourites, despite its imagery offering the most popular depiction of him. Is it the annoying buried vocal of the opening track, the difficult jazz soloing of the title track, the obnoxious Stones cover version? IT's hard to say why this gets less love than the harsher Heroes (that title track is not like the rest of the record) or the largely resistant Scary Monsters. I've frequently heard it described as bitsy or mixed but, really, there's a lot of adherence between these tracks and what they are telling us. Bowie found fame and found it was still a struggle and that clashed with the meteoric rise promised in Ziggy Stardust. If the fans wanted Suffragette City they got Panic in Detroit, if they expected Starman, they got Cracked Actor. Really, though, what was being offered was an outstretched hand to pull them up and fans don't always want to go where their idols lead.

THIS YEAR'S MODEL - ELVIS COSTELLO AND THE ATTRACTIONS @ 45

"I donwanna kiss you. I donwanna touch." Bam! And you're into No Action. Elvis Costello started his first three albums with an unaccompanied vocal. Just a short phrase. "Now that your picture's in the paper..." on the first album, the way I started with the second and then "Oh I just don't know where to begin..." on Armed Forces. Then he dropped it and never went back (as far as I know).

Someone wrote in to RAM about the negativity of then contemporary songs and cited what seemed like a thousand examples from this album where EC told he didn't want to do something. There's even a song called (I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea. There are two in that first line, alone. Even as someone who has almost never listened to lyrics beyond getting a general sense, the spat rejection is unignorable. It's a punk attitude.

It's an attitude that was almost completely absent from his debut My Aim is True. When I found out, in deep retrospect, that that first album's backing band, Clover, became the News behind Huey Lewis I didn't bat an eyelid. The plonky plinky yacht rock of My Aim is True alienated me from it until his follow up and to this day I can't listen to it without skipping. But, here's the thing: the good songs on that one are of the same calibre and character as these, it's just the arrangements and band that are making the difference. 

The linking song between the albums is the single Watching the Detectives. This skeletal spiky reggae number about distracted lovers and an icy suggestion of darkness smouldering beneath it, was recorded by a band that was only half of The Attractions. The dubby drums and boomy bass were descanted by Elvis' overlapping breathless vocal and Steve Nieve's chilling Farfisa organ (added later when the Attractions formed). It was cinematic atmosphere for meagre means and remains a masterpiece of minimalist world building pop.

That economy was taken to This Year's Model along with the newly formed Attractions, adding Bruce and Pete Thomas (unrelated) on bass and drums respectively. The new approach and the band to match it transformed Elvis Costello from an OK act into a high punching heavyweight. No Action slashes through its pugilistic chord changes and assaulting vocals, organ washes enriching and drums crashing. It's force and fury outdoing the hardest attempt at rocking on the first album in a way that erased it from my image of EC's catalogue. I still think of This Year's Model as the first one and My Aim is True as a dry run.

As the song progress, and you aren't going to get many sequences as rich as the entire first side of this disc from the rock era: This Year's Girl with its stretched 4/4 drums, melodic bass, chunky but subservient guitar, descanting keyboards and vocal force; the spy movie syncopation and big breakouts of The Beat; Pump it Up's double whammy of signature bass and keyboard riffs brought the talking blues of Subterranean Homesick into the London of Pretty Vacant; the surprising soul ballad flavour of Little Triggers; and the garage band joy and vitriol of You Belong to Me. All of it gives you a 1/2 platter of energy, ideas and sheer musicianship that the sleepy town by the sea yawning of the debut never approached (well, it's players had their chops, they were just boring ones). 

The Australian release of the album slotted Watching the Detectives in at the end of side one as it had with My Aim is True (New Zealand also got a reiteration on Armed Forces). It's a sore thumb on Aim but fits in without comment on Model. Most of the songs are around the three minute mark and six out of thirteen are shorter. There's no soloing or elongated introductions or instrumental sections; we're here to make statements, most of which include the sense: I don't want to. 

Side two tells you that it's already restless and keen to challenge its own formula. Hand in Hand begins with a psychedelic feedback and stretched backward vocal chorus before it cranks into place with a new sub-thee minute stunner. A bright and poppy song about a violent relationship. That blend of sweet sounds and darker meaning really hooked me at the time. It didn't need to be the first of that type of song but it was the first for me and of my time so I thrilled to it. I Don't Want to Go to Chelsea starts with a Latin bass riff that gets extended with a sharp and spiky guitar riff before the vocals come in with a strange tale that mixes the cool Chelsea, NYC, scene of Andy Warhol with the then contemporary one of punk London (and it's own Chelsea), urgent and angry.

Lip Service comes on like an old Beatles number. Someone is socially pricing themselves out of their old market and making mistakes. The narrator says he can now only give tokens but if she changes her mind ... All that and yet this doesn't come across as proto Incel; there's more sad reflection and sympathy and then even the warmth at the end when the band finish cleanly on a She Loves You style major 6th.

Living in Paradise is a kind of '50s ska with raked guitar chords, some tasteful whammy barred Jazzmaster in the pre-chorus and a big multi-sectioned chorus. This is the closest the songs on this album get to sounding like they could have been on My Aim is True. My guess is that it's an older one.

Frantic tom toms and glistening cinematic piano and very busy bass crash Lipstick Vogue to rude life. The rapid fire vocal is a kind of blown-up detail of Lip Service whereby she is distressed and confused by flattery, drugs and attention as he tells her she's much more than the slice that her lifestyle has rendered her to. And then something happens. After a calmer voiced but still breathless verse about slot machines and suggestions of narcotic oblivion ("you say I've got no feelings, this is a good way to kill them") the band fly off with their galloping bass and drum patterns as the cold after-midnight organ and piano tinkle and sear. If the melodic gifts of Bruce Thomas' bass playing hadn't already had you marvelling, the accelerating scale he plays will. It plummets into the last verse of desperate pleas from within the social incarceration that lead toward the killer line: "sometimes I almost feel, just like a human being." We end on the last chorus and a frenetic chant of: "Not just another mouth, the last of the lipstick vogue" until the fade. It's one of the scariest things on the record.

Night Rally's military drums and hymn-like organ chords give way to a plaintive song about resisting the coercion of his peers. The corporate logo adorns the sky like a batman signal or a swastika and the jolly company spirit becomes increasingly indistinguishable from jackboot order. "You think they're so dumb. You think they're so funny. Wait until they've got you running to their night rally." With the Rock Against Racism concerts needed to push back at a revived National Front in the U.K. and the failing Labour Government that would lead to the nightmare of Thatcherite corporatism only a year later, things around anyone looking up from their beans on toast would have seen things closing in. The song ends with a distorted repetition of the words night rally as a pattern that sounds like an air raid siren swells until the song cuts off abruptly as though its plug were ripped out.

This Year's Model is the flipside of Never Mind the Bollocks for what I was feeling during the punk years. I identified with the movement to the extent that I rejected the uniform as just another uniform and grew to care little for any gatekeeping as to what real punk was. If the Pistols were all swaggering rock force with taunts and much heavier commentary (it's still difficult to get a head around Bodies for many) Elvis Costello and The Attractions were the more abstract side of it, offering literature and cinema where the Pistols gave us slogans. We needed both.

For me, I remember finally getting the record after wearing my cassetted copy through. It was the following year and I had a problem that had broken through the annoyance it had been to take over my life; cystic acne. My face had become a child's drawing of a planet covered in volcanos. You don't get to do a lot of socialising in that state, and that which I'd already established was itself under threat. So Mum got me a referral to a dermatologist  who applied jubes of dry ice to the pocks in order to burn them off while my skin was still under seventeen. This eventually worked well enough but after each appointment I was left with a face burnt to a corned beef pink. I needed to bathe my face in salty water for hours for the skin to heal and would do that with whatever crud was on tv. The appointments were on Friday. Another feature of this routine was that I had enough disposable pocket money to buy one  or two LPs, so I'd duck into Palings or Chandler's and pick something up. One day I treated myself to the real record of this album and went home to lose myself in it all over again with bigger, deeper sound.

That was the weekend where I was given a choice of staying in and dabbing homemade seawater on my face or going to a massive party on a cane farm outside of Ingham that was going to go all night. With a face like the scene in the industrial safety training film that no one wants to see I hopped into Nita's car and off we went to the Northern Little Italy. It was glorious with music, booze, friends and girls I hadn't met. Of the latter was Nadia. She was a daughter of one of the Cane-ocracy that most of the party was composed of and she was the only one I could see in the crowd. I pushed myself forward and found out that she wasn't just beautiful but sharp as a tack and, atypical for that description, also humblingly kind. At sixteen, my sense of success in chatting up girls was, of course, laughably exaggerated and every time I tried to take a photo of her in the crowd with Dad's Pentax that I was using for my semester of photography in art class, she noticed and shyly covered her face which was coated with the most perfect skin I had ever seen in life, not a spot nor even a freckle, just an even curve of untouched snow. She wrote poetry.

After again failing to take her photo, I stopped dead. I stepped back into the crowd and gazed down at the floor and remembered as sixteen year olds with galloping hormones forget, that the beauteous match I was drawn to by compulsion did not see me the same way. We had an easy and warm conversation, I with an earthly Venus and she with the kind of boy she must have volunteered to  collect money for in the annual school charitable drives (I always got out of them).  Crushed, I waded through the rest of the night (we were all staying in or around the house as driving all the way back to Townsville was not happening) finding conversations that would be divertingly irrelevant to what I'd just experienced.

And I thought to find her again and tell her that she wasn't just another mouth of Lipstick Vogue, that if she changed her mind she could send a little letter to me. Even I, then, at that age, with that much of whatever I had already drunk under my belt, knew better as soon as the thought took form. But, as always (even now) it was the words than the general sense and the force of the music that let me find something like a means of coping without falling into the usual teenage mistakes of resentment or self-loathing. There was a voice over music that moved the way I did that made it feel not better but less tearing. 

None of those photos came out. They were all too dark. Underexposure. On the way back, the next morning, Nita stopped the car by a cemetery and thought we might get some photos. She took one of me. I still have it somewhere. I'm standing in front of a grave that sports a kind of menhir that towers for a short height above its slab. I, for some reason, am wearing a military tunic that I would have borrowed from my brother Stephen who wore them as motorbike jackets. I'm a little slumped, feet apart, and my face has a kind of funereal frown. Cut to a year or so later and I'm back from Uni in Brisbane, having breakfast and reading the local paper. There on page ten or something is a soft news story of graduating nurses. The picture was of Nadia, lighting a candle as part of the religiously flavoured ceremony. Long without the cystic devastation and possessed of the drivelling magnanimity of the twenty year old, I silently wished her well in her career and had a sip of coffee. If they'd mentioned that she was married or engaged or something I would have fallen to the floor in screams and sobs. Instead, I just heard it all again:

"It's yoooooooooou, not just another mouth of lipstick vogue."

Listening notes: I no longer have that LP but have never lacked a copy of the album. For this, I listened to the magnificent hi-res remaster from a few years back. It's the U.S. track listing which is identical to the U.K. one except for the inclusion of the single Radio Radio after Night Rally.

1983 @ 40: FEAST - THE CREATURES

A loud tremulous wail gives way to the whispers of a beach, wind and waves. Wind chimes. A conch shell horn. A vocal that sounds like it hasn't slept in days rises to address someone whose life is draining from them. Has she killed them. Are they at the final stages of a curse? The eerie atmosphere made stranger with the pun of the title Morning Dawning finds its point of optimum effect and establishes a stasis. And then - "the mourning is over. I still can't look into your eyes - the song retreats into the dark of the jungle and disappears.

Inoa'Ole is a chant in round of Hawaiian indigenous voices in warbling tones as glass ringing pierces the sound. When the booming drums enter with Siouxsie's wordless vocal trying more modal figures the chanting subsides but continues. The title line appears infrequently. Like much of this album it's in the atmosphere, a gently called dance on a creepy predawn.

Ice House begins with a vocal over a steady thumped drum. The voice keeps to its original pace as the drumming builds into an even pattern. Images of incest and erotica blur into promises of the preserving powers of ice. The lyric is derived from a John Bowen teleplay which was served up by the BBC in their tradition of horror stories for Christmas. Siouxsie's words are an abstraction rather than a description of the plot and emphasise the unsettling obsessive turn of the plot. The song ends with sounds of munching food.

Dancing on Glass strikes up a brisk 2/4 rhythm. A organ shimmers in the distance. Siouxsie's vocal is the same kind of jazz age swing as the single Right Now. Images of wilful damage and decadence by moonlight as the windows are smashed and their shattered remains danced upon. Again, Budgie's rhythm is unmasked by guitars in this decidedly un-rock outing.

Geko begins with the sounds of the jungle as Siouxsie whispers the opening lines. A marimba clomps the main chord progression in what it the first song on the album to have any kind of riff. Variously screaming, talking or hissing the spoken verses, Siouxsie breaks into the infectious chorus. The atmosphere of humidity and insect bites. The chorus only has to mean its images: Panoramic banana, a passionfruit samba. Pale skin is itching, a tropical fever. This ended the old side one with the closest thing to pop music fun on the whole record.

Side two begins with Sky Train and that begins with very busy drumming which would sound mechanical but is just expertly written and performed to interact with echo. If the idea is to emulate train motion clicking on the tracks its goes beyond the call and delivers an image of an unstoppable Hell Express. Siouxsie wails in multitracked rhapsodies around and through the onslaught.

Festival of Colours begins with more Hawaiian chanting soon descanted by Siouxsie singing in local dialect before switching back to English. The festival is a rite involving the scattering of coloured powder like ochre. While the music, again heavily percussive builds to an enjoyable plateau there are some listeners who might have wondered if it weren't just the musical equivalent of a silde night.

Miss the Girl is a response to J.G. Ballard's novel Crash which described upwardly mobile urbanites who pursue automotive impact as an extension of sexual pleasure. The marimbas strike an ominous figure as Siouxsie's dispassionate vocal sings of violence as a car is pitted against a human body. Not quite as frozen as The Normal's Warm Leatherette (also based on Crash), the track nevertheless explores the effect of witnessing violence though the eyes of one exhausted by it. This might have seemed a strange choice as a single but it is one of the only ones here that has the components of a pop song and is the closest the duo get to sounding like their band of origin, The Banshees. It got to 21 which ain't nothing.

A Strutting Rooster plunges deep into relentless heavy percussion with drums and marimba parts often blending into each other as Siouxsie chants in multitracked harmony. Is it as simple as the sight of a bird or is there the darker suggestion of cockfighting. Ambient effects rise and fall. Marketplace voices as Siouxsie's phrases are played like samples.

Flesh starts with sharp breath which might be sexual or hefty inhalation of lines of drugs. Siouxsie narrates a spoken word description of a high life party as we start to hear the sounds of merriment and socialising. A loud strident chant breaks out like a chorus but isn't placed like one: Piggy squeals and donkey brays at a sober party Doggy barks and horsey neighs try to shock the party. Light marimbas keep time with a barely discernible figure as percussion which sounds random goes in and out of focus. Images of violent cinema in production and editing. The time would be right for the pair to have seen and been affected by Cannibal Holocaust. It reminds me of the Banshees' song Monitor off JuJu with its lines about screen violence and the blurring of audience and onscreen victim. The party sounds swell up and everyone joins in the chant about Piggy squeals until it dissipates as though this was a recording of a drugged up bash gone hellishly wrong.

Siouxsie and Budgie last recorded under the Creatures name two years before with the EP Wild Things. Made as a kind of holiday project the set had turned out good enough to release and when the Banshees next took a break Siouxsie and Budgie set to again. Throwing the dart at a map and travelling to where it hit, Hawaii. They used the freshness of the unfamiliar locale to make field recordings and construct songs around rhythms and chanting provided by The Lamalani Hula Academy Hawaiian Chanters. 

Budgie's drum setup was not a kit but a collection of percussion instruments that were played separately in arrangements that frequently had him composing and playing with far greater sophistication than he was able as the Banshees' drummer. There are no high hats or cymbals or snare drums here. This guitar, bass and keyboard free record is an extension to the path away from conventional rock music that the Banshees had already been treading, at least experimentally, since the Kaleidoscope LP, Budgie's first record with the band as one of its most creative additions.

For her part Siouxsie continues to write like the lyricist of the Banshees but takes things a little further toward chanting and vocal motif, enjoying the luxury afforded by the creative detour this recording offered. As her voice must stand in for what the music abandoned (rock instruments) she is more on attention here than any time since the first Creatures release. So, you still get blank faced descriptions of darkness and violence but here it can as easily sound like a whisper as much as a scream.

The Creatures have proved to be one of the rare out of band experiences that worked and kept working in exploratory mode as the Banshees of the late '80s and '90s moved steadily toward the middle. There is a clear sense on this record that they both felt relief at being able to avoid the pressures of expectations that would meet every Banshees album thereafter. The results might have the unfortunate effect of allowing auld post-punkers like me use of this record as evidence that we, alone among all generations, had the coolest and most sustained resistance to the cock rock overground. But the other side of that is that this energetic and invigorating music is there for the discovery of anyone of any vintage to use as a spur to their own creativity. Creativity is what this album is made of and adventure is how it sounds. The rest is up to the listener.

Listening notes. I still have my vinyl copy of Feast but it was so used and beaten by my younger self that I went back to the CD A Bestiary of The Creatures which compiles the first EP and the songs from the single Right Now. It's a great package with a strong remaster and comes with my earnest recommendation. 

1983 @ 40: FILTH - SWANS

Swans were a problem from the start. 

Filth starts, continues and ends with a one approach: pulverise, repeat. There are basses, electric guitars, drums and vocals but not a crumb of rock music. There are chants where choruses would be but it isn't glam, either. So what does it sound like? Construction works across the road. Hammering, screaming drills and saws, yelling, the motion of powerful things that make other things move or shatter. Two sides of an LP or a seemingly endless grind of industry and tormenting cries for about forty-five minutes.

Who'd want to listen to that? Well, a lot of it has to do with when it was made. It's the early '80s and the music still rising from the ashes of punk is proving more progressive than the likes of ELP ever were. And transgressive. These songs are about domination, abuse, rape, subjugation and more. This music, highly disciplined for all its apparent chaos, is meant to feel like that. The band name was chosen from an observation that swans showed magnificent  outward beauty that concealed a brutal temprament. By extension, lift the veneer of civilisation and you'll find the same thing with humans. 

There are no explanations of any of this on the album art, you just have to find it out for yourself. If you can make it through the first track with its ugly, gurgling basses and thrashing drums almost drowning out the vocal that issues instructions for living as an unfeeling macho with the final twist of "come back for more!" Blackout confuses the meanings of a loss of power with a drugged loss of consciousness. Weakling, which sounds like a sheet metal processing plant, continues: "I don't feel pain. I never escape. I'm under the bed. I'm licking the floor." The surrounding whines and groans bash away until the victim narrator can only bellow, "this isn't real ... not ... real ... not ... real ... not ... real..." As twisted as The Birthday Party ever got there was usually some scrap of conventional musicality to help the medicine go down. Swans who apocryphally threatened a punter with violence for dancing to them, were good at making it clear that they were not going to come to you but the other way around. 

This is a rare case where comparisons with their peers works, simply because it was a time when a band like this had peers that also defied labelling. Swans got a fair few labels slapped on them: no wave, industrial, gothic, noise, dark romantic, and so on but all of that just peeled off. Like The Birthday Party, Throbbing Gristle, Foetus and so on, Swans were best described as their own thing. This was important at a time when post punk was showing clear signs of morphing into conventionality. It wasn't important to take an objectionable stance as a protest, though, it was important because there was still too much to say that needed to be said without compromise. Acts like these were never going to have massive global followings so it was crucial to keep the message clear of unnecessary sweeteners.

Filth offers nothing by way of sweetening. The drumming is 4/4 with few embellishments that might make it personable. The guitar is playing intervals but the effect is more of sheets of noise responding like one of the components of an assembly line. The basses (usually two at once) are the closest the band get to riffing but the figures are short and as perfectly repeated as possible. The vocals are the same kind of haranguing bellow with the only variation being that some tracks feature a delivery more like natural speech. You wouldn't call it singing. Its character is more like commands or taunts. There is no melody. In case you do get too much into it there are even moments that rob you of finding pleasure in it like the sudden stop in Freak which waits for a little too long to resume (and that's the shortest track). There is differentiation between tracks but it's from this one having a riff like structure and the next one being more of a storm. 

If that suggests chaos to you then you should know that every track on this album sounds like the result of immense preparation and perfection. This is not the work of whimsical free jazz jammers. The tracks are statements with lines in plain language packed tightly into musical presentations that admit of no distractions like melody or groove. If you aren't familiar with this record (or anything by Swans for the next five or so studio releases) you might conceivably be thinking of early Hunters and Collectors but, as harsh as that could get it still followed conventional rock formatting with riffs and melodic vocals (however primal they could get). This record and its immediate successors was directly reflective of the band's live performances and is effectively presented as a set in polished form. As such, it is executed to the same level of intimidating commitment to form. Seldom has a band from a rock context been so toughly military.

It's worth a note to describe the arc of the band from this point to now as it's illustrative of that commitment in whatever form they chose. After the first few releases (they have brought out a lot of live records) and some portents of future directions with instrumentation like brass sections or piano, that Swans changed tack several times. A lot of this had to do with the recruitment of Jarboe who brought her hefty musicality into the storm and stress bedrock, adding a classicism that, by its jarring opposition, could prove effectively eerie. Towards the end of the '80s with albums like Children of God and White Light at the Edge of Infinity the band became almost unrecognisably melodic and lyrical. This reached its head with the very smooth Burning World before roughing back down for the final two albums, by which time they were falling back on over a decade's worth of praxis and experimentation. After a long hiatus, Gira gathered different musicians (but included stalwart Norman Westberg on guitar who debuted on Filth) and released albums with mammoth tracks that harked back to the hammering early days but extended the range. 

I only saw Swans once, back in 2011. They played at Melbourne's Forum with the inspired choice of The Necks as support. The set was long and began with an unattended feedback drone that lasted for about ten minutes before anyone got to the stage. The rest of it was powerful and loud enough to be the first concert of my life that made me use earbuds. The audience was very mixed generation and I recall the alarming sight of a guy who looked about twenty loping in a kind of dance right beside one of the big bass bins that might have been doing as much to make him move as his own muscles. At one point Gira bellowed the phrase, "Jesus come down!" three times. It was so loud it felt like it was pushing all the air out of the room. The Forum is a magnificent building used for music as well as a cinema (it's original purpose) but during the '90s for a few years it was a Christian revival centre when last a phrase like that would have been heard within its walls. A friend who was there spoke for me when he said that, although he couldn't remember the details of much of the songs it was the best gig he'd ever been to. After that I got more of the early Swans records in a way that I'd only just appreciated before.

Swans are an experience rather than a songbook, however many songs from their later years are genuinely memorable. To hear them again is to recall or be informed that movements that challenge and change norms can seem to bloom brightest when threatened with absorption or defeat. If the drive behind this music was from the same kind of ultra-masculine machismo that they appear to oppose then it's also worth noting that the thing that the passing years leaves is the opposition.

1983 @ 40: PORCUPINE - ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN

After more than a year of touring and very little contact through the media the usual rumours of split ups circulated about Echo and the Bunnymen. Fellow Liverpudlians Teardrop Explodes had similarly fallen off the local radar and they had actually collapsed, never to regroup. The Birthday Party were no longer. As far as innovative rock music went, it was looking like the triumph by default of the synth duos. While I didn't have any objection to that but the idea that rock music was going out just at a time when it was convincingly washing itself of the cock rock cliches and making guitar band music relevant in the wake of punk. And then The Bunnymen released Porcupine.

The Cutter starts with a violin played Indian style, a wildly microtonal figure along the lines of the Beatles' use of Indian melody. It sawed into being with a strong motion, bending with portamenti at the top of the phrase and diving down again before the band crashes in with a clear and hard '80s bass tone. Ian McCulloch enters with a growl. "We're on the seventh floor, brewing alternatives ..." He hikes it up to the chorus for "spare us the cutter" before soaring with the second part "conquering myself until I see another hurt approaching. Say we will say we can. Not just another drop in the ocean. The opening riff repeats over the crisp gated drums and that nifty bass. Second verse but the melody is changed stepping down from the fourth through the major scale: "Come to the free for all with sellotape and knives ..."  The chorus punches back in but instead of ending with the riff again everything bursts into widescreen with what sounds like the massed pipes of McGlaggen playing a solid modal figure. McCulloch croons low over this about a happy loss as a big contrapuntal figure on guitar and strings plays against the reeds. Another chorus that leads to a break with the bass riff before yet another brief melody on the vocals "watch the fingers close when the hands are cold" Actually, that should be "coooooooooooold" as he sings the syllable over the second explosion of the third section in one of his characteristically operatic held notes. And it's in that voice, over the strings and guitars that he sings the happy loss part but an octave higher. If you aren't already doing a frantic rain dance by this point then the good folk of Flock of Seagulls are over there. This avalanche of pure joy repeats and comes to a clean finish and you already need to hear it again.

Well, they were not only still together but stronger than ever with an opening song that did everything they did best, rangy vocals, quirky but expressive guitar playing, catchy melody and a sense dynamics that made every verse and chorus different, propelling the song into hyperspace. The Cutter is one of my favourite songs of its time. It made 1983 feel like its own year the way that 1977 felt like Pretty Vacant or 1982 felt like World of Stone. Nothing beat it in its year.

Back of Love keeps the pace at heart attack with a shining, clipped two chord riff high on the fretboard from Will Sergeant who's already impressed with his work in The Cutter. This distinctive chopping continues under the verse until the bursting chorus adds layers, one more frenetic and another more stately. McCulloch's voice rides over the energy with an angsty tone in a tune along the modal lines of something like On Broadway before soaring to the ceiling for the chorus. "We're taking advantage of breaking the back of love." There's something else creeping in here that will keep surfacing across the album. McCulloch talked about the songs explaining the opposites within him. "I'm on the chopping block chopping off my stopping thought. Self doubt and selfism were the cheapest things I ever bought. Whether he's rasping intimately into the mic, bellowing his big tenor in the chorus or seeming to choke on his own words towards the end, his performance combines the intensity of a live gig with the precision of the studio. Again this is a band that know the power of development within each song and this one, while not as gawpingly varied as The Cutter still can't outstay its welcome as each listen surprises you again with a detail thrown in that separates verses from choruses and iterations from each other.

My White Devil takes it all down with a slow and ominous opening. A triplet bass figure and distant guitar feedback build a cinematic scene, that bass stuttering between points over the white wails. We're given a brief literary history of John Webster whose The White Devil gave this song its title before the song kicks into a more cruisy rock groove that either of its predecessors. A descending guitar figure suggests more Eastern influence with its sitar-like hammer on pattern. It's unclear to me that McCulloch's lyric is derived from Webster's stark work but The White Devil does contain a scene of fatal betrayal in which a dying character speaks of his confusion at facing death. "Change in the nether. Do I get the choice? Chance it forever. When do we get the spoils" suggests a similar state.

Clay approaches from the distance with metallic groans bending downward by the time it gets there it's a rapid machine, all stuttering clanks and low saws. McCulloch comes in with a cheerful melody that's almost boppy but the words say otherwise: "Am I the half of half and half or am I the half that's whole?" The scission is back, one side looking at the other and either not recognising it or just not liking what it sees. "When I was the Cain, you were the Abel." It begins with this mix of dark guitar rock and bright vocals and keeps coursing that way until the sinewy guitars start slithering around the chords and the voice finds new puzzles of duality, groaning here, sighing there and then, of course soaring to the heights of his voice. It's happy and angry but doesn't sound like any rock and roll that happened before it. Ratting tom toms supported by that solid bass with the guitars either hammering in the distance like stressed sheets of steel or screaming through saws. "When I came apart I was made of sand. When you fell apart clay crumbled in my hands." He sings it in a low rasp for the last pass before hitting the operatics again, pausing for the line about Cain and Abel before one final celestial declaration before the sudden end, the clanks falling into the distance.

Porcupine starts with drums that sound like slowed down cat o' nine tail lashes. A big reverby acoustic guitar strums rapidly like a flamenco figure that doesn't finish. High electrics whine in descent. The mood is minor. McCulloch starts in big throat mode with an angsty lament that feels epic. "There is no comparison between things about to happen. Missing the point of our mission, will we become misshapen?" A fall into another pendulum of minor chord to fifth and the voice is closer. This is kept longer than usual for a song by this band as the huge, icy atmosphere envelopes. There's an instrumental section in a slightly lighter mode with bells and lower strings that ends in a beautiful breath as the harmonic ground is reset for the return of the lament, it reverses the order of the parts with the high melody overlapping and taking over the more closeted one. And then with a bright chord we're moving. The drums pick up and the song begins to gallop. Big clean electric chords. The vocal comes in, muttering and growling at first, unintelligible wherever we were it's different now, fleeing, flying escaping. Soon McCulloch is wailing above it, suffering or elated, it's hard to tell. Will Sergeant's guitar squeaks and screeches rise as the song fades to the end of the side and McCulloch is finally comprehensible as he screams: "I'm beginning to see the light."

Side two starts with a gentle acoustic arpeggio which quickly kicks in to an energetic arrangement that harks back to The Cutter with Eastern portamentos in the lower strings and sitar-like guitar figures. A thrilling forceful ride. "What if no one's calling? God, then, must be falling." Heads Will Roll. No idea but it works.

Then we come to the album's speedbump. Ripeness is all clean funk and the suggestion of raga-like rock but it's wrong. I'm not sure if it's the lack of the orchestration or the plainness of the guitar band arrangement but this one lays the formula too bare and it falls flat. It feels like bits of the other songs thrown together to sound like an Echo and the Bunnymen song. McCulloch even does the soaring vocal bit on time.

Here's the thing, not just about this band but a lot of them. Like quite a few lyricists that wrote their own vocal parts, McCulloch at this stage is either caught unawares in his own formula or simply sticks with what he knows. Ripeness repeats the list-like pattern of most Echo and the Bunnymen songs. You could almost put any of the following lines in any opening verse in the three albums up to this one: "If I said, I'd lost my way", "We're on the seventh floor, brewing alternatives", "Where am I going? Where have I been?", "The man at the back has a question" and so on. The craft comes in how the songs open up and introduce more melodic material over expanding arrangements. If you take most of that away and you don't do enough work to make the next one stand on its own you get filler. Ripeness isn't so bad, in and of itself, it's just that it's set among jewels.

Like Higher Hell. A a worrying distant guitar figure with a deliberately unresolved 9th interval. McCulloch's opening verse obeys the figure described above but the chorus and growing swell of keyboards and strings beneath prevent it from sounding rote. And the chorus takes us right to the heart: "Just like my lower heaven, you know so well, my higher hell." Long, atmospheric action sequences bring us back to the doom and weave together until the vocal round of the extended fade. A satisfying dirge.

A gymnastic bass figure brings us into Gods Will be Gods as the drums play time and a melodica noodles brightly. A few opening lines and we're galloping. Momentum builds as the extended verses play to bright motion on the guitars. McCulloch plays with the modal melody of the verse figure. What sounds like a backwards guitar break (but could be delay plus volume pedal) introduces huge chorused open chords and the speed keeps up. "Gods will be gods but my god forgot I was made out of skin." And then, before you get too comfortable, it cuts out.

Bluer Skies starts with the relaxing sound of low tide. Electronic percussion slaps to life over a chunky bass. The verse is another list but breaks into a beautiful high voiced chorus. Repeat until the second chorus which is lifted by a three-note keyboard figure. Repeat but the verses are more withdrawn, weary. "I know belief is in your eyes. We can't believe in blind light." "I'm counting on your heavy heart to keep me from falling apart." Fade on the organ riff until the tide comes back in.

Ok so, this has been long, longer than I'd planned. It's just that this album keeps coming back and in a way that few from its time come back. The Cutter was a single and came with a video that mixed the band miming the song in a practice room with lo-fi back projection intercut with footage from the cover shoot done in Iceland. It was both performative and oddly cinematic at a time when music videos were growing so overblown that their scene's sound effects were louder than the music (YouTube Union of the Snake by Duran Duran for proof) but this brought the music itself front and centre. They were nothing like the grand images in my head when I heard the song but they didn't detract from it. The thrilling newness and energy of it began the year for me. It might sound feeble triumph now but it felt like the year was in good hands.

I was in third year university and good at it. I'd run out of the cinema electives and was forced to take subjects from modern history and contemporary culture. Most of these were ok but apart from the main study areas the year was down to hitting my marks and saying my lines, grabbing a distinction where I could. It gave me pause to take the music in more fully and what I noticed was that the fury of invention that post punk had been releasing was being decisively absorbed by the mainstream. There was plenty of good culture below the radar but as only the crowd-friendliest was going to hit the surface and get taken up, the best of it was destined once more for the obscurity of the bottom of the flow.

I was twenty and in this year I filled in for a guitarist in Brisbane band's first Sydney gigs, formed my own band, did studio recordings, played live and was played on the radio. It was effectively my indy music career in a single year (not an unusual trajectory). I changed nothing but had great fun trying. Backed by this kind of greatness that showed bands that were unquestionably rock but well beyond the creaking strains of blues rock influences could produce such worlds on sides of vinyl. It felt comfortable. That's not the word you should be using about such a post punk powerhouse of a record but all I mean by it is that I and anyone who wanted to continue looking beyond the cock rock revival that was waking back up in the venues and on the media could keep turning their lab tests into songs. It wasn't going to last but he best stuff never does.

BJORK - DEBUT @ 30

When flatmate Tracey brought back from a UK holiday the Sugarcubes album at the end of 1988 we heard a lot of it. Spikey guitar band rock that mostly sounded a few years old. Good, but old. What didn't sound old was the voice. That sounded unearthly, high and screeching here, cool and reedy there but always exactly pitched and emotionally accurate. Along with The Wedding Present's album Life's Too Good became the sound of summer at my place. This pretty much ceased as soon as we saw the follow up single a few months on when MTV played it. It was ok. Nice video. And that was it for the Sugarcubes.

Cut to 1993, first library job of many and walking to work through the Carlton Gardens with what I wanted to be the next James Bond theme in my head. I'd switch stations just to catch it and I hadn't done that since studying for year 12 exams when I needed to hear Ashes to Ashes as much as possible. It was a big serious sound, a riff played on timpani drums with a hissing electro hi hat swishing behind it like a sprinkler system. And then the voice, same one as The Sugarcubes album, in great form, climbing into the rhythm like a pilot into a cockpit, quietly, assured, getting comfortable and then raging. "If you ever get close to a human ..." I couldn't shake it. The bursts of energy and dynamic control that let it reduce before the next wave with the big screech wailing over the crests and that constant grave rumble of the orchestral drums.

See, at thirty-one I thought I'd outgrown new music. The last thing I'd liked was My Bloody Valentine's Loveless and Swans' White Light at the Edge of Infinity. I was still resisting acid house and everything that came to be called EDM because that just wasn't my drug. All that sludgy pop locally and from the U.K. at the end of the '80s and into the '90s very quickly boiled down into homogeneous goo. None of those West Coast bands were getting through to me (I liked them later, sorta, as I'd already been fifteen and there was no rush at twice that). But this, this was doing something.

Holy! What a breath! After the barnstorming Human Behaviour we get the skittish and jazzy doof and clang of riffs and electrokicks. She sings of going around town, alone in a crowd, her voice quiet and intimate against the bold arrangement. And then the chorus kicks in and she's crying because she needs, cares for, feels you, a vocal line so tooled it would sound like a reed instrument were it not in the hard longing in the voice. At the end her desperation has her at this pitch in the verse and chorus alike. The mix of jaunty music and tough feeling will describe most of the rest of the album.

But that's the point, this first outing beyond the confines of a rock band saw Bjork cast a wide net past the fishing limits of rock music and find grooves to suit moods of any kind from any strain as long as they aren't from the exhausted well of rock music. As I listen again to that perfect sound of the CD I'm reminded of why post punk initially binned the 4/4 crunch of rock, however briefly. Just for a few big winters we got sounds from the outer reaches of dub, musique concrete, even further reaching into classical and hard bop. The vacation was a rich one, if not intended as a fun escape, and here, when the world again needed something like it, Bjork takes us somewhere like it. Now it's cheekily informed by the sounds of the clubs, of smoky jazz or funky soulful Hammond bites and bips. And a kind of updated Tiki comes forward, as organic as the island decor and as busy as the multitude of insect populations zapping and buzzing around. 

Venus as a Boy lilts like a boat, clunking with Arabic fills on the strings and it's dreamy and sexy and floating. In wicked mode Bjork finds a companion at a party on the ordinary side and they flee to find their own fun out between the boats under the moon. At one point she opens a door and slams it shut so the dance thuds are muffled as she sharpens her invitation to archness. It's a gimmick but it works every time. "There's more to life than this," she winks and it's been arranged at the right time so what might have descended into backing vocals chanting that phrase. There's something like it but it's kept low in the mix as her voice soars above, never falling into cliche. The sounds of the partiers hub bubble through to the crossfade into what might be the side closer (but I've only ever known this as a CD or higher), her harp led languid cover of Like Someone in Love turns everything down to the 6 a.m. end of the night of the previous track. From breathy realisation to understanding in cool, full voice, she plays the scene to perfection.

What would have been the old side two introduces what comes across as the diary of a love story. It's a sandwich of belting numbers around a trilogy of love ballads and ends with a dreamy jazz coda. It's not announced in any way but there are clear indicators in the record's architecture that, instead of a standard side two of fillers and maybe another single, we get a legit song cycle.

Big Time Sensuality starts with a skittish jazz organ like something off In a Silent Way. This is set into a pumping electro kit. This should sound skeletal and would except for Bjork's vocal which comes in blazing: "I can feel something. It's about to happen. It's coming up". The melodic phrases are short and strengthened to bold major thirds. If you wanted to score this for an orchestra you'd have to have a brass section for this one vocal; its insistence and solidity would demand it. But this is Bjork who gave us some of the most adventurous vocal gymnastics since Yoko Ono, so, freed even from the outer edge of rock band conventionality with the Sugarcubes. She is giving us everything else that the spare arrangement cannot and it's as huge and excited as love at first sight.

One Day begins the trilogy of love and longing. A varispeed vocal which sounds like baby squeaks over a distant synth sequence. Bjork comes in with a bright vocal which climbs its melody from whimsy to full throated yearning. Light electronic orchestration supports the vocal, variously solid and airy. A trombone solo appears with a modal figure before Bjork cuts back in with the yearning "I can feel it" motif. She provides her own choir of distant backing: "one day, one daaay..." as though it's echoing through the landscape. The fade subsides with the trombone figure.

Aeroplane dives into an updated form of exotica, the fifties '50s and '60s lounge music by the likes of Martin Denny and Les Baxter. Your e-Mai Tai will be accompanied by clicking percussion, jungle sounds, bird calls, vibraphone and bubuhbaahs on the backing vocals while Bjork vocalises a notch above where she was on the previous track.

Come To Me seems to gather the previous two tracks and add a little. A bass figure with a buoyant echoing bass figure and synthesised steel guitar. The voodoo reef backing vocals are back. The vocal soars higher than both of the previous songs and lifts the song into clear passion. exotica and electronica blend and blur the boundaries as Bjork's voice seems to swim and then rise form the swell into a massive clear blue sky. "You know that I adore you. You know that I loooooooove you."

This trio of songs play a deft game of progressing from the last one and identifying with each other so closely that it's easy to remember a line from one as being part of another. I haven't tested this but they are probably in the same key and share a bpm. It's a song cycle rather than three songs on the second side of a record. The quality of each belies the musical skid row that the space in the overall sequence if reserved for. 

Violently Happy closes the internal sequence with more experimentation. Bjork begins with a grand descending declaration: "Since I met you this small town hasn't got room for my big feelings". The pulsing rhythm swelling beneath is all first wave techno with an insistent throb. Bjork proceeds to demonstrate that you can have all the doof doof of acid house and what was yet to be called EDM and still have a clear ranging organic centre to it. Her muscular vocal is the equivalent of the feeling of the best dancing you think you've ever done while you're still doing it. It's an affirmation of all the longing, devotional secular prayers of the rest of the cycle from Big Time Sensuality and it sounds like an ecstatic surrender.

Instead of closing there, though, the album ends with a complex harmonic jazz chorus of saxophones with  Bjork more quietly affirming the simple contentment of a way of living that promises adventure yet offers constant comfort. It's not all cosy, those saxes are really working the dissonance underneath the dreamy lines about diving and weighing anchor. She's home, happy and alive. 

This was my first CD. I didn't even have a CD player. They were beyond my means on a part time job. I had to choose between having a player or having something to play when I got it. Also, the record was new and there was a thrill in making this my first. I could wait for the player while I slowly built up my home stereo after the death of the three in one I'd inherited from Nanna in the '70s. I'd seen the discs up close before so the newness was a little curbed but still this was special. 

If the square of cover art was greatly shrunken from an old LP the designers had been clever enough to maximise the portrait of Bjork on the cover. It's monochrome but tinted with the greyish olive hue that dominates the rest of the artwork. Bjork, head to chest, with straggly hair that makes her look fresh from the shower or an all-nighter in Reykjavik, looks out quietly from behind an arch of hands flattened together, not in prayer but more like the anticipation of someone else's reaction. This is what I've come up with. Hope you like it. The extra comforable cashmere jumper is in contrast to the tiny offputting dots on the lower eyelashes which give off the sense of rave culture or something more sci-fi. There is neither artist name nor album title.

On the rear cover in a plain font Debut. Outgunning it massively from beneath is her name with alien lettering, a slanting oval and a triple umlaut over the name's sole vowel. Even smaller than the album title, the tracklist slants backwards; numbers, titles and running times. This might not be the first time for this but the phenomenon in the '90s and '00s of music acts bringing in their tracks in at around the same length is on display here. Was that in response to the excesses of the '70s and '80s? Maybe but I think it has a lot more to do with the twin forces of songcraft and danceability. Acknowledgments inside and more sci-fi design with a wide ribbed wall that could be out of Alien or A Space Odyssey. Inside the case, the disc was matt black, the artist name's off-world font repeated from the back cover.

I taped it at a friend's place. Another visitor thought I was strange for making the decision to get the music before the player even though I was demonstrating in front of her why that wasn't going to be a problem. The tape was only ever temporary and I knew I'd get more discs soon enough and when a better job came up all would be ready. There was that extra thrill of the change of decade and modus vivendi, too. I wouldn't have a home computer for another year and then it wouldn't be hooked up to the world. I affected a coolness about this, assuring friends that I did all my surfing at work and left it at the door while I still read books and played tapes at home like a Luddite. Really, I just wanted everything upgraded and faster and better and everything the new tech offered. Meanwhile I tapped away at short fiction (even won a local contest with a story which afforded me a futon - '90s).

But the thing I really luxuriated in was a return to the excitement of getting the real version of that good moment on the radio when something grabs at you from the speakers and holds on tight. I walked to work for a whole year with the serious orchestral drumming of Human Behaviour pounding in my memory. And now, here it was, in full thumping glory. And there was the rest, the tiny textures the arrangements that stretched from arch bebop to doofing sweatfests. And all, each and every one of them, were songs. It was there on TV with the videos by Michele Gondry for the singles. Boy did she know the right people.

Well, she hung in the right crowds. Most of the production is by Nellee Hooper, a maven of Bristol's Wild Bunch along with Tricky and the gang who'd soon form as Massive Attack. At her insistence, he brought the acid house into the studio to meet her songs. And it scrubbed and whined and barked to life around the voice that had thrilled us so well in front of the Sugarcubes but, now, free of the rock band, against a big canvas of new, soared into the clouds or fell back to just beside our ears to console, whisper and taunt.

What I did know is that, over the speedbump of thirty, I needed no more rock music in my ears, at least for a while. That's why I got around to the Nirvanas and Soundgardens later as, for all the talent there, they just sounded regressive. It wasn't necessarily that I wanted progressive, I just didn't want the repackaged old. This album gathered everything I wanted to know more about in contemporary music. I was still young enough for the clubs and went to parties where you really could zone out and take the music in. So it wasn't just me getting creaky and gravitating to the jazz cellar. Rock wasn't too loud for me, then, it was too creaky and done. This, with its perfect playability over three decades (I have the DVD-A, as well but listened to the CD for this first) gives me a nostalgia that has less to do with grief for dead hours than a reacquaintance with the joy I still feel on hearing it.

What I didn't know was that Bjork's Debut formed the best inroad imaginable to the strain I did follow in that decade, the one just around the corner that, like the best passing trends, like psychedelia or punk or ambient, it sounded of its time but never got old: trip hop. This wasn't that, that was still being invented in the clubs of Bristol, but this felt as fresh, as sexy and as creepy, as right time and night time as My Funny Valentine, Blue Monday, or Baby it's Cold Outside. Three decades on and it's still as fresh as this morning's coffee.

Listening notes: Yes, I did put the old CD on to hear this again. Still sounds exactly as it should. I also lay down in front of the DVD-Audio I bought some time in the '00s and heard it again in big spacey surround with a woofer for those doofs and timpani. That one also has a few of the videos that Michel Gondry at al made for the singles which bring big smiles. 

1973 @ 50: QUEEN

There are many ways to tell the world you have arrived as a band. In the age of the LP this only ever happens in hindsight but it can still be fun to think about. Paul counting in the first Beatles album. Jimmy Page's hammering powerchords opened Led Zep 1. Queen starts with a gallop. But it's a fade in.

Keep Yourself Alive starts with a chugalugging, heavily phased palm muted chord, joined by a flashy riff, louder, closer until the band's all there and they ramp it up to a fourth above. A brief clearing of the stage. Freddie comes in with a growl both rough and melodic. It's a litany of experiences. He was told million times, the sold a million mirrors, he ate a million dinners, he loved a million women etc.  The chorus bursts into the major key with a call and response of the title. What might at first sound like a corporate hippy anthem of try and try again carries a shade more darkness in the suggestion of the great opposition that the whole cosmos might as well be pushing back with. It's a fun and fast rock song with show off playing (Brian May modestly but firmly demonstrating his guitar arranging skills and tone shaping in the solo and Roger Taylor getting a micro solo on the drums) but also a statement of defiance. They're singing to the listener from their own experience (and a little hubris: their trial and error is nothing on Bowie's). 

Doing Alright is a legacy of the pre-Queen band Smile. Mercury takes the vocal to a liminal space between head voice and falsetto before the rest of the vocal members and multitracking come in with glorious harmonies. The mood and rhythm break with a diversion into a kind of sunny Latin shuffle which escalates into a crunching electric riff and metal version of the whimsy. Back in first verse land it's all light melancholy and sweets. Big riff breaks in again for a solo on top before a clean finish on the chorus. At one point this might well have been a song Brian May sang in the shower but by the time it got to the second track of Queen's debut disc it is presented as a showcase of harmonies, sudden turns and virtuoso guitar playing.

Having begun with something single-worthy, then the school concert intro to the band, they move on to a number that would only ever be an album track. Great King Rat starts with a crunchy minor key riff that opens up with a reverby acoustic and distant lead vocal. The creation of space and light in the arrangement and production is impressive when you consider that the modal tonality and motion of the lyric could have most easily be squeezed down into a kind of sea shanty. Here it is widescreen cinema. The subject of the song might be a gangster or just some wideboy Mr Sin who lived hard and played deadly. The chorus includes a corruption of the Old King Cole rhyme, giving it more intrigue and atmosphere. And then the middle section (too long and distinct to be a middle eight) which crashes and changes to a major mode as Freddy sings like a herald with lines from GKR's life about being a bad guy to get ahead (pretty much the opposite sentiment to the opening track). This ends with a trailing wordless vocal and patted acoustic guitar moment before we crash back into the last verse, guitar solo (ending in a burst of studio applause) and final chorus that ends with a fade out on a tom tom roll.

My Fairy King closes the first side with the kind of showcasing we've already heard in Doing Alright but bigger and wider. Rhythm changes, new melodic material , instrumental workouts, more of Brian May's wind quintet guitar tone, some impressive piano performance and lots and lots and lots of harmonies. It's easy to dismiss a track like this as showing off but it's worth recalling a few things about the time, also. 1973 might well be associated with glam rock but it is also a time when the prog bands were gigantic enough to have their live gear moved in road trains with the name of each member emblazoned on the the roof of the semitrailers. To stand out in this environment and avoid any possible charge of cashing in on camp or glam you needed to show that you could not only arrange like a 19th century composer but play every note perfectly AND provide a kind of mythos for any characterisation you included in the lyrics. If this had ever been a simple singalong it quickly got the Queen treatment. The great apotheosis of this, Bohemian Rhapsody, would not appear for a few albums and years on and by its time was prepared and recorded by a band with some rapidly acquired discipline. Until then, the world got things like this which, as calculated as it had been, sound mostly like a mess, as though Andrew Lloyd Weber threw an uncooperative rock opera out the window and went back to the drawing board. Beautiful vocals and fine playing but also very astutely placed at the end of a side of vinyl.

Side two begins with Liar. which begins with a drum pattern that the song proper when it begins ignores for a more Who-like powerchord workout made for the kind of venues where the band wanted to headline. A little calm then Freddy comes in with lines from a confession which are answered by the choir calling "liar!" The point at which Freddie wails, "nobody believes me!" and it's a small milestone. All good singers have one thing in common; they make every vocal about themselves. You might be the most proficient, have the most unassailable falsetto, be able to shatter wine glasses with your highest chest voice note, but if you can't make something, whether written for you or you found under a caravan, sound like you, then you don't get to join the greats. Sometimes this is self-fulfilling like Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan who only ever could sound like themselves and only every sang their own lines. Mostly it's the preserve of the tiny few. When Freddie complains that nobody belieeeeves him (I'm hearing it in his scansion as I type) it comes straight from him. By the time we get to the Oh Sinnerman call and response he finally sounds like the Freddie Mercury we would know and love, not just a skilled vocalist. Perhaps it also had to do with the enhanced tightness of the arrangement on this song which never strays too far from its own path in stark contrast to the previous track. It's as though they started on side one as a good band learning their trade and became Queen on side two.

The Night Comes Down begins with a gorgeous acoustic guitar workout. After a quick flourish from the Brian May orchestra, the vocals start with a refreshing acoustic vamp. Freddie's vocal takes us through a nostalgic trek before the choir enters with the chorus, plain but delicious. Plain, does what it says on the tin but it's a good tin. Brian May song and lovely for all that. It ends with a dazzling Brian multi-geetar serenade.

And bumps right into a thing that would be a feature of every Queen album until Jazz, the Roger Taylor rocker. John Deacon, on bass, was the only one who didn't sing lead vocals. Brian May did but not for a while. That left Freddie Mercury whose command of his voice had no equals on the face of the earth. So Roger went the other way and tried for a mix of Ozzie Osbourne and Robert Plant. Modern Times Rock and Roll charges like a mad bull for less than two minutes and doesn't waste a nanosecond. the breathless charge of it presaged the kind of full throttle of early punk. I bet no early punk acknowledged this, though.

The other thing that Brian May did was big metal songs. Son and Daughter is one of those, combining a big sinewy riff, crunching verse chords and a big bright chorus. The narrator complains about societal roles and the futility of pushing back against it. Why the chorus about wanting someone to be a woman? Maybe, after all that struggle he wanted love and sex to be simple. Absolutely no idea. Probably just sounded good sung. The guitar workout at the end is especially refulgent, casting more aural light than any so far on the record.

Jesus establishes a slamming two chord figure over which Freddie sings a fairly straight account of the fame of Christ. It's impassioned, serious and thoroughly hooky. Freddie wasn't remotely Christian but I tend to think he knew his audiences were acquainted with the bible story and probably admired the legend of the prophet, his power and adoration as a kind of bronze age rock star. This song features the kind of double speed instrumental section known and loved by numberless garage rockers but, considering the skill of the guitar playing, it's painstaking tonal setup and leaning toward atmosphere rather than chops it resembles most closely the Jeff Beck period Yardbirds. It's a stunning act of rock guitarism which yet gives way to a straight reading of the final verse and chorus which ends acapella until the fade.

The final track is an instrumental preview of the early single The Seven Seas of Rhye (fully realised on the following album) and is a softened anti climax after Jesus but pleasant for all that.

I didn't know this album until after I had my first Queen album A Night at the Opera. I'd heard Bohemian Rhapsody in the school holidays between '75 and '76. First week back at school, after hearing everyone else had heard it, too, a casually occurent wish was fulfilled when the video was on Countdown. It was as good as I remembered it. A few weeks later I bought my US pressing from Ken Herfords Import Records around the corner and luxuriated.

 And then, as every teenaged kid does, I had to get the rest of them. From memory, it was II then this one, then Sheer Heart Attack by which time the sequel to Opera, A Day at the Races, had come out. So, while I didn't hear them all at once it was in a squashed time period and they all pretty much blended ... except for this one. As the inadvertent effect was of a band sounding as though they worked toward and finally achieved their own sound in the space of one album, it felt like a first effort, the scene in the movie (of any rock biopic) where someone knocks something over, comes up with a phrase of future import, stumbles on a riff or whatnot and the rest is hysteria. 

But it was more like the opposite; the band had moved from this self-imposed image to the next, taking on players and singers (like Freddie) until at this point in their career they recorded these songs and struck upon their personality and sound. One of the things that is very notable. here, is that, for all the feeling around on the first side, there is a consistency that does form and a tone, character and weight that will take them to choose their strengths and present in sharper focus with each new effort. This is what happened with Queen. It wasn't the soaring development of a Beatles but for the first decade at least, no flab or filler either (ok, the John Deacon songs but a few of those were massive hits). And there was enough in the tank for the band that got to worldwide number one with a novelty single and only got stronger from that point. While they're clearly serious about their work in this first record it will always, after what followed, sound like workshopping rather than worldbeating. That said, find any rock band that wouldn't be proud enough of this to feel that they could just stop here.