Then Play Long

The STYLISTICS: The Best Of The Stylistics

2012-01-28T17:05:00.002Z

(#154: 19 April 1975, 2 weeks; 24 May 1975, 5 weeks; 16 August 1975, 2 weeks)

Track listing: You Make Me Feel Brand New/Betcha By Golly, Wow/Rockin’ Roll Baby/Break Up To Make Up/You’re A Big Girl Now/I’m Stone In Love With You/Stop, Look, Listen (To Your Heart)/Let’s Put It All Together/You Are Everything/People Make The World Go Round

Bowie missed a trick with Young Americans. If only, instead of dessicated soul-liloquies (although one senses the desperation lurking within “Can You Hear Me” and watches as the “human” is systematically eradicated altogether in “Fascination”) he had issued a series of lushly-orchestrated, androgynous serenades – who knows what impact that might have had, since no album sold more in 1975 Britain than this one. Smooth, silky, a perfect soundtrack for Martini-pouring…that is, if you don’t listen too clearly or take in its implications too fully.

The Stylistics as represented on this collection were less a soul group, more a laboratory experiment, a way for Thom Bell to expound and develop the theories he had conceived while working with the Delfonics. There was Philly soul, true enough, but other than its not-Motown serene smoothness, Bell’s work has little to do with that of Gamble and Huff; Kenny Gamble gets a co-writer credit on “Break Up To Make Up,” and most of these tracks were recorded at Sigma Sound with Philly musicians, but the relationship is otherwise parallel, close to non-existent.

The group came together in 1968 as a merger of two Philadelphia street bands, the Percussions and the Monarchs. Evidence that they didn’t yet know what to do with themselves can be found in their 1970 debut single “You’re A Big Girl Now,” co-written and co-produced by road manager Marty Bryant. It was done for $400, and sounds it; following a mock-oriental guitar opening and some referencing of Hendrix, a distorted Del Shannon-esque organ takes over, merging with the falsetto of Russell Thompkins, Jr, and the overall feeling is one of a JA dubplate, complete with melodramatic basso profundo talkover (it’s like the Ink Spots meeting the Paragons). Nonetheless the single sold healthily in Philadelphia, and provided their passport for signing to Avco; Bell was generally unimpressed with their demos and signed the group solely on the potential he heard in Thompkins’ voice. Almost from the start, Thompkins was the focus of Bell’s Stylistics, so forcefully that several of their early cuts are effectively solo Thompkins performances.

Bell, and his lyricist partner Linda Creed, opted to work with the group almost purely on a ballad basis; he was about to sign the Spinners for the uptempo stuff. It was a gamble that worked; of this record’s ten tracks, only one is uptempo, the rather unconvincing “Rockin’ Roll Baby,” a sort of Osmonds distortion of Bobbie Gentry’s “Fancy” (and which I fancy had originally been intended as a Spinners track) whose nice Carole King-ish groove cannot obscure wince-inducing words (“his little orthopaedic shoes” indeed!). And, apart from “You’re A Big Girl Now,” the only non-Bell track here is the (then) most recent; 1974’s autumn top tenner “Let’s Put It All Together” – now under the aegis of producers Hugo & Luigi and arranger Van McCoy, who must have thought that putting together a song in the Bell style was the easiest thing ever, the song sounds clumsy, stretched and over-simplistic; “My lips and your lips – what more is there to say?,” “You love me and I love you” – these words evoke Sesame Street, or possibly chapter one in a Teaching English As A Foreign Language handbook, and the song’s only saving grace is the unexpected suspended D major seventh chord which ends it.

Of the remaining selections, no less than five come from the group’s eponymous 1971 debut album – “Big Girl,” being one of them, set aside, these songs set out the template with which Bell intended to play. Intending to return to this source, though, the later songs are worth examination; “I’m Stone In Love With You” (1972) finds the singer’s soul still stoned, his mind largely occupied by aimless dreaming, culminating in him fantasising about owning the first house on the moon (“No population boom”). “Break Up To Make Up” (also 1972) is almost French in its melodic and orchestral constructs, moving both into neoclassical soul and a harbinger of New Pop, in that the lushness camouflages the hurt that is actually being sung about (“First you love me, then you hate me,” and its second verse casts a paranoid, askance eye on that of the O’Jays’ “Backstabbers”).

1973’s “You Make Me Feel Brand New” is in many ways the apogee of the Bell/Stylistics approach, and the group’s biggest pre-Hugo & Luigi UK hit single. As it was also a number two single, I have to be careful what I say about it here, but sufficient to notice the return of the electric sitar from “You Are Everything” with empathetic piano accompaniment, the subtlest key change perhaps in any pop record (from first chorus to second verse), the song’s near hymnal construction – there are multiple references to faith, “precious” and God, and note how Airrion Love’s voice trembles on “love,” “hands” and “again” – and, above all, what I believe to be the central premise of Bell’s Stylistics, namely the androgynisation of soul; the song ranges from Love’s bass to Thompkins’ falsetto, in other words from male to female, and in the end everybody and everything sounds as one. This goes beyond anything Bowie might have been thinking in 1975, the song’s lyrical clumsiness notwithstanding.

But if I have to return to the four remaining, peerless cuts from their debut, it is because they represent the group and producer’s best and most adventurous work. Oboe begins both “Betcha By Golly, Wow” and “Stop, Look, Listen” but each song diverges down a very different track; “Betcha” sticks to the psychedelic soul template, perhaps owing a little to Charles Stepney’s work with Rotary Connection, with its quietly elated references to skies, rainbows, candy smiles and “Catch A Falling Star,” but primarily with its exquisite melodic construction. In contrast, “Stop, Look, Listen” demonstrates how well the group worked as a harmonic conductor; the oboe is accompanied by pizzicato strings, giving way to glockenspiel, and guitar lines which alternate chunky chords with fluent single-note runs. The group’s triple ascents of “Lord” indicate how major an influence the Beach Boys must have been on Bell, as does the arrangement, with its solitary French horn resting on a bed of bass trombones. “You Are Everything” is the record’s most obviously psychedelic track, its electric sitar drowned in generous phasing, as Thompkins ponders about mistaking other women for his Other – the music plays as a stoner soul variant on “Kashmir” and the song proves Thompkins’ unexpected range, from troubled contralto to wretched sopranino; his voice is sweet always, but never less than sharp.

Best, and most visionary, of all, however, is the final track, “People Make The World Go Round,” which even in this abbreviated form remains their masterpiece. It comes across as a comfort variation on “Ball Of Confusion”; Moog howls and wind chimes give way to low electric piano, sighing bass and menacing Whitfield strings…and, eventually, a marimba. Politically the song is confused beyond belief (“Buses on strike, want a raise in fare/So they can help pollute the air”) but is redeemed by Bell’s brilliant arrangement – sour flugelhorns signifying a Wall Street gone to seed – the close relationship of the song’s melody and rhythm with Bacharach, and Thompkins’ weary, resigned yet still hopeful delivery. It’s like that, and that’s the way it is, he seems to sing, but does so like an angel, so persuasively that it’s difficult not to follow his instruction to “Go underground, young man.” The song proceeds with imperial patience, and finally, when the song might seem unable to go any further, Thompkins repeats the title phrase, over and over, further and further from the microphone, until in the end he becomes just another element in the framework, a stray leaf fallen in the pasture. Had I compiled this album I would have included the song in its six-and-a-half-minute entirety, since as Thompkins fades from view, or at any rate hearing, the song continues to drift, nowhere in particular; there are long, languid solos for guitar and flute (the latter played by Harold Vick, and drawing immediate comparison with Charles Lloyd’s work on the Beach Boys’ “Feel Flows”) and the music slowly vanishes into nowhere and nothing. A soulboy’s “Surf’s Up” (and released in the same year), this track opens up long-banished memories for me; I bought the original album – featuring the group reclining in a field of endless hay – on vinyl for a pound one languid Tuesday afternoon about a dozen years ago from a junk shop in Wandsworth (which didn’t know what it was selling) and took it back with me to Oxford, and it is memories of a disappeared Oxford which the song now engenders (apart from being a forebear of everything to come, including New Pop and Massive Attack); sensations of fugitive foxgloves in the declining shade of Botley Park, abandoned roundabouts and furniture warehouses, the shades of Ruskin and Wilde at the top of Ferry Hinksey Road, unexpected blossoms by canals, stiles which deposit one, via dog tracks, to the middle of Iffley, always the sunset, Air’s “All I Need” and Bill Fay’s “Some Good Advice,” Cumnor Hill of a Sunday mid-morning, a turning world, shivers in Port Meadow, getting towards dusk, becoming ever darker, across the universe.

Tom JONES: 20 Greatest Hits

2012-01-21T17:30:00.005Z

(#153: 22 March 1975, 4 weeks)

Track listing: It’s Not Unusual/Only Once/I’ll Never Fall In Love Again/What’s New Pussycat?/Till/Runnin’ Bear/Green, Green Grass Of Home/Thunderball/Love Me Tonight/She’s A Lady/Pledging My Love/Funny Familiar Forgotten Feelings/With These Hands/Delilah/I’m Coming Home/To Make A Big Man Cry/Help Yourself/The Sun Died/Daughter Of Darkness

I suppose it stands as a relative measure of how big they were at the time. Whereas Engelbert had to make do with a single sleeve and a dozen tracks, Tom gets a twenty-track double album with grandiose “Tenth Anniversary” subtitle and lavish gatefold sleeve picturing the Welshman with his many celebrity pals, and a motley lot they are too – after the expected Sinatra and Elvis, there are Joni Mitchell, Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, Smokey Robinson, Little Richard, Charles Aznavour, Tony B and Sammy DJ, but also snapshots (presumably all taken from the This Is Tom Jones TV series) of the man with Bob Hope, Matt Monro, Harry Secombe and Victor Borge; a conflict between aesthetic aspiration and the demands of light entertainment which I think penetrates to the very core of Jones’ music.

Like the Humperdinck collection (and inevitably there’s a shot of Engelbert and a bearded Tom, grinning and resembling no one as much as Godley and Crème) the track selection is slightly random; just as bona fide hits such as “I’m A Better Man” and “Too Beautiful To Last” are absent from His Greatest Hits, so were only fifteen of Jones’ twenty tracks actually “hits”; conspicuous by their absence are the likes of “Detroit City,” “A Minute Of Your Time,” “Without Love (There Is Nothing),” “I (Who Have Nothing)” and the dreaded “The Young New Mexican Puppeteer.” What we are left with is a portrait of a man in battle, not so much with the material he is given to sing but the way in which it is given to him.

It’s arguable that no one really knew what to do with Jones from the word go. In his 1972 survey Voxpop: Profiles Of The Pop Process, author Michael Wale undertook a series of lengthy, detailed interviews with the prime movers of the day. Among them was Les Reed, who as composer and/or arranger and/or producer had a hand in Jones’ most famous hits. When pressed by Wale as to what unique qualities he detected in Jones, Reed volunteered the following reply:

“I consider Jones has got a voice which nobody else in the world has got. He’s so detached from the rest of the world, singing-wise, that if one is au fait with his records and recordings to a point where you know where his next phrase is going to be without even thinking about it, then you have to write a song in that mode, even if it means embarrassing yourself by singing it yourself and all that, but you’ve got to get hold of Tom’s phrasing, his range and the type of lyric that he would like to sing about…he’s a man but he doesn’t want to show it too much on record…Tom can’t get sentimental. He’s a real man’s man, he’s got inward feelings, and so you have to put it in such a way that it’s not embarrassing to him for the public to listen to him singing something schmaltzy. It sounds very much round the bush but that’s how it works.”

Not everybody dealing with Jones had the patience to go round the bush. Reed, for instance, is very insistent that he would approach a Humperdinck song in a different manner from a Jones song, but too much of what is here veers towards the wrong side of schmaltz. Clive Westlake’s “Only Once,” for example, with its precious Spanish guitar, raspberry brass, regretful mutters about “the way young people always do” and general air of a failed Eurovision entry, is clearly a romantic/Hispanic song meant for Humperdinck, and so when Jones does it, it doesn’t work; similarly, the high camp of “Help Yourself” and “Love Me Tonight” are Engelbert environments in which Jones sounds utterly lost.

But, as I say, perhaps Jones was lost from the beginning. This collection begins, as I believe all Jones compilations are legally obliged to begin, with “It’s Not Unusual,” a powerhouse performance which must have sounded like emissions from another planet in 1965. Rejected by Sandie Shaw as an A-side, Jones grasps the song’s contours with as many limbs as he can spare, and Reed astutely limits the orchestral backing to fortissimo trumpets, ruminative baritone sax and Joe Morello’s pained lead guitar. It went straight to number one – there was, after all, literally, no competition – but immediately set its own limitations. The British male solo star was a nearly extinct species in that age of Beatles and Stones – chart regulars like Roy Orbison, Gene Pitney and the transported Texan PJ Proby being Americans – and it is true to say that for the best part of two years Decca had no idea how to handle Jones, instead trying him in all directions. From this period comes his reading of “With These Hands,” an early try at his Big Ballad template ruined by an over-florid, cheesy, Liberacean piano and an over-fruity vocal delivery (it is possible that Jones had Bobby Hatfield’s performance on the Righteous Brothers’ “Ebb Tide” in mind). He fared better with film themes; John Barry pushes him to his physical limits on the Bond tune “Thunderball” – how better were the Bond songs when they were about the villain! – forcing a climactic high C following which Jones fainted in the studio. And “What’s New Pussycat?” is odd and misleading enough to keep Jones on his toes (even though he indignantly demanded an explanation of the lyric from Hal David).

Only with “Green, Green Grass Of Home,” hitherto an obscure Jerry Lee Lewis album track, did Jones hit on his winning formula; tearful but unsentimental balladry sunk by battalions of ‘50s strings and choirs. Where on his original reading Lewis sounded unconcerned, resigned, about going to the gallows – and why is he to hang? What has he done with “sweet Mary”? – Jones never quite extinguishes the dread from his voice. Still, the single marked a bend in the road, where the adventure which had been straining at the leash throughout 1966’s groundbreaking series of 45s suddenly cut loose and sailed towards the more welcoming arms of the album format, leaving the charts more or less at the mercy of unambiguous, easily-felt balladeers.

The format continued unabated throughout 1967; Mickey Newbury’s “Funny Familiar Forgotten Feelings” is treated as the slushy country ballad it isn’t. “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again” – co-authored by a resurgent Lonnie Donegan – comes closer to identifying Jones’ dilemma. Here he is, this honest soulman who listens to Otis, to Solomon Burke and Joe Tex, and in my opinion doing his best to give an authentic portrait of a destroyed, betrayed soul. Yet so much about the record conspires not to place it alongside “The Dark End Of The Street,” principally the same Radio 2 legion of gloopy voices and strings which dogs so many of Jones’ record; ultimately Jones is driven to faux sobs and growls just to stay afloat. This is a not uncommon problem; his reading of “Pledging My Love,” for instance, starts out as a fine and obviously heartfelt performance before the arrival of the schmaltz battalion (and needless final verse key change) force him into shouting and bellowing. Likewise, he does his manful best with the old Ray Charles chestnut “The Sun Died” but is immediately torpedoed by weeping wah-wah guitar and a confusing melange of brass, strings and voices; there is simply too much going on in the background.

At the same time, Decca (and, it must be said, Gordon Mills) did their best to paint Jones as a “badder” boy than Humperdinck. “I’m Coming Home,” his ’67 Christmas offering, for example – why has he been away so long, and why does he think she’ll take him back, considering all he’s supposed to have done (has he been released from the penitentiary, or from the Army?)? He sings of unutterable emptiness (“My world is falling around me/I’ve got nowhere to hide”) but the song resolves nothing, emphasised by the early fade.

In 1968’s “Delilah” – a song, significantly, written with PJ Proby originally in mind – Jones makes no bones about it; for the second time in his career, somebody in the song dies, and multiple layers of Three Amigos trumpet camp cannot hide the fact that it is a squalid, cheap song about sexual inadequacy and murder. Even Jones couldn’t follow that; hence the forced jollity of “Help Yourself” (Jones’ ad lib cackling suggests that “round the back for a bit of the old brandy” had indeed come to pass) although poor old Ken Woodman (mislabelled here as “Ken Wood”) tries his utmost to keep the package holiday portrait afloat.

Beyond 1968 there is frankly not much to say (and so his reading of “Without Love,” one of his more convincing deep soul attempts of the period, is doubly missed). “To Make A Big Man Cry” is Reed trying to be Bacharach again, to little avail (“BeCAUSE it HAPpened to ME!” squeals Jones at one point). As for his forlorn early seventies, the less said, the better: in “Daughter Of Darkness” he is reduced to wishing the woman away, and although Martin Fry is anticipated more than once (“Sharing together the magic of love”) the whole sounds like a dodgy ITC detective show theme tune (Jones’ increasingly abstract ad libs appear to back this up). Paul Anka’s “She’s A Lady,” a Billboard number two, sees Jones doing his best to be Modern, and although Big Jim Sullivan’s guitar knows what time it is, the song, which essentially compares the singer’s wife with the lead trombone player in Anka’s band, patently doesn’t. Old school London Palladium belters like “Till” – a UK number two – kept the dowager demographic happy (complete with its closing “You Only Live Twice” rip) but one has to say an emphatic no to his interminable 1973 demolition of “Runnin’ Bear,” complete with “funky” rhythm and atrocious fadeout “chant” – “Indian Reservation” it is not (and is he, as Lena thought, really singing “happy hunting GOWN” at the end?). By 1974 Jones was down to the compulsory jauntiness of “Somethin’ ‘Bout You Baby,” which, with its “Billy Don’t Be A Hero” horn lines, is the cheapest-sounding track here, and certainly the smallest hit (it was lucky to reach #36).

In sum, then, Jones’ Decca contract, like Humperdinck’s, was nearing its end, and as a straight Greatest Hits package issued exactly one year earlier had failed to penetrate even the top ten, the TV-advertised route must have seemed irresistible. I am sure that Abigails the country over must have bought this for their dinner parties, but even this is undervaluing the man; for a period (I’d say ’66-9) he was Britain’s Elvis, the deepest and shallowest repository of his audience’s desire and fears, and little wonder that they ran back to him when times began to look tough again. There he is, his shirt wide open, baring whatever is left of him to bare, or bear; and look at him at the back, bowing down with a rose in his teeth, and hope it doesn’t suffocate him.

LED ZEPPELIN: Physical Graffiti

2012-01-16T17:14:00.002Z

(#152: 15 March 1975, 1 week)

Track listing: Custard Pie/The Rover/In My Time Of Dying/Houses Of The Holy/Trampled Under Foot/Kashmir/In The Light/Bron-Yr-Aur/Down By The Seaside/Ten Years Gone/Night Flight/The Wanton Song/Boogie With Stu/Black Country Woman/Sick Again

“Sick Again”? That’s putting it mildly. A funny thing about falling seriously ill; you are forced to take stock of everything and make a snap(py) decision about how much, or if, it matters, and more often than not you find it’s less important than you think.

Since last I wrote here – indeed, as I was preparing to write about this very record – I’ve been a hospital inpatient, firstly at the Friends Stroke Unit at King’s College Hospital, then at the specialist stroke care unit at St Thomas’ Hospital, having suffered what specialists call a transient ischaemic attack, or as you and I might call it, a mild stroke. No joke at all was my condition throughout the first couple of days of admission when I was essentially unable to move, eat or speak; things could only improve from there, and they did, so dramatically that I was able to go home on Friday – a fine tribute to the plentiful and kind teams of physicians, nurses, therapists and other specialists who made my recovery possible. However, these same world-renowned teams have made it starkly clear to me that I had a lucky escape, am lucky to be anywhere at all, let alone in front of a computer; the stroke was precipitated by a long history of undiagnosed hypertension and what cardiologists term atrial fibrillation – abrupt bursts of arrhythmia in my heartbeat. My father survived eleven days into his fiftieth year before being struck down by coronary thrombosis, and as I am now just over two years ahead of hitting fifty, I have been told that the only way I’m going to make it even that far is to change pretty much everything about my life. Continuing to write about British number one albums is an early indicator of stepping in the wrong direction, but there you are.

In any case I doubt I would have much of consequence to say about Physical Graffiti but I am more convinced than ever that it doesn’t matter nearly as much as it would like. There it stands, the imposing New York brownstone, containing seemingly all life, but on closer examination it’s the same combination of Google Images, band mugshots, Roy Harper and Noddy Holder anyone might expect. The same goes for the music; had the CD existed in 1975, this would not have been a double. Zeppelin reconstituted at Headley Grange in 1974 to lay down some new tracks, ending up with eight, the material taking up around fifty-three minutes of time – too long for a single album, too short for a double. So the decision was made to bung the package up to speed with what is basically Led Zeppelin’s Odds ‘n’ Sods; hitherto unreleased and buried masters from 1970-72, including Houses Of The Holy’s previously unavailable (for it failed to make the original cut) title track. What these seven selections do is increase the record’s running time to just under eighty minutes – with delicious irony (or ironic delicacy?) a little too much for just one CD.

But I don’t think that the extra material adds to the record’s imbalance so much as the fact that there are two records to take into mind here. Left alone, I’m sure that the first half, a compact thirty-five minutes, would have stood as one of the great Zeppelin albums, even though two of its six tracks are makeweight additions. On the same level, it’s impossible to flee the notion that the new material is very consciously conceived and executed to reinforce the idea of Zeppelin as World’s Number One Rock Band, and that the old stuff still finds them in a state of catch-up. Even routine rockers like “The Wanton Song” and the aforementioned “Sick Again” carry an expressionist determination absent from the daft “Black Country Woman” with its Don Partridge/McGuinness-Flint jugband mood and Percy Plant going beyond parody (his climactic “Whassa matta wit’choo mamma?” put me in mind of Freddie Starr attempting Burton Cummings, roast beef and all). Likewise, “Night Flight” trundles between channel-hopping genres to no great effect (R.E.M.’s “Bandwagon” sprung to mind) whereas the drone rock of “In The Light” is never less than clear about its intent, from the relationship between John Paul Jones’ sardonic harpsichord commentary and the band’s characteristic collapsing-into-itself angle of rock, to the unexpected materialisation of the leitmotif “Let me share your love” against backdrops prophetic of Aaliyah’s “We Need A Resolution.” The lazy sidestep shuffle of “Down By The Seaside” coasts by on its cocktail of “This Guy’s In Love” electric piano and Page’s iridescent Martin Denny marker pens without ever exceeding it (“Still do the Twist?,” asks an audibly exasperated Plant toward song’s end), but “Ten Years Gone” has enough passive reflection in its harmonic exquisiteness to make us realise where and how Jeff Buckley came into the picture. Next to that – “Boogie With Stu” finishes with a nice breakbeat.

On the first album, both “The Rover” and “Houses” earn their place; “Custard Pie” is nothing more than stock, inviolable state-of-the-1975-art Zeppelin of the sort which justifiably made Jack Bruce exclaim “Pah! Why are you playing me session musicians?” with its let’s-fox-the-pub-tribute-bands chordal and rhythmic structure but its dynamics are sufficiently alluring that the increasing dominance of Bonham in the track (especially noticeable from the last verse onwards) is accepted as natural. Set against this, the angst of “The Rover” is appealing – Plant moving from mournful (“My love, she is lying on the dark side of the globe”) to cautiously confident (“IF WE COULD JUST/IF WE COULD JUST/IF WE COULD JUST/IF WE COULD JUST…JOIN HANDS!!”) while the song’s second half is nothing less than “For Tomorrow” by Blur. Even “Houses” gets by on its cowbell-powered “Gudbuy T’Jane” motor (though it’s clearly a B-side).

Of the record’s three big setpieces, “In My Time Of Dying” is great fun, a three-cornered battle between Plant’s mortally wounded protagonist, Page’s guitar, hovering between Sumlin wail (the whole is really an elongated meditation on the Stones’ “Little Red Rooster”) and triple-bound rock rebound, and Bonham’s pitiless drums (the Page/Bonham synchronicity is particularly apparent here). Plant’s voice is content to moan in the background (“I never did no wrong” etc.) where Page’s guitar leaps out of the speakers like a jaguar when soloing, articulating Plant’s desired marching angels. On he goes, summoning whoever will come down to meet him – at times his “Oh my Jesus” sounds like “Oh my dealer” – and when Plant finally checks out, he finds himself unaccountably euphoric; “Oh, feels pretty GOOD!” He won’t unsink his teeth from the song, however, and the band finally have to resort to end-of-the-pier hi-jinks to get him out of there.

That leaves “Trampled Under Foot” and “Kashmir,” both justifiably celebrated (and, I’d wager, the main, or only, reasons why people keep Graffiti), yet note how the cumulative impact of each track depends on accumulated power and momentum. Yes, “Trampled” is Tom Jones just having heard Innervisions - in Rock Classic terms it’s roughly halfway between “Superstition” and “Long Train Running” (“Talkin’ ‘bout love”) – and Plant bawls far too much through it (in fact my central difficulty with Graffiti boils down to a surfeit of Percy) but its trail is unstoppable; you don’t want the damn thing to stop, even when it accelerates towards the end, and it’s authentically funky in the same way as its direct descendent, Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out.” Similarly, “Kashmir” makes for the post-’67 epic with its “I Am The Walrus” insouciance, Bonham’s fundamentalist (if carefully phased) drumming and Jones’ genuinely euphoric string and horn charts, marching between the twin key poles of D major and Gm7. And certainly the inner shudder – or is that disguised euphoria? – materialises the nearer the music strikes towards the Other, the exoticism and dreaminess powerful enough to make you forget that Kashmir is not in Morocco or Rawalpindi, but in the Himalayas; and while Plant’s impeccably imprecise “Let me take you there”s cannot be argued with, there is still the feeling of a big band flexing their muscle, letting us know that nobody in 1975 could compete with this (I mean…the Moody Blues? ELO?? Please!), but not yet telling us what they can add to the tale. Still, there you have it, a two-step “Hey Jude” for a dispossessed generation; you know that the Cazale character in Dog Day Afternoon would have taken both steps deadly seriously.

STATUS QUO: On The Level

2012-01-01T16:50:00.003Z

(#151: 1 March 1975, 2 weeks)

Track listing: Little Lady/Most Of The Time/I Saw The Light/Over And Done/Nightride/Down Down/Broken Down/What To Do/Where I Am/Bye Bye Johnny

A couple of images from the music of late 1974 to early 1975. First, the love that has died, the bitterness in breaking up, the consequent directionlessness, words which go something like this: “It’s no good trying to make it better/You know it doesn’t feel right to do/Everything we shared together/Would break in two.” The spectre of the train, the coexistence of “somewhere” (or “a somewhere”) with “nowhere” and are the two really that different? Second, the music, reflecting, echoing the sound of the train the singer has been vainly trying to catch (before finally jumping on it at the end), streamlined, absolutist without being rigid, set out as neatly and meticulously as a grid, a music so seamless and faultless that it could have been breathed by the sweetest machine. One sometimes searches for evidence of the human hand, but of course it’s some of the most human music imaginable.

I am not talking about Blood On The Tracks or Autobahn but the unlikely record which conjoins the two. Its obsession with trains may mean that On The Level is actually Quo’s Trans-Europe Express but it’s all there, just as nearly all of it is as evanescent and elusive as the Ames room on the cover (from “Down Down”: “I have all the ways you see/To keep you guessing/Stop your messing with me”). Think you have Quo nailed down? Think again.

Everywhere on the record are mine traps designed to snare the unwary. “Little Lady” has Rick Parfitt being walked out on by his lady; there is this street, and she goes down and out of it, he goes up and down the same street with other ladies and eventually she comes back up, also now walked out on; all this is done against a standard fast Quo template but as the song reaches its turnaround point, everything dwindles down to a tiny pastoral Mike Oldfield interlude of twinkling guitars before a hard-pressed drone muscles its way back in. Rossi’s “Most Of The Time” starts out with the seeming intent of a quiet, quasi-acoustic rumination before the group quite unexpectedly thunders into the picture with a loud, slow blues workout topped by Rossi’s extremely anguished lead guitar. “I Saw The Light” – not the Todd Rundgren song – concerns itself with resigned disappointment but even the singer finally gives up halfway through; nonetheless he is paralysed (“Standing on a platform/Watching all the trains go past/Keep on trying to catch one/But you know they’re much too fast.” All around are the ashes of the past, the burning need to get away, to escape.

Bassist Alan Lancaster – for me the album’s star; see his sighing bass at the climax of “Over And Done”’s instrumental break, his astonishing about-turn at the end of the full-length “Down Down,” his ceaseless, intelligent commentary on “Broken Man” – contributes perhaps the album’s two bitterest songs; the furious concentration of “Over And Done” is rather intimidating in its complete assurance – take away the blues tropes and mournful vocal, replace with Farfisa organ and French Situationist lyrics and you have Stereolab (listen to that almost inhuman, or superhuman, rhythm). The shambling loss of “Broken Man” recalls, of all rock bassists, Ronnie Lane with added boogie, and as he drunkenly stumbles through the ruination of his life, he sees her again – he is sure it’s her, but he can’t quite connect, possibly in himself can no longer truly recognise her – and runs away, back to nowhere. Parfitt’s “Nightride” tries for hope against desperate hope (the slightly wrecked atmosphere of the song is emphasised by the slowing down of the rhythm section as it moves from intro to verse) to look forward to reconciliation, perhaps even newness. But throughout lurks that paraphrase from a past life, from “Wild Thing,” the motif of “You you you, you move me.”

“Down Down” becomes more remarkable – and radical – every time I listen to it. How did such an uncompromising single get to number one (indeed is the Quo’s only number one single to date, if you don’t count “Rockin’ All Over The World” topping the NME chart in autumn ’77)? They were on tour, probably at the peak of their popularity – but even those factors don’t fully explain this modernist phenomenon. Throughout the song Rossi plays hide and seek with the listener and the song’s subject – and who’s to say the two are different? Sometimes he is almost taunting (“You’ll be back to find your way/Again again again again again again again again”). The music, meanwhile, looks sternly forward to punk; there is that same clean division of lines found in the early work of the Ramones – separate channels for separate guitar lines, all notes clean and scrubbed, everything scientifically in its spontaneous place. Added to that are the tantalising hold ‘em poker drumless interludes which break down and rekindle our expectations of a further explosion in ways which directly anticipate, say, Daft Punk (“One More Time” in particular). It is one of the most inscrutable number ones, and one of the least resistible.

Rossi’s “What To Do” takes its lead fairly directly from “Broken Man” with kaleidoscopic “Reelin’ In The Years” guitar curlicues, abstracting the latter song’s landscape into a discussion of life and direction and ways which, set down on the lyric sheet, might stand as Pinter:

“I told her of a life.
Of a strange one.
Pre-arranged one that I dreamt of anyway.”

Parfitt takes over again for the modestly cathartic “Where I Am” wherein the protagonist finally awakens (to the atypical landscape of a synth-drenched 6/8 ballad) to the world and to himself, and is now ready to re-enter the world. And finally, back to the roots, back to Chuck Berry, and the song that ties all the album’s loose ends together, a furious, hammering assault on “Bye Bye Johnny,” a song which doesn’t quite undermine its own modest hopes – the boy is off to Hollywood, his mother is tearful but happy, he makes it and promises to come back and build a mansion, and every night his parents wait patiently by the kitchen door, not even entertaining the notion that he might never come back. Nor the possibility that in truth he hasn’t made it, is wandering around in “a nowhere.” It is not quite the reassuring ending that this album requires, even though it makes great play of its ending, obliquely referring to “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” onomatopoeically representing the train slowing down (like the ending of “Trans-Europe Express”) and acknowledging “A Day In The Life” with its final sustained chord. Then, after an interval of seconds, the sound of a crowd, singing a song from the beginning of this story, “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”

I can’t quite put my finger on why this album proves so unexpectedly moving, other than it (again) disproves the idea of Quo as three-chord ponies; it seems to me a very compassionate record; virtually none of the songs could be described as “happy” and yet hope is never banished from their grooves. Apart from Parfitt’s occasional keyboard overdubs, there is nothing and nobody else on the record but the core quartet, mostly playing live in the studio, and it remains a potent steamboat of resistance against whatever else sought to suppress spirits at the time (and now). Where Humperdinck’s world (as represented in the previous entry) is finally a rather claustrophobic one, the Quo manage to charm and caress their way through the barriers, and thereby reach another level.

Engelbert HUMPERDINCK: His Greatest Hits

2011-12-26T15:13:00.003Z

(#150: 8 February 1975, 3 weeks)

Track listing: Release Me/Quando Quando Quando/Les Bicyclettes De Belsize/Spanish Eyes/Am I That Easy To Forget/There Goes My Everything/A Man Without Love/Another Time, Another Place/Love Me With All Your Heart/The Way It Used To Be/Winter World Of Love/The Last Waltz

There is a famous photograph from 1967 which features Engelbert Humperdinck and Tom Jones, Decca and the year’s golden boys, lounging back, grinning, against their respective Rolls Royces, as if in affable disbelief – how come they haven’t rumbled us yet? Or, more precisely, the Likely Lads of post-Beatles British balladry, or, more floridly (according to the late Billy MacKenzie) “Thunderbirds in pop.”

For a while, to the public, they were inseparable – hanging out together, appearing on each other’s TV shows – and must have seemed like two sides of the same coin. These days, though, I think of Humperdinck as a kind of Pacino to Jones’ de Niro; the two styles need each other but Jones’ persona is the less trustworthy, the more evasive – he is able to scurry under his varying masks of toughness and roughness, stutters and mumbles in his songs, gives the impression he’s always two further corners round the corner than you might find comfortable. Whereas Humperdinck wouldn’t have a heart if he didn’t wear it on his sleeve; he is painfully conscious about setting his own record straight (as a singer) – Jones laughs or hiccups off sorrow and suffering, but Humperdinck thrusts his loneliness in our faces.

And lonely he was fated to be, just like Gene Pitney and George Michael (two other singers whose audiences have not taken well to finding happy – look at the top row of photos on the rear of His Greatest Hits, taken, as with the star shots for Elton John’s Greatest Hits, by Terry O’Neill, and you’d swear it was George circa 1985); it was for a time his oxygen, his lifeline. Never forget that when “Release Me” blasted off from the bottom of the bill at Sunday Night At The London Palladium and into the world, he was already thirty with nearly a decade of failure behind him; sometime nightclub performer, both as singer and saxophonist, he had been laid low for a fatal while by TB, and by the time Gordon Mills proposed the name change from Arnold (“Gerry”) Dorsey he was struggling to support his wife in a cold, bare flat in Hammersmith. This was his last roll of the dice; if “Engelbert” didn’t work, it would be proper job time.

But it did work, and not necessarily in the venerable “you’re too beautiful to suffer” trope of pop idolatry; there was that Anglo-Indian unplaceable exoticism about him – more pronounced than that other Anglo-Indian re-import, Cliff Richard – and the idea that he popped out from nowhere and seemed to come from everywhere provided sufficient allure for the demographic Lena has elsewhere termed “the Housewives of Valium Court”; left alone by their day job husbands to dream of other and better things. In his palpable suffering, he provided a relief projection screen for the pains of his audience.

Not that Humperdinck has ever been a tortured soul, or at least not in ways he has decided to divulge to us; he is generally self-deprecating, amiable, wears “vain” like a Better Badge. When hustled onto a package tour in early ’67 with Hendrix’ Experience and the Walker Brothers he surprisingly bonded with Jimi, who would study his act closely from the wings and to whom the older man would offer tips on how to work an audience. Once he even provided understudy guitar for Humperdinck (“You can’t do this, Jimi! You’re a star!” “Oh don’t worry, I’ll stand behind that curtain and nobody will know it’s me”), who remarked (approvingly) that it was like being backed by three guitars. In more recent times he has happily provided the vocal for “Lesbian Seagull,” and upon discovering Damon Albarn had asked him to participate in Gorillaz’ Plastic Beach and that his management had turned Albarn down flat, an appalled Humperdinck promptly dismissed the team and installed his son as manager.

It’s a remarkable story in many ways, but it’s all the sadder that, despite the Pacino comparison, Humperdinck had for the most part to deal with the equivalent of – Val Guest, or Gerald Thomas. The arrangers who contribute to these twelve songs are none of them awful as such – on the contrary, they include top names of the period such as ex-Joe Meek conspirator Charles Blackwell, Johnny Harris and Mike Vickers – but none seems to have been inspired to provide more than the obvious. Too many of these songs follow an identical formula, with tinkling piano, obligatory key changes for the final verse (to show off Humperdinck’s range) and, worst of all, a horribly obtrusive Light Programme choir who seem intent on pushing the singer towards heaven, or hell, as quickly as possible. You can tell why something like “Am I That Easy To Forget?” didn’t do quite as well as his ’67 trilogy of hits; the Horlicks singers are blocking Humperdinck’s emotional path, the watching-as-she-walks-out-on-me scenario too familiar; the formula was becoming tired.

Those ’67 trilogy of hits, however, the three biggest selling singles of a year which supposedly opposed all that these songs stood for; if anything, quite apart from providing some sort of reassurance to maturing screamers finding Revolver a bit much, these performances solidify and refract their inbuilt misery. “Release Me” was built on the template of Little Esther Phillips’ 1962 version, but holds none of the knowing sass of the impetuous and bored fourteen-year-old girl playing patient emotional table tennis with her backing singers. And just because Phillips’ version is the more “approachable” or “authentic” (in relation to what?) does not necessarily make hers the superior reading. Humperdinck captures his own mounting desperation very effectively, starting low and gradually building up to the point where, when he finally reaches the top C of the final “So,” he can barely balance himself. It is almost like a plea from the future to the past to let it escape, and live, and maybe has more in common with “Strawberry Fields Forever” than it cares to admit. In a nation where no-strings divorce had only recently been legalised, this cut through to a lot of disappointed hearts, and the single remained on the chart for well over a year (in part bolstered by its ebullient B-side “Ten Guitars” which latter sadly does not appear on this compilation). At least in “Release Me” he has another (and realer) love to go to, or go off with, but the two follow-ups cut off these escape routes. “There Goes My Everything” is enhanced by John McLaughlin’s imaginative guitar comping but cannot be taken seriously due to a bumptious bass trombone which plods through the arrangement like a doped elephant, let alone the “there goes my only possession” leitmotif (is he waiting for the repo men to come and pick her up?). With “The Last Waltz” there is little left save piano, and echoes (both oddly reminding me of Ultravox’s “Vienna”) and the trail of the song is anyway confusing; in its tenure he appears to meet the girl and finish with her in the space of two minutes. Muscially, too, Les Reed achieves a crafty fusion of new and old; the verses are a competent Bacharach pastiche but the chorus could have come out of Victorian operetta. But it doesn’t seem to presage anything approaching a desirable future.

Even when Humperdinck is “happy” there is always a sting in his wink. “Quando Quando Quando,” one of his most popular tracks (though a surprisingly under-performing single in the UK) and certainly one which I heard in my youth performed by endless Italian wedding bands, does well with Harris’ criss-crossing vertigos of strings and woodwind, but he hasn’t won her yet and it’s debatable whether he will. His “Spanish Eyes” is also less assured (and wobblier on the diction front) than Al Martino’s hit version, and brings out some of the song’s innate absurdities (suddenly they’re in Mexico! Say “si si”!). Still, we recall that in The Good Life, when Paul Eddington’s henpecked executive Jerry is having a rare afternoon off, he stretches himself out on the sofa, pours out some liquor and revels in a Humperdinck album; here is also the man many men of their time wished they could be.

The loneliness, meanwhile, gets worse. If not tackling Les Reed/Barry Mason originals, he’d most often be found reworking translated Italian San Remo weepies. Thus “A Man Without Love” strolls merrily on its ground of sprightly acoustic guitar, French horn, harp and accordion, such that we hardly notice what he’s singing: “I cannot face this world/That’s fallen down on me.” Like David Ruffin in “I Wish It Would Rain,” he cannot even leave his room. He even cites “If You Go Away” (“slowly dying”). “Les Bicyclettes De Belsize,” written by Reed and Mason for a scatty short film about a bloke on his bike and a billboard model who comes to life, tries to breathe carefree but again and again the mourning chords (and muted trumpets) drag it down. “Come the dawn,” concludes Huperdinck, “they are all dead – yes, they’re dead.” We could almost be listening to Scott 3.

1969’s “The Way It Used To Be” is possibly Humperdinck’s most tortured record, in that Mike Vickers’ orchestra and chorus seem to pummel into his head – there he is, out of his room, but he’s in the dark corner of a restaurant, on his own, and everyone and everything else in there seems to be laughing at him, ganging up on him. As with Herman’s Hermits’ contemporaneous “My Sentimental Friend,” he asks the band to strike up an old love song, in the meagre hope that “she” might be passing by and look in, and be changed “even if the words are not so tender.” His mirthless laugh of “Ha!” is bitter, and the song tries very hard not to be “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me” (“It’s quite easy to let go/Then the song begins again”). Note the “crowded room” appearing yet again, like a harsh reminder of earlier and better times.

Reed’s arrangement of his and Mason’s “Winter World Of Love” does show some imagination, progressing from the icy “Il Silenzio” trumpet at the beginning to the hearth rug of Home Service strings which end the song, with Humperdinck progressively modifying his “O-ho”s to “Oh no” – but are they really going to stay in their bunker “until summer comes again” (well, it is the end of the sixties)?

As the seventies rolled around the Brtish hits began to dry up, although Humperdinck’s personal popularity did not and, if anything, increased abroad, especially in the States; 1970’s “Love Me With All My Heart,” a variation on “Love Is A Many Splendoured Thing,” did no business in the UK (there is a case for Humperdinck as inventor of X-Factor pop, with those bravura high notes, climactic key changes and choirs). His most interesting record of this period was 1971’s “Another Time, Another Place,” written by Mike Leander and Eddie Seago, which with its whirlybird arrangement is almost the anti-“Quando Quando Quando”; here is perhaps Humperdinck’s greatest torture – he keeps running into his ex no matter where he goes, and it’s always friendly and she’s almost always with somebody else – but the Strictly Come Dancing flourishes of Laurie Holloway’s aptly garish arrangement serve to mask deeper pains (“And I try desperately to hide”). Occasionally he even breaks into proto-Martin Fry mock-exasperation. And again, that word which keeps cropping up through the record, “regret.” Regret for not being hip, for sticking himself in , or to, the past?

But never, unlike Jones, does he do revenge songs. No, his is the epitome of pure romantic suffering; it’s a wonder that Mills didn’t think to rechristen him Heathcliff – it’s that intense and windblown. And that quality was still being clung to by a number of people, enough to get this last-ditch best-of to number one and on the chart for thirty-four weeks (last-ditch in that Humperdinck’s Decca contract was coming to an end, and so Decca took note of what K-Tel, Arcade and Ronco had been doing and advertised the record aggressively on TV; a signifier of a trend set to dominate the top of the album chart for the next fourteen years or so – single-artist retrospectives, and eventually the return of “Various Artists,” all aimed at relatively undiscriminating Woolworth’s buyers). But things were changing; Humperdinck, realising it was all finally rather ridiculous, if admirably so, ensconced himself happily on the Vegas circuit (and went on to score many more hits everywhere except Britain), Barry Manilow was waiting round the corner, and this year of 1975 will end in a quite different place, with another exotically glamorous, reinvented man of uncertain pedigree. But here we start, with the way it used to be, and who would ever think of trading in those Rolls Royces or conspiratorial schoolboy winks?

Elton JOHN: Greatest Hits

2011-12-20T19:08:00.005Z

(#149: 23 November 1974, 11 weeks)

Track listing: Your Song/Daniel/Honky Cat/Goodbye Yellow Brick Road/Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting/Rocket Man/Candle In The Wind/Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me/Border Song/Crocodile Rock

(Author’s Note: the above track listing refers to the UK and Australian edition of the album; in the USA and Canada, the non-single “Candle In The Wind” was replaced by “Bennie And The Jets,” and on the 1992 CD edition which has now become standard, both tracks appear)

At some point on the day this album began its second week at number one, Nick Drake died.

He died of an overdose of prescription drugs, almost certainly accidentally, but this didn’t stop the cult of explicable depression rising in popularity in tandem with his posthumous reputation. His death was noted in the music press at the time but not many words were expended on it; in November 1974 hardly anyone had heard him, or even of him, and the NMEs and Street Lifes of the time had bigger ghosts to pursue, the living phantoms of Syd Barrett and Brian Wilson being just two of them. It maybe wasn’t until later in the seventies, or even with the ascent of a new generation in the mid-eighties, that Drake’s life, work and anti-work were pulled into a spotlight of belated golden, with the accompanying romanticisation of untimely death and thwarted beauties that has kept a thousand lesser poets in bread slicings since the days of Chatterton.

What this means is that it’s difficult to listen to Drake’s music without the curse of foreknowledge. The act of dragging oneself back into a period when all of this was new, sort of hip and smart in its internal chat is a difficult one, not helped by the greying elegy offered by Ian MacDonald in The People’s Music, and which I now see was really an extended attempt to excuse MacDonald for whatever awful decisions he might take; the rationalisation of depression, the convenient cloak of the Horrid Modern World (with all those computers; the irony being that, at the time of his death, Drake was looking into training as a computer programmer) – above all, the refusal to face both himself and the inconvenient truth that depression is a thing, a condition, that happens, no matter how firmly you shut yourself off from the world or how courageously you attempt to continue walking in the world with a world of people to support you.

What this is all leading to here is the possibility of the existence of a benign double, an odd doppelganger (emotionally if not physically) who, unlike the depressive, is able to face the world and take it on, a lot of the time against his tightest will. Or perhaps this is simply a disguised self-meditation on whether it’s better to cut yourself off from the world or fight your way back into it, a question you wouldn’t think would require any hesitation in answering, but that presupposes the absence of a darkness.

Back in 1970, when Drake was still in a condition to face the world – up to a point – Joe Boyd hired Elton John to record an album’s worth of songs by other contemporary British songwriters; John was then just beginning to make a name for himself, and Boyd thought that this friendlier approach would be a way of getting unsuspecting listeners into the world of sprites like John and Beverley Martyn, and Drake himself. Elton recorded four Drake songs and his readings take the songs’ furrowed brows and point them some way towards the sun (especially the fatalistic “Saturday Sun”). It didn’t really do Drake any good – largely because, scarred by a misguided season of playing Northern working men’s clubs, he then ran a mile from any live work – but the work indicated that here was someone a little braver than Drake, someone not without his own demons (as even a cursory listen to Empty Sky will confirm) but who was crucially able to laugh them off. There’s a famous Val Wilmer photo of Elton from ’68; it is winter, he is standing warily at the side of a dirt track backed by a few trees, but is wearing a fur coat and a large, fetching hat. You couldn’t imagine Drake making any effort beyond wriggling into his creased jacket. And at the time Elton was just another Denmark Street hustler; with Taupin, he was attempting to churn out off-the-peg bubblegum before being taken under the wing of the two Rogers – Cook and Greenaway – who encouraged the duo to find their own voices and develop them, rather than follow the charts (Cook himself appears as one of many backing vocalists, in addition to Paul Buckmaster’s choir, on “Border Song” along with the likes of Tony Burrows, Lesley Duncan and Madeline Bell - the session singing Premier League, in other words – and one can explain its inclusion on Greatest Hits as a nod to his mentor, as well as a reminder that as a session pianist he had recently appeared on the Hollies’ “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.” It is naïve but not unpleasantly so, and you can already tell that he wants to get someplace else; Aretha heard the song and subsequently took it over).

But there are strong reasons why “Your Song” has had a million plays on oldies radio and become a standard and “Northern Sky” has not; imagine, if you can, and I realise it may be almost impossible, that you have never heard this song, this record, before. It made the top ten in both the States and Britain in early 1971, and it’s fair to say that it was quite unlike anything else in those lists, even the seemingly compatible singer-songwriter musings of the likes of Cat Stevens. For one, it buckles at the thought of bedsit-compatible vulnerability; this is a song which knows exactly what it’s doing, which is deconstructing the notion of writing a song, wondering about the purpose and eventual vision of a song, how it can best touch another’s heart even if you can’t remember what colour her eyes are. The hesitation (“Anyway…the thing is…what I really mean…”) is theatrical (since it’s all done with perfect actorly timing) but what it’s trying to express is pretty well worth expressing, even if it is that all this writing and balled-up paper isn’t going to replicate the electricity, the ecstasy, of falling in love or expressing your love for another, it’s better than keeping it all hidden, cradled away from anyone’s vision. It is the overgrown student, still living in his virtual hall of residence, not quite sure of what he wants to do other than he wants to do something and that something is better than nothing, or nothing-ness (I don’t believe Drake ever gets near nothing-ness, not even with “Black-Eyed Dog,” but his music is something you view with a telescope, or listen to with the benefit of twenty years in Oxford behind you for context; come closer and he’ll scratch, just a little, but just enough). Even for a Nick Drake to carry on living, whatever it took, and have no reputation as such beyond his peers, to be another veteran of the circuit, just like Keith Christmas or Howard Werth or John Howard (the latter is the exact missing link between Elton and Drake; hear 1975’s Kid In A Big World for someone wrapped up in himself but inquisitive enough to pierce the parcel’s paper), or be like Bill Fay, shrug your shoulders when the first and second albums don’t sell and return to the day job, fitting in songwriting and music in your spare time.

And “Your Song” is a smart record, too; Barry Morgan’s drumming is a minor masterclass in stoical response to compressed emotional turmoil (his impatient tick-tocking before finally setting off in the second verse) and Buckmaster’s strings don’t overwhelm or drown the singer. Nowhere does he make any mention of being dead, even though (as it would transpire) he had already attempted suicide once. You come back from that, you stay away from it or end up playing hide and seek with it until it (like it did with MacDonald) corners you.

And there is so much trouble in the seemingly benign lanes of Elton’s Greatest Hits, a very cleverly sequenced set of songs (and punchier and crisper than their album equivalents, too; these were clearly taken from the 45 mixes and therefore sound like the intended souped-up pocket transistor), yet also so much good humour. The backbone of “Daniel” is solemn but Elton’s playful semi-yodelling “Spayayayayain” puts me in mind of Steve Bent’s “I’m Going To Spain” (“The factory floor/Presented me/With some tapes of Elton John”). But then there are two differing songs on the same subject; disillusion with the Big City (read: Modern World) and desire to return home, as impossible or impractical as that may now be. So “Goodbye” swoons with its echoed regret, but “Honky Cat” swaggers along in a self-defeating James Garner fashion (“I QUIT those days and my…REDneck ways!”). Actually John’s vocal on “Cat” might be my favourite of his; whooping (those high “New” and “fools”) and regretting nothing in a damn-you way. His piano is enjoyably bombastic, towards the end veering towards Taylor forearm-to-keyboard blocks and Tippett-like runs (never forget where he got the “Elton” from – stalwart Keith Tippett right-hand men Elton Dean and Marc Charig once played with the erstwhile Dwight in Bluesology).

It also characterises an utterly British approach to American music; the Beatles never really grew out of being fans, and neither did Elton, the ultrageek, collector of and keen listener to virtually every record released; and thus both were able to relate very naturally to American audiences. “Yellow Brick Road” for instance clearly takes its lead from The Band in its weary, knowing trudge but in ways which could only have come out of power-cut early seventies Britain. The omniscient approach was also Elton’s greatest weapon; listening to Greatest Hits is akin to having a jukebox in your home, almost machine-like in its affable and infallible versatility. You want supra-Stones rock? There’s the blitzing “Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting” (“It’s seven o’clock and I wanna ROCK!” Bryan Adams is 14). Sensitive memoria? The original “Candle In The Wind.” A plea for life and a future that Drake could never quite summon enough of himself up to express? “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me,” complete with Spectorian/Wilsonian tambourine (and, of course, actual Beach Boys in the middleground). There’s the affectionate slug to the shoulder of pop history that is “Crocodile Rock” (Prince is 12). There’s the detail (Nigel Olsson’s shivering triple snare drum flourish in response to John’s “switchblade and a motorbike” in “Saturday Night’s Alright”).

And there may also be the suspicion that this is as good as Elton might get. Add “Bennie”(with its processed audience effects, the bridge between Simone’s “Ain’t Got No – I Got Life” and “Purple Rain” – those PURPLE flashes of synth!) and you effectively have here the entire range of songs on which his reputation has been built. Worldwide it’s still his best-selling album, and while there will be more hits and sidetracks to come (many of which this tale will go on to address) there is in this Greatest Hits the air of a summing-up, the conclusion of a phase, a period. This turned out to be the case; Elton, having been written about four times in two years, now disappears from TPL for almost sixteen years, and, as a new year begins and the 150th entry looms, there begins a bend in the road and the start of a very different set of priorities in our number one albums. But for now, think of Drake dressing up as Marie Antoinette, wowing a Vietnam/Watergate/recession-depressed American public, making out like Jerry Lee Lewis were merely a tougher version of Liberace, and conclude that whatever life throws at you, sometimes, when it matters (and it almost always matters) a custard pie remains the best response. Look at the white stick sitting astride the piano, directly behind Elton on the Terry O’Neill cover; not a crutch, but a walking stick. A guide, rather than an end.

(and in case you're wondering, "Rocket Man" was a #2 single in the UK, and so is mostly for Lena to evaulate and write about, but all I'm going to say at this point is that I can't think of any harsher, more alienating portraits of a deadening "straight world" than this; "zero hour, 9 a.m." is sung as though heading for the gallows, there is the question of whether he really is a rocket man - "I'm not the man they think I am at all" - and the multiple subtexts of "in fact, it's cold as hell" and "I'll be as high as a kite by then," together with Davey Johnstone's guitar lines which swoop and climb like someone else we might know, may suggest what might have happened had Drake invested in a synthesiser and how hard his fall might otherwise might have been.)

Rod STEWART: Smiler

2011-12-11T13:57:00.003Z

(#148: 19 October 1974, 1 week; 2 November 1974, 1 week)

Track listing: Sweet Little Rock 'N' Roller/Lochinvar/Farewell/Sailor/Bring It On Home To Me-You Send Me/Let Me Be Your Car/(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Man/Dixie Toot/Hard Road/I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face (Instrumental)/Girl From The North Country/Mine For Me

As the game became bigger, so the music diminished. Every Picture was a bunch of guys in a small but happily crowded room, swapping stories and feelings; Dull Moment was a slightly larger group of people in the mouth of a goal, and Smiler is a pub lock-in (the Prince of Wales pub in Holland Park, to be exact). The old faces (and Faces) are back, perhaps with too many new ones added, but there is no disguising that the singer, despite his continued, matey, now faux self-deprecating liner notes, is no longer existing on rice and beans and is a multimillionaire (or soon on his way to becoming one). A certain distance is growing, and along with it comes a similar degree of carelessness, and not the joyous kind.

Smiler was Stewart’s last album for Mercury (and held back for several months because of contractual dispute between Mercury and Warner Brothers), and the last of his “British” albums, and so, despite there being nothing about goodbyes in the packaging, there is definitely a sense of something ending, as in falling to bits rather than careful resolution, not that the latter was what the early seventies Stewart was ever about. Take it on its surface and it’s a fine, drunken fall-about of a record, the kind of louche, fuck-non-giving record which Primal Scream would love to be able to produce (but possess too much self-consciousness and history to do so). But peer a little closer and the exuberance is forced, the juxtapositions of loose playing and ultra-professional backing vocals and horn/string charts too ill-fitting. “Sailor,” for instance, flays like a ship flung between two icebergs; a T Rexy stomp (complete with possibly speeded-up backing vocals) and a barely controlled wind-formed monument of impassibility; pianist Pete Sears gives up keeping up and settles for Taylorish forearms to the upper keyboard, and the whole thing blows itself out into a free passage for tenor, guitar, organ and bass, Stewart meanwhile shouting exuberance, or confused instructions. Few tracks have controlled beginnings or endings; Berry’s “Sweet Little Rock ‘N’ Roller” begins like the end of Pet Sounds, with dog barks, and some noodling improv from Ronnie Wood which eventually unfolds into the song – certainly this track contains the album’s most creative rock playing, with drums and guitars impressively managing to criss-cross and maintain two different tempi at once, vigorous enough to ignore the probability that twenty-nine-year-old Rod is a little too old to be slavering over nineteen-year-old girls any more.

Everybody involved is just trying too hard and becoming exhausted as a result; but then maybe the formula itself was close to exhaustion. “Farewell” tries for the old “Maggie May” magic, complete with Martin Quittenton’s acoustic guitar and Ray Jackson’s mandolin, but the song simply isn’t there and its sentiments standard and banal; despite being a comfortable top ten hit single (#7 in the UK), the song has to my knowledge never been played on radio since. Indeed Dick Powell and Wood’s violin/guitar unisons become uncomfortably jagged towards song’s end and the music degenerates into disorganised busking, perhaps with a hopeful ear to John Cale (but likewise Fear or Helen Of Troy this is not).

The messiness finally becomes oppressive rather than liberating; by inviting all his friends round to the virtual pub, Stewart manages to drown out everything about himself that made him worth our attention. Elton pops up to contribute the rocker “Let Me Be Your Car” – by the sound of it, a Caribou reject – whereupon the record immediately turns into an Elton John record, with Rod reduced to distant backing vocals on his own album. Similarly the front line of Chris Barber’s Jazz Band, absent from TPL for twelve years, comes close to drowning Stewart out on “Dixie Toot.”

Elsewhere the extra voices are intrusive. Vanda and Young’s “Hard Road” – another of the album’s songs on the subject matter of leaving – tries for hangdog laxity but Ray Cooper’s bongos are far too prominent in the mix and Doreen Chanter’s “Sweet Home Alabama” background yelps obscure any intended poignancy or weariness. Like most of the rest of the record, the track thinks it’s outrocking the Stones, but isn’t. His reading of “Girl From The North Country” similarly seems disinterested; whatever closeness he once might have felt is rendered opaque by the over-miked drums, various aircraft/ambient sound effects, overzealous zigzag strings – little wonder that when he reaches the “And I never, never, never, never, never…” section he gives the impression that he wants nothing more than to retire. And the Sam Cooke medley/tribute is a shambles; not even approaching the still shocking, multiphonic, cataclysmic mash-up offered by Cooke onstage in 1963 (see Live At The Harlem Square Club, complete with approving byline by Stewart himself), the music limps into being from a strange, out-of-tempo intro, and again any spontaneity is immediately cancelled out by an absurd Chinese Opera/Radio Clyde string section – Stewart’s chatter and laughter seem pressurised, unreal. Possibly the lowest point is reached by Stewart’s well-meaning but hopeless re-genderisation of Aretha’s “Natural Woman” which is fundamentally wrong in all senses, from syntax to word flow to delivery; there isn’t the sense of shocked self-rediscovery, the justified reclaiming of one’s rights, nothing approaching catharsis (the track instead potters out of the door in an unremarkable fadeout).

The lack of direction persists. Why the harpsichord (or clavinet?) and acoustic guitar interludes? Where is the sense of any human contact with another human being? If all you want is an unregulated blowout, then Smiler is the album for you – the presence of stalwart Andy Newmark and Willie Weeks on “Let Me Be Your Car” once more implies a damn-you Sally Can’t Dance subtext (if Rod were capable of imagining one) – but offers little to touch or retain. The two tracks which stand out, as gum wrappers might stand out in a peat bog, are the closing reading of McCartney’s “Mine For Me” (a Paul-Linda co-write which McCartney himself does not seem ever to have recorded) which, although ostensibly working against the theme of leaving home (it’s all about leaving the “sweet painted ladies” behind and coming back), is set rather gloomily, as gloomily opulent as Ferry at the end of “Sunset” (if less creatively or emotionally expressed); Stewart even essays a couple of McCartney impressions (“Don’tcha know that the woman who love me…”) as a steel band approximates exotica in the background, before signing off with a resigned, knowing “Yeah, yeah, yeah”; and the other is the aforementioned “Dixie Toot,” which at least offers some sense that doing what he is doing is ridiculous (“I might even lose my trousers”); the repeated, diminishing emphases on “a good time” – beginning with the mourning that “It’s been so long since I had a good time” (and listening to Smiler, one can easily agree) and ending with the sod-it-I’m-off-to-heaven reveries of “Let’s have a good time really.” Finally he becomes more bitter, and realising the futility of all of this smoke and mirrors, signs off with a mutter: “I didn’t give a fuck/I had a good time.” Though the package attempts to emulate the feeling of all-mates-together, it is documented fact that by late 1974 the Faces (or what was left of them) hated each other, had grown tired of attempting to carry on making music together (and yet, at their death throes, they reconstituted for one last single, which may be the best thing they ever did: “You Can Make Me Dance, Sing, Or Anything…”), and that, equally tired of 93% top-rate income tax, Stewart was looking for a way out. Or perhaps just somewhere where he could be more easily heard – like in the old days, when all he had to worry about was whether to have one bar on the electric fire switched on, or both. Before, as the cover of Smiler suggests, he became another wee hairy Highlander, mocking the tourists.

The BAY CITY ROLLERS: Rollin'

2011-12-04T15:40:00.003Z

(#147: 12 October 1974, 1 week; 26 October 1974, 1 week; 9 November 1974, 2 weeks)

Track listing: Shang A Lang/Give It To Me Now/Angel Angel/Be My Baby/Just A Little Love/Remember (Sha La La La)/Saturday Night/Ain’t It Strange/Please Stay/Jenny Gotta Dance/There Goes My Baby/Summerlove Sensation

Two of the things which British pop may have lost forever to its impoverishment, aside from its sense of humour, are (a) excitable sleevenotes which manage to get the names of band members wrong (“Lesley Richard McKeown,” “Derek Longmuir…[‘s] brother Ian”) and (b) band questionnaires. No one now, not even N-Dubz, would risk losing their supposed cool answering straightforward Q&As, but the sleeve of Rollin’ has them; Eric Faulkner’s likes include “Lively Audiences” and “Alan’s Singing,” Alan Longmuir’s favourite musicians are the Carpenters, Led Zeppelin and Yes, and Woody Wood’s favourite TV shows are Top Of The Pops and Cartoon Cavalcade (Glen Michael is still around, but whither Paladin the lamp now?). The overall impression; five young, unpretentious Edinburgh lads wanting to please their audiences and themselves.

For a while, they pulled it off. The Rollers are TPL’s first wholly Scottish act, and for a time I wondered whether their first album would mark the point where the seventies finally begin, free of history. Not so easy, of course; both cover versions here are from the sixties, and the hits hark back even further. Indeed the Saxons, the Edinburgh beat group from which the Rollers arose, were in operation from the late sixties onwards; a random pin in a map brought the name change, and the recruitment of singer Nobby Clark brought minor success. They managed a top ten single in 1971 with their curiously-produced and arranged (by Jonathan King and Johnny Arthey respectively) cover of the Gentrys’ “Keep On Dancin’” and then failed to find a satisfactory follow-up. Numerous personnel changes ensued, and finally reliable (if then slightly naff) hitmakers Bill Martin and Phil Coulter were recruited to get them another hit. The first take of “Saturday Night” was unlucky not to make the Top 50, and after recording “Remember,” Clark became disillusioned and quit. Les McKeown, whose slight air of “one of these men is not like the others” worked to the group’s overall advantage, came in as replacement lead singer. In the meantime “Remember” took off and gave them a second top ten hit, but the versions featured on Rollin’ include hurriedly re-recorded McKeown vocals (unfortunately the Clark originals do not appear on the CD issue for comparison purposes).

The follow-up, “Shang A Lang,” hooked the cloakroom girls’ younger sisters, though. Easing up on the Spectorian echo, Martin and Coulter distilled the sound down to straight Glitterbeat thud with slashing guitar power chords, flowery piano triplets and buoyant harmony vocals (complete, on the singles, with a strange, strangulated voice which comes in at chorus fadeout to add a rough top harmony). The subject matter, as with the song’s successor “Summerlove Sensation,” could properly be described as saudade, nostalgia for a time Martin and Coulter might have remembered first hand but which the band and its followers almost certainly could not; the “blue suede shoes” and “doobie doo-way” of the fifties. The overall effect is something like a greyly optimistic spin on “Beach Baby” (and take it from this Glaswegian; the summer of 1974 was a bit of a washout) but the effect was insistent, and simple, and to a lot of working-class girls rather more fun than Jon Anderson or Mike Oldfield; suddenly they could dress up again, scream again, project their fantasies (the Osmonds had recently occupied the top two slots of the UK singles chart, but this was their last flourish betraying a fairly rapid decline in popularity; and furthermore the Rollers were here rather than in Salt Lake City). Pop, in the interregnum provoked by the decline of glam, was unexpectedly back.

All three singles (and “Saturday Night” to which I’ll return) are present here, in more or less their correct places, but as ever, the real fascination in Rollin’ is seeing what else they could get up to. The singles apart, there are three other Martin/Coulter compositions, the aforementioned two covers, and four band originals. The use of tympani on the singles and their suspiciously clean production may suggest the use of outside session musicians, but I think it safe to assume that everything else here is the work of the band themselves. The covers are not without their respective interests; their “Be My Baby” cannot hope to match the braised majesty of the Ronettes, as they clearly must have known, but there are some nice unexpected touches to the arrangement including a piano line lifted directly from John Cale’s “Paris 1919,” Derek Longmuir’s little tribute to Ringo’s solo on “The End” and the disturbingly solemn organ which appears in the track’s final moments. “Please Stay,” originally recorded by the Drifters, is best known here for the 1966 version by the Cryin’ Shames, almost Joe Meek’s last testament and a considerably bigger hit in Scotland and northern England than in the rest of Britain, and the echoes of ancient Edinburgh dancehalls are unmissable; McKeown, though, sings the song like a frightened auditionee, and listening to the song stumbling over itself and the many missed high notes and miscues (complete with a brief “talking” section) is rather like witnessing a Scottish male equivalent of the Shaggs, a feeling reinforced by the engaging shambling of “Jenny Gotta Dance” with its Max Wall drum hook, its echoing semi-swagger looking a year ahead to Hello’s “New York Groove” and its general air of proto-C86 indie (it shares its “angel”/”devil” divination with the group’s own “Angel Angel,” a standard rock ballad underscored by some surprisingly savage guitar chording from Faulkner).

Actually, they prove themselves capable of rather better than that, even in the unintentionally hilarious “There Goes My Baby” (their composition, not the Drifters hit) with its lyrical lift from Charlie Rich’s contemporaneous “The Most Beautiful Girl” and McKeown’s priceless Broomhouse talkover (“MA babeh…”), since the track climaxes, while we’re not looking, with a speedy conga and drums break which begs to be sampled. In terms of outstoning the Stones, the Rollers do not exactly set out to rock here, but amazingly they (with Martin and Coulter’s help) come up with a sort of Junior Choice version of “Midnight Rambler”; the playground blues strut of “Give It To Me Now” is quite unexpected in the deceptively reassuring wake of “Shang A Lang” (as I’m sure was Martin and Coulter’s intention). There are some good hissing coils of percussion; Derek’s drums rhetorically slow down and speed up, Faulkner does a fair Mick Taylor, and McKeown, bless him, does his best (he sounds most sated in the unlikely phrase: “Ah yes indeed”) even with words such as “Shim-sham-sham-a-ram/Baby I’m a ram” to negotiate.

Moreover, on their two self-penned acoustic forays, the Rollers find themselves a potentially promising direction; both “Just A Little Love” and “Ain’t It Strange” are thoroughly agreeable CSNY/America-type canters; indeed it is hard to listen to the arching bass, delicate conga counterpoint and tremulous lead vocal of “Just A Little Love” and not think of Belle and Sebastian; had this been a Mellow Candle B-side from 1970 I am sure it would long since have enjoyed a hallowed reputation (and Johnnie Walker might have played it). Likewise, “Ain’t It Strange” is a more than decent Rod Stewart pastiche, together with a violin solo from Faulkner himself, meandering mandolin (also Faulkner), a doorbell ringing at the sight of the word “doorbell”; Stewart could have done worse than cover the song himself.

Rollin’, finally, is the sound of a band trying to find their own voice while having to contend with the inconvenience of being the next Beatles (or T Rex, or David Cassidy, or…). “Saturday Night,” however, is rather more than that; a polished-up mix eventually went to number one on Billboard (in time for Christmas 1975) but this “original” take (i.e. with McKeown’s vocal rather than Clark’s) is really not that different, apart from bearing a punchier, tougher mix; the chants and accompanying descending guitar chords are irresistible, McKeown’s accent (“date,” “wait”) completely charming, the power pop organ considerably ahead of its time, the cobbled-together lyric (“the good ol’ rock and roll roadshow” indeed!) falling into perfect place. And in its dynamics and confidence of attack, it’s easy to see how this managed to inspire the Ramones and the younger Cobain and Love (and there’s a good dollop of G Glitter influence too, “Leader Of The Gang” most notably); here, kids, is a way out. What’s Les McKeown’s ambition? “To go to the moon.” Who could deny such bonnie chutzpah?

Mike OLDFIELD: Tubular Bells

2011-11-27T13:16:00.002Z

(#146: 5 October 1974, 1 week)

Track listing: Tubular Bells {Part One}/Tubular Bells {Part Two}

Although many observers find it easier to consider Tubular Bells the first New Age number one album, particularly given the involvement of an actual New Age pioneer, Tom Newman, as co-engineer, it is truer to consider it the most popular offshoot of an important and under-celebrated British counterculture. Robert Wyatt summed it up best in his remarks in an Invisible Jukebox feature in the December 1995 edition of The Wire, concerning the meeting point between progressive rock and experimental jazz at the turn of the sixties:

“The connection is very simple – Keith Tippett’s personality. A West Country bloke with a great big heart and completely unlike the Old Boy Network jazz mafia that was the London scene at the time. He had all barriers down, listened to everybody, open-minded, never put anybody down, and one of his things was to get all these different musicians from different genres together – particularly the South African exiles. He would get together these bands and get us into them and then we’d meet each other. So really you could put a lot of that down to one man.”

Tippett had much the same effect on the London scene as another teenager, Kevin Drew, would have on the moribund Toronto indie scene of the nineties; he saw the possibilities, ignored the limitations and set about persuading everybody with whom he came into contact that it would be a great idea if everybody worked and developed together. And so networks developed, and thanks to astute middlemen like Joe Boyd and John Cale, these spread to the States, this time via open-minded musicians such as Dave Holland, Jack Bruce and John McLaughlin.

What I am trying to convey here is that this period – for argument’s sake call it 1968-76 – was one of the healthiest, liveliest and most creative periods for British music, and one I am truly sorry to have been too young to live through properly. In 1970 my father took me to the Lyceum theatre in Drury Lane to see Centipede, the enormous band that Tippett put together, containing all his mates, or as many of them as he could cram onto one stage, and to say it was a formative experience is putting it far too mildly; from what I saw, heard and felt – and this would be reinforced, not just by the subsequent double album that Centipede did (Septober Energy), but also by my subsequent discovery of Carla Bley and Paul Haines’ not entirely unrelated Escalator Over The Hill - I knew that this was what I wanted from music, a true melting pot where everybody played together, regardless of genre or outside demands, where everything linked to everything else, singular pieces in a gigantic familial jigsaw puzzle.

Talk to any of the great musicians who were active at the time and are still with us – and over forty years of informal chat and note-taking with the majority of these players have provided me with much important information, which I still intend to process into book form as time and opportunity allow (as this generation is now in its sixties and seventies, and over the last few years its members have begun to pass away in earnest, it is doubly essential that this information is retained) – and they will all tell you the same story; nobody made any money out of their music, there was a constant battle with funding bodies and oppressive State radio, but the creativity stakes were never higher, the barriers never lower.

Centipede consisted of fifty or so musicians (fifty-five on the album, frequently more onstage) from all walks of musical life; rock was represented by King Crimson, Soft Machine, Patto/Timebox and the Blossom Toes, jazz by representatives from the aforementioned South African exiles (Blue Notes/Brotherhood of Breath) as well as regulars from the Westbrook/Gibbs/Collier bands, the occasional loose Canterbury cannon, old associates from Bristol whose connection with Tippett went back to the Beat Boom days, and a score of young classical graduates from the Royal College of Music. Septober Energy was a bold attempt to make this musical collision work, and was almost immediately savaged by the critics; indeed, Tom Callaghan’s sleevenote to the Beat Goes On CD reissue a dozen or so years ago appears almost to dissuade the casual browser from purchasing, so hard does he find it to summon up any enthusiasm for the music. Yet the intervening decades, and Tippett’s steady progress as a musician and band organiser, prove it to have been undervalued; the music is deceptively simple (as opposed to simplistic), largely based on slowly-evolving drones, chants and riffs over which anything from serpentine jazz-rock via Berio-esque classical abstraction and demented Irish jigs to “wa-hey” freeform freakouts is superimposed. Its cumulative power is crepuscular but immense, and the fourth side – a reworking of “Green And Orange Night Park” from the Dedicated To You, But You Weren’t Listening album – remains one of the most imposing and affecting sides of music to appear on any British record; as Elton Dean undertakes his marathon saxello solo, chants and riffs begin to build up behind and around him in a rough “Hey Jude”-type fashion before they finally engulf the solo voice and the music breaks down, or rises up, into a mass collective improvisation, miraculously held together by the iron grip of three drummers (one of whom, Wyatt, pounds merrily on his unmistakeable kit in the centre of the mix). Although not quite carrying the same impact as a concert performance – one of the saxophonists told me that the sequence in question had to be taped at ten in the morning, not the best time of the day for improvisers – the effect is mesmerising and empowering. You come out the other end thinking that anything is, and should be, possible.

If you’re wondering why I’m spending so much time talking about Centipede and Septober Energy it is because it was one of the main inspirations for Tubular Bells. This is not immediately apparent on listening; the other main influence, Terry Riley’s A Rainbow In Curved Air, is far more palpable. But the teenage Oldfield, already giving a history of folk-rock (Sallyangie, Barefoot) and toe-dipping into avant-improv-prog-pop via his membership of Kevin Ayers’ Whole World, came out of the same background and carried the same enthusiasm for adventure. Even at eighteen his invention is evident; he negotiates the treacherous slaloms of Ayers’ 1971 Shooting At The Moon, in the company of the likes of David Bedford and Lol Coxhill, with great skill and acuity; his talking bass on “May I?” already marks him out as somebody to watch. Although Ayers developed the Whole World specifically to explore further the mechanics of the pop song (which he felt that Soft Machine had somehow lost), his group is strong enough to move from song to free and back without much prompting and with a great deal of empathy.

But Oldfield wanted to develop his own music, and with some encouragement and material help from Ayers and others, he set about laying down the basic demos for Tubular Bells. Were there other influences? Apart from those stated above, yes, but it is unlikely that Philip Glass or Steve Reich (neither of whom was widely known in early seventies Britain, although Glass’ records began to be issued on Virgin in the UK shortly after Bells’ success) would have counted, let alone Bo Hansson’s oft-cited Music Inspired By Lord Of The Rings; since the latter, although available in Sweden since 1970, did not gain a British release until September 1972, by which time the main body of Tubular Bells was essentially complete (and in any case sounds much more like the Pink Floyd of Obscured By Clouds than anything by Oldfield).

Work on the piece continued fitfully, mostly in the room in Ayers’ then-home in Tottenham which Oldfield rented out, by clever manipulation of a reel-to-reel tape recorder which allowed instant overdubbing and “bouncing” of individual parts. Over this period he undertook other work to pay the rent, not only with Ayers but also as a part of the original line-up of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band (Harvey also secured Oldfield a day job as co-guitarist in the West End production of Hair). Despite all this, he remained anxious about his music’s prospects; most established record companies showed him the door, and it was only when nascent indie record shop/label proprietor Richard Branson floated the idea of Virgin Records that the prospect of releasing the music became a possibility. Engineers/talent scouts Newman and Simon Hepworth heard Oldfield’s demos, were knocked out and passed them on to Branson, who was likewise bowled over and offered Oldfield a contract and studio time to help knock the music into releasable shape (little change needed to be made to the original demos, which constituted “Part One,” while “Part Two” was composed and realised in the studio).

Released in May 1973, the record gathered enthusiastic notices, mostly of the kind which welcomed the kind of experimental rock which didn’t need to be dissonant or loud to proclaim its radicalism (which is not to decry, as many ignorant writers have since done, the important loud and dissonant work that was done in this period and write it off as “musical Marxism” – as if that were a bad thing). John Peel was so taken by the record that he spun it in full on his Radio 1 show, which in turn helped propel it into the lower reaches of the album chart; word of mouth, and particularly a BBC2 performance of “Part One “in November 1973, helped raise its popularity gradually. A concert at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall was also organised (much to the chagrin of the then-shy Oldfield, who took much persuading to participate), involving the likes of Steve Hillage, Fred Frith and Mick Taylor, filling out the record’s many guitar parts. Eventually William Friedkin heard the record and incorporated some of its main theme into the score for The Exorcist; although in truth there is little of the demonic about Bells, the gesture worked and the record went global. By the time the record eventually climbed to number one here, some seventeen months after its release, it was as established a part of the post-Beatles rock canon as Dark Side Of The Moon.

So what is there in the record to attract the careful or carefree listener now? It remained on the UK chart for a cumulative total of 279 weeks and sold in excess of 2.5 million copies in Britain alone. Clearly this sort of achievement is not attained without some level of “comfort,” even if the record in itself is often far from “comfortable.” Although Bells sounds almost nothing like Septober, the latter’s influence is measurable in different ways – the reliance on the gradual development and building up of different themes, the rather delightful naivety of its construction (there are many “bum” notes, but these add to the charm, unlike the well-intentioned 2003 note-for-note remake, which loses in spirit what it gains in technical accomplishment), the encyclopaedic embrace that it is the music’s intention to offer.

The music is so familiar that a section-by-section breakdown is, I feel, of little use; I do note, however, that Part One in itself offers a modest flick-through history of post-1955 British rock. Developing its two major themes, one despairingly minor and the other hopefully major, the music moves through discreet but distinct emotional peaks and troughs, from delicate single-note post-Jansch acoustic figures to mass electric thrashes. Within the intervening passages there is much reference to the Blues Boom, and Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac in particular, and a reddening sadness which never quite disappears despite such interventions as the Nasal Choir and accompanying pub piano. Eventually, just as the music is about to climb to a peak, it is cut off by bells, as though someone, or something, has died.

Out of the silence emerges a solo acoustic guitar (eventually joined by the ever-present Lowrey organ) which picks out a “Scarborough Fair”-type melody. This soon becomes brooding, however, and an angry crescendo is again abruptly stopped by a nautical line (“What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor”?) which turns into a long riff section sounding like Mayall’s Bluesbreakers playing with caps on their amplifiers so as not to awaken the neighbours. After a while the guitars and basses are joined by the voice of Vivian Stanshall, announcing the myriad instruments which will make up the fugal section. Inspired by, and hired because of, his work on the Bonzos’ “The Intro And The Outro,” Stanshall’s delivery works because it is done absolutely straightfaced and with tangible delight (contrast with the regrettably hammy contribution of John Cleese to the 2003 remake; he thinks he’s Basil Fawlty reincarnate, whereas Stanshall is funny because he stands stock still and makes no effort to be “funny”). The excitement builds up, and by the time of Stanshall’s awestruck “Plus – tubular BELLS!,” catharsis is released. The undertow disappears, wordless Stygian voices make the boat float, have raised the Titanic, and the music fades away to a calm sea of acoustic guitar, as though Oldfield had been in the folk club all the time, practising, the soundscapes only in his head.

Part Two is inevitably something of an afterthought, but works too in its own way; much of it is perceptibly a series of seascapes, quiet acoustic meditations conjuring up an introspective skipper, out on the ocean, gazing non-specifically at the horizon. But in the second of this sequence’s two themes there comes a heartbreaking move from minor key to major, as if to say; yes, it’s simple, but that doesn’t make it any less meaningful. Eventually high voices and rippling electric guitar begin to create waves and eddies around the music; this leads to a solemn, timpani-led, Gaelic-derived melody which steadily builds to a climax (with live timpani acting as the bassline); dissonance finally introduces itself to the picture, and a rushing “Day In The Life”-style escalation is stopped in its tracks by…

…Captain Beefheart? Well, it’s the “Piltdown Man” section, where in Oldfield has much fun grunting, growling and screaming (if such things can be described as “fun”; the screams in particular exceed those on Lennon’s “Mother”) over Steve Broughton’s drums (hence it’s a sort of “Out Demons Out” variant, though complete with bizarre touches, such as the country-and-western hoedown which appears out of nowhere midway through). Is it a parody of post-Percy cock-rock (is even Oldfield joining in the seasonal sport of outstoning the Stones?) or a continuation of “I Am The Walrus”’ joke-obscuring anguish?

Suddenly the sequence is over and we return to soft guitars, mandolins, harmonium and organ drone, improvising on the previous Celtic melody; gradually all of the instruments drop out of tempo and begin to issue seagull-like cries or oceanic ripples (here is where the Durutti Column begins). Once again the pacific Lowrey organ leads the final minor-to-major move and all settles down in a satisfactory, dying coda…or does it?

The final sequence gives the game away, and it’s a bit like having a custard pie shoved in one’s face; yes, all that you have been hearing have been clever variations on…”The Sailor’s Hornpipe”! Very classical (Elgar, Walton, Vaughan Williams) in nature, very Lord Berners in its final gesture; the original intention was to have the mix with Stanshall, as proto-Through The Keyhole narrator, chase Oldfield and Newman through The Manor, conclude the disc but it was felt safer to end with a straight reading (both are present on the 2009 Deluxe Edition 2CD set; again there is a cleaned-up 2009 remix by Oldfield himself, and again I have based this piece on the original mix, to be found on CD2). It sends its audience out, slightly baffled but oddly moved.

I do believe that the success of Tubular Bells was the definitive gesture in recognising the importance of the culture which enabled it to happen; the number of impressionable teenagers hearing this and being influenced – especially since, at nineteen going on twenty, this was a record made by somebody almost exactly their age – must be incalculable; in itself it marks the beginning of DIY indie rock – this is almost certainly the first record in this tale to be primarily conceived and performed by one person, the partial exception of Band On The Run notwithstanding. But I imagine a whole galaxy of impressionable young Brits – be they Kate Bush or Jim Kerr – hearing this and delving further, including into the other titles that Virgin was able to make possible throughout the period as a result of the record’s success; records by Henry Cow, Comus, Faust, Wyatt, Hatfield and the North, and, as a result of gaining the UK rights to the JCOA catalogue, Escalator Over The Hill itself. Certainly Bells was the record which inspired me to dig deeper into the above, and beyond; I can’t imagine anybody of the period not being affected or changed by it in some way, whether directly or indirectly. It presaged a New Age, all right, and it’s not Oldfield’s fault that the definition of that changed, or was made to change; this initial trilogy climaxed in 1975’s Ommadawn (which, since it didn’t make number one, won’t be addressed directly here) with some of Oldfield’s angriest and most pained guitar playing and writing, and an emotional climax involving the members of South African exile splinter group Jabula which is as eloquent a requiem for Mongezi Feza as Blue Notes For Mongezi. He moved on to other things – and there is much to consider in comparing the double 1978 releases from Oldfield and Tippett, Incantations and Frames respectively – but once you come up as part of a mutually dependent culture, it stays, I think, with you, and in you, for life.

Mike OLDFIELD: Hergest Ridge

2011-11-22T17:59:00.007Z

(#145: 14 September 1974, 3 weeks)

Track listing: Hergest Ridge (Part One)/Hergest Ridge (Part Two)

Author's Note: The history of different mixes of Hergest Ridge is a complex one. Dissatisfied with the original vinyl mix, Oldfield remixed the album in quadrophonic sound for the 1976 Boxed set. This mix became the basis of all subsequent vinyl, cassette and CD pressings until the 2010 Deluxe Edition release, which includes two more remixes by Oldfield - and the main 2010 Stereo Mix is also a rather drastic edit, since over two minutes of material are lost from the original. Happily the original 1974 mix is included on CD2, and since this represents the record which people bought and made possible its inclusion in this tale, I have based my assessment on it.

Before I get going, I should point out that I have not missed out an album; such are the whims and vicissitudes of the album chart that sometimes, not only does the follow-up to a hugely popular album get to number one where the original mostly does not, but that the follow-up can beat the original to the top. In this instance Mike Oldfield monopolised the top of the chart for the best part of a month; I pondered long and hard about whether I should have done this as a double with Tubular Bells, but on reflection the "reversed" order makes some critical perspectives possible which otherwise might not have been conceived.

Not to mention emotional ones. My father bought this album on the day of its release, and I had already been familiar with it for over a week, since it was premiered, in full, on Sounds Interesting, a late Sunday night Radio 3 programme which occupied roughly the same ground Late Junction does now, compiled and presented by the late Derek Jewell. A strange character, Jewell; middle-aged, and already a distinguished jazz and pre-rock popular music correspondent for The Sunday Times for a good two decades, he developed something of a taste for post-Beatles progressive rock and persuaded Radio 3 to run this chink in its classical armour. Essentially an Ellington and Sinatra man - he wrote more than one book about each - he also used the programme to air contemporary jazz and free improvisation releases, as well as some contemporary classical. Eventually punk came along, to which he reacted like a disappointed headmaster, and prior to his death in 1985 he was unfairly reduced to the level of "Derek Dull" caricature.

To return to the main subject, Hergest Ridge was, as I say, premiered on Radio 3, and my father recorded it on our old Ferguson reel-to-reel tape machine (the spool still exists). Already dazzled by Tubular Bells, I was impressed by this subtle forward move. I listened to Oldfield's work intently for a further two years, following which I got distracted by other music; listening to the album anew this week was the first time I had done so in some thirty-five years, and yet every note and gesture came back to me with immediate familiarity, and not a little emotion.

I should apologise for this extended reverie in my own past, since one of the purposes of this tale is not to get too "personal"; yet the task now becomes more and more difficult since we are firmly into "my time," the period of records fondly loved and memorised at first hand (I have already intimated this to some extent with entries from 1973 onward, but this marks the point where it became, shall we say, more fervent). And with so personal a record as Hergest Ridge it is almost as impossible to separate the listener from the music as it is to separate Oldfield the young, slightly scared twentysomething prodigy.

Oldfield had not expected Tubular Bells to explode as it did, and he became extremely wary of the media attention which the record's success not only warranted but now also demanded. Richard Branson was nagging him to come up with a sequel, but there was, by Oldfield's own admission, almost nothing in reserve. Never a city person, Oldfield searched for somewhere to live in the countryside, and found a rundown house called "The Beacon" near the Black Mountains, on the Herefordshire-Wales border. Cold, draughty and minimally furnished, the musician set to work converting one of the house's rooms into a studio. In the nearest town (Kington) he made the acquaintance of Leslie Penning, a medieval instrument specialist, and began to work with him and retrieve his muse (it is unclear who is responsible for the uncredited tin whistles and recorders which play the main theme at the beginning and end of "Part One" - possibly it is his brother, Terry Oldfield - but Penning certainly appeared on 1975's Ommadawn). From Kington there is a path, partially straddling Offa's Dyke, which ambles along gently for eight miles or so, eventually taking the walker up to the peak of Hergest Ridge, with its comprehensive, heart-stopping views of the hills of Shropshire and Wales; this provided Oldfield with his main inspiration for the record, although he has admitted that making Hergest Ridge was not an enjoyable experience ("My heart wasn't really into it").

Some of this precarious uncertainty certainly flows into the record. Evidently anxious not to present us with Tubular Bells II - that will come eventually, but not right now - Oldfield instead chooses to trace the same compositional structure path with more subtlety and more concentrated variation. The piece begins with a sustained drone over which various rudimentary woodwinds play the first theme (it is a bit like Eno nudging Shirley and Dolly Collins). The theme itself refers back to the climactic theme which closes side one of Bells but the harmonies and arrangement are very different; voices, glockenspiel and vibraharp make themselves evident in sundry corners of the mix before the entry of bass guitar provokes a return to lone mandolin. The music then works again towards crescendo with military trumpet and snare drum, leading via a modulation to timpani and mild, fuzzed dissonance. A gong gives way to a Lowrey organ bridge, which in turn culminates in the side's second (minor key) theme, played by the oboe of Lindsay Cooper (Comus, Henry Cow, Mike Westbrook Orchestra, etc.). Oldfield's lead guitar superimposes an improvised top line on the basic melody. A bell - does that ring bells? - leads to another build-up, complete with compressed falsetto voices (sounding like an army of Klaus Nomis). Rather than any outburst of temper, this falls directly into a bass riff, upon which a fugal passage is built with a third melodic theme; this immediately recalls the companion sequence at the end of side one of Bells but is more determined to reach catharsis. A pinprick shift into major key, complete with sleigh bells, introduces a Lowrey organ-dominant melody, highly reminiscent of Robert Wyatt (and I intend to get back to him before the end of this piece). The theme becomes gradually more animated - exactly where is this leading us to? - and then the gasp, as the air clears, and we suddenly find ourselves (after a suitable rubato bridge) on top of the Ridge, and the staggering, beyond-sublime entry of David Bedford's choir as piano takes over the harmonies from guitar (again, another episode Jeff Lynne must have heard prior to conceiving "Mr Blue Sky"). It is as if pain is being laid to rest, but even here there is little time to pause; the choir suddenly dips down into the original root chord, and the primary melody, and the tin whistles, return briefly before a relatively abrupt fadeout. "Innocence."

If Part Two could predictably be entitled "Experience," the music bears this idea out. As with side two of Bells, it begins in a pastoral, acoustic mood with a gradual, guarded build-up of instruments, before a simple, poignant theme is developed (the similarity of many of these melodies to late period Beatles should not be unremarked upon - Picardy third specialists will have much to enjoy here). This is improvised upon by Spanish and electric guitar solos; the harmonies spiral endlessly upwards before mandolins re-enter to state the side's second theme. A short crescendo bursts into the picture before the music dies down again. There is a return to the original theme (on Lowrey organ) but a bed of more anguished electric guitar rises in a recapitulation of the storm threat posited in "Part One." This gives way to a Philip Glass staccato organ loop, joined by a florid flute line (the latter a variation on the storm motif).

Then the thunderstorm breaks for real, and thrashing armies of guitars (reputedly overdubbed one thousand times) muscle their way in for a lengthy workout. At least it sounds mostly like guitars, but the mix is subtly altered such that at times keyboards become dominant, and even the guitars themselves are mixed so closely that they virtually become machines. And somewhere in there is the ghost of punk to come, already trying to sneak in through the door. A high-pitched organ line steadily makes its way upwards through the dense mesh, now turning into a proto-electronica raga.

Characteristic of Oldfield, the music immediately drops back down as it hovers on the point of boiling over, and we are again at peace with nature. But his guitar does not sound particularly happy or quiescent; the side's main theme blooms again with the emergence of Bedford's string section. But this too offers little succour; the music ends on a suspended, restless, discordant, hushed G major seventh.

This is the music of a disturbed mind, and as such its point was entirely missed by nearly all of the record's reviewers at the time. I was not able to find it online, but Ian MacDonald led the critical charge with a closely-printed two-page centrespread demolition of the record in NME; I cannot remember too much about the language but the piece's general gist was a rant against this "mentholated Vaughan Williams" (actually, as Lena quite rightly pointed out, there is a quite considerable Russian tinge to much of the music on Hergest Ridge, particularly in its second part, and it is remarkable that the author of The New Shostakovich should have missed this entirely), if not quite a plea for punk to happen. In retrospect, this can simply be viewed as another example of MacDonald's endless self-projection masquerading as critical commentary (give him something in 1974 that he cared about - On The Beach again; strange how that record keeps turning up here as a reference point - and he transcended the dusty porthole and flew) and I think to miss the anguish and distress at work in this music is to deny vulnerability or multifocal emotionalism in any musician. Yes, it is "well mannered," like Vaughan Williams, but like Vaughan Williams - and especially like A Pastoral Symphony, a disguised war requiem directly referred to more than once here (especially when the off-stage Margaret Price-esque wordless vocal steals into the concluding picture) - the manners are there to fool the ear. Moreover - and to get back to Robert Wyatt - Hergest Ridge is the more restrained, more concerned (and arguably darker) stepbrother of Rock Bottom (which came out at around the same time, was recorded at the same studio - The Manor - and in which Oldfield plays a small but crucial part); everything here is suggested rather than expressed (the glorious babble of Windo and Feza's horns, Wyatt's own exultation in unashamed nonsense, or should that be supersense?). Unlike Bells there is no humour, hardly any drums, nothing in the way of mischief; all replaced by a deep, consuming concern. The record's lesson, if any? You can go as far away into the back of beyond as you wish, but wherever you end up your demons stay with you. How Oldfield would address this is a story for somebody else to tell; how he got there in the first place I will deal with next.

Paul McCARTNEY and WINGS: Band On The Run

2011-11-13T13:57:00.004Z

(#144: 27 July 1974, 7 weeks)

Track listing: Band On The Run/Jet/Bluebird/Mrs Vandebilt/Let Me Roll It/Mamunia/No Words/Picasso's Last Words (Drink To Me)/Nineteen Hundred And Eighty Five

Observant readers will have noticed that it has been quite a while since this tale has had anything to do with Beatles band; two-and-a-half years, to be precise, since The Concert For Bangla Desh. And even Band On The Run patiently inched its way up our charts for over seven months before arriving at the top; it wasn’t an overnight success, either critically or commercially. There was little immediate talk of that then newly-minted critical cliché, the Stunning Return To Form; despite the success of “My Love” and “Live And Let Die,” I suspect most followers had resigned themselves to a life of indie Macca whimsy, not that McCartney had demonstrated any evidence of a plan or tactic in his post-Beatles life. Not that he needed to, either; wasn’t he, of all people (and especially, of all Beatles?) perfectly entitled to do as he wished? If Ram showed a contented man slightly disappointed with the outside world, and particularly with other Beatles, then he continued to drift without evident aim or bitterness; purposely odd singles (“Give Ireland Back To The Irish,” “Mary Had A Little Lamb”) and albums (Wild Life, Red Rose Speedway) which presented themselves as placid proto-blogposts, as opposed to the incensed and increasingly inward-turning proto-blogposts of Some Time In New York City and Mind Games. Meanwhile George wandered dolefully down his own road (Living In The Material World) and Ringo made the most likeable of all these records (Ringo, the only solo Beatle album to involve all four, though not on the same track). The Beatles had done their work and were dutifully ambling down their own duty-free paths. Did it matter if fewer and fewer people listened?

But something about Band On The Run burned slowly into people’s ears and they realised that, in the absence of a twelfth Beatles studio album, this would more than do. Moreover, it became clear that this was the boldest attempt by any Beatle to break free of their past, and in particular the sixties. Look at the cover of Sgt Pepper again; everyone from Huxley to Dylan, against a shining blue sky; then cut to the cover of Band On The Run, taken late at night up against a (stable) wall in Osterley Park, that rootless part of west London which isn’t quite Brentford nor quite Isleworth, featuring a ray of light in the centre of a black hole, in which we see a new seventies unlonely, hearty club, full of celebrity chums, whoever Paul and Linda could persuade to come down and participate.

McCartney was acutely aware that this was a tough and dark time, and so the album is mostly about escape in its various forms. Recorded in Lagos, Nigeria, more out of boredom than anything else, and in less than comfortable circumstances professionally glossed over in Paul Gambaccini’s essay which accompanies last year’s deluxe reissue (including a makeshift, half-broken down studio, a mugging at knifepoint which essentially necessitated starting the record again from scratch, protests of imperialism from Fela Kuti), and without Wings’ second guitarist and drummer, both of whom had quit just before the journey to Nigeria was due, Band On The Run is basically a McCartney solo DIY record, Denny Laine contributing discreet rhythm guitar and Linda contributing backing vocals and occasional Leonard Cohen-level keyboards (orchestral overdubs were taken care of in George Martin’s AIR studios upon their return to Britain, as were Howie Casey’s sax parts and Remi Kabaka’s conga part on “Bluebird”).

It is therefore a tribute to McCartney’s resourcefulness under trying (if self-imposed) conditions that Band On The Run succeeds as a “band” record. And, as implied above, it is arguably the first number one album of the seventies by a major sixties artist which physically tries to rid itself of “The Sixties” and position itself in the present. The title track makes it abundantly clear; it begins with a mournful, plodding elegy which could have fallen off the back of Abbey Road’s Long Medley and takes up where “You Never Give Me Your Money” left off; “Stuck inside these four walls/Sent inside for ever,” sings a saddened McCartney; the “if we ever get out of here” section was inspired by a remark George Harrison made at one of the Beatles’ seemingly interminable Apple business meetings.

But then guitars suddenly rev up and a large double orchestral flourish, succeeded by a sunny acoustic guitar, tells us that the wall, the prison, has been broken open, and that its author has fallen, gladly, into the seventies. The mood becomes optimistic, taunting, assured (“We NEVER will be found!” shrieks an ecstatic McCartney); we are out of the sixties straitjacket, ready to live for now. The couplet “Well, the undertaker drew a heavy sigh/Seeing no one else had come” could be a reference to the cover of Abbey Road or even a throwback to “Eleanor Rigby,” but there is no mourning here; it has been replaced by hope.

“Jet” follows immediately thereafter, and despite the lyrical obscurantism (almost certainly intended as throwaway; in Gambaccini’s notes McCartney refers to “Jet” being the name of one of his black Labrador puppies; elsewhere he has referred to a pony of the same name) is by far the most convincing of post-Beatles rockers; McCartney seems ready to push joy to the foreground and drums, piano, guitar, bass and synthesiser all appear more committed, more ravenous, than before (or perhaps since) – he too is ready and able to outrock the Stones, even including a proto-Neu!/Stereolab Moog-led motorik instrumental break (not to mention his onomatopoeic “ssssssss”s at the end of every “Jet.” But his arranging genius remains intact, and unexpected; instead of a blazing rock finale we get a takedown of a coda with Casey’s sax settling atop smooth strings.

“Bluebird” is a natural cousin to 1968’s “Blackbird” and lyrically similarly concerned with freedom, though the freedom here is more personal than political (love will see us through anything, get us anywhere). But the pace here is more relaxed, less intent on proving something, and it is among the most naturally beautiful of McCartney’s post-Beatle ballads, as well as one of the most artful; the strategically stinging cowbell which cuts through the transcendent second half of each chorus warns against complacency. “Mrs Vandebilt” is similarly like a world-weary descendent of “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da,” with its playground chants (the vocal call-and-responses betraying the very subtle influence of Kuti) but not emptied of hope; the song crawls to an exhausted halt after each of McCartney’s weary, exasperated “What’s the use of anything?”s, the “thing” hanging like Damocles’ sword in the bushy silence before McCartney’s shoulder-shrugging to-hell-with-it bass gets the song going again; there is an unsettling bout of maniacal laughter at fadeout.

This is perhaps the first sign that McCartney’s battle to rid himself of both sixties and Beatles may not be as easy as blasting a hole through the prison wall. “Let Me Roll It” introduces the elephant in the Wings sitting room; with a minimalist guitar riff which plays almost like the exact inverse of Clapton’s lines on “Cold Turkey,” with Elvis echo vocals on full blast against skating-rink organ and an “Oh Darling” rhythm, the song, beyond being a response or reproach to the Lennon of “How Do You Sleep?,” sees McCartney actively trying to “be” Lennon. It isn’t Stan Freberg parody level but the song’s generous openness, together with its similarly minimalist message, comes across as an extended open hand to Lennon (although, in getting his Plastic Ono mannerisms so exactly, it could admittedly be interpreted by some as a mockery; I don’t, however, believe that “mockery” has ever existed in McCartney’s working vocabulary).

“Mamunia” works through the Nigerian influences more soberly with its tribal-sounding choruses alternating with straight 4/4 medium-tempo rock verses, and although its sentiments (“The next time you see L.A. rainclouds/Don’t complain it rains for you and me”) never really rise above Guy Mitchell/Mitch Miller level, their delivery is heartfelt. McCartney is even sufficiently moved to issue a triumphant “Whoo-hoo!” after the phrase “Strip off your plastic macs”; still, the spectre of “Penny Lane” is not far removed.

“No Words” contains the album’s real open letter to Lennon; moving with as much assurance as “Happiness Is A Warm Gun,” McCartney addresses his erstwhile partner straight in the eye:

“You say that love is everything
And what we need the most of
I wish you knew, that’s just how true
My love was.”

The key words “NO WORDS FOR MY LOVE” are written in block capitals on the sleeve, so as to make things even more starkly clear, but despite the aggrieved guitar solo which is rapidly faded out at song’s end, there is no malice at work here; rather McCartney demonstrates that emotionally he has not shifted from “The Long And Winding Road” – his closing words “I wish you’d see, it’s only me…I love you” cannot help but touch the heart, and it’s only too bad that Lennon wasn’t more prepared to listen to them.

“Picasso’s Last Words,” written as an impromptu response to a challenge from dining partner Dustin Hoffman to write a song, there and then, about anything, in this case a magazine article describing the last night of Picasso’s life; giving a dinner for friends, he poured out the wine and exclaimed “Drink to me, drink to my health – you know I can’t drink any more.” At the end of the evening he retired to bed, fell asleep and shortly thereafter passed away. Back in the studio, McCartney worked on and expanded this idea into a miniature Long Medley; beginning as an appropriately drunken campfire acoustic singalong, the song then mutates into an ambient sequence, featuring some unattributed French dialogue, before breaking into a slow, stealthy, string-led revisit of “Jet” against tick-tock percussion. The strings enter in greater number for a Philly-style interlude; this in turn leads to a percussive workout (featuring Nigerian resident and studio owner Ginger Baker on tin can and shakers) culminating in a refrain of the “Mrs Vandebilt” chant, now wearing its African influences more readily. Clocking in at a shade under six minutes, it works because of its ease and patience; it is not painting an obituary for a group, but rather saying a graceful and respectfully mischievous farewell to a kinsman (as well as summing up the album itself).

The record ends by straddling no less than three decades (thus Band On The Run can also be properly described as the first “eighties” British number one album). “Nineteen Hundred And Eighty Five” is a wonderful nonsense Little Richard sex chant (or perhaps McCartney is channelling Robert Plant here) set against a varied musical background; a piano riff which anticipates Abba’s “S.O.S.,” a heavier organ/guitar-driven rock sequence and a poignant chorus/organ ballad section which provides the last link to Abbey Road and the sixties before McCartney cuts the thread; again, it sounds like he is fighting a battle, with his own history, with Lennon (note all the primal grunting and squealing leading up to the track’s climax), before whirring synths and portentous “Thus Spake Zarathustra” brass statements combine with strings to work up towards – calamity? Apocalypse? Haven’t we been here before?

A gunshot which seems to echo across the universe, then a long closing chord – E major, the same as “A Day In The Life.”

We’ve escaped. But don’t fall asleep - there's a repeat to fade of "Band On The Run" itself. The moral: we have to keep freeing ourselves over and over. Does this sound in any way familiar?

Elton JOHN: Caribou

2011-11-06T17:52:00.003Z

(#143: 13 July 1974, 2 weeks)

Track listing: The Bitch Is Back/Pinky/Grimsby/Dixie Lily/Solar Prestige A Gammon/You're So Static/I've Seen The Saucers/Stinker/Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me/Ticking

His first studio album to be recorded outside Europe, Caribou was named after the Caribou Ranch studios in the midst of the Colorado Rockies where it was made, and was literally done on the turn of a dime, in the narrow space allotted to John, Taupin and their band between two mammoth tours where they were still expected to deliver another album, as per their original questionable contract. If much of the record sounds rushed and on a par with Goodbye Yellow Brick Road: The B-Sides then that is because the songs were written and the basic tracks laid down in the space of nine days before Elton and band headed off for Japan, leaving producer Gus Dudgeon to put them into some sort of order, do guest overdubs, etc. And still John and Taupin were able to produce at least two classics under such hothouse conditions, if indeed some pre-preparation had not already been undertaken.

While Caribou is not entirely dispensable, it is nonetheless a minor work. More problematically it raises the question of whether, in eagerly being all things to all people, Elton was not turning himself into a branded vending machine. You want New Orleans funk? English vaudeville? Cod-French balladry? Country rock? Press a button here, and it will dutifully fill up the cup. Whether any of it gets us any nearer to, or deliberately places us further from, who or what Elton John was in 1974 is another matter.

Caribou is probably best when it's being purposefully silly, and at its worst when it is simply drifting, or trying to be meaningful. I'm not sure how much a seven-minute-plus ballad like "Ticking," an onomatopoeically angry study of a good but emotionally suppressed Catholic boy (but wait, Bernie; what's with the "Grow up straight and true blue"?) who ends up randomly gunning down fourteen customers in a pub in Queens before himself being gunned down by the cops (violent piano arpeggios echoing the "rifle shells"), would have connected with British audiences, and in any case both song and performance are as mirthless and self-righteously solemn as "I Don't Like Mondays." Infinitely preferable is the dumb music hall of "Grimsby" (as with other tracks, much aided by percussionist Ray Cooper's gallery of effects, e.g. the hissing tambourine after "Strangers have found themselves fathers") with straight-faced backing vocals ("The SKINNERS' ARMS") and sudden flashes of guitar, or the deliberately daft "Solar Prestige A Gammon" (into which Taupin still manages to insert five different fishes).

For a lot of the time, though, Caribou cruises, primarily with an ear to the American market; there are ample helpings of the Tower of Power horn section, to occasional good effect; their El Barrio lines do much to make "She's So Static" more than static (along with the song's eventual evolution into a rock tango), and even within the dull blues trudge of "Stinker," Elton is still able to utter a whoop of appreciation after a particularly inventive brass line. Davey Johnstone, too, does characteristically good work on guitar; his gargles on "Static," the way his tremolo touches the "touched" in "Saucers." But "Saucers" itself is boringly "quirky," a sort of anti-sequel to "Rocket Man" where Elton finds himself kidnapped by aliens, or at least dreams about it; and when he sings "flying in formation," even Johnstone cannot do more than provide the stock effects. What does it all mean - and, more pressingly, who would care? "Pinky" is a standard issue Elton ballad which may or may not be about self-pleasure, rescued only by Cooper's rhetorical congas and some Wilsonian harmonies; "Dixie Lily" is amusing solely for the familiar spectre of Englishmen trying to be as one with American folklore.

This leaves the two classic singles, which alone prove that Elton wasn't quite yet an efficient pop machine. "The Bitch Is Back" engages in the then fashionable sport of making better Stones records than the Stones, and through its deliberately tinny transistor production it succeeds; machine gun guitar, tambourine and brass are all on the mark, and the song may itself represent a premature coming out; he doesn't give a fuck, he'll sniff glue and eat steak - though he's stone cold sober - and although he gets an intimation of his own transience ("I entertain by picking brains/Sell my soul/By dropping names") the mood is ebullient, defiant; and the coming out undertow may be amplified by the fact that partially hidden among the backing singers is Dusty Springfield, by then already someone with an eventful past and uncertain present.

But "Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me" emerges from the record's faintly pointless bouillabase with a shocking completeness; inspired by "Surf's Up" and bearing a lyric which must have been directed at, or had been intended to be about, the 1974 Brian Wilson, Elton suddenly has to concentrate, and does so with some brilliance - he drops the camp and fake angst and abruptly sounds like a human being again (his desperate "Don't discard me"), while behind him the song builds up with an overarching naturalness (Daryl Dragon, the "Captain" of Captain and Tennille, and an important contributor to the Beach Boys' Carl And The Passions album, was responsible for the arrangement, and Toni Tennille is also on hand among the backing vocalists). Most inspired of all is when the unmistakable voices of Bruce Johnston and Carl Wilson rise like the reddest and most regretful of suns behind Elton's despair; Carl's wordless lines as the chorus reaches its climax are particularly overwhelming and affecting (and having listened to the newly-released SMiLE Sessions collection, probably even more so for this listener) - it is as if something from the promise of the sixties still survives, may yet flourish, if only we could allow it; and this at a time when the seventies were still struggling to free themselves from the apron strings of the sixties. The build-up is epic without being pompous, and if this were indeed conceived within those nine days then its achievement is all the greater, enough to provide a point for the amiable but rather directionless wanderings of the rest of the record. Caribou still did the expected business, both here and in the States; but how much more available could Elton make himself to his audience and yet remain sane and coherent? What was ahead of him but years of work, work, work? The answers, and his responses, were unexpected and often quite contradictory; nonetheless, two terrific singles squeezed out of what was effectively a contractual obligation album are no reason to go crazy, except in ways that are healthy.

David BOWIE: Diamond Dogs

2011-10-30T17:45:00.003Z

(#142: 8 June 1974, 4 weeks)

Track listing: Future Legend/Diamond Dogs/Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise)/Rebel Rebel/Rock 'N' Roll With Me/We Are The Dead/1984/Big Brother/Chant Of The Ever Circling Skeletal Family

I've written about Diamond Dogs before, a long time ago on another blog, and maybe it's a piece too jejeune to warrant a reprint, or perhaps its flapping spirit chimes in more tunefully with the record's curiously jejeune nature; it's hard for me, seven years and a lifetime onward, to call. Half of me says shut up and enjoy the ride, which still seems a lot shorter than its thirty-eight minutes might suggest, and the other half says, wait a moment - did any other number one album of its year, or of its time, push and challenge its audience so firmly and insecurely as this one?

The first thing to note is what a whale of a time this decomposing glitter-Bowie is having watching the world collapse. Let's face it, pop secretly always welcomes the apocalypse - think of Lydon's half-petrified, half-ecstatic tongues at the climax of "Holidays In The Sun," the impatient rush of the Annihilation mix of "Two Tribes," the bit on Public Enemy's "Burn Hollywood Burn" when Ice Cube storms into the picture with his terrifyingly authoritative "As I walk down Hollywood Boulevard"; oh yes, we pop addicts eagerly await The End, our pulses race at the very thought. "Tension, apprehension and dissension have begun," went the leitmotif of the period's most fashionable sci-fi novel, Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man, and I always secretly wanted to set that refrain to music (but somehow I always ended up in the neigbourhood of Stan Kenton's "Concerto For Doghouse"). To a ten-year-old besotted with Steve Gerber's Marvel titles and worse, caninohuman immutable apocalypse seemed a more interesting place to visit than, say, Blantyre.

Structurally the record is disjointed piffle, but that works in its favour; the main influence here is not so much Orwell (Sonia saw to any such ideas) as Burgess distilled via Lionel Bart (all these "urchins" bring Dickens far more closely to mind than droogs, but then Bowie has arguably always been far more Bart than Barthes). The lovely thing is that Bowie still, I think, feels deep down that it's 1965, or he's going to try his damnedest to make sure that it is; one of the record's key lines comes amidst the rollerball Philly-lite "1984" when he whispers "I'm looking for the treason that I knew in '65," and the non-closing loop of "Chant" resembles the Yardbirds with their legs broken, trying to relearn Bo Diddley as though relocated to Jupiter.

So much is still invested in the sixties. "Future Legend" tries to scare its listeners witless with drunken electronic pinges, "Bewitched, Bothered And Bewildered" guitar meditations and a phased Bowie growling about the end of everything but together it's a lot less authentically scary than something like "Bad Moon Rising" and a lot more like Journey To The Centre Of The Earth having taken a wrong turning in the wrong volcano. The sound of a Faces audience (complete with a distant "Wa-hey!" from Rod) brings in "This ain't rock 'n' ROLL! This is GENOCIDE!!" - startling enough in 1974, but set against a wrecked Lydon addressing a real, living San Francisco audience less than three years later at the end of "Belsen Was A Gas" ("Be a man! Kill yourself!") it sounds timid, a tad showbizzy; Bowie may well have spoken of the "diamond dogs" as so many little Rottens and Viciouses many years later, but perspective is the easiest thing to have.

Still, this is comparatively minor quibbling; the title track and "Rebel Rebel" are unstable photocopies of Stones rockers which make It's Only Rock And Roll sound arthritic (but then the latter's title track grew out of a band improvisation involving Bowie; nonetheless, "Fingerprint File" is the only thing I've ever wanted to retain from that particular mess of a record). They work because their instability is subtle; the stomps go on for just that little too long, when the ecstasy stops and the comedown and headaches start to worm their way into the listener. And also because Bowie sings them like Iggy and the Stones rather than Jagger. On "Diamond Dogs," for instance, the bridge-to-chorus dissonances become gradually more prominent, that cowbell is struck a little too hard to signify eagerness or even rhythm, and above all there is Bowie's own lead guitar (mostly; the Keef stuff on this and "Rebel Rebel" was the work of Alan Parker, who also does most of the guitar work on "1984") which manages to be both naive and commanding. Bowie's rheumatic saxes also reappear, even repeating part of the riff from "Sorrow" towards the end of "Dogs," but the message is still to leave the sixties ("Come out of the garden, baby"). "Rebel Rebel" too is much more of a gruelling grind than the 45 mix - losing the "You're so TACKY!" chuckle but not the 'ludes reference - to such an extent that it is as though Bowie is trying less to rock us than to hit us on the head with a clawhammer until we submit...and submit to what? He does sing "oh baby come unto me" before each chorus of "Dogs," nine years ahead of "Relax," and are those backing singers really singing "Bow wow wow" as though this were some unexpected midwife between Patti Page and Andre 3000?

The "Sweet Thing"/"Candidate" sequence plays like sixteen-year-old Martian Buzzcocks trying to decipher and copy the "Breathe"/"Time" equivalent from side one of Dark Side; the introduction runs backward into itself and Bowie steadily raises his crooning tone from Scott Walker beef baritone to proto-MacKenzie contralto, but still sounds dishevelled and shaken - when he reaches the quatrain "Like a portrait in flesh/Who trails on a leash/Will you see/That I'm scared and I'm lonely?" his voice quivers like Nelson marooned at the wrong end of a drawing pin. Other elements pass in and out of the song's fibres like electrocuted trains; Adam Faith pizzicato strings, a piano line in the second verse which foresees "China Girl," Bowie's wheezing palais alto, martial drums, Mike Garson finally cutting free under Bowie's careful guitar line and flooding the picture. The "sweet thing" becomes a "cheap thing" and goes straight into the babbling stream of "Candidate"; as the PR junk of the opening lines is steadily turned into the tenderest of doomed love songs (culminating in the famous couplet "We'll buy some drugs and watch a band/Then jump in a river holding hands," a dozen years ahead of "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out") the tempo progressively doubles and discordance (principally from Bowie's guitar) becomes denser. Saxes blow raspberries and at one point the song is in danger of drowning in an ocean of tambourines. Then "Sweet Thing" returns, this time as a sneer (yet set against a placid Moog/flute unison); this too eventually gives way to feedback, plectrum scrapings, the song then sloping backwards as though about to tumble off a cliff - and the penny drops; the comparable record from 1974 is Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom (and here we think of "Little Red Riding Hood Hits The Road" which ends up doubling back on itself), a part-gibberish, part-profound response to a world no longer clearly understood or recognised (in terms of Bowie's guitar playing, see also Wyatt's languid beginner slides on the same instrument in "A Last Straw"), where expression can only be reached through multiple alter ego voices - Mongezi Feza, Gary Windo, Mike Oldfield, Ivor Cutler - in the same way that Bowie was now positioning himself as a brand, different with every new release, and distant and quick enough to ensure that his audience didn't latch onto him until he'd firmly moved on. And then, without a break, into "Rebel Rebel" and its foreshadowing of the Runaways' "Cherry Bomb" (with the latter's "Hello dad, hello mom...").

On side two he opens up a little more, just enough for us to touch the waft of his breath, if not his garment; on "Rock 'N' Roll With Me" the cheesy organ and general air of stadium rock anthem parody are mainly there to fool the ear, since this is the record's "Be My Wife" moment, the point where Bowie steps out of his self-administered straitjacket and tells it straight; his performance is too obviously heartfelt to be a put-on - listen to how he mangles the word "tears" in the first chorus, or how his cries of "I'm in tears again/When you rock 'n' roll with me" are too close not to believe. And yet, this may simply be Ziggy again ("I would take a foxy kind of stand/While tens of thousands found me in demand") taking a further step away from the crowd, and at song's end, or at least before it disintegrates under columns of dusty dancehall saxophone, he finds his own way out (after having given away the confession "No one else I'd rather be") with the line "I've found a door that lets me out." Always running away, always moving...away from what, and towards whom?

"We Are The Dead" is performed as a doped New Depression elegy (to an extent the song follows the traces of the old Busby Berkeley number "Remember My Forgotten Man," although "Baby Bankrupt" is only hinted at in the latter rather than outwardly stated). As the song proceeds - and somewhere in the background (as on "Rock 'N' Roll With Me") there is Lulu, doing her best to bring Bowie back to some kind of earth - the narrative becomes heavier, speedier, more disjointed, more pregnant with dread ("I hear them on the stairs") and the song can barely keep up, since it's falling apart with every new disintegrating barline - if glam is to die, Bowie implies, then here is the underlying, spent ugliness. The song falls apart around him, his guitar sounding more and more alien, more desperate.

But remember that "door that lets me out," and there is something in Bowie's awkwardly assured performance in "Rock 'N' Roll With Me" which gives a greater, if subtler, clue than "1984" as to where he's headed. The plastic Philly romp of "1984" - like a de-fanged "Backstabbers" - could have come from Wakeman's Journey, or, more pertinently, from Jeff Wayne's still-to-be-conceived War Of The Worlds, and Bowie races himself against the ascending bass and 'cello lines only to ram himself repeatedly into a wall built of the feeblest bricks.

The police siren electric piano at "1984"'s fade melts into the synthesised trumpet and rock opera grind of "Big Brother" - five years before The Wall, here's Bowie building glass around himself, wanting both worship and forgetfulness, a steady closedown interrupted only by a forgotten folk fragment from when times were still comprehensible - Bowie yelping "I know you think you're awful square" as though he were still fourteen, before correcting himself, and us, with the codicil "Lord, I think you'd overdose if you knew what's going down." After a high howl of "FOOL!" the backing track steadily falls out of synch; again and again, a music on the verge of collapse, and the only way out is...nowhere, a hell of Klook's Kleek, over and over ("Shake it up!" "Move it up!") which eventually slams into itself and Bowie's barked "BRA BRA BRA BRA" locked groove, that's it, you've eaten me, record off the hi-fi, cut to black, ah fuck off.

Additional notes
Bowie's supposedly suboptimal lead guitar is more punk-anticipating than anything else on or about the album, including the dog's balls; he's got enough to scrape by (and of course has Alan Parker on hand to do all the difficult bits, just like he did with Wakeman's piano on Hunky Dory) and sometimes, as he clearly tells us, scraping is the only sane response to madness, the only upright answer to collapse. Whether he meticulously thought this out is beside the point, and if you even have to think that thought, you're not the sort of person for whom Diamond Dogs was intended.

So why the top-whack session musicians rather than the Spiders? Garson's still there, but otherwise it's Herbie Flowers, Aynsley Dunbar, Tony Newman and the aforementioned Parker; does his hacking of their hackwork parallel Lou Reed's very similar approach (with some of the same musicians) on the same year's Sally Can't Dance (except that proud Lou would never admit or surrender to "technical incompetence," God bless him)? A better parallel might be what Carla Bley did a couple of years later on Dinner Music, where she hired the likes of Steve Gadd, Richard Tee, Cornell Dupree etc. - the very best to those who think in terms of "very best" - and set them against unruly playing from Bley regulars like Michael Mantler, Roswell Rudd and Carlos Ward (or perhaps "unruly" was hoped for; the record largely fails because everyone's on their best behaviour and it's only on the Carla-herself-dominant "Dining Alone" and "Ida Lupino" that the music peeks out and looks towards further abrasive disruptions of placidity - nineties Arto Lindsay, for instance).

But yes, hack it up, hack glam to death, the fucker's dead anyway and anybody alive in 1974 can see that; give it to those kids on the roof and there you go, a month at the top for a record that in its own way is as fuck-you as Metal Machine Music. But then yet another 1974 record, On The Beach - remember? - with its huge YES to life disguised as a terminal NO and in the end Bowie's going home with the grin, in case you wanted any other part of him; open the exit door next time and...how long will it take us to summon up the nerve?

Rick WAKEMAN: Journey To The Centre Of The Earth

2011-10-23T13:38:00.004+01:00

(#141: 25 May 1974, 1 week)

Track listing: The Journey/Recollection/The Battle/The Forest

There's a quote from a brief Q&A interview with Gilbert O'Sullivan in Uncut magazine a few years ago which has stuck with me: "Between '67 and '77, originality was rife" - the implication being that the advent of punk meant closing down more doors than it opened. Suddenly everything was absolute, year zero, black and white, and so forth, and so mavericks, major or minor, who didn't quite fit in with either camp, or who didn't bear huge metaphorical "I AM A RADICAL" postcards tied around their necks, tended to get conveyed to the reject bin. It'a also interesting that while I sat around thinking what to write about this entry, my friend Mark Sinker posted these highly pertinent comments about the small, mobile, intelligent Victorian working-class unit John Martin, and I think he's got it just about right.

Dinosaurs indeed, and so it was Rick Wakeman's fate, at least for a while, to be condemned as one; yet listening to his Journey now raises the question of how anybody could rationally (or irrationally) conceive of it as representing any kind of an enemy*. Rather it speaks to me of modest, maybe slightly foolish but ultimately harmless dreams trampled over in the snotpush of "progress," even though the record and event remain one of the cornerstones of where British progressive rock had progressed.

(*Semi-digression: This doesn't even begin to mask the hypocrisy at work in much of the year zero ground pseudo-razing; remember that Keith Levene was at the time of Topographic working as a roadie for Yes, and various stock Steve Howe tropes turn up surprisingly frequently in early PiL work. In fact I was struck, while listening to an Old Grey Whistle Test compilation on Radio 2 last week (and thinking about Wakeman and Journey) how, in terms of musical approach and dynamics, there really was very little to choose from between Steve Hackett's "Los Endos" and PiL's "Careering"; both clearly sculpted from the same block - but of course in 1979 what mattered was the context which contributed to making Metal Box one of the albums for my own desert island.)

That Wakeman sounds infinitely more at ease here than on Topographic indicates in itself that Journey was a pet project long in his mind; he'd been thinking about doing it since 1971, and even though he had in the interim scored a major solo hit with his The Six Wives Of Henry VIII project, the British arm of A&M remained sceptical about its chances. No, it's too expensive to do in the studio; fine, I'll record it live (although some sequences, including parts of David Hemmings' narration, subsequently had to be redone in the studio for various technical reasons). Can't you get better-known musicians to play the rock parts; no, these are people I have known and hung out with since the scuffling days of the late sixties, they are the musicians best able to play this music, and I want this to be perceived as a piece of music rather than a superstar jam. OK, but we're still looking at forty grand - you'll have to put up some of your own money; look, whatever I need to do, I'll do it. Call this commercial? We're not going to promote it; I've spoken to Jerry Moss in the States and he says PROMOTE it.

And, of course, Wakeman was right every step of the way; the record sold millions around the world and the green light was given for this other idea he had involving King Arthur, and some ice. Absurd? More idealistic than absurd, I'd say; Wakeman had played on the all-star orchestral version of Tommy with David Measham, the LSO, the English Chamber Choir and Wil Malone's arrangements, and (with some help from Lou Reizner) convinced all relevant parties to embark on thie next adventure. Having just negotiated the challenging bends of Ornette Coleman's Skies Of America, Measham's LSO was fully equipped to deal with anything thrown at it, and their performance on Journey is technically faultless.

Listening to Journey over thirty-seven years later, my general feelings are those of simple pleasure mixed with some melancholy, for the record is as much of a part of the lost treasure world of catch-all/embrace-all of its time as Centipede's Septober Energy or even Cardew's The Great Learning (and it cannot be a coincidence that Dick Whitbread's artwork for Frames, the great 1978 masterpiece by Keith Tippett's Ark, takes its cue almost directly from Michael Wade's work here), although ostensibly there is little "radical" about the work.

Instead, Journey is that most unexpected but most welcome of 1974 things (at least to boys of my age, or slightly older), a rattling good yarn. It came exactly a century after the publication of Jules Verne's original book, which is pretty heavily condensed here by Hemmings' velvety narrator (Richard Harris was the original choice for narrator, and was keen, though was otherwise engaged at the time of the recording; Hemmings, just eight years down the line from Blow-Up, does the story as an amiable uncle with that park still festering at the back of his mind). Tbe book is perhaps more interesting for what it implies than what it tells; it is only partly an adventure story, in greater part a disguised, if digestible, history of the evolution of man, and in equal part a long digression about the importance of talk - much of the book is occupied by lengthy, winding discussions about geological speculation, and if nearly everything that is talked about has since been scientifically disproved, that is almost beside the point; there is no real reason why Lidinbrook and Adl should embark on this trip (there are no women present) other than to speculate, fulfill or surpass notions and schemes concerning giant mushrooms, battling porpoises and sea-turtles. They get sucked into one volcano in Iceland and get flung out on the slope of "the frightening Mount Etna," and somehow that is it; some commentators have speculated on the book as a pretext for exploring the old ego-versus-id inner battle, but the remarkable thing about both book and record is the complete absence of side in either; nowhere in Wakeman's Journey does one think about their trip as being anything but a physical trip, and while there may be merit in thinking about the brown, dull stuff that fills the centre of the Earth and Britain in 1974 - and the irony of one acting as an escape from the other - the record does exactly what it says in its Disneyland Records-type sleeve.

There is probably little need to examine the music in depth; it begins with heroic Richard Strauss French horns and Moog spelling out the work's main musical motif before settling down to become a paradigm of the kind of brooding, battle-anticipating soundtrack work that would many decades later - Lord Of The Rings, Harry Potter, etc. - become lingua franca. Then Ashley Holt sings a tremulous song (the mood, perhaps logically, predicates mid-seventies American AoR pop, most pressingly "Moonlight Feels Right" by Starbuck) and suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, we are flip-flopped into Air's Moon Safari with limpid electric piano carefully traced by Malone's strings. The beat steps up to Lemon Jelly level (under Hemmings' first narrative sequence) before choir and trumpets turn the mood medieval. A cyclical vibraphone line floats under Hemmings, giving way to some Moog spider jiving wherein we are abruptly reminded that this is 1974. Plateaus of strings and woodwind cast their shadow across this picture like a slightly irritable raincloud; there are not only hints of the overture to The Lexcion Of Love here but also an unexpected glance in the direction of the later stages of the Four Seasons' Genuine Imitatioon Life Gazette. A dialogue between Wakeman's Moog and French horns introduces some mild discordance, leading into a hallucinatory drone under Hemmings' "Voices! Voices!!"

Strings cascade down into - of all things - a funky Stevie Wonder-type clavinet workout (this being the commencement of the "Recollection" sequence) leading to a long guitar solo by Mike Egan. Here Malone's strings come into their own; sinister, bitonal, cutting out from beneath (as they would seventeen years hence on "Unfinished Sympathy"), before dropping out entirely to leave the choir to chat with Wakeman's clavinet before Wonderful World Of Disney harp and flutes make their entrance. The track's central song has a lounge mood, and its frequent diversion into unexpected harmonies makes me wish Billy MacKenzie had sung it (Holt is excellent, however; very much out of the trembling Colin Blunstone school of vulnerable). Electric piano argues with 'celli and basses for awhile before hissing wind effects take us into "The Battle." Wakemsn's clavinet riff under Hemmings' "World within a world" echoes "Bennie And The Jets," before the choir ushers us back into 1974. "Save me!" shriek Holt and fellow singer Garry Pickford-Hopkins against the stoic choir, and an effective air of tension is built up, though slightly dissipated by Barney James' slightly too eager drumming.

Everything eventually breaks open into...Shaft? It's cop show theme time ("the STORM!"), perhaps denoting George Sewell in Special Branch. Again, James' drums rush the tempo a little too much, but everyone sounds as though they're having a good time, before clavinet and strings re-enter to depict the "mastodon" and the "proteus." As we move into "The Forest," the funk mood returns, the protagonists spill into one volcano and out of the other, and from nowhere we get an accelerando knees-up of Grieg's "Hall Of The Mountain King" (cop acknowledged in Wakeman's brief, breathless sleevenote). Wakeman's own Moog wobbles in underneath, like a prog octopus, and then it's time for a brassy coda, followed by a pensive strings/Moog section, and then the return of the original theme, complete with florid Rachmaninoff-via-Liberace piano curlicues, the credit-roll choir title-singing, and finally three bangs and a thunderclap of a finish, to tumultuous cheers and applause (there were visuals in the form of stage sets, clips from the 1959 James Mason/Pat Boone movie - who'd have thought Pat Boone would play such a big, if indirect, part in the development of progressive rock? - and so on). As a piece of amiable/crazily ambitious entertainment it more than does its job, and one of my greatest regrets is how little room there would be for such a manoeuvre in today's zipped-up, neatly-demographised world. An enemy? Only to our own shameful preconceptions.

SLADE: Old New Borrowed And Blue

2011-10-16T16:46:00.003+01:00

(#140: 2 March 1974, 1 week)

Track listing: Just A Little Bit/When The Lights Are Out/My Town/Find Yourself A Rainbow/Miles Out To Sea/We're Really Gonna Raise The Roof/Do We Still Do It/How Can It Be/Don't Blame Me/My Friend Stan/Everyday/Good Time Gals

"How can a daydream change to a has-been?"

A successful rock band generally has two long-term aesthetic options. It can either expand and develop what it has already done, or simply carry on doing what they know they can do, and if they have any nous they will subtly tweak their music every so often such that they never fall behind the times. Among the latter I would include Status Quo, ZZ Top, the Ramones and AC/DC, and I wonder whether Slade would have been happier in this category, although they had strong ambitions to go beyond the holler-stompers which they felt might still entrap them. They had plenty of opportunity to think; Old New Borrowed And Blue was their first album to be completed following Don Powell's car crash, and I think there must have been a general feeling of, well, if we're going to go anywhere else or do anything else, now is the time to do it and go there.

This is not to say that the record represented an especially radical detour from the Slade blueprint, more that it intensifies what we already knew from Slayed? and the hits and cautiously sticks out its feelers in other directions. The group had already wrongfooted their fans with the post-crash single "My Friend Stan," which climbed with some effort to number two and which in its way was as much of a test of its audience as "Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing In The Shadows"; it reappears here and remains impassively strange, Holder welding together various double entendres over a backing of tack pub piano and Dave Hill's unexpected forays into country rock (it may well have a subtler political subtext at its heart with its talk of blacking eyes and fixing ties, but I will leave that for Lena to analyse when its turn comes).

From this stem comes at least two other tracks; Hill's "Jessica" quotes on "How Can It Be" - lyrically one of the record's more wistful songs, not that you'd know it from Holder's delivery - suggest more moves in the country rock direction although Powell's flat beat and the track's general make-do-and-mend buskerdom come down more in favour of Don Partridge (but watch that odd vocal coda; CSN&Y re-orchestrated by Morton Feldman). Whereas "Find Yourself A Rainbow" is a straightforward music hall singalong, with jangling Russ Conway piano and no side ("Don't forget...April showers"), which was later covered, again without apparent irony, by Max Bygraves. In Noddy there has always been the latent need to be an all-round family entertainer, but it's worth pondering what some of the 500,000 fans who placed advance orders for this album would have made of it (is this what we queued up and paid for?).

The rest of the album is devoted to rockers and mid-tempo rock-pop lopes. The record kicks off with the group's take on Rosco Gordon's "Just A Little Bit," previously a minor hit in 1964 for Merseybeat group The Undertakers (featuring a young but already very confident Jackie Lomax on lead vocals) and covered by many other beat groups including Them and The Animals (although the latter did not record the song until their ill-fated 1977 reunion record Before We Were So Rudely Interrupted) - so Chas Chandler must have recommended the number directly. If anything, Slade appear here to be inventing AC/DC. All the elements are there: the brutally straight guitar riffs and astute use of pauses and silence, and of course Holder's Bon Scott/Brian Johnson-anticipating hoarse shriek ("TURN YER LIGHTS DOWN LOW!"). Clearly a stage favourite, the group effectively turn the volume down, to the point where they seem to be playing with muffs on their speakers, and indeed their fingers are barely touching their instruments. Holder goes down, relatively quiet, developing his mutters of "teeny weeny" into abstract grunts and purrs, before the volume is suddenly jacked up again and they aim for the Zep bravura finale ("NOT 'TIL THE END OF TIIIIIIME!" followed by a bark of "Lo-o-o-o-o-o-ove!") but land nearer a proto-punk ending of messy guitar tunings and cymbal crashes.

On "When The Lights Are Out," one of the rare Slade tracks featuring Jim Lea on lead vocals, they appear conversely (or logically) to be inventing Oasis, their "Merry Xmas Everybody" setting settling into a rolling lope ("Let me feel your warm breath on my neck/It makes me hit the sky"). Slightly too poppy to qualify as pub rock, it nevertheless seems to be a song about the group's gradual disillusionment with the crowd and with unquestioning adulation ("We'll be sitting pretty/Scream a pitiful scream"). Much the same approach is used on "Miles Out To Sea" and the music's relatively restrained arrangement works in the song's favour; such a strange, dissociated song it seems too, with its floating out to the bay, its ghostly tropes of cabaret and red-haired monks - the song is performed as though the group already knows its game is up. As with roughly half the songs on the album, it's notable that Lea's piano is markedly more to the fore than Hill's guitar.

"My Town," hitherto buried on the B-side of "My Friend Stan," is one of Slade's strongest, and in my view least acknowledged, songs - it failed even to make the 4CD Slade Box retrospective - and, also in my view, one of their most heartfelt; it begins in hard rock cliche territory with its "hot shootin' mama," but the latter is only a peg on which to hang one of the hoarsest and aggressive choruses Holder ever screamed: "THIS AIN'T YOUR TOWN! THIS IS MY TOWN!" he repeats. "GET ON YOUR WAY NOW!!" he grunts and snarls. Meanwhile the music inclines towards early Beatles but there is something about Lea's wavering, close-picked, fluctuating bassline which suggests a previously unexplored missing link between Eddie Cochran and My Bloody Valentine. The song's implications go far beyond small-town matters; this seems a clarion cry, a warning from the working class to their interfering "superiors" to stay the hell away, a proud reclamation of working class culture. Did the group consider it too near the knuckle, too close to a truth, to risk putting it out as an A-side?

"We're Really Gonna Raise The Roof" is the nearest the record comes to a standard Slade stomper but there is an unsettling extra luminosity to Holder's screech; already quoting Bob Marley ("Get up, stand up!") and spitting out those "Go, go, go!"s with all the fervour of 1969 Barry Ryan, and the band at points struggle to contain this sometimes terrible power. "Do We Still Do It" continues in the same vein, with a spectral echo in the group's shouted responses, words like "corruptible" and a mantra of "Come on!"s repeated to the point of dervish insanity, or (and I do not use such words loosely) nirvana (and feel free to capitalise that last word; there are roots here too).

On "Don't Blame Me," however, Holder is in danger of blowing himself out of this world. Offering diarrhoeic yells against some scruffily-defined wrongdoing or injustice, Holder's astonishing vocal performance - is it ADT, or multiphonics? - gets the response of a violent, frustrated, wobbling solo from Hill (the furthest out the latter ever went on record). Despite the brief Robert Plant parody near the end, the primal screams on offer far exceed those of Lennon's; this is a pain beyond rational expression. As the track plays out Holder's scream is comparable with the tenor of Pharaoh Sanders or Gato Barbieri, ululatory, completely overwhelming its surroundings; when the ending comes, it sounds as though Holder has literally squashed the rest of the band. It is a terrifying performance.

Then come the strange singles, the already mentioned "Stan" and the highly uncharacteristic waltz ballad "Everyday." The latter is a more unsettling listen than is generally acknowledged; the song itself sounds like something that Gerry and the Pacemakers would have dropped midway into their set to take the pace down (and Holder's vocal, when controlled - in the "And you know that I know" sections - sounds uncannily like Gerry Marsden), but again and again Holder breaks into his holler; and the lyric (in part made up impromptu by Lea's wife Louise) must be the most abstract, haiku-like lyric to any love song this side of "True Love Ways." "One little wave/To say you'll behave"?

Such endeavours may reveal why Slade, despite great and sustained effort, never really broke America; Holder's voice, though capable of scarifying intensity, is not the most flexible of voices. Every song, be it country rock or vaudeville or MoR ballad, involves a swift ascent to scream mode; he lacks Plant's capacity for tenderness, and in truth, even over a modest album length of thirty-one minutes, his unceasing bullroarer, because unwavering, does become more than a little wearisome; it is like standing at the other end of a megaphone of a rabble-rouser at Speaker's Corner. The closing "Good Time Gals" attempts a cowbell-driven "Honky Tonk Women"/"All Right Now"-style return to normal business but it doesn't quite convince; Holder finally dives straight into smutsville ("I wanted to suck your candy - UHH!") and worryingly beyond ("I wanted to wear your clothes"). Despite the attempted climax of four straight "GIMME!"s, the heart is, I suspect, already out of it.

On the positive side, Holder's voice, despite its sustained tone of hectoring, does appear to be slightly more comprehensible than previously; and added to this should be the fact that the likes of Joan Jett and Cherie Currie - not to mention the slightly older likes of Steven Tyler and Joe Perry - were assimilating Slade's example and using it as a template for their own subsequent adventures (the first Runaways album is almost exactly a midpoint equation between Slade, the Sweet and Suzi Quatro). If you don't worry too much about subtexts, then as a rock record Old New Borrowed And Blue is a fine, varied and lively listen. But it is pretty unmistakably the work of a group who know that they have just passed their peak and want a last, loud say before bowing out, or down. Their next move was towards cinema; Slade In Flame is a harrowing and frequently ugly (but more or less truthful) picture of a rotten music industry and what it does to people at the bottom of its bucket, but the crowds were expecting slapstick and laffs; likewise, the film's downbeat and frequently bitter songs were too cold a bucket of water for fans to stomach - despite one final big hit ("Far Far Away") and one of the best songs and performances they ever recorded ("How Does It Feel?," written by Lea as far back as 1968), the soundtrack album stopped at #6, and by mid-1976 their singles were beginning to miss the Top 50; it took a long, slow process of rebuilding their reputation on the heavy rock circuit to enable their comeback in the eighties. Now a version of Slade continues to tour, without Holder, who, sick of touring and stress, has long since switched to broadcasting and occasional acting. Their best music survives, and remains loved, as indeed do the musicians themselves; and Old New Borrowed And Blue - you decide which songs are which - is best viewed as a cheerful last wave before everyone, musicians and fans alike, goes off and gets on with the rest of their lives.

The CARPENTERS: The Singles 1969-1973

2011-10-11T18:04:00.004+01:00

(#139: 2 February 1974, 4 weeks; 9 March 1974, 11 weeks; 1 June 1974, 1 week; 6 July 1974, 1 week)

Track listing: We've Only Just Begun/Top Of The World/Ticket To Ride/Superstar/Rainy Days And Mondays/Goodbye To Love/Yesterday Once More/It's Going To Take Some Time/Sing/For All We Know/Hurting Each Other/(They Long To Be) Close To You

"Think I'm gonna be sad...Loneliness is such a sad affair...Come back to me again and play your sad guitar...Makes today seem rather sad...Sing of happy, not sad..."

You don't have to know the ins and outs of Karen Carpenter's life to realise the mood which prevails throughout this collection; the word keeps recurring throughout the record, its feeling all-pervading. And while I am not necessarily an observer who bases his judgment of art on the life lived by the artist, it is impossible from these dozen selections to avoid the conclusion that Karen was not a happy person. Even when she essays happy, as on "Top Of The World," she never quite convinces the listener; her brightest thought is "I won't be surprised if it's a dream" and her shaky transition throughout the phrase "be the same for you and me" finds her on the verge of suppressed collapse. As with Perry Como, she cannot quite make "Sing" sing true; she is constantly trying to convince herself that happiness is a good idea.

But flawless sadness was what 1974 Britain seemed to want, indeed luxuriated in; this was its year's biggest-selling album, only beginning to step outside the top ten in November (and it did not leave the top five until September). Part of the duo's core appeal was that they sounded like no one else in their time, be it pop or rock or even easy listening, and it is true in the context of 1974 number one albums that they still did not. Everything on the record sounds beamed down from above, even if its words are frequently more in keeping with hell than heaven; it is quite convenient to assume that the Carpenters might have been among the most radical of pop groups, even if their radicalism had only extended to not sounding like Slade or Foghat.

The Singles 1969-1973 is not quite the straightforward greatest hits album it might initially appear; the majority of its tracks featured remixes, re-recorded lead (and harmony) vocals and, throughout side one at least, a spotless segue complete with new orchestral introductions and interludes. That this would herald a lifetime of endless tinkering with the same material suggested that the Brian Wilson influence was more encompassing, or possibly engulfing, than was sometimes apparent. The album begins with the piano/vibes introduction to "Close To You," recalling George Crumb as much as Burt Bacharach; Karen sings the first two lines before a bass slide and decisive snare drum usher in soaring strings, followed by a harp, and then an oboe/strings theme - travelling in less than a minute from Makrokosmos III to Vaughan Williams' A Pastoral Symphony. All very grandiose and Scott Walker a prelude, and it goes straight into "We've Only Just Begun," the bank commercial that Richard Carpenter decided to turn into a hymn.

Actually the Beach Boys connection is deeper; Tony Asher, the Pet Sounds lyricist, had originally been approached to compose the lyrics to the Crocker Bank ad but fell ill and recommended that Paul Williams take over and articulate the music of Roger Nichols. Both of the latter were writers and performers with a history of enterprising avant-MoR work at A&M - hear, if you can find it, 1968's extraordinary Roger Nichols And The Small Circle Of Friends (the CEO of Crocker Bank certainly did, and approached Nichols to write the jingle) - and when Richard Carpenter came across the commercial on TV one night, they were persuaded to extend it into a full song. Here, all is smooth and hopeful; Nichols and Williams might have written it, but only, I suspect, the Carpenters could have derived hymnal salvation from a bank ad - and, as the "Walrus"/police siren piano chords prove, not to mention Karen's anguished multiphonic "live" in the second verse (a regular trope which Karen would practise when she dropped her emotional guard; see also, out of many examples, the "wind" in "wind up" in "Rainy Days And Mondays"), the future is not quite as bright or uncomplicated as she would like. Similarly, "Top Of The World" plays like a simulacrum of a jaunty country song (that high pedal steel sustain which occurs like a wraith after all but one of the choruses), but the main interest here is Richard's arranging and producing - as with "Penny Lane," he subtly alters the mix throughout the song, emphasising different instruments at different points; the pedal steel, the harp, the Fender Rhodes.

A solo piano passage welcomes a swooning orchestral re-entry, followed by more solo piano, then strings and a strangely harsh-sounding cymbal, and finally cascading tubular bells, strings and harp, all of which alight upon the most desolate Beatles cover I can think of; again, Karen does her best to inject more life, less neutered deadness, into her vocal than the 1969 original - for example, in the rise to the final chorus, she now sings "Ohhh..." as compared with what sounds like "Hell..." in the original - but I wonder whether the original blankness didn't make for a more affecting performance. It's as if the sixties have drained away, and they know it; before they announce their official split, they are already mourning for the Beatles (and indeed the 45 of "Ticket To Ride" sold better immediately following the Beatles' split than it had done in the two months previously) - Karen's "don't care when" is a terrifying admission of nothingness and the Beatles' own "My baby don't care" sequence is jettisoned altogether from both readings; it is replaced by a distant wall of harmonised sadness. Welcome to the seventies; still goodbye to the sixties, even almost halfway into the next decade.

The blankness drifts easily into "Superstar," that lament for lost rock ("But you're not really here/It's just the radio"). Karen's vibrato is again teary but there are hidden dramatics; the thunderous low piano which rumbles into the picture following Karen's aghast "wait." Note also the especial subtlety; much was made of the rewrite of the line "I can hardly wait to sleep with you again" into "I can hardly wait to be with you again" - and yet they kept the line "What to say to make you come again?" Strings and trumpet move into a reluctant climax before a harp flourish presses everything down again. The segue into "Rainy Days And Mondays" is hardly noticed, and yet this song - another Nichols/Williams composition - gets surprisingly close to the knuckles of the Carpenters' sadness; "Talking to myself and feeling old," murmurs Karen at the beginning, before progressing through the song. The key word is "down" at the end of each chorus; the first Karen weeps in that multiphonic despair again, but with every recurrence she puts more and more force and confidence into the word. It's "what they used to call the blues" but she is not alone. "Run and find the one who loves me" is, however, a strange expression of relief, and Karen's performance now becomes more attacking, aggressive. "No need to talk it out/We know what it's all about" and the meaning of the song suddenly becomes clear, the hidden radicalism revealed - how many hit songs have there been about that time of the month? As Karen continues her gradual emotional opening up, she climaxes on a nearly triumphant "get" before taking the "me down" down to restless quietude.

An oboe bridges "Mondays" to "Goodbye To Love," Karen's new vocal echoing against piano as though in a dungeon. Sung in a deceptively reassuring G major, the self-constructed despair of the lyric chases itself around its own labyrinth (the long sequence in each verse where Karen sings a complex two-octave line over fourteen bars without pausing for breath), trying its worst to convince itself that giving up on life is the best option, but the pain can scarcely be concealed, which is why Tony Peluso's fuzz guitar solos make such an impact (and provoked hate mail from MoR fundamentalists and even Adult Contemporary radio boycotts) since it expresses everything that Karen cannot dare to articulate; it also reminds us, not before time, that apart from Brian Wilson, the Beatles and Bacharach, Richard Carpenter's main early influence was Frank Zappa - were the Carpenters an extended Ruben And The Jets-type study of "easy listening"?

The segue/suite idea does not extend to side two, whether through loss of interest or other reasons, but this side does spotlight the duo's attempts to pick themselves up again. "Yesterday Once More," their biggest British hit single, was allegedly inspired by the revival of interest in pre-Beatle pop at the time (and if so it anticipated American Graffiti and Happy Days, even though it didn't dare get its hands dirty) but there seems to be a much greater process of mourning at work in the song. It contradicts itself - Karen sings of happy times but then says that these old songs can make her cry "just like before"; and who are those "they" to whom she first sang them? A word here for Joe Osborn's bass, which effectively provides a third "voice" throughout the Carpenters' work; on "Yesterday" he is particularly inspired, virtually weeping behind Karen in the first verse before blossoming out (and note also the importance of the Farfisa organ, just before the climax to "Goodbye To Love" and throughout "Yesterday"). It sounds to me as though they are looking to recapture or retrieve something greater and deeper than golden oldies, and for the complete picture I would really have to refer you to side two of Now And Then, wherein the song bookends a long medley of oldies (complete with Peluso's camp DJ routine and 'phone-in quiz). Since the song made number two here as a single, I will leave detailed analysis to Lena, but in passing I would merely note that, the Beach Boys' "Fun Fun Fun" notwithstanding (and even that was recorded on New Year's Day 1964), there is nothing in the oldies medley beyond the autumn of 1963 and that, redone in the 1973 style, the old songs sound sterile to the point of being scary.

They do a fair job on Carole King's "It's Going To Take Some Time" with Karen's new love resolutions ("I can't make demands...I'll learn how to bend") marred only by a clumsy modulation after Bob Messenger's flute solo. Then the forlorn "Sing" despite the efforts of the Jimmy Joyce Children's Choir (read what you will into that name) - the first time that the voices of actual members of Generation X (the generation/movement, not the Bromley punk band) are heard in this tale - and then "For All We Know" with Osborn's high-pitched, questioning bass; unlike the fairly unambiguous path of "We've Only Just Begun," this song is sung in the foreknowledge that everything might not be perfect (as emphasised by Karen's strange English pronunication of the word "know"; see additionally her "down" on "Ticket To Ride" and her "over" on "Top Of The World") and so happiness seems as elusive as ever.

"Hurting Each Other" dates from 1965 - originally recorded by Jimmy Clanton, subsequently covered by inter alia Chad Allan and the Expressions (who eventually mutated into the Guess Who) and the Walker Brothers - and is the nearest the record gets to open emotional candour; it's the only point where the kettle threatens to boil. The song was clearly built for Scott's roller-coaster baritone but Karen puts extra measures of pain and bewilderment into the song, finally climaxing in something not far away from a shout: "CAN'T WE STOP? GOTTA STOP!"

And so the record stops, save but to welcome back the opening theme and the song where it all, effectively, began for the Carpenters - and, again, it was a song with a history dating back to 1963 - and it still sounds immaculate and felt, so much so that you don't realise that, far from being a happy ending, she doesn't have him; "Just like me, they long to be...close to you." Her contralto is as lost as ever but the musical cushion is impeccable; Richard's harpsichord, barely perceptible underneath the piano, Chuck Findley's cheeky Herb Alpert tribute in the break, above all the oceanic "Waaaaaaaah!" which feels like the singer's head emerging above water for the first time, having scuttled underwater, searching for she knows not what, and feeling the warmth of the sun (you see the Beach Boys subtext sneaking in there again?) - the song is about breathing in fresh air for the first time, the Girl in the Bubble breaking out and connecting with the world. Or so she hopes. Happiness is as uncatchable a horizon as ever (and we'll be getting back to that horizon) but you know that she is intently thinking about these songs, even as she sings them - and what are the two of them really thinking? I sense the Carpenters' key work as a kind of numbed, shellshocked reaction to something that has been lost - and in the world of Watergate in particular, we feel, underneath the layers of smoothness, a rumble; perhaps even a buried rage, on the part of a people who felt that those who were supposed to govern them and watch over them had just packed up and left with their money. SMiLE - which the Carpenters can't not have heard - may yet prove the other end of this telescope.

Perry COMO: And I Love You So

2011-10-02T18:58:00.001+01:00

(#138: 26 January 1974, 1 week)

Track listing: And I Love You So/Killing Me Softly With Her Song/For The Good Times/Aubrey/Sing/I Want To Give (Ahora Que Soy Libre)/Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Ole Oak Tree/I Thought About You/It All Seems To Fall Into Line/I Believe In Music

Though recorded in Nashville and produced by Chet Atkins, who also provides excellent lead guitar throughout, this isn't really a country album, but there are indications that someone was trying to do something interesting with, or exploit otherwise hidden emotions in, Como. It isn't quite Perry Sings The Great Hits Of Today, although the song choices are for the most part not obvious or hackneyed, and I have to be careful not to claim this to be an MoR equivalent of Grievous Angel. However, the seeming lack of adventure and surfeit of contentment in Como are both superficial and misleading factors, and this collection for the most part finds him, of the surviving great Italian-American balladeers, far more comfortable with the then-present than Dean Martin (who by now had almost given up on recording, essaying a reticent collection of twenties and thirties songs which Reprise couldn't find it in themselves to put out until 1978), Sinatra (on the comeback trail with Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back, now with a sardonic and resentful roughness in his voice which often led to an unwholesome sense of superiority in his performance, the winning vulnerability now almost entirely absent) or Tony Bennett (who indeed in 1970 did record a collection entitled Tony Sings The Great Hits Of Today! under pressure from CBS, from which he almost immediately recoiled and returned to jazz).

Part of the clue as to why this should happen may lie with one of the two arrangers engaged on the record; respected Nashville veteran Cam Mullins orchestrated four of the selections (including the title track), but the remaining six were done under the direction of Bergen White. The latter was by this time well into an illustrious Nashville career, but had (also in 1970) recorded the extraordinary collection For Women Only (for contemporaneous developments in American avant-MoR, see also records such as Van Dyke Parks' Song Cycle, Richard Harris and Jimmy Webb's The Yard Went On Forever, Randy Newman's 12 Songs, Lou Christie's Paint America Love, early Nilsson passim, etc.) featuring elaborate internal dialogues between voice and orchestra such as "Let Me Stay Awhile" and "If It's Not Asking Too Much," even venturing into murder ballad territory with "The Bird Song." The experiment was not repeated, but much of its emotion must have stayed with White; compare, for instance, For Women Only's treatment of David Gates' song "Gone Again" with Como's reading of Gates' "Aubrey" here; in both performances, the strings (and in Como's case the flute) do not quite let the singer rest, rather compel the singer to dig deeper into his possibly self-inflicted grief. This Como does - with some inevitable reminders of Scott Walker - with subtle aplomb; note how each verse climaxes in a vaguely despondent, wordless hum. "Aubrey," first heard on Bread's Guitar Man album in 1972, is a complex song, worrying around the notion of a lost, or perhaps non-existent, love, and Como approaches its self-questioning with considerable emotional restraint; his resigned coupling of "moon" with "but where was June?," his slow emphasis on the "came" of "It never came around."

This was bold territory in which to place Como, and it is possible that his absolute, unshakable but relaxed command and self-confidence perhaps work against the record's effectiveness, but this should be placed against the attempts of White and Mullins to coax him gently out of his comfort zone. In this setting one has to imagine Como with suicidal ideations, or having just come out of prison, or engaging in one-night stands, or being a shit, and since none of these is imaginable in Como's case - you cannot even picture him stealing an apple from the grocer's box aged four - the record does sometimes lend itself towards hotel lobby blandness, and in one case worse; White's "Tie A Yellow Ribbon" is an exhausted miscalculation, as though both singer and arranger realised that nothing could be done with this song, thus the reversions to cliche (the Terry And June flute and muted trumpet unisons) and the absence of destination in a song about travelling back home; the crucial "whole damn bus is cheering" is rendered as merely another stop on the endless treadmill, there is no "I'm coming home" fadeout - the bus merely vanishes into the distance.

But most of the record deserves better attention. It bore two major hit singles in the UK - the title track remained in our charts for nine months, and "For The Good Times" for just over six - on the crest of a considerable revival of interest in Como's work, but neither performance is exactly reassuring. The Don McLean-penned title track, for instance, appears to purr contently on its bed of marimbas, but the song is about someone with a dark past, who has known hell and despondency, and is quietly liberated about having life and love returned to him. But Como needs to display no exhibitions of outward ecstasy; his central emphasis on the line "I'm happy that you do" expresses the hardest of won peaces. Likewise, the Kris Kristofferson song had previously been a US country number one in 1971 for Ray Price, who sings this sequel to "Help Me Make It Through The Night" with slightly bemused anxiety (he knows he's being a cad but is trying to cover it up), whereas Como approaches the extended, elegiac farewell to his temporary lover with the same rich exhaustion as the Nixon of Watergate ("...and make believe you love me one more time/For the good times") - a slow, awkwardly stately retreat from a gaze which may be from his lover, or from the uncomprehending world.

In between these twin peaks, one notes the ingenuity of following up a Don McLean song with a song written about Don McLean. White's one-note strings and backing vocals introduction begins promisingly enough, but Como cannot get comfortable with the song, and at many points one suspects that he is singing more of himself than of any muse (for instance, his "I felt all...embarrassed by the crowd"). In addition, his changes of emphasis in the choruses, where the "with her song" and "with her words" do not exist independently, and rhetorically, of the "killing me softly" but rather roll on regardless, dilutes the performance's emotion. Yet he remains capable of altering his mood with near-imperceptible subtleties, for example when he casually runs "...in all my dark despair" into the slight smile of "like I wasn't there." The cymbal which regularly and threateningly hisses, like a strayed snake, throughout the performance also suggests emotional imbalance. All in all, side one is a surprisingly turbulent (in its slowly burning manners) emotional ride, and by the time Como reaches the ebullient "Sing" with its encouragement of good over bad and happy over sad, he finds himself unable to shake off the residual sadness.

Emotions arguably magnify in the record's second half; "I Want To Give" (arranged by Mullins) may be the keynote performance. Here Como finally lets it come out (as far as he was diplomatically able to do so); his "I beg of you to listen to my heart," his plea "to make a world that cannot fall apart," complete with the Hollywood motion picture ending, suggests a tired God singing (his repeated, and increasingly desperate, "if you'd just let me"s). Thereafter he falls back into reserved mode; "I Thought About You" is not the song on Songs For Swingin' Lovers but moves Como into the unlikely arena of funk-lite, complete with a fuzzed guitar solo (possibly the closest Como ever came to rock), over which Como sings such thoughts as "Once I even thought of dyin'..."; his final "Most of alllll...IiiiiiiIII thought" is shaky and trembling; is he prepared to crack that mirror? Not quite, as it turns out; "It All Seems To Fall Into Line" is a middle-aged variant on "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" and throughout the song Como patiently annotates the gradual stages of decline and collapse in the relationship with a suppressed sob which only really becomes palpable in his delivery of the song's final two lines.

Still, it is important to end each side on an attempted high, and it is significant that the album is programmed such that each side ends with a restatement of the transformative power of music in itself; Como approaches Mac Davis' "I Believe In Music" with genuine enthusiasm, over snappy electric guitar and strings (and eventually handclaps). He sings of something like salvation ("Find out what it really means to be young, rich and free!") and takes the record out on a relative high. And that is what must have appealed to its audience (the album stayed on our lists for over two years and, in a manner entirely compatible with Como's smart casual approach, slowly climbed up the chart for six months before topping it) - life then was tough and unhappy, and people were despairing, or simply bored, but the message was simple and far from plain; believe in music, agree that music is oxygen, and we'll all get by somehow. There are worse sentiments for a popular record to convey.

YES: Tales From Topographic Oceans

2011-09-22T18:11:00.004+01:00

(#137: 5 January 1974, 2 weeks)

Track listing: The Revealing Science Of God (Dance Of The Dawn)/The Remembering (High The Memory)/The Ancient (Giants Under The Sun)/Ritual (Nous Sommes Du Soleil)

It begins, as so many records of this period begin, with electronic howling winds ("Sounds like the Arctic!" remarked Lena). Eventually a lonesome guitar comes stumbling - or tripping? - into the picture, playing some lonesome single notes, like Hank Marvin stranded at the North Pole. This is an agreeable enough, if entirely unoriginal, beginning, but then the rest of the band comes in and I can't tear myself away from the knowledge that Jon Anderson's Accrington voice, possibly slightly speeded up for the record, bears an uncomfortable resemblance to that of George Formby. Then they start chanting...

It had been going well enough up until that point but then a young man in the audience raised his hand. and asked: "Are you going to be doing this with every bloody record?"

Baffled, I replied: "What do you mean?"

"Going through it minute by minute, word by word, note by note, gesture by gesture, until you've wrung all the surprise and beauty out of it? Three years we've been here now, and where have you got us? What have we learned? You're the sort who thinks that Concise is the capital of Nebraska. You're killing these records!"

Calmer, I responded: "It's killing something, but never the music. What you have to grasp is that this is, in great part, a detective story, a mystery; I'm trying to find something, and to do that I have to go through all the evidence that's available to me. Including, I might add, the ancient trick of conjuring up somebody in an imaginary (or is it?) audience - the Unreliable Listener, I could call you - in order to get things a bit, or a lot, further. The peril is the risk of missing something that might be the answer. Take your time; despite what the rest of the world tells you, it's there for the taking."

"But it's still killing something?"

"That in itself is the greater mystery, and unless you stay with me for the ride, you'll never see the solution. But rest assured that one aim is to get rid, or abolish, or force to abdicate, something that has been holding music down, and by extension us down, for far too long - so long that it has almost starved us. Patience, my twenty-one-year-old self, patience!"

With that he resignedly sat down, and drifted temporarily out of this story. But a deeper source of his pain and anxiety made itself apparent to me by re-listening to Tales From Topographic Oceans, namely that rarely - at least, so far - has a number one album been so anxious and meticulous to prove itself, and yet so shambolic in the proving. A double album, one track per side, which followed quickly on a triple live set, and would itself be succeeded later in the year by a three-song concept album (Relayer, which is cryptically alluded to within the misty midst of "The Remembering"). At their peak, they were as prolific and long-winded as any blogger!

Listening to it now, I feel variously boredom, frustration, annoyance and sympathy. Its eighty-one minutes drag by as slowly as the sixty minutes of Down Drury Lane To Memory Lane, yet contain so many minute moments of invention, coherence and foretelling that it is irritating that the group did not seek to expand them further. But finally I sympathise because hitting Yes is like punching a peanut which thinks it is a coconut; these are, or were, honest lads trying their best to (as they doubtless saw and still see it) push music forward.

But side one's "Revealing Science" lays out all the flaws. There's the chant, then a synth sea shanty ("Maid Of Orleans"! Who says that fifteen-year-old Andy McClusky and Paul Humphreys weren't devouring this in their bedrooms?), and then a random grab-bag of styles which could almost be termed postmodern or even prophetic, except that such an ingenious ploy is plainly outside the group's scope; they think they're writing Beethoven's Tenth. Thematically, it's the trusty old where-is-the-world-going meme, with several references to raping the forest, an unusual concentration on the word "moment" which seems to serve as a baton for changing musical gears, and reams of woolly semi-thinking about saving the world. They try their hand at folk-rock, space rock, even some pale fusion (but they most certainly are not Weather Report; see 1974's Mysterious Traveller by the latter for stark confirmation) and some old school sixties beat echoes; inevitably there are Peppery moments but ELP and especially the Moody Blues, with that damned mellotron, are recalled far more speedily. It cranks up for a rockout, then Rick Wakeman takes it down again with some cocktail Moog, and unlike the long Abbey Road medley, with which it shares a certain boue ("What happened to this song we once knew so well?"), there is no real sense of continuity or true cohesion.

The opening of "The Remembering" meanders forever - Chris Squire's bass is by far the most interesting thing going on here, and little wonder that the twenty-something Trevor Horn, then compelled to play "Tie A Yellow Ribbon" every night in a cabaret band, wanted to be him (and indeed sound like Anderson) - before settling again for mish-mash; there is a recurring synth leitmotif, meant to represent the topographic oceans but seemingly dropped into the piece at random. Again there is the ying and yang of loud bit followed by quiet bit, with essays in medieval lutism and touchy prog workouts, concluding in layered choirs and missed profundity. Lyrically it wanders around the plains of non-specific yeasaying, including a passing reference to Anderson's school days ("School gates remind us of our class"). But again there are touches of things greater; early in the lengthy instrumental introduction, Howe does something on his guitar, or touches the right pedal, which appears to invent the Cocteau Twins. Elsewhere there are echoes of the Beach Boys - "Sail On Sailor" as it might have been in abler hands - and more semi-random scrabblings building the path to Architecture And Morality. But all of these last but a few seconds apiece before being swept away in the next guitar solo, or Moog flourish. The album is half done, and that is not merely a statement about its duration.

"The Ancient" gives the group the chance for the obligatory percussive workout (I keep using the word "workout" in relation to this record, but it really does raise the same feelings as a listless day in the office). Despite Squire's valiant efforts to marry Jack Bruce with Stanley Clarke, this isn't exactly On The Corner in terms of world fusion as meltdown. In his sleevenote, Anderson talks about the piece being influenced by "lost civilisations, Indian, Chinese, Central American, Atlantean." Atlantean? Now hold on a minute; just because you call a track on your first solo album "Moon Ra" doesn't mean you are fit to wipe Sonny Blount's brow (especially if, so unlike Sun Ra, you are entirely lacking in humour), particularly in one of the many moments on this track when the band audibly feel as though they want to burst into "Atlantis" by the Shadows. We eventually encounter a beached whale of a rhythm track - puffing, bloated, oleaginous - over which Steve Howe does his best to get Robert Fripp chatting with Mike Oldfield (there is more than a fair scent of Tubular Bells throughout the record as a whole). And then there are more of these infuriating moments; two blink-and-miss-them upward harp-like flourishes that actually invent ZTT, a quietly probing guitar/echoplex/bass/drums interlude which foretells Bill Frisell's Power Tools a decade and a half later, even some Eno-with-a-Royal-College-of-Music-diploma Moog hisses from Wakeman. But then it's medieval time again, followed by a century-long Paco Pena tribute from Howe on his trusty acoustic. And then it rocks up again, and then it dies down. You could set your electricity meter by it.

"Ritual" is by far the best-structured of the four tracks, although everything is relative, since it begins with what could pass for a soundtrack to a BBC East Anglia documentary about sailing, presented by Cliff Michelmore, before moving into a melodic variant on "Gasoline Alley" for its main motif. Squire does a showoff bass solo. Then some more quiet. Then a dry run for the Police with some underlying evidence of 1964 Beatles still present (Squire's very McCartney-ish bass under the "at all" section). Then some Pet Sounds organ. Then a 5/4 rockout within which you can sense the band's collective urge just to say fuck it and move into "Louie Louie" (and it was largely Anderson and Howe's project; Wakeman spent most of his time in the studio hanging out with Black Sabbath next door, who were busy recording Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, before heading to the pub to play darts with Ozzy. Now Howe thinks he's Carlos Santana, but Caravanserai this is not (there's no joy). The music stops abruptly. Then a "Workshop" hammer n' tools percussive marathon, which I'm sure was great fun to play - actually it stops halfway between "Workshop" and "Antmusic." Then Wakeman revives his old "Space Oddity" tropes. Did I hear some scratching there? No, it's Rick trying to be Eno again. The mood now is one of an Anne Boleyn Secondary attempt at "Interstellar Overdrive" (you can smell the wood polish, see the teachers sitting with patient faces frozen in rictus smiles; Lena thought it was more like incidental music for The Six Million Dollar Man). Then we move back to unaccompanied, electric Howe. Anderson tries out for Jon and Vangelis - if I've studiously avoided analysing his lyrics here, it really is because I don't feel anything can be gleaned or learned from them; there are all the non-committal Moody Blues greetings card homilies about opening your eyes to see the sun, etc., some cod French, a confusing bit of business about whether he's going to call us or not, and finally lyrics which must have been threaded threefold through Babelfish (if only Babelfish had existed at the time, but really: "Look me my love sentences move dancing away"? "Hold me, around, lasting our"?), although the old calling still seeps through: "Hold me, my love, hold me," and, of course, "Flying home/Going home" (Anderson's multitracked harmonies do, admittedly, conjure up the Byrds). There is some liquidy piano, then a Tubular Bells-style build-up which wimps out at the last second and ends quietly, unresolved and unmoving.

So who bought this, apart from students and five-leaves-left stoners? Was it a quiet fortnight, or was its number one status the result of well-meaning Christmas gifts to teenage children? I can easily believe that the supposed epic nature of Oceans would look and sound big enough to beguile listeners just starting out, yet to learn about things like Future Days and Rock Bottom. Except that Yes had already, and repeatedly, proved that, when disciplining themselves, they were capable of superb songs: "Yours Is No Disgrace," "Roundabout" and "I've Seen All Good People" being only the three most obvious examples. Wakeman for one had had enough (but in truth he is hardly on there) and quit Yes after the record. But that distant pyramid, the lunar relics, the navy-blue sky - it was all an escape from grey, disappointing Britain. I still cannot work out what, if anything, the musicians on this record were striving to achieve, but after enduring its length we put on Aretha's Amazing Grace and it struck us that the title track achieved everything (and more) that Yes had been straining so hard to match; the effortless and natural move from one style to another, the unquenchable emotional openness, the happiness and laughter which comes from connecting with the world, even when it seems at its worst. So you see, the search, the ambition - both need to continue if a happy resolution, and perhaps even an ending, is to be reached.

Elton JOHN: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

2011-09-15T11:48:00.005+01:00

(#136: 22 December 1973, 2 weeks)

Track listing: Funeral For A Friend (Love Lies Bleeding)/Candle In The Wind/Bennie And The Jets/Goodbye Yellow Brick Road/This Song Has No Title/Grey Seal/Jamaica Jerk-Off/I've Seen That Movie Too/Sweet Painted Lady/The Ballad Of Danny Bailey (1909-34)/Dirty Little Girl/All The Girls Love Alice/Your Sister Can't Twist (But She Can Rock 'N Roll)/Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting/Roy Rogers/Social Disease/Harmony

A double album wasn't really what he wanted, but he did it anyway in the hope that it might count as both of the two albums he was contractually obliged to supply to DJM each year. No dice, said Dick James, we need another one; the musician had been hoping for a rest, but his situation - that of becoming the most recognised and famous pop musician on the planet - was no longer allowing for such luxuries. On the other hand, you could view GYBR as a spilling repository of everything that Elton John knew in 1973, all that he was absorbing; work on the record began in Jamaica (following the Stones' trail) but heavy manners in Kingston (the Foreman/Frazier fight happened while he was there) compelled a return to France. Thence (via Taupin) came recollections and reconstructions of things and people he had known in his life, the old and new music coming at him like an unending stream of snowballs. Remember that the artist capable of sensitive character studies involving Marilyn Monroe and Roy Rogers also, at some point in 1973, pranced around in a 190-pound gorilla suit onstage with Iggy and the Stooges in Atlanta. Interviews of the period do not picture a particularly happy or satisfied Elton, but then the end of 1973 was not a particularly happy or satisfying time; a ruin of Nixon, oil shortages, strikes, power cuts, curtailed working weeks - a time when one wondered whether Britain wasn't really happier with ration books, that self-denial was a national pastime as well as this nation's fatal flaw. The title track of GYBE alone fit perfectly into such imperfection with its impossible yearning; if you can't imagine multimillionaire Elton forsaking penthouse for plough (and horny-backed toads in Britain?) then remember that everyone has their own version of the blues, and do not forget the Floydian poignancy of those long guitar arcs and anti-rainbow vocal harmonies. "When are you going to come down? When are you going to land?" - sometimes it seemed that everything in 1973 was a homage to Syd (and yet it was this song, of all songs, which moved the young Axl Rose to think about considering a career as a singer).

GYBE does a good job of summarising 1973's main trends; the movietoned nostalgia of David Cassidy, the glam of Bowie, the marooned mystery of Roxy, the general "where do we go from here"ness of That'll Be The Day, the politely stuck-out tongue of Alice Cooper, the inescapable shadow of the Moon. But while the record reminds us that John and Taupin remained, at least at this stage, petit maitres rather than large-scale conceptualists, the long stadium synth rock of its eleven-minute opener suggests that a grander notion had initially lodged in their minds. Done in collaboration with David Hentschel, "Funeral For A Friend" begins where Quadrophenia might have left off, complete with portentous wind howls, tolling bells and morose lead melody. The endless piano crescendos and intrusions of tympani and castanets, however, suggest a path forward, even if to (in equal parts) Bat Out Of Hell (Davey Johnstone went on to work in Meatloaf's backing band) and War Of The Worlds. Into this picture - perfect for building up anticipation for The Star's arrival on stage - John enters, whereupon the song immediately switches into a tough, fast rocker, Dee Murray and Johnstone in particularly stern form. His girl has left him, and the song careers somewhere between Sinatra's "Cottage For Sale" and "Wichita Lineman" ("You're a bluebird on a telegraph line"), running straight through "Ziggy Stardust" ("But my guitar couldn't hold you/So I split the band").

The sequence sets the tone for a long, varied and entertaining journey - but the latter is not necessarily what we get. The album's first third is more or less faultless; "Candle In The Wind" as a third-hand threnody to a fussy departed spirit works better, I think, as a candlelit bedsit meditation on youth and incipient sexuality than as an elegy of national lament; I was in Westminster Abbey, in a professional capacity, when he performed the rewrite a lifetime later, and although the emotion dormant in him was unquestionable and evident, the square-pegging felt awkward, like an old family snapshot blown up to cover the walls of a skyscraper. Here the intimacy and self-doubt are not sacrificed or exercised beyond their capacity. "Bennie And The Jets," an unexpected number one single in the USA ("We decided to put it out because it was the Number One black record in Detroit"), is the record's most defiantly futuristic and aggressive moment (but note the unusual aggression of drums, bass and piano throughout "Candle"); drawing on and expanding the Bowie/Ziggy template, the song is simultaneously all-inclusive and isolating - what are these curiously disconnected handclaps and whoops on what palpably isn't a live recording (as it turned out, the main handclap loop was sampled from Hendrix's 1970 Isle of Wight concert, with other effects from various recorded Elton gigs)? Moreover, those calls of "We'll kill the fatted calf tonight" and "Let us take ourselves along/Where we fight our parents out in the streets/To find who's right and who's wrong") go further down the path of insurrection than John or Taupin ever ventured, before or afterwards; it's a British cousin to/anticipator of Rundgren's "Just One Victory" (1973 also being the year of A Wizard/A True Star, that unparalleled unravelling and reconstructing of pop history); there is even the hint that this is really what John and Taupin wanted to do all along, kick down and get dirty. Note the odd, stinging outbursts of organ at song's end, the residual sense of futurism, and that Prince was, in 1973, fifteen. After the diversion of "This Song Has No Titles," all Mellotron melancholy with Beach Boy-ish backing vocals, "Grey Seal" is a terrific Procol Harum word-puzzle propeller with its artful, perspective-altering bridge between verse and chorus, although we still appear to be at the movies ("On the big screen they showed us a sun/But not as bright in life as the real one").

If the album had remained at this level and gone straight to "Your Sister Can't Twist," we would be looking at a pretty unassailable classic. Alas, the six songs which comprise the record's centre bring with them what I can only describe as a "Willem Dafoe moment," i.e. that point in a perfectly good film - Wild At Heart or The English Patient, say - when Dafoe arrives as a supporting character and immediately turns the movie into a glutinous mess. Worse, these songs expose John and especially Taupin's limitations. There is no need to go into any of them in detail, except to say in passing that "Jamaica Jerk-Off" was a bad idea even at the time, that "I've Seen That Movie" is an overblown overexposure of the movie motif complete with weepy guitar solo, would-be epic strings and "passionate" vocalising, notable only for being a partial musical precursor of "Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word," that the utterly stupid songs about prostitution and lesbianism rank among the worst and most misguided to have so far occurred in this tale (complete with unwarranted algae of pseudo-moral outrage), that I am not encouraged to find out anything more about Danny Bailey, and that Elton's vocals become angrier and less coherent with the lesser material with which he has to work. No vigilant record company boss would have spared the secateurs.

To prove what a great single album this would have been, John and Taupin rally round in the final third with noticeable regaining of quality; "Your Sister Can't Twist" is a wonderfully pseudo-dumb rocker, John's piano sounding particularly joyous, with its exhortations to "Throw away them records 'cause the blues is dead" and the Farfisa organ placing the song (essentially an "At The Hop" derivative) somewhere between Johnny and the Hurricanes, American Gladiators and Blondie. "Saturday Night," meanwhile, is Elton's most convincing straight rocker and comfortably outrocks anything on Goats Head Soup; note how the prog-rock organ is swiftly wiped out by Jerry Lee piano dips with the advent of every chorus, and Johnstone's rollercoaster guitar riff sliding perfectly into the shouty fadeout. "Social Disease" works where the albun's midriff doesn't, largely because of its effortless humour, its claps and whoops, and John's hysterical vocal, landing between Randy Newman and a particularly frisky Leo Sayer ("Dis-e-EEEEEE-eeeese!"). The closing "Harmony" unexpectedly finds John in the same place as Bryan Ferry at the end of Stranded; out there on the sea, blissfully landlocked, and not without its winks of escape ("In any case I set my own pace/By stealing the show - say hello, hello").

But "Roy Rogers" cuts the deepest, and proves that John and Taupin's talents lay in the immaculate miniature portrait rather than the sweeping gesture; in its contemporary reflections it is the mirror song to "Candle" and as an end-of-every-big-thing piece it ranks with Richard Thompson's contemporaneous "End Of The Rainbow." Here Taupin gets it absolutely right; the nine-to-five guy who knows that life has passed him by, who's too tired or insensate or trapped to change anything, who's wondering what all that promise of the sixties was for, whose only connection to life is watching the old cowboy films on TV. Weep with Johnstone's steel guitar as it drops off in agony after John sings the line "While the wife and the kids are in bed" - the hopeless Dividend Stamp greyness of late 1973 Britain is perfectly captured; this, let us not forget, is the world from which BS Johnson had just absented himself. Nothing for it but to bury oneself, in hiding from commitment, in the memories of when he wasn't required to be responsible or careful. But note the "let's shoot a hole in the moon" warning, and the "hit the hilltop" near the end, both of which lead to the nuclear siren drone which actually ends the song. The past is one thing, but the future has to live, too. In the meantime, there was another album to be recorded, another responsibility to be fulfilled. Wasn't he already nostalgic for a time when he didn't have to do so much work, when the yellow brick road was safely distant from him, up in that beckoning light?

David CASSIDY: Dreams Are Nuthin' More Than Wishes...

2011-09-01T18:49:00.003+01:00

(#135: 15 December 1973, 1 week)

Track listing: Opening Music/Daydream/Sing Me/Bali Hai/Mae/Fever/Summer Days/The Puppy Song/Daydreamer/Some Old Woman/Can't Go Home Again/Preyin' On My Mind/Hold On Me

"I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand"
(Edgar Allan Poe, "Dream Within A Dream")

"If you try you will find me
Where the sky meets the sea"
(Rodgers and Hammerstein, "Bali-Hai")

"Until we meet again kiddies it's all over now baby blue..."
(David Cassidy, from his sleevenote to Dreams Are Nuthin' More Than Wishes...)

Whatever did happen to Billy Bigelow Jnr. anyway? Well, he grew up like no one anticipated, even though it was his mother - that cautiously innocent voice which rings down from entries #2 and #4 (have we really only travelled seventeen years, or no distance at all?) - who led him into becoming famous. Famous, that is, to a point, one almost beyond bearability. By the end of 1973 The Partridge Family had been cancelled and the boy - if we can speak of this twenty-three-year-old as such - had already become half forgotten in his own home. He remarked that he felt as though he had been marketed like a packet of cornflakes. In Britain, however, he had never been more famous, and was never to be more famous; late 1973 caught him at both the peak and the end of his popularity, a situation which necessitated his being smuggled into studios in laundry baskets to do television, a live following which would end in fatality in only a few months. He wasn't, in short, happy, and the surface happiness of this record does little to conceal the abyss of despair lying beneath.

The record already seemed like a lost relic in its own time; there on the cover is David and his Dalmatian, on the rear David's head rising wetly out of the water as though already auditioning for the cover of Fourth Drawer Down, in the middle David's track-by-track sleevenote, in his own junior doctor's handwriting, complete with drawings. With the record also came a separate print, of Bruno Piglhein's 1925 painting Pals, a rather forlorn watercolour featuring a naked girl and a black Labrador, sitting side by side by a river with their backs to us. The only reason this doesn't qualify for a hauntology label is that it's difficult to see what messages the record is sending us two generations later, other than those to do with the singer's state of mind.

It is not an easy record, either, and one can only marvel at the loyalty of the fans which surely must have sent it to number one. Loosely structured as a song cycle (although it is neither Cassidy's Pepper nor his What's Going On?), the record begins with a snippet of the closing track, "Hold On Me," in which the singer makes the following observation:

"Although life is a serious game,
Was it I who played wrong?
Do I belong to the small few
Who get lost in the race
Who still seem to pretend
When their daydream ends?"

And before he can reflect any further, the record immediately sways into John Sebastian's "Daydream," the beginning of his time. Dominated by Michael Omartian's tack piano (and the musicians appearing throughout Dreams are the best Cassidy could buy; Larry Knetchel, James Burton, John Guerin, Kim Carnes, Michael McDonald, Victor Feldman and very many more besides. The music is downhome luxurious), Cassidy speaks (in his sleevenote) of first hearing the song in 1966, stuck on the Long Island Expressway in 105-degree heat - a situation more in keeping with the Lovin' Spoonful's follow-up, the pre-apocalyptic "Summer In The City"). He gets into a sort of swing but despite his deprecations (near the end he speaks "Makes. Me. Feel. So. Good") he is not quite in the realm of happy.

In "Sing Me" he goes even further back, citing Kitty Kallen's "Little Things Mean A Lot," musing about his mother "posin' like Marilyn Monroe" (thus Dreams becomes the first of two consecutive anguished number one albums to mention Monroe), his father holding him up at the beach, "Life was a joy, I never got old," followed by the crushing self-revelation that he is fated to get old, particularly when he turns four and a new baby brother arrives home (whereupon he promptly flees on his bicycle). Backing singers plead, "Take me away." Back to a life without responsibilities, without fear, without retrograde selective nostalgia.

And then it is back to "Bali-Hai" and he sounds as though he is being born; he materialises through the ocean wave effects and Feldman's ghostly vibraphone, tracing himself back to the source of his pain, that special island that once promised everything. It is an exceptional reading, and if it sounds as though we are nearing Surf's Up or even Pacific Ocean Blue territory, you wouldn't be far wrong. He snaps out of his reverie, however, as reeling bass and congas rope him into "Mae," another song about mother fixation. Here Cassidy really shows his versatility - normally his voice is breathy, microphone-close, accentuating the sibilants, not that far from, of all singers, Cliff Richard - and his rumbling "warm and tender," his repeated self-hypnotising mantras of "I need you, Mae" (waves, swimming, back to the womb, it's all here; there is even a Van-esque abrupt holler of "ALL RIGHT!" as emotional breaktime) leading into Michael Jackson-predicting mutters and gasps ("HI need! HIII need!!") which in turn wander into barking abstraction.

The improvised take on "Fever" is also extraordinary; with its Superfly bass/piano unisons, its floating vibes/percussion echoes, its use of echoes and spaces, Cassidy's own unmoored vocal ("HIIIIII LIIIIIIGHT up!" he gasps at one point) above melodramatic drums and piano, it plays like a hook-up between Isaac Hayes and George Crumb. Had it been a long-lost track by, say, Terry Callier, Norman Jay would have been on its case decades ago. A superb climax to side one, only slightly lowered by the re-reading of the old Partridge tune "Summer Days"; despite this apparently being closer to Cassidy's original vision of the song, it doesn't make the song itself anything more than mediocre (as the lumbering, mistimed key change about a third of the way in highlights).

Then, however, it's side two, and the hits: Nilsson's "The Puppy Song" is treated generously, with spring coil percussion, vaudeville washboard, the tack piano again, and hopeful (though alas uncredited) clarinet, but none of this hides the song's rather starkly alienated nature; after all, he has neither a puppy nor (to extend the dog metaphor westward, as the song does) friends, and he is merely wishing for one so that "we can stay away from crowds" and from "signs that said NO FRIENDS ALLOWED." Likewise, "Daydreamer" ruffles into view atop Michael McDonald's warm Fender Rhodes grill, and one can clearly see how the ten-year-old George Michael would have, so to speak, got it, but the unwanted oneness is still non-detachable from the singer, and just when you think the song is all over, there comes the most pregnant of pauses, followed by: "I'm...just...a..." and that "a" sounds as though he is pulling down the rest of the world with him, closing ocarina solo or no. He recovers some ground, however, on Shel Silverstein's characteristically goofy "Some Old Woman" with his soul brother parody vocal ("It's a shame...HM!...it's a PITY!," his comedy growling of "wicked and WILD!," his perfectly-timed throat-clearing). He ends up roaring "LIES!" and nowhere else on the record does he sound as though he is having such an unalloyed good time.

But then comes the closing trilogy, and Cassidy's neck bends towards tragedy. Not that you would necessarily know that from the good-time ambience of the playing - the then-unknown Kim Carnes is rightly applauded by Cassidy for her tennis-match piano on "Preyin' On My Mind" - or the determinedly lighthearted nature of the sleevenote, but "Can't Go Home Again" spells it out as dismally as The Last Picture Show; he's back, and doesn't really know why, his mama calling his name, and his mind drifts into imperfect memory (the song, composed by Cassidy with Carnes and Dave Ellingson, was originally planned as an unending list of memories, sightings and insights relating to "this boy's lost track"); the old dreams, the absences (Tom who ran the picture show is long gone), the fact that "a double-deck cone don't cost a dime no more," maybe the record's saddest reflection, the final encounter with a crying street bum (whom he remembers from boyhood) who could easily be himself - turn, turn, back into the car, back to the station, if you can, there's nothing for anyone here, and Cassidy wishes above all else that he could simply be "anyone" before the music fades into a Bob James groove of comfort. "Preyin'" continues the theme with its musings about "the lonely old man passing through your town" although, as mentioned, Carnes' piano and backing vocals do their damnedest to punch some life back into the boy.

Finally, however, there proves to be no exit, except the last one; "Hold On Me" finishes the record as it began, and its sentiments are the record's darkest with its "set myself free" and Cassidy's most emotional vocal performance - "Circle closing in on me 'til I can't seem to see," "We're alone and we're broken...now don't we need loving?" (is this still, despite everything, 1969?) - until the original refrain returns and is turned into a reluctant singalong. "Do I belong to that small few that got lost in the race..."? Fittingly, the record itself became an absence; although its only slightly less troubled predecessor Rock Me Baby is still readily available, Dreams has not survived, available only (to mirror the beginning of 1973) as an expensive and hard-to-find Japanese CD. It feels like a dream from which Cassidy is unable to escape; waking up, he finds that he is still dreaming, and that dream is stardom, nothing like he expected. But can't those sands of seconds be turned into gold? How good could his grip be - or does he gladly sink into responsibility-abolishing oblivion? Not quite, for he has survived and endured; nevertheless, this record reminds us of the pain waiting for everyone when the carousel opts to stop, or is stopped.

"Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream."
(Poe, op. cit.)

ROXY MUSIC: Stranded

2011-08-24T18:52:00.002+01:00

(#134: 8 December 1973, 1 week)

Track listing: Street Life/Just Like You/Amazona/Psalm/Serenade/A Song For Europe/Mother Of Pearl/Sunset

"The Futurist Official dinner avoids the grave defects that pollute all official banquets:

FIRST: the embarrassed silence stemming from the fact that there is no pre-existing harmony between the table companions.
SECOND: the conversational reserve, owed to diplomatic etiquette.
THIRD: the moroseness produced by insoluble world problems.
FOURTH: the rancour of frontiers.
FIFTH: the low, wan, funereal and banal tone of the dishes."
(F T Marinetti, The Futurist Cookbook, 1932: trans. Suzanne Brill; San Francisco: Bedford Arts, 1989)

"I am for a life around the corner
That takes you by surprise"
(Roxy Music, "Manifesto," 1979)

There are recipes, and manifestos, and sometimes the division between the two is not as comprehensible as their shared unity. But think. Would it be worth it? It sounds revolting, potentially life-ending, too strange to look at, let alone try to eat. All these different, opposing ingredients. But take one bite, just the one. There will be such momentarily excruciating pain that you will briefly never want to come near it again, wish to run as far away from it as possible. But get past that wall of limitations, squeeze, push, burst beyond it, and you will experience delicacy and joy such as has barely been revealed to you in your years. The taste is catching, not really fatal; but there is a clear road, and two ways to travel - the past, and the future, the notions of nostalgia and consumerism, for your future lies in what you want, or are persuaded, to consume. Anything but to think about or stand in the present, with its awkward need for commitment and alternatives. Because sometimes the present is so unbearable that your feet might burn with the mere thought of living there.

But throwing it all together, and reorganising it into new and enriching shapes, is what it's all about. It? Or is it but a way to avoid thinking about the past, with all its torture disguised as retrospective candy? Or - and better - to look the past squarely in its reddening eye, laugh at it, or rather laugh with it (but why not both?) and nudge a future into existence? What if, like most of us, you're not at all sure where you want to go?

I think by the time of Stranded - and this is already The Third Roxy Music Album - Bryan Ferry had at least sketched out a draft of where he wanted to go. The mixing bowl has settled into a colour next door to concordance; Eno has already left and taken his flaming yellow with him. It's a wonder that either of the first two Roxy albums popped into pop; the eponymous debut laying out its agenda, then eating it into a symbiosis of King Crimson and Mike Westbrook's Solid Gold Cadillac that somehow cut deeper and worked warmer than either; side two of Roxy Music is like a photocopy of pop, muffed enough in the greys for unwary types to view it as "prog" (but didn't Ferry audition for the King Crimson singer job?). For Your Pleasure retains the dirty melancholy but gains more confidence; the vast Tara(ntula) plains of "Bogus Man" and the title track float with damaged Great Learning elegance (for Eddie Cochran was regarded as Cornelius Cardew's equal, and made better people's music into the bargain) while "Do The Strand" and "Editions Of You" spell out rock with a K for Kafka (and Kidd) and "In Every Dream Home" was coldly sweaty enough to christen the plasticity of prog anew.

But the end of 1973 was unjustly cold, dark and unforgiven. Here is where complete dissatisfaction with the present is made bare (if wired) in "Street Life," that least transparent of the season's Christmas hits with Paul Thompson's drums regularly tripping over themselves, finger snaps an oil scare away from The Addams Family and wavy line keyboards (stop feeling fascination?), Ferry growling, snapping, Little Richard wooooo-ing as though half a decade belting out "In The Midnight Hour" in toilets had to be paid back (and note the chewed-up "d"s and "l"s in the Billy Fury tradition). Anywhere - dreams of jet black angel fifties, Vassar debutante perfidity - is better than standing still ("You might be stranded if you stick around...and that's really something," concludes Ferry over a soundtrack that sounds like walking on hot coals).

There were other records around that related to Stranded, and ideally these should be heard in tandem: Ferry's solo These Foolish Things, a canny and canned exercise in emphasising the importance, majesty and continuity of popular song. Did anyone realise that "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" was such a great - and shocking - pop song before Ferry and David O'List got to work on their Spike Jones effects, and how naturally it fitted in next to Eric Maschwitz, or the whole Noel Coward thing? The comedy effects are put to subtler yet more ecstatic use on "Mother Of Pearl" - the single castanet which answers "flamenco," for instance. Then there is Eno's Here Come The Warm Jets. Much like Stranded, Warm Jets hovers lovingly over several differing variations of the same song and has no reserve or lack of wit about bashing different elements into each other, dodgem-style; thus the slo-mo poignancy of "On Some Faraway Beach" breaks straight into the punk sneer of "Blank Frank." "Baby's On Fire" sounds like rock trying to rescue itself from The Towering Inferno, whereas the tenderness of "Cindy Tells Me" meets its opposite, and match, in the determinedly ludicrous Ferry impressions on "Dead Finks Don't Talk."

What I'm trying to get at is that the Roxy Music of Stranded - and most of them were on both these records - walks a remarkable line in between the pop and popped extremes, even as its leader wrestles with his mind and Brylcreem. New keyboardist/violinist/electronicist Eddie Jobson was eighteen and fresh from Curved Air, and actually (or, at least, on this record) makes a better companion to Ferry, mainly because his lack of questions means greater concentration on how to soundtrack this mixture of woe and titillation. Some Roxy fans were disappointed by his work on "Amazona" and while it is true that the song's "weird" sections are clearly constructed with effort and skill, as opposed to the Connect 4 pot luck of Eno's anti-strategies, the interaction between Jobson and Phil Manzanera's guitar (albeit with Manzanera clearly taking the lead), coming out of the rapid 14/8 section, suggests the icy fallacy of the paradise to which Ferry is supposedly taking his partner, or hostage (although, with its references to "hollow sound" and "longings more profound," Ferry, as I think he is doing on "Serenade," may well be singing to, or about, Eno). Flashing blasts are finished by a serene Ferry hiccup and as they approach the drawbridge ("Journey's over - we're almost there!") the drums roll to a funereal stop and electrified bird whistles possess a false memory. "Serenade" flops along like a three-wheeled chariot with its fulminating Spector percussion - Fury doing Bowie's "Silly Boy Blue" sprung instantly to my mind - and Ferry (Ferry/Fury, and the two didn't look dissimilar) growls about G-plan gymnastics being of less meaning than the old mill stream in summer ("From courtly love to costly game"), even if, as any reader of George Eliot will know, the presence of an old mill stream does not preclude drowning. What does he want? "Will you swoon, as I croon your serenade?" he asks himself as much as, or more than, us.

Because this man is stranded; he is not quite undecided, but the tide is coming in, he can't make up his mind. Throughout Stranded he refers repeatedly to wasting time, and "wasting" can mean "in decay" here too (the latter is present in the "party-time-wasting" of "Mother Of Pearl," the more reflective meaning of decline in the "Do you disapprove how we've wasted my time?" of "Sunset"). At the beginning of "Amazona": "No more fall-out." As I said, anywhere and everywhere but here and now; and yet he can't live without it. Who could?

And yet Ferry can play tricks with time. If the transcontinental wanderings of "A Song For Europe" - which really play only in his head - will eventually become the falling-down buildings of "I Travel," if the ghosts of Sylvian are already making themselves feel in both "Song For Europe" and "Sunset," then the resemblance of the chord sequence of "Just Like You" to those of Blur's "Best Days" play like a blue prediction (those chords themselves being decidedly Kentish in the Robert Wyatt/Kevin Ayers sense), while the singer struggles not to fall in love, not to be overcome by it or to fall into it. Every time, fashion is pulled in as the culprit, just as it is on "Psalm," where it plays the role of a red herring. And yet, that sudden emotional eruption in the "How COULD..." section of "Just Like You" shows the momentary dropping of all masks.

Ferry is quite prepared to drop masks when needed (the snarl of "stepthroughthemirrorandSEE?" at the beginning of "Amazona") and to acknowledge that masks are not only needed a lot of the time but can also advance our case for living. "Mother Of Pearl" is a remarkable piece of music because he gruffly turns "pop" onto itself and forces it, and himself, to admit to real emotions, particularly happiness and joy, which the record had previously been doing its best to avoid. It begins waspish, the best Little Richard/New York Dolls jam session you never heard, with Ferry whooping, guitars, saxes and synths flying around his head like the artillery fire which will presently engulf Adam Fenwick-Symes at the close of Vile Bodies. But in comes a booming suburban James Earl Jones voice from nowhere: "HAVE YOU A FUTURE?" Shrieks Ferry in reply, "NO, NO, NO!" before the Voice corrects him with a firm and simple "YES."

And then he opens up, as the song slows to half-tempo, quoting "As Time Goes By," indulging in every sentimental gimcrack of a trope he can dredge up, knowing that this may yet be a dream of the firmest plastic...but he wants it, and her, as he allows awe to take over (Jobson's synth shiver which provokes Ferry's suddenly chloroformed "Steps right into-view"), as Andy Mackay's saxes honk like filled boots, and the Voice ("FU-TURE!") returns, before everything dips away towards Ferry's own voice, in a Newcastle club somewhere in 1964.

Newcastle - while Ferry was serving his art school/Gas Board apprenticeship, the thing was to be the Animals, but Roxy, though of similar instrumentation and talent distribution, appeared as a re-sexified Animals; sex thought of differently, and more colourfully, and more fervently - not that there's much talk of it here, but the breath of it is fetid enough to curtain any notions of overspent grief. As indeed is the spirit of Eno, hovering ambiently over the closing "Sunset," from the pre-ambient waterways which directly presage Another Green World to the unexpected poignancy of the Brian Wilson sleigh bells towards song's close, and the song is a hopeful and discreet closer, a record of a satisfied life closing down (Ferry's voice rises exultantly on "larks," glides effortlessly up and down an octave on the following "will sing"), the depth of his being underlined by Chris Laurence's magisterial bowed bass.

Perhaps the most palpable evidence of Eno's continuing grip on 1973 Roxy comes with "Psalm," which according to some sources was the first song Ferry wrote:

"'...On that occasion you told Bernard Stevens that you got no kick out of High Mass at some church or other in Patis because they went through the ceremonial and the music "as a formality" - those were your words. If you are religious it is your Protestantism, or if you aren't perhaps it's your British Way of Life that prevents understanding a faith which needs no exhibition of fervour.'"

(Constant Lambert, quoted in Arthur Hutchings' 1965 introduction to the former's Music Ho!)

Again he begins with fashion to trip up the unwary, and more importantly to prevent himself from believing, but as the song develops, with its straight piano and not quite straight-faced organ, his voice rises and chews on the second syllable of the word "sublime. A rhythm approximating broken-down R&B is introduced, Thompson drumming like Dannie Richmond, away from the centre. On the word "high," firecrackers explode as Ferry's voice dissembles into a single crystalline spark of electronics, violin, guitar and squealing alto. The drums steadily become more forceful, and even martial, as Ferry's surrender to faith grows more intense, and the London Welsh Male Choir quivers into being behind him. Ferry's "Op-EN-UP-your-EYES!" is simultaneously more exasperated and affectionate than Justin Hayward would have pitched it. At this point we notice how Manzanera, Mackay and Thompson have gradually turned the stately English background into a New Orleans gumbo shuffle, and also that the choir is singing in strange, unsettled tonalities (again there's something similar happening two years hence, namely Gavin Bryars' The Sinking Of The Titanic, which will appear on Eno's Obscure label). Everything boils forth, and Ferry is saved and convinced, or at least convincing us that he's been saved. An OMD drone awaits at journey's end.

Because the journey's beginning could scarcely have been more painful. Over thirty-eight years of familiarity with this record, "A Song For Europe" is always the one for which I reach first, and most fervently, because it spells out so many of the things I regard as essential to what can be understood as music, or even art (as though music weren't art); most tellingly because, if we view early Roxy Music as Al Bowlly trapped in a prog-rock band (the thirties trying to live within, and not merely with, the seventies), then we have to admit base emotion as being as profound as lofty speculation. Yes, it's a pisstake of Eurovision - some even say the song was anonymously submitted to the 1973 committee, although there is no real evidence that this ever happened - but it only uses pastiche as both shield and battering ram, to get through this stupid wall of plastic divisiveness, to admit that banal, crazy pop can quite a lot of the time get to the nub of things more handily than some higher art, but that a concept such as "A Song For Europe" could scarcely be imaginable without its high art carrot-masquerading-as-stick. He's sitting alone in an empty cafe - it could be in the shadow of Notre Dame, but then again it could be anywhere - thinking about someone who has gone, who isn't coming back (if there's any trace of the sixties in this record - potentially the first number one album of the eighties, never mind the seventies; the endless, futile search for "love" - the term "holy grail" even makes a climactic cameo in the midst of "Mother Of Pearl" - then it's in Jacques Brel filtered through Scott Walker) and, as a successor will do in a similarly climactic song of loss nine years hence, breaks down. "There's no more time for us" - a final response to West Side Story? - "There's no today for us," "My oyster [is] only a shell full of memories," "Now, only sorrow, no tomorrow." He closes down every escape route, but what else does the abandoned heart do when it has lost something central? And as mournful saxes, piano and guitar rise behind him, he intones the song's words, first in stentorian spoken Latin, and then in emotional French - his final cries of "Jamais! JAMAIS!" hardly offset or cancelled by his keep-us-guessing fading whistling. The point here is that sometimes you have to immerse yourself in "trash" to get to emotion, to express it directly, with candour and without cover, even if for half the span of a long-playing record you are playing hide and seek with emotion? Stranded, below and above all else, speaks for a future, one where high and low are revealed as two sides of the same, smiling coin, one where nothing is off limits or remote in terms of what can be reached or used; because, like Marinetti (but without his anti-Xenomania tirades), Ferry doesn't want to keep this an unruly mess; it is rather the basis for a new understanding of pop music, a different angle, a saltier taste. A style by which, against most odds, substance can be argued or sung into existence (the Futurism conceals, as it usually does, a Romanticism. Did somebody mention Keats?). The words here are as true as they would have been ten years ago, when I felt it necessary to begin writing in public, and five years ago, when Romanticism found, for me, a new purpose and a renewed meaning:

"never again, no, will I give up my heart
to gamble with fate is my crime
nevertheless love, it's all here in my book
I'd write it but don't have much time"
("Just Like You," Roxy Music)

Which then goes on to "I know it sounds crazy/But what can I do?/I've fallen head over heels over you," sung exactly as Adam Faith would have sung it. Faith, you can really see (all those "yes"es and "no"s in "Street Life"; "Mother Of Pearl" confirming that "yes" is the only final way to travel).

David BOWIE: Pinups

2011-08-18T17:50:00.003+01:00

(#133: 3 November 1973, 5 weeks)

Track listing: Rosalyn/Here Comes The Night/I Wish You Would/See Emily Play/Everything's Alright/I Can't Explain/Friday On My Mind/Sorrow/Don't Bring Me Down/Shapes Of Things/Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere/Where Have All The Good Times Gone

On several occasions throughout Aladdin Sane one gets the feeling that Bowie is trying to rectify the sixties, the history which by 1973 was already setting into boots of concrete. A sixties where, already, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop counted for more than anyone cared to reckon, where a furious reclamation of the Stones as improper punks could be essayed. Perhaps he felt the need to underline this mission further (if not necessarily deeper) or perhaps he was momentarily stuck for something to do after the end of Ziggy, but the reclaiming exercise attempted on Pinups speaks for elements of that decade with which I don't think too many people have still come to terms. With perhaps two or three exceptions, none of these songs in their original versions is revived on oldies radio. This is the world of flat-jawed, thuggish, nascent British R&B, a world in which many of its inhabitants felt that they were still playing jazz, bypassing the roll altogether to rock into a fairly frightening idea of the future.

Moreover, Pinups is the work of someone shut out of the epicentre by virtue of being that crucial three or four years too young; Bowie worked the clubs to some extent fronting the Lower Third and the King Bees but was always overshadowed by his elders. So Pinups is also a love letter penned by an only slightly disillusioned fan. Somebody who can't remember whether the Ricky-Tick was spelt with a "y" or an "i" is as devout a follower of his chosen movement as Thatcher must have been of Larkin's, with her "mind full of knives" misquote.

Commercially it did the business but was largely mocked by the critics; Bowie was accused of lacking passion, of applying a pop voice to R&B material beyond his ken, of ludicrously camping everything up. Yes, Bowie at his peak was always a pop looter, stealing bits of everybody's records and outfits and running off with them as though it were always Christmas. But, particularly in the dark light of the past ten days or so, Pinups offers, I feel, some of the most passionate singing Bowie has ever tried, and some of his most troubled singing, too. Van Morrison shrugs off "Here Comes The Night"; what the hell, I lost on this one, I'm a bit grouchy but there will be more nights to come. But Bowie sings it as though being booted about by a gang of baddies; against the Palais band saxophones he sounds like a wounded Lotte Lenya, screaming his hiccups, becoming gradually more and more desperate as he slowly grasps the extent of his loss. Likewise, "Everything's Alright," a top ten hit for the Mojos in 1964 but done by everyone on the circuit, sounds anything but all right; he shrieks and gurgles as pianist Mike Garson detonates any plans to turn the track into a Zeppelin prototype.

The two Yardbirds covers Bowie uses more obviously as Zep templates; on "I Wish You Would," Ronson's guitar sounds like a parody of the Jimmy Page to come, there are drunken harmonica/guitar unisons and police siren noises (thus also post-predicating "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago"), syllables exaggerated like spotlit goldfish, and the inevitable atom bomb ending. "Shapes Of Things" is a clearer seventies heavy rock adaptation ("Maybe a soul-DIAH!") although the mood is clouded by the gradual intrusion of desolate high string tones.

The pair of Pretty Things songs - they were perhaps the most thuggish of the lot - works well because they are played more or less straight, so much so that we can still see how the attack of "Rosalyn," both in rhythm and vocals, foresees Dr Feelgood and the Clash with rare acuity. But he can't quite get a grasp on the Who. With "I Can't Explain" he tries to turn '65 Pro-Plus rush into '73 glam stomp, with some rasping, ghostly sax, before flattening the song into a midtempo hard boogie crunch. Meanwhile "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere," a song practically impossible to cover, if purely because of the inbuilt failure of any attempt to revive the scarlet shock of the original, is handled comparatively timidly, with phased drums and Ronson working on the feedback, but only as a competent student. At a time when the Who themselves were looking back on their own history with Quadrophenia, and wondering whether to bury or incinerate it, Bowie's nods don't seem quite adequate, or diverting, enough.

"Sorrow," the hit single, is effective because of its photo-negative inversion of the ebullient horror of the Merseys' original; it suggests huge banks of emotion, with its lonesome violin and lacrimal saxophone, rather than the full-frontal brass assualt of the source, and manages both to cover and amplify some of Bowie's most heartfelt emotions on the reccord (even with his Jimmy Savile-esque "The OWNLEY thing I ever got from you"); his overlapping "I tried to find her 'cos I tried to find her" gets to the emotional nub (look at Twiggy, the cover suggests, see what the seventies have already done to her, how the mutating waves have hardened her, made her less approachable, more like...Bowie?). Its reverse is the brutal treatment handed out to "Friday On My Mind," in late '66 a handle for the Easybeats to work off some tension and drift out of office-dictated normality, but now a strange echo of the "rabbit" running in Dark Side Of The Moon becomes palpable as Bowie cries hysterically about how the working week, The Man, is crushing, squashing, strangling his life. His "even my old man is..." disappears into a murmur but he can barely hang onto the dead man's handle of the tube train; is this, his performance seems to suggest, all that we got from the sixties to take with us into the seventies (see also, needless to say, "5:15")? More of the same, but flashier-looking? Was it all...the silent cry of every concept album...for NOTHING?

"See Emily Play" takes that idea further. Bowie does everything to the already bent song except try to put it straight again. Already the Roger Waters undulating bassline at the end of the original - which announces quietly that this is the way the Floyd are going to go, with or without the guy at the front - has taken the song over. Bowie does it over in an oafish Cockney grunt as Ronson's synths hiss and Aynsley Dunbar (man of the match; superb throughout)'s drums collapse. A harpischord tries to nudge its way in without success before being drowned by Garson's tortured free piano. Drums stumble over the chorus as though unable to find their way home. Garson alternates between John Cale plink-plinks and Antonello Salis-style random assaults. Led by the drums, a vague Indian drone feel takes over momentarily. Then everything falls to pieces - like, it is implied, the mind of Syd Barrett - as string quartets, saxophones and other noises scrabble towards a scruffy fade. The song is viewed as a ruination, a sort of psychedelic Pompeii (and of course the Floyd would play Pompeii), a sternly playful warning.

But the heart is reserved for the closing, faithful reading of Ray Davies' "Where Have All The Good Times Gone," which is performed as good, lusty hard rock. The composer's rueful nod to McCartney ("Oh! Yesterday was such an easy game for you to play/But let's face it, things are so much easier today") is retained, Bowie's true voice finally emerges, and despite the obvious comparisons with the "depression" of its own time, the performance generates hope, confidence, the idea that, at the end of "Love Reign O'Er Me," Jimmy will survive the water, the crash, the sixties, and gladly carry on into a future. Still, Pinups remains one of Bowie's darkest corners, and the first step on the Low road. Maybe its sustained scream of mercy was something that the world of oil shortages, three-day weeks and strikes needed, just to get us through to a different world.

And then, with his next album, he encouraged the end of the world.

STATUS QUO: Hello!

2011-08-04T19:39:00.002+01:00

(#132: 27 October 1973, 1 week)

Track listing: Roll Over Lay Down/Claudie/A Reason Of Living/Blue Eyed Lady/Caroline/Softer Ride/And It's Better Now/Forty Five Hundred Times

Sir Clive Woodward, the former England rugby union coach, came up with the phrase, and it remains applicable, not least to the efforts of the current England cricket team. The phrase, or tactic, is "incremental accretion of marginal gains" and what it means is that a team hones itself in meticulous, microscopic detail, slowly working on improving every aspect of their practice and play, however seemingly irrelevant (hence, work on your palms because sweaty palms mean you don't bowl so well). The factors run into their hundreds, if not thousands, and the team is invariably the better for it.

Likewise it is sometimes the case in rock music that the spoils go to those who don't set out to cause controversy, or make extravagant gestures, but rather work hard on honing the one thing they know they can do. As with sport, the prize quite often goes to the player who doesn't "want" it as much as their opponent, and throughout their remarkable four-and-a-half-decade career (which at the time of writing shows no signs of winding down), Status Quo have never presented themselves as the kind of band which "wants" something, other than to rock.

There is no indulgence in their work, but instead fierce concentration (its fierceness amplified by the group's surface amiability). They may never have made a Sgt Pepper but neither are they liable to make a Goats Head Soup; they have simply carried on working on their thing with unflagging intensity and minute attention to their craft. Of course, none of this - particularly the word "craft" - is particularly sexy, and a music based on craft and effort alone would not be one to warrant major attention. It is probably true to say that Piledriver, this album's immediate predecessor, is the core Quo record; nothing but guitars, recorded practically as live, the purest vintage.

But Hello! is seen by many as the definitive Quo album, and its many surprising variations on what might initially seem to be a monumental, one-string template suggest that it might be the ideal album with which to teach a new follower or listener how to play rock. What is offered here certainly isn't unwavering three-chord boogie, even though it might sound like that most of the time. For instance, "Roll Over Lay Down" is a surprisingly brutal (and possibly even brutalist futurist) opener with many touches of inspiration in its arrangement; the subdued and subsidiary role played by Alan Lancaster's bass, for example, which sets itself as part of a call-and-response routine which lasts for the song's first half. Similarly, John Coghlan's drums do not settle down, seem always poised for action. There is the group's trademark usage of silence as punctuation, as well as an effortless control of the loud-to-quiet-then-back-again procedural, such that it all ends in a furious, hammering climax, accompanied by an ironically desolate Moog wind roar.

It is all about the group, however; it doesn't really matter whether Francis Rossi or Rick Parfitt is soloing at any given time (although as Rossi is credited with lead guitar I am assuming that most, if not all, of the solos are his work) - like Keith Richards and his various sparring partners in various editions of the Stones, they sound telepathic, ready to swap the lead/rhythm roles, and back again, at a mere second. And lyrically - though road manager Bob Young was responsible for most of their lyrics - there is a good deal more trouble being expressed than the music would superficially suggest. Both "A Reason For Living" and "And It's Better Now" explicitly speak of religion - the latter song owing a good deal in its construction and delivery to George Harrison (but, again, with ingenious stratagems deployed throughout, from the introductory Wilsonian vocal harmonies through the stop-and-start guitar/bass unisons to the final counterpart, gradually thickening in texture and spreading out before returning to the original setting and ending with a fast-drawing signoff) - and the protagonists of "Blue Eyed Lady" and "Caroline" are worse off due to an absence of faith, usually on the part of their respective cheating women ("To whom do you belong?," "How come you're all alone?," "When I'm thinking of you sleeping/I'm at home alone and weeping"), while the central emotional tenet of "Forty Five Hundred Times" - it comes down to the simple plea of "Be my friend," as basic and harrowing in its seemingly benign way as Richard Manuel's vocal on The Band's contemporaneous "Share My Love" - emphasises the record's theme of loneliness and detachment.

When they stray from their patent, it doesn't always work - "Claudie" is a pleasant midtempo meditation, melodically slightly indebted to "Maggie May" but rescued by its astute harmonic variations at the end and its brush-off vaudeville finish; "Softer Ride," already available as the B-side of the single "Paper Plane," bases itself on a drone model, over which Rossi and Parfitt glumly intone "I ain't gonna work/I ain't gonna work no more," before bursting into focus. "Never no more will I have to be..." - cue three harsh guitar "DO DO DO!"s - then the most deadpan "down" you are likely to hear, prior to ending on a harmonic question mark - but their modest commitment to adventure does them credit. Note the compelling structure of "Blue Eyed Lady," which, following a harmonically adventurous duet between ascending guitars (we could almost, for a few seconds, be listening to Yes), goes into boogie mode, but with a colourful array of key variations and a central hook which is only played and heard once. Coghlan's emphatic cymbal and snare bashes build up the tension which we already half-know is never going to be released.

"Caroline" and "Forty Five Hundred Times," however, are the record's main events; in its elementary tension-and-release palindromic structure, "Caroline" is one of the most natural rock hits of its, or indeed any, day; the group play with absolute assurance and deceptive lightness, Coghlan once again outstanding on drums, while Rossi sings his carefree lament in a what-me-worry (well-maybe-I-do) south London nasal tone which often creeps into the Kent backyards of Robert Wyatt. Piano (played largely by Parfitt) is added to the mix (as it is on other tracks), but does not overwhelm or impede the music's propulsion. Apart from a few keyboard and lead guitar overdubs, the feeling is live, and the attraction is instant.

"Forty Five Hundred Times" is the group's magnum opus, clocking in at nine minutes and forty-five seconds - and if vinyl had allowed, it could theoretically have gone on forever - and presenting a virtual handbook on the moods and dynamics of a rock band, not to mention an advertisement for Quo's entire repertoire of styles and gestures. It begins with a quiet, contemplative first verse (with Parfitt taking lead vocal), before the familiar midtempo stomp asserts itself. There is the hint of "Peter Gunn" in the bassline underpinning the song's main riff. Complex but canny guitar/bass unisons follow, then a guitar solo which could have sprung out of the happier pages of Aaron Copland. The song metamorphosises into a more familiar Quo tempo before accelerating with subtle speed; guest pianist Andy Bown essays minimalist high piano plink-plink notes straight out of John Cale's textbooks. The tempo grows faster still, asserting itself as the song's third palpable rhythm, before turning the volume down for another quiet interlude, guitars now scratchy fragments of notes (as with Mingus, Quo are experts at turning around when everything appears to be at the point of boiling over), but Rossi hits on a riff, both Bown's piano and Lancaster's bass pick up on it immediately...and then the group zones in on this motorik totality which reminds me how Quo have less to do with the history of rock than with what is to come, and in this case it is Kraftwerk (via, clearly, Neu!; the track is self-evidently Quo's "Hallogallo") - their assurance and community verge on ahuman, but at the same time they pull themselves back from the robot brink by their palpable enthusiasm for playing these riffs. The beauty of "Forty Five Hundred Times" is that it doesn't offer a solution, or a climax; the music gradually builds up again but just as it's about to climax it comes back down again and the song fades out, possibly to eternity. Seriously (because they're not taking it so seriously) outrocking the 1973 Stones, Quo sound as though they eat, live, breathe and sleep rock, and it is as untrammelled and welcoming as any rock of which I can think. All the detail, every single polish, or scrub, or tone-up, moves their music towards a greater good. They, for now, are British rock, and certainly capable of becoming a machine - until those winks and grins remind us that it's all for us, too.

SLADE: Sladest

2011-07-28T20:26:00.004+01:00

(#131: 6 October 1973, 3 weeks; 19 January 1974, 1 week)

Track listing: Cum On Feel The Noize/Look What You Dun/Gudbuy T' Jane/One Way Hotel/Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me/Pouk Hill/The Shape Of Things To Come/Take Me Bak 'Ome/Coz I Luv You/Wild Winds Are Blowin'/Know Who You Are/Get Down And Get With It/Look At Last Nite/Mama Weer All Crazee Now

If this seems like yet another premature greatest hits collection, bear in mind that (a) Noddy Holder's "Baby baby BAYYY-BEY!!" at the beginning of "Cum On Feel The Noize" wipes out all traces of Goats Head Soup in a sparrow's fart, and (b) the record was very nearly Slade's epitaph. Drummer Don Powell had been involved in a terrible car crash in the group's native Wolverhampton on July 4, 1973; his fiancee, who was a passenger in the car, was killed instantly, and Powell himself sustained horrific injuries and was lucky to survive. The other members were adamant: if Powell didn't come through, that would be the end of Slade. He came through surprisingly quickly; by mid-August, though still using a stick to walk and requiring to be lifted onto his drum riser, he was back onstage, gigging with the group. Why? Work, he felt, was the best therapy available - and yes, as with this record's music, it's a working-class attitude; keep ploughing and you will find redemption. Note how many of their hits depend on the leitmotif "It's ALL RIGHT," and transmit this to their audience; these may be tough times, my friends, but together we can break through them. All of "us" in it together.

So Sladest may have been conceived as a necessary stop-gap to keep their profile high while Powell recuperated, but pound for pound I reckon it's the best Slade album, and so did Lester Bangs, who back in December 1973 was moved to cite Pharaoh Sanders ("...it's the summun bukmun umyun culling of their flashest stompers...") in praise of it, and them. It did appear briefly on CD in 1993 (I managed to track down a copy) but is currently out of print, superseded by many subsequent Slade compilations. Still, I don't think any of the latter got the balance as exactly right as Sladest did; true, the as yet unreleased "Merry Xmas Everybody" is not included, but that track deserves (and will eventually get here) its own story, and in any case the record does an admirable job, with its mix of big hits, early singles and key album tracks, in summing up why they mattered.

The record's progress is marked in terms of contrasting dynamics and approach rather than a chronological snooze; "Cum On Feel The Noize" was, via clever marketing, the first single to debut at number one in the UK chart since "Get Back" and deservedly so; every fibre of the record blasts out a group at the summit of their powers. The purpose of the song was to commemorate their own audience - Chas Chandler produced all of their hits with a view to recapturing the band's live atmosphere, hence all the handclaps and boot stomps - and there is never any doubt that audience and group magically become one flowing unit; as I said in my review of Slayed?, the matchless shuffle n' grind of Powell and Lea's rhythm section has much more to do with jazz than rock. The music breathes out goodness, and Holder shrieks as though absolutely on top of his world. Abruptly the Stones seem very tame and limp.

The early songs, for those who do not know them, are a revelation; they clearly signify a group working hard to establish their own sound, but instead of unicorns and opening one's eyes to the sun these songs speak of ordinary matters. "One Way Hotel" is a shaggy dog story based on the situation of the group being on the road, having to check in at bed and breakfast dives, six to a room, and totally skint, although at song's end Holder indulges in a bit of Hammer horror as he gravely and oleaginously intones "sign my name on the line" before shrieking "I was done for!" The music indicates that Slade were, even at this stage, far closer to the Beatles than the Stones in terms of songwriting techniques and rhythmic approaches; Dave Hill's guitar solo is extremely George Harrison-esque. Similarly, "Pouk Hill" - amusingly pronounced throughout as though sounding like something else - is about a photo session in the dead of midwinter where the photographer obliged the group to pose naked from the waist down and displays remarkable group telepathy, particularly the closing rallentando. "Wild Winds Are Blowin'" demonstrate marked Led Zeppelin tendencies, although Hill's guitar veers more towards Hendrix and pulls the rest of the group into an Axis: Bold As Love groove. Their 1969 single of Mann and Weill's "The Shape Of Things To Come" was the first of their songs I recall hearing on the radio - and, although not a hit, got them on Top Of The Pops - and here the listener can most clearly discern where they're going; everything points towards Holder's trademark shrieking, the already individualistic drums and bass, Hill's cheeky "You Keep Me Hangin' On" paraphrasing. The strangest of these tracks is "Know Who You Are" which grew out of an instrumental jam entitled "Genesis" and which mixes Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young harmonies with Zeppelin attack and "Mouldy Old Dough" drums! Here Holder is positively threatening, alternating between soft vocal musings and harsh, staccato barks.

Then came the hits: Bobby Marchan's "Get Down And Get With It" which still feels the blood brother of Zeppelin's "Rock And Roll" (down to "It's been a long, long time") taken to punk slapstick extremes: it was the band's big setpiece stage act closer and Holder's lunatic cheerleading alternates with Joe Meek/Dave Clark tactics (the climactic entry of the foot stomps from "Have I The Right?", Powell's quick tribute to "Bits And Pieces"), while Hill's guitar becomes progressively unhinged, at the end zoning out beyond Hendrix to somewhere in Sonny Sharrock's back garden. It felt like, and proved to be, a reclamation to kids bored of "Tom-Tom Turnaround" or "The Banner Man."

"Coz I Luv You" is one of those singles which comes across as more and more unsettling and spectacular every time I listen to it, even with almost forty years' familiarity. Holder's Lennon-shaking vocal is the necessary cynosure, since everything else that happens around it parallels everything else that happened around the Beatles - think of a blend of (again) the Dave Clark Five, the Stones (Jim Lea's Wyman-esque bass octave rumbles), Stephane Grappelli, Fairport Convention and John Cale's Velvet Underground (Lea's violin). There is a terrible certainty which looms and finally takes over the track, which Holder's matey lyrics do nothing to dispel. "Look Wot You Dun," the follow-up, seemed a partial step backwards, back to Beatles song structures but with a lyrical limbo which examines itself as meticulously as anything Gilbert O'Sullivan was doing at the time, but who else would have augmented the rhythm section with a toothbrush? "Take Me Bak 'Ome" saw the more familiar Slade template develop, taking the boozy time-gentlemen-please-hiccup-babe scenario from the Faces and running with it. Then the blockbusters - how easy the swing of "Gudbuy T' Jane" still feels (Oasis really are not in it), the double-whammy closers "Look At Last Nite" and "Crazee"; the former the dark side of "Coz I Luv You" (with Lea'a bass subtly quoting from "Taxman" in the final verse), Holder resorting to more screams as he warns that all this is not going to last, the latter the perfect closer, Slade now their own planet, every atom fusing into a madness that can sometimes sound more terrifying than celebratory. "Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me," the most recent thing here, takes the formula to somewhere just beyond extremis; the group sound filled with helium and the chanting and communality are venturing towards the inhuman; sometimes these huge stompers sound as though stamped out within a huge, metallic meat-packing plant but the overall impression is what Lena calls "the hockey arena effect"; the ability of Slade to communicate to their core people, and who cares if no one in the States understands them, either when playing or speaking (Quiet Riot eventually hit number one in the USA a decade later with a majorly cleaned-up version of "Noize," now perfectly comprehensible but devoid of the original's unreachable magic)? Those who want to understand will understand. Nevertheless, "Skweeze" sounded about as far as Slade could go with this formula without spontaneously combusting. Regardless of where they went next - and we are not finished with Slade yet - this collection represents a perfect picture of why, three years before punk, things needed to be confronted and overhauled.

The ROLLING STONES: Goats Head Soup

2011-07-26T18:54:00.004+01:00

(#130: 22 September 1973, 2 weeks)

Track listing: Dancing With Mr. D./100 Years Ago/Coming Down Again/Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)/Angie/Silver Train/Hide Your Love/Winter/Can You Hear The Music/Star Star

'You haven't got any money?'
'No.'
'We aren't going to be married to-day?'
'No.'
'I see.'
'Well?'
'I said, I see.'
(Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies, chapter eleven)

"Sometimes I wanna...but I can't afford you."
(The Rolling Stones, "Winter")

In his memoir Life, Keith Richards doesn't spend too much time dwelling on Goats Head Soup, apart from explaining that "Angie" was just a name that came to him, and that Anita Pallenberg was about to give birth to their daughter Dandelion, who shortly thereafter had to be renamed Angela. He takes a good deal more time to discuss his experiences in Jamaica, whence the Stones decamped to record the album, and his memories are warm and real: the unexpected fusion of influences due to strong radio signals bringing in music from both New Orleans (the rhythm) and Nashville (the song), the devotional trance music of Steer Town, the movable community that was the Covenant, shoot-ups of the cinema screen - he loved it so much he kept, and still keeps, a house there. And, of course, enjoying the local delicacy (Anthony Bourdain has made a particularly persuasive case for its deliciousness) which gave the album its title.

His memories of making the album are not so rosy; overall he found it an enjoyable experience but the band hadn't been in the studio for a year, their tight looseness appeared to have shrivelled to a loose looseness, and everyone involved, including producer Jimmy Miller and assistant Andy Johns, was strung out on dope. In truth Kingston, Jamaica, was one of the few options open for the Stones at the end of 1972; Nixon's goons were playing tough over giving Jagger and Richards visas for the USA, while back in Britain they would have been hammered for tax. Few other countries would have been willing to let the whole band in.

Listening to the record now, it's a wonder that they didn't just call it quits after Exile - since where else was there to go, following a record of that dissoluble quality, but the way out? But there was money involved, and the interests of others. That stupid delusion that they needed to make a living took them over, and its effects on their music were pretty immediate. All the gamely disorganisation of Exile - and virtually all of its inspiration - had vanished, to be replaced by the first aural manifestation of the Stones as brand, as shareholders' paradise.

They had trapped themselves, and that is instantly evident from the dismal "Dancing With Mr. D." Did "D" stand for the Devil, or Death, or David Bowie, or Love Bug star Dean Jones? More pressingly, the song gives us no reason why we should care. All the elements from Exile and its immediate predecessors are present, but incorrect, or possibly too correct; the devil motif from "Sympathy," of course, the screams from "Gimme Shelter," the general swampiness of the rhythm track. But this is dabbling with the dark side for family entertainment purposes; Jagger does louche even less convincingly than Tony Orlando, and the whole is like a polished replica of Exile with all its elements cleaned up, scrubbed whole (and holy). Fatally for the Stones, and like much else on the record, the song plods. These are Stones ready to support Wayne Newton in Vegas, and a lot of people couldn't forgive them; the "D" finally turns out to stand for "dunce." "Black velvet eyes"?????

It doesn't help matters that Jimmy Miller appears to have been asleep for most of the record; the meagre production makes the group sound anaemic, almost invisible. Keyboards - variously played by stalwarts Preston, Hopkins and Stewart, as well as by Jagger himself - dominate the sound and the guitars are virtually inaudible. "100 Years Ago" begins like "Ruby Tuesday" but there isn't the song to support its musings about the impermanence of relationships; the track does pick up in the middle, largely because Mick Taylor is doing his best to keep us awake, but then settles back into its burrow of grey porridge. "Don't you think it's sometimes wise not to grow up?" sings Jagger, but that is exactly what they have done here; or at least proposed their notion of growing up. Is he really singing "I wanted out" towards the fade, or is he just pretending that he wants to "hide away" from us?

"Coming Down Again" reduces itself to a "Let It Be" cop, with yet more blanding-out piano and organ blocking our ears. Keith sings, and although it's not one of his better "wasted" songs, he at least sounds believing and believable. Charlie Watts is also moved to do his first creative act on the record; his drums, as they build up through the song, carry the intimation of the chain gang. But neither Bobby Keyes' Lyricon solo nor the pleasing harmonic variants which crop up towards song's end lifts us out of this gloomy, gruel-like morass. "Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo" tries to be a "Gimme Shelter" for the Watergate age but its improbable and dissociated grumbles - once these would have been howls - against the police and drugs and New York suddenly sound very old and watery pink rather than the redness of old; again, most of the musical interest comes from extraneous elements: Preston's clavinet and Rebop's congas, the horns (albeit mixed far too low) and Keyes' sudden irritable tenor bursts, the way the song mellows down and opens up for Taylor's solo before attempting to rage again - but the 1973 Stones are not the 1973 Stevie Wonder, and this is not "Superstition." As for "Angie," the song as a single topped the US charts and sold a million; here in Britain we saw Jagger doing his Charles Aznavour routine on TOTP and with sad wisdom stopped the single at #5. In the States it was taken as a protracted lament for/goodbye to the sixties, what have we lost, etc., but it's impossible to take Jagger's protestations about "no money in our coats" seriously (especially since he, no doubt with major prompting from Bianca, was good enough to donate considerable amounts of money to the Nicaraguan cause that year); getting back to Vile Bodies (to which this record sounds a more sober and apt musical accompaniment than Aladdin Sane, which of course doesn't make it the better record - on the contrary), one thinks of Adam and Nina, and the absence of ready money, and the drunken Major, and really are we not talking to our mirrored selves? It is true that Jagger's complacent sorrow nearly cracks on his last "Come on, dry your eyes," but he remembers his accountant in time and tidies up his yellow necktie.

Side two rushes through with paradoxical dreariness. "Silver Train" and "Hide Your Love" are utterly routine, robot Stones rockers and shufflers; for the first time in this exercise, I nearly fell asleep listening to them. "Winter" goes for the epic cry-out, but "Mandolin Wind" sends it packing without any ado; Jagger's self-pity seems (to borrow that Waugh word again) bogus (but nowhere near as fun or as disturbing as Roxy's "The Bogus Man" from a few months previously), unfelt; he strives for the Tosca self-immolation climax (the "coat" in "Sometimes I wanna wrap my coat aound you" which he makes sound like "cord"), complete with exasperated howls degenerating into random mutters (but he's not 1973 Van Morrison either). At this point Lena remarked: "This could be a very good Sheryl Crow album" - and I think she would have produced it better too. Some pacing strings materialise for an instant before the song's end, but it's melted before you can be moved by it.

"Can You Hear The Music" proceeds, in Lena's words, like Hallmark greetings cards being processed through a "Jaggerisation" machine; "When I hear the git-TAR," barks Jagger unconvincingly, "Makes me wanna MOOOOVE." By the time a cheery leprechaun flute enters the picture - what is this, the fucking Moody Blues? - one is almost ready to give up on life, let alone 1973. "Sometimes I, I'm dancin' on air/But I get scared" sings Jagger, sounding approximately eighty-six years old. Thereupon the track settles for a bad Traffic impression. Was there a worse major rock album release in 1973?

With "Star Star" the band finally comes to something resembling their senses, but it's too little (and also too much) too late in an era of "Personality Crisis" and "Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell"; their pupils had suddenly become their masters. Keith opens with an outrageous "Johnny B Goode" lift - yes, when times are bad, you reach for your original bottle of Chuck (and yet this was recorded in the same city and at the same time as records of such cruciality as Blackboard Jungle Dub!). Following Jagger's unattractive burp of "Hun-NEH," the band suddenly realise that they are the Rolling Stones, and, along with Jimmy Miller, wake up; the volume is audibly turned up. But it all still comes to so little; where once the band hardly needed to try in order to shock, here the pretend "outrage" is approximately as outrageous as Judge Dread, the Steve McQueen/John Wayne namechecks drift by us (because they are so badly mixed) practically unnoticed, and now it's a wonder that these guys ever got out of Anne Boleyn Secondary Battle of the Bands; well, no wonder, or more accurately there was no wonder left - the earnest Young Businessmen of 1965 had come through on their profit margins, sounding completely professional and comprehensively dead (Joan Jett's 1983 reading, hidden as a bonus track on the cassette edition of her Album, is far more knowing and far better). The songs sound unfinished and/or cynical, the band are either too sloppy or too cynical to give a damn about performing them; little wonder that this tale doesn't return to the Stones for a good (or bad?) seven years - like their sailors slowly being drowned by bubbly bath foam in the video for "It's Only Rock 'N' Roll," they were out of time. And what was with that "only"? What'a the point of "only" or onliness in art?

Rod STEWART: Sing It Again Rod

2011-07-21T17:51:00.003+01:00

(#129: 1 September 1973, 3 weeks)

Track listing: Reason To Believe (Find A Reason To Believe)/You Wear It Well/Mandolin Wind/Country Comfort/Maggie May/Handbags And Gladrags/Street Fighting Man/Twisting The Night Away/Lost Paraguayos/(I Know) I'm Losing You/Pinball Wizard (From the Rock Opera "Tommy (1914-1984)"/Gasoline Alley

Busy (to a point) with the Faces, Rod Stewart didn't have time to cut a solo record in 1973, and thus this time-marking/ticking-over retrospective from Mercury wrapped in a sleeve designed in the shape of a highball whisky glass, complete with ice, no evidence of soda and a grinning, reddened Rod in its spotlit reflection. Once more he was one of the lads only up to a point; apart from a grinning Ronnie Wood in the background of one shot, all six liner photos capture Stewart alone, having fun on stage, pirouetting in a tutu or just squatting on the floor, chilling (I'd bet a Having Fun With Rod On Stage record would have been much more fun, if less bamboozling, than the one from Elvis which crept into the racks the following year). Increasingly, it's all about him and him only.

The compilation itself is a decent, crafty one, dividing the sides neatly into meditative/folky Rod and rocking out/electric Rod. Commercialism had its say, of course; of the dozen tracks, four are taken from Picture, three from Moment and two apiece from 1969's An Old Raincoat Won't Ever Let You Down and 1970's Gasoline Alley. That leaves the scanty bait of Stewart's rendition of "Pinball Wizard" from Lou Reizner's all-star Tommy gala from 1972 as a dubious bonus; I would have been much keener to hear Stewart tackling it with the Who alone (cf. Fury's "Long Live Rock") but here we have to be content with the London Symphony Orchestra, grimly grinding through Wil Malone's charts and wishing they'd been a bit nicer to Ornette, and the English Chamber Choir compelled to bark out such lines as "I thought I was the bally table king" as though it were Brecht.

Of the remaining four tracks not previously discussed in this tale, three are covers, and one, 1969's take on "Street Fighting Man," is far more interesting for the group arrangement than Stewart's distracted-sounding vocal; there is no doubt that the only thing on his mind is to sing in a rock and roll band. The musicians, however, slow it down to a Delta groove, spearheaded by Ronnie Wood's grumbling bottleneck and underlined by Ronnie Lane's burping bass. Doubtless inspired by the "Dancing In The Street" quote, and mindful that Marvin Gaye was the chief drummer on the latter, the aim seems to have been to go for a smouldering "Grapevine" (via Creedence) undertow, and hence the various pauses, hesitations and so forth until Nicky Hopkins' piano triumphantly emerges from the melee and goes straight into the "We Love You" riff. A stage setpiece in the making, perhaps (particularly in light of another spectacular drum performance by Micky Waller) but it doesn't tell us much about its singer.

The record's relative lack of focus on Stewart the songwriter also means that we are deprived of such embryonic gems as "Cindy's Lament," "Blind Prayer" and "Lady Day," not to mention his spellbinding reading of "Man Of Constant Sorrow." The latter I would certainly have preferred to Mike d'Abo's "Handbags And Gladrags," which I have always found a pompous and sententious dirge regardless of who sings it; the song may as well have been titled "An Open Letter To My Teenage Daughter." d'Abo himself is on hand here, contributing piano and bombastic arrangement, but it is against the odds one of Stewart's great acting performances; even as one grumbles at the song's cheap sentiments (and sentimentality), one can feel Stewart's bafflement and despair, the sense that he is slowly losing himself as well as his child.

This leaves an early reading of Elton John and Bernie Taupin's "Country Comfort," issued before Elton's own version (on Tumbleweed Connection), which sets the early Stewart template fairly neatly; full piano, punctuative drumming, discreet guitar, a slow-burning consideration of the singer's situation. Against these must be measured the song's general half-baked naivete (John and Taupin were still on the way to maturation), but once more Stewart makes you want to listen: his weary sigh of "bones," his melancholy chewing over the concept of "machinery" superseding "fifteen men," the low-key harmony work (I think Lane's is the second voice) and the cinematic but uplifting final key change as Stewart makes his way towards "the road that's going home." Likewise, on the title track of Gasoline Alley, he sings about running back to the slums, backed by mandolin and guitars of various volumes, about "goin' home" and "runnin' home"; his cries eventually become more urgent ("Don't bury me here - it's too cold!") and finally his voice echoes into the vapour as the guitar train slowly toot-toots its way towards a halt. There's no real argument here against getting the original four albums, but Sing It Again Rod is the first example of stories in this tale which won't take too long to retell.

PETERS and LEE: We Can Make It

2011-07-17T17:02:00.003+01:00

(#128: 18 August 1973, 2 weeks)

Track listing: All Change Places/I'm Confessin'/Take To The Mountains/Turn To Me/There They Go/We Can Make It/Let It Be Me/Cryin' In The Rain/Good Morning Freedom/Cryin' Time/Never My Love/Welcome Home

"From the moment they started to sing, the whole studio was filled with a great warmth, not just because they make a beautiful sound, but because they are both very beautiful people."
Royston Mayoh, producer of Opportunity Knocks, from his sleevenote to We Can Make It)

"We're here...then we're not here. We're somewhere else. Maybe. And it's as natural as breathing. Why should we be scared?"
Willie Parker (Terence Stamp) to Braddock (John Hurt), from the film The Hit, 1984)

The Hit, directed by Stephen Frears, was maybe the first modern British gangster movie. True, The Long Good Friday was set in the present (1980) time but still seemed umbilically attached to the tradition which Get Carter had set a decade earlier (if "traditions" can be said to stretch over just one decade), but this road movie seemed more prophetic of the neutered, ineffective hideaways of such successors as Sexy Beast (Ray Winstone could almost be Tim Roth grown a generation, still having learned next to nothing), not to mention the gradual, voyeuristic glamourisation of gangland practised by Guy Ritchie and others. In The Hit, however, the picture is more jumbled; Stamp's supergrass, exiled in Goya's Spain for a full ten years after sending some former associates down with his testimony, seems to accept the arrival of his executors with calm, verging on cold, acceptance. He is supposed to be delivered to Paris to meet his fate, but soon we know that, like Lorca's Cordoba-bound horseman, he will never make it out of Spain. But he is not quite a regenerated, resigned John Donne; he subtly plays Hurt's robot professional and Roth's hardnut trainee against each other through their various adventures. The inevitable bloodbath occurs, but as Fernando Rey's police catch up with Hurt's Braddock, he has absorbed Willie Parker's unreachable coolness, become Parker.

The crime lord Parker sent down we only see at the beginning of the picture, as he is led down from the courtroom into the cells - he is hardly in shot for more than a few seconds, but his impassive glower casts a shade over the rest of the film which the plentiful sun cannot obscure or supersede. He looks, stares, although of course he cannot see. His name is Mr Corrigan, and he is played by Lennie Peters.

It is something to consider when one looks at the purple-dominant sleeve of We Can Make It, Peters and Lee's first and most successful album; Dianne Lee looks the picture of Test Card girl purity, but despite his homely smile one senses that Peters is concealing something; more pronounced is the high probability that, despite his blindness, there is the vaguely suggested ruthlessness of someone who could order your head to be taken off your shoulders if he so felt. There is a bigness to Peters which doesn't quite fit in with the intended cosy listening profile; he appears ready to burst out.

His history is accounted for in different ways; some stories claim that in his sixties days of pub and club work he was close friends with, and was promoted, or even protected, by, the Krays. What is certain is that he was not born with his blindness (although estimates of his year of birth vary, he was certainly born at some point in the thirties); when he was five, he was knocked down by a car while crossing the road, losing the sight in his left eye, and ten years later, upon remonstrating with a group of youths about throwing stones and disturbing his sunbathing, a brick was thrown directly in his face, causing permanent damage to his right eye.

He grew up in north London, was even one of Charlie Watts' uncles. He seems to have become seriously involved in music in the early sixties; the Migil Five of "Mockingbird Hill" fame were originally formed as his backing band. He worked solidly throughout the decade and issued the odd single here and there but greater success eluded him. While doing a summer season in 1970 he met with Dianne Lee, then principally a dancer and aspiring actress; they got on (though were never romantically involved) sufficiently that Lee became his backing singer; the duo's sound was refined (and made closer) with experience and in 1973 they managed to win a slot on Opportunity Knocks. Less an everyman's scenario of getting in ordinary people with extraordinary talents off the street, the show concentrated more on semi-established club and cabaret acts seeking a big break. They appeared, and won the show for the next seven weeks; it was not until the third or fourth week that Peters revealed his blindness. Their popularity was sudden and immense; the single of "Welcome Home" made number one and stayed on the chart for six months, and this album, masterminded by Scott Walker and Dusty Springfield's old Philips team (producer John Franz and arranger Peter Knight) quickly followed.

What to say of We Can Make It in 2011, other than the title's implied reaching out of hands to a beleagured British public desperate and hungry for the smallest crumb of warm reassurance? On the most superficial level it is a typical MoR record of, and firmly entrenched in, its time, with a boxed-in production and the general, slightly anaesthetising feel of music played to Co-Op shoppers.

On a deeper level it indicates the importance of establishing a distinctive and successful vocal harmony out of two fundamentally unremarkable voices. It's no accident that side two begins with two consecutive Everly Brothers covers; despite the already dated "Willesden Sound" reggae arrangement of "Cryin' In The Rain," these tracks demonstrate how much stronger Peters and Lee's voices were together than they were separately, especially when they take their solo turns. Peters is clearly the stronger singer, with an appealing brand of post-Ray Charles bluffness to his voice, although it is arguable that such voices could be found in any pub of a musical evening (Blackpool in the early-to-mid seventies, for instance, was, as I know from personal experience, full of Lennie Peters types, boisterously playing the hits of the day and silently wishing that somebody would come up and ask them to play Jerome Kern's "Yesterdays"; my father, indeed, made that very request to the pianist/singer in one restaurant in the summer of 1970 and he seemed startled but pleased - I cannot with certainty either deny or confirm that the pianist/singer was Lennie Peters since this would certainly have been part of his circuit at the time). Lee, on the other hand, really couldn't sing, at least not at this point - there is a Dusty-ish timbre to her voice but the best that can be said is that, when unaccompanied, she just about manages to stay in tune.

But when singing together, this somehow doesn't matter; indeed the underlying semi-amateurism is quite appealing, and both voices cancel out the failings of the other. Hear, for instance, the really rather touching ballad "Turn To Me," which is "Reach Out, I'll Be There" as Scott might have conceived it, so much so that Knight reproduces the intro and outro from Walker's "Rosemary" at song's beginning and end. And there is something surprisingly moving about the largely unspoken struggle of the pair to make sense of a nonsensical 1973 world, or the good fist they make of Tony Hiller and Ivor Raymonde's title track. "We can make it to the other side," their voices reassure us; hang on, we know the way even if one of us can't see (recall also Walker's highly pertinent "Such A Small Love").

When they don't strive for effect, Peters and Lee do well, and I think prospered over the coming decade because they knew their limitations. They turn "I'm Confessin'" into an affectionate little Satchmo tribute (complete with vocal impressions by Peters) with some nice spoken interplay: "It's too late for that, honey," whispers Lee's Home Counties vamp. Their reading of Buck Owens' "Cryin' Time" is aptly claustrophobic, conjuring up images of darkened front rooms, endless soul searching (why does this happen every time to Peters' protagonist?), Cresta cans, The Changes and Fred Trueman's Indoor League and other 1973 detritus, whereas their version of Blue Mink's "Good Morning Freedom" is bouncily optimistic in a let's-take-this-kandy-kolored-VW-camper-van-to-Maidstone sort of way. The Association's immortal "Never My Love" is recast as a Crown Paints commercial, complete with Pete Murray's Open House/Northern Dance Orchestra trumpet/flute unisons, and if this version doesn't begin to approach the heartrending profundity of the original (because, as they always did at their best, the Association sound as though they're holding something back; the ambiguous final chord of "Cherish," the simultaneous medium and fast tempo playouts of "Windy," the deceptive, full-throated plaintiveness of "Everything That Touches You") it says: well, we're reaching our destination, let's settle and sit down, and will this do? At this point, you feel, anything would.

Even on more challenging material they mostly retain their assurance. The opening "All Change Places," written by two chaps named David Gold and John Garfield, about whom I've been able to find out next to nothing, is the record's fiercest gauntlet; there's the warmongering general sending people to their deaths, here's the old guy queuing up in the Post Office for his pension - wouldn't it be so much better, the duo beam vibrantly at us, if they could change, not just places, but faces, for a day? The arrangement suggests a development of Mike Vickers' chart for Cilla Black's "Surround Yourself With Sorrow"; the sympathies the song is expressing aren't that far away from those of Prufrock (and how right that, at virtually the same time as this record, Eliot should be cited in the singer's notes to Let's Get It On - literally, everything that We Can Make It isn't, or wouldn't want to be. There is no sex here - "If I Should Die Tonight" is very far from either singer's mind - but neither is there a "Just To Keep You Satisfied" with which to close down the planet). They don't quite meet the challenges posed by Tony Hazzard's exceptionally strange "Take To The Mountains," a minor Top 40 hit for ex-Quiet Five singer and future West End rep reliable Richard Barnes three years previously, and the buried vocal mix doesn't help matters, but still the feeling of communal escape is unavoidable, the repeated refrain "No peace of mind" softly hammering at us over and over - it is simultaneously the more sober and the more abstract mirror of "Good Morning Freedom." Wherever you go, Peters might have reflected, you end up having to take yourself with you. Only Harold Dorman's clunky reggae-lite song "There They Go" doesn't work; the lightness the song needs to balance out its shadows isn't achieved in the production's murkiness, and the alternating of solo voices is perhaps unhelpful.

The record closes with "Welcome Home" itself; an adaptation of a French song entitled "Vivre," and a record which, I think, did as much to pull together an alienated 1973 Britain, or at least part of it, as "Merry Xmas Everybody" (each song pulled together separate strands of the same society). In some ways, it's a deliberately old-fashioned record; it could almost stand as a displaced WWII anthem with its huge choirs, soaring strings, homely guitar (possibly played by Derek Bailey, who was present on the sessions), slightly disturbing echoes of bass voices and subtle spreading out of its initial miss-you loneliness until the singers turn, face the world and sing to their audience. Such essential good-heartedness was rare in that season's pop, and I still find it an almost unbearably poignant performance - here, in all places and on/of all records, is a scenario which ends with the words "You're home once more."

"One person with two voices," Lena calls it, and each half makes the other complete. I think of another P&L - the McCartneys - and how Linda's vocals, while not especially outstanding in themselves, prove themselves indispensable to the whole. And we can also look back obviously to the Everlys, and look forward less obviously to the untutored female voices which will work to startling effect in just over eight years' time. As for Peters and Lee, although the hits dried up after 1976, they remained a hugely popular act on stage and television; they split in 1980, and Peters continued as a soloist for a while, with only limited success. They reunited in 1986 and continued to work together sporadically until Peters' death from bone cancer in 1992. Lee meanwhile went on to marry ex-Move/Wizzard bassist Rick Price, and both now perform as a double act. But it is perhaps wise to reflect on how hard won this return home was, particularly for Peters; there is menace in his unseen eyes but also much evidence of trouble and pain, despite his gamely smiles (and yes, he also appears briefly in The Long Good Friday, near the beginning). The predominant message from this collection to its purchasers and listeners, however, is unmissable; don't be scared. You know the game.

VARIOUS ARTISTS/ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK: That'll Be The Day

2011-07-14T18:13:00.006+01:00

(#127: 30 June 1973, 7 weeks)

Track listing: Bye Bye Love (Everly Brothers)/Poetry In Motion (Johnny Tillotson)/Little Darlin' (The Diamonds)/Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (The Platters)/Chantilly Lace (Big Bopper)/Runaround Sue (Dion)/Devoted To You (Everly Brothers)/Great Balls Of Fire (Jerry Lee Lewis)/Running Bear (Johnny Preston)/Tequila (The Champs)/Tutti Frutti (Little Richard)/'Til I Kissed You (Everly Brothers)/I Love How You Love Me (Paris Sisters)/Runaway (Del Shannon)/Bony Moronie (Larry Williams)/Honeycomb (Jimmie Rodgers)/Why Do Fools Fall In Love (Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers)/Party Doll (Buddy Knox)/Linda Lu (Ray Sharpe)/Red River Rock (Johnny and The Hurricanes)/That'll Be The Day (Bobby Vee and The Crickets)/Born Too Late (The Poni-Tails)/Wake Up Little Susie (Everly Brothers)/Book Of Love (Monotones)/(You've Got) Personality (Lloyd Price)/Well...All Right (Bobby Vee and The Crickets)/At The Hop (Danny and The Juniors)/Alley Oop (Dante and The Evergreens)/Raunchy (Bill Justis)/Rock On (David Essex)/A Thousand Stars (Billy Fury)/Real Leather Jacket (Vivian Stanshall)/Long Live Rock (Billy Fury)/What In The World (Shoop) ("Stormy Tempest" - actually The Typhoons)/That's All Right Mama (Billy Fury)/Slow Down (Eugene Wallace)/Get Yourself Together (Billy Fury)/What'd I Say (Billy Fury)/It'll Be Me (Wishful Thinking)

(Author's note: For sanity-preserving reasons I have done my best to avoid the multiple spelling and credit errors present on the original vinyl album's rear cover. Additionally, it should be noted that in light of protests by record companies regarding the domination of TV-advertised compilation albums in the chart, the British Market Research Bureau changed the rules, meaning that such records were confined to the separate compilation chart. This means that That'll Be The Day vanished from the chart completely after its seventh week at the top and that, to the great regret of this writer, the similar package for the film's sequel Stardust was not eligible for the main chart.)

"Of course we knew there were other things to sing songs about...our elders never stopped telling us...but rock and roll was our music: music for young people; performed by the young; and about the young."
(Ray Connolly, from his sleevenote to That'll Be The Day)

It, virtually needless to say, was never that simple, especially when this American phenomenon began to be heard and felt in Britain. Unless we happened to have been there, at the right age and in the wrong circumstances, there is no way of communicating how epochal, how life-commencing, it all was: the promise of everything coming to a nation which, in the late fifties, still had next to nothing; the need to wrench something out of this promise and hold onto it, make it ours. Was this living, or merely a way to avoid making a living?

But respond to rock and roll we did, and this story has told in part how it happened. If sometimes the shoddiness of presentation of the soundtrack to That'll Be The Day - a 40-track double - is annoying enough to make one wish that CBS or EMI had successfully won the rights rather than Ronco, its downbeat presentation (and its necessarily beaten appearance, thirty-eight years down the line) accurately matches the dour, doughy nothingness of its parent movie.

I am not sure whether the film That'll Be The Day has endured. Utilising a sixties Wednesday Play approach to describe a country still unable to forget or move beyond the war, David Essex, looking remarkably like Damon Albarn, is excellent in the fundamentally unsympathetic role of Jim Maclaine; Rosemary Leach is superb as his incrementally disappointed mother - of course, Maclaine's grief lies in the early desertion of his father, a role which he already knows he is doomed to repeat - and Ringo Starr is more than adequate as his new pal Mike; on screen he looks lighter than at any time since A Hard Day's Night.

But the question remains, and it's a major one; how far are we supposed to identify with this Pandora's box of resentment who throws his schoolbooks, and therefore probably his future, in the river, who, when shown a glimpse of what lies beyond, immediately turns into a ruthless womaniser, and who, finally, after making a pretence of returning home and getting down to compensatory business - running the family store, having a wife and child - abandons it all for the sake of a guitar and a train ticket? Either rock and roll was so potent, so comprehensively conquering, that it drove those under its spell to forsake family and friends to follow its pyritic trail, or Jim Maclaine is a thankless shithead who will (as Stardust later revealed) go crazy to the point of self-extermination. The film does not exactly scream "the future" or "colour" or "sex" towards us; rather a very familiar post-Ealing Studios melancholia that this is always how it will be, this ridiculous, pinched, pinching Britain.

It's clear that the soundtrack album works better than the film in explaining to us just how taken we were by all of this, and indeed outlines a summary of our reaction more efficiently and powerfully than the movie. The album is not quite what it pretends to be, and probably boasts the longest prelude or introduction of any number one album; an introduction that lasts three sides, and thirty songs. A registry of period favourites, or at least whatever Ronco could lease, and the mixture is as odd as one would expect, but in its own way quite revelatory.

As far as the oldies are concerned there is little need to expound on them at length; watching Essex walk off with that guitar at film's end, I was reminded of Chuck Berry's dictum that if he had the time over again he would get a degree in business studies and then learn to play the guitar. Chuck Berry, however, is not represented here, and neither are Elvis, or Gene Vincent, or Eddie Cochran, or Fats Domino, or for that matter Buddy Holly; the presence of two tracks from 1962's exercise in near-necrophilia Bobby Vee Meets The Crickets, including the title song, suggests that Ronco failed to secure the rights to the original - of these, Vee's "That'll Be The Day" is throatier, growlier and, in its final "day," desperate, but proves little match for the man who, by his death, inadvertently kickstarted Vee's career (he stood in for Holly that night), while "Well...All Right," perhaps the strangest of all Holly songs - its harmonies and arrangement presage the quieter Velvet Underground - resorts to bad impersonations.

There are a quartet of tracks by the Everlys; both "Bye Bye Love" and "Susie"'s power revolves around the unmentioned - there are sly hints in the final verse of the former that sexual inadequacy is the reason for his baby's desertion, while on further examination "Susie" is post-coital dread; it's clear that they've done it, and now they're making up frantic excuses. Both songs rely on their slashing, barline-cheating guitar lines to emphasise that which the Everlys themselves were too polite to express directly. On the other hand, "'Til I Kissed You" is a better Holly tribute (and develops on Holly's template) than Vee's, helped by Jerry Allison's trademark drum rolls, and the lovely "Devoted To You" reminds us just how keenly those two young lads in Liverpool were listening, as well as the Celtic roots (Scottish pibroch in particular) which helped inspire the duo's music in the first place.

In this collection, the second gathering of evidence in as many weeks, it's abundantly clear who's going to be their own man and who are in for the one miraculous shot. Given the ruckus they caused at the time, what is most remarkable about "Tutti Frutti" and "Great Balls Of Fire" at this juncture is their easy and instinctive sense of swing; yes, we know Jerry Lee was terrified of damnation by singing this (the Sun outtakes and studio dialogue attest to this) but in some senses this is a red herring - what is most overpowering about "Fire" is his incredulous joy ("Weellll....feels GO-HOOD!!" as though doing it for the first time), his reckless elbow piano runs, his extraordinary revelations of...life. Likewise, despite the standard depiction of Richard as untutored Wild Man, "Tutti Frutti" is furiously disciplined; every dip of rhythm is met by a swoop in voice and/or piano, and in lots of ways we are still evolving from the world of Jimmie Lunceford and Lionel Hampton. There's no doubt that Dion and Del Shannon are in for the long game; "Runaround Sue"'s gloriously insolent post-Darin Italo-cool man sneers (of course he's going to do the same thing himself in "The Wanderer"), and if "Runaway" finally did nothing to lead its writer and performer away from his own fatal dread, there is a definite feeling - and not in the Musitron solo alone - that new ground is being broken, and staked.

Otherwise it's the black performers, unsurprisingly, who sound the most vital. Lymon takes the nonsense of "Fools" and turns it into the most plaintive plea for reason that side of "Earth Song." Lloyd Price goes back to jump band territory (see also Jackie Wilson's "Baby Workout") all to beg, cry, the adoration or interest of his intended Other (although he already knows he's a fool even to try). Larry Williams conveys both grace and urge in his "Bony Moronie" whereas, in comparison, the Big Bopper booms and cackles oafishly and menacingly, like a trainee vampire. The Diamonds and Platters tracks provide us with a useful lesson in the interrelations between black and white music; Canada's finest take a decent Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs track and elevate it, via absurdity, into something approaching holistic trash art - authenticity be damned; this is far more exciting and sexy (in any case, the Monotones throw authenticity out the window with their adaptation of the Pepsodent commercial and its amazing harmonic snakes and ladders procedurals; the drummer, or book-thumper, seems for most of the record to be the only audible "musician"). In contrast the Platters take a Jerome Kern oldie and turn it into a portrait of dignified but increasing emotional breakdown; Tony Williams takes his time, slowly working up to his unholy, tortured, climactic, final "eyes" before collapsing as though shot. Equally "Born Too Late" and "I Love How You Love Me" give us a quick lesson in the development of a certain strand of white girl group pop; the Poni-Tails sound as though rehearsing to be the Shangri-La's, all whimpers and bafflement (their song is the precise obverse of "Young Girl"), whereas the Paris Sisters are there (as indeed, and crucially, is Phil Spector); their "I Love How You Love Me" floats weightlessly, ethereally, all blurred pianos and semi-stoned vocals, virtually pre-psychedelia, certainly pre-Julee Cruise.

There are a few other bits and pieces, and even a couple of curveballs; "Party Doll" is nothing much, apart from how startlingly Knox sounds like Neil Young. The already scared-sounding vocal of Danny Rapp on "At The Hop" indicates that he fully knows that this is all there will be (for him). The three instrumentals which conclude each of the first three sides are entertaining enough; the Pharaoh Sanders-anticipating sandblasting tenor of "Tequila," the relentless motorik of "Red River Rock" (it sounds like Neu!), the straightforward R&B thrust of "Raunchy" (and note how all three tracks, as with a surprising number of other tracks here, underline the centrality of the saxophone as a voice in early rock). The most intriguing curveball is "Linda Lu," a 1959 side by Fort Worth's Ray Sharpe (and a local hit only), striding confidently through the middle ground between blues and rockabilly; his stutters and word-ramming ("Herrealnameherrealnameherrealname is PATTI!") anticipating Daltrey.

But so much else belongs to the Light Programme's idea of rock and roll. "Sealed With A Kiss" is as scarily desolate (and at the same time absurdly adolescent) as ever but it belongs to a different time, a time which will acknowledge it four years later ("Caroline No"). It nevertheless towers over gaudy trinkets like "Poetry In Motion" (a re-recording; all others are originals) and the preposterous "Running Bear," the ghastly cover of "Alley Oop" (professionals pretending to be madmen, unlike the genuine maniacs Kim Fowley drew together as the Hollywood Argyles) and, perhaps worst, Jimmie Rodgers' gruesome "Honeycomb" which sounds drawn from a different century, with suitably grotesque imagery which I have no intention of replicating here. Nonetheless, all of this sets the scene for the extraordinary document that is side four.

Our immediate hurtling into the future with "Rock On" feels like a punch in the face after the previous ninety minutes of comfort, and nearly four decades on it still comes on as the future; beginning with a Dark Side Of The Moon heartbeat and slowly evolving into something between Chinese opera, Link Wray, Can and dub. In its chambers Essex sounds utterly lost, as was the intention ("And where do we go from here? Which is a way that's clear?") - its appearance is as shocking as that of "I Feel Love" after the careful pastiches of I Remember Yesterday, or "Good Vibrations" at the end of SMiLE. This, side four already seems intent on telling us, is exactly where we Brits took this rock and roll - and what did we do with it?

Enter the man whom British rock in 1973 had almost forgotten, despite having paved the way for almost all of it. "A Thousand Stars" was one of his old hit ballads, and he gives it a more than fine reading here; the voice isn't quite on top of things - yet - but the fullness of his accompaniment bucks him up, and his drawled, astronomical "more"s roll like the atoms of a cupcake. It is Billy Fury, in his gold lame jacket - do I really need to underline whom he is prophesising on that front cover? - and his five tracks on this side represent maybe four-fifths of a fuck-you comeback. We don't need to spend too much, or any, time on the non-Fury tracks here, although, with the exception of a routine run through Jerry Lee's "It'll Be Me," they all have their individual merits: Stanshall's shaggy-dog plot-summarising "Real Leather Jacket" (the original but then abandoned theme tune for the film) complete with hilariously ironic backing vocals, the lazy Stanshall-penned harmonica semi-instrumental "What In The World" ("...are you living for?" coo the backing singers, who have already completed "Real Leather Jacket" with a series of "oompah, oompah" chants, wonderfully echoed by the unmistakable staggered drum rolls of Keith Moon) and above all Eugene Wallace's very fine account of "Slow Down" (his voice somewhere between Terry Reid and Lemmy, and an underrated, and under-recorded, Irish singer-songwriter; sadly he passed away in 1999, but hear his 1974 album Book Of Fool - if you can find it - for yet another fruitful path British rock elected not to tread; somewhere between River and Pink Moon).

Fury's backing group was immense; alas, since the record came out on Ronco, no personnel details were given, and most of these have become hazy with time. Nevertheless, Moon, who certainly appears as "Stormy Tempest"'s drummer in the film, was present throughout (and Ringo may also have contributed some drums); Ronnie Wood and Pete Townshend appear to have shared guitar duties, Graham Bond is on sax, Steve Winwood on guitar and keyboards, Ric Grech and/or Jack Bruce on bass, and the Nashville Teens' John Hawken on keyboards. Others (possibly including Jeff Beck) may have been involved.

Townshend's "Long Live Rock," however, was essentially Fury with the Who; and when we think of the contemporaneous dereliction, soul-searching and outright rage of the Who's own Quadrophenia (which unfortunately peaked at #2 later in 1973 behind entry #133), we realise what an astonishing performance this is. In the film, it hardly feels like a seaside camp in 1958; even Moon forgets it is the fifties and starts being Keith Moon, and as for Fury - he is three-dimensional in a flat, monochrome world, he is the movie's punctum; he literally emerges as though coming through the screen. In "Long Live Rock," we have his "Suspicious Minds," his "Long Black Limousine," his '68 Special all in one; this is a furious burst of fearless defiance. At times - and this will be reflected in his remaining three tracks - he actually sounds as though trying to out-Bowie Bowie (his "I do, I do," his "There's room, there's room") and yet he also looks beyond this propulsion, towards something that already acknowledges what is happening on the King's Road - there is the unmistakable scent of Lydon in Fury's breath. The whole group rises to his challenge, the word of someone who was born, or reborn, with the original Britrock, and has now come back to declare that it continues, and thrives, and flourishes - his closing, protracted roar of "ALIVE!" over Moon's roaring drums is peerless, holy. It was the performance of his life, and he knew it; a shame that, thanks to legal wrangles, this and the other Fury performances collected here still await proper CD reissue.

He does "That's All Right Mama" as a confident, cocky strut; it is clearly Bruce playing bass, and Fury plays with and advances the song at the same time ("WAYYY you go!" he twice yells approvingly to usher in Winwood's piano solo); and if his "What'd I Say?" isn't Ray, then it's a fine, tongue-in-cheek reading, complete with deadpan doo-wop backing vocals (Ringo very evident in the latter) and some great squealing free alto playing from Bond. But Fury's own song "Get Yourself Together" is again remarkable; Winwood, Moon and Wood all pushing against, and through, the curtain, while Fury's increasingly intense imprecations to his Other ("I've gotta take you out!," "I wanna take YOU outsi-si-side!," "It's really lovely weather," "Come on, come ON, out-SYYYYYYYDE!!") really do make us think that punk has come early. If today it does not seem controversial to consider Fury the greatest British singer of his generation (and arguably, in pop music, one of the very greatest of any generation), the argument proferred here is unassailable and unanswerable; devil and angel, hidden and exposed, this music's rare power explains pretty forcibly and forcefully the issue of the British response to rock and roll; as with Roy Wood, Marc Bolan and others from the previous entry, the mission here, expressed far more strongly, is to right wrongs, to gather evidence as proof that rock still lived, that whatever spark it set off in our collective half a century ago, this is how far it spread, this is where everything stood, and somehow, that everything was going to be...well...all right.

VARIOUS ARTISTS: Pure Gold On EMI

2011-07-07T18:12:00.011+01:00

(#126: 9 June 1973, 3 weeks)

Track listing: Solid Gold Easy Action (T. Rex)/Lookin' Through The Windows (Jackson Five)/Crazy (Mud)/Mad About You (Bruce Ruffin)/Doobedood'ndoobe, Doobedood'ndoobe, Doobedood'ndoo (Diana Ross)/Ball Park Incident (Wizzard)/Stay With Me (Blue Mink)/Living In Harmony (Cliff Richard)/Heaven Help Us All (Stevie Wonder)/All Because Of You (Geordie)/Power To All Our Friends (Cliff Richard)/Psychedelic Shack (Temptations)/Who Was It? (Hurricane Smith)/20th Century Boy (T. Rex)/Step Inside Love (Cilla Black)/Roll Over Beethoven (The Electric Light Orchestra)/Keeper Of The Castle (Four Tops)/Sister Jane (New World)/Strange Kind Of Woman (Deep Purple)/Heart Of Stone (Kenny)

"He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly;
A terrible beauty is born."
(WB Yeats, "Easter 1916")

This might be the detritus of battlecries and champagne through which Aladdin Sane would have been obliged to trudge. Put bluntly, Pure Gold is a mess of a record, a jumble sale filled with faded names, never-weres, stars about to fall or in abeyance, and a few hardy survivors trying to fashion something new. There had been label-specific compilations of hits before, but none had made a significant impact on the chart; clearly a response to the K-Tel/Arcade/Ronco bandwagon - and also gingerly testing the way for the phenomenon of a decade hence which would effectively wipe these labels out - this ragtag of recent and somewhat less recent EMI hits was aggressively advertised on TV. Unlike some of the K-Tel compilations, there is no apparent shape or concept to Pure Gold; apart from beginning and ending side one with tracks which turn on different deployments of the chant "Hey, hey, hey!" and perhaps some humour in placing "Strange Kind Of Woman" directly after "Sister Jane," there is no discernible "story" to be told here, other than suggest that as a conglomerate of labels EMI was not in the best of health. If that's an odd thing to say about a company which at that time still had all four Beatles and Pink Floyd, amongst others, on its books, a listen to Pure Gold may suggest a certain detachment from, or loss of, pop which in the short term only Mickie Most's RAK subsidiary would really turn around.

Indeed, the album has to go all the way back to 1968 - then only five years, but already an eternity - for its sole Beatle content; McCartney wrote "Step Inside Love" as a theme tune for Cilla Black's BBC1 series, and for a peak-time television show it's a curiously low-key, somewhat vulnerable song and performance, despite George Martin's occasional orchestral sweeps. The track finishes on a repeated cycle of unresolved guitar chords - mostly, as with the rest of the song, derived from Jobim - and Black's "I want you to stay"s seem like a quietly desperate attempt to hold onto their decade, their moment. Could it even have been a requiem for Brian Epstein? The best version is the original demo, currently available on Black's The Abbey Road Years: 1963-73 triple-CD set and featuring McCartney on guitar; there are no crescendi - the song cycles quietly, pregnant with unspoken expectations, candlelit mournings.

EMI's major pop act of 1973 was T. Rex, but they were already on a gradual decline; after "Metal Guru" their singles peaked at two or three rather than one, but this seems to have momentarily sharpened Bolan's commitment. "Solid Gold Easy Action" and "20th Century Boy" both take the format to, and possibly beyond, its extremes; they are agitated, incoherent, in comparison with the easy, seductive roll of "Hot Love" or "Get It On." In "Solid Gold" Bolan compresses all his known elements - Flo and Eddie falsettos, Visconti strings - so furiously it's a wonder they don't explode; it would not have been out of place on the Pop:Aural label in 1981. "20th Century Boy" was his last great swagger, and, like Little Richard or Muddy Waters, there is absolutely no side to Bolan's boasts. Grinding guitar gurgles at us, Gloria Jones' backing vocals frequently overwhelm Bolan, and the track finally falls in on itself, Ian MacDonald's atonal, screeching alto, Bolan's impenetrable murmurs to the fade, as though already signing his death certificate.

In 1973 EMI also still had the rights to the Motown catalogue. So why, in the era of Talking Book, Lady Sings The Blues and Let's Get It On, is the label represented here by three three-year-old tracks, and a below par one from the end of 1972? In part this was to do with avoidance of overlapping with the Motown Chartbusters series, which in 1973 was just about still a going concern, but any casual listener to the Diana Ross and Jackson Five tracks in particular may wonder exactly what Gordy left behind when he left Detroit for L.A. For instance, writer/producer Deke Richards clearly had no idea what to do with Diana, if "Doobdood'ndoobe" is anything to go by; a clumsy mashing of various sixties Supremes tropes (including the baffling references to a "rock 'n' roll symphony"), episodic and discontinuous, full of angels wearing black - and is she really singing "I see bullets inside your eyes"? "Lookin' Through The Windows," written and produced by fellow Corporation member Hal Davis, flails similarly; there are lots of stabs at turning the Jacksons into the Junior Temptations - the use of echo, the staccato barks of harmony - but the net result is a collection of interesting bits without any real tune or purpose to hold them together. Only "Psychedelic Shack" prevails (complete with its full door-knocking intro, although here the track is faded early). Its effortless, mischievous inclusivity - and, presaging its eventual use as the cornerstone of Public Enemy's "Welcome To The Terrordome," its early deployment of intertextuality and sampling (once through the door and in the shack, the protagonist drops a needle on the record of "I Can't Get Next To You") - remains powerful, as do Whitfield's varied deployments of synthesisers, double drums and stereoscopic vocals. "Heaven Help Us All" has already been discussed here, but the Four Tops' "Keeper Of The Castle" acts as a sober successor; although now signed to Dunhill/ABC, Stubbs was still able to sing an edition of the News Of The World backwards and have us believe it. Sobriety and reflection are the keywords here; apart from some "Voodoo Chile"-referencing wah-wahs, moving swiftly through Blaxploitation into sensible balladry, the song appears to represent a deliberate step back from things like "Papa Was A Rollin' Stone" and "Superfly"; indeed, warns against them. Change society by all means, the song suggests, but don't forget that when you've brought everything down, you need to have something to put up in its place - remember your home, your family, the necessity to lay down roots, the ability to build. "Come on home," Stubbs keeps crying, and as a performance it's not that far from Charlie Rich's "Feel Like Goin' Home" (the version with just his vocal and piano, not the glutinous Billy Sherrill one). More refugees from an expired age.

It should be noted that both "Psychedelic Shack" and "Keeper Of The Castle" throw Cliff Richard's two efforts into monochrome. Now the raven in EMI's tower, and absent from this tale for fully a decade, Cliff was in the middle of his God-fearing Festival Of Light phase, and his hits were becoming progressively less big. 1972's "Living In Harmony" illustrates why. A bizarre country-gospel-pop jaunt, fiddles, banjo and pedal steel work hard as Cliff sings what sounds like a Partridge Family demo, all jollity and placid togetherness. Sometimes he is sinister - his guffawing "Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-har-mony" for a start, his "digging"s and his plaintive "I just want to give you life" (in every dream home, a heartache?) - but kazoo interludes and even a "Congratulations"-style pause and accelerando climax render it weirder and weirder until it climaxes with Greek bouzoukis. The song was co-written by Alan Tarney, who will subsequently play a major part in Cliff's major comeback later that decade, but Norrie Paramor's production is squarer than my old Technical Drawing class.

"Power To All Our Friends" was his second Eurovision attempt - don't call it a comeback, even if it did give him his biggest UK hit since "Congratulations" and his last top ten hit until "Devil Woman" - but in its attempt to paint a bucolic, noble Everyman picture (the vineyard proprietor, the girl on the beach in Monte Carlo) it ends up blurred and inchoate ("Power to the Sun" - but isn't the sun the biggest source of power we have?) with choppy rock guitars sitting uncomfortably alongside the stock bierkeller oompah-oompahs of the chorus. Producer and arranger David Mackay does his best to make the whole thing matter, and Cliff obviously sings as a believer in all of this, but the song ultimately doesn't connect emotionally beyond "Banner Man" level.

"Stay With Me," in contrast, shows that Blue Mink had long since surpassed the latter. A surprisingly touching and spacious ballad, its weightless harmonies and the careful single-note instrumental lines, as well as the use of echo, conjure up a kind of post-sixties pop psychedelia later to be spotted in such records as Liverpool Express' "You Are My Love." Clearly aiming for the Chicago/Chi-Lites sound, but instead gaining an unmistakably British tint, "Stay With Me" is a remarkable single.

There are a few other tracks here which make at least a token effort at learning from the past and moving forward. "Crazy," a song rejected by the Sweet but picked up by Mud (this would be a general Chinn/Chapman habit throughout 1973), sounds like the Tremeloes attempting "Hernando's Hideaway" on Temazepam with its tango rhythms, multiple background whoops, unfathomable cries of "Rearrange me!" and questionable lyrics about girls just out of school. If that weren't enough, the song's harmonic and rhythmic structures look forward unexpectedly to the Ozark Mountain Daredevils' "Jackie Blue." At least they were trying.

The twin distilled filters of the Move did more than try. "Ball Park Incident," Wizzard's debut single, remains a terrific, dense listen; surprisingly grungy in its production, Roy Wood snarling his tale of sitting on the porch, having found his girl shot in the schoolyard the previous night, possibly shot by his brother; his "It can't much matter to you"s growling their own bullets out. Much more like Springsteen than Spector, Wood was similarly inclined to create huge pictures into which he would attempt to cram the entire story of rock 'n' roll. Everything about this record is huge and menacing; the colonnades of honking saxophones, the drowning pianos, the tempo shifts and barline wrong-footings, the unanswerable power of the whole. It's still one of 1973's most overwhelming singles.

The Electric Light Orchestra, which at the time of "Roll Over Beethoven" still involved Wood in some degree (those giveaway sedulous saxophones, the atonal interlude of yellow-painted Chinese 'celli), were likewise still comparatively uncompromising, with its umbilical links to the British improv scene in its string section, and their reconstruction of both Ludwig and Chuck (although necessarily edited down for 45 use) remains compelling, with its alternating sections of Fifth and Johnny B. indicating divided passions. Its pub piano goes perfectly with the monolithic descending whole tones of strings and guitar; again there is that grunge oomph about the production, and both Beethoven and Berry end happily unified, as was always going to be the case.

This leaves the wild cards, and they were seldom wilder than "Mad About You"; a straightforward reggae ballad, recorded in Jamaica, then subjected to the barrage of Johnny Arthey's Willesden Sound. The result is as unnerving as anything Lee Perry was doing at that stage; the singer is nagged by a music-hall plunger trombone and eventually is faced with a wall of maniacal English laughter, so overpowering that you end up fearing for the poor bugger - it's as if he's surrounded by evildoers, a West Hampstead habitue having strayed a little too far into Brixton. And yet it made our top ten.

There is "Who Was It?," Hurricane Smith's third and last hit as a performer, and it's the same "Who Was It?" that we encountered on Gilbert O'Sullivan's Back To Front. Here the song is if anything more sinister, delivered in Smith's lecherous fiftysomething growl, decorated by Frankie Hardcastle's beefy tenor (Smith adds a lovely arranger's touch at the end, with a heaven-bound ghostly sax chorale). Given who is singing it, it's hard not to think that, in different circumstances, this is a song Syd Barrett might have written, or at least recognised. Lyrically, it's the Stockholm Syndrome - if the poor girl isn't careful.

Then there is the strange triptych at album's end. "Sister Jane" was early Chinn and Chapman, New World perform it like the earnest Australian folkies they were (and presumably still are), but the synth bass-based chorus introduces elements of disturbance; disturbing in that we are never told what Sister Jane has done, other than "fallen in love again" and "gone and changed your name," except there is now no way back, everyone will be pointing the finger, get out before they start pointing a gun. Did she get pregnant? Have an abortion? Marry a defaulter? Learn the tuba? No clues are to be gained from this unnerving (and largely unlistenable) tune, other than it sounds as though they have tied her to a chair in a shed to get her to talk, and that they are talking to her as though she were a two-year-old with Down's syndrome. Dogville or the Village's idea of pop? Who knows - just run away from it very quickly indeed. Is there even a "town" here, and how big is its population?

It is something of a relief then to proceed to "Strange Kind Of Woman" (Lena: "Thank goodness, rock 'n' roll!"), an extremely silly but very powerful record, Gillan totally earnest in his shaggy dog tale of lady of the night ("She loved everybody") whom he persuades to marry him "just before she died" - not that the latter throws him off any. Again, the track demonstrates just how comfortable Purple were at this stage (late 1971) with each other; the absurd 6/8 midsong interlude of psychedelic shadows fits in wonderfully (i.e. it doesn't fit in at all) and there is great purpose in Glover's bass and Blackmore's two controlled guitar solos (Lena: "So many dimensions into one song."). But then the record ends with the ludicrous "Heart Of Stone," perfomed in an even more ludicrous falsetto by Irish showband veteran/future cabaret star Tony Kenny over Martin and Coulter's patented proto-Rollers stomping. The falsetto alternates with Honey Monster growls ("I thought I was a-lone-UH!"), and so convinced was Kenny that he carried on for a couple more singles before opting out and leaving Martin and Coulter to recruit a reconstituted prog band under the "Kenny" brand name for cereal-filler hits like "The Bump" and "Baby I Love You OK." Left here to finish the record, it is akin to a trail of broken beer glasses that no one quite has the nerve to sweep up.

One track remains, and that is side one's closer, "All Because Of You," maybe the most extraordinary thing on the record. Some people here are seeking to push boundaries, others to retreat, yet others content to be incredibly strange beings, but Geordie seem to unify all of these. Its scary, speeding-up-vocal-to-become-Eno-raygun introduction is a brilliant touch, and the man who will one day become the voice of Back In Black - and Brian Johnson was still wearing his cap in 1973 - bursts in, midsong, as though someone has un-paused a cassette. The song and Johnson's performance demonstrate his roots in John Fogerty, but he is clearly aiming for something more; really the song only exists as such so that he can scream his way through it, but there are lots of remarkable little touches; the echoing "Hey, hey, hey"s (as opposed to the epileptic hiccuping of the "Hey, hey, hey"s on "Solid Gold") look back to the Dave Clark Five, and there's even a brief "Twist And Shout" sequence. Above all, however, burns the ray of renewed hope; this guy had nothing to say, no desire to live, even, until this girl came along, and he is duly renewed, and amazed by and ecstatic about it. Well, there's a rebirth worth celebrating.

Perhaps Pure Gold can be viewed, as well as a precursor to Now, as a gathering of evidence to support the argument for moving forward, with most of these songs showing elements of struggle - nearly all of the singers sound pushed to their limits - and a fervent desire to begin again. As chance would have it, EMI had just signed a group who would in time endeavour to sum up all of these elements and make a newness out of them. All would eventually change, unutterably.

David BOWIE: Aladdin Sane

2011-06-30T18:00:00.005+01:00

(#125: 5 May 1973, 5 weeks)

Track listing: Watch That Man/Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?)/Drive-In Saturday/Panic In Detroit/Cracked Actor/Time/The Prettiest Star/Let's Spend The Night Together/The Jean Genie/Lady Grinning Soul

Let's begin with Charlie Chaplin. Why not? Did he not also come out of south London, eventually to find his way to Detroit and machines? The differences between Chaplin and Bowie are otherwise too numerous and irrelevant to examine here, but note that in Modern Times he sees the automobile conveyor belts of Detroit as something approaching an end; an end, he scarcely needs bother to underline, of and to everything he cherished or nurtured about humanity. But in 1936 he could hardly see how those same belts could indicate a regeneration, a way forward for the otherwise abandonable, a future of Berry Gordy and Derrick May and Marshall Mathers...oh, and Iggy Pop. Contrast with the euphoric downhill helter-skelter lines of "Panic In Detroit" and it's clear that the chaos in itself provides the elements of what Bowie perceived in 1973 as being the future; he finds this man, a hero, a semi-shadowed representation of a recent, redder past ("the only survivor of the National People's Gang"), he runs around in rage, perhaps collecting a fantasy ransom, but when he returns the man is dead ("A gun and me alone"). There's norhing for it save to turn into his hero; there are too many riots, too much blood, too many foreboding shadows - but the performance is anything but sinister, Linda Lewis' backing vocals erupting into hysteria, Mick Ronson's guitar scratching furious atonalities. He is scared, this man, but there's hardly any doubt that he wants it.

And it is that wanting that makes Aladdin Sane such a violent and precious bursting out from the embryo of Ziggy Stardust, this forsaking of smallness, of provincial vulnerabilities, cutting all his foolish mash-ups and crazy patchwork quilts of twisting pop history and miraculously making it all fit, and also focus. Although the era's music press was generally unhappy about it - the term "sellout" recurred in reviews - the album thrust Bowie unquestionably into the foreground, an abruptly-arrived main event; this was the active catalyst which put the rest of his non-Deram back catalogue into our Top 30 (and only The Man Who Sold The World failed, and only just, to crack the 20), which forced a lot of people to realise that, suddenly, new things mattered, even if their raw material was often as old as, and sometimes older than, those who were to be replaced, superseded.

Without wishing completely to drop the necessary wariness when around Bowie, Aladdin Sane pulled off the trick of sounding better than anything else around it while simultaneously sounding like nothing this tale has yet seen, not even the Bolan tribute "The Prettiest Star," originally recorded in 1970 as a flop follow-up single to "Space Oddity" complete with guitar solo by Bolan himself. On this version the T Rex rhythmic throttle is introduced but there remains the odd Kurt Weill-isation of a hitherto relatively conservative song (the torchy "cold fire"s at the beginning chill the singer's tongue) and Ronson's solo is rather more anxious and angry than Bolan's. And in the meantime Bowie sings of the golding past and how it could still prove to be the future.

The record was a major development, even (or especially) from Ziggy; the latter has always borne for me the air of a Home Counties secondary school attempt at a rock opera; the singer's pronunciations on "Five Years" and "Rock 'N' Roll Suicide" are very actorly in an auditioning-for-RADA manner and Bowie and Ken Scott's production is underpowered, waferthin, and I think deliberately so; the music smells of stained nylon, festering fifties cupboards, forlorn boarding houses, damp pre-rock streets, and it may well be that this was a quiet revolt against glossy, bombastic, state-of-the-art seventies rock. Everything on The Rise And Fall seems to sneak under the duvet, cosying up to one's eyes or ears like a forbiddden comic book, or a microscopic transistor radio emanating Radio Luxembourg, assuring its listener (as "Suicide" makes clear) that he or she is not alone in feeling like they do - this could represent a way out, and for a few million teenagers, bored with their big brothers barking on about the sixties, it represented much more than that.

What Aladdin Sane does, however, is marry up the spirit of nearly-newness in Ziggy with a sounder development of the various ideas hinted at on 1971's Hunky Dory, the first Bowie album to sound like an integrated, conceived sequence of music. The lyrics are at this stage still largely nonsensical, but there is already an impatience boiling; "Life On Mars?," resurrected as a top three single some 18 months after its initial album release, is lyrically one of those inane Waste Land pastiches which every impressionable schoolboy writes at age sixteen, but somehow Rick Wakeman's piano, Buckmaster's strings, the telephone in the bathroom, all combine to make it something more than its parts; a jumbling up of the immediate past in order to enable a foreseeable future. Songs like "Andy Warhol" and "The Bewlay Brothers" build on this ambiguity and jog, if not yet quite run, with it.

Ziggy changed the world for everyone who heard it (and dressed up like him, and went to see him in concert, running the gauntlet of jeering school peers) but Aladdin made that change definite and more reaching. Its songs were written on the road in the States, where Bowie had toured throughout the final quarter of 1972. As his fame grew he took others, his own avatars, along in his slipstream; in 1973 he helped bring both Iggy (and the Stooges) and Lou Reed back into prominence (or into prominence for the first time) - if Iggy is turning into one of the secret heroes of TPL, and if "The Jean Genie" is by the writer's own admission a portrait of Iggy, hanging out with Bowie in denim-washed California, then the Stooges' grind motors even into "Panic In Detroit"; if Iggy is not the "man" then he wouldn't turn down the chance of being, or becoming, him (so that Raw Power is all the pent-up frustration of Ziggy re-thrashed into unsentimental odes to nothingness, and Transformer is the elegant dinner party accessory to second-person decadence; both seem to jut out of Bowie's orbit like particularly well-fed satellites).

But none of this shelters you from or explains the immediate impact of opener "Watch That Man" which with civilised contempt throws down the glove at the Stones and the Faces and endeavours to make mincemeat of both. Nothing on Ooh La La is as chillingly thought-through as this; and Exile has notice of competition; indeed, upset at RCA's decision to mix his vocals to the foreground in the track, Bowie prevailed and buried them back in the muddy mix. His chief read in late 1972 was Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, a still startling and self-deconstructing novel - does Ginger ever exist, except in Adam's unending dream about treasure and drunken majors? - which begins at the kind of twenties party which the song's scenario is reviving, with its references to Benny Goodman, "Tiger Rag" and - or but - "the bodies on the screen stopped bleeding." In Waugh's book, Adam somehow progresses, or degenerates, or regenerates (the concluding baby is as ambiguous as the child at the end of 2001), from flappy fop to soldier of the apocalypse, receiving dud cheques amidst the fallout. Already Bowie is wondering what would happen if this room, this facade, were to melt to nothingness, to confusion, to atrophy; what if the world is going to collapse, and - pace "Five Years" - what fun the ending would be.

The title track draws out the analogy further - is this a 1929 Quentin Crisp, or a thirteen-year-old Morrissey, or just Bowie himself, eagerly awaiting finality (as the schoolboy parenthesis confirms). Everywhere in the song, amidst its purple pores, the apparent grandeur slowly and methodically disintegrates; he is trying to sing this ballad about dead roses and songs about ballads ("Saddening glissando strings") but the atoms of the song won't let him rest, especially not the piano of Brooklyn's Mike Garson which slopes back and forth between McCoy Tyner/Roger Williams curlicues, intricate Cecil Taylor/Keith Tippett free runs and semi-random quotes ("Rhapsody In Blue" and "Tequila" being only the most obvious). The role of the piano here is ambiguous; does he represent the apocalyptic running down of everything, or a frantic attempt to reassemble everything in a new order? Whatever, the combination of ascetic croon (and, over Garson's second solo, some asthmatic John Tchicai-ish alto from Bowie himself) and post-Coleman jazz traced an irremovable scar on its listeners; certainly, I know of at least one nine-year-old Aladdin Sane admirer who might not quite have persisted with improvised music without this example, or confirmation.

"Drive-In Saturday" is arguably more avant-garde yet, and undoubtedly one of the strangest and most extreme singles to have made the UK top three. Cocking an astute ear to the imminent cleansed revival of the fifties, Bowie sets this selective nostalgia within a post-apocalyptic future, whose survivors - are they mutants, or cyborgs? - can only relearn the art of copulation and reproduction by watching remnants of old fifties movies; thus the creaking Palais saxophones combining with post-Eno electronic whooshes, the references to Jung, Jagger and (yet to be realised!) Sylvian, Bowie's sometimes reflective, other times barking vocals - the song is a warning about allowing the past to dominate our future so heavily if we cannot actively use it to get ourselves forward, or indeed back. Side one finishes with "Cracked Actor"; while touring the States, Bowie spoke of seeing an old Hollywood actor (identity never specified) down on his luck, out of money, full of booze and almost out of life. More than booze, too; there are references to crack and smack, and to "suck baby suck"; give this fallen star a last fuck before he pigs out of the system and down the drain. And yet, somewhere not quite indistinct in the middle, a plaintive "Please stay," maybe remembering the Cryin' Shames' nearly-hit, almost Joe Meek's last prayer for life. Somewhere else in the track there may be a harmonica, and there is the suggestion of two different tempi, as if fussily making up his mind whether or not to live.

Then there is "Time" with its easy outrages - the "wanking," the "quaaludes" - the glance at the fifth form watch, and its reminder to us that there are still, at this point, Jacques Brel and Scott Walker, there are still the rep theatre diphthongs, but the song builds in its great, damaged regret to something grander, from Garson's deadpan piano fills to full band and brass section, and somehow, in this furried mist of vague recollections and mislaid memories, the album's central line, and, I feel, its central premise, materialises:

"We should be home by now."

This is not merely the understandable cry of the touring artist, but something more, a recognition that he too has travelled from the sixties, but that too many people did not find their way out, were still not doing so; the piecemeal determination of the song "Aladdin Sane" inevitably puts Syd Barrett into mind (it can't be him - can it?), and in "Time," following one of Ronson's most unhinged solos on the record, the song too "goes home" and a choir of Bowies emerges for the long "Hey Jude" singalong. "YES!!!" he exclaims. "TIME!!!!" he sobs. Grab it back, wrench the magic from their fingers if you have to.

And so it comes to pass with his "Let's Spend The Night Together." In contrast to the gaucherie of the early '67 Stones - and 1967 was a year where they really didn't know where they were supposed to be going - and Jagger's hope-in-his-pants gung-ho, Bowie and his group storm through the song with a terrible assurance. From its introductory electro-whooshes and Garson's elbow-on-keys snigger, Bowie develops the song to such an extent that he is virtually daring the Stones of 1973 to better it, to be smarter, more astute. He does it as electropop and boozy bar boogie, pretty much at the same time, he gives a ridiculous "ha-HA-HA-HA-HA!" cackle in a falsetto which in the absurdity league table ranks at Gerry Monroe level. The song is taken faster and straighter, at least until the gaping black hole of an interlude wherein Bowie rants on about "Our love comes from ABOVE!" - Prince is fourteen going on fifteen - before which Ronson and Garson more or less demolish the song.

"The Jean Genie" was the album's other big hit single, and interestingly number two in our charts behind "Blockbuster" by the Sweet - both based on the same riff (the Yardbirds' "I'm A Man" which was Sonny Boy Williamson anyway). The Sweet are still my preferred option, if only for their remarkable ability to make apocalypse look and sound like a custard pie fight, but "Genie," though overplayed to the point of nullity on oldies radio, works far more dynamically in the album's context. The music's dynamics are slow-building rather than melodramatic, and that Keith Relf harmonica reappears prominently; Bowie drawls about degradation and fetishes like a newly drunken Dylan and the band are fist-tight around him, rattling tambourine and cobra guitars (especially at the word "reptile"), everything building up, boiling down and coming back for an even greater, if abruptly cut off, climax. No one was being as louche and as popular as this.

'Hullo, I'd forgotten all about you,' said the General. 'I picked up this little lady on the road. I can't introduce you, because I don't know her name. Wake up, mademoiselle.'

Such an unforgiving album, Aladdin Sane, a record revelling in the destruction and re-ordering happening around it, a record arrogant enough to take on the Stones and, moreover, keep the Beatles' red and blue retrospective albums off number one and out of this tale. As a gesture it was unbeatable; this, the new generation said, is ours - more so even than Electric Warrior, it was a declaration that any future, however topsy-turvy and otiose, was preferable to waddling in the detritus of any past. The two will violently collide again in entry #127, but in the meantime Aladdin Sane ushers us out and is finally generous enough to bestow upon us a happy ending, maybe happier than Chaplin and Paulette Goddard walking out into that most uncertain of futures at the end of Modern Times; Garson's florid cocktail piano flourishes set the solemn scene, and then in steals the voice:

"She'll come, she'll go..."

...and it is like the future being born (specifically it sounds like Billy MacKenzie emerging fully-formed from his chrysalis) as the song meanders through impossibly lovely, achy chord changes. There are some Spanish guitar flurries over Garson's ripples which are more Lorca than Dave Dee; "Don't be afraid of the moon," Bowie urges, before fading into his own imperceptible distance ("She will be your living end"), thinking of Scott and "Boy Child," dreaming of everything that will sooner or later emerge because of this record, these gestures, the look - is he naked in that centrespread or just newly dressed? The man who spent the greater part of the sixties as a catch-all joke strides back, in his good time, takes a look, and says: excitement, machines, riots - remember how good these felt, and who knows where they might still take us, with our unbottled courage? That thunderbolt down his face; don't you recognise a kiss when you see it?

The FACES: Ooh La La

2011-06-23T18:14:00.003+01:00

(#124: 28 April 1973, 1 week)

Track listing: Silicone Grown/Cindy Incidentally/Flags And Banners/My Fault/Borstal Boys/Fly In The Ointment/If I'm On The Late Side/Glad And Sorry/Just Another Honky/Ooh La La

If five years in rock and pop can seem a long time, then eighteen months can conversely seem longer, but even a cursory listen to The Faces' only number one album would be sufficient to sense that something had changed, and not for the better. Consider that since the day of Ogden's Nut Gone Flake - although at least one future was heavily hinted at during that record - pop had, in some ways relevant to this tale, turned into rock, and not long thereafter both Steve Marriott and the rest of the Small Faces had gone into keep-it-simple boogie rock; away from the sculpture and towards the chisel.

But Rod Stewart was already going somewhere else. His Faces - and how quickly they became "his" - were loose and messy in the best and worst ways. Always best experienced onstage, if you caught them on a good night it would be like swimming in the greatest pub you never built. Like Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, they shambled quite a bit, but all of a sudden they'd pull into tight focus and bear you along with them. They were mates, up for it, and their innate generosity towards their audience can be heard throughout the rockier moments of Ooh La La; Kenny Jones' truncheon-banging beats throughout "Borstal Boys" or his triple rat-tat-tat response to Stewart's "Shake me"s on the very silly "Silicone Grown," or Ian MacLagan's generous, front-mixed keyboards on "Cindy" or "My Fault" - they want us to join in, celebrate the Carlsberg laddism while rubbing out all the bad parts.

The trouble was that Rod was always more about pop than rock, about the business of constructing and delivering songs rather than rocking to randomville, and in the eighteen months since Every Picture had unexpectedly broken big, it's not hard to see how his craftsman hat was in danger of getting carelessly tossed about by The Faces' primal stampedings. Or, if that sounds too unduly harsh, that he was growing away from The Faces, perhaps even felt a little embarrassed about having to keep this boozy company. Ooh La La's predecessor, 1972's A Nod Is As Good As A Wink...To A Blind Horse (kept at #2 by Electric Warrior) was probably The Faces' best album, but Stewart appears on barely half of it; the hit "Stay With Me" notwithstanding, the things one remembers from it are the inventive work of the group as an instrumental entity (the inspired about-turn and osmosis which occur halfway through "Miss Judy's Farm") and, above all, the contributions of Ronnie Lane - "You're So Rude," "Love Lives Here" and in particular "Debris," the latter the profoundest thing the group ever did.

Remember also that Every Picture began its unexpectedly long life as a no-budget busman's holiday from The Faces, but suddenly - for whatever reasons, the foremost being probably that Stewart had the good sense to leave a lot of the solo groundwork to others - it overwhelmed its parent group. They would turn up for a concert and people assumed them to be Rod's backing band. Neither party was happy about this, as evinced by the grim sepia mock-portrait shots on the rear cover; only Lane appears to be smiling, and then only to keep from crying, and only he stares directly at the camera. Everyone else is turning away as though something horrendous has happened, and they cannot face up to its nature.

On the face of it, Ooh La La seems a slapdash effort - the record's total playing time scarcely exceeds half an hour - but much of this was down to the non-appearance of Stewart in the studio. If you wonder why the pleasant but pointless instrumental "Fly In The Ointment" - a sedate jaunt through the netherlands of Booker T and the Allman Brothers - appears at the start of side two it's to compensate for lack of Rod; he didn't turn up until fully two weeks into the recording sessions, and again is only really evident on about half of the tracks. The album is evenly divided - side one the rockers, side two the thoughtful stuff - and while no rock in 1973 was as matey and ready for action as "Borstal Boys" or "My Fault," it's not clear whether you'd want to buy most of these songs a second pint. From "Silicone Grown" onwards, Rod makes a decent show of being up for it - his purring "Wellllllllll" after the second verse, his "Sing it!" after the first instrumental break - but already there is that "lead singer" tone in his delivery which had been absent from his solo work, or at least kept at bay.

Moreover, there is in his work here a definite sense that he wants to move on. "Cindy Incidentally," the album's single hit, is in its honky-tonk ways an indirect precursor to "Born To Run"; there's no franticity about its wary strut - Jones goes for a martial beat - but it's clear that Stewart wants out: "This dream can pass just as fast as lightning," and I don't want to end my days in an upstairs pub room gargling out "Memphis Tennessee" for the ten thousandth time. "My Fault" sees him defiant in his stance; "I was just born this way/Yes, I was born this way" - does this remind you of something to come? - "I ain't gonna change for nobody, never, NEVER gonna change!" Both this and "Borstal Boys" could almost be described as The Prisoner gone to boogie ("Call out your number!" cries Stewart on the latter. "Who's a non-conformer? Not me baby! Oh yeah!"); I, chaps, am going to do whatever the hell I want whether you dig it or not.

But then there is Ronnie Lane's half to consider, and with his five songs Ooh La La becomes a markedly different proposition. "Flags And Banners" is a sobering shock of a haunted trip, over virtually before it starts; he is having a nightmare, the echo is crashing through the trees, and his Other is slipping away from him via a "scarlet door"; "your brothers' helpless prayers were all in vain" - a "Mandolin Wind" without any warmth or hope of a happy ending.

Lane gets Stewart to sing "If I'm On The Late Side" and coaxes the singer's best vocal performance on the record. The story of a delayed, or imagined, reunion - will she wait for him, will he get on any train, late or not? - Stewart keeps reasonable control over Jones' tramping foot percussion and the two Ronnies' roving guitar and bass. Although his performance is relatively subdued, there are still the mannerisms; Stewart does better on the unfortunately-titled "Just Another Honky," about an ending relationship, and it's difficult not to see the song as Lane writing about Rod, and indeed about the collapsing Faces ("It hurts me to think that I'll keep you in chains/Than if you were to leave me," "You can go if you want to/I don't own you, go be wild" - from inclusivity to indifference, all emotions are covered). At the song's end, Rod too collapses; his shivering "forevermore" sees his voice shatter into nameless splinters of dread, as if he too realises that there is no way back, no means of retrieving what he's lost; the football chumminess of the pictures in Never A Dull Moment suddenly seem as far away and irretrievable as Atlantis.

Lane sings "Glad I'm Sorry" in the voice of someone who has simply given up on the world (echoed by Ronnie Wood's pining guitar solos); his refrain of "Can you show me a dream/Can you show me one that's better than mine/Can you stand in the cold light of day?/Neither can I, neither can I" is as bleak as anything to come out in 1973 that side of Berlin. He gives the title track to Wood to sing in his adroitly strained tenor, a folk jig about grandfathers and grandsons and women and you don't know the half of it and we're forever doomed to repeat our predecessors' mistakes and, oh dear, fall in love. The fireside singalong, fuelled by MacLagan's tack piano and Wood's hearty acoustics, takes the record out; Stewart almost immediately alienated the rest of the group, and Lane in particular, by speaking in the music press about how bad the record was and how much better they could have done. Sensing no future, Lane unhappily quit the group in June and formed Slim Chance; after all, had the album not been a mess because of the absence of its main focus, too busy being a global superstar to come to the studio (producer Glyn Johns, by now an old hand at sorting out messes, did as good a job with his sticky-back plastic as could have been expected)? The Faces never made another coherent album again, though were capable of an unexpected autumnal evensong of a farewell with 1974's single "You Can Make Me Dance, Sing Or Anything..."; by the time they officially split in December 1975, Wood was already a Stone and Stewart was in another country. But he hasn't quite gone yet; the intervening two years would likewise prove to be an extremely long time.

LED ZEPPELIN: Houses Of The Holy

2011-06-19T16:31:00.003+01:00

(#123: 14 April 1973, 2 weeks)

Track listing: The Song Remains The Same/The Rain Song/Over The Hills And Far Away/The Crunge/Dancing Days/D'yer Mak'er/No Quarter/The Ocean

Listening to the scratchy indie jangle of "The Song Remains The Same," the unwary might have to pinch themselves that they are not listening to the Scritti Politti of 1978; the unexpected bar lines and harmonic developments almost act as a precursor to "Skank Bloc Bologna." Alternatively, listening to the easy-angled hard-verging-on-soft rock of the same song, one might discern the Heart of Dreamboat Annie - a happy sixty-first birthday to Ann Wilson, incidentally - or, listening to the oblique bass/guitar relationship and stiff-armed drumming of the song, one might sense a prediction of Ornette's Prime Time ensemble. Then again, listening to the sped-up (sounding) vocals of a furiously mixed-back Plant - towards song's end he sounds as though in receipt of helium - and the staccato harmonies in the song, one could easily predict Queen. Those unanticipated three-note basslines from Jones even foresee the Associates. The harmolodic Byrd mutation of the extended intro settles down to a swampy strut for Plant's entry, and Page is in hoedown mood, doing his best at times to turn the song into an Allman Brothers homage.

If some of these references appear fanciful (which I do not believe they are) then that underlines the multi-hued prism of influence that was the Zeppelin of 1973, even on what was once assumed to be one of their lesser records. In fact I enjoyed listening to Houses Of The Holy more than any of its three predecessors in this tale; its lightness is a salutary repose after the intensity of Four Symbols, and although it wrongfooted nearly all critics at the time of its release - what, no rockers, no anthems, what's with all this eclectic shit? - this is nearly always to the record's advantage.

At this point Zeppelin albums divided fairly reasonably between the Monoliths of Major Statements (II and IV) and divergent backwaters or detours giving them the freedom to experiment and regenerate (III and the present example). If much of Houses is dedicated to good-natured goofing around, it bears a lightness inaccessible to most of the group's peers. "The Rain Song," for instance, proceeds along much the same path as "Stairway To Heaven," yet, perhaps because it doesn't strive for effect, I find it rather more moving. Mostly, even in the "rock" sections, the mood is quiet, predominantly acoustic, albeit with Jones' Mellotron providing a useful readymade string section (with occasional atmospheric whooshes). Page works through some jazz chords and generates an atmosphere of Hawaiian lounge music, ambient and subtly laid with traps (Jones responds with a few cocktail piano tinkles). Plant sings through a simple four seasons of love analogy (though still manages to get in curveballs like "This is the mystery of the quotient" and quote Ben Jonson - "Speak to me only with your eyes" - and his "Talk Talk" as Bonham's drums nudge their way into the picture and the song turns to electricity sets a path which will ultimately lead to Spirit Of Eden). Melodically and structurally there is more than a passing resemblance to the Guess Who's 1969 US top tenner "Laughing" but "Rain" is fundamentally a very different song, far more meditative, and, when, Plant's "But I know" ushers in a hushed return to the original setting to welcome amd embrace his "...that I love you so," immensely affecting. Page's acoustic strums eventually resolve into the opening of "Over The Hills" which again demonstrates the proximity of Zeppelin's folkier rock to that of Fairport Convention (even though it gives Jones a bass solo).

But then the record loosens up and the party, such as it is, begins. "The Crunge" is a quite brilliant James Brown pastiche, Bonham's B-boy beats and even Jones' occasional harmonium-like synth bleeps providing a perfect backdrop for Plant to wreak audacious havoc over the angular 9/8 backing; again, the unwary listener may need to pinch themselves that they are not listening to 1981 post-punk funk, although Plant's deliberately ludicrous interjections - at one point paying homage to Otis by citing "Mr Pitiful" and "Respect" - seem somewhat warmer and more approachable than those of, say, James Chance. In fact Plant hams wonderfully throughout the track ("Ah, will you just excuse me," he coughs near track's end, before a Goonish dialogue about finding the bridge brings the track to a satisfactory halt). More significantly, the homage does considerably greater service to Brown's power and continuing influence (1973 was the year of the excoriating, blacker-than-Beckett The Payback) than some of his worthier white disciples, and Plant's vocal curlicues and teases also suggest a familiarity with Clinton's Parliament/Funkadelic theatre of R&B superrealism, then only just emerging into the mainstream.

"Dancing Days" provides yet more proto-No Wave angularity with Jones' organ squelches, Page's jittery guitar and Bonham's deadpan drums while Plant merrily deconstructs the love song ("I got my flower, I got my power," "You'll be my only, my one and only/Is that the way it should start?" - just how familiar was Green with this record?). The unexpected Rough Tradery of the album continues with its big hit, "D'yer Mak'er," wherein Plant croons a minimalist "Unchained Melody" variation over more scratched guitar, occasional barrelhouse piano and, above all, Bonham's cardboard dustbin of drum fills; the obvious antecedent is that of the Police - at one point Plant even sings, "Every breath I take/Every move I make" - but the energy is considerably greater and the song's essential good nature has made it last a lot longer, again, than more slavishly adherent eulogies to pre-dub JA.

"No Quarter" is the album's one nod to Epic/Future Stage Perennial but, although I think it the record's least convincing track, it does to its credit try its best to keep all of its elements within severe reserve; it bears no climactic rock-out, and while Plant's lyrics, decidedly within the Dungeons and Dragons section of the Zep oeuvre, are as silly as ever ("The winds of Thor are blowing cold"), the song perhaps relates most closely to the cover image of multiple child brother and sister crawling over the Giant's Causeway naked, not an image which would pass any contemporary board of control, in its aura of impending doom, or possibly a disguise of doom to conceal hope ("They carry news that must get through/To build a dream for me and you"), and Jones has a whale of a time with his various synthesised processors; the piano/guitar dialogues between Jones/Page are well coordinated, the build-up of the song gradual and logical. Against that, Plant's furiously phased vocal sounds a lot of the time like a subdued Ozzy Osbourne, and at fadeout he has an attack of the Barry Ryans ("I'm cold! I'm cold!").

Nevertheless, "The Ocean" - the nearest Houses comes to a "rocker" - provides a happy ending, its instantly recognisable riff rejuvenating the listener in a second (if you're wondering which Beastie Boys track sampled it, it's "She's Crafty") together with Bonham's characteristically monumental M25-building beats. Again, Plant sounds speeded-up but euphoric - somewhere between Brenda Lee and Noddy Holder - and there are nice nods to the fifties with the acappella doo-wop break midsong and the closing Fats Domino rave-up (Plant exclaiming, "C'mon, so GOOD!" at something Page plays). The song is about Plant's daughter Carmen, and the band's audience ("The Ocean" are they, and Houses Of The Holy the venues where the band had played), and although there is still an intimation of apocalypse ("Used to sing on the mountains but the mountains washed away"), we stroll away with kind hearts and generous spirit. A fabulous and unexpectedly prophetic album which may yet prove among the longest-lasting of Zeppelin records.

VARIOUS ARTISTS: 20 Flash Back Greats Of The Sixties

2011-06-12T16:54:00.009+01:00

(#122: 31 March 1973, 2 weeks)

Track listing: Yakety Yak (Coasters)/Splish, Splash (Bobby Darin)/Tired Of Waiting For You (Kinks)/Surfin' Surfari (sic) (Beach Boys)/Johnny Get Angry (Joanie Sommers)/Hats Off To Larry (Del Shannon)/Sweet Talkin' Guy (Chiffons)/Time Of The Season (Zombies)/Don't Throw Your Love Away (Searchers)/Save The Last Dance For Me (Drifters)/Here Comes My Baby (Tremeloes)/Hey, Paula (Paul and Paula)/Wild Thing (Troggs)/24 Hours From Tulsa (Gene Pitney)/Venus In Blue Jeans (Mark Wynter)/Young Girl (Gary Puckett & the Union Gap)/Colours (Donovan)/San Francisco (Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair) (sic) (Scott McKenzie)/Mr. Tambourine Man (Byrds)/Blue Velvet (Bobby Vinton)

"A collection of individuals...They make sounds for what we see, experiments with wood, glass and air for half-formed things. These small shards and movements can be scooped up together and rolled into something like a place or a landmark."
(From the sleevenote to Sketches and Spells by The Focus Group, 2004)

"for your pleasure
in our present state
part false part true
like anything
we present ourselves"
(Roxy Music, "For Your Pleasure," 1973)

"There's someone in my head but it's not me"

Like anything, the sixties can be re-presented in any way that happens to suit the individual, or the crowd of any given subsequent era. We clean up our attics of memory in preparation for a spring which may or may not deliver what a previous spring might have promised; maybe it's better like this, to hold the spectacles and above all the sounds at a certain distance, not being directly mixed up with them, or imbued with them as they were happening. Perhaps it clears our private airs for proper thought, or improper regret.

Everyone who went through the sixties, including this writer, who was but a toddler but did live through the main part of the decade, has their own story, their private meaning of what the time meant to them, and thanks to the cycle of self-preservation and the technological recycling of selective nostalgia, so does everyone else, including the grown generation who never experienced the sixties first hand. We have not been allowed to forget the sixties, yet thanks to demographic-manufactured/serving nostalgia so much of and from the sixties has been allowed to seep through into the dusty backroom of unwanted, unretrieved memory. Cut the experience down to 200 easy songs, and nobody will complain, other than perhaps about revolutions which echo those of their time a little too uncomfortably.

But there is another, artful way to sculpt these stories, to take what is screamingly familiar and arrange its elements to tell a story which makes us wish we weren't so susceptible to the erasure of total, messy recall. If you're really clever, you can thrust them all into the present time's nowness and help build a path to the future - who knew how exotic Ferry and Eno could make all these elements sound if they arranged or distressed them in a certain way ("ta ra" or "Tara," gone with another uncaught wind) - or if you simply wish to point a few, possibly moving, things out, you put together a collection like 20 Flash Back Greats Of The Sixties, a group of songs orchestrated in such a criss-crossing order as to deny the supposed randomness of K-Tel compilations; as with their previous fifties set, this sets out, I believe, to tell a very deliberate story. It is, I should state at this early stage, also a pronouncedly white one - there are only two tracks by black artists, and both of these were overseen by Leiber and Stoller - but the sixties of James Brown, of Motown and Atlantic and Stax, or even of Chess, or Delmark or Nessa or Impulse! or ESP, have their own stories to tell and their own narrators.

No; this album tells the tale of the not-quite-silent majority (of its twenty tracks, only seven are by British artists, and three of these are covers of American songs), the bit players, the extras. A fairy tale with most of the major characters absent. The remote and nearly forgotten byways of an extraordinary journey from pop to "Protect Other People"; a story, too, which was not without its immediate parallel.

Speak To Me

Yes, the album, which purports to be about and from the sixties, begins with two cuts from the fifties, but even this does not appear random or sloppy; instead, these two songs between them set the parameters for what is to come in the wake of their flood. Leiber and Stoller referred to "Yakety Yak" as "a white kid's view of a black person's perception of white society," but for most people it came as a wisecracking torrent of thou-shalt-nots, all the stupid rules and appropriateness which the fifties were itching to kick right out the window into the garbage. The singers voice the parental admonitions as high-octane neurophysical hysteria, suddenly dipping down into dictatorial "Don't talk back"s as the kid renders their pseudo-morals as rubbly gibberish.

"Don't give me that do goody good bullshit"

The real statement here, however, needs no words; King Curtis snatches his tenor and converts adulthood into baby babble. The use of the saxophone to express the otherwise inexpressible or inadequately expressed would not be lost on others.

"Up and down/And in the end it's only round and round and round"

Do The Strand

It started as a bet; Murray the K wagered Bobby Darin that he couldn't work a song out of the phrase "Splish, splash, I was takin' a bath" and Darin took him up on it. What an extraordinary disc it remains; it happily sweeps away any concept of parenthood or authority - the guy gets out of his bath, looks into his front room and suddenly there's a party happening, complete with Little Richard intertextualities. How did they get in there? Does he know any of them? How did they find him? Is he imagining all of it? In the end, it doesn't matter, he gives up the bath, puts his dancing shoes on, goes in there and joins in with the celebration. What are they all celebrating? Nothing less than the power of this pop, the ability of rock 'n' roll to move souls as well as, or better than, butts. Suddenly, all those threats about spending cash are more than ready to take out with the trash. The sixties are ready to go, if you want them.

Breathe

Abruptly we find ourselves right in the middle of the big banging sixties - this album's chronology finds its own logic - and there is this recurring leitmotif of waiting; the kid in "Yakety Yak" is waiting to grow up, but now he's grown up, found someone who's taken him out of being "a lonely soul" and, worse, "nobody," but the speed rush of "You Really Got Me" and "All Day And All Of The Night" is already wearing off; the Davies harmonies float at half-tempo above guitars and rhythm - "it's your life and you can do what you want" - and they sound exhausted, impatient and impotent; through how many more hoops will they be compelled to jump until they get what they want? How easy is it, even in 1965, to throw down that spade and tell the guy to dig his own holes? Where is the thing we were promised?

On The Run

Back a few years to the Californian kids, the ones fired up in part by "Yakety Yak" and the Lucilles and Mollies which inspired it - and who knows that some of them will end up reprising the parents' part? - who hear Chuck Berry and modify it in their engines, who want us to understand that their pastime will, by virtue of the necessary beach and sea, spread to the entire planet ("Everybody's learnin' now"), even to South Africa and "the coast of Peru." Make no mistake, they are convinced that their song is the right one and are committed to telling us which way the waves are crashing, knowing that - at least for now - they're destined, or doomed, to come out on top. Mike does lead, Brian and Carl are there in the middleground, the horizon is already endless.

Beauty Queen

Who was Joanie Sommers - she is still with us, so I have to be careful with that tense - and why "Johnny Get Angry"? Well, this is the impatient cry of someone who has perhaps had enough of her waiting. What to do in order to kick this guy's ass so that he can show that he actually loves her (if indeed he does)? She offers him multiple cruel temptations - she tells him they're through and he simply hangs his head (it "Makes me wish I was dead"); she allows someone else to cut in on the dancefloor and he meekly acquiesces - all in order that he can overcome the low-slung bass and guitar unison figure and be made to explode into colour. A shame that her manifesto is laid down with such comic ineptitude; she wants him to get mad, to "give me the biggest lecture I ever had," to be a "brave man" and a "caveman." None of this is convincing, and the mass kazoos of the middle-eight do nothing to make it believable or anything less than a dainty step away from the eternal darkness of "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)." The Carol Deene version which was a minor hit in Britain is exactly like an Englishman impersonating a Japanese comedian when he doesn't speak Japanese.

"could it be evil thoughts become me
tell us what you're thinking now
some things are better left unsaid"

Strictly Confidential

But then she has enough, leaves Johnny for Larry, whereupon Larry promptly does the same thing to her. No pre-Beatles pop star of the sixties, not even Orbison, crouched so firmly in unreachable shadows as Del Shannon; even when he appears to give himself a happy ending, there's none of the knife-edge euphoria of a "Running Scared." He stays in his corner, with his webs and plans, terrified that he will be tracked down and found out. He claims that, despite her laughing at him when she walks out, he still wants her back, but his howls of "cry, cry, CRYYYY-EE!" are as impenetrable as the most barbed of wires. The Musitron - his King Curtis (actually played by organist Max Glass, and no, I don't think he became Philip) - quivers in slithering sopranino terror. He never stopped hiding.

"You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today"

Editions Of You

Who knew in 1962 where, or what, these Californian waves would wash up, who would go on to swim in the Wilsons' waters? The Chiffons were one of the last of the original wave of pre-Motown girl groups to survive into the Beatles era (and clearly were an influence not lost on at least one Beatle) but 1966's "Sweet Talkin' Guy" proved their last big flush; their biggest hit in almost three years and also their last US Top 40 entry. It didn't become a hit in the UK until 1972, when the Northern Soul boom swept it into our top three, but both song and arrangement are so clearly indebted to Brian Wilson (and, given that Pet Sounds was yet to be released in the spring of 1966, the record is arguably ahead of Wilson) that it's indecent. As indeed is the song's progenitor; the guy's a shit, or at least she's saying so, warning every other girl to keep well clear of him, but something deep in her still wants him, his hunkily persuasive bullshitting. Meanwhile, the music moves from rather foreboding string slashes (reminiscent of Psycho) through to the pacific oboe and 'celli of the middle eight. Piano and harmonica also foresee "God Only Knows," as do the cascading triplets of the "You'll never win" sequence. Three contrasting views, then, of what might well be the same man.

Time

"To hear the softly spoken magic spells."

Recorded in the same studios five-and-a-half years earlier by a group who were more or less falling apart, so little regarded by their own record company that they were obliged to pay for part of their studio time with their own royalties and savings, the cautious sunniness of Odessey And Oracle belies the painful process of its recording; well, almost - things like "Butcher's Tale" and gestures such as the abrupt nuclear button ending of "All Our Friends," the rather sinister undertow to the chirpiness of "Care Of Cell 44," the dusty, languid piano and wordless falsettos which take out "Hung Up On A Dream" (a response to Hardin's "Hang On To A Dream"? Even if not, it sounded startlingly contemporary when heard on a Discman in Albarn's West London of summer 1995) suggest a terminal to this particular beach.

But the record ends with "Time Of The Season," a belated US top three smash (Cashbox placed it at number one) in the spring of 1969, when the Zombies had long ceased to exist and Colin Blunstone had returned to the insurance office day job. It successfully combines menace and reassurance, promises of darkness and pleas for light. The track relies on Chris White and Hugh Grundy's booming drum n' bass by accident - Paul Atkinson's guitar lines were largely left out of the final mix - but Blunstone's cavalier vulnerability benefits as a result; he is left to carry the tune virtually alone, guitar only entering with the partially comforting chorus. The song itself is a photocopy of summer of love chat as depicted in a darkening front room; the season's tropes - "what's your name?," "who's your daddy?" - fold back on themselves like a particularly hip-sounding Mike Sammes jingle over the "Stand By Me" backdrop. And like "Stand By Me" both song and performance rush to stop the mountains from crumbling, the world ending; out blossoms, straight from the Beach Boys via the Master Singers, the perfect harmonic triple and pledge: "It's the time of the sea-ea-son for lo-ving." Rod Argent's organ grabs the space whenever it can find it and indeed doubles in the long fadeout, each solo fighting against, or coaxing, the other, and yet more and more organs pile on as though to say: enough of this pussyfooting about faith and truth and bravery - this is a church which might resolve everything, if only you wanted it, racing around to come up behind us again, but on this occasion offering an embrace.

Breathe Reprise

"Don't Throw Your Love Away" was originally a 1963 B-side by proto-Philly soul vocal group The Orlons but Liverpool's Searchers took it to number one (their third chart-topper) in the UK (and to #16 in the US) in the optimistic early summer of 1964. The influence of Mike Pender and John McNally's Rickenbackers on The Byrds has long since been acknowledged but this song acts as a calming elder brother to "Time Of The Season" and offers a warning not to lose what we have in ourselves, wherever we are heading and whatever we are planning to do with the rest of this decade, "for you might need it one day." The song and performance perhaps foresee with all too much melancholy the ruination into which the sixties would eventually collapse, as well as giving subtle hints as to what might happen - the Indian drone elements which creep halfway into each middle-eight, the brusque triple guitar thrashes leading back into the verses. But keep your love, preserve it, develop it; it might, the record suggests, be all you need.

The Great Gig In The Sky

"Go on and have your fun," sing The Searchers on "Don't Throw Your Love Again," and so does Ben E King on "Save The Last Dance For Me"; the bookending of side one by child-to-man Leiber and Stoller tells its own story. Inspired by co-writer Doc Pomus' generosity towards his own wife - he suffered from polio and needed crutches to mobilise, but was happy for his wife to go out, socialise, dance and enjoy herself, trusting completely in her - this is as unmistakably an adult record as "Yakety Yak" is prophetic juvenilia. Using a deceptively busy Latin backing, the lyrics seem almost tailored for the rhythm, the consonants and vowels enunciated in as Latinate a manner as possible but still (if tenuously) remaining English. King's natural nobility sees the song through; he is the "man" of whom the singer of "Johnny Get Angry" can only imagine, he has enough confidence to know that she can go home with no one else but him, and we have no cause to doubt him. This is the ideal, the plateau, towards which the rest of side one has been working; no waiting, no hats on or off - we believe in this mutual fealty, as clearly as we can glimpse the ghost of Spector to come in the record's fibres. The development from King's lascivious "Mmm!" at the end of verse two to his final, satisfied "Mmmmmm" signifies a rite of passage for which the singer (bolstered by the high harmonies hovering behind and above him, like the most benevolent of protecting angels) is eminently qualified.

The Bogus Man

The second of Cat Stevens' three comings showed a slyer operator than the convenient sensitive singer-songwriter bracket was able to support. At this point Stevens was roughly halfway between his "Matthew And Son" days and things like "Was Dog A Doughnut?" but, as with his then labelmate Bryan Ferry, he was already very conscious of his history and the need to remould it if he were to count for anything, or anybody. His "Here Comes My Baby" is as rabid a rustling of its immediate pop past as anything on the first two Roxy albums, with its rapid-fire citations of "In The Midnight Hour," "A Picture Of You" and "You'll Never Walk Alone." Stevens was reportedly disgruntled by what he saw as The Tremeloes' pillaging of the song (including excising the entire final verse) - what, a serious song of hurt presented as a "La Bamba" rave-up?

Again, this shows how little musicians sometimes understand about their own music, what happens with it, or to it, when it's taken into the air, redistributed for the breath of everyone else. The Tremeloes treated the song just as they treated most of their other post-Brian Poole hits, as party time; they would burst onto TOTP waving their butchers' hands, yippeeing and whooping, and on record it was just the same - so much so that one wonders exactly how bothered they are at watching the girl of their dreams waltzing off with somebody else, with their cowbell whacks and their whistling (whistling!) breaks. Oh well, that's that, on with the party - or, like Smokey, are all the laughs there to hide all the pain?

Editions Of You (Slight Return)

"Hey, Paula" sounded almost from its conception like a crude pain-concealing mechanism, particularly as there was no "Paul and Paula" - it was Ray the student and Jill his landlady's niece who together knocked something up for local (Texas) radio, and the little ditty spread. The pledge of true love, and the virtues and disadvantages of patience ("I can't wait no more for you"), seem strained, overstressed. The two sound as though singing in separate universes; the church organ promises some kind of purity but the syrup of its would-be climax ("True love means waiting...") turns the record into a complete chimera. "TRUE LOVE IS NOT A HIGH SCHOOL PROJECT!" yelled an exasperated Lena, and indeed this is not the reverse of the frustrated "Tired Of Waiting For You" coin.

For Your Pleasure

"Wild Thing" comes as a major relief after "Hey, Paula"; this, the record screams, is what really goes on at high school. No conditions or boundaries here; the two are out on the dancefloor, moving to Buddy Holly (that "Shake it, shake it!" at the outro); the downward tongueing lick of guitar represents a move from child to man, "Louie, Louie" ground down halfway to fuck-tempo; Reg Presley (the glorious conceit of that name!) takes his time, lets the music pause and breathe before thrusting his tractor hack into the centre of things, even allowing a smudged ocarina into the picture. At climax, the band seem ready to fall over themselves, everything collapsing in orgy; this was the revenge of the dirty garage over the clean soda fountain. Reg Presley would never have got in the bath to begin with!

Brain Damage

But sometimes there is no turning back, especially if you make the wrong move. Throw that love away, or is it the early groaning of the adolescents of "Wild Thing" grown up and forced to accept, or face, responsibility? The singer of "Tulsa" is clearly an adult, yet his acts are perhaps the most childish on the record - and Bacharach and David knew this just as surely as they knew their audience. Pitney was never really allowed to be happy - whenever he was, the record flopped - and his croaking voice, as though in the middle of swallowing a dozen red barbiturates, was perfect for this quiet nightmare. What is he doing out on the road, a day's travelling away from getting home? Musician? Salesman? Will he ever send the letter? But he stops off at a motel for the night and meets a girl who behaves unexpectedly (he asks her to "stay," she says "OK." Just like that?). He asks for food, inspiring one of the most sinister of pop double entendres, "and she showed me where"; then they dance, they hit it off or at least Pitney thinks they do ("Told her I'd die before I would let her out of my arms" - her reaction is not recorded)...and that's it. "I can never...go home again," he sings in the manner of Mary-Ann Weiss' errant uncle; the ghost town chorus and Bacharach's final hanging-in-the-air duo of piano chords offer little guidance or exit. As they dance and get closer, the high trumpets shiver their rapid strokes, echoing Pitney's nerve-shredded heartbeat, the bloody coursing of his veins; he's excited, he's broken out of the straitjacket - but he is hardly joyous; it is as if he has already died. Maybe they'll run the cafe together and end up the parents from whom Tracy Chapman will a quarter-century hence be only too eager to flee.

Grey Lagoons

The old ways, what the parents in "Yakety Yak" would have liked, although I suspect even they would have blanched at a record which perfectly illustrates immediate pre-Beatles notions of pop, namely as something best kept in 1951, or at least sent back there. "Venus In Blue Jeans" was an American song - Jimmy Clanton's original made the US top ten earlier in 1962 - and while very far from a masterpiece, or even a passable pop song, Mark Wynter is careful, in the manner that a subordinate frightened of the sack is careful, to extract every element of space, yearning, desire, love from it. Drowning in Sargasso treacle, it plays, or drones anyway, like a flaccid Xerox of a long-spent desire, its surface opulence hiding a terrible emotional poverty, or should "poverty" be replaced by "constipation"? A last cry of a passing order...or was it?

"Run rabbit run"

Eclipse

"Young Girl" is from the other end of the sixties - it's as far as this compilation dares go - but equally sounds as though rock 'n' roll need not have bothered happening, even if it is one of the record's most disturbed and disturbing songs. "Young girl," croons Gary Puckett over static, springtime strings, fooling us into expecting a Johnny Mathis tribute, before the band snaps shut on him like a mousetrap; for the rest of the record, he wriggles in hurt, confusion, paranoia. By comparing it with Morrison's almost exactly contemporaneous "Cyprus Avenue," I do not mean to inflate "Young Girl"'s aesthetic worth, but simply mean to point out that where Morrison's driver is hurt because he is obsessed by a love that he knows he can never openly declare - she's fourteen, you can't touch her - Puckett is tortured by the knowledge that he has walked right into something he can't control. In one of the most overt demonstrations of projection on any number one record, however, Puckett tries to turn the tables on the girl, implying that she led him on, that she's responsible for all the come-on stuff, that it's all her fault, just as Pitney screwing the waitress was all the waitress' fault for existing. He goes even further, trying to spread out a flimsy moral blanket, but Travis Bickle he is not (and she, whoever she is, is probably not Iris). Puckett sounds scared, petrified, frozen; he wants to walk away but knows deep in himself that he won't, that he is scoring his own tragedy. Goodness knows what that says about what "the silent majority" wanted in their 1968 pop. Did somebody once say something about hoodlum friends, or dancing shoes? It seems so far away.

Any Colour You Like

And then the story changes, or deepens. We are in 1965, with this peaked-cap Glaswegian fellow whose guitar says "This machine kills" (because he wrongly reckoned that there weren't any fascists in Britain) who sings what initially seems to be an easy sunrise of a folk song, still hugely redolent of Dylan. There is simple joy in his craftily innocent double entendre ("In the morning...when she rises") and his already unorthodox guitar tunings (together with his close-miked voice, setting the pace for Nick Drake and others to follow) weld perfectly with the record's gradually thickening texture. His "When I see her...mmm, hmmm/Oh gosh" prefaces Bolan.

But then the song takes a different lyrical turning. "Freedom is a word I rarely use without thinking," twice with two "mmm, hmmm"s, then the codicil: "of the times that I've been loved." Thus does the song subtly branch out from the personal into the political (if you equate "love" with "respect" and "rights," and there's nothing in Donovan's dreamily determined croon to convince me otherwise), directly prefiguring "The 'Sweetest Girl'" by more than a decade and a half, and the seemingly unassuming "Colours" is perhaps this record's most radical track with the widest subsequent reach of influence; it is already heralding both seventies and eighties, it deconstructs the pop song (or even the folk song) to a modest degree, and yet its roots go much further back than any other track on the album, back to the nineteenth-century weavers and drovers.

Money

A harsh categorisation? Possibly not, but although Scott McKenzie and John Phillips, not to mention the San Francisco tourist industry, did very well financially from the success of this accidental anthem, and despite the song's origins as a promotional tool for the Monterey Festival, I can still listen to "San Francisco" and hear a heartfelt, if very politely expressed, call for radical change, a siren song to the counterculture, a plea to turn away from money and think of society again. So much of what makes the record count lies in its spaces, the floating glockenspiel (an earthly counterpart to John Cale's airy celeste on the Velvets' "Sunday Morning"), the subtle nods to Spector, the role of bass, bells and sitar in the complex middle-eight ("People in motion"), the ability of the song to suggest endless room in which to breathe. Perhaps in its own way it was as much of a chimera as "Hey, Paula" but it sounds infinitely more convincing; forget all that, the song tells us, let's just walk away and start something new. And keep it going? Well, that's the hard part.

Us And Them

And here is the song which signalled the change; McGuinn learning from The Searchers but making the quantum leap which was always just outside the Liverpudlians' reach (they had the rock but not the folk background) and once more, by simplifying Dylan's endless torrent of an original to what would pass in 150 seconds of a pop single, McGuinn somehow manages to say all that needs to be said; he sees these visions, this vizier whom he will follow, emulate and one day exceed. Everything is freed from gruelling, grey gravity; the float of the song is amorphous, McGuinn, Crosby and Clark piloting the ship into cosmos still to be imagined. Look upon this time, people of 1973, and look what you once might have had.

As opposed to what you settled for.

In Every Dream Home, A Heartache

As if to torment us, those of us who still cared enough to care, the record finally rewinds almost to the very beginning, before there were any Beatles or visible counterculture, to a song which closes the pages in a way which might dissuade some from reopening the book and attempting a rewrite. But chart history eventually rewrote itself; a US number one from 1963, "Blue Velvet" would finally rise to #2 in the UK as late as 1990, provoked by a television ad campaign (for Nivea hand cream) and general David Lynch mania caused by the airing of Twin Peaks. Impossible though it now is to listen to Vinton's reading (and there are others; Tony Bennett had the original hit in 1951, and the astounding doo-wop reading of the song by The Clovers came along in 1959) without thinking of severed ears, sordid underbellies of suburbia or Dennis Hopper's inhaler, even without that knowledge it would still sound like a pop record from Mars; the backing chorus is a little too clearly delineated, the spaces are so evenly spaced as to be not human (and the glockenspiel from "San Francisco" reappears, as does the space) - over this, Vinton is almost, albeit politely, at the end of his tether; much more than "Venus In Blue Jeans" or even "Young Girl" (for perfect symmetry, "Save The Last Dance For Me" should have been paired with "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town"), this spells out an ending.

It's impossible to listen to that last four-song sequence in particular and not be profoundly moved; here, discreetly underlined, is a story of what might have happened and what we didn't allow to happen, and it reflects our own painful craving for retrospective resolution. For in 1973 we were in large part all still trapped in the sixties, or its broken promise, as trapped as the man sung about, lamented, mourned, in the album this record kept at number two and out of Then Play Long (at least directly). These tunes were not quite everything under the sun - indeed, far from it - but even by this moment in history the eclipse had already taken hold. Disposable darlings or silver starfish with honeymoons? Think about the landmarks before you mourn.

ALICE COOPER: Billion Dollar Babies

2011-06-05T13:07:00.004+01:00

<#121: 24 March 1973, 1 week)

Track listing: Hello Hurray/Raped And Freezin'/Elected/Billion Dollar Babies/Unfinished Sweet/No More Mr. Nice Guy/Generation Landslide/Sick Things/Mary Ann/I Love The Dead

In rock, honesty and artifice are commonly held as polar opposites, even though they are almost always two sides of the commonest of coins. After all, if a performer not only owns up to the primacy of artifice, isn't he or she being as honest as they can possibly be? Either they rejoice or grieve for our secondary pleasure, or they revel in poking their ringed fingers into the fourth wall, and perhaps we as listeners or consumers feel as guilty in either case; we invest so much time and emotion in somebody who tells us that they are but a cartoon, yet how else do we treat our idols if not as abstract graven images worthy of temporary worship?

Myself, I'm not so sure; both honesty and artifice have many levels, and many of these are concurrent and interdependent. This is the first entry of what might superficially be described as American hard rock, or heavy metal, and pretty much the only American glam-rock entry (of its time, not counting manifestations in future generations), and it comes from someone who remains unapologetic about being in it for the money - Cooper, after all, was in part a protege of Frank Zappa - and being a superficial entertainer, all the mock theatrics being at strictly kindergarten level, a device to help disaffected teenage kids (almost all of them boys) get through difficult times. The billion dollar bill which came free with the original vinyl album of Babies was deliberately ambiguous in its design; an exultation at the power of what Kubrick called FUCK YOU money could bring - Alice in his counting house, reclining amidst his towers of coins - and a warning as to what untrammelled capitalism for its own sake could lead; the crowd taking their hats off to the USAF-10 warhead being towed along, as though Washington were the Kremlin.

Likewise, just because Cooper laughs and tells us that it's all a joke doesn't necessarily make it so. Artifice is, amongst other things, a useful hiding place for concealing hidden intents, and beneath and even among all the showbizzery of Babies there is a deadly serious undertow. The opening "Hello Hurray" - significantly not written by Cooper himself, but a cover of a song by Canadian Rolf Kempf - lays down his essential cards. Moving from its initial Righteous Brothers funereal pace via a distorted, slowed-down "Be My Baby" whiplash beat to an ominous, progressing march dominated by trebly synthesiser, anguished lead guitar and restless bass - the overall feeling and harmonics point directly towards Talk Talk's "Life's What You Make It" - Cooper appears, imperiously; he's about to go onstage, welcoming the dark embrace of his audience. It is clear that he's been anxiously impatient about this opening in his life ("I've been waiting so long to sing my song") and offers himself to his disciples, pulled or coaxed from the ranks of the disillusioned ("I've been thinking so long I was the only one"). But, with his repeated and increasingly frantic protestations that he is "so strong," doubt creeps in; maybe he's as weak and demolishable as his audience, but doesn't dare to tell them that openly. It's all very transitory and unstable, this perceived strength, and as a top ten single in early 1973 it was a startling betrayal of frailty, impermanence.

After that, the album settles down a bit; these days, a song called "Raped And Freezin'" would cause a slight shoulder shrug from followers of Nine Inch Nails or Agoraphobic Nosebleed, and in its own days it prompts little more reaction, a straight Stonesy rocker where Cooper amusingly partakes in some role reversal antics - he is picked up by "some old broad down from Santa Fe" who proceeds to launch herself on him, chides him for his impotence and throws him out of her car, leaving him "naked, stranded in Chihuahua," giving a Lennon-esque wail to the latter word. Following some multifocal primal screaming, the band then launches unexpectedly into a berserk "La Bamba" speedfreak romp as Cooper settles for incoherent babble. Indeed, much of Babies recalls what Lennon might have done at this time, free of constraints and commitments (i.e. a sort of Paul Lynde variation on Noddy Holder).

"Elected" was a vastly improved rewrite of "Reflected" from Cooper's 1969 debut Pretties For You (which is not a buried treasure awaiting recovery or rehabilitation) and as a pop single was an inspired blast of supercharged corn; he sings it like a Mick Jagger who's just been caught with his hand in the Watergate handwash basin, with some cheek but absolute, or absolutist, conviction; he never stops ranting, whether in the instrumental break or through the elongated brass-dominant coda (the musical star here is drummer Neal Smith with his ice-slippery rolls). The pledges are as spurious and banal as those of Number 6 in "Free For All" but Cooper knows it, swims in the relieving ecstasy that the hollowness brings. In its 45 form it was a magisterial custard pie in the face of respectability and trust, and his crowning "I DON'T CARE!" - the last coherent thing we hear from him before the song fades - reminds us why John Lydon was and is such a fan.

The title track alternates between Zeppelin/Plant parody and "Hernando's Hideaway" lounge interludes, complete with mumbles from guest vocalist Donovan, and lyrically appears to be treading the same ground as Roxy Music's contemporaneous and colder (if wiser) "In Every Dream Home, A Heartache" (inflatable doll as life-saver/late capitalist metaphor) before Smith's machine-gun drums beat the song to a dusty pulp. Meanwhile it is fitting that side one's culminating setpiece reflects Cooper's fear of going to the dentist's; "Unfinished Sweet" begins with tick-tocking bass and drums before Glen Buxton's guitar enters, progressing towards a proto-motorik groove which sounds remarkably like Neu!'s "Hallogallo" before "rock" becomes, once again, predominant. The tempo is punctuated by dentist's drill whirrs which recalls Eno's sine-wave oscillator; James Bond theme paraphrases follow before guitar and synth trills bring the song to an abrupt halt. Then we are left with a bewildering (but bewitching) passage of abstract noise, with industrial feedback drones, a wheezing bassline which floats in and out of the foreground, prior to returning to the original song, complete with Keith Richards-copping guitar riffs. A fake fadeout gives way to agonised patient groans, interspersed with a few werewolf howls. And all because the gums have got to go.

"Nice Guy," also a major hit single, is a neat turning of tables; Cooper blames the media for turning him into a demon, complaining that his neighbours and even his pastor are the real villains, slapping him away from goodness. But what does that tell us, or what is he telling us, about his relationship with his fans? He seems to relish the growl of "Mean!" at the end of the second verse, and Smith's drums collapse at song's end like a pre-built cage falling into submission. "Generation Landslide" plays like a White Album outtake, a jolly semi-acoustic pastoral romp, but Cooper uses it to nail the natural successors to Nixon's "silent majority," the baby boomers - i.e. his own generation - in the full knowledge that they will end up exactly like their parents, except less ashamed. His "la-da-da-da-daaa!"s are anti-romantic - cold rationalist, one might say - and he delivers phrases such as "pink high chairs" in a markedly proto-Lydon sneer. There is the faintest tint of "Sympathy For The Devil" to the song's swing, and a forest of harmonicas and piano ripples escorts us towards fade.

Cooper delivers "Sick Things" in slow, measured tones over distorted electro-bass and then stately brass and reeds, interrupted periodically by a clattering junkyard of guitar feedback phantom music; if that last phrase suggests, once again, Escalator Over The Hill, then Sick Things reminds me very pointedly that this album could almost be a junior school EOTH. There is a gradual build-up of huge grandeur, Buxton's guitar moving to a cleanly played lead, phased piano notes, the brass and woodwind suggesting the ship of Nixon, slowly sidling into dock. Is Cooper addressing his fans as his "things," or does he imagine himself as the immediately pre-Watergate Nixon, frantically scanning his people and reassuring himself of his total dominance? As with EOTH, this album strongly suggests a society collapsing in on itself, everything about to tumble - and there is no India refuge here, whether real or fictional; instead the song segues into a...jaunty Gilbert O'Sullivan piano riff. "Mary-Ann" is brief, with its one-joke (and very simple) lyrical twist and "Ballad Of Bonnie And Clyde" coda (the piano being multitracked into opaque whirlpools, and the track fades with trademark Gilbert oompah-oompahs, or should that be Kurt Weill?).

Finally comes "I Love The Dead" wherein Cooper ups the ante and goes for the necrophiliac vote. With its echoing piano and (yet more) primal screaming, it plays rather like the Plastic Ono Band tackling Gainsbourg. Eventually the song resolves into a massed "Carry That Weight"/"Hey Jude" singalong, complete with bursts of unilateral copulating grunts, before returning to its initial balladry; with the repeated "We love the dead"s, however, we progressively think less of Cooper the playground sicko and more of Nixon and Kissinger, salivating over the cadavers they have created (Cooper's howls of "Cadaver eyes"). The escalating string section calls for a double stop, Cooper gravely swallows, and we are left in an uncertain mid-air.

Billion Dollar Babies is based on a central concern for moral structures (again, consider the picture on the original sleeve of the band surrounding the baby, smeared in Cooper make-up) and stands as a subtle critique of its America, of the dishonesty of its own artifice. What has happened with America, the album appears to ask - has something gone too far, or do its people simply have too much? The sense of acidic satire, as well as the predominance of guitar solos (not all played by an ailing Buxton; Dick Wagner, amongst others, anonymously helped out), betray Zappa's influence, but the beach Cooper approaches here seems infinitely more terminal. His group were apt to conclude their stage act of the period with a non-ironic rendition of "God Bless America" - but was God still watching, or had he thrown up his hands and given up on his self-benighting subjects?

Elton JOHN: Don't Shoot Me I'm Only The Piano Player

2011-05-29T16:06:00.001+01:00

(#120: 10 February 1973, 6 weeks)

Track listing: Daniel/Teacher I Need You/Elderberry Wine/Blues For My Baby And Me/Midnight Creeper/Have Mercy On The Criminal/I'm Gonna Be A Teenage Idol/Texan Love Song/Crocodile Rock/High Flying Bird

The current critical talk is of something called, or conveniently termed, "retromania," a hungering for and/or obsession with the past which feeds its way into the present such that bearings are lost; things of the past lose their original context and become merely another vaguely exotic flavouring, leading towards a broth so bland that the future, if any there be, struggles to be heard and may even be suffocated. Although the early seventies' obsession with the recent past, and the fifties in particular, was far from the starting point of all of this - as some pre-Beatles entries in this tale have already demonstrated, there was a time when a good deal of early sixties music followers wanted it to be the twenties again - it did begin to cast a shadow over the supposedly eternally renewable futurism of rock music. The history had already been made, was already being cited and mourned, and even in 1973, despite the violent thrusts of the past into the future being made by Roxy, Bowie and others, there was the creeping feeling that "we" had already seen the best of it, that "it" (the spark or shock of the new) had effectively ended by 1968, that all that was left to do was undertake endless, knowing recreations of a negated newness, a redundant (because spent) nowness.

Some artists who did this were subtler and more persuasive than others, and Elton John is a key case in point. His first UK number one album (and in the UK, it would prove to be 1973's biggest seller) has tended to become ignored in the imposing shadow of its two hit singles (and also, puzzlingly, at the time of writing, one of the hardest of Elton's albums to find on CD) but as a retro-summary of where pop music had got to - or got us - in early 1973 it is hard to beat. It works, I think, as did Elton at his peak, because it, like the artist, knows its limitations; it does not expressly make any big statements, but its framing device of Vietnam is the conduit which makes the tinted nostalgia bearable, since that means the record is acutely aware of its present tense. Likewise, given that the record is effectively a collaboration between a musician and non-musician (lyricist Bernie Taupin is given nearly as many photos in the inner sleeve as Elton; this is definitely a duo of the Paul and Barry Ryan, or even Carla Bley and Paul Haines, type), it relieves Elton of the burden of having to express himself directly, since Taupin is there to articulate his ruminations and lamentations, leaving him free to sculpt the music as he sees fit.

The music of Piano Player, as with the words, don't cut through with quite the same prescience as those of its predecessor, Honky Chateau, but again "profundity" would be a hindrance here; the expression has to be light, the music has to be attractive enough to get us to listen to what it's trying to say. Hence opener "Daniel" became a big transatlantic hit single mostly on the grounds of its being a pretty, and thoughtfully expressed, tune; the man - or boy? - is supposedly heading for Spain, but this isn't the nearly-carefree insouciance of something like Steve Bent's "I'm Going To Spain" (wherein, you may recall, the factory floor present him with "some tapes of Elton John" to keep him company on his travels); the "God"s and "star"s are accentuated in such a way as to imply that he's not coming back, indeed is going much further than Spain, to fight. Similarly, the easy-going Van Morrison canter of the closing "High Flying Bird" is there to mislead the ear; what sounds like a fanciful mourning for a lover who's fled ("I thought myself her keeper/She thought I meant her harm") turns into a deeper lament; the scarlet red staining the white walls of the dressing room, the "little cross of gold," the "cold stone" and the "foreign field of death" - all remind us with subtle forcefulness that the visitations of the past are there to deal with, and not merely escape from, the bloodiness of the present.

In between these two cold peaks, the musical mood is rightly kept light-hearted, amiable, although the ghosts sometimes still escape; the Moody Blues echoes of voices and mellotrons, for instance, which intrude upon the throwaway rocker "Teacher I Need You" before normality resumes. "Elderberry Wine" disguises its rancorous tale of abandoned love underneath a jolly ray of McCartney kazoo brass lines. "Blues For My Baby" is the record's major setpiece; he and his lover are running away from their oppressive families, striving to get on board the Greyhound bus heading west, as far away from the past and its attendant pain as possible, and its patient progress is most notable for the slow and subtle changes in its arrangement; a sitar steals gradually into the ballad, while Paul Buckmaster's string section steadily increases in grandeur and volume as the screen widens out.

"Midnight Creeper" is a comedy "Midnight Rambler," with exuberant French horns doing their best to imitate chunky baritone saxes and Davey Johnstone's exclamatory guitar, Elton having great fun with his Tina Turner citations and constant self-denials ("I still don't know why you hate me so"). "Have Mercy" starts deceptively, a little like a Philly Sound remix of the Sweeney theme, before slowing right down to a crawl in which Buckmaster's strings alternate between harsh lead lines and soft support, possibly influenced by Lennon's "How Do You Sleep?" Elton's vocal, too, is hard and unyielding by his standards ("Just TAKE! These CHAINS! From AROUND my legs!"); Johnstone's guitar heckles from the audience pit.

From being held down by the wardens in the face of a rifle butt, "Teenage Idol" revels in its proposal to turn its protagonist's old guitar into a tommy gun; musically a precursor to "Bennie And The Jets" in both tempo and mood, the song is an affectionate tribute to Bolan but also a plea to himself; to get him out of his "one room dive" and become "a motivated supersonic king of the scene," and above all to get him away from the drink - and alcoholism, directly or indirectly referred to in almost every track, is this album's elephant in the sitting room.

"Texan Love Songs" takes Gram Parsons as its musical template and lyrically is a rollicking send-up of redneckism, and to a greater extent of the "silent majority" who voted for Nixon, didn't want change of any kind, and indeed resented these "fairies" with their "drug-crazy songs" and "communistic politics" who came along, dared to drink their beer and have a better life than them. Randy Newman's "Rednecks" tackles the same theme with under-the-door subversion and arguably greater profundity but this more than did for and within its context.

"Crocodile Rock" has always seemed to me a considerably smarter variation on the "American Pie" brand of pseudo-eulogy; it reaches back with leaping, major-key enthusiasm into a largely imagined past - did anyone ever attempt to do a dance called the "Crocodile Rock"? - which nods as happily to Pat Boone ("Speedy Gonzales") and Johnny and the Hurricanes as to its present (the rippling synth riff). And it's entirely possible that Elton is here singing about the song's protagonist as being rock 'n' roll itself; it's had its history, Suzie "left us for some foreign guy" (the Beatles?), and the singer has accepted that rock is "dead" but is happy to live in his constantly altering past; it extends a keening thumb towards the future, whereas Don McLean simply draws a dead, thick line over history as we were supposed to know it. In Britain, glam would take that revivalist shield and sculpt it into futuristic forms; but in the States, Elton would stand for the point where the past might still meet the future, at a point when all of the future seemed lost. In his next number one album, he would meditate at some length about how difficult it can be to get back to any meaningful form of "home" - it may be 1973, but the yearning for home has not disappeared or vaporised - but it's still worth getting past the mock-up vintage movie poster at the cinema door and the grinning photo of young Reg Dwight at the parlour piano, and looking at the bigger, and more complicated, picture.

GILBERT O’SULLIVAN: Back To Front

2011-04-21T18:52:00.003+01:00

(#119: 20 January 1973, 1 week)

Track listing: Intro/I Hope You’ll Stay/In My Hole/Clair/That’s Love/Can I Go With You/But I’m Not/Outro/I’m In Love With You/Who Was It/What Could Be Nicer (Mum The Kettle’s Boiling)/Out Of The Question/The Golden Rule/I’m Leaving/Outro

Despite the Beatles and some of Dylan, the question in early 1973 was still one of “authenticity,” the assumption of one-to-one communication between singer/songwriter and listener in the sense that he or she, the singer/songwriter, was telling you, the listener, directly about their own life. Anything that didn’t fit neatly into the back denim pocket of this personalised talisman was viewed with suspicion, confusion and/or mockery; woe betide further the music which sought to pop balloon notions of what “pop” could, rather than should, be about. Even with the example of Randy Newman, and the nascent ones of Springsteen and Waits, in the USA, no one quite seemed prepared for the return of the character study to pop, of the writer whose business or pleasure it was to tell stories of specific characters which might or might not stand for the writer, or for their nation, or for humanity, or for nothing much.

In particular, no one except the millions who bought his records and ensured the inclusion of this one in our tale knew what to do with Gilbert O’Sullivan. A singer-songwriter managed and encouraged by the manager who had previously renamed and brought us Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck; moreover, one whose early appearance was one of school cap, blazer and shorts, part William Brown, part Keaton, part Chaplin. Even in 1969 it was safe to say that there was nobody else on the scene quite like O’Sullivan, and he remains one of the most singular and inscrutable characters we are likely to meet in this story.

Whatever way you look at it, he doesn’t fit in; by the time of the cover shot, he had amended his appearance to youngish American collegiate, but the medallion, chest hair and vermillion shirt don’t quite gel, and on the reverse he appears concerned, protective of his piano and candelabras, slightly anxious, maybe chuckling on the inside. Within the sleeve came a monochrome poster; there remain the chest hair and medallion, but he looks glumly apprehensive, on the point of blank non-acceptance. He had just scored a US number one with “Alone Again (Naturally)” and naturally everybody asked him whether he really felt suicidal or had lost his parents so tragically (he didn’t and he hadn’t). He sighed decently, wishing they had seen more Alan Bennett or read more Stan Barstow (or, more markedly, Flann O’Brien) or just understood that an author of character studies isn’t necessarily, or at all, their character.

As far as Back To Front is concerned, this is probably just as well since we appear to be presented with a dozen or so different angles towards the same person. I don’t believe that any of it is O’Sullivan, although none of it could have been imagined without him. As the title suggests, the record is already askew; the cheery Phoenix Nights organ intro refers to “those of you leaving” and the final track is entitled “I’m Leaving.” In between these, together with regular proto-Victoria Wood updates on the album’s status (“I’m not quite finished yet,” he reassures us at the end of side one), we are faced with a story which may well be told in reverse (see also Rihanna’s Good Girl Gone Bad) or simply forty or so minutes of daft but wary amiability (there certainly isn’t the head-in-the-‘fridge threat which permeates, say, Wyngarde’s When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head).

And the songs go where no other songs of their age were really going. “I Hope You’ll Stay” begins innocently enough as a perky song of childishly courtly love with its references to cups of tea and playing Monopoly, ambling along wearing McCartney’s music-hall hat. ‘Cellos, trumpets and sighing bass guitar arrive in the second verse, but then, without warning, O’Sullivan does a seamless key-changing turnaround into an anti-unemployment rant (“A million out of work is really so good for nothin’/When you think there should be jobs by the dozen”) before slipping back into the song’s original worn cuteness, complete with whistling. “And not to think what the others think”; where does he want us to go?

Were this assessment down to the music alone, Back To Front wouldn’t require much space; the music is almost uniformly standard early seventies Radio 2-friendly MoR-pop, epitomised by Johnnie Spence’s girl/sportscar orchestrations, ruffled shirt percussion and italicised backing vocals. But this is the backing to “In My Hole” wherein O’Sullivan appears to be singing from the perspective of a worm, playing with the dirt, contentedly hiding away from birdsong and bell rings, asking us whether this way of life really is wrong. Despite the evident Milligan influence – a purple daisy named Maisy – on listening we were unexpectedly reminded of Eminem, and in particular the suicidal self-hermit Eminem we hear on “Going Through Changes,” locking himself in, watching the same DVD over and over, Ozzy howling at him as though mocking the bigger life he has exited. No doubt or peril for O’Sullivan in his hole, though; “Hollywood style!” he exclaims at song’s end.

“Clair” was the album’s big single and if its subject matter – a baby sitter’s exasperated but entirely innocent love for his charge – wouldn’t pass the Customs gate today, that may say more about our time than its. It is hard not to marvel at O’Sullivan’s trademark sod-it scansion-defying continuation of sentences into the next line (“I’m going to marry you. Will/You marry me, Uncle Ray?”) or sigh ruefully at now-unpassable couplets such as “I don’t care what people say/To me you’re more than a child.” The overall impression, however, is still one of innocence; of course he’s knackered, but why is he doing it in the first place if not out of love? The premature spectre of that other melancholy Irish-blooded humourist Morrissey, as with the album as a whole, is not far away.

But the remainder of side one steadily becomes less than innocent. “That’s Love” wobbles tentatively on just the right side of the cheesy tightrope with its Sound Gallery/Co-Op discount stamp lushness, and the way its emotions progress is very nourishing, from the scepticism of “I might appear somewhat rude” to the quiet liberated joy of “Knowing inside it must be real”; love wrongfoots him, and he’s happy to be proved wrong (note the completely unexpected Brian Wilson swoon rising up from “you dooooo” and back down into “it’s true” in each middle eight). “Can I Go With You” – where else but in early seventies Britain could there have been a song with such a title? – rumbles politely, like Tony Joe White in Surbiton with brisk harpsichord, until the pace tightens up (“Can I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I?,” chunky Fender Rhodes and guitar), even though his “promise to be true”s flick right back to early Beatles; he’s tried being cynical, but it’s put her off, and now he wants to prove he can be “true,” starting with to himself.

This is followed, however, by the unsettling “But I’m Not.” Rolling along on an Alan Price-style pub piano ostinato (and perhaps refer to Price’s score for O Lucky Man as a sort of sound mirror to this record) with a C&W guitar solo and Jerry Lee Lewis piano references towards the end, O’Sullivan justifies his love by emphasising to her how much he’s done for her, while at the same time warning her against “holding hands with other boys” or being “unkind” with a less than homely sheen. “They think I’m cruel/But I’m not.” His declensions of “no, no, no, no” veer on the grotesque; the song never quite ends, never finds it in itself to end, and things are revealed as less than comfortable as O’Sullivan speeds us hastily out of the first side.

“I’m In Love With You” finds O’Sullivan taking an unexpected but welcome detour into blues-rock lite and the words are fairly straightforward, the singer’s triple rhetorics crouching down, whispering and settling in his bed. Some fine wriggling solo guitar is provided by, I think, Big Jim Sullivan (personnel details are not given on the sleeve and I have been unable to establish the definitive line-up elsewhere). Halfway through, however, O’Sullivan interrupts the song to deliver the following: “Oh, life can be short/Of that there's no doubt/However, I'm not pushed for time/If you can't come out till/Round about nine” – a direct inject of overgrown boy into the adult undergrowth, and we all crease up and adore the man all the more.

The protagonist of “Who Was It,” in contrast, is almost impossible to adore. A pop song as BS Johnson might have imagined (and certainly lyricised) it, here we find O’Sullivan tripping up his Other in order that they might meet, trying to kiss her and managing “to succeed/(In getting it with your fist down below),” and undertaking other unfathomable actions, juxtaposing them with archaisms (“unabashed”) and music hall nostalgia (“A bloomin’ shame,” voiced in a chorus of descending triplets), and all because he loves her. It’s actively disturbing, and if I think of “I Want You” by that yet other melancholy Irish-blooded humourist Elvis Costello, the lineage is clear; like Costello, O’Sullivan is experimenting with what he can actually get away with in the context of a standard pop song, at least in terms of subject matter.

“What Could Be Nicer” is an exemplary character study which demonstrates O’Sullivan’s ability to look at the same picture from within the heads of different observers. It’s a family gathering, perhaps on a Sunday, or simply a picture of an extended family whose younger members can’t yet quite afford to find their own place. Home Service strings and choir provide the cushions, but the observations are extremely knowing; the older members of the family pass the time with routine questions about Helen’s letter to Uncle Tony, there is the wonder of two youngsters ready to venture out into the world balanced by the huge regret (complete with the intimations of minor key dread provided by the choir in the middle eight) that these same people will end up becoming old and getting ejected into the cold, left out of society. Look at that crying baby, listen to that kettle – is that all there is, and does it mean so much more than it sounds, is this heaven or hell? O’Sullivan’s camera eye roves among the heads and souls, pans out again to repeat the original picture; this is a fine balance to the exquisite balance struck between shock at personal rejection and the slowly mounting pains of bereavement in “Naturally,” and it is perhaps the album’s most moving song.

“Out Of The Question,” a single in some territories (though not in Britain), is a racy will you/won’t you precursor to Katy Perry’s “Hot And Cold,” though its protagonist’s ambitions are smaller than he might care to claim (“[We could have] Sailed empty handed round the world”) and he never misses a moment to emphasise that she, not he, is the one to blame (“I’m sorry, of course, but the fault is hers”). Whereas “The Golden Rule” is near-impenetrable; a Randy Newman canter with Robert Wyatt-esque melodic twists and turns over which O’Sullivan muses over the theme which has carried him through the record – in summary, you might take me for a fool, but I am most certainly not one – taking in Niagara Falls, getting the belt for a bad report card, liking the sound of pneumatic drills (“Don’t be such a miser!/At the most, a fiver’s all you pay”) and meditating on parental wham-bam (“And as you can see/The result was me”) before venturing out with an incomprehensible (and again Milligan-inspired, if not Joyce-inspired, if indeed not Coronation Street-inspired; in O'Sullivan's lyrics there is the frequent reminder of washing-line conversations, long and winding perorations about nothing in particular, beginning at A and ending up in J having gone through R) stream-of-consciousness spiel about money growing on trees, oranges and lemons, “not forgetting melons.”

Finally, O’Sullivan takes things out – or possibly leads them back in – with the space age Moog/fuzz guitar-powered rocker “I’m Leaving.” He’s had it with “this place,” can’t wait to shake it off and leave it behind, its empty streets filled with gutters. I have no idea whether he’s singing about Swindon, whence the O’Sullivan family decamped from Waterford early on in his life and where he was effectively brought up; still, it is possible to think of this as the record’s opening principled declaration before working backwards through several states and ages of love and life. His “Just ‘cuz I won’t spend my money here” – especially the “money here” – is essentially a punk sneer and leads into a high-pitched guitar solo. As the track slowly rocks out of the picture, O’Sullivan whoops like a Freddy Cannon reimagined by a younger Roddy Doyle...and then that silent movie piano and “I’m almost finished now, I’m almost finished now”...

The intro/outro concept was not new – O’Sullivan had used it on his debut album Himself - but I cannot think of any other album within Then Play Long that treats the fourth wall in quite the same way; he’s playing with us, dodging behind a wall or a bush if we get too close, and yet he is as completely in control of his environment as the worm – or mole – in “In My Hole,” regardless of width or length. He knows exactly what he is doing every step of the way, and in the intervening four decades has continued to do likewise; an admirable, stoical refusal to bend to any passing trend or vogue, a need to remain as true as possible to what he wants to say and express as profound, if not as palpably intense, as that of Van Morrison or even Scott Walker. It is a pity that Back To Front is currently only available on CD as an expensive and hard-to-find Japanese import – O’Sullivan has never stopped being a superstar in Japan – but its creator is noticeably reticent about unleashing his back catalogue in the UK (the excellent Berry Vest Of... compilation from 2003 is already out of print and reaching extraordinary second-hand prices); perhaps he feels that there isn’t the market, or simply wants his audience to keep up with where he is going now. His current album is entitled Gilbertville and the cover finds him hitch-hiking, his grand piano propped up beside him like a rucksack. Wherever and whenever you want him, he’ll turn up and start making his own sense. After all, he is in the business and the art of telling stories.