(#297: 17 March 1984,
2 weeks)
Track listing: Conditioning/What
Is Love?/Pearl In The Shell/Hide And Seek/Hunt The Self/New Song/Don’t Always
Look At The Rain/Equality/Natural/Human’s Lib
(Author’s Note: My CD edition of this album includes the rather
unnecessary “Extended Version” of “What Is Love?” and an additional track, “China
Dance,” an instrumental which originally appeared as a B-side to the single of “Hide
And Seek.” I’m sure that you’ll agree, however, that the title song is really
the only way to end this record.)
“Oh – what’s the
bloody point?”
(The last sentence entered in the diary of Kenneth Williams,
14 April 1988)
The first point to consider is – who is this Bill Bryant?
He grew up in Rayners Lane, that strange stretch of no man’s
land between Harrow and Pinner which today is best known for the Art Deco
building with its elephant’s trunk-like appendage which is currently under the
management of the Zoroastrian Trust Funds of Europe, and his life was
unremarkable until he met and fell under the spell of the guru Sree Sree Mentu
Maharaj, founder of the Universal Peace Mission, in 1971. Following a “spiritual
experience” of his own a year later, he began to spread Mentu’s word himself,
speaking and writing about spirituality, love and peace. Eventually he gathered
a small band of devoted followers, who would regularly convene to listen to him
speak at his home, in High Wycombe. Among these followers was his temporary co-worker
in an instrument factory, one Martin Jones, who was on his summer break from
university. Soon Martin’s brother Roy became acquainted with the man and his
faith, and eventually a third brother – Howard – was drawn into this circle.
Some have spoken of Bryant exercising a strong and powerful
influence over Howard. It is a matter of record that Bryant
was, more or less, Howard’s best friend (they were best men at each other’s weddings) and, if you will, his main spiritual adviser. Together they – along with Martin and Roy Jones – worked on
writing or reworking some songs, a great deal of which ended up on Howard’s
first album (six of its ten songs feature lyrics written or co-written by
Bryant). This influence was not necessarily a negative one; on the contrary,
Bryant knew that Howard had talent and worked intensely with the musician to
ensure that his – or their – songs could come through and be heard. This
situation continued until the point in 1983 when Jones was evidently set to
break big – his break came with a session that he did for Kid Jensen’s evening
Radio 1 show – and he attracted another, more experienced manager and promoter,
Dave Stopps, who was able to take, or sell, his work further.
Bryant and Jones then went their separate ways, and it does
not appear to have been amicable; the relationship became strained and in one
blog devoted to Bryant’s work, the following gnomic and rather sinister sentence
appears: “What developed was later described by Bill as improper and should not
have happened.” Whatever the truth of this assertion, listening to Human’s
Lib remains an uncomfortable experience, insofar as we are hearing, more or
less, one person – apart from the incongruous appearance and playing of Davey
Payne, the saxophonist with Ian Dury and the Blockheads, on “Pearl In The
Shell,” Jones really is on his own throughout (although producer Rupert Hine’s
touch is clearly evident) – singing and performing what essentially comes
across as being a lonely and slightly claustrophobic work; and yet on the majority of these songs he is singing words which in part are somebody else's.
Now, if we based our appreciation of a record on the influence wielded by the
musician’s guru, then that would rule out, amongst others, Who’s Next and All Things
Must Pass from this tale.
But listening to this record is often akin to being doorstepped
by travelling Jehovah’s Witnesses salesmen. The song titles read like the
chapter headings of what Christgau correctly termed a “revolving self-help
manual.” But it is perhaps important to note that Howard Jones, though commonly
thought to have come from High Wycombe, was actually born in Southampton before
moving, with his Welsh parents, back to Cardiff, near where he was raised. He
continued his (grammar school) education at Stokenchurch, just down the A40
from High Wycombe. As a teenager his family relocated to Canada. He then
returned to Manchester to study at the Royal Northern College of Music before moving
back to High Wycombe and encountering Bryant. His Welshness manifests itself in
his occasional tendency towards pulpit preaching, for instance in the
out-of-tempo outro to “Equality” (which was issued as a single in South Africa
as an anti-apartheid statement) or the “anyway/anyway” rhetoric of “What Is
Love?” It is very significant that his first band was not, as some sources suggested in the past, the Desperate Bicycles (“It was easy, it was cheap, go and DO IT!”), but a
progressive rock group called Warrior.
I do not think that progressive rock tendencies had deserted
Jones by the time Human’s Lib came
along; indeed, they are highly palpable, and not just in the “New Song”/”Solsbury
Hill” sense; “Conditioning” sounds highly influenced by Peter Gabriel 4 (and to a lesser extent by Bill Nelson), with its
systematic closing down of hope and individuality, via increased discordance and
even a “Peter Gunn” quote. The Hammond organ on “New Song” already sounded
dated (as did the presence, at the time, of mime artist and fellow Bryant
disciple Jed Hoile). “Natural” could have been performed by the eighties
Genesis.
Elsewhere his songs run between brooding balladry and polite
uptempo not-quite-pop. But it is clear that he felt that he had something that
he wanted to communicate to as wide and non-generalised an audience as
possible. “I’ve been waiting for so long” he sings in “New Song” – he was
twenty-eight by the time that became a hit (four years older than Morrissey).
There is the sense of emotions and feelings that had been held back for too
many years, now making themselves apparent.
These factors in themselves, however, do not make Human’s Lib compelling listening. “What
Is Love?” made me wish at the time that Thomas Leer’s “All About You” had been
a number two hit instead. “Pearl In The Shell” is humdrum Lego Motown, though
if its backing track had included a “Funky Drummer” loop and it had been
released in 1990, it could almost have passed for baggy (“And the fear goes on”).
He specialises in sermons – there are no love songs as such on the record. “Hide
And Seek,” which I saw him perform live and unaccompanied, on voice and grand
piano, at Live Aid, is a better song and benefits from not being
over-emphasised, but unfortunately Jones’ strained Vick’s Sinex vocal makes me
think of how avidly the thirteen-year-old Gary Barlow must have listened to it.
“Hunt The Self” suggests a failed Footloose
soundtrack bid which is derailed by an avalanche of percussion which in turn is
abruptly switched off, even though its lyric suggests some impatience on the
singer’s part (“Well it’s time for a change,” “Having deep talks with scholars
who sound so fine/Hearing this sham is like getting drunk on cheap wine”). Then
again, these lyrics were co-written with Bryant.
“Don’t Always Look At The Rain” has a nice chord change,
even if it’s late seventies Genesis feeding back to Brian Wilson, but like
Genesis and the Moody Blues, the message is annoyingly non-specific. Jones
doesn’t ask us to open our eyes and look at the sun: “And tell me,” he pleads, “is
it a crime to have an ideal or two?” But there’s having an ideal or two, and
being able to express and communicate it. Sometimes his lectures verge on
hectoring: “I love you even though you think that I don’t” (“What Is Love?”), “Everybody
wants to feel happy even if you think that you don’t” (“Equality”). The latter
song has a hook which immediately made me think of a-Ha’s “Take On Me,” but as
already noted, by its end we are already back at Speaker’s Corner, Jones
proclaiming through his megaphone (“Don’t you know, we’re just the same” – the same
as what?). The overriding philosophy here can best be summed up by “Natural”; “And
if they were not meant to be/Well, don’t you think they wouldn’t be?” And if
you could glean any practical sense or meaning from that, then Jones was speaking
to you.
But then the album turns around on itself. The closing title
track initially conjures up the spirit of Ultravox, but this is a far more
restless and worrisome song. Jones sings about what he’d really like to do, as if to say, well, all of what you’ve been
listening to here is a sham, or, well, you never knew the half of it, and it is
disturbing, like Squeeze performing the theme to Hallowe’en. He knows what he wants to do, but in the face of
freedom, finally waves a white flag: “But you just try being free my
friend/Everyone will hate your guts.” Make do and carry on. Keep calm and mend.
But the song ends with another percussive avalanche, as if the entire contents
of the recording studio had been pushed over; and then one looks at the cover
painting, done by one “Steg,” where four ungainly figures stand in front of an
unspecified coastline in the darkness. The one on the left, whose face is only
half-visible, is Jones, and there is something in his left eye which suggests
what he would TRULY want to do to the world – and you maybe don’t want to know
what that is. But look at the song’s lyrics, listen to its propulsion, keep
Jones’ Welshness in mind, and think of it performed a decade later, with
guitars and drums, and a vocal that’s an octave higher.
You surely can’t be
suggesting…?
They’d never admit to it, those early eighties teenagers
growing up in Blackwood. Not in a billion years. They were probably listening
to Declaration by The Alarm. But it’s
there. I can feel it. I can sense the
leyline that can be drawn from this song to something like “If You Tolerate
This…”
Provocative. But there’s
nobody else on this record. He sounds so utterly alone. And in one way it’s
slightly alienating.
Nobody else except the people who contributed to the songs
that he is recording. It is a dark record, but it’s not Hergest Ridge, that number one album that was so nearly Welsh. Music For A New Society by John Cale is
this album’s angry uncle. There was McCartney
II, of course, and so many of the songs on Human’s Lib sound like they still belong to an uncertain 1980.
But who else was doing
this at the time? Themselves and themselves only and alone?
There was Billy Bragg; in Germany there was Holger Hiller;
from Australia there was Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel; and, speaking of which,
Trent Reznor is a couple of months away from turning nineteen and learning how
to work a recording studio. The Downward
Spiral is only a decade away.
But you still feel under-nourished by the experience?
I think that Jones was trying to reintroduce progressive rock
through a shiny yellow back door. I find much of his debut album benignly indigestible. How can a better life, a better world, be achieved without any element of
conflict?
But he kept the first
Style Council album off number one.
Have you listened to Café
Bleu recently? The business of thought and expression, and the gap in
between.
The elephant in the
spring 1984 pop sitting room.
We’ll get to that
sooner than you think. But nothing else seems to be measuring up.
What’s the bloody
point?
Staying alive because you don’t know what’s coming next,
that’s what.
And what if we ARE all
the same?
Now what would be the bloody point of that?
