(#363: 2 April
1988, 3 weeks)
Track listing:
Always On My Mind (Pet Shop Boys)/Heaven Is A Place On Earth (Belinda
Carlisle)/Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car (Billy Ocean)/Say It Again
(Jermaine Stewart)/Gimme Hope Jo’anna (Eddy Grant)/C’mon Everybody (Eddie
Cochran)/Suedehead (Morrissey)/Candle In The Wind (Live) (Elton John)/Angel
Eyes (Home & Away) (Wet Wet Wet)/Turn Back The Clock (Johnny Hates
Jazz)/Valentine (T’Pau)/Hot In The City (Billy Idol)/Mandinka (Sinéad O’Connor)/Tower
Of Strength (The Mission)/Give Me All Your Love (Whitesnake)/I Should Be So
Lucky (Kylie Minogue)/That’s The Way It Is (Mel & Kim)/Come Into My Life
(Joyce Sims)/Who Found Who (Jellybean featuring Elisa Fiorillo)/I Can’t Help It
(Bananarama)/Oh L’Amour (Dollar)/Joe Le Taxi (Vanessa Paradis)/Stutter Rap (No
Sleep ‘Til Bedtime) (Morris Minor and The Majors)/Beat Dis (Bomb The
Bass)/Doctorin The House (Coldcut featuring Yazz and The Plastic
Population)/House Arrest (Krush)/The Jack That House Built (Jack ‘N Chill)/Rok
Da House (Beatmasters featuring The Cookie Crew)/I’m (sic) Tired Of Getting Pushed Around (Two Men, A Drum Machine And A
Trumpet)/Rise To The Occasion (Climie Fisher)
For many years I imagined this to be one of my favourite
Now volumes; I remember being thrilled
by the cover’s soaring
skyscraper reflecting the sun breaking through the
clouds when I bought it, and by what the records (or in my case,
Walkman-friendly cassettes, which I again used for this piece – their condition,
after almost three decades, is really not bad at all) contained. Having now
listened to it again, I’d still propose that side four, which constitutes the
last seven songs in the above list, is among the greatest individual sides of
music addressed in this tale. I’m not at all sure about the rest. However, its
story is a far less complex one than that of its
predecessor, mainly because it
is outlining the processes of a straightforward but game-changing story.
The record’s story is of how pop music got taken over by,
or changed hands with, that anxious thing called House music which had been
busy knocking on its door for the previous eighteen months or so. The music
that it contains goes back as far as a further three decades, yet it contains
pop records which would have been unimaginable even in 1985 – a new pop which,
it has to be said, mainstream radio and television did its best to ignore and
overlook while it was happening, in the hope that the old order – as dully represented
in most of the record’s first half – would, or could, reassert itself. I have
to qualify that by saying that, although Radio 1 and co. appeared still to be
stuck in a permanent 1965 (with listeners who remembered Caroline, Radio London
and the Light Programme in 1965), the situation was very different in London,
with not only innumerable pop-up pirate stations – the DTI-baiting politics of
the “keep this frequency clear” soundbite used in “Beat Dis” essentially acted
as a call to arms – but also commercial radio getting and staying with the
game; I well remember Chris Tarrant, of all people, playing things like “House
Arrest” and “Doctorin The House” on his Capital Radio breakfast show and
approving of them.
There is also a circularity to the story that Now 11 tells that I find appealing, in
that it starts and ends with old (or old-ish) songs presented to the listener
in a new way.
Pet Shop Boys
Maybe the truest version of the song was the quiet,
shattered dignity of Willie Nelson's acoustic reading, one of the legions of
great singles released in 1982 but seldom acknowledged as such (except in
Scotland, where it was a big hit). Elvis sang it like a brute belatedly tamed,
probing into his deepest, least hardened arteries to discover the core of
tenderness which would still justify his asking "Love Me Tender" in
Vegas, and as with most of his later work was interpreted as simply another
chapter of signifiers in his dysfunctional descent.
The Pet Shop Boys were asked to participate in an ITV
special in the summer of 1987 called Love
Me Tender to mark the tenth anniversary of Presley's death. They settled
for "Always On My Mind" with the declared intent of making it sound
as little like Elvis as possible. On the programme they came across as a wiser
and disillusioned Flanagan and Allen, mournfully bearing haversacks as they
proceeded slowly down a back-projected railway track. As a performance it was
as decidedly at odds with most of the others featured in that programme, as the
duo themselves were defiantly at odds with the suffocating blandness of the
upper reaches of 1987 chart pop. It elicited a massive response, and though
initially reluctant to release it as a single, they went back into the studio
with Julian Mendelsohn and recorded a full version; too late to appear on the Actually album (though it was added to
later pressings), it was rush-released at year's end and became the best
Christmas number one since "Don't You Want Me?"
In 1987 the Pet Shop Boys ruled pop - even if, other than
New Order, the Smiths (defunct by year's end) and SAW at their best, there was
so little competition. The ingenuity, originality and genuine (not second-guessed
from quarter-century-old soul sides) honesty of their work was enough to make
most other mainstream pop in 1987 feel ashamed to call itself pop (particularly
most of its protagonists didn't really want to be pop but soul, or at least pub
rock).
And "Always On My Mind" follows the tried and
tested Hi-NRG template of delivering ballads at ballad tempo while the rhythm
exultantly rushes along at double speed, but the Pet Shop Boys do it with
exceptional élan, complete with the
triple tease of the delayed intro. Neil Tennant delivers the song in the
persona of someone who knows he's a bit of a shit (whereas Elvis simply sounds
bemused and confused) but still needs that love, that company - he walks the
sardonic/vulnerable tightrope with enviable skill, dropping down his "my
mind" with the ingenious altered chord changes in the second half of the
chorus as though challenging you to guess whether he has a mind, as such. As
with Bernard Sumner, Tennant's "soul" is latent and inherent in his
vocal uncertainty; unable and indeed unwilling to emulate the howls, screams
and other "soulcialist" memes deemed necessary to signify Soul
Passion And Honesty (and predictably the Pet Shop Boys turned out to be more
genuinely socialist than most of the "real" acts of the time),
Tennant’s vocal style verges on the deadpan but never less than tactile and,
when he needs to be, is extremely moving (the record makes more sense if you
imagine Tennant singing it as a folk song, as if it were still 1970 and he was
still in the folk band Dust).
But the little addendum incorporated into the final, most
minute seconds of the record's fadeout is one of the most chilling endings to
any pop single; Tennant, strolling out of sight at the far end of the horizon,
turning back briefly and saying, "Maybe I didn't love you." It is the
portrait of the thrusting Thatcherkid so busy greedily sizing up his bonuses
and stuffing himself with cold trinkets signifying nothing that not only didn't
he have the time to say and do all those "little things," but indeed
that he viewed the concept of "little things" with near-inexpressible
contempt. Five years later, burned out in his bedsit, he suddenly wonders when
the sun stopped shining in those now lonely, lonely times.
Belinda Carlisle
In 1988 Britain it was not unreasonable to wonder what
the hell had happened to Belinda Carlisle. Gone were the Hollywood blonde bob
and the punk attitude, in came a straight auburn hairstyle, corporate gloss and
a lot of babbling bullshit about how great Reagan was (she was, and remains,
married to former Reagan aide Morgan Mason). Conspiracy theorists wondered
whether there had there been some sort of Stepford
Wives scenario where the real Carlisle had been replaced by a dead-eyed
robot.
“Heaven,” which you’d be forgiven for thinking was the
only record Carlisle ever made if you listened to daytime radio, does not
alleviate the issue. It is big, booming, unambiguous Reaganrock, and if
Carlisle’s voice sometimes reminds you of someone else (especially when she
growls, “Baby I-I…” in the bridges) then co-writer/producer Rick Nowels had indeed
previously worked with Stevie Nicks.
My feeling is more that Carlisle found herself in the
same dilemma as Morrissey; divested of the group of which she had been such a
key component, she is left with what is basically a replica of herself. It sort of sounds like her, vaguely looks like
her…but the spirit which permeated records like Beauty And The Beat and Vacation
(or even 1984’s underrated Talk Show)
is entirely absent. Not newness, then, but a part of the old problem.
Billy Ocean
In his eximious 1989 volume The Heart Of Rock And Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made,
Dave Marsh places this Mutt Lange/Ocean-penned cynical cut-and-paste job at
#339 – well up into the list’s top half – but finds no room anywhere for “Good
Vibrations.” This may explain why the book was so rapidly remaindered; it’s a
reasonably useful guide to doo wop and pre-Beatles pop but after 1963 reminds
us that “idiosyncratic” so often translates as “unreliable.” Throwing in
references to previous and better pop, including Art of Noise, the Stones, the
Beatles and Johnny Burnette, the record does not represent an advance on Lange’s
work with AC/DC or even Foreigner but jogs on its smug spot, Reaganrock
demanding that it be applauded for breathing. Slap it on the box? There are
maybe 100,001 other songs that would be ahead of it in the queue. At a deeply
conservative estimate. For car as allegorical myth transforming into actual
object of desire, it limps several hundred laps behind “Warm Leatherette” or “Motorslug.”
It is also, at 4:44, the longest song on this album.
Jermaine Stewart
Assuming the Jaki Graham role of Now rep reliable, it’s a wonder that something as stillborn as “Say
It Again” – a song I’m sure I heard previously in performances by MoR acts –
got an audience at all, never mind limped into the top ten while the world
around it was changing. The crass advice would have been for Stewart to invest
in a hearing aid or obtain an ENT referral for de-waxing under local
anaesthetic, but it’s much too late for that now.
Eddy Grant
His last big hit as a performer, though not as a
songwriter, and it’s a sprightly and righteous anti-apartheid protest song
which, despite the highly questionable lyrical device of personifying an
oppressive political regime in the form of a woman, still punches as it is
packed, particularly with its references to complicit and/or compliant media (“She
even knows how to swing opinion/In every magazine and the journals”) which
indicate that the situation now, generally and globally, has sunk below even
hopelessness.
Eddie Cochran
Revived for a Levi’s ad, the oldest recording on this
album – and, clocking in at 1:55, also the shortest recording to have appeared
on any Now album thus far – actually
sounds amongst its most radical, or maybe it was penance for not having Sigue
Sigue Sputnik on Now 7. Cochran’s
most urgent contribution to the development of rock was his sense of juddering minimalism;
like Acid House, everything is pared back to bass, drums and voice(s) with an
acoustic guitar strum in the middleground. Nor does Cochran waste any time; he
and his pals want to party and celebrate now,
and if they have to pay for it, either now or in forty years’ time, his gruff
laugh of “WHO CARES?” is one of the biggest fuck-you-John-Doe payoffs of any
rock record. “C’mon Everybody” still hasn’t dated, but “Suedehead” and the then
barely five-and-a-half-year-old “Hot In The City” sound decidedly old-fashioned
and marooned, as did Elton in his Mozart get-up – where are we? Sydney? Let’s
record a live album. What happened to the applause? To the audience? – singing a
fifteen-year-old song about an actress who had been gone a quarter of a
century. It was clear that this sort of thing wouldn’t work any more. Who knew
what was going to happen, and how an altered version of the same song would
come to rule pop less than a decade later, a rule so large and total radio
stations dare not play it, and the artist has to wish to revisit it ever again?
Was this what
she was listening to in 1988?
Sinéad O’Connor
She first came to my attention as the singer on a 1986 collaboration
with The Edge called “Heroine,” taken from a movie entitled Captive, enough so to make me sit up and
wonder. And then The Lion And The Cobra
happened, about a year later, and I only got around to hearing it after “Mandinka”
had entered the charts (my usual post-New Year habit of catching up with things
I’d missed in the previous year).
My God, there was something new and frightening here. “Mandinka”
– it’s an African tribe from whom Kunta Kinte came in Alex Haley’s Roots (and the practices of the Mandinka
tribe fill out the background to, among many other things, the meaning behind
Brenda Lee’s “Let’s Jump The Broomstick” – only scratched the surface; why,
there’s Marco Pirroni on guitar, here are some very Ant-like percussion
pile-ups, and at the front there’s Sinéad sounding like even Patti Smith wouldn’t
have sounded in 1987 (“I don’t KNOW NO SHAME!/I FEEL NO PAIN!”), and yet
(towards the song’s end) also like Elizabeth Fraser. The album’s big setpiece “Troy”
remains inviolable; Enya (an important part of the other end of 1988) turns up
reciting the 91st Psalm at the beginning of “Never Get Old,” Leslie
Winer not only appears on but also co-writes the closing “Just Call Me Joe.”
Ignored in end-of-year critics’ lists which found space for the likes of The
Sect and Blyth Power, The Lion And The
Cobra was 1987’s most startling debut album, a prolonged scream of
beauteous defiance.
The Mission
Ah, Goth, the poor trashy brother of rock music, the one
everybody points at and laughs at in the street, the music that nobody will
take seriously (even though most of the readers of the Melody Maker, by now far ahead of the NME in setting agendas and pushing the music writing envelope, were
avid Goths) – a music responsible for one of the most profound moments on this
record.
Those who weren’t around in the late eighties or only
dimly remember them might not realise that the process of, shall we say (plenty
of writers said it at the time), “rehabilitating” the music of, say, Led
Zeppelin or Fleetwood Mac was only a recent practice. Punk/1976 was still
regarded as Year Zero, and any trespass beyond that aesthetic Customs gate was
tantamount to treason. Zep sample-loving hip hop went some way to breaking down
that gate, while Ian Astbury grew his hair and wondered aloud why nobody
realised, or wished to realise, how great Zeppelin really were? 1987 was the year
when this tendency went overground, specifically with The Cult’s Rubin-produced
Electric – don’t worry, we’ll be
getting to them, if not for some while – but then there was Jim Steinman’s work
on Floodland, and finally The Mission
themselves, from the same Leeds streets as, but noticeably less “cool” than,
the Age of Chance.
And “Tower Of Strength” was their moment, and maybe Goth’s
moment. Explicitly indebted to
“Kashmir” to the point of hiring John Paul Jones
himself to produce and arrange the strings, Hussey, at the time of recording
the father of a newborn daughter, sings a moving song of love and devotion, not
just to young Hannah, but also – and this is what really gets me about it – his
fans. How many pop or rock stars have sung odes of love to their fans? But here
it is, Hussey getting his McCulloch-isms just right, his pained yet ecstatic
howls, while the song proceeds like a stately ship behind him. As great a
record as Frankie Vaughan’s “Tower Of Strength” and it should have been number
one for a month. The Mission bring back devotional rock, and in the process
make Whitesnake sound aridly old-fashioned, as though it were still 1972 and
power cuts and Maudlin Street.
Whereas “Tower Of Strength” stands for bodhisattva, the
forgoing of rock nirvana – for now – to save pop.
Girl In A
Sportscar
She was already in the car driving towards the city, even
if she wasn't herself driving, in one of two videos made for "I Should Be
So Lucky." She is cruising through the bright, yellow city of Melbourne,
gleefully giggling her song of unattainable fantasy to camera, mounted on the
back seat. In this imagination her adulthood is no complication.
The other, more widely circulated video, however, seemed
determined to keep her as the overgrown child star she strenuously didn't want
to be. She flips herself around a teenager's boudoir, with crudely chalked
"LUV"s and flower stems on a blackboard. "But dreaming's all I
do/If only they came true," she sings, another frustrated teenybopper
(then already pushing twenty) who knows she'll never get to meet...Rick Astley?
Naughty commentators at the time accused Kylie of not
singing on her hit, and assumed that it was a speeded-up Astley; but really
there is no doubt that this is Kylie singing; Pete Waterman has confirmed that
they had barely forty-five minutes to get the song recorded and mixed, and
indeed when she arrived at SAW's Southwark studios directly from Heathrow they
professed to have little idea about who she was, or of Neighbours, despite the latter having scored record audiences for
the BBC, even in its daytime slot. Perhaps they wanted to deny the concept of
Charlene Ramsey, sassy auto mechanic, in favour of...an Australian Mandy Smith?
Even notwithstanding this, there is a strong case for arguing that the child in
Kylie has never been truly eliminated; rather than being sensually attractive,
she has tended to come across as a best mate, an upbeat sister, someone who'd
nod sagely at Madonna's grey-green Abbess and carry on munching crisps
regardless.
Pace Astley,
however, "I Should Be So Lucky" proved that SAW's songwriting skills
were far more suited to knowing bubblegum than attempted nu-soul; it bounces
with unquenchable confidence and logic, it fizzes with the anti-anatomical
ecstasy which comes from the foreknowledge of being yet young and alive, right
down to its subtle motivic quotation from "(I've Had) The Time Of My
Life" in its brief instrumental break; it senses that a past may have been
lost, that a future is attainable (though "I Should Be So Lucky"
might still be the lobby to the antechamber leading to her final freedom) but
that the present, this early, still wintry 1988, was precious and had to be
seized with hands of fervent, fragile grace (her downhill glide of "And I
would come a-running," knowing that she doesn't give a damn about Captain
Wentworth's bank balance, only that it is so absolutely RIGHT!).
There will be more cities for her car to approach, drive
through and exit; some flimsily bright, some blearily dark, gates of gold,
suburbs of setbacks, avenue of triumphant comebacks. It will be one of the
strangest and most drawn-out stories to be told in Then Play Long, but for now let us preserve in our inner eyes Kylie
in her first car, enthusiastic and not yet defeated; and that "I Should Be
So Lucky" defies its subject matter, and perhaps even its writers and
producers, to bring tactile hope. The world should be so lucky.
Other SAW
Productions Available
“That’s The Way It Is” peaked at #10, low by Mel and Kim’s
standards, although it was one of their, and SAW’s, best. They did not perform
it on television, and were not featured at all in the video. The reason for
this was made clear when the duo appeared on Terry Wogan’s show in April of
that year; Mel Appleby had been undergoing treatment for spinal cancer and,
although she discharged herself from hospital so that she could record her
vocals for the song – and, according to Pete Waterman, she had a whale of a
time in the studio, totally getting into the record - was too ill to publicise
the record in person. So this record was Mel’s farewell and its sentiments,
ostensibly about offering comfort to a jilted lover, carry some inevitable, if
inadvertent, poignancy. Had Mel been well enough to record it, the duo would
have sung on “I’d Rather Jack”; as with their other hits, SAW push that
additional button to make it stand out. “I Can’t Help It” is not top-drawer
Bananarama or SAW, seeing both singers and producers rather too keen to go for
a Mel and Kim thing, and it was indeed their last record to feature Siobhan
Fahey (then, like Sinéad, heavily pregnant).
Notice how, from Sinéad to the Cookie Crew, when it comes
to making the change in late eighties pop, it’s mostly women who are
responsible?
Joyce Sims
An involved yet also detached vocal from Sims on this
restless ballad produced rather wonderfully by Curtis Mantronik; for the rap
response, see “Love Letter (Dear Tracy)” from Mantronix’s In Full Effect album (what do you mean, you haven’t got the first
four Mantronix albums, including the one without MC Tee and with “Got To Have
Your Love”? What’s wrong with you?).
Jellybean
A wonderful and by 1988 standards rather old-fashioned
disco tune. Sung by future Prince collaborator Elise Fiorillo, then only
eighteen, “Who Found Who” is the kind of song I wistfully wish Madonna still
had it in her to record (see also Michael Jackson and “I Can’t Help It”).
Dollar
As if to give their blessings to this new pop that was
happening, Dollar, absent from the charts and indeed from existence since the
end of 1982, briefly returned to prominence with a fine reading of the Erasure
song, just to prove they had been right all along. Their 1981-2 Trevor Horn
tetralogy of singles stands as one of the strangest and most compelling in all
of pop; Bazar’s final downward shiver of “Only ghosts are lovers on the screen”
at the end of “Videotheque” is as chilling and free of camp as “Past, Present
And Future.”
Vanessa Paradis
Try to imagine anything like this getting anywhere near
our Top 100 now, let alone top three (#2 on NME)
in 1988. Joe is a taxi driver; like the lawyer Paolo Conte he knows everything
that he sees, hears and feels around him, dreams idly of escape but is aware
that he will always let the train go. Patrick Bourgoin played all the
saxophones, the song bears a grave lightness that sounded new and welcome in
its time (and today), and its parent album M&J,
and in particular its standout “title track” “Marilyn & John,” must be
heard.
“Comedy”
Morris Minor and The Majors was the idea of comedian Tony
Hawks – he who later hauled a fridge around Ireland on his back and attempted
to write a second hit ten years later which did quite well in Albania – and it
remains depressing and a telling indictment of Britain that “Stutter Rap” did
better in our charts than any Beastie Boys single (even “Intergalactic” stopped
at #5). This is not to say that the record is entirely without merit – the Neighbours theme sample still makes me
laugh – and the Beastie impressions aren’t totally useless, but everything falls
rigid with the dull, sub-Barron Knights chorus. Yes, Britain, let’s treat this
rap thing as a transient laugh while we creep back to our Mr Mister albums, why
don’t we?
But side four of Now
11 wipes “Stutter Rap” off the fucking map.
Side Four
Because it was the same with this dance music thing, wasn’t
it? Ah, rock and roll; don’t worry, it’ll soon pass and we’ll be back to proper
singers and proper songs whose words you can understand.
But what is really remarkable about side four of Now 11 is the colourful nature of its
happiness. Like she who left home, it is having fun, something much of the rest
of the record seems to have forgotten about. “Beat Dis” would probably sound
hopelessly hackneyed to newcomers now – not helped by the legally-required
extrication of a sample from The Good,
The Bad And The Ugly – but back then it signified the start of something
new.
I remember seeing the Bomb the Bass and Coldcut singles as
new (12-inch) releases and from their sleeves onward they looked and sounded
much more fun than the earnest indie rock that was then being proffered as what
was happening. When they burst into the charts the following week – at numbers 5
and 25 respectively – it felt that the battlements had been overthrown.
Why? Because, as with most great pop music, it happened
before people became sure of things, when they didn’t quite know what to do
with what they’d found, or invented. In Derek Bailey parlance they were good
until they thought they were good. And yes, a big part of the attraction of
records like “Beat Dis” and “Doctorin The House” was the implication that you
and I, with a spare turntable and portable cassette player pause button, could
easily have made them. The looping and piling up of samples on “Beat Dis” might
sound almost wilfully amateurish to contemporary ears, but the
happening-without-your-permission thing was the hook.
These records, and others like them, flooded the charts.
Krush, from Nottingham and signed to a Sheffield-based industrial indie label,
made the top three (and again #2 on the NME)
with an aggressive and languidly threatening record that barely hung together
as a “song” at all. The groove was of
overriding importance. I know nothing of Jack N’ Chill other than they were two
guys named Vlad Naslas and Ed Stratton, but their one (instrumental, save for a
percussive Janet Jackson sample) hit is really rather splendid, a fusion of Simple
Minds’ “Theme For Great Cities” with Shakatak and Joe Meek, bursting with joy
at this great new Fairlight toy that they have and the funny things they can do
with it. Respectful of the past but not remotely tied to it.
The Beatmasters begin a brief but distinguished chart
career with their hip house being instantly and completely overrun by Clapham’s
Cookie Crew (“with a drrrrrrummmmANABASS!”); totally bewitching and compelling
(hello Riot Grrl in its own way). Two
Men, A Drum Machine And A Trumpet were Fine Young Cannibals minus Roland Gift
and plus a Humphrey Bogart sample and, I think, Graeme Hamilton (who had
contributed very similar trumpet playing to “Johnny Come Home” in 1985).
All this culminates in “Rise To The Occasion,” a nice, easy-going
pop song such as can be found on either of the first two sides of this
collection. But somebody – perhaps producer Stephen Hague – took it upon
themselves to take liberties with the song and play about with it in the hope
of introducing it to hip hop. And so the original song sounds slightly
petrified when put against the up-to-the-minute-end-of-1987 rhythm track and
samples, as if old pop is being eaten by the new. If “Pump Up The Volume” had
thrown down the initial gauntlet, its influence and infiltration were now total.
How right that this record should end with a mix by the man who co-produced its
beginning – Julian Mendelsohn – and how fitting that it should choose to walk
into the future. Pop hadn’t been this fun in years. It wasn’t going to let even
a skyscraper stunt or halt its growth.
Jazz Insects
Postscript/Envoi/Aposiosesis
And nothing, not even the rest of side four of Now 11, aims or reaches higher than “Doctorin
The House.” Coming from what we might charitably view as the Wire side of affairs, from people who
knew only too well what 1987 meant to them and why and how they should keep
going, Coldcut came, via the “Beats ‘N’
Pieces” white label and the “Paid In Full” remix, into the centre of the stage
and “Doctorin The House” is outrageous, outspoken, optimistic and optimised.
Yazz doesn’t have to do much except sing the title and hum a little abstract
line or two, since most of it is left to Coldcut and what I understand were
mostly cassette player pause buttons, skippier and slinkier than turntable
rhythms. There is a grand and rather regal sadness redolent of William Walton
submerged in a suboptimal radio receiver, as comets of snatches and hooks fly
by and sometimes circle around like falcons and sometimes pile up on top of
each other to interfere and go somewhere beyond NO-TONALITY, not really that
far from what Cardew’s AMM had proposed a generation before; that slow-motion
ellipse your brain makes when you are witnessing something fast, new and
unprecedented but need to slow yourself down in order to make sense of it,
confirming that “Planet Rock,” the blood which secretly or not so secretly
flows through the veins of all these songs, was The Most Important Record Of
The Eighties, zooming in, on and past Casey Kasem (“Oh BOY what a great RECORD!”),
Dave Collins (confirming that “Double Barrel” was One Of The Most Important
Records Of 1971, and then that great rising organ of scratch, everything
blossoming in acidic worship, and then the bells, the BELLS, for this is our
1967 and SAY KIDS WHAT TIME IS IT and it is OUR time and the margins collapse
and become the centre and even Simon Bloody Bates (“The Music Maker”) and TWO
false endings for some old sixties superhero thing, daring you to take it off,
challenging the need to “end” a pop record, and the next one’s going to go to
number one and right we’re on.
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