SUEDE: Coming Up

 

(#553: 14 September 1996, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Trash/Filmstar/Lazy/By The Sea/She/Beautiful Ones/Starcrazy/Picnic By The Motorway/The Chemistry Between Us/Saturday Night

 

This wasn’t quite the same band as the one which recorded entry #476. Bernard Butler had been gone for two years. Who was going to replace him? Nobody really visualised a seventeen-year-old A Level student who sent in a demo tape to the band’s fan club explaining how good he’d be for them. Yet it was drummer Simon Gilbert who walked into the office while Brett Anderson was sifting through a whole pile of tapes and thought he was listening to an early Suede demo – Richard Oakes had recorded his own versions of some of their songs and added a few of his own compositions to show how much he could contribute.

 

Intrigued, the band invited Oakes in for an audition. The chemistry between the two parties sparked immediately but they asked him to come back for a second go the following week just to prove it wasn’t a one-off. He duly returned, and it most certainly wasn’t, so he was offered the job. He had hitherto been playing in a Dixieland jazz band as well as in school “rock” groups, so he had a pretty good idea about how to assemble a song.

 

Hence the third Suede album, hailed by everyone as a mighty against-the-odds comeback, and perhaps easier to assimilate than the second one. The gestation period of Dog Man Star had been painful. Butler’s father had died shortly before the band had been due to begin their tour of the United States. In addition, he also became engaged, and felt overall that he was drifting away from the other three, and they from him.

 

There were virulent arguments and disagreements, and unquestionably a shipload of drugs floating around. For the album, Butler recorded his parts in a completely separate studio area from the rest of the band. He angrily quit the group before the record was properly finished, meaning that unnamed session musicians had to be brought in in order to cover for his absent work.

 

Not that Anderson was necessarily in a better place at the time; he had just moved into a flat in hilly Highgate, adjacent to what was essentially a Mennonite church, and would hear their hymnals floating through his walls. All well and good, of course, but spiritually and emotionally he was kaput, wasted.

 

Much of that waste naturally filters through to Dog Man Star. It is a forbidding and opaque collection. Its faster songs did not possess the snappy cheek of those from the record’s predecessor; humour, indeed, was almost entirely absent. The non-album single “Stay Together" which preceded it should have acted as a warning, since it was practically bipolar in nature; its first half a straightforward boisterous arm-waving consolation (Anderson), its second a hellish drive into a limbo beyond rational recognition (Butler, although it’s Anderson who yells “Don’t take me back to the past!”).

 

And yet, when it slows down, cools down and becomes more intimately intense, Dog Man Star offers us music as profound and moving as anything else of its decade. There are subtle clues on the album as to where it might be heading; the icy ethereality of “Daddy’s Speeding,” the rude snort of Andrew Cronshaw’s ba-wu flute which introduces “New Generation,” like an abruptly-awoken hippopotamus.

 

The sequence of “The 2 Of Us” and “Black Or Blue” – note Anderson’s prophetic “And I don’t care for the U.K. tonight” in the latter – is shiveringly brilliant, piercing through to emotions that much other mid-nineties music didn’t even strive to reach (Global Communication’s “14 31,” with its patient rhythm of the profoundest clock that ever ticked, bounds to mind as a comparison). “The Asphalt World” would work as an escape route from those cloisters – it is, or ought to be, the album’s antechamber to climax – were it not for some ill-advised extended jamming (Butler at this stage was no David Gilmour, who generally knows what notes to play, when to play them and most importantly why he should play them). “Still Life” is a splendidly semi-cathartic coda and the corniness of the closing orchestral passage doesn’t bother me at all; on the contrary, it elevates the dreams of the song’s everyday Valium Court housewife into a literal bolero of absolution.

 

Usually, in critical overviews of this closing section to Dog Man Star, writers focus on an assumed Scott Walker influence in its key songs. If there were, then hiring Andrew Cronshaw and Brian Gascoigne and his Sinfonia strings was actually slightly ahead of the Tilt game. But the overarching influence has never, to my knowledge, been acknowledged – listen to Anderson’s climactic “us” in “The 2 Of Us” or the way the word “coast” wriggles from his spirit in “Black Or Blue,” not to mention his mastery of the forlorn falsetto, and it is suddenly and abundantly clear that the singer is channelling Billy Mackenzie (hear “And This She Knows” or “Nocturne VII” and tell me I’m mistaken). Given that Mackenzie was about to be signed to Suede’s label Nude Records, the comparison here is surely unavoidable.

 

The imperfectly-completed artefact was perhaps too much to assimilate for everybody, including Suede themselves. Ironically, before he left the band, Butler had actually agreed with Anderson that their next move should be to get back to snappy pop songs with tangible hooks – you can witness the glory of McAlmont and Butler’s “Yes” as evidence of where Suede might have gone had Butler stayed. As things were, however, Anderson and Oakes, after a slightly wearying period touring Dog Man Star, knuckled down in an attempt to write such songs.

 

If anything, “Trash” was a glorious knockout comeback, proving to doubters that the new Suede were freshly capable of cutting it. While still very much the apprentice, Oakes nevertheless finds space to insert his subtle stamp on the song – which really acts as a manifesto for Suede and their fans - and the band sounded livelier than they had done in three years. “Filmstar” may get a little too comfortable in an imagined 1972 oasis, but as skulking bubbleglam it does its sneakily catchy business, while “Beautiful Ones” relies on the underlying bed of concealed sadness which rendered Suede different from (insert Sky Bet League One glam-indie band of your choice). Hooks and handclaps aplenty, exactly as though the new boy had swept into the room, thrown the curtains open and let the light back in. The band feels like itself once more. Meanwhile, “Starcrazy” indicates that Oakes was already working on ideas of his own, and they delightfully do not clash with Anderson’s.

 

Of the ballads, “By The Sea” dates from 1993 – which is why its opening line reflects “So Young” – but the album’s closing three tracks are new, and rather splendid, slowly reaching out to the listener as opposed to shutting the porthole on them. “Picnic By The Motorway” is so provincially grand that you don’t initially notice the song’s framing horror; it could be a sequel to “Daddy’s Speeding.” The forebearing languidity of “The Chemistry Between Us” – what does Anderson really know of “Streatham trash?” – supports a searing melancholy, not of a romance, but two drug addicts who have only their drugs in common, as a tool of communication.

 

But “Saturday Night” – and throughout Coming Up, Craig Armstrong’s string arrangements are a far apter fit for Suede than Gascoigne’s; they breathe (i.e. coming up for air) and cohabit with the songs rather than overpower them or comment on them from the sidelines – concludes on a note of cautious optimism and acts as a courtly response to Petula Clark’s “Downtown”; the day job is out of mind on a Saturday so let’s get out, enjoy ourselves, never trade a stupid decision for another five years of life, and most importantly of all, “never let the winter in.” Coming Up sounds as though Suede have freshly partaken of a new spring.

CROWDED HOUSE: Recurring Dream: The Very Best Of Crowded House

(#552: 6 July 1996, 2 weeks)

 

Track listing: Weather With You (Single Version)/World Where You Live/Fall At Your Feet/Locked Out/Don't Dream It's Over/Into Temptation/Pineapple Head/When You Come/Private Universe/Not The Girl You Think You Are/Instinct/I Feel Possessed/Four Seasons In One Day/It's Only Natural/Distant Sun/Something So Strong/Mean To Me/Better Be Home Soon/Everything Is Good For You

The sense of a parallel and slightly hazier world prevails throughout the more intelligent Antipodean rock of the second half of the eighties, and of the year 1986 in particular; think, for instance, of the Go-Betweens’ “Twin Layers Of Lightning” or the Triffids’ “Tarrilup Bridge,” each bearing a heat so hazy it could make pizzeria store fronts seem like tablets from heaven. The haze of “Don’t Dream It’s Over” may have a lot to do with Mitchell Froom’s keyboards, but there is a subtle commitment in Neil Finn’s writing and performance which doesn’t have to underline the fact that this is an anti-capitalist protest song. It doesn’t make a fuss but quietly stands in the corner, incrementally making a difference.

 

That last sentence fairly sums up what Crowded House have been trying to do in the subsequent half-lifetime. On the surface their music appears, or sounds, reasonable and approachable, and therefore possibly "centrist" - they are routinely described, or dismissed, as "dad rock," which reminds me of how odd it is, or isn't, that there does not seem to be such as thing as "mum rock" - and their approach certainly differs in superfluous kind from the band's arty predecessor Split ENZ (the capitalisation is important), though that may be down to Crowded House being essentially Neil Finn's project, whereas Split ENZ was principally his brother Tim's concept.

Still, the implicit menace felt through things like "I Got You" pervades in the unusually hazy keyboard lines of "Fall At Your Feet" and the politely gloomy confessional of "Into Temptation," the latter underscored by what sounds like a Mellotron. Though superseded by subsequent compilations, in particular 2010's two-CD The Very Very Best Of Crowded House - which includes their best song, "Chocolate Cake" - Recurring Dream marks an inadvertent temporary memorial, as Neil Finn decided to split the band up shortly after its release. Drummer Paul Hester had messily left in 1994, and the grudging "with Paul Hester" credit on the album suggests some residual grudges.

Yet this is proudly unworldly music, and inevitably this has something to do with New Zealand; without wanting to venture into dreary generalised pseudo-philosophical travelogues about the edge of the world, etc., it is true that the two islands' best bands sound as though at a diplomatically defiant distance from the mainstream of things, as though music filtered through to them in imperfect, faxed photocopies. The work of The Verlaines, for instance, can be interpreted as a manically sped-up punk variant on Crowded House's characteristically angular structures - 1993's Juvenilia is basically an inversion of the subject matters of Together Alone - and we see glimpses of The Chills - rest in peace, Martin Phillipps - in particular during the lengthy vanishing-into-nothingness of "Private Universe."

 

One could even - well, I would - suggest that the (im)perfect counterpoint to Crowded House would be Dunedin's The Dead C, where emotion and adventure finally overcome politesse and reserve; you really cannot appreciate Woodface (bearing Tim Finn's obvious presence in mind) without listening to Trapdoor Fucking Exit ("Hell Is Now Love," "Helen Said This").

If I'm focusing on artists recording for Flying Nun Records, it may be due to the fact that Neil Finn (together with his wife Sharon and another undisclosed business partner) has held a 25% shareholder stake in that label since it was bought back from Warner Music in 2009. But it enhances the totality of understanding Crowded House's music.

Recurring Dream is a straightforward singles compilation; four songs from each of their (then) four studio albums plus three new songs (for a proposed new album which was ultimately abandoned). Much of it will be accidentally familiar to you, yet there are bits of sonic business which gently steer the band away from being unambiguous easy listening; Tim's ad libs of "Aye!" and "Hey!" on "Weather With You," the free jazz trumpet solo which takes "Mean To Me" out (played by a member of a session band known as the "Heart Attack Horns"), the disconcerting electronic FX which announce "It's Only Natural." "Pineapple Head" is a delightul R.E.M.-style roundelay which could theoretically go on for always.

I'd say that, of the four original albums, Together Alone is the most ostensibly adventurous - the debagged post-baggy rage of "Locked Out" plus the aforementioned "Pineapple Head" and "Private Universe" - and Temple Of Low Men the most secluded (Neil seems be singing "Better Be Home Soon" while angrily crouching in a far, not-yet-dusted corner of the studio). Of the three new songs, "Not The Girl" is an explicit White Album tribute - far more Lennon than Neil's customary McCartney-esque deliveries - while "Instinct" buries its supremely catchy chorus in a sandy morass of indecision. The band did reassemble - minus Hester, who took his own life in March 2005 - in 2007, and it is encouraging to see that their more recent work, up to and including this year's Gravity Stairs, demonstrates undiminished imagination. And if you listen to 2010's Intriguer - particularly songs like "Inside Out" - you'll discover healthy evidence of the band being structurally influenced by...The Chills. Easy listening has never quite been Crowded House's thing, unlike meticulously-refined subtlety.

Bryan ADAMS: 18 til I Die

 

(#551: 22 June 1996, 1 week)

 

Track listing: The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You/Do to You/Let’s Make a Night to Remember/18 til I Die/Star/(I Wanna Be) Your Underwear/We’re Gonna Win/I Think About You/I’ll Always Be Right There/It Ain’t A Party…If You Can’t Come ‘Round/Black Pearl/You’re Still Beautiful To Me/Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman?

 

It was a Wednesday. I remember that much. To be more specific, it was the morning of Wednesday the eleventh of August, 1971. It was a gloriously hot and blue day, just under a fortnight before I had to return to school for the new term. I was seven years old. My father was at work, so my mother took me out to a park which was not the one which we regularly visited in Uddingston (because I remember going out with my mother on the bus to Tollcross Park on many occasions), which was Maryville Park, adjacent to the Tunnock’s factory and close to what at the time was called Muiredge Primary School. On this occasion we went to a park, or a play area I guess you’d more accurately call it, on Kylepark Drive, where all the well-off people whose children went to school with me and barely tolerated me lived.

 

I can’t remember why my mother took me out there except maybe she fancied a change. But it was a very fine and relaxed morning. I took it upon myself to sing all the songs in that week’s top thirty singles chart – because at the time if you listened to the charts on the radio they only went down as far as number thirty – and link them in the manner of a radio disc jockey.

 

It just felt like the right and most natural thing for me to do in that setting and at that time in my life, and I must have been pretty good at it because before long my performance drew a small crowd of admiring girls and in some instances their beaming parents. I wasn’t there to make a racket or cause a fuss, but just to entertain as best I could.

 

Everybody who was there agreed that I was quite remarkable. I sang all the songs from that week’s top thirty, which had only been announced on the radio less than twenty-four hours previously, in sequence of ascending order and from memory. Some even started to sing along with me as the ninety or so sunny minutes went along. No fuss or unpleasantness; just communal happiness.

 

Looking at that top thirty, as I am doing now while writing this because I can’t really remember it these days without looking it up on the internet, even though when I was younger all the charts were in my head and I never needed to look any of them up, it surprises me somewhat that I managed to pull that performance off. I know it was this chart and it was the eleventh of August because for whatever reason I remembered that “La-La Means I Love You” by the Delfonics was at number nineteen. I don’t know why that specific statistic has lodged itself in my head.

 

Today of course I recognise the record as Thom Bell at his exquisite best. I did not know of “People Make The World Go Round,” which Thom Bell did with the Stylistics at pretty much the same time, and indeed did not hear it at all for another twenty-eight years until I heard a cover version on the Innerzone Orchestra’s album Programmed and tried to find the Stylistics album which included the full six-and-a-half minute version (not the three minute-plus edit you got on compilations). I found that on a lonely and hot Tuesday afternoon, slowly walking back to somewhere (Oxford), in a crate in a record shop on Wandsworth High Street. It was Tuesday the seventeenth of August, just over twenty-eight years since my performance in the park, and of course I wondered what I had lost. The fact that it was a time that I was not really meant to see perhaps underlines the unutterable otherness of the whole experience.

 

However, getting back to looking at that top thirty, I really am puzzled as to how I managed to pull it off. There’s “Street Fighting Man” by the Rolling Stones – a song which didn’t get much, if any, play on daytime radio but still I knew it – and other political songs like “Bangla Desh” by George Harrison, “Soldier Blue” by Buffy Sainte-Marie and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” by the Who. Advanced stuff for my age. And there was tongue-twisting progressive rock in the form of “In My Own Time” by Family and the groovy “Devil’s Answer” by Atomic Rooster. Also a record called “Leap Up And Down” by Saint Cecilia which the radio had belatedly banned because at the time you weren’t allowed to sing the word “knickers” on the air but I had heard Noel Edmonds or somebody play it and it was catchy enough to stick. I sort of bleeped the offending word out, to much laughter.

 

I remember how most of those thirty songs went but not in meticulous, microscopic detail. I had no unassisted memory of “Watching The River Flow” by Bob Dylan and had to turn to volume two of his Greatest Hits to remind myself how it went – oh yeah, that one! Most of it, though, was happy random noise, whether it was “Heartbreak Hotel” (doing the rounds on reissue), “Monkey Spanner” or Slade’s “Get Down And Get With It” (I really enjoyed yelling that one out!). Even “Get It On” by T. Rex, which was right up there at number one, I simply treated as a wacky singalong, not knowing that it was rather near the lyrical knuckle (well, how are you supposed to know these things when you’re only seven, with your cream shorts and your Apollo 11 embroidered patch which came free when you sent off three used Super Mousse wrappers?).

 

Today I can rationalise why this odd assortment of songs constituted a “hit parade.” August 1971 represented a liminal period in pop, when the old (sixties) order had largely incrementally bowed out and nobody was yet quite sure what was going to succeed it (T Rex and Slade were as yet happening in isolation). Back then all I knew was that pop records either made you feel sad (“I’m Still Waiting”) or happy (“Move On Up”) or indeed occasionally both (“Just My Imagination”). A lot of the time I still think that’s all you need to know about pop.

 

So why am I thinking about all of this nearly fifty-three years to the day later? Because of the promise that could never be fulfilled, not least by myself. Everybody who was present in the park that Wednesday morning was sure I was going to become somebody really famous. One of them commented, “hey, this is the next Tony Blackburn!”

 

Maybe I’ve scrunched it all up in my imperfect memory and I was merely blurting out riffs and hooks and making a lot of noises to cover up for lyrical ignorance. That’s a major reason why minute analysis of lyrics is simply the wrong way to approach pop writing. Blue by Joni Mitchell had already been out for a couple of months but all I knew about her at the time was the song about the taxi where she laughs at the end and she wrote “Woodstock” and “Both Sides Now” but both were hits for others. I didn’t hear the album until one Sunday morning, about two o’clock, at a Christmas party in Morden in December 1988. It immediately penetrated my being and I bought my own copy from Tower Records on Kensington High Street one day later.

 

In 1971, however, all I was concerned about was, was it pop, was it happy noise, and does/do either/both work?

 

Perhaps that is still what concerns me. In 1971 I was seven and people loved what I knew and felt about pop music. After a while, though, you gradually find out that you’re not really allowed to do it any more. I didn’t become a disc jockey because that involved doing shifts on hospital radio for not very much money and as I understood things, once you managed to get employed by a radio station you had to earn a living playing music you basically hated.

 

Yes, you might justifiably argue at this stage, but you did not hate any of that 1971 chart stuff in 1971, did you? To which I can only reply, no I didn’t. Pop was all around you in a manner fundamentally different from how it’s all around you now. By “all around you” in 1971 I mean that pop was in the air, everybody breathed it, whether they liked its fumes or not. Whereas “all around you” in 2024 generally means what’s feeding into your headphones as you listen to the hot pop hits of today online – and no greater community is there to share it with you, not any more.

 

So yes, I’d say pop music in 2024 is as good as it’s ever been, and qualitatively in rude health – but how would you, or anybody, know? Furthermore – and this furtherance is very important – I know that it shouldn’t be me telling this to you.

 

Because knowing and singing the top forty in 2024, at the age of sixty, is drastically different from doing so in 1971, aged seven, and unquestionably a whole lot more sinister. It’s an indication that, no, you haven’t really grown up, have you – and people are exceptionally suspicious about people who don’t and/or won’t grow up.

 

I might have liked all pop music in 1971, but just a few years later the hormones kicked in, then punk, and both alter you irredeemably. You are obliged to take sides, learn (or learn to learn) that you do not like some pop music as much as you like other pop music. Meanwhile, playground chatter about the charts – who beat whom to number one, who got the highest new entry, where did THAT record come from, etc. – dwindles or mutates into talk about driving lessons, work placements and mortgages.

 

You are, in short, expected to grow up and put childish things away, including (implicitly and sometimes expressly) pop music. The other week I walked into the office humming “Good Luck, Babe” to myself – it’s catchy! – and you’ll never believe the blank stares I got in return, like, who is this ageing weirdo? You’re supposed to have “graduated” to classical or jazz or grown-up album artists, or to have stuck with the songs that were big when you were fifteen. Charli xcx or Billie Eilish don’t give a fuck if I think, never mind what I think about their work, and why should they – theirs isn’t intended to be “my” music, and quite rightly so; piss off back to the Beatles, grandad.

 

(Actually, as Ian Martin has commented elsewhere, it’s quite liberating to get past sixty and realise that you can think and say what you like because nobody truly gives a toss; it’s your deemed societal function to become a grumpy old git, because what are young people otherwise going to react against?)

 

So yes, like Max Schumacher in Network I am fully aware that things are far nearer to the end now than to the beginning. How is one expected to respond to that incrementally dire knowledge? I didn’t stop loving pop music because it is presumed to carry an expiry date. I listen to new music because I don’t want my mind to atrophy and consign me to a nursing home. I cannot live for, let alone in, the past. Orpheus loses Eurydice forever because he looks back. Lot’s wife looked back at burning Gomorrah and turned into a pillar of salt.

 

Hence you could say that it’s not exactly a great or helpful idea to look back, argues the co-author of a blog looking back. Maybe it’s down to how you do the looking, the angle of your gaze. But the reaction I’d get now if I attempted what I did at Kylepark over half a century ago would be horrible, brutal and probably terminal.

 

And of course I shouldn’t even think of attempting it. In the real world I of course wouldn’t. But there’s that irritating little subtext of a question, isn’t there – okay, you’ve been told to grow up, and you shouldn’t even be told, you should just do it, so no more swings and roundabouts in the park, and no more pop music. And then I’d have to go into a paraphrase of Limmy’s sketch about the swing, saying – all right, I’ll stop listening to pop, I’ll fit in. What have you got to replace pop music? I’ll tell you. NOTHING. Work, work and more work, which is all school trains you to do anyway, relieved only by booze, fags, maybe drugs, and inadequate holiday fortnights (provided you can afford any of these). No wonder people are fucked up, etc. etc.

 

So perhaps Kylepark in 1971 was my personal Millport. A moment which cannot, and should not, be recaptured. But, hey, this enduring, consumerism-based belief that you can go on being a rock ‘n’ roll adolescent forever – I can’t be seven until I die, let alone eighteen. Not even if I were born in a leap year.

 

Postscript

Yet all memory is fallible. Until quite recently I believed profoundly in the perfect day, which for me was teatime on Monday 15 August 1971. My parents and I were walking back from Bothwell Castle. The weather was beautiful. My father carried our transistor radio and we listened to Radio 4. Specifically I remember listening to Brothers In Law, a situation comedy about the world of barristers starring Richard Briers. I don’t recall anything specific about the show – least of all whether it was funny - but it felt good and fitting.

 

Being the age that I am now, however, I looked all of this up online yesterday. Not only was that Monday the sixteenth of August, not the fifteenth, but the evening repeat of Brothers In Law did not go out until Thursday – the nineteenth.

 

I note that track two on the abovementioned Innerzone Orchestra album is entitled “Manufactured Memories.” Track three is entitled "The Beginning Of The End.”

METALLICA: Load

 

(#550: 15 June 1996, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Ain’t My Bitch/2 X 4/The House Jack Built/Until It Sleeps/King Nothing/Hero Of The Day/Bleeding Me/Cure/Poor Twisted Me/Wasting My Hate/Mama Said/Thorn Within/Ronnie/The Outlaw Torn

 

It was not really possible for Metallica to be equalled, let alone bettered, but after five years the band were keen to try. Consequently they recorded enough songs to fill two very long albums, and as is usually the case (though not invariably so), there was one fairly good album lurking within all the excess baggage.

 

One would have imagined a disciplinarian producer of the calibre of Bob Rock to lay down a law or seven, but, as has been said elsewhere, a producer can only work with the material they have been given. In addition, the packaging looked tawdry – the Andres Serrano cover artwork (or quotation – it is actually a reproduction of Serrano’s 1990 piece “Semen and Blood III”) indicated that they were trying too hard, as was the ill-advised dressing-up photography within the cover; a lot of fans were put off by the latter. They weren’t expecting U2 postmodernist japes.

 

Load takes a while to get going – the record is literally overloaded. The opening song, the title of which I will not do the dignity of reproducing here, is a gruff rerun of “My Sharona” despite its attempts to fly into Foo Fighters airspace. The second song is tedious, smelly blues-boogie. The unpromisingly-named “The House Jack Built” endeavours to retrieve the classic Metallica template but is fatally sabotaged by what sounds like James Hetfield vomiting into a guitar talk box (in 1996!). This was not what Kurt had died for.

 

At this point, the album does wake up to an extent. Remarkably – who would have guessed? – the songs which sound most like Metallica work the best, and Load’s next four songs, while not scaling the heights of anything on its predecessor, are unimpeachable. The manner in which Hetfield manages to express the phrase “so-HOLD-ME-EY-EH” eight different ways in “Until It Sleeps” is quite masterly, as is the snarling emphasis placed on the “Careful what you wish/You may regret it” section of “King Nothing.”

 

On the other hand, there are occasions when the band try something un-Metallica-like and succeed. The working title of “Hero Of The Day” was “Mouldy” because the song sounded to them like something latterday Bob Mould might do. Hetfield doesn’t quite square his priapic growl with Mould’s nasal yearning, but the song would not have disgraced Sugar’s File Under Easy Listening – a record subsequently disowned by both its creator and the record company boss who released it, but I thought and still think that it’s rather splendid – and cumulatively probably Load’s most sinister song, given the very slow and subtle rise of sinister elements, culminating in the dramatic turnaround that accompanies the lines “But now the dreams and waking screams/That ever last the night/So build the wall, behind it crawl/And hide until it's light/So can you hear your babies crying now?” – words which in the Britain of September 2024 bear a terrible resonance.

 

“Bleeding Me” – and you can’t really get away from Chris Cornell, let alone Kurt – really is Metallica at their finest, brilliantly constructed with an unexpected mid-song about-turn; just as you thought it was over, along rolls further, bloodier thunder. Hear how drums and voice tumble in unison through the whirlpool of “OH, I CAN’T TAKE IT!” You can’t learn that level of symbiosis.

 

The album then dips again. “Cure” isn’t too bad but is vaguely pointless (whereas “Until It Sleeps” surprisingly works because in its verses the band sound a bit like The Cure). One message board wag described “Poor Twisted Me” as being “like George Thorogood gone flaccid” and I certainly cannot disagree with that succinct summation. “Wasting My Hate” (“And I won’t waste my hate on you…/think I’ll keep it for myself, YEAH!”) is, however, moderately funny and would have worked on a rejigged Load as comparative light relief.

 

“Mama Said” is a very earnest effort to pull off a country-rock ballad; muted and well thought-out, if slightly redundant in this setting – Hetfield uses the song to articulate thoughts about his relationship with his mother, who died of cancer when Hetfield was sixteen. It doesn’t attain the ambiguous heights of George Michael's similarly-themed “You Have Been Loved.” But “Thorn Within” is my favourite track and the most directly “Metallica” song on the record – a great riff, lots of unapologetic power.

 

One does have to say no to the wearisome Black Crowes retread of “Ronnie” – especially when set against the surprising imagination and enterprise of the same year’s Three Snakes And One Charm – but the closing “The Outlaw Torn,” in part apparently about the ghost in the band’s own cupboard, Cliff Burton, and takes the album out satisfactorily; the song’s handling of quiet-LOUD-quiet dynamics calls “I Want You/She’s So Heavy” to mind. As with the latter, “The Outlaw Torn” ends before it finishes, so to speak, but whereas Lennon cheerfully sliced the tape of “Want/Heavy” to wind the pseuds up – and wouldn’t it, let us be honest with ourselves, have been a profound disappointment if we had ever heard the actual end of that song? – “The Outlaw Torn” is faded early because there was no more room for it on the CD (the album runs for 78 minutes and 59 seconds – but how much filler could have been excised?), so I listened to the full “Unencumbered By Manufacturing Restrictions Version” which appears on the CD single of “The Memory Remains” and restores the song’s closing fifty-five seconds; while there is no major revelation to be heard, the song does actually come to a conclusion, and therefore wraps up the album’s proceedings pretty naturally.

 

It has to be wondered whether there was really any room for Metallica in 1996. The band say they were inspired by the work of many other artists when they put Load together, some of whom are perhaps unexpected (Oasis, Alanis Morisette, Garth Brooks – although in the context of “Mama Said” the latter does make a degree of sense). But when you compare it to other major hard rock albums of the time, it is possibly found wanting. It avoids the bluff cheek of Corrosion Of Conformity’s Wiseblood, it largely forsakes the technical cunning which underlies Rush’s rather fine Test For Echo, and it completely lacks the shattering power of Pantera’s The Great Southern Trendkill – there is nothing here to compare with “Floods” (“the vast sound of tuning out” indeed). Nor, if we take things outside 1996, is it as pop as Soundgarden’s Superunknown.

 

Some have argued that Load would have worked reasonably well as a side project. As a major album, however, it is somewhat out of its time. In 1997 a second, slightly shorter album entitled ReLoad was released; it is not addressed in this tale, as it only peaked at number four in Britain, but shares the same dilemma of excellent songs obscured by layers of barely passable filler (my picks: “Fuel,” “The Memory Remains” with its Marianne Faithfull not-yet-a-ghost cameo, “Carpe Diem Baby,” “Where The Wild Things Are,” “Low Man’s Lyric,” “Fixxxer”). Assemble a playlist of the best of both albums; then you’d have had a worthy follow-up, even to a previous album which almost demanded that it not be followed up.