MICHAEL JACKSON: Blood On The Dance Floor: HIStory In The Mix

 

(#571: 24 May 1997, 2 weeks)

 

Track listing: Blood On The Dance Floor/Morphine/Superfly Sister/Ghosts/Is It Scary/Scream Louder (ft  Janet Jackson; Flyte Time Remix)/Money (Fire Island Radio Edit)/2 Bad (ft John Forté & Wyclef Jean; Refugee Camp Mix)/Stranger In Moscow (Tee’s In-House Club Mix)/This Time Around (D.M. Radio Mix)/Earth’s Song (Hani’s Club Experience)/You Are Not Alone (Classic Club Mix)/HIStory (Tony Moran’s HIStory Lesson)

 

I have written about this album before. Specifically, in a posthumous and almost wholly male-authored anthology of essays about Michael Jackson published in 2009, I cursorily dismissed Blood On The Dance Floor as an “intermittently interesting but mostly wan remix album.” This was on the background of a glorified blog post which I wrote in about twenty minutes, approximately one hour after learning of Jackson’s death. I had other things to think about at the time (and still, over fifteen years later, have not been paid for writing the ”essay”). I’m abysmal at on-the-spot writing so it’s just as well I didn’t train as a journalist when I had the chance.

 

Then, after a decade and a half of not thinking about the album, I glanced warily at the mint CD copy which I had bought some years earlier for 50p from the Cancer Research shop in Carshalton for Then Play Long purposes (in those pre-streaming days) and inserted it into our player, with headphones on to ensure that I didn’t miss anything.

 

Well, that will teach me to come to snap judgements, and once again demonstrates why I can’t update this blog more often. I’ve now revised my opinion radically. Blood On The Dance Floor is one of the best albums Michael Jackson ever released. It might even be his best since Off The Wall. I can’t believe how good the record is, and how sorely, and sourly, it was underrated, sidelined or even damned by a lot of ageing men who truly ought to have known better.

 

The anthology is now mostly unreadable. Certainly its more “academic” analyses were incomprehensible even in 2009. But there resides in those pages so much bitterness and spite about what Jackson did or allowed to be done to himself after Thriller, together with collegiate sneering about his absence of a “soul.” Were they all deaf or stupid or, as I suspect, both? “Morphine,” “Is It Scary” and “Stranger In Moscow” were some of the most soulful and heartfelt songs he ever wrote and/or recorded.

 

The later Jackson songs are, of course, all about suffering, and specifically his own suffering, a gesture which seems perfectly acceptable to music writers when made by Ian Curtis or Kurt Cobain or Richey Edwards, or other white people. Black artists apparently aren’t allowed to suffer, other than in the standard racism/drug habit sense; they’re supposed to present a stalwart role model to mostly white music critics and must never exceed those boundaries or woe betide our whip of whim! John Lennon screaming about his mother is OK, Michael Jackson howling about the injustices that the world, from family on down, have deposited on him is out of order, not cricket.

 

What Jackson did learn from Lennon, apart from the odd indirect “Come Together” reference here and there, was how to structure his music as an extension of his life. What musician doesn’t, you may justifiably inquire, but I mean in the sense that, like Lennon, he saw his songs, or recordings, not so much as complete things in themselves but more as outliers of his self - the pop song as blog post, if you must, to which aim Lennon had been heading ever since “Glass Onion.”

 

While Jackson stopped short of conjuring up Two Virgins-type enterprises with Lisa-Marie Presley, enclosing cream envelopes filled with surplus sawdust from the floors of Neverland, he nonetheless wanted to make his music inseparable from his essence, or absence of same. If anything, the song “Blood On The Dance Floor” sees him positively welcome his assassin, maybe as a relief from having to think about his self any more – there is a terrible concealed ecstasy in Jackson’s triple-locked vocal assays as he anticipates the knife, metaphorical or otherwise, a closeted joy echoed in the slurring blips of electronica with which Teddy Riley punctuates the ending of every line and beat. I further note the song’s nod to the descending chord sequence of the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love” (“There'll be days that will excite/They'll make you dream of me at night” – that sums a lot of Jackson up) and the album’s possibly unintentional leitmotif of Hammond organ, recalling Jimmy Smith on “Bad.”

 

My 2009 assumptions were most likely based on residual disappointment with the album’s lead single, i.e. the abovementioned title track. I looked up some notes I had written on the song years before and discovered dreary observations on the 1997 General Election and what I did that Thursday and Friday, with the song itself scarcely mentioned. “Blood On The Dance Floor” may have been trying too hard to be like Janet (especially those muttered grunts), and certainly didn’t begin to measure up to the ransacked glories of The Velvet Rope, but it was disappointing only in the way that other Jackson album lead singles such as “The Girl Is Mine,” “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” and “Black Or White” were disappointing. I had to learn that lesson over and over again.

 

Get past that song, however, and Blood is, well, bloody incredible. Eight remixes of songs from HIStory and five new songs, not in that order. As though to punish us for underestimating the record, Jackson immediately unleashed its most “extreme” moment. I don’t know that “Morphine” has much to do with Nine Inch Nails, even less with Morphine the band. Sonically and rhythmically it hits as hard as – well, “Rhythm Nation,” but in a lot of Lennon-y ways it takes us right back to the gestures of “No Bed For Beatle John” with its distantly echoing hospital nightmares of medical chatter, some of which derives from the film of The Elephant Man - If you know, you know (and I’m leaving the David Lynch commemorations to others).

 

Meanwhile, the song crunches on the glass of Slash’s lead guitar, and you’d trust Jackson’s “put all your trust in me” as firmly as you would have done Kaa the Jungle Book snake. That is until it abruptly re-presents as an orchestral interlude, as though Jackson has been in the “real world” all the time, although vague walkie-talkie voices attempt to penetrate the cushion of strings. The man looks at himself in the mirror and is baffled, if not astounded (“oh GOD he’s taking DEMEROL!”) – flashback to me on the ward eleven weeks ago (or near enough) after my anaesthetic block had worn off and my left shoulder and arm became intolerably painful (memories of hearing some godawful Susan Calman travelogue thing on Channel 5); I called out for, er, morphine over and over, but to little effect until the night nurse at one in the morning said I should really try dihydrocodeine and paracetamol instead as these would be much more helpful. So I did, and the pain…diminished! I was taking the “wrong” painkiller, but when you’re so desperate you require pethidine then you’ve voyaged somewhere outside of “right” and “wrong.”

 

If anything, this moment puts me more in mind of Sonny Bono’s dubiously-intentioned and finally absurd “Pammie’s On A Bummer” from 1967, a would-be anti-drug epic that begins with some rudimentary modal-bordering-on-free improvising (involving, amongst others, Mac Rebennack, hence it resembles some of the less outré elements of Dr John’s Babylon) before resolving in a godawful sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-Dylan plonking with appalling rhymes and worse singing which would be sufficient to set anyone on drugs for life (there barely exists a recognisable melody). My hospital experiences in 2018 were enough to put me OFF drugs for life. But Jackson manages to avoid the pseudo-morality trap – at least on this song – and with a decisive “OOOOOH!” which could express either hurt or triumph, he returns to “Morphine” improper, subverting “The Way You Make Me Feel” as he does so (“Go on, baby!,” “DO IT!”). He cares so passionately about not needing to care about anything anymore.

 

We do not really divert from such emotional extremism. “Superfly Sister” revisits this mysterious woman – not Billie Jean, but clearly derived from her – “Suzie” who appears determined to undermine and kill Michael Jackson (she is also the subject of the title track). Perhaps it’s short for “suicide.” In any event there’s no faulting the excellent production, over which MJ hiccups and hisses the Jehovah Witnesses’ handbook in defiance of this tawdry and unworthy thing called sex, and which Bryan Loren nicely underscores with a nagging four-note low-pitched synthesiser hook, pinches of eighties 808 settings and sampled saxophone burps like impatient car horns.

 

“Ghosts” (apparently written for the film Ghost; does anybody remember it actually being in there?) materialises with floats of synthesised choirs into which a harsh Vocoder endeavours to barge. Lena thought the harmonic background to the endless “And who gave you the right…?” accusations reminiscent of another “Ghosts,” the one composed by David Sylvian and recorded by Japan (and there’s no reason why MJ wouldn’t have heard Tin Drum at some point in his life), but I’m not so sure; the weighty melancholy of the harmonies do make me think of something else, but exactly what it reminds me of has thus far eluded me (suggestions are welcome – “Bird’s Lament” by Moondog, perhaps?). Anyway, Jackson howls about harassment and jealousy before realising that the ghost tormenting him is…himself. It plays like what turns out to be one of two sequels this album has to “Thriller”; at the end he sucks in his own breath, and the lid of (presumably) his coffin is shut very firmly indeed.

 

Even this doesn’t really prepare you for the draining epic that is “Am I Scary” (no question mark; it’s assumed), prepared for the singer by Jam and Lewis. It begins with a James Bond-type introduction before Jackson’s whoop more and more comes to resemble a hacking cough. The song’s early bow-tied solemnity carries hints of early ABC. A quite unexpected Picardy third comes to rest restlessly, then a swirling piano that is immediately reminiscent of Thom Bell’s orchestration for “Back Stabbers.” This in turn is succeeded by Jackson’s demand to “Let them all materialise!” which is answered by repeated hammering that leads us into a howling wind of a chorus – scarcely has Jackson sounded angrier – before settling back down to quiet piano, strings and oboe which are almost instantly subverted by electrical interference. Jackson’s fury is unabated and if anything escalates: “Am I the beast you visualised?” he nearly cackles in triumph. He is his own evil, you are the evil, he scares himself probably more than whatever is supposed to be scaring him scares him…

 

…and again and again the man meets with the mirror and finally collides with it, falling right through the KEY CHANGE and the TUBULAR BELLS, screaming “I don’t want to talk about it!” (immediately buried in an avalanche of confused and conflicting mutters), “You know, you’re scaring me too!” The song totters back down to a funereal piano finale – “Could It Be Black Magic?” and what is anyone to make of that adjective?

 

These are Blood On The Dance Floor’s five new songs, the most emotionally extreme songs Jackson ever dreamed up, performed with a naked intensity that might make In Utero seem like a tea party with Mr Rogers in comparison. And don’t talk to me about “soul” – Jackson’s vocals on “Morphine” and “Am I Scary” are as soulful as anything he ever recorded. Just not the reassuring soul that tends to be required by the smugly moneyed.

 

Now it’s time to dance. “THE BEST DANCE ALBUM IN HISTORY!” the cover cleverly bet-hedges, and we are presented with an octet of variations of HIStory songs as though they are being reflected back onto the world which its singer secretly hoped to have created some idle afternoon. Or something.

 

And what a dance album this is. If Michael Jackson had come back with this album in 1991 we’d have long been showering it in praise. Suddenly (and, I presume, eagerly), the man is thrust into a present-tense world of music and is abruptly, and quite unexpectedly, bang up-to-date. Jam and Lewis themselves helm the rebooting of “Scream”; they don’t need to change that much other than make the song more percussively buoyant but the quiet introduction (“West End Girls”) leading into a deafening slam, a pummelling rhythm and the whine of drone helicopters lead very nicely out of “Am I Scary”’s pendulous pit. Janet is still there, trying to convince her brother that he can’t beat Rhythm Nation (can anybody?).

 

Pete Heller and Terry Farley give “Money” a calming underhaul, with Dust Brothers/Beck-style simmering electric piano and a purposeful low-grade groove (purposely shadowing “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” to my ear) that includes another reference to “back stabbers” and a growl of “Get dirty” worthy of Lisa-Marie’s father. The Fugees crew do their typical thing on “2 Bad” with nuclear siren alerts and a finely filthy punch (“back to where I wanna be…doin’ wrong,” “You are disgusting me”). Jackson’s rhythmic nous is here is fully that of the second half of Off The Wall’s first side; he divebombs the funk and lands headlong into the world of...Big Beat! Who would've funk it?

 

But Todd Terry’s reshaping of “Stranger In Moscow” is just stupendously brilliant. No wonder the Pet Shop Boys liked the original, since this is exactly how Neil and Chris would have tackled it – the lament double-tempoed into a rave. The sublime Bacharachian harmonic transitions are more sharply accentuated by Terry’s beats, which boast the same mischievous poignancy that drew me to him back in the days of Royal House, Black Riot and To The Batmobile (in 1988 it was akin to listening to somebody who had just figured out how to dance and, to his surprise as much as anyone else’s, found that he was rather good at it – did somebody mention “Long Tall Glasses” in the background?). Terry’s achievement is to render what was already one of pop’s loneliest songs into an ironically graver meditation; the “icon” finding himself surrounded by tourists, living, laughing, loving, having fun (but now he’s all alone in MOSCOW LAND HIS ONLY HOME!) and realising that he is unutterably, and beyond any hope of redemption or indeed hope itself, sealed off from that world, probably forever.

 

Entombed in your own life-defying/denying body and everybody is having fun around you.

 

(Conversely, however, to those who continuously moan about why Jackson never did nice songs like "I Can't Help It" any more; well, not only did he still sing them, but he also wrote them. You simply chose not to bother listening.)

 

David Morales puts “This Time Around” through a loop and finds lots of workable things to do with it (his ten-minute “Mad Club Mix,” available on the 2-LP set of Blood On The Dance Floor, renders the workable wacky); Michael Jackson As Dave Pearce Dance Anthem has a winning sheen as a reinvention; it suits him.

 

As does the 3am (eternal) Michael Jackson of Hani’s reimagined “Earth Song,” which works fairly effectively as a late night/early morning ambient lounge chillout floor-dropper; there’s MJ at the bar in Ibiza, half the dancefloor’s gone home and he’s mumbling semi-coherently to himself about the end of the world as the remainder of the world swims right by him. The mood is something like “The Sun Setting” and there is no big choral climax; it’s just the thought of it being the end of something, chiefly Jackson himself – aren’t all the songs on HIStory really monologues, directed only at the singer?

 

But Frankie Knuckles’ take on “You Are Not Alone.” Now that is an act of past-camp genius. To take, assess and rework maybe the most problematic song in Jackson’s oeuvre (chiefly because of the now-imprisoned creep who wrote it) and convert it into a work of lustrous art is something only the true greats are able to manage (then again, what does MJ say towards the climax of “Morphine” – “Don’t worry, I won’t convert you”?).

 

As Madonna did with the Miami Mix of “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina,” Knuckles (with Satoshie Tomeii) flings all the self-pity out of the pram and replaces it with a fuck-you-I’m-ME celebration of being alive. Yes, Badiou is not alone, and his burgers are the best (so much for “The Fascism Of The Potato”). Yet Knuckles turns the tune into a showstopping, high-kicking light entertainment classic with those lovely descending, diminished piano chords (and, again, that un-“Bad” organ, rematerializing as a beacon leading towards the light) you wish the song had always possessed. “You Are Not Alone” gets transferred to the type of ditty Bruce Forsyth or Marti Caine or even Val Doonican might have crooned of a Saturday televisual evening.

 

And its final triumph (of Jackson’s will) comes as the singer ecstatically yells, over and over, “GOTTA STOP LIVIN’ ALONE!” – well, of course, he was always singing that song to himself. Wrested back to the right (Gene! Grace!) Kelly. He realises the tomb can be irrupted.

 

The record peaks and closes with Tony Moran’s over(re)view of “HIStory,” as bots of Michael stutter “New force of a…” and “YOU ARE THE KINGDOM!” Moran leads Jackson into the wondrous land of…Faithless! and SASH!! (“I CAN’T! GET TO SLEEP!”) and the man in the mirror is now the mirrorballed man, in the heart of THE CLUB, still fighting with himself (“Can’t stop me/STOP me!,” “Keep movin’/DON’T keep movin’”). There’s a big campfire singalong about how we’ve all got to work together to keep everything going complete with a SAVE THE WORLD KEY CHANGE climax, some ceaseless and distant electronic burbles which made Lena think of Stereolab's "Fluorescences," and a real flag-waving euphoric finale to an album where the Worried Man works up the courage to fight off his ghosts, stare the mirror out and realises he was only made for dancing. It’s a remix of his life.

The CHARLATANS: Tellin’ Stories

 

 

(#570: 3 May 1997, 2 weeks)

 

Track listing: With No Shoes/North Country Boy/Tellin’ Stories/One To Another/You’re A Big Girl/How Can You Leave Us/Area 51/How High/Only Teethin’/Get On It/Rob’s Theme

 

As bad as things were for Depeche Mode in 1996, they were arguably worse for The Charlatans. Dave Gahan only “died” for a couple of minutes, but Rob Collins was killed permanently, in a drunken car crash on 22 July; he was twice over the alcohol limit and was not wearing a seatbelt, hence was thrown through his car’s sunroof. In last-minute body denial, he was able to stand up before collapsing. He died in the ambulance on the way to hospital.

 

The band had already been experiencing serious problems with Collins. While working on their fifth album, they complained that Collins fiddled about with and “ruined” some of the album’s songs, in the night after they had worked on them in the daytime, as a consequence of his alcoholism. They were considering letting him go, but his death understandably stopped the band in their tracks and caused them to wonder whether they should even bother going on.

 

It was Collins’ father who urged the band to do so. At Bobby Gillespie’s suggestion, they asked Primal Scream’s Martin Duffy (as that band were, at the time, “resting”) to join and help finish, and indeed tour, the album. He appears on at least four songs but is likely to have redone and reworked some of Collins’ original keyboard parts on others. Tim Burgess reckons he probably saved the band’s existence.

 

This all makes it quite difficult for me to evaluate Tellin’ Stories objectively. Clearly there was a lot of residual sympathy from the group’s fans, as well as the inadvertent poignancy of “anthems” like “How Can You Leave Us” (“How can you bleed on us?,” “No saint will save you this time ‘round”) and “With No Shoes”’ references to “walking with no shoes” and “fill[ing] my kidneys up with booze.” Moreover, the record includes two Collins-dominant instrumentals; “Area 51” and the closing “Rob’s Theme,” which latter is based on a tape the organist’s aunt made when Collins was three years old – you can hear the tweeting of birds and the murmurs of the infant Rob before a funk loop and breakbeat come in, like a nascent DJ Shadow track.

 

However, none of this actually makes Tellin’ Stories a better album. I’ve had problems with The Charlatans before and this record does not sound as though any of them have been resolved. It clearly isn’t for the want of trying – their Chemical Brothers chum Tom Rowlands, along with (on the opening song) one of the chaps from Bentley Rhythm Ace, turns up to add some loops here and there, and songs like “With No Shoes” and “One To Another” definitely benefit from the extra power. Preparing the songs in a cottage by Lake Windermere, Burgess in particular listened intensely to his Dylan and Wu-Tang albums in order to “analyse their vocal rhythms.”

 

But there are such things as being over-studious and over-respectful of Rock (and Rap)’s Rich Tapestry. Listening to Tellin’ Stories, it is clear that The Charlatans, whether with Collins and/or Duffy on keyboards, are a really good and powerful band. The authority that they stamp on the title track, whose key descending stone/Roses steps motif of guitar and drums was one of Collins’ suggestions that the band felt worth keeping, and “One To Another” is genuinely compelling. They know exactly what they are doing and, within their imposed parameters, are pretty inventive and resourceful – the increasingly crazed singalong of “How Can You Leave Us” benefits from their underlying control.

 

The problem lies, I’m afraid, with Tim Burgess. Sociable, genuine, generous, open-minded, honest, nice? Ticks for all six qualities. But a gifted lyricist and singer? Listen to their “comeback” single “One To Another.” If they had come up with something in the order of “Time Of The Season” by The Zombies, they would probably have spent six or seven weeks at number one. And the introduction to “One To Another” is literally awesome, with a sharply-defined killer riff (Tom Rowlands helps delineate that sharpness). But then Ian Brown’s kid brother comes in to mumble and drawl over the top, and all momentum is lost – there’s no melodic topline to hold onto. He manages to rip off both Jagger (“Pleased to meet yer”) and Shaun Ryder (“They’re going to burn YEWWWWWW!!”). One Steve Taylor – I wonder if it’s the same music journalist and sometime Channel 4 chat show host who used to bore the mellotrons off me in the eighties – writes in his unmissable tome The A-X Of Alternative Music that Burgess’ lyrics were “more understated and less cartoon” than those which Ryder and Kermit donated to Black Grape. Yet history repeatedly shows that it’s the overstated cartoon characters – be they Doctor John or Slim Shady - who get remembered.

 

Likewise, take a listen to “North Country Boy”; I’ve listened to it eight times this week in preparation for this piece, doing my damnedest to find worth in its arteries, and still think it remarkable, in all the wrong ways. A rewrite of Dylan’s “Girl From The North Country” but from the “boy”’s perspective? Well, there’s an idea for sure. But I remain amazed – again, in the wrong way – that somebody can sit and listen closely to (and presumably also itemise in delicate written detail) the vocal mechanics of Dylan and Raekwon and how delivery relates to or forwards or even subverts their words, and end up...singing the theme to When The Boat Comes In (you don’t know When The Boat Comes In? A painfully worthy but very popular BBC television series of the seventies – it was briefly revived in 1981 – set between the two world wars and starring James “better than polishing your bell up all afternoon” Bolam as a literal Jack-The-Lad to whom bad things happen over and over for our comforting pleasure. It boasted a terrific theme tune, sung by Alex Glasgow – the funniest thing about whom was that he wasn’t actually from Glasgow, or even Scotland – which David Fanshawe rearranged into an avant-gardey brass band thing. Obviously Tim Burgess also remembered it).

 

This happens so often throughout Tellin’ Stories that you’d be forgiven for nicknaming Burgess Tim Nice-But-Dim. That Tellin’, for a start. All the echt-Americanisms when you’re from the roaming plains of…Nantwich suggest a desperate desire to be a plainsman, which Burgess only achieves as an artist when he omits the “s” in the middle (it isn’t the last “n’” in 1997 Then Play Long album titles either). He said that he wanted “How High” to deploy “the punch of the Wu-Tang Clan but with the playfulness of De La Soul.” There are tangible hints of fusing Flashdance with MC Hammer shit in relation to this aim since the song sounds like the late Duncan Norvelle impersonating Liam Gallagher while dodging airgun pellets.

 

As for “Only Teethin’,” the singer’s hoped-for State Of The Nation address/epic – the conga motif from Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues” opens the song as a declaration of intent – well, you would have to call it something other than “Only Teethin’,” wouldn’t you (what does the expression even mean? Answers from residents of Cheshire, please)? Burgess hears a mix of Neil Young, Dexys and Sgt Pepper whereas I hear endless point-avoiding noodling, stream-of-consciousness stuff about Londoners and no climax or palpable purpose. Can I borrow his ears for a bit, since they seem to work better than, or at least differently to, mine? Meanwhile, “Get On It” would dearly like to out-Bob Dylan and The Hawks, and there’s even a coda of breakbeats and that type of thing to show how Up To Date the band (never The Band) is. But I forgot how it went even while I was listening to it.

 

Nonetheless, the album went down very well with Ian Indie types and hardcore Charlatans fans, enough to spend a rare fortnight at the top of the charts (it shifted 70,000 units in the first week of release alone), although that may have been due, not just to the public sympathy vote, but also to the fact that the cassette edition sold in Our Price for a fiver (I should know – I bought one. Hammersmith, the King’s Mall, if you please).

 

Thanks largely to the stupidity of Parlophone Records – the Plastic Beach/Boyzone debacle was neither unprecedented nor atypical – the success of Tellin’ Stories demoted a much finer album, which was absurdly released in the same week, to second place:

 

 

Supergrass knew what time it really was. They were getting un peu trop vieux to be singing about sitting up straight at the back of the bus. All bar two of the songs on their second album were worked up while they were in the studio recording it (Sawmills in Cornwall) and the spontaneity clearly worked in the band’s favour; see, for example, the frighteningly acute tightness they achieve on “Sun Hits The Sky,” complete with Rob Coombes’ antique synthesiser solo. If anything, In It For The Money paints a more realistic picture than its predecessor had done of what Supergrass, as a band, represented.

 

They try all sorts of new things on the record, do Supergrass, but there is also a deep, autumnal melancholy underlying their explorations that is particularly evident in songs like “Late In The Day” and its half-cousin “It’s Not Me” as well as the “I’m on my way” chorus of “Sun Hits The Sky.” They dabble with cocktail jazz (“Hollow Little Reign”) and scatterbrained artpunk (“Sometimes I Make You Sad”) but they do so with a lot more adventure and a lot less caution than Tim Burgess and Co. manage. "Richard III" - now a number one single by default - is so unapologetically punk rock as to qualify as "Song 3."

 

Above all towers the glorious lead single “Going Out.” I haven’t a clue what it’s about but it sounds big and akin to An Event, and moreover it is so effortlessly powerful – what a drummer Danny Goffey is – that it embarrassingly does The Charlatans better than, um, The Charlatans. The video is set at the famous bandstand in Battersea Park and mostly consists of the band energetically performing the song and a cloth-capped Goffey doing his best Keith Moon conspiratorial camera glances (there is also some brief slapstick as the band is chased around the park by a passing dog).

 

Supergrass succeed because they look and sound as though they take this music thing far less seriously and earnestly than The Charlatans. It’s fun watching them play “Going Out” and as a pop single of its 1996-7 ilk (as Cliff Richard might quip) I reckon it’s up there with (or at least towards) Ash’s “Goldfinger”; of course, it’s The Bloody Beatles (and a little R.E.M.; I like how the introduction to "Going Out" says hi to the one from "Stand"), but they momentarily make you believe in this stupidly wonderful thing called pop music again. Beyond that, I’d say that In It For The Money finds Supergrass reaching their real niche – they’re a no-frills art-rock band, like their indirect ancestors Supertramp, but with a better lead singer and better songs. They don’t sound crucified by the weight of Rock History, worried that Martin Freeman’s going to walk by with his digestive biscuit library of Classic Long-Playing Records and sternly admonish them. I’ve started listening to In It For The Money again out of pure pleasure as a result. I’m not sure I could apply any of those attributes to the worthy and in places powerful but overall dull Tellin’ Stories. Rob Collins, though. He had places to go other than being Brian Auger’s Number One Spiritual Son. If he’d taken better care of things, chiefly himself, he might have done.

DEPECHE MODE: Ultra

 

(#569: 26 April 1997, 1 week)

Track listing: Barrel Of A Gun/The Love Thieves/Home/It's No Good/Uselink/Useless/Sister Of Night/Jazz Thieves/Freestate/The Bottom Line/Insight/Junior Painkiller

One question I'm frequently asked by readers is: "Are you going to live long enough to finish Then Play Long?" As I have today turned sixty-one, my characteristically Aquarian response is: most likely not, but it will be fun trying.

The problem is the sheer number of albums still awaiting my attention and thoughts. This blog has now been running for almost sixteen-and-a-half years and, at the time of writing, has not even reached the halfway mark; the current running total for British number one albums is 1,385. And yet it feels as though I bought Dig Your Own Hole only the other week.

The real problem is with our old enemy, The Music Industry, which cannot stop releasing and marketing records. Long gone are the days of the mid-sixties where I could get through this blog pretty quickly since nobody got to number one back then except the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan and The Sound Of Music. But by the nineties we are in the fast-moving world where there is practically a new number one album every week, and that situation, by and large, has not subsequently changed. By the time I catch up with entry #1385 at the current weekly rate of posting, I'll be pushing ninety - if I even manage to make it that far - and of course by then there'll be nearly an additional thirty years' worth of albums to take into account.

Why, therefore, I hear you all cry, don't I step up the frequency of my posts? Well (predictable response alert), it isn't that simple. Not only do I have other blogs to look after but I also have a day job and an actual life outside the internet. There's only so much time available for me to divide.

In addition to that, however, is the fact that virtually every number one album isn't content with just being, you know, a collection of songs. They almost uniformly come to us as MAJOR STATEMENTS. It's no longer a case of two hits plus ten fillers. Album X is a MAJOR STATEMENT, album Y comes with a DVD you also have to WATCH, album Z is intricately linked to the artist's ten previous albums, conceptually and lyrically. When I consider the prospect of yet another number one album coming in with a running time of 60 or 70 or even 78 minutes, I can become moderately depressed. Oh, and some come back as "Deluxe" (a.k.a. rip-off) editions to entice mugs to fork out money for essentially the same thing twice over. Through what glorious times do we live.

Yes, I am aware that expectations have been raised (along with album prices), that people want quantitative as well as qualitative value for their money, hence just as films now have to drag on for three hours all the better to fit onto a DVD or Blu-Ray, albums need to be BIG and LONG and MULTILAYERED and, above all, MAJOR STATEMENTS. We are meant to worship solemn, stony statues rather than enjoy ourselves in the limited time that we're given - I enjoy the bore in the current London Review Of Books who states that "Critics are encouraged to be cautious about endorsing descriptions of literature as 'enjoyable'," which as we all know is not nearly as much fun as critics fulsomely praising literature designed to make us all feel as miserable as possible. But more about Depeche Mode in a moment.

What this means for me as a writer is that I can't just rattle off daily posts about each number one album. It takes me on average a week to evaluate each of these records as fully and properly as I can, to listen to them repeatedly and closely, to research the background behind each record and to arrive at a satisfactorily conclusion about it. One is otherwise in grave danger of issuing snap, one-listen judgements which one might later regret having made.

Take Ultra, for example (cue mass chorus of: "well, it's about bloody time you took it - this is why the blog's taking you ages, you just ramble on about irrelevant shit most of the time!" I know - I wish on an hourly basis that I could be a master miniatuarist. Not in my working vocabulary, I'm afraid. Irrelevant Shit, though - that would be a good name to have for a blog...). I initially groaned aloud at the prospect of needing to evaluate Depeche Mode's ninth studio album, particularly after having written so enthusiastically about the Chemical Brothers - all this new, colourful, lively excitement, and we are then compelled to dive back into this opulent pit of murky misery.

I wasn't keen on the record in 1997 either, mainly because its lead single "Barrel Of A Gun" was one of the most repulsive lead singles from an album I had ever heard. I knew about Dave Gahan's heroin addiction, suicide attempt and subsequent two-minute death from a speedball overdose, Martin Gore's alcoholism, Andy Fletcher's full-scale nervous breakdown and Alan Wilder unsurprisingly deciding to get as far away from them as possible (Wilder's own album of the period under the name of Recoil, Unsound Methods, tells the same story from his perspective, and track titles such as "Stalker," "Control Freak," "Missing Piece" and "Last Breath" perhaps speak for themselves).

But "Barrel Of A Gun" sounded ugly on purpose - yet more murky post-Achtung Baby treacle, with Gahan seemingly about to combust spontaneously; his repeated Woody Woodpecker snarls of "What-ev-AHHHHHHHHHHHH!," as though reaching like a cobra to snatch my head off, proved frightening enough to drive me away. Statistically it is the group's most successful single in Britain, along with "People Are People," but record company marketing strategies were not the same thing as genuine popularity; "People Are People" was an endearingly naïve ("awfully"; see also the "basically" in "See You" - Gore knows his Basildon talk) anti-racist song set to some storming electro which probably influenced "Mothers Talk" by Tears For Fears later the same (1984) year and to which everybody sang along, whereas "Barrel" was strictly For Fans Only ("People Are People"'s Top 40 form was 29-9-5-4-6-9-20-36; "Barrel"'s was 4-23).

 

I had to walk away at that point from Depeche Mode, a band I had hitherto liked quite a lot, sometimes despite myself. But it had been four years since the really rather good Songs Of Faith And Devotion. The story was that, before his overdose, Gahan had barely managed to struggle into the recording studio most of the time, and when he did manage it he was so off his head that only one usable vocal for the album was achieved; that was for "Sister Of Night," ironically the album's most restrained and contemplative song - and even that had to be cut and pasted together from multiple different takes. With equal irony, after he had completed his LAPD-imposed post-overdose course of rehab - which included taking singing lessons - he strolled back into the studio and laid down his vocal for, of all songs, "Barrel Of A Gun" as though nothing had happened.

With this in mind, you might understand why I was somewhat reluctant to listen to all sixty minutes and seven seconds of Ultra. An initial solo listen, on Monday afternoon of this past week, seemed to confirm my worst fears. The music sounded bloated, expensive, fatigued, entitled and inelegantly downcast. What a comedown from the Chemicals (in all senses). A second listen on Wednesday afternoon, with Lena, did not get us much beyond that first judgement - not to begin with, at any rate. However, Lena's ears perked up at "The Bottom Line" such that she remarked, well, it took Martin ten tracks to get there, but he's finally come up with an Actual Song! So I began to hear the record in a new light and by the time it ended I found that I wasn't wholly dismissive of it. Something was going on here - but what?

It took a third listen - alone, on headphones - late on Wednesday night for me to work out what this album was about; and Ultra is an album which is optimally experienced on headphones. The strategic position of "Barrel Of A Gun" at the beginning is deliberate, since it deliberately represents its singer at his absolute worst, struggling to breathe, never mind finding out what the world actually wants of and from him.

This is a question often posed about Depeche Mode; how come a snappy little electronic band from Essex ends up slavering would-be rock gods in the U.S.A.? Perhaps it's the difference between being thought of as "little" and as "gods." My feeling is that the group's colossal, if eventual, American success was an act of revenge on Britain, where they had been ceaselessly belittled and bracketed with glossy, shiny types of the early eighties, no better than Spandau Duran. I'm certain they must have snarled "we'll show you" under their collective breaths when they set to make Music For The Masses.

Whether Depeche were suited for giant stadia is another question. I think the ambition was slightly too big for them to take on, and they suffered personally and collectively as a consequence. Yet what was the alternative; stick around in Britain and continue to make cute-with-razorblades electro-bubblepop? That really hadn't been their ambition even in 1982.

What is clear, however, is that Ultra is the darkest album Depeche Mode had recorded since 1982's A Broken Frame - both records had seen the band down to a trio. However, the latter's air of bemused abandonment has been succeeded by a closeted rage - but maybe also some answers. "Barrel Of A Gun" is intentionally hard to take, but that was the record's point; begin at the bottom and see about digging your tunnel out of Hell, starting from where you are.

It did help that, for the first time, the band had sought an outside producer in Tim "Bomb The Bass" Simenon. It should be noted that this was not the eighties Tim Simenon responsible for daft bubblefunk brilliance like "Beat Dis" and "Buffalo Stance" (although, if you think about it, "Don't Make Me Wait" could easily pass as a Depeche Mode song) but the restrained, worthier nineties Tim Simenon of "Winter In July," "5ml. Barrel" and "Play Dead" by Squäwk. Nevertheless, he actually does a very good job, and on headphones the presumed murkiness re-manifests itself as clarity; the beats are pronounced in their purpose (and work to quite brilliant effect to counteract the otherwise meditative "Sister Of Night"). And he had been on Depeche Mode's case as a fan since the (superior) Some Bizzare "Photographic."

With no small relief on this listener's part, Ultra does not proceed to a succession of hardcore crunches exuding luxurious despair. "The Love Thieves" if anything sounds like George Michael's Older at a crossroad with Arto Lindsay's Prize, an exercise in avant-Tropicalia (as if Tropicalia hadn't been avant-garde to begin with). I still think that Gore uses twenty words to say what George could have said in just two, and that Gahan's would-be crooning voice doesn't complement or subvert the music quite enough - but it does represent a degree of progress.

The one-two hit of "You're No Good" and "Useless" - well, not exactly; they are bridged by an instrumental prelude "Uselink" which sounds like Vangelis warming up - demonstrates that the band's pop sensibilities (if such a thing were still relevant) had not been blunted. Gore's unforeseen chord changes remain sublime, but both songs fundamentally work as askew, bitter pop; note the wounded guitar figures, like Duane Eddy coming off worse in the Colosseum, which punctuate "Useless" (as do the beats of Tackhead's Keith le Blanc and Doug Wimbish, two of several guest players who drop by, not to mention the then-drummer for Simply Red). If you can get beyond the "they're trying to be Radiohead/Portishead/Nine Inch Nails" mindset - then again, no Depeche Mode to begin with, no Trent Reznor - there is plenty to "enjoy" on Ultra, even if Gahan's "Open up your eyes" on "You're No Good" momentarily conjures up the spectacle of Justin Hayward (then again, the Moody Blues never to my knowledge wrote any songs about resentful stalkers).

Even seemingly throwaway moments like the instrumental "Jazz Thieves," which superficially sound loungey in a Twin Peaks/oh-is-it-still 1990 manner, have their purpose - the arrangement is continually derailed by absentminded wanderings worthy of the more reflective Aphex Twin, and the track's elements reappear at different angles throughout "Insight."

 

"Freestate," nearly seven minutes long and underlined by Gore's cautious pedal steel-like guitar figures, is the album's key song, the one in which Gahan is clearly singing to and chiding himself - "Let yourself go," "Step out of the cage and onto the stage"; he is squarely facing his demons and calmly fighting to tear them off and away. It is Ultra's moment of emotional turnaround.

Beyond that shines the light to lead us out of the tunnel. I have left Martin Gore's vocal features until last because I feel they are Ultra's best and most important songs. "Home" is a great song by anybody's standard, although I have to remind myself constantly when listening to it that the voice singing it is not that of Alison Moyet (whose own album of self-catharsis, Hometime, delayed by dinosaurs at the time of the millennium, would eventually see the light of day in 2002) but of Gore himself. Richard Niles' strings do their sweeping best in a song which pitilessly describes what happens when a man truly is left to his own (toxic) devices.

"Home" might even be the most emotionally open song Depeche Mode ever created (1984's "Somebody," a live favourite, cops out with a pervy payoff); it is about somebody trying to destroy himself with alcohol but who is saved and brought back into the world by a lover, and I have to say it but this was me in late 2001 before my psychotherapist suggested putting all my pain and thoughts into writing, by means of a blog.

I am not going to deride or ridicule an album which is about a ruined man, or ruined men, who clamber his/their painful way, or ways, back to life because that would be saying I didn't matter. Ultra - an album, let us remind ourselves, was fortunate in ever having been made - has been quite deliberately sequenced and constructed to tell this story. "The Bottom Line," which includes actual pedal-steel guitar from B.J. Cole - possibly the only man to work with both Luke Vibert and the Two Ronnies - and restrained drumming from no less a personage than Jaki Liebezeit, sees Gore tackling the same subject matter as "You're No Good" but from a very different angle. I'm not sure if Gore is singing about a person as such, but more about pursuing the actuality of life as it is lived; however often his wings will get burned or singed while doing so, it is still immeasurably better than not doing it. In places - his two shivering, descending "The sun will shine"s - he sounds like Elvis, who should have lived to sing this song.

Finally - if you don't count the closing-down-for-the-evening signoff of the brief instrumental "Junior Painkiller" (the much longer, though still wholly instrumental, "Painkiller" can be found on the, ahem, "Deluxe" version of Ultra) - "Insight" is a really moving closer, with its great musical sweeps fully worthy of Sylvian and Sakamoto, where the two voices of Gahan and Gore finally combine, like the Everly Brothers floating in the Space Shuttle, ultimately to remind us, over and over, that "the fire still burns" (hey, look, we're still here!) and, more and more, "Give love/You've got to give love" as though to preach "we can, must and will make a new start." The tortured "What-ev-AHHHHHHHHHHHH!"s of "Barrel Of A Gun" are superseded by the "Whatever you do" which heralds the "Give love" entreaty. The two worlds have drifted together again. There is even a friendly nod to Tears For Fears ("Talking to you now") and is it just my ears, but in that long, satisfyingly patient ending, do I hear that other Basildon singer Andy Bell contributing to the harmonies? - the coda to what initially seemed like Depeche Mode's harshest record has them sounding like...Erasure. Which is a happy ending, of sorts, since this is where Then Play Long says farewell to the band. But what is it that the same band said, over and over, at the end of A Broken Frame? "Things must change/We must rearrange them." Ultra is where the rearrangements came to fruition. And I would never have thought of any of this if I'd only listened to it once. Life had better not be short.