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.

The CHEMICAL BROTHERS: Dig Your Own Hole

 

(#568: 19 April 1997, 1 week)

Track listing: Block Rockin' Beats/Dig Your Own Hole/Elektrobank/Piku/Setting Sun/It Doesn't Matter/Don't Stop The Rock/Get Up On It Like This/Lost In The K-Hole/Where Do I Begin/The Private Psychedelic Reel

I purchased this record, on compact disc, on the Monday that it came out - 7 April 1997 - from Harrods. Yes, I know, what the hell was I doing buying records out of Harrods? Actually it was a regular habit with me around that time and certainly had something to do with the fact that back then I had to travel to Knighstbridge in order to get my hair cut. It was only four stops on the Piccadilly Line from the Tube station nearest to where I worked (which in April 1997 was Barons Court) and it saved time doing both things at once before Tubing it back home to Turnham Green. At that stage Harrods boasted excellent record and book departments - neither of which exists in today's tourist trap of a department store - and was certainly reliable, if slightly pricier than HMV or Virgin, for new releases on major labels (though more independent affairs necessitated the trip out to Sister Ray or Selectadisc. You're fascinated by this minutiae, aren't you? I thought you might be.

What I definitely also owned and used at the time was a Sony Discman, and as is always the case with such phenomena you think of the old saying that music won't necessarily change the world, but can change the way in which you walk through it (I read Simon Reynolds using it in a rather infamous 1986 Morrissey interview, but he may have got it from someone else). Judging by the number of plays Dig Your Own Hole got in my Discman, I'd say that album was one of the truest demonstrations of a provable fact.

For the second Chemical Brothers album really did have that effect on me, and no doubt hundreds of thousands of hours. Despite everything that has happened to me in the subsequent quarter-century, I have never got rid of that copy of Dig Your Own Hole, with the gluey remnants of the Harrods seal still palpable and visible at its easternmost edge. It wasn't made to be analysed, but to soundtrack the listener's walk - or, if they're lucky, dance - through their world.

Everybody knows that by 1996 it had become increasingly clear that dance music was providing the most fruitful route forward for pop. One thinks of Kelly McDonald's prematurely wise schoolgirl telling Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting not to keep obsessing over Iggy Pop, that there were new roads being carved, new sounds, new visions; and I put special emphasis on the film of Trainspotting here, not only because it helped make Underworld's "Born Slippy," as radical a "pop record" as has appeared this side of "O Superman," into a huge hit (like "O Superman" it stopped at number two in the pop charts, but for so many it was their number one song), but also because it proposed an explicit link between the New Pop with which its characters grew up ("Temptation," be it Heaven 17 or New Order) and the new beats into which it had evolved.

 

Certainly I can attest that looking at, and more importantly dancing to, creative albums from this period such as Underworld's Second Toughest In The Infants, Leftfield's Leftism and Orbital's In Sides, the "opposition" of Heavy Stereo and Menswear, left to caretake Britpop in the absence of the bigger guns, looked increasingly careworn. The Chemical Brothers, however, strove to maintain communications between both camps; they idolised "Tomorrow Never Knows" as much as Paul's Boutique, and their 1995 debut album Exit Planet Dust contained many splendid tracks ("Leave Home," the extraordinary retooling of "Song To The Siren") though lacked a certain dimension - as their Heavenly Social club nights proved, this music really demanded to be heard and felt live for optimal penetration.

 

Dig Your Own Hole marks the point where Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons made their first decisive step towards making records as records. Its sixty-three minutes and twenty-seven seconds alternately dart and float by, and bear the very real sense that these ten songs are telling a story, especially as most segue directly, or indirectly, into each other. What is that story? Perhaps it's whichever story you wish the record to tell.

It would be lax and perfunctory to suggest that a full appreciation of Dig Your Own Hole would not be possible without the use of recreational drugs. Speaking as someone who has never voluntarily taken drugs - not even on an Acid House club night - I confess that my understanding of the record may be necessarily incomplete. "Lost In The K(etamine)-Hole"? The album more or less mimics an evening, and morning after, spent clubbing and coming down, all under the influence of drugs (what I experienced with the contradictory and combative drugs administered to me as an inpatient at St George's Hospital in 2018 would be enough to put anybody off the things for life).

It begins with the remnants of a previous dream, or nightmare, swirling woozily around in the foothills of memory - did I really live through that? - before the sampled voice of Schoolly D and a furiously funked-up slap bass hurl the unwary listener into the glorious and vivid 1997 present. The impact is so decisive and confident that you immediately realise, this is what U2 were trying to capture with Pop - and this is so, so much more exciting and thrilling.

Throughout "Block Rockin' Beats" elements are thrown at you like landmines in a pinball machine; everywhere you are jostled, pushed, shoved, cartwheeled out of complacency by the stray shrill elements with which you are ceaselessly bombarded. While the bassline reminds me of 23 Skidoo's 1984 classic "Coup" - an actual eighties anthem, kids - the track itself makes you shiver ecstatically as though you are right in the middle of a coup taking place. And this was a number one single? Yet we aren't really that far away from what some still called rock 'n' roll - Duane Eddy could have played that bass, and that might as well have been Lee Hazlewood having a party in the background. In addition, the focus on the slapped bass which dominated so much intelligent British (New) pop of the early eighties reminds us of how important bands like A Certain Ratio - that Manchester influence again - really were (and still are); not to mention much of Andy Rourke's work with The Smiths (likewise, Manchester).

The title track, aided by the buoyant bass of Red Snapper's Ali Friend, maintains the initial excitement. The Chemical Brothers are not trying to Make A Statement or Express Themselves; indeed, one is positively relieved by the absence of a Bono figure - the track began life as a remix of Björk's "Hyperballad," but when the petulant three-squawk pony objected to the slap bass elements, it mutated into this. "Elektrobank" is funkier and mightier still, striding into existence overlaying an anxiously fervent statement by DJ Kool Herc - he was there with everything first - then stuttering into magnificent majesty over a sampled loop of Keith Murray (taken from "This That Shit") which takes the listener on a fabulous dodgem ride and bears a momentum more unstoppable than the Big Beat things that would follow (not that I'm going to criticise fabulous folk such as Bentley Rhythm Ace - frankly, I couldn't get enough Big Beat in the otherwise comparatively fallow late nineties).

 

The initially imperceptible decelerando of the rhythm between "Elektrobank" and "Piku" is quite staggering in its genius; the latter begins as a hopeful strut before becoming ensnared in those distorted memories of calmer moments and spectacles - was that a river, or a forest, and why can't I grasp any focus? It of course also acts as a virtual pause of breath before the still flattteningly astonishing "Setting Sun."

The song's roots jointly lie in the duo spinning "Tomorrow Never Knows" in their DJ sets and elements of an abandoned Oasis song "Comin' On Strong." I doubt either element, isolated, would have borne the explosive impact of both being shoved together. It is precisely "Setting Sun"'s reclamation of the rhythm and aesthetic inclination of "Tomorrow Never Knows" which ranks it alongside, and arguably above, "Firestarter" and "Wannabe" as 1996's most anti-retro number one; at the time I was not alone in wishing that this had been the comeback Beatles single, that if they had persisted they would not have turned into ELO but would have ended up here. Its soundbites of fuzz and analogue-delayed guitar mush are its construct, rather than simply its building blocks, careering (and yes, PiL's "Careering" is felt somewhere within its immense, sprightly bowels) towards the ears at impossible angles full of electric shock touches (e.g. the backwards trombone siren - why hello, "Peek-A-Boo" by Siouxsie and the Banshees! - and minute pause which herald the second verse).

 

Within this Valhalla of a 1966/1996 whirlpool Noel Gallagher holds his own, doing his best not to be converted into a pinball on a VDU screen; his voice is the record's glue, but here he is not holding the revivalist fort but gladly hurtling into a new, more dangerous and infinitely preferable future - "You're the devil in me I brought in from the cold" indeed. Most startling at all is the out-of-tempo, virtually out-of-record twenty-second breakdown which occurs halfway through the song, where a descending bush fire of guitar feedback is slowed down infinitesimally and fed through Tom Rowland's analogue processing to produce what is, essentially, Stockhausen; pure, abstract electronic avant-garde music, perhaps the most avant-garde sequence on any number one single, and the final rebuffal to "Release Me" for stopping "Strawberry Fields Forever" from triumphing. In November 2006, as part of "Club Popular," I mixed "Setting Sun" in and out of "Telstar," and it fitted, as well as confirming my suspicion that "Telstar" is the key source of everything new, creative and sustainable about the futurism which has, despite regular fervent assaults from everybody glued to looking backwards, made pop worth caring about and loving. Tomorrow, I felt, always knows. Rationalism, pace one of Mr Gallagher's favourite lyrical calling cards, is fading away.

Dig Your Own Hole is in places as functional as it is meaningful. "It Doesn't Matter" and "Don't Stop The Rock" had originally been released as DJ promos in June 1996 as "Electronic Battle Weapon 1 & 2" respectively - as indeed, once upon a long ago, had "Blue Monday" - but in this setting both prolong the momentum that the record has been building up; the former pole-vaults around a cut-up sample of Lothar and the Hand People, and do I hear the introduction to the Kiki Dee Band's "I've Got The Music In Me" somewhere at the base, or heart, of "Don't Stop The Rock"? "Get Up On It Like This" pulls off the same trick, in this instance converting library music (a sample from the John Schroeder Orchestra's cover of "Money Runner," composed by Quincy Jones for the forgotten 1971 Warren Beatty/Goldie Hawn Hamburg-set comedy bank heist movie $ - or, as it was simply known in Britain, The Heist. Good soundtrack, that one; I especially recommend the Little Richard track "Do It - To It!") into the elements of distorted bewilderment, as though the listener is being buried in a haze of club night excitement.

The spectator, or protagonist, then stumbles out of the club, and no elements are readily tangible. "Lost In The K-Hole" captures that disorientation (im)perfectly; again, there are traces of a past life, and a real life all around the protagonist themselves, but all is blurred and indistinct, and a lot of it is imagined and mixed up. The "Amusing acid bass" on this track, played by one "Seggs" - actually John 'Segs' Jennings, bassist with The Ruts, no less - inevitably and I think purposely conjures up spectral memories of Phuture's highly prophetic "No Way Back."

Eventually the lucidly meandering dreams resolve, to a point, in the record's penultimate masterpiece - and key "coming-down" song - "Where Do I Begin." The Chemical Brothers had worked with Beth Orton before - she appears on Exit Planet Dust's "Alive Alone" - and in the interim she had released the first album under her own name, 1996's Trailer Park (a big chillout favourite in and around Oxford as I recall, forever overheard by me on rambles up to Cumnor Hill). She sings a fragmentary lyric over patient acoustic guitar, each of which might have been beamed in from foggy 1971, but the Chemical Brothers cleverly stretch and distort the song as it goes along - the kicking-in of the beats is a wake-up call and a half - such that it becomes a drugged ghost of its self and towards the end is hardly palpable, resolving in a foreboding siren drone waiting to be switched off.

But there is life after this death, as the duo demonstrate on the marathon closer "The Private Psychedelic Reel." Its prelude - keyboard figures both sprightly and pregnant - and its patient build-up immediately make me think of those other Virgin recording artists, Simple Minds (so much of Dig Your Own Hole has its feet in the roots of Sons And Fascination), before this almighty fucking thundercrack of drums blasts its way into our brains and bodies.

Thereafter the track - look, it's a bloody composition - is a clear celebration of life, of joy and of colour, completely of its late-nineties now but also entirely in pace with the "memory of our betters" who had "set controls for the heart of the sun" nearly three decades earlier (yes, James Murphy MUST have heard this) with wild phasing and in-and-out fades. Not to mention the superb clarinet (and "Dub 'Tetix Way'." i.e. sound-effects) of Mercury Rev's Jonathan Donahue - it is accurate to claim that this piece of music more or less rescued Mercury Rev from extinction and helped pave the band's way towards the following year's Deserter's Songs) - or, above all, the shatteringly brilliant drumming, which was initially thought ascribable to the Charlatans' late drummer Jon Brookes but was actually performed by Simon Phillips, veteran of Roxy Music's Flesh And Blood and the original Evita.

What is unquestionably the case, however, is that "The Private Psychedelic Reel" is not only one of the greatest closing album tracks ever recorded, but also among the most liberating. It is an absolute, fuck-the-squares celebration of LIFE and MOVEMENT which climaxes and justifies that comparatively rare phenomenon of a record which merrily, generously and unapologetically throws open all of the windows and lets all of the light back into the room of the world. Christgau said that the great thing about Dig Your Own Hole was that "it matters even more that their futurism is neither exclusionary nor puritanical." No limited editions, no rare groove, no tribalism. Although neither Chemical Brother is Mancunian as such - Rowlands hails from Henley-on-Thames and Simons attended Dulwich College - they met each other as students at the University of Manchester, and what can be said other than, well, Manchester rubs off on everybody who spends any meaningful amount of time there? "The Private Psychedelic Reel" of course makes one think of "I Am The Resurrection" but buried deep in its heart we can also discern the not-very-distant strains of a remix of James' "Come Home" ("The way I feel just makes me want to scream").

The Chemical Brothers are neither dance music puritans nor indie adherents, yet they have managed to unite both parties without contrivance or regret. I listened to Dig Your Own Hole so many times, while I was walking and sometimes when I was running. It made the whole world seem different and better (U2, whose fundamental aim that had always been, should have admired the duo's focused ambition as much as they possibly resented it). It felt like both (1997) now and forever. At the time, nobody I knew felt it so intensely, or indeed at all - least of all in Oxford. But I felt as if I had freed the record from Harrods, and donated it back to humanity.

(In memory of James Hamilton, who should have lived to hear this record.)

U2: Pop

 

(#567: 15 March 1997, 1 week)

Track listing: Discothèque/Do You Feel Loved/Mofo/If God Will Send His Angels/Staring At The Sun/Last Night On Earth/Gone/Miami/The Playboy Mansion/If You Wear That Velvet Dress/Please/Wake Up Dead Man

 

"Pop never had the chance to be properly finished. It is really the most expensive demo session in the history of music," Bono said, some years after the release of what was possibly the bleakest U2 album since October, and may also have been the most difficult album for the band to make. No last-minute rush job has taken so long to complete.

 

The recording of Pop began in 1995 and stuttered along almost until the last minute. Three of its songs dated from the Zooropa sessions and one ("Wake Up Dead Man") had originated as an uptempo song in the Achtung Baby period. I don't think they had the slightest clue about how to make this album. Over the best part of the two years they spent attempting to record it, they deployed a battery of producers - mainly stalwarts Flood and Mark "Spike" Stent but also Howie B, Steve Osborne and (comparatively briefly, before he decided he had more interesting things to do) Nellee Hooper. "I think it suffered from too many cooks," Paul McGuinness observed.

To add to their self-imposed woes, the band asked McGuinness to arrange dates for their 1997 PopMart tour before the album had been satisfactorily completed. The necessity of doing the latter ate into rehearsal time for the tour, which resulted in substandard performances. Pop had originally been scheduled for a Christmas 1996 release but the Spice Girls would easily have laughed that competition off.

Furthermore, in part necessitated by the time that Larry Mullen needed to recoup from major back surgery, much of the band's playing, including Bono's vox, was sampled and looped (mainly by Howie B), in a doomed attempt to mimic modernity. This leads to the general aural feeling of an A.I. version of U2 having made the record - and perhaps justifies the lamentably ludicrous Wikipedia entry on the album, much of which looks to have been penned by a bot ("'Staring At The Sun' features acoustic guitars and a distorted guitar riff from Edge [sic], and a simple rhythm section from Mullen [sic].").

 

We listened to the album for the purposes of this blog on YouTube because we literally couldn't be arsed to get up and find our CD copy. The intermittent interruptions of the album by commercials actually enhanced its hopeful status of disposable product - maybe they should have done what Sigue Sigue Sputnik did on Flaunt It! and booked advertising space between tracks. They announced the PopMart tour at a press conference held in the lingerie department of a New York branch of K-Mart - had they been watching the Father Ted Christmas Special too avidly? Or did it take U2 too long to realise that the postmodern disposable schtick had gone on for one album and one tour too many?

I felt pre-emptively glum when preparing to sit down and listen to and evaluate Pop. As regular readers of this blog will know, our principal aim with it is to do our best to see the good side of number one albums - after all, if they become that popular, they can't be rubbish...or can they? Even when approaching something I know isn't likely to be of much good, such as a Boyzone or Robson & Jerome album, I remain intrigued by what has been put into such records and try to work out their appeal as objectively as possible. But I saw Pop as another weary job to be done, from its ghastly sleeve - a really cheap and cheerless affair, akin to a 16 Most Requested Songs zero-budget compilation (yet in keeping with the deliberately cheap pedals and other effects used in the album's making) - inwards. Listening to it again did not dispel that weariness.

6: POP!
2: POP?
6: Protect Other People!
2: People's Own Protection!
(Patrick McGoohan and Leo McKern from their continuous dialogue in the "Once Upon A Time" episode of The Prisoner, McGoohan demonstrating that he certainly did know his Goethe)
 

Or pop as in the bursting of the bubble, or the exploding of the world; the original, unused end credit sequence of The Prisoner had the symbolic penny farthing morph into planet Earth, revolving in endless stellar darkness, out of which emerged the caption POP.

 

 

Pop was the album, and it couldn't have sounded less like that other sort of pop. "Discothèque" - note that acute accent on the E - begins the record with channel-swapping sabres which do not resemble those said to dwell in paradise before thudding, congealing beats stride in like a wrecking ball as a bipolar, bitonal Bono (in voices both high and low, female and male, and of course the wreckage of Sly Stone in corrugated mind) mumbles and howls, as lost in this carnival of yellowing youthful light as Joe Strummer's white man was at the Hammersmith Palais cabaret ("You get confused but you know it"), or the dancing queen having aged a generation, still lost but now hopelessly so ("Looking for the one/But you know you're somewhere else instead").

 

 

The beats - more militant early Def Jam than anything to do with Ecstasy, marshalled with mirthful pitilessness by mixmaster Howie B - pile up like serrated corpses as the singer searches for an essence which he hopes might not be him ("You want to be the song/The song that you hear in your head"), fully realises that he is wasting his time and life ("But you take what you can get/'Cause it's all that you can find"). In the chorus he shrieks for release - "let's go...and/or let go?...discothèque!(?)" as that Joshua Tree guitar tries to climb back in through the song's porous gaps. But the percussive activity continues to escalate until a climax of whoops and furious hand drumming - A Certain Ratio, the Pop Group, 1979 passim, hard to forget wasn't it? - blocks off all possible exits. In the video the group dressed as a joyless Village People in a halo of bloodied red which made them look as though the Manson family had just paid a visit.

 

It was evident with Pop that U2 had long since realised that the last millilitre of juice had been squeezed out of the pomo Lemon - but still they persevere with it as the record becomes progressively darker and more distant, if not more interesting. "Do You Feel Loved" (and feel loved?) plods on in the belief that EMF and Jesus Jones are still trendy. "Mofo" groans like 1980 Simple Minds (Adam Clayton's bass rotogravure trying its best to be Derek Forbes) inexpertedly crossed with 1997 Primal Scream (Vanishing Point achieves what so much of Pop strives to attain, mainly because, as with Screamadelica, Gillespie was smart enough to leave most of the work to Weatherall). Bono once again laments the passing of his mother, but did it so much more powerfully on "Tomorrow" and far more subtly and profoundly on "Lemon."

As with Achtung, so much of Pop's production is determinedly muddy, but in a more insidious sense, as if the band had been imprisoned in a kandy-kolored mesh and were struggling to escape from it. You can hear the old U2 - the one most people love - attempting to wriggle out to the listener on "If God Will Send His Angels." But "Staring At The Sun," the album's would-be big ballad "anthem," lopes along like a fuzzy Radiohead imitation, with Bono's voice very Yorke-like in places (oh, the IRONY) and where have I heard that little central melodic refrain in the verses before? Oh yes, on "Feel Good Inc." by Gorillaz, released eight years after Pop...

 

The album thereafter crawls along, largely uninterestingly. "Last Night On Earth" sounds like the film theme that it became. The Edge's "siren" effects in "Gone" compare very unfavourably with those on R.E.M.'s "Leave." "Miami" is a gloopy mess redeemed only by the strange, distant signals which materialise towards its end (Wikipedia says that the track "has a trip rock style." What the penny farthing fuck is "trip rock"?). "The Playboy Mansion," the basic leitmotif of which is more or less based on "You Showed Me" by the Turtles, is a wry look at decadent celebrity lifestyles and you end up just wanting to SLAP Bono and get him back to singing about tenements and shitty housing estates in Dublin and about going to church. You know, just something in which he might actually believe.

 

 

"If You Wear That Velvet Dress" is probably Pop's most intriguing song, as low as the bar may be, mainly I suspect due to Nellee Hooper's palpable involvement, and sounds like genuine musical adventure as opposed to plastered-on dayglo signifiers. "Please" calls for the Northern Ireland peace process to get going, but the General Election hadn't yet taken place and John Major was (just about) still Prime Minister so maybe Bono had a fraction of a point there ("Sunday Hopeful Sunday," as the possibly-looped drumbeat may indicate).

 

 

The record terminates with, or is terminated by, "Wake Up Dead Man," an exhaustingly debilitating song and performance which perhaps indicates the journey that Pop has taken - according to Bono, it "begins at a disco and ends at a funeral" - in which a muffled replica of the real Bono, the one you might remember from "The Ocean" when we were all younger and more hopeful, pleads for Jesus to help him and this "fucked-up world" (Wikipedia: "It is also one of only a few U2 songs to include profanity.").

 

 

I derived no joy or real insight from Pop, and it remains clear that U2 had hit a ceiling with their postmodern japes. The album is as dull a dead end as Rattle And Hum had proved to be, albeit for opposite reasons. People were tired of being told that anything meant nothing or that consumerism was evil but by God did we love it. The PopMart tour proved a generally flaccid and underpowered affair, the album initially charted strongly - possibly on the basis of numbers of copies shipped - but its sales rapidly fell off, and the band realised In No Uncertain Terms that it was time to stop pretending to be fashionable and to return to what they knew best and felt deepest. The consequent about-turn - see entry #636 - saw them pull away the gaudy curtains, reopen the windows and let genuine light back into their sharply-defined world. As we have already seen, 1997 really was a case of sink or swim, adapt or die for most artists, and it was no longer sufficient to exist as a name in itself, or to treat one's band as a business, an industry. The art needed to exceed the brand.

MANSUN: Attack Of The Grey Lantern

 

(#566: 1 March 1997, 1 week)

Track listing: The Chad Who Loved Me/Mansun's Only Love Song/Taxloss/You, Who Do You Hate?/Wide Open Space/Stripper Vicar/Disgusting/She Makes My Nose Bleed/Naked Twister/Egg Shaped Fred/Dark Mavis/An Open Letter To The Lyrical Trainspotter

The last song on this album offers a fair warning to people like me. In it, Paul Draper suggests that those who spend endless hours analysing what he says are more foolish than he is, but also that those who consider his words "just gobbledy-gook" might be equally dim. This sermon - a fitting term for a semi-concept album which focuses on a deviant man of God - is delivered in broad Scouse over a misleadingly jaunty uptempo romp resembling one of those throwaway Oasis B-sides, although, as he warns us midway through, the music turns progressively weirder, culminating in random piano bangs and odd looped electronic blips.

Since I am a music writer who is far more concerned about how words are sung than what they're about, perhaps I should disqualify myself from the above category. The ambiguity of "Lyrical Trainspotter"'s words may of course indicate a double-bluff and that we should take Mr Draper's lyrics very seriously indeed. But the song's point is absorbed - stop the waffling and simply experience, and hopefully enjoy, what you're hearing.

In 1997 I bought, listened to and loved this album without ever quite knowing why I did (love it). Listening to it again almost twenty-eight years on inevitably lends a different perspective. If blur represented a detonation of Britpop, Attack Of The Grey Lantern - recorded by Blur's then-support act and released on the same (Parlophone) label - celebrates dancing in its debris.

Conceptually Grey Lantern is a florid mess, and I suspect Mansun would not have wanted it otherwise. Its messiness personfies its charm and quite substantial impact. The overall idea was for a superhero-type figure - the Grey Lantern, as it were - who comes across various sordid inhabitants of an English village and tries to put them right; although Draper admitted that the concept "ran out of steam," the album's basic plot does get resolved.

Certainly the village Draper chronicles is a precursor of places like The League Of Gentlemen's Royston Vasey, but the album's ambition, inventiveness and scarcely-suppressed rage is what engage the listener. It is as though Mansun cut up all the elements of Britpop into pieces, tossed them into the air and reassembled them as brightly and expensively as possible. Or simply take it as the benignly rabid ambition of a young band determined to make as elaborate and complete a debut album as possible.

We are never quite sure where Mansun stand musically. The opening orchestral flourishes of "The Chad Who Loved Me" suggest the introduction to The Lexicon Of Love as deeply as they do John Barry, but when Draper's hoarse vocal protests intercept the idyll halfway through, the effect is comparable to the suddenly-unleashed Barry Ryan in the final third of "Eutopia."

It is definitely clear that the group are looking back at key elements of eighties New Pop in what they do. "Mansun's Only Love Song" shimmers very agreeably with Draper's voice at times floating and swimming as high as Billy Mackenzie, like the mirage of a great pop song. But "Taxloss" is a justifiably vicious assault on unregulated capitalism, taking in not just "Taxman" - if anyone is entitled to evoke the Beatles, it's a fellow Liverpudlian - but also early nineties indie-dance (either mix of Paris Angels' "Perfume" will do) before culminating in machine gun fire and air raid sirens ("Two Tribes"! It's a Liverpool thing).

Interludes like "You, Who Do You Love?" disturb with their grinding of elements from mid-period Verve with aggressive hard rock - and if we listen to Draper's delivery of "I wish I could be you" we realise that we have again reached the looking glass stage of things, where we not only look at the group's precedents but also those who will come after them. But more about that in a moment.

At the time the album's two major selling points were the big hits which succeed each other - if not statistically, then in people's hearts. Both "Wide Open Space" and "Stripper Vicar" thrive in the shadow of Tears For Fears - The Hurting and Songs From The Big Chair respectively - but while the first-named of these songs, absolutely exquisite and perfect in its almost bisected despair (you really feel that Draper is singing in two distinct voices) as the world steadily crashes in on the singer's head, its knitting needle guitar/police siren motif and its gigantic chorus, is sui generis despair, with endless delightful small touches in its arrangement (for example, the fractured piano splinters and gusty male voice choir underscoring the final verse), whereas the second (as "Mother's Talk" also managed) is a shamelessly powerful romp through the back gardens of sexual perversity - what a powerful introduction the latter song has, with its initial drum track abruptly joined by a second one (Big Chair's producer Chris Hughes had once been Merrick, of Adam and the Ants). These two songs both come as close as anything to "perfect pop" and get played as avidly and regularly by me today as they did in 1997.

 

The second half of Grey Lantern continues in a maximalist fashion - songs like "Egg Shaped Fred" and "She Makes My Nose Bleed" are loud and anthemic ("Bring her on DOWN!"). "Disgusting," which features a very Thom Yorkean lead vocal, makes as brilliant a use of bells as Pierre Henry's "Yper Yper" had done thirty years previously, as well as outlining the record's essentially English nature in its deployment of that key English apology for a word, "regretful." Meanwhile, the exemplary hard art-rock of "Naked Twister" - which appears to be about exactly what it sounds like it's about - points its index finger towards the future, for if Draper sounds like anyone, it is a direct precursor to Matt Bellamy, just as Mansun themselves help lay the groundwork for Muse (and, to a lesser extent, bands like My Vitriol). Much like Bellamy, one is not entirely sure what Draper is going on about most of the time, but it doesn't matter because the point is he's going somewhere and you either follow or feel ridiculous.

The big finish (nearly) of "Dark Mavis," where the record's loose plotlines are tied up, makes me think of what a "Hey Jude" written by John Lennon might have sounded like. It is epic, endless and sad - and consider also Vampire Weekend's "Hope," one of last year's most resonant recorded songs - yet also wildly celebratory as hands clap, the strings (great arranging throughout by Stefan Giradet) steadily spiral out of control and synchronisation, and everything settles - with "The Chad Who Loved Me"'s main string line. We finish, Draper's warning coda notwithstanding, where we began.

In some ways Attack Of The Grey Lantern could function as a soundtrack for an episode of Inside No 9; I was in particular thinking of "The 12 Days Of Christine" with Sheridan Smith - its brilliantly frightening use of Andrea Bocelli notwithstanding - as the record might easily represent a "life review" of pop and rock, their histories flashing semi-randomly in our heads before the life disappears forever. Its success as a record again demonstrates that 1997's best number one albums come from those artists who decided just to do what they wanted, and to hell with any consequences. Mansun's second album, 1999's dissolute but fascinating Six, accentuated the art over the rock and doesn't appear in this tale. What happened with both the band and Draper afterwards is outside the scope of this piece. I wanted to concentrate on the Paul Draper of 1997, a gifted autodidact of a songwriter, singer and multi-instrumentalist (with whom the rest of Mansun just about manage to keep up on this record) with everything still open and welcome to him. I think Grey Lantern is ludicrous, overblown and pretentious - and I mean that trio of adjectives as the highest of compliments.