DIRE STRAITS: Money For Nothing

(#375: 29 October 1988, 3 weeks)

Track listing: Sultans Of Swing/Down To The Waterline/Portobello Belle – Live/Twisting By The Pool (Remix)/Tunnel Of Love/Romeo And Juliet/Where Do You Think You’re Going/Walk Of Life/Private Investigations/Telegraph Road – Live (Remix)/Money For Nothing/Brothers In Arms

You have to hand it to Mark Knopfler ; he knows his demographic inside out and shamelessly plays to it. By his demographic I mean the moderately solvent but still pissed-off male nearing middle age who feels the world has failed him, recognises nothing of the world as it is now – even if that now is now approaching or passing thirty years ago – and, far worse, suspects that the rest of the world is having a much better time than him. I emphasise the maleness here because I doubt that many women would be empathetic towards something like the inordinately creepy “Where Do You Think You’re Going” – as Lena said, give that to Nick Cave and he’d sing it as a murder ballad – or “Romeo And Juliet” wherein Knopfler grumbles at the love of his life who’s had the cheek to go on and become a star (it’s like a Daily Mail “Don’t You Want Me?”).

The rest of the time, when he’s not feeling sentimentally nostalgic about fifties and sixties Tyneside (“Down To The Waterline,” “Tunnel Of Love”), he sneers at people who aren’t him, be it Central Line buskers, pop stars on television or semi-pro jazz bands. But it was his choice to go into the pub and hear a Dixieland band – and who the hell still wore “brown baggies and...platform soles” in 1978? – since, after all, he could easily have gone along and seen John Stevens, Trevor Watts and their pals at the Plough in Stockwell practically any Friday in the seventies. Even when he tries to do pop it is ponderous, forced and somewhat contemptuous (the disastrous “Twisting By The Pool”).

No doubt when he came up with the “street suss serenade” of “Romeo And Juliet” he seriously thought of himself as another Lou Reed but the song’s chocolate box melodrama pales instantly against Reed’s Growing Up In Public, released the same year as Making Movies which, though almost as conservative musically, is directed towards real people and real feelings – his second wife, his parents (“My Old Man” is one of rock’s most virulent eviscerations of the father figure) – and there is a sequence in the relatively restrained “Think It Over” of which Knopfler would have done well to take note:

“Because when you

Ask for someone's heart

You must know that you're smart,

Smart enough to care for it.”

Knopfler’s failing is that when he asks for someone’s heart, he expects that heart to be his housemaid. The expected Love Over Gold and Brothers In Arms selections are here and don’t need to be retraced, other than to say that even on the one record where he got it right – or, should I rightly say, outside or without the context of that record – “Private Investigations” can come across as simply further inscrutable, inaudible murmurings within an indefinable and possibly voluntary darkness, and that “Telegraph Road,” here presented onstage at the Hammersmith Odeon in June 1983 (it’s part of the Alchemy live double set; the Kevin Ayers’ Slim Chance reject “Portobello Belle” is an outtake from the latter) is divorced from its emotional heart by having people clapping their hands and cheering along to it, or by Knopfler endlessly playing his one “solo.”

Two of the four main advantages that Cohen has over Knopfler are lightness and humour, and he uses both to mask some of his darkest and most apocalyptic meditations on what was essentially his shrug-shoulders, what-the-fuck comeback album. The other two advantages are his innate poetic skills and the absence of fear of the present. If Cohen wanted to present I’m Your Man as late eighties Leicester Square-friendly Europop, that was his prerogative, and he understands Please/Actually-era Pet Shop Boys better than most; “First We Take Manhattan” responds to “It’s A Sin” by implying “sin? You don’t know the half of it” and backing up its argument with things and people which were relevant to Cohen’s life – the plywood violin and bringing the groceries in both carry a considerable personal back story, and familiarity with Beautiful Losers will join yet further of the song’s dots. Meanwhile, “Jazz Police” is a thrilling post-PSBs assault on harmonic structures and a very pointed attack on the self-deprecating Puritanism of something like “Sultans Of Swing.” Both “Take This Waltz” and “I Can’t Forget” have a kind of rueful mirth in their End Of The Affair settings which is entirely absent from the gainsaying “Romeo And Juliet.” The title song offers everything from its singer, if conveyed slightly desperately, whereas “Where Do You Think You’re Going” threatens to take everything away.

“Ain’t No Cure For Love” is the oh-fuck-it-surrender pop song that Knopfler was too afraid to write, “Everybody Knows” could have been written yesterday (that oud!), and “Tower Of Song” is one of the most graceful and terminal signoffs, genuinely self-mocking (“the gift of the GOLDEN VOICE,” his one-finger keyboard solo) while saying goodbye as finally and grimly as “Telegraph Road.” But there’s a world of difference between how Cohen and Knopfler, at the end of their respective records, treat the business of bidding farewell. You believe one and not the other. I listen to I’m Your Man quite a bit and many of its songs have been covered, with varying degrees of success., whereas I cannot readily think of cover versions of any Dire Straits song. Money For Nothing? Truer than you think – you’re paying for a sumptuous black hole, eighties rock’s most ornate and elaborate dead end. No wonder some Dunfermline-based building society managers were still listening to it and loving it as late as 1995.

Next: The end of an era.

U2: Rattle And Hum

(#374: 22 October 1988, 1 week)

Track Listing: Helter Skelter/Van Diemen's Land/Desire/Hawkmoon 269/All Along The Watchtower/I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For/Freedom For My People/Silver And Gold/Pride (In The Name Of Love)/Angel Of Harlem/Love Rescue Me/When Love Comes To Town/Heartland/God Part II/The Star Spangled Banner/Bullet The Blue Sky/All I Want Is You

(Author's Note:  Italicized songs are performed by artists other than U2.)


Bono recalled the section in Luke 9 when Jesus told a man not to wait and bury his father but to follow Jesus immediately. Daly responded to Bono’s summary, “Seems cold-hearted.”

Bono replied, “No, seems punk rock to me. He could see right into that fellow’s heart. He knew he wasn’t coming and he was just, it was pretense. We’ve gotta be a bit more cutting edge, not look to the signs of righteousness. Look to the actions.” -  "Bono on Jesus, C.S. Lewis and King David as a bluesman" 2013




It is hard to know just where to start here; at this juncture it is best to reach the summit gradually, and I must set the scene first.



Late October 1988 saw me in as bad a state as ever, though I was still functioning enough to go to Ryerson, read the Village Voice and other music weeklies, write poetry, and once again wonder if I had a writing voice and if anyone would ever care for it.  But mostly I was carrying grief with me, waking up to it as a seemingly permanent state like someone with the sniffles wakes up with a fully-blown headcold.  My mom couldn't sleep in the bedroom, but slept on the couch instead.  Lots of suddenly superfluous things neither of us needed or wanted crowded up the house, and we were too numb to do anything about it just yet.  Music kept both of us going, I think - me on my Walkman, and she listening to the CBC late into the night.

In this state my listening was alternately intense and casual; habitual and random.  So of course I got this album on vinyl and thanks to a free ticket given to the Ryersonian (the paper I would be working on in the next semester) I got to see the accompanying movie Rattle And Hum for free.  It was the thing to do, and liking U2 was quite hip at this time, as was the whole rock-with-a-conscience effort - I saw the Amnesty International concert at Maple Leaf Gardens, after all, and hadn't I seen U2 back in April of '87 in Pontiac, Michigan?  Yes, I did.  But even then I felt a bit weary and hollow, and the only time I felt good in conjunction with AI was when I actually helped get someone out of jail.  (He even wrote and thanked me, which was very kind of him, but tragically I couldn't write him back.)  I appreciated all the eager conciousness-raising, but wondered just how much people would be motivated to do something besides buy an album or maybe go see the band/performer in question again on their next tour.  I enjoyed all the concerts, of course; and now I think of it, I even went to one in April or May of '88 in Toronto, and that was a direct benefit concert for the Toronto branch of AI, which was cool.

Maybe it was my grief that made everything turn from a tint to a shade; maybe it was the approaching winter, the cold air seeping in, the end of summer.  But I remember being distinctly underwhelmed by Rattle And Hum and by the movie too - without any real ability to point to anything at the time, just a vague sense that something about it was wrong.

Little did I know, but across the Atlantic in the NME offices, things were starting to get complicated.  Now, as a Ryerson student the mantra was - and God knows this was drilled into us in our last year in the Newspaper section* - that the advertisers should not dictate the editorial or investigative parts of the paper, that if they don't like something that's run they can take their ads elsewhere.  Idealistic stuff we knew, but the point was that integrity was all in journalism, especially the harder stuff.  At the NME however, the editor Alan Lewis was doing the shameful censorship himself, sans advertisers.  And so a perfectly fine review of this album was canned in favor of one that was all praise, and all because the editor wanted to put U2 on the cover.  One review, the more truthful one, gave it a 4; the make-nice one was an 8, and sure enough, U2 did make the cover, denim, cowboy hats and leather vest in service to their current American phase.

Because I didn't know - in my almost daily round of errands, notes, jolting poetry ideas, etc. I could be distracted very easily - I had no idea that the writer of the first review, Mark Sinker, was sufficiently demoralized by this action that he left the NME just what Journalism Head John Miller would have told him to do, if he felt the editor was bound to do this kind of thing again for the same purposes (I have no idea if this happened again, by the way).  If I had known about this, then The Journalist's warning about writing for the NME in particular would have made a lot more sense.

Now, normally I don't approve of numerical ratings for things, but in the spirit of this last review (now since disappeared - maybe it's in the NME archives somewhere?) I will rate everything on the album out of 10, and more besides.

"Helter Skelter" - "This is a song that Charles Manson stole from The Beatles.  We're stealing it back."  Okay, first off I must say that as an American I feel a certain...authority about these four Dubliners coming over and paying, uh, "tribute" to my nation.  God knows Americans are not subtle people, but there's heavy-handed and there's feeling like you're being pelted by small potatoes.  U2 do not get going on the right foot here - the song is not scary enough, the gesture is clumsy and as a resident at the time in Los Angeles not all that far away from the killings, U2 cannot possibly understand how weird and tense and paranoid late 60s Los Angeles was.  Already I feel sorry for the audience here, because back in Pontiac U2 were not trying to ingratiate themselves with us Americans - yet. (1/10 for reminding me how batshit the original song is.)

"Van Diemen's Land" - Do you think Billy Bragg (Worker's Playtime, late '88, "Waiting For The Great Leap Forward") heard this and laughed?  How am I, suddenly immersed in poetry, supposed to react when I read in the notes that this is a song for Fenian John Boyle O'Reilly who was deported to Australia because he was an apparently not very good poet but caused trouble anyway?  This is sung by The Edge, nasally, and I doubt if it's any better than O'Reilly's poetry, really.  It is the first hint of the largely political subject matter at hand, but Billy Bragg is funny and this is just...dull.  (1/10 for reminding me of Billy Bragg, who I saw around this time at the Concert Hall, alongside Australian band Weddings, Parties, Anything.)

"Desire"  -  This was the big #1 hit song in the UK and probably why a lot of people bought the album.  I cannot hear it without cringing, though, as it is full of...sigh...signifiers and business and yet feels so secondhand.  And then there's the harmonica.  Now, the harmonica is one of those ur-American instruments that signifies a lot and has to be played very very well or else it sounds awful, and yeah, Bono can't play harmonica.  Robert Plant wails away on "When The Levee Breaks" and Chrissie Hynde sounds pissed off at the end of "Middle Of The Road" and Johnny Marr sounds like Johnny Marr on Smiths songs and elsewhere, and they can all play (so could Brian Jones and John Lennon, for that matter).  Alongside the ughtastic "AAwwRiIIIIGHT?" Bono makes it worse by sounding like a busker, though I feel I am insulting buskers by this comparison.  Playing something badly does not equal "authenticity" but someone seeking said quality and not understanding that it's mostly about actual experience and skills, fella.  (0/10 as it's also got the line "She's the promise in the year of election" which has always, always made me cringe.)   

"Hawkmoon 269" - This is a love song of endless similes and proceeds to slowly crush anything that love actually is out of existence.  "I Need You" by America is more succinct, and the only other song I can think of that is as inane about the sun is Cliff Richard's "Power To All Our Friends."  "Power to the sun" he sings brightly, not thinking that maybe the sun is actually a source of massive power itself?  (I must haplessly digress here to Brunching Shuttlecocks' survey of sources of light.)  "Like heat needs the sun" Bono sings, and there's Bob Dylan yes everyone American Musician Of Importance #1 has turned up here and is playing organ, let's give him a big hand, everyone!  Actually this makes me want to read Brunching Shuttlecocks and then listen to "Agua De Beber" by Astrud Gilberto, but to each their own, you know?  (1/10 for helping to introduce Dylan, eventually, to Daniel Lanois, who helped him out of his 80s slump.)

"All Along The Watchtower" - Oh, did someone say Dylan?  Well, here's U2 attempting this song after hearing it on the radio a few times.  To say it's not as good as Jimi Hendrix is obvious, but it's not even very good for U2, who at this stage in their US tour are in San Francisco trying to be The Beatles (again) by playing on a rooftop and spraying graffiti and calling it their "Save The Yuppie" gig.  OMG U2 are like, so punk rock!  They have a sense of humor about the recent Wall Street crash and are stopping traffic and not caring if they can't really play!  Meanwhile, the real spirit of punk is whittled away some more, and genuine subversion is trying to rid rock of the Rock 'n' Roll Hall Of Fame special episode 1968 The Year That Changed Rock Forever sludge that clogs up this album like the aforementioned head cold.  I mean, this is Tops Pops Hits level of badness, and saying it's "Three chords and the truth" doesn't change the fact, Bono, that this song has four chords.  What next - "Eloise"?  "People Got To Be Free"? "This Wheel's On Fire"?  "Dance To The Music"? "Tighten Up"? "When The Music's Over"?  "Honey"? (0/10)

"I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" - It may have seemed like a good idea at the time (really that could be the subtitle to this entire album) for U2 to perform this song with a gospel choir, what with it being a religious song and everything, but note how completely outperformed and outclassed they are by the New Voices of Freedom here at Madison Square Gardens, in particular by George Pendergrass and Dorothy Terrell, who make the song sound vital, as if it is about something, and that's because they aren't on autopilot, as the band seems to be after so many, many shows.  Eventually U2 have the good sense (for once) to just stop playing and let the choir take over, and it's one of the highlights here.  The thorny question of whether they have the choir here to make all this soul-searching more "authentic" is atill a good one, though, especially since it has become commonplace/cliche in so many songs to have such a choir come in at the end to make a rather ordinary song more "meaningful" and "uplifting."  Whereas gospel music is literally about enthusiasm, but is also profound and political and so on.  Maybe U2 are trying to signify here?  As Christians their understanding of music is different from, say, The Housemartins, whose song "I'll Be Your Shelter" is overtly gospel and political and darn it feels a lot more heartfelt, somehow.  (6/10 for the New Voices of Freedom)

"Freedom For My People" - The story of Sterling "Satan" Magee and Adam Gussow is so remarkable I'm sure Hollywood will make a movie about it one day.  They kept right on playing on the streets in the 80s, only getting a record deal in the 90s, on the back of their own efforts, nothing to do with U2.  Very much a touristy moment on Rattle And Hum, a sort of moment where the real United States once again subtly trumps whatever the tourists are doing.  Satan and Adam are still out there, God bless them.  And Adam plays better harmonica than Bono.  (8/10 for being too brief.)

"Silver And Gold" -Well there I was in my room, sitting on my bed or the floor or my chair (all so close to each other, didn't matter where) and I remember hearing this and feeling certainly moved by the sentiment - I mean who doesn't want to raise arms against their oppressors sometimes? - but weighed down by the rhetoric.  This is about a man who wants to be free, but here are U2, putting him in chains, chains that sound like Ry Cooder or Bruce Springsteen or David Gilmour.  Oh, and this song (as Bono explains to the audience in his odd neither-Irish-nor-American accent-  "Am I bugging you?  I don't mean to bug you") is about taking up arms?  About violence?  (Taps index finger to side of head, tries to remember, oh yeah) aren't you also the guy who said "Fuck The Revolution" about the actions of the IRA in late '87?  COME ON ALREADY dude, you can't have it both ways.  Also, when requested by Bono to play the blues, The Edge can't play them.  I wish I could say I was making that up, but I'm not.  Will Sergeant knows more about the blues than you do, son.  (0/10, made worse because I think Bob Dylan or Keith Richards or some such rock "legend" encouraged him to write this song.)

"Pride (In The Name Of Love)" - Yes we are back to this song again, and yes, it's live and oh yes Bono has something to say here. It's "PRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIDE" in the name of love, as annoying as Rihanna is these days.  It's not played very well (a bit too fast for me) and there's lots of back-and-forth whooah-ooohaaa-oooohs between Bono and the audience, but it's all a little self-congratulatory, coming at the end of tape one (or side two on the record) (0/10 for the audible smugness.) 

Pause...

"Angel Of Harlem" - If there was ever a song where the bingo cliche card would be filled, it's this one.  Again, to someone with more than a passing interest in jazz, is this just plain embarrassing, wrong on so so many levels it's hard to know where to begin.

But I will say that doing a song in Sun Studios about the New York jazz scene is, well, a little odd - mainly they are trying to be all Stax here, but Bono is no Otis or Sam nor indeed Dave.  He is YELLING this song about a woman whose very technique was subtle; he is glorying in being in New York and yet wearing a stupid hat (there, I've said it) like a yokel in Memphis.  Again, I'm not expecting a work of art here - after having suffered through the first part, nothing can really surprise me now - but this is horrendous.  That he throws in Miles (yes, just Miles, the masses of U2 fans are supposed to know who he is)**  is one thing, but OH NO he's mentioning John Coltrane and A Love Supreme.

As I have already explained, this album is both very good but is also a kind of stereotypical album that someone like Bono would champion, not just because it's a religious album but because it's practically a part of the rock canon at this point (jazz division obvs.) and that's all to be expected at this time...but still it's incongruous.  John Coltrane has nothing at all to do with Billie Holiday, he never worked with her, so again this is just Bono signifying that he has an incredible grasp on jazz because he knows about THREE people in it and is going to go on about one in a way that would have just irritated her, I'm guessing.  And of course she's portrayed as a tragic figure (you know, a bit punk rock, like Jesus) is also awful.  But the near-penultimate line, again yelled out as if he was a pig farmer - "SALVATION IN THE BLUES!" - is enough for me to ring the invisible bell and bring this album to an end.  Nope, nowhere near that yet.  (0/10 and if I could make it a minus, I would; also we haven't heard the last on A Love Supreme, oh no.)       

"Love Rescue Me" - In which American Musician Of Importance #1 comes by for a song he co-wrote and it's so meh I can't tell who wrote what parts - except for the part that quotes the Bible.  This is so bad that when he sings "the future is here at last" I am only happy because that means the song is ending, a song that mentions "the purple of her eyes" without ever explaining how her eyes got to be purple.  I'm sure this love is coming to rescue you, Bono, but I'd take her to the doctor, first.  (0/10, for quoting the Bible awkwardly.)

"When Love Comes To Town" - And here is American Musician Of Importance #2, the now late Mr. B.B. King.  To say that this man shows up U2 for the hopeless rubes they are is a gross understatement - and yet they treat, as Mark Sinker wrote, Mr. King as if he was their "butler."  There's no way I can put it better.  Mr. King himself called Bono a "young man" and that also just about sums it up.  Oh and SHUT UP BONO. (9/10 for King, 0/10 for U2.)

"Heartland" -  And suddenly a song that was recorded during The Joshua Tree sessions shows up and is remarkably better as it has Eno and Lanois, who do a much better job producing U2 than Jimmy Iovine does.  That it isn't that great by Joshua Tree standards but is a moment of calm and reflection here shows how frantic and unpleasantly loose Rattle And Hum is.  Somewhere a few young men in Abingdon are listening carefully - this is what to aim for, not all this other stuff around it.  (5/10 for reminding me how good The Joshua Tree is - easily forgotten at this point.)   

"God Part II" - So far Bono has taken up the cause of the anti-apartheid movement, asked and failed to hear the blues, been shown up by B.B. King, a choir and Bob Dylan and has attempted songs by Dylan and the Beatles.  Well, now he's all about John Lennon, and this is where I got off the figurative bus with U2, never to ride it again.  Lennon's songs can and will be remembered, in part because they are so direct and plain; and the many memorials to him in music were varied and successful.

This, on the other hand, is Bono seeming to take up the mantle of Lennon (a mantle his last album was trying to shake off).  It makes me feel queasy to hear this song - supposedly a sequel to Lennon's own "God" - and there in the second verse..."Don't believe in forced entry, don't believe in rape/But every time she passes by wild thoughts escape"- and this is followed by "I don't believe in death row, skid row or the gangs/Don't believe in the Uzi it just went off in my hand" and I scratch my head and think just what wild thoughts he (the narrator, though there is no reason not to think it's Bono) has and how violent he could be.  And this is the crux of the whole album - Bono always seems to be going on about what a terrible person he is (in one song he's living in the palace of sin) but what has he actually done that is so bad?  Is it just thinking about doing wrong things?  There are actions and there are words - hey, he says so himself up there - and part of me thinks that you actually have to do something wrong in order to know just how bad it is.  (Nick Cave could tell Bono a thing or two about this.)  Then he sings about how "I don't believe that rock and roll can really change the world"  and then "I don't believe in the 60s in the golden age of pop/You glorify the past when the future dries up" and then the whole album collapses in on itself.


And yet did I notice this at the time?  Gina and I were too stoked by the fact that he quotes Canada's own Bruce Cockburn next, from his song "Lovers In A Dangerous Time" from 1984's Stealing Fire.  That we would be so excited shows how modest and unthinking we were about Canadian music - gosh, someone noticed him!  And he's mentioned in the lyric sheet and everything!  This I remember clearly, but my exhaustion with this album came with it.  Did I think, hmm, maybe one day there will be Canadian music to look forward to expectantly as much as I did with this Rattle And Hum?  Maybe. That Bono professes to believe in love more than the past is, well, to be expected, but then what is the point of this selective look back at US music?  Is he saying that U2 has no real future, that this whole thing has been a dead end?

The 80s have been threatening to end for some time now - early '87 I'd guess - but here the 80s are truly coming to an end.  (Perhaps this inspired Fukuyama in thinking we'd come to the end of history itself.)  You can't be political and make a difference?  You can't look back without somehow being able to look forward as well?  U2 have effectively painted themselves into a corner here, and we have reached the divide - there are those who can engage with the present and future and have the capacity to learn and change, and there are those who are content to stick with what they know, who are suspicious of anything new, who revere tradition, who claim they don't believe in a "golden age of pop" when in fact they do.***  Reaching back to do a sequel to a song by John Lennon is hubris.  Is it what Roxy Music or The Human League or Mike Oldfield did?  No, but they aren't U2 now, are they?  (2/10 for quoting from a much better song, by a much better guitarist, for that matter.)

Digression:  Wouldn't John Lennon have been happier just listening and re-listening to The Chameleons' version of his "Tomorrow Never Knows" from Strange Times?  Wouldn't the world have been a better place had The Chameleons had some of U2's popularity and fame?  As I listen I hear Mark Burgess & Co. not just covering the song but relishing it, revelling in it, wrestling with it, trying their best to bring this 20-year-old song into the present, giving it a life, a second life.  This is not sloppy genuflection but an actual audible thinking about what the song is saying.  There is big difference between what you want and what you need.  Surely with songs like "Tears" and "Swamp Thing" are far more Lennon than anything on Rattle And Hum.**** 
     

"The Star Spangled Banner" - Yes, this is Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock and even if you hate hippies and think Woodstock was overrated, to hear the whole thing is still a revelation - this was used by U2 before they performed the next song, and to say it makes them sound dull and ordinary is an understatement.  (10/10 for Hendrix, 2/10 for U2's thinking here.)


"Bullet The Blue Sky" - OH NO not this again.

"So I'm back in my hotel room with John Coltrane and A Love Supreme ...in the next room I hear some woman scream out that her lover's turning off, turning on the television...and I can't tell the difference between ABC News, Hill Street Blues and a preacher on the old time gospel hour..."

Based on this, do you think:

He's listening to Coltrane but not very loudly;
He's "with" Coltrane on some spiritual level but not actually listening to him;
He listening to Coltrane loudly all right, because if he can't tell the difference between those shows then that's the only answer that makes sense;
He needs to get a different room.

(1/10 for mentioning Coltrane again and giving the listeners a logic problem to solve; the song around it is just as you'd expect, and since when does God need cash?)
 

"All I Want Is You" -Or, when in doubt, why not pretend you're Echo And The Bunnymen?

U2 were not a band who worked in isolation; they knew very well there were other groups - like the Bunnymen and The Smiths - who were just as good (if not better) and they had to keep the hell up.  Maybe part of the reason this whole thing is so bad is that they don't feel that sense of healthy competition any more, that they really are the biggest/best band in the world and can do what they like.  A big ballad that has strings arranged by one Van Dyke Parks (it is a total relief when they come in) is a way to close this...thing...but notice how the strings are a little...dubious, a little questioning?  At least U2 aren't trying to sound like The Beach Boys here (thank goodness for small mercies) and, um, well Ocean Rain is about twenty times better (song and album) but the lyrics and singing are kept in check, before the strings hmm and haw along into infinity.

As you have already figured out, I don't think much of this album and its success is a saddening and discouraging affair.  I mean, if you wanted to listen to The New in US music there was always rap or go-go; or if you wanted something old and something new at the same time, well, where better to look than country music?  There was Dwight Yoakam bringing the Buck Owens feel back with Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc. and Hillbilly Deluxe and showed that a young man from Kentucky could make in the punk rock bars of L.A.; straight out of Texas came the supremely inimitable Lyle Lovett with his self-titled debut and Pontiac; shit-kicking motormouth rebel Steve Earle - born in Virginia, raised in Texas, he's bad, he's nationwide - came out with Guitar Town in '86 and certainly caught the ears and eyes of many U2 fans, in my experience.  For those who want something a little more smooth, there was North Carolinian Randy Travis - his Always & Forever and Old 8x10 were huge, and helped to launch a whole movement called neotraditionalist. And let's not forget Lucinda Williams, who if there was any justice would be the main subject of this piece with her 1988 self-titled album, and not U2*****.

But U2 were in a touring bubble, turning and turning in on themselves, and did not heed the wisdom of another man from Texas:

"Ornette says, "The kind of music we play, no one player has the lead.  Anyone can come out with it at any time.  Rather than be a success myself, I want the music to be successful."  In other words, there aren't any stars on this record, or in Ornette's world; just people who play, and people who listen." - Bob Palmer, liner notes to Science Fiction by Ornette Coleman.

In the ambition of U2 lay their demise; they want to be big, and at this point are becoming the biggest band in the world - but they are losing sight of Coleman's view, if they ever had it in the first place.  Their antipathy towards "indie" rock shows this; their complete inability to understand American music despite having toured there for years is proof as well.  I can well imagine Brian Eno listening to this and wondering what went wrong, and it will be years before U2 return to TPL.  The US is a big, varied and blunt place; there is something fierce and lonely and profound about it that is too easily reduced to symbols, slogans, cliches - in part because they are true.   But there is a world of difference between someone wearing a Sun Studios t-shirt while recording there and someone who has a profound respect for Memphis and for the South in general.  (And as we shall see, the South itself is a varied region.)


But what do you say about Rattle And Hum, Mr Tennant?

"Rock critics liked RAH because they want a return to the traditional rock values.  What they basically want is for it to be like 1969 again.  It's this thing where British - or in U2's case Irish - groups discover the roots of American music.  U2 are doing this and they're just doing pastiches (his voice rises) and it's reviewed as a serious thing because 'Dylan plays organ' on some song and B.B. King plays on some throwaway pop song.  "When Love Comes To Town" that could have been written by Andrew Lloyd Webber.  It could be in Starlight Express if you ask me."     

"The fact is that PSB stand against all of this, so it's quite right that people like that should slag us off.  Because we hate everything that they are and stand for.  We hate it because it's stultifying, it says nothing, it is big and pompous and ugly.  We hate it for exactly the same reasons Johnny Rotten said he hated dinosaur groups in 1976."

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the opposition:

  

Now, compare the Bono-shining-a-spotlight-on-The Edge (you can just sense Ornette Coleman's amused distaste at that) to this pleasing and reverberating set of colors.  You just know and feel that this is different; that they didn't want to have a photo of themselves on the cover, as they - the Pet Shop Boys - have a plan.

Why do regular singles and then mix longer versions when you can just do longer versions and then edit them?  Why not prolong the feelings and emotions and dig into them right away?  To immerse yourself in the song, to immerse yourself in the music itself.  The op-art cover stands against the cult of personality that U2 stood for (yes, hello Living Colour, hello Vivid, hello Black Rock Coalition.)

It begins with a swirl of strings, a woman's voice giving us drama, the curtain pulls back....

...and we are in the past.   This is not the past of U2 however, a generalized past, but a specific one, set to a house track that clatters and speeds along  An ordinary day is sketched out - getting up, watching tv, talking with a friend, maybe going out to shop or staying in to eat.  "I didn't want to compete or play out on the street" - this album isn't called Introspective for nothing.  We are going back into a specific past, one of the imagination.  "Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat."  The past is remembered in the present, zooming ahead, and "left to my own devices" - those backyard devices of politics and music - are introduced, and the world of dreams and reality mix, and imagination and longing come into the mix as well.  This is a secret symphony, a moment when dreams are revealed, when the world and all its mundanity and ordinariness are redeemed by this long-held feeling.  "I could love you if I try."  Could the narrator try?  Once he had "no strength, no joy" and was lonely, but here he is, able to get all the news from the "party animal" (Jon Savage, as it turns out) and is coming out of his shell, where once he was a "roundhead general."  The music turns and swirls again and again, the everyday given drama and crispness.  This world is interior, and far away from the 'soul, passion and honesty' of U2.  The future is on the line - will he love?  "I probably would."  There are no certainties, no rote answers.

A man goes home; he is on the way home.  He knows no one will be there when he gets there, so he thinks that he wants a dog.  He wants a Chihuahua, a little yappy dog.  But not a cat (this song is mean about cats, I feel).  A dog that will bark and bark and distract him from his loneliness.  "Oh, you can get lonely..." Whether there ever is a dog at his place remains to be seen.  In all likelihood he walks through the dark, deep house song through the dark street and into the dark "small flat"...silent and with no dog around.  A friend of mine said this was one of the saddest songs she'd ever heard.  A dog to keep you safe from others?  A dog to keep you company at home?  Is the narrator capable of love?  Because that's what a dog, even a little jumping dog, really wants.  As anyone knows, you have to be ready for an animal, it's a full-on experience.  No miserable person can just go and get a dog.  There's a bigger problem here...

Remember when I said the South is a big area, quite varied?  Well, here the PSB are in Miami, working with the producer Lewis Martinee, who did songs for Expose and all of the players on it are Cuban - there's another America for you, U2!  But the song is about romance, deceit, jealousy, heat, and humidity, "all day all day."  The Other flirts and flirts, winning over others when she should be with the narrator - the thrill of the chase exhausting and causing doubt and a thunderstorm, on the inside.  It sounds like a tango, like a mambo, like the fragile heart being tossed this way and that by the forces of the Other, her dancing with danger wearing him out.  She is relentless and as tough and fierce as the sun.

And from sunny Miami we go to Paris...

Now, this is the 1968 that the PSB are about; this is the past they are recalling.  Not the Beatles, but the regular people of Paris - students, but others as well - protesting, on strike.  Not a rock song, but a movement from the people, those people including the Situationists.  It was on the wall:  Cela nous concerne tous. ("This concerns everyone.")  The police had books thrown at them as well as paving stones; this was an intellectual, social event, and a violent one.  Suddenly we are with a young woman - Tennant is singing it from her point of view - and she is surrounded, but courageous, just as the people of Paris were.  (Eighth Wonder had already had a hit with their version of this earlier in the year.)  This is a film though; the opening band playing at a counter-revolutionary rally.  Her boyfriend is a hooligan, he's The Man - but she has had enough of him.  "Take these dogs away from me" (scarier dogs than Chihuahuas I bet).  The song beeps and looms in the best French tradition, and the fascist speech is there in the break, the clapping, the marching - but she is resolute.  She is not scared.  She is not one for poses, for pretending.  She is going to fight for her equality and rights.  "If I was you, I wouldn't treat me the way you do."  The music rises and rises, she puts on her Chanel sunglasses and goes out into the daylight, after a night and morning of fighting.  There is nothing left to lose.  The future marches on; the workers march on.  Again, the music is utterly modern, bringing the past into the future...

"Always On My Mind/In My House" is one of those crushing ironies that U2 could not hope to compete with.  This is, as I have to remind myself at times, a country song by Willie Nelson, a song about that interior feeling of guilt and longing and hope being expressed to the Other, no doubt a woman, who is there at home feeling lonely and neglected.  Thus the PSB are quite able to pay tribute to the roots of US music while still taking this to a different place altogether.  That Tennant raps in the acid house part - his voice going up and down, the music pulsing, the ambiguity in their original version still there - makes this a more intense (85% cocoa in effect) version.  He loves and thinks of his other, but can she read his mind?  No, she can't because what he feels he won't show, or cannot show.  And yet the song warps and weaves back to that Christmas '87 #1 and the gliding, explosive and giddy style is still the multicolored light show above a mournful, solitary figure talking to her in his mind, his maybes being crushed by his love...but maybe he didn't love her?  Didn't love her enough?  More explosions at the end, to match the breaking glass as "In My House" begins, the house after all being not just the music but the social interior.  What does his Other have to say?  Still no idea, but suspect that a look between the two will say more than words; that he did everything for her, and was too busy to tell her so.  Do the PSB understand the US more based on this and "Domino Dancing"?  OH YEAH.

But now we go to Chicago, the home of house music, for something rather moving.  "It's Alright" is originally by Sterling Void and Marshall Jefferson, and is socially conscious and celebratory all at once.  It is also prophetic...

...and there's a choir, saying the title of the song, dropping out for Tennant, who is far away, possibly in the future?  And then the piano and beat of house, the "alright" being chanted...Afghanistan, South Africa, Eurasia - all in trouble, but hope is the solution.  What proof is there of goodness?  The music.  "Generations will come and go, but there's one thing for sure/Music is our life's foundation" and OH DAMMIT I'm crying, this is too moving "The year three thousand may still come to pass/but the music shall last/I can hear it on a timeless wavelength/never dissipating but giving us strength..."  And indeed the song goes on, then suddenly stops for those amazing chords on the piano and the morse-code beats in the back; this is is the future, the future is here NOW and there is no useless looking back as there is with U2.  Trevor Horn (for he produced this) does his usual magical job.  "It's gonna be alright!" sings Tennant, throwing his hope to the wind.  He knows it's going to be alright, that the music - this kind of music and its descendants - will indeed go on.  This faith in music goes against Bono's doubt, and the song ends with Chris (yes, Chris) saying that he too thinks it's going to be alright.  The choir ascends, the music lifts...

....and somewhere in London just a few days after Introspective is released, a little boy is born...and grows up to do this song, a kind of combination of answer record to "Always On My Mind" and an affirmation of the ecstasy of music itself.  Will the music go on and on?  Will the music last?  Could heaven ever be like this?  In all their sweaty evocations of the past, could U2 reach this joy and intensity?  Look at the cover of Introspective and then In Colour and the indebtedness couldn't be any clearer, but we are truly on the inside here, in the depths...(more on In Colour when the time is right).

There is another album which could be considered the "opposition" to U2 although the band itself didn't consider them to be as such; they didn't really compete with anyone.  They spoke to those who maybe felt a bit left out, a bit alone.  That they were now on a major label just meant more people could participate in that great aloneness, and I will get to who those people are in a moment.  The band I am thinking of is of course R.E.M. and this is the album:  

 

It starts with a stumble-and-fall, and confusion:  "Hello, I saw you, I know you, I knew you, I think I can remember your name."  There is a blithe eyebrow raising with Buck's guitar, but deadpan from everyone else.  "Pop Song '89" is not about being certain or sure about anything.  "Hi Hi..Hi" repeats Stipe, as if he keeps trying to talk and then not knowing what to say.  "I think I thought you were someone else."  There goes the 80s, poof, done.  It's over.  It is so strange; no one knows who they are or what to talk about. "I lost myself."  The music grasps and grasps but cannot hold on to anything - everything keeps slipping away, and HI HI HI
AND
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII" begins the PERFECT segue into "Get Up" and sleep is the subject or is it?  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH "dreams they complicate my life/dreams they compliment my life."  It is as if the decade is just one long dream that people are trying to get out of, or trying to dream their way out of.  AND music boxes tinkle and the inexorable pull backward as Stipe sings "this time there's no escape from dreams" as the song AAAHs once again and ends, pausing, ending as if the singer wakes up...

...already we are one hell of a place away from U2.  We are in the interior again, but this is a song of observation - Stipe telling Mills (who is in the background) to get up.  But dreams are powerful things and give life a certain dimension...

...and suddenly there's the sound of crickets (already I am homesick) and it's night and there's a mandolin and "Sometimes I feel like I can't even sing/I'm very scared" and automatically the narrator guides us back to childhood, falling into sleep in the backseat as you look outside and see the stars.  "I am in this kitchen, everything is beautiful, she is so young and old"..."You are here with me, you are here with me, you have been here with me..."  I don't think this is much of an exaggeration, but this is, of all 1988 albums, the one that helped me with my grief.  There is little distance between myself and these songs; I can't even call it my favorite of theirs, as it is more imprinted on me than any others.  "You Are The Everything" (and the whole album) brings it all back, too much to write about it objectively.  But I will try..

"Stand" is simply genius; a demented hymn, an orienteering anthem, funny and yet solid.  "If wishes were trees, the trees would be falling."  Nothing is permanent; "think about direction, wonder why you haven't before."  Be careful, look, notice, think about where you are and why you are there.  Are you where you thought you were?

And then Peter Buck does the WORST guitar solo ever, as if in answer to Bono telling The Edge to play the blues. STAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNND.

And then they do such a riposte to all of Bono's grandstanding (and perhaps their own?) that it's chilling.  Part one of this:  "World Leader Pretend" is the song of a dictator, a paranoid, remembering and ruling and "it's amazing what devices you can sympathize, empathize" and the wall here is coming down, right alongside a steel guitar and he is alone, far more alone than the narrator of "I Want A Dog."  "This is my world and I am world leader pretend."  The leader gets up, admits his mistake, takes full blame, knocks down his wall...YOU FILL IN THE HARMONY.  YOU FILL IN THE MORTAR.  I am not sure who the you is - the audience?  The Other?  A burden like this cannot be carried by one person alone. 

Oh man I don't know how I can write about this next song.  It makes me cry; I cry the whole way through it.  I don't like that a crying response to a song is seen as "girly" when it is only human.  Okay, here goes...it has two voices - Stipe sings background here, not Mills.  "Swingset hands,"  "I will try to sing a happy song."  "Come play with me..."  This is the interior.  This is the hopeless interior.  "I'm not supposed to be like this but IT'S OKAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYY."

"Hey those kids are looking at me...I told my friend myself...they're LAUGHING and they're running over here...what do I do?  What can I do?  What do I say?  What can I say?"

In case you hadn't figured it out, the wrong child is in a literal sense one who is disabled, but this song stands for anyone who feels isolated, left out...and there's a whole generation who have grown up listening to R.E.M. and who feel this way.  I don't know if they all hear this and cry as I do, but there is such poignancy here - is it an exaggeration to say that the soon-to-be-named Generation X were all made to feel this way by others?  I don't know.  But this says a lot more about frailty and courage and loneliness than U2 could ever do, and Stipe's near-angry last "OOOOKKKKAAAAAAAAAAAAAY??" is as sharp as ever.  It cuts any sentimentality right out.

As does "Orange Crush" - their own evocation of the Vietnam War.  "Follow me, don't follow me" says history, as if to say this is worth remembering, but not repeating.  Stipe's an Army brat; for him to do such a song, such an overt song about what happened must have been liberating.  Even if the song is about a high schooler going into war, it is about "time to serve your conscience overseas" and how a nation was brainwashed into thinking that was true....

And now the grandstanding song #2 - "Turn You Inside-Out"  When I saw R.E.M. do this, the background image was a school of fish, swimming this way and that.  The pounding, whipping noise, the beat, the absolute rules; this is about power and the manipulation of power, of crowds.  "II-IIII--IIII could turn you inside-OOWWWWWWWWWWWUUT."  "I believe in what you do!!  I believe in watching you!!"  Here Stipe is of course looking at himself, at his effect, at his manners, and admitting that he has power.  That the situation of being a lead singer of a popular band gives him choices.  All the bossy asides of Bono are pushed to the max, as people used to say.  The madness of a crowd, the charismatic leader, the power - there is a kind of madness here that R.E.M. are recognizing and it was damn strange to see this power brought to life onstage and then destroyed by Stipe.  This is not the future, he is saying, what is coming next will not be like this.

"Hairshirt" is once again about being an outcast, about being shunned, about being "soooooooooo alone."  But it is about giving up that guilt, casting it away, burying it, no longer feeling bad.  "Here I am...HEERE I AM." Do I hear "Creep" by Radiohead coming out of this?  Maybe.  Do I hear someone else, 21 just like me, listening and nodding?  Oh yeah.

"I Remember California" is not how I remember California, but the traffic jams, citrus fruits, smoggy skies, going up to or from Fresno...I know what they are talking about.  "History is made to seem unfair."  My father being buried beside his parents there in the San Joaquin Valley.  "I guess it's just a gesture."  Suddenly R.E.M. mean what?  Are like who?  My Bloody Valentine?  Talk about the opposition to U2!  "The lowest ebb and highest tide...the edge of the continent"...the end of the decade...the music here is exhausted, doomed, but it captures that finality of reaching the Pacific and what can seem like the end very well...

And now, the last unlisted song, one where everyone is playing a different instrument than usual and it's "It's Alright" again..."This world is big, and so are we/I stayed up late to hear your voice...this song is here to keep you strong."  Wonderfully amateurish playing, but that is the spirit here - "hold her and keep her strong while I'm away from here."  Bells!  Overlapping, dazed voices, a recognition of how much love there is in the world, how much love is needed.  A benediction, after so much turmoil.  Green was not meant to be a normal, regular album, and it still has a freshness and profundity that...well, you know...

I cannot tell you, due to my extreme subjectivity with Green, how important it was for anyone else, though time seems to have shown that it has had one hell of an impact.  How I grasped on to it for help at the time; how I felt understood by it, even if a little awed, and what a bulwark it was for me, as my grief grew and took hold.  It is as palpable as a hug, and in the fall of '88, with four more years of Republican rule (and in Canada five more years of Mulroney) the political lines were there, but my loss was not public.  The interior and exterior meet here, and just as they step up to major label fame, R.E.M. show they are not about to show false consciousness.  This is a rough album, and in time I would buy it again and associate it with another death; but there is life here, and a reminder that life is about love and support, and not power and influence...

And so the divide stands; U2 look backwards and implode, right there onstage, while the Pet Shop Boys and R.E.M. both have ways forward that include everything from genuine empathy and sympathy to a kind of bravura and profound faith in music that can actually sustain hope and the future itself.

My grief would follow me; sometimes it would carry me, paradoxically.  I would resist any call from the outside for now; the words of Jesus above couldn't really apply to me, as my father was still very much alive to me in so many ways; it would take a very long time to work through this, and I had no real guide or map.  The divide I mention is not just a musical one but increasingly a political one; this is a period of transition, though none of that has happened yet, and both in music and politics the old orders are stultifyingly there, but with some kind of other noise in the background.  If I tell you that on their future singles the KLF will use crowd noises from Rattle And Hum, well, that shows what subversion there is, and how immense the divide is between the two.

Next:  the old order, reasserting itself.    
    



* The Ryersonian was the twice-weekly paper produced by the Newspaper section - those deemed not good enough to write for the Magazine section but hapless at the Television section as we were not, for whatever reason, photogenic or technically adept enough for it.  We worked out of the modest (now demolished) Journalism building and watched a lot of MuchMusic, but that is for later on... 

**I was asked earnestly once by my friend Gina's also-U2-fanatical-friend who Billie Holiday was, as she had no idea and had never heard of her before.  She most certainly wouldn't know who Miles was, nor John Coltrane, either.  The last I heard of her she became a nun, and for all I know still doesn't know much about these musicians.

***It is about this time that Q magazine gets started.

****A man on youtube compared The Chameleons directly to Debussy.  A post-punk Debussy maybe, but I think the point stands.  The acoustic version of "Tears" is tough and yet delicate, and listening to it in '86 unwittingly prepared me for my father's death.

*****Or if U2 were more attentive to their own Irish roots, they might have noted Van Morrison and The Chieftains' excellent Irish Heartbeat or The Waterboys' Fisherman's Blues.  Granted these only came out in 1988, but they both show better ways of dealing with the past directly, with a kind of seriousness and joy that U2 are distinctly lacking.  

Chris DE BURGH: Flying Colours

(#373: 15 October 1988, 1 week)

Track listing: Sailing Away/Carry Me (Like A Fire In Your Heart)/Tender Hands/A Night On The River/Leather On My Shoes/Suddenly Love/The Simple Truth (A Child Is Born)/Missing You/I’m Not Scared Anymore/Don’t Look Back/Just A Word Away/The Risen Lord/The Last Time I Cried

(Author’s Note: “The Simple Truth” only appears on the CD edition of this album, but is so central to the record’s emotional story that it would be remiss of me to omit it.)

To be considered in conjunction with:

MY BLOODY VALENTINE: Isn’t Anything

Track listing: Soft As Snow (But Warm Inside)/Lose My Breath/Cupid Come/(When You Wake) You’re Still In A Dream/No More Sorry/All I Need/Feed Me With Your Kiss/Sueisfine/Several Girls Galore/You Never Should/Nothing Much To Lose/I Can See It (But I Can’t Feel It)

A story here of two Irishmen, neither of whom was born in Ireland and both of whom travelled somewhat before settling in Ireland, not that far away from each other. Chris de Burgh was born in Argentina and spent time in Malta, Nigeria and Zaire before coming to County Wexford; Kevin Shields was born in Queens, New York, and grew up there and subsequently in Long Island before his family moved to Dublin. Both men’s early interests in music were sparked by close encounters with future musicians of note; de Burgh was keen on joining The Perfumed Gardeners, a group run by his peers at Marlborough College, only to be turned down by the group’s leader, one Nick Drake, for being either “too poppy” or “too pushy” (sources vary). Meanwhile, in late seventies Dublin, Shields and his schoolmate Colm Ó Cíosóig put together a punk band called The Complex. On bass they recruited another schoolmate, Liam Ó Maonlaí, but the group split when Ó Maonlaí left to form Hothouse Flowers.

From there we can proceed straight to the two records under consideration here, as this is not an encyclopaedia of rock. Flying Colours came out at the beginning of Ocfober 1988 and is the only Chris de Burgh album to reach number one in Britain; Isn’t Anything appeared seven weeks later, in mid-November, and did not trouble the charts at all until it was reissued in 2012. One received fulsome critical praise; the other was barely mentioned in despatches. But one earned its right to be in this story, and the other only by invitation. The one and the other in these two instances are not the same records.

Yet I believe they are linked. How so? Not just because of the nationalities of the musicians involved (although the two female members of MBV are English) but also because they also represent two extremities of how we view and treat love and our relationships with each other and with the world. One might invoke the old parable of the classicist versus the romanticist, except that there is clearly a lot about Chris de Burgh that is unashamedly romantic, and it is difficult to go through any of Isn’t Anything’s thirteen songs (both albums have an identical number of tracks) without being aware of their “classic” precedents. Or perhaps it’s simply the case that each record is performed at a similarly high level of emotional intensity from two highly divergent angles. Romas Foord’s cover art for Flying Colours suggests somebody taking off from the planet altogether, at a distance, while Joe Dilworth’s treated photos for Isn’t Anything has the group painfully close up, yet smudged and blurred, as if you might only be imagining that you’re looking at it, at them.

Flying Colours strikes me as the work of a deeply worried man.  It is true that at the time de Burgh was only just turning forty (as opposed to Shields’ twenty-five). By now he was the father of two children, his daughter Rosanna and his first son Hubie, as is made evident by the lullaby “Just A Word Away.” So it was probably natural for him to be worried; in addition, given his Irishness, it is important to remember that in 1988 the Troubles were never far away (in the song “A Simple Truth” he sings about “a country torn from the south to the north”), and the spectres of soldiers and war are summoned here twice – and, by implication, also in the quietly defiant song “I’m Not Scared Anymore,” where he is lying in bed with his wife, thinking of their children, and for one rare moment his voice rears up into a roar: “Well I know I’ll protect them with the power of my love/TO THE VERY LAST DROP OF MY BLOOD!”

So much of Flying Colours concerns itself with protecting himself, and his family, from the world of shadows and night. On his own he is not to be trusted; wandering some foreign city in “Sailing Away” he struggles against temptation (“Underneath the red lights, I am watching where the shadows fall”) and only overcomes it with some difficulty (whereas “Don’t Look Back,” the nearest this record gets to uptempo, is a warning against those lights and “red and black” which the narrator, it is implied, fails to resist, with the song’s dying refrain of “I should have known better”). In the record’s most comical moment, “A Night On The River,” he has an argument while nightswimming with his lover, who promptly takes off with both the car and his clothes.

But the record cuts deeper than that. “Tender Hands,” “Suddenly Love” and “Missing You” are love songs from different but parallel angles – the first describes his pained loneliness, the third sees the narrator and his lover reuniting after a long time apart but its music-and-wine scenario is darkened by hints of paranoia (“You see, if I think you are beautiful/Someone else is going to feel it too”). The second, meanwhile, sees him surrendering to a sensual bliss as complete and enveloping as that described in “Soft As Snow (But Warm Inside)” with a sustained synthesiser dying of the light at the end which put me in mind of American Music Club’s “Last Harbor.”

Elsewhere, “Carry Me” is a moving and obviously heartfelt song about bereavement (“for Mark and Lynda, with love” reads the dedication). The narrator of “Leather On My Shoes” leaves his home, which has nothing concrete to offer him, to travel down an unspecified “freedom road,” possibly the same road the battered, exhausted, hallucinating protagonist of “The Risen Lord” is wandering however many decades later. “The Simple Truth” is the record’s centrepiece, a protest against the Troubles and the wider world running itself down to ruin (“The life of a child is more than a border/The life of a child is more than religion”) and all other twelve songs lead towards or away from it. The closing “The Last Time I Cried” returns to the soldiers/war scenario, and possibly more than that – what the first two verses are implying is pretty frightening – and seeing both the faces of his child and himself in the picture of a soldier, he breaks down: “Eli Eli Lama, Oh Lord, you have forsaken me” – the same words in Hebrew and English. This is not reassuring music.

Certainly, I’m bound to say, it does not reassure me. There is little doubt, listening to the record, that Chris de Burgh is essentially a decent and honourable man, if sometimes a rather silly one. Like Jon Bon Jovi, he knows precisely what his demographic is and how to package his music to reach them – and that’s a rare thing to find in a musician. I would say babyboomers approaching middle age, conservative with a small “c,” perhaps slightly disappointed by both the world and the paths they have elected to take through it, with dimming memories of how things used to be; such people in the eighties would have understood Flying Colours instantly, and these are the people whom de Burgh is trying, with great skill and artfulness – the album sounds spotless and precise, recorded as it was in Zurich with co-producer Paul Hardiman, who once produced Lloyd Cole and The The - to touch and perhaps move.

But I’m just not moved by it. I was certainly never a target listener, and so while I can appreciate what de Burgh is doing, I have to admit that it does not touch me or change the way I walk through the world. Naturally that is down to me and the way I am, rather than any failings on de Burgh’s part, and I hope that this tentative appraisal is of more use than the “oh, Chris de Burgh, hyuk hyuk what a lot of crap” crap that emanates from some unintentionally hilarious commentators; it has always been the purpose of this tale, not to sneer at records, but to find out why they were so popular and what they had to say to evidently so many people.

As I say, however, there is this other Irish record from the autumn of 1988 to consider.

“I'm telling you you're a sick mind

You come back so fine, so fine”

(“(When You Wake) You’re Still In A Dream”)

There are other ways of going down the railroad tracks and never coming back.  More bad prose has been written about My Bloody Valentine than any other musical artist and I do not propose to add to that pile (indeed, in respect of the interviews which I sourced for this piece, I do not intend to name or shame the journalists who wrote such poor copy – always you have to refer to what MBV themselves say to get to the heart of things). Conversely, no major musical artist is more talked about and less heard than My Bloody Valentine. You will scan the digital likes of 6Music and xfm largely in vain for their music. It does seem that radio, much like the public, has great difficulty acclimatising itself to MBV’s work; there is the residual feeling that even now, more than a quarter of a century on from when this music was conceived and recorded, MBV is a little too disturbing for placid middle-aged radio listeners, represent a bridge that no demographic dares cross. Yes, I got MBV when they happened, and so did all the people I cared and care about...but most, if not actively running away from their music, are passively unaware of it.

How Isn’t Anything works is really very simple.  If its music represents rock stripped of most things that make it “rock” – except, crucially, for the sex – then the record recollects memories of rock as being the only way to push rock forward. This Kevin Shields did by essentially removing all “guitar” from the mix; what you hear is the “reverse reverb” effects unit (the Alesis MIDIverb 1, to be specific, which was bought for the band in error; the unit had no “reverse reverb” facility as such, but Shields was so impressed by the sounds he got out of it that he kept it). In other words you are listening to the “ghost” of a guitar throughout.

Always while listening to Isn’t Anything – largely because of Colm Ó Cíosóig’s aggressive, rhetorical  (“Nothing Much To Lose”) and exceptionally physical drumming – the listener is aware of illustrious sixties (and contemporaneous eighties) influences. But the music of MBV was really unprecedented in rock; the Creation had never done anything like this, and neither had even Sonic Youth. So the songs here are attack without any attacking  - “Several Girls Galore” and “Cupid Come” frankly leave the Mary Chain standing (or sidewalking, albeit entertainingly) – or embrace the listener with a fetid but oddly pellucid closeness that resembles an indistinct but quietly determined whisper in one’s ear.

At its best, as in the single “Feed Me With Your Kiss”, voices and instruments lunge towards the listener from entirely unexpected perspectives, like Sonny and Cher being Doppler tested. The group seem intent on pummelling this desire into the ground – how many beats or breaks does the song need? Not even Hüsker Dü had gone that far. It is as if the kiss is so powerful it will violently dismantle the DNA of the love song for good.

I think the essential difference between this record and Flying Colours is that they stand on opposite sides of the same line in the sand. Flying Colours will never cross that threshold because it sees no need to do so; everything the artist wants to express is expressed plainly and without ceremony. But Isn’t Anything sounds as though it has made the quantum leap to the other side; looking desire and dirt directly in their faces and learning to live with them, allowing their implications to alter the molecular structure of what this music represents. Isn’t Anything comes down on the side of adventure, of risk, facing down the fear of failure.

Those who know and love the record will have their own memories of the time it appeared and how they reacted to it, and – for now – I’m going to keep mine to myself. I will say, however, that my favourite moments of Isn’t Anything are the slower ones; the closing “I Can See It (But I Can’t Feel It),” which is almost a flag-waving finale and the closest the record comes to a conventional rock song; the wondrous “All I Need,” powered only by a slightly irregular heartbeat - as atrial fibrillation finally takes hold, the song rapidly fades amidst a sheen of Fairlight, giving us a frustrating glimpse of a future that lies beyond that which this record implies; the staggering “No More Sorry,” its freeform drone fanfares surely inspired by the closing section of Keith Tippett’s Frames and hiding one of the most frightening of all female vocal performances, by Bilinda Butcher (“Filthy Daddy”); and above all the dazed “Lose My Breath” which Butcher sleepily sings as though “rock” is slipping away from her grasp – above all because it is a song about her infant son, Toby, and his asthma. Recorded largely in Wales, as well as a couple of studios in London, over a two-week period on an average of two hours’ sleep per night or early morning, Isn’t Anything is a gauntlet thrown down to the rest of rock of which only the most superficial elements have since been picked up (one Mancunian, twenty-one years old in 1988 and transfixed by this record, springs to mind). I suspect that a surviving forty-year-old Nick Drake would have wasted no time addressing it.

(Envoi: perhaps the deciding factor is the seven-inch instrumental single which came with initial copies of the album. "Instrumental No 1" is a standard MBV "rock" backing track which evidently never received a lyric or any vocals. But "Instrumental No 2" plays like the ghost of rock retreating from the world altogether; wordless choruses - are they voices or effects boxes or both? - intonating a lament over a suspiciously familiar rhythm track. Why, it's "Security Of The First World" by Public Enemy, and it's a small world, after all.)