The POLICE: Zenyatta Mondatta

(#239: 11 October 1980, 4 weeks)

Track listing: Don’t Stand So Close To Me/Driven To Tears/When The World Is Running Down, You Make The Best Of What’s Still Around/Canary In A Coalmine/Voices Inside My Head/Bombs Away/De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da/Behind My Camel/Man In A Suitcase/Shadows In The Rain/The Other Way Of Stopping

Followers of Hemingway will know that at the beginning of chapter seven of Death In The Afternoon he writes: “At this point, it is necessary that you see a bullfight.” Similarly, I am now going to say to you that, at this point, it is necessary that you go and read a book before continuing with this story.

Not any book, but a specific book, although really if you want to try to get to the nub of what Then Play Long is all about, then I can only recommend that you read as much as possible, books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, blogposts, anything from Cortazar to Popjustice, and also try to listen to as much music as possible, since behind each of these entries lie at least seventy-four or ninety-nine other albums (as far as the charts are concerned) and beyond those, probably about a thousand apiece. Where do you think you are going to learn more – from watching a jaded television nostalgia show about a non-existent “golden age” or from reading me?

Actually, the book you should read before progressing any further with TPL is Ask: The Chatter Of Pop, by Paul Morley, published by Faber and Faber in the late spring of 1986. Essentially a collection of Morley’s interviews with various (mainly pop and rock) notables, remixed, boiled down and boiled up anew with much late 1985 rage, it is also the first part of his disguised autobiographical triptych, the other two being Nothing and Words And Music. It is not an easy book to find on the high street; it has never been republished and is, in the words of a Faber and Faber man, probably “unrepublishable.” This is because one of the interviews is with a performer who is now routinely referred to in newspaper articles as a “disgraced rocker,” who took the unusual downhill slide from National Treasure to one of the most hated men in Britain, and in it the performer in question more or less admits to (some of) his misdemeanours.

That is too bad, since the rest of the book is a useful pointer to just how Morley, one of the architects of New Pop, viewed the Frankenstein monster that he was in part responsible for creating. How we got there and how we might have got stuck there, and unable to get out. This is not to say that it is a great book. The book (with the exception of an extended South Bank Show/Grace Jones prelude) begins fifteen months after it ends – the timescale is variable, ranging from 1977 to 1984 – with the one interviewee who has nothing to do with pop or rock, Quentin Crisp, interviewed in his dusty Beaufort Street bedsit, clearly charming the writer with his practised anecdotal verbosity and cavalier attitude to life.

I am not sure that either the book or Morley really recovers from this initial impression. Reading it now, I feel that some of the musicians are being confronted with the crime of not being Paul Morley – the Richard Cook wisecrack in the Phil Collins piece would probably now be a sackable offence – or not being Anthony Blanche, grand, blowsy raconteurs. The hapless encounter with Wham! reads like two bored schoolboys being sarcastically told off by their House Master. Fish bores him, Jerry Garcia is politely bored by him (and pretty much defuses his Fire Engines firecracker before he has a chance to launch it). Jim Kerr’s imagined internal monologue holds up better, mainly because we get a chance to look inside Kerr’s mind and also see very clearly what Morley makes of him and Simple Minds.

But the book effectively ends in March 1980, in the city once known as Bombay, where Sting and the Police are on tour and Sting, still, just about, has the time to sit down with the writer and muse, brightly, about where pop might be going. Sting is articulate, thoughtful, just before the world does things to him, and he talks about the Beatles and “that whole heavy punk thing” and that it’s not healthy that the old superstar rota is coming back and about Gang of Four and Joy Division and the responsibility of the pop star not to give his fans the same old shit: “…the next single has to be an alternative, a direction that we really shouldn’t take, that the forces around us say we shouldn’t take.” About the next Police album, he says: “I want something that I can’t actually put my finger on.”

And Morley and Sting see poverty and deprivation all around them, but somehow Morley comes out of it convinced that pop music is more, not less, important because of this, that it has to affect people from the inside out without becoming an instruction manual. That pop, against all the odds, still has a future.

So, you’ve read the book – what did you think of it? Provocative? Funny? Tough to follow? Firmly in and of its time? You had to be there?

Whatever you thought of it, I hope it will give you a better idea of what Sting and the Police were attempting with their third album, which at the time of Morley’s piece had not been recorded. In fact the album was taped more or less concomitantly with their second tour, over a four-week period, in Holland for tax reasons (although Nigel Gray, at no small cost, was retained as producer). The group were never satisfied with the results – indeed, they will go on to re-record two of its songs some years later, one of which will be written about here, the other as yet unreleased – and the reviews were at best lukewarm.

I think they were being a little too hard on themselves. Zenyatta Mondatta is an uneven record – a song about the apparent meaninglessness of lyrics is followed in fairly quick succession by two instrumentals – but is never less than an intriguing listen. Its lead track was also its lead single – the one Sting wanted to be “a bit off” – and as a single, “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” outsold everything else in 1980 Britain.

What engages our interest is that it marks the first occasion in this tale when explicit tribute is paid to Joy Division. Ian Curtis was still alive while the majority of Zenyatta Mondatta’s predecessors were being recorded, but had gone by the time the Police reached Hilversum, and the 26-second drone introduction far outdid the three seconds of polite feedback on “I Feel Fine.” Joined by a stalking, sustained second bass drum, scratchy guitar and solemn rimshots, the scene is almost set for a cousin of “She’s Lost Control.”

In fact, as Sting makes clear, it is he (although he refers to the protagonist in the third person throughout) who has lost all nerve. The subject once again is forbidden love, or at any rate unhealthy infatuation, but I think that all the teacher’s pet and Nabokov stuff is a smokescreen; although Sting was once a schoolteacher – he denies any autobiographical intent – this seems to be more a song about his relationship to his fans, his extreme nervousness at their nearness, and so really isn’t that far away from…

“A lot of groups have an image that is very hard to adhere to, like the stony-faced idol who can never be approached. I think Gary Numan has this, and it looks great at times, but how long can you keep it up?”

“Keep it up, it up…/Keep it up, it up…”

…Numan fretting about all the people looking at him but not seeing him. Synthesisers harshly slash into the instrumental break like serrated popcorn. Sting’s emphasis on the “WANT” and “BAD” of “She WANTs him, so BADly” – and when the band eventually break into a stock Police chorus, it isn’t quite believable, doesn’t provide warmth, makes one freeze.

Still, I don’t think it was the Police’s intent to alienate or intimidate, but to guide their fans into things they maybe hadn’t considered before. “Driven To Tears” marks the genesis of Sting’s Social Conscience, and instead of being dour and low-key, is musically lively and perhaps even angry, like a hyped-up “Roxanne” (complete with metaphorical band pauses). In Morley’s interview, Sting admits that crying at deprivation is “a bit of a futile, useless gesture anyway” – the song came into being while Sting watched starving Biafran children on the news while eating his dinner (see also the third verse of Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Nothing Rhymed”) – and the music makes it clear that his tears will be nowhere near enough. Live Aid this way lies, amongst other things, though not propelled along by a brief but startlingly angry Andy Summers guitar solo in which, not for the last time on this record, he channels the spirit of Robert Fripp.

While the record represents a clear advance from Reggatta De Blanc - musically it is much more assured and confident, and Stewart Copeland’s multiheaded drum manifestations are never less than inventive; though still fundamentally a jazz trio, they are plainly on their way to the stadium – the reggae genie still remains, although even this is more fervent than previously; both “Canary In A Coalmine” and the obligatory touring’s-a-drag song “Man In A Suitcase” sprint along like 2-Tone B-sides. However, while Sting tells the unnamed subject of “Canary” that they are suffering from delusions, by the time he gets to “Shadows In The Rain,” his doctor tells him that he’s the deluded one.

“Voices Inside My Head” is effectively an instrumental, with only a very minimalist lyric, but its clipped funk, Summers’ Nigerian hi-life guitar figures and gradual arrangemental build-up put one very firmly in mind of Byrne and Eno’s contemporaneous work (Remain In Light or Bush Of Ghosts; you take your pick) as well as, in the longer term, a stripped-down Broken Social Scene. Too bad that this excellent first side is marred by Copeland’s dull Afghanistan war/sex fantasy “Bombs Away” (“Guerrilla girl, hot and sweet”; erm, thank you, Stewart) which is the album’s “Student Demonstration Time” moment, i.e. skip it.

“Behind My Camel” is instrumental and mostly Summers (who also plays bass here, as Sting manifestly did not like the piece) and it’s not a bad John Barry Goes East attempt, although Summers’ tortured, distorted lead guitar puts one more in mind of Alan Rankine on “The Associate” (you expect Billy Mackenzie to pop up, making silly noises, at any point). Summers’ big moment, though, is on the album’s major workout, “Shadows In The Rain,” which gets as close as anything here to Sting’s expressed desire to take his listeners as far out as possible. Over a melancholy, hugely echoed vocal and a stealthy rhythm track, the guitarist is as loose and free as I’ve ever heard him; with discontinuous discordancies and putting his effects rack to full use, he steers the Police remarkably near to AR Kane/dreampop territory. If one remembers that the Police were, in some ways, their era’s One Direction (as well as potential Beatles) – this being an album bought by hundreds of thousands of screaming girls (don’t stand so close to Sting!) – then this is a remarkable push to the left and a remarkably brave demand being made of their audience. After that there is nothing to say, and so Copeland says it with his closing instrumental, clearly enjoying the Sandy Nelson echoes and obviously working up towards soundtrack commissions; you can hear both Rumble Fish and The Equalizer waiting in the distance.

But I have kept two songs aside, and for important reasons, since they provide between them both the key to this record and to why it mattered at this late stage of 1980. Christgau considers “De Do Do Do” the Police’s masterpiece, and it’s not unreasonable of him to do so, since it’s Sting’s clearest declaration of why pop matters. Not just in Summers’ continued inventiveness (the same, stubborn guitar riff throughout the verses, the echo chamber blossoms of the instrumental break) but, more importantly, Sting’s insistence that nothing matters more in pop than nothing. He grew up hearing “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” and “Da Doo Ron Ron,” and these records were no less great because their titles and choruses were meaningless (or metaphors for getting it on), and so here it is; it’s all he has to say to us, and it hits harder and more lastingly than “Driven To Tears” because we, as listeners, can get it immediately and think about it for longer, while still enjoying it as a finely honed pop song. This is all, Sting seems to say, that pop has, or needs, to say; anything else is window-dressing – this is pop’s essence.

”Or is rock music the stuff that creates the new nostalgia that helps us settle into the control state with no care for protest?”
(Morley, from the prelude to Ask)

”How can you say that you’re not responsible?”
(“Driven To Tears”)

“When The World Is Running Down” is my favourite track on the album, and a song to which I could listen all day long, with its lovely ascending-but-sounding-like-descending C9/D9/E minor seventh chord cycle. Summers plays it forever with just the right amount of echo delay and sustain to make it sound like a precursor to the Cocteau Twins; paired with the adroitly minimalist approach of bass and drums, and Sting’s skysearing vocal, it sounds, as much of this record does, as the light of the sun streaming in through the now open window. I cast my mind back and think of the North Sea at St Andrews, a blue shimmer in the distant yellow haze, of the openness of fields and seashore, and how this record once made me feel that I was out in the middle of the bluest ocean, on the brightest yacht.

But we have had all this ominous darkness, building up and up, most of the way through 1980, and it is time to reach the end of the tunnel, come out and see the sun BREAK up the clouds. Listening to the Police in this context, you cannot help but feel that, somehow, the air has changed. Things are not as they were. The funk chassis of “Voices Inside My Head” points an upbeat and playful path to Haircut 100 and early ABC. Those drums at the climax of “The Other Way Of Stopping” – what are they, in themselves, ANTicipating? Don’t Follow Us, We’re Lost Too was the title of an album by the long-forgotten Pearl Harbor and the Explosions, but seems to be the motto with this record, the addendum being: “…but that’s OK!”

“When The World Is Running Down,” though…what a song, and what a manifesto. Sting has said that his idea was that he would be the last man on Earth, after an unspecified apocalypse – so there’s another factor he shares with Numan – slowly winding his life down with what has been left behind and is still standing, and working. That works to a degree – the “I ain’t been out in years” and “can’t go out in the rain” remind us that nuclear fallout is about – but its implications seem to be far, far greater. Is this really a World War III survivor, waiting for the last candle to burn itself out before quietly doing away with himself, like Peter Sellers’ schoolmaster in The Blockhouse - or is this some seriously messed-up person who has decided to shut himself away from the world?

“Pick up the telephone, I’ve listened here for years/No one to talk to me, I’ve listened here for years.” You get the impression that even the Speaking Clock has lost patience with him. “Don’t like the food I eat, the cans are running out.” What sort of a mess is this guy in, exactly? An Otis Redding single, videotapes of James Brown and Deep Throat…is this all that’s left when history is all spoken out?

I’m not so sure that it’s about the apocalypse. Given the bright, open air (and not at all ironical) jauntiness of the music that accompanies these lyrics, it sounds like the group are trying to coax, or pull, the singer out of his hole to see, not atomic waste, but a brilliant new morning. But he has convinced himself; and to me he sounds much more like a jaded old man for whom rock finished in 1968, or 1975, living on his own, declining and imperfect memories, glaring through dusty portholes.

Yet the song sets up an aural war of its own; the music, representing the future, or maybe just the present, against the voice, glued to the past. It does seem to me that the song, and this album as a whole, act as a rebuttal to door-locking nostalgists. They suggest that the only alternative to slow, miserable, self-imposed death – that you can’t just deteriorate inside yourself, thinking that your time was the ONLY time - is to GET OUT and stride into the sunshine. And MAKE A NOISE about something, and have fun while you’re doing it. Zenyatta Mondatta represents the road out of the darkness. Perhaps even a New beginning for Pop.

Next: 1979 again, so soon?

David BOWIE: Scary Monsters And Super Creeps

(#238: 27 September 1980, 2 weeks)

Track listing: It’s No Game (Part 1)/Up The Hill Backwards/Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)/Ashes To Ashes/Fashion/Teenage Wildlife/Scream Like A Baby/Kingdom Come/Because You’re Young/It’s No Game (Part 2)

It had been six years since he had last been there. Six years; he noted the number with some satisfaction. At the same time, he shook his head in profound dissatisfaction, disappointed that, although he had come back to get on with the end of the world from exactly where he had left off, nobody had learned any lessons from the last one, and he was sure, even as he was making the record, that even fewer people could be taught anything by this one. They took the self-disgust, the aura of destruction (without the necessary creation obverse) and 1984 from the last one – but nothing else.

He’d known that at the time, too, which is probably why he had decided to “resign.” Just as he had done several years earlier.

When he got back to London, that first time, he knew he’d have to do something, even though things had been arranged so that he wouldn’t need to do anything if he didn’t want it.

Details were sometimes hazy, at other times clear, and among the clarity in that subterranean cavern he remembered that they had paid his way out. “Traveller’s cheques…a million…Passport…valid for anywhere…” And so it had proved.

He didn’t always remember how he got out but he did recall it involved guns, strangely-dressed soldiers, carnage and a rocket of some kind. When you’re drugged, retrospective memory isn’t always reliable; least of all to confirm that you’d actually escaped.

But he knew London all right when he returned there…and it was London, not a studio-built or chemically-induced fantasy of London. Virtually the first thing he did was drive to his bank in the City and get those traveller’s cheques converted and paid in; a million wouldn’t cause even the merest eyelid flutter there. It was a lot of money in 1968, and still was, such that he could, if he’d wished, live very comfortably off the interest on the interest.

But what to do? Of course he couldn’t go back to his old job, seeing as how he’d left it. To his mild surprise, he didn’t worry nearly as much as he expected to about being recaptured, or about his “freedom” being a chimera. If they’d wanted him, they could get him at any time; right there in the middle of town. He could do anything he wanted. If he wanted to do anything.

Janet wasn’t an option. Virtually the second thing he did was drive to her apartment block, only to be told by a nice young Australian woman that she was very sorry, but no Janet Portland was known here, and was he sure he had the right address, and you know he had been out of touch for a long time. He started, briefly; how could she have known that?

He didn’t blame her for getting out, and as far away from him as possible. He vanishes for a year and a half, another man turns up insisting he is “him” and kisses and embraces her as such…nobody could have put up with such things and remained sane. That is, if Janet had even been there in the first place. It seemed too suspicious; 1949 Young Debutante of the Year, much more interested in Ray Conniff than the Grateful Dead, expense account at Harrods – they never could have matched. He was not overly sorrowful about this.

Still, there is a limit to how long you can wander around London and not go mad. So it was that he grew his hair out a little – partly to avoid being recognised by casual acquaintances from the Village (not that he had seen any) – started smoking again and again took up the guitar which had lain dormant and untouched in the far corner of his study for several years. He went to Cecil Court, got art and fashion books, read up on things at the British Library – nobody blanched at his still unexpired membership card – took out subscriptions to the weekly music press and read the countercultural magazines that Number 48 sent him in the mail.

Eventually he began writing songs, or bits of songs, and in time they were found good enough to warrant a recording contract. He also played some arty clubs in and around London, and – remembering his kosho sessions in the Village – got some professional training in dance and mime. He was noted to be different, and before long, to his surprise, found himself on the charts with what was surely intended to be a novelty record, about a rocket – not that rocket, not the same 1? – going into space and the guy in the spacecraft. Writers thought it heralded the end of the decade, or some such.

Did they really think he’d written that song with the American GI in mind – whether in Vietnam, or aboard Apollo 11? He gave some cheery, non-committal interviews to the press, partially expecting to be unmasked by his former captors at any time (though nothing happened). Didn’t the song’s general subtext, not to mention his own closing paraphrasing of the guitar solo on “See Emily Play” – a song he would eventually record himself – suggest another subject…another “prisoner” of London who couldn’t find his way out?

Then that time passed and the first album was reasonable-grade Donovan and so it was back into the arty clubs, but he used that passport to get around – not once was he stopped at any airport – and travel a bit, and when he got back his music was tougher and more focused, and eventually he became one of the most popular people in Britain.

Not bad, considering he wasn’t using his real name, nor letting anybody see his full, unmade-up face.

But being big is sometimes as suffocating and bad as being invisible, and so it was that he felt he had to “resign” again. Some high chairs stirred when that happened. Unsatisfied with his self – his “One”ness – he was apt to hide behind a succession of masks, each more distorted and less recognisable than the last.

Who was he supposed to be again, today?

Where was he supposed to be?

And so, after announcing the end of humanity on his last record to go all the way, he began to travel again, and to explore his selves more deeply. How deep could not be fathomed, since the drugs were taking hold again.

Where am I supposed to be today? Philadelphia? Berlin? The Tower Ballroom? Victoria Station?

Do they even know it’s me?

It’s a nice idea, he had initially thought; the rebel (rebel!) who got on Top Of The Pops just to show he could. But then, what – glam star, ballad crooner, ballet dancer, leading actor, courtesan, impresario, free jazz saxophonist WHAT??!!??

He remembered cutting some disco sides about America, in America, which had gone down quite well.

He remembered Berlin better than you thought.

How there was nothing, but then he fought to pull something out of it.

Which is exactly why he couldn’t go with the punks – for them (as he saw it, from another country and in another state of mind/being) it had been all dogs, no diamonds, all lows and no heroes. Wallowing in the bad shit instead of using it to pull themselves out of it.

He resigned for this?

But he knew he’d have to come back sometime. Three records in Berlin, with Brian, and these had been great, cathartic even, but Brian was now playing pop with another David – remaining in the light – and he couldn’t just leave the skeletal family circling into extinction indefinitely. He had to resolve it somehow, and anyway there was the not small matter of steadily declining record sales.

So…another album as “himself,” with proper, pre-written songs. No matter that most of them were improvisations from scraps he’d thought about maybe a decade earlier, if not for himself, then for some girl groups he’d briefly had high hopes about; he reunited the old team (even though they weren’t very different from the Berlin team) and knew he could splash back down again.

He remembered the Corn Flakes packet from perhaps a year before, with its offer of free “Scary Monsters and Super Heroes.”

He knew that the cover would have to act as a self-destructive photo album; designs and sketches…”Glamour” said one such…and, in the background, discarded images of his former selves, all the ones people were alleged to have “loved.”

This is, he knew, the record where he had to come back and say “And now, this is me…but I’m not who you thought I was a few years ago. Be careful.”

Set the tape deck and there is this rancid fucking BLAST.

It could be called “Anti-Heroes.”

What’s happening? A Japanese woman barking, closely miked, at the listener (words, according to Japanese linguistic custom, normally used by men – so genders are already being bended), while he, neurotic and exhausted, sighs and moans his way through the lyric, as disappointed and affably exasperated as a post-apocalypse Noël Coward (“To be insulted by these fascists – it’s so degrading”). But Bob, churning his guitar from Planet Zonk-Ex(posure)…

…and the singer remembers seeing Bob on stage at the Lyceum, a decade before, as part of Centipede, and how people were disappointed by the album because Bob only produced it rather than played on it, but Bob and Godding AND Halsall were up there on the stage, with Pete and Brian and their VCS3 synthesiser things, and yes you had to have been there; it revealed to him a real model of how different civilisations could get on together. Not the scrubbed-up version they had tried to sell him on the Pembrokeshire coast…

…and he will just not shut up and the singer, now ending his tether, screams and SHOUTS (and lets it all out) “SHADDAP!” Twice. And the tape op has to cut off the song at its stem.

This is going to be a number one album????

This song – 7/4 Bo Diddley with vocals recorded as though it were the Family Dogg in 1969, and like “A Way Of Life,” the song is a list of crucifying placebos. Over and over, reaching out to the world but “It’s got nothing to do with you.” “We’re legally crippled,” they/he sing, It’s the death of love.”

The one age that was missed out of their Seven Ages of Man brouhaha.

Bob plays the changes but makes his solo sound like no guitarist was ever more radical.

And the moral of this song is a Village placebo; this shit is going to keep on happening because we say so and that’s the way things are and nothing you do can ever change it…

(“I walk, and walk/Do nothing”)

…so settle down in your lovely Village and just let it roll over you, like that big white balloon if you have any awkward questions…

The title track, oh it’s the story, isn’t it, about how he takes this girl and fucks her up – was Marianne and someone else ever in mind here? – but however far he drags her down, he’s going down with her; the general thump is derived from Monster Movie-era Can, most obviously with the closing sequence of “Noise!” chants, yells and screams, but the Cockney-isms anticipate somebody else, as does the “Waiting at the lights, know what I mean?” part of the bridge; bending his voice down low and conspiratorial, and twelve-year-old Damon and Graham, of Cheltenham, Essex, are listening and learning.

“Running scared,” just like Roy Orbison.

The trailer single had put him back at number one, and he was ambivalent about that, and about the whole space scenario; at the end of the previous year he had reworked the space song for television and it was now stripped, monochrome, the singer in the Embryo Room with food supplies for six months. With this he was happy that the video alone be shown; the eighties come walking towards the viewer, closely followed by a giant bulldozer.

The piano was Roy, whom he used before on Station To Station, and he was in the next room – for they were all in New York; it was cheaper and asked fewer questions than anyone or anywhere in London – to Springsteen’s band, who were making The River, and hi Bruce, can we borrow Roy for a little while (“Independence Day” is the present record’s “Be My Wife”)? Roy brings out this flange thing, or at least notices it, and so his piano riff is unlike anything this side of Joe Meek, possibly unprecedented, and alongside and behind it is the Spy Who Couldn’t Get Back In The Village, telling us what has happened in the intervening eleven years; the little green wheels which won’t stop following him, the “valuable friend” whose habit is too expensive to keep but who he knows he can’t, and won’t, shake off, the reduction of everything to throwaway newsprint good stories (“Sordid details following”)…and the nightmarishly opulent bridges with its spoken rebound of voice (“Oh, woe”?) lead to a chorus of what can only be described as resignation…resignation from “leading” pop, from being a “Face,” from being an example or avatar to anybody…

But we carried you in our arms on Independence Day!

The seventies are over, for sure, but with this song he sounds like he’s burying the sixties, too…all this over-romantic ideal(isation) of “home” (which invariably has revealed itself as nothing of the kind – “Many happy returns!”), all brushed away…and at the end of a song more eighties than anything in the eighties that has preceded it, a memory of “Mother’s Little Helper.” “My mama said to get things done…”

(Keep that “get things done” in mind; we’ll be needing it later…)

…”You’d better not mess with Major Tom” – so the junkie is now his own drug.

He went down Blitz, of course he did, wouldn’t let Jagger in but why should they, wouldn’t old Grandpa Mick just spoil our fun, all of us insecure nogoodniks who get routinely turfed out of all other clubs, so why shouldn’t we be allowed to have our own? Got some people together, brought them in to appear in the video, that strange dress inversion of the cover of Abbey Road - but was he convinced? Possibly the need to escape from his own past – that need which never really abandoned him – was the principal driving factor.

The ending is, unsurprisingly, similar in type and impact to that of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer”; the constant building up of layers, the sublyrical urge NOT to step down.

And there is of course the elephant in the 1980 sitting room, or on The Wall on that sitting room, apropos giving up on the present tense; yes, there’s Syd, still, in his blue electric room, watching the TV, if it’s plugged in.

But, make no mistake, “Ashes To Ashes” represents his resignation from being any kind of Number 1. The dream is over, now I’m John…wait a minute…

…who am I supposed to be, again, today?

“Fashion” is about not knowing who you are and not having the style to perpetrate the non-knowledge. Part “Golden Years” retooling, part song once called “Jamaica,” the song dwells on the close resemblance of “fashion” to “fascism” – from whatever side (“Turn to the Left! Turn to the Right!”) with a sinisterly recycled old radio jingle (“We are the Goon Squad and we’re coming to town BEEP BEEP!”), its brutalist futurist boot stomp is the link between Slade and “I Travel,” the theme is similar to “Games Without Frontiers,” the lovely “Talk to me” bridge is a flashback to side one of Low…but Bob’s guitar argues with the singer rather than agrees with him (as Mick was once wont to do); with practically every line, there is a sardonic, noisy guitar rejoinder. How anyone could ever think of using this as the music for a beauty pageant is beyond the singer’s understanding, except that it would again prove that no one was actually listening.

Side one, then, which everybody knows.

Side two, which never gets played and which nobody knows.

Not that there’s a lot to say about side two except that it’s Ziggy rearranged in very odd and disturbing new shapes. Who’s he trying to be on “Teenage Wildlife”? Oh – not that Billy Mackenzie guy, but Ronnie Spector. OK, now it’s making sense.

There was a conversation. The young man came to have a word with him.

-I’m big now. Bigger nearly than everyone. But I’m not happy.
-Mm-hm.
-
-
-It’s the fans, you see. One giant solid mass that makes me feel claustrophobic and that I can’t communicate with them.
-
-It’s not what I wanted. I feel trapped. I’m not letting them in. I couldn’t. You, of all people, should know that.
-
-I’m not as happy about this as I thought I would be.
-
-You’ve been there.
-
-David, what do I do? They wait for me in the hallway.
-Ah, Gary…
-
-Gary, I don’t KNOW any hallways. Not apart from my own.
-
-Look, I like your music. A lot. But…
-But.
-That’s not what I meant.
-
-When I made Low, my intention wasn’t to stay there.
-
-You know…I fought BACK. Made Heroes. Came out of hell and faced the world again.
-David…
-Whereas you don’t even allow yourself the possibility of escape in your music, except for turning into a machine – and you see how far that got you.
-*sigh*
-You’ve CONFINED yourself, Gary. Painted yourself into a corner.
-
-I’m sorry, but, you know…
-I know…
-…I can’t do anything for you. Can’t help.
-
-There are other things in this world to be concerned and worried about than pulling your own blind down in front of your face.
-That’s not what I’m doing, though.
-You are, and you don’t know it. Look, it’s like cutting your own arm off, I know, but you need to get about a bit more, Gary. Travel places. Meet people. Get out of the house, away from your gadgets.
-
-I feel for you but I cannot help you. Only you can do that.
-Just because my problem is trivial doesn’t mean it erases itself.
-That’s not what Neil Young will mean, either.
-?
-I just…I can’t be responsible for anybody else who chooses to follow my path. I’m no shining example to anybody. No matter what “The President” said.
-I don’t see.
-I figure you’re going to end up being you, anyway, no matter what I say to you.
-
-
-
-One tip. Learn to fly. Might be useful. I know somebody.

“Scream Like A Baby”: a projected (desired?) future. It’s in the near future, or it’s now, and people are being rounded up for being…different. So he imagines this guy…or maybe it’s just a “gun”…called Sam who gets carted away to prison, or camp, but can’t bear it, so decides to end things for himself anyway (“…he jumped into the furnace/Singing old songs we loved”). An air of ’Til The Band Comes In fatalism here (“But I never knew his last name/And we never had no fun”).

Or is it yet another delayed memory?

Note how on the line “And I’m learning to be a part of society” he cannot quite bring himself to enunciate the word “society.”

“Society,” he remembers being told, “is a place where people exist TOGETHER.”
-Yes, sir.
-That is civilisation.
-Yes sir.

Stupid, lovable Roland Walter Dutton, strung out in heaven’s high; that’s what you get for “cooperating.”

So why should he have cooperated?

Memories, now firmer in mind:

Climbing the inside of the rocket; reaching Number 1’s office.
Knock on the door.
-Come in, Big Bill.
He glanced at the seat’s occupant.
-I knew, of course, he said.
She was pleased to see him.
-Then you know we all have to get out of here.
-I had guessed.
-This was your idea. The Village. Everybody knew that.
-And that the idea would necessarily be used by another side for less than humane reasons.
-As ludicrous as it sounds, I’m also here to try and destroy this place.
-Even Number 1?
-Even I am answerable to someone.
-I’m not astonished.
Looked at the dial.
-So where’s this rocket headed?
-Out of here, that’s all I know. But downstairs…
-It’s all bullshit.
-Yes. They mean to kill you as well as the other two.
-Or send us into space, which amounts to the same thing.
She worked at the dashboard for a fevered minute or two.
-There. I’ve set it to take off in three minutes. We can get out of here by then.
-Really?
-Don’t worry; reinforcements are coming. Now let’s get down and get out of here.
They went down, and set the two prisoners free. Overpowering the guards was easy. Dressed in obfuscatory robes, and armed, they returned to the place of ceremony, where they were somewhat surprised to see that a one-sided battle was already taking place. Village soldiers were being ruthlessly gunned down. The “President” was in the process of being taken into custody.

A familiar-looking man in military uniform rushed to the figures just as they emerged.
-John!
-Well, James. Fancy seeing you here!
The Colonel grinned.
-When your ‘plane didn’t come back we did our own reconnaissance and tracking. Found the place pretty easily. Then it was only a matter of organising a force to come down here and liberate everyone.
-Thorpe?
-Oh, he’s in the helicopter. Complete coward but he has a head for facts and faces. Now let’s head out of here – the route is clear! Come on, Sir Horace, don’t be a tortoise!
He had safe passage, as did Nadia, Sir Horace, Alex and Sancho. He noticed other helicopters waiting to pick up other Village residents; also a container ship a mile or so out to sea to take some residents to – he guessed – Southampton.
-A tidy ending, the Colonel grinned.
-Almost too tidy, John chuckled. –Put this on television and nobody would credit it.
-It is a bit drab on that level, the Colonel agreed, -but as long as we’re all safe and alive, that’s the important thing!
-The rocket?
-Thirty minutes, Big Bill. Patience is a virtue.
He never read anything in the paper about a rocket taking off in North Wales. Nor was he ever tempted to revisit the area.

He remained golfing chums with the Colonel. At the Hammersmith Odeon in 1973 he spotted Nadia, three rows back from the front, singing along to “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide.” He sometimes spotted Sir Horace striding determinedly through the City and was happy to have him as an occasional drinking partner (Sir Horace had correctly surmised that that drink had drugged him into unconsciousness, rather than “killed” him; resurrection being the individual’s business).

Alex became the Godfather of Punk and he produced three popular albums by him. He particularly enjoyed Lust For Life - the title track being a “Dem Bones” for its time.

Then he sings a song written by a former Television personality.

Tom Verlaine, a guitar hero for an age that needed none. Tom Verlaine, whose failure to die in 1977 meant that Television carried on to a not-that-bad-really/but not as good as the first one second album and then a much-respected, non-record selling solo career. From his eponymous 1979 debut came “Kingdom Come,” a song about breaking rocks and working for the man until death do everything part – it’s as close as anything on this record gets to a Springsteen song – but here it is sung in that same quasi-hysterical Ronnie Spector/Tony Newley exaggerated vibrato, as if the singer is going to fall apart at any (gun)point. At one point he sings, “The Wall’s a mile HIGH!” and there is a fadeout chant that resembles “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” It is understood that Verlaine himself turned up at the studio one time, testing out various amplifiers and guitar lines, but that none of his work remained on the finished record (hence no credit for him).

Whereas Pete Townshend, a man who had once laughed sardonically at him for ripping off a Who song, turned up for “Because You’re Young” and sounded like…Lee Ritenour, or any session guitarist doing the gig for a buck. He was, as was his wont in 1980, pissed to fuck, but obligingly rolled out windmill chords. Meanwhile, the singer once again abnegates any responsibility for his spiritual descendents; he sees a girl, knows she’ll meet someone and fall in love but that they’ll end up like the protagonists on the title track and that, as per “Up The Hill Backwards,” everything’s just going to end up repeating itself regardless and so, like Leo Sayer but unlike Bryan Ferry, he’ll just dance his life away:

“They’re people I know – people I LOVE,
They seem so unhappy – dead or alive.”

And the last song is a subdued repeat of the first one; slower in tempo, more measured in delivery, though hardly less angry. It is as if he has acknowledged the fucked-upness of it all but he’s far from ready to accept things as they are. Not so long as there are (as he sings) children round the world putting camel shit on the wall, making carpets on treadmills or garbage sorting.

He listens to the tape running off its spool, and thinks: yes, that’ll do.

And the other John, the one he worked with five years previously, before he himself “resigned,” who kept coming into the studio and hanging out; he was a key influence on how the record turned out. “It’s No Game (Part 1)” as a new “Instant Karma”? Makes perfect sense. Don’t know how I would have got through the record without him being there.

And the record comes out and does pretty well, though not as successfully in the USA as he had hoped. But things are up and moving again and he takes the lead role in this off-Broadway production of The Elephant Man - he always had a secret penchant for acting - and a couple of months after the record’s release he’s in this theatre just uptown from the Dakota and one night there are these six fucking loud BANGS and he runs home to this apartment, except it’s a house, and when the door opens he cries: “WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON IN THIS WORLD?” over and over.

“It’s about time,” she says. “He’s upstairs, waiting to see you.”

* * * * * * * *

He rushed upstairs and knocked patiently on the bedroom door.
-Come in!
He entered and realised that he was no longer in New York, but in Bothwell, a few miles southeast of Glasgow. In the room he could see many rows and shelves of books, records and tapes, as well as some rather less neat piles of typescript. Sitting on his bed was a sixteen-year-old teenager, a Smith-Corona typewriter by his side with a piece of partially typed paper still in it.

He glanced over to read what the sheet said:
It had been six years since he had last been there. Six years; he noted the number with some satisfaction.
He turned to the boy.
-What the fuck is going on in this blog?
The boy, looking somewhat older and sadder than his sixteen years might have suggested, replied:
-Blog? What do you mean, “blog”?
-You bastard! You’re using me as convenient shorthand to try out yet more of your stupid crazy theories!
The boy pointed to a magazine on the bed. It was the seventh issue of The Face (subtitled “ROCK’S FINAL FRONTIER”). He recognised the person on the cover.
-You see, David, it’s only December 1980, and I’m afraid “blogs,” as you call them, don’t exist yet. That look, David! Really I don’t deserve it! In fact, I shouldn’t be here at all because actually I’m in Oxford, having my pre-entrance interview, but I don’t think that a future generation of readers is going to be particularly worried about that wee bit of discontinuity.
-It’s a good piece, that Jon Savage article about me.
-Are you as worried as he thinks you sound?
-More so, since the album is about not really knowing who I am, or who, or what, I want to be.
-So…what’s it all about? This Then Play Long thing?
-At this moment, it’s only a vague idea in my head. I already have more of the records than you think, and I would like to do something with them, but how to do it and get people to read it…that’s the problem.
-You’re sixteen, it’s a novelty…bound to work if you tried it now?
-You’d think, wouldn’t you? But the writing really wouldn’t be good enough. Even thinking about it now, I know that when I eventually get round to doing something about Then Play Long I will by now have covered barely a quarter of what will need to be written about.
-Why wait so long, then?
-As I say, my writing would let it down. At this point I am able to marshal facts but not yet able to manipulate and correlate them into a valid argument. If I published now, it would be a rota of dull data, full of history and information. It would be like publishing a bus timetable.
-I disagree. I’ve heard about some of your early work.
-So be it, and I have to tell you – because, thanks to convenient time loops, I can – that one of the pieces on Then Play Long will be a verbatim transcript of something I wrote when I was fourteen. It’s already up, and I’m not saying which one it is. But most of the writing would be pretty dreary.
-What’s the game? Making me out to be an extension of Number 6’s overactive and underemployed imagination?
-Because it allows me to undertake a major step forward in terms of how I want this blog to be perceived. That it’s a story about somebody writing a blog about number one albums, rather than a blog about number one albums…
-You’ve said that many times.
-And will continue to do so, since it’s true (apologies to the shadow of BS Johnson). And there’s something else I want to say, too. Something that needs to be demonstrated. There’s a point that I’m trying to prove.
-Which is?
-I haven’t got there yet.
-There’s gratitude for you!
-Look, I nearly stopped this blog because of you!
-Don’t blame me for building your own hallways.
The boy paused, uttering a remorseful sigh.
-I felt it was going to be vitally important to keep the blog going because of this incredible, and really when you think about it, even in 1980, pretty damn scary string of records…
-All of which are linked in one way or another.
-Most of them, anyway. Even Back In Black, half the songs on which are about death. But this string, it keeps piling up and up, higher and higher, in intensity, and your record is kind of the culmination of the whole thing…
-What you’re saying is that the string is about to snap.
-What I’m saying is that I’m rather scared about where this is all going, how it is going to culminate. Your record opens with a Japanese woman screaming…
-Well, she was on the cover of Kimono My House…
-…and ends with a song in which you sing, “Put a bullet in my brain/And it makes all the papers”…and I really don’t want THAT to be the brutal fucking quietus to all of this.
-I see.
-It’s like a prophecy.
-Indeed.
-
-
-There are, of course, other ways out.
-Such as?
-Accept that you can only do so much about the state of the world from where you are and that if you’re going to be able to do anything more about it you’re going to have to come towards the world and look it in its eye.
-
-Or that this is as far as you can go doing this sort of thing, and you’ll need to re-adapt.
-
The boy pointed to a corner of the room. “Look at all these records I’ve done so far,” he said, “two hundred and thirty-eight of them, including yours. The thing I’ve learned is that…”
He interrupted. “When does it all end?”
-That’s a good question. I don’t know, but have a look at these magazines here.
The back page of The Face; huge white type on black background with a (then) reassuring sky blue and vermillion logo:

“More
records.
More
tapes.
More
discounts.

the HMV shop”

“I have a feeling,” said the boy, “that sometime in the future HMV are going to wish they’d stayed with more records and more tapes.”

He then pointed to an article in the then current NME, all about the home taping boom and how homemade tapes were going to bleed the record industry dry until only an incredibly contracted record market would ultimately exist, for the benefit of collectors and specialists only. It seemed prophetic enough, and he reckoned it would come to pass, but not via homemade cassette tapes – no, these would themselves be rendered obsolete by a new, as yet unforeseen development, which in turn would be wiped out by something else, probably to do with computers. A time when you could pick songs out on a computer without having to go and buy any records; a natural reversion to the original state of things where people wanted to hear songs and songs only. He figured that most of what went to number one in the eighties album chart would be convenient compilations of lots of singles, or greatest hits packages. The sort of albums which make it unnecessary to buy albums. And that when enough people decided that the song alone was good enough for them, the album would dwindle towards obsolescence, a reminder of a more opulent, indulgent age where musical thoughts could be extended to fill forty-five or sixty minutes of the listener’s time.

So his belief was that albums as such were bound to have a limited lifespan, and therefore it was possible that, no matter when he decided to start Then Play Long, he could foresee an ending.

The Spy listened to all of this with interest, then added: “So where would that leave me?”

-I was coming to that. The thing I’ve learned, as I say, is that going through all these number one albums, it’s always the ones which look out of place which tend to have the greatest long-term impact. Take this one, for instance.

From one pile the boy fished out a twenty-year-old copy of Down Drury Lane To Memory Lane by 101 Strings.

-As improbable as it looks – and sounds – this record is actually the way number one albums are going to go. There will, in the future, be a book called Elevator Music, and it will include a chapter on 101 Strings where it says that they are “responsible for what is essentially the original world music…giving Middle America an exact replica of the world it wants.” That is to say, there will be nothing about ethnomusicological “forgery” or “fourth worlds,” but a careful and very studious and astute broth made out of those elements of “the world” most likely to appeal to Middle America’s very conservative ideas about what it wants and what makes it happy. The image of travelling the world, even aurally, without ever having to get out of one’s armchair. You must know the record; it is such an important influence on the second side of Low - ask Brian if you get a chance.

He continued: -The Drury Lane record never even made it to the States; it was a compendium of performances from previously available albums tailored specifically (including its sleevenote) to appeal to a British demographic of a certain age and bearing. “A macrocosm incarnate,” Mr Lanza writes, “now gobbling up nations and customs; now regurgitating them into easily recognizable sounds and symbols; now grooming, duplicating and selling them in the discount racks of Woolworth’s, K-Mart, and other mainstream emporia at bargain prices.”

-But it sells. The world recognises it. You may not feel it now, but I assure you that in time this is the path that you will follow.
-I don’t believe you. It sounds like a nightmare inversion of utopia.
-At the time of writing you have another four number one albums to go. Perhaps there may even be a triumphant late period comeback before too long. One of these is a compilation. The other will find you happy, rekindled, ready to take on the eighties and nineties, all pain and doubt nullified.
-You mean…I will sell out?
-All three records contain a relatively high proportion of cover versions.
-Or I could stop here?
-Except you won’t. You didn’t in 1968 or 1974, and you won’t now. It’s not in your nature, Number 6.
-What did you call me?
The boy rose. “Our time is nearly up. When you leave this house you will find yourself back in New York. Back to your life. Don’t worry about me or this ‘blog.’ I see my future before me, and there are elements of it that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, just as there are elements of it that will justify there being a future. The same as with most people.”
-You’re very talky and smartass for a sixteen-year-old.
-That is because this is my current 49-year-old self speaking through a useful literary conduit. As I say don’t worry – the point of this blog will make itself known, given time.
The Spy turned towards the door.
“Oh, and just one more thing,” said the writer. “Why did you resign?”
“So that I wouldn’t get six-and-a-half-thousand-word blog posts written about me.”
“More idols than realities…it’ll be alright.”
“What was that?”
“Oh, and as you’re leaving,” added the writer, who The Spy now noticed had pulled off his usual irritating trick of appearing to tell the reader everything but actually telling them nothing, “please could you ask Gordon to come up. Even though it’s only 1980, I can already tell that this story has been dark for too long; we need some light, some springtime, something to look forward to.”

* * * * * * * *

He walked back out onto 72nd Street.

He recognised her immediately.

“Hello, Alison,” he said.

“You’ve been reading my mind again,” she said.

“It’s in our nature,” he smiled.

“Who are you really?” she asked.

“Does it matter, as long as I am who I am?” he replied, and they strolled off happily.

When it comes to resurrections, there is always room for one more.

Kate BUSH: Never For Ever

(#237: 20 September 1980, 1 week)   

Track listing: Babooshka/Delius/Blow Away/All We Ever Look For/Egypt/The Wedding List/Violin/The Infant Kiss/Night Scented Stock/Army Dreamers/Breathing

Looking at the words of “Blow Away” – “With all of his licks and his R&B” – I’m reminded that once there was something called the KT Bush Band, which played various pubs in the waiting south-eastern space between Welling and Lewisham throughout the mid-seventies, with the teenage Kate belting out “Knock On Wood,” “In The Midnight Hour” and suchlike. Then I hear the nearly unbearable high note that she sustains over the second half of the second chorus of “Blow Away,” or her growls and screeches on “The Wedding List” and “Violin,” and remember that the Wilson Pickett thing was still within her, only to be brought out when enraged beyond articulation.

There was something called the KT Bush Band, pub rockers their type were once termed, and they would play the Rose of Lee around the same time that the Lewisham group Japan were moving into adulthood and still wanted to be the New York Dolls. But then there was art, and dance which looked like karate moves, and the things she heard and kept in her mind from her early youth which were not Stax or Motown. But there was still the KT Bush Band; two members, bassist Del Palmer and guitarist Brian Bath, stayed with her music when she moved beyond “Everybody Needs Somebody To Love” (although, looking at that song title, I wonder if she ever really did), there to remember and help propel her into a future. Her future or the British music industry’s future?

Because while she was still seeing and hearing things – Ken Russell’s Song Of Summer, Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (from the song “The Infant’s Kiss” I’m guessing that she saw the movie before she read the Henry James) – it has to be remembered that, prior to around 1985, Kate Bush was not exactly hip, in the same way that late sixties/early seventies Scott Walker was not quite viewed as a way forward. A moderately intriguing side road or layby, maybe, but not the road to tomorrow.

She was, I recall, always on Nationwide, BBC1’s teatime news magazine, perpetually being followed around by Sue Lawley – recording her new album, rehearsing for her tour – and at the British Rock and Pop Awards (the not remotely cool ancestor to the Brits) she was held up as being an example of what might save the music business, for those alienated enough still to remember the Beatles.

She was perhaps, if you weren’t in sympathy with her – if you heard the hits and watched Pamela Stephenson send her up on Not The Nine O’Clock News but hadn’t listened to the rest of her music – a bit naff. Interviews were rare and she had the piss taken out of her for ceaselessly vacillating between the two expressions “Wow!” and “Amazing!” when she did them (when Julian Cope turned up not long afterwards with his “Waaaugh, Corrie, immense!” spiel, this was of course automatically accepted as gospel). She even released a single called “Wow” which, if you actually listen to it, is like “Hello Hurray” as restyled by the Mackenzie/Rankine Associates – melancholy, scared and resonant.

Worse than that, EMI initially thought to market her to the “cor blimey/wouldn’t kick her out of bed” (im)mature lads brigade with “saucy” press shots, exposed breasts and so forth. This after they had released “Wuthering Heights” as a single only after a tearful, enraged Kate insisted that they couldn’t go with “James And The Cold Gun.” The debut album The Kick Inside - an NME number one in early 1978 - talked as frankly about what it was like to be a young woman as anything in British pop had done; it is the secret prog flipside of the Slits’ Cut. She was rushed into making a follow-up album, Lionheart, which isn’t at all bad, but she resolved shortly thereafter that things had to be done her way completely or not at all.

This young person, barely into her twenties, more or less the same age as Gary Numan, telegraphing to her listeners that this is not what it sounds like.

A young person whose maternal family was Irish and who was raised as a Catholic.

A person who listens to those Pink Floyd records, and above all Peter Gabriel’s Genesis, just as the younger Diana has a poster of Prince Charles on her wall.

A musician who comes out, whether she knows it or not, of that miraculous late sixties/early seventies congruence between different, parallel streams of British music, where folk-rock bled into prog-rock leaked into free jazz…

(if the viol scrapings of various members of the Skeaping family at the climax of “The Infant’s Kiss” sound spookily familiar, listen to the opening section of side three of 1978’s Frames: Music For An Imaginary Film by Keith Tippett’s 22-piece big band Ark – one of the string players in that line-up is Roderick Skeaping – whose slow, patient build-up and final eruption sound like Delius being resuscitated by the approaching ghost of Mingus.)

…and whose first album debuts with, of all things, “The Saxophone Song,” in which tenorist Alan Skidmore is nearly as unhinged as he is on the Walker Brothers’ “Fat Mama Kick,” recorded at pretty much the same time.

…and who absorbs all of this art into her head and mind and heart and feels that it can only come out one way; the cover of her third album was controversial at the time, with an illustrated (by Nick Price) Kate, hands clapsed to the back of her head as though sleepwalking, giving birth to hordes of animals. The analogy is uncomplicated – these songs are her babies – but the reverse cover, featuring an airborne Kate as a bat in the encroaching dusk, suggests more than just the routine succession of darkness (if song titles like “Night Scented Stock” don’t make it abundantly clear, this is definitely a record to be listened to at night, or on a dark winter’s afternoon).

But then the whole of Never For Ever is essentially about life and death; how we allow ourselves to die and how we might treat ourselves better to live. What goes and who doesn’t.

The music is rich and full; the only person who stops this album from being the first one in this tale to be wholly written, performed and produced by a woman is co-producer Jon Kelly; he was Kate’s engineer on Lionheart and clearly taught her a lot about how to work the studio – he works very hard indeed to bring out as good a sonic picture as possible, so that, although nearly thirty-three years old, the album does not sound remotely dated, even if it is unquestionably of its time. The Fairlight CMI sampler, to which Kate was introduced when she guested on the third Peter Gabriel album, was programmed here to excellent effect by John L Walters and Richard James Burgess from the adventurous electro-jazz group Landscape; when listening to songs like “Army Dreamers,” it is important to recall that in 1980 this was a new sound.

But if casual listeners or Bush followers had delved beneath the record’s winsome 1971 surface (or so it was largely perceived at the time) they would not have found a cycle of songs to reassure and comfort Nationwide viewers. Everything here is about death and birth, in that order, bearing a darkness that is frequently and I think deliberately oppressive. Some of it goes, lyrically and emotionally, beyond anything ever previously attempted in “pop” or “rock.” What would the average Daily Mirror-reading suburbanite have made of tribute songs to Sid Vicious (“Blow Away”) or punk thrashes which reference the Banshees and “Johnny” (Rotten?) (“Violin”)?

And is the album all just one – menstrual – song cycle about the one family?

Furthermore, what relation does it bear to previous number one albums?

Consider how, on Gabriel’s “Intruder,” the protagonist stops to smell the woman’s clothes and perfumes.

And then how, on “Babooshka” (a top five single; was anybody really listening to it?), a woman disguises herself, sends her husband “scented letters.”

Could the intruder be the husband himself, creeping out of the communal bed to remind himself of how he thinks his wife once was?

Because although he doesn’t know who’s sending these scented letters, we are told that he receives them with “a strange delight.”

Hold on a minute…haven’t we been here before?

“Better men than I/Have tried your strange delight/Is there no strange delight?”

He falls for her again, like he had done once before, and they meet up in a restaurant, and he recognises something in her but isn’t quite sure what. The song doesn’t give us an ending but the endless chinking and breaking of wine glasses at the end suggest that it may not last.

If Gabriel finds that the only solution to his internal crisis is to face out into the world, Bush seems to want to withdraw “the world” from her viewpoint altogether.

Back into the womb or the tomb – so hard is it sometimes to differentiate the two, as she points out on “All We Ever Look For”; parents who just want their children to be their replicas, and so set them off on a lifelong quest for something – anything, God, drugs, “a big hug” – to reproduce that original feeling, that not-remotely-strange delight. A wilful stepsister to Lesley Duncan’s “Love Song,” it likewise detours into a strange, quietly meditative section with the sound of doors opening and shutting, footsteps, birdsong, motorway traffic; its conclusion appears to be that the cycle won’t quite repeat itself – we’ll never be exactly like our parents (“But we never do score”) – but we’re doomed to keep on searching for…well, “IT.” Our elusive dreams.

“Delius” is about death, too; the last days of the composer (and Eric Fenby is acknowledged; “In B, Fenby”) contemplated over a purring drum machine and a semi-abstract musical background with booming bass voices alternating with Bush’s high waves. Somewhere between McCartney’s “Summer’s Day Song” and John Martyn’s “Small Hours” – if it sometimes resembles one of those amiably discursive inter-song links on Saint Etienne records (e.g. “Wilson”) then Bush’s “Ooh, he’s a moody Old Man” has a touch of the Sarah Cracknells about it.

(Was Ken Russell the only influence, however? In 1979 Vibing Up The Senile Man, the “challenging” second album by Alternative TV, was released to general ridicule, and predictably now sounds uncannily prophetic; the original record ends with a drunken freeform singalong: “Vis-sssss-iting DE-lius was a MAD aff-AIR!”)

Whereas “Blow Away” is about Bill Duffield, the lighting man on Kate’s 1979 tour who accidentally fell to his death while preparing the stage at Poole Arts Centre (given the Thomas Hardy/Dorset setting, one might be forgiven for seeing Hardy’s “President of the Immortals” silently at work in the background of this song), following which Kate resolved never to tour again (and she has kept to this resolution ever since). Never For Ever? – no, EMI, I am not going to keep playing your game. No, happy Surbiton lawn-sprinklers, I am not here to say what you’d like.

In the music she thinks of where the music goes after it’s gone into the air. If you were Eric Dolphy you’d say it went everywhere, but Kate is not so sure. “One of the band told me last night,” she sings, “that music is all he’s got in his life.” Slight but immense pause. “So where does it go?” What happens to a life when the music’s gone? Does it simply end?

The thought here is that it doesn’t, that people can have a near-death experience and glimpse the afterlife but come back, and anyway it’s all metaphorical – it’s the ghosts, the spirits, of Bolan and Moon and Buddy Holly that continue to inspire the musician. She gets points for remembering Minnie Riperton, for acknowledging one of her indirect ancestors Sandy Denny, and…the unusually emphasised “Vicious, Vicious”…

…coming from a partly Irish background, I’m sure Kate would have understood “Death Disco” in an instant; Lydon simultaneously holding a wake and a jig of life…

…but what does this have to do with a woman “testing” her husband?

(The heartbreak implicit in Pauline Yates’ smiling face near the end of the first series of The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin, when she realises who Martin the dentist really is but knows enough never to say anything…)

(does anybody else realise that Perrin is just the slapstick flipside to The Prisoner? “You resign, you disappear, you return”…”I feel like a new man!”…”Die, ‘SIX,’ DIE!”)

And then “Egypt.” At first glance this is just another piece of exotica, not really connected to anything else on the album, but that line:

“I cannot stop to comfort them/I’m busy chasing up my demons.”

Or, as Peter Gabriel put it: “I don’t know how to stop.”

…and then her vocal becomes tortured, harsh, disturbing as the song gets nearer its end. “Oh, I’m in LOVE with Egypt!,” sung as though she is being held prisoner in Egypt.

The record is all about Kate Bush’s demons really.

“The Wedding List” is aptly demonic. I don’t know whether the song was more than obliquely inspired by the Truffaut film, since the latter’s plot is entirely different; the bridegroom is not shot on his wedding day in a crime of passion, but killed accidentally by some guys horsing about with a rifle in an opposite tower. Jeanne Moreau’s widow systematically and pitilessly hunts them down and disposes of them, even unto prison. It’s not a terribly successful film – it’s another of Truffaut’s periodic attempts to do a Hitchcock, and Moreau is clearly out of her acting comfort zone for much of the time – but Kate’s song makes do with more than a McGuffin. She ambiguously tracks down her husband’s assassin and goes into some detail about how she’s going to kill him. But it really, and uncomfortably, is unclear whether there even is another assassin present, since the final verse (not printed in the lyric sheet) details how she then commits suicide, and inside her is found an unborn baby (“Was it Rudi’s?”). The verses are fast and intent, the choruses slow and funereal. Bush’s vocal becomes half-deranged; given the song’s subject matter and the time of its release, it is disturbing how much Bush sounds like Yoko Ono.

“Violin” is as “punk rock” as Kate ever got; she loves the instrument and tries to imitate its vast swoops and sweeps (“Filling me up WIIIITTTTTHHHH…”). Again there is Yoko-type screaming and a general feeling of early Roxy Music.

But what if that music is all you’ve got?

Why not let the child live?

Or does the child of “Babooshka” grow up and become confused, and then angry?

Is the widow of “The Wedding List” the “new” wife from “Babooshka,” and was one version of her husband battling another?

But what is the alternative?

Bring the child into the world, watch him grow (and for lyrical and continuity-related reasons the protagonist of two of the next three songs is male) and then see what happens.

But “The Infant’s Kiss” goes beyond all that.

I think Kate knew The Innocents. It isn’t The Turn Of The Screw but very little is. Deborah Kerr’s governess – a Cubist inversion of her character in The King And I - is plainly scared by her charge and equally plainly is sexually frustrated. So she sees the children, indeed sees into them and sees the spirits of the bad grown-ups who’d been there before.

It’s nearly the same with Bush’s protagonist. She tucks the child into bed, says goodnight…and then the song becomes truly frightening, because although nothing as such happens in the song, everything is going on in her mind, and, as I suggested above, it’s something that goes beyond and indeed turns around all the previous maleness in this tale, with those “young girls,” and “only seventeens,” and “back to schools.” Nobody went as far as this, and I doubt whether a song like this would even happen now. It is almost as if Bush is turning “rock music” on its head and pointing a mirror back at it.

And the difference is that here, like Morrison’s distraught driver in “Cyprus Avenue,” she holds back. She knows she can never have him – the implications she puts into the line “I want to smack but I hold back” are truly scary – knows in herself that what she is feeling is very, very wrong, and retreats (“I must stay and find a way to stop before it gets too much”).

(from earlier in 1980, already a ghost: “Gotta find some therapy/This treatment takes too long.” Two years before The Dreaming)

The song also has what is probably the most reluctant Picardy third I’ve heard in any piece of music.

A brief, multitracked, wordless vocal chorus; “Night Scented Stock,” which could have been named “Her Prayer”…

…and then the Joyce Grenfell on Factory electro-waltz of “Army Dreamers” where the infant of “The Infant’s Kiss” grows up, is sent off to war – perhaps to Northern Ireland (drummer Stuart Elliott here plays the bodhran) – and comes back in a box. The male/female call-and-response from “Delius” returns, more insistently, as Bush spells out the reasons why he couldn’t not be blown up (“What could he do? Should have been a rock star,” “But he didn’t have the money for a guitar” – a reason, pace “Blow Away,” why music can matter). The loss is profound, although the depth of the singer’s grief is buried within her ironically jaunty high-pitched delivery. What’s the point, the song appears to ask; we’re all going to die anyway.

(A lifetime later, a not dissimilar female musician, who would have been about eleven when Never For Ever was released, sang the following:

“Later in the dark
I thought I heard Louis’ voice
Calling for his Mother, then me,
But I couldn’t get to him.”
[PJ Harvey, “The Colour Of The Earth,” from Let England Swing, a record which goes some way towards answering some of the questions Bush asked three decades before.)

On which subject…

The last word – virtually – comes from the unborn child itself.

There has been a nuclear war, the cavortings of the “Babooshka” couple(s), like those of Tristan and Isolde on the Rhine, have somehow led to Gotterdammerung – one scarcely notices that for the most part “Breathing” and “Babooshka” follow the same chord sequence, are at times practically the same tune, and I am sure that was not accidental – and at last we get to hear from the child herself. She is in her mother’s womb; she may or may not be born but all she knows is that she is breathing in particles of fallout radiation (“Chips of Plutonium are twinkling in every lung,” Bush almost weeps) as well as her mother’s nicotine. Whatever state her mother is in, the foetus itself is suffering.

(Compare the opening “Outside gets inside, through her skin” with the paraphrasing of Ponting’s “The Sleeping Bag” on Ute Lemper’s “Scope J,” written by…Scott Walker. Although in that middle section Lemper sounds far more like Carla Bley than Kate Bush, I should say it is not my intention to place Walker at the crossroads of all of this music, however tempting that prospect might be; it just seems that somehow, he is there, even in 1980, a full year before Cope more or less brings his name back to the world – when I played Cope’s Fire Escape In The Sky compilation in my first year at university, I lost count of the number of times my fellow students made comments in the line of: “I thought Scott Walker was dead” – when he is entirely out of public view and his back catalogue can be purchased from most second-hand record shops and you’d still have change out of a fiver.)

The child wants to live but knows it will most probably never get the chance – and this, remember, is 1980, when the prospect of there being a 1981 was far from certain. “I love my beloved/All and everywhere” she sings, as though prematurely saying farewell (all the love she’ll never have or know; see the heartrending collage of telephone call signoffs on The Dreaming).

And then, following a long, indistinct, sampled speech about the effects of The Bomb, rather than looking out onto the world, as Gabriel has to do, the world looks in at her.

“What are we going to do?/We are all going to die!” they sing, as if readying themselves for meeting the ghosts of “Blow Away,” and among the voices is that of Roy Harper, making his third cameo appearance on Then Play Long in a decade, sounding like he is taking the world down with him. Bush screams, whispers – “Ooh, please let me breathe,” “Quick, breathe in deep” – and, finally, as she herself succumbs, finds the key: “Ooh, life is…breathing.”

(N.B.: don’t underestimate those “Ooh”s; they are sometimes important, as they let things sink in.)

(Another album from towards the end of 1980; the second Specials album, in which Jerry Dammers wrongfoots his fans and explores Muzak. The record is uneven but when it works, its impact is enormous: the climactic “International Jet Set” closes with a ‘plane heading towards crash landing, passengers (including the Go-Go’s) screaming that they’re all going to die, what are they going to do, and a taped announcement implying that there is no pilot on board.)

And that is it; in nearly a quarter of a century, a woman has her full say on Then Play Long. It was a long time coming but if you’re dealing with life and death, these things can’t be rushed. As a collection of songs, Never For Ever does anything but reassure; the mood is generally foreboding, and in the context of a number one album I might risk moderate blasphemy and say that I think that even as a gesture, or statement of intent, this album is far “braver” than moving yourself entirely out of the system and putting in your music as an uncensored stream of mind flotilla – expression becoming interchangeable with thought. The Wire’s collection of Walker essays No Regrets finally fails for me because it propels itself towards the misleading assumption that Tilt and The Drift constitute the apex of his work; Ian Penman’s “A Dandy In Aspic” contribution, in marked contrast, does succeed for me because it has the informed temerity to suggest that the Philips work of the late sixties and early seventies might actually still be Walker’s artistic apex, and that he benefited from the tension of showbiz and needing to sell records. As startling and original as Walker’s later work is, I am not sure that he has not simply been walking away from something – I don’t know what, or who, or why – since about 1977.

But Bush has stayed within the system, miraculously twisted it towards meeting her own terms, and negotiated a rare kind of compromise; she keeps selling, but continues to do exactly as she likes. We will meet her again in five years or so from now, when the rest of the world catches up with her breath.

Gary NUMAN: Telekon

(#236: 13 September 1980, 1 week)

Track listing: This Wreckage/The Aircrash Bureau/Telekon/Remind Me To Smile/Sleep By Windows/I’m An Agent/I Dream Of Wires/Remember I Was Vapour/Please Push No More/The Joy Circuit

We haven’t had too many examples so far of “It’s Tough At The Top”-type albums, the self-pitying ones where highly moneyed superstars whine about how rich and famous they are and what a drag it is being a loved, acclaimed pop or rock star. Perhaps somewhere at the core of chart compilation is a safety valve that stops such records from getting right to the top.

With Gary Numan, however, there’s always something else, something deeper, or more painful, that stops him from veering onto the self-pitying superstar course. So, just as Telekon is the third part of his “Machine” trilogy of albums, I think it’s also the most convincing. Consider: on Replicas he fantasises about a violent dystopia that might be the near future or the present tense viewed through an opaque glass. On The Pleasure Principle he seemed to be getting more accustomed to being a machine. But on Telekon, the mirror cracks and he decides that being a machine isn’t as great a future as he once thought it was. Songs like “Sleep By Windows” and “Remember I Was Vapour” are directly aimed at his fans, or devotees at any rate, and throughout the record there is the gruelling feeling that this idea of stardom wasn’t really what he signed up for, that he maybe feels emptier than he did when he was thrashing out punk guitar with Tubeway Army and earning only a crust. Daft Punk released an album called Human After All, and while it is not a very good album, its title could be equally applicable to Telekon.

As with other recent entries, there is an uncompromising savagery to this music which puts it far beyond 2013’s idea of mainstream, and its achievement in getting to number one is at the very least admirable. I have to warn you that we are now firmly entering “my time” as far as this tale is concerned and so there may be an unnecessary residual bias on my part towards these records. But it also has to be recognised that this 1980 run of albums is extraordinary to the point of staggering; qualitatively, it’s one of the finest sustained sequences in all of Then Play Long (and is by no means over yet) and maybe the best of its decade (those anticipating unalloyed brilliance through 1981 and 1982 may, I fear, be disappointed; 1981 is one of the downright weirdest years that we’ll do).

And, set against the varying degrees of darkness that its peer albums offer, Telekon really sets new standards for bleakness. The stark sleeve design – red ink on black backgrounds, white dry ice and an airbrushed, vaguely threatening “weapon” which turned out to be a tube from Numan’s mother’s Hoover – is heartbreaking in how much of the “future” it still entails. I think “heartbreaking” is an apt adjective to use here, since the songs are almost all about disappointment and alienation, moving away from who, or what, the singer might once have been.

There are no halfway houses with Telekon; neither of Numan’s mid-1980 singles, “We Are Glass” or “I Die: You Die,” is included – “We Are Glass” pops up on the CD version in between “Sleep By Windows” and “I’m An Agent” and sounds awkwardly out of place, whereas “I Die: You Die” works much better as a bonus track afterthought – and although the music is texturally thicker and fuller than on The Pleasure Principle, with guitars returning to some form of prominence (particularly noticeable on the crunch of “I’m An Agent”), the gloom is also enlarged, and a sort of sustained poignancy is achieved by the use of the ARP Pro-Soloist analogue synthesiser, which provides the “weeping” vibrato that crops up regularly through each track (and is logically reminiscent of Joe Meek).

Hence songs like “This Wreckage” – a strange and backfiring choice for third single - sound both fuller and emptier, Numan’s voice wreathed in greater echoic resonance but virtually empty of any feeling (“Wipe off my face/Erase me…/It’s all just show”) with endlessly wandering and vacillating whole tone chord changes. There is a vastness of nothing about these songs; I am reminded of when I first listened to them, on a train rushing down from Glasgow, through a darkened, storm-tossed, uncaring post-industrial North towards the oasis of Oxford, just a couple of months after the album came out; in between these two cities it felt as though Britain were collapsing, and this was the collapse’s non-erasable soundtrack. The chorus is Japanese for “leave you soon,” sung wistfully over triplicate descending raindrops. You’d never think there was a future beyond this song.

Nor does the rest of Telekon offer much in the way of a future, at least not intentionally – note how this is the third album in this 1980 sequence to feature the head of its artist on the cover, looking somewhat startled and afraid. But where Peter Gabriel solved his dilemma by turning himself, or his self, towards the wider world, Numan seems keener to shut out any notions of “the wider world.” “The Aircraft Bureau,” for instance, focuses on a ghost D-day pilot, warning anyone thinking about getting on his ‘plane to take care they don’t end up like him. Musically, gentle piano filigrees play against fulsome Minimoog and Polymoog melancholy; Simple Minds “et al” are credited with the handclaps towards song’s end (who would have thought Simple Minds, of all groups, would make such a discreet, sideways entrance into this tale?). As with a lot of Numan’s other work of the period, the singer himself is hardly present, instead giving prominence to a bright, Japanese electro melody played by synths and strings (violin and viola are used with greater architectural grace and logic than on The Pleasure Principle).

The title track, presumably inspired in part by Aladdin Sane – both concept and song - is so fearlessly avant-garde that one seriously, albeit briefly, wonders what went wrong with consumers of music after 1980; the exclamation “This was a number one album??” makes yet another appearance. The music is stealthy, wary, the lyrics random (“My dog went AWOL, I blame you all”) but uncomfortable (“It’s hard to breathe, it’s hard to breathe”). Chris Payne’s piano seems to fight against the rest of the song; atonal, sparse, out of tempo or key, as though Misha Mengelberg had dropped into a Yellow Magic Orchestra session. The effect is most disturbing.

Numan fans say that he was daft not to release “Remind Me To Smile” as a single; it’s the catchiest song on the record, with especially adventurous bass playing from Paul Gardiner, but there’s an element, perhaps of distrust, which prevents it from being a singalong. Numan’s barked “We must laugh” sounds like “We are glass,” and the call-and-response tug-of-war with the backing vocalists (the rest of his band) becomes stranger and more claustrophobic as the song proceeds. “Sleep By Windows,” however, ticks along malevolently (particularly on the part of Ced Sharpley’s quietly threatening percussion) and here Numan sounds as though he wants to block everybody, and everything, out of his life; the fans who camp outside his house or his dressing room, whom he will never let in (“Do you cry?/Do you dream?/Do you…did you?” – although he eventually did marry a fan). The risk is of course that he closes down the whole world as a result.

Side two begins with the very rocky (not rockist) “I’m An Agent,” the closest the record comes to 1980 Ultravox. Then comes the great whale of melancholia: “I Dream Of Wires,” covered later that year by Robert Palmer, which may well be about the good, vanished times when nobody knew who Numan was but he was happy (“New ways, new ways…/I dream of wires, the old days”) but also carries an element of apocalypse aftermath; there are several occasions on this side when Numan sounds like the last man alive, and on “Wires” he addresses this explicitly. “The last electrician alive” he sings, or intones, and this is not the album’s only reference to the Walker Brothers song (on “This Wreckage”: “My mirrors tarnished with ‘no-help’“). Yet, singing it, he hardly seems bothered, as if dozing off for an afternoon nap; the song fades out with a dolorous whistle superimposed on a post-Low funk rhythm track. “Remember I Was Vapour” is what BS Johnson might have called (if he’d had the sense to live to hear it) Numan’s “You’re Only Human Like The Rest Of Them” song, but again looks towards a post-human future, where nothing is left but receptors and signifiers (and doesn’t Numan sound curiously cheerful chanting out his “Remember I had reasons” lines?).

“Please Push No More,” which I remember carried quite a sizeable resonance as a performance piece, sounds, however, like the last song ever recorded. Over nothing much beyond Denis Haines’ piano, Gardiner’s quiet bass and Numan’s own delicate Minimoog, the singer once more muses on the album’s themes of faces, glass and identity; he is shutting out his audience as gently and irreversibly as the Roger Waters of 1980, putting the last brick in that wall (from “Sleep By Windows”: “I could talk about my programme/Where everything is white”). “I Was Only Joking,” to put it mildly, isn’t even on the same continent (literally). Nor does the closing “The Joy Circuit” give much, if any relief; Numan sings about reasons, pain, crying and dying as though this is all that life, and perhaps fame, have left him with. As the track reaches its climax, Payne’s violin and Rrussell Bell’s viola turn manic and hyperactive, cruising an asteroid hoedown like Fairport Convention on a spaceship. The music, and its artist, fade into silence.

And it’s possible that the silence, the loneness (as opposed to solitude), is all that the Gary Numan of 1980 wanted. In this instance, the bonus tracks on the CD edition are instructive. The original concept for the album was a man who could move any object just by thinking about it but who, intoxicated by his power, eventually destroys both the world and himself. But Numan seems to have reshaped that notion into a more person-specific idea of wanting to be left alone; and so the CD trails off with three instrumentals, the last being a moderately respectful reading of the first of Satie’s “Trois Gymnopedies”; placid (but not unthreatening) electronics, a plaintive piano, no vocals, no need to explain or apologise for one’s self.

Before this decade is out, another Then Play Long entry will come along with a similar theme, including a track entitled “Leave Me Alone.” At the other end of this decade, the twenty-three-year-old Trent Reznor will listen doggedly to Telekon every day while putting together Pretty Hate Machine. In the next decade, another exhausted superstar will scream with dissatisfaction at fame, recognition and compromise – and he, who presumably would have heard Telekon in his youth, will, like the performer of “Leave Me Alone” but unlike Numan, not survive. This record foresees all of this, and comes with its own inbuilt warnings. Is this really what he wanted when he looked down at the park, and didn’t yet realise that he was gazing into a mirror?

AC/DC: Back In Black

(#235: 9 August 1980, 2 weeks)

Track listing: Hell’s Bells/Shoot To Thrill/What Do You Do For Money Honey/Given The Dog A Bone/Let Me Put My Love Into You/Back In Black/You Shook Me All Night Long/Have A Drink On Me/Shake A Leg/Rock ‘N’ Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution

It is the early spring of 1980. The four surviving members of AC/DC are waiting, rather impatiently, for Brian Johnson to show up for the audition they invited him to attend. Other highly able and experienced singers have been shortlisted for the job of replacing Bon Scott; one of them was Noddy Holder. But Johnson was an idol of Scott, who recalled seeing him, as frontman of the group Geordie, climaxing a gig by rolling about on the floor, screaming and screeching, and at the end of the performance being carted off in a wheelchair. Talk about Little Richard – although it transpired that Johnson was being carted off to hospital to treat an attack of acute appendicitis, hence his rolling around and screaming. So Johnson became the first name on AC/DC’s list.

Where is he, though? He was supposed to be here an hour ago. “Oh, HIM,” said someone else. “He’s downstairs playing pool with the roadies.” The group shrugged their shoulders and thought: oh well, at least he plays pool, and moreover he gets on with the roadies – always a good sign.

Eventually Johnson was brought upstairs to meet the musicians; he was visibly upset about Scott’s death, as upset as the rest of them were – there had been some question about whether AC/DC should carry on at all, but they agreed, goaded by the encouragement of Scott’s parents, that he would have wanted them to continue. But he was here – what you do fancy doing? “How about ‘Whole Lotta Rosie’?” Johnson suggested, “I do that on stage with Geordie.” Fair enough, and they launched into the song, realising that this guy with the flat cap was actually bloody good. Encouraged, Johnson then suggested doing “Nutbush City Limits.” Fine, the band thought – it’s a pretty straightforward rock number, we can handle that. Johnson then proceeded to bawl out the song, at times singing an octave higher than even Tina Turner managed. The startled group realised that this guy was a completely fucking awesome singer – not only did he completely fit in with what the group was doing, but he was also making them sound bigger and livelier than they’d ever done before - and they allowed themselves a smile; the first time they’d smiled since Scott died. He was in.

There was some initial disquiet amongst hard-bitten fans and parts of the music press; the guy out of Geordie??!!? You may remember that Johnson first turned up on Pure Gold On EMI singing lead on Geordie’s 1973 top ten hit “All Because Of You” sounding and looking pretty much the same as he did seven years later. But Geordie never really followed through their initial success and so by the turn of the decade were primarily a gigging concern; it is said that at the time he was called to the audition, Johnson was still living at home with his mother.

But it really doesn’t take much more than a cursory listen to Back In Black to realise that Johnson was completely the man for the job; and I find the above story extremely moving. Listening to the album, it still sounds like the new beginning it was surely meant to symbolise – the band wanted a completely black cover, but Atlantic demurred, asking for at least a grey outline of their logo so as not to confuse purchasers – and a chance to start over again when all seemed finished. I don’t need to emphasise the personal angle I have on this – read The Church Of Me to find out how I did it – but I naturally have greater empathy towards art, and people, who come out of a tunnel of darkness, even if they have to carve their way back into the light. I suspect even the embryonic New Order, up in Manchester, must have taken note of how AC/DC managed it.

I’m not sure, however, that even AC/DC thought that Back In Black would become the milestone record it did become, a record outsold in the States by just five others (even though it never made number one on Billboard). The only album by a rock band to sell more copies worldwide is Dark Side Of The Moon. In other words, the album became a titanic totem to those adolescents who had missed the sixties and seventies and wanted to rock in the present tense.

Back In Black is maybe the most straightforward album to appear in this tale so far; it knows exactly what it wants to achieve, does what it says on the tin, etc. Yet half of its ten songs refer, either directly or obliquely, to its deceased dedicatee. On “Shake A Leg,” for instance, a song about the kind of pissed-off teenage delinquent who would help form the record’s core audience over more than one generation, note should be made of the emphasis Johnson gives in each chorus to the words “Wake the dead.”

This is most evident on the opening “Hell’s Bells,” which, although it is really about a rather terrified Johnson on a dodgy flight with the rest of the group to Compass Point Studios in Nassau, where they had to deal with tropical storms, near-hurricane winds and so forth (hence the references to “rolling thunder, pouring rain,” hurricanes and lightning), also works as a threnody, beginning with the solemn tolling of a single bell, soon joined by the group, deploying an uncharacteristically slow but hard tempo reminiscent of Crazy Horse; you half expect Neil Young, rather than Johnson, to come in. The song is clearly a sequel to “Highway To Hell” but Johnson seems to be exulting in the world’s apparently imminent demise (he roars “Satan get ya!” with untrammelled delight).

The group were right, though; Johnson makes AC/DC sound bigger (as does producer Mutt Lange, who realises very early on that with a group this tight – Cliff Williams’ bass is absolutely at one with the Young brothers’ twin guitars all the way through the record – all he needs to do is make sure it’s recorded right and that it’s mixed up loud enough to sound good on car stereos). Where Scott’s lower register bluesy raunch puts one in mind of a superior bar band, Johnson’s squeal – he starts where the likes of Ian Gillan leave off, and stays there; truly in his mastery of the sustained false upper register he is rock’s Gato Barbieri – seems to avail the group to the world, a voice that turns songs into anthems, will make them come across at stadium level (I wonder how many post-1980 people eagerly lapped up Back In Black thinking that it was AC/DC’s first album?). How does he succeed where Holder’s Slade failed (in the USA, at least)? He’s more direct – paradoxically, his voice is pitched so high that his words come out more clearly – while the band, although natural swingers (check the lovely breakdown and build-up in the last third of “Shoot To Thrill” for proof of their swing), are rhythmically much more direct. And there’s no evidence of a tongue in anybody’s cheek.

No, when they do songs like “Given The Dog A Bone” (I know some sources give the title as “Giving” or “Givin’,” but that’s what it says on the original issue, on both sleeve and label) and “Let Me Put My Love Into You,” they mean it (even if “it” invariably turns out to be the one thing), they give us lyrics which at times make Sid the Sexist sound like Gloria Steinem but which are so comically overdrawn that they are impossible to take seriously; Angus Young’s schoolboy gear is the clue – AC/DC are, essentially, thirteen years old, designed primarily to appeal to disgruntled young teenage males who maybe don’t yet have any idea of what the opposite sex are like. The point where kids just want to tell their parents to go screw themselves but have no notion of what that might involve.

But, dammit, they can rock. The penthouse hooker scenario of “What Do You Do For Money Honey” knocks Rod Stewart back into the dog kennel; “Let Me Put My Love Into You” shows that Stones who might be boss. Everything is pared down, economical, with neat, abrupt endings to songs; only the first two tracks exceed five minutes. Angus and Malcolm Young have the greatest symbiotic understanding of any lead guitar pairing this side of the Stones; it doesn’t matter who’s soloing, they are not exhibitionists, they feed off each other and enhance the whole.

But side two is where The Hits are. I can’t even begin to think of the nascent hip hop generations inspired to rustle up their own dope beats because of the monolithic title track; how long had it been since Zeppelin sounded this alive? Charged with writing a tribute lyric to Bon which avoided the mawkish and sentimental, Johnson came up with something Scott would have been proud to sing, defiant and relevant (“I got nine lives, cat’s eyes,” “Getting loose from the noose,” “Forget the hearse, ‘cause I’ll never die”). The central riff is brilliant and the triple across-the-beat elisions are more than worthy of Zep.

“You Shook Me All Night Long” sees Johnson getting more than satisfied; I just recall how any dancefloor would be flooded, mainly by women, when this song came on, whether student disco or office party – the song is not just first-class rock, but damn near perfect pop, with everybody working and striving to make the song strut and resonate. “Have A Drink On Me” was controversial at the time, and not considered in the best of taste, but it’s clear that Johnson’s attitude to alcohol-induced oblivion is ambiguous; on one hand he is clearly enjoying how the pub or club is making him feel, while on the other he is mindful of what happened to Scott after a similar night at the Music Machine club, so his drunken euphoria is guarded (“Forget about the cheque, we’ll get Hell to pay”).

“Shake A Leg” is flawless hard rock for a generation missing Aerosmith and how things used to be; I incidentally note (although it was Lena who actually noted it) that the protagonists of this song and “What Do You Do For Money Honey” could be interchangeable, thinking of a young girl growing up at the time, not far from where Johnson came, who might have started as the subject of “Shake A Leg” but eventually came to be regarded by some as the subject of “Money Honey,” and whose favourite group was…AC/DC. But if you were a pissed-off kid in 1980 whose parents and teachers just dragged you down with their endless cajoling and admonitions, wouldn’t you want to lock yourself in your bedroom and play this record very loudly indeed?

The record ends with the poignant “Rock ‘N’ Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution,” which was popular enough to become a Top 20 single in the UK. Poignant not just because Johnson gives the finger to middle men and fence-sitters, but also because the song – played mid-tempo, with drummer Phil Rudd doing his best Bonham epic soundscaping (and how ironic that Bonham probably lived just long enough to hear Back In Black) – is a reclamation of something that seemed, in 1980, to have become forgotten; the power of rock ‘n’ roll, the spirit of Chuck Berry that powers all of these songs. And, of course, the memory of Bon Scott, which I feel is being heavily called upon here – Johnson sings, more than once, “We’re just talking about the future/Forget about the past,” while being careful to take with him the elements of the past that are worth preserving. “It’ll always be with us,” he says, “It’s never gonna die,” and he does so with such unapologetic fervour that you’re not quite sure whether he’s singing about rock ‘n’ roll, or Bon Scott, or both. What he is saying, though, and what the record says as a whole, is that nothing ever finishes, or at least shouldn’t be cut off before it is allowed to finish. “Rock ‘n’ roll ain’t gonna die…/Rock ‘n’ rolling will survive”; they saw an end, but also a way out, and a way out that also proved to be a point of entrance for so many people – it’s impossible to count (Frank Black? Bob Mould? Rick Rubin? KRS-One? INXS, another Australian-based rock band but containing no less than three brothers?) but the total number of people inspired by this record to get a guitar and embrace rock music over the ensuing decades probably runs into millions.

“Rock ‘n’ roll, rock ‘n’ roll,” muses/proclaims Johnson, right at the end of the record, “Is just rock ‘n’ roll.” And that’s what makes it – and Back In Black - rock ‘n’ roll; the best straight-down-the-line rock record in this tale since Led Zeppelin II, worthy of placing beside the first Elvis album and Never Mind The Bollocks. It is one of the best reasons for not committing suicide, or curtailing a blog, that I know.

Next: Wiry vapours.