1982: A YEAR OF SINGLES CHARTED This piece began life as part of a thread on the I Love Music message board to which I contributed in December of last year. It was written pretty much on the turn of a dime, and completely from memory (i.e. in my lunch break!), and I don't really need to make anything in the way of amendments to it, except perhaps to note that "Bring Me Closer" by Altered Images is one of the ten greatest singles of the '80s, which may retrospectively excuse my slight sniffiness towards them below. By way of explanation, the following is a list of capsule reviews of, and impressions on, every single to make the UK Top 40 during the year of 1982. The date of entry is followed by the artist and title; the number in brackets is the highest chart position that single reached. And yes, I owned, and still own, all the singles mentioned. Why 1982? Because the first half of it was the apex of New Pop; because in particular the chart for the week ending 29 May may well be the greatest Top 40 singles chart ever; most importantly, because I was 18, in my first year at university, and everything felt deeper and more colourful than it has done before or since. In a sense, it's the year in which my life actually started. Sadly from about June onwards there is a palpable qualitative decline, and the picture at year end was pretty poor, though not nearly as poor as the ghastly chart year which was 1983. It starts with a film theme and ends with Jimmy Tarbuck and Allen Ginsberg in retro-Spector dub conference. 9 Jan: Christopher Cross Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do) (7) - had been hanging around since October, but following the release of the dud Dudley pic over Xmas it took off. Sneered at by many, but not by Danny Baker or myself - a late Bacharach pearl with Cross' strangely mismatched asexual voice/visual persona (an early forerunner of Tiny Woods out of Ultrasound?) finely attuned. Moment of punctum: the endless echo after he sings the first half of the first line "Once in your LIFE..." and lets the unresolved major tone be superseded by the minor piano chord which follows it. Sax solo by David Sanborn. 9 Jan: Alton Edwards I Just Wanna (Spend Some Time With You) (20) - one of many sadly forgotten gems of the glory that was Britfunk. The extraordinary escalating interface between backing vocals and brass before being plunged back down to earth by the thundering rhythms. Clearly done on a Brit budget but lovely. 9 Jan: Electric Light Orchestra Ticket To The Moon/Here Is The News (24) - late-period nihilism from a by-then severely pissed-off Jeff Lynne. Not as naff as you'd think, but Neil Innes would have added the necessary acidity to make these songs really work. 9 Jan: Human League Being Boiled (6) - on the back of their Xmas number one, EMI, ahem, fast-produced this reissue. The Gang of Four's "Love Like Anthrax" sadly did not follow suit, but the bleakness of the song suited the white greyness of 1982's winter. 9 Jan: Mobiles Drowning In Berlin (9) - Eastbourne's finest Toyah wannabes come up with a preposterous Peter Powell-championed slice of faux-Isherwood angst. 9 Jan: Stranglers Golden Brown (2) - About heroin, as every schoolboy knows. Again, the ethereality of the vocal fadeout and Jet Black's so subtle it's hardly noticeable drumming make this song into a pop record. 16 Jan: Elkie Brooks Fool If You Think It's Over (17) - Efficient reading which got Chris Rea noticed. I dig Chris Rea, so be quiet at the back. 16 Jan: Lindsey Buckingham Trouble (31) - To date his only UK solo hit, sounding very much like a dry run for his subtly avant-garde production on Tango In The Night. Agreeably unnerving, but man does he need the Nicks. 16 Jan: Olivia Newton-John Landslide (18) - Almost on a par with "Physical," the proto-Trevor Horn drumming cascades take Olivia's vocals, and the whole production, to unexpected heights. 16 Jan: Mike Post feat. Larry Carlton Theme From Hill Street Blues (25) - It's, um, the theme tune. Still awaiting sample-isation by Nas or Scarface. 16 Jan: Shakin' Stevens Oh Julie (1) - Quite possibly the only cajun UK #1 single. If this had been Nick Lowe you'd be calling it a classic. 23 Jan: George Benson Never Give Up On A Good Thing (14) - Not as good as, but a bigger hit than, its predecessor "Turn Your Love Around." Reminds me of being stuck on a freezing, water-deprived train in a snowdrift in Gleneagles. 23 Jan: Gillan Restless (25) - Notable chiefly for Ian Gillan's attempts at a Glaswegian accent in the chorus, viz. "Hey Jimmeh! Ah'm gettin' rest-leeeesss." 23 Jan Daryl Hall & John Oates I Can't Go For That (No Can Do) (8) - The second hit single this month with a David Sanborn sax solo. Timmy Thomas upgraded to a Manhattan high-rise. Empty but effective. 23 Jan Japan European Son (31) - Weirdly Sylvian & Co. enjoyed two parallel runs of hits during their peak; the new ones on Virgin and the ambulance chasing ones on Ariola. This was an example of the latter. Definitely a glorified album track which had no business being a single. 23 Jan Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark Maid Of Orleans (The Waltz Joan Of Arc) (4) - One of the most avant-garde intros to a top ten hit ever? Radio 1 DJs used to chortle to listeners "It's OK, they're just tuning up hee hee." 23 Jan Rhoda Dakar & the Special AKA The Boiler (35) - The most bitterly sane record ever to make the Top 40. Too painful for repeated listens (which, coupled with the inevitable radio ban, probably explains why it didn't chart higher) but MUST be listened to once. 23 Jan Stiff Little Fingers Listen EP (33) - "To your heart" is what Jake Burns wanted you to listen to. Probably a number one now if the Stereophonics were to cover it. 23 Jan Theatre Of Hate Do You Believe In The Westworld (40) - As with most other Kirk Brandon enterprises, this, ToH's only top 40 entry (and as you can see, only just), is so patently absurd yet oddly believable. Notable for the backward rhythm/Max Steiner sample at the end; at the time Barney Hoskyns described it as sounding like "Norman Whitfield trapped in a refrigerator." 23 Jan Tight Fit The Lion Sleeps Tonight (1) - Not as good as the Nylons version. 23 Jan Stevie Wonder That Girl (39) - One of my absolute favourite Stevie songs; the hymnal descending chords of the long fadeout chorus aren't that far away from "Escalator Over The Hill." Absent from the new greatest hits collection, needless to say. 23 Jan XTC Senses Working Overtime (10) - Their biggest hit, taken from that model example of the strange genre of English pop which is essentially sane but tries repeatedly to break out of itself, "English Settlement" - after "Skylarking" probably their best '80s album. 30 Jan Bow Wow Wow Go Wild In The Country (7) - Oh McLaren, oh Lwin, the punters should have given you a hit with Prince Of Darkness 12 months ago! Now the point has dissipated and it's great to see you on TOTP but - you know - sometimes timing is everything in pop. 30 Jan Adrian Gurvitz Classic (8) - Written, apparently, in an attic. Because he's an addict. Brian Protheroe said it so much better with "Pinball" back in '74. DLT's favourite single of '82. 30 Jan Haircut 100 Love Plus One (3) - No need to add to what I said on CoM about this seductive masterpiece. Deservedly their biggest hit. 30 Jan Modern Romance Queen Of The Rapping Scene (Nothing Ever Goes The Way You Plan) (37) - This used the same Cheryl Lynn riff as Brother-D's "How We Gonna Make The Black Nation Rise" but eschewed the Robert Elms-friendly soapbox preaching of the latter in favour of a determinedly fake French female "rapper" who, as Danny Baker noted in his glowing NME review, probably came from Cheshunt. But that just adds to the inexplicable magic of this, Modern Romance's finest moment, and therefore their smallest hit. 30 Jan Diana Ross Mirror Mirror (36) - One of La Ross' ill-advised "rock-outs." Need I tell you that the word "wall" appears in the next line of the chorus? 6 Feb AC/DC Let's Get It Up (13) - The title track of "For Those About To Rock" was of course the standout on the album, but this agreeable rumpus did well enough for them, though not up to the admittedly hard to surpass standards of its predecessor "Back In Black." 6 Feb D Train You're The One For Me (30) - Yes, ONLY #30! One of the ten most important dance tracks of the decade. OK it did get a Paul Hardcastle makeover (i.e. the keyboards off "19" and much gurning on TOTP) three years later and did, uh, twice as well (#15) - but this is an URGENT AND KEY record. Years ahead of its time in its use of space and echo (see Inner City at the opposite end of the decade for proof of this). Classic classic classic. 6 Feb Earth Wind & Fire I've Had Enough (29) - A below par second single from the treading water "Raise!" album, this was EWF's last UK top 40 hit. 6 Feb Jets Love Makes The World Go Round (21) - Imagine, if you will, a Popstars version of the Stray Cats, covering a Perry Como "rocker" which was creaky at birth. Yes it was that bad. 6 Feb Soft Cell Say Hello Wave Goodbye (3) - Do you really need me to tell you how great this is? And how utterly ashamed David Gray should be even to imagine that stretching it out to eight minutes by means of his trademark "ohhh-arrrghs" could actually add to the imperfect perfection of this performance? Away with you, child. 8 Feb Toni Basil Mickey (2) - Actually released originally in the summer of '81 and played to death by DLT, and now inexplicably a big hit. I can't hate this remodelled Racey album track but I cannot penetrate it either. 13 Feb Fun Boy Three/Bananarama It Ain't What You Do It's The Way That You Do It (4) - Foreseeing trip hop a long way off, the joyful romp of the '40s original is buried beneath impenetrable and disturbing layers of percussion and just-beyond-tonal harmonies. Minimal and startling. 13 Feb Black Sabbath Turn Up The Night (37) - Ozzy long gone, Ronnie James Dio now on vocals. Supernaut it ain't. 13 Feb Depeche Mode See You (6) - Their first single without Vince Clarke, and at the time their biggest, this opens the mine of existentialist Merseybeat at which Martin Gore once excelled. 13 Feb J. Geils Band Centerfold (3) - The whistling chorus is not a million miles from Grandmaster Flash's "Birthday Party." The milk-filled drums in the video offers no ambiguity as to the content of this out-of-place locker room anthem. 13 Feb Jam Town Called Malice / Precious (1) - Sorry I can't talk about the Jam right now, or what happened in my life in relation to this single in particular. Pain pain pain. 13 Feb Robert Palmer Some Guys Have All The Luck (16) - One of the extraordinarily mentalist singles that Palmer had out in the early '80s. Compare this with Rod Stewart's drearily straight-faced reading of the same song two years hence - here the "lyrics" are all over the place, blurred, slurred, with Russell Mael-esque yelps added. The passion needs more sense than the words can make of them. Cubist pop. 13 Feb UB40 I Won't Close My Eyes (32) - The standard retort in reviews was, of course, "as difficult as this record makes it." 20 Feb Abba Head Over Heels (25) - Their worst chart performance since 1975's I Do I Do etc., this marked the point where Abba perhaps "grew out" of pop, became TOO real. "The Visitors" was the B-side. 20 Feb ABC Poison Arrow (6) - Again, do you really need me to tell you that this OUGHT to have been number one for 20 weeks? That Horn was completely right in saying that this used the Linn drum as Dylan used the acoustic guitar? Multi-dimensional, poly-referential - a fantastic, FANTASTIC record. 20 Feb Associates Party Fears Two (9) - OK, maybe less than 20 weeks to give the doomed MacKenzie and Rankine a spell at the top. A surrealist scenario which lyrically would not have been out of place in the work of Throbbing Gristle, set to an IMAGINED idyll of Abba/Bowie/Sylvester. The most subtly sexual performance on TOTP ever. A glory. THIS GOT INTO THE TOP TEN. 20 Feb Iron Maiden Run To The Hills (7) - Oh leave Bruce alone, what harm's he doing you? Actually The Number Of The Beast is a fine record, and this was the biggest single off it. 20 Feb Kraftwerk Showroom Dummies (25) - Rushed out after The Model had topped the charts a month previously. No need; their albums work as a whole and they exceeeded "singles." 20 Feb Madness Cardiac Arrest (14) - The lyrics here happened in reality to my dad in July 1981. I will say no more. 20 Feb Nolans Don't Love Me Too Hard (14) - Their best single, and yes the title meant exactly what it was supposed to mean. 27 Feb "The Original" Adam & The Ants Deutscher Girls (13) - Ambulance chasing from Decca. Off the "Jubilee" soundtrack. 27 Feb Foster & Allen A Bunch Of Thyme (18) - The only hit single of the '80s to include the lyric "lusty maiden," I think it's safe to say. You know the video for "My Lovely Horse?" Mick and Tony to a T. 27 Feb Goombay Dance Band Seven Tears (1) - The gimmick was that the lead singer doubled as a fire-eater. In the Boney M lineage. Its rapid ascent to the top was viewed with the same resigned dread that one views a safe plummeting out of a 28th floor window, about to land upon your head. You know what's going to happen but are equally aware that you can do nothing to stop it happening. 27 Feb Starsound Stars On Stevie (14) - The Dutch proto-bootleggers' last chart entry, with the apparent participation of the Wonder man himself. 6 Mar David Bowie Baal's Hymn (EP) (29) - Soundtrack of the BBC TV production of the Brecht play, music by Dominic Muldowney. Worthy. Brecht last in the Top 40 two years previously when DB essayed his version of "Alabams Song." 6 Mar Derek & The Dominoes Layla (reissue) (4) - The full seven and a half minute version on 12". DLT creamed himself over the possibility of this getting to number one. 6 Mar Julio Iglesias Quiereme Mucho (Yours) (3) - I liked "Begin the Beguine" - Ramon Arcusa's gloriously just-out-of-date orchestration (complete with syn-drums) made it a great soundtrack for driving down the Westway - but this, frankly, was yeuccchh. 6 Mar Imagination Just An Illusion (2) - Their first two albums are CLASSIQUE and this was their biggest hit; Swain and Jolley's finest moment (including subsequent Spandau and Bananarama work). 6 Mar Kool & Gang Take My Heart (You Can Have It If You Want It) (29) - Midtempo snorer from the otherwise pretty good "Something Special" LP. Covered bizarrely by Robert Palmer one year hence. 6 Mar Gary Numan Music For Chameleons (19) - Everyone thought it were Mick Karn on bass, but no it was Pino Palladino. I will hear nothing against the glider-flying nihilist Numan for he was/is GREBT! 6 Mar Pluto Your Honour (19) - The same plot as Shaggy's "It Wasn't Me" but scripted by Talbot Rothwell rather than Ben Stiller. 13 Mar Chas & Dave Ain't No Pleasing You (2) - Far and away their biggest hit, a luvly old singalong which was Chingford Tor Ascender's favourite single of '82. 13 Mar Classix Nouveaux Is It A Dream (11) - Sal Solo! "satisfactiiiiiiiiOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOn!" Oh my god the horror, the horror - you 18-year-olds are lucky to have missed out on this. 13 Mar Elvis Presley Are You Lonesome Tonight (25) - The corpsing version which we all know ("Shit! 14 years down the drain!" etc.). 13 Mar Leo Sayer Have You Ever Been In Love (10) - The David Gray of 1974 enjoys his last top ten entry. He rarely passes up the opportunity to remind us of his lack of chart success in the UK since. 13 Mar Visage The Damned Don't Cry (11) - Oh come on, if this were Ladytron you'd be calling it a classic! Highly uncool at the time, but I have a sneaking admiration for the man Strange and his works. 20 Mar Boomtown Rats House On Fire (24) - Geldof goes reggae, not very successfully. The last time that the top 40 would see him until Band Aid. 20 Mar Japan Ghosts (5) - Divine, existentialist, subjectivist, brilliant, proposing a new future for pop which no one took up. Aesthetic bookmarks: Cassidy's How Can I Be Sure (1972), Tricky's Aftermath (1994). The synth which sounds like a mourning trombone section. The heart lies in what is not played or heard, but still felt. 20 Mar Barbra Streisand Memory (34) - My mum prefers this to the Elaine Paige original. 20 Mar Bill Wyman A New Fashion (37) - Strangely mournful recognition of his imminent aesthetic redundancy; not a patch on "Je Suis Un Rock Star." 27 Mar Altered Images See Those Eyes (11) - "You don't care about" I don't care about WHAT, Grogan? That voice just put me off, as hard as Martin Rushent's production tried to convince me otherwise. 27 Mar Bucks Fizz My Camera Never Lies (1) - Wasn't this one of the weirdest number ones ever? Andy Hill, producer, obviously trying to do a Trevor Horn - this song is askew, its subject matter ungraspable, its Heatwave-borrowed middle-eight harmonies completely at odds with the rhythm. Like ACR and Dexy's, Bucks Fizz fell so short of emulating Dollar that they inadvertently created something different. 27 Mar Dollar Give Me Back My Heart (4) - Now look me in the eye. Brian Wilson would have been proud to make this record. Loss, loss of hope, maybe loss of life. "I'm Not In Love" (sneakily referred to in the intro) taken a step further. Van Day's "I...love...you" at 3/4 angles to the backing track. Again, Horn's unparalleled use of silence, suddenly erupting in a massed Thereze Bazar chorus of death with a crib from Yes buried underneath. Then a dwindling down to just one, distant, frightened voice: "Now you're gone." Jesus fucking Christ this song shakes me to my core. 27 Mar Elton John Blue Eyes (8) - Billy Joel-esque balladry which I rather like because of those petrol station synths, and again an astute, sun-filled use of echo. 27 Mar Shalamar I Can Make You Feel Good (7) - First of four ace singles from "Friends." Jeffrey had not had his haircut at this stage. 27 Mar Status Quo Dear John (10) - Sounds more like Chas & Dave than the then current Chas & Dave single. 3 Apr Monsoon Ever So Lonely (12) - Arguably the only musical talent ever to emerge from Grange Hill, Sheila Chandra's obviously pioneering proto-World Music, proto-trance anthem did not ensure future hits, but she became one of the finest improvising vocalists in this country. One of two sometime members of John Stevens' SME to have a hit single this year. 3 Apr Motorhead Iron Fist (29) - "YOU KNOW ME! EVIL EYE!" Lemmy and the boys arguably past their year-old peak (i.e. "No Sleep 'Til Hammersmith") and before their next peak ("Deaf Forever"). 3 Apr PhD I Won't Let You Down (3) - Fantastic, beautiful single by Jim Diamond and sometime Improv keyboardist Tony Hymas. Takes Hot Chocolate's "Put Your Love In Me" to a different but equally intense spiritual galaxy. When the cavernous organ enters at the song's climax it becomes a hymn. What Cope didn't QUITE achieve with "Tiny Children." 3 Apr Pigbag Papa's Got A Brand New Pigbag (3) - Whoopee, free jazz back in the top three for the first time since "Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick" even though the single had been out for a year already (its main radio champion, bizarrely, was DLT). Good marketing tactics ensured eventual success, i.e. delete the single for six weeks, watch the back orders pile up, then put it out again with a 12" mix. 3 Apr Rainbow Stone Cold (34) - A stentorian if somewhat laboured Russ Ballard ballad; Blackmore's last top 40 appearance. 3 Apr Roxy Music More Than This (6) - Where Ferry took an ambient detour into splendid isolation. His TOTP performance of this, dragging on a fag while fingering the keyboards, is an exercise in coolness. 3 Apr Shakatak Night Birds (9) - This peaked three places higher than their late '81 masterpiece "Easier Said Than Done." Slightly underdone Brit jazz-funk, but I don't mind it really. 10 Apr Bananarama/Fun Boy Three Really Saying Something (5) - Again, the "passion" of the Velvelettes' original is surgically excised and replaced by an almost a-passionate, blank re-reading. Sublime pop, of course. 10 Apr Bardo One Step Further (2) - The GREBTEST Brit Eurovision entry - no arguing! Andy Hill produces this epileptic eruption of unfulfilled sexual tension. But of course it didn't win - didn't Britain know there was a war on? That we ought to be reverent? Wishing for peace (See May for the winner). 10 Apr David Bowie Cat People (Putting Out Fire) (26) - Usually missed off Bowie best ofs for contractual reasons (cf. Donna Summer's "Down Deep Inside") this is surprisingly effective (Moroder produced) and much better than the pallid retread on "Let's Dance." Deserved to go much higher than it did. 10 Apr England World Cup Squad This Time (We'll Get It Right)/England We'll Fly The Flag (2) - Recently resurrected as a call for renewed life at the close of Saint Etienne's "Finisterre." There was a war on at the time. 10 Apr J. Geils Band Freeze-Frame (27) - This underperforming follow-up to "Centerfold" occupies an exact midway point between the Look's "I Am The Beat" and Billy Joel's "Tell Her About It." 10 Apr Haircut 100 Fantastic Day (9) - Again, see CoM for my celebration of this. "I'm SO in LOVE with YOU!" As Nick Heyward, at that time, deserved to be. 10 Apr Daryl Hall & John Oates Private Eyes (32) - Plodding AOR; a partial retread of the infinitely superior "Kiss On My List." 10 Apr Paul McCartney with Stevie Wonder Ebony & Ivory (1) - Amazingly, and shamefully, Stevie's first UK chart topper was achieved by this crass nursery rhyme about black and white people living atop a piano. 10 Apr Simple Minds Promised You A Miracle (13) - My God it is SUMMER and Simple Minds WERE shiny yellow New Pop. Wonderful, eternal; they sat down to write, not just a hit, but a transcendent pop record. And this should have been number one, oh yes it should. When this charted, Peter Powell delivered an ecstatic five-minute eulogy about how brilliant 1982 pop music was that the likes of Simple Minds and the Associates could have proper hits. And, at the time he needed to be, he was right. 10 Apr Spandau Ballet Instinction (10) - Paul Morley grumbled for decades afterwards, "Horn saved them!" He certainly did; this might be the most fundamentally undanceable record ever to make the top ten, but Horn turned base matter into absolute drum-cascading magic. An orgasm of a record. 17 Apr Sharon Brown I Specialize In Love (38) - One of many delicious, synth-crunching proto-electro R&B tunes as played by David Stubbs in St Clements back in the day (Vicki D's "This Beat Is Mine" a near miss at #42 was another stone classic). 17 Apr Hot Chocolate Girl Crazy (7) - This breezy good-natured canter by Errol and the boys was accompanied by a video depicting housewives doing mass Jane Fonda-style workouts in their back gardens. 17 Apr Barry Manilow Stay (Live) (23) - Not the Maurice Williams/Hollies/Jackson Browne one, but his own plod of a ballad to promote his chart-topping "Live In London" album. 17 Apr Rocky Sharpe & the Replays Shout Shout (Knock Yourself Out) (19) - Bland R&R retread, as only British blandness can be. Still, an improvement on Russ Abbot's "A Day In The Life Of Vince Prince" which had crawled to #61 back in February. 17 Apr Kim Wilde View From A Bridge (16). The second of Kim's trilogy of death/alienation singles, this one actually culminates in a suicide. The next, her masterpiece "Child Come Away" managed only #43. See CoM for fuller discussion. 17 Apr Yazoo Only You (2) - Sorry, but I never got with Alison Moyet's "real" vocals, nor with Vince Clarke's overly plinky pop. On eternal rotation on my next door neighbour's stereo in college in the summer of 1982. 24 Apr Joan Jett & Blackhearts I Love Rock 'N' Roll (4) - Britney go away. Much brighter and harder-hitting than the Arrows' original, the punctum here is in the sustained guitar C which hangs over the final chorus. 24 Apr Junior Mama Used To Say (7) - Must admit I preferred the rawer original single mix of this which came out in the summer of '81 (where the horn lines continue all the way behind Junior in the fadeout) but this cleaned-up US remix certainly did the business, transatlantic-wise. 24 Apr Patrice Rushen Forget Me Nots (8) - More wonderfully seductive R&B, quoted by George Michael in "Fastlove" 14 years later as recognition of what he, and perhaps all of us, lost. 24 Apr Candi Staton Suspicious Minds (31) - On Sugarhill records (??), this uninspired discofied retread simply begs the question WHY? 24 Apr Shakin' Stevens Shirley (6) - Possibly the worst single ever to make the top 40, I have suddenly decided, certainly the most cliched lyrics, formulaic to formica level. Appalling waste of vinyl. 24 Apr Stutz Bearcats/Denis King Orchestra The Song That I Sing (Theme From We'll Meet Again) (36) - Oh hang on, how could I have forgotten this? The theme from a popular ITV series about neurotic WWII pilots starring Richard Kiley and Susannah York. The Stutz Bearcats used to pollute Saturday night TV with their endless smug appearances on The Two Ronnies, Seaside Special, etc. - an intellect and awareness-free Brit Manhattan Transfer. 1 May Queen Body Language (25) - Very noticeably omitted from any of the three Greatest Hits volumes, when Queen were trying to go all Eurodisco and spacious. An interesting failure in maximalist minimalism. Some awareness of Ze Records is vaguely evident. 1 May Scotland World Cup Squad We Have A Dream (5) - The GREBTEST footie song ever, forget your "World In Motion" - John Gordon Sinclair, BA Robertson and the boys say it all (would that they had). "IT'S NO' THE BALL YER KICKIN' YA EEJIT - IT'S ME!" 1 May Tight Fit Fantasy Island (5) - Cod-Abba, essentially, with an early appearance of cod-Horn drumrolls. Morley said in the NME that this was better than "Led Zeppelin III." Can anyone ever prove him wrong? 1 May Tottenham Hotspur FA Cup Final Squad Tottenham Tottenham (19) - With Chas & Dave of course. "Tottenham Tottenham/No one can stoppenham/We're gonna do it like we did last year." Indeed they did, right down to necessitating a replay. To their credit, they ensured that, on their TOTP appearance, the two Argentinians were prominently placed at the front. 8 May Associates Club Country (13) - The most sexual performance on TOTP EVER - Billy Mac and Martha Muffin ravishing each other like defrocked cardinals. A joy, a rapture and a wonder. 8 May Blondie Island Of Lost Souls (11) - Save my soul from cod-reggae, more like. 8 May Depeche Mode The Meaning Of Love (12) - As breezily yet ominously sunny as a postman bringing a letter postmarked Aldershot and containing a white feather to your door, this was another Gore masterpiece of misericordia. 8 May Fun Boy Three The Telephone Always Rings (17) - Almost demented in its unspoken paranoia, the sneering brass of the Swinging Laurels added to the single mix. As "un-pop" a pop record as Bowie's "Sound And Vision" was five years previously. 8 May Nicole A Little Peace (1) - The German nun who won Eurovision because we should all love each other and not drop nasty bombs and certainly not make post-modernist New Pop while our boys are getting killed. Puke. 15 May ABC The Look Of Love (4) - Smokey Robinson sings Barthes, produced by Meek, Spector and Messiaen. One of the greatest pop singles AND singles ABOUT pop ever made. No more needs to be said. 15 May Charlene I've Never Been To Me (1) - Dysfunctional! Where's the TV movie with Cheryl Ladd and Brian Dennehy? What the fuck was this doing on Motown? 15 May Kid Creole & the Coconuts I'm a Wonderful Thing Baby (4) - Or "Wherever I Lay My Hat" without the guilt and 20 times the easy swagger. Again they SHOULD have had the big hit 12 months previously with "Maladie D'Amour" but it was good to have them around. 15 May Duran Duran Hungry Like The Wolf (5) - Do do do do do do do do do do do do do do doooooooooooooooo. Who needs say more? 15 May Iron Maiden The Number Of The Beast (18) - The title track of an album which may have been far more important and influential than you realised. "The Prisoner" was my favourite track. 15 May UB40 Love Is All Is Alright (29) - What? Still alive? 22 May Altered Images Pinky Blue (35) - Oh go and speak to Mike Chapman if you want another proper hit! 22 May Adam Ant Goody Two Shoes (1) - A tribute to Kevin Rowland! He needed three stages to accommodate his TOTP performance of this! What a showbiz something or other! His first Antless single. 22 May Genesis 3 x 3 EP (10) - Lead track "Paperlate" I liked. An underrated singles band, generally. 22 May Japan Cantonese Boy (24) - The haiku-like signoff from "Tin Drum" works better in that context ("Sons Of Pioneers" as a single - sigh) but excellent all the same. 22 May Madness House Of Fun (1) - 'Tis pity that the genuine goodwill felt by every sane person when Madness finally made it to # 1 was offset by the fact that this wasn't one of their better singles, though it works well as a standard Norf Lahndon coming of age odyssey. "Our House" was more poignant, "Shut Up" more powerful. 22 May Prelude After The Goldrush (28) - Originally this acappella Neil Young cover was a hit in '74, but for some unknown reason it was rerecorded and resurfaced in the charts (I think Noel Edmonds might have been to blame). Desperation expressed even more quietly, but why? 22 May New Order Temptation (29) - Yet again, further comment is fruitless. Everyone knows how important, and how joyful, this record is. The butterfly emerges from a reborn chrysalis. 22 May Toyah Brave New World (21) - Oh leave us alone you Tory luvvie whinger! ("Cheer up love!" - K Chegwin on "Cheggers Plays Pop") 29 May Echo & the Bunnymen The Back Of Love (19) - Mac finally has a proper hit, while "Porcupine" is undergoing a prolonged and painful birth in the studio. 29 May Diana Ross Work That Body (7) - Its sub-Jane Fonda every day in every way ladies I'm getting better and better message is fatally undermined by the drum intro, which pays tender tribute to Max Wall. 29 May Siouxsie & the Banshees Fireworks (22) - Phenomenal autumnal pop in summer; a taster for the glory that was/is "A Kiss In The Dreamhouse." 29 May Soft Cell Torch (2) - Has to be heard in its full-length 12" format with Almond beseeching Cindy Ecstasy to understand his passion in the long discursive middle section. 5 June Beatles The Beatles Movie Medley (10) - A singularly incompetent sub-Starsound cut and paste job on sundry Beatles songs wot appeared in their films, to promote a barrel-scraping compilation entitled, er, "Reel Music." Who the Lennon could possibly spend ¸1.25 on this and play it repeatedly? 5 June Belle Stars Iko Iko (35) - The erstwhile Bodysnatchers reappear in the top 40. Here they lose out to Natasha but in the US it is a considerably bigger hit some years later. 5 June Bow Wow Wow I Want Candy (9) - A one-sided 7", but really not many people were still listening by now. 5 June Cars Since You're Gone (37) - Inexplicable appearance for this mediocre "I've been OK no I haven't really" also-ran from Ocasek & Co, particularly when you realise that "You Might Think" never even had a sniff at the top 40 here. 5 June Natasha Iko Iko (10) - She was Natasha England, and came from Hamilton (the one down the road from where I grew up, not the one in Canada). Completely unremarkable. The follow-up was, amazingly, a reading of Patti Palladin's "Boom Boom Room." 5 June Stevie Wonder Do I Do (10) - Complete joy and reaffirmation of life, this record is, down to its cameo by Dizzy Gillespie. Hear how the brass and horns swell up behind Stevie in the final climax, taking him out of your Selves. Fucking genius, even in 1982. 12 June A Flock Of Seagulls Space Age Love Song (34) - Their US biggie "I Ran" stopped at #43 here, but this sub-Buggles weedy techno-ballad thing did slightly better. 12 June Odyssey Inside Out (3) - Newly revitalised by its inclusion in the just-released Wild Bunch mix CD, this is, like all other Odyssey singles, sublime urbane R&B. "Like the words here in this song, you'll go on and on and on...without her." Nathalie you have to keep telling me that this is true. 12 June Queen Las Palabras De Amor (17) - The one trad moment on their "Hot Space" album, a rather routine Mercury ballad. The only track from this album to appear on any of their Greatest Hits collections is "Under Pressure." 12 June Rolling Stones Going To A Go-Go (Live) (26) - From the "Still Life" album. Think to yourself - how desperately do I really REALLY need to hear this? 12 June Shalamar A Night To Remember (5) - Jeffrey's had his haircut, read his Paul Morley and what do you know, he's on TOTP, trapped in a telephone booth. Pity poor old resolutely mulleted Howard Hewett who did all the actual, er, singing and writing and things. 12 June Status Quo She Don't Fool Me (36) - Titles like these are better straight men than Ernie Wise. You know what this sounds like already. You could probably sing it. 12 June Midge Ure No Regrets (9) - Done, apparently, because Ure thought that the Walker Brothers' version "lacked balls." This from someone who ruthlessly, erm, was influenced by "The Electrician" when he made "Vienna." 19 June Bucks Fizz Now Those Days Are Gone (8) - Tommy Vance remarked on the top 40 rundown after playing this record, and after a respectful pause: "That is an immaculate pop record." As indeed it is. What the hell happened to "us"? We were happy. "I can't face the thought of life without you." Harmonies worthy of "Pet Sounds." "And we couldn't see where we were going wrong...now those days are gone." Mike Nolan never sung better or truer words in his life. 19 June Cheri Murphy's Law (13) - Bonkers but brilliant groove of a record starring a speeded-up proto-scrub to whom nothing but bad things happen, for all of which he is responsible. 19 June Dollar Videotheque (17) - The greatest and bleakest pop single ever made. They met, loved, parted and now exist only as ghosts on either side of a perceived screen. I repeat, Bazar's concluding descent of "only ghosts are lovers on the screen" in tandem with J J Jeczalik's Fairlight is the most chilling vocal in the history of pop. 19 June Lynyrd Skynyrd Free Bird (EP) (re-entry) (21). It was there in '76, came back in '78, and now was back again for no reason other than that it was out on 12" for the first time. In those days this was still a selling point. 19 June Steve Miller Band Abracadabra (2) - Sounds like a psyched-out Squeeze, particularly in the album version's extended fadeout, where the song just vanishes, "Fly Like An Eagle"-style. Not helped by TOTP Legs & Co interpretation which guest-starred a magician who may or may not have been the Great Soprendo. 19 June Gary Numan We Take Mystery (To Bed) (9) - Fuck knows what that means (unless that's what it means). Basically "Music For Chameleons Part 2" and Numan's last top tenner. 19 June Roxy Music Avalon (13) - A regretful retreat into a Prospero's cell of nothingness. That's what "Avalon" the album is about. How come Ferry and Eno ("Ambient 4: On Land") ended up in the same place anyway? 19 June Leo Sayer Heart (Stop Beating In Time) (22) - Sayer does the Gibb Brothers, and a lovely song it is too with that same vaguely sinister chord progression, slightly reminiscent of the Stranglers' "La Folie." 19 June Shakatak Streetwalkin' (38) - A ripoff of "Street Life." But not as good. 26 June Captain Sensible Happy Talk (1) - He claims that he sings "Golly baby I'm a lucky cunt" and no one got it. He was lucky to get away with this irretrievably tacky taxpayer of a record - at the time, this recorded the biggest leap ever to number one, from the previous week's #33, but only stayed on top for two weeks before making an equally rapid descent. 26 June Clash Rock The Casbah (30) - Weird, huh? Top five in America, only #30 here. That's what you get for not doing TOTP "on principle" chaps. Subsequent reissue in 1991 got to #15. 26 June David Essex Me & My Girl (Night-Clubbing) (13) - A late entry in Essex's archive of weird pop singles; a stealthy creep of a record, and his last single to sound even remotely avant-garde. 26 June Imagination Music & Lights (5) - Again, you see, it's the implied minor key which undermines the celebration apparently being sung about in this song. Poignant all the way through. 26 June Visage Night Train (12) - the 12" of this is ESSENTIAL readers, especially where Rusty Egan goes mentalist on his drumkit at the climax. Their last top 40 hit. 3 July AC/DC For Those About To Rock (We Salute You) (15) - The title track and crowning glory of their gold-covered album. But wouldn't everyone have it on the album by now anyway? 3 July Bananarama Shy Boy (4) - Exit the FB3, enter Swain and Jolley, enter a certain compromise. But what the hell, it's the Shangri-Las without the pain. As yet. 3 July Irene Cara Fame (1) - Two years old, but revitalised by the TV show. Loved more than you might care to acknowledge. 3 July Dexy's Midnight Runners & the Emerald Express - Come On Eileen (1) - Altogether now, CELTIC SOUL BROTHERS! It should have been the CELTIC SOUL BROTHERS! Undeniably good to have Kevin R back at number one, and undeniably effective as a cathartic release after the tension and agony of "Too-Rye-Ay," but do you really want to hear this again in this disco? I was asking myself that question even then. 3 July Jam Just Who Is The Five O'Clock Hero (8) - German import which sold on the back of the B-side, the otherwise unavailable "The Great Depression." 3 July Japan I Second That Emotion (9) - No you don't, David. You knew better than this even then and probably squirmed when this got into the top ten as much as we did. 3 July Paul McCartney Take It Away (15) - You see, at his best (i.e. 1978-82) Danny Baker as a critic was OTM. The punctum in this Macca song is the ecstatic brass which enters right at the song's death; his best use of horns since "Got To Get You Into My Life." 3 July Trio Da Da Da (2) - If this was Blur you wouldn't necessarily say it was a classic. Still they got there, whereas DAF didn't. 10 July Brat Chalk Dust - The Umpire Strikes Back (19) - "Who Do You Do?" also-ran Roger Kitter, who probably doesn't even warrant inclusion in "The Entertainers," made a quick buck by this gruesomely unfunny and distinctly un-McEnroe sounding McEnroe pisstake. 10 July Hot Chocolate It Started With A Kiss (5) - One of the most heartbreaking acknowledgements of the impermanence of youth, of relationships, in pop. You know even from the whispered "you don't remember me, do you?" beneath the first chorus that there will be an unhappy ending. In many ways the failure of the Other to recognise the singer is worse than if she had died. Now she exists, but only as an empty vessel for his forlorn fantasies. "I thought life was always good! I thought you always would be mine!" exclaims Brown, almost petulantly, as if he's been refused a second helping. Which of course he has. "Walking down the street came...the star of my love story." Her failure to recognise him is as if he had never actually existed. It's a denial of his own life. "I never thought it would come to this." There are little more shattering declarations in pop than that. 10 July Junior Too Late (20) - A dull and worthy song about wife-beating, which subject should be neither dull nor worthy. The album was a big disappointment. 10 July Pigbag The Big Bean (40) - A World Cup tribute, apparently. Their point had already been made. 10 July Patrice Rushen I Was Tired Of Being Alone (39) - There's a rapid-fire additional two-liner to the latter choruses on this record which are sexier than anything that side of Janet Jackson. 10 July Donna Summer Love Is In Control (Finger On The Trigger) (18) - Summer meets Quincy Jones, does an "Off The Wall" and it's terrific. Still an undervalued album. 10 July Wavelength Hurry Home (17) - A deathly plodding MoR ballad which DLT and Simon Bates adopted as an anthem for soldiers coming home from the Falklands. Vomit. 17 July Belle Stars The Clapping Song (11) - They did better with this second lame cover version. 17 July Elkie Brooks Nights In White Satin (33) - Overwrought screeching and orchestration ruin this song which is actually about an inarticulable passion. It needs to be sung QUIETLY. 17 July Firm Arthur Daley (E's Alright) (14) - A sub-Chas & Dave "tribute" to the "Minder" character by disaffected ex-Rubettes. Five years later they would get to number one with "Star Trekkin'". Shortly after that one of them ended up as one of the KLF's backroom boys. 17 July Cliff Richard The Only Way Out (10) - Cliff's unassailably great run of singles from 1976-1981 had ended with "Wired For Sound" and this is somnolent AOR which goes nowhere and emotes less. 17 July Yazoo Don't Go (3) - "I ain't never gonna let you go!" threatens Moyet. Oh go on, I'll give you a tenner, you're crushing my ribs! 24 July Blondie War Child (39) - The 12" of this is a minor masterpiece. It never appears on any of their best of compilations, but it's one last gasp of life from them before they disintegrated. 24 July Kid Creole & the Coconuts Stool Pigeon (7) - "Tropical Gangsters" was rubbished in the press at the time. Doesn't get played as much as "Off The Coast Of Me" round my way but considerably more so than "Fresh Fruit In Foreign Places." Smart and hip. 24 July Cure The Hanging Garden (34) - Smiffy and the lads had only hitherto had one top 40 appearance, with "A Forest" in 1980. After this unexpected entry from their defiantly uncommercial "Pornography" album, they had to reinvent themselves. Oddly, "Let's Go To Bed" missed the 40, but "The Walk" put them in the top 20 for the first time about a year after this. 24 July Hayzi Fantayzee John Wayne Is Big Leggy (11) - Jeremy Healy and Kate Garner infamously doing it doggystyle on TOTP to this sub-Bow Wow Wow romper room of a record. Incredibly, Culture Club were already being dissed in favour of this lot in the NME and the Face, even before they'd had a hit. 24 July Madness Driving In My Car (4) - Acknowledged by the band themselves as a stopgap single, this is a pretty unremarkable canter which doesn't prepare us at all for their autumnal masterpiece of an album "The Rise And Fall." 24 July Stranglers Strange Little Girl (7) - They always managed to be more menacing, the quieter they got, just like the third Velvets album. This was the first song they ever wrote in 1974, and would have sounded as out of kilter in the charts then as it did here. 24 July Talk Talk Today (14) - A surprisingly long chart run for this, Mark Hollis & Co's second single. They weren't quite out of the "Duran support band" woods, and although the ambition was already evident, it wasn't until 1986's "The Colour Of Spring" that art started to break through. 31 July Bad Manners My Girl Lollipop (My Boy Lollipop) (9) - Please, just walk away. You don't need to know. Really you do not need to know. 31 July Boystown Gang Can't Take My Eyes Off You (4) - The hi-NRG cover on which the Pet Shop Boys based their later Bono deconstruction. I'm a stern, unbending Valli/Williams adherent as far as this song's concerned. Anyway, "Cruisin'" is the B Gang's undisputed masterpiece. 31 July Sheena Easton Machinery (38) - The Bellshill lass goes electropop, not very well (certainly not as well as 1981's berserk "Just Another Broken Heart" with its freeform slide-whistle solo). One year later we had "Sugar Walls" so the quality of your collaborators does matter. 31 July Fun Boy Three Summertime (18) - Unremarkable stopgap Gershwin cover. Not poignant. 31 July Survivor Eye Of The Tiger (1) - Worked surprisingly well in the context of Rocky III and as an addendum to it. Perfectly fine pop record - knows its own limitations and does exactly what it says on the tin. 7 Aug Associates Love Hangover/18 Carat Love Affair (21) - Oh my God, if you're going to do Diana Ross, don't be all worthy and reverential; find the punctum in the songs! The reading of "Love Hangover" here isn't as determinedly mentalist as the Peel session version recorded earlier in the year, but it betrays a mischief which even in the late summer of 1982 seemed to be slipping from pop's mainstream grasp. 7 Aug Kool & Gang Big Fun (14) - Doesn't measure up to "Get Down On It" but a reasonable dancefloor filler of its month. 7 Aug Pink Floyd When The Tigers Broke Free (39) - From "The Wall" soundtrack; Waters' dad gets blown up at Anzio and we all have to suffer for it again. 7 Aug David Sylvian/Ryuichi Sakamoto Bamboo Houses / Bamboo Music (30) - Oddly directionless ambient musings which don't measure up to "Taking Islands In Africa" from 1980 or indeed the imperishable "Forbidden Colours" from '83. 7 Aug Tom Tom Club Under The Boardwalk (22) - Weymouth and Franz now had twice as many top 40 hits as Talking Heads. Was it worth it? This lacklustre Drifters-go-Ze cover certainly wasn't. 7 Aug Toto Coelo I Eat Cannibals Part 1 (8) - Involving, famously, Bob Holness' daughter, and necessitating precisely none of your time. An "Opportunity Knocks" idea of "raunchiness." 14 Aug Captain Sensible Wot (26) - "He said CapTAIN! I said WOT?" The heartfelt follow-up "Croydon" failed to trouble the scorers. 14 Aug David Christie Saddle Up (9) - He was French! I think. Would have sounded naff even in 1973. Gary Davies liked it. 14 Aug Thomas Dolby Windpower (31) - Too damned askew ever to be a pop star, this was the first of Dolby's very intermittent top 40 entries. The quasi-nuclear greyness hanging over the pylons of this song suggests that there is no future. Astonishingly, the Magnus Pyke-guesting Wacko Jacko fave "She Blinded Me With Science" only managed #49 in the UK later the same year. 14 Aug Kids From Fame featuring Valerie Landsburg Hi-Fidelity (5) - Again, an extremely adequate pop record which would not unduly trouble me if I never heard it again. The "Kids From Fame" TV soundtrack album took turns with "Lexicon Of Love" in the number one spot over the summer. 14 Aug Modern Romance featuring John DuPrez Cherry Pink & Apple Blossom White (15) - Not even remotely ironic sexless retread of the Perez Prado perennial. Exit Geoff Deane to a career of crap sitcoms thereafter, excepting one true moment of genius - Divine's "You Think You're A Man." 14 Aug Rockers Revenge featuring Donnie Calvin Walking On Sunshine (4) - The first Arthur Baker production to make it into the UK Top 40 (Bambaataa's "Planet Rock," arguably a more important and influential record than almost anything discussed here, stiffed at #52). Important, influential, brought Eddy Grant back to our attention; still sounds sublime. 12" required for maximum effect, preferably in rotation with Larry Levan's mix of the Peech Boys' "Don't Make Me Wait" (#49, Nov '82). 14 Aug Sting Spread A Little Happiness (16) - It's ironic you see! He's demonic! He brings the girl back to life. All very dodgy, like most of Dennis Potter's musings, and too dark perhaps for "Happy Talk"-style success. The B-side of the 12", however, includes the Police's finest five minutes, the incendiary "I Burn For You." 21 Aug Chicago Hard To Say I'm Sorry (4) - I love what DJ Hype did to this with his 1996 "Hold Me Now" (it never seems to have gained official release) but this is glutinous slop. 21 Aug Duran Duran Save A Prayer (2) - Where LeBon and friends, frankly, try to do Japan. I liked it. Pity they didn't risk putting out "The Chauffeur" as a single - might have been their biggest hit. 21 Aug Haircut 100 Nobody's Fool (9) - The final gasp from an audibly deflated band. Worth it, though, for the terrific workout on the B-side "October Is Orange" which presages Working Week's "Venceremos" by a couple of years. 21 Aug Queen Backchat (40) - The fourth single from "Hot Space." Backchat is, apparently, "takin' up my energy." It sounded like it. 21 Aug Carly Simon Why (10) - Brilliant autumn-period Chic masterpiece. The punctum here is how the synth wavers (Boards of Canada!) seemingly offpitch behind Simon's vocals, thus admitting the existence of vulnerability). 21 Aug Soft Cell What (3) - Efficient but pointless retread of Judy Street Northern Soul classic. Should have re-released "Memorabilia," Phonogram. 21 Aug Shakin' Stevens Give Me Your Heart Tonight (11) - Stuck for 98 weeks at number 11 as well, as I remember. Ballad set to "Three Steps To Heaven" rhythm. The Phoenix of the New fails to fly from the ashes of the past. 21 Aug Wonder Dogs Ruff Mix (31) - A disco record with barking dogs fed through the then new Fairlight contraption. Much loved by Simon Bates and DLT. 28 Aug Depeche Mode Leave In Silence (18) - Gore starts to go Goth and a wee bit industrial. 1983 is really when they hit their stride with "Construction Time Again." 28 Aug Grandmaster Flash & Furious Five The Message (8) - It's easy to forget how powerful this record actually still sounds, especially when set against the bland R&B of the rest of their debut album. The sort of cold shower which Miss E and the Roots now presumably still want hip hop to receive, it is brutal and completely unsentimental, setting the tone for a generation's worth of gangsta rap. Sonic architecture, however, was still some way off. 28 Aug Evelyn King Love Come Down (7) - "Shame," the finest pop record of 1978, only got to #39 (though it was on the top 75 for 23 weeks), but this was pretty good in itself, if now a bit old-sounding. 28 Aug Gary Numan White Boys & Heroes (20) - One suspects that by this stage the gliders were taking precedence. 28 Aug Showaddywaddy Who Put The Bomp (In The Bomp-A-Bomp-A-Bomp) (37) - Strange to find Showaddywaddy still nibbling at the top 40 as late as 1982? Interesting that their star declined almost exactly in coincidence with Shakin' Stevens' rise. This was, literally, the last gasp of an exhausted enterprise. Though it would not prepare us for their astonishing double-header gig with Einsturzende Neubauten at the Kilburn National the following year. 28 Aug Simple Minds Glittering Prize (16) - A eulogy to found love. Abba as they could now not be. A beautiful and eternal record. 28 Aug UB40 So Here I Am (25) - A sort of low calorie "Ghost Town" which sort of hints at what was to come with Roots Manuva, etc. - "sitting at a bus stop, wishing I was somewhere else." The band sounded marooned. 4 Sept ABC All Of My Heart (5) - Somewhere on ILM is the definitive commentary on this, written by Dr C. The one time on the album when Fry's voice is alone, when we finally get to hear HIM. The resultant collapse. The unfulfillable dream of an orchestration. The saxophone which will play forever anyway, fadeout or no fadeout. 4 Sept Dire Straits Private Investigations (2) - DLT's greatest single of all time. A typically dull plod which doesn't even lick the boots of Viv Stanshall's "Big Shot," it probably only gains its kudos from its length, regardless of content. An unnecessary hit. 4 Sept Jennifer Holliday And I'm Telling You I'm Not Going (32) - Forget yer Careys, yer Houstons, yer Dions - you want wailing and screaming, well listen to THIS. From the musical "Dreamgirls," J-Ho pleads with every atom in her body to hang on to life, to cling to the Other, even if the Other is only a mirror. More ham than the Waitrose deli counter, but I dig it. 4 Sept Shakatak Invitations (24) - There is no discernible tune to this record, but Bill Sharpe's piano tootles along regardless. 4 Sept Shalamar There It Is (5) - The best of the "Friends" tetralogy of singles; the same aspiration to, and recognition of, the "higher love" which you find throughout "New Gold Dream." 11 Sept Sylvester/Patrick Cowley Do You Wanna Funk (32) - The last gasp of the "Mighty Real" man; surprisingly effective proto-electro. 11 Sept Mari Wilson Just What I Always Wanted (8) - Punters, they always get it wrong. Two classic singles earlier on in 1982 - "Beat The Beat" and "Baby It's True" both worthy of Saint Etienne, both worthy number ones - and then a dud, and whaddya know, it's a hit. Pah. 18 Sept Animals House Of The Rising Sun (re-entry of reissue, as Guinness has it) (11) - WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY? 18 Sept Adam Ant Friend Or Foe (9) - The point at where the Ant audibly destructs. A cringeworthy TOTP where various Radio 1 DJs were freeze-framed dancing to this record - including Jonathan King. 18 Sept Culture Club Do You Really Want To Hurt Me (1) - In his Smash Hits review, David Hepworth compares Boy George's voice to Dennis Brown. So undemonstrative a record this is, so regretful, so quiet in its bemused grief - so misunderstood a number one. 18 Sept Dollar Give Me Some Kinda Magic (34) - Dollar figure they don't need Trevor to make good records. Wrong. 18 Sept Fat Larry's Band Zoom (2) - Old school R&B ballad, would have been a hit for the Stylistics ten years previously, or Boyz II Men ten years hence. Very nice. 18 Sept Jam The Bitterest Pill (I Ever Had To Swallow) (2) - The Style Council were already halfway in. 18 Sept Pinkees Danger Games (8) - An utterly pointless Beatles pastiche which apparently got to #8 by dubious means. 25 Sept Clash Should I Stay Or Should I Go/Straight To Hell (17) - The former was destined to get to #1 nine years hence, but here is a mere advert for "Combat Rock." Note the subtle Hendrix paraphrasing in the string line of "Straight To Hell." 25 Sept Hot Chocolate Chances (32) - A very workaday follow-up to a masterpiece. 25 Sept Imagination In The Heat Of The Night (22) - "All I Want To Know" should have been the next single. The bitterest yet most fragile British R&B ballad I can think of. 25 Sept Musical Youth Pass The Dutchie (1) - Everyone from Peter Powell to John Peel agreed that this was a breath of fresh air. And no I didn't clock the involvement of Pete Waterman. And yet it's impossible to listen to this now without foreknowledge of the fate which lay in store for at least some of these musicians. Can't always divorce the art from the life, even retrospectively. 25 Sept Roxy Music Take A Chance With Me (26) - Unnecessary third single from "Avalon." Flawless, yes, but it's an album track. 25 Sept Ultravox Reap The Wild Wind (12) - Ure and the lads meet George Martin. You'd never discern it from the unchanging evidence of this lumbering cargo of a song. 2 Oct Dexy's Midnight Runners Jackie Wilson Said (I'm In Heaven When You Smile) (5) - Yes we know, Jocky Wilson, TOTP etc. But this song affirms life, more so perhaps than the Van the Man original. 2 Oct Kids From Fame Starmaker (3) - Glutinous celebration of sucking up to authority. Not here you don't. 2 Oct Pretenders Back On The Chain Gang (17) - Yet again, Legs & Co demonstrate their over-literal understanding of song lyrics on TOTP as they perform dressed as a, erm, chain gang. Haven't you heard of metaphors? A distinguished resignation from life of a song, in any case. 2 Oct Sharon Redd Never Give You Up (20) - More bought, perhaps, for its B-side, the stone electro classic "Beat The Street," which still sounds good. 2 Oct Spandau Ballet Lifeline (7) - The lads decline Horn's offer to produce their next album; Gary Kemp says "he's too headmasterly; Swain and Jolley are more like your mates from the pub." This is offensively bland. 2 Oct Tears For Fears Mad World (3) - And don't we all think differently of this song now, post-"Donnie Darko"? 2 Oct Who Athena (40) - Their inglorious final top 40 entry. Daltrey intermittently roars "She's just a girrrrRRRLLLLL-AH!" You can't sing along with it. 9 Oct Bauhaus Ziggy Stardust (15) - Desperate for a hit? Never! 9 Oct Kid Creole & the Coconuts Annie I'm Not Your Daddy (2) - "'cos if I was in your blood/Then you wouldn't be so ugly." Words and sentiments worthy of Eminem. And all the mums and dads sang along. 9 Oct Julio Iglesias Amor (32) - Bit livelier than "Quiereme Mucho" but no "Begin The Beguine." 9 Oct Japan Life In Tokyo (28) - Ariola cashing in their chips again. Strangely, their proto-glam reading of "Don't Rain On My Parade" - very nearly a hit back in '78 - doesn't warrant a reissue. 9 Oct Melba Moore Love's Comin' At Ya (15) - Serviceable R&B. Brandi Wells' "Watch Out" was more deserving of a top 40 place. 9 Oct Toyah Be Proud Be Loud (Be Heard) (30) - But be remembered? Probably not. 16 Oct Beatles Love Me Do (re-entry) (4) - 20th anniversarty reissue rewrites history and ensures that every official Beatles single has made the top five, simply to annoy the Guinness compilers. 16 Oct Blue Zoo Cry Boy Cry (13) - Unbelievably, Paul Morley's Single of the Week in the NME of old; now comes across as a somewhat sub-Teardrop Explodes attempt at psychopop angst. Perhaps it was the "so blank I can inscribe my own soul on it" theory which attracted. 16 Oct Eddy Grant I Don't Wanna Dance (1) - 14 years after "Baby Come Back," Mr Grant does indeed come back to the top with an effortless groove, almost arrogant in its pop confidence. 16 Oct Kool & Gang Ooh La La La (Let's Go Dancin') (6) - Oh dear dear dear - "Are you a Mrs or are you a Miss-Ain't?" 16 Oct Barry Manilow I Wanna Do It With You (8) - Amazingly, Bazza's only UK top ten hit single. 16 Oct Piranhas featuring Boring Bob Grover Zambesi (17) - Strange update of Lou Busch '50s big band chart-topper, lodging itself somewhere between the Bonzos (Stanshall-style duff trumpet playing) and the Streets (listen especially to "All Got Our Runnin's" - not that far away from this, lyrically - "as for the landlord's rent, I've spent it on a tent, so if he's asking questions you'll know what to say"). 16 Oct Raw Silk Do It To The Music (18) - Lovely R&B electro-stomper. Also big in St Clements. 16 Oct Shakin' Stevens I'll Be Satisfied (10) - Actually, this attempt at the old Jackie Wilson showstopper ain't all that bad. The Dixieland horns blaring behind him - as well as the false ending - make for a pretty neat and supremely confident pop record. 16 Oct Wham! Young Guns (Go For It) (3) - Don't get married - "wise guys realise there's dangers in emotional ties." Look where it gets you, eh, George? 23 Oct Abba The Day Before You Came (32) - A five-minute suicide note. The day before the Other came is now the day before Death will come. Because there's a grief arising from the unspoken knowledge that the Other is no longer there. Too dark, too rich for pop consumers. Listing the details of your life as if you are trying to make some sense of it. This is what you leave the world i love you i love you i LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU TIME HEALS EVERYTHING EXCEPT WOUNDS 23 Oct John Cougar Jack & Diane (25) - What happens if they don't die? Life goes "on and on, long after the thrill is gone." An unexpected response to the above record. 23 Oct Diana Ross Muscles (15) - Written by Jacko, it's a love song to a snake. 23 Oct Dionne Warwick Heartbreaker (2) - Dionne's biggest UK hit done without the aid of Bacharach and/or David, but with the aid of the Bee Gees. Really it's a Bee Gees record which just happens to have Dionne up front (contractual reasons, apparently). Of course it's great pop. They were capable of it, you know. 30 Oct Blancmange Living On The Ceiling (7) - For the second member of John Stevens' SME to chart this year, I bring you Stephen Luscombe, who with Blackburn's finest Neil Arthur had this unrepeatable hit. Corny as hell in its sub-Byrne way, and yes you can see all the joins, but this got played a LOT in its day. 30 Oct Marvin Gaye (Sexual) Healing (4) - TOTP referred to it as "Healing." Harrumph. Another record which is so securely embedded in the canon that there's no need to say much about it, except of course that it's Gaye's own suicide note, his passport out of Belgium, back to America, back to showbiz, back to the wrong end of his transvestite dad's gun. 30 Oct Daryl Hall & John Oates Maneater (6) - "You Can't Hurry Love" goes electro, sort of. This was their highest UK chart placing. Actually "Out Of Touch" was their great masterpiece of a single - produced by Baker - but here stalled at #48 in the autumn of '84. 30 Oct Renee & Renato Save Your Love (1) - FACT: Renato (without Renee) sang at my cousin's wedding in March 1984, and a very nice man he was too. The Xmas #1 for 1982 and assassinated at the time, mostly for its lower-than-low budget video and tasteful V-neck pullovers, but you know there are greater things in this world to hate. That's my excuse anyway. 30 Oct Status Quo Caroline (Live At The NEC) (13) - This rose from 38 to 13 in one week, and then slipped to 14 the next week, thus denying them a place on TOTP (why weren't they on the previous week then?). Despite the fact that the original had already gone top five in 1973, Quo attempted to sue the British Market Research Bureau and the BBC for deliberately falsifying the chart so that they couldn't do TOTP. And you think you're paranoid? 30 Oct Supertramp featuring Roger Hodgson It's Raining Again (26) - Their last hit. How can you hate it? It's just always been there. Doubt that Scooter could do much with it, though. 6 Nov Clannad Theme From Harry's Game (5) - Enya makes her maiden appearance in the top 40 in this proto-Ambient song about terrorists in Ireland. The most subversive top 40 hit ever? 6 Nov A Flock Of Seagulls Wishing (If I Had A Photograph Of You) (10) - OK so ridicule me, but this song has an undeniable power which shines even through its hairdo naffness, especially in the terrific build-up and layers of synths which bestride its climax. No doubt this was why it was their biggest hit. 6 Nov Michael Jackson & Paul McCartney The Girl Is Mine (8) - Inauspicious maiden single from "Thriller" where Jacko and Macca argue unengagingly about the affections of the Other. On the sleeve of "Thriller" the song is illustrated by a Jacko drawing depicting him and Macca playing tug-of-war with the benighted lady, dangling in mid-air with a look of strange ecstasy. What the hell does that tell us about Jacko's predilections? 6 Nov Donna Summer State Of Independence (14) - Jacko also turns up in the backing choir for this rather good Jon & Vangelis reading (still prefer the orig, though, with its freeform Dick Morrissey/Tony Oxley intro). 6 Nov Whitesnake Here I Go Again / Bloody Luxury (34) - "Here I Go Again" was a chest-beating ballad by the hirsute Mr Coverdale. "Bloody Luxury" I regret to say I have never heard. 13 Nov Duran Duran Rio (9) - They're on a boat. John Taylor wishes he was Mick Karn. John Taylor ends up selling millions more records than Mick Karn. Go figure. 13 Nov Modern Romance Best Years Of Our Lives (4) - Had the Tremeloes still had a serious chance of getting hits in 1982, this is exactly the sort of record they would have made; all Benny Hill-style yippees and lots of meaty hands being waved in the air. 13 Nov Simple Minds Someone Somewhere (In Summertime) (36) - Released in the dead of winter. A holy track, however. 13 Nov Talk Talk Talk Talk (Remix) (23) - But not drastically so. Comments made above apply equally here. 20 Nov Human League Mirror Man (2) - Borrowing its opening from the Contours' "Just A Little Misunderstanding," this was the League on autopilot. The B-side, however, "You Remind Me Of Gold" is an underheard jewel of a song. 20 Nov Japan Nightporter (29) - The standout track from "Gentlemen Take Polaroids," but its appearance as a single on Virgin indicated that the game was truly up and that the band had in fact split. 20 Nov Evelyn King Back To Love (40) - Almost exactly the chord sequence to "Love Come Down" played backwards. 20 Nov Musical Youth Youth Of Today (13) - Perfectly adequate follow-up, but was the party already over? 20 Nov Lionel Richie Truly (6) - The man's first solo hit, and as undoubtedly heartfelt as the rest of his repertoire. 20 Nov Yazoo The Other Side Of Love (13) - This single was a big mistake. The B-side "Ode To Boy" should have been the A-side, and this was belatedly recognised by the failure of "The Other Side Of Love" to appear on their recent best of compilation. 27 Nov Adam Ant Desperate But Not Serious (33) - Worst chart performance since Cartrouble in Jan '81? Pretty serious I would have thought. 27 Nov David Bowie/Bing Crosby Peace On Earth - Little Drummer Boy (3) - Necrophilia? One dying man and one dead-eyed man sing insincerely about Xmas. What was going through people's heads? Klaus Nomi's shattering "Death" would have made a more fitting Xmas #1. 27 Nov Bucks Fizz If You Can't Stand The Heat (10) - But the formula was already beginning to melt. 27 Nov Culture Club Time (Clock Of The Heart) (3) - One of the finest soul records ever to come out of a British recording studio. Don't underestimate just how good early Culture Club were at their best. 27 Nov Madness Our House (5) - Surely a number one at any other time of the year, this is a goodbye to youth equally as regretful, if not as tortured, as "It Started With A Kiss." It remembers the good times of youth but recognises their impermanence and is never sentimental about it. David Bedford's strings speak what Suggs can't. 27 Nov Shalamar Friends (12) - "And not the fairweather kind." And not really a single, either. 27 Nov Ultravox Hymn (11) - Lots of "give us this day"s and "forever amen"s run through this would-be pomp anthem. Oddly non-illuminating, and rather stodgy. 27 Nov Young Steve & the Afternoon Boys I'm Alright (40) - Oh my fucking Lord. "Wacky" Radio 1 jock Steve fucking Wright. "I'm alright, you're alright, everybody's feeling alright tonight/We're havin' a laugh and singin' a song/If you're alright you can't go wrong." Sub-Chas & Dave, obviously, which I'm beginning to think is equivalent to being sub-Stalin. Without doubt the worst record EVER made EVER EVER EVVVVEEEERRRR with the possible exception of the follow-up, 1983's "Get Some Therapy." 4 Dec Phil Collins You Can't Hurry Love (1) - Oh my God! The Blues Brothers "pastiche" video! The respect to those of a prior era! The "how can I smuggle my wife pissing off with the electrician into a cover version" subtext! Actually, I have a correction to make - I once saw Phil C drumming in tandem with John Stevens in a big-band line-up of the SME (Camden Jazz Festival '79) so that's three of them this year. Are he and Bob Fripp the only two Tory improvisers? 4 Dec Dexy's Midnight Runners Let's Get This Straight (From The Start)/Old (17) - The A-side is pretty unremarkable - it sounds like a "Too-Rye-Ay" reject - but you NEED to have the 12" for their astonishing live demolition of "Respect." I saw the Projected Passion Revue line-up perform this at Edinburgh in '81 and it was hypnotic and dervish-like. Fantastic. 4 Dec Incantation Cacharpaya (12) - Theme from a BBC doc about "The Wings Of The Condor" - Attenborough in the Andes, etc. 4 Dec Jam Beat Surrender (1) - Their farewell single, and a Style Council record in all bar the rhythm section. 4 Dec Kool & the Gang Hi De Hi Hi De Ho (29) - Do you think they were running out of ideas? 4 Dec Malcolm McLaren/World's Famous Supreme Team - Buffalo Gals (9) - By default, the most revolutionary and farsighted record to make the top 40 in 1982. "Wheels Of Steel" missed out on a chart placing in '81, so this was - to the mainstream, if not to cynical NME readers like myself - something seriously radical. And how fitting that it should be Trevor Horn who carved an escape route out of the cul-de-sac which New Pop had become. The Art of Noise were to follow soon thereafter. Fuller discussion of "Duck Rock" in general on CoM. 4 Dec Barry Manilow I'm Gonna Sit Right Down & Write Myself A Letter (36). Bazza does Fats Waller. Uh, that's it. 4 Dec Cliff Richard Little Town (11) - Boy did Cliff have a tizzy fit when this "heartfelt" Xmas single failed to enter the top ten! "I DESERVE to be number one!" he lamented. "Twinkle twinkle little star/Now I know just what you are" goes the fadeout, as if he had suddenly been made aware of a gold nugget of knowledge which had hitherto been withheld from mankind for aeons. 4 Dec Soft Cell Where The Heart Is (21) - First single from their second and finest album "The Art Of Falling Apart," and, like Abba, proving too rich and too layered for general consumption. The underbelly was now visible, and scaring off the public. 4 Dec Donna Summer I Feel Love (Remix) (21) - Proto-electroclash 15-minute 12" reconstruction by the late Patrick Cowley. Moroder said more in six minutes. 11 Dec Abba Under Attack (26) - Abba's last "official" single, and a rather muted goodbye at that. 11 Dec Kid Creole & the Coconuts Dear Addy (29) - Darnell rescued the closing track from "Fresh Fruit" to get a late Xmas hit. But the chart peaks had already been climbed. "Doppelganger" would seriously underperform in 1983. 11 Dec David Essex A Winter's Tale (2) - The lad gets Mike Batt to conjure him up another "Bright Eyes." Unfortunately he gets Tim Rice to do the lyrics. Not a wise move. Still, one of the biggest hits he ever had, so who's looking? 11 Dec Imagination Changes (31) - Pushing it a bit with a fifth single from "In The Heat Of The Night." Not as good as the second or third ones. 11 Dec Maisonettes Heartache Avenue (7) - Frightening-looking bearded Lol Mason, ex- of City Boy, returned with this DLT-sponsored Merseybeat pastiche. He looked like one of my Moral Philosophy tutors. Not encouraging. 11 Dec Santa Claus & the Christmas Trees Singalong-A-Santa (Medley) (19) - Polydor's MD and his mates get pissed around a piano and expect you to pay ¸1.25 for the results. Astonishingly, quite a few people did. 11 Dec Shakin' Stevens The Shakin' Stevens EP (2) - Lead track was his reading of Elvis' "Blue Christmas." Also featured, "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" and other music by old men. 11 Dec Dionne Warwick All The Love In The World (10) - "won't take me away from you." Warped logic, Brothers Gibb. Why should it? Not as pervy as "Love You Inside Out" however, which came mysteriously unadorned by an illustrative picture sleeve. 18 Dec Laura Branigan Gloria (6) - Belated Eurodisco summer fave finally gets into the charts. 18 Dec Fleetwood Mac Oh Diane (9) - Bizarre dislocated Lindsey Buckingham-directed doo-wop homage; like Cabaret Voltaire trying to do Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers. So strange that it hasn't even surfaced on their recent best of compilation ("Gypsy" from the same album, only got to #46 in October). 18 Dec Keith Harris & Orville Orville's Song (4) - A song of refuge for disenfranchised misfits the world over? Or just an over-glutinised piece of the kind of slush which chain-smoking 60-year-old hacks believe children fall for? You decide. I suspect that Mr Harris long since has. 18 Dec John Williams Theme From E.T. (The Extra-Terrestrial) (17) - It's the theme! It's Xmas! You know! 25 Dec Wah! The Story Of The Blues (3) - And, for 1982's final entry, the third part of Liverpool's Crucial Three gets a toehold on the charts, and promptly scores a bigger hit than either Cope or McCulloch have ever managed. Pete Wylie has always struck me as a cross between Bruce Springsteen and Jimmy Tarbuck, but the 12" version of this (with his "Talkin' Blues" epilogue) is indispensable. posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
KRAFTWERK: KEEP BREATHING Tenthly, there is the most important and lasting achievement of Kraftwerk, insofar as the adjective “lasting” is already superfluous, insofar as they stretched time to become concomitant with the expansion of the universe, inasmuch as “time” has become irreverent, intothehot that Kraftwerk make time however long and whatever time you want it. How have they achieved this? I was reminded by my first hearing of “Aéro Dynamik,” one of 12 tracks on their new album, Tour de France Soundtracks. It sounded, as does all genuinely great music, as though it had been around forever, that it was already so familiar even though I had never heard it before. Kraftwerk are powered by ceaseless movement but they also intend a vast, monumental permanence. As if they had made all music ever made and were simply waiting for you to discover it. All of a sudden it doesn’t matter that it’s 17 years since their last album of original material. It’s rendered irrelevant, even if Tour de France Soundtracks would have caused a sensation had it been released in 1983 or 1988 – because, having now heard it, I cannot say for sure that it wasn’t. Or it just needed 20 years to warrant completion. It’s allowed. And in any case, the gap between Electric Café and Tour de France Soundtracks is only one year longer than the gap between Tango In The Night and Say You Will - and we don’t make nearly as much of a fuss about the latter. Electric Café - their previous album which was released in 1986, which would have caused a sensation had it been released in 1976 or 1996, even though it was their finest record. There is a sense in which all Kraftwerk’s different routes converge in particular upon the song “The Telephone Call” where emotion finally becomes explicit, where all roads have proved to lead to a blank switchboard trying to contact the centre, which of course has vanished, if it hasn’t collapsed, if it weren’t a chimerical black hole to begin, and end, with. But Kraftwerk need to go on living. And to live, we have to move. And to make music, movement is necessary, even the opening and closing of John Cage’s Kelvin piano lid. They have previously shown how time can be stretched in a car, on a train; and now they show us how to stretch time infinitely on a bicycle. A bicycle in perfect working order must run silently. It is the quietest form of transport yet the form which requires the greatest amount of physical exertion. And of course, if one cycles for long enough, far enough and high enough, one can forget, or transcend. Should one really listen to this “soundtrack” while watching footage from the Tour de France? Or is the imagined cycle ride so much more interesting, virtually? Kraftwerk, the most human of musicians. Why? What drives their music? The human breath. Somewhere at every stage of this album someone is breathing, even if it’s via a sampler. Remember of course that it’s a record which mimics and provokes constant, steady and harmonic movement, so to berate it for not being “danceable” is missing the point of points. They do not have to prove themselves on any dancefloor. Their aims – and remember, this is music made by people in their mid-fifties – are different. And as with Fleetwood Mac, all they have done is come back to us after a long time away, just to demonstrate that they still know what it’s all about, that they can still do “it” better than anyone else. There’s something truly idolatry about the absolute confidence of Kraftwerk’s return. No need for manifestos, explanations; you site yourself within their musical field and prepare to worship. Thus the “Tour de France” suite itself, which encompasses the first five tracks. How wonderfully they demonstrate their continued and ceaseless brilliance. Musically it would be easy to dismiss their rhythms as hopelessly dated Ambient House cast-offs from 1993. Not at all the case; as stated above, this music is not for dancing, but is a soundtrack which enables or facilitates your exploration of the world. It’s the gently persuasive pulse familiar to devotees of, say, Carl Craig’s More Songs About Food And Revolution. So the rhythm is benign yet godlike in its remorselessly compassionate progression. Synthesised strings tug at your sleeve. Ralf Hutter’s eternally knowing and deep vocals; the near-presidential permanence of his basso profundo “Tour de France” as if it resounds securely within you, letting you know that you are still of this world. There is something immensely reassuring about Kraftwerk’s infallible radicalism. The echoed sudden ascent of synthesised woodwind; no one else could reproduce this instantaneous poignancy. And hear, in “Tour De France Étape 2,” how the seemingly unadventurous rhythm actually changes, minutely and methodically, over each four-bar succession; microscopic but key changes in filters, in sequencers – it’s actually hyperactive on the quiet. As monumental as the cliffs which suddenly veer into view to let you know that, yes, this actually is Brighton; how serenely eternal. And how distended things become in “Tour De France Étape 3,” when the melody and tonality suddenly start to waver – they’ve been listening to Aphex and Paradinas, Biosphere and KLF (especially “It’s Grim Up North,” to which this is a less stressed-out cousin); they just choose, admirably, not to Broadcast it so much. And how it all resolves itself, and everything else on the side, in its “Chrono” finale, its sudden eruption of church organ fusing Moroder and Messiaen. In a way, the centrepiece to this album is “Vitamin” which reminds us that it could still be 1986 if we wished, with its intro reminiscent of (or did it inspire?) 1986-period Depeche Mode (specifically “Never Let Me Down Again”), and its immaculate, stately statement of the best melody Gary Numan never wrote, as if to point out to Numan, gently and undemonstrably, you could have chosen this career. Contralto synthesised oboe melodies circle around the structure like giant but embraceable satellites. The chorus of “Carbohydrate protein/Ahh-B-C-D-Vitamin” proves that Kraftwerk are as much pop as they ever were; knowingly ridiculous, yet meaning everything (as the lyrics contain means to continue living). Then the aforementioned “Aéro Dynamik” – the individual stands out from the group, but can finally only truly exist within the group – which segues into “Titanium,” as again the tonality wavers and we move closer to the song’s structure, realising that it is anything except what we lazily assumed that it was. Then “Elektro Kardiogramm,” wherein Kraftwerk remind us that electroclash need not clash. The rhythm here is a sample of Hutter’s heartbeats as measured on the cardiogram in question. “Minimum, maximum/Beats per minute.” Rather that than no beats at all – and the understated sexual subtext, of course; where the hell would Kraftwerk be without that? Finally “La Forme” allows the Kraftwerk gods to descend gracefully from the mountains, back to the world; the longest track here at 8:41, but the best statues always require time and patience to build. “Régéneration, relaxation.” The minor key lament sits with immeasurable patience under the graceful arches of the song, until, in the epilogue, “Régéneration” itself, the melody is allowed to cry a little – but with happiness. Finally, of course, it’s “Tour De France” itself, the record which, together with the Art of Noise’s Into Battle EP, proposed a different and better 1983 when 1983 was still present. In Harlem, Detroit and Chicago they accepted the proposal; here our self-constructed detours were too large to swerve around, and we had to wait until 1986, by which time Electric Café had appeared to ask us, well, where have you been? You wanted to know the point of “Tour De France”? 20 years later, here it is; digitally reworked and rearranged, and its melody has never sounded more heartbreaking in its innocence. Welcome to the future; it was ready for you 20 years ago, but better late than never. The subtle nods to Sakamoto in the main melody, the breathing, the breathing; the song never stops breathing, and it tells you not to stop breathing either. Now this brightly-lit palace of a pop record has its doors open for us to walk through, and its emotional power as this album’s climax is overwhelming. The last words sung on this record are: “Camarades et amitié.” Have any musicians ever been more identifiably human? Has time ever mattered less? Perhaps I just wish that it were 1983 or 1986 or even 1999 again. Kraftwerk tell me, in the profoundest of ways, that this might still be possible. “For we go to history not simply to find out what has happened in human affairs, but also what is possible. And not only is it difficult for an historian to mask his beliefs about what is possible and desirable, but that history which is lit by some clear and circumspect idea of what human life can be is generally preferred to the history that is impassive, that never commits itself, and that lacks a guiding ideal or the irony and tears that go with applying such an ideal to the record of human affairs.” (Charles Frankel, “Explanation and Interpretation in History.” Philosophy of Science. Williams and Wilkins Co., Baltimore: 1957) posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
THE SINGLE LIFE I cannot remember a time in my life when I wasn’t surrounded by records, by shelves of music in whichever form. My late father was among the most fervent of collectors; so I have never had a particularly emotional attachment to the seven-inch single. Having known records practically from day one of my life, there was never that alien element of strangeness or newness about a piece of vinyl – simply one more item to add to the collection. As an infant I remember being particularly fond of Slim Gaillard’s rendition/deconstruction of “How High The Moon” which my father bought as a 10-inch 78 in the late ‘40s, and it remains one of my favourite singles insofar as it was probably the one piece of music which introduced to me the notion that artistic expression didn’t always have to be straightforward. Gaillard’s recording starts out as a conventional enough reading, but it isn’t long before he starts stretching out words, playing with syllables, playing with his guitar rhythm until finally the song ceases to be a song, becomes a Cubist reflection of a “song” with syllables existing on a new, abstract basis, stripped of overt meaning. Coupled with Gaillard’s ineffable confidence and the terrific rhythm of his own guitar driving the performance, it occurs to me that this one recording is the link between Lucier and Minogue; in its unfettered joy and mischief in destabilising “meaning” and turning it inside out in order to accommodate it with the demands of the song’s rhythm, it is also the missing link between Marinetti’s art of noises and Horn’s Art Of Noise (Currently, alas, it is even more difficult to find than I Am Sitting In A Room; it has yet to be reissued on CD, though I’m sure that the boys at Proper Records will get round to it soon. Until then you have to keep your eyes peeled for the occasional used copy of the original 78 turning up in Mole Jazz or Ray’s Jazz Shop). The record, however, which alerted and electrified me to the possibilities of pop – well, I’d responded vaguely to Cream’s “I Feel Free” in extreme infancy and had the dimmest of memories of being stirred by the video of “Strawberry Fields Forever” on TOTP, but the one performance which really cemented the existence of this thing called pop in my mind was Barry Ryan doing “Eloise” in October 1968 on a Saturday teatime pop programme entitled All Systems Freeman presented by the luridly and splendidly melodramatic DJ Alan Freeman (though I’m sure Ryan also appeared on a similar BBC programme compered by Tony Blackburn round about the same time). Freeman leered benignly into the camera, told us that this next song would be number one before it had finished, and the camera then swooped speedily (or as speedily as 1968 technology would allow) towards the adjacent stage whereon Ryan emoted hysterically in front of Johnny Pearson’s orchestra for five or six minutes. Was this a “single”? It didn’t seem to subscribe to any given notions of one – it was far too long (this was before I’d heard either “Macarthur Park” or “Hey Jude” or for that matter the six minutes of “Those Were The Days”); it didn’t canter agreeably on one level – there were fast, aggressive bits, slow, tearful bits, and my God when the slow bit suddenly leapt out and became fast again, with jumpcuts of Ryan doing his faux-Presley swivelling, this four-year-old writer nearly ran behind the sofa, it was so frightening! This was something more than what I had been told. And then came The Crazy World of Arthur Brown to perform “Fire.” “I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE!” screamed a burning, bearded candlestick-wearing maniac in extreme close-up, as the performance proceeded to climax in what appeared to be the group spontaneously combusting. I had nightmares for a fortnight after that. I also pleaded with my dad to purchase both singles straightaway. He went one better with Arthur Brown and came home with the album, which even more scarily demonstrated that “Fire” was no longer even a “single” but part of a longer and clearly demonic “suite” of songs, with chaotic organ and guitar noises threatening to destabilise and obliterate every “song” there was. Barry Ryan had no album out at the time, so I had to make do with the seven-inch of “Eloise” on the turquoise and gold MGM label. And then my dad introduced me to The White Album at Christmas… (In fact, Barry Ryan’s work between 1968-70, in tandem with his twin Paul (as songwriter and producer) remains some of the most bewilderingly daft, and therefore most profound, pop music ever produced, the missing link between Scott Walker and Jim Steinman. The quietly desperate psychosis of “Love Is Love” which proceeds from its “glad to meet you” mumblings to demonic declarations like “And when I’m gone….there will still be my son!!!” “The Hunt” which sees Ryan screaming “tally-hoooooo!!” over absurd over-phasing. Above all, the encroaching waves of “Kitsch” which blends Ryan squealing “Prawn cocktail stiiiiiick!” over a paranoid orchestra and inhuman choir – Joe Meek conducting the Mayflower Pilgrims in the afterlife - with a Terry Riley-meets-James Last knees-up (“Go go GOOOOOO!!!!”). Truly astonishing) When punk, and more importantly (given my age) post-punk, happened, the format of a piece of music was frankly (a) irrelevant and (b) unplaceable, and in several hundred ways this made that particular adventure more of an adventure. Every Saturday morning trip to Bloggs’ Records in Glasgow’s St Vincent Street was a doorway to new ways of making and responding to music about which you wouldn’t necessarily have known even five minutes before setting foot in there. 7, 10 or 12 inches, picture discs, cassette-only, no discs, albums, singles, things in between – you didn’t know what you were going to get except the full and certain knowledge that all of it would be interesting and life-changing in even the remotest of ways. And that’s not even counting the disco 12-inch singles – Donna Summer’s 17 minutes of “Love To Love You Baby” above all, but also Double Exposure’s “Ten Percent,” Sylvester’s “Mighty Real,” T-Connection’s “On Fire”… All of this means that, although I cared enough about the seven-inch single to have, and still have, thousands of the damned things, I cannot find it in myself to weep in nostalgia for their loss. I suppose that this is where Paul Morley (in his Guardian Review piece of Friday last) and I differ, although I can feel how he felt, even if his piece is just two hastily-built streets away from It Were All Fields Around Here – besides which, if it really were all fields around here, he was steering the bulldozer – the attachment to artists, groups, as one would attach oneself to friends; people whose singles you would never really desert, even when at times they heartily deserved it. Morley cites Bolan, Bowie, Mott, Roxy; and well he knows the vague distress rising towards betrayal when each seamless sequence of singles culminated in, or deviated towards a “Truck On (Tyke)” or a “Knock On Wood” or a “Foxy Foxy” or an “All I Want Is You”; that moment when you realise with a muted horror that people you trust don’t always know the way ahead. But then you continue to live, and make new “friends.” Or one-night-stands who, like the Nova Mob, come and do their job and then promptly go away again (“Ambition,” “Let’s Start The Dance,” “She Is Beyond Good And Evil”) even though really none of them does. Morley speaks of showing a seven-inch single by New Order to his 11-year-old daughter, and remarks how the feeling must have been equivalent to his grandad showing him a George Formby 78. How deliberate the choice of artist must have been there, for New Order certainly played a central role in the ousting of the seven-inch – as well as the ousting, not to mention outing, of much else – with the release of “Blue Monday,” when (not quite for the first time, but certainly most prominently) one started to observe the sign in the HMV singles chart rack: “AVAILABLE ON 12-INCH ONLY.” Or perhaps it was “Temptation,” the 12-inch version of which starts immediately from the point where the 7-inch stops. You needed them both. Or perhaps it was “Atmosphere” by Joy Division, which, if Factory had waved a flag as white as its sleeve and given it a proper 7-inch domestic release, might have become the Xmas #1 of 1980 – rather than “There’s No One Quite Like Grandma,” which, realising the role cast for it, was obliged to take its place. But no, “Blue Monday” needed its seven-and-a-half minutes, and it needed the wider and deeper grooves of the 12-inch to drive home its multiple puncta most efficiently and effectively. Did Morley @ ZTT kill the seven-inch single? In a 1983 filled to nausea with Nik Kershaw, Howard Jones, Wham!, Tears For Fears, Roland Rat, Cliff Richard, Paul Young, Ryan Paris, Kajagoogoo, Shakin’ Stevens, F R David, Status Quo, one might understand why Morley might have felt that the whole shameful thing needed detonating…or at least destabilising. Thus the multiple versions of “Relax,” the 15-minute 12-inch only tangentially related to the 4-minute 7-inch, but stretching out the argument as Gailliard stretched out those syllables decades before. But the 7-inch remained central to this concept, not an adjunct; it was the 7-inch which got them on TOTP, which got them banned, which got them to # 1, which kept them on the chart for a whole calendar year, which got them back to # 2, kept off the top by themselves, which got them to “Two Tribes,” which was admittedly 20 million times better on 12-inch, which still needed the 7-inch, which caused the TOTP red carpet to be unfurled for them, which even provoked the 7-inch to be remixed subtly but crucially for inclusion on Now That’s What I Call Music 3, which could only happen with the proviso that “Dr Mabuse” also be included on the album, which meant that that invaded far more heads than would otherwise have been the case, which meant that after all that Wham! ended up back at #1 anyway. I can’t particularly feel anything about the loss of the seven-inch, or indeed the replacement of crackle by silence on CDs. I can’t pretend that CD singles are ever likely to be collectable (Blur’s “Popscene” only costs you £35 because the band are too bloody-minded to put it on any of their albums) or that they are particularly sexy. But I want to listen to music which is being created now, and I don’t want it to sound buried in crackles; I enjoy the convenience of CDs, as a householder I appreciate the absence of vinyl from my front room, and the consequent absence of what Laura always described as “the smell of digestive biscuits.” And when the occasional seven-inch still nudges its way towards the forefront of my attention, I remain thrilled that something like “Kill Or Be Killed” by Bloodclaat Gangsta Youth can engender the same unthinking excitement in me as “Eloise” did 35 years ago. I am grateful for the gasps of admiration which inevitably escape from my mouth when I listen to the Girls Aloud album and still get those pangs I got from The Lexicon Of Love 21 years ago. Is this all affecting what pop is being created, and how it is being created? The pop song template stretches to fill the time and space necessary for it to make its point, whether it’s the ten minutes of “Born Slippy” or the two minutes of “Song 2.” Ten minutes of “Born Slippy” at number one. We didn’t have that in 1971, or even when I was fourteen. As far as the wider reaches of music in general are concerned; well, as a record reviewer it’s easy to groan when inserting a less-than-promising looking CD into the machine and seeing the legend “78:54” come up on the LCD; nearly all hip hop and R&B albums would benefit from a strict 45-minute limit, for instance, while things like Terence Trent D’Arby’s Internet-only Wildcard! demonstrate painfully the importance of editing and concision. Then again, it’s unquestionable that classical and improv music have both benefited from the switch from vinyl to CD; one wishes that CDs had been around in the early days of labels such as FMP or Incus – their length suits the twists and turns and winds of improvisation perfectly, and the ‘70s vinyl classics now seem like a vaguely quaint repository. And edging back towards a mainstream, if indeed such a thing remains; if it’s true that we are inured by our experience and the endless back catalogues never to expect anything truly shocking or revolutionary out of any new music, this may only be applicable to purposely over-conceptualised “albums” with their absurd concepts and over-inflated costs, and which now seem increasingly grandiloquent and old hat. Or we may be braver and venture into the world where “albums” seem to dissociate themselves from any concept other than the oldest one in the book; that wherein the artist approaches us and tells us about their lives in an aesthetically interesting and emotionally involving way. So the wider space which Morley implicitly welcomes (if he does welcome it) has to take into consideration the likes of M Ward, Gillian Welch, Dizzee Rascal, David Sylvian…records which, in the best improv “tradition” (see I told you we would win the argument in the end!), are unafraid to stop mid-song, to consider what they have just told us, to leave a bit of a mess, to not quite tidy things up. Astonishing things like the debut album by Paul The Girl, Electro-Magnetic Blues, utilising a line-up and approach which could have existed in 1971, but redeploying its own elements to tell us something new, to make the old breathe again and thus become new. Or potentially life-changing things like Kimya Dawson’s Sorry That Sometimes I’m Mean which prove the continuing ability of music to drive me to anger and tears. Tellingly all of these records typically last between 45-60 minutes, as with records of old. An alternative universe where Peter Wyngarde counts for slightly more than Lynyrd Skynyrd. The songs are already in all of our heads; but this particular revolution will require different ways of listening to them. posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
CHURCH OF ME CONSUMERS’ GUIDE The first of a VERY occasional series THE ALBUM CHART: WHAT YOU SHOULD BE PAYING It’s all very well the RIAA suing millions of song swappers, but it doesn’t disguise the fact that one of the fundamental, if not the most fundamental of, problems with the record industry today is that it’s asking us, the consumers, to pay a uniform standard price for CDs which are, qualitatively, not of a uniform standard. This seems to ignore one of the central tenets of the supply-and-demand principle; people will only pay for produce what they consider is a fair and reasonable price – otherwise they will simply not buy it, or buy a less ostentatious but far more rewarding, and cheaper, alternative. This field study was prompted by the sighting, during one of my perhaps too frequent tours of the music sections of South London charity shops, of a pristine copy of Blur’s Think Tank - complete with “limited edition” red cloth cover and booklet – for £3. This seemed to me an eminently fair price, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that I, as a “music journalist,” had already had a copy sent to me free of charge, I would definitely have snapped it up. And the difference is more than psychological. At the standard price of £15 you are, if not a stalwart Blur fan, immediately conditioned into thinking “oh Gawd not another angsty Albarn ersatz-World Music assemblage of outpourings,” whereas at £3 one thinks: “well, I might give it a listen.” And after listening to it in a £3 mood, rather than a £15 mood, I find myself feeling somewhat more charitable towards it than I did at the time of its release, and am even prepared to concede that the forlorn circuitous climax of “On The Way To The Club” is remarkably poignant. Perhaps if I’d continued to listen to it in a £15 mood, I might never have spotted that, amongst other things. I therefore feel it incumbent upon me to provide one of The Church Of Me’s occasional forays into public service, not to mention some light relief which may come as a welcome antidote to the exceptional intensity of recent postings. So herein I present my guide to What You Should Actually Be Paying For Albums, based on this week’s UK Top 40 album chart. Were you to venture out and purchase all 40 albums at standard full price, you wouldn’t be left with much change out of £600, and even at HMV/Virgin Chart Album prices you’d still be paying well over £500. And you would be entitled to feel somewhat peeved. Within this modest proposal, I have carefully scrutinised the contents of all 40 albums and have set realistic prices for each. These are based on a variety of factors: the general quality of the album, obviously, in proportion to any fluctuation of quality within the album, and also the kind of prices which you might reasonably expect to pay for each albums, or albums of their kind, in South London charity shops, or splendid discount shops such as Mister CD in Berwick Street, Soho. The fact that some of the senior residents of the chart can now be borrowed from your local library has also been taken into consideration, as does the relative frequency of appearance of certain albums in the bargain basement of the Music and Video Exchange. Scientifically, mathematically and morally, I consider that you should pay no more for each album than the price which I have set; if you are charged more, either argue loudly or seek to purchase the album elsewhere. Or perhaps just go and buy a far more worthwhile “non-chart” album; for example, the new album by Cat Power, which may well provide you with far more aesthetic adventure and comfort than anything in this list. 1. BEYONC? Dangerously In Love Well, this is an easy starter. A killer four-track EP – five tracks if you count last year’s admittedly ace single “Work It Out” which has been grudgingly tacked onto the end of the UK issue of this album – comprising perhaps the best four tracks recorded by any artist this year (i.e. its first four tracks), subsequently drowned out by a dozen gloopy, aural chloroform ballads. Recommended Price: £5 – the same as you’d pay for MBV’s You Made Me Realise EP 2. DANIEL BEDINGFIELD Gotta Get Thru This A great album it remains, but really this is cynical marketing gone haywire – the fourth distinct cover I have seen on this album, and the loathsome trick of adding on the new (and rather unremarkable) single as a “bonus track,” therefore forcing stalwart fans to fork out another £15, is, er, loathsome. Recommended Price: £7 – as obtainable from Mister CD, with less picturesque but equally functional album cover 3. DELTA GOODREM Innocent Eyes On a personal level, I am extremely glad that Ms Goodrem has recovered from her cancer. On a musical level I cannot realistically suggest that a third of a week’s dole money be invested in this doubtless sincere but severely sagging feast of overly pianistic angst. Part of the problem with pop at present is that the Holly Vallance album bombed, whereas this “truth” seems to have prospered. Recommended Price: 50p – and likely to be priced as such in second-hand shops in about six months’ time 4. SUPER FURRY ANIMALS Phantom Power Now, here’s a perfect example of the Think Tank dilemma. Another highly reasonable but ultimately forgettable SFA album – too much midtempo maundering, virtually no genuine mischief. You know the situation of the tentative debut album – set out your pitch, let us know what you’re about, the second or third album will be the real killer – well, the problem with SFA is that every one of their records sounds like a tentative debut album. They never quite break into their second album phase, if I know what you mean; and Gruff Rhys’ (to me) unlovable voice compounds the problem (cf. Clare Grogan pre-Bite). And yet, were I to encounter this for £3 in a South London charity shop, I’d be tempted to dig deeper into it – to concede, perhaps, that the segue from the Wendy and Bonnie darkness/suicide sample to Gruff Rhys’ “Hello sunshine” at the album’s opening is actually rather stunning. Need to be Sexy Future Androids, really. Recommended Price: £3 5. STEREOPHONICS You Gotta Go There To Come Back Qualitatively, of course, one has to admit that some artefacts are beyond price. This is not the same thing as being “priceless.” Recommended Price: you should charge them £15 to give you a copy. Otherwise, if you really need it, £1 6. KINGS OF LEON Youth And Young Manhood Did I miss something? Really, did I miss something? I suppose that if you took Creedence Clearwater Revival and systematically denuded them of John Fogerty’s composing and arranging genius and instrumental skills, installing the lead singer of, say, Pond in their place, you might end up with something like the Kings of Leon. Because you came to boogie, but can you really boogie to this plod of a record? I suppose that if you never lived through Dread Zeppelin, you might find something of value in the Kinds of Locust, but why do 35-year-old lapsed Clash fans pine so avidly for the Zimmer frame (See perhaps also Solid Silver by Mike Silver, which in 2-3 months’ time will be immovable from the Top 10)? Recommended Price: £2 – but you could get a mint copy of Cosmo’s Factory from that stall off Goodge Street for the same cost 7. GEORGE BENSON The Greatest Hits Of/The Very Best Of Two titles, just like Fables Of The Reconstruction, which, normally enough, this is just like in an abnormal way. And it has to be confessed that I listen to this record rather more avidly than you might expect (because if you didn’t, you’d miss the importance of “Turn Your Love Around” to the pop of November 1981, or “Never Give Up On A Good Thing” to the Glasgow-Dundee (via Gleneagles and Perth) train on a freezing, snowbound Wednesday morning in February 1982). Bah humbug, however, as all Benson compilations fearlessly exclude “Supership” (Or how, in an unfunny way, “Inside Love (So Personal)” is the unspoken B-side to “This Charming Man” in a November 1983 sense). Recommended Price: £10 – really, it’s worth it, but remember to spare £7 for your copy of Miles In The Sky, on which Benson also appears to far more disorientating effect 8. THE DARKNESS Permission To Land Something quite endears me about The Darkness. As with The Cult in 1987, they believe so fervently in their doomed mission to revive 1974 that, in a perpendicular way, the mission is no longer doomed, and 1974 funnily matters again. But would your admiration for their undimmed assumption that Queen’s Sheer Heart Attack is the dark secret upon which all pop and rock converges stretch to forking out £15 for that post-“Catherine Wheel” falsetto? Recommended Price: £5.49 – the same price you would have paid for The Cult’s Electric in 1987 9. KYM MARSH Standing Tall Ah, Kym, Kym, Jack-less, group-less Kym. You could have got the Neptunes, or at least Jus’ Blaze, if you’d asked nicely. But, like Robbie Williams, she mistakenly believes that “sincere” post-Cold Feet “rock/pop” will open your hearts for her. 50 minutes to describe How She Will Survive. Some of us just get on with surviving, in an infinitely more entertaining and infinitely less joyless way. Recommended Price: 50p – a likely regular companion of Mark Owen’s Green Man in British Heart Foundation shops everywhere. Possibly from the third week of release 10. EVANESCENCE Fallen The single plus support acts? Not particularly Christian, either. Not particularly great, either; though I recognise that just two or three minute degrees separate this from Buffy: The Musical. Moral: it only takes a minute degree to fall in love. Recommended Price: £2.50, as recently seen in Oxfam, Tooting High Road 11. BARRY WHITE The Collection Of course, if I were a purist I would say, save your pennies until Universal get it together to assemble a proper and scholarly-annotated box set of this visionary’s work. But then to be a purist would, by definition, deny that Barry White ever existed. His art depended upon the listener being impure. And really, this by-the-book compilation is where you need to start. Just make sure you don’t finish with it. Recommended Price: £7, as always seen in Mister CD, slipcase included 12. THE THRILLS So Much For The City So damned agreeable. This is why the singles chart remains more important than the album chart – there, you can see, through Lumidee, that someone has finally got ESG; whereas here you can see, through The Thrills, that someone has finally got Microdisney. Whereas I would suggest that you find a copy of The Apartments’ The Evening Visits… for a suggestion of a better and more interesting 1985. Otherwise, as evidenced by the never-more-ironically titled The Thrills (precisely because they’re not being ironic), it eventually folds back on itself and turns into 1973. Recommended Price: £1.50 – and how many times will you actually play it after, say, October? 13. CHRISTINA AGUILERA Stripped Grotesque and self-pregnant this/she may be, but at least it’s of an approximate “now.” An astuter Aguilera would of course have recorded an entire album with The Strokes. Still, for “Dirrrty” (yes, I remember Hard Corps, even if Christina can’t)… Recommended Price: £2.99 – the price of the “Dirrrty” CD single. You are “Beautiful” only because you say so 14. JANE’S ADDICTION Strays Dunno. Would I have liked this better if it had come out in 1992? Would it have changed anything? Or haven’t the Red Hots lapped them several thousand times in the interim? It’s there, but can anyone find any use for it? Recommended Price: £4 – the same price as a mint copy of Rituel De Lo Habituel as recently seen in MVE, Notting Hill Gate. Which still, and not uncoincidentally, sounds mindblowing 15. 50 CENT Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ Another essentially unlovable record, but the difference is that it is weirdly and compellingly so. The Bill Withers of rap returns to the sound of Dr Dre’s post-Badalamenti, post-“Buffalo Stance” laments. Not as hard as, or harder than, he looks. Recommended Price: £7 – Mister CD again. Two videos do not a legitimate “second CD” make 16. BUSTED Busted The instruments play their own instruments, but ultimately this is, in its indisputably own way, as conservative and trapped as Kings of Leon. And again, too many ballads! Don’t ask the family! Recommended Price: £2 17. DOLLY PARTON The Ultimate Dolly Parton Is this compilation any different from previous Parton compilations? Has she been on Graham Norton again recently? Did I miss something? Still, if you must have a Dolly album, then this is probably the second one you need, the first being her 1983 masterpiece Burlap And Satin - the latter available for a fiver, if you know where I look. Recommended Price: £11 – fair’s fair! It’s worth it! 18. MORCHEEBA Part Of The Process Apparently they had some hits. Apparently Fortysomething was supposed to be a comedy drama. And to think you could have had Portishead. Or, for what matters, Cibo Matto. Shame on you thirtysomethings, all. Recommended Price: if you want it, you’ll either pay £12 or nothing at all. I know my demographics 19. SEAN PAUL Dutty Rock Have to agree with Simon that’s there’s something eerily underwhelming about SP’s success. Especially when Beenie Man’s immeasurably superior Tropical Storm languishes unbought. Are we that easy to forget? Recommended Price: £2, based on the fact that Streatham Library had it in stock for a good six months before it charted, during which time it was taken out a grand total of twice, once by the author 20. THE OSMONDS The Ultimate Collection Not to be confused with the US Osmond-Mania! compilation which I recently reviewed for Uncut - that was only a single CD, and this is a double, but nonetheless it was musically far more interesting (especially the astonishing juvenile psychosis of the early Donny stuff – “I can’t EXIST without you!”) and cut out all the Little Jimmy nonsense. Still, the 1996 Very Best Of… sat untouched in the Westgate Library, Oxford, for almost four years before being put in the sale rack for £2, whereupon Laura promptly purchased it. And with two CDs, there really was no excuse for not featuring more tracks from 1973’s proto-Polyphonic Spree masterpiece The Plan. Is anyone under 40 buying this record? Recommended Price: £2, for reasons stated above 21. AVRIL LAVIGNE Let Go We now enter into the languishing midriff of the charts, wherein its elder residents dwell and hang on to life. The problem with April Lavage is that she cannot actually understand the concept of letting go. It’s not the same as “rocking out.” She perhaps isn’t even speaking to herself. It is the non-smile of a confirmed robot. Recommended Price: £2.50, as seen in Cash Converters, Camberwell 22. JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE Justified Ah, if only Uncut had trusted me six months ago, put Justin on their cover and made Justified their album of the month, they would now by default be the coolest magazine in WH Smith’s. For of course it’s indisputable that Justified is the Off The Wall of our times; sexy, brilliant and blank. Recommended Price: £7, as seen in Mister CD. As you will have noticed, prices are not always directly proportional to aesthetic quality. The notion that Fay Ripley, or Anna Chancellor, is prepared to pay £12 for the Morcheeba album does not make it a greater work of art than Justified. 23. COLDPLAY A Rush Of Blood To The Head oh i don’t like radiohead they’re just hippy dippy art crap pink floyd avant-garde self-indulgent do songs like fake plastic trees do ok computer 2 no tunes and this is what you end up with ergo LESS THAN NOTHING Recommended Price: £2 – appearing in greater quantities in Trinity Hospice shops all over South-West London 24. NORAH JONES Come Away With Me You want some “jazz” records of “now”? How about: Derek Bailey, Ballads? Lunge, Strong Language? Keith Rowe/John Tilbury, Duos For Doris? Maggie Nicols, The Gathering? Dave Douglas, Witness? Alan Tomlinson/Steve Beresford/Roger Turner, Jump Street? Spring Heel Jack, Masses? Or do you consider Escapology by Robbie Williams to be a jazz “record”? Recommended Price: £2 – especially with cynical “bonus CD” 25. S CLUB 7 Best – The Greatest Hits Of… Sometimes very touching in its blankness, heartbreakingly happy are their smiles as their souls and bodies slowly get ripped apart; if there had only been a little more sex, we’d be talking The Partridge Family. Jo O’Meara’s final “goodbye” is as suicidally moving as Po’s performance of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” in Teletubbies. Recommended Price: £10 – if you still believe in pop, you’d be very pleased to purchase, or better still be given, this 26. THE RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS By The Way Very proficient, obviously enduring, but has it got us anywhere? Or did it just fill an ill-defined gap? Recommended Price: £4, as recently seen in the FANA charity shop, Clapham Junction 27. ASHANTI Chapter II And to think you could have had Tweet. Shame on you twentysomethings, all. Recommended Price: £5, as will be seen in Mister CD in, say, six weeks’ time 28. SIMPLY RED Home Fake cool image is clearly not over. Just because Hugh Laurie probably considers this the greatest album ever made doesn’t mean that it’s better than, say, A Tribe Called Quest’s Midnite Maurauders. Recommended Price: £3, as seen in Beanos, Croydon 29. JIM REEVES Gentleman Jim – The Definitive Collection In 1975, Reeves’ 40 Golden Greats - with a virtually identical tracklisting – topped the charts. So great was the outcry that it might have provided one of the tributary approach roads towards punk. Isn’t Prefab Sprout’s version of “He’ll Have To Go” a thing of generously regretful genius? Recommended Price: £10, because your mum will be happy to own it 30. EMINEM The Eminem Show Mathers’ This Is Hardcore, but infinitely funnier and scarier; a deserved long-runner. Recommended Price: £10, you can’t complain, precisely because he does 31. MIS-TEEQ Eye Candy What a disaster this record is after the elegant roughness of their debut. Yes, they’ve made the classic mistake – go American, go “mainstream,” go “global,” go boring, go anonymous. And to think that Alesha Dixon was the potential successor to Ari Up. A terrible error. Recommended Price: £7, as seen in Mister CD in its second week of release 32. THE WHITE STRIPES Elephant Well, Jim Reeves is in there, isn’t he? Recommended Price: 19s 11d – if you want it to be 1963, charge 1963 prices! 33. UB40 Labour Of Love I, II And III An economy-sized multipack. How thoughtful. You could buy the Don Letts Trojan 2CD compilation for the same price. Recommended Price: £2 – the total amount it would cost you to purchase each volume, separately, in the MVE bargain basement, which boasts plenty of copies 34. THE DRIFTERS The Definitive Drifters Now here’s a thing. 50 tracks over 2 CDs; everything they did which was remotely interesting, from the revolutionary “There Goes My Baby” to the lovably naff “There Goes My First Love”; intelligent sleevenotes. I would have no problem with paying proper money for this, that is if I hadn’t already been sent a copy ahem. Recommended Price: £9.99, as seen in Reckless Records, Soho 35. SHANIA TWAIN Up I’m wondering, you know. I’m wondering whether this isn’t the best album in the Top 40 this week. I’m walking steadily towards the characteristically articulate and enticing arguments in its favour from Glenn the Silence Warmonger; quietly adventurous, sexy, astute and very danceable. And I have to descend (or ascend) several rungs and admit that the twinkle in Shania Twain’s eyes, or that inadvertent curl of a friendly growl when she tries to scale an octave too quickly, frankly turns me on something chronic. And this admission may be an adjacent centrepiece to The Church Of Me; why shouldn’t it? Sex was always adjacent to Stanley Spencer’s centre. An album chart without sex would be…what? “Down”? Recommended Price: oh just pay the £15. You know you want it 36. GOOD CHARLOTTE The Young And The Hopeless As I was saying, an album chart without sex would be… Recommended Price: £1 – let’s face it, you could get the collected works of Kingmaker for that price 37. SUZANNE VEGA Retrospective – The Best Of… Is there a point where Dolly Parton, Shania Twain and Suzanne Vega all meet? Not the first Vega compilation, but frankly I want to have it, and frankly I actually do have it. In some moods I am ready to admit that any record which includes “Caramel” is by default the greatest of records. And “Small Blue Thing”… Recommended Price: £9, but make sure you have £12 spare for The Essential Leonard Cohen 38. FLIP AND FILL Floor Fillas Scooter without the humour, the punctum, the tunes and, indeed, the point. Joy is less with this music, the kind which forces Top Of The Pops “presenters” to be confined to wearing dark clothes so that they don’t overwhelm the spurious “coolness” of the programme. For those who consider Kelly Llorenna more important than Billie Holiday. Or Diamanda Galas. Recommended Price: 50p, the same price as the Grace album which you will find adjacent to it in the Crusaid charity shop in Pimlico, and which is much, much better. I mean, “Not Over Yet”! 39. ATHLETE Vehicles And Animals Incuriously enough, this is the second album in this week’s Top 40 to owe a considerable debt to the works of the underloved 1980s group Microdisney. And to think you could have had The High Llamas instead. Shame on you Nick Hornby, all. Recommended Price: £2.50 – give it time, it’ll be there in the Notting Hill Housing Trust charity shop in Tooting, right next to Sleeper’s The It Girl and Menswear’s Nuisance 40. DIZZEE RASCAL Boy In Da Corner Well, well, well. You knew this is where everything else was leading to. This is a hard finisher. But it’s the only logical end. There it is, a future being howled out for you at the extreme fringe, where the blueness of the sky turns into the blueness of the glue holding the jigsaw together. How appropriate that this, of all records, should be propping up all the others. Dizzee Rascal bears the entire weight of pop music on his uncertain shoulders. And what difference would it have made if this list had been reversed, with Dizzee standing on everyone else’s assured shoulders? How apposite that we should begin with a mirage of what pop is, which gradually de-colourises until we end up with the stark, rancid yellow of the cover of the Dizzee Rascal album. From Beyoncé, who stares at us endlessly, to Dizzee, who does everything to avoid staring at us. What a story this turned out to be. A history of pop music only because the people who bought it said it was. Recommended Price: go by Sister Ray; give the man a tenner and a couple of quid extra, just in case posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
BASIL KIRCHIN: POSTSCRIPT Monday’s piece was written before I had seen David Toop’s review of Quantum in the new Wire, to which curious readers are directed for further information. I had quite forgotten that Kirchin had scored several horror films in the early ‘70s, including The Abominable Dr Phibes, and also that he had travelled to the Ramakrishna Temple in India some years ahead of the Beatles. The childlike voice (“Something special will come from me”) heard at the beginning and end of the album does, as I suspected, belong to his wife Esther; and if a “rock guitarist” does appear halfway through side two to “strangle” the “singer,” it isn’t Ray Russell but could well be Bailey – I replayed Guitar, Drums ‘n Bass and reminded myself that he was/is capable of “rock,” even if it’s the rock of Henry Moore rather than the rock of Kings of Leon. posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
DO YOU MAKE YOUR ROOM IN MY MIND? 1. Rooms Well I had to listen to Lucier again. In the same way that I Am Sitting In A Room has become someone else’s story by the mere fact of its transporting existence, so it is that The Church of Me has taken on a secondary life by having become part of someone else’s story – a story precipitated, at least in part, by Lucier’s room. It’s now out in the world, with what is by my count its third, but by far most prominent, citation in print. Does that mean that CoM no longer “belongs to me”? Not quite…to the greatest extent, it does depend on the room in which you are reading/absorbing it. I similarly wondered: how would Lucier’s Room alter in character and structure, depending on how you listened to it? Does playing it through speakers lend it additional, or different, resonances than listening to it via headphones? Or via a hi-fi rather than on a Discman? Or heard in your own room as opposed to being listened to two rooms away? Indoors or outdoors? To the best of my knowledge, the only record shop in London which stocks the “definitive” 45.23 recording of Lucier’s Room is These Records. This is a shop situated about halfway down Brook Drive, SE11, a curious time capsule of a street which runs parallel to, and behind, the Imperial War Museum; a street which seems to have been frozen in 1953 with its Salford terraces – or perhaps the way large parts of suburban Lanarkshire still were in, say, 1973 – and what are not quite reproduction antiques of shops (“H WELLS – CONFECTIONER”). At one end, the genteel squalor of midriff Lambeth; at the other, the honest wreckage of Newington Butts and the outskirts of the Elephant and Castle (Dante Road; how apposite – “BEWARE OF THE DOG” scrawled in white chalk across four high brown corrugated fences protecting sub-Barratt homes). And it is uncuriously appropriate that the only shop in London in which Lucier’s Room can be purchased is a shop which you have to strive to find, which you in several senses have to know about before you can find it – because otherwise it is nearly invisible and impossible to nail down. The sort of shop you feel you might have dreamt, even when you’ve gained entry into it. A shop which only advertises itself in the subtlest of senses. Before you can find These Records you have to know about the anonymous red door (so that no “X” can be painted on it by any passing Thomas More wannabes?), recognise what the vintage 78s lining the bottom of the otherwise shuttered shop window signify, be aware that you have to ring a doorbell to get in. In other words, you can only find this shop if you are genuinely determined to do so. A record, then, you can only find in a shop which you can only find if you want to find it. Who said anything about Willy Wonka? (i.e. someone needs to…) In one extremely decisive way, These Records acts as an alternative V-Shop (if only for Wire readers); once you enter its incense-scented interior you are faced reproachfully with an alternative history of pop as it could have been (or could still be), where Cornelius Cardew counts for more than the Beatles, where the Beach Boys and Chuck Berry are superseded by This Heat and Musica Elettronica Viva, where Die Trip Computer, Die! is still a palpably possible pop music. Thus it was that I made my Discman Lucier’s room for Saturday morning and took it for a walk round the dark regions of SE11. The area is strangely paradisical if your definition of paradise is a world devoid of other people. West Square and its attendant Garden were an irresistible room. Squint your eyes closely enough and you, as I imagine most of its inhabitants do, imagine that you’re in Onslow Square, that you are somehow detached from the poverty and blood which silently surround you. West Square Garden was ideally deserted; apart from a few idle strollers, the place was uninhabited. No one chose to stop and sit. If you really wanted to find me, you would have found me in West Square Garden, London SE11, between 11:00 am-12:00 noon on the Saturday just passed. Listening to Lucier. Quietly – so that even more unimagined harmonics and resonances could make themselves known. The subtle structure which means you never entirely lose your grip on its origins – even in Lucier’s introductory instructions you can hear him pacing it musically; and how significant these stutters are – the “rhythm,” the second “script,” the “not.” How the meaning is not necessarily transferable, but can still be vaguely discerned even as the original voice which produced it may already have died, may already be beyond your reception, may still be fighting it out in soundwave space with old “Dastardly and Muttley” cartoon soundtracks, or Woolf (either V or L) on the Third Programme or Home Service. Listening to it on the same day at the same time in, say, Soho Square, would have provoked a piece of music which would be the polar opposite of what I had just experienced (you can discern, or at least comparatively approximate, this by the extreme differences in Caroline Kraabel’s “Taking A Life For A Walk” programme/recital, depending on whether she’s wheeling her pram down the Old Kent Road or up Denmark Street). After that – the dying voice – the Imperial War Museum proved equally irresistible. I had not been there for more than two years, prior to which time Laura and I visited it (and studied in it) on numerous occasions. So up Brook Drive (through the soup of Brook Drive?), through the discerning desolation of Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park, and up the steps to the green-domed IWM. Not very busy, as it tends not to be, even with the £10 entrance fee now abolished; quarter-full, as it has always tended to be, with eager(ish) young boys, their considerably more eager fathers and the occasional, bored-out-of-her-tree partner/wife/mother, always standing aside, letting the boys get on with groping the tanks and trenches. It was by any standards bizarre that Laura was the only woman I ever knew who was actively excited by and interested in the subject of war and combat, and the First World War in particular. I of course did not linger. After a quick and poignant tour of the 1940s House exhibition (in several ways, My House Circa 1965), I went up the lift to the second floor, and the WWI art gallery. Almost entirely free of people, I sat, already tired, on a director’s chair and gazed intently yet blankly at Nevinson’s A Taube (1915). A child lies dead on a cobbled street, blood seeping out from its head; beside it (the gender is not immediately identifiable) a bombed shop-front testifies to what has happened, but the culprit is nowhere to be seen. The “Taube” was a German two-seater reconnaissance ‘plane – the word “taube” is German for dove, while the word “taub” is German for dead. Eyes still fixed straight at the painting, my mind drifted indirectly away from it and I thought of my last visit, when we were both here, and the importance of the fact that one of us had to go on living, to provide even the most scant of testimonies that “both of us” were once upon a time alive. Finding an obscure fire exit door I knew of old, I disappeared from the main gallery and slipped through another fire exit door to come face to face with John Singer Sargent’s “Gassed 1918.” I sat down to meditate some more. Such an emotional painting in its declared avoidance of obvious emotion; the setting sun, growing ever paler, the imperceptible vomiting by one blinded gas victim over sundry other bodies; above all the football game incongruously proceeding at the rear. “As if to drive home their plight, Sargent ensures that the raised limb of the man kicking the ball is echoed in the leg lifted up by the third soldier in the line.” (Richard Cork, The Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art And The Great War, Yale University Press, New Haven/London, 1994) And that football game kicked off unconnected memories; of Sunday Mail comic strips circa 1969, of Sunday morning Barrowland murals – those 5 Boys colours, as if my extreme youth had been transposed with the grief and pain portrayed by Sargent almost half a century prior to my existence. I rapidly remembered the painting’s original inspiration, Bruegel’s The Parable of the Blind. Then things became strange. The Lucier piece started to re-echo in my head. This was yet another room, but this time a completely soundless one apart from what I could recall within my own mind. I suddenly felt detached. I felt as though I were nowhere and yet everywhere. I could live in this “room” for the remainder of my life. I could walk through that painting and back into my old life, my former world. I had no orientation consciously tying me to the Imperial War Museum, or to London, or to Earth. Then I glanced to my left and caught sight of Travoys arriving with Wounded at a Dressing-Station at Smol, Macedonia, painted by Stanley Spencer in 1919. The surgeons at the extreme top of the centre of the painting, bathed in a halo of welcoming and life-restoring light. If only. “All I see: flying bits. I begin to count them.” (Nina Nastasia, “While We Talk”) Later that afternoon Radio 2 played Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.” Lucier’s room becomes, briefly, the mainstream. How apposite that the creator of “O Superman” should be wed to the creator of Metal Machine Music. You couldn’t have one without the other. 2. Pain There is more overt activity, and far more overt emotion, in Duos For Doris, the new 2CD set by two-thirds of the current AMM, Keith Rowe and John Tilbury; but this remains a room, a room, moreover, of grieving. Two days before recording, in January of this year, Tilbury’s mother died aged 96. We mourn as we can. The 70-minute “Cathnor” which takes up the whole of CD1 is the main event here, where the majority of the grieving and catharsis occurs. Rarely have we heard a more overt structure in AMM-related music than we do here. No instrumental credits are included on the sleeve; you have to know that Tilbury plays piano, and that Rowe plays something which may or may not once have constituted a guitar. It doesn’t really matter – here are two men, both in the region of 60, communicating and crying. The build-up is so cautious, yet so determined; Rowe’s electronics cautiously build an arch through which Tilbury’s never more solemn piano chords can proceed. And these piano chords are circulatory; they ascend and descend regretfully but rigorously. With patience and passion. Then at 43 minutes the calm finally bursts and we hear two minutes or so of complete unfettered rage. Noise enough to drown any crocodile tears. It’s as if the ghosts engineered by the overtones in Lucier’s room have suddenly fed back on themselves, and a phantom has emerged, raging and screaming. Thrashing and pounding as though stabbing their own hearts – but all there is left to do is return to the piece’s symmetry, as Tilbury’s cyclical chords descend and Rowe’s “guitar” decomposes. It is as profoundly static and moving as Gorecki’s Third. 3. Quantum My copy of The Book of British Dance Bands From The Twenties To The Fifties doesn’t have an awful lot to say about Basil Kirchin. Born in 1929, the son of noted bandleader Ivor Kirchin, he eventually formed a band in conjunction with his father, the tagline for which was “The Biggest Little Big Band In The World.” On my record shelves, neither Kirchin figures prominently; Basil appears as a drummer on some sides by Teddy Foster’s Kings Of Swing, as well as on occasional sessions by the bands of Roy Fox and Ted Heath (he briefly replaced Jack Parnell in the latter), and Kirchin Senior not at all. On the same shelves are two albums credited to Basil Kirchin, dating from 1971 and 1974 respectively, both entitled Worlds Within Worlds - one on Island, the other on EMI. Nestled incongruously (or not) between the John Kirby Sextet and Andy Kirk’s Twelve Clouds Of Joy, these releases present a rather different Basil Kirchin than the one of an established dance band drummer. There are names on each such as Evan Parker and Derek Bailey, for example, and the albums themselves experiment with “found sounds” of nature in a parallel-with-Holger-Czukay kind of a way, except that these sounds were recorded and assembled on location by Kirchin and his wife Esther during what he describes as a ten-year period of travelling. Now comes a third album from Mr Kirchin, recorded in 1974 but unreleased until now - Quantum is a record of two distinct parts, but one common intent; and to this writer it sounds like the most fully realised record of the trilogy. Essentially, Part One is based upon recordings of various animals (hornbills, geese, etc.) while Part Two takes its lead from recordings of the voices of the autistic children who inhabit the community of Schurmatt in Switzerland. Both parts were painstakingly assembled (to a click track, even) by Kirchin in conjunction with what he describes as his “Praetorian Guard of musicians.” He says that six musicians participated but only mentions four by name – Evan Parker (on soprano sax), Kenny Wheeler (on flugelhorn), bassoonist Graham Lyons and bassist Daryl Runswick. The initial astonishing thing about this record is that the KLF must have heard it somehow, for it starts with a sample of birds crowing “God Save The Queen,” almost identical in nature to that which climaxes “The Queen And I” on the first JAMMs album. Quickly, however, the music progresses to a regretful, restrained organ refrain, giving the impression of a Robert Wyatt backing track. A female voice (Esther Kirchin, one presumes) sings “Something special will come from me.” After this, however, controlled mayhem breaks loose, as Parker’s soprano enters, duetting with the dawn chorus (very Steve Lacy) before an uncredited guitarist makes his entrance – unmistakably Derek Bailey, but given the current state of relations between Parker and Bailey, one can perhaps understand why Bailey was reluctant to be especially credited here. The heat is slowly turned up and Parker’s soprano erupts into characteristic but always relevant tumult – as with the recently reissued and expanded Live At The Unity Theatre duet album with Paul Lytton, one is again reminded just how startlingly raw and passionate Parker’s playing was at this stage. The surprise, though, is how Runswick keeps up with him all the way, at some stages more so than Bailey. I’ve never paid especial heed to Runswick’s bass playing previously – his work on various Ray Russell and Harry Beckett albums was, shall we politely say, functional – but as with Jeff Clyne on Oxley’s Four Compositions For Sextet, it’s astonishing how easily he cuts free here; easily a match for the Guys and Millers of the time (as well as a pointer to his own subsequent experimental works such as I Sing The Body Electric). The drummer (again, I presume, Kirchin) is coolly propulsive and the interaction with the animals does rise to such a pitch that it’s hard to distinguish one set of “voices” from the other (which was kind of the idea). It’s Lucier’s room with added haemoglobin injected; again, that howling out at the world. Parker doesn’t feature particularly prominently on Part Two (and Wheeler only really surfaces about six-and-a-half minutes into this section) but Part Two is even more astonishing. Bookended by a childlike nursery rhyme organ/Moog refrain (and some taped applause), the children of Schurmatt treat us to their concept of speech and song, venturing even further than the Langley Schools Music Project. The music at times becomes just as feral as Oxley or Brötzmann’s bands at their most uncompromising, but the at times anguished, at other times splenetic, voices are not only integrated perfectly into the flow of the music but actually dictate the flow. About halfway through Part Two, Kirchin comments on a “rock guitarist” who sounds as though he is trying to strangle the child whose voice we are hearing at the time. This particular guitarist is not named, and from his brief appearance certainly isn’t Bailey, and may not even be a guitar at all (Ray Russell, perhaps?) – for the thrash is then taken up by Runswick’s furious arco bass and Lyons’ rampaging bassoon, Kirchin’s drums (and keyboards?) never letting up in their drive. Eventually some kind of catharsis is achieved, pain and blood are acknowledged – and we return to the fairground melody which opened Part Two, now bolstered by a child’s voice, as if to say, we have accomplished something. Or have we? “Fol-de-rol/Hiding in my little place/No one can find me or see my face/Something special will come from me.” It’s an exceptionally terrifying moment, as fearful in its own way as the soundtrack from Bagpuss. The fear makes itself most manifest when the music is at its quietest and most tonal. So what happened exactly to Kirchin? Already in his mid-40s at the time of this music; what, or who, converted him? And what has he been doing since? Now 74, his sleevenotes are meticulous in not really giving anything away. And yet, here we have another possible route opened up down which pop, or any, music could travel. Did someone say Boards Of Canada? More probably one should say that it’s a 1974 equivalent of the KLF’s Chill Out with some foreknowledge of Metal Machine Music. 4. Irresolution Logically enough, the child song at the end of Quantum segues very nicely indeed into “We Never Talked,” the opening track of Nina Nastasia’s Albini-recorded debut album Run To Ruin. Her plea to herself to “stay sane.” The way in which Jim White’s remarkable drumming systematically destabilises the “rock” of “I Say That I Will Go.” The quiet revolution of “Superstar.” Above all, the lament of the corpse in “The Body” – Nastasia’s beyond-plaintive cry of “Why did you do it?” might be the most affecting three seconds of singing I have heard this year. The record doesn’t last long – just over half an hour – but there’s an incandescent passion existing within it which stays with you for years, if you’ll let it. There really isn’t that much which needs to be said about Run To Ruin except that (a) you should buy it; and (b) I would, were my situation the same as it was four or five years ago, have added this to my Discman playlist utilised when travelling on the Oxford Tube on dark winter mornings, where in the right conditions nothing seemed quite of this planet. The warmth of ultimate isolation – strangely comforting to me at the time, seeing as I didn’t know what was going to happen. Should you find yourself compelled to commute on the A40 between Gloucester Green and Victoria of a particularly numbing early morning in winter, you might wish to try out some of the following: Marion Brown, Sweet Earth Flying Sandy Dillon, Electric Chair East River Pipe, The Gasoline Age Four Seasons, Genuine Imitation Life Gazette Horslips, The Tain John Mayall, Bare Wires Piano Magic, Low Birth Weight Leo Smith, Divine Love Throbbing Gristle, Heathen Earth Peter Wyngarde, When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head oh, and: Alvin Lucier, I Am Sitting In A Room, but you already knew that. They worked for me, anyway. Can the same be said for life as it is now? I’ll answer that one once I come to terms with the extraordinary fact that, with Lumidee’s “Never Leave You” about to go to number one, people seem finally to have got the point of ESG. In the meantime… “So we discuss suicide, and the ghosts, as I say, change so oddly in my mind; like people who live, & are changed by what one hears of them.” (The Diary of Virginia Woolf Vol 4, Hogarth Press, London: 1977-84) posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
WORDS AND MUSIC BY PAUL MORLEY (Improvisations in the same way that Archie Shepp improvises on “Girl From Ipanema”) (Or as John Coltrane or Big Brovaz improvise on “My Favourite Things”) How the fuck did he know? After Laura died, about the only piece of music I could listen to was Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room. I listened to the harmonics of the solitary man – no longer solitary only because his tape recorder dictates so - with a view to drowning myself in them. Because I could only listen to multiple replications of my own voice, inside myself, to drown out what I dreaded could otherwise be audible. If I listened deeply enough, I figured, it would save the walk to Port Meadow. Virginia Woolf’s River Ouse by proxy. One Sunday morning I imagined that I was still listening to Mr Lucier sitting in his room but discovered that I was in fact listening to “I Dream A Highway” by Gillian Welch. So similar in its structure and approach – that is, the need to approach an approximation of infinity. Welch’s highway can go on forever just as the remnant fleet of Lucier’s voices can (and do, if you let him/her/them). But Gillian Welch’s highway was a way out for me; a way back to music, a way back into the world. In this city which Paul Morley constructs as he goes along in the third volume of his autobiography Words And Music - Ask says: do you have to ask? - Nothing cries: everything – he has opted for the twin towers of I Am Sitting In A Room and “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” to mark how high music can rise, dominate, mother and succour. Kylie is not on the cover of the book, except for her presumed shadow, looming over the Camberwick Green-done-by-Julian Opie picturescape (surely it cannot be Brian Eno?), but drives throughout the book towards the city of which she herself is the culmination and purpose, a city imagined by Morley but which could not hope to exist without Kylie. Perhaps when she reaches the other end of the city she will prove to be the Bartlebooth of pop; turning back, she douses the city in a soluble chemical, leaving a pristine sheet of Whatman paper in its place. In this case, Morley is the city’s Winckler; he has been allotted the duty of cutting it up into interesting and sometimes soluble jigsaw puzzles. Does Minogue fit with Mis-teeq? No, the hue deludes you; in fact she clicks in right next to Oval, nearer to Oval than to Mud at any rate. But only because the jigsaw has been dissembled in such a way as the puzzler dictates. And why, in any of these jigsaws, in the hundred thousand or so words which Morley devotes to “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head,” is the centre of the song never mentioned? The black hole into which, if we’re insufficiently careful, all of music is likely to collapse: “There’s a dark secret in me. Don’t leave me locked in your heart.” Now we are going to have to think very seriously indeed about this “dark secret,” about this sequence as a whole. Note how the music audibly slows down at this point, as if to pause for breath, as if to let the mask slip for just a few seconds (cf. the five seconds of His Girl Friday where Cary Grant lets the horror become visible: “The last man who said that to me was Archie Leach…”). Unless of course the dark secret is stealthily in the background of the book/Kylie’s drive as a whole. Unless of course the dark secret that, in imagining Kylie’s untimely death at the end of her throbbing ride, Morley is really writing about Marc Bolan. Unless of course the dark secret is New Order. Joy Division and New Order played an indispensable part in Nothing - and you can interpret that however you like – and naturally take a back seat (or at least sit in those back seats not already occupied by LaMonte Young or members of Kraftwerk) in this new book. However, New Order come out when they’re needed – “Blue Monday” as the valediction/culmination/initiation of something very central to pop music, Kylie’s legit bootleg of “Can’t Get You…” and “Blue Monday” cementing that importance and tying all the threads together. Perhaps the dark secret is that there was the option of quoting “In A Lonely Place” (“Someday we will die in your dreams”) at the song’s climax and maybe making things too clear. Would I have liked “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” more, or less, or differently, if I hadn’t known, indeed grown up with, Mike Westbrook’s “Can’t Get It Out Of My Mind”? Do I actually need to call up “Paul Morley” here, into The Church Of Me, to seek advice and counselling? You should be so lucky. I’ve got to be certain. I was extremely touched by my cameo appearance on page 120 as one of the… For God’s sake don’t say “keepers of the flame.” …I’m sure Thomas the Manchester lover will be pleased to see he’s been mentioned too. It’s strangely reassuring to have lived long enough to see the proof that, actually, I was right. About so many things. And now it’s all being taken as gospel. I envy the fact that, no longer being a “rock writer,” you now have the free time simply to listen to the realisation of what you predicted and planned 20 years ago, without the pressing need – or indeed any need – to have to write about or criticise it. It’s a luxury I’m not sure I have any more, and I’d quite like to get it back. You see, for the best part of 20 years that’s how it was with me. I had my audience – Laura, the only audience I wanted or needed. I felt no need to become a “music writer.” So in a Magnolia kind of sense, I’ve regressed back to about 20 or 21. You are clearly not cut out for Uncut. Why is your writing there so crap? I know, I know, but as Paul Eddington says in The Good Life: “It pays for all the goodies.” It’s impossible to express an opinion – in any event, Your Own Opinion – in any music publication now. Give everything some stars – no matter that my two stars for Beyoncé may count for much more than Barney Hoskyns’ four stars for Goldfrapp; glorified ticksheets for lapsed 35-year-old Clash fans. In any case, there’s an agenda to my Uncut writing: note the deliberate flatness, the endless repetitions in which I purposely indulge; it’s a ghastly ghostly parody and undermining of the flatness of this kind of writing. To work it towards some neutral point of post-amoebic anti-existence, and then maybe extricate all the studium from the world, or at least from writing about music, as opposed to writing because of music. Yet you continue to insist that Church of Me is not a blog about music. Music is used as a therapeutic tool, a life-saver. You might consider it as the expression of a lonely and frightened widower staring intently at every record in his collection, defying it to mean something again, or mean something different, in order to avoid pouring paraffin over the lot of them. Primarily The Church Of Me is a series of post-life conversations with Laura, the weblog as ouija board/confessional booth. Secondly there is the struggle to avoid the truth that music, though never a replacement for humanity, remains completely central to my determination to continue existing. Nothing has been more important in these last two years. “Music is the only saviour” says Gail Brand, whom I would trust with my life. And there’s another thing… Why can’t people see that pop would be even better without the crassly tasteful careerists, if we actually had Gail Brand and Chan Marshall as primary potentates rather than Goldfrapp or Topley-Bird? (Clue: anyone who calls their album “Quixotic” isn’t) Why, in essence, cannot Lunge and Cat Power be allowed to be pop? Because they are. Really. Anyone I should have included? I presume that the absence of Dollar and Albert Ayler from Words And Music was intentionally so that I can use them as the dual starting points for my own forthcoming variation on the theme: The Next Five Minutes After Death. “Give Me Back My Heart” and “Ghosts (Second Variation).” Although a more personal duo for me would be George Crumb’s “Music For A Summer Evening” and ELO’s “Mr Blue Sky.” 1978. I was in love at the time. It was not reciprocated. Dollar and Ayler are there of course. Any city has too many buildings to analyse comprehensively in a book of this nature. It was not intended that this should have been pop Perec or pop Pevsner. It is of course correct that these other books of yours have, in a McGoohan sense, no need to be written, because – as with you and Lucier – the image I have of Eighty-8 or 132 is so much richer and perverted than what any realities might offer. Like the lost books in Prospero’s Books - they are great precisely because they are lost and thus unspoilt by you or I having read them. Eighty-8 in particular – that list of records was, in many ways, the soundtrack to my childhood. You really couldn’t have done any of this without me, could you? David Thomson and Max Harrison also had important roles to play. But it’s useless and joyless to deny it. Can you imagine how important it was to a 17-year-old to be told that the first Was (Not Was) album was pop’s Escalator Over The Hill? That review changed everything. My dark secret is that it may have kidnapped my life. But was I really the greatest? It becomes clearer with every new year that Paul Morley cannot be beaten. He’s the undefeated champ, the man who illuminated the shallowness of nearly everyone else who has attempted to write ABOUT music in the literal sense – i.e. creeping around it and pretending that it doesn’t really exist, or that cinema is there in its place. The greatest practitioner of a shallow art? You said yourself how frustrating it was that it was so easy to be the greatest music writer in the world. Why isn’t it harder? Why aren’t there more of you? There certainly are far more of me now…Heronbone, Ingram, Nixed, Carmody, Southall, Cozen…it could be said, Marcello, in fact here I am saying it, that now you even have children of your own. And I’ve only been at it for two years. How easy and frustrating is that? That’s not really why you did it, though. B S Johnson – “I’ll get it all down, mate.” I had to leave evidence that the Laura I knew existed, because here was a life and, well, here was a couple, and this is what they were like and this is how they lived and here’s what music had to do with all of it, which was pretty much everything. So I couldn’t have done any of it without Laura. Metal Machine Music? It’s there, as of course it had to be. Linked horizontally between Tubular Bells and Branca’s Ascension, linked vertically to the KLF. You can’t really understand the KLF without first having heard, listened to and lived with Metal Machine Music. And I couldn’t have understood anything without first having heard, listened to and lived with Escalator Over The Hill. Your writing on which significantly appears on Stylus rather than on CoM. It’s an absent centre. Laura, and to an extent my dad, of course are THE absent centre. But the Stylus piece will be in the book version of CoM; it would be meaningless without it. Or indeed my Freaky Trigger piece on Pulp. Or indeed the things from ILM and ILE which I cannot afford to lose; the 1982 piece (central), Jools Holland, Spiritualized, Perry Como, childhood and cheapness. So, what do you think? The source – from and towards. Would I have liked Words And Music so much, or differently, or more, or less, had I not known Mike Westbrook’s Metropolis as the dark secret in the heart of Petula Clark’s “Downtown”? Had I not read Constant Lambert at an impressionable age? Had the Third Eye Centre in April 1980 not taught me that John Stevens actually was the centre of everything? And what about The People Band? Is it the greatest book ever written about music? It might just be the greatest book ever written because of music. Am I Nabokov yet? One has to keep one’s options open. posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
FEEL ANGRY? WELL LISTEN TO THIS We have a right, not just to feel angry, but to be angry. There is, for instance, no point whatsoever in applying the creed of Thumperism to our leaders, or to the BBC, or to the Ministry of Defence, or indeed to the press: in today’s Guardian we have plentiful line-toeing from Polly “my husband works for the BBC” Toynbee – truly a woman with genuine, heartfelt sympathy for the low-paid servile underclasses, at least until she consults her accountant – and Rod “I’m A Punk, Me” Liddle, who proves that despite all the cosmetic snarling, He’s A Company Man To The Bitter End (that fish-eye can’t be so easily cast off, can it?). The usual necrophilia, and everyone is fighting for the best remains to cart off as a moral trophy. In the meantime a man is dead by his own hand (only after it has been pressed down so hard by so many other hands) and the atrophy of life continues whereby “political columnists” earn £5000 per week by making readers annoyed, while doctors, nurses, teachers and firefighters are loved and adored, that is until they start to make treacherous Commie requests to earn enough money from their work to be able to give their families three square meals a day and pay their rent. I search around for explosive, angry music made now, and what do I find? The Thrills pretending it’s 1968. The Darkness pretending it’s 1973. Super Furry Animals trundling further down their quirky road to nowhere. Asian Dub Foundation – I wish I could love you but I cannot. So it’s back to 1994 I am forced to go, back to Seize The Time, the first and greatest album by Fun’Da’Mental – the necessary flipside to the nirvana of Transglobal Underground (most of whom were involved in this record), how to make the “Dream Of 100 Nations” a reality. It remains one of the most caustic and furious articulations of rage ever captured on a British record. Did it sell? Like most of what we perhaps should have had as “Britpop,” it of course didn’t. Boring. Preaching. Stop spoiling our fun. And, as is usually the case with those silly enough to take the media at their word, far more venom regarding the issues of “reverse racism,” “Crow Jim,” etc., was spat out in the whiter-than-white pages of Melody Maker and Select than any serious consideration of what Fun’Da’Mental were actually saying. Seize The Time certainly is no facile polemic of a record, though polemic it undoubtedly is. Immediately from its beginning – a recording of an answering machine death threat from a member of C18 – we are thrust into a violent percussive, Bollywood-sampling whirlpool of anger. These are the same elements of Transglobal Underground amplified into fury. As pop, as punk even (or especially), it is so monstrously and monumentally assertive and assured in its drive that it’s perhaps little wonder that people turned away from it and towards more easily digestible homilies (“Live Forever”). The propulsion continues into the title track, a reworking of their 1993 single “Wrath Of The Blackman,” still one of the greatest and most terrifying singles of its decade – the righteous fury of Malcolm X set against a melodica being thrown out of the 98th floor of a skyscraper, climaxing in ominously quiet orchestrals (is that the theme from Inspector Morse we hear sampled at the end? “Speak the truth”…). As the record progresses through the even more virulent likes of “President Propaganda” and “No More Fear” we realise that this is the exact Brit counterpart to Public Enemy’s Fear Of A Black Planet. The screaming of MC Mushtaq, Hot Dog and Propa-Gandhi is astutely balanced by the unrelenting polytonal, polyrhythmic ascensions of Aki Nawaz and Impi-D. By the time “No More Fear” collapses in a kaleidoscope of “Stop the white propaganda!” and London Tonight cut-ups of Stephen Lawrence’s murder (remember, less than a year ago at the time of this record’s release), one feels as though the world is about to collapse. “Dollars Or Sense” quietens the onslaught a little with its examination of religion as corrupted capitalism. And then we come to the moral centre of the album – “Mother India” featuring the voice (both as singer and narrator) of the great Natacha Atlas. A quiet but deeply passionate declamation of the importance of women – up to and including Leila Khaled – in the history, present and future of the struggle. The restful eye of the violent storm; everything else on Seize The Time leads up to and away from, and is justified by, this piece of music. Back to rage thereafter. Where’s the cliché about “this could have been recorded last week”? “Mr Bubbleman” opens with the voice of Alan Clark talking about the sale of arms to Iraq – the act which, in its own long way, led to what happened in Harrowdown Hill on Thursday – and shamelessly confirming his preference for animals over humanity. The ensuing rant is brilliantly unfocused and splenetic, like LeRoi Jones filleted through Jimmy Pursey. The story goes, however, that upon receipt of a copy of the album, the late, lamented Mr Clark sent Nation Records a complimentary thank-you letter, saying that he thought the track very good indeed… The onslaught then resumes with the sonic bloodbaths of “English Breakfast” and “Bullet Solution?” – but note the question mark at the end of the latter title. There is now doubt, the recognition that extremist suppression does not necessarily require an extremist response – and in the track “Fatherland,” which is punctuated by the voice of a dim Brummie (“This is the greatest country in the world, but it’s being polluted…because they bring their ways, but they don’t want our ways”), the tenor is one of sadness rather than anger at their ignorance. There is a plea for education, from which understanding can only blossom – and then, finally, some catharsis, some celebration, as “New World Order” and especially “White Gold Burger” appropriate the good humour of TGU and show us exactly what we could have if we so chose. But note the sinisterly confident drive of the concluding and brilliant “Mera Mezab” – the anger is still there, the blood still ready to flow if you insist on suffocating us. Fuck you if you want to fuck us. A record which would not have caused the sensation it deserved, I feel, even if it had been released in 1981 or 2003. Now we seem to prefer the good-time, keep them under control template of Dishonest Albarn’s sanctifying of world music. Consider the new record by Terry Hall and the aforementioned Mushtaq. Extremely entertaining, undoubtedly furious beneath its layers of veneer – but these layers are the problem; they neutralise the anger, lead it into the safe Jools Holland battery farm of compromise, whereas anger is now what is required. I suspect, however, that any anger which does surface from the State We’re Currently In will be directed towards ensuring that suppression becomes greater. So IDS will sneak into Downing Street, we will continue to pretend that Coldplay and Colder are the future of anything, and warnings like Seize The Time will continue to languish in bargain basements and charity shops the country over. Rescue it. posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
FRAGMENTS OF A FORTHCOMING BOOK: THE NEXT FIVE SECONDS AFTER DEATH I will not comment on the attendant irony of the Prologue to The Church Of Me and the events in Longworth on Thursday evening. We never really knew him. He always popped in the shop for a tin of ready rubbed. He kept to himself. He was well-loved. The luxury of affection granted when it’s too late for the recipient to acknowledge it. What an embarrassment. Did he have no shame? No consideration for Abingdon property prices? Couldn’t he have done the decent thing and done it in…I don’t know…Cromer? He did it. Now you’re never going to believe me until I do it as well, or better. He was in the wrong line of work. He died so that other people could justify their own jobs, never forgetting that only 5% of all jobs are in fact “necessary.” You’ll never vote for these wretched charlatans again, will you? Then turn the pages of today’s paper. Read about how Archer plans to bankrupt everyone who’s ever crossed him when he comes out of the nick tomorrow. Read onwards to learn about James Hewitt’s ambition to become a Tory MP. Remember how infinitely worse and more hellish the alternative would be. But we always vote for mirrors, never for idols. Thus does Big Brother decompose into a waiting room at Stansted, complete with haystack lacking a needle in the field outside. We want the nuclear family. Parents – the virgin and the housewife. Children – the thug and the zombie. Sustain that breath and suppress it for one week. Or for longer if you’re Adam Ant. Rod Hull, Philip Larkin, Paul Gascoine, Adam Ant – the list of misanthropic right-wing notables contains its own logic. And, certainly in the cases of Larkin and Ant – and maybe Gascoine, by dint of his presence on “World In Motion” – the art excuses the eager extinguishing of their own, already dim lights. Adam Ant was, with the Police, a supreme example of how insufferable musicians suddenly make perfect sense when they start having hits. Before Kings Of The Wild Frontier Adam and the Ants were about glum glam. Decca Records for McLaren’s sake! Then McLaren stripped him of his band, made far better and more honestly (!) mischievous records with Bow Wow Wow. Then Ant eclipsed everything with his unironic Nietzsche Goes To The NAAFI persona. “I’m standing here! What do I see? A big NO-THIIIIIIIING!” (“Antmusic,” whose inverted commas are every bit as necessary as those of “Heroes”) Antmusic was only ever about the Ant, and as a side treat it was the pop which justified post-punk. Hear how all the guitar scrawls from Gang of Four, the percussive punctum of the Pop Group, the sly cock of the head towards the Bush Tetras, the polemical nod towards and then away from Scritti, suddenly moulded with what he knew from his Tornados, his Dave Clark Five, his Dave Dee, above all his Gary Glitter, and exploded in “Kings Of The Wild Frontier,” all over “Dog Eat Dog,” the kind of genuine fake “World Music” which “Honest” Damon Albarn will never quite understand. He was as punk as Stanley Baxter and as showbiz as James Chance. It was always all about showbiz, but did he realise what his music was still offering us? The Arto Lindsay rancidity of a guitar throb which pulses under “Stand And Deliver”? The Throbbing Gristle backwards breakbeats and orgasmic tubular bells which climax “Prince Charming”? Above all else, “Ant Rap,” one of the most avant-garde records ever to make the Top 3, sounding like a popped-up offcut from PiL’s Flowers Of Romance? How all the Burundi drumming carried the unmistakable subtext of Orange Order parades? (take the latter especially into account when listening to what Dick Witts and Andrew Wilson did with the same ingredients on “Taboos” by The Passage, another of the ten greatest singles of the 1980s). Then there were no Ants but plenty of pre-Robbie Williams solipsism – all his 1982 hits were entirely about himself, even “Goody Two Shoes” which was ostensibly a good-natured jibe at Kevin Rowland – and then decline, interrupted only by 1984’s unexpectedly aggressive “Apollo 9” and ruined terminally by 1985’s “Vive Le Rock.” Whereas five years earlier he had pronounced that “rock music’s lost its flavour” he now retreated from the future (“She’s scratching her records/But she’s not scratching mine!”). He used his five minutes on Live Aid to promote it, because no ego allows even global misery to interrupt or disabuse its unquenchable and unbeatable pain. And do you really ring the Sun when you come out of sectioning? Does he need to be seen to suffer? Is writing this bloody blog any more morally defensible? posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
EPILOGUE TO THE CHURCH OF ME 1. After the death of his first wife Hilda Carline, Stanley Spencer continued to write letters to her for the remaining decade of his own life; extended conversations with the afterlife as a means of interpreting and, more importantly, keeping alive the memory of their living relationship. 2. After the death of Oliver Hardy, Stan Laurel continued to conceive and write routines for both of them for the remaining eight years of his own life. It kept his creativity alive and stopped him from immolating himself in untold depths of grief. 3. The bad memories towards the end will discolour the good if you are not careful. I might have been unduly unfair to I, Monster recently. In reality I am too scared to listen repeatedly to their song “Sunny Delights” – a summer song which is about dehydrating, melting and dying in an ozone-less torment of a heatwave. The distant trombone sample reminds me of Pete Moore’s arrangement of Cole Porter’s “Samantha” which ends the David Jacobs Show on Radio 2 every Sunday night. This always marked the end of our weekend and our reluctant return to the world of work. Now it is yet another symbol of a life, an existence, beyond anyone’s reach. I think of the August Bank Holiday Saturday, the hottest day of 2001 in Oxford, and what the heat and the sun did to help finish off someone already too weak to fight anything off. 4. But I also think of what our lives were like in the years before then, summed up well by Roy Harper in his song “Me And My Woman”: “I never know what kind of day it’s been on my battlefield of ideals But the way she touches and the way it feels, must be just how it heals And it’s got a little better since I let her sundance.” 5. David Bedford’s orchestral arrangement on this song – how it comes and goes, listening and interpolating, the personification of the Other. 6. Perhaps it is the painful effort to prolong one’s own life which makes me so hostile towards those who would assert that there is no future, that it was all over by 1969 or 1974. Of Ian MacDonald’s The People’s Music I have little to say except to quote from Harper again: “You tell me that Grandad was a hero That he fought for peace and no more guns But I think he must have changed his name to Nero You see every time he grunts he kills his sons.” (“One Man Rock And Roll Band”) 7. So many reasons why the career of Joy Division/New Order is the greatest career in all of pop music. Laura and I would never have happened without them. What greater example of bereavement counselling is there than the career of New Order? On Movement they are speaking in the tongues of the deceased. But they leave an escape hatch open for themselves with “Everything’s Gone Green.” The laughing heard in the intro to the 12-inch of “Temptation.” “Blue Monday” – we mourn the person, we embrace the monument, we reinvent pop, we move on and live. 8. The sentiment of the Byrds’ “Everybody’s Been Burned” is relevant. One could describe one’s new ambition as finding someone to whom the last line of the song could be sung. PROLOGUE TO THE CHURCH OF ME He awakened, quite naturally, at 5:51 am. It was strange how getting up at six in the morning to go to work was drainingly exhausting for him; yet, having gone to bed at about 1:15 am, he could feel that he had had a full and satisfying night’s sleep. It was a lush morning, warm but not stiflingly so. Even the dreams had divested themselves of the elements of nightmare – always the case when there’s a definite end to be met. After ablutions and breakfast he briefly looked at the contents of his front room. He knew it was unwise for his gaze to linger too long upon them. What would happen to everything? He left a note for his landlady with this month’s rent, saying that he would be away for some time. But after so many months the landlady would run out of patience and dispose of everything in there in lieu of any further rent payments. That is if the bailiffs didn’t get there first; sent by the card company following six months of ignored reminders, final reminders, debt collection notices, county court judgements. Who could possibly sell, or want, all of it? An archive meaningless without the existence of its proprietor, whose existence had not been deemed sufficiently noteworthy for the archive to be preserved and deified. He remembered the equally quick gaze he gave to the empty, echoing flat in Oxford – now just another anonymous, unlovable bolthole of accommodation – before putting the keys back through the letterbox. In fact he was too hot and tired for prolonged gazing and meditating, having just spent two hours shifting everything out of there. Probably just as well. He would otherwise probably never have made it beyond Sandhills Park and Ride. He went out into the comfortable-looking street. He had no need of a newspaper from the 24-hour garage, where already cars were filling up in the forecourt, their drivers beaming at the thought of a long and happy day of travelling. Victoria Coach Station in miniature, but with no set departure times. A bus appeared on cue, and he boarded it. He knew of course that in other circumstances he would now be waking up in Brighton for a bracing stroll along the promenade. But Brighton was no longer an option. He knew from the moment he emerged from the train station that this place held nothing for him, would not delete or assuage his pain, would be too crowded for him to stay sane. The art of walking down an ordinary street was usually enough to defeat him; the debilitating need to assert himself every five or ten paces. So he used public transport whenever he could, though could doubtless have done with more walking, if it didn’t exhaust him so much. The bus approached Streatham Hill station. Not too late to give Brighton another chance. Hop off, hop onto a commuter train, change at Gatwick and away you go. But of course he is having none of it. Can’t go there again. He stayed on the bus until it reached its terminus at Clapham Common. What a lovely day for just lounging about on the Common. Any sane person would; get a paper, a book, switch your Walkman on, spread the towel out and enjoy yourself. Or you could always cross the road and get an 88 to Camden Town (too much like Brighton for his liking), then the 24 to Hampstead Heath and leisure about there for the rest of the day. Maybe come out the Highgate end, go and have a look at Highgate or Crouch End or Muswell Hill, perhaps go as far as Ally Pally; or else venture in the opposite direction, towards Finchley and the surreal farmlands of Mill Hill. You didn’t even need to do that. Look, there’s the tube – get the Northern line to Waterloo, spend a nice morning wandering on the South Bank, looking at the second-hand books. This idea he actually half-considered; it was always one of his favourite ways of spending a morning in London. Then a quick coffee in the NFT café, then go over the bridge and keep going towards Covent Garden and Soho; check out the record and bookshops. He had recently, and briefly, experimented with the idea of doing this in the company of others, but it had been a disaster. Everyone, most of all him, felt uncomfortable. It was a stupid idea. This is the kind of activity which can only be undertaken on one’s own, or in the trusted company of a loved Other. There were too many memories of what it was like when both of them did it. True enough, anyway, that even if he did get the tube he would probably have to change at Kennington and wait for a Charing Cross train. Too much effort. Today he needed to expend the least amount of effort possible. He thought of that strange street, Windmill Row, which comes at you at the junction of Kennington Road and Kennington Lane. It was almost like a miniature Abingdon; the little music shop, the newsagent next to it – the kind of Home Counties oasis you don’t expect to encounter in the unforgiving terrain of south-east London. Home Counties? More than that; he could narrow his eyes and imagine that he was approaching Swaffham, or Stamford. But he will not get the tube for here comes a 137 bus, going all the way to Oxford Circus, and here he is getting on it automatically. The back seat upstairs is free; he makes himself comfortable on it. It’s a holiday so the bus is not too busy. Not too late. Not too late just to stay on it until it gets to the Circus of Oxford, and then you can go through Soho, Covent Garden, South Bank in reverse. Or anywhere for that matter. Not Battersea though. Nothing of value for him in Battersea. He passes the Stepping Stone restaurant and remembers an uncomfortable staff Christmas dinner from a few years ago. Forced smiles, daggers out at appraisal the next afternoon. Except it wasn’t even at the Stepping Stone but at the Café Rouge up the road. Cold turkey and colder pudding. The circuitous industrial estate, the Battersea Park roundabout, and then it’s Chelsea Bridge. The north riverbank on the left side reminded him far too lushly of another now defunct element of his life. In truth there was little left in London which didn’t remind him. Still, you know the deal; come off at Sloane Square, have a gander down the King’s Road, maybe walk down to Kensington Gardens, come out the Notting Hill end and then onwards to Portobello. But he is not taking this option either. The logical and rational thing for him to do would have been to disembark at Lower Sloane Street, cross over and get an 11 or 211 to Victoria Coach Station. See if you can’t get a last-minute return to Glasgow! Go up and see your mum! With no luggage? Glasgow was, more than ever, not an option. Or why even settle for the Coach Station? Stay on the bus until you reach the train station! Then you have one final chance to go to fucking Brighton! The express service! Or Lewes for fuck’s sake if you want that genuine Virginia Woolf feeling. Take a look at the old house. Think what must have gone through the poor bastard’s head as she strained not to turn the selfsame head back towards the house, the life, which she was leaving behind. Nicole Kidman stepping daintily into the Ouse in sumptuous Philip Glass-soundtracked sunlight. In reality it was a windy, freezing March afternoon and the river was flowing so fast that even walking, never mind jumping, into the bastard would have been enough to break your neck and finish you off. Nonetheless, what he had to do could not be accomplished in Lewes. So he stayed on the bus, right the way through Knightsbridge, right up to Hyde Park Corner, and even here he had the option of getting off and getting on a 14 or 19 to Piccadilly and just – well – try to keep going. But of course he is a stupid bastard and he knows exactly where he is going and no one is ever going to be able to talk any sense into him. With crushing inevitability he finally gets off the 137 bus at the approach to Marble Arch and makes his way towards the Oxford Tube stop. Even here there are options, so many options, still open to him – a 10 or a 73 into town, there a 36 heading towards Paddington; get off there, walk down Westbourne Grove into the Grove of the Lad Broke for indeed he is a lad broke so fuck off as regards that unfulfilling option. But no, here is an Oxford Citylink coach, and no way is he getting on it. Why did Oxford Citylink never bother to install toilets in their coaches? It is inexplicable. Well, they say, it’s only 52 miles, not long enough to justify the expenditure – and yet here you have the Oxford Tube with its double deckers and WCs making a killing. If he were to go to Oxford he would do so on a Tube of Oxford coach in bright red in accordance with its indirect sponsors the Central Line. He looked again at the 36 bus peeking out from behind it. Perhaps go to Paddington and get a train? 15 quid, but what does that matter? It is true that on evenings when he was running late or tired he would sometimes opt for the train just to get home at a reasonable time, when he didn’t feel in a mood for the slow jams of the Savoy Circus. But that was not the way he usually did it, and if he’s going to do it this time, he must do it the way he usually did it. And before long the Oxford Tube appeared. There were only a couple of studenty-looking tourists waiting at the stop beside him, and he noted with some relief that the coach itself was relatively sparsely populated. He paid his ten quid, went upstairs and settled in the front seat. Crowded coaches were a terrible and suffocating thing. He had become used to the commuter crush, having done it for so many years, but doubted whether he had any energy left to endure it now. The day, most importantly of all, needed to be free of stress, since in a way that was the purpose of the day. The bus drifted down through Bayswater, Notting Hill (not too late to get off! Make your excuses!) and the Shepherds Bush roundabout (you could still get off here! One last chance! No chance) before heading onto the empty expanses of the A40. Astonishing how quickly one could get from the BBC to Park Royal when there was no commuter traffic. Perhaps, he reflected, he should have done it on a 5:20 pm Friday night jam-packed coach/motorway for the real experience. The Savoy Circus, East Acton (Wormwood Scrubs blending imperceptibly with Hammersmith Hospital), the half-demolished Western Avenue, the Hoover Building (what would it actually be like to live somewhere like Perivale?), Hanger Lane, all flicked by with great rapidity, and before he knew it he had arrived at the terminal desert of Hillingdon. He realised of course that this was yet one more chance for him to get out of the deal; come off here, get the tube back into town (Baker Street in 45 minutes; come on, admit it, you just had a funny morning). He will not be talked to. He thought it odd that Hillingdon station, and what surrounded it, was not strictly speaking Hillingdon, but the unlovely arse-end of Uxbridge. Actually the little he had seen of Hillingdon itself suggested that it tended to do itself down overly. But that hospital. Hospitals in general. So he is staying on this bus and nothing and no one is going to get him off it until he so decides. On through the fake ski-slopes outside Gerrards Cross, the distantly glimpsed Chequers, the non-existence of Borehamwood. The approach to High Wycombe. Truly this is a grand approach; the town brutally cut into the hillside, looking far bigger than it actually is. He thought sadly of past summer evenings, coming back home through this cutting, music on the Walkman. When work was a pleasure. Oh no, it was scarcely five or six years ago that he thought nothing of getting off the coach at Victoria and walking at breakneck pace to Denmark Hill in about 40 minutes, happy and looking forward to the day’s adventures, or even the day’s routines. Now walking to the end of his own street was enough to knacker him. In truth he could have done with a lot more walking, but the right foot would start to ache with the bare minimum of propulsion and the lung damage sustained following the accident meant that he was more easily wont to run out of breath. Then more Wycombe, with the briefest glimpse of Windsor Castle on his far left; onwards through the hollow lands of Stokenchurch, waiting for the Telecom Tower’s upstart little brother to make itself visible – and then, the great cutting, the great boundary, used in a million car adverts, the point where GLR disappeared from reception and was replaced by BBC Radio Oxford, for he was now back in Oxfordshire. The luxuriant panorama of countryside which awaited him at the end of the cutting – Oxford itself not yet visible, but there the Didcot cooling towers, that most reliable of landmarks. And there the Junction 6 turnoff at Lewknor. He had never quite worked out why the coach always stopped here, except that he had once heard a story that it was because the managing director of Oxford Tube lived around here. Oh the joys of compulsory capitalism. And even here it was not too late for him to turn back, to walk under the bridge and get the Tube returning in the opposite direction, back to London, back to life; or if he couldn’t be bothered about London, why not hitch-hike a bit, flag down a passing local bus service and maybe have a look at Thame, with its street of tea shops and its occasional opportunities to meet Robin Gibb or Tim Rice. The options that are open to man in the 21st century are limitless. At Lewknor, needless to say, he did not disembark, and instead he carried on through the anonymous farmland – there the Thame turnoff, and right in front of it, there the turnoff to Oxford. He mused that maybe he could have hitched all the way up to blinking Birmingham if he had so wished. But what was there for him in Birmingham? He thought of someone he had known in Edgbaston, but that was 20 years ago. Come off it. But he would not come off it, not even at the service station. One of the most frightening nights of his life came when, having boarded the National Express from Victoria to Glasgow, it followed the A40 route and stopped off at Oxford Services for refuelling. He shivered. This was no escape. A freezing cold December midnight, and there she was, the whole purpose of his life, freezing just a couple of miles up the road in Headington Cemetery. He would gladly have stepped out, lay down and let the coach squash him. So onwards, past the tower block at Wheatley adjoining the library where she did her apprenticeship, and then there he was, at Sandhills Park & Ride. Even here he could have opted out, crossed over and gone back. It was still early and it was still summer. The day remained in hand. The day remained an option. But he carried on, past the Green Lane roundabout, past Bury Knowle Park. However, he had to get off at Headington shops. He didn’t know whether he had the nerve to visit, but he wasn’t going to be there again, so off he finally came. The plexiglass shark. He thought about what kind of life its owner must have. He had never knowingly seen him in all his years in Oxford and regretted it somewhat; he sounded like the sort of bloke worth having a pint with in the Angel and Greyhound. He had heard stories that the man had at one point stared bankruptcy in the face – his shark-related legal battles having cost so much – but how he had come through it and was now content with his jumble sale jumpers. Was there a lesson there for himself? What’s a shark worth? So across the road, past Somerfield, and up the Old High Street with its impossibly narrow pavement. then left into St Andrew’s Road, past a pub wherein he had recently spent a depressing birthday, then right into Dunstan Road, past Ruskin College, up the hill and finally through the gates of Headington Cemetery. Then after an interval, which need not be described here, he left the cemetery via the John Radcliffe side gate, threaded his way through the hospital grounds – having to stop off in the hospital itself to visit the gents’, invoking more memories of how she was always there to visit him when he was transferred there after the accident, how she brought him home – then out past the Arthur Sanctuary House, round the back of the old football ground, down Cuckoo Lane, down through Sandfield Road and then back onto the road to Oxford proper, past South Park, through St Clements, past Magdalen and on down the High Street. When he reached the Carfax Tower he noticed that it was still too early for the Carfax Chippy to be open. This he decided was probably a good thing. Can’t do what he planned to do on a full stomach. Needed to feel at ease. He was now on the penultimate stretch. He did not especially need to dwell in detail on the city itself. He knew it too well. Down, therefore, through the shops on Queen Street, past the Westgate, the Library, the council, the castle, the nick. Onwards down Park End Street, past the train station (still time to get that train back to Paddington. Never too late you idiot!) and onto the Botley Road. Past the forlorn B&Bs and the Wetgate Hotel whose missing “S” was apparently irreplaceable. The allotments. The community centre. The entrance to Botley Park. And through there he wandered, knowing what he would see at the end of it but driven to see it nonetheless. There was of course nothing for him there anymore. How could he have expected there to be anything there for him? New curtains in the window, new furniture, new decorations; all visible from ground level. New people. He didn’t feel invaded or emptied, just out of place. It was utterly alien to him. He did not understand its purpose. He did not recognise the place. He stared into his past and found only a blank space. Not even indefinable grey matter; just a colour-free, toneless blank space. A nothingness. He realised that his work was done. He never quite understood why people felt the need to berate him with words such as: “How do you think she would have felt to see you like this?” It actually did not matter because she was not here to see him like anything. It was enough to get the words down, as proof that once she existed and this was the difference that she made to the world and this is where, and how, she stays alive. Only one place left to go. He of course no longer had a key to go through the gate and the shortcut into Binsey Lane proper, so he had to do a U-turn up Helen Road, back into Botley Road (there a number 4! Why not pay a visit to Cumnor Hill or Abingdon? No, Cumnor Hill consisted of a pub populated entirely by Mojo readers, and that’s all there is to say about that) and then down the whole length of Binsey Lane, being careful to avoid 90 mph idiot drivers (not that there were any; a few cyclists and that was it, the Perch Inn having only just opened its doors), then turn right at the Perch Inn, down the shaded path, over the stile, and there he was, back in Port Meadow. It was a glorious day, not a doubt about that. He observed the Oxford skyline away off to his right and the cows grazing directly opposite him on the other riverbank. There was no one else around. He walked for a while in the direction of Godstow Lock. Can’t do it there of course; too many people, that pub with its clientele of impatient motorists. Perhaps carry on towards Wolvercote? Or go up over Duke’s Cut and plunge into the Wolvercote Viaduct? Bit too melodramatic; besides which he didn’t fancy being threshed into pieces. No, go for that bend just before Godstow becomes visible – Black Jack Hole. Oddly appropriate. There was never any talking to him. He was given so many chances and discarded all of them. Even at this final moment there is absolutely nothing on earth, except him, to prevent him from crossing over to Wolvercote, getting the bus back down the Woodstock Road into town and getting the next Oxford Tube coach out of Gloucester Green. He takes one final cautious look behind him. No one coming. No swans in the river either to start pecking at him when he goes in, either. Mustn’t overlook that possibility. He is of course severely disappointed that no woman appears to talk him out of it, because if the truth is to be told, the selfish, self-pitying prima donna that he is, that is actually what he wants; not to disappear, but for another Other, a gentle and compassionate female, to come and gather him up in her arms – metaphorically, of course – rescue him and nurse him back to life. It was always fantasy. If that’s what he really wanted he would have done something about it. He would have gone out, gone places, start chatting to people, and as akin as something like that might be to cutting off his right arm, he would somehow have overcome his self-constructed prison and the ideal would have become reality. Except that he’s tried that, and all that happens is that he depresses the fuck out of every potential new Other because he cannot shut up about what has happened, because he cannot block out what has happened, because THIS WAS MY LIFE AND IT HAS NOW ENDED and really what he is about to do now is the best and most painless option. One last long look, then. Not at Brighton Beach, but at the place where they had been happiest. And, almost subliminally, the pain gradually disappeared and there was now in its place a strange sort of contentment. Now that there was no turning back – now that everything had been decided – there was no need to fear anyone or anything. Most importantly, there was no need to fear that her life would be forgotten – the words he has written prove that she was here and that her spirit has found a home wherein the person he knew can never die. He found it in himself to smile a genuine smile for the first time in too many years. posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
