KYRIE Well? Not too bad, thanks. Better than expected. How did you get on with Morris and Bellamy? I found both frustrating. Which is probably how they wanted it. On a literary level, Morris was clearly far ahead of Bellamy. But Bellamy got it right, didn’t he? Classical music played over the telephone while you wait to be connected! Paintings and sculptures projected on the front of skyscrapers! Benign corporate control! Bellamy was of course speculating about Boston in the year 2000. Responses depend upon whether one prefers astrology to literature. Or life to either. I did a bit of supplementary reading and viewing as well – the first episode of “The Prisoner,” the chapters describing the protagonists’ journey from London to Oxford in Iain Sinclair’s “Radon Daughters.” I expected that you would have expected it of me. Madam, you are the kind of reader I adore above all others. Don’t give it away! You’re right. We haven’t got to M Ward yet. But about News From Nowhere - you have to remember it was a dream rather than a prediction, a fantasy spelt out in the very title; “Nowhere” being the literal Latin translation of More’s mongrel word “Utopia.” So fragile, so touching, ultimately so sad. Why sad? Well none of it came true, did it? His fantasy of industry and capitalism being overthrown semi-benignly, cities of green foliage, hills and woods, and happy artisans working only for art’s sake… My friend, you have fallen into the classic trap. In which timescale is this dream set? Well, the protagonist – William Guest (i.e. William Morris) wakes up about two hundred years in the future. Old Hammond tells him that the great revolution occurred about one hundred and fifty years ago. And he fell asleep in the late 19th century. Which means… Of course. It’s very nearly the 22nd century. One hundred years from now, more or less. So it is still too early to predict. Exactly. Contemporary readers are always tripped up by such references as Hammersmith Bridge being rebuilt and re-opened in 2003. It makes them think that this is supposed to be happening now. Bit hard on Bazalgette’s bridge, wasn’t he? Morris was a bit hard on everything. The green Hammersmith-Barnes span has always been one of my favourite London bridges; reassuring and reliable. And rather grand, though I understand how vulgar it may have seemed to an over-sensitive late Victorian thinker. Although of course had the IRA succeeded in blowing it up, a new Hammersmith Bridge could well have been opened this year. There’s so much poignancy before the fact. How Guest falls asleep in the bleak dead of winter and awakens in summer sunshine. Wake up on brilliant days. Was that why “Someone Somewhere In Summertime” had to be released as a single in November 1982? Yes! The fluidity of Guest’s movements through the “new London” has a remarkable quality. Even when travelling in a horse and cart we still feel that the characters are floating through London. Movements are very rapid here – note how quickly they manage to get from Hammersmith to Piccadilly and beyond. The elasticity of time reminded me somewhat of “The Man Who Was Thursday.” Chesterton wrote that as a partial parody of News From Nowhere. Saffron Park – a.k.a. Bedford Park in Morris’ old North Chiswick stamping ground – is populated by fops pretending to be artisans. Gabriel Syme effectively functions as a moral bucket of cold water, but he is as spellbound by the illusion as anyone else. And of course Chesterton took the time travel to deliberately absurdist levels – note how, at the novel’s climax, the characters seem to travel from Dover to Earl’s Court in about five minutes. London as a giant trampoline, around whose corners they keep bouncing. It appears paradisical, but the key word there is “appears.” We never quite get rid of the feeling that this isn’t quite the perfect future which Guest professes to desire. And anyway…wouldn’t industry’s march have been inexorable? Doesn’t anyone use the Tube? How do they live if they “sell” their wares for free? Where’s the economic matrix? Where are the immigrants? One black child in Piccadilly Market, and that’s it. What about… You are forgetting that this is a dream and not Das Kapital rewritten by John Ruskin. You also discount the notion that this might all still come true a century hence. True, few, if any, of us will be around then, but it might still happen, but for very different reasons, all of which blind us with their obviousness in the world of the early 21st century. The revolution happens after a General Strike and a battle in Trafalgar Square in 1952. Well he couldn’t have known about the two world wars. Or the Depression. The Wall Street crash did more damage to capitalism than any Committee for Public Safety could have mustered. We still haven’t recovered properly from it. That having been said, Morris is painfully on the mark when he talks about the downside of unregulated capitalism. His rightly furious remarks about wage-slaves, useless consumer goods and nationalistic expansion into “foreign territories” could have come straight out of Naomi Klein. Or Klein out of Morris. Naturally. Indeed. Neither is keen on anarchy; they still insist on the joys of work (when the job is not unpleasant and the output is not pointless), on the absolute importance of permanence of some notion of “collective society.” In which, incidentally, a woman’s place is still a woman’s place. Yes, I noticed that. But then is it? Morris certainly doesn’t believe in the “family” matrix. Partners should be free to drift off with others, then back if they so wish. And what about the character of Ellen? Won’t she blow all of this apart? If the society of 2090 doesn’t manage to do it themselves, that is. But you are skipping to the end of the book. We need to journey to Oxford first. Morris seems to be in something of a rush to get out of London. Once Guest gets into the boat and starts the journey to Oxfordshire the pace of the story immediately slows down and becomes more reflective, less in a hurry. Morris’ London of 2090 is still a city, of course. Long Acre is chock-full of buildings; Hampstead remains a “town.” It certainly isn’t the London of half a century before Morris, when Dickens could take a stroll in the country to Camden. It is only when Morris/Guest gets out of the city that he encounters people with even a semblance of awareness of the history which preceded them. Oh come now, the centrepiece of the novel is Guest’s lengthy histo-sociological discussion with (or obtuse questions directed at) Old Hammond. Who lives in the British Museum. Detached from “London.” Oh, very good. Ageing is one of the many things of which this not-quite-brave new society seems to be straining to avoid getting into its mind. The “young” couple – Dick and Clara – are so bland and colourless. They remind me of a stereotypical couple in the later, lesser Ealing Studios dramas. Look, for example, at John Fraser and June Thorburn in 1955’s dreary Touch And Go. It would be difficult for ameobas to assume more colour than this already dead couple. The father, Jack Hawkins, is scarcely more alive. The film is about the efforts of the latter – a supposedly adventurous interior designer – to emigrate to Australia. But there are too many ties, which is the same thing as saying that there are only as many ties as one wishes to have draped around one’s neck. How tight would you like that noose to be wound? One presumes he doesn’t go to Australia after all. Of course not. That would be tantamount to saying that the entire philosophy on which the “Ealing film” was based was a destructive fallacy. Much better to be Alexander Mackendrick. Send the whole bloody structure tumbling. The Ladykillers is the bleakest of Ealing films, isn’t it? All about the utter impossibility of abolishing The System. Danny Green’s violin case catching in the front door of Katie Johnson’s boarding house sums up precisely why Morris’ utopia could not happen. The attraction to the old order – to any tangible form of order, no matter how repressive or suffocating – is too strong. So the robbers kill each other off and leave the Old Lady with all the money and a pleasant daydream which may just have been a reality. The film demonstrates how the cosy community is simply a better-disguised prison. Once filming had been completed, Mackendrick took off for America as fast as his feet could carry him. The prison which, a decade later, Patrick McGoohan – with the aid of many familiar faces from Ealing – will attempt to demolish. He too legged it for America. But Morris has a touching faith in the communality of the upper/middle and working classes. After the General Strike, Trafalgar Square battles and civil war of attrition, the two sides come to a reluctant agreement into which they gradually settle with succeeding generations. We know from the Restoration, never mind the actual General Strike of 1926, how improbable this state of affairs will be. Every decadent monarch has to be replaced by a Cromwell, or similar. Back to the boat trip. Back also to the character of Ellen. She explodes with colour and passion, does she not? Such a contrast to everyone else in the book. Morris’ idealised woman. But yes, her appearance is a severe jolt to the complacency of the society in which Guest has found himself. And the arguments with the old “grumbler” of a grandfather! The arguments about the merits of literature! Sound familiar, do they not? They are crucial arguments, too; do we want an ordered society with no literature, or the Mayhew-documented squalor of Victorian Britain with its Brontës, Dickenses, Hardys and Thackerays? Or to put it another way, a perfect world with a David Gray soundtrack, or a mess of a world with a soundtrack provided by El-P, Girls Aloud and DJ Scud? Orson Welles in “The Third Man.” The Borgias and the cuckoo clocks. But think of what else he makes Harry Lime say. “Free of income tax, old man.” Ten thousand dots. He didn’t have a high opinion of the general public. Nor, I think, did Morris. Everything in this utopia is paternalistic in its beneficence. Again and again Morris rants against “vulgarity,” about everything being “cockneyfied.” Clearly if plain people were to exist in this new society, they had to do so like obedient pupils, and therefore lesser beings. So much for equality. And I think Morris knew this deep down. Repeated reminders are spread throughout the book that this state of affairs may not be permanent, may yet undo itself. When in Oxford, Guest asks the archivist Henry Morsom, “What is to come after this?” Morsom replies with a hearty laugh, “I don’t know…we will meet it when it comes.” It’s very sinister. But not half as sinister as the artificial gaiety of Dick and Clara. Both are noticeably affronted, though retain their benign façade, when Guest questions them about concepts such as money, crime and punishment, love and death. With Clara’s character, particularly, there’s a very distinct air of “don’t spoil our fun.” ”Questions are a burden to others. Answers a prison for oneself.” Quite. Perhaps the most sinister chapter is chapter 24, when passing through the Berkshire countryside, one Walter Allen appears to recount the story of a rejected would-be lover who murders his rival. Dick and Clara are entirely bemused by ideas such as grief. “He should just get over it,” speaks the cheery voice of the cure-all therapist a century too soon. You end up wanting to shake them and ask them what they are afraid of. They have dim knowledge of the blood and pain in the eras which preceded them and an inbuilt determination never to go back there again. So their defence mechanisms automatically rise up. It is as though they are constantly fighting to suppress these thoughts. So they are not really free. Merely in the most deviously disguised of prisons. To be fooled into thinking that their world is perfection whereas it is in fact strangling them, slowly. And Ellen knows this. Oh yes, she wouldn’t be in this book if she didn’t. She knows full well how Guest got here; she may well be a fellow time-traveller herself, but it’s never explicitly spelled out. She is cynical about the new world, but reluctant to resume existence in the old one. There are few more heartbreaking statements in English literature than Ellen’s “I love life better than death,” which she uses to settle the books-versus-life argument. I love life better than death. The cloud comes at the end, swallows him up and takes him back to 1890. That’s sad, too. You could never film that ending. The look which Ellen gives him at the dinner party just before he disappears. Don’t talk to me, we cannot acknowledge each other, you must return to your proper… …station in life? Just go back and do your best to make this happen, she’s saying. We are all your descendents. Mess it up and we won’t exist. It’s up to you. But what about… Bellamy has hardly come into this discussion. It’s the dullest of books. All that happens is that the protagonist awakens in Boston in 2000. The society is one of state capitalism – Morris’ is explicitly one of communism – and the protagonist merely comes to terms with it and decides that it’s not the worst of states to be in. Bellamy loves his technology, but not necessarily his characters. If one wanted to extend the concept of time travel, one could propose that “News From Nowhere” is in fact the sequel to “Nineteen Eighty Four.” Oh, very clever. Orwell’s final chapter. The society which has replaced Big Brother? Yes! Morris’ proof that communism doesn’t necessarily have to be involuntarily converted into state capitalism, perhaps. How tragic would it be if the utopia described by Morris turned out to be, not the unobtainable future, but an irreversible… Steady on. We haven’t quite got that far yet. Time to do some more reading. What do you make of this? Selected excerpts from Song From Somewhere, my forthcoming book on British jazz “…Joe Harriott’s position in British jazz was exactly analogous to that of Alexander Mackendrick in British cinema; by nature part of the mainstream, yet quietly curious about what might lie just beyond the banks visible to his eye. Just as Mackendrick politely demolished Ealing’s politesse with The Ladykillers, so did Harriott quietly set out making British jazz veer off its overly respectful towpath. Harriott always claimed that his experiments with free jazz on records like Free Form and Abstract were completely independent of those of Ornette Coleman, and that in fact at the time of recording these albums he was unfamiliar with Coleman’s music. Listening to them again 40 years later, what is puzzling is why Coleman’s name should be used as a reference at all. Harriott’s music is far more indebted to the careful methodology of George Russell or Don Ellis; harmonic and rhythmic patterns are all present, and his alto sax seems more interested in exploring the harmonic implications of the music, as opposed to Coleman’s approach of improvising directly on the melody without recourse to harmony at all. Coleman preferred not to use a pianist, and even in Prime Time the guitars of Ulmer, Nix and Ellerbee have far more rhythmic than harmonic implications. Harriott used intelligent, thoughtful improvisers such as Shake Keane, Coleridge Goode and Pat Smythe, though Bobby Orr seemed to understand the rhythmic implications of Harriott’s music better as a drummer than Phil Seamen. These records were clearly experiments; Harriott continued to record and perform standards, and never had anything to do with the Little Theatre Club/Ronnie Scott’s Old Place developments in the mid-1960s. Were he alive now he would probably be musical director emeritus of the Jazz Warriors…” “…British jazz has never been good at innovating, but matchless at toying with, stretching and imploding existing innovations (the innovations of British improvised music do not altogether, or even particularly, stem from roots in jazz). In Perspectives, the 1972 album by the Stan Tracey Trio, quite remarkable results are achieved by extending the implications of Monk’s innovations, being careful to layer them with a veneer of approachable Horace Silver, and then stretching them out in an entirely different manner. Tracey’s piano is more obviously aggressive and percussive in its deliberately discursive approach, and helps us to understand exactly how major an influence Silver was on Cecil Taylor’s music. Unlike the typical Monk rhythm section, too, bassist Dave Green and drummer Bryan Spring are not content to lay out and keep their heads down; they both, especially Spring, keep prodding actively at Tracey and only drop out when they know that Tracey has absorbed their propulsion…compare with The Howard Riley Trio’s 1973 Incus album Synopsis. Although the latter involves a more obviously improv-centred rhythm section – Barry Guy and Tony Oxley, stretching so narrowly that they scarcely qualify as a rhythm section at all – the spatiality offered here is palpably that of Bill Evans and Paul Bley; notes are careful, considered, never superfluous. The exaggerated formality of Riley’s approach contrasts dramatically and efficiently with the strumming and thunder thrashing raging and purring behind, in other words with, him…” “…Derek Bailey continues to make his reckoning, to continue summing things up, except he’s never satisfied with a summary in and of itself. With the eponymously-titled debut album by his new group Limescale he approaches the History of Music, or even the History of Himself, as benignly as he did The Song on Ballads. In some ways the instrumentation of this quintet harks back to the earliest (and perhaps most adventurous) days of jazz – guitar, bass saxophone and clarinet, and also a dictaphone and a pile of bricks (we have to remember our Duchamp, remember it’s 1918). Tony Bevan treats the bass saxophone as a virtual bass, occasionally raising his head to make more obviously saxophonic comments, and at many points on this record holds everything together, introducing what we can loosely approximate as “rhythm.” Whereas Manchester’s THF Drenching and Sonic Pleasure (on dictaphone and bricks respectively) are far more compatible, quiet and violent than you might imagine. The bricks are the group’s “drums.” Ms Pleasure addresses them with a chisel, or simply beats them together or hammers at them. The result is a surprising percussive lightness; uncannily like Sunny Murray, to be vaguely honest, free but crucially light, to balance the sometimes unexpected onslaughts from the other musicians. The Drenching dictaphone is the most freely mobile and versatile of these five voices. As far as improvising on the dictaphone is concerned, I can only think of Holger Czukay as a precedent; but Drenching is rhythmically very astute and sonically effective – lightning-fast rewinds, repeats and speed variations sometimes provide a piano-like harmonic framework, at other times can squawk and slap as freely as the freest of saxophonists. “But the real revelation here is clarinettist Alex Ward, whom I had previously regarded as a slightly more animated Braxton disciple. Sometimes he can sound rather constricted in the wrong environment, but here his attack is positively feral, even coming near to Br?tzmann territory on occasion (on the track “French Archive” he is positively Ayler-ish in his passion). Meanwhile, Bailey’s guitar carefully polices the premises, unafraid to reintroduce rhythm if required. His wistfulness on “Academy Now!” could almost have you wondering if Ralph Towner had wandered in on the session. “The instrumentation, and free approach to same, remind us not only of early jazz but also the adventures of the likes of the Bonzo Dog Band, who in their many looser moments were quite prepared to go “out,” with Roger Ruskin Spear’s bass sax bleating and rampaging as required, but who preserved, via Neil Innes, an innate and irreducible melancholy. The centrepiece of the Limescale album is the 17-minute “Charity Singles Ball” where Bailey’s guitar prompts can conjure up Charlie Christian or, at one exceptionally startling moment, threatens to turn into U2’s “New Year’s Day.” There are moments of deeply mournful brooding, but eventually the musicians work themselves up towards a fabulous and tremulous climax of collective screams threatening to demolish one’s speakers. Balance this with the sad Bechet/Mezzrow trudge of the closing “Titles By Drenching” – a woozy but very old and instantly recognisable lament. But again the material is poked at, prodded, and the musicians heat up for one final orgasmic screech as if to say: don’t bury us yet.” HYMIE’S BASEMENT The male Cat Power? Hymie’s Basement are a duo comprising DJ/musician Andrew Broder (a.k.a. Fog) and cLOUDDEAD vocalist Jonathan Wolf (a.k.a. Why?) with input from Dose One. Yet another Anticon spinoff then, yet, for those who feel that Anticon might sometimes be Sub Pop with turntables, their eponymously-titled debut album, which is due for release on Lex Records at the end of October, is one of the year’s quietest and finest. The post-hip hop My Computer? There’s a similar pulling down of the shutters upon the world, though they can still see outside; thus the splenetic opener “21st Century Pop Song” – one of only three songs here to utilise guitars – which sneers an American apocalypse into existence (“Shout at the TV just like your dad”). Similarly, the frenetic thrashing and polytonal harmonising which begin “All Them Boys” brings to mind a slacker Proclaimers – no, let us not mention They Might Be Giants – before the song suddenly decelerates and detours into a wasteland of indistinct synth tones and solemn, stately piano. Suddenly it is nightfall. But whereas Chan Marshall’s similarly stately piano is used to try to shed, and maybe to donate, some more light upon, or to, the world as a whole, Hymie’s Basement are trying to get as far within themselves as their molecules will allow. So there’s the strange narrative of “Ghost Dream” which describes a driver who has driven his truck into the river on the way to a gig and elects to drown because he cannot bear to throw away the bass guitar which is weighing the vehicle down (“Meet your new angel monster”). In “Moonhead” Wolf is struck by a “crater exactly the size of a human head” and his head therefore becomes the Moon* *which reminds me; no sooner had I written about Slim Gaillard’s “How High The Moon” than it finally comes out on CD, as part of the Verve reissue Slim Gaillard Rides Again!. Gaillard’s glee at the prospect of the planets meeting, colliding and exploding, and his tossing and slurring around of concepts like “moon,” “stars” and “sun” can be as poignant as the final moments of Major Amberson. We will all go together when we go…except some of us won’t…** **The heartbreaking “The Pump” (with its central, almost sotto voce lament of “When she’s not there, there’s only air”) reminds us that had this album been released by Simon and Garfunkel in 1966 under the title The Sound Of Silence, it might have changed everything. “Parrots” starts out bouncingly, with the synth bassline from Hot Butter’s “Popcorn,” but that soon slows down towards stasis. Most frightening of all is the baritone robot of a voice, chanting in lieu of a heartbeat, on “Pretty Colors (Smile Your Brains Out).” The “real” voice of Wolf comes in for awhile, musing about what children should really know, but soon gives up the ghost, while the ghost continues its preprogrammed damnation. The logical extension of “Fitter, Happier”? The apocalyptic duo/duel of voices which arise out of the graveyard piano of “America Won/America Too,” which then suddenly cease and leave the piano to cope on its own. Is there a more final final line than “If you’re lonely, have a lobotomy”? The centerpiece? “Lightning Bolts And Man Hands,” a very careful six minutes where we return to an acoustic guitar. Wolf ponders on the assumed inferiority of the left hand to the right, has clearly lost everything and as a consequence tries to disappear within his own self, to be eaten by his own body; nothing left to think about or consider than what he knows for sure exists. The song is immeasurably moving, almost on a par with Smog’s “Prince Alone In The Studio.” And of course Hymie’s Basement is finally swallowed up in the closing “You Die” which could almost be Coldplay, except the vocals are undecided and the drum machine keeps hiccuping and throwing the track off balance. At the end, a high-pitched drone, waiting for you to switch the life support machine off. To die or to live again? Of course it is a very male thing to want to vanish into yourself. Kimya Dawson sings about trying to raise her child. Chan Marshall sings about the world. But this Jonathan Wolf just seems to want…not to be. You were saying about Morris’ utopia… Yes. It’s sad that Guest has to leave, but hope remains…he has to return in order for what he has just seen to exist. To complete his work as he is best able – in his own time and age. The door is not firmly closed on the future; in fact he has to return in order to open it. But how tragic would it be if we were to view what Guest has seen, not as a symbol of a benevolent (if still uncertain) future, but as a vision of something he did know, somewhere he did live, but has now gone, vanished forever? Wouldn’t you just want to… Stop. IAN MacDONALD “…A melancholy song, it’s also the final working-out of the dilemma central to On The Beach: how to regain and maintain authenticity when the pressure is on to present a false façade and when life itself is almost too awfully real to allow any space for creativity.” (From Ian MacDonald’s review of Neil Young’s On The Beach, Uncut, August 2003) I no longer have any idea about what constitutes the “best piece of music writing” but I know what my favourite piece of music writing is, the piece which did most to lead me here, and that was Ian MacDonald’s two-page NME review of David Bowie’s Low in January 1977. Citing everything from Rhinehart’s The Dice Man to the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love” in service of a close examination of the gradual and systematic dehumanisation of music, art and the world, of how any attempt at chance and spontaneity is instantly nullified, this piece told me how record reviewing and music writing could amount to infinitely more than the maitre d’ wine list which most music criticism emulates (“The new Coral is slightly off but the Thrills are warmly recommended” etc.). This was writing aware of its history, writing which actually instructed the reader to take pop music seriously, writing which stayed with the open-minded reader for decades even as it described the closing of minds. Did we know that even then MacDonald was writing his own obituary? Two years to the day and I was surrounded by reminders of suicide. Roy Cropper clumsily attempting it in Coronation Street, and then, for real, the obituaries in that day’s broadsheets for MacDonald, who had taken his own life that weekend at the age of 54. To cap it all, Kodwo Eshun remarks in this month’s Wire how he briefly assumed me to be “a younger, more generous-minded Ian MacDonald.” Signifiers outweighing the signified. MacDonald had apparently grown very depressed over the state of the world over the last two years. It would be easy for me to make facile comments of the nature of: well, perhaps he would have liked to swap his last two years for this writer’s last two years. Or perhaps not. Harder yet to realise that his depression extended back some 30 years; there had been two suicide attempts in the late ‘70s. Dick and Clara would no doubt have told him, exasperated, to get over “it,” as people with clinical depression rarely do. Am I staring into a mirror when I read about what happened to MacDonald? Could I have helped him in any way? I had his email address but never used it; I didn’t think we, as we were in 2003, had much to talk about or even that much in common. It wouldn’t have stopped anything, anyway. I didn’t even know. How to sum him up? His best popular music writing was indisputably that which he did for the NME in the ‘70s (I sometimes think that my second favourite piece of music writing is MacDonald’s two-page demolition of Oldfield’s Hergest Ridge in August 1974, fast following his fulsome praise of Tubular Bells a year earlier). Typically the broadsheet obituaries gave prominence to his Shostakovich biography, coming even above Revolution In The Head; the antiquated snobbery which continues to drive millions into the arms of The Sun. Revolution In The Head is among the most problematic of music books. Brilliantly conceived and indisputably authoritative, yet fundamentally wrong-headed; at least, that’s what one would assume without knowing much of MacDonald’s personal life and beliefs, even though they make themselves increasingly visible and indivisible as the book progresses to its rather tragic end. There is more than a touch of the Max Harrisons about MacDonald’s systematic analysis of every Beatles recording; ostensibly hard and unsentimental in its criticism (the early stuff might have been better, McCartney might have been more adventurous than Lennon, “Helter Skelter” is just bad metal) but never completely objective. Again and again MacDonald conjures up the sunshine and wonder of Britain in 1966/7 (his heartfelt comment on how anyone who wasn’t between the ages of 14-30 in 1966 could understand what a beautiful time it was, or the real cultural significance of something like “Penny Lane”), again and again he underlines to us how things can never be as good as they were then, be it music or life; and his ill-informed comments on contemporary pop (as well as contemporary classical and jazz) indicate that this world is now beyond his reach. There is a great, intractable sadness about this which distances him from the “I-don’t-like-it-therefore-it’s-no-good” school of red-nosed clowning in which too many writers still indulge. He is aware of his self-imposed limitations. As a cultural signifier I did not think that Revolution In The Head was very helpful, playing as it did the rôle of an inadvertent midwife to the stifling canonical tendencies of ‘90s Britpop. And MacDonald’s later writing, as anthologised in the recent collection The People’s Music, indicates that a ghost was already doing the writing, the spirit having fled, except for one incandescent final moment – his Nick Drake piece for Mojo, which worked so brilliantly because MacDonald summoned up for the last time the spirits which had originally driven him. His recollections of sitting in his rooms at Cambridge, watching Drake premiere Five Leaves Left, are heartbreaking in their suddenly recaptured evocation of unalloyed happiness, with full hindsight of how that particular story was to end. Was MacDonald staring at a mirror even then when he looked at Drake? He attended (but did not graduate from) King’s College, Cambridge, an idealistic, Left-leaning institution which tends to leave the idea in the minds of its students that they can somehow transcend the world, or at least give them a strong cocoon within which they can safely view the world. From a 1970s NME viewpoint – an entirely different creature to the NME of today – the re-entry of MacDonald into the harsh, capsule review, ticksheet world of the monthlies in the ‘90s and beyond must have been barely bearable. Everyone’s writing in Uncut comes across as “cramped and awkward.” In the current edition there are capsule reviews by MacDonald of things like a live Animals album, a Ron Wood solo anthology and a Searchers anthology. He must have wondered why he bothered. Was this all that was left of his world? How can one describe the magnitude of the horror which descends upon a human being when, in one lucid second of despair, they catch a sideways glance of themselves in the mirror and realise that they are just one near-invisible speck in an obscure corner of the universe? To spend their lives searching for perspective and recoiling in pain and horror when they finally find it. The realisation that the world they knew and loved has gone, is of the past, exists only in their memory, and that nothing lies ahead except further struggle and pain. Why bother to preserve such a life? The pills are to hand. There is, of course, a more difficult option, which is to try to continue living, to try to find new worlds to inhabit – they won’t be the same as the old one, but at their best they will make you glad that you stayed alive long enough to find them and to live in them. I am not sure that Ian MacDonald had that kind of strength left in him, nor can I condemn him for not having it; for I am acutely aware that I too am staring into a potential mirror when I read his obituaries, that this too is how I might end if I’m not careful. If I come to the conclusion that music is finished. If I cannot disengage myself from the prison of my memories. If I cannot understand that William Morris’ utopia is to come and not something which has passed away into the past. So I continue, Laura. I expected that you would have expected it of me. “As a document of a despairing personal low, On The Beach would be a kind of masterpiece by any standard. Yet it’s the album’s inner strength, its refusal to die or evade the issue, its ultimate squaring up to a regenerated future which make it such a moving experience.” (MacDonald, ibid. Emphasis added by the present author) posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR A WAY OUT At the end of this week I will be off to Glasgow for the second August Bank Holiday weekend in a row, to visit my mother. Outwardly I generally moan about how I wish there were other, more exciting, sexier, life-affirming options for such holidays, but inwardly I rather enjoy being fussed over and attended to – in other words, a chance to be 14 again. The main reason for visiting my mother this week is, of course, that a week tomorrow (Monday 25th August) will mark the second anniversary of Laura’s death, and I still do not trust myself to be alone on that day. Company, even the most elemental, is required. This is of particular importance when it comes to the fact that I am still questioning much of my previous life. Parenthood – does it really fuck you up? Or does it just butter you up for a glittering, chimerical future which can never be obtained? The jury in my head remains out. But the question was again prompted by the recent BBC TV two-part docu-drama on the Brontës. A terrible thing it was too, crippled by unbelievably hammy narration from Patricia Routledge (the kind of middle class after-the-fact Customs barrier which has deterred so many from investigating 19th century literature) and generally overacted by Patrick Malahide and others in a manner more suited to 1975 schools programming. Of course, it reinforced the given Gaskell gospel on the glum family, namely three girls and one Lester Bangs prototype fatally fucked up by a solipsistic, ultra-Tory fire-and-brimstone merchant of a father, who, if he were not wishing to stick his knob into them, decided to make them so inward-looking and unsuitable for even the most menial of jobs in the “real” world that they were obliged to invent a fantasy world of shining, heroic, proto-Narnian aristocracy to compensate for the fact that they lived slap bang in the middle of the 19th century West Yorkshire equivalent of Easterhouse or the Stonebridge Park estate – for that was the reality of Haworth in the Industrial era. Despite the sterling efforts of Juliet Barker to plead that this was not, in so many words, the case – that Patrick Brontë did try to inculcate “liberal” values in his children – we are left with the fact that one could say as much about Larkin’s father, who pointed his son in the direction of Joyce, Hardy and Downbeat magazine. It doesn’t obscure the swastika in the Treasurer’s office of Coventry City Council, nor does it negate the truth that 19th century “liberal” values were roughly equivalent to, say, John Redwood’s values today. Thus did the hapless girls turn (or were turned) into Tory snobs because it was the nearest thing to rebellion they could imagine. Out of the Haworth milieu – in Brussels, even in London – they floundered. And it makes one wonder whether their writing was even that good, or whether – as with Thackeray – the superficial subversion in fact was an attempt to excuse the deeply reactionary sentiments simmering underneath. The most dispiriting thing about the programme, though, was that it made Haworth Parsonage – shot from the usual sub-Third Man crooked camera angles – as alien to this viewer as Jupiter. And I am not entirely sure whether this is the fault of the programme’s clichés or whether this marks a systematic sea change in my own feelings and beliefs. Laura and I knew Haworth – and West Yorkshire – well, and many the time we marvelled, bewildered and stunned, at how the sisters, with their tiny feet, managed the walk from the Parsonage to Top Withens every morning before lunch, while we struggled to scramble up banks, perched unsteadily on narrow dirt tracks at the edges of treacherous precipices. Haworth is a tourist attraction now, its acutely sloping streets reminding one of a postal sub-district of Lincoln in more mountainous surroundings. Keighley, the nearest railway station, is a reproduction antique adjacent to a severely rundown town. The three or four miles from Keighley to Haworth strive hard to be bucolic; council estates carefully hidden away from the main drag, but never quite escape the corner of one’s left eye. The perpetually locked doors of the Brontë Society headquarters – another cultural Customs barrier – sneer at passers-by. From the Brontë docu-drama I could neither persuade nor force myself to engender any strong feelings about the Brontës or Haworth or the moors, one way or the other. Is that how it should be? Did I narrowly skirt the precipice of a comfortable and complacent future? Is it time to survey the whole Haworth/Brontë/Strachey/RAF/WWI world and just let go? “Where lies the hope for the future, and not in mere empty regret for the days which can never come again?” (William Morris, “Art and Labour,” The Unpublished Lectures of William Morris, ed. Eugene D Lemire. Detroit: 1969. Not a question as such, but turned into one by the present author) BONE THUGS-N-HARMONY: EXORCISM AFTER DEATH Few records, and fewer hip hop or R&B records, look death so clearly and consistently in the face, and yet so laconically, as E.1999 Eternal, the 1995 masterpiece by Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. Bone and DJ U-Neek managed to travel to further and darker cobwebs of worlds than even the Wu-Tang managed at their bleakest and most pitiless (Only Built 4 Cuban Linx). There are few starker openings to an album than “Da Introduction” which tyrannically chains Norman Whitfield to Lee Perry via The Dramatics (the rain sample from the latter’s “In The Rain” is the absolute leitmotif of this album, running through most of it). If only Whitfield had kept going and trusted his blacker instincts; the crossfire of slowed-down, backward vocals (Hendrix’s “Third Stone” wakes up in the ‘hood, waiting to be shot), cross-channel sirens, screaming guitars, trebly yells, coffin-nail beats – mewling insistently and creepily into “East 1999” with its children’s music box motif, a string synthesiser acting up for Thom Bell all by itself. Overseen by executive producer Eazy-E, who died before the album was released, this could also be the bleakest and most extreme NWA by-product, darker even than Dre. No Eminem-style “I’m only joking folks” asides here. Foreseen here are the ragga stylings later to become familiar with T.O.K. (and which really ought to have been familiar from BDP’s Criminal Minded - “The Bridge Is Over,” etc.) and the Sprechtstimme of Nelly. But we must also remember that BTH hail from Cleveland. The title E.1999 Eternal relates to an intersection of two streets in the city – in other words, the “crossroads” – in other words, you die here – in other words, no 21st century shall you see – in other words, this record is the missing link between “Thriller!” by fellow Clevelanders Pere Ubu and Thriller by Michael Jackson. - in other words, when they sing the words “I’m running, jumping” and the staccato, atonal piano chord is repeatedly hammered as per John Cale – in other words, it becomes superreal – in other words, Milligan and Sellers’ Running, Jumping And Standing Still Film - In another, not necessarily better world (remember Jackie Brown), the music of “Crept When We Came” could be the Delfonics, as could the harmonies. But here the strings are synthetic and programmed for slaughter rather than salvation; or the spectre of slaughter which stalks every street when you cannot find an exit. “When I start pumpin’, that’s when you lay low.” It is so pitiless in its descent. As is “Down ’71 (The Getaway)” which is the missing link between Robert Forster in the apartment in Jackie Brown and NWA’s “Fuck Da Police.” But the breaks here are explosions, as though the judge’s gavel had been fitted with a detonator. Kill! Kill! Live! Down with ’71? Attica blues…not a better world. “Mr Bill Collector” – these harmonies are so yearning. But they are yearning just to blow the head off someone who doesn’t agree with them (“I didn’t mean to take his life, but the nigga tried to get away and run off with my ill”) (“They did not intend to take his life/He just pushed his luck a little too far that night” – Rod Stewart, “The Killing Of Georgie”). “Budsmokers Only” tells us that they get high to make them so inward-looking and unsuitable for even the most menial of jobs in the “real” world that they are obliged to invent a fantasy world of shining, heroic, proto-John Woo deathocracy to compensate for the fact that they live slap bang in the middle of the late 20th century Midwest equivalent of the Stonebridge Park estate or Haworth. And what a beautiful descent into oblivion it sounds, too – underscored by Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Reasons,” as if to ask: well, do you need any? It is of course the missing link between Silver Convention’s “Fly Robin Fly” and Pharrell Williams’ “Frontin’”. the reality of greatness… “Crossroad.” The beating heart of this record, a threnody, a kaddish for the fallen who tripped themselves up. Voices/harmonies distorted beyond belief, falling into the tears of their own stoned sleep, because we focus and look at what happens when death becomes a reality because it ALWAYS is…Bone Thugs-N-Harmony mourn their own extinction. Symmetry? “The Ambassadors is a distillation of the Renaissance. Everything is in it. On a table between Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, representatives of the French king in London, are emblems of exploration, learning and trade: a globe that shows Brazil, mathematical and time-telling instruments, music, a carpet – used as a tablecloth – imported from Turkey. The men are reserved, po-faced; they give little away. Behind them is a claustrophobic green curtain that presses the picture forward, slightly parted to reveal Christ on the cross. A distorted, at first baffling, black and white form smears itself in a disruptive oval across the painting; viewed from the right-hand side, it reveals itself as a human skull. “’Vice versa, life is death.’ There have been many explanations of this deliberately confounding picture, but the simplest is offered by Erasmus. Life is death: all the material and intellectual and artistic energies of the Renaissance, recorded in this picture, all the politics – represented by the Ambassadors themselves – and the pastimes can switch in a second to their opposite: death. This Silenus invention is, historically, the literal truth of the painting. If we were to dig up these two men, skulls are about all we would find, if not mere dust. Holbein is pointing out the grim truth about all the historical images of ancient Romans that were revered in Renaissance Europe – AT HENRY VIII’S HAMPTON COURT, TERRACOTTA PORTRAITS OF ROMAN EMPERORS REMIND US OF PAST GREATNESS. But in truth, Holbein points out, the reality of greatness, in time, is a skull. Life is death.” (Jonathan Jones, “The Monstrous And The Magnificent,” Guardian Weekend magazine, 16 August 2003. Emphasis very deliberately provided by the present writer, to remind himself that some links in The Church Of Me have to be considerably more clearly signposted than others) But Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, standing alone in the rain, pass the crossroads and turn the whole album into a symmetrical pattern. “Me Killa” they chant, at first tentatively, and then with decisive fuck-you-ness, distorting Little Peggy March into Dre knows what. Thereafter the record stumbles and feels its own way towards an afterlife…the grotesque utopia of “1st Of Tha Month” – the missing link between “Hey Jude” and Kelis’ Kaleidoscope (“Wake up, wake up, wake up/Cash your checks and get up/It’s tha 1st of tha month” – the missing link between The Sandpipers’ “Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls” and The Streets’ “All Got Our Runnins”). Then the extraordinary “Buddah Lovaz” – that is, worship of the “Buds” they are smoking, which unravels a very direct truth about post-Coltrane spiritual jazz, as if we couldn’t have guessed it anyway; slowly they stone themselves, their Osmond harmonies slip out of synch, slither through syllables. A lovely fucking mess, and then…”Die Die Die” – a chant which hardly exists, a threat which they cannot pull themselves together to enforce, they’re so blissed out – and then the chaos of “Mr Ouija 2” and “Mo’ Murda,” as demented as anything on the upcoming OutKast album, which unravels a very direct truth about post-Arthur Doyle ecstatic jazz, as if you couldn’t have heard it by the way… …but is there a way back into life? QUICK INTERMISSION – CAPPA Gotta be quick ‘cos that’s how he talks Nottingham rap unknown since Stereo MCs but Cappa has much more on his plate newish record Spaz The World not Dizzee Rascal he needs to work a little less if he wants to be nevertheless brutal beats The P Brothers DJ Paul S and Ivory not sure about Apocalypse Now yet again on “Cirques des Clowns” but dammit “Speak” with guest MC Scor-Zay-Zee thrashes along like nothing since prime Blade no sample clearance here zeromoney so consequently more layered as good old ’86/87 rap was not a nod to ragga or garage but not a nod to Angus fucking Batey in Mojo this month either Christ Chuck D and Rakim watching each other top each other not a mention about Scott La Rock being shot dead don’t mention Schoolly-D a Golden Age which we will never see again because it’s all commercial now like Why? and Beans and the Neptunes and anyway I was 26 when The Chronic came out so by NME diktat that’s when music had to end but fuck if you feel it’s all over either keep it to yourself or if you write publicly that it’s been all over with music since 1968 or 1976 or 1992 or 1997 then really stick a 9mm in your mouth and blow your fucking head off your body because your life is over and you have fuck all to live for and you deny and sneer at the lives of others so terminate yourself and get out of our way that same Cecil Taylor elbow on upper register keyboard motif in “15-10” and I didn’t even mention how in the “Intro” Cappa proposes “I’ll slit my wrists so I can return to haunt you” and in “Speak” “I’ll make my family fortunes and marry Les Dennis’ bird” but nonetheless “Watership Down” is a wary lament “Learn To Be Strong” is budget Blueprint but damn good at it the mournful late-night slit-my-wrists-or-not mood of “Prevail” Nottingham town centre exploding on “I.D.S.T.” and I think of B S Johnson’s football writer in The Unfortunates coming to Nottingham and not remembering whether he had ever been there before though the place seemed instantly recognisable to him but this matters because Cappo says Nottingham matters which matters more than Madonna sneering “Nothing Really Matters” if such matters matter and it’s “Gloves Off” with Mr 45 to finish Brentford Nylons comes to Cabrini Green via the Wednesbury turnoff and just fucking buy it THE NEPTUNES: YOU CAN’T CLONE THIS You thought – or were made to think – that they were finished, had run into cliché, had exhausted their cycle. A Neptunes Presents album? The Clones? Surely tempting cynicism far too far? Because you know they were so 2001 and anyway Goldfrapp and the Rapture are on this season and besides FUCK YOUR SHIT he screamed with renewed life - 18 tracks, an intro and 17 songs by 16 different artists, with at least 15 possible futures of pop. This album - The Neptunes Present The Clones, rightly described by Westwood as “the hottest album on the streets,” shows the Neptunes to be so fucking far ahead of everybody else’s game that it’s laughable. A Pillows And Prayers for the 21st century. At least 50% of the contents of Now 58. Including Busta Rhymes’ brilliantly minimalist “Light Your Ass On Fire” with its Mr Magoo “hmm”s. When the bass finally kicks in halfway through the song. Clipse’s “Blaze Of Glory” with its swooning MBV synths blueprinting a path for pop to walk (essential truth masquerading as an interlude between interludes: and this is why it is important to resist the easy conclusion that it’s all over. It is indeed true that, armed with a spare £11, I would advise you to forego Broadcast’s HAHA Sound - the desperation of those capital letters! – in favour of the United States Of America album, which does it all sexier and profounder and better, without the beyond-irritating disinclined, flat, please-hit-me vocals of Trish Keenan. And if you want John Barry-esque harpsichords, you should invest in some John Barry compilations before blowing the bank for Broadcast - Themeology on Sony which covers the known routes, despite blokey Jonathan Ross sleevenotes, and Lounge Legends on German Polygram which goes down Barry’s darker alleys, containing the other two parts of the Persuaders cimbalom/synth bass triptych, the themes from Orson Welles’ Great Mysteries and The Adventurer, not to mention the only CD in existence on which you can purchase the full six minutes of Donna Summer’s “Down Deep Inside.” But, were you standing in a street surrounded by record shops right this second, you should purchase The Neptunes Present The Clones before considering, or doing, anything else. That, readers, is the difference) There’s the lunatic Ludacris hijacked by a Sousa marching band trapped in a honey jar on “It Wasn’t Us” (“Bankruptcy? – it wasn’t us!”). And there’s a song for the most endless of summers – Pharrell Williams’ own “Frontin’,” which sounds vaguely like a demo for Timberlake, but actually just fucking listen to these blissfully angular guitars and synths. Luxuriate in all that space. For the second time this year, Jay-Z spectates actively on one of the singles of the year. It’s the missing link between Bobby Goldsboro’s “Hello Summertime” and Prefab Sprout’s “Hey Manhattan” with Nas’ “The World Is Yours” as the only possible best man. Oh, damn it, why can’t Pop Idol come up with something as effortlessly adventurous and mainstream as Vanessa Marquez’ “Good Girl”? Listen how the benign Kelly Clarkson pop is slowly and gradually turned into something with many more corners and much more unexpected. Kraftwerk’s Tour De France Soundtracks with Debbie Gibson on vocals. And all Vanessa wants is your love. And all Nelly wants is you back. “If,” a completely unannounced new cut from the Herre-man, is wonderful in its self-enclosed lamenting. So much colour coexisting with all this adventure! (Anticon just need that little more colour – that’s the difference) Here’s Rosco P Coldchain with “Hot” turning the reassurance of Indeep’s “Last Night A DJ Saved My Life” into something far more minimalist and troubling. You might be following trouble down the drain if you’re not careful. Didn’t we just want Snoop Dogg to work with the Neptunes? Actually, while writing this I’m reminding myself of just how bloody well Doggystyle has endured over the last decade. Actually, just before writing this I was reminding myself of just how big a hit Justin Warfield’s “Fisherman’s Grotto” should/could have been, so that people don’t scratch their heads at Mojo’s Roots Of Hip Hop compilation and wonder what Blood Sweat & Tears’ “Lucretia MacEvil” is doing on there. ANYWAY, Snoop is back here with “It Blows My Mind,” and by God it does…he has finally mutated into George Clinton, as we always knew he would. The cornices (Doric and Ionic), the smoothly obtuse angles of this song – who else is doing this right now? And so effortlessly? What perhaps they shouldn’t do, of course, is rock, unless they’re N.E.R.D. or Fam-Lay. Not quite sure what the two central straight rock tracks on this compilation – Spymob’s “Half-Steering…” and The High Speed Scene’s “Fuck It Spend” – are doing here, as they appear to have nothing to do with the Neptunes. But apparently this all comes from a proposed film soundtrack, so doubtless there are reasons. Even so, by virtue of its immaculate surroundings, “Half-Steering…” still manages to sound 100000000000 times more convincing and filled with life than just about any “rock” music of which I can currently think. Including those one-hit-wonders The Rapture. But when N.E.R.D. “rock,” as they do on “Loser,” we are talking about the “rock” of Nyro or Rundgren or Becker and Godley and Creme and Fagen (i.e. “rock” as something to cling to or fuck to as opposed to an empty simulacrum of jaded masculinity). And the song, which itself is called “Rock N’ Roll,” by new signings Fam-Lay, may well be the most quietly radical track on this record. Extending and stretching the innate and learned creativity of hip hop and R&B to such an organic extent that samples are no longer necessary. Dislocating and inviting at the same time, Fam-Lay may well unleash the most unexpectedly compulsive debut album since Music In A Doll’s House by Family (to which latter of course it is umbilically attached). Ragga! Put Sean Paul to bed for Chrissakes! Bring back Supercat! “The Don Of Dons (Put De Ting Pon Dem)” featuring Supercat and Jadakiss is phenomenal; an accordion cut-up and fractured beneath the boomkat bass and delivery, Astor Piazolla abducted to Virginia Beach, with Clifton Chenier and Keith Hudson as the midwives. Clipse are all over this compilation (and people are still only just getting “Grindin’”) and their “Hot Damn” will be the track which opens CD2 of Now 58. Not to be outdone, here’s N.O.R.E. outdoing everyone (and who woulda thunk it?) with the Get Smart theme gone walkies of “Put ‘Em Up,” sampled horns blaring away in a corner; Don Ellis and his Orchestra locked in the pilot’s cabin. But for extremes of extremity you’d find it hard to trump the beyond insane “Pop Shit” by Dirt McGirt – a.k.a. Ol’ Dirty Bastard – and should settle simply for immersing yourself in the loops, sirens and wobbly warlocks which this track, and Mr McGirt himself, has to offer. Contrast with I’m Mad, Me, the new chart-topping album by The Coral, or You Wouldn’t Like Me When I’m Angry, No Honestly, I Get In A Right Royal State, the forthcoming album by The Vines, or, Look They’ve Got “Grievous Angel” For Three Quid, the final album by The Thrills, which latter of course provide no link whatsoever between any other pieces of music whose titles or lyrics contain the word “Thriller.” This is berserk, this is Joe Meek being prodded awake by an Uzi (“I’m a Woolworths shotgun man myself”), this is madness (not, God preserve us, Madness), and, yep, this is now. And I haven’t even mentioned the concluding “Popular Thug” by new romantic couple Kelis and Nas. What do you mean you ruled her out? What do you mean you ruled the Neptunes out? At the moment the Neptunes just rule, as Horn did in 1983, as Perry did in 1973, as Meek did in 1963, as Van Gelder did in 1953. They rule. OK? One final word of recommendation: records like The Neptunes Present The Clones are one reason why I don’t jump into the water. ENVOI Tuesday 11 September 2000 A couple in their mid-thirties sit in the comfortably warm sun in the huge garden at the rear of Hampton Court. They are happy. Everything else seems a galaxy away. It was just under two years since he had cheated death. She had less than a year to live. And at the time, neither of these latter two facts mattered at all. Freeze-frame the image in your mind’s eye and work forward from there. Then it might all come into focus again. Thursday 6 September 2001 Four years to the day after the funeral of Diana, former Princess of Wales, who died prematurely at the age of 36. This particular funeral does its job. Of course it is a watered-down, 12 certificate, sanitised version of her we are commemorating. Older members of her family would not understand. But then that is all which is needed for this purpose. A good ceremony which doesn’t offend or embarrass anyone. He, however, has a different purpose, and pledges that the Laura he knew will not fade from history, will be commemorated in as best a way he can manage. On that afternoon, fortified by two bottles of straight Victory Gin, he is not yet quite sure how to achieve this, but knows that some way of celebrating and immortalising the Laura he knew is vital, so that when he himself dies, that Laura will not die with him, but live on. A suggested soundtrack I’ve not previously written at all about Badly Drawn Boy’s The Hour Of Bewilderbeast, but it was one of Laura’s last favourite records and commemorates the ups and downs of love in an entertaining, funny and musically adventurous way. Listening to it now – which is obviously difficult – I’m struck by how much of the record is written from the perspective of someone who’s already bereaved, even though in Damon Gough’s case this is clearly untrue. The bucolic “The Shining” contains words such as: “Now I’ve fallen in deep, slow silent sleep, it’s killing me, I’m dying.” The almost imperceptible pause in “Magic In The Air” after the words “And if you should lose me…” and the song’s inevitable and entirely irresistible shift into Taja Sevelle’s “Love Is Contagious.” The very long pause after the song has ended. The Monochrome Set guitars of “Camping Next To Water” belie imagery which could soundtrack the images of David Sylvian on the sleeve of Blemish: “But there’s no use in feeling/All the things I’m feeling/There’s no one here to feel with me.” The sardonic Carla Bley brass improv which lifts “Say It Again.” And, at the point where the track, and his life, appear to be falling apart, satisfactory closure is achieved with a song entitled, unironically, “Epitaph” – an epitaph of doubt, of jealousy, an embracing of love and life. “I hope you never die.” And his partner joins in to sing along with him on what sounds like a cassette recording in their front room. It’s hard for me to listen to this without wanting to jump into the water. And for these reasons I cannot say that I can bring myself to listen to this record other than very occasional occasions. But I would suggest that if you were looking to understand exactly what Laura and I had as a couple, as the greatest of all double acts, you could start by listening to this hour of music. closer to closure? But just as he is about to step into the water, he notices that he is not alone, that numerous others have unexpectedly appeared on the bank. There is the woman from Belgium who commands him not to go in. There is the trombonist who stands at the rear, benignly smiling, not needing to say anything, knowing that ultimately that he won’t go in. He is strong enough to make that decision for himself. Nearby, a guitarist and a journalist take his hand. Behind him, there are other writers, some of whom he idolises, and readers of his own writing. A friend from Oxford stands slightly at a distance from the others but smiles at him fondly anyway. In reality none of them needs to say a single word. He knows that they are there. Because, above and beyond anyone and anything else, he stops himself from jumping into the water. The Church Of Me is, amongst many other things, a complete, unabridged record of all the thoughts which go through his mind during the few minutes while he is standing on that riverbank. Suggested reading The Church Of Me will be taking a break for the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, you could do worse than read Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and William Morris’ News From Nowhere, ideally not in that order. When I return we will consider more deeply the question of what exactly is defined by a missing link. Last words “Doesn’t? It? Feel? Good? To? Stay? Alive?” (Gene Clark, “Some Misunderstanding,” from the album No Other, Asylum, 1974) posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink . . .
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 . . .
