BONZOS, BOMBS AND REBIRTHS: THE CHURCH OF ME ALBUMS OF 2005

Who would have thought that the primary inspiration for adventurous new musicians in 2005 would have been the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band? Large in number, multiple in instruments (and multiple in instrumental competencies), always up for something new and amusingly strange but with the debris of a semi-buried past eternally central in their minds, that not-so-strange blend of Walt Whitman and Carla Bley, of Marie Lloyd and the Soft Machine. And then sometimes that past has to be resolved, the pain converted into a celebratory wake so that we might live again. The Arcade Fire know all about that; the question is, how do they decide to live now that their perhaps definitive statement has been made vivid and large alive, on both record and stage? Do they fall for the illusion that they could save the world and end up wagging a stern white flag at our noses like Bono in ’83? That of course remains to be resolved. Certainly, though, the Arcade Fire seem in imminent danger of spawning the greatest number of pallid copyist bands since the Birthday Party; people like Australia’s Architecture in Helsinki, who have the multi-instruments, the goofy grins and the studiously scruffy pullovers, but as yet no real purpose; or Britain’s own Guillemots, whose wearily predictable cocktail of musical saw and rudimentary horn lines on "Train To Brazil" foretell a future as bright and doubtless as Doves and any other British bands who think themselves above the definite article.

And then there came along the extraordinary The Shortwave Set, who came closest to the ineffably comical sadness of Neil Innes’ Bonzos at their most desolate ("Readymades") – those Victorian cartoon contraptions superimposed on that empty, windbeaten beach; the forgotten music which they cannot allow to die – and they made a record likely to last far longer than anything they sampled.

Back from the dead. The motif was inescapable, especially in the second half of 2005 when I reflected on losing two good friends who should have been two much closer friends; and it follows that nearly all of the records which appear in the upper parts of my lists are not only to do with remembrance but also with making people, places, life live again, even if all of it boils down merely to this writer living again. A lot of us have been wandering around the rims of that beach, waiting for the world not to end; and perhaps bringing back The Church Of Me simply postpones that end, even if by a nanosecond. But Kate Bush came back, and that in itself (or herself) was nearly enough; Bill Fay and Vashti Bunyan being brought back was more than we could have possibly hoped for; and even Eno and David Sylvian moved a little nearer to deliver painfully pertinent music. Even New Pop Mark II enjoyed an entirely unanticipated, if deeply troubled, second wind.

Looking through my lists, I would say that if the artists on it have a single quality in common, it is that none of them proceeds as though they were trying to build a career; even if, like Charlotte Church or Rufus Wainwright, you know damn well that they’re building a career, it’s equally obvious that they have something urgent to communicate above and beyond that base motivation. Consequently, the overt empire-builders celebrated in every other music periodical’s 2005 lists get short shrift here; the brief glimpse of genuine madness seen in "This Boy" notwithstanding (like a recidivist rockist Girls Aloud – "Not a boy but a wealthy bachelor!/I want a CAR!"), Franz Ferdinand, always closer to Set The Tone than to Josef K, have resolutely continued to underwhelm me; the LCD Soundsystem record is a near-faultless singles compilation with a dodgily smug album attached; Goldfrapp’s Supernature sounded just the thing of the moment when blasting out into The Lanes of Brighton in August (especially "Lovely 2 C U") but still rather too pleased with itself in the less forgiving moments of early winter; and the inverse popularity of Confessions On A Dancefloor in comparison with that of the Girls Aloud, and even Sugababes, albums summons up painful, if familiar, questions about why people are so happy to settle for so little. And Arular seems to have got short shrift from every quarter, not all that justly; suffice to say that it made it as far as the 51-60 section of my long list, much as Piracy Funds Terrorism did a year ago – entertaining in a zany 1981-reminiscent colour kind of a way, depending on how many blind eyes you have available to turn to you-know-what and how flexible you’re prepared to be when it comes to the application of Larkin’s Law. As for the second wind of Britpop, that will be discussed with almost admirable ambivalence within the context of the lists, to which I shall now proceed without further delay.

THE USUAL NOTES

As ever, I have listed 100 albums (except it’s more than 100, but I’ll get to that, as you knew I might) divided into two lists of 50; one for reissues, compilations and new findings from The Archives; and one for the new stuff. As ever, I will list these in reverse order, Pick Of The Pops-style; but unlike previous years, time and similar annoying factors have precluded me from spinning the countdowns out over several days, so I’m afraid I’m going to run the risk of inducing premature indigestion in my readers and post both lists in full, in one go. But of course you are entirely free to proceed down (or up) the lists at your leisure.

One good side-effect of compiling these lists is that it gives me the chance to republish some of the best stuff from Koons Really Does Think He’s Michelangelo. In response to the clamour of queries: all of the Koons writing does still exist, on my hard drive, and other elements of it will reappear in CoM over the coming months – but I’m more than happy to reintroduce some of the best stuff from Koons in this new context.

TOP 50 REISSUES, COMPILATIONS AND THINGS FROM THE PAST I NEVER KNEW EXISTED, OR DID KNOW THEY EXIST, BUT I’D NEVER HEARD THEM, EXCEPT IN SOME CASES ON DODGY BOOTLEGS, BUT YOU NEVER HEARD ME SAY THAT, RIGHT?

50. ABBA The Complete Studio Recordings
And still it stands – still as in motionless, still as in eternal, eternal as in "The Eternal" – this bloody strange body of work, now encased in an icebox of tainted blue, like the last thing Virginia Woolf might have seen, as bizarrely formidable and insurmountable in its way as Metal Machine Music. It’s all here; all eight albums (only eight? There seemed so many more) plus all the non-album singles and B-sides, alternate mixes, extended mixes, French, Japanese and Esperanto versions of the big ones, plus two DVDs’ worth of all the videos plus a documentary plus some 1981 live footage. They tell you so much, so candidly, about themselves and yet remain entirely and eternally untouchable, so we have to work it out for ourselves, how these Swedish Seekers started off being folky and happy in a silly Paul Nicholas kind of a way and then progressively switched off every light, one by one, over the ensuing decade until they’d vanished and no one had noticed. How they started as the Seekers and ended up as Joy Division with the clock ticking through the accumulated dust, or ashes.

And it is vital to be said that those who can’t, or won’t, work out Abba, not from their system, but won’t or can’t understand why they were so much more than the Brotherhood of Man’s embarrassed stepparents, can’t really hope to reach the centre of writing about music before it collapses. Many people who should know better haven’t forgiven them, blame them for Steps (and anyone blaming a pop group for causing Steps literally does not understand pop music), think of them still as the Nordic Newer Seekers, all flared blandishments, all whiteout but not in a Terminal Cheesecake kind of way. Why "Dancing Queen" is still loved and worshipped 29 years later whereas "Mississippi" or "My Sweet Rosalie" aren’t has nothing to do with kitsch (unless you agree with Barry Ryan that kitsch is a beautiful word) but to do with the process of technological/emotional rapport and advancement which means that "Dancing Queen" will always sound as though it were recorded last week; why "Waterloo" winning ’74 Eurovision was a far bigger death blow to the petrified doxa of rock than EMI’s deletion of "Anarchy In The UK" (but a parallel blow, in force and cunning, to Metal Machine Music coming in from the other and opposite, but not opposing, margin) – no, too complex. Better to blow dreary raspberries at their blue jumpsuits and start using words like "soul" and "authentic" as Paul Weller did in his recent book Words And Music: A History Of The World In The Shape Of Mick Talbot’s Transient Goatee; or to sit in our respective corners and paint ourselves into them, and finally paint ourselves blue, both inside and out, as many doubtless continue to do on internet music message boards which I no longer read (because whichever music message board you visit, however long you stay there, you will by natural law end up having the same six arguments with the same six people) with their defeating arguments about rockism and popism in a Super Furry Animals versus Superman Lovers kind of way; or to ensconce ourselves in cosy apolitical boogaloo bars and chat with 50-year-old company directors about why post-punk failed (the actual reasons for which were: people claiming to inhabit both Metal Machine Music and Abba when they really meant Kiss Alive! and Supertramp; and these are spookily the same reasons for the failure of Bush and Blair, in a Human League and Chrome Hoof when they really meant Duran Duran and Kelly Clarkson kind of way). However, the Complete Studio Recordings of Abba will never die, including the full-length "Summer Night City" with its full orchestral prelude, so that makes a hat-trick of pop masterpieces (Dare, Lexicon Of Love and New Gold Dream) which could only have been created on a background of full, subtle and heartfelt understanding of both Abba and Metal Machine Music.

Oh, and Madonna had to beg Abba to help resurrect her career. Abba and Zoot Woman. How punctum is that?

49. ? AND THE MYSTERIANS The Best Of ? And The Mysterians 1966-67
Miracles can sometimes yet occur; after years of wilful neglect, Allen Klein finally started reissuing the Cameo-Parkway back catalogue on CD this year, which not only means that the original Chubby Checker hit singles are once again obtainable but that "96 Tears," a major canyon of a gap in its absence from canonical CD consideration, is now back in circulation together with the rest of ?’s two albums; and fabulous they are, from the stoopid petulance of The Hit through to proto-MC5 semi-freakouts like "Girl (You Captivate Me)" and "Why Me" (the latter featuring a very confused sounding Tony Orlando on backing vocals).

48. STEVE ELLIS An Everlasting Soul: The Anthology
47. TONY CHRISTIE Definitive Collection
Two Sixties soulboys who didn’t really ask to end up elsewhere, but that was what happened; a bunch of Small Faces wannabes are kept out of the CBS studios bar the lead singer, who accidentally invents both boy bands and Northern Soul with the brilliant artifice of "Everlasting Love" (and also Trevor Horn, with that drum break near the end), then gets pissed off and pisses off to do odd things with Zoot Money and other vaguely out-there people of the era, including porn movie themes ("Loot’s The Root"), Jimmy Webb covers ("Evie"), and fractured where’s-my-pale-ale early ‘70s singer/songwriter angst ("El Doomo," "Jingle Jangle Jasmine") before ending up in heavy metal land. A shame; one twist to the left and Steve Ellis could have become a slightly harsher Terry Reid.

Tony Christie, meanwhile, became a kind of Pastor Jack Glass Sings Tom Jones figure; his songs perpetually expressing high-volume, high-register outrage at the decaying mores of the world – "Las Vegas" ("I’m gonna burn you DOWN!"), "I Did What I Did For Maria," the Biblical cop allegory that is "Avenues And Alleyways" ("Can we ever stop them?/Some of us…are gonna TRY!") – so it’s no surprise that Jarvis found him the ideal voice for "Walk Like A Panther," having learned nought three decades on ("A halfwit in a leotard/Stands on my STAGE!"). Naturally his music is therefore a trillion times more fun than boring old Jones The Groans, but don’t ask me to do the Amarillo Walk at parties, I’m telling you now.

46. VARIOUS Eurovision Song Contest: Kiev 2005
In imminent danger of becoming a routine annual fixture on these lists, Eurovision this year diverged more entertainingly than it ever has done, mainly due to the deliciously ironic spectre of all the Western entries progressively becoming more Eastern (exemplified by the winner, Greece’s "My Number One") and vice versa – Serbia and Montenegro’s high-kicking 1983 Ultravox 12-inch bonus track, and most memorably, the Eastern Bloc Cornershop that was Moldova’s "Boonika Date Doba." Best trad Eurovision song (1973 model) was Malta’s "Angel"; best trad Eurovision song (1955 model) was Austria’s quite spellbinding "Y Asi" with that trombone for a bassline; best rapproachment with Modern Pop modes would fall somewhere between Spain’s demented girl-rap "Let’s Get Loud" and the tetra-turntable approach of Bosnia’s Feminnem; while the most rockist Eurovision entry would be a tie between Norway’s Wig Wam (who made the Darkness sound like the Pipkins they always really were) and the surprisingly effective "Teen Spirit" derivé of Russia’s "Nobody Hurt No One."

45. VARIOUS Hallucinations/Come Into The Sunshine
Excellent pair of Warner Brothers compilations from the late ‘60s when straightforward American harmony pop was starting to refract and radiate from what Brian Wilson had started; Lee Mallory, the Association, Harpers Bizarre and even Dino, Desi and Billy, amongst many others, warp out with benign brilliance. The "weird" stuff is on Hallucinations, the "straight" sunshine pop on Come Into The Sunshine; but often the edges blur.

44. SHAKIN’ STEVENS The Collection
Some months ago I wondered aloud why we didn’t get straightforwardly wonderful pop singles like "Cry Just A Little Bit" any more – if you can call the Human League doing "Rock And Roll Part 2" with Sheena Easton on vocals a straightforward pop single, that is. Shaky was always a cut above the dim MoRevivalists of early ‘80s Not So New Pop; his early covers ("Green Door," "This Ole House") were admirably unpredictable and his enthusiasm for them contagious, and then he subtly went about incorporating elements of cajun ("Oh Julie"), Dixieland ("I’ll Be Satisfied") and even hi-NRG ("A Little Boogie Woogie In The Back Of My Mind," would that the lyrics could be listened to now) in his work. I found this compilation fresh and stimulating listening, as indeed you would have done had the album been called Nick Lowe – The Collection.

43. NOEL HARRISON Life Is A Dream
Now this is how to record classic singles: the son of Rex sang "Windmills Of Your Mind" as live on the Paramount Studios soundstage, with the film of The Thomas Crown Affair playing on the screen behind him, and beneath him, Michel Legrand at the piano, directing (and at the end blowing kisses to) the orchestra. Here "Windmills" is joined by 25 other examples of exquisite desuetude which variously pay tribute to Donovan ("Leitch On The Beach"), introduce backward drumming into pop (1965’s "Sign Of The Queen") and cover Leonard Cohen as perhaps no one else would dare to – check out "Dress Rehearsal Rag," which Harrison sings as though dressing for dinner at high table with Princess Margaret.

42. LES PAUL WITH MARY FORD The Best Of The Capitol Masters: 90th Birthday Edition
So easy to forget, isn’t he, this modest man who amiably started off several million revolutions with his multitracked guitar and his wife’s chorale of voice. As with most forward-looking music recorded in the ‘40s and early ‘50s, Paul’s work now sounds like Ghost Box before the fact; memories of the future, indeed – not quite "solid" but as tangible as a trapeze. So many roads built from this beginning, leading to so many routes, to Meek and Wilson, or to Fripp and Fennesz. And he does it mostly with standard songs – a directional history of post-war popular music could be pinpointed at its origin with both Paul’s and Slim Gaillard’s readings of "How High The Moon" – one leading to the light and reserve, the other to dark brews and radiance.

41. DONOVAN Barabajagal
If we say YES to Kate Bush then we must also say YES to Donovan (and double ditto for Vashti Bunyan, since it was Donovan’s dosh which paid for Vashti’s caravan trip). Unlike Dylan, his oeuvre has been under-lauded, and is therefore fresher and more surprising to jaded ‘00s ears. All four of his EMI albums from the ‘60s were reissued this year (the others being Sunshine Superman, Mellow Yellow and The Hurdy Gurdy Man). Really you need them all, but for a good and not so obvious overview of his approach Barabajagal is a fine starting point, with its sexily demonic title track collaboration with Jeff Beck, the do-you-dare-me-to-be-twee-ness of "I Love My Shirt," the genuine poignancy of "To Susan On The West Coast Waiting," the Bush-inspiring "Lord Of The Reedy River" and the great "Atlantis," a friendlier and smarter "Hey Jude," complete with Beatles backing vocals.

40. THE FIRST CLASS Summer Sound Sensations: A First Class Top 20
Of course, of these 21 (!) songs only "Beach Baby" actually made the Top 20, and to an extent this compilation is "Beach Baby" plus supporting acts – but that’s to belittle one of John Carter’s many projects. This one focused on elegantly cheesed off early ‘70s comedown soft pop – titles like "What Became Of Me," "Long Time Gone" (not the David Crosby song) and "I Was A Star" say it all, as do surprisingly bitter music biz satires like "Bobby Dazzler." Alas it was Carter’s fate to have his heartfelt modernist protest song "Too Many Golden Oldies" released some 18 months after it was recorded – in mid-1977, bang in the middle of punk. However, "Beach Baby" remains one of the most startling and moving of all pop records, and I am pleased to be able to republish the piece I wrote about it at the beginning of this year.

39. AFX Hangable Auto Bulb
A very welcome, if seriously belated, CD debut for this brace of Aphex EPs from 1995 which concentrated on the rubberband-bending drill ‘n’ bass facet of his personality. The second EP just makes it for me over the first, due to the introduction of RD James’ inimitable gift for poignant melodicism mixed with the determinate rhythmic franticity on "Wabby Legs" and "Every Day."

38. THE ALPHA BAND The Arista Albums
Well, you know of the late Beta Band; here are their American ancestors from a generation ago. T-Bone Burnett, David Mansfield and Steven Soles, all members of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue band, deployed similarly unpredictable mid-song genre-changes and gung-ho musical adventurism which – again, in the middle of punk – perhaps went underacknowledged but whose relevance quickly became apparent following the rise of their ‘80s spiritual heirs the Pixies. Anyway, this 2CD package handily compiles all of their three Arista albums in full, and it remains a lovely blend of Tex-Mex, virtual world music ("East Of East"), bluegrass and burnt-out psychedelia.

37. ALAN BRAXE AND FRIENDS The Upper Cuts
He was partly responsible for "Music Sounds Better With You," of course, which is duly present here, but also, in conjunction with Fred Falke, deathless classics of epic sad dance such as "Intro," "Palladium" and "Rubicon." Tracks like "Love Lost" manage the not inconsiderable feat of being both tearjerking and phallus-motivating.

36. THE ASSOCIATES The Affectionate Punch
Perversely I think I still prefer the ’82 remix job which Alan Rankine did on the album (to "make it more pop") but the skeletal opacity of the 1980 original still peeks through to today, thanks to brilliant songs like "Logan Time" (if we’re talking "I’m In Love With A German Film Star," ahem) and "Even Dogs In The Wild."

35. CURRENT 93 Judas As Black Moth: Hallucinatory Patripassianist Song
There is of course Coil (or was Coil) and their legacy is now, sadly, immortal; but in the complicated internecine world of post-TG avant-industrialism one tends towards one or the other, so this 2CD 32-track collection of David Tibet’s best over the last quarter century or so is a useful catch-up aid. And catch up we should, since elements of what Current 93 started persist in the work of Antony and Six Organs Of Admittance, not to mention kick-starting the revival of interest in the likes of Shirley Collins, Bill Fay and Simon Finn, all of whom pay due homage in this compilation’s sleevenotes, and some of whom also appear on the compilation itself. My own favourite is 1994’s "Lucifer Over London," wherein Tibet exults over imminent destruction as a hopped-up Elias Ashmole would once have done, transporting his priceless junk over Lambeth Bridge so that they could be buried in Oxford.

34. THE GLOBE UNITY ORCHESTRA AND THE CHOIR OF THE NDR-BROADCAST Hamburg ’74
Quite possibly the greatest of Globe Unity line-ups – both Derek and Evan in attendance, Han Bennink and Paul Lovens both on drums – in acridly rampant form, in collision with an unutterably bemused German radio choir trying to sing Tannhauser and repeatedly being distracted and bombarded by Alex von Schlippenbach’s crafty stratagems. There was some theatrical/textual involvement, but as the sleevenote is in German and my German is rustier than the average Thornton Heath scrapyard, I will confine myself to the sole English payoff which is given – "FREE JAZZ (only thing left/conquers the world)." If only.

33. JOHN LYDON The Best Of British £1 Notes
Unique among Lydon-related compilations, this makes you rethink. Buried deep in its bowel is "Sun," a forgotten 1997 single, which, half a decade before going into the jungle, finds Lydon bemoaning "Nature" ("I miss the car park! I miss the concrete!") over an extraordinary backing track which fuses medieval estampie, electronica and doleful kwela accordion. If Robbie Williams had released this as a single in 2005 he would have been lauded, but standing joke Lydon snuck it out in 1997 and no one noticed. And among the handful of Pistols and PiL tracks included here, there are other little revolutions which no one noticed; 1984’s Bambaataa/Laswell collaboration "World Destruction," two clear years before Aerosmith and Run-DMC; the opening quartet of Anarchy, Public Image, Love Song and Open Up, now violently flung together to illustrate the collective story which they told; and 2005’s "The Rabbit Song" which, if the first track of Girls Aloud’s Chemistry is anything to go by, some have already noticed.

32. VARIOUS So Young But So Cold: Underground French Music 1977-1983
Superb and much-needed compilation by Marc Collin and Ivan Smagghe which proves that, between "Pepper Box" and "Da Funk," innovation continued apace in French pop. Examples include the long-overdue CD debut of Mathématiques Modernes’ "Disco Rough" (featuring St Arto of Lindsay), Kas Product’s title track, Moderne’s "Switch On Bach" and, best of all, the astonishing double-headed 1982 single from (The) Hypothetical Prophets: "Person To Person" and "Wallenberg." Can someone re-release Bernard Szajner’s Some Deaths Take Forever please?

31. THE GUN CLUB Mother Juno
One of a rash of Gun Club reissues to come out late this year courtesy of Sympathy For The Record Industry. Mother Juno was always my favourite, not just because Robin Guthrie produced it (and, boy, is he all over "The Breaking Hands") but because the Cocteau perversely seems to draw out even more blood from Jeffrey Lee, Kid Congo & Co. than usual. Note the presence on drums of Nick Sanderson, then ex-of Clock DVA and to be-of World Of Twist, Earl Brutus et al.

30. GIRLS ON TOP Greatest Hits
A vinyl-only issue, and one of dubious provenance ("Compiled by The Watcher. Apologies to Richard" proclaims the sleeve), but then with bootlegging, wasn’t that the point? It does, however, serve a more than useful purpose by compiling all of Richard X’s pre-Sugababes oblique strategy seven-inchers ("I Wanna Dance With Numbers," "Being Scrubbed" and the inevitable "We Don’t Give A Damn About Our Friends") and it all still sounds fresh and insolent. Whereas Osymyso, for instance, is now kind of poignant; the final moments of "Intro:Introspection" (My Way, The End, etc.) I find rather moving.

29. MICHAEL GIBBS Michael Gibbs/Tanglewood ’63
Gibbs has never quite had the credibility that his more febrile Britjazz contemporaries of the period – Westbrook, Tippett, McGregor – had and still have. Maybe his alternative existence as The Bloke Who Does The Music For The Goodies had something to do with it, or more pertinently, that his large ensemble experimentation was of the conservative kind; that is to say, it owed much more to Pete Rugolo and Gil Evans than to Sun Ra or George Russell, and arguably more to Messiaen and Robbie Robertson than either (listen to the slow flute melody and affable folk-rock acoustic guitar on "And On The Third Day" for instance). But at its best, his orchestra could kick arse as swiftly as any other – check out the ecstatic "Family Joy, Oh Boy!" which starts with a brass fanfare straight off side three of The White Album before roaring into action as drummers John Marshall and Tony Oxley breathlessly invent drum ‘n’ bass, while Jack Bruce, Ray Russell and Chris Spedding do a more than adequate job of keeping up with them as Alan Skidmore and Kenny Wheeler do their usual post-bop job on top. And, on side two of the original Tanglewood ’63 album, Gibbs finds something beyond all this – firstly in the astonishing 12-minute drift of "Canticle" which sounds like "In A Silent Way" filtered through Charles Ives’ "The Unanswered Question" – undulating, unresolved orchestral chords through which pointillistic flutes and soprano saxes emerge and retreat, like those waves and little fishes swimming between my feet – and secondly in the amazing "Five For England" (some of which was used as Goodies incidental music) where the pink-suited Chris Spedding erupts with some practically Velvet-esque guitar over Gordon Beck’s never-predictable Fender Rhodes chord choices and Roy Babbington and John Marshall already running into the next continent in the rhythm section.

28. VARIOUS Nick Bourgas Presents…Celebrities At Their Worst!
This may have been around for a little longer than 2005, but that’s when I came across a copy, and in terms of plays it’s received it should probably rank a lot higher in this list. There are four 2CD volumes in all, but Volume One is the pick, with all the classics: the Troggs Tapes in full, the Beach Boys being driven bonkers by Murray Wilson ("Sing from your hearts, boys!"), Orson Welles’ Findus commercials ("I wouldn’t direct any living actor like this in SHAKESPEARE!"), Buddy Rich’s multiple band rages (truly this was the Mark E Smith of jazz – "This is not the goddam House of David, this is the Buddy Rich Band! YOUNG people! With FACES! NO MORE FUCKIN BEARDS! They’re OUT!"), Casey Kasem’s "fucking dead dog," Freddie Hubbard inviting his white audience to "kiss my black ass, motherfuckers" and perhaps best of all, for those tricked into thinking that Paul Anka’s hip again, his epic tirade against his musicians and the world in general – "I don’t care if it’s Jesus Christ. I’m the only important one on that stage" – which he delivers, in terms of timing and the use of pauses, like a Harold Pinter play. "I slice like a fucking hammer. The guys get shirts. Where’s Joe?"

27. JONI MITCHELL Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter
Another little revolution which passed almost unnoticed under punk; cross-dressing and blacked-up on the cover, Joni enlisted the aid of Weather Report to soundtrack her odes to getting pissed and pissing ("a tequila-anaconda/The full length of the parking lot!"), trying to persuade Jaco Pastorius’ bass to talk to her and even causing Mingus to bow at her font on the wonderful, endless "Paprika Plains," an immaculate reflection on nuclear pastoralism ("And at the point of vanishing/Where the sky and the earth meet/A bomb blasts/Deadly mushrooms/White/Gold/Heat") pausing through sober piano interludes and orchestral flourishes (from Mike Gibbs, his second mention in three albums) and finally inventing Gillian Welch ("I’m floating back to you"). Now finally available as a domestic (UK) CD release.

26. DEREK BAILEY AND EVAN PARKER The London Concert
If useless "comedian" Justin Lee Collins wants to justify his existence, he should forget about chasing up weary tropes like the 1986 cast of Grange Hill or the Christmas number one, but set about reuniting Derek and Evan. It will never happen, of course – too many notes have overflowed the pathway, so to spit – but this 1975 performance, finally released in its entirety, highlights what a painfully vital improvising duo they once were – spiky, unsentimental, answering each other back, utterly compulsive and still of the moment three decades hence.

25. THE PREFECTS The Prefects Are Amateur Wankers
Why no Hard-Fi or Kaiser Chiefs in these lists? Perhaps because some of us remember how guitar bands could at one time in the history of evolution manage to be both shit-scary and guffaw-funny. Birmingham’s The Prefects, led by a pre-Nightingales Robert Lloyd and also featuring Joe "Compulsion" Crow, should have had eight number ones, all of which are included on this, their sole album, including the ten-minute "Bristol Road Leads To Dachau" and the ten-second "VD," either of which, had they gone straight in at number one two months ago rather than the Arctic Monkeys remembering Jam choreography like it was Metal Machine Music or something, would still have shattered key windows.

24. JUST-ICE Back To The Old School
Hip hop is the musical genre which more than any other is in danger of turning me into Charlie Gillett as I reminisce fondly about the dayshh where hip hop records were thrown together for two dollars with live, scruffy scratching before digital capitalism drowned spontaneity out, and yet could still sound like a million dollars, as exemplified by Just-Ice’s first and greatest album from 1986, produced by Curtis Mantronik, the Vini Reilly of StreetSounds, and edited by the Evan Parker of chopped beats, Chip Nunez. Classics such as "Cold Gettin’ Dumb" and "Put That Record Back On" sound like Yello abandoned in the Bronx, glistening, abrupt and there’s a bang.

23. THE MIKE WESTBROOK CONCERT BAND Mike Westbrook’s Love Songs
After years of sadly lonely championship of this record, which even its maker didn’t think much of (possibly because most of its lyrics were written by his first wife), I’m extremely pleased that it is now available on an affordable CD format (as opposed to ludicrously-priced hard-to-get Japanese imports) as it’s the nearest Westbrook ever came to pop (Solid Gold Cadillac included). Considerably mellower than its epic predecessor Marching Song, Westbrook’s standard nine-piece line-up is augmented by Chris Spedding’s guitar and the gorgeous vocals of the gorgeous Norma Winstone. In particular, "Love Song #4" is a staggering achievement, if only for its opening duet by Winstone’s voice and Mike Osborne’s alto, which is about as carnal and physical as British jazz has ever got (Keith and Julie Tippetts’ more intimate adventures excepted), and that’s before the track goes on to invent post-rock, Dexy’s Midnight Runners and Saint Etienne ("It wasn’t me who walked away" dying into the echoing distance at the end is pure Sarah Cracknell). There’s also the bonus of both sides of the non-album single, "Magic Garden," a real discovery of psych-folk/freeish jazz which wouldn’t have been out of place on Jon Savage’s Meridian 1970 compilation, and a version of "Original Peter" which manages to be both slicker than the album original, and rougher, with a wonderfully vitriolic tenor solo by George Khan riding roughshod over the electric piano and cooing vocals.

22. RICHARD HELL Spurts: The Richard Hell Story
If you need to understand exactly why punk had to happen, listen no further than "That’s All I Know (Right Now)" by the Neon Boys. Over Tom Verlaine’s howling guitar come the exultant screams of Richard Hell, daring to out-Dylan Dylan and actually sound more vital and electric than anything Dylan had done after the bike crash. The track veers and swoons in and out of gloomy glamour focus – and, incredibly, it was recorded in 1973. Sadly the Neon Boys EP is not represented in full on this compilation – and should have been, in preference to the duff Dim Stars stuff – but the two tracks which are included point us directly to the inversion of rock and roll which was to follow with the Voidoids, with their nearly 40-year-old jazz/skronk guitarist and their ex-Foundations bassist. Everything the casual listener could want is here; best, in the end, to think of Hell as the Georges Braque to the more rationalist Cubism of Verlaine.

21. IAN BROWN The Greatest
Infinitely more fun and more adventurous than the stolid Roses, Brown’s solo career has been accidentally avant-garde; and when assembled together stand his work stands up enormously well in the half-life dreams of "Dolphins Were Monkeys" and "Whispers" as well as the sinister scenarios of "Corpses In Their Mouth" (with the best atonal harmonica solo since Archie Shepp’s "Blasé"), "Golden Gaze" and "Time Is My Everything," like a burnished Burnage sunset which turns your horizons towards a Richard Teitelbaum 1979.

20. JEAN-CLAUDE VANNIER L’Enfant Assassin Des Mouches
In many ways, a literal cross between Escalator Over The Hill and Melody Nelson – in fact the album is something like a Tropic Appetites-type footnote to Melody Nelson’s Escalator, deploying a staggering range of tactics pilfered from free jazz, primitive electronica, choral music and burning psychedelia by M Vannier, the arranger on Melody Nelson who called on Gainsbourg to provide a text/plot to sensibilise his imaginary soundtrack. This Our Serge duly did; the fact that the title translates as "The Child Killer Of Flies" should give some indication about the gruesome paths his plot takes. Originally released in minimal quantities in 1972, now available again, complete with a Vannier full-frontal portrait (striding across an empty beach), and yet another reminder of a delirious dotty path which music took in that supposedly deserted decade between Pepper and punk.

19. THE NIGHTINGALES In The Good Old Country Way
Robert Lloyd’s second appearance in this list; the Nightingales back catalogue reappeared, serially, in earnest over the year, and this, from 1986, is my personal favourite; a politely berserk mixture of country, post-punk and music hall starring the remarkable violin playing of then-teenager Maria Smith which in itself (herself) is the missing link between Vassar Clements and Ornette Coleman.

18. DEFUNKT Defunkt/Thermonuclear Sweat
Strange, or not as the case may be, that even with the residue of post-punk interest this vital Rykodisc 2CD complete works reissue of one of the greatest punk-jazz crossover bands passed by completely unnoticed, even by the owner of the record shop where I purchased it. For a long time the likes of "Strangling Me With Your Love" and "Avoid The Funk" were bizarrely considered too constipated, too het-up, to cut it in the post-House era, but with the inevitable reverse motion of the pendulum we can now see that Joe Bowie and fellow conspirators were right all along and their scratchy, stuttering funk now sounds fresher than ever, especially 1981’s stand alone single "The Razor’s Edge" in its full 12-inch format; one of the big dancefloor hits during my first year at university (at least, when I was DJing).

17. THE YOUNG GODS XXY: XX Years 1985-2005
As the saying doesn’t quite go, you could have had it so much better. An unintentionally poignant reminder of a period in the mid-‘80s when Switzerland briefly led the pack; with Yello and the Young Gods, they seemed to be defying Harry Lime and dictating the future of music. Was it simply because Franz Treichler – one of the great gruff voices in rock – chose to sing in French, thereby relegating the Young Gods to a seldom-consulted footnote to the career of Trent Reznor? Their opening gambit – the 1985 single "Envoyé" – still seems like a gauntlet thrown down to rock (so clipped, so precise, so unplayable yet so transcendental) in terms of a future of rock and roll without guitars, where samplers were still an open door ready to absorb and refract everything from Scriabin to Subotnick. In truth The Best Of The Young Gods could adequately be encapsulated by their first two albums and attendant singles – for one, this compilation omits "Jusqu’au Bout," an anthem so alluring that Melody Maker used it for a radio ad campaign – but the unexpectedly ferocious likes of "Donnez Les Esprits" reminds us that as late as 1995 (with the album Only Heaven) they were still capable of surprising. But instead we were content with James Brown and Led Zep signposts to remind us not to outdo ourselves.

16. COMUS Song To Comus: The Complete Collection
I’ve never quite warmed to the New Wave of Acid Folk. The likes of Banhart and Newsom are too studied, too knowing, as in having gone to an imaginary Berklee School of Acid Folk – insufficiently elemental. And promising as they might be, Chrome Hoof, in their monks’ cowls, Cosmic Circus theatrics and careful randomness, walk in the heavily shadowed footsteps of Comus. Bear in mind that 1971’s First Utterance sounds like John Dowland being blown up by Peter Hammill and Marc Bolan in free dub conference – all those elegies to dead yet to die, to bloodied myths of the past, all screamed out by Roger Wootton, who was Roger Chapman transfixed by a frozen liquid spear of Phil Minton; and all (mostly) performed on acoustic instruments. It continues to sound chilling and uncompromising 34 years on, and even the relative compromise of 1974’s belated follow-up To Keep From Crying comes across as a desperate attempt to be "commercial" for fear of involuntary deposition in the ducking stool. First Utterance is the main event here, however, and if anything it now sounds like a direct aesthetic precursor to the slightly more considered Swans who made 1987’s best album, Children Of God (and not simply because the gorgeous Lindsay Cooper overblows her electric bassoon and other assorted woodwind on both records).

15. BARRY RYAN Singing The Songs Of Paul Ryan 1968-69
In 1986, when the Damned scored an unexpected top three hit with their rather over-prosaic reading of Barry Ryan’s "Eloise," they were universally derided for being reduced to covering what was then still considered a ludicrous piece of ‘60s MoR trash. Some of us were believers from the beginning; I still vividly remember Alan Freeman, on his 1968 ITV pop show All Systems Freeman, introducing Ryan, whereupon the camera immediately swung to a hairy man seemingly in the midst of an epileptic breakdown, alternatively screaming and crooning over a deranged orchestration. The single sped to the top of the charts shortly thereafter, but subsequent singles and albums sold far better in Europe – specifically, in Germany and the Low Countries. Perhaps they were simply too hot-blooded for British reserve.

Nonetheless, both of Ryan’s 1969 albums have now been reissued on CD, together with two extra tracks previously issued in Brazil only (!). The sleevenote gets it about right; "Eloise" stands tall as a shotgun wedding between the studied angst of Scott 4, the resentful adventure of the Bee Gees’ Odessa and Webb’s "Macarthur Park" had the latter been written in a bedsit in Stevenage after a bad day at the sewage works, and the whole was the opening shot in the plan of Paul and Barry Ryan, a hitherto largely (and unjustly) sniggered-at twin boy band duo. Now Paul wrote the songs and Barry sung, or rather bellowed, them – and the results remain amazing, from the opening atonal, FX-laden "Theme To Eutopia" via "My Mama" where Barry pays tribute to his mum much as Norman Bates might have done. Beckett-esque deadly introspection is touched upon in "What’s That Sleeping In My Bed?" while "You Don’t Know What You’re Doing" also indicates, apart from the above, a template for what Jim Steinman would go on to do with Meat Loaf a decade hence – grandiose and whimpering.

That was the Barry Ryan Sings Paul Ryan album, but its speedy follow-up, simply entitled Barry Ryan, went even lefterfield, commencing with "The Hunt" wherein Barry shrieks "Tally-ho!" over George Mitchell Minstrels backing vocals, before detouring into sodden balladry ("Swallow Fly Away"), discoloured Northern Soul ("I See You" with its curious falsetto lead and bemused-sounding backing vocal from Tony Rivers and the Castaways), culminating in the truly demented "Feeling Unwell" which begins as a Lionel Bart show tune and ends up engulfed somewhere in the neighbourhood of Berg’s Wozzeck. As for the Brazil-only tracks, they convey the apposite aura of Caetano Veloso drowning out Long John Baldry backing tracks with feedback. Let us hope that Rev-Ola will eventually bring out the even more bizarre albums which the Ryans continued to release throughout the ‘70s.

14. JULIAN PRIESTER PEPO MTOTO Love, Love
The cover with its marine blue sea stretching out to nowhere is typical ECM, but the accompanying album is, with the exception of certain Derek Bailey titles, the least typical record ECM ever released, and seems more like something which should have come out at the tail-end of Strata-East or Impulse!, residue from the full-blooded free jazz honkouts of the late ‘60s (and may explain its long absence from the catalogue). Priester, previously trombonist with Max Roach’s band and sometime member of Herbie Hancock’s electric ensembles (Fat Albert Rotunda and, more pertinently, Sextant), suddenly exploded in 1973 with this tumultuous and noisy fusion (fission, more like) of synths, percussion and free jazz horns. Dr Patrick Gleeson whirls and shrieks as Priester, Hadley Caliman, Mguanda David Johnson etc. improvise right through and beyond the intermingling structures of tunes like "Images" and "Eternal Worlds," merging into two unbroken vinyl sides of spiritual disunity. Absolutely bloody essential.

13. VARIOUS No New York
As, indeed, is this, which at long, long last got a legitimate CD reissue this year. Where were the rave reviews? Why is it only number thirteen in this list? Perhaps it was simply unlucky; finally allowed back into the public domain at the exact point when interest in post-punk had run out, just when it was clear that The Industry was only bothered about Duran Duran tribute bands. That could also explain why I never really felt Simon’s book; published in 2002, say, it could have acted as a call to arms, an active catalyst for change. However, after three years of systematically dribbling/diminishing of the prospect of a No Wave Mk II, both Rip It Up And Start Again and the reissue of No New York seemed like reluctant afterthoughts, too late to change anyone or anything – though the possible impact on those too young to have experienced the first time cannot and should not be ruled out. Still, No New York officially exists again; four bands, four tracks apiece, yet sufficient to fill up one side of a C90. So why do Lydia and James and Arto and Mark still seem as remote from today’s music – even the best of it - as Al Jolson?

12. VARIOUS It’s So Fine: Pye Girls Are Go!/VARIOUS Hearing Is Believing: The Jack Nitzsche Story 1962-1979
Two different routes taken out of the heart of pop, British and American (sometimes the difference is blurred), as the ‘60s bled into the ‘70s. It’s So Fine offers 50 tracks over 2 CDs of wonderful and ingenious girl pop by people like Tina Tott, Sandra Barry and others you’ve probably never heard of, with some more familiar names such as Petula Clark and Helen Shapiro, on a journey beginning with Petula’s properly ecstatic "Gotta Tell The World" and ending with Billie Davis’ petrified reading of Bacharach and David’s "The Last One To Be Loved," and with only one bona fide hit single among them, "Something Here In My Heart (Keeps A-Tellin’ Me No)" by the Paper Dolls, a sort of failed 1968 Girls Aloud. From this, proceed to all the Where The Girls Are and Dreambabes volumes you can find.

Meanwhile there was also Jack Nitzsche, arranger by choice for Spector, the Stones and Neil Young, whose story is illustrated by 26 tracks over one CD. But what a story: starting with "The Lonely Surfer" and Frankie Laine, and ending with Graham Parker and the Rumour and "One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest," taking in en route pre-Beat Boom idols (Bobby Darin, Lesley Gore, Little Stevie Wonder), berserk mid-‘60s auteurs (Lou Christie, Judy Henske, Garry Bonner’s beyond bizarre "The Heart Of Juliet Jones") to late-‘60s/early-‘70s regretful burnout – the James Gang’s "Ashes, The Rain & I" where Nitzsche’s strings seem to erase the group out of the picture entirely, cause them to take their leave; and Marianne Faithfull’s definitive and still frightening 1969 reading of "Sister Morphine." And again, only one hit single (Doris Day’s "Move Over Darling," if you don’t count Jackie de Shannon’s original "Needles And Pins") between the lot of them. Sometimes we miss so much in our anxiety to be living in nowness.

11. SLOWDIVE Souvlaki
Much as was the case with Reading’s unfortunate Slowdive. Unfortunate because they came along at the "right time" but then the "right time" was rapidly over and they committed the unforgivable crime of continuing to evolve down the same musical path rather than jumping on the next passing stylistic ambulance. Their three albums, together with all their non-album EP tracks and single B-sides, have now been reissued, and all require your urgent attention. Just For A Day (1991) continues to rise above all of the other shoegazing wannabes of the period with a very natural grandeur – severely in debt to the Cocteaus, of course, and no one ever seriously claimed that Rachel Goswell was Elizabeth Frazer when it came to voices, but songs (or events) like "Morningrise" and "Catch The Breeze" capture something of that innocent magic which the Cocteaus at the time were in imminent danger of sacrificing on the altar of self-parody. And indeed they also had to contend with MBV reinventing the guitar and feminising noise on Loveless, not to mention an unlucky, unhappy Melody Maker interview where they talked about not knowing how poor people lived (in an Ian Carmichael, rather than a Marie Antoinette, sense).

But they deserved a better fate and a larger audience. Souvlaki (1993) was their masterpiece and the pick of this bunch. On it they teamed up with Eno (who they were delighted to learn was already a Slowdive fan) and breathtaking songs like "Sing," "When The Sun Hits," and, above all, "Souvlaki Space Station," actually draw a map of much of what we love in contemporary electronica and avant-rock – here’s where Sigur Ros. Ulrich Schnauss and Pluramon, among many others, begin. By the time of Pygmalion (1995) they had largely been sidelined virtually out of existence by The Lads Of Britpop and reduced to their core duo of Neil Halstead and Goswell. It’s an album of quietly disturbed pre-post-rock loops, and if "Miranda" or "Trellisaze" had been credited to LaBradford they would now be venerated. The group then metamorphosed into the equally wonderful Mojave 3 (the missing link between Sigur Ros and Richard Hawley) but their Slowdive oeuvre really should not be ignored again; rather, learned from.

10. VARIOUS Stock/Aitken/Waterman Gold
Along with New Order and the Pet Shop Boys, SAW were virtually alone in keeping the British pop single alive in the mid-late ‘80s. In large part this was caused by their individual manipulations and modifications of the base matter of Hi-NRG (and, later, House) to express what they needed to express. If SAW’s work was comparatively monodimensional, this is no criticism; their narrow focus, derived in the first instance from explicitly gay dance icons like Divine and Hazell Dean, with the bridge being Dead Or Alive’s "You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)" (the latter is sort of ZTT with Leo Baxendale depping for Marinetti), kept their pop confections exquisite but pointed. Thus the still-shocking eruptions of Mel and Kim’s "Showing Out" and "Respectable," as brutalist futurist as anything Tackhead or Test Dept or Jam and Lewis produced in ‘86/7, balanced by the guilty innocence of Rick Astley and early Kylie (the beautiful "Turn It Into Love," which actually does sound like the Pet Shop Boys rewriting "Sub-Culture"), the innocently mature regret of Donna Summer (the continued implied minor key underlying "This Time I Know It’s For Real" suggests that this new dawn could yet end in darkness) and an equally brutalist proto-popism – with the Reynolds Girls’ hysterical (in all senses, and in the best way) "I’d Rather Jack (Than Fleetwood Mac)" (and for the record I should mention that I have since played this song to a member of Fleetwood Mac, who promptly burst into laughter, considered it a work of genius and wished he’d come up with the idea. I wonder if you can guess which member that was?) and, less obviously, with the gorgeously spiteful attack on Real Soul/Real Ale rockism that was SAW’s own "Roadblock" (so much so that they not only removed Jimmy Ruffin’s lead vocal from the mix but steadfastly refused to go on TOTP to promote it, just like the Clash and the Prodigy). This splendid 3CD compilation, which has proved an unexpectedly big seller, principally to thirty- and fortysomething housewives wishing to relive their teenage years of lust and Lurpak, also reminds us of semi-forgotten delights, such as the surprisingly hard house and unexpected multiple chord changes of Samantha Fox’s "Nothing’s Gonna Stop Me Now," or late flowerings like Boy Krazy’s bizarre "That’s What Love Can Do" (a full year before TLC’s "Ain’t 2 Proud 2 Beg"), Lonnie Gordon’s "Happenin’ All Over Again," maybe the best single vocal performance on any SAW record, where Gordon’s passion threatens to unbalance and dislodge the entire PWL juggernaut, and, best of all, from 1987, the full eight 12-inch minutes of Mandy Smith’s "I Just Can’t Wait (Mandy’s Theme)," where, as I said last time, Balearic Beat is invented and Mandy’s voice is a Chartres Cathedral ghost at sea, barely visible or tangible.

9. VARIOUS Run The Road Volume 2
Everyone stopped being interested in grime just as it was becoming interesting again – and, naturally, immediately started to complain that much of the best grime which came out in 2005 wasn’t actually grime at all, but British hip hop, or tarted-up garage, or made by women (the scandal!). With Run The Road Volume 1 a case could in extremis be made for the British hip hop theory (as if everyone’s memory is so short they can’t remember what a monumentally great record something like Blade’s The Lion Goes From Strength To Strength was, and is; a double album which, in 1993, said more about New Cross brutalism than the entire works of Carter USM) but with Volume 2 things were going enjoyably askew – if "enjoyable" is quite the right word to attach to something like Plan B’s "Sick 2 Def," the single most astonishing piece of music to emerge in 2005, a brutally unapologetic rap set to an acoustic guitar seemingly strummed with razor blades which told its story of death, murder, resentment, cause and effect backwards (and then ellipsing) and joined together so many strands – Bert Jansch to Johnny Cash, Nas to Dizzee, Current 93 to Shirley Collins, Derek Raymond to Charles Dickens – with such reproachful wisdom; uncomfortable as only the best art can be. My only regret is that Cash isn’t around to cover it; he would have understood where Plan B was coming from and getting at immediately. Elsewhere Mizz Beats sounded like their own fuzzy ghosts on "Saw it Comin’," Dynasty Crew’s "Bare Face Dynasty" was like the Lea Valley being scythed apart by pterodactyl bulldozers; and Lady Sovereign’s "Little Bit Of Shine (DJ Wonder Remix)" with its multiple stops-and-starts, its direct audience addresses (and winks), its fuck-you bold pile-ups of abstract and concrete noises, is almost indescribable in its Peter Sellers on Ze Records remixed by Steve Beresford wonder.

8. PATTI SMITH Horses/Horses
Already discussed in full; the 30-year-old original paired with this year’s performance at the Royal Festival Hall which managed to snap Patti out of her long-term benign coma and reminded her, and us, that we shouldn’t just feel sorry for loverboy(s).

7. THE TUBBY HAYES QUARTET Mexican Green
As with Mike Gibbs, Hayes’ posthumous reputation as The Great Mainstream British Jazzer may have worked against him. Whereas the avant-breakers who followed him – Surman, Parker, Osborne et al – are now all venerated and remembered, Hayes seems to have fallen into some disrepute, not helped by the continued unavailability of the core of his ‘60s work on record. Now Universal have reissued all six of those Fontana (as were) albums. Some work better than others; in particular the two big band sets, Tubbs’ Tours and 100% Proof, benefit from being more focused. The pick of the bunch, however, is 1967’s Mexican Green, recorded when the tenorman was becoming anxious about the progress of his own work, knowing that straight-down-the-middle hard bop couldn’t continue forever, and acutely aware of the young Surmans and Skidmores nipping at his heels. Thus he assembled a new quartet featuring pianist Mick Pyne, bassist Ron Mathewson and drummer Tony Levin, then all in their early-to-mid twenties, to freshen and free up his music – with miraculous results, for Mexican Green is one of the very greatest of British jazz records, encapsulating Hayes’ art better than any of his other recorded work. Listen to the absolute technical and emotional assurance of his tenor sax on the opening "Dear Johnny B" negotiating the slalom hairpins of the tune and its harmonies with a natural brilliance which threatens momentarily to put Coltrane in the shade, or his more ruminative playing on "Off The Wagon" ("our country and western, rock and roll, avant garde, rhythm and blues, bebop tune" as he was wont to announce it in concert – and funnily enough, it is) or "A Dedication To Joy." Deepest of all, however, is the quarter-hour title track which moves swiftly and easily between frenetic Latin rhythms and unalloyed free improvisation, and sees Hayes setting the stage for the next phase of his musical development – which, due to well-documented health reasons, sadly never really was to be - confidently culminating in Sanders/Ayler honks and squeals as the rhythm maelstrom swirls beneath and alongside him.

A personal note: I was privileged to know and work with Rose Hayes, Tubby’s widow, in the early part of my NHS career. She, too, went too soon – in 1995, aged just 58 – and had more than enough tragedy to cope with in her life, but I know would have been overjoyed to see her husband’s work come out and be appreciated and loved again.

6. MARK STEWART Kiss The Future
A shocking pink manifesto, and a stiff, stern reminder of what Mark Stewart started and what he could yet start. It also acts as a harsh parallel to the John Lydon compilation; listening anew to the Pop Group and Maffia sides reminds us that selling out was exactly what Stewart was not about, and considered observational diatribes like "Liberty City," "Dream Kitchen" and "Hysteria" cut to both Henry Mayhew and Guy Debord – immersing oneself in the shit of consumerist ruination in order to find the pearls which lurk beneath. The 12-inch of "Hypnotised" is a sort of Beckton sewage works equivalent of Arthur Russell’s "Let’s Go Swimming" in that it never quite swims where you expect it to, drifting in and out of focus and tempo. And, of course, the inescapable giant shadow which this work casts over what was to come out of Bristol subsequently, Tricky in particular. This marvellous music must not only be heard, but acted upon.

5. SCRITTI POLITTI Early
And, parallel with Stewart, simultaneously sweeter and more bitter, was the early Scritti. There’s nothing to add to what I originally wrote about this on Koons in January, so here it is again.

4. BUNNYBRAINS Box The Bunny
This may be the most staggering personal discovery I made in 2005 (but many thanks to Paul Brownell for pointing me in its direction in the first place) – four CDs, plus a DVD, of what is virtually the missing link between the ‘80s arsequake of the Butthole Surfers, Big Black and Happy Flowers, and the ‘00s brainquake of Animal Collective, Sunburned Hand Of The Man and Wolf Eyes; the complete recorded works of this not quite scrutable group from the ‘90s – noisy, confrontational, hilarious, sick, moral, atonal, hummable; Box The Bunny really is like discovering a record collection you never knew existed, and will be written about in full on CoM at some stage early next year.

3. JUDEE SILL Judee Sill/Heart Food/Dreams Come True
Yes, I know; we should have loved her more when she was with us. Sometimes I despair; what good will my words do for someone who has been gone these last 26 years? And how could you tell from the music she made? Deceptively simple songs like "Jesus Was A Cross Maker," so strong even the Hollies covered it, or deceptively complex songs like "The Donor," the latter off Heart Food, a masterpiece to rank with Joni’s Blue and Laura’s Tendaberry. You look at the pictures of Judee in these CD booklets; laughing with her dog, bespectacled, unassuming; conducting the orchestra in her denim jacket with manuscript extending over five music stands, and you simultaneously want to weep for her and strangle her for being so fucking stupid and careless with her own life. Could you tell from any of this that she was a drug addict and petty criminal who had done time and still won a scholarship to music college?

And now there’s a third album we never knew about, and it is so effortlessly joyous and life-affirming (sample titles: "That’s The Spirit," "Sunny Side Up") that the heartbreak doubles and triples. How can someone with this much life in them – end so soon, so pointlessly?

To a degree Judee Sill’s cult remains an exclusive one; these records are expensive to buy, but in important ways are priceless – once you’ve heard them, you’ll never want to trade them in. Again, this is an artist whose art demands more space than this small general summary, and Judee Sill will likewise get the full CoM treatment soon.

2. ROBERT WYATT AND FRIENDS Theatre Royal Drury Lane 8th September 1974
My second favourite record of all time – Rock Bottom – performed live and made to sound more expansive and more minimalist, harsher and more gorgeous, together with assorted reminders of what a brilliant and glorious and probably unrepeatable time this was for British music.

1. BILL FAY Bill Fay/Time Of The Last Persecution
THE BILL FAY GROUP Tomorrow, Tomorrow And Tomorrow
I was, almost until the last minute, entirely prepared to put Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow at the head of my Top 50 New Releases list and make it my 2005 Album Of The Year, even though it was recorded a quarter of a century ago. I am also aware that there is a great temptation to exult in something I helped cause, and that is something which must be avoided at all costs. I am fully aware that I am named and quoted in Mr Fay’s own sleevenotes to his Deram (via Durtro) reissues – and maybe in a slightly admonitory way, though I like to think that in my original CoM piece I did my best to avoid the pitfalls of Syd Barrett Mk II. So making Bill Fay’s oeuvre my Reissue Of The Year may be interpreted as modest nepotism.

However, others did far more than the slight part which I played in the revival of interest in the man’s music; notably, Jim Irvin, whose Mojo review of the original 1998 See For Miles CD reissue prompted me to listen to it in the first place, and David Tibet who actually went about re-releasing them when See For Miles went bust and the CD started retailing for stupid-high prices on ebay. Nonetheless it is a joy to see this genius’ work finally receive the acclaim it has long been due. Add to that the fact that, 24-27 years on, his third album came out of the cold (twice as long as Kate Bush) seemingly at the point when it was needed, and that "Strange Stairway" set off something in me which may still lead to a (re)new(al of) life, and one ends up with something just beyond music. Here is what I wrote about Tomorrow, Tomorrow And Tomorrow on Koons back in Easter.

TOP 50 NEW RELEASES

50. KANO Home Sweet Home
Not all of it works, but at its best ("P’s & Q’s," "Typical Me") this was a bold but still raw advance on grime-goes-pop. The final orchestral tumult of "Signs In Life" cuts very deeply indeed, but the highlight is still the oldie "Boys Love Girls" which is grime as Liechtenstein might have painted it.

49. ELLEN ALLIEN Thrills
Less careerist (and less obviously present) than Goldfrapp, this German schaffel/you label it then record was a masterclass in cold cauterisation of techno; and yet, like all the best machine music, deeply human ("Washing Machine," "She Is With Me"). Deeply danceable as well.

48. FANNYPACK See You Next Tuesday
The Pussycat Dolls? Well, their untainted version of "Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go?" is unknowing genius in the same way as Steps’ "Tragedy" was, and Tori Alamaze really only has herself to blame for letting "Don’t ‘Cha" slip through her careless hands, but otherwise it’s those twelve eyes, they don’t smile. Whereas Fannypack didn’t even pretend to smile and hit a lot harder with hilariously propulsive pop like "Nu Nu (Yeah Yeah)," "Seven One Eight" and the quite brilliant Sousa-meets-DAF-meets-Pulsallama mash-up that is "Twisted."

47. VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR Present
Forget the Gang of Four’s walk-of-shame reunion; the venerable VDGG regrouped this year after some three decades away, blew everyone apart at the Royal Festival Hall and recorded this superb double album (one half songs, one half improv) which somehow manages to be both the prequel and sequel to Metal Box. Brilliant, unhinged, vivid and what the fuck did the cardiologists put in Peter Hammill’s arteries? Note to Lydon: "Nutter Alert" and "Abandon Ship!" – just like 30 years ago, this is what you’ve got to beat.

46. THE BOY LEAST LIKELY TO The Best Party Ever
To what base ends have we come when James Blunt’s preferred support band make it into the CoM Top 50? But this was a rare display of good taste on the Thatcherite squaddie crumpet’s part; the duo’s take on C86 tropes roams down engagingly unpredictable alleys, and a place in this list is guaranteed to anyone who’ll name a song after a Bill Bryson quote ("Warm Panda Cola").

45. CHARLIE HADEN/LIBERATION MUSIC ORCHESTRA Not In Our Name
Charlie Haden and Carla Bley hold aloft the red and black banner, just as they did on the cover of their 1969 original; but now the faces are grimmer, older and more defiant, and the music infinitely sadder. This is the real sequel to the first album; 1982’s Ballad Of The Fallen had its moments but was squashed by general reticence and that damnable neutralising ECM production aura. Most of the players here are new names, with the Puerto Rican altoist Miguel Zenon proving an exceptional talent, but the real joy is in Haden’s humanity and Bley’s inimitable orchestrations; those brass voicings throughout the extended "America The Beautiful (Medley)" (the album’s only scrape with free jazz) which she and only she can produce, and her genius in making gold out of unpromising raw material; turning "Amazing Grace" into a graceful R&B waltz, or Dvorak’s New World Symphony into an Ellingtonian elegie, the subtly increasing rage throughout Bill Frisell’s composition "Throughout," and the grim, stately finale of Barber’s Adagio, scored for Bley brass, whose final sustained trombone sob (Curtis Fowlkes) acts as a shockingly sober counterpart to the exuberance of Roswell Rudd on the original’s closer "We Shall Overcome." And Charlie will not be the last Haden to appear in this list.

44. NEW ORDER Waiting For The Sirens’ Call
The cover says a big "No" but the music says a bigger "Yes." There was a lovely moment in spring this year, while driving through the Lake District, listening to "Krafty," and that divine chord change which only New Order can manage emerged just as the mountains took on a hue of sunset red, and I knew that yet again the bastards had hit the mark. New Order may very well go on forever, and great songs like "Jetstream" (hey! they can even make the Scissor Sisters listenable!) and "Dracula’s Castle" (who else, eh? I ask you, who else?) prove that they should do so.

43. LANSING-DREIDEN The Incomplete Triangle
A genuinely unexpected take on Ye Olde Rocke; I have no idea who or why Lansing-Dreiden are – this album’s twelve tracks are identified only by Roman numerals and there is no further information apart from their website address – but this seemed to me a fresh and invigorating example of what adventurous guitar-based music can still produce when it’s got a mind (to it). Rather like AR Kane’s "When You’re Sad" if they’d been American and Butch Vig had been their producer.

42. CHARLOTTE CHURCH Tissues And Issues
She reminds me a lot of Lulu, actually – those same mischievous fuck-you (if you’d like) Celtic eyes, the same cheerful disregard for anything other than the joys of living now and for now, the same depth-charged voice (see: "you’d be my favourite thing," "whatever you may do"). And although there was a little too much of the hedge-our-bets R&B balladry on what could fairly be termed the first "Church Of Me" album, the best pop here was uncanny – the handclaps of the first six seconds of "Crazy Chick" are enough to make it one of 2005’s singles of the year, "Casualty Of Love" deals with the opera/pop interface in a non-cringeworthy way, "Call My Name" is wonderfully dirty Welsh Beyoncé. Best of all, however, are the extraordinary Eurodisco in hell of "Let’s Be Alone" (Guy Chambers, we never knew you had it in you!) and the quietly chilling closer "Confessional Song" whose Church-penned lyric of pained daily minutiae wouldn’t have been out of place on the Manics’ The Holy Bible ("Got myself a little dog/She’s eighteen weeks old now/Guess she’s just a substitute/But I don’t know what for"). Not to mention "I need professional help."

41. CAGEDBABY Will See You Now
I was put off listening to this album for six full months because of its cover (though I am assured it is a genuine 1970-vintage festival photograph), which was obviously my loss because this is a rather lovely abstract dance record, like a more in focus Boards Of Canada or a Brit Casino Versus Japan, in direct contrast to its lyrics ("I’ve a story to tell of Scriptures in Hell").

40. GORILLAZ Demon Days
This Damon Albarn, he wanders the world but doesn’t make a big thing out of it. He inspects Syrian Farfisa organs tuned to Arabic scales, or penetrates Chinese mountain range villages to make field recordings of people blowing into leaves or sounding car horns. And all of this seeps back, subtly, into the music he then makes. I suspect that Albarn is shaping up to be a very significant figure in music, but increasingly he seems best able to demonstrate this as a non-present cartoon frontman rather than a flesh-and-blood one. The last Blur record, Think Tank, was a morose and uninspiring thing; whereas on Demon Days, though the emotions are hardly brighter ("Every Planet We Reach Is Dead"), the effect is curiously more uplifting. Strange random figures are picked up along the way – Neneh Cherry, Roots Manuva, De La Soul, Dennis Hopper, Ike Turner – and become mere passengers. But then Gorillaz help to give Shaun Ryder his first number one single after 21 years of trying, and "Dare" is duly great, Ryder both celebrating and undermining the song. Meanwhile, "Feel Good Inc." undemonstrably demonstrates Albarn’s knowledge of what time it is, while the whispering stark car parks of "Kids With Guns" instantly obviate the need for Hard-Fi. I have a feeling that this record should have been placed much higher in this list.

39. THE RESIDENTS Animal Lover
…who have been exploring the same (if parallel) stark car parks as Gorillaz (complete with the absence of faces) for most of my life, and Animal Lover is as reassuringly bleak as any of their work, journeying from the diurnal dismay of "On The Way (to Oklahoma)" and ending with the not-hushed "Burn My Bones" ("And leave the ashes in the snow" – the sort of song the Arcade Fire might produce in 20 years’ time).

38. KID CARPET Ideas And Oh Dears
This year’s Curser Minor geek-savant-makes-great-pop record, full of agreeably warped songs like "Green And Pleasant Land" and "Hip Hip Hooray" interspersed with mentalist cut-ups ("Nelson Street Space Invaders"). A pity that no room could be found for his reading of "Jump" from last year’s excellent Shit Dope EP, for the benefit of those who think Paul Anka is hip, or something.

37. BORIS Boris At Last – Feedbacker
My feeling about much Japanese noise music is that it will eventually turn out like The Wizard Of Oz – drop the cloaks and the fake mystique and you will find a wizened little squirt in the chair, reading Catherine Cookson. Maybe you’d find Paul Anka. But Boris are one of the bands who occasionally justify the hype. Feedbacker is just one track, 43 minutes long, which runs the expected gamut from quiet to FUCK, but it does so with expertise and emotion, thereby making it a curious, if opposite, bedfellow to the album at #23 in this list.

36. ARIEL PINK’S HAUNTED GRAFFITI Worn Copy
I’m still not quite convinced about this lo-fi avant-pop business either, many of which records sound like resumes to be submitted to David Fridmann for consideration of producing (i.e. Substitutes For Actual Real Pop), but the Trepanated Earth man Ariel Pink still seems to be on the right track. Best to treat songs (or fragments of songs) such as "Life In L.A." or "Oblivious Peninsula" as a hungrier, broker Warren Zevon, yet to start smoking.

35. MALCOLM MIDDLETON Into The Woods
One of the best and cheeriest examples of good old post-rock indie like they used to make came from this second solo album by the Arab Strap guitarist, which found him in a (naturally) jauntier mood than is the norm with Aidan Moffat. The opening trio of "Break My Heart," "Devastation" and "Loneliness Shines," despite their titles, might be the most propulsive start to a guitar record since Matthew Sweet’s Altered Beast.

34. PRINCESS SUPERSTAR My Machine
Now if only Madonna had come back with an album like this! "Quitting Smoking Song," "Sex, Drugs & Drugs," "I’m So Out Of Control," "World Council Entertainment Dictatorship" – sexy, provocative, funny, and, in the wondrous title track, profound about disposable (Rachel Stevens, do a cover).

33. BOARDS OF CANADA The Campfire Headphase
32. LAWRENCE The Night Will Last Forever
Boards of Canada are one of those few groups (New Order are another) who I frankly want to make the same record over and over again, in the same way that I want to stay with the same woman forever. There are some guitars on The Campfire Headphase, and perhaps a greater air of ending (the undying long fade of "Farewell Fire"), and the ‘70s American TV/Punchstock images are more sharply defined (in that you can now see some faces) but otherwise their journey continues uninterrupted; I could swim in the placid pining of "Peacock Tail" or "Oscar See Through Red Eye" for an element of eternity.

Germany’s Peter M Kersten, a.k.a. Lawrence, however, takes it a little further. This is more troubled melodic techno from the same mould as Selected Ambient Works Vol 2 and Global Communications, but with a more palpable uncertainty (titles include "Lost Images," "Happy Sometimes," "Leave Me Tomorrow") and a surprisingly sharp and bitonal electric piano commenting throughout. The melodies are for dying in.

31. GOGOL BORDELLO Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike
We have been here before, at least those of us who remember Ivo Papasov and/or Les Negresses Vertes. But I saw the Eastern Bloc-via-NYC collective Gogol Bordello live at the ICA last week and they have something of the Lorca duende about them. They do the percussion procession throughout the audience, like the Stones to the Arcade Fire’s Beatles, and their tunes are splendid, as evinced by this Steve Albini-recorded second album of theirs whose highlight occurs with the unbelievably louche "Start Wearing Purple," another of 2005’s finest singles and the Christmas number one which should have been.

30. SING SING Sing Sing And I
Emma Anderson was always responsible for most of the loveliness in the otherwise overrated Lush, and, unhindered, continues to produce wonderful, ethereally rancorous pop (with Lisa O’Neill) in the duo Sing Sing. "Going Out Tonight," as previously noted, is one of the songs of the year; a lament for a disastrous night out which could have fitted into either the Shortwave Set album or the Girls Aloud album equally.

29. EVAN PARKER Evan Parker With Birds
For those curious about the apposite reference in my piece on Aerial, here is yet another Koons reprint to make the story deeper.

28. BROADCAST Tender Buttons
Now down to a duo, Broadcast responded by making some of the most urgent music of their career; less bloodied perhaps than its predecessor, Haha Sound, but songs like "Corporeal" and "Michael A Grammar" show the old strength and subversion undiminished.

27. KING BRITT Presents Sister Gertrude Morgan
It should be a nightmare. Recordings from the veteran preacher made in 1969 at Preservation Hall, New Orleans, remixed and newly soundtracked. Think Moby or Little Axe. But King Britt, as expected, brings dynamism and power (and indeed the album’s highlight, "Power (Voodoo Version)," comes awfully close to the truly demonic) to his music, making it an unanticipated monument to a city which, subsequent to this album’s recording, has become lost; a document of a way of living perilously close to extinction.

26. GO-KART MOZART Tearing Up The Album Chart
The second Lawrence to appear in this list with his second Go-Kart Mozart album, a mere six years after the first one ("I still want to be a star/But I just sold my guitar/And you know the way things are…"), and still gloriously warped Glitterpop with cheery tunes like "Listening To Marmalade," "At The DDU" and "Donna & The Dopefiends." This album is more or less why the Kaiser Chiefs album is, more or less, not here. And the second Birmingham entry in three albums!

25. LADYTRON Witching Hour
Three Top 45 singles and one Top 130 album placing shall not wither Ladytron as they deliver their most brutal dose of Newer Pop yet. Songs like "Destroy Everything You Touch" and "Sugar" are like Xenomania going Neubauten.

24. ANTONY AND THE JOHNSONS I Am A Bird Now
I don’t feel quite as strongly about this as I did when it came out; the guest cameos become wearisome after a while, and as an album it doesn’t hang together as well as the previous eponymous one. But in terms of unconfined emotion and dragging life back from the jaws of death, performances like "Hope There’s Someone" and "Man Is The Boy" are among this year’s most profound. Boy George’s cameo on "You Are My Sister" is touching mainly because his voice is shot to fuck, and Rufus Wainwright’s appearance on "What Can I Do?" is quietly shattering. More about the latter anon.

23. MEW Mew And The Glass Handed Kites
The Good Cop to #37’s Bad; a seamless, hour-long, 14-track melange of preposterously brilliant epic prog-pop which recalls the path A-Ha should have taken – and it all ends with a drum solo and a tacit sobbing voice, alone: "Please don’t leave me." The song and album climax "White Lips Kissed" is a contender for the year’s best ballad.

22. ROBYN Robyn
Apparently the same Robyn S who, in another life, once sang "Show Me Love," this was one of the most remarkable female pop records of recent times, ranging from genuinely tortured ballads ("Crash And Burn Girl," "Should Have Known") to the semi-amused/semi-outraged resignation of "Bum Like You" and the what-the-fuckness of "Konichiwa Bitches" which shows Gwen Stefani what time it really is. Deserves a proper, full-blown, major album release, which you know deep in your hearts it’s never going to get.

21. ROOTS MANUVA Awfully Deep
20. LETHAL BIZZLE Against All Oddz
The old brushes the palms of the new in urban black British music. Roots Manuva returned with his third album in twice as many years and, with wittily stabbing songs such as "Too Cold" and "The Falling," unexpectedly transported us back to the 1995 of Earthling with possibly the best trip hop record of the intervening decade; all vibes and unearthly darkness. Whereas Lethal Bizzle took some of the scarred cheek of the younger Manuva to power his own musings on life, sex and death. "Slow" with Kele La Roc is the most distended, woozy urban ballad for some considerable time, and the fragment of "No!" convinces us that the upcoming second More Fire Crew album is going to be something extraordinary indeed.

19. POLAR BEAR Held On The Tips Of Fingers
Included here in preference to its other half, Acoustic Ladyland’s Last Chance Disco, which latter is a little too cute for its own good, with its "Nico" and "Iggy" as though John Zorn’s Naked City never happened, but this is the first evidence of something genuinely new happening from within the bowels of the f-IRE Collective. Much of this is down to the presence of Leafcutter John on electronica, who performs the same "direct inject anti-jazz ray gun" function which Eno sometimes still provides on Robert Wyatt records; but the record and the group go beyond "jazz" and tap an ancient and long-misused source of pre-prog pastoralism. The closing "Life That Ends Too Soon" could be used to draw the curtains on an old life.

18. SAINT ETIENNE Tales From Turnpike House
A serious underperformer commercially at the time of its release, and the accompanying children’s album intended for autumn release seems to have been indefinitely delayed/junked, despite the involvement of Xenomania, David Essex, Anthony Rivers senior and junior, and an ex-ELO cellist. All more the pity, for TFTH now comes across as a lighter, urban equivalent of Aerial; the same day-in-our-lives scenario, the same unlikely cameos, the same children-orientated second album, "The Birdman Of EC1" if you will, "Milk Bottle Symphony," but the night ends with the death of "Teenage Winter" rather than the ecstasy of "Nocturn." I say "lighter" but after 7/7 it is difficult to listen to this record and not hear it as a requiem for something intangible but deep which was wiped out. The following piece was written a couple of weeks before the bombings, and has appeared on at least two message boards, but I make no apology for republishing it in this, its natural home.

The bastards.

The bastards.

They've done it again.

Wrong-footed me. Dared me to shrug my shoulders at the top of this thread.

And then I listened to the thing, on my Discman, on a 31-degrees-in-the-shade Saturday, walking from Oxford Street to Chalk Farm.

The benign abandonment of these sunny, empty streets in the Bloomsbury/Euston/Regent's Park triangle.

The only shop open in Great Titchfield Street was - you guessed it - a tanning salon (not, alas, the Tropicana Tanning Salon).

In a semi-derelict newsagents just off Wells Street to buy a much-needed bottle of water, the elderly proprietor invites me to admire her nice young terrier.

Round the nexus of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital. Blocks of flats which look like displaced houses from the road which ran parallel to the Thwaites brewery. A white-haired, tanned, pullovered fiftysomething wanders past me with a watering can. He is probably extremely well-known, but I don't stop to look at him.

Jumping over the end of Cleveland Street, the Tower looking down upon me ruefully, and not quite protectively.

Even the main traffic lights on Euston Road appear to change in super-slow motion on a day as liquid as this.

Down the shadowed side of Osnaburgh Street, across from the former insurance office where Laura briefly worked too many years ago, below the windows of the flat where once Kenneth Williams lived; a smaller and pokier place than you'd expect. Two dusty front windows, only one open. Everything in this street appears to be on the brink of turning into dust - disused factories, Houses which don't seem to House anyone -

"throws a gown over every place I've been
And every little dream"

The long, peopleless procedural that is Albany Street. Almost peopleless, at any rate. A group of backpacking students stop at a pub, and realise dolefully that it's not open yet. "Don't worry," says one, "there's another one just up the road that's definitely open." And indeed there is - the Cafe of Good Hope. Across the street from where Henry Mayhew once lived.

The communality of the poor. Everybody talks about the enclosed individual prisons of London. No one ventures outside their room, talks to anyone else, etc.

"I walk these side streets alone"

But you wouldn't know it from round about Robert Street. There's an estate there, not quite the Regent's Park Estate from whence sprang Flowered Up and where the components of Militant Esthetix continue to dwell. People amble out, smiling, talking to each other, passing cordial greetings, eyeing me with suspicion. Should I be here?

"She knows this has to end"

It's easy to feel out of place. I rest my legs at a bus stop. Two people join me; a crew-cut twentysomething in shorts and iPod, swaying his arms and tapping his feet, enraptured, glancing around to see if anyone else can feel it, but I can't even hear what he's listening to. To my left, a distinguished-looking, grey-haired, bespectacled fiftysomething, possibly an Independent leader writer, looking benign rather than bemused.

The church at Redhill Street whose clock seems to have long stopped. The nearly luminous redbrick which runs in the little side street behind it, but which proves to lead to nothing except the sectioned-off wall of a school playground. I make my way back to the main drag, and a black woman looks at me exceptionally dubiously.

The shops here are standard, but perhaps all that is needed. A Post Office which at 11:45 in the morning is already closed. A dry cleaners. A betting shop. A tanning salon (and no baker). A piano shop. Why the piano shops in out-of-the-way locations? I recall Courtney Pianos in Botley Road, across the street from where once we lived. The idea was that once we got a proper house we'd get in a piano (there wasn't enough room for one in the flat) and I'd teach Laura to play it.

Further down, past more closed-down depots and warehouses, along whose walls I walk directly as the shade does not penetrate more than a couple of inches beyond them, the street becomes distinctly more rural (you could almost be walking down a street in Harrogate, or Blantyre) and delicately more opulent. To my left, the complex of backs-to-the-street Cumberland Terrace pied-a-terres wherein '70s rock stars hang their spurs during the week. To my right, past the TA barracks, I suddenly see Cherry Tree Lane from Mary Poppins, identical in every detail and blossom. Park Village West - what is this elysium doing on the outskirts of Camden? And such transcendence is not limited to those of affluent means; back in the estate, there was a block called Kelso House. Through the entrance portal I can view an unbelievably light and colourful bouquet of garden and enchantment. Also closed off to me.

"We need some space"
"I said I'd miss my mates"

I'm now at the top of Albany Street, at the junction where the outflow from Camden meets the back end of London Zoo.

"Let's build a zoo!...Here they come! Two by two by two by two..."

I opt not to suffocate in the drowning human traffic of Camden proper so make my way down Gloucester Avenue, past the LMC, before emerging at Chalk Farm, en route to one of the most magical days I can remember having for a long, long time.

"Stars above us/Cars below us/Nothing can touch us, baby"

Tales From Turnpike House is about escape. The Stars are regularly referenced in contrast to the "grey" (and recall the grey-on-white-on-grey design of the Finisterre sleeve; what was that about "I love to get lost in the city" and how did that end up as "Slow down at the Castle?").
(in Ryman's 253, remember, the fatal tube crash occurs at the Elephant and Castle - the End of the Line. Beyond that, it's the multiple Congo deltas of Old Kent, Walworth, Camberwell, every man for himself)

It's about a day in a dozen lives; A Grand Don't Come For Free multiplied by side one of 'Til The Band Comes In with a libretto by Georges Perec and scored by - well, scored by the Rivers (the absence of rivers is tangible in the record's story).

There isn't much unalloyed joy in TFTH; the nearest thing to an uplifting song being the hopelessly hopeful "Sun In The Morning," and even the temporary rooftop relief of "Stars Above Us" is tempered by the knowledge that, 14 years after "Nothing Can Stop Us," the reassuring reflex is now "nothing can touch us." The fear of being touched ("Side Streets" is remarkable; music by Tom Jobim, lyrical plot by "Robert De Niro's Waiting." The not-particularly-hidden deathwish of "Maybe I'll get it tomorrow") means that no one can touch you; or, like Gary Stead, you end up drinking yourself into - more drinks. He'll lambast his long-suffering partner or the "Aussie bar staff" playing the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but he invariably ends up buying another round at the Hatton Fan.

The remarkable way in which the rhythm template from "My Heartbeat" is used as a springboard for other diversionary/introductory tactics on "Milk Bottle Symphony." The echoing fade of "away" into non-human static on "Slow Down At The Castle." The perversity of "A Good Thing" being far more Xenomania-sounding than the two Xenomania-assisted songs (but how Xenomania-like was "Shower Scene" from Finisterre?) and piercing something vital with Cracknell's "it's all for nothing" refrain.

The way in which the frustrated vaudeville waltz of "Relocate" suddenly atomises into an abstract Julian Opie landscape straight off the bluer corners of Sound Of Water halfway through, and how apt it is that David Essex now sounds more like Bowie than ever ("Sounds like a load of balls!").

The heartbreaking instrumental fragment of "The Birdman Of EC1" which appears to have flown off somewhere between the Cocteau Twins' "Beatrix" and Plaid's "Eyen."

And "Teenage Winter" - my God, what a song, what a closedown, what a last-bit-of-Escalator Over The Hill gone pop, where all the disparate voices return for their reluctant curtain calls as the stage collapses around them - nothing's what it used to be, that two copies of "Every Loser Wins" don't add up to a winner, that a Subbuteo '81/2 catalogue in the drawer ISN'T A SUBSTITUTE - and we realise horribly what growing up actually means; not so much the halycon grief of Pet Sounds, but "mums with pushchairs outside Sainsbury's with tears in their eyes."

But at least the mums with pushchairs can still connect on even an elementary level; the narrator of "Sun In The Morning" returns for a grief-stricken "Goodnight" as Tony Rivers' "Our Prayer" harmonies seem to indicate that there won't be another morning. Another potentially perfect day lost. No reassurance. Park your bike in the alley.

And yet there is an escape route. Or perhaps it's a dream within a dream in the same way as that central demo section of the third Bill Fay album. I don't know whether I would have reacted to TFTH in as passionate a way as I have if there hadn't been Up The Wooden Hill, a quarter-hour taster for an upcoming "children's record." Because in these 15 or so minutes exists the life and spirit more or less absent from the main album's story. "You Can Count On Me" is Chinn and Chapman reshaping Cornelius' "Count Five Or Six." "Barnyard Brouhaha" dares to be one nanoinch's breath away from "Crazy Frog." "Let's Build A Zoo" and "Excitation" together give us perhaps the sexiest vocal performances of Cracknell's career - here she's happy, mischievous, provocative; Deee-Lite x Mud + Sweet Exorcist (and get that "suffragette" line in "Excitation"! For kids, did they say?).

But then there's something else. The hidden ending to the album proper. David Essex returns in "Bedfordshire" presumably having been convinced to move to the country. With his hitherto unheard son, he ventures to take him on a walk, and there's an immensely poignant acoustic reverie (not that far from Van Morrison's "Coney Island," really) which sounds as though the cynical old geezer has rediscovered life via his child ("It's green 'cos - that's the colour of Thunderbird 2!" "You're right, son! You're absolutely right!"). Here, we are moved away from the easy associatives of old Small Faces album tracks (but here's another reason for my passion - calling songs "Up The Wooden Hill To Bedfordshire" or "Night Owl" means you're inadvertently referencing The Songs Of Our Lives) towards something more affecting. But more real? At the end, Essex turns towards his child, towards us, and informs us that "If you close your eyes, you can see anything you like." So they may well still be in Turnpike House. But they have managed to realise the wonder of what's on their doorstep. Maybe.

But "Night Owl" returns us to the grief of "Goodnight" - Cracknell sitting alone, downstairs, at midnight, paranoid about the creak on the stairs (it's the same protagonist as "Side Streets"), wondering what she could have done to make her life better. A children's album? Only in the same way that side two of Tiger Bay was a children's album. The urge to return to childhood. The fear of now. The fear of death, violent or natural.

On the bus home, some considerable time later, there is a young girl sitting at the front of the top deck of the bus. As the bus crosses Waterloo Bridge she gives an involuntary gasp of shock and wonder. It was obviously the first time she'd seen the view. What Saint Etienne tell us is that we all gave that gasp at some stage in our lives - in my case, when I was no more than five or six - and that the challenge is to recapture that gasp and make it work for you, so that your existence can be (re)turned into (a) life.

17. RACHEL STEVENS Come And Get It
A shiny yellow New Pop Mk II masterpiece which would have ranked considerably higher had its artist, and her record company, believed in it a little more. But then, what can you do, when even a record as assuredly avant-garde as Chemistry can’t get beyond number eleven in the album chart, bonus Christmas album or not?

16. RUFUS WAINWRIGHT Want Two
Whereas there was absolutely no question about Rufus not believing in his music, but once again this is what I said about Want Two some months past, and the intervening time has done nothing to diminish its immense emotional power and artistic adventure.

15. VASHTI BUNYAN Lookaftering
It now occurs to me that, growing up in the Glasgow of the 1970s, Vashti Bunyan must have been living but a few miles away from me, plying whatever trades she was plying to get by. Not that anyone really knew anything about her until Just Another Diamond Day, her 1970 odyssey of leaving London for Scotland in a caravan, was republished in 2000 and people began listening to it. Thus was she gradually persuaded to give music a second try, and thus do we now have Lookaftering, her first album in 35 years, having spent the intervening period raising her children. Sound familiar, except at thrice the length?

There has been talk that Bunyan was unhappy about the Banharts and Newsoms of this world being on the record – in interviews she has diplomatically commented that some of the choices of musicians were those of the record company – but thankfully they keep their mouths shut and provide full service to the music. And what music. Such a fragile voice, such a surely not-approaching-60-years-old voice, such a 25-years-before-Sinead-O’Connor voice. And songs so fragile they could snap on the turn of a whisper. Typically the profoundest moments are aided by the only returnee from the Diamond Day sessions – arranger Robert Kirby, who on the spellbinding "Turning Backs" and "Feet Of Clay" gets to the heart of Vashti, and therefore to our hearts.

"But if your love should cross with mine
I will be here on your side
So long as you want me to be
I’ll not be going far or wide."

Oh yes.

14. SUGABABES Taller In More Ways
A very real return to form after 2003’s dull Three, exemplified by the fact that there’s a song entitled "Joy Division" which sounds like a car-crash between 1981 On-U Sound and "I Am The Walrus"; one of 2005’s purest pop songs (and its best video) "Push The Button," a song Alma Cogan could have sung fifty years ago but which sounds like it was recorded next week; "Red Dress" with its gleeful fusion of 23 Skidoo and the Sooty-Braden Show Band; the gasping ballad "Better" with its yodelling "I’m drowning " section recalling Frank Ifield doing Beckett; and the epic closer "Two Hearts," overseen by the Godlike Cameron McVey with its too-close drumming, its steadily escalating emotions and its final string section curlicue. Three places above Rachel because they believed in it, and we can in turn believe in them.

13. FREE BASE The Ins And Outs
The best free jazz rave-up of 2005 with the unbeatable trio of saxophonist Alan Wilkinson, bassist Marcio Mattos and drummer Steve Noble – a collective age not far short of 150, but sounding about twelve years old as they thrash, honk, howl and caress in expert 1969 John Surman fashion. Highlight: the thirteen-minute carve-up that is "Absolute Xero," presumably with the late and much missed Mr Slingsby in mind.

12. VITALIC OK Cowboy
Really this record should have gone in the compilations/reissues list, since Laura was still with us/me when "La Rock 01" was first out, but this is the template for much of the great pop which has passed since; maximalist schaffel which, like all great pop, arose out of an accident; Pascal Arbez-Nicholas wanted to be Giorgio Moroder, didn’t quite manage it and therefore accidentally achieved something else.

11. NINE HORSES Snow Bound Sorrow
David Sylvian’s most "accessible" pop record probably since the days of Secrets Of The Beehive; not a retreat from the icy world of Blemish (which latter, remember, ends with the sun coming out) but a benign reminder that he can come close to us if he so wishes. Nine immaculate musings (or should that be nine immaculate curettings?), therefore, on war, death, sex and love, not in that order, sometimes oscillating between the ominous and reassuring (the title track), more often proceeding through virtuous post-Jon Hassell balladry (trumpeter Arve Henriksen Sylvian’s virtual instrumental alter ego here), but with observations like "The Banality Of Evil," cutting continents deeper than a thousand limp biscuits ever could hope.

10. JOHN HOWARD The Dangerous Hours
Never mind James Blunt; here is the record which should have shifted 360,000 copies this year alone, the best album of learned pop balladry performed by a fifty-something bespectacled gay man. So one could also say, never mind Elton John. Certainly Howard’s vocal power is astonishingly undiminished from the days of Kid In A Big World, and on this collaboration with author and poet Robert Cochrane he relishes the opportunity, not only to sing terrific songs like "And Even Now" and "Maintaining The Anger" with gusto and PROPER passion, but to maximalise his musical resources (all songs are performed by Howard alone, on vocals and multiple keyboards) such that the whole thing sounds like a drumlessTrevor Horn album, with choirs of Fairlights and cascading vibes. Highlight: the gorgeously grievous "Blame The Night" which fittingly ends with hope:

"Come the dawn
That feeling in my heart
Your hand in mine
The future’s in a kiss
Aware of time to share another’s life
Grateful that today
Brings the smile of someone new."

Oh, yes.

9. RICHARD HAWLEY Coles Corner
Subtract a little sparkle from John Howard, add a little grit, a pinch of Morrissey, and you have the equally astonishing third album by Richard Hawley; a cross between Nick Lowe’s Dig My Mood and Julee Cruise’s Floating Into The Night with his not-quite-confident baritone (lushly desolate in the string-laden title track) – an afterlife rock ‘n’ roll incorporating rewrites of "Sleep Walk" ("Hotel Room," an ode to a bottle of scotch, "’Cos you’re here in my arms…"), stunningly poignant balladry which truly would not have shamed Roy Orbison ("Darling Wait For Me"), "Born Under A Bad Sign," the sort of song Morrissey should be singing more often these days – but all the while the fantasia slips out of his hands, and the cold rationalism of his native Sheffield reasserts itself – in the chilling "Tonight," the devastating penultimate solo acoustic reading of the old traditional folk song "Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet" with which the world could be closed down, and finally, with "Last Orders" a drift into Eno ambient territory, amorphous/distorted piano chords, dying forever.

8. BROOKE VALENTINE Chain Letter
Practically the only bright spot in what was otherwise the worst year for nu-R&B ever, Chain Letter is cheeky, fractious ("Blah Blah Blah" far outdoing "Sweet Dreams My LA Ex"), and even the ballads are integrated into the album as a whole and carry the necessary poison; if performance Oscars were to be given out, Brooke’s gradual volte-face from sorrow to rage on "I Want You Dead" would get Best Actress.

7. PETRA HADEN Petra Haden Sings: The Who Sell Out
And she sings it herself, all of it, all its parts, multitracked, like the avant-pop opera Stockhausen has perhaps always been too scared to write. Among its many assets are the fact that Haden’s harmonies bring out the essential Brian Wilson influence prevalent in Townshend’s work of the time (and only at that time), thus the likes of "Tattoo" and "Our Love Was" end up even more poignant than the originals. "Silas Stingy" is now made an object of pity and compassion rather than a laughing stock, and "I Can See For Miles" in a Flying Pickets sing Stimmung kind of way joins so many dots that it flattens me, pleasurably.
Most poignant of all, of course, is that Haden was asked to record this album by producer Mike Watt as a tribute to his fellow Minuteman, D Boon, who loved the original Who album and who was tragically killed in a car crash 20 years ago. So once again there is the remembering, and Haden does it as adventurously and poignantly as her dad (see #45).

6. GIRLS ALOUD Chemistry
It looks as if once again, just like the last time, New Pop had a second wind and the world looked it in the eye and said "No." For Chemistry, the apex, the peak of New Pop Mk II, only entered the album chart at #11 (as Simon Mayo ominously commented on Radio 2 last Monday, "possibly not high enough") in the same week that Will Young’s not-at-all-bad third album plummeted from 2 to 20 in its second week of release. No, they want the "real" again, James Blunt and his striptease, Dido and her please don’t hit me tease, the Kaiser Chiefs ‘cos they’re right about the taxis and the condoms aren’t they and thank God they elected Cameron now we’ve got a chance again. Is Real Ale always destined to win? Then again, at the beginning of the album Girls Aloud do warn us that they’re not going to tell you their names. My feelings are nameless.

5. THE ARCADE FIRE Funeral
But then again, just because everybody says that’s the way it is doesn’t automatically mean that it ain’t that way. Just because everyone has raved about the Arcade Fire and Funeral doesn’t mean they’re not justified in doing so. We have to be so careful, all the time. All I know is that three people to whom I spontaneously played Funeral burst into tears when "In The Backseat" came on; that there is an opportunity here for genuine goodness to go hand in hand with greatness, or that this may be the only opportunity they get. Plus they are Canadian, which in my world as it stands currently counts for everything. Here is the final reprint (for now) from Koons. At the moment they have everything to lose except their lives, and they helped other lives to live again, including mine.

4. BRIAN ENO Another Day On Earth
I have no way of knowing how different this record, Eno’s first record of songs for 28 years, would have sounded, or how differently I would have responded to it, without 7/7; now it sounds like a long ceremony of consolatory hymns, of the kind of soothing which doesn’t nullify, sung largely in that indestructible English voice of his, and I have found listening to it a deeply moving experience, like sitting in York Minster on the first Sunday of December. And why doesn’t Eno nullify? Because in the album’s last track – "Bonebomb" – he escorts us back, shockingly, to the present, cutting up Aylie Cooke’s voice as she prepares to cut up the world, all soundtracked to a guitar which might as well have been Mike Oldfield in 1974. Therein resides genius.

3. THE BOOKS Lost And Safe
Was this the most radical record of 2005? Either this or any of those Ghost Box packages, which I suspect represent the next step in wherever we are going. But, again, so unassuming in its radicalism, its deployment of samples, its subtly distorting voices and acoustic guitars. I listen to "Twelve Fold Chain" as some people might once have listened to Elvis singing "Blue Moon" in the Sun Studios. "This is the birth/That everyone is always talking about/The one assumed but not remembered." As with the subsequent two records, this is genuinely something I have never heard before. This sounds like a future.

2. THE SHORTWAVE SET The Debt Collection
And this sounds like the past being lovingly recycled to justify the future. Top of my list until the very last lap, I was almost disappointed that the Shortwave Set turned out to be three people from Deptford rather than John Carter, Tony Burrowes and Barbara Ruskin, but this album is something very special – Millican and Nesbitt’s piano refrain from a generation ago ("There’s Nothing To Say" indeed) reappearing in ever ghostlier mutations throughout the album like a leitmotif. However, the crucial difference between this and all other charity shop pop is that the songs came first, and then the notion of samples to accompany or underline them. Thus the cautiously exuberant "Is It Any Wonder" is above anything else a great SONG, worthy of the Family Dogg circa 1969; and ditto for "Repeat To Fade," "Head To Fill" and so on. It all reaches resolution with the shattering "In Your Debt" – and look, it starts with birdsong. And they can’t bring themselves to end the song. That orchestral sample refuses to die. So they start playing the melody over it again and then layer the Tomita sample on top and it is so beautiful you want to live, not die, and then it ends in vinyl crackles supplanting the birdsong and then one guitar chord (again, like a scythe) and she tries to sing "Yr Room" straight faced but keeps corpsing and apologises that she can’t see it through, and of course it is a million times more moving than if she had sung it straight and is that scream a cry or a laugh and am I laughing what do you think oh yes yes yes

THE CHURCH OF ME ALBUM OF 2005

1. KATE BUSH Aerial
As if there could be another. She came back, so I came back, but you were there just ahead of her, so I came back for you, yes you see this is all intended for you, written only for you, and someday soon I will whisper these words to you to save you reading them but then one needs to keep a record.

(The Church Of You returns after the New Year)

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

SUDDENLY I’M FREEZING
"Chemistry" by Girls Aloud

"She was preserved in freshness. I couldn’t touch her. I couldn’t reach through the ice. She floated in it mildly, she was adrift, far off, in some private place. Surprised, and dreaming, with wide-open eyes. She couldn’t see me. Ice gleamed on her like moonlight.
‘The ice wanted to prevent me. It talked: no no no no."
(Michèle Roberts, Flesh & Blood: Virago Press, 1994; chapter 10)

They stare at us on the cover, icy, as if from under a placid, inescapable sheet; there is a little bewilderment, a hint of indifference, a smouldering hatred, a faint trace of ridicule. The unasked question is: "What are you doing here?" Within their staring lies the germination of the bemused but kindly look which Beatrice would first have given to Benedick. Within their glancing lies also, and simultaneously, the contempt of self-contemptuous singletons, lurking in West London wine bars to give their managers and creditors the slip (towards the record’s climax they will sing of "Chelsea chicks" drinking white wine spritzers). "Do you know me?" will be the central question, closely pursued by the befuddled puzzlement of "Do you love me?" And what sort of love is required or desired? Must we induce premature deaths by never falling below the speed required by the market, or decide to slow down and thus ensure the market’s final irrelevance? What do we really, really want?

The third Girls Aloud album was always expected to be the crowning glory of the unexpected late 2005 renaissance of New Pop Mark II; this generation’s Lexicon Of Love, the Statement which simultaneously sums everything up and then makes everything else redundant. The delicious irony of a group set up by a television programme whose subtextual remit was to delete the last half-century of pop, to take everything back to a cosy, compliant, agreeable 1954 of Dickie Valentine and Alma Cogan, and then turning the tables with the help of the operatives Xenomania whose supratextual remit was to give birth to everything that New Pop had promised a generation previously, such that they snatched sex pop, colour pop, punctumised pop, from the jaws of careful, remains potent. Yet Chemistry exceeds any superficial remit, for it is very consciously Xenomania’s most ambitious work to date – as happened with Stock/Aitken/Waterman and Mel and Kim, Higgins and co. seem to be inspired by GA to pull out all of the extra stops available to them, as well as sneakily tugging at a few unavailable stops. In fact it is the bastard niece of Lexicon Of Love and A Grand Don’t Come For Free; an extended meditation on the uselessness of inverted commas when it comes to "love" (and think about inverted commas around "come" as well) constructed as a concept album with a storyline, complete with alternative endings.

Then again, do we know Girls Aloud as anything other than the collective Girls Aloud, just as Martin Fry and Mike Skinner were the collective ABC and Streets? They appear in the CD booklet on first name terms only, none of them quite smiling at the camera (observe the giveaway Freudian slip in Cheryl Tweedy’s dedication to Xenomania – "an inspiration not only 2 me but I’m sure 2 any aspirin song writers"). Only one track, "It’s Magic," credits GA as contributory composers, and even then, as "Girls Aloud" only. Yet this is not the anticipated scenario of Men telling Women What To Think – Xenomania’s Miranda Cooper has taken particular care to claim sole responsibility for the album’s lyrics, and furthermore, the topics and approaches were only arrived at following detailed and intense discussion with the Girls.

When you hear the opening whispered fusillade of "It’s all about the hell of it/It’s all about the game/Don’t ask me to say my name/Don’t ask me to share my fame" you realise that you’re immediately being pitched into an even less hospitable climate than the previous two GA albums (which weren’t exactly enticing you to come on a-their house, either). But the shocking "Intro" is the album’s shocking denouement; as with the first 30 seconds of Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate or the jitterbugging opening titles of Lynch’s Mulholland Dr, if you miss it you miss the entire record’s point. "You took the bait, now you’re looking like a fool/Don’t ask us to break the rules" is a couplet one would expect from John Lydon – and a listen to "Rabbit Song," the obligatory new track on the latter’s Best Of British £1 Notes compilation, betrays a surprising or unsurprising musical/rhythmic overlap with "Intro." Perhaps the least user-friendly intro to a mainstream pop record likely to be heard for some while (because we expect Eminem to blow our brains out three seconds into any given track one), it quickly squats to a halt. An alarm clock rings (so much more potently, because so much more subtly, than at the end of track one of the current Madonna album), there are some faraway crowd noises and suddenly it’s a Dolly Mixtures 1982 A-side produced by Tony Mansfield.

"Models" is astonishing because, even though you were expecting Girls Aloud and Xenomania to start thinking about resurrecting the ethos of the Mo-Dettes or Girls At Our Best! in 2005, you’re amazed that they actually did something about it and went through with it (though maybe Xenomania have their eye on the Pipettes). Indeed, GA’s monumental monotone FUCK YOU vocals are so captivating that one almost regrets it when individual voices come through more recognisably in the verses (but don’t ask me to say their names). It does set the tone for the album’s story, though, with its uncommitted, too-rich/spoiled boyfriend ("Why don’t you call? You’ve got my number and it’s driving me crazy!") who is soon mocked in a brief mock-Sloaney mid-section ("Darling, we’re a fashion, don’t you know?"). "You get your kicks like flyster shit," complains one GA before observing that his own "kicks" leave her "torpid and cold." The nightmare reverse of this song’s scenario will be (re)visited in track ten.

Then there is "Biology." In an age of instant hits/shit, where The Hook and The Point are by economic necessity thrust upfront immediately afront one’s face to engage their instant attention (and thus is the magic of pop music degraded further to the aesthetic level of a mugger’s flick knife), how utterly refreshing to meet a pop single which takes its time to reveal its ingredients, including the chorus, which does not as such appear until well after two minutes into the song – and indeed the song’s structure mirrors exactly the theme of the girl getting "her head in the shade," for it is about hiding from threats, or meeting and trumping them with unexpectedly greater threats of your own.

The song begins almost as a mockery of Marquee blokey blues-rock – a twelve-year-old singing along to her dad’s Bad Company records? – as the singer turns the stock Plant/Rodgers/Marriott mannerisms and dismantles them by the act of merely reversing them. "Why don’t you CLOTHE me FEED me SAY you NEED ME without wicked GAMES? Come on and CALL me HELP me SAY you LOVE ME and not my dirty BRAIN." Not only does that act as a virtual manifesto for courtly love, but we also have to take the possible view that this is Girls Aloud taking the piss out of The Bloke’s pleading. Possibly because they have to – for when the song drifts into more familiar 1980 synthpop territory the voices become multiple and the emotions turn darker. The "closer" section, where the music, the beat, the man – the rape? – are making a seemingly unstoppable advent on the progenitor – is extremely troubling, and this in turn is followed up by the stern chorale of "You give it up…and then they take it away/A girl’s got to zip it up and get her head in the shade." No means no, Zero Tolerance – "We’re gonna call it a prophesy!" – but when the clouds part for the chorus finally to reveal itself, the ambivalence is made explicit. "You can’t mistake our biology!" the lead GA warns as the others chant, "The way that we walk. The way that we talk. It’s there in our thoughts…So easily caught" (which latter immediately raises the spectre of Michael Hordern in the film of Up Pompeii! – "My daughter is chaste." Frankie Howerd: "And so easily caught"). They do not sing it in the frame of an invitation to party. The opening "Whatcha Gonna Do About It" staccato jerk riffing reappears for one final time (think also "Fit But You Know It" as seen from the opposite angle) but the words have vanished.

Sex, if there is to be any, will be strictly on GA’s own terms. Thus "Wild Horses"*

(*one could argue that Chemistry is an extended attempt by Xenomania to de-masculinise pop – all these signifiers of titles, "Whole Lotta History," "No Regrets," "Models," "Wild Horses," "Long Hot Summer," "Swinging London Town," named after buildings long since demolished)

begins with a bizarre roundelay of an intro which sounds as though it’s escaped from the Peter Wyngarde album ("Poor boy Peter [Wyngarde? Andre? Doherty?] didn’t know how to claim his miracle/Lost his way/Cost him dearly like his dad") before making mincemeat of the Stones ("Woo woo!") as they send their inadequate Other packing, again turning his own clichés against him ("Take your lazy dog with you/Your train is running late and overdue") atop a bizarre electro-bluegrass backing over which GA now begin to deliver a rap which isn’t as sprightly as they make it sound. "I was trying to sedate him, trying not to blow/I was trying not to hate him – wouldn’t you know." It does indeed sound like Daphne and Celeste grown up ("The rings on his fingers were as false as the kisses he gave") but again the sung verses take the song into a darker dimension ("Took my time, thought I’d be safe," followed by a terrible, inscrutable, elongated wail of "oh!"). Fucking so bad it feels like rape.

And then there is "See The Day," the first of three occasions on Chemistry when the voice is left alone (relatively speaking) to own up and admit vulnerability. Indeed the lead vocal (Cheryl?) and Xenomania’s arrangement do a far better job of bringing out the song’s troubled compassion than its author, Dee C Lee, did on her original recording in 1985. Back then I was prevented from accessing the song’s real nature by the glutinous Real Soul/Weller/NME/Red Wedge/Proper Music Not Tarzan Boy layers of fat which occluded any kindness. With GA, however, the story is different. "When you look at me," the voice begins alone, "tell me what you see. Do you see no love at all?" It’s a quietly insistent request masquerading as an invitation to a wanted and/or errant lover to let go of his self-constructed restraint, not be afraid of uncertainty, and finally release himself from the past. Although slightly less remonstrative than Eric Matthews’ bitterly gorgeous 1995 song on the same topic, "Faith To Clay" – a song which really builds on the theme of "heartache leads astray"**

**(and isn’t that a record whose time has finally and quietly come, It’s Heavy In Here by Eric Matthews? Listening to it now I hear firm portents of Antony, Rufus Wainwright, Sufjan Stevens…)

- its tearful desperation balances its emotional generosity. "When you look away, is it mean to say that she haunts you night and day? And does it hurt your heart when I say let’s start to heal the part that’s been torn?" The Girl is prepared to be slow and patient ("Just watch and learn…/I’ll show you how long it can be"). Meanwhile, behind her, the arrangement seesaws between tubular bell and tympanic explosions and quiet piano, and nudges the cage of genius in the central instrumental section where Higgins brilliantly replaces the Ivor Raymonde wannabe of the original arrangement with eerie Morricone howls and gulfs of desert wind and stray bullets, before abruptly dropping back to the 6/8 piano, which we now see is a direct descendent of Japan’s "Nightporter."

The sex-mad (as in: sex inducing madness) duologue of "Watch Me Go" and "Waiting" marks the point where the album doubles back on itself – for, as with Time (The Revelator), the record’s two halves are symmetrical mirrors. "Watch Me Go" is the sparkiest that Chemistry gets, with a great old skool hip hop meme (Salt N’ Pepa?) giving way to a Fun Boy Three skank over which the Girls sing gleefully – or are they gleeful? – about a Catherine Millet lifestyle of random sexual encounters. "Got the gasoline, pour it on, I’m ready to blow!" they exclaim rather more convincingly than when Gwen Stefani used the same metaphor a year ago. And there’s a great moment at 3:01 when a Girl (Nicola?) purrs "for sure" over a spooky Dammers keyboard line. Spooky is the word, though, for the song’s central refrain of a night (or afternoon?) of sex, counted off in hours as John Lee Hooker (!) once did – "Quarter past two, I was dressed in red, tied up to your bed, begging on my knees/Quarter past three, I was in the shower, almost half an hour, you were at the door/Quarter past four, you came back again, said your name was Ben, then we went for more." Troubling, again, in an Isabella Rossellini/Kyle McLachlan/Blue Velvet kind of a way - I was almost willing the Girls to be saying "Bent you on my knee" rather than "begging on my knees," but with this song and its shadow "Waiting" we have to face the unlikeable but unavoidable possibility that S&M games are being enjoyed here in both S and M ways. Even here, though, Cooper’s lyric devolves into bizarre allegorical surrealism ("I’ll take a little bit of pain, OK, and the beat of the big trombone") which in turn gives way to a cackling schoolgirl chant of "I know what you’re thinking you’ve been thinking about my butt!" to fade. Who’s really cracking the whip here?

"Waiting," which musically joins some dots between "Everybody Needs Somebody To Love" (as the Action might have played it in ’65) and Fine Young Cannibals’ "Good Thing," seems to confirm that the Girl has reached the limit of her involuntary adventures away from the inadequate Other. The track itself is fabulously constructed, with the triple penetration of the opening "knock knock knock" echoed throughout (see particularly the ecstatic "Toni-i-ight" at 1:23 and the swooning "sta-a-ars" at 1:34). "Who wants to come in my candy shop?" the Girls enquire, producing the spectre of Barbara Windsor on Stax (not that absurd a chimera: see Diana Dors’ extremely strange 1964 single "So Little Time," most easily obtainable on Morrissey’s Under The Influence compilation). "Throw me to the wolves!" they scream joyfully. "I’ll never get to heaven with my glass half full." But the underlying unrest persists – sardonic asides of "hey there buttercup!" jostle for prominence with lines like "I’ve been hating all this talking baby, black and blue" and "It’s been hard not trying to fight you baby with the things I do." And yet it all seems to come right by the song’s end, as a resolution of sorts is reached – "Wap! Bap! The boy can move!" So sexual "perfection" is achieved; but will it prove enough?

"Whole Lotta History" ostensibly sounds like an offcut from Grease, but it is "See The Day"’s emotional twin, and the Grease analogy is hardly a put-down; think of Olivia’s quiet prayer (Abba writing for Connie Francis in 1958?) of "Hopelessly Devoted To You" amid all the hurly-burly boys’ stuff ("Greased Lightning" et al). Except that in the ‘70s no one could have conceived the solemn Massive Attack string intro, itself in danger of becoming the cliché of musical clichés – but it’s instructive to compare the strangely timeless staccato 6/8 over 4/4 (it’s the same beat as schaffel, actually) with what Cameron McVey achieves from the same starting point with the Sugababes’ "Two Hearts." Though the latter is by some distance the greater song, the importance of "Whole Lotta History" lies in its representation of the Girl’s turning point, her recognition that sex is thrilling for 15 minutes, but that something more substantial is needed in the long term. The musings are distended. "I give myself the blame." "Does she love you like I never could? Would she hurt you, ‘cos I never would?" (and it is urgently important to interpret that last line in both ways, if we’re talking about sex). "I’m falling all around (? With joy?) when you miss me," the Girl continues. "So tell me that you’re not alone." This is distinctly creepy stuff indeed, in the neighbourhood of Elvis Costello’s paean to frustrated S&M "I Want You." A louder and angrier Girl briefly breaks the ice – "I’m damned if I do and I’m damned if I don’t!" she roars. "But you cost me so much love" – before the stark confession (on a deserted dancefloor?) of "And it keeps me spinning and controls what happens ‘til Monday/And it might sound crazy but your voice still leaves (and that satiated purr returns again as "still leaves" is extended over four bars at 3:26-3:27) me all funky."

"Long Hot Summer," however, was a single always more likely to carry more weight in winter than in summer. It manages to parallel both "Wild Horses" and "Biology" in lyrical subject and musical construction respectively, and although the joyous major key – with that always irresistible two-chord glacier of ascending guitar to take us from the first to the second half of the chorus, like ice added to the Coke in an August Bank Holiday Brighton – might lead us to think this is the emotional inverse of Bananarama’s "Cruel Summer," its subject matter could almost make it the prequel to "Cruel Summer." "I know you like to wear my dressing gown when I’m not there," the song begins, conjuring up Lynsey de Paul’s "Getting A Drag" – "I guess you like it in my shoes/Just ‘cos you drive a Maserati and the ladies stare/Don’t mean you go as fast as I do." So it’s a complaint about the five-second squirt-it-out/light-a-cigarette approach. "Baby," they exclaim, outraged, "watch the needle when you’re heading south!" The instruction to "Slow it down!" is answered by an ironic swanee whistle before descending into the chorus. "It’s only Sunday morning and I need that Friday feeling again," the Girls muse. "Suddenly I’m freezing and I don’t know why," which is a brave assertion to make on a 2005 top ten single. Sex as work. "When your fingers start to run, it’s no fun," they break free of the rhythm to decry, and then the return to the theme of fighting – "Baby if you fight me/How you gonna like me?/Running down that Old Kent Road (the spectre of the music hall is never too far away from Chemistry’s multilayered surface)…/Why do you fight me?" – after two songs which have seen the progenitors fighting him off.

And then one of the most sinister endings to any recent pop songs as the Girls now turn to their hapless/hopeless Other, and finally to the consumer/camera/us: "A little late to take it slow," they snigger. "Like a cannonball/Got what I wanted/Now I’ve seen it all." But they also realise that they too are victims: "So finally I’ll put the shade around the world" (echoing "Biology"’s "get her head in the shade"). "It’s what I wanted…/But I just can’t lie/Now I’m queasy." Once more, that "I just can’t lie" has to be interpreted in both possible ways.

"Swinging London Town" finds GA on the other side of the "Models" mirror. "I pussyfoot from drink to drink" they snarl. "The Queen Of London Town" they proclaim uneasily as the inevitable "I Feel Love" throb makes its entry. "I’m just a big-time Gucci girl/A first in Retail Therapy/Now the downward slide to rehab" isn’t quite a swipe at Kate Moss (remember "poor boy Peter") but possibly a swipe at themselves, though thankfully not on the crass level of McLaren telling Annabella to sing about being a worthless little puppet in a band called Bow Wow Wow. "I’m starting to drown," they coo as the synths, Killing Joke guitars and beats start to pile up like atonal phenobarbitone, before they pronounce the question "Do you know me? Do you REALLY know me?"

Just as everything’s about to spill over into chaos, however, the clouds break and we drift into a reverie of avant-fluff (nice to know someone else remembers the Gentle People’s Soundtracks For Living, not to mention "Moments In Love" because everyone else will) as a desensitised Girl asks "do you love me?" as though already on transit to the afterlife, spurting out disjointed thoughts on Camparis in Soho, "cocktails with price tags to make you choke on your Sushi," and "Chelsea chicks" driving down the King’s Road in "Daddy’s Bentley" before the original track returns. The Girls continue to drown but there is a residue somewhere in the middle of their voices which betray the likelihood that they are, fundamentally, loving it, swept away in the W1/SW3 social tsunami. Nevertheless, as an exercise in electro-urban angst "Swinging London Town" is easily on a par with the work of neglected late-‘90s operatives like Skinny and Bedlam-A-Go-Go; the emptiness as palpable as breathable damp.

"It’s Magic" – which I note closes the non-UK versions of the albums – is perhaps the simplest and most heartfelt of Chemistry songs. It is also the cleverest, as it provides a potted history of ‘80s electropop, with its intro of snarling Leer/Rental Roland bassline minimalism, then gradually building up to Depeche Mode chordality, then gliding into the sublime slow cumulonimbi of the Pet Shop Boys (the Claude Thornhill and Gil Evans of electropop – listen to the latter’s "The Happy Stranger" from 1947 followed by the PSB’s "Do I Have To?" and see for yourself***) and finally settling in late ‘80s Balearic heaven****.

***(The great altoist Lee Konitz, a lifelong collaborator with Gil Evans but also a man who calls a spade a spade, once gave a very simple explanation to how Gil arrived at the slow, patient, impressionist claudications of French horns and tubas which characterised his great early work: "It was music to smoke pot by. Gil was a copious pot smoker. The music moves at the same speed as the mind of the pot smoker.")

****(One of the many advantages of the new Stock/Aitken/Waterman Gold 3CD compilation is that it has found room for the full-length 12-inch glory of Mandy Smith’s "I Just Can’t Wait," the record which invented Balearic beat and maybe SAW’s greatest achievement, fulfilling the dream, as it did, for the "artist" to disappear. And the teenage Smith does, her voice drifting in and out between banks of George Benson guitar lines and sweetly static synthesiser motifs. It remains the nearest that SAW ever came to making "art pop" and if it came out on Warp tomorrow everyone would hail it as the masterpiece it actually has been for the last eighteen years.)

And "It’s Magic" is where the Girls Aloud reverie/adventure ends and they elect to return to reality. "Other side of my world" one sings (immediately echoing the vast canyons of Luther Vandross and Marcus Miller’s immortal "The Other Side Of The World") "and I know that I’m in love with you. And there’s this tugging inside (the Girl nearly sobs on the word "tugging"). We both know I took you for a ride…/and honey, what have I done? Oh believe me I have realised…with you I know that I can be myself. I can call you crying at four in the morning on your naked bed." Again, the tenderness inherent in "See The Day" comes to the fore. "Let your body be free/That innocence/Let me set you free/It’s my chance." And the previous emotions are reversed. "You are in my thoughts (recall "It’s there in our thoughts") all the time/I need some help in shifting this heartache ("Heartache leads astray")."

It’s an extraordinary courageous admission to make on a 2005 pop record, that somehow "pop" and "sex" in themselves are not enough, that immediacy does not lead to happiness. As the couple stroll off benignly into the New Order sunset of "It’s Magic" that couple is unmistakably Beatrice and Benedick, united, with nothing to prove, in bed or otherwise. Rationalism has prevailed, and emotion more hard won, and therefore more valuable and concrete when it emerges, as a result (as Plato pointed out, rationalism and emotion are so necessarily intertwined that the former can only realistically arise after extensive first-hand experience of the latter). A happy ending, of sorts, and it would indeed be very tempting to leave the Girls there, discovering the simpler and better joys of some new kind of bliss.

But, as Oscar Wilde remarked, a happy ending is only possible if you don’t tell the rest of the story.

"The mask of ice that moulded her face blurred at the edges. It melted, and slid off. Her buckler and breastplate of ice turned to slush, to water. Her gauntlets of ice fell from her hands."
(Michèle Roberts, op. cit.)

As I said at the beginning of this piece, the album has two alternate endings. Or perhaps they are two different ways of expressing the same – far from happy – ending. First, "No Regrets," a morose bossa nova over which electronica burbles indistinctly, like the waters of a melted ice cube. Only one Girl appears on this song. Again, disparate memories cloud her mind – "Rainy Sundays, kids’ TV/Fish and chips in NYC" – but she knows that she has chosen to lose, to sever any connection with a workable and habitable world. "So sure the cocktail hour would last for all eternity." Finally, as she prepares to die, she beseeches us: "Just forget those heartfelt pleas/No regrets, no baby…not for me." Or, as another troubled woman once put it, remember me, but forget my fate. The scorpion and the frog…she can’t help it, it’s our nature.

And the final song, "Racy Lacey" describes in unremitting brutality the grisly fate for which she was always intended. Built on the remnants of "Sound Of The Underground" – a memory calling from a distant and now unreachable past – the Girls now assume the role of the audience, surveying what the Girl has now been reduced to. "I know this girl/She’s not too bright/But she’s educated in bed all right…/A PhD with her legs apart." At first we reel in happy disbelief that a lyric which a generation ago would have been sung, unironically, by Whitesnake or Saxon, has now been reclaimed by women…and then we realise that this is nothing to celebrate, the "she’s got undulating, punctulating, grinding hips" motif notwithstanding. "She clicks her fingers, guy comes to heel (or to heal?)/Chewed up, spat out, no big deal." The chorus itself is a music hall relic (musically) over which the Girls sing, "Boudoir beauty, it’s all that she can do…/A bedhead through and through…/She’s got this crazy mind." A sound effects interlude of unsexily boinging bedsprings and banging headboards follows (sounding nothing like seagulls or cricket bats), after which the Girls recite the story of "Watch Me Go" from the third-party perspective: "And so this girl, I’ve heard it said, can spend up to 24 hours in bed. She gets her suitors to wait in line and she’s worn them out by half past nine." This is delivered in terms of rueful ridicule…and it is a suitably grotesque portrait of a shadow of a victim of the market who will never voluntarily break her ropes even if someone comes to untie them. Look, say the Cold Rationalists, this is what free enterprise leaves us as…sex as soap powder, love as a too-expensive/too-much-hard-work luxury, demographic husks of empty. The singer of "No Regrets" says farewell to a world she’s been told she can’t afford, and therefore proceeds to tie herself to her bed for eternity, already dead. Fittingly the song, and therefore the album, cuts off abruptly after the final "she’s got this crazy mind," as if the C90 tape had run out (the playing time of Chemistry is 45:53) or a painful reduction of a life had been humanely severed.

"Now I am drunk on an infallible poison
That my sister Medea brought to Athens.
I feel my pulses pushing it icily
Into my feet, hands and the roots of my hair.
I see the sun’s ball through a mist,
And you, whom my very presence sickens,
I see you in a mist, darkening.
My eyes go dark. Now the sun’s light at last
Can resume its purity unspoiled."
(The closing section of Phèdre’s deathbed speech from Phèdre by Jean Racine, translated by Ted Hughes and staged shortly before his own death in 1998)

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

THE LIVING MUSIC: ROBERT WYATT, PATTI SMITH AND THE WINTER REMEMBRANCE

Live concerts are one thing, and a very important thing at that. The standard jazz maxim used to be that seeing a local player at your local pub would tell you more about the mores and movements of the music than any visiting giant from overseas. But even with musical giants, at least those who do not choose to base their art in what they can produce in the phantasmaphallic environment of a studio, or a bedroom, we can learn different and deeper things about them when we view them in the flesh, struggling with and/or triumphing over the necessary spontaneous graffiti to be scribbled on the minds of the audience with whom they are interacting. Or simply, or complexly, giving us more than they are apt to do within the confines of a record.

Given the vital flesh-and-blood nowness of what can be gained by both artist and audience from a live performance, it is often argued that live albums tend at best to be contract fillers, a pale souvenir of an unrepeatable electricity, a protracted exercise in redundancy. As someone who has appeared (inaudibly and invisibly) on a number of live albums as a member of the audience – the scope ranges from Gil Evans Live At The Royal Festival Hall (1978) to Atari Teenage Riot Live At Brixton Academy (1999 – talk about closing down the millennium with a vengeance!), I’m naturally not so sure. Of course, with jazz, a music where immediacy of response and creation is crucial, in contrast with the inbuilt limitations of having to cram a simulacrum of spontaneity into the confines of a 78 record, its evolution has largely had to be documented via live performances – Jazz At Massey Hall, Ellington At Newport, Mingus At Antibes, Coltrane At The Village Vanguard (’61 and ’66). Soul, too, has revealed its truer colours (and exposed its pertinent gospel roots) onstage – think of Sam Cooke at the Harlem Square Club, turning the glossy ‘50s balladry of "You Send Me" into a bilious, primeval howl of sex in front of a palpable audience, whooping him on into multiple cracked vocal screams a full two years before Pharaoh Sanders became known to the world. But post-Beatles rock can stretch out and breathe in unexpected ways, too. On Live At Leeds, John Martyn, in tandem with Danny Thompson and John Stevens, stretches the after-hours aquacity of Solid Air into particles which seem to span all known and yet to be known horizons of harmolodics and rhythmic disappearance/sublimation. And inevitably there is Judas Dylan at the "Albert Hall," his "Rolling Stone" cracking a salient whip of which the Columbia recording studios of 1965 could only dream.

More recently, though, there has been the less welcome tendency of old music to allow itself to be imprisoned, petrified against the dagger of the dead archive, rekindled not to encourage or challenge those who "loved" it but to reassure, to flatter its audiences by doing it exactly the way "we" remember it, entire albums in sequence, track after track in its Right place, don’t fuck with the formula Brian. In the case of Gang of Four this tendency has been truly pitiful to witness; their re-recording of their "greatest hits" – music with which they once threatened to change the world, as if – now mocking their original incarnations, four wealthy middle-aged businessmen quietly sniggering at their folly-filled youth, such that now capitalism is celebrated rather than cast off, like Tory constituency stalwarts ashamed of their Young Socialist days, such that Entertainment! now only means "Entertainment!" or rather "If you’re 20 and you’re not a socialist you’ve got no heart; if you’re 30 and you’re not a capitalist you’ve got no brain" etc. At least Brian’s SMiLE could be excused on the grounds of no one having heard the album as it had originally been intended, as if anyone could remember exactly what it was supposed to intend in the first place.

There have been two releases this year which point to either end of the above spectrum, but which both subvert the spectrum; 30-year-old music as you have never heard it before, or which pretends you’ve heard it before except that it then detours you down unfamiliar and darker roads.

Firstly there is Theatre Royal Drury Lane: Robert Wyatt & Friends In Concert, Sunday 8th September 1974, a record whose proper release some of us have been awaiting for fully three decades, since, following his paralysis, this was the only live performance which Wyatt gave in his own right before retiring from the stage altogether (and he has not been persuaded back), concomitant with his then new album, Rock Bottom. What is especially thrilling about this performance is not just that all six tracks from Rock Bottom are performed in their entirety, but that the collective personnel for the gig comprises – well, the kind of line-up which I’ve always thought of as the perfect line-up in an ideal world, a world wherein all possible worlds meet, and get on, and a dream personnel which is probably unrepeatable in the more straitened musical world of 2005; a group where radical improvisers and Marxist theorists meet up with multimillion-selling rock stars (rock stars, moreover, responsible for two of the biggest selling albums of that year, worldwide).

But Wyatt’s dream team was no nerdy, schoolboy-daydreaming, Bill Laswell-style sling-‘em-together-and-see-what-sticks academic exercise in fusion; no, these musicians share a deep communal history. Wyatt’s friendship with Nick Mason and Julie Tippetts went back to the Oz/IT days of the mid-‘60s; both Wyatt and Mike Oldfield were intermittent members of Kevin Ayers’ Whole World; and indeed, with the presence of Oldfield, Gong’s Laurie Allan, Hatfield and the North’s Dave Stewart, Henry Cow’s Fred Frith and, for that matter, Ivor Cutler, there was something of a Virgin Records supergroup nature about the whole exercise – but these were the early days of Virgin, a company then still small enough to care about not caring about being different, or out of step, and ready virtually to share their product with their audience; how many ‘80s New Pop celebrities got their kickstart from those 49p copies of The Faust Tapes, and let us not forget that Virgin’s UK release of Escalator Over The Hill was subsidised by the success of Tubular Bells.

And let us also not forget that music as radical as Wyatt’s was in 1974 could be presented to a highly appreciative audience without frills or Trojan horse entryism tropes; thus John Peel saunters on characteristically right at the beginning of the CD to introduce the band (and, as Wyatt himself notes, provides "one of the best solos on the album") and makes you realise, sadly, that really no one could fill his shoes, these having been formed by an unrepeatable accident of history, circumstance and uncanny freedom. Immediately Wyatt launches into the most ostensibly radical performance of the evening, a semi-freeform canter over Hugh Hopper’s "Dedicated To You, But You Weren’t Listening" which lyrically anticipates punk ("Give me the truth, give me the truth" insists Wyatt, sounding nothing like a punk) before swimming in the rueful reverie of Hopper’s "Memories" backed by Fred Frith’s dolorous viola. Then we come to the Rock Bottom material. Long-term Churchgoers will need no reminding of the degree of estimation with which I hold the original album; as with all of my very favourite records – Escalator, Metal Box, you know the rest – it succeeds in creating an absolutely self-sufficient world of its own, an alternate universe in which the listener can bask, apart from and above all of the routine pabulum which otherwise crosses our paths.

At Drury Lane, though, Wyatt takes the Rock Bottom music into a different and less comforting dimension. The obvious comparison here would be with Coltrane’s fetid and ferocious demolition of that family favourite A Love Supreme at the Antibes Jazz Festival of 1965; similarly, there is a distinctly feral (and, let’s face it, far more overtly sexual) aura to what Wyatt does to these songs. They are not quite performed in sequence; here "Alife" with its commendably virulent tenor freakout from Gary Windo (and Oldfield nervously comping behind him on guitar) precedes the quietude of "Alifib" (where Oldfield more or less reproduces the solo which on the original may have been attributable to an uncredited Oldfield, or Wyatt’s strange Italian organ, or a speeded-up Hopper) and "Little Red Robin Hood Hit The Road" is not performed until nearly the end of the concert.

And the modes of the music, as I said, are different. "Sea Song" initially proceeds much as it did on record, but the whole-tone keyboard interlude is here extended and reshaped to feature Dave Stewart. Stewart (and yet again I must reluctantly remind readers that the Dave Stewart of Hatfield and the North and future chart-topping Bizarro ‘80s cover version hitmaker with Colin Blunstone and Barbara Gaskin notoriety is not the subsequent Tourist and Eurythmic) is an important contributor here, for on Rock Bottom Wyatt played all of the keyboard parts. However, Stewart’s improvisatory skills make the music more fluid, give the illusion of greater movement. He begins his solo feature on electric piano, its twinkles reminding us of the harmonic debt owed to Joe Zawinul (specifically In A Silent Way), before switching to organ for a more violent sequence of Sun Ra-esque distorted discords (Hopper’s fuzz bass stinging like a Marxist wasp behind him). Then Wyatt returns for the final verse, and again the final mouth music sequence is extended. Indeed, this record may stand (perhaps in tandem with The End Of An Ear) as the best example of Wyatt’s "longer line" style of abstract scat improv vocalese. On "Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road" the interaction between Wyatt’s voice and the great Mongezi Feza’s pocket trumpet is divine. Another live recording of this song from the same period does exist – you can find it on Henry Cow’s Concerts – but whereas on the latter performance, Chris Cutler’s drumming is insistent and squarely accented on the beat, here Laurie Allan lends a kind of shuffle, or swing, to the rhythm which highlights the Feza/Wyatt symbiosis more clearly. This is not necessarily an "easier" performance, though – Wyatt’s delivery of the lyrics is rancid, scornful and underlined by a violent vibrato which actually makes him sound like John Lydon (or vice versa; after all it is neither impossible nor improbable that the eighteen-year-old Lydon would have been among that Drury Lane audience). Nevertheless, it is, as always, both heartening and depressing to hear Mongezi Feza, a disciple of Don Cherry to be sure but ultimately very much his own man and a trumpeter the likes of whom have not been seen since. And to think that at the time of recording he had only some 15 months to live; it’s little wonder that Wyatt cited Feza’s death as the main reason behind his (for the most part) absence from the music scene for five years before quietly, discreetly resurfacing on Rough Trade in 1980, and even less wonder that in recent years he himself has taken up the trumpet, as if to play the notes that his ghost cannot.

Now Julie Tippetts is alone at her keyboard, providing a kind of interlude with her song "Mind Of A Child," or more accurately the emotional string which holds everything else together, for this song – so simple in its lyrical message, so devious in its harmonic paths – was also the centrepiece of Tippetts’ own contemporaneous album, Sunset Glow; a record expressly designed as an "answer record" or "companion record" to Rock Bottom (Wyatt was the dedicatee), and a record which dips its toe in the same peaceful flow of sea to soul – and if this in turn sounds familiar, then remember that this is the same tradition from which the young Kate Bush emerged; the next time you listen to "Nocturn," it is wise to bear in mind its spiritual parents, Rock Bottom and Sunset Glow, who once both stood in the Atlantic in the hope that something new might be born.

We then proceed to a section drawn from the Matching Mole repertoire, which is the most straightforwardly entertaining section of the record; on "Instant Pussy" Tippetts and Wyatt’s abstract voices wind around each other joyfully like wet, abstracted belly buttons. "Signed Curtain," in contrast, could well be a bridge between something and the other; it begins as one of Wyatt’s characteristic deconstructions of The Popular Song ("This is the first verse" etc.), but when Oldfield takes an extended guitar solo it swiftly mutates into a peaceful, non-ironic Tubular Bells variant. And "Calyx" is a torched song from which Antony could pick up a few tips.

But then the mood suddenly switches back to utter blackness, with the climactic "Little Red Robin Hood Hit The Road" with Wyatt’s requiem for a drowning, crumbling England soundtracked by Oldfield’s desperate guitar and the furious double-drum attack of Mason and Allan before giving way to Ivor Cutler, who delivers his recitation as though from the bowels of hell, Frith’s viola and Stewart’s musique concrete synths meanwhile scraping and howling some unimaginable pain before it is all cut off. Not that Wyatt would let that stand; everyone mucks in for the closing rendition of his still unexpected hit single "I’m A Believer" which steadily modulates from heady avant-pop to freeform scrum to bizarre, but entirely in keeping, run-through of "The Laughing Policeman." A performance, then, which not only invites us to see familiar material in a startling new light, but which also emphasises the generosity, implacable good humour and genuine adventure at the heart of Robert Wyatt; a man who, like Keith Tippett and Brian Eno at the time and too few others since, saw nothing amiss with, and everything to gain by, getting people from sometimes conflicting musical worlds to work and thrive together.

"The captain is permanently impassioned and lacking in self-control, as is expressed in his manner of communication, which tends to consist of curses and turns his exhibited authority into a rant. He can’t write, and when speaking he needs help with his grammar. He claims the right to be more natural, following his instincts, and therefore to have lived a more fulfilled life. She, on the other hand, uses language in a more detached manner, precisely because she doesn’t have a language of her own. She appropriates male language, and uses its effects to her advantage."
(Freida Grafe, from her essay on Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1947 film The Ghost And Mrs Muir, BFI Film Classics: London, 1995; italics are those of the present author)

All those dead boys. All those sacrifices. All those good boys she cannot bring back, no matter how hard she tries. What can she do, then, other than be better than them, achieve what they’re no longer around to achieve? Would she have dared if they had still been alive? I’d like to think so, because here is the great icebreaker of women in rock and roll, the record which had both the cheek and the art to defrost and resuscitate everything down to its most basic filial elements and make it – better. Just as Kate exhorts Elvis to still be living on "King Of The Mountain," so does Patti implore Jim Morrison to escape his petrified bloated bathtub on "Break It Up," a séance which turns into an ascension, Tom Verlaine’s guitar and Smith’s imprecatory "Up UP UP!!" staccato orders rising as surely and gloriously as Sanders and Coltrane a decade earlier.
It’s now the 30th anniversary of quite a lot of attempts to reconstruct rock music, if not de-invent it – not just Horses, but also its spiritual twin Born To Run (for Birdland read Jungleland; "Free Money" is where the two meet, Wendy’s answer song). Neither record is quite what it pretends to be, although they are equally sincere in what they mean to be; Patti sees Blake and Rimbaud (and maybe also Plath and both Parkers, Charlie and Dorothy) as well as Jim and Jimi and sees the opportunity both to worship them and to supersede them; Springsteen thinks of the Dion, the Bruce Channel, the Little Anthony of his semi-innocent youth and constructs a schismatic theme park (Born To Run is an alternative soundtrack for Coppola’s One From The Heart, an encyclopaedically world-weary musical which never once peeks outside the doors of its studio) including, some say, the early deployment of sampling. It is also the 30th anniversary of "Bohemian Rhapsody," but apart from the fact that this eleven-year-old listener had strongly sexual crushes on both Patti Smith and Freddie Mercury (a woman who dressed like a man and a man who looked like a woman – go figure) there is little to bond the two other than (a) Mercury was in part inspired by Marc Bolan, who at one point in the early ‘70s had a thing going with Patti – transatlantic romances, eh? What’s the possibility of that happening now?; and (b) "Bohemian Rhapsody" is the Huysmans to Patti’s Rimbaud; the exquisitely tired, indwelling, inchoate decadent who will try a taste of anything (opera, metal, Novello) but avoid commitment at all cost, including that of his own future ("Nothing really matters, anyone can see").

But Horses continues to be singular, and not simply within the Patti Smith canon; it is simultaneously a depository and a distillery for everything she had learned in the previous quarter-century, everything she wanted pop or free jazz to be but to her ears never quite was. Thus her retooling of "Gloria" is precisely the threat of sex from which the protégé of Van Morrison’s "Madame George" runs away as fast as possible ("This is the train, this is the train…"). Madonna has spent her entire career trying to live up to the declaration of principles in the first verse. Patti dreams of the "sweet young thing" who probably wouldn’t even be allowed into the party where "everything’s allowed" and consequently "I just get bored"; she’s out there, "humping (on) the parking meter," and now Patti dreams of her invading her space, and she invading Gloria ("And her name is…" could so easily be misconstrued as "And the nightmares…") and taking "the big plunge" such that the chimes at midnight finally defeat the need for words ("Ding-dong ding-dong ding-dong ding-dong") and time is frozen; and then you look at that cover with her in the suit and detached tie, and then you look in the 30th anniversary CD reissue booklet in the middle and see Patti, still looking like the future, standing in the middle of what might as well be the Allman Brothers Band roadies, as deliciously out of place as Lindsey Buckingham on the sleeve of Tusk, and at eleven and for a long while thereafter that’s what I wanted Patti to do to me; dreaming of her strolling into my bedroom and making me hers. All of a sudden Suzi Quatro and Lynsey de Paul seemed – almost – Edwardian. The point of orgasm comes as she swallows the final "sins" and purrs with delight, after a pause, "but not mine."

But it is finally a dream, and the first in a long line of ghosts; yet consider the "sweet suicide" of her sister on "Redondo Beach" – she mourns, but sexily (those pellets of "gone gone"); and then the passion is detached from the rock(ist) meme and made to fly, and drag rock with it, on "Kimberly"; the astonishing moment at which Patti takes flight, breaks away from the fluid 6/8 song and howls her mother to Massive Attack’s "Protection" ("The palm trees fall into the sea/It doesn’t matter much to me as long as you’re safe Kimberly") defying the winds and waters of apocalypse, startles as searingly as Coltrane erupting out of the politesse of "Out Of This World" or "Chim Chim Cheree" (talk about "a network of spittle"!) and this is the point where you realise that this is what you want, the rhythmic laterality of Ornette united with the frenzied verbal drift of Kerouac – like Kerouac, Smith stands apart as both tie themselves to traditions as soon as they loosen the bonds. They have much more in common with Stanley Spencer and Virginia Woolf than with Allen Ginsberg or Cindy Sherman.

On the 30th anniversary reissue, the original Horses (plus the equally original "My Generation" with John Cale’s humping wobbleboard bass giving the impression that they’re keeping the Titanic afloat) is paired with the 2005 performance given at the Royal Festival Hall, in track order ("Side 2" Smith sardonically, but amicably, announces after "Free Money"). Lenny Kaye, Tom Verlaine and Jay Dee Daugherty remain from the original personnel (Verlaine only appears, unforgettably, on "Break It Up" on the original album, but here he plays all the way through, and sometimes beyond); Tony Shanahan stands in for the deceased Richard Sohl on keyboards; Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers deps for the not-interested Ivan Kral on celebrity bass. Unlike other Norman Rockwell-style cosy reruns, manfully divorced from the context which made the music so electrifying to begin with, Smith is aware that Horses isn’t going to mean what it meant 30 years ago – too much has happened in the interim, too many more boys have been lost, and that Qur’an quote of "All wisdom can be found between the eyes of a horse" quoted on the sleeve now takes on an even more decisive significance, as indeed does Smith's final, outraged whine on the new "Gloria": "Jesus died for someone's sins - WHY NOT MINE?"

And yet, performing Horses seems to bring her back to life. Her voice has travelled a little further up the nasal passages, as though her inflamed inferior turbinates can barely contain her undimmed passion, and the croak which was always and vulnerably there has intensified; but this works for Patti since as a singer she now sounds more like Carla Bley than she did in ’75 (and therein lay another reason for my original passion; Horses was like the wildness and mischievously profane profundity of Escalator Over The Hill made even more pop) and also, more importantly, helps bring Patti out from the veil behind which she has perhaps grieved longer than is healthy – all those dignified and unimpeachable sarcophagi of albums which she released throughout the ‘90s and early ‘00s conveyed a kind of wilful noble untouchability more to do with Queen Victoria than Audrey Hepburn. Or indeed all the compromised records she made after Horses, all with their individual, isolated undying moments, but as with Van Morrison after Astral Weeks, how many of them would you listen to from start to finish as entities (how much better would Radio Ethiopia had been if Ornette had made the sessions, as was originally planned?)?

Thus in "Birdland," "the boy" is now not quite Peter Reich or Huey Smith, but Patti herself, arising from the ashes of her own multiple bereavements (for the last decade Patti’s head has essentially been placed "in the crux of (her) arm"), the shamanic healing, Poe’s raven (so much more concisely and brilliantly articulated than Lou Reed’s idea of Poe’s raven; if there’s a crucial ingredient which Reed’s The Raven lacks, it’s helium), all bringing herself back to life ("I WON’T GIVE UP, WON’T GIVE UP, DON’T LET ME GIVE UP" – so "Birdland" is the "little farm in New England" where The Church Of Me had been hibernating, Lenny Kaye’s scratching – almost Bailey-like! – guitar commentary is my community, commenting and encouraging from the sidelines, and my particular "helium raven" knows exactly who she is).

And then there is "Land"; nine-and-a-half minutes on the original album, seventeen-and-a-half minutes long at the Royal Festival Hall. Listen to the opening scrapes of escaping stray water from the faucet reacting to Smith’s recitative, how it slowly and patiently forms into something bigger, and it’s easy to think that you’re listening to the first music ever made, to music actually being invented, and the bridge of "horses horses horses horses," spanning 200 years from Blake, cutting right through the centre of Jim Morrison, leads us to the world (not to mention setting the stage for the Guinness advert of the ‘90s with the sea of horses and Leftfield’s "Phat Planet") and into the Northern Soul clubs of "Land Of A Thousand Dances" and now we’re discovering the other sex for the first time ("Dip into the sea, the sea of possibilities/It started hardening, It started hardening in my hand/And I felt the arrows of desire" – then go and listen again to the title track of Kate Bush’s The Sensual World, then, and only then, listen to Siobhan McKenna’s recitative of Molly Bloom) and finally they end up becoming panoramic, standing in the Atlantic, or is it the Red Sea, are they waiting for Moses to part them, is "Johnny" Coltrane or Rotten, and then the boy is left on his own, by the sea, his only realistic option that of drowning himself for good (see the death and transfiguration of Duncan Thaw in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, another blog before its time) because now, at the Royal Festival Hall in 2005, Smith starts ranting about the world of "CELLPHONES! and FAX MACHINES!" and war and blood and implies that it might be better for him to drown but she can’t allow the boy to lose himself and so she leaves him an escape hatch, a ticket out of there, a ticket on the beach, a ticket to the party, and he commutes through the other end of the "black tube" and suddenly he’s at this party and he sees this sweet young thing humping (on) the parking meter but IN THE SHEETS THERE WAS A MAN and EVERYTHING AROUND HIM is UNRAVELING LIKE SOME LONG FENDER WHINE DANCING AROUND TO THE SIMPLE ROCK AND ROLL SONG and it is not "Summer (The First Time)" or maybe it is and you realise that Patti is this boy and you are she and she is Gloria and Praise Be To All Good And Useful Things if you know your Blake and Gray (the resurrection of Aitken Drummond! New Jersey on the horizon of Peckham Rye!) and after 30 years of hurt they can now complete the circle and make "Gloria" GLORIOUS again and sometimes you have to wait years for the ending to make itself apparent

But there is an epilogue – "Elegie," originally written by Patti and her then partner, Blue Öyster Cult guitarist Allen Lanier, in explicit tribute ("Trumpets, violins, I hear them in the distance") to Hendrix. For a moment you wonder whether she’ll want to perform it at the Royal Festival Hall, because the list of lost boys is now much longer. She sings the song, plaintively, but it has now become a requiem roll call. She announces them solemnly: "Jim Morrison. Jimi Hendrix. Robert Mapplethorpe. Todd Smith. Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith. Richard Sohl." The crowd cheer, a little confused, as though expecting a ghost band to materialise onstage. There is, somewhere within her semi-veiled dignity, a rage which will not go away; maybe the same rage which seemed to dwell within Elvis in the ’68 TV special when he leaves Scotty, DJ and the boys behind for the last time, to sing "Memories" against a pre-recorded orchestral backing track, as if to say THAT IS WHAT I WANT TO DO YOU CANNOT DRAG ME BACK TO THIS AND KILL ME but he was too polite and dumb to say it out loud, with the inevitable consequences.

And it explodes, for she then does "My Generation," and apart from Flea’s rather too linear bass playing (yes he’s an RHCP and a crowd-puller but Cale surely should have been brought in for this?) it detonates with even more ferocity than it did in the 1975 of "Summertime City" and "Rhinestone Cowboy" – but this is, again, now a requiem rather than a cocky, youthful threat. "We" might have "invented it" and indeed "took it over" – but to what ends? At 4:09 Smith starts to rage. "My generation! We had dreams! We had DREAMS, man! And we created Fucking George Bush!" as Kaye, Verlaine, Shanahan and Daugherty’s instruments scream behind her. She gives her dying wish. "New generation! Rise UP! Take the STREETS! Make CHANGE! The world is YOURS! Change it! CHANGE IT!" DON’T END UP LIKE US! DON’T TURN INTO YOUR FUCKING PARENTS! – even though she knows, in her saddest of hearts, that they have already realised their designated role in life, namely to make exactly the same mistakes.

…AND WINTER REMEMBRANCE

The Kerouac and Ghost And Mrs Muir references were not accidental, for I am of course aware – how could I not be? – that tomorrow she would have been 41. And yet, the grief which I continue to feel can no longer be said to be unalloyed. There are changes happening in my world; after four years crawling down my own black tube it would seem that I have now emerged at the sea, and may indeed be looking forward to crossing it. Events over the last couple of months continue to leave me in what can adequately be described as a state of dazed amazement, in some disbelief that what is happening actually is happening. Of course I have imagined myself being at this point several times in the recent past, and it’s always proved to be a mirage. But this feels different.

So it is not a case of saying goodbye to a previous life, but more an impetus to finally let the past go. "The Sweetest Girl." Scritti Politti. You know how the words run.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

WHY RACHEL DIDN'T GET IT

In the hospital where I work the League of Friends have a monthly sale of discounted goods. The most recent was a week ago last Friday. Amongst the bric-a-brac on offer were a pile of new CDs "Donated For Charity" by various record companies – mainly Universal – retailing at competitive prices, none of them having managed to sell many or any copies at more competitive prices. At the bottom of this particular pile – and even in this company looking somewhat ashamed; reduced circumstances, but at the bottom, as an afterthought, as ballast? – was Come And Get It, the recently-released second album by Rachel Stevens, yours if you’d wanted it for £1.99, complete with a bonus DVD of seven videos, all featuring the lady voted last week by the readers of Smash Hits as Most Fanciable Female. Were this not sufficient humiliation, a few weeks previously – in fact, on its first Saturday of release – I had witnessed, in the HMV shop at Oxford Circus, a crowd of typically Saturday Top Shoppers openly congregating around and laughing at the album, which was not conspicuously displayed in that week’s selection of new releases; a spectacle last seen by me in 1989, when punters were pointing and sniggering at Terence Trent D’Arby’s underperforming second album, Neither Fish Nor Flesh. Overheard comments included: "Who does she think she’s kidding?" "Does she think she’s Goldfrapp? She’s fackin’ S Club and always will be!" "It’s embarrassing, it’s like your mum." In the mainstream broadsheets and the specialist music press the album was either ignored or given rave reviews on the proviso that it wasn’t going to sell. The album accordingly made an unspectacular, and nearly unnoticed, entry into the album chart at 28, and quickly made its excuses and left, despite Ms Stevens doing the blanket rounds of chat shows and teen television over the previous fortnight. Or perhaps because of her doing so.

So what happened? Why did one of the most outstandingly creative and discreetly avant-garde pop records of 2005 become, essentially, stillborn? When I first heard the finished version of Come And Get It in September I thought I had borne witness to the herald of the second coming of New Pop Mark II. Goldfrapp’s Supernature had sounded surprisingly alluring when heard on a blindingly hot summer’s day in Brighton, but this far surpassed it. Every track contained at least half a dozen ideas for a pop future. But then I thought the same about Anniemal a year ago, and that particular masterwork persists in its reluctant residency in the bargain bins. Is it that some pop just goes over the heads of today’s consumers? Or is it another indictment of the British music industry’s craven inability to handle female talent properly?

With Rachel the problem may have been more deeply rooted. "Some Girls" hit number two last year on the back of a Sports Aid charity tie-in and residual S Club fan interest, but apart from a dull cover of "More More More" which is pointedly absent from her album, subsequent, more complex singles have typically foundered at around about the number 11 mark (which in 2005 singles chart terms is the equivalent of number 41 in old chart currency) pretty much in inverse proportion to their musical interest. Did The Kids get confused by Rachel’s ad libs in the Kim Wilde-does-"Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)" knockback of "Negotiate With Love" – "Can you turn down the track a little bit please?" etc.? In fact these asides add to her endearing vocal qualities; her playing with phrases actually mirrors and refracts the playing around of the Other of which the lyric complains and she sounds like she’s having fun if periodically being politely bowled over (that almost apologetic out of breath "negotiate with…love" at the start of the final chorus). What was it, indeed, that record buyers didn’t understand? Similarly "I Said Never Again (But Here We Are)" is an utterly charming mindfuck of a pop song (listen to those "1-2-3-4"s – they make you want to hug her!) which was universally derided as an "Antmusic" ripoff. Unfortunately the nay sayers neglected (a) to check the songwriting credits, whereupon they would have found that one of the writers was Rob Davis, formerly of Mud, so it’s fair to say that Rob was simply taking back what "Antmusic" took from "The Cat Crept In" (Mud’s 1974 #2 follow-up to "Tiger Feet") in the first place; and (b) to recall that Antmusic was a gloriously unapologetic exercise in pilfering and reshaping elements of Link Wray, Morricone, Roxy and so on.

The invention continues throughout Come And Get It. "Some Girls" was a typically filthy Richard X production, of course, its subtle duplicity (a would-be pop princess being ripped off by a mentor more incompetent than sinister) virtually unnoticed. In the context of the album it’s one of three exercises in schaffel-pop – the bitemporal approach (a fast, light 6/8 superimposed on a hardcore dance 4/4 beat) pioneered by the likes of Akufen and Vitalic at the turn of the millennium, reviving a form which in pop had become lost to follow-up – previous historical examples of the same rhythmic matrix would include Blondie’s "Call Me," Amii Stewart’s version of "Knock On Wood," Elvis’ "Way Down" and, for those who really have lived long enough, Polly Brown’s "Up In A Puff Of Smoke" (and Gary Glitter, lest you forget – those "Rock and Roll" chants bolster up the closing seconds of "Some Girls"). The other two are "Crazy Boys" – a noticeably cleaner Richard X production which sounds like someone applying sparkling polish to the Goldfrapp template, gleamingly striding through hitherto inaccessible hotel lobby connecting doors, wiring up James Bond ("nobody does it better" indeed!) with Christ ("Forgive me, I know not what I do") – and the terrific "Every Little Thing," another Rob Davis co-write which sounds like Eno producing Clodagh Rodgers doing "My Coo-Ca-Choo;" check out the lovely quadrangle of "Oh! The sting of your kiss! Mwah! The twist in my touch! (Beep!)" in the second verse.

And yet here is an album which finds its artist at the start assertive and slightly threatening ("I like to watch you suffer ever so slightly" she croons on the sprightly "It’s-Just-Like-Kylie!" opener "So Good"), but by its end she is virtually on her knees, pleading for love and understanding of her façade ("Dumb Dumb"). Despite the aemotionalism perceived by the album’s critics, her ballad singing is touchingly fetching in a Thereza Bazar-had-she-been-Art-of-Noise’s-lead-singer kind of a way. She betrays exquisite fatigue on "Funny How" which effectively undermines the determined Luomo-out-of-Kylie rhythmic bounce with a lyric which references both the Pet Shop Boys/Patsy Kensit and the KLF ("The night got cold/It’s way past three/Take these fools away from me") and acts as a curious cold rationalist counterpart to the painful poignancy applied to the same subject matter on Sing Sing’s "Going Out Tonight" (a song which in itself has proved to be the missing link between Slowdive’s "Catch The Breeze" and the Streets’ "Blinded By The Light") even as it then goes on to cite Nomad ("I wanna give you devotion") and the Four Tops/Joy Division ("so don’t walk away"). Her reading of Alexis Strum’s superb song "Nothing Good About This Goodbye" is also sublimely hurt, wandering in a limbo between Air and Emma Bunton. But perhaps deepest of all is "I Will Be There," a song which many thought should have closed the album, and which is very nearly the last will and testament of Thereza Bazar on that videotheque screen before she truly mutates into a ghost. Rachel sounds on the verge of tears on the treadmill of "Round and round we go/Here we go again" before coming as close as this record dares her to do to becoming nakedly emotional – "We can live forever/This doesn’t have to be the end" – before evading her body entirely. "Is it OK if I meet you in heaven? Is it alright if I’m with you forever?" a chorus of Rachels sing, as smooth as the blanket swept over to cover the pain. And that unearthly, tender chord change on the third line of the chorus ("I will be there…") is enough to make a tender soul wish to evade Earth altogether. Watch Kylie cover this next year when she’s recovered. The poignancy will be, literally, unbearable.

And all of this appears on an album which hasn’t sold, or has been purposely undersold, is laughed at in shops and buried at the bottom of charity piles. Why?

Some possible reasons:

1. "She doesn’t mean it!"

As said by Chris Evans on Radio 2, dismissing "I Said Never Again." "Not like Charlotte Church! She means it!" This ties in with the Guardian music critic’s observation that Rachel Stevens possesses "the personality of a boiled egg." Not to mention "Who the hell does she think she is?" The overriding impression would appear to be that with Come And Get It, Rachel has proved herself to be a fish out of water, someone dabbling with things The Power Of Which She Does Not Know, your mum doing the Twist to LCD Soundsystem.

This theory cannot be entirely dismissed. What was sorely evident on her numerous television appearances was the extreme disinterest Rachel exuded when it came to the music she was supposed to be promoting, if not championing (and if not championing, then why not?). As I’ve said previously, she came across like a Young Conservative who’s accidentally walked into an electropop(ist) club night; a bit above it all, perhaps, desperate to get back to the David Gray and Dido she really likes. Her snooty air on the children’s TV show hosted by public school alumni Dick and Dom didn’t exactly encourage floating voters, either.

And as far as "meaning it" goes, it’s probable that she hasn’t been afforded the opportunity to show what she "means" – the general consensus is that she’s still the Baby Spice equivalent of S Club (indeed, one outraged Telegraph letter-writer – is there any other kind? – complained about how he was to explain to his eight-year-old daughter why squeaky clean Rachel Stevens now only wore knickers on TV!) and hasn’t really proven herself as an independent particle. Charlotte Church, however, gives a well-known history; with her it’s the classic teen idol-becomes-adult conundrum, but it’s one she’s handling exceptionally well. The twinkle in her eye is ever present; she makes no secret that she’s having a ball playing this game; her eyes smile when Rachel's evidently do not. And her strategy is better thought out, such that the startling futurism of tracks like "Let’s Be Alone" (one of 2005’s most sheerly pleasurable pop songs, including that "Enola Gay" quote in the final chorus) or the sneakier futurism of the likes of "Crazy Chick" (whose opening handclaps are as stridently sensual as Amelie’s heels tap-tap-tapping to your door in "1 Thing") come across as heartfelt and genuine as the straighter-edged ballads (though the latter still convey a weird aura of the Manics going R&B). The Sugababes, too, have had a chart-topping triumph with their splendid new album which is just as futuristic and Wire-friendly in its own way as Come And Get It. But then again, the Sugababes also now have a background story to tell – fans have never known them as anything other than Sugababes, they have to an extent grown up with them, are still interested in the paths of their lives, so are able to connect with them on that elementary but still vital level.

Nonetheless it remains rather unfair to dismiss Rachel for not "meaning it." I think her voice is the right one for the tenor required by the songs on Come And Get It; light but not drowning, vulnerable but never terminal. She possibly simply needs to learn to convey that emotionalism visually.

2. "Madonna is Madonna and that’s what makes her Madonna."

Ah yes, the elephant in the living room who refuses to be ignored. So here is Madonna, who is Madonna who is anybody or anything you want her to be in any given financial quarter, crassly digesting Rachel and Goldfrapp and maybe even Linda Lamb, for those who haven’t lived long enough, and she does the double – number one single and album, Hung Up On A Dancefloor – which seems to sneer at Rachel, look, kid, this is how you do it and here is how you don’t give a shit, which sees her swallowing up No Wave for the second time and regurgitating it as a handy, yummy revival as if Cristina had never revived "Is That All There Is?" (where is where Madonna starts, in the same sense that Patrick Hernandez’s "Born To Be Alive" is where Madonna starts) and views her swallowing up the future of music from the perspective of those of us who never forgot the Young Gods and who thought that the possibilities of sampling meant a million new possibilities for music, Bartok against Duane Eddy, Braxton with Bonzos, except that the future of music has turned out to be the astute Mylo who has correctly divined that we don’t really want music to have a future, just an endless, easy past, that we deserve no more from the limitlessness of sampling, that instead of plunging into a sexy abyss of chaos we clutch back "Bette Davis Eyes" and ooh do you remember the school disco and deelyboppers and the Kids From Fame and isn’t it a laugh and then you scream DOES EVERY FUCKING THING HAVE TO BE A LAUGH but then you go down the route of Celine (Ferdinand or Dion, it all ends the same) by thinking that.

So Impressions On A Dancefloor superficially sounds impressive and mighty and up to the second as long as you’re listening to it two rooms away from where it’s playing. You could briefly chortle at the little Gwen Stefani tick-tock jibe which opens the album ("Time goes by so slowly" – will our Gwen be singing "Unchained Melody" when she’s 47?) and hey, here’s how to play the game because Madonna asked Abba nicely and the KLF didn’t and turns the hi-energy sleepless heartbreak of "Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight)" into an irritation which can be relieved with a dash of Nytol. In the same way, you might think that "Future Lovers" revs up "I Feel Love" to speeds and power unimaginable in 1977 if you’d never heard what Mark Stewart did with it on "Fatal Attraction" in 1987, which was rather more than superimposing a "Ray Of Light" rewrite on its top. And "I Love New York" seems to swoon with improbable modernity if you’re not familiar with Dakar and Grinser’s cover of "I Wanna Be Your Dog" (the latter is less In Your Face than the former, but then the former loses among many other things the deviously subtle Dark Magus keyboard curlicues). After a while the UP-ness refuses to let you relent – rather than being celebratory, listening to the record is like being battered over the head with a weighty exercise bike 120 times per minute. Confessions Of A Hangman will not allow the listener to breathe as ultimately it does nothing more than billboard the joyless John Knox work-and-nothing-but-work ethic without which Madonna would have to look in her own mirror, and we can’t have that, can she? If anything the album’s "downbeat" second half is even more pestilent than the first half, for herein we find a shameless farrago of self-pity, self-glorification ("I guess I deserve it," she coos imperiously on "How High" apropos her career and money, not in that order) and self-love masquerading as selflessness ("Push" wherein she sings "You push me" while staring in the mirror rather than looking her audience in the faces), perhaps reaching its nadir in the interminable Kabbalah recruiting advert that is "Isaac" – think "Frozen" remixed by the Afro-Celt Sound System and pass the Imodium, Alice – before concluding with the inevitable, if loveless, schaffel of "Like It Or Not" whose message is "You can love me or you can leave me," alongside other subsidiary Wittgenstein-esque homilies such as "Sticks and stones will break my bones," "Better the devil you know," "Can’t get you out of my head" and "OK I made that last one up." That a purple leather jumpsuit is seemingly enough to get her to number one in this reduced world of ours asks why other musicians even bother trying, but not in the Aerial way.

3. "The British music industry cannot handle female musical talent properly."

And by that, I mean British. Perhaps Annie From Norway should have done a few more Popworlds and a few fewer Shoreditch DJ sets, but her record company had absolutely no idea how to market her and thus was a great pop album lost. Even with Charlotte and Goldfrapp there is the aura of "hedging their bets," albeit markedly reduced. But I’ve also been listening to a couple of very fine ‘60s girl pop compilations which came out this year – It’s So Fine: Pye Girls Are Go! and Sassy And Stonefree: Dreambabes Volume 6 – which between them contain some 70 pop gems, two of which were hits. What happened there? The sleevenotes more or less give us the answer; whereas in America talents like Carole King, Jackie De Shannon, Ellie Greenwich, Toni Wine, Carole Bayer Sager etc. etc. were given room to flourish and develop, in Britain the likes of Barbara Ruskin and Val McKenna – both considerable talents, and in the case of Barbara Ruskin a seriously awesome, lost talent, as singer, songwriter and producer – were marginalised; only Jackie Trent, by dint of being Mrs Tony Hatch, thrived (and the Trent/Hatch reinterpretation of Scott Walker’s "Such A Small Love" on It’s So Fine has to be believed to be heard). Otherwise it remained a boys’ club, and fantastic Northern Soul stompers like Nita Rossi’s "Untrue, Unfaithful (That Was You)" were routinely buried on the B-side of slushy MoR fare which it was decided – by the men in suits, many of whom had been in the music business since the days of Al Bowlly – The People Wanted. You realise just how important Suzi Quatro was as a symbol when she came along; but that was all she was – she was from Detroit, her hits were written and produced by men, and the wave of women who followed in her immediate wake – Patti Smith, Joan Jett – were Americans. Is it an exaggeration that we had to wait for the Slits and Siouxsie for British women musicians to finally have their say? And is it because 49-year-old men still think they know what’s best – i.e. women singers and musicians are only marketable as come-on R&B fodder or breathe-on-me-and-I-break vulnerables – that genuinely vulnerable people like Rachel Stevens end up being pushed and pulled any way as though on a pinball table, with the inevitable lack of jackpot?

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

. . .

THE AGE OF THE AERIAL

"Give me, instead of beauty’s bust,
A tender heart, a loyal mind,
Which with temptation I could trust,
Yet never linked with error find.
One in whose gentle bosom I
Could pour my secret heart of woes,
Like the care-burthened honey-fly
That hides his murmurs in the rose."
(George Darley, "It Is Not Beauty I Demand")

The wind is inescapable, unavoidable. It is the same wind which could either fuel or blow out the fire on Wuthering Heights. But this time it isn’t just about coming back. It’s about summoning others to come back; in other words, life. Why Elvis? Why Rosebud – and by Rosebud, is that Hearst or should it be Orson?

"Why does a multi-millionaire
Fill up his home with priceless junk?"

"The interiors were cramped. The garden was littered with thrown-away Macanudo cigar butts – this is a terrible image, a blindness to nature…His bathtub was full of old books. His closet had maybe thirty identical black silk shirts."
(David Thomson on the living conditions of the last days of Orson Welles, Rosebud: The Story Of Orson Welles)

She is of course summoning herself back, after twelve very busy years, but not simply her own self. She’s been listening extensively to the works of Massive Attack, whose once-removed imprints are all over both halves of Aerial; on "King Of The Mountain" the not-quite-splendid isolation is articulated by the slowly ascending triple string chords as well as the Ryuichi Sakamoto synth pattern in limbo. She’s impersonating Elvis (there’s a chuckle buried deeply, which will eventually emerge from its chrysalis) as well as trying to will him back to life, to deny that he died

(and here’s the section where I’m afraid you’ll need to go back to Gillian Welch’s Time (The Revelator) and remind yourself of what she said about Elvis. Did he die the day he died?)

to return that 40-year-absent smile to his face ("Looking like a happy man?"). Meanwhile the wind whistles, its chill palpable, and it’s evident that the same spirit breathes here as breathed on "Dead Souls" – Kate Bush is summoning the souls of the dead, trying to understand why or how they died. In the multitracked "blow southerly" chorus it is as if she’s caught in the act of exhuming them, dragging their bodies back onto the ground. And then every individual will live again, proud and triumphant atop their mountain – and they can never make their way down again ("The wind it blows the door closed").

A Sea Of Honey is a study about how life can expect to be lived once that door has been blown shut, and we choose never to open it again. Far from being a prelude, or a softener, to disc two, it defines everything at which the songs of disc two laugh, or ridicule, or negate. In other words, the simple and complex joys of A Sky Of Honey would not carry nearly as much emotional impact were we not aware of the tragedies slowly being dissected on disc one. A Sea Of Honey is the tunnel through which we are obliged to swim if we are ever to emerge into the light of blissful blue.

Grieving penetrates virtually everything on A Sea Of Honey – and where there is grief, there is often associated compassion for others who decide to shut themselves away from the world, for whatever reason, never more so than on what everyone else has mistakenly thought to be the album’s comic relief, the song "Pi" which is actually a heartbreaking plea to rejoin humanity, to realise that a world comprised of lists and numbers, of doomed rationalisation of random biological occurrences, is not a substitute for interacting with other people. "Oh he love, he love, he love/He does love his numbers/And they run, they run, they run him/In a great big circle/In a circle of infinity" – a circle from which he does not seem to wish to escape. Thus does Bush sing him a tender lullaby to try to prise him away from this dead world, a lullaby comprised of the number Pi extended to however many decimal points are needed, as though any were wanted. Gradually her singing of the numbers drifts out of tempo, after an initial sustenato of the number "3" to make it sound like "free." Her 5s are like cuddles, her 8s and 9s see her in a virtual flood of tears, her 4s are subtly sensual, and she freezes in dread as she rolls the fatal number "zero" around her tongue like a barbiturate she doesn’t want to swallow. The verse musically offers Hugh Hopper/Matching Mole chord changes, but the numbers are accompanied by rueful electronica which, not for the last time on Aerial, indicate some familiarity with the work of Boards of Canada (compare, for example, with "Olson" from Music Has The Right To Children, which latter’s number count stops making sense, eerily, at 36).

Both "How To Be Invisible" and "Joanni" could represent Bush turning into herself, to denounce her own wilful absence from the world, if indeed she can be said to have ever been away from it. The former is a strangely loping torch song in which Bush examines the consequences of thinking "inside out," the slow decay which will occur once you have decided to remain "under a veil you must never lift/Pages you must never turn" and subsist in a microscopic world of yourself ("Eye of Braille/Hem of anorak/Stem of wallflower/Hair of doormat")

"The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning."
(Sylvia Plath, "Ariel")

"Is that an autumn leaf falling/Or is that you, walking home?" The sudden sob at the word "mirror" in the line "You jump into the mirror" and the whistling ("The wind is whistling," remember) which bookends the song. But those two lines again – "Under a veil you must never lift/Pages you must never turn/In the labyrinth"…

…of militant Islam?

The lyrics to the song "Joanni" are accompanied by a photograph of Bush, the lower half of her face seemingly obscured by a veil and her hands clutched together in prayer. She may well be laughing, or trying to laugh, underneath that veil. The song itself, with more sinisterly ascending strings, returns to Massive Attack territory, or at least on the same planet surface at right angles to the narrator of "Antistar." With its description of a girl who ostensibly is Joan of Arc ("All the cannons are firing/And the swords are clashing?…/And she looks so beautiful in her armour/…blows a kiss to God/And she never wears a ring on her finger") but reminds Bush of someone else ("Who is that girl? Do I know her face?"). Herself? Or…given the apocalypse of the first verse ("And the flags stop flying/And the silence comes over/Thousands of soldiers")…a suicide bomber? The progenitor of Eno’s "Bonebomb" ("I waited for peace…and here is my piece")? In these two songs there is definitely the touch of the muezzin wall present (even, at times, bearing a bizarre but entirely logical resemblance to John Lydon’s voice).

And then there are the two devastating songs with Bush alone, voice and piano, which almost made me wish that the whole of A Sea Of Honey had been recorded solo, which cut into an exceptionally deep core of pain. First, "Mrs. Bartolozzi" – a song about a housewife watching the clothes of herself and her family spin around in her washing machine, and the fantasies which that engenders in her mind, primarily sexual in nature. What is perhaps most remarkable about this song and its reluctant twin "A Coral Room" is how unhurried it sounds – one marvels at the increasingly rarefied qualities of slow patience which Bush applies to her writing and performance. Note the many pauses in "Mrs. Bartolozzi" – it’s as if she’s thinking over what she’s just sung and hasn’t quite decided where to take the song next, which road to travel down (or which river to swim down). This was a quality very common in thoughtful avant-garde British singer-songwriters between 1969-78 (see John and Beverley Martyn’s Road To Ruin and Simon Finn’s Pass The Distance for two extreme approaches to this tabula rasa) – the tradition of Roy Harper, indeed the same tradition within which those formerly lost souls Bill Fay and Vashti Bunyan worked. Remember that Kate Bush was virtually the last British singer-songwriter to come out, or come into, that tradition before it was supplanted, or superseded; thus when listening to Bill Fay’s Tomorrow, Tomorrow And Tomorrow we can see exactly where Bush got the ball and how far she subsequently ran with it, virtually single-handed for the next 15 years. And what about Vashti Bunyan, whose second album, a mere 35 years after her first, finds her sounding 35 years younger than she did on Just Another Diamond Day (again, the patient compassion of a Bunyan song like "Turning Backs" is the other, necessary end of the tender Bush spine)? There’s something quietly significant about all these artists coming back from the cold in 2005.

But back to "Mrs. Bartolozzi." Wade in the Woolf waves of sensuality as Bush does so effortlessly here, gently transforming banal domesticity into a David Cox seascape. When she sings "Oh and the waves are coming in/Oh and the waves are coming out" with the piano ebbing and flowing in watery counterpoint, you can tell she really feels the movements which matter. "Oh and you’re standing right beside me/Little fish swim between my legs" would have been about a thousandth as astonishing if that couplet had appeared on the new album by Madonna, Bush’s senior by two weeks. Because we hear it so infrequently it penetrates far more deeply than the corporate wink which we pretend not to worship in 2005 mainstream pop (though that of course isn’t to say that the more intelligent pop operatives – the Sugababes, Girls Aloud, why the same intelligent pop operatives we had three years ago – aren’t sneakily and sexily dismantling those memes and know full well that they are doing so; contrast with Rachel Stevens, who torpedoed one of the year’s best pop albums basically by acting like a Young Conservative who had volunteered to work in Spearmint Rhino for a week for an ITV documentary).

However, the sea and the fish are – for now – merely a daydream. And it’s a daydream parenthesised by a nearly unspeakable pain. "I think I see you standing outside/But it’s just your shirt"…and if we look at the accompanying photograph in the CD booklet, it depicts a washing line in which there is a terrible red in the centre, as unavoidable as the red coat in Schindler’s List, bloodied…and then Bush virtually breaks down. "And it looks so ALIVE!" she screams, whimpers, "Nice and white." This is someone who might not be coming back ("And all your shirts and jeans and things"). The childhood memory of a nursery rhyme which intrudes towards the end of the song, and the mystifyingly terrifying first few lines of the song: "I remember it was that Wednesday/Oh when it rained and rained/They traipsed mud all over the house/It took hours and hours to scrub it out." And the song’s progenitor is obsessed with getting everything clean – note how the words shiny, clean and white keep reoccurring throughout – that you wonder: what horror is she trying to erase? Who were "they"? The Gestapo? Come to take her husband and children away? Was Mrs. Bartolozzi...interfered with?

Finally there is the option of drowning in A Sea Of Honey’s closing song "A Coral Room," a song which continues to leave me speechless as, with its visions of ruined houses, of past lives ("And the planes came crashing down"), the memories we clutched to our breasts, held against our hearts, now in disrepair, a broken home for spiders, it quietly sums up what for me has been the overriding trend of 2005’s important music – the feeling that, especially after both 7/7 and Hurricane Katrina, it’s after the end of the world (if Bush doesn’t mind my citing Sun Ra, which I’m sure she wouldn’t) and we’re engaged in a salvage operation. Think of the Shortwave Set’s reclaiming of battered 1974 MoR, their refusal to let their source material rot; of Eno’s generously gracious hymns of solace to a dying world (notwithstanding the deadly punchline of the final track on Another Day On Earth); Saint Etienne’s sadly wise realisation that all those Subbuteo catalogues and Gibb Brothers 45s ultimately count for nothing in the face of destruction (can anyone listen to "Side Streets" now and not shiver at the thought of 7/7? "I’ll probably get it tomorrow/’Til then…"); Antony’s mutation from boy to guhl; Rufus and Martha trying to redefine the pods from which they emerged; King Britt bringing Sister Gertrude Morgan back; the Arcade Fire bringing EVERYTHING back; Bill Fay being brought back – somehow it is all summed up in "A Coral Room," especially in that deathly pause between Bush’s first "What do you feel?" and her calmly tearful "My mother. And her little brown jug" (again a childhood nursery rhyme echoes in the collective memory, sung here by one Michael Wood, who may or may not be the television historian). When Bush sings "See it fall" it sounds as though she has plunged 30,000 feet into the abyss. Her tiny cry of "Oh little spider" also reminds us of Cat Power’s reading of "Crawling King Snake." At last, she turns to you, to me, to us, and her voice soars with choked emotion as she demands "Put your hand over the side of the boat. What do you feel?"

The centrepiece, the lynchpin, of this entire sequence of music is of course "Bertie," Bush’s ode to her son, arranged and performed by members of my favourite group the Dufay Collective as a 15th-century estampie realigned by John Dowland. Note how she cannot allow her larynx to let go of the downward cascade of the word "sweet" in "Sweet dreams" and the words-are-really-no-good-for-this-kind-of-thing inarticulate genius couplet of "You bring me so much joy/And then you bring me/More joy," worthy of Marvin Gaye purely because of how she sings it. But the medieval roundelay is minor key throughout, and sometimes she sounds as if she’s weeping. Has her displacement of time meant that she has seen forward to Bertie’s death, or her
own?

"How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar. There is a spark there. Next moment a flush of dun. Then a vapour as if earth were breathing in and out, once, twice, for the first time. Then under the dullness someone walks with a green light. Then off twists a white wraith. The woods throb blue and green, and gradually the fields drink in red, gold, brown. Suddenly a river snatches a blue light. The earth absorbs colour like a sponge slowly drinking water. It puts on weight; rounds itself; hangs pendent; settles and swings beneath our feet."
(Virginia Woolf, The Waves, whose prelude should perhaps not be read until you’ve heard the album, as it pretty well gives away the entire plot)

Suddenly…there is colour. A beneficent lightness. A child’s voice. "Mummy? Daddy? The day is full of birds. Sounds like they’re saying words."

"A. Sky. Of. Honey." Or, if you twist your ear to 45 degrees, "Don’t. Go. Oh. Bertie."

Even as the sun and the piano and the birds of "Prologue" rise upwards and ever upwards, Bush is already foreseeing transience and non-existence. "Every time you leave us/So Summer will be gone/So you’ll never grow old to us," even as the piano magically unfolds in ascending scales and arpeggios, and the bass, drums and orchestra make discreet entries, even as Bush has to switch to Italian to express what English can’t quite ("Like the light in Italy/Lost its way across the sea"). Just as in "A Coral Room" the patterns of the melody echo the thoughts of Bush’s voice; they come after her words, as opposed to merely erecting a framework for them. Bush’s melodies will go exactly the way Bush wants them to, and at the speed which she decides – slow and patient.

"Some dark accents coming in from that side…"

Rolf Harris as Stanley Spencer, miserable and bereft in his Belsize Park bedsit. "An Architect’s Dream" (to be listened to in tandem with Annette Peacock’s An Architect’s Heart, obviously – and just how much of Annette’s I’m The One cascaded into the impressionable mind of the teenage Kate?) equates art with sex, blissfully. "That bit there, it was an accident/But he’s so pleased/It’s the best mistake he could make." With swift ease, the tools become different tools. "It’s just a smudge/But what it becomes/In his hands/Curving and sweeping/Rising and reaching" – and Bush makes sure there is absolutely no ambivalence about what she’s singing about (note the equivalent quatrain of "Moving and glistening and rocking its babies in rhythm" from "A Coral Room"). And inevitably, "Whenever he works on a pavement/It starts to rain." Swiftly sunset is upon us. Rolf becomes a bemused spectre, a memory of a Columbia EP Kate might have heard as a child ("I’ve Lost My Mummy"? Or perhaps she just remembered the swimming public information films), who is soon swallowed up by the massed Bush chorus ("So all the colours run – see what they have become!").

Now it is nightfall, and the childish joys of that "lovely afternoon" become distinctly carnal and not a little pagan. "Sunset" is an exquisite scribble of Euro-Tropicana which wouldn’t have been out of place on the stunning Nine Horses album (Snow Borne Sorrow, or David Sylvian Was Right All Along). Bush sings wondrously of colours ("The most beautiful iridescent blue") but again worries about the horror of non-existence – that pause which comes after the first delivery of "Where sands sing in crimson, red and rust – Then climb into bed and turn to dust," and which amplifies its pain in the lines "Keep us close to your heart/So if the skies turn dark/We may live on in/Comets and stars." It’s an ECM samba for the end of the world (and distinctly ECM, as Eberhard Weber and Peter Erskine are the rhythm section on this track). However, after the last "climb into bed and turn to dust," Bush turns her back defiantly on mortality and ups the tempo to a Balearic house rave-up. "The day writes the words right across the sky/They go all the way up to the top of the night." Running up that hill again…to encounter a brief and astonishing episode ("Aerial Tal") where Bush suddenly gives us some vocal free improvisation in duet with the blackbirds, which obviously makes me think that, apart from Virginia Astley and maybe Messaien, she’s also heard the Evan Parker With Birds album, but even this is but a mere prelude to…

"We went up to the top of the highest hill. And stopped. Still."

And – again, like stout Cortez from whose notion of the Pacific I can never seem to tear myself away – Bush discovers…the eternal (or Joy Division’s "The Eternal")? "Something In Between" is the first of Aerial’s supreme one-two punch which gives me…just what I always wanted? Deep oceans of synthesisers, whale guitars and subaquiline bass suddenly but gently veer into view as Bush sings of being not quite this and not quite that. "Somewhere in between/The waxing and the waning wave/Somewhere in between/What the song and silence say…/Sleep and waking up…/Breathing out and breathing in…" Between man and woman, between jouissance and ennui, between life and death, between boy and guhl…

"Oh I’m scared of the middle place, between life and nowhere"
(Antony, "Hope There’s Someone")

But Kate Bush isn’t scared; she’s simply awed – that trembling sopranino sustenato of a note to which she clings throughout "Oh how we have longed for something that would make us feel so…" Words are really no good for this kind of thing, but the thing is, the twirls and curlicues of the arrangement set beside her voice, the echoes of a generation ago when I did feel so…but I’m thinking of a marriage between the Cocteau Twins’ "Ribbed And Veined" and Boards of Canada’s "Peacock Tail" and Björk’s "All Is Full Of Love" and, most deeply of all, Billy MacKenzie’s "At The Edge Of The World" because something here makes me hear that Kate Bush has become the new lead singer of the Associates and unless you’re a 1982 child like me you won’t know how that makes me feel, though you could make a decent guess and perhaps realise that Kate Bush becoming the new lead singer of the Associates is for me an infinitely more infinite prospect than Madonna becoming the new lead singer of Zoot Woman. And those gentle backing vocals, provided by Gary Brooker, the voice of Procol Harum, the co-author of "A Salty Dog," promising us that we can never really truly die, capped by the tender double meaning and let-me-die-now-poignant punchline which I won’t spoil for you, suffice to point out that it transposes the spirit of the closing two minutes of ELO’s "Mr Blue Sky" into the closing two minutes of George Crumb’s "Makrokosmos III," and unless you’re a 1978 child like me who waited 27 years for the two to come together…well, guess with a kiss.

And then, incredibly, there is "Nocturn," the song of the year, maybe of the century, possibly of the millennium, not that I anticipate personally living long enough to ratify either of the two latter options. The "sweet dreams" refrain returns, and out of tempo Bush oscillates as wildly but as gently as Julie Tippetts at the beginning of side three of Keith Tippett’s Frames.
"Everyone is sleeping. We go driving into the moonlight"…

"Could you see the guy who was driving?"
(Kate Bush, "King Of The Mountain")

…and then the most delicate and most gorgeous bass and percussion line you’ve ever heard eases its way in like the first tentative wave as Kate sings as tenderly as she has ever sung, quiet and wondering. "Could be in a dream/Our clothes are on the beach," and you can’t quite believe what’s happening here, now it’s Judee Sill singing Propaganda’s "Dream Within A Dream" and did you think you’d live long enough to witness that? The song gently ascends with that slow patience, not hurrying to reach ecstasy, and Rolf Harris is there too, on didgeridoo, doubling up the bassline discreetly, and yes…"No one, no one is here" (even though everyone is) and…OH MY FUCKING GOD…"We stand in the Atlantic/We become PANORAMIC" and it soars above all of us, climbing higher and unbelievably higher, as if trying to drag Varese and Meek down from their clouds, "The stars are caught in our hair/The stars are on our fingers/A veil of diamond dust," and then you notice that Joe Boyd is thanked in the sleeve credits and fuck me if Kate Bush, who NEVER stopped believing in the Incredible String Band, is trying to make 1967 live again as the eight-year-old Kate Bush imagined she remembered it. The washing machine now long gone – "The sea’s around our legs/In milky, silky water" – they sink into ecstasy ("We dive deeper and deeper") until the unreal sun comes up and a sudden dawn chorus howls in rage against the dying night ("Look at the light, all the time it’s a-changing (Bob Dylan!!)/Look at the light, climbing up the Aerial") because it’s fuck me yes yes yes a thousand times yes Oxford London Toronto YES

AND ALL OF THE DREAMERS ARE WAKING

She’s up, and she can’t come down. Finally, "Aerial," the song itself – and it’s Frankie’s "Relax" in 6/8, a thumping sex beat as Bush finally cuts the strings of restraint and screams as only she can except up until this moment on Aerial she hasn’t actually done so but she screams "I’ve gotta be up on the roof! Up, up on the roof! In the sun!" and then the scream turns into a laugh and she turns into a bird

and then the guitarist, Danny MacIntosh, who is actually Bertie’s daddy, who has so far kept a similarly reticent profile, suddenly erupts with Hendrix lava, interacting with, fucking, Bush’s cackles ("Come on let’s all join in!") and she keeps laughing, is it at us, or with us, and it’s frightening, or it’s liberating, and then suddenly there’s nothing except the dawn chorus of the blackbirds and the now distant echoes of laughter because they are now ghosts and they are happy and life continues anyway.

"The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside."
(Woolf, The Waves, from the Prelude)

Or, like me, you might prefer the following option:
"And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room, an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one."
(John Donne, "The Good-Morrow")

For L.G., who should have heard Aerial,
And for L.F., who thankfully can.

posted by Marcello Carlin Permalink

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