October 2021 – Richard Watt

10. Venus And Mars, Wings, 1975

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Richard

The first 13 tracks are all you need for the full 1975 experience

I vividly remember being at Scout camp in the summer of 1974. Amid all the fun and games involved with messing about unsupervised near (and occasionally in) fast flowing, deep water, making things out of wood with sharp knives and – inevitably – setting fire to things in the name of sitting around and singing songs which probably weren’t in Scouting for Boys, there was a copy of Band on the Run floating around.

Not the album, but someone had with them the single, with Zoo Gang on the B side. It was the first time I had seen the famous Apple label in the flesh; I remember being mesmerised by it, especially the flip side with the cut apple and the bright white flesh.

No, I have no idea why anyone had a record with them at camp. We were in a field in the middle of Glen Esk; there was no electricity, and I’m pretty sure if someone had a battery-powered or wind-up record player, I’d remember that. But there it was; I can picture the field, where our tent was, and where my sleeping bag was positioned within the tent. I could take you from there down to the river or over to the campfire, and I can very clearly picture passing this single around and admiring it.

The single had been out for a while, so we knew it, and I know I was particularly taken with it, with its multiple sections and styles, and I must have gone out and bought my own copy shortly after coming back from camp – perhaps on its way out of the charts, it was a little cheaper. Incidentally, I was in doubt about whether I had owned the single until about ten minutes ago, when I played Zoo Gang and was able to hum along, note perfect after more than 40 years – I definitely had my own copy, and must have played it often enough for it to be stuck firmly in my subconscious.

So, I could probably claim that Band on the Run was the first record I bought for myself, and leave it ambiguous enough that it might have been the album. It wasn’t though; I guess that owning the single had made me in some way a Wings fan, so I’d be on the lookout for whatever came next. There was a single, and then, almost immediately, a new album. I’m pretty sure I didn’t rush out and buy it straight away; indeed, I’m almost certain that twelve-year-old me would have planned the whole thing carefully, making sure that I knew which album I wanted before going in to Bruce Miller’s and having my head turned by something I was less sure about.

I wish the memories of this momentous occasion – having saved my money, going in to town on the bus and instead of peering wistfully at the bins, actually making up my mind to go and buy something specific. I wish I could be certain it was Bruce Miller’s (it might just as easily have been Boots, after all); I wish I could remember what else I looked at before plumping for this, but all I know is that for at least part of 1975, my entire album collection was Venus and Mars by Wings.

Did I really understand the connection between this and the Beatles? I like to think so, but I imagine it was all a bit fuzzy – after all, the Beatles had broken up close to half my life before – they were ancient history. This was now; this was the future, for all I knew. I took it home, I opened it up and for the first time discovered that particular ‘new album’ smell (much more evocative to me that the new car smell) and found the extra bits and pieces in the sleeve. I wish I could tell you that I didn’t have to look it up, but I did – I had a vague memory of there being stickers or something, but on investigation, it turns out there was a poster, a round sticker which I think I stuck on the back of my bedroom door, and a long thin sticker which would have worked just as well as a bookmark, and which again triggered a memory of how it smelled as soon as I saw it again. It was a gatefold album (as so many were in those days), it had the lyrics on the back, and a brightly coloured inner sleeve.

To my great disappointment, it didn’t have the Apple label – the fairly dull black Capitol one was only enlivened by the red and yellow dots echoing the billiard balls from the cover. It was a thing of beauty which I remember well, yet – the single aside – I cannot bring to mind even one of the songs. It’s the album I owned the longest, yet I know almost nothing about how it sounds.

My second album was Burn by Deep Purple, and as soon as I heard that, I abandoned Wings. I’ve heard most of what they did over the years (I have a few things to say about the live album in a bit), but I have never felt the urge to revisit this, or to put it back in its place in my collection – I suspect I’d buy a copy of Band on the Run before replacing this, if I’m honest.

So, what follows is a genuine rediscovery for me – I suspect it’s not all that great an album, and having sneaked a look at the lyrics a few minutes ago, I’m certain it doesn’t rank in the top echelon of McCartney wordsmithery, but I’m going to be fair and as unbiased as I can, and I suspect I will remember more of this than I realise.

The first thing I noticed was what wasn’t there – I could have sworn that this album contained both Silly Love Songs and Let ‘em In, but it turns out they’re both on the next album, which I definitely didn’t own. So what do we have here?

It opens with the title track, easing us in with acoustic guitars and a voice which doesn’t really sound like Paul McCartney setting the scene – we’re at a rock concert, waiting for it all to start, which it does without a break; we’re straight into Rock Show, which is straightforward rock and roll complete with all the requisite cliches of the time. McCartney is just enjoying being a rock star at this point in his life; something he was never really able to be while he was a Beatle. It’s not exactly challenging, but it’s a lot of fun – McCartney and Denny Laine slipping in and out of character as they celebrate being able to do this for a living.

There’s no gap; Love in Song follows straight on from the fade of Rock Show, and it’s pleasant but nothing more than that – it’s a love song by the numbers, and while no-one is in any doubt about Paul’s ability to write a tune, this doesn’t really do anything or go anywhere; there aren’t many words and the whole thing amounts to “Paul’s in love; isn’t life wonderful?”

You Gave me the Answer is a Paul McCartney pastiche number – a slight ragtime number with those treated vocals which Freddie Mercury employed around the same time in his own pastiche numbers, but with a little more bite to them. Oddly, having heard it just now for what felt like the first time, I’d be perfectly happy to go back and listen again – it’s fun and frothy where the previous track was plodding. Perhaps it picks up a bit from here.

Well, maybe. I have no idea what to make of Magneto and Titanium Man – I mean, it’s another pastiche in the style of 10cc, but I don’t feel the sense of fun it’s presumably supposed to engender – it’s about some comic book characters, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why, or how the twist in the last line is supposed to work, or whether it even is a twist, since nothing happens. It’s bouncy and not entirely without merit, but the harder I look at it, the less there seems to be there.

Letting Go is much more like it; more what I thought this album was going to be. This sounds like 1975 in a way that none of the others has. Apparently, it was a single in the UK, but I don’t remember it at all – it chugs along at that pace which always threatens to break out into something more interesting, but never quite does. I think it’s meant to sound like classic American rock (which, of course, was modern American rock at the time), and I imagine in the right context it would work, but at the end of side one of an album which has wandered all over the musical landscape, it feels like they’re just trying on another costume, and while this one fits a little better, it’s not going to stick in my mind, I’m afraid.

I conjure up a mental image of me getting up to turn it over, and put the needle down at the start of side two, which reprises the first side – Venus and Mars (Reprise) shifts location from the rock show to the middle of a science fiction novel – instead of waiting for the band to come on, we’re waiting for a spaceship to come and take us on vacation, apparently. This version segues into Spirits of Ancient Egypt with a series of intriguing bleeps and boops which have absolutely nothing to do with the song, which does a little Marc Bolan stuff before becoming another straightforward rock and roll song about – well, who knows, frankly. It’s entertaining enough, but seems to be about trying to reach Cleopatra on the phone, for some reason.

Medicine Jar is genuinely baffling. It’s here because Wings was supposed to be a proper band, with everyone contributing. This is written and sung by Jimmy McCulloch, who was the guitarist in Stone The Crows as well as Wings, and it’s pretty much a Stone The Crows song. Again, as I seem to be saying to everything, it’s perfectly fine, but I really don’t know what it’s doing on here. Mind you, I’m not entirely sure what any of these songs are doing on here. I’m guilty of a little bias here, I know – I think if I had been a little more worldly-wise at the time, I’d have only bought a Wings album to hear one of the Beatles doing his thing, and this ain’t that. Twelve-year-old me probably loved it and cheerfully sang along.

Call Me Back Again is one of the Beatles doing his thing; in this case the same thing he did in Oh Darling! on Abbey Road – it’s more loping blues with that familiar voice pushing itself to the slight raggedness we always preferred John Lennon doing. It’s actually one of the better tracks on here, but I think what’s bothering me is that there’s nothing new here – Paul could have written this in his sleep, and it’s quite possible that he actually did.

At least Listen to What the Man Said is familiar, and features the great Tom Scott (not that one, the one who was working with Joni Mitchell at the time) on saxophone, which lifts it above the mid-range which pretty much everything else on this album has been operating in. It has a spark to it, this – a better-than-average melody and it is paced in such a way as to keep it interesting; there’s a direction to this and a point which has been missing from so much else. Of course, it helps that I remember it as a single, and have heard it more than once since 1975, but it genuinely is more satisfying that everything which went before it.

It slides imperceptibly into Treat Her Gently / Lonely Old People which merges two half-songs into a more than decent album closer. It is (they are?) the only songs I’ve come back to today which will probably stick with me – I’ll likely go back and revisit the ragtime one (I’ve forgotten the name of it already), but this I might actually seek out and listen to again because it’s a proper pair of melodies which work really well together.

I know, it’s not the album closer. I wish it was, because almost the only thing I remembered about the album after all these years on was that it ended with an inexplicable version of the Crossroads theme. I don’t know why it’s there, and I don’t think it brings anything to the table beyond a vague sense that even in 1975, Paul McCartney could record absolutely anything and people would buy it. It’s weird and slightly unsettling – it sounds different enough from the one you heard on TV all the time to throw you off balance, but maybe it sums this album up quite well.

Albums don’t have to have a coherent theme or message; they don’t have to make narrative sense or be of one consistent style all the way through, and many of the ones I love have none of those things. This one doesn’t, either. It’s a patchwork of a thing; well produced and well played, but it almost all feels like filler; there’s nothing here to grab the attention and nothing which screams ‘classic album’ at you. It is – and I don’t mean this in a positive sense – inoffensive.

I was hoping that my relisten would prompt me to go and buy my own copy, but it hasn’t. In the end. Mid-seventies Paul McCartney was comfortable and safe, and lacked a collaborator who would challenge him, particularly in the lyrical department. There are good tunes here, and it’s not dull, but I kind of wish that the first album I bought was a little more daring, rebellious or challenging.

Still, it could have been worse.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

I think the consensus is the if you really need a Wings studio album in your life, it should be Band on the Run. I’ve heard a couple of the others, and they’re much like this one – perfectly fine, but nothing more.

Compilations to consider?

I had to look this up, but when I saw a picture of the cover, I remembered Wings Greatest. It has precisely no songs from this album on it; make of that what you will.

Live albums?

Now, this is worth your time. Wings Over America is a behemoth of a live album, featuring not only the best Wings songs of the time (including a number of these songs given a significant boost of energy and excitement – yes I went and listened to them all specifically to compare), but five McCartney Beatles songs, given a live treatment they never had in their original lives. If you want a Wings album in your life, save up and buy this – it actually sounds like the band is having a lot of fun.

Anything else?

There are a couple of videos of the live shows, and I think I must have sat through Rockshow at some point, because the clips I’ve seen from it look familiar. I don’t believe there’s a Wings biography, which is a shame, because I think the idea of a book written from Denny Laine’s perspective would be something we’ve never really seen elsewhere.

[Note: January 2023. I’ve amended the name of the B side of Band on the Run to Zoo Gang, which has the unintended consequence of making the comment below which pointed out my mistake look a bit foolish. Thank you, anonymous commenter]

9. Physical Graffiti, Led Zeppelin, 1975

Posted on October 24, 2021 by Richard

Biodegradable plastic bags. Not where you thought I’d be going with this, was it?

The plastic record bag was ubiquitous through the late 1970s, especially at school, where every second child (more boys than girls, you might think, but the girls I was hanging out with were often lugging around their own 12 inch square bags stuffed with the latest must-share records) was toting a bag of albums to go with the obligatory backpack, or ‘schoolbag’ as we still called them at the time.

Carrying your own or someone else’s precious albums around was fraught with danger in Aberdeen. Even on the calmest days, you never knew if there was a howling gale lurking around the next corner, ready to whip your record bag round and smack it against your knees; or if a sudden downpour might allow rain in to soak the precious cardboard sleeve – there was a way of twisting the handle to try to mitigate against this, but it often resulted in circulation being cut off from your fingers. You couldn’t quite hide it under your blazer (or I couldn’t; as noted before, I was a Small Child), and that, along with stuffing it into your schoolbag, ran the risk of bending the contents, possibly permanently.

Still, we persisted – albums were swapped, taped, and handed back on a strictly understood rotation – you had to have enough time to listen carefully and decide if you wanted to record it, but you didn’t want to appear as if you had just decided to keep the album for yourself. Some albums seemed to live in a permanent rotation, with Brain Salad Surgery one of those which seemed to live at school, being passed from hand to hand until no-one was entirely sure who actually owned the thing. Others, and Physical Graffiti was very definitely in this category, only appeared rarely; their owners being extremely nervous about lending them out, and dreading being approached and asked for a listen.

The 1970s were a time of excess in music, of course – it’s one of the reasons punk happened, after all – and few albums represent that excess as well as Physical Graffiti. If it does, as I’ve suggested before, represent exactly what it was like in 1975, it is as much in the sprawl and excess of the thing; in it’s intricate cardboard engineering, as it is in the music itself.

And it’s the sprawl of it which made it so valuable, and made its owners so nervous. It was, for one thing, a double album. Double studio albums were not nearly as common as double live albums, of course – serious collectors probably only had the White Album, Exile on Main Street and maybe Blonde on Blonde before this came along – and were more expensive to own in the first place. Add to that the way this is packaged, with so much die-cut cardboard which could be so easily damaged – the dreaded sudden gust of wind as you rounded the art block might whip the thing out of your hand and slide it expensively across the concrete and into the wire fence before you could react.

Add to that the fact that the bag it was contained in might not be a sturdy plastic one with reinforced handles, but in one of Boots’ own-label biodegradable ones – the ones which school legend had it would dissolve if carried in the rain – and it was probably better just to pretend you didn’t own a copy of Physical Graffiti at all.

Prior to the opening of The Other Record Shop in 1976, we either bought our albums in Bruce Miller’s, whose bags were sensible and mostly rain-proof, especially if you folded the top over and carried it under your arm (again, shorter arms made this tricky for some of us), or from Boots, whose selection was for some reason more eclectic and slightly cheaper. At least, that’s what I remember. The downside of buying from Boots was the weird, slimy, not-quite-plastic biodegradable (and proudly so) record bag. The bag bore the slogan ‘Record and Tape Value’, which gave a clue to the real reason I spent so much time in Boots’ record department.

I couldn’t afford to buy an album every time I went in there, of course, but I could keep a keen eye on the blank cassette tape section for any deals. Multipacks of C90 tapes were the order of the day; you could get two whole albums (or one double album) on one, so if you bought a five pack, you had an instant record collection once the required number of albums had done the rounds of the playground. I’m sure I had a favourite brand, but the truth is that my favourite brand was whichever one was on sale – I remember having quite a lot of Boots own brand tapes.

So, having negotiated the purchase of enough blank tapes to effectively kill off the music industry single-handed, having been reluctantly allowed to take the hallowed object home, and having not damaged it in any way during the process, what awaited the eager young record enthusiast when Physical Graffiti was eased out of the biodegradable bag?

Before getting anywhere near listening to it, a significant amount of time is spent just marvelling at the thing. It’s a triumph of the sleeve designer’s art, this – no wonder it was so expensive. You slide the inner sleeves out, only to discover that they had been inside another sleeve, which could be removed, revealing the tracklisting, and that the actual outer sleeve is indeed full of holes as you had heard – the only record sleeve you’ve ever seen which you can see through.

Of course, some time is spent putting the various inner sleeves back in different orders to see how each of them looks through the various windows, and peering at all the pictures, trying to interpret what’s going on here – some of those are clearly pictures of the band; others are – well, mysterious.

And, of course, the whole thing is a bit mysterious. Even given my exposure to some complex music in my early teenage years, I’m not sure I was really ready for Led Zeppelin; not really sure what on earth they were on about half the time – I was just swept up in the power and grandeur of the whole thing. Physical Graffiti was a physical experience; even if I didn’t understand it, I could still be swept up in it.

So, having admired the packaging, and then the fantastic label, the needle drops on side one, and this seemingly serious and grown-up album kicks off with a track called Custard Pie. I mean, now I know what was going on, but Robert Plant could have been singing about anything at all at the time – I had no lyric sheet to ponder, so it just washed over me.

The Rover seems to be in a similar mode; I imagine that the first time through I might have had a slight concern about whether this album was going to be four sides of straightforward blues-based rock songs, but In My Time of Dying quickly (well, it doesn’t do anything quickly, but you know what I mean) puts that to rest – this sprawling, epic extended jam on all manner of gospel songs and motifs is still mesmerising and startling – it takes several minutes to feel like you’ve got a handle on it, only for the gear change to propel you into full wakefulness. Listening to it now, I’m as amazed as I ever was by the instrumental interplay – I can hear the bass clearer now than I ever could have back then, but it’s still familiar to me; it all works together to slide you through eleven minutes with barely a pause for breath.

And then, just like on Revolver, some studio chatter at the end causes much grinning – the lack of polish is part of why I keep saying that this is the sound of 1975.

Side two starts with the song which appears to be on the wrong album – Houses of the Holy was a couple of years old by the time this was recorded, and apparently didn’t fit on the album which took its title. It definitely fits here, though – side one feels like it was warming us up for this and the two which follow.

Every rock band of the 1970s wrote songs about cars and sex; none of them did it quite as thoroughly (and quite as disturbingly to the overheated teenager) as Trampled Underfoot – I wonder if it was ever possible, even in my wide-eyed innocence, to read it as a straightforward song about how much Plant loves his car.

Probably not. Maybe I just sublimated all my confusion into an appreciation of the weird and wonderful sounds coming out of whatever keyboard John Paul Jones was playing. None of which quite prepares you for the first time (or the hundredth time, come to that) you hear Kashmir. This is proper rock and roll over-indulgence; all those strings doing those non-rock and roll things, evoking some unknowable part of the world – not Kashmir, exactly, but somewhere other. I read Dune around this time, and Kashmir was my mental soundtrack for a lot of it – it’s perhaps the ultimate ‘lost in the desert’ song, and you can feel the temperature rise just by putting it on, even after all this time.

And it would be the best song on Physical Graffiti, too, if it weren’t for the next one.

There’s a natural gap here, as you get up to swap records over, and it’s probably just as well, because the otherworldly introduction to In the Light might be a bit much if it just followed directly on from the end of Kashmir. In the Light remains firmly in my favourite Zeppelin songs, as it has been since I first heard it – maybe it’s because it’s a bit more like the prog songs I had been immersed in, or because I love the way it is arranged, with Jimmy Page’s guitar illustrating rather than driving the whole thing forward. I know that some people find it unfinished and unsatisfying, but it seems to me that it fits the slightly ramshackle nature of this album; I think Zeppelin could be guilty of being too polished at times; they were an organic experience, and ultimately that’s why I’m talking about this great, sprawling, self-indulgent album rather than the better-known and probably more loved ones.

Bron-yr-Aur is the only possible way to ease us back in to the rest of the album; anything else would risk sensory overload. Mind you, even after I figured out the tuning for it (or more likely, was told it), learning to play it was way beyond me – it’s the very definition of ‘deceptively simple’.

Down by the Seaside is calm and almost relaxed in comparison to much of what has come before, and is about as 1975 as you can imagine. Even turning the distortion up in the midsection and sliding back in to the Zeppelin sound can’t derail that laid-back West coast feeling, which has fully reasserted itself by the end.

Ten Years Gone puts us back to the blues-soaked songs of side one, but this is a grown-up, world-weary version of the strutting hero of those earlier songs. I keep thinking of the wide-eyed teenaged me listening to all this, and trying to work it out. What did I know about all of this grown-up stuff? I suspect I mostly ignored the words and concentrated on the tone of the guitar during that delightful, lyrical solo.

You can make a case that the album actually had three sides worth of material, and that the final side is less than essential. Well, you could make that case; there won’t be any of that nonsense going on here. Physical Graffiti is a complete package – it has a natural flow – peaking, to be sure, either side of the mid-album disk swapping, but the tail is as important to the overall shape of it as the head is. Not many people’s favourite tracks will ever be picked from the final five, but that doesn’t mean you should just skip over them.

Night Flight is obviously an anti-Vietnam War song now; it’s extraordinary how American Zeppelin were at times – no-one was going to be drafting a long-haired bloke from Wolverhampton to go and fight in Vietnam, but Plant carries it off as if he was personally on the run from the authorities.

The Wanton Song is another slice of the 1975 sound; the guitar sound between the verses is not one we’ve heard before, but it’s instantly recognizable as belonging to this exact point in time. Lyrically, it’s right back to the febrile, sweaty stuff we thought we’d left behind about an hour ago, but it’s all part of the plan.

Boogie with Stu and Black Country Woman definitely wouldn’t have made it onto a single album version of this; they are of a piece with some of the less-focused tracks on Exile on Main Street; the Rolling Stones album closest in spirit and lack of overall plan to this. Black Country Woman was recorded outside, and features a passing aeroplane, which was just left in – you can hear the decision being made before the track proper starts. I can’t help feeling that the spontaneous feel of it works rather well, and covers up some of the lack of polish which would surely have been applied to a studio version.

We end with Sick Again, and perhaps the less said about the lyrical content the better. At best, you can read it as a warning, but you can’t help hearing just a bit of swagger in it. It’s a slightly depressing way to end, but again, it’s just about as 1975 as you can get.

We have a few more stops on my timeline before the excesses of the mid-seventies are swept away by punk and all that followed. You can hear why there were so many objections to a lot of this, but you can also, clearly, hear why it has survived as long as it has. It may or may not be the best Led Zeppelin album; it may or may not be your favourite, but there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s the most interesting.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Let’s see, the first four demonstrate a band growing into their sound and figuring out how to take over the world. The second and fourth are usually picked out, for reasons which become immediately obvious when you listen to them, but I remain fond of the way Led Zeppelin III doesn’t do the things it was clearly expected to at the time. Houses of the Holy is as good as the albums either side of it, and is perhaps a little overlooked. Later albums, after the car crashes and tragedies, really don’t hang together as well, but I still like In Through The Out Door, for all its flaws – I think you can see where this band might have gone next (and if you want to know where they thought they were going, have a listen to Wearing and Tearing from the posthumous album, Coda).

Compilations to consider?

A couple – I think Mothership contains everything you need to know if you want to find out what all the fuss was about; there are others out there, and as long as they’re curated by Jimmy Page, you’ll be in safe hands.

Live albums?

I’m sure I’m not the only person to have been a little underwhelmed by The Song Remains the Same at the time; I’ve never quite got round to listening to the remaster, I really should do that. The Page-approved How the West Was Won is perhaps a better representation of what they sounded like in 1972, and we’ll address Celebration Day below.

Anything else?

Any number of books, of which Hammer of the Gods is lurid, sensationalist, and probably mostly true. I recently read When Giants Walked the Earth by Mick Wall, which is thorough, even if I could have lived without the bits where Wall imagines a band-members’ eye view. The Song Remains the Same film doesn’t really work, sadly – there’s a lot of ‘you had to be there, and on the same drugs’ about it, but if you want to watch the four of them living out their fantasies over some poorly-recorded concert footage, don’t let me stop you. There is a DVD of some of the concert footage, significantly cleaned up, but I’ve not seen that all the way through, so should reserve judgement. Celebration Day, however, is worth a look. The concert footage of the only reunion show is, of course, crystal clear, the sound is excellent, and the band appear mostly to be enjoying it. It’s not what a 1970s show would have been, of course, but it gives you an idea.

8. In A Glass House, Gentle Giant, 1973

Posted on October 17, 2021 by Richard

As with so many of these, the last two tracks are not from the original album

I’m going to try to stay away from talking about genre too much in these – I have plenty of views on labelling music, not all of them consistent. Fencing certain types of music off from others puts up barriers but having a label to put on something you don’t know can be helpful – it’s perfectly valid to ask what kind of music this is when it’s something you’ve never heard.

Equally, it’s often fun to go into something completely blind, and I’ve discovered some things I love by just taking a chance, knowing nothing in advance.

All of which is to say that I do want to talk a little about Prog Rock as a genre (or a label if you prefer) so I can talk about Gentle Giant, and why you may never have heard of them.

Every genre, I think, has a Gentle Giant – a band who fit all the defining characteristics; who should be talked about in the same breath as the really big names, yet who somehow never quite grow beyond their core fanbase, all of whom will tell you unprompted about what you’re missing and how they should have been as big as the bands you were all talking about.

The bands we were all talking about in our Year Areas (that’s what we called them; you may have had Form Rooms or Common Rooms, or you may not have had anything, come to think of it) were Pink Floyd, Yes, Genesis and so on. There were one or two devotees of the Canterbury scene who had Caravan and Camel albums; I even remember seeing Barclay James Harvest lurking among the inevitable copies of Supertramp’s Crime of the Century. I don’t, however, remember ever seeing anyone clutching a Gentle Giant album. They didn’t appear in the fairly eclectic selection available to borrow in the library, and while I was aware of the cover of Octopus, for example, they otherwise passed me by.

So this isn’t a tale of how I heard Proclamation on ‘Fluff’ Freeman’s Saturday afternoon radio show, or of how I discovered Acquiring the Taste in a pile of records being passed around school, or in a friend’s brother’s collection; it’s the story of how it’s never too late to find a new favourite band, and why their most difficult album may just be their best.

On the first Christmas after we moved to Victoria (that’s Victoria, BC in Canada, if you’re wondering – a long way from that Year Area where we were swapping ELP albums), my children, who clearly know me well, presented me with what I insisted on calling a Record Player – it may have a Bluetooth connection for significantly improved sound, and it may have more features and functions, and be altogether a significant upgrade, but in principle, it’s a turntable, an arm with a needle at the end, and therefore not so different from my faithful old red plastic player from forty years before, and suddenly I was back in a world I hadn’t known I’d missed so badly.

The first time I went back into what I now have to call a record store was at once disorienting and comfortingly familiar. I genuinely hadn’t understood that vinyl was back and in a way which resembles strongly the way it was when I was a teenager – there, among the racks of familiar sleeves, were hundreds of album covers I’d either only seen in miniature as CD sleeves, or as digital images. Alongside those, whole areas of music which I knew nothing about – there were genres which hadn’t existed the last time I’d flipped through racks of vinyl albums, and I’m pretty sure none of the staff had been born then either.

Of course, I had spent many happy hours in record stores since the advent of the CD, but there’s no comparison between clacking through piles of plastic squinting at the text on the back to being able to see the whole sleeve the way the designer imagined; to be able to read the track listing and sleeve notes without having to get out your magnifying glass (did I mention I’m nearly 60?).

That first time back in a record store was disorienting. I felt like some alien intruder into a world I didn’t properly understand – it looked familiar, but it had been so long since I’d done this, I wasn’t sure of the etiquette – was I supposed to be pulling gatefold sleeves out of their plastic to inspect the inside? Should I be sliding the second-hand albums out to check the quality? Was I still supposed to be carefully leaning everything back in place so the weight was distributed evenly? (Obviously, yes, but some people seemed not to worry about that). Most importantly, was it OK to crouch down and pull out those crates tucked below the racks to poke around looking for something which I hadn’t found in the main stack?

That first time back was also comforting, though. Here were all those Frank Zappa albums I used to pore over without ever buying one; the smell of the records, and the feel of them, even the way I kept my place in the stack with one hand, while pulling something out and flipping it over to read the back felt so completely familiar; a muscle memory which had never gone away. I could have spent all day in there just reorienting myself to it all and getting lost in rediscovering all those albums I used to own, and which I could now revisit.

That, too was disorienting – where to start? Did I work my way through all those albums which I used to own and rebuild my collection like that? Did I look for albums which I loved, but had only ever owned on cassette – either as original or copy – or CD? What about all those classic albums I had never quite got round to buying but which I clearly should own? Then there was the whole sub-category of albums which had come out long after the demise of vinyl and were here in a format they had never been designed for? Did I want to own a vinyl copy of OK Computer which was a double album, but with each side shorter than it would have been if it had been planned as a double vinyl album?

In the end, I settled for a pattern of partly recreating my old collection – there were a significant number of dreadful albums I owned in the early eighties which I had no particular desire to ever hear again, but a lot I really wanted back in my life – and filling the gaps in the ‘I really ought to own a copy of that’ section. This mainly worked well, and I quickly came to understand two things: I’d mostly rather own a second-hand copy of the appropriate vintage than a new re-press; and I now lived in a different continent, where the subtle differences between the album I remembered and the one I now owned were at once intriguing and unsettling.

There are several excellent record stores in Victoria – it’s that kind of place – each with its own unique approach to making me feel at once old and a kid again. On one of my first forays into the largest of them, I decided that I should fill one of the gaps in my rapidly-increasing pile of albums with a Gentle Giant LP. I had, by this time, heard quite a bit, partly thanks to the marvellous Steven Wilson remixes. I had been enthralled by the songs I’d heard from Three Friends, so that was the album I looked for.

I was then plunged into the whole confused and confusing saga of Gentle Giant releases in North America. I couldn’t find a copy of Three Friends because I was looking for the UK sleeve – in Canada and the US, the cover of Three Friends is the same as the cover of the first album, but with the words ‘Three Friends’ inked over the forehead of the giant (look it up if you don’t believe me). Having discovered how much I actually loved the sound of this band – in spite of the warnings in the sleevenotes of Acquiring the Taste which specifically advise against buying the album (again, look it up), and the fact that it remains dense, complex music which requires concentration and study rather than casual listening, I decided I needed to hear more, and to hear it in its original condition, un-remixed and un-repackaged.

Which led me on a tour of all the record stores in town before tracking down a copy of Octopus (I really wish I had the space to explain why that album title speaks to me) in Turntable Records, surely the most claustrophobic and wondrous record store in the world. I took Octopus to the counter, whereupon I was engaged in conversation about all things Gentle Giant – just like in the seventies, record stores now are owned and staffed by enthusiasts; people who will recommend things to you; ask if you’ve heard this or that; and have lengthy conversations about seeing Rory Gallagher in concert in 1979. I was told that, while Octopus is a wonderful album (as it is), I really should hear this one, and had a copy of In A Glass House pressed upon me, along with an anecdote about seeing the band perform it live.

It was a little more expensive than the others I was buying that day, but this was, of course, because it was an import, the original never having been released in North America, because the record company thought it ‘uncommercial’.

Exactly my kind of thing, then.

By all accounts, the band themselves aren’t fans of In A Glass House, it having been recorded in a period of turmoil with founding member and eldest of the three Shulman brothers, Phil, having quit to go back to civilian life. This only makes me like it more, of course. I have a decent collection of Gentle Giant albums now, but this is the one I come back to most often. I love the craft of the sleeve, with its plastic window featuring the band playing their instruments and the cardboard insert which features the band playing their other instruments, for reasons lost to the mists of time. I love the look and feel of the whole thing; the lyrics printed on the paper inner sleeve which has miraculously survived all this time, and the terrifying flimsiness of the vinyl itself; none of your 180 gram modern stuff here; this wobbles as you take it out of the sleeve, as records always used to.

It sounds, however, like few records ever did.

It starts with sounds of destruction – breaking glass and hammers resolving into a rhythm which is itself overtaken by the first song, The Runaway. Gentle Giant songs don’t sound like anyone else – some of the rhythmic devices could have come from a Frank Zappa album, but the instruments – some of them easier to identify than others – are always a little off-kilter, each phrase establishing itself only to be rephrased by some other part of the orchestra and then taken off in a different direction, while the vocals do whatever it is that Gentle Giant vocals do.

The Runaway is a perfect example of why it’s so hard to describe a Gentle Giant vocal line. The phrasing, right from the first line, is off; emphasis appears on all the wrong syllables, and some lines change pace halfway through, compressing half the meaning into an almost garbled string of sounds. Meanwhile, most of the lines are sung by two voices in harmonies which owe their origin to plainchant, and there are, likely as not, a pair of recorders playing an entirely different melody underneath.

Honestly, I could spend the rest of my life listening to just this one song, and not be confident of having heard everything going on in it.

An Inmate’s Lullaby is percussion-driven, hopping from rhythmic pattern to rhythmic pattern without ever settling on anything you could tap your toes to. As a portrait of insanity, it’s terrifyingly plausible, while managing to be whimsical and even fun in places – the rapidly detuned tympanum at the climax makes me laugh every time.

Way of Life is almost danceable – at least at first. It rollocks along, a song which you can follow and nod along to. Well, until it breaks down into a middle section featuring a pipe organ and the pure, calm voice of Kerry Minnear sounding like he’s dropped in from the thirteenth century. You close your eyes, ready to relax into this calm, pastoral vision only to have it explode into some kind of stadium rock anthem, where it only lingers long enough for you to get to your feet and attempt to sing along before seemingly forcing you to ride a bike with no suspension down a cobbled hill, before crashing into a church organ which moans at you wheezily until it expires, your front wheel still spinning while you stare up at the ceiling trying to figure out exactly what just happened.

And that’s just what’s happening in the left speaker…

The second side is even better. Experience is awash in keyboard lines which stutter along, punctuated by unidentifiable sounds under another intriguingly phrased vocal about…

It’s not clear what any of these songs are about, really. After dozens of listens, I came to the conclusion that it’s a picture of some kind of mental breakdown, seen from a number of angles and perspectives. It certainly would explain why the music leaps so effortlessly from one genre to another, from one rhythm to another, from the latest in electric and electronic sound to the recurring church organ; why the vocals head off in such wildly different directions, and why it’s all at once unsettling and enormously rewarding to listen to.

By the end of Experience, the modern rock song, complete with fluid and expressive guitar solo, is in all-out war with the harpsichord-driven madrigal. They come to a sort of uneasy peace by the end, and perhaps that is what this album’s about – figuring out how to reconcile all the different influences and experiences of everyone; how to cope with one piece missing.

Then A Reunion comes in and is basically a string quartet with electric bass and Minnear’s fragile voice pressed right up against the microphone so you can hear every breath. It is a welcome moment of calm before those same violins, now electrified, burst us into the title track and, perhaps, try to sum the whole thing up.

There’s no way to sum the whole thing up, though. In A Glass House the track, like In A Glass House the album, defies description – it lurches from moments of calm to passages of wild abandon. There’s melody which never quite manages to assert itself, and random instrumentation – saxophone and mandolin at one point – there are lyrics which pick out the themes of the whole thing without ever making themselves clear enough for you to nod sagely and say “oh, that’s what it’s all about”.

At times it sounds like pure 1973, all swampy guitars and pulsating bass, and in the next instant it leaps out of time altogether and wanders around the whole of musical history, trying things on and discarding them while always somehow managing to convince you that there’s a destination up ahead somewhere.

There is, to my great delight, a hidden track at the end of side two, featuring very short snippets form all six songs. It serves to illustrate that there has been a purpose to all of this, and it does have a thread running through it. It’s just that the thread is of some previously unknown material and quite possibly exists in a dimension we can’t quite perceive.

Another album released in 1973 touched on some of these same subjects and went on to dominate the musical landscape for decades; In A Glass House is the very definition of the road less travelled in comparison, but I’d argue that it’s just as deserving of your attention, and by virtue of it being largely unexplored territory, maybe has more to say.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Absolutely. In fact, I wouldn’t start here – Acquiring The Taste (if you can get past the frankly revolting cover), Three Friends, Octopus, The Power And The Glory, and Free Hand all have much to recommend them (listen to the first and last tracks on The Power and the Glory, for example) and perhaps should be tackled before diving headlong into this most complex of albums. Later albums try to adapt the Gentle Giant sound to move with the times, but don’t work for me – the joy and glory of this band is that they don’t try to fit in.

Compilations to consider?

For the usual Prog reasons, I am bound to say not really, but the aforementioned Steven Wilson remixes album, Three Piece Suite was my way in to the band, so maybe start there.

Live albums?

The only live album released in the band’s lifetime, Playing The Fool, gives a pretty good idea of what the live show was like around the time of Free Hand; it’s not on rotation like some of the other Prog live albums of the time are for me, despite the famous recorder quartet section on side two. There are a large number of other live albums out there, some of them more official than others, but I haven’t explored them. Yet. I feel like there’s still a lot to explore in the studio albums, so there’s time enough for all those….

NOTE ADDED JANUARY 2023: Here’s a thing. Playing The Fool may not have been in heavy rotation when I wrote this, but I subsequently acquired a vinyl copy and I think I am now ready to admit it to the very top tier of 1970s double live albums. It’s spectacularly good; I just needed to hear it properly in its original format to understand that. Ignore the idiot who wrote that last paragraph; he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Anything else?

Nothing written down (beyond things like this, and countless interviews and articles in the music press), but there are a couple of live DVDs available, and a few snippets on YouTube which serve to illustrate just how strangely compelling this band was.

Oh, and a kind of fan tribute / reunion video from the first COVID lockdown, which is just a delight.

7. Tubular Bells, Mike Oldfield, 1973

Posted on October 10, 2021 by Richard

This is a re-released version; only the first two tracks appear on the actual album

When I write, I write about memory. I don’t know why that is, particularly – I only identified it myself a few years ago, when I was ploughing through the piles of unfinished story ideas and almost-finished novels which litter my hard drive. Even the tagline for Going Back says that “some memories are not memories at all…” Some writers have subjects; mine appears to be the power and fallibility of memory.

All of which is to say that my original direction for this post was to do with not remembering exactly how and when I first heard Tubular Bells and wishing I could indulge in a little time travel to go back and experience that first listen again in the familiar comfort of my teenage bedroom.

I can, of course, picture the bedroom; my father still lives in that house, and when – pandemics permitting – I go over and visit, I can stand in the middle of that tiny boxroom and wonder how on earth I fitted everything in – so many books, so many records, so many football and music magazines – there was barely enough room for a bed and a wardrobe, although I was not a large child, so that probably helped.

One of the things I cannot figure out is where I put my faithful old red plastic record player. I did move the furniture around in there from time to time, so that doesn’t help, but I can’t bring to mind now which piece of furniture I must have balanced it on – a low table of some kind, perhaps, with enough space underneath for my slowly growing record collection? I just can’t picture it.

I know it wasn’t on my desk – dad had rigged up for me a cunningly hidden desk inside my built-in cupboard; it was situated over the top of the stairwell, and had a sloping floor, which I suppose stopped me letting my junk pile up down there, but also reduced its usefulness as a closet. We removed the door and dad mounted a large wooden surface across the width of the cupboard, with just enough space for me to pull up a chair and write my never-ending stream of history essays on. The record player didn’t live there, because there wouldn’t have been enough room for it.

I sat here, behind my current over-sized desk pondering this for some time, and my thoughts started to drift, as my thoughts tend to – I must have borrowed Tubular Bells from someone at school; it was how you heard new things in those days. I must have played it on that red record player with its low fidelity mono speaker, thereby reducing the effect more than a little, and I must have pored over the sleeve, making notes which would go on the cardboard insert of the blank tape I recorded it on.

Such a shame that home taping killed music, wasn’t it?

I found myself wondering about the stories I knew about the album – I knew about Richard Branson and Virgin Records; about Oldfield obsessively refining it to make it all sound the way it had in his head, and how side one was his original vision, and side two had been recorded in a less organised way, and I wondered to myself –

How the hell did I know all that?

By the time I first heard it, Tubular Bells wasn’t news. It didn’t appear in the music weeklies I was reading; indeed, by the time I was reading those, Oldfield was already on to the next album, or the one after that. By the time I owned Oldfield’s live album, which I’ll come back to later, this was all ancient history, so what was going on?

Yesterday morning (as I write this, of course), I had a revelation. I had poked at my memory long enough and hard enough for it to dislodge something long buried under the piles of trivia I keep there. I had a sudden insight into something I at first dismissed as irrelevant: one of the pieces of trivia I hang on to is the fact that Robert Palmer and Elkie Brooks used to be in a band together called Vinegar Joe.

Now, first, what possible benefit is there to me of knowing that? Secondly, where the hell had I found that out? I thought a little more, and I remembered a book. There was a book, and it lived in the school library.

The library was down at the far end of the English Department corridor, and contained, as all school libraries do, copies of improving texts which could be studied – I don’t remember the arrangements for borrowing, but I know you could duck in there and read things, which I rarely needed any encouragement to do. One day in 1977 or so, a new book appeared in the reference section – extraordinarily, the school had a copy of the New Musical Express Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock Music. I don’t know who made the decision to acquire that, but I do know for certain that but for whoever that person was, this, and many other examples of me writing about music, simply wouldn’t exist.

Now I think about it, it was a magnificent treasure trove. I, and many of my similarly obsessed peers, pored over it at lunchtimes and break times. We pretended to be carefully studying the history of Roxy Music and not even noticing those decidedly not-safe-for-school album covers, lovingly reproduced in living colour for our education and edification.

I read it, piecemeal and over a period of time, cover to cover. And it was between the covers of this magnificent volume that I learned so much of the trivia which clogs my brain to this day. I learned of Henry Cow and Egg, and so many other bands I would never quite get round to hearing, but would be able to name drop for years, and I learned about the history of Tubular Bells and Virgin Records, and now a lot more things make sense to me.

I never owned my own copy of it, although I wish I had now. Presumably it was frighteningly expensive at a time when acquiring albums was a bit of a stretch, and in any case, was out of date as soon as it left the printer, but what a magnificent thing it was; the closest a music-obsessed teenager in 1977 would come to being able to look things up on the internet.

So when I first put on side one of Tubular Bells, I kind of knew what to expect. Listening to it in 2021, of course, I’m immediately prompted to think of The Exorcist, but I hadn’t seen that back then (nor did I for many years afterward); back in about 1975 – my best guess for when this first reached my ears – I was engrossed in two separate things; identifying each instrument as it arrived, helpfully spelled out on the sleeve in what I assumed was the correct order; and trying to follow what was happening to the music.

There are no lyrics to distract me, so it’s all about hearing that theme weave in and out of the accompaniment and following the bass line until a second theme fades in and pushes its way to the front. Had the music teachers at school assigned this for us to analyse and break down, I suspect I’d know a lot more about music theory than I actually do. As it goes on, it seems less straightforward to follow – some of the instruments which come in just do their own thing without necessarily relating to what’s gone before. I wondered then, and wonder now, if there had ever been a temptation to break it up into individual tracks in places.

Listening now, of course, is intensely nostalgic – bits I’d half-forgotten swim back into focus just in time as one theme fades out and I suddenly remember which melody is coming next – there comes a point with all music where it doesn’t really matter if it works as a formal composition, it’s just familiar and makes sense on its own terms. About fifteen minutes in, I realise with a start that this is probably the only album which will appear in this entire list which doesn’t feature any drums beyond the timpani on the second side. Did I notice that at the time? Did anyone remark on it, or did we just take it for granted that the rhythm was entirely driven by the bass guitar?

Then Viv Stanshall pops in to take us on a tour of the instruments, and it all makes perfect early-seventies sense. Of course Viv Stanshall is announcing the instruments as if they are negotiating the entrance of some unfathomable social event. I did know who Stanshall was – I suspect the Bonzos had an entry of their own in the Encyclopedia, and in any case, John Peel was the home of the Rawlinson End broadcasts – played among the offbeat and obscure during those late night radio programmes I definitely wasn’t listening to when I should have been asleep.

The only issue I had with Tubular Bells then, and still do to an extent, is that side one really does tell the whole story; the second side feels like a bit of an afterthought, as pleasant and entertaining as it is. Even now, having had all these years to think, I don’t know if I have much to say about it beyond it being in many ways more of the same, albeit with some different instruments and a little slower paced. If I’d had my own copy, I don’t know how often I’d have gone to the trouble of turning it over each time.

As it was, however, I had taped it from the copy which belonged to whoever it was who was brave enough to lend it to me in the first place, so my tape – lovingly transferred from the single speaker on my red plastic Fidelity HF42 record player to my cheap plastic cassette recorder via the ‘included’ microphone placed as close as possible to the source to minimise the background noises – played the whole thing all the way through, so if I wanted to listen to the other side of the tape (I think a Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac compilation, though I could be wrong), I’d have to listen to this the whole way through, even trying to ‘sing’ along with the Piltdown Man’s grunts and howls.

Of course, for all that I ‘knew’ Tubular Bells at the time, it can be plainly seen from my primitive recording set up that I hadn’t really heard it. Playing it through my computer speakers from a digital download about thirty years after it came out was a significant improvement, but it wasn’t until I acquired my own second-hand vinyl copy a few years back and listened to it through a really good pair of noise-cancelling headphones that I really heard it all the way from the grand piano intro to the recapitulation of the theme on acoustic guitar at the end, and then on into the Sailor’s Hornpipe.

Of course it’s better, but it doesn’t have quite the same effect on me as that fuzzy old tape had.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

There are a lot of Mike Oldfield albums out there, several of them reinterpretations or reimaginings of Tubular Bells; I can’t in all honesty recommend many of them, because in most cases, all I’ve ever done is give them a listen or two and then gone back to the original version. However, we had a copy of Five Miles Out for many years (I suspect it was Zoë’s rather than mine originally) and it’s still good, especially the title track and that one Hall and Oates made famous.

Compilations to consider?

Not that I’m aware of – as with so many of the artists who have gone before, I’m not sure how you could break Oldfield’s music into small enough chunks to fit on a ‘Greatest Hits’ – there’s one on Spotify, and it runs to two and a half hours…

Live albums?

I had a copy of Exposed when it came out – there was a documentary – maybe a South Bank Show – about the live show at the time, and it intrigued me enough to get my own copy. I remember it being interesting, but essentially a live version of the Incantations album followed by a live version of Tubular Bells with an orchestra. I haven’t heard it in many years, though.

Anything else?

Oldfield’s autobiography, Changeling, looks intriguing, but I’m afraid I’ve never read it. The relatively recent BBC documentary is available (at least it is here in Canada) on YouTube, and is definitely worth a watch.

6. Ege Bamyası, Can, 1972

Posted on October 3, 2021 by Richard

One more album from 1972, and while it has a lot in common with the others, it’s not something I was familiar with at the time, or for many years afterward. I definitely wasn’t listening to experimental Krautrock along with my regular infusions of prog, and the only connection I had with any of this in the 1970s was that I knew the name Holger Czukay.

At some point in about 1976, I started buying the weekly music papers. My paper of choice, and I’ve confessed to this before, was Sounds. I am convinced that Sounds shaped my view of music in a not-entirely healthy way for far too many years; I know for certain that this list of 60 albums would be quite different had I been reading the NME or Melody Maker every week, and I doubt it would exist at all had I been reading Record Mirror, although my only interaction with RM at all was to occasionally look at it for chart details, I’m not really basing that on anything.

Each week, I’d read Sounds from cover to cover, starting with the news section which I only later came to realise were simply pasted in paragraphs from record label press releases, all the way through to the mysterious classified adverts at the back (ads for loon pants ran for many years after they fell out of fashion; I often wondered who was buying this stuff, although the regular ‘comedy’ t-shirts always cheered me up, whether or not I thought the Pope smoked dope).

Reading Sounds was an education – either I was learning about new and upcoming releases by bands I liked already, or being pointed in the direction of other things I might like, or I was reading about whole areas of music which I knew nothing about and making mental notes. My mental notes, however, often went nowhere – unless something appeared on John Peel’s radio show, it was unlikely I’d ever hear any of it – for all that I loved almost everything about 1978, as we’ll see, it’s almost inconceivable to me now that I couldn’t just press a button somewhere and listen to the latest thing to see if I would actually like it.

On top of that, I wasn’t exactly rich. I came late to the world of work, not so much as a paper round in the years when I’d have enjoyed having some disposable income, so if I wanted to hear music, I’d have to save up for it.

So the only way to hear music by the regularly-mentioned Holger Czukay and his band of German musicians would be if someone had a copy I could borrow (as far as I know, no-one did), or if there was a copy available to borrow from the library. I’ll be coming back to the library, but it’s safe to say they didn’t have any Can albums in stock.

Or maybe they were so popular that they were always out on loan; I know which theory I subscribe to.

Eventually, however, I came back to the 1970s and started to poke around in the areas I’d neglected. Fate, or the Scottish education system in the 1970s, dictated that the Modern Language I would be first exposed to would be German. I’d go on to take French further (and learn a decent amount of Italian later), but my first exposure to another language was to Hans und Lieselotte and their dog Lumpi. This, naturally, led to an affinity with Kraftwerk and their ubiquitous single Autobahn – I actually had my way in to all this German music, but didn’t pursue it. I was, however, hypnotised by Autobahn, and that probably coloured my view of German music; it all likely sounded like that. I had no idea what ‘Motorik’ meant, but I’d read about it, and eventually I read enough to understand that there were all sorts of other things out there I should hear.

And then, one day, there was the internet, and shortly after that became a daily part of my life, it was possible to listen to pretty much anything you wanted – you think the internet is a Wild West of unfettered access to copyrighted music now? You should have seen the late 1990s.

At some point, I clicked on a link which took me to that weird-looking record I remembered from my ‘browsing in record shops’ days, and discovered that my Prog-period self would have just loved this, and that my current self still does.

The first thing to point out, naturally, is the cover image. It’s distinctive and doesn’t seek to explain itself – it’s in Turkish, for a start (Turkish is another language I poked at for a bit, but that’s a story for much later) and it’s a can of okra. That’s it. What does it have to do with the music? Who knows? It was 1972; things didn’t have to make sense.

Every time I put this on, it startles. Even knowing that Pinch is so drum-heavy, I’m not prepared for how the relentless rhythm overpowers everything, nor am I ever quite ready for Damo Suzukis’ not-quite intelligible lyrics delivered in a spaced-out drawl over (or, more accurately, under) a scattered bassline which is pointing roughly in the direction of the drums rather then doing the traditional rhythm-section thing. 15-year-old me would have loved this, but I doubt whether he’d have understood it. 58-year-old me doesn’t understand it either, but it’s compelling.

By the time Sing Swan Song drifts into the light from behind the waterfall (echoes of Close to the Edge, of course), it’s clear that Suzuki is actually singing in English, which, on first listen, was a little disappointing – only after absorbing it for a while and doing some more reading did I properly understand that this was the least German of the German bands; Can happened to be based in Germany, but they were World Music long before that was a label.

The sound remains restless and hard to define throughout – One More Night is the sound of a Saturday night, bass and drums oozing through the walls or up through the floorboards as the band layer the sound with those fluid, seventies guitar and keyboard lines which are at once familiar and oddly alien.

The second side kicks things up a gear by stripping them back – Vitamin C is a spare, rhythmic skeleton of a hit single – if you’re looking for a way in to this album, perhaps this is it – it’s a more recognisable song with verses and a memorable chorus that what we’ve heard so far, and it’s likely to be the melody stuck in your head several days later.

Soup reminds me of late sixties psychedelia at first, but keeps veering off in random directions and speeding up or slowing down as the mood takes the band; by the end, having survived the complete breakdown of the sound into great slabs of almost indigestible noise, we appear to be somewhere in North Africa, hearing those distinctive sounds as Suzuki rambles off into his own made-up language, and the drums search in vain for some structure.

I’m so Green feels like a return to the world of normality after the apocalyptic ending of Soup, only out of context can you really appreciate how strange it actually is. Once it shuffles off stage, Spoon wraps things up – famously (for some definition of famous, of course), its success as a single after being used in a German TV show earned the band enough money to make the album. I can hear that soundtrack vibe in there somewhere, but I also hear the sounds which tie this to the synthesizers of Kraftwerk, and – with hindsight, of course – the soundscape which inspired so much of what came after this.

I didn’t hear this in 1972 (it would likely have terrified me), nor did I hear it at the time when I was trying to understand the likes of Public Image; if I had, a lot of things would have made a lot more sense.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

The only one I know is Tago Mago, which is the same but completely different. One day, I’ll get round to hearing the rest, but I feel like I’ve hardly peeled back the lid on Ege Bamyası, so there’s plenty of time yet.

Compilations to consider?

I’ve listened to Anthology all the way through, and I have a lot of mental notes of things to follow up (where the hell does She Brings the Rain fit in to everything, for example?) – I’d suggest that’s a good place to start.

Live albums?

There is one – released originally as part of a box set, I don’t know how easily available it is, and I’ve never listened to it, so let me know what you think!

Anything else?

I have put All Gates Open: The Story of Can on my wishlist; I’ll let you know if I ever get round to reading it. I should also point you at Julian Cope’s Krautrocksampler, although, again, it’s one of those books on my ‘I do mean to get round to it one day’ pile.

Oh, and Can appeared on Top of the Pops once, which is – odd.