Monthly Archives: December 2021

18. Strangers in the Night, UFO, 1979

Posted on by

We’re now firmly in 1979, and it’s every bit as confused musically as 1978 was.  There’s a period in my life coming up where I only bought albums by bands with long hair and distorted guitars, and I’ve had to work quite hard to keep this list representative without swamping the next few posts in albums which even I don’t really remember.

For the sake of research, of course, I have listened to some of them, but my decision not to include albums by the likes of Krokus, Tygers of Pan Tang or April Wine (no,really) was entirely justified.

Still, this was always going to be on the list.  Indeed, when I tried to come up with some rules to help me narrow the selection down, the ‘no live albums’ rule was never going to make the cut because it would mean I couldn’t include this.  It really is that good, and I’m going to try to explain why.

I have a post or two coming up which will try to explain my sudden conversion from thoughtfully nodding-along devotee of the abrasive and obscure to wildly head-shaking gangly, denim-clad fan of middle-age hearing loss, so I’m not going to go into all of that here.  This album landed in my life probably about a year after it came out, just as all that noise was turning my head, but it was different then, and it is now.

UFO are too easily dismissed as just another heavy metal band, but I’ve never been convinced that was what they were trying to be.  Sure, they fit into the same pattern established by Deep Purple and Uriah Heep – the five-piece with keyboards tempering the guitar-heavy sound, but there were as many cliches missing as present in their sound, and I’ve retained a fondness for their sound, and this album in particular, precisely because they didn’t do the things the other bands did.

For a start, UFO had a background in the late sixties underground, and at least one album which they themselves defined as ‘space rock’; their singer, the incomparable Phil Mogg, had a warm mid-range voice with no histrionics or extreme frequencies, their songs aimed more in the direction of Springsteen than Tolkien, and theirs was, unusually for the bands I was listening to at the time, music which worked significantly better live than in the studio.

According to my faulty memory, I saw them live at least three times, and remember that they were always good value; joyful and straightforward, clearly having as good a time up there as we were down here.  You definitely couldn’t always say that about the avalanche of loud bands I went to see in those years; there was always something special about a UFO show.

(Incidentally, the only other band I remember as fondly in terms of terrific, engaging live shows were Whitesnake, but they weren’t getting on this list.  Make of that what you will…)

Of course, they did – especially in the version of the band featured here – have an extraordinary guitarist who was writing the book on what rock or metal guitar was supposed to sound like; Michael Schenker had heard all of the first wave of rock guitarists and decided that he could do that, only faster and louder.  Unencumbered by self-doubt, he propelled these otherwise perfectly solid rock songs into something closer to the sounds which the music of the NWOBHM – the world’s worst acronym – was about to make at once popular and unfashionable.

And there’s the issue, I think, with UFO.  At a time when the musical trends were still firmly in the realm of the new and experimental; when ‘unpolished but keen’ was still a virtue, and when creating a new idiom rather than playing in an existing one was seen as crucial to success, UFO had found a sound and style which worked, and had polished it in hundreds, if not thousands, of live shows, but had discovered that – for the most part – the music press weren’t interested in that.  Certainly radio and TV weren’t interested in them, and it was hard to shake off the idea that their sound was somehow ‘old-fashioned’ or derivative in some way.

I think you could say that about a lot of the bands which followed them, and I can honestly tell you that none of that criticism ever bothered me – my sole criterion for music at the time was whether or not I liked it – but I think it held them back.  Even today, when many of the older bands have been reappraised in the light of having 50 years or more of context, I don’t think this terrific rock band have ever been afforded the respect they deserved.

Which, when you listen to the live behemoth that is Strangers in the Night (or to give it its full, original, title – Strangers in the Night: A Double Live Album), is frankly baffling.

Before I dove into the warm bath of nostalgia which is the music itself, a word or two about the album and why – in this case especially – more is less, and better is worse.

As I’ve noted already, double live albums were rare and precious beasts, and this one was no exception.  The cover – by legendary suppliers of surreal covers to the likes of Pink Floyd, Hipgnosis – somehow captures the thrill of being right down the front of the stage by hiding the raw close-up photograph with pop art dots and lines.  It’s still startlingly effective at capturing the energy of the whole thing without being in any way cliched or stereotypical.  Even today, looking over at my own copy, it leaps out of the neat row of spines, almost insisting on being played.

Sadly, though, my own vinyl copy, although a thing of beauty in its own right, isn’t the same as the original copy.  Throughout the whole of this project, I have been carefully noting every Spotify link which has in some way offered ‘extras’.  This is the first album in the list whose reissued version messes with the running order (and, not incidentally for me) also completely changes the packaging, so that the careful diagonally placed wording, and the extension of the cover image into the gatefold, has been replaced by horizontal text, and a nasty dull green interior.

All of which means that I’m still searching for a second hand copy of the original release, because this stuff matters.

It matters that the original release features a running order which doesn’t reflect the actual stage show of the time.  You might think it more important to keep the flow of the stage show, but I disagree.  The stage set was designed to work as a full 90-minute plus event; the album has to work as four sides of vinyl, meaning that each side has to have its own flow.  Each section has to cover arouns 20 minutes, and sound like it all fits together; each side has to have its own logic while leaving you wanting more.

The reissued and remastered vinyl edition breaks those rules, and while I still love the music (and appreciate the extra tracks, even if I still think ‘Cherry’ is one of those rare UFO songs which works much better in its studio incarnation, and is really weirdly placed as second song), I’d much rather have the original, which just works better.

The Spotify link up there, therefore, is a playlist I’ve put together which restores the original running order.  All that’s missing is the original spoken introduction (the reissue adds it to the beginning of one of the extra tracks), which is a shame, but you can’t have everything.

This album, however, does have a pretty good stab at giving you everything.  Schenker, famously, quit the band before this was released, meaning that he took no part in any overdubs or other tidying up of the sound; the extraordinary guitar is all exactly as it sounded on the night (or nights; no-one is pretending this is all from one show, and it is rumoured that there are even better takes out there, some of which have been released.  While I’d like to hear those – and will track them down eventually – nothing can take the place of the original and the effect it had on me at the time.)

So, because of the way Spotify works, you’ll have to imagine the introduction (“Hello, Chicago! Would you please welcome from England…U…F…O!) before plunging in with me.

Natural Thing starts on this version with a spoken introduction which feels a little pout of place, but immediately sets the tone for the whole thing – the guitar riff is pushed a little back in the mix at times, making this a full band sound, and while it bounces along nicely, I’m already anticipating the transition to Out in the Street, where the band slow the tempo down and let the keyboards set the scene for a song which appears to be about a fading silent movie star.  It’s the first time we hear Schenker really do his thing, and he somehow manages to make a guitar solo in his own wild style also fit the gentle melancholy of the whole song.

In the spirit of the whole ‘making each side flow’ idea; the other two tracks on side one crank up the pace; both Only You Can Rock Me and Doctor Doctor are splendid examples of the rock anthem; both together this early on in the album might threaten to overshadow what’s to come, but they’re merely setting the scene.  Only You Can Rock Me is also a perfect example of the way UFO used dynamics to make their songs stand out; instead of just hurtling headlong into the solo, the song slows down, catches its breath and clears the stage for their young German superstar.

Michael Schenker repays the debt at the beginning of Doctor Doctor, laying out a carefully structured introduction before launching into the simplest and most straightforward (but also one of the most beloved) of UFO songs.  It’s not a complicated thing, but it never fails to put a smile on my face.  And this is only side one.

Side two begins somewhat controversially.  Claiming to be a couple of songs short (although two songs were added to the reissue, so not sure what the real story is there), it was later – much later – revealed that both Mother Mary and This Kid’s were recorded as-live and added to this with overdubbed crowd noises. I certainly didn’t notice at the time, and I’m not sure what it matters now.  One of the intriguing things about the idea of these being studio recorded is, of course, that this probably isn’t Schenker playing, but his replacement, Paul Chapman.  I’m not sure you can tell the difference, which may be as a result of Chapman’s own versatility, or possibly simply down to my own familiarity with the songs; it all sounds right to me, because I’ve heard it so often.  Listening now to This Kid’s I’m wondering if I do hear a different sound to the solo, or if I’m now projecting what I know onto it.

What I do hear is what I always loved about this song; the deliberate breakdown into a kind of loping blues to – once again – set the guitar solo off, before it. too breaks down and ends almost abruptly.

There’s no doubt, however, that Love to Love was recorded live; the studio version of this song has a grandeur to it, but the live version towers over that; carefully building its various instrumental introductions (including a pretty good for its time synthesized string section) before Mogg’s world-weary voice does heartbreak and loneliness in a way few singers in this genre ever did.  Live, this song was always enhanced by the lighting; “misty green and blue” makes a lot more sense when you see it performed.

Love to Love is the first song where we properly get to hear what was so special about this band playing live; it is a slow song with all the pacing issues that can come with that, but they never let the tension of the song drop; it keeps you involved as it makes space for everyone to take the weight of the rhythm while we wait for the dam to break; when it finally does, the guitar solo is – of course – impeccable and inevitable, driving us to an ending which seemed unreachable at the beginning.

It’s at this point I will take a paragraph to wax lyrical about the bass playing of the late Pete Way.  In many respects, Way was the focal point of the band in the live environment.  Even more than his guitarists, Way was the energy of the band on stage, constantly on the move, always driving the songs along, or reining them in as needed, and not averse to a little showing off (or lying down) of his own.  I’m probably going to forget to mention it when we get to Rock Bottom, but it’s the bass in that song which allows the astonishing guitar to work, and it’s Pete who gets the thing back on the rails once Schenker has – as far as anyone can tell – spontaneously combusted.

Halfway through, and the pace picks back up – Lights Out is an inevitable crowd-pleaser, allowing Phil Mogg to demonstrate that he does indeed know which city he’s in (Chicago in this case) and provoke an audience which is already bouncing along to even greater frenzy.  Lights Out also demonstrates the flexibility of the UFO lineup – the keyboards are a key part of the overall sound, but if Paul Raymond needs to pick up his rhythm guitar and keep the train rolling, he does just that, underpinning the instrumental sections with a doubling of the rhythm, which lets the actual rhythm section keep the pace of the thing going.

And then we reach the centrepiece of the whole thing, the full eleven minutes of Rock Bottom, demonstrably a crowd favourite, and – of course – the one where the guitarist gets to properly show off.

Except, I don’t buy the whole ‘showing off’ thing.  I don’t know how this song evolved from its studio version to the whole wig-out we hear here, but it will surely have been an organic thing; the middle eight slowly expanding as Schenker thinks of something else he can add to the structure of it.  At no point does it feel to me that he’s just playing for the sake of playing; there’s a structure to it, at first an interaction with the rest of the band before he pulls on a thread long enough for it to start to unravel and take him to somewhere new.  It’s what musicians do; what they’ve always done – just follow the music and see where it will take them.  Sometimes we get to go with them, and when someone as startlingly talented as Michael Schenker is at the wheel, you’ll be taken to places you really didn’t expect.

There’s a drum fill towards the end which seems to signal the start of a second movement, or an understanding that we’ve reached the point where it needs to come back to the main theme, then Schenker wraps it all up and stands back, wondering where the song went.

Everyone takes a deep breath, then it’s once more round the main structure of the song before an inevitably protracted ending, because you can’t just end a song like that; you have to end it.

Rock Bottom will, I’m sure, have been the final song of the main set; whet’s left are the encores, and they are signalled for the owner of the original vinyl edition by having to get up and turn a disk over. 

Spotify, of course, ploughs straight on, but if you want to take a short pause at this point, I recommend doing just that.

Side four is pretty much party time – Too Hot to Handle is a straightforward fun rock song, tempered by I’m a Loser which is probably the finest example of the social realist UFO song – they flirted with this idea several times during their career, but perhaps never as successfully as this, with its evocation of being homeless in the big city.  Not, perhaps, where the previous couple of songs had been pointing, but as much classic UFO as the whole ‘rocking out and having fun’ songs.

I’m pretty sure it didn’t come in the middle of the encore in reality, though; it definitely brings the vibe down a notch.

On the home straight now, though – Let it Roll is closer in spirit to those early Deep Purple songs than anything else here – the nearest UFO ever came to a ‘cars and girls’ song, but with the dynamics we’ve come to love keeping it from becoming just a mindless ‘driving fast’ song; there’s always something more in the music than is hinted at in the lyrics of a UFO song, and nothing spells that out better than this song, with the keyboards shadowing the guitar through the instrumental break and giving it a distinctive shove as it kicks back into gear.

It comes to an end with Shoot Shoot, another clear crowd-pleaser, and pretty much the perfect song to end on, as it contains all the elements which have made the previous eighty or so minutes such fun; catchy melodies, great interplay between all the musicians, wild guitar work, and just an enormous sense of everyone thoroughly enjoying themselves.

I know I see this album through the uncritical lens of nostalgia, but, honestly, if I had to save only one album from the dozens I bought around this time to represent the kind of hard rock or whatever genre you want to call it that I loved so much back then, it would be this one, hands down, no contest.  It’s quite possibly the greatest live album of its kind, and pretty much one of the best rock albums of all time.  No way it wasn’t going on this list.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Everything you read will tell you it’s Lights Out, and it’s a fine studio album to be sure (but with the caveat, as noted, that the live versions blow the studio ones out of the water).  Personally, I’d recommend one of the later studio albums, The Wild, The Willing and the Innocent (remember what I said about Bruce Springsteen?) – it covers all the UFO bases, and is pretty much the peak of their mature songwriting.

Compilations to consider?

If you treat this as a compilation, it’s pretty much unbeatable, although there are some later songs worth consideration, so I’d probably go for Headstone.  I know they got back together and kept making music, but they definitely peaked around 1981, and Headstone covers that era as well.

Live albums?

Well, yes.

I haven’t listened to any of the others, but they were always a compelling live band, so anything which is well recorded and has decent sound will probably hit the spot. 

Anything else? If you’ve become hooked on the wild and crazy guitar sound of Michael Schenker, then you should check out some of his solo work, although it does sound a little dated now.  I remember being particularly fond of his Live at Budokan album, so maybe start there.  I know I’d read a biography of UFO (I read Bernie Marsden’s book a while back; having been briefly in UFO in the mid-seventies, he had some interesting things to say; I’d love to hear the other side of the story, and all the other stories…)

17. Video-Flashback, Eberhard Schoener, 1978

Posted on by
This should link to a playlist – just let it run…

I was a perverse child.  And, yes, I was still a child in 1979, even if I didn’t particularly believe that at the time.  Just take the existence of this album in my collection – the entire reason I owned it was that I was determined not to like The Police.

The first Police album, Outlandos d’Amour hade made an appearance on the old record player in the drama theatre dressing room, and neither I nor anyone else knew quite what to make of it.  I should explain:  towards the end of my fifth year I more or less stopped going to classes and spent all my spare time in the drama theatre.  This is not quite as rebellious as it sounds, of course – exams were over, the only meaningful classes were the ones relating to next year’s courses, and June of 1979 was spent putting on plays.

There’s another album coming up which will poke around at that particular time in my life, so I’m going to restrict my thoughts this time out to the regular flow of albums which were played on that record player (and how I wish I could remember what it looked like – I can picture the albums themselves lying on the shelf in front of the mirrors, but the machine we played them on draws a complete blank).

That dressing room is where I first heard the early Jam albums, the Damned, all those Bowie albums which required more careful listening than we were giving them (especially Lodger, which I didn’t understand at all at the time), a couple of late Seventies Rolling Stones albums (which I didn’t pay particular attention to, to the point where I still confuse Black and Blue and Some Girls), and this Police album, which kept coming back to the top of the pile, and still didn’t add up.

The thing was, I suppose, that we were (certainly I was) heavily influenced by what we read in the music press, which had generally been unimpressed by the whole Police thing.  I could hear what the critics meant; they were trying to be punk but failing to convince; they were using reggae stylings but in a strangely unmoving way; they were way more accomplished musicians than they were letting on, and one of them was a straight-up hippy who had been in Curved Air.

I decided I didn’t like them (I softened towards them much later, when I finally accepted that they were just a pop-rock band like all the others), and aside from joining in the general sniggering whenever the song about the blow-up doll came on, tried my best to ignore them.

Then I read about this album by some German composer and early practitioner of electronic music, which featured all three members of The Police to greater or lesser degree, and which sounded obscure enough to pique my interest, and just about perverse enough to make it worth investing in.  I think my intended line, if questioned, was that while I didn’t like The Police, I did have a lot of time for their earlier stuff, which most people hadn’t heard.

I don’t remember ever being questioned, however.

What I do remember is going down to The Other Record Shop on Union Street specifically to look for this album.  Ok, even that is not quite true; I remember going to look for an album called Video-Magic, which I’d read the review of.  After a little head scratching, I discovered this one called Video-Flashback and decided that something must have been lost in translation, as this one did feature all three members of The police, and the songs I’d remembered the names of.

What I’ve since discovered, while trying to find this album to add it to this list, is that this is actually a re-released version of Video-Magic with a couple of tracks from an earlier album called Flashback added on.  It didn’t bother me back then, as I had  – pretty much – secured the album I’d been looking for; it threw me completely when compiling this, because what I remembered and what was true were some distance apart, but still obviously related.

To give you an idea of the confusion, the front covers of Video-Magic and Video-Flashback are different, but the back covers are the same.  Both are on the Harvest label (with that lovely bright yellow and green colour scheme), but the track listings are subtly different.  I struggled for ages to make my memory and reality match up, but I think I finally got there.

So, in outright defiance of one of the rules I set out for myself at the start, this is a compilation album.  I should really have taken it off the list because of that, but I’d sunk a lot of time and effort into it (just pulling together the playlist up there took a lot of time), and I do remember that I wasn’t that keen on it after all the fuss, so I’m looking forward to a re-evaluation.

The first thing I’m going to say is that I’ve heard all of these tracks during the whole ‘building a playlist’ operation, and I clearly remember all of them, so I must have given it more than just a cursory play at the time.  And on first impression, it’s….  Well, let’s find out, shall we?

The first track is Trans-Am and the opening fanfare is immediately familiar; I almost feel that this must have been used somewhere else, although that seems unlikely.  I can’t tell (the recording isn’t exactly crystal clear) if Sting is just yelling gibberish at the beginning, but it does turn in to recogniseable English words in the middle, and you have to say, the mixture of classical instruments and futuristic-for-the-time electronica works pretty well.

Only the Wind sounds like it comes in halfway through, with the chorus right up front and seemingly at the end of a long development which we haven’t heard.  It’s immediately replaced by a reprise of the swirly electronic sound effect from the first track, then an entirely different song takes over, all ambient electronics and wide soundscapes.  Maybe we’re meant to have been swept up in the wind; I can’t be sure.  It feels like this is actually the music which Schoener was interested in, but he shrugs and ushers Sting and Andy Summers back in at the end – the singer in full high-pitched growl mode as we go out the way we came in.

Speech Behind Speech is much more interestingly mournful; a better analyst than me would be able to identify which mode this is written in, but I really like the wide open spaces of it, and Summers’ guitar howling over the sparse melody in a way which must have heavily appealed to the Prog part of my brain.  I’m not sure who wrote the lyrics for this, but they also fit the prog mould – they sound profound, but don’t really mean anything very much.  As much as I enjoyed being re-acquainted with the first two, this is the first track I feel I’ll come back to.

Koan starts promisingly; the strings weaving around a synthesiser line which slowly dissolves into something more chaotic.  This strongly reminds me of modern, minimalist classical music – it’s a long track, and it’s tempting (in the absence of any other evidence) to regard it as the heart of the album, the other songs with the soon-to-be-famous singer on them will draw the crowds in, but this is what the artist really wants them to hear.  Again, the sound quality leaves a little to be desired, and I’d really like to see if I can track down a clean copy of it, because it’s got a lot if interesting stuff going on, including several moments when it really could turn into Kraftwerk, and others where it’s more Steve Reich or Terry Riley.  It’s downright fascinating, and I’m definitely coming back to this one.  The discography listing on Discogs gives this as 8 minutes long, while the video (taken from Video-Magic is over 12 minutes; I’m afraid I don’t remember it well enough to be able to pinpoint where the fade was.  Or the edit, if that’s what happened.

I’m at the ‘turn disc over’ moment, and the thing I register most clearly is that I want to know more – I really want to dig deeper into this.

Octogon (sic) starts with some industrial beats, but quickly adds a loping bass with more intriguing synth sounds before turning into a fairly generic-sounding mid-seventies rock track – it could almost be Mike Oldfield, another Schoener collaborator, accompanying the very Prog-sounding middle section.  Again, it’s quite a bit more than the sum of its parts here; I find myself staring off into space and trying to pick out all the inspirations.  Assuming that is Andy Summers, it’s a long way from the work he was doing with The Police, which I guess was my point all those years ago.

Frame of Mind is not at all what I was expecting.  It came back to me after hearing it, but the boys’ choir singing plainchant had me looking to see if I hadn’t picked the wrong video entirely.  Fortunately, Sting’s fluid bass and the high register strings pull it back into the same idiom as most of the rest of the album, so I know it’s the right song, but it threw me for a moment.  Now, having listened a few more times, it mostly fascinates me, the idea of melding soaring guitar solos and simple choral singing, surely recorded in a church, sounds like a terrible idea, but it really does work.  I might go back and play with the mix a little, but then again, I’m not listening to it in optimal circumstances.  Despite that, I love the ending when all the instruments drop out and the choir sings us gently to the end.

I can’t be sure that the video I found for Signs of Emotion is for the right version.  It sounds right at the beginning, but it’s clearly been taken from another compilation, and I can’t help feeling that it’s a remixed or even re-recorded version of the song I remember.  Something’s not quite right about it, although that may just be me over-analysing things.  It’s a little self-indulgent, this one, but works in context, I think.

A very strange thing happens a couple of minutes into Code-Word Elvis.  I listened to it all the way through while I was compiling the playlist, because I had remembered this song in particular, and I still really like the juxtaposition of Sting’s vocals and the solo violin, and the fact that it still sounds like it was recorded in the toilet.  Exactly one minute and twenty seconds into the video, my head snapped up, as the record appeared to jump.  Now, this wouldn’t be so surprising (many YouTube videos are taken from turntable recordings, after all), but here’s the thing – my copy jumped in exactly the same place!  So, there are two possibilities here; either an entire run of pressings of this record all jumped at the same point, or this is actually taken from a recording of the record I used to own.  Both are highly unlikely, I’m sure you’ll agree, so I’ve finally settled on the third option as being likely to be true – it’s not a jump at all; it’s deliberate, and I’ve misheard the lyric all along.  I now am – almost – convinced that Sting doesn’t repeat the “d’you like my hero” line; he actually sings something like “d’you like rock ‘n’ roll”, which changes the rhythm of the words, and makes it sound like there’s a skip when there actually isn’t.

It definitely bugged me at the time – a brand new record shouldn’t jump like that – but to hear that jump again, exactly where I remembered it, brought me up short.  As did the fact that I actually remembered the sequence of numbers which are probably meant to represent Elvis’ zip code or something (I checked; it’s not a real zip code) which lead into the sudden acceleration of the sax and guitar break.  I think this is going to turn out to be my favourite of all the songs on here, partly because it helped me remember that I owned several albums which skipped in predictable places, and hearing songs from them on CD later in life just felt wrong.

Let’s wrap up with Video-Magic, which naturally starts with sound effects from the latest fad, the unthinkably cool video magic of Pong.  Now that video games are mainstream culture, and incorporating sounds from them into music wouldn’t be seen as anything special, it makes me smile to hear the ‘brave new world’ implied by this.  I also have to comment on Sting’s willingness to push his voice about as high as the human voice will go.  Not entirely successfully, it has to be said, but it’s more arresting (did you see what I did there) than anything he did on Outlandos d’Amour.

How to sum that up, then?  First of all, I was smarter than I realised in 1979.  This is an interesting, eclectic album with many things I’ll want to come back to, and I will definitely continue my search for a vinyl copy, although I doubt many, if any, ever made it across the Atlantic.  I also wonder at myself a bit – this really should have led me into more strange and intriguing music than it actually did.  I teetered on the edge of the weird and obscure in 1979, but I have to admit that the properly odd music just slid by out of reach until some time later, when I went back to find all the things I’d been missing.

I did finally figure out Lodger, for example, and while a lot of the music my neighbours in university halls of residence were playing only became favourites later in life, I didn’t write it all off, perhaps partly because of this.

 Any other albums by this artist to consider?

This is the only one I’ve heard (at least, the only one I’ve knowingly heard).  I intend to rectify that.

Compilations to consider?

Well, it turns out….

Live albums?

Probably, but not that I can recommend.  Keep reading, though.

Anything else?

Yes! (told you it would be worth it).  While researching for this post, I came across this, which is a virtual museum exhibit in Google Arts.  I haven’t heard it all (and my German is a touch rusty now), but the musical excerpts are terrific, especially the stuff with the Balinese Gamelan orchestra.  It’s taken more than 40 years, but I’m finally exploring more of Eberhard Schoener.

All thanks to the fact that I couldn’t stand The Police….

16. Dire Straits, Dire Straits, 1978

Posted on by

This is the first album on the list which is still, several months after I drew it up, highlighted as being one which could drop out if I remembered something else which really should be on there instead.  And I have no idea why, at this stage, because if this project is about memory (and it is), then this is one of the clearest album-related memories I have.

You know, at the time, the six years of secondary school felt like an eternity, which is hardly an original observation, and – of course – looking back at them now, they passed in the blink of an eye.  And that’s particularly true for all the music I consumed in those years.  It was, as I’ve mentioned once or twice, a tumultuous time in music, and while we had far fewer ways of accessing it than are available now, I think it meant that we treasured every moment; every time something jumped out from the background noise and caused us to sit up and take notice.

I certainly listened to the people I’d got to know at school (and elsewhere) whose taste aligned with mine; we swapped tips and recommendations more often even than we swapped albums, but the moments which really landed were the ones I discovered for myself.  Listening to the radio in the evenings, whether the relatively clear Radio 1, or the much more scratchy and romantic-sounding Radio Luxembourg, the moment when you discovered something you were sure no-one else had heard stuck in the mind, even if sometimes it just faded back into the ether because you’d missed the announcement, or the signal faded before you could hear who it was.

I know for sure that I first heard Joan Armatrading on the radio that way, as well as Be-Bop Deluxe (I’ll be coming back to that shortly), Magma (I have no idea who was playing Magma in the night on radio which reached me, but it was out there, and I was at once fascinated and terrified), and a dozen others either obscure or just soon-to-be-famous which I considered in some way ‘mine’ because I’d heard them, and liked them, without being told if they were ‘cool’ (or whatever word we were using at the time) or if it was part of some wider scene which I hadn’t heard of.

Late night radio was a strange mysterious place where you might hear absolutely anything, including Radio Moscow competing with Voice of America, or even what were reputed to be coded messages being passed between spies.

Or you might, one evening while trying to get to grips with trigonometry, hear Sultans of Swing and lose your train of thought while wondering what this was, and what it was doing on the radio.

I think I’d seen the adverts for the album before hearing the song – I can’t be sure, but I remember slightly tasteless line drawings of plane crashes titled ‘Anyone can get into Dire Straits’, and thinking that sounded like a radical kind of band, unencumbered by ideas of propriety, only to discover that they were – well, what, exactly?

I’ll tell you what they weren’t; they weren’t in any way punk, or new wave, or post-punk, or whatever 1978 was supposed to be about.  They sounded like nothing else I was listening to, but they didn’t sound like the ‘pub rock’ I was half expecting – this wasn’t Dr. Feelgood (who definitely appear in the ‘dozen others’ up there) or Ian Dury; it wasn’t Dave Edmonds or Nick Lowe or any of those artists who also weren’t really related to the punk scene, but who were being pulled along in its slipstream.

Dire Straits sounded like they had dropped in from a parallel universe where punk never happened, and musicians were still judged by their technique and production values; where being a bit of a ‘muso’ was a thing to be proud of, and where you could still write songs which read like short stories and somehow managed to be self-referential without sounding obscure or wilfully self-indulgent.

Dire Straits were just weird, you know?  It shouldn’t have worked, but it did.  I loved the single, and I rushed out and bought the album, and loved it too.

And the album is still on this list because of exams.

In the spring of 1979, between bouts of hay fever and the thrill of a generation-shifting general election (I sat my French Higher on election day; we tried to protest that our concentration had been disrupted by the SNP vehicle driving around using its megaphone to encourage us to get out and vote), I spent the last few weeks of fifth year studying, or – to be more strictly accurate – ‘studying’.  Classes were done for the most part, I was at home on my own with only the history textbooks and my album collection for company, and I used Dire Straits as my study guide.

Side one would give me a solid twenty minutes on the causes of the First World War; side two would see me through trying to remember the sequence of post-Napoleonic congresses ( Vienna, something, Troppau, Laibach, something else, possibly Vienna again).  Or something else; I remember the record way better than I remember what it was I was supposed to be learning.

(I just looked it up; Vienna, Aix-la-Chappelle, Troppau, Laibach, Verona.  Apparently.)

Anyway, it was a couple of years before I figured out that in order for me to focus and actually learn stuff, I needed music without lyrics; music which wouldn’t keep distracting me with intriguing words, and which might cause me to remember that Queen Victoria carried around a six-blade knife or something.

What I do remember, however, is that the rhythm of studying, the 20 minutes at a time pace, was entirely driven by listening to this album, over and over while I tried to force my brain to remember stuff.  I’m sure I actually listened to other things as well; but this is the one I remember, and this is the one which was never going to be bumped off the list.  I’m not sure how representative of what I was listening to in 1978 it really is, but I do know that it didn’t matter whether it was fashionable; all that mattered was that I liked it.

Of course I have a vinyl copy of it now.  Taking it out of the sleeve just now, I paused when I saw the label.  This is a Canadian copy, bought second-hand a couple of years ago; was that Warner Brothers label the same as the one I had?  Imagine the frustration of being in my bedroom in 1979 and having a question like that occur to me – I’d never know.  I’d like to let the 16-year old version of me know that he can’t imagine how cool the future actually is, and how trivial it is to look up the label design of the original UK release of Dire Straits and have the pure nostalgia rush of seeing the original Vertigo ‘jellyfish’ label in greens and blues, and to be – just for a second – sitting on my bedroom floor surrounded by notes on the Corn Laws and the Great Reform Bill.

Dropping the needle on side one instantly reminds me why I loved this.  Down to the Waterline is evocative of something I couldn’t have put my finger on then, and I doubt I can now – it’s just something spare and chilly until that instantly recogniseable guitar breaks in and transports us to the waterfront; not the one I was familiar with from where I grew up (and not, I suspect, the one where Mark Knopfler grew up; this has much more to do with Marlon Brando than it does trawlers coming in from the North Sea).

Water of Love frustrated me then because I couldn’t look up exactly what kind of guitar that was making that distinctive sound.  Again, I can just look it up now, although now I can easily pick out the sound of a National guitar with its metal resonator without looking it up; again, sixteen-year-old me would have been amazed by how much room there remained in his brain for useless information.

Setting Me Up is where I probably first started to wonder about what kind of music this was I was listening to; it’s kind of rock, but it’s full of other things – I was aware of the general sound of country music, for example – perhaps this album marks the beginning of my dislike for labels on music.  Somewhere around this time, I decided that there were only two kinds of music; things I liked, and things I didn’t.  I did refine this a bit over the years, particularly when I decided that the vast majority of music landed in the category ‘things I haven’t given enough time to yet’, but somewhere around here, I started to consciously try not to pigeonhole music, and to take what I was hearing on its own terms.

Six Blade Knife is so laid back it might well keel over at any point.  I’m not sure, listening to it now, how any of this was supposed to help me study, but perhaps I was less likely at 16 to just close my eyes and drift along with it instead of getting on with what I was supposed to be doing.

I’m pretty sure there’s an album much further down this list which conjures up the same feelings as Southbound Again – the sense of moving on, going somewhere, probably to the south, somewhere which promises things somehow not available where I live now.  It reads like a despairing cry from someone at their wits’ end, but it sounds like a recommendation to get on the road and look for something else; I was already thinking about where I wanted to go and study; all I knew for sure was that it would be somewhere ‘down the line’

As I flip this over, I’m not sure I understand what about it appealed so much to the teenaged version of me; it feels like a much more ‘grown-up’ album than the pop-punk and rock I’d been living with.  Maybe that was the appeal; sixteen is a tricky age.

The big hit single is in its proper place – track one on side two – and I’m not sure there’s much more to say about it; it’s a fixture of the general consciousness, but a couple of observations, perhaps.  First of all, it’s the first time I remember being aware of a discrepancy between the printed lyrics and what is actually sung.  It gave me an abiding interest in the record-making process; surely it’s somebody’s job to just check that the words on the inner sleeve match what is actually on the record?  How do these things get decided, anyway?

The other thing is something I alluded to earlier; one of the things I most like about Sultans of Swing is that it’s talking to itself.  They’re not playing jazz or Creole, but the instruments to respond to the words, so that when ‘guitar George’ knows all the chords, we get to hear some of them in a way which just underlines that this is a million miles from all the three-chord songs in the major key I’d been immersing myself in.

It’s OK to love both, though.

In the Gallery is an honest-to-God polemic.  I mean, it’s delivered in a lazy, laid-back style which will likely cause you to miss the point entirely, and I don’t agree with the premise particularly, but I’m struck by the whole argument about authenticity in art, because I think that’s what’s going on here with the music – Dire Straits don’t care if they’re not trendy and iconoclastic; they have no time for the simple or the anti-music; no patience with being contrary or radical; they understand and recognise quality and staying within the recognised boundaries.

Again, I don’t hold with any of that, but I completely understand what they’re saying, and I do love this album even though it’s a million miles from pretty much everything around it.

Wild West End starts with that National guitar again, and is probably my favourite piece on here; it tells a story which romanticises London in a way which resonated powerfully with me at the time, and which still works, even though that West End doesn’t exist now, and probably never did – it was a vision of a place which I so very much wanted to experience for myself, and never quite did.  It reminds me strongly of the opening to David Mitchell’s remarkable novel Utopia Avenue, which begins right where Knopfler is drinking his coffee and chatting up the waitress, but quickly shows you the things which Wild West End glosses over; the underbelly of Soho and the West End don’t really show up in this airbrushed version.

I remembered Lions being much slower and darker that it actually is; I don’t know why that is; it may have something to do with the fact that I probably associated it so strongly with the fact that I was convinced I would never learn all this stuff; that I’d inevitably fail all my Highers and have to find something else to do when I left school.  It’s actually much closer to Wild West End part two, with the daytime crowds all heading home, and leaving the lions in Trafalgar Square to the mercy of the drunk and lonely.  It’s a song about being a commuter, which is really not what I remember at all.

I think to enjoy Dire Straits now, I have to be in the mood for it; way back then, I could put it on at any time and get something from it, but I’ve listened to it now while actually looking forward to hearing something else entirely, and I enjoyed the nostalgic aspect without ever quite feeling myself transported back to 1978.

It all worked out, though.  I got the grades I needed (apart from History, which was upgraded on appeal after I pleaded hay fever, which was at least partly the truth), I had one more year of school which I spent cramming in as much music as I could, putting on plays, and learning about anything and everything in the hope it would prepare me for the next stage of life.

I didn’t get to London, but I’ve never regretted the choices I made back then, when I had no idea who I was, and no idea if I should like Dire Straits or not.  Turned out, it didn’t really matter.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

The second album is an attempt to exactly replicate the first, and suffers from not being as fresh or new, but Making Movies, Love Over Gold, and Brothers In Arms are all famous for a reason.  Dire Straits weren’t radical or raucous, but they knew what they were doing.

Compilations to consider?

I have a pretty comprehensive one called Private Investigations which includes some of Knopfler’s solo work, and is about as comprehensive as you’d ever need.

Live albums?

Yeah.  Alchemy is, if you like Dire Straits, pretty much essential.  They were a fantastic live band, and all the performances on Alchemy are elevated significantly above the studio versions.  Forget the compilation, go get a copy of this instead.

Anything else? There are dozens of videos out there of Mark Knopfler doing his thing; I always enjoy them when I stumble across them, but I can’t think of anything else I’ve ever read or seen about Dire Straits.  They weren’t the kind of band who lent themselves to wild autobiographies or detailed video retrospectives.  But you should own a copy of Knopfler’s score for Local Hero, though – everyone should.

15. Some Enchanted Evening, Blue Öyster Cult, 1978

Posted on by

1978 was a strange place.  I’ve already alluded to the fact that I was listening to absolutely everything available, but it still took me by surprise to discover that this album, a regular on my plastic turntable, was from the same year in which I was listening to John Peel late at night and regularly joining in with earnest discussions about the exact definition of ‘new wave’ and ‘punk’.  As we’ll see over the coming weeks, I was completely immersed in hairy rock music for a while, but that didn’t really start until 1980.

There are a couple of albums coming up which I bought during my heavy metal phase, but which were released before 1980, but I’m certain this wasn’t one of them.  For some reason, however, I became entranced by the curious, hard to classify, music of Blue Öyster Cult right among the pop songs and experimental nonsense of 1978.

I think that the album which – thanks to a terrible old joke – I still occasionally refer to as ‘Sam and Janet Evening’ follows directly from my love of Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple.  The music is more or less in that idiom, but comes with its own mythology and mystery, and is – importantly – American.

I’d like to think that I was fully informed on all kinds of music from both sides of the Atlantic, but looking at the list of what’s gone before, I’m not sure that was true.  American music was different and slightly intimidating – bands sang about things we knew nothing about, and as far as I could tell, the whole punk revolution seemed to have passed them by.  Of course that wasn’t true (I’ve just been talking about Blondie, for example), and was in any case a wild generalisation, but I was mainly being guided by what was appearing in the pages of Sounds, and that was mostly British bands – and there were a lot of them, to be fair.

So Blue Öyster Cult were exotic and strange; we’d heard Don’t Fear the Reaper, of course, and – being sensitive teenagers – had pored over the lyrics, extracting all kinds of meaning from them.  That doesn’t explain, of course, why I suddenly fell in love with this album in particular, and continue to have a fondness for the band.  It’s not even their best live album, in my opinion; we’ll get to that.

The other strange thing about this is that it’s a single live album, which goes against everything I hold dear, and is basically indefensible – how can forty minutes of music sum up a whole live show, and to compound things, it even features two cover versions.  All told, this album contains only five BÖC original songs, and is in a genre I probably imagined I had left behind.  So what’s going on?

I’ll almost certainly come back to this point, but I’m pretty sure that my guiding principle when choosing music to listen to during this wild period was ‘how different is it from the last thing I listened to?’  This certainly doesn’t sound much like the pop-punk of the last two albums on the list, and in its choice of cover songs is looking back to the late sixties, so it certainly covers that base.  I think it also represented a genuine attempt on my part to educate myself about things – I remember listening to Iron Butterfly around this time, and trying to understand how all of this could fit together with the stuff I already knew – this album led me to the MC5, and I heard the Stooges and the Velvet Underground for the first time about the same time; there was a world of music I still knew nothing about, and I thought I was fairly well educated in such things.

None of that, of course, logically leads to this album; perhaps nothing does beyond a glowing review in Sounds and a desire to have an album no-one else did.  What I do know is that it cemented my love for great live albums (apparently there are heretics out there who don’t enjoy live albums), and for a strange band which seemed to be playing by slightly different rules to everyone else.

Honestly, listening to it now, it doesn’t start all that promisingly.  Maybe over-hyped introductions asking if we are ‘ready to rock and roll’ weren’t quite clichés yet (and maybe this album helped them become clichés), but RU Ready 2 Rock starts as a fairly generic ‘first song of the show’ introduction.  It brightens up pretty quickly, featuring all the moving parts in the band showing off what they do, some tight harmony singing, but it’s no better than average overall, and while I may have enjoyed the whole audience interaction at the time, I am rolling my eyes pretty damn hard listening to it now.

Fortunately, it settles down quickly.  ETI  is much more like it – this is what I expected from the weird band – incomprehensible lyrics, possibly containing answers to all the big questions, married to catchy melodies and absolutely no pandering to the audience beyond offering up crowd-pleasing solos and a wild acceleration towards the end which provokes the imagined sight of thousands of heads nodding along, faster and faster until some fall off altogether.  It is Blue Öyster Cult, after all.

The rest of side one is taken up by Astronomy, which is one of those songs I find hard to be objective about.  From the moment I first heard it, there was something about this song which spoke to the part of me which loves long songs which refuse to explain themselves, wandering off into strange, murky corners where there is a ‘light that never warms’.  There are a lot of dynamics going on in this song, and hearing it played live like this is positively thrilling; the tempo shifts between sections, but everyone is on the same broad path.  This is an underground band who just happen to play in the classic rock idiom; while some bands appeared to be openly trying to subvert your children, there were others like BÖC who were doing it all more subtly right under your noses.

Flip it over, and here’s the cover of Kick out the Jams, complete with sanitised introduction – of course, at the time, I knew nothing of the MC5 live album, the controversy sparked by the original introduction, and the fact that the record company at the time had wanted to replace the offending word (look it up, kids) with ‘brothers and sisters’, and therefore entirely missed the point that this was a sly dig at the sanitisation of music.  As far as I knew, it was just a terrific rock song, which sounded exactly like a Blue Öyster Cult song.  I wonder what might have happened if I’d been able to go and listen to the original live version of this.  Would I have found this version a little too safe?  I’ll never know.

Godzilla movies were often the talk of the playground growing up – I’m not sure where people were seeing them in the days before even VHS, but even if you hadn’t managed to catch a late night showing of one, it was possible to have a decent grasp of what it was all about, so at least Godzilla made some kind of sense, especially the bits in Japanese.  I honestly don’t think this song – which is now one of the staples of classic rock radio made much impression on me at the time – I was impatiently waiting for the next one…

I had, of course, heard Don’t Fear the Reaper before, and was keen to hear a live version, which didn’t disappoint.  I know I didn’t hear the album it came from until some time later, this was the first time I’d been exposed to the full weird wig-out of the middle section instrumental, and it’s that part which sold me on the whole Blue Öyster Cult thing.  Even when I was denying the existence of all those hairy albums I used to own, I’d hang on to this one (and a couple of others; see below), because there was something other about this band; something which raised them above the rank and file of ‘metal’ or whatever category people were putting all this racket into.

Finishing off with an Animals song recorded in Newcastle must have seemed like the most obvious thing in the world to the band at the time, but I still think it sits a little oddly; there are any number of terrific BÖC songs which could have gone here instead, but that’s reckoning without the fact that this is actually the second live album by the band, so another live version of something like 7 Screaming Diz-busters would have felt like a bit of a rip-off.  Having said that, a single album with two cover versions doesn’t fall far short of that mark either.  The whole thing smacks of a record company insisting on getting a live album featuring the two big singles out there as a money-making exercise, yet I loved it then, and while I don’t perhaps love it quite as much now, I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting it just now.

I couldn’t quite fit this into my remembered world of subversive singles, torn jeans and safety pins before re-listening to it, but it does kind of make sense now.  This was a mix of pretty much everything I’d been listening to up to 1978 – it was dark and mysterious, but featured wild drumming, bass playing and – especially – guitar freak-outs.  It wasn’t remotely like the spiky-haired sneering which seemed to be the way things worked now, but it also wasn’t bland corporate rock – as I’m sure was their intention all along, Blue Öyster Cult didn’t fit into any category, and that suited me fine.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

There are any number of BÖC studios out there – they released one in 2020, for goodness’ sake – but only a couple I’d recommend without hesitation – Fire of Unknown Origin is terrifically camp, and lots of fun, while Agents of Fortune was perhaps the only unequivocally successful album before that, although the early ‘monochrome’ albums all have something to recommend them.

Compilations to consider?

You know, I’d never considered that question before now.  Inevitably, there are several, but never having heard any of them, I don’t know if I can recommend any of them.  I’m going to suggest that you don’t seek one of those out, and instead skip ahead to the next section.

Live albums?

This is not a stupid question as it looks.  There are three ‘classic era’ BÖC live albums, of which this is possibly the least good.  I love On Your Feet or On Your Knees, but didn’t hear it until much later, but both it and this one pale – in my humble estimation – beside Extraterrestrial Live from 1982, which can also serve as a decent compilation and introduction to the band.  I’m aware of its shortcomings – the drumming, in particular, is not quite up to scratch as a result of having fired the original drummer halfway through the tour which provided the recordings – but I can overlook all of those because it’s essentially a version of the show I saw the only time I ever saw them live, and it came out while I was more or less obsessed with them.  Your mileage may vary, of course, but if you’ve never heard any BÖC, I’d start there.

Anything else? I’m going to skip over whatever else may be out there to point you to current guitarist, singer and all-round renaissance man Richie Castellano, whose Band Geek project is just the most fun you can have on YouTube.  Go have a ridiculously large amount of fun watching him and his friends playing 25 or 6 to 4 on kazoos; I promise you it’s worth it…