Monthly Archives: January 2022

23. The Wall, Pink Floyd, 1979

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I’m well aware that I have written extensively on this album on this site, and can’t possibly have anything new to say about it.  I’m also, however, aware that all the stuff I wrote before was about the album itself, and its place in the Pink Floyd discography.  Very little of what I wrote was about The Wall’s place in my life, and why – despite the fact that I’m still ambivalent about parts of it – it played such an important part in my life at the end of 1979, and for the few months following that.

I was, as I have said before, listening to many different types of music in 1979.  The albums I chose for this list to represent that year have included obscure German electronica, synth-pop, post punk, classic rock (and some French heavy metal which has bled in from the future).  What on earth does this giant piece of Rock Opera (I’m calling it that; it’s the label which fits best, I think) by a band who had dropped out of the general definition of ‘cool’ several years before; a double album written and performed under duress because of tax liabilities – what is it doing in this list, and what was it doing on my record player in December 1979?

Let me rewind a little.  The summer of 1979 seemed full of possibilities; there was a lot of music to process, some of it new and challenging, and some of it overlooked in the rush to write off everything prior to the Year Zero attitude which seemed to follow the Sex Pistols and the Clash.  Somewhere in there, Pink Floyd had released an album which ranks among their very best – Animals.  I hadn’t heard it before, but at some point in the summer of 1979, someone lent me a copy, and I was struck by how well it articulated all the pent up frustration and anger everyone was feeling; how well it summarised the Seventies and the creeping sense of helplessness in the face of several failed economic policies.

By the time we went back to school in August, my friend group was down to the few of us who really wanted to ornament our academic resumés – in my case, by retaking the final year of History to bump me up to the mark I’d need to get in to Edinburgh University.  We picked a few unrelated classes to fill out the week – I did Accounting and Latin, among other things – and mainly talked about music even more than we had done in the previous years.  There was an overarching feeling of restlessness and desire to be done with all this now, which was only amplified in my case when my appealed History score came back (I think I pleaded hay fever, and pointed to my class work and estimate exam scores); I had been upgraded as I’d hoped, and didn’t actually need to be in any of these classes any more.  I spent a lot of time in the library and reading room; and a fair bit of time at home listening to whichever album had come my way that week.

Around November, the EMI publicity machine got up a head of steam, promoting the forthcoming Pink Floyd album like it was the most important piece of 20th century culture to date.  There were interviews and radio programmes, preview selections (including a reputed single with a worryingly disco beat), and a general sense of anticipation I didn’t remember feeling for any other record.  It had, after all, been an entirely unthinkable two years since the last one came out; what on earth had they been up to?

Of course I liked Pink Floyd; even when it wasn’t fashionable, my tapes of Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here got a lot of play.  I’d been startled by Animals and was keen to see if they could really carry off a double album about alienation and the rock star life, or whatever it was really about.

It didn’t fit with anything else I was listening to, but I knew I was about to move out into a much wider world, and perhaps it was time to revisit some of the stuff I might have been missing.  Equally, perhaps it was just a superb marketing job.  Either way, I found myself handing over my fiver (I’m guessing here, but it was probably about that) in The Other Record Shop on or about the day of release – I know it was dark by the time I got it home; I have the clearest memory of sitting on my bed, peeling the whole thing open and investigating everything – the artwork, the clear plastic label held on with static, the way the drawing of the wall itself grew as you moved from side to side.  Owning a copy of The Wall was an event; it was a major part of my life before I’d listened to a note of it.

Which all feels wrong now; I couldn’t have been that exercised about a Pink Floyd album, could I?  It has only just occurred to me that this is the third 1979 album I’m talking about released on the Harvest label, but that can’t have been a factor – I paid a lot of attention to labels, but not to the point of buying only albums released under one brand.  I genuinely don’t know what was going on in the music-loving parts of my brain.  Interest had been whipped up by the release, and subsequent success of Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2 and I had heard Roger Waters talk to Tommy Vance on the Friday Rock Show about it, but why did I jump on a bus straight after school, and head into town to buy my own copy?

I’ll never know, sadly.  The impact of the album is undeniable, and the way it loomed large in my life for months overshadows everything else about it at this point.  I brought it home, played it over and over, learned all the words (I’m still pretty much word-perfect on most of them), worked out what most, if not all, of the sound effects were, and even tried to find out which films some of the dialogue had been lifted from – a significantly harder task in early 1980 than it would be today – and generally listened to nothing else for months.

In early 1980, I was part of a production of Hamlet­ – I played Claudius – which is the only other thing from that period which still impacts who I am and how I look at the world.  I liked Shakespeare before doing it; I loved Shakespeare and his language ever after.  I spent weeks learning all this wondrous text, and would regularly find myself at home alone (very few classes, see above) switching from testing myself on “Oh, my offense is rank…” and seeing if I could sing along with all of side three of The Wall without having to look at the words.

I’m still pretty much word perfect on that speech as well, although there are few opportunities to prove it.

It was an intense period of my life – I imagine being seventeen and ready to move on to the next part of your life is still intense for anyone going through it.  I’m not special, but I had Hamlet and The Wall to help me through it, and that probably explains an awful lot about me….

At this point, I usually ask myself how well it stands up now, and do a track-by-track analysis of how I react to it now.  I’m going to amend that a little.  Firstly because I did that not too long ago, and I know what I think now, and partly because it’s so bloody long that no-one will read to the end; not even me.

So my reaction to listening to The Wall in 2021 (2022 by the time you read this) will be more impressionistic – I’m going to treat the four sides as four acts in a play, and see where that takes me.  I am, of course, going to listen to my vinyl copy while I do that, because of course I have a vinyl copy – not the original one, which I wish I had held on to above any of the others I sold all those years ago – but the one my children presented me with a few years back, and which provokes fierce nostalgia and a desire to break into Shakespearean dialogue whenever I see it.

If I am to follow my own metaphor, Side 1 is Act 1 in the life of the main character – we’ve been told by the publicity machine to call him ‘Pink’, but I don’t think there’s any point at which it’s spelled out for those of us just listening.  It starts with a baffling track which only makes sense much later on – it turns out this is Pink on stage being a rockstar, and deciding to show us his childhood as a way of explaining what’s happened to him.

So Act 1 is Pink’s childhood, which is naturally informed by Roger Waters’ own.  He doesn’t even have the solace of having had an idyllic upbringing before being packed off to a school he clearly hates – the absent father is a recurring Waters motif (and I should say that the concert film of Waters’ own performance of The Wall addresses this whole part much more effectively that any of the songs he wrote about growing up fatherless and resentful of the war machine which took him away.)

The first appearance of the ‘Brick in the Wall´ theme is probably the one closest to the original idea; all sparse bass and reverb.  It prepares us for the reprise, which filled the dancefloors of the world, and may have contributed to the perceived loss of respect for teachers and schools which people of my generation like to complain about, despite it having been part of our own experiences, if perhaps a little more internalised than it seems to be now.

Anyway, where was I? Ah, yes.  Roger – sorry; Pink – didn’t have a nice time at school, and he thinks we should dance along to his complaints while nodding thoughtfully at a splendid David Gilmour guitar solo.  The song dominated musical discussions for weeks, and comment sections of respectable newspapers for almost as long – what were the ethics of having children sing about needing no education, and why were the young people of the world buying this subversive tract in such large numbers?

Subversive?  Well, yes.  Perhaps a little ham-fistedly (it’s pretty obvious, and Pink Floyd are far from the first band to make money complaining about how terribly hard it was to have to go to school), but it was moral-panic inducing, and made more impact on the wider world than any of the actually subversive stuff we’d been listening to these past few years.

Act 1 closes with Pink complaining that his mother was overbearing and suffocating.  It’s a nasty little song, which is treated more fondly than it should be because it’s got a nice laid-back acoustic feel.  It does set up much of what follows, but the older I get, and the more I think about it, the less I like it.

Having spent all of Act 1 setting up the foundations of Pink’s psychosis, Act 2 manages to feel at once rushed and overlong.  How does he end up in a band?  How does he move so quickly from teenaged boredom to walling himself off from the world?  And why does he have to spend so much of the intervening period whining about how awful life is?

Which is not to suggest that there aren’t any great songs on the second side; there are, and there were originally planned to be even more – my original copy had the lyrics to a much longer version of What Shall We Do Now?, faithfully reproduced on the copy I’m holding now.  Both One of my Turns and Don’t Leave Me Now convey the creeping drug-fueled paranoia of the famous but isolated musician on tour.  I might quibble about the need for two versions of the same essential story, but they are both tremendously well-crafted songs, with the slide into chaos and violence prefaced by the phone call – seemingly featuring a genuinely baffled operator who wasn’t in on the joke – and ending with the destruction of the hotel room in that time-honoured seventies rock star way.  The two songs (and the quick burst of Empty Spaces which follows) mark one of the few times on the album where all four band members seem to be contributing to the sound, and it’s one of the reasons I can still listen to all of side 2 with something close to enjoyment.  At the end of the act, Pink pushes the final brick in place with what feels like a suicide note attached, but in reality is simply the point at which  the story needs to turn and begin to resolve.

I’m listening to it now, aware of the flaws but trying to hear it with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of my teenaged self.  In spite of all the literature and poetry I’d been exposed to (I was reading Camus, Heller and Eliot as part of the curriculum at around the same time), I don’t think I tried to equate it to any of that; I think I was just hearing a terrific rock album, telling a compelling story which I hadn’t really thought about before, and doing it with cool sound effects, well-crafted guitar solos and exactly the kind of existential angst which propels teenage boys through those difficult years.

Act 3, then, should see Pink regaining some kind of control, and taking the first steps to resolve his situation.  Of course, this isn’t a generic novel of any kind, and nothing of the sort happens.  Instead, there are twenty minutes which are the heart of this album – fully realised songs which make their points carefully and thoughtfully.  This is what Pink Floyd always were about – the first two sides have been pretty much a Roger Waters solo album, but this one pulls everything together – even the brief digression into the dream of Vera Lynn somehow being able to bring back Pink’s missing father more or less works in the context of the whole thing.

Act 3 is the portrait of the artist, alone and isolated by his own actions.  He is walled off from the world, but – perhaps deliberately – this produces the best of the songwriting on this whole album.  The three main songs, Hey You (moved from last place on the side to first, as revealed by the lyric sheet), Nobody Home, and Comfortably Numb are the three key songs on the album as a whole.  They refer back to each other and tie the whole concept together in the face of the somewhat more overblown parts to come.

Comfortably Numb is, however, my least favourite of the three.  I’m certain that’s due to its over-familiarity, as it is still a magnificent piece of music.  I just wish there was some way to hear it for the first time again.

Intriguingly, that’s not really been a problem for any of the other songs, going all the way back to Revolver, which I might have become tired of.  I wonder if there’s a threshold for how many times I can listen to something before I decide that I actually have heard everything it has to offer, and can move on past it.  If there is, I’d say Comfortably Numb passed it several years ago.

The final act sees Pink’s breakdown and resolution.  Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to have been anyone in the studio to say no to any of the excess, so we have to sit through several songs from Pink’s show and then a full-blown parody of a trial.

OK, I know that Pink and his band (or the surrogates which Waters presumably is using to try to keep himself at arms length) are delivering satire; it’s all very 1984 and dystopian, but there really are lyrics about fascist marches, open discrimination and rape, and it’s just a little – weird.  It seems to come out of nowhere; Pink is self-pitying and isolated, not some kind of black-shirted dictator, and despite the caustic energy of the whole ‘show’ part; I’ve never felt particularly convinced by it.

That’s a lie, of course – seventeen year old me though it one of the greatest things he’d ever heard, and it took quite some time for me to actually go back and look again at what was actually going on.  The acid test for the first three songs on side four is that – notwithstanding that Run Like Hell was a single in North America – you can’t really take them out of context.  No-one (I hope) could get up on stage and play Waiting for the Worms with a straight face before moving on to something unrelated. 

Waiting for the Worms is the song which is supposed to justify all the satirical stuff; a peek inside the decaying mind of Pink as he sits back at the hotel while his band riles up the crowd.  It feels more than a little forced to me now, and I do remember being unnerved by the orders barked through the bullhorn – I was acutely aware of things happening elsewhere in the world, and having someone – even parodically – talking about meeting outside Brixton Town Hall and firing up the ovens was deeply uncomfortable.

I wish I could say it sounds dated and amusing now, but it doesn’t.  Of all the subjects to parody, this one is perhaps the most misjudged.  I’m glad that I had a well-enough developed sense of the world to see it for what it was at the time, but it doesn’t sit well.

Neither does The Trial, which is a mini-operetta with caricatures of the characters we were introduced to in Act 1 and is the dictionary definition of ‘overblown mess’.

All of which seems to suggest that I don’t really like The Wall at all, and that’s not true.  I do think it would make a punchy single album with all the excess trimmed out, and there are songs here which I know all the words to but have no particular desire to listen to too many more times, but I can’t ignore the effect it had on me at the time, and how it still has a claim on me after all this time.

As I’ve said before, it didn’t change my life, but I sure thought it had for a while there.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Well, yes.  Most of the albums up to this point have something to recommend them, even Ummagumma, but the run from Atom Heart Mother to Animals is essential, and this isn’t far from it.  In addition, both soundtrack albums – More and Obscured by Clouds – are worth a listen.  After this (some say including this), albums are either Roger Waters and friends, or David Gilmour and friends.  And you can skip The Endless River altogether.  Wasn’t me who christened it Endless Drivel, but I wish it had been.

Compilations to consider?

The usual Prog warning here – you have to hear the whole albums, not snippets.  There are a great many Pink Floyd compilations, of which Relics is perhaps the best known, containing offcuts and rarities rather than edited versions of the well-known later songs.

Live albums?

Not really, although the Dave Gilmour version of Pink Floyd were at their very best on Pulse, which is being reissued, so you could try that.  The live performance which sticks in the memory, of course, is the one from Live 8, and that’s available on YouTube, but not as an official release – can you imagine how many lawyers would have needed to get involved for that to happen?

Anything else?

Many things – operas, picture books, documentaries, movies; you name it.  If I have to recommend one thing, however, it would be Nick Mason’s memoir Inside Out; it’s as comprehensive as you could hope for, and while he does spare his old friends some kickings which they were perhaps entitled to, it tells a complex story very well.  Is there a definitive Pink Floyd biography?  I’d suggest not yet, but I’m happy to be proved wrong.

22. Trust I (Préfabriqués), Trust, 1979

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In strictly chronological terms, my story is about to undergo a transformation.  In October 1980, I went off to university in Edinburgh, and it took me a long time to adjust to my new life.  One of the oddest things about that new life was that, despite being exposed to a whole world of possibilities in the music available to me, my tastes narrowed dramatically.  For a couple of years there, I responded to the increasing complexity and density of what I was studying by retreating into music which was uncomplicated, straightforward and, above all, loud.

I’m sure there’s a lot of psychology going on there – I was alone in a city I didn’t know, probably too young to have made the leap (but determined to be somewhere else), and I struggled, especially in that first year, to make friends.  My release from the pressures of academic life came in a couple of ways in which I could retreat into the safe world of a crowd which liked the same things I liked, and which – importantly – wasn’t going to make me think too much.

1980 was still firmly in the era of free tuition and student grants, so I had a certain amount of financial freedom.  Unlike many of my peers, I didn’t spend all my disposable cash on beer; instead, I went for football matches (and train tickets to get me there), records and concert tickets.

There’s a whole paragraph about how everything was so much more affordable then – I lived, as I recall, on £15 a week – but let’s not get into that whole area right now, shall we?

I went to as many concerts in those first couple of years as I could.  Researching it now, there was an astounding array of bands and artists on offer to me – I could easily have seen two or three a week, including some big names at the time, and many who would shortly become famous, but I restricted myself entirely to concerts where the audience would be made up of long-haired spotty adolescents in denim.  I know I missed out on a lot of things, but I also had a lot of fun.

And my hearing isn’t what it might be these days, which I suspect is related.

Just being part of the denim-clad crowd wasn’t enough for me, however.  I wanted to know as much as I could about the bands I’d be seeing, and one of my particular quirks was that I was determined not only to enjoy the headliners (whose records I probably already owned), but also the support acts, however obscure.  While most of the crowd was in the bar, I was down the front, earnestly nodding along to a band neither I nor anyone else would ever hear from again.

One of the reasons I wasn’t in the bar back then was that, as I said, I was very young, and looked younger.  Getting served was always a gamble, and one I preferred to skip when I could, particularly in those days when there was no such thing as ID to prove age.  Again, there’s probably a whole discussion to be had here on the weird way the UK driving license encoded your date of birth so it was hard to prove your age….

Anyway, before going to a gig in 1981 or 1982, I’d do my research.  If I was, for example, going to see Iron Maiden on March 9th 1981 at the Odeon (the remarkably handy venue I walked past every morning on my way to classes), I would, of course, listen to all the albums I already owned of theirs, I’d have read up in Sounds about the tour, and what to expect, and I’d have done as much digging as I could on their support act, in this case an obscure French band called Trust.

I’m sure French heavy metal is a diverse and rewarding area of study.  I wouldn’t know, however, as Trust is the only French metal band I’ve heard, to my knowledge.  I wanted to know something about them before I went, and so I went down to Phoenix Records on the High Street and bought myself a copy of the English language version of Répression, an album I discovered to be exactly the kind of thing I loved at the time.  Trust, it turned out, sounded a bit like AC/DC, but were significantly more political, and had an attitude which seemed to owe a lot more to the punk outlook on life than a lot of the bands I’d been listening to.  It probably helped that, according to the sleeve notes, the lyrics on Répression had been translated by (or with the help of) Jimmy Pursey of Sham 69. 

The translations were, for the most part, more literal than poetic (something they addressed on the next album, as I recall), which meant that some of the songs sounded a little disjointed.  It gave them a strangely complicated sound, with the music sticking to the patterns which had been worked out with the French lyrics, and then Bernie Bonvoisin sweating bullets trying to make the translated words fit the rhythm.  The net effect was a startling sound, quite unlike anything I had heard before.

Incidentally, I have no specific memory of going out and buying the record and so on; it’s just what I did back then.  What I do know is that, after seeing them live, I went and looked for any other Trust albums I could find.  I won’t suggest for a minute that they blew Iron Maiden (with whom they would shortly swap drummers) away or anything, but they made an impression on me, and I wanted to know more.

Sadly, finding any more Trust albums was difficult, as there was only one, and it had only been released in French.  It wasn’t until the release of the next album, and their own headlining tour the following year that it was possible to lay your hands on the first album, whose name I apparently had forgotten – I went searching for an album called L’Élite, only to discover that some sources call it Trust I, and others Préfabriqués.  It was a compelling album to me at the time, but apparently not to the point where I remembered the name.

It was a strange phase, my bout of noisy rock music, and we’ll be meeting another couple of examples of it in the coming weeks (but not a representative selection of everything I bought in those couple of years; even I would be hard pressed to slog through more than one Tygers of Pan Tang album).  There was a lot of music which I obsessed over for a few weeks or months, then pretty much forgot about, a few albums I think still stand the test of time, but hardly any I’ve felt the urge to go and collect all over again.

But I think if I saw a copy of this album in a record store, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself.  I liked, even loved for a while, the other two Trust albums I bought, and I maintain they were a formidable live presence, but it’s this album, entirely sung in French (aside from the AC/DC cover) which brings back the strongest memories.

Partly, I think, because it is in French; for all my desire not to be an outsider, the idea of loving an album because I could sing along to it in another language was appealing.  I wanted there to be something interesting about my collection of albums driven by distorted power chords and featuring dodgy-looking covers, and this album completely fits the bill for that.  There is one song in particular which I can still, if provoked, sing snatches of in the original language, and I remember painstakingly looking up the words I didn’t know to see if I was, in fact, getting the gist of it.  It’s because of this album that I know the French for ‘tank’, and while I probably didn’t (and still don’t) get all the allusions, I still look upon this album with great fondness.

I haven’t, however, listened to it all the way through for quite some time, so I’m looking forward to this, and to seeing if I can find whatever it was about this band which resonated so much with me at the time.

It kicks off exactly the way so many metal albums of the time did – rapid drumming, and the crisp guitar riff providing as much of the rhythm as the bass, although it settles down into a more recognizable structure just as the vocals kick in.  Of course I’m expecting the words to be in French, but hearing it now, I’m struck by two things – the fact that I can’t follow them at all now (despite living in Canada, my French does not get much use these days, and is painfully rusty); and the fact that Bernie doesn’t sound much like any other heavy metal singer you’ve ever heard.  It’s honestly more of a rap; a recitation of poetry over the music than it is traditional metal singing, which so often ventured into areas only dogs could hear.  The middle eight is terrific, breaking down in a way I’d completely forgotten, and the inevitable guitar solo is economical, getting us back to the heart of the matter with relatively little fuss before a splendid drum breakdown pulls us over to the side of the road, a little breathless, but in one piece.

I just looked up the words.  My goodness, they were angry.  I’ll come back to that, because the way it sounds is really important to how it works, but to translate everything as I go along will definitely end up making this an academic exercise, and I’m trying to react to how the music makes me feel rather than translating the words to see what he’s on about.

Palace has a delightful, lyrical introduction, which quickly translates into – wait a minute, it moves into a first verse which is positively funky.  Only once it’s suckered us in does it flip into full metal mode.  This one I do remember, now it’s under way – mainly because the line “bouche a sexe, sexe a bouche” stands out as somewhat risqué, especially for the time, and because it flips back into what Bernie calls ‘disco’ in a somewhat dismissive manner before exploding back into “rock and roll”.  Pretty clear which side of the ‘disco wars’ Trust were on…

Next up, the introduction to Le Matteur swings, complete with finger clicks, and a swagger which just has me grinning.  Honestly, about thirty seconds into this, I am completely sold – even if everything else on this album is dreadful (and I doubt that), the first three tracks have been worth the price of entry alone.  Wait; saxophone?  Oh, I love this.  I get that they were up against it when it came to breaking out into the Anglosphere, but, honestly, they should have been huge, just on the strength of this album.

Bosser Huit Heures is much more straightforward; a simple diatribe against working eight hours a day for minimum wage, and how the unions don’t do anything about that.  It’s much more what I was expecting from this album, but it’s bursting with life and energy, and uses the talkbox much more effectively than Peter Frampton (q.v.) ever did.  The last line dissolves into laughter, perhaps because it’s moved from vitriol to the ridiculous, even for Trust.

Comme un Damné is the first track to initially make me wonder if they’re running out of stream a little; the energy is still high, but it quickly snaps me out of my doubts with a chorus which seems to call out to Jacques Brel – among the riffs and solos, the whole thing just sounds like Alex Harvey doing Next, and had me laughing out loud.

Dialogue du Sourds rattles along like it knows it only has about two minutes of vinyl to squeeze into, which it did.  In those two minutes, Trust are going to try to break down the entire global political situation, and explain why young people may be turning to revolution.  They do this without pausing for breath – well, that’s not true, either.  They do exactly that – stop for a beat while everyone inhales before thundering back into the connection between Ho Chi Minh and the Red Brigades in Europe.  It’s like being on a political demonstration in the middle of a thunderstorm.

That’s a good thing, in case you were wondering.

Flip it over, and here comes the track I remember most.  Incidentally, the album cover picture on the site I’m using to look up the lyrics shows the same cover as everywhere else, but with a large sticker on it, saying L’Elite – no acute accent, so maybe this was the one I had; intended for the English-speaking market?  I can’t be sure any more, and my French definitely isn’t good enough to do the digging I’d need to do to find out.

Anyway, here’s what I had always thought of as the title track, and it’s unrelenting.  Loud, in-your-face rock music with a real lyrical edge; it’s what I remembered the entire album being like.  I am, to my delight, able to sing along with the bits about tanks in the street and dissidents.  I even remembered that there was a breakdown where the music becomes much more sparse, allowing for some stereo effects on the guitar solos, and then a final section with the voice breaking down entirely in frustration.

Police Milice is, as even the less Francophone among you might have guessed, a tirade about the militarisation of the police.  I love the various sound effects which are sprinkled around this track, but it’s perhaps a little ‘Trust-by-numbers’ otherwise

H&D is much more like it, though.  I do remember looking this up to see what exactly it was that the title stood for, but I don’t think translating it literally gave me any more clue than it does today.  I think I’m missing something, literally, in the translation, but it’s a terrific rock song nonetheless, alternately swampy and straightforward; still as angry and bursting with ideas and energy as at the beginning, leaving Bernie out of breath at the end as he tries to articulate his frustrations.

Covering AC/DC’s Ride On seemed to be one of the things which European rock bands felt obliged to do, and while it’s a fun twist on a familiar blues to hear it sung in a French accent, and with piano and backing singers, I’m not sure it either brings anything to the album beyond another opportunity for guitarist Nono Krief to show off his chops, which are substantial.  I’m trying not to sound jaded about it, because there’s a lot going on, but I think I’d rather have heard another original in French than this, which seems to illustrate several things which this album isn’t really about.  Your mileage may vary, of course, but I’m glad there’s still one more track to go, because nearly seven minutes of this is a little more than enough.

Toujours pas une Tune, fortunately, allows us to remember this album with significantly more fondness than if it had ended with the harmonising of the backing singers on Ride On.  The piano is still there, and the driving energy of the rest of the album is back.  Bernie is spitting out the words and the swagger and politics are back in full effect.  It’s much less metal than many of the others, and it’s more effective because of that; the piano and slide guitar give this a feel much more New Orleans than Orléans.  It’s a great way to end an album which has turned out to be full of surprises.

Honestly, I love it.  I can clearly see why I loved it then, and also why the later albums, which were much more about trying to sound like what the audiences (people like me, to be fair) probably wanted, didn’t stick in my mind nearly as well.  Had they continued in this vein, with all their influences showing, and without the need to conform to the prevailing soundscape, who knows if it would have made a difference, but I think it might have taken them to a few more interesting places.  I know this kind of thing isn’t for everyone, especially if it’s all sung, or recited, in high-speed French, but it’s a lot of fun and well worth the effort.  We’ll be meeting another album shortly which is in a similar idiom, but doesn’t have nearly as much fun with it, and I know which one I’d rather listen to today.

All together now: “Devant ces chars d’assaut vous n’aviez que des idées”

You don’t hear that often enough these days…

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

The other two I owned (in translation) were Répression and Marche ou Crève or Savages in its translated version, of which I remember precisely one song, and that was the one sung in French (Le Mitard), so I’m not sure what that says.  Probably that you should stick with this one if you want a dose of French heavy metal.

Compilations to consider?

There are a whole heap of them, all in French and therefore not widely available.  I’ve listened to a few tracks here and there, and while I might yet go back and revisit Trust, I didn’t hear anything which turned my head.

Live albums?

They were a tremendous live band, so I’d like to recommend one, but I haven’t heard any of them, so proceed at your own risk.

Anything else?

The song Antisocial had quite an effect on the band Anthrax, who covered it to great success (although in my mind, it’s not a particularly great version), and they were influential to a whole generation of bands I’ve never heard of, leading to a tribute album which I’ve not been able to find anywhere, not that I’ve looked all that hard.  Overall, Trust are a band I remember fondly for this one album, and perhaps that’s the way it should stay.  If anyone knows where I could track down a copy of this, though, I’m definitely in the market for one.

21. Cut, The Slits, 1979

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As per usual, the original album has only tracks 1-10

I’ve just taken another look at the list of albums from 1979, and while it’s genuinely representative of what I was listening to at the time, it doesn’t cover all of what I was listening to – not by a long shot.  Around this time, the whole Two Tone / Specials thing was going on, and I was consumed by that for a while; I was still listening to Prog, to some of the classic rock I’ve included in the list, to all the various flavours of synthesised electronica, even to some classical music.

On top of all of that (and several I’ve no doubt forgotten), there was the whole punk / post-punk / new wave scene going on, and I remained fascinated and absorbed by all of that.  I’ll be covering people like Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson in due course, and I sadly couldn’t find room for Ian Dury or any of the other bands – some of whom even made it to Aberdeen in person.  I remember being enthralled by The Ruts and a whole slew of singles which seemed to be pointing the way towards what came next – the do-it-yourself aesthetic of punk married to a more disciplined approach to songwriting than some of what had come before, which seemed to rely on the ability to shock more than the ability to make you sing along.

Then there was this album. I know that it would never have appeared in the library – not with that cover – and I know it wasn’t the kind of thing you could casually leave lying around in your bedroom – not with that cover – but I also know that I had a tape of it, and while there was a lot of stuff going on in 1979, and so much music that there are entire genres I don’t remember listening to, this strange, intense, captivating album stayed with me, and instantly transports me back to that time and place whenever I hear it.

A few years ago, I read Viv Albertine’s mesmerising memoir (full details below), and resolved to revisit Cut.  What I found was so much more than the sparse, half-finished sound I remembered.  At a time when everything seemed to be ground-breaking, it was easy to overlook that which genuinely was shifting expectations of what was possible, what was normal.

The Slits were deliberately provocative, from the name, to the image, to the kind of music they made, to – particularly, if less publicly – being a band of women who expected to be able to do everything the men did; there was a confidence about them, easily dismissed as arrogance, which simply expected the world to work the same way for everyone.  The Slits weren’t the first all-female group (and by the time Cut was recorded, they were no longer all-female), but you can argue that they were the first of this wave of groups who made things up as they went along, had something to say which they expected to be able to get out into the world, but who happened not to pay any attention to what was not called the patriarchy at the time – it was simply called ‘the way the world works’

Cut isn’t, however, about being a woman in a man’s world; it’s about being a woman.  It’s about the lives of three young (very young, in the case of singer Ari Up) women living in the uncomfortable inner-city world of the late 1970s, where disorder and breakdown seemed to be around every corner.  For a comfortable teenaged boy, it was something of an eye-opener.

I was, I like to think, politically aware in 1979.  I read the newspapers, I was outraged by the same things that outraged my generation; I had my CND and Rock Against Racism badges, but I’m not kidding myself about any of this; I wasn’t exposed to any of the situations which generated these songs.  There’s an obvious difference between being aware of inequality, and having to live with any of it; a difference between being shocked and concerned at the way the streets were policed, and being subjected to it.  I know that, and I knew it then.  What I’m grateful for is that I was exposed to all of this through the music I heard and the people I knew, and I’ll always be grateful for having heard this album at a time when its radical (to me, at least) approach to the world could shape my ideas.

What I know about women’s place in the world is not because of the books or newspapers I was reading at the time, or because there was something which happened to me or to someone I know; it’s not because of the vast majority of the music I listened to which (as I’m sure you’ve figured out by now) didn’t all see women as equals or as anything much beyond objects of desire; it’s because I heard Cut in 1979, and thought about it, and understood at some unconscious level that there is no difference. The people who made this album were having the same kind of experiences as the men, and were reacting to them in the ways which made sense to them, and – I don’t know how, given the hormones sloshing around – that message got through.  This record, as much as, if not more than, any of the others on this list, changed the way I think about the world, and it did so without me really noticing.  It did so in a way which I only properly acknowledged when I came back to it much later, and properly listened to what I’d been hearing back then.

It’s not jolly and tuneful; it’s not whimsical or lyrical; it’s played by a group who are clearly still figuring it all out as they go along, and it’s genuinely radical, life-affirming and perspective-altering.  It might be the best album on this list.

And, if you’re 17 when it comes out, the cover is extremely distracting, yet the album still does what it did to me.  That’s extraordinary.

The songs are short and to the point, and they’re knowing – the first track is called Instant Hit,  which you could read as an arch commentary on disposable pop music until you hear the words about heroin.  It is brilliantly structured, with the voices layering this sharp criticism as if it was a round of the kind you learned in primary school.  The drumming – as it does throughout the album – underpins the jerky, reggae-like rhythm; there’s a real confidence and swagger to it, and it immediately has me feeling the way I felt when first hearing it, likely on the John Peel radio programme late at night.

So Tough gives the first proper glance at what turned my head.  I don’t think I had ever heard women talk about men like this before.  It felt like I had intruded on some private conversation; something I probably hadn’t thought about before.  There’s also a line about milkshakes and cherry cheesecake which resonates so strongly with me that it will need a whole paragraph of its own.

Around this time, I was part of the Longacre Players; it was the more grown-up version of Children’s Theatre which you graduated to on turning 16.  We rehearsed on Wednesday evenings and then retired to Radar’s American Diner for the cheapest food on offer and over-exuberant teenage gossip.  Milkshakes and cheesecakes were only for special occasions (I seem to remember the usual order was a plate of fries to be shared between about ten of us), but hearing that line again now, I developed a faraway look in my eye; it’s nothing more than a strange coincidental resonance, but it will have meant something to me then, navigating this strange, difficult world of hormonally fuelled social interactions.

Spend, Spend, Spend – a phrase which has a life all of its own – was almost certainly the first time I’d properly thought about consumer culture.  It’s as relevant today as it was then; in fact, I’d argue it’s something we should spread more widely.  At this point I’m also going to confess that I probably wasn’t interpreting the lyrics as closely in 1979 as I’m able to do now – a combination of Ari Up’s accented English and a complete lack of words printed on the sleeve (plus the fact that I only had a cassette version in any case), meant that it was only recently I found out exactly what she was saying.  I got the gist though, and this leads inevitably into…

Shoplifting.  Short, sharp, to the point, probably the first time I’d heard the very London expression ‘do a runner’, and just joyful in it’s bassline and accelerating drum pattern.  It’s the heart of the album in some ways; fun but with the clear picture of life in a squat – the genuine hardships of the time colliding with the music of the future. Oh, and the last line still makes me giggle gleefully.

Elvis Costello tried to make the same point as FM in Radio, Radio, but while he played it for political point-scoring, this song projects a genuine sense of paranoia and unease.  Listening to it now, I project on to it the idea that this is a female perspective; living in fear rather than discomfort.

Just an aside as we turn the record over; this is a female driven album, but we shouldn’t ignore that Budgie on the drums and Dennis Bovell in the production booth form the underpinnings to the sound and allow all this to flourish on top of it.  Budgie was about to join Siouxsie and the Banshees and become much better known, but his drumming on this is easily as good as anything he produced later in his career.

Newtown is sparse and bleak – another song more relevant today than it was at the time – it describes the addictive qualities of the everyday and mundane accompanied by a percussion track which uses matches and a spoon to underline the point; that modern life is, as some one else would point out many years later, rubbish.

Ping Pong Affair (faithfully rendered with Ping Pong upside down on the cover and even the label) is the real eye-opener for me; hearing  the aftermath of a relationship from the point of view of someone who genuinely fears being raped after storming out, or somehow expects to be assaulted just for being out alone, was sobering and has stayed with me.  I love the production on this, the treatment of the voices in particular.  It stands out because it’s meant to, I think, and reading Viv Albertine’s book all those years later put the song into its proper context – it was genuinely frightening to be a woman alone on the streets in 1979, and I don’t think it’s improved all that much since.

All of which makes Love Und Romance harder to interpret.  You can take it at face value as a jolly love song right up to the point where the scary German lady threatens to break your neck if you’re not home when she gets in.

Teenage me goes a little pale at that point, I think.  Which – I’m pretty sure – was the general idea.

Typical Girls is the one more widely known, and is exactly the kind of song you fall in love with if you fancy yourself some kind of non-conformist rebel – and which 17-year-old doesn’t?  My favourite part of Typical Girls isn’t on this record; it’s the part where Mick Jones of The Clash responds to it in Train In Vain in a way which plainly demonstrates that he’d missed the point entirely.

The basslines by Tess Pollitt throughout the album are fluid and I wouldn’t change them for anything, but I can’t ignore that it’s Ari Up wielding the bass on Adventures Close to Home, and she plays it as much as a lead instrument as part of a rhythm section, and it gives the whole song a much more polished and complete sound.  It’s a strange thing, to love a sound but also be kind of interested to hear it done differently.  Adventures is a complex and fascinating song; philosophical and forthright, and – at the risk of repeating myself – not the sort of thing I’d been used to hearing a woman write or sing about.

I did, genuinely, change the way I thought about things after hearing this album.  I also don’t think I really knew why I did; it just happened.  It’s only after coming back to it that I understand what a profound effect it had on me.  It’s also really hard to express this without sounding patronising; an entirely ironic side-effect of the way I could plainly see that the world worked in 1979, and the way I gradually understood it ought to work, and – naturally – a product of the fact that, more than forty years later, it still doesn’t work that way, and while it would be easier today for The Slits to get this album made and heard; I can’t say it would be all that much easier, and would involve focus groups and earnest discussions about the picture on the front.

Overly long sentences aside, this is still an essential, empowering album, and I wish there were more like it.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

One other which I heard at the time – Return of the Giant Slits which I remember as being even more strange and experimental, but which I never owned or have felt any urgent need to rediscover.  Also, a much later one by a reformed band without Albertine, but I haven’t heard that one at all, I’m afraid.

Compilations to consider?

There is one I remember – it didn’t have a name, and may not even have been an official release.  It does, it turns out, have a Wikipedia entry, so at least I know I wasn’t dreaming it.

Live albums?

Some of the above compilation album is recorded live, but no official one I know of.

Anything else?

Yes.  This whole post has been a roundabout way of me imploring everyone to read Viv Albertine’s magnificent, unflinching, tough but ultimately triumphant memoir Clothes, Clothes, Clothes; Music, Music, Music; Boys, Boys, Boys.  It is, without doubt, the finest memoir of that turbulent punk period, written by someone who was there, and who saw it through a different lens than everyone else who has written about it (and I’ve read a lot of those over the years).  It’s also, in its second half, an extraordinary story of an extraordinary ordinary life. If you don’t read or watch any of my other recommendations in this whole thing, please read this one.

20. Replicas, Tubeway Army, 1979

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One of the most important things about liking new music in 1979 – at least to the kind of teenager I was – was the idea of being simultaneously ahead of the curve, and not being seen to like anything too popular.  Being into music in any form was a minefield – there were genres and sub-genres to navigate; some things which were inexplicably popular, and others which sounded perfectly fine, but were apparently to be avoided at all costs.  You never knew whether bringing your latest purchase in to school would cause eyebrows to be raised or brows to be furrowed, and having the ‘wrong’ opinion on something could be social death.

It was, of course, profoundly tribal – navigating the wild waters of the final couple of years in school needed the instincts of a politician as fads, football teams, bands and people fell in and out of fashion.  Striking out on your own was wildly risky, but if you got it right, could be enormously rewarding.

I’ve written before on here about how the end of my fifth year at school revolved around the drama theatre, and putting on plays rather than doing any actual school work.  The record player in the dressing room was just one of the incentives we had to spend as much time as possible skulking around backstage, ostensibly learning lines, painting scenery or figuring out the lighting, but in reality listening to as much and as varied a selection of music as possible.

And doing so in the company of like-minded contemporaries; people whose musical tastes clearly overlapped in some intriguing ways.  We’d compete to bring in the record we thought would score most points, and we’d talk confidently about bands we’d never heard, and we’d disparage music because it got played on daytime radio.  We listened to The Jam’s All Mod Cons album, and wondered why English Rose didn’t warrant a mention in the tracklisting; was it possible that the musicians themselves were as self-conscious about the songs they liked (and wrote) as we were?

Liking something new, then, was fraught with danger.  You might rave about a single you heard one evening while failing to do your maths homework, only to discover that the NME had already panned it and decided it didn’t fit with that week’s prevailing orthodoxy.  Equally, you might hear something and confidently declare it a tuneless dirge, only to discover that the band had a four-page spread in the music press and were being declared the future of music.

It took me a long time to get over my first reaction to Joy Division, I can tell you.

I had no doubts, however, about Tubeway Army.  I like to think I heard Down in the Park first, but it’s unlikely; like everyone else I knew, I saw them perform Are ‘Friends’ Electric on the Old Grey Whistle Test and went out and bought the single the next day.  The previous album in this list notwithstanding, here was something genuinely different and arresting – it might have been written intentionally for a sixteen-year-old science fiction reader suffering from all the usual teenage insecurities and uncertainties.  It didn’t – or so I thought at the time – have an obvious wide appeal; I couldn’t actually imagine anyone who didn’t share my exact tastes actually liking it, so it was perfect.

I brought it back in to the dressing room and played it several times that afternoon.  I like to think that everyone else gave it and me a wide berth, but in truth, many of us has seen them on TV the night before, and we were all intrigued.  The single had a picture sleeve with a close up of the robot frontman (whose name turned out to be Gary Numan) and the B side suggested that here was a whole new sound, not just a novelty single, although the layers of guitar on the B side also promised that it wouldn’t be a completely alien listening experience.

Of course, there were doubters – those who pointed out that Numan was basically doing a slightly less tuneful David Bowie impression, and who scoffed at the whole ‘synthesisers as viable musical instruments’ thing, but Tubeway Army definitely made a connection with me, and the album quickly followed the single into my ever-expanding collection.

My obsession with all things Gary Numan, however, didn’t outlive the band by much.  Numan dropped the band name before the end of 1979 (which always struck me as a curious decision), and I lasted only one more album before moving firmly toward the more guitar-heavy end of the music continuum.  But for a year or so there, it seemed that androids, computers and synthesised keyboard sounds were the way forward, and I was right there with them, right up to the point where it all got a bit too popular and successful, because I was still a fickle teenager, after all.

I have listened to Replicas since then, so this is not a completely cold reading of the album – however appropriate that might sound.  I do seem to remember that it’s not as bleak, cold and artificial as its reputation might suggest, but I also know that I haven’t hurried to procure a new copy, nor have I gazed fondly at it any time I came across one.  It was an important part of my life at the time, but perhaps not so much in retrospect; I’m keen to find out just what I actually think of it now.

Me, I Disconnect From You starts with the synthesiser equivalent of a guitar riff, followed by an actual guitar, or just possibly an artificially generated guitar sound.  The fact that it’s hard to tell is one of the most appealing features of what is otherwise a simple, if catchy song.  It clearly introduces the idea of the narrator as distant, alien and possibly artificial.  Is he the vaguely robotic figure on the front cover?  We assume so, and I think this is the first glimpse of the issue which makes this album harder to like than it should be.  It is cold and distant; it’s meant to be, but that really does make it hard to love – the emotions are missing, and the voice is playing a key part in keeping the listener at arm’s length, which is tricky to pull off successfully.  I like this song, but a whole album of it will be tough going.

Fortunately, all such reservations are swept aside by the powerful nostalgia rush of Are ‘Friends’ Electric?  This is much easier to relate to, although I’m the one bringing the emotion to the occasion – the song is telling a story, and the variation in the vocal style to the semi-narrated sections works to break up the flatness of the singing, and gives us a way in.  I have read suggestions that the lyrics to this, and to the album as a whole use the disconnected, robotic android effect to show us life from somewhere on the autistic spectrum, and it’s an intriguing thought – you can definitely hear in the words to Are ’Friends’ Electric? that sense of disconnect from social interactions, but you can just as easily, I think, ascribe it to the character Numan is playing, who is – I think – intended to be not-quite, or not-entirely human.

The Machman is much warmer (I’m aware I’m throwing around terms like ‘cold’ and ’warm’ as if it was obvious how they relate to music) because of the guitar part it kicks off with – the more analogue sounds help to make the vocal tone more relatable, and even though the emotion of the song is downplayed, there are a couple of places where words are oddly stressed to make them fit, and they allow a glimpse of the person behind the robot mask.  I like this more than I remembered.

On the other hand, my heart sank a little when Praying to the Aliens started with the same staccato rhythms and nasal voice; it does redeem itself with a more catchy chorus and interesting bassline; the various keyboard bleeps serve to keep the interest going, and by the end, I’m humming along, but I am definitely finding the relentless sameness of the approach to these songs a little wearing.

Down in the Park is, on the face of it, more of the same, but it has a bit more spark to it (I’m going to mention the bass playing of Paul Gardiner here again; he really propels this and several other songs along when the repetitive nature of the keyboard threaten to drain the whole thing of life.  Down in the Park takes a broader look at the setting for these stories, and it is not a pleasant one; I’m sure the line about ‘rape machines’ was designed to shock; it provokes unease now, although it’s not objectionable in context, it’s just not necessarily a context I want to spend much time in – I get it; the machines are mutilating and killing humans.  Perhaps there’s a redemptive through-line to all this mechanical misery, but I have to say, I don’t remember one.

You Are In My Vision feels like it rocked in from a completely different album.  There’s some more feeling to all of it, even the lyrics which simply depict the android being unable to look away from the degraded state of the humans around him.  It’s not exactly cheery and sing-along, but I think it works better than most of the songs on here, partly because the mix of instruments seems to work better.

Next up we get some treated drums, which really were the harbinger of the sounds which would fill up the charts of the early 1980s.  Where did the soundscape for all those synth-pop songs we remember so fondly come from?  Right here.  It’s not – I don’t think – a drum machine; the rhythms sound like they were created by a human and altered later (or were one of the very first electronic drum kits, although I have my doubts about that, too).  Either way, Replicas, the album track, is – deliberately or otherwise – pointing the way to one possible future, and it’s interesting mainly because of that.

It Must Have Been Years is further evidence that Numan’s voice reacts to the backing it’s being given.  While the tone is unchanged, this is a fairly straightforward guitar-based rock song, and the vocal line can’t help feeling more engaged and alive.  I have no idea what he’s singing about; like several songs here, these appear to be short stories pulled from a bigger context; we don’t know what ‘UDs’ are, but it’s an effective way to hint at a much greater depth and bigger story than we’ve seen so far.

When the Machines Rock is an instrumental, and freed from having to provide a platform for the words, the machines do, if not exactly rock, at least bounce along convincingly and with more life in them than we’ve heard so far. 

The longest track on the album, I Nearly Married a Human is also instrumental, and feels like it has a lot of work to do, to round this all off with enough conviction to make you want to come back for more.  It has a lot of interesting stuff going on, and this  time I think I do detect a drum machine once the long, filmic introduction gives way to the beat.  I honestly haven’t remembered any of the songs on the second side, but this one, I think would repay a little more investigation.  It certainly contains some of the seeds of the Next Big Thing which was just emerging as bands got their hands on relatively cheap technology – I can hear Ultravox, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, even Depeche Mode in this track, and while all of those were already on the road to their own sound in 1979, and might well have got there without this album, the fact that someone had brought this new style into public consciousness didn’t hurt.

Overall, I can’t say I’ll be rushing back to Replicas any time soon.  Unlike the other distinctly 1979 sounds I’ve talked about in the last few posts, this hasn’t surprised or delighted me beyond the nostalgic buzz I got from the first side.  It’s a cold, dark world, and not one I care to spend too much time in.  I appreciate its influence, and I do – at least I think I do – get why I was so in thrall to it at the time, but it doesn’t feel like it has stood the test of time nearly as well as I had hoped.  I’m a little sad about that, because it was important to me at the time, and I wish I liked it more than I do.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

There is only one other Tubeway Army album, the self-titled debut.  I listened to it a while back, and found that I like it much more than Replicas.  It’s definitely worth a listen, as – I suppose – is the first Gary Numan album, The Pleasure Principle. Recorded shortly after Replicas with the same band, but bafflingly released under his own name, it contains more hit singles, but is otherwise very similar to this.  I owned and loved it at the time, too, but I haven’t listened to it in many, many years.  After that, Numan went on doing his thing, and was successful at it, and I tip my hat to him, but don’t feel the urge to investigate any further.

Compilations to consider?

No Tubeway Army ones, and I’d hesitate to recommend a Gary Numan one, on the grounds that I haven’t heard any.

Live albums?

There is a live version of Replicas, and any number of other live albums, including at least one I remember from about 1981, called Living Ornaments, but – again – I’ve only heard snippets from that and not enough to recommend anything.  I did hear a live version of Are ‘Friends’ Electric recently, and that seemed to work pretty well; Numan’s voice had lost some of that affectless tone, and the whole thing, complete with audience singalong, was quite a lot of fun.

Anything else?

A couple of autobiographies, which I’m going to suggest are worth looking into if you’re a fan, mainly on the strength of an interview I heard Numan give a few years back, during which he came across as a thoroughly likeable bloke with some interesting stories to tell.

19. Sound-on-Sound, Bill Nelson’s Red Noise, 1979

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The album is on Spotify, but not in Canada, so I can’t link it here…

When the CD began to replace the LP, I found myself in something of a dilemma – did I replace all the albums I’d lovingly accumulated, or accept that times had changed, and move on; keep buying new music, just do it on the new shiny digital format?

The answer wasn’t clear for a number of years – the first device we owned capable of playing CDs also had a turntable – but in the end, when I no longer had a way of playing all those records, I reluctantly sold them (in my defence, they were bulky, heavy and a severe pain to move around, and we moved house a lot in those days), and selectively replaced the vinyl albums I loved the most with copies on CD, which was much more portable.

I also had a ridiculously large collection of albums on cassette, including re-recorded versions of many of the vinyl albums I no longer owned.  We’ll be coming to all those format issues in good time, I suspect.

In the meantime, this was one of the albums I bought on CD to replace my vinyl copy, and I have no idea why.

In fact, as I’ve been thinking about this album, I have no idea why I bought it in the first place, let alone a second time.  I don’t remember thinking of it particularly fondly at the time (bar two songs, which I’m coming to), and I can’t imagine why I thought I needed to hear it again some time in the early 2000s.  On top of that, I’ve had to jettison somewhere in the region of 200 albums from this list – albums which I’d have considered higher up in the pecking order than this one, yet here it is.

What’s going on?

I wasn’t a particular fan of Bill Nelson – I was aware of Be-Bop Deluxe, but only to the point of having seen people with copies of Sunburst Finish or Axe Victim; they were, as far as I could tell, in the same general musical area as the likes of Supertramp or Alan Parsons, only with fewer hit singles – and I don’t remember this having been excitedly passed around like a few other albums of the time.  What I do remember is that I definitely took my copy of this in to school to lend to someone, so I must have, at least to begin with, liked it enough to recommend it to others.  Whenever I think of this album, my mind conjures up, for some reason, the gallery above the games hall at school where we would occasionally play table tennis, so presumably, that’s where I swapped it or talked about it, or something.

But it has its hooks in me, clearly.  From all this time away, I’d like to tip my hat to the marketing team who promoted this album, because you must have done a staggeringly good job.  There was also, I imagine, a glowing review in Sounds.  What there wasn’t, as far as I can see, was a clear understanding of what this album was, or why I should buy it.  More than once.

1979 felt like a bit of a crossroads in music.  There was a clear sense that guitars were perhaps becoming a little old hat.  Synthesisers, previously unwieldy and untrustworthy banks of electronics which would go out of tune if you looked at them funny, were suddenly compact, affordable (up to a point) and able to make new sounds; noises which turned up all over the post-punk landscape.  Bands were more easily able to get their music into the hands of the public, and all kinds of strange music was much more readily available than before.

Some of the bands I’d been following changed their approach to things around this time; songs became shorter, spikier and had fewer instrumental excesses.  There was also a generational thing going on; new, young bands appeared, who appeared to take pains to disavow everything which had gone before.  Many of the people who were getting the attention of the music press were musical originalists; they had new instruments, or new ways of using old ones, and an apparently genuine desire not to pay attention to the previous generation.  Unlike most musical generations, who sought to build on what had gone before, this generation seemed interested only in burning everything down and starting again.

If you were an established musician, therefore, with several successful and critically-praised albums under your belt, you had something of a dilemma.  A few – OK, Genesis – managed to reinvent themselves as pop stars; a great many wandered off course, never to be heard from again, and some, including – it would seem – Bill Nelson, tried to start again with a whole different approach to music.

There’s another, more famous, keyboard-based album coming up next week, which spotlights just exactly what was going on with all these synthesised keyboard sounds, but this was the first of that wave of albums I’d heard, and perhaps I wouldn’t have got to that other one without this one first; perhaps this was my gateway to electronic music; the one which would set me on a path away from all those noisy guitars.

Or perhaps that was the Eberhard Schoener album from before.  Either way, as I’ve already hinted, it didn’t stick.  I still prefer my guitar-based music to have keyboards in it, but I never – quite – went full electronic.  Which, no doubt, is my loss.

I’m no closer, however, to finding out just what it was about this album in particular which snagged my attention and brought me back to the point where, a couple of years ago, I found myself staring at a second-hand vinyl copy in a record store and wondering if I should buy it for a third time.  I didn’t, on that occasion, but perhaps I should have.  Let’s find out….

As I said before, there are two tracks on here I can still hum, and even know some of the words to.  They are, it turns out (and as I had suspected) the last two songs on the album, but the comforting thing for me is that I do recognise the names of the others; this wasn’t something I bought and then hardly ever played.

The first thing I notice about the opening track, Don’t Touch Me (I’m Electric) is that it’s a guitar-based song; this clearly is more a more complicated album than I remember.  The vocals are in the late-seventies ‘not quite singing’ idiom, and there’s a lot going on in the mix – weird squelching sounds, a synthesized saxophone solo, and a real spikiness to the whole thing; it’s a short, snappy post-punk song which might easily have appeared on that Boomtown Rats album from a few weeks back.  Not what you’d call a memorable tune, but there’s more going on than I perhaps realised at the time.

And now I’ve invoked Tonic for the Troops, I hear it all over For Young Moderns too.  Not just the title, but melody lines and the whole idea that this is new, ‘modern’ music.  What’s obvious here is that the ‘new’ sounds are layered over a traditional rhythm section and the punchy guitar chords frame whatever synthesised sounds there are, illustrating just how much is ‘new’ in this sound – not as much as you might think at first listen.  I also have a sneaking suspicion that there’s a musical theme or two which we might hear again later.  The song eventually fades out under a fistful of discordant piano which manages to be – as intended, you suspect – cold and robotic while also chaotic and unstructured.

Stop/Go/Stop is, frankly, more of the same.  It has a Philip K Dick-inflected dystopian future feel to it, and music to match.  I keep trying to find synonyms for ‘spiky’, because that’s really the key feature of all the music so far.  I do think this marries the old and new sounds more successfully than the previous two tracks, but I’m not sure I have anything much more to say about it.

Furniture Music was, I think, a single from this album, but I don’t think the plodding rhythm and blank nihilism struck much of a chord with the British public.  It is a more interesting song than I’m making it sound, very late seventies / early eighties in feel, but there are bands and artists just around the corner who will make this kind of thing hugely popular by just tweaking the sound a little.  This, for example, might have benefited from being about 10% faster, or just holding the guitar sound back so the synthesizer carries more of the tune.

And, I’m sorry, but I’m not getting on with the vocal stylings.  Knowing it’s done for effect doesn’t make it any more bearable to listen to, I’m afraid.  Maybe I loved it more when I was a whiny teenager, as that’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like.

Fortunately, Radar in my Heart is much better.  Faster, more melodic, with more interesting extraneous noises.  It’s beginning to dawn on me that this is an album sung from the perspective of a robot or android or something, and this works much better with that in mind, and with the spark of life which has been injected into this.

Stay Young also works; I think it helps that it has a harmonica solo followed by a proper, old-fashioned guitar break, and the synthesized sounds weave in and out rather than being laid on top of everything.  It’s picked up quite a bit since I had a moan about it; let’s see what side two sounds like.

Out of Touch is the inevitable one about the psychotic breakdown; this seemed to be a common theme around this time, and there’s undoubtedly a whole doctoral thesis to be written on the themes of psychosis and disconnect in the lyrics of post-punk bands; were they trying to shock (there’s one line in this song which is definitely there for effect, and which sits very uneasily with the rest of it now), or were they just reflecting the times?  Hard to say in this case; it’s a song sung in character, and while there’s probably some value in diving deeper into whether all these songs are from the same point of view, and whether that character is a robot or just a dehumanised person, I’m not sure they’ve yet made the case that they deserver any further analysis.

If this album has a manifesto, it’s laid out in A Better Home in the Phantom Zone, which is the point where it finally stops experimenting and just breaks out an actual song which is about something.  It is, of course, partly about the whole ‘suburbia is the worst’ aesthetic, but it has a real bite to it, and rather than just referring to things, it actually manages to invoke the spirit of someone like J G Ballard, and the fascination and disgust with the mundane.  I like this song better than everything I’ve heard so far put together, and it’s because the musicians feel involved, and so does the listener.  I’d have happily listened to a whole album of this, thanks.

Sadly, Substitute Flesh can’t quite maintain the momentum.  Where it should make you uneasy and on edge, it just makes me, at least, slightly queasy.  I can clearly see what Nelson was aiming for here; it’s just that the song doesn’t quite hit the target, and it just sounds a little disjointed – the music here is much better than the vocal line and the lyric, which probably needed another couple of drafts.  It’s not dull like the middle parts of side one, but it doesn’t quite reach its potential, either.

The Atom Age is similar, although it lacks any of the edginess of the previous track – it’s just a blank robot anthem.  Listening to it, I’m irresistibly reminded of Hazel O’Connor and her android persona in Eighth Day; it’s very much of its time, and I don’t think it’s aged well.  Oh, and there’s a guitar solo which feels like it’s dropped in from another song; another genre, even.

Anyway, here come the two songs I remember clearly; I’m really looking forward to finding out why.

For the first time since I put this on, I’m smiling.  Art/Empire/Industry has me bouncing along; not only does it have an irresistible beat and a riff I remember after all this time, it feels like – maybe for the first time – everyone on this track means it. There’s a callback to an earlier track, a neat invocation of Nineteen Eighty-Four, some vocal treatment towards the end which finally lifts the sound out of the groove of disinterest it’s been mostly stuck in, and while it’s just as nihilistic and bleak as all the other tracks, it’s also fun.  And that’s ultimately what I’ve been missing.

Revolt Into Style explicitly namechecks 1984, and as a result, the song almost breathes a sigh of relief – this is what all of this has been about, and now we can just cut loose and enjoy ourselves a bit.  Like its predecessor, it’s a song full of life and has a melody which will crawl into your brain and stay there for – let’s see – 42 years and counting.  I was afraid of this, but it’s true; the last two tracks on here are so much better than everything else that I almost understand why I bought the CD version – at a time when there was no other way to hear half-remembered songs from albums you no longer owned, buying another copy was probably worth it, just to hear two tracks which had stayed with you long after the overall impression of the album had faded.

Before I go, I’m going to recognise the sterling work of drummer Dave Mattacks throughout this exercise.  I’m not sure I’d have got through all of this without his care and attention to detail.  When he, too, gets to cut loose at the end, it feels like a just reward for all the work he’s put in holding these songs together.

Overall, then, do I recommend rushing out to buy your very own copy of Sound-on-Sound?  Probably not, although you can make up your own minds.  1979 was a strange and interesting year for new music, and while I don’t think this album heralded anything in particular, I’m sure its influence was felt in some of the things we would shortly be listening to, and while I won’t be urgently seeking this out next time I’m in a record store, I’m certain that if it was carefully remixed, I’d love to hear some of the things which are surely hidden away in here somewhere.

Anyone got Steven Wilson’s number?

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

This is the only Red Noise album; if the guitar-focused parts intrigued you, you might like to try some Be-Bop Deluxe (Sunburst Finish with its oh-so-Seventies cover is still probably their best, but the last two albums point the way towards this, as it turns out).  The next Bill Nelson album, released under his own name, is called Quit Dreaming (and Get on the Beam), and I’ved heard that a couple of times.  It does seem to address some of the issues I had with Sound-on-Sound, and almost had a hit single in Do You Dream in Colour?

Compilations to consider?

There’s a Very Best of Be-Bop Deluxe album, and several Bill Nelson compilations, including a recent series called The Dreamer’s Companion which I know nothing about, but may well investigate.

Live albums?

Not from this band, although – intriguingly, I have heard a live version of Out of Touch, which I think was the B-side of a single.  It is fascinating to think that there might be a whole live set from this time out there somewhere; I have a suspicion that these songs might well have worked better live.

Anything else?

Not that I’m aware of, although in researching this, I see a DVD called Flashlight Dreams…and Fleeting Shadows, and I’d like to know more.