March 2022 – Richard Watt

31. The Top, The Cure, 1984

Posted on March 27, 2022 by Richard

This one wins a prize - you can ignore the last 17 tracks...

It turns out 1984 was quite the year for albums. In looking back at this list, it’s clear now that as I came to the end of my Edinburgh years, my musical tastes opened up considerably, and I started buying albums by all sorts of people.

It would nevertheless have surprised the 1981 version of me to find a Cure album on this list. In my first year at university, and my first in Halls of Residence, my next door neighbour, a maths student who I might otherwise have had a lot in common with, basically played albums by Joy Division, the Psychedelic Furs and The Cure. Now, I’m absolutely certain he was driven to distraction by the relentless wailing and tortured guitar noises coming from my side of the wall, but at the same time, I developed an unhealthy dislike of what I considered the plodding and dreary post-punk noises coming my way.

As I’ve mentioned before, it took me years to actually appreciate Joy Division (and I heard some Psychedelic Furs the other day without flinching at all), but The Cure was a different story – I like to think they came to me as much as I came to them.

I think my biggest problem (and it wasn’t a particularly sophisticated theory) was that music should be in some way fun. I wasn’t able to hear any enjoyment in the early Cure albums (and, thanks to Alan next door, I knew them almost as well as the ones I played), and I couldn’t see the point of any of it. Which strikes me now as oddly incurious of me.

There are genres and styles of music I don’t appreciate as much as others, but I like to think that for much of my life, I’ve given everything a fair shake. There’s a certain attitude to music – something I think of as inauthentic or (thanks to Rush) dishonest – and that usually turns me off, no matter how much fun the people making it seem to be having. But everything else, I like to think, has its merits, even if I can’t always see it at the time. There was clearly a period, however, where I just didn’t try to like anything which didn’t fall within a narrow scope, and I know I missed out on a lot which I would only later come back to, shaking my head at my younger self.

But, like I say, The Cure came to me as well. The early albums, particularly Seventeen Seconds and Faith were all doomy soundscapes and sparse, unsettling lyrics, and I absolutely understand what they were doing and why they are so loved now, but it wasn’t until I heard the quirky and, as far as I could tell, uncharacteristic single The Lovecats that it occurred to me to go back and re-listen to a band I had already written off as ‘not my sort of thing’.

The Top came out the following spring, and I borrowed it from the seemingly inexhaustible supply at Airyhall Library (qv). It was one of the albums of the summer for me, although it’s perfectly possible for me to claim that I’ve never really heard it at all.

As I’ve mentioned several times, the standard practice with library albums was to borrow two (the other one I took out with this one was The Drum is Everything by Carmel, who turned out not to be The Next Big Thing after all, but is an album I recall fondly nevertheless) and record them onto either side of a C90 cassette – this one was on a BASF tape whose inlay card was originally bright orange, but which faded over the course of the summer to a sickly yellow colour.

It faded because it lived on the dashboard of the giant Transit van I spent my summers driving around. My summer job throughout my university years involved me delivering bits of sonar equipment around Aberdeen, often delivering or collecting from the various helicopter companies as the gear was shipped offshore, or sent back for maintenance; it was pretty well paid for a summer job, and – in the latter couple of years – allowed me to listen to a huge amount of music thanks to the cheap cassette player we bolted to the dashboard in an attempt to avoid overdosing on Radio 1.

I don’t know whose player it was, or exactly how it was powered - it wasn’t a particularly sophisticated customisation; I’m almost certain it involved a bar of scrap metal bent into shape and bolted to the top of the dashboard holding the poor defenceless player roughly in place. Did we run power directly from the battery? I don’t remember that, but I know it worked.

The company had two Transits and what I would now call a pickup truck – the pickup was luxurious, with a built-in cassette player, and was the sole preserve of the senior storeman; I remember driving it only once or twice, but it wasn’t nearly as much fun as my beast of a Transit anyway. Of the two vans, everyone but me preferred the standard-sized one; it was more maneuverable, and had enough space for all the stuff we moved around. It was probably more comfortable and quieter, but I much preferred by beast – a long-wheelbase version with four wheels on the rear axle, which didn’t always quite fit into all the spaces I tried to squeeze it into, and had an unnerving habit of jumping out of first gear at inopportune moments.

But it had the cassette player, and that probably swung it for me. I’d take the Beast out even if the other two vehicles were available; even if I was driving across town in heavy traffic to pick up a packet of O-rings, because I could listen to my music as I drove.

I say listen – the Beast was not a quiet, contemplative place to listen to the subtleties of an album, it rattled and boomed, had no internal divider (unlike the smaller van, where you sat in a cab, you could enter the Beast by the rear doors and walk the length of it to take your seat up front), and the speaker on the cassette player was not exactly high fidelity. At the time, I also had a cassette of Prokofiev’s violin concertos which I listened to in there, and there are whole movements I was pretty much unaware of for years.

But I heard enough of The Top to know I liked it and it’s weird, psychedelic noises, and I discovered that I liked The Cure, although never enough to make me a full-on fan; enough for me to want to know more, and listen to other albums, and so on. Other than the first time I played it, in order to record it, however, I’m not entirely certain I’ve actually properly heard it, though.

It’s such a distinctive part of my life, and conjures up happy memories of barreling along the back roads between Bridge of Don and Dyce, cheerfully bullying people in Minis into the hedgerows as I careered past, reversing neatly into the cargo area at Bristow Helicopters and all the while singing along with an album whose words were a complete mystery to me. Perhaps I should actually find out what it sounds like.

As soon as I hear the laughter and distorted guitars at the beginning of Shake Dog Shake, I am transported back to the interior of the Beast. There’s a lot going on; the strange guitar tuning and distinctively post-punk bass sound, a lyric which is very dark and unsettling – it couldn’t be anyone but Robert Smith sing, yet unlike pry preconceived notions about this band, there’s nothing dull or plodding about this at all; it’s menacing, but still full of energy and life. Don’t think I’ve ever heard how it tails off at the end, though.

What I hear in Birdmad Girl is that The Cure and Aztec Camera are operating in the same songwriting space; just taking it in entirely different sonic directions. Where Roddy Frame is all bright, crisp chords and open spaces, this is dense and muddy – deliberately so. I remember the line about being a polar bear, and it doesn’t make any more sense to me now than it did then, but it still makes me smile.

Wailing Wall is straight up Siouxsie and the Banshees in sound and construction – Smith was also in the Banshees around this time – and is definitely a song I know less well than the others – it lacks the dynamic range needed to cut through the din of the interior of a late 1970s Transit van, and I have only a vague impression of how it sounded. Now, I hear it as a kind of impressionist painting of a song – full of sonic influences and ideas of what being at the Wailing Wall actually sounds and feels like – you can almost taste the dust in the air. Oh, and some of the guitar sounds move from left to right and back again – I definitely didn’t know that before.

Give Me It, however, definitely cut through the noise. It’s strange to me that I know a song like this – the very definition of a Cure ‘deep cut’ – almost as well as I know the pop singles I was regularly exposed to from the radio. It’s a wild, noisy, angry, urgent mess of a song, but that’s what I loved about it then, and what stands out now. There’s no doubt that it comes from a dark place, and is as fearsome a picture of addiction and dissonance as you could ever hope to hear, but it’s also wildly alive and direct. It pulls no punches, and you can’t look away, nor should you.

Dressing Up features a very 1980s synthesised flute or pan pipe sound (I’m guessing the latter, but it’s definitely not generated by anyone blowing into anything). Some songs form this era haven’t survived to well – the limitations of the technology tend to make them sound thin or somehow ‘shiny’, but this works really well still – the warm bass tone helps, as does Smith’s indulgent vocal, and I’ll even forgive the little glissando at the end, which is only just the right side of cheesy.

Side two – although this was on a C90, so I never made the distinction – starts with the only really well-known song from this album – Caterpillar Girl was clearly designed to be Lovecats part two, and still has all of its irrepressible bounce and simple joy. It’s full of interesting sounds – the jagged violin part, the multiple percussion parts, the random piano runs, and the sweet background vocals – and now I hear how it’s mixed, I love it even more – there’s just so much going on under the melody. The bright pop sensibilities of this seem a long way from the mist and fog of the early albums, but there’s a clear through-line in Robert Smith’s voice, which never quite manages to be purely joyful; there’s always an undertone of something darker however much fun everyone else seems to be having.

And the ending is just perfect.

I’m not quite as enamoured of Piggy in the Mirror; it feels to me like Smith is almost parodying his own singing style. For the first time on this album, I feel like the whole thing could do with being sped up a touch. I like some of the sounds going on here (the pan pipes are back), but I don’t have much else to say, I’m afraid.

The Empty World, however, has a wonderful, sparse, military air, like a half-remembered nightmare set in the world of The Nutcracker. It features another of those pan pipe melodies, but this one sticks in the brain long after the song is done. Terrific drumming, too. Really like the soundscape of this one.

Around the time this album came out, I was also being exposed to the music of Tom Waits. They have nothing particularly in common, but the conflation of the Tom Waits album Swordfishtrombones and this song called Bananafishbones always gave me pause. This is perhaps the most psychedelic of the songs on here; I still have no idea what it’s about, but I love the weird bounciness of it.

I had one of those metal spinning tops as a child; I have no idea what happened to it, but the sound it made was pretty much exactly the sound which is stitched in to the beginning of The Top. I wonder now if I had ever clearly heard it before – I don’t think I was surprised by it, so perhaps there was something about it which stuck with me. This is the most Cure-like of the songs on here, and I feel sure that it was around this point that I finally got what my neighbour Alan had been so enthralled by: it’s a sparse sound, with plenty of room for the imagination to roam. There is a version of me, I think, which went to see The Cure in 1980 instead of Saxon; a version of me which still ended up pretty much here in my musical journey, but perhaps sees this album as not particularly enthralling compared to some others, while the version we’re stuck with in the real world loves this album for the way it helped me open the doors and start listening to everything going on around me, not just the stuff I thought I ought to like.

The Top ends with the top winding down and falling over, but for me it ended with the realisation that I’d missed a lot in the last three years, and I’d better get on with catching up.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Given how much I like this one, you probably shouldn’t consider me an expert on Cure albums, but I also like Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me and Disintegration. There are others with even higher reputations which I simply don’t know as well as those, so there’s probably a lot you could catch up on if you felt so inclined.

Compilations to consider?

Standing on a Beach is my favourite, although it came out in 1986, so is missing a lot of later stuff, like Friday I’m in Love, which means you should probably try something later.

Live albums?

The album called Concert is contemporaneous with this album, and features some of these songs; later live albums tend not to feature any of these songs, but as I may have mentioned, I’m not a Cure expert.

Anything else?

For such an influential and popular band, there’s surprisingly little out there to read about them. The ‘official biography’ Ten imaginary Years is about 35 years old at this point, and still seems to be the definitive story. If there’s something out there I’ve missed, do let me know.

30. Grace Under Pressure, Rush, 1984

Posted on March 20, 2022 by Richard

I hadn’t specifically planned to land on Rush at the halfway point in this, but here we are. The main reason that I imposed a rule of ‘one album per artist’ on this list is that there would have easily been half a dozen Rush albums to write about, and probably half a dozen more I’d have tried to sneak in, leaving the list looking a little lopsided.

Despite that, choosing this as mt representative Rush album was straightforward. It’s not the best Rush album, or the best-known, and it’s probably not – quite – my favourite, but it’s the one which sums up a specific and pivotal time in my life, and which chimed with me and where I was in life so exactly that it was always going to be Grace Under Pressure, or p/g as the cool kids call it.

Well, I’m joking about the ‘cool kids’ part, obviously. The one thing anyone in the UK could tell you about Rush in 1984 was that they were decidedly not cool. Earlier on in their career, the NME had dubbed them ‘junior Hitlers’, a tag which rankled for reasons I’ll explain later, and which definitely cast them into a shadow from which they never quite emerged in Britain, at least.

A few months ago, I watched an episode of ‘Word in Your Attic’ featuring David Mitchell (not that one, the other one) talking about his extraordinary book Utopia Avenue, during which he returned more than once to the music of Rush, and saw clearly that not only is the music of Rush a gap in the otherwise comprehensive knowledge of both David Hepworth and Mark Ellen, but perhaps a certain unease at the mere mention of this band who talked about the likes of Ayn Rand in their sleevenotes.

So, being a Rush fan in the early 1980s was to be something of an outsider. We knew that none of those labels were accurate (well, the one about the distinctive vocal register was true, but Geddy Lee’s voice set Rush apart from everyone else), and there was so much depth and complexity to the music produced by these three Canadians. In many ways, I was perfectly happy that most of the people I knew didn’t get it; having to justify the one band which meant more to me then (and probably now) than all the others put together got somewhat tiresome after a while.

But I live in Canada now, where Rush are a national icon, and wearing one of my Rush t-shirts will provoke conversations and a shared experience rather than stares and pointing.

Rush appeared in my life – I’m fairly certain of this – when a copy of Permanent Waves appeared in the year area in early 1980. Spirit of Radio had already been something of a minor hit, with the kind of radio play which songs with the word ‘radio’ in the title always seemed to get, and I was already heading down the slope of noisy rock music previously alluded to. This album spoke to me, but what I did was go out and buy a couple of the earlier, noisier albums, and I disappeared into that world for a few months, slowly working my way forward until Permanent Waves made more sense.

There’s a whole essay to be written about that exploration, and the way I carefully accumulated the albums I’d read about, but I have done a lot of that before. What I have been thinking about as I prepared this was the course of my first three years in Edinburgh, when the previously alluded to avalanche of noise and tight trousers was filling up my record collection. There were, of course, layers to my listening habits – the radio would accompany me through the early and late parts of the day, while I would throw on an album by the flavour of the month to get me through essay-writing, or whatever it was I was supposed to be doing, and then when I just wanted to put something on and listen to it, It would almost always be a Rush album.

There was something different and hard to define about the music of Rush. Superficially, you could listen to an album like 2112 and hear all the same elements which were in those Saxon albums from a few weeks back. But there was also some of what had attracted me to the Prog albums of the early seventies; telling longer-form stories with interesting musical progressions and things you didn’t hear anywhere else.

And the stories they were telling weren’t like all the others. Of course, a lot of it – especially the early songs – got written off at the time as ‘pretentious’, but here were songs about the French Revolution, about philosophy and the human condition. Permanent Waves contains a nine-minute song in three parts about the place of science in the modern world, which is more relevant than ever in 2022, although I’m not sure I still share the optimism these days.

Rush also always challenged the listener by moving on to the next thing before they got bored of the last one; we might have been happy to continue buying albums with twenty minute long pieces about Athenian philosophy of the mind (or whatever it was that Hemispheres was actually about), but Rush weren’t interested in making them – they moved on, and brought us with them.

Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures were influenced as much by The Police and Talking Heads as they were by what had gone before, and by the time we got to Grace Under Pressure, the very sound of the band had changed; there were more and more keyboard sounds, and electronics appearing in unexpected areas. It is, in many ways, a very 1984 album, but it’s also a very Rush album; full of the signature thoughts, ideas and sounds, and the ridiculously virtuosic playing. Many of the albums I’d been listening to over those months and years were to a degree interchangeable; Grace Under Pressure could not have been by anyone else.

I could write a book about Rush, and one day I just might, but I do want to constrain myself to this particular album and this particular time in my life. At the time this came out, in April 1984, I was coming to the end of my university career. I’d be graduating in the summer, assuming I ever got my dissertation on Turkish grammar finished, and Id be heading on to – well, I had no idea. Alongside my first few plays of this album were a mountain of application forms, as I participated in the ‘Milk Round’ of corporate entities looking to scoop up as many graduates as possible.

I pretty much knew I didn’t want to follow that path, but I had no idea which path I did want to follow. I went to a few interviews, filled in all the forms, and tried to come to terms with the fact that the relatively cushy academic life I’d known for almost all of my life was actually coming to an end and I was going to have to grow up, face my more mature responsibilities, and figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. As I did so, I was obsessively, almost to the exclusion of everything else, listening to this album and its concerns about life in this strange time, and the responsibilities and pressures of being a grown-up in a world seemingly designed to crush the human spirit.

As I wandered around the streets of London in my best, if somewhat ill-fitting, interview shoes, having secured three separate interview which I remember absolutely nothing about, what I do remember is listening to Grace Under Pressure. Not on any physical device, but simply playing it over and over in my head – I could comfortably get through all forty or so minutes of it entirely in my own brain, and when I reached the final fading notes of Between the Wheels, I could mentally flip it over and start again.

No other album in my life – none of the other fifty-nine on this list, none of the other Rush albums, none of the hundreds I discarded but which I’m ridiculously familiar with – none of them infected my brain like this one did. I know (because I tried earlier) that I can’t still do the whole ‘playing the whole album in my head’ thing now, but I can conjure up most of it without too much effort.

What on earth is it, then, about this mid-career and often overlooked album which has burrowed so deeply into my brain? Perhaps it would have been some other album from 1984 – I have a few more to get through yet – but I doubt it; this is a collection of songs which spoke so clearly to me and the mental state I was in as I contemplated what would come next that I still can’t shake it off nearly forty years later.

Distant Early Warning starts by laying out the sonic palette of the album – the guitar sounds are more of a wash than a driving riff, the drumming is illustrating as much as it is powering the rhythm, and there are layers of synthesised sounds. There’s also a deliberate burst of static, which had me convinced that my brand new copy was in some way damaged. The song itself is a furrowed-brow of a lyric about things like acid rain and the fragility of the world. Again, more relevant now than when it was written. I do remember alluding to it in an essay I wrote for the civil service entrance exam.

I’m not a civil servant; perhaps I have this song to thank for it.

The song, like much of the album, is shot through with cold war imagery. It does place the album in context, and again, feels perhaps a little more relevant than it might have done twenty years ago.

Afterimage is a properly adult song about the death of a close friend. It surprised me back then with the way it laid out the raw emotions of a sudden unexpected tragedy, and it still does today. There’s a middle eight which never seems to get going, echoing the sense of time standing still while we process something largely incomprehensible. There’s a short guitar solo and the repetition of the lines about remembering and how we try to hold on to the lost one by ‘feel[ing] the way you would’.

Geddy Lee’s parents met in a Nazi concentration camp. Red Sector A is the only time Rush ever tried to address this; while Neil Peart’s lyrics could often be political and personal, I’m not sure that he often felt comfortable getting this personal. The song is more abstract than I’m making it sound; it’s a reflection of a victim who is never identified – the song never says ‘this is what it was like for Geddy’s mum’; there’s no indication that it’s a specific place at all; it’s just a chilling reflection on how anyone in this situation could easily feel like the last humans; that humanity itself must have come to an end for this to have happened.

It's just a rock song, but it’s a really powerful and important one, and I’d like to think that it might have caused the person who wrote the line about ‘junior Hitlers’ to just pause and reflect a little.

Instead of writing giant, sprawling, epics, the 1980s version of Rush split the themed songs over three albums. Tied to Witch Hunt on Moving Pictures and The Weapon from Signals, The Enemy Within is billed as ‘part one’ of the trilogy, but was evidently the hardest to write. Addressing the internalised fear which can paralyse, it doesn’t offer solutions, just an acknowledgement that everyone suffers from random, inexplicable fears as well as the justified ones. This song also features the clearest of indications of the influence of The Police, and is perhaps the most musically dated, for all that I still enjoy bouncing along to it.

The Body Electric invokes Walt Whitman in the service of an intriguing science fiction tale of a decaying android ‘on the run’ from something or other – perhaps the fears in its own mind. I can’t help feeling that Neil Peart, were he still with us, would have enjoyed the TV show of Westworld, which mines pretty much this seam in a way which is a lot more mainstream than songs like this were in 1984. I should point out here that Peart’s drumming, often technically brilliant and even – whisper it – flashy, is employed to perfection in the service of the mechanical nature of this song. There are some extraordinary patterns in the mid section as the machine breaks down, but the metronomic regularity of the beat is never lost and reasserts itself whenever needed. As with pretty much every Rush song ever recorded, I could happily just listen to the drum track on repeat, trying to figure out how you do that with just the regulation number of arms and legs.

It took me longer to love Kid Gloves than the other songs on here, and for the life of me now, I can’t understand why. It’s an insightful and clever lyric with a truly spectacular instrumental break, in which drum and guitar duel over an ever-shifting bass pattern which seems to be herding the unruly kids back into line. I think perhaps I wasn’t as receptive to the idea that all that I’d been learning these past few years might not actually have equipped me for the world beyond; I don’t know. But I love it now.

The opposite has happened to red lenses. Fully enjoyed at the time as the ‘playful’ song on the album, I perhaps find it a little tricksy now. It’s definitely coming at the whole cold war paranoia theme from a less serious direction, and it is a welcome lifting of the covers, in which we discover that this most serious of bands are actually having a blast out there, and mucking about with all the technology at their disposal. Perhaps I just find the whole thing a little too 1980s in its sound; certainly the references to the Soviets date it almost as much as the layers of digitised sounds do.

But, holy crap, the bassline in the fade is extraordinary. I’m going back to listen to that again…

I digress. Between the Wheels is the masterpiece on this grown-up album, featuring a cold-eyed look at what it meant to live in such uncertain and terrifying times. If anyone was to ask me what it was really like living in fear that one side or the other might just decide to start flinging nuclear weapons around, I point them at this song, which confidently predicted that we were ‘living between the wars, in our time’.

And it gives me the opportunity to single out Alex Lifeson’s guitar playing. I know that this period of Rush is not exactly his favourite, as his guitar sounds tended to fade in the mix a little under the layers of interesting keyboards, but whenever he cuts loose, as he does here, you’re reminded that he’s as good a guitarists as his bandmates are at their instruments; you do occasionally still read articles about how under-rated he is as a guitarist – I saw one only this week – but not in these quarters. As the kids say these days, if you know, you know.

And that was always the case with Rush. I knew, and I was always happy in my knowledge – those who avoided them for whatever reason were missing out, and it was enormously rewarding to me to see them slowly gain acceptance and respect in their later years, as the rest of the world woke up to what some of us had always known – Rush were something very special indeed, and while I miss them every day, the joy of knowing thwt I can go back and listen to any of their albums and be instantly transported to the world as it was back when I first heard it remains undimmed.

If there had been 60 Rush albums, that’s what I’d have written about.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

OK, I’m not going to do the cop-out thing of recommending them all (but I do recommend them all). If you like this, then the ones either side of it, Signals and Power Windows will likely be up your street too. Everyone who considers themselves a rock fan will already own 2112 and Moving pictures, so I’m going to instead recommend their last album Clockwork Angels. To produce so much music of such high quality so late in a bands career is - well, it’s what we should have expected from Rush, I suppose. And to end it the way they did, with The Garden, still leaves me speechless in a mixture of admiration and profound sadness.

Compilations to consider?

Tricky one, this. As a Rush completist, you’d think I’d own all the compilations as well, but I don’t. Honestly, there are several to choose from, and they will all be excellent, so take your pick.

Live albums?

Oh, yes. Rush built their career on magnificently executed live shows, and released a live album every four albums until the early 2000s, when they started releasing live albums after every tour. There’s even a live album of the Grace Under Pressure tour, which was released much later. With the proliferation of 40^th anniversary editions of all the key Rush albums, all of which contain some new live recording, it’s pretty much possible to hear what they sounded like live at any point in their career.

But I’m going to recommend Different Stages from 1999, as it sums up everything about the band in the live experience. There are later, more spectacular shows (you should look up Rush in Rio, for example), but for sheer joyful musicianship, this is the set which I go back to more than any of the others.

Anything else?

Yes. Two films covering the later stages of their career sum up what Rush were about, and why they meant so much to so many of us. The first, Beyond the Lighted Stage, is a stroll through the complete history of the band, with all the usual biographical tropes, but is genuinely engrossing and entertaining, even to non-obsessives. The second, Time Stand Still, is an account of the final tour, and is both an exploration of what it means to work at these high standards as you age, but also looks in some depth at what the end of a band like this means to is fans. It’s perhaps a little less accessible that the first, but has some real insights into the power of music, and is warmly recommended.

Oh, and there are endless books. I could do a whole post on those, too. If you don’t read anything else, though, read Neil Peart’s Ghost Rider, his account of his ‘lost years’ as he tried to come to terms with the death of his daughter and wife and re-emerge into the world. Then listen to Vapur Trails. It’ll all make sense after that.

29. Body and Soul, Joe Jackson, 1984

Posted on March 13, 2022 by Richard

Hey! The original nine tracks, and nothing else...

When I think of this album, I think of sunshine and beaches, which is perhaps not quite the mood Joe Jackson was going for, but for that you can blame the Sony Walkman, or – to be more accurate – whichever cheap knockoff version I was using at the time.

The iPod is, naturally, seen as the device which revolutionized music consumption for the generations which were first exposed to portable digital music, but we oldies had our own revolution in the 1980s, when it suddenly became possible to lug your music collection around on cassette. Significantly more portable than an album, and – naturally – much less prone to damage, I know that I travelled for years with a clutch of cassettes rattling around in my hand luggage – no train journey or flight was complete without my immediate neighbours being subjected to the sound leaking out from the flimsy headphones which these cheap and cheerful devices always had.

I’ve noted before how much of my collection was on tape; recorded either from albums I owned or ones I’d borrowed from various sources. As I gradually reached a reasonable level of disposable income, I went out and bought my own copy of some of those albums, but others were actually bought on cassette.

There were two reasons for this – firstly, that I was doing more driving than before – my summer job during the early eighties involved me driving a van around Aberdeen, and my first ‘proper’ job involved driving my company car around the north of Scotland. In both cases, I had access to a cassette player – crudely rigged up, in the case of the van, and part of the ‘in-car entertainment system’ in the case of my succession of underperforming Vauxhall Astras.

I also had the faithful, if flaky, portable cassette players – it seemed possible, even likely, that the future of recorded music was the Compact Cassette, to give it it’s full name.

I mean, by 1984, I was beginning to see the occasional CD stand in record shops – The Other Record Shop in Edinburgh had one, a metal spinner with about a dozen titles on it, but the price alone was surely going to mean that cassettes were the way forward for all but the ultra-rich…

Like most of my peers, I imagine, I became adept ad untangling tape when my player decided to chew it – I didn’t risk a C120 cassette, with its tape you could spit peas through, in anything other than a top quality, static player which wasn’t going to be jolted or move in any way during playback, but a standard C90, with two albums worth of material on it, was usually safe right up to the moment when the tell-tale distortion of sound indicated that something had gone badly wrong.

It's why I never went anywhere without two pencils – one to rewind the spool with, and the other to run the tape over to try to get rid of the worst of the crumpling.

Yes, it does sound like a bit of a faff, doesn’t it?

For the most part, though, despite the vagaries of playback, the humble cassette, its pre-recorded cousin the Musicassette, and the much rarer Cassingle became the main way I consumed music. If the sound quality wasn’t up to the vinyl original (original and best, some might say), it usually didn’t matter – I was listening in the car, or on a train, or in the huge metal echo chamber of the long-wheelbase Transit van which meant I often only had a vague idea what my favourite songs actually sounded like.

The flexibility – and, I reflect now, the seemingly disposable nature - of the cassette meant that not only did I treat them with much less care and attention than I did my precious LPs, but that I would often try out music I might not otherwise ever hear. Not included on this list are many classical albums, records by half-forgotten eighties bands and compilations taken from radio shows; the odd live concert taped of the radio or TV, or comedy albums, a number of which I had on cassette, and which somehow continued to entertain me, no matter how often I heard them.

I pondered long and hard about which Joe Jackson album to write about, and I’ve settled on this one, which I only ever owned on cassette. While I still love many of his albums (see list below for details), this is the one which travelled around with me; this was the one I had with me when we went to the Canary Islands for a January holiday early in our married life, and this is the one which reminds me of sunshine and beaches, despite being set in smoky New York jazz clubs.

Joe Jackson belongs to that wave of post-punk artists who adopted some of the attitude flying around at the time, and used it as a vehicle for getting his clever, sophisticated music into the public consciousness – we’ll be coming to Elvis Costello in due course, and I couldn’t find room for Ian Dury or any of the others, but there were more than a few of them.

What set Jackson apart from his peers for me was the fact that he was the least pop star person you could imagine, but there he was, having people sing and dance along with his chilly, cynical tales of modern life. I loved those early albums, and even – maybe particularly – Jumping’ Jive, which got Cab Calloway and Louis Jordan songs into the pop charts.

I also struggled for a time with Joe, due to his loudly-proclaimed disdain for the kind of music I liked. I went off him for a bit, until I eventually came to my senses and realised he was right; much of the music was uninteresting and an awful lot of it was somewhat misogynistic. By the time I came back to him, I had matured somewhat in my taste, and he had moved on, getting closer and closer to what, I suspect, he had always wanted to do from the start.

I was, I’ll confess, a little surprised to see this album come up in 1984, as I associate it with a slightly later period, but that’s an effect of when I bought it and was listening to it, not of when it was recorded – there’s another album coming up in this list which I bought and listened to avidly in 1984, and it’s in exactly the same idiom as this one, so it does make sense, it’s me who is out of time, not Joe.

So, what do we get, then, when we slip the cassette from its lavishly-packaged but tiny sleeve, designed to evoke the jazz records of the 1950s? Well, what you don’t get is the experience I just had, pulling my more recently acquired vinyl copy out of its sleeve – you don’t get the full effect of the design, which doesn’t just evoke the 1950s, it slavishly copies it – the back of the sleeve is a marvel of the designer’s art, with everything about it, from the monochrome photographs to the typefaces, to the wall of text explaining exactly how this was recorded, designed to take you back another 30 years.

It's a time capsule inside a time capsule, this album, and it predisposes me to love it, although I suspect it might have been regarded as a touch pretentious when it was released.

The Verdict dives right in to the soundscape of the album – horns, piano and the ever-reliable bass of Graham Maby. It’s inspired by the 1982 film of the same name, although I don’t think it ever had any official connection to it. It’s in many ways a typical Joe Jackson song, a plaintive story told with the music doing as much of the work as the lyrics. If previous album Night and Day had been about the gloss and sheen of New York life; this one is clearly going to be told from the other side of the street, all grime and flickering neon reflected in rain-stippled puddles.

The back cover text makes much of the recording process, and it’s really only now, hearing it through a really good set of headphones from the original vinyl copy, that I can hear what the fuss was about. Artists really have no control over how people consume their music, and I have no doubt that Joe would have been positively horrified to see me nodding along to songs I couldn’t properly hear.

I definitely was able to hear the overall intended effect of a song like Cha Cha Loco; it’s firmly in the Latin-infused idiom of West Side Story; it’s another part of New York deftly invoked using the sounds of the area; you might wonder how a skinny boy from Portsmouth ended up singing in Spanish above a cha-cha beat, but this is what Jackson does best; imbuing his own distinct songwriting style with whatever influences he has around him.

Next up is Not Here, Not Now, a simple piano ballad at its heart. The fluid bass echoes the soundscape of the earlier tracks, and the chorus threatens to break into a much fuller arrangement, but is held in check mainly by Jackson’s voice reminding us that we “don’t wanna make a scene”. There’s a restrained solo on what I think is a flugelhorn, not in its usual bright military voice, but in an unsually mournful tone. It’s a quiet masterpiece, which I think I’ve often overlooked in the past.

You Can’t Get What You Want is one of a small handful of songs which have startled me in grocery stores in Canada. It was clearly a hit single here – like the other one which usually catches me out, XTC’s Mayor of Simpletown – but I’d only ever known it as an album track, causing me to pause beside the bananas, wondering why my local Save-on-Foods was playing deep cut Joe Jackson album tracks.

I can see why it worked as a single, all eighties slap bass and sophisticated rhythms; in fact, I wonder why it wasn’t a hit in Britain – perhaps the overall slightly Latin feel just didn’t translate.

Go For It was a particularly annoying eighties catchphrase – it has a real smack of Thatcherism and men in red braces clutching giant mobile phones to it for me, so I don’t think I ever paid it enough attention before – I’d certainly never noticed the quiet count-in before.

You know, I think I was right – it’s slight, and not exactly up to Joe’s usual standards. It’s fine in a chirpy, disposable pop kind of way, but that’s not really what this album is about.

Side two starts with what I think Jackson was aiming for all along – a carefully constructed instrumental; something of a scene-setter which might, perhaps, have worked better as the opening track to the whole album. It’s not really pop music of any kind; you could have an orchestra play this and it would be a fine piece of film score. It carries the feel and mood of the album, but it’s not otherwise like it in any way. Naturally, I love it – it has themes which develop and resolve, and is in all respects like the progressive music I’d – sort of – left behind at the end of the seventies. I think it’s the key to what’s going on here; this album isn’t really about the songs, it’s about the mood, the feel.

And then Happy Ending comes along and goes all pop song on us, with a straightforward duet raised above the ordinary by its shifts from minor to major and back again, and its jubilant saxophone lines. I’m not sure I’ve known until now who the second vocal on it was, so take a bow Elaine Caswell; her voice is perfectly matched against Jackson’s distinctive tone.

The flip side of Happy Ending, hinted at by its slowly deflating ending, is the heartache and world-weariness of Be MY Number Two – a familiar scenario arrived at from a slightly unusual angle. It’s perhaps the best-known song on here, and is for the most part a simple piano ballad – more stripped-back and raw that the bettwr-known ones on Night and Day, but it fully earns its explosion into full-colour instrumentation at the end; it’s heartfelt if slightly awkward, and is one of those timeless Joe Jackson songs which just works.

Album closer Heart of Ice does many of the same things Loisaida did; instrumental-driven, it takes a simple theme (introduced on the flute) and develops into something which leaves you wanting more. There’s a magnificently disciplined piece of hi-hat playing controlling the whole thing; reining in the rhythm while allowing the wind instruments in particular to go off and explore the musical landscape.

Again, I find myself smiling at the introduction of Graham Maby’s bass – Maby has been virtually ever-present on all Joe Jackson’s albums, and there’s something about the way in which he approaches whatever Jackson throws at him which gives any Joe Jackson album such a distinctive sound. As much as the biting lyrics or the sharp vocal sound, it’s the playing of everyone around him, bass in particular, which lifts the music of Joe Jackson above his peers for me.

I love almost all of his albums, but it’s this one – which I likely am only now hearing as its creator intended – which keeps me coming back for more.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

A great many; from the new wave stylings of the first two, released within months of each other, and containing some of the greatest late seventies pop songs, via Beat Crazy’s seeming lack of discipline, through the unexpected and bizarre trip into forties swing which is Jumpin’ Jive, and on through Day and Night, Joe Jackson rarely, if ever disappointed. As a case in point, the two other albums in serious contention for this spot ion the list were the ‘recorded live in front of a silent audience’ oddity of Big World, and the almost unknown Blaze of Glory, which is just brilliant, but which lost out to this on the flip of a metaphorical coin. Try any of his albums, they all have something to recommend the.

Compilations to consider?

I have (or had; that’s another story) a CD copy of The Best of Joe Jackson, and recommend it to anyone who’s still unconvinced by the whole ‘you should buy all his albums’ theme of this post.

Live albums?

My favourite is the Live 1980-1986 set, which features three entirely different readings of Is She Really Going Out With Him? (at least my copy does; the one on Spotify seems to only have two…

Anything else?

Film soundtracks, classical albums, a symphony, a collaboration with Todd Rundgren which I’ve just discovered, and really should investigate. There’s also an autobiography called A Cure for Gravity which only really covers his early life, as he thinks life as a pop star (and presumably whatever he considers himself to be now) is not worth writing about. He did keep a blog for a while, though, and that’s worth a look.

28. High Land, Hard Rain, Aztec Camera, 1983

Posted on March 6, 2022 by Richard

See below for listening instructions

As I perhaps hinted at, we have pretty much skipped past 1981 and 1982 – on the face of it, odd to miss out the years when I was first buying albums in great numbers, but as I’ve hinted already, there wasn’t a huge amount of variety in those albums, and while I regard some of them fondly, and others in a kind of ‘what was I thinking?’ kind of way, I’m still aiming for variety and to attract the passing reader who really doesn’t want to hear my thoughts on Angelwitch, Magnum or April Wine.

I told you; what was I thinking?

Oh, and Magnum were actually pretty good for a while there.

But I digress. Living in Edinburgh in the early 1980s, it was impossible not to be aware of the music I otherwise wasn’t listening to. There were posters everywhere advertising the ‘Sound of Young Scotland’, and although it took me a while to come round, I did eventually get there, and opened my ears to what was going on around me.

This was partly due to peer pressure and mainly to the fact that Edinburgh in 1983 was just about the perfect place to be young, interested in buying as many albums as possible, and in possession of a student grant (ah, those were the days…)

The memory of Edinburgh’s record shops can still cause me to go all misty-eyed, although I’m not aware that any of them still exist (and would be delighted to be proved wrong). I had my regulars – the ones I walked past daily, or were close enough to where I was studying that a trip to check out the new releases wasn’t exactly out of my way, and there were several others I rarely visited, mainly because Edinburgh is built on several extinct volcanos, and is still the only place I’ve lived where everywhere seemed to be uphill from everywhere else.

My regular, and favourite for those first couple of years, was Phoenix on the High Street. Close enough to be easy to nip out to between lectures, it was biased towards the kind of music I was listening to (although not exclusively; I remember picking up Van Morrison albums in there, too). I joined a lineup outside Phoenix one day, discovering after a few minutes that we were queueing to meet Ian Gillan and have him autograph something. The fact that I was entirely unprepared, and didn’t have anything for him to autograph didn’t stop me – while all around me, people were handing over their treasured copies of Made in Japan or Clear Air Turbulence, I sheepishly presented him with the back of an envelope I had stuffed in my pocket. Treasured it for years, I did, although I don’t think it still exists.

Round the corner from Phoenix was the mysterious GI Records in Cockburn Street. It was the place to go for the hippy sound – they always seemed to be playing Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus or Forever Changes, and I know it’s where I bought that overpriced Japanese import Mountain live album with the 20-minute version of Nantucket Sleighride on it. GI didn’t sell singles, but made an exception for Laurie Anderson’s O Superman, which I bought purely to be able to say I bought a single from GI.

Well, also because it was terrific, but mainly for the first reason.

Back up on the High Street, The Other Record Shop was on the other side, further down the hill. It was similar to, but bigger than, the Aberdeen branch, but had a huge second-hand department upstairs, where many a past-its-prime bargain was to be had.

Back up the hill, and turning left on South Bridge, Ripping Records was the place where punk went to not die (the window was always full of Dead Kennedys, Exploited and Crass singles), and also had a superb second-hand department upstairs.

Coming out of Ripping, if I was going back to halls, I’d pass the Record Exchange (which I don’t remember ever buying anything in), next to a strange second-hand book shop which kept me in cheap but seemingly previously unread thrillers whenever I was finding the actual reading I was supposed to be doing too much.

The other shop I spent a lot of time in wasn’t a shop at all – Ezy Rider was actually a stall in Greyfriars Market, and stretched the meaning of the word ‘eclectic’ to its limits. Everything in Ezy Rider was cheap, probably second-hand, but most of it was things you’d never heard of. I rarely bought anything in Ezy Rider, but that was mainly because I had no idea what most of it was. I could easily spend a whole afternoon in there, though, just staring at stuff.

The New Town had its share of great record shops, too – including the multiple branches of Bruce’s – and it was over there, in the less-frequented half of town, that I was gradually turned on to what this ‘Sound of Young Scotland’ thing was all about.

You were wondering when I’d get round to Aztec Camera, weren’t you? So was I, to be honest – I could write about Edinburgh’s record shops for days.

When I ventured over to Bruce’s, or Listen, or any of the others – some whose names I’ve forgotten, to my shame – it seemed that they played a different kind of record while I browsed. 1983 was full of pop music – see next entry for confirmation – but some of the ‘jangle pop’ you heard in Bruce’s wasn’t the same as the stuff on the radio. This was the Scottish version – bands like Josef K, Fire Engines and Orange Juice; and of course, Aztec Camera.

The first time I heard Aztec Camera, I likely dismissed it as being just like all the others. I read about Roddy Frame – who, for all practical purposes was Aztec Camera, and sighed to discover that he was younger than me (still is, as far as I know) and endlessly more talented.

I don’t know at what point I was stopped in my tracks by the guitar parts in an Aztec Camera song, but it was likely in Bruce’s, and it was definitely something from this album (I’m pretty sure I know which song, but we’ll get there in good time). I don’t claim that my life and musical taste flipped around at that precise moment – it took some months for me to admit to the change – but something shifted in me.

I’d been dividing music into ‘album bands I like’ and ‘pop music I tolerate because it’s on the radio a lot’. Aztec Camera convinced me that one did not exclude the other, and when I finally gave in and listened to the whole of High Land, Hard Rain, I really did experience a shift in attitude and understanding. It was another Airyhall Library album, and I’m almost convinced that the other side of the tape I copied it to was Orange Juice’s Rip It Up, but if it was, this was the side I played on repeat.

I didn’t own a copy of this until I bought it on CD many years later, but I played my poorly recorded tape version so much that I can remember every little nuance – even the ones I couldn’t quite hear. If you’re going to listen along with me to this one – and you should – keep in mind that Roddy Frame is 19 years old when this comes out; it’s supernatural what he was doing.

I remember Oblivious as having been the big single from this – it was certainly a track I already knew, but it wasn’t until I properly listened to the whole thing that I was struck by the audacity of the thing – there’s a fabulous one-note guitar solo, for example, and what 19-year old comes up with lines like “they call us lonely when we’re really just alone”?

At the end of Oblivious, my brain does that thing where it starts the next track just ahead of me hearing it; a sign of an album which has thoroughly wormed its way into my brain. The Boy Wonders has a delicious double meaning, expertly unpacked in the chorus while I’m trying to work out – now just as much as forty years ago when I first heard it – how the hell he does that thing with the acoustic guitar where he’s simultaneously playing rhythm and lead.

Walk Out to Winter may, for some reason, be the best-known song on this album (I’m going by Spotify plays, which may not be the best measure ) it’s certainly the song I think of first, and one of the ones which I can just sing along to without thinking about it. I’m already in danger of just rhapsodising about the guitar work on every song, but just listen to the instrumental break, and how a whole new melody appears and develops quite apart form the vocal line…

The Bugle Sounds Again is the song I was thinking of earlier – it sounds simple; an ode to the creative muse and the writer’s relationship with it, strummed gently or not on open of those big, fat-sounding acoustic guitars, but when I once looked up the chords to see if I could play along, there were literally dozens of them I’d never heard of, and several I’m sure my fingers couldn’t form. And while all these diminished and augmented chords are are pushing the rhythm along, there’s a finger left over to pick out a solo line; it’s not clear just how extraordinary it is until you try to do it yourself.

The last track on side one (it’s a short album) is melancholy, slightly slower than what’s gone before, and with a layer of classical, Spanish-sounding guitar all over the middle eight which a lesser band would have electrified, followed by what the young folk call a breakdown which emphasises the final lines without changing the feel or message of the song. We Could Send Letters is one of my favourites, perhaps because it does sound a little less cheerful and upbeat than the others.

Who am I kidding; every one of these tracks is one of my favourites.

Take Pillar to Post, for example – it’s in the ‘hit single goes here’ spot; track one on side two – I don’t think it was a single, but it’s designed to sound like one – all early eighties production and electronic drum sounds, but you can’t hide the quality of the songwriting. It may have been a shameless attempt to climb the pop charts, but it works just as well as an uplifting, cheery album track, right until you find yourself wondering just exactly what ‘these bitter tokens are worthless to me’ is really saying.

Release doesn’t hide those spacy jazz-inflected chords – it leads with them, framing a slow, careful introduction during which we’re encouraged to notice that Frame’s voice is as good as his guitar playing. Each chorus adds more instrumentation and more tempo until the plaintive ballad of the first verse is completely forgotten in the rush to the finish – it crash lands in a pile of those same chords, overcome by its own momentum.

One of the strengths of this whole album is that it often takes a simple-sounding melody, and a straightforward lyric, and build into something quite intricate and complex with arrangements which somehow never overwhelm or obscure the message at the heart of the song. Lost Outside the Tunnel is a perfect example: there’s a lot going on, from the extra percussion sounds all the way to the spectacular guitar line which ends it, but none of what’s going on ever diverts attention from the melody line of the chorus in particular, which I’ll be humming for days now I’ve listened to it a couple of times.

Back on Board might just be the best of all these melodies; it’s literally and metaphorically uplifting, doing what it says it’s doing, pulling us all up with grace, before – for the first time – a song is extended beyond it’s natural end so Frame can show off some of his influences with an extended piece of close-harmony girl group singing, which eventually dissolves into a straightforward singer-songwriter solo song – has there ever been a better one-take song then Down the Dip about going to the pub?

It's the perfect ending to a near-perfect album, although the version I linked to up there, and the version I owned for years on CD has three more tracks. All three are rough and ready, demo-sounding songs which would happily have sat on the original with a bit more production. But they weren’t on the original version, and I’m not reviewing them, not even the coruscating Queen’s Tattoos.

You should listen to them, though – there’s no such thing as too much Aztec Camera.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

All of them, to be honest, from the over-produced Knife via the crowd-leasing Love to the astounding Dreamland (still my favourite, despite the memories this evokes). You should listen to Roddy Frame’s solo work too; it’s all great. He’s an artist who never compromised; just did things his own way, and as a result, his work is always interesting and rewarding to listen to.

Compilations to consider?

The Best of Aztec Camera is terrific, and the only place I’m aware of where you can hear his version of Van Halen’s Jump – but, honestly, buy all the albums; they’re great.

Live albums?

Sadly not, but if Roddy should ever be playing near you, you should go and see him, because he’s just as good as you’d imagine he would be. Editing my own copy as I go; I discover that there are a couple of Roddy Frame solo live albums, so you should check those out - I’m certainly going to.

Anything else?

There was – and I’m delighted to say, still is – a great fan website called Killermont Street. If you dig hard enough, you’ll find an essay I wrote about how Belle of the Ball from Dreamland is the perfect song… The website doesn’t seem to have been updated in a while, but I’m glad it’s still there.