Category Archives: Music

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 man 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.

18. Strangers in the Night, UFO, 1979

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

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

Compilations to consider?

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

Live albums?

Well, yes.

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

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

17. Video-Flashback, Eberhard Schoener, 1978

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This should link to a playlist - just let it run...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t remember ever being questioned, however.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Any other albums by this artist to consider?

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

Compilations to consider?

Well, it turns out….

Live albums?

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

Anything else?

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

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

16. Dire Straits, Dire Straits, 1978

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s OK to love both, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

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

Compilations to consider?

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

Live albums?

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

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

15. Some Enchanted Evening, Blue Öyster Cult, 1978

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

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

Compilations to consider?

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

Live albums?

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

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

14. Parallel Lines, Blondie, 1978

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Somewhere around 1978 I was co-opted into writing for the first issue of what we fondly imagined was Aberdeen’s first fanzine.  I don’t exactly remember how it happened, but suddenly I was spending evenings at the old St Katherine’s Centre – before it reinvented itself as the Lemon Tree – trying to figure out what the youth of Aberdeen wanted to say about anything.

What I wrote has, thankfully, been lost to the mists of time; I’m pretty sure it wasn’t particularly good or even slightly original (I was deep into my ‘terrible poetry’ phase at the time) but I was just happy to have been invited, and to be involved in this as yet unnamed project.

Finding a name for the thing was actually the toughest part of it all.  We just couldn’t come up with anything everyone liked, although not for the want of trying – there was, eventually, a list of about thirty potential names, none of which had convinced the majority of us, until someone offered to read them all out and someone suggested doing it from the bottom up.

Therefore, the name of Aberdeen’s first (or not; I’m really not clear on that) fanzine was: In Reverse Order.  We were absolutely certain that it was the beginning of a media empire; it actually lasted a whole two editions before everyone went off to do their exams.

However, those weeks of trying to wrestle IRO into shape were huge for my musical education – those meetings were where I first heard so much music  - The Ramones were a favourite among the group, for instance – and where I discovered people prepared to discuss music and disagree with each other without falling out about it.

Between the endless discussions about how to secure an interview with Aberdeen’s leading punk frontman, Albie Deedsoon of the Tools, we talked about bands like Wire and whether The Adverts having a hit single (for some definition of ‘hit’, of course) amounted to ‘selling out’.  And one evening, someone casually dropped in the astonishing fact that Debbie Harry was 32 years old, and therefore, not exactly part of the youth revolution we fully expected to happen any day now.

(I looked it up, and for once, my memory and timelines are pretty much spot on)

I don't know if we were ever really sure about Blondie.  1978 was the year when everything seemed to be happening at once, and it was getting harder and harder to keep tabs not only on what was going on, but which of the bewildering array of new bands and artists you were supposed to spend time on, and which were probably just another passing phase.  Younger readers will have to bear in mind that not only were we doing this at some distance from London, where you at least had the opportunity to go and see some of this stuff for yourself, but realistically the only way you knew anything at all about new music was via the music press.  Even hearing singles on the radio didn't always help: were, for example, Yellow Dog just another novelty act, or were they on the brink of a substantial career?  It was impossible to tell at times.

In the middle of 1978, we were in the grip of the nebulously-defined 'New Wave'; nobody really seemed to know what that meant - was Ian Dury New Wave despite being basically pub rock with added swearing?  How about the Motors?  In fact, who the hell were the Motors?  If they hadn't had a write-up in your music paper of choice, how were you supposed to know whether you were meant to like them or not?  You could pick out the disco stuff; you could pick out the novelty stuff that your parents were buying; you could pick out the MOR / throwback stuff like Mud, Darts and Showaddywaddy, but then you'd get City Boy, and you'd be scratching your head again.

With most New Wave stuff, you could at least identify a sort of British authenticity - The Jam might be channeling The Faces and The Kinks, but you knew where they were coming from.  American bands, however, tended to need a bit more study.  Blondie were a case in point.  The earliest stuff was punk enough to deserve some respect - X Offender and Rip Her To Shreds were particular favourites in that early flurry of female-led bands like the Banshees, X-Ray Spex or The Rezillos (and, yes, the Rezillos were another tricky one - genuine or parody?).  Then we got Denis, and it suddenly wasn't as clear - that's not punk; that's not even particularly New Wave; it's just a pop song.  But they're from New York - what do they know about our music scene?  Are they even trying to fit in to the way we do things here?

Parallel Lines didn't exactly clear things up, but it did change the way everyone looked at Blondie.  I don't think there was any inkling just how much better this was going to be than the first two albums; and I definitely know that even if you hadn't given much thought to Blondie before, this made you sit up and take notice.  They seduced you; took you in and led you by the hand until you were dancing to a disco song without really knowing how you got there.  Of course some of it was image; but a lot of it was sound - this is a real grab-bag of an album, with something for everyone, but in this case, that description is a compliment; they may not themselves have known which direction they were going in, but they gave all of it a fair shot, and most of it they carried off with some style.

If you're coming to this new, you'll be influenced by the fact that there are five songs here which were big enough hit singles to have entered the public consciousness; you aren't likely to be being introduced to Heart of Glass or Sunday Girl, but try to listen to it all the way we did in the summer of 1978 - After we got past the explosive start of Hanging on the Telephone, we were in uncharted territory, and while in retrospect the big singles seem obvious, I'm not sure they were at the time.

So, rather than the start of side one being three familiar songs, try to hear it as the hit single, followed by three songs which offer different views of the way Blondie want you to think of them - the stalkery insistence of One Way or Another; the cheeky familiarity of Picture This (was there ever a song more obviously recorded before the ink was dry on the lyrics?  I have no idea how she makes 'and you'd be on the skids / if it weren't for your job at the garage / if you could only...' scan like that; I'm amazed that it didn't get edited again after that, but I can't imagine it any other way, it has a breathless urgency to it which completely sells it).  Then it's straight into the weird new sounds of Fade Away and Radiate - it's the most representative of where New Wave was going at the time; moody and sparse, I think it's the high point on the album for Debbie Harry's voice - there's nothing else here which carries the emotion of this.

I Know But I Don't Know sounded then, and still does, like New York punk - a reminder that this isn't like the bands we were hearing every day.  It harks back to the punk sound a bit, as does the beginning of 11:59, which is immediately undercut by the melodic joy of the voice.  I loved that song then, and it turns out I still do - just listen to Clem Burke's drumming. Will Anything Happen continues down the punk-influenced road, before we make a couple of handbrake turns.

The first time I heard Sunday Girl, I don't know that it jumped out at me; it wasn't until I heard my sister singing along with it that I realised that it was purely and simply a perfect pop song - that, more so even than Heart of Glass turned Blondie into a pop band, and took them away from those of us who hoped to hang on to a cutting edge rock band with a cool girl singer.

Then, as if pop wasn't enough, they keep going right into the heart of disco.  Now, this was controversial - while Britain never had the 'Disco Wars', there was a definite dividing line between rock and everything else.  I'm almost certain that the original version of Heart of Glass I heard wasn't quite as obviously dancefloor oriented, but of course, all memories have been obliterated by the one everybody knows.  I might have bristled at it in 1978, but it's bloody great, isn't it?

As is I'm Gonna Love You Too; the point at which the teenaged me gives up trying to pigeonhole this album, and just goes with the flow.  Now, the whole idea of punk and New Wave bands covering songs from before I was born seemed contrary to what this was all supposed to be about - how can there have been a Year Zero if you're going to cover Buddy Holly songs?  About thirty seconds in, none of that matters - Holly was obviously a punk like us, and this is just brilliant (whisper it, it's probably my favourite track now).  After which, I'm afraid the last song is a bit of a let down - it really, really needs to be as sweary as some of the other songs we'd heard, but I guess if you're on a major label, there are things you cant do in 1978.

So, what do I think now?  I have to say, this has been an intensely Proustian experience - listening to this all the way through for the first time in years instantly transported me back to the grubby little office in the St Katherine's Centre and those fumbling attempts to put something in print.  We may not have known what we were doing, but we were firm in our convictions. And Parallel Lines was challenging those convictions.  Eventually, I think, I came down on the side of it being ‘not New Wave enough’ for us.  It would no doubt join all the other albums from 1978 which were about to disappear into a vague, uncategorizeable pile of half-remembered music.

Of course, I was wrong - we all were.  'Parallel Lines' pushed Blondie, and Debbie Harry in particular, out of the bubble of 'New Wave music' into the broader cultural arena.  It may have some classic elements of all the great music of its time, but it spoke to the rest of the world - the world outside our little smoke-filled room where we knew everything - and in some ways, began the process whereby pop music started to feature in the mainstream press - I think this album marked the last time that you could only read about bands like Blondie in the NME or Sounds, and I think it was part of the reason that embryonic fanzines like ours foundered – we didn’t really have a clear idea what we wanted to write about, and if bands we liked were going to be putting out albums which you could read about in the Sunday supplements, then what was the point, really?

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

The self-titled debut album features the early songs mentioned above, and is still worth a listen, as is Plastic Letters, although it is a bit dwarfed by Denis.  After this, both Eat to the Beat and Autoamerican were popular, but I can’t honestly say I heard much more than the singles.  After that, splits and reunions produced a few late-period albums, which diodn’t really reach my consciousness beyond the terrific single Maria, which ought to have prompted me to listen to the album it came from, but somehow didn’t.

Compilations to consider?

The Best of Blondie is the classic one, and I doubt that the later repackaged and expanded albums add anything to it; all the big songs (14 of them unless you’re in the US, when you only get 12) and no filler.

Live albums?

Apparently there are a couple – one from 1978 – the parts of it I’ve heard suggest the sound isn’t all that great, but it’s called Picture This if you feel like tracking it down – and one from 1999, which features much better sound, but a few ‘here’s one from our new album’ moments which may not be to everyone’s taste.

Anything else?

There are whole shelves of books dedicated to how Debbie Harry changed the whole world, but I’d stick to the ones she wrote herself for some real perspective – Face It is on my ‘to read’ list; I’ll report back if I manage to get to it.  I’d also love to find the tape I made of the New Year’s Eve concert from the Apollo in Glasgow in 1979 – I suspect the audio of it (I think there was video as well) must be kicking around online somewhere; that would be something to see.

13. A Tonic for the Troops, The Boomtown Rats, 1978

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The first ten tracks only...

If you’re paying particularly close attention, you’re probably wondering where all the albums released in 1977 are.  It’s a fair question; it’s not like there are no great albums from that year, but when I was putting this list together, the thing which became clear quite quickly was that 1977 in my life was dominated by singles.

1977 was in some ways something of a Year Zero for music.  It felt like everything changed at once; the music we loved fell out of fashion almost overnight; instead of being restricted to the music press, we were suddenly seeing the more notorious members of the more notorious bands on the front pages of the national press.  And there was a sudden and almost impossible to manage deluge of new, different music – some of which didn’t even sound like music at all – appearing mainly on singles.  A lot of those singles came and went in a week or two, you might hear it once or twice on the radio and never be entirely sure what the name of the band was; some of them stuck around and hung around long enough to poke around the edges of public awareness; and a few of them turned out to be classics of their type.

And hardly any of them led, at the time, to me buying the album they came from.

If you look now at the best-selling artists of 1977, you would be hard pressed to see anything had changed at all.  I was turning 15, and it felt like there was a revolution going on, but the charts were being dominated by Brotherhood of Man and David Soul; Baccara and the Manhattan Transfer.

Julie Covington gets a pass because of Rock Follies.

And here’s the thing – among the Sex Pistols, Clash and Damned singles; alongside Ian Dury and Tom Robinson, I was still buying music by Yes and ELP; still listening to Frampton Comes Alive!, I was just doing that in secret, because Something Had Changed.

Elvis died, Star Wars came out, and everything I knew about music was turned on its head. When I talk about it now, I think I tend to give the impression that I was in the vanguard of all that was new and sweary, with everything I knew and loved being left behind, but that’s not true at all.  What I know most surely about 1977 and 1978 was that I still loved everything – it’s around this time that I discover Prokofiev and Bartok, for example – and I’m not making up the fact that it did matter which musical choices you confessed to, and which you kept quiet, but the truth is that I just loved music, and there was so much of it.

We’re going to be in 1978 for most of the rest of the year, but looking at it now, it’s a surprisingly eclectic list of albums.  I’ve also discovered that two of my original 1978 albums were actually released in 1979, but I’ve already warned you about my imprecise memory, so that should come as no surprise.

The first two 1978 albums, however, kind of sum up what had actually happened – something I can only really appreciate with the benefit of hindsight, and that is that I had finally fallen in love with pop music.

Sure, it wasn’t quite as all-encompassing a love as my other musical loves, but for all the talk of revolution and uproar in music, an awful lot of what was happening was that really clever songwriters had found a way to get their smart, catchy pop songs be seen as cool and vaguely iconoclastic.  Suddenly, the really great songs had ditched the euphemism and mystery, and were talking about sex, drugs and sausage rolls.

I may have misremembered a bit, there.

You could get your music banned and still be successful – and ‘banned’ was a relative term, of course; you might not hear the Sex Pistols much on daytime radio, but you certainly could later on in the day, alongside weird, apparently tuneless dirges by bands you’d never hear of again, and Teenage Kicks by the Undertones.

All sorts of bands got swept up in what the media called ‘punk rock’; there were dozens of tribal distinctions to be made, and endless arguments about whether this or that band was punk or not; ‘New Wave’ very quickly came to represent everything which came after the immediate throwing over of the traces; music which wouldn’t have been heard a couple of years before was now popping up on a seemingly endless raft of independent labels, or on cassettes which only looked a little more professional than my own mixtapes.  This wild, energetic music was everywhere, and it was truly impossible to keep track of it all, never mind which bits of it you were ‘supposed’ to like, and which were by impostors and (one of the favourite terms of disparagement, alongside ‘rockist’ and ‘boring old farts’) ‘poseurs’.

Which, I think, is where we have to introduce the Boomtown Rats.

I don’t know, now, if I was supposed to like the Rats or not.  I don’t remember if owning a copy of Tonic for the Troops was cool, or if people were sniggering at me behind their hands.  Now, of course, I don’t care.  Back then, I suspect it kept me awake at night.  I hadn’t rushed out and bought Never Mind the Bollocks (although I’d certainly heard it all, and had a taped copy and a giant Holidays in the Sun poster); I hadn’t bought the first Clash album despite being blown away by White Riot, and later White Man in Hammersmith Palais.  Someone I knew had the Damned album, and the first Jam album, but my first foray into this new music was the second album by this bunch of Irish musicians I knew next to nothing about, save that every one of their singles had caused me to grin maniacally.

The big unanswered question I have about owning this album is whether I bought it before or after hearing Rat Trap.  I like to think it was before, in a sort of ‘I liked them before they became ludicrously popular’ way, but I can’t be sure.  What I find, to my surprise, now, is that looking at the album, the front and back covers are very familiar to me, and I could probably still hum most of the songs (I’ll find out shortly), but I don’t recognise the inner sleeve or the label.  To be fair, I have owned hundreds of albums, and am unlikely to remember all of them in detail, but so far, every album I’ve looked at has either brought back memories of holding it in my hand and poring over it, or has caused me to reel back as the Canadian version I now own is so different from the one I remember.  This, however, causes me to draw a blank.  Could it be that I actually didn’t play it all that often after I bought it?

More likely, was 1978 so full of albums that I just didn’t spend as much time with it as I thought?  I don’t know, but I suspect that is nearer the truth – there was just so much going on at this point, as we’ll see, that perhaps it’s not too surprising that I don’t clearly remember the green Ensign label and the inner sleeve with photographs from what I think is the Olympic stadium in Munich.

Anyway, never mind all that, what does it sound like now?

Like Clockwork was one of those singles which had so engaged me, and it comes flooding back – the bassline, the cowbell, the ‘tick tock’ introduction and the middle eight are all present and correct.  It’s impossible to hear Bob Geldof’s voice now without all the later associations; impossible to remember that he was pretty much unknown at this point.  What is clear is that this, like everything here, is a song in the modern idiom – which is to say, the original pop idiom – three minutes or thereabouts, wrap it up and move on to the next one.

Blind Date banishes my doubts; I know this – I remember singing along to it, and I remember that I didn’t know the lyrics at all.  Is my lack of familiarity with the inner sleeve down to the fact that my copy didn’t have one?  Someone with more inside knowledge of the workings of the record industry can perhaps fill me in on whether inner sleeves being replaced with generic paper ones was a thing back then – I know that there was at least one other album in my early collection which lacked the inner sleeve it should have sported, but was this a common occurrence?

Oh, “Are you really going out with Adolf?” really brings me back.  The American pronunciation of Adolf is, of course, intentionally calling back to the sixties call-and-response girl group records, but this is properly dark subject matter, however light-heartedly presented.  This is probably part of the reason the Boomtown Rats were (and probably still are) treated with some ambivalence – we know he doesn’t mean it; it’s designed to shock, to be edgy – singing a song from the perspective of Hitler is either genuinely shocking, or it’s just being done for effect, because that’s the kind of thing bands were supposed to be doing now.  I’m still not sure what Geldof had in mind here; punks wandering about with swastika armbands were part of the intention to shock; perhaps this was as well, I’m not entirely sure it’s stood up to the passage of time.

Similarly, Living in an Island is an equally jaunty song about suicide.  Nearly 60-year-old me is a bit cynical about this stuff, however well played, but I suspect 15-year-old me was listening open-mouthed to how daring this all was.  It’s slightly reggae-inflected, like so many songs of the time were, but I’m not sure how much of the sound is driven by being what you were supposed to sound like.

Side one ends with Don’t Believe What You Read, which is bouncy, punk-inflected (albeit with a slightly more traditional guitar solo) and in exactly the same was as the last two, a little knowingly cynical about everything.  It sounds like it was intended to be vitriolic about the press, but quickly becomes a generic ‘don’t believe anything which is written down’ rant, which is just a tad nihilistic…

I should say, despite my misgivings about the lyrical content, I’m having a great time reliving these songs; they’re really well-crafted pop music.

Talking of which, here comes She’s So Modern. 

I like to think (see above) that this was the single which prompted me to buy the album, although sitting here in 2021 listening to how ‘modern’ the 1970s are is a little… well, nostalgic, I suppose.  I don’t think the 1970s felt particularly modern in the 1970s, to be honest.  Although I did have a digital watch around this time, so there’s that.

Nice modulation at the end, guys.  Not sure about the lyrics, but I’ll let this one slide, too.

There was a general obsession with Howard Hughes after he died; the autobiography scam and the revelations about his eccentricity – Me and Howard Hughes seems like an inevitable reaction; it’s not about Hughes, but is a reaction to all the stories about him.  It’s also a cracking little tune, which I only remembered upon hearing it again.  So far, I’m enjoying side two a lot more.

Can’t Stop, however, need not detain us long.  It’s pop-punk by numbers; catchy refrain, jagged instrumental interludes, and it’s one of those amphetamine-=fuelled songs whi8ch was clearly more fun to record than it is to listen to.

I didn’t recognise (Watch out for) The Normal People until it reached the chorus, when it popped back into focus – I remember wondering what a ‘genuine fridge’ was, and whether the repeated use of ‘lucky bugger’ was proper swearing or not.  Ah, more innocent times.

Before we deal with the final track, I’m just going to say that I like this album.  It’s a little mannered, I think; a little forced – trying to be something it’s not; this is clearly a band of competent musicians dumbing down a little for the fame and fortune, but it’s still a lot of fun, and I’m glad to have revisited it.  Not sure how often I’ll come back, but it was nice to be reminded of what it felt like to be in the middle of all this wild pop music for a time.

And then there’s Rat Trap.  Now, I’m not going to pretend otherwise; I absolutely loved this song from the first time I heard it.  In that typically overblown teenage way, I imagined it was somehow speaking to me, even though it really had nothing to do with my life.  It’s also the only track on the album which doesn’t do the dumbing down thing; it’s carefully and cleverly constructed – the bassline alone is worth the price of admission – and of course, it’s a little calculating, designed for chart success.

It’s also very clearly nodding to what Bruce Springsteen was doing.  Springsteen was about as not-punk as you could get in 1978, although he mined the same seams.  Geldof seems to have recognised this, and Rat Trap is a deliberate attempt to frame the ‘downtrodden teenager’ trope with some of the Springsteen sound without making it sounds like it was all happening in some imagined suburb of Pittsburgh.  For me, it works, and although I Don’t Like Mondays is better known, and the whole ‘Bob Geldof saves the world’ thing probably overshadows all that came before Band Aid and all that followed, I don’t think he or his band ever sounded better than they did on Rat Trap; it was a part of my teenagerhood which I’d never want to change, and I think that’s true about this whole album – it’s not perfect by any means, but it was perfect for me at that time and in that place.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

I never bought another one; the whole thing left me behind as quickly as it arrived – I have heard both The Fine Art of Surfacing and Mondo Bongo but I can’t honestly recommend them to the casual listener, as I haven’t heard enough of them.  Mondays is on the former, though, if you’d like to explore what else they were doing at that point.

Compilations to consider?

Boomtown Rats’ Greatest Hits perhaps underlines the fact that they had fewer hits than you’d think.  Loudmouth includes some of Geldof’s solo work, and is definitely better value.

Live albums?

I was about to say ‘not as far as I know’, but there appear to be a few post-reunion live albums of varying degrees of ‘official’ all recorded in the 2010s.  nothing, as far as I can see, from 1978, but there must be something out there somewhere…

Anything else? Bob Geldof’s post-Live Aid autobiography Is That It? is definitely worth a read – I have no idea what happened to my copy, but I remember it quite clearly, including the parts where he appeared to have single-handedly built the M25. 

12. Hejira, Joni Mitchell, 1976

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We met the school library a little while back; there was another library which played a much more significant part in my life during the seventies, and introduced me to all sorts of music I might not otherwise ever have heard, including – and perhaps especially – Joni Mitchell.

I was brought up with the idea that going to the library on Saturday morning was part of the natural order of things – I remember going when we lived in Essex at the end of the sixties, and I know that joining the library was one of the first orders of business when we moved back to Aberdeen in 1970.  At first, I concentrated on working my way steadily through the age-appropriate book section, and gradually moved on into the sections which contained books I probably didn’t entirely understand, but which fired my imagination – I met lots of classic science fiction in that library, but I also developed an enduring love for a great many authors – the first time I read Tin Drum, for example, was a copy from the Airyhall library, and I date my love of John Barth to a copy of Sabbatical I thought I would try one day.

All of which went out of focus a little the day I discovered that you could also borrow albums from the library.  If I’m remembering correctly, records could only be borrowed for a week at a time, making the whole exercise somewhat more complicated than it otherwise should have been, but at that point I was perfectly happy to bike or even walk over and swap whatever I’d borrowed last week for something even more obscure and intriguing -looking.  The selection must have been refreshed reasonably frequently – perhaps there was a central stock for all the city libraries which got rotated – I do know that new releases didn’t appear immediately; there was definitely a delay before you could get your hands on the very latest thing, but there was enough of a back catalogue that there was always something new to try.

As I recall, the record section was divided roughly into one third classical, one third jazz, and one third ‘popular’, which covered a wide range, naturally – there was a fair bit of “easy listening” among the ‘popular’ – and the selection wasn’t exactly aimed at the spotty teenager looking to hear the latest and most obscure music before it became famous.  It did, however, contain enough music which, if it wasn’t already classic, was well on its way.  I know I ran through various artists like John Lennon and Jackson Browne; Eric Clapton and Elton John, some of which I taped, and some of which I didn’t.  Airyhall library is where I discovered that I preferred Frank Zappa to Captain Beefheart, and where I borrowed a copy of Weather Report’s Heavy Weather for the same reason I would eventually pick up a Joni Mitchell album.

I know my timings are off here, because I remember my first exposure to Joni being at the same time as I first heard Birdland from that Weather Report album, but since it came out in 1977, there may have been some separation between them.  Either way, I know I first heard both of those in Mr. Dunbar’s drama classes, where we were occasionally expected to do movement exercises to pieces of music.

There’s a whole section here about my life in drama as a child, but I suspect it’ll have to wait for something which ties more closely to it.

Whatever my memory of it may be, I know for sure that we were required to do something to the accompaniment of Joni Mitchell singing Big Yellow Taxi,  and being told that we perhaps weren’t quite ready for Joni Mitchell yet.  Maybe some of my classmates weren’t (although I like to think we were a pretty sophisticated bunch), but on being told that I wasn’t ready for her, I had to hear more.  The library had a copy of Ladies of the Canyon, and – I think – For the Roses, and I devoured those, but heard nothing else for a long time (as we’ll see, I was trying to cram in a lot of music in those years).  It wasn’t until 1980 that I finally came across the album which turned me into a lifelong Joni devotee – the remarkable live album Shadows and Light.

There were songs on Shadows and Light which dumbfounded me in their simple complexity – raw emotions expressed in a line of poetry, and music which shimmered and weaved all over the melodies, so you often couldn’t be entirely sure what you had just heard, and had to go back for more.  The fact that the jaw-dropping bass playing on it was by the same Jaco Pastorius who had startled me on Heavy Weather seemed somehow appropriate – it all tied together to a particular time and place in my life.

Further digging revealed that pretty much all of the songs I loved most from Shadows and Light (apart from The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines, which can still render me speechless in its live incarnation) were from the same album, so I went out and bought it, and I’ve never been without a copy since.

Hejira is, on the surface, just another album by a singer-songwriter who has decided to augment her sound by bringing in some jazz musicians to play the music she could hear in her head.  It’s just an album about being adrift and restless while travelling across the vast expanses of North America; it’s just an album about the fragility of relationships and what it means to be a woman in what was still very much a man’s world; it’s about how the present ties to the past in music in unexpected and inexplicable ways; it’s about old friendships and how they evolve; it’s about driving past a farmhouse, burning down in the middle of the night and being unable to change anything; about the remorselessness of the journey, the need to travel and keep moving; it’s…

It’s all of those things, and a thousand others, and it’s as much an experience as it is a physical object, and I love it to the point where putting that into words becomes almost impossible, and it’s an album which is part of me in a way which few others are.

It starts with the unmistakeable sound of Pastorius’ “Bass of Doom”, turning Coyote from a simple tale of a one-night stand into something altogether more muscular and with an irresistible momentum.  The story could be tawdry, but the combination of Mitchell’s irresistible voice and the sheer poetry of the thing turn it into something ineffably romantic and almost wistful – she knows it’s wrong, but it’s a moment suspended in time, and it’s all the fault of the freeway anyway.

Amelia spoke to me the moment I first heard it – I have always been drawn to the stories of those aviation pioneers, and of Amelia Earhart and Amy Johnson in particular – doing what they did on the same terms as the men who never did quite understand.  Joni’s in the same mental space; doing what she does and demanding to be treated as an equal.  The song conjures up the desert, and spaces which were entirely alien to me, but planted a longing in me to see them for myself.  It’s also partly a meditation on some of her earlier songs – Both Sides Now and This Flight Tonight both make a subtle appearance as an older Joni takes stock.

Furry Sings the Blues is another masterful photograph of a time and place; the old man is clearly visible, propped up on his pillows in the corner of the room while Joni tries to figure out her place in all this musical history, while Neil Young blows his almost but not quite random harmonica over it all.  The song is much more of a poem than the others here – it teeters on the edge of not scanning as the words assert themselves; not one of them wasted, or extra – just enough to paint the picture and no more.

Strange Boy has the same feel as Coyote in some ways, but is more personal, more of a rage at the situation; Joni having grown up and tried to move on, the strange boy steadfastly refusing to, with his skateboard and his obsession with his schooldays.  He has always seemed to me a Vietnam victim, but I don’t know if he’s entirely fictional or not.

The title track is in many ways the peak and pivot of the album; the return of that bass, this time restrained and fluid, underpinning the song as it reviews all of what has gone before; the travel, the vague longings for some kind of change in her life, and the uncertainty of what that might be.  All through the song, the bass grows and pushes out into the far corners of the soundscape, until, just before the fade, there is almost nothing else going on but Jaco’s experimenting.  It sums up what’s been going on so far – there’s no chorus, no hummable hook, just a songwriter putting her soul on the page, and creating a soundscape to give the words room to breathe and explore.

For a long time, I had a theory that the first track on the second side of an album was the key to the whole thing.  If that’s true in this case, this album is about being adrift in New York, which isn’t quite the case, but if you read New York as a symbol for the whole of the US, it works more.  It’s a long meditation on the nature of love and ambition – Sharon, who had wanted to be a singer, ended up with the domestic life which Joni had wanted until she discovered she was a singer.  Joni wonders about love and the nature of marriage (“the ceremony of bells and lace”) while wandering around New York; taking us with her on the ferries and showing us the skaters on the rink in Wollman Park. There are no answers, because this album is not about answers.

The Pastorius bass returns to propel Black Crow through all the various modes of transport and out the other side, to a place where we understand that thinking like the crow and being the crow are entirely different things; with a sigh, Joni turns back to the road, looking for a place to stay for the night…

The Blue Motel finally allows her to confess what she’s been skirting around all this time; for all the pain and loss, the inevitable heartbreak of the end of the affair, she’s lonely, and ready to try again just to see if it will numb the pain for a while.  It’s a relaxed blues, played by musicians who just feel like hanging out in the groove and seeing where it takes them.  Joni tells us she’s ready to give up the travelling, ready to settle down and put an end to all this.

And we don’t believe a word of it.  The one song which musically breaks the otherwise fluid, restless feel of the album stands out because it’s not true – it doesn’t have the honesty of the others here; it’s whistling in the dark, and we know that because it’s not the final track.

Hejira ends the only way it possibly can; with a look back at the themes and motifs of the whole thing, and the return of the magical bass, which has underpinned everything important about the album, and acted like a musical highlighter to help us see what’s most important.  Hejira is a journey of time, space and mind, and it was always coming to this – after considering all the options, Joni’s going to bow to the inevitable, get back in the car, and seek the Refuge of the Roads.

I’ve had to stop myself here; I could write a book about this album, and how it makes me feel; about how it was the only possible accompaniment to my own road trip across the US a couple of years ago; about how I only really understood it after having heard it on an actual road trip where the highway stretched out ahead of me, and there might well have been a farmhouse burning down, or a highway service station next to a blue motel.  It’s at once timeless, and a snapshot of how things were in the mid 1970s; a story we can all relate to, and a story which only Joni Mitchell could have told; a songwriter’s plea to be understood and her desire to be cryptic.

And it couldn’t have been written by anyone else, or played by anyone else.  It stands aside from the mass of confessional singer-songwriter albums which came along in the wake of Dylan; it stands aside from the wave of female singer-songwriter albums which followed Carole King and Tapestry; and I think it stands alone in the Mitchell catalogue, because it seems that it’s the one album where she put everything she knew into her work, and it came out exactly how she wanted it to.  The fusion of these songs with these specific musicians created something untouchable.

I’m not making a list of my 60 favourite albums here, or the 60 best albums, but if I was, this would be pretty near the top of both those lists.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

That’s a hugely difficult question to answer.  If you love this, the albums either side: The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter operate in a similar soundscape, although I think both are flawed in different ways.  Blue is an essential album whatever else you may think of Joni, and Court and Spark isn’t far behind.  All the early albums are in a similar idiom – Joni, her guitar and her songs – and if you like Blue, you’ll get something from almost all of them.  All the later ones have things to recommend them – I love Wild Things Run Fast, for example – but you should be aware that the very Eighties production values haven’t aged as well as you might have hoped.

Compilations to consider?

Both Hits and Misses have much to recommend them as ways in if you don’t know her work at all.  She also curated three compilations in 2004; The Beginning of Survival focuses entirely on her later work; Songs of a Prairie Girl is themed around her upbringing and her life, and Dreamland is a much more straightforward collection of her own favourite songs.

Live albums?

Well, yes – Shadows and Light (in its original LP form) is peerless, but so is the earlier Miles of Aisles.  Both are highly recommended.

Anything else?

Her long-promised autobiography has never materialised; I hope it does, because hers is an extraordinary story.  There are various books of paintings and poetry, all of which are worth your time and money; several more or less official biographies – the ones I’ve read all seem to miss the point somehow; I do think hers is a story only she can tell, but maybe the music has done that already.

Oh, and Shadows and Light is (or was) available on DVD.  It’s as remarkable as the audio version, and you can see Jaco Pastorius at work alongside one of the few musicians who really gave him space to do his thing.