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Richard Watt

Tag Archives: amwriting

22. Trust I (Préfabriqués), Trust, 1979

Posted on January 23, 2022 by Richard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You don’t hear that often enough these days…

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

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

Compilations to consider?

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

Live albums?

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

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

Posted in 60at60, Music, Writing | Tags: 60at60, amwriting, FrenchMetal, trust |

17. Video-Flashback, Eberhard Schoener, 1978

Posted on December 19, 2021 by Richard
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….

Posted in 60at60, Music, Writing | Tags: 60at60, amwriting, EberhardSchoener, musicwriting, Sting, ThePolice |

60 at 60

Posted on August 22, 2021 by Richard

60 at 60 – what to expect

There will be sixty albums at the end of this process, and – all things being equal – I’ll post them once a week in the sixty weeks leading up to my 60th birthday in October 2022.  They may well appear in more than one place, but the definitive version will be here on these blog pages.

The albums will appear in chronological order; I’ve wrestled with this for a while now, but finally settled on the simplest order.  This means that some albums will be wildly out of sync with when I first heard them, or first owned a copy, and others will appear exactly as they did in my life.  This won’t, therefore, be a linear story, but I think that themes will appear naturally as we go along.

There won’t, however, be one album for each year of my life.  I did start from that point, but picking only one album from, say, 1978, would not only be impossible, but would not tell the full story of what it was like to be 15 going on 16 at that extraordinary time for popular music.

I have, however, applied a couple of restrictions, to keep some variety in things (but see the disclaimer below):

  • One album per artist.  I’m slightly flexible on this, as we’ll see – some artists appear on more than one album – but there’s one Beatles album, for example.  This, as you might imagine, has caused some sleepless nights, but as I write this, the list hasn’t changed for about a month, so I’m probably happy with it now.  Also, you’ll only have to hear me ramble on about one Rush album, not all 19 of them.
  • No classical albums.  If you read the previous memories, you’ll notice that this is a Mahler-free zone.  Perhaps it’s too restrictive – I don’t know, but getting this down to sixty was extraordinarily difficult; I had to ditch anything which wasn’t what we might call ‘rock and pop’ after the first couple of days of wrestling.
  • No ‘greatest hits’ or equivalent (although yes to live albums, for reasons we’ll get into later).  No ‘Various Artists’; no career retrospectives, entertaining though those could be.  There is – I think – only one album in here which bends this rule; we’ll get to it in due course (some time next April, at the current rate).

I’ve left out so much, including several bands and artists I’d consider among my favourites (fourteen year old me would have been horrified to find no Deep Purple on this list, for example).  Sometimes, I’ve left things out because I’ve already written about them exhaustively; others just wouldn’t fit (there are six albums released in 1978, for example, so no room for about a dozen others which I’ll talk about when we get there.)

On the other hand, there are some things in here I have written about before (including the very first one), and I’ve left them in because they are important to my musical journey, or because perhaps I felt that I’d like to see if I can get a wider audience for some of that writing.  The majority of what’s to come is new writing, but apologies in advance if you feel I’ve said something before – I probably have.

The other point to make here – and I’m sure I’ll say it a few more times before we’re done: these aren’t my sixty favourite records, or even the ones I consider the sixty best; they are, for the most part, sixty albums I have something to say about, or which correspond to a significant part of my life, or which just couldn’t be left off this list for one reason or another.

A word or two about the composition of the list is in order, however.

When I completed my first pass at a list of sixty albums to represent my life, I was struck by just how much of it was by, for want of a better expression, ‘white boys with guitars’.  Not all of it, to be sure, but seeing the list of names written down was a little sobering.  Are my musical tastes really that narrow?

Well, in a way, yes they are, and I think there are a number of reasons for that.

Firstly, and there’s no getting away from this, I’m a middle-class white boy.  I grew up in comfortable suburbia and wanted for nothing.  The music I heard, and the music my peer group listened to, reflected that.  We listened to music made by people like us.  It challenged and tested us in the ways we wanted to be challenged and tested, but it ultimately reflected our lives back to us in one way or another.

When I wasn’t listening to my treasured collection of early seventies Prog albums (might as well get that one out of the way now; there’s going to be more than a few Prog albums, especially early on) I was, like everyone else I knew, glued to my transistor radio tuned to Radio 1.  I’m old enough that I was tuned to 247 on the Medium Wave at first, and what I heard through the static and fuzz was a broad selection of what everyone else in the country was listening to.  It didn’t really reflect what I was buying, but it was just as much part of my life.

1974 on my list is represented by the albums I bought around that time, but it’s just as much represented in my life by Sweet Sensation’s Sad Sweet Dreamer or the Three Degrees When Will I See You Again.  I didn’t buy albums by any of the acts I heard on Radio 1, though.

So if you’re holding out to see which classic soul, R&B, reggae or hip hop albums I’m going to review, you’re going to be disappointed, I’m afraid.  It’s not that I didn’t or don’t appreciate all those forms of music, and many others; it’s just that I never bought or loved any of those albums – not even Maggot Brain, which would have blown my pre-pubescent mind..

Still, it’s never too late to start.

Posted in 60at60, Music | Tags: 60at60, amwriting, amwritingaboutmusic, sadsweetdreamer, whenwilliseeyouagain |

60 at 60

Posted on August 22, 2021 by Richard

Sixty albums to mark sixty years

Twenty years ago (well, nineteen as I write this), I had the idea to mark my 40th birthday with forty pieces of writing about music which had meant something to me over those years.  I more or less managed it through the chaos of dealing with huge changes at work while adjusting to having two young children in the house, and ten years later, I thought I should revisit it, add ten more memories, and reflect on what had changed in the intervening decade – including the fact that I was by then a citizen of an entirely different country.

Naturally, I can’t let another ten years go by unmarked, but I’m equally sure I can’t go back to that particular well again.  It’s not that I couldn’t find another ten pieces of music and another ten memories, more that the intention of the thing was to talk about particular memories, and for the most part, those haven’t changed.  What I remembered about Buzzcocks twenty years ago is what I remember about them now; I’m confident I don’t have anything particularly new to add to that story and, well, if you’re reading this, you probably read that, too.

So sixty different things, then.  Sixty pieces of writing about what, exactly?  I toyed with sixty novels or sixty films, but I do still want this to be about music.  Thanks to things like Spotify, I can point you to the music and let you discover it for yourself, if you don’t already know it, and that’s much harder with books or films (or TV shows, or whatever else I briefly thought might work).

No, it was always going to be music, and the format I’ve settled on, and given away in the subtitle, is the humble Long Playing record.  Probably the most significant change in my musical life since I last sat down to do this is that there is a neatly filed shelf of vinyl albums just to my right, replicating in many ways the one I shed more than thirty years ago when it seemed likely that the CD would be the ultimate musical format, and all that vinyl was a) extremely heavy and awkward to move and b) mostly composed of things I bought in a fit of misplaced enthusiasm in 1981 and had never listened to since.

That long-lost collection did have some gems, most of which I’ve replaced – often with second-hand copies of similar vintage – and some things which are now rarities owing to living in entirely another continent.  Some of what I sold back then I don’t miss and wouldn’t replace, but what I didn’t appreciate back then when we needed the space (and probably the money) was that I wasn’t just selling stuff; I was letting go of a significant part of my life.

CDs, it turned out, were just commodities; LPs were possessions, carefully created experiences which could whisk you back in time just by the act of sliding the inner sleeve out and inhaling that particular vinyl and cardboard smell.  Even the humblest hardly played albums could have me in a reverie; if you saw me now in a record store, flicking through the stacks in the way I did when I was 15, you would be struck by the faraway look in my eyes as I uncovered something as unpromising as Metal Rendez-Vous by Krokus; you might wonder what on earth could be causing me to give this slice of early eighties landfill euro-metal more than a glance, but if you had owned the original and not thought about it for more than half your life, you might understand.

I tried it with a CD of Peter Gabriel’s So, the first CD I owned, but there was nothing there.  Twelve inches of vinyl does something to me that nothing – not even a well-loved book – does, and I think it’s a factor of my age.

I was born in 1962, so missed the initial surge of 12 inch LPs triggered by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys and all that followed them.  By the time I was aware of albums, and could afford to buy my own, they had a fixed place in life and a culture all of their own.  I fondly imagined that by flicking through the Frank Zappa back catalogue in Boots’ record department, I was participating in an age-old ceremony; taking the baton passed down to me by generations of music lovers who had gone before me.  I didn’t really understand that I was only fifteen years or so into what we might call the ‘album era’, and that it would only last another ten years as the predominant musical format.

I grew up musically in the peak of the album era, and it unquestionably shaped the way I think about, and listen to, music to this day.  If, like me, you are pushing sixty, I imagine that you, too, feel that there’s something right and inevitable about the LP record.  Other generations will see it differently; I think my children do appreciate the aesthetics of vinyl, but to them music is something you stream on whatever device you have to hand – the analogue way of doing things is awkward and slow.

Which, I think, is kind of the point.

Posted in 60at60, Music, Writing | Tags: 60at60, amwriting, amwritingaboutmusic, krokus, petergabriel |

Richard Watt

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