Tag Archives: #amwriting

34. Steve McQueen, Prefab Sprout, 1985

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The first eleven tracks are the album, but keep listening, because the acoustic versions are also excellent

This is the album on the list which has me most confused about its release date, and when I bought it.  I have a clear memory of hearing Faron Young on the radio in early 1986, and going into the Other Record Shop in Inverness to buy a tape of the album that same weekend.  It’s such a clear memory that it won’t be shifted by anything as trivial as facts, which suggest that not only had the album come out the previous summer, the single which was actually out that January was a completely different track, released under a different name (I’ll get to that), which I vividly remember hearing while parked in the car park of the Western General hospital in Edinburgh some time the following summer.

I can’t account for any of the memory lapses; my recall of specific events, dates and places is normally pretty much spot on (just ask my long-suffering family), so I think I’m going to have to try to unpick all the things which happened between buying that Smiths album back there and heading off to work in Inverness in my company car, with Prefab Sprout blaring out of the fancy built-in cassette player….

I did eventually finish my dissertation on Turkish grammar, and graduated (on a Friday 13th in 1984, to my great delight).  I promptly went back to my summer van-driving job and pretended that I wasn’t going to have to decide what I was going to do with my life now that I had finally shaken off academia.  Some of my friends were going on to do a one year postgrad course, but I really was finished with studying and the student life – at least, I thought I was; looking back, another year of something a little more practical than Linguistics might not have been a bad idea.  My mind was made up, however – I was going to plunge headfirst into the corporate life – just as soon as I could find someone who would employ me.

After several false starts, and a half-hearted attempt to join the civil service, I found myself in possession of a full-time salaried job complete with company car (I missed the ‘company van’ phase by only a few months).  I started work for Bookwise Service as it was then known in January 1985, trailing round the supermarkets and department stores of Aberdeen, filling the shelves with Jeffrey Archer and Catherine Cookson novels, sending unsold copies back and generally passing myself off as a bookseller, when I was in truth little more than a sales rep for a book wholesaler.

I had, of course, impressed my new employers with my knowledge of all kinds of books, but being the kind of person who was easily distracted by a new book by a favourite author coming along proved to be as much a handicap as a benefit – I wasn’t always as efficient as I might have been in getting my day’s work done, as I might find myself idly flicking through this book or that for much longer than I needed to, especially when it meant I could delay as long as possible the inevitable drudgery of tallying the returns and finding someone to sign my paperwork.

And if that meant there was little time left to do the actual selling part of my job, so much the better – I wasn’t, at that stage of my life, a natural salesperson, and actively avoided getting into the conversations where I was supposed to negotiate extra space for the next bestseller, or ask for an larger than normal order for the new children’s book on the grounds that there was a new TV show coming along.  I enjoyed my time at Bookwise, and learned many basic truths about commerce and the retail environment which still serve me well to this day, but it wasn’t an actual career as far as I could see.

Still, I could pretend to be a bookseller, and swan around in my company Vauxhall Astra, so it had its compensations.

One of which was that, for that first year, my Mondays were spent in the enormous book department of the old Boots store on Union Street.  For some reason, it was the largest selection of books other than in the mainstream bookshops, and it took most of Monday to restore to order after the ravages of the weekend (if memory serves, I also used to go in there on a Friday morning to top things up before the weekend).  The book department was right next to Boots’ eclectic record department, and my Mondays were often accompanied by the sounds of whatever new releases the record department had acquired the previous week.  There weren’t many customers about on a Monday, so I could often place requests for rarities – I finally got to hear some of their extensive Frank Zappa collection that way – or just listen along to whatever was fashionable in 1985.

So, in all likelihood, I first heard Prefab Sprout in Boots; I can believe (but not remember) that I heard this whole album while filling shelves with Agatha Christie and Wilbur Smith back copies.  It seems likely that it inserted itself into my brain when it was a new release, and I only got round to getting my own copy much later.

Many things happened in 1985, including Zoë and I deciding to get married the following year, which threw up a whole new set of questions, including where we would live.  I think we were both keen to be out of Aberdeen; we’d both studied in Edinburgh, but found ourselves living ‘at home’, and I know I was chafing against it.  However, Aberdeen was a ruinously expensive place to live in the mid-eighties, so when the opportunity came up for me to relocate, we agreed I should go for it.

Which is how I eventually ended up in the car park of a guest house on the banks of the River Ness, clutching my newly acquired copy of Steve McQueen.  I’m sure I was supposed to be house-hunting or something, but buying records always took priority over the minor details of life, and I did find the first of three places I lived in in Inverness shortly afterwards – no more guesthouses for me.

There was a certain amount of discontent from my bosses at Bookwise when I declared that I was going to be living at the far end of my new territory – I was now covering everything from the outskirts of Aberdeen to Dingwall, with occasional trips to the far north and the Western Isles thrown in for good measure, and I’d been asked to find somewhere to live around the mid-point of the area.  Jobs for Zoë, however, were far more likely to come up in Inverness, so – stretching the definition of ‘middle’ somewhat, we took root in the Highland capital for a couple of years.

So when I put Steve McQueen on my list, I remember thinking ‘oh, that’ll be fun, to talk about living in Inverness and hearing Faron Young on the radio and so on’.  It has come as something of a surprise to discover that none of that was true – that I may well have owned the album months before moving up, and that I may not have bought it in Inverness that first weekend, after all.

I do, however, remember playing it while I drove round Inverness looking for somewhere to live, and I do definitely remember it being a fixture in my brand-new Astra (I broke the previous one just before Christmas in 1985; black ice and a lucky escape involving having to be pulled backwards out of a hedge by a grumpy farmer in a tractor; don’t ask).  I remember all these songs with great fondness, and how Prefab Sprout, in spite of their name, became one of my absolute favourite bands of the next few years.  This is one of those albums which has retained its freshness and familiarity for me over nearly forty years; I’m not rediscovering this one, because I know exactly how it sounds.

I’m still looking forward to it, though.

I mean, how can you not love an album which starts with a passionate cry of “Antiques!”?

Faron Young caught my ear because – like so much of the music in the mid-eighties – it didn’t really sound like anything else.  It’s a slice of faux-Americana, filtered through the cynical gaze of the outsider, who sees and hears all these things but isn’t much impressed by them.  It wasn’t a fond anthem of respect for a legendary country singer (who, I’ll be honest, I had never heard of); it was a clear denunciation of how his music was fake and insincere like so much of what appeared on the surface of a road trip across the US.

And then there’s a completely off-the-wall instrumental break which fits completely with the weird banjo-driven sound while simultaneously sounding like the band were just fumbling around blindfolded.

And then Bonny comes along and is just a perfect jewel of a song; it’s a metaphysical reflection on the end of a relationship delivered as a straightforward pop song, sung with real feeling and heartbreak. If you ignore the message, though, it’s just a delightful melodic confection which has you humming away merrily while the song bitterly regrets missed chances and lies awake wondering how things turned out this way.  It’s easy to sing songs like this as laments; much harder to do this and still sound convincing.

After thinking about it for several decades, I’ve decided that I still don’t exactly know what’s going on with Appetite; it sounds in some respects like a nonsense song – perhaps sung to an unborn child, but it’s clearly not that – it deals with broader philosophical questions around the more basic human urges.  None of the songs on Steve McQueen are disposable pieces of pop culture; they all have something to say.  It’s just that a song like Appetite needs a lot more study than you might at first think, hearing its cheery melody and its playful lyric.  It’s saying something profound about the human condition, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to work it out, given enough time.

On the other hand, you can read When Love Breaks Down – probably the best known song on here – as a straightforward ‘end of the affair’ song; this time, the tone is appropriately slow and mournful; it conflates autumn and sadness in the usual way, and then…

And then it kicks up into another of those bouncy choruses, and you wonder if you’ve read it all wrong again.  The second verse suggests all is actually well, but the conclusion is surely that both parties are lying to themselves and the truth is more painful than the upbeat attitude suggests.

And, I think, that’s part of the overall thrust of this album – you have to consider the medium and the message; nothing is as straightforward as it seems.

For example, the next track, technically known as Goodbye Lucille #1, was called Johnny Johnny when released as a single (which I’m certain – or am I? – I first heard on the radio while sitting in the car park of the Western General.  There was a good reason for being there, but this is rambling enough as it is; what I do remember is momentarily being excited at the thought of a new Prefab Sprout song, and immediately realising that somehow the name had been mixed up; only later discovering that it had been given a new, more radio announcer-friendly name).

Anyway, where was I?  Oh, yes.  It’s another breakup song, this time from the perspective of a well-meaning outsider.  Poor Johnny is being comforted and advised by someone determined to run through all the cliches in the book until he reaches “give it a rest” – thanks, pal.

But that’s not why this song sticks in the memory so powerfully – neither is it due to the committed singing, or the delightfully fluid bassline, or – again – the sheer catchiness of the whole thing.

No, Goodbye Lucille #1 stands out for the way it plays with the cliché of a missing heartbeat.  The first time round, Paddy McAloon’s vocals push straight through the beat that the band deliberately misses; the second time, he catches on and also pauses, causing my head to snap up in delight; I just love when a song plays with metre like that, and this is so understated and cool that it manages the same trick twice with only a subtle variation which keeps it fresh.  The fact that after the second missed beat, the song starts to crumble, and the veneer of politeness is stripped away to reveal the real raw emotions underneath is a bonus.  Again, it sounds deceptively straightforward, but there’s a lot going on under the surface.

It takes a certain degree of confidence to call a song Hallelujah in the wake of Leonard Cohen and all the cover versions out there; it’s braver still to invoke George Gershwin in the lyrics while protesting that  – in the words of someone else entirely – “this is not a love song”.  Fortunately, this is another work of genius, drifting along in that delicate tracery of 1980s guitar washes with snatches of woodwind and knowing backing vocals – it sweeps you up in its dishonesty and treachery and leaves you whistling a merry tune while it makes off with your loose change.

I’ve pretty much always believed that Moving the River is the best song on here, but I don’t think I’ve ever been able to explain why, even to myself.  Part of it, I know, is the half-spoken intro, full of twists and turns, where the clear impression is of someone only just able to keep up with his own thoughts.  He addresses his father as ‘kid’; he invokes the newfangled art of breakdancing; he is clearly complaining about the futility of his existence in the shadow of his parents, or of picking up the pieces after them, or – well, or something.  It’s another lyric of deliberate complexity which never quite comes out and says what’s on its mind, while beguiling the listener with its slippery precision.  Only after its done do you wonder what, exactly, that was about.

But it’s enormously satisfying to sing/speak along with the opening verse; it has a hand-tooled precision which just flows – this is not one of those songs where the writer has shrugged and said ‘good enough’.

Horsin’ Around has a whole different meaning for anyone who has ever seen the stunning BoJack Horseman and – only now am I seeing this – I think it might be connected.  I’d love to know if there is some germ of a connection here, because I now can’t help but hear this from BoJack’s perspective; it’s pretty much perfect for his character – the ‘worthless friend…or foe’.

Leaving that unlikely synergy out of it, I love the loping swagger of the confidently incorrect protagonist, and the way the song drops into an exaggerated swing to make the key point in the middle eight before coming to its inevitable, painful conclusion that it really was all his fault all along.

Look, it’s basically the plot of BoJack Horseman, and I’ll never hear it the same way again.

Desire As is the counterpart to Appetite – long before there were ’99 problems’ to worry about, Paddy McAloon had six things on his mind, and despite his protestations, the nature of desire clearly is one of them.

From a collection of songs about the fragile nature of love and the fickle nature of the human heart, this song stands out as the most ambivalent and – perhaps as a result – truthful about the transience of desire.  To point up the ambivalent quality of the words, the song itself never quite seems to get going, threatening to break out into something else but continually being pulled back by the uncertainty of the words.  It’s perhaps the key to the whole album, but don’t expect answers.

Blueberry Pies is inflected with doo-wop singing and strangeness.  It never quite says what it means, and swings along in a kind of woozy haze of half-truths and unremembered dreams.

I’m assuming the title is rhyming slang for ‘lies’ – if I’ve been wrong about this all this time, well, I guess I’ll spend the next few decades trying to figure it out again.

You can’t end an album like this on the down beats of woozy lies, though – there has to be some more fast-paced philosophy, and When the Angels delivers in spades.  It’s as religious as this album gets, with its church organ opening, and musings on the nature of angels, but it’s a particularly English religiosity, concerned with the kind of things William Blake pondered, and doesn’t have any qualms about calling angels ‘heart-faced little bastards’.

I mean, how can you not love a song, an album, which ends with an upbeat discussion about the nature of the skin of angels, and whether they are jealous of us mere mortals?

Well, on the basis that the angels have probably never heard this album, I think the jealousy is justified.  Steve McQueen doesn’t just stand up as an album, it actually improves with each listening, and has done for nearly forty years now.  I’ve never tired of it in all that time, and while – as we’ll see – there’s another Prefab Sprout album I love even more, there was no way I was missing this off my list.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

I’m going to skip my usual ‘all of them’ recommendation, and point you at Jordan: The Comeback which is a great, sprawling, concept album covering all kinds of things no-one else would even think to write about, never mind trace a thread through, and culminates in the staggering Scarlet Nights, which is one of a select few songs I consider actually perfect in execution.

But the other albums, especially From Langley Park to Memphis are also great.

Compilations to consider?

When Life of Surprises  came out, I actually had a CD player in my car, and it lived in there for years.

Live albums?

For various reasons, Prefab Sprout weren’t really a live band, so – as far as I’m aware – there’s no such thing as a live album.

Anything else? Yes, and it’s apparently now classified as a Prefab Sprout album, so it should probably be under ‘other albums’ up there.  Paddy McAloon now suffers from sight and hearing problems, making his chosen profession a little tricky to carry on.  In 2003, as a direct response to losing his eyesight, he released I Trawl the Megahertz, which is a truly unique work of genius, but is sadly overlooked and unregarded.  You should try it; it’s not like anything else you’ve ever heard, not even Prefab Sprout albums.

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 looked only 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 which 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 unmistakable 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.

8. In A Glass House, Gentle Giant, 1973

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As with so many of these, the last two tracks are not from the original album

I’m going to try to stay away from talking about genre too much in these – I have plenty of views on labelling music, not all of them consistent.  Fencing certain types of music off from others puts up barriers but having a label to put on something you don’t know can be helpful – it’s perfectly valid to ask what kind of music this is when it’s something you’ve never heard.

Equally, it’s often fun to go into something completely blind, and I’ve discovered some things I love by just taking a chance, knowing nothing in advance.

All of which is to say that I do want to talk a little about Prog Rock as a genre (or a label if you prefer) so I can talk about Gentle Giant, and why you may never have heard of them.

Every genre, I think, has a Gentle Giant – a band who fit all the defining characteristics; who should be talked about in the same breath as the really big names, yet who somehow never quite grow beyond their core fanbase, all of whom will tell you unprompted about what you’re missing and how they should have been as big as the bands you were all talking about.

The bands we were all talking about in our Year Areas (that’s what we called them; you may have had Form Rooms or Common Rooms, or you may not have had anything, come to think of it) were Pink Floyd, Yes, Genesis and so on.  There were one or two devotees of the Canterbury scene who had Caravan and Camel albums; I even remember seeing Barclay James Harvest lurking among the inevitable copies of Supertramp’s Crime of the Century.  I don’t, however, remember ever seeing anyone clutching a Gentle Giant album.  They didn’t appear in the fairly eclectic selection available to borrow in the library, and while I was aware of the cover of Octopus, for example, they otherwise passed me by.

So this isn’t a tale of how I heard Proclamation on ‘Fluff’ Freeman’s Saturday afternoon radio show, or of how I discovered Acquiring the Taste in a pile of records being passed around school, or in a friend’s brother’s collection; it’s the story of how it’s never too late to find a new favourite band, and why their most difficult album may just be their best.

On the first Christmas after we moved to Victoria (that’s Victoria, BC in Canada, if you’re wondering – a long way from that Year Area where we were swapping ELP albums), my children, who clearly know me well, presented me with what I insisted on calling a Record Player – it may have a Bluetooth connection for significantly improved sound, and it may have more features and functions, and be altogether a significant upgrade, but in principle, it’s a turntable, an arm with a needle at the end, and therefore not so different from my faithful old red plastic player from forty years before, and suddenly I was back in a world I hadn’t known I’d missed so badly.

The first time I went back into what I now have to call a record store was at once disorienting and comfortingly familiar.  I genuinely hadn’t understood that vinyl was back and in a way which resembles strongly the way it was when I was a teenager – there, among the racks of familiar sleeves, were hundreds of album covers I’d either only seen in miniature as CD sleeves, or as digital images.  Alongside those, whole areas of music which I knew nothing about – there were genres which hadn’t existed the last time I’d flipped through racks of vinyl albums, and I’m pretty sure none of the staff had been born then either.

Of course, I had spent many happy hours in record stores since the advent of the CD, but there’s no comparison between clacking through piles of plastic squinting at the text on the back to being able to see the whole sleeve the way the designer imagined; to be able to read the track listing and sleeve notes without having to get out your magnifying glass (did I mention I’m nearly 60?). 

That first time back in a record store was disorienting.  I felt like some alien intruder into a world I didn’t properly understand – it looked familiar, but it had been so long since I’d done this, I wasn’t sure of the etiquette – was I supposed to be pulling gatefold sleeves out of their plastic to inspect the inside?  Should I be sliding the second-hand albums out to check the quality?  Was I still supposed to be carefully leaning everything back in place so the weight was distributed evenly? (Obviously, yes, but some people seemed not to worry about that).  Most importantly, was it OK to crouch down and pull out those crates tucked below the racks to poke around looking for something which I hadn’t found in the main stack?

That first time back was also comforting, though.  Here were all those Frank Zappa albums I used to pore over without ever buying one; the smell of the records, and the feel of them, even the way I kept my place in the stack with one hand, while pulling something out and flipping it over to read the back felt so completely familiar; a muscle memory which had never gone away.  I could have spent all day in there just reorienting myself to it all and getting lost in rediscovering all those albums I used to own, and which I could now revisit.

That, too was disorienting – where to start?  Did I work my way through all those albums which I used to own and rebuild my collection like that?  Did I look for albums which I loved, but had only ever owned on cassette – either as original or copy – or CD?  What about all those classic albums I had never quite got round to buying but which I clearly should own?  Then there was the whole sub-category of albums which had come out long after the demise of vinyl and were here in a format they had never been designed for?  Did I want to own a vinyl copy of OK Computer which was a double album, but with each side shorter than it would have been if it had been planned as a double vinyl album?

In the end, I settled for a pattern of partly recreating my old collection – there were a significant number of dreadful albums I owned in the early eighties which I had no particular desire to ever hear again, but a lot I really wanted back in my life – and filling the gaps in the ‘I really ought to own a copy of that’ section.  This mainly worked well, and I quickly came to understand two things: I’d mostly rather own a second-hand copy of the appropriate vintage than a new re-press; and I now lived in a different continent, where the subtle differences between the album I remembered and the one I now owned were at once intriguing and unsettling.

There are several excellent record stores in Victoria – it’s that kind of place – each with its own unique approach to making me feel at once old and a kid again.  On one of my first forays into the largest of them, I decided that I should fill one of the gaps in my rapidly-increasing pile of albums with a Gentle Giant LP.  I had, by this time, heard quite a bit, partly thanks to the marvellous Steven Wilson remixes.  I had been enthralled by the songs I’d heard from Three Friends, so that was the album I looked for.

I was then plunged into the whole confused and confusing saga of Gentle Giant releases in North America.  I couldn’t find a copy of Three Friends because I was looking for the UK sleeve – in Canada and the US, the cover of Three Friends is the same as the cover of the first album, but with the words ‘Three Friends’ inked over the forehead of the giant (look it up if you don’t believe me).  Having discovered how much I actually loved the sound of this band – in spite of the warnings in the sleevenotes of Acquiring the Taste which specifically advise against buying the album (again, look it up), and the fact that it remains dense, complex music which requires concentration and study rather than casual listening, I decided I needed to hear more, and to hear it in its original condition, un-remixed and un-repackaged.

Which led me on a tour of all the record stores in town before tracking down a copy of Octopus (I really wish I had the space to explain why that album title speaks to me) in Turntable Records, surely the most claustrophobic and wondrous record store in the world.  I took Octopus to the counter, whereupon I was engaged in conversation about all things Gentle Giant – just like in the seventies, record stores now are owned and staffed by enthusiasts; people who will recommend things to you; ask if you’ve heard this or that; and have lengthy conversations about seeing Rory Gallagher in concert in 1979.  I was told that, while Octopus is a wonderful album (as it is), I really should hear this one, and had a copy of In A Glass House pressed upon me, along with an anecdote about seeing the band perform it live.

It was a little more expensive than the others I was buying that day, but this was, of course, because it was an import, the original never having been released in North America, because the record company thought it ‘uncommercial’.

Exactly my kind of thing, then.

By all accounts, the band themselves aren’t fans of In A Glass House, it having been recorded in a period of turmoil with founding member and eldest of the three Shulman brothers, Phil, having quit to go back to civilian life.  This only makes me like it more, of course.  I have a decent collection of Gentle Giant albums now, but this is the one I come back to most often.  I love the craft of the sleeve, with its plastic window featuring the band playing their instruments and the cardboard insert which features the band playing their other instruments, for reasons lost to the mists of time.  I love the look and feel of the whole thing; the lyrics printed on the paper inner sleeve which has miraculously survived all this time, and the terrifying flimsiness of the vinyl itself; none of your 180 gram modern stuff here; this wobbles as you take it out of the sleeve, as records always used to.

It sounds, however, like few records ever did.

It starts with sounds of destruction – breaking glass and hammers resolving into a rhythm which is itself overtaken by the first song, The Runaway. Gentle Giant songs don’t sound like anyone else – some of the rhythmic devices could have come from a Frank Zappa album, but the instruments – some of them easier to identify than others – are always a little off-kilter, each phrase establishing itself only to be rephrased by some other part of the orchestra and then taken off in a different direction, while the vocals do whatever it is that Gentle Giant vocals do.

The Runaway is a perfect example of why it’s so hard to describe a Gentle Giant vocal line.  The phrasing, right from the first line, is off; emphasis appears on all the wrong syllables, and some lines change pace halfway through, compressing half the meaning into an almost garbled string of sounds.  Meanwhile, most of the lines are sung by two voices in harmonies which owe their origin to plainchant, and there are, likely as not, a pair of recorders playing an entirely different melody underneath.

Honestly, I could spend the rest of my life listening to just this one song, and not be confident of having heard everything going on in it.

An Inmate’s Lullaby is percussion-driven, hopping from rhythmic pattern to rhythmic pattern without ever settling on anything you could tap your toes to.  As a portrait of insanity, it’s terrifyingly plausible, while managing to be whimsical and even fun in places – the rapidly detuned tympanum at the climax makes me laugh every time.

Way of Life is almost danceable – at least at first.  It rollocks along, a song which you can follow and nod along to.  Well, until it breaks down into a middle section featuring a pipe organ and the pure, calm voice of Kerry Minnear sounding like he’s dropped in from the thirteenth century.  You close your eyes, ready to relax into this calm, pastoral vision only to have it explode into some kind of stadium rock anthem, where it only lingers long enough for you to get to your feet and attempt to sing along before seemingly forcing you to ride a bike with no suspension down a cobbled hill, before crashing into a church organ which moans at you wheezily until it expires, your front wheel still spinning while you stare up at the ceiling trying to figure out exactly what just happened.

And that’s just what’s happening in the left speaker…

The second side is even better.  Experience is awash in keyboard lines which stutter along, punctuated by unidentifiable sounds under another intriguingly phrased vocal about…

It’s not clear what any of these songs are about, really.  After dozens of listens, I came to the conclusion that it’s a picture of some kind of mental breakdown, seen from a number of angles and perspectives.  It certainly would explain why the music leaps so effortlessly from one genre to another, from one rhythm to another, from the latest in electric and electronic sound to the recurring church organ; why the vocals head off in such wildly different directions, and why it’s all at once unsettling and enormously rewarding to listen to.

By the end of Experience, the modern rock song, complete with fluid and expressive guitar solo, is in all-out war with the harpsichord-driven madrigal.  They come to a sort of uneasy peace by the end, and perhaps that is what this album’s about – figuring out how to reconcile all the different influences and experiences of everyone; how to cope with one piece missing.

Then A Reunion comes in and is basically a string quartet with electric bass and Minnear’s fragile voice pressed right up against the microphone so you can hear every breath.  It is a welcome moment of calm before those same violins, now electrified, burst us into the title track and, perhaps, try to sum the whole thing up.

There’s no way to sum the whole thing up, though.  In A Glass House the track, like In A Glass House the album, defies description – it lurches from moments of calm to passages of wild abandon.  There’s melody which never quite manages to assert itself, and random instrumentation – saxophone and mandolin at one point – there are lyrics which pick out the themes of the whole thing without ever making themselves clear enough for you to nod sagely and say “oh, that’s what it’s all about”.

At times it sounds like pure 1973, all swampy guitars and pulsating bass, and in the next instant it leaps out of time altogether and wanders around the whole of musical history, trying things on and discarding them while always somehow managing to convince you that there’s a destination up ahead somewhere.

There is, to my great delight, a hidden track at the end of side two, featuring very short snippets form all six songs.  It serves to illustrate that there has been a purpose to all of this, and it does have a thread running through it.  It’s just that the thread is of some previously unknown material and quite possibly exists in a dimension we can’t quite perceive.

Another album released in 1973 touched on some of these same subjects and went on to dominate the musical landscape for decades; In A Glass House is the very definition of the road less travelled in comparison, but I’d argue that it’s just as deserving of your attention, and by virtue of it being largely unexplored territory, maybe has more to say.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Absolutely.  In fact, I wouldn’t start here – Acquiring The Taste (if you can get past the frankly revolting cover), Three Friends, Octopus, The Power And The Glory, and Free Hand all have much to recommend them (listen to the first and last tracks on The Power and the Glory, for example) and perhaps should be tackled before diving headlong into this most complex of albums.  Later albums try to adapt the Gentle Giant sound to move with the times, but don’t work for me – the joy and glory of this band is that they don’t try to fit in.

Compilations to consider?

For the usual Prog reasons, I am bound to say not really, but the aforementioned Steven Wilson remixes album, Three Piece Suite was my way in to the band, so maybe start there.

Live albums?

The only live album released in the band’s lifetime, Playing The Fool, gives a pretty good idea of what the live show was like around the time of Free Hand; it’s not on rotation like some of the other Prog live albums of the time are for me, despite the famous recorder quartet section on side two.  There are a large number of other live albums out there, some of them more official than others, but I haven’t explored them.  Yet.  I feel like there’s still a lot to explore in the studio albums, so there’s time enough for all those….

NOTE ADDED JANUARY 2023: Here’s a thing. Playing The Fool may not have been in heavy rotation when I wrote this, but I subsequently acquired a vinyl copy and I think I am now ready to admit it to the very top tier of 1970s double live albums. It’s spectacularly good; I just needed to hear it properly in its original format to understand that. Ignore the idiot who wrote that last paragraph; he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Anything else?

Nothing written down (beyond things like this, and countless interviews and articles in the music press), but there are a couple of live DVDs available, and a few snippets on YouTube which serve to illustrate just how strangely compelling this band was.

Oh, and a kind of fan tribute / reunion video from the first COVID lockdown, which is just a delight.

60 at 60 – a new writing project!

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It’s about time I started writing again, don’t you think?

Soberingly, it’s almost twenty years since I started the ’40 Musical Memories’ project, and as the following posts will explain, it’s time to get back on the horse. Combining my two favourite things – music, and writing about music, #60at60 will be with the unsuspecting (and largely uncaring) world in just over a week. To kick off, and test my methodology, a couple of introductory posts

Music writing

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As long as I’ve been writing, I’ve been writing about music. Most of it was never intended for public consumption, but in the last couple of years I have been sounding off on various topics dear to my heart on a closed forum which I’m not going to identify here, mainly because it’s closed, but also because it’s not really relevant.

I am among the less youthful members of the forum, so I tend to approach everything from the starting point of “here’s something you might not know”. And if I can write about 1978 in the course of it, so much the better.

As a rule, my readers have been very complimentary, so I figured why not expose my ramblings to the wider world, by which I mean the half-dozen or so people who might accidentally stop by here.

These posts fall into a couple of broad types: a survey of an artist’s entire album catalogue (I’ve covered Pink Floyd, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin in detail; the Rolling Stones in much less detail); or a single post devoted to a single isolated album or an artist’s entire career – some of those have sprawled over two or more posts as time and energy permitted.

There’s no particular structure to any of this; it’s a record of my side of what are often multi-faceted and sprawling conversations. I’m editing the posts as they go in to remove any identifying marks, or to remove replies to other posts (I’ve also trimmed most of them of the score out of 10 I gave the album, as it’s not really relevant to this format). They’re here, I suppose, to preserve them for posterity, and perhaps to remind myself as I get older what it was I used to think about the Yellow Submarine soundtrack or whatever, back when I still had the facility to make cogent arguments about music…

Anyway, these are my thoughts on music; I don’t expect anyone to agree particularly.

Index:

It’s been a bit quiet around here…

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Being a kind of ‘what I’ve been up to’ post:

Avid readers of this blog (that’ll be me, pretty much) might be wondering what, exactly, I’ve been doing these past couple of years.  There was a book, then another one seemed to be reaching some kind of readiness, then – nothing.

The answer, as so often in life, is that there has been no one thing which has pushed me off schedule; life just got in the way – any writer will recognise that.  Since last we met (barring a couple of posts down there which I’ve imported from my Tumblr pages), Shore Leave seemed to be more or less done, so why, you may ask, hasn’t it emerged into the world?  Well, it’s a little complicated.

Shore Leave update:

It’s done, and I’m almost happy with it.  The trouble is, there’s a lot of meaning packed into that ‘almost’.  A couple of years ago, I had the marvellous Bryan Tomasovich do a developmental edit on it, and he was enormously helpful, pointing out the areas where work was needed, (and being encouragingly kind about the rest of it) – I thought about it for a while, and then several things happened at once: we moved from Prince George to Victoria, there were all the usual things which go along with that process – new house, new job, new school for Conor, and the book sat on the back burner for a bit.

There are those who, on reading that, will exclaim that I should have just got on with it any way, but there was another problem.

The more I thought about Shore Leave and Bryan’s comments, the more I realised that it needed a more substantial rewrite than at first appeared.  This would mean effectively a second complete ground-up reconstruction, as the key weakness is that a minor character needs to become much more the antagonist of the story – this will work, it will make it all stronger, and ‘ll be happy about it when it’s done, it’s just that…

It’s just that, having lived in my head for so long, I had no more mental energy to give another reworking of the story.  It will rise again, and be better for this process, but as a way of easing me back into writing, it’s a non-starter.

So, what now?

I have played about with the website (you might have noticed); in doing so, I hit upon the idea of refreshing the 50 Musical Memories to make them more interactive (and to fix many of the broken links), so I’m doing that, and I’m working on importing another two music-based projects which I’ve posted in other places over the years (I looked at ‘Rediscovering Rush’ yesterday, it’s about 60,000 words as it stands; it’ll take a while) – both of those will get rewrites as I go, and will appear on here as categories for those who are interested.

What about writing books?

I’m doing that, too.  While Shore Leave sits there maturing, I’m actively writing two other stories, tentatively entitled A Little Bird Told Me and The Tip Run – both have a plot, a structure, and some substantive writing behind them; the former is taking shape more quickly than the latter; I’ll be focusing on them just as soon as I get all the other stuff tidied away.

There’s also a vague idea forming which looks like it might have a bit more of a science fiction concept; it’s a great concept, but I can’t fit a story into it just yet.  I’ll get there, though.

 

So, I’m not being idle; I am suffering a little from the whole ‘too many things to choose from’ problem, but I’m getting there.  I’m setting myself a target of posting in here at least once a week – but I’ve said that before…

Rediscovering Rush – Introduction

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I first stopped listening to Rush sometime after ‘Power Windows’.  I don’t really know why; I haven’t stopped to analyse it too much; it’s just one of those things that happened.  Life went on; time failed to stand still; I got married, moved house, moved house again, changed jobs, lived life.

One day I was contemplating the tediously pointless daily car journeys I was making, and decided to buy myself a Rush album to while away the hours.  So, I bought ‘Hold Your Fire’ on cassette tape, and I got right back into it all again.

I bought ‘Presto’ on tape, too.  Then…

Then, nothing.  I stopped again – this must have been about 1990.  After that, Rush was just this band I used to listen to.  My musical tastes changed, and for more than ten years now the only concerts I have gone to have been classical ones: I heard a magnificent Grieg Piano Concerto on Friday night; remind me to tell you about it some time.

Then I saw ‘Different Stages’ in a Virgin Megastore in Brent Cross one New Year – in the sale, it was, and I thought ‘Why not?’  And I was off again – it lived in my car CD player (I’ve moved on and – I like to think – up in cars since the ‘Hold Your Fire’ days) for months, and I grew to love all these old songs again.  I even grew to love some of the new ones – that bass solo on ‘Driven’ is terrific, and I can’t resist -er, ‘Resist’, being Scottish.

Then – you’re probably getting the idea of this now.

Last Christmas, my family gave me an mp3 player.  It’s a nice one – a Creative Zen Touch – and it has room for lots of Mahler symphonies.  And the odd bit of rock music.  I loaded some things on there I hadn’t heard for years – all that long-haired, sweaty music I loved 25 years ago – and I tried to pick just one representative Rush track to put on it.

And, of course, I couldn’t.  So I loaded up representative tracks from all the Rush albums.  And then I realised that wasn’t enough; I needed more.  At the same time, following an intense period of work, I felt the need to get back to writing again, and needed a project to stimulate me.

So I hit on this idea of ‘Rediscovering Rush’.  I have been intrigued and fascinated these last few months to realise that these three guys mean more to me than anything else I listened to all those years ago.  I’ll be honest with you – they don’t mean as much to me as some classical music does – please don’t engage with me on the topic of Mahler’s second symphony unless you want to be bored rigid by my private enthusiasms – but there is something special in their music, and I’d like to find out what it is.

So, here’s the plan.  Over the next – well, however long it takes, to be honest – I am going to listen to the entire Rush back catalogue on my little Zen Touch – while I’m exercising; while I’m flying to Italy (or Canada, soon); while I’m sitting here browsing while I should be working, and I’m going to write about it all.  I’m going to try to find out just what connects so strongly with me, and I’m going to try to find out  what I think of all this music now – am I more critical now?  Am I still excited by it?  Will I fall in love all over again with something I’d completely forgotten?  Will I make it to the end of ‘Feedback’ with my sanity intact?

Tune in and find out.  I don’t really know where this will go, but I aim to have at least a little fun finding out.