REPLICAS @ 45

The first few seconds of this album contains the universe of its artist's approach for the first part of his career. A curly modal figure sounds high on the keyboard of a synthesiser. It's joined by a staccato beat on rock instruments. It drops a tone for a few plays then returns as the vocal enters. A high register, thin and cold, sings of a strange crisis. He can't recognise his own photograph. He might be speaking to himself or to some form of other, perhaps a doppelganger. And the last line of each verse states the title: Me, I Disconnect From You. The song ends on a big rock chord but the opening riff decays and slows to a quiet stop.

As the  album progresses, the machine like precision of the arrangements, the reedy vocals and the icy scenarios of the lyrics, we feel the theme surfacing. A dystopian sci-fi world of androids and humans with a mounting alienation and nihilism spreading through the nightscape. While the songs have the quality of cinematic scenes and suggestions of narratives within themselves, they can also break out and refer to each other until the world takes form. 

Are 'Friends' Electric bursts on stage as a stadium sized factory of synthesised architecture. A grounding riff pumps a pattern of fifths as a descant sounds a partial seventh. When the cold, thin vocal appears it's delivering half of a conversation between a character and his home delivery replica sex worker. The only problem is that the human has begun to extend his feelings beyond the replica's function and it's starting to feel like love with all the pain and alienation that can entail. The massive grinding arrangement pauses for a kind of middle eight with bright keyboards circling around sevenths and the vocals change to spoken word. It hurts and he's lonely. This gives way to a soaring, blissful restatement of the circular figure but higher on the scale. When the factory grind reappears it feels like more of the same of this isolation. A shorter verse features the title and the aching realisation: "and now I've no one to love". After another middle eight ("I don't think I mean anything to you") we leave on a fade with the melody of the "no one to love" repeating to silence. 

This extraordinary sci-fi dystopia story was released as a single and made it, without a singalong chorus to number one. The song is a weighty downer but anyone who heard it at the time with an inclination to the new and the unusual heard electronic music that bore no resemblance to familiar forms the way Kraftwerk's later '70s work did. Are "Friends" Electric is closer kin to Donna Summer's barnstorming trance I Feel Love than Autobahn or Trans Europe Express. And this includes the other factor that Gary Numan persisted with in his initial run of success: rock instrumentation. It was cold and spiky rather than cock rock overdrive but it was rock music. The guitars, drum kit and bass are all audible along with the electronics but they are not dominant, there is no sense that the synthesisers are a red faced gimmick and there is nothing of the gymnastics of prog rock: the united front of rock band with committed synthesis is presented with full power. It felt like a first. It had precedents galore but this lean fusion had not been heard before. It was cinematically compelling and offered a credible path out of the dust of punk's crushing demise.

The Machman begins with a guitar riff that sounds like a routine genre figure until the vocals and synths arrive. The replica's encounters with the living are cryptic and paranoid in an urban nightscape. Praying to the Aliens does something different again by  preferring an electric piano with a slapback echo (which always reminds me of Bowie's We Are The Dead from Diamond Dogs) which creates a nervous energy. More technoir with statements about sexual identity and function without a clear speaker position. The stuttered Rhodes figure constantly flits around the arrangement as confusion swells. While the sense of concept album is clear throughout the record, it's application is often reduced to a kind of stream of consciousness account, not intended to further a narrative but continue the flow with a disjointed scene like both of these. If this album were a movie it would be Blade Runner as directed by Zulawski.

Then we come to the big one. I can recall speeding along the South East Freeway in a friend's car, seeing the towers of the Gold Coast form on the horizon in 1980 as the booming knells of Down in the Park rolled out of the speakers. It put me into the movie and until the next person spoke I was speeding towards intrigue. Big tolling notes on bass, synth and electric piano form a seven note sequence. A shiny descanting synth figure comes in. Another night scape. The vocal comes in after two iterations calling out images and statements that are picked up like litter on the set. The War, rape machine, a friend called Five. It's a walk through of an underworld of brutal entertainments that can leave their human participants dead. The verses are sung over the nearly unchanging ground of the opening figure but there are bright and flowery inserts which add more modal melodic material with a carnival feel. After each of these the main theme is played out as a slow, heartrending instrumental in the synthesised strings. Most of the imagery made it on to the album art, with Numan, platinum blonde and pale, standing like a mannequin in a dimly lit room as his reflection looks at him in a way not possible with the angles. Another man (probably from Are "Friends" Electric) is looking through the window. In the distance outside, a neon arch forms the letters The Park. After the storm of the main song has passed we're left with a repeating figure from the relief section that finally, lands with a big droning bass from below. A perfect side closer, by now you are immersed in the world.

Side two starts with a grumpy rock figure in the guitars. It even starts with a drumstick count in. There's a synth drone to add some texture and colour but this is the Tubeway Army as they thought of themselves to begin with. The driving overdriven riffs continue the album's pattern of playing persistently between vocals, often just insisting on a single chord. Where in Johnny B. Goode or even Breathe, this carries the mood whether rocking or dreamlike. On this album and throughout Gary Numan's earlier years, spare bars of guitar band sound more like an idling machine, grunting at attention for the next use. The vocals sing a quite  bright melody that leads to a chorus of the title. The kind of entertainment of the Park is seen up close with live sex and violence with generous dollops of surveillance. And with this comes the understated flow on effect of the indifference to the humans at the results of the brutality. All that in an upbeat rocker.

The title track takes us back to the cinematic magnitude of Down in the Park and "Friends". A bass throb plays a constant heartbeart while banks of humming and groaning synthesisers form a bed for a lyric about isolation. The narrator walks outside through crowds of nameless figures. There is a sense of shame in his non-conformity. He turns on the crowd but at best they treat him with the caution of crowds faced with irregularity, violence, delusion, and smile nervously. When the police arrive, he pleads guilty but is allowed to walk away. Between the verses the synthesis blooms to a poignant figure that is both cold and heartrending, as though a machine were trying to emote or a human was trying to be mechanical. The song ends as the heartbeat slows and a persistent howl falls into reverberation.

It Must Have Been Years starts with the same instrumentation playing the heartbeat but this is quickly obscured by loud riffy rock with nary a keyboard present. The vocal is the most rock like of the whole album. The warmer approach to the arrangement tells us that the observer of the stagnation he's describing is not a machman. However, the verses are like a day in the life of a machman sex worker. This one is either at the end of their career or in such a state of intense overuse that they are headed for landfill. Is the title/chorus a passing but repeated occuring thought that the figure at the centre has lost track of time but figures their career had begun wholecloth years before. The sole instance of a guitar solo is as frantic as the rest of the song and heightens the sense of panic before ending on a downward bend before vanishing. Just another spasm hitting its shelf life. I used to get annoyed at the rock of that solo. How could it belong in such a richly new field, sounding like some schoolkid ace guitar player  with a Gibson copy and a fuzz pedal. Really, it works. It does sound like the playing of a young musician aiming to impress but it also expresses the emotional content of the song. In an album that was met with criticism for its apparent coldness, these few seconds of flashing lead guitar spike and give the lie.

When the Machines Rock a chirpy synthesiser workout that breaks for a grandeur as big as the factory floor. I Nearly Married a Human begins as a druggy version of the synth line of the opening song but adds textures like an emulated drop and ripple effect as well a small number of motifs for development with the electrodrums coming in in sections. The music develops between the two figures with bright hazes of swells and piercing glissandi. This sounds like it started as an afternoon's noodling on the keyboard but Numan takes it well beyond that. Add an evocative title and the rest is up to you, a romatnic montage between two figures before the penny drops and all we are left with is the fading two element rhythm. And in the end the data you give is equal to the data you live.

Replicas gave a younger audience what Bowie had started but kept going until cities rose from its grooves and an adventure of sadness and action awaited. As punk's bonfire was settling into ash and the suits were trying to replace its figures with newer, easier to control units, we knew we could do much worse than listen to this. Gary Numan said he was in a music shop one day and walked past a synthesiser. He stopped and pressed a key. It had been set up with a fat bass sound that resonated through the building. In that moment all the things he'd been thinking about as he walked under the clouds and the towers, all the books of crashes, high rises and dreaming androids bloomed before him. The mechanical punk of Tubeway Army gave way to something that sounded like those ideas and felt as big as a tower block.

I didn't get all the words and I was in Townsville where the rain meant monsoons and smelt of mangoes and mosquitos and I still got it. And that was just as I'd got the thrill of seeing the Saints and the Sex Pistols on tv a few years earlier. This was different but it came from the same place. Music seemed to be changing every month until you stood back and realised it was just getting wider. This record was one that clung to me, though. I still have no hesitation in calling it one of the best of its era. And driving back from the Coast to Brisbane with the rain stinging my eyes while I pushed my head out the passenger window for as long as I could, the song was thunderous in the car and I was yelling the chorus:

You are in my vision!

You are in my vision!

Listening notes: I walked around with this in earbuds, hearing the hi-res download but at home listened to a late '90s CD with extra tracks. Both versions are free of the brickwalling compression of the loudness wars and have a joyous, dynamic clarity.

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT @ 60

CLAANNG! It starts movie the record and it seizes ears. Those two seconds of clamour, like a steel gate being broken open, have been tortured under audio microscopes for decades. The verdicts vary but tend to land around an F9 (F chord with an added G note). But it's not just an F9, anyone could do that, it's a group effort. George on his 12 string playing the whole six courses with the G on the top on the high E. John  plays on an acoustic. Paul is playing a D on his bass and George Martin some inversion of F on the piano. There's even a pinched cymbal for the toppermost of the poppermost frequencies. It's like the whole band crushed into a cube which then explodes.

It never repeats. It doesn't have time. John comes in with the vocal; "it's been a haaard daaay's night..." joined by the band on the fourth syllable. From that point that wrought steel of the insisted note that climbs to the sharp blue note ("workeeeeeng") hooked everyone who heard it. This is followed in the forward momentum by the rolling climb ("but when I get home to you ...") to the modified blue note phrase in perfect completion. The middle eight breaks ranks with the G major tonality of the verse by literalising the key signature and playing B minor instead of major for the modulation to E minor. Um, ok, that's getting yawny, isn't it? Ok, it's a slight deviation but an important one as it smooths over the dramatics of the minor key to keep the bluesy attack going. It's a song of happy wife happy life that a man in his mid-twenties might imagine with the sexual rewards packed into words like ok and alright which might feel vapid now were it not for the force of the song. The solo breaks out cinematically a movie theme riff made with piano and varispeed 12 string (George eventually did play the speedy bits at the peak of the phrase live but for the recording he needed to play them slower). The song ends on an even more elongated vowel stretched over a single note and the sweet surprise of a pretty jingling phrase that works with the fret position George was playing for the opening chord, as though by this stage, after all that conjugal exhaustion it's now a ringing fragment.

I Should Have Known Better is a big bright love song that starts with a sweet harmonica figure and continues with a verse that features the same note elongation as the title track. The minor key middle eight is so streamlined it doesn't quite sound minor. George comes in with the band's new secret weapon, the Rickenbacker 360/12, playing a ringing verse melody and ending on a chiming G 6th. For me, it's standard Beatles fare and if I listen to the record, I'll leave it on. Besides, it's completely overshadowed by what came before it and what's just around the corner.

If I Fell starts with a Lennon vocal over strummed acoustic guitar. Then the harmonies kick in and it takes over the heads of anyone who hears it. The silvery close harmonies of this ballad of adoration are meltingly beautiful. Any comparisons with other contemporary harmony masters like The Everly Brothers or The Beach Boys fall away as the chord progression stretches the key of D major beyond showtune sophistication they were already familiar with. Then, when the middle eight comes up it's like another warp into a parallel key. I can remember scarcely believing the beauty of this song that wasn't the kind of big shouty pop rock I knew their early singles were, it just took things somewhere else. (Aside: in the stereo version the second middle eight seems to end with McCartney's voice breaking. After decades of thinking this it was revealed to be an erroneous move on the faders. The mono version of the exact same recording doesn't have it.)

George's vocal is up next with a throwaway written for him by John and Paul. It's fun with a kind of cod Spanish nightclub feel sneaking in through the Mersey beat. 

And I Love Her is a Paul ballad in a minor key with a haunting reverby vocal and some tasteful classical guitar support from George. While you can still hear the influences of Bandstand balladeers of the time the song escapes the cheesiness that might envelope it through the seriousness of the vocal and a strong transition from the middle eight to the following verse where the stern minor chords return. If the contemporary production wasn't out in such force it might have been pleasantly spooky.

Tell Me Why gets us back to big and shouty and works fine but I'd never put it on just to hear it in isolation. 

Can't Buy Me Love closes the old side one in a bluesy shuffle by Paul with something like his Long Tall Sally scream. It was a single and has a decent enough anti materialistic message, preferring love over the trinkets of love. A big stomper to end the side.

That's important. In the U.K. you turned the disc over and heard a bunch of other new Beatles songs. In the U.S. you heard session muso versions of side one songs as instrumentals. The Beatles are not playing on the tracks and they do sound listless and note-hittingly perfect. This Capitol label trickery didn't start nor end with this and it was the same on the next soundtrack LP for Help. Utter ripoff.

Side two of the real LP kicks off with a loud snare crack before Anytime at All burst forth. The chorus opens with shouty harmonies of the title phrase but then the verse changes. It's Lennon solo and in several takes so his alternate lines can come in before he could properly finish the previous phrase. Considering the double tracking going on (from the previous album on) whereby individual vocalists would do two vocals matched as exactly as possible to beef up the sound of the voice, the overlapping lines meant that some fairly fancy work was happening in the studio. I don't know if they ever tried it live but it would have been possible for McCartney to fill in the alternate lines. It's an engaging romantic rocker with a lot of close mic-ed piano playing closely with the 12 string.

I'll Cry Instead is a shuffling sour grapes number by Lennon with a sneering vocal that is belied the lyric. He'd like to do all sorts of things since he lost his girl but he can't so he'll cry instead. It's not a big ironic twist but it comes across as a self effacing smile (unlike a similar later Run For You Life which just gets more problematic as the years go by). 

Things We Said Today is McCartney being a clever dick with chord progressions but also delivering an engaging love song with a melancholy minor key verse and brightly harmonious part B. Then the middle eight bangs in and it just stops behaving like it's in any key with a coolcat melodic diversion that leads easily into the next verse. George's triplet minor chords in the intro, breaks and fade are something we haven't heard before on a Beatles record. It's a quiet but important innovation. I can thoroughly recommend the live version of this (Eight Days a Week soundtrack CD) which those triplets are ringing and that far away from being power chords and the big yelping intros to the middle eights. This version feels tame by comparison but it shares some eeriness with And I Love Her.

When I Get Home is a big shouting stomper like Tell Me Why, only shoutier and stompier. I sometimes skip it. 

You Can't Do That is an unsmiling replay of I'll Cry Instead. A bluesy figure on the 12 string opens the cowbell clunking shuffle in which Lennon as a jealous lover is berating his partner non stop for two and a half intense minutes. It was the B-side of the title track as a single. Viv Albertine describes the intensity of first hearing it in her great Clothes Music Boys, feeling a song as a whole body experience in a way that approaches alarm. While there's no violence threatened the tone in the powerful Lennon vocal contains no forgiveness.

And then, as a closer, the yearning I'll Be Back comes in with acoustic guitars and a close harmony chorus that starts minor but ends major. The verses are John in aching mode, stretching the vowels to breaking and falling back into the melancholy chorus. Even with the early '60s boxed in production the pain is audible and the phrases have the beauty of the best folk music. Beautiful.

The major achievement of this set, aside from the quality of the music itself, was that it was the first album wholly written by the band (and the only one consisting of solely Lennon McCartney songs). No rock band had done that yet. It was put together while on tour over six months of 1964 and in anticipation of the accompanying film. While most of the side one songs get a look in in the movie at various moments, the film is a concentrated comedic depiction of life at that unimaginable fame peak so a lot of the tunes get lost in the flow (though And I Love Her and If I Fell are given what amount to proto performance videos). But, after the accelerating times they were getting through, to fill two sides of an LP with untried material of entirely original composition is extraordinary. 

There has recently been a kind of shift among younger fans of the band to hold this higher than the usually lauded last five albums. Part of that is youthful perversity (like mine when I championed Revolver over the likes of Abbey Road) but part of it is from the unignorable feat of thirteen songs with really only two filler tracks (that some are now affecting). Take the context of the scheduling and film away and you still have a strong two sides of vinyl record, packaged with a kind of decorated contact sheet of publicity photos where the band are pulling faces. It's a mild effect now but in the days when the smiles on record covers had to be painted on, it would have come across as endearingly cheeky. And that's what this is, as soaring as some of its music is and as clearly indicating of the near future's greatness, this is a cheeky record that seems to be mugging at the world's camera and saying: "go on, then, do better."

ARMED FORCES - ELVIS COSTELLO AND THE ATTRACTIONS @ 45

The first three Elvis Costello albums begin with vocals. "Now that your picture's in the paper...," on Aim, "I don't wanna kiss you, I don't wanna touch ..." on Model and on Armed Forces it's, "Oh I just don't know where to begin." After that begins my decline in being the uber Costello fan that I was. I find My Aim is True almost unlistenable with its cool 'n' breezy day west coast feel. The songs are there but the arrangements make me wince. This Year's Model showed how good the songs were by dressing them up in trimmer power pop threads. And then there's Armed Forces which is the Everest peak of that first phase. After that, I like this moment or that but very seldom a whole record. Yes, I know his writing got deeper and more grown up but I still prefer the angry little brat of the first three. I just listened to the whole thing again for this and I wasn't just singing along, I was grimacing and sneering along. That's how good this record is.

After that choked "Oh-oh-oh I -" the band bashes in for the syllable "just" and it's on. Where the previous platter sported a skeletal approach to arrangement, shrill Farfisa chords and spiky guitar lines and spat out lyrics, Accidents Will Happen establishes a developed sound whereby when there isn't a particular figure or effect, the backing returns to a wall of boom. Grand piano nudges the organ off the stage (though it's still around), Bruce Thomas' heavenly melodic bass lines are even further forward, and Pete Thomas' drums are by turns crisp or clever. If anything, Elvis' trademark Fender Jazzmaster is absent through much of it. What this brings to this vindictive song about a collapsed relationship is a strange grandeur. It's rushed but stately but has lines like, "There's so many fish in the sea that rise up in the sweat and smoke like mercury ..." The guilty, "I know what I've done," ends the song with a sudden coda swinging between major and minor as voices in harmony repeat, "I know, I know...." Costello wasn't writing about my late adolescent hormonal investigations but, b'crikey, it felt like it.

I don't recall seeing the video for this song until a year or so later and can't remember it being on Countdown. It's a little postmodern marvel, mixing animation loops of the band with more industrial style cartoons of the scenes of accidents in the workplace and the home, often featuring graphs and trajectory illustrations. The final choir of "I know" plays under a wire frame portrait of Costello being drawn repeatedly along with a readout of statistics. The stuff of sci-fi noir in the decade to come. YouTube it.

Senior Service (junior dissatisfaction) retreads the odd drum pattern from Chelsea but soon settles into a vocal heavy piece about seething upward mobility. From the menacing whisper of the chorus to the echo-drenched verses about wanting what the guy one notch up has. I knew at the time from an interview that Senior Service was the brand of cigarette smoked by producer Nick Lowe.

Oliver's Army barges in with a piano figure that sounds like steel drums and plays a '50s inspired pop melody. This was inspired by sight of startlingly young British soldiers in Belfast. The verses are increasingly sinister, going from a bureaucrat's jaded views on military recruitment to an increasingly ugly manipulator, appealing to racism and fear in the young and dispossessed. The chorus is the bit that everybody sang along to, not quite realising that the Cromwellian army it sang of was there to oppress and control local populations. The song was a hit here and accompanied by a cinematic clip of the pale band in a tropical setting. "And I would rather be anywhere else than here today." Everyone at school in my military town tapped their toes and sang along.

Big boys continues the wall of boom but adds dynamics. In a voice that's one defeat away from a whimper Costello sings, "I am starting to function." An organ note plays and stays. "In the usual way. Everything's so provocative. Very , very temporary. I shalle walk." On "walk" the thunder enters with massed chords and big tom toms and a loping bass note that feels like it's being thrown from a height at the start of every  bar. After a verse with new melodic material we go back to the big steps of the bass lope and thunder toms. The narrator (also, characteristically in a Costello song from this time, the second person lines) sees himself as inadequate. He lists his absent qualities and failure with women in some pretty pop passages. This album was a training ground for the songwriters of the '80s and allowed them statements that would never chart set in radio friendly sugarpop. On the one hand you'll want to sing along with the melismatic "so" of the chorus. On the other he's spitting out the words of an embittered Lothario. The song turns again, now in sympathy with the woman he rejected because she accepted him. He just needs the strength to cross her off the list and walk on like the big boys. They will reject him as a try hard and he will have to move on, around and around in the cycle of self-loathing. A dark song. It ends on an instrumental fade of the loping bass (which offers some impressive parting flourishes. On and on and on.

Green Shirt offers respite with its harpsichord delicacy and lightly throbbing synthesised bass. The sudden snare interjections punctuate rather than jolt as Costello almost whispers lyrics that blur newsreaders with clerical staff of a totalitarian regime and something like a phone sex line. Rather than a series of concrete predictions, Costello is pushing back against a kind of corporate commodification of society. The news anchor is as alluring as the workers on the phone lines as they coo streamlined lies and glosses. All the colours of situations are turned to black and white and the brass buttons of the military shirt as the calming voice of the administration guides us to the entertainments. One of my favourite couplets in the song does have a predictive tint: "Better send a begging letter to the big investigation. Who put these fingerprints on my imagination?" How's that for a preview of the post-truth culture? Shout to Steve Naïve on the keyboards whose Farfisa delivers more nuance and creepy tentacles that a string section could.

Party Girl is a song that I needed to hear more than the others to get into. Like all the material on the album, it's layered and complex. The song starts with an epic feel, guitar arpeggios spread out in a kind of saddening fanfare before Costello comes in. On the surface, he's telling her that she shouldn't condemn herself as being a mere party girl but he's also getting seduced by the power that gives him. And amid the gentle assurances of her individuality he tells her that he could give her anything but time. Ouch! "Starts like fascination. Ends up like trance." he says over a few fretless bass slides that are the musical equivalent of cute raised eyebrows. This gives way to a brief but lovely piano interlude before the next verse where Costello ups the word play with lines about being the guilty party girl. The final admonition, I could give you anything but time is stretched, as though hesitant before, on the word time, the song ends in a passionate coda that could be from Abbey Road. Costello yells: Give you anything but -" and the harmonies answer, "time" over a bursting dam of emotion. This is the most unexpected turn of the record, containing less self-consciously clever lines and served up with music that suits it more than conforms to the rest of the album.

The old side two starts with Goon Squad and a big figure that effectively combines grand piano with guitar. It sounds like spy theme. The lyric is a letter home by what at first seems like a soldier but unravels so it could apply to any kind of organisation based on a hierarchy. In a kind of switched perspective to Oliver's Army, the boy who answered the recruitment call is discovering that none of the promises have come true and that, rather than advancing up the ranks, he's been relegated to the lowest of the thugs. The almighty boom of the track continues until a brief break in the arrangement with Costello's voice EQ-ed paper thin and Bruce Thomas' playing fills the void with impressively busy runs along the scale. A plunge back into the nightmare of the situation roars to the fade under which Steve Naïve plays sinister spindly dissonance on the keyboards.

Busy Bodies starts all at once with the booming wall including a big keyboard wash and jangling guitar arpeggios. Wall o' boom. The vocal melody rises with each line smooth until it stops for lines of commentary, short sung lines with staccato responses on the organ. "Everybody's" Dit dit dit dit. "getting meaner" dit dit dit "busy bodies" dit dit dit dit "Caught in the concertina." Then it launches back into the boom of another verse. This song builds like a tide, wave after wave of verses where sex and corporate competition blur. There are sections but no breaks, no middle eights or solos, just a forward moving mass of populating and competition served up with the sweetness and substance of pudding. The final word is like an admission of inevitability as the last chords sound under a Beach Boys like falsetto figure, a completely unexpected, delicious treat.

Sunday's Best is another constant force but this time a sinister waltz. "Times are tough for English babies. Send the army and the navy..." Costello raids the tabloids for material but not the Schoolgirl Sex Serenade for Septuagenarian headlines. He plunges into the personal ads and editorials the winking, whispering pages of aspiration, lewdness and hatred. The 3/4 grind suggests the fairground, comedy and thinking that's loopy in both senses. Costello builds, phrase by phrase, the mind of the root-system of the culture of his time which included the ascent of Margaret Thatcher, Mary Whitehouse and the National Front, his voice going from a prurient stage whisper to a barely contained hysterical yelp for the chorus: "Standing in your socks and vest. Better get it off your chest. Every day is just like the rest but Sunday's best." Perversion and piety, church and smut, all blending to the mud grey that all plasticine rods eventually become. Everyone knows but no one recognises anyone. We fade out with a sharply sarcastic waltz figure on the guitar and I realise again that this is one of the few songs on the album that would sound identical live and here in the studio, the band is that good.

Moods for Moderns is the closest the album comes to something more typical of its time, a post punk snarl, the type dismissively termed new wave by DJ's who saw it as a too hard basket and pronounced it with a sneer. A series of images from relationships is shoehorned into a quirky dissonant groove and skittish rhythm with organ stabs and whispers for the verses and harsh snappy harmonies for the choruses. The commodification of sex or romance feels like fast food or a heightened service industry as partners change partners like the season's new clothes. "Soon you'll belong to someone else and I will be your stranger just pretending."

Chemistry Class has the most stately and broad arrangements in which one line has a big sounding piano arpeggio and the next is held up by momentous tom toms. This can be reversed but the procession of them is what keeps our attention. The vocal is mostly plaintive in the verses and quietly arch in the chorus, it sounds world weary, knowing, describing something for the hundredth time. The narrator is witnessing yet another sexual encounter that will end in another emptying breakup. The working title for the album was Emotional Fascism. The phrase appears on the artwork. Armed Forces was chosen as a more media friendly title but the first applies to most of the songs here and nowhere more than this and the following tracks which make it more explicit. The chemistry on show here is attraction but it gets sinister as he asks, "are you ready for the final solution?" This might refer to the genetic mix of sexual activity or the chemistry of the brain, but it alludes to the holocaust. Seldom has a more violent word play been delivered with such creepy awe. The alternating piano and drums accompaniment to the verse lines which had started so yearningly quickly takes on something more humanly percussive. The song fades on an instrumental repetition of the final lines of the chorus with a pulsing effect on the guitar that suggests machinery that perhaps is scanning for the next case; the musical beauty of the song itself ingested by the engine.

Two Little Hitlers surprises by launching into a sunny pop reggae arrangement. On the surface of it it's another relationship song featuring trademark wordplay and this time a kind of happy go lucky resignation to the inevitable conflict emerging from coupling. You could see it as a kind of summary of the whole album where love and sex and conflict and cruelty bash against each other. By this point the conflict has escalated to a struggle of wills and ends with an echo of General McArthur's vow following a defeat: "I will return." This phrase which ends the chorus but also repeats into the fade is accompanied by what sounds like a deliberate lift of the Rebel Rebel lift. I say deliberate as it's only half the riff, just enough for the knowing to acknowledge. 

The first three Costello albums had signature artwork. Aim's Buddy Holly like man in a suit and a guitar by way of introduction. Model's more aggressive stare from behind a camera. Finally, the set that promised emotional fascism, a herd of elephants with the leader looking to stampede the viewer. The rear cover of the Australian release had the US front cover, a stylised face surrounded by action painting drips and splatters and a splattery title and band name in yellow over it. This got confusing when seeing it presented as the front cover in music press ads etc. The local edition opened on the right side which confirmed the elephants as the front cover. I liked the collision of art styles and the violence of the writing on the rear cover but I was always more intrigued by what was inside.

The inner sleeve featured the term emotional fascism on both sides and on each part of the phrase, "our place or yours?" The photo on one side was the band in front of an English suburban house and the reverse was of Costello apparently collapsed on the diving board of a swimming pool while another figure is underwater, perhaps dead. Around the photos is a series of rectangles, red on one side and yellow on the other. The red ones have the song titles and band member names and the yellow ones are the names of home decoration colours (like White White). The abstraction of this reminded me of all those Pink Floyd and 10CC Hipgnosis covers where every second one had images so removed by abstraction that the meaning was anyone's guess. This looked like the band was out of place (Elvis was wearing a suit to the pool) or oppressively in place. From my sprawling Queenslander house in Townsville the middle class two storey place looked compact and comfortable. The band in their tight fitting noo wave suits with white sneakers do not look like they live there. It was clearly ironic but also like hearing localised jokes in British tv comedies that meant nothing to you but still sounded funny.

It gave the record a modernity that knew it had to do better than depict opulence by contrast with social commentary. The house, if out of the reach of most Britons of the time, unremarkable in its design, feigning larger manses rather than being them. The pool does suggest wealth but it is a place of accidents and bad endings, the kind of thing the tabloids of Sunday's Best would delight in. Like the images of mundane consumerism in the inner sleeve of Model, this acknowledgement of consumerist aspiration and my appreciation of it felt like I was invited into the club who had the eyes to see. Hey, a seventeen year old doesn't need much to cry rebellion.

However the rebellion here was gratifying. This was probably the first new record I pushed on everyone I could. If it was at a party I went to, I made sure I put it on, twice at least. I made cassettes for classmates and made friends listen to it when it came out, pointing out every bit of irony or arch pun as they came up, not trusting them to hear it themselves. Better still, girls liked it. The kind of girls who could talk about more than the same bullshit boys were meant to spout, in fact, the very kind of real people under the surface of Party Girl. Well, that didn't do me all that much good but I had conversations that shoulds coulda woulda that I still recall with others who needed a little intoxication and less encouragement, whose observations sounded like newspaper columnists and whose jokes drew years of world experience from the ether. All just kids like me, of course, but in those moments ...

Armed Forces served all this up with a sound big and brash. There was no apology for the expansion of the approach, none was needed. Rather than a slick sellout improvement this felt like real development. There is a lot of fine trickery and key manipulation going on in the compositions and the band was clearly peaking with some strong imaginative and emotionally punchy playing. What I didn't know was that this would be the end of the first phase. The second and onward would push me further than further from Elvis Costello. He got more sophisticated as the albums came out, even writing for string quartets and with the great Burt Bacharach. But never again would he release another album songs that, banger after banger, described what I was observing with my own eyes and feeling with my own nerves in my last year of High School. I enjoyed High School, well, I enjoyed the years, but the more you enjoy anything at that age the closer you get to feeling the heat of its hazards. I was lucky to have good older siblings for those public moments that my shyness might have prohibited, and records like this for all the other moments where I and the walls of my room had to work it out between us.

My 1983

Got the Sunlander back to Brisbane earlier than normal with a grab of new songs written on keyboard. One of them had such an odd chord progression that I still need to write it down before I can play it again. Greg wanted to record a few of the ones we'd demo-ed before the break in 8-track. He'd been inspired by witnessing This Five Minutes record there over the holidays. We kept in touch via letters. Try doing that now. 

Also, he was going to go to Sydney with Tex Deadly and the Dum Dums. It had only been two months but I'd never heard of this band that featured both Wadley brothers. That's probably not true as it would've been mentioned in despatches. Anyway, in a development that would never cause a problem now (or even a few months later) Ian had just started a job at the Public Service and couldn't go. I was asked to stand in on guitar for the Sydney gigs. 

Practices for days learning both the Dum Dums set and the Gatekeepers songs for Basement. Exhausting but exciting. Basement was like a daydream breaking into reality. The recording quality was astounding to me, better than I imagined it could be. Some lessons: don't record guitars with reverb going in; if you think you have a choral vocal arrangement listen very hard to the practice tapes before wasting studio time on an embarrassingly bad recording. We redid Keeper of the Gate twice, the third time got it right ... ish.

After a fine suburban dinner, we packed into the van to get us to Sydney. A non-fatal drive. We checked into the Burnley in Kings Cross, feeling like veterans o' the punk wars. Walking around the Cross zapped our little minds with its surround sound music, arrays of sex workers and unsleeping street life. The first gig at the Southern Cross had a blowout by the support band so we, minus Greg Perkins, went on as the Gatekeepers in our first live show. We played big venues like the Trade Union and smaller cooler ones like Stranded with acts like The Johnnies, Hoodoo Gurus and The Scientists. Sydney audiences loved Greg Perkins in a way that none dared love anyone on stage in Brisbane. That was a window to the future. What a week and a bit that was.

I don't remember being expected to stay in the band but at the time Uni was more important to me than playing in a band whose music I wasn't a fan of, so when I was dropped off back in Brisbane at Griffith Uni in the middle of O-week, I felt nary a conflict. What I did have was a tape of the four songs we'd done at Basement and an academic year to get done.

Getting back home was good as I found out that my brother and his difficult family had decamped to Townsville so he could do his hospital internship. For the whole year. It was just me and Stephen who'd come down to finish his law degree. That gave me another problem but one disaster at a time. Unpacking that evening was like floating in an oxygen enhanced meditation chamber and being allowed to scream.

Third year was fine, really. Most of us had binged on the attractive film electives and were left only with history and politics electives. That was a slog but there was still a bunch of good stuff to do and discover. I liked Uni and I was good at it. Bob Hawke had led Labor to victory in the Federal election which was a blast after almost a decade of coalition bullshit. Closer to home, the Nationals won the State election in their own right and, for all we knew, would be in power until the end of time. Bummer.

Before he left for Sydney with the Dum Dums, Greg had put the song Susan Burn on to a cart at 4ZZZ and I woke one morning with it blaring on my clock radio. Living the holy Mangrovian dream, my friends. People I didn't know knew that song. After a few months, Greg returned to Brisbane. This had been announced in Time Off with a captioned photo that said he was coming back to join the Gatekeppers (sic). 

We started gigging and hit a steep learning curve about practicing and playing our instruments properly. After some yucky gigs we got better (enough for one uni crony who had seen one of the bad ones to approach me after a good one with a grin and, "well, Pete, ya did good"). This led to more recording, at the 8-track home studio of a friend of the Wadleys. This, plus a live track, made up what would be our Cosmic St cassette album (don't scoff, it was normal in that scene and, besides, however much of an exaggeration it might have been, it did get into the RAM independent top 10 ... for a week).

The band didn't impinge on study to my memory. Both seemed balanced, even with the busier social calendar that the former brought. I kept writing new stuff and at one point rigged up a pair of cassette players to do some primitive multitracking.

I finished up the year and the B.A. quite easily, without the rush of the disrupted previous year and far more confidence that I'd ever had of emerging with some decent results (I was that dick that would whinge loudly in the common room if he only got a pass). So, at some point in November of 1983. I took the bus back to the city and another to Auchenflower for the last time. At breakup drinks (Queens Hotel, the big one with the high ceilings) I thought I was having an acid flashback but was most likely just very pissed. Whatever we were feeling about it, we'd all got through three years of university at least a little the wiser but more importantly, the more fortunate for the free education of the time, for the post punk ethic of openness to exploration and bags of daydreams we'd need to grow out of.

But this summary should be about the music of the time. It's gone on longer than usual this time as I was making music as well as listening to it. So here are the singles I recall:

The big one was Blue Monday. The galloping drum machine intro and delayed entrance of the vocal with a great filling electronics made it both a dance-stravaganza and a troubling accusatory song that some thought was about the Falklands War and others a Swedish student suicide pact. You could dance and grieve at the same time. Australiana was a comedy bit that heralded a rash of other comedy records. I didn't love it but liked the idea of that charting. I and friends ridiculed Redgum's Vietnam song I was Only 19 little suspecting how genuinely affecting we would find it decades later. Prince continued on the scene with the iconic 1999 which, like almost everything else he released, interested not me. She Blinded Me With Science by Thomas Dolby annoyed me. Human League's Fascination had a great chorus and a goofy verse. Soweto was infectious and glorious until you thought about the by line and had to wince. The Eurythmics came out of the cocoon of their old power pop origins to fly high with a triumph of electro pop that resonates down the decades. The Clash were disintegrating fast and Rock the Casbah was proof. Kajagoogoo's Too shy was meant to be sexy but sounded more like the Blitz version of Playschool. Rio by Druan Duran had them push through to stadium star status and well beyond my interest. Wall of Voodoo burst out of the margins with another one for the ages with the propelled Mexican Radio. Tears for Fears gave us a emotive chunk of greatness with Mad World (yes, the original is still better than the movies version). UB40 covered Neil Diamond's Red Red Wine and made it into a poignant mini drama. The Cutter by Echo and the Bunnymen ruled its niche and influenced all. The Call released their hit The Walls Came Down which featured a wannabe David Byrne vocal and a wordless sung hook that ran up and down a major third. The Violent Femmes brought out the spare and impressive Gone Daddy Gone which won them fans. Madness ditched the ska beat for a '60s cover It Must be Love which was ok. Culture Club's boring Do You Really Want to Hurt Me was followed by the far superior Church of the Poisoned Mind. The Stray Cats' Stray Cat Strut was and is a jazzy marvel. INXS came out with The One Thing which was a variation on Subterranean Homesick Blues and took them further from their quirky origins closer to the big rooms. And that's all I recall. No, wait, there's one more.

The song I love possibly the most of anything that came out in 1983 was one that people mostly seemed to revile. There are people born decades after its release that have inherited their parents' distaste for the track. When I heard the opening riff of Safety Dance gleaming out of a car radio, with its bold modal tonality and fun vocals I had found the song of the year for me. I still adore it.

So that's it for then.  Happy News Year to Youse.

1983 @ 40: POWER, CORRUPTION AND LIES - NEW ORDER

Power, Corruption and Lies took New Order further into their emerging identity as a dance band with an edge. If that sounds dismissive and trivialising, it shouldn't. The band had struggled to put some distance between their illustrious early years. The first single even had the Joy Division by line and the album Movement felt like music that couldn't quite come unstuck from the last thing the band had done. The singles were the thing. Procession, Everything's Gone Green, Temptation and the stunner Blue Monday moved solidly into dance music, as much in stylistic debt to Georgio Moroder as Kraftwerk. When the next album came around, even if every other interview they did brought the old band back up, anyone with a persistent longing had to admit they had left that station.

Age of Consent's bright and catchy bass riff and keyboard patterns light up the room. Even Bernard's words about a failure of communication in a relationship sounded happy if you didn't listen to the lyric. And, yes, you could tap your toes or do the hip shake jerk all afternoon. If the funereal We All Stand bring back memories of Closer the arrangement is still sparser and lighter than it would have been. The mood is eerie rather than depressing. The Village brings back the brightness. "Our love is like the flowers," sings Bernard over busy and happy rhythms and textures that were fast becoming signature, guitar and keyboard tickles.

Notably absent from the production is the legendary figure of Martin Hannett. What he would have made of any of this is the stuff of guesses. The band took charge of production. When the joy of The Village fades into the mostly rhythmic introduction to 5 8 6 we can't imagine the old team adding atmosphere. This fades into the main body of the song which emerges from a low rumble into a busy electronic shuffle that sounds like someone tinkered a little with the Blue Monday midi programming. This, like all the songs on the old side one, allows textures and moods to speak more forwardly than individual songs and that plays perfectly well, even with the slower moments.

Side two brings us the open window on a summer day of Your Silent Face which begins with a synthesiser pattern so effortless and soothing you feel as though you're floating when it comes on. This opens on to a huge electronic strings chord progression that feels like a royal procession. Bernard's thinner melodica (haunting on In a Lonely Place) pleases. His vocal is calm and mid range. The strange lyrics report an experience that has left someone either apathetic or traumatised but beyond communication. At first the line, "why don't you piss off," sounds contemptuous, a cheap joke at the end of a hard won lyric. But the more I hear it the less I think it's the song's narrator and more the one who had the dark experience. This might belie the beauty of the musical arrangement (the closest, incidentally, that they ever got to sounding like Kraftwerk) but whatever personal motivation for the words the tension between the weary voice and the sublime grandeur of the music always compels me to either stop what I'm doing and give it all the attention I have or stop it and play it when I can listen only to it.

Ultraviolence plays like a disco march without the keyboards. The lyrics seem to bear the title out for once, with imagery of assault and consoling advice to move past a traumatic memory. The impersonality of the arrangement and subdued vocal add a creepy air and feel like a memory that encases the one recalling. gives me the shivers every time I hear it.

Ecstasy is mostly instrumental with a processed, robotic voice chanting something unintelligible as well as a lot of whispering. The strident dance groove is like  5 8 6 and might as well evoke a intoxication as just plain ol' dancing. 

The album ends on Leave Me Alone which has the now familiar New Order interplay between a big loping chorused bass and plinking guitar riff on the high frets that so many bands o'er the globe lifted wholesale. Bernard's words are melancholy, evoking failure of communication. To an exhausted person, everyone looks weary. Still, there's a lovely intrigue about: "but for these last few days, leave me alone." 

As with Movement you could  go through the words and the way the music sounds and make a case for the continued haunting of Ian Curtis over this band. It would be years before they could be heard in their own right. However, this time the band offered a constantly developing approach that would take them to moments of inspiring greatness. If this record sounds a little too much like mood over songwriting it might simply be a desire to sound as candid as they could. Peter Saville's artwork is a triumph, a lush painting of a bouquet interrupted by digital coding, keeping things both beautiful and always a little disturbing. 

And that works well by being subtle. This was not the new band's Unknown Pleasures, it was the state of things as they were. As with Movement, they left the big hit single off the album so it couldn't diminish what was there. What was there was something shared by other significant artists at the end of the free wheeling post punk years before so much of it was absorbed by a hungry mainstream. There was enough beauty here for a few car commercials, for sure, but too much murky shade for the big bucks world. Ok, so the next single after this was one song mixed four times which did not feel like fan service in 1983. But if you had this LP that might have given you a secret smile.

PUBLIC IMAGE FIRST ISSUE @ 45

A boomy bass wanders in space before a distant scream brings a drum roll and a big spacy pattern filled with heavily treated guitar playing what sounds like a metalwork shop with saws and the kind of tools you don't want to share a room with. More screams before Lydon comes in with lines about boredom, change and the repeated refrain, "I wish I could die." This might be Lydon's disgust with the scene he and his former cohorts did so much to make. The old punks (meaning those veterans form a very short lived scene) clung to what had become cultural traditions. The call to arms of British punk turned out to be more of a fanfare for the expansion and exploration of post-punk. Electronica, industrial, dub, and anything else that worked. That was the real revolution. Lydon's final words after nine minutes of oppressive dirge are spoken like a doctor pronouncing cause of death: Terminal boredom.

Religion is a spoken word track. Lydon rails against religion with a series of attacks. Religion II is the same with some expansions and a three chord grind like the opening track. I clearly recall how thrilling this was, hearing someone take aim like this. Then, perhaps less than a few listens later, it sounded like the poem that the Year 11 malcontent couldn't get into the school paper. The musical version packs more punch.

Annalisa begins with a bass and drums groove as substantial as a soul workout. Keith Levene's guitar, as effect laden as any of the other tracks (probably a combination of ring modulation and chorusing, but I'm guessing) gives more settled form to the rhythm, adding more of an offset. Lydon's vocals are high and whining but very effective. The song is the story of Annaliese Michel whose religiously extreme parents took her neurological condition for demonic possession and effectively tortured her to death. The song is not aired for shock value like the previous one, there's real compassion in there, even if it can be difficult to detect at first.

Side two begins with the anthem of the year. Public Image begins in steps. A bass playing quavers alternating between first and fifth. Drums enter with a slapping snare as Lydon repeats "Allo, Allo..."  before hte guitar comes in with a ascending progression which sets off ignition with a laugh from Lydon. Levene's riffing on this song is epochal. Huge fanfare-like figures of two note patterns that sounded in 1978 that you would never be able to learn them by ear. After John McKay's sabre slashing style on The Banshees' debut album, this sounded like it was imagined in widescreen. Lydon's verses could be about his former manager Malcolm McClaren or just as easily about Sex Pistols fans, railing against the scene's expectations and misrepresentations. Here, he claims his own, singing with neither the sneer nor the snarl of his Pistols vocals, hitting the notes he needs and sounding in total control. The chorus is the title, an elongation of the vowels as Levene's new fanfare rides the rhythm section like waves. A classic of the past fifty years and beyond. It never fails to excite me.

Low Life is like a shrill retelling of Public Image. More directly about McClaren, the "bourgeoisie anarchist". While there is none of the awe-inspiring musicality of the previous song, this packs its punch in clear terms. Lydon's vocals are clear but low in the mix. There are a few echoes of Steve Jones Major third descents in the guitar in the chorus for good measure.

An echoed slag-gather. The band comes in all at once for Attack with another Pistols like chord progression. Like Low Life the mix is kept low. Lydon's vocals are even more buried and drenched in delay. The attacks of the title refer more to those received buy Lydon, this new band and the one he was cast from. Judges, ministers, press, and anyone else are targeted in a series of J'accuse tirades. the song ends in a brief shambles.

Fodderstompf. What to say? Tinkling piano. Bass and drums play what sounds like contemporary disco. Keith Levene was absent so no guitar. After a few taunts like, "be bland, be boring." Jah Wobble and John  Lydon are at the mic rambling in high shrieking Monty Python voices. Lydon at one point intones, "we only wanted to finish the album with the minimum amount of effort which we are now doing very successfully." This goes for almost eight minutes. The first time you hear it, it's funny. It doesn't survive the first listen. "We only wanted to be loved," is screamed repeatedly and forms a chant or chorus or whatever your mood at the time makes of it. The drummer, Jim Walker describes feeling angry every time he hears mention of the track, let alone the track itself. He just hears Jah Wobble and John Lydon ripping off their fans. Something like that means that the track will have its devotees as well as detractors. Me? My mood decides.

In the very early '80s the bass player of the band I was in saw the cover among my records and asked: "Did you buy this because of the single?" He meant Public Image and his grin told he had, too, and then lived through the rest of it. Yes, I had. It was played on local commercial station 4TO who had been surprising in some of their staff's support of the edgier music coming from the U.K. at the time. I thought it sounded marvellous. It felt like Lydon was really moving on rather than getting bogged down and ther result was that from what I considered greatness he had burst into flames of inspiration. I was sixteen.

So I went down to the import record shop around the corner (Ken Hurford's Inport Records) and asked about it. They neither had it nor had heard of it so I ordered it. I was called a week later. I was surprised as I assumed it was coming in from the U.K. It was on the Australian Wizard label (as the Pistols had been). It was on translucent green vinyl.

I played Public Image about five times in a row, mostly buried in headphones to live inside that gigantic fanfare. Then I turned it over and heard the rest, right up to Fodderstompf. Fodderstompf, at least to a sixteen year old Pistols fan who was expecting the ascension from the greatness of Never Mind the Bollocks to even greater wonders, fucked the whole canvas up. The endless dirge of Theme passed by without effort because, once you knew it, you knew that it wasn't trying to be a snappy pop song but an atmosphere. Religion caught me at the right age but I'd skip the spoken word part. The rest I liked but missed the rallying cries of No Future or Pretty Vacant and I only wanted them brought into the greatness of Public Image. That wasn't the band on this record, though, nor on any after it.

Things got better; Metal Box and Flowers of Romance were classics of the post punk aeon. But this angry, contrary, mess of a record stopped everyone who might have rallied. And if they listened to the words, rallied in the best way by using it as inspiration. Having your trust thrown back in your face like a bucket of beery piss was not going to do that. Whose would? Well, it changed. The following year saw the release of The Great Rock and Roll Swindle which had fun moments but also a lot of prognosticative bullshit as well. We had to wait until Metal Box for PiL, as they started calling themselves. In the meantime the sounds from good radio stations ironed out the need for heroic band names and titles and could swathe us in the sounds of discontent that were by turns violent and breathtakingly beautiful. This was a speed bump, however inadvertently, but speed bumps are there to keep us alive and ready for more roads. So, maybe they did waste seven minutes of our time sounding like high school Monty Python kids at three a.m., maybe we needed the pause.

THE SCREAM - SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES @ 45

It's right there in the first few minutes of the album. A lone bass note gently slides downward. A guitar figure, unresolved, descends, falling through the dark. Percussion. A distant woman's voice wailing. There's two of them. Nothing's quite at the same level. Pure isn't so much an instrumental as an aural movie trailer, the genre madness horror. It's 1978, most albums released under the flag of punk start with big bashing guitars and sloganeering vocals. This band, composed of people on the scene from the word go, are going for atmosphere and it makes them stand out. It also makes them a little scary.

Jigsaw Feeling fades in after a brief silence, a chromatic riff with the guitar riff high on the fretboard, building until it reaches altitude when Siouxsie barges in with her bludgeoning voice. It's all wrong - pitchy and unbalanced - but it's perfect for the song, overbearing, harsh, punitive. "My brain is out of my hand, there's nothing to prevent, the impulse is quite meaningless in a cerebral non-event." The last syllable is punched out, percussive. You can hear the barre chords on the guitar now and they behave the way you'd expect a punk band but it's the descant lines, the metallic slashing overhead that will account for the band's guitar sound for this and the next album. It's not chaotic sonic flailing, there's a clear skill and direction to it, but it's troubling, violent but psychologically violent. As Siouxsie's voice punches about a shattered mental state, the bright stinging of John McKay's guitar is her equal. After the spooky opening, this is a torment ... and it appeal is strong and instant. 

Overground also fades in but it takes longer and keeps the tension from breaking into a barre chord assault. It's a strident Flamenco rhythm in the guitar which breaks the expected four on the floor of rock (let alone punk). Siouxsie comes in plaintively, worried about having to appear conventional to others. It's not what you'd call characteristic but it's worth remembering that bands off the mains of the time had to bend backwards for a foot in the door of a record company. Not everybody pranced around like the Sex Pistols, getting attention for swearing and spitting. The calibre of the music on this disc, the seriousness of purpose indicates that whatever they were like at parties, this band was looking to express their independence from their own peers. Not superiority, really more independence, the freedom to explore how they would, regardless of canons of behaviour that had already formed around them as to how a punk band should and sound and how they should act. Instead of pretending they weren't doing it they wrote an unignorable song about it which features hesitant guitar screeches between verses that suggest the danger of it. It's less the amped up football chants of Sham 69 than the exploratory noise of The Kinks or Who of the previous generation. Towards the end of the song, rather than bring it to a crescendo, they just intesify, Siouxsie doubling on the vocals, harmonising with herself but also getting mixed down as though polished into normality. Bold move, no guarantee the listeners would get it.

Carcass follows with a kind of reassuring familiarity. It's an early one and sounds it, a smashing descending guitar riff, a wailing vocal and insistent drums, it's tough nut punk all the way through even to the chorus: "Be a carcass, be a dead pork. Limblessly in love!" A sexually frustrated butcher dismembers the object of his affection, heightening his arousal as never before. It might sound like New Rose but the story could be straight out of The Painted Bird. We end on a field recording of snorting pigs.

The same brooding bass presence as the start of Pure. It's sliced up by the atonal guitar blades. Siouxsie begins the words and we realise, holy fuck it's a Beatles song. Her voice climbs through the ascending opening lines, twice by which time the band has picked up speed and her voice is a full throated wail. The chorus is robbed of the descending guitar line of the original but Siouxsie blares out an odd imitation "helter skelter, nananananananana!" The band charges through to the next chorus and then ends on the same doubling of the opening lines, climbing up through the noise. But this time it cuts abruptly as though it's fallen and crashed to the ground. The Banshees would revisit the Beatles again as a much changed band for 1983's Dear Pridence. It was from the same album but was not the same kind of cover version. Helter Skelter trades the screaming distortion of the White Album original and puts it by the other tracks in the dark. Dear Prudence was given a kind of post punk psychedelia, phasing and big production and a video shot in Venice with lots of dayglo colour distortion. It's the statement of an established band, comfortably flaunting an influence. Helter Skelter here is an experiment, a dare, brash young punks gatecrashing a Fab Four classic (well the song's Manson connotations didn't hurt).  End of side one.

Side two starts with the big sound of full barre chords through a phaser. This quickly turns into a more chunky rhythm as the band and Siouxsie come in. The vocals are in close harmony and kept in a block low in the mix. "I am just a vision on your t - v - screen. Just something conjured form a dream." Even the fame of the still small punk club scene led people to typify the band, particularly Siouxsie herself and as tv appearances and positive press increased, the richly imaged singer attracted attention from all quarters. "My limbs are like palm trees swaying in the breeze. My body's an oasis to drink from as you please." The sense of cultural predation was felt deeply. The spiky rhythm of the track with its pummelling tom toms, the compressed howl of the vocals and the lashing guitar tell us how angrily.

Metal Postcard (Mittageisen) begins with a threatening march rhythm on the toms and bass. The guitar comes in with sharp dissonant bends like staccato siren blasts before settling into the kind of chord riff that would sound like Black Sabbath if it were played on the lower strings. Up there on the higher frets it sounds more machine-like and cold. Siouxsie comes in with images of families dining on metal, workers saving metal for later as a chorus declares, "metal is tough, metal will sheen, metal will rule in my master scheme". This strange scenario is an image of fascism. The band had received aggressive responses to the inclusion of oppressive symbology like swastika armbands, however ironically or just provocatively they were worn. Siouxsie based the the lyric on work by Wimar-era collage artist John Heartfield whose surrealist anti-Nazi work (and his own Anglicisation of his name from Johan Herzfeld) put him afoul of the brownshirts and on the right side of history. The Banshees evocation of Heartfield was even released in German translation in Germany and made it to an equal best double A side in the U.K. (the other side Love in a Void won the airplay, though). It might not have assuaged the detractors (but not even the later song Israel could do that, however much of a classic of the era it became) but it stands as clear testament to the power of a band that could tighten its politics so forcefully and still produce a compelling rock song. As with most of the lyrics on this album there is an unsettling play between the nursery and the dystopian nightmare.

Nicotine Stain is plummets back to Ur punk the way that Carcass did, slamming powerchord riffs and yelling. It's all above ground this time as Siouxsie tears through smoking addiction. This applies to all other nasty habits, of course, which is a dangerous thing for potential rock stars to do, considering how many take the overcalming approach to tour stress. However, making it about cigarettes rather than heroin keeps the habitual nature of it in focus. Anyone can write a slamming anthem about smack (Lour Reed already did the depressing one about it). 

Suburban Relapse starts with stark dissonant guitar chords high on the fretboard. They come in from different speakers, left-right-left-right, stark and uncomfortably bright. The bass enters softly. The drums hit a bar of tom toms, four on the beat and no more, until the rhythm fills out, this time he's using the snare. The tense cacophony tightens and breaks into a grinding progression laced with a cutting sax riff. Then Siouxsie comes in, the words already sub-hysterical: "I''m sorry that I hit you but my striiiiiiiing snapped .... I'm I'm sorry I disturbed your caaaaaaaat nap!" The lines themselves stretching until they snap. Every other line, almost, is like that, stretch, with wailing notes drawing out into tight, dangerous lengths before the violence of the last syllable. The band moves around the vocals, speeding here, slowing there around the cyclonic voice as the song swells into a massive fist of intensity before coming to an end as orgasmic as it is brutal: "Re-lapse! Re-lapse! Re-lapse! howling against the punching of the band.

The Banshees did this a few times in their initial career and it's something worth noting here, almost at the end of the record: they sound live. Suburban Relapse, like all the other songs (except the opening instrumental), benefitted from being part of their live sets for about a year. By the time they got to the studio, the arrangements were in place, including the dynamics and developmental passages. The band was ready to explore familiar territory in the unfamiliarity of the recording environment. Suburban Relapse, though, sounds entirely live. Like The Lord's Prayer on the next album or Voodoo Dolly on Ju Ju (also made after the songs had been played live extensively), Relapse feels organically arranged and dependent on how well the band was playing during one take. Young producer Steve Lillywhite gave the band all the air they needed to get this done, tweaking only when necessary for the production. This, and the band being ready to do it this way, created one of the truest documents of a celebrated live band finding their sea legs in the sterility of the studio.

Where Lillywhite did come in handy were moments like Pure where something formless was given form and established the signature for the whole album in minutes, like an opera overture. Another such is the closing song Switch. This is a carefully managed piece in which the arrangement follows the strange lyric about professionals changing their vocations, taking characteristics of the opposite world view: priests become scientists but keep their religion which contaminates their results; scientists become religious which pretty much leads to the same disastrous ends: the authorities of society and culture render themselves into dystopic tyrants. At the time this felt like weird science fiction, an update on Orwell and Huxley and a response to some of the more adventurous moments on the BBC like The Guardians or 1990, or (thought I didn't know it at the time) J.G. Ballard.

In a well judged break from the previous track's sturm und drang, Switch begins with a clean electric guitar playing a minor chord in arpeggio. The unexpected texture of this, both calming and worrying (it has a horror movie score feel to it). The band comes in with Siouxsie with lines about different lives and categories merging. The band gets insistent until it pauses for the line: "watch the muscles twitch for a brand new switch." On that word the band takes on a higher gear to move the darker passage of the tale. At the end of the first new phase verse the rhythm suddenly sparses out with hard echo on the guitar slashing out high chords and the drums (more unusual snare from drummer Morris) as we hear about the doctor whose treatments become religious. Then it's back to the galloping band as a vicar who tries science cannot shake the constraints of religion. We end as gently as we began with the clean arpeggio as the people stop and protest in revolt before an apocalyptic event which might be a terror attack leaves body parts beyond redemption. "They're dying to switch." Finally, after the cataclysm, a slight hammer-on note on the guitar. End.

What felt like fanciful sci-fi in 1978 sounds normal now. There's a YouTube clip of Jordan Peterson claiming a credits list of qualifications well beyond his genuine ones, anything that might lend credence to his highly influential word salad. The song also describes the kind of post-truth world we are continually told we live in. Steve Bannon helping to win the election for the monster Trump famously declared his strategy to be, "fill the zone with shit." This has been adopted in Australia and some of that has circled back to places like the U.K. whose recently aired refugee policy was almost verbatim that of the troglodyte Coalition from the past decade. Then there's the mass of bullshit that rose from lockdowns and resulted in a self-proclaimed freedom movement which held rallies where libertarians marched alongside uncloaked neo-nazis. "Watch the muscles twitch ..."

Ok, so this is another long and ranty album article. But listening again, and more closely than I have for decades, has brought me back to how powerful its statements, how artful its execution and how arch its presentation. The Clash gave us some handy political slogans. Never Mind the Bollocks gave us the gobbing attitude. Damned Damned Damned gave us pogo-ing speedy fun. But The Scream gave us something altogether different. This album is often cited as the source point of post-punk, the more adventurous branching of U.K. musicians into new territories, eschewing the already canonical boundaries punk was forming for itself. There remains a fearless quality to the music of the very late '70s to the early '80s by which influences as diverse as Lee Scratch Perry and Stockhausen, Neu and The Beach Boys could be cooked up in the same pot. Just before all that, The Scream gave us a view into a world where the subject matter wasn't shocking but unnerving and to the credit of its producer, the band who already knew their material was left to express it, needing only technical assistance.

Even the cover art. The title, which might lead punters to thinking of Edvard Munch, was buried in the concept. People swimming under water in a pool. It's not the band, as I used to think, but a group of models in their teens, their colourless pallor accentuated by lights from above. There is nothing salacious about it, they really are kids in a pool. But they are in a place where it is impossible to scream, where a scream would only be attempted by the most severe of shocks, silent and self-annihilating. It's something that occurs only after looking at it while the record plays and then only after a few times. This was an image without band member mugshots or obvious statements.

As for that image, this was the band that did the most to suggest what the coming sub genre of Goth would look and feel like. And it was a new angle entirely. Screaming Lord Sutch had fun with the ghastly and grotesque but knew it was showbiz. Black Sabbath felt a little closer but veered towards their own sub genre. Alice Cooper was all frogs and snails and staged beheadings like a Vegas show. But this was different. American Debbie Harry's tough New York talk was glossed over by the media who preferred her cute and a little edgy. But this record that turned Sue from Bromley into Siouxsie Sioux from your holy, bloody nightmares didn't go for any of that. 

The Pistols song Bodies left me shaking when I first heard it, there's almost a shock per verse in it. The songs on The Scream take time to do that, multiple listens. The sound is clear, if strange at first: John McKay's severe sabre like guitar figures weren't like anything around them (until Keith Levene, or The Edge but he was helped by Steve Lillywhite). Kenny Morris' insistence on every part of the kit except for the rock-defining snare put him one further out than Paul Cook in the Pistols (another gleeful tom-er). Steve Severin was not a bass virtuoso but what he did worked as well as Geezer Butler has for Sabbath (and he got nimbler as the years progessed). 

And then there's Siouxsie, never have I cared less about a singer's wobbly pitch when the sheer overriding force of her expression comes in. A different vocalist would have left this record in the honourable mention stack but Siouxsie's vocal hurricane that can let you feel the coolness of its eye is a compulsion. Of her era it is she and John Lydon who sit at the top of the heap as far as personal might and influence, bludgeoning out from the speakers into the nervous systems of anyone listening. They are, of course both in the big tv moment where the Pistols swear at the drunken old Bill Grundy that pushed the term punk rock from a fanzine scene into the tabloids. Steve Jones does most of the swearing but Lydon is quietly seething. Siouxsie, to the rear with bandmate Steve Severin and the Selecter's Pauline Black looks like a prototype of herself, Westwoodian half-skinhead, half Weimar art-beast and chunky makeup. But she looks more like the scenester that she had been before she got in front of a mic and grievously assaulted The Lord's Prayer. Give that a little under a year and some aesthetic reinforcement and she is an icon feeding the fires, on T-shirts to this day with her spiky fright hair and Cleopatra eyes, recognisable across decades. Add but moments of her caterwauling command and roughshod poetry of unease and you'll have another fan. This is one of my favourite albums.

Listening notes: There's a lesson in this. I had a cassette back in the '70s which was replaced with an U.K. pressing of the LP. For this article I began by listening to the 2006 Deluxe Edition CD. Then, by chance, I found a copy of the 1989 CD in my work cupboard (I'd taken it in with a stack of others to help during the drudge bits of the day). With knowledge of the effects of the loudness war on the CD, I took it home and listened. It was immediately more airy than the later Deluxe which I was able to prove by comparing the waves of the same song from each. While there were clear dynamics to the 2006 master, the '89 instance was quieter but had far more separation of sound, particularly in the details of the drums (often the first victim of brickwalling masters). The 1989 master was in fact the original plus some boosting of both top and bottom not permissible for vinyl reproduction. It was from the brief glory days between CDs given exhausted old masters and the overcompression that has plagued digital music presentation since the mid-'90s. It is a perfect-sounding CD that proves the superiority over vinyl (more dynamic range and no noise) and its day has largely gone. Have any CDs from the late '80s to the mid'90s? Keep them. That beautiful sound is what we've lost in competition and the numbskulled vinyl revival. Thank you, thank you, ladies and gentlemen,.