Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 10: The mid to late 80s

Up until this point in musical history, the best rock/pop songs and albums being produced were also in the mainstream and consequently the artists responsible would appear ubiquitously on shows like 'Top of the Pops'. But the mid-80s proved a turning point, and 'Top of the Pops' went the same way that 'Doctor Who' did at that time (in the era of Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy), and that's straight down the shitter.  Nonetheless, there were plenty of great albums in the second half of the decade.

10/10 albums from 1984-9

The best LP of the decade comes from Kate Bush.  I'm sure I wasn't the only 15 year old in love with her when she released "Hounds of Love" in 1985.  My obsession was such that my mum, in an effort to help me find a girlfriend, once claimed that her friend's daughter looked like Kate Bush.  She didn't.  She was much more like Alison Moyet.  No disrespect to Alison Moyet, but she wasn't really competing with Kate Bush for a turn on my turntable or a space on my wall.

'Dawn escapes from moon-washed college halls' was still 3 years off for me when Marillion's Fish sang this favourite lyric of mine on "Misplaced Childhood's" 'Kayleigh' (1985).  There is no better album for songs that segue into each other and it's easy to be forgiving of his heart-on-sleeve self-pity, because his use of language is unique:  He somehow manages to sound like an English Literature post-grad with a thesaurus fixation without coming across as a right bleeding ponce.

On the subject of lyrical masterpieces with complementary melodic dressing, I'll add to this list of near-perfect albums, The Smiths' 1986 classic, "The Queen is Dead".  Another light that never goes out.  And I'll throw in REM's "Green" and The Waterboys' "Fisherman's Blues", my soundtracks to the summer of '88 and a first year at university, where I strived to become as equally poetic, tragic and Cinderella-obsessed as Marillion's Fish.

Bob Dylan's mid-to-late 80s period is his most maligned and appeared to have finally signalled the death throes of his career, but he pulled off yet another resurrection, probably the most incredible for ...oh, about, the best part of 2,000 years.... when he allowed Daniel Lanois to soundscape a collection of great songs that became the beautifully atmospheric "Oh Mercy".  And as Bob ended the decade having a resurrection, The Stone Roses were born, claiming to actually be the resurrection and sounding like the lovechildren of the 60s and the 90s on their self-titled, lemon and paint-splat adorned debut LP.

9/10 albums from 1984-89

Lanois (alongside Brian Eno) can also take credit for a similar sound on U2's "The Unforgettable Fire" (1984), adding timeless sophistication to the more raw sound of their early LPs.  So much so, that you can even forgive Bono's gurning smugness and ridiculous attire of a ten-gallon Teletubby hat, sex worker boots and Kentucky trailer park mullet as he gave himself a hernia singing about Martin Luther King.  He refined this look when U2 pulled off pretending to be an American country-blues rock band on "The Joshua Tree" in 1987.  I found myself easily able to overlook their affectations while the music was so great - but once they started to wade through a mire of tedious mundanity from the late '90s onwards, those affectations made me want to punch Bono every time he flicked his fingers and caused a child to die of poverty.

Two 9/10 albums of the time really challenged me.  Springsteen's "Born in the USA" and Dire Straits's "Brothers in Arms" proved to be my gateway LPs into their older, less 80s sounding-music; and consequently these albums then became, for a long time, disregarded in my mind as weaker, overly commercialised, too-radio-friendly, digital, hyped CD flagships.  Recently, they've grown on me again, enormously so, as the songs are all strong on each and the 80's production has dated better than much from that that era.

REM were riding an artistic wave in the late 80s as a run up towards becoming A-listers in the early 90s.  The prequels to "Green" were "Life's Rich Pageant" (1986) and "Document" (1987) and together this forms a trilogy of their best and most consistent LPs throughout a long career.  Anything else might come close and might include classic songs, but always had a couple of weaker tracks to detract.

Other 9/10 LPs from this era are:  Marillion "Fugazi" (1984) and "Clutching at Straws" (1987), Madness "Keep Moving" (1984), Sting "The Dream of the Blue Turtles" (1985), The Smiths "Meat is Murder" (1985) and "Strangeways, Here we Come" (1987), 10,000 Maniacs "In My Tribe" (1987) and "Element of Light" (1986) by Robyn Hitchcock and The Egyptians.  A real mix of fashionable and unfashionable and all of which, except the latter, I had procured and started to love by the end of that decade.

The rest, year by year

1984 was marginally weaker and the remaining ranks of my top ten are taken up with 7/10 scoring LPs from Prince, Madonna and even Frankie Goes to Hollywood.  Much more typical 80s pop than the choices above.

1985 was - coincidentally, much like 1975 - a mid-decade peak year, helped by many 8/10 albums, from Suzanne Vega, Madness, Richard Thompson and The Pogues.

1986 has a range with some great albums by The Bangles, The Fall, Crowded House and Peter Gabriel, towering above some very average efforts from Queen and Dylan.

1987 was similar in that respect, with the top ten ranks scrapping the barrel a bit, courtesy of a 5/10 from Springsteen and some good but unexciting records by John Mellencamp and Aztec Camera.

1988 proved to be better and full of 7/10 LPs from The Fall, The Pogues, Crowded House, The Travelling Wilburys.

1989 scores even better with Kate Bush, 10,000 Maniacs, Tom Petty and Neil Young.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 9: The early 80s

 The early 80s except 1981

What do nuclear energy, synthesisers and social media have in common?  Like many inventions they have been usefully used and atrociously abused; but more than most inventions the results have been at polar extremes.  Synthesisers epitomise the 80s as much as men with hairstyles like their mums', the only difference being that synths weren't always quite as shit. Successful bands who embraced the synth as a primary instrument were capable of knocking out a few great singles, but never enough to rescue an LP from the concrete shoes of its more average album tracks.  Thus, you won't find any Tears for Fears or Depeche Mode or Eurythmics albums on my 80s lists of top tens.  What you will find are albums by my usual favourites who either (a) mastered the benefits of the synth as a primary instrument, (b) used it as secondary instrument to complement their music or (c) avoided it as you might well cross the road to ensure you don't step in a dog turd.

Category (a) includes Bowie's "Scary Monsters... and Super Creeps" (7/10) in 1980.  Top track 'Ashes to Ashes' pretty much invents the 80s, as a song and video.  It's not just that Bowie changed his entire image as often as I change my pants (once a year), it's the fact that whatever new style he immersed himself in, he pulled it off better than anyone else.  Almost.  Roxy Music can also take some credit for blueprinting the 80s sound in the first year of the decade with "Flesh and Blood" (8/10), an even better LP than Bowie's.  Bowie lacked the consistency on "Scary Monsters...", as he did on 1983's "Let's Dance" (5/10), despite the title track being damn near perfect.  Roxy Music again score better with 1982's "Avalon" (7/10).  In each case, the tone of these albums was very much in keeping with the sunny side of the 80s: Upbeat, glossy and optimistic.  In contrast, Joy Division's second and final album "Closer" (8/10) reflected the darker, industrial northern gloom that also characterised the decade, like 'Boys from the Blackstuff' did.  Sadly and poignantly it proved an appropriate epitaph to Ian Curtis who took his own life 2 months before the LP's release.

Category (b) is a strange mix.  Kate Bush was too much of a restless artistic genius to ignore the benefits of a synth (and a fairlight) and embraced both on 1980's commercially accessible "Never for Ever" (9/10) and '82's more interesting, but less poppy "The Dreaming" (9/10).  The latter featured Rolf Harris on didgeridoo.  Yes, I know.  But it could've been worse.  Gary Glitter on backing vocals for instance.  Saville on synth.  OK, I'll stop there.

Jethro Tull, whose response to punk had been to release albums you could Morris Dance to, shocked many by adding synths to their usual folk-rock-band-with-flute approach and did so to tremendous effect on "The Broadsword and the Beast" (8/10) in 1982.

The Police were initially well known for play-fighting on camera and using French phrases for album titles in the late 70s, whilst musically they relied on their 3 instruments of bass, drums and guitar, played with extraordinary skill.  In 1980, they were still playfighting, but they started to use synths; and what sounded like another French LP title - "Zenyatta Mondatta" (9/10) - was actually just made-up words meaning absolutely nothing at all.  In 1983, they signed off with an even better LP, with even more synths and a synthy 80s sounding not-French-at-all title, "Synchronicity" (10/10).

I'll sub-divide Category (c).  (If that's not the nerdiest sentence that I've used so far across 9 super geeky blog posts, then I don't what is.)  Firstly, there are those bands who used a lot of electronic keyboards, but not synths.  The Cure's 1982 "Pornography" (7/10) features, as does Marillion's debut "Script for a Jester's Tear" (8/10) the following year.  I might even lump Dire Straits in there for company, simply for increasing keyboard use on 1980's "Making Movies"(7/10) and '82's "Love over Gold" (8/10). 

Then there is a whole host of artists who stuck with traditional instruments, ducking modern means of performing music, even if the production methods or their choice of personal attire was unmistakably '80s.  In some order of preference:

There was always more to Madness than jaunty dance-along singles with obvious comic panache, but their development from "Absolutely" (10/10) in 1980 to "The Rise and Fall" (10/10) in 1982 did represent a long journey to a more serious place, even if the album covers travelled a mere half mile from Chalk Farm tube station to the top of Primrose Hill.

Fun Boy Three might not have had the cultural impact of the band they spawned from, but I've always enjoyed them FAR more than The Specials ('Ghost Town' notwithstanding) and they proved to be another band with a two-(classic)-album career: their eponymous debut LP (8/10) in '82 and the remarkable "Waiting" (10/10) in '83, on which every single song could have charted in the top ten had they all been released as singles.

U2 in the '80s hadn't yet evolved into unbearable wankers.  They were merely bearable wankers, and I've retained enough residual teenage adulation for them to still really enjoy "Boy" (8/10) and "War" (9/10) from 1980 and '83.  Dylan slowly toned down the Christian fundamentalism from "Saved" (8/10) to "Infidels" (9/10) in the same years, even though he was still singing about Jesus without necessarily sounding like he'd collaborated on the lyrics with St John the Evangelist.  And retaining a devotion to good old fashioned ways of doing things with minimal decoration from the age were Richard and Linda Thompson ("Shoot out the Lights" 7/10 1982), Bruce Springsteen ("The River" 9/10 1980), The Waterboys' self-titled debut (6/10 1983), Dexy's Midnight Runners ("Too Rye Ay" 7/10 1982) and the first of many LPs from R.E.M, ("Murmur" 6/10 1983).

That leaves a few LPs that don't fit into categories with any others, so I'll stick ZZ Top's "Eliminator" (5/10 1983) into its own group of bands with long-bearded guitarists not called Beard and unbearded drummers called Beard; I'll put "The Gift" (7/10 1982) by The Jam into the category of albums with 'A Town Called Malice' on them; and Pink Floyd's "The Final Cut" (7/10 1983) in with all the other albums of off-cuts from a previous album by bands who were collapsing in a mire of hatred towards each other.

1981

This year proved to be a bogey in the trifle.  On average, I own 14 albums from each year of the 80's, but only 8 from 1981 and absolutely no classics in there.  The best of a relatively not-too-bad bunch is Madness's "7" (9/10), the very first album I bought for myself, but distinctly the weakest of their first five.  Dylan's "Shot of Love" (8/10) is a close second alongside the first solo outing for someone I discovered much later in life, who took his inspiration from Dylan, The Beatles and early Pink Floyd - so I'm not sure why I overlooked him for so long - and that is Robyn Hitchcock.  Incidentally, I am writing this just days after he played a very small intimate venue local to me, where my daughter worked for several years.  To be stood at the front just a metre from a musical hero in such familiar surroundings is quite surreal. (His lyrics are equally surreal.) His debut, incidentally is called "Black Snake Diamond Role" (8/10), and no, I don't understand why either.  

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 8: The late-70s

 1977

1977 was a fork in the road.  The rock music world became partitioned between those who bought and loved the crude, spit-in-your-face brashness of "Never Mind the Bollocks" by The Sex Pistols and those who fell in love with the polished beauty of Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours".  It was a simple choice between nasty and nice.  Nice Fleetwood Mac spent 1976 in California, wasting 6 months of expensive recording studio time blowing a bottomless budget on excessive feasting, singing about the self-destruction of their relationships/marriages to each other as they simultaneously self-destructed, being served drugs like canapes at a wedding reception and snorting cocaine out of each other's bum holes.  Nasty Sex Pistols were touring clubs and colleges of the UK and swearing on TV.  On that basis, you'd take nasty over nice, but it's "Rumours" (10/10) that has always taken pride of place in my record rack.  I don't own and have never even listed to "Never Mind the Bollocks".  I imagine it's bollocks and so I'm not minding it.

The Sex Pistols and punk in its purest form have always been too raw and unimaginative for me.  It's like road rage on record. But undeniably, the whole punk movement - and by that I don't mean just the Pistols, I mean its influences as well, The Stooges in the US and elements of the UK pub-rock culture, like Dr Feelgood - influenced so many great bands in the late '70s and beyond, that we should take our hats off to it.  Not that they ever wore hats.  Except perhaps my favourite punk, whose individual style out-punked the punks.  Poly Styrene's band, X-Ray Spex, had something more than other punk bands of the era, partly down to her image (for example, the middle-aged woman's tweed jacket and skirt), partly down to her quirky lyrics and song subject matter ('Warrior in Woolworth'), partly down to her distinctive voice and partly down to their unusual inclusion of a sax player.  Their sole album, "Germ-Free Adolescents" just misses out on my 1977 top ten, but is well worthy of an honourable mention.  There are two albums on that list for 1977, which can claim a close affinity with the movement.  Ian Dury and the Blockheads released "New Boots and Panties" (8/10).  I haven't been able to test this claim, because my turntable doesn't work in this way, but if you set it to 45rpm and your needle arm automatically rises and lowers itself onto the record, then it will land on side 2 track 4 at the start of 'Plaistow Patricia'.  This song commences with Dury sing-shouting the opening words, "Arseholes, bastards, fucking cunts and pricks".  Not something you'd hear on a Fleetwood Mac record.  The second punk-related album is Talking Heads' debut "Talking Heads:77" (7/10), which is pure CBGB, pure 'psycho killer', pure not-Fleetwood Mac.

Even the dinosaurs found themselves taking notice of - and even demonstrating a thin slither of influence from - punk in 1977.  Queen attempted to get a bit punky on "News of the World" (7/10), about as punky as parents who are trying to use young people's slang.  Pink Floyd's "Animals" (9/10) certainly contained their first attempt to move from the melodic hippy (Gilmour voiced) lyrics to the unmelodic angst-ridden (Waters voiced) lyrics.  The songs 'Sheep', 'Dogs' and 'Pigs' on the LP are all angrily aimed at society's squares, including city bankers and Mary Whitehouse.  This was dinosaur rock doing a Sex Pistols on the Bill Grundy show.

Jethro Tull, however, easily managed to swat away any flies from the punk dung pile as they picnicked in the tranquil and antiquated idylls of pre-industrial English folk.  "Songs from the Wood" (7/10) sits resolutely in my list alongside Waylon Jenning's "Ol Waylon" (7/10) in eschewing urban modernity; unlike David Bowie, who existed on a plane above everybody else.  Much as he was a self-proclaimed magpie of artistic ideas from others, Bowie did this in order to create new styles, not to reflect current ones, like punk.  On "Low" (8/10) and "Heroes" (7/10), he helped create an early blueprint for 80's electronic pop music, albeit with significant help from Roxy Music's dodgy-haircut-afflicted former keyboardist, Brian Eno.  And completing 1977's top ten is Peter Gabriel, whose debut solo effort, affectionately named after himself (6/10), manages to hang off of Bowie's shirt-tails in his wise efforts to discard the prog rock self-indulgence that characterised his final record with Genesis (the overlong "Lamb lies down on Broadway") for something more akin to art rock.

1978

Talking of art rock, 1978 was the break-through year for the most unique female music artist of her time, Kate Bush.  She had grown up taking inspiration from Bowie and Roxy Music and probably even Genesis, but her remarkable originality, engrossing execution and popular appeal all warrant the use of that oft-misapplied term, 'genius'.  Her first two albums top my 1978 list - "The Kick Inside" (10/10) and "Lionheart" (10/10) - alongside Blondie's "Parallel Lines" (10/10) and "Plastic Letters (9/10).  Debbie Harry was the first woman to front (and write songs for) a chart-topping band and Kate Bush was the first female singer-songwriter in the UK to reach number one.  Another legendary debut in 1978 came from Dire Straits with their eponymous debut album (9/10) which spawned Knopfler-esque singing and guitar work on a plethora of rock songs for the next decade, from the likes of Dylan and Tull to that Geordie bloke who sang the theme tune to 'Auf Wiedersehen, Pet'.

Tull, meanwhile, made no efforts to get down with the kids and remained ensconced in their namesake's historical era, the agricultural revolution, with "Heavy Horses" (8/10); while Dylan roped in some backing singers for a hastily recorded "Street Legal" (8/10) which sounds great despite them missing their cues and the band generally not knowing what  Bob wanted them to do, which is fairly typical.  The Rolling Stones managed to knock out the best album ever to contain both a bona fide disco song ('Miss You') and an authentic country song ('Faraway Eyes'), without it sounding like a jumble, on "Some Girls" (8/10).  And finally, The Jam, moved beyond being a post-punk band to embracing enough melody and variety to win popular appeal on their best LP, "All Mod Cons" (8/10).

1979

The decade ends with more debuts, more new wave and more tenacious plying of their trade from the dinosaurs of rock.  

Pink Floyd's "The Wall" (9/10) is, as my brother once described after I played it in its entirety on a car journey while he tried to sleep, "an hour and a half of a psychotic having a moan."  I fully understand people hating this album, it's the most egocentric, navel-gazing, gloomy example of adolescent wallowing in one's own self-styled victimhood, that it stands to reason that it appealed to university students for the next decade or more.  Made worse that Roger Waters was nearer his mid-30s than his adolescence as he indulged in a mire of unsubtle self-pity; but I still like a lot, thanks in part to Gilmour adding some unforgettable musicality and partly due to the nostalgia of being a self-pitying adolescent when I first listened to it.

While one rock dinosaur introspectively disappeared up his own arsehole, another disappeared off his own scale of reinvention and surprise.  Bob Dylan found Jesus!  A proper, full-on, genuine conversion to Christianity was so intense for Bob, that it turned him into an evangelical zealot.  "Slow Train Coming" (9/10) contains lyrics of such fundamentalist, intolerant preaching, such apocalyptic fire-and-brimstone damnation of mankind, that you'd assume the whole thing was some kind satirical parody.  It wasn't.  But musically, with Bob on top form and enhanced by Mark Knopfler's session guitar work and Jerry Wexler's production, it's one of his best.

Knopfler was much in demand in the late 70's and Dire Straits' second album, "Communique" (9/10) matched the crisp quality and unforgettable hooks of their debut. Meanwhile, Neil Young toured "Rust Never Sleeps" (7/10) with roadies dressed as jawas from Star Wars and the album's opening track providing Kurt Cobain's suicide note over a decade later, claiming that 'it's better to burn out than to fade away'.  Bands still burning in 1979 included more new wave/ post-punk groups, The Police ("Regatta de Blanc" 8/10), Blondie ("Eat to the Beat" 8/10) and Talking Heads ("Fear of Music 7/10).  And cheesy not-quite-prog-rock pop rockers, Supertramp, reached their artistic zenith on "Breakfast in America" (9/10).

But 1979's two best debuts burst from different directions from two of the most unique English bands of all time.  One tragically lasted only until the suicide of its lead singer after two albums, but created a cult legacy that has endured; the other has (with lengthy breaks in between) continued to record new material and tour in the 40+ years since, becoming generation-spanning musical icons, epitomising British popular culture and performing on the roof of Buckingham Palace and at the London Olympics.  This could never have happened the other way around.  The former is Joy Division, whose beautifully gloomy debut was "Unknown Pleasures" (9/10); the latter is Madness, who managed to squeeze onto their first album (10/10) the title track 'One Step Beyond', 'My Girl', 'Bed and Breakfast Man', 'The Prince' and 'Night Boat Cairo'.  That's like releasing a greatest hits volume 1 as your first LP.

Thus, after a mid-70s lull when the decade's early kings were sometimes struggling to maintain momentum, the late 70s saw their resurgence and the birth of a new generation of kings and queens who would cement their places in pop's most unforgettable history for decades to come.  I would never have guessed at that time or for many years afterwards that almost 20 years into the 21st century I would take my daughter to see Blondie and Madness at London's Roundhouse for what was to become two of our favourite concert experiences ever.