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30/12/2018 11:29 am  #1701


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

Tek wrote:

Good review AC.

Not my favourite Joy Division album though, That would be 'Unknown Pleasures'.

Cheers Tek, I prefer "Closer" but that's the magic of music, we're both right


I don't know a lot, but I know what I like!
 

30/12/2018 9:16 pm  #1702


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

arabchanter wrote:

 

My favourite tracks change on a daily basis, but today I don't think you can go far wrong with, the mid section of "Passover," "Colony" and "A Means To An End," but like many albums I've liked before, just drop the needle and I'm sure it wont disappoint,and can I just add I think the musicians in Joy Division are very underrated and the haunting vocals of Ian Curtis are the Ying to their Yang in my humbles.

 

This isn't in my loft .

Only after I got into New Order did I go back to listen to Joy Division, but this is a great LP. That bit about the musicians you've written: Stephen Morris is a highly rated drummer, I'm sure he could adapt to any style.

Atrocity Exhibition is a fine showcase of the band's skills, Sumner and Hook swapped instruments for the song, the mix of which Peter Hook hated. 

I don't think the band actually wrote the songs, the results were basically jams that were expertly mixed at a later stage.

shedboy wrote:

arabchanter wrote:

shedboy wrote:

what a wonderful review - welcome back.  Bizarrelly I was listening to Closer today in the house.  I love it and have it on vinyl in the loft somewhere.

Thanks shedboy, gonna try and catch up a bit more the day.

You might want to be careful about mentioning vinyl in your loft as Pat mentions his sometimes,

Next thing you know, it will be "has anyone ever seen Pat and shedboy in the same room at the same time?"  
 

och no how many aliases can I have lol , Cheers Pat

On a serious note best JD album i would normally say is unknown pleasures but then i play closer then i play unknown pleasures - they are subtly very different but both amazing.

Fuck me, hope I don't find shedboy in my loft........
 

 

30/12/2018 9:35 pm  #1703


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

PatReilly wrote:

Fuck me, hope I don't find shedboy in my loft........
 

I don't know about shedboy, but if you found LocheeFleet up there, would that be "Gash In The Attic?" 


I don't know a lot, but I know what I like!
     Thread Starter
 

30/12/2018 10:44 pm  #1704


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

DAY 469.
Iron Maiden..................................................Iron Maiden   (1980)










Short and sweet, this type of music has never really appealed to me, too much wanky guitary noodling going on for my liking. I do like Eddie, and I'm sure I spotted quite a few of his extended family on the telly yesterday (down Govan way.)


Apologies to any Maiden fans who might be reading this, but I really didn't take to this, the only track that I can recall was "Charlotte The Harlot" so that must have been no' too bad, but on the whole got pretty nauseating to be honest.


I'm sure they're all fine musicians (in their field) but I can't honestly say I enjoyed this, even the vocals had this sort of Opera meets screech stylee going on, so to sum up this album wont be going near my vinyl collection.




Bits & Bobs;



Harris got the band name from a film of The Man in the Iron Mask. The "Iron Maiden" was a metal coffin with spikes running outside it that could be inserted inside. The occupant was than impaled and presumably killed.


 
In New Year's Eve of 1978, the band was recording "Iron Maiden," "Prowler," "Invasion" and "Strange World" in Spaceworld Studio near Cambridge. It cost them £200, which exhausted their resources and preventing them for actually purchasing the master tape. Two weeks later, when they obtained the tape, they found the music was raw and unmixed, because the master copy had been wiped. They gave this rough copy to DJ Neal Kay, who played it at the Soundhouse to a great reaction. They began playing gigs there and the demo tape found its way into the hands of Rod "small wallet" Smallwood, who became the band's manager.


 
Doug Samson left the band for health reasons, and was replaced by Dennis Stratton as guitarist. Dennis left because his musical preferences differed with the rest of the band's (although no one took it personally; he remained friends with the band members) and became the manager of The Carts and Horses. Adrian "H" Smith, friend of Dave Murray and former leader of the band Urchin (which had since broken up) took his place. After his solo project, ASAP (Adrian Smith and Project), Adrian decided he wasn't prepared to go back to the band's lifestyle, and was replaced by Janick Gers.


 
Dave Murray helped Adrian start the band Urchin, which was originally called Evil Ways.


 
Paul Bruce Dickinson (who went by the name Bruce Bruce before joining the band) released a single with Rowan Atkinson in the UK. It was a cover of Alice Cooper's "(I Want to Be) Elected," and the artist was credited as "Mr. Bean and the Smear Campaign," which was the band of musicians Dickinson had assembled. Between Bruce's vocals, Rowan, in character as Mr. Bean (who was running for Prime Minister) would describe his ideas for Britain ("There will be no tax cuts. But a lot of people will be forced to have haircuts- yet, Mr. Brownson, that means you!") and eventually delivered his manifesto. At the end of the song, it is revealed that he won every single vote. It was also included on the soundtrack for the film Bean.


 
Dickinson aspired to be a drummer, even going on record as saying "I want to be Ian Pace's left foot". He once stole congas from his school to practice. As soon as he learned of his singing abilities (about 1976), he joined the band Styx, who were named after the river of Hell according to Greek mythology.


 
The band claims Jethro Tull, Deep Purple, Van Der Graf Generator, Arthur Brown, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and the Beatles as inspiration- Bruce reportedly was listening to the Beatles at age five.


 
McBrain was drumming at age 10, playing on his mother's cooker with anything that could serve as drumsticks, including knitting needles.


 
The ever-changing "Eddie" is their mascot. He appears on all the album covers and most single covers. Originally, he was a theatrical mask called Eddie The Head (or Eddie T.H.). However, when Derek Riggs designed the cover art for the single of "Running Free," they were fascinated by the one-armed junkie-like zombie who was chasing Bruce, and made him Eddie instead. For the next few albums, Eddie appeared in prison, Hell, etc. In 1992, Melvyn Grant designed the cover for Fear of the Dark, which depicted a skinny, skull-headed, purple-blue monster playing a guitar. He appeared in the next few album covers like this. The 1996 cover of Best of the Beast, designed by Derek Riggs, featured variations of all the previous Eddies attacking the viewer.


 
Dickinson is a licensed pilot and has a record label called Air Raid Records, which is his nickname.


 
Dickinson earned the nickname "The air-raid siren" for his distinctive vocals.


 
In 1995, Dickinson released the solo album Accident of Birth and followed them up with 2 more, Tattooed Millionaire and Chemical Wedding. They were full of Biblical references - "Jerusalem," "Book of Thel" etc.


 
Nicko McBrain's birth name was Michael Henry McBrain. As a child, he carried around his favorite teddy, Nicholas the Bear, around everywhere, so his family jokingly nicknamed him "Nicky." When he got older, he changed it to "Nicko" to sound cooler.


 
Before Maiden, Nicko McBrain performed with singer and keyboardist Billy Day, as well as being a member of bands like the Blossom Toes, the Pat Travers band, Trust (a French politically-oriented metal band that actually supported Maiden's UK tour in 1981), and the Streetwalkers, which McBrain later called a "great little band." He was surprised they had no sucess, although they released many albums.


 
Dave Murray was fired from the band in late 1976 after he and Steve Harris had a fight at the Bridgehouse. Dave became a member of future Maiden guitarist Arian Smith's band Urchin, and he was replaced by Terry Wapram. At about the same time, Tony Moore joined the band playing keyboards. They played one gig at the Bridgehouse and keyboards were clearly not what they were looking for. Moore left, and Wapram was close behind, claiming he couldn't play without keyboards. Steve wanted Dave back, so he attended an Urchin gig, and after the show convinced Dave to play guitar for Maiden again.


 
Paul Day was the vocalist from late 1975, when the band was formed, to spring of 1976, when he was replaced by Dennis Wilcock, a former songsmith for the Smilers. It was he who recommended Dave Murray was a guitarist to Steve Harris.


 
Steve Harris was originally bassist for the band Gypsy's Kiss (originally called both Influence and Temptation) and was one of the Smilers (ie, member of the band Smiler). He played ads in Melody Maker for band members and came up with vocalist Paul Day, drummer Ron Matthews (who went by Ron Rebel), and guitarists Terry Rance and Dave Sullivan. Steve was the only one who lasted past 1976, and, indeed, is the only band member to have been in Maiden ever since its formation.


 
After Dave Murray was recruited as backup guitarist, original guitarists Terry Rance and Paul Sullivan took offense and left. Bob Sawyer was hired as second guitarist (although he used the name Bob D'Angelo). For the first time, Maiden had a proper lineup (with Steve Harris on bass, Ron Rebel on drums, and Dennis Wilcock on vocals). Nevertheless, it changed six months later.


 
In August of 1980, KISS invited the band to support them on their European tour, as well as to perform at Reading as special guests to the band UFO. Pete Way was one of Steve's biggest heroes, so he agreed without the slightest hesitation. This skyrocketed their popularity in Europe. Reportedly, KISS and Iron Maiden got along very well together, both as musicians and as friends.


 
Blaze Bayley (real name: Bayley Cook, nickname: The Dark Lord) originally started a band called Childsplay, until becoming a vocalist for Wolfsbane and eventually being selected as the replacement for Bruce Dickinson (Wolfsbane supported Maiden on tour in 1990 and Steve Harris said he was "truly impressed" after hearing Blaze warming up). In 1999, Bruce returned to the band and Blaze left. Despite rumours to the contrary, everything was done on good terms. Blaze formed his own band (called simply Blaze) and has released three solo albums to date: Silicon Messiah, Tenth Dimension and As Live as it Gets.


 
Bruce Dickinson and Ozzy Osbourne share much common ground; they are both lead singers of a British heavy metal band with a distinctive singing style. They were also both inspired by the Beatles at very young ages. For the 1994 album "Nativity in Black: A Tribute to Black Sabbath", Dickinson covered "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath", with the band Godspeed providing the music. He sang it in his typical air-raid siren manner, and Godspeed made the song sound a little more metallic than it originally had; many found this a very unusual track as a result.


 
In 1999, a computer game was released titled "Ed Hunter." In it, the player assumed the role of Eddie T. Head and travelled throughout London and eventually into Hell. Throughout the game, Maiden's music plays ("The Phantom of the Opera", "Wrathchild", "Hallowed Be Thy Name", "Fear of the Dark", "Powerslave", "Futureal", and "The Evil That Men Do" all appear) and many subtle references to the band appear; for instance, in the first level, Eddie visits Acacia Avenue and Charlotte the Harlot can be seen in a window. To promote the game, Maiden went on the "Ed Hunter" tour, with an Ed Hunter stage prop built. It re-appeared for their "Brave New World Tour." Finally, in one level Eddie battles the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, a reference to Bruce Dickinson's running feud with Metallica.


 
Steve Harris: "I've got audio tapes that go right back from '76, not right from the first gigs, but from the days when we used to play places like the Bridge House. They're a bit dodgy. There's a version of 'Purgatory', which was then called 'Floating' and it had an arrangement that was a bit different. I've also got a tape of my very first band, Gypsy's Kiss, of us at the Cart and Horses. It might have been the first gig we did. There's a song called 'Endless Pit' which later became 'Innocent Exile'. The tapes exist, but I never play 'em to anyone!"


 
Original vocalist Paul Di'Anno was, between various rock projects, a chef, butcher, and other kitchen-related jobs. He was fired after the release of Maiden's second album, Killers, for behavioral issues (he had been partying heavily and often showed up for recordings, and even at concerts, drunk and/or stoned). He had a few subsequent bands, one of which was named Killers, but never reached the success Maiden did with Bruce Dickinson (who, ironically, also had the first name Paul). However, after Bruce left the band in 1993, there were rumors that Di'Anno would return to his post, although ultimately Blaze Bayley was chosen.



 
Derek Riggs, who drew most of the cover art, created a little trademark symbol of his: Two circles a distance apart from eachother, which a larger circle above that space. The larger circle has a line through the middle, which continues on down through that space and ends as an arrow. From the right half of the circle, a stick is protruding, and is attached to the smaller circle on the right. This forms his initials, D.R. It subsequently became a symbol of hardcore Satanism, distinguishing committed Satanists from the "poseurs."


 
As well as having his own video game, Eddy appeared in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4.


 
Iron Maiden drummer Clive Burr played on the band's first three albums (Iron Maiden, Killers and The Number Of The Beast). He left the band in 1982 due to Iron Maiden's tour schedule and personal problems. Burr performed with many other bands of the same sound before being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1994, the treatment of which left him deeply in debt. Iron Maiden staged a series of charity concerts to help their old bandmate and was involved in the founding of the Clive Burr MS Trust Fund. Burr passed away on March 12, 2013 in his sleep at his home at the age of 56.


 
During the height of the siege of Sarajevo in 1994, Iron Maiden decided to smuggle themselves into the Bosnian city and give a concert despite constant shelling and sniper fire. When their arranged UN heli-transport bailed out, they hitched a hike in the back of a truck.


 
Monty Python's "Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life" is played over the PA system at the end of every Iron Maiden concert.




Iron Maiden was formed in 1975 in Leyton East London by bassist Steve Harris (who is also the primary songwriter for the band).




The current members of the band are Steve Harris (on bass, backing vocals and keyboards), Dave Murray (om guitar), Adrian Smith (on guitar backing vocals) , Bruce Dickinson (on lead vocals), Nicko McBrain (on drums) and Janick Gers (on guitar). Former members include Paul Di’Anno (lead vocals from 1978 to 1981), Blaze Bayley (on lead vocals from 1994 to 1999), Dennis Stratton (on guitars & backing vocals from 1979 to 1980), Doug Sampson (on drums and percussion from 1977 to 1979 and Clive Burr (on drums and percussion from 1979 to 1982).




The band has been dogged with accusations of Satanism by religious fundamentalists throughout their career, but a Brazilian priest, Marcos Motolo describes himself as “their number one fan in the world”. He has 162 Iron Maiden tattoos, a son called Stevie Harris and references their lyrics in his sermons.




Besides brewing beer, flying Ed Force One and being an author and broadcaster, Bruce Dickinson is also a skilled and enthusiastic fencer who was once listed seventh in the rankings for Great Britain.




Steve Harris is an enthusiastic footballer who was offered a trial with West Ham as a teenager. He has a full-sized football pitch in his back garden, which is the home ground of Iron Maiden’s own football team consisting of members and associates of the band.




The Iron Maiden mascot, Eddie the Head, was originally a mask at the back of the stage. Blood capsules were fed through the mouth, invariably soaking the drummer with fake blood. Artist Derek Riggs based the first drawing of Eddie, for Maiden’s debut album, on an image he saw of a decapitated head on a Vietnamese tank.




Iron Maiden Guitarist Janick Gers has a degree is sociology.




They were the first big international metal band to play in India, to over 30,000 people who came from all over India, Bangadesh, Pakistan, Nepal and Bhutan.




Bruce Dickinson was expelled from boarding school for taking a leak in his headmaster’s dinner.




The song “The Trooper” is about the Charge of the Light Brigade at the battle of Balaklava and is based on a poem written by Lord Alfred Tennyson.



The band are known for having
incredibly dedicated fans, with one
particularly committed chap going so
far as legally changing his name to
Iron Maiden. Whilst in other legal
facts we find drummer Nicko McBrain
became a born again Christian after
having a religious experience in 1999
when accompanying his wife to
church.



Maiden guitarist Adrian Smith
bought his first guitar off other
Maiden guitarist Dave Murray when
he was fifteen for five quid. Smith
fixed up the broken axe and sold it on
for a profit.



The first time that long-time
Maiden manager Rod Smallwood saw
the band, then-singer Paul Di’Anno
had been arrested for knife possession
earlier in the day, forcing Steve
Harris to sing lead vocals for the first
and only time at a Maiden gig.



In the early days, when touring,
the band used to travel around and
sleep in a truck that they had bought
which they dubbed “The Green
Goddess”.



"Prowler"

The first track on Iron Maiden’s debut album, “Prowler” was originally recorded at Spaceward Studios in Cambridge, UK in 1978 for their original EP The Soundhouse Tapes. A more polished version was recorded at Kingsway Studios in 1980 for their self titled album.

 The lyrics describe – in disturbing fashion – a serial exhibitionist stalking women and then flashing his naked body at them.





"Remember Tomorrow"



 Paul Di'Anno said that the lyrics of this song were inspired by his grandfather.


That was about my grandfather. I lost him in 1980, when I was on tour. He was a diabetic. They cut off his toe and his heel, then he lost his leg from the knee down, and he just sort of gave up.



But the lyrics don’t relate to it, to be honest with you – just the words “remember tomorrow.” Because that is what he always used to say – that was his little catch phrase. “You never know what is going to happen, remember tomorrow, it might be a better day.” So I just kept it in, and that was it.

 

"Running Free"




This bouncy, punky song was Iron Maiden’s first single. Singer Paul Di'Anno said that the lyrics were “autobiographical” in that they were about being young and wild:



‘Running Free’ is about me as a kid. My mum ruled my life, but she said to me, ‘You live in a shit area, but do what you can do and see what happens… As long as you don’t hurt anybody, just get on with it’. But I did get into trouble with the law a few times and that’s the only thing I wish I could change… The grief I gave my poor mama. I never really knew my real dad, but my step dad was really cool. Sometimes, he’d surprise us and walk in when we were doing some speed, but he’d just brush it off as long as it wasn’t heroin or the hard shit. I don’t have the same attitude with my kids, though – if I catch ‘em with anything I’ll kick the crap outta them."

 In concerts, the band likes to play this song as a “call and response” with the crowd. This can be heard in numerous live recordings.

 In the single’s cover artwork, the band’s mascot, Eddie the Head, can be seen for the first time in a simple, raw design.




"Phantom Of The Opera"

 "Phantom Of The Opera"is a French novel written by Gaston Leroux. It has been adapted into an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical and multiple movies.


 The song features an extended instrumental portion with Iron Maiden’s signature guitar harmonies.Although the song was recorded with Paul Di'Anno on vocals, longtime frontman Bruce Dickinson has been known to tell the crowd at shows that if they don’t like this song, then they don’t “get” Iron Maiden.  "It’s a song written by the band a long time ago, before I was in Iron Maiden… It was the “New Wave of British Heavy Metal”. […] I was in a band called Samson, and Iron Maiden was a support band that evening, and they played this song. I had never heard a metal band playing a song like this before, and this song – really – is everything that Iron Maiden is all about. […] THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA!" Bruce Dickinson speech at Ullevi Stadium, Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2005, introducing the song to the audience.





"Transylvania"



Of course, Iron Maiden wouldn’t just choose a random place to pen a track about – Transylvania is the home of Count Dracula. The success of the novel has made Transylvania almost synonymous with vampires in the English-speaking world.


 Transylvania has a terrifying non-fictional Vlad as well; Vlad The Inpaler was a monarch there who was known for impaling people on large spikes, and is thought to be Stoker’s inspiration for Dracula.



The initial idea on this one was to have lyrics. It originally had a melody line for the vocal, but when we played it, it sounded so good as an instrumental that we never bothered to write lyrics for it.

Steve Harris, composer of the song.



Just going a wee bit off topic, I knew of the Mary Shelley connection, but didn't know about this;
  It is probably the most famous horror story in the world with Bram Stoker’s trips to the far north east of Scotland helping to inspire his Dracula masterpiece.

 Here, Mike Shepherd, a researcher who lives close to Cruden Bay where the writer spent long spells of summer, looks at how this corner of Scotland proved to be the perfect fodder for Stoker’s Gothic creation.

 At the end of July, London society either took off to the grouse moors of Scotland or to spa retreats on the continent. Bram Stoker, the business manager of the Lyceum theatre and better known today as the author of Dracula, did neither. Instead, he took a 13 ½ hour train journey to Cruden Bay in Aberdeenshire where he spent most of August writing books.

  A new exhibition to be held in the village explains how the Irish author came across Cruden Bay on a walking tour in 1893 and in his own words, fell in love with the place. He returned year after year until 1910, two years before his death.


 Much of Dracula was written in Cruden Bay. The plot and main characters had been in planning for three years before 1893 and the author’s first visit. Yet, Bram Stoker would not start writing the novel until 1895 when the first three chapters were written in the village.


 What took him so long? It’s a good question as most of his other books were written in a fury of inspiration. The project had stalled for some reason and it looks as if something about Cruden Bay got him going again.


 I suspect one explanation is that he discovered something rather curious when he talked to the locals in the village. Although they were devoutly Christian, many of their superstitions and traditions had survived from pagan times, albeit detached from any original spiritual beliefs.

 A local minister, Reverend John Pratt wrote just over thirty years before the publication of Dracula in 1897 that pagan fire festivals were still being lit in Aberdeenshire and that they, ‘present a singular and animated spectacle - from sixty to eighty being frequently seen from one point.’


 The unlikely coexistence of Christian and pagan beliefs was compared at the time to flowers and weeds springing up together in an unkempt garden


 Bram Stoker believed that God and the universe were equivalent, a pantheism he shared with his spiritual guide, the American poet Walt Whitman. He would have been impressed by the survival of both Christian and pagan beliefs side by side in the Aberdeenshire community, because he accepted all religions from all times and throughout the world as valid and part of the greater whole. This led him to a curious thought. What if an ancient god, devil or spirit turned up in the modern age and employed the old magic to wield mayhem in the modern era? This was possible in the spiritual universe that framed Bram Stoker’s gothic novels; and would bring forth a 15th Century vampire from Transylvania in Dracula and the spirit of an ancient Egyptian mummy in The Jewel of Seven Stars. The latter novel has been the inspiration for all the Hollywood mummy films.


 Aspects of Cruden Bay crept into Dracula. For instance, Bram Stoker was greatly impressed by the dramatic cliff top setting of nearby Slains Castle. He would use it as a setting for at least five novels, three of them in disguised form but still recognisable from the description. The floor plan of Slains Castle is used for Dracula’s castle in the novel.


Jonathan Harker visits the Transylvanian castle and is led by the count into ‘a small octagonal room lit by a single lamp, and seemingly without a window of any sort.’ A small octagonal room is a prominent feature in the centre of Slains Castle and the main corridors of the castle lead from it. It still survives after the castle fell into ruin in 1925.


 While writing Dracula, Bram Stoker would walk up and down the coastline thinking out the story in detail. Perhaps this was when he noticed something unusual. Cruden Bay resembled a mouth he would write. The beach was the soft palate while the rocky headlands at both ends resemble teeth, some even looking like fangs.


 Two of his novels, The Watter’s Mou’ and The Mystery of the Sea, were set in the village with much of the dialogue in the local Buchan (Doric) dialect. This is surprising as it’s largely impenetrable to anyone from outside the area. What’s even more surprising is that Bram Stoker also accidentally included a Doric phrase while writing the dialogue for a Whitby fisherman in Dracula, “I wouldn’t fash masel’’ the fisherman says, - I wouldn’t trouble myself. This is possibly the only instance of an internationally famous novel containing dialogue in Doric!


 I’ve spent the last six months researching Bram Stoker’s life and times in Aberdeenshire for both the exhibition and a forthcoming book on the topic. Although Bram Stoker last visited Cruden Bay in 1910, amazingly some residual memories of the author still survive in the village. One woman told me that her parents looked after Bram Stoker’s dog on one holiday because the local hotel would not allow pets in the rooms. When the author returned to London, he sent them an enormous box of chocolates with blue lace lilies on the front.


 Another woman I talked to is the great-grand niece of Bram Stoker’s landlady when he stayed in the village of Whinnyfold near Cruden Bay in the later years. She remembers her ‘Aunty Isy’ from the 1940s.
 Although Cruden Bay in Bram Stoker’s time, then called Port Erroll, was a small village with a population of 500, life never got dull all the time he was here.


 The author of Dracula found much in Cruden Bay to excite his interest.




"Strange World"


 The meaning of this song can be interpreted in several different ways.

 It could be about vampires, seeing how it follows the instrumental Transylvania, the title of which was inspired by the vampire story of Bram Stoker. The lines about plasma wine could refer to drinking blood. However, this explanation is unlikely, seeing that Transylvania originally was supposed to have lyrics.

 The lyrics could also be about getting high, although the sad message in the lyrics (“Living here, you’ll never grow old”) doesn’t make much sense.


 Another meaning is getting in a state of mind where you can pause time in a dreamlike situation. You know that it’s only a temporary illusion, however, which explains the more somber and slower music.



"Charlotte The Harlot"

 This is one of four songs about Charlotte, who left her man to be a hooker. This is one of the few Maiden tracks penned entirely by guitarist Dave Murray.


 The other tracks in the Charlotte saga are "22 Acacia Avenue from The Number of The Beast, "Hooks In You" from No Prayer for the Dying, and "From Here to Eternity from Fear of The Dark.




"Iron Maiden"



 The song named after the band (and by extension, the title track of their debut album).

 This classic metal anthem is always the last song before an encore, and an excuse for Eddie to appear either walking on stage or in the background 


Some of you might like these images of Eddie and Maggie?



 FUN FACTS: Where Iron Maiden mascot Eddie lived in the 70´s10. May 2013 / Torgrim Øyre[/url]Does this brick wall and the street lights look familiar to you all? This is the railway bridge in Finsbury Park where Iron Maiden mascot Eddie lurked around in the seventies and was immortalized on a certain picture.Earlier today original Iron Maiden cover artist Derek Riggs posted the above picture on his Facebook page. The picture shows the street in Finsbury Park where Riggs drew the inspiration for the iconic debut album of Iron Maiden.[url=https://maidenrevelations.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/01maiden01.jpg][/url]Eddie hanging out in Finsbury Park by the railway bridge sometimes in the late 70’s.Says Riggs in a posting on his Facebook page:– Earlier I was talking to a friend about when I used to live in Finsbury Park in London in the mid 1970’s, and how run down it was back then. Well I went to look on Google Earth to see if it was still there and how much it had changed and then I realized that I could get a street view. So this is a picture of the railway bridge and the wall and the houses in the background that inspired the background of the first Iron Maiden album cover.However, the atmosphere back then was slightly different he adds:– Of course it was night, there was a big moon in the sky and the trees weren’t there then (it was over thirty years ago).Derek Riggs used to rent a room just around the corner in Oakfield Road (down to the end and to the right) on the picture.In the early 80’s Eddie moved to Finchley in North London where he pulled nurses and bullied the prime minister.[url=https://maidenrevelations.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/album_killers1.jpg][/url]Scream for mercy, he laughs as he’s watching you bleed… Eddie being up to no good in Finchley, North London.[url=https://maidenrevelations.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/sanctuary.jpg][/url]Eddie in need of some sanctuary from the law. Finchley, North London 1980-[url=https://maidenrevelations.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/03-women-in-uniform.jpg]Pulling women in uniform. Naughty bugger. Finchley, North London.
 


I don't know a lot, but I know what I like!
     Thread Starter
 

06/1/2019 6:49 pm  #1705


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

DAY 470.
The Undertones.............................................Hypnotised   (1980)













Gonna try and rattle through a few albums tonight, so some may be short and sweet.


"Hypnotised" was for me at least a bit of a disappointment, It kinda reminded me of one of our ex players/heroes on his second time around, you ken it's the same boy and you are really wanting him to succeed but for what ever reason it's no' the same and you're left a wee bit deflated,well that was me with this album.


I had never heard this album before, which may sound strange after all my fawning and slavering about their debut disc, but for some unknown reason I didn't move on to the next one, and I'm rather glad I didn't.


I don't know what they were thinking about on the A side, were they trying to be sophisticated/mature who knows? but what they did was gave a pretty mundane performance (apart from the opening track,) and as for "Under The Boardwalk" I really don't want to hear that version ever again, really who the fuck thought that was worth album time?


This album was definitely "a game of two halves," the B side certainly picked up for me with more upbeat tunes,and although I've never had a lot of time for "My Perfect Cousin," "Tearproof," "What's with Terry?" and "Boys Will Be Boys" more than made up for that, I must admit I thought he opening track "More Songs About Chocolate and Girls" was also decent, but the stand out for me was the glorious "Wednesday Week"



Although the second side rallied a bit, I really wish I hadn't heard this album, This is probably just me as I held them in such high esteem after their superb debut album that  this has just left me a wee bit sad.


As I have the tracks I like already on various playlists,this album wont be going into my collection.





Bits & Bobs;


Have written lots already in post #1668 (if interested)





“We were street urchins from war-torn Derry who battled their way through clouds of tear gas to play punk rock.”Well, that’s what they thought on Top of the Pops, anyway. So writes Michael Bradley, bass guitarist with the Undertones and a man who freely admits he never takes anything too seriously.

 “I would probably be the best in the band at telling stories about the band, and occasionally people would say to me that I should write it all down.”

 The result is Teenage Kicks: My Life as an Undertone.

 “I used to say I didn’t want to write a book because I would hate it if I turned up in Bargain Books and saw 100 copies sitting there for 50p each. That still might happen,” he laughs.

 This is Bradley’s version of the band’s story, from its formation by a group of friends at St Peter’s High School in Derry in 1976 until their breakup in 1983.

 He covers all the landmarks you’d expect – their first record, their first appearance on Top of the Pops, and the now famous tale of John Peel playing Teenage Kicks twice in a row – in a tone that is as fresh and authentic as the day when Billy Doherty asked in a tent in Bundoran if he wanted to be in a band.

 “OK. D’you want more beans? Not exactly Lennon and McCartney at Woolton Fete but it was good enough for me,” writes Bradley.

 It reads like a memoir of the youth we all wish we had had, as told by your best friend.


 “It was fun. I think it’s because it happened so fast for us and it happened without any great effort on our part. In the summer of 1978 we had made Teenage Kicks in Belfast. It hadn’t come out yet but it was one of those great summers, we used to play in the Casbah in Derry and then walk home.

  “We would stay out until two or three in the morning just standing at a street corner talking with the rest of the boys. In September the record came out and we were on Top of the Pops and signed to a record label, all without ever going to London.”

 As the book came together, Bradley explains, themes emerged “that we never ever took it seriously, that like any other band we had arguments and fights, and that we always based ourselves in Derry.”

 The city is a constant and Bradley readily admits Derry made the Undertones what they were.

 “Derry influenced us because it was so contained. Our influences came from records, and the NME. Your whole world was punk, the latest records, and being in the band, because we were very tight-knit. You just accepted everything else, you didn’t moan about it.

 “Of course we all had views. We were all Derry Catholics, and I do talk about the hunger strikes in the book, but I knew I couldn’t write a good song about the Troubles.

 “I don’t think anybody’s written a good song about the Troubles. It’s hard to do without becoming cliched. If you were to write a song about the Troubles, it would have to be in black and white, but in reality there are layers to it.”

 “Our songs were influenced by people like the Ramones, and Derry was an influence because we stayed there and we had support there, we had great relations and great friends.

 “Derry has changed. It’s better but it’s also worse, and obviously nobody has jobs any more.

 “I much preferred being a teenager in the late 70s because you didn’t know everything instantly and you had that great process of discovering bands.

 “We were very lucky because we were the only band in Derry. Nowadays there are at least 20 bands like the Undertones, writing their own songs, playing, trying to make it. And cheap guitars are really good these days. I’m always amazed by that.”

 If Derry has changed, so too have the Undertones. The record that reached No 31 in the British charts in 1978 has taken on a life of its own.

 “Teenage Kicks has now become a phrase,” acknowledges Bradley. “It’s left us now. It’s out there, it’s common currency, people use it, and I don’t mind that.”

 Does this mean they have finally become mainstream?

 “I wouldn’t like to be thought of as a rebel at my age. It works for Eamonn McCann, it works for Keith Richards, but I don’t think it works for anybody in a band really.

 “I’m happy enough with the way it worked out, and I think the book is kind of a book about people, about it working out, and about things coming to a natural conclusion.”

 Part of that working out was the reforming of the band 17 years ago, with Paul McLoone replacing Feargal Sharkey on vocals. The Undertones continue to perform regularly.

 “It’s a very different thing now because we are playing mostly old songs. It’s a kind of hobby, it’s like going away fishing with your friends.”

 This year the Undertones are celebrating their 40th anniversary with performances – an Undertone never says “gigs” – in Dublin, Belfast, England and Europe.

 “Will we ever stop? Yes. Once one person decides it’s enough, I think that’ll be it. When the bus stops, we’ll all get off at the same time.”




"Wednesday Week"


 The Rolling Stones and Lynyrd Skynyrd wrote songs about girls named Tuesday, but The Undertones came up with one about a lady named Wednesday.


The Undertones came up with lots of characters for their songs, and in this one, Wednesday Week is a girl who breaks the singer's heart. It runs a compact 2:16, but is packed with ambiguity as we're left to wonder if this lady exists at all, or if she's only in his head:


Wednesday Week, she loved me
Wednesday Week, never happened at all




 
The Undertones formed in Derry, Northern Ireland, in the mid-'70s, a challenging time and place for a band as their Catholic fans avoided shows in Protestant areas and vice versa.


They had a series of modest UK hits in 1978 and 1979, notably their debut single "Teenage Kicks." In 1980, they released "Wednesday Week" as the second single from their second album, Hypnotised. By this time they were getting lots of positive press in the UK, who hailed them as the fresh sound of the post-glam era. They only managed one more Top 40 hit (the ambitiously titled "It's Going To Happen!") and never made inroads in America, despite tour of that country, including one with The Clash.

 
Feargal Sharkey was the group's lead singer. He said that "Wednesday Week" was the first Undertones song that his parents liked.


 
The song was written by the group's guitarist, John O'Neill.
 
 


I don't know a lot, but I know what I like!
     Thread Starter
 

07/1/2019 12:23 am  #1706


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

DAY 471.
The Jam.......................................................Sound Affects   (1980)













Sound Affects was quite a good listen, I liked The Jam but can't say I was too fond of Weller when he went solo, he thought he was erchie in my humbles, and there's the rub fir me, I find it hard to detach my dislike of Weller from the obvious gift of songwriting the man possesses.Some time ago ('round about '94) me and my best and oldest friend, an ex poster on here (doontheroadarab) went to the Albert Hall with our then burds to see Paul Weller, I think we only lasted 3/4 of an hour before we fucked off to the pub.Now these tickets weren't cheap,but none of the four of wanted to be treated to Weller doing guitar solos thinking he's fuckin' Hendrix, or listen to his snidey/sneering diatribe about the "Royal Albert Hall" and the people who use it regularly, to be honest he wasn't being "right on" he just came over as a right smarmy cunt.



Anyways back to the album, I found it a pretty good listen especially "But I’m Different Now," " Man in the Corner Shop," " Start! " and without question my favourite Jam track "That's Entertainment."


Jack Dee once said "I like listening to The Pogues, but can't think of anything worse than being stuck in Shane McGowans company" this for me but substitute McGowan for Weller.


I have most of The Jam tracks I like on CD, and this album as a whole doesn't really do much for me and as such wont be getting purchased.



Bits & Bobs;



Have written previously about The Jam in post #1515 (if interested)

The Jam formed in Surrey England. They were one of Punk and New Wave's best-loved groups. They hold the record for the most simultaneous UK Top 75 singles ever, with 13. They all entered the chart in January 1983, following the band's dissolution in December 1982.


 
Their career got off to a good start. After being spotted playing at a street market in London's Soho, they were asked to open for the Sex Pistols. The Jam signed to Polydor records in 1977.


 
Following the split of The Jam, Bruce Foxton spent a lot of time producing Stiff Little Fingers, eventually becoming their bassist. Rick Buckler, the drummer, opened an antiques shop.


 
The band's debut chart hit "In The City" is pure Punk Rock, and spent 14 weeks in the listings, but never rose higher than #40.


 
Bassist Bruce Foxton had three minor single chart entries on Arista Records after going solo. The top achiever of the trio was entitled "Freak" (1983).



Gary Numan says he had an audition to be in The Jam, but he failed it when they wouldn't let him use his distortion pedal.




 With six released in five years, each one of the Jam’s albums is a distinct stage on Paul Weller’s journey from callow, Thatcher-supporting yoof to mature writer with more on his mind than just teenage angst and political disatisfaction. This, their fifth effort, often vies for the title of their best; the other candidate of course being 1978's All Mod Cons. But whereas AMC is a heady slice of proto-Britpop, wearing its sensitivity and social comment (and debt to the Kinks) like badges, Sound Affects is a superb amalgam of funk and mid-60s psychedelic rock. All sprinkled with fantastic hooks and tight-as-you-like playing.

 This was where Weller began moving towards the Britfunk of his next outfit, The Style Council. Horns began to enter the mix on tracks like Dreamtime while Bruce Foxton's bass on opener Pretty Green was a distinct move away from the bolshy four-four of previous work.

 The band had obviously opened their ears to more than just the Who and Ray Davies. There are as many references to post-punk bands like XTC (Music For The Last Couple or Scrape Away could be from that band’s Drums And Wires) and Joy Division as there are to the Beatles’ Revolver-era psychedelia. Start! is Taxman in all but name, but done so wonderfully as to negate any gripes, while That’s Entertainment’s backwards guitars fairly reek of incense. But underneath was the tough, cynical heart of Weller's jaded young man. Like some earlier version of Pete Doherty with actual talent, this was Blake's Albion viewed through the grey of a council estate window.

 Weller’s lyrics were also more human and approachable. Several times he makes self-deprecating reference to his 'star' status (Boy About Town) and also the acceptance of the healing power of love (But I'm Different Now). Only on Set The House Ablaze (which sounds like an out take from their previous album, Setting Sons) does he sound like he’s treading water.

 Ultimately Sound Affects shows a band that was being pushed by its leader slightly beyond their level of ability. Buckler and Foxton's propulsive acumen was already falling behind Weller’s ambitions. After the full-on soul revival of The Gift he was to abandon the three-piece for pastures new. But on this album you get to hear the Jam at their absolute peak.





"Start"


 
Paul Weller got the idea for this song from reading George Orwell's book Homage To Catatonia, which is set in the Spanish Civil War. Weller said, "There is a lot of talk of an egalitarian society where all people are equal but this was it, actually in existence, which, for me, is something that is very hard to imagine."


 
The bass line was borrowed from The Beatles "Taxman," and The Jam was surprised there was never a court case. In Kutner and Leigh's book, Weller says, "I thought it was all a bit stupid, the riff thing doesn't bother me at all. I use anything and I don't really care whether people think it's credible or not, or if I'm credible to do it. If it suits me I do it." (there you go fuck abbidy else)


 
The Jam wanted this to be the first single from the album, but their record company wanted something else. They relented and the band were proved right when it topped the UK chart.


 
Weller: "I thought Going Underground was a peak and we were getting a little safe with that sound, that's why we've done Start."


 
This was featured in the 2000 film On The Edge.




"That's Entertainment"


This sarcastic, acoustic punk song finds Paul Weller brooding over the heartaches of everyday working-class life. Speaking to Mojo magazine about the tune in 2015, the former Jam frontman said: "It's one of those list songs really. It was so easy to write. I came back from the pub, drunk, and just wrote it quick. I probably had more verses, which I cut."


"It was just everything that was around me y'know. My little flat in Pimlico did have damp on the walls and it was f--king freezing."



"I was doing a fanzine called December Child and Paul Drew wrote a poem called 'That's Entertainment.' It wasn't close to my song, but it kind of inspired me to write this anyway. I wrote to him saying, Look is it all right if I nick a bit of your idea, man? And he said, It's fine, yeah."


 
This song is number 306 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest songs. According to the magazine, Weller claims he wrote this in 10 minutes after "Coming home pissed from the pub"


 
This reached #21 in the UK despite only being available at the time as a German import. At the time it was the biggest-selling import release and record high chart placing.




"Man In The Corner Shop"



This is a slice of social commentary from Paul Weller, lead singer and songwriter for the Jam. "The whole song is a comment or piss-take, whatever way you look at it, me being flippant about the class system," Weller explained in Daniel Rachel's The Art of Noise: Conversations with Great Songwriters. "It keeps coming back to the man in the corner shop: the person underneath who's jealous because he thinks he's making all the money, but the man in the corner shop's struggling and the boss in the factory also gets his cigarettes from the corner shop. So it becomes a central focus people come back to, but then they're all equal in the eyes of the Lord, the church."
 


 


I don't know a lot, but I know what I like!
     Thread Starter
 

07/1/2019 8:51 am  #1707


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

Some great songs on Hypnotised, like you say A/C, it's a strange one they included their version of Under the Boardwalk here, for it sounds so limp and out of character compared to their self penned numbers.

But apart from that cover, I quite like side one, and side two is brimful of great songs. Quite a unique band and sound.

The Jam also were always distinctive, but were moving away from their basic sound (and appeal, to me) by the time of Sound Affects. Start! is typical of their previous stuff, but although I liked That's Entertainment, it's a bit too languid for me to be in a 'favourites' selection of their stuff. And although I'm a soul fan, I was unsure about their stuff which featured horns.

 

 

07/1/2019 12:28 pm  #1708


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

DAY 472.
Tom Waits...........................................Heartattack And Vine   (1980)












This will be only the second Tom Waits album I have listened to, the first one I liked very much, this one not so much, could it have been the novelty of the first time listening? No, I listened to "nighthawks at the diner" several times and still enjoy it.


Although not as good as "nighthawks" it wasn't without his on the money lyrics especially on the sad "On the Nickel" or equally haunting "Rubys Arm's," and of course using his famous sardonic wit in "Heartattack And Vine" and "Jersey Girl" for me kicks Springsteens cover well and truly in to touch


I'm glad I've listened to it but if I was going to buy one of his albums it would be the aforementioned "nighthawks at the diner, so this album wont be going into my vinyl collection.




Bits & Bobs;



Wrote already about Tom Waits in post #1299 (if interested)



On his seventh studio album,Tom Waits seems restless, rambling, and ready for a change. Heartattack and Vine, unlike his previous albums, comes off as much more rooted in its time, in spite of any retro stylings, and that time is 1980. While there are a couple of standout songs, for the most part, the album doesn’t feel like Waits to me, and not because of a change in style. It just comes across as empty.


 The title track opens the album, hinting at things to come, with low rumbling electric guitar and a pulsing rhythm before Tom starts his growl. Even at his most experimental to this point, it was always rooted in jazz or blues. But this song feels more like rock, playing with jazz and blues influences. And when he sings “you’ll never recognize yourself on Heartattack and Vine,” I can’t help but think how true that is. It does seem to be setting the stage for the more theatrical style he will adopt on future albums.


 Tom’s career is pretty much defined by his love affair with saloons, bars, strip joints and skid row in general. While that is still here, it’s not the matter-of-fact or even romanticized version of it of his previous work. Here, it comes across as almost post apocalyptic. It’s urban decay, after a crash from high times, where there are tattered tuxedos and sequins scattered about amongst the rubble. It’s mostly not pretty. “Downtown” has an obnoxious cocaine vibe that makes me think of Wall Street yuppies tearing up the town with utter disregard for everyone else. It’s a far cry from the lonely sympathetic souls of Closing Time or the longing, restless working class heroes of The Heart of Saturday Night.


 There are still a few standout tracks, though. Interestingly, it’s the ballads. Most notable among them is “Jersey Girl” which feels very much out of place here, with it’s Drifters inspired chorus of “shala lala” and summer boardwalk imagery. It’s one of his sweeter songs about simple, working class tenderness. And then there is the last song, “Ruby’s Arms” with piano and orchestration that could border on overly sentimental, but is somehow reigned in by the raspy Waits. It’s a simple little story about a guy, perhaps a soldier, leaving his love, for the last time, in the middle of the night. You’re not sure if he’s leaving because he just wants to or if he is somehow making a very difficult choice, but either way, he’s lamenting that he’ll never see her again as he goes off into the cold night, and when Tom’s voice cracks for a second in the last line, it’s the perfect tearful icing on this heartbreaker. It’s a great closing song.




On Heartattack and Vine, the patron saint of America’s hobo hipsters returns to the sentimental ballad style he abandoned for jazzier, less song-oriented turf after The Heart of Saturday Night. Though Tom Waits’ new album sports its share of slinky blues vamps, it’s the tear-jerkers that really matter. Lyrically, “Jersey Girl” conjures up Bruce Springsteen’s world, then adds an arrangement that echoes the Drifters’ “Spanish Harlem.” But the tune’s eager romanticism becomes warped in the caldron of what’s left of Waits’ voice. In the six years since The Heart of Saturday Night, the artist’s vocals have deteriorated from gruff drawls into hoarse and sometimes ghastly gargles that make the very effort of drawing breath seem a life-and-death proposition. 
 “Saving All My Love for You,” “Ruby’s Arms” and “On the Nickel” boast the same morbid pathos as “Jersey Girl.” With their wistful folk-pop melodies and Fifties film-score orchestrations, they suggest the pop-song equivalents of hand-tinted antique post cards. Or at least that’s what the singer’s down-and-out delivery turns them into. Of course, Tom Waits’ derelict-poet-saint, gazing up from the gutter to find a rainbow, is an assumed character. Yet it’s only partly an act. For almost a decade, Waits has submerged his own personality and played this role so completely that he’s now a willing surrogate for all the low-life dreamers who don’t have his gift of gab.


 But in a time when hipness is often equated with selfishness, Waits’ woozy, far-out optimism has never seemed fresher. While he can be faulted on many counts — the godawful condition of his voice, his perverse love for dime-store kitsch imagery — the purity of his intentions is never in question: Tom Waits finds more beauty in the gutter than most people would find in the Garden of Eden. If his lack of objectivity has kept him from developing into a major artist, Waits’ indivisibility from his self-created persona makes him a unique and lovable minor talent.




"Jersey Girl"

 

Waits wrote this song about his new wife, Kathleen Brennan. He was getting over a turbulent relationship with Rickie Lee Jones when she came into his life and "saved him."




When Jones and Waits split, Francis Ford Coppola asked them both to work on the music for his film One From The Heart. Jones declined, but Waits took the gig, which is where he met Brennan, who was on the project as a script supervisor. They got married just months later.


 
Bruce Springsteen covered this song in concert on many occasions. He started performing it at a series of shows in 1981 at the new Meadowlands arena in New Jersey. Even though he did not write this, Springsteen feels the character is the same guy from his earlier songs "Sandy" and "Rosalita," who has now grown up and got the Jersey Girl.


 
Springsteen released this as the B-side of "Cover Me" in 1984. Two years later, he used the same version, taken from a show at The Meadowlands, on his boxed set Live 1975-1985. This is one of the few cover songs Springsteen released. Usually it was other artists performing his songs.


 
In 1981, Waits joined Springsteen on stage for this at a show in Los Angeles.


I don't know a lot, but I know what I like!
     Thread Starter
 

10/1/2019 12:38 am  #1709


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

DAY 473.
UB40..................................................................Signing Off   (1980)















No fannying around, I love this album.


I was lucky enough to see them twice before they became yer go to reggae cover band, now this is just my take, and to be honest I still liked their covers and they probably done the original artists a favour as a lot of people might have tried to find the earlier versions of their offerings, from Neil Diamond to Lord Creator, bumping Eric Donaldson, Jimmy Cliff and even having the audacity to step on the toes of Dylan, Presley and The Allman Brothers by fuck. 



Now don't get me wrong I do like most of their versions, but if given the choice I would take the originals every day of the week, it's just something about the original versions that just seem right (give them a go and see what you think) apart from Neil Diamond's "Red Red Wine," his and UB40's versions pales in significance compared to Tony Tribe's version (in my humbles) where I'm sure UB40 got their inspiration for their version.




Anyways the album, kicks off with "Tyler," a thought provoking number that for me says "Welcome, check your coat in here, " this is how we roll, if you're no' comfortable get yerself a taxi and shoot the cra', 'cause we've got a hell of a lot more to say."



So the album goes on, "King," "Burden Of Shame," "Food For Thought," and "Little By Little" through to "Signing Off" and all ports in between, every track worth a listen with sometimes if you listen closely enough an added lesson to be learnt.


This is another of these albums when listened to can't be split into favourites tracks,but taken as a whole this album evokes great memories of the concerts I went to, both at The Playhouse in Edinburgh, the first 1980








No' my ticket, but similar, aff the tinternet, as is the next ticket.




And the second time time in 1982.









Why we didn't go to the Dundee concert is lost in the midst of time, maybe because it was a sell out and we couldnay get tickets, who knows?


Anyways I kinda liked UB40 much better when they were starting out, long before the production took over and they were just getting to grips with things,so to sum up this album will be going into my collection as I loved it but with the bonus of the iconic cover, it was never in doubt from the first time I seen It in the book.






Bits & Bobs;



In the summer of 1978, UB40 was born out of jam sessions in a basement rehearsal space in Birmingham, England. Several of the members, including Ali Campbell, Brian Travers, Earl Falconer and James Brown knew each other from the campus of the Moseley School of Art. With the addition of Ali's brother Robin, Norman Hassan, Astro and Mickey Virtue, the bands line-up would solidify and remain unchanged for nearly 30 years.


 
UB40 caught their first big break after Chrissie Hynde spotted the band rocking a London pub stage. She asked them to sign on as the opening act for The Pretenders upcoming tour. In February 1980 they released their debut single "King"/"Food for Thought" on the small independent Graduate Records. The record took off, peaking at #4 on the UK Singles Chart. It was the first single to reach the UK Top 10 without the backing of a major record company.


 
UB40 cemented themselves as left-wing political activists early in their career. The band took its name from a document (Unemployment Benefit Form 40) used to claim unemployment benefits from the Department of Health and Social Security in the UK. Their debut album Signing Off features cover art emulating the form, and several tracks from the album touch on social and political issues. "Burden of Shame" derides the ills of British Imperialism while "Food For Thought" addresses famine in Ethiopia and "Madame Medusa" takes on the Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher's rise to power in Britain.


 
UB40's unique sound brings a pop sensibility to the traditional sounds of ska, reggae, early roots rock and dub. While their earlier material was more traditional, both in music style and lyrical themes, some critics and reggae purists look down on their "reggaefying" of pop songs like "Red Red Wine" and "I Got You Babe," a sound that brought them much mainstream success in the late '80s and early '90s.


 
It took UB40 a long time to break through in the US, but it happened in a big way in 1988 when their reggaed-up cover of Neil Diamond's acoustic ballad "Red Red Wine" saturated the airwaves and lit up the Billboard charts. The song was originally released on 1983's Labour of Love, an album of cover songs by some of the band's favorite artists and music idols. The album topped the UK charts then, but it wasn't until their appearance at the Free Nelson Mandela Concert at Wembley Stadium in London in June of 1988 that American's really caught on. The show was televised worldwide, and soon American DJ's were spinning the track incessantly. The song topped the Billboard Hot 100 in October of that year.


 
Released in July of 1993, Promises and Lies became UB40's biggest record to date, selling over 9 million copies worldwide. The first single, a cover of Elvis' "Can't Help Falling In Love" would earn the group their third UK #1. The song also climbed to the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 in the US and would remain there for 7 weeks, giving the group their second #1 hit in America. The track gained even further popularity when it was included on the soundtrack for the 1993 Sharon Stone thriller Sliver.


 
Released on the 25th anniversary of their debut Signing Off, 2005's Who You Fighting For was a formidable return to the politically-tinged roots rock of UB40's early years. Spurred on by their disgust with British and American involvement in the Iraq War, the band penned songs like "War Poem" and "Sins of the Father," calling out the ills of war and unrelenting oil lust. The title track kicks off the message loud and clear with lyrics like "You do the killing, they do the drilling. You do the dying, they do the lying." In 2006 the record was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album.


 
With over 70 million records sold, UB40 is one of the world's best-selling music artists. So, when four of its original members were declared bankrupt in late 2011, it came as quite a shock. Saxophonist Brian Travers, drummer Jimmy Brown, trumpeter Terence "Astro" Wilson and percussionist Norman Hassan were all declared "insolvent," meaning tax officers could now seize property belonging to the band members to pay back debts stemming from the mismanagement of their now defunct record label DEP International. A spokesman for former lead singer Ali Campbell, who acrimoniously split from the band in 2008, said he was right to quit the band: "It is ironic that the very week they celebrate their first gig they have been declared bankrupt... vindicating both Ali and Mickey Virtue's decision to leave UB40."


 
Founding member Terence 'Astro' Wilson quit in November 2013, claiming the band was making him "miserable" and describing it as a "rudderless ship."


 
Ali and Robin Campbell's father was Scottish folk singer Ian Campbell (1933 – 2012). As leader of the Ian Campbell Folk Group, he was one of the most important figures of the British folk revival during the 1960s.


 
When a teenage Ali Campbell received a hefty compensation package following an assault, he used it to fund musical instruments for the fledgling UB40 band members. He recalled to The Daily Mail: "On my 17th birthday I got caught in the middle of a fight and was hit with a glass - I had 90 stitches on the left side of my face. I used my criminal injuries compensation to start UB40."





"Food For Thought"



The song was inspired by the massacre of Kampuchea, which was a state existing from 1975 to 1979 in what is now Cambodia. It was run by the Khmer Rouge, a Communist group that controlled the state with an iron fist and murdered all who opposed it.


 
This was the Birmingham band's first single. It was released as a double A-side with "King," which was a lament for Dr. Martin Luther King, which was also a rootsy, Ska-based song. "King" seemed to be the favorite with live audiences, but it was "Food For Thought," that got the airplay and became their first hit. It charted despite being released without any major-label marketing or promotion, but they were aided by being the support act to The Pretenders on their UK tour, after Chrissie Hynde saw them playing in a pub.


 
The song is a bitter meditation on third-world poverty, and an indictment of politicians refusal to relieve famine. For many listeners it took a while to decipher the lyrics sung by Ali Campbell and discover for instance that he wasn't singing "I Believe In Donna," he is in fact referring to an "Ivory Madonna."


 
UB40 played their first gig in February 1979. The money needed to start the band and buy instruments came from compensation awarded to after he was glassed in a pub fight.


 
This song, along with the rest of the album, was recorded in a Birmingham bedsit. The room was so small that the drummer Norman Hassan had to record his percussion in the garden. On some of the tracks if you listen really closely, you can hear the birds singing in the background.


The band titled their first album Signing Off, as they were signing off from the unemployment benefit. The band's name comes from the paper form that needs to be completed by someone wanting to claim unemployment benefit
in the UK-an Unemployment Benefit Form 40.


 

The lyric "Ivory Madonna" was often misheard by fans to mean things like "I'm a prima donna" or "I, Marie and Donna." UB40 guitarist Robin Campbell found this amusing, but was also bothered a bit by how the song's message was lost on many people.


 
The band debated the subtlety of the lyrics before settling on the final version, and Campbell regretted being too ambiguous.


"I find it incredible that people can't understand it," Campbell said. "That upsets me. I think the symbolism's quite obvious. But now I'm concerned about writing too subtly."



"Mmm, I'm all for being blatant," said bassist Earl Falconer in discussing the topic.





From Retro Dundee with many thanks, a fine site, and one I would thoroughly recommend to anyone looking in.







I was amused by this little snippet in an old Melody Maker I have, dated January 1982.
A piece about UB40 playing in Dundee.

 It says they were banned from playing in a few cities around Britain because of their political stance on the previous years riots. However, Dundee Council, considered to be the most left-wing in the country at the time, welcomed the reggae rebels to the extent that Lord Provost Gowans laid on a civic reception for them!It mentions Liverpool as being one of the cities they were banned from, so that must have been just before Derek Hatton's Militant Tendency took control!


  By the way, I only put this photo of the band up because it was the one that accompanied the article in MM. Not sure if it was taken in Dundee. They are standing in front of some Space Invaders machines, so maybe they nipped along to the arcade beside the Caird Hall before they went on stage!









 
 
Here's one they deffo didn't come close to matching, ENJOY!









 


I don't know a lot, but I know what I like!
     Thread Starter
 

10/1/2019 1:21 am  #1710


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

Interesting that they (UB40) got their 'big break' because of Chrissie Hynde.

Never knew that and a bit of an unlikely source given their genre.

Good bit of trivia.

 

13/1/2019 7:30 pm  #1711


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

DAY 474.
The Teardrop Explodes.......................................................Kilimanjaro   (1980)












Can't say I was overly impressed with this album, it sounded very much stuck in it's time for these lugs and although I did buy it back then I have a feeling I wasn't particularly fond of it then either.


Back then you really had to take a punt on an album as their was no Spotify,itunes or the various downloading sites where you could get a bit of a taster before you shelled out, I liked "Reward" but that was all I knew of the band, and to be honest that and "Treason (it's just a story)" are the only two tracks that I would take the time to download.


Anyways I didn't really take to the album and as for that absolute fanny "Cope" he just cements my opinion that this album wont be going into my collection.




Bits & Bobs;





The Arch-drude, His Copeness, Saint Julian, that hippie eccentric from the BBC: there are many identities of Julian Cope. His work continues to pour forth seasonally, from writing on the ever-brilliant Head Heritage site to his panoply of side projects which regularly gestate into releases ranging from Odinic chanting to proto-metal. He continues to attract a loyal and tribal following of fans, dissenters, amateur archeologists and 'heads' to his ever increasing array of books, CD releases and performances, and it would be just a willow wand's width from the truth to say he is one of Britain's more baffling yet most beloved Renaissance Men. He embodies the Fool - in the mythical sense - juggling both wisdom and neo-spiritual nonsense as he capers about remote hillocks, poking optimistically at the fabric of time, space and music.
However, back in 1979, he was yet to be any of these things. Back then, he was just Julian Cope from Liverpool Polytechnic: post-teen acid head, friend of pop-curmudgeon Ian McCulloch and pre-Wah! Pete Wylie, signed to Bill Drummond"s Zoo Records, and lead singer of emergent shambling Scouse-pop band The Teardrop Explodes. Having released both 'Sleeping Gas' and 'Bouncing Babies' to some North Western acclaim (a nod from Tony Wilson) and some national attention (a begrudging acknowledgement from the NME and alleged fear from nascent pop darlings U2 and Duran Duran), Cope and his lysergically-challenged bandmates headed for the Welsh hills to concoct a haphazard and unruly record filled with pop promise, but somehow never quite achieving the potential glory which had Vox and Le Bon worried. This, of course, might have had something to do with Cope and co's minds achieving The Great Unravel on a daily basis - Cope"s memoir Head On recalls the band regularly riding to the studio on imaginary horses.


 In fact, it's no small wonder that in Killimanjaro, (including the technically post-album track and arguable Explodes zenith 'Reward'), they managed to create such a precocious collection of shimmering pop. Killimanjaro has all the urgency of an ambitious first release, the unkempt charm of blatant talent, and the sound of supreme confidence wrestling with inexperience.


 In the album's lyrics we detect things going psychedelically skewiff for the Drude - meanings shrouded in vague metaphor, a hint of megalomania and concurrent paranoia in tracks like 'Second Head': "I know the banisters are leaking" becomes "Beware of false promises, You must be wary of people". Of course, the most obvious signpost is Cope's own acid confessional 'Went Crazy', detailing an inability to manage a literal relationship with information, with social interaction: "And I looked all around, And went crazy".


  The second CD on this re-release tells the not-particularly-hidden tale (Head On"s gospel according to Drude himself is a finest testament of that) of 'Killimanjaro's experiments and excesses, including unhinged live track 'Bouncing Babies' with Cope's laughably ADD attempt at audience interaction. The Teardrop Exploded not with a bang but a whimper in 1982 after a patchy second album Wilder and the inevitable internal disputes: the band that drops together often stops together. Cope retreated to a small dark room to cocoon himself around his obsessions and ingestions, triumphant with the surprisingly cogent World Shut Your Mouth. And indeed, for a short while, it did.


The Teardrop Explodes: how we made Reward

Julian Cope, vocals and bass

 I was the last member of the Teardrops to take drugs. I’d loved Jim Morrison since I was 14, but I wanted to be like Captain Beefheart, who’d said: “I don’t need drugs. I’m naturally psychedelic.” Unfortunately, I wasn’t. One day our guitarist Alan Gill said: “Just have one toke, mate.” Then, soon after, our keyboard-player, David Balfe, gave me acid. It was a revelation. I went from drug puritan to acid king. I would ride imaginary horses to the studio with Gary Dwyer, our drummer. His was called Bumhead, mine Dobbin.


 One day, in the middle of this madness, Alan said: “I’ve got a song that sounds like you wrote it.” He played me this fantastic bassline, then turned to Balfey and said: “And you play this.” Balfey, who was also our manager, was always telling us what to do – so I loved someone ordering him about. Gary could only drum two ways, reggae and soul, so he played it soul and we had a song, Reward.


 We first recorded it for a John Peel session. The opening line – “Bless my cotton socks, I’m in the news” – was how I felt. We were on the radio! We’d made it! But when the band heard it, they went: “That’s rubbish … no … it’s brilliant.” Because I’d grown up in Tamworth, I had this idea that Reward had to sound like a northern-soul classic. When we recorded it as a single, I urged the producer to make it sound hectic and frenetic, like we were playing in an icerink, but the first mix just wasn’t mad enough. So me and Bill Drummond, our co-manager, booked another studio with another producer, and I took acid. I remember Bill saying: “Julian, you’re dancing and the music’s not even playing.” Bill’s Mr Teetotal, but I drove him so nuts he got a bottle of whisky and drank the lot.



 Suddenly, I was in command of a possible Teardrops hit. The first thing I did was cut the drum intro, so it went straight in at the trumpets, which we’d started using because I was obsessed with the Love album Forever Changes. Then we took the guitar out. There’s only one guitar chord in the whole song – and the guitarist wrote the music.



 By the time the single came out, we’d split up, calling each other wankers on stage. Then we were asked to do Top of the Pops. Gary and I put a new lineup together and got some acid to take along. But as we drove past Balfey’s house, I was struck by a sense of loyalty, even though we’d been pummelling each other. So I shouted: “Balfey! Come on Top of the Pops with us – you can mime the trumpets!”



 David Balfe, keyboards

 Julian only hit me once. Although it was scary, it wasn’t serious. He’d gone nuts because I was fed up with him being late for rehearsals. He’d been finishing some conversation with someone at the Armadillo tea rooms. He chased me round the rehearsal room and started thumping me. There was always tension between us, even though we were friends. Bands are like that. One minute you’re best mates, the next it’s: “Thump the drummer!”


 I remember the first time I heard Julian play the Reward bass riff. It was exhilarating – like we’d plugged into the mains. When we did it live on the BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test, we’d taken amyl nitrate and weren’t sounding great. A week later, we were in the studio to record it, and the producer said: “Oh, I hope we’re not doing that song.” I remember all sorts of problems with the horn solo. I kept saying: “No, no – it’s got to sound like wild elephants.” When I heard the second mix Julian did, I thought it was genius.



 I was on Top of the Pops four times with the Teardrops, each time playing a different instrument. I was so out of my tree on acid the first time, there was blood on the trumpet because I was banging it into my face so hard. It still amazes me that Reward got to No 6. It’s a mad awesome record unlike anything else in pop. We sounded like Vikings on acid fronted by a lunatic.




 
Julian Cope, the former lead singer of the chart-topping 80’s pin-ups The Teardrop Explodes, is playing a secret solo show in the back room of a community arts centre in the Berkshire frontier town of Aldershot. Union Jacks flutter in all the pubs. Cope’s hair is, by some margin, the longest in the surrounding area. Onstage alone in a floppy hat and sunglasses, Cope surveys the small but swollen space and modestly takes stock of the situation; “”I know I’m not current,” he laughs, “And I don’t believe I’m timeless. But I am in my forties, and I’m in sight of fifty. And once you’re over fifty, sixty’s not far away. And then you are allowed to be legendary. So I just have to keep my head down and keep working. And then I can be legendary.”


 To many, the antics that characterise Cope’s career are already the stuff of legend. Cope famously appeared on the cover of his second solo album wearing only a turtle shell, protested against the Poll Tax dressed as a giant baby from space, and is currently winning new fans in America with his super-dense, ‘ambient-metal’ project LAMF. To most people, Cope admits, he is “that World Shut Your Mouth guy”, best known for the anthemic smash hit to which even Terry Wogan succumbed in 1986. But perhaps his strangest achievement is the completion of two heavyweight books on Prehistoric Archaeology, the second of which, The Megalithic European, is published this month.


 1998’s The Modern Antiquarian, a colour coded gazetteer of British prehistoric sites was the answer to a prayer for those of us who’d spent years trekking across moors to stone circles on advice pieced together from quasi-mystical pamphlets or dry academic tomes. Stand at the centre of the Orkney mainland with The Modern Antiquarian in your hand and lost civilisations rise up around you in three dimensions. Now Cope has applied the same utilitarian ethic to the monuments of the continent in The Megalithic European. At his home in the Wiltshire countryside, within striding distance of the stone circle of Avebury, Julian Cope holds forth.


 “My job is to make un-cool things seem cool,” he says, his foot up on a kitchen chair like a rock star bestriding a monitor. “If you can find a way of presenting these things correctly, people will get into them. And if you can get people out of believing that stone circles are about Wellington boots and anoraks, that they can be elegant, why not do it? When I put together my Scott Walker compilation album for example, he was so in the boneyard, he was just though of as a git, but I am a total field worker. I get into things and go to places, and see if they do it for me, and if they are going to do it for other people. Is there enough remaining above ground? Or if the thing is underground, is it superbly underground? Is it the mother of all underground temples? Is it a hypogeum from hell? Can you go in and lose yourself?” Initially, I’m uncertain whether Cope is using subterranean prehistoric temples as a metaphor for the 60’s balladeer Scott Walker, or whether he is actually talking about subterranean prehistoric temples. Then I realise, it’s both, at the same time. Cope in conversation doesn’t so much free-associate as make entirely unrelated ideas occupy exactly the same space. And he’s barged into the world of archaeology with the open-minded enthusiasm of the very gentlemen amateurs whose work the science was historically built on. Has he been welcomed?


 “There’s two types of Archaeologists,” Cope explains, putting down a toy wooden guitar which he is making for his ten year old daughter, who wants to attend the local Halloween event as Angus Young from AC/DC. “The older guys are pleased to be able to debrief to someone. They’re like spies with all this information so they can afford to be generous. Aubrey Burl, who writes books with flat names like “The Stone Circles Of The British Isles.”, and I get on really well. I can call him up and go, “Aubrey I think I’ve found a new stone circle.” And he goes, “I suppose it’s quite possible but don’t tell my wife because I am too old to start visiting there now.” If I’ve ever had a problem it was with Archaeology’s middle management, who felt we should have taken more official routes to publish that sort of book.” Invited to lecture at the British Museum in 2001, Cope chose the subject of The Norse God Odin in Christian symbolism. “I went from Odin to Christ via the various pagan pre-cursors of Christ. The very nice old guys at The British Museum in dicky-bows had been saying, “You’re not the normal kind of person we have here, but you do it the way you want.” So I did the lecture in full face-paint and five inch platform shoes, two nights, sold out. It was amazing!”


 In The Modern Antiquarian, Cope’s analysis reflected his own performance background. Stones with quartz in them would look great glittering in the moonlight if you were a prehistoric audience on mild natural hallucinogens watching the prehistoric equivalent of Julian Cope. At the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, earlier this year, Cope’s own persona seemed influenced by his archaeological imaginings. In psychedelic combat clothes, giant shoes and face-paint, Cope became an absurd and impregnable priest-clown figure, and spent most of his two hour set in the audience, declaiming over a wilfully-primitive punk-metal backdrop. “Being on stage, dealing with an audience, with hysteria, with a really barbarian art-form, is the closest you get to a religious experience,” he concludes. “The shaman and the showman are inextricably linked. Little Richard recognised that. Jerry Lewis was damned from the moment he opened his mouth. Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele, however, were never in any danger.”


 The Aldershot show was supposed to be a low-key date, re-acquainting Cope with live performance after months of writing. But with Cope, nothing is ever low key. The fanatical fan-base are out in force, undiluted by the less evangelistic onlookers present in bigger venues. Cope is derailed by enthusiastic interjections from proprietary fans and the show lurches from one interruption to another. There’s a section of every Cope crowd that think he is their own private cult figure, a rock legend they can still reach out and touch, insult or fondle at will. Tonight, guitar in hand, Cope appears happy to indulge this clammy notion at close range. But there’s a mighty Four Wheel Drive in the car park waiting to whisk him back to Wiltshire, where, one suspects, he is already planning his next great adventure. “I’m in a unique position,” he had said, earlier, “but through luck, not judgement. There are people from my time, like Billy Bragg or Nick Cave, still doing everything with real dignity. But they have their feet in the officially straight world. There might be a South Bank Show on them. But me? I’m doing an Ambient Metal installation in a Greek Art Gallery. And writing about Ziggurats.”



 

 


I don't know a lot, but I know what I like!
     Thread Starter
 

13/1/2019 9:15 pm  #1712


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

DAY 475
The Specials...........................................More Specials   (1980)












This is quite an eclectic tracklist but with the the lyrical sharpness that depicts the social history of the time. This album opens up with one of my all time favourite ska numbers "Enjoy Yourself" although I much prefer Prince Buster's version, the rest of the album is what you've come to expect from The Specials another forty odd minutes of happy dance yer socks aff music but should you care to listen to the lyrics, they paint  totally different emotions, anger,sadness but most of all thought provoking and honest sentiments.


I certainly did enjoy this one but as I have already bought their debut, and like it better, I won't be putting this one into my collection (just yet)





Bits & Bobs;


Have already written about The Specials before in post #1708 (if interested)



More Specials is the second album by English ska[/url] band [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Specials]the Specials[/url], released by [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_Tone_Records]2 Tone Records[/url] in October 1980. After the success of the band's [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Specials_(album)]self-titled debut[/url], band member [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Dammers]Jerry Dammers[/url] assumed the role as the band's leader and stirred them into expanding their [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_tone_(type_of_music)]2 Tone[/url] sound into other genres of music, most prominently a [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lounge_music]lounge music[/url] and [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easy_listening]easy listening[/url] style inspired by [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzak]Muzak[/url]. Several band members disagreed with Dammers' vision and brought their own influences to the album, including from [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_soul]northern soul[/url] and [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockabilly]rockabilly, contributing to an eclectic sound palette. The relations between band members continued to sour into the album's accompanying tour and most of the band departed in 1981.


 The album features collaborations with the Go-Go's[/url] members [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belinda_Carlisle]Belinda Carlisle[/url], [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Caffey]Charlotte Caffey[/url], and [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Wiedlin]Jane Wiedlin[/url]; [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoda_Dakar]Rhoda Dakar[/url] from [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bodysnatchers_(band)]The Bodysnatchers[/url]; and [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Thompson_(saxophonist)]Lee Thompson[/url] from [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madness_(band)]Madness[/url]. The lyrics on the album, as with the band's debut album, are often intensely political. Upon its release, the album alienated some fans, but reached number 5 in the [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Albums_Chart]UK Albums Chart[/url], while its singles reached the Top 10 of the [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Singles_Chart]UK Singles Chart[/url]. The album also reached number 98 on the [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Top_200]Billboard 200[/url] albums chart. Critics greeted the album with praise, where journalists felt the album marked a bold step for the band. It has been since cited as an influence on the [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trip_hop]trip hop genre in the 1990s, and has been re-released several times.




It's all in the title–More Specials delivers on everything that made the Specials' first LP so great. More punk energy, more two-tone ska rhythms, more blending English humor mixed with Jamaican songwriting. It's definitely a sophomore album, diminishing returns and all, but that quality has led to it become one of ska's more underrated albums.



Given that The Specials had some monstrous tunes ("A Message to You Rudy," "Little Bitch"), More Specials can't help but feel like a retread. But it's also such a remarkably solid, smartass album. A cover of "Enjoy Yourself (It's Later Than You Think)" announces the record on a snarky note, calling for the listener to give into life's revelry before he/she dies (Choice lyric: "My name is Terry and I'm going to enjoy myself first"). Frontman Terry Hall sounds more assured on the mic this time around.



Speaking of mic control, toaster Neville Staple has a more pronounced presence here as well, especially on tracks "Man at C&A," "Sock It to 'Em J.B." and "Stereotype/Stereotypes, Pt. 2." Staple's chants give the songs a more pronounced dub vibe. The Specials is great, but More Specials actually feels closer to dub spirit.




Hall and Staple complement each other lyrically as well as musically. Staple has a more serious tone, usually with some sort of socio-political conscience at play (well, besides the song where he just lists James Bond movie titles). Hall is way more sarcastic (Per the chorus to "Pearl's Cafe:" "It's all a load of bollocks"). Between the two, More Specials finds a nice equilibrium.



Boosted by some choice guest stars (the Go-Go's, Lee Jay Thompson from Madness), More Specials is better than its reputation might suggest. Given that the original lineup for the Specials didn't last much longer after its release, the album also serves as a fitting finale, given or take some choice singles from 1981.



I found this QI, it's a piece about "Ghost Town" (I know it's not on the album, but still) and it gives you a bit of an insight about the times.




In 1981, Britain was in a state of crisis: the government was as unpopular as any since the war, unemployment was rampant and riots were breaking out across the country. Into this turbulent mix, the Specials released their doom-laden, highly political single, Ghost Town. On the eve of the re-release of the Coventry band's albums, Alexis Petridis tells the story of the most remarkable single ever to top the UK charts

It doesn't happen often these days, but pop singles have occasionally shown a startling ability to sum up the mood of their times. The Beatles' winsome All You Need Is Love encapsulated the blissed-out, dippy logic of 1967's Summer of Love. Twenty years later, the Pet Shop Boys' Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money) offered an arch deconstrution of the yuppie dream: a suitably cynical record for a cynical era.


 No record, however, can claim to have captured the spirit of its age quite as acutely as The Specials' Ghost Town. Released 21 years ago this summer - an anniversary heralded by the reissue of the Coventry septet's complete back catalogue - it remains the most remarkable number one in British chart history. Despairing of rising unemployment and frustrated by the most unpopular government of the post-war era, it was not only a peculiarly unsettling record, but a uniquely prescient one. As Ghost Town reached number one, its lyrics were horribly borne out. "Can't go on no more," sang the Specials, "the people getting angry." As if on cue, the worst mainland rioting of the century broke out in Britain's cities and towns. For the first and only time, British pop music appeared to be commenting on the news as it happened.


 "Everything else in the charts was starting to go a bit Human League," says Billy Bragg, Britain's foremost political songwriter, who, in the summer of 1981, had recently left the army. "Ghost Town summed up how much exciting stuff was going on in the town during punk. Clearly the Specials and a whole generation had been hugely inspired by what had happened with punk, culturally, socially and politically, but what had it led to? Synthesizers and floppy haircuts."



 The Specials formed as the Coventry Automatics in 1977 when Jerry Dammers, the keyboard-playing son of a clergyman, asked a fellow student at Lanchester Polytechnic, bassist Horace Panter, to help him record a set of self-penned reggae songs. They recruited musicians from Coventry's thriving club circuit: Jamaican-born guitarist Lynval Golding had played in local soul bands, singer Terry Hall and guitarist Roddy "Radiation" Byers were faces on the punk scene. Dammers' flatmate John Bradbury was drafted in on drums. Finally, Automatics roadie Neville Staples, a former member of disco-dancing troupe Neville and the Boys, simply plugged in a microphone during a gig and began chatting along with the music.


 They released their self-financed first single, Gangsters, in early 1979. A year later, they were one of Britain's most successful bands, the authors of five top 10 singles - one, Too Much Too Young, topped the charts in January 1980 - and a hit album. Their success had spawned its own genre and attendant youth cult, called Two Tone: the name of the Specials' record label and a nod to their multi-racial line-up. The charts were filled with bands aping their punky, politicised take on ska, the long-forgotten precursor to reggae which had been popular in Jamaica during the 1960s. While the Selecter, Madness, the Beat, Bad Manners trailed in their wake, the Specials sealed their supremacy with a second album, More Specials. A daring and audacious attempt to add jazz and easy listening muzak to the Two Tone stew, it had sailed effortlessly to number five. "Punk was dying, the Sex Pistols had split, the charts were full of second-division punk bands and people were after something new," says Horace Panter, now a special needs teacher. "We were in the right place at the right time and we had the tunes."


 The Specials embarked on their More Specials tour in autumn 1980, a band at the top of their game. It should have been a golden time, but as their bus ploughed around England, the Specials were self-destructing. Relations between the band members were at a low: they had endured a gruelling schedule for over a year, and the sessions for More Specials had been spectacularly stormy. To add to their woes, the tour was marred by audience violence which disrupted gigs in Newcastle, Leeds and Cambridge. At Cambridge, Hall and Dammers attempted to intervene to stop fans battling with security guards. The pair were arrested, charged with incitement to riot and fined £400. "What started out as a big party ended up like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," says Roddy Byers.


 "Everyone was getting under pressure and the band was getting tired," says Dammers. "It wasn't just that, the country was falling apart. You travelled from town to town and what was happening was terrible. In Liverpool, all the shops were shuttered up, everything was closing down. Margaret Thatcher had apparently gone mad, she was closing down all the industries, throwing millions of people on the dole. We could actually see it by touring around. You could see that frustration and anger in the audience. In Glasgow, there were these little old ladies on the streets selling all their household goods, their cups and saucers. It was unbelievable. It was clear that something was very, very wrong."


 The roots of Ghost Town go back further, to the Specials' first major UK tour. In 1978, still a good time local reggae band, they had wangled a bottom-of-the bill support slot with the Clash. In Bracknell, however, the gig was disrupted by neo-Nazi skinheads allied to rabble-rousing street punks Sham 69. Losing out at the polling stations thanks to the rise of Margaret Thatcher, the National Front had instigated a programme of "direct action", infiltrating football hooligans and skinheads: "bovver" at gigs and matches was the far right's new route into the headlines. Earlier in the year, seig heiling skinheads had caused £7,500 worth of damage at a Sham 69 concert at the London School of Economics.


 "In Bracknell, the Sham Army turned up, got onstage and attacked the lead singer of Suicide, the other support band," says Dammers. "That was the night the Specials concept was born. I idealistically thought, we have to get through to these people. It was obvious that a mod and skinhead revival was coming, and I was trying to find a way to make sure it didn't go the way of the National Front and the British Movement. I saw punk as a piss-take of rock music, as rock music comitting suicide, and it was great and it was really funny, but I couldn't believe people took it as a serious musical genre which they then had to copy. It seemed to be a bit more healthy to have an integrated kind of British music, rather than white people playing rock and black people playing their music. Ska was an integration of the two."


 A year after the Bracknell gig, the Specials' eponymous debut album set out their stall. The cover featured the band in the mod uniform of tonic suits, loafers, pork pie hats. Inside, simplistic pleas for racial tolerance were set to the choppy beat of ska, popular with the skinhead cult in the 1960s. The album dealt in social realism. Despite their complaints that London was burning with boredom, most punk bands had retained a whiff of metropolitan glamour. Terry Hall's vocals, however, described a grimly provincial world of shopping precincts and shabby ballrooms in a deadpan Coventry whine. The album also displayed the band's ability to define the preoccupations of post-punk youth - the NF are on the march, teddy boys and punks punch it out, "boot boys" lurk in the shadows, waiting to strike. It was a talent that would come to its fullest fruition on Ghost Town.


 So would Dammers' plan to create "a weird new music that was a Jamaican-British crossover". He had begun experimenting with the band's trademark ska sound on their second album, More Specials. Not every member was enthused by Dammers' attempts to fuse reggae with easy listening. "He wanted to do this sort of muzak thing, put drum machines on everything," says Byers. "He'd been right up to that point, but I started to think he was losing it a bit." Rows erupted in the studio. "It was horrible," says Lynval Golding, on the phone from his home outside Seattle. "Every day somebody left the band."


 The acrimony spilled over into live performances. During one show, Byers smashed his guitar over Dammers' keyboard. There were further pressures on the band. Golding was seriously injured in a racist attack in south London, an incident that inspired Ghost Town's horrified B-side, Why? Dammers refuses to discuss the band's drug use in depth, but admits there was "too much drink in the dressing room, too many drugs". He also admits the Specials' penchant for inviting their audience to invade the stage during concerts had got out of hand: "At first it started off, it was a great laugh: we're all in this together, there's no stars here. Then gradually, people were getting onstage two numbers into the set and it became tedious and dangerous. In the end, the whole audience wanted to be onstage, the PA stacks were swaying and it was dangerous, but you couldn't stop it. We told the audience it was too dangerous and they wouldn't have it and it ended up in a massive ruck with the bouncers."


 After the Cambridge debacle, the Specials announced they would quit touring. "You're in this amazing, fantastic group making this wonderful music and you can't play it any more because people are hitting each other," says Panter. Disillusioned with life as a Special, he joined a religious cult, Exegesis, which preached self-assertion, creating yet more friction in the band. "Just to add to the fun and games, Horace joins some nutty cult and starts giving them all his money!" complains Dammers. "It was a nightmare." By the time the Specials met in early 1981 to record Ghost Town, the band was in its death throes. "Everybody was stood in different parts of this huge room with their equipment, no one talking," Panter remembers. "Jerry stormed out a couple of times virtually in tears and I went after him, 'Calm down, calm down.'" It was hell to be around."


 Inspired by the scenes Dammers had glimpsed in Glasgow, Ghost Town was powered by despair and anger at everything from the state of the nation ("Government leaving the youth on the shelf," intoned Neville Staples, his voice gloomy and thick with West Indian patois, "no job to be found in this country") to the Specials' decision to quit touring: "bands won't play no more, too much fighting on the dancefloor".


 The single's stark lyrical vision was set against an equally unique musical backdrop. Ghost Town offered a loping reggae beat topped with eerie, jazz chords, stabbing horns influenced by soundtrack composer John Barry and instead of a chorus, a harrowing wail, which according to Dammers was "supposed to sound a bit middle eastern, like a prophecy of doom". Once again, the sessions were fraught.


 "People weren't cooperating," says Dammers. "Ghost Town wasn't a free-for-all jam session. Every little bit was worked out and composed, all the different parts, I'd been working on it for at least a year, trying out every conceivable chord. It was a combination of the first album and the second album, the complete history of the band gelled in one song. I can remember walking out of a rehearsal in total despair because Neville would not try the ideas. You know the brass bit is kind of jazzy, it has a dischord? I remember Lynval rushing into the control room while they were doing it going, 'No, no, no, it sounds wrong! Wrong! Wrong!' In the meantime, Roddy's trying to kick a hole through the wall from the control room to the studio room. It was only a little studio in Leamington and the engineer was going, 'If that doesn't stop, you're going to have to leave!' I was saying, 'No! No! This is the greatest record that's ever been made in the history of anything! You can't stop now!'"


 "Can't go on no more, the people getting angry": under the circumstances those lines could have referred to the situation in the Leamington studio. But as the Specials argued, events in the country were progressing at a dramatic rate. New unemployment figures showed a rise from 1.5m to 2.5m in 12 months: unemployment among ethnic minorities had risen 82% in the same period. In the first week of April, police in Brixton introduced a stop and search policy, named Operation Swamp after Margaret Thatcher's 1978 assertion that Britain "might be rather swamped by people of a different culture". In six days, 943 people - the vast majority of them black - were stopped by plainclothes officers. The first rioting in Brixton broke out on April 10. Ten days later, over 100 people were arrested and 15 police injured in confrontations in Finsbury Park, Forest Gate and Ealing.


 There were also 350 arrests in incidents outside the capital. In Coventry, an Asian teenager, Samtam Gill, was murdered in a racist attack: in subsequent fighting between skinheads and ethnic minorities, police made 80 arrests. The Specials announced they would play a concert in Coventry for racial unity on the day of Ghost Town's release, June 20. The National Front announced a march through the town on the same day. "The gig was half-full," says Horace Panter. "There were rumours the NF was going to turn up and attack."


 Then, on July 10, Britain erupted. A second wave of rioting in Brixton spread throughout the country. The list of areas involved makes remarkable reading now: Brixton, Southall, Battersea, Dalston, Streatham and Walthamstow in London, Handsworth in Birmingham, Chapeltown in Leeds, Highfields in Leicester, Ellesmere Port, Luton, Sheffield, Portsmouth, Preston, Newcastle, Derby, Southampton, Cirencester, Nottingham, High Wycombe, Bedford, Edinburgh, Wolverhampton, Stockport, Blackburn, Bolton, Huddersfield, Halifax, Reading, Chester, Cardiff and Aldershot all reported "riots" of varying degrees. The next day, Ghost Town reached number one, developing a terrible currency not even Dammers could have predicted.


 "It was an incredible moment," he says. "I can remember Rico [the Specials' veteran Rastafarian trombone player] saying, 'Jerry, if your army combine with my army, it's a revolution!'" "It floated on a tide of what was going on in society," says Billy Bragg. "If you think of songs that are expressly political like Robert Wyatt's Shipbuilding, did its political content keep it from getting to the top of the charts and did Ghost Town sneak up there because it wasn't overtly political? What's being expressed in that song? Nothing's happening, everything's going down the pan, it's that classic no future, nihilistic punk thing. Ghost Town might well have been the only punk number one."


 Its success couldn't halt the Specials' demise. At their Top of the Pops appearance, Neville Staples, Terry Hall and Lynval Golding announced they were leaving the band. "We didn't talk to the rest of the guys," says Golding. "We couldn't even stay in the same dressing room. We couldn't even look at each other. We stopped communicating. You only realise what a genius Jerry was years later. At the time, we were on a different planet."


 "After more or less getting on my knees and begging them to do the song, I thought, after it got to number one, I've proved myself to the band, they're going to respect me and realise I knew what I was doing," says Dammers. "Critical acclaim, popularity, it's at number one, the critics think it's the best thing since sliced bread. Then Neville came into the dressing room and announced they were leaving. I was really, really upset."


 Byers quickly followed. Today he performs with a Two Tone revival band, The Allstars. "I was relieved more than anything," he says. "If we'd carried on, I'd have ended up dead, or someone would have got hurt. I wish I hadn't drunk as much and argued less, but you can't change the way you are." Alienated by his involvement in Exegesis, Panter quit the next year: "I hated leaving. I just felt like I was being sucked into a black hole of depression. I was full of Exegesis and self-assertion and Jerry was dead against that. It must have been hell for him."


 Dammers and drummer John Bradbury struggled through a third album, In the Studio, with new musicians. Released in 1984, it spawned the hit single Free Nelson Mandela, leading Dammers to form Artists Against Apartheid, but otherwise its dark and foreboding songs about war, agoraphobia and racism sank without trace. "The Specials were a really unique combination of people," says Dammers. "To find that kind of combination, the balance of the different people, the different talents, it just doesn't come up very often."


 Today, it seems inconceivable that a record with the musical and lyrical content of Ghost Town would get anywhere near the charts, much less make number one. It was, says Billy Bragg, a product of its time. "1981 was really one of those cusp years. It was the end of punk, but it was also the beginning of a more engaged politics of the 1980s as a response to Thatcherism. 1981 was the year Glastonbury was revived as a CND-supporting festival. Ghost Town wasn't just the end of everything, it also marked the beginning of something different. That built up to the miners' strike and Red Wedge in 1987, but we went out of fashion around the same time Margaret Thatcher went out of fashion. The demise of Thatcherism and the events that led up to the fall of the Soviet Union have left us in a post-ideological political landscape. It would be very difficult for young bands to make political music these days."


 Dammers is still a musician, yet he has released only a handful of records since the Specials' demise. "It does depress me that British music seems to have gone back to the way it was before punk," he says. "All these bands that sound like Gerry Rafferty, dressed up in trendy young people's outfits. It seems to have gone backwards, the music's split between black and white again. Some reggae guys once said to me, 'Ghost Town isn't the best record ever made by any means, but it's the best record ever to get to number one.'"



 


I don't know a lot, but I know what I like!
     Thread Starter
 

14/1/2019 10:45 am  #1713


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

DAY 476.
Steve Winwood......................................................Arc of a diver...(1980)











Short and sweet, I didn't really like this one, I know he does most of it himself but for me so does a self-employed builder, it doesn't mean the finished work is any better 'cause he done it all himself, it just means he can't blame any cunt else if it's shit.



Now I'm not saying this is shit, but I did find It rather bland, if you could indulge me please, if you can close your eyes and listen to this album..........what the fuck is Phil Collins doing singing? Has anyone seen the two of them in the same room? I rest my case my Lord!


This album was like a hybrid of Phil Collins and Steely Dan in my humbles, the former gies me the dreh boak and the latter I can only listen to in small doses,


This album wont be getting purchased.




Bits & Bobs;




Here's a review of the album (not my opinion);



I don’t think I’m going out on a shaky limb by proposing that the majority of singer/songwriters have, at one point or another, thought that if they were allowed to play all the instruments and sing all the parts of their compositions themselves they would, at last, be able to craft their tunes exactly as they sound in their heads. In other words, “if I didn’t have to deal with all the bozos on this bus I could reach my potential.” Nowadays, in this age of having the luxury of a multi-channel recording studio (with no expensive hourly rates) available on the PC in your bedroom, that dream is an easily-attained reality for almost anyone on the planet. But until the advent of integrated circuits, unimaginable data storage and memory capabilities as well as user-friendly engineering software that ideal was difficult if not impossible to accomplish. Only a handful of extremely talented and brave souls like Stevie Wonder and Todd Rundgren were willing to attempt such a feat but they were the rare exceptions, not the rule. Even then they had to rely on others for some amount of technical assistance so a pure, all-by-myself-with-nobody’s-help album that sounded worth a flip was, to my knowledge, non-existent. Enter Steve Winwood.




Mild-mannered, affable Steve had been strained through the ringer. Stints with The Spencer Davis Group, Traffic, Blind Faith, Ginger Baker’s Air Force and an unsuccessful solo LP had frustrated Winwood not for the music he made in those endeavors but for the constant personality conflicts and infantile soap opera dramas that plagued each of them. Who could blame him for thinking “I could do great things if only I didn’t have to involve other people!” Therefore, after finding out in the course of recording his ‘77 “Winwood” disc that being in charge of a collection of musicians didn’t necessarily mean they’d do what you wanted them to do, he made the decision to go it wholly alone. He took his earnings and his dignity, went home to Gloucestershire, built his own facility, named it Netherturkdonic Studios and sequestered himself inside for three years. The result was the remarkable “Arc of a Diver,” a record that he wrote, performed, engineered, produced and mixed completely on his own. It takes a special artist to do that competently but Steve Winwood has always been special so it really didn’t surprise me or any of his loyal fans much at all. We were just happy to have him back with us.




He wisely opens with the catchy and highly-applicable-to-his-situation song “While You See a Chance.” It is, admittedly, firmly ensconced in the category of pop yet it still impresses with its involved, well-thought-out arrangement. This wasn’t thrown together in a day, folks. The chord progressions he created contain a lot of contemporary R&B ingredients and, considering that the whole album was built piece by piece with only Steve singing and playing all the parts, it’s astonishingly seamless. In light of the cynicism generated by punk rock and the vapid sentiments aired by New Wave during the late 70s, Winwood’s positive and motivating message of “when there’s no one left to leave you/even you don’t quite believe you/that’s when nothing can deceive you/when you see a chance, take it…” was so refreshing that the tune rocketed to #7 on the singles chart and stayed there for weeks. “Arc of a Diver” has a Motown-ish feel that glides underneath Steve’s warm, unmistakable voice, making for a pleasant listening experience under any circumstance. His guitar prowess (or lack thereof) has always been his weakest asset but he smartly keeps it under a tight rein here. The lyrics explain his temporarily-retired scenario poetically. “Lean, streaky music/spawned on the streets/I hear it/but with you I had to go/’cause my rock & roll/is putting on weight/and the beat it goes on,” he sings.




“Second-Hand Woman” follows. The throbbing bass drum that epitomized the dreaded disco beat was, tragically, a necessary evil in those waning “boogie down” days (everybody was still toying with it) but the song itself is rather harmless and his synth licks are sprightly, giving the track pizzazz. The words address both his disdain for and attraction to groupies as he goes from “you’re society’s slave, babe/you’re an ugly rumor” to “please don’t go away today/tomorrow’s okay.” “Slowdown Sundown” is next and it’s a pensive ballad with an engaging, balanced blend of instrumentation to lend it a firm texture. He tosses in some clever kicks and accents along the way to keep it interesting and his synth ride sounds like a soprano sax. He sagely saves the Hammond organ for the last segment and it bestows upon it a delightful gospel aura as he croons “here’s to someday when someone understands it/why life keeps turning like a mad thing/until that someday I’ll just play what I have to play/though I play it alone.” Can’t say he’s not honest. A mysterious but sly, funky groove guides “Spanish Dancer,” a track that erects a cool, jazzy atmosphere. Winwood’s voice is his most unique gift and he’s an unrivaled master at knowing how to use it as he does when delivering emotional lines like “you can’t hold me when I get to feeling this way/it’s all over, I’m inside the music that’s playing/it takes me out across the wall/it makes my life a carnival.”




The nearly 8-minute “Night Train” is powered by Steve’s energy-filled performance where his proficiency on an array of keyboards can’t be overlooked. He coerces an excellent funky bass guitar approximation out of his synthesizer, the tune’s dynamic bridge section proves he wasn’t about to take shortcuts and he delivers a tasteful, golden-toned guitar lead to top it off. “My ticket paid/trying to fade/I hope I get there/not just somewhere I was leaving,” he sings. He closes the album with the runt of the litter, “Dust,” but with a voice like his it could be a nursery rhyme air and it’d still be decent. He tries too hard to be profound with lyrics like “the dust settles again/to remind me still/of memories I’ve cherished so long” but this pop ballad isn’t so lame that it spoils the whole stew.




Released on the last day of 1980, this record zoomed up to #3 on the Billboard charts, bringing Winwood out of the shadows and into the limelight. In some ways I guess that was ironic since he seemed to be trying to get out of the circus rather than become one of its featured acts. But the confidence that level of acceptance gave him spurred him on to continue down the path of no longer feeling that he had to be part of a band to express himself as a legitimate, relatable artist. “Arc of a Diver” is very consistent throughout and most of the time it sounds like anything but a D.I.Y. project. Steve spent a whole lot of time on this record and you can tell without a doubt that he put his heart and soul into every single track. It’s not his jazziest work but that’s okay. It’s a lasting monument to a great artisan’s self-motivated determination to finally get it right.




And an interview;

” ‘Gimme Some Lovin’ ” is obviously the bane of my life in some ways, because I’ve got to do it all the time,” says Steve Winwood, relaxing in an outlandish Las Vegas hotel room. “But now you actually have a lot more people who have heard ‘Higher Love’ than ‘Gimme Some Lovin’.’ Or, often, people have heard ‘Gimme Some Lovin” and don’t know it’s me. That happens a lot. They say, ‘Why are you covering that Blues Brothers song?’


 Characteristically, Winwood – as obliging a bloke as you’ll find – isn’t disturbed that people sometimes fail to associate him with the best-known song of his career, a song that has been a dance-floor burner since he co-wrote and sang it as a teenage prodigy with the Spencer Davis Group in 1966. Perversely, he almost seems to enjoy the lack of recognition.  Warming to his subject, Winwood – who is wearing khaki shorts, a Johnny Clegg and Savuka T-shirt, white sneakers and sweat socks – takes a pull from a bottle of Perrier and tells a story about Tom Lord Alge, who co-engineered Winwood’s 1986 smash Back in the High Life and co-produced his latest album, Roll with It. “We were working for quite some time, and something came up, and we talked about ‘I’m a Man,’ ” Winwood says, referring to the Spencer Davis Group’s other legendary hit, which he also co-wrote and sang. “And Tom said, ‘You don’t mean “I’m a man, yes I am….” ‘ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘You wrote that?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ You know, he just really didn’t know.”


 At this point Winwood, who has a day off in Las Vegas, where he’s performing at Caesars Amphitheater, can afford to take such slights in his stride. At forty, he is more successful than ever, on the strength of the massive sales of Back in the High Life and Roll with It. Not that he had been a slouch before.


 After bursting on the scene with Spencer Davis, Winwood formed Traffic, one of the most adventurous bands of the Sixties and Seventies, in 1967. He separated from Traffic in 1969 to form Blind Faith, with Eric Clapton, bassist Rick Grech and Cream drummer Ginger Baker. In 1980 his solo career took off for the first time with the platinum Arc of a Diver, a virtuoso studio performance on which Winwood wrote all the music and played every instrument on every track.
   Winwood’s youthfully innocent good looks, his disarming manner and his refusal to wear his stature on his sleeve can make for surprises. An offhand, let’s-get-settled question like. “When was the last time you were in Las Vegas?” elicits an equally casual answer: “Nineteen years ago, on the Blind Faith tour. I went to see Elvis on his comeback tour. He was amazing.”


 Still, the Las Vegas setting, the impossible kitsch of his Caesars Palace hotel room (the parlor of the suite is a nightmare vision of yellow, brown and mustard tones, with a wild floral pattern on the walls), the mention of Elvis and even Winwood’s distance from his celebrated past create a certain uneasiness. The scene is haunted by a remark Winwood made three weeks before on a brutally hot Sunday afternoon in Chicago, during one of the first stops on his tour.


 In a far more subdued suite at the Omni Ambassador East, Winwood explained how three years earlier, after the relative failure of his album Talking Back to the Night, he had “decided to embrace the fact of being an entertainer.” Straightforward as it may seem, the remark sounded strange coming from a man whose exquisite musicianship, outstanding voice and expansive musical vision had long set the standard of integrity.


 “This is probably a recent thing that I’ve realized, about music being entertainment,” he said, his voice hoarse from the previous night’s show. “I had a choice to go a couple of ways. If I was to say, ‘Well, I’m a musician, I’m not an entertainer,’ then I have no business going onstage with lights and trying to look … I should be in the back doing the music, and somebody else should be out front.


 “So you have the choice. You have to decide which way to go. I thought about it long and seriously, and I thought that if I sing songs to people, you can’t deny it, you’re an entertainer. It’s not just ‘I’m entertaining them’ but ‘I am actually an entertainer.’ ”
   This decision obviously had enormous commercial benefits. Both Back in the High Life and Roll with It are fine records that have yielded hit after hit. Onstage, Winwood no longer finds an instrument to play on every song. Although he seems uncomfortable at times, he dons fashionable duds and tackles the frontman’s role with determination – and the crowds at his sold-out shows love it.


 But it’s hard to escape the feeling that Winwood isn’t challenging himself, that his Eighties work isn’t charged with the passion he displayed early on. “Really, your question is about the value of art in the marketplace,” Winwood says in response to this observation. “That’s a tricky question. It’s got to be a balance, and it’s hard to get the balance right every time. I spent a lot of years doing stuff where people said, ‘That’s fantastic,’ but nobody bought it. That also is a bad situation, because what are you achieving? You do want to be heard – unless you’re trying to create some elitist thing.”
 Some of the moves Winwood has made to get his music heard have also raised tricky questions. His sponsorship deal with Michelob – which seems to have included writing “Don’t You Know What the Night Can Do?” for a TV commercial –has made him a symbol of artistic compromise to many people, including some of his former admirers. So if his fans see him as a different man from the one who co-wrote and sang “Gimme Some Lovin'” and “I’m a Man,” perhaps, in a certain sense, they’re right.


 The controversy surrounding steve Winwood is all the more problematic because his is one of the most extraordinary careers in contemporary pop music. Though he is only forty, that career extends back over twenty-five years.


 Steve Winwood was born on May 12th, 1948, in a suburb of Birmingham, England. His father, a manager in a local foundry, played saxophone and clarinet in semiprofessional bands, and his mother, Winwood says, “was always singing. She didn’t play an instrument, but she would be able to naturally harmonize.” At six Winwood began to take music lessons, primarily on piano, and at nine he began guitar lessons.  When he was barely a teenager, Winwood started to develop his own musical ideas. Through his parents and their families, he learned about parlor music and the big bands. His brother Muff, who was five years older, taught him about blues, jazz and rock & roll. At thirteen, he was admitted on a part-time basis to music college, where he studied piano.


 “All the time my brother had these school bands, which were like jazz bands,” Winwood says, running his hand through his reddish-brown hair, “and I would play with them. We’d have the odd gig at the local church hall or something while I was still at music college. I happened to say to my tutor that I quite liked to play jazz and rock & roll. That was it. He said, ‘Well, listen, if you’re learning this, you’ve got to forget that. You can’t do both.’


 “So, I figured if I couldn’t do both,” Winwood says, with a gleam in his eye, “I knew which one I wanted to do, and it wasn’t the one he was teaching me.”


 Winwood was only fifteen when he was discovered by Spencer Davis, who was teaching languages by day and playing in Birmingham clubs by night. Davis was looking to form a blues band; a musician friend suggested that he check out the Muff Woody Jazz Band.


 “Muff played guitar in a sort of jazz style, like Wes Montgomery,” Davis says. “Steve was playing piano in the style of Oscar Peterson – at that age! So I walked in on that, and I was totally blown away. Immediately I wanted Steve in the band.”


 Winwood was elated, but he couldn’t get around on his own because he was too young to drive. Muff offered to switch to bass guitar and to drive Stevie, as he was then known, to the gigs. Davis drafted Pete York as drummer, and the Spencer Davis Group was born.


 Propelled by the enormous interest in blues and R&B at that time in England, the Spencer Davis Group took off. At sixteen, Winwood was a star. “Steve was such a rich asset,” Davis says, “because even at that age – his voice. When he sang, he was able to copy Jimmy Reed and that style of singing. I thought, ‘Where the hell is this voice coming from? From a diminutive guy like this, at that age, how can he do it?’ But he did it.”  At the height of the group’s popularity, however, Winwood began to find its focus restrictive, and he quit. “I got tired of just copying blues records,” he says. “I wanted to explore other avenues of music.”
  Winwood had begun to spend more and more time with players closer to his own age, like Dave Mason, a roadie for the Spencer Davis Group, and Jim Capaldi, the lead singer in a Birmingham band called Deep Feeling. In 1967, Winwood, Mason, Capaldi and Chris Wood, another Birmingham musician, formed Traffic, with the express purpose of opening up some new musical territory. To begin defining their new direction, Traffic moved to a cottage in the English countryside. It was the Summer of Love, and life at Traffic’s communal cottage was dominated by psychedelics and music – a mood perfectly captured on the band’s dreamy debut album, Mr. Fantasy.


 “We’d listen to different kinds of music – classical, folk, jazz, all kinds of ethnic music, country music, early rock, blues,” Winwood says, “and the only thing we calculated was to try in some way to incorporate all of them. We were trying to get ourselves a sound which was purely Traffic and couldn’t be mistaken for anybody else.”


 Mason, whose taste tended more toward wistful pop, left and rejoined the group several times, often leaving chaos in his wake. After the band released its second album, Traffic, in 1968, Winwood split and formed Blind Faith with Eric Clapton, who had recently left Cream.


 The album Blind Faith, released in 1969, features three splendid Winwood tracks – “Had to Cry Today,” “Can’t Find My Way Home” and “Sea of Joy.” But the album’s virtues were quickly forgotten when the group’s American tour – one of the first arena tours in rock history – deteriorated into an oppressive mix of greed and pandering.


 “After we’d created an identity for this new band – which wasn’t Cream and wasn’t Traffic – with the record, when we got out onstage, we didn’t have the strength of will to maintain that,” Winwood says. “To start with, a large amount of people who went to the shows wanted to hear Cream. So a couple of times we gave it to them, and of course they loved it.  “That was it then. It’s like an alcoholic having a drink. And then, of course, we did that every night, and it was so easy, because that’s pleasing the crowd. Both Eric and I got unhappy, and we didn’t have the strength to say, ‘No, this is not right,’ and pull it all back together.”


 Blind Faith disintegrated shortly after the tour, and Winwood did a brief stint with Ginger Baker’s Air Force. He then began work on Mad Shadows, the solo album that eventually turned into Traffic’s folk-inspired 1970 masterpiece, John Barleycorn Must Die.



 Although the re-formed Traffic was successful, it soon became something of a musical revolving door, with Mason and a host of other players coming and going. Winwood’s will to persist with the band suffered a devastating blow in 1972, when, after the release of the band’s most popular record, The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys, in 1971, he developed peritonitis as the result of an appendicitis attack. The potentially fatal disease caused him to reexamine his life.


 “That was the first time I had anything like that happen, and it had a big effect,” Winwood says. “I was about twenty-five years old, which often is a period where people go through a change. I did what they tell me rock stars do now; I started exercising, eating the right food. I stopped just living for tomorrow.


 “From then on, through the Seventies, I came to terms with the real world a bit more. You know, traveling with a rock band, there’s a certain unreality about it. You don’t know where you are, what day of the week it is. People book your plane flights, pack your bag, do your laundry. If you do that from when you’re fifteen, it’s very unreal.”


 After Traffic released When the Eagle Flies and completed its 1974 tour, Winwood left the band for good. “I’d had enough of this album, tour, album, tour,” Winwood says. “It was like I was on a treadmill and there was no way of getting off. I just had to say, ‘That’s it with Traffic; no way can I do that anymore.'” At that point Winwood retreated to his rural home in Gloucestershire, in an attempt, as he puts it, “to bring discipline to an undisciplined life.” 
 “I started deliberately mixing with people who had nothing to do with music or any of the arts,” he says. “You know, there was an idea in the Sixties that people who complied to rules, or who went to work at nine and came home at five and wore suits, that they were wrong. I suddenly began to realize ‘What’s wrong with working from nine till five? That’s great.’ And I started to do that myself a bit then.”




This period of personal regeneration coincided with some of Winwood’s most far-ranging musical experiments. In the mid-Seventies he played and recorded with the Japanese percussionist Stomu Yamashta, the salsa-driven Fania All-Stars and a number of African musicians – anticipating some of the major trends of progressive Eighties music. He also recorded Steve Winwood, his first solo album. Introspective and lyrical, the album stands up admirably more than a decade after it came out.

  At the time, however, the record bombed. Nineteen seventy-seven – the year the Sex Pistols fired the shot heard round the world – was not the best time for a Sixties luminary to release such a refined album. Consequently, Winwood’s memories of punk are harsh.


 “It was against everything that I had been or was to that point,” he says bluntly. “It was against music, too. It was antiestablishment. They were really just advanced hippies. I’d been through that antiestablishment thing in the late Sixties, and during the Seventies I suddenly realized the value of being establishment.”


 Though Winwood virtually disowns the record today – “I only did it because the record company wanted some product from me” – the failure of Steve Winwood provoked a crisis for him. His tenure with Traffic had ground him down, but his years off the road had made him something of a forgotten man. His experimental records had never reached much of an audience, and his solo album entered a musical and social culture that seemed to have no place for him or his increasingly conservative values. As a result, he seriously considered giving up his career as a recording artist.
  “I think because of the experiences I was having through the early Seventies, I was almost preparing myself unknowingly for that, to go into some other area,” he says. “I wasn’t desperate, I don’t think, but I was definitely ready to do whatever was necessary.”


 Winwood decided to give recording one last try. To do so, paradoxically, he burrowed deeper into himself, holing up in the sixteen-track studio in his home in Gloucestershire. Over the next three years, he wrote, played and produced all of the music for Arc of a Diver. “I knew ‘Okay, I’ve got one shot left, and I’ve got to make it count,'” he says. “At the point of Arc of a Diver, I wanted to give it everything, and if that wasn’t successful, that would be it. But I had to make sure I was giving everything. And I certainly did — there was nobody else on the record!”


 Arc of a Diver‘s first single, “While You See a Chance,” soared into the Top Ten in early 1981. The album’s slick electronic sheen, however, suggested a commercial intent that many of the singer’s longtime fans had a hard time dealing with. It didn’t help that “While You See a Chance” was written with Will Jennings, a professional lyricist from Los Angeles. Though Winwood had rarely written his own lyrics, he’d always worked with friends and musicians like Jim Capaldi and Jimmy Miller, who co-wrote “I’m a Man” and produced the Spencer Davis albums, the first two Traffic albums and Blind Faith.


 Winwood, however, says that he values Jennings’s workaday approach to songwriting – “I learned about discipline from Will,” he says – and their collaboration continues to this day. Together they wrote all the songs on Talking Back to the Night and the vast majority on Back in the High Life and Roll with It. Winwood also cites Jennings’s uncanny ability to express Winwood’s emotions, using “While You See a Chance” – which captures Winwood’s optimism as he was attempting to get his career back on track – as an example. “We didn’t talk about what the song was about,” Winwood says. “He just came up with this lyric, and it was right for me, right for him and right for the song.”
   Winwood’s exhilaration with Arc of a Diver‘s success was short-lived. He’d always disliked touring, so he didn’t go on the road, and videos had not yet come along to provide artists with another means of staying in the public eye. So Talking Back to the Night – another one-man show – failed to find a substantial audience when it was released, in 1982. By that point Winwood was thirty-four and wondering what the future held for him.


 Enter Mr. Entertainment.


 I made a conscious effort three years ago to start working with musicians and producers and engineers,” Steve Winwood says. “I got a manager. I obviously did those things consciously. I have to say that those people are directly or indirectly responsible for my success now. There’s no denying it.”


 Manager Ron Weisner describes his relationship with Winwood as a “nurturing situation.” Weisner, who has worked with Michael Jackson, Madonna and Rick Springfield, among other artists, met Winwood about three years ago. Winwood was looking for a manager. The only person to play that role for him in the past had been Chris Blackwell, who also happened to own Winwood’s label, Island Records, and the company that published Winwood’s music. “It’s a real conflict of interest going on there,” Winwood says. “I needed to get out of that situation.”


 “I’ve always been a fan of Steve’s,” Weisner says. But when Weisner first started working with Winwood, his friends in the business weren’t impressed. “Everybody said to me, ‘What, are you fuckin’ crazy? I mean, why? This guy is washed up, he hasn’t had hits, he’s old news. Forget it.’ “


 Winwood had already begun working on Back in the High Life, and Weisner was determined that the record not be another homemade job. The first step was suggesting that Winwood record in London. “As soon as he agreed to that,” Weisner says, “I said, ‘Well, forget London. Maybe you should go to New York.’ ”   New York not only provided access to the numerous guest artists who turned up on Back in the High Life – including Chaka Khan, Nile Rodgers, James Taylor and Joe Walsh – it also got Winwood away from a troubling personal situation. His marriage to his wife Nicole had begun to sour; he would eventually divorce her and marry Eugenia Crafton, a Nashville native whom he would meet at a Jr. Walker show in New York in 1986.


 Russ Titelman was called in to produce High Life with Winwood. With all this activity, it’s easy to read the album’s title track as an expression of Winwood’s hope for what it would accomplish. But he says the song is more an expression of the moment.


 ” ‘Back in the High Life’ was not written to predict what I would be doing but because of what I actually was doing,” he says. “You know, I was living in New York. I was going out. I was playing with people onstage. I’d go down to people’s sessions.


 “I knew that Back in the High Life was going to be my last album on my contract, and I had thought for a long time about going into production and stuff. I finally decided ‘No, I might as well pursue my career as a solo artist and put everything into it.’ I guess I probably had never put everything into it, because I’d always felt that I was above being an entertainer.”


 Videos were the next step. Winwood had always been a shy – but extremely appealing – performer. Good-looking and intense, he seemed insistent on letting his hair-raising skill as a keyboardist, guitarist and singer take precedence over personality. So veteran Winwood watchers were stunned when the “Higher Love” video showed a chicly attired Steve cavorting with models and – could this be true? – not playing an instrument.


 “I’ve been a very strong believer in quality video,” Weisner says. “You know, I represented Michael Jackson – I was involved in ‘Billie Jean’ and ‘Beat It.’ I kept telling Steve, ‘Look, what we have to do is translate what you do best musicwise to visuals.’  “I found in the past that there are certain artists who are very talented writers who don’t come across in video. You look at, like, a Dan Fogelberg, who I think is a brilliantly talented guy but doesn’t come across visually. I’ve always tried to put Steve in an environment that is presentable and believable. You know, I haven’t shot him out of a cannon.”


 The stage show to support High Life – Winwood’s first full-scale tour in over a decade – proceeded along the same lines. Winwood stepped out from behind his keyboard and … entertained. Weisner says, “I said, ‘Steve, I mean, when I saw you in the past, I never knew if you had legs,’ because you would never see him up. He would be very laid-back and timid.”

 Audiences have responded to the new Steve Winwood, on both the High Life and the Roll with It tours. During an uneven performance at Poplar Creek Music Theater, outside Chicago, in July and a far better show at Radio City Music Hall, in New York, five weeks later, the crowds were equally ecstatic. Winwood, however, still doesn’t seem entirely at ease with the flashier character running around onstage.


 “Actually, the place where I feel most comfortable and most naturally at home is in the recording studio,” Winwood says the day after the Poplar Creek show. “I have to work at being onstage. I’m not a natural at performing, although there is a way to learn to be a natural, if you know what I mean.


 “I work, and I take instruction, direction, from as many people as I can in order to learn how to work onstage. Whereas in the studio I have no problem. I don’t need anybody to show me what to do. I can quite happily see myself doing that for the rest of my life. But I couldn’t see myself going onstage, traveling from city to city for the rest of my life. No way.”


 Roll with It was Winwood’s first album for Virgin Records, which signed him to a multimillion-dollar three-album contract that even Weisner describes as “insane.” “I felt that Warners did a phenomenal job [distributing Back in the High Life]”, the manager says. “But it kept going back and forth with the numbers, and finally you had to be a little retarded not to look toward the Virgin side.”  Although it was recorded in Toronto and Dublin, Roll with It has a distinctly American feel, partly because of the time Winwood has spent in Nashville since marrying Crafton. “I’ve been learning about the history of R&B,” he says. “A lot of the people from Memphis and Muscle Shoals are all in Nashville now, and I’ve been meeting them.” In fact, the Memphis Horns, a staple of the great Stax-Volt hits of the Sixties, play on the album, which recalls the style of R&B that Winwood used to play with Spencer Davis.


 Shortly after the single “Roll with It” began climbing the charts this summer, a Michelob television commercial featuring “Don’t You Know What the Night Can Do?” started appearing. The song had been licensed to Michelob before Roll with It was released, so some assert that Winwood and Jennings had written the song for Michelob’s campaign, “The Night Belongs to Michelob.” Neither man denies the charge, though Weisner insists that the song was written before the deal with Michelob was struck.
  “There are two aspects to this,” Winwood says defensively. “The first one is whether the music that I’m doing is worse because they’re involved in it. Are they paying me to write or to record something that’s of inferior quality?


 “I mean, I wrote a seven-minute song. Okay, they used fifty seconds of it, Fine. The edits were theirs, although I approved them. I wrote a seven-minute song. It had the word ‘night’ in it, but so have other songs I’ve done. They knew that. There’s no way that their involvement made me present a lower-quality product. There’s no way. The second thing, which has obviously been thrown around, is how rock & roll stood against the establishment. Well, rock & roll has always been sold by major record companies.


 “The thing I want to do as a musician is to reach more people with my music. If they can use part of it on a commercial, then I’m reaching potentially more people. The fact that it’s on TV and in commercials – music is entertainment. That’s the way I see it: music is entertainment, and commercials can be entertaining. So I’m happy with it.”  So is Michelob. Winwood appeared at press conferences with representatives of the company, acted in the commercials, permitted large Michelob banners to be prominently displayed at his shows and in every way seemed content to allow his credibility as an artist, built up over twenty-five years, to be used to sell a product.


 I‘m happier than I’ve ever been, and I have a family, which is, like, fantastic,” Winwood says, beaming. “It’s wonderful. But aside from that, careerwise, I would never have believed someone who told me ten years ago I was going to have my biggest record ever when I was forty.”


 The mood is definitely upbeat in the Winwood camp these days. Winwood and Genia – a lovely blonde with a strong Southern accent – have one young child, and another is very much on the way. They split their time between Gloucestershire and a large farm near Nashville. “We’ll be in the States for when the baby’s due, which is the end of November,” Winwood says. “Basically our home is in England, and we haven’t been there for a while, but obviously it will take a few weeks before we can travel with the baby.”


 At the moment, Winwood, Genia and Nobby Clarke, Winwood’s longtime road manager, are perusing the Las Vegas papers to find a show to see that night. It won’t be Elvis’s comeback tour – in fact, the leading contender at the moment seems to be The Magic of David Copperfield – but then that’s not the only thing that’s changed over the years. “I think as you get older,” Winwood says, “you kind of get less radical and a bit more philosophical about things.”  


 As for the future, Winwood has two more albums left for Virgin, but the next one is not due for release until the spring of 1990. And once this tour is over, he’s under no obligation to go out on the road again, though he allows that “I’m enjoying it more than I ever have, so maybe I can do a bit more of that next year.” Production work is also a possibility.  Now that he’s back in the high life, will Steve Winwood dare to do more than just roll with it? “Goodness knows what the next album will be like,” he says, shaking his head. “I mean, maybe it will get very radical. I don’t know yet.” 


I don't know a lot, but I know what I like!
     Thread Starter
 

14/1/2019 2:14 pm  #1714


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

Of the recent albums, Kilimanjaro is a big favourite (no surprise there, eh A/C?), but Signing Off is OK and More Specials a bit more so in the 'ok' stakes. 

But, cannae mind if I'd written before, I preferred The Beat to any other of the UK reggae/ska bands, by far, and also sided with Jamaican reggae and the original sound of rocksteady. UB40 and The Specials were a wee bit like tribute acts to me, although Ghost Town was such a great song and so original.

Back to the absolute fanny 'Cope'. He's always been one of my favourite music guys, from this album, but there is a bit which I do find cringey and probably fake about him.

I think it's not true when he (and many other musicians) claim to have taken copious amounts of drugs prior to entering the studio or playing live. A singer might just about get away with it, but to play an instrument competently, the less drugs (including alcohol) consumed, the better you will play. Songwriting is a different kettle of fish, I'd concede.

But that album like: lots of the songs were released as singles from it, and I feel it has a commercial sound, a bit of it's time, but then I'm trapped in a time warp in any case.

 

15/1/2019 9:55 am  #1715


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

DAY 477.
Pretenders.................................................Pretenders   (1980)













I've always liked "Pretenders" and if I'm to be honest the original draw was Chrissie Hynde, dressed in leather and damn sassy, with the hypnotic voice of a siren that being of a similar age could have me drifting into the rocks and ship wrecking myself any day of the week.


The songs on this album especially the ones that became singles, I've always thought of as good poppy type tunes with catchy hooks and riffs that kinda stick in your head, but as I've mentioned before I've started reading the lyrics to most of these albums nowadays, it's funny how much I've probably missed over the years as I only seem to retain certain parts of songs (mainly the choruses) but if you read the lyrics from this album and peel away the thin veneer, some of the lyrics are miles away from what you might have previously thought,she certainly lays herself bare and tells it like it is with no frills.



This was a very enjoyable and certainly eye opening experience for me, all the tracks were worth a listen especially "Stop Your Sobbing" which I personally think is the best version I've heard, and even though I have most of these on a greatest hits CD, I think this album will be a fine addition to my vinyls, so this will be getting added to my collection.





Bits & Bobs;



Hynde has a daughter, Natalie, with Ray Davies of The Kinks. They had a common-law marriage, and tried to get married legally, but the registrar refused to issue them a marriage license because they were arguing.


 
Hynde is a vegetarian and animal-rights activist. She once joked that McDonalds should be firebombed.


 
Honeyman-Scott died of a heroin overdose a few days after Farndon was fired from the band for excessive drug use. Farndon died 10 months later of an overdose at age 30.


 
Hynde was a freshman at Kent State University in 1970, and was protesting when the National Guard killed four students. She left and never went back to college.


 
Farndon and Hynde were lovers until she kicked him out of the band in 1982.


 
Hynde grew up in Akron, Ohio, which is where serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was born. She moved to London in 1973.


 
Hynde left Ray Davis and married Jim Kerr, the lead singer of Simple Minds, on May 5, 1984. The couple met just months earlier when their bands were both touring in Australia; soon after their wedding, Simple Minds opened for The Pretenders when they toured America. On March 25, 1985, they had a daughter, Yasmin. They divorced in 1990.


 
When Hynde first moved to England, she took work as a music journalist. Among the musicians she interviewed were Brian Eno and Suzi Quatro.


 
Chrissie Hynde had several other jobs when she first arrived in England. They included selling handbags in a market and working for Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren in their punk clothing store SEX.


 
Chrissie Hynde's priorities shifted as she got older. In 2003, she told the Independent: "I'm not 18 any more, and I don't live for music. It's not like I'm waitressing any more and I get home and put on an Iggy Pop album just to save my life."



Hynde is the only continuous band member through all 14 different lineups: Yes, 14 different combinations of members have recorded/performed under the band's name with Hynde being the only constant. That's a lot of personnel change over the years! Eight of these lineups happened in the first decade of the band's existence, thanks to drug problems, deaths and personality clashes. Even Chambers left the band in 1986 before coming back in 1993.



Former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr once was a member of the Pretenders: Who knew? After the Smiths broke up, he played on their Fall 1987 tour and can be heard on the single "Windows of the World", but Marr left after some disagreements with Hynde to go join The The.



The band didn't officially exist from 1987-1990: After so much change in the mid-1980s, Hynde shut the band down in late 1987 as the only remaining founding member. She started it up again in 1990, however. The post-1980s releases haven't been as popular as the group's early work, however.



Chrissie Hynde is from Akron, Ohio, but she moved to London in 1973 to get in with the music scene there. She worked at clothing designer Vivienne Westwood’s punk rock store SEX in the World’s End counter culture epicenter of London where The Clash members also lived. At that time Sid Vicious, who would later become famous as Sex Pistols bassist, was 17 and he’d hang around the store. Hynde tried to get him to marry her so she could be legit with an actual work permit. They went their separate ways and Hynde eventually cobbled together The Pretenders in London. Lots of drug issues caused band members to come and go, but she has remained the one consistent member to this day.





 A controversial piece from Vogue that I found interesting;



Just How Reckless Is Chrissie Hynde?

Pretenders front woman **Chrissie Hynde’**s memoir, Reckless, didn't officially go on sale until today, but Hynde has already been in the headlines for more than a week, for inflammatory comments she made while discussing incidents chronicled in the book.


 If you haven’t been following the story, the most upsetting of those incidents goes like this: A 21-year-old Hynde meets a bunch of Hells Angels while visiting a friend of a friend at the Cleveland City Jail. Practically comatose on quaaludes, she agrees to accompany them alone to their house for “a party.” Once there, the bikers force her to strip, throw matches at her naked torso, and sexually assault her.


 On its own, this would be plenty newsworthy. But the most shocking part of this shocking story is what the singer took away from it. “Now, let me assure you that, technically speaking, however you want to look at it, this was all my doing and I take full responsibility,” she writes. “You can’t fuck around with people, especially people who wear ‘I Heart Rape’ and ‘On Your Knees’ badges.”


 And when asked about the episode in an interview with the Sunday Times last week, Hynde doubled down. “If I’m walking around in my underwear and I’m drunk, who else’s fault can it be?” she said. “If I’m walking around and I’m very modestly dressed and I’m keeping to myself and someone attacks me, then I’d say that’s his fault. . . . You know, if you don’t want to entice a rapist, don’t wear high heels so you can’t run from him. If you’re wearing something that says, ‘Come and fuck me,’ you’d better be good on your feet.”



 Anyone who has read Hynde’s interviews over the years knows that the singer is provocative and outspoken. This is the same Hynde, after all, who in 1987 told People magazine that eating an animal was commensurate with eating one’s own child, and who in 2003 said onstage, “We deserve to get bombed. I hope the Muslims win!”


 It’s also the same Hynde who, while promoting her 2014 solo album, Stockholm, called out 21st-century pop stars for overtly trading on their sexuality, then skirting responsibility for those choices by blaming their managers and labels. “The artist is in control of what they’re doing,” she told the Evening Standard. “You can always tell anyone to fuck off. No one ever pressurized me. I don’t know what the difference is. If they’re under pressure to get their kit off, maybe they should just be making porn films? Maybe they’re in the wrong game? I think if a girl walks onstage and picks up a guitar and starts playing like Jimi Hendrix, believe me, no one would be asking her to take her clothes off.”


 Hynde’s views—both those above and as expressed in discussions of her own sexual assault—challenge our desire to claim her as a feminist (a term that she has, for the record, never fully embraced). Her recent statements have, at this point, been deconstructed from all angles by writers and survivors of sexual assault who are much better versed on the politics and psychology of rape than I am. But what struck me while reading Reckless is the way those comments reflect Hynde's lifelong preoccupation with clothing and self-presentation, an obsession with a woman’s right to look and feel sexy.


 First and foremost, it’s worth noting that what Hynde recently said and what she wrote in her memoir don’t really track: In the interview, Hynde suggests that women who dress provocatively telegraph their availability for assault. In the book, it’s not Hynde’s clothing that sends that message; it’s the rest of her behavior, her reckless willingness to throw herself in harm’s way, her impulsive decision to go home with a bunch of men who are themselves telegraphing their intentions (remember what those badges said?). Perhaps she was naive or too ’luded out to know her own mind, but Hynde chose to ignore the signs. The writing, she admits in the book, was on the wall.


 Or, rather, it was on the clothing. Hynde’s strange, sartorial framing of what can lead to rape, and certain passages from Reckless, reveal that she’s always been hyper-focused on the stories our clothing tell about who we are.


 Hynde’s memoir covers her life through the early eighties, when the Pretenders first rose to fame: her middle-class childhood in conformist, fifties Akron, Ohio; her years as a disaffected student at Kent State in the sixties; her struggle to get her music career off the ground while living in Paris, Cleveland, and eventually London, her home for the past four decades. She proceeds chronologically, but even so, the details are tough to keep track of. (And based on the quantity and diversity of drugs imbibed throughout, it’s hard to trust those details anyhow.) I often found myself lost in which squatter’s hovel is where, which junkies die and which ones don’t, which men become lovers and which ones are just pals, which of those pals/lovers are destined for punk-rock glory, and which ones are just minor hangers-on.


 It’s a memoir of a messily lived life, but from the outset, deliberate sartorial choices loom large. On page one, for example, we meet Hynde’s parents: her father, decked out in his Marine Corps uniform, her mother, wearing a red-and-white-striped dress. Soon thereafter we learn that little Chrissie (or Christy, as she was then known) would never have been allowed to wear blue jeans, a symbol of her parents’ conservatism. Later, when she moves to London and gets a job working at Sex, the boutique owned by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, Hynde gets an education in the look of rock ’n’ roll. “Nobody I knew thought about fashion,” she writes. “Designer labels didn’t exist, not to people like us, anyway. Gucci? That was for someone’s sad auntie. But being around Malcolm and Viv, I started to understand the meaning of glamour, that how you present yourself to your fellow man is a way of communicating ideas.”

  An ambivalence surrounding sex also comes across loud and clear. Hynde is reluctant to lose her virginity, and when she does, well into college, she treats it as a hassle. “I can’t remember having sexual fantasies about actually getting it on with one of my rock-star heroes,” she admits at one point. “I wanted to be them, not do them.” It was the era of free love, of the Pill, of sexual liberation, and Hynde partakes. But music, not sex, remains her priority; and to what degree early trauma shapes those attitudes, we never really learn.


 Can she be a rock star without becoming a sex symbol? That’s Hynde’s challenge. When, after years of trying, she finally manages to assemble the band that becomes the Pretenders, she realizes she needs a stage look. “The idea of trying to be sexy was repellant to me,” she writes. “Something I’d never deliberately do.” Many of the anecdotes she tells are a bit fuzzy around the edges, but one stands out. She vividly recounts a story of the time she made an exception to the sexiness rule, buying a rubber bondage skirt from Sex and wearing it out to see a show. Many shots of Southern Comfort later, Hynde passes out in the bathroom, hugging the toilet bowl, her skirt around her waist, one leg sticking out into the next stall. Eventually a cleaning woman finds her, and after some effort, manages to pull the skirt back down over the singer’s sweaty body. “How embarrassing—painful too,” she writes. “I never tried to dress sexy after that. Fuck that. Over-the-knee boots was the limit.”


 Reckless is filled with experiences that might make a person feel exceedingly vulnerable—being beaten, say, by a boyfriend while at work; getting sexually assaulted, robbed, and basically kidnapped by a stranger in Cleveland while hitchhiking; the Hells Angels fiasco. But it’s the rubber skirt story that is told with the most pathos: It’s the experience of trying to be sexy, and failing, that seems to make Hynde the most uncomfortable.


 Which isn’t to say that fashion isn’t important to her. Hynde’s look—that unwavering commitment to bangs and thick eyeliner, to choppy hair and waistcoats and skinny jeans and androgyny—is indelibly woven into her persona, as much a part of her legacy as iconic Pretenders songs like “Back on the Chain Gang” and “I’ll Stand by You.” It’s a look that may have originally been conceived as a bit of a fuck you to fashion, but it’s one that’s made her a fashion icon. And it hardly came together accidentally.


 “I liked that I could buy some cool clothes, new boots, and a good guitar,” she writes about the early days of making it. Toward the end of Reckless, Hynde describes shooting the cover for an early Pretenders album in a pair of boots she’d recently had custom-made by a Greek shoemaker. “There had been a boot-maker in Toronto who some of the getdown boys had come back from, wearing block-heeled, Faces-type things, and I’d always wanted to do that, design and have my own boots made, so it was the first thing I’d done when I got the band together.”


 The cover of the book features a photo of Hynde, sitting in a bathtub, her arms and legs reaching for the camera, her torso completely obscured. On her feet are a pair of block-heeled, pointy-toed Chelsea boots that could match the description above, rendered in a gold foil that makes them stand out in an otherwise black-and-white image. It’s a strange, irreverent pose, one that puts her footwear front and center. These boots are made for walking, it seems to say; no high heels for Hynde. We are looking at a woman in control.


 If there’s a criticism to be made about Reckless, it’s that Hynde, for all her willingness to dredge up the dirt of her storied life, never really lets down her guard. Punk, as Malcolm McLaren knew when he assembled the Sex Pistols, is about image more than anything else. Reckless is about image, too. As Dwight Garner pointed out in his New York Times review of the book, Hynde tells only half the story here, and it’s not always the half you most want to hear. How did she feel about the many traumas of her life? How and when did she give up drugs? What was it like to become a mother? Was she ever able to reconcile with her parents? What about her many love affairs? We’re left in the dark, treated instead to ironic quipping, or another round of fast-paced name-dropping.


 Reckless is as carefully constructed a piece of self-presentation as Hynde’s stage persona—both a sort of armor against the parts of fame that are most unsettling to her. Reckless is the literary equivalent of a long set of bangs, obscuring a heavily shaded pair of eyes. As a portrait of an era, it’s fascinating; but as a window into the soul of its subject and author, it falls short. Chrissie Hynde remains a very cool enigma.




"Brass In Pocket"


 
There is a lot of British slang in the lyrics:

"Got Bottle" - Have courage.

"Skank" - Move your body side to side.

"Reet" - Righteous

"Brass" is a Northern English expression for money, harking back to the days when non-silver coins, or "Coppers" were worth something.




Lead singer Chrissie Hynde grew up in Akron, Ohio and was a student at Kent State University in 1970 when four students were killed by the National Guard. She left for England in 1973, where she formed the group with three guys from Hereford.


 
 Chrissie Hynde rarely explained what her songs were about, but she let on with this one in a 1980 interview with Sounds: "It's very lightweight pop type of song, nothing heavy about it. It's along the lines of the guy who is feeling very insecure, not about pulling a girl but, say, trying to be accepted by the guys down the pub. It's a front he's putting up. It's like buying a pair of new boots and you feel great but then you get home and see you spots in the mirror. Or take a couple of dexies and you're in gear for the evening but on the train home it's different."


She had clearly internalized the British argot. "Pulling a girl" means finding a companion for the evening; "dexies" are Dexedrine pills, which give the user a jolt of energy. At the time, dexy abuse was common in the UK, especially amongst musicians and clubgoers. The band Dexys Midnight Runners took their name from the pill.


 
The song's title came about after The Pretenders first-ever UK gig, when they were in the communal dressing room with The Strangeways, who they were supporting. Chrissie Hynde wanted to know whose trousers were sprawled over the back of a chair. One of The Strangeways Ada Wilson said: "I'll have them if there's any brass in the pockets."


When Chrissie inquired what he meant by brass, it was explained to her that brass is a northern slang term for money. Chrissie fell in love with the expression and was inspired to write the song.


 
It usually doesn't show up in printed lyrics, but at the end of the song, Hynde coos the line, "Oh and the way you walk." She says that's an important part of the song; it's her telling the insecure peacock that she approves of his offering.


 
In the video, directed by Mark Robinson, lead singer Chrissie Hynde plays a waitress, implying that "brass" was the change she got from tips. Hynde worked as a waitress in the US before moving to London.



Note in the video when James Honeymoon-Scott points to the daily special tag on the cafe menu he is holding, at the same point the lyrics of the song hit "I'm special, so special." Pure corn... but funny.

Most Pretenders songs were written solo by Hynde, but the group's guitarist, James Honeyman-Scott, is also a credited writer on this track.


 
This was the breakout hit from the first Pretenders album, which was a triumph by any measure. In the UK, three singles were released before the album appeared. The first was a cover of The Kinks song "Stop Your Sobbing," which was released in January 1979 and reached #34 in March 1979. "Kid" followed in June, going to #33 in August. In November, "Brass In Pocket" was released; it rose to the top in January 1980, and stayed at #1 for two weeks.


The album was also released in January 1980, and went to #1 in the UK. In America, it took a while for the group to get noticed. "Brass In Pocket" was the first single there, going to #14 in May 1980. "Stop Your Sobbing" followed, reaching #65 in July. The album is consistently cited as one of the greatest debuts in rock.


 
In an interview with the Observer newspaper from December 12, 2004, Chrissy Hynde said, "When we recorded the song I wasn't very happy with it and told my producer that he could release it over my dead body, but they eventually persuaded me. So I remember feeling a bit sheepish when it went to #1."



In a VH1 interview, Hynde admitted to loathing the song, and said that since so many fans love it, she continues to play it.


 
The Pretenders came to producer Chris Thomas' attention when he saw them at The Marquee Club in London. He recalls "I especially liked 'Brass In Pocket.' I went backstage to tell Chrissie. However Chrissie told me she didn't really like it. I insisted it was going to be a hit and if she didn't want to record it she should send it over to the producer Willie Mitchell and it would make her a fortune."


 
This song got a resurgence when MTV went on the air in August, 1981. Most American acts didn't make videos, so they had to lean heavily on imports. The Pretenders were a tasty selection because of Hynde, a female American rock singer with great camera presence. The network jumped on their video for "Message Of Love," which was released a few months earlier but was never a hit in America. That one didn't get much heat, but "Brass In Pocket" did, even though it had been out for over a year. Hynde waiting tables became a defining image from their early era.

Thanks in large part to the video, the album got a boost in sales. In August 1982, it was certified Platinum for sales of over 1 million in America.




"Tatooed Love Boys"



This song is about the sexual assault committed by a biker gang against Pretenders leader Chrissie Hynde. While hanging out with a friend, she was asked to go to a "party" with some guys from a local biker gang. Her friend declined, but Hynde went along with the bikers.


She takes full accountability for the attack. In her book Reckless: My Life as a Pretender, she wrote: "Now let me assure you that, technically speaking, however you want to look at it, this was all my doing and I take full responsibility. You can't f--k around with people, especially people who wear 'I heart rape' and 'On Your Knees' badges."



 
While she was being attacked, one of the assailants said, "Shut up or you're going to make some plastic surgeon rich!" She paraphrases that threat in the lyrics:


You know what they say:
"Stop snivellin', you're gonna make some plastic surgeon a rich man"



 
This frantic track makes a sudden stop at the 1:22 mark before going into a wild instrumental breakdown, then ending at a hard 2:59 with a cold ending when Hynde sings, "You are that."


Like most Pretenders songs, Hynde wrote "Tattooed Love Boys" on her own and worked it out with the band, doing it by feel. Without much structure, it made for some unorthodox musical moments like the false ending. She developed a kind of telepathy with her drummer, Martin Chambers, who was able to follow along.


"I can understand her way of doing it," he told Sounds in 1980. "Take 'Tattooed Love Boys' where there's a gap. Normally you'd count the beat through the silence so you can all come back in together. But not with Chrissie. No count, no way. It lasts as long as she wants it to last."


 
There is no chorus in this song, and the title is mentioned just twice in the lyric. That's not the formula for a hit, but it is classic Pretenders. The song has appeared off and on in their setlists throughout their career.


 
This was part of the first Pretenders album, which many count among the greatest debuts in rock. It was most successful in the UK, where Hynde formed the band after moving there from America in 1973. The big hit from the album was "Brass In Pocket," which went to #1 in the UK and became a mainstay in America, thanks in large part to the video. The album also hit #1 in the UK.


 
Chrissie Hynde waited until 2016 to explain this song, which is understandable considering the subject matter. She typically stayed away from interpreting her lyrics, leaving that task to the listener (she also wanted to limit inquiries into her personal life). This song proved especially vexing, especially the line, "I shot my mouth off and you showed me what that hole was for."


 
This first appeared in June 1979 on the B-side of "Kid," which was the second Pretenders single in the UK. The album was released in January 1980.




"Stop Your Sobbing"

Written by Ray Davies and recorded for The Kinks' 1964 self-titled debut album, this was later covered by The Pretenders as their first single. The Pretenders' recording of the song led to the relationship between Davies and the band's frontwoman Chrissie Hynde, which eventually resulted in the birth of a child.


 
In order to convince guitarist James Honeyman-Scott to join the Pretenders, Chrissie Hynde hired one of his favorite recording artists, Nick Lowe, to produce this song.


 
In his autobiography, Ray Davies writes of a girlfriend who may have been the subject of this song: "Her sobbing was making me feel guilty and I told her to stop... there was something so desperately lonely about her."


 
The Pretenders covered another Ray Davies penned track a couple of years later, "I Go To Sleep," for another single release.

 


I don't know a lot, but I know what I like!
     Thread Starter
 

17/1/2019 12:31 am  #1716


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

DAY 478.
Einsturzende Neubauten....................................................Kollaps   (1981)













This'll no' tak lang,they wanted to record "the most unlistenable album ever"......obviously no' heard  Thelonius Monk's ear bleeding offerings.


To be fair they did give it a shot, but what I can't work out is, at what stage of your life do you decide that the sounds of drilling, grinding, and battering bits o' metal wi' a hammer was the way to advance your musical career?


Now I worked fir many years doon the boatyaird, and I was surrounded by caulker/burners rattling away,metal munchers grinding like mad men, ginger beers banging their shifting spanners against anything that made a noise, plumbers banging wooden wedges, trying to get their pipes to meet, labourers swishing their brushes (but obviously never at to a high tempo,) and boys lobbing welding rods in to the Tay (there must be thousands in the Stannergate bit o' the Tay) which made a great whooshing noise, but ken what? not once did I think "man this would make a bra' album," the sheer fuckwittery that goes in to thinking "people will love this" is mind boggling, or have I missed something (let me know if I have,) but I would thoroughly recommend if you haven't already listened to this, please give it a miss, unless of course building noises is your thing!


Anyways, this was a hard listen and one I know I will never have to endure again,this album will most definitely not be coming anywheres near my house.





Bits & Bobs;


EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN

Many young and creative people living amid the state of emergency in West Berlin during the 1980s perceived it as a kind of normality. It was a period in which anything seemed possible.


 When Blixa Bargeld was asked if he wanted to perform at the Moon Club on April 1, 1980, he thought up the band EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN, accepted the gig and called a few friends. The initial members of the band turned out to be musicians who happened to have time that evening. The official birth of EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN is generally linked to this concert. Certainly, no one could have dared to predict back then that the band would continue to be so highly productive, and still be going strong after almost four decades.


 A “Greatest Hits” Tour, beginning in January 2017, with a double concert in the spectacular “Elbphilharmonie” venue in Hamburg – which sold out in record time – demonstrates that the band EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN is still very much alive after nearly 37 years of the most intensive musical ecstasy. The following outline of the eventful history of an evocative band shows why this course should not be taken for granted.


 With the release of its debut album “Kollaps” in November 1981, EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN declared war on all conventional listening habits. The album is actually an “inaudible” record; it is a frontal attack on expectations and ways of listening that have been blunted by mainstream sound. For lack of money, among other reasons, the range of instruments consisted of “found” and self-made objects, created from sheet metal and including drills, hammers, a “non-voice” that snatched shreds of German words from a text, and professional studio equipment, which was consistently used to undermine its actual technical purposes. This nonconformist mixture itself would become the foundation of a completely new understanding of music that would later influence countless artists, and would highly stylize the band’s subsequent albums into milestones of the industrial scene.


 As a construct or entity, EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN is one of the few German bands that internationally sends out a genuine impulse via its unique trendsetting mix. It has affected numerous other bands and art genres – from dance theater to the visual arts; and has also inspired film up to the present-day – from Schlingensief to Tarrantino. Although the media mocked the band in the beginning as a bizarre “curiosity in the divided city,” it quickly established itself around the world as one of the renowned greats of the present and of pop culture. It has influenced an entire generation and even today it provides often copied blueprints for experimental sound art and performance.


 Characterized by its original and radical redefinition of the term “music,” EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN often takes part in unusual and pioneering collaborations, as for instance with the Japanese director Sogho Iishi. The band has also shared far-reaching experiences through theater projects with well-known directors and dramaturges, including Peter Zadek, Heiner Müller and Leander Haussmann, all euphorically documented by the art press. And the band members have received invitations to highly regarded international cultural events, such as documenta 7, the Biennale de Paris and the EXPO in Vancouver.


 Always ahead of its time, around the turn of the millennium the band developed an Internet-based, independent production platform with the help of Erin Zhu. It was called the “Supporter Project” and was free from any ties to the rest of the music industry. It made an enormous output of releases possible for the band from 2001 to 2008, and turned the group into early inventors of what has become the ubiquitous “crowdfunding” today.


 Another impressive highlight in the very eventful and unprecedented history of EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN is marked by the band’s highly symbolic performance at Berlin’s “Palast der Republik” on November 4, 2004. This building, which has been torn down since then, was the former seat of power of the once imposing German Democratic Republic. The impressive live material – including background vocals of a 100-person “supporter choir” – was released on the enthusiastically received “Palast der Republik” album and DVD. In the interim the material has taken on a documentary quality; bearing testimony to an epoch that is now long gone.


 Since 2014, the band has received recognition through a worldwide traveling exhibition on German art of the 1980s. Organized by the Goethe-Institut, a section of the exhibition is dedicated to EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN.


 In the same year, “LAMENT,” a newly composed musical work, commissioned by the region of Flanders to commemorate the start of World War I, was released as an album. It made its specially-conceived, debut performance on November 8, 2014 in Diksmuide, Belgium, the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the war. The resonance for the album and live performance were overwhelmingly positive worldwide, and the work was celebrated as a masterpiece on the extensive tour through Europe that followed.


 The band’s first, long-awaited “Greatest Hits” album is now being released, in November 2016. It is a successful, carefully selected and “audiolicious” cross-section that represents 36+ years of the band’s work. All of the songs are remastered and “Haus der Lüge” is also remixed. As originally intended – but was not possible at the time for a lack of financial resources – this piece is now enhanced with strings and trombones. Of course, the title “Greatest Hits” should be taken in the ironic, tongue-in-cheek spirit in which it is intended.


 Thus, EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN once again offers evidence for the lasting effectiveness of the band’s philo-acoustic long-term therapy. Blixa Bargeld, Alexander Hacke, N. U. Unruh, Rudolf Moser and Jochen Arbeit have completely outgrown the former Berlin Wall malaise, and the apocalyptic visions and death longings of earlier days are already a thing of the past. Meanwhile, the same ardent desires still drive the tireless spirit of its pioneers: EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN will continue its search on an eternal quest for the still undiscovered sound.




 On October 5th, 1981 West Berlin’s pioneers of Industrial Music Einstürzende Neubauten (Collapsing New Buildings) released their first official studio album Kollaps.Prior to Kollaps, the band had released the live to tape cassette  Stahlmusik—which despite being unconventionally recorded live in a pillar in Stadtautobahn Bridge—was more conventional a record than Kollaps, which saw percussionists N.U. Unruh,[/url] and [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.M._Einheit]F.M. Einheit[/url] incorporate found objects an sheets of metal for Neubauten’s trademark harsh industrial sound accented by singer/guitarist [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blixa_Bargeld]Blixa Bargeld screaming vocals.

 'Steh Auf Berlin' (from Kollaps, 1981)


 Beginning with the sound of an electric drill, 'Steh Auf Berlin' contains all the elements the early Neubauten became notorious for: power tools, metal percussion, brute repetition, and screaming lyrics obsessed with decay, disease, and imminent destruction. It's also an exemplary early instance of a later lyrical hallmark, Bargeld's effortlessly multi-layered punning: the title "Steh auf Berlin" means "stand on top of Berlin" but also "I love Berlin" and, as an imperative, "Berlin, wake up!" Their music would soon grow considerably more nuanced and elaborate, but this song's treble-heavy repetitive clang is a perfect document of the brash young band's early sound.



 
 


I don't know a lot, but I know what I like!
     Thread Starter
 

17/1/2019 11:41 am  #1717


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

DAY 479.
Siouxsie And The Banshees...................................Juju   (1981)












Have to say I enjoyed this one better than the last one from the book (The Scream,) which it was basically, especially with her propensity for doing her wobbly bit at he end of most lines.


This will have to be a quicky as I've got to catch a train shortly, as I said I did enjoy this one, and my favourite tracks were "Spellbound" "Night Shift" and "Head Cut."



As "her indoors" has a greatest hits CD, this album wont be going into my collection





Bits & Bobs;



Have already written quite a bit about this band in post #1625 (if interested)




Despite a potentially calamitous walk-out by the band's original guitarist and drummer in September 1979, the following year found Siouxsie And The Banshees enjoying their most success yet, with two hit singles and a Top 10 album, 'Kaleidoscope'.  By the end of 1980, with drummer Budgie and guitarist John McGeoch both installed as full-time members, The Banshees were a working unit once more - and with something to prove."We were still a young band," says bassist Steven Severin, "and we couldn't wait to move on to the next thing.  Most of 1980 had been spent regrouping.  We barely toured at all.  But 1981 was virtually non-stop live work.  We took a month off to record 'Juju' and the rest of the time was spent on the road.  That certainly helped get us this wider audience.  And that's when we got the Suzettes!  Every town we played, 40 or 50 Siouxsie clones would turn up."

 Siouxsie had defined the female punk look as early as December 1976, when she and Steven joined The Sex Pistols for their headline-grabbing appearance on Thames Television's 'Today' show.  By 1981, her part-dominatrix, part silent movie queen persona had become even more stylised and distinctive.  Her jet-black hair now crimped into a shock-headed crown of long spikes, her body encased in leather and lace, fishnets on her arms, and her face a modern-day Cleopatra mask, Siouxsie had become a style icon for a generation of ambitious, thrill-seeking young women.


 "But we didn't want to go on stage and be faced by a load of Siouxsie cartoon figures,"  she once said.  "that was missing the point."


 "We equated all that mimickry as an overflow from glam," Severin adds, "the way that people would dress up as Bowie or Bryan Ferry.  Of course, it was part and parcel of being popular."


 While 'Israel', the band's Christmas 1980 single, narrowly missed a Top 40 placing, it confirmed the group's standing among the so-called alternative crowd, those for whom punk and its aftershocks represented a radical challenge to the mainstream.


 "As 1981 started," Severin remembered in 2003, "it was a weird time in music because a lot of the old guard had fallen away or changed.  The Pistols had finished and (John) Lydon had formed Public Image Ltd.  The Clash were in America, and even post-punk acts like Joy Division had split.  People used to say that bands like Public Image Ltd., Joy Division, even The Cure were ripping us off, but I preferred to think they were having the same ideas as us, but just a bit later.  Maybe that's being a little generous, but I did feel they were kindred spirits to some extent."


 None of these groups enjoyed the cachet that Siouxsie And The Banshees had.  The Banshees' long, hard, 'no compromises' struggle to find success had earned them a genuine Class Of '76 badge of authenticity.  And that only enhanced their appeal to younger audiences, who began to follow the group with almost tribal-like loyalty.  'Juju', a self-contained spectacular of the macabre and the magical, provided this audience with a near-perfect soundtrack.


 "If the album sounds unified, that's because it was prepared that way," says Steven Severin.  "It was rigorously rehearsed and played live before we even thought about recording it.  We thought, OK, we're a touring band now, so let's work to the strengths of that.  We played a series of shows in February and March 1981 and most of the songs destined for 'Juju' were debuted then."


 "It was," said Sioux, "the complete opposite of the way we'd done 'Kaleidoscope'."


 Whereas 'Kaleidoscope' had been conceived as a set of songs united only in their diversity, 'Juju' grew from one central idea.  "'Juju' was the first time we'd made, for want of a better word a 'concept' album that drew on darker elements," Severin said recently.  "It wasn't pre-planned, but as we were writing, we saw a definite thread running through the songs, almost a narrative to the album as a whole.  The African statue on the cover, which we found in the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill, was the starting point for a lot of the imagery."


 'Juju' has since become regarded as the ultimate 'goth' album.  "The Banshees would never say they were a goth band because it's simply not true" said John McGeoch.  "They paved the way for other people to say they were goth bands, but it simplifies things too much to give it a label like that.  We were more thriller than horror movie, more Hitchcockian blood dripping on a daisy than putting fangs in something."


 Because all the songs had been, says Severin, "honed to perfection and bullied into shape by playing them live", there was only a hint of studio experimentation when The Banshees came to record the album in March and April 1981, again with Nigel Gray producing.  "Everything was crisp by then," Severin explains.  "We'd already been through the 'lose that verse, lose that change, you're losing the audience' bit already.  We knew exactly what we were playing, and what overdubs we wanted to do."


 "It really felt like a solid unified group around that time," added Sioux.  "A lot could be understood without anyone necessarily saying it."


 Fired up with a sense of unity and purpose they'd not experienced since recording 'The Scream' in 1978, Siouxsie And The Banshees knew they had a work of real significance within their grasp.  And, if some of the record harked back to the vintage Banshees group sound, there was also inspiration from another, less likely quarter.  "Me and McGeoch talked about 'Their Satanic Majesties Request' - era Rolling Stones a lot while we were working on 'Juju'," says Severin.  "We weren't necessarily going to dress up in capes and pointy hats, but we wanted that 'Stones or Small Faces go psych' feel."


 Both 'Spellbound' and 'Arabian Knights' were urgent, electric-acoustic and dramatic, full sounding restatements of the band's original style.  "They just came out like that," says Severin.  "They were both strikingly obvious singles, though they weren't written deliberately for that purpose."


 'Spellbound' was classic Banshee Pop, whilst 'Arabian Knights', a despairing song that looks at the oppression of women in the Middle East, was accompanied by scenes reminiscent of an old Alexander Korda epic, complete wit mock swordfights and flying carpets.  "That wasn't such an obvious single," reckons Severin.  "In fact it opens quite moodily, before you get to the chanting chorus."


 The hits might have helped boost sales, but what really transformed 'Juju' into one of the key Banshees albums were the four lengthy epics that provided the cornerstones of the band's live shows, both throughout this period and beyond.


 Coming after the two singles, and the gloriously corrupted funk of 'Into The Light' Steven Severin's 'Halloween'  marked a dramatic change in pace.  Although milking the title for all it was worth ("trick or treat"), the song was actually based on a revelation the bassist experienced when he was six.  "I suddenly realised that I was a separate person," he said.  "I was no longer simply part of things.  And once you realise that, you've lost a certain innocence."


 If 'Halloween' was the most furiously paced of the quintessential quartet, the five-minute-plus 'Monitor' was the most relentless and dirge-like.  "It's about tower block muggings," said Siouxsie around the time of the album's release.  "I read that they installed monitor cameras in the building and eventually people use to watch them more than TV!," she continued with considerable - and Orwellian-like - prescience.


 Sandwiched between the two epic performances on the second side of the original vinyl LP are 'Sin In My Heart', a cue for Sioux to pick up her teardrop-style guitar on stage, and the woefully underrated 'Head Cut', a breathtakingly intense song that literally exhausts Sioux by the end.


 Inevitably, though, it's 'Night Shift' and 'Voodoo Dolly' that steal the show.  Both break the six-minute mark, both are full of menace, shifts in dynamics and are both tailor-made for the stage.


 'Night Shift' was based on a true-life murderer.  "This news journalist told me that they had a lot of information about the (Yorkshire) Ripper before he was caught," said Sioux in 1981.  "I don't know how true... that he was a necrophiliac, at least while he was a gravedigger, and that was why he wanted to work the night shift."


 Although the song's dramatic build-up sounds perfectly accomplished to ordinary ears, Steven Severin now admits that, "of all the songs on 'Juju', that one's the least prepar4ed.  It sounds loose, a bit hesitant though that's quite charming to me.  Someone once told us it reminded them of Led Zeppelin's 'Kashmir', so as time went on, we decided to make it more 'Kashmir' than 'Kashmir'!"


 If ever a song threatened to encapsulate Siouxsie Sioux in song, it is - for better or for worse - 'Voodoo Dolly'.  It's virtually impossible to listen to it without recalling her flamboyant, flamenco-influenced dancing and dramatic falls to the floor at the climax of The Banshees' live show.  As the slow, funeral pace picks up, Sioux appears to become increasingly possessed by spirits conjured up by the song, or "that little drum in your ear".  Either live or on record, 'Voodoo Dolly' was always a spellbinding performance, a seven-minute incantation to the unthinkable that ends in an old-fashioned, all guns blazing climax.


 "That's the song that brought all the skulls and beads out," says Steven Severin, recalling the era when Siouxsie became the undisputed witch queen of the British rock underground.  "But look at the photos on the inner cover and she's wearing white lipstick like a Mary Quant mod.  It was as much '60s as it was anything else."


 'Juju' did have a horror theme to it, but it was psychological horror and nothing to do with ghosts and ghouls.  We were quite confident with the image we were putting across, and were starting to play with it a bit."


 Not that their audiences - or the many bands that followed in their wake - always understood that.  "I've always thought that one of our greatest strengths was our ability to craft tension in music and subject matter," Sioux added.  "'juju' had a strong identity, which the goth bands that came in our wake tried to mimic, but they simply ended up diluting it.  They were using horror as the basis for stupid rock 'n' roll pantomime.  There was no sense of tension in their music."








 .


I don't know a lot, but I know what I like!
     Thread Starter
 

17/1/2019 7:06 pm  #1718


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

Einsturzende Neubauten: what a fucking racket!

I quite like it, but it's for listening to alone in an empty house when next door's dug is barking.

Never really got into The Pretenders, some of the singles were just ok, but, being a Kinks fan, I didn't like their cover so much.

A/C, you're doing well keeping this going, I think I'm liking these albums generally less and less.

 

17/1/2019 11:00 pm  #1719


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

PatReilly wrote:

A/C, you're doing well keeping this going.

Back atcha' Pat, I think you've replied to every album!
Much appreciated
 


I don't know a lot, but I know what I like!
     Thread Starter
 

17/1/2019 11:50 pm  #1720


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

DAY 480.
Heaven 17.............................................Penthouse And Pavement   (1981)













This ain takes be back to when Fatties was at it's best,that's in my humbles of course, I remember Ned Jordan played "Fascist Groove Thang" quite a lot around this time and put me on to them.


I really loved listening to this one (and how cool is the cover), although nowadays the production seems a bit thin/light or something like that,it doesn't feel full and rounded if that makes any sense, I bought this when it first came out and whether it's memory driven or it's just great music of it's time,I can't see any reason that I wouldn't want to buy it again.



Synth-Pop?............. bring it on, every track fir me is worth the entrance fee and more, from "(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang" to the final track "We're Going to Live for a Very Long Time" all solid gold in my humbles, maybe you had to be going around with a certain group of friends at that certain time to appreciate how good this feels, but I did and I do.


This album will be going into my collection, and if you're from a different generation to me, give it a blast you never know, you might be taken with it.





Bits & Bobs;



Heaven 17 were formed by former The Human League founder members Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware. Glenn Gregory had been Human League's original choice when seeking a vocalist for the band but he was unavailable at the time, so they chose Philip Oakey instead. When Marsh and Ware left the group in 1980, they enlisted Gregory for their new project.


 
Ware and Marsh formed British Electric Foundation (B.E.F.) around the same time. The production group is best known for relaunching Tina Turner's career with her covers of "Ball Of Confusion" and "Let's Stay Together."


 
They were named after the band in Anthony Burgess' novel and Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange. The story line has fictional group Heaven Seventeen at #4 in the charts with "Inside."


 
Heaven 17 achieved three UK Top 20 hits, "Temptation" (#2), "Come Live With Me" (#5) and "Crushed by the Wheels of Industry" (#17). Their biggest commercial success was their debut album Penthouse And Pavement , which spent 76 weeks in the UK album chart between 1981 and 1983.


 
Heaven 17 had little commercial success in the US, because of their reluctance to tour. Martyn Ware said: "We'd never had any intention for touring with Heaven 17 because we lost quite a bit of money touring - un-recouped stuff. It was the start of MTV, and we figured that with the money that we would have spent on tour support, why don't we – in a very modern way - service all the world's markets simultaneously with spending that money on making good videos?"



"It worked, in terms of making us internationally popular," he added. " But America at that time was still wrapped up with the idea of touring bands. Because we didn't tour, we had a negative impact on the record company and the system in general taking us seriously. 'Who are these weird English dudes who refuse to tour? Who the hell do they think they are? So it generally had a negative effect on sales. Having said that, the hipsters liked us in New York and L.A. and San Francisco - on the coasts, really. But because we never really toured, we never 'broke' in America, in that sense."


 
Heaven 17 made their first live performance in 1986 on the UK television program The Tube (with the help of backing tapes).


 
Although most of the band's music was recorded in the 1980s, Heaven 17 have occasionally reformed to record and perform. Marsh left the band in 2007 but Ware and Gregory have continued to keep the Heaven 17 name alive.






Classic Album: Penthouse And Pavement – Heaven 17





How two members of Sheffield’s most pioneering pop group split to form a new politically-driven band that would ultimately rewrite the rule book with a debut album of icy electronica and futuristic funk…

Following the release of Reproduction and Travelogue, two landmark albums during the burgeoning synth-pop movement of the late-70s, The Human League’s failure to live up to their promise commercially proved to be hugely problematic for the band as the 80s dawned.

 Proclaimed as “the future of pop music” by David Bowie, the Sheffield collective’s frustration that those titles languished unsold in record shops while their peers – OMD, Gary Numan and Visage had taken the sound to the top of the charts brought tensions within the band to a head.

 Fearing that the pressure to have a hit would cause the group to implode, manager Bob Last engineered a split, unceremoniously ousting founding member Martyn Ware from the line-up.

 “I turned up at the studio one day and they said they were throwing me out of the group,” Martyn told the BBC in 2015. “I was extremely hurt because not only were we very close as a band, Phil [Oakey] had been my best friend for years prior to that. There was an increasing amount of niggling arguments within the band – between myself and Phil in particular. But at that age we were just locking horns trying to determine who was the alpha male of the group – the founder or the lead singer. But what I didn’t know was that Bob Last and the record company had already come to the conclusion that the band wasn’t going to work and had engineered a plan to destabilise the group by dropping words in Phil’s ear, telling him he should be the star and that it should be a vehicle for straightforward pop.”

 While Martyn felt betrayed and let down by his former friend and colleague, he was comforted by the loyalty of bandmate Ian Craig Marsh, who also left The Human League to work with him on the British Electric Foundation (BEF), an experimental production company on which they could collaborate with established artists and launch new projects. The pair soon recruited Glenn Gregory to complete their new music group.

 Glenn had been one of Martyn’s best friends since they went to school together and was originally in the picture to front The Human League.

 His decision to move to London to pursue a career in photography prevented him joining The League, but his regular retreats back home ensured he was kept abreast of what was happening on the social scene.

 Gregory was a key figure on the Sheffield live music scene, frequenting the Meat Whistle arts project, the launchpad for countless groups – including Cabaret Voltaire and Clock DVA. He was back in Sheffield on a photography assignment to shoot Joe Jackson for Sounds magazine when Martyn asked him to join the band – an offer he accepted on the spot.

 The friendship between Ian, Glenn and Martyn was fundamental to the instant rapport they had in the studio and set about creating their own musical manifesto. While the new-look Human League had dared to change their direction in favour of a pure pop approach, Heaven 17 decided to take a wider view and incorporate their political opinions into their music.

 “It was a very political time and we wanted to address that in our music,” Gregory told the BBC. “At the same time, we still wanted it to be dance music. However, pop music and political sentiment are two entirely different things and didn’t mix, even though we wanted them to.”

 Sheffield was going through an economic crisis following the deconstruction of the city’s steel industry. The buildings that once thrived with the buzz of manufacturing were often used as rental spaces for musicians, artists and filmmakers. After taking advantage of the minimal asking fees to use these disused factories and warehouses to write and demo tracks, the group’s relocation into a studio only fuelled their creativity further.

 While the city may have had an abundance of rehearsal rooms and creative hubs, professional studios were scarce and Heaven 17 found themselves sharing a studio with The Human League, who were simultaneously recording their own breakthrough opus Dare.

 The two bands were forced to establish a shift pattern with one recording at night, and the other taking over during the day. Sneaking a listen to what his former group had recorded, the sense of rivalry only fuelled Martyn’s own creativity.

 “I was massively motivated – it was like this great explosive supernova of creativity unlike anything I’d experienced before or since,” he said.

 Within days, the band had written and recorded (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang, a song which would shape their musical identity, juxtaposing upbeat, dance-influenced tracks with lyrics which hammered home their political views – issues such as the arms race, nuclear war, religious extremism and the rise of the yuppie, a stance that set them apart from many of their peers.

 John Wilson, a local session musician, was recruited to contribute the bass solo to Fascist Groove Thang. The result proved invaluable, not only for the song, but to the whole way the group wrote music – Ware later said meeting John alongside the invention of the Linn LM-1 drum machine were the two most significant occurrences during making the album. Wilson’s accomplished ability as a rhythm guitarist allowed them to be more adventurous in their songwriting and created an entirely new avenue for them to explore.


 

 Material recorded with Wilson had a new wave warmth and a more varied sound than the sparse electronics they had previously restricted themselves to.

 The trio highlighted the contrast in material by dividing their debut album into two: the ‘pavement’ side of the album represented their primitive, electronic side while ‘penthouse’ was where they featured a more vibrant, experimental sound.

 Aside from the sonic reference, Penthouse And Pavement represented their own journey. “The duality of the penthouse and the pavement was the aspiration of what the working class could do if they set their minds to it, but grounded in a grim reality as we saw it,” Martyn says. “The pavement side was us waving goodbye to our pure, electronic pop – that’s where we came from. The penthouse stuff was really an indication of where we were heading musically.”

 The public’s first taste of Heaven 17 came with the release of debut single (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang in March 1981. Received positively by the music press, it looked like Heaven 17 would score a huge hit and get their big breakthrough. However, a ban slapped on the song by Radio 1 for its controversial lyrics proved disastrous and the single stalled outside the Top 40.

 Two months later the group released Play To Win, again the single failed to crack the Top 40 despite radio airplay and a performance on Top Of The Pops. This proved even more disappointing for Martyn and Ian, as it coincided with The Human League’s first Top 20 success with The Sound Of The Crowd.

 

 Undeterred, the trio released their debut album in September 1981. Critics praised their bravery in tackling global issues and their innovative take on synth-pop by incorporating futuristic funk into the mix. Despite not having produced a genuine hit single, the album reached No.14 in the UK and spent a total of 77 weeks in the chart, making BEF’s first pop project a success.

 The album’s iconic artwork by Ray Smith helped define their aesthetic. The depiction of the band as businessmen wearing sleek suits surrounded by the latest state-of-the-art technology was an ironic take on the emerging yuppie culture and capitalist greed.

 However, the message was lost on the movement it was mocking and songs such as Let’s All Make A Bomb became adopted anthems by oblivious fat cats and city traders.

 “Ian came up with the title of Penthouse And Pavement and we loved it. He also brought in a Newsweek magazine or something like that,” Glenn told Penny Black Music. “There was an ad in it for something like Toshiba. It was a really dull ad for big business and Ian said we should make something like that the front cover. From there we came up with the logos which appear on the sleeve of ‘The New Partnership – That’s opening doors all over the world’ and ‘Sheffield-Edinburgh-London’. The latter came from a packet of Dunhill cigarettes that was in the studio and had something like “London-Paris-Rome” on it. We stole all kinds of influences like that.”

 The careful construction of that slick image was a deliberate attempt at presenting themselves as a brand rather than a band, pre-empting the direction of the music business in years to come.

 Having taken their name from a fictional pop group of the future, Heaven 17’s forward- thinking and innovation in determining how a modern pop group should function has proved alarmingly prophetic now we are living in their future – with not only the group’s sound, but the political issues they highlighted as relevant as they ever were.



The Songs


 1. (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang 
Clocking in at almost 160 BPM, (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang owes more to the futuristic dance of Giorgio Moroder than the experimental electro of Kraftwerk. Completed within 10 days of forming, Heaven 17 took an instrumental track called Groove Thang, which they had initially written for the debut British Electric Foundation album Music For Stowaways, and developed it for their debut single. Adding a bass guitar rhythm track by John Wilson, the song was given a funky, new-wave feel. The single’s condemnation of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan proved an ill-fated move. The song was banned by the BBC due to concerns by Radio 1’s legal department that it libelled the new US leader.


 2. Penthouse And Pavement
Drawing an obvious influence from American R&B, the album’s title track is a funk-driven groove that prominently features female back-up singer Josie James on the chorus (a template which they would later perfect on their biggest hit, Temptation) and rhythm guitarist John Wilson. On the surface a party song, its lyrics tell a different story, alluding to being a slave of a greedy capitalist system – a theme they would further explore on 1983’s Crushed By The Wheels Of Industry.


 3. Play To Win 
Undeterred by the under-performance of (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang, Play To Win was released as a single. Once again using dance music to soften the blow of their political message, Play To Win landed them their first spot on Top Of The Pops. Despite the increased promotion, Play To Win only reached No.46 – one spot lower than …Fascist Groove Thang. In 2016, the song was introduced to a whole new generation when New York DJs The Martinez Brothers remixed it and made it one of Ibiza’s biggest tracks of the summer.


 4. Soul Warfare
Continuing the theme of selling your soul, track four on the album continued to hammer home the group’s anti-capitalist stance. Presenting an overwhelming sense of spiritual desolation, Soul Warfare highlights capitalism’s game-playing and the strategy that is involved in acquiring control: “You could be part of me/ Forget the wealth you’re forsaking/ Your strategy is clear/ My soul is there for the taking.” It is this damning call that brings the ‘pavement’ aspect of the record to a close.


 5. Geisha Boys And Temple Girls 
Ushering in a different sound, Side Two begins the ‘penthouse’ sequence of songs. Contrasting sharply with the numbers on Side One, Geisha Boys And Temple Girls kicks off with a distinct synth solo which sounds like a cutting-edge take on a classical piece – very reminiscent of the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange.


 6. Let’s All Make A Bomb 
Let’s All Make A Bomb is one of the album’s most misunderstood tracks, with many believing it to be about making money. Ware denies the lazy interpretation, explaining it to be: “About mutually assured destruction and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. You’d never put those in the lyrics but that was the philosophical basis we were working from.” Highlighting the ridiculous notion that governments would happily fund war and arms, rather than tackling global issues such as famine, disease or industry, Let’s All Make A Bomb is more relevant today than ever.


 7. The Height Of The Fighting 
Released as the final single from the album in 1982, The Height Of The Fighting failed to chart. Dealing with the subject of the Cold War arms race, the track serves as both a rallying plea for anti-capitalist insurgency while simultaneously satirising militarism. Musically, the song’s innovative use of synths and samples, proved influential for a whole generation of electronica artists.


 8. Song With No Name 
If there was ever any doubt as to how much of an input Martyn and Ian had into The Human League, the eerie Song With No Name dispels it. This curious number appears to tell the story of an artist struggling with debilitating writer’s block, before smacking the listener with its sinister, concluding twist.


 9. We’re Going To Live For A Very Long Time 
The album’s closer, We’re Going To Live For A Very Long Time is another deceptively cheerful track. With its sing-along chorus inviting everyone to join them, Heaven 17 use joyous terms such as “fun” and “party line”, but the offer is however prefaced with: “on the way to heaven”… giving the song a bleak inevitability.




 The Players

Martyn Ware 



As songwriter and producer on Penthouse And Pavement, Ware also provided backing vocals, played synthesisers, piano, percussion and programmed the Linn drum machine. During the 80s he worked for other artists, producing Tina Turner’s Private Dancer album and Terence Trent D’Arby’s Introducing The Hardline According To… before applying his production skills to Erasure’s I Say I Say I Say in the early-90s.


 
Ian Craig Marsh 



As a member of performance-art group Musical Vomit One, Marsh was a prominent figure on Sheffield’s punk scene in the late-70s. He swapped his guitar for a keyboard and founded The Human League, British Electric Foundation and Heaven 17 with Martyn. Ian left Heaven 17 in 2006 and no longer performs, choosing instead to teach music.


 
Glenn Gregory 




Gregory started out by performing with Ian Craig Marsh in a number of Sheffield-based bands, before leaving for London to pursue a career in photography. He returned to the city in 1981 to join Heaven 17 as the group’s lead singer. He has also worked with Martyn on BEF projects and established a career in soundtrack music, writing for radio, TV and film.



 The Big Picture 


 Having hoodwinked the yuppies into thinking that they were in their corner with their Penthouse And Pavement album cover, the video to the title track continued with the same 80s city slicker image. Set in the headquarters of the BEF (British Electric Foundation), the video features the sharp-dressed men of the album cover brought to life. While seemingly on the verge of closing a big deal, their secretary (played by actress Emma Relph) conspires against them before she is uncovered. Penthouse And Pavement’s ambitious clip set the bar for Heaven 17’s increasingly cinematic future videos enhancing their polished image.



 Play To Win



Having been designed as a new concept of pop group under the British Electric Foundation moniker, Heaven 17 originally set out to only be a studio-based band. With no plans to ever play live, believing tours to be “outdated”, Ware and Co favoured the new medium of music videos to promote their music.

 As well as the challenges presented by recreating their tech-based sound in a live setting (they felt live instrumentation would change their sound too much), the two years Martyn and Ian had gigged with The Human League had proved financially disastrous. Concerts hadn’t translated into record sales and it was too much of a risk to take Heaven 17 on the road for fear of similar circumstances. Years later they would concede that touring would have cost less than their lavish videography.

 Aside from TV performances on the likes of Top Of The Pops and The Tube, the group didn’t play a full live concert until the mid-90s.

 However, when they did embrace the live arena, it kicked off a whole new era for the band and unexpectedly re-energised them. Beginning with spots on the Big Rewind 80s package tours and The Steel Town Tour (a joint venture with former foes the Human League and ABC), Heaven 17 proved to be an accomplished live draw. Unfulfilled by the short, hits-exclusive sets those tours limited them to, in 2010 they embarked on a headline tour to mark the 30th anniversary of Penthouse And Pavement. Playing the album live in its entirety, the tour was a resounding success – both for the band and their fanbase. It was so triumphant, in fact, that they decided to do it all again for the 35th anniversary in 2016.


 
 

Last edited by arabchanter (18/1/2019 1:23 am)


I don't know a lot, but I know what I like!
     Thread Starter
 

18/1/2019 12:09 am  #1721


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

Can I just say thank fuck I've eventually caught up, and from tomorrow I can get back to one album per day.............stick it up in the morning and haver shite about it at night.


Also can I thank everyone who looks in, I've just noticed that there's been over 100,000 views (106,506) and when I think back to the start we were getting about 10 views an album (now it works out at about 219 views per album.

Thanks also to Tek for allowing me to use his board as a vehicle to jot down my rabid mumblings, and of course all the people who have taken the time to join in (you know who you are,) and once again it's the same as any other thread on here, it's free to join in and I'd be very happy to see your contribution/thoughts.


I don't know a lot, but I know what I like!
     Thread Starter
 

18/1/2019 12:10 am  #1722


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

sorry,double posted somehow

Last edited by arabchanter (18/1/2019 12:12 am)


I don't know a lot, but I know what I like!
     Thread Starter
 

18/1/2019 10:10 am  #1723


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

I must be losing it, I could have swore it was in Fat Sams I first heard Heaven 17 but it couldn't have been,according to Retro Dundee Fatties opened in December 1983, so I'm out by at least a couple of years.

The late 70s and 80sBC (before children) were liquid and other stimulant fueled times, but I definitely heard Jordan playing it somewhere and us having a conversation about it, and still believe the early days in Fatties were the best, so sorry for the mixed up info,but age does play tricks with your mind


 

Last edited by arabchanter (18/1/2019 10:55 am)


I don't know a lot, but I know what I like!
     Thread Starter
 

18/1/2019 10:21 am  #1724


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

ALBUM 481
The Go-Go's..............................................Beauty and the Beat   (1981)









Beauty and the Beat is the debut album by new wave band The Go-Go's. It was released on July 8, 1981 and charted at #1 on Billboard’s Hot 200.

 It was the first number 1 album to be written and performed by an all female group. It’s widely considered to be one of the cornerstones of American new wave and one of the best debut albums of all time.


I've always liked "Our Lips Are Sealed" and thought the Fun Boy Three just done a cover of it, I didn't realise Terry Hall co-wrote it, everyday's a school day eh.
 


I don't know a lot, but I know what I like!
     Thread Starter
 

18/1/2019 12:28 pm  #1725


Re: 1001 albums you must hear before you die

Siouxsie And The Banshees: I like Siouxsie’s voice, and the collective band sound, but apart from a couple of tracks including the outstanding Spellbound, Juju as an album isn’t in any way outstanding to me. But it was well received and critically acclaimed, so what do I know?
 
I’ve got Heaven 17’s Penthouse and Pavement, but inherited it when my brother in law went away to Oz. It’s actually a very good record, one which I sort of missed when it came out. Was aware of a couple of the singles, but preferred other electronic bands at the point P&P was released. The opening side is great, overshadowing side two in my view, which is also fine.
 
Finally saw them in 2007 in Callendar Park when they shared top billing with Sheffield compatriots Human League (the night following St Mirren beating us at Tannadice in the afternoon with contemporary cheat of the time Kenny Clark sending off Noel Hunt early on). They played most of the tracks off P&P, but to be brutally honest they struggled recreating their sound. Human League were easily the better performers that night.

 

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