Tekel Towers » 1001 albums you must hear before you die

arabchanter · 25/9/2019 9:53 am

Album 547.
The Fall.................................This Nation's Saving Grace (1985)

In 1985, Mark E Smith and The Fall unleashed their tenth and most complete album to date. Producer John Leckie gave the group a far more polished sound, horrifying Smith, who insisted the finished record was mastered from hos sonically inferior cassette copy. Indeed the sweet acoustic melodies of "Paint Work" are rudely interrupted because Smith accidentally pressed "record" on his home tape deck, creating an abstract but effective sound collage.

This Nation's Saving Grace saw The Fall gain wider acceptance, and is a great example of their ability to be pop without having to compromise their stance.

arabchanter · 26/9/2019 9:09 am

Album 548.
Abdullah Ibrahim...................Water From An Ancient Well (1985)

No album better captures his stately, deceptively, simple music than Water From An Ancient Well, featuring superlative Ekaya, with flautist Carlos Ward, tenor saxophonist Ricky Ford, baritone saxophonist Charles Davis, bassist David Williams and drummer Ben Riley.

His expansive voicings give the musicians vast territory to explore, while his folk-like themes capture the poetry of daily life in South Africa

Sounds a bit Jazzy

Will try and get Springsteen done later tonight.

arabchanter · 26/9/2019 10:58 pm

shedboy wrote:
Never heard of minuteman so you have introduced me to something very new here

As for the Fall - that album isnt everyones cup of tea but it is certainly one that changed my life. Be keen to hear feedback on it. I subsequently went on to meet Mark and even play on certain tracks (much much later) but like most he sacked me and started again. He was a genius but a drunk and sometimes brutal person.

Still and always will love the fall.

Good to hear from you shedboy, I hope you're well bud.

He did seem to be a bit cranky from what I've read, but got to be honest I don't think I would have been able to take his pish without giving him a right hander, my old man used to say "the gift of growing old is, you can recognise a cunt before they open their mouth" I don't think he was far wrong!

Don't be a stranger.

arabchanter · 27/9/2019 12:40 am

Album 546.
Bruce Springsteen............................Born In The U.S.A. (1984)

When I seen this I thought not this cunt again, this is now the fourth album by Springsteen that's been in this book, and still churning out his morbid lyrics, but the funny thing was I didn't mind this one so much. This may have instigated a new category..............drehvin' music, now I dinnay mean nipping to the shops fir a pint o' coo, I mean a bit of open road, maybe going to an away match, slap it on in the motor and you've got yourself forty odd minutes of fine traveling music.

This is obviously at odds with my previous thoughts on Mr Springsteen, but even though I wouldn't give any of his albums "hoose room," but I do think this album has so many sing-along anthemic songs that stuck in the "jam jar" you could have a wee sing-song or at least a toe-tap to alleviate the boredom.

I thought most of the tracks were decent, but my favourite has to be I'm On Fire always had a saft spot fir that ane, under three minutes and affy catchy in my humbles, but there was a good cross section of styles on this album, the only thing is I really can only go a couple of tracks at a time if I was indoors sitting listening to this, maybe If I was in the car and your moving I think I could cope better.............but time will tell.

This album wont be going into my vinyl collection but will be downloaded fir the motor.

Bits & Bobs;

Have already written about Springsteen in posts 335, 409 and 511 (if interested)

Born in the U.S.A.          July 19, 1984 4:00AM ET

By Debby Miller

Though it looks at hard times, at little people in little towns choosing between going away and getting left behind, Born in the U.S.A, Bruce Springsteen’s seventh album, has a rowdy, indomitable spirit. Two guys pull into a hick town begging for work in “Darlington County,” but Springsteen is whooping with sha-la-las in the chorus. He may shove his broody characters out the door and send them cruising down the turnpike, but he gives them music they can pound on the dashboard to.

He’s set songs as well drawn as those on his bleak acoustic album, Nebraska, to music that incorporates new electronic textures while keeping as its heart all of the American rock & roll from the early Sixties. Like the guys in the songs, the music was born in the U.S.A.: Springsteen ignored the British Invasion and embraced instead the legacy of Phil Spector’s releases, the sort of soul that was coming from Atlantic Records and especially the garage bands that had anomalous radio hits. He’s always chased the utopian feeling of that music, and here he catches it with a sophisticated production and a subtle change in surroundings — the E Street Band cools it with the saxophone solos and piano arpeggios — from song to song.  The people who hang out in the new songs dread getting stuck in the small towns they grew up in almost as much as they worry that the big world outside holds no possibilities — a familiar theme in Springsteen’s work. But they wind up back at home, where you can practically see the roaches scurrying around the empty Twinkie packages in the linoleum kitchen. In the first line of the first song, Springsteen croaks, “Born down in a dead man’s town, the first kick I took was when I hit the ground.” His characters are born with their broken hearts, and the only thing that keeps them going is imagining that, as another line in another song goes, “There’s something happening somewhere.”

Though the characters are dying of longing for some sort of payoff from the American dream, Springsteen’s exuberant voice and the swell of the music clues you that they haven’t given up. In “No Surrender,” a song that has the uplifting sweep of his early anthem “Thunder Road,” he sings, “We made a promise we swore we’d always remember” no retreat, no surrender.” His music usually carries a motto like that. He writes a heartbreaking message called “Bobby Jean,” apparently to his longtime guitarist Miami Steve Van Zandt, who’s just left his band — “Maybe you’ll be out there on that road somewhere . . . in some motel room there’ll be a radio playing and you’ll hear me sing this son/Well, if you do, you’ll know I’m thinking of you and all the miles in between” — but he gives the song a wall of sound with a soaring saxophone solo. That’s classic Springsteen: the lyrics may put a lump in your throat, but the music says, Walk tall or don’t walk at all.  A great dancer himself, Springsteen puts an infectious beat under his songs. In the wonderfully exuberant “I’m Goin’ Down,” a hilarious song that gets its revenge, he makes a giddy run of nonsense syllables out of the chorus while drummer Max Weinberg whams out a huge backbeat. And “Working on the Highway,” whips into an ecstatic rocker that tells a funny story, hand-claps keeping the time about crime and punishment. Shifting the sound slightly, the band finds the right feeling of paranoia for “Cover Me,” the lone song to resurrect that shrieking, “Badlands”-style guitar, and the right ironic fervor for the Vietnam vet’s yelping about the dead ends of being “Born in the U.S.A.” Though there’s no big difference between these and some of the songs on Springsteen’s last rock LP, The River, these feel more delightfully offhanded.

The album finds its center in those cheering rock songs, but four tracks – the last two on either side — give the album an extraordinary depth. Springsteen has always been able to tell a story better than he can write a hook, and these lyrics are way beyond anything anybody else is writing. They’re sung in such an unaffected way that the starkness stabs you. In “My Hometown,” the singer, remembers sitting on his father’s lap and steering the family Buick as they drove proudly through town; but the boy grows up, and the final scene has him putting his own son on his lap for a last drive down a street that’s become a row of vacant buildings. “Take a good look around,” he tells his boy, repeating what his father told him, “this is your hometown.”

The tight-lipped character who sings “I’m On Fire” practically whispers about the desire that’s eating him up. “Sometimes it’s like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull, and cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my skull,” he rasps. The way the band’s turned down to just a light rattle of drums, faint organ and quiet, staccato guitar notes makes his lust seem ominous: you picture some pock-marked Harry Dean Stanton type, lying, too wired to sleep, in a motel room.  That you get such a vivid sense of these characters is because Springsteen gives them voices a playwright would be proud of. In “Working on the Highway,: all he says is “One day I looked straight at her and she looked straight back” to let us know the guy’s in love. And in the saddest song he’s ever written, “Downbound Train,” a man who’s lost everything pours his story, while, behind him, long, sorry notes on a synthesizer sound just like heartache. “I had a job, I had a girl,” he begins, then explains how everything’s changed: “Now I work down at the car wash, where all it ever does its rain.” It’s a line Sam Shepard could’ve written: so pathetic and so funny, you don’t know how to react.

The biggest departure from any familiar Springsteen sound is the breathtaking first single, “Dancing in the Dark,” with its modern synths, played by E Street keyboardist Roy Bittan, and thundering bass and drums. The kid who dances in the darkness here is practically choking on the self-consciousness of being sixteen. “I check my look in the mirror/I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face,” he sings. “Man, I ain’t getting nowhere just living in a dump like this.” He turns out the lights not to set some drippy romantic mood but to escape in the fantasy of the music on the radio. In the dark, he finds a release from all the limitations he was born into. In the dark, like all the guys trapped in Springsteen’s songs, he’s just a spirit in the night.

The Rolling Stone Interview: Bruce Springsteen on ‘Born in the U.S.A.’         December 7, 1984 1:45AM ET “We wanted to play because we wanted to meet girls, make a ton of dough and change the world,” says Springsteen

By Kurt Loder.

Seattle was the market, but Tacoma was Bruce Springsteen‘s kind of town. He and the E Street Band had flown in from Vancouver on the second leg of their Born in the U.S.A. tour, and immediately everybody got sick. Something in the air. “The Tacoma aroma,” locals call it, a lung-raking stench of noxious lumber-milling fumes and other foul industrial emissions that imparted a green-gilled tinge to most members of the Springsteen tour party and made Bruce himself sick to his stomach. Nevertheless, his first, sold-out show at the 25,000-seat Tacoma Dome went on as scheduled. Bruce is nothing if not a trouper.  He could have played the Kingdome in Seattle, thirty miles away, where the air is clear and the ambiance more upscale. But the smaller Tacoma Dome has better acoustics, and anyway, Springsteen – although he’s something of an upscale guy himself these days – maintains a well-known interest in the embattled world of the working class. Tacoma, in its bilious way, was perfect.
He really was sick, though – white as a sheet when he took the stage and wiped out for sure when he left it four hours later. But he never let it show. He kicked off with a booming, boot-stomping “Born in the U.S.A.” and then descended into several songs from his starkly brilliant Nebraska album, keeping the audience with him all the way. He’s got his raps down on this tour, talking about “powerlessness” at one point and, at another, “blind faith – whether it’s in your girlfriend or the government.” “This is 1984,” he tells the howling crowds, “and people seem to be searchin’ for something.” In Tacoma, before counting off the haunting “My Hometown,” he delivered and extended plug for a community-action group called Washington Fair Share, which recently helped force the cleanup of an illegal landfill and is working to overturn Governor John Spellman’s veto of a “right to know” law that would require local industries to inform employees of all toxic chemicals they’re being exposed to on the job. “They think that people should come before profit, and the community before the corporation,” Bruce announced. And then added, pointedly,”This is your hometown.”  This is world-class rock & roll, all right, but something more besides. And in 1984, Bruce Springsteen has become something decidedly more than just another rock star with an album to flog. He is a national presence, his charisma co-opted by as unlikely an adherent as Ronald Reagan – even as Springsteen himself pokes relentlessly through the withered and waterless cultural underbrush of the president’s new American Eden. In pursuit of what can only be called his dream, Springsteen has been tenacious: dropping out of Ocean Country College in his native New Jersey in 1968 to take his unlikely chances as a songwriting rock & roller and stubbornly waiting out a devastating, yearlong legal dispute with his then manager, Mike Appel, that prevented him from recording for nearly a year in the mid-Seventies. After selling 2 million copies of his 1980 double album, The River, he followed it up with Nebraska, a striking, guitar-and-voice meditation on various kinds of pain and craziness in the American hinterlands, and then followed that up with Born in the U.S.A., which treats some of the same themes within a full-bore band context and has suddenly become his biggest album to date.

As the tour progressed, Springsteen sat down for interviews in Oakland, California – where he plugged the Berkeley Emergency Food Project – and in Los Angeles, where he maintains a house in the Hollywood Hills. Asked how he keeps his tightly structured stage show fresh down to the last mock-rambling anecdote, he said, “It’s a matter of: Are you there at the moment? Are you living it?” It’s a test he appears to pass both on and off the stage

“Born in the U.S.A.,” the title track of your current album, is one of those rare records: a rousing rock & roll song that also gives voice to the pain of forgotten people – in this case, America’s Vietnam veterans. How long have you been aware of the Vietnam vets’ experience?

I don’t know if anybody could imagine what their particular experience is like. I don’t think I could, you know? I think you had to live through it. But when you think about all the young men and women that died in Vietnam, and how many died since they’ve been back – surviving the war and coming back and not surviving – you have to think that, at the time, the country took advantage of their selflessness. There was a moment when they were just really generous with their lives.  What was your own experience of Vietnam?

I didn’t really have one. There wasn’t any kind of political consciousness down in Freehold in the late Sixties. It was a small town, and the war just seemed very distant. I mean, I was aware of it through some friends that went. The drummer in my first band was killed in Vietnam. He kind of signed up and joined the marines. Bart Hanes was his name. He was one of those guys that was jokin’ all the time, always playin’ the clown. He came over one day and said, “Well, I enlisted. I’m goin’ to Vietnam.” I remember he said he didn’t know where it was. And that was it. He left and he didn’t come back. And the guys that did come back were not the same.

How did you manage to escape the draft?

I got a 4-F. I had a brain concussion from a motorcycle accident when I was seventeen. Plus, I did the basic Sixties rag, you know: fillin’ out the forms all crazy, not takin’ the tests. When I was nineteen, I wasn’t ready to be that generous with my life. I was called for induction, and when I got on the bus to go take my physical, I thought one thing: I ain’t goin’. I had tried to go to college, and I didn’t really fit in. I went to a real narrow-minded school where people gave me a lot of trouble and I was hounded off the campus – I just looked different and acted different, so I left school. And I remember bein’ on that bus, me and a couple of guys in my band, and the rest of the bus was probably sixty, seventy percent black guys from Asbury Park. And I remember thinkin’, like, what makes my life, or my friends’ lives, more expendable than that of somebody who’s goin’ to school? It didn’t seem right. And it was funny, because my father, he was in World War II, and he was the type that was always sayin’, “Wait till the army gets you. Man, they’re gonna get that hair off of you. I can’t wait. They gonna make a man outta you.” We were really goin’ at each other in those days. And I remember I was gone for three days, and when I came back, I went in the kitchen, and my folks were there, and they said, “Where you been?” And I said, “Well, I had to go take my physical.” And they said, “What happened?” And I said, “Well, they didn’t take me.” And my father sat there, and he didn’t look at me, he just looked straight ahead. And he said, “That’s good.” It was, uh . . . I’ll never forget that. I’ll never forget that.  Ironic, then, that today you’re the toast of the political right, with conservative columnist George Will lauding your recent Washington D.C. concert and President Reagan invoking your name while campaigning in your home state, New Jersey.

I think what’s happening now is people want to forget. There was Vietnam, there was Watergate, there was Iran – we were beaten, we were hustled, and then we were humiliated. And I think people got a need to feel good about the country they live in. But what’s happening, I think, is that that need – which is a good thing – is gettin’ manipulated and exploited. And you see the Reagan reelection ads on TV – you know: “It’s morning in America.” And you say, well, it’s not morning in Pittsburgh. It’s not morning above 125th Street in New York. It’s midnight, and, like, there’s a bad moon risin’. And that’s why when Reagan mentioned my name in New Jersey, I felt it was another manipulation, and I had to disassociate myself from the president’s kind words.

But didn’t you play into the hands of professional patriots by releasing an election-year album called Born in the U.S.A., with the American flag bannered across the front?

Well, we had the flag on the cover because the first song was called “Born in the U.S.A.,” and the theme of the record kind of follows from the themes I’ve been writing about for at least the last six or seven years. But the flag is a powerful image, and when you set that stuff loose, you don’t know what’s gonna be done with it.

Actually, I know one fan who infers from the rump shot on the album cover that you’re actually pissing on the flag. Is there a message there?

No, no. That was unintentional. We took a lot of different types of pictures, and in the end, the picture of my ass looked better, than the picture of my face, so that’s what went on the cover. I didn’t have any secret message. I don’t do that very much.   Well, what is your political stance? Election Day is two weeks away: are you registered to vote?

I’m registered, yeah. I’m not registered as one party or another. I don’t generally think along those lines. I find it very difficult to relate to the whole electoral system as it stands. I don’t really . . . I suppose if there was somebody who I felt strong enough about at some point, some day, you know.
You don’t think Mondale would be any better than Reagan?

I don’t know. I think there are significant differences, but I don’t know how significant. And it’s very difficult to tell by preelection rhetoric. It seems to always change when they all of a sudden get in. That’s why I don’t feel a real connection to electoral politics right now – it can’t be the best way to find the best man to do the hardest job. I want to try and just work more directly with people; try to find some way that my band can tie into the communities that we come into. I guess that’s a political action, a way to just bypass that whole electoral thing. Human politics. I think that people on their own can do a lot. I guess that’s what I’m tryin’ to figure out now: where do the aesthetic issues that you write about intersect with some sort of concrete action, some direct involvement, in the communities that your audience comes from? It seems to be an inevitable progression of what our band has been doin’, of the idea that we got into this for. We wanted to play because we wanted to meet girls, we wanted to make a ton of dough, and we wanted to change the world a little bit, you know?

Have you ever voted?

I think I voted for McGovern in 1972.

What do you really think of Ronald Reagan?

Well, I don’t know him. But I think he presents a very mythic, very seductive image, and it’s an image that people want to believe in. I think there’s always been a nostalgia for a mythical America, for some period in the past when everything was just right. And I think the president is the embodiment of that for a lot of people. He has a very mythical presidency. I don’t know if he’s a bad man. But I think there’s a large group of people in this country whose dreams don’t mean that much to him, that just get indiscriminately swept aside. I guess my view of America is of a real bighearted country, real compassionate. But the difficult thing out there right now is that the social consciousness that was a part of the Sixties has become, like, old-fashioned or something. You go out, you get your job, and you try to make as much money as you can and have a good time on the weekend. And that’s considered okay.  The state of the nation has weighed heavily, if sometimes subtly, on the characters depicted in your songs over the years. Do you see your albums as being connected by an evolving sociopolitical point of view?

I guess what I was always interested in was doing a body of work – albums that would relate to and play off of each other. And I was always concerned with doin’ albums, instead of, like, collections of songs. I guess I started with The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, in a funny way – particularly the second side, which kind of syncs together. I was very concerned about gettin’ a group of characters and followin’ them through their lives a little bit. And so, on Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town and The River, I tried to hook things up. I guess in Born to Run, there’s that searchin’ thing; that record to me is like religiously based, in a funny kind of way. Not like orthodox religion, but it’s about basic things, you know? That searchin’, and faith, and the idea of hope. And then on Darkness, it was kind of like a collision that happens between this guy and the real world. He ends up very alone and real stripped down. Then, on The River, there was always that thing of the guy attemptin’ to come back, to find some sort of community. It had more songs about relationships – “Stolen Car,” “The River,” “I Wanna Marry You,” “Drive All Night,” even “Wreck on the Highway” – people tryin’ to find some sort of consolation, some sort of comfort in each other. Before The River, there’s almost no songs about relationships. Very few. Then, on Nebraska. . . I don’t know what happened on that one. That kinda came out of the blue.

Wasn’t the central inspiration Terrence Malick’s Badlands, the film about mass murderer Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Fugate?

Well, I had already written “Mansion on the Hill” during the last tour. Then I went home – I was living in a place called Colts Neck, New Jersey – and I remember I saw Badlands, and I read this book about them, Caril, and it just seemed to be a mood that I was in at the time. I was renting a house on this reservoir, and I didn’t go out much, and for some reason I just started to write. I wrote Nebraska, all those songs, in a couple of months. I was interested in writing kind of smaller than I had been, writing with just detail – which I kind of began to do on The River. I guess my influences at the time were the movie and these stories I was reading by Flannery O’Connor – she’s just incredible.  Was there something about Starkweather that struck you as emblematic of the American condition?

I think you can get to a point where nihilism, if that’s the right word, is overwhelming, and the basic laws that society has set up – either religious or social laws – become meaningless. Things just get really dark. You lose those constraints, and then anything goes. The forces that set that in motion, I don’t know exactly what they’d be. I think just a lot of frustration, lack of findin’ somethin’ that you can hold on to, lack of contact with people, you know? That’s one of the most dangerous things, I think – isolation. Nebraska was about that American isolation: what happens to people when they’re alienated from their friends and their community and their government and their job. Because those are the things that keep you sane, that give meaning to life in some fashion. And if they slip away, and you start to exist in some void where the basic constraints of society are a joke, then life becomes kind of a joke. And anything can happen.

Did the stark acoustic format you eventually chose for Nebraska just seem the most appropriate setting for such dark material?

Well, initially, I was just doing songs for the next rock album, and I decided that what always took me so long in the studio was the writing. I would get in there, and I just wouldn’t have the material written, or it wasn’t written well enough, and so I’d record for a month, get a couple of things, go home, write some more, record for another month – it wasn’t very efficient. So this time, I got a little Teac four-track cassette machine, and I said, I’m gonna record these songs, and if they sound good with just me doin’ ’em, then I’ll teach ’em to the band. I could sing and play the guitar, and then I had two tracks to do somethin’ else, like overdub a guitar or add a harmony. It was just gonna be a demo. Then I had a little Echoplex that I mixed through, and that was it. And that was the tape that became the record. It’s amazing that it got there, ’cause I was carryin’ that cassette around with me in my pocket without a case for a couple of weeks, just draggin’ it around. Finally, we realized, “Uh-oh, that’s the album.” Technically, it was difficult to get it on a disc. The stuff was recorded so strangely, the needle would read a lot of distortion and wouldn’t track in the wax. We almost had to release it as a cassette.  I understand “Born in the U.S.A.” was actually written around the time of Nebraska; do any other songs on the new album date from that period?

Actually, half of the Born in the U.S.A. album was recorded at the time of Nebraska. When we initially went in the studio to try to record Nebraska with the band, we recorded the first side of Born in the U.S.A., and the rest of the time I spent tryin’ to come up with the second side – “Bobby Jean,” “My Hometown,” almost all those songs. So if you look at the material, particularly on the first side, it’s actually written very much like Nebraska – the characters and the stories, the style of writing – except it’s just in the rock-band setting.

You seem to have taken a more spontaneous, less labored approach to recording this album. Max Weinberg says that the title track of Born in the U.S.A. is a second take – and that he didn’t even know the band was going to kick back in at the end until you signaled him in the studio.

Oh, yeah. That entire track is live. Most of the songs on Born in the U.S.A. are under five takes, and “Darlington County” is live, “Working on the Highway” is live, “Down-bound Train,” “I’m on Fire,” “Bobby Jean,” “My Hometown,” “Glory Days” – almost the whole album is done live. Our basic style of recording now is not real tedious. The band is playing really well together, and in five or six takes of a song, they’re gonna get it. Born to Run was the only album I really did extensive overdubbing on; it’s also the only album where I wrote only one more song than we recorded. For Born in the U.S.A., we recorded maybe fifty songs. The recording is not what took the time; it was the writing – and waiting till I felt, “Well, there’s an album here; there’s some story being told.” We record a lot of material, but we just don’t release it all.  Bootleg buyers contend that some of your unreleased material is among your best. Does the brisk bootleg trade in your unreleased material annoy you?

I guess nobody likes the feeling that they wrote a song and in some way the song is bein’ stolen from them, or presented in a fashion they don’t feel they’d want to present it in – the quality isn’t good, and they’re so expensive. I don’t have any bootlegs myself. I always tell myself that some day I’m gonna put an album out with all this stuff on it that didn’t fit in. I think there’s good material there that should come out. Maybe at some point, I’ll do that.

You’ve turned two of your current hits, “Dancing in the Dark” and “Cover Me,” over to producer Arthur Baker to convert into dance-mix singles – with what some of your fans see as bizarre results. What made you want to do that?

I heard this dance mix of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” on the radio, and it was incredible. It sounded like fun, so I hooked up with Arthur. He’s a character, a great guy. He’s had another fellow with him, and they were really pretty wild. They’d get on that mixing board and just crank them knobs, you know? The meters were goin’ wild.

Did you have input into this?

Not much. The entire thing is Arthur Baker. He’s really an artist. It was fun to just give him a song and see what his interpretation of it would be. I was always so protective of my music that I was hesitant to do much with it at all. Now I feel my stuff isn’t as fragile as I thought.

You’ve also started doing videos recently. What do you make of the medium?

Video is a powerful thing, and I wanted to be involved in it in some fashion. But it presents a variety of problems. I didn’t want to infringe on my audience’s imagination by presenting some concrete image that was a replica of an image in the song, and I didn’t want to create another story, because I was already tellin’ the story I wanted to tell.  For “Dancing in the Dark,” you brought in film director Brian De Palma and made a lip-synced concert video. Why?

Brian was great, because I had no time – we were getting ready for our first show – and he came in on real short notice and really took the burden off my shoulders. We did that video in about three or four hours. Lip-syncing is one of those things – it’s easy to do, but you wonder about the worth of doing it. That video was great, though, because I noticed that most of the people that would come up and mention it to me were people who hadn’t heard my other stuff. Very often, they were real little kids. I was on the beach and this kid came up to me – I think his name was Mike, he was like seven or eight – and he says, “I saw you on MTV.” And then he says, “I got your moves down.” So I say, “well, let me check ’em out.” And he starts doin’, like, “Dancing in the Dark.” And he was pretty good, you know?

You’ve certainly achieved mass-market success this year. The Born in the U.S.A. tour is selling out arenas across the country, and the album has sold over 5 million copies worldwide. Has becoming a rich man changed you at all?

Yeah, there’s a change. It doesn’t make living easier, but it does make certain aspects of your life easier. You don’t have to worry about rent, you can buy things for your folks and help out your friends, and you can have a good time, you know? There were moments where it was very confusing, because I realized that I was a rich man, but I felt like a poor man inside.

In what way?

Just my outlook on things in general, because I guess it was formed when I was young. I mean, basically, you know, because of the lawsuit and a bunch of other things – and because of how long it would take me to make records – I didn’t get to a situation where I had any dough in the bank till around the River tour. And this tour, we’ve been doin’ great so far. But I don’t know if money changes you. I guess I don’t really think it does change you. It’s an inanimate thing, a tool, a convenience. If you’ve got to have a problem, it’s a good problem to have.  Obviously you don’t spend your money on clothes. What do you do with it?

I’m just figuring that out right now. One of the things I can do is play benefits and help people out that need help, people that are strugglin’, you know, tryin’ to get somethin’ goin’ on their own. Money was kind of part of the dream when I started. I don’t think . . . I never felt like I ever played a note for the money. I think if I did, people would know, and they’d throw you out of the joint. And you’d deserve to go. But at the same time, it was a part of the dream. Part of like . . .

The pink Cadillac?

Yeah, the pink Cadillac. Me and Steve [Van Zandt, his former guitarist] used to sit around and say, “Yeah, when we make it, we’re gonna do this and that. . . .”

What did you plan to do?

Mainly, we planned to be just like the Rolling stones. They were the band we liked the best at the time. But you grow up, and when you finally put that suit of clothes on, sometimes they don’t fit, or they fit differently, and you’re a different person, and what you’re gonna do is different, I guess. But in general, I do enjoy the success we’ve had, and the fact that we have an audience, and I’ve enjoyed the financial success that I’ve had. It’s helped me do some things that I’ve wanted to do.

Would it be an exaggeration to say that you’re a millionaire?

No, no. I definitely got that much.

What’s your house in Rumson, New Jersey, like?

It’s the mansion on the hill! [Laughing] It’s the kind of place I told myself I’d never live in. But before this tour I was lookin’ for a big house, ’cause I was living in a real small house that I rented. I’d always rented, ever since I was a kid, and I realized I’d been playin’ for twelve years, and I didn’t have any sort of . . . nothin’ that was like any kind of home. I had a bunch of old cars that I’d collected over the years, old bombs: pickup trucks that I picked up for like $500, a ’69 Chevy, an Impala that Gary Bonds gave me and a 1960 Corvette that was one of the few things I got out of Born to Run. And all these old cars were stashed away in different people’s garages all across New Jersey. So I said, wow, I think I’m gonna get a big house. But what I really wanted to get was a farm with a big barn, where I can build a studio so I don’t have to travel to New York to record all the time. Which is what I’m gonna get when I go back after this tour.  So the Rumson house is just a sort of way station?

All my houses seem to have been way stations. That’s the kind of person I have been, you know? I don’t like feelin’ too rooted for some reason. Which is funny, because the things that I admire and the things that mean a lot to me all have to do with roots and home, and myself, personally, I’m the opposite. I’m very rootless in that sense. I never attach myself to any place that I am. I always felt most at home when I was like in the car or on the road, which is, I guess, why I always wrote about it. I was very distant from my family for quite a while in my early twenties. Not with any animosity; I just had to feel loose. Independence always meant a lot to me. I had to feel I could go anywhere, anytime, in order to get my particular job done. And that’s basically the way I’ve always lived. Lately, I’ve . . . I’m still not . . . I don’t know if I’m a big family man. My family’s been my band. I’ve always been that way. I think when I was young, I did it intentionally, because I knew I only had sixty dollars that month, and I had to live on that sixty dollars, and I couldn’t get married or I couldn’t get involved at the time. And then it just became my way of life, you know? It really became my way of life.

You were never on the verge of getting married?

No. I lived with a girl once. I’d never lived with a girl before. I was in my early twenties, and I’d never even lived with anybody.

How come?

I don’t know. I’m not exactly sure. I guess I just wanted to be free to move, a road runner. It’s silly, I guess. It sounds silly to me now when I say it. Particularly because I don’t really value those ideals. I guess I see fulfillment, ultimately, in family life. That just hasn’t been my life, you know?

But you’re writing all these songs about relationships. What does your mother think about this situation?

I got an Italian grandmother, and that’s all she asks me. She speaks half Italian and half English, and every time I go over it’s “Where’s you girlfriend? When are you gonna get married?”  Is it possible for you to have normal romantic attachments?

I guess so. I’ve had steady girlfriends in the past. I went out with a girl I met at Clarence’s club. I’m just not really looking’ to get married at this point. I’ve made a commitment to doin’ my job right now, and that’s basically what I do. Someday, I’d like to have the whole nine yards – the wife, the kids.

And until then? I’m trying to picture Bruce Springsteen just asking a normal girl for a casual date.

You just do it. You’re out in a bar or somethin’, and you meet somebody, you can’t worry. You gotta go ahead and live your life in as normal a fashion as possible. When I’m out, I don’t really think that much about the other part of my life, about how people are looking at me. It’s not relevant, almost. Somebody may go out with you once or twice because of who you are, but if you’re a jerk, they’re not gonna want to, because it’s not gonna be any fun, you know? That kind of thing wears off pretty quick.

So you’ve never allowed yourself to become isolated, to slip into the Elvis Presley syndrome?

One of the things that was always on my mind to do was to maintain connections with the people I’d grown up with, and the sense of the community where I came from. That’s why I stayed in New Jersey. The danger of fame is in forgetting, or being distracted. You see it happen to so many people. Elvis’ case must have been tremendously difficult. Because, I mean, I feel the difference between selling a million records and selling 3 million records – I can feel a difference out on the street. The type of fame that Elvis had, and that I think Michael Jackson has, the pressure of it, and the isolation that it seems to require, has gotta be really painful. I wasn’t gonna let that happen to me. I wasn’t gonna get to a place where I said, “I can’t go in here. I can’t go to this bar. I can’t go outside.” For the most part, I do basically what I’ve always done. I’ll walk into a club, and people will just say hi, and that’s it. And I’ll get up and play.  I believe that the life of a rock & roll band will last as long as you look down into the audience and can see yourself, and your audience looks up at you and can see them-selves – and as long as those reflections are human, realistic ones. The biggest gift that your fans can give you is just treatin’ you like a human being, because anything else dehumanizes you. And that’s one of the things that has shortened the life spans, both physically and creatively, of some of the best rock & roll musicians – that cruel isolation. If the price of fame is that you have to be isolated from the people you write for, then that’s too fuckin’ high a price to pay.

You must have had a chance to observe Michael Jackson’s situation firsthand. Didn’t you meet him after a recent Jacksons concert?

I saw them in Philadelphia. I thought it was really a great show. Real different from what I do, but the night I saw ’em, I thought they were really, really good. Michael was unbelievable – I mean unbelievable. He’s a real gentleman, and he’s real communicative . . . and he’s tall, which I don’t know if most people realize.

What bands have you been listening to lately?

I listen to a lot of different types of things. I like U2, Divinyls, Van Morrison. I like the band Suicide.

That makes sense: “State Trooper,” one of the songs on Nebraska, sounds very much like Suicide.

Yeah. They had that two-piece synthesizer-voice thing. They had one of the most amazing songs I ever heard. It was about a guy that murders. . .

“Frankie Teardrop”?

Yeah! Oh, my God! That’s one of the most amazing records I think I ever heard. I really love that record.

What about Prince? Have you ever seen him live?

Yeah. He is incredible live. He is one of the best live performers I’ve ever seen in my whole life. His show was funny; it had a lot of humor in it. He had the bed that came up out of the stage – it was great, you know? I think him and Steve, right now, are my favorite performers.  Have you seen ‘Purple Rain’?

Yeah, it was great. It was like an Elvis movie – a real good early Elvis movie.

You once tried to meet Elvis Presley by jumping over the wall at his Graceland mansion. The attempt failed, but have you met most of your other idols in the music business?

Well, I’m real ambivalent about meeting’ people I admire. You know the old saying: Trust the art, not the artist. I think that’s true. I think somebody can do real good work and be a fool in a variety of ways. I think my music is probably better than I am. I mean, like, your music is your ideals a lot of times, and you don’t live up to those ideals all the time. You try, but you fall short and you disappoint yourself. With my idols, I just like their music. If the occasion comes up, I like to meet them, but I never really seek it out very much, because it’s their music that I like in general. People always say they were disappointed by Elvis, they were let down. I’m not way sure that’s the right way to look at it. I don’t think anybody was disappointed by his great records, you know? I think personally it’s a hard way to go for everybody out there, and that he gave the best that he had, the best that he could get ahold of.

You, at least, seem unlikely ever to emulate Elvis’ drug problems. Is it true that after nearly twenty years in the rock & roll world, you’ve truly never so much as smoked a joint?

I never did any drugs. When I was at that age when it was popular, I wasn’t really in a social scene a whole lot. I was practicing in my room with my guitar. So I didn’t have the type of pressure that kids might have today. Plus, I was very concerned with being in control at the time. I drink a little bit now. There’s nights when I’ll go out and do it up. But not too much when we’re touring, because the show is so physically demanding, and you gotta be so prepared.

There’s also a notable lack – in your songs, your stage show, your videos – of any sort of exploitative sexual imagery of the kind that routinely spices, say, MTV. Nor do you appear to encourage a groupie scene backstage at your shows. This is unusual for rock, and I wonder if it has anything to do with your growing up with a strong, working mother and two sisters.

I don’t know. I think if you just try to have a basic respect for people’s humanness, you just generally don’t want to do those things. I think it’s difficult, because we were all brought up with sexist attitudes and racist attitudes. But hopefully, as you grow older, you get some sort of insight into that and – I know it’s corny – try to treat other people the way you would want them to treat you.  It’s like my younger sister. When I was thirteen, my mother got pregnant again and she really took me through the whole thing. We used to sit on the couch and watch TV, and she’d say “Feel this,” and I’d put my hand on her stomach and I’d feel my little sister in there. And from the very beginning, I had a deep connection with her.

One of the best times I can ever remember was when she was born, because it changed the atmosphere of the whole house for quite a while – the old “Shh, there’s a baby in the house.” And I’d watch her all the time, and if she started cryin’, I’d run down to see what was the matter. I remember one day I was watchin’ her, and she was on the couch and she rolled off and fell on her head – she was about one, still a little baby – and I felt like, “Oh, that’s it. Brain damage! My life is over, I’ve had it!” [Laughing] My family moved to California when she was like five or six, and we didn’t see each other for quite a while. But every time we did, it was like automatic – like we’d never been apart.

I think that what happens is, when you’re young, you feel powerless. If you’re a child and you’re lookin’ up at the world, the world is frightening. Your house, no matter how small it is, it seems so big. Your parents seem huge. I don’t believe this feeling ever quite leaves you. And I think what happens is, when you get around fifteen or sixteen, a lot of your fantasies are power fantasies. And I think that’s one of the dings that gets exploited by some of the more demeaning types of music. If you’re a kid, you feel powerless, but you don’t know how to channel that powerlessness – how to channel it into either a social concern or creating something for yourself. I was lucky; I was able to deal with it with the guitar. I said, well, I feel weak, but when I do this, when I feel this, when I hold it, I feel a little stronger. I feel like I’ve got some line on my life. I feel I have some control. That feelin’ of weakness, of powerlessness, is there. And I think it gets exploited and misdirected.  One of the problems in the United States is that “united in our prejudices we stand,” you know? What unites people, very often, is their fear. What unites white people in some places is their fear of black people. What unites guys is maybe a denigrating attitude toward women – or sometimes maybe women have an attitude toward men. And these things are then in turn exploited by politicians, which turns into fear – knee-jerk fear of the Russians or of whatever ism is out there. Or in a very subtle kind of indirect way – like some of our economic policies are a real indirect kind of racism, in which the people that get affected most are black people who are at the lower end of the economic spectrum. And I think somewhere inside, people know this – I really do. They don’t fess up to it, but somewhere inside there’s a real meanness in using things this way.

I think it’s changing somewhat, but how many times in this election campaign did you hear that the major complaint against Mondale was that he was “wimpish”? It’s still a very, very big part of the whole American culture. It’s all wrapped up in a variety of different ways in my own music – dealin’ with it, fakin’ it, tryin’ to get over fakin’ it, tryin’ to break through it. It’s just . . . there’s just so much . . . it seems to be. . .

Overwhelming?

Yeah.

What keeps you going at age thirty-five? (he's now 70 believe it or not)

I was lucky. During the lawsuit, I understood that it’s the music that keeps me alive, and my relationships with my friends, and my attachment to the people and the places I’ve known. That’s my lifeblood. And to give that up for, like, the TV, the cars, the houses – that’s not the American dream. That’s the booby prize, in the end. Those are the booby prizes. And if you fall for them – if, when you achieve them, you believe that this is the end in and of itself – then you’ve been suckered in. Because those are the consolation prizes, if you’re not careful, for selling yourself out, or lettin’ the best of yourself slip away. So you gotta be vigilant. You gotta carry the idea you began with further. And you gotta hope that you’re headed for higher ground.  This story is from the December 6, 1984 issue of Rolling Stone.

"I'm On Fire"

Springsteen came up with this song in the studio during recording sessions in early 1982. He was playing around with a slow Johnny Cash rhythm which he put to some lyrics he had already written. The song was recorded in May 1982, and originally intended for the Nebraska album, but it was not released until Born In The U.S.A. was finished in 1984.

Springsteen, pianist Roy Bittan, and drummer Max Weinberg recorded the first version of this song themselves because the rest of the band was taking a break when inspiration struck.

The song is about a man who wakes up with night sweats lusting for a woman - he feels like he's on fire when he suddenly awakes. Springsteen writes using the voice of many different characters, and they often have some kind of unpleasant ordeal to endure. The stark lyrics went well with the Johnny Cash-inspired rhythm, and didn't hurt the song commercially, as it made the Top 10 in both the US and UK.

This was the fourth of seven US Top 10 singles from the Born In The U.S.A. album.

In England, this was released as a double A-side with "Born In The U.S.A."

The lyrics leave a lot of wiggle room for interpretation, but the video lays out a pretty clear story: The singer is an auto mechanic who desires the upper class married woman who keeps bringing her car in to him for service. One night, he drops off her car, considers ringing her bell, then thinks better of it.

This was the first time Springsteen acted in a music video; it has a similar theme to Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl" clip, where Christie Brinkley plays the socialite Joel's mechanic is after.

Springsteen was just getting comfortable with music videos, and with the clip's director John Sayles, whom he worked with on "Born in the USA" The music-less intro worked in part because the song is so short, so adding the dialogue made it about average video length. MTV is based in New York and was run by rock radio veterans who thought very highly of Springsteen, so it wasn't too surprising when "I'm On Fire" won for Best Male Video at the second MTV Video Music Awards, held in 1985. It was just the second awards ceremony - "Uptown Girl" was nominated for the award the previous year, but lost to David Bowie's "China Girl."

We never see the face of the woman in the video, which implies that she could be a fantasy, as Springsteen's character has a lot going on in his head. The woman's voice is Maggie Renzi, who produced the clip.

In 2000, Johnny Cash, who inspired this song, covered it on Badlands: A tribute to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska.

  AWOLNATION covered this in 2015 for the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack. Mainman Aaron Bruno told Billboard magazine: "It's a song I've always loved, and someone gave me an opportunity to interpret it my way and see what happens."

"If you give me the task of just doing my own version of a beautiful, perfect song, it's an easy experience," he added. "I just made it moody and kind of lo-fi and trippy and dark, and in my mind there was no way they were going to use it. But they liked it, and I felt blessed to have a reason to do that song my way."

japanarab · 27/9/2019 3:50 pm

Could be an age thing AC? The amount of stuff I previously wrote off but now love is incredible. Used to worry far too much about what was cool etc. No anymore thankfully, and appreciate a lot more music purely for that.

arabchanter · 29/9/2019 9:41 am

japanarab wrote:
Could be an age thing AC? The amount of stuff I previously wrote off but now love is incredible. Used to worry far too much about what was cool etc. No anymore thankfully, and appreciate a lot more music purely for that.

What are you trying to say JA

I think you're spot on though, I think we all had that pretentious period in our lives.

Nowadays, I wouldn't say I had better taste, just more tolerance and an interest in music of all sorts,but it's very true about changing your view about some music, I bought albums back in the day that I wouldn't give house room to these days, and conversely I'm buying albums I wouldn't have been seen dead buying back then.

arabchanter · 29/9/2019 10:00 am

Album 549.
A-ha........................................Hunting High And Low (1985)

The Norwegian trio were in exactly the right place at the right time to take advantage of the mid-eighties MTV revolution, In 1985. A-ha achieved phenomenal album sales on the back of the highly innovative video for the first single from Hunting High And Low, "Take On Me." The state-of-the-art promo, which saw a cartoon Morten Harket leaping from the pages of a comic book to woo a surprised young woman, pushed them to the top of the charts in several countries including the USA. The song sees Harket's crooning morph effortlessly into a yearning falsetto.

Although despised in the retro-rockist Nineties, Hunting High And Low remains a bright, breezy, and brilliant electro-pop-classic.

I think this may turn out to be one of those JA was alluding to, for me at least.

Tek · 29/9/2019 9:33 pm

I'll be honest, i really like that A-Ha album.

The title track in particular. Very strange chords in it.

arabchanter · 29/9/2019 11:53 pm

Album 547.
The Fall.................................This Nation's Saving Grace (1985)

So round about 2 o'clock this afternoon I had my first listen to this album, I can't say I was looking forward to it as I really didn't get/enjoy the last offering from the book Live At The Witches Trial, but as the day went on, and on behalf of the marmite lovers I decided to give it a few more plays and with the assistance of a bottle of "Russian gabby water" see if I mellowed towards cunty baws Smith and his ensemble.

As the afternoon drew into night I kept on thinking, I like the music and musicianship, but canny really go the vocals with the music, they just seemed like they were strangers to me, so had this daft idea of would it be possible to have an album with one side just music and the other just vocals nothing else, that would be pretty unusual but that seemed to be The Fall's bag so why not, I bet it would sell.

Anyhoo, as the day developed and a few more listens, I found myself actually enjoying this platter, whether it was the copious amounts of vodka consumed or Mark E Smith had just worn me down I don't know, lyrically for me this was pish, musically I rated it, and it certainly grew on me the more I played it, none of the tracks were actual stand outs for me, but on the whole a decent album.

Unfortunately Smith has one of those weaselee pusses that you just want slap, and by all accounts his personality and demeanour just signalled CUNT and incoming!

This album wont be going into my collection, but will be downloaded for random mix playlists.

Bits & Bobs;

Have already written about The Fall in post #434 (if interested)

The Fall : This Nation’s Saving Grace

Mark E. Smith has a reputation for being an irascible drunk, a miserable misanthrope, and a disagreeable
bandmate. He’s the only permanent member of The Fall, whose lineup has changed so many times, it’s been a completely different band, several times over. Yet, Smith is The Fall. It’s his songs that drive the band’s albums. It’s his cantankerous and garbled delivery that sets them apart. Musically, however, the band was always traveling in an exciting direction, playing jangly post-punk on early records like Live From the Witch Trials, more recently taking on glam-inspired, yet dirty stompers. Yet the band hit their stride in the mid-80s during a time known as `The Brix Period,’ named for the band’s then-guitarist, and Smith’s wife at the time. During this period, The Fall recorded several of their greatest albums, including The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall, Bend Sinister, and the album that has come to be known as the greatest of their career, This Nation’s Saving Grace.

This Nation’s Saving Grace marks a true high point for the band, mixing confident and strong musicianship with knockout songwriting. While the band had previously mastered the fine art of messy and dissonant post-punk chaos, this line-up had taken it to a more accessible realm, albeit one still arty and strongly independent. After a short instrumental in “Mansion,” the band brashly announces their presence with the explosive “Bombast.” As gruff and as confrontational as ever, Mark E. Smith shouts with venom, “Bastard! Idiot! Feel the wrath of my bombast!” over a loud and thoroughly rocking backing. And more of Smith’s random bursts of genius erupt in “Barmy,” where he declares, “Out of England I dream of its creamery/when I’m here I dwell on Saxony.”

Though by no means straightforward, “Spoilt Victorian Child” is full of rock `n’ roll swagger, propelled by Brix’s awesome riffs and Mark’s sideways delivery, ultimately resulting in him spelling out “E-N-C-Y-C-L-O-pedia.” Yet “LA,” slightly mellower and darker, finds Mark E. Smith showing an incredible amount of vocal restraint on this almost-instrumental track. Musically, it has a dark, synth-propelled groove, making it one of the most accessible tracks on the album, followed by one of the most abrasive—”Gut of the Quantifier,” a glam-inspired stomp with repeated cries of “stick it in the mud/stick it in the gut.” An almost rockabilly swing style drives “My New House,” another rollicking standout.

“Paint Work” is one of the strangest songs on the album, an acoustic track paired with sampled voices, an organ melody, a drum machine and Smith’s indecipherable mumbles. On “I Am Damo Suzuki,” the band pays tribute to Can frontman Damo Suzuki, borrowing melodies from the band and dropping references to their songs in the lyrics, such as “what have you got in that paper bag? Is it vitamin C?” As tributes go, it’s a bizarre one, but a damn good one, making it a true Fall essential. The short, eerie “To NKroachment: Yarbles” closes off the album with a haunting bassline and bizarre layers of effects.

Cassette and CD versions expanded on this eleven-track version of the album, adding the rockabilly, Brix-sung “Vixen” and the melancholy jangler, “Petty Thief (Lout).” And in 1988, three singles released around the time of the album were tacked on to the tracklist: the careening punk rock death-ride “Couldn’t Get Ahead,” the ’50s-ish singalong “Rollin’ Dany,” and the awesome, abrasive rocker “Cruisers Creek.” These five tracks have become so inseparable from the original, that it’s easy to forget that they weren’t originally there. In any case, they’re absolute must-haves.

The Brix period didn’t last all that long, she and Mark eventually getting divorced. And as a result, Mark penned the vicious “Sing, Harpy!” in 1990. It might just be that Mark E. Smith isn’t meant to be a married, domestic man. And I can’t imagine him being one. Rather, he’s the frontman of one of the greatest, most inconsistent, most unpredictable and strangest bands in history. With 25 studio albums, there are several that achieve a greatness similar to that of This Nation’s Saving Grace, but it’s still at the top of the pyramid, displaying the best that the post-punk legends had to offer.

Mark E. Smith’s Best Insults;

On Kate Bush:

“Who decided it was time to start liking her again?” Smith said in 2014. “I never even liked her the first time round. It’s like all these radio DJs have been raiding their mam’s and dad’s record collections and decided that Kate Bush is suddenly cool again. But I’m not having it.”

On Telly Savalas’s beloved detective character Kojack:

"He's a twat"

On young bands The Fall typically shares festival bills with:

A bunch of "ass lickers"

On Mumford & Sons:

“We were playing a festival in Dublin the other week. There was this other group, like, warming up in the next sort of chalet, and they were terrible,” Smith said in 2010. “I said, ‘Shut them cunts up!’ And they were still warming up, so I threw a bottle at them. The bands said, ‘That’s the Sons of Mumford’ or something. ‘They’re number five in charts!'”

On Morrissey (probably):

According to A.V. Club writer Jason Heller, the 1984 Fall song “C.R.E.E.P.” is rumored to be about the fellow Manchurian and then-Smiths crooner. Let’s take a look at a verse and judge for ourselves. From Genius:

"He reads books; of the list book club
And after two months—his stance a familiar hunch
It’s that same slouch—you had the last time he came around

His oppression abounds, his type is doing the rounds
He is a scum-egg; a horrid trendy wretch

Well, Morrissey wrote a song about visiting John Keats, Oscar Wilde, John Yeats’s graves, so he’s probably read some books.

On Suede:

Upon hearing news that Smith passed away, Suede bassist Mat Osman tweeted a story about playing a few shows opening for the Fall early in the band’s Britpop band’s career. Osman said he and his bandmates were huge fans, but nervous to be touring with the post-punk legends because Smith could be “could be rough on support bands,” but the cantankerous frontman turned out to be friendly and accommodating throughout the tour.

The M. Night Shyamalan twist came shortly after the band finished the tour and were listening to an interview with Smith on the ride home.

Especially when Skinner asked, “Do you like any of the new bands who are calling you an influence.”
Mark said “Like who?”
Skinner asked “Well, like Suede.”

There was a perfectly timed beat.

“Never heard of them.”

Mat Osman (@matosman)
On Thurston Moore:

In a 2010 New York Times review, Ben Ratliff wrote that Smith “once suggested that Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth should have his rock license revoked.”

On Prince:

When asked by a journalist in 2017 if he was a Prince fan, Smith responded: “No. They’re weird aren’t they, Prince fans?”

On the state of music in 2017:

“The standard of music these days is fucking terrible. Being poorly you have to watch shit like Jools Holland,” Smith told The Guardian in what the site calls Smith’s final interview. “A lot of it sounds like when I was 15 and I’d go round to a long-haired guy’s flat to score a joint and they’d always put on some fucking lousy Elton John LP. That sounds like Ed Sheeran to me, a duff singer songwriter from the 70’s you find in charity shops.”

On Philip K. Dick movie adaptations:

“I think the original Blade Runner is the most obscene film ever made, I fucking hated it. The Man in the High Castle is one of my favourite books; how they fucked that TV show up I don’t know,” Smith told the Guardian. “The only good Philip K Dick film is Total Recall, it’s faithful to the book. Arnie gets it. I was physically sick watching A Scanner Darkly, it was like an episode of Cheers painted over except they all smoke dope and imagine women with no clothes on.

On people from Manchester:

“I don’t like Northern people, I don’t like Manchurians,” Smith told Noisey UK. “There’s something about Manchester musicians that’s particularly fucking irritating. They have this sort of God-given right, which Londoners used to have I suppose. They think they’re superior, but they’re not. Manchester’s only got Freddie and the Dreamers.”

On Franz Ferdinand citing The Fall as an influence:

“If I could afford a lawyer, I just might pull an injunction on them mentioning our name. Haha! I mean, if you’re new to The Fall… a lot of these groups… I don’t know what it is,” Smith said in 2006. “I think a lot of these group use it to sound a bit hip. When I was a teenager, people used to say “oh well this group sounds a lot like this group”, and then when you go and see them they sound like a pack of shit. They sound like the Talking Heads to me, and I’m not knocking them, it’s just misleading.”

On Pavement:

Smith was known to be the hardest on the bands that looked up to him the most. Pavement made no secret of the influence the Fall had on their music and Smith made no secret of that fact that he was unimpressed by the ’90s indie rockers, explicitly calling them “rip-offs.”

“It’s just The Fall in 1985, isn’t it?” Smithfamously said of Stephen Malkmus and co.. “They haven’t got an original idea in their heads.”

A piece from the wonderful "Retro Dundee"

THE FALL IN DUNDEE - 1984

The Fall were in Dundee twice in 1984.
Their visit in March was for a gig at Teazers (the night club at the Royal Hotel in Union Street).
Local music journalist, Bob Flynn was there to cover the show for Melody Maker, resulting in this excellent review above.
The Fall were, and are still considered to this day, one of the best bands ever to hit the alternative/indie scene back in the 70's, and their no compromise attitude to the music industry since has been just as inspiring as their creative output.
They then came back a few months later in October to play another gig, this time at Fat Sams. The gig was originally supposed to be at The Fountain, but they switched it to Fatties.
I have an original recording of the Fat Sams gig, and a wee reminder that local band, AAGA were the support.
You can click onto the Teazers review to read the enlarged version.

Finn Seemann · 30/9/2019 8:20 am

Never been a massive Springsteen fan, but Born in the USA is a fantastic album. Tried listening to Lloyd Cole again too, but it's too bland for when you are doing your ironing...

Looking forward to listening to A-Ha again, couldn't have admitted liking them when the album came out...

The Fall were one of those bands that have been around for the whole of my music listening life, but I was never one for bands that wanted you to invest a bit in them before you 'got it'. For me that was Mark E Smith over the back. On that basis I'm not going to bother now.

Last edited by Finn Seemann (30/9/2019 8:23 am)

PatReilly · 30/9/2019 8:28 am

This Nation’s Saving Grace

Enjoyed reading the stuff above about Mark E. Smith, an argumentative killjoy even as a younger man. Don't reckon it was an act, either. Also think he must have annoyed the media immensely, as on his death last year there was very little in the way of tributes to a prolific talent who was also very unorthodox: he certainly didn't court popularity.

Got this album when it was released (on that fancy new CD format too): it’s got a relentless repetitiveness to it, especially tracks like ‘What You Need’ and my equal favourite (today) ‘Spoilt Victorian Child’.

‘L.A.’ is like a film soundtrack, in fact I used it for backing productions at my work, thinking it would convert a few people to The Fall or at least make me seem ‘cool’. That never happened.

I think on the CD extra tracks were added, like ‘Vixen’, which was a bit Cramp-like, and the single ‘Couldn’t Get Ahead’.

The other equal favourite track on the album for me is ‘My New House’, which is another persistent noise. Ominous sounding and irritating if you aren’t into Smith’s delivery right enough.

“The spare room is fine,
Though a little haunted,
By Mr Reagan who had hung himself at number 13”

PatReilly · 30/9/2019 8:30 am

PS, I still don't get any buzz in the least from any Springsteen stuff: it's turgid, to me.

Finn Seemann · 30/9/2019 8:32 am

PatReilly wrote:
PS, I still don't get any buzz in the least from any Springsteen stuff: it's turgid, to me.

Generally agree, but I can make an exception for the majority of the tracks on Born in the USA.

PatReilly · 30/9/2019 8:38 am

Finn Seemann wrote:
PatReilly wrote:
PS, I still don't get any buzz in the least from any Springsteen stuff: it's turgid, to me.
Generally agree, but I can make an exception for the majority of the tracks on Born in the USA.

It's great we all like different things!

arabchanter · 30/9/2019 11:36 am

PatReilly wrote:
Finn Seemann wrote:
PatReilly wrote:
PS, I still don't get any buzz in the least from any Springsteen stuff: it's turgid, to me.
Generally agree, but I can make an exception for the majority of the tracks on Born in the USA.

It's great we all like different things!

I read your last post and an old shed song sprung to mind "we all agree................Dundee United are magic"

Anyone else remember it?

arabchanter · 30/9/2019 11:53 am

Album 548.
Abdullah Ibrahim...................Water From An Ancient Well (1985)

My initial doubts were confirmed, this was indeed jazzy pish, had a bit of a job trying to find this one but eventually found it on spotify.

Not gonna waste yer time on this one, it was the usual jazz format, a group o' people trying to make their musical instrument louder than the next person and ending up getting carried away, complete and utter shite.

This wont be going into my collection.

Bits & Bobs;

Water from an ancient well
Anyone who has seen Abdullah Ibrahim perform live and solo will attest that it is a very intense, even spiritual experience.

He will play without interruption for hours, blending a plethora of compositions into one long continuous suite, driven by the ostinati produced by his left hand, while different, shifting melodies or further rhythmic patterns weave in and out of a seamless fabric that implicitly has no beginning or end.

It was fellow pianist Cecil Taylor who described the instrument as “88 tuned drums”, but it is Ibrahim’s playing that really makes that description come alive.

It’s not hard to see the ancestry of Africa’s overlapping polyrhythms translated into Ibrahim’s pianistic style. Appropriately, an early live recording (of a solo concert in Copenhagen in 1969) was called African Piano, and many other releases of his put Africa upfront in their titles—Anatomy of a South African Village, African Space Program, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Echoes of Africa, Ancient Africa —

Ibrahim is about to release his first solo-piano album in at least a decade, and he is touring South Africa to support it (not alone, however, but with his trio, the other two members of which are New Yorkers Belden Bullock on bass and George Gray on drums). The album is called Senzo (Gallo), and the reference is to the Japanese word for “ancestor”, as well as being Ibrahim’s father’s Sotho name, he told me on the phone from New York.

“The idea of this CD, playing extended performances without a break,” he says, “is to try to recreate a spirit of trance-dance storytelling.”

This relates to Ibrahim’s interest in African cultures where dance and storytelling are not just forms of entertainment but have communal spiritual meanings. He is a kind of shaman, communicating with ancestors from all over the continent (and the planet), channelling for them through his music. Healing runs in his family, as well as a strong church influence, and then there is his own 40-year engagement with Eastern martial arts—“Nothing to do with fighting,” he notes with a chuckle.

Senzo is a somewhat different proposition to Ibrahim’s previous solo-piano albums. Instead of the driving ostinato pattern holding it together, and the sense of an intensity, the music on Senzo is meditative and glancing, almost more a form of calligraphy than any other art form. A series of lightly shaped fragments arise and then, almost before their identities have emerged, fade and merge into the next piece. The feeling is of a mind playing upon memory, finding pieces of reminiscence, holding them up to the light and then moving to the next one. If the earlier solo performances were like thunder rolling across mountain tops, Senzo is more like sunlight sparkling through a dancing shower of rain.

Ibrahim’s live concerts in South Africa in November will incorporate his solo excursions into the trio structure. He has worked in many formats, from a duo (his famous albums with Johnny Dyani in the 1970s) to trios, bigger bands such as the seven-piece Ekhaya or the WDR Big Band in Cologne, all the way up to large symphony orchestras.

In the meantime, what we will hear in November offers Ibrahim an improvisatory freedom that is as close to an entirely solitary performance as he could come without actually leaving the New Yorkers at home.

“We can take off in any direction at any moment,” he says. “If I play with a trio, my musicians understand that every performance is quite different and that I allow myself to go in any direction. My compositions act as a signpost. They give me a formula in which to improvise, a freedom to expand. The songs are never static.

“The compositions try to capture different moods and experiences and they act as launching pads. There are always events that you’ve touched on, way back, that re-emerge—it’s like retracing the steps of memory.”

But his music is not merely a backward-looking exercise. It may contain memories of all sorts of different music, from that of his idol and mentor, Duke Ellington (subject of several tributes from Ibrahim in years gone by) to that of the free-jazzers of 1960s New York such as Ornette Coleman, never mind the raw energy of fellow South Africans and one-time collaborators such as Kippie Moeketsi and Basil Coetzee. But it is also timeless, like the trance-dance of South Africa’s First People, the |Xam (as another album title of his has it, this is “music from an ancient well”), and always moving into the future.

For Ibrahim, even in his mid-70s (he turned 74 on October 9) and after a composing and performing career spanning six decades, there is a constant sense of adventure. “This is the beauty of the genre we’re working in,” he says. “There’s always the possibility of new discoveries.”

By now Ibrahim’s music has taken in so much, and transformed so much from so many sources into his own unique voice, that it is way beyond jazz as such—though jazz might be the most inclusive music around. Ibrahim’s music is just music, perhaps a music of the spheres. In our talk he quotes the 13th-century mystic poet Rumi: “There is only one sound. All the rest is echo.”

PatReilly · 30/9/2019 3:24 pm

arabchanter wrote:
I read your last post and an old shed song sprung to mind "we all agree................Dundee United are magic"

Anyone else remember it?

Aye, a football song used by many clubs based on Cielito Lindo.

Some folk will remember better than me.........

♪♫ ♪ ♬"We all agree
Davie is better than Yashin
Dossing is better than Eusebio
And Dundee are in for a thrashin'" ♫ ♬ ♪

arabchanter · 03/10/2019 9:42 am

Album 550.
Tears For Fears...............................Songs From The Big Chair (1985)

For a brief time, Tears For Fears became the biggest band on the face of the planet on the strength of this album, a release that ranks as one of the best pop albums of the decade. The group had already been regular chart fixtures in the UK, burst onto the world scene by adding a healthy dollop of glistening pop nous and organic instrumentation to their cerebral and sensitive electronic music.

Most groups would not have the nerve to open an album on such a bombastically epic and awesome track as "Shout," with it's chiming guitar solos and immense drum production. But their arrogance was justified given that they had penned such an unbeatable clutch of songs.

Had this one back in the day, hopefully stands up as well today.

Finn Seemann · 04/10/2019 10:18 am

Still love TFF and that album. Brilliant pop.

Rick Dagless · 04/10/2019 8:31 pm

Finn Seemann wrote:
Still love TFF and that album. Brilliant pop.

Totally agree. Obviously Everybody Wants to Rule the world is a classic but Head Over Heels is a brilliant track as well.

Some great pop albums around this time just before Stock Aitken and Waterman came in and flooded the charts with utter dross.

arabchanter · 07/10/2019 10:54 pm

Album 549.
A-ha........................................Hunting High And Low   (1985)

I can't honestly say I enjoyed this as a whole, fragments gave me short term pleasure, such as "Hunting High And Low," and "The Sun Always shines on TV," and of course the wonderful (if listened to sparingly|) "Take On Me"

For this listener at least, this should have came with a banner "This Is The Deffo Eighties, no argument," The style of vocals seemed to be prevalent in quite a few of the bands around that time, as was the synth music, but the thing that put me off was the indiscriminant abuse of the top note by Mr Harket, that probably wasn't, but seemed to be in most songs.

To be honest I didn't hate it, but really couldn't hack listening to this all the way through again. The video for "Take On Me," was outstanding, even today I think it's pretty cool, talking about pretty, the girl I was going out with around this time, was in love and mad for Morgen Harket which may or may not have a bearing on this blurb, all I can say is after watching him I had to physically pull her off of her chair as she seemed stuck to it, if you get my drift.

Anyways, although well produced and the band being pretty tight, this was just too much eighties for me to listen to again in a one'r, I don't mind hearing the better tracks randomly, but couldn't sit down and listen to this right through.

This album wont be getting added to my vinyl collection.

Bits & Bobs;

The Norwegian pop trio broke through in the US when their previously unsuccessful tune "Take On Me" hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1985 thanks to an innovative music video that combined pencil-sketch animation with live action. They hit the chart again when the single "The Sun Always Sines on TV" landed at #20. While their success in the US was short-lived, the group became much bigger stars in Europe, notching a string of international hits throughout the '80s and '90s.

Harket stumbled upon the title "a-ha" in Waaktaar's songbook and suggested it for the band name. "It was a terrible song but a great name," he told Rolling Stone.

Waaktaar and Furuholmen met when they were kids and later formed the prog rock group Bridges. When the pair moved to London, they were bombarded by the pop music culture, which was scarce in Norway, and embraced the new sound. Harket, who was a member of the blues/soul band Souldier, joined the group as lead singer and the trio became a-ha.

They also have a huge following in South America, particularly in Brazil, where the Rock In Rio festival is held. At the 1991 event, a-ha's audience at the Maracana stadium topped out at 198,000, a Guinness World Record for the biggest rock concert attendance. When the festival invited the trio back for its 30th anniversary in 2015, it prompted the group to reunite after a six-year hiatus and release the comeback album Cast In Steel.

During the band's early days in London, Waaktaar met his wife, Lauren Savoy, a Boston native who was studying abroad. The couple married in 1991 and joined their surnames. In 1994, they started the rock band Savoy, which found a following in Norway.

Their sole Grammy nomination was for Best New Artist in 1986, but the prize went to the English band Sade.

Furuholmen's father, jazz trumpeter Kare Furuholmen, was killed in a 1969 plane crash in Oslo, when the a-ha keyboardist was six years old. Furuholmen was shocked to learn that Harket witnessed the tragedy as a child when he was returning from vacation with his family.

They wrote and recorded the theme song for the 1987 James Bond film The Living Daylights. They had a rocky working relationship with the movie's composer, John Barry, who referred to the trio as the "Hitler Youth" at the film's premiere.

Album Review

The 80’s were an interesting time for pop music. The mainstream musicians had abandoned the popular disco trends of the 70’s and began experimenting with a more electronic based sound. As a result synthesizers became extremely popular. This spawned forth an almost overwhelming number of one hit wonder bands. A Flock of Seagulls had “I Ran (So Far Away)”, Soft Cell had “Tainted Love”, and who could forget a-ha and their hit song “Take on Me”.

A-ha is a Norwegian synth-pop trio that formed in 1982. After their hit single “Take on Me” reached the charts, they became extremely popular in the mainstream music scene. Unfortunately they were forgotten not long after they achieved success. They went on to record more albums and still tour to this day, but essentially their career ended as soon as it began.

Many of us make the assumption that the typical one hit wonder band has only one good song. Quite often that is true. But a-ha’s debut album “Hunting High and Low” is physical evidence that some times one hit wonders can make more than one master piece, and in this case, ten masterpieces.
a-ha are…

Morten Harket – Vocals

Magne Furuholmen – Keyboards, vocals

Pål Waaktaar – Guitars, vocals

“Hunting High and Low” demonstrates a more creative and complex approach to writing synth-pop music. Many of the artists of the 80’s had the catchy keyboard melodies, the electronic drums and the memorable choruses, but their music lacked any real back bone. A-ha’s music consists of the same poppy trends but also contains multiple layers of synthesizers. Each synthesizer has a different setting, and this creates a chaotic, almost orchestral effect. Essentially the music has multiple things going on at once rather than simple background music with vocals over top of it. This makes the music more appealing to the listener who prefers a more complex style rather than pop.

But like I said, “Hunting High and Low” also has its pop side. Pop is essentially built around catchiness, and this album is jam packed with memorable melodies and interesting rhythms. An obvious example of this is “Take on me”. It instantly catches your attention with a simple, yet effective drum intro which eventually leads to an unforgettable keyboard melody. The song progresses into the sing along chorus that everyone knows and loves and continues to get better from there. But “Take one Me” isn’t the only memorable song off the album. Virtually every song on the album is catchy in some way, usually through keyboards or vocals. Some of the other notable tracks include “Train of Thought” “Love is Reason” and “The Sun Always Shines on TV”. Basically, this shows that both mainstream listeners and none mainstream listeners can appreciate this album in some way.

80’s pop is sometimes criticized for being repetitive and unoriginal. But “Hunting High and Low” does not fall into that trap. Each song is easily distinguished from the other. The fact that a variety of synth settings are used contributes to this. But this is also due to the simple fact that all the songs are structured differently. Many typical pop songs are linear and consist of intro motif/ verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus/ending melody, but a-ha’s music tends to go off into more directions. For example “The Sun Always Shines of TV” has a climatic nature and alternates between loud exciting parts and quiet moments. It also contains brief instrumental sections here and there which aren’t quite as common in the pop world. Another important detail is that songs don’t always present the same moods and emotions. Of course you have your happy upbeat songs (Take on Me, Love is Reason) and your slow sad songs (the title track, The Blue Sky). But “Hunting High and Low” also contains songs of a, dare I say, epic nature (The Sun Always Shines on TV, Living a Boys Adventure Tale). Some of the songs hold the ground between happy and sad and emit a neutral ambiance (Train of Thought, I Dream Myself Alive). One could say that “Hunting High and Low” is an emotional rollercoaster which has its emotional highs and lows at various parts of the album. In other words, you’re not hearing the same thing over and over again.

Another quality that “Hunting High and Low” contains is Morten Harket’s magnificent vocal performance. He is easily one of the best vocalists from his era. This is due to two things. One of them being that he has incredible range. He can hit any low notes with ease, and can go fairly high as well. Most of us are aware of this because of the one high note in the chorus of “Take On Me”. He also hits the high notes on the intros to songs like “The Blue Sky” and “Living a Boys Adventure Tale”. He doesn’t act like Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and over power the rest of the music with his high voice. Instead he waits for the right moments to take advantage of his range, and thus allows the listener to enjoy both his vocals and the other instruments in the song. A listener who is not familiar with a-ha’s music may find his high pitch voice to be somewhat irritating, but after a few listens it can be easy to get by. Morten Harket’s greatness is also due to his soulful voice. He can sing in a passionate and sorrowful nature in songs like “And You Tell Me” and the title track. Yet he can also force his voice into a much more vigorous and masculine state for songs like “Train of Thought” and “I Dream Myself Alive”. He can bring a tear to the listener’s eye, or empower them to do manly things. Either way, the vocals are great.

“Hunting High and Low” may be a great album, but it isn’t perfect. The music is wonderful, but it lacks the presence of a guitar. Pål Waaktaar is only heard at certain points of the album. Even when you do hear him, he isn’t doing much more than strumming his acoustic guitar. At times when he uses his electric guitar, you may hear him do some sort of riff or picking pattern. But his guitar his so heavily produced that it blends in with the keyboards and hardly stands out on its own. Any guitar lovers may not be happy with this album for that reason. Another flaw found in “Hunting High and Low” is generic lyrical content. Virtually all of the songs on the album deal with relationships (usually failed ones) which are probably the most common lyrical themes in pop music history. The words them selves are nothing more than bland and overly simple. For example: the title track is a beautiful sounding song which contains boring lyrical passages…

"Here I am and within the reach of my hand she's sound asleep

And she's sweeter now than the wildest dream.
Could have seen her
and I watch her slipping away

But I know I'll be hunting high and low"

These lyrics hardly have any real appeal to them. They aren’t clever in anyway. They aren’t deep or poetic. They aren’t even catchy. They sound more like a paragraph than a song. It is understandable however, considering that a-ha is from Norway and their first language is not English. But that doesn’t help the fact that the lyrics fall flat in comparison to the rest of the album. Again the listener must face the fact that nothing is perfect.

In short, “Hunting High and Low” is a fabulous work of art with a couple of minor set backs. Even though the lyrics and the guitar work are weak, the rest of the music stands out tremendously. It is a must-have for any fan of synth-pop, and it presents all the traits that people love about the genre. a-ha may have been a one hit wonder, but their other music remains exceptional to those who dug deep enough to find it.

"Take On Me"

A-ha wrote and recorded the first version of this song in 1982 with the title "Lesson One" - it had different lyrics but contained the basic keyboard riff. In 1983, the song got the attention of industry veteran Terry Slater, who became their manager and helped them secure a contract with Warner Bros. Records later that year.

In early 1984, they re-wrote the song as "Take On Me" and recorded it with producer Tony Mansfield. Released as a single only in Europe, it went to #3 in their native Norway, but didn't chart anywhere else, flopping particularly hard in the UK. A video made for this version that was remarkably undistinguished compared with the one that came after.

At Slater's suggestion, they re-recorded the song with producer Alan Tarney, who beefed it up with more instrumentation and energy. Around this time, a record company executive named Jeff Ayeroff moved from A&M to Warner Bros., and championed the song. In the book I Want My MTV, he said: "I fell in love with the song. Then I saw a picture of the band, and it was like, Do people actually look like this? Morten Harket was one of the best-looking men in the world."

Ayeroff commissioned a new video, hiring Steve Barron, whose work included "Don't You Want Me" by The Human League and "Billie Jean" by Michael Jackson, to direct

.

The video was released in May 1985, and used the new version of the song produced by Alan Tarney. A promotional single was released at the same time with stills from the video in the sleeve art. Warner Bros. promoted the song through the video, getting movie theaters to show it before films and eventually getting it on MTV. When MTV picked it up, radio stations also played the song, and by August it was in the US Top 40. The song continued to climb the charts until it hit #1 on October 19, where it stayed for one week. A week later, the song also reached its UK chart peak, coming in at #2 behind "The Power Of Love" by Jennifer Rush.

This song became a hit in the US because of its innovative video where a cartoon figure beckons the reader to join him in comic. It was created by Michael Patterson and his wife Candace Reckinger, who would later work on videos for "Opposites Attract," "Luka" and "Impulsive."

Patterson told us: "We started on a-ha's 'Take on Me' - the project began with my animated film Commuter, which won the student academy award in 1981 - it's done in the same animation style. I directed the animation and drew everything on that clip - we also did the finish for it here in LA. It's credited for bringing experimental animation into the mainstream."

The video was inspired by the transformation scene in the 1980 sci-fi film Altered States. Every scene was shot live then projected onto paper and traced.

It was directed by Steve Barron, who was responsible for much of MTV's playlist in the 80s, as he also directed "Billie Jean," "She blinded Me With Science," "Karma Chameleon" and "Summer Of '69."

A-ha were a Norwegian trio formed by Morten Harket (vocals), Pal Waaktaar (guitar) and Mags Furuholmen (keyboards). They moved to London in January 1983 and signed to Warners later in the year. Furuholmen chose their name as it was a simple exclamation known all over the world.

With this hit, a-ha became the first Norwegian band to have #1 in USA.

Bunty Bailey, the woman Morten Harket falls for and saves in the video, became Morten's girlfriend for a couple of years after they met on the shoot. After their breakup, she moved on to other music videos, and was one of the girls singing "back-up" for Billy Idol in his video for "Got To Be A Lover." Look for the blonde in the white outfit in the middle.

In 1986, a-ha had a UK #1 hit with "The Sun Always Shines on TV." The next year, they recorded the soundtrack for the James Bond movie The Living Daylights. They have a fairly large following in parts of Europe, but had less success in the US.

Producer Alan Tarney generated the main rhythm on a Roland Juno 60 synthesizer. There is also a LinnDrum in the mix, programmed by Pal Waaktaar.

The TV show Family Guy did a spoof on the famous music video, with Chris Griffin being pulled into the black-and-white animation at a supermarket (in the 2005 episode "Breaking Out Is Hard to Do").

Weezer included it on The Teal Album, a 2019 covers set. The video for their version stars Stranger Things actor Finn Wolfhard as a young, mullet-sporting Rivers Cuomo. We see him playing the song with his friends, played by Wolfhard's real-life band, Calpurnia.


Because of the singer's Norwegan accent, lyrics to the song are often misinterpreted. In one verse, many people hear, "Talking away, today isn't my day to find you," but the correct lyrics are actually, "Today's another day to find me."

The song reached #1 in 27 countries including Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States. It remained on top of the Eurochart Hot 100 for nine weeks.

Volkswagen used this song in a commercial titled "Feeling Carefree." In the spot, a guy daydreams during a meeting as he sketches out scenes reminiscent of the video. When he comes back to reality, he realizes he is singing the song.

In the 2018 movie Ready Player One, this is mentioned as the favourite song of James Halliday, creator of the virtual world where most of the action takes place. The song was used in a trailer for the film.

The band learned the hard way that chart success doesn't equal financial success, at least not right away. When they found out the song went to #1, they celebrated with dinner and champagne at a swanky restaurant - only to have their credit card refused.

This was featured in the 1997 John Cusack film Grosse Pointe Blank and was included on the second volume of the official soundtrack.

This was used on The Simpsons in the 2005 episode "Future-Drama."

In 2008, a "literal version" of the video went viral, with a Morten Harket impersonator narrating the action of the clip. Mags Furuholmen was a big fan of the comedic take. "I thought it was f--king fantastic. It was amazing. I wish we'd have that video back when we made it," he told Rolling Stone. "The lyrics make so much more sense than the one we have."

Furuholmen said early versions of the song were influenced by The Doors, particularly keyboardist Ray Manzarek. He told Rolling Stone: "Manzarek's almost mathematical but very melodic, structured way of playing the keyboard was a huge influence in how I approached my instrument. And I think a lot of the strength of a-ha comes from absorbing things like that and adding our own Scandinavian flavor to it."

The video won six out of eight nominations at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards, including Best New Artist in a Video and Viewer's Choice. It was a record number of wins in the ceremony's three-year history (Michael Jackson's "Thriller" won half as much in 1983).

When the trio performed this on Solid Gold in 1985, they were accompanied by The Go-Go's drummer, Gina Schock.

a-ha recorded a gentle, acoustic version for the 2017 MTV special Unplugged – Summer Solstice. This rendition was used in the 2018 movie Deadpool 2 in a scene that evoked the video: Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) pulls Wade (Ryan Reynolds) into her realm, so they can be together on another plane of existence.

"The Sun Always Shines on TV"

Pal Waaktaar, a-ha's guitarist and writer of this song is quoted in 1000 UK #1 Hits by Jon Kutner and Spencer Leigh as saying: "The Sun Always Shines On TV was written on one of those down days. Me and Mags (Furuholmen, keyboards) were in a hotel watching English television on a rainy day and the guy announcing the program says, 'It's a rainy day but, as always, the sun always shines on TV.' The song is about the power of television and the way television presents life."

The video continues the story of the "Take On Me" video. At the beginning, Morten Harket turns back into a comic book character and then it shows television-like credits.

Andrew Wickham, the Warner Bros. A&R exec who signed the band to the label, listened to his secretary when she said the tune would be a hit. "She convinced him to make room for it," Waaktaar explained. But the sun wasn't shining on the band when it came time to record. "When we recorded it, we were really sick with influenza. Magne and Morten were lying in the studio on camping beds with high fevers."

This was used in the trailer for the 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire.

This won two trophies at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1986: Best Editing in a Video (for editor David Yardley) and Best Cinematography in a Video (for Director of Photography Oliver Stapleton).

A live version was recorded for a-ha's 2003 album, How Can I Sleep with Your Voice in My Head.

The band performed this at the Nobel Peace Prize concert in 1998.

he band was named after a song written by guitarist Paul Waaktaar-Savoy, the title of which caught the eye of lead singer Morten Harket while flipping through Waaktaar's songbook. "It was a terrible song," Harket told Rolling Stone in 1986, "but a great name."

It seems odd to look back on it now, but when a-ha performed "Take on Me" on the syndicated music series Solid Gold, they were a four-piece, with the regular trio supplemented by a drummer. This drummer wasn't actually part of the band, but, hey, when a band plays live, they're supposed to have a drummer, right? Even if a-ha had wanted to increase their membership permanently, the musician in question already had a day job, and...well, call us crazy, but we're pretty sure The Go-Go's didn't want Gina Schock to depart their ranks.

Getting the opportunity to do a theme for a James Bond film upped a-ha's street cred pretty much everywhere in the world except for America, where even the lower reaches of the Billboard Hot 100 had become elusive for the group, but "The Living Daylights" wasn't without some strife. The problem child, however, was longtime Bond composer John Barry, who was said to have been grouchy about the fact that his name wasn't on the songwriting credits and, even though the song was actually written by Paul and Magne, reportedly had Magne's name removed in favor of his own. Later, when a-ha is in mid-tour and unable to attend the Royal Premiere of the film, Barry grouses to the press about how difficult the band had been to work with, referring to the band as the "Hitler Youth." Good times.

Believe it or not Morrissey has admitted to being an a-ha fan. In a July 1987 interview with Creem, when asked about artists who sold more records than The Smiths but didn't sell out concerts, he cited a-ha, "whom I happen to like a great deal: on the last tour, we were doing two shows as they were cancelling their one show because they couldn't fill the auditorium, and yet a look at the charts showed them with a single at #2 and an album at #9." His appreciation of the band may or may not continue to this day, but as recently as July 2004, when he played a show in Norway, Morrissey started the proceedings by offering a line from "The Sun Always Shines on T.V."

    A wee bit of local to finish off;

December 1986

Ticket Bonus for A-ha Fans

There was a renewed ray of hope yesterday for teenage female fans in Dundee who thought Friday’s Caird Hall concert by Scandinavian pop heart-throbs A-ha was a sell-out. Some 150 of those who missed out when the majority of the tickets went on sale earlier this year could strike lucky.The Caird Hall central booking office, inundated by queues of fans wanting to see the Norwegian trio on their first Dundee appearance when tickets went on sale in April, faced another rush yesterday after picking up an extra 150 tickets for the performance out of the blue. They were held back by promoter Mel Bush for his own use, according to office staff. But now he has released them for the general public at £8.50 each.

A-ha’s first performance in Dundee is part of the final leg of an exhaustive world tour which has seen them perform to near Beatlemania-like scenes in Australia, the U.S.A. and Europe.

arabchanter · 08/10/2019 8:40 am

Album 551.
Dire Straits.........................Brothers In Arms (1985)

This, the fifth studio album by Dire Straits, was their first to top the US album chart |(it stayed there for nine weeks, and was certified multiplatinum) It also became the bestselling album of 1985 in Britain where it was No.1 for three months, it was also the first CD to sell one million copies.

High on atmosphere and pristinely produced Brothers In Arms was arguably the peak of the group's career, and their few subsequent original albums lacked the same magic

arabchanter · 09/10/2019 10:10 am

Album 552.
Prefab Sprout.............................Steve McQueen (1985)

For a short while in the mid-1980s, school was cool: you could hardly pretend to understand The Smiths, Lloyd Cole, or Scritti Politti without a degree in English literature. But the hippest name for wordsmithery was a Newcastle quartet whose run of albums meant that nobody argued when Paddy McAloon claimed he was the finest songwriter of his generation.

PatReilly · 10/10/2019 8:10 am

a-ha: they were a bit out of kilter to bands I liked in the mid-eighties, but I'd just got married and had to find middle ground in musical tastes with the wife around that time, summer in 1985. Having said that, the songs on Hunting High and Low weren't enjoyed for peace or part of a fad, I still generally like that album, and have secured a few other a-ha recording since that point. 2009's 'Foot of the Mountain' was a decent collection.

But I get A/C's concern for Morten Harket's range at the high end, and can see how it may grate.

arabchanter · 13/10/2019 7:28 pm

Album 550.
Tears For Fears...............................Songs From The Big Chair   (1985)

Was a bit worried when I seen this, as I thought it would have aged, but thankfully I thoroughly enjoyed it and didn't think it was stuck in the eighties like some of the other offerings I've listened to lately.

I can't in all honesty say I like the two blokes, I always thought they were a wee bit up themselves but I am learning to separate the person from the music, although I'm not finding it at all easy so far. Musically I've always liked Tears For Fears, they always had a great rhythm to their songs, lyrically they could be a bit on the morose side but the production always camouflaged that in my humbles.

I remember hearing Mad World for the first time, it was in a mates car and we were on our way to play a match, now this lad loved his music and always had the best sound systems in his motors, so we're driving along and he says "get yer lugs roond this" and he played Mad World, I don't know if it was the heavy bass he had turned up or because of the superb stereo effect or simply the volume he had it at (max) but it really knocked me out and it was a memory that stands out for me, to be honest I'm normally more of a lyrics man but that instrumentation/production/arrangement call it what you will was five star and is still a record I can play more than once in an evening, which with my boredom threshold speaks volumes.

Anyways, Songs From The High Chair was very enjoyable, I especially liked "Shout" a pretty damned decent way to open an album, "Mothers Talk" was another but my stand out track was the sublime "I Believe." "Everybody Wants To Rule The World," I don't know if it's because it's been massively over-played, but I've gone aff it big style, I'll admit it can be classed as a classic in some quarters, but even though it's a good tune I turn it off when I hear it now (opinions eh?)

So will this album be getting added to my collection,?

No, although every track is well produced and performed, I think I'll cop out and get myself a download of their greatest hits, as finances dictate my album buying power, this wasn't quite worth the entrance fee and as downloads are free this is the route I'll be taking with Tears For Fears.

This album wont be getting added to my vinyl collection

Bits & Bobs;

Tears For Fears is primarily a duo made up of co-lead vocalists Orzabal and Smith. Although Smith has a handful of songwriting credits in the group's repertoire, Orzabal is the primary lyricist.

The English synthpop duo met as teenagers in Bath, where they joined the new wave act Graduate. In 1981, they formed their own group, History of Headaches, which quickly became Tears for Fears.

Much of their early music was inspired by the work of American psychotherapist Arthur Janov, founder of primal scream therapy, which focuses on bringing repressed childhood memories to the surface and dealing with the trauma through intense crying and screaming. Both Orzabal and Smith had difficult upbringings and were attracted Janov's ideas. Janov gained notoriety when he took on John Lennon as a patient in 1970.

Smith came up with the band name when he read about using "tears as a replacement for fears" in Janov's 1980 book, Prisoners Of Pain.

Their debut album, The Hurting (1983), featured their breakthrough single in the UK, the melancholic "Mad World." Their follow-up album, Songs From The Big Chair (1985), brought them worldwide fame, with the singles "Shout" and "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" hitting #1 in the US.

Smith left the group shortly after the release of their third album, the blues and jazz-influenced The Seeds Of Love. It was a lengthy production that saw the duo scrapping an album's worth of material and starting over, visiting several different studios, and taking months upon months to edit the tracks. Although the album landed in the top 10 on charts around the world, it pushed the group to its breaking point. Smith moved on to a solo career in New York City, while Orzabal soldiered on as Tears For Fears.

Smith and Orzabal patched things up in 2000 and began work on the reunion album, aptly titled Everybody Loves A Happy Ending (2004).

Orzabal wrote the comedic novel Sex, Drugs & Opera, published in 2014, about an aging pop star who goes on a reality show in an attempt to revive his career.

Smith made a few appearances on the long-running detective comedy Psych (2006-2014); the show's protagonist, Shawn Spencer, was an avid Tears For Fears fan.

The duo credits Ian Stanley for getting them into technology. Before they met him, they were writing everything on acoustic guitar, and Stanley - who worked with members of their old group, Graduate - offered to let them use his home studio with all the bells and whistles, including a synthesizer and a drum machine.

Manny Elias joined Tears for Fears after the dissolution of his previous band, Interview. He drummed on the Tears for Fears' first two albums and co-wrote the tunes "The Way You Are" and "The Working Hour."

Adolescence was not Curt Smith’s idea of a good time. His parents separated when he was very young. To get attention, he took up a brief life of petty crime that peaked when he was arrested for stealing cameras from his school in Bath, England. Then his best friend, Roland Orzabal, insisted that he read Arthur Janov’s Primal Scream.

Janov’s premise about the suppression of feelings and the childhood roots of adult neuroses made a lot of sense to Smith. Orzabal, who was also a problem child and who lived with his divorced mother, was ecstatic. After he had read Janov’s book, he says, “I rushed out to everybody I knew and started blubbering to them about it. Everybody thought I was a nutter. The only person who could see any sense in it was Curt.”

As Tears for Fears, Smith and Orzabal, both twenty-three, have since turned their primal screaming into a successful New Wave act. The pair’s 1983 debut album, The Hurting, topped a million in world sales and spawned three Top Five singles in England. Their latest LP, Songs from the Big Chair, could beat that. “Shout” has already been a major Common Market hit, while in America, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” a sober synth-bop number with a catchy chorus and a surprising heavy-metal guitar solo, has cracked the Top Twenty.  “What Americans are getting at the moment,” admits Orzabal, referring to the blatant simplicity of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” “is watered-down Tears for Fears.” Elsewhere on The Big Chair, the duo jazz up their Janov with the hushed introspection of “I Believe” and the droll humor of the “Shaft”-like string introduction to “Mothers Talk” (which is actually a computer sample of strings pinched from a Barry Manilow record).

Tears for Fears’ slick studio confections lack the crude confessional intensity of Plastic Ono Band, John Lennon‘s classic 1970 album, which was also inspired by Janov’s theories, and Smith gets annoyed when “people think we’re being heavy about something that, to us, is perfectly obvious.” He admits, however, that he and Orzabal took themselves “too seriously on the first album.”

“There was a fear,” adds Orzabal, “that people would think we were indoctrinating them.” As a result, they exchanged the brooding tone of “Mad World” and “Pale Shelter” on The Hurting for the more commercial sound of The Big Chair. Yet when he came up with the rah-rah chorus for “Shout,” Orzabal says, “I thought it was too simple, a bit crass.”

Friends since age thirteen, Orzabal and Smith have tried nearly every form of rock, past and present, in their eager quest for self-expression. Orzabal persuaded his pal to become a singer after he heard Smith warbling along to a Blue Öyster Cult record. As Graduate, their first recording band, the pair specialized in Beatlesque power pop. They also went through a brief sensitive-folkie phase before forming Tears for Fears, releasing their first single, “Suffer the Children,” in England in 1982.

The two are not upset that most of their amateur psychology sails right over the heads of their fans, most of whom are teenage girls. They are touchy, though, about comparisons to Wham! and other British pinup duos. Tears for Fears were invited to open a few arena shows for Wham! during that band’s planned U.S. tour this summer; they graciously declined.
“I think they’re big fans of ours,” Orzabal figures. “Under those glamorous tans, they are really two very depressed individuals.”

This story is from the June 6th, 1985 issue of Rolling Stone.

Songs From the Big Chair
by Tears For Fears

In the 1980s, Tears For Fears was a progressive/new wave project by composer and vocalist Roland Orzabal and bassist Curt Smith. They reached their commercial peak with their second studio album Songs from the Big Chair, which peaked at #2 in the UK and topped the US charts, while spawning four hit singles. Thematically, the album adopts a sort of mellow, electronic, primal-scream-like approach with rich and sophisticated pop compositions on the human condition and emotional healing.

Orzabal and Smith were acquaintances as teenagers and later as session musicians, where they first met future group drummer Manny Elias. After a short stint with the band Graduate, which yielded an album and single release in 1980, they formed a band to the develop a sound similar to Brian Eno or Peter Gabriel. The group got their name from a technique used in primal school therapy, developed by the American psychologist Arthur Janov, and most famous as the inspiration for the album, John Lennon/plastic Ono Band. Keyboardist Ian Stanley offered the duo free use of his home studio where Tears For Fears recorded and released three singles through 1981 and 1982, with the third of these, “Mad World”, reaching #3 in the UK late in 1982. Their debut album, The Hurting, was released in early 1983 with Stanley and Elias becoming full bandmembers, making Tears For Fears a quartet.

In 1984, the group began working with producer Chris Hughes on a follow-up to their successful debut album, with two singles released late in that year ahead of the early 1985 release of Songs From the Big Chair. The album’s title was inspired by a 1976 television film, “Sybil”, about a woman with multiple personalities who only found stability when sitting in her therapist’s “big chair”.

A regimented percussion introduces and persists throughout “Shout”, co-written by Orzabel and Stanley. In contrast to the mechanical instrumentation, the melodic vocals and synth riffs help the song grow in richness as it progresses. Released in November 1984, it was a smash hit on both sides of the Atlantic. “The Working Hour” has a completely different feel, starting with a jazzy saxophone solo and orchestral effects before the song fully kicks in with percussion by Jerry Marotta and grand piano by Andy Davis. It takes two full minutes before the vocal part of the first verse begins in this interesting song which is at once dark, desparate and distant but also warm and inviting.

Another chart topper, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” makes good use of arpeggios and motifs, which helped make it the cleanest pop song thus far on the album. The song’s middle section has a couple of rhythmic guitar sections with a later hard-rock-style guitar lead played by Hughes, who also played a large role in completing this composition. The first single released ahead of this album, “Mothers Talk” is driven by overbearing synths, percussion and chanting vocals, While this song has some new wave elements, these are buried within the thick production.

The second side starts with “I Believe”, a lounge-like ballad by Orzabel which stays sad and slow throughout and features Will Gregory on saxophone. The side and album concludes with “Listen”, a dramatic track which features long stretches of synth ambiance between vocal lines before it builds to an intense crescendo in the long outro where Orzabel and Marilyn Davis trade distant vocal chants. The middle of the side features a mini-suite where differing versions of the hyper-synth track “Broken” acts as both an intro and epilogue to the track “Head Over Heels”. The most melodic and interesting song on the album, “Head Over Heels” also possesses the best musical arrangement and overall composition, especially during the ascending chorus sections with sweet musical overtones and riffs by a variety of instrumentals. The outro to this Top 10 hit finishes with a coda section featuring bouncy bass, main riff and scat vocals until it reaches a climax at very end with a solo vocal line by Orzabal.

Songs From the Big Chair hit the Top 30 in about a dozen national charts across the globe. The band followed-up this worldwide hit with a world tour that lasted over a year before the group took an extended break, not releasing their third album until 1989.

"Shout"

Tears for Fears were followers of American psychologist Arthur Janov's school of Primal Therapy. This song was inspired by his primal therapy treatment, which worked by getting people to confront their fears by shouting and screaming. The name of the group came from Janov's book Prisoners Of Pain.

This was written by Tears For Fears frontman Roland Orzabal and keyboard player Ian Stanley. In the liner notes to the single, Orzabal explained: "The song was written in my front room on just a small synthesizer and a drum machine. Initially I only had the chorus, which was very repetitive, like a mantra. I played it to Ian Stanley, our keyboardist, and Chris Hughes, the producer. I saw it as a good album track, but they were convinced it would be a hit around the world."

This was a huge international hit, especially in the US, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK.

Songs From the Big Chair was named after the movie Sybil, in which a girl with 16 personalities retreats to a psychiatrist's chair.

John Lennon went through Primal therapy in 1970. Many of the songs he wrote immediately afterward were inspired by his experience in therapy, including God, Mother, and Working Class Hero.

The music video for "Shout" features vocalists Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith venting their anger on a gorgeous, isolated cliffside at Durdle Door in Dorset, England.

"The Working Hour"

A track from the breakthrough Tears For Fears album Songs From The Big Chair, "The Working Hour" was written by vocalist Roland Orzabal, drummer Manny Elias and keyboard player Ian Stanley. Orzabal wrote the lyric about being sick and tired of people telling him what to do - it was his way of kicking out his frustration.

If you're picking up a Peter Gabriel vibe on this song, that's probably because Jerry Marotta contributed to the track, handling drums and saxophone arrangements. Marotta was one of Gabriel's go-to studio pros in the '80s.

Two saxophone players perform on this track: William Gregory and Mel Collins, with Gregory doing the solo. Another outside musician, Andy Davis, was brought in to play the grand piano.

This runs 6:31, a second shorter than "Shout," which precedes it on the album. But while the vocals on "Shout" come in at the 11-second mark, "The Working Hour" has a full two-minute soundscape before Orzabal starts singing.

In 2001, Tears For Fears used the title of this track for their compilation album The Working Hour (An Introduction To Tears For Fears).

Both Orzabal and Smith call this their favorite track on the album, thanks to the sax. Orzabal told The Sound Bard: "Saxophone was always part of 'The Working Hour,' because of the riff. The main saxophone riff is extremely important and powerful - it's got that sort of 'crying' quality to it."

This almost became the album title, but Orzabal vetoed it in favor of Songs From The Big Chair, named for their earlier tune "The Big Chair" (the B-side of "Shout").

"Everybody Wants To Rule The World"

This song is about the quest for power, and how it can have unfortunate consequences. In an interview with Mix magazine, the band's producer Chris Hughes explained that they spent months working on "Shout," and near the end of the sessions, Roland Orzabal came into the studio and played two simple chords on his acoustic guitar, which became the basis for the song. Said Hughes: "'Everybody Wants to Rule the World' was so simple and went down so quickly, it was effortless, really. In fact, as a piece of recording history, it's bland as hell."

This was the first US #1 hit for Tears for Fears. "Shout" went to #1 two months later.

"Everybody Wants To Rule The World" is a line from the 1980 Clash song "Charlie Don't Surf." Did Tears for Fears lift it? Joe Strummer of The Clash thought so. He recounted a story to Musician magazine about confronting Roland Orzabal in a restaurant, informing Orzabal that "you owe me a fiver." Strummer said that Roland reached in his pocket and produced a five pound note, ostensibly as compensation for poaching the line for his hit title.

Curt Smith, one of the two members of Tears for Fears, did a solo, acoustic version of this for the soundtrack to The Private Public, a 2001 movie where he made his acting debut.

Dennis Miller used this over the closing credits of his HBO TV show, which ran from 1994-2002.

Although musically this is quite a jangly and catchy song, its lyrical theme is actually pretty dark. "The concept is quite serious - it's about everybody wanting power, about warfare and the misery it causes," Curt Smith explains on the band's website.

The song was covered by Lorde for the Hunger Games: Catching Fire soundtrack, which was released by Republic. She reworked Tears for Fears' tune into a haunting dirge, bringing out its inherent darkness. The label's executive VP Tom Mackay explained to Billboard magazine that the New Zealand singer-songwriter was wrapping her Pure Heroine album at the time tracks were being solicited for the soundtrack. "There was not time for her to write a demo, submit it and come back after changes [are requested]," Mackay said. "Like a lot of songs on this album, it's an artistic leap. When we heard it, we were amazed how she reshaped it-it's hard not to think about President Snow and the Capitol in the film and in the book."

In a Season 2 episode of the TV series Mr. Robot, the character Angela Moss (Portia Doubleday) sings a plaintive karaoke version of this song as she struggles through a moral crisis. "You really have a desire to rule the world?" a guy asks her when she comes to the bar. "Oh, my desires go way beyond that," she replies.

The band had trouble getting into the original incarnation of the song, which featured the lyric "everybody wants to go to war." When it was changed to the title phrase, everything clicked. "Once we got those lyrics, it was a joyful song," Orzabal explained.

This was used in the 1985 movie Real Genius, about a group of teen geniuses, led by Val Kilmer, who try to foil their professor's plot to sell their high-powered laser to the military. It was also featured in the 1997 comedy Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, starring Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino, the 2015 NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton and the '80s-themed Steven Spielberg film Ready Player One (2018).

This was featured in several TV shows, including ER ("Sharp Relief," 1998), Cold Case ("Greed," 2004), Malcolm in the Middle ("Lois Battles Jamie," 2005), Numb3rs ("Hot Shot," 2006), Brothers & Sisters ("States of the Union," 2007), The Wire ("React Quotes," 2008), Medium ("But for the Grace of God," 2008), Psych ("A Nightmare on State Street," 2014), and Riverdale ("Chapter Thirty-Nine: The Midnight Club," 2018).

Because "Shout" was the group's first single in the rest of the world, Tears For Fears thought it should also be their first release in the US, but the record label insisted "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" was better suited for their American debut. "Which is interesting in retrospect," Smith told " told Consequence of Sound, "because it was one of those times when the record company was right and we were wrong, because for America, yes, it was a better first single."

The 30th anniversary re-release of the album contains a few different versions of the song, including a live performance from Canada's Massey Hall, an alternate single, and an instrumental rendition. Smith said of the instrumental: "When you strip a vocal off a track, you get to then appreciate how that track was built because you’re just listening to the elements of the music behind it."

"Mothers World"
This politically charged tune was written by Tears For Fears' co-lead vocalist Roland Orzabal and keyboardist Ian Stanley. Orzabal, who also sang lead on the song, explained the meaning in a 1985 documentary on the band: "The song stems from two ideas. One is something that mothers say to their children about pulling faces. They say the child will stay like that when the wind changes. The other idea is inspired by the anti-nuclear cartoon book When The Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs."

In the UK, this was released as the album's lead single. "This was a taster for Songs From The Big Chair, the second album, on which we unashamedly tried to become more commercial," Orzabal explained. "I was against it, but I was swayed by some of the people that I was working with. They wanted to come out all guns blazing, but I wasn't ready for that. It was from this point, though, that things really started to explode."

In the US, "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" was the album's first single and the band's breakthrough hit in the country. A re-recorded version of "Mothers Talk" was released as the fourth single in the US and landed at #27 on the Hot 100.

The strings used in the intro were sampled from an undisclosed Barry Manilow record.

"I Believe"

The sleeve notes of the group's 1996 rarities album Saturnine Martial and Lunatic state that this was an homage to the style and work of British singer-songwriter Robert Wyatt. Tears for Fears' Roland Orzabal originally planned to offer the song to Wyatt before the band recorded it themselves. Wyatt's "Sea Song" was covered by the group as the B-side to this single in the UK.

Will Gregory of Goldfrapp played saxophone on this track, as he did on another song on Songs From The Big Chair, "The Working Hour."

The introspective ballad finds the narrator taking a hard look at his beliefs, including whether his destiny is created through free will or determined by fate, and challenging the listener to do the same. Orzabal remains cryptic about the song's meaning, but it's one of his favorite tracks on the album. "Very simple, a nice sort of jazz swing to it," he said. "Now, I don't wanna harp on about the lyrics or anything like that, but I think that they are the most potent and powerful lyrics we've ever put onto vinyl."

The liner notes specifically state: "Dedicated to Robert Wyatt (If he's Listening)." This is a reference to "Dedicated To You But You Weren't Listening" by Wyatt's former band Soft Machine.

"Head Over Heels"
Written by Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith, this song finds Orzabal going "head over heels" for a girl and pleading with her not to break his heart. The lyric is a combination of poetry and pathos that veer into dangerous territory at the end, as he sings:

It's hard to be a man when there's a gun in your hand
Oh, I feel so...

Any girl getting this missive would be wise to file a restraining order.

"Head Over Heels" was the tenth UK single release from Tears for Fears, and it scored them their eighth UK Top 40 hit. It is one of five hit singles from their third album Songs from the Big Chair.

The album Songs from the Big Chair takes its name from the 1976 American TV drama series Sybil, in which the title character, suffering from psychiatric problems stemming from child abuse, seeks refuge in her therapist's "big chair." For those of you who missed it, Sybil was based on the controversial book about a woman who was supposed to have had 16 different personalities. The TV series was pretty much the campiest, most-over-the-top portrayal of mother-daughter dysfunction since Mommie Dearest. Orzabal and Smith stated that they based this title choice solely on the concept that the songs on the album were so varied, that they all had different personalities all their own.

The song "Broken" precedes this song on the album, and is played both before and after this song in concerts, as it was originally composed as a segue into "Broken."

There are two versions of this song out there. The shorter version ends on a cold stop. The longer version is known as the "preacher version," because it opens with Roland Orzabal reciting the lyrics from their song "I Believe" as if delivering a sermon.

The video to "Head Over Heels" was directed by Nigel Dick, who would later direct Britney Spears in "Baby One more time." Roland Orzabal gave Dick the concept, which was meeting a beautiful girl in the library and growing old with her. He also suggested many of the very random images, like the rabbi and the chimp. There's even an homage to the movie Ghostbusters in a scene where Orzabal pulls a card catalog drawer and the cards go flying.

The song featured in the 2001 movie Donnie Darko during a scene where a camera flies around the school. Director Richard Kelly said on the DVD commentary that the scene in which the tune was used was written and choreographed specifically with the song in mind.