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













Not a great Dire Straits fan, in fact he's another knob, but for me this album was a half decent listen, I say half decent because I enjoyed side 1, side 2 not so much.

Knopfler was a pretty good songwriter, whom I have started to grudgingly give a bit more credit, hell he's even no bad at the strummin game as well, but tends to go off point and get a bit wanky at the drap o' a hat.


I have to admit I have more time for it these days, I'm sure I dismissed it back then but hopefully pretentiousness is a burden I've offloaded as the years have rolled on, the first side of Brothers In Arms was a joy and the second side may well have been overshadowed by the former.


Anyways, all in all a good listen, but a few tracks longer than necessary in my humbles, so not quite good enough for me to part with my hard earned, I don't think I would play often enough to justify the cost, so will be downloading it mean time, this album won't be going into my vinyl collection, also thought the album cover a bit plain even though it was Mark Knopfler's 1937 14-fret National Style "O" Resonator.






Bits & Bobs;

Have written about this band already in post #1527 (if interested)





Rolling Stone                           July 4, 1985 4:00AM ETBrothers In ArmsBy Debby Bull




Except for their swell debut hit single, “Sultans of Swing,” in 1979, the British band Dire Straits has never come as much of a surprise. And, then, what caught you off guard was how much the singer sounded like Dylan. Brothers in Arms, their first studio album since Love over Gold three years ago, offers more of their winsomely rocking tunes. The band is augmented by bassist Tony Levin, Weather Report drummer Omar Hakim, a horn section, which includes the Brecker Brothers, and some thirteen different keyboards that are used to explore orchestral textures. Carefully crafted instead of raucous, pretty rather than booming, and occasionally affecting, the record is beautifully produced, with Mark Knopfler’s terrific guitar work catching the best light. The lyrics are literate, but the scenarios aren’t as interesting as they used to be on records like Making Movies, still the band’s most solid LP.
Side one has the most driving songs: the bouncy “Walk of Life,” a Fifties rock & roll song about cool Fifties rock & roll songs that features a cheesy organ sound, and “So Far Away,” a missive from a distant town, with a catchy bass line rumbling underneath it. After a grandiose introduction, “Money for Nothing” shows what a guy who moves refrigerators for a living thinks of the rock stars on MTV. “See the little faggot with the earring and the makeup/Yeah buddy that’s his own hair/That little faggot got his own jet airplane/That little faggot he’s a millionaire,” the guy mutters, while Knopfler’s guitar grinds out his irritation. The guitar turns delicate for the gentle “Why Worry,” a song that’s as soft as a sigh.  Side two, made up of four songs about men and war, is more ambitious and less successful. Knopfler practically whispers the lyric to “Brothers in Arms” but never turns out images that catch your eye; the music’s lovely, though, with the electric guitar cutting patterns in a soft-toned background. But no telling metaphors are found in this quartet of songs, and the music lacks the ache that made Knopfler’s recent soundtracks for Comfort and Joy and Cal so powerful.



Singer Mark Knopfler wrote the title track Brothers in Arms in 1982, in the midst of the Falklands War. The two-month conflict claimed the lives of 258 soldiers.

 In 2007, Knopfler released a new version of the track to mark the 25th anniversary of the conflict. All proceeds went to a programme to help veterans deal with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.


Knopfler wrote Money For Nothing – which mocks the rock star lifestyle – after hearing a “hard-hat type” complaining in a department store while MTV played in the background on a wall of TVs.



In 2007, Mötley Crüe bass player Nikki Sixx claimed that Money for Nothing was about his band’s outrageous lifestyle. He said had been told that the videos the man was grumbling about was theirs.


The album was recorded on the island of Montserrat, in the Caribbean, where Sting happened to be on holiday. He popped in to help out on Money For Nothing.



Although he has joint writing credits for the track, Sting only provided the opening refrain – pinched from his own Police hit Don’t Stand So Close to me – to which he sings “I want my MTV.”

 He was reported to be embarrassed that his song publishing company demanded the credit.


Drummer Terry Williams was replaced by Sting’s drummer Omar Hakim halfway through the album after producer Neil Dorfsman decided he wasn’t up to scratch. Hakim recorded the beat on all the tracks in two days although Williams’ drumming can still be heard in the iconic opening of Money For Nothing.



Weird Al Yankovic parodied the song for his movie UHF, mixing it with the theme tune to Beverly Hillbillies. Mark Knopfler gave permission for the spoof and insisted on playing guitar on the song.


Walk Of Life was written to celebrate buskers on the streets of London. The original video features a busker on the tube but it was changed for the US market to montage of sporting bloopers.



"So Far Away"
 
This song finds Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler lamenting an itinerant lifestyle that keeps him away from a loved one. Although he was on the road a lot (the album was recorded in Montserrat), the song is not autobiographical. "'So Far Away" is something I would want to apply to anybody," he told the BBC. "Quite apart from anything else, we are now a world of travellers and air travellers. Families are split up in different parts, all over the place, and it has relevance."



He added: "It was about conducting a relationship over a telephone, which is a joke. It can't really be done over a long period of time, because you both get exhausted with it. That was the basic idea."


 
The line, "I'm tired of making out on the telephone, 'cause you're so far away from me" hails back to a common element of the 1980s: the phone-sex line. Remember, it was before the Internet, kiddies. You had phone lines you could call that began with prefixes like 1-800, 1-900, and so on. They'd bill an outrageous price per minute, and you'd find yourself talking to a phone sex worker, or listening to an erotic recording, or even on a "party line" socializing with real, actual people. Then the bill would come in and you'd have to bluff the phone company that a phreaker hijacked your line and ran up that bill. Good times!


Billy Joel took on this topic in his song "Sometimes A Fantasy."


 
Because of the time when the album came out, Brothers in Arms was one of the first to be recorded in direct digital aimed at a CD release. The album was still released on vinyl as well anyway. This dual release strategy actually led to some discrepancies; half the tracks on the CD are longer than their LP equivalents.



"Money For Nothing"


This song is about rock star excess and the easy life it brings compared with real work. Mark Knopfler wrote it after overhearing delivery men in a New York department store complain about their jobs while watching MTV. He wrote the song in the store sitting at a kitchen display they had set up. Many of the lyrics were things they actually said.

 
Sting sings on this and helped write it (he and Knopfler are the credited writers). That's him at the beginning singing "I want my MTV." Sting did not want a songwriting credit, but his record company did because they would have earned royalties from it. They claimed it sounded very similar to a song Sting wrote for The Police: "Don't Stand So Close To Me."
  

The innovative video was one of the first to feature computer generated animation, which was done using an early program called Paintbox. The characters were supposed to have more detail, like buttons on their shirts, but they used up the budget and had to leave it as is. It won Best Video at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards.



The video was directed by Steve Barron, who also directed the famous a-ha video for "Take On Me" and Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me With Science."


 
In the book I Want My MTV, various people who worked at the network explain that Dire Straits' manager asked the network what they could do to get on the network and break through in America. Their answer was: write a hit song and let one of the top directors make a video. Mark Knopfler took the directive to write an "MTVable song" quite literally, using the network's tagline in the lyrics. The song ended up sounding like an indictment of MTV, but Les Garland, who ran the network, made it clear that they loved the song and were flattered by it - hearing "I Want My MTV" on the radio was fantastic publicity even if there were some unfavorable implications in the lyrics.



Steve Barron was dispatched to do the video, and charged with the task of convincing Mark Knopfler, who hated videos, to do one that was groundbreaking. Barron says that Knopfler wasn't into the idea, but his girlfriend - an American - was at the pitch and loved the idea. Knopfler agreed (in part because he didn't have to appear in it), and Barron hired a UK production company called Rushes to work on it. Said Barron: "The song is damning to MTV in a way. That was an ironic video. The characters we created were made of televisions, and they were slagging off television. Videos were getting a bit boring, they needed some waking up. And MTV went nuts for it. It was like a big advertisement for them."




The line "I want my MTV" was the basis of the cable network's promotional campaign. They played clips of musicians saying, and often times, screaming the line between videos.


 
This was the first video played on MTV Europe. The network went on the air August 1, 1987, six years after MTV in the US.


 
The album version runs 8:26 with an extended outro. The single was cut down to 4:38.


 
In the US, this stayed at #1 for three weeks. It also won a Grammy in 1986 for best Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group.


 
Mark Knopfler played a Les Paul Junior plugged into a Laney amp on this track. Producer Neil Dorfsman recalled in Sound On Sound magazine May 2006: "We were going for a ZZ Top sound, but what we ended up getting was kind of an accident."


 

Twenty-five years after the song's release it was banned from public broadcast in Canada after one person complained about it being homophobic. The original version included a description of a singer as "that little faggot with the earring and the make-up" plus two other uses of the word "faggot," although a cleaned-up edition was made available, Oz-FM in Newfoundland played the first edition in February 2010 at 9:15 at night. The result was a single complaint and the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council ruled that the unedited version of the song was unacceptable for air play on Canadian radio stations because it "refers to sexual orientation in a derogatory way."




Knopfler has pointed out the song was written from the viewpoint of a stupid character who thinks musicians make their "money for nothing" and his stupidity is what leads him to make ignorant statements. Speaking in late 1985 to Rolling Stone the Dire Straits songwriter expressed his feelings about people who react angrily to the song. He said: "Apart from the fact that there are stupid gay people as well as stupid other people, it suggests that maybe you have to be direct. I'm in two minds as to whether it's a good idea to take on characters and write songs that aren't in the first person."




Common sense finally prevailed on August 31, 2011 when the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council put an end to the ban and allowed individual radio stations to once again decide for themselves whether to play the classic rock tune.


 
Mark Knopfler was once a reporter working on the Yorkshire Evening Post. He told Uncut magazine that his journalistic experience fed into this song. "I was reporting, verbatim, what a particular guy thought about music," he said. "I transcribed his words there and then. He was a meathead. To him being a rock star was easy, hence 'that ain't working.'"



"Walk Of Life"

Mark Knopfler wrote this song to celebrate the street buskers of London, hence the references to "Be-Bop-A-Lula" and "What'd I Say," two standards that might be part of a singer's repertoire in the mid-'80s.


 
The music video shown in America took a different approach: it showed sports bloopers. Stephen R. Johnson, a recent graduate of USC Film School, was the director. It was Mark Knopfler's idea to put sports in it, which was intercut with live footage. Knopfler's other directive was to avoid shooting him from the side to avoid the full effect of his nose.



This video did very well on MTV, but it was not the original. The first version of the clip, which was shown outside the US, was more true to the song, with footage of a busker in a subway (or as they call it in England, the tube). The sports-themed video was specifically aimed at American audiences, with footage of American teams.


 
This was the fourth single released from Brothers In Arms. It benefited from a catchy keyboard sound (played by Alan Clark)  which established the band on MTV and on Top 40 radio in America.


 
Before the lyrics kick in, Mark Knopfler does a few "who-hoo"s, which help create a whimsical vibe. When he spoke with the BBC in 1989, he expressed some woo remorse. "There's too many 'woos' at the beginning of 'Walk of Life,'" he said. "I heard it on the radio the other day and thought, Oh my God! What was I doing that for?"



"Why Worry"

Written by Mark Knopfler, this song finds him comforting a loved one in rather poetic terms:



But baby, just when this world seems mean and cold
Our love comes shining red and gold
And all the rest is by the way




It's almost a lullaby, as he turns the cold, cruel world into a place of tranquility.


 
This runs 8:31, with the last four minutes instrumental. When Mark Knopfler spoke with the BBC in 1989, he had second thoughts about this section. "The playout of 'Why Worry' seems to be a very pointless thing to me now, all that faffing around with pretty sounds," he said.


 
The Everly Brothers released this on their 1985 album Born Yesterday; Jennifer Warnes included it on her 2018 album Another Time, Another Place. She said: "Mark Knopfler understands the Everly Brothers and Ricky Nelson and all the American music, maybe more than a lot of Americans know it. He wrote this lovely, gentle song that the Everlys did, and I loved it. It's musical, it's intimate, it's loving."



"Brothers in arms"

This song was inspired by the Falklands War, which was going on when Dire Straits lead singer Mark Knopfler wrote the song. The Falklands War was a conflict between Argentina and the UK over islands off the coast of Argentina that each country claimed rights to. The islands are British territories, but in 1982 Argentina tried to reclaim one of the islands. Britain reclaimed their territories, but lost 258 soldiers in the conflict.


 
In this song, Mark Knopfler sings about a soldier who is dying on the battlefield, surrounded by his comrades, who remain by his side as he slips away. It's a look at the folly of war and the plight of those who fight them. "We've got just one world but we live in different ones," he told the BBC. "It's just stupid, it really is. We're just foolish to take part in anybody's war."


 
The title is something Knopfler's dad said. In discussing the Falklands War, he described the Russians and Argentinians as "Brothers In Arms," meaning they had similar ideologies. That phrase ended up being used as the title for the album.


 
In 2007, a new version of this track featuring Mark Knopfler was released to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Falklands War. Proceeds from the sale of the single went to a program that brought British veterans back to the site of the war in an effort to help them deal with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.


 
 Compared to the music video for "Money For Nothing," which was very modern for the time, very colourful and also very '80s, the video for "Brothers In Arms" is quite the opposite. It features sketchings of an ocean, a pendulum, soldiers, an island and the band playing as well as real footage of landscape and the band. This keeps the colors in black, white and gray with the exception of the end that is a colored sunset.

 

 

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














This album was a decent listen if you like your music on repeat, fir me ten of the eleven tracks were dead samey, whether it's his vocals or maybe the way they all seem to have the same over textured feel about them I don't know.


McAloon writes some excellent verse although often verging on the maudlin side of life, taking each track as an individual entity, there wasn't a track that I hated, but taken the album as a whole I just didn't get what it was about, just too many sound-alikes, I reckon if a DJ wanted to do a mix of Steve McQueen he could probably drop the needle just about anywhere and nobody could tell,


They seemingly played the Dance Factory back in '84, now I used to go now and again not knowing who was on but wanting a bit of live music, and back then I was very partial to bit of "Lou Reed," now, if they had been on and their live set is anything like this album, fuck me I'd be climbing the walls or on meh toes pretty lively like,but deffo chewin' meh lip aff, as you all may know, when you have partaking, the last thing you need is slowwwwww  zzzzzzz.


Anyways, the only track that stood out for me and that I really enjoyed was "Faron Young," so that will be getting downloaded, but as for the rest, maybe some of the more mature posters will mind o' this, it was like when you left the arm up on your record player, it kept on playing the same record over and over ( please correct me if i'm wrang aboot this, old age sometimes mixes it up a little.)


This album wont be going into my collection.





Bits & Bobs;

They keep themselves to  themselves, but here’s a few facts about the strange tunesmiths . . . Prefab Sprout — the name. It doesn’t really mean anything, it’s a makey up.“l put two words together that didn’t mean anything because people would say, ‘What does it mean?’ l had other names at the time like Chrysalis Cognosci. I wouldn’t pick Prefab Sprout now because it would strike the wrong note.”


 As a young boy, Paddy studied at a seminary (he nearly became a priest) but he left when he knew that music was his real calling. He studied English at Newcastle Polytechnic and started playing in the pubs round Durham, with the first Prefab Sprout, who by all accounts were a rather raucous three piece.


 Paddy’s gone through some weird phases. At one point, he considered writing an album of songs that all had the same title but were numbered, 1, 2, 3 and so on . . . he also wanted to write a whole album about sport. None of these ideas came to complete ‘fruition’ — phew!


 At first, the Sprouts were turned down by every major record label, and at the time decided to set up their own small label. They had 1000 copies of the first single, ‘Lions In My Garden’ and released though their newly formed Candle Records label, which had slogans ice ‘ The Wax That Won’t Get On You Wick’.


 This led to a deal with local Kitchenware records. The first album ‘Swoon’ was released and everybody became truly astounded by Paddy’s clever wordplay and unusual melodies . . . or something. Anyway, everyone said it was truly fab, even if they didn’t have any hits!


 The next release was a lush album full of rather super tunes called ‘Steve McQueen’. Everyone squealed and held their hands up in delight and said it was even better than ‘Swoon’ . . . and they had a hit! ‘When Love Breaks Down’ whizzed up to the heady heights of the number 25 spot, and the Sprouts even appeared on ‘TOTP’. Hurrah!


 An album called ‘Protest Songs’ was due for release but it was pulled at the last moment and is still snugly entrenched in the tape store!


 After a long ‘lay off’, only it wasn’t because Paddy McAloon writes every day. they returned with shock, horror, a huge hit single. ‘The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’ whizzed up into the top ten and gave the Sprouts a bit more recognition. The third album ‘From Langley Park To Memphis’ was another collection of meisterwerks and people started to talk about Paddy in hushed tones . . .

 The Sprouts have never been known as a rock ’n‘roll live outfit. ~ They haven’t played live since a tour of Japan in 1986 and their last appearance in Britain was one date at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, in February of that year. Paddy doesn’t even like going to see people play live!

 “I’ve never been to see anyone l couldn’t have lived without seeing, even if I’ve thoroughly enjoyed them. I can just put a record on and they live in my imagination! The air of mystery of never having seen Michael Jackson! I’d rather imagine him in Encino, wandering around with his animals and watching Fantasia in his private cinema. That’s better than anything l could ever see on stage.”

 At the moment Paddy’s working on Zorro The Fox, a soundtrack from an unwritten film. His imagination has also come up with The Jesse James Symphony, Moondog and Jordan — The Comeback. All songs devoted to Elvis Presley and telling the imaginary story of his life, his death and him landing on the moon . . . and suchlike.


 Paddy’s a bit skewy – hurrah!




 Though there is no band like Prefab Sprout, they do encapsulate British rock in the 1980s like no other. They doubled down on hooks like the Stone Roses, infused lyrics with wordy poetry like Morrissey and keenly bounced bass off of synth chords like New Order or the Pet Shop Boys.


 Fronting Prefab Sprout from the late 1970s onwards, Paddy McAloon was more keen than any of his contemporaries to inherit an esteemed history of jazz–informed pop songwriting from Stephen Sondheim and Paul McCartney. As he sings on the 1991 song "Paris Smith," McAloon wished to be the “Fred Astaire of words."


 And while the band’s 1985 album Steve McQueen never achieved the immediate fame of many of its peers’ work, the album’s legacy has steadily grown over three decades thanks in large part to its arresting tension between good old fashioned rock and roll and groundbreaking digital production.



Just like how the Beatles stretched the modern studio to its limits in the mid–’60s, Prefab Sprout knew it would need embrace the cutting edge technology of its time to get the most mileage out of its expert pop compositions. That’s where Thomas Dolby came in.

 Thomas Dolby first took a shine to Prefab Sprout in 1984 as part of a panel on BBC’s Roundtable, a program where DJs and popular musicians weighed in on new releases.


 By that point, Dolby had hit it big in North America. His single “She Blinded Me with Science” rocketed to the top of the US and Canadian charts in 1983 with the help of a video that proved popular on MTV.


 McAloon wanted a hit of Prefab Sprout’s own. Aligning with a tech savvy hitmaker must have seemed like a smart move, even if he was singing songs about bygone idols like George Gershwin and the American country music hitmaker Faron Young.


 Given the landscape in Britain at the time, the choice wasn’t all that strange. The like–minded Scritti Politti used an array of drum machines and digital synths including the Lindrum, the Roland TR-808, Yamaha's DX7 the Fairlight CMI, and the Oberheim Systemizer to make sugary sweet and decadently funky pop music as complex as Prefab Sprout’s own.


 Additionally, given that the most successful British groups of the era were synth pop acts like The Human League, Depeche Mode, and Duran Duran, it makes sense that an old school rocker like McAloon would sense that a splash of electronics could make his music more commercially marketable.


 Despite Steve McQueen’s run in the Top 40 of the UK charts, McAloon would publicly lament what he perceived to be poor commercial performance. Dolby apparently admonished McAloon about this. And within just the three years between Steve McQueen and its follow–up, the album sold 900,000 copies worldwide, better than any of Dolby’s own albums had performed.


 Steve McQueen has not endured because of its sales or chart success, though. It sustains thanks to masterful pop songs equally thick with forlorn romance and earworms, skillfully arranged by Dolby.


 Dolby’s innovative, nuanced production used synthesizers and the Fairlight CMI to paint McAloon’s McCartney–esque, dense compositions in water colors at a moment when Kate Bush and Jan Hammer were using the same tools like spray paint. The Fairlight CMI was a groundbreaking and infamously unreliable sampling computer best explained by Herbie Hancock on an episode of Sesame Street.







 Dolby Hears the SproutIt may have been Dolby’s self–identification as a songwriter that drew him to “Don’t Sing,” the single from Prefab Sprout’s first record, Swoon, played on that BBC program. It’s a gnarled song, with dense lyrics that sprawl past the margins of 4/4, forcing unexpected sequences of two and three beat phrases.


 Soon after the programme, Prefab Sprout’s manager and Kitchenware Records head Keith Armstrong asked if Dolby would be interested in producing the band’s next record. The band had no demos to show, so Dolby was invited up to the McAloon County Durham family home in Northeast England.


 There, in a small bedroom in a remote former rectory, McAloon sat with Dolby and a tape recorder as he played Dolby around 40 songs he had written, pulling sheets of lyrics out from stacks under his bed.


 Dolby took back these tape recordings and selected his favorites — some of them already seven or eight years old — for what would become Steve McQueen.


 In the Studio
McAloon’s songwriting involved strumming a guitar until he felt the time had come for the next line of lyrics, leading to phrases with an awkward number of bars. Dolby saw his role on Steve McQueen mainly as the “the editor, the filter.” Only once that work was done could he “add a little fairy dust of [his] own with the keyboards.”


 Using studio technology as part of the songwriting process was the ace hidden in Dolby’s sleeve. His savvy with music technology earned him fame with a mad scientist “synth boffin” persona employed on his debut album The Golden Age of Wireless.


 That integration of studio and songwriting was old hat to Dolby. His early years saw him building his own Powertran Transcendent 2000 monosynth from a kit and recording his own compositions on a Tascam Portastudio with a Boss Dr. Rhythm, presaging this century’s wave home electronic producers and songwriters by at least two decades.


 Dolby favored the Fairlight CMI and a Jupiter 8 on the record, the McAloon brothers later recalling that Dolby was not a “DX7 man.” He worked closely with the band’s other singer, Wendy Smith, to add her parts, often doubling them with her voice sampled through the Fairlight — one of the most distinctive and defining textures on the record.


 No One Planned It, Took It for Granted
Paddy McAloon knew nothing about recording and was insecure as an arranger. “I’m only really happy when I’m writing songs,” he told Jim Reid in 1985, “even the arrangement is a labour to me.”


 Dolby choreographed the band’s approach to performing and arranging the songs closely. Dolby took apart and reconstructed McAloon's chord sequences, with a mind to layer sound with different instruments and textures.


 He would examine McAloon’s piano phrasings and edit his fingering note by note. If McAloon was playing a full guitar chord high up on the fretboard, he would instruct him to only voice the bottom strings, leaving the rest to another keyboard or two.


 McAloon, then self-conscious about his singing, recalled being coached closely. Dolby told him to emphasize the lighter, more breathy aspect of his voice, with a few allowances for harshness on “Faron Young” and “Goodbye Lucille,” called "Johnny Johnny" when released as a single.

 These were old songs Dolby selected — holdovers from the band’s early incarnation as a pub rock band — retaining something of their rock n roll origins but made wide screen by Dolby’s production.


 The truckin’ pastiche guitar riff that serves as the main motif on “Faron Young” is given doses of heavy reverb for a cinematic quality during key moments. Dolby used the Fairlight on this track to imitate a banjo, performing credible banjo roll patterns to uncanny effect in the song’s intro.


 On the opening to “Goodbye Lucille #1,” the gentle four–note descending guitar line that opens the track is doubled by a palm muted guitar — a simple, thoughtful detail that adds a world of texture to the moment.
 The rehearsals paid off and Dolby recalls that once the mics were set the album “basically mixed itself.” Dolby’s own instrumental contributions were the embellishments and textures, added after the basic tracks were recorded.


 McAloon would have a few other artistic triumphs, like Jordan: The Comeback or I Trawl The Megahertz. He would finally score a top ten hit with Steve McQueen’s follow up, From Langley Park to Memphis.


 But Steve McQueen stands alone as a high watermark for ‘80s production and is a stunning example of the power of collaboration in which the traditionalist songwriting values of Paddy McAloon found a happy, transcendent marriage with the empathetic and technologically-literate ears of Thomas Dolby.


 Paddy was thrilled with the results. While talking about Dolby's production work on her 1985 album Dog Eat Dog, Joni Mitchell was quoted as having said that Thomas, “has a tendency to interior-decorate you out of your songs." Paddy instead claimed that Dolby had “made my songs into little palaces.”


I'm with Joni



 Dance Factory Dundee: February 26th, 1984

 




“‘THAT single! Such complicated beauty reeks of Wall Of Voodoo and Steely Dan unsmoothed and unAmericanised, with Stevie Wonder harmonica and a tight jumble of words and rhythms clicking and ticking into strange places. Much too complicated for the charts but a jewelled movement in the right, crazy direction.




“That name! A joke at the expense of image and the ridiculous pretension of the pop pose. Paddy McAloon, ah ’tis a fine Irish name, plays harmonica and guitar. Martin plays bass and Wendy goes “Oooooo”. Perverse, amusing, a sliding butchery of what’s going down in the mind of pop.




“Paddy is befringed with a floppy mop of hair. Wendy tucks her blonde tresses under a cap and wears dungarees. There is a slight resemblance to a subversive, off-world Thompson Twins – No, that’s a dire insult, it’s only on a visual level. This music was always going to be difficult to play live with ridiculous musical gear changes and rhythmic tricks their anxious appeal.




“Only a shadow of the recorded sound, they battle with their ideas and try to make them live. Plain wacky this, you don’t know where you are. Good. But they’ve got to watch they are very clever and that can lead to an elitism that would be a mistake. Clever, not clever-clever, is the way it should be. The beginning was excruciating, the band were hesitant, the feedback shrieked from various points, and the vocals non-existent. (The sound man is currently undergoing treatment). It was well over halfway through before Wendy’s cooing vocals were audible, just in time to save Paddy’s harsh voice from faltering along with some highly dubious guitar chords.




“The last three numbers saved the night. ‘Hallelujah’ was actually tuneful and light, the superb ‘Don’t Sing’ almost got near to the record and I loved it just as much in its rough state.’ Lions’ went right off the track but still worked. With an apology for ‘not being too lively tonight’ they left. I think they care. I think they could be very important.




“So the gulf between the record and the performance is massive but somehow it didn’t really matter. And that’s the wonder of Prefab Sprout.”




Bob Flynn, Melody Maker, March 10th 1984



 

Dundee University 18th October 1985.








"Desire As"



Frontman and songwriter Paddy McAloon, (from Mojo magazine October 2009): "There's a lot of plain speaking in my lyrics, and once or twice a few depth charges, (quotes from this song): 'There are six things on my mind/You're no longer one of them.' That's written from a point of abject confusion; it's cold but more a put-down of the person saying it."



"When Love Breaks Down"

 
Prefab Sprout were a UK pop/rock group formed in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in 1982. This song, in which their frontman and songwriter Paddy McAloon recalls the romantic folly of his youth, was their first of seven UK Top 40 hits.


 
In an interview with the October 2009 edition of Mojo magazine, McAloon was critical of one of this song's lines. He said: "I became very conscious of other people making hit records and I wanted to be there with Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Scritti Politti. It would be nice to have a song the milkman could whistle, I like the glory of language, the gag. Some don't work out, like on 'When Love Breaks Down' - which I'd always heard as uptempo - 'absence makes the heart lose weight.' It seems prissy, glib, too thought out."


 
The album was titled Steve McQueen in all countries apart from the United States, where it was called Two Wheels Good, due to a legal conflict with the estate of American actor Steve McQueen.

Always liked Suzanne Vega - chilled out inoffensive, second album better though.

Album 553.
Mekons..................................Fear And Whiskey   (1985)














No' even gonna comment or even look at any social media with regards to futba after that shit show today, god bless music................a great bunker to hunker down in and let the world pass you by.



So, Fear and Whiskey, an absolute topper of an album in my humbles and has there ever been as good an opening verse to an album as:

I was out late the other night
Fear and whiskey kept me going
I swore somebody held me tight
But now there's just no way of knowing


 I don't think so, if as Pat reckons "Mekons went a bit to fuck with the album" having never listened to the Mekons/Mekons (What are they actually called?) I for one can't wait to explore their back catologue, I've read people comparing them to X, The Clash, The Pogues and the Dictators which I must admit acts is a magnet rather than puting this punter aff, and I can certainly hear the Clash in the opening track and Hard to Be Human Again, and Abernant does have a hint of The Pogues, but being honest I feel that's pedancy, this album is what it is, a fantastic, mixed up, messy, Robbie Nielson formation of an album, but that actually works superbly in my humbles.


I have never been one of these precious people who derides country music, and if this is part alt-country, cow punk or fuckin' blue grass I don't give a fuck, it certainly got under my skin, the more I play it the more I love it, not in the sense that it wears me down or ureka i've just got it, I just feel downright comfortable and at home with this.



I haven't got any favourite track at the moment, but I would thoroughly recommend this album to each and everyone who looks in on this thread, this album will be going into my vinyl collection ( If I can source a vinyl copy, seemingly thin on the ground)




Bits & Bobs;




Lester Bangs once wrote, "The Mekons are the most revolutionary group in the history of rock 'n' roll," and although he wrote it tongue in cheek, that doesn't mean he was wrong. Thoroughly uncompromising, creatively restless, at once witty and profoundly cynical, and seemingly incapable of repeating themselves, the Mekons are one of the few bands from the first wave of British punk who not only never turned their back on their guiding ideals, but clung to them with greater tenacity over time. (This helps explain why their audience, while relatively small, is unfailingly loyal.) The Mekons were (and remain) as strongly political as any band short of Crass, but their Marxism came from the perspective of the guy at the bar, not unintelligent but rarely academic. Since 1977, the Mekons have followed a musical path that has taken them through punk ("Never Been in a Riot"), noisy experimentalism (The Quality of Mercy is not Strnen), synthesizer-based avant-pop (Devil's, Rats and Piggies: A special message from Godzilla), fractured country (Fear And Whiskey), rock & roll (The Mekons Rock 'N' Roll), electronics (Me), and several brands of folk (Natural: Ancient and Modern, and Jura) funny I've got a nice bottle of single malt called Jura (Journey), and for all their sonic shapeshifting, they've always managed to sound like the Mekons, brave contrarians who've gone too far to stop, at every turn.




The Mekons were formed in Leeds, Yorkshire, England in 1976 by a handful of art students at the University of Leeds. The original lineup featured singers Andy Corrigan and Mark "Chalkie" White, guitarists Tom Greenhalgh and Kevin Lycett, bassist Ros Allen, and drummer Jon Langford. Taking their name from a villainous alien in the U.K. adventure comic Dan Dare, the Mekons' witty and shambolic brand of punk earned them a reputation in Leeds (where another idiosyncratic political band, Gang Of Four, was incubating), and they were one of the first bands to sign with the independent Fast Product label. Their debut single, "Never Been in a Riot" b/w "32 Weeks," was released in 1978; the A-side was a sarcastic response to the Clash's's "White Riot," while the flip got its title from the amount of time one could stay on unemployment. A second single for Fast, "Where Were You" b/w "I'll Have to Dance Then (On My Own)," appeared later the same year, and as the Mekons began receiving more press attention, they were approached by Virgin Records, which signed the group to a recording deal. The Mekons' first full-length album, The Quality Of Mercy Is Not Strmen, was released in 1979, and traded the shambolic punk of their earliest sides for a more brittle and experimental sound. After the album was released, Ros Allen left the Mekons and would later form Delta 5. After the release of a double-7" set, Teeth, that saw the band adding fiddles and electronics to their attack, the Mekons parted ways with Virgin, and struck a deal with the independent Red Rhino label. Their second album, Devils, Rats and Piggies: A specil message from Godzilla was also known simply as Mekons, and found them further pursuing the experimental sounds of Teeth. It was the last album featuring Andy Corrigan, and the band's initial lineup split after a gig in New York City on New Year's Eve 1980/81. Fittingly, the Mekons's next full-length, 1982's The Mekons Story (aka It Falleth Like Gentle Rain From Heaven: The Mekons Story) was a purposefully ragged collection of live tracks, studio outtakes, demos, and other odds and ends that served as a tongue in cheek history of their first five years. Following the release of 1983's The English Dancing Master, a challenging fusion of dance rhythms, dub-wise sound sculpting, and traditional British folk, the band took time off from recording to regroup.




When the Mekons returned in 1985 with the album Fear And Whiskey, they were a very different band. Tom Greenhalgh and Jon Longford were the only holdovers from the original group, with the latter moving from drums to guitar and vocals. Dick Taylor, one of the founders of the Pretty Things and an early member of the Rolling Stones, was on lead guitar, while Lu Edmonds (who had worked with Public Image Ltd) was on bass, Steve Goulding (of the Rumour) handled drums, and Suzie Honeyman played violin. The band's new sound was scrappy rock & roll with a pronounced country influence, and the lyrics were full of boozy contemplation along with the tribulations of daily life. The 1986 album The Edge of the World(which, like Fear And Whiskey, was released on the band's own Sin Records label) followed in similar fashion, and added Sally Timms on vocals and Rico Bell on accordion to the mix. This core of musicians would dominate the Mekons' recordings and performances from this point on, and these albums earned enthusiastic reviews from critics in the U.K. and North America, as well as winning them a new audience among underground rock fans with a taste for roots music.


 Fear and Whiskey  So it turns out this is a stone-cold masterpiece. Who knew? It's been out of print for years, but now that it's back, it's being called everything from "a good set of drinking songs" to "the seed that sprouted alt-country" to "the greatest rock album in history." Fear and Whiskey was the first great statement of "shambolic punk" band the Mekons, and yes, it is as great as all their rabid fans have always said (though "the greatest rock album in history" is, of course, a bit of a stretch).


 As I was digging through my rock library to figure out what defines a classic, I found an essay by Steve Wynn of the Dream Syndicate, listing his top criteria for what makes a great rock album. The most important factor, he argued, was "the potential of falling apart at any moment": not just that the recording sounds rough around the edges, but that the entire band could have careened off the rails at any time. The Mekons, circa 1985, fit that description wonderfully. Though this album took months of planning, Fear and Whiskey sounds as chaotic and spontaneous as any great night at a dance hall full of the reek of stale beer. Just like a live show, almost all you can hear through the record's tinny sound are Steve Goulding's drums-- pounding out a dance beat crossed with a military tattoo-- and Susie Honeyman's fiddle, soaring above, pretty but ragged. Singer/guitarists Tom Greenhalgh and Jon Langford bellow, cheer and grumble through the noise. They sing about booze, they sing about politics, and most of all, they sing about despair: Greenhalgh opens "Chivalry" with, "I was out late the other night/ Fear and whiskey kept me going," while the heroic tune from the violin keeps him upright.


 But let's move past the drinking and look at what it stands for: failure and camaraderie. The Mekons were born in '77 but were all but defunct by the mid-80s; they reunited to play benefit shows for miners during the strike of '84-85. As "non-aligned lefties," the band raged against the Thatcher administration, and watched the suffering of miners who were on strike for a year and then went back to work in defeat. But against that backdrop, Fear and Whiskey doesn't so much as stumble. Every disaster turns into a victory anthem, from Greenhalgh and Langford shouting through "Hard to Be Human Again," to "Abernant 1984/85," which is a glorious waltz no matter how bleak the lyrics ("They seek to destroy us/ How much more is there left to lose?").


 The music is a mess of influences united on the bones of punk music. The Mekons always subscribed to the "anything goes" rules of Britain's "Class of '77," and Fear and Whiskey is their most famous example: this was the record where they started to assimilate country music. It was a radical move in mid-80s Britain, not least because of the right-wing politics that were associated with the style. Musicologists have labelled this the father of alt-country, that bastard offspring of indie rock and country/western-- though for as much as you hear it on "Darkness and Doubt" (complete with a John Wayne reference), or the cover of Hank Williams' hit "Lost Highway," country is just one of the styles jammed in here, along with English folk, Leeds punk, and whatever else was at hand. Anyone who expects scenic Americana will stop short at the second song, "Trouble Down South," a weird mini-drama that would bring a lesser album to its knees: Ken Lite narrates some kind of a military advance over a reggae-inflected drum machine and a wheezing accordion, while soprano Jaqui Callis struggles to hit her highest notes. As far as it fits here at all, it's to force the listener to accept that the Mekons are ready and willing to do whatever they want.



 No matter how scattershot the first few songs sound, the second half of the album justifies everything. With a "proper" band assembled, these last five songs were "recorded and mixed one fine spring day in 1985," and they make up one of the most spontaneous, exciting and perfect album sides ever. For fourteen minutes, from "Flitcraft" to "Lost Highway," the Mekons don't touch the ground. This is music that is effortlessly, spontaneously great, with a massive beat that sweeps along grim lyrics like, "We know that for many years there's been no country here."



 But it's right near the end that they play the crowning song, the most perfect part of the album: "Last Dance," a pop song that sounds like it had never been played before that day but where every note falls in place, down to that throwaway guitar solo and Honeyman's beautiful fiddle, so bright it could make you want to cry. The narrator sings about the end of the night, when the music's winding down and it's time to search the room for someone to take home. The lyrics are resigned to failure, but then there are two lines in the middle-- "So beautiful, you were waltzing/ Little frozen rivers all covered in snow"-- sung by a man whose desire stretches his capacity for eloquence: he could have just seen the woman he'll marry. And he probably goes home alone.



 The Mekons didn't stand on the brink of collapse because they chose to; they accepted the knowledge that everything could be ripped from their hands. The Thatcher administration could declare war on the people; the miners could lose the strike. You could get one great night out of hundreds of bad ones, and for those fleeting moments you grab whatever you can-- even if it's just a handful of rowdy old songs.


 Fear, Whiskey and Punk Rock: The Story Behind the Kick-Ass Mekons Doc A new documentary on the veteran first-wave punk/country band charts a long, strange career

 Worth a look if you get the chance.




Dundee Link



Clarks Bar Dundee, 19/08/2014, The Mekons with Robbie Fulks perform "Millionaire". This gig was the last night of their highlands and islands tour.







I thought I'd never heard The Mekons before, but I came across this ........I never knew!
   






 

Last edited by arabchanter (19/10/2019 10:56 pm)

Album 554.
Big Black...........................Atomizer   (1986)













This is an album that I can't say is comparible with anything I've heard before, musically it draws you in, but lyrically some of the tracks made me want to switch it off initially, this is a very intriguing offering that after a few plays I've come to the conclusion that for me at least it wasn't championing some of the more lurid pictures that the lyrics portray, but more "look guys this shit is happening, and I for one aint gonna duck it, listen in "


As I said I loved the musicianship, and I've always been a sucker for the precision of the old Roland drum machine setting the beat for most of these tracks, although this is not my normal cuppa I did enjoy this one, even the six minute "Kerosene" didn't fuck me off as much as usual. The opening track did take a few plays to understand, but the rest of the tracks I enjoyed tremendously.


Trying to get some bits & bobs about this band was a bit of an eye-opener, never type Big Black into your browser , although I've always thought of myself as "been around the block a few times" the suggestions I got were mindboggling both in the male, female and also the gender neutral, so the bits & bobs may be a tad shorter than usual.


This album wierdly enough I've taken a considerable liking to, but the thing is, is it a platter I'd play in public? to guests? to my kids? I think the answer is most likey no to all of the above, so this album wont be going into my vinyl collection but will be downloaded as a case of urgency to play on my I pod, and anything I can blast it out on with my earphones in.




Bits & Bobs;


Big Black was one of the most important Chicago punk bands of the 1980s. They are one of the Big Four and released a bevy of albums and EPs before breaking up in 1987. Fronted by Steve Albini and lead on guitar by Naked Raygun founder Santiago Durango with Naked Raygun's Jeff Pezatti on bass, and later Dave Riley on bass after Pezzati left the band due to the pressures of touring and recording with Raygun.


 Big Black was very often hard bass driven and heavy, aggressive, with an industrial edge and used a drum-machine, and Albini along with Naked Raygun were very much responsible not only for Chicago's founding punk sound, but also for influencing the early industrial music genre born in the Midwest primarily in Chicago and Detroit around the same time. While they are recognized for the dawn of punk music in Chicago and its original, unconventional sound - contributing nothing like what came out of New York, London or the West but instead an entirely unique unconventional approach to punk - they are less mentioned for in part influencing/creating a whole new genre of music simultaneously that became popular later on during the 1990s with the likes of producers such as Trent Reznor and also influenced bands like The Cure, Killing Joke, and many other New Wave groups, and even the Seattle alternative grunge explosion. Among a slew of other genres including punk, noise-rock, post-hardcore, etc., Big Black could also be labeled as pre-industrial. With the use of a drum machine and a commanding sound that left audiences numb, they were a crucial predecessor to the burgeoning industrial music genre, producing music and results that was far beyond the groups that would go on to adopt industrial like Ministry, Nine Inch Nails and Erasure.


 After disbanding in 1987, Albini went on to start Rapeman and later Shellac, as well as becoming a mega engineer, producing the likes of Nirvana (In Utero), Sonic Youth, The Pixies (Surfer Rosa), and many others.





"Jordan, Minnesota"


 from the liner notes of Atomizer:


"You can’t think about it, really, because if you do then you go crazy, stark gibbering spitting and pissing in your pants crazy, so you don’t think about it. but once in a while you do think about it, and there’s all this weird shit going on and you can’t believe it can all really be like this. you think of all the bad, bad things you do to yourself out of some weird need. you go places, bad places, to fulfill some gnawing need, and you do ugly things to yourself and other people not because of the ugliness–well, sometimes because of the ugliness, i guess–but usually because there’s something else there and you’d do it no matter what. there are people who do. no matter what. they fuck their children, for shit’s sake. a whole town. bus drivers, school teachers, cops, storekeepers, housewives, little boys, little girls. very little, they play games with it, like very special hide-and-seek, and very special spin the bottle and very special poker, and every day the little boys have to get up and walk to the bus stop with the daddy who mouth raped them the night before, and they have to get on the bus with the bus driver who rubbed his shit in their hair, and say “yes maam” to the lady who made them lick her the night before, and then they have to go home, you know, where daddy and mommy have been making martinis for the little get together later on, and go hide under the covers where they know they’ll be found anyway and day in and day out for the rest of their motherfucking lives and then they grow up and they have babies and like i said, you don’t think about it because you go crazy."


   What have the artists said about the song?

 In an interview with Evelyn Morris for LISTEN which focused on Shellac’s relationship with gender issues and feminism, Steve Albini specifically addressed an number of his songs, including “Jordan, Minnesota”:



This song, inspired by news reports of a purported child sex abuse ring in the town of Jordan Minnesota, might be the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever had to own up to. Read the news reports of the day, and they all took at face value the preposterous accounts of an ambitious prosecutor, who groomed and falsified testimony from children as young as three or four. They painted a hellscape where children were regularly raped and traded between adults as sex objects. There was a round of scurrilous prosecutions and eventually some poor son of a bitch was scapegoated off to prison, but the whole thing was a sham. None of it happened. It fit the national mania at the time to find child sex predators, and it fit my personal pretension that all of us, all of humanity, is capable of both the most elevated and most depraved acts imaginable. I am deeply sorry I was duped, and if this song perpetuates the impression that these people were actually doing these things, then it’s caused harm, and I’m sorry for that as well. There is literally no way I can make up for that.




"Passing Complexion"



Racial passing occurs when a person classified as a member of one racial group is also accepted as a member of a different racial group. A black person with light complexion might pass as white in certain situations to afford a certain privilege or avoid discrimination.


 What have the artists said about the song?From the Pig Pile liner notes:



Nowadays we can see talk show panels comprised of people who have to tell people they’re black because they’re pale, don’t look like the “black” archetype, and therefore miss out on all the racism they’re entitled too. If someone can be “black” by proclamation, then the term is as meaningless now as it was in the 1920’s.




"Big Money"


 Written about abuse of power in the police force.from the liner notes of Atomizer:



"Greed that manifests itself in laziness. a cop who sleeps in his car. a cop who goes into “bad” neighborhoods for recreation. a cop who uses his position as a bludgeon."




"Kerosene"


 From the Atomizer liner notes:



"In small towns, there are few forms of amusement. two prominent ones are easy sex and arson. When the more simple exercises lose their bang, new combinations develop.



Any similarity between the rhythm patterns used and Led Zeppelin drumbeats is entirely appropriate."





"Bad Houses"

 Written about a man who frequents whorehouses and the sickening disgust he feels for himself as a result.

 from the liner notes of Atomizer:

 “we do things, bad things, and go places, bad places, even when the thrill is seldom worth the degradation. maybe we need the degradation, maybe we associate it with the thrill, and after a while, they become inseperable. then the thrill becomes secondary.”



"Fists of Love"



 A lovely little tune about domestic violence.

 from the liner notes of Atomizer:


 “take expression of emotion to its physical end. until the expressions take on meanings of their own. they become almost rituals in their gravity, fist fucking, wife-beating, whatever.”


 In an interview with Evelyn Morris for LISTEN which focused on Shellac’s relationship with gender issues and feminism, Steve Albini specifically addressed an number of his songs, including “Fists of Love”:




"We’ve all known people in relationships where there was a kind of wildness, whether sexual or not, that would appear to an observer to be violent, but within the context of the relationship, everything was part of the fun. My wife, for example, would once in a while slap me or another friend in the face, not out of anger, but because it was maybe the funniest way to conclude a sentence."



"There are also aspects of sexual relationships that, while consensual and “enjoyed” by everyone involved, are frankly appalling on face value. Toys, bondage and light dominance are the vanilla wafers of this behaviour, but in my circle of friends choking, punching, penetration with fists and objects, cutting, branding, suturing etc. all made appearances. The dark side of this is that once behaviour like that enters your ken, the other kind of fisticuffs, the kind used to exert dominance, cause harm or exact revenge loses some of its context because it isn’t unique."



"For a lot of people, squares in pure vanilla relationships for example, nobody gets hit, nobody gets tied up, nothing weird ever happens. In that context anything to the left of standard banging is de facto evil or criminal and nothing more needs to be said. That isn’t true in our circles, so the hinge of every relationship is consent. Not willingness, that can be engineered or manipulated, but consent. Two people who’ve been up for days on crank or crazy on pills can both be willing to do something, but if the situation has been engineered to exploit that, it isn’t consensual."



"If there is an underlying power relationship, say bandleader to side player, manager or producer to artist, promoter/booker/club owner to band etc. then conditions may prevent the concept of consent from applying. If you agree to have sex with someone because he could ruin your career otherwise (or take your children or leave you homeless or cause you any of a million smaller consequences), then willingness isn’t consent, it’s the product of fear or coercion."




"Stinking Drunk"

 A song about falling off the wagon.

 From the liner notes of Atomizer:


 “if you haven’t been for a while (a long while), then the reasons you quit lose focus, you forget the sensations that used to be all-important, then curiosity-overcomes you.”



"Bazooka Joe"


 A song written from the perspective of a guy getting a traumatized soldier to go into some sort of dirty work for him by pretending to be his friend.

 from the liner notes of Atomizer:


 “joe comes back from the great war very different, he has done nothing but kill and watch death for many long months, he has trouble adjusting until a friend suggests a new line of work, compatible with joe’s new skills.

 Part of the drum track is an M1 carbine being fired in a field exercise, by a guy named joe."



"Cables (Live)"



A live version of “Cables” from the Bulldozer 12" EP closes out Atomizer. According to Steve Albini’s liner notes, the track was recorded “at the only benefit gig I’ve ever heard of where the club owner insisted on taking his standard cut from the door.”


 What have the artists said about the song?from the liner notes of the Bulldozer EP:



"these guys in montana would go to the slaughterhouse after school and watch the cattle die for entertainment. they used to describe the prods, hammers, cables and hooks with a kind of hobbyist’s fascination. sometimes they helped out.

 from Atomizer:



"our interests in death, force and domination can change the way we think, make us seek out new forms of entertainment.” ever been in a slaughterhouse?"



Found this interview with Steve Albini quite interesting!







 


 

Thanks for your comments Pat, and interesting stuff about the Atomizer , but how come I feel you're moving ever closer to this





God Bless The U.S of A 

Last edited by arabchanter (24/10/2019 10:39 pm)

arabchanter wrote:

Thanks for your comments Pat, and interesting stuff about the Atomizer , but how come I feel you're moving ever closer to this





God Bless The U.S of A 

Too far!
 

Album 555.
Suzanne Vega.........................Suzanne Vega   (1985)













Suzanne Album 555.
Suzanne Vega.........................Suzanne Vega   (1985)






Suzanne Vega for this listener was pretty meh, boring and very insipid, the lyrics had a certain crispness which unfortunately for me didn't blend particularly well with the orchestration, lyrically although on the hum-drum side, were pretty much on the money but just didn't put itself "front and centre"



Apart from  "Marlene on the Wall"  and perhaps "Crakin' I wasn't too impressed, like Finn said earlier pretty inoffensive but no' even no' bad to be honest, no' an album I would  want in my collection, and although I do think Vega is a superb piece of gash that's no' quite enough for me to put her in my vinyl collection, so she wont be being purchased.






Bits & Bobs;



Suzanne Vega was born in Santa Monica, California, but grew up in Spanish Harlem and the Upper West Side of New York City.


 
She was raised by her mother, a computer systems analyst and her stepfather, the Puerto Rican writer Egardo Vega Yunque


.
Suzanne Vega attended New York City's High School of Performing Arts where she studied modern dance and graduated in 1977. Vega later attended Barnard College where she majored in English Literature.


 
Suzanne Vega wrote "Tom's Diner" whilst eating breakfast at Tom's Restaurant in New York City. Tom's Restaurant was also used as the model for Jerry Seinfield's hang out in his hit sitcom Seinfield.


 
She auditioned for the lead role in Desperately Seeking Susan, but lost out to Madonna.



 
In 1989 Suzanne Vega became the first ever woman to headline at UK's Glastonbury Festival. After receiving death threats from a girl infatuated with her bass player, Vega performed in a bulletproof vest.


 
When German computer programmer Karlheinz Brandenburg was developing the technology that would come to be known as the MP3, he found that Suzanne Vega's voice was the perfect template with which to test the purity of the audio compression that he was aiming to perfect. As a result, the MP3 format's voice compression was specifically calibrated to sound good when playing "Tom's Diner". Because of this, Vega has been referred to as the "Mother of the MP3."


 
Vega was the first major recording artist to perform live in the Internet-based virtual world, Second Life. The event, which took place on August 3, 2006, was hosted by John Hockenberry of public
radio's The Infinite Mind.


Suzanne Vega’s debut album was released in 1985. Well-received by music journalists, it reached platinum status in the UK and produced the international hit single ‘Marlene on the wall’.


 The album was produced by Lenny Kaye and Steve Addabbo.


 In 1989, Rolling Stone magazine listed Suzanne Vega at number 80 on its “100 Best Albums of the Eighties”.It is also mentioned in the book ‘1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die’.


 
Vega wrote this about coping with loneliness; she finds comfort by looking up to a poster of Marlene Dietrich on the wall. Vega really did have a poster of Dietrich on her wall. She explained in SongTalk magazine: "That was a truthful song. The lines came out of my life. But you want to be careful, too, because you don't want to get into 'Oh, my boyfriend left me...' I have a problem with specifically confessional songwriting. I think you have to craft it in some way. I don't think you can come on stage and blurt out your innermost feelings. My niece can blurt out her innermost feelings. She's four years old. I wouldn't want to pay $25 to go see her do that. You need to put it in a form. Although it is truthful, you have to give it some respect, or a certain kind of dignity, by putting it into a kind of form. Because these people are not my friends. They're paying to see a show, some form of entertainment. So I'm not gonna sit there and talk to them like Ronee Blakely in Nashville."


 
Marlene Dietrich was a German actress who became an international film star in the 1930s. During World War II, she put her movie career on hold in order to entertain US troops, a move that won her the Medal of Freedom, the highest military award a civilian can receive. Dietrich was 90 years old when she died in 1992.


 
Vega told SongTalk that this song always seemed "a little wide of mark, somehow." Said Vega: "It's accessible and people do like it, but for me, personally, inside myself, I feel I had something in mind, and I kind of did it, it was stylish, it was interesting, but I didn't feel it was quite the bulls-eye that some of the others were. The idea of using a poster as a reference point is a very pop idea. It's a song about Marlene Dietrich. You kind of get that from it, or it's a song about a relationship."


 
This was Vega's first single. It did well in the UK, but didn't get noticed in America. Vega, who is from New York, found success in the US 2 years later with her album Solitude Standing, which contained the hit song, "Luka."


 
Bauhaus lead singer Peter Murphy included a song called "Marlene Dietrichs favourite poem" on his 1989 solo album, Deep, where he makes an apparent reference to this track:



Just wise owl tones no velvet lies
Crush her velvet call
Oh Marlene suffer all the fools
Who write you on the wall



Suzanne Vega on Gender Identity, Britney Spears and New Concept Album Singer-songwriter’s latest, ‘Lover, Beloved,’ is inspired by life and work of Southern author Carson McCullers

 When Suzanne Vega premiered the play, Carson McCullers Talks About Love, five years ago in New York City, the evening of theatrical cabaret was the culmination of decades of investigation into the Southern author. But it didn’t satiate her creative spark. This week the “Luka” singer releases Lover, Beloved: Songs from an Evening with Carson McCullers, a 10-song concept album that takes listeners on a journey through literary luminary’s life and work.


 Vega discovered Carson McCullers – author of novels The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding – as a teenager after reading her short story “Sucker,” loving its language and modern feel. But she didn’t realize it was written by a woman until she later read a biography, and her gender fluidity appealed to Vega.
  She explains that, although she’s heterosexual and has been married to men (“happily,” she points out), there was a time when “I did not like being female, being a girl,” which she expressed in her song “Small Blue Thing.” “I wanted to be something other than that, not necessarily male – if I could have been a thing or a plant or anything … I really loved how she was so open about her bisexuality. She was dual-natured the way she lived her life.”

 A collaboration with her friend, singer-songwriter Duncan Sheik, this album is a witty, bluesy passageway into a previous era. “Harper Lee,” a song packed with more literary references than seems feasible, is mined from actual things that McCullers said and wrote about her contemporaries. After the release of Lee’s Go Set a Watchmen last year, people wondered if it would spur Vega to change the song in some way. “I think [Lee] has, in effect, only written one book,” she explains. “It proves how prophetic Carson’s spirit it. It’s not the only thing that’s of this time. There’s quite a few things: gay people can marry … the Black Lives Matters movement has coalesced. The last song on the album, ‘Carson’s Last Supper,’ has overtones of Bernie Sanders’ [campaign] message. She was genuinely ahead of her time.”



 Despite a robust creative output over the years, perhaps Vega is still best remembered for her two earliest and biggest hits: the poetic observations in “Tom’s Diner” and “Luka,” which deals with child abuse. In fact, “Tom’s Diner” was once again a radio hit last year – nearly 30 years after its original a capella release on her first studio album Solitude Standing – when Giorgio Moroder remade it with Britney Spears singing the familiar lines: “I am sitting in the morning/At the diner on the corner/I am waiting at the counter/For the man to pour the coffee …”


 “I have to say, I was surprised,” Vega says. “It came right on the heels of Fall Out Boy [who sampled the song on “Centuries”]. I thought, ‘That’s great that Britney Spears wants to do this.’ I was impressed because it was her idea and … it’s showing maturity in her career choices.”


 Vega admits she was also surprised how closely Moroder followed the DNA remix that hit Number Five on the Hot 100 in 1990 after its release, hoping it may take on a disco tinge. “I’m a big Donna Summer fan, and I was expecting a real transformation,” she says. “I was thrilled [Britney] did it, and I hope she does it in her live show.” 
 The first single of this latest album, “We of Me,” may be a bit too transgressive to ever see such mainstream success, despite being the most contemporary-sounding song. The language is taken from The Member of the Wedding, and is sung from the perspective of the young protagonist, who wants to join her brother and his bride to be a perfect trio. “In Carson’s own life, she ended up loving two people at the same time,” Vega says. Alas, as joyful as it is, a song about a threesome – sexual or spiritual – may still be too much for someone to enjoy on their own wedding day.



 

Album 558.
The Smiths..........................Meat Is Murder   (1985)














The original photo of this soldier, Marine Corporal Michael Wynn, was taken in 1967. He had the words “Make war not love” inscribed on his helmet. It was used as the image for Emile de Antonio’s doc ‘In the Year of the Pig’ in 1968, but The Smiths changed the wording to “Meat is Murder” for their ’85 album. Wynn is reportedly still alive and living in Australia.




Meat Is Murder is the great lost Smiths album, in the sense that it has been obscured by their later work.  ( I don't personally think so)


After their debut, Manchester's finest sons went into the studio with the mission statement of making a record that would better represent their live sets and BBC sessions. Not that The Smiths had been a total dissapointment, but guitarist Johnny Marr, who is as adept at a metallic crunch as a Fiftie's rockabilly shuffle, would truly amaze with his guitar palette this time round.


Morrisey was on the ball too. His attention had turned to his passions vegetarianism, pasifism, and antiauthoritarianism---the album title, the album cover ( a shot of a Vietnam soldier at war) and in particular the lyrics of the title track, spoke volumes about his strong lifetime views.


Meat Is Murder is The Smiths with a point to prove. The album sounds all the sweeter when you realise they actually proved it.



 

hkgarab wrote:

Hello, new poster here - aye ok not but I wanted to come on to clear a couple of things up.

Moving to hkg and in Amsterdam just now.  Pat - you didnt say anything to offend me in the slightest i have enjoyed the chats and interactions as this is the best site out there.  I just decided as i was moving abroad and having made an arse of myself enough it was time to move one.  Just signed up to say that.

You can see why I'm dubious  



Welcome to the forum hkgarab. I hope you have a safe trip and happy future.

hkgarab wrote:

Hello, new poster here - aye ok not but I wanted to come on to clear a couple of things up.

Moving to hkg and in Amsterdam just now.  Pat - you didnt say anything to offend me in the slightest i have enjoyed the chats and interactions as this is the best site out there.  I just decided as i was moving abroad and having made an arse of myself enough it was time to move one.  Just signed up to say that.

Tek - sorry you took it that way and i apologise for giving any impression of a huff.  It really wasnt meant like that but alas yet another post by me that was intended one way and ends another.  One thing keep it going bud this site is awesome.  Ive struggled mentally for a while now and so sorry i got a wee bit drunk and came on here with my drivel  

Chanter - you deserve a medal and i personally would love to shake your hand personally.  What an achievement.  Big Black is a classic - songs about fucking also equally as good.  

I will PM you all as well as didnt like the feeling I had left for any reason other than time to move on.  New job, new country, new culture and same old united i suppose lol

SRYB

Shedboy (identity stolen by locheefleet)

xxxx

Shedboy I for one enjoyed your posts, sometimes a bit leftfield but I'm the last cunt to talk about anybody talking shite, I've been doing it long enough myself on here .


I always liked your posts and new quite a few were tongue in cheek, but I have got a bone to pick wi' you.......I thought I might be on a promise wi' thon locheefleet................ye bastard that you are


Anyways all the best for wherever you lay your hat, and don't be a stranger, please!  
 

Album 559.
Tom Waits........................Rain Dogs   (1985)










Rain Dogs is the eighth album by American singer-songwriter Tom Waits. It’s often considered the middle album of a trilogy of sorts, starting with Swordfishtrombones and ending with Frank's Wild Years


 It’s an unpredictable, thoroughly unique album that, really, could only have been made by Tom Waits. Here he refines and perfects his style to an impeccable degree – the songs all sound like they were performed by some derelict Dixieland jazz band of the damned and Waits spits out demented poetry like he could easily be muttering these songs to himself as he wanders in and out of alleys in the dead of night.


 This is undeniably reinforced by Waits' total willingness to experiment in the studio. As he’s said of his process:


"If I want a sound, I usually feel better if I’ve chased it and killed it, skinned it and cooked it. Most things you can get with a button nowadays. So if I was trying for a certain drum sound, my engineer would say: “Oh, for Christ’s sake, why don’t we just sample something?” I’d say, “No, I would rather go in the bathroom and hit the door with a piece of two-by-four very hard.


 Rain Dogs was primarily influenced by his recent move to New York City with his expectant wife, Kathleen (their first son, Casey, was born shortly after the album’s release).


 The album was a stunning critical success (and is still universally regarded as a classic) and achieved some chart success, peaking at #29 in the UK and #188 in the US.