Undertones First album: there were different versions of that, some with more singles (and general tracks) on it than others.

One of my favourite Undertones songs, Mars Bar, is on the longer version, longer than the original half hour LP which you've maybe reviewed A/C. I wonder how long the vinyl album you buy will be? 

The other all time favourite, You've Got My Number (Why Don't You Use It?) is also on one but not the other. 

There's only one track I don't enjoy on the original listing, True Confessions, but I'll excuse them that.

Generally, The Undertones always sounded a happy band, great stuff to listen to and very distinctive with Fergal Sharkey's shaky, accented voice and the backing vocals of the band. Choppy guitars, usually at a chuntering pace all added to the originality of the sound.

For me, the best band to come out of the Emerald Isle, and the second best artist/band, after Rory Gallagher.

DAY 439.
The Clash..............................................London Calling   (1979)












As I've mentioned before The Clash are one of my favourite bands and this was another album I had in my collection before my mother donated them all to charity. The thing I particularly liked about this one was the variety,and especially the ska inspired numbers.


As I'm falling way behind I'm going to keep my ramblings short until I catch up a bit (thank fuck I hear you cry,) this is a great album (even if it is a double) and one that without question will be going into my collection.





Bits & Bobs;


Have posted already about The Clash (if interested)





=16pxBy now, our expectations of The Clash might seem to have become inflated beyond any possibility of fulfillment. It’s not simply that they’re the greatest rock & roll band in the world — indeed, after years of watching too many superstars compromise, blow chances and sell out, being the greatest is just about synonymous with being the music’s last hope. While the group itself resists such labels, they do tell you exactly how high the stakes are, and how urgent the need. The Clash got their start on the crest of what looked like a revolution, only to see the punk movement either smash up on its own violent momentum or be absorbed into the same corporate-rock machinery it had meant to destroy. Now, almost against their will, they’re the only ones left.

Give ‘Em Enough Rope, the band’s last recording, railed against the notion that being rock & roll heroes meant martyrdom. Yet the album also presented itself so flamboyantly as a last stand that it created a near-insoluble problem: after you’ve already brought the apocalypse crashing down on your head, how can you possibly go on? On the Clash’s new LP, London Calling, there’s a composition called “Death or Glory” that seems to disavow the struggle completely. Over a harsh and stormy guitar riff, lead singer Joe Strummer offers a grim litany of failure. Then his cohort, Mick Jones, steps forward to drive what appears to be the final nail into the coffin. “Death or glory,” he bitterly announces, “become just another story.”


 But “Death or Glory” — in many ways, the pivotal song on London Calling — reverses itself midway. After Jones’ last, anguished cry drops off into silence, the music seems to scatter from the echo of his words. Strummer reenters, quiet and undramatic, talking almost to himself at first and not much caring if anyone else is listening. “We’re gonna march a long way,” he whispers. “Gonna fight — a long time.” The guitars, distant as bugles on some faraway plain, begin to rally. The drums collect into a beat, and Strummer slowly picks up strength and authority as he sings:
 We’ve gotta travel — over mountains
We’ve gotta travel — over seas
We’re gonna fight — you, brother
We’re gonna fight — till you lose
We’re gonna raise — 
TROUBLE!

 The band races back to the firing line, and when the singers go surging into the final chorus of “Death or glory…just another story,” you know what they’re really saying: like hell it is!



 Merry and tough, passionate and large-spirited, London Calling celebrates the romance of rock & roll rebellion in grand, epic terms. It doesn’t merely reaffirm the Clash’s own commitment to rock-as-revolution. Instead, the record ranges across the whole of rock & roll’s past for its sound, and digs deeply into rock legend, history, politics and myth for its images and themes. Everything has been brought together into a single, vast, stirring story — one that, as the Clash tell it, seems not only theirs but ours. For all its first-take scrappiness and guerrilla production, this two-LP set — which, at the group’s insistence, sells for not much more than the price of one — is music that means to endure. It’s so rich and far-reaching that it leaves you not just exhilarated but exalted and triumphantly alive.


 From the start, however, you know how tough a fight it’s going to be. “London Calling” opens the album on an ominous note. When Strummer comes in on the downbeat, he sounds weary, used up, desperate: “The Ice Age is coming/The sun is zooming in/Meltdown expected/The wheat is growing thin.’


 The rest of the record never turns its back on that vision of dread. Rather, it pulls you through the horror and out the other side. The Clash’s brand of heroism may be supremely romantic, even naive, but their utter refusal to sentimentalize their own myth — and their determination to live up to an actual code of honor in the real world, without ever minimizing the odds — makes such romanticism seem not only brave but absolutely necessary. London Calling sounds like a series of insistent messages sent to the scattered armies of the night, proffering warnings and comfort, good cheer and exhortations to keep moving. If we begin amid the desolation of the title track, we end, four sides later, with Mick Jones spitting out heroic defiance in “I’m Not Down” and finding a majestic metaphor at the pit of his depression that lifts him — and us — right off the ground. “Like skyscrapers rising up,” Jones screams. “Floor by floor — I’m not giving up.” Then Joe Strummer invites the audience, with a wink and a grin, to “smash up your seats and rock to this brand new beat” in the merry-go-round invocation of “Revolution Rock.”



 Against all the brutality, injustice and large and small betrayals delineated in song after song here — the assembly-line Fascists in “Clampdown,” the advertising executives of “Koka Kola,” the drug dealer who turns out to be the singer’s one friend in the jittery, hypnotic “Hateful” — the Clash can only offer their sense of historic purpose and the faith, innocence, humor and camaraderie embodied in the band itself. This shines through everywhere, balancing out the terrors that the LP faces again and again. It can take forms as simple as letting bassist Paul Simonon sing his own “The Guns of Brixton,” or as relatively subtle as the way Strummer modestly moves in to support Jones’ fragile lead vocal on the forlorn “Lost in the Supermarket.” It can be as intimate and hilarious as the moment when Joe Strummer deflates any hint of portentousness in the sexual-equality polemics of “Lover’s Rock” by squawking “I’m so nervous!” to close the tune. In “Four Horsemen,” which sounds like the movie soundtrack to a rock & roll version of The Seven Samurai, the Clash’s martial pride turns openly exultant. The guitars and drums start at a thundering gallop, and when Strummer sings, “Four horsemen …,” the other members of the group charge into line to shout joyously: “…and it’s gonna be us!”


 London Calling is spacious and extravagant. It’s as packed with characters and incidents as a great novel, and the band’s new stylistic expansions — brass, organ, occasional piano, blues grind, pop airiness and the reggae-dub influence that percolates subversively through nearly every number — add density and richness to the sound. The riotous rockabilly-meets-the-Ventures quality of “Brand New Cadillac” (“Jesus Christ!” Strummer yells to his ex-girlfriend, having so much fun he almost forgets to be angry, “Whereja get that Cadillac?”) slips without pause into the strung-out shuffle of “Jimmy Jazz,” a Nelson Algren-like street scene that limps along as slowly as its hero, just one step ahead of the cops. If “Rudie Can’t Fail” (the “She’s Leaving Home” of our generation) celebrates an initiation into bohemian lowlife with affection and panache, “The Card Cheat” picks up on what might be the same character twenty years later, shot down in a last grab for “more time away from the darkest door.” An awesome orchestral backing track gives this lower-depths anecdote a somber weight far beyond its scope. At the end of “The Card Cheat,” the song suddenly explodes into a magnificent panoramic overview — “from the Hundred Year War to the Crimea” — that turns ephemeral pathos into permanent tragedy.



 Other tracks tackle history head-on, and claim it as the Clash’s own. “Wrong ‘Em Boyo” updates the story of Stagger Lee in bumptious reggae terms, forging links between rock & roll legend and the group’s own politicized roots-rock rebel. “The Right Profile,” which is about Montgomery Clift, accomplishes a different kind of transformation. Over braying and sarcastic horns, Joe Strummer gags, mugs, mocks and snickers his way through a comic-horrible account of the actor’s collapse on booze and pills, only to close with a grudging admiration that becomes unexpectedly and astonishingly moving. It’s as if the singer is saying, no matter how ugly and pathetic Clift’s life was, he was still — in spite of everything — one of us.


 “Spanish Bombs” is probably London Calling‘s best and most ambitious song. A soaring, chiming intro pulls you in, and before you can get your bearings, Strummer’s already halfway into his tale. Lost and lonely in his “disco casino,” he’s unable to tell whether the gunfire he hears is out on the streets or inside his head. Bits of Spanish doggerel, fragments of combat scenes, jangling flamenco guitars and the lilting vocals of a children’s tune mesh in a swirling kaleidoscope of courage and disillusionment, old wars and new corruption. The evocation of the Spanish Civil War is sumptuously romantic: “With trenches full of poets, the ragged army, fixin’ bayonets to fight the other line.” Strummer sings, as Jones throws in some lovely, softly stinging notes behind him. Here as elsewhere, the heroic past isn’t simply resurrected for nostalgia’s sake. Instead, the Clash state that the lessons of the past must be earned before we can apply them to the present.


 London Calling certainly lives up to that challenge. With its grainy cover photo, its immediate, on-the-run sound, and songs that bristle with names and phrases from today’s headlines, it’s as topical as a broadside. But the album also claims to be no more than the latest battlefield in a war of rock & roll, culture and politics that’ll undoubtedly go on forever. “Revolution Rock,” the LP’s formal coda, celebrates the joys of this struggle as an eternal carnival. A spiraling organ weaves circles around Joe Strummer’s voice, while the horn section totters, sways and recovers like a drunken mariachi band. “This must be the way out,” Strummer calls over his shoulder, so full of glee at his own good luck that he can hardly believe it.” El Clash Combo,” he drawls like a proud father, coasting now, sure he’s made it home. “Weddings, parties, anything… And bongo jazz a specialty.”




But it’s Mick Jones who has the last word. “Train in Vain” arrives like an orphan in the wake of “Revolution Rock.” It’s not even listed on the label, and it sounds faint, almost overheard. Longing, tenderness and regret mingle in Jones’ voice as he tries to get across to his girl that losing her meant losing everything, yet he’s going to manage somehow. Though his sorrow is complete, his pride is that he can sing about it. A wistful, simple number about love and loss and perseverance, “Tram in Vain” seems like an odd ending to the anthemic tumult of London Calling.But it’s absolutely appropriate, because if this record has told us anything, it’s that a love affair and a revolution — small battles as well as large ones — are not that different. They’re all part of the same long, bloody march.





Between rehearsals, band members "relaxed" by playing football (soccer). But these were pretty brutal matches. "We played football till we dropped and then we'd start playing music. It was a good limbering-up thing," remembered singer/guitarist Joe Strummer. Anyone who came to the studio to visit was roped in to play. "[The CBS record executives] got kicked in the shins, pushed over. That was quite fun," added bassist Paul Simonon.



Much to the chagrin of the record company CBS, band members asked Guy Stevens to produce their album. Stevens had drug and alcohol problems and was a bit of a madman. "He'd pick up a ladder and swing that around. And then he'd throw six or seven chairs against the back wall," remembered singer/guitarist Mick Jones. It wasn't unusual to see Stevens in a wrestling match with the sound engineer Bill Price. "When we were mixing, he used to get so excited I used to hold him down with one hand and try to carry on the manual mix on the desk with the other," said Price. All that chaos energised the band.



The phrase "London Calling" refers to the signal the BBC World Service used, and the song (and album) references many struggles plaguing Britain at the time — unemployment, drug abuse and racism. "We wanted 'London Calling' to reclaim the raw, natural culture [of rock]. We looked back to earlier rock music with great pleasure, but many of the issues people were facing were new and frightening. Our message was more urgent — that things were going to pieces," said Strummer to The Wall Street Journal. There's also a lyric that speaks to an event across the pond — the nuclear reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in March 1979. ("A nuclear error, but I have no fear.")



Just as iconic as the music on "London Calling" is the cover artwork, with its image of Paul Simonon smashing his bass and its pink and green lettering, a direct homage to Elvis Presley's self titled debut album Pennie Smith shot the picture at New York's Palladium theatre. "The Palladium had fixed seating, so the audience was frozen in place," Simonon said.  "We weren't getting any response from them, no matter what we did ... Onstage that night I just got so frustrated with that crowd and when it got to the breaking point I started to chop the stage up with the guitar." Smith had been ready to pack up her camera until she saw Simonon looking "really, really fed up." "I just got the one shot and that was it," she said. "End of roll of film." Ironically, she thought the image was too out of focus and didn't want it to be on the cover. But Joe Strummer loved it and fortunately, he prevailed.




The biggest U.S. single off the album was not listed on its sleeve. But that was because it was supposed to have been a giveaway promotion with the magazine New Musical Express. When that fell through, the song was added to the album. "A couple of Clash websites describe it as a hidden track, but it wasn't intended to be hidden. The sleeve was already printed before we tacked the song on the end of the master tape," said engineer Bill Price. Despite the title, there's no mention of trains in the lyrics — it's actually a sort of love song. Songwriter Mick Jones has said the track is like a train rhythm — hence the name. Later editions of the double album include the track in its listings.




Mick Jones tried to teach Paul Simonon to play the guitar (as he had no previous experience), but he couldn't grasp it so he took up the bass because ''it's easier and has only 4 strings''.


In the early days the Clash often went hungry. Once, after a long night spent putting up posters, Paul Simonon heated up the remainder of the flour and water paste on a rusty blade and ate it.


During a tricky period in the late 70's, Manager Bernie Rhodes tried to replace Mick Jones with Steve Jones from The Sex Pistols.


When American writer/music critic Lester Bangs toured England with The Clash, Bernie Rhodes tried to set him on fire.


Mick Jones played guitar on the Elvis Costello song 'Big Tears' on the B-side of 'Pump It Up'.


The Blockheads (they of Ian Dury And...) once turned up unexpectedly at a Clash recording session dressed as policemen, causing Mick Jones to flush all of his illicit substances down the toilet and the rest of the band to flee.


They also sold their double and triple album sets 'London Calling' and 'Sandinista!' for around the price of a single album (£5.99). This meant that they had to forfeit all of their performance royalties on its first 200, 000 sales. They were constantly in debt to CBS and only started to break even around 1982.


Strummer disliked the punk practice of gobbing. Especially after someone landed a greenie in his open mouth and he got hepatitis.


There were 204 drummers auditioned before The Clash settled for Nicky 'Topper' Headon.


In 1977 when The Clash were signed to CBS some people believed they had 'sold out' to the establishment, particularly Mark Perry, founder of the leading London punk periodical, Sniffin' Glue. He said: "Punk died the day The Clash signed to CBS."


 Joe Strummer toured America as an honorary Pogue in winter '87, replacing Phil Chevron who was ill with a stomach ulcer. The Pogues took advantage of this situation by playing faithful versions of "I Fought The Law" and "London Calling".


Sandy Pearlman, producer of "Give 'Em Enough Rope", so disliked Joe Strummer's voice that he mixed it more quietly than the drums throughout the album.


Drummer Nicky Headon was nicknamed 'Topper' by Simonon, because he thought he resembled the Topper comic book character 'Mickey the Monkey'.


Both Paul Simonon and Viv Albertine of The Slits modelled for a Laura Ashley calendar



'Should I Stay Or Should I Go' was written by Mick about American singer Ellen Foley, who sang the backing vocals on Meatloaf's Bat Out Of Hell LP.




.The Clash were the first (and last?) white band to have their likeness painted onto the wall of Lee Perry's famous Black Ark recording studios in Jamaica.



"London Calling"



This is an apocalyptic song, detailing the many ways the world could end, including the coming of the ice age, starvation, and war. It was the song that best defined The Clash, who were known for lashing out against injustice and rebelling against the establishment, which is pretty much what punk rock was all about. 


 Joe Strummer explained in 1988 to Melody Maker: "I read about ten news reports in one day calling down all variety of plagues on us."



Singer Joe Strummer was a news junkie, and many of the images of doom in the lyrics came from news reports he read. Strummer claimed the initial inspiration came in a conversation he had with his then-fiancee Gaby Salter in a taxi ride home to their flat in World's End (appropriately). "There was a lot of Cold War nonsense going on, and we knew that London was susceptible to flooding. She told me to write something about that," noted Strummer in an interview with Uncut=inherit magazine.


 
According to guitarist Mick Jones, it was a headline in the London Evening Standard that triggered the lyric. The paper warned that "the North Sea might rise and push up the Thames, flooding the city," he said in the book Anatomy of a Song. "We flipped. To us, the headline was just another example of how everything was coming undone."



The title came from the BBC World Service's radio station identification: "This is London calling..." The BBC used it during World War II to open their broadcasts outside of England. Joe Strummer heard it when he was living in Germany with his parents.



The line "London is drowning and I live by the river" came from a saying in England that if the Thames river ever flooded, all of London would be underwater. Joe Strummer was living by the river, but in a high-rise apartment, so he would have been OK.



The line about the "Nuclear Error" was inspired by the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor meltdown in March 1979. This incident is also referred to in the lyrics to "Clampdown" from the same album.




The Clash recorded this album after returning to England from a short US tour. The band was intrigued by American music as well as its rock'n'roll mythology, so much so that the album cover was a tribute to Elvis Presley's first album.




This was recorded at Wessex Studios, located in a former church in the Highbury district of North London. Many hit recordings had already come out of this studio, including singles and albums by the Sex Pistols, The Pretenders and the Tom Robinson Band. Chief engineer and studio manager Bill Price had developed a slew of unique recording techniques suited to the room. 




Fellow punk band The Damned were recording overdubs to their album Machine Gun Etiquette in the studio, and as they were old touring buddies of The Clash they roped Strummer and Mick Jones into record backing vocals for the title song to their album - the shouted lines of "second time around!" in that song are actually Strummer and Jones in uncredited cameos.




Interestingly, the band initially wrote most of the London Calling album at the Vanilla rehearsal studios near Vauxhall Bridge in London. Roadie Johnny Green explained: "It had the advantage of not looking like a studio. Out front of a garage. We wrote a sign out front saying 'we ain't here.' We weren't disturbed."




With a great vibe going in the studio and having already recorded some demos with The Who's soundman Bob Pridden, Strummer had the crazy idea to record the entire album there and bypass expensive studio time. CBS refused point blank, so Wessex was chosen because it had a similar intimacy to Vanilla. The original Vanilla demos were made available on the 25th anniversary edition of London Calling.




At the end of the song, a series of beeps spells out "SOS" in morse code. Mick Jones created these sounds on one of his guitar pickups.

The SOS distress signal has often been used metaphorically in songs (like the 1975 Abba song), but in "London Calling" it's more literal, implying that the disaster has struck and we are calling for help.




London Calling was a double album, but it wasn't supposed to be. The band were angry that CBS had priced their previous EP, The Cost of Living at £1.49, and so in the interests of their fans they insisted that London




Calling be a double LP. CBS refused, so the band tried a different tactic: how about a free single on a one-disc LP? CBS agreed, but didn't notice that this free single disc would play at 33rpm and contain eight songs - therefore making it up to a double album! It then became nine when "Train in Vain" was tacked on to the end of the album after an NME single release fell through. "Train" arrived so late on that it isn't on the tracklisting on the album sleeve, and the only evidence of its existence is a stamp on the run-out groove and its presence on the end of side four. So in the end, London Calling was a 19-song double-LP retailing for the price of a single!




Rolling Stone magazine named London Calling the best album of the '80s. Pedantic readers noted that it was first released in the UK in December 1979. In the US it was released two weeks into January 1980, meaning that from a US perspective, it's a 1980s album. And if anyone can come up with a better alternative to best album of the '80s, Rolling Stone would love to hear from you!




According to NME magazine (March 16, 1991), we know that Paul Simonon smashed his bass guitar - as photographed on the cover of the album - at exactly 10:50 pm. This is because he broke his watch in the process and handed the busted bits to photographer Pennie Smith, who snapped the photo.




Smith thought the photo wouldn't be good for an album cover, citing that it was too blurry and out of focus. "I was wrong!" she admitted in the Westway to the Worlddocumentary!



As a tribute to Clash singer/guitarist Joe Strummer, who died in 2002, Bruce Springsteen, Dave Grohl, Elvis Costello and Little Steven Van Zant played this at the close of the 2003 Grammys as a tribute to the band. All four played guitar and took turns on vocals. The Grammys is the type of commercialized event The Clash probably would have avoided, although they did win their first Grammy that night when "Westway To The World" won for Best Long Form Music Video.




In 2003, The Clash were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and it was rumored that Bruce Springsteen would join them to perform at the ceremony. The classic lineup of Strummer/Jones/Simonon/Headon were in talks to reunite to perform at the ceremony and play on stage for the first time since 1982, but Simonon was always against a reunion. In the end, Strummer's death in December 2002 put paid to the reunion of the original lineup, and the remaining members declined to play. Said Simonon: "I think it's better for The Clash to play in front of their public, rather than a seated and booted audience."




According to Mick Jones, his guitar solo was played back backwards (done by flipping over the tape) and overdubbed onto the track.




This is one of the most popular Clash songs, and has been used in many commercials and soundtracks. It was used in promos counting down the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, as well as the film soundtracks for Intimacy, Billy Elliot, and the James Bond movie Die Another Day (2002).




The lyrics contain an observation about how society often turns to pop music to make them feel better about world events, and how The Clash didn't want to become false idols for folks looking for escapism. This can be heard in the line, "Don't look to us - phoney Beatlemania (a reference to The Beatles' massive fanbase in the '60s) has bitten the dust!" (Mick Jones said the line was "aimed at the touristy soundalike rock bands in London in the late '70s.)



There's also a subtle reference to Joe Strummer's brush with Hepatitis in 1978 with the mention of "yellowy eyes."




A check of the archives reveals that this song - hailed by many music journalists as a monumental track - received far from unanimous praise from critics when it was released. David Hepworth in Smash Hits criticized the band for playing too loud in the studio. "Why won't Joe Strummer let us hear more than one word in every three? Until they face those elementary facts, sides like 'London Calling' will always fail to condense all that fury and grandeur into a truly great record," he wrote.



The sales figures and continuing popularity of the song suggest that not many other people had the same problem!




The video was filmed at Cadogan Pier, next to the Albert Bridge in Battersea Park in London. It was directed by longtime friend of the band Don Letts, and made on a wet night in December 1979 which sees the band performing on a barge. Letts didn't have a happy time doing the video. He explained:

"Now me, I am a land-lover, I can't swim. Don Letts does not know that the Thames has a tide. So we put the cameras in a boat, low tide, the cameras are 15 feet too low. I didn't realize that rivers flow, so I thought the camera would be bouncing up and down nicely in front of the pier. But no, the camera keeps drifting away from the bank. Then it starts to rain. I am a bit out of my depth here, but I'm going with it and The Clash are doing their thing. The group doing their thing was all it needed to be a great video. That is a good example of us turning adversity to our advantage."




Joe Strummer does some ominous echoed cackling about two minutes into this song. He was essentially imitating a seagull, as heard on the Otis Redding song "(Sittin? On) The Dock Of The Bay."



Many cover versions of this song have been recorded, including variants by One King Down, Stroh, and the NC Thirteens. Bob Dylan covered the song during his 2005 London residency, and Bruce Springsteen has followed up from his performance of the song at the 2003 Grammys by performing it at some of his concerts, including on his 2009 London Calling: Live in Hyde Park DVD, which is named after the song.




In late 1991, the Irish folk-punk band The Pogues sacked lead singer Shane MacGowan just at the height of their fame. Joe Strummer, by now well split up from The Clash, agreed to take over on vocals for a couple of years until he departed in 1993 on good terms - he didn't want to be the permanent replacement for MacGowan and wanted to do his own thing. During his time with the Pogues, the band would often play a searing version of "London Calling" at live shows. Like many strong Clash songs, Strummer took it with him to play with his solo band the Mescaleros in the late 1990s.



Authorship of this song was credited to Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, but at some point the other two members of the band, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon, were added.



  

London Calling LP.

Certain songs sit in your head from the day you hear them, for me 'Spanish Bombs' is one. For me the best song on the album, which I bought at the time. However, I've never been a big Clash fan, finding them to be too much of the 'serious biscuit' types. That said, it got me more interested in the period of history covering the Spanish Civil War (making me sound a 'serious biscuit' too, I suppose).

The opening title track 'London Calling', 'Guns of Brixton' and 'Lost in the Supermarket' are other favourites. In fact of the four sides, side two is the standout.


Quiet Life LP.

Japan was another band I wasn't really into at the time, although since then David Sylvian's proven himself to be a musician of fine ability, working with some top talents, including Robert Fripp, for whom I've previously stated admiration.

This from the early 'nineties (if you have four minutes A/C!!!):




As for the Quiet Life LP, the singles from it are my favourites,especially the title track. But it was released as a single a few years after the LP, wasn't it? And to fit in with today, 'Halloween' opens side two!

DAY 441.
Marianne Faithfull.......................................................Broken English   (1979)











Never knew much about Marianne Faithful, apart from the alleged mars bar incident, "As Tears Go By," and she wa a bit of a ride back in the day.


So seeing this album was a bit of a surprise, but listening to it I found it very good, another little gem that pops up now and again in this book, she certainly put herself emotionally up front and centre, the tracks ranged from country to blues, and even has a bit of disco beat going on.


Faithfull's vocals were captivating (at least for this listener) especially on the last track "Why'd Ya Do It" if you don't want to listen to the whole album (but I recommend you do) please listen to this song, any number that has the line "Every time I see your dick, I see her cunt in my bed" and the rest of it is in the same vein, has got to be worth 5 minutes of your day. I enjoyed all the songs on this album, even the 2 covers were half decent.


This album will be going into my collection,I also love the albums cover, this is another album I would never have heard had it not been for this book, don't miss the opportunity to listen to this album, it's a mixed bag, but all the better for it.





Bits $ Bobs;




Marianne Faithfull had her first hit, a big one, in 1964, with “As Tears Go By” (written by her lover, Mick Jagger, with Keith Richards), but it was never as a singer that she was central to the iconography of Swinging London: it was as a Face. She had, you may recall,a sweet, well-bred, quavering voice. She also had eyes so innocent that no man could resist their suggestion of unearthly possibilities of lust.
 From there, the story is well known: another record or two, a promising acting career, a miscarriage, an attempt to hang onto a romance that had outlived its proper pop moment, suicide attempts, heroin. Not long ago, she pulled in a bit of tawdry notoriety with dirty tales of the old days. The end.

  In the late Seventies, Marianne Faithfull was little more than just another irony—an irony perpetrated not so much by bad luck and hard living as by the image of that face, now over a decade gone and, in the minds of those who had seen it, no less indelible than it ever was. But that face was always a paradox, the face of the virgin who knows every means to seduction. Faithfull lived it out, that’s all. One waited, perhaps, for her to turn up in the news again, dead. One could hardly have expected Broken English, a stunning account of the life than goes on after the end, an awful, liberating, harridan’s laugh at the life that came before.



The lyrics of Broken English are not autobiographical, but the album’s power begins with Marianne Faithfull’s old persona and with one’s knowledge of the collapse of the woman behind it. Faithfull sings as if she means to get every needle, every junkie panic, every empty pill bottle and every filthy room into her voice—as if she spent the last ten years of oblivion trying to kill the face that first brought her to our attention.
The voice is a croak, a scratch, all breaks and yelps and constrictions. Though her voice seems perverse, it soon becomes clear that it is also the voice of a woman who is comfortable with what she sounds like. You start by thinking she won’t even make it through the opening track, but before the first side is over, she has you hooked. She knows how to use this voice, twist it, make it cut. Her voice seems incapable of expressing pleasure, peace of mind, surprise: it’s all knowledge and bad dreams. The musicians, a little too faceless, back up the feeling; they’re hard-nosed, expert, doomy. You hear a lot of very modern British R&B, wracked synthesizer music and reggae inflections rather than reggae shtick. When Faithfull sings with a tiredness so intense you can barely make out the bitterness behind it, the band focuses that bitterness, and when she wants to slap someone’s face, the band makes sure it gets slapped. Faithfull depicts moral and physical debris; the band provides a bizarre frame of elegance, perhaps recalling the money behind the waste of the pop life. Thus the paradox of Marianne Faithfull’s old persona remains intact, but now it snaps shut.




Faithfull cowrote three of the songs, including the title tune (her reflections on the Baader-Meinhof terrorists, and no more illuminating than most rock & roll comments on politics). There are also John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero,” Shel Silverstein’s The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” (nice housewife commits suicide over broken dreams), Barry Reynolds’ “Guilt” (“I feel good/I feel good/Though I ain’t done nothin’ wrong I fee! good”), Joe Mavety’s “What’s the Hurry” and Ben Brierley’s interesting “Brain Drain ” I mention the compositions because, with one exception, they are incidental. Some work, some don’t, but with each one, Faithfull’s singing has a conviction that is truly frightening. She could be singing in German, and her disgust and rage—and its complexity—would come through whole. The one song that matters as a song is “Why D’Ya Do It,” a raw, utterly shameless confession of sexual jealousy with no hope of revenge. Faithfull acts it out. There’s a depth of obscenity here to make those male rockers who think they’ve gotten away with something when they throw a sexless “fuck” into a bragging tune blush: Faithfull sings—rants—about her lover’s infidelity as if it were a form of defecation. The low, growling music is obvious and right; Faithfull pushes on, past anger, to the point where ugliness is its own justification.




I may have made Broken English sound like some sort of accident: a surprisingly listenable case study of a hapless neurotic. That’s not what it is at all. It is a perfectly intentional, controlled, unique statement about fury, defeat and rancor: the other side of Christine McVie’s lovely out-of-reach romances. It isn’t anything we’ve heard before, from anyone. As far as Faithfull goes, there’s a gutsiness here, a sense of craft and a disruptive intelligence that nothing in her old records remotely suggested. Broken English is a kind of triumph: fifteen years after making her first single, Marianne Faithfull has made her first real album.




The Day The Rolling Stones Were Caught Having Sex With A Candy Bar


On February 12, 1967, a party at Keith Richard’s home in Sussex, England was interrupted by a police raid. The authorities only needed an excuse to arrest the musicians, given their unconventional attitude.A few days after, the newspaper News of the World released alleged details on what law enforcement officers had found at the scene. One of these claims said that Mick Jagger had been found with his face between Marianne Faithfull’s legs. However rather than simple oral sex, it was inferred that the musician had been eating a Mars candy bar place inside the actress’s vagina.
Everyone wanted a piece of the Stones and this newspaper found a way to give the masses what they wanted through this seedy story. However, as crazy rock and roll as this story sounds, it was a total fabrication. Faithfull has stated that indeed when the police came into the house, she was naked and wrapped in a fur rug. Her nakedness was because she had just taken a bath, not because of any sexual behavior.


 In her own words, as written in her autobiography, “The Mars Bar was a very effective piece of demonizing. Way out there. It was so overdone, with such malicious twisting of the facts. Mick retrieving a Mars Bar from my vagina, indeed! It was far too jaded for any of us even to have conceived of. It’s a dirty old man’s fantasy — some old fart who goes to a dominatrix every Thursday afternoon to get spanked. A cop’s idea of what people do on acid!”



Keith Richards has explained that the raid was not as dramatic as it was made to come off as. No doors where kicked open and definitely no orgy was occurring at that particular moment. The authorities knocked on the door and they opened. That being said everyone at the Redlands estate was coming off an acid trip at the moment. "How the Mars bar got into the story, I don't know," Richards recalled. "It shows you what's in people's minds."



Mick and Keith ended up spending some days in prison, accused of perversion and drug trafficking. The two were unaware of what had been published in the News of the World until their trial. Fans were so angered by the demonization of their idols that they protested outside the offices of such news outlet. After paying their five-thousand-pound bail, both Richards and Jagger regained their freedom and continued to create the music that people love to this day

DAY 450.
Michael Jackson................................................Off The Wall   (1979)












Off The Wall is the fifth overall studio album by American singer Michael Jackson. It was released on August 10, 1979, by Epic Records, following Jackson’s critically well-received film performance in The Wiz. While working on that project, Jackson and Quincy Jones had become friends, and Jones agreed to work with Jackson on his next studio album.


 Recording sessions took place between December 1978 and June 1979 at Allen Zentz Recording, Westlake Recording Studios, and Cherokee Studios in Los Angeles, California. Jackson collaborated with a number of other writers and performers such as Paul McCartney Stevie Wonder and Rod Temperton


 Five singles were released from the album. Three of these had music videos –"Don't Stop Til You Get Enough""Rock With You"and "She's Out Of My Life" Jackson wrote three of the songs himself, including the number-one, Grammy-winning single "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough"


 It was his first solo release under Epic Records, the label he would record on until his death roughly 30 years later.



Sorry about the randomness of the posting lately, I've got a lot on my plate at the moment but will catch up as soon as I can.  1  

DAY 452.
Gary Numan..................................................The Pleasure Principal   (1979)











The Pleasure Principle is Gary Numan's third album and marks the first time where he is not credited as The Tubeway Army, After his U.K. chart-topping Are Friends Electric, he had enough clout to convince his label (Beggar’s Banquet) to allow him to go with a solo identity.


 This album was a departure from the more guitar-based punk of Gary’s first two albums: Tubeway Army and Replicas.


 
"I wanted to experiment by making an album without guitars; I wanted to make a purely electronic album. It wasn’t intended to be a great artistic statement although I did feel synths were, to this new form of music, what guitars had been to most of the musical styles that had gone before.“ – Gary Numan, 

 
Numan first used the Vox Humana string-like sound on the PolyMoog synthesizer in several tracks on this album, including his most famous song, Cars

 


 In addition to these “new at the time” synthesizers, The Pleasure Principal is notable for being is Gary Numan’s only album with no guitars on it. It is also the first where he started adding viola and violin to the mix.

DAY 442.
The Slits.............................................Cut   (1979)











Strange, quirky but very interesting, this album was rather enjoyable, "Cut" was an album I'd never heard before, In fact I can't recall hearing anything by The Slits before this, their name and the album cover I can vaguely remember but that's about all.


Musically this band weren't really up to much, but after watching several videos of them live, that didn't seem to matter much, their style seemed to be a crossover of punk/ska, and lyrically took me back to a time/life were I didn't have that big boy tag hanging round my neck called "responsibility" and could do what the fuck I liked.


My favourite tracks were "Instant Hit," "Shoplifting," "Typical Girls" but "FM" was the standout for me, closely followed by "Newtown." I've been listening to this album while writing my slavers, and am now of the opinion it doesn't really have a weak track, in fact I was only going to download this album but am now having second thoughts, initially I did enjoy it  but on second playing this album seems to be a grower, with track after track getting stuck in my head but not in a bad way.



Anyways this album will be going into my collection, I've got a funny feeling this is going to be one of my favourites.





Bits & Bobs;


Girls Unconditional: The story of The Slits, told exclusively by The Slits


Ari Up, Viv Albertine and Tessa Pollit speak about how The Slits proved that young women could be responsible for some of the most influential and innovative music of the punk movement




I spent two weeks on the trail of The Slits. I’m given a number for Tessa Pollit, the bass player of the band, and arrange to meet her at her home in West London. A few days later I meet Viv Albertine, one time guitarist and Slits songwriter, at the book launch of new biography Typical Girls? The Story of The Slits, and just in the nick of time, after much running around and plenty of patient finger drumming, I finally got hold of band mouthpiece Ari Up, on the phone from her home in New York.
Ari splits her time between Brooklyn and Jamaica and is notoriously hard to pin down. Born in Germany she moved to London in the mid-’70s with her mother and speaks in an accent part German, part West London, part Patois.

 “All the people who were in that revolution back then in the punk time, it left something in those people,” she says. “The ones who didn’t die or sell out are incredibly untamed and free spirits, they have evolved into incredible people like when you meet Poly Styrene [of X-Ray Spex] now, she has become an amazing person. There are just one or two who felt so pressured they had to buy into society.”


 On May 16th 1976, Arianne Forster (Ari Up), aged 14, is at the now legendary Patti Smith gig at Camden’s Roundhouse, having a row with her mother Nora (now Mrs John Lydon). Ari soon attracts the attention of Joe Strummer’s then girlfriend Paloma Romero (Palmolive) and Kate Corris, who approach Ari with the idea of forming a group. They begin rehearsing the very next day as the first incarnation of The Slits. Rehearsing in Joe and Palmolive’s squat, they are soon joined by Tessa Pollit who recalls the moment she joined the band.


 “Originally The Slits had another bass player called Suzie Gutsy. I met The Slits through this News of the World article that was written about women in punk right at the beginning. Ari came round to my flat and she really liked all this poetry I had written on the wall. Suzie Gutsy got kicked out and I joined, that was it really. I was playing guitar before and so I had to learn bass in 2 weeks for our first gig and that was at The Roxy in Harlesden.”


 In the audience that night was Viv Albertine. “I was in the Flowers of Romance with Sid Vicious and Sid left to join the Sex Pistols,” explains Viv. “I saw The Slits play at the Harlesden Roxy and I thought they were amazing. We met up a few days later and played together, and I backcombed their hair like the New York Dolls and that was it, we just clicked.” Kate Corris was next to be given the elbow as Viv stepped in on guitar. Ari Up, Viv Albertine, Tessa Pollit and Palmolive were now The Slits, and in terms of classic lineups, always will be.


 Despite being integral to punk’s evolution from the very beginnings in 1976, the band have never received the same attention The Clash or The Sex Pistols have. Yet The Slits were doing something no other band had done before. You have to remember when The Clash’s Mick Jones picked up his Gibson Les Paul for the first time, there was a long line of boys wielding guitars from Elvis to Johnny Thunders to emulate, but as female musicians there was no her-story, all The Slits had for inspiration was Patti Smith.


 They were the first group of female musicians doing it on their own terms. Their sheer inability to compromise or sell themselves on their sex appeal was a major inspiration to the Riot Grrl movement in the 1990s, and today their musical influence can be heard in bands from Sonic Youth to The Horrors. There seems to be no other time in rock’n’roll history where women were fronting bands and playing their own instruments. But was Punk really a time of equal opportunity for women? Sat in her basement flat just off Ladbroke Grove, Tessa remembers the reality of it all. “It was incredibly male orientated then, within the record companies, and it was a real struggle,” she says. “I think people forget how much of a struggle it was. I mean there has always been female singers but not women playing their own instruments”


 For Viv, “It was a bit like the Second World War, where the women came to the fore because they were needed to work in the factories. It was such a bleak time, three-day weeks, a heat wave, no youth culture on TV or in the media, rubbish all over the streets. Any little rat that could rise up did. It was quite an equal time but it seemed to shrink away after.”


 Despite completely rewriting rock’s masculine rulebook and inspiring a feminist revolution in the ’90s, Tessa believes that The Slits never viewed themselves as feminists. “I just hate labels,” she says. “We never set out to be feminists because then there is a set of rules and I don’t want to be labeled on any level.”


 But as Viv pointed out, the female punk revolution was short-lived and when I ask Ari if she thinks there has been a progression in women’s roles in music she says, “I didn’t know it would come to this, where everything is like a factory. You see Lady Gaga and she is dressed all crazy in these space age outfits, but she is totally straight, she isn’t a rebel. I can see straight through her, she is business. Her sexuality is so trashy and cheap and she is just singing about having too much and fucking about and being vulgar. People think that is rebellion. When you look at the philosophy, it is scary. Even Britney is on this really sexual out there thing. All these girls are so groomed and polished and are being put out there as an industry or as a gimmick. It is scary to think that this is how women are meant to look.”


 But back in the bleak mid-’70s when The Slits embarked on the legendary White Riot Tour alongside The Clash, The Jam, Buzzcocks, and Subway Sect, Viv recalls the rest of the country weren’t quite prepared for the four girls:“We were like the massive rebels of the tour. The way we looked was much more unusual or far out than the guys, because by now people were used to rock and roll looking guys, but girls in fetish wear, with their t-shirts slashed, hair standing a mile on end and in Doctor Martin boots? They couldn’t stand it and they would say we will only have them in the hotel if they walk from the door to the lift and we don’t want to see them again till the next day. Everyday the tour manager would threaten to throw us off the tour, Norman the bus driver had to be bribed daily to let us on the bus. It was bloody stressful.”


 Tessa: “I can’t really think of anyone like us before. I think because we were women it was even more threatening because of the way we looked. Especially when we were going out of London it seemed to cause even more shock. I think we got thrown out of one hotel because I had The Slits graffiti-ed on the side of my case. I suppose you have to look at what it followed, the whole ’60s apathy thing and the fact that it was a movement, it wasn’t just one group. Something had to break at that period. It was probably the worst style ever in the ’70s as far as I can remember, it was vomit-making, the style was so horrible, the haircuts, the clothes, the house design, the avocado green bathroom suites.”


 But it wasn’t just The Slits being female that made them different, it was the style of their music too. When all the other punk bands were shouting “1234”, The Slits were playing to a different beat. They were amongst the first bands on that scene to draw their inspiration from reggae music and at the time of the White Riot tour they were being managed by Roxy DJ Don Letts. For Tessa, reggae was hugely inspiring to the way she played. “There were more reggae artists playing live, like Big Youth and Burning Spear, and the film The Harder They Come, which was really influential, and there were a lot of sound systems and shebeen blues clubs. It was just a real time for reggae in the ’70s. Before punks had ever made any records there was reggae. Thank God, because it was hugely inspiring. Don Letts was djing at the Roxy club playing pure reggae so we got to know all these songs and even to this day I love Jamaican music, just love it.”


 I ask her how the Jamaican community took to four punk girls turning up to their clubs. “Maybe it was more acceptable to be a white woman than to be a white man and be there. In the Ballyhigh Club in Streatham, Ari would just start dancing and be surrounded by a crowd of people. But somewhere like the Four Aces in Dalston, which doesn’t exist anymore, it, would be much more of a tense atmosphere, like who do these people think they are, coming into our club. Ari used to go on her own from a really young age, she had quite a nerve, she was 15, but you can’t help but like her.”


 The Slits were also the first musicians to point out that women played their instruments in a different way to men, quite a revelation but for Tessa it was the only way she knew. “I like the fact that women do play differently,” she says. “For me I was always playing with other women so I didn’t know any different.”


 Viv, though, was making it up as she went along. “We, in a way, tried to fit in with boys and how they played,” she says. “I hadn’t been taught an instrument so I was literally making it up as I went along and with things Keith Levene [later of PiL] was showing me, though he wasn’t showing me straight forward things. He was teaching me more the mentality than the actual chords. He gave me the confidence to do what I wanted and I would make things up and he would say, ‘What time is that in? It works but it shouldn’t.’” At the time Viv was going out with Mick Jones. “Mick didn’t teach me anything. Only the guys you don’t sleep with teach you something.”


 Unlike the other punk bands, The Slits didn’t sign to a label straight away in 1977. Viv didn’t think the band were ready. “Mainly we didn’t sign because we knew we didn’t sound like we did in our heads. That and the record companies wanted to market us and package us up as sexy punk girls. There really weren’t any other all girl bands at the time. We had to wait till someone took us for who we where “


 Finally, the band signed to Island in 1978. What was particularly unusual is that Island Records agreed to give them full creative control on everything, from the artwork to the choice of single, something that is still rare in the business today. The band’s first single, ‘Typical Girls’, was backed with a cover version of Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’. It was a song that Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records, thought would give the girls more success, but they were adamant they would go with their own song ‘Typical Girls’ as the A-side. Although the band were able to make their own career decisions, they weren’t always the most financially-viable. I ask Viv if the term ‘bloody-minded’ would be a suitable term to describe The Slits’ attitude to the music business at the time.


 “I think every decision we made, made it difficult for us. We kept thinking ‘Why aren’t we commercial? Why aren’t we on TV?’ On the other hand, we were so uncompromising on how we spoke to people, how we did interviews, how we looked, everything was utterly uncompromised. So we led ourselves down this difficult cult route. Which actually, 20 years later, worked out pretty well as it kept The Slits pure and now because we were so uncompromising the band has such a strong identity. But it did mean we made no money and we had no commercial success.”


 Their success seems on a par to a band like The Velvet Underground’s in the ’60s. Neither bands sold huge amounts of records on release but their influence has been huge and ongoing. But when I ask Tessa about when she first became aware of their now legendary status, she seems blissfully unaware of quite how influential the band have been.


 “I wasn’t aware at all till I hooked up with Ari a few years ago. She kept going on about how we had influenced the whole Riot Grrrl movement. I didn’t get it until we started playing in America and we had an audience out there, a young audience. I was quite shocked.”


 But long before Riot Grrrl, a young Madonna had been in the audience and you can see the influence The Slits had on her style on her first appearances on Channel 4’s innovative music programme The Tube. But again, Tessa has a very grounded view to this. “I think she must have been quite influenced by the way Viv dressed as she came to see us before her career took off but I don’t like to go on about things like that. I just think, so what? Everyone is going to get influenced by what they see. I just don’t like to blow my own trumpet. I just want to keep moving forward and try and not get egotistical about anything.”


 The Slits released their debut album, ‘Cut’, produced by legendary reggae producer Dennis Bovell, on the 7th September 1979. By this point drummer Palmolive had left the band and had been replaced by Budgie, who later went on to join Siouxsie And The Banshees. On the album’s cover, Ari, Tessa and Viv stare defiantly into the camera lens. Like Amazonian warriors they are caked in mud and naked apart from a loincloth. Pennie Smith shot this now legendary image of The Slits in the summer of 1979, almost 30 years ago to the day. In an era where female role models like Katie Price are most often surgically modified into the cartoon image of a woman, and the teacup-wielding Lady GaGa is considered to be outrageous, that image of The Slits seems more relevant than ever. I ask Tessa if they were aware quite how important that shot of them would become.


 “I think we knew it was going to cause a storm. But it was an incredibly liberating feeling splashing around in the mud. I can’t even remember where the idea came from but it was the perfect setting for it. It just had this ambiguity about it, us against a country house with roses growing up the walls. It got very mixed reactions. I think we just liked to push the boundaries. I spoke to Vivien Goldman and she was working for Sounds or Melody Maker at the time and she took it to her editor. They were saying, they are so fat and ugly we aren’t putting that in our paper. They just didn’t want to see women like that.”


 At the time the photos caused outrage with one man going so far as to try and sue the record company for crashing his car after seeing the three naked Slits looking down at him from a huge billboard.


 After the release of ‘Cut’ the band’s sound became increasingly experimental. In the early 1980s, The Slits formed an alliance with Bristol post-punk band The Pop Group, sharing a drummer (Bruce Smith) and releasing a joint single, ‘In The Beginning There was Rhythm’/ ‘Where There’s A Will’ (Y Records). The Slits released their second album, ‘Return Of The Giant Slits’ in 1981 and in the December of that year, the band decided to split. Ari was 14 when she joined the band, Tessa and Viv only a couple of years older. Tessa believes they did the right thing. “It felt like we needed a break,” she says. “We needed to go off and experience our own adventures. We had grown up together and we had worked so hard, everything was about The Slits. We needed to have our own individual experiences in life. I don’t think it was a bad thing and the whole music scene became so squeaky clean in the ’80s and I think that was what put me off. Something really switched in the ’80s.”


 Still, the split didn’t come easy. It left a huge hole in each of their lives. Tessa spiralled into heroin addiction and Viv likened the aftermath to being akin to posttraumatic stress disorder. “It meant so much to me,” she explains. “But by the time we split up I was burnt out. I couldn’t bear to listen to music for about two years, it was terrible. I went down the filmmaking path. I thought that was a better option at the time. In the ’80s music got very careerist, it was no longer about expressing yourself.”


 Ari had twins shortly after the split and left England to live in the jungles of Belize and then Jamaica.


 Ari Up and Tessa Pollitt reformed The Slits with new members in 2005, and in 2006 released the EP ‘Revenge Of The Killer Slits’. The EP featured former Sex Pistol Paul Cook and Marco Pirroni (ex-Adam & the Ants, and Siouxsie & The Banshees) as both musicians and co-producers. In fact, Cook’s daughter Hollie is a member of the current line-up, singing and playing keyboards. Other members of the reformed band are German drummer Anna Schulte, and Adele Wilson on guitar. I asked Tessa what led her and Ari to getting The Slits back together.


 “I hooked up with Ari about five years ago, we hadn’t seen each other in years. She had been all over the place in the jungle, in Jamaica and America. I went to see some of her solo gigs and I just got itchy to get on stage again and play some of our old songs. It was like there had been no time gap and we got on like we had just seen each other yesterday. We have led very parallel lives and have been through similar experiences. She had lost her son’s father, he was shot in Jamaica, and I had lost my daughter’s father, Sean Oliver, when she was five, we have both been widowed.”


 Viv Albertine joined the group for two gigs in 2008 but decided she didn’t want to reform. “That sealed it for me. I didn’t want to go back,” she says. “I felt awkward singing songs like ‘Shoplifiting’. I am a woman now and still have stuff I want to talk about but I can’t be playing songs from 25 years ago.” Viv will be releasing a single of her own later this year and an album though US label Manimal Records. When I ask her what she thinks of The Slits now, Viv tells me, “You watch Ari on stage even now and she still comes over as something absolutely amazing and different. She has no fear and no body consciousness. She still does something for sexuality and women that I don’t think any other woman does.”


 2009 is a big year for The Slits. Not only is it the 30th Anniversary of their cult album ‘Cut’, but this year also sees the release of the first Slits album in 28 years. ‘Trapped Animal’ will be released in October. The band recorded the record in Los Angeles earlier this year. A superb biography on the band written by journalist Zoe Street Howe (Typical Girls? The Story of The Slits) was also released in April.

 Ari takes her role as a Slit very seriously and is still hugely conscious about not being pushed into a position she doesn’t feel comfortable with. “I am constantly worried about The Slits and haunted about The Slits, that The Slits do not have to sell their integrity or their principles or about being pushed into something we don’t want to do. I mean that is a struggle we all have to deal with all our lives anyway.”

 I remind her how Joe Strummer had praised them for managing to keep hold of their integrity.


 “The Slits have become something beyond The Slits, bigger than life, bigger than our personalities,” she says. “They have become very mythical. The responsibility to stay true to ourselves is huge. People need something like The Slits, even if it isn’t us. Every time we play, there is always a girl who says, ‘I am going to start a group’. There is always someone who tells us that we have been an inspiration or life changing.”



 How we made Cut (the Slits)
 The Slits' Viv Albertine and producer Dennis Bovell recall how the punk pioneers' debut LP was helped along by spoons, nudity, matches and mud
Viv Albertine, guitarist



 We were all virgins when it came to composing and writing, but we liked the ideology of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood: always questioning things. That fed into our music. We new we were a first, which could be uncomfortable, and we were much more revolutionary than the Pistols and the Clash. They were rock bands, whereas we were using world music and reggae, filtered through our own musicality.


 We were like a female Spinal Tap, really: we argued, toured and wanted to make a classic album that never dated. Island, our label, got Dennis Bovell to produce it. They said he had very broad musical knowledge – he liked everything from white rock to reggae, which sounded perfect. We were also drawing on other influences: our favourite album was Dionne Warwick sings Burt Bacharach, which we deconstructed. My guitar style was based on the anonymous guitarist on that.


 So in the spring of 1979, we were dispatched to Ridge Farm in Surrey. Dennis was trapped with all these girls! He and Ari [Forster, singer] were very strict. I'd only been playing for 18 months and was with these control freaks. I often went to bed in tears, wondering what humiliation waited for me the next day, what weaknesses would be revealed in my playing. When I was playing Newtown, they kept saying: "You're not getting it." By the end, I was so furious I just thrashed at the guitar and made strange noises. Over the intercom came: "That was fantastic!"


 Dennis corralled us into shape and tidied up all the ends, but without trampling on creativity. It was so rare for a man in the 1970s to put himself inside the heads and hearts of four crazy young women. Budgie [Peter Clarke, drummer] also helped pull it all together. Ari was very communicative about how things should sound and Budgie could take that from a girl who was 17. He had a feminine sensibility. They were extraordinary men to come across. Ari, in her German-Jamaican accent, would tell them exactly what she wanted from the hi-hat.


 The album cover was shot in the rose garden. We wanted a warrior stance, to be a tribe. We were egging each other on, and the next thing you know we were sitting in the mud, smearing it over each other. We knew, since we had no clothes on, that we had to look confrontational and hard. We didn't want to be inviting the male gaze.



 Dennis Bovell, producer


 Chris Blackwell from Island Records told me: "I've signed this group and I don't know what to do with them. It's a girl group, a punk band." He gave me some cassettes of them live and I thought: "Yeah, they certainly can play." And I agreed to do the album.


 We were in the studio for 10 weeks, and it was solid work. The band had clear ideas about what they wanted. Ari, Tessa [Pollitt, bassist] and Viv had written the songs; they just needed me to shape them. We worked from nine in the morning till late. Then I'd tell them, "Off you go to bed," so I could fix things. And Ari would say, "No, I'm not going to bed!" She would always insist on being there if I was doing anything to the music.


 They weren't good at reggae, but they were keen to learn. In Newtown, I'm on keyboards and percussion. It's about drug-taking, but the drugs were football and TV. I got hold of an ashtray, a spoon and a box of matches and that was my percussion: shaking the matches, tapping the ashtray with the spoon and occasionally striking a match. The ashtray was symbolic of smoking, the spoon of heroin. They said: "You're mad!" We were using a mixing desk that belonged to Jon Anderson of Yes. We weren't supposed to be, but he was on tour. Ari carved on the desk: "Ari was here."


 I got a bit of a shock when they did the cover. I went off to have a quick dip in the pool while they were shooting it. When they finished, the owner's son said: "Why don't you jump in the pool to get the mud off?" I said: "No!" But they jumped in anyway. There's a photo of me in there with them. I've tried to get hold of the negative.




 If you read or watch interviews with members of The Slits, it’s obvious that they used to get a bit of hassle from men. This includes being told that they couldn’t play properly, being taken for prostitutes when walking down the street and having to argue vociferously with the business guys to keep control of their own image and music. But how much sexism did they encounter in the late 1970’s and would a similar band have it any differently today?

 Manager and DJ Don Letts describes a particular issue:
 “On the White Riot tour, we had to bribe the coach driver, Norman, to allow them on the bus….. He just couldn’t compute…. women weren’t supposed to be like this!”The summer of 1976 was hot and it felt like something was going to erupt. Viv Albertine describes how she spent the whole summer trying to learn guitar with Sid Vicious, only to be told she was not good enough. Just as well, really because when Viv joined The Slits, things got a whole lot better.

 


 Live, the band had to front it out. Albertine admits to being terrified with nerves before going onstage, but implies that the bond between the girls gave them the courage and confidence that shines out to the (mostly male) audience.

 The Slits practised standing in an assertive way so that they weren’t copying boys’ bands or lacking in confidence. Viv Albertine makes an interesting comment about how German-born Ari Up had none of the English embarrassment about her body:

 “She was very relaxed about her body. She pissed on stage … not to be shocking – she deperately needed a piss.”
The freedom with which Ari dances in videos and the naked frontery of the cover of ‘Cut’ serve to confirm that physicality. In fact, following the break-up of The Slits, Ari found another opportunity for freedom:
 “The ’80s sucked, because it became yuppiefied….I basically just retreated into the jungle, lived naked in Belize and Borneo. I just couldn’t handle it. Tessa went to Africa and lived in the desert.”




 John Lydon married Ari Up’s mother, Nora and the couple have brought up Ari’s sons, particularly since 2010 when Ari died of breast cancer. She had refused chemotherapy, apparently because she wanted to keep her rasta dreadlocks.


 Perhaps the most interesting thing that runs through the accounts of this period is that most of the negative reactions towards The Slits were accusations about the girls’ impropriety, attempts to manipulate their music or public expressions of shock. There seems to be very little out-and-out direct sexism as we would know it today, particularly from those on the punk scene. It was as if outrage was directed at the band as punks, and this dampened anything else about them as women. The Slits also seemed to believe that feminist concerns of the day missed the point – take the outcry over the ‘Cut’ topless cover:

 “I think it was really, really the right thing. It expresses the way we still are, the way we feel, the way we sound and the way we visualise life…. I like in the way that it offended the feminist rights women, for instance. We were just doing a thing spontaneously, naturally.” Ari Up



 In the same interview, Ari also explains that the punk scene was protective of girls, with mixed friendship groups being common within punk. Diversity in character, presentation and behaviour was encouraged and gender roles were broad. Ari says that a lot of people at that time were pretty asexual:


 “There wasn’t all that cock-rock agenda in the punk scene, which was great for The Slits, because it gave us so much support from the boys in that time. They weren’t sexually motivated…. I never encountered any sexual harassment. I was only 14 and everyone was older than me, but never did a boy come up to me and say: “Oh, have you got a boyfriend, can I fuck you?” There was never any of that, there was always respect. We were protected by the boys as if we were sisters. We were never sexually humiliated. That shows the innocence, right there.”




John Peel said " the two performances by The Slits for Peel Sessions would both be in his top ten Peel Sessions"









 

 































 

Slits 'Cut': hadn't really listened to that before either, although I was aware of the band. That poor lassie Ari Up must have overdone the heroin at an early age, by her early twenties she looked 10-15 years older.

Think the unusual attraction of her vocal delivery was due to her unfamiliarity with English, in fact the three main Slits were all from abroad.

However, I think I'd get fed up pretty fast listening to The Slits for too long. Which is unusual, for I normally like stuff that's a wee bit different.

PatReilly wrote:

However, I think I'd get fed up pretty fast listening to The Slits for too long. Which is unusual, for I normally like stuff that's a wee bit different.

I thought the same, until I played it again, now played it quite a few times and really enjoying it.
 

DAY 455.
Dexy's Midnight Runners...............................Searching For The Young Soul Rebels   (1980)










Searching for the Young Soul Rebels is the debut studio album by English pop group Dexys Midnight Runners, released on 11 July 1980, through EMI Records. Led by Kevin Rowland, the group formed in 1978 in Birmingham, England, and formed a strong live reputation before recording their first material. Recorded during April 1980, the album combines the aggressiveness of punk rock with soul music, particularly influenced by the Northern Soul movement.The album was preceded by and contains the hit-single "Geno", which topped the UK Singles Chart. It also contains two other charting singles: "Dance Stance" (re-recorded as "Burn It Down") and "There, There, My Dear" (which included the lyrics "I've been searching for the young soul rebels" that inspired the album's title).


They have admitted to naming their band after the drug Dexedrine, the prescription stimulant which is also a semi-popular way to get out of your head for a spell. The "midnight runners" comes from the ability of Dexedrine users to dance all night..





 

DAY 446.
Cheap Trick.......................................................At Budokan   (1979)


















This album is very much of it's time, though I must confess I bought "Live at the Budokan but I don't think this was the cover I had. Listening to it now "I Want You To Want Me"  is about the only track that I would volunteer to listen to these days.


This leads me to wonder whether I bought albums just to entice the gash, I know there was one girl I knew who was obsessed with this band, could I have been so conniving?

You can bet your sweet arse I was


Anyways this album wont be going into my collection.





Bits & Bobs;


Cheap Trick: "For us, ...Budokan was like winning the lottery"Cheap Trick’s At Budokan is widely hailed as one of rock’s greatest live albums. All four Tricksters tell Classic Rock the story of big dreams, hard work and plain dumb luck
Life happens to you when you’re busy making other plans,’ John Lennon once sang. And never in a million years could Cheap Trick have imagined how their career would be transformed as the result of a monstrous fluke.


 Sure, they had great commercial songs with giant hooks, and a distinctive image which played off the visual duality of the movie star good looks of lead vocalist Robin Zander and bassist Tom Petersson, and resident “weirdos” – lead guitarist Rick Nielsen and drummer, Bun E Carlos. But there have been hundreds of other worthy bands who’ve also possessed all the right ingredients for success, but who the fickle hand of fate has tossed on to the ever growing rock’n’roll scrapheap.


 Dateline 1979. Cheap Trick mania had hit the world. After years of slogging it out on the road playing every ratty dive in the States or opening for the likes of Kansas, Santana, Kiss and Be-Bop Deluxe, Cheap Trick had finally arrived. They’d achieved what only a few years prior had seemed to be a near impossibility – superstardom. Their 1979 live album, Cheap Trick At Budokan was an international sensation and its follow-up studio release, Dream Police, was tearing up the US charts on the heels of the Beatlesque ballad Voices and the epic title track.


 However, just prior to this massive success, the Rockford, Illinois quartet’s prospects for a prosperous music career were looking decidedly bleak. “If it weren’t for …Budokan,” says Robin Zander,” it might have been the end for us. We were in debt by about a million dollars. That album saved us from probable obscurity.”


 Rewind to early 1978, and despite a series of critically acclaimed records – Cheap Trick, In Color, Heaven Tonight – and an endless slate of punishing road work, the band couldn’t get arrested in the US. Their three albums had flopped, and with constant touring draining their finances the band were in trouble. Meanwhile, unexpectedly, and thousands of miles from their hometown, Cheap Trick had broken the Japanese market, racking up three Gold albums and a string of Top 10 hits, such as Clock Strikes Ten, I Want You To Want Me and Surrender.


 By late April 1978 Cheap Trick were heading to the Orient for their first Japanese tour, primed to revel in the glory of their newly acquired fame. Landing in Japan, 5,000 screaming fans greeted them at the airport. Rick Nielsen laughingly recalls, “We rode coach on the way there and first class on the way back.”

 Throughout their stay, the band would experience the same uncontrollable mania that their spiritual musical forefathers, The Beatles, had witnessed 12 years earlier on their last world tour. Official band photographer Bob Alford remembers the ensuing madness, “It was just like Beatlemania. Gangs of Japanese fans were chasing them everywhere trying to rip their clothes off. I remember girls hanging out of the side of high speed taxis taking photos, risking life and limb. It was nuts!”


 “It was really dangerous for us to even do anything because the people would just get crushed and dive in front of trains and out of taxis,” Nielsen told Guitar Player. “There were thousands of people in the hotels and the lobbies. You couldn’t look out the window or else people would just go wild and the hotels would throw us out.”


 The band were slated to perform shows on April 27 in Osaka and on April 28 and 29 at Tokyo’s Budokan, a 14,000-seat arena which had previously hosted performances by the likes of The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. The idea to record a live album didn’t come from the band, though, it was a decision made by the suits.


 “In Japan, CBS/Sony was splitting into two companies,” explains Bun E Carlos. “They decided that every time a band on Epic or Columbia came over they’d record their show and put out a series of Live At Budokan albums. Bob Dylan and Cheap Trick were the first albums they released.”


 By this time, Cheap Trick were one of the world’s top live acts, hardened by years of rigorous touring. “We were busy as hell, playing nearly 300 dates a year,” says Petersson. Their incendiary shows in Japan captured a band at the height of their live powers. Onstage, lead guitarist Rick Nielsen was a cartoon character run amok, a tsunami of wild, distorted power chords and demented showmanship, who’d routinely bombard the audience with a hailstorm of guitar picks. Zander’s between-song patter could seemingly incite the primarily female audience into a frenzy at will. His song introductions were carefully worded. “They told us to make sure Robin spoke slowly so the Japanese audience could understand him,” Nielsen admits.


 Drenched in rapturous applause and punctuated by the riotous screaming of thousands of devoted fans, the insane audience reaction made an indelible impression on the quartet. “The crowd response was incredible,” Nielsen affirms. “It was so loud it was almost frightening.”


 “It was mainly young girls and it kind of sounded like a Hannah Montana concert more than Woodstock,” laughs Tom Petersson.
  “Live albums are often beefed up and although it sounds phoney, the Budokan audience was for real,” Rick Nielsen said in 1979.  Up to that point, listening to Cheap Trick on record and seeing them live were two markedly different propositions. The band were gravely disappointed with the production of 1977’s In Color, as Tom Petersson laments, “The label tried to make us radio-friendly and safe because our first record didn’t do well, and it completely wrecked the way we sounded. They said, ‘We love you guys, if only you sounded like someone else, it would be great.’ To me, that makes no fucking sense. The label thought we were too heavy and too weird. Jack Douglas, who produced our first album, he understood us. That’s the way we sounded. That second record has all these great songs and it doesn’t sound anything like us with that Shakey’s Pizza Parlor version of I Want You To Want Me. When I hear that version now I go, ‘Oh my God, is that lame!’. The album failed miserably everywhere except in Japan.”



 In 1976, the band had recorded I Want You To Want Me for their first album but its primal scream ferocity made it sound more like a lost track from John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band album than a sure fire hit single. Ironically, while a live rendition of the song would later become Cheap Trick’s first smash hit in the US, it wasn’t originally in the set for the Japanese shows. Nielsen would note, “We’d taken it out of the American setlist because the single had bombed. We brought it back because the Japanese had turned the In Color version into a hit. The live version was the way it was always supposed to sound.”

  Seeing Cheap Trick live, their songs took on a much harder edge. “The live record is very heavy and the songs reflect that. It’s the way we sound on stage and that ultimately translated on the album,” attests Petersson.

  Surrender is one of those songs that came alive on the concert stage. Decades on, it’s gone on to become one of Cheap Trick’s defining anthems. A perfect marriage of thunderous guitars and Who’s Next-sounding synthesizers, the song’s wacky lyrics spin an unsettling image of parents ‘rolling on the couch/Rolling numbers, rock and rolling/Got my Kiss records out’. Kiss’ Paul Stanley would later remark, “I thought Surrender was very cool. There were a lot of bands who were obviously influenced by us who cited us as an influence until they became big themselves, and then they decided that they forgot who their influences were. It was cool that Cheap Trick never lost that.”


 When assembling the tracks for the finished record, the Japanese record company pushed hard for the inclusion of more commercial songs (Come On, Come On, Surrender, I Want You To Want Me, Clock Strikes Ten) at the expense of experimental fare like ELO Kiddies, Terry Reid’s Speak Now Or Forever Hold Your Peace and the aggressive guitar freakout, Auf Wiedersehen, a song about suicide.

  “Epic/Sony whittled it down to a single album and included the most radio-worthy songs of the bunch. They wanted it to sell big,” says Zander. The label also demanded that the band include three new songs on the record. Need Your Love and Look Out were unveiled during the shows – they were recorded for previous albums but unused – while the group also reintroduced a favourite cover they’d performed regularly in their club days, a ferocious rendition of Fats Domino’s Ain’t That A Shame.



 Back in the States, the band were flying high on their triumphant reception in the Far East, but work still had to be done on the live record. Zander expands, “I remember between gigs in ’78, me and Rick were wearing ourselves out flying back and forth to New York to do mixing. It was lots of fun. We produced it, so at that time it was the album we were most satisfied with.”



 Rumours have circulated for years about the authenticity of such classic live albums as Thin Lizzy’s Live And Dangerous, Aerosmith’s Live Bootleg and Frampton Comes Alive, but Bun E Carlos insists that on Budokan, “there was very little fixing done in the studio. We patched up some guitar mistakes, and we fixed some of Rick’s background vocals because there were times he wasn’t near the mic. But it’s about 98 per cent unaltered, and you can tell because there are clinkers all over the place, like me dropping a drum stick in Surrender or Rick hitting a wrong chord.”

  In October 1978, Cheap Trick At Budokan was released in Japan and was a commercial blockbuster. They’d conquered the Far East and now the rest of the world was in their sights. A significant buzz was starting to build about the band in the US. Rolling Stone ran a story on the rising Midwest upstarts and word spread quickly.



 “Some imports showed up in places like Boston. There was a grassroots build happening at hip record stores and college radio immediately jumped on it,” Carlos enthuses. The album would go on to sell a whopping 75,000 copies in the States, making it the best selling import album at the time. Epic Records took close notice of this growing phenomenon and released the radio sampler, From Tokyo To You.



 “Radio started playing the heck out of that thing,” marvels Carlos. Soon afterwards, they issued the album worldwide where it soared to No.4 on the Billboard charts. I Want You Want Me was a smash Top 10 hit and follow-up single, Ain’t That A Shame landed at Number 35. “When the import started selling, the company was only too happy to bring the album into the mainstream,” remembers local Epic promotion manager, William ‘Biff’ Kennedy.

  Contributing to the album’s unprecedented success, Budokan hit at a time when live albums like Live And Dangerous, Queen’s Live Killers, Love You Live by The Rolling Stones, and Frampton Comes Alive were meeting with enormous success. But as Tom Petersson bluntly reveals, “To be honest I’m not really a big fan of live albums except for The Who Live At Leeds, which is unbeatable. I don’t think any other live albums hold up to that one.”



 The bassist might not have been a fan, but as a consequence of their live album’s success Cheap Trick’s status was transformed from opening act to headliner.



 “It was four guys from the Midwest doing what they do best, playing live,” shrugs Rick Nielsen. “The songs still stand up. We made the Budokan famous and the Budokan made us famous.”



 However, there was one major drawback to the album’s unexpected success; it scuppered plans for the release of their next studio record, Dream Police. “Budokan took everybody by surprise,” admits the guitarist. “Our label thought the live album would only sell two or three hundred thousand copies in the US and then Dream Police would come out and be a mega hit. Then suddenly the live album took off like crazy and Dream Police sat around for a year until it came out.”

  Since Cheap Trick first played at Budokan, many other rock icons have followed in their footsteps and released albums taped at that historic concert hall. Yet mention the word Budokan to your average music punter and most likely the first thing they’ll think of is Cheap Trick. Despite all of their post-Budokan achievements, the group’s landmark 1979 live album remains a quintessential milestone in their career.

 And the fact that its runaway success was so unexpected makes its enduring popularity even more rewarding 30 years later. “Any time you have big success it comes out of left-field,” notes Petersson. “You can’t plan it. There’s no formula. …Budokan was Cheap Trick finally winning the lottery.”

Last edited by arabchanter (07/11/2018 10:07 pm)

Starting with 'Armed Forces', Elvis' second last great album, for me. Both sides.

I still sing the harmonies for Oliver's Army every time it comes on in the car, at this bit:
But there's no danger
It's a professional career
Though it could be arranged
With just a word in Mr. Churchill's ear

Does everyone? Or anyone? I'm hoping I'm not odd. 

Goon Squad and Green Shirt are other favourites, but I enjoy all the songs, and the album isn't in the loft, it's in a cupboard now. Think it's another one I got when it came out, but I've 'lost' the live EP that came with it.


Gang of Four's 'Entertainment' was an odd one. I wasn't aware of the band's work at the time of release, and couldn't mind much about them, so listened again there. The guitar is quite like the bloke in Franz Ferdinand, and initially I was drawn to the sound overall. But although enjoyable, I thought a lot of the songs were very similar, the same criticism which could be levelled at some of the stuff I really like. 

So I come to the conclusion that Gang of Four weren't really my cup of tea, although I would support many of their political points of view.

The song titles too, I liked, but given the plaudits they've received for their perceptiveness, some of the lyrics and rhyming couplets were quite tame and twee. Example: from 'At home, he's a tourist',
He fills his head with culture
He gives himself an ulcer
He fills his head with culture
He gives himself an ulcer 

Deary me.....

I know we've not reached the review spot yet for 'Searching for the Young Soul Rebels', but that would be the 'eighties we've got to in the book. Cannae think there'll be many more LPs I like coming up, but you never know, for I enjoy some stuff I never thought too much of at the time.

A wee story about Dexys. You know how  a story gets repeated so often, that folk begin to believe it? Well, I was the banjo player in Dexys, although not on this album, but the follow up. I let folk in on this when 'Come On Eileen' hit the charts, could hardly deny it because I'm there, in the video, playing the banjo. Periodically people still ask me about it.

Some of the stuff I've told people, I begin to wonder myself if it's true.
 

DAY 448.
Pink Floyd.....................................................The Wall   (1979)












I'm going to hold fire on this one, I found it quite intriguing and am curious to see if I like it any better when I can sit back and give this double album the attention I think it may deserve. Never really been into Pink Floyd or double albums but after giving this a quick listen and without reading the lyrics or knowing the story, I want to hear it again, so this is going to be given a proper listen to,without distractions (hopefully) in the near future.


So although I don't think there is any danger of me buying this, It's going on the subbies bench for now, to be played with all the others gathering dust on the bench, when I can find some spare time (what's that?).





Bits & Bobs;




Have already written about Pink Floyd in earlier posts (if interested)



The Wall by Pink Floyd



The Wall was the most ambitious album of a long and storied career filled with ambitious projects by Pink Floyd. This double-length concept album was composed by vocalist and bassist Roger Waters and spawned an equally ambitious tour, a feature film, and a legacy which has only grown in almost four decades since its release in 1979. The album’s concept was developed by Waters following Pink Floyds 1977 “In the Flesh” tour, which followed their previous studio album, Animals. With Pink Floyd at the height of their popularity on this tour, Waters became increasingly frustrated by the ever rowdier audience and began to imagine building a giant wall between the audience and the stage. Waters further developed the “Wall” idea to include isolation, problems with authority, and the real-life loss of his father as an infant during World War II. However, “Bricks in the Wall” (as it was then known) was not the only concept Waters developed at that time. A second concept album dealing with themes of marriage, sex, and family life was also presented to the rest of the band for a vote in 1978. Pink Floyd opted for The Wall, and the other concept would eventually be developed into Waters’ debut solo album, The Pros and Cons of Hitchiking in 1984.


 The Wall has 26 songs which, by comparison, is the same number of tracks as Pink Floyd’s four previous studio albums combined. To help refine and produce this monumental project, Waters brought in Bob Ezrin, who had previously worked with Alice Cooper, Lou Reed and Peter Gabriel. Ezrin, Waters, and guitarist David Gilmour were the main refiners of the material, working from a 40-page script. The album was methodically recorded in several locations including England, France, and the United States. This was mainly due to the band’s year-long “tax exile”, which found them in odd living arrangements and often bickering with each other. Waters made it clear that he was in charge of the project, dictating the schedule and eventually advocated the firing of founding keyboardist Richard Wright when Wright refused to cut a family holiday short because Waters had moved up the recording schedule.


 Drummer Nick Mason recorded many of his tracks independently at Britannia Row Studios in London early on in the process. This left Waters and Gilmour as essentially the only band members who fully participated in the day-to-day production through the end. When the team got to New York, Ezrin suggested that Michael Kamen and the New York Philharmonic and Symphony Orchestras, and a choir from the New York City Opera be recorded to enhance several of the theatrical tracks. Ezrin and Waters also captured many of the spoken-word and sound effects used on the album. The minimalist cover design and accompanying sleeve art was designed by cartoonist Gerald Scarfe, who later worked on the animation for The Wall tour and the 1982 film Pink Floyd The Wall, bringing a consistent feel to both projects.

 Later reprised on the final side, “In the Flesh?” is a reference to the band’s tour where the Wall’s initial concept began. For a few seconds the melody of the album’s last song “Outside the Wall” is played, solidifying the album’s comprehensive feel, before this track explodes into a riff-driven hard rock jam which immediately destroys the subtle stereotype brought on by previous Pink Floyd albums. The tracks single verse is in sharp contrast with gentle staccato piano and doo-wop harmony behind Waters’ lead vocals. After exploding back to the main riff for the coda, a dive-bomber effect crashes and is interrupted by the sound of a baby crying, symbolizing the protagonist’s loss of his father as a baby. “The Thin Ice” is much softer and measured, with Gilmour providing the verse vocals and Waters the chorus as, again, there is only one verse/chorus. Gilmour’s signature, slow bluesy guitar close out the song.


 The three song medley; “Another Brick In the Wall, Part 1” / “The Happiest Days of Our Lives” / “Another Brick In the Wall, Part 2” is one of the most radio-friendly sequences of the album. Driven by Gilmour’s rhythmic guitar arpeggio, the segment eerily enters in contrast to the faint sound of children playing in the background. Waters melody is soft at through the first section as Gilmour adds overdubbed, sweet slide effects. After a helicopter effect, the second part is shorter with much more movement, vocal effects, and intensity, leading to group’s first and only number one hit, “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2”. Although composed by Gilmour and Waters, it is Ezrin who deserves much of the credit for the song’s success, as he advocated for both the disco-flavored drum beat by Mason and the second verse and chorus, which featured a choir of schoolchildren. Like many of the early songs on the album, this was originally written as just one verse and one chorus and was barely a minute long. Without the band’s knowledge, Ezrin copied the first verse and spliced it in as an exact second. Inspired by his own earlier work on Alice Cooper’s School’s Out, Ezrin overdubbed 24 tracks of kids singing and laid it on top. The band was initially resistant to this, but eventually relented.




“Mother” is notable for variations between pure folk and differntly-timed waltz. Recorded later in the recording of the album, session drummer Jeff Porcaro was hired to lay down the beat under the guitar solo and later verse/chorus. Both Waters and Gilmour share lead vocal duties in this building song of question and answer dialogue between son and mother. Starting side two, “Goodbye Blue Sky” begins briefly as a pleasant folk song, which quickly turns dark with foreboding synths backing the picked acoustic guitar. “Empty Spaces” was an abridged, last second replacement for the longer “What Shall We Do Now?”, which did not appear until the Pink Floyd The Wall movie. Notable for its backwards-masked message, “Empty Spaces” acts as a bridge to the standard hard rocker “Young Lust”, a song about casual sex that has more Gilmour influence than any other on the album.


 Starting with “One of My Turns”, the first half of the album concludes with four tracks that painfully describe the final internal steps of building the protagonist’s wall. “One of My Turns” is split into distinct segments, starting with a groupie’s monologue, followed by a soft ballad with Waters accompanied only by a synth-organ. Finally, the song snaps into a hard rock rendition of the protagonist’s violent breakdown, which terrifies the groupie. “Don’t Leave Me Now” uses some interesting sound and production techniques but has minimal lyrical content, while “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 3” is a much more rage-filled rendition of the earlier melody. Finally, this cross-fades into “Goodbye Cruel World”, a delicate song builds on Waters two-note bass riff and the slightest synth by Wright. The vocals are haunting and dry to end the first act of The Wall.


 “Hey You” is an excellent song which uniquely sits just outside the album’s concept. In fact, this song, sounds like it may have fit in better on the previous Wish You Were Here or Animals albums. Starting with Gilmour’s crisp acoustic and smooth vocals, the mesmerizing ballad gains rock instrumentation on the way to the climatic guitar solo followed by the frantic last verse sung by Waters. The spooky “Is There Anybody Out There?”, starts with a horror movie like intro where the title is spoken several times in a well-treated voice. Then the song turns quite classical and sweet with an instrumental passage led by the classical guitar of session man Joe DiBlasi, backed by an orchestral arrangement. “Nobody Home” is a deep ballad that features Ezrin on piano behind Waters’ fine lyrical motifs. Two very short tracks follow which harken back to Britain during World War II. “Vera” directly references British singer Vera Lynn, who had a very popular song called “We’ll Meet Again” during the mid 1940s, while “Bring the Boys Back Home” is driven by military snare drums, a brass orchestra, and a deep choir accompanying Waters’ strained vocals.




“Comfortably Numb” is one of the most indelible tracks on The Wall due to its pure theatrical sound and lyrical dialogue. Much like “Mother” earlier on the track, Waters and Gilmour vocalize separate characters through the contrasting verses and choruses. Gilmour composed the music as an instrumental during the recording of his self-titled debut album in 1978. Waters changed the key of the verse and added the lyrics and title. However, it wasn’t all happy cooperation as this song sparked a bitter internal fight over two distinct productions of the song. Waters wanted a more stripped-down version while Gilmour advocated for Ezrin’s grander orchestral version. In the end, they compromised with the lyrical areas keeping the orchestral arrangement and Gilmour’s closing guitar solo playing over the band’s rock backing.


 The fourth and final side of the original LP contains the most movement musically. The short linking track “The Show Must Go On” was to originally include The Beach Boys’ doing the backing vocals, but ultimately Bruce Johnston was the only member of that band to be recorded, along with a vocal ensemble that included Toni Tennile of The Captain and Tennile (these same backing vocalists were used for “Waiting For the Worms” later on side 4). “In the Flesh” is a reprise of the opening track which starts a violent sequence of songs where the story’s protagonist envisions himself as a fascist dictator and his concerts a political rally where “undesirables” are thrown “up against the wall” in an apparent Che Guevera-type execution method. On “Run Like Hell”, the violence spills out into the streets as told through Waters’ ever-strained, multi-tracked vocals. Musically, this upbeat piece is one of the most rewarding on the album, featuring Gilmour playing ostinato with rhythmic echoes, the only keyboard lead by Wright, and tactical effects and screams to frame the intended scenes.


 “Waiting for the Worms” is less frantic but just as potent as its preceding track, with Gilmour and Waters alternating vocals and moods once again. Political and philosophical, this track straddles the lien between the internal strife of the protagonist and real-life commentary on the British empire itself. During the climatic outro, a crescendo is built until it crashes to a halts with “Stop”, where the hallucination ends and the protagonist resolves to settle his own mind once and for all. “The Trial” was composed by Waters and Ezrin and is unlike any song ever made by Pink Floyd. With Waters using several distinct voices to play the various characters. Most of the actual music is performed by the Kamen-conducted New York Symphony Orchestra in grandiose style, with a nice guiding piano by Wright and just a few splashes of traditional rock elements added by Gilmour and Mason. Ultimately, the judge renders his verdict and orders, “tear down the wall!” with a subsequent, repeated climatic chorus. “Outside the Wall” is a dénouement to the album, which takes place in the uncertain time after the wall has been torn down.


 One of the best selling albums of 1980, The Wall had sold over 23 million by century’s end. It topped the charts in six different countries, including the United States, and reached the Top 10 in several more. Pink Floyd The Wall followed as a major motion picture in 1982. The band followed the album with a highly theatrical tour which included the building (and tearing down) of a 40-foot high wall of cardboard bricks on the stage. This would be the last Pink Floyd to include Waters (who left the band in 1983) and the recently-fired Wright was hired on as a paid touring musician for this tour. Ironically,  he was the only musician to make money, as the other three absorbed financial losses due to the elaborate production. In 1990, Waters broke out this elaborate set for a single concert to celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall called The Wall-Live in Berlin.



Found this QI;



Pink Floyd’s The Wall was the best-selling album of 1980, and consumed the band for much of the early part of the next decade. It also caused irreparable structural damage to the band that eventually led to its collapse


 "Sometimes I feel like the ship’s cook,” says drummer Nick Mason of his time with Pink Floyd. “I see various commanders come and go and when it gets rough you just go back down to the galley.”


 In the early part of 1979, when Pink Floyd convened in Miravel in the south of France to record what would become their massive The Wall, bassist Roger Waters was very much the man at the helm of the giant prog rock band. Yet some 26 years down the line, as Pink Floyd once again found themselves in a frenzy of press interest after the Wall line-up reconvened – quite unbelievably, given the bitterness that had existed between certain members after Waters quit – to play at Live 8 in London’s Hyde Park, Floyd guitarist David Gilmour was the one who made the ultimate decision as to whether the band would even appear at the event. And with a new solo album, On An Island, due out this month, he made it reluctantly.


 Anyone who followed the bickering and in-fighting in the ensuing years between 1983’s The Final Cut, Waters’ announcement in December 1985 that he was leaving the band, and the decision by Gilmour and Mason, along with keyboard player Rick Wright, to continue as Pink Floyd and release A Momentary Lapse Of Reason in 1987, would today not be surprised by the manner of the band’s falling out. 


 Back in the mid-80s, when all hell broke loose for the normally publicity-shy Floyd, it was a different matter entirely. Not least when it transpired that the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, had been the building of the various massively successful The Wall-related projects.


 When the four members of Pink Floyd who created The Wall spoke to Classic Rock back in 1999 (each individually, it should be noted), in the build-up to the release of Is There Anybody Out There?, the live record taken from the 28 The Wall shows in 1980, it was one of the first opportunities for facts to override speculation. And that’s exactly how it turned out.


 With Waters having been painted as the domineering force in Pink Floyd, his assertion that his relationship with David Gilmour had “fallen to pieces during the making of Wish You Were Here” did not come as much of a surprise. What did, however, was how Gilmour viewed the scenario.


 “I can categorically tell you that’s untrue. Roger wanted to be the leader and the boss and in charge, which he, de facto, was,” Gilmour said. Yet Gilmour also maintains that, from his point of view, all was fine during the making of The Wall, despite him having only three co-writing credits.


 “There’s a lot of misconceptions about the start of major hostilities between myself and Roger,” he said. “We had a highly productive working relationship that operated pretty well through The Wall. There were some major arguments, but they were on artistic disagreements. The intention behind The Wall was to make the best record we could.”


 Released in November 1979, The Wall stands as Pink Floyd’s grandest statement, presenting them as the major prog rock players of the 80s. That fact was aided by the huge success of the No.1 single Another Brick In The Wall Part 2, which spent 12 weeks in the UK chart following its release in December 1979 – the first time Floyd had had a taste of the UK singles chart since the Syd Barrett-era See Emily Play reached No.6 in June 1967. Despite the indulgent nature of the concept of The Wall, and its release at a time when punk rock’s wind of change had attempted to blow away such perceived ‘rock dinosaurs’, the album was a massive commercial success. Having sold 1.2 million copies in the first two months of its release, it went on to sell in excess of 30 million copies, making it the best-selling double album ever.


 Despite the success of The Wall, relations between the band members suffered during its creation. Few Floyd fans even realised that Rick Wright had been given his marching orders by Waters, until his name failed to appear anywhere on 1983’s The Final Cut. Problems arising from the lack of a production credit had led to a vastly decreased artistic contribution from the keyboard player.


 “Rick’s relationship with all of us, but especially Roger, did become impossible during the making of The Wall,” Gilmour revealed, before adding of his conversation with Waters over the sacking: “I said: ‘You’re letting this get very personal aren’t you?’ I won’t quote what he said!”


 Wright was said to be unavailable for the original 1999 interviews, but after the feature was published he contacted Classic Rock to demand to have his say. He admitted his disappointment at his dismissal, but concluded that as a hired hand he was, ironically, probably the only one of the Floyd to make any money from the Wall shows.

 Even more surprising was the revelation from Waters that Gilmour also suggested the two of them get rid of drummer Nick Mason. “He famously, or infamously, said: ‘Why don’t we get rid of Nick too?’,” Waters claimed.
  “Nick had his limitations as a drummer,” Gilmour admitted. “Though Roger says that, I don’t have any memory of saying that, apart from joking.”
  The affair was given more credence, however, with Toto drummer Jeff Porcaro being brought in to play on Mother. “It’s got 5/4 bars in it,” Waters said. “Nick, to his credit, has no pretence about that. It was quite clear he couldn’t play it.”
  “If something’s right for a track and I can’t do it, then so be it,” the ever-affable Mason agreed. Of any possible sacking, he added: “I probably realised there might have been a sense of, ‘Hang on, why don’t we…’.”
  Mason and Wright were not the only people within the Pink Floyd circle to fall out of favour during the making of The Wall. Storm Thorgerson’s Hipgnosis team, for so long linked with Pink Floyd’s iconic sleeve artwork, was replaced by vicious political cartoonist Gerald Scarfe for the project.
  But perhaps the most damaging Wall project for Pink Floyd was the making of Alan Parker’s film version in 1982, with Bob Geldof in the lead role as Pink. “The point where Roger and my relationship became unworkable was during the making of the film,” Gilmour explained. “Alan Parker and Roger rowed so badly that Alan walked out. In my view then, and now, it wasn’t workable.”
  “I once had this quite heated conversation with him [Alan Parker] where he said a film is made up of 100 perfect minutes,” Waters revealed of the row. “That was when I realised we were having problems. I’ve actually grown fond of it, though I very much regret there’s no humour in it, but that’s my fault. I don’t think I was in a particularly jolly state.”
  By 1999, the then warring band members found much to savour in their 1979 record and the shows that followed. “It was kind of iconic, wasn’t it?” offered Gilmour, who in the show’s highlight stood atop the huge wall built on stage, to play the album’s finest moment, Comfortably Numb. “We knew when we were making it that it was a good record and that it would make a fantastic show. I can remember driving with Roger, one day towards the end of our time in France, and he said to me: ‘God, we must never stop working together, we make a great team’.”


 But perhaps the final word on The Wall should go to its main protagonist, Roger Waters: “It’s the third of a trilogy of great works I’ve been involved with, starting with Dark Side Of The Moon, all the way to Amused To Death [a Waters solo album]. To date, The Wall is my finest musical achievement.”





"Comfortably Numb"



Roger Waters wrote the lyrics. While many people thought the song was about drugs, Waters claims it is not. The lyrics are about what he felt like as a child when he was sick with a fever. As an adult, he got that feeling again sometimes, entering a state of delirium, where he felt detached from reality. He told Mojo magazine (December 2009) that the lines, "When I was a child I had a fever/My hands felt just like two balloons" were autobiographical. He explained: "I remember having the flu or something, an infection with a temperature of 105 and being delirious. It wasn't like the hands looked like balloons, but they looked way too big, frightening. A lot of people think those lines are about masturbation. God knows why."


 
In a radio interview around 1980 with Jim Ladd from KLOS in Los Angeles, Waters said part of the song is about the time he got hepatitis but didn't know it. Pink Floyd had to do a show that night in Philadelphia, and the doctor Roger saw gave him a sedative to help the pain, thinking it was a stomach disorder. At the show, Roger's hands were numb "like two toy balloons." He was unable to focus, but also realized the fans didn't care because they were so busy screaming, hence "comfortably" numb. He said most of The Wall is about alienation between the audience and band.


Exploring further, Mojo asked Waters about the line, "That'll keep you going through the show," referring to getting medicated before going on-stage. He explained: "That comes from a specific show at the Spectrum in Philadelphia (June 29, 1977). I had stomach cramps so bad that I thought I wasn't able to go on. A doctor backstage gave me a shot of something that I swear to God would have killed a f---ing elephant. I did the whole show hardly able to raise my hand above my knee. He said it was a muscular relaxant. But it rendered me almost insensible. It was so bad that at the end of the show, the audience was baying for more. I couldn't do it. They did the encore about me."


 
Dave Gilmour wrote the music while he was working on a solo album in 1978. He brought it to The Wall sessions and Waters wrote lyrics for it.


 
Gilmour believes this song can be divided into two sections: dark and light. The light are the parts that begin "When I was a child...," which Gilmour sings. The dark are the "Hello, is there anybody in there" parts, which are sung by Waters.


 
Waters and Gilmour had an argument over which version of this to use on the album. They ended up editing two takes together as a compromise. Dave Gilmour said in Guitar World February 1993: "Well, there were two recordings of that, which me and Roger argued about. I'd written it when I was doing my first solo album [David Gilmour, 1978]. We changed the key of the song's opening the E to B, I think. The verse stayed exactly the same. Then we had to add a little bit, because Roger wanted to do the line, 'I have become comfortably numb.' Other than that, it was very, very simple to write. But the arguments on it were about how it should be mixed and which track we should use. We'd done one track with Nick Mason an drums that I thought was too rough and sloppy. We had another go at it and I thought that the second take was better. Roger disagreed. It was more an ego thing than anything else. We really went head to head with each other over such a minor thing. I probably couldn't tell the difference if you put both versions on a record today. But, anyway, it wound up with us taking a fill out of one version and putting it into another version."



This was the last song Waters and Gilmour wrote together. In 1986 Waters left the band and felt there should be no Pink Floyd without him.

 
When they played this on The Wall tour, a 35 foot wall was erected between the band and the audience as part of the show. As the wall went up, Gilmour was raised above it on a hydraulic lift to perform the guitar solo. It was his favorite part of the show.


 
In the movie The Wall, this plays in a scene where the main character, a rock star named "Pink," loses his mind and enters a catatonic state before a show. It was similar to what Syd Barrett, an original member of the band, went through in 1968 when he became mentally ill and was kicked out of the band.


 
This song is the final step in Pink's (Roger Water's) transformation into the Neo-Nazi, fascist character you see in the movie The Wall. Medics and the band manager come in and give Pink a shot to pull him out of his catatonic stupor, the manager pays protesting Meds some cash to shut up and let him take Pink to the concert in the state he's in (obviously a threat to his health, but the Meds, who probably don't make enough money, accept). In the movie Pink begins to melt on the way there, and underneath he finds that he is the cruel, fascist model of a Nazi party representative by the time he arrives at the concert. Supporting this, afterwards are the songs "The Show Must Go On" (Pink realizing as he gets to the show that there isn't really any turning back, and he's forced to go on-stage), "In the Flesh II" (the redone version of the first song on the album, now with Nazi-Pink singing, threatening random minorities), and "Run Like Hell" (after the crowd, loving nazi-Pink, has been whipped into a frenzy, now hunting minorities in the street, much like late 1930 Germany). While it does seem that this is a song about the "joy of heroin," it has little, if any connection to heroin even if it's condition resembles that of somebody who's totally wasted.


 
David Gilmour played this on his 2006 solo tour, where he was joined by Pink Floyd keyboard player Rick Wright.


 
Van Morrison played this with Roger Waters at a 1990 concert Waters organized in Berlin to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall. This version was used in the movie The Departed and also appeared in an episode of The Simpsons.


 
Gilmour's second guitar solo on "Comfortably Numb" regularly appears in Best Guitar Solo of All Time polls. In an August 2006 poll by viewers of TV music channel Planet Rock it was voted the greatest guitar solo of all time. For the solo, the Pink Floyd guitarist used a heavy pick on his Fender Strat with maple neck through a Big Muff and delay via a Hiwatt amp and a Yamaha RA-200 rotating speaker cabinet. Gilmour told Guitar World that the solo didn't take long to develop: "I just went out into the studio and banged out 5 or 6 solos. From there I just followed my usual procedure, which is to listen back to each solo and mark out bar lines, saying which bits are good. In other words, I make a chart, putting ticks and crosses on different bars as I count through: two ticks if it's really good, one tick if it's good and cross if it's no go. Then I just follow the chart, whipping one fader up, then another fader, jumping from phrase to phrase and trying to make a really nice solo all the way through. That's the way we did it on 'Comfortably Numb.' It wasn't that difficult. But sometimes you find yourself jumping from one note to another in an impossible way. Then you have to go to another place and find a transition that sounds more natural."