Tek wrote:

Good review AC.

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

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

PatReilly wrote:

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

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

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













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


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


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


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


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



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


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





Bits & Bobs;


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





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Does this mean they have finally become mainstream?

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

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

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

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

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

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




"Wednesday Week"


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


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


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



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


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

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


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

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

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

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

 

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















No fannying around, I love this album.


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



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




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



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


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








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




And the second time time in 1982.









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


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






Bits & Bobs;



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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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





"Food For Thought"



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


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


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


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


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


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


 

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


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


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



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





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







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

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


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









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









 

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












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


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


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




Bits & Bobs;





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


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


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


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


The Teardrop Explodes: how we made Reward

Julian Cope, vocals and bass

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


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


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



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



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



 David Balfe, keyboards

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


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



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




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


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


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


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


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


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


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



 

 

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











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



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


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


This album wont be getting purchased.




Bits & Bobs;




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



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




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




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




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




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




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




And an interview;

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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



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


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


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


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




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

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


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


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


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


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


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


 Enter Mr. Entertainment.


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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













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


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



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





Bits & Bobs;



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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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



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



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



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



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





 A controversial piece from Vogue that I found interesting;



Just How Reckless Is Chrissie Hynde?

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


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


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


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



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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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




"Brass In Pocket"


 
There is a lot of British slang in the lyrics:

"Got Bottle" - Have courage.

"Skank" - Move your body side to side.

"Reet" - Righteous

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




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


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


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


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


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


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


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



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

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


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


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


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



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


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


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

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




"Tatooed Love Boys"



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


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



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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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




"Stop Your Sobbing"

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


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


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


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

 

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












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


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



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





Bits & Bobs;



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




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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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








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PatReilly wrote:

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


 

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

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