MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - More Songs About Buildings And Food by Talking Heads - 1978

And so we come to the concluding album of this current seasons My Most Loved Albums, and we near the end of the 1970's, certainly a seminal era in my musical explorations. Every subsequent musical enthusiasm I have ever had, you will find has its roots in this decade.

Talking Heads are another interesting example of the idiosyncratic US punk band who smoothly morph into post-punk. After the edgy angular psychopathy of their self titled debut, Talking Heads brought in Brian Eno to produce the ''difficult' second album. Second albums become troublesome, because the freshness of their debut is now gone. All their best early songs, which they've performed endlessly and finely honed through live performance are now mostly used up. The compressed time to write fresh material, plus the added pressure to produce another winner, often means a band plays safe and reproduces more of the same. And on many levels this invariably disappoints. Bringing in Brian Eno was an astute move. if anyone was likely to encourage a band to shake itself up, to playfully stretch and subvert its existing paradigms, it would be him. It both was and wasn't going to be, just more songs about buildings and food, as the album title announces with its tongue firmly in its ironic cheek 

More Songs About Buildings And Food, is the album where Talking Heads began to move away from being a punk band who cut their teeth in the New York underground scene, and venture into more experimentally artful territory. Playing with mashing up their frenetic choppy guitar style with funk stylings, and open up further that more plaintive reflective tone to David Byrne's lyricism. Byrne's song writing style tends to start with the recognisably everyday and work outwards towards the universal. No album begins with so much committed attack, than this stirring opening track, a mass assault of guitar rhythm launches Thank You For Sending Me An Angel, which comes charging towards you like this galloping brigade of pounding horses. Into which Byrne enters whelping like a cowboy high on speed.

Eno's role on this album appears to have been to direct already existing temperaments, and where needs be to sprinkle a bit of standard Eno magic over a track. The latter arrives in its most recognisable form on Found A Job, probably my favourite track off the whole album. It starts as a simple hearted typical David Byrne song about a couple in the middle of a domestic argument, both searching for a vocation in life. The song motors along, and then two thirds of the way through Byrne shouts 'hit it', which kicks off an infectiously off beat stepping counterpoint rhythm that instantly elevates this into a wholly new musical level of joyful brilliance. It takes Talking Heads rhythmic drive, and forces it to take a sideways step out into unknown peripheral vision territory. Its utterly fabulous.

The album concludes with The Big Country. Byrne is in an airplane looking down on the quintessentially American landscapes of urban and rural life. He observes other people living simple conventional lifestyles, but finds he wants none of it - 'I wouldn't live there if you paid me, no siree' But nonetheless he still wants to live and belong somewhere, just not there. Encapsulating the ennui of Byrne's tired alienated persona, whilst also being a curious elegy to the very thing he most reviles. Its an emotionally conflicted, yet reflective song. Where we want, but don't want, what modern society has to offer us. The universality of Talking Heads songs are founded on quite plain and simple human yearnings for love and belonging. I've felt many of their songs spoke directly to my own past aspirations and struggles, which imbues them still with an enduring fondness, etched as they are with personal meaning.

So, that concludes this first series of My Most Loved Albums. In the end ten became twelve, and ended up at sixteen albums. These are in no way definitive, but they represent this moment in time and are a reflection of my enduring tastes, both then and now. At some point I may do one on the 1980's, but I need a break from a commitment to completing lists for a while. So when the spirit moves me, then maybe you'll hear some more.

MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - Horses by Patti Smith - 1975

 

In this the penultimate album of the first series of My Most Loved Albums, we find ourself once more circling around and back to 1975. It was at this point in the Mid -1970's when the previous music press murmurings about punk finally landed at our shores. And so we have the intriguingly malformed beast that is Horses, and the arrival of Patti Smith. Not on the musical surface sounding all that trad punk - a very arty eclectic version perhaps. But her insouciance, well its all there in its stylish album cover. This iconic immaculately executed Robert Mapplethorpe photograph, captures the essence and feral spirit of his close friend. The look of indifference in those eyes stares straight at you, the confident swagger of that the jacket slung over her shoulder conveys. This is the quintessential performance poet and musician. She might have rode in on the wave of punk, but she doesn't feel remotely beholden to it, nor to anything really. Much more closely affiliated to Rimbaud than to The Ramones. She introduces a feverish level of artistic expressiveness into rock'n'roll that hasn't quite been matched since, by anyone, even by her.

I remember, on first hearing I was not at all sure I liked this alien species. Where was this woman coming from?  Introduced to punk in the UK by The Damned and The Sex Pistols, the New York CBGB's punk scene was producing these really idiosyncratic counter cultural punk bands, as diverse as Jayne County and Suicide. These weren't quite what anyone here thought of as punk in the UK. But they were defiantly so in attitude, and that made them interesting. I'm noticing as I comb through my music collection, looking for My Most Loved Albums that US Punk bands are still present. But UK punk. not a whisper, because our home spun version of punk was orientated towards independent singles, self promotion, punk magazines. There was an alternative ethos at work, in which albums felt middle aged and so out of fashion. Albums in the UK became closely associated with the corporate record industry, the behemoths of Progressive Rock and the West Coast hokey earnestness of singer songwriters. US punk bands seemed instinctively to be Post-Punk, years before anyone here understood what that might mean. Because punk, though it moved fast, became tired and ran out of road very quickly.

And here we have Patti Smith singing, well, more screaming, whelping and drawling, her half sung half spoken surreal hallucinatory poetry. Wildly expressive outbursts triggered, as though in the midst of a psychotic episode. 

'The boy looked at Johnny, Johnny wanted to run,

but the movie kept moving as planned
The boy took Johnny, he pushed him against the locker,
He drove it in, he drove it home, he drove it deep in Johnny
The boy disappeared, Johnny fell on his knees,
started crashing his head against the locker,
started crashing his head against the locker,
started laughing hysterically

When suddenly Johnny gets the feeling he's being surrounded by
horses, horses, horses, horses
coming in in all directions
white shining silver studs with their nose in flames.'*

So, yeah, that felt challenging. Patti Smith sounds so permanently wired throughout the entire proceedings, really worked up and pumped. These days when I listen to albums from this early punk period, I hear lots of potential, that generally is never subsequently fully explored. Rebellious creatively tends to have a very short fuse, before it inevitably enters the dominant mainstream. This is what punk did, quickly become a convention, and disappear up its own anally retentive clenched buttocks. And then, when I listen to Horses, I think, more music as as radical and as experimentally out there as this, that would have been really good.  Ah, the persistence of dreaming of what punk might have been.

Fifty years later Horses has attained and is now firmly grounded in its seminal, much lauded, status. In the same way The Velvet Underground and The Stooges had become godfathers of punk from earlier eras. You have to hand it to Patti Smith, she did single handedly make performance poetry legit, and launched a whole host of other performers as a result. Her subsequent artistic career is more than admirable, so today she is revered as this no nonsense rebellious feminist icon. Nothing, however, has quite equalled the derisory drawl of Gloria's much quoted, opening coda, being transgressively thrown in your face -' Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine.'*

*Lyrics by Patti Smith taken from the album Horses, released by Arista Records November 10th 1975.

MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - Live At Dublin National Stadium - Alan Stivell - 1975

 

A feature of the early seventies was folk music suddenly becoming cutting edge, shifting heavily into folk-rock-fusion territory and cross fertilising a few tropes. This was a delayed repercussion, of Bob Dylan going electric ten years previously. A European pioneer of this fusion was Alan Stivell. Who had almost single handedly salvaged Breton folk music and introduced us to the romanticism of the Celtic Harp and the Breton Pipes. And having done all that hurled them both into the centre of progressive rock music. He moved from folk purist to folk rock star, then later on, to world and new age music. You get the feeling Alan Stivell is one of life's explorers, a musical enthusiast and boundary crosser, always able to respond positively to the possibilities of fresh musical terrain. 

This live album, in folk rock circles has become something of a revered classic. It captures the feeling, the stirring spiritual power of what, in his prime, Stivell could achieve. Because he is also in possession of a lyrically beautiful voice, with solid wide range and a unique sensitivity. Give him an old Breton folk song and he'll bewitch you with its simple uncut beauty. This is 1975, so Stivell has long dark hair and a beard, in his early thirties, and is a handsome man. You can hear as he performs an almost messianic magnetism, a magical charm that entrances through the music.

Many decades later, I cannot recall quite how I first came across this album. His was certainly a name frequently mentioned in the music papers of the time. Most likely my buying of this album was the result of one of my 'take a gamble' trips.  A strategy I increasingly used during the seventies and eighties. I'd go down to the local record store or HMV and collect a handful of records, tapes, or later CD's I'd never heard of before, but caught my interest, and buy them just on the off chance they might be good. I discovered all sorts of brilliant stuff this way. 

These days you can just cruise Spotify or You Tube if you want to know what a group or singer sounds like, and don't have to commit to purchasing at all. The algorithm guides you towards stuff it thinks you might like. But there was something a bit more random and likely to challenge your personal tastes about what I used to do. Yes, it was wasteful on finances and resources, because not everything I bought as 'a gamble' I found interesting. Other things I slowly grew to love. Those duff purchases, when I lived in London, went straight down to the record and tape exchange in Camden.  

Live in Dublin, still packs a punch today, and doesn't feel that dated either. Over the years I've re-purchased it in different playing formats, which I guess is as good an indication as any, just how much I still love and value it.

MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - Blue by Joni Mitchell - 1971

 

Though released in 1971 I arrived late to the Joni Mitchell party, fifty years late in fact. Tail end of the sixties singer songwriters, well these were just not my bag in the seventies. It was all progressive or glam rock, or punk, post punk, or whatever music trend I was briefly affiliating myself with at the time. I would say the guiding star of Joni Mitchell's career, is that she rarely fully embodies the ethos or zeitgeist of any time or era. She wrote the song that encapsulated the spirit of Woodstock, a festival she was never to perform at.  Always doing entirely her own thing, continuing to write these idiosyncratic personal songs that stretched the envelope of how and what she could express or encompass. Pushing herself forward, when even her fans wanted her to stay put exactly where she'd just been, for a little while longer.

Always the first in many aspects, the first of her generation to coruscatingly bare her soul through her songwriting. The first woman of her generation to resolutely forge her own career path in music, beholden to no one. And then there is the purity and ever expanding reach of what that remarkable voice could express. As free as a bird, going wherever it felt was right, in whatever manner that was right. Her work continues to sound totally unique as a consequence. In terms of longer term cross generational impact there are few from her era to match or keep up with her. You underestimate the importance, life force and reach of Joni Mitchell's recorded work at your peril. 

Her first few albums were for whatever reason, the production or Joni still finding her feet as an artist, appeared to waver in their level of confidence and assuredness.  On Blue, finally everything comes together to create one perfectly heart rending album.  And boom she was right there, and never appears to lose total grasp of it. Listening to Blue, I'm amazed people were so taken aback and annoyed by Joni exploring Jazz quite so thoroughly later in her career. The inflections and scat are all in essence there on Blue, in the way she vocally skips and scampers across her lyrical landscapes.

Now I guess everyone who listens to Blue will be struck by different tracks for often quite disparate reasons. But I would be completely in love with any album, if it contained one love song as good as A Case of You.  'I can drink a case of you, and still be on my feet' she sings. Expressing both her intoxication with the lost love object, whilst also stating she's still upright and capable of being fully herself. She is not subsumed into submissiveness or contrition by her continuing desire for this persons love. Its complicated, and I guess that is why this still rings so true.

MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - Clear Spot by Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band - 1972

  

I picked up Clear Spot in a cassette sale. Back in the seventies when a local independent record store was a common thing. I'd heard Captain Beefheart on John Peel, in the Trout Mask Replica era, and that was definitely a taste challenging to acquire. Clear Spot doesn't particularly turn down the wackiness, more redirects it, by changing the musical sources it draws upon. For this is one hell of a strident amalgam of a Rhythm & Blues - Bluegrass mash up with Captain Beefheart's uniquely surreal imagination. On the albums title track Clear Spot it works hard at straddling the border between experimental and mainstream. This album probably marks the high point of Beefheart's most accessible period of music making.

Captain Beefheart shares a similar musical ethos to Frank Zappa, with whom he once worked. Part Dadaist absurdity, counter cultural drug influenced fantasy and in Beefheart's case one hell of a howling wolf of a raucous blues voice. Rough edged, wailing and plunging the depths, it grabs your attention through its over committed delivery. And on Clear Spot he develops a tenderness and soulful intonation, on tracks like Too Much Time, with its Stax horn section, or on Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles and My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains where both have this fondness for and an unabashed sense of love.  

But by and large Clear Spot is most remarkable for the power of its blues inflected shuffling stompers. Such as Circumstances and Long Necked Bottles, or the immortally title of Nowadays A Woman's Gotta Hit A Man, which concludes with 'to make him know she's there.' A lot of the time there is a pumped up male braggadocio going on here too. 'Some of my woman have tears in their eyes when you ask them about me I swear.' which, because it will often be accompanied by some absurdist wit, it makes  questionable if this is meant to be taken completely at bare faced value.

Beefheart is at his characteristically most unhinged and preacherly on Sun Zoom Spark, and is a wack job out of his head on smack on  Low Yo Yo Stuff - Golden Birdies - Big Eyed Beans From Venus. But these are so full of brilliantly evocative imaginative associations and word puzzles they are enjoyable bits of linguistic playfulness. There are the moments here where childish glee is injected into the rich mix of this album. Its what makes this so utterly loveable. 

 

MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - Indiscreet by Sparks - 1975

Already a few years into their English renaissance, Indiscreet was Sparks third album in as many years.Still riding high on their first gallop of fame, they took this interestingly oblique left turn. A turn which presages pretty much everything they do subsequently. A form of creative pursuit of new musical terrain, that has become the guiding myth to their entire subsequent career. Indiscreet is the logistical first fully fledged blueprint for it. In which a wide and eclectic variety of styles and approaches to music making, will all exist within the one album. It was the first occasion when Sparks would draw near to self-sabotaging their fame, just by being too damned inventive and original for the conventions of the music business. That simply wanted them to produce more product, exactly like the last one, thank you.

One of the themes explored on this album is reflected in its title - Indiscreet. There is often a flavour of ideas, experiences and subjects being talked about here, that really are not normally aired via a pop song.  In Hospitality On Parade, its that serving other people you don't know, is a very public pretense, with a facade of hospitality that conceals a whole buried cache of resentments and vengeance. 

In, Without Using Hands, we have a song about the vacuous nature of international tourism that has a tragic denouement of a fatal explosion in the Ritz Hotel where 'the manager is going to live his entire life, without using hands'. Yeah, that one gets very dark, very suddenly. 

Under The Table With Her, is a song written like its a quartet chamber piece, about two children under a table at a posh banquet pretending to be dogs in order to be given scraps of food.

But other songs slowly build up to being edgy, like one of my top favorite Ron Mael songs - Tits. Two pals are sitting in a bar drinking. One guy is talking about how he cannot be intimate with his wife, since the birth of his child, because 'Tits are only there so they'll help our little Joe so that he'll grow. But as the song progresses, the two guys get ever more drunk, and the married guy starts to become paranoid about his wife's phone calls, and her fidelity, perhaps someone else is having an affair with her. Until in the next verse he accuses his bar friend of being the adulterous lover. The lyrics are conversational, and jump around subject matters and focus, as real conversations tend to do. Its a masterful piece of songwriting.

It Ain't 1918, is about a couple who refuse to embrace modern technology, and the social pressures on them to conform. 

The Lady Is Lingering, is a lovely song about a man who can't believe why a woman is hanging about near him. Is she or is she not interested in him? It captures the male perspective on whether he's reading or misreading the signals correctly. Whilst for the woman she's increasingly aware that 'its a risky business all this waiting and wandering'. Add in the hit songs Looks Looks Looks and Get In The Swing, and you have a hugely diverse range and styles of song here. Indiscreet is simply jam packed with musical and lyrical inventiveness and wit.  Its an entertaining and somewhat timeless album, that's still utterly fabulous. 

MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - The Man Who Sold The World by David Bowie - 1970

When it comes to David Bowie there really ought to be more than one much loved album. I've selected The Man Who Sold The World because I have always had a particular fondness for how contrary and odd it is. It was way out of step with the singer songwriter vibe he'd been doing prior to it. It has a grungy hard rock and doom ridden feel, with its dystopian, ever prevalent madness theme. At the time folk wondered what the hell was he doing. His record label must have been tearing their hair out.

It is clear, in retrospect, that The Man Who Spld The World builds on a thematic vein that Bowie starts with Space Oddity and takes all the way through his career, of the alienated, and often alien, outsider, disconnected from ordinary human life. The original cover photo was the infamous one of Bowie wearing a dress, that looks like it was run up from a pair of his Grandma's old curtains. I mean a man wearing a dress - gender fluidity in 1970? Way ahead of its time, certainly. The whole thing felt, at the time of release, like career suicide.

The Man Who Sold The World, released two years before Ziggy Stardust, is undoubtedly its precursor. It has a central saviour figure, with a sci-fi story arc running through it. These sorts of dystopian worlds kept reappearing throughout Bowie's career right up to Blackstar 2016 his last album before he died. This played most significantly on the mournful 'end of times' echoes that it shared with The Man Who Sold The World. I wasn't really aware of The Man Who Sold The World until after Ziggy Stardust's huge success. Re-released, with a black and white photo of Bowie in a sparkly Ziggy costume.The original album cover, nor this Ziggy inflected replacement, really reflected the darkly somber nature of its regret filled melancholy - the authoritarian implosion of a messiah like figure. 

Bowie, and Marc Bolan to a degree, brought sexual ambiguity to the fore in the short lived feverish sugar rush that was seventies Glam Rock. And the opening obliqueness of Width of a Circle, that begins the album, contains the classic sexually subversive Bowie lyric - 

He swallowed his pride and puckered his lips And showed me the leather belt round his hips. My knees were shaking my cheeks aflame. He said "You'll never go down to the Gods again"  

If you were a teenager just discovering what his sexual orientation was, living in the cultural backwoods of the Isle of Axholme, this was a beacon, brazen and alluring. I doubt I fully understood at the time exactly what he was referring to, though I undoubtedly sensed its transgressive intent. He gave a whole misfit generation a voice, a vehicle for their individuality to express itself through, and a dress sense to go with it. He gave me hope and the confidence to move towards living my life fully, as who I really was. 

Of the numerous Bowie songs I love, Man Who Sold The World is one from the very top shelf, its just so immaculately written. The opening thrill of it is beguiling, from the moment that melancholic cyclical riff from Mick Ronson's guitar strikes up. And when it reaches the chorus there is that jagged staggered ascending riff that runs counterpoint to -

' Oh no, not me, I never lost control. You're face to face  with the man who sold the world'  

I've always found the structure and production of this song, perfectly executed, yet so completely and delightfully off kilter simultaneously. I mean, what was he actually on about here? Whatever you do, do not listen to the Lulu version of this. Though produced by Bowie, it is a bizarre choice of singer, singing a quite inappropriate choice of song for her

At the time, this album had a strong influence upon my sense of aesthetic and my writing adopted some  of its themes. Bowie never wrote more explicitly about madness and mental instability than here. The crazy little voices whispering 'Can I keep him' in the background of All The Madmen. In the song  After All it appears like its a lament for the consequences of late sixties hippy idealism, but it also paints a picture of a people who lost to a world of drugs and vacant stares.

'I sing with impertinence Shading impermanent chords with my words I've borrowed your time and I'm sorry I called. But the thought just occurred That we're nobody's children. At all, after all'

Looking back through my teenage poems, always an embarrassing thing to do, you'll find lots of tortured and tortuous verses about losing ones sanity. Something I actually had no lived experience of, but its amazing what teenage angst can be mistaken for.  And that, was all Bowie's fault.
. 

MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - This Heat by This Heat - 1979

 

This Heat, now where on earth do you start explaining them? Pretty much unknown by the wider public, then and now. Too idiosyncratic in their output to leave an inspirational legacy for future bands. You could say, in terms of marking out the basic musical territory - they make experimental, semi-improvised pieces of music. But that tells you very little about its quality, nor what effect it has upon you. Even I Tunes defines this album as Unclassifiable, which seems very apt. 

The album briefly opens with forty seven seconds of the bleeping tumble of Test Card 1, that slips seamlessly into the chaotic guitar rattles and aggressive banging of a flat toned drum rhythm on Horizontal Hold. This has it interludes of gentler introspection, almost pausing for thought, before exploding back into a dramatic widening out of its vistas via a raspy jangling guitar and the moaning undulations of a synth. Its as though you've been travelling underground in a sulphurous dimly lit subway and suddenly you emerge into the glaring light of day, and are swept out onto a manic freeway. It's quite a hair raising out of control musical motorway drive that this track is taking you on.

Having made the jump from Progressive Rock to Punk, by the latter years of the seventies, I was now willing to steer myself towards any music that seemed like an invitation to enter adventurous territory. Seeking out bands aiming for new unheard of places. This shift in my musical horizons and aesthetic expectations, was encouraged by being at Art College in Leeds when punk initially erupted onto the scene. My musical tastes were hence highly unlikely to become frozen in 1972 and never thaw out. In fact it was quite the opposite, I was constantly moving on to my next musical embrace, with a passionate enthusiasm.

I began seeking out the contrary, the strange and the resolutely AWOL. My musical tastes increasingly eclectic and broad ranging. For which I now feel truly grateful, because via this experience I enriched and broadened my world view beyond parochial or tradition bound ones. I saw music as liberating, and hence the world as being altogether a freer and happier place, when not held within rigidly held traditions or fixed xenophobic borders. I think this desire for a wilder exploratory music, free of perceived boundaries, somewhat mirrored my internal world. Where I was having a parallel exploration of awareness and acceptance of my own sexual orientation. A feeling of wanting to reciprocally liberate myself too from my many inhibitions. Though I was not yet ready to be fully publicly open about any of that.

I started encountering reviews of This Heat's live performances in the music press. I never saw them live, but they were represented as intense one off events, highly improvised, yet also very controlled sound-scaping, that unexpectedly could dramatically metamorphose into totally different astonishing vistas. Their approach to live performance appears similar to the early live work of Cluster, with its mixture of prerecorded and freely improvised electronic and traditional instrumentation. They were also within barely a few years of the peak quirky anarchic musical world of Faust. The avant guarde influence of German groups from the early seventies does seem present in This Heat. So they do have some antecedents, their idiosyncratic music did not come completely out of nowhere. 

Where I actually heard them first was in a session for John Peel's radio show. I was instantly taken by their atmospheric provocations. It's a music that can unexpectedly capture you, be edge of the seat stuff, vocals sometimes weirdly muffled, phased to a whisper, or in high falsetto, to ominous background groans. Crashing hissing synth sounds, clanging guitars, out of which a clicking rhythm emerges and a doomy drum beat. hearing one music sections metamorphosis into the next. This can make the whole experience of the album feel like this is one long piece of abstract sound collage. This approach is utilised only on this debut album, abandoned on subsequent ones. To my ears, whilst remaining adventurous, This Heat's subsequent work was never quite as captivating or as exhilarating an experience as this debut album is. 

The best example of this musical collage technique means pieces entitled Music Like Escaping Gas morph into Rainforest that then slips into The Fall of Saigon. I tried, and failed to find this musical progression on You Tube, so you'll just have to seamlessly re-form it in your imaginations. 

The actual Fall of Saigon happened four years previous to this albums release. 1979 was the year Apocalypse Now was in the cinemas. The apparent coincidence of this to the albums release, tells you all you need to know about the zeitgeist of this era, where a doomed dour fatalism hung over the world. One This Heat may subliminally be attempting to convey. The apocalyptic descent of one small countries civilisation into political anarchy. And the failure of a assertively minded US, Post War to effectively carry out the role of guardian and purveyor of Western Democracy, a pose it had self-adopted. Similar to Kurtz,in Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness, the US travelled up a very murky moral river and go quietly mad in the dank and fever infested depths of a Vietnamese tropical jungle. This Heat on The Fall of Saigon captures the decadent decay and malignant hubris of when a righteously minded political conflict turns out terribly wrong. 

MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - Machine Head by Deep Purple -1972

 

If you'd asked my teenage self in 1972 what music I was into I'd have responded without hesitation Hawkwind and Deep Purple. The early seventies, was now very very post the Utopian whimsical excesses of the late sixties hippy. The seventies, almost from the start announced itself as a different more dour era, with oil crises, debilitating strikes, wars were going very badly wrong, the world economy tanking, and with it any progressive idealism was quickly withering away.  

What became referred to as Progressive Rock' emerged from a distinct lineage of sixties bands such as the seminal Yardbirds, then The Who, Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience. It was hard rock, and hard rock was for hard men. Though a hard young man was very far from what I actually felt myself to be, at the time. My deep love for Deep Purple was a denim moment, of dressing up as a 'real man'. It was all a quite innocent and naive view of what true masculinity was. And though this might seem like a far cry from teenagers today, going to the gym, idolising Andrew Tate and having far right sympathies. I suspect these slightly more concerning tendencies, will have a similar exploratory motivation behind them, of trying out a particular image and way of being masculine for size. Its quite a narrow definition and a reductive one, but you don't know that when you are fourteen. The dawn of my later struggles to break free of that tightly drawn convention of masculinity, was only in its infancy.

Deep Purple, like their contemporaries Led Zeppelin, bore all the musical style, flourishes and visual appearance of what would later come to define a new musical genre - Heavy Metal. Long hair, bare chested singer ( hairy was optional), and one demon of an axe player. But it had not yet become the formulaic pose of manhood rampant in leathers, aggressively screaming at you through mega amplification, we now know, somewhat deride and lampoon. At this time, it still bore some of the leftover gentler trappings of 'The Age of Aquarius' that preceded it.

If you listen to what they are actually doing, Deep Purple are emerging from a strongly blues orientated corner. Just take a listen to Lazy from Machine Head. With the added flourish of keyboard interludes with their pseudo classical finesse, Progressive Rock bands of this era, sure they needed a forceful singer, a brilliant guitar player, but they also required a flamboyant keyboard player with some seriously flashy technical skill. This was a moment when the keyboard player was briefly considered sexy. ELP had Keth Emerson, Yes had Rick Wakeman, and Deep Purple had Jon Lord. 

As a matter of course Deep Purple  always made the opening track of an album a real rockin belter. Usually some sort of ode to fast livin -drivin- rockin lifestyle, type a thing. It was the track Fireball on the album Fireball, Speed King on the album In Rock. On Machine Head, Highway Star takes this up a further knotch of intensity as it motors on and on with unrelenting vigour for near on seven minutes. The classic formula for such a Deep Purple song, would always open with a strong vocal wail from Ian Gillan, a verse, a chorus, repeat, then each band member would have a segment for their own moment in the spotlight. Highway Star peaks, as they often did, with a truly blistering guitar solo by Ritchie Blackmore. This one still blows your socks off with its speed and technical finesse. Finishing on a lengthy crescendo of rapid fire arpeggios sliding upward then downwards, to a verse, chorus, repeat, the end. I think I would treasure Machine Head purely on the basis of this one track alone. It is so quintessentially them.

Blackmore at his best is the band's central and key expressive force. Even if he's a grumpy conceited sod the rest of the time. He was often the reason why the band split or members left. I have lost count quite how many iterations of Deep Purple Plc they are currently on. However, despite all that, Blakmore's guitar riffs are what Deep Purple Mark 2's entire sound and reputation is constructed around. The recording of Machine Head has indeed become legendary, mainly because they recount that legend in song form. The classic Purple track - Smoke on the Water. The band recorded the album in a sweet of rooms in a hotel. Once holding off the police, who'd come to tell them to stop making that row late into the night, long enough to complete a drum track that was coming together well. 

And there is a cohesive quality to Machine Head, that they were rarely to achieve subsequently ( their album Burn maybe another example). For me, its the undoubted pinnacle of their early career. The strange and straightened circumstances of its making being far from insignificant. Though many albums of that Progressive Rock era came to define it and hence have dated badly. Consigned to that most significant limitation of being considered nostalgic. Deep Purple's Machine Head manages to still transcend its period, because its musically grounded, and always punched above its weight. No overbearing conceptual structures or poncy pretensions, its just straight forward uncomplicated hard rock music. 

Deep Purple accompanied and became the soundtrack of my early pre-pubescent years. Everyone in my street knew I adored the band, because I'd open my bedroom window wide and broadcast it to them and to the world. Because they bloody well needed to know about it.

MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - Rock 'n' Roll With The Modern Lovers by Jonathan Richman - 1977

 On reflection someone like Jonathan Richman should not exist. But that he does, is a curious triumph of the will for the odd man out in humanity, for the lone outsider. He is gauche, full of sentimental whimsy, a love for the deliberately badly rhymed lyric, and a coy but mischievous sense of humour. But despite all of that, he is deadly serious about stripping rock 'n' roll back to its most basic original elements. The latter being the main reason for his ascendancy in the aftermath of punk.  

He is quite largely forgotten now. If you hear Egyptian Reggae you'll probably realise you've  heard this as a kid, but not know who it was by. Yet in his heyday a Jonathan Richman live performance could be the most uplifting joyful life enhancing thing you could ever imagine attending. He was fun, playfully childish, with a lot of tongue in cheek faux naivety, and was an innocent pleasure to spend a couple of hours with. More quite often, for at a Jonathan Richman concert the number of encore's became legendary. You fall in love with him, this unique individual, and simply surrender for a while into his quirky uncomplicated arms. 

Rock 'n' Roll With The Modern Lovers, from 1977, on first hearing, sounds as though it were recorded in someone's badly soundproofed garage, and eschews the use of any amplified instruments. All the four albums he recorded for Beserkley Records at this time are great in there own way, but this one, for me, captures the spirit and ethos of Richman's approach to music making to near perfection. Sometimes it reminds me of the youthful brio of early Beach Boys songs, if you take way the endless extolling of surfing or girls.. 

The subject matter of Richman's songs, are quite ordinary, everyday and often overlooked ones. So he writes these modern love songs to an urbanised world, about the lonely financial zone, the government center, the bank teller. On Rock'n'Roll With The Modern Lovers he lauds the Ice Cream Man, The Roller Coaster, sings about leprechauns coming back to rock'n'roll, watching an old car decay in the street, or the qualities of a late afternoon. And, yeah, on first listen, you know I get it, it does sound twee or infantile. But in the hands of a nasal off key Bostonian, if you can stay open to it, some how it can utterly charm the socks off you. Replaying this album is like spending an evening with an really old friend whose company you really value, because they reconnect you with a less cynical, more innocent open hearted awareness for just being alive.

MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - In Search of Space by Hawkwind - 1971

By the time this album was released in 1971 I was already an avid Science Fiction fan. I'd begun reading the classic post war authors Asimov, Clarke, Delaney. I'd also read loads of Micheal Moorcock, an enthusiast for his fantasy novels like Stormbringer and the Eternal Champion series. I don't think Moorcock's involvement in the band drew me towards Hawkwind. There was a sort of happy synchronicity along the way. This became inevitable when Silver Machine became a huge hit in 1972. I officially joined the ranks of becoming a Hawkwind fan, and had an embroidered Hawkwind badge sewn onto my jean bomber jacket.

Hawkwind had been going since 1969 and had built up a substantial following on the hippy festival circuit. They literally performed anywhere to anyone who would have them. Initially a ramshackle and invariably spontaneous gathering of scruffy haired individuals, who would improvise together. They gradually turned into a regular tighter band, with its own specific vision for itself. Dave Brock and Nick Turner were the central driving force in that, even though they clashed and fell out an awful lot. Ever the hippy's, whether they should cash in on Silver Machine's success, became just one of many divisive issues, besides petty jealousies. 

In Search of Space was recorded by the quintessential lineup that included Lemmy, the poet Robert Calvert and dancer Stacia. It was to be followed later, fueled on music business optimism alone, by a two disc live album Space Ritual, where ideas that had only seemed a provisional sketch on In Search of Space, through misguided ambition became seriously over-puffed profundity. In the end their was a substantial rift in the band, members left, including Lemmy. but the band reformed itself. As it has continued to do so, reformulating itself countless times over the decades. almost as if Hawkwind as an entity can never be allowed to die.

The relative containment of its vision on In Search of Space makes it cohesively hold together better. Though it still has moments where it veers into 'clumsily handled profundity'. Its their reputation for being shambolic and rift prone, that leads to them being generally underestimated as musical innovators in their heyday, and since. They could fit quite neatly into the sort of improvised stream of consciousness collective jams of the late hippy era. But at that time what they were attempting felt distinctly new, they were powering up an endlessly pounding warp drive. 

In Germany, avant guard wave of bands, such as Neu, were developing the constant 'motorik' beat that was to almost become standard across the emerging genre. Amongst these pioneering experimental German bands was Amon Duul 2, who are perhaps Hawkwind's nearest musical continental cousin. Emerging out of an 'anyone who turns up can play' collective, with a similar penchant for long running trips of spacey improvisations. Its no big stretch of the imagination to see that what Hawkwind were doing here in the UK was not dissimilar. For sure they lacked the controlled purity of some of them. Being British, Hawkwind evolved, in the same way you untangle a muddle of yarn -in a chaotic frustrated manner. Nevertheless they honed their signature playing style into this formidable engine of endlessly forward moving propulsion. Albeit with spacey screeches, bleeps and vast ascending notes to the stars, exploding and echoing all around it.

To a young naive science fiction buff, into progressive rock, Hawkwind were a beautifully wrapped gift to my nascent imagination. Over puffed profundity is to a teenage boys ears high minded ideology. I listen to this music now with older, perhaps differently attuned ears. And what I hear today is a band experimenting with how making slight adjustments in emphasis changed the whole tone and effect, whilst the constantly pounding drums, the thrash 'n crash of groaning guitar riffs, went on and on, as though on eternal over drive. Phasing in chanting and moaning background voices, flutes and saxophones woven in then out of its musical fabric. The opening track of the album, You Shouldn't Do That, at fifteen minutes plus long, is an excellent demonstration of this technique. 

Hawkwind are often considered a bit of a one trick pony, in that once discovered and mastered, this propulsive rhythm is all they ever seemed to do. Their execution of it was undoubtedly well polished. Give them the time and space, they could fluidly take you anywhere in the cosmos on the back of their musical constellation. One long raw driving grunge infused riff at a time. I love it still, every clunky imperfection and poorly conceived ideas 'n' all.

MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - Mott by Mott The Hoople - 1973

 

Throughout his career David Bowie was extraordinarily generous towards musicians who fell on hard times. Mott The Hoople, were a band popular with the music press, who just could not break through into mainstream success. Bowie heard they were thinking of packing it in. At the height of 'Ziggy mania' he stepped in and offered to give them one of his songs and to produce them. The song he gave them was All The Young Dudes, one of Bowie's best songs from this or any period. Because of the Bowie connection, and because it was a classic song, it was a hit, peaking at No 3. Bowie wanted to give them another song as a follow up Drive In Saturday. Mott The Hoople turned it down, because they wanted to write a hit of their own. In 1973 they released Honnaloochie Boogie from this album Mott, which peaked at No 12, which was the beginning of a short run of punchy hits climaxing with Roll Away The Stone.

Ian Hunter has a distinctive vocal delivery, a unique mix of Dylan's muscular inflections, with a louche campy, even occasionally fey insouciance. Plus he has some powerful pipes behind it.  Fully utilising that voice, makes his lyrics all the more telling. What distinguishes Mott, and makes it such a great album is that it has ambition and a hard earned confidence and swagger. Touched briefly by the genius hand of Bowie, Mott The Hoople soared to an altogether higher level. The quality of Ian Hunter's songwriting on Mott is brilliantly evocative. Conveying the human costs of being a working band touring the concert circuit. I don't think anyone else has quite captured that so vividly in song.

The album opener - All The Way From Memphis lays out the territory the album is going to explore. That Hunter had picked up the baton of rock'n'roll, and run with it all the way from its source in Elvis and Memphis.

Forgot my six-string razor hit the sky
Half way to Memphis 'fore I realized
Well I rang the information my axe was cold
They said she rides the train to oreoles

Now it's a mighty long way down the dusty trail
And the sun burns hot on the cold steel rails
'n I look like a bum 'n I crawl like a snail
All the way from Memphis

And a later verse gives you the sense of the journey the band has been on to get this far. and how easily all this fame could vanish.

Yeah it's a mighty long way down rock 'n' roll
From the Liverpool docks to the Hollywood bowl
'n you climb up the mountains 'n you fall down the holes
All the way from Memphis

On The Ballad of Mott The Hoople , Hunter produces a melancholic song of lyrical regret for what they've gained and lost from all the fruitless years spent chasing the tail of rock 'n' roll success. Here they are, having reached the height of their fame and he's reflecting on the travails they endured in order to get here, and writing a song like this.

I changed my name in search of fame
To find the midas touch
Oh I wish I'd never wanted then
What I want now twice as much
We crossed the mighty oceans
And we had a few divides
But we never crossed emotion
For we felt too much inside

You know all the tales we tell
You know the band so well
Still I feel, somehow, we let you down
We went off somewhere on the way
And now I see we have to pay
The rock'n'roll circus is in town

Buffin lost his child-like dreams
And Mick lost his guitar
And Verden grew a line or two
And Overend's just a rock'n'roll star
Behind these shades the visions fade
As I learn a thing or two
Oh but if I had my time again
You all know just what I'd do

Rock'n'roll's a loser's game
It mesmerizes and I can't explain
The reasons for the sights and for the sounds
We went off somewhere on the way
And now I see we have to pay
The rock'n'roll circus is in town

So rock'n'roll's a loser's game
It mesmerizes and I can't explain
The reasons for the sights and for the sounds
The greasepaint still sticks to my face
So what the hell, I can't erase
The rock'n'roll feeling from my mind.

The final song on the album I Wish I was Your Mother, is a heartfelt song on the costs to family life, a love life, and to a sense of belonging to anywhere that's long lasting and meaningful.

I scream at you for sharing
And I curse you just for caring
I hate the clothes you're wearing, they're so pretty
And I tell you not to see me
And I tell you not to feel me
And I make your life a drag, it's such a pity
And I watch your warm glow palin'
And I watch your sparkle fadin'
As you realise you're failin', 'cause you're so good

No, I don't mean to upset you
But there's so much crime to get through
If only I could make it easier then I would

Oh, I wish I was your mother
I wish I'd been your father
And then I would have seen you
Would have been you as a child
Played houses with your sisters
And wrestled with all your brothers
And then who knows
I might have felt a family for a while

It's no use me pretendin'
You give and I do the spendin'
Is there a happy ending? I don't think so
'Cause even if we make it
I'll be too far out to take it
You'll have to try and shake it from my head

Oh, I wish I was your mother
I wish I'd been your father
And then I would have seen you
Would have been you as a child
Played houses with your sisters
And wrestled with all your brothers
And then who knows
I might have felt a family for a while.

I'm quoting song lyrics at length because these really are finely wrought examples of the popular song genre, poetic reflections, putting fame on one side, of the unseen debits of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle. And they perfectly demonstrate why Bowie chose to do what he did, because Ian Hunter on Mott proved he was a songwriter of quite outstanding ability. Its why Mott has become one of My Most Loved Albums, because its  lyrics emotionally gets to me every time.

MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - 2nd Honeymoon by Deaf School - 1976

 

August 1976, and 2nd Honeymoon, Deaf School's debut album is released. The music press was impressed and hailed them as the next big thing. The album was launched and a tour was lined up. Deaf School were six musicians and three lead singers, so they were quite a large band to take on tour. But live was where to see them at their best, so we were told. I did just that when they turned up near me, and indeed they were one of the best live performances by a band I've seen. Holly Johnson credits them with the single handed revival of the Liverpool music scene, and what an effect that had upon the bands, like Frankie Goes To Hollywood, who came next. 

Each band member played a character with their own 'nom de plume'. As though they were performing in a long running play - Enrico Cadillac Jnr, Betty Bright, The Rev Max Ripple, Cliff Hanger. This all adds to a playful evocation of period on 2nd Honeymoon. Composed as a suite of cabaret style pop songs, it conjured a feeling for 1930's Hollywood, as performed in your local village hall. 2nd Honeymoon was a homage to those classic musicals, with its deftly written storytelling songs that captured a distinct mood through their lyrical dialogues. Across its twelve songs you'd get an episodic glimpse into the lives of a couple who take a weekend away to hopefully rekindle their fading love for each other. As Enrico Cadillac sings on the track 2nd Honeymoon - '

'But isn't this a scene from some old movie, a pretty but a useless escapade, and sometimes its alright, and its alright sometimes, but when its not you know, it will be won't it though?'

Which gives you a sense for how the use of dialogue, internal and between characters is one essential element in the Deaf School songwriting magic. Having three lead singers did gift them a dynamic dramatic quality through this type of exchange within songs, and even more so live.

Deaf School were all former Liverpool Art School students and staff, so the attention to visual and presentation detail you'd sort of expect. Deaf School's misfortune was that within six months of their debut album being released, punk exploded onto the UK music scene and what they were trying to do became instantly viewed as boring and old hat. They fought on through two more albums then packed it in. Band member Clive Langer went on to produce Madness and Dexy's Midnight Runners, and knowing that, you can see how the idea of a band visually embodying character and an ethos filters through from Deaf School. And there are times on 2nd Honeymoon when musical arrangements find their echoes in those future bands. Deaf School still occasionally reform to record or do a short tour or a one off anniversary show.

The band itself being so overlooked was a real loss, because 2nd Honeymoon is a fabulous debut album. Well written songs, superb musical arrangements, good production, with an eccentric mix of styles and often playfulness, that can suddenly break out into a Grieg reference played brashly on a saxophone. Every time I revisit this after a year or so away, it surprises me again how fresh and original, how lively and full of pzazz it still is. What a delight it remains from the start with What A Way To End It All through to its melancholic finishing song - Final Act..

MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - Movies by Holger Czukay - 1979

 

Holgar Czukay was a co-founding member of the much revered German avante guarde pop band Can. Movies, released in 1979, was his debut as a solo artist. This had been very much a pet project of his, spending hours and hours getting the mix of its complicated elements right. He'd become an enthusiast for the possibilities of electronic sampling, looping recorded sounds, cut and pasting found sources, dialogue from radio or TV and blending them into one cohesive musical piece. Most of this he did manually on tape, this was decades. before modern day digital recording made this sort of thing easy peasy. 

This approach to music making was totally cutting edge at the time, disparate musicians from New York hip hop artists to Cabaret Voltaire in the UK, were starting to splice found voices and cut up loops of riffs into the construction of their music. Czukay however took sampling to another compositional level, one that was intrinsic to how the music was made rather than as a unique ornamental, but essentially surface flourish. 

What strikes you with Movies from the start is how sophisticated and slick this all is sounds. Czukay was an accomplished musician, he played bass guitar in Can for ten years. Throughout Movies Czukay's immaculately light guitar playing rings through like a beautifully chiming bell. One of the general characteristics of Czukay's solo work, his ambient work aside, is the musical wit and playfulness that leaps out at you. He seems, on the surface at least, to have been unconcerned with needing to be taken seriously. This guy was having far too much fun for that. Its a trait I am particularly fond of in an artist, if they can be quite experimental, but not get too up themselves about the importance of what they are doing.

The album consists of only four tracks. Two shorter finely wrought pieces.The daft and delightful Cool In The Pool that introduces the album, and Persian Love, a sinuously cut up homage to the power of Persian singing recorded extracts from short wave radio, reconstructed and interacting with Czukay's distinctive guitar playing, its the highlight of the album. This latter track proved to be the beginning of Czukay's future engagement with 'world music' and musicians. Troublesome as some can find what they interpret as white Western cultural appropriation. Its since become a wider issue with music sampling, when is appropriation justified, and when is it plain theft? Yet after you consider all this, the album is called Movies, Czukay is primarily painting pictures, creating movies in musical form, and through your ears painting them in your minds eye. Czukay loves this music, and reveres it enough to compose something this unique from it. This is literally his love song to their love songs. 

The other two pieces are longer fifteen minute mini symphonies, one called Oh Lord Give Us More Money. The other, Hollywood Symphony is Czukay's homage to Hollywood B movies, inter-cut as it is with snippets of dialogue from them. This one piece is probably the finest example of what this technique was capable of. Like all My Most Loved Albums, Movies is an album I never tire of hearing, and however pioneering it was at the time, it does not feel remotely dated.

MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS - Lambertland by Tasavalan Presidenti - 1973

Its 1973, glam rock was in full pomp. Progressive Rock music has emerged energised out of the remnants of late sixties hippedom. With the rise of Krautrock, the UK finally wakens up to the fact that there is some particularly innovative wacky music going on in Europe. The music papers send their writers out chasing around Europe trying to be the first to discover and champion a new fabulous European band, and their explorations reach as far as Finland, and Tasavallan Presidenti. 

At the time I'm heavily into Hawkwind and Deep Purple. So when I read about Tasavallan Presidenti and their supposedly brilliant guitarist Jukka Tolanan, I am intrgued enough to buy their first album Lambertland. Now Lambertland is a very strange beast of an album, and was so even at the time. Musically its the wildest amalgam of a huge range of stylistic influences. Yes, you could catagorise it as 'progressive' rock fusion, but also it is incredibly jazzy, and has a strongly inflected undertow of folk infused flute and drum rhythms. Plus the lead singer has this really unusual intensity to him, as he sings the quite often surreal lyrics. Lets just say he's not your classic heavy progressive singer, with more jazz timing, suggestions of folk singing, and a dash of scat.

There are a lot of tracks that move time signatures not once, but quite a lot more than once, as the mood of it shifts up and down gears. Its clever, dexterous, cerebral, but its also really passionate and the band's playing is so incredibly tight. This material has been well honed through a lot of performances. Their follow up album Milky Way Moses was a disappointment. Tasvavallan Presidenti underwent some changes in band members just after Lambertland was completed, losing the singer for one. And you can tell because Milky Way Moses had very little of whatever they possessed when they recorded Lambertland. Tasavallan Presidenti existed from 1969 -74, reforming briefly in the 80's and again in the 90's, and are currently still active.  

I have loved and replayed this album for many years. It miraculously survived my punk purges, the new wave, 80's electronica, world music phases, because it remains so unique and captivating I simply love it every time I put it on to hear. Like all - My Most Loved Albums, its been bought in vinyl, then tape, CD and download formats. That's hopeless devotion for you.

 

MY MOST LOVED ALBUMS ~ Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy by Brian Eno - 1974

As my most purchased album, this is a prime candidate for my most loved album. I bought it on vinyl when it originally came out in 1974, then on cassette, CD and now as a download.  This is the album where Eno's use of Obscure Strategy Cards to direct or wrong foot his creative process starts to be experimented with. I remember being fascinated with trying to discern how the layering of sounds interacted, discovering somewhere in the back a little sqeak of a noise that was perhaps once the starting point for an idea that got abandoned. On vinyl the album ends with the grooves being caught in an endless loop, something you could only really do in that format. This album set the template for me of the sort of music I love to love - adventurous, arty, discordant, odd, exciting music, that's still strangely accessible.

He was interviewed on the radio at the time and he talked about noticing the similarities between reggae and waltz rhythms and what emerged from that was the track Back In Judy's Jungle. https://youtu.be/r3mrcxek67A

There's the proto-punk of  the Third Uncle which proceeds at a absolutely furious pace and descends by the end into outright cacophany with what sounds like a guitar, highly amped being played with a bow or a chair leg, take your pick. It remains for me a track that shows what the musical potential for punk was before it had even happened, something that punk, once it did arrive, never really fully explored.
https://youtu.be/2zSrkb5pkrQ

Put A Straw Under Baby is composed like a surreal lullaby that half way through has the Portsmouth Symphonia bursting in as if trying to wake the baby up.
https://youtu.be/xVajcgZk2Tc

The True Wheel starts off in a sort of ploddy rock mode that gradually turns the dial up as it becomes more avante garde, with a middle section where a recording of a string section is played backwards ontop of the original recording.
https://youtu.be/FByM0r-VOLc

After the eccentric rock /pop of his first album Her Come The Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy resolutely places itself as an experimental album, with nonesense lyrics and often bizarre musical conjunctions. For me its a wonderfully daft, delightfilled album, simultaneously both serious and playful. It was Eno revelling in the potential of where ideas let free from his absolute total control would lead him.

After this album came Another Green World and his interest being drawn by the electronic landscaping of Cluster / Harmonia. What ultimately flows from that are his Ambient albums. We very rarely hear him sing nowadays, and the inventiveness and dry wit to be enjoyed in the Dadaesque lyrics of Taking Tiger Mountain, is hardly ever seen again. However much of a humourless brainbox he can sometimes appear to be, this is Brian Eno at his most oddball and human.