Picture nicked from The Lost Planet

Of all the albums I owned in the days before Motorhead, Out of the Blue was certainly the one that had the longest lasting affect on me. If you asked me to name any albums from before my heavy metal Damascus (In late 1979) I’m sure I could name very few. And I suspect that the only one that was a real album, as opposed to compilations, was the Electric Light Orchestra’s finest hour.

I spent too much of last night lying awake with Mr Blue Sky swimming around my head and so decided that today was the day I should reacquaint myself with Out of the Blue, I wanted to hold the album with its colourful gatefold sleeve and its gorgeous blue vinyl (and the space station cut-out I’d forgotten about). Sadly holding it was out of the question, I’d guess it’s getting tatty and dusty in my dad’s shed with too much of my past.

So the next best thing to holding and stroking and smelling was to give it a listen. So I headed over to we7 and settled in for a morning wallowing in the lush and layerd (and over-lush and over-layered) album of my past. I enjoyed it much more than I expected to. With metal came a dismissal of all that went before, and ELO where probably the most thoroughly shut out. I would suggest that I haven’t heard the whole of OotB since I first heard Overkill.

I’ll not leave it so long again.

I’m not entirely sure how I became a fan of XTC but for a very short period of time in the early 80s I was. At the time I was listening to, almost exclusively, heavy metal. The two exceptions (that spring to mind) were XTC and Kate Bush. I’ve regularly listened to Kate over the years since but very rarely revisit XTC. My love of XTC covered their Black Sea, English Settlement and Mummer albums, at which point it pretty much stopped. I do own a copy of Skylarking but honestly couldn’t name a track off it and suspect it was bought second-hand in a fit of nostalgia in the late 80s and filed away barely listened to.

English Settlement always felt like the archetypal XTC album: It had their best single (Senses Working Overtime); Their most recognisable cover (the Uffington White Horse); and from title to tracklisting has that Englishness that was XTC.

The last time I gave English Settlement a listen was in 2006 when I took my first (and only) shot at NaNoWriMo. My awful (I mean really awful) novel, Plan 4, featured a chapter where the three protagonists decide to hunt down the chalk carving on the front of XTC’s English Settlement and spend a night there.

“Are you sure it’s a real thing Anna? I mean…they could have just made it up”, Spirit was not convinced of the plan as yet.

“Of course it exists, it’s a chalk carving.”

“But it’s not a photo, it’s only a drawing, maybe they just doodled it.”

“For fucks sake Spirit, it is real!”

(You get the idea with that)

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I remember being disappointed in it back then, so disappointed that when my characters reached the White Horse they chose to listen to My Bloody Valentine. Listening today though it seems so much better than then. There are annoyances and it occasionally shows its age but for the most part it stands up pretty well, I’ll probably not leave it three years before I listen again.

I arrived at Hawkwind, obviously, by working back from my love for Motorhead. I never loved Hawkwind in the same way, maybe it was the (very misplaced) hippies mess they got tangled up in, or maybe it was becuase the new albums they were releasing around then, Sonic Attack, Church of Hawkwind, Choose Your Masques, were all actually pretty poor. I saw them at the Guildford Civic Hall three or four times duing the early 80s and the shows were a strange mix of thrilling and tedious. The last time, on the Choose Your Masques tour, my enduring memory of the show was the Silver Surfer animation projected behind them, and the dancers – the music itself is long-forgotten.

Despite all of that in Space Ritual they produced an album that was better than any Motorhead managed. I had a double vinyl copy and I suspect that the Calvert bits diminished my appreciation of it. With vinyl you didn’t have the luxury of programming out the weird arty-farty nonsense and get on with the psychedelic rock music, so I suspect that the album never got the full appreciation then than it deserved. Most likely I’d get frustrated and dig out Overkill instead; no distracting weirdness on that album. Listening now for the first time in more than 20 years, those bits no longer bother me and I can understand their importance to the album as a whole. I was able to enjoy this as the piece of art it was, rather than a collection of rock tracks. I’d forgotten, and still barely notice, that Space Ritual was a live album which is why I never chuck it out as one of my favourite live albums – it may well be the best live album ever.

To be honest I’m more than a little surprised at just how much I love Space Ritual – maybe it’s a quirk of timing and that at some undetermined point in the future I’ll read this back and have a what-was-I-thinking moment.

OK – I haven’t really dug anything out…but a sudden wave of uncontrollable nostalgia inspired me to post this to the Galaxie 500 Mailing List – which got (mostly) the whistling silence it’s astonishing off-topic-ness deserved. I thought it really ought to live here where it can offend no one…

Back in the early 80s (I might have mentioned a few hundred times before) I was a huge metal fan – but the metal I liked wasn’t the tight-trousered, eye-liner-wearing glammy type; I liked my metal a bit grubby. But as a music obsessive I considered any band that passed through Guildford as fair game which meant that I saw lots of bands that it would be cool to boast about but I barely remember the gigs (e.g. The Jam, Buzzcocks (I think), SLF, Pretenders) and lots more forgettable crap (or crap I wish I could forget (Gary Moore, Budgie, Toyah)).

Anyway Hanoi Rocks came through town and they wore girly-clothes and make up, they were not all hard and manly like I liked my rock, but we went along anyway expecting to snigger, and probably heckle. But they were awesome – they rocked so hard, they played for hours, Michael Monroe, the lead singer, looked great (something I probably wasn’t ready to admit out loud at the time…I liked my rock stars like Lemmy remember!) and played a saxophone, and clambered up the PA and just gave us an awesome show. Most of the audience left before the second encore, I could never figure out why, which just made the ending so much more special because we got 20 minutes more just for the 50 or so of us who stuck around. I think they covered Train Kept a-Rolling.

I bought albums but they were disappointing and I never saw them again – shortly afterwards Razzle, the drummer, died in that Motley Crue related accident and it seemed that my Hanoi Rocks love was destined to be all about a couple of hours at Surrey University in 1984.

So today, on the back of this nostalgia trip I found myself at YouTube thoroughly enjoying the stacks of Hanoi Rocks videos from that period and seeing exactly why this gig is one that I never forgot. I’m about to reacquaint myself with a couple of albums but am expecting to be disappointed.

Yesterday we were watching an episode of The Simpsons where Homer was driving his family home, the car was covered in dust and Marge suggested that they get it washed but Homer chooses to ignore her. Just then Lenny pulls up alongside and suggests that Homer wash his car and Homer swerves into the nearest car wash.

Anyway, Hazel owns Tracey Thorn’s A Distant Shore and has done for many years and for all of those years I’ve skipped past it whenever I see it because…well…you know…Everything But the Girl…she may even have suggested at some point that I give it a listen but I suspect was treated to a Homeric snort or shrug. Last week Alistair Fitchett on his Unpopular blog wrote about A Distant Shore in his “20 albums that changed my life” series. Given that other entries in that series had included Galaxie 500, The Velvet Underground, The Kinks, Belle and Sebastian and The Go Betweens and included three albums that featured in my list I decided that the time was right to give Tracey a chance.

The album is short but stunningly sweet, beautiful in places. Simply arranged with guitar strums and Tracey Thorn’s voice, its an album I wanted to be alone with and one that required an immediate second, and then a third listen.

So thanks Unpopular for exposing me to this…oh and Hazel…<shrug>…

Creedence Clearwater Revival were one of the many bands that my Dad passed onto me. We had a couple of albums kicking around (Willy & The Poor Boys and maybe Green River) but Cosmo’s Factory is the album that stuck in my head, possibly because of Travelin’ Band and Up Around the Bend, a couple of songs I have fond memories of. So this was the album I grabbed this morning when I thought a blog post was long overdue.

I’ve just made my way through it but it was bloody hard going – an album full of charmless, stodgy, chunky dross with very little clue as to what I may have liked about it. Fogerty’s voice grates and the majority of the album stinks to high heaven. The side two centrepiece of an eleven minute version of I Heard It Through the Grapevine was shameful. I shall never listen to this again.

On his blog Music Arcades, David posts a piece about an album every day, the recordings are selected using a database and a random number generator. “Just dug this one out” was me trying to do something similar but my posts are sporadic and the randomness is the disoganised randomness of my head rather than database driven. The posts on Music Arcades contain a mix of (lots of) obscure, (some) familiar and (occasional) “I haven’t given that a thought for years”. Yesterday’s post about Deep Purple’s In Rock was one of the latter and I woke up in the early hours of this morning with a strange desire to listen to the album…and write about it. So here I am…doing both.

I didn’t have the album to hand, I suspect like much of my dubious past it lives in my dad’s shed. So I had to make do with the version that last.fm had on offer, which was of questionable origin, for example the version of Speed King never had the intro that David mentioned in his post (which was one of the things that got my appettite whet in the first place).

In Rock was an album (and Deep Purple were a band) that I was never really a fan of (although it was an album I owned). The Hard Rock/Heavy Metal distinction that David mentions was very important and the music I was listening to and loving during that period was most definitely Heavy Metal. Metal, to me at least, was less pretentious, more exciting, more about the “feeling” and less about the “music” – Motorhead were metal[1], Sabbath were metal and Deep Purple were rock, Gillan (the band) were metal even if Gillan the voice was rock. The late 70s rock graph looked like this (to me)…

punk <- – - -> metal <- – - -> hard rock <- – - – > prog
            ^
            |
            me

So In Rock was an album that meant very little to me and listening to it now there are only mild pangs of familiarity, although Ian Gillan’s voice is still something that gives me a buzz – maybe because it is the archetypal rock voice – although it probably makes me want to listen to bits of Glory Road rather than any more Deep Purple.

However, In Rock, puts where I live on the musical map. According to the astoundingly anal (and that’s said with genuine envy) Deep Purple Appreciation society website …

It was at Hanwell Community Centre that Mk 2 began their rehearsals and wrote much of their hard rock masterpiece “Deep Purple In Rock”.

Actually there’s more to Hanwell than just Deep Purple. The Wikipedia entry also mentions The Who, Marshall Amps, Jimi Hendrix and…errr…The Magic Numbers – and doesn’t, but could, mention Uriah Heap.

[1] although anywhere you find a discussion of Motorhead you’ll find an argument about what slot they fit into – it seems that some people see HM as something to be slightly embarrassed by and so try and find new (or in Motorhead’s case old) places to file the HM bands they love.

I’ve always been most fond of the transitionary era of The Beatles and for many years have proclaimed Rubber Soul and Revolver as my two favourite albums, and that the band’s pinnacle was the Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane single. The proclamation would normally have been followed by a dismissive sneer at Sgt. Pepper and pretty much all their subsequent albums. My thinking was that with Pepper they threw all their ideas and imaginings into a bloody great bucket which was then stirred and stirred into an over-rated mess that left them pretty much bereft of any pop sensibility for the rest of the band’s existence. The rest of their career was spent churning out tiresome rock music (with a rare treat here and there) until they, thankfully for all of us, imploded.

Having Ian MacDonald’s awesome Revolution in the Head in the toilet for a couple of months urged me to reassess that position. My opinion was so firmly entrenched that it turned out that Sgt. Pepper was the only Beatles album we hadn’t bought on CD. Having acquired a digital copy I gave the album a listen for the first time in probably 10+ years.

And here I am, and nothing is tempting me to change my position. The opening track is a great opener but the unbearable run up to Fixing A Hole is a section that I have no desire to suffer ever again. She’s Leaving Home is the one pop gem in amongst all that cacophonous/pretentious/smug/silly nonsense.

I never had the opportunity of hearing the album in 1967 and it may well have been stunning on first release but without that, I can hear nothing but a confused and confusing muddle that just reaffirms my position that The Beatles started their very steep downward slide with Sgt. Pepper and for me there’s no Beatles-related release worth more than a cursory listen until McCartney’s first solo album

A Day in the Life is astonishing but it doesn’t change my opinion of the album because it sits bolted onto the end after the reprise of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. That, and the fact that it succeeds where so much of the album fails, gives the impression that it’s not a part of Sgt. Pepper and the fact that it shares vinyl with it is merely chance.

Actually I think I’ll declare that A Collection of Beatles Oldies is my favourite Beatles album – just for contrariness, for the timing of its release and because I picked up a beautiful copy of it in a second hand shop while on holiday in Jersey in 1984 for a quid.

OK – so this is “digging out” an album that I’ve actually never listened to before. Hazel has had it, I guess since release and I guess because of the Aimee Mann contribution. And of course I’d heard and enjoyed, in a cool but novelty way, Common People. But a whole album of Shatner seemed a ridiculous thing to even contemplate – so I never did until this afternoon. I skimmed through the thousands of tracks on my portable drive and Kirk’s presence overpowered me and I got a desire to listen to it.

Track one of Has Been is the aforementioned Common People and on most other days I wouldn’t get beyond that. It is great, although the singing (apparantly Joe Jackson) really takes the edge off, and becuase of the contrast with Shatner’s frankly beautiful delivery, possibly even exaggerates the novelty aspect of it. Today I persisted and found myself being absolutely stunned by just how good the whole album is.

Unfortunately like Common People a number of other tracks have the magic of Shatner broken by the contributions of the interlopers. I’d wanted to say that it should have been only Shatner on the album but it would have definitely been a lesser album without “I Can’t Get Behind That”. The album really should have ended there.

So here I am, four years after everyone else discovered this album, finally realising that Mr Shatner is a treasure and that Has Been is, despite the likes of Joe Jackson and Brad Paisley hauling it back from the verge of being a classic, an album that I can’t help but love.

I was late to the Go-Betweens party; no sooner had Ken exposed me to their pop beauty than they decided to split up. Grant and Robert both released excellent solo albums and played London within days of each other. First up Grant at the Borderline played a decent and solid set and was joined by Robert for an encore (of Clouds, if memory serves), I left happy if not blown-away. Then at the Subterranea, Robert Forster and a backup band he’d apparantly picked up in Berlin, staked his claim as my favourite ex-Go-Between.

I saw him many times after both with and without Grant and eventually I finally got to see the pair of them billed as The Go-Betweens. I guess they realised what too few other people already knew, that the world was a better place with The Go-Betweens in it…and is a worse place now we don’t have that luxury any more. The Subterranea show was amazing, organ-drenched and sleazy, Robert swaggered, scrounged drinks from the audience and finished with an astounding version of Grant Hart’s 2541 – the version he released on I Had a New York Girlfriend a couple of years later doesn’t even hint at the majesty of that first time.

Danger in the Past still sounds like it always did, I could pick out songs…”Baby Stones” is an exceptional opener and “Is That What You Call Change” is a beautifully worded tirade, but picking the best from an album of greats is really too hard. None of his subsequent albums channeled his cockiness quite so eloquently and none of them really hit the mark like this one.