Here's yet another article from The Files. This article - based on a non-specific request from a fanzine editor to yer actual Keith Telly Topping to 'write something about your ten favourite LPs of all time' was first published in a British magazine in the mid-1990s: Some of it still stands up quite well, I think. Some of it, however, is pseudo music-journo crap of the worst kind, so be warned in advance.
New York, London, Paris, Munich...
Rock and Roll (or "pop music", to give it it's proper name) is the saxophone intro to Van Morrison's 'Moondance'. It's Steve Craddock's chiming jingle-jangle-morning guitars on Ocean Colour Scene's 'Yesterday Today'. It's the BIFF!-BANG!-POW! drumming of John Maher on a slew of Buzzcocks Forty Fives. It's the strut of The Clash, the menace of Killing Joke, the theatre of The Rolling Stones, the sweaty power of James Brown, the scream of (mid-period) Siouxsie &The Banshess. It's Julian Cope slitting his stomach open on stage at The Hammersmith Odean. It's the charm of 'This Ol' Heart of Mine (Is Weak For You)' or 'Heatwave' or 'Nowhere To Run ' or 'Back In My Arms Again'.
Pop music is Motown. Stax. Decca. Parlophone. Rough Trade. Polydor.
You know what they say - "if you want to know what it's all about, just read the label..."
Pop music is Keith Richards' dramatic intro to 'Gimme Shelter', the lyrics of 'Belsen Was A Gas', the vocals on 'Ball & Chain', the bassline on 'Release The Bats', the drums on 'Won't Get Fooled Again.'
What pop music is not is bloody Knoffler or Collins or Mercury or Sting or any of those other mortgage sensible, middle-aged, middle-class, middle-bloody-everything going-bald bastards who prostitute their youth in the name of being "the acceptable face of rock and roll". They are whores to their art and should be shafted up the arse with a big loud guitar until they cry for their mummy.
Pop music is the deftness of The Trash Can Sinatra's 'White Horses', the rockabilly-skank of The Motorcycle Boy's 'Big Rock Candy Mountain', Mick Ronson's guitar on Bowie's Seventies work, the word-play of Edwyn Collins or Smokey Robinson or Elvis Costello. If pop music has a manifesto, it's the lyrics of Noel Gallagher's 'Rock & Roll Star.' Pop music is The Undertones and The Ramones, Slade and Oasis, music that is loud, young, daft, spotty and stupid. The stuff that fourteen year olds play very loud in their bedrooms and their mothers have to tell them to turn down.
Pop music survives by constantly re-inventing itself. This has always been so, since a young, white country singer, Elvis Presley used a coffee-break at Sun Studios in Memphis to sing 'That's Alright Mama', a song he had been taught by a old black man, inventing rock and roll in the process.
When David Quantick in the NME in 1986, wrote a seminal piece of rock and roll journalism on the rise of do-it-yourself indieism, he called it Pop Will Eat Itself. The title not only gave a bunch of Black Country Grebo's a fantastic band name, it also served to define the self-references of the latest generation of hungry offspring.
When I talk about the music that inspires me, it is usually singles. Many of the most important music statements in the history of modern culture were originally designed to inhabit the grooves of seven inches of black vinyl. And it's this outmoded format that still gives rise to many of those moments that you want to live and die for. Unfortunately singles are an uneconomic way to listen to music and so, the entire Motown single-collection and the work of noted singles bands such as The Who, The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Clash, Buzzcocks, New Order, The Ruts, The Fall and David Bowie will not find a place in those records that I would chose to take with me into exile.
The LP - not, and never 'the album' - is the purist listening experience. Between thirty and forty five (or, in the case of the Grateful Dead, two hundred and forty) minutes of one sound. It makes a mockery of the single by exposing all of the glaring possibilities of judging a band by one song only (how many people love 'Say Hello, Wave Goodbye' or 'Don't Talk To Me About Love', but have nothing else by Soft Cell or Altered Images in their collection?) The LP survives (as the CD), because it presents value for money, a collective experience and the presentation of images and content under one banner.
I am not, and never have been, a great lover of people who pigeon-hole music. I was born in 1963 and grew up listening to what my two, older, brothers were listening too. Some of this has stuck with me (The Byrds, The Beatles, Bob Dylan), whilst some of the more outrageous excesses of the era (ELP), make me a lifelong appreciation of death-by-hippy. When I was ten I discovered Glam Rock (I'm not ashamed to admit I wore a Star Jumper and Oxford Bags). When I was fourteen, I became a punk, had my nose broken at a Clash concert, queued for hours for tickets to see Buzzcocks and fell in love for the first time listening to 'Pretty Vacant' at The John Boste Youth Club in 1978. Yet I still listened to Motown and Stax, was aware of folk-rock and The Velvet Underground and The Doors,spent Christmas 1979 discovering the Led Zeppelin, The Pink Floyd and Hawkwind were, actually, not all bad and when asked, stated that my favourite band was The Jam, a group that straddled the images and sounds of 1960s beat and 970s aggression.
The Jam were a band who relied for their impact upon an implicit anger in the socio-political enviroment of England. From 'Sounds From The Streets' and 'I Got By in Time' on their debut LP, through the shaky This is the Modern World period, to the triumphant return to form of All Mod Cons, Paul Weller's songs raged against a system that simultaneously patronised him (as an 'angry young man') and yet refused to allow him a lighter, more introspective side ('Fly' on All Mods Cons comes closest to understanding the mellower side of Weller's dichotomy). In 1979, fresh from a trio of outstanding singles ('Down In The Tube Station At Midnight', 'Strange Town'/'The Butterfly Collector' and 'When You're Young') they produced Setting Sons - the last great LP of the 1970s (it came out two weeks after London Calling, calm down traditionalists).
Setting Sons has a - more-or-less - continuous narrative. Put simply, the LP contains a number of songs written around a single theme; the effect of the passage of time, and of changing attitudes, on relationships.
This was something that Weller had always been interested in ('I Got By in Time', written as an eighteen year old proves this), but on songs such as 'Thick As Thieves', 'The Eton Rifles' and, especially, 'Burning Sky', the singer honed his world-view from out of the straight-jacket of
realpolitik and into another field altogether. Other songs like the caustic 'Saturday's Kids' ('Saturday's kids live in council houses/wear v-necked shirts and baggy trousers'), the harrowing 'Private Hell' and the bitter anti-war tirade 'Little Boy Soldiers' (written three years before The Falklands conflict which it, with horrible irony, seemed to predict), are fragments, snapshots of life in 1979. Although Weller later expressed reservations about
Setting Sons, the LP's elegance under the microscope remains. In many ways it was the culmination of the first part of The Jam's career. After their next single, 'Going Underground', made number one they were, though frequently brilliant, never quite the same band again.
Weller, when he was preparing The Jam's next LP (Sound Affects), was quoted as saying that he had been listening a great deal to The Beatles 1966 masterpiece Revolver for inspiration and even cheekily pinched the bass-riff from George Harrison's Taxman for Start. Revolver is a remarkable work. It is easily the best, most coherent and most well-aged of all of The Beatles canon (though Rubber Soul pushes it close). It pisses on the horrendously overblown Sgt Peppers' from a great height. Revolver is swingin' London personified. It was probably the last time that democracy, of any sort, existed within the Abbey Road set-up and is a record that everyone in the world should own.
Revolver exists in its own, unique, twilight
demi-monde world of evocative memories and kitsch nostalgia. Like watching an episode of
The War Machines or
The Avengers, it instantly transports you, without specific references, to another, better, time. One in which England were the World Cup holders and all the girls were beautiful and had long hair and mini-skirts.
Wistful and melancholy ballads like 'Eleanor Rigby', 'For No One' and 'Here There And Everywhere' (three of the most perfect songs ever written and penned when their author, Paul McCartney, was just twenty three years of age) battle for prominence alongside some of The Fabs most brilliant power-pop songs ('And You Bird Can Sing', 'She Said, She Said', 'Got To Get You Into My Life') and, amid the mood trappings and the period charm, the first signs of Lennon's emergent weirdness with the psychedelic flirtations of 'I'm Only Sleeping' and 'Tomorrow Never Knows'. And just to prove that it shouldn't be taken too seriously, there's 'Yellow Submarine' as well.
If the 1960s were represented, on the one hand, by the growing-up-in-public development of the English rock scene, and on the other by the West Coast freedom and experimentation (fuelled by an overdose of happy sugar), that Monterey and Woodstock stand for, then off at some tangent, and completely divorced from the aesthetics of the age was The Velvet Underground, a group of New York art students who, thanks to their attachment to Andy Warhol's Factory gained a huge notoriety late in the decade. They never played live outside America (we'll ignore the Lou-less 1972 UK tour, pedants) and never had a hit record worthy of the name, and yet The Velvet Undergroud would become the biggest single influence of two entirely different youth movements a decade and a half later.
Most who seek inspiration (notably the punks) went straight to the bands début LP (recorded with the German singer Nico), but for the purist it is
The Velvet Underground, their eponymous third LP, and the first without the talent of John Cale, that is the definitive product.
The Velvet Underground is the point at which the then twenty four year-old Lou Reed, suddenly discovered the beauty of love.
For
The Velvet Underground is an LP of love songs the like of which nobody has ever equalled, or probably ever will. 'Pale Blue Eyes', 'Jesus', 'Beginning To See The Light' and the extraordinary early funk experiments of 'What Goes On', breath life into a tired and cynical genre and highlight the darkness and frustration of bondage to convention, and, significantly, offer no solution.
The Velvet Underground mocks its imitators with breath-taking verve. It is fifteen years ahead of its time and, recently seems to have been accepted as the final text on the first band to wear black. Without
The Velvet Underground there would have been no Orange Juice, Aztec Camera, Primal Scream, The Jesus & Mary Chain, The Sex Pistols or, possibly, no David Bowie. Think about it.
When The Jesus & Mary Chain arrived like a gang of rabid dogs in 1985 they were described as 'The Velvet Underground if they'd been produced by Phil Spector.' They were loud and spotty, wore leather, sang songs about drugs and sex and lied hideously about their age.
Their first LP,
Psychocandy, followed a string of extraordinary singles, and, like them, was dominated by feedback, wailing siren guitars, droned vocals and lyrics which, frankly, beggared belief. 'In a Hole' states, 'How can something crawl within/My rubber-holy baked-bean tin?' It is audacious and, at the same time,
laughable. At times it sounds like an advert for dental drills and yet, amid the chaos, there are also tunes. Beautiful tunes. 'My Little Underground', 'Never Understand' or the fragile 'Just Like Honey'. If you have a reality-disorder then
this is the LP for you. It resotres your faith in 'Cash From Chaos' and works, largely, on the strength of its hype. Don't buy it,
steal it.
The mythical link between The Jesus & Mary Chain and The Sex Pistols is tenuous at best. While the brothers Reid hummed and harred about their anti-everythingness, The Pistols actually meant it (mannn). At least that is what Malcolm MacLaren would have everyone believe. The Sex Pistols were, in fact, pure theatre. In another age, they would have been underclass rabble rousers, stirring up the crowds and then nipping off into the night before the bother started. MacLaren's trick was to use the media to create a climate in which four loud-mouthed youths actually could cause outrage. This was the 1970s, after all, an era when mainstream television was dominated by sex and violence. With 'Anarchy In The UK', Rotten, Matlock, Jones and Cook, basically, ripped-off The New Yorks Dolls sound,with a healthy side order of Hawkwind. They did it very well, and the song remains what it always was, a piece of classic rock and roll with a cynical sneer on its face. But what they achieved with one 'what a fuckin' rotter' on live television was much, much more important. They became the first band since The Rolling Stones to actually divide an entire nation.
Never Mind The Bollocks ... Here's The Sex Pistols is a great LP, although, if you're looking for the definitive Pistols' product, you'd be better advised to get the
Kiss This! 
CD which includes all of the songs from Bollocks plus several b-sides and out-takes and Sid doing what only Sid could to 'My Way'. All of the good stuff is there; the Johnny Thunders-baiting 'New York', the great Pistols pop single 'Pretty Vacant', the one-note bass on 'Submission', the powerhouse introduction to 'God Save The Queen', the sick-funny antics of 'Bodies'. This is remarkable music, made all the more so by the means with which it was presented to the public. The medium is the message. Rite on. Never trust a hippy
.
If pop music continues by re-inventing itself, then there is no finer example of this than eponymous début by Manchester's The Smiths. The Smiths, in 1984, took the musical backdrop of The Byrds and The Velvet Underground, with the dexterous guitar work of Johnny Marr, as a form over which Stephen Morrissey could paint his - vulgar - poetic images.
In 'Still Ill', Marr's jingle-jangle-morning guitar lines run into words which mean nothing and yet everything, highlighting Morrissey's twin obsessions: outrageous existentialism and wistful nostalgia for a loss of innocence. Yet 'Still Ill' represents only the merest fraction of the sweeping visions on offer on
The Smiths. 'The Hand That Rocks The Cradle' is a Byron poem with a Rickenbacker soundtrack, 'Reel Around The Fountain' a tortured plea for self-fulfilment, 'Suffer Little Children' a chilling and angry evocation of abuse and death and 'Hand In Glove' one of the last great love songs in an age of crass and cosmetic emotions.
Retrospectively, after Meat is Murder and The Queen is Dead had cemented The Smiths' standing as articulate, intelligent and above all funny readers of 1980s aesthetics, doubts began to surface about The Smiths as an LP. It was badly produced, the naysayers claimed. The piano frills on 'Reel Around The Fountain' and 'I Don't Owe You Anything' were needless, the singing was flat and emotionless. Marr was having an off-day. There's no bass. And so on. Sometimes, to know genius, you have to have it rammed down your throat until your in danger of choking on it. Okay, so the American version includes 'This Charming Man' as a bonus. Buy that if it makes you happy. It probably will.
The first great movement post-punk (aside from the somewhat esoteric Sheffield 'industrial' scene) came via third generation Merseybeat. 1980 was the year and Echo & The Bunnymen, Wah! Heat and The Teardrop Explodes were the bands. Interestingly, as with many movements, the Liverpool sound of the era was produced in an atmosphere of apparent incest. It was the same fifteen or so names that kept on cropping up in bands across the next few years. The Teardrops begat The Wild Swans (producers of the best single of 1982, 'Revolutionary Spirit') who begat The Lotus Eaters, who were blood-related to China Crisis, who had former members of Wah! and The Bunnymen and The Teardrops, blah, blah, blah...
Julian Cope, Ian McCulloch and Peter Wylie all began in the same band; The Crucial Three, who then became A Shallow Madness after Wylie left to form Wah! and then The Teardrop Explodes when McCulloch zoomed off with Will Sergeant to The Bunnymen. This left Julian Cope as the sole inheritor of The Teardrops curious mixture of influences (The Doors, The Pink Floyd, The Monkees, The Clash, Pere Ubu, Thirteenth Floor Elevators, 1960s bubblegum et cetera). The Teardrop Explodes (named after a line in an issue of Daredevil), recorded four stunning singles for the Liverpool label Zoo before being snapped up by Mercury and recording the, almost, perfect pop LP, Kilimanjaro.
Kilimanjaro is how
all pop music ought to sound. Joyously displaying its influences openly: rebellious, irreverent and just a touch insane. It is the sound of youth, alive and being pop stars. Once Alan Gill left to reform Dalek I, The Teardrops had a hit single ( the glorious 'Reward', available on the latest reissues of
Kilimanjaro), then fell apart under the strain of the tension between Cope and keyboard player David Balfe.
Their second LP,
Wilder is really the work of a different band altogether and, although its weird brilliance is still beloved by many, myself included, The Teardrop Explodes lost their pop audience almost overnight. This is not to suggest that
Kilimanjaro does not feature moments of
extreme nonsense; Cope's aping of Syd Barrett on 'Went Crazy', the sly re-working of psychedelia of 'Poppies (In The Fields)', the over-the-top lunacy of 'Sleeping Gas', Cope's first tentative steps towards his Jesus Christ obsessions which remain with the writer to this day, on 'Bouncing Babies' and the extraordinary sensual love song 'The Thief Of Bagdhad' mark out the LP as something to be treasured.
Having split up during the making of a third LP (posthumously released as the brilliantly titled Everybody Wants To Shag The Teardrop Explodes; which proved that, among their other achievements, Cope, Balfe and Gary Dwyer invented acid-house eight years before S-Express), Cope took his 'floored genius' off to an eccentric, sometimes erratic, but often brilliant solo career of remarkable recordings (Fried, Skellington, Saint Julian, Peggy Suicide, jehovahkill - the latter managing to get the singer sacked by Island records). Cope remains a great, if unhinged, talent and the world is a better place for having him around.
The link between Cope and The Monkees might, at first, appear to be slim. Both were mocked and derided in their time, only to emerge years later from the madness with their triumphs intact. Both suffered from a plethora of serious doubters who chose to ignore innovation and cry 'Emperor's New Clothes'.
The Monkees were The Stone Roses of their era. Over-hyped, over-paid and over-here. Everyone knows that they were a manufactured copy of The Beatles, put together by American television. All of that is irrelevant. The Monkees produced in three years (1966-68) some of the most outstanding pop music of the era. The fact that their first two LP's had precious little to do with the band, having been put together by musical advisor Don Kirshner (later responsible for the, even more suspect, The Archies) and songwriters like Boyce and Hart, Goffin and King and Neil Diamond doesn't enter into it. Serious musicians Peter Tork and Mike Nesmith were, obviously, somewhat pissed off by their relegation to roles as dogs who would be occasionally thrown a scrap of meat that hadn't been gobbled up by The Monkees more photogenic stars Jones and Dolenz. So they rebelled and, after a heated meeting at which Nesmith punched a hole in the wall of Kirshner's office with the comment 'that could have been your head', the band were given sole control of their recordings. And here is where the story really begins.
The Monkees third and fourth LPs
Headquarters (April 1967) and
Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, Jones Ltd (August 1967) are remarkable, quasi-garage-band thrash LP's, not a million miles removed from the early effects of punk rock ten years later.
Pisces especially, offers, housed within it's
Revolver-influenced cover, much that is surprising.
The hit single 'Pleasant Valley Sunday' (a remarkably cheerless Gerry Goffin and Carole King song about small town suburban conformity) should have told the listener what to expect, but this only scratches the surface of the wit and punning social comment on songs like Nesmith's 'Salesman', 'The Door Into Summer' and 'Don't Call On Me', which mixed with the perfect pop of 'She Hangs Out', 'What Am I Doin' Hangin' Round?' and Harry Neilson's 'Cuddly Toy'. But it is for its extrodinary climax, 'Star Collector' that
Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, Jones Ltd will be most remembered. A Goffin and King song about groupies - sung by Davy Jones - that was a decade ahead of its time and didn't wish to hide its misanthropy, 'Star Collector' is also one of the first songs to use the moog synthasizer (Mike Dolenz owned the third moog ever made). The effects and trickery that producer Chip Douglas had deliberately kept off
Headquarters bursts forth here in a flowering of studio technique that puts much of
Sgt. Pepper's to shame. After this madness, it's only a short step to the Bob Raefelson/Jack Nicholoson collaberation on
Head and the resulting spiral into (in Tork's case) bankruptcy and jail. That's rock and roll for you.
The great live LP is something that bands have tried for years to perfect. The Rolling Stones Get Yer Ya Ya's Out is satanically good in places but is ruined by a suspicion that some of the guitars have been overdubbed in the studio (and by that whiny-voiced bird shouting 'Paint It Black, you devils!'). Other albatros-like gigantic messes of live presentation like Zeppelin's Song Remains the Same, remind us of 1970s excess and should be avoided like the plague. I remember once listening to Queen's Live Killers. For all of the horrible pompous pretension of the recording the band remain, pointlessly, tuneful. There's even a drum solo. If I'd been there on the night, I'd have thrown things at them.
The 'great' live LP is rare and, to date that has only been one that has eclipsed a bands studio output. This is
One Man Clapping by james, recorded at The Moles Club in Bath in front of an audience of around six hundred. This is the only way to capture a band, and especially
this band, live. There is something about the electricity between james and the audience that is difficult to describe to the uninitiated. To cut a long story very short, Manchester's james gained a small, but vocal cult following during the mid-80s with their series of remarkable singles on Factory ('What's The World', 'Hymn From A Village') and Sire ('Chain Mail', 'What For?').
Their first LP,
Stutter gained critical acclaim although today it sounds a mite hurried and frustrating, as though the band knew what they wanted to do but couldn't quite summon up the energy or the bottle to try. After a second LP, the enigmatic
Strip Mine was held up for almost a year by Sire's reluctance to release it, the band found themselves living on thirty quid a week, unable to tour by Sire's financial restrictions (placed on them and other recent signings, allegedly, because the company had poured all of their money into Madonna's
True Blue tour and couldn't afford anything else). Having managed to extract themselves from Sire, james staged what was at the time, designed as a farewell concert at Moles with drummer Gavan Whelan leaving because, in his own words 'I'd be better off on the dole'. Hence
One Man Clapping, an LP full of definitive versions of the bands best material ('Chain Mail', 'Sandman', 'Why So Close?', 'Johnny Yen', 'Are You Ready?', 'Scarecrow') together with three new songs. 'Whoops' took the bands manic energy to an extraordinary level, as did the set closer 'Stutter', a heavy-metal nightmare of a song in which Jim Glennie and Larry Gott, basically race to see who is going to get finished first.
If Tim Booth's intention was, as stated to finished like The Singing Detective and go whistling off into the sunset with a classic 'fuck you' to the music biz, then 'Stutter' was the perfect vehicle. However it was the second-to-last song of the set, 'Burned' which caused the most attention. 'Burned' is a (not-even-thinly) veiled attack on Sire: as bitter and vicious as any song ever written by anyone about anything: 'If you don't look cool/they won't look at you' sang Booth on the opening line. There are those who were at Moles that night who cried openly. It was the end of an era but, just as is often the case, the story didn't end there. One Man Clapping was designed to make james some money to pay off their debts but, typically, Sire claimed three quarters of the royalties in lieu of monies owed to the company from the band's days with them. james carried on, found a new home at Fontana, and, suddenly with the Gold Mother LP and an expanded line-up, found themselves actually selling records. 'How Was It For You?' and 'Come Home' were small hits, the anthemic 'Sit Down' a vast hit and, suddenly, they were pop stars. Now it has become unfashionable to like them since the recent LP Seven showed a disturbing trend towards stadium rock. Me, I will love them until the day I die. Great bands don't become bad bands overnight. Well, except possibly in the case of The POlice.
The development of REM's following through ten years of superb LP's and singles is, like james, the tale of triumph over adversity. Coming from the unfashionable deep south of the states, initially pigeon-holed as leaders of some mythical 'stateside invasion' of US guitar bands, raised on a diet of 1960s beat and 1970s punk (whose number also included Green On Red, Wall Of Voodoo and The Long Ryders), Stipe, Buck, Berry and Mills were in reality the most original and most intelligent band of their time.
The early Chronic Town ( notably 'Carnival of Sorts'), Murmer and Reckoning display a band whose discovery of the Rickenbacker sound is tangible and whose joy in confusing their audience with semi-inaudible vocals and murmered lyrics spoke volume's for where their priorities lay. They had a shaky spell mid-1980s when they seemed in danger of turning into an AMERICAN ROCK band (and all of the shite that entails), but by 1989's Green they had rediscovered their weirdness and, in the process, found themselves a huge US college rock audience who were looking for something vaguely 'alternative' or 'indie' (and all of the shite that entails). A similar case could be given for the reason why The Smiths, five years after their demise are suddenly the biggest-selling English band in America.
In 1991 REM released
Out of Time, their most coherent and consciously pop LP to date. Staggeringly, given the bands understanding of their audience's pivotal role in their legend, they chose not to tour with the LP and, instead, spent the year doing low-key acoustic gigs and secret appearances, dragging back some mystique from the pop-star glam that their sudden, new-found fame had created for them.
Out Of Time is close to being the greatest LP ever released by
anyone. Certainly it is an audacious, lyrically breath-taking, stylistically daring LP. The rumour that REM had done a dance-track (cos, like, 'we've always had this dance element to our music'), brought groans from many sections of their audience in 1990, but 'Radio Song', with input from rapper KRS-1, became an hymn of dissatisfaction that, in some ways, predicted the LA riots. Songs about radio conformity from Elvis Costello's 'Radio, Radio' to The Smiths' 'Panic' have used the idea that radio is in control of people's lives. Here Stipe takes the opposite route. Radio is out of control, dive-bombing helplessly without any motivation.
'Losing My Religion' has many champions as the song of the 90s; a howl of fear from the singer that he is in danger of following the listeners of 'Radio Song' into the abyss. If, as has been suggested, the song is about Mark Chapman, then this makes the decent into personal madness and the solutionless end to the song even more poignant. After this, and the anguish of 'Low' (one of REM's most important and understated songs) it comes as a positive relief when the next songs deliver to the listener the feeling that life can be worth living (notably the ludicrously jangly 'Shiny Happy People'). Then it starts to get morbid again, through 'Texarkana' and the downright weird 'Country Feedback', songs which seem to wish to say 'NO' to life, but, again, the effect is destroyed by the closing song, 'Me In Honey', a thing of poetry and beauty.
If
Out of Time had in companion-piece when released it was the eponymous debut LP by Liverpool's The La's. The La's four-years in the making and, upon release, disowned by its creator singer/guitarist Lee Mayers, is nevertheless the great lost Beatles LP (recorded somewhere between
Help! and
Rubber Soul), with all the cynicism one could imagine and more besides.
The La's had already scored notable hits with 'Timeless Melody' and the classic 'There She Goes' when they took their live set into the studio.
The La's sounds like it is, raw, brutal, funny, sexy, dangerous. From the opening rocker 'Son Of A Gun' to the closing chimes of the eight minute epic 'Looking Glass', The La's, like another of its contemporaries The Stone Roses (another LP with an eight minute closer), revels in discovery. The punning 'Doledrum', the cynical wordplay of 'Way Out', and the simple rock and roll love song 'Feelin'', are just three of the twelve perfect slabs of Merseybeat, 1990s style.
The La's, the LP to fall in love to that summer.
So far, most of the material that I'd take with me has been pop music played by young white men on electric guitars. That's to be expected, firstly because dance music works at its best in the club and on a seven inch single. However, since I'm planning on taking a multi-deck stereo with me that will allow me to use tapes, I intend to cheat and slip into my life-jacket pocket that oh so important c120 tape featuring selected Temptations, Miracles, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, James Brown, Otis Redding and other gems from the Motown back catalogue on one side and twenty of my favourite disco, funk, house and rave singles mixed into a continuous sixty minute loop on the other.
Actually, since I'm taking something to dance to, I'd better include The Shamen's
In Gorbachev We Trust. Here, Colin and Will, after they'd given up wanting to be Pink Floyd and before Will went and died (in a bizarre and very Spinal Tap 'drowning accident') and Colin turned himself into a comic-strip parody of himself, managed to produce their perfect synthasis of style and content.
'Synergy' is a song to die for. An absolute gem of a song, mixing drug-speak with
Star Trek samples and thrashy guitars. Everybody in the western world should be made to listen to this song at least once a day (possibly twice). After that, even the funky-wibbling of 'Raspberry Infundibulum', 'Jesus Loves Amerika', and 'Transcendental' sound tame. Also,
In Gorbachev We Trust includes a new twist on that old standby, the drug song, 'Adam Strange'.
And so we come to the finale: One last LP to take. Well, since I'm taking my favourite LP's of 'all time' and since 'all time' is 'any time' and there being no time like the present, there is nothing that excites, amuses or pleases me more than Denim.
For those who don't know, Denim are the bastard offspring of the 1970s, formed by Lawrence Felt with various ex-members of The Glitter Band. Denim sing songs about the Seventies in a way you've never heard before.
Back In Denim is a
seriously funny record. I mean, any band who can have the nerve to record 'Theme From
Robin's Nest' as a b-side have got to be worth a laugh, right? The opening song, 'Back In Denim' informs us that 'Denim put the soul in your rock and roll', which is the greatest piece of self deification since 'Hey, Bo Diddley'. In 'Middle Of The Road', Lawrence produces a literary of all of the music he hates before telling the listener that, if they are looking for him, he'll be found 'in the middle of the road.' There is better to come as the LP progresses through its centre piece, 'The Osmonds'.
'The Osmonds' is the most important song ever written about the 1970s. Whether tongue in cheek or completely serious, 'The Osmonds' tells it how it is, or rather was. The song name-checks every facet of the era, from Love thy Neighbour and Chopper bikes to Derby County and Oxford bags. 'American Rock' is the best Lou Reed song that Lou Reed never wrote, concerning two guys called Jake and Bill and a girl called Jane. It's affectionate and witty and also rockin'. Back In Denim ends with Lawrence's most personal song, 'I'm Against The Eighties' in which the singer tells us why he's hated the last ten years so much. It's interesting that from the nostalgic distance of two decades away, even The Osmonds can look pretty groovy. Let all the children boogie.
The generosity and friendship shown towards us British writers out here never ceases to amaze us and, as a consequence, each year we come back for more and usually drag a few new converts with us. Plus, it's always nice to see old friends and make some new ones.
There was a genuinely fascinating discussion on the development and future of Battlestar Galactica with Paul Cornell, Shaun Lyon, Caroline Symcox and Graeme Burk, Jill Sherwin's amusingly irreverent Buffy & Other Vampires event with Lars and Christa from Mad Norwegian Press, the annual TV Shows On DVD presentation, moderated by my dear friend Clay Eichelberger and including my old mate from the BBC Steve Roberts, and a tribute panel to the late and much missed Craig Hinton which was attended by many of his contemporaries and friends. For much of the rest of the time, this blogger checked out the dealers room (though, thankfully, this year he didn't come away with a bunch of novelty trinkets to clutter up the Stately Telly Topping Manor living room), took in a few other panels from the floor, networked and chewed the fat in The Green Room, generally wandered the corridors bumping into many old friends and held court in the bar on the subject of why $5.90 for a bottle of Heinekin is 'an effing disgrace!'
In other news, just to note, for anyone interested, that the second of my seven 'no really, these are the last Buffy articles I'll ever write, ever, honest' appears in Xpose issue 102 which is available in all good newsagents (and some very bad ones) today.
