ELVIS COSTELLO & THE ATTRACTIONS ARMED FORCES @ 45

 

Celebrating its 45th anniversary today is the third LP from Elvis Costello, Armed Forces, which was released on January 5th, 1979. It's the album where Costello firmly established himself as in control of his product and where he most fully refined his abilities to write tight, concise pop songs with biting sociopolitical commentaries. 

 

Recorded over an economic six week period beginning at the end of August of the previous year, this was Costello's second outing with his permanent backing band, The Attractions, and the first to credit the band on the album cover. By this time, thanks to an extensive touring schedule, they'd developed a close rapport, and keyboardist Steve Nieve in particular, was much more involved in working out song arrangements. Nick Lowe was back in the producer's chair and even contributed a song for the US version of the album, What's So Funny 'Bout Peace Love and Understanding. 

 

With his first two albums skewed towards a relatively "punk" aesthetic, Costello was conscious about making a move to a more accessible pop sound with this production, moving the band into a more "new-wave" friendly style of performance. The result was a collection of razor-sharp songs that were easy on the ears while still offering his acerbic trademark sense of cultural insight. The working title for the album at the time production began was "Emotional Fascism", which didn't stick, though it may have been more apt given Costello's attitude in the studio. By the time of its production, he'd established himself as the de facto "last word" when it came to any and all creative decisions, a stance which occasionally created tensions between him and Lowe. These strains were minor in comparison to the results that they achieved in the studio, however, with Lowe proving instrumental in delivering the results that Costello demanded. Overall, Lowe maintained a steady hand in the production and engendered a high standard of morale, creating a level of musical agreement within the band that some would say was never matched again.

 

For the record's packaging, the original UK release featured an elaborate gate-fold design with a herd of stampeding elephants on the cover. The North American version, however, had the package simplified and featured an abstract splatter painting instead, with the inner slip utilizing the UK's front image. The US version also omitted the song, Sunday's Best, in favour of Lowe's song.

 

Critical reception and audience response were consistently positive and have remained so over the decades since its release. Many consider the album to be Costello's best work of his career. Personally, this was my introduction to Elvis Costello after having seen his controversial appearance on Saturday Night Live. At the time I picked up the album, I was just beginning my foray into the new territories of "punk" and "new wave", with this album being among the first half dozen records I'd add to my collection from those genres. Along with RAMONES, The Clash, DEVO and Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello was one of the foundational artists who started me along a path of musical exploration that would take me to so many far flung creative shores. 

 

MUSIK VON HARMONIA @ 50

 

 

Celebrating its golden jubilee this month is the debut release from the super-group formed by fusing NEU!'s Michael Rother with Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius of Cluster, with Musik von Harmonia being released in January of 1974.

It was a magical musical union that began when Rother approached Cluster about the possibility of backing him up for a live version of NEU!. Once the trio began to explore their potential, via jamming at Cluster's rural studio in the German village of Forst, it quickly became apparent that a new entity had been given birth. Rother claimed that "it was sort of a musical love at first sight, really... it was just something I hadn’t experienced before." Abandoning his plans for NEU!, Rother stayed on in Forst with his new collaborators and they began recording the material that would end up on their debut LP.

Though the sound of the album clearly contains the DNA of both NEU! and Cluster, there is also a distinct sense that its totality is indeed more than the sum of those parts. It's no wonder the trio were so keen to pursue their partnership when it resulted in an album that has gone on to be considered one of the quintessential titles in the realm of so-called "Krautrock".

The album so impressed Brian Eno that he proclaimed Harmonia as "the world's most important rock band" at the time. In fact, he would end up coming to Germany to work with them, releasing a number of albums from their collaboration. That influence would extent to Eno's work with David Bowie during his acclaimed "Berlin" era, as well as set him further on the path towards developing his concepts for "ambient" music.

CHRIS & COSEY - SONGS OF LOVE & LUST @ 40

Celebrating its 40th anniversary this month is the album that turned a couple of "wreckers of civilization" into pop stars, as Chris & Cosey's Songs of Love & Lust hit the record shops in January of 1984.

As members of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle, Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti had created reputations for themselves as controversial outsiders and provocateurs, pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable as both music and art. However, after the release of their confection of a single, October Love Song, late in 1983, they set their sights on creating a kind of music that was seemingly more conventional than anything they'd done previously. Their move in this direction began with their first two albums, Heartbeat, and to a lesser extent, Trance, which had a much more experimental vibe, but Songs of Love & Lust was purposefully and unapologetically striving towards accessible pop music, with intelligible, up front lyrics and melodic hooks that could linger in one's memory of the song, long after it was finished playing. For hardcore "industrial" music fans, this may have come as something of a disappointment, but for those willing to indulge the duo, their flirtations with mainstream song-craft opened up some wondrous possibilities.

This album was my introduction to Chris & Cosey, post TG. I'd only really dabbled in TG prior to this album's release, and didn't know of the existence of Psychic TV or Coil at all. As such, it functioned as a gateway drug into that world, offering infectious hooks and grooving rhythms I could relate to quite easily, where TG had seemed mostly impenetrable. That would all change soon enough, however, as the rest of 1984 would find me backtracking through Throbbing Gristle's catalogue, as well as Chris & Cosey's earlier releases, and eventually discovering PTV and Coil, until I was immersing myself in their entire oeuvre of sonic mayhem. But this was the album that truly piqued my curiosity and stuck with me, continuing to offer up its delights all these decades later. There are still songs on this album that I consider some of their all time best works.

PUBLIC IMAGE - FIRST ISSUE @ 45

 

Released on December 8th, 1978, the debut LP from Public Image Ltd, First Issue, turns 45 years old today. After the spectacular implosion of the Sex Pistols at the beginning of the year, and encouraged by the band's debut eponymous single two months prior, punk fans were eager to see what Johnny Rotten had in store for an encore. Chances are they weren't expecting to get hit over the head with an album that kicks off with a 9 minute art-rock dirge, pleading for a death that never comes, and ends with a 7 minute disco piss-take whinging about how they "only wanted to be loved". And while it may have been dismissed by many at the time as a petulant private joke, the reality of the album was that the band were digging in their heels in order to utterly upturn the apple-cart of what punk (and pop music itself) was and could be.

PiL came into being thanks to a casual conversation between John Lydon and Keith Levene back in 1976, when they both realized that the day would soon come when they'd be on the outs with their respective bands (Sex Pistols & The Clash) and looking for new opportunities. They promised each other they'd put their heads together when that time came, and sure enough, PiL were born a couple of months after the Pistols fell to bits in January of 1978. With close friend, Jah Wobble, quickly recruited for bass, and drummer, Jim Walker, sourced via a music paper ad, the band set about inventing their music the way they imagined it should sound, as if the Pistols has actually succeeded in destroying rock 'n' roll instead of reanimating its fetid corpse.

Beginning recording in July at Virgin Records' Manor studio, the first track to emerge was the single, Public Image. I've gone into great detail on that song's single release already, so I won't repeat myself too much here. You can look it up if you want to. Suffice it to say that the song set the bar high for the rest of the album, perhaps too high. Following its completion, the next set of songs, Theme, Religion and Annalisa, were laid down at Virgin's Townhouse studio.

Theme kicks off the album with a 9 minute excruciating wall of thunderous bass, whip-cracking drums and Keith's guitar sounding like you're in a continuous auto accident with a flurry of shattered glass smashing into your face. Lydon tops it all off with his insistent wailing of "I wish I could die", though the song is not anywhere near suicidal. Ironically, there's something actually quite obstinate and life affirming about the agony being expressed and the clear indication that nothing is capable of convincing the songs protagonist to genuinely give up the ghost. Lydon has described it thus, "Didn't you ever have that feeling when you get up with a hangover, and you look at the world and think 'Count me out, I'd rather die!'?"

Religion started off as lyrics written while Lydon was on tour in the US with the Pistols. He tried showing them to the rest of the band, but they weren't interested. The idea of splitting the song into a spoken recitation followed by the full mix was another example of the LP balking at convention, refusing to pander to expectations. The song was divisive among the band members. Wobble, particularly in later years, felt the disparagement of religious belief was unfair, and he wasn't happy with the contrivances of the mix, with its radical panning of instruments and voices sounding forced. Keith always loved the track and came up with the idea of the two versions. Annalisa follows with its harrowing true life story of a young German girl starved to death by her superstitious parents, who believed she was "possessed". That wraps up the first side of the LP, while the single kicks off the second, leaving the remainder of the album to struggle towards completion.

After the first four songs were recorded, Virgin's advance dried up and the band were forced to resort to recording at Gooseberry Sound Studios, a cheap reggae studio used because Lydon knew it from the recording of some Sex Pistols demos. Lowlife, Attach and Fodderstompf were all recorded there, sounding less produced and immediate in their impact than the first half of the album. Fodderstompf, in particular, was another divisive track due to its absurdity and expedience. Jim Walker hated it, considering it a rip-off for anyone who bought the album. Keith didn't have anything to do with it. It's really all Wobble and Lydon. Built on a tape-looped drum beat & some kind of electronic squelching sound, musically it's all about Wobble's bass, which bubbles and percolates incessantly. Atop this minimalism, Lydon and Wobble exchange quips in annoying Monty Python style falsetto voices, wittering on about how they "only wanted to be loved" and how "love makes the world go 'round". At one point, Wobble lets slip the true motivation of the track, "We only wanted to finish the album with a minimum amount of effort, which we are now doing very SUCCESSFULLY!" As puerile as the humour is, if you love it, you LOVE IT! I'm in that camp, personally, and consider it the clearest harbinger of where the band would go on their landmark sophomore release, Metal Box. The formula, "slap a beat down and do weird shit on top", is sturdy and flexible and one I've utilized COUNTLESS times in the creation of my own music. The song even became an underground disco hit at NYC's infamous Studio 54, where its sentiment had an ironic appeal for the club's decadent celebrity clientele.

For the packaging of the LP, the parodying of the press begun with the tabloid newspaper style wrapping of the single was taken to another level. The record was packaged in gorgeous glossy photos of the band members, each emulating a different popular magazine cover. Lydon graces the front, with his hair a natural colour, combed and contained, all pimples covered in picture perfect foundation makeup and sporting a vacant stare that exactly captured the hollow essence of a vapid celebrity. The same is true for the rest of the band images. On the bottom of the back cover, the final indignity is printed as "Public Image Ltd would like to thank absolutely nobody. Thank you." Up yours!

With all its contrarian cantankerousness, the press had a field day ravaging the album. Sounds reviewer Pete Silverton said that the single is the "Only wholly worthwhile track on the album." He dubbed the rest of the songs as "morbid directionless sounds with Rotten's poetry running just behind it." CREEM's import reviewer dismissed the album as art-rock nonsense, comparing Lydon's singing to a rabid Yoko Ono. Yet that initial disparagement has given way to retrospective praise as the album's daring and uncompromising nature became an inspiration for future generations to push their own limits and take their own chances. It was the beginning of a process that would come to full fruition on albums like Metal Box and Flowers of Romance, albeit the latter represents something of a dead end for the intrepid musical traveller when it comes to PiL's forays into the unknown.

The album wasn't released in the US until a remastered reissue in 2013. Warner Brothers, the band's US label, felt it was unsellable and demanded the group re-record parts of it. They went back in the studio in February of 1979, but their efforts were for naught and only an alternate version of Fodderstompf emerged, used as a B-side on the Death Disco 12" single, released later that year. No other alternate recordings seem to exist, save a different mix of Annalisa, which was included on the 2018 retrospective box set, The Public Image Is Rotten. There are rumours of another song, You Stupid Person, being recorded after the single and subsequently abandoned, but only Jim Walker seems to recall it, claiming to have a cassette copy of a rough mix, but the other band members are more vague about it, and Lydon has no recollection of it at all.

As far as debut LPs go, First Issue is certainly one of the most audacious to have come from the original "punk" movement, offering numerous clear signposts for escaping out of the "Death Valley" of punk's restrictive three chord thrashing. It's a bratty bastard of an album, but it has proven to have staying power and influence well beyond the practical joke it was initially accused of embodying.

D.O.A - THE THIRD AND FINAL REPORT OF THROBBING GRISTLE @ 45

Released on December 4th, 1978, the second studio album from Throbbing Gristle, D.O.A. - The Third and Final Report, is turning 45 years old today. After the relative success of their debut album, Second Annual Report, and it's follow up single, United b/w Zyklon B Zombie, TG were able to finance their next album on the sold out sales of their first, which they'd pressed in an initial run of less than a thousand copies. It wasn't a lot, but it was enough of a fiscal foothold that they were able to put a bit more into their recording process & production values than had been possible with the first album, including some actual multi-track recording and a colour LP sleeve.

By moving beyond the mostly live recordings of the first album, it was an opportunity to explore the band's sonic potential in a more controlled environment. There were still live excerpts on D.O.A., but there was more emphasis on crawling out of the murk and achieving some clarity with their sound. They also decided to reveal themselves individually within the context of the band, offering up solo tracks from each of the four members. Peter Christopherson concocted a pastiche of surveillance recordings and found sounds, Genesis plucked out a violin based existential suicidal lament, Cosey invoked homey intimacy with the sounds of children playing and a remarkably pastoral guitar, and Chris put together an electronica tribute to ABBA's Dancing Queen.

Overall, the album offered up a bizarre and rather disjointed collection of musing and examples of their controversial nature. Death Threats made a track out of their answering machine tape, capturing agitators leaving their condemnations for the group. I.B.M. was a harbinger of technological tyranny, E-Coli warned of a bacterial apocalypse and Hamburger Lady, the album's crown jewel, told the tale of a burn victim's unending torment. All in, the album may have been a bit of a dishevelled assemblage of impressions, but it certainly held together as an expression of the group's individual and collective obsessions.

The cover photo and calendar poster, included with the first 1000 copies, added to the controversy of the release by showing a young girl in a potentially exploitative situation, deliberately left ambiguous by the group in order to breed a sense of vague unease with the product. Other packaging games included having the second 1000 copies of the album pressed with false track markers (the "bands" visible on a vinyl disc) to give it the appearance of having fifteen tracks of exactly equal length and a short sixteenth track. The official TG discography called this pressing the "Structuralist Spirals" edition.

Because of the intensity of so many of its individual elements, the album may be one of TG's most challenging releases, outside the overt rawness of their purely live albums. It's not casual listening or background music and, while it has moments of softness, they are shattered by occasionally brutal assaults, or twisted by deeply unsettling dives into bleak oblivion, so one must constantly adjust to each composition's entirely distinct aesthetics. Ultimately, it's an album that manages to touch on nearly every corner of the human emotional landscape.
 

JOHN & YOKO - UNFINISHED MUSIC NO. 1. TWO VIRGINS @ 55

 

Marking its 55th anniversary today is the debut album from John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Unfinished Music No. 1. Two Virgins, which was released on November 11th, 1968. A record like this can only exist if one of the people making it is a Beatle who doesn't have to worry about whether anyone buys it and has access to a record label owned by his band. That's not to say this shouldn't exist. The fact it does is a wonderful thing because it's such an incredibly bizarre, self-indulgent mess of chaotic fun. It's the sound of two people rediscovering their inner children and sparking a whirlwind romance in the process.

John Lennon first encountered Yoko Ono in November of 1966 when he was invited to attend one of her exhibitions in London. She was an obscure Japanese underground artist and John found her work possessed a decidedly positive world view, something he found exceedingly appealing given the general pessimism of most alternative artists. After the exhibit, he kept in contact with her and, two years later, while wife Cynthia Lennon was away from their home on vacation, he invited Yoko over to spend the evening in order to show her his home studio and play her some of his sound experiments. These were totally avant-garde improvisations he knew the Beatles would NEVER have any interest in, but Yoko was fascinated by them and the two began to work on making some noises together that night. The next morning, Cynthia came home unexpectedly and discovered the pair dressed in matching white robes and sitting cross legged on the floor, staring into each other's eyes.

What they created for this album was essentially a lot of random incidental noises and vocalizations layered over-top of a series of tape loops and snippets of pre-recoded bits and pieces. They had no arrangements in mind or plans for any of it. Lennon described Unfinished Music as "...saying whatever you want it to say. It is just us expressing ourselves like a child does, you know, however he feels like then. What we're saying is make your own music. This is Unfinished Music."

After it was recorded, Lennon had to spend the next six months trying to persuade the rest of the Beatles to release it on Apple Records. Their hesitance was somewhat justified, given it was generally reviled by both fans of the band and music critics. Actress Sissy Spacek, using the pseudonym Rainbo, even recorded the song "John, You Went Too Far This Time" in response to the album's cover! Despite its bizarre nature, John & Yoko still ended up working with George Harrison to construct the similarly inspired sound collage, Revolution 9, for the "White" album.

The album ended up becoming the first of a trilogy created by the couple, all working within the same strange cacophony of experimentation. Not exactly the kind of "music" most Beatles fans were looking for. As a result, these albums have become rather obscure artifacts within the canon of both The Beatles and John Lennon. The cover for the album featured the couple stark naked in their birthday suits. The distributors for the record were none too pleased with such an image and the LP ended up shipping tucked inside a brown paper bag for retail sales, which were unsurprisingly minimal.

QUEEN - JAZZ @ 45

 

Celebrating its 45th anniversary today is the seventh studio LP from Queen, Jazz, which was released on November 10th, 1978. While it was a commercial success at the time, it followed a pattern of ups and downs for the group throughout the decade, being viciously ridiculed by critics at the time of its release, though radically reassessed in later years in the wake of Freddie Mercury's passing.

Though Queen's rise to superstardom was initially a continuous trajectory upward, after the breakout success of Bohemian Rhapsody and A Night at the Opera in 1975, the band began to suffer through an oscillation of expectations. They continued so sell millions of records, but the persistent expectation to exceed past successes meant they were constantly unfairly dismissed if a record didn't, in some tangible way, seem to surpass what had come before. It's an impossible position to be in as a band. After Rhapsody, A Day at the Races, was met with mixed reviews and suspicion, until News of the World came along the following year and blasted away all the doubts that critics had been pelting the band with, but then Jazz came along and the press seized at the opportunity to feast on the band's flesh anew. Of course, The Game followed next and knocked everyone sideways before the band fell afoul AGAIN with Hot Space. And on it went...

When it came time to record Jazz, the band were staring down the barrel of massive tax bills in the UK, which meant that recording at home simply wasn't economically feasible. They had to scramble to avoid being crushed by the taxman and initially opted to record in France as an alternative. It was while they were attending the nearby Montreux Jazz Festival, likely the inspiration for the album's title, that fate would have them run into David Bowie, who was recording Lodger at Mountain Studios. Bowie recommended the band relocate to that studio and they were impressed enough with the facility that they moved operations there in July, the day after the jazz festival's completion. In fact, they liked it enough that the band would eventually buy the studio and make it their permanent base of operations going forward. On July 19, Brian May's birthday, the band attended the 18th stage of the 1978 Tour de France, which inspired Freddie Mercury to write the lead single, "Bicycle Race". They spent a total of about three weeks in Mountain Studios, only taking a few days off for Roger's birthday on the 26th, when they allegedly trashed a Montreux hotel. Mercury was reportedly seen swinging on a cut-glass chandelier in the hotel during the party! After wrapping up in Montreux, they returned to France to finish off overdubs before sending the mixes to New York for mastering.

For the packaging of the album, Roger suggested the minimalist disc graphic he'd spotted as graffiti on the Berlin Wall. The internal gate-fold photo showed a wide angle shot of the band's gear displayed in Mountain Studio. With Bicycle Race and Fat Bottom Girls picked as the premier double A single for the album, the band concocted a promotional event held at Wembley Stadium in the UK. They staged a nude female bicycle race that would provide images for the poster, included with early pressings of the LP, and the single's sleeve, although they had to paint on bikini bottoms to avoid protests for the single cover. There are also reports that Halford's, who supplied the bicycles on loan, hit Queen with a bill to replace all the seats due to "improper" use. Though the band saw it all as a bit of "cheeky" fun, they came under fire for their objectifying of women. Critic Dave Marsh wrote in his review in Rolling Stone, "Fat Bottomed Girls" treated women "not as sex objects but as objects, period (the way the band regards people in general)", and finished by famously tagging Queen "the first truly fascist rock band".

Most other contemporary reviews of the album were similarly disparaging. Mitchell Cohen of CREEM called Jazz "absurdly dull" and filled with "dumb ideas and imitative posturing". Village Voice critic Robert Christgau said the album was not wholly bad, even finding "Bicycle Race" humorous, although he said Queen sounded like the band 10cc "with a spoke, or a pump, up their ass". Sales of the album and its singles were certainly respectable, but the tactic of releasing another double A-side single didn't pay off as well as it did with We Will Rock You b/w We Are the Champions from the previous album. With critics of the era behaving like a tank of hungry sharks, any signs of weakness were a clarion calls to start the feeding frenzy. Queen were CLEARLY on their way OUT, so you'd better get your bite in before they sank into the abyss.

In the years since its release, Jazz has most certainly been given a repeal of such undeserved harsh judgments, with both critics and fans coming to recognized the album's strengths. Within its baker's dozen songs, the band took fans on a breakneck, whiplash inducing thrill ride of styles and techniques. Rather than a chaotic hodgepodge, it's a roller-coaster ride, from the bizarre mania of Mustapha, to the menacing funk-rock of More of That Jazz, the band keep listeners on the edge of their seat through every turn. Numerous songs became live staples and Don't Stop Me Now, in particular, became Freddie Mercury's most quintessential composition, embodying the singer's philosophy and attitude in a way that has even been scientifically recognized as one of the most catchy songs ever written!

Personally, while I loved the album at the time it came out, and still do, back at the end of 1978, I was beginning a journey into a different realm. Though I started that year by joining the official Queen fan club, and stocked up my wardrobe with Queen T-shirts, badges and belt buckles (and I DID go to high school with ALL of it on!), by the end of 1978, I'd discovered music by RAMONES, The Clash, Sex Pistols, DEVO & Elvis Costello, so Jazz was kind-of the "beginning of the end" of my obsession with Queen. 1979 would not see them issue a new studio LP, only the uneven, poorly received Live Killers, and while I bought The Game in 1980, it was the last Queen LP I'd spend my money on for at least two decades. But nostalgia brought me back to the boys eventually and I still appreciate giving this record a spin now and then.