1984 Music: Big Country, Steeltown

Release date: 19 October 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Sort of. 

I liked Big Country’s first album, The Crossing, but didn’t own it. I didn’t pay much attention to the release of Steeltown but encountered it a couple of years later in someone else’s record collection. I was a bit sniffy. Even in the 80s, I found romantic elegies for industrial masculinity passé and regressive – they said nothing to me about my life – and explicit politics of any kind were inherently naff (I didn’t like Billy Bragg either). 

  

This is very definitely a rawk album, not a pop one, but it has in common with Rattlesnakes not only its Scottish connection but the fact that it’s ten bangers in a row without a duff track, and every one of them fizzing with energy. Of course Cath Carroll (again) in the NME hated it (I’m really beginning to enjoy her invective): 

So strong is the crusading tone of the recorded Big Country that a stubborn image has formed in the old mind’s eye: it concerns Stuart Adamson who, each and every time he undertakes a vocal track, cannot reach the emotional peak required unless he is standing in front of a wind machine and a blinding light. …  As usual Big Country here sound heroic, tempestuous, impossibly romantic. Every instrument and voice has been put through their unique ‘Cavalry Charge’ effect and still, every time Adamson opens his one mouth to sing, at least three other Stuarts are heard in varying stages of folksy harmony. Nothing has changed. The diddle-diddle solo is given plenty to do and must by now be ready to take its place in Celtic history alongside tartan-edged white parallel trousers and hung-over New Year’s Days at Balmoral. 

Once again, Carroll’s review is shadowed by Steve Sutherland’s in Melody Maker. But he was a full-fledged believer: 

“Steeltown” is, simply, superb, and everything Big Country ever said they were and everything we sort of hoped, with fingers crossed, they might be. There’s no ifs or buts about it – no “if only they weren’t so naïve”, no “if only we weren’t so cynical”, no “if only The Clash hadn’t cocked it up so badly for everyone else”, no “if only they didn’t wear those checked shirts”, no if anything. 

The sound that emanates from this album exhilarates – the power is internal, dynamic and emotional, not external cosmetic bluster. All the rockist arguments have been defeated, we never stop to consider this passion might be posturing. Thin Lizzy doesn’t come into it, nor do those nagging doubts that the bagpipe guitars might be a gimmick. This is sheer purpose made practise, adrenalised action. 

The debate whether Adamson is capable of reinvesting cliché with meaning is rendered redundant. The deed is done. 

What’s interesting about this gushing is how closely it replicates the emotional arc of a Big Country song – if you’re willing to give yourself over to it – staring off into the middle distance, avoiding paying attention to inconvenient particulars under your feet. 

In fact, only two of the group’s four members were Scottish (and both of them were born outside the country). In any case, the group’s fetishisation of ‘Scottishness’ might seem to contradict my generalisation that few of the albums I’m discussing here show any real commitment to place. But if one were to be unkind, one might say that Big Country’s songs are set in the same country as Braveheart: an idealised, fantasy landscape, as opposed to, say, Glasgow – or Dunfermline. Let’s call it ‘Wonderland’. Here’s a 1984 performance of a track from The Crossing: 

 

I should clarify that ‘The Storm’ is my favourite track on the The Crossing, and seeing it played live only underlines the group’s high level of technical skill. They have fantastic chemistry together onstage – no doubt the result of a lot of practice. So I’m being unfair: the film that Big Country actually soundtracked in 1985, Restless Natives – which I went to see at the cinema, surely because of their association with it (it was probably a deserted cinema, since no one in England followed my example) – is cleverer and funnier about Scottish identity than Carroll’s review is able to imagine. 

 

As for ‘Steeltown’, well, in the early 1990s, I did a few shifts as a security guard on the old Ravenscraig steelworks near Glasgow. That enormous site, itself as big as a village or small town, had closed, but was yet to be decommissioned or dismantled, and so it had to be patrolled – for years – to prevent thieves, and for insurance-liability reasons: that is, to stop any trespassers from injuring themselves and suing. Some of the men I worked with had once been steelworkers there, at far higher wages. Not so much the world of Steeltown then: more that of The Full Monty. I described this experience obliquely in my first novel, Five Wounds: 

Everything was preserved in a sticky grease coat, to which dust stuck and was fruitful and multiplied. The uneven concrete floor was encrusted with ridges of once-molten metals and alloys, with oil and with pigeon droppings, which fanned out in pale, luminous layers under the places where the pigeons squatted in the roof. … As he grew up in these massive enclosed spaces, Cur rose from the floor onto gantries that had once moved over mysterious pits. Long-dead jokes and insults were sprayed on walls and pinned to bits of paper in the rest quarters. Cur read them with curiosity, and began to feel nostalgia for a life he had never known. He spent much of his childhood enclosed in what had once been a control booth for one of the gantries. It had scratched plastic windows and cracked leather seats. Underneath the windows, every inch of wall space was covered in pictures of naked women with spread-eagled legs. 

I think the legacy of these places is more complex than clichés normally allow. So I prefer the Big Country songs that sing – very effectively – not from the point of view of the men working in these places, but the women who love them: ‘Chance’ on The Crossing, and ‘Come Back to Me’ on Steeltown: 

 

I have your child inside me 

But you will never know 

I never will forget you 

While I watch that child grow

1984 Music: Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, Rattlesnakes

Release date: 12 October 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Yes. In my collection of home-taped C90 cassettes, number one had Kilimanjaro by the Teardrop Explodes on one side, and Rattlesnakes on the other. (I owned both albums on vinyl: I just didn’t have a record player.) 

This was the most commercially successful among the albums I’ve looked at so far, and given that its success was arguably based on taking the Postcard Records aesthetic and smoothing off its rough edges, I expected the music press to take a dim view of its hit-friendly gloss. But for the most part this doesn’t seem to have been the case. In the NME, the review by Cath Carroll (last encountered slagging off The Pale Fountains) fortuitously sits next to the review of Spring Hill Fair by The Go-Betweens in the 6 October issue: 

There have been many albums lovingly created under the working title of ‘I’ll Be Lou’s Mirror’, from the Dream Syndicate to the Blue Orchids – and that’s only in the last couple of years. Lloyd Cole’s marvellous all-purpose reptilian drawl can rescue a struggling melody, can turn re-translations of ‘O’ level French essays into testaments of suffering and the cool … Is there anyone who doesn’t like Cole and his cronies, who have made the Velvets do a part C&W album and part deep-south blues-funk – gentle, self-mocking, inoffensive and superbly balanced. Every song is instantly memorable. … The record plays like a film, heavy on limpid atmospherics and post-coital maudlinity shot through with illogical bouts of teenage exhilaration. 

Admittedly Steve Sutherland in Melody Maker was rather more critical, and along the exact lines I was expecting, but my impression is that he was the outlier, not Carroll: 

Like Orange Juice’s “Texas Fever” and ABC’s “Lexicon of Love”, “Rattlesnakes” is an album of cynicism masquerading as romance. It’s about past pop’s legacy to the present rather than love or hate or any of the emotions it feigns. It’s about how modes of expression haven’t moved on one iota from early Bob Dylan, how a generation bereft of its own voice falls back on playing with the language of its peers. It pretends to comment on this situation, boasts its own cleverness, preens its wit and says nothing. 

This sounds more like a review of Scritti Politti than Lloyd Cole, but it’s more targeted here: 

Of course, he’s really a cardboard Edwyn Collins and it’s as if he burst from nowhere to steal Edwyn’s thunder. He’s like a swot graduate from some pop school … Edwyn, an acutely sensitive and self-conscious youth, makes self-deluding records to pretend he’s wasted and reckless. … Cole, on the other hand, keeps a cool business head and seldom strays far from a settled, scholarly perspective. 

But even Sutherland concludes: 

I’ve been too hard here on purpose because this record’s good enough to stand it. Compared to most else around, it’s a gem ...

It’s hard to deny how polished Rattlesnakes sounds, especially for a debut – by that I mean that every song is laden with lyrical and musical hooks: there’s not a dud among them. Whereas Ian Pye damns with faint praise by describing Pacific Street as ‘very much an album’, by contrast this sounds like a greatest hits compilation (and in fact nothing Cole has done subsequently has had anything like its impact: I can only imagine how frustrating that must be). Moreover, everything is in service of the song: the only instrumental solo on the entire album is the guitar one in ‘Forest Fire’. 

 

And whereas you have to work hard to figure out the relevance of whatever obscure allusion Paddy McAloon is making on Swoon, here the references are all wrapped up in pointed one-liners (or couplets). While this can certainly be shallow – quotations instead of emotions, or an appeal to the snobbery of those who ‘get’ the references – it’s also a lot of fun if you don’t take it too seriously (‘She’s sexually enlightened by Cosmopolitan’). And there’s more specificity and deft characterisation in this quatrain than in the entirety of Pacific Street: 

Jody wears a hat 

Although it hasn’t rained for six days 

She says a girl need a gun these days 

On account of all the rattlesnakes

  

Many of these songs were written in a basement room at Glasgow Golf Club, where Cole’s father worked, and while Cole was as an undergraduate at Glasgow University. But the songs seemingly owe very little to that Glasgow connection. As I noted when discussing Julian Cope, this free-floating quality is shared by most of the albums I discuss. The Pale Fountains came from Liverpool and Prefab Sprout from Newcastle, as was very obvious when they spoke in interviews – but you wouldn’t know it from any of the songs on their first albums. The NME review of Rattlesnakes notes that ‘The contradiction of an English laddie groaning away in high Trans-Atlantic has become our firmest, unquestioned alternative tradition’. And most of Cole’s songs on this album also seem to be set in a fairly generic version of America (one with freeways and forest fires and the New York Times crossword). Only ‘2CV’ is explicitly set in London – and maybe ‘Charlotte Street’ since the road of that name in Fitzrovia is well-known, though that is also the song with the New York Times crossword, and a ‘union card’ (not necessarily American, but probably intended as such on an album that references On the Waterfront).* 

This kind of thing is often aspirational. It not only represents a desire to speak to American audiences and therefore be successful internationally, but more symbolically, it’s a rejection of provincialism: America is the great beyond, the place you escape to – the same place represented by the Western frontier, or by LA and Hollywood, in the American imagination. And in fact Cole later married and settled in America. 

The best thing I can say about this album is that it hasn’t dated at all: perhaps the fact that the allusions are all to 60s music, books and films helps in that respect. 

*There is also a Charlotte Street in Glasgow, though nothing in the song suggests it’s set there.

1984 Music: The Pale Fountains, Pacific Street

Release date: late February 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? I had the group’s second album, … From Across the Kitchen Table (1985), but not this one, which I didn’t hear until quite recently. 

With this album, we go three for three with music-press dismissals from the time of its release – in fact from the same week as the Swoon reviews quoted in my previous post, and with some of the same pejoratives. Cath Carroll in the NME liked the tracks ‘Reach’ and ‘Southbound Excursion’ and the trumpet of Andy Diagram, but little else: 

Boy scout and Bacharach chic, their brave new vision many moons ago, is now (if you’ll pardon the metaphor) the stuff that chips are wrapped in. Now that the limelight has shifted to their progressors, Aztec Camera and Prefab Sprout, it is safe to look upon them without being dazzled by the flare of average talent, publicity and milksoppiness. The work is still largely peopled with the thrumming of massed acoustic guitar lines which probably began blossoming in lunchtime Christian Union sing-songs at grammar school. There are a number of anonymous ‘pretty’ songs, dandy ear-fillers for the person whose ideal summer’s day is a reply to that Tracey Thorne fan letter and a lettuce sandwich. …. There are too many mannered ‘atmospherics’: somebody flicks flamenco on a Woolworth’s guitar whilst Mickey Head winds down and moans obscurely into his Horlicks before starting the song proper. 

I think Carroll has her class signifiers all wrong here: just because the Fountains cited ‘Shirley Bassey, John Barry and Simon & Garfunkel’ as influences (to quote the presenter’s introduction to their 1983 Old Grey Whistle Test appearance) that doesn’t make them grammar-school boys – which in turn makes their ‘milksoppiness’ a more pointed statement.

  

Admittedly Ian Pye in Melody Maker was more positive than Carroll: 

Rumours of a massive advance and then nothing, The Pale Fountains have already been written off as Virgin’s second Blue Rondo – a tax deductible mistake. Well not so fast. “Pacific Street” isn’t exactly “Forever Changes”, though it would dearly love to be, but it’s pop music well out of the mainstream and all the better for it. Despite the fact the Fountains have unashamedly based their whole sound around the classic acoustic guitars/Mexican horns/discreet strings of Love they still manage to appear daring in the context of mid-Eighties pop. For a start this is very much an album and not a couple of singles with a bunch of fillers. It sets a special mood of melancholic restraint and develops its themes with respect for a wider aim beyond three minutes of glory. … Just hearing real instruments (no offence intended to synths here) is refreshing but their confident blend of that seminal West Coast magic with early Brit pop – Sandie Shaw et al – is the real key to their magnificent sense of atmosphere. … at the end of the day I’ll take the quiet eloquence of The Pale Fountains in place of the Bowie and Clash clones polluting the charts without pausing for thought. 

 

The best way I can sum up Pacific Street is to say: it’s the polar opposite of Pornography by The Cure. 

One of the dynamics that makes Love’s Forever Changes so fascinating is the contrast between the upbeat, easy-listening music and the acid lyrics: the ‘cancer-in-the-sugar sensation’ Barney Hoskyns refers to in his Cope review. But here both music and lyrics have a curiously weightless quality: Pacific Street barely has a memorable lyrical phrase. Certainly the moon-in-June scenarios have no shadow of real sadness or complexity – but that also means they can’t be truly joyful. 

 

‘Unless’ manages to be a little melancholy: ‘There was a lonely boy or should I say, He was seventeen? You went away’. But that’s as profound as it gets. ‘(Don’t Let Your Love) Start a War’ cuts a little deeper, but if the titular image is strong, its meaning is not described with any specificity. Occasionally I suspect the bathos is meant to be funny, a wink that this is a band firmly rooted in realistic expectations: 'Cause we could go for ever and ever, Abergele's not too bad this time of year’ (I would actually have welcomed more detail on Abergele, but the town's name is all we get). Only the trumpet solo that opens ‘Beyond Friday’s Field’ feels genuinely sad. And while most of the songs seem to be about romance, there’s no sense of an individual personality being summoned, just a vague feeling. Consequently, it’s also a sexless album – the one quality it shares with Pornography. But while the latter album has no libido because it exists in a deep depression, here the absence of desire just seems to be another refusal of complexity. 

That seems like a more negative assessment than I intended to write: everything Ian Pye says in his review also applies. I also consider a lot of these criticisms to have been addressed in the Fountains’ second album, … From Across the Kitchen Table.