1984 Music: The Blue Nile, A Walk Across the Rooftops

Release date: 30 April 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? No, not until I moved to Glasgow in the early 90s. 

Note: apart from the Melody Maker and NME reviews, all quotations in this post come from Allan Brown’s book, Nileism: The Strange Course of The Blue Nile, which I recommend. 

This album makes an interesting comparison with Sparkle in the Rain. It’s much slower and more contemplative – introverted where Sparkle in the Rain is extroverted, minimalist rather than maximalist – but here too we are in an electrified and modern city (‘Tinseltown in the Rain’, ‘Automobile Noise’). In keeping with the lack of specificity about geography I’ve already noted in blog posts about other 1984 albums, there are no unambiguous topographical details on A Walk Across the Rooftops. Nonetheless, no one who’s ever lived in Glasgow will be in any doubt as to why the waterfront is depicted as lashed with rain on the Simple Minds album, or why the ‘big rhythm’ of the city on ‘Tinseltown in the Rain’ is indistinguishable from the hiss of falling water.

So we’re in Glasgow. 

Or are we? 

Certainly a lot of listeners assume we are. Here, for instance, is fan Yvonne C. Stewart talking about ‘Tinseltown in the Rain’: 

For me the song is all about Glasgow. It reminds me of walking up Argyle Street in the rain, like the day I bought the record. It reminds me of seeing everything in black and white for some reason, just as it’s about to get dark and all the lights come on. A wet Glasgow evening. Lots of people around. Lots of noise. The lyric ‘Is there a place in this city/a place to always feel this way’ gives me the feeling of being safe and happy, just being there. 

But arguably none of this is in the song – someone who lived in Manchester could as easily project their own experience on it (plenty of other cities have ‘redstone buildings’ for example). And while the group themselves may have had Glasgow in mind as the backdrop for several songs, ‘Heatwave’ and ‘From Rags to Riches’ were explicitly inspired by the (then-)recent history of Beirut, while ‘Easter Parade’ was a film noir snapshot of 1940s New York, where the Easter Parade is a regular fixture. 

Like Yvonne, I brought my own set of prior assumptions to this last song when I was living in Glasgow in the early 1990s, where parades are mainly occasions for sectarian provocation by the Orange Lodge. So I thought there was an interesting contrast between the sentimental, nostalgic atmosphere of the song – only recorded on successive Sundays in the studio to preserve its air of sanctity, though I didn’t know that then – and the harder actualities of life in Glasgow. But I brought that contrast to the song, as more careful attention to the lyrics would have told me, with their references to typewriters, hats, radio, etc.

Nonetheless, the songs on A Walk Across the Rooftops do have this quality: they cry out for listeners to fill in their gaps – to move towards them imaginatively – because they have a kind of hollowed-out quality. As David Quantick explains: 

[I]f a song is a house, most bands wallpaper it and put in the pictures. The Blue Nile seem to have done all that, then taken all the furniture and pictures out and painted it white. It’s not that they write Spartan songs, they write songs where everything has been removed. It’s the art of subtraction that they specialise in. … With ‘Tinseltown In The Rain’ or ‘A Walk Across The Rooftops’ people use terms like cinematic and Cinemascope. But they’re tiny records. They’re like looking at a beautiful city then realising you’re looking at a miniature model. 

One of the most common words used about The Blue Nile’s records is ‘emotional’, especially about Paul Buchanan’s rich, saturated vocals. But there’s another word that comes up over and over again in Allan Brown’s book: ‘detached’. Referring not only to the abstract lyrical perspective and the group’s attitude towards fame, fortune and publicity, but to their whole identity as mediated through the music, which exists in the tension between these two seeming opposites: emotional and detached. As Buchanan put it in an interview with the NME published on 12 May 1984: ‘I don’t think we really want to present ourselves as players or personalities or people.’ 

This negation of self assumes an almost spiritual quality: Brown describes the first album as ‘dry, precise, reverb-free music; as still and devout as children praying’. In that sense, its strategy is quite different to Sparkle in the Rain and The Unforgettable Fire: there’s nothing ‘big’ about this album, which, as Quantick suggests is better understood as ‘miniature’, and not only because it entirely eschews sonic exaggerations like gated reverb. 

Another word that comes to mind is ‘synthetic’. A Walk Across the Rooftops was very much a studio concoction – the group didn’t perform any of this album live until the tour for their second album, five years later. So the album has a hermetic, self-enclosed quality. And it was constructed meticulously over a much longer length of time than was normal for a debut album – mainly due to a collaborative arrangement with the album’s producer, Calum Malcolm, who also owned the studio where it was recorded. Its creation was famously financed by Linn, then known solely as a manufacturer of hi-fi equipment, who had decided to start a record label to demonstrate the superiority of their analogue equipment for reproducing the music they released. So studio precision was built into the brief. 

The sound is dominated by keyboards, many of them treated or manipulated; by synthetic drum pads – played by an actual drummer, Nigel Thomas, though working under mechanistic constraints (he wasn’t allowed to use cymbals or fills); and a string quartet on loan from the Scottish National Orchestra, which, like the drums, you might initially mistake for a synthetic substitute, except for the richness of the sound. The bass is central, but, while there are sometimes guitars in the mix, they’re rarely prominent. Some of the sounds are samples, or improvised effects, presented as short fragments repeating within the song structures – but the non-sampled sounds often have this quality too, which is why it’s easy to mistake their origins at first listen. In any case, sampling required a great deal of ingenuity given the state of technology in 1984. Paul Buchanan: 

To generate all the sounds in “From Rags to Riches” was hard work. None of it came out of a synth, apart from the little Jupiter. … We found objects and recorded them, changed them, moved them, put them under water, we did a thousand things to get what we were looking for. 

And floating above it all – that voice. Much of what it’s singing is very simple, even banal – but it’s the way he’s singing it. It reminds me of a quotation from Terrence Malick, which was a kind of motto for me when writing The Angels of L19:  

When people express what is most important to them, it often comes out in clichés. That doesn’t make them laughable; it’s something tender about them. As though in struggling to reach what’s most personal about them they could only come up with what’s most public. 

This perhaps sells Buchanan short. For every couplet like ‘Do I love you? Yes I love you,’ there’s a line like ‘Tall buildings reach up in vain’. In any case, in a song, lyrics don’t exist in isolation: they are presented to us through a performance and against a background of instrumentation. 

Obviously the music press loved them, even without any gigs in support of the album. Here’s Paul Du Noyer in the NME from 5 May: 

For this listener at least, recollections of the ’84 Spring sunsplash will forever be entwined inside the record I’ve played so constantly in the past two weeks. Meet The Blue Nile and greet their album debut: some music to shade your dreamtime in subtle colours, a quiet influence, delicious persuasion. … It’s a record with scant similarity to anything else around at the moment, perhaps the fruit of some reclusive, obsessive vision. 

It’s difficult stuff to describe (often a good sign), … It’s easier to suggest the moods it evokes: romance, doubt, a rich sadness. The keynote is restraint; far from straining for effect, The Blue Nile allow their music to find its own atmospheres … a kaleidoscopic shift of textures where nothing intrudes to upset the balance or divert the steady, even flow. 

And Helen Fitzgerald in Melody Maker on the same day: 

Good music can always complement the mood you’re in, but you know you’re on to something really special when songs can create and influence these moods of their own volition. The Blue Nile’s stunning debut album seduces the emotions as well as the senses, and instead of fighting its effect, the sensible thing to do is relax and enjoy it. 

Seduced initially by the intoxicating width of the title track with its heart-stopping open spaces and sensuous basslines, you’ll recognise straight off that you’ve hit on a vein of hedonistic luxury. There’s a mesmeric quality in this music that makes you want to savour every track with the respectful appreciation of a connoisseur. … 

“Tinseltown In The Rain” stands out as the sweetest flavour. Lush strings and a dynamic beat forming a backdrop for the incisive clarity of Paul Buchanan’s vocals. Lesser mortals have compared his mellow tones to Tom Waits, John Cale (on “Easter Parade”) and even Nils Lofgren, but that’s all preposterous nonsense. 

Rich and smooth, his tones have no sharp edges, no unpleasant gravel. … 

Experimenting with texture is obviously a Blue Nile fascination, from the sparse piano/vocal simplicity of the ballad “Easter Parade” to the more complex constructions of “Heatwave” and “Tinseltown.” The authors are bent on moody intricacy without being artificially clever. 

Individually, the tracks weave patterns that leave traces of spectacular emotions. Nostalgia, romance, elation and reflection are woven into their fabric with gossamer-fine delicacy. 

Their spacious arrangements are deceptively fluid. Listen to “From Rags To Riches” (the instrumental version, “Saddle The Horses” is the single’s B side) on headphones and you’ll see that their simplicity is a carefully crafted illusion.

1984 Music: The Waterboys, A Pagan Place

Release date: 1 June 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Very much so. 

The Waterboys were my favourite band from 1985–8, and the most exciting concert I’ve ever been to was their gig at Liverpool University Student Union on 2 May 1986. As the previous post suggests, I only became aware of them after This Is the Sea was released in 1985, but I quickly bought everything I could find – and nowadays I consider 1984’s A Pagan Place to be the superior album. Its successor is a little too pompous, the cavernous reverb on the wall-of-sound production a little too much. 

It’s worth noting that the version of A Pagan Place now available on digital download and CD after a remaster in 2002 is not quite the album I bought on vinyl in 1985. There's an inferior outtake ('Some of My Best Friends Are Trains') inserted in the middle, and two of the songs included on the original release have been altered: the outro for the second track ‘All the Things She Said’ is pointlessly extended, adding an extra minute or so to the running time to no good effect, while the third track ‘The Thrill Is Gone’ substitutes a different take with a much looser vocal than the original release – one might argue it’s more emotional; alternatively one might describe it as more amateur. I have no idea why these alternate versions weren’t just included as extra tracks – fiddling around with the contents of an album many years after its release (beyond remastering) makes no sense to me. But this is a great album in whatever iteration one encounters it. 

The Waterboys are really a vehicle for songwriter, vocalist and guitarist Mike Scott. The group’s composition changed from album to album, and this was part of Scott’s design, to keep things fluid (hence the name). Indeed, the first album released by the ‘group’ was really a collection of solo demos with occasional contributions from other musicians, notably saxophonist (and later mandolinist) Anthony Thistlethwaite. A Pagan Place was therefore the group’s first proper release, and notably features keyboard virtuoso Karl Wallinger (later of World Party), though he was not present for the earliest sessions in 1982. 

This fluidity creates a sense of musicians newly excited by the possibilities of working together, and reconfiguring regularly to recapture that excitement. It's there in the immediate burst of energy in the album’s opening seconds, when a fastly strummed acoustic guitar charges forward into ‘A Church Not Made With Hands’, and is then joined by Wallinger’s rolling piano, drums – and trumpet from Roddy Lorimer. This song is one of the great album openers of all time, and the first lyrics we hear are a quotation or paraphrase from CS Lewis’s The Last Battle: 

Bye bye shadowlands 

The term is over 

And all the holidays have begun

At the time, Scott was also a fan of Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, and was interviewed in Strait, the Christian music paper I mentioned in my post on the Violent Femmes. However, as the album’s title of A Pagan Place suggests, he did not define his beliefs as narrowly as Lewis did, and has subsequently I think disassociated himself from this connection entirely. He was for many years (perhaps still is) a resident in the Findhorn community in Scotland, which doesn’t seem to have any doctrinal commitments beyond a belief in holistic ‘spirituality’ and a commitment to ecology. More of a hippie than a Christian then – he even looks a little like Donovan. But in 1984 the lyrical allusions on the album and the sense of yearning for transcendence the music shares with U2 were more than enough for me to identify a kindred spirit. 

The childlike frame of reference borrowed from Lewis is important I think – part of the album’s Romantic openness to innocence and wonder. At the climax of ‘A Church Not Made With Hands’ a chiming, soaring electric guitar solo follows the similarly childlike declaration ‘Isn’t that a pretty sun? Sitting in a pretty sky. Ooh, will we stay and watch it darken?’ 

Interestingly though, the album’s ‘relationship’ songs are all clouded by adult emotions and regrets (‘All the Things She Gave Me’, ‘The Thrill Is Gone’ and ‘Rags’) – my distant memories of reading Scott’s memoir suggest that these songs may have been inspired by the same person. 

One of my favourite songs on the album is ‘Red Army Blues’, about a Soviet soldier condemned to the gulag in 1945 for fraternizing with Americans. It has revealing lyrical weaknesses: ‘I prayed for Mother Russia, In the summer of 43, And as we drove the Germans back, I really believed that God was listening to me’ doesn’t really sound like the sentiment of a loyal Soviet atheist, and ‘Bit my lip against the snow’ hardly does justice to the savagery of the Russian winter. But the song ultimately works because it has a very clear dramatic structure: in other words, it works as a story. And the music serves that Doctor Zhivago conception of individuals caught up in larger turmoil, with fake Russian choirs and pseudo- balalaikas, and epic saxophone solos. It all requires a certain suspension of disbelief, but it takes you places.

The album’s closer, ‘A Pagan Place’ takes us back to the state of mind of its opener, and its ‘Church Not Made With Hands’ – significantly, Roddy Lorimer’s trumpet reappears here. And we are definitely back in the world of Romanticism, where nature is the gateway to the world of the spirit, not its antagonist, and where some some sacrificial, Christ-like hero – or perhaps just a fellow seeker – serves as our point of identification: 

How did he come here? 

Who gave him the key? 

It slipped into his hand 

So secretly 

Who put the colour 

Like lines on his face? 

And brought him here 

To a pagan place

Like the subject of ‘A Church Not Made With Hands’ the figure invoked here is mysterious, elusive. It’s important that the lyrics are phrased as a series of questions. For Scott, unlike CS Lewis, it’s being open to the questions that matters – not pretending to have the answers. And if this figure is a ‘god’, then perhaps it is Pan, who is named in ‘The Pan Within’ on This Is the Sea and ‘The Return of Pan’ on Dream Harder. I’m also reminded a little of Herne the Hunter in the fictionalised pantheism of Robin of Sherwood, a television series first broadcast in 1984, though this is certainly a coincidence rather than an influence, since it wasn’t broadcast until most of A Pagan Place had been recorded.

I haven’t mentioned the album’s most famous track. ‘The Big Music’, which gave its name to the sound of all the groups who shared Scott’s wide-eyed wonder – it’s not one of my favourites. 

For the music weeklies in mid-1984, Scott was a person of interest, but not a star. Someone to keep an eye on for the future perhaps, but not yet entirely convincing. For the NME, the album’s release seems to have fallen into the gap created by the strike I mentioned in my post on the Violent Femmes, but David Quantick reviewed one of the group’s first concerts at Strathclyde University on 5 May: 

The Waterboys are one of those bands who get played on David “Kid” “Jensen”’s show without actually manifesting any signs of existence outside that world; I contend that nobody owns a Waterboys record. At all. This is a pity, since Mike Scott and his Garçons D’Eau are the purveyors of what we forest folk call a rocking sound. … 

Mike resembles Chris Jagger, which fact of course instantly reminds the funky young reviewer of the rough-edged and smelly-men-in-food-stained-coats aspect of the Waterboys’ music; you could say the boys play a kind of r’n’b, but you’d need a very supportive family to get away with that simple a remark, because The Waterboys have a sense of pop as well, one which occasionally gets too grandiose, granted, but a sense of pop that knows a good tune and goes out with it for years until people wonder when the wedding is. … 

I like The Waterboys: although occasionally harking back to a ‘70s idea of rocky pop and songwriterly posing, they stay on the right side of contemporary. Their main problem is that they’ll always be a serious-minded and intelligent group lacking the power actually to move you. …

In Melody Maker, Jeremy Lewis wrote a short review of the album for the 2 June issue: 

The Waterboys have gone halfway to making a great record, filled with bright and brassy pop. Roddy Lorimer’s incisive trumpet breaks the surface of the music with a flourish as bright as gleaming chrome, and although their little portrait of the world contains more grey than that of the Pale Fountains, the same reliance is placed upon enticing melodies and synth-less sound. 

Yet there is an outmoded element within the album that revolves around the persona of Mike Scott himself, a sort of pre-punk early Seventies folksiness that occasionally spills out all over the sound and mars the enterprise.. If Scott falls short of excellence, then it is because he pulls himself down into the more of some rather tacky past influences.

Occasionally, though, it works. “Rags” unrolls with an almost organic elasticity towards a series of great, gushing climaxes. “The Big Music” is filled with booming echoes, vitality and tension balanced in a dramatic equilibrium. “Red Army” has a powerful, pained saxophone replete with tragedy. … 

An odd record, wearing a mask of commerciality, but with something a little more elusive at its core. I don’t think Mike Scott wants to be pinned down and his record is rather like a blurred snapshot of a slippery spirit. … A record marked by too much cant and not enough candour: “I have seen the big mountain/And I swear I’m halfway there”. Perhaps next time, he’ll give us the view from the peak. 

Some of this doesn’t feel like it’s engaging with the music at all – the accusations of unfashionable influence just seem silly now. And r’n’b – even ‘pop’ for that matter? Surely this is music positioned interestingly between folk and rock (something increasingly obvious on subsequent albums)? Its ‘elusive’ qualities are correctly identified – but this is a feature, not a bug. Just when you think you’ve got Scott pinned down, he’s on to something else. 

The NME also ran an earlier interview with Scott on 21 April, in the run-up to the album’s release. Paul Du Noyer’s framing remarks here are notably more positive: ‘[advance single ‘The Big Music’ is] his strongest effort yet, the record’s a blessed match of power and grace. It’s definitely rock, and proudly so; an avalanche of acoustic guitars, real drums, impassioned vocals, trumpet and sax as bold as brass can be’. They later ran another interview on 11 August, in which Scott explained: 

“I am really interested in life. What it is, where it comes from, what is behind physical being … and I think all that is religious. It’s hard for me to give you an answer. I care about what I say. 

“I went to church as a little boy. I was always quite pissed off with church. It was really miserable, all these miserable people in their best clothes with flash cars outside, inside these four walls, singing dirgey hymns. It didn’t seem like a celebration of life, and there’s no better way to pay tribute to the thing that gives you life than by celebrating life. Bob Marley said, I don’t go to church – I am a church. That was how he celebrated life.” … 

In the thoughtless modern way of categorisers, The Waterboys will be simply indexed with U2/Bunnymen/Big C and their garrisons of hero-rock. Almost any sector of ‘A Pagan Place’, with Scott’s overwhelmed voice at its heart and the music swelling and swirling all around him, keeps that promise: of warrior legions galloping to the crest of a hill … 

“… Over which lies the new world!” Scott offers a sharp giggle. “I don’t see that really …”

1984 Music: Julian Cope, World Shut Your Mouth and Fried

 

Release dates: early March and 9 November 

Was I listening to these in the 1980s? Yes. 

I begin my survey of 1984 music with Julian Cope’s two album releases from that year: World Shut Your Mouth and Fried. If one were to believe the critical wisdom of the time, Cope’s career peaked with the early singles by the Teardrop Explodes – the ones released on Zoo Records. These singles, ‘Sleeping Gas’ and ‘Bouncing Babies’, were, supposedly, better than the re-recorded versions on the band’s first LP Kilimanjaro, which was in turn better than the group’s second and final LP, Wilder, which was in turn better than Cope’s first solo LP, World Shut Your Mouth. All these successive releases were compared unfavourably in reviews to their immediate predecessors, so that Wilder, dismissed on release, nonetheless became a stick to beat World Shut Your Mouth with. 

With Fried the critical trend changed slightly: although for the NME, it marked no improvement on World Shut Your Mouth (and indeed David Quantick’s review contains the expected unfavourable comparison to the previous record, even if he remained dismissive of both), the Melody Maker review by Steve Sutherland was far more positive. That wasn’t enough to help sales though: Cope was dropped by Polygram soon after. He seems to have taken it all to heart, to the extent that World Shut Your Mouth is currently unavailable officially, and for many people Cope’s solo career begins with Fried. 

This is a pity. My own personal ranking would be: Kilimanjaro is better than the early singles, Wilder is better than Kilimanjaro, World Shut Your Mouth is as good as Wilder, and Fried is a (small) step down from both. Both of the first two solo albums traditionally suffer, not only by comparison with Cope’s earlier work, but also with Ocean Rain from the same year by his perennial Liverpool rivals, Echo & the Bunnymen. But they are very different records. Ocean Rain is a self-conscious attempt to create ‘THE GREATEST ALBUM EVER MADE’ (as the adverts described it), and if it doesn’t reach those heights, it achieved enough to intimidate its own creators out of attempting to replicate its success for another three years. By contrast, both Cope’s 1984 albums have a dashed-off, spontaneous feel – attempts to shake off the doldrums of the collapse of the Teardrops – but this gives them a real energy. Ocean Rain is stately and self-important, swaddled in strings: World Shut Your Mouth and Fried, recorded much more quickly and for a fraction of the cost, blow a raspberry in its direction. 

 

Consider the following lyrics from ‘An Elegant Chaos’, the first few lines of which are singled out for particular scorn in Barney Hoskyn’s NME review of World Shut Your Mouth: 

People I see 

Just remind me mooing 

Like a cow on the grass 

And that’s not to say 

That there’s anything wrong 

With being a cow anyway 

But people are people 

With the added advantage 

Of the spoken word 

We’re getting on fine 

But I feel more of a man 

When I get with the herd 

Sure, it’s no ‘Fate, up against your will’, but it is … well, it’s quite funny. Its silliness makes me laugh – as it's intended to. It also has some clever wordplay. 

The lyrics have this kind of loose inventiveness and lack of concern with the singer’s dignity throughout, and the music and production are enlivened with all kinds of playful grace notes: Kate St John’s oboe, a sitar, samples of revving engines and children playing, backwards guitar riffs, and invented historical references in the lyrics (‘Metranil Vavin’, which pretends to be about a Russian poet and reads like a treatise on Gnostic theology). But, in contrast to the lush orchestration of Ocean Rain, the sound throughout World Shut Your Mouth has a kind of fundamental cheapness, which for me is part of its charm. The keyboards and organ are particularly unmajestic, as is the drum machine on ‘Kolly Kibber’s Birthday’.

  

Hoskyns was not impressed by any of this. From the NME review published on 29 February: 

The problem with Cope is that he writes everything in major chords, so that there’s never the cancer-in-the-sugar sensation he demands of music. All is delivered with the same orotund enthusiasm, be it the soft Blondiesque pop of ‘Elegant Chaos’, the forced Matt Johnson-style funkiness of ‘Pussyface’, or the wistful Kevin Ayers of ‘Lunatic and Fire Pistol’. To this day, Cope is singing ‘Baa-Baa-Baa’ and meaning it. 

I’m not qualified to say whether everything on the first solo album actually is in major chords, although it surely can’t be true of the mournful ballads on Fried. But I think the obvious rejoinder would be that World Shut Your Mouth is supposed to be an upbeat album – and its success in this regard was the result of some psychic effort on Cope’s part ('I hold on to beauty / If I lose my grip I might fall'). It’s certainly not the product of complacency. 

Fried is more of the same from World Shut Your Mouth – except it's gloomier, with less melodic variety and fewer musical or lyrical jokes. Despite the deliberately ridiculous cover image of Cope crawling naked under a giant tortoise shell, it takes itself more seriously: the queasy antics of ‘Reynard the Fox’, which describes a character cutting his stomach open, are diagnostic here – there’s no hint of a wink to soften the horror of this image. 

One of Cope’s weaknesses in this early phase of his career was his fondness for minimalism and repetition. In his first volume of memoirs, Head-On, he tells of being mesmerized by a Subway Sect performance in Liverpool in 1977:

Drums and bass started together, a slow mid-tempo beat: Boom-bum-bum-bum, Boom-bum-bum-bum, Boom-bum-bum-bum … 

Then a single tiny guitar note: Bow, bow, bow, bow, bow …

For at least a minute, the riff held steady, then the lead singer carelessly turned half round, the mike in his left hand. ... There was no chorus. Just the same riff throughout. I guessed the chorus must be the bit where everyone sung the same word over and over. The song finished and there was polite applause.

The next song was the same. A kind of three-note Stooges thing. But still at 15 mph. This time the guitarist played a chord for most of the song, but when the singer muttered, ‘Solo’ into the mike, the guitarist returned to the steady Bow-bow-bow of the first song. 

‘Sleeping Gas’ is an early example of a song written according to this model: the reason I find the Kilimanjaro version superior is that it mitigates the monotonous chant of the lyrics with inventive production that layers sounds to create texture (horns, a double-tracked vocal, etc.). Cope was only a co-author for this particular track, but it seems to serve as a model for too many of the compositions on Fried. I’m incapable of musicological analysis: I just know that as a listener to World Shut Your Mouth, the movement in the vocal line recalls someone excited about what they have to tell you (pace Hoskyns) – and some songs are so bursting with ideas that they change musical gears several times, e.g. ‘Sunshine Playroom’. Conversely, Fried has several songs that not only do nothing to disguise their monotony, but actually emphasise it with a none-more-basic musical arrangement, especially ‘Search Party’ and ‘Torpedo’ on the second side – but also ‘Laughing Boy’ and ‘Me Singing’ on the first: and that’s 40% of the album. ‘Sunspots’ does the same thing, but here, as in the Kilimanjaro version of ‘Sleeping Gas’, we have the clever arrangements and different layers (e.g. tuba, a recorder) that provide the variety missing from the melody. 

 

Finally, despite the caveats above, there is something quite remarkable about ‘Reynard the Fox’ beyond its grotesque imagery (though that imagery is also part of it). Consider the passage where Cope sing-speaks: 

Reynard left and went to Warwickshire, to a mound near a railway line, With canals and a freezing swamp. He climbs high up above the countryside And breathes freely. To the south he could see Polesworth, and to the North he could just make out the ruins of the priory where Joss and I Played cricket as children. … 

When pop albums evoke place, they usually do so implicitly, by atmosphere or indirect allusion: think the post-industrial landscape of Manchester as mediated by the music of Joy Division. By contrast, this passage from ‘Reynard the Fox’ seems a very modest, literal account, eschewing the kind of poetic detail prized by many critics, but this level of topographical specificity is virtually unprecedented in mid-80s pop (including on the rest of Fried and World Shut Your Mouth). The obvious precedent is The Beatles, in ‘Penny Lane’ (its twin ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ is actually far less specific in this regard), but I suspect many musicians deliberately avoid this kind of detail in the mistaken belief that being less specific makes their songs more ‘universal’ and thus easier for listeners to identify with. But a favourite writing maxim of mine applies to songs as much as to stories: it’s always better for a story to be set somewhere rather than nowhere. Hence The Angels of L19 is set mainly within that postcode (and, even more specifically, mainly on South Mossley Hill Road).

It’s perhaps symptomatic that Cope reverts to a speaking voice to deliver this quasi-voiceover narration in 'Reynard the Fox', which offers details from his own childhood (Joss is his brother). It also seems important that this passage immediately precedes the description of Reynard cutting his guts open: it’s establishing the setting for what might now, in the context of this precise invocation of place, be interpreted as a shamanic ritual. This interpretation is partly based on Cope’s notorious stage antics, where he cut his own stomach while singing this song, perched on a custom mic stand named after Yggdrasil, the World Tree on which Odin’s body hung after he sacrificed himself to himself (Odin is hymned directly on Fried’s ‘O King of Chaos’). So perhaps ‘Reynard the Fox’ is the foundational text for Cope’s later interest in both prehistoric archaeology and magic ritual.