1984 Music: Other Stuff

Some other albums from 1984 I don't have the energy to write about in-depth, but that were/are on my radar and/or in my wheelhouse: 

The Go-Betweens, Spring Hill Fair 

Biba Kopf in the NME on 6 October: 

Spring Hill Fair? How do you get there? 

Ride in on the tide, the tidal wave flooding the suburbs where civilised streets trail off into the wild, drowning the last livestock, swallowing up liquid assets. And wait, wait for the waters to subside. Then cling like a leech to the mudstained walls, count the damage and latch onto what’s left. 

What’s left are The Go-Betweens, immigrant craftsmen watching helplessly as their dreams are dashed on the rocks, their dreams carried off on successive waves, their lives and loves rent apart. Cling like leeches to them, for if they don’t always seem like good company, there’s plenty of sustenance here. It just takes time for their abundant qualities to surface and shine. 

It’s taken me to this third LP to even notice they’re alive. I would have gone on blissfully ignoring them if it weren’t for the hooks of their current single ‘Bachelor Kisses’ – the LP opener – that affecting male rejoinder to ‘Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend’. The mud, it transpires, wasn’t mud after all, but a lifegiving silt deposit, staining everything it touches a rich, melancholy brown.

 

   

Prince and the Revolution, Purple Rain

 

Siouxsie & the Banshees, Hyaena 

This album is the one with Robert Smith of The Cure filling in on guitar, after a run of classic albums featuring John McGeogh in that role. I therefore expected it be inferior, but it's pretty good, and Smith makes a decent lead guitarist:

  

David Sylvian, Brilliant Trees

   

 

The Replacements, Let It Be

   

 

The Alarm, Declaration 

My first 'proper' concert was The Alarm on the Declaration tour at the Royal Court in Liverpool in 1984, and I went back to see them again on the Strength tour the following year. Now the lyrics remind me a little of the scene in This Is Spinal Tap (also released in 1984), where Nigel talks about his amp that goes up to eleven – but whereas Nigel understood this setting was to be reserved for special occasions, The Alarm used it as their default (I'm speaking of the group's emotional register, not necessarily the actual volume). I now find the resulting cascade of cliches and mixed metaphors a little wearing, but when the songs are simpler and more direct, it works better. In their Cliffs Notes summary of Stephen King's The Stand (a book and author I had no knowledge of in 1984), sticking to a script provided by someone else actually gives the lyrics more focus:

   

 

Billy Bragg, Brewing Up with Billy Bragg 

The Falklands War didn't produce too many great protest songs, perhaps understandably, given its scope was whatever the opposite of epic is. The greatest of this meagre haul is undoubtedly Elvis Costello's 'Shipbuilding', in either version (by Robert Wyatt or Costello's own), but the second-best is perhaps this track off Bragg's second album:

 

 

Television Personalities, A Sense of Belonging

And this is perhaps the third-best:

  

 

Cocteau Twins, Treasure 

I bought Head Over Heels, the Cocteau Twins' second album, with my 1984 Christmas money – I think because the cassette version included a bonus EP, so it seemed better value – but I now think this, their third album, is better.

 

 

Bronski Beat, The Age of Consent 

A truly groundbreaking song and album: 

  

 

The Sound, Shock of Daylight (mini-album) 

Something of a comeback for The Sound, after being dropped by their record company after their previous album. A statement of intent. Here's Allan Jones in Melody Maker on 7 April:

This is the way it sometimes goes: a group plays its way into the frame, cheered on by the enthusiasm of the music press, which always likes to think it knows a good thing when it hears one. Albums are championed, success is predicted; record companies look forward to emphatic ticks in profit margins.

Increasingly, however, the public isn’t quite so easily convinced. At first, the group’s supporters stand their ground, berating the public for its cloth-eared insensitivity. But the public refuses to budge, carries on buying Howard Jones albums.

By the time the group releases maybe its third LP, alarm bells are ringing. And, if that record stalls at the counter, heads start to roll: critics become embarrassed by their original declarations, start looking for new favourites. More often than not, the group ends on the heap, its dreams of glory vanquished by the harsh realities of a commercial market-place that demands immediate returns, obvious definitions of success. Crushed by the wheels of industry, the group is simply discarded and the world moves on, not terribly touched by the group’s demise.

This is very nearly what happened to The Sound; but The Sound refused to go under. The Sound didn’t flounder on the indifference that followed “All Fall Down”, they reorganised their lines of attack, prepared themselves for fresh assaults. The result is, of course, “Shock of Daylight”; what we call these days a “mini-LP”: six tracks, 30 minutes of bright, highly-charged music that stands as a defiant testimony to The Sound’s resilience, their determined reluctance to exit on cue for premature obscurity. …

The record rattles off the deck with the pneumatic clatter of “Golden Soldiers”, which finds Adrian Borland delivering an impassioned declaration of love over slurred brass fanfares, pugnacious bass and thoroughly hectic drumming. A breathless juggernaut of rhythm, “Golden Soldiers” successfully buries the idea of The Sound as some dreadfully dour old conglomerate. “Golden Soldiers” introduces a new Sound: more alert to the physical nuance of music; frankly, it sounds like The Sound have discovered sex and the arch poetics of yore have been put on hold, indefinitely.

  

 

The Triffids, Raining Pleasure (mini-album)

  

 

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Born in the USA 

It's actually the previous album, Nebraska, that gets a mention in my novel. However, the release of Born in the USA was a big event in 1984, even for the music papers. Adam Sweeting in Melody Maker on 28 July rather oversells the album’s gloom, perhaps in order to emphasise that it is ‘serious’ music he is entitled to take seriously:

All over Bruce Springsteen’s America, the lights are going out. In the bars, in the factories, in the frame houses. On “Born In The USA” Springsteen is older, even more claustrophobic and increasingly desperate.

It seems astonishing that Springsteen’s morbid obsessions – prison, busted marriages and the futility of good times – should have made him such a legend in the American heartlands. The man’s a walking museum piece, conceived and formed in the primeval days before MTV, still adhering to the simple, robust formulae of the rock’n’roll music he grew up with. He has more in common with Henry Fonda than with Boy George.

Armed only with some badly-corroded blue collar dreamscapes (“Blue Collar” director Paul Schrader gets a thank you on the sleeve, coincidentally) and the mighty E Street Band, Bruce has forged a collection of songs here that ranks with anything he’s done, and indeed, “Born In The USA” might be his best record. Nevertheless, the last mythic rocker paints pictures of unremitting gloom. I find this rather odd. …

If you were to boil down the subject matter of “Born In The USA”, you’d end up with death, either literal or metaphorical. Dead relationships, ruined lives, dead-end jobs and dead people. The fifth word Springsteen sings on the record is “dead”. The opener, the title track, blasts off with Bruce accompanied by a funereal snare drum. It’s a veteran’s lament (“Had a brother at Khe Sanh fighting off the Viet Cong/They’re still there he’s all gone”), a saga of a man who chose the army over prison and ended up with nothing. Springsteen sings it like a wounded bull while the band sound like an avalanche. …

It’s the earthy comradeship between Springsteen and his group which prevents this from being a cultural suicide note. On the inner sleeve the band are pictured in monochrome in a shadowy unfinished house, so deglamourized that Clarence Clemons looks like a plumber, while the rest could be detectives from the 38th precinct. Age has withered them, but they endure. …

Orange Juice, Texas Fever (mini-album) and The Orange Juice

 

 

The Mighty Wah!, A Word to the Wise Guy 

The mysteriously named 'X Moore' reviewed this album for the NME on 11 August:

The parallel between vainglorious Liverpudlian bands and Derek Hatton’s Liverpool Council Labour Group – banging of drums and beating of chests being dead popular with each – has been staring us Marxist pop commentators in the face these last few months, just waiting to be exposed. 

When I finally tracked down the lyric booklet for ‘A Word To The Wise Guy’ I discovered, blow me, that Wylie’s parting line on ‘Come Back’ is indeed “And hats off to Hatton…” and not “Let’s hitch up to Heather!” as had been painstakingly gleaned from weeks spent listening to Radio 1. 

From the sleeve of the album onwards – its logo the City crest overpainted with the cross of Lorraine, the cover painting’s portrait of The Resistance, the City’s motto ‘God Gave Us This Leisure (To Enjoy)’ scratched in the paint, the vision of Free Liverpool and occupation – ‘A Word To The Wise Guy’ is a document of a city in struggle. 

Maverick? Certainly. Magnificent? Possibly. It is unquestionably the best album about municipal socialism I’ve heard in many a year.

 

 

The video for 'Come Back' has invaluable footage of Liverpool in 1984, and it's a cracking song, whose call to return to the city I followed to write my novel (at least in spirit): 

  

 

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, From Her to Eternity

 

The Icicle Works, The Icicle Works

I'm not sure how much this is remarked upon, but surely the first album of this Liverpool band drew on the example of the Teardrop Explodes? In any case, Helen Fitzgerald in Melody Maker on 24 March quite liked it:

There’s something growing out of season. Something strong and fiery, something new and exciting, something only a fool would ignore. This record is mine and I’m not sure I want to share it. The Icicle Works are more than a favourite band, their music is a germinating seed of a rebellious attitude that isn’t falsely acquired. … “The icicle Works” is more than my album of the year – it might well be the album of my lifetime. You can agree or argue, that doesn’t matter – but the next time someone tells me there’s nothing exciting happening in music anymore, I’m going to laugh in their face.

  

 

Meat Puppets, Meat Puppets II

Not a million miles away from the Violent Femmes:

 

 

The Bangles, All Over the Place

This interview was broadcast on the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1984 or 1985, and it was accompanied by the video for the single ‘Going Down to Liverpool’. This was where I first encountered The Bangles – possibly in the same show as the report by Richard Skinner I mentioned in a previous post. The dates are a little uncertain: the YouTube rip of the Skinner report dates it to 1985, and some discussion on a forum dates this interview with the Peterson sisters more specifically to 19 February 1985. But the YouTube post of the interview says ‘circa 1984’, and the release of ‘Going Down to Liverpool’ is here described as forthcoming, which would also mean 1984. And I’m fairly sure I bought the album with my Christmas money at the end of 1984, and not in 1985.

The Bangles were the most commercial of the Paisley Underground bands, and – eventually – the most successful. They are a little poptastic for my tastes nowadays but I enjoyed All Over the Place at the time – especially ‘Going Down to Liverpool’. As Andy Kershaw’s interview suggests, the song was written by Kimberley Rew, ex-member of English psychedelic revivalists The Soft Boys, for his new group Katrina and the Waves, who also recorded it, in several versions. 

In the interview, Kershaw expresses scepticism that the very Californian Bangles even knew what a UB40 was – as any fule kno, it was the form you needed to sign on for unemployment benefit in the UK, and as such the inspiration for the band of the same name. I wonder if even Rew – an Oxford graduate – was self-consciously slumming it a little when he wrote the song, though most semi-professional musicians in the UK at the time were familiar with the Job Centre, since unemployment benefit effectively served as an arts bursary throughout the 70s and 80s. But the date of the song’s composition – 1982 – and the seemingly arbitrary reference to Liverpool suggest to me that it might have been inspired by Alan Bleasdale’s Boys From the Blackstuff, the most talked-about television show of that year (though it was not broadcast until November, so I may be wrong about this). 

I don’t know anything about the milieu The Bangles grew up in, but it’s hard to imagine them dropped down into Bleasdale-world for a musical guest spot in the way that UK bands appeared in the middle of each episode of The Young Ones (the second series of which was broadcast in 1984) – hard to imagine them on The Young Ones for that matter. Certainly there’s none of the scuzziness of The Dream Syndicate in their music, and everything feels very sunny and light – in ‘Going Down to Liverpool’, their delivery of the line about doing ‘nothing, All the days of my life’ is therefore unconvincing. 

Nonetheless I find their appropriation of the song interesting, in that it mirrors the American response to the so-called British Invasion of the 60s. This attitude is made clear by a 1986 performance, in which the introduction describes ‘Going Down to Liverpool’ as a trip ‘far, far away, across the ocean wide, to the land where The Beatles and The Rutles came from’. The inclusion of the latter group with the former feels significant here: the pastiche lumped in together with its inspiration. Both Liverpool and the UB40 are treated as fetishes of authenticity, but entirely detached from their original context. 

 

Echo & the Bunnymen, Ocean Rain 

Yes, yes, I know, I know. But I have nothing to say about it that Donnie Darko hasn't already said better. I admit didn't pay much attention to this at the time of its release. In my experience, you either liked the Teardrops/Cope or the Bunnymen, rarely both.

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.