What is there to say about this album? Contemporary with the Stone Roses making one epochal album and disappearing into legal limbo for six years, the La’s made one epochal album and disappeared completely. Stories abound about front man Lee Mavers and his obsessions with perfection. Did he really insist that he wanted a mixing console with ‘genuine 1960s dust’ on it? I don’t know. Did the band record some of the tracks repeatedly, trying to create the sound Mavers heard in his head? Probably. Is ‘There She Goes’ a drug song? Yes. Is ‘Timeless Melody’ one of the most brilliant tracks ever recorded anywhere by anyone? Yes.
Outside the cd insert.
As I understand it it was assembled by Steve Lillywhite from the detritus of numerous recording sessions, none of which were definitive enough for the band. The record company stepped in and insisted that an album be put together, and it was.
Inside the cd insert.
The result is an album that is essential for any fan of tuneful guitar pop. There are at least half a dozen great little tunes, and only a couple that drag at all — even if the band apparently complained that they had played badly, possibly on purpose because they did not really want to work with Lillywhite, just so that it would not get released….what a mess it ought to be! I recall a quote — I think it was Eric Temple Bell — who in his book Men of Mathematics said something like, ‘It takes two to make a masterpiece; one to paint it and another to shoot the painter when it is done’. And similarly, a work of art is, Da Vinci apparently said, never finished, only abandoned. Mavers needed help abandoning this album, and quite possibly never wanted it released.
But he’d struck a deal with a record company, and eventually it found its way into the public consciousness. And this is one occasional when I am glad that the creator did not get the final say, because even if this record is not exactly what he wanted it to be, it’s a bloody good listen.
How good were the Sports? That’s rhetorical; they were brilliant. I completely believe that if they had been English they would have been huge in the late 70s, up there with Elvis Costello and other big new wave acts. Or maybe not, given how their experiences in America worked out (their single ‘Who Listens to the Radio’ made the charts there, but they failed to capitalise…). Anyway, while this album does not have that hit on it, nor ‘Don’t Throw Stones’ which was probably their second most famous song, it is a better album that Don’t Throw Stones, and a must for anyone who likes snappy guitar rock with odd (though not always heartfelt) lyrics and perfect tunes.
Cover of Suddenly by The Sports.
The Sports began in Melbourne in the later 70s, growing out of a bunch of Melbourne acts, meaning that every member was already a pub rock pro by the time they started. The initial line-up had Ed Bates on one guitar and Andrew Pendlebury on the other, but after the first album Bates left and Martin Armiger came in; thus formed the definitive version of the Sports. In total the band released four LPs (all excellent, but this one the best, I think) plus a couple of EPs and a belated live album (Missing Your Kissing) which is hard to find.
On the original LP the cover was die-cut, with sort of louvres in it, which always got damaged. That explains the off look of the CD cover, which is pretty ordinary.
‘Strangers on a Train’ is probably the most well-known song here, but the album takes off with disciplined energy right from the start. The band races through a bunch of three minute pop-rock songs as if they’ve got to get the riffs and tunes out before their arms explode. ‘Murmurs’, ‘Go’ and ‘Suddenly’ border on the frenetic. ‘Oh Mama No’ veers into territory similar to the Who’s ‘I’m A Boy’ (‘Everybody knows/Even when I keep my pants on/I’m gonna get arrested some day…No, mama, no, don’t make me wear that dress tonight’), while ‘The Lost and the Lonely’ makes the best use of a theremin in popular music since the Beach Boys. It is an ode to the late night lonely hearts requests radio announcer — ‘there’s a letter from a mother of three, she wants to hear Gene Pitney, she’s got to hear Gene Pitney’. I love the hint of suburban, housebound desperation wrapped up in just that one little lyric — it’s like poetry in how much it packs in . ‘I Tried to Love Her’ (‘but she’s a lunatic’) adds a little more humour. The overall vibe is one of inner city relationships between grown-ups who kind of know each other lie but can take it. So there’s irony, there’s cleverness, there’s a little feeling, but it is anything but confessional.
I can’t list my favourites. The only track I ever even consider skipping is ‘It Hurts’.
This is my number one album when I want to be picked up and forced to enjoy the beat. A tight, professional band playing great, unpretentious tunes with consummate skill, never hanging around long enough top get boring, never indulging themselves. It’s commercial guitar pop/rock at it’s best.
Pete Townshend himself once (in his autobiography, I think) declared Quadrophenia the last great Who album. Since (apart from the semirandom B-sides and rarities collection Odds & Sods) The Who By Numbers was the very next Who album, that clearly makes it less than great. Well, I guess if you like your Who to be bombastic stadium rock (like Quad and Who’s Next) then that is true. No, that’s not fair; it’s true anyway. This is not a great album. But it is an interesting and oddly beguiling one.
The Who By Numbers cassette inlay card.
Townshend is responsible for nine of the ten tracks, Entwistle for ‘Success Story’ which, despite some rather ‘first world problems’ whining about the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle (‘Away for the weekend/We gotta play some one night stands/Six for the tax man and one for the band’ and ‘Back in the studio to make our latest number 1/Take 276, you know is used to be fun’) ends up as one of the more affirmatory tracks on the disc.
Townshend veers all over the place. Self-flagellation and paranoia (‘However Much I Booze’, ‘How Many Friends’, ‘In a Hand or a Face’, ‘Dreaming From the Waist’), tuneful dirty jokes (‘Squeezebox’) and middle aged ennui (though Townshend was only 30 at the time, he’d already done his nostalgia trip on Quad, so in the accelerated world of the jaded pop star was embarking on his mid-life crisis) (‘Imagine a Man’ and to some extent ‘Slip Kid’).
The Who By Numbers LP sleeve.
Despite the weird mix of teenagerish angst and mid-life crisis in the lyrics, the sense of someone who knows they should be on top of the world but has not become who they wanted to be, the album works for me and I think it is because of the music. ‘Slip Kid’ is a part of the Lifehouse jigsaw puzzle that never came together, and is as good as most of Who’s Next and decidedly less pompous than some of it. ‘Dreaming From the Waist’ ends with an Entwistle bass solo that shows why his playing was and is so highly regarded. Acoustic guitars, crunchy electric guitars, lead bass, that Entwistle sound on ‘Success Story’ that sounds like a truck, piano-y ballads, it’s all here, and the tunes are top-notch, so the album has a nice varied texture. We get the ukulele-driven ‘Blue, Red and Grey’ which is a tiny masterpiece that could be about enjoying the little things but might be someone reflecting on life before the jump off a bridge. Daltrey was at his peak; having stretched himself in unexpected ways on his solo albums, be brought that lightness of touch to songs like ‘Imagine a Man’, whose vocal sound follows on from Daltrey more than from any Who album.
The cover — I vaguely recall an interview with Entwistle where he said that the cover for Quadrophenia, with its booklet of B&W pictures, text, clever reflections in the scooter’s mirrors and so on, has cost something like £30,000 (I wonder what a house cost in 1973), whereas By Numbers cost about 30 quid. Along with Shilo by Neil Diamond, I am guessing it is the most scribbled-on album cover in history.
So what we have is a somewhat depressed mishmash of an album, lit by flashes of unexpected humour and instrumentation, and still interesting because the four people at the middle of it all were so brilliant together despite themselves. But I rather suspect it is also one for the fans rather than the casual listener…
If you’ve tasted The Who and found them bombastic and blokish, this album might be interesting. If you don’t like the more confessional, self-medicating style of song writing, it is definitely not for you. If you like The Who but have skipped this one because it has on it none of their more famous tracks, give it a go.
The Lucksmiths were a tuneful guitar-pop trio (and briefly, at the end, a four piece) based in Melbourne. Crucially for me, they played a lot of gigs in Ballarat at the beginning of their career. Indeed, their first two lengthy recordings — First Tape and Boondoggle — both namecheck Ballarat institutions of the early 90s — the Bridge Mall Inn, a live music venue that attracted a lot of good acts — and 3BBB, Ballarat community radio, one of the first broadcasters to pick up and play them. I have vague memories of them playing the refectory at Ballarat University College (then University of Ballarat and now winner of the ‘tertiary institution with the worst acronym’ award, Federation University), although this might be an example of remembering things that never happened. I know the Dead Salesmen (or the duo, singer and guitar player) played there.
CD insert of “A Good Kind of Nervous” by the Lucksmiths.
Anyway.
From the beginning they showed a knack for beguiling tunes and lyrics that reflected the everyday concerns of folks living in the inner suburbs on less-than-munificent incomes. Shared houses, the weather, relationships, the pub. The Lucksmiths never put their hearts on their sleeves and wailed. They reflected ironically, and not without puns.
“A Good Kind of Nervous” is in my opinion a transitional work. Over their years together, they broadened their instrumental pallet and cut down on the wordplay, the songs becoming subtler, melodic as well as tuneful, and the lyrics less flippant.
This album is the last of the early albums. It has songs about being fascinated by crimes and murder mysteries, and ditties of under two minutes. The next album, Why That Doesn’t Surprise Me is lusher and more spacious and, while hardly a sudden break from the past, in retrospect is clearly the first ‘later’ Luckys album.
Which is not to say “A Good Kind of Nervous” is trivial or lightweight. Some tracks are just larks — if there is a more tuneful couple of minutes than ‘Under the Rotunda’ I’ve yet to hear it (‘…and I didn’t mean to yell it’s/just that I’m a little jealous/’cos you can do the Rubik’s cube and I can’t/I relied on blind faith and dumb luck/but eventually the stickers were unstuck.’), and ‘Up’ (‘I know this is ridiculous/I’m an idiotic Icarus’) was clearly copied by Disney… well, probably not, but they should have used it in the movie. ‘Columns o’ Steam’ is simply a little joy, especially if you’ve ever ridden Puffing Billy. ‘Wyoming’, though slight, nicely evokes the view of empty spaces seen fr0m a bus. ‘Caravanna’ and ‘Guess How Much I Love You’ strike a note of gentle ennui, something of a trademark of the group.
It’s not heavy. It doesn’t make me weep or punch a wall. It makes me smile a bit, and whistle now and then, and maybe feel a little sympathy for a couple of the protagonists. ANd fight to avoid singing along with a couple of tracks.
And then I go about my business, feeling just a little bit better.
What can I say about You Am I? This album came out at their mid-90s commercial peak, when the sky was the limit and they were in the middle of a run of three number 1 records.
It got a lot a press at the time, but somehow even then their success was too good to be true. Can you be idiosyncratic, lyrically dense and vulnerable and be successful if you are not the Smiths? I’m not sure. Even back then the writing was on the wall; they went number 1 but they also debuted there and watched their records fall out of the charts pretty quickly. Their fans bought them up, but there was no long tail. They never had a real hit single, nothing in the top 10. Singer songwriter guitar player Tim Rogers was too honest and too diffident at the same time, and interviewers never seemed to ‘get’ him. They just did not look like the next Midnight Oil or INXS. They looked more like the next Go-Betweens — destined for a coterie following, and critics’ darlings.
Hourly, Daily CD insert.
I was reasonably youthful then. I had my copy of Hi Fi Way. I’d seen them live. I bought the album even after hearing the rather too jangly single version of Mr Milk on the radio. I kept going to see them live, I’m even in the audience of their live album (and that is a cracker, I might say).
This record won a bunch of awards, called ARIAs, that apparently ended up in Tim’s toilet. It’s a sixties pop record, a suburban concept record about meeting girls and getting stuck where you are. It contains possibly Tim’s best ever lyric — and there are a lot to choose from — in ‘If We Can’t Get it Together’, a song that should have been the first single in my humble and probably wrong opinion. About getting married: “We might as well do it next week, cos we’ve met everybody that we’re ever gonna meet.”
It’s got a lot of good tracks on it, and in my opinion no really weak ones. It’s an Australian masterpiece, no doubt. Since this album they made the equally marvellous #4 Record and then turned from a beat group into a rock group, which at the time I didn’t like and am still ambivalent about, though I do like their self titled album of a couple of years ago, and more all the time.
Hourly, Daily bombed in the UK, where it was seen as a pale echo of dying Britpop; but taken on its own, twenty years after its release (not that it was really of its time anyway), it stands out as an example of sharp guitar rock/pop writing, with snappy hooks both musical and lyrical, and underneath it a connection to a place — the suburbs, wherever they are — and a way of life that might not be what you wanted but it was what you had, and it’s limits had to be overcome but at least it gave you a place in the world.
If you’ve never given it a spin, you could do a lot worse.
It seems to me I’ve been a bit limited in these entries so far — three British acts from the 60s (Townshend, The Stones, Cook & Moore) and two British acts from the late 80s and 90s — The Bluetones and the Manics. So I’m going in a very different direction here and running with a British act first prominent in the 1970s — Elvis Costello and the Attractions. My copy is a tape; here’s the insert unfolded and scanned:
Inlay card for Armed Forces.
Right.
Well, there’s not much to say here; this is EC&TA at the absolute height. There is not a bad track; worst thing about it is a little tape wow at the beginning of side 1, which I think might be particular to my copy.
It’s everything a guitar pop album should be; tuneful, witty yet with something to say. You’ll know ‘Oliver’s Army’, but it’s not more of a stand-out than ‘Two Little Hitlers’ or ‘Accidents Will Happen’. The songs tend to be short, the lyrics a little dark and paranoid, though political rather than personal; he’s the observer on the outside, looking at the world and at other people with a cold eye.
Sometimes he gets accused of his lyrics being too clever; objectively, I think that might be true, but in fact I’ve never been bothered by that. I like pop music that doesn’t treat me like I’ve never read a book. So many songs seem to just rhyme ‘blue’, ‘do’, ‘you’ and ‘through’.
This is one of the essential post-punk albums, almost the quintessence of the new wave, channelling the politics and anger of punk through a more tuneful and poppy sensibility.
A couple of tracks don’t stick in the mind, but maybe that’s a comment on the quality of the rest.
Pete Townshend is one of the major figures in ‘rock’ music, writer of a clutch of songs that have become part of the fabric of our world — in Australia we had a panel show called ‘Talkin’ ’bout your generation’ (or something like that), which had a theme tune that was clearly meant to evoke ‘My Generation’ but not to alert it’s copyright holders… I have heard ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’ quoted by people who don’t know where it comes from (I’m not 100% sure it’s original with ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, I suppose).
That was all done with The Who, the most erratic of the ‘great’ bands of the 60s and 70s, capable of the sublime and the ridiculous, often consecutively or even simultaneously. Townshend has a history of taking himself and rock ‘too seriously’, and yet would not have left the legacy he has without doing so. Irony is fashionable and a useful defence mechanism, but it takes courage to say ‘these ideas are important to me and I’m going to try to do something meaningful’. And in a field as ephemeral and commercial as popular music, that’s no easy credo, and one open to ridicule.
Add to that his personal travails, implied by the abused little boy at the centre of ‘Tommy’ and the angular stories in Horse’s Neck‘, and then approached gamely in Who I Am, and add the legal trouble over his access of illicit material on the web (which, when viewed against the background of the abuse he suffered and the charity work he had been engaged in since long before the incident was clearly an exercise in idealism and foolishness rather than anything else) and Townshend is a complicated, conflicted and contradictory figure. The dissolute rocker who remains naïve, the conscious artist who works in the most commercial of spheres, the lauded guitarist who hates performing.
By the late 1970s, the Who had run its course; the band was to make two more albums before turning into a nostalgia show, but Keith Moon had finally killed himself, Townshend was in a drink, drug and self-disgust induced pit (in the liner notes he thanks ‘Remy Martin Cognac for saving my life by making the bloody stuff so expensive’) and Roger Daltrey was looking at more and more outside projects. The writing was on the wall.
Townshend, like many artists, fed off the discord. He was angry over the treatment in the press of Moon’s death and channelled it into ‘Jools and Jim’. He was angry in general and gave us ‘Empty Glass‘ itself, a track that begins ‘Why was I born today? Life is useless like Ecclesiastes say’, which sounds kind of self-pitying except its delivered in a yell that says I’m gonna do something about it or die trying. He knew the drugs were damaging himself and his ability to do what he ought for those around him, but they were so beguiling he could not help himself — and we have ‘A Little is Enough’, one of the absolute stand-out tracks on the album, and something the Who could not have recorded without turning into nothing more than Townshend’s backing band. And perhaps the nonsense made the moments of tranquillity dearer, seen with greater appreciation, and we have ‘Let My Love Open the Door’ (which seems to have become popular with move soundtrack collators) and ‘Keep on Working’, a loping track that begins ‘I was digging in the yard today…’
I find the sound of the record, even on CD, tinny. ‘Gonna Get Ya’ would be better at half the length, and I like ‘I am an Animal’ except some of the lyrics are pretty naff. Having said that, the sonic breadth is impressive, if tilted towards the early-80s electronic, with some big guitars, some acoustic guitars, some syth stuff and everything in between.
I bought this record years ago second hand on vinyl; I don’t think I was old enough to grasp a lot of the meaning. The CD copy I have has four ‘bonus’ tracks that are reworkings of tracks on the album, and while interesting they add little. They don’t need to add much; this is one of the most important composers in popular music operating at the top of his game. If the production was not so redolent of 1980 I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone who likes thoughtful, if rather personal/confessional, popular music. As it is, I still recommend it but I would suggest listening to a few tracks if possible first. The sound feels trebly, too ‘bright’; if ears were eyes you’d be squinting at times listening to this record.
Last week I looked at the 29 minute, 12 song December’s Children (and everybody’s) by the Stones. This week we’ve got 11 songs in over 50 minutes, on the Bluetones’ incredibly self-assured (is there such a thing as being ‘quietly arrogant’?) debut, Expecting to Fly. Released in the slipstream of Oasis and Blur and ‘Britpop’ in the mid-90s, the album went platinum in the UK, though was less successful in other places where it was not carried by the larger cultural movement (‘Cool Britannia‘, anyone?). With a band name that recalled the Stone Roses and a sound that was part Brit guitar pop and part west coast (the album is named for a Buffalo Springfield song, although the band hails from Hounslow, not far from Heathrow airport, and the album opens with a roaring plane) they knocked out some pretty nifty singles. Some insight into the influences may be gained by a quick reference to front man Mark Morriss’s recent album, The Taste of Mark Morriss, which is a collection of covers (‘This record should be played LOUD. Ideally on a yacht.’).
Single sleeves — ‘Bluetonic’ (left) and ‘Slight Return’.
On release it topped the UK charts for one week, briefly displacing Oasis. The buzz around the album came from the first two singles, the tuneful ‘Bluetonic’ and the sublime ‘Slight Return’, two of the shorter, more focussed tracks. Many of the others stretch out with a lot of tuneful but not always distinctive guitar work from the heavily underrated Adam Devlin, a man who can twang, funk and riff along with the best of them — though a lot of that was to show up more clearly on later albums and their eclectic B-sides.
‘Slight Return’ is why I bought the album. (It’s the one that goes ‘you don’t have to have the solution’, which I mention because the band has a habit of not giving their tracks the most obvious names.) I have rarely heard a song and been moved to buy the record instantly. I think the video clip was on Rage (a show that is in its own way an Australian icon), and I went out an toddled off to JB HiFi and bought the album. I got a special deal — it came with a VHS tape containing the film clip and a bunch of other clips from contemporary Britpop bands signed to the same label. Shed 7? Menswear? Something like that. I have it somewhere still.
On the track listing there’s a gap between the fifth and sixth tracks, and on the album you can hear the needle slide into the run off groove and track six starts with it being dropped onto the record.
As I noted, there’s a sonic sameness across the album — the four band members provide virtually all the sound, and it really is a pretty consistent bass/guitar/drums, and while there is some variation in tempo it is not pronounced. Having said that, there’s not a weak link in the playing, and as you listen to the album over again the variations do become apparent, they just sort of lie there waiting for you to hear them. Again; quiet confidence. ‘The Fountainhead’ bounces along nicely, ‘Time & Again’ is a strong closer. ‘Vampire’ is rather anonymous and could easily have been cut, but I would not drop anything else. ‘Putting Out Fires’ I like a lot, except it uses ‘was’ in a grammatically incorrect way that must have been intentional (this is a band that wields irony and ambiguity with considerable flair — ‘Glad to See Y’Back Again?’ is a B-side on ‘Bluetonic’), but it grates nonetheless.
The Bluetones are tuneful, clever, rock extremely effectively when they want to, and I can attest that they’re an excellent live act. Very few bands have their sense of humour or ability to knock out a catchy tune with deft lyrics, and, oddly, their (relatively) famous debut album is not the best showcase of those abilities. So I read over what I’ve written and I sound less than enthused. I really like this album. ‘Bluetonic’, ‘Slight Return’, ‘Carnt Be Trusted’ (note the pronunciation) and ‘Cut Some Rug’ are great tunes with smart lyrics, and much of the rest of the album is not far behind. Few album have four great songs and a bunch of other nearly as great ones.
Inspired by One Album a Day, I have (perhaps characteristically) decided to aim lower — I’m going for one a week… Partly because my collection is not that big and partly because I just can’t be bothered. It should work out at about one a week, anyway.
And this week it really is a record — December’s Children (and everybody’s) by The Rolling Stones. Indeed, my copy is so genuine it plays rather poorly.
Side A label.
This is late very early Stones. Next in line would come Aftermath, their first album of all original material. This one is evenly split between covers and originals. Speaking of covers, here’s the cover picture, captured by long time collaborator Gerard Mankowitz:
Mmm. Surly.
And it would not be an early Stones record without some kind of trippy nonsense scrawled out by their manager and producer, Andrew Loog Oldham:
Heavy.
And in fact he does not even quite tell the truth; these are not twelve new tracks at all. This album is an oddity of the era in which releases were very different in the US and the UK and record companies wielded enormous power over their signings. There is no UK equivalent for this album, as far as I know. It is made of up tracks going back to almost the very beginning of the Stones’s recording career (the rather sweet ‘You Better Move On’ which I first saw/heard on 5×25). It contains a couple of big singles, including ‘Get Off of My Cloud’, the follow-up to ‘Satisfaction’ and (for me at least) preferable to that song if nothing else for Charlie’s drumming and the syncopated backing vocals. That is at the start of side 2. The album opens with a frantic cover (‘She Said Yeah’) which showcases Mick’s rapid-fire croaking, and that track is followed by three more covers before we get UK B-side ‘The Singer Not the Song’ which is a nice example of Keith’s and Brian’s guitars ‘interweaving’ such that one comes to the front then the other, filling in each other’s licks rather nicely. This lies at the heart of the Stones’s sound, along with the hairy backing vocals that sound more like fun than like the Beatles.
Each side ends with a pointless live track that is better skipped. Side two is originals except for said final track, and all but ‘Gotta Get Away’ are Stones gold (and that track is not half bad). ‘I’m Free’ is another showcase for Charlie Watts, marred only by an aimless little guitar break that is saved by being (at least) short. ‘As Tears Go By’ is a ballad, apparently the first song Jagger/Richards wrote together at the behest of Oldham, and originally recorded by Marianne Faithful. This version was released in the US as a single. ‘Blue Turns to Grey’ is a little gem of guitar pop, perhaps a little clichéd, but showing a little more feeling than the (already) cynical Stones were wont to show.
But.
Of the covers on this album (ignoring the noisy, pointless live stuff), only ‘You Better Move On’ stands out from the average, while of the originals all except ‘Blue Turns to Grey’ can be found on The London Years, which is absolutely essential for any record collection that has any interest in the 60s. This is because the album is flanged together from singles and B-sides and tracks previously released in the UK but not the US, while The London Years is unusually comprehensive in that it contains all the singles and B-sides from both sides of the Atlantic (not from Australia, though, where believe it or not the Stones’s version of ‘Under the Boardwalk’ was a single, if I recall correctly). And in this age of mp3, I guess there’s no need to buy whole albums for just a couple of songs anyway. Further, this really is ‘just a bunch of songs’. There is no careful sequencing, no ‘album experience’ here, and so there’s no harm in just cherry picking what you like. This is well before AOR.
So, in short, this little album (29 minutes long, including the live stuff) only has two songs that can’t be sourced elsewhere more sensibly. So it’s a marginal purchase at best; I got my copy a long time ago and I can’t recall where, and if I had already had the singles collection I’m not sure I would have forked out for it. I am not a Stones completist. Having said that, I’m glad I have ‘Blue Turns to Grey’ and ‘You Better Move On’. Even if the sound is a bit dodgy — for several reasons.
(1) It is vinyl and vinyl clicks and pops and gets scratched (warmth — huh! Just means the transmission function has no sharp edges.)
(2) It is old and at some point was not well treated; and
(3): which just makes for muddy sounding stereo. Mono would be better.
The Mob really has no idea. The Mob is swayed by advertising, by reputation and by precedent, but not by reality. Not like you and me. It reacts to itself following complex dynamics that are hard to predict and don’t make much sense. Take popular music. Most of it is appalling; and it always has been. Bad songs in the top ten is not unique to any decade. The sixties might have seen the Who, the Kinks and (if you like that sort of thing) the Beatles, but it also saw the Archies.
Frank.
In 1987 Squeeze, a British Pop (in the good sense of tuneful guitar music with smart lyrics) group hit the top forty with Babylon and On, an album of light-weight pop, mostly pretty vapid, with very 80’s instrumentation. As usual with Squeeze the tunes were there, but apart from the brilliant ‘Lighting Matches’ the album is pretty ordinary.
The follow-up, though, was 1989’s Frank, and it’s a peach. Tuneful, varied, replete with nifty, tasteful guitar work and the usual Squeeze lyrics about getting drunk, letting people down and cheating on your girl, it is easier to list the songs that don’t work (‘She Doesn’t Have to Shave’, a rather naff tale about her time of the month and ‘Can of Worms’ an earnest but awkward tale of broken homes and new men around the house). Against those two you can list, well, everything else. Personal favourite is probably (today) ‘Slaughtered, Gutted and Heartbroken’ but ‘(This Could Be) The Last Time’ comes close. There seems to be a slight Stones-y homage thing going on, with that track an explicit copy of a Stones song-title, and ‘Melody Motel’ sounding in title (not in music) a little like ‘Memory Motel’.
It contains ‘Dr Jazz’, a rare non-Difford/Tilbrook track that is a highlight of the album, with Jools Holland celebrating the music he loves, ‘Love Circles’ and ‘If It’s Love’, two typically tuneful Squeeze non-hit singles, and the rollicking yet grim ‘Melody Motel’.
The album seems to be modelled on East Side Story, the band’s acknowledged classic (it even finishes with a fifties-ish romp, same as the older album), but stands completely on its own.
And charts? Frank bombed. The best Squeeze album since their early days when they nearly became really big, it disappeared without a trace and cost them their contract with A & M.
I’m sure the money that comes with popularity means something to a musician with kids and a mortgage, but it correlates negatively with quality, if at all.
DSPACE 