Amongst my memories of first discovering music, or at least music which wasn't the Beatles, the arrival of my first tape recorder is significant for reasons which are probably obvious. I don't remember hearing much music on the radio as a kid, but I heard enough to be aware of Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street. I used to go to stay at my grandparents' house in Kenilworth every other weekend, and there was a point at which whatever the usual arrangement had been, suddenly it was just my dad coming to fetch me home on Sunday evening, and because it was my dad, he had the radio on, usually tuned to the top forty countdown. This meant that I heard a selection of the same songs with such frequency as to imprint them on my memory as things I liked, and when I was given a tape recorder for my birthday, naturally the first thing I did was start taping things I liked from the radio; and Prime Time by the Tubes was in there right from the beginning, even though I'm not sure the dates add up right.
Later I learned that the Tubes were an American punk band, and later still I concluded that they were an example of how America never understood punk. I no longer quite hold either of these views, although I still maintain that a bunch of poets hanging around with Lou Reed in some New York loft was never, ever the birth of punk.
Anyway, I loved Prime Time so much that I immediately ran out and bought the album some forty years later when I happened across a copy in a crappy second hand store which seemed suspiciously like some guy's front room. I played it once and decided that I'd been right about Americans failing to understand punk.
Then, another year or so on, I dig the thing out for a second play and find that it has something, even if hanging onto the idea of the Tubes as an American equivalent to the Pistols is obviously a waste of time. I guess they were punk in so much as that they were a bit freaky, relatively speaking, and none too bothered about fitting in; plus there was a fairly low calorie anti-establishment message centered around the idea that too much telly is bad for you. I don't know about the earlier material, but musically this one is operatic and conspicuously well played, a little like a weird conflation of Kiss and Devo but coming out sounding a bit like Styx in their Mr. Roboto period. It's so theatrical it's almost Rocky Horror. Guitar solos, mullets, vocal harmonies, futuristic monosynth and sax solos: ordinarily I might duck for cover before Michael J. Fox shows up and tries to teach me a thing or two about what it's like to be young, but fucking fuck it - this is a great album. The songs, big pompous poodle-haired wedding cake compositions though they may well be, have got serious pull, never mind just Prime Time. There's TV is King, I Want It All Now, Only the Strong Survive, and about the only song I was less struck on is the ballad, Love's a Mystery (I Don't Understand) but my wife has been going crackers over that one, so everybody's happy.
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