Spandau Ballet - Journeys to Glory (1981)

We read in the weekly music paper about how they were all the rage down in that London, but it was difficult to hear them over the sound of Judas Priest, Saxon, and the Wurzels around our way, so their impact was reduced. We smirked at them in their tartan blouses on Top of the Pops, but truthfully we weren't that bothered, and I bought The Freeze because it sounded a bit like Joy Division; and a handful of approximately decent singles followed before they turned into Val Doonican's warm-up act. Toes were tapped but ultimately it was hard to care, meaning that I'd never really thought about Spandau Ballet for longer than five seconds - excepting periods of meditation upon my hatred of Robert Elms which probably don't count; and thusly over a thirty-year period didst Spandau Ballet eventually accrue mystery sufficient as to warrant my noticing this in the Half-Price racks and wondering what it was like.

The thing which surprised me most is how pedestrian they sound, some new wave band you might have heard rehearsing in the village hall beefed up with a big production and - oh - looks like Santa brought someone a synthesiser for Christmas; and yet this was once thought to be what comes next. We had seen the future, and it was a little bit like what you hear when you turn over to BBC2 and watch the test card for a while. With hindsight, it was all very Alan Partridge.

Okay, that's a little harsh. Journeys to Glory is not without its qualities, and there was probably a point at which it sounded important and forward looking when played in some self-involved club or other; and musically it's fairly decent, but the problem is that Tony Hadley is simply a fucking awful singer. Technically he's wonderful but, to paraphrase my friend Andrew J. Duncan, there's nothing wrong with his voice and that's what's wrong with his voice. He sounds like a million other technically perfect bellowing and hooting Brentwood's Got Talent contestants, but that's all he does. There's neither range, subtlety, nor soul, regardless of how closely he sonically resembles the somewhat superior Alison Moyet. If they revised this with all of the vocals re-recorded by some guy caught having a poo in the alley outside the studio, it might be remembered as a classic, as opposed to the first album by that New Romantic band who weren't as good as Duran Duran.

I'm still going to buy the second one if I see it though. Instinction was mint.

The Art of Noise - Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise? (1984)

It was the timing which sucked me in, the timing combined with the novelty of a record made from replayed samples of existing sounds, something which then remained unknown outside the Fairlight CMI being put through its paces on an episode of Tomorrow's World. Back in 1984, I was obsessed with the Italian Futurists and felt they shared some sort of rebellious impulse in common with the music I tended to like; so when this lot turned up, openly acknowledging Luigi Russolo's Art of Noises manifesto and on a label named after one of Marinetti's concrete poems, it caught my attention; and yet something didn't quite sit right. It might have been some sort of misplaced proprietorial regard of Futurism on my part - these people were cashing in on the thing which only I knew about and only I really understood and they hadn't asked my permission; but also it was irritating how Trevor Horn, when asked about Zang Tumb Tumb, said only that it was an onomatopoeic percussive sound, adding I suppose it's rather Dada.

Next they seemed to be everywhere, and so much so that I heard every single track on this album long before I bought it, which was actually a couple of years later on a wet Saturday afternoon when I couldn't really find anything else in the record shop. By that point the thing had become so ingrained that it couldn't fail to sound good, as indeed it did, and as it still does. It's sharp, funny, and stupid, and it has all sorts of things going on, and it's beautifully produced as you would expect; but I don't know if it was ever important or even particularly ground breaking, as many have since claimed.

The samples were, so I am informed, mostly presets which came with the Fairlight CMI, so most of what Art of Noise did was in the arrangement, and presumably in Horn's ability to make it all sound as lush as a Ferrero Roche advert; because at best what we have here is what Throbbing Gristle would have been were they all nicely behaved Oxbridge graduates, which is why Paul Morley made for such a good fit. The clues are all over the place, not least in sampled bass lines playing what may as well have been Rock Around the Clock and so inadvertently foreshadowing Jive Bunny; and then more recently I rediscovered a tape of the Horn promoting the first Art of Noise record on the wireless, during which he opined:

I think the truth of it is that people don't learn how to play their instruments properly nowadays. They learn how to talk to the music press. They learn how to do their hair. They learn about what to wear and what to say, but the basic physical learning of - do you know of anybody in a group nowadays who is a good guitar player? Do you know if the guitar player in Duran Duran is a particularly good guitar player? In the old days you knew who was a good player, you knew that Eric Clapton [was a good guitar player].

Seriously, grandad, fuck the fuck off. Of course, Morley and Horn were only ever involved in the most negligible sense, at least according to J.J. Jeczalik, but it seems significant that they were able to hitch their wagons to the Art of Noise in the first place without anyone noticing a disparity. Morley dismissed later Art of Noise releases as novelty records, seemingly implying that this one should be considered high art, which doesn't really work. It's great pop music, but it was never art, which, considering how Art of Noise achieved a whole shitload of musical firsts, is quite shocking; but then you might also argue that Jive Bunny did a whole load of stuff no-one had done before.

The Buggles - The Age of Plastic (1980)

The concept of presents on Valentine's Day is new to me, so I'm not entirely sure who fills the Santa role for this occasion - possibly Barbara Cartland or someone of that kind. Anyway, whoever landed the job, it seems she'd overheard some conversation I'd had during the previous week and had accordingly deposited a copy of the first Buggles album inside my traditional Valentine's Day underpants when the day came.

The conversation began with the revelation of Video Killed the Radio Star having also been a hit over here in Americaland, which surprised me for some reason. Wringing what little memory of 1980 I still have at my disposal for what few drips are to be had, I vaguely recall looking at The Age of Plastic in the local record shop - almost certainly WHSmiths - and wondering what it would be like to own the album. The problem was that my pocket money was a limited resource and I already had a massive internalised list of albums I really, really needed by the Stranglers, David Bowie and others; and then Graham told me that Devo had done a second one; and by the time I could afford to risk copping this thing, the moment had gone.

The Buggles - named as some sort of pun on Beatles - were Trevor Horn of the lavish production and terrible red spectacles, and his mate Geoff, both of whom ended up in Yes. I remember thinking it seemed an odd move, but having listened to this album and realised it actually really doesn't have much in common with the Angelic Upstarts after all, it makes sense. Horn, who is probably more or less single-handedly responsible for most of the eighties, was quite clearly always a bit proggy, and it shows here once you listen past the squeaky clean surfaces and efforts to distil the essence of bubblegum.

Culturally speaking The Age of Plastic sounds very much like the final flourish of belief in a future as something different to the present, the last Gernsback-inspired rock opera about jet packs, food pills and the monorail. Of course there are dystopian details for the sake of texture, not least the heart police putting you under cardiac arrest - whatever the fuck that is - but the presence of grit is mainly just an excuse for Trev to sing about shiny serving clones and metal friends. We're a long way from Gary Numan being bummed by a machine in the park, figuratively speaking.

Older, or at least more obsessive, boys and girls may recall Horn and Downes having a less famous writing partner called Bruce Woolley. He co-wrote Video Killed the Radio Star and Clean Clean, and recorded versions of both for English Garden, the debut album by his own band, the Camera Club. English Garden is a rockier affair than The Age of Plastic and frankly a much better record, perhaps sounding more akin to Sparks than the generically skinny-tied new wave effort suggested by the cover; and it's a shame Woolley didn't have a bit more involvement in this one, although it might have changed the entire course of the eighties and denied Duran Duran a few of their fifteen minute extended b-sides. Maybe that wouldn't have been a huge loss.

I suppose the Buggles were a victim of Trevor Horn's success in so much as more or less everything we recall of the eighties with either a sneer or at best an indulgent frown - orchestral stabs, pasteurised funky bass, shiny jackets and obvious sampling, it all started here, more or less, smuggled in under what may as well be Andrew Lloyd Webber trying to make a musical out of an A.E. van Vogt novel. I'm not saying that's a bad thing so much as that listeners may have to attune their ears to the sound before full appreciation is possible. It's cheese, but not necessarily bad cheese, even given the Alan Partridge-esque presence of Island - a reggae instrumental - as a bonus track on the compact disc, and it being impossible to hear Kid Dynamo without getting a mental image of Noel Fielding pulling surprised futuristic faces.

I'm not sure it was worth the thirty-five year wait, but I've heard worse; so thanks, Barbara, I guess.

Sweet Exorcist - CCCD (1990)

Although it might be pointed out that there are a number of things considerably worse than weirdy industrial types trying to get down with the kids - nuclear war, asphyxiation, and finding oneself forced at gunpoint to consume human faeces being but three - this isn't to say that weirdy industrial types trying to get down with the kids isn't pure arseache. There's the Porridge version of house music for one horrible example, a particularly mystifying response to the genre bearing more resemblance to what happens during the second half of an extended 12" mix of almost anything released by Duran Duran back when people were still buying their records. Of course you don't really expect too much from Porridge, the poor old fucker, so it's not really news when he does something which isn't very good.

Cabaret Voltaire on the other hand had much further to fall, and two decades later I still haven't fully recovered from the sight of Stephen Mallinder wearing a giant stopwatch and moonwalking backwards across a stage whilst exhorting all the ladies in the house to put their hands in the air and wave them like they just don't care. It didn't help that the record sounded like Stock, Aitken and Waterman, but the biggest mystery seems to be that Richard H. Kirk quite clearly knows how to cook up the real thing when he feels like it, as this one demonstrates, at least allowing for the involvement of the other bloke, the one who wasn't in Cabaret Voltaire.

In fact, it's startling how good this record is and how much it gets right without sounding like an impersonation. Listen closely and I suppose it's not a million miles from what Kirk was doing around the time of The Crackdown, but the whole is a very different sum of its parts. Rather than attempt to merely replicate the sound of dance music as was, Sweet Exorcist instead went for the effect and achieved something which sits very comfortably amongst all those original Detroit and Chicago acid tracks specifically because it's different. Very few of those original tracks actually did what everyone always remembers them doing, specifically that Roland bassline squiggle with the same four to the floor bum-tsk-bum-tsk beat. Sweet Exorcist instead brought the sine wave back to dance music, bleeps and pings as last heard on either games consoles or Kraftwerk records, I suppose; and they brought the sine wave back dry, without too many effects cluttering up the sound - this being the detail which the likes of Porridge always get wrong. This is an intensely electronic sounding record with virtually nothing occurring which wasn't originated inside a box of some description, although it's organic in tone at least in so much as that it doesn't feel particularly digital. Percussion aside, the sounds here provide notation without quite being musical, all building up into intense cat's cradles of clicking and pooting towards a hypnotic, even somewhat trippy whole that seems almost divorced from its own ingredients.

I think I've just reviewed a dance record as Jilly Goolden, but never mind. Normally this sort of thing would be a side project at best, but it's actually better than at least a couple of Cabaret Voltaire albums.

Wire - Manscape (1990)

I'm not quite sure why I don't have more by Wire. I can appreciate them for sure, but for some reason, for all their dazzling brilliance, I've never found myself actively seeking out their records. Consequently those objects I do possess tend to have been picked up in bargain bins because it was Wire and it was cheap and I couldn't quite work out why I'd never got around to buying the thing when it came out. Manscape found its way to me by a friend in England who sends me money by converting pound notes into dollar bills at the bank, and then concealing these within the casing of a compact disc which he sticks in the mail. He lives off the grid, as the expression has it, without anything resembling a bank account, and this really is the easiest way for him to pay me for services rendered. He's also a fan of Wire, but I imagine this one wasn't so much to his liking.

Apparently recorded under the increased influence of dance music as it stood around the close of the eighties, Manscape differs from other Wire releases in sounding very much like they knocked it out in a studio recently vacated by Duran Duran. It has that same drum machine sound, those same McGeochisms in the guitar department, and a suggestion of brightly coloured suits with shoulder pads and promotional videos with everyone doing that eighties dance in which you keep your elbows still whilst jerking your quiff from side to side; but, it's still Wire, and it sounds like Wire. It took a good few plays before I stopped asking myself what is this shit?, but I got there eventually.

Obviously it's not a patch on Chairs Missing, but it's not actually bad once you get past the cognitive dissonance, and arguably constitutes a worthy exercise in seeing if gold can be wrought from the sort of hairspray fuelled production which keeps threatening to break into Addicted to Love; and surprisingly it can, although maybe not so surprisingly as I suppose PIL and Simple Minds usually managed the same trick well enough. Manscape is further aided by Wire's peculiarly self-aware lyrical concerns falling somewhere between those of David Byrne and Laurie Anderson, and the simple fact of there being some fucking great arrangements on here, particularly on Where's the Deputation? and What Do You See? both of which have more than a whiff of Severed Heads about them.

Thinking about it, Manscape feels like the work of a band who've just discovered Come Visit the Big Bigot in some respects, which can only be a good thing, even if it's not necessarily the first reason why you might want to buy a record by Wire.

Devo - Moody Theater, Austin, Texas (2nd July 2014)

Devo were an early and important discovery for me. I was fourteen or so, and my record collection comprised four Beatles albums. I was aware of punk, although I wasn't quite sure what it was seeing as all I seemed to hear on the radio was either Dan Hartman's Instant Replay or the Electric Light Orchestra; although that said, I'd watched the first Public Image Limited single and Germ Free Adolescents by X-Ray Spex performed on Top of the Pops and found both songs strangely hypnotic. Graham, my best friend, lent me his copy of the first Devo album apparently having decided that I needed to hear it. It was on red vinyl, and there was something disturbing about it. It was something new in the world. I listened to it once whilst staring at the weird and freakish figures on the cover as I sat next to the record player, then decided to take it back to Graham. There was something strange and deeply unwholesome about this music. It implied regions of human experience I had never considered, and would rather not know about; but Graham insisted I keep at it, give it another listen, and so I did.

Devo became my new favourite band, and have remained pretty much unchallenged in this capacity ever since. Henry Rollins once observed that there are two kinds of people in the world, those who get Devo and those who don't, and generally I've found this to be true whilst thanking providence that I can be counted amongst the first group. The last person I knew who didn't get Devo was the pothead owner of an atheist bulletin board for whom they were essentially interchangeable with Duran Duran. He preferred Kiss and classic rock, and by strange coincidence he was also something of a dick in terms of his interpersonal relationships and how he dealt with other people. Since my brief encounter with that guy, I have known to shun those who don't understand Devo, to walk the other way before they can infect me with their failure and turn everything complicated.

The point that so many somehow miss, is that Devo were never art rock or novelty pop or weirdness for the sake of weirdness. They have always been in essence a folk band, and in American terms possibly the only folk band, the group who see clearly and who understand how our society really works. If they seem a little fucked up stood there in their fake plastic breasts and with those things on their heads, then maybe you need to take another look around yourself, at this world in which we were denied the silver rockets promised by Hugo Gernsback, where Archie has that sister with an IQ of thirty-seven who somehow never gets a mention in the comic books, with Betty and Veronica forever lost in their own lurid fantasy existence of cowboy pharmacology and giant babies. The bottom line - at least for me - is that Devo have ever been so finely attuned to the ongoing backwards progress of human culture, so sensitised to the real stuff, that almost any band or artist stood next to them will inevitably look like teenagers trying to appear cool whilst smoking the wrong end of their first cigarettes; and as a band devolving backwards along the timeline of their own career in keeping with everything else that's happened since the industrial revolution, it seems fitting that now, forty plus years, countless albums, and two fallen soldiers down the line they should be taking the dark Ohio basement in which they recorded their very first songs on tour.

I know most of the material played tonight from the Mechanical Man EP, from the two Hardcore Devo collections of formative recordings originally released by Rykodisc, and a handful of tracks which eventually made it onto the first two official albums. The original recordings sound muffled in places, prone to tape degradation, the best that could be done under primitive circumstances, bluesy science-fiction surf tunes scraped together with home built synthesisers on a rough framework of spastic rhythms. Transposed to a stage before hundreds of eager Texan spuds, it's peculiar how the songs remain the same whilst forming new, unfamiliar shapes. I feared it might sound as weird and cranky as those archive discs, partially because I was there with Mrs. Wax Cylinders whose main frame of reference was this being the band who once had a hit with Whip It. I needn't have worried, and found myself surprised at how funky some of the songs sound in such a setting, even how heavy. The loudest band I ever saw was probably Terminal Cheesecake, and although this wasn't at even half their volume, Devo - against all odds, the novelty band who got a namecheck on Different Strokes and upon whom a Kiss fan might rightly pour his hairy chested scorn - sounded or maybe felt bigger, heavier, darker, funnier, and more relevant to the mess we've gotten ourselves into than ever. Mechanical Man achieved an effect resembling the sort of thing to which Black Sabbath once aspired; Bamboo Bimbo could have been the Swans at their most pensive and grunting; Fountain of Filth and I've Been Refused came on with such righteous energy as to leave no doubt of this being the band formed in response to the outrage of the Kent State Shooting of May, 1970. They didn't exactly play all of the hits - I personally would also have liked to have heard Chango and maybe Bottled Up - but it was all of the good stuff, all the weirdly terrifying and yet strangely intoxicating forms found when you flip the Beach Boys over and scrape off all that stuff that's been growing on their underside; Jocko Homo and Gut Feeling and even the infant-headed Booji Boy finding his way onto the stage for a few numbers with the help of what was either a baby walker or a Zimmer frame, depending on whether you're looking backwards or forwards.

Finally, to boil the above bones down into something that will settle better on top of your beer, it was not only a good gig, but possibly the greatest gig I've ever attended by at least a few definitions, some quantified by hairs erect on the back of my neck throughout the performance. Forty plus years, countless albums, and two fallen soldiers down the line, and Devo are still able to surprise me. I don't know if there's ever been another band capable of such a feat, who could retrace their first steps and still take us somewhere entirely new.