Into the eighties we go, and another selection of some of the albums I think were the most important over the last 75 years.
If the 1980s were the decade of electronic music, especially in the pop sphere, then they couldn’t have had a better start than this bleak, stripped down masterpiece. The songs have hooks galore, but the atmosphere is austere, mechanical and dystopian. There is no warm glow of humanity, just metal, wires, and blinding light.
Three Mantras was awash with disinformation. There were, for a start, just two of them: an eastern and a western. It was marketed as an EP, but had a run time of forty minutes. It was also one of the trio’s (as they were then) finest achievements, predicting the cultural clash between the Islamic and Judaeo-Christian worlds very quickly after the seizing of power in Iran by the Ayatollahs. Voice of America was a more traditional nine track affair, with its sights firmly set on fundamentalism of a different stripe.
Politically engaged in a direct way for the first time (see “Biko”), this is still one of Peter Gabriel’s most satisfying records. It was the record where Gabriel, guest drummer Phil Collins and engineer Hugh Padgham came up with the gated drum sound that would go on to dominate the decade. “Intruder” was the first. Collins was so pleased with the result that he used the sound on his first solo single “In the Air Tonight”, and the rest is history.
Two very different aspects of British reggae. London’s Misty in Roots were the more spiritual in their music, but as political in their actions. People Unite was a Southall based collective that gave the Ruts their first break, and was on the frontline in the street confrontation between black and Asian youth and their allies on the one hand, and the National Front and their implicit supporters at the Met on the other. Member Clarence Baker was severely beaten by the Special Patrol Group in 1979. You just had to put up with that sort of thing then. UB40 were a multi-racial outfit from Birmingham. The songs were much more explicitly political, even though the music had a tendency towards the soporific at times. Signing Off is their best album, a long way from the insipid pop-reggae covers band they’d become.
Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” is all over the opener “I Travel”, but it was good that some old punks were listening. The track was the making of Simple Minds who had already released two decent albums of Bowie inspired, angular pop. The rest of the album is not as frantic, but there’s a unifying sense of purpose behind it that they lacked before, even if the central European themes (see also Ultravox’s Vienna) were already a bit hackneyed.
The California-based avant-pranksters’ bid at pop stardom? Not quite. The Commercial Album is in a lot of ways the Residents most accessible work. Especially since that if you don’t like a tune, another one will be a long in a minute. Literally. These were commercial tunes in as much as they were a length that made them suitable for advertising. Each of the forty tracks is one minute long. It’s actually quite a discipline composing something memorable and engaging that only lasts a minute.
With Eno fully on board as an unofficial fifth member, Talking Heads’ masterpiece is split between a side of three Afro-funk workouts and a side of more focussed, but highly varied rock and pop. “Once in a Lifetime” was the earworm, but “Listening Wind” is probably the highlight, whilst “Overload” takes the band into Joy Division drone territory.
This is possibly my favourite Springsteen album, although I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily the best. It is probably the most representative. There are throwaway, good-time rockers, pop gems, blistering rock and roll, sombre tales of life’s darker side, and moments of existential despair. In other words, all of life is here. It’s not that surprising that Springsteen toured it, in full, extensively a few years ago. It has all the ups and downs, highs and lows, thrills and spills of a live set without any tweaking.
Joy Division’s Closer is probably my album of the year, but I covered them in ‘79. Buggles followed the brilliant “Video Killed the Radio Star” with The Age of Plastic, a great synth-pop album that sounds way ahead of its time. Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark struck twice with their self-titled debut and its follow-up Organisation. Synths were prominent on Magazine’s Correct Use of Soap, Japan’s Gentlemen Take Polaroids, Yello’s Soild Pleasure, and the master himself David Bowie whose Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) restored him fully to commercial favour after the slightly left-field excursions of the Berlin trilogy. Laurie Spiegel’s The Expanding Universe was a neglected masterpiece of early electronica. It’s far better known now than it was at the time. Colossal Youth by Young Marble Giants brought a calm minimalism that would prove influential. The Jam had another winner with Sound Affects, and the Clash splurged out with the triple Sandinista which everyone agrees would have made a stunning single album, but nobody agrees on what would be left off to make that theoretical classic. Finally AC/DC shook off the tragic loss of Bon Scott with one of the biggest selling rock albums of all time, Back in Black, and Dead Kennedys made the definitive American punk statement with Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables.
Music Musings and Miscellany 