75 Years of the Album: 26. 1974

1974 saw an IRA mainland bombing campaign, the three-day-week, an oil crisis, inflation and recessions. But there were also some good records out.

Brian Eno – Here Come the Warm Jets (Island February) / Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) (Island November).

Eno began his post-Roxy career with a brace of records of brilliantly skewed rock music that straddled glam, prog, the avant-garde and his own weird take on pop. Lyrically there was plenty of oddball Dada-esque ramblings, but the music (especially on the second record) was muscular. Only “On some faraway beach” and “Taking Tiger Mountain” itself were their hints of his ambient direction.

Tangerine Dream – Phaedra (Virgin April).

Tangerine Dream signed to Virgin, jettisoned some of their more extreme spaced out tendencies in favour of burbling sequencer riffs, and pretty much defined their sound. They also bagged a surprising top twenty album. Its possibly the definitive Tangerine Dream album, although Rubycon (1975) hones their sound even more. Cluster’s Moebius and Roedelius teamed up with Michael Rother of Neu! to create Harmonia. Musik from Harmonia (Brain) is the best of their records. Can’s Soon Over Babaluma (United Artists) was the last of the classic United Artists Can records. The move to Virgin in ‘75 began their decline. And Tangerine Dream leader Edgar Froese’s solo album Aqua (Virgin) is one to hear.

Blue Oyster Cult – Secret Treaties (Columbia April).

Eight tracks of perfect rock from the connoisseur’s metal band. Having Richard Meltzer, Sandy Pearlman and Patti Smith write the lyrics meant that there is an intellectual bent to the band lacking in any of their peers (with the exception of Hawkwind). And Secret Treaties has some of their very best tunes, such as “Career of evil”, “Flaming telepaths” and “Astronomy”.

Richard and Linda Thompson – I Want to See The Bright Lights Tonight (Island April).

April ‘74 was a pretty good month for albums. Richard Thompson and Linda Peters married in 1972, and this was their first (and best) record together. It’s also one of Richard’s darkest set of songs, with “End of the rainbow” giving a particularly bleak view of life. There are brighter points (the title track, for instance), and “The Great Valerio” sees the world pushed away in a dream-like concentration on the art of a tightrope walker. It reminds me of the Blue Nile’s “Easter Parade” in the way that a scene of excitement and celebration can be frozen into something so still.

Neil Young – On The Beach (Reprise July).

Harvest this definitely isn’t, and the sixties dream dissolves into a post-Nixon fug of alienation. The mood is sombre – almost more down and out than downbeat. For years contrary Young left it out of print before a CD finally arrived in 2003. I would argue its his best record, especially the trio of songs on the second side: the title track, “Motion Pictures” and the cynical “Ambulance Blues”. Neil’s fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell was a bit more upbeat with Court and Spark (Asylum), the perfect balance between the old singer-songwriter Joni and the new jazz Joni.

Kraftwerk – Autobahn (Vertigo November).

The first album that Ralf Hutter appears to own up to, Autobahn still has more in common with the three Philips albums than it does with, say, The Man Machine four years later. An edit of the 22 minute title track was a hit, of course. The second side is instrumental ranging from the gorgeous “Telstar”-esque “Kometenmelodie 2” to Florian’s flute-led, bucolic “Morgenspaziergang”.

Here are seven other records of note, in no particular order. Diamond Dogs (RCA) is heavier than Bowie’s previous few albums which maybe why it’s not as widely loved. Gil Scott-Heron teamed up with multi-instrumentalist Brian Jackson for the first time for Winter In America (Strata-East). Stevie Wonder’s Fulfillingness’ First Finale (Tamla) ditched the Moogs for a more organic, and reflective sound. Jackson Browne’s Late for the Sky and Tom Waits’ The Heart of Saturday Night (both Asylum) looked at two sides of seventies California: Browne’s fading sixties dream and Waits’ world of working class diners, bars and flop houses. Bob Marley’s first album without Tosh and Livingstone Natty Dread (Island) gave the world “No woman no cry”. Finally, Peter Gabriel’s last hurrah with Genesis was the patchily brilliant concept alum with a barely intelligible plot The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (Charisma).

TV: Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany

After last week’s generally fascinating, if slightly flawed, Synth Britannia (no mention at all of Suicide, and some of the chronology seemed a bit iffy to me), BBC Four’s music documentary series moved on to look at some of the biggest influences on both the synth-pop movement, and indeed all post-punk and electronica music that’s happened since, from Acid Mothers Temple to Alva Noto and all points in between.

Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany is rather a grand title, and it immediately apologised for the term. Krautrock was coined by anglocentric British journalists and has unfortunately stuck ever since to the various amusement / irritation of the musicians themselves. But at least their music was accepted here – in their homeland they remained, by and large, obscure. I remember when I first met my German friend Olly in the early nineties, I breathlessly waxed lyrical about all the German bands that I was a big fan of, and was astonished that he’d never heard of half of them. I’d simply assumed that acts like Cluster, Faust, Neu! etc would all be household names in Germany, something that turned out to be far from the truth.

The programme offered 1968 as year zero for the movement, suggesting that everything before then was Schlager and classical music. Although that’s certainly true for the electronic and experimental bands that followed, surely things weren’t that simple. After all, many British bands cut their musical teeth in Hamburg at the start of the sixties, and other ex-pat acts like the Monks were pretty successful in their adopted land. There must have been some indigenous equivalent, surely.

That question aside, this was an hour stuffed with great anecdotes and superb archive footage. Those interviewed were a great bunch of characters with intelligent, dry humour and none of the rock star pomposity of their Anglo-American prog-rock equivalents. The central theme was that this wasn’t a scene as such, but a bunch of disparate groups from all over the country whose music was equally eclectic, but whose philosophy was strikingly similar – to create a new art music for Germany untainted by the past and yet specifically German rather than a poor facsimile of the dominant Anglo-American forms. And to challenge the West German establishment, something still riddled with relics of the Nazi era. They succeeded, and collectively became a massive influence on much of the interesting music made in the last thirty years. Indeed, most are probably far more widely known today than they ever were in their heyday.

Nearly all of the big players were present and correct – Amon Düül, Popol Vuh, Cluster, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Neu!, Harmonia, Can, Faust and, of course, Kraftwerk. The only serious omission was Ash Ra Tempel. There were some great stories – Amon Düül’s uncomfortable association with Andreas Baader and Ulriche Meinhof; Faust being sold to Polydor as the German Beatles (?!); Damo Suzuki’s bizarrely spontaneous induction into Can; Klaus Schulze’s admission that he still had no idea how to properly work his first synth that he’s had for nearly forty years. And also some superb archive footage, including the pre-electronic Kraftwerk. Implied, but not explicitly said, was the contention that Eno was little more than a thieving magpie, appropriating ideas from his collaborations with Cluster and using them in his work with Bowie, that archetypal chameleon.

Cramming all this into an hour inevitably felt a bit rushed. But it was great that somebody had the foresight to step outside the usual Anglo-American axis and tell the stories of the makers of some of the twentieth century’s most forward-looking and influential music.

For UK residents, it’s on the iPlayer.

Song of the day: TANGERINE DREAM – Nebulous Dawn (1972)

Kraftwerk, Neu, Harmonia, Popol Vuh, Faust, Can, Ash Ra Tempel, Cluster – all are afforded suitable reverence. Yet Tangerine Dream are often considered kinda naff. Granted, since their seventies heyday, they’ve churned out an awful lot of bilge unworthy of the name. The classic trio of Edgar Froese, Peter Baumann and Christopher Franke, though, were as groundbreaking as any of their more celebrated countrymen during their early and mid seventies heyday (and also sold a lot more records than most of them). One of their most ‘out there’ works was the double album Zeit (time).

Zeit had just four tracks, each a side long. As well as the three core musicians there were several guests including four cello players. Both the opening cut “Birth Of Liquid Plejades” and the following track “Nebulous Dawn” are dominated by the cellos. They underpin the pieces with extended, sonorous drones that owe more to Stockhausen than they do to any kind of rock music, progressive or otherwise. This is avant-garde music in the guise of rock. “Nebulous Dawn” has all sorts of spaced out electronic burblings and analogue synth noises going on in the foreground, but it’s the drones that give the track its mesmeric power. It is only in the final couple of minutes, when the organ comes in, that there is the merest glimpse of the sequencer pulses that became the group’s trademark.

The whole album has a neo-classical structure – like a space symphony in four movements. It can be taken as prototype ambient music, but this is more intellectually stimulating than your run of the mill chill-out pap. It wasn’t until the Future Sound Of London’s Lifeforms album, released 22 years later, that another relatively mainstream act managed to take this music to the next level. 35 years on, Zeit still sounds like it was made tomorrow.