Not everybody makes it. Life's a long road. I remember an imagined vision I had once. A long time ago. Drinking beer with a friend in a bar on Richmond Hill when I was in my early twenties, .I probably shouldn't have been drinking. I was on medication.In my mind's eye as the alcohol began to kick in, I saw a couple of hot air balloons rising across dark heavens and I thought to myself 'life is not short' as you're constantly told. Life can actually be a long and incredible and mysterious journey.
Listen to Sun Kil Moon's latest album All The Artists for further evidence of life being a strange road..Or hot air balloon trip if you prefer. Sun Kil Moon is the alter ego of Mark Kozelek. Kozelek started out in the Nineties with Red Hill Painters who put out a number of completely remarkable but slightly medicated sounding records that might appeal to medication inclined consumers..
Over thirty years the man has put out any number of beautiful, luminous but evidently slightly depressed and potentially depressing records.,If anything with the years he seems to go further and further into psycholgical decline. Though not artistically I'd say. Listen to All The Artists thirty years almost on now. Be warned Kozelek hasn't cheered up much, even though his records are still very much worth immersing yourself in,
Kozelek can be a problematic and irrascible figure. I'm not entirely sure if he's cancelled, He's certainly had some rocky times of late. Numerous charges of sexual misconduct and unwanted advances of a sexual nature to a number of parties. Stripping naked in a hotel room with an unconsenting woman. Violent verbal abuse of other artists. Notably War on Drugs. .An aggressive and increasingly litigious attitude to accusations about his behaviour. Mark, Mark. That's what Donald Trump does. It's not pretty whichever way you look at it. Whether this makes you reluctant to listen to his work anymore is an open question. He's clearly troubled and troubling. The problem (if that's a problem), is that I still think he's very good. As are his records.
I've listened to All The Artists over the last few days. It doesn't have tunes so much as stream of consciousness monologues. It lacks the beauty of Kozelek's Red House Painters records but does emit a powerful claustrophobic atmosphere that's still impressive. I suspect it would be getting a lot more attention than it is if Kozelek hadn't backed his own career into a siding of his own making of late and made media uncomfortable about giving him any more coverage than they need to. This is a really intense record of narratives and depressed literate thought. If that's what you're after. It's not easy listening..
Every band there's ever been gets a book written about them or gets to wtite their own book at some point. It seems to be an unwritten law of Rock & Roll. Now here is the World of Twist's written by guitarist Gordon King. The band didn't have any hits or appear on Top of the Pops. Still they produced a fine album, Quality Street which I stil enjoy playing once in a while. They were Roxy Music if they'd hailed from Manchester and dressed in charity shop outfits.The Pulp that never made it
The first chapters are familiar. Tales of growing up in provincial England in the Sixties and Seventies. In King's case falling under the spell of Yes and Prog. His biggest regrest seems to be not the lack of fame so much as the fact thatthe band never got to play the stage show they dreamed of putting on.
I bought this at the time on cassette and listened to it a fair bit . It didn't really resonate too much. I wasn't American. The songs of smalltown woe didn't really resonate. Good set of songs but Springsteem seemed to have polished his sound for mass acceptance and parked the poetry for a couple of years. Some great songs and lines mind.
Finding a new record to listen to on a Friday. You can do far worse than listening to House Of All Souls, the latest album from House of All. It's early. The sun hasn't risen yet. I'm heading towards a set of back to back lessons with busy German people business people. Starting at half seven and continuing unbroken until one .By the time you read this I'll be done. Money will be heading for my bank account come the 8th of March. I'll be deciding what to do with my weekend.
When I get a moment during the morning. I'll be listening to this. Martin Bramah a founder member of The Fall and Blue Orchids goes forward leading the staff and banner of The Fall into battle. With him are The Unfallen. The last of the prominent Fall alumni, The Unfallen. Apart from those playing in Brix Smith's band or hanging out in Northern Libraries or Unemployment Exchanges or Old People's homes.. Steve and Paul Hanley. Si Wollstencraft. Some younger bloke you may not have heard of..
In Germany they have an Ausbildung System. Apprenticeship in a craft which you opt for when you leave school which still seems to hold good and provide a fundamental infrastructure for society. Provide lifelong training in a skillset. Making shoes or being a bookkeeper. A skillset that might be useful for the rest of your days strikes me as a worthwhile thing. Others might disagree and say 'I'll vote for Boris Johnson or find out what Michael Gove thinks'. People are strange. Jim was right..
House Of All is a sturdy set of songs about history, occult, fraternities, going into the woods in search of mushrooms wuth your mates. The odd way that human beings choose to organise themselves. You can hear the words which hasn't always been the case, I like it ! They're playing fairly close to me soon I notice.
That's some album title. Post millennial Rock & Roll seems to find itself increasingly drawn to poetic expression. I prefer them to Take That who I was much bemused by in the Nineties. They have guitars which is always a good start. They're nit even attempting to speak to the likes of me. That's alright. I did find my attention wanderung after a while.
The Pogues were a band apart. Even if they emerged as part of a movement. Of hard drinking and hard playing multi unstrumental bands who drew on Punk and Folk in equal measure. Rum,Sodomy & The Lash was their real arrival statement. They got in the charts. Appeared on Top Of The Pops got played on Radio One. With the man with the worst teeth in Rock & Roll at their head. In some ways Rum is a record that tells their story. It was as beautiful, as ugly, as poetic, as prifane, as timeless as poignant as anything they ever did. But they had plenty more wild cards up their sleeve. Glasses to drain. Cigarettes to smoke. Stories to tell.
I didn't particularly run around and jump up and down to Madonna in 1985. I was a young man and was in thrall to literate guitar bands with Fender Telecasters, Rickenbackers and classic paperbacks on their bookshelves and their minds.
That wasn't really Madonna's thing at that point in time. That facet of her personality blossomed later. What was ahe into in 1985? Well boys most obviously. Pop Music. Making money. At a point when the American Dream still had a curious lure.
Madonna was just fun and she made great records she was fun and the girl you most wanted to dance to. You couldn't ignore her. She was the girls with the hips. And the tits. And the hits. You coudn't ignore her. Why would you have wanted to.
'Mannered'.I like a bit of mannered. Particularly when it teams up with creative vision. Anna B Savage's You & I Are Earth, us the kind of album that if it is heard by the right ears and pushed by movers and shakers with the right sway could get a Mercury Award nomination a few months down the line.
It's an enchanting, more-ish album. One to fall into. The kind of thing to listen to at your study desk, (if you have one) as night falls. Headphones on. Something to listen to and fall in love with before turning in.
A very English sensibility is at work here. Savage gives her eccentricities full rein lyrically but in terms pf its mindset, which is really quite disciplined chambe folk ,it's immediately beguiling. It feels like Aldous Harding is trying her hand at making a Nick Drake album. Remarkably she pulls off almost everything she attempts.It's impressive.
She's off on tour in the UK and Ireland in the coming weeks. Then off to Europe and America as April becomes May. This is exciting adventure. A record to be pleasntly surprised by, incresingly intrigued and then come back and re-experience the rapture.
'the first appearance of music that came to be called psychedelic... Bassist Paul Samwell -Smith's production gives Roger The Engineer an imphatic prescence, keeping giotars in the foreground without letting them run the game. . '
The Smiths were in their pomp in 1985. Meat is Murder. Morrissey flouncing around in big blouses. On Top of the Pops and when he wasn't in Geoff Travis complaining about the chart position of That Joke isn't Funny Anymore or Shakespeare's Sister. He was a difficult man to keep pleased.
Even for a complete standout band Boy With The Thorn In His Side sounded remarkable. It had wings of its own. Focussing on one of Morrissey's bugbears, the anxiety of representation. Beeing musindersood.In Johnny Marr's words, 'it was an effortless piece of music with an effortless spirit.'
Once more thanks to Darren Jones for directing me to another Song of the Day / wonderful record to wake to. . Today Dead Gowns debut album It's Summer, I Love You & I'm Surrounded By Snow. If that's not enough to pique your interest I imagine the record should.
Genevieve Beuadoin AKA Dead Gowns hails from Maine and writes her own narrative and review on her Spotify bio, This is often the way these days. Artists and their packages come self contained with their own rave reviews.
In this case the plaudits and flowing prose seem apt because It's Summer, is one hell of a record. Vivid, poetic and resonant. My turns gentle then emotive. Outsider Folk. Speaking of one of those summers that will stay for you for the rest of your days. Appreciated Darren,.
Father John Misty is a Post Modern Elton John if that's what you're lookung for. He's not always joking either. His work is jokey but also has heart. He's a millennial artist. It's music which reflects times which appear smooth but there is trouble stirring under the surface..His records reward repeated plays.
The Cure were not happy campers right from the off. With 1982's Pornography they got particularly intense. Claustropobic. This is their Closer. Not always the easiest record to listen to. It has a clammy and relentless quality.
'I saw a treehouse on the outskirts of the farm. The powerlines have floaters so the airlines won't get snagged. The bells are ringing through the town again. The children look up all they hear is sky blue bells ringing.'
I've never had a band that inhabited me the way that R.E.M. did between 1983 and 1987. I never will again. I listened to other music. Saw fims and read books but they occupied my waking hours in a way that was quite spectral looking back. I'm deeply grateful to the four of them. They were doing the same for any number of others. It wasn't just me. They were inspirational. The primary responsibility of great cultural artists.To encourage others to create themselves.
Driver 8 was another song that occupied me in a remarkable way. A driving riff. A phenomenal momentum and power. I played it again and again and wondered where it came from. What it was saying. R.E.M. were not a band that answered questions like this. They were all mystery and enigma. Like the best things in life. Where was the train going to. Who was Driver 8? What was the Go Tell Crusade? As with Dylan the questions were the beautiful and key thing,
Nadia Reid's latest album Enter Now Brightness has a rather uninspiring cover. A picture of the back of Nadia Reid's head. It's a perfectly nice head and the back of it is fine. But it hardly inspires the casual listener to pick the record from the racks and take it home. New records are an investment these days and the cover isn't really that persuasive in encouraging neutral parties to attach themselves to Nadia's narrative rather than going to M&S and getting a pair of jeans instead.
Still 'You Can't Judge a Book by its Cover' as the man says, so I'm giving Enter Now Brightness a listen now. It's not bad at all. Reid is from New Zealand and is a singer songwriter of an immediately recognisable stripe. Her songs are unembroidered and hail most obviously back to the likes of Joni Mitchell and Jill Saint John. Vashti Bunyan.
She talks and sings about relationships. Friendship and love. How they're like plants and need to be tended. Cared for. As you would the plants in your flat or garden or they can wilt, wither and die.Something to be avoided They're songs crafted and embroidered with poetry, melodic touches and poetry. This is good unadorned work which will appeal to those who have invested previously. Perhaps it lacks the extraordinary to lift it into the essential but it's quality product.
It took me a while with Jesus & Mary Chain. I was suspicious of hype and there was a definite element of hype to them. Alan McGee was involved. They played a notorious gig at the campus of my university in my furst year. I didn't go. I confess partly due to the notoriety of their name. OK, I had a fairly religious upbringing and felt somehow my mother might disapprove. Things like this still had an impact until you were some way into your twenties.
But I regret not going.Though I'm not one for regrets on the whole. By all accounts it was something else. And the quality of their songs became stringer and stronger. In many ways the Reid brothers songs had something of the Brill Buikding about them. That's the ones that were noy directly inspired by The Stooges and The Ramones. This one was pure gold. A needle and a blackened spoon. True dark romance. Things I didn't and still no little about . I'm lucky.
Today there's increasingly heated debate about which ayr the best Felt albums. Back in the day nobody really wanted any of them. Theywere never the next big thing, Though theur records were consistently good. Take Forever Breathes the Lonely Word. It's poetic. And melodic. And perfectly formed. But the world wasn't listening.
Check out the brains on Sting ? What a big head. Listening to this record again for the first time since it came out in 1985 when frankly it was ubiquitous for a year and my brother and best friend played it all the time.. I loved The Police. Certainly their early records but Ghost in the Machine too. At .the time and still.
I played Outlanders a couple of days ago and it still stands up as truly great Pop Music if verging on the preposterous in terms of its wordplay. Never mind the Reggaeisms which sometimes move towards slightly questionable cultural appropriation. The kind of impressions you shouldn't really make. Ones that cross lines . Hey. Mick Jagger was there fifteen years earlier. .Pop Music is supposed to be daft. And reward theft.
But Sting took the ludicrous aspects of his personality, particularly his gargantuan narcissicism up a mountain track of his own devising as The Police grew and he began to think 'do I really need these guys'. I could have this whole pie to myself'. He decided he not only wished to be an enormously rich Pop Star at the wheel of a Rock & Roll juggernaut. He wanted to be considered a Literary Artist too with not only a considerable intellect but a fabuous sense of humour. Not to mention a fairly enviable codpiece (see Dune)
By 1985 I was off to university and Sting's ego was off into orbit. The Police had split and he wished the world to know that he was not only incredibly erudite and sensitive and even understood Jazz. He wanted to take ownershop of it. He was more than just Pop now. He was a seer. So he recruited a troup of top class players to prove it and drifted off into orbit, Meglomaniac.
Don't get me wrong Dream of the Blue Turtles is a really good record.A lot of the tunes are really great toetappers and masterfully and inventively crafted pieces for the chattering classes. It's beautifully presented. So polished. But boy does it preen.It never stops preening for a single moment. Stand still Sting ! He can't. Each song takes up a different academic dilemma. Sting is clearly stung my his own myriad, fantastic qualities. He juts his jaw at a different critical horizon for each song he tackles and slays each one in turn. What does love mean? Are the Russians good people? Why do people go to war? Why am I so cool and hunky? OK I made that last one up. He never bloomin' stops. I still like it though.
'Libraries gave us power. Then work came to make us free.'
Over the years I've gone backwards and forwards with Manic Street Preachers. I never really attached myself to their comet's tail as many did. They always had something but it wasn't always for me. Their name was always great . Somewhere between Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood and a comic book treatment of The Old Testament. A truly great Rock & Roll band name.
The Richie Edwards incarnation with which they appeared was never really my thing. He was the important player in that band until he went missing and I'm afraid he never appealed to my sensibility. What I was looking for.He was an artist in distress and I had plenty of problems of my own at the point of my life.
As for their sound. I always liked The Clash but never particularly took to bands who took them as a guiding inspiration any more than I gravitated to bands who blindly followed Joy Division or The Fall..Why not just listen to The Clash, Joy Division or The Fall if that's what you identify with. They had the idea first.
The Holy Bible is often considered the go to MSP record but I missed it at the time. I found some of the things Richie was going through and getting up to fairly repellant and disturbing I confess. I went tp one concentration camp. I won't be back I've only come to it the record itself in retrospect. It's damned impressive. One of the few records genuinely worthy of critical comparison with the two Joy Division albums in terms of harrowing intensity and full blooded engagement . Living genuinely on the edge. Artistic bravery of the ultimate kind. It's an incredibly compelling record.
Design For Life is actually the Manics album that means most to me. It came out and I bought it at a time when I was going through a genuinely deeply upsetting break up that did me some damage for a number of years. I remember vividly listening to the title track while smoking a cigarette at the window of my room in my parents house. Genuinely distraught at what I was going through,
They were quite the right band for a moment like that. To soundtrack the intense, threatening moments in peoples lives. To offer consolation and solace to those in apalling distress and crisis of identity. To put out a hand to hold just when it's needed. They deserve respect.
Anyway, I got over it and didn't really follow the Manics much thereafter, Their sound is ultimately a little too monochromatic despite its relentlesss artistic commitment for my tastes for the most part. I don't care for James Dean Bradfield's voice and though their lyrics are always the real deal their tunes often pass me by . They can be bland. Quite self consciously, But I genrally opt for more stylistic variation. Colour is not their thing.
Still here is Critical Thinking. Their 15th studio album after almost 40 years.Good for them. They didn't seem like a band that would survive. But against the odds they have. They're incredibly resilient. Durable. I gave it a listen this morning and it's not bad at all.. They're an interesting band to listen to in these Post Truth Days.. They engage, the record is called Critical Thinking which is the essential skill if you're not going to lose your moorings in these times and get carried away in the remorsefless flood by the distractions of deluge and lies.
But as much as I enjoyed listening to the record it falls short of being an essential one for one key reason. The band sound contented these days. Even happy. Good luck to them. But really the best Manic Street Preachers records came from places where they clearly weren't . I'll give it seven and listen to the stand out tracks agin where thy reconnect to their unforgettable fire once more. They won't be forgotten.
FYI that woud be to the title trackwhere they update the zeitgeist Irvine Welsh 'choose life' monologue of the Trainspotting film for an even more perilous age. Hiding From Plain Sight where Nicky Wire at last takes the mic and does so with some emotional and rigorous aplomb. I hope people will notice this. They're a band that stand apart. They understand Art and its importance. Community. The winds of change. They know their Orwell from their Gramsci. Their Walter Benjamin. How many bands can you say that of? How many people for that matter. I don't. But I'm glad they do. Respect.
A few weeks ago when I got back my flat after a Christmas break away, Los Angeles was burning in catstrophic wild fires and it seemed like a good time to listen to Pet Sounds.It's a beautiful elgaic album at the best of times. At the worst it can be almost painfully poignant. But it's also immensly consoling. An incredible work of art.
Matt Johnson didn't really hold back with 1986's Infected. Almost forty years on it's still pretty much spot on. Worse really. But we still muddle by. Cool tunes and lefrfield raging.
The Pretenders were two down, two left standing by 1984. Chrissie drafted in Robby McIntosh, a fine guitarist (Though James Honeyman Scott of course was quite irreplaceable) and they held their own with Learning To Crawl. Lots of backs to the wall guitar duelling.
It doesn't hold together as well as it might, but it's plenty enjoyable. Two fine singles, including a wonderful Christmas one. A neat cover of Thin Line Between Love & Hate and Middle of The Road which is passable. They were doing well to survive,
My rundown of 1985 is full of Indie also rans who put out great records that were general noticed by people like me Janice Long, Kid Jensen and John Peel. I don't think Peely played Prince. He was the star of the commercial heavens. With Michael Jackson. Madonna. Springsteen. But Prince was far more leftfield by instinct than any of them. He put this our in 1985. I have the single somewhere. So much remarkable stuff happens in three minutes.
I've discontinued this series for the best part of a year. Not sure why. But I fancied a change this morning and this popped out ar me. It was a reminder of people. Of times. Of the importance of love.And most of all The Beatles. They're ones to write off at your peril.
'Sunday Morning ! Praise the dawning.' Let's find a record. No. Not Lou this time. Don't like the look of the new Bartees Strange. How about Denison Witmer. There's a name to conjour with Anything At All. That will do.
Then you take a listen and you realise very quickly that it will more than do. It's a small treasure. Fruit falling in the Sufjan Stevens orchard. Sufjan plays on a couple of tracks. Older and Free the second track sets the scene.
'Down by the lake it's all queen and lace. Up in the hills it's wineberries. Stopped at a farmstand along my way. Picked up a pint of wild cherries.' How good is that? What more do you need. What more could you need. The scene is set. Autumn has arrived early.
My bath can wait. I'll listen more to this. It's poetry,'Beholden to no one but me. For the first time in weeks.' The record progresses in awe and wonder. Positivity, Endeavour and craft. Denison was born and raised in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and he clearly has the gift. Anything At All is magical American Folk Pastoral. Splendid !.
' Life is not a Morrissey song.' A girlfriend. On our split. Early nineties.
'Morrissey is the Hilda Ogden of pop: harrassed, hard done by and constantly surrounded by woe.' NME Review 1985 "Morrisey (sic) and co have once again delved into their sixties treasure-trove, and produced a visceral power capable of blowing the dust off Eighties inertia. The majestic ease of Morrisey's melancholic vocals are tinted with vitriol, as they move through vistas of misery with plaintive spirals around the pulse of Johnny Marr's vibrato guitar. The string's muted strains conjure wistful signs that bridge the schism between crass sentimentality, and callous detachment. Eachrepeated phrase intensifies the hypnotic waves, with results that outflank anything since "This Charming Man". Catharsis has rarely been tinged with so much regret, and shared with so much crystalline purity." Melody Maker Review 1985 'Oh I didn't realise that you wrote poetry. I didn't realise you wrote such bloody awful poetry' Morrissey lyric 1986
"The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there."
L.P. Hartley, The Go Between 1953
When I was 17 and 18 I had very specific routines. On Thursdays I'd buy a music paper, usually the NME. I'd watch Top of the Pops on Thursday. Generally The Tube on Friday. On Sunday afternoon I'd listen to the chart countdown. I listened to and recorded David Jensen and John Peel during the week in the evenings. Sometimes I'd take a small transistor to college so I could listen to Janice Long running through it again during the week. This may strike a chord with people who were doing similar things at a similar point in time. We were almost unknowingly living through a time of great change. And not just the one that was going on inside ourselves. The government was bad. I've never known a worse one.Perhaps I actually have since come to think of it.
A particular NME Thursday sticks in my mind. This one. I can date it because helpfully it tells me in the top left hand corner - February 1984. Alarmingly this is almost 30 years ago. I bought a copy from W.H.Smiths, took it to Richmond Green, sat down on a park bench and read what Morrissey had to say. Thousands of fey youths up and down he country were probably doing pretty much the same thing as me at pretty much the same time.
Re-reading the article at this remove is a rather odd experience. It starts with a quotation from Jean Genet. Fair enough. He was apparently the inspiration for this, which in turn was a major inspiration for Morrissey himself but still. It's an indication of just how much the world and music journalism has changed. NME journalists don't quote Jean Genet anymore. Music journalists don't generally either except if they're amateurs and have blogs of their own like me.
Music seems divorced from all this stuff now. Almost as if it's been neutered. Compartmentalised into a sealed, boxed category all of its own. A consumer option that is a world away from the tortured poets in box room attics of the late seventies and early eighties who dreamed of nothing else but appearing on television on Thursday evenings, recording sessions for Jensen and Peel and expounding their views on everything at enormous length to like-minded NME journalists who secretly (or not so secretly) fancied themselves as romantic novelists .
This stuff is loaded with compressed, resonant, personal memories. I watched The Smiths performing this on Top of the Pops later on that same year. I seem to recall David Sylvian's video being shown on the same show. Angus McBean, directed by Anton Corbijn. Cocteau would have been proud. See what I mean? People pushed the boat out back then.
After it was over, the girl next door Emma Pailthorpe came round and rang the bell. She was very upset, almost tearful as her cat had captured and killed a small bird. I went over and we buried it in a box in her back garden. We then watched Some Like It Hot. All very innocent. Quite Morrissey. Emma Pailthorpe, here's to you wherever you are!
The world opened up for The Smiths and their looks in 1984. The music press had been waiting for their arrival unknowingly for years. Top of the Pops and the charts which had been just wonderful between 1978 and 1982 were on the wane. It was all becoming quite Thatcherite. Glossy, vacuous salesmen selling product. Wham !, Spandau Ballet, The Thompson Twins, Howard Jones, Nik Kershaw. A pox on them all.
The things that had been worth believing in were gone or were going. The Clash, The Jam, The Specials, Joy Division and the Teardrops had all packed it in. The Bunnymen, Banshees, Associates, PiL and Simple Minds were in decline. U2 were not the answer, much as they wanted to be. New Order were self-consciously plain.
Though for me personally R.E.M. and The Go Betweens emerged at the same point and I loved them as much and sometimes more than The Smiths, they were never going to mean the same to a sea of pale British youths looking for a cause and icons. An ideal an image and identity to believe in and follow. The Smiths ticked all the boxes.
They did it all that year. Except that they didn't release the undeniably great studio album that everyone, themselves most of all, knew they were capable of. I remember feeling their first, self-titled record seemed a little flat given the hype despite some great songs, great statements and a great cover. I've come round to it over the years but I wasn't alone in my initial judgement The compilation of singles, b-sides and session tracks Hatful of Hollow which was released later in the same year made up some ground and captured a lot of that early energy and brilliance but there was a sense that The Smiths, despite all they'd achieved, still had something to prove as 1984 became 1985.
At which point I moved here. To a hotel in Locarno on the Italian border of Switzerland where I worked for six months in my year out before university. I got letters from my sister letting me know what was happening and there was one shop in town where they had back issues of NME and Melody Maker but for the most part whatever was going on music-wise in the UK during this time passed me by and so I missed this...
I came back just in time for Live Aid where The Smiths were notable by their absence. Boris Becker won Wimbledon for the first time. Emma Pailthorpe moved away. So did I shortly afterwards. Up to Norwich to university for the big adventure. The Smiths released The Queen is Dead at the end of my first year which realised once and for all their promise.
My girlfriend at UEA had a cassette copy of Murder which we listened to alongside Prefab Sprout, Lloyd Cole, Go-Betweens, R.E.M. and Jesus and Mary Chain. Perhaps things weren't so bad after all. But I didn't own the album myself for years afterwards and only got myself a vinyl copy last year. In the intervening period though I've come to appreciate it more and more and so plan to record that appreciation here as best I can .
The cover of the album is typically stylish but perhaps as bold a statement as the band ever made with theirartwork. We were used to or became used to Northern kitchen sink or TV icons, Warhol derived or art school images. They were all beautifully realised but in some ways deserving of the adjective tasteful. This was something different. A photograph of marine Michael Wynn taken during the Vietnam War. The original statement on his helmet,' make war not love,' doctored by the band to show their album title. Hardly a hippie statement.
"Where did the image come from on the cover of the LP? That makes a link between war and, well, meat is murder. "Yes, it does. And the link is that I feel animal rights groups aren't making any dramatic headway because most of their methods are quite peaceable, excluding one or two things. It seems to me now that when you try to change things in a peaceable manner, you're actually wasting your time and you're laughed out of court. And it seems to me now that as the image of the LP hopefully illustrates, the only way that we can get rid of such things as the meat industry, and other things like nuclear weapons, is by really giving people a taste of their own medicine."
- Melody Maker, March 16, 1985
'Sir leads the troops. Jealous of youth.'
'If you dropped a pencil you'd be beaten to death. It was very aggressive. It seemed like the only activity of the teachers was beating the students.' Morrissey on his schooldays.
The first song on the album was every bit as uncompromising as the cover. As Simon Goddard puts it in his excellent, Songs That Saved Your Life, it's a throwing down of the gauntlet.
'Belligerent ghouls run Manchester schools.'
Try to watch this famous clip from the late 60s Ken Loach film Kes on which opening track The Headmaster's Ritual is surely partly built. See if you get right the way through. It's not very easy to do so even though it is darkly funny if you like that kind of thing. Especially if you have within you the knowledge of the film's bleak deadening ending where the sad main character's dream of escape is murdered along with his kestrel.
It's very hard-going because the brutality of it is true for thousands of kids who went to school in the fifties, sixties and seventies. Listening to The Headmaster's Ritual is a much more pleasant and enjoyable experience at least for me because it has an unstoppable tune, breakneck momentum and poetic, funny lyrics. Music can sweeten these things. It's no less real for all that.
For me Meat is Murder gets under the skin of the English character better than any of their other albums. Even the much lauded Queen is Dead. The Headmaster's Ritual takes you back onto the playing fields of secondary schools when you were thirteen on wet winter afternoons. As someone who was notoriously inept at football I'd be put at right back and told to stay there. Never mind the cross country runs around Petersham tow paths and back lanes straggling at the back, panting asthmatically with the other under-achievers.
I wasn't whacked on the knees, kneed in the groin or elbowed in the face. This was the late seventies so sports teachers couldn't anymore. I'm not sure they wouldn't have done so if they could have got away with it. My experience wasn't so brutal but it's not a part of school routine I look back on very fondly. I've said elsewhere that I'm generally nostalgic but I'm very grateful I won't be going back there. As for the song. It hits its targets square on. This relives secondary school from this era and just before and all its crouching horrors better than anything else written in music for me.
When my parents brought us back to Britain in the early 70s we lived in Nottingham for three years up to 1975. Every year in October they held the Goose Fair on the Forest Recreation Ground. It dates back 700 years. In the early 70s it was all toffee apples and candy floss, waltzers, dodgems, haunted houses and helter skelters. I imagine it still is. Truly British experience.
Second track Rusholme Ruffians inhabits this territory just as Headmaster inhabited its but the song is populated by an older cast than me and my soft-centred memories of Goose Fair when I was eight. It's all about the teenage initiation of fair night and there's more casual brutality and violence in store with a teasing bit of sexual intrigue and cheap romance thrown in for good measure. Morrissey is steeped in this culture and it all just trips off his tongue, this time accompanied by a musical arrangement that whirls and reels like the rides itself. There's a big dollop of Presley's His Latest Flame here. One of Morrissey and Marr's favourites.
For me the initial inspiration for the song seems taken at last partially from That'll Be The Day, the nostalgic rock'n'roll movie that was a big hit in the early seventies. Morrissey is so adept at taking a basic template from films or books, populating it with his own people and way of looking at and commenting on the world and setting it off. The song is so well realised that it almost makes you giddy. Morrissey appears to be beaten up at the end. The senses being dulled are mine. Poor fellow. But his faith in love is still devout. You can almost smell the grease in the hair of the speedway operator. I could quote the whole thing line by line but really it speaks for itself so I'll just post a link.
' and the air hangs heavy like a dulling wine...'
I've barely mentioned the other players in the band yet and it's remiss of me because they're every bit as important to me as Morrissey in the realisation and greatness of the album. It's all sounds so effortless throughout though I'm quite sure it wasn't.. I'm not sure Andy Rourke will ever get the credit he deserves for bringing funk to indie kids and making sure they enjoyed it whether they were ready for it or not. Mike Joyce never does anything flash but that's exactly what's required.
Marr meanwhile, as for much of his Smith's career just operates on a different level from any other guitarist I can think of. It's the sensitivity of his playing that gets me every time. Versatility too. It says everything about the partnership and how much Morrissey missed him that I don't think I've ever really noticed the musicianship on his solo records even though I enjoy plenty of them.
It is strange how words and music go together in The Smiths. A literal interpretation would end up sounding like one of Nico's bleaker albums and that certainly isn't the case . It's one of The Smiths breeziest records. Paul Du Noyer puts it well in his NME review of the album.
"It's not as if the words and music sound 'made for each other': they don't. Of course, they don't clash or contradict, they simply work independently of each other. Morrissey's singing preserves a quality of solitude; the instruments and voice operate in eerie detachment, but often to beautiful effect. Morrissey and Marr don't so much sink their talents into one as give you two for the price of one."
When I saw Morrissey for the first time a couple of years ago, (sadly and unforgivably I missed out on The Smiths), he set off with I Want the One I Can't Have, so he clearly holds it dear. I don't blame him. It says a great deal of what he's about in just over three minutes. Yearning, poetry, melody, life, emotional anguish. Whatever you think of him, and there's a whole great constituency who can't abide him, he tapped into a whole way of writing about emotional experience that no-one had touched on before and barely anyone has come close to since, though I'd doff my hat to Jarvis Cocker . Still. Morrissey wears the crown.
'One memorable couplet from your new record: "A double bed, a stalwart lover for sure/These are the riches of the poor."
Morrissey: That came from a sense I had that, trite as it may sound, when people get married and are getting their flat - not even their house, note - the most important thing was getting the double bed. It was like the prized exhibit; the cooker, the fire, everything else came later. In the lives of many working class people the only time they feel they're the centre of attention is on their wedding day. Getting married, regrettably is still the one big event in their lives. It's the one day when they're quite special...
Isn't that a mite condescending?
Morrissey: Yes it does sound condescending, but it's a fact I've observed. I do know people who have no money, marry and live in very threadbare conditions and have threadbare requirements. I'm glad I'm no longer in that situation myself. It sounds very snotty but what can I say?'
NME Article, 1985
Wrong album but it made me laugh out loud so I had to share it!
What She Said is described as sub Heavy Metal by both the NME and Sounds reviews of the time. I can't hear it myself. It sounds far too melodic to me. It is the most full throttled musical attack so far from all three players and is less a song than a reel but it keeps the pace and standard high. It makes me think of how The Byrds take on James Williamson of the Stooges might sound. Williamson is Marr's long acknowledged hero and inspiration.
How come someone hasn't noticed that I'm dead.
And decided to bury me. God knows I'm ready.
Morrissey meanwhile is piling up the references to the Northern British working class underbelly. 'The tattooed boy from Birkenhead', who 'really, really opened her eyes.' And also adding to the almost endless list of lines that only he could ever write / purloin. 'I smoke because I'm hoping for an early death.'.
Both this and the 'How come someone hasn't noticed that I'm dead and decided to bury me,' line are both redrafted (perhaps slighty shamefully) from Elizabeth Smart lines in By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. The band meanwhile go hurtling onwards into the side's mirthless finale. 'That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore' often mentioned by Marr as amongst his favourite Smiths tracks.
If you ever want to change the mind of a Smiths or Morrissey sceptic, don't play them 'That Joke', because it's Morrissey at his most bleakly relentless and for once The Smiths come and meet him halfway and even compliment him in their sour tone. It's a great, evocative, eerie even profound track but it should surely never, ever have been a single.
What were they hoping for? Top 5 and heavy rotation on the Simon Bates and Steve Wright shows? To be played last song but one at the Student Disco in between Come on Eileen and New York, New York. Please trust me. I went to student discos in the mid-Eighties and they really did play these songs as last and second last song on a regular basis. That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore meanwhile didn't get a look in.
Time's tide will smother you...
I don't know what Philip Larkin's poetry is like but I imagine there's a fair serving of the ingredients that make this up in there. Alan Bennett would surely also approve. It's great British Northern miserabilism. I think it's wonderful but in some ways it's only Marr's and the other musician's astonishing sensitivity that keeps it buoyant and afloat. The reprise is great. And it's even greater if it's raining which it is as I type.
'Each household appliance. Is like a new science. In my town'
Nowhere Fast, Side 2 Song 1 could hardly provide a greater contrast. So what if Morrissey's shovelling on more miserabilism. He surely doesn't mean it. He sounds almost chirpy. That comment about dropping his trousers to the Queen is probably meant satirically though given his well publicised opinions of them it probably actually isn't.
This song was also mooted as a single. I think it went as far as the pressing stage. On balance it probably had a better shot at the charts than That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore and had it made it onto Top of the Pops could have provided one of the truly great Smiths moments. They might have even got some drunken freshers onto the dancefloor towards the end of that student disco. The Youtube film I've posted above is superb and I'm very grateful to be able to use it to brighten up my blog. Thanks to those responsible. Time very well miss-spent.
This is the fierce last stand. Of all I am...
Round about here is where Meat is Murder is reputed, according to received wisdom to drop in terms of quality and dip below classic status. Not with Well in Wonder as far as I'm considered. It's one of my favourite of all Smiths songs. The arrangement is stately grace. They actually made the genius move of recording the sound of rain here, and layering it behind the song as it builds and fades. Rain is such a British sound and such a central feature of our condition.
I hope you get my meaning here and I don't come across as pretentious. It's not something I could really explain without writing a PhD and frankly I don't have the energy, brains or money and no-one needs my thesis. Still. I love the arrangement. I love the rain on the track. I love the song. I like the way it has no chorus. I love the nagging unknowable dilemma of whether you enter the consciousness of someone who you will never see again. I think the emotion presented of someone who is almost dying wracked in anguish by the grief of rejection is magnificent. I love Morrissey's falsetto. Please help the cause against loneliness. Please keep him in mind!
A crack on the head. Is what you get for not asking...
I'd be willing to wager that if a poll was carried out amongst Smith obsessives as to the weakest track on Meat Is Murder that Barbarism Begins at Home would win by a country mile and would be obliged to have done the walk of shame minutes before we reached the funk bass solo. It's mentioned as the lowpoint on virtually every review of the album I've ever read. I haven't as yet managed to track down any dissenting voices so might as well provide my own.
It's got a great title. Morrissey's performance is excellent. There are some great guitar effects and it allows Andy Rourke in particular but Mike Joyce as well to come into their own. It's no less than their due. Their treatment within the band at the hands of Morrissey and sadly Marr too from all I can gather is little short of shameful as from everything I can see they were absolutely integral parts of the band from pretty much the word go whether they wrote the songs or not. They certainly played on them and did a mighty job.
They also have good names which I may have mentioned is important in a group and they looked right. They never let the side down in fact made them much stronger than they could conceivably have been be had it been Morrissey and Marr and session musicians or Morrissey and Marr and musicians that didn't look right or fit. They made up the gang which was what Morrissey so desperately wanted and needed. Respect to them both.
There was a lot of bass crime in the 1980s. Jaco Pastorius was a formative influence for many who wielded the instrument then and Mark King in particular did things during the decade which should have ensured he did time. Nothing Rourke does here even comes close. It's just within the context that The Smith's existed which was an incredibly white one that jaws dropped and eyebrows were raised amongst the indie fraternity. Good for them. They were much too good as musicians for such constraints.
It's overlong but I've just listened to it and it's fine. It's not When I'm Sixty-Four bad or Hippie Boy bad or as bad as the Bill Wyman song on Their Satanic Majesties Request. It's far, far better than all of these. It's just funk indie kids. Get over it! It is the weak track mainly because it's too long but doesn't topple the album's claim to greatness by any means. Perhaps the weakest thing about it is that it makes domestic violence sound like quite good fun which is surely not the driving idea behind it.
Heifer whines could be human cries
Closer comes the screaming knife
So to Meat is Murder. I love the track while it has no impact whatsoever and never has had either on my nervous system or conscience. I'm a confirmed meat eater and was never likely to stop being one at the behest of a pop star - great as Morrissey is at being that. It seems he didn't convince his colleagues in the band either. I won't get into the whole morality debate here. It's not a subject that I can get very heated about.
I cannot understand the Morrissey quote I posted earlier in the article on the subject. It doesn't make any ethical sense to me. Morrissey seems to love animals but not love people too much if at all. If you listen to his lyrics he seems unable ever to establish this connection. It's one of the factors that makes him such an incomparably great artist in my eyes. He has an unresolvable dilemma. He's constantly reaching out for something he'll never attain. He wants the one he can't have. And it's driving him mad...
This track doesn't outstay its welcome in terms of its length as Barbarism probably does .The sound effects, a whole barnyard of animals and the sense that some of it may well have been recorded in an abattoir so close does the sound of their braying get particularly at the end makes it highly effective.
So that is pretty much that. Unless you think How Soon is Now is part or should be part of this album. It was on the American release and has since been added to the UK listing of the CD at least. I don't see any reason why not. It's an incontestable great track up there in both Marr and Morrissey's finest career moments.
'You shut your mouth...
It exists on a slightly different plane from other Smiths songs. To me it sounds almost as if its the work of a completely separate band. It would certainly raise the status of the album to undeniable greatness. So it's in. I think it's generally placed at the beginning of Side 2. I'd prefer it between Nowhere Fast and Well I Wonder.
A footnote to all this. The titles for the reviews of the album in the three music titles successively were Top of the Chops, Meat on the Ledge and Steak Your Claim. Hmm!
So that's it. Meat is Murder. I hope I've argued the case for its greatness with some conviction. The next two albums are quite wonderful too and as I said I've come round to the first of late. However, I couldn't review any of them without repeating myself at great boring length. I regret somehow writing so much about Morrissey here and neglecting the rest of The Smiths somewhat because to me they were always a band first and foremost. I lost interest in all parties concerned for a long time on the break up.
So back to the initial question. Is life like a Morrissey song? Well no. She was a very wise woman and was quite right as she was about most things. But it is sometimes something like a Smiths song. And all the better for it too.
