Speaker 1Hello and welcome to the Album Years and this is episode number two of the podcast which I'm co-presenting with my colleague here Mr Timothy Bowness. Hello to you Tim. Hello. The whole concept of the Album Years as I maybe explained last time is that we pick one particular year during the classic album era which we reckon runs roughly from the mid-60s to the end of the millennium. We pick one year during that period and we talk about albums from that year that we think deserve to be talked about and that means avoiding in a way many of the more obvious choices. So we're going to be talking about 1973. I can tell you now we're not going to be talking about The Dark Side of the Moon. Why are we not going to be talking about The Dark Side of the Moon? Does that upset you Tim? It does upset me actually. It's the album now that dare not speak its name. Well listen it's a masterpiece. I love it. I love the album. I've listened to it a million times. That's part of the problem. I don't feel there's anything left to be said about The Dark Side of the Moon. It's been dissected. It's been deconstructed. It's been reconstructed. There is nothing left to say about the album. The Dark Side of the Moon. Don't say anything about it. So anyway the reason I sneak it in secretly. Well the thing is I'm sure it's going to come up. I'm sure it's going to come up and that's the way of things. That's the way this podcast works. We're going to talk about albums that we think may be a little bit more under the radar. Not obscurity. Some of them will have been hits at the time but for whatever reason they haven't attained the same cachet and heights of an album like Dark Side of the Moon. Now 1973 Tim I don't know if you agree this is an interesting year because it's a year when so many great albums were made and we we're both making our short lists up for this year and we it was it was kind of we were spoilt for choice weren't we?
Speaker 2Absolutely. I mean for me it's one of those years where almost every single genre seemed to be going through a peak. So you had brilliant soul albums, brilliant progressive rock albums, brilliant jazz and jazz rock albums. It was a fertile year.
Speaker 1Now I don't know if you disagree with me or not but I always also sense that 1973 even though what you've said is absolutely true it was like a peak year for many of these genres there's almost a sense that it's in transit that the music is in transition that some of these genres are just on the turn slightly. I think of particularly I think of jazz rock and we've had this wonderful period of experimentation and scorched earth jazz and Miles Davis you know the weather early weather report albums and just coming along at this point in 1973 are the more kind of middle-of-the-road artists like Deodato. Who are about to take electric jazz into the elevator aren't they? Now I love early Deodato albums I'm not saying that's a bad thing necessarily but the reason I mentioned that is that we're going to talk about now one of your choices for for this year which is a clearly a progressive rock album an album from the progressive rock genre but I think many people would point to this album and say this is when progressive rock began to turn when it jumped the shark in a sense when it got too big for its own boots. And the album in question is of course Jethro Tull's A Passion Play. Now I love this record but you've picked it Tim so tell us about this record and why it means a lot to you.
Speaker 2Well for me it's still one of my favorite Jethro Tull albums I think it's one of the most musically and lyrically detailed albums by the band. I also think there's rarely a moment where it's not interesting for me Thick as a Brick although it's a great album and it has a fantastic central theme it suffers from a lot of different things. I think it's a great album and it has a lot of jamming. This by comparison seems meticulously plotted out lyrically musically there's some interesting use of new technology it's one of the first Jethro Tull albums to use since the flute's been abandoned and you have saxophone so it has a very different textual quality at times and bar the kind of self-consciously quirky theatrical interlude The Hare Who Lost His Spectacles I think it's a wonderful album. I think it's a wonderful album statement of intent really and it's Anderson at his best as a composer a singer a lyricist
Speaker 1you see I'm not sure I completely I'm not sure I completely agree with you because I think Thick as a Brick is a superior record for the simple reason that it has better tunes more memorable melodies. I think a passion play suffers slightly from being slightly overwrought conceptually it kind of dominates the melodies and I think that's part of it part of the issue for me the kind of the conceit of the of the theatrical framework I think sometimes for me just drags it down a little bit it feels a little bit too self-important sometimes but I but I do agree with you in a sense there's something wonderful and we've talked about this before I think we talked about this in the 1980 episode as well there's something wonderful about wonderful about an artist kind of reaching for the stars and being completely fearless in terms of being seen you know potentially seen as being pretentious or over ambitious and that's something that I think is really important. And this is an example of an album like that isn't it isn't it?
Speaker 2Absolutely but I don't think he's making compromises anywhere lyrically or musically.
Speaker 1And talking of artists that are completely sort of you know unafraid to embrace you know ambition and and you know reaching reaching for something huge and massively kind of you know over ambitious in that sense I want to talk about this album. Now originally on my 1973 list I had the Hall and Oates album Abandoned Luncheonette which I love that record it's you know it's what it's what I think we might refer to as kind of blue-eyed soul you know white men making soul music but bringing in influences that perhaps only white men would bring in and this is an example of a record like that and it's Todd Rundgren a Wizard of True Star. Now Todd actually produced Hall and Oates later in the 70s and it makes perfect sense that he would do that because I think he has much in common with with their you know their interest in soul music and and singer-songwriter music but there's so much more in this album this album is completely off its trolley isn't it it's got psychedelia it's got jazz it's got music concrete it's got progressive rock it's got balladry it's got it's all there isn't it it's got rock and roll in it this is Todd in his home basically setting up his home studio and doing whatever the fuck he wants and sonically it sounds like shit I mean it's got one of the worst drum sounds I've ever heard in my life on it on one of the most beautifully sublime tracks Zen Archer the drum sound is horrendous. But it's almost so good you you kind of overlook it and of course that first side is is very much you know taking taking its lead from side two of Abbey Road the idea of a series of interlocking pieces fragments some of which are barely a minute long and weaving them into all into this incredibly uh diverse and eclectic kind of patchwork of of music so what do you think of this album Tim?
Speaker 2I love its fearlessness and I also love the fact that it's incredibly dense and eclectic but what ties it all together is his wonderful facility for a melody yeah and that is the thing that at this stage in his career Todd a bit like Paul McCartney however experimental he gets he manages to make this quite communicative quite accessible quite beautiful and Zen Archer as you say is perhaps the pinnacle on the album it's a tremendous piece of music. And yes you know it's pulling in influences from anything return to forever yes Smokey Robinson Laura Nero it's all put together in a distinctively Todd way.
Speaker 1I think like you say whatever he does it comes out sounding like a hundred percent Todd doesn't it it doesn't matter what he's what he seems he's like a magpie he's borrowing from all these different genres but it just sounds like him and it is the sound of someone you know we come back to this time and time again when we talk about some of these albums it's the sound of a man who doesn't give a fuck about what people think he should be doing you know record companies and fans alike but the other thing about this right the other thing about this record one of the other great ironies of course is that he became known as a producer in fact I think he was already known pretty well he's pretty well established already as a producer for a producer to make such a horrendous sounding record is not the best calling card but I guess he was one of those guys he's one of those producers that had ideas so he was an ideas man rather than a kind of sonic alchemist he was more about the idea you know we've often
Speaker 2discussed this for me the role of the producer is very much ideas it's helping out with arrangements it's helping out with the direction of the music Brian Eno is a great example of that technologically technically I'm not sure he's particularly gifted but in terms of ideas he's superlative I think you're
Speaker 1right I think a lot of people have have kind of got those things confused over the years I think I think you know because both of us grew up in the year of the 80s when people like Trevor Horn were at a peak we now sometimes think producers and and the sonics of a record are kind of synonymous and they're not are they you know producers as you as you kind of pointed out the producer was there to give ideas and to get the the song arrangement into shape and come up with ideas for the arrangement yeah to get
Speaker 2the best performance out of an artist for me a producer is there listening to what's being played how it's being played and then telling them what could be improved upon so it's actually having the ears for the overall project
Speaker 1and Todd is certainly someone that was absolutely full of ideas at this time I mean this there's arguably too many ideas on this record So, shall we, let's move on to another record. I wanted to talk about, you know, one of the other genres I feel like was in a period of transition during this year, 1973, was the singer-songwriter genre. Now, this is a great era for singer-songwriters. Of course, we've had an incredible explosion of singer-songwriters from the late 60s through the early 70s. People like Crosby, Stills and Nash and Neil Young, of course, and Joni Mitchell, of course, arguably the greatest of all from that whole genre. But ironically, Joni didn't make an album in 1973, so we're not going to talk about Joni. It's one of the only years she didn't make an album. But this artist did, and it's a fairly, I think it's fairly safe to say this is a pretty underrated and unknown singer-songwriter, Judy Sill. And this is called Heart Food. And it's an incredible record, isn't it? Up there with the likes of Nick Drake in terms of someone who was probably very, very, very obscure at the time, but continued to be. Continues to be rediscovered year after year by people who just fall in love with the quality of the work on this record.
Speaker 2It's a great album. Yeah. I mean, I've been aware of it for some time, but I came to it relatively late. I mean, quite a few musicians recommended it to me over the years. And I guess I heard it for the first time about 2002, something like that, and fell in love with it. I thought it was a tremendous album. And as you sort of implied, it's actually Premier League singer-songwriter. And compared to Nick Drake, I mean, Nick Drake, whose work has, of course, meant a great deal to me and I think is very, very strong. It's understandable why perhaps he wasn't the biggest star of his day. It doesn't quite connect with what was going on. It's a little too introspective. Well, it's very English, isn't it? And in some ways, the interesting thing with Judy Sill is it's all there. This is Premier League singer-songwriter that absolutely fits in with the zeitgeist and yet didn't sell. And it's got perhaps two of the finest songs I've ever. One of the finest songs I've ever heard on the album, The Kiss and The Donor. And The Kiss is a much more conventional love song, which almost has a Karen Carpenter-style glacial beauty. Whereas The Donor is up there with surfs up in terms of its harmonic intricacy and its unusual use of almost Gregorian pre-classical influences.
Speaker 1I think one of the reasons why Nick Drake, you know, never broke through at the time, of course, is he was crippled by incredible shyness and introspection. So maybe there's something similar going on here. Anyway, I don't know. But it is a wonderful album. And yes, you're right. I think to single out The Kiss and The Donor as two of the highlights of the album, not only highlights of the album, but highlights of the whole singer-songwriter genre is absolutely spot on. So you mentioned Karen Carpenter there, Tim. And that made me think about your next choice, which we're going to talk about. Because when I put this album on, I was very much reminded of Karen Carpenter. This is an album where. It's one of those examples where there's an artist that, of course, is almost ubiquitous. And you think you know everything about them. And then you discover that there's this little kind of hidden corner of their discography that you knew nothing about. And that's certainly the case with this artist for me. And you bring in this album to my attention. And we're talking about Diana Ross, who made this album called Touch Me in the Morning in 1973, which I knew nothing about. And my honest opinion is that this, to me, sounded like the record company had said to. Diana Ross, you know what, Diana? This girl, Karen Carpenter, is having a lot of success. We'd like you to make a record just like that. And I didn't really feel like her voice was that suited to that kind of style of almost saccharine orchestrated ballads. To me, it did, dare I say, come across as a little bit like a poor man or a poor woman's Karen Carpenter. But convince me otherwise. Make a case.
Speaker 2Well, it's one of the first albums I ever really came across. Because it was something that my dad would play on repeat as we'd go on tortuous seven-hour journeys to Devon from the northwest of England. So every single note on this album I know very well. I think it's a very strong album. It started off as a concept album called To the Baby, which was in honour of the fact that Diana Ross had had a child. And it was a more politically motivated work. But I think Motown at the time felt that it was lacking in tune. So they brought in a couple of songwriters and the title track. Touch Me in the Morning emerged and they rejigged the album. So what you have is a more commercial vision than was originally intended. But the eight-minute medley that ends the album, Brown Baby, has the kind of sonic soundscape of Marvin Gaye is what's going on. And it also has the political undertones as well.
Speaker 1OK, I have to confess, I didn't get to the end of the record. So maybe I missed the crowning achievement on it. Diana Ross, political? I mean, you know. Diana Ross was political. If you say so. Yeah. If you say so.
Speaker 2So for me, I don't really see it in terms of Karen Carpenter. I'm very familiar with the Carpenters' work. And although I think there's an understated sensuality that is similar to Karen Carpenter, I see it as being closer to Dionne Warwick's work with Bacharach and David in the 60s. Because there are such strong melodies on this album. I mean, it's very consistently well-written, disciplined, you know, with the exception of the eight-minute closer, which I rather like. I sort of see it as being a 70s response to those great orchestrated pop albums of the 60s. But I think this marked a real change in Motown because it was a killer on a commercial level. And from this point onwards, a lot of Motown's releases tended to be more honed in a self-consciously commercial way. So you were talking at the beginning of the show that 1973 marked the end of a certain way of thinking. And I know that what you were going on about was that in some ways it was going on about what you were going on about. You mean, beautifully articulating, beautifully articulating, eloquently articulated. Yeah. Was that 1973 was like an overripe fruit. It was that fruit that just passed its best. A little too sweet, a little too soggy.
Speaker 1OK. It sounds like you have a nostalgic attachment to that record. So we're going to give you a free pass on that one. I honestly didn't think it was that great when I listened to it. But anyway, I'm sure there are people out there that agree with you and disagree with me. So anyway, one album we're going to talk about now, which I think everybody agrees is an undisputed masterpiece from the era. And, you know, obviously one of your favorites. Dark Side of the Moon? No. Well, that is an undisputed masterpiece, but we're not going to talk about that. Jubiler Bells! No, we're going to talk about Roxy Music, For Your Pleasure. The second Roxy Music album. Now, I. I have many friends who probably consider this to be the greatest achievement of all time. And I think you would probably put it up there too, wouldn't you?
Speaker 2It's certainly my favorite Roxy Music album. And yeah, it would be in a list of favorite all time albums.
Speaker 1Well, you know, listen, I love the album too. I'm kind of playing devil's advocate here too. You know, I can say what I like about it and then you can be much more eloquent about it than I can. But what I like about it is it's kind of got still got that sort of slightly. glam element. I love glam rock. I love this sort of period of, you know, we're coming out of the glumness of the sort of, you know, blues rock of the late 60s and the way that kind of developed into the early 70s. And we're coming out of that into something much more kind of exotic and flamboyant and glamorous. But at the same time, it's got that kind of art school mentality with people like Eno and his EMS synthesizer and Bowie and his art school upbringing. So it's really the beginnings of what I suppose a lot of people, would call art rock, isn't it? Is it? Is that fair to say? Is this beginning of art rock? I think it is fair to say, yeah. This and 10CC maybe? I mean, I think it's.
Speaker 2Well, 10CC obviously were making very good albums at this point as well. I mean, it was their debut release this year. But the 10CC album was much more about pastiche, at least their debut was. I think sheet music was a far greater statement. But isn't this too?
Speaker 1Hasn't this also got. I know that the first Roxy Music album has got a lot of what you would call pastiche in it. You know, 50s rock and roll. It has. But
Speaker 2what's interesting about it is it draws from almost 20s pop music and 50s rock and roll and subverts it in a 1970s glam way. It's got quite a murky, almost Todd Rungren-esque production, that debut album, which perhaps gets in the way of the enjoyment. Not anymore. But I like the debut album.
Speaker 1Not anymore. But since I remixed it, it sounds stunning. It sounds. Anyway, I'm joking. I've got that remake. You thought it was a load of shit, didn't you? You'd rather listen to the original.
Speaker 2I thought, as old Mr. Grace would say, you did very well.
Speaker 1Thank you very much. With a couple of buxom women on either side of him. Anyway, so I've interrupted you for your pleasure. Tell us why this is such. Why is this the pinnacle of the Roxy catalogue? What makes it the pinnacle of the Roxy catalogue?
Speaker 2Well, interestingly enough, to deviate, because we like to deviate, Eno thinks it isn't the pinnacle of the Roxy catalogue. For him, it's actually Stranded. It's the album that followed this, because he felt that they took. took the experimentation from For Your Pleasure and managed effortlessly to turn it into something that was more commercially honed. And he's right. I mean, Stranded, which I think might have also been 1973.
Speaker 1I don't know, but I don't think there's many people that would agree with. I mean, you know, maybe he's just. Mother of Pearl? Yeah, no, listen, I love that album, but The Bogus Man, In Every Dream Home, A Hard Take?
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean, I think this is the last Roxy music album music, perhaps with the exception of Manifesto, which I think is a very underrated album by the band that had a real sense of edge and discovery the one thing about stranded is it's a band completely on top of what they do they're controlling all of the elements and eno of course is still at this stage a random element so what you have is a far greater sense of professionalism than on the first album when they're borrowing aspects of other bands so for example the bogus man which i think is one of the album's highlights you can hear aspects of frips a tonality in the guitar you can hear aspects of jackie leibs it's metronomic drumming there's a can uh reference point i think in bogus man but actually i think roxy music do can better than can because i think no one does
Speaker 1can as well as can but i take your point i love the roxy music album but the can no one does can as well as can anyway carry on as you
Speaker 2were so yeah so several of my favorite pieces here um it it has grandeur it has playfulness and it has a tremendous sense of thrilling experimental exoticism and you know in every dream home a heartache is perhaps my favorite roxy piece of all time yeah
Speaker 1it's amazing i think they're kind of pulling off the bowie trick here aren't they and i say the bowie trick meaning they're making something that is simultaneously incredibly commercial and accessible but at the same time couldn't be more experimental it's interesting you brought up bowie because i think
Speaker 2a better album overall than bowie had done roxy music are ahead in the game this is a better
Speaker 1album than bowie's album from this year isn't it a lad
Speaker 2insane it certainly is although bowie's album has qualities a lad insane is something that i much prefer to ziggy stardust because it's one of those syndromes where you know an artist's most successful album and fan favorite quite often isn't mine i know ziggy stardust is held up as a great achievement for bowie and of course it's a very good album it's a tremendous sounding album for its era but i think it's bowie at his least adventurous certainly vocally certainly lyrically and certainly musically whereas a lad insane may not be quite as coherent an album but with the title track alone you've got something that is venturing into new directions in that case avant-garde free jazz
Speaker 1so you um by the way i just wanted to mention here for the listeners we the first album that we're going to be releasing is the first album that we're going to the first show we did the 1980 show we tried to talk about way way too many albums and uh we didn't get through anywhere near as many as we hoped so we're being slightly more modest this time and we're just we're just picking 10 or so albums to talk about but we're kind of we decided what one thing we would do is like maybe reference other albums as we've done there with the bowie album from that year um that kind of connect to the main album we're talking about so with that in mind i want to talk now about what was happening in the world of kraut rock in 1937 and i'm going to talk about what was happening in the world of kraut rock in 1937 and you've just referred to can in a rather derogatory fashion if i may say uh which i was quite appalled by uh to suggest that roxy music did can better than can did which of course listeners will all appreciate is an absurdity do you want me to insult you even more yeah go on low david bowie does tangerine dream better than tangerine dream i'll treat that comment with the contempt it deserves and move on so kraut rock this is this is an album we're going to talk about which is the can album from this year which is but there are there are some other wonderful kraut rock albums from this year and i use the kraut rock term knowing that it's kind of derogatory in a sense to kind of lump all these groups together but at the same time faust who released i think their best album this year faust four had a track on the album called kraut rock so even they embraced it anyway so this year we had tangerine dreams phaedra we had faust four we had klaus schultz cyborg or cyborg we had the second noi album kraut rock was as as an absolute peak here and what was extraordinary about kraut rock and i'm sure you know this too is that most of these bands were big in the uk in a way that they weren't big in their home country yeah um and most of them were signed to to uh british labels so noi were on united artists cam were on on uh i think they're also on united artists uh phaedra tangerine dreams album was of course the their first release for the the the very newly set up virgin records another british label so it was almost like the kraut rock sound somehow resonated much better with the british than it did with you know with the german with the german people themselves so um i wonder why that should be there's something um that's almost become part of the musical vocabulary of pop and rock music when you listen to a band like can isn't there the use of repetition it's it's almost like the in some ways it comes from the same place as progressive rock but at the same time it couldn't be further away from that could it because it's all about economy and it's not just about the music it's all about the music it's all about the showmanship and it's not about complexity it's about repetition and simplicity and in that sense it has more in common with you know someone like steve reich or philip glass than it does with with yes or gentle giant so i don't you talk even though you've slagged them off in talk talk about can and future days i
Speaker 2suppose a lot of the kraut rock bands actually did emerge out of specifically british psychedelia i think if you look at the core influences for tangerine dream can faust perhaps less so pink floyd psychedelic pink floyd are a major influence i think a lot of the long form can grooves even on future days sound as if they're partly coming out a source full of secrets for example or pink floyd live at pompeii and i can hear a lot of that psychedelic era floyd in early tangerine dream early can early class schultz etc etc and the beatles as well oddly enough i think that you know the textures on something that strawberry feels outside of that perhaps you've got the more avant-garde um stockhausen certainly um well airman airman schmidt
Speaker 1airman schmidt and helga chuka i both studied you know i believe with carl hans stockhouse yeah so there is you can hear
Speaker 2that so so i think specifically it comes from the same place as progressive but it's a deviation from it so you could argue that progressive rock comes out of psychedelia to an extent sure sure the beatles pink floyd 67 maybe even the moody blues that those albums in 67 point at where bands like king crimson yes
Speaker 1genesis but i don't think they're going to come out of but i but i don't think that's i don't think that's necessarily the whole story with with the bands like can annoy because i hear when i listen to can and this is this is to be fair this is one of their more slick albums the the albums before this were a little bit more had a little bit more primitivism to them i mean there were great records to take a mega monster movie i hear sister ray velvet underground sister ray i oh yeah completely i mean certainly the 13th floor elevator i i hear that kind of influence of american garage you know the slightly more intellectual end of american garage the seeds you know repetition um simplicity almost stream of consciousness lyrics and an album like future future days i believe was cut directly to stereo so there's no multi-tracking there's no apart from editing after the fact there is no revisionism there's very little overdubs so this is very much jamming live and then and then basically editing the improvisations to create the impression of structure and create the impression a bit like miles davis was doing at the time very much and and i also was just about to say i also hear that i think that kind of cut up technique which of course is something they would have got from people like stockhausen and teo macero what doing what he was doing with miles um but it's also but it also somehow transcends all of those things doesn't it krautrock is something that has a quality all of its own and it's very difficult to articulate what that is um well it
Speaker 2is given that the bands are so different if you think of tangerine dream faust can and cluster although there might be a common psychedelic sonic palette they sound very
Speaker 1very different but i think they have from each i think the one thing they have in common all of those bands you've just mentioned annoy of course being uh another good example of this they have an interest in repetition ostinatos so you don't you don't have a lot of interest in repetition i mean like a band like emerson lake and palmer for example would never have done much in terms of just simply repeating a simple figure whereas a lot of these crack rock bands i mean obviously tangerine dream was all about the use of sequences which is by definition a repeating ostinato which you then improvise over the top of and i think there's something that's common to all of those artists that we've mentioned here klaus schultz's the cans the noise the clusters it's about setting up cycles isn't it and then kind of processing or processing the music and then you know you're playing over the top of them in a way that i guess in some ways isn't the granddaddy of this terry riley with yes yes yeah very much it's interesting isn't it the the use of repetition which you could argue was something that i guess was much more influential i mean with the one band we haven't mentioned of course which in arguably the most influential crowd rock band of all which is craftwork are the possibly one of the most influential bands of all time for the simple reason that electronic music exploded in the 80s and 90s and then it was the most influential and they very much those artists very much looked to kraut rock rather than progressive rock as their kind of as their kind of year zero so listen let's go on to um another of your choices the soft soft machine now uh another band we both love another band that's kind of hard to kind of hard to categorize aren't they i mean We talked about psychedelia. started out as a psychedelic band and increasingly moved towards jazz rock and one of the one of the stories i've heard is that um soft machine uh when they were moved from they were on cbs records at the time in the early 70s when they were moved from cbs's mainstream rock and pop arm to their jazz arm they became they went from becoming they went from being the worst selling pop and rock artist they had to becoming the best selling jazz artist they had which just shows you about the sales of jazz music in the early 70s uh soft machine seven so yeah so this this is kind of the album where carl jenkins is is taking over the band but it's still got that wonderfully kind of wistful english quality that i think they lost on subsequent albums this is the last album they made for cbs um i think the later albums i'm sure you'd agree they moved more towards kind of anonymous jazz rock but here they've still got that that wonderful what i associate although soft machine were kind of removed from that scene what i associate with the canterbury sound that very english melancholia very beautiful charming melodies without any of that kind of archness or cynicism that perhaps you get from you don't get that kind of showiness that you get from some of the american jazz rock from the same period i don't know if you agree with me
Speaker 2on that absolutely i mean it's as i've said along with two it's my favorite soft machine album and carl jenkins dominates composition which means it has a real but sonically it's coming from terry riley a rainbow in curved air it's a lovely fusion of early american minimalism very subtle grooves and extremely pretty melodies and it's for me the most complete album they ever made i mean they hint at this on six they hint at this on third um and after this point as good as they are it certainly is as you pointed out becomes a more anonymous flashy jazz rock proposition and it's something it doesn't communicate to me in the same way and i've always put this album in terms of its wistfulness and its melancholia with hatfield in the north's debut album which is another gorgeous piece of work though a lot more humorous and a lot more playful by comparison so
Speaker 1now it's interesting we talk we're talking there about the fact that soft machine even though they're obviously they're playing with or they're kind of playing an american style of music aren't they you know jazz rock is a style of music that kind of indisputedly came from america started in america but there's something about it it's been it's been anglicized in a way that makes it sound very distinctly different to the american jazz rock and i want to talk about a similar kind of thing that's going on with the singer-songwriter genre in in this period of time uh you know we've talked about judy sill's album which is an american singer-songwriter very much cut from cut from the same cloth as your joni mitchell's album which is an american singer-songwriter very much cut who obviously was a canadian singer-songwriter but there was at the same time a group of english quintessentially english and scottish in the case of john martin singer-songwriters that were doing something very very different and very distinctly english and i want to talk about those one of those albums now which is roy harper and life mask now it's a sad thing to say that most people have heard of roy harper because of a led zeppelin song title but you and i have both been massive fans of roy harper particularly this period of his work um when he's doing something really quite different with the whole notion of acoustic based singer-songwriter music isn't he particularly on this album
Speaker 2he is yeah and in some ways it's interesting to compare and contrast him to john martin because they're similarly working with echoplex they're similarly working on the textures of their guitars and they're great players but they come up with very different things just because they're john martin's music is much more sensuous much more melodic whereas roy harper's although it comes out of dylan there's a very stringent englishness to his enunciation in some ways um he's like a softer peter hamill i kind of see there's a peter hamill roy harper i think there's a connection but
Speaker 1i think i think the thing you're picking up on there if i might sort of interpret what you're saying here please do sir is that john martin wasn't about the words was he john martin was about the feeling the sound of his voice whereas roy is very roy harper is very much like peter hamill it's very wordy isn't it it's very much about the narrative and the words and
Speaker 2the lyrics yeah i mean john martin could produce an entire album with the words sung three thousand times and it would be exquisite and indeed he did that
Speaker 1yeah he produced inside
Speaker 2out i believe he did yeah roy harper you're right you can hear his influence on ian anderson and roger waters again and he's a great singer and he's a great singer and he's a great singer and again two songwriters who strongly believe in the power of the word and um harper i guess was as much a poet as he was a singer songwriter and in some ways you could argue it's a difficult thing it's a debate we've both had in the past but i've always believed that lyrics are incredibly important but that the music itself perhaps is the most important you can get classic timeless groundbreaking have terrible lyrics whereas the best lyric in the world can't sell it i think that's
Speaker 1why roy harper would have much more in common with someone like bob dylan who because bob dylan and you know you think of a song like sad eyed lady of the lowlands it's that stream of consciousness thing isn't it and here we have on side one of life mask we have a 23 minute stream of consciousness piece of music called the lord's prayer now you could be you could you could argue that that puts him also it gives him quite a lot of power and it's a great song and it's a great song and it's a great song a lot more in common with the world of progressive rock here's a side long piece which has various you know kind of sections and movements to it but it's quite stripped back it's mainly predominantly just acoustic guitar and voice for most of the duration and it is very very uh lyric vocal based equally i
Speaker 2think with roy harper there's a kind of bile in his voice and this again connects him to peter hamill that the word and roger waters and roger waters yeah so hamill are precursors to punk as much as they are uh examples of the most experimental elements of the progressive music scene so i think that if you were listening to it purely sonically it would still give you a feeling this music you know it's quite ambitious the way in which it cuts up the spoken word and the way in which it processes the guitar there's also
Speaker 1the hamill album from this year now we joked in the first episode that peter hammer was an artist that's probably going to crop up in every single episode because there's almost there's there's almost there's almost there's almost there's almost barely a year goes by when there isn't an interesting peter hamill record and the and the record he's made from this year chameleon chameleon in the shadow of the night is also one of my favorites and also you know an idea of taking what can be done with a simple acoustic guitar voice singer songwriter context processing in the studio um pushing the idea of structure and compositional structures to its absolute limits so there's something it does seem to be something in the air in 1973 in terms of these these british singer songwriters also the year that kevin coin made marjorie razor blade and again another massively ambitious uh you know acoustic based singer songwriter double album in this case so there's something in the air isn't there in this time in the british singer songwriters
Speaker 2yeah and coins instincts again you can hear the influence of dylan and what he does but it's thoroughly anglicized it's made into something more experimental more eccentric and angry
Speaker 1again it's angry again and angry
Speaker 2yeah kevin coin is another one of those artists that probably made as much sense on stage in 1970 as it did in the early 70s and 80s um and i think it's interesting that he's made a lot of sense in the early 70s and 80s um and i think it's interesting that he's made a lot of sense in the early 70s and 80s um as did of course you know hamill and harper um although it's interesting with hamill and harper that hamill managed to navigate the new wave effectively in the same way that bowie did frip did gabriel did and harper to a certain extent always had that whiff of um you know the 1970s about him the early 1970s that the harper album was the one that was seen a lot in the early 70s and 80s and 80s and 80s alongside led zeppelin 3 pink floyd's wish you were here for obvious reasons is
Speaker 1that i think that part of that is because he was seen as a massive stoner he's just got that kind of vibe about him that he's basically a hippie he's he's permanently stoned and you could kind of hear that in the music whereas hamill sounded like he was always complete you know it was almost like the opposite he was completely hyper he wasn't chilled out at all harper was just like so chilled out he was like falling off his stool whereas hamill was completely manic you know um so there is that kind of separates them in a sense anyway i think we should move on tim i want to talk about another of your choices now this is an artist that i i'm going to come clean here and say i don't like this artist i have tried i he's just one of those artists a bit like nick cave i have massive admiration for nick cave i just don't like any of his records and i've tried and i've tried and i've tried and i appreciate the genius of it and this is lou reed um i love the early velvets albums i just can't really find a way into his solo catalog and i know that this album we're talking about from 1973 but i think it's a really good album and i think it's a really good album and is rated uh by again by many people whose opinion i respect yours carl glover's opinion um as being his absolute masterpiece and i have it um i just don't like it very much so i'm gonna ask you to i'm gonna i'm gonna ask you to tell everyone why this is a a record well worth it which which absolutely is and i can see that it is a a great record and it is absolutely worth listening to and worth owning but i'm not the right person to speak about it so you speak about
Speaker 2difficult album really to sell, isn't it? Because I think that you either get the voice and the mood or you don't i mean this is certainly one of his most ambitious albums and i think one of the things that's kind of missed out with lou reed is that he always saw his songs as being short stories as much as songs and berlin is the novel if you like so it's a fairly relentlessly bleak depiction of a relationship and a life in chaos and torn to tatters by um you know drug consumption as much as anything else what i think lifts this above a lot of lou reed albums is the production it's produced by bob ezrin who obviously later on in the decade goes on to produce pink floyd's the wall famously and at this stage he was famous for doing alice cooper's albums and alice cooper's albums of this period actually it's an album we didn't put on our list but billion dollar babies was around this time might have been his 1973 album again superb orchestration so i think bob ezrin's involvement in this as much as anything is what i like i mean as a whole this just works very nicely i mean obviously it's it's difficult to use the word nice about an album that has the song it's quite not i was gonna say it's quite
Speaker 1nasty it's got sort of it's got a sort of undercurrent of nastiness about it hasn't it
Speaker 2well one of the great um rumors about this album which um has been denied latterly was that i think it was bob ezrin in order to get a particular emotional peak in the album he wanted um the as the children are being taken away from the mother that the story depicts and this is probably because of her you know drug abuse and so on and allegedly bob ezrin called over to his own children kids your mum's dead it's a great
Speaker 1story but if it if it is true that's that's just going too far isn't it listen um so okay i think i think you've made a good case for it there is an album that i kind of admire when i hear i just don't like it very much i think for me the early velvet underground charm for me at this point in lou reed's catalog most of his solo work to be honest i find is a little charm less uh for me yeah and i prefer i've got
Speaker 2to say that in terms of velvet underground solos i love the velvet underground debut album but actually in terms of the solo albums because it was like roxy music all of them produced quite a number of solo albums and they were all interesting and the john kale albums around this time you know helen of troy um fear tremendous pieces of work and nico i mean her albums yeah which were produced by kale in some cases fearless and totally consistent and although she may have been the least musical in one of the least musical bands um brilliant pieces of work when we get to
Speaker 11969 we'll definitely be talking about the marble index for sure which is an album that you introduced me to many years ago and it's it's definitely in my top 50 albums of all time anyway let's i think we've got one more album i want to talk about before before we wrap up and then then we can give a brief shout out to anything that we haven't talked about you know from this year because there were so many uh great records this year but one record i do want to talk about because it is um i think it's an amazing record and it's again by a band that many people wouldn't really consider as having reached any kind of artistic peak until much later in the 70s but to me this is uh right up there with all of their best work and it's on the third day by the electric light orchestra now this is as i say the third band's third album that's the title and it's not a record i see a lot of people talk about there's no real big big you know mainstream hit singles on this album although some people might know mama bell and some albums some versions of the album have showdown added as a bonus track which was kind of a non-album single at the time this album for me is jeff doing his um i am the waris rock and roll album and i'm doing this album for the first time in a long time with cellos um it's it's kind of getting that formula absolutely honed to perfection because obviously later on he's moving increasingly towards i guess moving away more from the lennon influence to more than mccartney influence more towards pop and of course was a genius when he when it came to writing uh timeless pop songs but on this album he's not trying to write timeless pop songs he's still trying to create something far more progressive in the true sense of the word far more experimental far more of a fusion of pop and classical instrumentation the whole of the first side is again we talked about the todd album having a continuous suite the whole of the first side of the album is a continuous suite which is bookended with two versions of the same uh theme called ocean ocean breakup so it has this very conceptual kind of bent and scope to it and i just love those heavy cellos used in place of you know what would traditionally be sort of distorted guitars it's that kind of heavy cellos and nothing heavier than uh multi-tracked heavy cellos so i don't know if you're familiar with this album tim but uh it's one of my absolute all-time favorites might even be my favorite elo album on a good day
Speaker 2it was it was such a fertile period for pop music i mean i'm thinking here of 10cc sparks who are about to release kimono my house and elo that tremendously inventive pop music that seemed to be coming out the second side of abbey road in the 70s and um i think that's what i think that's what i think is going to be one of my favorite albums of all time and i think it's going to be one of my favorite albums of all time and i think it's going to be one of my favorite albums of all time and i think it's going to be one of my favorite albums of all time and i think it's going to be one of my favorite albums of all time and i think it's going to be one of my favorite albums of all time and i think on the third day fits very nicely into that i see on the third day as being the first album where they become elo i love the first album the first album is actually one of my favorite electric life me too and partly because it's incredibly unpredictable it's quite insane in parts and there's obviously the roy wood influence on this but on on the third day it's like they're absolutely in control of their materials it's like they're absolutely in control of their materials it's like they're absolutely in control of what roxy music is and on on the third day this is a very confident lynn making a great album
Speaker 1but he's still yeah sorry just to try he's i think the the difference between what came before and what and what came after and this album is kind of like the watershed moment is there still that darkness that the early albums have um the kind of almost oppressive use of cellos very much so you get to the next album the next year el dorado you get to the next album the next year el dorado you're starting to become much more lighter much more pop but this album's still very dense and very it's got a very dark oppressive atmosphere to the voice he's i think partly because i don't think he was very confident with his voice at the moment at that time he was processing it a lot using that kind of megaphone effect on the voice distorting his voice it makes it very claustrophobic in a way uh the sound of this record the production on this record so for me this is at this i think we're going to talk about this with a lot of artists they're reaching a certain point where they're in transition maybe it's true of the soft machine we talked about they're in transition but there's a point where they're just between two worlds where they're just getting the best of what came before and the best of what's to come and things are perfectly in balance and for me that's what we have on this
Speaker 2album i think it's interesting i mean that transitional period can be um often the most exciting i mean you know talk talk color of spring is one of those albums where it's transitional yeah yeah you know the discipline of the pop song era talk talk but you then have the beginnings of where the band are about to go and it's a tremendous collision of accessibility and ideas which makes it one of my
Speaker 1talk talk favorites as well so um that's kind of i think that's all the albums that we had on the on the list of must must must talk about but we should just maybe give a shout out for some of the other albums that we did have on our list that we we simply haven't had time to listen to but you know as we said we may we may get to the point where if the show carries on we may come back to this again but we haven't talked about some great albums t-rex tanks uh probably my favorite t-rex album uh vangelis earth um the last of the really the evangelist rock albums where he's still using a lot of guitars and drums and very much a companion to the previous year's aphrodite's child album 666 uh barry white stone gone bowie's a lad insane we did talk a little bit about labby sifris for the children and another album i knew nothing about that you you turned me on to which uh again is a very interesting kind of a different take again on the singer-songwriter album uh lonnie liston smith's astral traveling kind of spiritual jazz record um sandy denny's like an old-fashioned waltz uh led zeppelin's house of the holy which is kind of borderline classic rock canon uh so i'm not sure we would talk about that anyway but it's a great album and and perhaps one of the more underrated corners of their discography uh klaus schultz's cyborg we briefly touched on henry cow's legend album or leg end depending on how you want to say yeah uh you know another album i guess which which kind of loosely falls into that sort of soft machine hat from the north canterbury related sound not my favorite henry cow but it was a great album and again one of the first albums on the on the very newly launched virgin records at the time so those are albums we didn't get a chance to talk about but they're albums that myself and tim all uh all of those albums we also rate very highly so as you can see we we were really struggling to get this down to uh the ones that we talked about okay thank you very much again for listening and we'll be back next episode I think We're actually going to move into the 90s, Tim. How about that? Good God. Well, we will find out next time as we talk about 1992. So the last thing that remains for us to do is to pick two albums from 1973. First of all, the one that we think is our personal favourite and the one that we feel perhaps is the most influential in terms of signposting the future, Tim. So what would be your choice for your favourite 1973 album? I suppose it has to be Dark Side of the Moon. Okay, and your most influential record?
Speaker 2In terms of influential, I'd say that For Your Pleasure, because I think this is what comes to define a lot of post-punk music and a lot of early 80s experimental electro pop.
Speaker 1Cool. Okay, I think I'm going to agree with you in terms of For Your Pleasure, being possibly the most influential. It's certainly the album that seems to come up most when I talk about, you know, albums from this year with other people. It's an album that comes up time and time again as having been a big influence. So in terms of my personal favourite album from this year, it's tough. There are so many on this list. I'm looking at Tangerine Dream, Phaedra. I'm looking at T-Rex, Tanks. I'm looking at ELO on the third day. I'm looking at Peter Hamill's Chameleon in the Shadow of the Night, all of which I would be very happy to be straightforwardly, grounded on a desert island with. So I can't really pick between those, to be honest, to be fair. But anyway, and Dark Side of the Moon. Obviously, I literally do not need to hear that album ever again. When I was a kid, my dad listened to it over and over and over again. And actually, I've got a lot to blame my dad for or thank my dad for in terms of my musical DNA by playing the album relentlessly when I was six or seven years old. And now I never need to hear it ever, ever again as long as I live. But it is an album I will hold up as a perfect, perfect record. But there's nothing else to say.
Speaker 2So you had Dark Side of the Moon. I had Touch Me in the Morning.
Speaker 1I think you might have got the better deal. Well, I probably did. Based on what I've heard of Touch Me in the Morning, I definitely did get the better deal, yeah. Anyway, on that note, we'll say goodbye. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you, Tim. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
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