Speaker 1hello and welcome back to the album years for the first time ever tim we're actually going to do this face to face like you and i normally indeed yeah discuss stroke argue about the music i mean it could get very physical it could get for the first time it could get physical now the interesting thing is of course we started this as kind of a covid project didn't we so it was by necessity it was all done via zoom remotely speaking but we thought now that we can you know now that we can interact we should actually try and do this face to face so let's see maybe the magic won't be there as i say this is kind of how me and tim usually discuss music you know face to face uh trying to fob off you know yes mid-period billy joel albums onto each other you know in swaps and all that stuff not that there's anything wrong with mid period billy joel it's not at all we're just discussing off mike what a classic album he made this year because we're talking about 1977 right this is your choice tim but it's a year we've been planning to talk about for a long time isn't it because it's such a kind of you know seismic pivotal pivotal there yeah that's as van morrison said a period of transition and is that that was one of van's that was van's album of this year was it which ironically is one of the few i've not heard very much also i'm afraid i haven't so nice to see that i'm not the only one that hasn't done my research this year but so let let's let's talk about 1977 obviously for for most of us here at least in the uk 1977 is a year that i think people who time always think of as the year of punk but also a much more successful commercially at least into a genre was the genre of disco which kind of exploded this year too didn't it so we got these two kind of opposing things punk and disco which are kind of shaking everything up aren't they but
Speaker 2you've also got i suppose the american mor fleetwood mac dominated 77 to a degree as well and obviously queen in britain had an enormous hit with news of the world so it's um i mean what's interesting for me is kind of when we were looking through the news of the world it was through this list it's not one of those years where we kind of really need about three to ten episodes to kind of really three to ten three to ten episodes i'm thinking and every genre seemingly you know obviously it's seen in retrospect as the era of punk to a degree the era of disco but almost every genre seems on fire and i think when we did 76 i remember saying that we thought there was something a little exhausted so you could partly understand why 77 had to happen but what's interesting is some of the artists in the older unfashionable styles are actually producing their best work in 77 and it's for different reasons i think it's for two reasons i think one it's artists who are very aware of what's happening and so they're somehow kind of connecting with the zeitgeist and two and it's something we like equally it's artists who seem oblivious to what's happening and they're just lost in their own lovely little fantasy world but i think
Speaker 1i was looking through the list earlier the list that we're going to go through and it is a very a very long list of albums we want to talk about for this year there's very few albums that aren't at least affected in some way at least to my ears very few albums that aren't affected in some way by the three things that we've kind of mentioned which is the the revolution of punk the revolution of disco or as you say i mean i kind of think of that as almost like an extension of the laurel canyon singer-songwriter scene of the early 70s but it's become increasingly smoother increasingly more disconnected from you know reality in a way isn't it and obviously crossing over to a massive audience and disco in a way i suppose is the other side of that coin it's a very it's a very upwardly mobile expensive kind of lifestyle it's the it's the antithesis in a way of punk isn't it so it seems to me like there's very little that isn't affected in some way by at least one of those i think
Speaker 2there are a few outliers and weirdly enough it's actually in the progressive field where you get them i'd say you know i can think of three albums that don't really seem to have anything of 1977 about them i'd say yes going for the one anthony phillips geese and the ghost renaissance novella where they seem oblivious to anything that's happening and it's as if they've just kind of pursued what they were pursuing almost with a kind of blind focus on it
Speaker 1isn't that probably just a bit of time lag in that case maybe it was the next album for them that they would have started to take on the they're just a little bit slower to kind of you know acknowledge and absorb what's going on but i mean i guess we'll we'll we'll come to those things certainly i see the influence through a lot of things i mean you look you think of albums like abba the album which was the big abba record that she has definitely an influence from disco on that
Speaker 2record well there's an influence from progressive so i think what's interesting with that album is it's very expansive record and yes it does have those kind of smooth textures that you come to associate with say chic there's that kind of almost symphonic disco which i i've always rather liked you know
Speaker 1but let's start because you know certainly for you and i i mean we we were sort of i mean i was nine in 1977 you're probably a couple years older me you've been 11 or 12 i think 13 13 oh my god old geezer in the house alert this would have been a very important i mean this was about the time i was starting to buy music in fact i bought my first record this year which was carly simon nobody does it better which i still think is one of the great i i brought that as well well well
Speaker 2interestingly kind of coming on from 70 i think when we did 78 that it was a great year for singles and a great year for very eclectic singles so i would have been buying albums by this stage but singles were probably the main thing i was
Speaker 1going to buy i
Speaker 2mean i started buying i think you know my first singles was sort of 75 so it was one of those things where i was like oh my god i've got to buy my first album i've got to buy my first album i've got to buy my first album i've got to buy my first album i've got to buy my first album but yeah during this period there were so many different things that were so exciting and what was quite nice i guess still at 13 i wasn't reading the music papers so i was open to it all without
Speaker 1prejudice really so yeah absolutely i mean i was buying predominantly well i was buying only singles in 1977 i couldn't afford to to buy albums but i wasn't probably interested in albums at that stage anyway i was interested in albums at that stage anyway i was interested in albums at that stage in these sort of pop moments you know i was only in some ways i was only sort of aware of punk as a phenomenon as being very much on the periphery of my you know childish perspective of pop music because of course it's also true to say that punk although its longer term impact is huge it wasn't particularly successful commercially was it you wouldn't have seen a lot of punk music in the top 10 would you not at all
Speaker 2and i think that it took quite a while to get to the top 10 but it took quite some time i mean you know where i was i was based in between liverpool and manchester and there wasn't necessarily you know now if we see films one of the things i can't stand is when you see these films set in 77 and everybody is either wearing a disco gown or they've got a mohawk and the fact of the matter was that if you want to know what kind of late 70s early 80s britain looked like i always think gregory's girl is one of the best examples where everyone's got reasonably long hair still very little hair and i think it's a good example of that fashion sense and rush posters on the wall and actually this was closer certainly to you know to where i was in cheshire at kind of grammar school it was closer to that than it was of course we had punk fans and new wave fans and i bought into some of that as well but again i bought into it because i was hearing things on the radio on top of the pops it was what excited me so you know i could buy the stranglers for example in 78 the squeeze or buzzcocks but i was buying them carly simon or elton john or yes or whatever it was was that partly
Speaker 1because of your age because i think i mean certainly in my age when i was nine years old and starting to buy singles i had no concept of i didn't care you know what was hip what was fashionable what was trendy what was unfashionable i didn't care you know i think those things become more important to maybe in your mid-teens you know being part of a tribe not i mean you know i'm sure you and i've both got stories about you know pretending that we didn't like some of the music that we did like or almost convincing ourselves that we didn't like it because it wasn't the right thing to be at the age of 15 or 16 it wasn't the right thing to be seen to be listening to bat out of hell well or incantations by mike oldfield you know
Speaker 2well bizarrely for me i remember having because i still had my mccartney and wings posters on my wall and i did have yeah i'd like joy division posters what the hell and of course now i quite like that combination but at the time you do feel slightly stuck and you're like oh my god stung by the uh by the criticism but yeah i it was buying because you liked i mean i kind of i got into albums at that stage and i think the first music for me i think probably similar for both of us really that i was really attracted to film music so john barry's bond film music was probably the first music that i totally fell in love with had the albums by and so on this was kind of you know when i'm eight nine um so film music was was quite important i didn't really have a sense of what was fashionable it was just what you were attracted to so i guess the first pop singles for me were always things like sparks this time big enough for the both of us i'm not in love behemian rhapsody which had a cinematic quality i suppose were those really the singles you bought yeah because actually this is one of the things where i can be completely honest about because i hated pop music when i was at school i liked hymns i liked classical music that my grandparents played and i loved john barry
Speaker 1because the reason i ask is there's a brilliant story and i and i kind of completely relate to this there's a brilliant story in the book by giles smith called lost in music yes yeah i've heard that about how he convinced himself the first single he ever bought was hey jude i think i think it's hey jude by the beatles and even in his own mind he's kind of convinced himself yeah and then he goes up into his attic one day and he finds a box of his singles he bought when i was a kid and he's numbered them all in order that he bought them and he's shocked to discover that he's been kind of fooling himself as well as everyone else when he's been telling it and actually the first thing i forget exactly what it was but like chicory tip or something like that so he's almost like brainwashed himself into believing that the first single he bought was but i know for a fact the first single i bought was nobody did a good carly simon but the second single i bought might have been by donny osmond or something i don't know i'm sure i made some terrible fashion faux pas
Speaker 2the thing is because i was i was obsessed as i said with you know john barry soundtracks and i hated pop music so when i was at school it was sweet it was the osmonds to a degree it was slayed and it was just very very boorish i mean i was pretty much you know at the school i was a little like lord snooty i'd be in there with my top hat oh
Speaker 1wow you were a
Speaker 2snob even then for me i hated this and so it was when i'd heard i'm not in love on top of the pops and i think actually before that it was sparks this time big enough for the both of us that just ran through my head rampantly but i didn't buy it but i'm not in love i did buy and i absolutely fell in love with it and the only thing on top of these things i'm telling you was abba where i liked abba at the time so i'd have bought abba singles and that's the only kind of what you've called now pop we all bought abba
Speaker 1singles but but okay so so with that in mind yeah what was your response to the whole kind of punk here's one chord here's another one here's a third one now go and form a band i mean that kind of reduction to the very basic elements of making music i mean how i mean that was even less sophisticated than slade in the suite wasn't it so how did you respond to that and how did you respond to that and how did you respond to that very badly no i i really you said you were buying buzzcock singles so you can't have responded
Speaker 2that's 78 that was later um and i think they were always more sophisticated i think people kind of underestimate how sophisticated some of those great new wave and punk pop singles were it's this thing you know i think because of music can be beautifully produced people can be fooled into thinking it's sophisticated and i think we both know this that certain music we love let's say pink floyd some of it isn't particularly sophisticated or complicated at all but it sounds beautiful it feels beautiful whereas actually some of these punk pop songs were quite difficult to play quite difficult to write so i i've never quite bought into you know the complexity arguments but i at the time was sort of aware of punk and a couple of friends would have been interested but for me it was again listening to music on the radio listening to it through friends listening to on top of the pops and something spoke to me some things didn't so at the time and now sex pistols and clash i didn't like in the way i didn't like slayed and sweet and i still don't like those early albums i think john lidden with public image became fantastic and inventive and in fact the first sex pistols album i can see it's quite well produced and he's kind of interesting but to me it's like a status quo album it just does nothing for me and ditto the clash whereas the stranglers when i first heard them no more heroes top of the pops absolutely grabbed me what a great song great arrangement so some of it got me some of it bored me to tears what about okay so what about
Speaker 1the damned new rose i mean that's pretty back to basics would that have appealed to you or spiral
Speaker 2scratch ep by the buzzcocks spiral scratch did and i don't quite know why there's something kind of there's a nagging insistence in the early buzzcocks um and i became a much bigger fan of magazine but the damned didn't damned to be honest it's not that i didn't like them it's i just didn't know enough or hear enough
Speaker 1okay because as you know new rose is now yeah yeah it's perceived to be the first ever british punk rock single um if i'm if i'm right i think they beat the pistols by a couple of weeks putting new rose i love new rose so let's tackle i think one of the one of the fundamental things that we want to discuss here is the revolution the punk revolution uk style versus the punk revolution us style now i i've had this discussion with richard barbieri quite often because richard is a big fan of the so-called us uh punk bands and i've never been as much of a fan i've always preferred the uk stuff and there is a big big difference for me the us stuff never and probably that's one reason why you may prefer that sort of reductive atavistic back to basics thing that the uk punk had and when i think of bands like television and talking heads i just think they're actually still really arty and pretentious yeah and in a good way and when i think of bands like blondie and the ramones i just think it's bubblegum pop dressed up with some slightly you know more arch uh production so i don't necessarily think of that music as punk for me punk is something that i've very much associated with the uk and singles like new rose by the damned anarchy in the uk by the pistols the first wire album which is also very clever in its in its way and very art school in a way but it's also very very um how should we say primitive deliberately primitive in the way it's it's kind of uh fashioned so maybe we should talk about that the sort of uk versus you say i mean you the uk versus us sort of approach to to punk what what's your feeling about that well yeah i
Speaker 2think there was always something sort of slightly um grubby and back to basics about the uk approach and and you
Speaker 1know the main but that's punk isn't it to be grubby and back to basics i mean okay it's quickly developed into something more sophisticated it is but i find it very you know it's interesting
Speaker 2we're going to a pretension here that i found the british side of it more pretentious so the clash's first album which i've never liked whereas i i love santa nista i love london calling um i even think combat rock's got some great stuff i think they became a brilliant and really diverse band actually but that first album does absolutely nothing for me and i think there's a kind of pretension where it's actually some pretty bright talented people really dumbing it down whereas at least i think the us punks were true to themselves true to their history true to their influences and there was an aspirational quality that i bought into as well so the us bands i just sort of discovered more late 70s but mainly patty smith talking heads for me were the big things that i adored and once more it would have been because of my age i discovered you know i think it was patty smith because she was on top of the pots with because of the night and i bought easter which is a stunning album and with talking heads there was a south bank show special on fear of music but
Speaker 1that's much later obviously isn't it i mean yeah we're talking about the talking heads first album
Speaker 2here i mean i love i love it but i i would have only heard it say 79 80
Speaker 1compared to say wires pink flag to me it's a lot of people would say this is i think this is the the crux of the matter really a lot of people would side with say the talking heads uh over the wire i would always personally i would prefer the wire it's a similar kind of um situation in a way they're kind of artists painters conceptualists whatever you like whatever however you want to describe it but they're taking a slightly more back to basics approach and they're filtering it that's filtering that through or they're filtering their sensibilities through that kind of musical vocabulary i love the wire album i don't particularly like the talking heads album the talking heads album to me sounds closer now to fleetwood max rumors than it does to the first damned album or the first alternative tv album whereas the wire album still has this incredibly visceral kind of quality to it like they've just gone into a basement and record and not i mean that's that album is notorious for having like 23 songs a bit like the ramones album in a way but much more sophisticated than the ramones the ramones album just to me just sounds like people doing rock and roll 50s rock and roll yeah i think there's rock and roll there's surf there's bubble gum it's boring to me i don't like those kinds of music it's boring to me whereas pink flag there's something about pink flag pink flag no no pun intended that sounds like pink floyd put through a sort of a punk filter and i and i love it and maybe it's just being english and and finding more connections and finding more connections and with the sensibility of british punk than i did with us punk i still to this day i quite like marquee moon i don't see how it's punk in any way to me what i think of as punk is encapsulated by the dams new rose the pistols anarchy in the uk um the jams first album you know although the even the jams first album you can say well actually it's just kind of they've taken the who template yeah and they've made it a bit more sort of brash and a bit more cynical um so there you know you can hear the precedence through through a lot of these things uh i suppose that respect i just never related to the american um the american punk sound so much whereas richard feels completely the opposite
Speaker 2yeah well i thought as well you know for me the first talking heads album i think is quite underrated and i kind of see there's also a disco sensibility to it and what i liked about the american bands was there was a kind of a spindly atonal quality to the guitar playing so um richard tells me the voidoids had it as well you know blank generation television because richard hell had been in television as well television to a certain extent i always saw as being a kind of punk variant on grateful dead i think you can hear live dead in what they do the whole the unison guitars i you know so i quite like the ambition of marquis moon and i thought they were bringing something fresh to that dual guitar approach and again talking heads have that slightly atonal slightly cross rhythm that you can see also fits in with the burgeoning new york minimalist movement the steve reich uh philip glass and so on and i guess that's partly why i kind of connect with it yeah
Speaker 1yeah i can see that you know and i can also see how that that approach of television particularly um influenced the next generation of you know punk musicians the post-punk musicians in the uk so you get bands like gang of four and xtc you completely again i much prefer the english sensibility maybe again it's just because of you know who i am and and always responding more to english music than american music i'm generalizing now but certainly this point in time um i can see how that would have also perhaps been something that wire themselves would have been listening to at the time but there's also something quintessentially english about wire i hear that also in a band like ultravox you know yeah john fox who himself was an artist and again you know patty smith on the other side of the of the ocean was a poet you know so there's there are parallels there too um but so what you know what for you would be what what music from this uk scene did you sort of respond to in a positive way or none of it well it's
Speaker 2just no i stranglers very much so and i bought the singles at the time and you know got into buying but interesting because you've put
Speaker 1the strength you haven't even put the stranglers in the punk category you've put the stranglers in and we've kind of collaborated on this list here but you i've let i've let you have this one you've put the stranglers alongside hawkwind vandergrift generator and pink floyd in the sort of progressive rock punk crossover category yeah and i completely understand why you would do that but in a way they could equally have gone alongside ultravox and wire and the sex pistols and the jam in in the uk punk category well they were weird but you know i loved those first two
Speaker 2albums they did in 77 yeah so i think the stranglers were quite different i think there's a recognize almost all the instrumentalists you know greenfield and um jean-jacques benel in particular and it was a tremendous sound and what was interesting about them is a bit like the american bands you can hear they're rooted in a kind of 60s psychedelia as well that comes through and then you can hear how that influences the next generation that i was listening to the stranglers first couple of albums again recently and you hear how much julian copen tier two explodes took from them which is something i hadn't kind of realized at the time but in retrospect you can hear that so i just thought you know a fantastic combination of personalizing a kind of 60s roots making it sit nicely in the 70s um and obviously influencing some of the new wave to come but i think again with the stranglers they're one of those bands that very quickly evolved into something different you know for me they hit a kind of creative peak on the raven but i love the fact that you know even in the early 80s with feline they're still redefining themselves they seem musically curious and i think that's one of the things you don't get in a lot of the meat and potatoes british punk really well i
Speaker 1think also what's interesting about the stranglers is just the fact they had a keyboard player yeah most of these punk groups we're looking down this list the clash the damned the jam the pistols they didn't have keyboard players and i think only ultravox is the only other band i can see on the sort of broader sort of uh musical vocabulary opportunity for more musical more sort of varied textures musically and they were a little bit older as well weren't they so they weren't like paul weller was like 19 or whatever john john johnny rotten was like 20 these guys were mid-20s or in the case of jet black the key uh the drummer was already in his sort of late 30s yeah yeah so they had grown up through so i mean i suppose this is an example of of a little bit of opportunism on their part but there is something also very punk about the attitude is this kind of sneering um cynicism that hadn't been in in a lot of music through the 70s and i think that's what in a way that's the hallmark of a lot of what we've come to know of as punk music it's not only the reductive nature of the music and as you say in some cases the music is quite deceptively complicated and the opposite of reductive um it's actually quite clever music but it's that kind of sneering archness that kind of appears in a lot of these bands like wire um and also that sort of thing is let's just cut to the chase let's get through this song in a minute and 52 we don't need seven minutes to say what we want to say we're going to say or in the case of why we're going to say in like 52 seconds you know or the ramones we're going to say it quickly to the point and probably at twice the speed that we would have done if we've been recording this in 1975 so two years later all the tempos are up and we're going to be able to say what we want to say in the next few years so two years later all the tempos are up um and and that's kind of a hallmark of punk too isn't it the sort of brevity the to the point the sneering quality so we're just going to
Speaker 2bash this out yeah i think so and you know going back to ultravoxing again like stranglers not only to have a keyboard player i think they came from a different tradition you can hear the bowie and roxy music art rock art pop background certainly in their debut it's very prominent and whereas i think it's it ha ha ha was this year 77 it's much more brutal but you can still see in a way that they're coming as much from eno as the
Speaker 1well craftwork i think i think craftwork was their their big probably you know too but i can hear a lot of craftwork in the second ultravox album even even some of the language about being robots and being sort of you know slightly alienated and and and like almost like an automaton you know there's a lot of that imagery
Speaker 2isn't there but there's a kind of conceptual heft isn't it you probably the second album might be my least favorite i still think it's great but i think there's there's always a real sense that this is thought out it's part of a bigger picture which i kind of liked about but going on in a sense what you were saying about attitude because one album that because i think i have that section it's kind of is it a prog is a punk where i do think there were certain artists from the prog side that had so beautifully dovetailed with punk that there's almost indistinguishable and then people like the stranglers and a few others who had dovetailed the other side and then people like the other side and then people like the other side and i think the pink floyd album from this year fits what you said in one respect okay very long tracks very slow tracks in that respect it's the antithesis one of the things that you know isn't that widely discussed is that two of the songs had been written before wish you were here you know they were actually being toured before wish you were here had been recorded but there is something about animals perhaps more than any other album of this year that captures what it was like to live in england in 1977 that period of gloom depression mary white house mary white house tension and what they have is not only this brilliantly grimy britain of 1977 there's a real cynicism and edge in the way in which it's sung even gilmore so this material may have been written in 74 but perhaps because of the atmosphere within the band even the guitar solos on dogs they have they are dripping with attitude and bile which perfectly links it to 77 in my mind anyway i think you're
Speaker 1right i think a lot of that might have been serendipity um you know just coincidence that roger waters is very angry uh increasingly angry at that time the alienation i think the band members felt within within the band from each other and also perhaps the fallout from the massive massive success of dark side of the moon had kind of taken into it taken them into an area which put them kind of on a parallel with a lot of the attitudes of punk rock and of course it's ironic in a way that pink floyd became in some ways the symbol partly i think because johnny rotten was known to go around with a t-shirt saying i hate pink floyd they became a symbolic of all that punk was a rejection of but you're right there's a lot of common certainly a lot of commonality between something like animals no more heroes by the stranglers what about i mean i would have thought for you tim you would have probably i was expecting you to say that the one artist that you felt a lot of affinity with would have been elvis costello because he came more from a sort of sophisticated singer-songwriter background so what about elvis costello i would have thought for you he would have been someone you would have related more to
Speaker 2yeah but i kind of discovered him slightly later i bought the single so you know watching the detectives an amazing single but for me the breakthrough in terms of of me getting the music was probably Oliver's Army Armed Forces period which I think is a great album and once more I think that you know he's always seen slightly as a kind of reductive artist during that period but if you listen to Armed Forces it's an incredibly eclectic musically versatile album where he could be drawing from psychedelia, jazz, ABBA there's an awful lot that he's drawing from as well as writing these brilliantly literate pop songs so yeah he was definitely an artist I felt an affinity with.
Speaker 1Ian Jury I mean he's another kind of I guess he's another he's another artist that kind of benefited from the sort of scorched earth policy of the music press doing away with all of the sort of you know the progressive rock and the Laurel Canyon scene and the smooth FM pop of things like Rumours Ian Jury was another artist that kind of benefited from that because he'd basically come up through the London pub pub rock scene hadn't he but he was suddenly embraced by the punks as someone who had an affinity with that
Speaker 2well he was a real one off and you know again fantastic hit machine during that period very distinctive singles and some really strong albums as well I mean what I think was interesting about that whole period is that Zapper always said you know that you you know for AR executive you sign 10 bands one succeeds and this is why for him the 60s and 70s was so interesting because they often didn't know what they were doing and I think punk was a great period in the artists like Elvis Costello Squeeze who really were not punk in any sense and Ian Jury as you've just pointed out managed to get in yeah but both of those
Speaker 1artists you just mentioned were on Stiff Records a tiny independent label so they didn't get the record deals the bands that got the record deals obviously Controversial, The Sex Pistols got a record deal but then got dropped out of the record deals dropped and then got another record deal and then got dropped again so the record companies were struggling with punk I mean interesting Wired's album comes out on the Harvest label the same label that Animals came out on that year so I think even there there's a parallel between Wired and Pink Floyd I always think of Wired very much as the Pink Floyd of the punk scene not only for those reasons
Speaker 2also the artwork I think ties in that you know I think that for Floyd and Wired the visual were almost as important as the music you know somebody had asked a question online whether we'd ever bought albums as a result of the covers and of course the answer is yes and you know Wired and Floyd are two of those bands where the covers would have beguiled me as much as the music in a way and it was part of an all enveloping experience those artists that's why I think Wired hit the Floyd nerve but it's
Speaker 1also true to say and this is coming back to what I was hinting at with the Costello and the Jury thing that a lot of these bands were not getting big record deals there were this new generation of independent labels popping up as well and so maybe this is another thing that distinguishes the UK punk scene from the US punk scene Talking Heads was signed by Seymour Stein I think to Sire Records Blondie was signed to I forget who it was now it was Chrysalis in the UK I remember that Television were on Elektra they were on these big big corporate multinational you know labels the Ramones were also on Sire whereas a lot of the UK bands couldn't get record deals and ended up being on brand new independent labels a band like the Damned were on were they also on Stiff actually I think a lot of these bands were on Stiff Records I mean Buzzcocks were New Hormones
Speaker 2weren't they it was their own label initially and then
Speaker 1Buzzcocks were New Hormones yeah in fact Squeeze put their first single out I think this year on their own label didn't they and then got picked up later by A&M so there was a lot of bands putting out records on a new generation of labels as well there's going to be a lot more kind of exploding in 78 independent labels because a lot of these bands the big record labels were wary of so I think you're right there is a sense that when the music industry senses that something is happening the first thing they do is they go out and sign 10 bands and they just see what sticks they don't necessarily understand it but they know if the kids are digging it that they might be lucky they might get lucky with one of these 10 bands they sign and there is a degree of that too obviously well I think
Speaker 2it's what the gate keeps you know if you're talking about the music papers that there was overnight especially with NME and to a degree sounds that overnight they took on board punk to the detriment of almost everything else but an interesting thing is going back to Floyd because Animals was released I think in January 77 and that was still getting front page of NME and it was still being played and it's entirety on the John Peel show so there's still that element that things are about to change
Speaker 1significantly it's interesting if you look at so John Peel for those of you don't know John Peel is a very very famous UK DJ that was always at the forefront of every change in music for decades I mean he's legendary in that sense so John Peel had this thing called the festive 50 every Christmas he would get his listeners to vote for their favourite songs and it's interesting picking up on what you were saying Tim if you look at the one from around 1977 1978 and I have looked it's a mixture of things like Stairway to Heaven alongside Anarchy in the UK and there's a real transition but if you just fast forward even two years all of the Shine On You Crazy Diamonds have disappeared and it's all from then on Joy Division, The Smiths, Cocteau Twins, The Fall and all of the old school classic rock artists don't get a look in but there is as you say there's this 12, 18th month period where they kind of co-exist before all the kids realise they should not be listening I mean putting this in quotes now they should not be listening to the Zeppelins
Speaker 2but it also happens to the students because as I said Gregory's Girl looks like Britain did I think when I was a kid when I was at school and to an extent Marky Smith if I'm thinking that even the kids who were the punks in my school were more Marky Smith than John Lydon in terms of sort of image and so on so it takes some time for these things to filter through you know if you look back at yearbooks of 79 it's not what you think you know if we're now watching this documentary on channel 4 of I Love 1979 and everybody is a certain way they're not and they never were.
Speaker 1Is there a sense that the true punk leading on from what you're saying there is there a sense that the true punk would have been someone that didn't care about what people thought about what they listened to so Marky Smith in that sense is more of a true punk because he would have been very honest about the fact that he was as influenced by Cannes as he was by I don't know Velvet Underground or whatever or the Stooges is there a sense that the you know the kind of the weekend punks the ones who kind of adopted the oh we don't listen to any of that prog rock or you know 60s shit that's all rubbish it's year zero and of course the music belies that anyway doesn't it you listen to it and you can as you say you can hear I mean I listen to a song like Tank by the Stranglers off Black and White which is the following year I think this is this is obviously so influenced by bike by Pink Floyd you know even down to the you know the sort of writing a song about a method of transportation
Speaker 2well I've always been wary of year zero things really you know of course it's very exciting as an artist to reinvent yourself and also to find a new scene that's absolutely inspiring I don't doubt that some people found that but you know generally speaking they all came from somewhere they all had certain root tastes and some of them it was very obvious you know you find there are quite a number we know these musicians from punk and new wave bands where actually they really were you know either kind of singer songwriter jazz fusion or prog and that was their true love even during their success well because you look at
Speaker 1when they grew up and you think how could you not how could you not be aware of those things I mean if you were Pete Shelley from Buzzcocks or Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols or you know Colin Newman from Wire you're suddenly emerging as a professional musician in 1977 and you're making music nothing comes from a vacuum so what did you grow up with you grew up with Slade Led Zeppelin Pink Floyd Carpenters you name it this is what you grew up with and okay I think there was a lot of revisionism around that time oh yeah we only listened to Bowie and Roxy bullshit bullshit you were also listening to Nectar you know so
Speaker 2well is it because I think isn't there a t-shirt with Ian Curtis wearing a
Speaker 1Nectar shirt well I asked Stephen Morris about this and he said yeah Ian loved all that stuff you know but I think in some senses we can't blame the musicians because you mentioned the music press there's a lot of the music press kind of impose I remember speaking to Nick Beggs about this you know Nick Beggs who came out with the Kajagoogoo and The Goo in 84 Nick had grown up as a bass player being inspired by Return to Forever Stanley Clark, Brand X Jaco Pistorius he wasn't allowed he was actually told by the press department at EMI don't mention that stuff and this is the mid 80s this is another era completely but the same is true isn't it
Speaker 2because I you know God when I was a teenager I'd kind of started in the early 80s when I was doing interviews initially on kind of radio and sorry manchester and liverpool radio stations bbc stations in independent you couldn't mention certain things and of course the djs themselves had much more eclectic tastes than they were willing to allow their show you told me a
Speaker 1story tim you told me a story about when you were when you were a teenager with all your buddies and punk came along that you went out lining british telephone boxes with copies of eggs the civil
Speaker 2service it's pretty close to the to the truth basically it's a terrible terrible thing it's an awful waste but there's a
Speaker 1zero it's a year zero in war in the
Speaker 2waza um it wasn't quite that though it was um it was more that we used to be able to buy albums for like five and ten pence at a manchester shop called yanks and we just used to go through so many albums you know we'd go to manchester weekend come back with bags each of us with maybe you know 10 to 20 albums each and we'd listen to them and it would be anything from funk to prog to reggae to classical to jazz and it was a way of finding out what you liked what you didn't like and the things we didn't like we ended up disposing of and unfortunately we sort of ridiculous ways of disposing them so for example you had 30 albums hanging off the stockton heath swing bridge what sort of albums would
Speaker 1these have been
Speaker 2though nectar would have certainly been amongst them actually because nectar were always really cheap in yanks i i love
Speaker 1this image of of some unsuspecting you know person going into a red telephone box to make a phone call and finding a copy of eggs the civil this is the other thing
Speaker 2that yes we would next to the telephone leave albums in telephone boxes um and there were a couple of supermarket car parks where we would completely cover certain spaces
Speaker 1i love this i i love this story because of course now you would probably admit to loving some of those records right and but this is what i'm saying that i think when you're at that kind of age your impressionistic age you kind of convince yourself i mean i did it you can i convinced myself that some of this music which i genuinely i've grown up listening to abba and carpenter's records and donna summer records and i probably did go through a phase in the 80s where i convinced myself that i couldn't and shouldn't be listening to this stuff is this kind of window in the middle of your life where i think this you know being older now we couldn't
Speaker 2care less could we yeah i mean i think i kept i mean i think it's i think i kept the things that meant something to me i always kept so again if we're talking about say pink floyd they didn't go those albums you know kate bush the things that i absolutely have you know the first things i
Speaker 1but kate bush was always eternally you know the first things that i kept were the things that i a hipster territory she's never been someone that was persona non grata has she really but certainly the floyds would have been and things like nectar would have been completely beyond the pale sure completely beyond the um but some of
Speaker 2these were you know it was a genuine sense of for us it was discovery it's like what do you like what do you dislike so it's now i was talking about the other week of an album that i remember getting for something 10p in the cut up bins and i still love it and i loved it then it was kind of unfashionable then is now stevie wonder's secret life of plants what an amazingly creative intriguing record so if i believed in something that stuck
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