Speaker 1let's let's catch the chase it's him in 1977 yeah what was the archetypal unquestionable cut out bin bargain bin record i'm again
Speaker 2i'm not quite sure because if you think about the albums that were big in the progressive field during this well not just progressive not
Speaker 1just progressive were there albums from the sort of laurel canyon scene that were considered you know by 1977 were considered bargain bin favorites i don't
Speaker 2think you know in 77 i still think things like you know yes genesis floyd was selling fantastically and we're not reaching those bargain bin and we're not reaching those bargain bin and we're not reaching those bargain bin and it was probably at that point the likes of the carpenters it was more the kind of safe mor of the late 60s early 70s neil diamond carpenters i don't know i
Speaker 1remember seeing quite a lot of copies of better by far by caravan in the in the bargain bins at the time gentle giants a missing piece uh crosby stills nash oh that was yeah yeah okay um graham nash and steve still solo records uh through fair gap or i think that was one of the steven stills albums from the period um those ones i remember seeing a lot in in in the bargain bins around that well i think they
Speaker 2suddenly i think you know as much as anything else i think the american mor scene suddenly seemed incredibly outside of the zeitgeist although the exception to that of course was was neil young who had american stars and bars this year which was a really ragged album but very beautiful and very creative well that's interesting i think it's a really good album and i think it's a really good
Speaker 1album and i think it's a really good album and i think it's a really good album and i think it's a really good album interesting isn't it because neil young kind of stayed relevant by almost anticipating the back to basics non-musicianship outsider element of a lot of punk rock whereas his buddies yeah crosby national stills sort of moved ever further towards the kind of muso slick la west coast sound didn't they so neil whether through design or luck with albums like tonight's the nights kind of almost predated or predicted the back to base expression of course he was you know at the time he was he paid the price for that didn't he his so-called back to the ditch trilogy um the on the beach tonight's the night zuma i think those are the three records he considers in that no time fades away they're very ragged aren't they and very punky uh out of tune out of time yes um and i think that in a sense is a really good album and it's a really good album and i think that in a sense is a really good album and i think that in a sense is ironic it was in the 80s that he seemed to lose his way yes but in the 70s he'd kind of stayed relevant by almost being punk before punk was a thing
Speaker 2well i was thinking about this that what you know this idea of the um is it a prog is it a punk thing that the prog bands that to a certain extent integrated well sonically with that era let's think of vandergrift generator pink floyd hawkwind you know artists from another generation who actually sounded really quite natural and at home in 77 i think it was a combination of those artists like neil young and neil young as you just pointed out was another on one level anticipating what was happening or accidentally just reflecting what was around them but the second level is that those were the bands that perhaps had more influence on the upcoming new wave and punk bands that actually vandergrift always had that vicious atonal quality pink floyd were in some ways always one of the least musical of the progressive well you have to i think you
Speaker 1have to be careful when you say when you say least musical actually they're one of the most musical in the sense that their melodies and their attention to texture and production yeah or the the least technical the least showy the
Speaker 2least showy that basically elements of say what pink floyd vandergrift generator hawkwind were doing in 72 73 were still being reflected in the music of the new wave artists and the punk artists so you know i'm sure stranglers wire as said before and certainly when it comes to the likes of magazine tier two explodes those were the artists that at a certain extent they would still be drawing from and not embarrassed to be drawing from whereas the more florid technically complex music of elp yes seemed from a totally different generation a totally different mindset i think so it's that combination really that you know pink floyd hawkwind vandergrift neil young on one level they were the artists that the new bands were drawing from on another level they did move with the zeitgeist
Speaker 1yes i mean though those bands again just really more by luck than judgment but they sounded more relevant in 1977 in a punk climate because actually they'd always had a simplicity or or in the case of hawkwind a kind of non-musician outsider yeah kind of vibe to what they did they were not great musicians they didn't want to be great musicians let's just say the influence of something like mahavishn orchestra and return to forever was completely absent in bands like pink floyd vandergrift generator and hawkwind where whereas it was very apparent in bands like yes um the the complex the shredding the the jazz kind of uh tonalities uh harmonic inversions of jazz were all over those kind of bands but they're completely absent you know and you know let's talk about the ham one of our favorites the ham the ham every every year we have to talk about the ham because the ham was very prolific throughout this whole period again another year the ham made two records one with vandergrift generator the quiet zone the pleasure dome which was an album which was made with a new stripped down um although ironically there were more people in the band but there was something that was very different from the sound that was more in keeping with punk and new wave it was streamlined there was less of the extended compositions there was none of the keyboard elements because there was no keyboard player suddenly in the band except for the ham himself surely more by luck than judgment this was an album that just seemed to reflect the the coming of punk rock wasn't it
Speaker 2yeah but i think he already had those elements in his mind and i think it's a really good album i think it's a really good sound you know nadir has got aspects true yeah oh yeah
Speaker 1absolutely and it's a prototype punk album
Speaker 2if ever there was one very much so and so i think that it was all always a part of his vocabulary and although vandergrift's music and hamill's music can be quite naughty it's very instinctive you know it's not a kind of showboating compositional naughtiness there's something where it is pure pummeling excess you know to me when i hear some of that music there's a kind of hammer horror grand guignol whatever there's there's an aspect that they're almost amusing themselves while creating this horror which i think a lot of punk was just saying it was like how fast can we get how ugly can we get how extreme exactly and i think that was always in hamill and and um vandergrift's dna which is another reason why i think that you know that punk generation didn't drop them and drew some inspiration from them and and i can hear aspects of vandergrift in them and i think that's a really good album and i think that's a really good album and the early stranglers as well and i think it's you know i think hamill did play with the stranglers live as well during that period there was more of a crossover than we we think latterly but going back to something you were saying earlier that while on one level the return to forever that aspect weather report that level of sophistication was absent completely from the british punk in terms of charts in terms of success some of those artists were having their biggest success you know weather reports biggest albums album was from this era heavy weather 77 steely dan's asia was as close as they came to very complex harmonic inversions jazz fusion music in a way so on one level while this music was the epitome of what one shouldn't be doing it was also in its commercial apotheosis if i can use that word
Speaker 1so i mean we have talked about that on on on the podcast before haven't we actually if you look at what was what were the biggest records during that period of time i think that's a really good example of that i think the biggest record buying demographic during the so-called year zero punk post-punk era they are breakfast in america the war of the world yeah bat out of hell rumors um they're not really signifying a new a new era for music at all um that took time i think to filter through so yes i mean that's certainly true commercially the the biggest record buying demographic was still the squares for want of a better word yeah the people who probably only bought one or two records a year i mean i remember my mum and dad buying breakfast in america you know um saturday night fever soundtrack my mum and dad were not going out and buying damned damned damned or you know or new boots and panties by injury they they you know of course they weren't that was that was aimed perhaps that's it you know perhaps it was because the demographic that those records appealed to were more of a singles but then as we've said they weren't they weren't really making many inroads into the singles chart either were they those artists so not at that that point not at that point no so i think it was it it is something that history tries to tell us at least was much more seismic than it actually was at the time it was happening in an underground way it was happening i suppose in school playgrounds and it was it was going to be something that would have a massive impact on perhaps the 80s generation of musicians people like roland orzebel would have grown up you know listening as much to um you know genesis albums as well as uh you know punk rock records yeah and suddenly you hear those the influences of those two kind of you know and us included i suppose in that too you know we we grew up we became of age as people that were inspired to be musicians ourselves during this very confused confusing in a good way time
Speaker 2didn't we well it was an exciting period and i think it comes back to again the beginning of the show that almost all the genres to a certain extent were operating at their peak you know so for me an album like going for the one by yes is arguably one of their greatest albums and it was a huge commercial success and going back to the great billy joel you know his album from this year the stranger it's really ambitious mor with some brilliant singles you know this is a gifted songwriter with a great sense of humor and sense of production is there a sense
Speaker 1that the very the very first volley if i can use that word of of punk records just weren't interesting enough for someone like you and me to an extent although i was very young at the time just weren't interesting enough from a production or a sort of musical vocabulary sort of you know in a sense of the musical vocabulary just weren't interesting enough to appeal to you who'd already started buying 10 cc and wings and and those kind of records and me who'd started off listening in my house with my parents listening to things like dark side of the moon i mean i tell this story interesting interesting to me at least in my book i tell this story about how the first time i ever heard the beatles i didn't get it because i'd my my mom and dad didn't like the beatles they didn't own any beatles records i didn't hear the beatles what i heard growing up in my house was tubular bells dark side of the moon saturday night fever donna summer early donna summer georgia moroder records so the first time i heard the beatles is when a kid at my school lent me the red album and i thought it was the twiest most uninteresting it was so disappointing okay it might have been differently if he lent me the blue album yeah but the red album famously for those of you don't know i'm sure everyone knows this but the red album covers the sort of 63 to 66 period to me my god i was into things i want to hold your hand and she loves you i'm thinking this is just what the fuck is this shit you know this doesn't and maybe there was an element of punk sounding that way to us this this first wave of punk yeah stranglers and perhaps wire exclude although i didn't hear where wire at the time because they just weren't commercially successful enough to to be on my radar but the bands that were the clashes the dams the jams the sex pistols to people like you and i who've kind of grown up hearing these kind of sophisticated productions with the 10cc or pink floyd tubular bells just wasn't
Speaker 2interesting enough yeah i think there's an element that you know my parents say weird enough they were quite young but they had very old-fashioned tastes so i was kind of brought up with the likes of sinatra you know the crooners but equally they did have carpenters albums so we had carpenters and we had yeah there were certain you ubiquitous albums in houses so we did have the simon garfunkel greatest hits and we had the beatles red and blue and it was the blue album that as a kid i thought this is magical you know i adored that record and i think you know yes there's an aspect of truth is that for me it got interesting 78 79 80 and maybe it was the bands being truer to themselves or what have you all the productions and the era becoming more sophisticated but that's when i got really excited by a lot of the new artists that had emerged out of punk but yeah that first and you know i would still probably go for um just the way you are over anarchy in the
Speaker 1uk well i would too but i wouldn't go for it over say um drums and wires or 154 exactly kilimanjaro so so i think there's a sense that for us this this is what i mean by this first volley of albums this sort of sort of um heralding of this new generation and this new approach and this new aesthetic to making music was too back to basics but very very soon in fact we've we've recovered 78 haven't we we did 78 i think there were so many records that came out of that kind of um that new approach to making music that we completely fell in love with but they are the records that come from yeah i mean
Speaker 2very quickly but yes you know if you think of say the clash six is almost like the edifice it's been absolutely shattered pummeled and then you're building the bricks up again in really interesting ways and of course you know the direct legacy of that punk sound i don't think would have interest either us because you had the oi movement the sort of 79 80 81 oi bands who were the most direct reductive descendants of that who of course didn't ever figure on my radar no um but
Speaker 1then the bands that came out in 78 79 bands like magazine um obviously we we love that music so there's a sense that very quickly even the musicians that were making punk and shall we say kind of using it in a way as as an opportunity to get a foothold in the industry that suddenly became obsessed with punk and all these record labels signing punk you know very quickly developed out of that kind of reductive approach and became the bands well that's it that i
Speaker 2think why it was exciting as a period because it was a kind of a knocking down of structures and then exciting new structures being built in their wake and i
Speaker 1suppose ultimately what punk comes down to and again this is the learn three chords that's actually that's enough now so this idea that you had to be brilliant muso musicians like you would hear in yes or gentle giant actually no you can make music is about it's not about technique or it can be about ideas it doesn't have to be about technique and of course that's something that both you and i completely adhere to don't i mean i still consider myself very much a non-musician i love working with great musicians but my i myself i'm a non-musician so in that respect isn't wouldn't you look at someone like you know it's the grandfather of this this whole kind of idea of the non-musician this conceptualist and
Speaker 2what's interesting there is that you know we're talking about artists that captured the zeitgeist while not being a part of it of course bowie and eno in 77 you know we're talking the heroes so let's talk about that yeah
Speaker 1because because we have a category here there's new wave there's old wave and there's david bowie and chums and there's a sense that they've just ridden this whole they just kind of rode through the whole 70s always managing somehow to be part of the zeitgeist didn't they yeah again you wonder how much of that was just love and how much of it was just judgment but what a year for the bowser fantastic the bowser together with his buddy brian i mean it still blows my mind that low and heroes came out within a few months of each other i mean that's just probably still my two favorite bowie
Speaker 2records but what's brilliant about them is that again a bit like animals they managed to capture that kind of grimy depressive aura and i know he didn't record it in britain but it captures brilliantly that grimy depressive aura of late 70s britain and yet it's nothing like you know this is somebody who was an acknowledged influence on some of the punks ditto eno and rather than do some kind of two-bit imitation of it or jump in on it they do something entirely different which of course becomes hugely influential by the late 70s early 80s it defines the musical era and i rather like that that you know they've suddenly got their followers they are the movement and they ignore it you know you know that year of course not only is he working with bowie he's working with cluster yeah and producing absolutely gorgeous pastoral albums and of course he's inventing ambient around this period as well which is the antithesis of punk well
Speaker 1let me stop you there to take issue he's not inventing ambient he's inventing ambient he's not he's defining
Speaker 2he's inventing it you
Speaker 1know no he's brian eno we're not he's invented it let's just get one thing straight brian eno did not invent ambient music he defined it he came up with the term ambient music i thought he invented music as we both know tim ambient music existed for many many years before i mean i still i still say for me tangerine dream zeit from 1972 is the proto ambient hippies man so anyway um no i mean brian you know the great conceptualist you know uh he released a great album this year before and after science bowie at the same time was producing iggy lust for life you could say Iggy Pop, one of the grandfathers of the whole punk aesthetic, isn't it? And the punk approach. But again, an artist that had not sold anything really until that point. It's almost like punk legitimizes a lot of these artists or at least gives them, I mean, Velvet Underground. I mean, Velvet Underground, I mean, again, I don't know this for sure, but I'm guessing between 1967 and 1977, no one talked about the Velvet Underground.
Speaker 2I think they were talked about a little more because I've got a whole collection of sort of music magazines from the early 70s. And Lou Reed and the Velvets are there. They're always in the background. They're not in the foreground, but they are spoken of fairly frequently.
Speaker 1But punk would have elevated them, presumably.
Speaker 2Yes, but by 1979, 1981. They're like the Godhead, right?
Speaker 1Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And similarly with the Stooges.
Speaker 2Very much so, yeah.
Speaker 1Who would have struggled until that point. Apart from Bowie's sort of patronage, I think Velvet Underground would have probably been completely unknown to most people. I'm guessing again here. As you say, you may know differently, but certainly punk suddenly, these groups, these artists were very much in vogue, weren't they? Yeah. And the genius of Bowie, of course, is to be able to just be there at the right place at the right time. Yeah. In such that he doesn't seem like, quite the contrary, he doesn't seem like someone jumping on the bandwagon. He seems like someone who's actually predicted. Even though, I mean, if you listen to a record like Low, I mean, let's face it, Side 2 is anti-punk, isn't it? Very much so. It's closer to what Cluster and early Kraftwerk, early Tangerine Dream. Yeah, yeah. But again, there's just enough about it that seems like it comes from outside of that kind of world. There's just enough about it that seems like it comes from outside of that kind of world of slick West Coast musodom. Jazz, again, is complete. You know, I keep coming to this idea that I think somehow jazz in many ways was the persona non grata at the table in 1977 because it's the progressive rock bands that had absorbed jazz and adopted jazz tropes into their music. It was the sort of West Coast slickness, which came from things like CTI Jazz Records. It was those. It was those records that suddenly sounded completely like they were beaming in from another planet. And yet the bands that had the artists that had no jazz influence at all, the Bowies, the Floyds, the Hawkins, are the ones that seem to somehow be able to ride it out.
Speaker 2Well, I think it's a particular type of jazz, isn't it? Because obviously Floyd in some of the Richard Wright chord progressions, you can hear some kind of 50s, 60s jazz. I think it's the fusion. Return to Forever Weather Report. Or even to a degree, even though it was their year, Steely Dan.
Speaker 1But presumably, and again, I'm not a Steely Dan fanatic, presumably sold despite being incredibly unfashionable.
Speaker 2I think Steely Dan always managed to get away with it, partly because of their lyrical bite and sophistication. And I think that they didn't have that kind of, as you put it, you know, as Miles Davis used to refer to it, the grinning motherfucker approach. I love that. They managed to avoid that. In some way. Right. They were a bit sneery themselves. They were a bit sneery themselves, even though the music was immaculate and extraordinarily complex. Yeah. But you are right. I think the bands that kind of rode it better were the ones who had almost ejected all of that from their vocabulary.
Speaker 1Let's talk about the one band from America that we haven't talked about. And I don't know a lot about this band, but they seem to be a band. They're a band that consistently crop up in hipster circles, at least, as being massively influential at this time. And interestingly, a band that had no guitars, I don't think, correct me if I'm wrong, which is Suicide. Yes. I've listened to Suicide. I don't particularly like it. To me, it's again, it's like 50s rock and roll played on synthesizers with a sort of punky attitude. So to me, it's the kind of rock and roll. It's the same reason I don't like the Ramones. It's the sort of rock and roll thing. I just can't. I just don't. I don't like rock and roll, folks. Sorry. My bad. I'm sure. Never like rock and roll. But I think you're more of a fan than I am. And I know Richard Barbieri is a big fan as well. What was Suicide doing? What was their place in this particular era?
Speaker 2Well, Daddy-O. You see, I quite like some of the rock and roll. I mean, I actually think some of the early 50s son recordings, you know, people like Presley, Cash. I think those records sound great, sound exciting. And if that was the thing as well, because I was quite familiar. I was quite familiar with some of those when I was younger. And actually, the new punk records, I could see how they were attempting to go back to this idea of one and a half minute to two and a half minute singles. But actually, if you listen to Gene Vincent, for me, there's more going on in a Gene Vincent single or a Buddy Holly single in terms of sort of composition, production. And I say even the early raw son recordings for Presley, they're very, very interesting. In the way that, you know, 50s Miles. David's recordings are interesting. The way in which the mics are placed. The studio ambience. Yeah. And it's before people kind of forget. It's before you've actually really got what becomes the sound of rock and roll that, you know, people like Scotty Moore aren't doing that chug along boogie. It's a lot more peculiar and interesting. And Johnny Cash is something of a non-musician himself and is almost playing no notes, but quite interesting rhythms on some of his recordings. So I was slightly more drawn. Drawn to that than you were. And yeah, I didn't like the Ramones, whereas Suicide, I did rather like, actually, I think there's something very fresh and very unusual. And they were using kind of, well, I'm about to say cutting edge synths, I guess when they started off in the early seventies, there just weren't very many bands who were just kind of synth oriented. And you're right. It was this kind of weird synth music that had an indeterminate length that was drawing from a rock and roll vocality. So it was the sound of the future and the past at the same time. And they weren't entirely defined by the Chuck Berry or the Gene Vincent or the Presley, because they take these lyrics and they take them to kind of a darker taxi driver type place because it was very New York of the seventies. So there was a kind of psychopathic element. So it wasn't like, you know, if Gene Vincent was in an institution with Edgar Fraser. Right. You know?
Speaker 1I mean, I can see that and I don't dislike it, but it just never quite appealed to me. I think it's the sort of the direct pastiche-ing of fifties rock and roll tropes. But then I say that and I love Mark Bolan. Yeah. And, you know, T-Rex, you know, the big T-Rex singles were all basically pastiche-ing. Eddie Cochran. Fifties rock and roll songs. And Bowie also, you know, he was doing a fair bit of that too. So I don't know what it is. It's just a bit of a blind spot I have, I guess, for fifties rock and roll and things like Ramones and Suicide. There's not enough. There's not enough else there to sort of draw me in.
Speaker 2I guess that there is, I say, for me and Suicide and Party as well. It's, you know, it's the treatment of Vega's voice that he gets more and more demented as a piece. Now, if you're listening to something like Frankie Teardrop or whatever, it gets more and more demented. It goes on. The vocabulary is pure.
Speaker 1Demented, I like.
Speaker 2Yeah. Rock and roll pop song. But this is, in a way, kind of predicting what David Lynch did with rock and roll. You know, he took some of the rock and roll elements because both of us like Judy Cruz. And again, he used, in a sense, almost pure rock and roll ballad vocabulary. But he invested that with a darkness, with an atmosphere.
Speaker 1That's the bit I like. And I think Suicide sort of had that as well, I guess. Yeah, I guess so. True. Yeah. I mean, interestingly, from my point of view, my favourite quote unquote punk record from this year, and it is a record that I think is one of the greatest records of all time. And certainly one of the most important records to me. It's a punk record that has no guitar or virtually no guitar and no rock and roll tropes at all, which is Throbbing Gristle's second annual report, which we will come on to later. So in a sense, that's the punk record that redefines music for me. And there's an argument to say that it's much more redefining musically than some of these records we've talked about, which was, as we've kind of pointed out, in a way, It's kind of just old rock and roll tropes dressed up with a bit more archness and a bit more speed.
Speaker 2When I was thinking about this year, you know, obviously this is something we're going to come on to much, much later. But the albums that I would have discovered relatively soon after this period that really spoke to me and still speak to me are not necessarily of this year in spirit. For me, I say there's so much exciting music in so many genres. You know, which some of which we're going to come on to. But then the albums that perhaps I still really play with absolute adoration have nothing to do with the year, but they are artists still at the top of their game.
Speaker 1But then you say that, but also you would concede that there are some great records this year that come out completely by artists that that are somehow by accident or by design somehow seem to be a really great record that come out completely by artists that that are somehow by accident or by design somehow seem to be a bowie the ham the hawkwind the pink floyd maybe it maybe is more by luck than judgment with the exception of the stranglers certainly in the case of of peter hamill and hawkwind and floyd and maybe it is more by luck than judgment and bowie that they they seem to have arrived at a similar point at this at the same time yeah that somehow aligns them with what's going on despite them which is this return to basics angrier more arch kind of approach to to popular music you know one of the great things of course we can do is we can look at history and kind of draw parallels that were never really there in the first place there's a lot of serendipity and a lot of happy accident going on here maybe in another alternate reality the sound of 1977 would have been the sound of return to forever and brand x and not the sound conceivably yeah of of pink floyd but then as we said there is an element of that being true too with the biggest records of the era being more kind of soft rock side yeah
Speaker 2but i think what you know distinguishes the artists we're talking about here say neil young pink floyd hawkwind and the ham van der graaf is that what i like about and bowie of course you know bowie's heroes and low that these albums not only they they kind of fresh statements and we said this before they kind of echo the zeitgeist but they are 100 percent genuine curious investigative albums that totally reflect the artists whereas for me some of the misfires are when you get the comedy punk like gentle giant i think had a comedy punk track and it was a terrible mistake you thought we wouldn't do it bet you thought and you know i really wish they hadn't because it was it was a terrible pastiche of what was going on and there were a few artists like that who were when when i think you attempt to embrace the zeitgeist and you don't really feel it and you're not being true to yourself it's the worst it's the worst of both words
Speaker 1that's that's when you get things like although i quite like it but then you get things like yes tomato which was a you know what brilliant album i love it too but generally generally considered to be a misfire for the band and things like the gentle giant record and the love beaches and things like that it's it's not even it's not even that some of those records are trying to be punk although in the case of the gentle giant track you mentioned of course it is there's also steve hillage track called 1988 activated yeah yeah it's not even those tracks it's that you kind of become aware that those bands are not quite sure what they should be doing anymore yeah that punk has kind of pulled the rug out from underneath them the the music press becoming increasingly critical and just downright hostile towards people like emerson lake and palmer and gentle giant they're not quite sure what they should be doing anymore they're not quite sure what they should be doing anymore and i think you're right this year that's yet to happen that presumably albums like animals and going for the one although we're not including the floyd in this in this category but presumably let's look down the list here at some of the other progressive rock artists that made records this year going for the one by yes jethro told songs from the wood presumably this is before those bands have really felt let's say they were still writing this material in 1976 1975 it's before they've really felt the impact of the new the new order and you're going to hear the impact of that on the next records they make with some
Speaker 2of them you're right with others i think they just kind of waited until the moment you know i think bands like genesis and tell really punk doesn't kind of impact on them at all kind of rode it out yeah but it's when they hear the electronic revolution the synth pop the new romantic because i think they have an artistic affinity with it you know jethro told do go synth pop to a degree and and i think why it works is because he genuinely likes it he genuinely thinks this is where the band can go this is exciting me ditto i think you know whatever one thinks of them they're not my favorite records at all but genesis very very effectively became an 80s pop band and an honest 80s pop band and they succeeded but they ignored that whole you know and then there were three is as far away from a punk ethic as you can get
Speaker 1but there are bands aren't there that definitely seemed to respond to oh yeah the year zero the emerson lake and palmers for for sure not quite sure the 10 cc's of this world and we'll come on to talk about 10 cc two fantastic records came out this year from from the 10 cc axis and again i would suggest to suggest to you the reason they are so good is because they were probably conceived and written before any of this sort of buzz about punk really started to make them question themselves yeah so it was the following records that were the one but there's
Speaker 2an interesting thing as well when i was listening to to animals actually for this program i realized there's one influence somebody who should have been here in 77 could have made it his own is john lennon is a bit of a proto punk in the sense if you listen to plastic i know band in how stripped down that is and that um has a direct connection with the productions of the 50s and the raw singer-songwriter production it's very stripped down and very angry and you can hear you know waters is a huge fan and you can hear the kind of yelps for desperation in lennon's voice in water's voice and of course lennon rides this out completely out of all the beatles he is one where you can see that people could acknowledge him as a major but you see
Speaker 1see this is it and it's interesting the more we talk about this the more you can think of precedence mccartney's first solo album yes yeah very diy so there's another precedent for someone that's kind of this this whole kind of back to base i mean okay we're not talking about the musical vocabulary still very sophisticated songs and but there is a sense of going back to basic sly stone sly and the family small talk there are lots of records that predate the whole thing of the whole punk thing where there seemed to be there seemed to be this notion of the artist rejecting the excess of what went before yeah i mean it isn't let it be you know it is and i
Speaker 2think what's interesting is if you read the interviews from that kind of period that i think people were responding you know psychedelia was one of those periods where it was a kind of upwardly mobile aspirational experimental era where everybody was using the technology of the day to find themselves in fresh sonic spaces and they were becoming more conceptually grand and you have a few bands and the beatles one you could argue they started it on the white album although go against it with abbey road um that suddenly they think my god we've really strayed from the roots of what got us into music in the first place and so whether it's the band whether it's dylan whether it's the beatles you're right that impulse to strip things down to basics because you think you know we've gone a bit too far here that was around in the late 60s early 70s and there were quite a number of precedents
Speaker 1it was probably always there i mean you know so i don't think it's necessarily the whole punk thing is a new thing and again it's probably one of those things that was very much a media manufactured yeah or or a malcolm malcolm mclaren who was the the manager of the pistols a very malcolm mclaren manufactured thing and of course again 50s rock and roll yeah uh he loved to dress like you know the teddy boys and his whole thing was rock and roll and i guess his the whole punk thing which coalesced around him and his store and his band came about because he hated the sort of 70s prog rock psychedelic rock jazz rock thing he wanted music to get back to basics but probably never anticipated the longer term impact that would have on everything from pop to hip-hop music to electronic music there is a punk kind of approach goes through there's pretty much gone through all music ever since and i think that's why we talk about this era as being so important at the end of the day is that it has had a long term impact on popular music that prevails to this day doesn't it yeah and although at the moment i
Speaker 2think we've not been in an era that is so far away from the sounds of punk in terms of either the stripped down or the anger and it is weird you know because we do live in obviously i think the last seven years have been amongst the most divisive politically and the most seismic in terms of society and of course there is experimental music there is angry music but generally speaking never has chart music been so anodyne and so much a replica of itself you know it seems to be in an ever rapid sense of feeding upon itself the whole pop will eat itself logic so that's kind of interesting you're right
Speaker 1but there is a way that the punk kind of spirit has prevailed which is that you just don't hear muso you don't hear musos on pop music that is true you don't hear now maybe that's got nothing to do with punk that's got maybe there are other factors involved i
Speaker 2think it's more technology i think it's more in some ways as well convenience you know i i think i've said this before on the show that i think formats dictate our so the introduction of the lp in the early 50s created the themed sequenced album obviously frank sinatra billy holiday um lots of jazz artists made conceptually themed albums and played to the format rock bands took that even further i think cd impacted very badly on music in the sense that we've got 80 minutes to fill we're gonna fill it and i think streaming has impacted on music so i think that what we're talking about in terms of the lack of production finesse in terms of the lack of choruses the lack of chords it's to do with the sheer immediacy of access of music and the format people access it via but what's
Speaker 1interesting about the cd era it was almost encouraging people to be more excessive and more muso and to fill up songs you know make seven eight minute songs as you say yeah but we seem to have had a reaction against that in the era of streaming which is things have come back to being very concise the vocal has to be in there right from the beginning of the song the vocals got to be there intro fuck that we don't want intro people are going to turn off they're not going to sit through a 15 second drum intro vocal straight in and in a way that's a very punk thing isn't it it is it is perhaps perhaps i know i think you're coincidentally but it's entirely coincidentally
Speaker 2and you are right you know and this again is how formats influence art itself you know that we think of say one of 1975's best and best selling albums and one of the first albums i ever bought and fell in love with wish you were here this is an album that doesn't feel like it could exist in this era or be created now in some ways of course there are artists who are playing to pockets of obsessives who are perhaps imitating the effects of those albums but it's just it's very far from where pop music's at now you know a piece that obviously has an almost silent atmospheric five to ten minute album and it's just it's very far from where pop music's at now you know a piece that obviously has an almost silent atmospheric five to ten minute intro before it even has the vocal it is the antithesis of streamed pop music but as i say i think it is more to do i think that punk ethic it's not to do with people being aware of the history of punk it's to do with what's their
Speaker 1concentration spans attention sorry attention spans people being unable to concentrate through anything that doesn't have an immediate melodic vocal hook this is the way pop music seems to have gone unfortunately uh you know i'm i'm sad about that but then i'm old and obviously i'm from a different generation but i do miss the in modern pop music i miss the solo i miss the personality of musicians i miss the beautifully crafted intro i miss the surprising tangential kind of shift that you would hear in a even a dire straits you know song yeah yeah that you simply don't hear in modern pop which is all so uh it sounds like it could have been written by an ai algorithm
Speaker 2well i think going on to ai it's really fascinating that of course you know now people have this idea of let's hear john lennon singing bohemian rhapsody let's you know all of these fusions and what was interesting to me is that when they were doing ai versions i think it was of drake partly because this music is auto-tuned to death anyway and it's programmed it's synthesized people couldn't tell the difference and people were liking the ai drake as much if not more than drake and i think what's interesting is at the moment that contemporary pop music can be absolutely replicated by ai whereas actually if you wanted to do porn hearts ai we would notice the differences straight away give it time give it time you might be right
Speaker 1yeah give it a couple more years and you may be you may be having to retract that statement no i agree god i
Speaker 2hope not yeah yeah i mean in some ways i totally agree with you but there is so much human error in the music that's being played in the days as well as complexity so it's a combination of complexity and human error that means these things are damn difficult to replicate whereas contemporary pop music as we say we could probably now go on and do an ai drake they'll be pretty damn good and
Speaker 1on that bombshell i think we should we should conclude part one of 1977 sim we've kind of we focused on in this part of 1977 really just talking about the whole you know yeah what kind of impact it's going to have on the music did us punk uk punk have on music so i think that's a nice kind of way that's kind of nice self-contained episode there albums that we've talked about i mean we haven't sort of specifically focused on particular particular albums for any length of time here but from for me personally my favorite punk album from the year punk in inverted commas would be wires pink flag marky moons by television is a brilliant record that would go on to have a big impact on the bands like gang of four xtc later on and you and i we have a lot of love for these sort of progressive slash punk crossover records don't we i mean peter hamill's over from this year what a yeah unbelievably fantastic confessional singer-songwriter gloom fest that indeed and and
Speaker 2that was an album i completely fell in love with when i first heard it and in some ways you know we talk about albums that were inspirational to us that was for me because it was almost like i was like i was like i was like a permission to be as dark and as fucked up as i probably was and musically and musically again
Speaker 1it's on that kind of dividing line between sophisticated unsophisticated isn't it the playing is is not particularly hard you know it's not hard it's peter playing piano and guitar in his way almost coming at it from again an outsider non-musician approach but it's sophisticated enough isn't it and so you could almost imagine yourself i could do this i could channel my own sort of you know thoughts about life through music like this confessional music like this it's an amazing record i think one of my favorite records by the ham ditto animals for me which is a top three floyd album for me yeah animals
Speaker 2i agree with you it's in my top three floyd albums and it's it's 100 the floyd that emerged from the psychedelic male situation while being 100 a creative album made in 1977 it's a great achievement um and is certainly going to be in my top five of the year probably you know when we come to that
Speaker 1point in i'm sure 2025 i'm sure it'll be in my top five too yeah and i just want to say that obviously that there are i think i think as we touched on earlier there's a few singles that came out by punk rock bands that for me actually define what i love about punk more than the albums do so you know i think it's a great achievement and i think it's a great achievement and i think it's a great achievement and i think it's a great achievement and i think it's a great achievement new rose by the damned which was the first british punk single um and the spiral scratchy people to me in a way that's that's kind of all i need from and that yeah yeah pink flag by wire maybe
Speaker 2but but that tells you it doesn't it it's what you need it's like okay that's what i've got and weirdly one of my favorite punk records of all time was 79 which was um babylon's burning by the ruts i thought that was so intense and um it had a kind of relentlessness that i responded to well and you have
Speaker 1as a killing joke very yes i think
Speaker 2killing joke and to an extent as well i think when shot by both sides came out that had a similar nagging insistence that was as close as a magazine ever got to classic punk but this is kind of what i'm
Speaker 1saying it's it's all for us i guess it's kind of starting to happen the following year isn't it what's kind of becoming interesting for us the following year but for me this year it would be the damn single the buzzcut single and the and the pink flag by the wire that for me the defining i genuinely love those as as signifiers of what punk stood for i think that's a good point to stop at part one of 1977 we've still got so much to talk about so we'll wind up part one there as a sort of thorough discussion of punk music punk rock in 1977 and we will return in part two of 1970 this is gonna be a three-parter i think isn't it tim it's got at least at least you were saying
Speaker 2ten parts well i was thinking we're going to be doing this until 2025 2026 what just 1977
Speaker 1so we're going to return in part two to talk about how had progressive rock in its truest sense fared in 1977 high vibration it's going to be interesting you love that record i do i love half that record we're going to talk about that and more folks in part two in the meantime thanks very much for listening we'll see you again soon goodbye from me and goodbye from tim bye bye you
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