Speaker 1low energy unfocused foggy you might be dehydrated whether it's hot yoga over 100 degree weather or too much sun gator light with a specialized blend of five electrolytes was scientifically designed to help move fluids into the body faster for rapid rehydration shop now at retailers nationwide gator light hydrates faster than water is it in you symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist hello yes that's right pot pickers it's another episode of the
Speaker 2album years with myself and my colleague tim boness and after our marathon 1977 episode well in fact it ended up being four episodes we're hoping this one's going to be a little bit more succinct aren't we we're doing 90 we're jumping forward 10 years we've done this before haven't we where we've sort of gone exactly yeah 10 years forwards or back sort of to see how things have changed in the space of a decade and i think it's fair to say that the jump from the 70s to 80s tends to be quite a big it's quite a big change isn't it probably more so than i mean if you imagine if you jump between 2005 and 2015 you probably wouldn't find that much difference would you in the musical climate true but going from 70s 80s it's a big change isn't it as i suppose it would be 60s to 70s too wouldn't it so 1987 i'm 19 this year so i'm still very much buying records the day they come out i'm very excited about new releases this year particularly for my artists like prince but also some other artists too you know some really good mainstream albums this year isn't there so um well should we start off by talking about the prince record from this year sign of the times i remember hearing the single on the radio um and thinking oh my god this he's completely reinvented himself again um with you know this being the first single off the record what's the record going to be like what's the record going to be like what's the and of course it turned out to be this double album sprawling uh and i think a lot of people these days kind of see as his i suppose purple rain is his most commercially successful record but a lot of people see this as his great artistic masterpiece don't they they do i mean it's not my
Speaker 3favorite album of prince when i what's your fave i really like parade actually parade was amazing and um i was very keen on around the world in a day as well and actually his batman soundtrack i is incredibly underrated but this is better than that
Speaker 2isn't i mean this he's in a there's no question that he's on a roll here isn't
Speaker 3he yeah i think it's a little too sprawling and diffuse for my taste but when it's good it's amongst the best work he's ever done and the title track it felt quite revolutionary at the time and still sounds very powerful yeah i mean
Speaker 2the bravery to release uh as a first single off your record you're kind of this like arena rock star by this time i mean biggest star in the world at this moment uh alongside michael jackson madonna and springsteen he's definitely in that he's in the big four isn't he yeah and the confidence to be able to release is the first single from your record a track which is little more than a beat box yeah um a guitar and a voice and doesn't even have what you might call a chorus to it i mean it's like a it's it's like a slogan song a sloganeering song it's it's political it's talking about aids it's talking about the space race it's very topical um as the title would imply it's pretty bold to release this as a first single isn't it but he had a history doing this because the first single off of parade of course was kiss and we've never heard anything like that before and then the first single he released off purple rain when doves cry so where's the bass you know where's the rest of the arrangement yeah and he was very good at that wasn't he stripping things down but still making it seem somehow you know important and
Speaker 3revolutionary but this was like a state of the nation address as well it's like lyrically it was more his marvin gaye what's going on to a certain extent wasn't it
Speaker 2yeah and then i remember i remember buying the album the day it came out and taking it home and just being first of all dazzled by all of the kind of bases that he touches on this record even within the first side i mean you've got sign of the times which we've already talked about then you've got playing and playing you've got housequake which is like hip-hop funk and then you've got the ballad of dorothy parker at the end of the end of the side which probably my favorite track on the record yeah mine too it's just again it's it's kind of a singer-songwriter sensibility but it's not like any singer-songwriter thing you've ever heard before is it again it's this very kind of almost cheap sounding beatbox this kind of queasy keyboard
Speaker 3queasy is the word i
Speaker 2always use for this track yeah but then this great lyric and it's kind of great story telling lyric and of course name checks joni as well which we always like yeah and then the record carries on like that doesn't it i mean just goes or shoots off in all these different directions but i think he's one of those artists you know that everything he does is just going to end up sounding like him so he he can pull off something um this diverse and but it all still sounds like it comes from the same well which it does in this case prince but so what is this one of those records that you would say is the quintessential double album that would have made a better single album i mean
Speaker 3for me yes because i don't think it's particularly disciplined and i don't think it's particularly coherent i think what you want really with these albums is that they are absolutely chaotically insane or you want focused and it isn't quite either parade i think is very very focused there's an album around the world in the day again has a has a real atmosphere i can necessarily okay i mean i
Speaker 2have to say i love it you know but as i think we discussed on previous episodes i i kind of like we were talking about don juan's reckless daughter the journey album from 77 i kind of like the fact that these entries exist in the catalogs oh yeah yes you know where they're big sprawling self-indulgent perhaps not as um accessible not every track is perhaps what but there's a sense of searching and there's a sense of a sense of experimentation and i kind of enjoy the records on that basis but having said that it's fair to say that a lot of people would consider sign of the times to be his his defining uh master i think
Speaker 3partly because it obviously shows almost all aspects of his talent and it is the big statement and quite often people will opt for the big statement as the definitive and it's also
Speaker 2timing isn't it he was the hippest coolest biggest rock star in the world at that moment and he could have released something disappointing and the fact that he didn't the fact that he actually didn't rest on his laurels he made something that is arguably as experimental and radical as anything he'd done and anything he would do at the time when you know it's that beatles thing you release sergeant pepper when you know the world are looking in your direction yeah there's something bold about it there's something bold about doing that rather than doing playing it safe to release something this bold this experimental this eclectic at the moment when the the whole eyes of the music world are focused on you and expecting expecting you to release something
Speaker 3revolutionary i think that was part of it i think expecting expectation that you know sometimes our perception of music is based on our expectation of what we want it to be and i guess with sign of the times the the title track i thought was bold revolutionary sounded incredible this was something i was expecting from the whole album in a way i suppose what i wanted was for the whole album to be that brave that radical and i maybe only found it on a few tracks okay i mean i think parker being one i think it is i think it is all that kiss i thought was a great yeah opening gambit for parade and the album didn't disappoint me in a way it was as strange as i was expecting purple rain was as grand as i was expecting so i think it's partly my fault not the album's fault it was a certain expectation i had in my head i remember around this time seizing the banshees released an astonishing single peekaboo which was one of the most radical things they ever did which i adored but the album which was probably perfectly good didn't match what my dreams for the album were based on the single okay i think
Speaker 2that's a bit unfair on sign of the times i think it is pretty much as radical as that all the way through just perhaps some tracks not to your personal taste yeah but i mean tracks like housequake it hot fang it's an amazing record it's amazing record i still think it sounds great and of course one of the other interesting things about this period of prince is that the albums that he released during this time are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what he was actually recording in the studio and i i don't know if you have the deluxe edition of the album but there's like there's like two three hours of other songs
Speaker 3that he recorded so it could have been any number of albums in a way well
Speaker 2in fact he reconfigured the album several times at one point it was was going to be released under a pseudonym camille i mean if i was your girlfriend it's another amazing track sung in his camille voice and then he reconfigured it to be another album i think called paradise garden or something i forget and he delivered it to the record label as a three lp set and they said no somebody would say no to prince that's pretty brave anyway um and he went away and he re-edited it into the two lp version that we know but there were so many great tracks that fell by the wayside and um a lot of those came out in this deluxe edition which is one of the few examples of a deluxe edition i think that kind of justifies the uh you know the the term
Speaker 3well quite a lot of his deluxe editions have copious studio cuts that are as good as anything that got on the album yeah so i think that's it i think you know this was a selection of a potential many selections right so let's go
Speaker 2through some of the other big moments make sure to subscribe to our channel if you haven't already and
Speaker 3i'll see you in the next one
Speaker 2and i'll see you in the next one and of course we've got Eno coming back as producer and Daniel Lenoir as well Daniel Lenoir giving them that extra textural element but it's one of those albums where it feels like every song was a single again every song was almost like an instant classic think of With or Without You and Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For Streets Have No Name Bullet in the Blue Sky I can still remember I haven't heard the album for many years but I can still remember almost every track
Speaker 3it's a strong record I mean I think as well it's more streamlined it's a strong record in its own way it's more streamlined and focused than Unforgettable Fire I probably prefer Unforgettable Fire as an overall album experience but Joshua Tree is where that combination of songwriting and sounds really sort of you know hits its highest point
Speaker 2I think they're also you know you might disagree with me it also feels like they're letting their inner rocker sort of out a bit more on this record particularly The Edge
Speaker 3yeah and one of the things I'm going to come to in this episode is how for whatever reason one of the bands that I think are a major influence on 1987 Led Zeppelin I think Led Zeppelin The Shadow of Zeppelin suddenly and I think there was a compilation I think it was a CD age compilation that to a certain extent brought Zeppelin back into the consciousness or people realised quite how good they were but I can hear it in so many bands this year and they were attempting to make it to be the biggest rock band in the world on this there was a different motivation behind this album
Speaker 2and they pulled it off and they pulled it off yeah so I think again as I was saying earlier it's almost like a band whose time has come and they're rising they're rising to the challenge and delivering arguably you know their greatest album until that point at least their most most kind of cohesive and complete statement artistic statement and as you say
Speaker 3I think there were kind of three universal killer singles
Speaker 2as well and then the final record we have in the mainstream section and interesting enough you wouldn't normally expect this to be in the mainstream section because it's it's Marillion but they were they were a mainstream band at this point weren't they they had broken through with Misplaced Childhood their previous record they'd had a number two single they'd had a number one album at least in the UK they were a mainstream band weren't they so Clutching His Straws was the fourth album they'd released it's the last one with Phish I think it's a great record I think it's probably my favourite of the Phish
Speaker 3era records are you a fan Tim? yeah it was my favourite Marillion album Full Stop and I think by this stage they have lost all of the early influences this is a contemporary 1980s conceptual rock band with heart and they do pull it off you know they've completely reinvented themselves in a certain way while not betraying the ambition and not betraying I suppose the progressive influences that were at the forefront when they started but I think it's very strong and I think as a band of players as well there's just some really nice textural guitar playing from Steve Rothery Kelly is a very sympathetic support you know there's nothing excessive or inappropriate on this and I think that from a lyrical and vocal point of view Phish has completely found his distinctive voice I think you're right
Speaker 2they've lost a lot of that early gauche-ness that they had both lyrically and musically and they just sound like Marillion at this point and in many ways this is an album that sets although they replaced the singer and from here on in it would be a different singer this is kind of where the Marillion sound is complete everything that they would do going forward from here kind of has its roots for me in this album even more so than Misplaced Childhood and I think
Speaker 3the trad prog element the only bits in there you can hear perhaps the influence of the overarching concepts of Pink Floyd and some of the textures of Gilmore but you know I hear at times even Joni Mitchell and some of the guitar playing it's not I think Fish was also quite influenced by her
Speaker 2as a lyricist too wasn't it again you sort of provisionally put this list together Tim which I've added to and amended slightly but one category you've really shone a spotlight on for this year is Goth and this kind of was the era of Goth and you know Goth had been around for a while you think of the early Cure records but Goth had kind of broken through in a way to the main stream around this time yeah in fact funny enough the cures album from this year which i love kiss me kiss me kiss me is another sprawling double album is or at least has got aspects of some of their their more joyous uh music in fact the first single from the album why can't i be you is a kind of big joyous stomp isn't it but at the same time you've got artists like fields of the nephilim emerging which is almost like comedy goth and i quite like i quite like fields of the nephilim but it's ludicrous it's it's taking the more comic book aspects uh of goth but it's fun it's it's cartoony uh it's fun i bought dawn riser at the time i still quite have a kind of fondness for it but talking of ludicrous there's none more ludicrous of course than dead can dance and i say that in the best possible sense of the word uh within the realm of the dying sun their third album i'm sure we must have talked about this band before yeah they are so so over the top that they risk everything in falling flat on their face but they completely pull it off for me and this for me this is this is one of their two masterpieces i think this one and the following record the serpent seg the two peak period dead can dance
Speaker 3see for me it was always spleen and ideal and within the realm of the dying sun those are the two that i well really similar era yeah um i think it's where they're finding their voice to a certain extent has more in common with the kind of goth post-punk roots it's still in the realm of a dying son is casting there's no guitars yeah and then guitars have gone yeah yeah and post this they become something else altogether yeah um but i really like this and again a very cinematic brooding influence throughout um brendan's very serious scott barry's baritone um and certainly some of the most um ambitious lyrics in popular music history but you know
Speaker 2what this is that this is again time and time again we talk about this sometimes when you reach for the stars you know if you can pull it off the ridiculousness is just just makes it all the more enrapturing and and i think even a progressive rock band at their most pretentious couldn't have come up with a title like within the well say that john anderson probably could have done within the realm of a dying son but it's the fact that the sun is dying as well yeah it's very goth isn't it you know
Speaker 3well i think i think the imagery in a way is why it ties in with goth but you are entirely right that you know in some ways it's tangential and of course there's always there's a dark atmosphere and it's interesting isn't it 1987 because what we've had is we've had live aid we've had 86 there's almost been this kind of jolly up-tempo artificial loads of money 80s and yet 87 is where goth hits and as you say it's been around for a while because you know i think 4ad are in some ways the unsung champions of goth because bauhaus released early works on the label and birthday party i think were a huge influence on it and those bands were popular and those bands were influential and again i liked those bands but for whatever reason it suddenly comes to the forum and sisters of mercy as well i think have their day in the sun yeah i love this record superb record and what a
Speaker 2strange what a strange hookup that was jim steinman yes of bad and we talked about bad out of hell on the on the 77 episode what a strange hookup that was i mean to get you but in actual fact when you hear the record it's like oh yeah that makes perfect sense yeah because there's something about goth that is very cinematic kind of very cartoony large scale or potentially and here you have jim steinman taking the sort of melodrama of the sister sister mercy that was always there and suddenly making it sound like like a trevor horn production you know yeah or a jim steinman production to be fair because he'd been doing it for longer than trevor and um this corrosion what a great what a great single that is what i like
Speaker 3about the whole album is you know there are exceptions of course 1959 the piano ballad but it's massive it has this massive yeah drum sound this massive guitar sound these massive obviously the choral backing vocals are absurd but i adore them but what i also think is very clever about this album is there's actually not very much on a track if you actually listen to a track sometimes it sounds like there are only two or three instruments on it they might be overdubbed to the nth degree but there's not very much and that's one of the reasons i think why it is so massive and so direct okay you've got this kind of overwhelming avalanche of noise but if you listen there aren't fiddly details or fiddly instrumentation inside it it's a really sort of direct guitar riff choral drum eldritch's voice holding the central ground so i mean this
Speaker 2is definitely a peak era for the use of reverb isn't it and i wonder if a lot of it is down to that it's like the dead can dance albums like that too there's probably not a lot there but there's so much reverb everything is drenched in reverb everything sounds massive everything sounds like a dead can dance album like it's beaming in from the other end of a stadium or an aircraft hangar and of course it gives everything this incredible weight and depth and size um and and you know the mid 80s obviously was was a period when people were using and abusing reverb not always in you know in the best way but when they did when people got it right i think reverb was a became a real sort of part of the fabric of the music of the 80s yeah i think it's why a lot of people think a lot of people who love 70s music they don't like 80s music because they think all gated reverb stadium reverbs but i think there were some records that really uh were defined i mean i think of an album like seeds of love by tears and fears or songs from the big check without the reverb those albums wouldn't be the albums they are and i think that's certainly true of sisters of mercy and the dead can dance here isn't it
Speaker 3too yeah and there's a real confidence with this i really like the first and last and always as well but this takes it up a notch without losing any of the band's qualities let's go to a band that we've got in this
Speaker 2category that certainly were not playing up the cartoon joke aspect we've talked about swans before on the show children of god they made two records kind of back to back one under the name of skin and one under under the name of swans one of which was a sort of ambient orchestral torch song record and one of which was more more like their traditional pummeling drums and guitar record but actually i think it's a really good actually even that that's simplified that's oversimplifying things because even children of god the swans record has these beautiful ballads with string textures and again a lot of use of reverb this is swans in transition because they've come from being i mean i think when we talked about cop i described it as the most negative music i have ever heard in my life and i stand by that cop the album by swans from i think 83 84 is the most nihilistic negative record i have ever heard in my life and i'm including throbbing gristles second daniel report in there um and i love it but this is swans coming out into the sunshine a bit more relatively speaking is isn't it there there's more space in the music the production is a little bit more expensive sounding it's not as nihilistic but
Speaker 3this was great for me it's possibly my favorite swans album because it has the extremes i think it goes from that atonal attack of sound to these gorgeous jarbo interludes and no and actually it reminded me at the time of a more extreme dead can dance in some ways because i think the jarbo moments have that poetic otherworldly quality which lisa gerrard definitely brought to dead can dance and so that was what i found so entrancing about this and why it's perhaps my favorite album by them that you know you are being slapped across the face with a hammer and then all of a sudden you're being soothed but even when you're being soothed there's a darkness in that music yeah i
Speaker 2mean there is a sense that michael gyrer and brendan perry are kind of two sides of the same coin the sort of dark and light aspects of they both sing in a similar register but everything michael gyrer sings sounds like a funeral eulogy or something and it's it's just got one of those voices and this is one of those records where i think that early nihilistic guitar pummel drum pummel and the more considered textured chamber orchestral pieces are in nice balance on this record and it's a long record it's a double album 70 minutes one of my favorite bands of all time tim which is a band you introduced me to when you handed me very soon after we met you handed me a copy of slabs yeah smoke rings and i was completely smitten from from the moment i heard it because it's a mixture of brutal industrial music and funk finger pop bass finger pop in funk but it's brutal and in many ways it's like swans because it's again steven drace sings a little bit like michael gyrer similar voice similar vocal range but it's swans with james brown's back at rhythm
Speaker 3section yeah or a certain ratio or a certain ratio yeah i mean and i like you was actually drawn to this where it is it's industrial level noise but with a real popping sensibility it's quite an unusual combination and they do pull it off completely and the album
Speaker 2this year dissension also has aspects of pure noise music which again i've always loved too so and also free jazz is in there too there's honking saxophones and trumpets it's a real smorgasbord of different styles coming together
Speaker 3and it gives just as you say that it tells you what a lie it is when people say well the 80s of course they weren't experimenting with genres they weren't experimenting with extremes it was all surface level stadium pop music or stadium rock music there were so many of these no i think the opposite bubbling under the surface it was such an exciting era i
Speaker 2think the 80s is probably the most experimental era of all in some senses but you're right you have to look beyond the mainstream you have to look the peripheries to find these kind of records and it is the fallout from punk because these kind of bands wouldn't have existed if punk hadn't happened you know these are people with ideas they're not great musicians but they're people with ideas collision is a great word the music sounds like it's colliding as well it's so powerful and overpowering it is a collision of funk of noise of industrial music of free jazz of goth all coming together in this incredibly unique sound i've never heard anything quite like slab and it's a shame in a way they did they weren't more successful like they made one more record after this and then i think they just gave up because it seemed like nobody was listening uh but we were yeah well i
Speaker 3mean certainly some of the early no man experiments we were very slab influenced yeah well and and swans as well i think were big dead can dance to an extent as well that it was playing with the extremes of noise and beauty so let's move on from goth
Speaker 2i mean just to just again to emphasize how much goth music there was around this year we also had albums by jesus and mary chain breathless uh the mission and skinny puppy but let's move on to electro variations my favorite depeche mode album was released this year music yeah mine too uh black celebration and music for masses are my two depeche mode albums and again is this a case where it's they're kind of at that point in transitioning and it's just
Speaker 3the right balance for us it is the right balance but you know we were saying about certain years where certain genres suddenly appear everywhere so when we were talking about mid 70s and the influence of let's say progressive or underground rock you can actually hear in johnny cash's concept albums or the carpenters going to goth this is this is goth's year because one of the things about black celebration music for masses is it's a darker depeche mode in some ways it's operating in a not too dissimilar territory you're right but what's interesting
Speaker 2about depeche mode is they had a history of releasing really dark singles i'm thinking blasphemous rumors i'm thinking master and servant and so that's quite a hard trick to pull off isn't it and the singles from this record never let me down yeah uh behind the wheel uh these are not what you would think of as obvious i mean you think this is the same band the first few singles just can't get enough new life slightly twee and i don't mean that as a criticism but you listen to those records they're quite the cute they're cute they're twee yeah and six seven years later you've this band that have transitioned transitioned from releasing singles like i suppose it's the difference between martin gore's approach and vince clark's approach martin gore always was more drawn there was this slightly seedy s and m undercurrent wasn't there and i think of singles around this era like stripped and question of lust so they've had this succession of singles master of master and servant blasphemous rumors and this album is kind of encapsulated in that aspect of what they do and they have they would have a bigger record with the next record violator was their really big record but i like them just like you i like them just at this
Speaker 3moment somehow and there's also again quite a cinematic minor key quality to the compositions and you can hear as well they've been listening to people like philip glass as well and canis garzi i think has some kind okay i don't hear
Speaker 2that but if you say that's that's yeah interesting at the time they were becoming massive in america weren't they yeah yeah which how you would never have predicted how would you have predicted that some kids from basildon making this kind of weird kind of s and m e pervy electronic pop would i mean because to be fair they'd struggled a little bit in the uk throughout the ages i think people had kind of decided that if they weren't going to do more of their cutesy pop then we weren't going to be interested but but they found a lifeline in america apparently and became like a stadium band long before they were a stadium band
Speaker 3in the uk and you know for me they were reaching a mass market with you know music for the masses yeah but music of integrity yeah and at this stage they were still discovering themselves i think as well that's that's one of the things i think that by violator they found themselves yeah up to this point they're still discovering what they can do what they can be and i think that's one of the exciting parts of this
Speaker 2album yeah yeah sure i think once they got to violator they'd kind of created the archetype and everything after that has been kind of referenced back to this period in a way hasn't it yeah as much as i love some of the other albums after that pet shop boys we love the pet shop boys don't we yeah we love them who does i don't know does anyone not love pet shop boys everyone loves pet million people actually their second album it's not my favorite i think we you and i both tim both agree that they're for us their imperial phase is going to happen with the next couple of records yeah yeah introspective and behavior particularly but they've done wonderful
Speaker 3stuff since then but those two albums were where it was this is the real deal yeah i mean i
Speaker 2love pretty much everything they've done but those two albums are my favorites
Speaker 3and i think as always with pet shop boys i mean you know tenant is a very good lyricist i think he's got a very sweet and affecting voice and i think one of the things that's interesting with pet shop boys is they're this electro pop duo and what they don't have partly because tenant has got this kind of likable almost al stewart singer-songwriter they don't have that period affectation that if you like blights a lot of bands in the genre it's a very natural voice very good gift for melody you know these this is somebody who's clearly schooled in pop song writing well he was he
Speaker 2was a music critic wasn't he so he was kind of a music nerd and actually there is a there is a sense that a lot of pet shop boys uh songs are them taking other bands other artists and kind of channeling them through their you know their prism to come out sounding exactly like the pet shop boys i mean for me for example on this album it's hard for me to imagine that rent the song rent isn't morrissey isn't referencing morrissey it's the sort of thing morrissey i love you you pay my rent that seems like a very morrissey thing and i'll bet neil tenant was a fan of morrissey at the time i was
Speaker 3i would i would think so i mean the thing is there was always a depth and a melancholy even when they had their brashest singles and this album i think is this the one with king's cross closing yes yeah which is is a beautiful um piece of music and of course
Speaker 2their very first big their big breakthrough song west end girls also had that sort of underlying sense of of melancholia yeah uh melancholia was big in 1987 apparently maybe you're right maybe maybe it is a kind of fallout from from live eight and and you know there was a i always i always think of the eighties sort of pre and post live eight because it came right in the middle of the eighties and it definitely did change the way people thought about what people expected from them musically but as we see here there's always a swing back and there's the pendulum always swings back in the opposite direction too if everyone's expected to make happy clappy music then let's provide them with the alternative music music music a carnival cruise
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