Speaker 1hello and welcome to another podcast in the album year series um this is the first time we've done a we've done a recording of a podcast episode since it went live so there's a few things we want to say first thing we realized is that we had to give people a way to listen to some of these albums we were talking about now we're not legally able to broadcast clips of the albums themselves as part of the podcast but of course what we can do and we should have thought of this to begin with we can create spotify playlists and that's exactly what we've done so myself and tim have collaborated on creating a spotify playlist for each episode that we've done so far and you can find that um i think it's on my spotify artist account so and the other thing of course we noticed as soon as we went live is how many great albums we'd forgotten about you know um and not only fans reminding us but also remembering ourselves i mean you just you just wrote me an email yesterday saying 1992 i should have mentioned suzanne vegas 99.9 fahrenheit degrees uh which we completely failed to talk about and i love that album too and we completely forgot about it in the 1973 episode we didn't even mention larks tons in aspic quadrophenia we didn't mention
Speaker 2goodbye yellow brick road to be fair we didn't even mention larks tons in aspic quadrophenia one of my favourite albums to be fair though in certain cases these albums have been spoken of a lot and i think the whole idea of the podcast was to in a sense give new light to albums that people knew very well or introduce them to albums and it's been really gratifying to see how many people have said that they'd never heard of common one they like van morrison but common one they'd not heard they've listened to it as a result of the podcast um judy sill is another one who seems to have benefited or at least people have written to me and said i didn't even know she existed what a beautiful piece of work
Speaker 1they're kind of yeah i mean they're two examples of almost like no risk discs aren't they you could almost recommend them to anybody that loves music and you kind of know they're probably going to enjoy them you know but in 1980 we didn't talk about xtc's black sea uh for example which is a masterpiece in my view uh tiered to explode
Speaker 2to killy mangiaro one of my
Speaker 1favourites right so there are many that we've missed and i think one of the things myself and tim have talked about is if if the show does do well and it does continue to run we may well circle back and revisit some of these years again so we might do a 1980 part two or a 1973 part two um and by all means uh you know go on to go on to the podcast platforms and leave ratings and leave reviews uh and let us know what you think about it we we'd love to know so 1984 tim yeah a golden year in
Speaker 2the annals of pop
Speaker 1well it is isn't it and it's another one we had this problem with 1980 and when 1973 we did not have it with 1992 but we had this problem with 1873 and we had it with 84 and we had this problem with 1924 that it's almost like what do you leave out because there's so many so many great records released in in this 12 12 12 month period and so what what we've resigned us after doing is kind of we're going to talk about almost little groups of records aren't we uh to try and cover more than more than just a small selection we're going to talk about little groups of records um and maybe we should start with with um great debut albums this year from intelligent uh intelligent new art pop artists and i think the the prime candidate for to start the discussion here would be uh the blue niles first album a walk across the rooftops now i know you adore the blue nile tim i love this record too um but i think arguably it probably means even more to you than it does to me for me hats is their masterpiece this i always felt i always felt this album was almost like a dry run for hats but i listened to it again yesterday and and i i felt slightly different about it it's it's quirkier and it's more angular isn't it than hats
Speaker 2i think there's a good case to say that blue nile walk across the rooftops sets out what the blue nile do so beautifully everything else has just been a refinement and um i kind of feel as well there's a purity about this album that i love hats but there's a slight as you've pointed out on occasion there's almost a slight springsteen-esque quality in some of the observations some of the phrasing whereas this has a weird originality you know it's almost like um sinatra in the wee small hours singing over brian eno there's something very fresh very unexpected and um i don't know whether they ever replicated this level of purity or originality
Speaker 1possibly not although i think hats is a much more assured record for me one of the words that kept coming into my mind when i was listening to a walk across the rooftops yesterday was it sounded based on what i know about what they did later on it sounds quite tentative but in a good way one thing i did also i did a lot of work on the album and i did a lot of work on the album and i also noticed is i mean you made the point i think in the first episode that music always takes precedence that if yeah and john martin is another example here if if the music if the atmosphere is perfect it almost doesn't matter what words you speak now i just want to give you a reminder here the chorus to the first song on a walk across the rooftops which is the title track these are the lyrics i am in love i am in love with you i am in love i am in love with you the chorus to the second song on the record tinseltown in the rain is this do i love you yes i love you the chorus to the third song on the record from rags to riches is this i am in love i am in love with a feeling now does this are you suggesting a limitation does this does this demonstrate a slight paucity of inspiration in that in the lyrical department or is this a little bit of a or is it just that he's just going with that incredible kind of emotional charge you know the feeling of being in love and it's just all pervasive and it somehow just fit i've never noticed it before it just fits the music
Speaker 2doesn't it it does i but i think what it is it's kind of the simple payoff to what are often quite evocative verse lyrics and if you think of even the title a walk across the rooftops there's something in the album where it does give um a very vivid sense of a city at night if you like or a desolate industrial landscape i i find it very evocative of place and the chorus is yeah you know maybe there is a sense of conventional pop writing craft that what you have is you have this setup and then there's this quite simple but killer accessible chorus line it's interesting
Speaker 1isn't it because they they they kind of pull off something that they shouldn't be able to pull off which is that they they almost turn this incredibly almost over sentimental music into something that even indie kids can kind of enjoy it it's it still feels slightly detached it doesn't tip over into into bathos for me and i think that's the beauty of it i mean the walk across the rooftops is a great example because the baseline on that is really quite you mentioned the word in industrial there is almost in a way that there isn't on any of the blue nail albums i mean by the time of hats it's completely gone but on this album there is almost a sense of industrial soundscapes the way the bass is incredibly fragmented and angular on the title track well i think the keyboards
Speaker 2on this are very original as well and i think there's often just a use of sound rather than melody which you're right they didn't tend to sort of use again after that maybe there's aspects of it on the very final album high where you almost feel that they're trying to recover what they've lost from the early days of blue there's almost i love high you know again one it's more it's within context but it feels to me with high that they're almost attempting to recreate that landscape that beauty that sense of freshness that they had on the debut
Speaker 1which is a tough thing to do when it's almost completely instinctive isn't it it's almost unplanned um absolutely um so i mean this you you kind of say along with with van morrison's common one this is kind of a a no risk disc in a way it's almost impossible to dislike this album
Speaker 2i think so yeah and i think it's an interesting thing with quite a few albums in this year that we're going to discuss is suddenly that kind of post-punk angularity um and limitation of references you know if you think of punk the one thing it did it took rock back to its rock and roll roots and its blues roots and its rock vocabulary if you like and i think what's interesting is that as the 80s progressed you're getting more influence from whether it be ambient jazz chamber classical or whatever it is and i think that's a really good thing to do and i think that's a really good thing to do and i think that's a really good thing to do and i think that's a really good thing to do and i think that's a really good thing to do and i think that's a really good thing to because on this there's kind of almost bartok style stabs of yeah of orchestra
Speaker 1yeah so this is this this is a perfect moment because i've just shown tim we said we'd sort of group records and i think there's there's two or three other records from this year that fall into the same category as the blue nile album they're not necessarily all debuts but they are i think as you very eloquently put they're almost the sound of um young musicians kind of that have come through the sort of um you know post-punk new wave revolution but they're now stretching out and reaching for other things like jazz like ambient music and in the case of prefab sprout which is this their debut album swoon from 1984 almost reaching back to that almost classic tin pan alley songwriting tradition of rogers and hammerstein or burr baccarat um so two other wonderful i mean the sylvan album was a debut in a sense too wasn't it was his first solo record the sylvan records got much more influence from from jazz and and uh uh and ambient music as you say the prefab sprout from the traditional songwriting craft so this seems to be again something in the water doesn't there this year thomas dolby the flat earth another one i know you're a big
Speaker 2fan of yeah yeah well also you know laurie anderson mr heartbreak scott walker's climate of hunter what was interesting to me i remember you know because i was 20 in 1984 and i remember being incredibly excited that rock and pop was looking outside of itself and not only outside of itself in terms of musical reference points but also in terms of lyrical reference points there was something quite cinematic let's talk about
Speaker 1one of those albums you've just mentioned which is one of my favorite albums ever which is climate of hunter by scott walker i mean this album is just nuts uh but what what i love about it and we talked about this again in previous episodes is it's this it's the point at which an artist is between two worlds so as we know later on scott scott made some very very very strange almost semi-theatrical albums which i which i admire but don't particularly love albums like the drift and bish bosh which it's almost like he's deconstructed the whole process of making pop music to a point where it has no uh bears no relation to pop music at all but on this album there's still the vestiges of his great you know his late 60s early 70s albums like scott three and scott four but he's obviously also reaching towards the avant-garde tradition with this you talked about the lyrics being very cinematic on this album of course the lyrics are they are cinematic but he's using the cut-up technique isn't he's using the william burroughs technique of basically using random phrases to create um some very beautiful lyrical images but images that don't necessarily mean anything um except they do in the context of the music of course they do take on meaning this album is still for me probably my favorite this and tilt are my favorite scott records they have they have that balance between the orchestral pop of his early careers uh and the avant-garde tradition that would come later um i just think it's it's a perfect record um and you talk i mean we were talking about the blue nile being tentative i mean this this is the sound of a singer that's anything but the sound of a singer tentative isn't he he's completely uh has the confidence of not giving a fuck what people want from him or what people expect from him and i don't think the album did that well at the time did it but but again it's become a the proverbial cult classic hasn't
Speaker 2it yeah absolutely and of course it begins with that great lyric this is how you disappear yeah and this is after you know he's he's come back after six years in the wilderness yes and it's such a strong statement of intent yeah it's a fabulous album it was one that i loved at the time by the way i think it's the one that i love the most and i think it's the one that i love the most and i think it's the one that i love the most and i think it's the one that i love the most and i think it's the one that i love by the time of bish bosh it is a case of admiring it rather than loving it you know being delighted that somebody's out there making that music and feeling compelled to take that journey whereas on this i was completely with him and it was it was kind of hilarious at the time because i was working with a saxophonist and um he bought it for his mum because i've been raving about it in the band rehearsals and he put it for his mum who'd been a scott walker fan and it was a case of almost kind of ripping the record off the uh the player and and smashing it she was so hurt she was actually to the point of tears i believe because
Speaker 1this was not the scott walker it is it is all it is almost as if frank sinatra had suddenly done an album with carl heinz stockhausen or something isn't it or yeah you know or a free jazz ensemble i mean it's it's such an it still remains one of the most extraordinary moves for for a you know previously a kind of very mainstream pop teeny teenage heart throb to have made this discordant experimental uh i mean i you know i i can hear elements of what else was going on in the 80s at that time the use of fretless bass some of the production techniques are very much rooted in that era aren't they the sort of early 80s era but he's completely reconfiguring that whole musical vocabulary to his own ends it sounds like it sounds and of course lest we forget there's some quite big superstars on this race mark knopfler is on this record uh billy ocean is on this record uh doing thing doing things you'll never have heard them doing on any other record uh and there are some there are some uh you know the british free jazz scene on here as well evan parker is on the record ray russell is on the record um just an extraordinary record i think that um you know hopefully will still be discovered in years to come let's move on um let's pick something different now you mentioned bowie we always mention bowie bowie is is like he's ubiquitous isn't he whatever whatever year you're talking about what era whatever era you're talking about almost whatever genre you're talking about david bowie is in this somewhere isn't it but 1984 wasn't a good year for for him was it creatively speaking i mean there's an argument it wasn't his best well it wasn't his best there's an argument to say that the whole of the 80s was was was not a great era and much like neil young it wasn't the best time for him and some might argue that this album he produced this year is the is the absolute nadir of his career but being david bowie it's still worth a listen isn't it and it's still worth talking about and that is tonight so tim release the kraken david on this on the david bowie scale just how shit is tonight well i think you're right i think along
Speaker 2with never let me down that followed this it is the all-time nadir you know i'm putting tin machine above this i'm putting david bowie's debut which i actually quite like i love that debut yeah yeah um above this um and the thing is that bowie should have been making climate of hunter you think of where bowie's come from and so yeah bowie should have been doing something like this you know he'd had an enormous hit with let's dance and let's dance to be fair was bowie tackling the mainstream and doing it brilliantly i think let's dance isn't his best album but it is a very good pop album with a couple of great singles and there's a real energy and you can feel he's enjoying it and tonight is 35 minutes long and you know i remembered buying it at the time and thinking you know gilbert and george influence cover quite interesting loving the alien what a fantastic piece of music it's a full stone isn't it it is i mean you know you look at the second track and your heart begins to sink and as it goes on it starts to sink even more and by the time of the fourth track i think which is tonight which is a kind of cod reggae version of a track he'd written with iggy pop in the late 70s um you know there is blood on the carpet at this stage how i
Speaker 1mean you you obviously i think you were an absolute bowie fanatic at this point so i can only imagine how crushed you must have been uh putting that record on the turntable and it gradually gradually unfolded yeah yeah you can
Speaker 2imagine it the elation getting the album out listen to the first track it's good not that i would do you know metaphorically maybe there's this fists pumping and by the second track heartbreaking yeah by the end of the album you're in a pool of tears like the squonk
Speaker 1so let's let's um let's talk about something completely different now tim what about this record now uh this i think this is another no risk disc this is the sort of album you can recommend to almost anyone and they almost can't help to fall in love with it uh tabula rasa yeah arvo pet's first album well i say first album i mean this arvo pet is he comes from the classical tradition so the concept of albums is not necessarily relevant here but this was the first piece of vinyl that was released with his compositions on certainly on a on a big mainstream label ecm and this um in a way it really shook up the world of classical music didn't it um it it it's unashamedly melodic after years and years and years of classical music gradually drifting towards a tonality serialism the avant-garde including alvo pet to be fair some of his early pieces are much more angular and avant-garde but suddenly out of nowhere emerges this record tabula rasa with four pieces that are unashamedly melodic harmonic spiritual and beautiful absolutely
Speaker 2classical music had moved towards tonality before obviously with the minimalism you're talking philip glass terry riley it was more tonal and had an impact on rock music and i think why this is a really good choice is because it did have an impact on rock music now this was a classical album but uh you can hear it in the likes of this mortal coil dead can dance i think arvo pear and gretzky the holy minimalists um even the cocktail twins they're reaching for that spiritual clarity without the religious angle of course so i think it really had an impact on rock and pop culture as well as shaking up the classical world and obviously i know that you and i were very taken by it i mean i
Speaker 1think that's another no risk disc that's the sort of record i would just buy for somebody even without knowing much about their musical taste confident they probably would find it very hard to
Speaker 2resist do you think we should actually create a no-risk discs shop we probably actually have our recommendations we'd probably
Speaker 1set ourselves up for a fall if we did that you know people would have us under the trace
Speaker 2descriptions act but i think you're right with this you know like minimalism i suppose you know give it the grandmother test if i played my grandmother in c she's going to punch me yes if i play a tabula rasa she's going to kiss me yeah it passes
Speaker 1the grandmother test
Speaker 2you'd like to
Speaker 1think that's true my mum my mum for example i did buy a copy of tabula rasa for my mum and she does love it and uh let's so let's move you're managing to preempt everything i'm about to do here tim you've done it again because you've just mentioned this mortal coil on cocteau twins and i think we should talk about um the the 4ad releases from this year now 4ad was a label uh that for me were at their peak they're still going today they're very successful label they have things like grimes i think and and some other very hip things but for me the golden era is is the 80s the era of cocteau twins uh who released their third album treasuring this year which for me is their Again, it's that moment when they're in transition. from being almost the kind of pseudo Susie and the Banshees tribute band that they started off as, and that's a little bit unfair because they're much better than that would suggest, but there's certainly an element of truth to that, is there not? To becoming a slightly more middle-of-the-road, the classic ethereal sort of 4A, almost the sound that people would consider to be the archetype of the 4AD sound. They're somewhere between those two stools on this album, aren't they? And for me, that's what makes it their best record. It's still got the edges, it's still got the primitivism, it's still got the new wave edge to it, but Liz Fraser is beginning to come into her own as a vocalist and Robin Guthrie also beginning to come into his own as an extraordinary textural guitar player. So for me, this is their masterpiece. And 4AD, as you pointed out also this year, was this Mortal Coils first album, which has most famously Song to the Siren on it, and the first Dead Can Dance album. Dead Can Dance, one of my favourite bands of all time. The first album perhaps is a little bit of an outlier in their catalogue but it's still a great record, I think.
Speaker 2Well, I think you're right. I think this and the Pearly Dewdrops Drop single EP was where the Cocteau Twins found their voice. So I'd agree with you. I mean, you know, Victoria Land, When Push Comes to Shove, might be my favourite. I love it also, yeah. Treasure and Pearly Dewdrops Drop is where they find their voice and when they were becoming a thing. And once more, it's what we were saying, is that this is music that isn't quite rock, isn't quite pop, and is reaching for the spiritual. You know, there's a strong link with the Arvo Piet and a strong link with the Blue Nile. And I suppose what's also interesting is that when people think of the 80s, they think of glossy, shallow pop. I mean, still it prevails, that image of shoulder pads, make-up, you know, maybe even Dead or Alive, Boy George, something like this. But for me, the 80s was very much on a personal level and also the music I listened to about discovery. It was an amazing period of creativity, an invention, you know, where I think pop and rock had kind of shaken off some of those restrictions that punk had imposed.
Speaker 1I mean, again, I'd say, you know, I'd say this is a no-risk disc. Almost anyone could enjoy this music. It has very little to do with genre, does it? It spans every genre and somehow is elevated above all of them. And I think that's a wonderful thing when a band actually achieves that point in their career.
Speaker 2Absolutely. And I think another thing that kind of ties it in with this whole album years thing is that packaging was very important to 4AD. Yeah. The artwork was such a wonderful evocation in a sense, you know, what was it, 23 Envelope, I think? Yeah, Vaughan Oliver. Vaughan Oliver did a lot of this. He's just recently passed away, unfortunately, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was just as amazingly beautiful and evocative of the music. You know, it was a complete world that you immerse yourself in with the album sleeve and the music. And I think that was the case with, with 4AD, Factory. And Factory, yeah.
Speaker 1I was just going to say, a strong parallel with what Peter Saville was doing at Factory. There was almost something about the sleeves that drew you in, that made you want to be, you were interested in the music even before you heard a note of it or before you knew anything about the band. And that, of course, that's the beauty of a great cover, isn't it? Which was largely lost as CD became more dominant as a format. We kind of lost that. One of the beautiful things about vinyl. So 4AD, a shout out to Ivo. I don't know if he's listening, by the way, but Ivo was the guy that signed all of these artists, Mr. 4AD, it was his label in the 80s. And if you're listening, Ivo, you did a great job, mate. Anyway, so why don't we do, let's move to something completely different now because there were other things going on. Of course, there were other things going on in the scene, the 1984 music scene. And one of the things that was going on, which I was really immersed in because I was about the right age to be really into this, was there was a new wave of British progressive rock. Now we talked, we talked in the 1980 episode about how, you know, new wave of British heavy metal was kind of a thing in that particular era. But there wasn't really many bands that transcended the sort of cult level and actually, you know, made the jump into the mainstream. And the same is absolutely true of the new wave of British progressive rock that emerged around about the early 80s. The only band that really crossed over to mainstream success was Marillion. And it was their second album, Fugazi, that came out. This year. And I think, you know, I loved this band when I was a kid. And I loved this band because I had discovered, you know, like a lot of kids, I discovered progressive rock through going back in time and discovering the great albums from the 70s. But most of those bands were not making that kind of music anymore. And if they were, they were playing arenas, you know. So it wasn't really accessible to me as a kid growing up in Helmerhampstead to be able to experience that music in the way that I guess a lot of the people who are around me around in the late 60s, early 70s would have done in small clubs, very intimate settings where the power of the music must have been, you know, visceral. And so to be able to go and see Marillion, who had an incredibly charismatic front man in Fish at the time. And I used to go and see them even before they, you know, even before they released their first album because they were kind of local to me in Helmerhampstead. They were in Aylesbury just up the road. And to follow them through getting their first Friday rock show session, getting signed to EMI, the first single. The first album script for Jester Tear doing really well. And then being fascinated to see what would be their next move and would it continue their ascendancy? And of course, history now tells us that it was the next album that really made them household names, you know, Misplaced Childhood. But this album is kind of transitional, isn't it, Tim? I don't know how familiar you are with this album.
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean, Marillion and the New Wave of Prog is an odd thing for me, Neo-Prog, because by that stage, really my favourites, they were 4AD, Factory, Blue Nile, Sylveon, etc. ECM, you know, Miles Davis. And so, although I absolutely loved a lot of the progressive artists and still followed the original progressive artists, the New Wave of Progressive Artists, I was slightly less interested in. A bit sceptical. Slightly sceptical about. Yeah, yeah. And I think Fugazi's interesting because it's where they find their identity. Of course, you can hear hints of Genesis, hints of Floyd, and hints of the Baroque 70s progressive. But if I listen to that, it's closer to Simple Minds than it is Foxtrot. Or at least it
Speaker 1has as much in common with Fugazi. It has certainly as much in common.
Speaker 2And I felt they found, you know, I think they got better as they went on. And for me, I'd say Clutching at Straws is the album where they really come together and they've got quite a natural identity that's entirely their own. But it also draws an interesting question. This New Wave of Prog, you know, Fugazi, was against the very nature of progressive music. Progressive music, if you like, was always about finding new ways of expressing yourself. So I kind of see the spirit of progressive. 1984, the spirit of progressive to me, perhaps, is in Blue Nile, is in the Sylvan album, is in Scott Walker, is in Laurie Anderson. In that case,
Speaker 1can I throw in another name at this point? Because I think you're right. I think one of the problems with the New Wave of progressive music or whatever it was called at the time is there was too much reliance on the track. There were too many tropes of 70s, you know, 70s bands. So, I mean, Marillion famously or infamously stealing a big section of Supper's Ready on one of their early songs, unfortunately, kind of gave them a reputation. So people could, at that point, it was almost like people could only hear the sort of old prog rock tropes. Now, so I'm going to throw in a name for you, Tim, here. Cardiacs are the one exception that proves the rule. This is the one band that emerged in this year, 1984. They were way below the radar for a long time, but I think they're the band along with Marillion whose music will prevail because they were doing something completely new with the notion of progressive rock and they weren't relying on those old tropes. So their first album, The Seaside, came out this year and I still think even though it has fairly low production standards, you know, in sonic terms, it still sounds like a band that have arrived from nowhere in the sense that you, you just get little hints that, you know, they've maybe listened to this or that, but at the same time it's completely original and it's setting an agenda for a completely new way of making quote-unquote progressive rock. I don't know if you agree with me.
Speaker 2Yeah, I think you're right. Well, I think, you know, going back to the new wave of progressive bands, generally, what I was trying to say is that they worked within a rock vocabulary and they worked within a rock vocabulary that, as you say, had been set by the classic progressive bands and I think the thing is that when you were talking about Blue Night, Kyle, Sylvia, and Scott Walker, Laurie Anderson, it's reaching outside a rock and pop vocabulary which, of course, is what the original progressives did. You listen to King Crimson, Genesis, yes, they're drawing from classical, they're drawing from country, they're drawing from jazz, which none of the new wave of progressive bands did. They drew exclusively from rock. Yes. And that's not to say there weren't good albums and I say, I think Marillion genuinely turned into something quite special and even on the first album you can hear that actually they're, they're a good 1980s rock band. You know, they're not quite the band that people think they are because of this Sumpers Ready comparison. Cardiacs, you're right, they're in a different
Speaker 1world altogether. your point is well made that most of the new wave of progressive rock bands were drawing from this very small pool of influences whereas bands like the Blue Nile were much more broad in their taste and I think the same is true of Cardiacs. The same is true of Cardiacs. That clearly they are a progressive rock band. I mean, the complacency the musicians, relationship um but at the same time they had as much in common with punk rock uh or a band like madness as they did with a band like egg for example you know who tim smith apparently said is was his biggest influence as a kid was egg and that makes sense to me you know but uh i think cardiacs are the exception that proved the rule and i think marillion would become the exception that proved the rule yeah okay let's move on so um let's talk about um let's talk about ztt now because this is kind of the heyday uh of uh ztt trevor horn and paul morley's empire uh you know they were trying in a way to completely reinvent pop music weren't they and the whole way that pop music was presented the whole way pop music was marketed a secret wish is is still to come this is not 1984 but in this year we do have the debut frankie goes to hollywood album welcome to the pleasure dome which for me was slightly disappointing given the three or the two or three singles that have been released so far and i think that's a really important thing to think about which were some of the most amazing singles i think have ever been made um but i'm actually going to go for the art of noise album who's afraid of the art of noise uh which uh which again is you know it's it's basically an album about the technology of the day it's an album that almost exclusively used the fair lights um and it but it's you know what the funny thing is it still sounds good
Speaker 2it's it's a great album and obviously i guess in the public imagination it's it's in love that sells it you know it's used in a lot of films and a lot of adverts at the time um but it is an extraordinarily experimental album using cut-up techniques you're talking about scott walker using cut-up techniques lyrically this is using cut-up techniques musically where it's almost the history of music mangled in a fair light and it's it's um very unexpected sonically and great fun as well as being innovative and crucial points being quite tender and quite but weirdly going back to the last conversation um i think you're entirely right the frankie hollywood album was quite disappointing the singles were groundbreaking and exciting and the album didn't justify that double lp length and it seemed to sort of peter out and and actually i much prefer liverpool the follow-up album which i think is a really underrated interesting record yeah yeah you know um but what's interesting about it is if you listen to the first side of um welcome to the pleasure dome it's a 16 minute track with steve how on and in some ways that really is progressive rock transplanted to the sonic territory of the mid-1980s and so on and i think that what horn did it was reinventing his love of that kind of epic progressive music but in a shiny 1980s pop yes
Speaker 1and i think what's interesting is he grew up loving those things but he also grew up loving things like georgio maroda and so it's the confluence of the two things isn't it great pop great dance great grooves but with the epic scale and ambition of progressive rock at its most pretentious and its most far-reaching but you know he pulls it off doesn't he he absolutely and he pulled it off time and time again you know he pulled it off with grace jones he pulled it off with the proper although the propaganda album was more steve lipson than trevor but steve was one of trevor's you know sort of protégés later on of course we get the great seal records he managed to pull this thing off and and got the whole world of pop right behind him uh but actually you say i mean even and when you kind of combine that with the kind of conceptualism of someone like paul morley yes you're absolutely right it's just as pretentious if not more uh as anything amerson lake and palmer did bless absolutely and i loved it um right i want to talk about something else completely different now tim i don't think you're going to like this record uh but to me it's a very very important one i i would describe this as probably the most negative record anyone has ever made can you guess what i'm talking about tim that's them swans fellas into swans yeah uh swans cop came out this year now i i don't say this lightly this is this is not hyperbole this is one of the most i think the most nihilistically negative records ever made now if you do it with enough conviction it crosses over from being ridiculous to being amazing swans cop tell us what your impressions of this
Speaker 2record it's strange really because obviously i like later swans i mean swans one of those bands that are continuing to make innovative records you know gyra is in his 60s and he's as creatively focused as he's ever been and he's not repeating himself in my opinion you know i've got a lot of time for swans and and weirdly listening to this uh sometimes i find it quite relaxing because it's like monumental slabs of noise and it's a bit like if you take the most demonic black sabbath riff and you take the most demonic black sabbath riff and you take the most demonic black sabbath riff and you have the tempo and then you have a man i don't know grumbling about his lupus on top of it you're kind of getting there i mean i just want to read you some of the lyrics from you're going to get the podcast banned
Speaker 1now well because you know it's so ridiculously negative uh i mean this is this is the title track of the album called cop okay nothing beats humiliation nothing beats them like a cop with a club nothing beats your head like a cop in jail nothing hurts you like a cop with a club nobody rapes you like a cop in jail nobody beats your body like a cop nobody burns your skin like a cop with a match nobody burns your skin like a cop in jail the heat hurts humiliation is a disease now if you imagine a man in a sort of loincloth on stage flagellating himself bellowing that out out of this most i mean almost overpoweringly loud snail temper discordant industrial rock music it's intense and i love all the swans i love all the swans albums they're all different and as you pointed out they're they're one of those groups that are constantly evolving constantly redefining their musical vocabulary but there's something so pure about their early work in the sense that it is uncut nihilism and negativity and i fucking love
Speaker 2it there you go yeah well to me it just sounded a bit like my childhood but other than that
Speaker 1now let's talk about another we talked about swans being very negative you know miserablism in that sense here's another artist that has a reputation for extreme miserablism and in fact it was very easy to make fun of the smiths wasn't it at the time particularly when they brought out heaven knows i'm miserable now it was almost like you know it was almost like what everyone already thought about the smiths and suddenly they'd released a single which gave them you know license to basically you know take the piss um but the album that they did they did two albums this year they did their debut album proper but i think and i think you'll probably agree with me i think the compilation of peel sessions and single a and b sides hat full of hollow is um is the superior record so many great tracks on this everyone will probably know how soon is now this charming man but songs like um you know this night has opened my eyes what a lyric what a lyric i mean you know social conscience and all that well i
Speaker 2was a big smiths fan and i agree with you i think the smiths debut album the one that they've gone in to make as an album there's something a bit flat about it i mean it's got some incredible pieces especially um the piece about the moore's murders is it's suffering children yeah suffer little children yeah um but there's something overall quite sonically flat about that album whereas this presents the smiths as they were it has the highs it has the lows it has the connections with with other types of music and it's a very good album and it's a very good album and it's a very good music so ends on a couple of their most uh beautiful ballads um but in between you get pieces as you say like how soon is now which is the band at their most experimental and and haven't noticed it's interesting because you know i always found it quite funny and and maybe it's a northern english thing i'm not quite sure you know to me it was always irony it was always completely amazing
Speaker 1yeah absolutely um although we may have to see things in a slightly different light knowing what we know about morrissey now it's unfortunately it's almost can't admit to liking morrissey now days you know but but certainly at the time he seemed to be you know as you say very witty very ironic and they were genuine little genuine laughs weren't there but you
Speaker 2know one thing i think get missed about the smiths and this is another return kind of post-punk is that i think because morrissey's voice which is totally distinctive totally his own and again a real deviation from that affected clipped sound dominated the late 70s early 80s one of the things that missed is that it's a return of a virtuosity with bands like the smiths prefab sprout to an extent roddy fraymaster camera you're talking about amazing instrumentalists i mean ma and rook are actually superb musicians i mean if you actually listen to the chords in um heaven knows you know actually it's closer to dr hook than it is an indie album but yeah yeah um if if you listen to some of the other he's managing to sort of weave together a kind of a history of great rock phrasing you can hear the early beatles in it you can hear even the epic back rack and david chord sequences this is very clever musically
Speaker 1yeah and i think and also obviously you know we have to talk about morrissey's voice um you know he's not a natural singer is he uh he sings out of key sometimes but he has just got that personality and that charisma in abundance um and he just completely draws you into his world um and so every song was almost like a like a miniature short story wasn't it on these records and he's - Absolutely. - And the other thing I love about Morrissey is he has, no concept of how a song should be structured so you know a song like what difference does it make you know he'll sing the chorus twice and then he'll get to the last chorus which should be the big payoff chorus and then suddenly he's singing a different melody in different words it's like no you're not supposed to do that you're supposed to nail the chorus home at the end um and i love that about the smiths i think i wonder if it was something you know we talked about the first album being slightly disappointing maybe they were slightly overwhelmed by the album the idea of having to deliver an album statement whereas on this record it's mostly drawn from single a and b sides um smaller chunks of music peel sessions where they're trying things out they haven't got that weight of expectation they've got from that debut album so it just feels more natural it feels more like where who they really were you know so it's a
Speaker 2lot more playful isn't
Speaker 1it yeah my favorites my favorite smiths fact still to this day is this one is that in the space of time it took yes yes to follow up 90125 their big million selling breakthrough album with the number one hit to follow that up with big generator the smiths formed released six albums 20 singles changed the face of pop music and broke up again and then yes released the follow-up i think just before we move on from the smiths it's worth mentioning some of the other you mentioned this kind of northern sense of humor this sort of slightly dry ironic sense of humor we also had some other great records coming out this time echo in the bunnyman's ocean rain uh with you know killing floor is that the name of it killing moon i beg your pardon killing moon yeah terrific single on that record but the whole record the icicle works debut album you you talked about sort of muso uh you know that that that band were quite muso too weren't they but great yeah i love i love that record you know um and the water boys released for me what is still my favorite record of theirs which is a pagan place um you know a wonderful record so i mean this whole year is just full of great records isn't it well you know you two's unforgettable fire was this year as well and you've also got albums like the first everything but the girl album eden you've got the second second talk talk album it's my life these are definitely albums which are beginning to show slightly more muso tendencies aren't they you know whether it's the case of everything but the girl definitely drawing from you know the jazz kind of songbook or it's my life they're they're beginning their gradual move towards you know this kind of post-rock sound that they develop later on in the decade yeah well thomas
Speaker 2dolby's flat earth as well which i you know my favorite thomas dolby album probably is the golden age of wireless flat earth shows him expanding his vocabulary again sort of you can hear steely dan joni mitchell ecm jazz gabriel's experiments with um tribal music all sorts of things it's one of the reasons why 1984 you know remains a sort of uh important year for me even though um i realize that this whole period is often overshadowed by people's perception of it being dominated by seven and the ragged tiger which wasn't even 1984 well and also
Speaker 1lest we forget this is the year of the band-aid single um and i think uh as a result of that things became more worthy didn't they but not necessarily better musically so we're just that's just around the corner we're just before that so the last album i want to talk about tim we're going to talk we're going to list off some others that we haven't had time to talk about at the end now laurie anderson made two albums this year one of them is a five lp box set which to me is her definitive statement which is the united states album which is an all-encompassing work she was working on for many many years a performance piece which contains most of the songs that are also present on mr heartbreak and the previous record big science so it's really a masterpiece or you know of of 80s conceptual performance art and music and theater and lighting design and poetry and prose um but this album uh is kind of a distillation of that slightly more higher production standards because the united states was recorded live and i know this is your favorite laurie anderson album how to describe laurie anderson she she kind of comes out of that tradition of of performance art and and artists like robert wilson and philip glass doesn't she but but she's really got her own thing uh going on in fact i actually thought we should talk about this uh laurie anderson using the laurie anderson voice because she kind of speaks like this and everything has this kind of android delivery the kind of voice you'd hear on an automated telephone system today it's true but she was one she was kind of drawing on that it's almost like making the banal exotic
Speaker 2well i mean her first album big science is the one that sounds more like united states the box set it's got that thinner soundscape although it's more produced and of course it has one of the most unusual top five hits of the year and it's got all time you know superman which is clearly coming out of einstein on the beach but with sort of contemporary electronic instrumentation and and that remains a favorite for me and this album i think is my favorite because it was her expanding you know she had adrian ballou playing a lot of the world guitar on
Speaker 1it yeah nile rogers nile rogers
Speaker 2yeah yeah um bill laswell i think produces this doesn't he so she's stretching her parameters on this you know it's a great sounding record as you say i think she manages to make sound profound and but i
Speaker 1think i think what's sorry i was just going to say what's also nice about laurence isn't it it's it's that she you know she's obviously come to music as a secondary thing um yeah and she's brought with her a lot of kind of you know the vocabulary from being a performance artist or a poet so look for example in in her lyrics there's a lot of repetition isn't there so like united states starts off with you're driving you're driving at night you're driving on a dark road at night and you've lost your way you've lost your way so it's this constant kind of finding the rhythm of quite in themselves quite banal phrases yeah um and i just you just get i mean her voice is just wonderful anyway isn't it so you kind of get hypnotized well
Speaker 2she you know she obviously came out of performance art she came out of performance literature to its end obviously you work with william burrows who appears on this album as well and he was quite you know a compelling performer and you can see that she's honed this craft where she's been to poetry readings she's seen a lot of poetry readings the early shows by the likes of philip glass and she's managed to sort of fuse this with a contemporary pop vocabulary that actually isn't as experimental or frightening you know the whole point is that you know with this no risk disc you're not going to recommend swan's cop on a no risk no you you're probably not going to recommend this but actually it's not a million miles away from what gabriel's doing or david burn is doing and some of that banal repetition i hear in david burn as well as laurie anderson yes almost aspects of junk culture i mean david burn
Speaker 1is definitely an acquired taste isn't he too i think i think i think what's completely absent from from laurie anderson is any sense of um the tradition of blues soul rock and roll that's completely absent isn't it this is very much new york in the in the early 80s um a kind of arch uh performance art aesthetic well it's
Speaker 2interesting because i know that peter gable always thought she should be huge and and wanted to push her towards a more pop vocabulary and you wonder how much of pop she was aware of because i thought this was with scott walker earlier one of the things that was interesting about him is that he said he was completely oblivious to what was going on and he bought the top 10 albums of the day right but he admitted that he had absolutely no sense of what was going on and just bought these top 10 albums to get a sense of what was happening so that his work could almost fit with the zeitgeist and you wonder with anderson you know whether he'd surrounded herself with people like blue laswell who were that new york cutting edge rock and pop scene through an absence of knowledge or through a complete awareness of what was going on
Speaker 1one of the stories i love about scott walker is that somebody met just a couple of years before he made climate of hunter and he signed to virgin uh somebody met him on the streets and of course by that time he hadn't made an album in like seven eight nine years or something i think last album was like 74 and they said to him scott oh yeah wow it's amazing to see what have you been doing and he said i've been painting and and and the the person said to him oh what have you been painting you know still lives watercolors no i've been painting and decorating he'd actually gone into professional painting and decorating you know so little interest in you know you know being in the pop world at that time it's amazing wouldn't you love that though you know you need scott walker turns up
Speaker 2scott walker comes in and he's there painting this is how you disappear
Speaker 1well yeah while he's painting your bog yeah i love that while he's painting your toilet yeah i love that anyway listen i think we should call it a day there but obviously there's a few other albums that we want to just pay lip service to that we haven't had time to talk about um dali's car we talked about briefly talked about the sylvian uh brilliant trees up mick khan also released uh an album collaboration with pete murphy this year dali's car the waking out which i love uh very great isn't it because that is the more logical
Speaker 2follow-up from tin drum in a way isn't it dali's car the waking out
Speaker 1very much amazing record i've already got time to talk about it uh manuel gotching released e2e4 this year which is a single one-hour electronic that is so ridiculously ahead of its time it's unbelievable if you listen to this record you will hear most 90s electronica uh personified in this record uh a great record from from manuel gotching um what else have we got this
Speaker 2year we've got ultravox lament peter hamill's the love songs one of my favorites is without mercy dritty column great records yes uh
Speaker 1we've got uh roger waters and david gilmore both releasing uh good records pros and cons of hitchhiking and about face yeah purple rain of course prince which many people would say we've got a lot of people would say that was the best album of 84 i wouldn't necessarily disagree with them but i think that that's one of those albums that's just been discussed at infinitum so we didn't want to talk about it here particularly King Crimson released Three of a Perfect Pair, their last album for many, many years, which is a really good record. So, Tim, let's now pick the album or albums that are closest to our own hearts. And let's pick the album that we think was perhaps the most influential, maybe the wrong word, but the most that was that was kind of setting the tone for what was to come later in the decade in that respect. So, yeah, what would you pick as your favourite first from this year?
Speaker 2I mean, I think Blue Nile for definite. It's something that I still play regularly. I still find utterly beguiling. Maybe outside of that, Scott Walker or Laurie Anderson. Yeah, sorry, the one that I think is the most influential. One that you just mentioned in passing, actually, because, you know, the thing is, The Smiths, it was revolutionary. It was great. But you couldn't say it sort of hinted at a future for pop or rock. I mean, obviously bands like Sway. Sway took The Smiths' template to an extent, but there was no real future in it. And nor was there really in these albums that I felt represented a new spirit of progressive albums like Brilliant Trees and Climate Hunter and Mr. Heartbreak. Actually, the effect was quite minimal in terms of the wider culture, unfortunately. But I do think E2, E4 is one of those albums that you listen to it. And it's perhaps because of the simplicity of the production. It sounds like it could be tomorrow.
Speaker 1Tomorrow. I'm going to slightly agree with you, but I'm going to raise you as well, because I think what you've just said is absolutely true of E2, E4. But I also think it's equally true, if not more so, of The Art of Noise, because The Art of Noise, in a way, predate the whole idea of DJ culture, of sampling, of using found sounds, using breaks. And that, you'd have to admit, was definitely what was about to happen in a big way, you know, right through the late 80s, through the 90s, into the 21st century. The whole idea of, you know, using found sound to create music. Which is something very much at the heart of The Art of Noise. The sampler is at the heart of that band. I mean, it is the heartbeat of The Art of Noise, isn't it? It is the sampler. And so, in that sense, the sampler is the sound that's going to come to the forefront. And to be fair, it still is. As we speak, in 2020, it still is the sound at the forefront of pop music in 2020. So, I'm going to say Art of Noise. Who's afraid of Art of Noise? Although, I totally agree with you about E2, E4, too. And for my personal favourites, Climate of Hunter, Cocteau Twins Treasure. Swans Cop. And Purple Rain is just a genius record, isn't it? So, I'm going to cheat and pick four. But, like you say, so many great records. I could have picked A Pagan Place. I could have picked Tabula Rasa. Sure. Just so many amazing records in 1984.
Speaker 2In the jazz world, I mean, one we missed, I think Pat Metheny's First Circle was out. And this was another album that had contemporary electronic textures. But a very strong influence from Brazilian music. But also Steve Reich. And it kind of fits into this. It's an era where things were very fluid, if you like. And obviously, about a year later, David Bowie works with Pat Metheny on This Is Not America, which was one of Bowie's greatest 80s achievements, I think.
Speaker 1It's an interesting time, isn't it? And I think there is something about the fact that Live Aid is just around the corner. I can't help feeling, every time I think about Live Aid, I can't help thinking, noble as it was, it kind of set music back a little bit. And this kind of incredible climate of experimentation and creativity and being kind of selfish about the way people. I mean, you know, people forget that one of the very important things about being an artist is being selfish. You have to be true to yourself. You cannot think about your audience when you make music. I mean, that's not entirely true because there are some artists that have managed to navigate those rather choppy waters of being able to please their audience but do their own thing at the same time. But most people, I think, create their best work. And they are not thinking about their audience. And unfortunately, Live Aid created a climate where everyone was thinking about their audience. And I think it did have a detrimental effect on the music.
Speaker 2Anyway. I think you're right, you know, because if I think about my record collection, you know, 1984, there's again, like with 73, 80, 79, 81, there are hundreds. And there was a dearth of things that really excited me in 85, 86. Now, I was so excited at the possibilities that 84 suggested, and it was very disappointing. And of course, this leads to me meeting you in 87. I remember some of our early conversations were about what had been exciting and the absence of that in the present. And how we ended up retreating to listening to Donovan records all day long.
Speaker 1We did, yeah. Which we're going to come on to in our next episode, kids, when we talk about 1967. So anyway, let's call it a day there, Tim. So next time we'll be talking 1967, as I just mentioned. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you, Tim. Bye bye. Goodbye for now. Bye.
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