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Speaker 2Tim, we've talked about how one of the hallmarks of the 80s is the kind of transition from post-punk music to something more kind of sophisticated, a bit more glammy. But there are still a lot of the bands from the punk era still kind of, you know, working in those waters. Let's talk about some of them first. First of all, we have to talk about, I think, one of the greatest post-punk albums ever, possibly one of the most depressing, claustrophobic, you know what I'm going to talk about now, don't you? One of the most depressing, claustrophobic, and nihilistic albums ever made, certainly ever made by a mainstream charting act. I'm talking about, of course, Agadou.
Speaker 3You're talking about Pornography by The Cure.
Speaker 2Pornography by The Cure, what an album. Now, I used to make a joke on stage. I used to say, you know, obviously I'm not known for my fun lyrics, but then I used to say, what do you expect from someone who's not a fan of Pornography? Someone who grew up listening to The Cure's Pornography, where the first line on the album is,
Speaker 3Isn't it, what's it matter if we all die? Something black falls out of your mouth and we laugh.
Speaker 2What a great way to start our record. That is it, isn't it? Does it matter if we all, yeah. I mean, but that kind of, it doesn't get any brighter from there on in, does it really? Let's face it. The title track being one of the most claustrophobic pieces of music I've ever heard in my life. Well, the whole album is relentless. It's relentless. I love it. It's great. I mean, absolutely. Now, the funny thing is, of course, from this point on, there was no way they could go further in that direction. So they actually went in the complete opposite direction, which is one of the wonderful things about The Cure, isn't it? That they could have basically stopped here and they would have been this, probably along with the Joy Division catalogue, it would have become this kind of, you know, little catalogue crystallised in time, nihilistic, sort of black anorak, indie kids' favourites. And of course they went off and wrote, Let's Go To Bed and Close To You and Friday I'm In Love and, yeah, completely reinvented themselves as quite. Lovecats. Yeah, quite a joyous pop band. Yeah. But I keep coming back to the trilogy, the nihilistic, depressing, claustrophobic trilogy, 17 Seconds, Faith and none more depressing than. I come back to that and then I come back to things
Speaker 3like Disintegration as well as a personal favourite. I love them. The trilogy is great and this is. It's almost like. I mean, because the first album is almost like. I mean, there's a couple of great tracks on it but the first album, which I don't think the band were fully behind. No. is a total outlier. Seems like a false start to me. They begin on 17 Seconds. Yeah. And Faith takes it that bit further, goes into grey, dim areas. Pornography is that blackened to an extreme extent. My favourite is still 17 Seconds, which was the first Cure album I bought. But that trilogy, fantastic. And it is. How fun. How far can we go?
Speaker 2How dark can we get? And also, I think the difference between Pornography and 17 Seconds and Faith is the drum sound. Again, they're using that big. Different producer, Phil Thornley. They're using that kind of big, roomy drum sound, which just sucks all of the air out of the mix. You know, like on 17 Seconds and Faith, the drum sounds are very clipped, very small. Yeah. There's all this space. On Pornography, there's no space. Everything is claustrophobic. Everything sounds like it's sort of like taking up all of the sonic space. The vocals, the drums, the guitars, the keyboards. It's a massive, massive sounding record. It just, it feels like, it does feel like you're getting sucked into this maelstrom of negativity and nihilism. And sometimes that's exactly where I want to go.
Speaker 3Yeah. No, I mean, weirdly enough, I was asked to do another YouTube podcast in which it was about music that affects your mood or music that in some ways relates to how you're feeling. And. And how it also relates to mental health. And I was saying that in the 80s, one of my go-to albums was Pornography. Because if there was a certain mood I was feeling, a certain bleakness, Pornography was the perfect soundtrack to that. And it didn't plunge me deeper into despair. It was merely an echo of that despair. So it is one of my most played Cure albums. And it is something they never properly return to. And you kind of wonder why. I mean, I don't know what, you know, Robert Smith's mindset was during this era.
Speaker 2You do. You worry for his mental health at this point.
Speaker 3Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the drums are very different. So one of the big differences, as you say, I think on 17 Seconds, it's quite metronomic. Almost at times like primitive drum machines in the background of these spartan guitar lines. Faith is more amorphous. This is really dense and quite heavy tribal drumming throughout it as well.
Speaker 2Yeah. Big, rummy sounds. And also his voice. He's never sounded more demented than he does on this record. Some of the treatments on the voice, I forget which the song is now, where he sings the line and then the echo repeats the line and then they start pitch shifting the echo. And there's all this vocal processing on the record. It's, you know, we come back to this word time and time again, that sense of otherness this record has. This sense of the band could never recreate this, even if they tried. And I think there has been periods in time where they've tried to get back to the sound of the classic. I think Disintegration, in a way, was the first time. They tried to get back to that melancholic feeling they captured on these three records. But there's something about the age they were, the time they were making the records, the technology that was available to them, the aesthetics of the sound of the time, the drum machines that were available to them, the production techniques available to them that are kind of burned into the very fabric of these records. Yeah. That big tribal drum sound, we're hearing it on the Dreaming. We're hearing it on anything Steve Lillywhite produced. We're going to hear, we're going to talk about it also on Susan the Banshee's album. That big, the English Settlement, the XTC album, that big, roomy drum sound is kind of, that's the drum sound of choice of the day for a lot of bands.
Speaker 3But I also think what you've tapped into on this is something that the Associates and the Kate Bush have that not a lot of albums do during this year, and that is the otherness, the otherworldly quality. There is something, despite its darkness, quite spectral, quite demented, quite free, I find about this album, which a lot of us don't. A lot of records don't, you know, the Gabriel, as we said, beautiful and powerful and dynamic. Yeah. It's not got the same sense of strangeness and otherness. I remember, I guess it was a description I remember that related to a Robert Wyatt album around the time it was in the NME. It was something like strangely beautiful and beautifully strange. And I think that that's something that kind of captures these albums as well, including Pornography.
Speaker 2I'm reminded there was, I forget who it was now, but somebody was talking about The Exorcist, the film, and saying there's something evil in the very celluloid of that movie. Yeah. And there is something about albums like Pornography, I mean, I would sort of talk about Throbbing Gristle's second annual report in the same terms. There's something sick in the very essence of the music that even the band would find it difficult to understand exactly why it sounds like it does. Where it comes from. Where it came from. I mean, they were still very young at the time, I think Robert Smith's like, you know, 22, maybe 23, and it sounds like he was in a very dark place and he's channelling that through the music and he could never get back to that space ever again. But they were big.
Speaker 3I mean, the thing about The Cure is that almost from the off, they were getting a lot of press, a lot of sales. So even before the Lovecats era, this was a rated band that was selling decent sized venues.
Speaker 2Well, that's the funny thing, isn't it? If you think about this, this record came out the same year as Duran Duran's Rio and about a year later, The Cure would have been in direct competition. At the top of the charts, you know, for joyous pop. Yes. And yet at this moment in time, you cannot imagine two more different records. No. And two more different aesthetics than The Cure's Pornography and Duran Duran on the beach with the supermodels on the yacht in the Bahamas making Rio. It's so far apart. And yet these records came out the same year. That's a beautiful thing about music, isn't it? Let's talk. Oh, we've got a listener's review of Pornography. Let's hear what they make of Pornography and it takes them to a place of sickness.
Speaker 4As well. Hi, Stephen and Sam. How are you guys doing? So 1982 is the year. I'm thinking Pornography by The Cure. This is such a landmark record for the whole goth post-punk movement. Very dark, depressing record. One hundred thousand years. That's one of the God most evil guitar riffs ever written, in my opinion. The rest of the album is great as well. Hanging Garden, Figurehead, the title track. Very cool album. Hope you guys discuss about this one. I think it deserves your guys' opinions. I'll be listening. Thank you, guys.
Speaker 2Thank you very much. Yeah. Well, as you heard, we absolutely love this record. We love it, too. So we're on the same page there. Let's talk about XTC's English Settlement. I hear many people talking about English Settlement as the kind of pinnacle of XTC's catalog. I've never quite felt that way myself. I love all XTC albums. I'm kind of an apologist for the band in that sense. I love them all, you know, for their own reasons. English Settlement. they almost always felt something about slightly unfinished i totally
Speaker 3agree do you know what
Speaker 2i'm talking about yeah
Speaker 3never i mean i know that this is seen as a bit of a holy grail um and i loved xtc from the very early singles again i was buying them early on drums and wires what a razor-edged masterpiece that was black sea pop masterclass mama that came off and i love mama you know you know it's one of the albums i think is unfairly neglected i'd even go as far as you know obviously we know sky larking but big express i think is great very much my least favorite of me too and i still like
Speaker 2it don't get me wrong no still like it really good amazing songs do you know i think for me
Speaker 3okay two things one it's over long this is a double album that extends its welcome and two because they're such a creative playful tonally adventurous band in my mind and i might be being really unfair to it this is a fairly samey
Speaker 2i think you're right i agree i agree it's all that's what i mean by it sounds almost unfinished it almost feels like xtc they haven't brought that final level of arrangement detail to some some of the tracks like tracks like leisure down in the cockpit knuckle down they're almost too simplistic for xtc in my in in my mind compared to things that were on black sea like uh you know um no language in our lungs roads roads go to the globe from drums and wires and then from tracks some of the classic tracks from mama like um love on a farm but farm by his widget there isn't that degree of sophistication in the production to me now i don't know if it's something to do with hugh padgium it's the only album he ever produced on his own for xtc and he was on the cusp of becoming the in fact he may already have been the producer of choice of phil collins and the police and it feels like the album just doesn't have the same amount of sophistication some of the songs are brilliant but some of the songs are not and i think it's brilliant some of the songs feel like those classic if it had been a single album those songs would have been really get to b-side kind of songs some of the ones i mentioned before but at the same time since he's working overtime jason and the argonauts fly on the wall melt the guns brilliant tracks snowman brilliant tracks english roundabout
Speaker 3brilliant and also it fits in my academy the underrated in this is their only album sure we'd be talking about what a genius album it is yeah by a long lost band so yeah it's a great album and it's a great album and it's a great album and it's a great album and it's a great album and it's a great album and it's a great album there's quality that it's just in relation to what proceeds and what follows and it comes back to me with something you used to say about i think xtc possibly elo and 10cc maybe beatles even that each song had its own distinct sound world they created these pieces you know out of the blue i remember you talking about this 10cc definitely did it and i think xtc did you listen to black sea you listen to it sky larking every song has its own it's what it's like we're
Speaker 2what are the lyrics about yeah now let's create a sound world that fits in with that and is very very big on the music reflecting the lyrics this
Speaker 3less so this is an i agree it's almost like and and it's going to sound worse than i intend it to an xtc demos album i
Speaker 2really like the record but for me and one thing i hate is when people say you know about double albums oh they made a great single album no but this is the one occasion where i'm going to get against my rule i could make an amazing single album from english from the best tracks no thugs in our house yacht dance i could put together like eight or nine tracks that for me would be an amazing but as an album 15 songs however many years on their 15 or 16 songs i think it's overlong too many of the tracks feel like they were left in a state they wouldn't normally have left them but it's still a great album last time with terry chambers isn't it this one last time with terry chambers he's on he plays a couple of tracks on mama yeah but yeah okay
Speaker 3but yeah hymns to the silences another one which we both agree that van morrison later but you could make a great single album out of what is quite a flabby normally as i
Speaker 2said i don't like it when people say that you know because for me sometimes double albums the sprawl is what makes them unique in the catalog do you know what i mean yeah um but this is an album where where i feel like i would probably cherry pick my favorite tracks and contradict my own my own rules there let's move on susan the banshees a kiss in the dream house i've never been a big fan of susan the banshees i love the idea of using the banshees um what do you know this record timmy is this on
Speaker 3guitar um oh god it might be i'm trying to think it might well be i mean i knew and loved you know because it's easy again i bought the early singles loved them and then i thought kaleidoscope was an album you know actually the first two albums are great saying that but kaleidoscope was the first time i bought as it came out adored the singles um and i think there's a lean what i love about that is there's a nagging quality to the hooks there's an intensity and there's a leanness to the production that i really quite like and around this time i think slightly before there was a single it's one of my favorite susan the banshees singles israel israel yeah i think it's stunning
Speaker 2non-album single yeah i do love that and the singles
Speaker 3collection i think it was once upon a time yeah that's really indispensable so we're doing
Speaker 2alan partridge again here aren't we what's your favorite susan the banshees album i'd have to say the best but there is a sense that that is the case for me anyway as more of a dabbler in the catalog yeah
Speaker 3i remember just and still it's the same i've listened to it i like the sound of it i like the ambition they're going in a more slightly tribal but also symphonic direction but i always remember feeling this was a little bit more bloated than i want it to be and that's my fault in some ways but you know i love some of the latest stuff you know cities and dust where they're in decline or um you know others so i still think they continue to be a very interesting band with very interesting individual players you know like the police like japan people like severin budgie they were great actually and obviously they had a procession of really interesting guitarists i mean
Speaker 2did they correct me if i'm wrong i say my knowledge is not that great about the catalog didn't they follow this with the covers album through the looking glass which to me is always a sign of a little bit of a creative impasse you know what i mean it's certainly
Speaker 3yeah i wonder if that's a little later but yeah it's later and they did a double live album right okay which again is for me another sign of a creative impasse yeah
Speaker 2yeah let's talk about a band that at this time you could you could say had a very very strong suzy influence the banshees influence cocteau's their first album the cocteau twins first album garlands in some cases uh where's it suzy and the banshees influences very obviously on its sleeve and again this is a little bit of a false start for them very soon they were to you know they were going to develop into something much more special like you know almost like a a butterfly growing out of you know of the pupa in a sense here they're still kind of a little bit tied towards their post-punk roots they're very young aren't they i think liz is like 18 years old or something on this one of the great voices of all time surely liz fraser but here she's really channeling suzy isn't she i like it i mean
Speaker 3it's funny because i've just been slightly critical of kissing the dream house you know again which is more my memory i didn't listen to again to refresh so i might be entirely wrong but my my view was that whereas kaleidoscope hit a sweet spot for me as an albums band a singles band kiss in the dream house was just as i've said ever so slightly bloated whereas actually garlands i love the razor edge intensity clearly they've got almost one influence and it's using the banshees well i
Speaker 2think it's also the the drum machine i love the drum machine yeah gives it a unique quality yeah diy again the bedroom the bedroom thing
Speaker 3but you really feel like they needed to make this music
Speaker 2yeah yeah yeah it's good i like it too it's i like it too the birthday party junkyard obviously nick cave famously nick cave's uh early band i think he was in another band before this called the boys next door but birthday party was like the band that kind of brought him to the international stage um i wasn't so familiar with the birthday party i've got one ep which are quite like as as you know from previous episodes if you heard me talking about nick cave i'm not the biggest fan of nick cave and i've always found that to be pretty much my problem because i know he's amazing there's something remarkable remarkable about the birthday party it's kind of unhinged punky it's almost like blues music but played with a sort of punky you know we've used this word a few times uh on the show already that kind of like frenetic abandon demented abandon um it's a punk rock approach to to swampy blues isn't it in a way birthday party and he is possessed on there he's possessed he's probably strung out on heroin at the time probably completely possessed i mean i like this i
Speaker 3really love the guitar sound and the drum sound because again it actually has quite a big drum sound at times the one track i was remember coming back to was she's hit is that the one right i think so yeah really powerful there's a loose i mean what's interesting with them is that they use the kind of heavily gated production technique sometimes but with a looseness of as you say a shambling indie blues band and he's got this tremendous commanding voice and weirdly i hear aspects of that later on in the early sugar cubes i think they had that kind of almost trash can indie quality that i hear in the birthday party because again there's a sort of dissonance at times with the guitar it's
Speaker 2very distant it's very aggressive it's it's unhinged i mean it is kind of on the edge of foot it feels like it's on the edge of falling apart yeah most of the time it feels like most of the tracks are live captured like capturing lightning in a bottle capturing a live take vocals and all um it's very punky it's very blues it's very arty as well
Speaker 3well without it being a favorite album for me i was actually really struck by it so i heard it at the time because the frame was a huge fan and it was one of those where i was arrested it was almost like this is brilliant there's something here and while you know i wouldn't put it in my top 10 of the year it was definitely one of those albums that opened my ears to certain possibilities and certain aspects i wanted in my own music as well that i heard this and i thought jesus this is on fire yeah which could be a title on the album jesus this is on fire well their
Speaker 2first album was called prayers on fire
Speaker 3was it was it yeah um this
Speaker 2is the second album uh yeah i think there's a sense that there's a there's been a lot of sort of drip down influence from this kind of stuff i think it bands like the john spencer blues explosion those kind of bands um it's almost that kind of aggressive punky arty rock art rock blues thing which i actually i like the idea of it i think this is kind of paraphrasing what you're saying i like the idea of it yeah more than i like the reality of listening to it let's talk about bow house the sky's gone out in some in some cases bow house i mean goth bands get accused of being very you know they're easy to make fun of aren't they got the goth scene is very easy to make fun of you know um bow house possibly more than any other band elevated goth music to levels of pretension that are just off the scale and this is their album and i quite like that about them the sky's gone out now they wear their influences on their sleeve on this album there's a cover of third uncle from the eno album which they do a very good version of although no one can replicate robert fripp's guitar solo on the original they do a very credible version they also around this time release a non-album single of ziggy star a very faithful version of ziggy stardust perhaps a little bit too on the nose as a cover but this album is kind of interesting because it's so pretentious the second side has this three this triptych called the three shadows three shadows i think is it three shadows i think it's three shadows i think it's three shadows it's called three shadows thank you research assistant a lovely research assistant rob there has confirmed that i wasn't making a schoolboy the three shows it's i mean it's none more
Speaker 3pretentious isn't it well we were talking earlier about how duran duran culture club that on one level the excess and the glamour is such a massive repudiation of punk that is immediately preceded it and equally the level of of pretension that some bands are getting at you know the proto goth pre 480 i know 480 are around this because i'm 480 birthday party 480 as well yeah cocktails as well of course but i'm talking about you know when we have dead condense in the mid 80s yeah it goes through the roof that you can see that level of what some people would see as pompous pretension foreshadowed in this and it's like oh my god they had benny the bouncer you don't get that on dead can dance you don't get that in bauhaus this is deadly serious deadly pompous you don't get it on pornography either you don't get it on pornography do you
Speaker 2benny the bouncer no um or are you ready eddie
Speaker 3no you don't get that no but thank god i yeah i really like this i like the atmosphere again not my favorite band not my favorite album of the year but i've always liked bauhaus and bella legosi's what a phenomenal greatest debut single of all time and i actually along with spirals a real soft spot by
Speaker 2the damned and spirals scratched by buzzcocks
Speaker 3real soft spot for the peter murphy solo albums that he made on beggar's banquet and we love
Speaker 2darley's car his collaboration with
Speaker 3mick as well what an amazing record i know it's hated i love it i love
Speaker 2it so pretentious i love
Speaker 3it see that i would say is a favorite album i adore it yeah um so actually i've got a lot of time for peter murphy and bauhaus and i like this and i kind of like the fact that they're just following their instinct wherever those instincts
Speaker 2take them i think they were damned i think they were quite dysfunctional as a band you know again their inter interpersonal thing was was pretty compromised and that comes out in the music obviously they implode pretty soon after this as a band they made one more album which was even more schizophrenic than this one so there's that kind of constant friction that you hear pulling in different directions from track to track but the one thing that unites it all is it's unbelievably pretentious and all the better for it yes the psychedelic furs forever now let's produce by todd rungren let's start off with a review i don't know this record let's start off by listening to a listener's review of psychedelic furs forever now hello steven
Speaker 5and tim the album i would like to shine a light on from 1982 is the third lp from the psychedelic furs forever now this album employed the production talents of none other than todd rungren and contains some stellar tracks such as love my way president gas and the title track this album is notable among the band's discography for fusing their trademark smoky post-punk bite with a shimmering pop sensibility no doubt influenced by rudgren's presence the end result is something i think really works and stands out amongst their peers anyway i would love to hear your thoughts on it
Speaker 2peace thank you very much for that really todd is like the leonard zellig of pop isn't he just pops up in all these plays todd rungren produced that doesn't matter what you're talking about todd rungren probably produced it um i don't know the record tim you do i
Speaker 3do i really like it and um quite i think a development from what had preceded it i mean i i like what they did before as well but this might be my favorite album because it's the psychedelic furs with more psychedelic color in parts i mean president gas has got that kind of relentless dissonant almost bowie scary monsters quality there's certainly a frip influence on the guitar drinking game favorite love my way is along with pretty in pink my favorite psychedelic furs single and has this lovely little marimba line running through it which you always credit in a sense to rungram because it's a production technique that wouldn't have appeared on the earlier albums and richard butler's voice clearly is coming from a place that bowie had made his own but butler does have this kind of smoky gravelly personal take on the bowie style so yeah i've always had a soft spot for psychedelic furs and i really like this album it might be my favorite of those thank you to the listener
Speaker 2for the review there too um making up for me not having any idea about this record at all let's just quickly um go through some other records that came out this year in this category scritty polities songs to remember their first album cabaret voltaire two times 45 concert angels fiction the clash combat rock never been the biggest clash fan i love london calling but i've never been particularly a fan rock's pretty
Speaker 3good pretty diverse i mean it has
Speaker 2some very famous tunes on it doesn't it should i stay or should i go is on this right yeah rock casbah yeah rock casbah is great a certain ratio we do love and they made two albums this year which in a way very different records the beginning of the year they released sextet which again is a very dirty lo-fi kind of industrial funk record yeah kind of a continuation of what they were doing on to each has my favorite ace a certain ratio track on it knife slits water but then at the end of the year they released an album that almost sounds like a level 42 album studio orientated jazz funk yeah i'm not a big fan of it it's a very strange and very swift transition isn't it it is and almost feels like another band
Speaker 3right yeah i mean sextet is great and as we said before it's almost like if weather report had been brought up on joy division there's some strangeness going on it's it's post-punk yet you can see they've got some yeah jazz and fusion but as you say there's a dirty diy and the voices are all
Speaker 2sort of out you know off key and droning and a little bit in the back of the mix and then suddenly there's this really slick you know it's presumably a different singer on on um i think so is it martin moscrop that that disappears after sextet could be
Speaker 3i mean i you know really sextet's great sextet is amazing and i and this one i think they perfect it later because there's an album from i think it's 86 force called force yeah and i love four that's that's kind of pulling back a little bit of the yeah because it's really ambitious and again it has you know you were talking earlier about what pop used to have and i guess that you know radio had also had it you know this thing we were talking about behemian rhapsody and music by john miles where you had and living let die these mini symphonies and there are actually a couple of almost kind of funk pop mini symphonies on force and i really like the album so it sounds great and there's a couple of i think it's mickey way is it there's there's a couple of sort of more more hip hop kind of rock and roll kind of stuff and i think it's it's a great album it's a great album it's a great album it's a great album it's a great album it's a great album it's a great album and so i kind of think as you say they pull back in some respects by regaining the yeah i mean don't
Speaker 2get me wrong i love the fact they change i love that they develop but this particular and they still sound good within the space of 12 months is a is a is a very very big change and i think the problem i have with this is the problem i have with it is is not the fact they've changed but they've become quite anonymous on on the second record in the year whereas nothing could be from the truth on on the previous record sex tech which we which we love let's talk about joe jackson's night and day we we were talking earlier i forget which band it was we were talking about the band that almost exists outside of the venn diagram of pop we were talking about i think dexys we were saying almost but they don't fit anywhere joe jackson where does he he's bizarre he's had a really fascinating career started out in a sort of post-punk group became a solo artist carried on with the post-punk thing had a couple of big hits as a post-punker is she really going out with him reinvented himself as almost like the post-punk band and he's kind of like the - Is this Jazza? Joe Jackson's Jumpin' Jive. Made a big band record and now makes serious classical music. What an amazing career.
Speaker 3He did have very, very diverse tastes. Really? I think he's classically trained, played in lots of pub bands in Portsmouth. He was obsessed for a while with Keith Emerson and ELP. You know, so he has all of this in his DNA. I think he was well aware of, as we know from Jumpin' Jive, 20s and 30s big band jazz. So he had a lot in his armoury. And yeah, I like him because he's kind of, he's wayward. And there's one album I think he did in the mid-90s where it's got a kind of Mitchell Froome griminess to the production. But it's a concept album called Heaven and Hell. And you can hear lots of, it might not be Heaven and Hell, the title might be something different.
Speaker 2Let's talk about this album, Night and Day, which sounds a bit like Heaven and Hell. But Night and Day, this is the album he released this year, which is an album, obviously had a massive, massive hit on it in Steppin' Out. It's an album of kind of smooth, jazz, very slick influence, but very American sounding. And of course, it was a very big hit in America. He was briefly part of the so-called, you know, second British invasion, including bands like Tears for Fears as well. This was a massive hit in America. The video is all shot in America. It looks very American. It's him kind of playing, you know, and he's in his late 20s and he's kind of, he's almost prematurely balding already. He's the anti-pop star in many ways. He has an image of an anti-pop star. In so many ways, he was kind of an outlier. He was outside of anything that was going on. But this record was obviously a very, very successful record, Night and Day. And probably I can imagine being embraced by the sort of coffee table. People just want a record to play in their cocktail party. It's got that sort of degree of accessibility. You can imagine it being played alongside a Steely Dan record. I was about to say,
Speaker 3Goucho, Asia and Donald Fagan's Nightfly are the three, I can sort of connect with this. Yeah, this could completely go in there. And it's nothing like those, no? Yeah, but what's fascinating is it's then nothing like Jumping Jive. And when he emerges on the scene, he's almost a bit like, you know, you have the Elvis Costello, Graham Parker and the Rumour and Joe Jackson.
Speaker 2Yeah, because he fits in with that really well. Yeah, and it's almost like Joe Jackson, we don't talk about Joe Jackson because he never kind of belonged to anything in particular. In some ways that does him a disservice that we don't, you know, don't talk enough about Joe Jackson. He's had a very interesting career and I'm sure he's had, you know, by choice. He's had the career he wanted, being able to sort of be a magpie and just sort of move from one genre to the other.
Speaker 3And I think in stepping out on this album, he made enough to secure the rest of his career, probably. I suspect so.
Speaker 2I think it was a very big hit. Let's talk about Felt and Lawrence. The first, the debut album by Felt, Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty, this year. Felt. Now, famously, Lawrence decided that Felt were going to make, 10 albums and 10 singles in 10 years, and then they were going to break up. And that's exactly what he did. Stuck to his guns. And even within that 10 years, Felt made many different kinds of music. This first record is half instrumental, half vocal. What I love about Lawrence is he never seems to hit a single note in tune, but it never sounds out of tune. It's almost like because every note is out of tune, you don't notice that it's out of tune. Do you know what I mean? I love Felt. I mean, gorgeous kind of, atmospheric lo-fi, a bit gothic, a bit Cocteau-sy in places. They had a great guitar player, Rob, my beautiful assistant. What was the name of the guitar player on Felt? Morris D. Bank. Yes, yes. Lovely style, you know, a little bit Robin Guthrie-esque in a way. All the guitar sounds have this sort of trail of reverb to them. So there's a lot of space and ambience to the music. And then Lawrence, what an eccentric. Let's hear a listener review of Felt. Felt's first album.
Speaker 6Hey, guys, my name is Javier Jones from MedellĂn, Colombia. My pick for 1982 is Scrambling the Antiseptic Beauty by Felt. Perhaps the charm of this album lies mainly in the simplicity and at times the innocent rawness of the sound. However, when you add the band's dreamy post-punk nature and Lawrence's captivating voice, it slowly builds a haunting and somber contrast that, for me, makes it a fascinating album for that year. Love the podcast, Javier.
Speaker 2A much more articulate exploration of the album than I gave. Yes, I mean, there is a sense of space about the album. There's very little going on. Sometimes the drums are just hitting the tom. The guitars are doing a lot of the heavy lifting. And then Lawrence's very peculiar out of tune draw, which kind of just sucks you in.
Speaker 3But it's odd, isn't it, that they were known for these elaborate titles, beautiful album covers. And as you say, you could almost put them as like a DIY 4AD band in a sense. And of course, they did Primitive Painters, did they not, with Elizabeth Fraser?
Speaker 2Yeah, produced by Robin Guthrie, yeah.
Speaker 3What's interesting is what he became, Denim, which was the polar opposite of this.
Speaker 2Yeah. So he's clearly a maverick. But even within the Felt catalogue, his first ten albums, there's one album called Train Above the City, which is an album of vibraphone electric piano instrumentals, cocktail jazz. Yeah. What a bizarre, almost to the level of performance art. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't know what you're going to get with an ex-Felt record. And I like that about Lawrence. I mean, someone who clearly is not career minded at all. But this album has a very haunting spectral beauty to it.
Speaker 3And I love that title, Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty.
Speaker 2Amazing. Yeah, they had some great titles. Let the Snakes Crinkle Their Heads to Death, which apparently Bobby Gillespie advised Lawrence was the worst album title in history. Right. Orange Juice. Two albums this year, Tim. I know very little about this band except Rip It Up. That's the big hit. You can't hide your love forever. What can you tell us about Orange Juice, Tim? Not much by the sound of it.
Speaker 3No, look, I've got Rip It Up and love it. Oh, well, tell us about it then. What do you love about it? What do I love about it? I think, as I said before, with that Haircut 100, there was a weird sub-genre, kind of that postcard approach of this joyous, intelligent pop music that drew from funk. But Orange Juice were always that bit more experimental as well. You know, he was a great guitarist, Colin, so there'd be some interesting solos. They also had a really interesting rhythm section. And they produced a couple of killer pop singles. And of the two albums, Rip It Up is the one that I would play more often.
Speaker 2He's got a voice that you have to learn to love, hasn't he? I suppose so. It's bizarre. I mean, you know, I quite like it, don't get me wrong. But I can imagine for a lot of people, I mean, Cleaves and Mortimer famously took the piss out of him on Shooting Stars. They do their club singer spot where they do a song in the style of a club singer. And they did Never Known a Girl Like You before, is that the song? And then you had Mark Lamar saying, "I've never heard anything like that song." And then they get Edwin Collins actually comes out and he does it. It's brilliant. Oh, brilliant. Anyway, a few other albums that came out this year in the post-punk fallout. The Sounds' third album, all fall down. I like The Sounds, but we talked about it before. Killing Jokes' third album. Revelations. We love Killing Joke. We talked about Nighttime, I think we talked about it as a favourite of ours. The Fall, Hex Education Hour, isn't it called? Induction. Isn't it called? You've written Hex Education Hour. No, that would be, it wouldn't be me who'd have done that. It's just spelling mistakes.
Speaker 3That's the MacBook that's done that.
Speaker 2Spell correct. Induction Hour. Hex Induction Hour. Yeah, that could have been a terrible schoolboy era if we haven't done that. Except it wasn't. It's Apple. Blame Steve Jobs. The Fall, Hex Induction Hour. I've never been, I love The Fall. I've never been particularly fond of this era. I know that for some people, this is the era they love the most. Perverted by Language, Hex Induction Hour. I love the early, I love things like Grotesque, The Slate CP. And then I love The Beggar's Banquet era. I love that era. Curious Orange. There's some good ones there, I agree. Yeah, I love that. Friends Experiment, love that. This era, I find The Fall a little bit impenetrable, a little bit cold. I don't necessarily warm to them. Are you a fan, Tim? I find it interesting. No, I like it.
Speaker 3It's definitely interesting. Yeah. I like it. Probably like you, actually, the period I most enjoyed was when they signed to Beggar's Banquet and they were doing The Orange Orange, you know, I Am Curious Orange, et cetera. I love those records. Friends Experiment, I Am Curious Orange, yeah. So that's my favourite period.
Speaker 2Basically when Bricks is a big part of it, yeah. But I like these, I do like them and I like the covers as well. I mean, the one thing you can say about The Fall is they always sound like The Fall. That is true. Which is to say they sound like nothing else. You talk about outliers in The Venn Diagram. I mean, they are. Yeah, they are. Right. One more album in this category, Tim, which I'd like to throw in. The Thompson Twins set. This is the album I was trying to remember earlier that Thomas Dolby is all over. Thomas Dolby Guests on Keyboards is produced by Steve Lillywhite. If you listen to this album, now everyone knows Thompson Twins, big hits, Hold Me Now, Doctor Doctor, all those songs. This is their second record when they were still a band. And they've come out of the sort of squatter, you know, punk rock scene. And I listened to this record for the first time in a long time. I listened to it when I was a kid because I was a big fan of like the pop stuff. And I went back and it didn't it didn't compete with me because it sounded like a completely different band. Of course, it is a completely different band. This is the closest comparison I can think of to an English equivalent to Talking Heads at the time. OK, yeah. A lot of that sort of very taut, funky, almost world music influenced rhythm tracks with a very kind of hysterical kind of vocal approach over the top, but these Great hooks. I hear elements of 23 skidoo. I hear elements of Shriekback, I hear elements of The Slits. There's reggae, there's funk, there's world music, there's post-punk. Really fascinating. I'm not going to say it's great, because it's not the sum of its parts, ultimately, but a very interesting, very interesting record. I don't know, I only know the hits.
Speaker 3I mean, I knew of their reputation, that they were seen as quite arty and eclectic.
Speaker 2Very arty. Collective, that's the word.
Speaker 3And I didn't mind the hits. And I could see, you can hear in the hits that they've come from an interesting background.
Speaker 2There is one hit, In the Name of Love, you know, In the Name of Love. So that's on this record. And I think once they had that hit, they're like, this is what we should be doing. Or Tom Bailey and Alana Curry, this is what we should be doing. Let's fire the rest of the band and just go. So they kind of took that as their template, and obviously it worked out very well for them. But here it was kind of the anomaly on this record. It's a very punk-funk record. I mean, it's got more in common with a certain ratio than it does with Duran Duran at this point. Which again, if you think about where they were two or three years later, it's almost hard to equate the two things.
Speaker 3It was like Blamonge began. In a slightly more talking heads, rhythmic way as well, you know. Yeah, I think Rupert Hynde connected something else, didn't he? He produced one of the later Thompson Twins albums.
Speaker 2Could be. Nile Rodgers produced a record for them. Yeah, I think maybe Close to the Bone he produced. I'm not sure. Yeah. Anyway, that's just an interesting. And Thomas Dolby is the connecting factor there.
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