Speaker 1Hello and welcome to The Album Years and for the first time ever we've kind of divided one year into two parts because there were just so many great albums or not necessarily great but some interesting albums too maybe not so great but ones that we wanted to talk about that we felt we had to to make this a two-parter so this is part two of 1979 a new decade is just around the corner what's going on well there's a lot going on we've already talked a lot about what was going on in the world of art rock what was going on in the world of singer-songwriters progressive rock post-punk synth pop but there are also this year some albums which are well i tell you what first of all let me just do a quick a brief recap of what's going on in some other genres uh so jazz rock we have some great jazz rock albums this year um we have brand x product we have bruford's one of a kind we've also got frank zappa making not one not two but three albums this year i think um joe's garage act one perhaps being the real standout from from the albums he made this year uh carlos santana made a solo record this year oneness weather reports 830 if you like weather report
Speaker 2this is them at their best
Speaker 1anyway so we disagree on that um and then we have uh the world of heavy rock we have uh now it's very interesting tim just just off air a minute ago you made the point actually that new wave of british heavy metal was just around the around the corner and the whole idea with new wave of british heavy metal was that it was kind of revitalizing the world of heavy rock and metal but actually the the list of albums that came out the year before uh the new wave of british heavy metal really broke through kind of gives it i mean acdc's highway to hell scorpion's love drive black rose by thin lizzy motorheads overkill you you know you've you said is that their best album i think it's definitely you know that maybe an ace of spades are their best records uh gillan's mr universe uh rainbows down to earth motorheads bomber also from this year which and obviously another fantastic title track so you know it as you say it was in pretty rude health wasn't it despite the fact that um apparently it you know it needed new wave of british heavy metal to come along with it and it was a really good song to revive the world yeah new
Speaker 2wave of british prog you could kind of understand in the sense that the music that it was trying to evoke in its covers and um its arrangements had long gone you know the artists that they were influenced by genesis yes had long since abandoned that baroque approach whereas with the new wave of british heavy metal um you couldn't in a sense get more brutal than motorhead motorhead having two huge albums in 79 that were commercially successful and respected and also of course you know um the music mutating into more popular areas with white snake rainbow gillan etc you know the deep purple offshoots and an acdc arguably producing their greatest album in highway to hell um so the kind of that rough almost new wave influenced metal was um seemingly extraordinarily successful at that point also had bands like ufo with their double live album strangers in the night i think was um 79 which was was enormous so yeah it's odd you can't quite see the need for the new wave of heavy british heavy metal bands in the sense that it was already in the system and it was already enormous whereas obviously new wave of british prog there's there's an absence of what people is that true though is that
Speaker 1true though because we already talked about this the enid arguably the most pompous progressive rock band of all you know uh and and you know bands like uk you know a relatively new band still making very vintage progressive rock uh jethro tull pink floyd steve hackett my coldfield camel still very much keeping faith with with the fan base i think i think this is the last
Speaker 2year for it though and i think you know when you're about sort of 14 15 16 two or three years makes a big difference so with the new wave of british heavy metal it comes directly after this or during it so
Speaker 1but i think there i think your point is well made there is an analogy here uh certainly but i'm but again i'm looking at the list and i'm thinking well really apart from motorhead it's kind of all a bit it's a little bit more slick and perhaps a little bit less what the real you know heavy rock fans would want from their metal isn't it i mean scorpions love drive white white snakes love hunter gill and mr universe rainbow down to it's getting a bit more pop and a bit more phase isn't it so perhaps the new way of british heavy metal brought back that sort of edgy but motorhead were kind of the exception to that
Speaker 2weren't they motorhead acdc maybe judas priest as
Speaker 1well i think yeah possibly yeah yeah but interesting interesting point though yeah um so also this year this category i've called the new pop because these were the bands that were having the number one albums the number one singles uh the specials first album we talked about the specials second album in in a previous episode but this is the first down which is again a great record uh madness one step beyond the clash is london calling which is i think it's brilliant but it's been discussed and it's always in the top 10 albums of all time so we don't we don't need to discuss it here the jam setting sons which had a massive hit and eaten rifles on it there were even bigger hits to come from the jam but i think the band that kind of fits into this that were american is the b-52s and i know you're a big fan of of this first album tim so tell us about the b-52s
Speaker 2like alex chilton they were taking influences from 50s 60s this particular sort of post-war american affluence and optimism and they were reinventing that in the post-punk era and i think blondie had something of that as well but the b-52s carried it through with the image as well the cover artwork and it was this kind of distinctive um reinvention of a particular period of american culture and there's something just so infectious and what's interesting about it is that despite this kind of 60s girl group and 50s rock and roll there's also something of that edgy afrobeat funk that you find in talking heads so they did sonically very nicely fit in with the cbgb scene as well very logically years later they do an album mesopotamia with um david byrne producing and that's where you can really hear a connection between kind of burns quite stripped down grooves and the b-52s and i think it's a really underrated piece of work but it's one of those that got pretty much slaughtered at the time but i i mean i can
Speaker 1totally hear the talking heads connection straight away i mean tracks like planet claire as well the first track but we're going to we're going to talk about talking heads now i think because i've you know some of these categories obviously they're very arbitrary the way i've done them i've put talking heads in the art rock category but because they because i tell you why because they weren't really having hits at this point so the new pop i've sort of reserved for the artists that were really crossing over to the pop charts um talking heads didn't really have a big hit until the following album uh you know remain in light with with once in a lifetime fear of music they were still very much a kind of underground art rock act weren't they in a sense so this year is another fantastic year for for art rock artists bowie released lodger which i think we should talk about because it's not canon because it's not the album that bowie fans talk about a lot it's not the bowie album that the the critics tend to come back to but it's a fascinating one in his kind of career trajectory isn't it comes between it comes between two and a half years ago and it's a really fascinating one and it's a really fascinating two kind of established canon classics heroes and scary monsters it's kind of the the forgotten sort of you know album between those two towers um but it's a fascinating record isn't it because he's doing things on this record that he's not really done before or since maybe later maybe maybe later on with an album like outside he kind of tried something a bit similar but this whole idea you know with with boys keep swinging where everybody in the band is told to play an album where the guitar player is playing the drums and the bass player is playing the piano i love that i mean that's that's pure art rock isn't it in a sense uh that kind of playfulness but you know he comes up with this amazing track out of it i mean boys keep swinging what an amazing track the singles from this record for me dj and boys keep swinging two of the great bowie singles from this whole you know this whole decade but the album itself as a whole is very i mean it's truly experimental isn't it and maybe you can explain a bit more about it since you probably
Speaker 2yeah i think it perhaps is you know bowie's most experimental album along with outside and perhaps uh black star again it's one of those albums where i'm not quite sure people don't like it because it does have two astonishing hits it's not relentlessly bleak it's not relentlessly experimental it's not relentlessly off the wall but it is one of the most inventive fluid unpredictable albums he made you can hear him dovetailing with the kind of art rock of what people like talking head to doing in new york at that point you can hear him using world music reference points you know once more there are afro grooves there's also kind of eastern european um and eastern almost turkish influences on this because perhaps resulting from his time living in a turkish neighborhood in berlin and what i like about this it's bowie sounding as if it's almost like controlled hysteria if that makes any sense throughout this album it pulls back from absolute chaos. So it's controlled hysteria and goes off in so many tantalising directions, many of which he never really investigated afterwards. And vocally, he's at his vocally and lyrically is his most freewheeling as well.
Speaker 1I love his voice on this album. It's on tracks like Don't Look Back in Anger. It's just it's pure Bowie. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I love this record. It's definitely an outlier in the Bowie catalogue. But I think in many ways, it's an artist where the outliers over time do tend to become the most loved, beloved by the real hardcore fans, don't they? I mean, you talked you talked you talked on a previous episode about Ziggy, you know, the established, you know, classic in the Bowie catalogue was one of your least favourite albums. It's it's, you know, because you you kind of think you feel it's one of his least interesting in sort of in terms of the ambition of what he's attempting to do. It's not it's nowhere near the same league as on sound an album like Blodgett. But it's but it's also I think it also suffers because it's seen as the sort of runt of the trio, isn't it? The low that what they call the Berlin trio, although most of it wasn't recorded in Berlin. But it's seen as the runt of that kind of that three album run that Eno was working on with him. And it gets forgotten because of that. But I think the real Bowie fans know in many respects, it's one of the jewels of his catalogue, isn't it?
Speaker 2Yeah, I think it's partly as well that, you know, when you're looking at those other albums, you can more easily categorise them. So low, of course, is seen as his electronic, ambient and proto new wave album. Heroes sees him colliding to a certain extent with the emerging new wave and stamping his identity all over it. And with this album, there are as many musical directions as there are songs. And perhaps that's the problem. Difficult to know, because, of course, Roxy Music's album from this year as well, Manifesto, which is one of my favourite Roxy Music albums. Was also dismissed.
Speaker 1I like that record.
Speaker 2Yes, the last great Roxy Music band album for me. This is where, with the great Paul Thompson and with, I think it's Alan Spenner and Gary Tibbs on bass. They make an astonishing band sound and they take the music to territories they've never been before. I mean, this is split into two sides, the east side and the west side. And the east side has more of Roxy, perhaps. If you like, setting their camp in the new wave, but in their very much experimental art rock guys and the second size, the west side, it's Roxy investigating more R&B and soul influences. But once more, you know, in quite an unpredictable, experimental way. But of course, it's known for the single Dance Away, which is one of the great singles. But, you know, I think fantastically creative achievement and one of their most underrated. I like it.
Speaker 1I mean, Dance Away definitely looks forward to things like Avalon and Flesh and Blood, doesn't it? It's got more of that sort of lounge, sort of 80s polished lounge sound. But then you have songs like Trash, which is much more close to perhaps. So it is, you know, we talked about sometimes we love these albums where an artist is kind of between two worlds. Maybe Manifesto is another example of that. It's kind of somewhere between what they've done and also what they're about to become. We've also got Talking Heads with Fear of Music, a great record from this year. We've talked about Talking Heads at length before. But the album, the other album I have in this category that I think you do want to talk about, and I'm a big fan of these guys, too. And this is another very, very interesting record, which is the Godly and Cream record from this year, Freeze Frame, which is one of my favorite Godly and Cream. One of my favorite songs from the whole kind of 10CC family, which is I Pity Ananima Objects, which is just I mean, this is them at their most conceptual in the sense that how can we create a pop song which has a catchy melody where every single syllable is a catchy melody? In the vocal performance is a different pitch. So some syllables sound like the voice has been slowed down. Some syllables sound like the voice has been sped up and it must have taken them ages to piece it together. And that's what I love about these guys. It's that it's that almost kind of like we set out to solve a problem. We approach it like a piece of science, but we come out with this great pop tune anyway. So anyway, Freeze Frame, I think it's their third album, isn't it? After L and Consequences, we must talk about Consequences when we talk about it. We talk about 1977, one of my favorite albums of all time. But this is another great inventive pop record, isn't it? That probably most people would have would have missed at the time. Did it have any hits on it? I don't. It had. Well, the Englishman in New York
Speaker 2wasn't, of course, it wasn't the Sting track. This was played on TV a few times. And great video. Huge 10CC. Yeah, great video. And I was a huge 10CC and Godly and Cream fan. So I remember this being on programs like Magpie, bizarrely, you know, Magpie. It also actually had around the time of Consequences, in fact, just before it was made, an article on how the gizmo was made. Imagine that. Children's TV in Britain. Those were the days. A 10 minute article on the gizmo. That's what you need.
Speaker 1So just for those that don't know, the gizmo was a was a contraption that Godly and Cream invented that basically was something that fitted on the guitar that enabled them to create the sound of orchestral instruments like violins, cellos. Because it actually had little, I think it had little metal wheels that would kind of rotate. And they would scrape against the strings. So rather than the normal sort of guitar sound of being plucked or strummed, it had that kind of more texture of a bow going across a string. So it enabled them to create these, I mean, Consequences is just off the scale, what they did on that record. It just enabled them to create these incredible orchestral soundscapes, all using the guitar and this contraption called the gizmo, which unfortunately never quite caught on. But it's certainly the signature sound on a lot of those early Godly and Cream records, isn't it?
Speaker 2Yeah, and very distinctive. And one of the tracks you're mentioning, I pity Inanimate Objects, the guitar solo on that track is astonishing.
Speaker 1Also crazy. As well.
Speaker 2Yeah. I mean, for me, again, it's the third in a run of tremendously inventive albums that don't really seem to have many peers as well. The thing about Godly and Cream is that they do seem locked, almost sealed in their unique world. And what's kind of interesting about them is that 10cc a year earlier had done. Perhaps their most successful album, Bloody Taurus, but it was artistically several leagues below Freeze Frame and Elle. And in some ways, it's almost seen that 10cc as soon as Godly and Cream had left, that they kind of aged 50 years. You know, I quite like Bloody Taurus. Deceptive Bends, I really like, you know.
Speaker 1I mean, in a sense, they are. I mean, this category is art rock. This is really art in capital letters rock, isn't it? Because this. It's almost like they are. They are painters or artists, but making pop music the way they think about music, the way they imagine each song has to paint a picture like a completely different landscape to every other picture they painted. I mean, if anyone is interested in Godly and Cream, I mean, I would say go and listen to this track. I pity inanimate objects. Even if you don't like it, you'll be fascinated by the way it's put together, the way it's recorded, the way that every syllable in the vocal performance is a different. I can't really explain it very clearly. You have to go and listen to every syllable is recorded at a different speed. And, you know, like I say, it must have taken them an eternity to put this together. But it's pure. It's in that sense. It's pure art rock, you know, really made by people that have obviously grown up as thinking of themselves more as painters or artists than as pop musicians. Fascinating. When we do 1977, we're going to I know we're going to wax lyrical consequences because. Have an entire episode. Oh, wow. What an album that is anyway. Electronic ambient music. Let's just have a brief rundown of electronic and ambient music from this year. We have Steve Hillage's Rainbow Dome music, which is very much an anomaly in his catalogue, a purely ambient record, which strangely, I think, became later on in the 90s, became the most popular album in his catalogue when it was picked up by people like Alex Patterson of The Orb, you know, as very much part of their aesthetic, you know. And it's a very cosmic, beautiful, textured, floating ambient music. It's a beautiful record that I love that record. Ashra's Correlations, Tangerine Dreams, Force Majeure, perhaps not the best Tangerine Dream album, a slightly more ponderous, progressive rock album in their catalogue. But but still, you know, still still kind of they're keeping faith with the fans. A couple of great Vangelis albums from this year, Opera Sauvage in China. Great Clive Schultz album, June. Helden, Stand By. Helden are an interesting band, aren't they? They're kind of like. They're kind of like the dark side, the kind of the dark flip side of, say, something like Steve Hillidge, Rainbow Dome music, which is very much a cosmic meditation music. And then you've got Helden, Stand By, which is this kind of sick sound, isn't it? It's very dissonant, but it's very intense. And I think it's I think it's aged quite well because of that. Actually, it still sounds quite good.
Speaker 2Well, Helden do sound a band apart in that genre, don't they? And I guess that they came more out of the Eno Fripp tonality. Rather than, you know, Tangerine Dream or Clive Schultz.
Speaker 1But what's interesting is Richard Pienhuis is still he's still very experimental. He's made albums with Merzbau and Wolfhuis, you know, so he's that's very interesting that whereas artists and artists like, you know, I don't know, Vangelis ended up making big mainstream Hollywood movies. Helden on the same time Richard Pienhuis has ended up collaborating with some of the most extreme industrial and noise artists. And I think that tells you all you need to know, really, about where his music came from. And it's still coming from he didn't
Speaker 2make an album with Lulu, you're right.
Speaker 1He didn't make an album with Lulu. No, that is that is true. Yeah. although Metallica did make an album with Lou Reed called Lou Reed. Which I actually like. I've never even heard it. I've never heard it. I've heard conflicting views about it. Some people, of course, dismissed it as garbage, but I've heard other people say, actually, it's actually really, really good.
Speaker 2Yeah, I think it's somewhere in between. And it's also, you know, with some of these collaboration albums that you get, it's maybe it's a bad Metallica album and a great Lou Reed album. I came to it more from a Lou Reed perspective. It was, you know, Reed doing something very different, but yet being true to himself. So I always liked it.
Speaker 1I think what's sad about that, and we're kind of digressing slightly here, moving to talk about Metallica and Lou Reed's album, Lulu. But what's very sad about that is that Metallica are a band that it seems their fan base will not allow to change. And it's a shame in a way, isn't it? That Metallica, you'd think here's one of the biggest bands in the world, and they tried to pull off a radio head in a way, didn't they? By doing something completely different. Completely different and redefining their audience. And it backfired horribly on them. And their last couple of records, they've just gone back to their, their kind of very typical Metallica sound, which to someone like me, and I bought Master of Puppets at the time, and I loved it. To me, I would be more interested. I would be more interested if they were doing more experimental things. It's artists kind of confronting expectations that keeps me interested in them. But I think it's fair to say Metallica are an example of a band that the moment they try to do anything, different, they're very, very conservative audience, basically abandoned them.
Speaker 2But I think you can bring that back to 79, because one of the interesting things is that a lot of bands were confronting expectations. So as much as Tusk isn't the clash, it is confronting the expectations that people had of Fleetwood Mac after Rumours. As much as Stevie Wonder's Secret Life of Plants is not quite Xenakis. It's an extraordinarily experimental. Album that isn't a logical follow up to songs in the key of life. And that's one of the things that was so exciting again about 79 that quite a number of artists, David Bowie, for example, you know, this was not the easy album for him to produce. They just went with their own instincts and creativity.
Speaker 1I think you're right. Let's talk about a couple of albums in more depth now, now that we've kind of, you know, briefly summarized what was going on in some other genres. But let's let's perhaps talk about a couple of albums that I think I've got them in the outliers category. I cannot really think how you would categorize these albums. And one of them is is the first album by This Heat. Now, This Heat are they're kind of an anomaly because they are they're kind of a band which are seen as part of the new way. I mean, you know, I think they're kind of an anomaly because they are they're kind of a band which are seen as part of the new way. But these guys have been around the block. They're they're they're musicians that have been in progressive rock bands. They are musicians that have been in free jazz bands. They are very musically literate. They set themselves up with their own recording space, cold storage studios in London. And they start making this music, which it's very difficult to categorize. One minute, it might remind you a little bit of King Crimson. The next minute, it might remind you a little bit of, say, what? Robert Wyatt was doing on rock bottom. The next minute, it might remind you of what Public Image are doing or magazine are doing. The next minute, it might remind you of Peter, Peter Brotsman, free jazz record. It's just all over the place. And it's fascinating because of that. But I think it also paid the price because it didn't really belong in any genre. It was it was a beyond genre. Now, we talked about this before, I think, in some other episodes about how albums sometimes that seem outside of genre paid the ultimate price for that. Don't they? If you can't market a record to an audience, you do end up kind of floating, you know, kind of disembodied in a way. But I think those albums stand the test of time more so than most generic albums. But at the same time, they have moments on this record that could be punk or new wave.
Speaker 2Yeah, though I kind of link it weirdly with a couple of artists we talked about earlier, Godley and Cream. Yes, absolutely. Peter Hamill in the sense that these are just people making noises in the studio. And putting together what they feel is the most interesting compilation of those noises. And it covers a lot of ground. And I guess whereas it has paid a price for not being any one particular thing, equally, it's still talked about in reverence now. So it's sort of paid off in the long run and obviously the long run being an Eagles album in 1979.
Speaker 1The less said about that, the better. I mean, the influence of this record, absolutely. I mean, there are a lot of people that now will drop this heat as a concept. As a kind of, you know, as an influence, a reference point. And so they have, in a sense, ascended to that level in the same way that perhaps bands like Cannes and Faust did. And I think there is a sense that they have, you know, if there is an association, it is with the krautrock scene. It is with the bands like Cannes and Faust who could take everything from music concrete to rock and roll, to progressive rock, to jazz rock, you know, and mix them all up together somehow in this weird kind of Teutonic soup. And here we have a band doing that in England. It's always the end of the '70s. There's something about that first album, it's the pure kind of like sense of foreboding.
Speaker 2Well, that's the thing, isn't it, in the late '70s that there was a sense of foreboding and actually a couple of albums have this. So, you know, we were saying Stormwatch has a real sense of foreboding. And weirdly, one of the albums we kind of glossed over, which you've not heard, Randy Newman, his ballads kind of hint at what Johnsburg, Illinois will do, you know, on Tom Waits' Swordfish trombones. He's coming from a very similar place. It's very 1979 in that, like The Long Run, like Tusk, it's the album following the huge hit, the entry into the mainstream that doesn't quite hit the mark with the audience.
Speaker 1I love the album of Nilsson doing his songs. Oh, that's a beautiful album.
Speaker 2Nilsson sings Newman. Yeah, one of the finest albums of the early '70s.
Speaker 1Yeah, I think it's even, isn't it even late '60s? It's quite early, I think, isn't it?
Speaker 2I thought it was '71. I'm not sure, it might be '70 actually.
Speaker 1Should we see what's kind of. What's the kind of schoolboy era you've made there, and actually look it up?
Speaker 2Well, you said '69. Well, let's see, shall we see who's the schoolboy here then? I'm going to go for 1970.
Speaker 1Okay, you might be right, let's have a look. Nilsson sings Newman, February 1970, recorded in 1969. So I'm going to say that's a draw. I'm going to say that's a draw. Oh, that is a terrible mistake. I know, it's terrible. Well, earlier on, you called Jethro Tull's album Benefits. I mean, that's embarrassing. Benefits. That's embarrassing.
Speaker 2I don't think I did call it Benefits. You did. So that's probably because. That's probably because I was on Benefits when it was released. You called it Benefits.
Speaker 1Now, I was going to humiliate you, but I thought, I'll let it go. But now you've humiliated me, I'm afraid that.
Speaker 2Look, in a previous episode, you said, well, this album, when it was released in 1874. Now, I didn't correct you that you're a century out. What album did I say was released in 1874? Just listen back, just listen back to the album years, which is worth doing.
Speaker 1Well, I don't know what album we're talking about. Maybe it should have been released in 1874, It perhaps sounded like it was released in 1874.
Speaker 2Maybe that was your point.
Speaker 1So let's get the industrial section out the way now. Now, as you know, folks, if you listen to this show before, you know I'm a massive fan of industrial music and Tim really is not. So I'm forcing him to listen to, as a consequence of doing these shows, I'm forcing him to listen to music that he's not familiar with and he probably doesn't like. And this episode, no exception. This year was a very important year for industrial music. This is the year of the first albums by Cabaret Voltaire. One of the most important industrial acts of all. Now, interestingly, Tim, you mentioned suicide earlier. I always thought Cabaret Voltaire and suicide had a lot in common, but Cabaret Voltaire was like suicide with the horrible American rock and roll thing removed, which is the bit I really don't like. But there is a strong sonic similarity, I think, between what Cabaret Voltaire were doing, using drum machines and synthesizers. And this is their first album mix up. It's a classic album. It's not my favorite Cabaret Voltaire album, but it is a classic. And, you know, again, it's the sound that you couldn't imagine having happened without punk having happened in the meantime. Now, one of the other really important records from this year is Throbbing Gristle's third album, Twenty Jazz Funk Greats. Now, Throbbing Gristle have, I think, been largely written out of the history of what happened in 1976, 1977, because in 1976, they released their album Second Annual Report. If the Sex Pistols Nevermind the Bollocks was actually a heavy metal album, Second Annual Report is truly the spirit of punk. This is an album that was recorded on cassettes. It's incredibly lo-fi, using synthesizers, but in a very punk way, recording your albums on cheap Sony Walkmans, pressing your album in plain white sleeves with pasted on artwork. And interestingly, albums later, Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats, they're not only, you know, they're not only ahead of the game in 1977, they're also ahead in the game in 1979 because they're starting to incorporate things like easy listening into their sound. Tim, tell me about your impressions listening to these records. I love this. I'm obsessed with this music. I absolutely love it, but I understand it's not for everyone.
Speaker 2Yeah, it's a bit like putting hemlock in my strawberry milkshake, really, wasn't it? This Cabaret Voltaire. Where I did hear the suicide influence quite liked the use distorted bass synths and drum machines um throbbing gristle i quite enjoyed partly because of the diversity of it and partly because it could be disquietingly beautiful on occasion um quite unusually upbeat and cheesy but in interesting way there's almost kind of precursor to electro pop on a couple of the pieces um and i think the cover is a very nice indication of what the contents um contain because the cover is them sort of mimicking this very cheap mfp middle of the road collection yes and they're amidst the flowers it's almost as if you've got mfp version of sound of music and they're on a clifftop with lovely flowers but then you have to know that this clifftop is beachy head which in britain is the suicide capital and i've been there actually it's a very unusual place i've stayed there um not with the intention of committing suicide i hasten to add and um it's a very beautiful part of the country but it's very eerie because you continually see ambulances and people wandering around checking to see if somebody else has jumped off so very unusual and the contents of the album are that where it's on one level at parts quite pretty but there's always something disquieting beneath the surface
Speaker 1there's a subversion of easy listening on this record and this is absolutely yeah and this is what's fascinating about them and and it's fascinating how easy listening became then from that point on became very much a part of industrial culture uh you know picked up by a lot of other artists uh you know nurse with wound which we're going to talk about also uh did an album called the sylvie and babs hi-fi companion which was very much a pastiche of one of those kind of 50s or 60s american uh you know easy listening albums um one thing you didn't mention about the cover tim is i don't know if you looked at the back of the cover it's a repeat of the front cover but with a with a corpse in the foreground oh i haven't
Speaker 2seen that okay yeah i've only seen the front cover that's
Speaker 1that's really playing uh with people's perceptions about what is good or bad taste and i think that's what throbbing gristle was very good at they were very good at pushing people to the boundaries of what they would consider to be in poor taste uh so the serial killer chic of course the the very term industrial music was created by throbbing gristle was coined by genesis industrial music for industrial people this idea of and you've kind of touched on this when we talked about some other things and you touched on this when we talked about punk the sense of disillusionment that was around in particularly in britain that's all we can talk about obviously in relation to our own lives that sense of the winter of discontent there was power cuts every week as well and so this kind of music reflects that particularly the birth of industrial music a lot of people listening to this would would think to themselves well why why is that good that's the very opposite of what i want from us i want something enlightening and enriching but music has also always been about making people look at the world in a different way holding up a mirror you know but the other arm we want to we want to mention here is the first nurse with wound and one of my favorite all-time artists nurse with wound made their first record this year chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella and the story i love most about this album is that i think it's when sounds reviewed it they gave it five question marks so so which i think tells you all you need to know about it what the fuck would they have made of this record in 1979 you know well this is
Speaker 2interesting as well because obviously on another level one of the things i find interesting about 1979 is that we were talking about the older artists who were suddenly reinventing themselves in the face of punk some of them extremely well so people like frip hamill bill nelson and so on but the flip side of that was some of the new wave artists who were while giving reign to their actual core influences sounding a lot older and there were a couple of cases here because i think the clash that we've mentioned london calling i think is a great album but of course it goes back to anything from scar to rock and roll to almost mop the hoopool hard rock similarly tom robinson too i don't know you've heard that but that has kind of honky-tonk rolling stones influences at times a lot of the who is in there and it was quite interesting that while you had some artists who were kind of like you know like you know like you know like you know like who were sort of moving towards the future inspired by punk you had some of the punks who were suddenly completely just looking in the rearview mirror i think
Speaker 1that's partly because what we what we talked about earlier that a lot of the punk musicians actually had come through the pub rock uh scene as opposed to coming from nowhere you know they'd been around for years playing pubs and they had been playing r&b and they had been playing rock and roll standards uh you know certainly in the case of joe strummer who his band the 101ers were you know they're just a good time and suddenly he's in the clash and he's like he's like the spokesman for the punk generation of course it's never as simple as that as you made the point sure the year zero was of course nothing of the sort you mentioned tom robinson band here there's there's a little kind of sidebar here that i want to talk about which is produced by todd and uh produced by todd rungren of course and he made he produced at least three albums we know of this year uh tom robinson bands trb2 is one of them two albums that i know you're a big fan of are also produced by todd rungren and he's produced at least three albums this year which are the tubes remote control and patty smith's wave uh wave i know obviously i know dancing barefoot but i don't know the album other than that that great it's a great song uh great single so tell us about these two albums uh if you can tim well
Speaker 2i suppose think about the todd productions this year i was wondering if he was attempting to help the bands find their natural voice so for me patty smith's wave it's perhaps her least liked album but it's maybe my second favorite after um horses you can almost hear a kind of jefferson airplane grateful dead freedom in some of the arrangements as well as a couple of classic singles in frederick and dancing barefoot as an album i think it's one of the most natural sounding and powerful patty smith releases and i just kind of think that you know rungren in effect is giving them free reign whereas the previous two albums radio ethiopia and east both of which i like are maybe making more self-conscious nods to the scene that surrounds them this really seems to be locked in patty smith's own world and um the same with tom robinson that you know in a way obviously rungren was a huge who fan probably a huge stones fan and you can imagine that he's allowing them the freedom to express their natural voice with the tubes the tubes had had about three studio albums before this and they've been magnificently varied i mean the big hit white punks on dope is closer to david bowie's art pop or not the hooples art rock but the albums themselves were all over the place they would shift from sort of return to forever zapper-esque jazz fusion to disco to pastiches of 40s film music and i think it was purely on the basis of the title white punks on dope that they had this reputation in the punk field plus of course they're risque live performance but i mean you know i always i like the first few albums but you know they're they're daffy they're all over the place and in some ways you know you can hear a lot more that they have in common with the residents and frank zapper than they do the cbgb's scene and they're fantastic musicians remote control is a concept album it's based on the novel being there that was also made into a film around the same time with peter sellers and effectively it's about an idiot savant who is reared on television and the cover is is a evocation of that for this album todd has created a very consistent sound world and there's none of the irony of their previous albums none of the jokes and it's just a fantastic sounding art rock pop album that also hints at the fact that it's a very consistent sound world and it's a very consistent sound world and it's a very consistent sound world and it's a very consistent sound world the fm rock band that they're going to become in some ways you could compare it with quadrophenia in its soundscape there's a lot of use of synth but there's also a lot of use of um powerful rock band but a powerful rock band of virtuosos and as i've said some killer choruses where i think that rungren got involved in the writing of this album as well so he really kind of hones what maybe the band always wanted to be
Speaker 1so um okay so let's kind of start to wrap up now because um obviously we've talked about a lot of records here we do need to just quick quickly i think round up um what was happening in the world of soul and disco music this year um obviously some some very big records this year michael jackson's off the wall uh for some people still i guess his his best solo record probably i would say it's my favorite michael jackson solo record earth wind and fires i am ditto actually a great earth wind and fire album um sister sledge we are family and sheik's risque which is it's hard to think of them as separate albums in a way because they're both very much um from the from the nile rogers uh bernard edwards well i love those
Speaker 2two albums in particular you know sheik risque is
Speaker 1fantastic yeah fantastic records um and also the second album by someone who's going to become uh you know uh arguably the most important artist of the 80s prince uh so he makes he makes his second down which is brilliant uh and in fact he has one of his his most famous songs on it um i want to be your lover also i feel for you which was which was later picked up and covered by chaka khan and turned into a massive hit as well so there you go a lesser known prince album that still has two massive hits on it so the last album i really want to talk about in any depth tim unless there's anything you feel we've missed but there's one i think that is um stands out on its own again it is an outlier although it obviously firmly belongs to the tradition of minimalist classical music um is einstein on the beach which i know you're a massive fan of too um by philip glass um so his music for the robert wilson opera einstein on the beach which i think had been staged originally about three years before but the album came out in 1979 as a four lp box set and even that was an abridged version and in fact he re-recorded it um 20 years later i don't like the re-recording as much as the it's still good but there's something about the sound and the grain of the original recording of not only of einstein on the beach but i think of his other key piece from this era uh music in 12 parts again which he re-recorded later much smoother better produced but i love the grain of those original 70s recordings there's
Speaker 2something very cold about the re-recording something very digital i
Speaker 1suppose yeah yes i think that's it and it's the it's the the organ tones are more organic on those original recordings um and they're not as perfect that you you know you i mean these people are having to play incredibly complicated repetitive scores not complicated in the sense of there's a lot of music to play but the music they do have to play they have to play with incredible concentration to get these repeating ostinatos time and time again with subtle changes an extra note here an extra note there you know an extra harmony here i mean the concentration involved in performing this four hour piece is four hour opera must have been off the scale it just it blew my mind when i heard it it's a record i got out of hemel hemstead library uh probably sometime in the mid 80s and it just completely blew my mind uh and still continues to this day to do so uh it's a beautiful record i think it's one of the most melodic
Speaker 2yeah it's one of the most melodic records of all time i think it's one of the most melodic records of all time i think it's one of the most melodic records of all time i think it's one of the most melodic records of all time i think it's one of the most melodic records of all time i think it's one of the most melodic records of all time i think it's one of the most melodic records of all time in a sense all the philip glass you need to hear is in this album partly true because you know you have every aspect that he investigates you know from the extremely complex shifting time signatures to the relentless ostinatos um to the slower more elegiac pieces that almost kind of have a mozart or a bark quality oh absolutely um and there is something perhaps even more hypnotic about this because you have the use of his usual you know very as you put it grainy organs and the use of the wordless voices but on this you also have this added kind of post-modernist use of talking voices speaking voices all sorts of gibberish appears to being said but in such a hypnotic way that you can't hear it in such a hypnotic way that obviously you know by the end of certain pieces you have mr bojangles ringing right on your brain right um yeah i mean i it's relentless it's hypnotic it's beautiful at times it's overbearingly intense absolutely absolutely but but i think also the
Speaker 1use of words i mean it's it's very it seems very nostalgic and poetic i mean there are precedents for use of you know robert ashley had been doing this sort of voice voice operas for a long time before this but there's something about the way that he the philip glass it combines with the philip glass music that is incredibly it seems very nostalgic and poetic and haunting um and it doesn't i think this is something you you know you can't argue with someone that finds it boring you either find it intense and it holds your attention or it doesn't and to me it completely holds my attention um no matter how long it goes it's almost like i want it to last even longer you know it completely holds my attention and i think it's a really good piece of work and i think it's i'm completely swept up in it um it's just an extraordinary landmark of of 70s you know classical minimalist music but it also crossed over to the pop market as well didn't it which is interesting because it's i think partly because of the repetition and partly because he made records for virgin north star was on virgin music music in 12 parts was on virgin there was a
Speaker 2crossover wasn't there i think maybe because of the scene he emerged out of for some reason it sort of fits with the music that he's playing and i think it's a really good piece of work and i that new york cbgb's punk scene it fits with the art scene of talking heads television to an extent and there's something in the packaging of those albums and perhaps the raw sound because of course the complexity is very different from quite a number of the cbgb's band this is not the ramones but there was something in the packaging and in the raw sound that the perception of it was that it was coming from the cbgb's band and it was coming from the cbgb's band and it was coming from this kind of hip ghetto in new york there's something very exciting about it i guess
Speaker 1that's interesting because they were all hanging out as i understand it and most of my understanding comes from reading books by patty smith but there was this sense that all these people were hanging out together so lamont young and philip glass were hanging out in the new york lofts with laurie anderson with david byrne with joey
Speaker 2ramone with alan ginsburg
Speaker 1and robert
Speaker 2fripp you know and i think that's a really interesting thing to hear and i think that's a really interesting thing to hear and i think that's a really interesting thing to hear and you can hear in discipline you can hear in and you can hear in discipline you can hear in and you can hear in league of gentlemen what frip has
Speaker 1taken from totally
Speaker 2yeah yeah um yeah i mean it's league of gentlemen what frip has taken from totally yeah yeah um yeah i mean it's you know it's astonishingly you know it's astonishingly you know it's astonishingly quietly um influential and i guess one of the quietly um influential and i guess one of the quietly um influential and i guess one of the one of the most major works that came out of this one of the most major works that came out of this would have been laurie anderson's united states would have been laurie anderson's united states would have been laurie anderson's united states that we discussed which we talked about a while that we discussed which we talked about a while that we discussed which we talked about a while back which has a kind of similar scope it's it's
Speaker 1back which has a kind of similar scope it's it's back which has a kind of similar scope it's it's very it's very much the sister album to einstein very much the sister album to einstein very much the sister album to einstein on the beach the use of the i mean although on the beach the use of the i mean although on the beach the use of the i mean although the musical forces are relatively small on the musical forces are relatively small on the musical forces are relatively small on the lorian it's essentially a solo performance what philip i mean i say philip glass i think a lot of the credit has to go to robert wilson um you know obviously who he created this opera with and robert wilson was a was a director of operas and dance and if you can see einstein on the beach is an extraordinary visual experience
Speaker 2yeah i mean it's as i think it probably is the pinnacle of his achievement i i love coen escarce i love glass pieces i love dance there's so much of his work that that um that i'm connected to but maybe this is the one that that really trumps them all and north star i think is a nice bite-sized introduction to what philip glass does as well it is
Speaker 1and interestingly enough north star was covered this year by mike oldfield on platinum um yes of course so there is there is a crossover to the to the world of well
Speaker 2platinum of course had elements of american minimalism and disco you know this again was a progressive artist doing progressive things um in contrast if you like to the other great um progressive guitarist making an album this year steve hackett who in effect made a glorious symphonic progressive album that in some ways showed a progression in terms of his abilities but was a real classic progressive statement in the old sense of the i love
Speaker 1that i mean he does do some things on spectrum mornings he has the piece with the um the koto doesn't he the the red
Speaker 2the red yeah and his use of the guitar synth as well is quite unique
Speaker 1um so listen to him i think we should call it a day there we've been speaking for hours about 1979 it seems to me um let's so let's let's do our customary thing of rounding up this is going to be really hard because there are so many albums to choose from but let's try and choose uh a our favorites and b the album that we feel perhaps pointed most towards what was going to be coming in the future so um what are your thoughts on favorite and most influential this is
Speaker 2almost impossible because there are so many albums from this year that i love from rickie lee jones to pinkie pie and i think it's going to be to the wall to randy newman's born again to einstein on the beach um if i had to take one away on the desert island i guess i'd go with einstein on the beach because there is so much of it in that album yeah there's so much of it
Speaker 1yes it's three hours long
Speaker 2yeah and despite its repetition i still think it throws up surprises so maybe i go for einstein on the beach and the wall as my two favorites so i'll go for one obvious and one less obvious in terms of influential it's again impossible to say because of course that razor edge post-punk sound really only has a kind of a limited lifespan as much as i like it whereas something like the george omoroda sparks album you could still hear in elements of music you know in the early 90s okay i think
Speaker 1those are good choices yeah yeah i'm going to agree with you i'm going to be boring and i'm going to agree with you on on einstein on the beach that is definitely one of my desert island discs i think the other would be uh metal box by public image or second edition depending on which version you've got um i i also love bill nelson's red noise uh album um yeah there's so many great records um in terms of most influential i i'm going to go for the gary newman uh the pleasure principle i i think okay that even a good choice even though perhaps his his influence hasn't always been as strong i think for a short period after um he kind of broke through i think there was a very strong influence he had on almost all pop music um going into the early 80s uh so uh you know and i and i think actually his influence is still heard today you know you you can hear it yeah in artists like nine inch nails for sure and also he was sampled a lot by bands like sugar babes you know and and some other pop artists so he he's kind of he's he's kind of always there he's always gary newman's always there somehow uh in pop music even today um and he wasn't incredible i think he's a very
Speaker 2underrated figure and
Speaker 1incredibly innovative in his time credibly innovative in his time yeah uh okay that's great so it just leaves uh leaves it for me to say uh thank you very much on behalf of myself and tim and again just to remind people if you can if you have enjoyed this please do do leave us reviews and ratings on uh on the podcast sites it really helped a lot uh last time a lot of people led left reviews including the person that left us our first one star review thank you very much for that but um you can't appeal to everyone uh but you know these things really help us so if you do have time just drop us drop us a rating or even a little you know a couple of lines review be great to encourage us or not or to discourage us depending on how you feel about this um thank you very much and we'll see you next time for another year i don't know what that will be me and tim haven't discussed that yet but uh thank you very much goodbye from me and goodbye from tim goodbye you
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