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I started watching the classic Australian music show Countdown when I was about five or six. This happened to coincide with what was a period of nebulously sexual performances from the likes of Kate Bush, The Knack (yes - My Sharona is cheesy and overdone, and shamefully commercial, but there's nevertheless something a little dangerous about the way Doug Fieger looks at you through all the white glare of that clip - especially at six years of age) and Adam Ant. I found these artists almost repellently fascinating - though I didn't understand the meaning of their primal pull until much, much later. At that age they filled me with an unknown fear.
The feeling was never more intense than the time I watched in lascivious horror as a snaggle-toothed, snake-hipped man with a headband and tight red leather pants hauled himself across the stage, sweating with desire, screaming in a tribal falsetto as other men with chests as bristling as their huge mullets throbbed away on low slung guitars. It was only about a decade later that I identified this fearsome display of male sexuality. It was the 'hard' rock band Loverboy - the subsequent inspiration for the AOR revival, most accurately homaged in Mark Wahlberg's performance in Boogie Nights.
Interestingly, Heart's Magic Man, with its pulsating beat and Ann Wilson's moaning delivery, had a similar aural effect on me at a young age. The song was brilliantly put to use in the seduction scene of the film Swingers many years later.
So when I finally figured out that the guy who sings the interestingly anodyne 80s-big-haired-wedding-ballad duet 'Almost Paradise' (from the Footloose soundtrack) with Ann is none other than that slinky ugly-sexy man from Loverboy, Mike Reno, it all. made. sense. They'd both bumped and ground all that sexual frustration out in their earlier work and were no longer scary.
Forever changes is the ultimate beautiful, paranoid, dissonant, end-of-the-decade suicide note from the city of broken dreams. A gang of earthlings fronted by ethereal, handsome, tragic Arthur Lee, Love summed up the late sixties, somehow embodying the promise of that decade (the success of the civil rights movement, the stirring of subcultures, the politicisation of youth and the explosion of pop culture and music-as-art) and the flipside - the fin-de-siecle nightmare (LA gothic - Altamont, 'nam, the demise of the Kennedys, acid burnout, excess and disillusionment).
Forever Changes feels like an open-roofed drive along the wide promenades of Los Angeles, with its haciendas, its carparks, its canyons, its diners, chain stores and gas stations, its festering underbelly, its grotesque wealth, its oppressive open space, its lost souls and its casualties. The city of the Mamas and the Papas on the one hand and Charles Manson on the other.
On this album it's a city recalled by the melancholy flamenco trumpet solo of Alone Again Or, the deceptively upbeat opening track; the menacing conscript's lament A House is Not a Motel; the psychedelic psychobabble of The Red Telephone and the shimmering existentialism of You Set the Scene. And through it all, the young Arthur Lee, at the height of his beauty and power, singing:
This is the time and life that I am living
And I'll face each day with a smile
For the time that I've been given's such a little while
And the things that I must do consist of more than style
This is the only thing that I am sure of
And that's all that lives is gonna die
And there'll always be some people here to wonder why
And for every happy hello, there will be good-bye
There'll be time for you to put yourself on
Everything I've seen needs rearranging
And for anyone who thinks it's strange
Then you should be the first to want to make this change
And for everyone who thinks that life is just a game
Do you like the part you're playing
The story of Love is only more poignant 40 years later, because we all know how the dream ended.
PS: Forget The Doors. They weren't in the race.
I have to admit I'm a late convert to this band. I have been so close to picking up one of their two albums in record stores, but put them down again because of their 70's prog looking cover art and highly dubious name.
After being drenched in their ridiculously radio friendly pop one too many times, I had to get an album and see if they're stayers or merely the sweet soundbites on so many car adverts* and film trailers.
Like their Sub Pop stablemates The Shins, their sound is straight-faced, shimmering, fearless falsetto Carl Wilson vocals - vulnerable, sweet, right-on-the-note; jangly guitars, layers of keyboard and lush production and just a blue hint of that ubiquitous alt-country sound. There's even a genuine southern twang to Ben Bridwell's vocals and the timeless Springsteenesque lyric about a screendoor slamming in Window Blues. Needless to say, I can't help myself. It's the sort of stuff that fills my eyes with tears.
No One's Gonna Love You is, musically and lyrically, so arrestingly sentimental that you feel it must be taking the piss at first. But Bridwell plays it so straight that you allow him to melt your frosty, cynical heart just a little and start imagining it soundtracking a particularly momentous occasion in your life - the likes of which don't often occur in this worker bee's life, so it just gets played on the Mac while you type out a review.
My favourite track is Ode to LRC. It's the first song of theirs that really made me take notice. There's something so summery and nostalgic about it you remember you're human. I know, I know, they do commercials. I'm still trying to get my head around that... but they've supported the utterly brilliant Iron and Wine. They can't be all bad. And musically they get to you (and probably make you buy stuff) in a way that other horrendous bunch of soul-less car advert types with an equally dire name (the New Radicals) could never hope to. That is enough for me.
They may not have the social conscience of their musical forebears (Neil Young, David Crosby and friends), but they've got the sensibilities of everyone who ever got a shiver hearing the strains of slide guitars sounding from a cabin up in the canyon where these sounds were first pioneered.
*Horror of horrors, they have pawned their stuff to flog SUVs of all things - but it's like love, you've got to know that your beloved has committed a crime before you fall. After that it's way too late... you love 'em anyway.
Slip Sliding Away...
'Music to play at my funeral' has always been a lively topic of conversation among my friends, and it seems to have been done a fair bit (to death, if you will) in the media lately. Ultimately, I suppose, who the fuck cares what gets played? You're no longer around to enjoy it. It might as well be something faintly ridiculous or a bit edgy. I used to say it would be something like 'Me I Disconnect From You' by Gary Numan, or 'Fade to Grey' by Visage
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Foreword: 2007 was the year of films about Joy Division, or, more specifically, Ian Curtis. And so, to use his own words, the Atrocity Exhibition continues. Perhaps this review would not be as caustic had I not been suffering from a bit of Joy Division retrospective fatigue following the admittedly excellent film based on Deborah Curtis’s depressing book*, but I can only call it as I see it. So here goes:
Okay all you simpering 2008-minted Joy Division fans – let’s have it out here. New Order was a far superior and more influential band than Joy Division ever were, but many of you will never be exposed to that brilliance except through films about their former incarnation. And that is a damn shame
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If you really love music, you listen to it as you might watch a film - you sit down and absorb it. Or you jump around the room to it. You let it flood you for that moment - at least, that's what I have always done if the music is worth listening to. There's certainly no "multi-tasking" allowed when you sit down to watch a film, so why is it that the scourge of our age - marketers - are trying to identify what it is we like to do when we listen to music? The short answer is they want to package the music we listen to into neat little genres which have nothing to do with influences and styles, and everything to do with the consumer's needs - preferably allowing them to listen to music 'products' while they're consuming other items.
A recent survey in the UK, commissioned as part of a "re-branding" of classical music for the younger generation, found that various age groups liked, amongst other activities, to drive, to wind-down after work and to do the housework to classical music. Each question had an activity linked to it - after all, who just listens anymore? You've got to be caught up in a frenzy of other activity which the music helps you achieve... at least, that's how this clumsily designed and patronising market-research would have it. But it's not just classical music being flogged as activity music. If it can't be packaged neatly into a 'lifestyle category', it can't be sold
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Welcome to Rock n Flicks! Here's a (by no means exhaustive) list of the things you can expect to find now that I'm at the helm:
Gig reviews
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Diminutive Liam Finn, with his engaging, affable manner, fisherman’s beard and leprechaun-like appearance, is well suited to the low stage and informality of the Northcote Social Club on a Thursday night. There are lots of shout-outs to the audience, and good-natured banter and horsing about with fellow rock progeny Eliza Jane “EJ” Barnes.
Musically though, it’s straight down to business. Finn is a maestro who manages to be every member of the band rolled into one dynamic if slightly crazed operator, peering intensely over that beard and darting about to twiddle knobs and dodge the obstacle course of wires and microphones around him. And there is something endearing about those pristine white ‘dad’ trainers tapping furiously on the effects peddles
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The Drones – the group dubbed ‘Australia’s most important band’ – took to the stage at the Corner on Saturday night to a capacity crowd, in one of their final performances before they head to the States to showcase their considerable talents. Velvet Underground-esque support act Snowman set the agenda with a set of haunting, richly layered noise using sax, violin, wide-eyed chanting and at times almost operatic vocals to build a wall of defiant, experimental sound.
The Drones peddle a brand of simple, yet sophisticated dark rock, pioneered by the likes of The Birthday Party and The Dirty Three and energetic front man Gareth Liddiard channels the ghosts of every disgruntled, black-clad loner who ever sat down with his guitar and a chewed pencil
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With their swag of classics like Hold the Line, Rosanna and the ubiquitous Africa, Toto have become synonymous with slick, well-produced pop rock from a time when image and visual trickery was less important than how you sounded on FM radio.
As they approach their 30th anniversary tour, the band join the ranks of a select few – the Stones and U2 spring to mind – who have been together and touring for all that time
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