Broadcast May-26-2012 - podcast available here. All comments are from Philip Random's notes (with some editorial diligence). The full countdown list (so far) can be found here. Links are not necessarily to the exact same recordings we played on-air, but we tried.
688.
Frankie Goes To
Hollywood - Welcome to the Pleasuredome [randoEDIT]
1984 was Frankie's
year. The root of it, I figure,
was a line from Two Tribes (which won't be on this list because I'm assuming
you've heard it). "Are we
living in a land where sex and horror are the new gods?" The land they were from was England,
but given the degree of international success they had, it's safe to say they
were speaking of the whole mad Cold War world. Which would have put the Pleasuredome everywhere apparently,
with the bombs about to fall, the shit about to hit -- decreed by no less than
Kubla Khan if you know your Coleridge (but no, knowing your Rush lyrics doesn't
count).
687.
Trouble Funk -
drop the bomb
Recorded Live in
London but their hometown was Washington, DC, where a friend of mine found
himself on business more than once in the late 80s. I remember him trying to describe a Trouble Funk show to
me. Like rap, except not at all
really because they weren't rapping, and there was a full-on band. But man did people go wild to it.
686.
Led
Zeppelin - nobody's fault but mine
This one comes from Presence, the good
heroin album (as my friend Mark used to put it), the shitty one being In
Through The Out Door (Jimmy Page so fucked up he just left most of it to John
Paul Jones). Either way, the Zep's
days of full-on Satanic world dominance and glory were slipping past them by
1976, which didn't stop them from laying down some of the evilest blues mankind
has ever known. Even if, in this
case, it was a song about taking responsibility for the mess you're in, which,
when you think about it, is very un-Satanic behaviour.
685.
Pogues -
Turkish Song of the Damned
If I Should Fall
from Grace with God is the album where the Pogues made it clear. They were way more than just a rowdy
gang of ex-punks who figured their parents folk music went well with too much
alcohol and drugs. They were
worldbeaters now, with a raw handle on their roots-based instrumentation that
let them go pretty much anywhere they cared musically, slay any dragon. Only the aforementioned alcohol and
drugs (and more alcohol) could stop them, which it did.
684.
Slow - Bad Man
Let's be clear
about it. Slow invented so-called
Grunge a good half decade before most of the world ever heard
of Nirvana. Four dysfunctional
boys from the mean streets of Vancouver's plush west side making it clear you
could love punk rock and the classic rawk likes of Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, ACDC, The
Rolling Stones (a truly radical concept at the time), and better yet, the two
went beautifully, raucously, dangerously well together. I remember seeing Slow one night at the
Arts Club on Seymour (long gone now) at their atom smashing peak. They opened with a Temptations cover,
but the crowd quickly got over that shock once the singer guy hopped up onto
all the front row tables and kicked everybody's beers into their laps. A very bad man indeed, even if he was
just a teenager at the time.
681.
Sally Oldfield
- water bearer
Smooth, ethereal,
fresh as the waters of Rivendell itself, Water Bearer (the album and the song)
isn't just redolent of the Elven music you were likely to hear at Elrond's
joint, it purports to be the real thing.
Which would be laughable if it wasn't just so NICE (and I mean that in
the nicest possible way). Or like
I previously noted about Abba being the musical equivalent of taking a hot
bath, then going to bed with clean sheets, except here the sheets are woven
from some mystical silk that's not just lighter than any feather, it actually
transports you to a dream realm where all the secrets of eternity are revealed,
and everything is proven to be gold, with touches of mithril around the
edges.
680.
Brothers
Johnson - strawberry letter #23
From one of those
mystery albums that just seemed to end up in my pile sometime in the mid-90s (I
probably grabbed it at a yard sale).
And it's all very nice, groovy and smooth, but then Strawberry Letter #23
comes along and takes things to a whole other level of invention. Music you can taste as well as feel.
678.
T-Rex - the
slider
It seems that
Motron and I are still arguing.
Electric Warrior versus The Slider. And he's still winning, here with the title track from The
Slider which, as with pretty much all T-Rexian gems, makes no particular sense
until you decide it's like those warnings you used to get on porn-films: "completely concerned with
sex". In other words, way
over my head when it was new, even as my head was completely concerned with sex
– I just couldn't see past it.
Glam was definitely a strange thing to have erupting all around you in
the pubertal suburbs of the early 70s.
Thank all gods for that.
677.
Queen - march
of the black queen
Say what you want
about Queen and their crimes of pomp, excess, absurdity; when their second
album hit in 1974, it was unlike anything the world had ever heard, unless
you'd heard the first one, but this one was even more so. The full metal raunch of Led Zeppelin,
the camp 19th Century operatics of Gilbert and Sullivan, the
heartfelt harmonic longing of the Beach Boys, the brash pop adventuring of the
Beatles, Phil Spector's Wall of Sound.
And glam. And it
worked. And if you were fourteen,
fifteen years old getting by on five bucks allowance a week, what better album
was there to buy with your meagre funds, but one that had EVERYTHING on
it. In the case of March Of The
Black Queen, it was all in the same song.
676.
Nancy Sinatra +
Lee Hazelwood - sand
It's 1968 and even
Frank Sinatra's little girl is getting into the weird stuff, with a lot of help
from Lee Hazelwood, who (as the story goes) earned himself a talking-to from a
couple of Frank's hefty friends from the old neighbourhood for songs such as
Sand. Which, it's worth noting, I
didn't hear until after I'd encountered Einsturzende Neubauten's rather bleak
mid-80s cover version. Strangely,
the original feels even darker.
675.
Black Oak
Arkansas - Uncle Lijah
I remember seeing
these guys on late night TV when I was maybe fourteen, and being impressed by
A. the singer's snarling vocals, and B. the band smashing all their gear at the
climax of the set. Imagine my
surprise maybe twenty-five years later when I discovered they were actually a
great, kick ass southern-fried rock and roll band – where the redneck howl of
Lynyrd Skynyrd met the deep, evil swamp blues of Captain Beefheart (or perhaps
Howling Wolf). And, it's worth
noting, David Lee Roth pretty much stole his entire look from front man Jim
Dandy.
674.
Tall Dwarfs -
crush
My friend Carl
brought Slugbucket Hairybreath Monster (the EP) back from New Zealand in the
mid-80s. He dragged a whole pile
of vinyl back actually, but this is the only slab that mattered enough to me to
eventually own. Garage-psychedelia
by way of lo-fi bedroom recording that was as sharp, as grimy, as fresh, as
messy as anything anyone else in the world was offering. Crush gets chosen for the list for the
sheer urgency of its groove, the cardboard box sounding drum sound, and the
lyric. What do you do when you find out that
everyone loathes you?
673.
Pink Floyd -
careful with that axe, Eugene
It would've been summer
1972. I'm almost thirteen and
trying to convince some other kid how cool Alice Cooper is, simply because the
songs are so evil. He turns up his
nose and says, "But he could never be as cool as Careful With That Axe,
Eugene. That crazy scream when he
just murders everybody." Of
course, being in the middle of nowhere, he couldn't actually play it for
me. No, I'd have to wait a good
ten years before I finally stumbled onto the right version, the one where he
screams so loud and eldritch it can't help but shake you up – the live one from
the late 60s that ended up on Umma-Gumma.
672.
Can - future
days
It's 1973 and Can (probably the greatest band
that most people have never heard) are touching both the peak and the end of
their glory days. Not that they
don't still have some great music in them – it just won't ever get back to this
soft, strange almost subliminal power.
Because vocalist, front man Damo Suzuki is slowly fading away, not to
return. Which, in a way, makes for
their best (certainly their most consistent) album. Like a sweet dream of a future that actually came true,
because there I was, a good ten or twelve years after the fact, hearing it for
the first time and it was perfect, it was exactly what the mid-80s felt like
when the drugs were just right and the nuclear winter rains stopped
falling.
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