Broadcast May-5-2012 - 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.
722.
Propaganda -
dream within a dream
They say you
finally know what a decade sounds like by its middle year. So for the 1980s, I'm choosing
Propaganda, mostly forgotten now, but trust me, this is what 1985 sounded like.
Big, majestic, mysterious,
definitely with a dark side – a dream within a dream indeed. All credit to the band themselves who I
know nothing about except I think the woman doing the singing was German (maybe
they all were). But don't overlook
the guy in the control room, twiddling the dials, pulling it all together – one
Trevor Horn whose previous credits included the likes of Frankie Goes To
Hollywood, ABC, Grace Jones, Malcolm McLaren's Duck Rock, not to forget Yes and
The Buggles (he was in both of them).
Pop sonic artist of the decade?
It's an interesting argument.
721.
Eric Burdon +
War - paint it black
The album title
(the Black-Man's Burdon) says it all.
Eric Burdon takes his whiteman-slumming-in-the-blackman's-world thing all
the way to the edge (and beyond) and, among other things, delivers an epic take
on one of the great
Rolling Stones songs. Released in
1971, but I didn't hear until 1994.
A moment I remember all too well.
Kurt Cobain had just offed himself, everybody was fumbling around in
shock at Steven's place. Some guy
whose name I forget said something like, "Fuck you, Cobain. There's always something to live
for. I bet you never even heard
this." And then he put this
on.
720.
Malcolm
McLaren - double dutch
Young Tim (my
little brother's friend) turned me onto this. Or more to the point, he forced it on me, because I wasn't
biting at first. Sex Pistols
ex-manager trying to sing, high school girls skipping rope, sampling before we
even had a name for it – I could not see it adding up. Until one night, a little wasted,
dancing to it, I got it. It was
fun. Cultural boundaries
were eroding, great Jericho like walls were crumbling, and I was smiling.
719.
Jello Biafra
+ DOA - we gotta get out of this place
In which Jello
Biafra hooks up with Vancouver's own DOA and utterly nails a cover of one of
the essential rock anthems.
Maybe the essential rock anthem.
I think I heard Bruce Springsteen say that once. This situation's killing me. Might be school, might be a job, might
be prison, a bad relationship, your family. Doesn't matter where you are, there's only one direction to
go, and that's OUT. With a
vengeance.
718.
Nina Simone -
revolution
It's 1969 and
Nina Simone, one of the great voices (and souls) to ever descend upon music,
delivers an album of mostly brilliant pop covers, including this rousing riff
on the Beatles Revolution. Music
to change the world by. Or as a
friend once put it, if this is what Church sounded like, I'd go every night.
716.
Lee Perry +
The Dub Syndicate - kiss the champion
No argument.
Time Boom X De Devil Dead is one of the greatest (mostly) forgotten albums of
them all. Wherein reggae-dub
ORIGINATOR Lee Scratch Perry finds his way to the confines of Adrian Sherwood's
On-U Sound, hooks up with one of the hottest bands on the planet (The Dub
Syndicate) and unleashes an apocalypse of mad rants, boasts, insights that only
make sense once you stop trying … to make sense that is. Needless to say, we listened to this a
lot whilst tripping the old lysergic, not trying at all. Who says reggae isn't psychedelic?
715.
Godfathers -
when am I coming down?
My friend Gary
likened it to losing control of your car.
You're bombing along at speed and everything's perfect, superlative
even. Until you're halfway around
a bend, going maybe eighty mph and you lose traction, with various trees, a
ditch, a fence, all coming up fast.
You ARE going to crash. The
question is, how will you crash?
And what will you crash into?
Losing it on psychedelics is much the same. It’s just a much longer crash, in much slower motion.
714.
Marianne
Faithfull - guilt
This song made
no sense to me at first. I thought
she was saying she felt GOOD. So
why so gloomy then? Was this some
twisted junkie thing I needed heroin in my veins to figure out? But then maybe five years later, I
finally bought the album and read the title, and there it was: Guilt. Which suddenly made all kinds of sense. And reminds me of sage wisdom c/o the
Amazing Jillian. Guilt's so easy
to avoid. Just don't do that thing
that you'll end up feeling guilty about.
Words to live by.
713.
Gram Parsons
- in my hour of darkness
Who says there
aren't ghosts? Gram Parsons was
dead of a heroin overdose before the world ever heard this album. Which made the final song In My Hour Of Darkness way too creepy, particularly the part where he delivers his own
eulogy: Another young man
safely strummed his silver string guitar - and he played to people everywhere -
some say he was a star - but he was just a country boy his simple songs confess
- and the music he had in him so very few possess.
712.
George
Harrison - beware of darkness
I would've been
eleven when the Beatles broke up, and then George Harrison's All Things Must
Pass hit the world (and hit it did).
The big singles were My Sweet Lord and What Is Life, but I got to hear
the whole thing because my cousin had it, all six sides. Not that I understood a song like
Beware of Darkness, but I got it
anyway. I mean, who cares what the
worlds were saying? The title and
mournful tone were speaking volumes about the nature of the world, all the dark
spirits floating around, wanting a piece of me.
711.
David Bowie -
Panic in Detroit
As I remember
it, David Bowie HIT as follows.
First came Space Oddity (radio hit in late 1972), then Ziggy Stardust
(various album tracks heard on FM radio which I was just starting to discover). Then I actually saw pictures of the
guy (beyond weird), and heard the rumours (that he
actually was an
alien, that he and Elton John were secretly married). But by 1973, things were settling a bit. Yeah, the guy remained supremely weird,
but it was the music I was really noticing. How fucking good it all was!
708.
Bobby Blue
Bland - somewhere over the rainbow
I first heard
this wafting over backyard barbeque sometime in the early 90s. And it was good. I believe I was actually playing
croquet at the time, taking it very seriously, understanding that it was far
more than just a game, that it was in fact an analogue for the great and
imponderable complexity of the universe, and man's place in it – the
"games" we all must play.
I'm sure the LSD and Tequila helped.
707.
Severed Heads
- Alaskan polar bear heater
There's joy in
repetition, or maybe just madness.
And truth in the notion that way too many of the so-called Industrial
Musicians of the 80s only got worse as they got better at figuring out how to
play their instruments and related technology. In Severed Heads case, that means they'd peaked long before
I ever heard them. But
fortunately, that truth eventually found me via Clifford Darling, Please Don't
Live In The Past, a double album full of delightfully strange excursions into
what can only be called NOISE.
706.
Steve Hackett
- Icarus Ascending
As the story
goes, Peter Gabriel split Genesis in 1975 and everything went to shit. But actually listen to some of their
immediately post-Gabriel stuff and a different truth emerges. It was guitarist Steve Hackett's
departure that really triggered the ugly slide into POP-oblivion. And look no further than Please Don't
Touch (Hackett's 1978 solo outing) to see how things might have been. Icarus Ascending is the BIG ending, and
yes, that is Richie Havens (the hippie black folk guy that brought down the
house at Woodstock) laying down the heavy vocal gravity.
