Posts Tagged ‘Virgin Records’

DEVO – ” Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! ” Released 28th August 1978

Posted: March 12, 2021 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Are We Not Men We Are Devo!.jpg

“Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!” is the debut studio album by the American new wave band Devo. It was originally released in August 1978, on the labels Warner Bros. and Virgin. Produced by Brian Eno, the album was recorded between October 1977 and February 1978, primarily in Cologne, Germany,

The album received somewhat mixed reviews from critics and peaked at No. 12 on the UK Albums Chart and No. 78 on the U.S. Billboard chart. Recent reviews of the album have been more uniformly positive and the album has charted on several retrospective “best of” lists from publications including Rolling Stone, Pitchfork Media and Spin.

On May 6th, 2009, Devo performed the album live in its entirety for the first time as part of the Don’t Look Back concert series curated by All Tomorrow’s Parties. On September 16, 2009, Warner Bros. and Devo announced a re-release of Q: Are We Not Men? and Freedom of Choice, with a tour performing both albums

In 1977, David Bowie and Iggy Pop received a tape of Devo demo songs from the wife of Michael Aylward, guitarist in another Akron, Ohio band, Tin Huey. Both Pop and Bowie, as well as Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, expressed interest in producing Devo’s first release. At Devo’s New York debut show in 1977, Bowie proclaimed that “this is the band of the future, I’m going to produce them in Tokyo this winter.” Eventually, Eno was chosen to produce the album at Conny Plank’s studio located near Cologne, Germany. Bowie was busy with filming Just a Gigolo but helped Eno produce the record during weekends. Two tracks, “Come Back Jonee” and “Shrivel-Up”, were recorded at Different Fur in San Francisco, California; proprietor Patrick Gleeson co-engineered the album. All tracks were mixed at Plank’s studio. Since Devo was without a record deal, Eno paid for the flights and studio cost for the band, confident that the band would be signed to a record contract. In return for his work on the album, Eno asked for a share of any subsequent deals.

The recording sessions were a source of frustration for Eno and Devo. Eno found the band unwilling to experiment or deviate from their early demonstrations of recorded songs. Devo later admitted that “we were overtly resistant to Eno’s ideas. He made up synth parts and really cool sounds for almost every part of the album, but we used them on three or four songs.” A majority of the tracks were later remixed by David Bowie; excluding “Space Junk”, and “Shrivel Up”, which had Eno’s production still intact.

After 16 years of eligibility, Devo snagged their first Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nomination in 2018.

It’s a long time coming, say fans. “It took this long for Devo to be nominated simply because their highest charting song, “Whip It,” only got to No. 14, and the history of this process holds that a band gets in either, and mostly, because of popular, commercial success or singular artistic influence,” notes David Giffels, co-author of the band biography Are We Not Men? We Are Devo!

“Critics had a hard time figuring Devo out initially, and they were constantly subverting both the commercial and critical systems. So, they sort of undermined the usual expectation of a rock band in terms of its route through the Rock Hall sausage machine.”

Gerald V. Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh were art students moonlighting in the music world while attended Kent State University. They were there on May 4th, 1970, when the National Guard shot and killed four college students and injured nine others during a protest. De-evolution was happening before their eyes.

The band’s line-up solidified by 1976 when Casale and Mothersbaugh were joined by their respective brothers, both named Bob, and drummer Alan Myers. From there, they slowly infiltrated the mainstream, influencing generations of artists along the way.

They Made One of Rock’s Best Debut Albums, David Bowie famously announced during a 1977 gig at Max’s Kansas City that he was going to produce Devo’s debut album, and that helped secure the band a major-label record deal.  Brian Eno ended up working on most of that LP, 1978’s Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, which almost immediately found fans, as well as many critics, with its herky-jerky interpretation of the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” The album’s other tracks showed that there was much more to them. “Jocko Homo” and “Uncontrollable Urge” revealed punk roots, while other tracks showed off their experimental nature.

Devo were not Just a Band but an Art Project, A photo of golfer Chi Chi Rodriguez was used for the early “Be Stiff” single as a comment on commercialism. They made a short film all about their theory of de-evolution. And they they were one of the first American bands to embrace video as a new medium. “They pioneered the use of video, predating MTV, and created a new kind of art — the music video — within the rock ‘n’ roll genre at a time when very few new frontiers were left,” says Giffels. “Devo owned the art of video, uniquely and with complete authority.”

They Were Sincere About That De-Evolution Theory, Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale believed that modern society hit its peak and was making a downward slide in the form of de-evolution — that mankind was regressing biologically and as a society. This increased conformity among the masses led to the group’s famous yellow hazmat stage outfits, stiff organized movements and songs that embraced and mocked cultural norms. “Let’s be honest, is there any question that de-evolution is real?” Casale asks UCR. “Did you think we were joking?”

They Managed to Push Their Way Into the Mainstream, Even though their debut album was certified gold, 1980’s Freedom of Choice was even bigger, selling more than a million copies, thanks, in part, to the hit single “Whip It.” Over the years, they’ve released studio LPs, live records, compilations, EPs, singles and a soundtrack, and are one of the most easily recognized bands from the era. They have some high-profile fans, including Neil Young, who included the band in his 1982 movie Human Highway. And Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale have worked on, separately and together, music used in commercials, TV shows and movies, including Pee-wee’s Playhouse, a Diet Coke ad and several of director Wes Anderson’s acclaimed films.

Their Influence Is Super-Huge, Devo’s famous fans and early champions include David Bowie, Brian Eno and Neil Young, but their influence since then has included bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Arcade Fire, all of whom have covered the group onstage or on record. Their robotic rhythms can be heard in countless punk, New Wave, college rock and indie-rock artists throughout the decades. “If you were going to identify a band from the New Wave genre, which certainly deserves a presence in the hall, Devo defined the sound and the look in a quintessential way, and with more artistic and cultural depth, in my opinion, than any other candidate,” says Giffels.

Few albums have announced a band as sufficiently as Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo. The record says everything you need to know about the band Devo, and while in 2021 the prospect may feel a little passe, in the late seventies, the mere concept of Devo was revolutionary. For that reason alone, the band go a long way to define the very nature of post-punk music.

Not necessarily the band’s best album, Are We Not Men? is certainly their seminal moment in musical history. It was this album that allowed a generation of music lovers to cock their head sideways and attack rock music with a brand new view. Devo are undoubted pioneers of the post-punk genre and kept the keen spirit of experimentation at the forefront of everything they did.

Devo

  • Mark Mothersbaugh – lead and background vocals; keyboards; guitar
  • Gerald Casale – lead and background vocals; bass guitar; keyboards
  • Bob Mothersbaugh – lead guitar; backing vocals
  • Bob Casale – rhythm guitar; keyboards; backing vocals
  • Alan Myers – drums

LAURA MARLING – ” The Albums “

Posted: December 3, 2020 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Laura Marling.

British singer-songwriter Laura Marling has accomplished a lot across seven studio albums and 12 years recording music. She’s garnered Mercury Prize and Grammy nominations, collaborated with Ed O’Brien of Radiohead, Blake Mills and others, and she’s even started teaching online guitar lessons, which she details below. This all to say, she’s a supremely talented artist who moves in dynamic ways within the folk-rock lane. 

Her new album “Song For Our Daughter” was scheduled to come out later this summer but she found an opportunity to connect us all during the COVID crises by releasing it early. Marling said in a statement regarding the change of date, “In light of the change to all our circumstances, I saw no reason to hold back on something that, at the very least, might entertain, and at its best, provide some sense of union.” The album is a nod to Maya Angelou’s collection “Letter To My Daughter.” Marling herself is not a mother but she takes us there through her delicate song writing  writing for a girl who needs confidence and hope.

ALAS, I CANNOT SWIM (2008)

Laura Marling is an alt-folk singer-songwriter from a small village just outside of Reading. The story goes that she came to London with nothing but her guitar and a handful of songs. Still just a teenager, her talents were soon noticed at early Way Out West (who released her debut single) and Blue Flowers gigs. On her debut album for Virgin records she shows astonishing ability to spin heart rending tales of love and loss for someone so young. She has a breathtakingly pure voice that’s equal parts Regina Spektor, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. She is an extraordinary talent – voice, lyrics, music, presence. no wannabe celeb, aspirant popstar-babe. Rather a determined woman with an overwhelming desire to communicate through word and music. If you have a heart you need Laura Marling in your life right now.

Marling’s debut, produced by Noah & The Whale’s Charlie Fink, We had four weeks at Eastcote Studios, two weeks doing my record and then a further two weeks back-to-back doing the Noah & The Whale record. We laid down the bass, drums, guitar and vocal all at once, and then we did overdubs – this is the same for all albums I’ve done, pretty much. My dad ran a recording studio which shut down when I was quite small, but I remember growing up around all of that outboard gear at home. So I guess I was slightly more familiar with the studio than the average 17-year-old, but still it was my first proper session.

These were all my first songs, written from the age of 16-17. There was a batch of songs before that that were on an EP, “London Town” – I didn’t like them very much by the time I got to making this. I haven’t listened to this for a long while, I very rarely play any of those songs live, so it’s a bit of a distant memory to me now. And the production was very much of the time I guess, that ‘new folk’ world – glockenspiels and banjos and whatever – which is good, that’s what it was supposed to be then. I don’t really think of this as part of my catalogue.

I SPEAK BECAUSE I CAN (2010)

UK songstress Laura Marling releases her sophomore album, “I Speak Because I Can”, on Virgin Records. Produced by Ethan Johns (Kings of Leon, Ryan Adams), I Speak Because I Can is the follow up to Marling’s lauded, mercury prize-nominated debut, Alas I Cannot Swim. I Speak Because I Can is Laura Marling’s coming of age album, if such a thing can be said about the brilliant songwriter whose compositions belie her age (for the record, she’ll be twenty this year it was released). Recorded in 2009 at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in outside London, and featuring the talents of her backing band Mumford and Sons, I Speak Because i Can reveals a new side to Laura Marling, whose debut was released when she was only seventeen years old. Its ten songs are imbued with a new richness, ripeness and sophistication, marked by homespun tales and sparse instrumentation. I Speak Because I Can showcases not only Marling’s ability to tell one hell of a story, but her incredible guitar playing, which has grown more intricate since her first album. Marling chose Ethan Johns to produce her new material, as she credits many of his earlier records (among them albums by Ray Lamontagne, Kings of Leon, Emmylou Harris, Sarabeth Tucek and more) with kindling her interest in music. She had long admired his way of working – his use of reels; his quiet, traditional methods of production; the warmth found within the records he produced. he gave her the space to find her own identity; as such, the record reveals a new maturity, and at points, Marling’s voice sounds a little harder, a little world-wearied, while still showcasing her impressive range not heard on previous recordings. and while I Speak Because I Can is, at times, a darker album than its predecessor, it is a brilliant step forward from a young artist who continues to keep us awe-struck at her talent.

A leap forward, with Marling inspired by British folk and The Odyssey, and working with producer Ethan Johns The difference between being 16 and being 19 is quite a shift, isn’t it? Ethan was very intimidating, but I quickly realised it was nothing but a type of shyness. He turned down the first record, but I tried again with the second one – he seemed to be more impressed with the song writing. I went down to meet Ethan at Real World Studios, where he was working at the time. He came and picked me up from the station, and he was wearing triple denim and circular pink sunglasses, like John Lennon, and he had his crazy California hair. I thought he looked completely mental. I was very shy still, I didn’t really say much. As we were walking around Real World, he said, “It’s never really worked out for me, working with female artists, I seem to not do well with it.” So, being in my tomboy/late teenage years, I was like, “Well, I’m not like every girl, it’s going to be a totally different experience”, and it was. We started at Eastcote, but Ethan didn’t like the sound of the room, so we moved to Real World.

I took my band with me, and we all stayed there at probably horrendous expense. We got driven in our splitter van from Glastonbury to Real World, we stayed there for two weeks and it was really magical. I’d read The Odyssey, and I obviously thought I was quite clever because of that, so a lot of it was based around Penelope and Odysseus, and Hera – there’s a lot of Greek mythology and Classics, I was really into it then. I had discovered tunings after the first album too, and a lot of I Speak Because I Can was in major and minor open-D tunings. I was also going through the unbelievable intensity of anybody’s late teenage years, I was so full of fucking hormones and excitement. I remember writing a lot, it was a good time.

A CREATURE I DON’T KNOW (2011)

The follow-up to 2010’s ‘I Speak Because I Can’. like it’s predecessor, the new record was produced by Ethan Johns. the vibe here is looser, the rhythms more adventurous, her vocals are more soulful, more sexual and more assured. marling has found a new intensity on her deeply impressive third album. she has come a long way in a short time, and has undoubtedly got further to travel. The more expansive third record, again produced by Ethan Johns, I went from touring I Speak Because I Can straight into the studio to make this. That was the cycle that I was on then – I made the album, put it out, toured it for a year and then went straight back into the studio with a new crop of songs.

It was a natural progression; the sound of this album was dictated by my touring band at the time, as we had been playing all these songs in soundchecks for the previous six months. We did all the pre-production away from Ethan because everybody was too scared to play in front of him. My drummer and my keyboard player, they’re proper musicians who’ve been playing with me almost since the beginning, they’re proper trained incredible musicians, but everyone else in the band didn’t really consider themselves a musician.

So I had a slightly ragtag band. Of course Ethan’s got the little black book of every musician you might want, but I only wanted people that I loved on the records, that I knew were on my side. Maybe that was a bit paranoid of me, but I was a bit paranoid then of everybody, and I wanted to make sure that ultimately I had control of everything. It was also very important for me to keep my musicians employed, which I did manage to do for those four or five years, which felt like an achievement. So what I was doing was because of a mix of paranoia and economic anxiety!

LIVE FROM YORK MINSTER (2012)

Marling’s only live album, including a cover of Jackson C Frank’s “Blues Run The Game”, There are a lot of churches to play in Europe, but we decided to supersize that to cathedrals. We organised it through some quite intense logistical negotiation, literally talking to the bishops and persuading them it was a good idea, because I don’t think they do it very often, particularly somewhere like York Minster. It was such a spectacularly beautiful venue. We were bringing in our own sound system, and the acoustics in some of the cathedrals were much more tricky than others – Liverpool was completely wild and very hard to tame, but we were in a smaller room in York Minster, not in the main atrium, and luckily it was a good one to record.

A completely stone room with wood on the ground has a particular quality to it. I think Charlie Fink had played “Blues Run The Game” to me, and I figured it was in the same tuning as “Goodbye England…”. I added it to the set because it was such an unusual tuning that there were not many songs I could play in it.

ONCE I WAS AN EAGLE (2013) 

A stunning 16-track folk-rock epic, and Marling’s own favourite, I discovered smoking weed before this album, that’s the reason the first four songs are one. It’s like a nice lull, where you’re off on another planet. I’d had some intense emotional growth since the previous album, and I’d started to feel like I very much wanted to be on my own and not with a band. Though they’re still my band and I love them very much, it felt like I couldn’t get any time on my own, like I was always on tour or in the studio, and it started to feel like people recognised me a little bit, and it all overwhelmed me. So with this album I went back to Ethan on my own. It was a really amazing experience. I think he had wanted to get his hands on my music without all of those people around, so he could do with it what he really wanted. By that point we were friends, and I entrusted him with this really emotionally intense album.

“Once I Was An Eagle” is Laura Marling’s fourth album in five years, and she’s still just 23 years old. It’s been an accelerated artistic growth but Marling hasn’t put a foot wrong yet. Once I Was An Eagle features a reduced cast of – predominantly – Marling and regular producer Ethan Johns. The English Joni ruthlessly dissects her love life on this confessional album. It’s a beautifully melodic collection that hits engaging heights.

I went and recorded everything for him, in order, at his house – just me and a guitar with his engineer Dom Monks, who’s also brilliant – and then I went away for a week. When I came back he’d done most of the instrumentation on it, and he’d started to paint around the tracks.

I still think of it as a magical happening. People were trying to say it could have been shorter, and maybe a couple of songs could have been B-sides, but that was the story I wanted to tell. Ethan was into it too, he wanted to do a double record.

Ruth [de Turberville, cellist] came to play on the record towards the end. There’s a bit in “Pray For Me” where her cello line sounds like it’s rising above me, wrapping itself around my neck and pulling me down – there was some emotional quality to it, just as what Ethan did on it had an emotional quality. There was a sense that something was about to peak, it did feel like that. I felt like it was the best record I’d ever made, and I could sense that it would be harder to carry on from then.

SHORT MOVIE (2015)

Self-produced in London, Marling’s fifth was the quickest she’s ever written and recorded, The funny thing was that the magic from “Eagle” didn’t last, because Ethan and I ended up making a record afterwards that we threw in the bin. It was a big financial mess, and that was quite a shock to me. I don’t have a lot of money to play with, I’m not a multi-million selling artist, so scrapping an album was a big deal. There were a couple of reasons for it, it wasn’t totally the song writing. I was living in Los Angeles, so Ethan had come over to do it, we rented Sunset Sound which was also really expensive. The nice thing is that on that record we had Jim Keltner, so I got to hang out with him for two weeks – he was amazing. It took me a little while to get over the shock of that, and the disappointment that me and Ethan felt.

Laura Marling has released four albums in only seven years – and she’s only just turned 25 now. Working on fresh material, fifth album Short Movie Self-produced, the songwriter worked extensively alongside drummer Matt Ingram and studio engineer Dan Cox during recent sessions. Short Movie has a cinematic wide eyed joy, and Marling’s writing seems freer. False Hope, inspired by the experience of being tapped in a New York airb’n’b during hurricane sandy, swirls round in a sea of electric guitars. Gurdjieff’s Daughter pulls a huge chorus out of its back pocket with the ease of somebody producing a lighter. There’s a strain of playfulness, too. Strange Love sees Marling adopt the kind of stilted, burning delivery that should come free with a bit of wheat to chew on. Short Movie is wonderfully unlike anything Marling has attempted before.

I came back to London and said to my drummer [Matt Ingram], “I need to do an album for cheap.” He said, “Come and do it at my studio.” I ended up producing it with him, and that was an amazing experience. “Short Movie” was a very quickly written batch of songs, because I’d scrapped everything from the album that we threw away. So this was a very concise timespan, just a very short period in my life. I actually don’t really like the album, but I get why I wrote it and why I had to write it. I needed to keep moving or I was going to drown in the sorrow of having failed. It’s the first time I played electric guitar on a record – a friend had a bungalow in Joshua Tree that they weren’t going to be in for a couple of months, so I took all my guitars out there. I had guitar amplifiers all around the house, and there were no neighbours so I could play as loud as I wanted. That’s how that sound arrived.

SEMPER FEMINA (2017)

A return to form, produced by Los Angeles wunderkind Blake Mills, It was so interesting working with a different producer, he couldn’t be more different to Ethan. And I was such a huge fan of Blake’s already, so it was weird to go in and be so in awe of somebody. He’s my age too. The main thing he inspired in me was that if you worked hard enough you could be as good as him – there was no mystical quality as to why he was so good, other than that he worked really fucking hard. Ethan is from an older time where there was more money in the music business, so he works from midday until nine o’clock and he doesn’t work at weekends, which is fine; but Blake works from 10am until it’s done! I took three members of my band with me, because I was a bit worried that Blake would intimidate me to the point where I wouldn’t be able to get my point across. I’m glad I did that because it just about kept it from becoming a Blake Mills record, which it could have easily become.

In those three weeks, I’d come back home at like 3am every night and play guitar in my backyard – I’d practise every night so that the next morning I’d come in and he wouldn’t be able to play my parts better than I could. I just couldn’t believe that someone could work so hard for someone else’s music, it was amazing. He’s quite a force to contend with, though, he doesn’t fuck around and he doesn’t banter, he just works. Blake literally seems bored when you’re playing him a song, when he feels it’s not sonically interesting. On “Soothing”, he started changing the chords so they were more interesting inversions, and then he orchestrally arranged this three-piece bass part for it.

Semper Femina is Laura Marling’s sixth album – an intimate, devoted exploration of femininity and female relationships, and among her finest work to date. Written largely on the tour that followed 2015’s Short Movie and recorded in Los Angeles with production from Blake Mills, it is at once a distinctive and musically compelling collection of songs, run through with Marling’s fierce intelligence; a keen, beautiful and unparalleled take on womanhood.

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SONG FOR OUR DAUGHTER (2020)

Laura Marling’s exquisite seventh album ‘Song For Our Daughter’ arrives almost without pre-amble or warning in the midst of uncharted global chaos, and yet instantly and tenderly offers a sense of purpose, clarity and calm. As a balm for the soul, this full-blooded new collection could be posited as Laura’s richest to date, but in truth it’s another incredibly fine record by a British artist who rarely strays from delivering incredibly fine records.

Taking much of the production reins herself, alongside long-time collaborators Ethan Johns and Dom Monks, Laura has layered up lush string arrangements and a broad sense of scale to these songs without losing any of the intimacy or reverence we’ve come to anticipate and almost take for granted from her throughout the past decade.

Marling’s classic-sounding latest, returning to her roots with Ethan Johns co-producing, I didn’t enjoy producing Short Movie myself, and I didn’t feel like I wanted to do that again – you can’t get a good enough perspective on your own, being both inside and outside the record at the same time. I thought Dom Monks and Ethan Johns as co-producers would just give me that security, but I think it was challenging for Ethan to change his role. I’d had to do a lot of random admin stuff earlier in 2019, which meant I’d sat on these songs for a while, which was hellish for me. But in that time I’d also moved back to London, set up my own studio, demoed everything extensively, contacted everyone I wanted to play on it… Ethan was the last part of the puzzle actually. He wanted to use this studio in Wales because he likes to record to tape, but I’m not a purist in that way. Dom Monks is the zen master between two nutbags, though, so he held the sessions together.

I wrote the album while I was travelling around Europe for about four months, mainly the south of France and Italy, living in a campervan and staying on farms, very late twenties. It was really nice. I always feel like my albums are on/off – I Speak Because I Can was good, A Creature I Don’t Know was OK, Once I Was An Eagle was good, Short Movie was whatever, Semper Femina was good, and I sort of felt this one might be whatever… I don’t know, though! I never know what people are going to think, but people seem to really like it. I wasn’t expecting it to do so well. I thought I’d lean back into just being a songwriter which is all I really want from Laura Marling, from my solo stuff. And then Lump provides me with this whole other experience.

Laura Marling performs “Song For Our Daughter” at the prestigious Royal Albert Hall in London as part of the Mercury Prize 2020: Album of the Year. 

LUMP – LUMP (2018)

A collaboration with Tunng’s Mike Lindsay created Marling’s “greatest pleasure”. We were doing some Neil Young support shows and at the London one my guitarist Sam said, “Oh, my friend Mike’s coming down after the show, he’s quite weird and he wants to ask you a question.” He is a weird guy, in the best possible way, and he’s got an unusual manner. He said quite bluntly, “I need you to come into my studio in Shoreditch, I have something and only you can do it.” I was recently single at that time, feeling quite free about possibilities, so I said yes. I was renting a flat in Dalston, so I walked down on a very hot day to his basement studio in Shoreditch. It was absolutely boiling, no natural light. After a bit of awkward small talk, he played me 36 minutes of music without stopping. I had just started reading the Surrealist Manifesto and I’d underlined a bunch of words, and I started singing them over the top – Mike had demarcated where he thought songs were, and verses and choruses, and after the first day we’d done “The Curse Of The Contemporary” and “May I Be The Light”, and by the third day we’d almost finished the record.

I knew when we were making it how special it was – there was no buddiness or communication, just like when Ethan worked on Eagle… and I left for a week. Lump had that quality too. Mike and I have now made two albums and toured, but we don’t really know each other too well, and are paranoid about maintaining that distance between the two of us, so we don’t lose that quality. Lump is the greatest pleasure in my life now, because it doesn’t feel like mine. There’s a second album done, it’s probably coming out this year but I don’t know when.

The RECORDS – ” Shades In Bed/ Crashes “

Posted: October 24, 2020 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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May be an image of 2 people, people standing and text that says "the records the records/ shades in bed bed"

Among vinyl devotees, The Records will be forever known for the dizzying late-70s single “Starry Eyes” . The Records were formed out of the ashes of the Kursaal Flyers, a pub rock group featuring drummer Will Birch. In 1977, John Wicks joined the band as a rhythm guitarist, and he and Birch quickly started writing songs together, Wicks as composer, Birch as lyricist. The Kursaal Flyers dissolved three months after Wicks joined, but he and Birch continued to write songs together with the hopes of starting a new four-piece group with Birch on drums and Wicks on lead vocals and rhythm guitar. Birch soon came up with a name for the formative band: The Records. The new group was heavily influenced both by British Invasion bands like The Beatles and The Kinks and early power pop groups such as Badfinger, Big Star, and Raspberries. Power pop was experiencing a renaissance on both sides of the Atlantic, thanks in large part to the burgeoning punk/new wave movement.

The group’s line-up initially included bassist Phil Brown and lead guitarist Brian Alterman, whose guitar riffs have been compared to that of the Byrds. Alterman played on two early demos that were later included on the album Paying for the Summer of Love, before joining another band. Alterman was replaced by Huw Gower in 1978. Like Birch and Wicks, Gower and Brown were music veterans: Gower had played with a band called the Ratbites from Hell and Brown had been the bass player for the Janets

New Year’s Day in 1980: Joe Jackson & The Records started the year with verbal jousting in the UK press; Joe had been quoted in music weekly ‘New Musical Express’ (NME) saying “I feel more in common with what The Clash are doing than with The Records, who are about the most boring band I’ve ever heard”; The Records responded with a letter to the Editor, that read in part “While the Clash remain true to their ideals & therefore meet with resistance from many US radio stations, Joe, on the other hand, woos his followers with a selection of easy-on-the-ears Steve Miller rewrites…”.

The band’s 1979 debut – originally titled “Shades in Bed” in the UK, — stands as one of the absolute pinnacles of late ‘70s power pop, thanks to the consistent song writing (lots of power pop albums drop off bigtime after the first three songs), notch-above harmonies, and having a bit of a recording budget from Virgin Records (compared to the often indie label, cult power pop bands favoured by the collector cognoscenti today). “Teenarama” and especially the astounding classic song, “Starry Eyes,” gained some airplay around the world, and show up on every Top 25 Power Pop Songs lists since.

It was 40 years ago when The Records returned from the USA, from JFK, on TWA (708) after an eight week tour, during which time the group played a total of 38 shows, and enjoyed opening for Joe Jackson (six dates), The Cars in Central Park and the Midnite Special TV Show (with The Cars), having the Dbs and the Rubinoos opening for us, our album hitting #41 on Billboard, and meeting Billy Joel, Jan and Dean, Robert Palmer, Flo and Eddie and many other interesting characters along the way.

Will Birch and John Wicks had founded The Records in 1978. Will thought of the name in the bathtub. Influences included Big Star, The Raspberries, Blue Ash, Badfinger, Stealers Wheel and the Beatles’ Revolver LP. Will and John immediately wrote 11 songs including “Teenarama, Up All Night and Held Up High”. They advertised in Melody Maker and located Phil Brown (bass) and Huw Gower (guitar). In 1978 The Records joined the Be Stiff Tour as backing group for Rachel Sweet. They recorded the 45 “Starry Eyes” and signed to Virgin Records.

Their debut album Shades In Bed (aka ‘The Records’) helped to establish their reputation, particularly in the USA, where “Starry Eyes” was a minor hit. They toured with Joe Jackson, opened for The Cars in Central Park and played their own headline shows with the likes of the dB’s and The Rubinoos in support. In 1980 Jude Cole (ex Moon Martin) joined the group in time for their second album, “Crashes”, featuring “Hearts In Her Eyes”, a song Will and John originally wrote for The Searchers.

A third album, Music On Both Sides, was recorded in 1981. The Records disbanded in 1982.

They were hired to back Stiff Records singer Rachel Sweet on the “Be Stiff Tour ’78”. The Records opened the shows with a set of their own. Birch and Wicks also wrote a song for Sweet’s debut album entitled “Pin a Medal on Mary”. The song writing duo also penned “Hearts in Her Eyes” for the Searchers, who made an unexpected comeback with their power pop oriented album The Searchers in 1979.

Based on their demos (later released as Paying for the Summer of Love), the band was signed to Virgin Records in 1978. Their debut single, “Starry Eyes”, was released in the UK that December and has since become their best-known song and an oft-covered power pop standard. Allmusic called it “a near-perfect song that defined British power pop in the ’70s”.Due in part to its clear influence by American power pop, the song was a bigger hit in the US than in the UK; it peaked at No. 56 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October 1979.

The group prepared their debut album with producers Robert John “Mutt” Lange and Tim Friese-Greene. Huw Gower produced “The Phone”, which was added to the album in preference to one of Lange’s efforts, a cover of Tim Moore’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Love Letter”. The debut LP “Shades in Bed” yielded another single, “Teenarama”, their second-best known song. The album was released in the US in July 1979 as The Records with different song sequencing and with the original single version of “Starry Eyes” replacing Lange’s re-recording that appeared on the UK edition.

The album was sufficiently well received to peak on the Billboard chart at No. 41. Gower also produced the bonus four track disc of cover tunes included in the album release, which also received FM airplay, notably the version of Spirit’s “1984”, which was strong enough to become short-listed by Virgin as the second single off the album. deep-cuts like “Girl” demonstrate the British group’s soft powers. Vocalist John Wicks, who died in 2018, the Records always seemed more indebted to studio-trained, throwback pop acts than the more caustic punk of the time. The result was songs like “Girl,” which unites charging guitar riff’s with the sort of airy, all-hands-on-deck harmonies even the Hollies would have envied.’

That was the pinnacle of their success. Returning to the UK, Will Birch engaged the services of producer Craig Leon to record two new songs and to remix two tracks from Shades in Bed for a possible single release. Huw Gower acted as co-producer. After an aborted German tour with Robert Palmer, Gower left the band and relocated to New York, where he joined forces with New York Dolls lead singer David Johansen. Their collaboration led to the successful album Live It Up.

Jude Cole, a 19-year-old American, who had been in Moon Martin’s backing group The Ravens, joined for the album “Crashes” (1980). The album was not a hit, and did not yield any successful singles, and record company support for the band dried up during the Crashes tour. Cole stayed in the US, while the core of Birch, Wicks and Brown returned home to England.

The trio expanded into a quintet with guitarist Dave Whelan and lead singer Chris Gent. Previously, most of the songs had been sung by Wicks, but with other members frequently taking lead vocals for individual songs. Birch has since declared that the decision to recruit a lead singer was made “perhaps unwisely”. This line-up recorded a third album for Virgin, 1982’s “Music on Both Sides”. Like its predecessor, the album was not a hit.

After this, the band effectively broke up. Birch turned to tour managing, running ‘Rock Tours’, a sightseeing London Bus venture, producing and writing. In 1990 the original band briefly reformed to contribute a track for the 1991 Brian Wilson tribute album, Smiles, Vibes & Harmony. Birch, Brown and Wicks cut the basic track for “Darlin'” in London; Gower added his parts and mixed it in New York. The same year also saw the US release of Paying for the Summer of Love. Both recordings received great press, but were not enough to outweigh unresolved past issues within the core membership, which effectively killed any possibility of restarting the group. Wicks relocated to the US in 1994 and was writing, recording and performing both solo and with a new incarnation of the band up until 2018. Brown succumbed to an undisclosed degenerative illness on February 2nd, 2012. Wicks died following a year-long struggle with cancer on October 7th, 2018

The Records

XTC – ” All Along the Watchtower ” Bob Dylan Cover

Posted: July 17, 2020 in MUSIC
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The story goes that when Bob Dylan heard Jimi Hendrix’s swirling cover of ‘All Along The Watchtower’ he said that the track no longer belonged to him, that Jimi had provided the essential version of the song. He clearly hadn’t heard XTC’s fresh take of the track on the TV show ‘So It Goes’.

While punk rock was sweeping the globe and the need to destroy the past to create a new future was an ethos that many bands latched on to, a rejection of rock ‘n’ roll’s past was a fashionable thing and most punks spent their time describing the acts that came before them with a snotty snort of derision. However, one band was happy to take a look back to the sixties and find themselves a gem, that band was XTC.

The group formed in Swindon in 1972 and quickly merged into an impressive unit. Fronted by Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding, they were creating avant-garde rock before punk was a murmur in the streets of London. But with the rise of punk, the band found themselves a home on Virgin Records and released their debut album, White Music.

The album was full of fresh new sounds and, in a 2009 interview, Partridge said of the record which began with their song ‘Radios in Motion’: “We couldn’t think of any better way to start off our first album than with the ‘kick the door in’, breezy opener we used in our live set… the lyrics are very silly, picked for their sonic effect rather than meaning. The first refuge of an inexperienced songwriter, forgive me, but they do have a youthful scattergun energy.”

While the record was brimming with youthful exuberance, one moment on the album stands out among the rest though with their cover of Dylan’s ‘All Along The Watchtower’. The idea for a cover was a toss-up between the Dylan song and The Rolling Stones’ ‘Citadel’, as he explained: “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to cover one of these songs, because they’re both from people who represent the Old Guard,” remembered Partridge. “I think it would be mischievous to do either of these songs in a radically different way, and to show that we’re not in awe of the Old Guard, and that we can take something that they’ve done, smash it all up, and put it back together in our way.”

There was no better place to show of this newly smashed and glued back together track than Anthony Wilson’s ‘So It Goes’. The TV show was quickly becoming known for giving new punk talent a shot at a television spot, a coveted thing in the late seventies. XTC knew they had an opportunity to take and they certainly grabbed it with both hands.  That moment as XTC smash it all up and put it back together again with a smirk and a dubby rhythm which is truly intoxicating. It may not be Dylan’s favourite cover version but it’s right up there as the most unique seen on independent TV.

The SEX PISTOLS – ” Never Mind The Bollocks ” Released 28th October 1977

Posted: October 27, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Never Mind The Bollocks was furious, funny, and wildly obnoxious. It also showed that the Sex Pistols knew how to write classic rock songs better than most…
Despite having released only one single by that point, in the spring of 1977 The Sex Pistols were the biggest news in British music. And yet the punk movement’s most high-profile standard bearers still had to prove to a lot of rock fans that punk had some musical substance to back up the hype. The Clash, The Damned, The Jam and several others already had debut albums out, and The Pistols were being swamped by their own self-created chaos. Recorded between October 1976 to March-June 1977.

They’d recently sacked bass player Glen Matlock, and when they went into the studio in March 1977 with his replacement, Sid Vicious, they found that he couldn’t play the required parts.

While the band signed and then unsigned to A&M records after being dropped like a hot potato by EMI, guitarist Steve Jones stepped into the breach to play the bass bits, and eventually, once the band finally inked a deal with Virgin Records, Never Mind The Bollocks… made it into shops at the end of October 1977. A less than promising background then, but as it turned out, it was well worth the wait.

12. Seventeen
Side two’s opener proved to be one of the less focused tracks on this most sharp-eyed of records. There’s a certain weary, can’t-be-arsed quality to it, which, I guess, suits its subject matter. The final rabble-rousing chant “I’m a lazy sod” is one of the few times on this first album that they manage to sound indistinguishable from Sham 69. They could do better, and did.

11. Liar
This one can sound pretty, well, vacant at times, with vague, incoherent lyrics, but the fieriness of Rotten’s delivery, along with some of Paul Cook’s most splenetic drumming and the trademark snarling riff assault, lifts this track above mere filler status.

10. New York
Any group with Johnny Rotten on the mic is always going to sound pretty ferocious, but if anything, the Pistols suited the fast and furious approach that defined punk in the first place, which meant that this slower, sludgier track didn’t stand out as much as some of its neighbours.

9. Submission
Reputedly the result of Malcolm McLaren suggesting the band write a song about S&M, instead they wrote about being on “a submarine mission for you baby”, by way of a two-fingered salute to their beloved svengali. “I can’t figure out your watery love,” growls Rotten, to a slow, sludgy soundtrack. No, us neither, but the track still retains a certain sleazy menace.

8. EMI
Songs about ‘the industry’ are rarely enervating stuff for the listener, but the Pistols had already had enough run-ins with labels to last a whole career. Lyrically, this final, ‘fuck you and goodbye’ track is satisfyingly stinging – “You do not believe that we’re for real, or you would lose your cheap appeal” – and the refrain “Who? EEE-EMM-IIIII!’ always packs a punch. it’s rant first, song second, but few have ever ranted better than Johnny Rotten.

7. No Feelings
A wired, urgent rocker that spews the Pistols’ world-view all over the pavement, and asks us what we’re going to do about it. “I got no emotion for anybody else / better understand I’m in love with myself,” he hollers. Meanwhile, the vim and fizz of the performance suggest otherwise – nihilists or not, they still aim to thrill.

6. Bodies
By the standards of a band who would later release a song called Belsen Was A Gas, a song about a “girl from Birmingham / she just had an abortion” should be relatively easy-going fare. But the brutal judgement served on this woman (“Pauline”, allegedly a real Pistols fan who told them of abortions she’d had) in Rotten’s lyrics make for wince-inducing listening..

Yet it’s one of the strongest tracks on the record, partly because it’s so disturbing – I mean, you weren’t under the impression punk was meant to tread carefully around such topics were you? Pretty much the definition of Uneasy Listening.

 

5. Problems
Lit up by Steve Jones’ slashingly simple but brutally effective guitar riff, this high-octane rocker could quite easily have been a fifth single from the album, had the band not near-imploded by that point. One of the heaviest tracks on the record and, aside from the singles, certainly among the best.

4. Holidays In The Sun
The Pistols’ first post-Matlock composition, and the album opener, began with the sound of jackboots marching and ended with Rotten wibbling incoherently about wanting to go “under the Berlin Wall”, by which point, we were too busy pogoing to question what he was on about.

The main riff may have sounded suspiciously similar to that of The Jam’s In The City, but you make your own rules in the punk game. Lines such as “a cheap holiday in other people’s misery” would prove to be among the best Rotten ever wrote, and the fascistic chant of “Reason, reason, reason” gave it a dystopian edge that only added to the sense of Year Zero that punk loved to promote.

3. Pretty Vacant
The Pistols’ third single is lifted to greatness chiefly by one of Johnny Rotten’s finest vocal performances, in which he snarls, sneers and roars an anthem of defiance for a blank generation while sounding anything but vacant – rather he seems to be storing up enough angry energy to fuel Britain’s wind farms for decades to come. As ever it’s built around a blindingly simple base – a handful of chugging power chords, a chantalong chorus and a few well-chosen lines (“You’ll always find us… out to luunch!”), but its powerful enough to shake any laid-back muso out of their complacency.

2. Anarchy In The UK
There can’t have been many more hair-raising couplets in rock history than “I am an anti-christ! I am an anar-kyste!”, and its impact has hardly been dulled with time or repeated listens. The scattershot references to the IRA, UDA, NME and council tenancies, and vows to “destroy passers by” made their singer sound genuinely unhinged and capable of doing serious damage to anyone within gobbing distance, while the pounding, relentless rock rhythm section underneath it make resistance futile.

1. God Save The Queen
Claiming to be an anti-christ, and indeed, an ‘anar-kyste’ were startling enough claims for a rock’n’roll frontman to make, but to then publicly dismiss our reigning monarch, observing “she ain’t no human being” in the year of her universally celebrated Silver Jubilee, represented a whole new level of provocation to the establishment. In terms of timing alone, this is a work of spittle-flecked, petulant genius.

More importantly, though, it’s also a roaring, swaggering firecracker of a rock’n’roll song, the like of which we’ve rarely heard before or since. One that sets your pulse racing just as thrillingly as “A Wop Bob A Loo Bop, A Wop Bam Boom” did 20 years previously

And that coda of “No future, no future for you” summed up much of the uniting sentiments that drew together punk’s audience of disaffected youth in the first place. Punk may have been dismissed as a novelty back then, but they’ll be playing this one long after her majesty is dead and gone.

The SMASHING PUMPKINS – ” Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness ” Released 23rd October 1995

Posted: October 23, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Produced by frontman Billy Corgan; The Smashing Pumpkins’ third album is a twenty-eight-track opus of incredible scope and wonderment. Led by single Bullet with Butterfly Wings, The album features a wide array of styles, as well as greater musical input from bassist D’arcy Wretzky and second guitarist James Iha the album shot to the top of the charts and spawned a number of great singles. It has sold over ten-million units and considered one of the finest albums from the 1990s. Many would question the audacity of a group including twenty-eight tracks on an album. The fact there are no weak moments is backed by a record which sees the U.S. band present their most engaging and ambitious work yet. Billy Corgan’s unique and exceptional song writing is given room to breathe and explore. Mellon Collie’ helped reshape the face of Alternative-Rock, almost single-handedly. It is always a risk releasing a double album – regardless of how good you are – but The Smashing Pumpkins had no fear.

Go big or go home. That’s pretty much what this came down to. 25 years ago Smashing Pumpkins were commercial and critical darlings, coming off the scene-setting “Gish” and the monumental alt-rock statement of “Siamese Dream”. Their next move was a risk – a double album that shaped up as an anachronism on one hand and a potential commercial and critical disaster on the other. Their label told them as much, but Billy Corgan was set on it. “Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness” had to happen.

At this remove, it’s hard to imagine a world where the Pumpkins didn’t take the nuclear option. Mellon Collie feels like the last great hurrah for a certain breed of Gen X American rock band, a final grand statement from a disparate group of artists bound together by the fact that they’d upended the pop apple cart by accident.

Lacking the slash and burn punk streak of Nirvana and the cinematic dourness of Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and the wider Seattle set, Corgan’s music always felt more classic, more florid, less deliberately of the moment. But it’s easy to forget that both Gish and Siamese Dream were defined in part by their succinctness – shoegaze-literate hit after shoegaze-literate hit. Split across two sides that represented day and night, Mellon Collie’s sprawl was startling by comparison: 28 songs (totalling two hours) made the cut, and three times as many were written in a spree that recalled Bruce Springsteen’s feverish hot streak in the build up to Darkness On The Edge Of Town.

“I went around saying I was inspired by Pink Floyd‘s The Wall to try to create that kind of big, ambitious thing,” Corgan told David Wild in the liner notes for Mellon Collie’s 2012 reissue. “And, of course, jerks in the media still take me to task for saying that. For the record, from my point of view, I wasn’t trying to say that I had written my Wall … what I meant was that we were trying to reach for something expansive like Pink Floyd achieved with The Wall, as opposed to making a double album like The White Album by the Beatles, which was basically a wider collection of great songs by a group.”

Chief Pumpkin Billy Corgan was certainly on a creative streak in the early to mid-1990s. Between Siamese Dream, the outtakes collection Pisces Iscariot, the triple-LP length Mellon Collie, and the collection of b-sides compiled on 1996’s The Aeroplane Flies High (which showcased almost 30 new outtakes, although some were covers or written by guitarist James Iha). In this era, The Smashing Pumpkins released about 7 hours of new music recorded between December 1992 and August 1995, much of it written by Corgan, while even more music would surface on later reissues of Mellon Collie and The Aeroplane Flies High.

‘Set the Ray to Jerry’ is one of many Pumpkins outtakes that surfaced on The Aeroplane Flies High, as a b-side to 1989. It shares the gentle insistence of ‘1979’, moodily intense but never launching into a full-blooded rocker. It’s simple, with just drums, a simple James Iha guitar lead, and Corgan on bass. It was apparently written during the Gish tour, and dates back to the Siamese Dream sessions – Corgan told Guitar World that producer Flood vetoed the song.

  • Billy Corgan – Lead vocals, lead and rhythm guitar, piano, keyboards, autoharp, production, mixing, string arrangements
  • Jimmy Chamberlin – Drums, vocals
  • James Iha – Rhythm and lead guitar, vocals, mixing, additional production
  • D’arcy Wretzky – Bass, vocals

Originally Released 23rd October 1995