David Bowie - Young Americans (1975)

No one does re-invention quite like David Bowie. After moving from hirsute Folk-Rock to trashy Glam in the early-seventies, his next move would prove to be his most shocking yet. Confounding his Glam disciples he re-emerged as a smooth operating practitioner of Philadelphia Soul with the album Young Americans. True, the transition had been coming; embarking on the second half of his infamous Diamond Dogs tour in 1974 the Philly influences were apparent – a slicker sound, grander arrangements – as Bowie had absorbed blue-eyed soul music like only he could: by drowning himself in the music and its concurrent scene.

Always, always, surrounding himself with the most brilliant musicians Bowie’s dalliance with Soul yielded a remarkable album that proved he was capable of mastering any field of music he turned his hand to. Opening with the lusciously lucid title track the listener is treated with a design of things to come: a big, confident sound full of yearning emotion. The elegant ‘Win’ is as heartfelt as you are likely to hear whilst ‘Fascination’ (co-written with Luther Vandross who is part of the sumptuous backing vocal group throughout) delivers a funky bounce as infectious as the bubonic plague.

Elsewhere, ‘Right’ delivers a cool latino shake and the opulent ‘Somebody Up There Likes Me’ is delivered with religious fervour, played in the funkiest church you’re likely to visit this side of Suffragette City.

Was his version of the Beatles' ‘Across the Universe’ a wise move? That’s for you to decide but it certainly is a valiant attempt. The delicately poised ‘Can You Hear Me’ makes amends and could easily be sung by Dusty Springfield or any other soul great.

The album closes with the highly-stylised funk of ‘Fame’. Co-written with guitarist Carlos Alomar and John Lennon, the song takes a wry look at globe-eating stardom and, ironically, delivered Bowie his first US no. 1.

The music here is distinctly upbeat, positive and relaxed, something which was incongruous with Bowie’s whirlwind, drug-addled life at the time. Ditching the theatrical wail of his glam period and instead mining his sumptuous baritone, Bowie’s voice lends the songs here an almost soothing quality yet fortunately it all verges just the right side of easy-listening. A gloriously intoxicating album and one which furthered his ever-rising star.

Lady GaGa - Poker Face (single)

Who the hell does Lady GaGa think she is? Actually, who the hell is Lady GaGa? You turn your back from the pop scene for thirty seconds and suddenly a new peroxide-blonde upstart is wearing a bin bag and gyrating your way on screen. This latest pop offering releases her second single, Poker Face, on Monday and you just know the song is going to be played in Turkish discos.

Drawing that great parallel between gambling and love (whether to stick or twist, keep your cards close to your chest, blah blah fucking blah) the song betrays GaGa’s Wild Child image and opts for cosy synths and a particularly limp chorus. Alternately it could be about oral sex – try and picture the boisterous geezers on dancefloors shouting “‘Ere, I’d like to Poke ‘er Face! Oi! Oi!”

She’ll probably be huge because I just don’t know anymore.

Iggy Pop - The Idiot (1977)

It’s hard to imagine just how fucked up Iggy Pop was back in the mid-seventies. As the Stooges crumbled in a murky swamp of drugs and death Pop found himself a broken shell of a man, the result of an intense heroin addiction. After an ever-increasing series of embarrassingly pathetic incidents, both on-stage and off-, he checked himself into a mental institution where he claims his only consistent visitor was David Bowie, something of an old acquaintance from headier, bygone days in London after Pop re-located there after yet another Stooges meltdown. It is fair to say that Bowie helped Pop tremendously in his recovery from his serious problems yet Iggy returned the favour, assisting Bowie through a period of crippling cocaine use.

So, as Bowie absorbed the Pop into his now-downsized inner-sanctum, the two set about writing and recording an album to be known as The Idiot. It certainly holds its own place in Rock history: it was the album Ian Curtis listened to when he decided to hang himself. Contrary to Curtis’ dramatic reaction to the record it is, in reality, a mighty fine offering from the pint-sized rocker.

Partly recorded in France and Germany (Bowie’s fascination with Krautrock present throughout) the album is notable for Bowie’s role as producer and co-writer. It says something so deliciously apt about Iggy Pop, the perennial almost-was, that one of his finest, most focused and personal albums has someone else looming ominously over proceedings; here it is Bowie as puppetmaster. Despite some mystery over who features on the album it is generally perceived that the music is practically all Bowie’s whilst Pop deals primarily with lyrical duties.

The album opens with 'Sister Midnight', an exercise in measured funk courtesy of Bowie’s superb rhythm section of Dennis Davis and George Murray complimented by the grandly talented Carlos Alomar on guitar (here taking a writing credit).

From here the album wears it’s electronic, postmodern influences on its sleeve, most notably on the clunky 'Mass Production' and the post-punk classic 'Nightclubbing'; the latter is as sleazy and lecherous as you’re likely to hear, its lobotomized beat and stabbed synths creeping along with menacing detachment . The creepy 'Baby' sees Pop’s croon at its most melancholy and features the delightful line ‘Maybe there’s nothing to see/ I’ve already been down the street of chance’.

Delving deeper, Pop casts a nostalgic eye back on his days in the Stooges with 'Dum Dum Boys', a song which exposes the singer as a lonely soul, abandoned by his brothers when he most needed them. Shouting, ‘Where are ya now I need ya?’ he sounds battered and bruised, yearning for a simplicity the past, and drugs, have laid waste to.

The albums centrepiece, however, is the impossibly brilliant 'China Girl'. Far superior to Bowie’s glossy attempt six years later, this version grooves around euphoric melodies before Pop adopts a pained, strained vocal as the song gallops away into the distance, leaving this listener slack-jawed in awe. A breathtaking song.

For those thinking that this is some sort of ‘rehab’ album for the Motor-City native, they are grossly mistaken; he was still battling many demons during this period of his life and the album chronicles a man merely picking up the pieces. Generally overlooked in the Iggy Pop canon, The Idiot is a pale, anaemic album (check out the vampiric 'Funtime') which rarely looks optimistically on proceedings. It does, however, chronicle a particular flux one of Rock’s most inimitable characters was going through and the listener can’t help but root for him throughout. Just don’t mention car insurance.

The Rolling Stones - Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out (1970)

Live albums can often be patchy affairs. Live Rolling Stones albums are often patchier. However, one thing which can be said about them is that they certainly reflect the particular phase the band would have been going through at the time. From 1982’s Still Life when they just didn’t care anymore to 1991’s Flashpoint which captured them as the well-oiled money-making monster we know and love(?) today, the evolution of the band has always been caught on tape. The quality of the recorded show is also dependent on Keith Richards’ own dependence on drugs.

The Rolling Stones first official live album, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out, was recorded in late 1969 as part of an American tour, their first tour anywhere since the halcyon days of 1967 when the band couldn’t hear themselves over the screaming girls who would leave auditoriums stinking of piss. The band now faced a different challenge: the audience were there to actually listen to their music, so the band bumped up the amplification, the length of the show, everything.

The album begins with the band’s now-trademark recording claiming them to be ‘The Greatest Rock ‘n Roll Band in The World’ – first used on this tour – and, on listening to the album, one really can’t argue with the claim. Capturing a band embarking on the peak years of their career as both a live act and as a recording group the album is drenched in the sex and death blues which they so excelled at.

The tracklisting isn’t instantly recognisable for fans expecting yet another run through of 'Satisfaction' or 'Get Off of My Cloud' – but doesn’t that make it all the more exciting? Here the Stones flex their blues muscles with renditions of Robert Johnson’s lonesome 'Love in Vain' - sounding like one of those perfect concert moments where time and unexplained emotions are perfectly crystallised - as well as the creeping 'Stray Cat Blues'. Yet it is the utterly menacing 'Midnight Rambler' where the true magic of the album lies. Stretched out to nine minutes Keith Richards’ raunchy riff (does he know any other?) is gradually replaced by a bluesy breakdown, the essence of the blues dripping from Richards and Mick Taylor’s fingers.

For those who possess a sketchy knowledge of the Stones there is enough here to remain satisfied. 'Jumpin Jack Flash' is played with heady abandon whilst 'Honky Tonk Women' is dispatched with glorious enthusiasm. 'Sympathy For The Devil' bounces along intoxicatingly as Mick Taylor screams and wails on his Les Paul (his playing deliciously gorgeous as usual) and the welcome inclusion of 'Live With Me', including a fantastically bum note right at the start of the song, harks back to the band’s R ’n B roots (never has a group of skinny white cockneys sounded like a troupe of black Chicago natives). There is of course a couple of Chuck Berry numbers, 'Carol' and 'Little Queenie', to keep Keith Richards happy.

They were the baddest band on the planet during this epoch, a time when hippy idealism was being booted in the head, and no band anywhere possessed such an inherent sense of danger or a knack of backing it up. The performance recorded here captures a band in fine live form and, more importantly, having a hell of a time on stage. And to think Altamont was just over a week away...

Late of the Pier + Support - Komedia, Bath - 23.02.09

Standing across the street from Bath’s shiny new Komedia club I puff on my cigarette. The red neon sign bathes the pavement and washes over those in the respectably hefty queue. An aesthetic dominates: angular haircuts and fine facial hair for the boys, similarly geometric haircuts and shimmering, multicoloured leggings for the girls. I think I spot someone who is over 21.

Komedia’s neo-classical opulence appears better suited to opera than sweaty Rock ‘n Roll but no one minds as groups of students and teenagers huddle in groups in front of the stage, no doubt exchanging tips on what shampoos to use (or not, in some cases).

‘Thank you for clapping; people sometimes throw things at me after the first song’, says Connan Mockasin, standing alone with his guitar. Flitting from the psychedelic to the haunting to the unashamedly catchy, he manipulates his guitar like a Hawaiian Jimi Hendrix, bending and twisting notes out of all recognition. His songs take off properly when he is joined by his drummer, gaining a ramshackle bounce which would make Jack White proud.

Four young men walk on the stage looking like they’ve just spent the day in Topman. They are Post War Years and they are criminally ripping off Foals. It is so painfully predictable, so painfully now that half of the audience are resigned to obligingly pay attention whilst the other half lap it up like Pavlov’s dog as the band lay on synths and clipped guitars over jarred, fidgety drums. Keep looking interested and move slowly towards the bar...

As the house lights go down, a wave of clammy anticipation washes over the venue. Late of the Pier launch headlong into singles 'Space and the Woods' and 'Heartbeat' and the sound is thunderous. The brittle synths and keyboards are replaced by thick zaps of sound, the bass threatens to bring the walls down and my nostrils actually start quivering.

Looking like the confused offspring of Gary Numan and Freddie Mercury, they are dressed in capes and binliners as they storm through Fantasy Black Channel. The band whip the pit of teenagers at the front of the stage into a hot, sticky frenzy; 'Focker' is a particular highlight grabbing the audience by the neck and refusing to let go until it has its way. Which it does.

As they play their final song, 'Bathroom Gurgle', the band is looking drained. Vocalist Samuel Dust is sitting on one of the speakers dangling a beige dap on the end of a hospital-thin leg out towards the audience who are trying to get a touch of their hero. They don’t quite reach. They never will.

David Bowie - Low (1977)

Ask someone what 1977 represents in music and the answer is invariably the explosion of Punk. Punk Rock’s primary policy was to bulldoze the Establishment into touch yet David Bowie was always aloofly separated from the Establishment despite his stratospheric success. Whilst Punk was gobbing away in London, Bowie had set up shop in Berlin with Brian Eno to begin work on a set of albums which would come to be known as his ‘Berlin trilogy’.

However, this was no holiday. After spending the first half of the seventies in a vacuum of cocaine, Bowie’s move was a type of rehab: shutting himself off in a bleak and fractured Berlin wrought with social and political tension, he was rid of the slimy hangers-on, the yes men and (the majority of) his drug dealers which had been following him for the previous five or so years as his star rose and rose.

Low was the first album of this new musical path. The album could easily be viewed as an apt metaphor for Berlin itself; an album split into two distinct halves – the decadent and the bruised.
If Bowie was experiencing a new clarity of mind then it is obvious from the off. Opener Speed of Life (one of four instrumentals on the album) strides forward triumphantly with the determined optimism of someone who thinks the only way from here is up. The perky Breaking Glass follows with its strolling funk, showing that Bowie had lost none of his precision showmanship.

The album’s first single Sound and Vision continues the upbeat mood with its rubber drums before Be My Wife (verging on self-pity) and Always Crashing in the Same Car (a sombre admission of clumsiness, both physical and emotional) ease the listener into the album’s more textured landscapes.

The tracks co-written with Brian Eno have the ubiquitous producer’s mark stamped all over them. Warszawa is a grand gesture complete with primal howls whilst Art Decade is unsettling and haunting; both songs perfect for a German Art-House flick never released in a cinema (not one near you anyway).

The album has something of a futile, limp ending. Weeping Wall comes and goes without kicking up any fuss whatsoever whilst Subterraneans meekly rounds things off (although it does feature some cool smoky sax).

Bowie’s glam disciples were thrown off track with his previous effort Station to Station, yet these were the same fans who felt bemused at his foray into ersatz-Soul. Low heralded a new era of experimentation and furthered artistic restlessness and the album shows an artist unafraid to confront demons and forge new musical expression. It alienated fans even further but by this point Bowie had more than earned his right to do what he damn-well pleased. (8/10)

The Human League - Dare!

Question: What happens when two of your original band members leave to form their own group?
Answer: You recruit two schoolgirls you find in a disco as backing singers and create a genre-defining masterpiece.

By the end of 1980, having released two albums, the Human League had fractured after singer/songwriter Phil Oakey and co-writer Martyn Ware fell out due to differing ambitions for the group; Oakey wanted to pursue a poppier, more accessible pathway whilst Ware was insistent on furthering the group’s more experimental facets. With a UK and European tour perilously imminent Ware finally left taking other member Ian Craig Marsh with him (both going on to form Heaven 17).

Oakey remained the sole survivor of the Human League and was all but written off by the music press. That is until he hired two musicians to replace the departed Ware and Marsh but, more importantly, recruited two 18 year-old schoolgirls, Joanne Catherall and Susan Sulley, as backing singers/dancers, giving the seemingly moribund group a galvanising injection of glamour.

After completing an often tumultuous tour (the integration of Catherall and Sulley was not a smooth one due to an adverse reaction from some hardcore fans) the band went into the studio to record Dare!, the pop-influenced album which Oakey had wanted to record yet which had cost him his partnership with Ware. Cue huge success.

The album is an impressive display of crisp, hygienic production which, seemingly against the odds, manages to possess a degree of warmth and depth. Oakey’s heartfelt croon and intelligent lyrics lend the songs a passion which complements the album’s otherwise distant, often alien sounds. Unlike electro’s common tendency to sound like the artist in question is just discovering new sounds on his synthesizer and laying them down before your very ears, there is not a great deal of ostentation here; everything is in its place for a reason.

By the time you reach the album’s final track, the world-eating Don’t You Want Me, the ears have been tended to by ten crafted pop diamonds, each with their own story to tell. The kitsch boogie of The Things That Dreams Are Made Of is a cloudy-eyed paean to materialism; the elegant Darkness a fearful, paranoid cry for help; whilst I Am The Law is told from the perspective of a controlling lover (it’s chorus is the creepiest passage of music on the album).

Elsewhere, you can almost see the disco lasers swish and chop before your eyes on Do Or Die and the plaintive Seconds casts a nostalgic eye on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The soap opera of Don’t You Want Me is still a superb pop song after all this time, despite Oakey’s initial reservation that it was merely an album-filler (thank God for record executives going behind artists’ backs and choosing the singles themselves).

A pre-requisite of any great pop album is that each song sounds utterly unique, creating it’s own individual imprint in your mind. In this department Dare! does not fail. Whilst it occasionally sounds like an 80s porn soundtrack there is a real sense of innovation throughout the album. It often sounds so simple, like the majority of great pop should, yet if you listen closely the construction of the album is meticulous and one can imagine Phil Oakey obsessing over what sounds should be where. It is fantastic pop music in all its catchy, hummable glory and despite being held to account for creating all manner of awful 80s electro groups is as big an influence on modern pop imaginable.