Boys Keep Swinging being one of those David Bowie tracks that should’ve been a huge hit (and it did actually chart in the UK), but the Americas of the late 1970s just weren’t ready for a song about boys being boys, cutting their moves, striking their poses, popping cherries, checking out other boys, looking good in uniforms. Certainly not one sung by a known alien.
Exposure is a song (for lack of a better word) that Peter Gabriel and Robert Fripp conceived for Gabriel’s rather unsettled second album. Bleak, abrasive, creepy, prophetic – it was determined (it seems) to drive a wedge between what each had been up to in the past with their previous outfits, and the brave new future on the verge of boiling over as the 1980s dawned. Then, to drive the point home, Fripp made it the title track of his 1979 debut solo album, although now a different singer (a woman named Terre Roche) was tearing up the atmosphere, taking things to the point of genuine pain. Because, to quote Mr. Fripp, ” … the old world, characterized by large, unwieldy and vampiric organizations, was dead.” And what did the new one sound like? Small, independent, mobile, intelligent. And up for a fight, no question.
It’s 1979. The 1960s are long gone. Get over it. Unless you’re Embryo (German hippies with hot musical chops), in which case, you pile into a bus with a film crew and a load of recording gear and go further, go east, across Persia, Afghanistan, down the sub-continent into India, mix it up with masters and untouchables, deliver the ancient news. There’s even a movie about it.
In which Severed Heads remind us that there’s joy in repetition, or maybe just madness; and truth in the notion that many of the so-called Industrial artists of the 1980s only got worse as they got better at figuring out their instruments and related technology, got to sounding more and more like normal musicians. In Severed Heads case, that means they’d peaked long before I ever heard them via any number of cassette only releases. But fortunately, that truth eventually found me via Clifford Darling, Please Don’t Live In The Past, a double vinyl compilation full of delightfully strange and, if needs be, antagonistic excursions. Alaskan Polar Bear Heater seems to concern a cocktail.
“Marianne Faithfull‘s Broken English being one of the best albums of 1979 (or any other year for that matter), Guilt being a track that made no sense to me at first. I thought she was saying she felt ‘good’. Why so exquisitely gloomy then? Was it some twisted junkie thing I needed heroin in my veins to figure out? Then I bought the album and read the title, and there it was: Guilt. Which reminds me of sage wisdom c/o old friend Jill. Guilt is easy to avoid. Just don’t do that thing that you know you’ll end up feeling guilty about. Words to live by.” (Philip Random)
“Second of two in a row from London Calling, arguably the greatest rock and roll album ever. Released at the very end of the 1970s which definitely makes it the first indispensably great rock and roll album for the 1980s, because none of it was looking back. Commercial radio, of course, only played two tracks but all four sides were nigh on brilliant – the power and rage of full-on punk tempered only enough to allow everything else to burst on through. With The Card Cheat, that meant widescreen rock all brassed up and gunning for the promised land, which is again miles beyond anything Bruce Springsteen could have hoped for at the time, who I’m only mentioning here because his 1980 double album The River had no problem getting played all over the radio. And it was at least two sides too long.” (Philip Random)
Randophonic 