Coke, Crisps, Refreshers and Fleas The Size of Rats - let's have a listen to 'Diamond Dogs'

Watersmeet forever!!!

A few nights ago (Good Friday 2011 to be precise) I could not sleep for love nor money (or even a bit of both) so I ended up reaching for the ever faithful ipod and instead of the soporific tranquility of Brian Eno's 'Thursday Afternoon' which usually does the trick, I felt awake and jittery enough to listen to Bowie's 'Diamond Dogs'. I got through the whole album, still couldn't sleep and then lay there conceiving the blog I am about to write. As this is the first chance I have had to sit down and get the thing written, I hope it comes across as well as it did in my head at 3am the other morning..............

I am pretty convinced that I became the person I am today - at least in terms of how I love music and how music affects me - on a particular night in 1974 when I was a mere 9 years old. Mum and Dad went out for the evening and the usual list of babysitters must have been so unanimously out of action that the job eventually fell with my brother Brian and a few of his friends. Our folks left Brian with a list of do's and dont's, vague bedtimes for us all and the price of a Chinese takwaway for all. The 'Chinese take away' the boys went and bought consisted of a bottle of Teachers, 40 cigarettes and enough Coke, crisps and sweets to keep the rest of us happy and also quiet. To complete the picture, the two brothers from up the road arrived with a copy of the recently released 'Diamond Dogs' which was played, over and over, on Dad's old radiogram for the entire evening. I don't remember there being any respectful, silent appreciation of the album - it was just kind of happening in the background, but as the older boys got more and more hammered on Whiskey and I got more and more charged on the sugar and inevitably deadly additives in cheap 1970s sweets I became more and more transfixed with what I was hearing. Quite content to stand in a corner out of the way, chopping Townsend-like at my makeshift tennis racquet guitar, I couldn't quite believe that music could have such a physical affect on a human being, as goosebumps rose on my arms, my scalp tingled and my chest hurt (it wasn't the three packs of Refreshers I had scoffed either) Not only was I transfixed by the album, I was also terrified by it as well, particularly the howl that kicks it all off and the terrifying imagery in the spoken 'Future Legend' that follows, as 'fleas the size of rats' suck on 'rats the size of cats' - In fact, for at least a year afterwards, I played 'Diamond Dogs' with numbing regularity, but everytime carefully placed the needle far enough over to miss out 'Future Legend' completely. I'm sure my brothers and my sister will remember just how scared I was of an album I enjoyed so much.

So the evening in question came to a not too sticky end. We managed to tidy up, get our comatose babysitter into bed and his friends off home - in fact we even managed to somehow muster up a chow mein and a couple of spring rolls from somewhere, just to make the deception complete. (Sorry Mum and Dad - it was all Brian's fault of course) and eventually Brian got his own copy of the album, only for me to comandeer it and play it until I wore the vinyl out.

'Diamond Dogs' is an exceptional album, possibly Bowie's best (very close though - my jury is still out on what is my actual favourite, if indeed I even have one) Whilst is misses a lead guitarist of the calibre of, say Mick Ronson or Earl Slick (at that time, past and present Bowie guitarists respectively) as Bowie himself opted to play all the guitars on the album, you do still have the wonderful avant guard piano of Mike Garson and some excellent sax playing from Bowie himself who also brings in Moog and Mellotron synthesizers to great and eerie effect. Aside from the chilling 'Future Legend' you get the (very Stones like) glam shuffle of the title track and the lead off single 'Rebel Rebel', the US Cop Show funk of '1984', the rousing ballad 'When You Rock and Roll With Me' and the dark and sinister 'We Are The Dead' - which is one of my favourite Bowie lyrics (it wasnt until years later when I bought a CD release with printed lyrics that I realised that what I thought was him singing 'funky bumps' is actually 'fuck-me pumps'). The real moment of magic on the album comes with the ten minute medley 'Sweet Thing / Candidate / Sweet Thing Reprise' - a beautiful and melancholy construction in which Bowie compares casual sex to 'putting pain in a stranger' and invites his friend / lover to 'buy some drugs and watch a band and jump in the river holding hands'. The whole show ends with the eerie Mellotron 'choir' that introduces the prayer like appeal to a higher God of 'Big Brother' (this 'choir' effect would be used to similar grand effect a decade later on XTC's 'Deliver Us From The Elements' and a further decade later on Radiohead's 'Exit Music') and ends with the quirky, almost funky, 5/4 shuffle; 'Chant Of The Ever Circling Skeletal Family' and the repeated echo to fade of 'Bro...bro.....bro....bro.....' which to me, did and still does sound like 'Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian' - When you consider the circumstances under which I first encountered this incredible album and then nurtured a love for it that holds strong to this day, that seems quite fitting to me. Cheers Hedge!

By the way - if you are one of the kind few to read this blog, please do add yourself as a follower and also you might care to read a lot of the comments added to past entries by my fine friend, the excellent and accomplished musician, poet, performance artist and psychoanalyst to the living dead, Mr Andy Warner, aka Drew Crow Star - I really do appreciate the comments he has added and have no reservation in saying that what he writes is a damn sight better than what I produce. Your good health, My Lord.

More to follow?

Col

'The Sun Machine Is Coming Down' or "Mum, what's a phallus?" - Bowie's Space Oddity album revisited.....

'Space Oddity' (originally released with the imaginative title 'David Bowie') is Bowie's second album, released in 1969, still a good few years before the megastardom that came with 'Ziggy Stardust' I wont go into all the biographical stuff. If interested, why not read THE best Bowie biography of them all; 'Strange Fascination' written by my good friend David Buckley - I'll add a link to his marvellous website at the end of this blog. (Was that okay David? Great. £20.00 should do the trick. No problem. Any time)

As you should all know by now (all five of you that read this anyway!) I always write about albums in terms of my own experience and impression of them. And so it came to pass that I first heard 'Space Oddity' the album in the dull summer of 1977. I had just finished my first year at secondary school, adolescence was kicking in and to make matters worse I was carrying a huge pre-pubescent torch for a friend of my life long and therefore long suffering friend Rachel. I dont remember much about this object of my affections now, other than she wore paisley headscarves and at the age 12 already had the demanour of an angry librarian who you have just told that you've dropped your books in a muddy puddle. It never came to anything you understand. Poor Rachel, she had to put up with a lot growing up two doors down the road from me, and I'm sure she did her best to fight my cause with the wonderful Headscarf Harridan. Thanks Rach!

The more I have gained in years, the more I regard 'S.O.' as a guilty but quite intense pleasure. Listening to it earlier this evening for a pre blog reappraisal I was relieved to find that I still love it to bits, still sing along with all the words and even still get a bit excited at the end of the lengthy hippy indulgence of 'Cygnet Committee' - a song that completely blew me away when I first heard it. The album is in places, let's be honest, as cheesy as a great big overripe Brie and with all its late 1960s fey folkiness it does sound at times like it was conceived, performed and recorded by Trevor and Simon's legendary early 1990s kids TV pastiche 'Singing Corner' but this all adds to its undoubted charm I'm sure.

Back in 1977 I hadn't read a single Bowie biography and had no real regard or concern for any chronology in his work so as far as I was concerned he had always been a big famous rock star and hadnt spent the whole of the 1960s in vain pursuit of a hit single or two. He was also, of course, light years away from the loved up hippy folk rock of Space Oddity by 1977 and was about to release 'Heroes'. I cared not.

Of course things get underway with the title track, about which I cannot say any more really and I expect if you are reading this then you may well have heard it a few times already. This is followed by the easy going bo diddley jam of 'Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed' which (honestly) prompted me to ask "Mum, what's a phallus?" because of the line 'I'm a phallus in pigtails'. 'Letter To Hermione' and 'An Occasional Dream' are (in my opinion) two of Bowie's most enduring love songs. Terribly dated of course, and there is still that urge to shout 'swing your pants' from time to time but I still reckon they are very sweet and slightly melancholy songs. 'Cygnet Committee' clocks in at just under 10 minutes and is Bowie's passionate rant against the hippy principles. It is a bit cringe inducing with hindsight, but I still love it and just a few hours ago I was relieved to still find myself bellowing out 'I want to livvvaaaah' at the end, the goosebumps rising on my arms once more. Bowie's ode to 'Janine' (a name given such a bad press in the aftermath of Spinal Tap and Eastenders) is a little more lively and the strange but beautiful 'The Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud' sounds like something from an avant garde late 1960s stage show. Possibly that was the intention at the time? One of my favourite songs on the album is the Dylanesque 'God Knows I'm Good' - a genuinely sad tale of a poor and skint old dear reduced to pilfering from a supermarket (a tin of 'Stewing Steak' no less) and getting caught in the process. I was very moved indeed. Still am. The poor old woman. Someone give her a shilling to pay for it and let's let bygones be bygones you bastards!!! And so to the final song, the hippy anthem that never was, and none other than Bowie's own 'Hey Jude' (if I say so myself) - 'Memory Of A Free Festival' Actually, its great. OK there's the grimace inducing, posh Cambridge spoken intro ("errm, maybe I should announce it") and some pretty hairy hippy imagery ("We talked with tall Venuisans passing through") but so what. Just as I did (quietly) as a 12 year old, headscarf fixated, pre-teen oik back in 1977, I found myself singing (loudly); 'The Sun Machine is coming down and we're gonna have a party' over and over again earlier this evening with great passion, and feeling all the better for the experience.

As an early Bowie album this is indeed 'rugged and naive' but to me it is still incredible nonetheless.

More to follow.....

Col

PS Visit David Buckley's website here;
http://www.david-buckley.com/
He is a seriously good rock writer, a thoroughly decent bloke and I do hope to have the chance to get inebriated with him in person at some stage in the very near future.

Let's have a listen to 'Music In A Dolls House' by Family

There are times when only the unlikely combination of a bacon sarnie and a large whiskey will do. But as I doubt there is the makings of either in the kitchen at the moment and a lightning trip over to Chorleywood is not practical at this moment in time, a coffee and a couple of the ‘toffee pennies’ – you know, the ones that can remove fillings, or even teeth if you are not careful - from the Quality Streets left over from Christmas will have to do. For someone who claims to have such a broad and varied taste in music, there are still quite a few bands that I only know one song by. If I mention Blue Oyster Cult, Bachman Turner Overdrive, Boston and Golden Earring (to name but a few) I wonder if you could possibly guess which songs they might be? And there’s me getting all irate when people say the only song they know by The Vapors is ‘Turning Japanese’ – talk about double standards. Up until recently, the same applied to Family (their 1973 chart hit ‘Burlesque’, another favourite of my brother Brian, being the song in question) until I read somewhere or another that The Beatles had intended to call what became their eponymous 1968 double (‘The White Album’) ‘A Dolls’ House’, then discovered that Family had beaten them to it with their debut, ‘Music In A Dolls’ House’ This incredible feat of inadvertantly putting one over on the musically omnipotent Fab Four was reason enough for me to want to investigate ‘MIADH’ for myself a few years back. Thankfully good old Milton Keynes library had a lonesome and distinctly under borrowed looking copy in stock. Job done. MIADH is, dare I say it, quintessentially 'British Rock From 1968', in that it blends left over remnants of psychedelia, embryonic progressive rock, back to basics blues rock, folkie ballads and some oddball humour into an addictive and hugely enjoyable 35 minutes or so. Prominent throughout are the distinctive trademark wobbly vibrato vocals of Roger Chapman, backed by the striking falsetto of multi instrumentalist Jim King. As for content, it’s one great big (but massively enjoyable and strangely cohesive) mess of differing themes and styles. Sit back and enjoy the eccentric tally ho and gallop of the opener ‘The Chase’, the beautiful string backed ballad ‘Mellowing Grey’ and the shuffling boogie of ‘Old Songs New Songs’. Jig around a bit to the funky / bluesy ‘Hey Mr Policeman’, the power house rock- reminiscent of late Small Faces – of ‘Winter’ and the dreamlike tick / tock of ‘Breeze’. The psychedelic phased drums and mellotrons of the mini epic ‘3xTime’ close the album, but not before you get a short raucous blast of ‘God Save The Queen’ – and that’s only half of what is on offer here. Both Jim King and bassist Ric Grech (who went to join Clapton, Baker and Winwood in ‘Blind Faith’) left the band one year later after the band released their follow up, the more mature but equally impressive ‘Family Entertainment’, but the band continued, developed and went from strength to strength. Family continued to produce some fine records well into the 1970s (I have since caught up with most of their back catalogue and would recommend ‘Family Entertainment’ and ‘Bandstand’ for further listening) but would never again produce something quite so whacky and wonderful as ‘MIADH’, without doubt one of the great British albums of the late 1960s. More to follow.......