round and around...

In the process of clearing out the 10,000 surplus emails in my inbox, I've come across another post that I wrote for someone else (in 2009). As I'm loathe to let good(?) content go to waste, and because I find it interesting (even if no-one else does).... I'm (re-)posting it here.  Enjoy. I still have a soft spot for Nik Kershaw.

---

Memories Can't Wait.... a song that reminds me of a friend (originally written for Ben on Silent Words Speak Loudest, or possibly The Art Of Noise. I can't remember)

I didn't grow up in an especially musical household.  Neither of my parents are particularly into music and because it had never formed a large part of their lives, it was only natural that my two brothers and I didn't initially form much of an interest ourselves.  I've always found it a little hard to understand how two people, both just five or six years younger than Paul McCartney and presumably slap bang in the prime demographic for the Beatles, could have both have missed out on such a vibrant period of British music, but miss it they did.  My mum tells me that she owned a copy of Revolver and my dad had a pile of "Top of the Pops" LPs that he had inherited from his father's pub, but their hearts weren't in it and our house was largely devoid of background music.

My first real musical exposure, then, came instead from regular visits to the house of a friend just down the road.  Like me, Will had two siblings, although where I was a middle child, he was the youngest by several years.  I don't know if his parents were especially into music, but his dad worked for Rotel, manufacturers of high quality stereo equipment, and their house was naturally filled with top-notch hi-fis.  Although we spent a lot of our time together mucking about with computer games, playing with our Star Wars figures and riding our bikes outdoors, we did occasionally mess around with the record player and with his brother and sisters' 12" singles.  Although I can remember listening to the likes of Murray Head's "One Night in Bangkok", a bit of Level 42 and "Hole in My Shoe" by Neil from the Young Ones, the artist that always stood out the most for me was Nik Kershaw.  Both "Human Racing" and "The Riddle" were released in 1984, and we used to sit entranced by songs such as "I Won't Let the Sun Go Down on Me", "Human Racing", "Wouldn't It Be Good", "Wide Boy" and - especially - "The Riddle".  Our listening coincided with our reading of "Masquerade", the book of illustrations for children by Kit Williams that concealed clues to the location of a golden hare hidden somewhere in the UK.  The book was first published in 1979, but the hare had only (apparently) been discovered in 1982, so the idea of riddles was fresh in our minds as we tried to work out what on earth Nik Kershaw was trying to tell us when he spoke of trees by rivers, holes in the ground and old men of Arran.

Kershaw has, of course, subsequently revealed that there is no meaning to "The Riddle" at all, but to our ten year old minds it was a puzzle well worth trying to solve.  Besides, it was (and remains) a fantastic record, and through it I began to discover a love of music that has stayed with me to this day.  I can't say that I listen to Kershaw very much any more, but he has the proud distinction of being the artist who created the first two albums that I ever bought with my own money.  Better yet, whenever I think of him, I can't help but think of the letter that I wrote to Jimmy Savile in the summer of 1984 asking if he could fix it for me and for my best friend Will to meet our hero.  Saville never wrote back, sadly, and he certainly never fixed it for me.  Although his parents still live down the road from my folks, I lost touch with Will a few years ago after we both went to University.  Musically we had drifted apart, with him baffled by my love of heavy metal and me a touch confused by his love of Lenny Kravitz.  We'll always have Nik Kershaw though, and whenever I hear the chiming opening chords of "The Riddle", I'm reminded of my first best friend.

gonna get you, no matter how far...

Shamelessly copying Pete from Uborka, I’ve decided to do an album-by-album career retrospective of a band that have remained a musical touchstone in my life. Pete has been working his way through the many and varied back catalogue of David Bowie, but I’m choosing a band who have been ground zero for my musical taste: Iron Maiden. For all their commercial success, Iron Maiden have never exactly been cool, even if you can now find their t-shirts worn by people who wouldn’t dream of listening to their music. Truth be told, it was the album cover that led me to pick up that cassette copy of The Number of the Beast in Our Price in 1987, but it was the music itself that proved to be a turning point in my listening life, moving me away from my juvenilia and opening the door to a much, much wider and more interesting musical world. The only other band that have had anything like the influence that Iron Maiden had on me were The Smiths, but I didn’t discover them until I was nineteen years old and starting at University. Iron Maiden took hold of me when I was thirteen, and I still get a fierce sense of joy today, aged 41, when I listen to their music.

Iron Maiden, Iron Maiden (1980)

Iron Maiden are very much Steve Harris’ band: formed in 1975 and working their way through a number of experimental line-ups before finally releasing their debut album in April 1980. Only a couple of members of the “classic” Iron Maiden line-up were in place at this time, with the band featuring, as well as Steve Harris on bass and Dave Murray on guitar, Paul Di'Anno on vocals, Dennis Stratton on guitar, and Clive Burr on drums. The band’s mascot, Ed the Head, is also in place on the album cover…. albeit looking a little more intact than in some of his later incarnations. Steve Harris has always reacted angrily to suggestions that the band’s sound has ever been influenced by punk, but you only have to listen to the moment when Di’Anno’s vocals kick in on opening track, “Prowler”, to realise that Harris is fooling no-one and the influence of punk is writ large across much of this album. Mostly this is because of Di’Anno’s growly, throaty vocal style, but there’s also a raw-ness to the band themselves that makes the comparison impossible to avoid. It’s true that Bruce Dickinson’s operatic foghorn wail and enormous vocal range took the band to another level when he joined for The Number of the Beast, but there’s surely no denying that Di’Anno’s vocals were a large part of Iron Maiden’s early success (and the album charted at #4 in the UK charts, which seems remarkable). Maybe it’s controversial to say so, Bruce Dickinson is clearly the better singer with a much bigger range, but Di’Anno’s singing here on songs like “Running Free” and “Iron Maiden” has never been matched or bettered by Dickinson, even though both songs remain in the live set-list for almost every gig. For all the punky influences, there are also hints of the band’s future direction in songs like “The Phantom of the Opera”, with its sprawling arrangement and duelling guitars (that will forever, in my head at least, conjure up images of Daley Thompson in that brilliant Lucozade advert).

Listening back to the album now, what strikes me the most is quite how good it is: the band had been honing their craft for five years by the time they released this record, and although they apparently aren’t happy with the production on the album, it still sounds pretty good to me. Raw, maybe, but that suits the songs (follow-up album "Killers" actually suffers from having more of a production sheen on it, in my opinion). In fact, I don’t think there can be many records that are 36 years old and still sound this fresh. Maybe the band doesn’t sound entirely like classic Maiden yet (mostly because it doesn’t feature Bruce Dickinson), but it’s barely dated. This incarnation of Maiden are some way from the finished product, which was probably still three or four years away at this point, but they are edgy and exciting and clearly on the cusp of something big.  As a sure sign of how much I like this album, I even really like the instrumental piece, "Transylvania" too.  Without Di'Anno singing - the single biggest factor in the band sounding so different - it actually sounds a lot more like the Iron Maiden we've come to know and love over the years, albeit a punkier version. Steve Harris once said that "I think if anyone wants to understand Maiden's early thing, in particular the harmony guitars, all they have to do is listen to Wishbone Ash's Argus album. Thin Lizzy too, but not as much. And then we wanted to have a bit of a prog thing thrown in as well, because I was really into bands like Genesis and Jethro Tull. So you combine all that with the heavy riffs and the speed, and you've got it". Hmm.  Maybe that's true, but I think the punk is in there whether he likes to admit it or not, even without Di'Anno's vocal style.

 One of the most interesting things about Iron Maiden over the years has been the sheer breadth and variety of their lyrics. I’m sure that, in most people’s heads, they sing about nothing much more than war and the devil… which is probably an easy assumption to make given the subject matter some of their most famous songs (“Aces High”, “The Trooper”, “The Number of the Beast” to name three). Actually, they are incredibly varied: myths (“Flight of Icarus”), ancient Egypt (“Powerslave”), poetry (“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”), Nightmares (“Fear of the Dark”)… etc. etc. The lyrics on their debut are somewhat cruder: “Prowler” is a great song to open the record, but there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s about a stalker and “Charlotte the Harlot” isn’t exactly at the forefront of feminist thinking. Some of the slower songs are good, but perhaps a bit cheesy and derivative (“Remember Tomorrow” sounds a bit like Thin Lizzy, and “Strange World” sounds a lot like a re-heated version of “Remember Tomorrow”), but at least the band are trying to mix it up a little bit.

Best Song: Phantom of the Opera. Not for nothing do they still play this one at most of their gigs. It’s the best signpost here of the direction the band are heading.
Biggest Surprise: I’d forgotten how good Sanctuary sounds
Weakest Song: I’m not a big fan of “Strange World”, but even though they’ve revisited her in four subsequent songs, the lyrics to “Charlotte the Harlot” just make me wince
Ed the Head looks…..: …. Like a zombie punk. Just don’t tell Steve Harris that I said that.
Three word review: Raw, vibrant, fresh.

Next: Killers (1981)

This should be an interesting journey: with the release of this year's "The Book of Souls", Iron Maiden now have 16 studio albums.  Many of them I know extremely well from my youth, but I essentially stopped buying new Iron Maiden records when Fear of the Dark was released in 1992.  I'm looking forward to this, although it may take me a while.

she glows in the dark and I'm struck by the sight...

Musical Youth - Part 1: Scoundrel Days by a-ha

I'm starting a new feature.  No reason, other than that the fancy takes me and the idea struck me when I was travelling back on the East Coast Mainline from Edinburgh last week.  The idea is that I'm periodically going to revisit a formative album from my past.  I'll look at what it means to me and will then give it a critical reappraisal by giving it a damn good listening to and writing up what I find.  I don't know if I'll do it very often - perhaps I'll end up doing it every week - but I thought it might be fun to track back through the years and see how I ended up where I am musically today.

I'm going to start with a-ha.  This was the band's second full-length album, and was released on 6th October 1986.  The songs included were:

"Scoundrel Days"
"The Swing of Things"
"I've Been Losing You"
"October"
"Manhattan Skyline"
"Cry Wolf"
"We're Looking for the Whales"
"The Weight of the Wind"
"Maybe, Maybe"
"Soft Rains of April"

The album was a worldwide success, going platinum in the UK and reaching number 2 in the album chart.

So much for the bare facts.  What does the album mean to me?  Well I was given the album on cassette for my birthday in March 1987.  This wasn't the first album I ever owned - that honour belongs to "Kings of the Wild Frontier" by Adam and the Ants.  It wasn't even the second or third, as I went through something of a Nik Kershaw phase in the couple of years before this that saw me getting both "Human Racing" and the "Riddle".  At around this time though, I was avidly taping songs off the chart show every Sunday night and was just starting to become seriously interested in music to the extent that I asked for a few albums on my birthday list.  I remember asking for "Running in the Family" by Level 42, which wikipedia tells me was released in the same month as my birthday (I was thirteen).  I didn't get that, but I did receive a copy of "Silk and Steel" by Five Star and this album by a-ha.

Why a-ha?  (actually, why Five Star is probably the better question, but that's for another day).  Well, like everyone else, I remember being bowled over by "Take on Me" in particular and they were, of course, one of the biggest bands of the day.  I don't remember any of the singles from this album, although both "I've Been Losing You" and "Cry Wolf" were released late in 1986, and "Manhattan Skyline" was released in February 1987, so it's entirely likely that I taped them off the radio and took a shine to them enough to ask for the album.

Funnily enough, I don't remember listening to the album all that much.  On cassette the album was oddly formatted so that one side had an awful lot of blank space on it.  I had a fast forward button on my crappy one-speakered cassette player, of course, but I remember finding that really annoying.  Other than that, I don't really remember spending an enormous amount of time listening to the album.  I think I did listen to it lots, but I don't remember it.  Regardless, it's still a pivotal album for me: Nik Kershaw had been a shared experience with my best friend that he had discovered first and shared with me, but a-ha was all me and for that reason it's one of the first places where my love of music  - and the buying of music - really started.

I think the reason that I don't remember the album all that much is that I changed schools in September 1987, and by Christmas that same year, I had bought my first Iron Maiden album and was well on my way into heavy metal.  My path took a very different turn for a while, and it wasn't until much later that I found my way back to a-ha and began to appreciate them all over again.

I actually saw a-ha live a couple of times fairly recently, in 2009 and 2010, and they were splendid both times.  After the first of those gigs, I was given a copy of this album on CD for Christmas by a very thoughtful friend who knew its significance to me, and at the gig in 2010 they actually played most of that album in full to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the original release.  It sounded splendid, but in many ways I had been on such a journey of my own since 1987 that it was really like discovering those songs all over again.

So what does it sound like today, in 2013?

Well, I suppose this is cheating since I actually rediscovered the album a few years ago, but they sound pretty good actually.  Sure, there are large parts of this that sound inescapably like the 1980s, with those synths and drums.  That much was probably inevitable.  There are very few points on this album where that production is allowed to overwhelm the songs themselves.  Morten Harkett, of course, has an absolutely magnificent, pure voice, and that cuts through almost everything else.  There's also a kind of epic Scandinavian aloofness to this record, an iciness that gives the whole thing an air of timelessness.  It helps that the songs are pretty bloody good too: just have a listen to "Scoundrel Days", "The Swing of Things", "I've Been Losing You" or - especially - "Manhattan Skyline" and discover again what bloody good songs they are.



Listen to his voice!  Amazing.  It's a bit 80s in places, perhaps, but the quality of the song easily cuts through that.  Great lyrics too.



It's not all good, and I could happily do without "October" (which - weirdly - reminds me a bit of Scott Walker, "Time Operator" perhaps), and "Maybe Maybe" perhaps lacks a little gravitas, but it's still an album I can happily listen to... and in fact, it's been a real pleasure putting it back on again this week.  They were a properly good band, you know and their music I think has stood the test of time and would probably have been as  successful in any era (with the appropriate contemporary production, perhaps).

A great place to start.  I may have had to go all the way through a lot of shouty heavy metal to get to this point, but I swear that this album sounds better to me now than when I first heard it in 1987.

Where to next, I wonder?