“THE HIGHWAY THAT’S LEADING ME”: JONI MITCHELL’S ‘HEJIRA’ (TOP 50 ALBUMS)

“I’m not an evasive writer. You don’t have to dig under the words for the meaning… When someone asks what a song is about, I want to say, ‘Well, did you listen to the words?’”
- Joni Mitchell

”A Decade Full of Dreams”

We are here to talk about the 1976 Joni Mitchell album ’Hejira’. But if we take our time in getting to it, wind our way round some serpentine curves, wouldn’t that be the most *’Hejira’* way of going about things?

The NME Book of Rock, the first music book I ever read, described Mitchell as a “singer/songwriter with a pure voice, specialising in highly-wrought emotional ballads… notorious for various romantic attachments”. A widespread notion which reaches its nadir in the notion that her music’s ‘confessional’, like an emotional version of striptease. (Notably, its a term she always disliked.)

And some still see her through that frame, the epitome of a hippy-dippy Sixties artist, going gooey over clouds, getting wide-eyed about Woodstock and falling in love with passers-by every few minutes. But they mistake the overture for the act. It’s the early-to-mid Seventies where she came into her own.

It's the first two albums which most match that popular image, and while they do contain some great tracks there’s also times where she sounds like Phoebe from ’Friends.’ Mitchell herself later conceded “to me, most of those early songs seem like the work of an ingenue.” It was the third try, ’Ladies of the Canyon,’ which first brought in the changes. Released in 1970, it meant that for Mitchell the Sixties ended right on cue.

A few numbers, such as the title track, could have come from the earlier albums. But mostly it pointed forwards. Which also meant wider. While the earlier albums had featured occasional bass, extra instruments came to be used more expansively. But perhaps most significant of all was the guitar-sporting folkie making greater use of piano.

It was followed by ’Blue’ (1971), which capitalised on all of this and is regarded by some as her best album. And where the title track made it clear which element she was channelling - “Blue/ Songs are like tattoos/ You know I’ve been to sea before”. Then on ’River’ she imagines the titular body of water as something she could “skate away on”. (Yes, skate. She was Canadian.) And her piano-based music came to flow like a river. Which went with something else…

Leonard Cohen, particularly on his earlier albums, set his songs in a heightened realm, full of slightly mystic characters doing richly symbolic things. It is something of a wrench to hear that famous lines in ’Suzanne’ may have been inspired by someone called Suzanne making him a cup of tea and putting bits of orange in it.

While other songwriters use a more straightforward, conversational style, directly addressing the listener in a way which feels immediate and involving. (Think of how many songs are sung second-person, to “you”.) As John Lennon put it: “say what you mean and put a backbeat to it.” Sinead O’Connor’s ’The Emperor’s New Clothes’ would be an example, with its payoff line “you asked for the truth and I told you.” If you were ever to find out that the song wasn’t a faithful description of her life at the point you couldn’t help but feel it was lessened.

And these are diverging approaches, branching off from each other. You need to pick one.

Well, maybe me or you would. And most people seem convinced Joni Mitchell picked the second. But she didn’t. Instead, she straight out refused to pick. And she seems able to slip between the two irreconcilable opposites within a single line. At times she’d deliberately juxtapose them for effect…

“She speaks in sorry sentences
“Miraculous repentances
“I don't believe her.”

…the punchy immediacy of the last line added like a pin to a balloon.

And this created a kind of double virtue. You feel like something significant is being imparted while, at the very same time, that she’s talking straight to you. ’Song For Sharon’ (which we’ll get to, promise) is written as if a letter to a long-time friend, casually mentioning Dora and Betsy as if we know them.

And the flowing piano enhanced this, enabled her lyrics to be more free-flowing and semi-stream-of-consciousness. Her tracks can have the buzz of meeting up with an old friend, where the torrent of conversation seems both effortless and endless, something to ride. It gives it a compulsive quality, the exhilarating feeling of being absolutely in the moment. (Yeah okay, she’s the only one doing the talking. It still feels that way.) And the immediacy of music, the sense that it’s all happening now, is always a positive feature.

And these go on to work as part of a triple whammy, with her Seventies shift in subject matter. ’California’ starts:

“Sitting in a park in Paris, France
“Reading the news, it sure looks bad
“They won't give peace a chance
“That was just a dream some of us had”

…and this just one year after she’d written the hippie anthem ’Woodstock’! John Lennon, the one who’d coined ‘give peace a chance’, later sang “the dream is over.” Yet where he was rueful she was phlegmatic. Her tone is “remember when we thought that peace stuff? Boy, what had we been smoking?” From that point on the song moves on to other subjects, like waking and shrugging off a strange dream.

Mitchell has said she saw her generation as an equal-but-opposite reaction to the stultifying, conformist Fifties. “Out of it came this liberated, spoiled, selfish generation into the costume ball of free love, free sex, free music, free, free, free, free we're so free. And Woodstock was the culmination of it. [But] I was not a part of that.”

Except of course the writer of ’Woodstock’ was. Giving up on social change after finding out you won’t be given it seems pretty on-brand for that description. With Mitchell, as with many others, the dominant subject of her music became herself. On the afore-mentioned ’Song For Sharon’ she sang, out loud and upfront:

“Well, there's a wide wide world of noble causes
“And lovely landscapes to discover
“But all I really want right now
“Is... find another lover”

And its the self-importance of singer-songwriters which so often grates. The genre often feels like First Word problems recited over some strummed guitar. Godspeed’s Efrim Menuck once called it the “privileging of individual angst”, while Mclusky recorded an album acidly titled ’My Pain and Sadness Is More Sad and Painful Than Yours’.

All true. Except there’s a crucial difference between Mitchell recording ’Hejira’ and Jerry Rubin becoming a stockbroker. An artist’s first responsibility is to find what they’re good at and do that. There’s not a lot to be gained in demanding they write a song calling for the military-industrial complex be dissolved if their talents lie elsewhere. Mitchell was made to sing about the bittersweet richness of life, in all its complexities and self-contradictions. If it took her a little while to get round to that, she still got there. And anyway, personal relations, aren’t they part of life too? Or should we be stamping down Jericho full time?

As she said herself: “A lot of people could have written a lot of my other songs, but I feel the songs on ’Hejira’ could only have come from me.” Or as she sang herself…

“People will tell you where they got
“They’ll tell you where to go
“But till you’ve got there yourself
“You never really know”

Besides, in her case that free-flowing, semi-conversational style mitigates against self-absorption. (Or at least too much of it.) She sings less like she’s shining a spotlight on her personal dramas and more like she’s catching up with us.

And also, for someone supposedly so self-obsessive, Mitchell could be acutely observational, pinning people with a phrase…

“Like a priest with a pornographic watch
Looking and longing on the sly
Sure its stricken from your uniform
But you can’t get it our of your eyes”

And once more, there’s a companion musical shift. As said, post-’Blue’ she started the move to a fuller band. The music grew more intricate, bringing in brass and strings. This grew slowly, but was unmistakable by 1975’s ’The Hissing of Summer Lawns’, which even incorporated the jazz standard ’Centrepiece’.

’Ladies of the Canyon’ had, clearly enough, been her Laurel Canyon album, the backpackers and freewheeling hippies who passed through it drawn from her own crowd. Songs are like quick snapshots of life happening around her, friends caught in character poses. While ’Summer Lawns’ is definitely her take on LA – “the city of the fallen angels”. Its like a film, with a cast list full of larger-than-life figures. Which means the most inventive, the most musically rich Mitchell album is the one most concerned with artificiality. (“Beauty parlour blondes with credit card eyes/ Looking for the chic and the fancy/ To buy.”)

But then there’s a bend in the road.

By this point the ‘studio album’, rich with effects and overlays, had become a thing you did - cemented in the popular mind with ’Sergeant Pepper’. And, as with that example, there wasn’t much to do once you’d gone there but reverse back out again - go back to what you were doing before. And at least in part ’Hejira’ does this, goes back to the simpler and more direct songs of ’Blue’. Precisely one track has more than four players, most have three.

But at the same time the sound became more jazzy. Mitchell had always been as much a Jazz as a Folk fan and, feeling Rock musicians lacked finesse, she started to work with Jazz players. Perhaps starting off with LA Express playing on her 1974 album ’Court and Spark’. Which ended with the Jazz cover… yes cover, ‘Twisted’. But ’Hejira’ was the first of her albums to incorporate the fretless bass of Jaco Pastorius, and involved her singing evocatively about “strains of Benny Goodman”. So the album which went back simultaneously went forwards. 'Summer Lawns’ had worn its sophistication on its sleeve, while ’Hejira’ held it closer to the heart.

Now Jazz to me is like chilli or garlic. You wouldn’t want to taste it on its own too much, but it can serve well when added to other things. And when added to Folk it creates a kind of sweet ’n’ sour. (Just think Pentangle.) This fretless playing just went with her lyrics, free-form music to give wing to her free-form narrative. (Not unlike Van Morrison’s ‘Astral Weeks’.)

”Porous With Travel Fever”

Also, if the element running through ’Blue’ had been water, and the instrument piano, this changes too. This album featured not a note of piano. On ’Amelia’, she sees the vapour trails of six planes in the sky, and likens them to guitar strings. A track named, of course, after the aviation pioneer. Elsewhere she paid tribute to those “who’ll walk the girders of the Manhattan skyline.” The music doesn’t seem even as bank-bound as ’Blue’, but passing in jets and flurries like air streams.

As is often, the immediate reason for the switch was simple and practical. It was largely written on a road trip across America, from LA to Maine, and a guitar had simply gone in the van easier. At one point she describes coming across a piano mid-journey, and falling on it like an ex-lover. But that necessity was fortuitous. When she picked up a guitar again, it was as if it was a new instrument. The result was, if not in the standard sense, a classic air guitar album.

And, yes, travel… The observant reader might want to point out she had written about travel before. Often, in fact. ’Blue’ had opened with the line “I am on a lonely road and I’m travelling”. But those travel songs tended to focus on place. ’California’ was sung to California, as if to a person. Here the travel itself was the thing, the road runs through the whole album. One track is titled *’The Refuge of the Roads’* and the highway appears on the cover superimposed over her figure, as if it’s what she has inside - a space where you’d expect a presence. She said herself: 

“I wrote the album while travelling cross-country by myself and there is this restless feeling throughout it…The sweet loneliness of solitary travel.”

The title track opens with “I’m travelling in some vehicle/ I’m sitting in some cafe”, and its the “some” which sticks out. It’s the smooth transience of the road which soothes you, like rubbing a succession of freshly laundered hotel towels across your cheek. Freedom is the absence of snags and ties, passing through places the way a ghost walks through walls. On ’Coyote’ the road offers odd-couple romances and one-night-stands, inoculated against entanglements. Because all the time you’re in some place you’re just some person, unencumbered by the associations and expectations of those who ‘know’ you.

She sang “Your life becomes a travelogue/ Of picture postcard charms.” And the songs are like travelogues, flitting from one incident to the next, passing a farmhouse on fire or a couple sitting out on a rock.

The result’s an album that’s literally as free as air. Not in the sports commentator sense of “I literally don’t know what literally means”, but literally as free as air. Drums, which usually play a grounding role in music, are so sedate you pretty much need to check the track listing to know when they’re there. (They appear on four tracks, percussion on three, while two feature neither, seeing as you asked.)

But then there’s a curve in the road.

Like a yin/yang sign, pursue one course for long enough and it’ll bend and turn and become its opposite. And with that in mind it would be tempting to take songs as antonyms, set the floaty, gossamer-light title track and ’Amelia’, the world seen from “clouds at icy altitudes”, against ’Song For Sharon’, with it’s more distinct pulse, and self-confessed hankering for human attachment. But, as is often the way with Mitchell, nothing is so clear-cut…

Faulkner wrote the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself. He probably wasn’t thinking about Joni Mitchell, but he might as well have been. She writes not like she’s providing some summation of her life, where it all led to this, but mapping the beats of her heart. And ’Hejira’ frequently returns to her conflict between this wanderlust and a desire for the most tied of all knots. Described by her as ”the strongest poison and medicine of all.” Brought on not by a love affair, a one night stand or even a crush, but by spying “the long white dress of love” in a Staten Island window.

“In our possessive coupling
“So much could not be expressed
“So now I am returning to myself
“These things that you and I suppressed” 

But later in the same song she adds:

“I’m porous with travel fever
“But you know I’m so glad to be on my own
“Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger
“Can set up a trembling in my bones”

And this is (as promised earlier) ’Song For Sharon’, sung as a letter to a home-town friend. Notably, Sharon’s possessions are material, Mitchell’s metaphysical…

“Sharon you've got a husband
“And a family and a farm
“I've got the apple of temptation
“And a diamond snake around my arm”

The concluding track is ’Refuge of the Roads’ as if Mitchell never really returned from that trip. But ’Song For Sharon’, the longest number, feels like the album’s centrepiece. Ultimately she doesn’t resolve any of this, or even try to. She just tells us it like it was.

To sum up… Heading for another drudgeful and demanding day of work one Monday morning with ’Hejira’ playing in my head, I figured that whatever transpired after I arrived, in that moment I was in free transit. An album that even makes Monday mornings more bearable. Who could ask for more?

“AS FAR AS WE CAN FLY”: ’SPACE RITUAL’ BY HAWKWIND

(Top 50 Albums)

“Originally we just wanted to freak people out but now we’re just interested in sound. For instance, if a monotonous sound like a chanting goes on long enough, it can really alter people's minds.… We try to create an environment where people can lose their inhibitions. We also want to keep clear of the music business as much as possible - just play for the people. It's like a ship that has to steer around rocks, we have to steer round the industry.”
- Dave Brock, ’NME’ (Jan ’71)

”Everything exists for itself, yet everything is part of something else.”
- ’Space Ritual’ sleevenote

“You couldn't overstate the importance of Hawkwind if you tried. They're a credible candidate for the most important band in the history of everything, ever.” - Me

”Waiting For Take-off”

’Space Ritual’ (known by pedants as ’The Space Ritual Alive In Liverpool and London', 1973) is the finale and cumulation of Hawkwind’s classic space trilogy - following from and building on ’In Search Of Space’ (1971) and ’Doremi Farso Latido’ (1972). Citation does not seem needed. So what led to such an outpouring of awesomeness as this?

We have something of a clue in an earlier release, their eponymous debut. Which stated in the liner notes “by now we will be past this album”, suggesting they regarded it as something of a staging post. (It was after all released in April 1970, by a band who had only played their first gig in November 1969.) And I’m going to suggest that it lacks four vital elements…

First, though Nik Turner plays on the debut, he sang no lead vocals. Now, Dave Brock was the founder and band leader. (And sole constant member, up til today.) Who sang, frequently. But the founder felt no inclination to be the front man. Turner, whose initial involvement had been as a roadie, fell into that role but once there took to it with some relish.

They were described by frequent collaborator Michael Moorcock as, respectively, the band’s backbone and spirit. Brock was the tent pole, keeping the band up. But Turner was the carney character who called the punters in. (Though he sometimes shared, sometimes alternated that role with Robert Calvert. No-one has ever said Hawkwind’s history is insufficiently confusing.)

Second, though Dik Mik contributed electronics for the first album he didn’t team up with Del Dettmar till the second. (Dettmar was credited for synths, Dik Mik for “audio generator”. I have no idea what that is.) Now this was a time when bands often turned to electronic music. But the new instruments were mostly played in the old way, as if a concert pianist had his Steinway swapped for a synth at the last minute. Whereas with Hawkwind…

The first ever electronic film soundtrack, by Louis and Bebe Barron for ’Forbidden Planet’ (1956), had been credited as “electronic tonalities” rather than music. (Largely to circumvent their non-membership of the Musician’s Union. But it’s still a good description.) And Dik Mik and Dettmar worked in a similar way. They’d surge unpredictably, their sound barely controllable, like even the player isn’t really sure what’s going to happen next. And as both were more tinkering boffins than proper musicians that’s not altogether surprising. They saw their role as to “add atmospherics”. And electronics from this early era often has this quality, as if the preserve of haphazardly gifted amateurs, the Doctor in the Tardis rather than Jean Luc Picard aboard the Enterprise. More the Silver Apples than Rick Wakeman.

But the main giveaway is that it lacks the brilliant ‘cosmic hieroglyph’ cover designs Barney Bubbles would provide for the space trilogy. These were complete and integrated works of design, rather than just a logo slapped atop an image of the band. See for example ’In Search of Space' below. (Just about visible is the way the gatefold had a jagged centre opening.)

”Space is one solution”

Finally, and perhaps the cherry to place on the top of all this, the first album containing no references to space. Though adverts for it still proclaimed “Hawkwind Is Space Rock”.

Now mention Hawkwind and most will say ‘Space Rock’ straight back at you. But then mention Space Rock and most will say ‘Hawkwind’. Pink Floyd’s early years notwithstanding, they pretty much define the genre. (As much as ex-member Lemmy’s next band, Motorhead, would do for Heavy Metal.) Partly because having had one… precisely one… hit single they fell into the strange situation of being the underground band the overground has heard of.

Okay, but Space Rock… was ‘space’ any more than just a euphemism for the verboten subject of drugs? Well partly, yes. ‘Acid rock’ often had the more mainstream-friendly (not to mention law-abiding) monicker substituted for it. And the lyrics to classic Hawkwind tracks such as ’Master of the Universe’ and ’Orgone Accumulator’ are respectively cosmological or Reichean, but those are fairly transparent metaphors for the real subject. (“It’s no social integrator/ It’s a one-man isolator”… hmm.)

Acid rock originally meant whatever soundtrack was added to Acid Trip parties. (Which early on was just regular rock music.) But Hawkwind weren’t just a setting to take drugs to, their music was a slightly different means to the same end. They nailed the notion of music as drug, music whose primary purpose was to alter the perceptions of the audience. Band members liked to tell the anecdote that they hid their drugs in their equipment, then kept prying police dogs away by playing sub lows at them. Which sounds a bit too good to actually be true. But there’s a symbolic kind of truth to it.

As Andrew Means said of them, “the listener is just as much a traveller as the musician”. Dave Brock cheerily conceded “it was basically freak-out music.”

And this is where space comes in, as a handy a metaphor for sonic exploration. It was a way of framing music which defied the confines of convention just like space transcends gravity. John Weinzierl of Amon Duul, more or less Hawkwind’s German cousins, summed up what it was to be radical youth at odds with all around you: “We had to come up with something new… Space is one solution.”

But space also stood for both the beyond and the imagination, the outer and inner realms, inasmuch as they’re different things. Robert Calvert commented “we can hypnotise the audience into exploring their own space. Space is the last unexplored terrain, it’s all that’s left, it’s where man’s future is.”

While Brock said: ”We were all reading science fiction and after the first moon landing, exploring the idea that everything could change. We were taking LSD, and the journey outward was also an inner journey, I suppose.” (Which was exactly what drew me to Science Fiction as a youth. And a huge part of the initial importance of Hawkwind to my young self was that you could get your music and your Science Fiction in one serving.)

Ken Kesey was ever-keen to point out that it was a CIA weapons programme which had given hippies LSD to take, initially literally. So it’s fitting that the other great product of the Cold War, the Space Race, provided the other escape route.

One route to sonic exploration was free jazz. Nik Turner described his aim as to “play free jazz in a rock band.” He’d hung out with free jazz players while travelling through Berlin, who were key in persuading him that expression was more important than technical ability. This was more to do with the approach than the sound. Though some of his sax playing can be very free jazz, particularly on ’You Shouldn’t Do That’.

But overall, their biggest free jazz inheritance was less direct. It was the way the band played in the moment and proved themselves so adept at improvisation. In the BBC documentary ’This Is Hawkwind, Do Not Panic’ Lemmy recalled: “It was a real rapport. We could be facing different ways and change at the same time during a jam… I’ve never had that since. I’ve never had it before that, come to that.”

This was the Sixties era, where collectivism held sway. (The line from ’Sonic Attack' “think only of yourself” is clearly intended as the Devil talking.) As Murray Ewing notes “how much the lyrics are about ‘we’ and ‘us’, ‘Deep in our minds’, ‘we shall be as one’, ‘So that we might learn to see/The foolishness that lives in us’. Consciously tribal, Hawkwind were seeking to create a communal experience.”  Added to which vocals are often chanty and choral-sounding, even with a whiff of folk to them. (This was perhaps only true for Brock. But then Brock contributed so many of the vocals.)

Yet Turner’s squalling sax is on the same track as some of the most intense riffing you’re likely to hear. ’You Shouldn’t Do That’, a sixteen-minute epic, audaciously opened their second album ’X In Search Of Space’ (1971). Repetition and sensory overload should surely be contrary forces, yet here they’re combined into one heady brew. It may well be the band’s finest studio moment.

Joe Banks tried to capture their recipe:“Hawkwind took the heavier end of the 60s underground sound as a starting point and created a monolithic concoction of garage rock, primitive electronics and free jazz, with the power of repetition and the riff always to the fore.” And he’s right about the riffs. Hawkwind’s USP was to combine the earthiness of hard rock with the spaciness of… well, space without losing the benefits of either.

Pink Floyd, then still darlings of the UFO club rather than arena fillers, were an early influence. But, as so often, it’s the differences which are significant. On ’Interstellar Overdrive’, aesthetes and post-graduates, Floyd dispense with the riff almost as soon as they can. They just needed a countdown routine, a hand-hold to hook the listener, before dumping them deep in zero gravity. Whereas Hawkwind, deranged freaks, pile on the riff with the zeal of young lovers.

Banks again: “Hawkwind’s willingness to let the music splurge messily outside the lines - to overwhelm a song’s structure without destroying it - is what sets them apart from the rest of the British rock scene….In a scene dominated by music that values technical flash over visceral noise, Hawkwind are travelling in the opposite direction by unlearning the rules of traditional blues-based rock.”

Well, yes and no. There was a whole period where clueless music journos noted Hawkwind had synths and sang about space, and so labelled them Prog. (Partly because of the bozo assumption that anything early Seventies that didn’t look like Glam must by definition be Prog.) Despite them not having anything like the flamboyant approach to musicianship or the ‘clean’ sound of the genre. Rightly reacting against this, we tended to veer too far the other way and insist on their absolute originality.

Whereas, in truth, their genesis came amid an era of heavy riffing. ‘Hard rock’, a term which now sounds more like a tautology than something that needs inventing, came into common use around this time. Iron Butterfly’s ’In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’, released in 1968, had done much to trailblaze this. Hawkwind’s first album was released a mere two months after the Black Sabbath’s debut. (Who weren’t yet associated with a metalhead scene which was only starting to exist, but thought of as a “people’s band” much in the same way as Hawkwind. They may not have played as many counter-cultural benefits. But then who did?.)

”Perhaps The Dying Has Begun”

And this part-explains an often-asked question. In wider culture, they’re the British Grateful Dead, the symbol of a counter-culture which hadn’t died just because the media had announced it was time to move on. (Assisted by the way both bands has such vivid iconography, and such fanatical fans so given to networking.)

But the Grateful Dead had started in 1965, so it made some sense to see them as the emblem of an enduring Sixties. Hawkwind’s first gig wasn’t until 1969… until November 1969, barely scraping their way into the decade which supposedly defined them. And their first album didn’t appear until 1970, when the dream had been deemed over. Rob Chapman’s magnum opus ’Psychedelia and Other Colours’ (2015) mentions them not once. It seems a conundrum. How can you come so late to the party, and be its soundtrack? The answer to this is to turn the question the other way up.

It’s easy enough to portray hippies as blissed-out innocents, without a single salient idea beneath their headbands. Yet Hawkwind’s conception of space was one sometimes found in Science Fiction, where the Romantic notion of the Sublime was enhanced , extended and projected out onto the vastness of the cosmos. It’s where we must be, but at the same time it may well destroy us without even noticing. Think of the lyrics to ’Space Is Deep’:

“Space is dark, it is so endless
“When you're lost it's so relentless
“It is so big, it is so small
“Why does man try to act so tall?” 

Or a couplet from ’Lord of Light’, which captures the perennial dualism: “A day shall come, we shall be as one/ Perhaps the dying has begun.” Or the way ’Brainstorm’ is simultaneously escape route from Earth, space rocket as one step up from teenage wheels (“Can’t get no peace till I get into motion/ Sign my release from this planet’s erosion”) and one-man suicide trip (“I’m breaking up, I’m falling apart/ I’m floating away.”).

True, psychedelic music hadn’t all been twee and pastoral. (However it was later caricatured.) Something like Pink Floyd’s ’Careful With That Axe Eugene’ was exquisitely sinister. But they were never so relentless, never so deranged, never bit into the brown acid as deeply as Hawkwind.

And where better to experience all of this than live? Live albums normally signify a band at an impasse. The label are on at them to put out something but they’re too coked up. Whereas Hawkwind were always primarily a live band. Their studio albums were often recorded in as close to live conditions as possible, sometimes containing live tracks regardless. But it was the all-live ’Space Ritual' where they really reached the stars. (Let’s see how many other entries in this top fifty are live albums. Not expecting a high number.)

And around this time they were gigging ceaselessly. Gigs organised like (in the album title) a ritual or (in the parlance of the time) a trip, rather than a live-action jukebox. And though culled from two separate shows, and requiring editing even to fit on a double LP, the album seeks to document that trip as much as possible. The three new tracks (‘Born To Go’, ‘Upside Down’ and ’Orgone Accumulator’) weren’t released on any subsequent studio album, confirming this was intended as a ‘proper’ release.

Brock… and it seems it mostly was Brock… had a gift for dynamics, both within and between tracks. He’d segue between the rocket-propelled heavy riffing tracks and the more lyrical numbers with finesse. For example from ’Born to Go’ into ’Down Through The Night’. These were often sung respectively by Turner and Brock, a similar dynamic to Waters and Gilmour in Pink Floyd from this era. (Most notably in ’Brain Damage’ where they trade vocals within one track.) And ’Space Ritual’ segues all the way through, not breaking for applause till the finale.

However, while it’s great we get to hear it, it’s shame we can’t see any of it. The band had ploughed the profits from their one hit single into creating an audio-visual experience. But filming, especially under stage lights, was a more expensive and technically challenging prospect in those far-flung days.

”World Turned Upside Down Now”

’Orgone Accumulator’ proved to be the pointer towards the next era of Hawkwind - not spacey but sleazy, low-down and rumbling. Rather than the riff just being the touch-paper to the sonic derangement, the track sticks unrelentingly with the riff like a pair of tight-fitting jeans, all rocket propulsion with no zero gravity. It’s described by Joe Banks (in the Quietus) as “brilliantly moronic”. 

To quote Murray Ewing again: “A community-binding collective of tribal shamans no more, Hawkwind became something like a normal band.” In the clearest sign of a changing of the guard, Dik Mik was replaced by the classically trained Simon House. (Though Del Dettmar stayed for one more album.)

Tracks became more like songs. Lyrics, which had been concerned with evoking the sense of something, more took up scenarios or even mini-narratives. Sleeves went for a more regular fantasy look. See for example the next release, 1974’s ’Hall of the Mountain Grill’ below. (The front cover, if not the back, is still by Barney Bubbles. But it’s an SF image adorned by band logo and album title, unlike the integrated design of earlier.)

But if they were now less space more rock, this was still a pretty good seam of rock. If they were no longer astral travellers, they were finding some pretty good places to visit on the ground. Though naysayers portray Hawkwind as something stuck in the Sixties it would be truer to say the very opposite, that they acted as a barometer of change. Their late Seventies era was full of dystopian grandeur, befitting the sourer times. The classic line was from ’High Rise’ – “He was just like you might have been/ On the ninety-ninth floor of a suicide machine”. It’s all that communal “we” chanting inverted. Now we all succumb to the same fate. Just one at a time.

”We Turned All This Noise On”

The winged shadow of Hawkwind is cast far and wide. Like Black Sabbath they may have stamped their identity on a genre, but their influence went way beyond that. John Lydon (ostensibly the default anti-hippy) has recounted buying their first album, and played no less than ’You Shouldn’t Do That’ when given a BBC radio show, while the reformed Pistols covered ’Silver Machine’. Joe Strummer was a fan, as were Black Flag's Henry Rollins and Dez Cadena. Crass' original mission statement was to be to the Pistols what Hawkwind were to the Beatles.

…and we’re not done yet, that was just the punks! Conrad Schnitzler, founder member of Kluster and Tangerine Dream, called them his favourite band. When Joy Division turned into New Order and took up electronics, they emulated Hawkwind. The Orb recorded a tribute called Orbwind.

Nigel Ayers of Nocturnal Emissions saw Hawkwind as the primary influence on Industrial and Noise music: “This is something that they rarely mention in the press, as Hawkwind have this reputation as a British ‘hippie band’… Whereas if they were a German hippie band… Zoviet France have told me they were very keen on Hawkwind. SPK were well into Hawkwind back in Australia… Hawkwind were the first band I was aware of to popularise the idea of sonic attack - infra and ultra sound as a weapon… Whenever I saw Throbbing Gristle I thought ‘Hawkwind without the lights and without the tunes’.” (‘Sound Projector’ 7, 2000)

In fact Throbbing Gristle, then trading as COUM Transmissions, played their first gig supporting Hawkwind. Even after becoming TG, they traded under the description “post-psychedelic trash”, while Simon Reynolds describes their sound (quite accurately) as “psychedelia inverted”.

Want to experience the vastness of space? Don’t hand over your savings to Branson or Bezos. Just get hold of these three albums, and you’ll be out there in no time.

“The streets were our oyster,
“We smoked urban poison,
“And we turned all this noise on,
“We knew how to fight.
“We dropped out and tuned in,
“Spoke secret jargon,
“And we would not bargain,
“For what we had found,
“In the days of the underground”
- ‘Days Of The Underground’

Otherwise unattributed quotes are from Joe Banks’ ‘Hawkwind: Days Of the Underground’ (Strange Attractor Press), which is a labour of love - with all the advantages and disadvantages that brings.

“IT SHOULD BE CLEAR BY NOW”: PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED’S ‘METAL BOX’

(Top 50 Albums)

“Sewing The Seeds Of Discontent..”

It begins with bass…

Because where else? Jah Wobble’s bass was a vital ingredient of PiL’s sound. All too often in rock music, bass is really there just as a kind of stock, to thicken the sound. Whereas his playing is not at all secondary. It’s rich, full, laying out the ground everyone else moves on.

Then, as Simon Reynolds put it, “because Wobble’s bass carried the melody, Keith Levene’s guitar was given license to freak out.” Not that it needed much encouraging.

If it’s close to conventional guitar at all, it’s what you’ll hear right at the end of guitar solos, when the player’s finished running up and down the fretboard and just plays washes and tones. Usually a signal the solo’s about to end. Here it’s kept up for the whole track. It puts music through the shredder, then throws up those shreds in waves. Andy Bell compared it to “ground-up diamonds fired at you through a high pressure hose.”

It’s also similar to the ‘effects’ role rock music often assigns synths. Except of course they aren’t thought of as a lead instrument any more than the bass. Their role to provide peripheral ‘sound effects’, the musical equivalent of marginalia. Here they’re front and centre. And it’s surely not coincidental that Levene swapped guitar for synth on some tracks, most unmissably with ’Careering’.

But Wobble’s bass never quite carried the melody as much as a guitar would. Plus, both Levene’s guitar and Lydon’s vocals are as high in register as the bass is low, creating a sense of space, an open-ness. Like artists incorporate white space into their designs, PiL left space in sound. (Remarkably, we can now hear the ‘fat’ as well as the ‘lean’ version of these tracks, after Wobble released ’Metal Box In Dub’ in ’21. Live version reviewed here.) The result is one of the best Post-Punk albums. But it’s also one of the most Post-Punk albums, epitomising the sound. Alongside ’154’ (released the same year), and ’Closer’ (released the next).

As some of you may have already heard, Lydon had been the frontman of the Sex Pistols. And Levene was a founder of the Clash (if only briefly a member). Only Wobble had been uninterested in Punk, which he dismissed as “bad rock & roll”. How did they get from there to here? ’Metal Box’ let’s not forget, came out in 1979, a mere two years from ’Never Mind The Bollocks’. 

The answer’s given by the two things Lydon did on leaving the Pistols. He called Can to persuade them that he should be their new singer, only to find they’d just split up. And he travelled to Jamaica, to scout out Reggae acts for Virgin. And Krautrock and Dub were to play a major role. If you’re looking for influences, those aren’t bad choices. They’d arguably been the two most innovative forms of music from the previous ten years.

Except of course influences should never be treated as ingredients, the recipe doesn’t make the chef. And the Pistols had already been the band who launched a thousand clueless copycats, proof that what influences mostly give you is something to live up to. Levene has said “I respected my influences enough never to imitate them.”

Reynolds again: “PiL assimilated both the dread feel of roots reggae and the dub aesthetic of subtraction (stripping out instruments, using empty space), without ever resorting to the obviously dubby production effects like reverb and echo.”

And it wasn’t just the effects. Reggae was then popular associated with sunshine and good times. (Even if that wasn’t a description Roots fans were likely to go along with.) PiL turned that influence into something bleakly British, the sound of rain-sodden streets on wet weekdays.

’Metal Box’, you maybe able to guess the format. Which had proved expensive so it was soon repackaged as ’Second Edition’, a more regular double LP. In a sleeve which reproduced ’Metal Box’s greyness, with distorted photos of the band that look like Munch if he’d gone in for making fairground mirrors.

Opening track ’Albatross’ was effectively made up on the spot. And as Lydon has since said: "Many people don't understand that [the album] was improvisation… what we had to do was quite literally sneak into studios when bands had gone home for the night.” And the album was recorded guerilla-style, in multiple studios.

Though some have gone on to overstate this. The very next track, ’Memories’, not only benefits from multi-tracking, it’s clearly two different mixes (if not versions) spliced together. (With characteristically little effort made to hide the join.) Overall, extemporised may be a better term. Tracks were thrown together in the studio in double-quick time, with zero preparation. But the studio was then often used extensively, to work on what they had.

For all the talk of Can the album shows as much a musical debt to another Krautrock outfit, the duo Neu!, who had worked precisely this way. And Krautrock in general disdained the traditional way of recording, diligently transcribing the songs, practising until you were drilled in them, then going into the studio to get the finished product on tape. The Fall’s ‘Slates’ EP (1981) was mostly put together the same rapid-fire way.

Why do such a thing to yourself? Well, we shouldn’t overlook the fact that PiL were the least hardworking band in showbiz. Last minute was normally considered too early a time for them to take on something. A Virgin exec described them as as “a well-oiled machine that burns money and generates pot smoke and excuses.” (There’s an irony to their being so Can influenced. Can almost never stopped playing while PiL almost never started.) But it wasn’t just that.

Post-Punk was in its way cerebral. Both PiL and the Fall were named after books. But it also prized instinct. As soon as you start to think, you’re more likely to think something already thought. You needed devices to bypass rational processes and conscious thought. And you’re not going to think if you don’t give yourself enough time to.

Levene has said: “The idea was to break through conditioning, take yourself out of one channel, and into another space.” And Wobble: “Everybody these days thinks ‘This must be rational’. You’ll find music that’s not really on a rational level will worry people and produce extreme reactions.”

But enforced spontaneity was one means among many. Levene has also said: “I just had an ear for what was wrong. So if I … made a mistake or did something that wasn't in key, I was open-minded enough to listen to it again.” (Of course these are both classic devices used by Surrealist artists.)

On the late, lamented radio show ’Mixing It’, Wobble cited ’Poptones’ as the best PiL track. He was right. And in fact it’s also the best indication of what they were doing… As Head Heritage point out, “Lydon free-associates in clusters of words.” Listen a while and you’ll notice he dances round a few phrases, repeating them in ever-shifting combinations. Which is pretty much what Levene’s guitar does with notes.

Rather than hold their place in the mix, maintain formation, the two dance around one another, ever in flux. Motion is ceaseless, but none of it is forward motion. These aren’t songs in the traditional sense, moving between verses and choruses via pre-built bridges, they’re more like installation pieces you visit and soak up.

Wobble described this as “modal. You have a home key and you modulate around and then you come back to it… It isn’t just repetition… it’s a block of sound going on.” Much like Can the sound is audaciously stripped-down and intricate at one and the same time.

Not that many noticed back then. With bands, attention inevitably falls on their front-man. Exacerbated in this case by Lydon being the only face in a band then made up of unknowns. But, at least at this point, he was insistent they should be seen very much as a group. “In this band we are all equal. No Rod Stewarts. We all do equal amounts of work, we all produce equally, write songs and collect the money equally.”

The front cover of ’First Issue’ had been a beaming Lydon. But ’Second Edition’ featured Levene, then for ’Flowers Of Romance’ Jeanette Lee. (Theoretically a band member, though no-one seems sure what she was supposed to do.) And while interviews of the time were normally acrimonious, in perhaps the most confrontational one of all, part of Lydon’s ire is down to the show not wanting to interview the whole band. (Though unsurprisingly he still dominates events, with Levene popping off for a beer.)

Given all this, it’s bizarre how the band had a rotating drum stool throughout this time. Three different drummer play on the album (David Humphrey, Richard Dudanski, Martin Akins), while both Levene and Wobble stepped in at points. Others were roped in too, but not as far as recording. It’s something that should really ruin an album, especially one essentially about the interplay of the musicians, and it’s remarkable that it doesn’t.

“I Can’t Forget The Impression You Left”

Bur what, I hear you ask, about the words? Which had after all been Lydon’s main contribution to the Pistols. Here they were as extemporised as anything else, which straight away gave them a different, more stream-of-consciousness nature.

Lydon was previously known for accusatory lyrics, jeering diatribes, a kind of urchin version of Wilde. He sang ‘you’ songs, pointed outwards (perhaps best encapsulated in the line “the problem is you”). But he gives this up for ‘I’ songs, turned inwards (“All in your mind/ Where it all began”). They have quite a stream-of-consciousness character, perhaps inevitably with their being thought up so quickly. They feel confessional, yet cryptic and elusive at the very same time.

And his singing style changed as much as the music, less to taunt a target and more as though no-one is listening. And in this process spleen gives way to angst. Lydon later said: “PiL is more experimental but also truer and honest.”

Lydon drew the cover for the single ’Death Disco’, “Public Image Limited” added as if the artist’s signature. (Though the only album sleeve to see one of his drawings was the live follow-up, ’Paris Au Printemps’.) Add all these things together and we have an Expressionist style, described by no less than the Tate gallery as “art in which the image of reality is distorted in order to make it expressive of the artist’s inner feelings or ideas.”

And in fact it was ’Death Disco’/‘Swan Lake’ (depending on whether you were listening to the single or album version) where this reached his apogee. Writing a song about his mother dying must have seemed about the most unlikely thing for the ex-singer of the Pistols to do, let alone have it set to an abrasive guitar line borrowed from Tchaikovsky.

But this transition had been part-disguised. The first album had kicked off with a very much first-person song, ’Theme’. While the single ’Public Image’ gets both ‘you’ and ‘I’ into it. Yet ’Low Life’ and ’Attack’ are about as accusatory as a song can get. But who to? It was widely assumed at the time ex-manager Malcom McLaren was the target, with who Lydon was then in legal as well as personal dispute. Though Lydon himself has said before now it was the rest of the Pistols.

Yet when I first heard that first album, my first thought was that all those second-person accusations protested too much, and were pretty clearly a displaced form of self-criticism. “You fell in love with your ego/ it did not fit in the plan.” Reminding you of anyone? Besides, bitter ex energy for the dodgy manager and former band-mates? Can’t these songs be about something more interesting than that?

In fact it’s the social commentary lyrics which can now seem the weakest, which tend to a kind of O-Level social realism. (“It’s not important/Not worth a mention in the Guardian.”)

Let’s swing back to ’Albatross’. What is the title thing Lydon’s so keen to rid himself of? I think he’s describing what he’s doing, right there and then. The opening line is “slow motion’, and indeed it’s pretty at odds with punk’s paciness. Lines like “I know you very well/ You are unbearable” might refer to Punk music, which he’d grown keen to announce was now moribund. 

But that’s too narrow really. Post-Punk was not just anti-Punk but anti-rockist, insisting Rock music’s claims to be something wild, free and outside of social conventions were absurd, that it had long since degenerated to a set of stale gestures to sell stadium tickets. Same as the old boss.

In interview at the time, Lydon would vent his hostility to… well, to most things, but Rock was a common target. (And Levene too, if he ever got a word in.) “It’s dead, it’s history… it’s too limited, too much like a structure, a church.” Or an albatross, maybe. (I saw Lydon’s more recently reformed PiL, the one without Wobble or Levene, twice. And each set started with a version of ’Albatross’, suggesting to him it remained that statement of intent.)

When Life Gives You Lightning

This self-enforced spontaneity business, we looked at the pluses. But are there pitfalls? Of course there are! It relies on you escaping your own trap unscathed, scoring a surprise six. The band’s debut had been intermittently brilliant but doubtlessly flawed. And the follow up to this, ’Flowers Of Romance', was to be even more uneven. (It boldly set sail without Wobble’s anchoring bass, but met headwinds.) There’ll be few fans of original era PiL who don’t consider this their best release.

Which helps solve a riddle. The previous album had finished with a near-eight-minute track to bring it up to the minimum length that Virgin would release, brazenly admitted on the track itself. The next one was even shorter. Why did such idlers release a double album between them?

It must have been realised, at least instinctively, that this was the time it was coming together, that it was now or never. When lightning keeps striking, make lightningade. (Or however that saying goes.) Wobble’s famously described the band as “three emotional cripples on three different drugs”, which was never going to lead to stability. Notably, none of the four album sleeves (counting the live ’Paris Au Printemps’) features a photo of the band together, they’re always shot separately a la ’White Album’.

And the now best-known photo of the band is the one taken at Lydon’s home, where each stares out obliviously into his own section of space. After this album, Wobble was soon out the band. (With the usual contradictory tales about whether he was fired or quit.) The three never recorded together again.

Is it a perfect release? Well, we are talking about possibly the most perverse group of individuals ever known, so probably not. As the album moves into its second disc, it either loses its original focus or casts its next wider, as is your preference. 

’Chant’ with its ceaseless refrain “love war feel hate”, like a version of Hate Week from ’Nineteen Eighty-Four’, with Lydon channelling his inner Davros. (The device of constantly repeating a mantra phrase until it becomes almost a riff is another Krautrock motif, as found on Faust’s ’J’ai Mal Au Dents.’) If ’Poptones’ sounded sinister, this verges on the infernal. Though perhaps at variance to other tracks, it was a favourite for live sets and even TV appearances.

Let’s compare it to Genesis. No, really! ’The Knife’ had been about a diabolic tempter, with the singer duplicating his dark charisma on stage. Which might seem a role ready-made for Lydon. But ’Chant’ is more about the dehumanising apparatus of broadcast, the tannoy’s distorting effect on the human voice, like a power object that only leads to evil. (Lydon talked a lot at the time about disliking the divide between performer and audience of the gig setting. Though his attempts to break it down tended to be handing out the mike while having a fag.)

In ’Rip It Up And Start Again’, Simon Reynolds charts the start of Post-Punk as Lydon leaving the Pistols, then adds the similar act of Howard Devoto quitting the Buzzcocks to form Magazine. And notably Devoto showed a similar disdain for the herd mentality in ’Shot By Both Sides.’

’The Suit’ is the one track where the trademark sneer returns, with “it is your nature” never used more a put-down. Though it’s more dismissive than adversarial, an understated seethe, telling its subject they’re not even worth getting worked up about. It’s not one of the album’s best tracks, but holds its place.

The two instrumental tracks, ’Socialist’ and ’Radio 4’, seem the biggest outliers, surely done on days Lydon didn’t show up. The rapid-tempo ’Socialist’ can’t help but recall the speeded-up tracks Neu! used to fill out their second album. While ’Radio 4’ is all Levine. However, when you get used to the fact they sound nothing like the rest of the album, they’re pretty good in themselves. And segueing the calming ’Radio 4’ after the frenzied ’Chant’ is something of a demented masterstroke. (On the original release with no track break between them.)

More of a problem… for some reason, they used only the instrumental version of ’Another’, re-titled ’Graveyard’. The complete version was to be found on the flip side of ’Memories’. Had it been on the album, it would have been one of the stand-out tracks.

But it’s ’Bad Baby’ which is the weak link. Mostly, the band sound like a bunch of boho artistes scoffing at your workaday notion of rehearsal, and somehow getting away with it. While this just sounds un-rehearsed, at one point Lydon even calling out timing instructions. Though the hackneyed lyrics also hold it back.

’Home Is Where The Heart Is’, a significantly better track, was for some reason abandoned and later completed for the B-side of the ‘Flowers Of Romance’ single. (With the bass line of the then-departed Wobble looped.) Contrary to the Simon Reynolds quote above, it does use some of the more classically dubby effects, so imitating its influences may be why it was originally dropped.

It’s sometimes asked why Virgin were so tolerant of Lydon’s fire-extinguisher-squirting antics. They probably figured that something would occur to him before long, being anti-commercial doesn’t really make you much money. If that was their gamble, it certainly paid off. After the relative flop of ’Flowers’, a more commercial direction was decided on. Though a less commercial direction might have proved challenging.

It shouldn’t be overlooked that originally, Levene was on board with this. He was on board with the move to America, the universally recognised sign of embracing dollars. Yet ere long Lydon had booted him from the band he co-founded, and embarked on a tour of Japan backed by session musicians. It was the first in a bewildering series of volte-faces, between fortune hunting antics and genuinely creative pursuits, that’s lasted till this day.

And yet reforming the Sex Pistols was a blatant cash-grab, while reforming PiL was an equally obvious signal he wanted to make good music again. (I saw that version of PiL and said afterwards “Lydon seems constantly able to surprise you, sometimes even pleasantly.”) Then one day he became a Trump cheerleader in the confused belied that this was being ‘edgy’ and ‘current’, and proved his well of surprise had dried up after all.

Wobble, who’d left partly to get away from the anti-work ethic, was unsurprisingly the most productive, even given a long break spent on on the non-musical Underground. He embarked on a series of solo releases and collaborations, wide-ranging in style but normally creatively successful - even if his blacked-out teeth never graced ’Top of The Pops’ again.

After seeing him one time, I said: “As the Eighties and Nineties wore on his love of dub, Krautrock and world music became less marginal and more prophetic. You could play a good game of 'Where's Wobble?' in the history of that era, his trilby ever-present if rarely centre stage.” (If you don’t believe me check out the list.)

When Levene did work again, which didn’t seem often, it tended to be in collaboration - where his contribution was even less upfront than it had been in PiL. His main post-PiL act was to reunite with Wobble to form Metal Box In Dub, a calculated snub to Lydon’s reformed PiL. I never saw them, but YouTube tells of good things. Sadly, he died in November ’22. Peter Cook liked to tell a gag about his ambition in life being not to live up to his potential. Nothing was more true of Levene.

"SOMEBODY CALLIN'" HOWLIN’ WOLF’S ‘MOANIN’ IN THE MOONLIGHT’

(Top 50 Albums)

When I was first getting into music, what histories there were faithfully followed a script. Rhythm & Blues’ role had been important but brief, to be the midwife of Rock & Roll. (And it normally was R&B, more than Gospel or Country.) It was portrayed as original but basic. It had taken black people to come up with it, all simple-minded yet pure of heart like they were. But it had taken white people to pick up on that and turn it into something.

Even R&B artists would at times go along with this, perhaps figuring it not best to bite the hand attached to the deepest pockets. None less than Muddy Waters sang ’The Blues Had A Baby And They Named It Rock and Roll’ (1977), which at least moved midwife along to mother.

But if anything, it was the other way up. Rock & Roll finally formally broke something which had in actuality been undermined in American music decades back, the colour bar. And that was a significant cultural event. But to do it, it had to dilute the material down for a mass audience, make it more palatable. (And the right term is mass, not white, audience. You could tell a similar story with Country.)

Big Joe Turner’s version of ’Shake, Rattle and Roll’ is not just better than Bill Haley’s, it’s better at all the things Rock & Roll is supposed to be good for. The same is true for Big Mama Thornton’s ’Hound Dog’ over Elvis’, and you could keep going.

But it’s more than that. The problem with constantly searching for the roots of Rock & Roll is that everything else just gets thrown away as a weed. When, if you just look at what’s in your hand, it can be the finest flower. We should stop seeing Blues as a staging-post to somewhere else, and start seeing it as a place in itself.

The two big stars of the classic post-war era of R&B were Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Their creative rivalry was only accentuated by their being on the same label (Chess) and using the same main songwriter. (Willie Dixon, who would deliberately tell Wolf a song was already promised to Waters, knowing he’d then insist it had to be his.)

And they sound very little like someone trying to come up with Rock & Roll. True, there’s times they rock it, and as well as anyone. Wolf’s ’Rock It Boogie’ comes self-described. But, as a general rule, in straightening itself out in order to be made into Rock & Roll, Blues became a more rigid, more regularised form of music. In picking up the fixed-voltage power of electricity, it lost the free-form force of unpredictability.

Not so with our guys! Giles Oakley wrote “they can continue the use of country-style unpredictability in bar lengths, giving free range to the blues feeling surging through the whole band as if it were one man.” (‘The Devil’s Music’, 1976). He was talking of Waters’ band, but it applies to both. Rather than upbeat and animated, their music was measured and spacious, even laconic. (Perhaps best summed up by the Wolf lyric “Oh the church bell tollin’/ Oh the hearse come driving slow”. Not something you could sing over a Gene Vincent beat.) Harmonica was often then used to thread, bend and stretch between the placed-out guitar notes, like barbed wire curling round fenceposts.

And Waters was great. Truly great. But ultimately, Wolf was even better.

I’d first heard Blues early, as a child, as my Dad had some old records. And my young ears could barely take in music that sounded so unearthly, so totally removed from the Pop music and advertising jingles which I’d taken to be music.

He had no Howling Wolf. (Due, I’d suspect, to the lack of any ‘authentic’ acoustic era.) In fact I wasn’t to hear him until an adult. Whereupon, despite having had years to acclimate myself to music, when I finally got there he still sounded as unearthly as the Blues I’d first heard.

It is true that lyrically, particularly by the time of R&B, Blues did tend to prefigure Rock & Roll. And Wolf sang as much about the familiar themes as anyone else, women not being able to resist him, and his baby doing him wrong. (However those two were supposed to fit together.)

But his lyrics could also hinted at something sinister going on, at lurking, indeterminate menace. (Something people associate with Robert Johnston, but don’t imagine in electric Blues.) In the later track ’Ain’t Superstitious’ from 1961, the title phrase is continually countered by lots of good reasons to be superstitious. Yet, importantly, Wolf knew to never make it any more explicit than that. It was like that anxiety dream where you’re not sure quite what’s causing the anxiety, making you all the more anxious.

(And Blues was ever thus. All the things that books earnestly list as creating the genre, which basically come down to racism, are almost never referred to explictly in the music.)

And this perfectly matched his voice, gravelly but also given to unearthly, name-defining howls, wails and moans. (He liked to say he’d originally tried to yodel like Country star Jimmie Rodgers, but howls were simply what had come out of his throat and so he’d gone with them.) Suffice to say, if you take to Wolf’s voice, you’ll most likely take to everything else about him.

And voice and lyrics were then married to the spectral music, sounding like it could pass through walls. The opening track ’Moanin’ At Midnight’ (1951) sums this up well. It starts with Wolf literally setting the tone with a low moan, as if retuning you into his frequency. Surely one of the greatest track openings of all. It’s the equivalent of saying “who-hoo” in a ghost story, except in a way that actually works.
It’s a classic example of the combination effect in music, the whole being more than its parts. Lyrics like “Somebody calling me/ Calling on my telephone” scarcely sound like Pulitzer prize stuff. But add it to the voice and the music and the result is spine-tingling.

But going back to that idea R&B was a basic genre, does any of it get repetitive? The short answer is yes. Even that low moan intro gets straight-out duplicated on another track on the same album, ’Moanin’ For My Baby.’ But there’s two things to consider here…

First, this was never planned as an album. The currency of R&B was the single, at most the EP. The Billboard R&B chart, which began in ’49, even included jukebox plays alongside record sales. This album, though put together back in the day, was complied from already released singles. (In ’59, from material dating back to ’51.) And that was what albums were to Chess, at least back them. (Fun fact! ‘Album’ originally referred to a clutch of 78s packaged together. It meant ‘separate things collected together’, like a stamp or photo album.)

And more broadly… the notion that Blues was, formally speaking, an authentic Folk art is nothing but a hopeless romanticism. It was a commercial genre, with labels as much hit factories as Motown would later be, which gave many a living and got some rich (Wolf included). However, it still retained many elements from folk culture. Including a lack of interest in originality. If someone had a new idea, whether a lyric or rhythm, that was simply taken as added to the buffet table. Everyone else just helped themselves, and were unabashed about doing it.

And if that person who had the new idea was you, then what else would you do but copy yourself? Stars would commonly cover their own songs under different aliases. Sometimes this was to slip through contractual obligation. But it was more than that, songs didn’t have some definitive ‘finished’ version, like novels or paintings. They were fluid things, changing with each iteration.

So the line between one song and another naturally became thin and porous. Recording essentially the same track with a few elements shifted around was par for the course. R&B was only interested in what worked. And Wolf himself did all three of these - borrowed from others, got borrowed from by others, and recycled his own best ideas.

So if the measure of R&B is its effect on R&R, Howlin’ Wolf’s was probably nil. But that’s because it took rock music over a decade to catch up with him. Sam Phillips claimed he was the greatest artist he ever worked with, despite going on to record the Sun Records roster. Dylan named him as the best live act he’d seen. The Stones, though named after a Waters song, called him “one of our greatest idols” and covered ’Little Red Rooster’. The Doors did ’Back Door Man’, while Marc Bolan stole ’You’ll Be Mine’ and Led Zeppelin ’Killing Floor’… the list goes on. And you hear his howl all the way through Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart. Hail the wolf!

“TURN MY HEAD INTO SOUND”: MY BLOODY VALENTINE’S ‘LOVELESS’ (TOP 50 ALBUMS)

Noise Will Set Us Free

My Bloody Valentine are now chiefly known for two things. The Brian-Wilson—like quixotic quest that lead to the recording of ’Loveless’, which nearly bankrupted their label. (Alas not entirely succeeding, leaving Creation still able to release Oasis albums.) And their tooth-rattling live performances, particularly on ’You Made Me Realise’.

And, at least in part, fair enough. The one time I saw them in their original incarnation they played a shortened set as part of a package tour. And still had time to play the extended version of ’You Made Me Realise’, with it’s mid-section of free-form noise. Though I probably got off lightly. There were nights where, no lie, the track would stretch out for half an hour and do structural damage to the venue.

And it was in noise the band found itself. They were originally just another clutch of Indie no-hopers, much as Joy Division before them had started out as second-rate punks. Figuring they were going nowhere they booked a final tour where they resolved to turn up the volume. Which they may well have originally meant purely as a fuck-you gesture. Guitarist and main man Kevin Shields has subsequently spoken of a desire to kill their own songs. They had, in the words of a later song, Nothing Much To Lose.

But noise seemed to offer possibilities. Because volume doesn’t just amplify the sound, even if that’s what it’s intended for. Inevitably, it changes the sound. You can treat those changes as interference, and try to minimise them, like people normally do. Or you can play into them.

And Shields then devised a style of tremolo playing which worked with this, soon dubbed ‘glide guitar’. Some say it came about after he’d needed to borrow a guitar, which happened to have a tremolo arm on it. Musos can ready about this here should they want. Suffice to say that, by bending and distorting the notes, it worked well with volume.

It’s true enough they came to be as influenced by others who had taken up noise before them, such as Sonic Youth and the Jesus and Mary Chain. But discovering the possibilities of noise for themselves, that may have been vital.

The ’You Made Me Realise’ EP in ’88 marked this change-over, handily marked by being their first release on Creation. (All that was before can really be regarded as juvenalia.) And from that point to this day reactions inevitably split into two contrary camps: “Is it supposed to sound like that?”, and “Who cares, when it sounds so awesome?”

Except, crucially, they never entirely tore up those Indie roots. It was like a swoony Dream Pop outfit and the most abrasive noise guitar band had been carelessly double-booked, but somehow still found a way to get along. Tracks sported Dream Pop titles, such was ’Blown a Wish’ or ’(When You Wake) You’re Still In a Dream’. 

And as ever there’s more to Pop that music snobs make out. Though music journos sooner reached for Sonic Youth comparisons, Phil Spector’s lush, epic soundscapes are as much an influence. Even now there are those who insist ‘masculine’ Rock is superior to ‘feminine’ pop. While Shields’ and Bilinda Butcher’s vocals, sometimes swapping, at others never quite overlaid, sailed over such restrictive distinctions.

Shields would insist he was influenced by Hip-Hop, despite never using Hip-Hop beats and at a time when any Hip-Hop/Indie crossover was effectively nil. What he borrowed, I suspect, was Hip-Hop’s habit of pushing disparate elements together and watching them collide, like fitting together pieces from different jigsaws. Making ‘wrongness’ work for you.

As an example listen to the opening of ’Soft As Snow’ and try and guess where and how the backing vocals will come in. Which you can’t do. They’re crazily, creatively counter-intuitive.

A great deal of great music doesn’t stake out the extremes (“the heaviest album evah” and all that), but mixes up the colours until new shades are made. And MBV would be a prime example, blissed-out and blistering all at once. Sometimes their music would be fragile wisps of things, murmured vocals floating past your ears. At others it was like getting wired up to the mains. And they’d jump from one to the other mid-track or, fairly often, do both at the same time.

It was delirious and intoxicating, like getting the punch and seeing the stars simultaneously. If we need a soundbite description, let’s go with ‘woozy noise with tunes’. Shields was after “the most beautiful songs with the most extremeness of physicality and sound.”

Though I doubt it was ever consciously intended, the music epitomised the philosophy that nothing is ever truly solid, essentially itself, separate from the rest of the world, but everything is fluid, changing and morphing. Brutal noise will eventually become serene, dreams are never so distinct from nightmares, love turns to heartbreak, and so on.

Now musically speaking, I’d come of age in the early Eighties. When Post-Punk had been stridently forward-looking, disdainful of the done-before. Which was inevitably succeeded by its polar opposite, music which was quite happy to have its roots showing. And as the Sixties had been the era most effort had gone into walling-off, it became the most brought-back, in scenes such as the Paisley Underground. To water the roots or cut yourself loose from them, that had come to seem music’s inevitable divide.

Then MBV came along and managed to look back as a way of looking forward. That Sixties psychedelic sound had in its day not been quaint or retro but been pushing at the limits. So now was the time to take up that baton and push harder.

A classic example would be vocals. Sixties beat groups were forever battling old-school engineers, who were insistent on making vocals prominent and distinct so listeners could hear the words. Whereas the bands wanted them to be made part of the rhythm. So MBV pushed down the vocals even further, setting them amid the other instruments, just another sound source.

Leading on from which, could you claim their sound was psychedelic? It’s not something you’d say of the bands which most influenced them. And, inevitably enough, Wikipedia labels them as Shoegaze, plus the charmingly oxymoronic Noise Pop. But psychedelic music plays with loss of form, epitomised by those liquid wheel light shows, in order to project a disorientating sense onto the listener. Which tended to work best when there was some semblance of form left to attack. Relatively straightforward song structures and simple tunes were bent and twisted, almost beyond recognition but never quite. Which sounds very much like… well, you may be ahead of me.

Abandon All Spatial Metaphors

What was effectively their first album, ’Isn’t Anything’, came out later in ’88. Later described by Mark Fisher as “a great album, for sure, but it's the sound of a band still escaping from rock. No doubt that gives the album a sense of drama that is absent from the anti-climax that is ’Loveless’. ‘Isn't Anything’ has more jagged edges, a terrain whose variegation makes it more palatable to rock tastes. ’Loveless’, by contrast, is a world with no edges, a world of deceptive similarity in which it is easy to become lost (for to locate yourself here you must lose yourself)… everything is smeary, bleary, blurred, slurred. Listening, you're drawn towards images of what is neither solid nor liquid, but viscous: honey, molasses, clotted blood…”

And Simon Reynolds was just as right to say it sounded “the same as before, only more so - more lustrous, languorous, inchoate, phantasmic… They've never been more them.” Escaping from planet Rock? After take-off, achieving orbit is simultaneously a complete breakthrough and a logical next move.

’Isn’t Anything’ still has semi-coherent lyrics (well some of the time) and a semi-recognisable band photo on the cover (albeit already blurring at the edges). But the band had already been replacing choruses with hummed vocals or instrumental breaks. Now, they were doing away with with such things altogether.

Similarly, the standard hierarchy of instruments of the traditional rock band is simply jettisoned. The album should come with a warning - “abandon all spatial metaphors all ye who enter here.” (i always associated that with the way the sleeve was in unassuming lower case, much like this sentence, something carried through to their track listings on i-tunes today.)

Fisher went on: ”Rock's propulsion and compulsion, its scurrying towards release, is suspended, perpetually deferred, captured in a dilating tension… regular sonic laws do not hold (you find yourself unable to say whether the album is trebly or bassy; the sonic geography of high and low is smoothed into indifferentiation).”

While Reynolds called in “[not] 'rock' so much as magma, a plasma of sound that barely conforms to the contours of riff or powerchord.” Fisher compared it to Turner’s squalls of brushwork.

And if that doesn’t sound much like a band album, we were to discover later it wasn’t. Shields wrote as much as he had on the predecessor, all tracks bar one. But by this point he was also recording almost all the instruments himself, so fixated on getting things down the way he wanted. Debbie Googe doesn’t seem to have played any bass, despite getting credited. Moreover, Shields would often leave months between his laying down one instrument and another, a long way from Rock notions of immediacy and band tightness.

Further, ’Isn’t Anything’ is a series of tracks which combine to make up a great album. ’Loveless’ is more a great album which doesn’t really reduce to a series of tracks. There’s often interludes which seem to belong to neither one track nor the next, more to the album as a whole, working like conjunctions in a sentence. The result is, it’s one of my most-loved albums and I’d be pushed to name half the tracks from it. And very few of the words.

In short, ’Loveless’ is the album where the band most got to sound like themselves, which should surely be the aim of every band. But all this means its achievement is heard best in the context of its predecessor. Listening to ’Loveless’ alone would be like watching ’2001’ by jumping straight to the Stargate sequence. Of course you can, and in one sense you’re cutting the chase to get the goodies. But in foreshortening the journey, what do you miss? And most creators are like that. Each new work can stand alone. But it’s so much richer when seen as part of an ongoing narrative, and you’re so much poorer to wrench it from that narrative.

As the band brought out two innovative albums with a hefty gap between, and then (for the longest time) no more, this seemed to create a space for others to occupy. Pretty soon their wake had spawned a whole genre, soon dubbed Shoegaze. With most of the bands as cluelessly copyist as the original my Blood Valentine had been with Indie.

But as ever with genuinely innovative bands, their actual influence radiated wider, happened more slowly and wasn’t always so transparent. There are for example few Post-Rock outfits who don’t bear the MBV DNA. Like those live performances of 'You Make Me Realise', this could be an album whose influence never actually ends…

It even sounds good played backwards at half speed. No, honest!

“I WANT TO GO TO A DIFFERENT LAND”: PJ HARVEY’S ‘STORIES FROM THE CITY, STORIES FROM THE SEA’ (TOP 50 ALBUMS)

“The one rock star that makes me know I’m shit is Polly Harvey. I’m nothing next to the purity that she experiences.”
- Courtney Love

”You Showed Me Just What I Could Do”

Polly Jean Harvey’s fifth album, ’Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea’ (2000) features her singing “is this love, is this love that I’m feeling?” like trying to hit on a name for some unfamiliar taste. It was described by Caroline Sullivan as her “wild-love-in-New York record… that bubble[s] over with adoration for a significant other, with the city as its backdrop.”

All of which made for a contrast to the earlier darker, more bluesy mood, particularly on her first two albums. Back then weightier tracks seemed to thicken the air around them, as characters entangled themselves in their own follies and desires. Tracks were called things like ’Water, ‘Hair’, ‘Legs’, ‘Snake’ and ’Man-Size’. Imagery was mostly bodily, nature-based or elemental. (’Kamikaze’ is perhaps the only number here which kept up the old ways. Listen for example to her high-register voice on the chorus.) Yet she broke up her original trio to embark on exploits new.

We’ve grown so used to love songs we tend to tune out the words as soon as we glean that’s what’s going on. They’re like politicians promising prosperity. Yet despite all the dead weight of overspent cliches, sometimes a record comes along which genuinely seems to bottle the feeling, the euphoria, the sense of daily life transformed into something thrilling. To cite the old Situationist saying: “Being in love means really wanting to live in a different world.”

There’s a tradition more often found in Latin arts (for example in the films ’Les Amants Dans Pont Neuf’ (1991) and ’Betty Blue’) (1986) where the lovers are counterposed to society. They just want to be together but the demands, possibly the very presence, of others inevitably insinuates its way between them. In this tradition the lovers’ desire to be together is tantamount to their fusing into one.

“When we walked through
“Little Italy
“I saw my reflection
“Come right off your face”

And isn’t the city the perfect backdrop to a love affair? A burst of endless energy passing around and through you, streets to discover just as you discover each other.

Remember how being out on the town would be demonstrated by old films? With a whirling montage of bright neon lights, careering traffic, dancing girls and spouting champagne? Tracks such as ’Good Fortune’ feel like those sequences looked, erupting in a euphoric rush. And rock music itself seems to belong with the city, as much as it does with electricity.

So the album’s shot through with parallels between big and small, between the vast and the immediate. “Do you remember the first kiss?/ Stars shooting across the sky.”

And Harvey pointedly sings “from England to America”. British artists have long had a tradition of the American album, the hit-and-rush of being plunged into the States on their first tour. Except it meant something simultaneously narrower and broader than that suggests. The American album was often really the New York album. And sure enough all those landmarks show up here, Brooklyn, Little Italy, the Empire State Building.

But at the same time it was the city album, the reaction to metropolitan life. Because even if they existed elsewhere New York was still the ur-city, the city of cities. (For later generations this may well become somewhere in China.) And notably this album titles itself not after New York but the more archetypal “the City.” (Harvey herself said that many songs were written during a long stay in New York, but it shouldn’t be seen as her New York album.)

Like rock music cities can feel liberating. You can throw off the weight of custom, of social expectation, to finally become yourself. Partly, their mass nature offers anonymity. But it’s a feeling which gets fused with the geography of a city, boulevards to stride along, rooftops to scale and look down from. That’s a feeling caught in art and literature aplenty. So the open streets of the city enables the affair, letting the lovers run down them past a sea of strangers. (“Threw my bad fortune/ Off the top of/ A tall building.”) It’s cities which have freeways, after all. 

”Just Give Me Something I Can Believe” 

Exhilarating, but perhaps not sufficient. For an album with so many love songs, only one’s a duet. (‘The Place We’re In’.) And both the album cover and video for ‘Good Fortune’ show her amid the whirlygig of a night out on the town, but adventuring alone.

Or maybe not? What if in that opening quote Sullivan had it right, but wrongside-up? What if the city’s not background but foreground?

You sometimes entertain theories about art not because you want them to be right, for the internet to unite in agreement with you, but because you just want them to work for you - and only in that moment. Even terms like ‘headcannon’ are too strong to describe this, for you need to be free to dump your own theory as soon as it stops working for you, and move on to entertain something else - even if it formally contradicts. It’s not about them being right, but useful.

It’s like placing a filter over a photo. It allows you to see that photo in a certain way, it brings out some elements and diminishes others. And you can take it away again when you’re finished with it.

And as one such theory, what if the love affair doesn’t just take place within the City but with it? The never-named lover is a personalisation of the place, its liberating force jolting through you like the sensation of being in love. ’You Said Something’ keeps coming back to that “something” you said (without ever saying it, naturally enough). What if it isn’t said before that Manhattan view but by it - by the flashing lights, the colours and the five bridges. All of that stretching vista seen as a message just for you. Me-into-you morphs into me-into-City.

Harvey has been dismissive of the notion her music should be taken as displaced autobiography, and understandably so. Too many confuse the impetus of a song with its meaning. But it’s perhaps notable that she was brought up in the scarcely-more-rural location of a Dorset farmhouse. (While I may love the album so much having grown up in a small town. As a child my intention was to move to America, and change my name to something more befitting this new land. At the time Fred seemed a good choice. And naturally by America I meant New York.)

”When You Got Lost Into the City”

On release, most concentrated on the album’s bright and striking new tone. But if this is about a love story with the city its a torrid and tempestuous affair, not one solely spent watching sunsets. Just like getting lost in the city, it has another face. Which is, to quote another lyric, “sharp as knives”.

It opens, after all with declamatory guitar and the lines “Look out ahead/ See danger come/ I want a pistol/ I want a gun”. And more knives and guns ensue than are found in your normal love story. Because the overpowering city cannot but cast its shadow over you, dominating you and rendering you anonymous. From the Bible via Brecht and punk (all three lyrical or musical influences) comes the longstanding tradition of the City as Babylon, the centre of all that’s corrupt and oppressive. And this shadow spreads over numbers like (the near-Brechtian titled) ’The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore’. (“Too many people out of love”).

The tracks here often sound just as energised but by a different kind of energy, one not bestowed upon you but generated by necessity. The link’s reversed, the City doesn’t enable you but comes down upon you. It becomes a battlefield, its “universal laws” set against your “inner charm”. You’re in a constant state of agitation, if not outright war, just to keep hold of your own self. (“This world’s crazy/ Give me the gun”). The line “Little people at the amusement park” always reminds me of Harry Lime’s infamous cuckoo clock speech in ’The Third Man’, delivered looking down at human dots from a Ferris wheel.

In fact it comes to feel so Babylonian it’s inherently apocalyptic, as if set somewhere so mighty the only possible next step will be a fall. Though written long before the terrorist attacks on New York on September 11th, it now seems almost impossible not to hear the album in that context.

"Sometimes it rains so hard…
“And in my heart
“Feels like the end of the world”

But, and should there be any regular readers they’ll doubtless be ahead of me here, the magic happens when these misfitting pieces are put together regardless. There’s no absolute division between the themes, more the feeling that as two sides of the same coin one bleeds into the other. The album starts with ’Big Exit’, running into ’Good Fortune’. The in-your-eyes lovers morph before your eyes into the folk staple of the outlaw couple, living not just outside of but against society.

Because when seen from a distance, the City isn’t just where the good stuff happens, or even the bad stuff. It’s where the stuff happens, while the small-town backwater you inhabit is a featureless, event-free purgatory.

”One Day There’ll be a Place For Us”

And there’s one other aspect to the album, which I suspect is more (if not entirely) personal to me…

Part and parcel of my leaving that afore-mentioned small town was my ability to enmesh myself in political activism. Which I was soon pursuing with the fervour of a love affair; the exhilarating feeling of being transformed and being able to transform, the desire to be everywhere at once, the belief you could punch your way out of consensus reality into a better one by force of will alone. You told yourself everything was heading towards a mighty conflagration, during which the future would be hammered out.

It was heady stuff, and inevitably it made you headstrong. It came with a tendency to fetishise conflict beyond any context, and a romanticisation of crime as some inherently Robin Hood affair. We indulged all that, in the words of the song, “until nothing was enough/ Until my middle name was excess.”

This being Britain, none of us actually had guns. Thankfully, as in our befuddled hands they’d have less likely to shot down the lackeys of the klepto-imperialist hegemonic order, and more likely taken our own toes out. But “this world’s crazy, give me the gun”, that sentiment captures how it all felt.

Remember the Funkadelic line “freedom is free of the need to be free”? We were the very opposite, enslaved to the need to be free, all-consumed by the burning desire to keep activism ever-aflame lest it splutter and all be lost. Like the song says “we just kind of lost our way/ But we were trying to be free.” 

Set against the slow, measured piano and virtually sprechgesang vocals are those agitated cymbals. It sounds like dry kindling, one of those tracks that smoulders so much it constantly threatens to self-ignite. But it sets expectations to defy them, breaking into a more serene chorus, and the promise “one day… we’ll take life as it comes”.

Harvey proved keen to keep her sound moving. She took to pinning up a sign in the studio asking ‘Too PJH?’, a warning against repeating herself. And this was really the album that cemented all that, the freeway that always took you somewhere new.