Month: February 2013

Tom’s choice of theme inspired me to take the plunge and purchase this album shortly after our last meeting. Up until recently, ‘Legend’ ticked the box as my sole source of Marley and reggae in general. A comfortable but lazy position to take and one listen to this, put it straight to the top of the pile of existing records I had thought about bringing along.

I found it instantly irresistible and have probably have been over-playing it since it was first unwrapped. I’ve never been attracted by the cover art on this album but now I’m passed that I can just get on with a wonderful groove that starts right from the opening track, ‘Coming in from the cold’.

My non-existent knowledge of reggae means I’m unlikely to contrast and compare very much on this one. But as his final studio release prior to his death in 1981, reportedly this was his most religious/spiritual offering combined with a band knowing exactly what they were doing.

Whether it just because I’ve got access to better audio equipment these days, but the detail on this album (of course best heard on cd) , of single instruments and percussion  is stunning and I find myself anticipating single piano notes etc. throughout the album.

The best known tracks are left towards the end of the album and fellow owners of Legend will know them well. The upbeat dance feel of ‘Could you be Loved’, softens you up for the spiritual body blow that follows with the beauty of ‘Redemption Song’.

Not the album I had originally anticipated bringing, but seeing as Rob brought along two that I had originally considered, just as well.

Rob listened: It’s hard not to enjoy ‘Uprising’. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could take against it at all. I have no great insight to offer. I’m resisting the urge to start farting on about how sunshiney this album is. I guess it’s potentially interesting to consider the dissonance between the way Marley presumably intended his music to be received, socially conscious, even revolutionary, and the common perception of these songs as the soundtrack to life on some idyllic (imaginary) Caribbean paradise. But i’m not that interesting.

I admire reggae immensely for it’s apparent reliance on extreme repetition. I hope one day to have listened to enough to be able to discern countless sub-genres, influences and radical expressive forms within it, but for now i’ll settle for it all sounding a bit samey and a bit good to my stupid ears.

Tom listened: Like Graham, my journey into the music of Bob Marley was ostensibly through Legend (although I do recall being appalled at the age of 10 that his ‘cover’ of  No Woman, No Cry was so rubbish in comparison to the definitive version by….you guessed it…Boney M of course).

Subsequently I have explored some of Marley’s back catalogue and I like all the albums I own, possibly preferring Rastaman Vibration (to Natty Dread and Burnin) due to the lack of Legends tracks on it, giving it a feel of a level playing field rather than having a couple of tracks that I know inside out already.

I have never been tempted by Uprising – I usually work on the assumption that an artist that has been around for a while is usually a spent force by the time they record their last album. There are some obvious exceptions to this rule but in Marley’s case the critics have tended to favour the run from Catch a Fire through to Exodus and I have been happy to be guided by their judgement. However, Uprising sounded pretty fine to me and, as far as I could tell, there was no particular drop in quality between it and Marley’s earlier records. Obviously, the two Legend tracks are amazing but there were plenty of others on this album that made just enough impact during the single listen to make me think that, given enough time, Uprising could easily hold its own amongst Marley’s more recognised classics.

Nick listened: Me being me, I never bought Legend and instead went and bought a handful of Markey’s studio albums while I was at university instead. One of them was this, and it’s great. Brilliant choice, and not one I would have considered as a ‘swan song’; I kind of know it’s last in Bob’s discography, but just don’t think of it that way.

Clearly on a roll now, I offered up my 3^rd debut album since I couldn’t find one to bring along for the relevant theme night.

I guess when you reflect on the fact you own a record in LP, CD and digital format, there must be something about it that has motivated such purchasing activity. My only problem with this album is not really understanding why, I keep being drawn to pulling it out for a listen on a regular basis since its release in 1984.

It straddles a number of genres ranging across pop/soft-rock/jazz/soul/AOR and more. Certainly in 1984 it didn’t fit with indie tinged range of things I was listening to and seeing live. Maybe it was a London thing, as at the same time as this came out we were venturing “up West” as it were, to small clubs to see people like Carmel perform.

Perhaps we thought we were more sophisticated by dabbling with such styles and putting pop and indie to one side, for a while? More simply it could have been I was 18 and fancied Sade Adu.

It doesn’t sound as smart and cool as it did in 1984, but Sade still smolders in her strangely detached way, all these years later. Sometimes feel this should be available on prescription to all X-factor wannabees, just to show if you have the basis of a good voice, you don’t need to travel through half a dozen notes to sing one well.

Unfortunately, not long after its release, the album seemed to become absorbed by yuppie culture and dinner party soundtracks, leading me to reject it for a few years. But it keeps gnawing away at me over the years for a run out. Perhaps its simply nostalgia that shouldn’t be inflicted on others (I suspect some will agree), but there is something comforting about the style that doesn’t try too hard, is melodic and hooky enough to keep you interested and of course there is always pictures of Sade to look at!

If you were around at the time you you couldn’t ignore the three hit singles and ‘Your Love is King’, ‘Smooth Operator’ and ‘When Am I Going to Make a Living’ remain amongst the best tracks. Only six studio albums since 1984, more than 50 million albums sold worldwide and repeatedly well received output, suggests judicious use of her talents. Strangely, I have never felt inclined to purchase her later works. Perhaps this album fills a personal niche, and for me that’s value enough.

Helpfully the first line on the Wiki page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sade_(band)) cautions you not to confuse Sade with Slade. I wonder how many romantic plans with dimmed lights and a glass of wine have been ruined by Noddy Holder?

Nick listened: “Smooth Operator” is one of those songs that seems, to me, to be burnt into the world’s cultural consciousness, an indelible melody etched into our shared memory. Other than that, the first time I was really aware of Sade in any meaningful sense was circa 2000 when she released an album and was lavished with praise; suddenly I became aware of quite how successful she’d been in the 80s, and how… laid back about the time between album releases. Having gorged on Kaputt last year, and explored some Roxy Music and Prefab Sprout, smooth, sophisticated 80s sounds aren’t as alien to me as they would have been a few years ago. But even so, as beautifully-played (how do young musicians learn to play like this?!) and sung and produced and arranged as this was, there seemed something a little… bloodless… somehow, about it, to me at least. It may be that half the people I know who’ve made music aesthetically similar don’t have voices anywhere near as accomplished as Sade’s, and my brain therefore decodes / unpacks them as somehow riskier, more broken, more human, or it may be that the whole package here is just so smooth and aspirational as to seem unreal and therefore, to me, if not to millions of others, not worth thinking about anymore than I think about driving a Bentley. (Conversely the unrealness of My Bloody Valentine does appeal, but it’s a very different sort of unreal.) But a good listen nonetheless, and a surprising and excellent choice for our little club to pontificate on.

Tom Listened: I suppose we all go through that phase, usually in our mid to late teens, when we come to realise that our parents are not quite the all conquering super-heroes we always assumed they were (in my case their loss of status was only slight), when they reveal themselves as ‘as fallible as the rest of us’ human beings. I distinctly remember an incident in my adolescence that epitomised this realisation – the point when my pop music hating father returned from a long car journey extolling the virtues of this ‘amazing’ new artist he had discovered being played on the radio whilst he was driving – Sade. Now, the problem was not with Sade’s music at all, it was in my father’s reluctance to listen to any of the music we liked at the time (Beatles, Stones, early Elton John, Queen, Police) with anything other than sniffy dismissiveness at its ‘vacuous, trivial nature’ whilst then extolling such smooth, undemanding, seemingly light fare as Diamond Life. My brother and I just couldn’t compute this and so we dismissed the music of Sade without really considering its worth in just the same way as our father did with our favourite records.

I’m pretty sure that I had never listened to Diamond Life all the way through before Graham played it to us, but I had heard Smooth Operator and Your Love is King like a squillion times and, despite not having listened to them for ages, they still felt ubiquitous and slightly overfamiliar. I preferred the tracks on the album that I had not previously heard and it was not difficult to see why this album was such a big seller and also why my father would have liked it back in the mid 80s. For me, a little like Nick, it felt just a bit too smooth and polished to fully appeal and I didn’t get a sense of Sade as a person (although she’s got a wonderful voice) – in direct contrast to The Blue Nile, I felt as though she was detached from the material she was singing on Diamond Life and therefore I found it hard to connect with the record. So were Ben and I right to turn our backs on our father’s latest love 27 years ago? The jury’s still out, but I suspect it will be a verdict we never entirely find out!

Rob listened: I remember Sade as a mysterious and alluring character when I was growing up. Her songs never quite fit the pop mould they were apparently being squeezed into and, as far as I could tell, she was no ordinary pop singer, no Alison Moyet or Rick Astley. Although all three certainly had wonderful voices, I can’t recall Sade having a public profile as most pop stars were required to. Whilst I never felt the singles from Diamond Life were for me, I definitely did feel that they were something ‘other’. Fast forward 16 years and I found myself sufficiently intrigued and enticed by the reviews of ‘Lovers Rock’ to go out and buy it, although I recall pathetically claiming I’d picked it up as I thought my wife might like it, before keeping it in my car for the next 6 months. It’s a great record, with through lines from ‘A Love Supreme’ all the way to The XX.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying I enjoyed listening to Diamond Life for what I reckon must have been the first time. Thanks Graham.

Graham sowed the seed at our last meeting – as cinematic listening experience go Hats is up there with Dummy as one of the most evocative, image laden pieces of art this side of an Ennio Morricone soundtrack.

Hats is the Blue Nile’s second album and for me, it is exquisite in every respect. I’ve seen it described in various places as melancholic, plaintive, wracked, harrowing but to my mind none of these adjectives quite nail it. The word that always springs to my mind when I listen to Hats (although you don’t really listen to Hats, you live inside it) is ‘romantic’…doomed romance undoubtedly, but beautiful with it and so, so sad that it is one of the few albums, possibly the only album that consistently leaves me choked up. Whilst this was being played at record club Rob seemed to mysteriously morph into Graham and just sat through the entire record without uttering a word. I am intrigued to know whether this was due to him:

a) Being asleep.

b) Becoming so maudlin whilst listening to Hats that he couldn’t bear to speak for fear of blubbing.

c) Being mesmerised by the album’s emotional heft and musical brilliance.

d) Being none (or all?) of the above.

No doubt the truth will out with time. Whatever, Hats broke new records for the quietest listen we have yet had with whole tracks passing by in total silence!

In direct contrast to an Elvis Costello album, Hats sets a high bar from the off and maintains that quality throughout. On the night I played Always Coming Back To You as a precursor (my favourite song from Scott 1) because Hats has always struck me as the kind of album that Scott Walker would have been making if he had continued to produce albums like the first couple of self-titled efforts on into the 1980s. The production values are undeniably of their time, but the songwriting is timeless, from the gigantic swirling mass that is Headlights on the Parade, the equally fine (despite the Tina Turner bassline – thanks Graham) Downtown Lights which reveals an uncharacteristic glimpse of Paul Buchanan’s anger and angst in the song’s quite brilliant coda, to the more stately, practically funereal ballads of Over the Hillside, Let’s Go Out Tonight and From a Late Night Train. Throughout Buchanan’s voice is ravaged and ragged, always effortlessly powerful but equally always restrained; this is a heroic effort free of sentimentality where the city is the backdrop and hopeless love is the subject.

The city plays a huge part in Hats success as an album, creating images in the mind that are hard to shift and shape the record, providing the ‘scenery’ for the acts that are played out in its seven perfect jewels.  But the city that The Blue Nile evoke on Hats is a million miles away from the snafu city that Bitches Brew has always conjured up, the dangerous city that Stevie Wonder sang of on Innervisions or the alienating, paranoid Cities on Talking Heads’ Fear of Music. No, Hats is a city of upturned collars, hunched shoulders, drizzly pavements, loneliness and street lamps. And this picture is painted in each and every song, nuanced and subtle and poignant and devastating until the final Saturday Night offers the faintest of glimmers of hope when Buchanan admits that he ‘loves an ordinary girl (who will) make the world alright’. The fact that earlier in the song he admits to the listener that he expects this love to be unrequited is par for the course…this is The Blue Nile after all, not bloody Katrina and the Waves!

Nick listened: There isn’t much else to say after Tom’s beautiful write-up here. I’ve owned Hats for years and, while I don’t play it all that often because it does, certainly, require a specific mood to fulsomely appreciate, I do love it dearly. A beautiful, lovelorn, windswept, failed urban romance of an album.

Graham Listened: A band I seemed to have read a good deal about over the years and would probably have had agreed they were good despite never having listened to one of their records. Tom, your write up says it all, in fact, “I hang on every word you say”. Magnificant sweeping cinematic vibe, whereas I always had imagined a far more delicate and paired back sound. Shows how much I know!

Rob listened: First things first. Tom, since you asked, the answer is ‘not quite’ to each of the four options above, but if you mixed them all together into some sort of swirling mood-gloop, that’s probably somewhere near how I felt. In truth, my state of mind was largely being shaped by the comedown from three days of codeine-based painkillers, followed by the double-whammy of a massive local anaesthetic and preparatory root canal work. The effects of the former were fading, and aftermath of the latter starting to make itself felt. I guess in some senses, the Blue Nile probably did fit my mood fairly well.

It struck me, listening back to ‘Hats’ a couple of times after the meeting, that to share Tom’s feelings for it you probably either had to have lived with it through thick and thin and to know it intimately enough that Paul Buchanan’s weltanschauung becomes your own for the duration, or alternatively be attracted to the precise, smooth, lush signifier sounds of 80s sophisticate pop. I reckon Tom, Nick and Graham each tick one or both of these boxes. I’m afraid I don’t.

Some of ‘Hats’, particularly some of Buchanan’s vocal lines, has started to grow on me, and I can imagine the circumstances in which I might reach for it. Balanced against that, I feel sufficient, gentle, magnetic repulsion from the AOR sound that I suspect my mental filing system will keep pushing The Blue Nile towards the back.