Having recently re-discovered I owned a  copy this album, it would have been a much better choice for my 1982 album of the previous round. No theme this week meant I was free to bring it along anyway. Rhythmically I thought this might mark a departure from my normal fare and allow us to ponder on an artist who has covered such a wide range of bases in his career.

From proggy/eccentric/worldy/political/pop it is pretty hard to find a file to put Mr Gabriel under.

From distant memory, I acquired this album in 1982 after a series of swaps, which to the best of my recollection, included Men at Work and Genesis. I think I came out the winner. I have never sought out any Gabriel era Genesis, but I’m pretty confident it sounds nothing like this!

I took to it pretty quickly as basically it sounded weirder than much of what else I was listening to, and had a spooky cover. Certainly the video for ‘Shock the Monkey’ was disturbing enough to get my interest at the time. It was pretty easy to please a 16 year old in those days!

I pretty much left the album alone for many years until I finally saw Alan Parker’s film, Birdy. The soundtrack recycles some of the tracks on this album and immediately triggered renewed interest in the album.

While, like many, I enjoyed the videos like Sledgehammer from 1986’s ‘So’, it has always been the darker atmospherics of this album that have held my interests. Heavily indulging African and Latin rhythms, sounds and atmospherics throughout, it is not an easy listen and sometimes a little too melodramatic in places. Overall I guess that is why some of the tracks work so well on the movie soundtrack.

‘Rhythm of the Heat’ is a brutal opener with African percussion and along with ‘Lay your Hands on Me’, and my personal favourite ‘Wallflower’, they are my stand out tracks from the album. Some very ‘heavy’ subject matter lies behind many of these tracks but seeing as I have misunderstood most of it for 20+ years, it is not essential to enjoying the album as a whole.

Tom Listened: Although I have never been a huge fan of Peter Gabriel, I had a ‘phase’ around the time of Sledgehammer and my copy of So languishes somewhere in my record collection, unlistened to and unloved for many years now…I am sure it sounds as good today as it did back in the 80s though. Must give it a go. Whilst So is the only Gabriel album I still own, my brother and I definitely had some of his self-titled albums back in the day but their whereabouts are a mystery to me now. I don’t think we had 4 but perhaps we did and I just never got round to getting to know it properly. I certainly enjoyed those albums back then and listening to Graham’s offering the other evening brought back why – Gabriel’s music is an interesting mix of influences, thoughtful and thought provoking, perhaps a little too earnest at times but, to my mind, well worth a listen. As Graham has pointed out above, Peter Gabriel is a bit of an enigma – hard to pigeonhole, one senses he is elusive and private and operates way outside the mainstream whilst still being widely admired and respected. Must be doing something right!

Nick listened: Peter Gabriel is one of those artists who I’ve had on my mental checklist of people to investigate for what seems like forever – my first exposure was Sledgehammer, which I loved as a kid (didn’t everyone?), and whilst I know he as in Genesis, the Genesis he was in are, as far as I can ascertain, a very different beast to the one that did tha awful song about being crap at dancing. I really enjoyed Security, and nosed for it at the weekend when I was in a record shop – alas they didn’t have it, and I was left ruing all the times I thought about buying remasters of his albums for a fiver each and out it off because I thought they’d always be there.

Rob listened: You know how when you get older things that were dreadfully despised when you were young seem to become fashionable, only for you to reaIise that you just got old and started to like old-people things? No? I’m thinking primarily here of golf and Peter Gabriel. Anyway, I was really pleased to see this pop out of Graham’s special Record Club bag just a couple of days after I’d read this rather convincing case for ‘So’ on The Quietus, a record that seemed so unashamedly grown-up to me when it was first released and about which still somehow hung sufficient wafting wisps of perceived former prog-rock atrocities that I’d mentally filed it somewhere far, far away, equidistant between Marillion and Luther Vandross, if such a thing were possible. So, as I was saying, I was pleased to see and hear this, although it seemed to suffer the Curse of the Curry and its details now elude me. I like Peter Gabriel. He seems like a decent chap, clearly very committed to what he’s doing, unashamed to be creative, political and intellectual and, oh what’s the use? I still can’t remember what it sounded like.

I’m going to go out on a limb here…Clear Spot is Captain Beefheart’s best album. There, I said it! Sure, it’s not as ‘out there’ as many of his other discs but, let’s be honest, we have all listened to it a helluva lot more times than Trout Mask Replica, Lick My Decals Off Baby or Doc at the Radar Station. Haven’t we?

I got lucky with Beefheart. I chanced upon Clear Spot whilst I was at university without realising that it is THE gateway drug as far as the good captain’s discography goes. Weird enough to be compelling, tight enough to be thrilling, concise enough to leave you wanting more…yet, crucially, not too difficult. It does sound like music after all! I imagine that if I had bought one of Beefheart’s more avant-garde offerings as my first Beefheart purchase I may have stopped there. If I had bought one of his mid-70s ‘pop’ albums I almost certainly would have given up on him there and then. No, if you fancy checking yourself out some Beefheart and are not too scared about the addictive qualities of his music, Clear Spot is definitely the place to start.

Now, I am a huge fan of Trout Mask Replica and (especially) its follow up, Lick My Decals Off Baby, but I can’t help feeling that in some ways they are less of an accomplishment than Clear Spot. Groundbreaking they most definitely are and both are easy to admire, but they are so hard to love and I don’t think I have ever experienced that chill down the spine listening to them that I did when playing Clear Spot at record club last night – that thing you get every so often with a record when you REALLY listen intently and you are just blown away by how good it sounds, how it twists and turns so unexpectedly yet maintains its groove, its structure, its accessibility. I guess it helped knowing there were two Clear Spot virgins present so maybe I was imagining what they were hearing, as the opener Low Yo-Yo Stuff writhed its way to its conclusion. To use a sadly devalued (in current times) term…just awesome!

As Rob pointed out on the night, Clear Spot somehow manages to fuse so many genres of music that it should be a complete mess. How can a great soul ballad such as Too Much Time, follow the boogie stomp of Nowadays a Woman Gotta Hit A Man and lead into the garagey delta-blues of Circumstances and pull off the trick of sounding so right? I guess there are three things that tie all the disparities together on Clear Spot – the lyrics, the voice and the grooves. The songs on Clear Spot (the only exception being the 90 second afterthought of Golden Birdies) hang together so brilliantly, always on the verge of cacophony and discordance, but pulling back in the nick of time, returning to the groove that so wonderfully underpins the entire album. There was an inordinate amount of head bobbing and foot tapping (about as animated as we get) whilst Clear Spot played and I imagine that is the last thing anyone who only knows Beefheart through TMR would have thought.

Unlike Neil Young (see Round 38), I went on to acquire many more Beefheart albums that I really like..in fact I own eight Beefheart albums and I like every one! His is a fascinating catalogue; a singular artist deserving, to my mind, of every word of praise that has ever came his way but I have always felt it was a great shame that the alchemy he chanced upon on Clear Spot (the album he allegedly wrote partly as an apology to his band for putting them through the two previous albums) was never really repeated, his later albums veering much closer to TMR and LMDOB in style.

Nixk listened: I bought Trout Mask Replica whilst at university and, frankly, hated it. Listened about three times and thought it was unbearable discombobulation rather than music. So I decided that Captain Beefheart wasn’t for me. On the strength of Clear Spot, I may have been hasty and wrong – because it was awesome. I will be seeking it out at some point in the future.

Rob listened: My favourite Beefheart album and has been since I bought it almost 20 years ago. Like Nick and unlike Tom, I started with ‘Trout Mask Replica’ when it was reissued in 1990. Unlike Nick I found it baffling, laughable, fascinating, challenging and, for all those reasons, rather thrilling. I still can’t say it’s ever come fully into focus for me as some of the devout claim it will, but its existence and the fact it holds such cultural cache, is something we should all rejoice in.

‘Clear Spot’ is radically different in so many ways, but as Tom points out, it is illuminated yet further by the radioactive afterglow of TMR. I can’t add much to Tom’s assessment of the album other than to throw in a couple of extra adjectives: tight, gripping, moving, mesmerisingly sung and to mention that the only reason Jo and I didn’t get married to one of the songs from ‘Clear Spot’ is that we couldn’t choose between ‘Too Much Time’, ‘My Head Is My Only House…’ and ‘Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles’.

“I look at her, she looks at me, in her eyes I see the sea…”

Graham Listened: I have tried to appreciate/understand Beefheart in the past and failed miserably. I have sought out footage and recordings to help in the process but never really understood why he is regarded as a genius in many quarters. Maybe tonight I came close to getting it at last. I bobbed my head and tapped my foot appropriately to an overall sound I felt comfortable with. There were moments where I wondered “why has he done that” and “what is going on here”, but not enough to alienate me in the way exposure to Beefheart has in the past. My defenses have been weakened!

My choices were more functional than inspired.  Drawing 1982 and 2007 was not helpful as in 1982 I was sixteen and had little ‘taste’, whereas in 2007 I only bought 2 records released that year (and didn’t think the team would put up with 24 tracks from Led Zep’s ‘Mothership’).

Had it been 83-84 (geddit?), the field would have opened up much more widely, but 82 was always going to be a different offering from an artist/s I had brought along before. However, in recent developments, a half-term clearout of our loft has led to the discovery of another box of LP’s which contained potential choices. In amongst others that can only be described as “corkers” I know Rob can’t wait to hear Marillion’s 1983 ‘Real to Reel’ live album!

After playing ‘Sons and Fascination’ in Round 29, I thought I would bring this along as it fills the slot between that album and where it all went wrong (at least in my opinion) in 1984 with ‘Sparkle in the Rain’. There are a few hints on this album as to where they are going, but mainly they seemed to be applying a more ‘poppy’ polish to the sound on their previous album. In fact some of the synth and baselines on this album had me thinking more ‘New Romantic’ than ‘New Wave’ and I’m sure Kajagoogoo must have had a listen.

If you turned the drums on the title track up to “11”, you are not that far away from the “de-dum, de-dum, de-crash bang wallop of ‘Waterfront’. My favourites remain ‘The King is White and in the Crowd’ along with the only instrumental, ‘Someone up there likes you’. Both tracks typical of a haunting and sophisticated sound, shortly to be totally dispensed with.

With the nights’ strongest linkage between artists and years, I threw in ‘Nothin’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSMcK_HJXuE from 2007’s Robert Plant and Alison Krauss collaboration on ‘Raising Sand’. The track is a cover of a Townes Van Zandtsong and apart from some of the “pickin’ and fiddlin’” sounds pretty alien to the rest of the album.

Tom Listened: Having set the ‘Year of Release Lucky Dip’ theme, I have to admit to a pang of guilt when Graham (having, by his own admission, struggled to find something to bring from 1982) suddenly exclaimed that he could have brought The Nightfly by Donald Fagan…an album that is currently languishing in the side door of my car! It would have certainly have given the evening a different feel – slick ‘yacht rock’, as opposed to the new wave transitioning into stadium rock of New Gold Dream.

I was really impressed with Sons and Fascination, less so with NGD, probably because it was easier to hear echoes of the Simple Minds we all know and hate. Still much more palatable to me than what was to come afterwards, Simple Minds on New Gold Dream sounded like a band that were in the process of cashing in their chips – they had decided on their game plan and had begun making music that was (probably) less innovative and creative and (definitely) more commercially attractive than what had come before. It was interesting to hear the progression but, for me, I suspect Sons and Fascination will be the last album in their chronology I would be interested in picking up.

Rob listened: Graham drew the short straw in more ways than one. Not only was he allocated what seemed to be one of his most heavily mined years, but he also got to play his eventual choice during takeaway hour. I’m not sure how much we all listened. I liked some of what I heard, recognised some of it, and the transitional phase represented by NGD is easy to discern.

I have a certain sympathy with Simple Minds. It’s easy to look back after decades of hearing their most famous songs pumped out of the radio like so much aural styrofoam and conclude that they cynically moved into making hollow stadium rock. I can’t imagine they did. Back in the early 80s, along with U2 and others I’ve blanked from my memory, the shift towards making a bigger sound, writing bigger songs to attempt to fill bigger spaces, physically and emotionally (and yes, financially) must have been at least as much an artistic endeavour as a business one. I’m not convinced they could have known where they were going, how it would be received or, years later, how hollow it would sound.

Nick listened: Rob’s right that this suffered by timing – whatever’s on when the food arrives tends to get short shrift, whether it deserves it or not. After exposure to Sons and Fascination, Real to Real Cacophany, and Empires and Dance this year – my first foray into Simple Minds beyond big radio hits – New Gold Dream (wtf are the numbers about?) definitely sounded like a transitional record. I didn’t recognise much, if anything, from it, and doubt I’ll investigate it, or them, any further beyond this point.

The mid 70s were an interesting time for popular music, not that I can remember much of it first hand, due to being five at the time…as opposed to off my head on drugs! Of those records that have stood the test of time, it seems as though a disproportionate number of them are bleak, harrowing, doom laden evocations of the human condition. Maybe these records document the point in time when the hippy dream turned sour, the idealism of the late 60s and early 70s giving way to self-doubt, cynicism and suspicion. Maybe the hippies had nowhere left to go but here. Ironically, seeing as he was the arch anti-hippy, this trend may have been kick started by Lou Reed’s 1973 rock opera, Berlin, which is just about as dark as an album can get and surely hugely influential (although you never can tell about influence, can you Nick!). Whatever, in the next couple of years there followed a slew of similarly unsettling offerings such as Gram Parson’s Grievous Angel, Big Star’s 3^rd and Joni Mitchell’s Hissing of Summer Lawns. Artists were experimenting musically and thematically and were really challenging their fan-base in the process. It seems as though many of these records were poorly received in their day but they make for captivating listening all these years on and, to me, often sound far more interesting than their bigger selling precursors. Possibly the epitome of this phenomenon is Tonight’s the Night, Neil Young’s most ragged, tortured and, arguably, finest LP.

First a confession. I have never really ‘got’ Neil Young. This is strange considering I have a ridiculous number of Neil Young albums (after all, there are a ridiculous number of Neil Young albums to have). I have always suspected a case of ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ about his records; to my mind they often don’t go anywhere particularly interesting – a guitar workout lasting 10 minutes is pleasant enough but when the riff is so simplistic and linear (see Cowgirl in the Sand, Down By the River, Southern Man, Like a Hurricane), it can all get a bit monotonous. In comparison to, say, Halleluwah by Can which twists and turns and goes to all sorts of surprising places in its 20 odd minutes, I never found all that much to discover in Neil Young albums. But I kept buying them because I kept reading about how they were so good. The next one was going to be THE ONE. But it never was. Then I bought Tonight’s the Night…and then I stopped buying Neil Young albums!

It was obvious from the off that this one was the real deal. The history of the album, the circumstances that led to it being the work it is, is well documented. Suffice to say, Young was in a pretty bad place going into making Tonight’s the Night…and it shows. And that is what makes it such a compelling listen. The songs teeter on the brink of falling apart throughout the album; they are raw, wounded and as vulnerable as the man who wrote them. Listening to Tonight’s the Night recently, I once again find myself wondering whether an album this messy would even get released in this age of studio perfection and computer technology. Having recently made two mega-sellers in Harvest and After the Goldrush, Neil Young must have had pretty much carte blanche at Reprise at the time and, whilst artists who have overwhelming power have often made appalling records, in this case such clout was surely necessary in getting it released – after all, the album only saw the light of day two years after it was recorded! Listening to it today makes me wonder about those decision makers in the big record companies. Alright, Tonight’s the Night was never going to sell as many copies as Harvest, but its tarnished brilliance is so hard to deny that it would have to be an inordinately cynical ear to turn it down.

There is little point singling out individual tracks as they really need to be heard as part of the whole. Young’s triple LP best of, Decade, includes the title track and Tired Eyes but neither of these songs make half as much sense as they do when heard on the album itself. As Rolling Stone’s Dave Marsh put it, ‘This is Young’s only conceptually cohesive record, and it’s a great one.’ Me, I’m glad I persevered with Young and, who knows, maybe one day I’ll go back to and fully appreciate all those other albums of his I’ve purchased over the years. But even if I never listen to one of his other records again, I know Tonight’s the Night is one album I’ll never grow tired of.

Nick listened: Tom introduced this by saying, twice, “Nick will hate this”, and describing it as (paraphrasing rather than verbatim) “the most rubbishly performed, sung, played, and recorded record ever”. He also said (verbatim) “This is the only Neil Young album that I own that I like. I own eight Neil Young albums.”

Well, I didn’t hate it. I own about four Neil Young albums (Harvest, Gold Rush, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, and Rust Never Sleeps) and I quite like all of them. I quite like Neil Young, in a completely non-committal way, in that I think he’s a good songwriter, decent guitar player, and interesting, charismatic singer. I didn’t think Tonight’s The Night was badly played, sung, or recorded – certainly Neil’s vocals go a little further off-piste a little more frequently than on other records I know by him, but it was never monstrous or offensive – if anything, it was kind of touching for him to be clearly reaching beyond himself, writing songs and melodies outside his range. Neil’s tremulous, cracking vocals, if anything, accentuated the emotional heft of these songs about the deaths of his friends.

Rob listened: I liked this a lot. I rarely delve back beyond 1977 but many of the records I’ve bought in the last 15 years or so have a clear and direct lineage with the music that came from America in the midst of her post-Sixties comedown. Tom preceded ‘Tonight’s The Night’ by playing ‘Brute Choir’ by Palace Music. The two records could have been recorded in the same year. Neil Young’s songs here, perhaps simply as a result of their simplicity and honesty, sound as fresh and raw as the day he wrote them. Quiet, meaningful albums tend to get crushed like so many wheel-broken butterflies at DRC meetings where, truth be told, we like to talk more than we like to listen. ‘Tonight’s The Night’ had our rapt attention and rightly so.

Graham listened: Not sure what happened to the incredibly well-crafted review I left last week but here is a repeat summary. I also quite like Neil Young but have never sought out any of his records. I’ve considered it but then I’ll see him singing live on tv and pause for thought. After Tom’s introduction (which may have been a clever ploy for future use) I was expecting a bit of a ramshackle mess. What we got was something sincere, sensitive and captivating.