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POTTY ABOUT PEPPER

Is The Beatles' classic LP `Sgt Pepper` the best record ever? Tim Worthington examines the story behind the groundbreaking record.

No doubt many of you have all but given up on the article already, having decided that this is just another attempt at stirring up controversy through idle gainsaying of whatever might be expressed by popular opinion. To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if that reaction was taking hold, as it's the one I've encountered the most when expressing my provocative theory. However, this isn't just idle gainsaying. I genuinely believe that under no circumstances could “Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band” rightfully be called the greatest album ever made, and what's more I have arguments to back up my position and everything. Never mind the greatest album of all time, it isn't even the greatest album of 1967, or even of The Beatles' own career. However, my grand statement has already been made – twice over in fact – so it's time to start on some of those supporting arguments that I was talking about. Are you ready? Right then, let's journey back twenty years ago today… and, erm, some more.

The reputation that “Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band” has attained and enjoyed, whether rightfully or wrongfully, is inextricably linked with its position within the context of the pop music of the time, and thus it's only right that this article should go into a considered but ultimately objective look at that very same position. As early as 1963, a critic in The Times had taken the unprecedented step of nominating John Lennon and Paul McCartney as the songwriters of the year, and had made bold claims about what he believed they were capable of achieving. They may have been working with limited studio facilities and under the pressure of turning out two albums a year in-between constant touring and making films, but they unquestionably did start to live up to the writer's predictions. Even their earlier output had a greater depth and sense of invention than practically any of their contemporaries could manage to create, and matters started to take an even more exciting detour after they travelled to America, meeting The Byrds and Bob Dylan and trying certain ‘substances' in the process. By 1965, they were being allowed more time, freedom and technology in the studio to perfect their music, and it showed. “Rubber Soul”, which was released that year, was described by rock critic Nicholas Schaffner as being like the moment in “The Wizard Of Oz” when the visuals suddenly shift from black and white into colour, and it's easy to see just how revolutionary it must have seemed in the cultural landscape of the time. The range of diverse instrumentation, textures and tempos was quite unlike anything that had been heard in commercial pop music up to that point. ‘Nowhere Man' and ‘The Word' utilise atypically laid-back guitar patterns and circular melodies, ‘I'm Looking Through You' explores unusually abstract emotions for the lyrical style of the time, and the sublime ‘Think For Yourself' betrays for the first time the Eastern influences that were coming to influence their work and their visual image. The latter was even more prevalent on ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)', which blended Lennon's blunt and daring lyrics about a sexually predatory female with a droning sitar line courtesy of George Harrison, who had become fascinated by the instrument after hearing one used in the soundtrack to the band's 1965 film “Help”. The album didn't entirely break loose from the constraints of their earlier image and style – the twee ‘Michelle' and ‘Girl' are evidence enough of that – but all the same the album in the broadest sense occupied a vital key position in the development of popular music as we know it. And then, they somehow managed to better it.

Trailed by the remarkable single ‘Paperback Writer'/‘Rain' (the former featuring thundering guitar and intricately-layered vocals on the chorus – failed attempts at live recreation of which were reputedly the primary reason for The Beatles abandoning live performance later that year – and the latter a jerky rhythm and a melody that seemed almost to expand and contract), the 1966 album “Revolver” took The Beatles' music – and indeed music in general – into the realms of exciting new possibilities. The album is framed in a robust, sturdy guitar pop style, but within that lie amazing depth and innovation in the lyrics, the melodies and the arrangements. The ‘conventional' tracks were experimental enough; ‘I Want To Tell You' is propelled by a disjointed guitar riff and a discordant piano, ‘I'm Only Sleeping' is decorated by gentle flourishes of backwards guitar, and the bitingly satirical ‘Taxman' is performed with such ferocity and vitriol that it continually sounds as though it's about to career out of control. Elsewhere, it gets very experimental. With the vocals backed by only a string quartet, ‘Eleanor Rigby' endeavours to relate the kind of gritty narrative that would have been found in the ‘kitchen sink dramas' of the day in its lyrics, dealing with downbeat topics that had previously been shied away from in pop music. On ‘Love You To', George Harrison delved further into Eastern influences than he had on ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)', creating a fusion of western pop song and Indian raga, with vocal lines disintegrating into atonal religious wails. ‘She Said She Said' has paranoid lyrics about a bad acid trip (“you're making me feel like I've never been born”) with an instrumental backing to match, complete with cymbal crashes that sound the way that flashing lights feel. This innovation and experimentalism reaches a highpoint with ‘Tomorrow Never Knows', a song characterised by megalithic drums (later sampled by The Chemical Brothers for ‘Setting Sun', which says something about how powerful this track sounds), backward running tape loops and John Lennon shouting his vocals through a microphone, which seems to end in a self-repeating cacophony but in fact closes with an unexpectedly jaunty piano. Not even the pointless ‘Yellow Submarine', which in spite of all the “it's about drugs really, honest” excuses that are made for it will always remain a terrible song, manages to drag “Revolver” down. The album sounds every bit as fresh and exciting now as it did back in 1966, and it's hardly surprising that at the time, the next Beatles album was awaited with genuine and feverish excitement.

“Revolver” was followed early in 1967 by a double ‘a'-sided single, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever'/'Penny Lane', which saw Lennon and McCartney make musical revisits to places from their respective childhoods. The former benefitted from lush, dense instrumentation, and set each of its introspective and mysterious verses to entirely different music. The latter, on the other hand, painted a kaleidoscopic view of city life with its youthful and exuberant lyrics, and brash arrangement that brilliantly evoked the hustle and bustle of a busy suburban street. Regarded by many as the most influential single of all time, and indeed so internationally successful that tourists from around the world still flock to both of the locations identified in the song titles, it neatly represented both of the extremes of British psychedelic music and heightened anticipation for the next full-blown Beatles album. There was a genuine sense of excitement taking hold at the time – evidenced by such contemporaneous coverage as a Granada reporter doorstepping Ringo Starr outside Abbey Road studios to ask how work on the album was progressing, and a fantastic ‘behind the scenes' radio preview presented by a young Kenny Everett (which, incidentally, can – and should – be heard on the BBC album “Kenny At The Beeb”) – and The Beatles continued to work away in the studio.

But while they worked away, other people were working away in a similar fashion, and in the gap between the release of “Revolver” and its follow-up, some incredible advances were made as other artists attempted to pick up where the album had left off. In America, ‘garage bands' were conjuring up amazing sounds as they attempted to replicate the style of the album on a low budget and with extremely cheap and limited instruments. Over in the UK, psychedelic bands were starting to dominate the London club scene, notably Pink Floyd who had been performing free-form instrumentals live before The Beatles had even released ‘Rain'. The Who had won widespread critical praise for their linked suite of songs ‘A Quick One', as had The Rolling Stones for ‘Going Home', a lengthy number that was largely improvised in the studio while the tapes rolled. Another group to have graduated from the early 1960s ‘beat' scene, The Pretty Things, released a startling single called ‘Defecting Grey' which they described as “experiments with vodka, acid and grass all condensed into one song” and which has further (and very accurately) been described as sounding like four songs having a fight, which unlike The Beatles they had been able to recreate live. Most significant, however, were the advances made by The Beach Boys. Previously uncomplicated purveyors of good time surf music, their creative force Brian Wilson had been spurred into grander visions after hearing “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver”, and painstakingly crafted the astonishing “Pet Sounds”, a breathtakingly emotional album somewhere between pop, hymnal and Christmas music, which many believe to be completely flawless. He then went further, creating the single ‘Good Vibrations' which tied together disparate strands of music recorded in different locations yet was still robust and commercial enough to become a huge international hit. In music press polls for 1966, The Beach Boys topped The Beatles as best group, and not without good reason. In the short space of a few months, The Beatles had gone from being sole innovators to being just one group of many attempting to push back the frontiers of music. “Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band” could not have invented the metaphorical wheel as so many of its supporters claim, as the evidence is there that the ‘wheel' in question had already been invented, not least by The Beatles themselves. Of course, that doesn't stop it from being an excellent album in the conventional sense. However, the fact that it isn't an excellent album does.

Well, if I'm going to posit the theory that "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" maybe isn't quite as good as people frequently make it out to be, then at least I can do it properly and go through the entire album, track by track, assessing its various strengths and weaknesses. Let's start, as logic would dictate, with the opening track, which also happens to share its title with that of the album. 'Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' opens with the faked sound of an orchestra tuning up and an audience taking to their seats, which is - by 1960s standards - very impressive and convincing indeed. Compare it with, for example, the horrible dubbed-on applause from The 13th Floor Elevators' not-actually-live-at-all album "Live", the amplified hairdryer that shows up between the tracks on The Small Faces' live EP, and indeed the cacophonous howl that runs throughout The Beatles' own "Live At The Hollywood Bowl", and there is absolutely no contest. Proof that The Beatles had access to the most sophisticated recording equipment available in 1967 is contained in the opening seconds of the album. But did they use these facilities to their full potential? Well, with regard to this track, the answer is a resounding 'no'. This isn't down to the arrangement or production, both of which are crystal clear and reasonably imaginative, but more due to the quality of the song itself. It starts off excitingly enough, with a squealing burst of guitar and an excited opening verse, but from that point on it rapidly becomes dull and plodding. It's probably no coincidence that when Jimi Hendrix premiered the song live a couple of days before the album was released, he truncated it after the opening verse and went off into one of his manic guitar improvisations instead. As an opening track, it's hardly the kind of unequivocal attention-grabber that a supposedly classic album should necessarily have. In this respect it certainly doesn't stand up well next to, for example, Nick Drake's 'Intro', The Stone Roses' 'I Wanna Be Adored' or even Oasis 'Rock'n'Roll Star', all of which hammer home the point of their respective parent albums to the listener straight away, leaving them genuinely excited to listen further. Unfortunately, the main reaction that I get from this track is to skip forward to the next one the second that the opening verse gives way to meandering repetitiveness. But unfortunately, the second track is...

'With A Little Help From My Friends'. Right, we're on to a huge point of contention already. Basically, I don't care what predictable excuses might be trotted out about every Beatles album needing a 'Ringo Song' or whatever. There was nothing to stop them from writing a 'Ringo song' for this album and actually making it good . This, however, is only a very short distance away from the sort of insipid tosh that the likes of Bruce Forsyth and Jimmy Tarbuck used to end their variety shows by singing, and it's telling that the first cover version of this song to be released was by cheery 'family entertainer' Joe Brown. It's also equally telling that another opportunistic cover version, by the psychedelic duo Young Idea (which is surely the least-remembered top ten hit of 1967) was superior to The Beatles' original, yet also compared very badly to their own previous and subsequent singles and was easily the worst of their career, which came to an abrupt end shortly afterwards. Wet Wet Wet's 1987 cover version, recorded in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the album's release, was bland in the extreme, and like Joe Cocker's tedious slowed-down 'heavy rock' "Wonder Years"-soundtracking 1968 reworking only serves to further prove that this is not really the sort of song that should appear on what is supposedly the greatest album of all time. By now, you're probably all wondering why I'm even bothering to listen to the album if I appear to dislike it so much, in which case I would direct you to...

Next up is 'Getting Better', which in all honesty is one of the most criminally underrated highlights of the album. It has the same relentlessly upbeat feel that characterised The Beatles' less sophisticated early singles, but is also imbued with intricate and constantly varying harmonies, a chiming, repetitive and unquestionably psychedelic rhythm guitar track, and a fantastic moment where the darker shades of the lyrics in the final verse are accompanied by a quick drone on the sitar from George. "I have to admit it's getting better" they sing with infectious optimism on the glorious chorus, and it's quite an apt line to appear at this point in proceedings. With two good tracks in a row, things most definitely are getting better.

And happily, this momentum is maintained by 'Fixing A Hole', which again is a fantastic track that has never really received the recognition that it so clearly deserves. The melody is a neat intersection of inventive psychedelic pop, mass audience-friendly singalong, and joyously lazy blues, and on top of all that there's some truly dazzling guitar work from George. On a general level, this is easily the most psychedelic song on the album, so fluid and dreamy in its arrangement and performance that it constantly sounds as though it is just about to drift away from the speakers and off into the distance (in fact, it almost literally does appear to do this during the fade out). Again brimming with infectiously positive sentiments ("it really doesn't matter if I'm wrong or right, where I belong I'm right", "I'm taking the time for a number of things that weren't important yesterday"), the song isn't even marred by the perpetual insistence of boring idiots on spotting supposed 'coded' drug 'references' where there don't actually appear to be any at all. Interesting fact - a cover version of this song was once recorded by none other than Kevin Eldon, future habitual collaborator of Lee and Herring and Chris Morris. Bet you never knew that!

Then, unfortunately, this run of great songs is spoilt by the appearance of 'She's Leaving Home', a so-called 'tearjerker' about a girl who is, rather unsurprisingly, leaving home, and which is set to an exceptionally dreary orchestral backing. The lyrical storyline is clumsy and incoherent, the sentiment horribly mawkish, and worst of all it appears to celebrate the ingratitude of a spoilt brat. If Paul McCartney had wanted to write the musical equivalent of an episode of "The Wednesday Play", then he ended up writing one that not only lacks the hard-hitting grittiness for which the series was renowned, but also one that only survives in the BBC archives as a damaged print missing several vital key scenes. In short, what had been done so brilliantly in 'Eleanor Rigby' was made a complete mess of here.

After having had to endure such an awful song, it really is a tremendous relief to hear the arresting fairground organ intro to 'Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!'. You'll find no ungrateful spoilt brats here, just a deadpan description of insane circus acts, dreamed up by John Lennon after he bought, for no readily obvious reason, an original authentic Victorian circus poster at an auction; proving that despite the uniformly fawning reviews that are routinely handed out to artists who deal with 'real' issues in their songs, sometimes it can simply be more fun to hear about Henry The Horse dancing the waltz. The strident, catchy song is festooned with what sounds like an army of fairground organs and calliopes, providing more proof than any other moment on the album of how genuinely exciting it must have been to discover the potential and possibilities of the recording studio in the late 1960s, and is all the better for it. 'Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!' is pure exhilaration from start to overarranged fiddly fairground organ finish, and brings the first side of the album to a suitably jubilant close.

Meanwhile, side two appears to open with the sound of an amplified wasp. Then, when you realise that it isn't Pink Floyd circa 1969 after all and so this isn't actually going to be the literal sound of an amplified wasp, and something distinctly Indian-sounding starts to play over the top, you slowly start to realise what's really going on. It's 'Within You Without You', another of George Harrison's journeys to his inner self, and very tedious it is to listen to too. Whereas his previous forays into Eastern-influenced sounds, notably 'Love You To', had resonated with experimentation, excitement and urgency, this song ultimately only resonates with the sound of the listener's snoring. It does very little that could be described as being in any way experimental, exciting or urgent, and quite simply goes on for way too long; in fact, 'Strawberry Fields Forever' and 'Penny Lane' could both have easily fitted into the space that this takes up on the album. With this track, George Harrison finally reaches the musical spiritual nirvana that he had been seeing, but the rest of us just reach a state of transcendental boredom. The track ends with raucous laughter, presumably courtesy of people who had been listening to something else altogether.

And they clearly hadn't been listening to the track that follows either. 'Within You Without You' was merely dull; 'When I'm Sixty Four' is the moment when you stare at the speakers incredulously and wonder what on Earth possessed someone to put this on the album. The song is supposedly a humorous music hall pastiche, but there are two things very wrong with this claim - firstly it isn't actually amusing, and secondly the cloying, insipid melody (and indeed the lazily thrown together lyrics) share little of the joyous raucousness that characterised music hall songs. For anyone who would like to argue that the song did actually meet both of those criteria and that I have no idea what I'm talking about, I would refer you to 'Your Mother Should Know', which was recorded later in 1967 for "The Magical Mystery Tour". This not only has a rousing, infectious melody that you can easily imagine the cast of "The Good Old Days" noisily singing along to, it also contains a wry and well-aimed lyric that genuinely does make me smirk. 'When I'm Sixty Four', on the other hand, seems to exist purely to make itself as annoying and frustratingly insubstantial as possible, and I defy more than a handful of people out there to say that they honestly, genuinely think that it's some kind of classic rather than merely the archetypal 'nice tune'. From boredom to incredulous vitriol in the space of two tracks. Good going, 'greatest album of all time'.

Remember what I was saying about 'Your Mother Should Know' disproving the flimsy argument that you have to look at 'When I'm Sixty Four' in the context of being a pastiche of music hall blah blah blah etc? Well 'Lovely Rita', the track that directly follows it, does much the same thing. The lyrics are straight out of that lost world of bawdy, seemingly-laden-with-innuendo-but-ultimately-completely-innocent comedy that anyone trying to imitate music hall should in turn try to imitate, and the song is far more musically robust than 'When I'm Sixty Four'. In place of those infuriatingly twee oboes and chimes come some pleasingly vulgar kazoos and a superb burst of piano playing courtesy of producer George Martin (whose musical input into The Beatles' recorded output should never be undervalued, but sadly frequently is). 'Lovely Rita' is a delightful song on many levels, and is to an extent genuinely experimental (the sound collage that closes the track was genuinely innovative for the time), and while it may not be the greatest song ever written, it's certainly far closer to that end of the spectrum that many of the other songs that it has to share the tracklisting with.

There are no such criticisms about 'Good Morning Good Morning', however. In fact, there are no criticisms at all, as this is arguably the best track on the entire album. Behind the infectious melody and Lennon's biting, sarcastic lyrics about the banality of 'normal' people's existence lie sterling guitar work and driving, tempo-shifting, expertly-judged drumming. In fact, anyone who insists on spouting the sneering, baseless myth that Ringo Starr was a "rubbish drummer - no arguments" should be forced to listen to the isolated drum track from this song on an endless loop until they finally admit that they had no idea of what they were talking about. And that's just the basic unadorned take of the song that appears on "Anthology 2"; the full version has blaring brass, manic splurges of lead guitar, and strangely processed backing vocals. There are also a lot of animal noises that genuinely follow a 'path' through a country estate, carrying on after the song itself has faded, and ending with a foxhunt riding past a group of chickens.

The next track opens with a hamfisted edit. Or, to be more accurate, it opens with what sounds like a hamfisted edit to modern ears. Such are the technical wonders of our age that Jesus Jones (don't smirk!) can segue from one song into another so flawlessly that it takes you a while to realise that it's actually a new song and not just some strange coda, but back then studio technology simply wasn't that good, and in 1967 the sound of a clucking chicken suddenly turning into guitar feedback must have sounded revolutionary. Said feedback is followed by the sound of The Beatles muttering and gearing themselves up for a take, and then by a thumping drumbeat and some very loud guitars. This is the sound of The Beatles who made girls faint at The Cavern and played Shea Stadium in glittery suits, and what's that song they're whipping the crowd into a frenzy with? The same song that opened the album in such unspectacular fashion, only this time with the tempo whipped up and the boring part excised, and it sounds nothing short of fantastic. The Beatles themselves seem to sense this, as evidenced by the enthusiasm-filled ad-lib of "we're Sergeant Pepper's one and only Lonely Hearts Club Band". This is top stuff. If only the whole of side two could have been like this and 'Good Morning Good Morning'.

Well, maybe not quite all of side two, as then 'A Day In The Life' might not have ended up as the ambitious and rightfully celebrated song that it is. It starts off as a laid-back acoustic number, as Lennon sings with genuine detachment and bitterness about some stories that he had spotted in a newspaper. Suddenly, almost from nowhere, a massive orchestra appear and start to build in volume, getting louder until they reach an abrupt halt at the height of their cacophony, and a jaunty rhythm sneaks out from under it. McCartney then starts singing with positivity and infectious energy about getting up in the morning and going to work, then it shifts back into Lennon's earlier style for a mysterious (actually about the state of unrepaired roads in Blackburn, Lancashire, for reasons best known to Lennon himself) final verse. Then the orchestra come back, reach the same dramatic halt again, and give way to an almighty atonal piano crash, which seems to reverberate for absolutely ages. This last noise has rightfully become one of the most famous motifs in music, but unfortunately the status and importance of 'A Day In The Life' in the history of pop music has meant that the song has become a signifier for automatic connotations of artistic innovation, and other people are not above using it to lend a false and arrogant sense of 'importance' to their own work. Not too long ago, a Channel 4 press launch used 'A Day In The Life' to back clips of the likes of Ricky Gervaise and Dom Joly, which frankly was pushing the ridiculousness of artistic comparisons into new levels. Nonetheless, the piano noise shows the painstaking dedication of The Beatles not just to songwriting but also to the laborious process of recording - the effect could easily be achieved by computer nowadays, but back then they had to painstakingly count out the number of bars in the song - in real time - where the orchestral bits were going to be inserted. This, and the song in general, is testament to what you can achieve artistically when you really work hard at something. Unlike 'She's Leaving Home', which tried its absolute hardest to be moving but failed miserably, 'A Day In The Life' makes no such efforts at all and yet ends up affecting in a curious and abstract way. On a "South Bank Show" documentary about the album some years ago, George Martin isolated the lead vocal track from the master tape of 'A Day In The Life', and reflected in clearly overcome tones about how far the band had progressed musically in the four years that he had been working with them. Given that nowadays it takes most artists about four years to make one album, you can't help but marvel at the sheer brilliance of this song.

Actually, the end of 'A Day In The Life' isn't quite the end of the album, as it is followed by (apparently) a tone that can be heard by dogs and cats but not humans, and then by an extremely abrupt sound collage located in the inner groove of the original album. However, that isn't really interesting enough to enter into discussion about. The revelation that if you turn up Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side Of The Moon" to full volume right at the end, a string quartet can be heard playing the intro to The Beatles' 'Ticket To Ride', and indeed the wild inter-fan arguments that fact provoked, are for more interesting. But "The Dark Side Of The Moon" is the subject for another article on greatest albums of all time. Back to "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".

What does all the above analysis actually tell is? Well, outside of any tiresome and tedious ‘interpretations' that pretentious people who like to avoid having any real opinions on anything ever might like to draw, all that it really tells us is that “Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band” has – in my personal opinion – five tracks of varying degrees of ropiness to eight of astounding and enduring greatness. Not a bad average by anyone's standards, but at the same time definitely not the stuff of which best albums of all time are made. Just imagine, though, if those five tracks had been excluded and five of equal quality to the rest of the album had appeared in their place. I know that it's all very well and good speculating on hypothetical situations, but in this instance I'm not actually speculating on a hypothetical situation. At the same time that the tracks that made it onto “Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band” were recorded, five of the best songs that The Beatles ever recorded were also committed to tape. ‘Strawberry Fields Forever' and ‘Penny Lane' we already know about, but there were also three superb outtakes from the sessions that sadly remain far less widely heard than they deserve to be. Aside from the lightweight singalong ‘All Together Now' and the truly bizarre ‘You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)', not so much a song as it is an affectionate pastiche of vintage BBC radio shows like “It's That Man Again!” (an idea that, in retrospect, was done to far better effect by The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band on ‘The Craig Torso Show'), the sessions also yielded ‘Hey Bulldog', ‘It's Only A Northern Song' and ‘It's All Too Much'. ‘Hey Bulldog', a Lennon/McCartney composition, is a rocking riff-driven beat-psych number with gloriously venomous lyrics (“what makes you think you're something special when you smile?”), which was far closer to the sound of the bands then playing on London's psychedelic live scene than any of the tracks that made it onto the album were, and more importantly contained a distinctive yet strong enough hook to have made it into a potential hit single. ‘It's Only A Northern Song', a George Harrison number written to fulfil contractual obligations with his publishers, comes swimming in a sea of deliberately discordant orchestral sounds and subtle but atmospheric tape effects. Most significantly, ‘It's All Too Much' (also a Harrison composition) mixes a raga-inspired melody and wonderfully dippy lyrics about the world being a slice of birthday cake with a strident drum pattern, undisciplined feedback-drenched guitars, joyful organ playing that would not have sounded out of place on a Monkees single, and seamless diversions into not only an excerpt from a piece of classical music, but also a brief snatch The Merseys' early 1960s hit ‘Sorrow'. On ‘It's All Too Much', the band – who are playing everything live and in one take – sound as though they're having even more fun than they were on ‘Good Morning Good Morning', and the recording stands as one of the finest ever made by The Beatles. Sadly, the three superior numbers were forgotten about until work started on the “Yellow Submarine” animated film, when they were included on the soundtrack (and even then, ‘Hey Bulldog' didn't make it into the American version), where they unjustly remain among the least-known Beatles tracks of all. It could have all been so very different, though. So different, in fact, that there would have been no need for this article!

Having dealt with the issue of whether “Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' can justifiably be called the greatest album ever made or not, it's only right to go on to look at a couple of the other myths that have grown up around it over the years. Is it, as some claim, the definitive psychedelic album? Well, some of its contents are certainly definitive psychedelic tracks (as indeed are the five non-album tracks mentioned above), but the album as a whole does not deserve similar praise. Some of the tracks – I'm looking at you here, ‘When I'm Sixty-Four' – aren't psychedelic in any way, shape or form. There were two high profile albums in the summer of 1967 alone that were more psychedelic than “Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band” could ever have hoped to be. Pink Floyd's debut release “The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn” rejects all of that clichéd peace and love nonsense in favour of lyrics about the icy wastes of space and riding bikes at high speed through Cambridge (part of the reason why it hardly sounds dated at all today), drenches the instruments (all guitar, bass, drums and organ with no embellishments) in dizzying volume and heavy reverb, and includes some extended improvised instrumental numbers that represented the first significant challenge to the ‘rules' of the three-minute pop song. Meanwhile, over in America, Captain Beefheart's debut offering “Safe As Milk” took a detour into uncharted musical waters, backing gibberish vocals with bluesy arrangements that sounded spontaneous and formless, as though they were being directed by some sudden impulse (but were, in fact, meticulously arranged and rehearsed to sound that way). Listen to either of those albums next to “Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band”, and you'll know what being ‘psychedelic' is all about. In that respect, it just sounds a bit, well, ordinary really. Obviously this doesn't apply to several of the individual tracks, some of which could genuinely give the contents of any truly psychedelic album a run for their money, but that's just individual tracks. Here we are talking about the album as a whole, and as a whole it isn't the most psychedelic album of all time. The Beatles will only be responsible for a serious contender for that honour when EMI get around to releasing a well thought-out compilation of their most psychedelic moments. But as to the question of if that would ever happen, your guess is as good as mine.

So does it have the best cover of all time then? Once again, the answer has to be a resounding ‘no'. Admittedly Peter Blake's collage was an imaginative and innovative idea for the time, and contains a number of impressively clever touches, but the best album cover of all will by necessity have to have dated well, and this hasn't. From a modern perspective, it seems cluttered, random, and possibly even veering towards the pretentious. It isn't even Peter Blake's best artistic work, as a recent retrospective exhibition proved. Ironically, the covers of “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver” have dated far better, as indeed have those that followed the “Rubber Soul”-style ‘distorted band photo' template such as The Rolling Stones' “Between The Buttons” and Pink Floyd's “The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn”, which have stood the test of time well. And even if the album is looked at in terms of being an exercise in lavish pop-art overdesign, then even in that respect it's still beaten hands down by The Rolling Stones' contemporaneous “Their Satanic Majesties Request” – the contents of that album might have been on the whole markedly inferior to “Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band”, but the packaging – namely a garish three-dimensional colour holographic image (and if you were lucky enough to get a promo copy, that came mounted on a padded silk sleeve) – is vastly superior. I have no idea what the best album cover of all time is, and to be honest I'm not sure that I care to know, but I do know for certain that it isn't “Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band”.

Was it the first ever concept album? Well, aside from the fact that the honour rightfully belongs to Chad And Jeremy's mid-1960s offering “Of Cabbages And Kings”, it's debatable whether “Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band” actually qualifies as a concept album in the first place. Proper concept albums deal with a running theme from start to finish, whether a story (The Pretty Things' “SF Sorrow”, Fire's “Magic Shoemaker”), abstract concepts (Pink Floyd's “The Dark Side Of The Moon”, Camel's “Flight Of The Snow Goose”), or most infamously the biography of a deaf, dumb and blind kid who sure plays a mean pinball. The unifying device on “Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band” is supposedly that the album is a ‘stage' on which several different bands appear. This was unquestionably a clever and innovative musical joke at the time (albeit one that was done far better by The Turtles on “Battle Of The Bands” the following year), but it was not the stuff of which concept albums are made.

Surely people must have recognised it as a psychedelic masterpiece at the time of release then, I hear some of you ask? Well, the tedious and pointless ‘drug prophet' Dr. Timothy Leary declared that the album was steeped in the message “turn on, tune in and drop out”, but aside from that there was little in the way of recognition of any kind of Earth-shattering genius – in fact, most reviews at the time are almost amazing in their sheer conservatism. They were mostly positive and favourable, but at the same time were hardly incisive (“a bit cheeky, this one” was one of NME's more pertinent comments on the album), and many had mixed feelings. Some were even downright negative, more than one knocking the album for its self-indulgence and pretentiousness. Even its influence on music is not quite as strong or even as beneficial as some would have you believe; the immediate after-effect was that loads of sub-standard pop groups started dressing up in psychedelic Victorian garb and writing songs called things like ‘Auntie Mabel's Button Shop' in the vain hope of scoring a hit in the shadow of the album's success, while the longer-term legacy has merely been that an endless parade of idiots have laboured under the misapprehension that the path to becoming the ‘new Beatles' is to sound exactly the same as the old Beatles. Meanwhile, The Beatles themselves followed the album with the irritating ‘All You Need Is Love' (which, ironically, boasted a fantastic b-side, ‘Baby You're A Rich Man'), and closed 1967 with “The Magical Mystery Tour”, a superb film that was shown by the BBC on Christmas Day. “The Magical Mystery Tour” was accompanied by the single ‘Hello Goodbye' and by a strong six song EP, both of which recalled the same sort of playful psychedelia that had been explored by ‘Penny Lane' and ‘It's All Too Much'. There then followed a series of superb singles (among them ‘Hey Jude' and ‘Lady Madonna'), and two albums filled with interesting but ultimately lazily unfinished ideas, and an admirable attempt to get ‘back to basics' with their final album “Get Back”, which was scuppered when their new manager Allan Klein mangled it into the far less impressive “Let It Be” (if you own the “Anthology Three” compilation, try reconstructing the “Get Back” album from its contents – it's great!).

At the time of its release “Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band” was unquestionably a ‘big' album, but was not considered to be any more epochal than any of the other ‘big' albums of the time. So how did it get from there to being labelled the greatest album of all time? That, regrettably, is down to the ‘clip show' mentality that drives popular culture. For no readily obvious reason, the public love to have clearly defined lists of what is considered to be good and bad, love to have anniversaries to celebrate, no matter how pointless or seemingly arbitrary they may be (“Twenty Two Years Of The Two Ronnies”, for example, or Channel 4's season of programmes marking the fourteenth anniversary of punk), and love to hear other people's non-opinions on subjects. This isn't a new phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination, and back in the 1970s – possibly before today's favoured ‘pundits' like Kate Thornton and Jamie Theakston had even been born – the people whose opinions were believed to be important in the shaping of such lists considered – in much the same way as people today consider “Bagpuss” to have been the greatest children's television programme of all time – “Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band” to have been the greatest album of all time purely because it was something from the past that was nicely-packaged, uncontroversial to celebrate, and easy to reminisce about. Challenges to its position date back to the early 1970s (for example Richard Goldstein's startling attack on the album, which he considered to “reek” of pretentious over-instrumentation), but the opinion has proved to be self-perpetuating. It's a ready-made benchmark for quality in music with a long history of being enthused over to refer back on, eliminating the need for opinion-forming of any kind, and has undeservedly been elevated to this position while the praises of “Revolver” remain criminally undersung. A pity, really, because the album itself is perfectly enjoyable in its own right, but the endless transparent hype that has surrounded it for so many years makes it difficult to listen to objectively.

GET THAT MOUSE!!

Words: John Connors

It’s a shame that the creator of the decade’s most audacious musical development goes by the name of Danger Mouse because, frankly, it’s all we Brits can do to avoid thinking of Penfold, letterboxes and bog frogs. When what we should really be considering is the future of music.
Danger Mouse’s `Grey Album` slipped from the wainscoting in late February and soon had interested media parties, music fans and record companies in a froth. Taking the full vocal tracks from Jay-Z’s `The Black Album` and replanting them amidst cut up bits of The Beatles’ `White Album`, `The Grey Album` contains not an iota of original music and runs riot over all kinds of copyrighting laws not to mention infuriating the noggins of EMI. Yet by the second week of March it had been downloaded a million times making it every bit the equal of 2004’s biggest selling LPs only of course it will be absent from end of year sales charts. The impetus was kicked off on February 24th – named Grey Tuesday – when over 19,000 websites were offering the album for free. As fast as EMI tried to stop it with a litigious hurricane, more and more sites willing to join the party became involved. Amusingly he did actually comply with EMI’s demand that he stop distributing the album but by then it already had a life of its own. There were 3,000 promo copies actually made but these were all give away and a lot of them ended up being sold on eBay.
Danger Mouse himself is really called Brian Burton and a native of New York and lays the source of his musical cross fertilisation on having grown up listening to hip hop and then going to college and discovering the likes of The Beatles, Radiohead and, er, Mozart. Yes, he really did choose his moniker from the fondly remembered cartoon (“I guess I just liked the eye patch or something” he told NME) and began creating ambitious mix tapes. He doesn’t seem to think that what he’s done is that musically unusual; “I hear hip-hop in all of The Beatles stuff. There’s a real psychedelic soul thing going on.”
“When the idea first came to me I locked myself in a room for two weeks and started dismantling the entire `White Album`” he says, “I was doing 15 hour days over and over again and it was driving me insane….I spent four days solid separating every single note that didn’t have any vocals on it.” Refusing to use his owns samples, he constructed unique scatter hop beats by putting together snippets of Ringo Starr’s drumming.
Reviewing the album, NME went into some details as to what each track sounded like and here’s what they said about just one track, number 5; `Blasts of metallic noise from `Helter Skelter` and THAT guitar scale and lyrics from `99 Problems` equals a loud, lewd and very rude blast of braggadocio.
Inevitably `The Grey Album` has re-started the debate about the future of records music with younger fans and journalists claiming that it is the beginning of the end for record companies. In the long run, the way we acquire music has and will continue to evolve, that’s for certain and this album will eventually probably end up as revered as those first sampling singles most of us head like `Jack You Body`, ie not very. Also, the glee with which the album has been greeted with appears to stem as much from the fact that The Beatles’ previously impermeable fortress has been ramsacked; once again everything spins back to the fab four. Certainly nobody is talking much about Jay-Z other than to say “who?”. Until the established icons of popular music are left to one side, real innovation will not happen. Besides, you could conceivably undertake a project of similar ambition by splicing Pam Ayers with Muse samples and nobody really wants to see a new generation’s version of Jive Bunny do they?
The issue of free downloading remains as it always was – if record companies were done away with and people could issue their music over the internet for free, nobody would ever make a living from music. Eminem and Dido and the rest would have to stack shelves five nights a week to earn enough money to pay for the equipment they would need to make their music. There is the real rub; free downloadable music is not actually free at all, unless you have managed to bypass paying for internet access at all anyway. Is just that your money ends up in the hands of another branch of Virgin or someone instead of their music department. There are signs that the big chains have realised the scenery is changing behind them; cds now are much cheaper comparatively than they were a few years ago.
In the end, it’s a race for control of our ears. But would people be getting so excited if `The Grey Album`

THRILLING THE WORLD

Tim Worthington on one of the biggest selling records of all time; Michael Jackson’s `Thriller`

It's something of a cliché to start off an article about Michael Jackson by talking about his face. Unfortunately, though, it's also something of a useful starting point for the purposes of this piece. For as ludicrous a theory as this may sound, there does appear to be a direct relationship between the condition of the notoriously delicate Jackson visage and the music that emenated from it. Back in the days before plastic surgeons had been allowed anywhere near his facial features, Michael Jackson was something of a nascent musical genius. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he was co-writing and co-producing exhilarating r'n'b/disco/soul crossover tracks like 'Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough' that stunned critics and audiences alike, and his energetic and often tongue-in-cheek videos made him ideally suited to the demands of the emergent MTV generation. As his visual profile grew ever more discoloured and distorted, however, and the leanings towards increasingly baffling and abnormal cosmetic alterations took their toll, his music began to sound equally odd and unnatural; tuneless and artificial, with a clinical precision to the arrangement and performance that seemed designed to eradicate any traces of soulfulness, energy or enthusiasm, ending up as the musical equivalent of a cheap, tacky, ugly-looking plastic contraption that doesn't have any obvious intended function.
At the time that he released "Thriller", Michael Jackson still looked relatively normal. It's clear that his music was still relatively normal too, as "Thriller" not only sold in staggering quantities - eventually going on to become one of the best selling albums of all time - but also achieved the rare feat for a mainstream performer of uniting music critics in praise for its progressive thinking and invention. Jackson's subsequent output has suffered an often well-deserved mauling in the intervening years, but "Thriller" has yet to fall from grace. In fact, the same people who take such delight in battering his later efforts are often also to be found lavishing praise on "Thriller", and pondering how someone who produced such a praiseworthy album could have lost touch with artistry and reality in such a spectacular fashion. As such, you can imagine that there would be plenty to say about the album, its huge sales figures and its enduring classic status. But this particular writer has never actually heard "Thriller".
Well, perhaps I ought to qualify that statement a bit. This isn't some pathetic and pretentious attempt to claim that I'm too 'cool' to have ever heard the album above the sound of Bob Marley and Led Zeppelin, and I'm not a contestant on "Never Mind The Buzzcocks". Of course I heard all of the many singles taken from the album, because at one point, realistically, there was no escaping them. I'm aware of the titles of the other tracks on the album, and indeed have some faint and indistinct memories of actually having heard a couple of them. But - and this is the important part - I've never actually listened to "Thriller". Not being exactly the world's greatest fan of Michael Jackson, I've never had any particular inclination or desire to give the album a proper listen, and if I ever have heard it in full, right the way from start to finish, then it's pretty much gone in one ear and straight out of the other. In a way this is hardly surprising, given that the Jackson image was arguably promoted above the actual music for most of the 1980s, and that he’s as well remembered for wearing a single black glove, owning a chimp called Bubbles, and having his hair set on fire by Pepsi or something as he is for any of his releases during the time. If the music was considered secondary even for people who actually liked him, then why would anyone with no real interest have paid much attention? Mind you, not liking a lot of what you’ve heard could probably count as ‘paying attention’ in some sense. With the obvious exception of 'Rockin' Robin', I quite like the Jackson 5. Michael Jackson's solo material, however, is a different matter. While he has produced a couple of decent tracks, I've always found it difficult to feel anything but disdain towards the soppy exhortations to heal the world and make it a better place "for you and for me and the anti-human race" (well, that's what it sounds like), the pompous and self-important video in which he prevented the holocaust and brought an elephant back to life by holding on to some trees and shouting "he-heeeeeeeee" a lot, and the endless procession of interminable and interchangeable third and fourth singles from each album, all lacking any sense of inspiration and sounding virtually identical apart from their titles (and even they aren't tremendously different from each other). Neither "Thriller" nor any of his other albums ever held any particular appeal for me, so this evaluation of the album against its lofty reputation is, to all intents and purposes, being done on the basis of a first listen. It's easy to assess an album’s strengths and weaknesses when you know it back to front, hidden string quartets playing ‘Ticket To Ride’ as it fades out and all, but not quite so easy when you aren’t really familiar with it in the first place. Nevertheless, cassette (for added authenticity) in hand, let us press on. Or, to be more accurate, press ‘play’.
“Thriller” opens with the song that provided lazy tabloid journalists with an easy headline when Jarvis Cocker memorably disrupted Jackson’s performance at the Brits over a decade later - ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’’. The track begins in a rather exciting fashion, with some characteristically 1980s programmed bass punctuated by horn stings, and happily the song that follows is every bit as exciting. Rather than merely singing, Jackson freewheels lyrics at a manic speed over the regular as clockwork backing vocals and rhythm track, and the energy and enthusiasm that he is putting into the performance is clearly apparent. At times, he even lapses into a sort of Rex Harrison-style ‘spoken-sung’ approach to emphasise particular words or phrases, which was probably worked out in advance but still manages to create the illusion of sounding spontaneous and impulsive. The impression that the listener gets from this track is that Jackson really is intending to ‘start something’, and that this excitement is a prelude to an equally exciting album. Even the fact that Jackson appears to sing “you’ve a vegetable” (surely they can’t be the actual lyrics?) several times in a row is not capable of dampening the dynamism. Unfortunately, having ‘started’, the track seems to have no intention of stopping. After a certain point, it just seems to repeat itself over and over again for an absolute age, and it all becomes a bit tiresome and tedious. Then, just when you think it’s finally over, it mutates into some sort of world music chant with the sound of Jackson getting overexcited rather than singing over the top. For the most part ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’’ makes for enticing listening, but by the time it finally gives way to the second track, it has long since outstayed its welcome.
‘Baby Be Mine’ does not start in quite the same arresting fashion as ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’’, opting instead for a more laid-back funky drum roll and a slap bass motif. To the casual observer, the track sounds somewhat undistinguished and reminiscent of the standard chartbound slick 1980s funk-soul-by-numbers sound of various mid-1980s Michael Jackson wannabe pretenders - although it’s highly likely that all of the one-hit wonders that the track calls to mind were in fact simply copying ‘Baby Be Mine’ in the first place. A clear case of how being ahead of the game can somehow make your music date even faster. ‘Baby Be Mine’ is not a remarkable song by any stretch of the imagination, and it’s easy to see why it has since become probably the least-remembered track from “Thriller”, but at the same time it’s a competent and listenable number that sits very well within the musical framework of the album as a whole. Overall, the song is probably most notable for its well thought out arrangement and instrumentation, particularly the glossy brass embellishments, the understated and well-judged use of the keyboard pitch bend control, and a very odd synth figure that sounds alarmingly like the noise that used to accompany Steve Austin’s slow motion jumps on “The Six Million Dollar Man”. Whether by accident or design, Steve Austin appears to jump back down again at the start of the next track. This is ‘The Girl Is Mine’, a laid-back duet with Paul McCartney as the two megastars stage a good-natured debate over which of them can claim ownership of a ‘doggone’ girl. Nice to see that political correctness was a cornerstone of Jackson’s work long before he ‘thoughtfully’ removed racially sensitive lyrics from the single version of ‘They Don’t Care About Us’. It’s quite amusing to hear Paul McCartney lending his rather unadaptable vocal style to laid-back soul, but the song becomes more amusing still towards the end when the two abandon the idea of singing alternate verses and simply exchange “the girl is mine”/”no no no she’s mine”/”I think you’ll find she’s mine”/”he-heeeeeeee she’s mine” and so on. Then, amazingly, it gets even more amusing still with an ill-advised spoken section (“Michael, we’re not going to fight about this, okay?” - “Paul, I think I told you, I’m a lover not a fighter”), and a genuinely baffling deep voice musing “yep, she’s mine” which sounds as though it should belong to a novelty song rather than a key track on one of the biggest selling albums of all time. What is particularly odd about ‘The Girl Is Mine’ is that while, from the cynical distance of a listener who doesn’t particularly like Jackson’s music, it would seem safe to dismiss this as trite syrupy nonsense, closer examination reveals it to be an actually rather pleasant song. Jackson and McCartney later duetted again on ‘Say Say Say’ for the latter’s album “Pipes Of Peace”, which became a top ten single on the back of a video that saw them running a medicine show while wearing facepaint or something, and some even more ridiculous musical and vocal embellishments than ‘The Girl Is Mine’. The two appeared to be firm friends for a while, but all that changed when Jackson outbid McCartney for the publishing rights to the Beatles’ compositions, thereby kickstarting a long chain of bitterness and complicated copyright wrangling that probably continues to this day.
The following track opens with the sound of a very large door being opened by an elephant. Even if you’ve never heard this opening montage of spooky footsteps and creaking noises before, it should be obvious what it’s all leading up to. Sure enough, the arresting chords that herald the appearance of the album’s title track follow soon afterwards. It’s time to be a bit ‘controversial’ and state that ‘Thriller’ is, at best, an extremely flimsy song. The lyrics as a whole are clever, with a neat pull back halfway through to reveal that they are describing a film being watched by the narrator rather than actual events, but on closer examination the songwords themselves are absolutely atrocious (particularly the clumsy and mirth-inducing reference to a “thing with forty eyes”). Similarly, the spoken word sections by Vincent Price (which must have cost a fair packet to arrange) come across as high camp rather than the cool and menacing veneer that Jackson was presumably hoping for, and in fact sound amusingly like the intro to Spinal Tap’s ‘Stonehenge’ (“…no-one knew who they were, or… what… they were doing”). What really compensates for all this and makes the track stand out, though, is the intricate and atmospheric soundscape. Over a taut and unwavering electrofunk backing, the song is punctuated by deliberately cheap and nasty ‘horror’ sound effects that would sound risible in a big screen film but are perfectly suited to the demands of the musical style. Not even the apparent inclusion of the sound of a toad that has swallowed a mobile phone can mar the still-impressive blend of radio-friendly slickness and expensive studio experimentation, although the sudden ending is a bit of a let down. The song just seems to stop, followed by an unconvincing ‘madman’ laugh and the elephant being sent back out again. As well as being the title track, ‘Thriller’ was the main marketing point for the album as a whole, promoted by an acclaimed short film (well, it’s more accurate to call it that than a ‘video’, as it contained a lengthy narrative sequence that was entirely separate to the actual miming to the song) in which Jackson and a lady friend watched a horror film at the cinema before dancing with a troupe of zombies. Believe it or not, this actually caused no small amount of controversy at the time - the entire film was only given one showing on UK television, late at night on Channel 4, and more worryingly its storyline reputedly landed then-devout Jehovah’s Witness Jackson in hot water with his spiritual leaders. ‘Thriller’ is a key moment in the history of pop video and music marketing in general, which proved that a little bit of expense and a slight excursion into other fields could produce massively beneficial commercial results. Then again there are some of us out here who remember it more for Lenny Henry’s inspired parody (“…they look like they’re fans of Aston Villa”).
Something of a let-down after the over-the-top sonic ridiculousness of ‘Thriller’, a surprisingly weedy rattle of synth drums provides the lead-in to ‘Beat It’, a song which - along with ‘Billie Jean’ - was supposedly written overnight by Jackson when it was pointed out to him that there weren’t really enough fast songs on the album. There’s no denying that ‘Beat It’ fits the bill as a ‘fast’ song, driven as it is by a crunching riff and some air guitar-inviting squealing soloing from Eddie Van Halen. That said, the rather muted and understated feel of the track does leave the listener with the impression that they should have mixed the guitars a lot louder (although perhaps it was mixed deliberately to sound good on radios, which it most definitely did at the time of release), but despite this ‘Beat It’ still manages to impress on several levels. Lyrically, it is a remarkably early condemnation of gang violence (a meaning that has been obscured by the in-one-ear-and-out-of-the-other nature of much of the rest of Jackson’s lyrics, and by Weird Al Yankovic’s infinitely more memorable parody ‘Eat It’, but which is patently obvious if you listen closely), and unlike many of the other tracks on “Thriller” it doesn’t meander, merely making its point within an impressively brief running time and, indeed, immediately beating it.
Next up is ‘Billie Jean’, and if Michael Jackson really did write this song overnight, then he deserves every last bit of the adulation that was heaped on him following the release of “Thriller”. There is more sophistication and experimentation in this song than anyone would reasonably expect of a worldwide top ten hit - this is pop music that is intelligent, original and highly commercial all at the same time, and in that respect it’s a lot closer to ‘Good Vibrations’ than it is to Celine Dion. It was actually chosen as the NME’s single of the year in 1983, beating legions of Factory minimalists and Postcard janglers to the top slot, and if that comes as a surprise then perhaps it’s important to bear in mind just how different a commercial and critical proposition Michael Jackson was back then. Far from being the horrendously pale purveyor of musical nothingness mumbling something about ‘the children of the world’ that he is more familiar as today, the Michael Jackson of 1983 was immensely creative and, well, a lot more normal. He may have already developed a disquieting taste for owning vast legions of llamas and installing rollercoasters in his back garden, but the 1983 model of ‘Wacko Jacko’ was someone who was down to Earth enough for NME to be able to despatch Danny Baker to interview him about actual proper topics that made sense. More importantly, he was someone who had already released one well-received solo album (that is ‘solo album’ in terms of one that he actually wrote and co-produced with Quincy Jones, as opposed to his 1970s efforts) in “Off The Wall”, and had just released another that lived up to every bit of the hype and expectation. This incarnation of Michael Jackson had, in all seriousness, the potential to become a Beck-style figure (or even, potentially, a David Bowie-style figure), an inventive and prolific recluse whose new releases were eagerly awaited by mainstream and alternative audiences alike. Unfortunately, he lost the plot somewhere along the line, and that was the end of that. Meanwhile Prince, who was dismissed by some as an inferior Michael Jackson copyist when he first made inroads into the charts, did indeed go on to become what Jackson should have become. As for ‘Billie Jean’, suffice to say that it still sounds fantastic, and the inventive video in which Jackson is stalked by a private detective while lighting up paving stones as he walks along the sidewalk (possibly an early manifestation of his latterday ‘messianic’ posturing, particularly considering the scene in which he transforms a tramp into a rich man by throwing him a single coin) arguably deserves just as much praise as the more feted ‘Thriller’ video. Mind you, that ‘answer record’ by someone whose name is lost to pop trivia history was pretty awful, and it’s still impossible what Jackson was on about with all that “gonna dance on the floor in a round” business. Nor indeed what point he was trying to make by singing “just remember to always think twice, don’t think twice”.
If ‘Billie Jean’ was great, ‘Human Nature’ is even better. It’s actually quite disconcerting to hear the track if you’ve never heard it before, as the intro will most likely be more familiar from its appearance as a sample in close harmony girl group SWV’s blissed out early-1990s hit ‘Right Here’. One of those odd moments like when you watch the documentary spoof in an old edition of “Victoria Wood As Seen On TV” and realise that it’s where Ricky Gervais stole the idea for “The Office” from, covering his tracks by removing the audience laughter and indeed any traces of actual humour. ‘Right Here’ was a pleasant and endearing song in its own right, but ‘Human Nature’ is a revelation. Shimmering synth lines sketch out an evocative arrangement that really does call to mind a subdued stroll around a serene neighbourhood as dawn breaks, and this is bolstered by equally effective and evocative lyrics (“get me out into the night-time, four walls won’t hold me tonight”). This is, to all intents and purposes, The Velvet Underground’s ‘Sunday Morning’ relocated from John Cale and Lou Reed coming down while traversing “the streets you crossed not so long ago” to a megastar with an altogether cleaner lifestyle casting a chilled-out glance across suburbia (although he doesn’t mention seeing his llamas and rollercoasters reflected in the moonlight, which is a bit of a shame). It’s very surprising indeed that ‘Human Nature’ is not better known outside the context of the album, and perhaps there’s still room for that to change; there’s a surefire chart-topper in there if S Club 7 or someone of their ilk should see fit to cover it. There’s some silliness towards the end when Jackson starts singing “tell ‘em that it’s da da da da” and more ridiculously “zhuh zhuh zhuh zhuzh zhuh zhuh zhuh zhuh” (no, me neither) in lieu of the proper chorus, and it’s hard to resist the temptation to splutter “s - double - u - v” over the top at key moments, but ‘Human Nature’ is fantastic. Incidentally, fans of unlikely cover versions might like to note that jazz pioneer Miles Davis turned in a wonderful take on ‘Human Nature’ on his 1985 album “You’re Under Arrest”.

‘Human Nature’ is superb, but the same cannot be said, however, of ‘PYT (Pretty Young Thing)’. The rather laviscious spoken intro is something of a rude intrusion after the delicate ambience of ‘Human Nature’, and the song that follows is not really very interesting. It flounders around searching for a purpose, but fails completely and launches into an extended piece of “repeat after me - sing ‘na na na’…” silliness (incidentally, those doing the repeating after him are Janet and Latoya Jackson, although even at this early stage the mysterious third sister ‘Rebbie’ was nowhere to be seen), and it’s telling that the only really interesting part of the song is when a robot intones “pretty young thing” for no readily obvious reason. There isn’t really much that needs or deserves to be said about this boring slice of nothingness, apart from the fact that it was this track more than any other that was responsible for the ensuing mid-1980s wave of point-missing production line "Thriller" copyists, including such five minute sensations as Jermaine Stewart, the wonderfully named Oran 'Juice' Jones and all five of Five Star, who briefly clogged up the charts with their undistinguished slabs of slick soul tedium. Not the most impressive legacy for any album, but unfortunately for "Thriller", it was the most publically obvious one. To get back to the point, 'PYT (Pretty Young Thing)' is little more than unimaginative filler. Matters don’t improve tremendously much with ‘Lady In My Life’, which closes proceedings in frustratingly unspectacular fashion. It’s not a bad song - it’s certainly a lot better than ‘PYT (Pretty Young Thing)’ and would have done a far better job of following ‘Human Nature - but it just isn’t the kind of definitive statement that a ‘classic’ album should finish with. On an extremely basic level, that’s the biggest problem with “Thriller” - its highs are exceptionally high, and its lows are very boring indeed, and the variable quality goes up and down like one of Jackson’s llama-infested rollercoasters. Ending on a ‘down’ point after the brilliance of ‘Billie Jean’ and ‘Human Nature’ is a very bad move, lending an air of anticlimax to the whole set. This is only compounded by the discovery of the fact that “Thriller” is only nine tracks long. It does indeed clock in at the average length of an album for the time, and some of the tracks (well, ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’’) are of more than substantial length, but there’s something about an album running to less than ten tracks that just feels incomplete. Somewhere between ten and fifteen tracks, you’ll have the average commonplace album. Between two and four, you’ll have something that you at least know is ambitious in intent. Anywhere between these two extremes, though, and it’s quite likely that you’re going to be saddled with a handful of tracks that simply go on longer than they ought to. Perhaps not the best way to have ended the album.
So could it in fact have ended differently? Well, yes. There’s probably just enough room for one more track to have been squeezed on to the album, and oddly enough the recent ‘Special Edition’ reissue of “Thriller” contains a bonus track in the form of ‘Carousel’, a bona fide outtake from the “Thriller” sessions. Presumably one of the tracks that was replaced by ‘Billie Jean’ and ‘Beat It’ on account of not having been ‘fast’ enough, ‘Carousel’ is admittedly somewhat on the light and bubblegummy side, but it’s certainly enjoyable and would have lent the album a greater degree of diversity, not to mention a more upbeat, positive and definite conclusion. Why they left it off isn’t entirely clear, but the decision was certainly of detriment to the album as a whole. Incidentally, this reissue also includes a demo version of ‘Billie Jean’ with rather unfinished lyrics, excerpts from Vincent Price’s voiceover session, a couple of interviews with Quincy Jones and other members of the original production team, and a track called ‘Someone In The Dark’ that was originally recorded for Jackson’s ‘talking book’ reading of “ET The Extra Terrestrial”, and features a guest appearance from the irritating animatronic puppet himself. It really is as odd as it sounds.
Never mind how discarded tracks squandered on albums made to cash in on films that Jackson professed to like because “it reminds me of me” sound. How does “Thriller” itself sound? And more to the point, how does it sound to someone who’s coming to it with as fresh a pair of ears as it’s possible to approach Michael Jackson’s music with unless you’ve been walking round with your fingers wedged firmly in your ears for several decades. The answer is… surprisingly good. As noted above, there’s a frustratingly insubstantial feel to the album as a whole and it lacks the artistic weight of consistency and coherency that a truly ‘classic’ album should probably have. On top of this, it veers between highs and lows with alarming and disorientating frequency, and one or two of those lows are very low indeed. But the highpoints of “Thriller” are astonishing enough to compensate for all of these, and you leave the album thinking about how great ‘Human Nature’ is rather than how risibly bad ‘PYT (Pretty Young Thing)’ is. Any album that can have that effect on a first time-listener even despite sounding rather dated in places and decidedly ‘of its time’ as a whole has to have something rather spectacular going for it.
Also, while the album probably cost an enormous amount to make and ate up studio time like nobody’s business, its sophistication and slickness is in fact a brilliant deception that creates the illusion that it was economical in production and arrangement. The overlong and welcome-outstaying conclusion of ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’’ aside, the entire album conjures up images of Jackson and Quincy Jones working out concise but effective arrangements with a couple of sequencers and the bare minimum of instruments and very nearly jumping up and down with excitement as they put each track together in a mere handful of takes. Most other international million-selling albums, naming no Michael Boltons, routinely sound like money falling into a bottomless pit, which makes “Thriller” all the more distinctive. You get the impression that it could easily have been written and recorded in someone’s bedroom.
Ultimately, while it’s easy to see both why “Thriller” sold so well and why it is held in such high critical regard, and indeed easy to see why it’s a lot better than the vast majority of albums that it normally gets incorrectly bracketed with, it’s probably not enough to convince the floating voter who doesn’t much care for Jackson’s work as a whole. There are more good tracks than bad, and a fair helping of sublime moments (the middle eight of ‘Human Nature’ and the initial verses of ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’’ are probably the best), but the worse tracks are clear and definite pointers towards the bland and uninspired directions in which his music would subsequently develop. Yet “Thriller” is perhaps most interesting as a tantalising hint of how Michael Jackson could have been. Imagine, for a second, if he had indeed taken the same route as Prince, regularly producing music that brilliantly danced on a fine line between slick commercialism, quality songwriting and forward-looking experimentalism. “Bad”, the much-hyped follow-up to “Thriller”, was essentially one great song (‘The Way You Make Me Feel’), one well above average song (‘I Just Can’t Stop Loving You’), and a lot of substandard meandering. If it had all been of the same standard as ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’ and ‘I Just Can’t Stop Loving You’, things would have turned out very differently indeed. Jackson’s albums would be bought enthusiastically by fans of all genres, and would be used as a yardstick for other releases to be judged by rather than left orbiting in some strange tune-free universe of their own. The set-to with Jarvis Cocker and that baffling business about a statue of Jackson sailing down the Thames would be seen as amusing KLF-style stunts rather than embarrassing displays of pomposity, but then again it’s also tempting to speculate that they might never have happened in the first place.
As it stands, Michael Jackson is probably more famous for being, in tabloid speak, ‘a bit bonkers’ than for his music. The public perception of him was cruelly but brilliantly captured in a parody of ‘Bad’ written (by Ian Hislop!) for the 1980s ITV satire show “Spitting Image”, in which a puppet of Jackson was seen singing “I’m mad, I’m mad, I got fruitcake in my brain, I’m mad, I’m mad, I make Reagan look quite sane”. Further on in the same number, the latex lookalike offered “as for the bits they cut off me, they’re now recording their own LP”, and although it was nothing more than a piece of throwaway late night ITV topical whimsy, perhaps that’s how we should view Michael Jackson. Maybe “Off The Wall” and “Thriller” should be regarded in isolation from his later output, as to be honest it is like looking at the works of two entirely different people. Or maybe his story should be treated as one of the great near-misses of rock music. Well, whatever - at least he gave us “Thriller”, and in particular ‘Human Nature’. How many of the people who never ‘went rubbish’ can lay claim to such an achievement?

PET SOUNDS

Uncovering rarely heard artists.
No 1: The Korgis

Chances are that you’ve never heard it but I have always said that `Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime` is one of the most sublime singles ever released. In an attempt to discover a little more, I bought The Korgis Best Of LP and what did I find but a treasure trove of songs that deserve a lot more recognition than they have.
The Korgis essentially consisted of two people; bassist/singer James Warren and keyboardist/singer Andy Davis who had both been in a band called Stackridge in the early 70s. By 1978 they had taken on the accoutrements of New Wave and, named after the Korg synthesiser, released their debut single `If I Had You` in 1979. Reminiscent of a slow rock and roll ballad from the 60s but with a shiny production and George Harrisonesque guitar lines, it was a minor hit. Their first LP included tracks like `Young N Russian` the next single that wasn’t a hit and the bizarre `Boots and Shoes` which has a brilliant echoey vocal that seems to snarl at you. There was also `Art School Annexe`, a playful tale of juvenile lust that reminds this listener of the likes of Sparks, XTC or 10CC; witty albeit very English pop at it’s best (even though Sparks were American of course). There were plenty of earlier influences notably on `Oh Maxine` in which the protagonist begs the lady in question not to leave him “though you make love in a matter of fact way”. But it was synth soaked ballads that were to be The Korgis’ forte and `I Just Can’t Help It` is an early example of that style. The LP was recorded with various session musicians in Bath in the same studio later used by Peter Gabriel for his groundbreaking second and third solo LPs.
The second Korgis LP `Dumb Waiters` is the one a few people may recall as it spawned `Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime`. This was to be their only real hit, including a Top 20 position in the US and Top 5 place here. Its even been done as a cover version twice; by Yazz and Baby D though they both technoed it up. “Change your heart…. and look around you” it advises as an orchestral style synth motif swirls in the background. It could have been overdone but the beauty of the song is its simplicity both in arrangement and message. I love the bit where you get a distorted violin solo too! There are other gems from this 1980 record; notably another majestic balled `If It’s Alright With You Baby` who’s opening recalls The Walker Brothers and the more eccentric `Perfect Hostess`.
The third record `Sticky George` saw James Warren assuming a more prominent role and a more eclectic still mixture of styles surface. `Domestic Bliss` is complex and full of percussive explosions and lyrics that question the nature of marriage while `Contraband` manages to be both jaunty and mocking at the same time; Warren assuming the role of a misogynistic character. As the other tracks became more eccentric so the ballads became even grander. `That Was My Big Mistake` is waiting to be given the bland over by someone like Westlife but it would be their best single if they did while `Can’t We Be Friends Now` examines pos relationship feelings with a regretful yet hopeful air. But perhaps the jewel in the crown is `All The Love In The World`, another song crying out to be re-discovered thanks to a cover version. A simple dedication of romance and honest feelings it’s sprinkled with barely restrained chords and a lovely optimistic vibe. After this LP, it seems The Korgis vanished.
Don’t be put off by the fact that the duo themselves resemble shady nightclub owners on the cover; give `Klassics` their Best of collection a chance. Even if some of the production sounds a little dated twenty plus years on it is a discovery worth making.

( `KLASSICS` THE BEST OF THE KORGIS is in the shops now at a reasonable price and contains 20 tracks. Its on Music Club MCCO 474)

MOONGLOW

`Dark Side of the Moon` has been one of the most successful LPs of all time. Tim Worthington examines this landmark record from 1973.

When Syd Barrett left Pink Floyd in 1968, logistically that should have spelt the end of the band. At that point, their success and public profile hinged both on Barrett's catchy, chart-friendly slices of psychedelic eccentricity, and the dynamic free-form instrumentals that he had been the main driving force in the creation of. The other band members had displayed little in the way of songwriting ability by that point, and the loss of main songwriter, lead vocalist, guitarist, creative spearhead and main motivational driving force all at once would be enough to persuade most other bands to call it a day. As luck would have it, though, Barrett's departure left a small but vital loophole that allowed the remaining band members and new guitarist Dave Gilmour to redefine Pink Floyd in their own image.

When Barrett left the group, their intended second album was still over ten minutes short of the required length. Although EMI were understandably cautious about the prospect, Pink Floyd announced that they intended to fill the remaining space with a single ambitious track. Divided into three sections, 'A Saucerful Of Secrets' attempted to tell the story of a war between mythological figures in musical form. It opens with a collage of ominous rising chords, moves into a middle section with a dramatic, insistent drumbeat and lightning bolt effects (created by hitting microphone stands against guitars - something that Dave Gilmour, who had just come out of a top forty covers band, later described as "culture shock"), and finally transforms into a majestic wordless chorale. Although it might sound a bit pretentious, and indeed is somewhat spoiled by the jarringly abrupt edit at the track's conclusion, 'A Saucerful Of Secrets' still stands as a surprisingly listenable number with several clever touches. More importantly, as the title track of Pink Floyd's second album it impressed critics and audiences alike, and the band's future was secure.
Pink Floyd's next project was the soundtrack to the film "More", but their imagination had been fired by the possibilities of linking 'suites' of music with a running theme, and they returned to the concept early in 1969 for a live experiment. Performed under the rather ridiculous banner of 'More Furious Madness From The Massed Gadgets Of Auximines', 'The Man' and 'The Journey' were song suites that combined old and new numbers from their repertoire to tell the story of birth, and of the average working day. Although the suites were abandoned before the band started work on their third album "Ummagumma", the project had taught them a lot about working with that format, and it was decided that for the second disc of the double album, each band member would compose their own thematic piece of music. Although often derided and dismissed by critics, there is in fact worth to be found in these compositions. Nick Mason's 'The Grand Vizier's Garden Party' was, by the standards of the day, a highly sophisticated and experimental sound collage that drew on elements of world music in addition to a pitch-perfect cash register. Rick Wright's cinematic 'Sysyphus', which relates the tale of the Greek mythological figure who was condemned to push a stone up a hill for all eternity, creates a dense wash of orchestral sound from non-orchestral instruments. Dave Gilmour's 'The Narrow Way' linked a series of distinct guitar compositions, and broke with tradition by setting the lead vocals so far back in the mix that they effectively became just another instrument. Most significantly, Roger Waters' 'Grantchester Meadows'/'Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict' moved from a gentle acoustic ballad enhanced by beautifully-recorded animal noises into a surreal track that sped up and slowed down said animal noises to form a propulsive rhythm track.

"Ummagumma" was followed in 1970 by "Atom Heart Mother", the title track of which was quite unlike anything that had been attempted in popular music before. Based on a series of painstakingly planned and rehearsed variations on a pastiche western film theme written by Dave Gilmour, the track took up the whole of the first side of the album, blending the techniques that all four band members had perfected in their solo compositions on "Ummagumma", and lending an even greater depth to proceedings with the addition of an orchestra and choir who were more used to participating in easy listening recordings. 1971's "Meddle" took the idea one stage further, this time by applying the same principles to a 'proper' song with verses and a chorus. ‘Echoes’ was, to be frank, a dynamic and stunningly inventive use of one side of an album, darting between different sections of music but continually returning to the central song structure. However, even that creative highpoint was not quite enough for Pink Floyd, and their next attempt at devising a similarly constructed track started to become something very different when it began to splinter into entire separate songs. Soon, each member of the band was working on individual ideas in much the same way that they had done for their contributions to “Ummagumma”. Only this time, they were all working towards a common and unifying theme. A rough version of the album length piece, given a working title of “Eclipse (A Piece For Assorted Lunatics)”, was incorporated into their live shows late in 1971, with their previous album only just having arrived in the shops. A year later, the finished piece, now retitled “The Dark Side Of The Moon”, was completely recorded and ready for release, and on sale by March 1973. And by Pink Floyd’s standards of the time, twelve months was a gap of almost unprecedented length. Sort of puts the idea of today’s popular acts taking an average of three years to make an album into perspective, really.
As you are probably well aware, the success of “The Dark Side Of The Moon” took everyone involved with it by surprise. Almost overnight, it transformed Pink Floyd from a club-hopping underground act into stadium-straddling megastars, and then it just kept on selling. “The Dark Side Of The Moon” has been dipping in and out of international album charts for the best part of three decades. Close to thirty million copies have been sold worldwide, and it’s estimated that one in every fourteen people under fifty years old in the USA owns a copy. Most staggeringly, for many years EMI ran (and may well still be running) a CD pressing plant entirely devoted to producing copies of “The Dark Side Of The Moon” in order to keep up with massive international demand. Needless to say, the album has frequently been cited as a strong candidate for the honour of best album of all time. Ordinarily it would be easy to launch a constructive argument against this automatic perceived status by pointing out that commercial success isn’t necessarily equitable with artistic merit, but in this case it just isn’t possible to do so. “The Dark Side Of The Moon” was never intended or created as anything more than a dense, experimental work, and nobody concerned expected it to be as much of a commercial success as it has proved to be. The music and lyrics are far from ‘mainstream’ fare, and its creators were, at that point, still actively keen on blurring the boundaries between rock music and avant-garde electronic composition. There had even been plans, at one point, to record the entire album using the noises of household objects instead of conventional instruments. “The Dark Side Of The Moon” represents the exact opposite of all of those albums that had enjoyed multi-platinum worldwide sales without involving even the merest hint of artistry – this is an album intended for those who appreciate angular, experimental works, that somehow managed to find favour with the widest audience imaginable.
The reason for this mainstream acceptance is quite clear once you listen to the album. Pink Floyd had always dealt with complex and abstract emotional subjects in their lyrics, most notably the broadside against authority figures who claim to know the ‘wheres and whys’ in ‘Echoes’, but “The Dark Side Of The Moon” took this into a whole new arena. Any good concept piece requires a coherent concept to make it work, and the masterstroke of “The Dark Side Of The Moon” is that it deals with the pressures of modern life. The idea developed from a growing sense of dissatisfaction among the four reluctant celebrities with their wealth and status; this weighed particularly heavily on Roger Waters, a committed socialist who found his bank balance difficult to reconcile with his staunch principles. In addition, the decline of their former leader Syd Barrett, who had left the band depressed and disturbed by the same pressures that his erstwhile bandmates were now starting to feel. These concerns manifested themselves in honest, open and direct lyrics, which when combined with their innovative musical style made for a formidable combination. Few of the people who have bought the album over the years may have encountered the same sort of pressures that drove Pink Floyd to create “The Dark Side Of The Moon”, but the lyrics were elliptical rather than specific, with the result that the album has strong resonance for just about any listener. Rick Wright, whose telling response to the question of why the album keeps on selling in vast quantities is a shrugged “I don’t know”, also once remarked that his only explanation was that “it touched a nerve – it seemed like everyone was waiting for this album, for someone to make it”.

The above may go some way towards explaining why the album sold in such vast quantities, but unfortunately it sheds very little light on the more fundamental question of whether or not it’s as good as so many people make it out to be. The only way to do this is to assess the music outside of any considerations of commercial success, and as a large part of the appeal of “The Dark Side Of The Moon” is that it is a concept piece with a definite and deliberate structure (which, in fact, had been painstakingly worked out before a single note of music had been recorded), it’s only right that it should be examined in sequential order from start to conclusion. So, here goes.
Most ‘classic’ albums tend to open with a deliberate and attention-grabbing song, but “The Dark Side Of The Moon” typically rejects this tradition by kicking off proceedings with a subtle, intricate sound collage. Composed (or, to be more accurate, devised on some graph paper) by Nick Mason, ‘Speak To Me’ acts as an overture for the entire album by combining elements from all of the other tracks into a dense sonic montage. The title of the track comes from the phrase that engineer Alan Parsons used to start the recording of each of the interview sessions that provided the spoken word soundbites that litter the album. The interviewees – who included everyone from Pink Floyd’s road crew to Paul and Linda McCartney – were seated in a darkened studio and asked to give the first response that came into their head when they read a question related to the album’s theme from a randomly-selected card. Excerpts from several of these recordings appear in ‘Speak To Me’, backed by a montage of music and effects that provides early hints of the motifs that will dominate the album. As with most of the major Floyd projects of the era, Mason acted as the project ‘manager’, ensuring that the concept of the piece was maintained, gathering together everyone’s individual ideas and working out where they fitted into the wider picture. As such, ‘Speak To Me’ acts as a superb introduction to “The Dark Side Of The Moon”, forming an exciting but remarkably understated ‘trailer’ for the album. It’s thoroughly refreshing to hear an album opening in such a studied and atypical fashion, so “The Dark Side Of The Moon” is looking very promising so far.

The first track proper, ‘Breathe’, is Roger Waters’ most candid exposition of the ideological conundrum that had troubled him since becoming a member of a successful rock band. Using the human body as a metaphor, and drawing lyrical inspiration from “The Body” – a 1969 film that did much the same thing and for which Waters had provided the soundtrack – Waters rails against the pursuit of ‘pointless goals’ that erode people’s beliefs and quality of life. It is lyrically and melodically impressive, but although undeniably atmospheric, it is not particularly distinctive in its arrangement or use of sound. However ‘On The Run’, the track that follows it, indisputably is. Originally known as ‘The Travel Sequence’, the song deals with the frantic pace at which modern life is lived, eschewing lyrics in favour of evocative sounds. An early synthesiser was used to create what Dave Gilmour has described as “a mobile, repetitious, travelling type of sound”, and this was overlaid with an airport announcer reading out departure times, the laconic voice of legendary Pink Floyd road manager Roger The Hat, and the footsteps of someone who runs for but ultimately misses the plane that takes off at the track’s conclusion (an effect that was created by having assistant engineer Peter James run around Abbey Road studios in heavy shoes until he literally collapsed breathless on the floor).
More stunning sound effects form the opening of the next track, ‘Time’. A collage of ticking and chiming clocks ring out, like a nightmarish alternate version of the “time… for a story” sequence from the old ITV children’s show “Pipkins”, and then dissolve into a strong song about the folly of wasting time, backed by a deliberately percussive bass from Waters, and Mason drumming slightly ahead of the beat to give the listener the feeling that they are ‘keeping up’ with the song. ‘Time’ leads into ‘The Great Gig In The Sky’, a stunning instrumental written by Wright. Originally this was intended as the backing to a series of parodies of bible passages, intended to reflect the way that religion is open to wilful misinterpretation by those wishing to tailor it to meet their own extreme beliefs, but this idea was dropped (possibly at EMI’s insistence) and replaced with session singer Clare Torrey wailing a haunting, wordless improvisation over the top. ‘The Great Gig In The Sky’ marks the end of the first side of “The Dark Side Of The Moon”, and it’s interesting to speculate whether or not the album would have met with quite as much success if the track had been released in its potentially controversial original incarnation.

Meanwhile, the second side of the album opens with the track that got the album’s foot in the commercial door. ‘Money’ is quite clearly a satire on the attitude of the idle rich, with Waters’ lyrics practically spitting venom at every turn (“think I’ll buy me a football team”, “I’m alright jack, get your hands off my stash”), and the arrangement was deliberately tailored by Gilmour to resemble a radio-friendly American AOR track in order to highlight the point of the parody. Unfortunately, as with most acute satire, the song was misinterpreted by the very people it sought to mock; ‘Money’ was taken as a call to arms by well-heeled American youths, and was given blanket play on Stateside radio. While there is no question that ‘Money’ was directly responsible for the album’s initial breakthrough in the American market, its success also detracted not only from Waters and Gilmour’s intentions for the piece, but also from its status as a fine piece of music built around an inventive tape loop percussion track of the sound of coins and tills, and from the overall effect of the band’s live shows. Pink Floyd were used to playing concerts where the emphasis was on atmosphere rather than star presence, and were dismayed to suddenly find themselves playing to audiences whooping and cheering for ‘Money’.
Satirising something in a way that is too acute for non-sympathisers to pick up on is one thing. Failing to convey your meaning adequately is something else altogether, and that’s exactly the problem that clouds ‘Us And Them’. Originally written in 1969 for the film “Zabriskie Point” (but eventually rejected as ‘too sad’), the song draws its inspiration from both the increased incidences of police brutality towards politically motivated students in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the inequality of distribution of food on a worldwide scale. Admirable enough sentiments, but unfortunately on this occasion they weren’t expressed clearly enough. Few people have managed to fully and correctly interpret the point of the lyrics – in fact, the editor of this very title once described the song as “a real humdinger of meaninglessness” – and as such it proves to be an awkward stumbling block that comes perilously close to marring the otherwise seamless conceptual flow of the album. Pioneering echo effects or no pioneering echo effects.

‘Any Colour You Like’, on the other hand, was never open to such misinterpretation, as it doesn’t include any lyrics. Pink Floyd’s musical roots were in free-form improvised instrumentals, and this track stays true to that established style. Included for no other reason than that the band wanted the excuse to play an improvisation on stage, ‘Any Colour You Like’ is completely at odds with the idea of a polished, commercial album, and its only concession to the theme of “The Dark Side Of The Moon” is that its title refers to a phrase that automobile entrepreneur Henry Ford used to use whenever he felt that people were making unreasonable demands of him: “you can have it in any colour, as long as it’s black”.
‘Any Colour You Like’ is followed by ‘Brain Damage’, the most heartfelt and poignant song on the album. It refers explicitly to the mental problems endured by Syd Barrett (“…and if the band you’re in starts playing a different tune”), and was written after the band had revisited old unreleased session tapes recorded with Barrett while selecting tracks for the compilation “Relics”. Barrett’s troubles are used as a metaphor for the extremes to which the pressures explored on the rest of “The Dark Side Of The Moon” can ultimately push individuals, and the song segues straight into the album’s glorious finale ‘Eclipse’. An elaborate musical crescendo with dense soulful backing vocals, ‘Eclipse’ encapsulates the theme of the album with the image of the sun being blocked out by the moon, although it does end on a positive note, suggesting that if we all work together, we can help each other overcome the pressures of modern life. Abbey Road’s staff cleaner Jerry Driscoll muses “there is no dark side of the moon, really, matter of fact it’s all dark”, and the album fades out with a pulsating heartbeat.

And that selfsame closing heartbeat brings us round to the closest that the normally placid and enthusiastic world of Pink Floyd fandom has ever come to a raging argument. In the early 1990s, one fan pointed out that if you turned the volume right up about one and a half minutes into 'Eclipse', you can just about hear a string quartet start to play behind the heartbeat sound. What's more, twenty seconds later, said string quartet appear to suddenly start playing the opening riff from The Beatles' 'Ticket To Ride'. This claim was the subject of much derision in various high profile Pink Floyd fanzines with people claiming that it was a load of nonsense because they knew the album off by heart and had never once blah blah blah etc, but the fact of the matter is that if you follow the listener's instructions, you can indeed hear a string quartet behaving in exactly the manner he suggests. Quite what they were doing there is a different matter altogether, but in the absence of anything resembling official confirmation, we'll just have to assume that this was yet another of the secret messages and hidden surprises that litter the majority of Pink Floyd's albums, waiting to be discovered and argued about by attentive listeners.

“The Dark Side Of The Moon” was launched on 27th Feburary 1973 with a press conference at the London Planetarium. The original plan was for a quadraphonic (a long-outdated 1970s format involving four separate speakers in an early precursor to ‘surround sound’) mix of the album to be played for the press, but when it became obvious to the band that the system that EMI planned to use for the event was not up to the required standard, they refused to attend and sent cardboard cutouts in their place. One journalist ‘hilariously’ remarked that he couldn’t tell the difference. It entered the UK album chart at number one, and basically, has kept on selling since then.
Surprisingly for such a successful album with heavy symbolic overtones, very few absurd myths have sprung up around “The Dark Side Of The Moon”. Possibly due to the fact that its creators have always shunned the limelight and the public lifestyle, the album has never really attracted the sort of ridiculous fabricated stories that usually spring up around similarly ‘legendary’ albums and then refuse to leave. However, there are a couple of common misconceptions worth highlighting. The first is that the album supposedly represents the ultimate album for smoking marijuana by – made by dopeheads for dopeheads, and unable to be understood on its proper level unless you’ve been toking on that crazy reefer before, during and after listening. In actual fact, Pink Floyd were notorious in the industry at that time for never wasting a single second of studio time, spending every available moment perfecting their recordings and only pausing sessions to watch football matches, Spike Milligan shows and “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”. The fact that the album sessions were sandwiched in short gaps either side of a huge American tour only serves to emphasise just how industrious they were. The album was crafted with a combination of care and speed that represents the polar opposite of the average joint toker’s workrate, and the idea that it can only really be understood by those who have a fondness for suspiciously thick cigarettes is equally ridiculous. Enough people have managed to understand it without the aid of drugs to keep it selling in continuously large quantities to this day. Like all myths about the role of drugs in the creation of cultural artefacts, all this reveals is how insecure and desperate to win acceptance as a wild ‘rebel’ the person telling the story is.

More curious is the story about the supposed relationship between the album and “The Wizard Of Oz”. According to several sources, if you play the album and the film in tandem, there is an odd synchronicity between the on-screen action and the music and lyrics. While I haven’t been able to verify this, given that I have no intention of watching “The Wizard Of Oz” under any circumstances, there are plenty of people who are quite happy to confirm that this is true. Where they differ, though, is what you should do after the album runs out with an entire half of the film left to run. Do you start the album at the beginning again, or move on to its chronological successor “Wish You Were Here”? Apparently, the ‘believers’ are unable to reach agreement on that point. Regardless, it’s established fact that the band did not watch “The Wizard Of Oz” while making the album, nor did they intend it to mirror the onscreen action (although it seems that no-one’s tried playing it while watching a football match), and the more important question here is who thought of the idea of playing album and film simultaneously in the first place, and in what more constructive ways could they have been spending their time.

But outside of such pressing issues, there is an even more important and fundamental question to be asked – namely that of whether “The Dark Side Of The Moon” lives up to its lofty reputation or not. And the answer is yes. And no. On the one hand it is a remarkable album that justifies every last purchase of its sales figures. It exists on a more sophisticated plane than any other album with a similar level of success, and is packed with stunning musical figures and well-written lyrics. Although its has a weakness in the fact that it really needs to be listened to as a whole rather than in the form of individual tracks for full appreciation to be possible, it is nonetheless a thoroughly enjoyable experience, and certainly far from the ‘background music’ tag that has been unfairly and implausibly applied to it by various sneering quarters over the years. If it genuinely struck a chord with so many listeners, then it did so for all the right reasons. Yet at the same time, as experimental as the album might be in comparison to other chart-hogging record breakers, it is unable to reach the sheer staggering highs that Pink Floyd had achieved on many of their other offerings. It is their most consistent album by far, but by that same definition there is nothing to match the dizzying experimental highs of ‘Atom Heart Mother’ or ‘One Of These Days’, the risible lows of ‘Seamus’ or ‘A Spanish Piece’, or the sheer head-scratching bafflement of ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’. A safe plateau had been reached in between the various extremes, and while there have been many fine moments on their subsequent albums (the moving, elegiac salute to Syd Barrett ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, for example, and the biting sarcasm of ‘Sheep’), the comfortability of this new position meant that they could never fully recapture the truly experimental excitement that characterised their earlier albums. “The Dark Side Of The Moon” captures Pink Floyd at the height of their abilities, but not necessarily at their best.

POTTY ABOUT PEPPER

Is The Beatles’ classic LP `Sgt Pepper` the best record ever? Tim Worthington examines the story behind the groundbreaking record.

In 1987, the world – and more specifically, the Granada TV region – went mad. To the delight of marketing people and lazy journalists everywhere, that year marked the twentieth anniversary of the release of The Beatles’ album “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, and as such it was the perfect excuse for a load of documentaries, under-researched columns and vast charity concerts celebrating the fact that it had, apparently, changed the world forever. Most significantly, the album opened with the line “it was twenty years ago today”, providing everyone with the perfect context in which to frame their sudden burst of Peppermania. Ever since then, “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” has been held up on a regular basis as the single greatest and most influential album of all time. Which would be a perfectly acceptable situation, if it wasn’t for the fact that the album quite simply isn’t worthy of such sweeping and ambitious plaudits.
No doubt many of you have all but given up on the article already, having decided that this is just another attempt at stirring up controversy through idle gainsaying of whatever might be expressed by popular opinion. To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if that reaction was taking hold, as it’s the one I’ve encountered the most when expressing my provocative theory. However, this isn’t just idle gainsaying. I genuinely believe that under no circumstances could “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” rightfully be called the greatest album ever made, and what’s more I have arguments to back up my position and everything. Never mind the greatest album of all time, it isn’t even the greatest album of 1967, or even of The Beatles’ own career. However, my grand statement has already been made – twice over in fact – so it’s time to start on some of those supporting arguments that I was talking about. Are you ready? Right then, let’s journey back twenty years ago today… and, erm, some more.
The reputation that “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” has attained and enjoyed, whether rightfully or wrongfully, is inextricably linked with its position within the context of the pop music of the time, and thus it’s only right that this article should go into a considered but ultimately objective look at that very same position. As early as 1963, a critic in The Times had taken the unprecedented step of nominating John Lennon and Paul McCartney as the songwriters of the year, and had made bold claims about what he believed they were capable of achieving. They may have been working with limited studio facilities and under the pressure of turning out two albums a year in-between constant touring and making films, but they unquestionably did start to live up to the writer’s predictions. Even their earlier output had a greater depth and sense of invention than practically any of their contemporaries could manage to create, and matters started to take an even more exciting detour after they travelled to America, meeting The Byrds and Bob Dylan and trying certain ‘substances’ in the process. By 1965, they were being allowed more time, freedom and technology in the studio to perfect their music, and it showed. “Rubber Soul”, which was released that year, was described by rock critic Nicholas Schaffner as being like the moment in “The Wizard Of Oz” when the visuals suddenly shift from black and white into colour, and it’s easy to see just how revolutionary it must have seemed in the cultural landscape of the time. The range of diverse instrumentation, textures and tempos was quite unlike anything that had been heard in commercial pop music up to that point. ‘Nowhere Man’ and ‘The Word’ utilise atypically laid-back guitar patterns and circular melodies, ‘I’m Looking Through You’ explores unusually abstract emotions for the lyrical style of the time, and the sublime ‘Think For Yourself’ betrays for the first time the Eastern influences that were coming to influence their work and their visual image. The latter was even more prevalent on ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’, which blended Lennon’s blunt and daring lyrics about a sexually predatory female with a droning sitar line courtesy of George Harrison, who had become fascinated by the instrument after hearing one used in the soundtrack to the band’s 1965 film “Help”. The album didn’t entirely break loose from the constraints of their earlier image and style – the twee ‘Michelle’ and ‘Girl’ are evidence enough of that – but all the same the album in the broadest sense occupied a vital key position in the development of popular music as we know it. And then, they somehow managed to better it.
Trailed by the remarkable single ‘Paperback Writer’/‘Rain’ (the former featuring thundering guitar and intricately-layered vocals on the chorus – failed attempts at live recreation of which were reputedly the primary reason for The Beatles abandoning live performance later that year – and the latter a jerky rhythm and a melody that seemed almost to expand and contract), the 1966 album “Revolver” took The Beatles’ music – and indeed music in general – into the realms of exciting new possibilities. The album is framed in a robust, sturdy guitar pop style, but within that lie amazing depth and innovation in the lyrics, the melodies and the arrangements. The ‘conventional’ tracks were experimental enough; ‘I Want To Tell You’ is propelled by a disjointed guitar riff and a discordant piano, ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ is decorated by gentle flourishes of backwards guitar, and the bitingly satirical ‘Taxman’ is performed with such ferocity and vitriol that it continually sounds as though it’s about to career out of control. Elsewhere, it gets very experimental. With the vocals backed by only a string quartet, ‘Eleanor Rigby’ endeavours to relate the kind of gritty narrative that would have been found in the ‘kitchen sink dramas’ of the day in its lyrics, dealing with downbeat topics that had previously been shied away from in pop music. On ‘Love You To’, George Harrison delved further into Eastern influences than he had on ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’, creating a fusion of western pop song and Indian raga, with vocal lines disintegrating into atonal religious wails. ‘She Said She Said’ has paranoid lyrics about a bad acid trip (“you’re making me feel like I’ve never been born”) with an instrumental backing to match, complete with cymbal crashes that sound the way that flashing lights feel. This innovation and experimentalism reaches a highpoint with ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, a song characterised by megalithic drums (later sampled by The Chemical Brothers for ‘Setting Sun’, which says something about how powerful this track sounds), backward running tape loops and John Lennon shouting his vocals through a microphone, which seems to end in a self-repeating cacophony but in fact closes with an unexpectedly jaunty piano. Not even the pointless ‘Yellow Submarine’, which in spite of all the “it’s about drugs really, honest” excuses that are made for it will always remain a terrible song, manages to drag “Revolver” down. The album sounds every bit as fresh and exciting now as it did back in 1966, and it’s hardly surprising that at the time, the next Beatles album was awaited with genuine and feverish excitement.
“Revolver” was followed early in 1967 by a double ‘a’-sided single, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’/’Penny Lane’, which saw Lennon and McCartney make musical revisits to places from their respective childhoods. The former benefitted from lush, dense instrumentation, and set each of its introspective and mysterious verses to entirely different music. The latter, on the other hand, painted a kaleidoscopic view of city life with its youthful and exuberant lyrics, and brash arrangement that brilliantly evoked the hustle and bustle of a busy suburban street. Regarded by many as the most influential single of all time, and indeed so internationally successful that tourists from around the world still flock to both of the locations identified in the song titles, it neatly represented both of the extremes of British psychedelic music and heightened anticipation for the next full-blown Beatles album. There was a genuine sense of excitement taking hold at the time – evidenced by such contemporaneous coverage as a Granada reporter doorstepping Ringo Starr outside Abbey Road studios to ask how work on the album was progressing, and a fantastic ‘behind the scenes’ radio preview presented by a young Kenny Everett (which, incidentally, can – and should – be heard on the BBC album “Kenny At The Beeb”) – and The Beatles continued to work away in the studio.
But while they worked away, other people were working away in a similar fashion, and in the gap between the release of “Revolver” and its follow-up, some incredible advances were made as other artists attempted to pick up where the album had left off. In America, ‘garage bands’ were conjuring up amazing sounds as they attempted to replicate the style of the album on a low budget and with extremely cheap and limited instruments. Over in the UK, psychedelic bands were starting to dominate the London club scene, notably Pink Floyd who had been performing free-form instrumentals live before The Beatles had even released ‘Rain’. The Who had won widespread critical praise for their linked suite of songs ‘A Quick One’, as had The Rolling Stones for ‘Going Home’, a lengthy number that was largely improvised in the studio while the tapes rolled. Another group to have graduated from the early 1960s ‘beat’ scene, The Pretty Things, released a startling single called ‘Defecting Grey’ which they described as “experiments with vodka, acid and grass all condensed into one song” and which has further (and very accurately) been described as sounding like four songs having a fight, which unlike The Beatles they had been able to recreate live. Most significant, however, were the advances made by The Beach Boys. Previously uncomplicated purveyors of good time surf music, their creative force Brian Wilson had been spurred into grander visions after hearing “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver”, and painstakingly crafted the astonishing “Pet Sounds”, a breathtakingly emotional album somewhere between pop, hymnal and Christmas music, which many believe to be completely flawless. He then went further, creating the single ‘Good Vibrations’ which tied together disparate strands of music recorded in different locations yet was still robust and commercial enough to become a huge international hit. In music press polls for 1966, The Beach Boys topped The Beatles as best group, and not without good reason. In the short space of a few months, The Beatles had gone from being sole innovators to being just one group of many attempting to push back the frontiers of music. “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” could not have invented the metaphorical wheel as so many of its supporters claim, as the evidence is there that the ‘wheel’ in question had already been invented, not least by The Beatles themselves. Of course, that doesn’t stop it from being an excellent album in the conventional sense. However, the fact that it isn’t an excellent album does.
Well, if I'm going to posit the theory that "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" maybe isn't quite as good as people frequently make it out to be, then at least I can do it properly and go through the entire album, track by track, assessing its various strengths and weaknesses. Let's start, as logic would dictate, with the opening track, which also happens to share its title with that of the album. 'Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' opens with the faked sound of an orchestra tuning up and an audience taking to their seats, which is - by 1960s standards - very impressive and convincing indeed. Compare it with, for example, the horrible dubbed-on applause from The 13th Floor Elevators' not-actually-live-at-all album "Live", the amplified hairdryer that shows up between the tracks on The Small Faces' live EP, and indeed the cacophonous howl that runs throughout The Beatles' own "Live At The Hollywood Bowl", and there is absolutely no contest. Proof that The Beatles had access to the most sophisticated recording equipment available in 1967 is contained in the opening seconds of the album. But did they use these facilities to their full potential? Well, with regard to this track, the answer is a resounding 'no'. This isn't down to the arrangement or production, both of which are crystal clear and reasonably imaginative, but more due to the quality of the song itself. It starts off excitingly enough, with a squealing burst of guitar and an excited opening verse, but from that point on it rapidly becomes dull and plodding. It's probably no coincidence that when Jimi Hendrix premiered the song live a couple of days before the album was released, he truncated it after the opening verse and went off into one of his manic guitar improvisations instead. As an opening track, it's hardly the kind of unequivocal attention-grabber that a supposedly classic album should necessarily have. In this respect it certainly doesn't stand up well next to, for example, Nick Drake's 'Intro', The Stone Roses' 'I Wanna Be Adored' or even Oasis 'Rock'n'Roll Star', all of which hammer home the point of their respective parent albums to the listener straight away, leaving them genuinely excited to listen further. Unfortunately, the main reaction that I get from this track is to skip forward to the next one the second that the opening verse gives way to meandering repetitiveness. But unfortunately, the second track is...
'With A Little Help From My Friends'. Right, we're on to a huge point of contention already. Basically, I don't care what predictable excuses might be trotted out about every Beatles album needing a 'Ringo Song' or whatever. There was nothing to stop them from writing a 'Ringo song' for this album and actually making it good. This, however, is only a very short distance away from the sort of insipid tosh that the likes of Bruce Forsyth and Jimmy Tarbuck used to end their variety shows by singing, and it's telling that the first cover version of this song to be released was by cheery 'family entertainer' Joe Brown. It's also equally telling that another opportunistic cover version, by the psychedelic duo Young Idea (which is surely the least-remembered top ten hit of 1967) was superior to The Beatles' original, yet also compared very badly to their own previous and subsequent singles and was easily the worst of their career, which came to an abrupt end shortly afterwards. Wet Wet Wet's 1987 cover version, recorded in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the album's release, was bland in the extreme, and like Joe Cocker's tedious slowed-down 'heavy rock' "Wonder Years"-soundtracking 1968 reworking only serves to further prove that this is not really the sort of song that should appear on what is supposedly the greatest album of all time. By now, you're probably all wondering why I'm even bothering to listen to the album if I appear to dislike it so much, in which case I would direct you to...

'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds'. Listen to it, and you start to get some kind of sense of why this album has had so much praise heaped upon it over the years. Time may not have been kind to its poorly mixed bass guitar and extreme stereo separation, but from the arresting and otherworldly harpsichord intro onwards this is an engaging and beautiful song. The relatively simple arrangement using untypical instruments is a delight, and serves as a pertinent reminder that underneath all the orchestras, MBEs and studies in transcendental meditation, the Beatles were a real band with robust performing and songwriting abilities. Personally, I believe John Lennon's oft-disputed claim that the lyrics were inspired by a painting that his son had done rather than the ingestion of hallucinogenic drugs, because - as any genre afficionado will be able to confirm - all that nonsense about newspaper taxis and plasticiene porters with looking-glass ties is far closer to the "this is what I think might be 'out there'" imaginings of bandwagon jumpers and paisley poseurs like the early Status Quo, rather than genuine lysergically-fuelled lyrics, which all appear to be about falling off ferris wheels and girls who have a garden growing in their hair if you look really closely. On the same album that Wet Wet Wet tackled 'With A Little Help From My Friends' in 1987, The Christians took on 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' and produced a highly impressive and individual reading of the song. Although, having said that, those who are justifiably wary of the world of cover versions will probably not hesitate to remind us all of Elton John's predictably character-free rendition, The Pasadenas' risible attempt to turn it into a soul song, and inevitably William Shatner's near-legendary over-hysterical interpretation, about which I shall say no more.
Next up is 'Getting Better', which in all honesty is one of the most criminally underrated highlights of the album. It has the same relentlessly upbeat feel that characterised The Beatles' less sophisticated early singles, but is also imbued with intricate and constantly varying harmonies, a chiming, repetitive and unquestionably psychedelic rhythm guitar track, and a fantastic moment where the darker shades of the lyrics in the final verse are accompanied by a quick drone on the sitar from George. "I have to admit it's getting better" they sing with infectious optimism on the glorious chorus, and it's quite an apt line to appear at this point in proceedings. With two good tracks in a row, things most definitely are getting better.
And happily, this momentum is maintained by 'Fixing A Hole', which again is a fantastic track that has never really received the recognition that it so clearly deserves. The melody is a neat intersection of inventive psychedelic pop, mass audience-friendly singalong, and joyously lazy blues, and on top of all that there's some truly dazzling guitar work from George. On a general level, this is easily the most psychedelic song on the album, so fluid and dreamy in its arrangement and performance that it constantly sounds as though it is just about to drift away from the speakers and off into the distance (in fact, it almost literally does appear to do this during the fade out). Again brimming with infectiously positive sentiments ("it really doesn't matter if I'm wrong or right, where I belong I'm right", "I'm taking the time for a number of things that weren't important yesterday"), the song isn't even marred by the perpetual insistence of boring idiots on spotting supposed 'coded' drug 'references' where there don't actually appear to be any at all. Interesting fact - a cover version of this song was once recorded by none other than Kevin Eldon, future habitual collaborator of Lee and Herring and Chris Morris. Bet you never knew that!
Then, unfortunately, this run of great songs is spoilt by the appearance of 'She's Leaving Home', a so-called 'tearjerker' about a girl who is, rather unsurprisingly, leaving home, and which is set to an exceptionally dreary orchestral backing. The lyrical storyline is clumsy and incoherent, the sentiment horribly mawkish, and worst of all it appears to celebrate the ingratitude of a spoilt brat. If Paul McCartney had wanted to write the musical equivalent of an episode of "The Wednesday Play", then he ended up writing one that not only lacks the hard-hitting grittiness for which the series was renowned, but also one that only survives in the BBC archives as a damaged print missing several vital key scenes. In short, what had been done so brilliantly in 'Eleanor Rigby' was made a complete mess of here.
After having had to endure such an awful song, it really is a tremendous relief to hear the arresting fairground organ intro to 'Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!'. You'll find no ungrateful spoilt brats here, just a deadpan description of insane circus acts, dreamed up by John Lennon after he bought, for no readily obvious reason, an original authentic Victorian circus poster at an auction; proving that despite the uniformly fawning reviews that are routinely handed out to artists who deal with 'real' issues in their songs, sometimes it can simply be more fun to hear about Henry The Horse dancing the waltz. The strident, catchy song is festooned with what sounds like an army of fairground organs and calliopes, providing more proof than any other moment on the album of how genuinely exciting it must have been to discover the potential and possibilities of the recording studio in the late 1960s, and is all the better for it. 'Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!' is pure exhilaration from start to overarranged fiddly fairground organ finish, and brings the first side of the album to a suitably jubilant close.
Meanwhile, side two appears to open with the sound of an amplified wasp. Then, when you realise that it isn't Pink Floyd circa 1969 after all and so this isn't actually going to be the literal sound of an amplified wasp, and something distinctly Indian-sounding starts to play over the top, you slowly start to realise what's really going on. It's 'Within You Without You', another of George Harrison's journeys to his inner self, and very tedious it is to listen to too. Whereas his previous forays into Eastern-influenced sounds, notably 'Love You To', had resonated with experimentation, excitement and urgency, this song ultimately only resonates with the sound of the listener's snoring. It does very little that could be described as being in any way experimental, exciting or urgent, and quite simply goes on for way too long; in fact, 'Strawberry Fields Forever' and 'Penny Lane' could both have easily fitted into the space that this takes up on the album. With this track, George Harrison finally reaches the musical spiritual nirvana that he had been seeing, but the rest of us just reach a state of transcendental boredom. The track ends with raucous laughter, presumably courtesy of people who had been listening to something else altogether.
And they clearly hadn't been listening to the track that follows either. 'Within You Without You' was merely dull; 'When I'm Sixty Four' is the moment when you stare at the speakers incredulously and wonder what on Earth possessed someone to put this on the album. The song is supposedly a humorous music hall pastiche, but there are two things very wrong with this claim - firstly it isn't actually amusing, and secondly the cloying, insipid melody (and indeed the lazily thrown together lyrics) share little of the joyous raucousness that characterised music hall songs. For anyone who would like to argue that the song did actually meet both of those criteria and that I have no idea what I'm talking about, I would refer you to 'Your Mother Should Know', which was recorded later in 1967 for "The Magical Mystery Tour". This not only has a rousing, infectious melody that you can easily imagine the cast of "The Good Old Days" noisily singing along to, it also contains a wry and well-aimed lyric that genuinely does make me smirk. 'When I'm Sixty Four', on the other hand, seems to exist purely to make itself as annoying and frustratingly insubstantial as possible, and I defy more than a handful of people out there to say that they honestly, genuinely think that it's some kind of classic rather than merely the archetypal 'nice tune'. From boredom to incredulous vitriol in the space of two tracks. Good going, 'greatest album of all time'.
Remember what I was saying about 'Your Mother Should Know' disproving the flimsy argument that you have to look at 'When I'm Sixty Four' in the context of being a pastiche of music hall blah blah blah etc? Well 'Lovely Rita', the track that directly follows it, does much the same thing. The lyrics are straight out of that lost world of bawdy, seemingly-laden-with-innuendo-but-ultimately-completely-innocent comedy that anyone trying to imitate music hall should in turn try to imitate, and the song is far more musically robust than 'When I'm Sixty Four'. In place of those infuriatingly twee oboes and chimes come some pleasingly vulgar kazoos and a superb burst of piano playing courtesy of producer George Martin (whose musical input into The Beatles' recorded output should never be undervalued, but sadly frequently is). 'Lovely Rita' is a delightful song on many levels, and is to an extent genuinely experimental (the sound collage that closes the track was genuinely innovative for the time), and while it may not be the greatest song ever written, it's certainly far closer to that end of the spectrum that many of the other songs that it has to share the tracklisting with.
There are no such criticisms about 'Good Morning Good Morning', however. In fact, there are no criticisms at all, as this is arguably the best track on the entire album. Behind the infectious melody and Lennon's biting, sarcastic lyrics about the banality of 'normal' people's existence lie sterling guitar work and driving, tempo-shifting, expertly-judged drumming. In fact, anyone who insists on spouting the sneering, baseless myth that Ringo Starr was a "rubbish drummer - no arguments" should be forced to listen to the isolated drum track from this song on an endless loop until they finally admit that they had no idea of what they were talking about. And that's just the basic unadorned take of the song that appears on "Anthology 2"; the full version has blaring brass, manic splurges of lead guitar, and strangely processed backing vocals. There are also a lot of animal noises that genuinely follow a 'path' through a country estate, carrying on after the song itself has faded, and ending with a foxhunt riding past a group of chickens.
The next track opens with a hamfisted edit. Or, to be more accurate, it opens with what sounds like a hamfisted edit to modern ears. Such are the technical wonders of our age that Jesus Jones (don't smirk!) can segue from one song into another so flawlessly that it takes you a while to realise that it's actually a new song and not just some strange coda, but back then studio technology simply wasn't that good, and in 1967 the sound of a clucking chicken suddenly turning into guitar feedback must have sounded revolutionary. Said feedback is followed by the sound of The Beatles muttering and gearing themselves up for a take, and then by a thumping drumbeat and some very loud guitars. This is the sound of The Beatles who made girls faint at The Cavern and played Shea Stadium in glittery suits, and what's that song they're whipping the crowd into a frenzy with? The same song that opened the album in such unspectacular fashion, only this time with the tempo whipped up and the boring part excised, and it sounds nothing short of fantastic. The Beatles themselves seem to sense this, as evidenced by the enthusiasm-filled ad-lib of "we're Sergeant Pepper's one and only Lonely Hearts Club Band". This is top stuff. If only the whole of side two could have been like this and 'Good Morning Good Morning'.
Well, maybe not quite all of side two, as then 'A Day In The Life' might not have ended up as the ambitious and rightfully celebrated song that it is. It starts off as a laid-back acoustic number, as Lennon sings with genuine detachment and bitterness about some stories that he had spotted in a newspaper. Suddenly, almost from nowhere, a massive orchestra appear and start to build in volume, getting louder until they reach an abrupt halt at the height of their cacophony, and a jaunty rhythm sneaks out from under it. McCartney then starts singing with positivity and infectious energy about getting up in the morning and going to work, then it shifts back into Lennon's earlier style for a mysterious (actually about the state of unrepaired roads in Blackburn, Lancashire, for reasons best known to Lennon himself) final verse. Then the orchestra come back, reach the same dramatic halt again, and give way to an almighty atonal piano crash, which seems to reverberate for absolutely ages. This last noise has rightfully become one of the most famous motifs in music, but unfortunately the status and importance of 'A Day In The Life' in the history of pop music has meant that the song has become a signifier for automatic connotations of artistic innovation, and other people are not above using it to lend a false and arrogant sense of 'importance' to their own work. Not too long ago, a Channel 4 press launch used 'A Day In The Life' to back clips of the likes of Ricky Gervaise and Dom Joly, which frankly was pushing the ridiculousness of artistic comparisons into new levels. Nonetheless, the piano noise shows the painstaking dedication of The Beatles not just to songwriting but also to the laborious process of recording - the effect could easily be achieved by computer nowadays, but back then they had to painstakingly count out the number of bars in the song - in real time - where the orchestral bits were going to be inserted. This, and the song in general, is testament to what you can achieve artistically when you really work hard at something. Unlike 'She's Leaving Home', which tried its absolute hardest to be moving but failed miserably, 'A Day In The Life' makes no such efforts at all and yet ends up affecting in a curious and abstract way. On a "South Bank Show" documentary about the album some years ago, George Martin isolated the lead vocal track from the master tape of 'A Day In The Life', and reflected in clearly overcome tones about how far the band had progressed musically in the four years that he had been working with them. Given that nowadays it takes most artists about four years to make one album, you can't help but marvel at the sheer brilliance of this song.
Actually, the end of 'A Day In The Life' isn't quite the end of the album, as it is followed by (apparently) a tone that can be heard by dogs and cats but not humans, and then by an extremely abrupt sound collage located in the inner groove of the original album. However, that isn't really interesting enough to enter into discussion about. The revelation that if you turn up Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side Of The Moon" to full volume right at the end, a string quartet can be heard playing the intro to The Beatles' 'Ticket To Ride', and indeed the wild inter-fan arguments that fact provoked, are for more interesting. But "The Dark Side Of The Moon" is the subject for another article on greatest albums of all time. Back to "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".
What does all the above analysis actually tell is? Well, outside of any tiresome and tedious ‘interpretations’ that pretentious people who like to avoid having any real opinions on anything ever might like to draw, all that it really tells us is that “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” has – in my personal opinion – five tracks of varying degrees of ropiness to eight of astounding and enduring greatness. Not a bad average by anyone’s standards, but at the same time definitely not the stuff of which best albums of all time are made. Just imagine, though, if those five tracks had been excluded and five of equal quality to the rest of the album had appeared in their place. I know that it’s all very well and good speculating on hypothetical situations, but in this instance I’m not actually speculating on a hypothetical situation. At the same time that the tracks that made it onto “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” were recorded, five of the best songs that The Beatles ever recorded were also committed to tape. ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’ we already know about, but there were also three superb outtakes from the sessions that sadly remain far less widely heard than they deserve to be. Aside from the lightweight singalong ‘All Together Now’ and the truly bizarre ‘You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)’, not so much a song as it is an affectionate pastiche of vintage BBC radio shows like “It’s That Man Again!” (an idea that, in retrospect, was done to far better effect by The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band on ‘The Craig Torso Show’), the sessions also yielded ‘Hey Bulldog’, ‘It’s Only A Northern Song’ and ‘It’s All Too Much’. ‘Hey Bulldog’, a Lennon/McCartney composition, is a rocking riff-driven beat-psych number with gloriously venomous lyrics (“what makes you think you’re something special when you smile?”), which was far closer to the sound of the bands then playing on London’s psychedelic live scene than any of the tracks that made it onto the album were, and more importantly contained a distinctive yet strong enough hook to have made it into a potential hit single. ‘It’s Only A Northern Song’, a George Harrison number written to fulfil contractual obligations with his publishers, comes swimming in a sea of deliberately discordant orchestral sounds and subtle but atmospheric tape effects. Most significantly, ‘It’s All Too Much’ (also a Harrison composition) mixes a raga-inspired melody and wonderfully dippy lyrics about the world being a slice of birthday cake with a strident drum pattern, undisciplined feedback-drenched guitars, joyful organ playing that would not have sounded out of place on a Monkees single, and seamless diversions into not only an excerpt from a piece of classical music, but also a brief snatch The Merseys’ early 1960s hit ‘Sorrow’. On ‘It’s All Too Much’, the band – who are playing everything live and in one take – sound as though they’re having even more fun than they were on ‘Good Morning Good Morning’, and the recording stands as one of the finest ever made by The Beatles. Sadly, the three superior numbers were forgotten about until work started on the “Yellow Submarine” animated film, when they were included on the soundtrack (and even then, ‘Hey Bulldog’ didn’t make it into the American version), where they unjustly remain among the least-known Beatles tracks of all. It could have all been so very different, though. So different, in fact, that there would have been no need for this article!
Having dealt with the issue of whether “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ can justifiably be called the greatest album ever made or not, it’s only right to go on to look at a couple of the other myths that have grown up around it over the years. Is it, as some claim, the definitive psychedelic album? Well, some of its contents are certainly definitive psychedelic tracks (as indeed are the five non-album tracks mentioned above), but the album as a whole does not deserve similar praise. Some of the tracks – I’m looking at you here, ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ – aren’t psychedelic in any way, shape or form. There were two high profile albums in the summer of 1967 alone that were more psychedelic than “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” could ever have hoped to be. Pink Floyd’s debut release “The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn” rejects all of that clichéd peace and love nonsense in favour of lyrics about the icy wastes of space and riding bikes at high speed through Cambridge (part of the reason why it hardly sounds dated at all today), drenches the instruments (all guitar, bass, drums and organ with no embellishments) in dizzying volume and heavy reverb, and includes some extended improvised instrumental numbers that represented the first significant challenge to the ‘rules’ of the three-minute pop song. Meanwhile, over in America, Captain Beefheart’s debut offering “Safe As Milk” took a detour into uncharted musical waters, backing gibberish vocals with bluesy arrangements that sounded spontaneous and formless, as though they were being directed by some sudden impulse (but were, in fact, meticulously arranged and rehearsed to sound that way). Listen to either of those albums next to “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band”, and you’ll know what being ‘psychedelic’ is all about. In that respect, it just sounds a bit, well, ordinary really. Obviously this doesn’t apply to several of the individual tracks, some of which could genuinely give the contents of any truly psychedelic album a run for their money, but that’s just individual tracks. Here we are talking about the album as a whole, and as a whole it isn’t the most psychedelic album of all time. The Beatles will only be responsible for a serious contender for that honour when EMI get around to releasing a well thought-out compilation of their most psychedelic moments. But as to the question of if that would ever happen, your guess is as good as mine.
So does it have the best cover of all time then? Once again, the answer has to be a resounding ‘no’. Admittedly Peter Blake’s collage was an imaginative and innovative idea for the time, and contains a number of impressively clever touches, but the best album cover of all will by necessity have to have dated well, and this hasn’t. From a modern perspective, it seems cluttered, random, and possibly even veering towards the pretentious. It isn’t even Peter Blake’s best artistic work, as a recent retrospective exhibition proved. Ironically, the covers of “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver” have dated far better, as indeed have those that followed the “Rubber Soul”-style ‘distorted band photo’ template such as The Rolling Stones’ “Between The Buttons” and Pink Floyd’s “The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn”, which have stood the test of time well. And even if the album is looked at in terms of being an exercise in lavish pop-art overdesign, then even in that respect it’s still beaten hands down by The Rolling Stones’ contemporaneous “Their Satanic Majesties Request” – the contents of that album might have been on the whole markedly inferior to “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, but the packaging – namely a garish three-dimensional colour holographic image (and if you were lucky enough to get a promo copy, that came mounted on a padded silk sleeve) – is vastly superior. I have no idea what the best album cover of all time is, and to be honest I’m not sure that I care to know, but I do know for certain that it isn’t “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”.
Was it the first ever concept album? Well, aside from the fact that the honour rightfully belongs to Chad And Jeremy’s mid-1960s offering “Of Cabbages And Kings”, it’s debatable whether “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” actually qualifies as a concept album in the first place. Proper concept albums deal with a running theme from start to finish, whether a story (The Pretty Things’ “SF Sorrow”, Fire’s “Magic Shoemaker”), abstract concepts (Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side Of The Moon”, Camel’s “Flight Of The Snow Goose”), or most infamously the biography of a deaf, dumb and blind kid who sure plays a mean pinball. The unifying device on “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” is supposedly that the album is a ‘stage’ on which several different bands appear. This was unquestionably a clever and innovative musical joke at the time (albeit one that was done far better by The Turtles on “Battle Of The Bands” the following year), but it was not the stuff of which concept albums are made.
Surely people must have recognised it as a psychedelic masterpiece at the time of release then, I hear some of you ask? Well, the tedious and pointless ‘drug prophet’ Dr. Timothy Leary declared that the album was steeped in the message “turn on, tune in and drop out”, but aside from that there was little in the way of recognition of any kind of Earth-shattering genius – in fact, most reviews at the time are almost amazing in their sheer conservatism. They were mostly positive and favourable, but at the same time were hardly incisive (“a bit cheeky, this one” was one of NME’s more pertinent comments on the album), and many had mixed feelings. Some were even downright negative, more than one knocking the album for its self-indulgence and pretentiousness. Even its influence on music is not quite as strong or even as beneficial as some would have you believe; the immediate after-effect was that loads of sub-standard pop groups started dressing up in psychedelic Victorian garb and writing songs called things like ‘Auntie Mabel’s Button Shop’ in the vain hope of scoring a hit in the shadow of the album’s success, while the longer-term legacy has merely been that an endless parade of idiots have laboured under the misapprehension that the path to becoming the ‘new Beatles’ is to sound exactly the same as the old Beatles. Meanwhile, The Beatles themselves followed the album with the irritating ‘All You Need Is Love’ (which, ironically, boasted a fantastic b-side, ‘Baby You’re A Rich Man’), and closed 1967 with “The Magical Mystery Tour”, a superb film that was shown by the BBC on Christmas Day. “The Magical Mystery Tour” was accompanied by the single ‘Hello Goodbye’ and by a strong six song EP, both of which recalled the same sort of playful psychedelia that had been explored by ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘It’s All Too Much’. There then followed a series of superb singles (among them ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Lady Madonna’), and two albums filled with interesting but ultimately lazily unfinished ideas, and an admirable attempt to get ‘back to basics’ with their final album “Get Back”, which was scuppered when their new manager Allan Klein mangled it into the far less impressive “Let It Be” (if you own the “Anthology Three” compilation, try reconstructing the “Get Back” album from its contents – it’s great!).
At the time of its release “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was unquestionably a ‘big’ album, but was not considered to be any more epochal than any of the other ‘big’ albums of the time. So how did it get from there to being labelled the greatest album of all time? That, regrettably, is down to the ‘clip show’ mentality that drives popular culture. For no readily obvious reason, the public love to have clearly defined lists of what is considered to be good and bad, love to have anniversaries to celebrate, no matter how pointless or seemingly arbitrary they may be (“Twenty Two Years Of The Two Ronnies”, for example, or Channel 4’s season of programmes marking the fourteenth anniversary of punk), and love to hear other people’s non-opinions on subjects. This isn’t a new phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination, and back in the 1970s – possibly before today’s favoured ‘pundits’ like Kate Thornton and Jamie Theakston had even been born – the people whose opinions were believed to be important in the shaping of such lists considered – in much the same way as people today consider “Bagpuss” to have been the greatest children’s television programme of all time – “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” to have been the greatest album of all time purely because it was something from the past that was nicely-packaged, uncontroversial to celebrate, and easy to reminisce about. Challenges to its position date back to the early 1970s (for example Richard Goldstein’s startling attack on the album, which he considered to “reek” of pretentious over-instrumentation), but the opinion has proved to be self-perpetuating. It’s a ready-made benchmark for quality in music with a long history of being enthused over to refer back on, eliminating the need for opinion-forming of any kind, and has undeservedly been elevated to this position while the praises of “Revolver” remain criminally undersung. A pity, really, because the album itself is perfectly enjoyable in its own right, but the endless transparent hype that has surrounded it for so many years makes it difficult to listen to objectively.

What is known as…parklife

Tim Worthington on the record all the people loved in 1994

In 1994, Blur's "Parklife" was regarded as one of the most important records ever made by a British band. It was lauded by critics and by fans, and against all expectations it managed to overcome its supposed 'niche' appeal to cross over to huge mainstream sales. Blur were hailed as the saviours of homegrown music by just about every sector of the media imaginable, and the long-established barriers between alternative and mainstream music finally looked set to - rather fittingly - blur. By 1995, however, something had gone very wrong indeed. Suddenly "Parklife" was being openly sneered at as a collection of Chas and Dave-style knees-up cockneyisms made by posh art school tossers who don't know naffink about real life wot like we do, our kid, and almost overnight came to be viewed as yesterday's news and even something of an embarrassment. In time even Blur themselves seemed keen to distance themselves from the album, reinventing themselves with an American 'alt-rock' fixation to considerable acclaim while dropping most of the songs from "Parklife" from their live act. Since then, it's been all but forgotten about.
This rather bizarre and turbulent turn of events immediately throws up two rather troubling questions - how and why did "Parklife" fall from favour in such a spectacular fashion, and how well does it stand up today? The normal assumption would be that the two questions were in fact linked by a common answer; namely that the 'mad for it' naysayers were right, and that "Parklife" was the musical equivalent of the Emperor's New Clothes, with millions of listeners waking up one morning and realising that the album they had thought was great wasn't in fact much good after all. With regard to "Parklife", this is far from being the case. There are still plenty of people who listen to it, and presumably are still buying it as it's still available, and even the album's harshest critics would have to concede that it is, by and large, an inventive and hugely enjoyable work. The questions are different, and the answers are different, and need to be treated as such - but at the end of the day, they still relate to the same album...

The story of "Parklife" essentially begins back in 1991, during Blur's first flush of success. At that time, both the band and their record label Food/EMI lacked confidence and seemed unsure of their direction, and this led to their debut album "Leisure" becoming a confused and hesitant (if promising) affair rather than the definitive statement that it could easily have been. Blur's music at that point fell somewhat awkwardly between the two major alternative trends of the day - 'indie-dance' and the feedback-drenched 'shoegazing' sound - and the label were keen to streamline their act and push them in both of those directions at once. The original tracklisting for "Leisure" as the band had envisaged it was somewhat different to the eventual release, excluding four of the weaker tracks that would end up on the album. In their place would have been four other tracks that displayed increasing ambition and diversity in their songwriting and performance. 'Luminous' and 'Inertia' were shimmering, ambient slices of dreamy psychedelia that were more sophisticated that anything that appeared on "Leisure", and more significantly, 'Uncle Love' and 'Mr. Briggs' were dynamic, jangly 'character songs' that betrayed a debt to The Kinks, Syd Barrett and early David Bowie. Unfortunately, the demands of the label prevailed and the tracks were relegated to b-sides, and they remain largely unheard to this day. Which once again underlines the need for a decent Blur b-sides compilation, but that's a subject for another extended rant.
B-sides or not, the four rejected tracks did indeed suggest that Blur's collective musical ability and sense of ambition were rapidly developing, and within months of the release of "Leisure" this had manifested itself in a very unanticipated fashion. To the alarm of their record company, demos for new songs that had been written over the summer of 1991 and were intended for the follow-up album showcased a darker style, which eschewed the catchy 1960s-influenced choruses of their hit singles in favour of minor chords, overloaded guitar noise and downbeat melodies. The first single from the projected second album, 'Popscene', was released early in 1992 and sounded nothing like the Blur that the public knew. The psych-tinged indie-dance leanings and shimmering guitar soundscapes of the previous year were all gone, replaced by a punky Buzzcocks-influenced sound with a rhythm section that recalled Krautrock acts like Can, and brass embellishments that looked towards The Rolling Stones circa "Exile On Main Street". Despite having a fascinating combination of styles and influences and an air-punchingly exciting melody, and generally just being a fantastic song, 'Popscene' was completely out of step with the times and fell flat on its face as a result. At a time when musical fashion favoured imported 'grunge' outfits like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, who celebrated slovenliness in their music, outlook and appearance, a British band shouting about the artifice of stardom over a taut musical structure was never going to be given an enthusiastic reception, and the single barely scraped the top forty. The second album was scrapped at the label's insistence, with barely any of the songs deemed worthy of further development. and a demoralised Blur were left to start again from scratch. A disastrous American tour followed, which was an horrendous experience that saw them fall out quite badly. With the threat of being dropped from the label unless they could pull their increasingly shambolic and drunken live shows into line also hanging over their heads, the summer of 1992 very nearly spelt the end for Blur.

Most other bands would understandably have given up in frustration, but somehow Blur managed to struggle through these difficult times, their anger and feelings of dejection manifesting themselves in a new sense of purpose as the band developed an astonishingly single-minded resolve. When Blur returned from America and to the process of writing and recording their second album, their hatred for the herd-like mentality of musical fashion could not have been stronger. Although most of the band (and guitarist Graham Coxon in particular) were fans of American guitar music in general - something that has always been deliberately overlooked by lazy journalists seeking to label them 'hypocrites' for adopting American influences on their post-1997 work - none of them cared for the grunge look, lifestyle or sound. The chart failure of 'Popscene' and their miserable trip to America had only served to heighten this sense of alienation, and a conscious decision was made to explore a defiantly 'British' approach in the making of the new album. A new set of songs were rapidly written and given cautious approval by the record company, and suddenly the feelings of rejection and failure that had surrounded their initial attempts to craft a second album were replaced by enthusiasm and determination.
However, the actual process of shaping the album into a state where it could go on release was to prove to be something of an uphill struggle. Initial sessions began in the late summer of 1992, with Andy Partridge of XTC - whose own work had been a clear influence on Blur's new material - acting as producer. After a couple of weeks, it became clear that the sessions were not working out as the notoriously strong-willed Partridge clashed repeatedly with the demands of the record company (who wanted drum machines used on as many tracks as possible in case 'dance remixes' were deemed necessary), and work on the album was halted once again. Album sessions recommenced with Stephen Street, who had worked on "Leisure", and late in December 1992 the completed album was presented to Food/EMI - who immediately rejected it on the grounds that it lacked an obvious single. Damon Albarn wrote the stunning 'For Tomorrow' overnight on Christmas Eve 1992, and the label were immediately satisfied. Not so their American label SBK, though, who were alarmed by the album's decidedly 'British' sound and refused to release it until another potential single aimed at the American market had been added to the tracklisting. Too weary of the never-ending project to stand his ground, Damon went away and wrote 'Chemical World' - another superb song that, oddly, was rapturously received by the Americans even though it still had essentially the same flavour as the rest of the supposedly problematic album. In April 1993, a full eighteen months after work had first commenced on Blur's second album, "Modern Life Is Rubbish" was finally ready for release.

"Modern Life Is Rubbish" could hardly be described as having set the charts alight (although it made the top twenty and all of the extracted singles made the top twenty), but its real success was on an entirely different level, and more important and influential than huge sales figures could ever have been. Released at a time when decent homegrown music was particularly thin on the ground and music fans had long since tired of the grunge domination of the alternative scene, "Modern Life Is Rubbish" was an absolute revelation. Although clearly informed by vintage guitar pop, it could not be described as a 'retro' album and it had little in common with the dull sixties-fixated makeweights that would follow in its wake. Rather than slavishly and lazily copying the successful sounds of the past, Blur's new material represented a remarkable cross-pollination of styles and influences, described by one reviewer on the album's release as "resembling early 1970s David Bowie looking backwards to Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd, and forwards to The Sex Pistols" and also containing nods towards artists as diverse as My Bloody Valentine, Julian Cope and The Kinks. Fans and critics alike took to the album immediately, and the immediate effect of the album was to engender a new sense of enthusiasm for British alternative music - a sharp contrast to the downbeat mood of the previous year. "Modern Life Is Rubbish" was the musical highlight of 1993 for many; at it came as little surprise to see it featuring heavily in the music press end of year roundups and polls. Blur had showcased some new material on Radio 1's "The Evening Session" within weeks of the release of "Modern Life Is Rubbish", and when they were interviewed for the various end of year round-ups, Damon revealed that their follow-up album, produced once again by Stephen Street, was almost complete and that he felt it was even better. What he didn't mention, however, was that while "Modern Life Is Rubbish" was and remains a decidedly 'indie' work largely inaccessible to anyone who isn't inclined towards that sort of music in the first place, the follow-up was to be a far less parochial affair, taking the meshing of styles and influences a step further and moulding them into a kaleidoscopic affair packed with radio and chart friendly arrangements and melodies.

Spearheaded by the top ten single 'Girls And Boys', "Parklife" was released in April 1994 - less than a year after "Modern Life Is Rubbish" - and immediately outsold virtually every other 'hit' indie album of the decade so far. Over the summer, the album won several awards and the title track became another top ten single, and suddenly sales figures increasing even further, wildly surpassing just about anyone's expectations. Receiving blanket play everywhere from Radio 1's influential Mark Radcliffe and Chris Morris shows all the way to local commercial radio stations, there was no escaping "Parklife" in 1994. Since then, though, it's rarely been heard and it's likely that even the majority of people who actually really loved the album haven't given it a proper listen in many years. So it's time to root out the CD, smirk once again at the insane cover photograph of two crazed racing greyhounds, and find out exactly what this "Parklife" business is all about...

"Parklife" opens with 'Girls And Boys', the single that smashed into the top ten shortly before the release of the album. The track had been earmarked as a single from the very outset of the album sessions, with Stephen Street having phoned Food shortly after recording was complete to tip them off about it, and it isn't difficult to see why as 'Girls And Boys' is packed with catchy hooks and boasts a naggingly insistent chorus. The track is as much of a far-reaching mish-mash of influences as anything that had appeared on "Modern Life Is Rubbish", but crucially these contrasting influences looked far beyond the horizons of British guitar pop. To all intents and purposes, 'Girls And Boys' is a eurodisco track, albeit one decorated with keyboard sounds that called to mind New Romantic acts like The Human League and Talk Talk, a willfully vaulting bassline and angular guitar figures that owed more than a little to Wire, and a melody and vocal line infused with the manic energy of New Wave. It sits somewhere between punk and pop, but not at all uneasily. 'Girls And Boys' is a confident and attention grabbing track that still feels as powerful and energetic now as it did back in 1994, and although the lyrics subtly mocked the holiday hedonism mentality of large sectors of the mass audience, enough of them went out and bought both the single and the album. The track was remixed for the dance market by The Pet Shop Boys, who only succeeded in stripping all of the character and dynamism from the individual arrangement and turning it into just another bland in-one-ear-and-out-of-the-other piece of ephemera. Bassist Alex James later perceptively likened this experience to "asking someone to take your dog out for a walk, and when they bring it back it's a different dog", and in retrospect it served as the first real hint of the problems that would accompany the album's flirtation with the mainstream. Nonetheless, 'Girls And Boys' is a fantastic opening to "Parklife", but with a further fifteen - yes, fifteen - tracks to go, can this momentum be maintained?

The momentum is certainly maintained by the second track, 'Tracy Jacks'. Another character song in the tradition of Ray Davies and Syd Barrett, it shows just how far Blur had progressed since "Leisure" both lyrically (compare it to the fact that Damon had considered the ridiculous if unarguably numerically accurate "he's got a three bar heater but it don't keep him warm, if he bought another then he'd have three more" to be an acceptable lyric for 'Mr. Briggs' in 1991) and musically. It's that rarest of beasts - an obvious 'album track' rather than a single, but audience-friendly enough to become widely popular in its own right. The song is deliberately ambiguous, from the non-gender specific spelling of the character's name right down to the fact that it's genuinely difficult to tell whether the 'he' referenced in the song is actually Tracy Jacks or not (try writing it all down and looking at it from a grammatical viewpoint if you don't see what I mean). The issue of titular identity aside, the lyrics concern a straight-laced businessman having a breakdown of some sort after a health scare, and attempting to emulate Reginald Perrin's fake-suicide walk into the sea before being picked up by the police. This continued a lyrical obsession with high-powered businessmen that had started with the superb 'Colin Zeal' (the polar opposite of the central focus of 'Tracy Jacks', a loathsome over efficient salesman with a keen understanding of the commercial mindset, who "keeps his eye on the news, keeps his future in hand") on "Modern Life Is Rubbish", and would be driven into the ground with the dismal 'Mr. Robinson's Quango' on the follow-up album "The Great Escape". There are melodic and structural hints of both Barrett's 'Arnold Layne' and Davies' 'David Watts' in the song, but like all of Blur's best work it merely suggests its points of reference rather than directly copying them. 'Tracy Jacks' is a highly original composition, closer to an early 1970s film theme than a guitar pop song and with the soaring string section to match. Throughout the song, there are musical decorations that never fail to impress even after all this time - the sparkling keyboard sounds and bright guitar chord that open the song, the sudden change to militaristic drumbeats at the end of each verse, Damon suddenly singing "laughing" in one line while the others continue to sing "Tracy Jacks", the formal string arrangement in the middle eight, and the guitar solo that performs a pitch perfect impersonation of a circling seagull without the aid of samplers or a safety net. Even at the end of the track very odd things are happening, and if you turn it right up during the fade, you will hear the string section apparently starting to play a completely different song. 'Tracy Jacks' is a strident, upbeat and instantly memorable number with plenty of surprises and intricacies, and strong enough to impress any listener after they've been hooked in by 'Girls And Boys'.
Next up comes the mid-tempo 'End Of A Century', which is where things start to go a bit awry; not in terms of musical quality, but in a wider conceptual sense. After listening to the album on the day of release, a friend of mine who was at the time an ardent Blur fan tried to explain why, despite liking the album enormously, he had serious reservations about it - "you can imagine pissed-up wankers singing "wwwwwooooooargh, end of a century", and you never could for anything on the other albums". The suggestion there was that Blur appeared to be flirting with the demands of lowest common denominator audiences at the same time as retaining their 'arty' stance, and as far as he was concerned that could only lead to trouble. As it turned out he was right, but that's something that we'll come back to later. One of the lazy criticisms that was frequently levelled at Blur and their fellow artistes in the 'Britpop' movement was that they were "just ripping off The Beatles". That may well have been true in some cases, and risibly so in one case in particular, but it was never something that was really true of Blur and 'End Of A Century' is the only track of theirs that even comes close to being recognisably in the style of the 'Fab Four'. Even then, it's only informed by one particular track that in itself hardly typifies the Beatles' sound - namely 'For No-One', an underrated McCartney gem from "Revolver". The resemblance between the two tracks is minor and structural at best, with 'End Of A Century' replacing the pounding piano of 'For No-One' with a cheerful organ figure and ringing guitars, and the repeated horn solo is the only part of the song that could really count as direct inspiration. This is 'Britpop' of sorts, but not the sub-Merseybeat drivel espoused by an endless parade of Paul Weller-endorsed dullards in the mid-1990s. It's British pop as it was post-"Revolver", when the millions of uniformly-named guitar pop outfits signed to Decca, EMI and Pye in 1966 felt inspired to write more expansive and laid-back numbers with trumpets, organists and 'far out' lyrics, that had lain just out of reach on UK psych compilations ever since. 'End Of A Century' is a great song with lovely intertwined vocals, and the fact that it underperformed when extracted as a single (stalling just inside the top twenty at the height of "Parklife" mania) should not be taken as any kind of comment on its quality. The sound of a window smashing and someone shouting "Oi!", something of a rude intrusion after the gentle and pastoral ending of 'End Of A Century', heralds the arrival of the album's title track. 'Parklife' was one of the new songs premiered on "The Evening Session" over the summer of 1993, at which point the lead vocals were still handled by Damon Albarn. When they came to record the track in the studio a couple of months later, however, Damon found that he was unable to fully capture the voluble Cockney loudmouth character that he had created for the song. One phone call later, actor Phil Daniels was in the studio to stand in as narrator. Effectively recreating his role as mouthy mod Jimmy from the cult 1977 film "Quadrophenia", Daniels lent considerable depth to the finished product (particularly noticeable when you compare it to the original BBC session version), lending the vocal power and enunciation needed to match up to the riotous vulgarity of the backing track. Just as 'Girls And Boys' had built effectively on a straightforward guitar pop song by intertwining it with programmed rhythms and chord sequences, 'Parklife' takes a song that had clearly been essayed in the established Blur style, as is evidenced by Graham's dynamic lead guitar lines, and embellishes it with an arrangement that transforms it into something very different. A drum machine and insistent guitar chords provide the taut and unwavering rhythm, but over this the musicians (including a full brass section and some further real drums from Dave Rowntree) play live, and the whole track seems to sway like a noisy drunken pub. Daniels plays the role of a larger-than-life Londoner, observing the daily mundanity that surrounds him ("morning suit can be avoided if you take a route straight through what is known as Parklife", "I get up when I want to, except on Wednesdays when I get rudely awakened by the dustman") with an amusing mixture of obscure slang and wit (the line "it's not about your joggers, who go round and round and round and..." amusingly rotates around the stereo 'picture' as Daniels repeats himself). 'Parklife' is more than the set of thrown-together lyrics about nothing in particular that it is so often derided as - it's an effective and relatively realistic in-character evocation of a world and lifestyle that do exist but are rarely commented on. However, it's not really a world that Blur themselves were immersed in by any stretch of the imagination, so while the track is fantastic it still calls to mind the same nagging doubts that had arisen from 'End Of A Century'. But again, that's something that we will return to later. 'Parklife' made the top ten in the summer of 1994, but while it was certainly very popular at the time it has since become the biggest target of sneering derision in Blur's entire career ("it's Chas'n'Dave knees-up cockney shite, our kid" etc, even though it's the only track on the album that comes anywhere near meeting this description, and it's difficult to imagine Chans'n'Dave singing lyrics that are anything like these anyway), so the natural assumption would be that it will not have aged very well at all. Needless to say, this is not the case and with the added fresh perspective brought by not having really heard it properly in many years, 'Parklife' sounds as good now as it did back when Blur were turning up to "Top Of The Pops" with Phil Daniels in tow on a weekly basis.

Four songs in, and the album has maintained a consistently high standard. Unfortunately, this immediately changes with track five. Less than two minutes long, the ranting and punkish 'Bank Holiday' only appears to have made it to the tracklisting on the strength of Graham's razor-sharp guitar playing, as there is literally nothing else to recommend it. The lyrics are patronising and snobbish and make no sense anyway, and there's precious little in the way of a discernible tune. Weak musical links are never usually a bar to a 'classic' album being recognised as such - after all, "Definitely Maybe" has the risible 'Digsy's Dinner' - but it has to be said that 'Bank Holiday' is a real let-down after the uniform brilliance and impressive diversity of the previous four tracks. Fortunately, it's all over with very quickly, and if you remember to press the track skip button on the CD player then it goes away even faster. Incidentally, an obscure Japanese Blur compilation included a recording of Japanese fans screeching (rather than singing) 'Bank Holiday' as Blur arrived at an airport. The reasons for this track's inclusion - and indeed the reasons why they were singing 'Bank Holiday' in the first place - remain something of a mystery. Fortunately, the following track is a vast improvement. 'Bank Holiday' avoids the Britpop tag by virtue of being tuneless and purposeless garbage, but 'Badhead' achieves this in a more subtle and effective fashion - by not being noticeably 'Britpop' at all. Instead, the key influences appear to be Scott Walker and Nick Drake, of whom Graham in particular was a huge devotee. These influences had already memorably manifested themselves on 'Young And Lovely', a tragically overlooked folky ballad recorded during the "Modern Life Is Rubbish" sessions but accidentally left off the final tracklisting and relegated to b-side status, but like much of the rest of "Parklife", 'Badhead' places these decidedly non-mainstream influences in a more accessible musical context. The delicate ambience of Drake's melodies and the blaring but understated brass arrangements favoured by Walker are both in evidence, but assimilated into an arrangement that fitted easily with the rest of the album, with soft ringing guitar and a lovely baroque organ flourish at the end of the second line of each verse. Although lyrically abstract,' 'Badhead' appears to be about a remorseful hangover (something of a recurring theme in Blur's work at the time - see also 'Oily Water', 'Into Another', and rather obviously 'Hanging Over'), and the gentle and bittersweet feel of the track matches this well. 'Badhead' is not a depressing or miserable track by any stretch of the imagination, but it works well as a contrast to the upbeat mood of the previous tracks, and hints towards the astonishing greatness to come later in the album. Once again, the 'rude awakening' tactic is called into play for the tracklisting of "Parklife", and the soft tones of the end of 'Badhead' are immediately followed by a voice asking "ready then?" with such clarity that if you listen to it on decent headphones, it almost sounds like it's in the same room as you. The assembled throng clearly is ready, then, as Graham counts in "one mississippi, two mississippi, three mississippi, four mississippi", and the peculiar 'The Debt Collector' starts. An instrumental in waltz time, 'The Debt Collector' employs the same sort of musical vulgarity as 'Parklife' with a full brass and woodwind section, but omits the recognisable guitar pop structure, sounding for all the world like the Trumpton Fire Brigade Band turning up to the bandstand in the throes of drunken hellraising. 'The Debt Collector' is even further removed from the stereotyped notions of Britpop than 'Badhead', and succeeds as a brief and unexpected musical interlude where 'Bank Holiday' had failed. The following track also opens with some stray studio mumblings, along with some tentative 'spacey' sounds conjured up by acoustic guitar and organ. 'Far Out', the debut composition and lead vocal from Alex James, was only recorded at the last minute and was not originally intended for the album. 'Far Out' had originally been attempted halfway through the "Parklife" sessions, when it was given a heavy guitar arrangement and intended as a b-side. On listening to the finished product, the band felt that it sounded a little too similar to Syd Barrett's 'Interstellar Overdrive', and rejected it. A week after the official end of the album sessions, the band booked a further quick session to have another go at the song. This time they simply used acoustic guitar, keyboards and congas to create a celestial sound reminiscent of what passed for musical evocations of 'outer space' in the 1950s, and the results were so good that 'Far Out' was hastily added to the album's already tightly-packed running order. The song is essentially just Alex, a keen astronomer, listing his favourite constellations, but like 'The Debt Collector' it works really well as a diverting interlude, and "Parklife" is better for its brief but charming presence.

'Far Out' also helps to set the mood for and provide a perfect lead-in to the following track. Whereas 'Far Out' evokes visions of the night sky as seen through a telescope by a floppy-fringed bassist, 'To The End' calls to mind twinkling stars and a moonlit sky above a Parisian Cafe with a string quartet playing in the corner, almost as if the album has swooped down from Alex's stargazing to descend on somewhere far removed, both geographically and thematically, from the setting of 'Parklife'. 'To The End' is the moment when the Britpop myth as peddled by its detractors is shattered - whereas 'Badhead' could still be tarred with the same brush as the other tracks by association and 'The Debt Collector' at least called to mind an eccentric brass band playing on a bandstand in the corner of some dull municipal park, there is nothing remotely 'Brit' about this song. Its lush cinematic arrangement and orchestration were clearly inspired by the 1960s 'Frenchpop' ballads performed by the likes of Brigitte Bardot and Francoise Hardy (of whom Graham was again a devoted fan), and a fair proportion of the lyrics are in French. Not to mention the fact that the song features an authentic-sounding accordionist and backing vocals provided by Stereolab's Laetitia Sadier, and not a single trace of that widely derided Beatles copyism. On top of all this, 'To The End' is an utterly beautiful song, poignant and romantic in both its lyrics and its sound. Alex reputedly cried when he heard the completed final mix, and although the song only managed to climb just inside the top twenty when extracted as a single (despite being aided by an atmospheric monochrome video and a fantastic performance on "Top of The Pops"), it thoroughly deserved the exposure. Blur were seemingly so taken with the song that they re-recorded it on two separate occasions, firstly as a French language version that showed up on the b-side of 'Parklife', and secondly as 'La Comedie', a partially rewritten duet with Francoise Hardy that featured a completely reworked and even more effective organ track. Then the spectre of 'Bank Holiday' returns to haunt the album, and the desolate beauty of 'To The End' is followed by another sudden comedown. A spluttering programmed rhythm signals the start of 'London Loves', a song with a dynamic chorus but very little else to recommend it. In the song's favour, it does highlight the oft-ignored input that the non-songwriting members of Blur bring into the creation of the actual music, with the admittedly impressive staccato arrangement having developed directly from Dave Rowntree's original idea for a programmed rhythm and Graham's loopy Robert Fripp-style guitar solo threatening to take the song in a completely different direction. On the other hand, though, it lacks rigidity and structure, seeming to wander about aimlessly in places and avoiding the effort of working out a real ending in favour of including a loop of the instrumental backing with a GLR travel report played over the top. 'London Loves' is as sonically and stylistically interesting as the rest of the album, but the song itself is most definitely good rather than great, which lessens its impact severely.

'Trouble In The Message Centre' is a similarly mixed affair. Reminiscent of both Gary Numan and Magazine, the song is impressive and the arrangement even more so, particularly the archaic New Wave-style synth sounds and Graham's forceful, minimalist guitar solo. What lets 'Trouble In The Message Centre' down, though, are the lyrics. Damon later confessed that he had pretty much thrown them together in five minutes while looking at a hotel telephone and a complimentary book of matches, and it shows; not merely in the fact that he had borrowed phrases directly ("strike softly away from the body") which were so jarring in their obviousness that he might as well have used "nice to see you, to see you nice", but also in the fact that the lyrical construct is a very weak one indeed. The song aspires to say nothing at all and succeeds in saying nothing at all - a sharp contrast with the epic poignancy of 'To The End', the wit of 'Parklife' and even the drama and mystery of 'London Loves'. Suddenly, the momentum that had been maintained so wonderfully up to 'To The End' is tailing off, and if this were a cheap tabloidy ITV documentary then they'd choose to illustrate this point with a downward-zooming graph line with Damon's face stuck on the end. And, amazingly, it gets worse. According to an interview with the band in 1995, 'Clover Over Dover' was originally tried out as a ska tune but came out as "Nirvana meets Doctor Drugs". As hideous a prospect as that sounds, it's still a thousand times more interesting than the indistinct wash of blandness that the song became. A few seconds of birdsong, a harpsichord riff that sounds like it doesn't really belong in the song, and then nothing really noticeable happens. The song goes absolutely nowhere, unless continually repeating itself without any hint of enthusiasm counts as a direction, and ends up as a dull mess that even people who know the rest of the album off by heart have difficulty recalling much detail about. 'Clover Over Dover' isn't a bad song, it's just a boring song - and in the context of "Parklife", that's actually a worse thing to be.

'Magic America' is a much better song than 'Clover Over Dover', but it still suffers from the same 'almost there but not quite' affliction as 'London Loves' and 'Trouble In The Message Centre'. It is a well-written song with an interesting and effective arrangement, and its return to the same sort of embellished guitar pop template as the earlier tracks is particularly welcome after the misfires of the previous couple of selections. The lyrics - written at the height of the band's collective loathing of America - are a sarcastic swipe at the sort of people who automatically think that anything American has to be good (describing a character pointedly named Bill Barratt who went on a dream visit to America, "took a cab to the shopping mall, bought and ate 'till he could do neither any more, then found love on Channel 44"), and although they veer towards being nasty and sneering at times, overall they are amusing and a fairly powerful insight into the general mood of the times, when there was at least some semblance of a genuine reaction against American cultural imperialism. At the same time, though, the song feels as though it falls marginally short of requirements in some way that's difficult to narrow down, as though it is lacking something that could give it an extra bit of impact. Had it not come after 'Clover Over Dover' this might not have been so noticeable, but it does and as a result the fact that it merely coasts along rather than seizing control of the declining album and pushing it back up to dizzying heights stands out a mile.

This is where the main problem with "Parklife" lies. With the obvious exception of 'Bank Holiday', the album had been interesting, inventive and stunningly good up to and including 'To The End', but then went straight into a dramatic dip lasting for an entire four tracks. None of these are bad songs by anyone's standards, but they lack the excitement and vigour of the rest of the album, and really do leave the listener feeling as though the band's enthusiasm has tailed off. At a whopping sixteen songs long, the tracklisting could have stood to lose or at least replace a few numbers, and perhaps in that case some or all of these four should have gone. When the tracklisting for "Modern Life Is Rubbish" was being compiled, it was difficult to fit everything on that deserved to go on without turning it into a sixteen or eighteen track album, and for the sake of streamlining some great songs - among them 'When The Cows Come Home' and 'Young And Lovely' - failed to make the final cut. Ironically, while that album would only have been strengthened by the addition of those tracks, "Parklife" could only have stood go gain from a bit of judicious trimming. As it stands, the album feels unnecessarily overlong and padded out, and it's tempting to speculate on the number of people who prefer the first 'side' to the second. Fortunately, all of these thoughts are then confidently shoved aside by the hammering guitar that opens 'Jubilee'. Much was made at the time of Blur's antipathy towards the idle and unkempt tendencies of grunge fans and American 'slacker' teenagers in general, but 'Jubilee' displays an equal disdain for the indolent and awkward youth of our own fair shores. Supposedly born in 1977, the year in which the Queen's Silver Jubilee celebrations took place and the punk rock movement reacted in a manner that genuinely did appear to frighten certain sectors of the establishment, 'Jubilee' is a seventeen year old jobless layabout who, according to the lyrics, spends his days sniffing solvents, watching rubbish on television, trying to avoid going outdoors, and snorting at his banker father's exhortations to pull himself together. The track seems to embody everything that is great about the rest of the album - the musical swagger of 'Parklife', the lyrical incision of 'Tracy Jacks', the dynamism of 'Girls And Boys' and the keyboard sounds of 'Trouble In The Message Centre' - and includes yet another memorable musical joke as the line "...so he just plays on his computer game" is followed by a procession of cheap and tacky laser blast noises derived from a novelty keyring. On 'Jubilee' these sounds fitted perfectly, adding superbly to both the excitement and the deliberate tongue-in-cheek ridiculousness of the arrangement (however, the following year Paul Weller 'borrowed' the idea for 'The Changing Man', attempting to use the keyring sounds seriously (because he got the feeling, man) rather than as a splash of humour, and ending up looking and sounding a bit foolish). Noisy and exuberant, and not to mention a well-timed swipe at the nation's youth that is somewhat at odds with the public image of "Parklife" as a Union Jack-clad standard-bearer for all aspects of British culture, 'Jubilee' is just what is needed to lift proceedings at this point in the album's running order. As the closing guitar of 'Jubilee' feeds back into the distance, a low, swishing sound somewhere between a muted cymbal and waves gently brushing against a harbour wall on a dark, rain-drenched night murmurs its way into the start of 'This Is A Low'. An ominous acoustic guitar jangle gives way to a dense wash of moody guitar, bass, organ and soft and understated drumming, with a sonar ping echoing somewhere in the background, conjuring up images of heavy grey rainclouds gathering above quiet British coastal towns. Over this, Damon's lyrics make their way around the shipping zones that surround the mainland, obliquely commenting on the state of the nation as they go. Since its inception, BBC Radio 4 has broadcast the Shipping Forecast last thing at night, and the reassuring familiarity of a formal voice reading out the weather predictions for the likes of Tyne, Forth and Cromarty became something of a source of comfort for the dejected and homesick Blur during their unhappy American jaunt of 1992 (it can be hard playing over the closing credits of their undervalued tour film "Starshaped"). Here, however, it is far from being a reassuring reminder of Britain, instead using the allusions to weather conditions to create a sense of indefinable gloom. Reflecting on this intangible melancholy, the chorus advises "this is a low, but it won't hurt you, when you're alone, it will be there with you, finding ways to stay". The song rumbles on in its ominously engaging style for two verses and choruses before Graham's guitar solo, a massive sonic onslaught of three overdubbed guitars (including one with its amp turned up to full and placed inside a wooden cupboard) that sounds more like a breaking thunderstorm than a momentary interlude in a pop song. The song then washes back into the quiet and understated acoustic figure that had introduced it, but rather suitably proves to be a metaphoric calm before the storm, as the chorus blasts back in one more time, seemingly more furious and intense than ever. 'This Is A Low' is quite simply a stunning piece of music, yet amazingly it nearly didn't make it onto the album. The untitled backing track was recorded as normal during the album sessions and it was agreed that it would make a superb climax to the album, but Damon could not come up with a vocal melody nor a suitable lyric, and rather than compromise the sheer power of the track the band simply put it to one side. However, Stephen Street was particularly insistent that it would have to be completed and added to the album, and eventually Graham, Dave and Alex began to agree with him. Damon still maintained that he could not come up with anything that could do the composition proper justice, but was suddenly struck by inspiration while listening to the backing track on a walkman as he walked around the coastal area near his parents' home on a grey and overcast day. Using a shipping map handkerchief that Alex had given to him as a Christmas present for inspiration, he sketched out the full lyrics and suddenly 'This Is A Low' was on the album. It remains a potent conclusion, the best track on the album, and arguably the best piece of music ever recorded by Blur. Andrew Collins once desribed the track as "five minutes and sixteen seconds of bliss", and as there isn't really a better way of putting it his comment will serve just as effectively here.

Some ten seconds or so after the end of "This Is A Low", the cheap pre-programmed portable keyboard-style drum pattern of 'Lot 105' shuffles cheesily into view. Named after the Hammond Organ that plays its main melody (which in turn got its name from the fact that Damon had bought it in an auction), the brief instrumental starts off reminiscent of incidental music from "Sale Of The Century", suddenly becomes spluttering and jerky, and finally turns into a punky thrash that sounds like someone kicking over tables in a bingo hall before shuddering off into the distance and beyond the conclusion of the album. 'Lot 105' serves much the same purpose as 'Commercial Break' had done on 'Modern Life Is Rubbish' and as the often-unlisted instrumental fragments would continue to do on all future Blur albums - it deliberately upsets the balance of the real closing track, ensuring that the listener is still paying attention even at this late stage. On this occasion, though, 'Lot 105' was not needed to ensure that attention was being paid. This has been a determined and critical listen-through of the whole of "Parklife", undertaken with the intention of establishing if it still seems as good as it did back in 1994 - and the conclusions are somewhat surprising. "Parklife" does not appear to have dated in any way at all. The criticisms are still the exact same ones that formulated on initial listens to the album when it still had its HMV price tag on the CD case, and it still excites and dazzles in the exact same places too. Times have moved on, musical fashions have moved on, and even Blur themselves have moved on, but this album does not seem to have done so at all. Thanks largely to the remarkable cross-pollination of differing influences from different stages in pop history, it remains exactly as it ever was and time has done nothing to diminish its impact. Which makes it all the more puzzling that it is now so widely mocked and ignored.

When "Parklife" was released, it was given a rapturous reception by the alternative music press and alternative music fans alike. For many, Blur had been the musical heroes of 1993, and it was exciting to find them delivering on the promise and potential of "Modern Life Is Rubbish" to such great effect. As 1994 progressed and the success of the singles and the constant namechecks made Blur hard to ignore, the mainstream audience caught on to the album too. And that was where its troubles really started. While "Parklife" was at the top of the album charts, the first single by a five-piece Mancunian outfit hovered around the top forty for a week or two and quickly disappeared again. Over the summer, their next single narrowly missed the top ten, and suddenly Blur had a very serious rival for their position as the nation's favourite indie-band-with-mainstream-crossover-appeal. Unlike Blur, Oasis had no 'arty' leanings and were happier to just get on with the business of giving the undemanding public what they want, and what's more they were completely unashamed and unapologetic about that fact. More significantly, they were the products of underprivileged backgrounds and far closer to the authenticity of the lifestyle that Damon Albarn could only describe from a distance on 'Parklife'. In interviews, they had no Damon to espouse complex and vaguely pretentious theories or Alex to babble on about imported cheeses and playing practical jokes on Keith Allen, just Noel and Liam Gallagher to restate, in completely unadulterated form, the authentic thoughts and viewpoints of the inarticulate. In the eyes of the mainstream audience, Oasis were 'authentic' while Blur were a bunch of middle class pretenders. At first, relations between the two acts seemed cordial enough. "Parklife" and Oasis' "Definitely Maybe" were both championed as musical highlights of the year, and frequently mentioned in the same breath. Later in the year, though, came the first real hint that Blur were not going to have a particularly smooth ride through mainstream success. Since its inception in 1992, the Mercury Music Prize, which was established to recognise musical invention and innovation, had been awarded to Primal Scream for "Screamdelica" and to Suede for "Suede". "Parklife" was the bookmakers' and opinion makers' favourite to walk away with the prize in 1994, and with good reason. However, the judges startled everyone by announcing that the prize had gone instead to M People's "Elegant Slumming", a fairly mundane and ordinary electropop album that had sold exceptionally well but had not been held in high regard by the critics. Accusations flew back and forth that the judges had been 'persuaded' to go against instinct because the organisers didn't want to be seen to be giving the prize to a white male guitar band for the third year running, but all the same this was a clear indication that Blur were not cut out musically for competing in the mainstream arena, and that if they persisted in vying for position with bands like M People then they were going to continue to get their fingers burnt in this fashion.

Blur did not seem to learn anything from this experience, though, and there was worse to come the following year. The rapidly snowballing adulation for Oasis was shifting away from being based solely on the quality of their music, as they began to take on an iconic status for those wh yearned to appear 'streetwise' when in fact they were nothing of the sort. Although real streetwise people at that point tended to be into dance music DJs and would have booted any home counties student throwing their weight around and playing at being a scally in an Oasis t-shirt from one side of the road to the other rather than look at them, this reality seemed to be lost on the legions of people who felt the need to boost their self-esteem by adopting a psuedo-Gallagher 'mad for it' nature and affirming their status with continued statements of disdain for "them art school tossers what are in Blur". Never ones to let an opportunity to behave like charmless bullying oafs pass them by, Oasis played up to this, turning their attention away from rubbishing inoffensive indie act Shed 7 to make ever more unpleasant and unfair derogatory comments about Blur. Rather stupidly, Blur - or at least Damon - decided to play up to this in turn, with the result that the hostility suddenly increased tenfold. The idea that music fans might have the audacity to quite like both acts was brushed aside, and battle lines were pointlessly drawn up between opposing factions of fans, The media played along with it too, adopting a rather patronising "whose side are you on?" stance that had little or nothing to do with music, and then someone had the stunningly dumb idea of having both acts release new singles on the same day.
The 'Battle Of The Bands' was a ridiculous idea from the outset. For a start, it has to be said that the two competing singles - Oasis' 'Roll With It' and Blur's 'Country House' - were not really worthy of attention on this scale. Both were decidedly average songs that lacked the excitement of the previous year's offerings, and somewhat tellingly a lot of 'proper' fans of the band, in it for appreciation of the music, failed to be swept up on the wave of hype. While the thought of 'For Tomorrow' squaring up against 'Whatever' in a race to the number one slot, 'Country House' and 'Roll With It' (once described by David Quantick as being "arty and clever in the same way as some bricklayers building a birdhouse out of bricks is arty and clever") could hardly be described as defining moments in the history of pop music, and the depressing emptiness of the hype was plain for all to see. Some tried to argue that the concept of the 'battle of the bands' was in the tradition of the Rolling Stones and The Beatles, but only succeeded in making the artifice look even more ridiculous and themselves look like babbling idiots. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones rarely if ever released albums or singles on the same day (in fact, they went to great lengths to avoid this), and there was never any pretence of a 'chart battle' or of the two acts being 'arch rivals'. In fact, they sometimes even worked on songs and other projects together. However, by then the publicity machine was in overdrive, and plenty of people fell for the over inflated hot air that surrounded both releases. The 'story' was covered by the broadsheets and the ostensibly serious television news programmes, and the 'chart battle' became something of a talking point for a couple of days. 'Country House' won the race to the top slot, but even for Blur themselves the joy was short lived. By now, the concept of 'Blur vs. Oasis' had become a safety in numbers class war for those who didn't actually give a fuck about the music - it was now seemingly about identity and social alignment, which could apparently only be displayed by aligning yourself to Oasis with a violent fervor (in a literal sense, as reports circulated about people in Blur t-shirts being given unprovoked kickings by their Oasis-loving counterparts). This reached a pathetic nadir when Noel Gallagher publicly expressed a wish that members of Blur would "catch AIDS and die". Surprisingly, the normally avowedly right-on music press did next to nothing to berate him for this lame brained remark, preferring instead to get on with the serious business of refusing to castigate him for fear of upsetting the band's vociferous fanbase. Which it is why it is particularly satisfying to take this opportunity to call him a spiteful moron.

Yet even in the eyes of those who had been able to see through the Oasis 'phenomenon' from the outset, Blur were in serious trouble. 'Country House' was followed by "The Great Escape", a largely unexciting album that tried too hard to replicate the template of "Parklife" and only succeeded in further dampening the enthusiasm of their dedicated fans. By this time, there was even internal dissent over the band's direction. Graham in particular had been uncomfortable with the mainstream leanings for some time, barely featuring in the 'Country House' video, failing to turn up for some television appearances, and delivering a subtle but cutting comment on his views on 'Britpop' by taking to the stage in an American army helmet. The fickle nature of the mass audience meant that the tide had now turned against Blur; Oasis had 'won', and the band were left to retreat and seriously rethink their musical trajectory. Two years later they returned with a new, overtly American-influenced direction while Noel Gallagher and his gang were still peddling the same old same old to ever-diminishing effect, but that's another story.

So, that's why "Parklife" fell from grace so spectacularly - it was elevated to the status where it became about 'more' than just the music, and it was those selfsame pretensions that engineered its downfall. A sad inevitability it has to be said, if you want to court the mainstream audience but aren't prepared to play by their 'rules'. The question still remains, though, of how it stands up as an album, away from any considerations of contests with the Gallaghers to see who could piss furthest. And the answer is that it stands up very well indeed. Most of the songs are excellent, and even the lesser selections are at least listenable and mostly interesting. The album is admittedly weighed down somewhat by the four-song dip in quality towards the end, and perhaps in this respect it could have benefited from being a couple of tracks shorter. That said, if 'London Loves', 'Trouble In The Message Centre', 'Clover Over Dover' and 'Magic America' had been excised the album would have run to les that forty minutes, so perhaps it's more pertinent to treat "Parklife" like "Leisure" and speculate what songs could have been included instead. Scanning the b-sides that accompanied the singles that were taken from the album, it soon becomes obvious that there isn't exactly much in the way of replacement tracks to choose from. 'Magpie' was an outtake from "Modern Life Is Rubbish" and would not have fitted comfortably onto the album, 'People In Europe' was never intended as anything more than a throwaway b-side, 'Peter Panic' suffers from the same problems as the four tracks it would be replacing, and 'Anniversary Waltz' would mean that there would have been two waltz-time instrumental tracks on the album. Meanwhile, 'Beard', 'Red Necks' and 'Alex's Song' were both not recorded at the time of the album's release, and not very good. The Acid Jazz pastiche 'Supa Shoppa' would have made an interesting inclusion, but look carefully at the handwritten tracklisting on the inlay card, and you'll find something even more interesting. Not only was 'Clover Over Dover' not originally intended for the tracklisting and shoehorned in - in a different pen- at a later date, but 'Theme From An Imaginary Film' very nearly made it onto "Parklife". Originally written for Steven Berkoff's film "Decadence" but eventually rejected by the director, the lush and operatic song is quite unlike anything else that Blur have ever recorded, and is certainly more than strong enough to have provided an impressive and diverting link between 'To The End' and 'Jubilee'. As it stands, however, the song only ever saw light of day as a b-side to 'Parklife', and is currently only available on the carefully compiled Blur b-sides collection that no-one has seen fit to put together yet.

Even with the four 'problem' tracks in place, though, "Parklife" was a massive success in critical and commercial terms, and frankly it deserves a lot more recognition than it appears to receive at the moment. The days when it was pointlessly bashed for no real reason by people keen to stay in line with the crowd may be long gone, but today it is instead largely ignored, which is perhaps an even more unfortunate state of affairs. "Parklife" was more than a passing piece of musical ephemera, and even outside of the cultural importance of its status as the first truly great album by a British guitar pop act in many years, it remains a great album in its own right that deserves far more respect that to be sidelined on the basis that Liam Gallagher once said it was a load of cockney knees-up rubbish about jellied eels or something.

Leave it ahhhht, guv.

Features index

TV

Music

Film

Miscellaneous

Ten Rock Myths Debunked

Danny Kirwan

Beck

The Stone Roses

Primal Scream

The Beach Boys

What's new

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Grey Tuesday - Danger Mouse

Michael Jackson's Thriller

Pet Sounds No 1 - The Korgis

Dark Side Of The Moon

Sergeant Pepper

Parklife - Blur

POTTY ABOUT PEPPER

Is The Beatles' classic LP `Sgt Pepper` the best record ever? Tim Worthington examines the story behind the groundbreaking record.

GET THAT MOUSE!!

Words: John Connors

THRILLING THE WORLD

Tim Worthington on one of the biggest selling records of all time; Michael Jackson’s `Thriller`

PET SOUNDS

Uncovering rarely heard artists.
No 1: The Korgis

( `KLASSICS` THE BEST OF THE KORGIS is in the shops now at a reasonable price and contains 20 tracks. Its on Music Club MCCO 474)

MOONGLOW

`Dark Side of the Moon` has been one of the most successful LPs of all time. Tim Worthington examines this landmark record from 1973.

POTTY ABOUT PEPPER

Is The Beatles’ classic LP `Sgt Pepper` the best record ever? Tim Worthington examines the story behind the groundbreaking record.

What is known as…parklife

Tim Worthington on the record all the people loved in 1994

Features index

What's new

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

POTTY ABOUT PEPPER

Is The Beatles' classic LP `Sgt Pepper` the best record ever? Tim Worthington examines the story behind the groundbreaking record.

GET THAT MOUSE!!

Words: John Connors

THRILLING THE WORLD

Tim Worthington on one of the biggest selling records of all time; Michael Jackson’s `Thriller`

PET SOUNDS

Uncovering rarely heard artists. No 1: The Korgis

( `KLASSICS` THE BEST OF THE KORGIS is in the shops now at a reasonable price and contains 20 tracks. Its on Music Club MCCO 474)

MOONGLOW

`Dark Side of the Moon` has been one of the most successful LPs of all time. Tim Worthington examines this landmark record from 1973.

POTTY ABOUT PEPPER

Is The Beatles’ classic LP `Sgt Pepper` the best record ever? Tim Worthington examines the story behind the groundbreaking record.

What is known as…parklife

Tim Worthington on the record all the people loved in 1994

Uncovering rarely heard artists.
No 1: The Korgis