The enlisting of glam rock champs Chinn & Chapman led to a complete reinvigoration of the band and the release in 1978 of Parallel Lines completely changed the band's fortunes critically and commercially and they became absolutely huge. There isn't a dud on Parallel Lines, it's one of the most perfectly constructed pop records ever made, lyrically it's silly, dirty, flirty and musically it's pristine, clean pop with a slightly nasty edge. It's all great stuff but it would still have failed if the songs weren't so great. It's got a couple of great one-twos ('Hanging on the Telephone' and 'One Way or Another'; '11:59' and 'Will Anything Happen') and the rest of the songs are brill in their own right anyway. Even the spacey experiment 'Fade Away and Radiate', which should be terrible, is ace. The next couple of albums were more pure pop and to my mind throwaway which is why I've made do with the Best of Blondie comp from 1981 to cover those albums. The best later tunes are 'Union City Blue' and 'Call Me'. I know it was very smart of Debbie Harry to have cottoned on to rap as the future of music very early, but we have to be honest the song 'Rapture' is truly terrible, no?
Now we've got another lengthy session in the company of one band. I've always really loved the Blue Aeroplanes, partly because of and partly despite the fact that they are desperately pretentious. Perhaps precious is a better word. It takes a peculiar kind of arrogance to assume that your poetry is good enough for other people to listen to and to set it all to rock music (and to wear the terrible jackets and shades that Gerard Langley always sports). But then this is a band who had no concern about trying all kinds of musical stuff in the name of art. First album Bop Art (1984) is too clearly in awe of post-punk and Soft Machine so despite having a couple of decent tunes, for the most part it's experimental musical tinkering about in a not particularly interesting way. The follow-up Tolerance (1986) is much better and can be seen as being in a sense the first true Blue Aeroplanes album (Bop Art was made up mostly of demos and recordings by their previous incarnation as the Art Objects). Tolerance still has the clear post-punk influence in its rhythmic drums and elastic bass ('Rare Flower' is pure Gang of Four), but there is a clear sign that a kind of folk tradition is influencing the music as well and there are mandolins and banjos augmenting the standard rock instrumentation. In fact this is one of the most remarkable things about the Blue Aeroplanes - no instrument was out of bounds and all were utilised in a totally logical way. Tolerance also has Langley's first successful use of someone else's poetry cast into music (Auden's 'Journal of an Airman'). Tolerance isn't the best record in the world but it does show that from very early on, despite being a steadfastly arty art-rock band, the Blue Aeroplanes had no confidence issues. It also has hints ('Warhol's Fifteen' for instance) of the soaring guitar techniques they would use a lot later.
Better yet is 1987's Spitting Out Miracles. It's a disjointed album because there are a lot of different styles being tried out. They're all relatively subdued pieces though and any change of pace or style doesn't jar. This time out we've got mandolins, banjos, balalaikas, violins, dulcimers. Nothing sounds out of place though and I think this is partly because of Langley's spoken word delivery which helps make anything sound like an appropriate backing. There are even a couple of nods to pop structure ('Bury Your Love Like Treasure' which has a special place in my heart thanks to its loving evisceration by the mighty Allegros). The best songs though are the most sedate: 'Season Ticket to a Bad Place' is a lovely piece of melancholia which is vaguely reminiscent of Richard Thompson's guitar work, and the Louis Macneice poem set to music 'Do the Dead Know What Time It Is?'. It's a great, slyly bold record whose experimentation passes by almost unnoticed, so successful is it, and the album demonstrates just how adept the Blue Aeroplanes were at creating odd, shifty records without them sounding like anything unusual is going on at all. Fire Records followed Spitting Out Miracles with the album that gained the band their most attention up to that point, which was ironically a compilation of rare singles tracks between 1984 - 1988 called Friendloverplane. This is the first Blue Aeroplanes record I heard and I remember buying it on a whim in Plastic Surgery Records in Maidstone, taking it home and just loving it. It's the definition of eclectic, there's all kinds of stuff going on here, from straight rock songs to noise experiments and every shade in between. Lots of it doesn't work but that's the glory of the whole album, the stuff that doesn't work is fascinating anyway and the stuff that does is just great. I remember not knowing what to make of it at the time, but just thinking it was brilliant.
The three years following the release of Spitting Out Miracles saw line-up changes and the band were clearly developing a new sound during that time, as evidenced on the 'Jacket Hangs' single. It's a big song, it's a very guitars song, it's a serious (in every sense of the word) rock song. Gerard Langley's spoken word poetry schtick remains intact but his presence is at the very forefront of the massive sound. Signing to a major label obviously meant lots more money for recording and the production values (this is Gil Norton's work after all) are extremely high. The other three songs on the single are similarly big and urgent (although the cover of the Kinks' 'Big Sky' isn't strictly necessary). The single was the announcement of the next album, Swagger (1990), whose name is no misnomer. This is a seriously big and seriously intended rock album of the first order. Gone entirely are the lo-fi acoustic poetry slams cum avant-folk tunes, gone is the eclectic instrumentation. In their place are massive songs and huge slabs of rock. Unsurprisingly this is stadium rock of a kind that could never work in a stadium, it's too clever, too arch and too uncompromising (ie, monolithic album closer 'Cat Scan Hist'ry'). It's a really fantastic album and although both the production and Langley's style date it slightly, it's still mightily impressive. I think it was supposed to be a statement of intent that was never really capitalised on because despite efforts to replicate it, they never made an album as good again. By the way REM fans, don't forget that Stipe is doing his typically peculiar backing vocals on it, having been impressed by the earlier albums before REM became huge themselves. The Swagger chapter ends with the Loved EP (1990), which has four non-LP songs, the lead of which, '(You Are) Loved' is as good as anything on the album, but you can hear that it wouldn't have fit properly. There's a decent cover of Richard Thompson's 'You're Going to Need Somebody', a pointless cover of 'Sweet Jane' and an acoustic version of one of the album tunes.
Tomorrow finishes up the Blue Aeroplanes and moves on to the Blue Nile. Let's get melancholy.
No comments:
Post a Comment