Rock Music

A Commute To New Wave Stardom: The Jam, In The City (1977)

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A deep dive retrospective into the debut album from Woking’s finest, The Jam. The politics, their suburban beginnings and the 1977 era of Punk Rock where they made their name with their own played-fast brand of Mod influenced New Wave. What self respecting chart obsessed 14 year old boy didn’t turn their school tie back to front after watching In The City on Top Of The Pops?

The Jam, In The City. Debut album from 1977. Full retrospective.

Britain, 1976 to 1977

Start with the weather. The summer of 1976 was the hottest anyone alive could remember. Reservoirs shrank, standpipes appeared in the street, and the government appointed a Minister for Drought. Within days of the appointment it rained. That is about as British as a national crisis gets, and it set the tone for a year in which very little went to plan.

Harold Wilson had resigned in the spring and left James Callaghan a country with high inflation, rising unemployment and a currency that kept sliding. By the autumn the Labour government was asking the International Monetary Fund for a loan and accepting the spending cuts that came with it. Unemployment was heading for the one and a half million mark, and school leavers were taking most of the hit. In August the Notting Hill Carnival ended in a riot. The National Front was getting bolder on the street, and the arguments about race that followed spilled into the music press and onto the stage.

For a sixteen-year-old in 1976 the message was plain. The jobs were going, the adults had no answers, and the music on the radio was Abba, Wings and a lot of Elton John. The bands that mattered to teenagers were mostly dinosaurs or exiles. Prog had run out of road. Glam had turned into cabaret. Pub rock was honest and hard-working, and it was also being played by men who looked like your dad.

Then the Sex Pistols swore on teatime television. On 1 December 1976 Bill Grundy invited them onto Thames Television’s Today programme, drew out a few four-letter words, and handed the tabloids a story that ran for weeks. Gigs were cancelled, councils passed bans, and EMI dropped the band within six weeks. In the same period The Damned put out “New Rose”, the first British punk single, and The Clash were rehearsing in a Camden warehouse. By spring 1977 the Silver Jubilee was coming, the Pistols had a single lined up that would make the Queen part of the argument, and punk had become a national row rather than a London fashion.

That is the world In The City was released into. Anyone who tells you it arrived at the start of punk has the dates wrong. It arrived at the moment the record industry finally decided to sign everybody.

Woking, and the boys who came out of it

The Jam did not come from Camden, the King’s Road or the Bromley Contingent. They came from Woking, a Surrey commuter town where people go to escape London and return to it every morning with a season ticket. Paul Weller grew up in a pebbledash semi with his father John, a builder and taxi driver who would become the band’s manager and, for a good few years, its unofficial fifth member and chief disciplinarian.

Weller met Steve Brookes and Dave Waller at school and the first version of the band came together in 1972, when Weller was fourteen. Rick Buckler, another Woking boy, joined on drums. Bruce Foxton arrived around 1973 and took over on bass, later than the others and a couple of years older than Weller. For much of the early period Foxton played lead guitar and Weller played bass. When Brookes left in 1976 the two swapped, and the line-up that would make the record was fixed: Weller on guitar and vocals, Foxton on bass and vocals, Buckler on drums.

What happened between 1972 and 1976 matters more than most punk histories allow. The Jam played for four years before anyone signed them. They did the working men’s clubs of Surrey and, with John Weller pushing the bookings, ventured north to the cabaret circuit, where a group of teenagers doing Motown and Who covers had to win over an audience that had come for the comedian and a plate of chicken and chips. In a 1970s club you either learned to hold a room or you went home. It gave them something the art-school punk bands mostly lacked, which was stamina and a habit of rehearsal. A cassette of their early practice sessions later turned up in Steve Brookes’s book Keeping the Flame, and it shows a young band that was serious about the work well before anybody was paying attention.

What they were listening to

Weller has always been open about it. The starting point was The Who, and specifically the My Generation album, which he found in the early seventies and treated as scripture. From there it ran outward to the Small Faces, The Kinks, early Beatles, Motown and Stax. He bought the clothes and the records and learned the songs. Around 1975 he saw Dr Feelgood, and Wilko Johnson’s fast, choppy, rhythm-and-lead-at-once guitar told him what was possible with one guitar and a very short temper.

None of this was fashionable in 1976. Mod was a memory, and most people under twenty did not care what kind of jacket a Small Face wore in 1966. The Jam looked odd to their own generation, and the punk audience could be hostile to a band in suits playing R&B. That was the tension the debut album carried. It sounded like punk in speed and volume, and looked and behaved like something older.

July 1976, and the trip to town

The turning point is easy to date. On 9 July 1976 Weller went up to London to see the Sex Pistols at the Lyceum, where they were third on a bill headed by the Pretty Things. He knew of them from the music press and wanted a look. He came home changed. Years later he summed it up plainly, saying there was a scene there and he wanted to be part of it. It explains most of the Jam’s next twelve months.

Woking had a stage. London had a scene. Weller started writing quicker, sharper songs about the town he lived in and the one he wanted to reach. He would tell Q magazine in 2011 that “In The City” was “a young man’s song, a suburbanite dreaming of the delights of London”. Read that back slowly, because it is the key to the album. A Londoner did not write about London this way. This came from a lad on the commuter train out of Woking who could not wait to get in.

Other accounts of the song add a further detail. Weller has said he wrote it after seeing the Pistols and The Clash, while in what he calls his Who phase. You can hear both in the record. The urgency belongs to the first two, and the chords and the harmonies belong to Pete Townshend.

Signing

The Jam worked London through the winter. They supported Wire at the Roxy in January 1977, an odd pairing that gives you an idea of how loosely the new bands were being grouped. On 22 January they played the Marquee as support to a group called Bearded Lady. In the audience was Chris Parry, a New Zealander and former drummer with the Auckland band The Fourmyula who had ended up as an A&R man at Polydor. Shane MacGowan, later of The Pogues, had told him to go and look.

Parry signed them within weeks. The terms were not generous. The advance was £6,000, with a royalty of six per cent, and the deal initially covered a single. Polydor soon took up an option that stretched the contract to four years and four albums. That is a lot of album for a band who had not made one. It is also the reason the group were in a studio while their contemporaries were still arguing with lawyers. According to one account, CBS’s chairman Maurice Oberstein phoned John Weller at the last minute with an offer said to be three times Polydor’s. By then Parry already had the band recording, and John Weller declined.

Parry is worth a paragraph of his own. He produced the first two albums alongside Vic Smith, who now goes by Vic Coppersmith-Heaven. He went on to found Fiction Records and sign The Cure. He was also, by most later accounts, the man who understood that the Jam were a pop group at heart and did not need to be pushed into being something angrier.

The sessions

The band cut demos in February, at a small studio in Soho by one account, and these were eventually released as The Polydor Demos in the reissue set. The album itself was recorded in March 1977 at Polydor’s own studio at 17 to 19 Stratford Place, off Oxford Street. It was done fast. Weller was eighteen. He would turn nineteen five days after the record came out.

Bruce Foxton’s memory of the sessions, given to MusicRadar years later, is refreshingly unmythologised. The album was more or less the live set, recorded live and played very quickly. He says you can hear it speeding up as it goes, and he adds that it does not matter, because the excitement was captured. He is right. The record’s biggest flaw and its biggest virtue are the same thing.

A reviewer at Sounds in 1977 wrote that the album sounded rushed, as though the band had been hurled into a studio before they were quite ready. The fairest reply is that they had. The songs were road-tested and the playing was tight. What was missing was time to shape the sound, and the result is a thin, trebly mix in which Buckler’s drums crash around at the front and Foxton’s bass does more of the melodic work than the mix admits. Punk records were being made quickly and cheaply that spring, and the label wanted the single out while the tour was on.

Release

“In The City” came out on 29 April 1977 and reached number 40. It is two minutes nineteen of tremolo guitar, a rolling bassline and a shouted chorus, and it got the group onto Top of the Pops. One retrospective claims the Jam were the first New Wave band to appear on the programme, which I would treat with care because several acts had a claim, but they were certainly among the first.

The album followed on 20 May and reached number 20. The timing tells its own story. The Damned had put out their debut in February. The Clash and The Stranglers released theirs in April, three weeks before the Jam. The Pistols would not get Never Mind the Bollocks out until October. So in May 1977, what the shops had was a run of debut records from London punk bands, and one from Woking that had a Batman theme on it.

The band had also joined The Clash’s White Riot tour from 1 May, though only for part of its run. It put them in front of the biggest punk crowds in the country, and it tied them to the scene in the eyes of the press.

The album

Side one opens with “Art School”, and if you want to understand what the Jam sounded like in the spring of 1977, play the first thirty seconds. It is guitar-led, fast and slightly messy in a way that is obviously intended. The Rickenbacker 330 that Weller played then has a jangle that no punk guitarist wanted, and he plays it like a stick. Foxton’s bass rides underneath. The sound is closer to 1965 than 1977 and much faster than either.

“I’ve Changed My Address” follows and keeps the pace, and then the record slows just enough for a cover of Larry Williams’s “Slow Down”, which The Beatles had also recorded. It is played straight, and you can tell the group regarded it as a favour to the ancestors. “I Got By in Time” is a solid tune that never quite finds the hook you expect from it.

“Away from the Numbers” is the first sign of the writer Weller was about to become. It is about not wanting to be counted, and in the way it moves between sections and leaves room for the bass it points to All Mod Cons rather than back to the pubs of Woking. Ceremony’s retrospective describes it as power chords fused with R&B melodies, and that is close. Side one closes with the theme from Batman, the 1960s television series, written by Neal Hefti. It is a throwaway and it is delivered as a throwaway. It is also a clue. A band at the front of punk who put the Batman theme on their debut are telling you they do not take the rules seriously.

Side two starts with the single. The introduction is Foxton’s bassline, arriving as a fast-moving pulse over which Weller’s guitar cuts in, and then the vocal enters with a lyric about uniformed men and the right to kill, a line that reads oddly now. It sounds like a protest and it works as one, though Weller was eighteen and was not writing a manifesto. The lyric’s real subject is the phrase “the young idea”, which is sung as the chorus and sounds like it came off a badge.

There is a footnote to the song that has become part of Jam folklore. The bass figure resurfaced a few months later on the Sex Pistols’ “Holidays in the Sun”. Weller has told the story of a run-in with Sid Vicious over it, and the accounts of who hit whom vary with the teller. Whatever happened, the resemblance is real, and it is a compliment.

“Sounds from the Street” and “Non-Stop Dancing” keep the momentum going. They are the least distinctive stretch of the album, quick and shouty, and the lyrics circle familiar territory of youth, noise and impatience. “Time for Truth” is the direct political song. Weller lines up the politicians for a kicking and does it in a way that sounds heartfelt and a little naive. It is worth knowing that around this time he told the NME that the band would vote Conservative at the next election. He changed his mind soon enough, and it is a useful reminder that in 1977 no one in the Jam had a settled politics, only a settled dislike of being talked down to.

“Takin’ My Love” shows the R&B and soul roots underneath the speed. “Bricks and Mortar” closes the record with a complaint about redevelopment, the spoiling of old streets by new concrete. It is the closest thing on the album to a preview of the songs he would write about Britain over the next five years, where the target was the whole country and not just the councils.

Twelve tracks, two covers, not much over half an hour. It does not outstay its welcome.

What it does well, and what it doesn’t

The strengths are energy, tunes and precision. The band is tight, and Buckler and Foxton in particular sound like a unit that has spent four years playing in rooms where mistakes are punished. The tunes are better than those on most punk debuts. The vocal is confident. Weller is a much more musical singer than the Pistols’ Johnny Rotten or The Clash’s Joe Strummer, and the harmonies with Foxton have a pop quality that was rare in the scene.

The weaknesses are equally clear. The production is thin. Some of the songs are filler, and one or two are pastiche. The lyrics are teenage in a way that Weller himself outgrew within twelve months. Most tellingly, the album shows a band still working out whether it is a punk group with mod tastes or a mod group with punk pace. The Who influence is so strong in places that some listeners at the time heard a tribute act, and the charge was not entirely unfair. It was a limited way of hearing it. A tribute band does not usually write “Away from the Numbers” or take an album to number 20.

Later views

Time has been kind to the record without turning it into a masterpiece. Fans tend to place it below All Mod Cons, Setting Sons and Sound Affects, which is where it belongs. Pitchfork reviewed it as part of the reissue programme. The 40th anniversary box set, 1977, was released in October 2017 and collected the album, its follow-up, the February demos, live recordings and the Peel sessions.

The band members have looked back on it with varying degrees of fondness. Foxton remains proud of it and talks warmly about the thrill of hearing the single in his local pub. He has also pointed out that the record company and the audience wanted a repeat, and that the group were already moving toward ballads and acoustic guitars when they made the next single, “All Around the World”. That single went to number 13 in July. The second album, This Is the Modern World, followed in November, only six months after the first and widely thought of as the rushed one.

Rick Buckler died on 17 February 2025. In later life he felt that Weller had been given too much of the credit for the band’s catalogue at the expense of the rhythm section. Listen to the record and the point is easy to accept. The drums on “In The City” do the work of pulling the whole thing forward, and Foxton’s bass is an equal partner. In 1977 they were the best rhythm section in the new bands, and they still sound like it.

Verdict

In The City is not the finest Jam album, and it is not a punk record in the way Never Mind the Bollocks or The Clash is. It is a small-town group taking its chance and taking it well. There are perhaps five genuinely excellent songs. There is a great single. There is a set of musicians who could play, and a teenager who was about to learn to write.

The best way to hear it is as a document of one moment: the spring of 1977, when the guitars were loud, the government was on its knees, and a lad from Woking with a Rickenbacker and a good haircut looked at the city on the horizon and decided to catch the train. It sounds like someone who has not been let down yet. Within two years he would be writing about buses, tube stations and the ordinary cruelty of British life, and the music would be far better. This record is where the lad from the suburbs starts.

Play it loud like you’re packed into the 100 Club for half an hour.

We Wanna Be Your Pen Pals. The Ramones (S/T) (1976)

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On 23 April 1976, Sire Records put out a 29-minute LP by four men from Queens who dressed alike, played fast and shared a surname that none of them was born with. It cost $6,400 to make. It reached number 111 on the Billboard chart, its singles missed the chart altogether, and radio mostly ignored it. Fifty years on, it is one of the most copied records in rock.

This piece looks at where the band came from, what New York was doing around them, how the album was made, whether it was the first punk album, and what happened when the Ramones flew to London in the summer of 1976 and met the people who would build British punk.

Forest Hills

The Ramones came from Forest Hills, a residential part of Queens, and the story starts with school friends. John Cummings and Thomas Erdelyi played in a garage band called the Tangerine Puppets in 1966 and 1967. They later got to know Douglas Colvin, who had moved to the area from Germany, and Jeffrey Hyman, who had been singing in a glam band called Sniper since 1972.

In early 1974 Cummings and Colvin asked Hyman to join them as drummer. Colvin wanted to sing and play guitar, and a friend, Richie Stern, was meant to play bass. After a few rehearsals it was clear Stern could not play bass. Colvin moved to bass and kept singing, Cummings became the only guitarist, and the band had a gap behind the kit. Erdelyi was acting as manager and kept sitting down to show auditioning drummers what he wanted. Eventually he took the stool himself. Hyman moved to the front.

The name came from a scrap of Beatles trivia. In the Silver Beetles days Paul McCartney checked into hotels as Paul Ramon. Colvin liked it, became Dee Dee Ramone, and the others followed: Johnny, Joey and Tommy. They were not related, but the fake family did the job. A gang with a uniform is easier to remember than four separate guitarists, and the matching leather jackets and torn jeans made the point before anyone heard a note.

What they listened to matters more than the name. The Stooges and the New York Dolls were in there, but so were girl groups, the Beach Boys, bubblegum and the British Invasion. Tommy Ramone later said “Judy Is a Punk” was built on Herman’s Hermits’ “I’m Henry VIII, I Am”. The Ramones did not reject pop. They stripped it to the frame and played it at speed.

They played their first show on 30 March 1974 at Performance Studios in Manhattan. The songs were fast and short, and most ran under two minutes.

The Bowery

Downtown Manhattan had two rooms that mattered: Max’s Kansas City, which had a reputation from the Warhol years, and CBGB, a bar on the Bowery that had been set up for country and blues and ended up hosting something else entirely. The Ramones made their CBGB debut on 16 August 1974, opening for Angel and the Snake, a prototype Blondie.

Legs McNeil, who co-founded Punk magazine the following year, remembered the black leather jackets and the wall of noise as the band counted in each song. What struck him most was a simple point of difference: “These guys were not hippies.”

That sentence explains a lot about 1974. Rock had grown long-haired, self-serious and expensive. The bands filling stadiums played long solos on records that took months to make. In a small room on the Bowery, a band with no solos and a seventeen-minute set was a rebuke. By the time the album came out, they had played CBGB seventy-four times.

They were not alone. Television, the Patti Smith Group, Talking Heads, Blondie, Johnny Thunders’ Heartbreakers and Richard Hell were all working the same circuit, and they sounded nothing like each other. Talking Heads played some of their earliest shows in support of the Ramones. The scene had no shared sound. What it shared was a rejection of the big-rock model, and the Ramones were the plainest version of that rejection.

Getting signed

Lisa Robinson, an editor at Hit Parader, saw the band and began writing about them. She then pressed Danny Fields, who had worked with the Stooges and the MC5, to manage them. He agreed in November 1975. Fields brought in Craig Leon as producer, and Leon helped persuade Sire president Seymour Stein to come and see them.

Stein signed them in late 1975. Sire offered to release a single, “You’re Gonna Kill That Girl”. The band said no and asked for an album. Sire agreed on one condition: the studio bill would come out of their advance. So the Ramones paid for their own debut, which helps explain the budget.

Seven days at Plaza Sound

The album was recorded at Plaza Sound, a studio on the eighth floor of Radio City Music Hall, in early 1976. Sources differ on whether sessions began in January or February. All agree on the numbers: about a week, with three days for the instruments and four for the vocals, at a cost of $6,400.

Leon said years later that the budget forced the speed, but that it was all the time they needed. The techniques were old-fashioned, close to how the Beatles were recorded, on four tracks. Leon then added overdubbing and doubling, which gave the guitars more weight than a bare live take would have.

That is the trick of the record. It sounds crude, but it is not sloppy. Johnny Ramone’s guitar is a dense, even buzz, with every chord struck downwards, and the bass and drums lock on to it. The songs are arranged. Nothing wanders. Fourteen tracks fit into just over 29 minutes because nobody wastes a bar.

The songs

“Blitzkrieg Bop” opens the record with a chant that works like a football terrace song. Tommy Ramone often pointed to the Bay City Rollers as a model for that kind of shout-along hook, and the joke that a tartan pop band fed the first punk hit is worth keeping. The title borrows the language of war, the tune borrows from pop, and the whole thing runs about two minutes.

The rest of side one is a run of short, blunt sketches. “Beat on the Brat” has a cheerful singalong tune wrapped around a violent idea. “Judy Is a Punk” is a two-line character study. “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” is a slow, sweet song with bells in the mix, and it proves the band could write a proper ballad when they wanted to. “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” (does anyone, anywhere even sniff glue now?) and “I Don’t Wanna Go Down to the Basement” are teenage complaint delivered with a straight face, and the humour is dry enough that some listeners missed it at the time.

Side two is darker in places. “53rd & 3rd” is Dee Dee’s song about male hustlers on that Manhattan corner, and it treats its subject without flinching or fuss. “Let’s Dance” is a cover of the Chris Montez hit from 1962, a reminder of how much of this music / scene came from the early 1960s. “Havana Affair”, “Listen to My Heart” and “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World” complete a set that swings between romance, boredom and menace inside a few minutes.

There is one rule the album never breaks: no solos. Joey Ramone’s voice, a nasal Queens croon, sits on top of Johnny’s dense block of chords and refuses to show off. The effect is comic and unsettling at once. The songs are about glue, hustling and violence, but they are played with the bright tunefulness of a pop group, and that gap gives them their edge.

The sleeve

The cover is a photograph by Roberta Bayley, black and white, grainy and lo-fi of the four band members leaning against a brick wall in their jackets and jeans. Sire paid $125 for it. It has been imitated more often than almost any other sleeve in rock. The title in bold Franklin Gothic all-capital letters, tightly spaced and set as large as possible across the top of the photo followed on the band’s subsequent albums. The band’s eagle logo, adapted from the US presidential seal, came from Arturo Vega, who worked closely with them, and it turned the group into a brand before that word was common in music.

What happened next

The reception was thin. Few critics reviewed it on release, and most who did were neutral. Radio ignored it. In America it stalled at number 111, and it took decades to reach a gold certificate. In the UK it did not chart at all. The follow-up, Leave Home, reached number 45 there in 1977, Rocket to Russia reached 60, Road to Ruin reached 32, and End of the Century reached 14 in 1980. Britain needed time, and the band needed to go there first.

The album’s standing grew slowly and then all at once. It was later placed on the US National Recording Registry, and it now sits near the top of most lists of essential 1970s records.

Was it the first punk album?

It depends on what you mean, the (perpetual) debate is always more useful than the answer.

If “punk” means a spirit, a stance or a set of ancestors, then the Stooges, the MC5, the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls got there first. The Modern Lovers’ proto-New Wave album was recorded in the early 1970s but did not come out until 1976. Patti Smith’s Horses arrived in 1975, and it is a punk record in attitude but not in sound.

If “punk” means a complete sound, with short songs, fast tempos, no solos, a uniform and a sense of humour, then the Ramones got there first on record. Nicholas Rombes, who wrote the 33⅓ book on the album, and the critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine have both described it as the first album labelled punk rock.

The competition is close but later. Blondie’s debut appeared in late 1976. The Saints’ single “(I’m) Stranded” came out in Australia in September 1976, the first punk record from outside the US, and Ed Kuepper has said that hearing the Ramones a month before recording made him think his band had been beaten at their own game. The Damned’s “New Rose” was the first British punk single in October 1976. The Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.” followed in November. Album by album, the Saints’ (I’m) Stranded and the Damned’s Damned Damned Damned both came out in February 1977, the Clash’s debut in April, and Never Mind the Bollocks in October.

So the fair answer is this. The Ramones made the first album that sounds the way punk records would sound for the next decade, and they made it before most of the people who copied it had recorded a note. Whether you call that “first” depends on how much weight you give the Stooges. I would call the Stooges the parents and the Ramones the first child.

London, July 1976

The Ramones went to Britain because there was interest in the band there. They had grown up on British music and were pleased to be going. Two shows were booked.

The first was on Sunday 4 July, the American bicentennial, at the Roundhouse in Camden. The Ramones supported the Flamin’ Groovies, with the Stranglers also on the bill, and played in front of somewhere between two and three thousand people. That was more than they had played to in total up to then, as Danny Fields recalled. He also said it did not feel legendary at the time.

Two details in the folklore need correcting. First, the Sex Pistols and the Clash were not at the Roundhouse. Both were in Sheffield that night, playing the Black Swan pub, and it was the Clash’s first ever gig. Second, the Roundhouse crowd was full of the people who mattered anyway. Members of the Damned were there, as were Gaye Advert, Adam Ant, Shane MacGowan and Chrissie Hynde.

The reviews split along familiar lines. The NME said the band had turned the old hippy hall into the sleaziest garage in London. Melody Maker‘s Allan Jones called them moronic, which, given the song titles, was not entirely unfair.

The next night, Monday 5 July, they headlined Dingwalls, a Camden club that held about 500. This time the Pistols and the Clash were in the room. That includes Brit Punk Royalty like: Joe Strummer, Paul Simonon, John Lydon, Glen Matlock, Sid Vicious, Chrissie Hynde again, and Brian James, Rat Scabies and Captain Sensible of the Damned. They saw a band play short songs at speed and stop only to count in the next one. Strummer, remembering it later, said you could not slide a cigarette paper between any two of their songs. He also called the first album “the first word of Punk”. Now watch clips of early Clash gigs, they’re going at 100mph in their spray painted boiler suits.

The visit did not create British punk. The Pistols had been playing for months, and the 100 Club scene was already forming. What the Ramones gave the British bands was proof that a full, professional-sounding record could be made at this speed with this little, and a sense that there was somewhere for it to go. John Robb has described the night as one where nearly every band seemed to speed up overnight.

Pen Pals With The Damned

The Damned are the British band most closely tied to that week, and the link is easy to follow.

Brian James had been in London SS, the group that also passed through Mick Jones and Tony James, and he formed the Damned with drummer Rat Scabies. They found Dave Vanian, a gravedigger by day who dressed like a vampire, on vocals, and Captain Sensible on bass. They took the name from Visconti’s film and from Village of the Damned. Accounts of the band’s early days say James played Sensible records by the Stooges and the Ramones as a kind of induction. Whatever the exact details, the Ramones were on the turntable before they were on the stage.

All three of the band’s future core were in the crowd on 4 and 5 July. Two days later, on 6 July, the Damned made their own stage debut at the 100 Club. Sensible has since said the Ramones “kickstarted the whole thing” in Britain, and the timing supports him. The Damned then did what the Ramones had done in New York: they got there first. “New Rose” came out on Stiff on 22 October 1976, produced by Nick Lowe at Pathway Studios in Islington, and it was the first single from a British punk band. It beat the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.” by about five weeks. Damned Damned Damned followed on 18 February 1977, the first British punk album, and it ended with a Stooges cover, which tells you where their heads were.

The debt ran back the other way as well. In April 1977 the Damned played four nights at CBGB, the first British punk band to do so. Sensible has said the club emptied the room and started soundchecking for a second show on the same day, which was not how things worked at home. The British band that owed the most to the Ramones was now playing the Ramones’ own room.

The record does not show the two bands sharing a UK tour in these early months, so the relationship is better described as mutual recognition than partnership. The bands exchanged handwritten letters, you might say punk-pen pals in the era of expensive long distance phone calls well before social media and direct messaging and before The Ramones returned to Britain in December 1977 on their second UK tour, with the Rezillos supporting at Newcastle City Hall on 20 December, and the New Year’s Eve show at London’s Rainbow Theatre was recorded for the live album It’s Alive. By then the audience they had barely met the year before had turned into a country that knew every word.

Verdict

Ramones is self evidently not the most musically complex album of its year, it is not meant to be. It is the most economical. It shows that a band could do more by subtracting things than by adding them, and that a joke, a hook and a tempo could carry a record. Every good short song since has some of it.

The reputation can get in the way of the record. It is funny and precise, and it is over before you have time to get bored. Put it on. It will be finished in half an hour, and you will probably want to hear it again.

A Few Facts

  • Released: 23 April 1976, Sire Records
  • Recorded: Plaza Sound, Radio City Music Hall, New York, early 1976
  • Producer: Craig Leon
  • Length: 14 tracks, 29:04
  • Cost: $6,400 funded by the band
  • Chart: US 111, no UK chart placing on release
  • First UK shows: Roundhouse, 4 July 1976; Dingwalls, 5 July 1976
  • The Damned’s “New Rose”: 22 October 1976

Retrospective: Pete Townsend’s Mod Meisterwerk

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Four Faces, One Parka: The Who’s Quadrophenia at Full Throttle

After a break, a 45renegade rock and roll long read.

The Who, Quadrophenia. Mod concept double album from 1973.


There is a particular kind of arrogance required to follow a masterpiece with an act of self-demolition, and Pete Townshend has never been short of it. By fifteen minutes into Quadrophenia, the listener has already been drowned, half deafened and abandoned on a rain-lashed beach with nothing but a scooter horn for company. That is precisely the point. This was never going to be a comfortable record, and comfort was never what The Who were selling. What they were selling, in the autumn of 1973, was a working-class boy’s nervous breakdown scored for a rock band that had, by its own reckoning, gone slightly mad trying to make it.

Released as a double album on 26 October 1973 on Track Records, Quadrophenia arrived heavy with expectation. Here was a band fresh from the twin triumphs of Tommy and Who’s Next, the former having invented the rock opera more or less by accident, the latter standing as the tightest, most muscular thing they had ever put on wax. Townshend, never a man to repeat a trick when a bigger one was available, decided the follow-up would be his masterwork: a return to the mod scene that had made The Who in the first place, told through the eyes of a fictional teenager called Jimmy Cooper, and structured around the idea that Jimmy’s cracked personality contained four distinct selves, one for each member of the group. It is a conceit so audacious it could easily have collapsed under its own cleverness. That it mostly doesn’t is the whole story of why this record still matters.

The Concept: A Mirror Cracked Into Four

The title itself is a piece of Townshend wordplay, a splicing of “schizophrenia” with the “quadrophonic” surround sound format the industry was flirting with at the time, itself never quite catching on the way stereo had. But the real meaning sits closer to home. Jimmy is a mod, one of the pilled-up, scooter-riding, sharp-suited kids who had swarmed Brighton and Margate a decade earlier, and his four warring facets are drawn directly from the four members of the band that made him. Daltrey supplies “a tough guy, a helpless dancer”. Entwistle is “a romantic”. Moon, inevitably, is “a bloody lunatic”. Townshend himself settles for “a beggar, a hypocrite”, which tells you rather a lot about how the album’s author saw his own contribution to the story.

Townshend later called it “a sort of musical Clockwork Orange”, and there is something of Alex’s alienation in Jimmy’s arc: a lad chewed up by dead-end work, indifferent parents, a girl who prefers his best mate, and a subculture that promises belonging and delivers only another set of rules to break against. Set explicitly in London and Brighton in 1965, the record trades on the mods and rockers riots that had scandalised middle England the year before, using that moral panic as the backdrop for a story that is really about something much smaller and much more universal: a boy who cannot work out who he is, surrounded by people who claim to know exactly who they are and are almost certainly lying.

What separates Quadrophenia from Tommy is that Townshend was no longer working in symbolism and pinball metaphor. He was writing what he knew. This was his own adolescence, transplanted onto a fictional narrator, full of purple hearts necked on a Brighton-bound train, of humiliating scenes at the family dinner table, of a scooter wrecked in a fit of self-disgust and a final, ambiguous reckoning on a rock out at sea. The record ends not with resolution but with a kind of exhausted clarity, Jimmy stripped of his parka, his pills and his illusions, asking only to be washed clean by something bigger than himself. Whether he lives, dies, or simply grows up is left deliberately unresolved, which is more or less the correct way to end a story about being seventeen.

Production: Chaos in Battersea

The making of Quadrophenia is as much a part of its legend as anything printed on the sleeve. Work began as early as May 1972, but was repeatedly derailed. Entwistle and Daltrey were off making solo records, Moon was distracted by film work, and Townshend himself had a failed multimedia project called Lifehouse still smouldering in the background, its wreckage supplying several of the songs that would eventually surface here. When serious sessions resumed in the summer of 1973, the band’s own new studio, a converted building on Thessaly Road in Battersea nicknamed The Kitchen, was still a building site, plaster dust and all. The solution was to wheel in Ronnie Lane’s Mobile Studio and use it as a makeshift control room while the walls went up around them, which gives you some idea of the seat-of-the-pants energy that runs through the finished record.

Engineering fell to a young American named Ron Nevison, hired more or less by accident and kept on because the band liked what they heard. It was, by his own account, easily the biggest and most technically demanding session he had worked on, and it shows: this is an album stitched together from multi-track synthesiser sequences, sound effects lifted from crashing waves and pouring rain, and a wall of overdubbed brass, all of it performed by Entwistle himself, who by all accounts simply picked up a French horn and got on with it. The band had originally hoped to mix the whole thing in true quadrophonic sound, hence the title, but the format’s technical limitations in 1973 meant the ambition was quietly abandoned in favour of an unusually wide and detailed stereo mix instead. It remains one of the most sonically ambitious rock records of its decade, layered and cinematic in a way few guitar bands were even attempting.

Behind the desk, the record marks a genuine fracture. Kit Lambert, the band’s co-manager and the man who had shaped their sound and their sensibility since the mid-sixties, had drifted into addiction and irrelevance by this point, and his relationship with the group broke down for good during these sessions. He was gone from their day-to-day affairs by the time the album reached the shops, though he retained an executive producer credit as a formality. It is tempting, and probably not wrong, to hear some of the record’s themes of betrayal and abandoned mentors as bleeding directly out of that collapsing relationship. The Who, in other words, made a self-produced record about a boy losing faith in the adults around him while quietly losing faith in one of their own.

There is one more piece of production trivia worth dwelling on, and it says something about how records were actually consumed in 1973 rather than how we imagine they were. The original pressing was what the trade called an auto-coupled release, meaning the two discs were not sequenced the way a listener might expect. Record one carried sides one and four, while record two carried sides two and three, an arrangement that looks like a pressing plant error until you remember the record changer, that now-vanished piece of hi-fi furniture with a fat spindle capable of stacking several LPs at once. Load record one onto the spindle followed by record two on top, and the mechanism would drop and play side one, then side two, in correct running order, without anybody needing to get up. Flip both discs over together and sides three and four would follow in the same fashion. It meant a single owner with a decent changer, or two mates each bringing a copy round, could in theory let the whole eighty-one minute story unfold uninterrupted, an oddly appropriate bit of engineering for a record so preoccupied with continuity and character. It also explains why generations of vinyl collectors, encountering an original Track pressing for the first time and finding sides one and four sharing a disc, have assumed for a moment that they have stumbled on a factory mispress rather than a perfectly deliberate piece of 1973 thinking.

The Personnel: Four Men, Playing Themselves

If Tommy had been Townshend’s story told through the band, Quadrophenia is the band telling Townshend’s story about themselves, and every player rises to the size of the task.

Entwistle’s playing throughout is extraordinary, not least on the opening salvo “The Real Me”, which he has described as essentially a bass solo with vocals attached, and it is hard to disagree. It stands as one of the great recorded bass performances in rock, muscular and melodic at once, and it sets the tone for an album on which “The Ox” is arguably the single most important instrumentalist in the room. His brass arrangements, all performed and overdubbed by himself, give the record its widescreen, almost orchestral quality.

Moon, for his part, delivers what would prove to be his last truly focused studio performance with the band, chaotic and thrilling in equal measure, a man playing as though the kit might escape him at any moment, which by 1973 it very nearly could. Daltrey, so often accused across the band’s catalogue of merely delivering Townshend’s words, finds the role of his career here, particularly on the closing “Love, Reign o’er Me”, where he pushes his voice to a raw, torn extreme that remains one of the definitive vocal performances of the entire classic rock era. And Townshend, credited as sole writer of every note and word on the album, a first and only occurrence in the band’s catalogue, plays guitar with a controlled fury throughout while quietly running the whole ambitious apparatus of synthesisers, orchestration and structure from behind the scenes. He would later call it the best music he had ever written, and on his own instrument’s evidence, it is hard to argue.

The Songs: Seventeen Tracks, One Long Exhale

Across four sides and more than eighty minutes, the record moves with a cinematic patience that rewards, and frankly demands, a single uninterrupted sitting. The opening instrumental collage, “I Am the Sea”, drifts in on surf and gull cries before dissolving into snatches of the four character themes that will recur throughout, “Love, Reign o’er Me”, “Helpless Dancer”, “Bell Boy” and “Doctor Jimmy”, planted here like seeds that will not fully flower for another eighty minutes. It is a device lifted straight from film scoring, and it works.

“The Real Me” then detonates the album proper, all coiled fury and domestic frustration, before the record settles into its narrative stride: the wounded nostalgia of “Cut My Hair”, the desperate pill-popping travelogue of “5:15” as Jimmy rides the train to Brighton, the aching, semi-autobiographical “I’m One”, and the extraordinary “The Rock”, an instrumental piece so densely orchestrated it could stand as a symphonic movement in its own right. “Bell Boy” gives Moon his moment in the narrative spotlight, playing the washed-up former mod hero Ace Face now reduced to fetching towels at a seafront hotel, a piece of very English, very bitter irony about what happens to youth movements once the youth grows up. “Drowned”, written originally as a devotional piece for Meher Baba before being repurposed for Jimmy’s near-suicidal despair, remains one of the rawest, least ornamented things here, and arguably the most purely felt. It all resolves in “Love, Reign o’er Me”, a genuine peak of the entire rock opera form, Daltrey’s voice cracking open over Townshend’s piano and strings in a moment of catharsis that has lost none of its power in fifty years of imitation.

Reception: A Nation Struggling to Keep Up

Critical response on first landing was broadly enthusiastic, if occasionally bewildered by the sheer scale of the thing. Newsweek’s Hubert Saal placed it among rock’s great milestone records. Melody Maker’s Chris Welch called it a masterpiece, the Who at their absolute peak, “sap flowing from the roots of their creation”. Within NME’s own pages the following year, Nigel Rogers went further still, hailing it as the greatest exposition of the rock and roll ethic yet committed to vinyl, a judgement plenty of readers at the time would have thought overblown and which fifty years of hindsight has done nothing to disprove. Rolling Stone’s Lenny Kaye offered the more ambivalent, and in retrospect the more accurate, verdict: The Who at their most symmetrical and most cinematic, and also their most maddening, an album whose ambition occasionally outran its own listenability.

Commercially it did rather better than the reviews suggested it might, going gold on the day of release and platinum within forty-eight hours, eventually reaching number two on both the UK and US album charts, the band’s highest ever placing in America, kept off the top only by Elton John. The touring party that followed was, by every account including Townshend’s own, a genuine disaster. The backing tapes required to reproduce the synthesiser and sound effect parts live were unreliable to the point of sabotage, and the Newcastle date that November ended with Townshend hauling his sound engineer bodily across the mixing desk before smashing his own guitar in fury when the tape sync failed yet again during “5:15”. By February 1974 the band had quietly dropped most of the album from the set. It would be twenty-two years before they attempted it properly again.

Legacy: The Long Afterlife of a Mod Kid

If the initial tour was a wound, the years since have more than healed it. The 1979 film adaptation, directed by Franc Roddam and featuring a young Sting as the doomed Ace Face, arrived at the precise moment of Britain’s mod revival, and did more than perhaps anything else to cement the album’s mythology, dragging the whole story to a new generation of parka-wearing scooter kids who had been in short trousers first time round. Townshend himself has been unambiguous about where it sits in the band’s story, telling NME in 2011 that he had come to regard Quadrophenia as the last truly definitive Who album, the point at which the story, and perhaps the band itself, effectively ended.

It has since taken its place, with little serious argument, among the small handful of rock operas that actually work as records rather than curiosities, name-checked by everyone from Q magazine’s list of the hundred greatest British albums to Rolling Stone’s five hundred greatest albums of all time. The Who returned to it properly in 1996 for a one-off Prince’s Trust performance, then again on a dedicated 2012 to 2013 world tour performing the album in full, and a 2011 Director’s Cut box set unearthed Townshend’s original home demos, revealing just how much careful editing turned a sprawling autobiography into something closer to disciplined cinema.

Fifty years on, what still strikes hardest about Quadrophenia is not its scale, though the scale remains genuinely startling for a band working with 1973 technology in a half-built Battersea studio, but its honesty. This was four men in their late twenties writing about being seventeen and getting it exactly, uncomfortably right: the pills, the parkas, the pack mentality, the sudden lonely comedown on a rain-swept rock when the tribe has scattered and there is nobody left to impress. Jimmy never quite finds himself. Neither, in the end, did the mod movement that spawned him. But the record that tells his story remains one of the very few genuine peaks British rock has ever reached, and it has lost none of its nerve in the telling.

Steve Coulter writes on pop art, punk culture and the music that made them at 45renegade.co.uk.

Retrospective: Bending The Space Time Continuum With Siouxsie and the Banshees

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What if the darkest records are not the loudest, but the most controlled? What if the albums that linger are the ones that bend the air in the room rather than batter it? In 1981, Juju by Siouxsie and the Banshees arrived without bombast, yet it altered the physics of post-punk. This is not just a revisit of a proto-gothic touchstone, but a forensic look at how tension, texture and John McGeoch’s discordant guitar architecture combined to create a record that still distorts the light more than four decades on.

Siouxsie and the Banshees Juju Retrospective


Some albums feel as though they were forged rather than pressed, as if the grooves were cut into something denser than plastic. Not vinyl, but matter with its own gravitational pull. The kind of record that seems to bend the space around the turntable, to alter the light in the room once the needle drops. Juju by Siouxsie and the Banshees is one of those records. We remember it as blacker than black not because of chemistry or pressing plant folklore, but because it behaves like dark matter, invisible yet undeniable, distorting everything that drifts too close.

When it arrived in 1981, the Banshees were not evolving so much as condensing. Earlier line-ups had explored abrasion, fracture, psychedelia. With John McGeoch fully integrated alongside Siouxsie Sioux, Steven Severin and Budgie, the band found a way to make tension feel engineered rather than instinctive. This was not a question of genre alignment. It was a question of control. The songs on Juju feel calibrated, their emotional temperature set deliberately cool, their eruptions carefully rationed.

McGeoch’s contribution is often described in terms of texture, but that risks underselling the precision of his discord. He favoured suspended fourths and fifths, open strings ringing against fretted notes a semitone away, small harmonic frictions that never quite resolve. On “Spellbound,” the signature figure is built from interlocking arpeggios that refuse to land squarely on a comforting root. The chorus effect widens the sound, but it is the interval choices that create unease. He lets notes hang just long enough for their overtones to collide. The result is tension without clutter.

Nigel Gray’s production understands that less is not emptiness. The album is remarkably defined. Budgie’s toms are tuned to resonate rather than thud, giving his circular patterns a ritualistic thrum. Severin’s bass is forward enough to be melodic but never woolly. The guitar is bright, sometimes almost metallic, carved into its own frequency range so that every harmonic scrape is audible. Nothing bleeds. Nothing smears. The darkness comes from structure, not murk.

If McGeoch bends the air, Siouxsie controls its pressure. Her vocal performance across Juju is far more technical than its reputation for incantation suggests. She uses vibrato sparingly, often holding notes straight and cool before allowing the slightest tremor at the tail end. On “Arabian Knights,” she tightens her phrasing, clipping consonants, letting certain vowels stretch into faint sneers. The effect is not melodrama but disdain sharpened to a point. She sings slightly behind the beat at key moments, creating drag against Budgie’s insistent patterns.

“Monitor” showcases another facet of her control. She narrows her tone, almost flattening it, reducing expressive flourish so that the lyric feels observed rather than confessed. The performance mirrors the theme of surveillance. She sounds as though she is watching herself sing. That self-conscious distance becomes part of the album’s architecture.

“Into the Light” deserves closer inspection than it often receives. The track is driven by a pulsing, almost motorik bass figure from Severin, but it is McGeoch’s ascending arpeggios that give it lift. He builds the main pattern from repeating shapes that shift position incrementally, creating the sensation of upward motion without obvious modulation. The guitar tone is cleaner here, less abrasive, but the intervals remain unsettled. There is always a note that sits slightly askew, preventing the euphoria from turning soft.

Siouxsie meets that structure with one of her most dynamic performances on the record. She begins in a relatively low register, voice contained, then gradually opens it out, allowing more air into the tone as the song expands. Listen to the way she attacks the word “light,” the initial consonant crisp, the vowel bright but never sentimental. She resists full-throated release. Even at the track’s most expansive moments, she maintains a core of steel in the sound. The transcendence here is disciplined. It rises, but it does not dissolve.

The production reinforces this restraint. Gray keeps the drums dry enough to feel immediate, avoiding cavernous reverb that would have pushed the track into bombast. Delay is used to create width rather than wash. The stereo image feels stretched but anchored, the rhythm section holding the centre while guitars flicker at the edges. The effect is propulsion without chaos.

“Voodoo Dolly” remains the album’s slow detonation. It begins with space. McGeoch voices chords with deliberate gaps, leaving a hollow in the middle of the mix. As the track builds, he increases density rather than distortion. Additional notes are layered, sustains lengthen, dissonances become more pronounced. Budgie tightens his patterns, the toms growing more insistent. Severin’s bass thickens the floor.

And Siouxsie changes. Her repeated line becomes progressively less contained, but never uncontrolled. She allows more grit into the upper register, pushing the note until it strains against pitch without collapsing. The tension is physical. You can hear the breath. You can hear the restraint. Gray captures this escalation with forensic clarity, ensuring each harmonic clash and vocal edge remains distinct.

More than four decades on, Juju still feels heavy because it was designed that way. Its darkness is not cosmetic. It is structural, embedded in interval choices, in drum tuning, in vocal phrasing, in the careful refusal of excess. It does not rely on atmosphere as shorthand. It constructs it from first principles.

Play it now and the vinyl looks unremarkable. The black is ordinary. What is not ordinary is the way the room seems to contract once it begins, the way the air feels fractionally denser. The gravitational pull was never in the plastic. It was in the decisions. And those decisions continue to bend the space around the record, holding it in orbit long after so many of its contemporaries have drifted into background radiation.

Retrospective: Television – Marquee Moon

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New York in the mid to late Seventies was a city eating itself alive. Bankrupt on paper, feral in practice, littered with burnt-out cars, shuttered storefronts and the low-level menace of economic collapse. Out of this came CBGB, a former biker bar on the Bowery whose original promise of roots music curdled almost immediately into something far more interesting. It became a refuge for the literate, the maladjusted and the terminally dissatisfied. Punk did not so much arrive there as coagulate. And among the first bands to understand that this new language could be stretched, warped and interrogated rather than simply shouted was Television.

Tom Verlaine had already been living inside this world for years by the time Marquee Moon appeared in early 1977. Alongside Richard Hell he had escaped New Jersey boredom, bonded over poetry, speed and a shared belief that rock music should aspire to something sharper than stadium heroics. The Neon Boys, their early incarnation, were less a band than a sketchbook. When Hell departed in 1975 to form the Voidoids taking with him the ripped shirts and confrontational nihilism that would become punk’s uniform, Television were freed from the obligation to perform rebellion in quotation marks. What remained was a band increasingly obsessed with structure, tone and the slow burn of ideas unfolding over time.

CBGB became their proving ground. While other groups detonated through short sets like flash-bangs, Television played long, winding songs night after night, refining them in public. Guitar lines evolved incrementally. Tempos breathed. Solos were not indulgences but arguments. By the time Elektra committed them to tape, these songs had been lived inside, paced around, stripped back and rebuilt. This was not punk as rupture but post-punk as concentration.

The first thing that still startles about Marquee Moon is its clarity. In an era obsessed with distortion and speed, Television chose exposure. Verlaine and Richard Lloyd rejected the familiar hierarchy of rhythm and lead, opting instead for two guitars in constant dialogue. Lines coil, overlap and contradict each other. Melodies appear, dissolve, then reappear altered. Verlaine’s tone is all treble edge and nervous elegance, like fluorescent light flickering on wet pavement. Lloyd grounds the music without weighing it down, muscular but articulate. Beneath them, Fred Smith’s bass moves rather than anchors, while Billy Ficca’s drumming borrows from jazz as much as punk, restless, rolling, impatient with straight lines.

Andy Johns’ production deserves credit for knowing when to disappear. Best known for capturing the brute force of Zeppelin and the Stones, here he allows space to remain space. You hear fingers scrape strings, cymbals decay naturally, air move in the room. Nothing is smothered. Nothing is disguised.

The album unfolds like a series of nocturnal walks through the same city seen from different angles. “See No Evil” announces itself with a rush of romantic urgency, its guitars darting ahead of the beat as if chasing something just out of reach. “Venus” reframes desire as motion and uncertainty, its lyric more impression than declaration. “Friction” hums with paranoia, Verlaine’s voice hovering between detachment and barely concealed anxiety, a perfect document of urban overstimulation.

Then there is the title track, still one of the most audacious statements ever made by a band nominally associated with punk. Ten minutes long, refusing any conventional chorus, it unfolds patiently, methodically. The closing guitar passage is not a solo in the heroic sense but a gradual ascent, Verlaine circling a figure, stretching it, worrying at it, until something breaks open. It feels earned rather than delivered. The listener is trusted to stay with it.

That trust is why Marquee Moon continues to endure. It has never belonged comfortably to its moment. While safety pins and sneers quickly dated, this record remained oddly ageless. Its concerns alienation, romantic idealism, intellectual hunger, the solitude of city life still resonate because they were never tied to fashion. Each generation finds it not as an artefact but as an invitation.

Its influence is everywhere yet curiously diffuse. You hear its DNA in post-punk, indie and art rock, in bands who learned that guitars could converse rather than compete. Sonic Youth, R.E.M., The Strokes and countless others absorbed its lessons, but no one has ever really replicated it. That is because its magic lies in a precise convergence of people, place and temperament that cannot be reverse engineered.

Most new wave guitar records chased velocity and attitude. Marquee Moon chased precision and clarity. It demonstrated that intensity did not require volume, that virtuosity did not need flash, and that punk’s most radical gesture might be patience. Television never surpassed it and never needed to. The album stands complete, self-contained, immune to time.

It remains the sound of New York before it was cleaned up, when danger and beauty shared the same bar stool and ideas mattered as much as noise. A record that asks you to listen closely, think longer, and walk home alone replaying its guitar lines like secret diagrams. Not just one of the greatest new wave guitar albums, but one of the rare rock records that feels inevitable, as though it was always there, waiting for the right minds to tune into it.

RETROSPECTIVE: R.E.M.’s Epiphany

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A pivotal moment in R.E.M.’s evolution, Lifes Rich Pageant captures the band stepping out of the shadows and into focus. This retrospective long read examines its place in the R.E.M. canon, the creative risks that reshaped their sound, and why this fierce, principled 1986 album marked the point where conviction, clarity, and power finally aligned to signpost the future.

R.E.M. Lifes Rich Pageant

R.E.M. had already built a cult by the time Lifes Rich Pageant arrived in the summer of 1986, but it was still a fragile thing. College radio fame, earnest fanzine devotion, and a reputation for wilful obscurity are not the same as permanence. The first three albums had sketched a band almost mythic in outline: Michael Stipe’s voice half-buried, lyrics treated like overheard conversations, guitars that chimed rather than cut. They were beloved, but they were also evasive. Lifes Rich Pageant is the moment R.E.M. stopped hiding behind atmosphere and decided to speak plainly, loudly, and with intent.

It is their loudest early record, and that matters. Bringing in Don Gehman, fresh from work with John Mellencamp, was a deliberate act of sabotage against their own mystique. Gehman insisted on clarity, punch, and definition. Peter Buck’s guitar was no longer a shimmering fog but a serrated instrument, pushed forward in the mix. Mike Mills’ bass became a melodic force rather than a polite underpinning. Bill Berry’s drumming, often understated on earlier records, snapped into muscular life. This was R.E.M. discovering the value of impact.

The opening run is still startling. Begin the Begin does not drift in, it kicks the door off its hinges. Stipe’s vocal, for once, is up front and intelligible, full of clipped urgency. These are not cryptic mumblings but rallying cries, political and personal tangled together. The world is wrong, systems are broken, and the band sound newly determined to say so. The shift is not just sonic but philosophical. Where Murmur and Reckoning felt inward and impressionistic, Lifes Rich Pageant looks outward, alert to pollution, imperialism, environmental collapse, and moral fatigue.

Fall on Me remains the record’s moral centre. It is a protest song that never once raises its voice, a masterclass in restraint. The lyric is direct without being didactic, the melody aching without self-pity. It is one of the first moments where Stipe’s political writing finds a universal register, rooted in the body and the family rather than slogans. In retrospect, it lays the groundwork for everything from Green to Automatic for the People.

Cuyahoga extends that environmental concern into something almost elegiac. Rivers catch fire, civilisations poison their own wells, and history repeats itself with grim reliability. Yet the song does not despair. There is still a sense of wonder, a belief that naming the damage is a form of resistance. This balance between anger and hope becomes a defining R.E.M. trait, separating them from the hectoring earnestness that doomed many politically minded bands of the era.

Crucially, Lifes Rich Pageant does not abandon joy. These Days barrels along with almost reckless energy, Mills and Berry driving the song like men possessed. I Believe offers a kind of bruised optimism, a declaration of faith that feels hard-won rather than naive. Even Superman, a cover, serves a purpose. Sung by Mills, it punctures any creeping solemnity and reminds the listener that R.E.M. still understood pop pleasure, still valued humour and lightness amid the seriousness.

Within the R.E.M. canon, this album is the hinge. Everything before it is prelude, everything after it is expansion. Without Lifes Rich Pageant, there is no confidence to make Green, no authority to slow things down on Automatic, no credibility when the band take stadiums by the throat in the late eighties and early nineties. It is the moment they realise they can be both principled and powerful, obscure and accessible, righteous and tuneful.

It is also the album where Michael Stipe steps fully into his role as a frontman. Not a rock god, never that, but a communicator. His lyrics sharpen, his vocals project, and his presence anchors the band’s ambitions. He sounds less like a man whispering secrets and more like someone willing to be overheard.

Nearly four decades on, Lifes Rich Pageant feels less like a transitional record and more like a manifesto. It is R.E.M. announcing what they stand for, sonically and ethically, and proving they can do so without sacrificing complexity or grace. Many bands have a moment where talent hardens into purpose. This is R.E.M.’s, and it still crackles with urgency, intelligence, and the thrilling sound of a group realising exactly how good they can be.

RETROSPECTIVE: Bowie, Standing By The Wall

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Revisiting David Bowie’s Heroes decades on, this article explores its Berlin origins, the band behind the album, Brian Eno’s role and whether it stands apart from Low.

David Bowie Heroes Album Retrospective


By the time Heroes emerged in October 1977, Bowie had already disposed of the rulebook. Low had landed like a communiqué from another future, half songs, half atmosphere, a record that seemed to reject the very idea of audience comfort. The temptation has always been to frame Heroes as its louder twin, the one with the anthem, the one that returned Bowie to something approaching recognisable rock form. That reading does the album a disservice. Heroes is not a corrective to Low. It is an expansion, an album that breathes the same air but looks outward rather than inward, shaped by geography, by collaborators, and by a band operating at a rare level of collective intuition.

The setting matters. Hansa Tonstudio, perched within sight of the Berlin Wall, was not simply a studio but a vantage point. The city in 1977 was still scarred, divided, uneasy. Bowie absorbed that atmosphere completely. If Low felt like a psychological evacuation from Los Angeles excess, Heroes feels like Bowie standing still long enough to take in where he had landed. The walls, literal and emotional, are everywhere on this record.

The core band remained unchanged from Low, and that continuity is crucial. Carlos Alomar was once again the spine of the operation, his rhythm guitar style economical, precise, never showy. Alomar’s playing on Heroes is less funky than his work with the plastic soul era Bowie, but his sense of movement underpins everything. Dennis Davis on drums is similarly restrained but vital. His playing has a physical intelligence, knowing when to push and when to pull back, especially on tracks like Beauty and the Beast where tension is built through repetition rather than brute force. George Murray’s bass lines are melodic without drawing attention to themselves, often acting as a bridge between rhythm and texture.

Hovering above and around them is the now legendary pairing of Brian Eno and Tony Visconti. Eno’s influence is often overstated as some sort of ambient fog machine, but his real contribution lies in disruption. His Oblique Strategies cards, his encouragement of chance, his willingness to treat the studio as an instrument all helped Bowie escape habitual thinking. Visconti, meanwhile, grounded the chaos. His production on Heroes is cleaner and more assertive than on Low, particularly on the vocal tracks, but still full of space. The famous gated vocal effect on the title track, achieved by positioning microphones at varying distances that opened only when Bowie sang louder, is a perfect example of technology serving emotion rather than novelty.

The opening track, Beauty and the Beast, announces immediately that this is not a retreat into comfort. Bowie’s vocal is fractured, almost feral, darting between personas. Lyrically, it feels like a continuation of the internal struggle first exposed on Low, but externalised. The city is no longer a metaphor for the mind. It is the stage on which that struggle plays out. Fripp’s guitar slashes through the mix, not as a soloist but as a source of friction, pushing against the rigid rhythm beneath.

Fripp’s presence across the album cannot be overstated. Brought in at the last minute and reportedly completing his parts in a matter of hours, his playing defines the record’s emotional peaks. On Heroes the song, his sustained, soaring lines do not decorate the track, they lift it. The myth around the song often threatens to reduce it to its origin story, Bowie glimpsing Visconti and Antonia Maass kissing by the Wall. What matters more is how the music refuses sentimentality. The lyric never promises permanence, only intensity. We can be heroes, just for one day. It is defiant precisely because it accepts limitation.

Elsewhere on side one, Bowie continues to explore fractured identity and communication. Joe the Lion draws inspiration from performance artist Chris Burden, but it also feels like a self portrait in motion, Bowie throwing himself into the work with no safety net. Sons of the Silent Age is one of the album’s quieter triumphs, its crooning melody undercut by lyrics that hint at repression, at voices denied expression. Blackout closes the side in a rush of nervous energy, all clipped phrases and sudden turns, the sound of a mind overstimulated rather than soothed.

If side one is confrontation, side two is immersion. Like Low, Heroes gives over half its running time to instrumentals, but the mood is different. Where Low often felt like drifting through empty rooms, Heroes feels rooted in place. V-2 Schneider tips its hat to Kraftwerk but refuses pastiche, its groove mechanical yet strangely human. Bowie’s saxophone playing here is deliberately unschooled, cutting through the track like an alarm rather than a melody.

The trio of Sense of Doubt, Moss Garden and Neuköln forms the emotional heart of the album. These are not background pieces. They demand attention. Sense of Doubt is built on a descending piano figure that seems to sink deeper with each repetition, evoking a sense of inevitability. Moss Garden offers a brief illusion of calm, its Eastern inflections suggesting a spiritual escape that never quite arrives. Neuköln is the most unsettling of all, Eno’s treatments and Bowie’s sax combining into a mournful, alien soundscape that captures the loneliness of displacement. Named after a Berlin district known for its immigrant population, it resonates as a study in alienation without a single word being sung.

The closing track, The Secret Life of Arabia, is often treated as a curiosity, but it serves an important function. Its rhythm and melodic energy hint at movement, at travel beyond Berlin, beyond the album’s confines. It suggests that Bowie was already looking ahead, which history confirms. Lodger would soon scatter these ideas across the globe, but Heroes remains anchored, its power drawn from stillness rather than motion.

Over the decades, more details have emerged about the making of Heroes, but none of them diminish its mystery. The speed of the sessions, the reliance on instinct, the willingness to commit to first or second takes all speak to a creative moment that cannot be replicated. Bowie was sober, focused, and surrounded by collaborators who understood when to contribute and when to step back. This was not the sound of a genius imposing his will, but of a band and production team operating as a single organism.

So is Heroes merely a continuation of Low, or does it stand alone. The honest answer is both. It makes little sense without Low, yet it surpasses it in emotional range. Where Low fractures, Heroes reaches. Where Low withdraws, Heroes risks connection. In Bowie’s catalogue, it occupies a rare position. An experimental record with a genuine anthem, an art album that found its way into public consciousness without compromise.

RETROSPECTIVE: London Is Drowning and I Live By The River

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Today marks the 45th anniversary of London Calling, The Clash’s groundbreaking double album that redefined punk and reshaped British music. More than just a record, it was a bold statement, mixing genres, politics and raw emotion with a restless energy that still resonates. In this definitive retrospective, I delve into the album’s iconic sleeve, the sprawling diversity of its songs, and the pivotal role played by producer Guy Stevens in crafting a sound both urgent and timeless.

The Clash London Calling Retrospective


By the winter of nineteen seventy nine The Clash were standing at a crossroads that most bands never reach. Punk had given them a voice and a platform, but it was already clear that the narrow version of the movement being sold back to the public would not hold them. London Calling arrived not as a rejection of punk but as an argument with it. An artful double album crammed into a single sleeve, a density made up of ideas and restless energy, it sounded like a band refusing to be boxed in by its own reputation. This was The Clash insisting that urgency did not have to mean limitation, and that rebellion could be rhythmic, melodic and historically aware all at once.

“London Calling is the first of The Clash’s albums that is truly equal in stature to their legend”. Charles Shaar Murray NME 1979.

The sleeve announced that intent before a note was heard. Pennie Smith’s photograph of Paul Simonon mid swing, bass guitar raised and about to be smashed against the stage floor at the Palladium in New York, is still one of the defining images of British music. It is beautifully blurred, caught in motion rather than reverence. Overlaid with the pink and green lettering lifted from Elvis Presley’s debut album, it made a knowing claim on rock and roll history while quietly asserting ownership of it. The decision to house the double vinyl in a single sleeve was driven by CBS insistence the album was a single album but relented to the inclusion of a 12 inch single. Artfully the band added the further nine tracks to the extra vinyl and flipped the 45rpm to 33rpm – the finished ‘double’ album complimented by a “Pay No More Than” hype sticker. So no gatefold excess, the lyrics were printed on the inner sleeves, practical and open, inviting the listener to engage with the words as part of the experience rather than as an accessory.

Musically the record sprawls, but it never drifts. The title track opens like an emergency broadcast, Strummer’s voice riding a sinewy rhythm as images of nuclear anxiety, flooding and social collapse tumble out with the urgency of a last transmission. From there the album refuses to settle into any single identity. Brand New Cadillac barrels through rockabilly with reckless joy. Jimmy Jazz slouches through smoky shadows. Rudie Can’t Fail lifts the mood with warmth and swing, its horns and skank rhythm sounding like celebration as defiance.

What becomes clear as the sides unfold is that this breadth is not a stunt. These styles were absorbed, argued over and lived with. The historically underrated Mick Jones brings melody and pop intelligence, shaping songs that are generous and emotionally direct. One of the album’s most cherished moments, Train in Vain, sits at the very end of Side Four and was a late addition, originally intended to be given away as a free flexi-disc with NME before that plan fell through. The band insisted it be included on the album, but because the sleeves were already printed it was not listed on the cover or lyric sheets and initially appeared as a surprise hidden track etched into the run-off groove. Its immediacy and vulnerability, sung by Jones, with a narrative of love lost, feel like the intimate counterpoint to the political breadth that precedes it.

Joe Strummer’s writing elsewhere on the record grows more impressionistic and humane, trading blunt slogans for scenes, doubts and contradictions. Paul Simonon’s bass is central to the record’s physical pull, and his vocal turn on Guns of Brixton adds a colder, more controlled shade to the palette. Built on a taut reggae rhythm, the song’s sense of unease and inevitability reflects the lived tensions of South London without theatrical exaggeration. “When they knock on your front door, how you gonna come? With your hands on your head or on the trigger of your gun.” – now that is Thatcher’s London Punk ‘1979 style’.

The deeper cuts are where London Calling truly reveals its confidence. Koka Kola disguises its critique of creeping Americanisation beneath a jaunty shuffle, its irony sharpened by how pleasant it sounds. Spanish Bombs is one of Strummer’s finest lyrics, fragmented and poetic, its half-remembered Spanish phrases and images of civil war and tourism colliding into a meditation on distance, memory and solidarity. The Four Horsemen lurches forward with apocalyptic humour, biblical imagery delivered with a grin that barely masks the anxiety beneath. Death or Glory pairs one of Jones’s most immediate melodies with a lyric that quietly punctures the romance of rebellion itself.

Even the stylistic detours serve a purpose. Lover’s Rock leans into reggae’s sensuality without losing tension. Wrong ’Em Boyo tips its hat to ska’s roots with genuine affection, not as nostalgia but as acknowledgement. Each track adds another voice, another rhythm, sketching a map of London as a listening city where cultures collide and converse.

Holding this sprawl together was producer Guy Stevens, a volatile and divisive presence whose background proved crucial. Stevens came from an earlier era, steeped in rhythm and blues and shaped by his work with Mott the Hoople. He believed in feel above all else. Precision bored him. Commitment did not. His behaviour in the studio has become part of the album’s mythology, but beneath the chaos was a clear philosophy. Stevens pushed the band to play as if the songs might fall apart at any moment, to reach for performances that felt dangerous rather than correct.

That approach suits London Calling perfectly. The record breathes. Tempos flex. Instruments bleed into one another. There is space in the sound, even at its densest, and a looseness that gives tracks like Clampdown and Guns of Brixton their physical weight. The tension between band and producer was real, but it was productive, forcing instinct to override caution.

As a production, the album strikes a rare balance. It sounds expansive without being bloated, raw without being thin. The double album format could easily have sunk it, but instead it allows the band to pace the journey, each side carrying its own momentum and mood. By the time Train in Vain fades out, there is a sense of having travelled not just through styles, but through arguments, fears and affirmations.

Decades on, London Calling remains a challenge as much as a classic. It asks whether a band can grow without losing its edge, whether politics and pleasure can coexist, whether history can be acknowledged without becoming a trap. The sleeve still feels perfect. The songs still feel urgent. Guy Stevens’s restless spirit still hums through the grooves. The Clash did not simply make a great double album. They made a statement of intent that continues to sound alive, unresolved and necessary.

RETROSPECTIVE: Thirty Minutes Of Mayhem. Damned Damned Damned

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A retrospective look at The Damned’s 1976 debut Damned Damned Damned, exploring its raw punk impact, riotous sleeve photography and lasting legacy in British music history.

The Damned debut album from 1976.

The Damned crashed into 1976 like a brick through a Woolworths window. Their debut, Damned Damned Damned, was the first British punk LP that truly meant business. While others in the class of 76 mooted revolution, The Damned simply plugged in, bashed it out and left the wreckage where it fell.

Captain Sensible’s guitar is jagged and loud. Brian James’ riffs sound like they were dragged straight from a petrol soaked rehearsal room. Rat Scabies plays as if the kit has personally insulted him. Dave Vanian croons through the chaos with that odd (and enduring) mix of horror film charm and rock ’n’ roll sneer. It was equally messy, sharp and exciting.

“New Rose” remains the lightning strike. It was the first British punk single to hit the shops and it still tears out of the speakers… “Is she really going out with him?”. “Neat Neat Neat” speeds along with a bass line that seems permanently on the edge of collapse. “Born to Kill” and “Fan Club” show they had more depth than the cartoon horror look suggested. Compared to the art-school cool of some of their peers, The Damned sounded like blokes who simply wanted to play faster and louder than everyone else and didn’t care what you thought.

The decades since have added even more shine to the story. The band ended up outlasting nearly every punk rock group they were once lumped in with. While others imploded or retreated into myth, these lads carried on through countless line-up changes, resurrections and strange detours. From goth phases to psychedelic experiments, their legacy stretches far beyond this debut. Yet fans and critics always return to Damned Damned Damned as the moment punk hit tape with no filter.

The sleeve jumped out of the racks in its day. You could spot it from across the shop floor. That Brian Griffin photograph of the band splattered in cream pies looked nothing like the punk imagery doing the rounds. It was chaotic and cheeky, like a food fight in a youth club. The rough black border and the bold caps font gave it a low budget feel, yet it had real intent behind it. Stiff Records always liked sleeves that poked fun at rock seriousness and this one did it perfectly. The original release mistakenly added an Eddie and the Hotrods group pic on the reverse (now collectable) or was it a mistake? Until a reprint was ready Stiff added a sticker ‘Erratum – apologies blah blah blah”, but was that a little cash from chaos before that term was coined by the competition? You’re even wealthier if you own the sleeve with the cellophane near-obliteration of The Damned cover for those Seventies shops whose sensibilities may have been offended.

The story behind the money shot only added to the charm. The band thought it would be a quick prank. Instead the shoot descended into real mayhem, with arguments, laughter and cream everywhere. You can see it in the image. It is not staged rebellion. It is four lads caught mid racket. For fans flicking through racks in 1977, that sleeve was a promise. Buy this and you will get noise, mischief and a band who do not take themselves too seriously. It still works today. ‘Made to be played loud at low volume’, it sez so on the label

The album still feels alive. It captures a time before punk had any rules, before the press boxed it in, before major labels tried to polish it. By modern standards the record is rough. That roughness is its charm. It is the sound of four musicians in a hurry, playing like the whole world is about to shut their gig down.

Looking back almost fifty years later, Damned Damned Damned remains a blast. It is not a museum piece – although the sleeve is now peak-zeitgeist. It is not a nostalgia trip. It is a reminder that British punk began with noise, risk and instinct rather than theory. The Damned were first out of the traps and they made sure no one forgot it.

RETROSPECTIVE: We’re Selling England By The Pound

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A retrospective of Genesis’ ‘Selling England By The Pound’. The band’s fifth long player from 1973 is a Progressive Rock classic that captured a changing newly decimal Britain through Mellotrons, lawnmower men and Cockney villains. Essential listening for anyone who thinks Prog Rock was all capes and codswallop. Genesis proved you could be both preposterous and profound.


GENESIS: Selling England By The Pound (Charisma) 1973

There was something gloriously, quintessentially English about Genesis that set them apart from the prog rock pack cluttering up the album charts in 1973. Where Yes disappeared up their own cosmic backsides and ELP bludgeoned you with their virtuosity, Peter Gabriel and his merry band of public schoolboys crafted something altogether more peculiar and affecting with this, their fifth album.

Selling England By The Pound arrived at a curious juncture for the band. After the commercial disappointment of Foxtrot failing to break America (despite ‘Supper’s Ready’ being the sort of 23-minute epic that should have had the Yanks weeping into their cornflakes), Genesis regrouped and produced what many consider their defining statement. Recorded at Island Studios with John Burns and the band sharing production duties, this was a record that positively reeked of England in 1973: a country caught between nostalgia for its crumbling past and uncertainty about its increasingly tatty future.

The album opened with ‘Dancing With The Moonlit Knight’, which nicked its central melody from ‘I Know What I Like’ before that song even appeared. Gabriel’s lyrics were stuffed with references to Wimpy Bars, breakfast cereal mascots and Churchill’s England, painting a portrait of a nation flogging off its heritage for American consumer tat. “Can you tell me where my country lies?” he asked, and you suspected he already knew the answer. Tony Banks’ Mellotron swirled around like fog over the Home Counties while Steve Hackett’s guitar work was, as ever, economical but devastating.

‘I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)’ was the obvious single, and it proved a canny choice. Built around Phil Collins’ crisp, almost funky drumming and a nursery rhyme melody, it told the story of a lawnmower man content with his lot. It was Genesis at their most accessible, which wasn’t saying much, but there was real charm in its eccentricity. The promotional film they shot, with Gabriel prancing about in a cloth cap and braces, was either brilliant or barmy. Possibly both.

But it was ‘Firth of Fifth’ that had the musos wetting themselves. Banks’ opening piano passage was genuinely beautiful, all cascading romanticism and melancholy, before the band crashed in with typical Genesis precision. Hackett’s guitar solo in the instrumental section was an absolute belter, soaring and lyrical without ever tipping into tedious showboating. If you needed to convince someone that progressive rock could be genuinely moving rather than just technically accomplished, this was the track to stick on the turntable.

‘More Fool Me’, sung by Collins, was a bit of pleasant fluff really, though his voice had a vulnerability that suited the material. ‘The Battle of Epping Forest’, however, was vintage Gabriel madness: a nine-minute saga about rival gangs of Cockney villains that name-checked half of East London and featured more characters than a Dickens novel. It was exhausting, occasionally bewildering, but never boring. The time signatures flipped about like eels while Gabriel adopted various accents and personas. You either thought it was genius or pretentious twaddle. This writer leaned towards the former.

The album closed with ‘The Cinema Show’ and ‘Aisle of Plenty’, the latter essentially a reprise that bookended the record nicely. ‘The Cinema Show’ was another lengthy piece that referenced T.S. Eliot and featured some of the most intricate playing on the record. Banks’ organ work was particularly fine, while the rhythm section of Collins and Mike Rutherford locked together with the sort of telepathy that only came from years of playing school halls and student unions together.

What was remarkable about Selling England By The Pound was how distinctly British it sounded. This wasn’t blues-rock or heavy metal or glam. It was something altogether stranger: folk melodies colliding with classical pretensions, Edwardian music hall meeting avant-garde rock, all filtered through the sensibilities of five blokes who probably read too much Tolkien at Charterhouse.

Gabriel remained one of rock’s most fascinating frontmen, a genuine oddball who could make theatrical gestures seem vital rather than risible. His lyrics here were his best yet, full of wordplay and social observation, even if they occasionally veered into sixth-form poetry territory. The rest of the band were operating at a level of musicianship that would have been intimidating if it wasn’t in service of actual songs rather than mere technical exercises.

Did this prove to be the album that broke Genesis to a wider audience? Not quite. They were far too weird, too English, too prog for that. But for those willing to enter their peculiar world, Selling England By The Pound was a rich and rewarding experience.