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RETROSPECTIVE: The Velvet Underground & Nico

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Hardly anyone bought it. The figure usually given is around 10,000 copies in the first year, which is a guess, but nobody disputes the estimate or relevance. The album crept to number 171 on the Billboard chart, sat there briefly and dropped away. Radio ignored it. With Sixties sensibilities some shops refused to stock it. It came out in March 1967, between Sgt. Pepper and the Monterey festival, and it was a record about drug dealers, sadomasochism and the grey misery of a Manhattan morning, with a banana on the front.

Brian Eno later said that everyone who bought a copy went off and formed a band. He was exaggerating, and he said it in an interview rather than carving it in stone, but the instinct was right. Bowie, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Television, the Ramones, Roxy Music, Joy Division, Sonic Youth, R.E.M. and the Jesus and Mary Chain all took something from it. Most of them heard it years late, from a second-hand copy or a friend’s older brother. The album did its work on a delay.

The Velvet Underground and Nico. A retrospective review of this most influential of Sixties albums.


Four people and a loft

Lou Reed grew up in Freeport, Long Island, on doo-wop and rhythm and blues. At Syracuse University he studied under the poet Delmore Schwartz, who drank hard, talked brilliantly and told his students that writing mattered more than almost anything. Reed took that to heart. After graduating he landed a job at Pickwick Records, writing cheap imitation hits for budget compilations, often in an afternoon. People tend to forget this part. Reed could write a hook on demand, and the best songs on the album are proper pop songs that happen to be dressed in filth.

John Cale came from a Welsh mining village and trained as a classical violist and pianist. A scholarship took him to America, where he drifted into the New York avant-garde and ended up playing in La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music, a group that held single notes for hours. Cale arrived in rock with a head full of drones and no interest in the twelve-bar blues. He turned his viola into something closer to a ship’s horn, and it gave the band a sound that no one else had.

Sterling Morrison, an old friend of Reed’s from Syracuse, played guitar and is usually the one left out of the story. He shouldn’t be. Morrison’s lines wind around Reed’s rhythm playing with a calm precision, and they stop the noisier songs from falling apart.

Maureen Tucker was the last piece, and arguably the strangest. She played standing up, with mallets rather than sticks, on a bass drum laid on its side, and she hardly touched a cymbal. She never played a fill. Her beat just kept going, flat and insistent, like a pulse you couldn’t turn off. Drummers in the punk and indie scenes learned from her that leaving things out can hit harder than putting them in.

They called themselves the Velvet Underground after a trashy paperback about sexual subcultures that Cale had picked up off a pavement. Reed and Cale shared a cheap apartment on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side. They rehearsed constantly, argued constantly and wrote about the life going on outside the window.

What they were writing about

Pop in 1966 was getting brighter. The Beatles were making Revolver. Brian Wilson was building Pet Sounds. Dylan had gone electric. California was filling up with flowers and long guitar solos. Reed wrote about scoring heroin.

“I’m Waiting for the Man” is a plain report of a white kid taking the train up to Harlem with twenty-six dollars. The piano pounds one chord over and over, and the band drives along like someone walking too fast through a street he doesn’t trust. Nobody in the song is a hero or a victim. Everyone just wants the afternoon to be over.

“Heroin” is harder to listen to. Reed doesn’t warn you off the drug and he doesn’t sell it to you either. The band speeds up and slows down with the rush, Cale’s viola screams, Tucker’s drums lurch ahead and fall back, and the whole thing ends up sounding like a person sinking and surfacing. It remains one of the most disturbing things ever recorded in a pop format, mainly because it keeps its opinions to itself.

“Venus in Furs” takes its title from Sacher-Masoch’s nineteenth-century novel. Cale’s viola drone gives it the sound of a ceremony held in a cellar somewhere in eastern Europe, and Tucker thumps out a slow march underneath. Fifty-odd years on it still sounds like it was made by people who had been told the rules and decided against them.

Then there is the other half of the record, which the reputation for decadence tends to bury. “Sunday Morning” opens the album with a celesta chime and a lullaby tune, sung by Reed in a voice that sounds tired and slightly nervous. “Femme Fatale” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror” are tender songs, sung by Nico, built from plain words and simple chords. “I’ll Be Your Mirror” in particular is about as direct a love song as any written in the sixties. It is often said to be about Nico herself, though Reed gave different answers at different times.

“Black Angel’s Death Song” is the oddity, a stuttering poem over a scraping viola that was apparently too much even for the club where they played it. “European Son” closes the record with a long, deliberately wrecked jam full of feedback and smashing glass, dedicated to Delmore Schwartz. It is a loud goodbye, and plenty of listeners still skip it.

The range is what makes the album. They could be vicious and gentle on the same side of the record, and they never apologised for either.

Warhol

By 1965 Andy Warhol was already famous. The soup cans and the Marilyns had made him the most talked-about artist in America, and his studio, the Factory, had become the place where painters, models, drag queens, poets, hangers-on and addicts mixed. Warhol wanted to try his hand at managing a band, partly out of curiosity and partly because it fitted his idea of art as something you could make in any medium.

The group was found playing at the Café Bizarre in Greenwich Village, where the film-maker Barbara Rubin took Warhol and his associate Paul Morrissey to watch them. A deal followed. Warhol would present the band as part of a travelling multimedia show called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a sensory assault of live music, projected films, strobe lights and dancers, with Gerard Malanga cracking a whip across the stage. It was designed to overwhelm, and it did.

Warhol’s actual contribution to the album is smaller than the legend suggests. He paid for the first recording sessions, which gave the band the freedom to work without a label breathing down their necks, and he lent them his reputation. He is credited as producer, but by most accounts he sat in the control room and said very little. The engineering was handled by Norman Dolph, and when Verve took on the record, Tom Wilson tidied the final mixes. Wilson had produced Dylan’s electric records and he knew how to get rough music onto vinyl without scrubbing out its character. He rarely gets the credit he deserves.

Warhol did make one decision that changed the group. He wanted a female singer, and he had a particular one in mind.

Nico

Christa Päffgen, known as Nico, was born in Cologne in 1938. She had modelled, appeared briefly in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, and made a single produced by Jimmy Page. Her voice was low, flat and strongly accented, with a coldness that made every line sound like it was coming from the far end of a corridor. Reed, Cale and Morrison were not delighted to have her foisted on them, and Reed in particular resented the attention she attracted.

The pairing worked anyway. Her singing on “Femme Fatale,” “I’ll Be Your Mirror” and “All Tomorrow’s Parties” gave the record a ghostly counterweight to Reed’s street-level sneer. “All Tomorrow’s Parties” is the standout, a grand, slow piano figure over a hammering rhythm, with Nico delivering a portrait of glamour that sounds like a party and a wake at the same time. Warhol is said to have rated it as his favourite song by the group.

She left after this one record and went on to make a run of bleak, brilliant solo albums, several of them produced by Cale. Her work here is a large part of what gives the record its mood.

Making it

The recording was messy. The first sessions took place in April 1966 at Scepter Studios, a cheap and run-down place in Manhattan. The band got through a lot of material in a few days, including early versions of “Heroin,” “Venus in Furs” and “Waiting for the Man.” Some of those takes surfaced much later as bonus material, and they are worth hearing for their rawness.

The tapes then went west. Verve, part of MGM, took on the album and brought in Wilson, and a few tracks were recorded or redone in Los Angeles. “Sunday Morning” was written late, after the label asked for something that could be released as a single. It is slightly funny that one of the album’s gentlest moments exists because a record company wanted a hit.

The record was finished in 1966 and didn’t come out until March 1967. The delay had several causes: the label dithered, Verve was busy with Zappa’s Freak Out!, and there was a legal complaint from Eric Emerson, a Factory regular whose photograph appeared on the back of the sleeve. The first copies were pulled and the sleeve was altered. When the album finally arrived, nobody at the label put much weight behind it.

The banana

The cover is a Warhol design, and it is as simple as album covers get: a yellow banana on a white ground, with his signature across it. On the first pressings the banana was a sticker. Pull it off and you found a pink, flesh-coloured banana underneath, with the instruction “Peel slowly and see” printed beside it. It is a joke that doesn’t take long to land.

The sleeve was fiddly and costly to make, and it added to the delays. It also shaped how the album was received. The Warhol name sold copies to the art crowd and put off the rock audience, who took the record for a pretentious sideshow. The band’s name appeared in small type on the back, and Nico’s barely at all. Still, the image outlasted the sales figures. It is now one of the most reproduced sleeves in history, printed on bags and t-shirts and hung in galleries.

Why it didn’t sell

Bad timing counts for a lot. The album arrived in the middle of the psychedelic boom, when audiences wanted colour, optimism and big guitar jams, and it had nothing to offer them. Radio programmers found the subject matter unacceptable, and the label had no idea how to promote it. MGM was far more comfortable with jazz and middle-of-the-road pop.

Critics didn’t help. A few were kind, but many dismissed the record as noise or as an art-world stunt. Rolling Stone didn’t exist yet, so the kind of writing that might have explained the band had nowhere to appear. The live shows were famous in New York and baffling elsewhere, and touring the rest of America turned out to be difficult.

The band also fell apart internally. Reed and Warhol clashed, and by the end of 1966 the group had split from their manager. The follow-up, White Light/White Heat, came out in early 1968 and was louder and nastier, as if the band was deliberately closing the door on a wider audience. Cale was out by the end of 1968. The group carried on without him and made two much gentler albums, but the original line-up never recorded together again.

The long fuse

What saved the album was other musicians. Bowie got hold of an acetate through his manager in 1966 and was playing “I’m Waiting for the Man” on stage before the record had even come out. He kept the Velvets in his head for years, and in 1972 he co-produced Reed’s Transformer. Iggy Pop and the Stooges took the rawness. Jonathan Richman of the Modern Lovers worshipped the band. The New York punk scene of the mid-seventies, from Television to Patti Smith to the Ramones, treated them as ancestors. In Britain, Roxy Music, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division and later the Jesus and Mary Chain all drew on the same combination of cold detachment, repetitive rhythm and noise.

The reasons are fairly simple. The record showed that you didn’t need virtuosity to make serious music. You needed three chords, a steady beat, something to say and the nerve to say it. For a teenager in 1976 with a cheap guitar and a bad attitude, that was permission.

The critical verdict has since turned all the way round. The album sits high on most greatest-ever lists, and Rolling Stone put it in the top twenty of its 2003 ranking. The Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry in 2006.

Sorting the legend from the facts

A few of the stories that cling to this album deserve a second look. Warhol is often described as its producer, which is true on the credits and not in the studio. The claim that nobody bought it overstates things slightly, since it did chart, though the sales were poor by any measure. The line about every buyer starting a band is Eno’s joke, repeated until it hardened into fact. And the idea that the band loathed Nico is too tidy. Reed in particular found her presence awkward, but they wrote some of their most beautiful songs for her, and the album would be much weaker without her.

One more point is easy to miss. The record wasn’t recognised as a classic in the seventies. Its standing built slowly through the eighties and nineties, as punk, post-punk and indie created an audience that already spoke the language.

Playing it now

Put the record on today and the first thing you notice is how little it sounds like 1967. Tucker’s drumming could sit on an album from any decade since. Cale’s viola still sounds odd. Reed’s lyrics are still blunt, and they still don’t flinch.

It isn’t an easy listen from start to finish, and it was never meant to be. The run from “Sunday Morning” to “Waiting for the Man” to “Femme Fatale” to “Venus in Furs” swings between tenderness and menace so quickly that it can feel like whiplash. “European Son” at the end is a test of patience. Stay with it anyway.

A few people in a rented loft, a rich patron with a taste for the odd, and a banana made a record that almost nobody wanted. Within ten years it was everywhere.

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: 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.

Opinion: Damnatio Memoriae To You Two

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The Romans believed you could kill a man twice: once with a knife, and once with a chisel. Damnatio memoriae was the final insult – the attempt to erase a disgraced leader not just from power, but from history itself. Names scraped from stone. Faces smashed out of marble. A bureaucratic fantasy that if you removed the image, the damage would politely follow it into oblivion.

It never did.

Which is worth remembering when people fantasise about a future where Donald Trump or Nigel Farage are somehow airbrushed out of the record, as if history might do us the courtesy of forgetting its own mistakes. They won’t be erased. They’ll be preserved, not as heroes, but as warnings.

Rome’s condemned emperors weren’t nobodies. They were reminders of moments when the system broke down, when spectacle replaced competence and grievance became governance. That’s why the Senate went after their memory so aggressively: not because they were insignificant, but because they were awkward. Proof that power had slipped the leash.

Trump and Farage sit in that same uncomfortable space. Not great statesmen, not master strategists, just opportunists who learned how to monetise anger in an era of economic erosion and cultural exhaustion. They didn’t invent the decay; they surfed it, grinning, while institutions buckled beneath them.

Like those defaced Roman busts, their absence would tell a louder story than their presence ever could. You don’t explain the early 21st century without explaining how democratic systems proved so pliable, how media ecosystems rewarded provocation over truth, how resentment was sold as authenticity and bought in bulk.

History doesn’t forget figures like this. It labels them. Contextualises them. Pins them to the page with a quiet but devastating caption: this is what happens when inequality deepens, trust collapses, and politics becomes theatre. The real memorial isn’t a statue, it’s the wreckage left behind. Fractured discourse. Weakened norms. A lingering sense that the rules are optional if you shout loudly enough.

So no damnatio memoriae here. No chisels, no erasure. Just the long, cold afterlife of being remembered as a cautionary tale, the kind future generations study not with admiration, but with disbelief that it was ever allowed to happen at all.

OPINION: The 51st State Thought Experiment

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Britain becoming the 51st state is fantasy. Britain choosing to behave like one is not. This what-if examination explores how a pro-US Reform government could radically reshape the economy, science and social contract by embracing American models rather than apologising for them.


The fantasy is not that Britain becomes the 51st state of America. The fantasy is that Britain can continue as it is – adrift from Europe and with a tenuous US trade agreement. The more plausible future is less dramatic and far more unsettling: a sovereign Britain that keeps the Crown, the pound and its sense of self, but quietly reorganises its economy and institutions around an American centre of gravity.

A pro-US Reform government would not ask for stars on the flag. It would do something more radical and more realistic. It would ask whether Britain’s post-war settlement, its economic etiquette and its suspicion of ambition are still fit for a century shaped by American power, capital and technology.

The 51st state thought experiment matters not because it might happen, but because it exposes what would change if Britain stopped pretending it was something other than what it already is: a mid-sized, high-talent, under-leveraged economy living inside an American system without admitting it.

Britain already inhabits an American world. Its security is guaranteed by American military power. Its technology sector is fuelled by American capital. Its cultural output is measured against American benchmarks, even when it pretends to resist them. What Britain lacks is not independence, but honesty.

A Reform government aligned with the United States would frame this not as submission, but as realism. Growth before comfort. Scale before sentiment. Outcomes before process. Britain would remain sovereign, but it would stop behaving as though sovereignty meant insulation from global gravity.

This would mark the end of Britain’s long habit of moralising its own inertia. The language would change. Decline would no longer be described as dignity. Stagnation would no longer be defended as fairness. Alignment would become a choice, not an embarrassment.

The central economic shift would be philosophical. Growth would cease to be treated as a happy accident and start being treated as a moral obligation. Labour markets would be loosened. Planning laws would be stripped back in the name of speed. Capital would be welcomed without apology. Failure would be tolerated rather than stigmatised.

The results would look uncomfortably American. More volatility. More visible inequality. More upside for those prepared to move quickly and take risk. Regions that adapt would accelerate. Regions that do not would fall further behind.

This would be defended as an end to managed decline. Britain has spent decades spreading stagnation evenly and calling it social justice. A pro-US Reform government would argue that fairness without growth is simply decay with better manners.

In this Britain, personal wealth would stop being something that required apology. Equity would matter more than salary. Ownership would matter more than tenure. The cultural suspicion of ambition would be quietly retired.

This would produce more millionaires and more discomfort. Britain’s class system has always existed, but it prefers to operate in soft focus. An American-style economic reboot would sharpen the image. Winners would be obvious. So would those left behind.

The political wager would be that aspiration matters more than equality, and that people tolerate inequality better than they tolerate the sense that nothing ever improves.

Britain’s strongest case for alignment lies in science and technology. This is not a declining sector, nor a fragile one. Britain is already a serious force in artificial intelligence, life sciences, quantum computing, climate tech and fintech. Its problem is not ideas, but scale.

A pro-US Reform government would align regulation, funding and research priorities with the American innovation system. Capital would move more freely. Defence and dual-use research would be expanded. Universities would be treated less as heritage institutions and more as strategic assets.

The effect would be immediate. Fewer startups selling early to Silicon Valley. More companies scaling at home. London, Cambridge, Oxford, Manchester and Edinburgh operating as an integrated research and innovation corridor plugged directly into American capital and compute.

The cost would be autonomy. Britain would risk becoming a research engine for American priorities rather than a global rule-setter in its own right. But the counter-argument would be blunt. Ideas without scale are just exports waiting to happen.

The NHS would survive a Reform reboot, but it would lose its untouchable status. A hybrid system would emerge, closer to American reality than European idealism. Public provision would remain a floor, not a ceiling. Private care would be normalised rather than whispered about. Insurance-style supplementation would spread quietly.

Outcomes would improve for those with money and worsen for those without resilience. Access would speed up. Anxiety would rise. But the system would become more honest about what it can and cannot provide.

The Reform case would be unapologetic. A healthcare system that functions primarily as a moral symbol is not a functioning system.

Education would be reframed as strategic infrastructure. Elite universities would be celebrated rather than apologised for. Fees would be defended as investment. Student debt would be normalised. Skills pipelines would be aligned ruthlessly with technology, defence, engineering and energy.

Inequality would arrive earlier, but ceilings would rise. Britain would stop pretending that universal sameness produces excellence, and start admitting that outcomes depend on concentration of resources and intent.

The most disruptive change would be cultural. Politics would become louder, faster and more confrontational. Consensus would be treated as delay. Consultation would be seen as obstruction. Media would grow more polarised, more performative and more American.

Britain would lose some of its quiet decency and gain a sense of direction. Whether that trade is worth making depends on how much one values calm over momentum.

Would this Britain work? Economically, almost certainly. Technologically, very likely. Socially, only if Britain accepts that equality of outcome is no longer the organising principle.

This is the truth buried inside the 51st state thought experiment. Britain does not need to become American. It needs to decide whether it still believes in growth, ambition and power, or whether it prefers decline that feels fair.

A pro-US Reform government would not be asking Britain to surrender its identity. It would be asking whether that identity has become a comfortable excuse for underperformance. The future on offer is not annexation. It is acceleration.

The real question is not whether Britain could survive behaving more like America. It is whether it can survive continuing to pretend it is not already living in America’s world.

OPINION: Art Punk & The Dismissal Of Punk Orthodoxy

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Art punk was the moment punk stopped congratulating itself and started asking harder questions. Emerging in the late Seventies as a dismissal of punk orthodoxy and refusal to let that rebellion calcify into costume. It channelled punk’s energy through conceptual art, minimalism, electronics and a deep suspicion of rock mythology. Bands on both sides of the Atlantic treated punk less as a sound than as a method, stripping it down, warping it and, in some cases, dismantling it altogether. What followed was music that alienated as often as it thrilled, and in doing so quietly reshaped everything that came after.


Art punk was never a genre anyone involved bothered to name at the time. Like most labels that later harden into received wisdom, it was applied by critics trying to explain why certain Seventies punk records sounded wilfully strange, emotionally evasive and intellectually awkward compared to the pub-brawl version of punk that nostalgia prefers to freeze-frame. Punk, in the familiar story, was about demolition, a righteous zero hour where rock was burned down and rebuilt from instinct alone. Art punk accepted the need for destruction, then immediately started asking what else might be salvaged from the wreckage. Ideas, for one. Doubt, irony, formal experiment, the suspicion that rock music might actually benefit from thinking too hard about itself.

The distinction was not technical ability or even experimentation for its own sake, but intent. Art punk distrusted punk’s own emerging clichés almost as much as it despised the bloated theatrics of Seventies rock. It had no interest in authenticity as sweat or sincerity, seeing both as just another costume. Instead, it treated rock as a medium to be dismantled, reframed and occasionally mocked. Songs could be cut short, stretched into abstraction or reduced to repetition. Lyrics might read like fragments, slogans or private jokes at the listener’s expense. Performance itself became a problem to be solved, often by draining it of charisma altogether.

New York provided the first sustained proof that punk did not have to mean bluntness. Television looked like a rock band but behaved like a literary salon with amplifiers. Their long, spiralling guitar lines owed more to jazz, poetry and restraint than to punk’s scorched-earth economy. Marquee Moon remains a provocation precisely because it refuses easy allegiance. It is neither punk-as-slogan nor rock-as-spectacle, but something cool, elevated and faintly aloof, a record that suggested punk might be a framework rather than a rulebook.

Talking Heads took a different route, draining punk of romance and replacing it with tension. Early Talking Heads records sound like anxiety formalised, clipped rhythms and minimal figures supporting lyrics obsessed with alienation, systems and self-surveillance. Borrowing freely from Dada, conceptual art and pop anthropology, they treated the modern city as both subject and laboratory. Punk here was no longer about escape but about exposure, about making the listener sit with their own discomfort.

If Talking Heads intellectualised punk, Suicide obliterated its remaining assumptions. Drum machines, primitive synthesisers and confrontational repetition stripped rock to its barest, most threatening elements. Suicide were not interested in scenes, solidarity or even approval. Their music functioned like an endurance test, daring audiences to confront boredom, menace and emotional void. In retrospect, they feel less like a punk band than a warning about where punk might end up if it followed its own logic to the extreme.

That logic became even more unstable in the American Midwest. Pere Ubu sounded like industrial collapse rendered as art. Drawing on musique concrète, free jazz and an atmosphere of civic decay, they made punk that felt genuinely alien. The Modern Dance was not a refinement of punk but a mutation, proving that the form could absorb noise, abstraction and paranoia without becoming polite. It is no accident that later British post-punk musicians treated Pere Ubu less as peers than as evidence that almost anything was possible.

Conceptual control reached its most explicit form with Devo, who turned the band into a piece of performance art. Their theory of de-evolution, identical uniforms and mechanical rhythms drained rock of humanist pretence. Devo’s satire was not playful but forensic, exposing the stupidity and conformity beneath American optimism. Punk, for them, was simply the most efficient delivery system for bad news.

In Britain, art punk arrived not as an opening statement but as punk’s second thought. Once the safety pins were commodified and the outrage routinised, bands began interrogating what punk could still do. Wire understood earlier than most that punk’s real weapon was not speed or volume but reduction. Pink Flag treated songs as raw material, slogans rather than statements. What followed was even more radical: a steady erasure of punk itself in favour of electronics, abstraction and distance. Wire did not betray punk. They completed it, then moved on.

Magazine offered a more overtly literary escape route. Howard Devoto replaced punk’s blunt nihilism with modernist unease, his lyrics circling alienation, desire and power rather than simply rejecting everything in sight. The music incorporated keyboards and art-rock structures without lapsing into comfort. Magazine mattered because they insisted that punk intelligence did not have to disguise itself as rage.

If some of this still looked like rock music, Throbbing Gristle arrived to ensure that nobody in the U.K. at least felt safe confusing art punk with entertainment. Emerging directly from the performance art collective COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle treated sound as material and provocation as principle. Tape loops, electronics, transgression and deliberate moral discomfort replaced songs altogether. Their work sits at the outer edge of art punk, but it is essential, because it demonstrates the endgame of punk taken seriously as an artistic idea rather than a style. Once you accept that anything can be questioned, you eventually question whether music needs to behave like music at all.

The influences that shaped these bands rarely pointed backwards. Minimalism suggested repetition without payoff. Krautrock offered propulsion without blues heritage. In praise of negative space Dub revealed space and absence as compositional tools. Conceptual art legitimised irony, framing and emotional detachment. Above all, art punk rejected sincerity as a moral virtue. Authenticity, as rock had defined it, was exposed as another sentimental fiction.

What makes art punk still matter is how badly it fits with the way punk is now remembered. Contemporary punk nostalgia prefers leather jackets, simple narratives and the comforting lie that rebellion can be endlessly replayed without consequence. Art punk tells a harsher truth. It says that punk only mattered when it refused to behave, when it alienated its audience, when it dismantled its own myths faster than the market could package them. Very little of that spirit survives in a culture that treats punk as heritage branding.

Art punk was not about saving punk. It was about proving that punk was disposable. That once its job was done, the only honest response was to push it somewhere uncomfortable and leave it there. The real scandal is not that punk ended, but that so much of what followed pretended it never asked these questions at all.

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.

CURRENT AFFAIRS: USA Rogue State? Part 2

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Following the events of January 3rd a continuation piece from my article USA Rogue State? February 2025.

USA: Rogue State? (Part 2) – A New Precedent

The great conflicts of our time still loom. Ukraine grinds on, the Baltic states remain taut, and Taiwan sits under permanent pressure. Yet America’s sudden strike on Venezuela suggests something else is shifting first: the way power is exercised, and the ease with which it is now justified.

The world has not tipped into open war. Not yet.

Ukraine grinds on. The Baltic states remain tense but intact. The Taiwan Strait is still defined more by naval choreography than gunfire. The much-trailed great-power collisions remain, for now, on the horizon. But something else has moved, quieter perhaps, and more corrosive.

The overnight American strike on Venezuela, unilateral and justified after the fact, is not the opening act of global conflict. It is something subtler and potentially more dangerous: a precedent in search of a doctrine.

Washington insists this was exceptional. A sui generis response to criminality, corruption and national collapse. That argument would be more persuasive were it not the standard preamble to almost every intervention of the past three decades. Exceptionalism, after all, has form.

What unsettles is not simply that the United States acted, but how easily it did so, and how thin the legal and diplomatic scaffolding appeared to be. There was no UN mandate. No coalition patiently assembled. No serious attempt to clothe the operation in the rituals of multilateral consent. This was not Iraq redux. There was no effort to persuade the world. There was merely an announcement that it had been done.

For America’s adversaries, this is not hypocrisy newly discovered. Moscow and Beijing have long dismissed the so-called rules-based order as a euphemism for American latitude. But the Venezuelan operation offers them something more useful than rhetoric. Evidence.

Russia, already at war in Europe, will draw a bitter but clarifying lesson. Allies, however loyal, are expendable when they cease to be useful or defensible. Venezuela was a geopolitical bauble: oil-rich, symbolically defiant, but strategically indefensible from Moscow’s perspective. Its removal does not weaken Russia militarily, but it further narrows the map of places where Russian power can plausibly shelter its friends.

This matters not because Venezuela was ever decisive to Russia’s fortunes, but because it represented something Moscow increasingly lacks: the ability to project influence beyond its immediate neighbourhood. One by one, those outposts are disappearing. The loss tightens Russia’s isolation at precisely the moment it can least afford it.

China’s calculation is quieter, but potentially more consequential.

Beijing does not depend on Venezuelan oil to function. It has diversified too carefully for that. But Venezuela has been useful precisely because it lay outside American influence, a supplier insulated from Washington’s leverage, sanctions and electoral mood swings. Energy security is not merely about volume. It is about options.

A Venezuela governed from Washington, or by a government whose survival depends upon Washington, removes one of those options. Oil that once flowed eastward under long-term arrangements may now be repriced, redirected, or simply discouraged. No announcement is required. Markets, like diplomats, understand power when they see it.

None of this proves motive. It does not need to. Geopolitics rarely operates on confession. The point is consequence. The removal of Maduro does not merely tidy up a regional problem. It reshapes the strategic environment in which Russia and China already feel increasingly hemmed in.

For the Baltic states, the lesson is more ambiguous. On the one hand, the operation demonstrates that American power remains overwhelming and decisively usable. On the other, it underlines an uncomfortable truth: US force is increasingly discretionary. It is deployed where Washington wills, not where treaties alone demand. Deterrence depends not only on capability, but on predictability, and predictability is precisely what has been weakened.

China, watching from Beijing, will be less interested in Venezuela itself than in the method. Taiwan is not Caracas. The military, economic and reputational costs of a move across the Strait are of a different order altogether. But the Venezuelan strike sharpens two competing instincts within Chinese strategic thinking.

The first is urgency: act before American resolve hardens further. The second is caution: note how swiftly international opinion curdles when sovereignty is breached without consent.

Beijing’s preferred posture remains pressure without ignition. Encirclement without invasion. Venezuela does not alter that calculus overnight, but it adds a volatile data point to an already unstable equation.

What Ukraine, the Baltics and Taiwan share is that they are already priced into global risk. Markets, militaries and ministries have learned to live with them. Venezuela was different precisely because it was unexpected. It did not emerge from slow escalation or a frozen conflict thawing. It arrived fully formed, announced as fait accompli.

This is why the episode matters beyond Latin America. It suggests a United States increasingly comfortable with post-hoc justification, less concerned with international buy-in, and more willing to test how far its power can be exercised before resistance coheres. That is not rogue behaviour in the cartoon sense, but it is a form of strategic unilateralism that corrodes the very norms Washington claims to uphold.

Supporters will argue that the outcome justifies the method. That a malign regime has been removed. That oil markets will stabilise. That a long-suffering population may yet glimpse reform. All of this may prove true. But outcomes do not erase precedents. They entrench them.

The question, then, is not whether America is a rogue state. The term remains too blunt, too loaded, too performative. The better question is whether the United States is becoming a situational state, one that applies law, restraint and multilateralism when convenient, and dispenses with them when speed or advantage beckons.

History suggests this is not a sustainable posture. Empires can ignore rules only while they write them. The moment others begin to improvise in response, the system fractures.

The great conflicts remain on the horizon. But Venezuela reminds us that the road towards them may not be paved with grand confrontations or red-line speeches. It may instead be littered with smaller, sharper acts, each justified, each exceptional, each making the next one easier.

And that, more than any tank column or missile test, is what should give us pause.

Next. Will a rogue USA look North?

Venezuela will not be the template. It will be the permission. Once permission is granted, the question is no longer where America will act next, but how those closest in Canada and Greenland will recognise the moment when alignment begins to feel like absorption. In his peculiar way Trump has asked nicely, we are beginning to see that this USA will simply take what doesn’t capitulate easily.

RETROSPECTIVE: Dire Straits’ 1980 Audiophile Delight

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A retrospective review of Dire Straits’ 1980 album Making Movies. Knopfler’s technical brilliance meets romantic melancholy in an era that supposedly had no use for either. In my heavily late Seventies NME hack influenced style.


DIRE STRAITS: Making Movies (Vertigo) 1980

There was something deeply suspicious about a band this technically accomplished in 1980. While half of London was still thrashing about in bin liners and safety pins, Mark Knopfler’s lot turned up with an album so pristine, 38 minutes so meticulously crafted, that you half expected to find the corners mitred.

Making Movies arrived eighteen months after their self-titled debut made them improbable millionaires in America, and it was clear they’d been spending the intervening period in expensive studios rather than the back rooms of grotty pubs. Recorded at New York’s Power Station with Jimmy Iovine producing – the man who’d just finished polishing Springsteen’s The River – this was Dire Straits going for broke, or rather, going for more money than they’d already got.

The opening salvo, “Tunnel of Love,” sprawled across eight minutes like some Dylanesque fever dream filtered through a Tyneside accent. It was all fairgrounds and Spanish guitars, with Knopfler’s finger-picked lines circling each other like moths round a sodium lamp. The man played like he was being paid by the note, which he probably was.

“Romeo and Juliet” – which got played to death on Radio 1 – was the sort of thing that had sixth-formers scribbling lyrics in the back of their French textbooks for years. It was wretchedly romantic, all unrequited longing and cinema queues, with Knopfler doing his best to sound like he’d actually had his heart broken rather than just read about it in a Leonard Cohen novel.

But here was the rub: it worked. Despite themselves, despite the almost offensive levels of musicianship on display, despite the fact that punk never happened in their world, Dire Straits crafted something genuinely affecting. “Hand in Hand” swung like prime-era Dylan, while “Les Boys” – a tawdry tale of Parisian transvestites – had the sort of seediness that Bowie used to do before he discovered Switzerland and synthos.

The centrepiece, though, was “Skateaway,” a peculiar bit of New Wave-ish funk about a rollerskating girl cruising through urban decay. It had synthesizers, for God’s sake. Synthesizers! On a Dire Straits record! Pick Withers’ drumming was tighter than a gnat’s chuff, and the whole thing sounded like what might happen if Steely Dan decided to have a go at writing a hit single.

Mark Knopfler remained an enigma wrapped in a headband. His vocals sounded like he was perpetually on the verge of nodding off, yet there was a sly intelligence to his wordplay that elevated this above standard-issue soft rock tedium. He’d clearly listened to a lot of JJ Cale, a lot of Dylan, a lot of those American FM radio staples, and he wasn’t afraid to nick the best bits.

The production was, predictably, immaculate. Every hi-hat shimmer, every bass throb from John Illsley, every keyboard wash from Roy Bittan (on loan from the E Street Band, no less) sat exactly where it should. It was the sonic equivalent of a freshly Hoovered front room with the cushions all plumped up.

Which brought us back to that initial suspicion. In an era when the most exciting music was being made by people who could barely play their instruments, Dire Straits were almost confrontationally competent. They weren’t interested in year zero, in tearing it all down and starting again. They wanted to take you to the pictures, buy you chips on the way home, and maybe have a bit of a cuddle if you were lucky.

And you know what? Sometimes that was enough. Making Movies didn’t change your life or inspire you to form a band in your mate’s garage. But on a rainy Tuesday evening when you were skint and miserable and the world seemed determined to grind you down, it might just have made things seem temporarily bearable.

Which, in 1980, was worth something.

RETROSPECTIVE: Talking Heads – Remain In Light 1980

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Some records arrive like a whisper and fade, others crash in like an avalanche and leave you stumbling in their wake. Remain in Light is one of the latter, a slab of paranoia, rhythm, and obsession that still sounds as unmoored and visionary in 2025 as it did in 1980. Forty-five years on, the album hums with the intensity of four New Yorkers trying to rethink the world, their identities, and what a pop record could do. It is both human and alien, cerebral and primal, art-school gone feral. Listening now, you realise Talking Heads did not so much make an album as invent a language for disorientation.

Part One: The Sleeve

Pick up the sleeve and your first impression is confusion masquerading as design. Four faces, distorted and layered, hover in red, black, and white, a simulacrum of identity rendered through early MIT image-processing technology. The work of Tibor Kalman and M&Co, it feels both robotic and living. Your eyes register familiar features, only to be immediately unmoored. Tina Weymouth’s fascination with African masks, refracted through digital manipulation, turns the human face into a machine’s suggestion. It is uncanny, a whisper of the postmodern anxiety that would haunt the next four decades of visual culture.

Every detail matters. The typography is sharp and arresting, suggesting urgency without screaming. Fighter-bomber Avenger silhouettes and ghostly abstractions hover in the margins, hinting at violence, both literal and psychic. The design does not complement the music so much as anticipate it, a visual prelude to the interlocking chaos within. In 1980, it was a statement that identity was mutable, mediated, and constantly under negotiation. Today, that’s the norm.

Kalman’s brilliance was in making technological imperfection a part of the aesthetic. The faces are corrupted, glitched, degraded – human error filtered through a machine. This is not a record cover; it is a manifesto. By the time you slide the vinyl from its jacket, you are already prepared for disorientation. What follows is not just music, it is an ecosystem, a carefully constructed labyrinth designed to engage both body and mind.

Part Two: The Music & Legacy

Recording began at Compass Point Studios in Nassau, a sun-soaked bunker that would become a crucible for genius and frustration alike. The band was joined by Brian Eno, the unofficial fifth Head, whose influence was less about notes than architecture. He arrived with a philosophy: treat the studio as an instrument, treat chaos as composition, and do not flinch at failure. The sessions were famously intense. The band worked long, bewildering hours, layering loops, polyrhythms, and improvisations until something miraculous emerged from the mess.

The foundation was African-inspired polyrhythms, specifically the hypnotic grooves of Fela Kuti. This was not mere imitation; it was a translation of complex rhythmic systems into a New York art-rock vocabulary. Each instrument moves independently, a conversation of contradictions. Drums and percussion interlock but never collide, basslines snake around vocal hooks, and guitars oscillate between melody and texture. Adrian Belew’s guitar is both nervous and ecstatic, Jon Hassell’s trumpet drifts like a mirage, and Eno’s synthesizer textures shimmer in the spaces between. The record is dense yet breathable, controlled yet chaotic, deliberate yet accidental.

Byrne’s vocals are equally layered, a collage of obsessions and idiosyncrasies. He borrows from hip-hop cadences, ritualistic chant, and fragmented narrative, creating a delivery that is more incantation than song. The lyrics often circle existential dread with playful detachment. In “Born Under Punches”, Byrne’s voice is manic and fractured, a protagonist grappling with information overload and identity crisis. “Crosseyed and Painless” is a sermon on anxiety, paranoia, and social collapse, delivered with sharp wit and relentless rhythm.

The album’s architecture is deliberate. The first side, buoyed by kinetic energy, draws you into the labyrinth. “The Great Curve” is an ecstatic frenzy, the band locked in an ecstatic groove that simultaneously propels and destabilises. By the time “Once in a Lifetime” arrives, you are primed for reflection. The song balances existential inquiry with dance floor immediacy, Byrne pondering selfhood and entropy against a backdrop of hypnotic repetition. It is both absurd and devastatingly human.

Side two darkens the palette. “Houses in Motion” jitters with post-industrial dread, a cityscape of anxiety rendered in sound. “Seen and Not Seen” drifts toward abstraction, its protagonist dissolving into observation, a meditation on presence, absence, and perception. “Listening Wind” introduces political undercurrents, a commentary on global turbulence and American complacency filtered through dense polyrhythms and hypnotic motifs. The album closes with “The Overload”, a spectral transmission that hints at collapse and transcendence simultaneously.

The genius of Remain in Light lies in its simultaneity. It is both academic and visceral, cerebral and bodily. It occupies a transitional space where intellect and instinct cohabit uneasily but beautifully. The recording process itself becomes audible: the tape loops, studio experimentation, and improvisational layering are part of the listening experience. You hear the struggle, the trial and error, the moments of panic and revelation. This is music as architecture, as experiment, as living organism.

Culturally, the album is a negotiation of influence. The band’s engagement with African rhythms is complex, filtered through Western ears and art-school sensibility. It raises questions about appropriation, translation, and homage, but the resulting work is undeniably original. It is a fusion of ideas and sounds that challenges the listener to reconsider boundaries, genres, and expectations. The record is not just a reflection of its time, it is a critique of it, questioning identity, technology, and the very notion of pop music as a commodity.

The legacy of Remain in Light is vast. Upon release, it charted modestly, yet critics recognised its audacity. The album influenced generations of musicians, from the electronic experiments of the eighties to the worldbeat experiments of later decades. It bridged punk’s urgency with funk’s elasticity, art-school conceptualism with dancefloor immediacy. Touring the album proved difficult; the complexity and intensity of the arrangements tested the band to their limits. Yet the recordings themselves endure, a testament to ambition, collaboration, and the willingness to confront chaos head-on.

Listening today, the album resonates with a prescience that is uncanny. Byrne’s exploration of selfhood, Eno’s textural interventions, the band’s rhythmic sophistication all speak to an era increasingly dominated by technology and mediated experience. Forty-five years on, the music still feels urgent, still unsettles and energises in equal measure. It is a record that rewards repeated engagement, revealing new facets with each listen. The textures, the contradictions, the obsessive layering, all retain their power to unsettle and illuminate.

In retrospect, Remain in Light is not just an album. It is a blueprint for artistic ambition, a testament to the potential of collaboration and the thrill of experimentation. It embodies the tension between accessibility and difficulty, dance and reflection, humour and despair. Its enduring influence is evident not only in the artists who followed but in the ways it continues to challenge contemporary listeners. The record is a meditation on identity, perception, and creativity itself, an exploration that remains vital and uncontainable.

Four decades on, the album hums with life, refusing to settle into nostalgia or canonisation. It is human, machine, ritual, and meditation all at once. The visual and sonic languages it employs remain radical; the ideas embedded in its grooves still resonate. Talking Heads, at their apex, were not content with simple pop. They sought transformation, and in Remain in Light they achieved it. 

Listening now, the record still demands attention. It insists on engagement, on immersion. The faces on the sleeve, the fractured rhythms, the cascading vocals – all converge to create an experience that is simultaneously exhilarating and disorienting. It is, as ever, a record that challenges, delights, and confounds.

Remain in Light remains a masterpiece because it continues to operate on multiple planes. It is art, it is music, it is philosophy, and it is ritual. It occupies a space that few albums dare to enter, and fewer still manage to navigate successfully. Forty-five years later, it retains its power, its strangeness, and its brilliance. Talking Heads created not just an album but a living organism, one that still breathes, pulses, and disrupts.

For those willing to engage fully, it remains an astonishing journey, a record that refuses to be tamed, a testament to what happens when intelligence, curiosity, and obsession collide. Remain in Light is not simply listened to. It is experienced, interrogated, and felt. It is, in every sense, timeless.