1974: GAYNOR

Gloria GAYNOR
Never Can Say Goodbye (7 Dec - 2)

This will be the last entry I'll have time to complete before I disappear for a fortnight to enjoy an extremely well-earned holiday, and it seems fitting to depart by ushering in, not only the first "G" entry - steady - but also a record which for many readers may represent Year Zero, Day One, the moment when the future started; the first crossover Hi-NRG hit. In 1974 there was also Donna Summer's "The Hostage" which hit big in Germany and the Low Countries if nowhere else. But three full years before Summer's Once Upon A Time brought forth the genesis of the sequenced disco concept album (compare "I Need You Now" with Leonard Cohen's "The Guests"), there was side one, tracks 1-3, of Gloria Gaynor's debut album Never Can Say Goodbye - three segued songs with identical beats unifying to create something of a symphony to transience (and typically, such transience has proved far more durable than most of the "durable" music of this period), mixed and overseen by one of the most important operatives in any sphere of '70s music, the late and great Tom Moulton.

Beginning with the still bizarre "Honey Bee," in which Gaynor implores her Other for s(con)sensual satisfaction in a series of unsubtle metaphors ("Come on and sting me!" "You're always buzzin' buzzin' buzzin'") over a deranged fuzz guitar which seems to have escaped from Sky Saxon's coal bunker (why was the garage punk-disco fusion chimera left so unexplored?), the music strides into "Never Can Say Goodbye" itself and finally reaches its climax with a dizzying rush through "Reach Out I'll Be There."

Certainly "Never Can Say Goodbye" sounded like a bewitching future in the winter of '74, with its frenetic string intro, like "Love's Theme" at 78 rpm and its unstoppable layers of percussion topped by a strangely Nashville-sounding guitar, describing/re-inscribing an old Jackson Five weepie as though reheard via amyl nitrate. The methodology of speeding up a ballad to 120 bpm and amazingly making it doubly more moving and affecting did of course subsequently become a staple of gay disco, which is why Donna Summer's 22-minute artifically adrenalised rush through "Macarthur Park" may well cut deeper than Richard Harris' ham theatrics - her inhuman cackle ("A-haaaa!") is arguably more disturbing than any element of the original - and why Neil Tennant's reluctant confession of "Maybe I...didn't love you" right at the fade of the Pet Shop Boys' "Always On My Mind" touches a place Presley didn't even know existed.

As with "Until You Come Back To Me," "Never Can Say Goodbye" is a song about the desperation necessary to hold on to something, or someone, that has drifted away. Whereas Michael Jackson's soprano sobbed on the original recording, and Isaac Hayes' baritone boomed on his quickfire (1971) cover, Gaynor appears out of control - and the speed rush of the music traps her in the same way Moroder traps Summer on "I Feel Love"; as Gaynor sings "There's a very strange vibration," it's as if she's being involuntarily transported to the Earth's core to make her passion burn ("It says TURN AROUND YOU FOOL!"). But every time the roundabout slows down to give her an opportunity to get off, Gaynor denies herself the option - "Don't wanna let you go!" Note the coy/euphoric "Hey" acting as a subtle nod to the early Supremes. But in her despair, Gaynor is paradoxically and cosily euphoric about her imminent annihilation ("I can't do with or without"), and so the speed continues not to relent.

Outwardly, everything about "Never Can Say Goodbye" points to a hitherto unseen and unimagined brightness. The 18 minutes of side one of its parent album act as a challenge to Northern Soul hangovers (and indeed those 18 minutes were highly popular at the Twisted Wheel and similar) - can you keep it up for all that time? When sufficient numbers were hopped up on dust or sherbet fountains, they found that they could; hence the imminent arrival of the 12-inch single, and hence in the long-term side one of The Lexicon Of Love - all five songs, though not segued or strictly sequenced, share the same BPM, and work towards a cathartic climax of despair in "Valentine's Day." Here is one of the many places where it started.

1974: A.F.

Aretha FRANKLIN
Until You Come Back To Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do) (16 Feb - 26)

One can become too isolated. While listening to music in solitude certainly allows the listener to build for himself a particular version of the world (or a specific bunker in which to hide oneself from the world), if you do not listen to music communally, whether in an audience or at the home of friends, you are literally missing half the story. Sometimes I feel that's what I've done of late, having such scant opportunity to listen to music in congenial company. Thus you can yawn discreetly at the LCD Soundsystem album, only to have your notions overturned a few weeks later as you witness friends and colleagues enjoying it, having fun and dancing to it. That, you might well say, is the point. But where does the communal aspect start and the personal perspective stop?

In answer to the question frequently asked as to why I had not become a professional music writer in the early '80s when I had the opportunity, my stock response is to say that it was not necessary for me to convey my views and passions to an audience, for I already had the ideal audience. I felt that mutual one-to-one reactions to music were, frankly, our personal business and none of yours. Then three-and-a-half years ago that audience was suddenly no longer there, so I had to find a new one.

But with Funeral, the debut album by Montreal's The Arcade Fire, a record which has been in my house for some time but has only recently been played in the company of others, I am now starting to feel that maybe what I think about this record is "our" business, reluctant as I am to go into detail about friends visibly moved to tears, or to euphoria, sometimes simultaneously, as they were listening to Funeral. Let's be honest, there is no bigger kick than playing your record collection to someone else and find that they enjoy it, can relate to it. But then there is the very occasional record which can puncture a gathering of people at a deeper communal level and can directly speak to, and of, all of us (or at least all of us gathered in the front room). Funeral, I feel, is such a record - perhaps the first such record there has been since Music From Big Pink.

As with their Canadian forefathers The Band, The Arcade Fire offer us a direct line to simplicity of emotion, but expressed in music of deceptive complexity. I am loath even to use words such as "deceptive" in this context because The Arcade Fire do not set out to deceive anyone. Funeral is so called (and such a name for a debut album!) because it was made in the immediate wake of, and in direct emotional reaction to, the deaths of several elderly members of the bands' families over the preceeding year. Remarkably it manages to avoid sentimentality entirely; the emotions it expresses are almost brutal in their realness, but compassionate in their articulation. Much has been made of the main voice heard on the album, that of Win Butler, in terms of its being "weak." If anything, Butler's voice is extremely reminiscent of Ian McCulloch, and his sudden, confident octave leaps on songs such as "Power Out" and "Crown Of Love" do not betray technical inadequacy. Yet there is also a naked vulnerability in Butler's singing which also puts me very much in mind of The Band's Richard Manuel - listen to the latter's "Lonesome Suzie" off Big Pink and see what I mean - with a quiet (and occasionally not so quiet) determination to be proud of its "weakness," particularly as it is set, musically, against what could reliably be called "The Big Music" (pace the Waterboys). The opening track, "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" with its not-quite-translucent, distorted high strings and piano (it could almost be the renegade piano from the middle section of "Beach Baby"), sets us up for a year zero Joshua Tree - an epic done from scratch, shed of any prehistoric pomp. It cannot be an accident that the song's rhythm is identical to that of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," and there is a similar steady but unstoppable momentum through this song about trying to turn lead into gold ("Spread the ashes of the colors over this heart of mine!"), about trying to unite with each disconnected other, not by screaming about how you're going to knock on their door and tap on their windowpane through a loudhailer, but by building a tunnel - "And if my parents are crying then I'll dig a tunnel from my window to yours."

In this scenario, "Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)" is the album's equivalent to "Where The Streets Have No Name" but its jerky rhythms are far more urgent - as if Butler will die if the song stops - as over increasing strata of guitars and percussion the singer proclaims "Light a candle for the kids, Jesus Christ don't keep it hid!/...And the power's out in the heart of man, take it from your heart, put it in your hand." The effect is scarily uplifting, like being abducted to the top of the Telecom Tower. And in many ways, this could also pass as Talking Heads' "Road To Somewhere" - note the frenetic vocal on "Neighborhood #2 (Laika)" which could have come straight out of Fear Of Music ("Cities" specifically) with its "Alexander, our older brother, set out for a great adventure" intro and its bowel-lowering chord change halfway through.

"Crown Of Love" seems like a newly (and desperately) excavated doowop song - "Please Stay" for an impermanent new century - which again provokes a profoundly confused but emotionally inviolate vocal from Butler ("In my heart there's flowers growin' on the grave of our old love"). Again the music builds up stealthily until the sun breaks, the tempo doubles, and the strings scrape out a reincarnated ELO riff; exceptionally euphoric, as though he has managed to clamber out of the grave. "Wake Up" finds the newly reawakened Butler demanding that we allow all of our souls to be punctured in defiance of our own inevitable passing ("With my lightnin' bolts a-glowin' I can see where I am goin' to be when the reaper he reaches and touches my hand") over a mass choral singalong. And when it changes key, as you were dying for it to do, you realise that this is the genuinely skykissing record which Oasis might have made had they paid less attention to how the Beatles had done it. Even this is not the end, for at 3:51 the song breaks into a Northern Soul/Motown gallop ("You Can't Hurry Love" meets "Lust For Life"), gradually breaking down into its children's glockenspiel and plucked violin components.

And anyone - U2, the Bunnymen, Oasis, whoever - would be proud to have come up with "Rebellion (Lies)" which somehow succeeds in wedding Wire's skeletal pragmatism with a propulsion seeming to owe more to Acid House than to any notions of rock. The unstoppable rush of Butler's "Every time you close your eyes" mantra makes one weep for all the lost chances, all the dull compromises, which British "rock" has made in the last decade - it really does come across as Heaven Up Here - in many ways, the record about which I last felt this "passionate" - reborn.

And then it goes one divine step further.

You hear her voice jovially urging the lost brother of "Laika" ("Come on Alex, don't die or dry up!"). You hear her again, interacting warmly with Butler in bilingual bliss in "Une Annee Sans Lumiere" (the gorgeous balladry of the first half giving way to the raging rock of the second). Her drumming throughout is like the judge's gavel of Levon Helm ("We Can Talk About It Now") smashing the self-constructed coffin open and allowing breath to flow into her again. She is Regine Chassagne, and her two, seemingly unobtrusive tracks, take Funeral to a new emotional and temporal level. First there is "Haiti" with its police siren guitars and hushingly discordant keyboards and its bilingual lyric about fleeing "the soldiers angry yelling," delving deeper into the woods ("In the forest we are hiding, unmarked graves where flowers go"). Her scarcely-stopping-short-of-tearful voice stopped the heartbeats of everybody in that front room.

And she is also given the finale, "In The Backseat," which for the only time on the album expresses explicit grief. Her voice is perhaps similar, stylistically, to Bjork, but emotionally Regine far outstrips the Icelander. Over a chord sequence so gorgeous as to inspire the desire for death, Regine weeps openly ("The lightning bolt made enough heat" - i.e. the aftermath of "Wake Up" - "to melt the street beneath your feet.../The family tree's losing all its leaves/Crashing towards the driver's seat"), and, as though to take her in its arms and embrace her lovingly, the song (which hitherto has seemed like a broadcast from an unexpected afterlife) expands accordingly, opens up with a truly epic string flourish and leitmotif which continues to build as Regine wails "Alice died in the night," "I've been learning to drive all my life," and the final, cataclysmic scream of "Oh, Norah!" - as she watches all the familiar landmarks of her world fall away, as she watches herself getting older, realising that eventually she will be the only landmark left. At the song's climax an undertow of improvised, pointillistic string flurries enters beneath the proud ending, and soon enough everything dies away, leaving the violins to scuttle about - the dawn chorus of birds, reborn for a new and hopefully better world, saying a littler but deeper prayer.

1974: FIRST CLASS

FIRST CLASS
Beach Baby (15 Jun – 13)

"Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse,
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently we could have kept it so."
(Philip Larkin, "Reference Back," 1955, stanza 3)

The intangible sound of static, just like the beginning of "Telstar." A fragment of a once-happy song emerges from this abstract mausoleum. A disc jockey who doesn’t quite sound American. "This is the summer sound of First Class and their record ‘Beach Baby," yeah man…" And then the strange nasal voice fades, giving way to a solemn organ chord, as though we had inadvertently blundered our way into a funeral service (it is the next chord after "Good Vibrations"), before that too is subsumed, or even drowned, in a sudden tsunami of drums, timpani, strings, brass and finally buoyant, boyish harmony voices bringing us back to…well, trying to bring something back to us. Trying to remember what it was like to live before the end of the metaphorical September which the record inhabits. The record is "Beach Baby" by First Class, and it was the culmination of the life’s work of its creator, one of the most extraordinary operatives in post-war British pop, John Carter.

Carter had spent the best part of a decade working towards this masterpiece, and had done so under a dizzying variety of pseudonyms, greater in number than those of Jonathan King, to whose UK label he was signed in the guise of First Class. As mainstay of the Ivy League in the mid-‘60s, he was responsible for the immaculate melancholy of rueful soft pop classics such as "Funny How Love Can Be" (but under the surface of softness, apprehend the polite sneer of "There she goes, with her nose in the air") and "Tossing And Turning."

It was with the final Ivy League single, 1966’s "My World Fell Down," that Carter ventured to cut the Merseybeat dummy loose. Suddenly the harmonies are dappled in minor oceans of echoing miasma; there are baroque strings and a quietly sobbing solo violin to end. Clearly he had been listening acutely to Pet Sounds, but he had not yet made the transition from artisan to visionary; it was down to America’s Gary Usher, under his studio guise of Sagittarius, to amplify the song’s otherness, with a careful lead vocal from Glen Campbell, Bruce Johnston taking the topline harmony of the chorus and an otherworldly "middle eight" of a seemingly random sound collage abruptly terminated by the slamming of a coffin lid (incidentally, the apocryphal story that said sound collage was an outtake from the "in the cantina" section of "Heroes And Villains" is not actually true – though heavily and naturally influenced by Brian Wilson, Usher came up with it
all by himself).

Nevertheless, in between innumerable session singing and production duties – including the uncredited lead vocal on "Winchester Cathedral" and writing "Semi-Detached Suburban Mr James" for Manfred Mann, as
well as several Herman’s Hermits hits and even that other Nuggets staple, "A Little Bit Of Soul" by the Music Explosion – Carter continued to refine his peculiarly but specifically British vision of post-Wilsonian pop; via 1966’s "I Couldn’t Stand Another Day Without You," where the Mersey template dissolves in petals of acid ("I can’t tell day from night"), details such as the quarrelsome guitar line on 1967’s "Time And Motion Man" and the gorgeous, if still derivative, "Am I Losing You," this phase of his art culminated in "Let’s Go To San Francisco," credited to the Flowerpot Men (his preferred soft-psych moniker between 1967-70) and widely derided at the time as a cynical flower power cash-in, but actually an intelligent, heartfelt and enterprising record, particularly when heard in its full six-minute length (complete with "Good Vibrations"-style breakdown halfway through and its ending of a whirlpool of piano feedback). Indeed the Flowerpot Men seemed to be the harbour under which Carter could express otherwise inexpressible emotions – consider the half-hidden "Say goodbye to mother" refrain in "A Walk In The Sky," and the sad wisdom of 1969’s "White Dove" (hear how oceanic Carter’s production had become by this stage, with its tolling bells and pre-Cocteau Twins guitars) and 1970’s moving "Say Goodbye To Yesterday." Or the Flowerpot Men records which ended up being released under other names – "Tahiti Farewell" (Haystack, 1969) is "Cool, Cool Water" with a didgeridoo added. The amazing "A Night To Be Remembered" (Dawn Chorus, 1969) takes a basic (but tremendous) Ivy League song and subjects it to a melee of primitive Moog bleeps, banjo picking and Bach organ chorales. And above all there is "Mythological Sunday," released in 1968 and credited to "Friends"; a stunningly beautiful and limpid technicolor dream with vocals which sound strangely like Robert Wyatt and an innate melancholy which places it somewhere between People’s "Glastonbury" and Traffic’s "No Face, No Name, No Number." But the clue is in the title; four-and-a-half minutes in, as the song appears to be coming to its natural end, its space is gradually invaded by synthesised gunfire and a mournful military march ("When Johnny Comes Marching Home" redone for the Vietnam era) proceeding from channel to channel. The dream is broken by blood; thus "Mythological Sunday" is also a forefather of "America No More" by the KLF. And this from someone who, virtually in the same breath, was writing cheery little McCartney-esque ditties like "Knock, Knock, Who’s There," Mary Hopkin’s 1970 Eurovision entry - a "Those Were The Days" variant, but kinder and gentler to itself.

As the ‘70s dawned Carter moved into a curious mixture of bubblegum and CSNY-type introspective folk-pop. As Stamford Bridge he was happy to indulge in unapologetic post-"Sugar Sugar" candy pop, though under this particular pseudonym he sneaked in some songs which were noticeably close to someone’s bone – perhaps his then principal co-writer and former schoolfriend Ken Lewis, about to quit the music business, beset by depression – such that songs such as "First Day Of Your Life" and "Move Out Of Town" take on an additional if inadvertent poignancy, as did 1971’s brilliantly panscopic "Hello Hello Hello" (released as Stormy Petrel – I hope that you are managing to keep up with all of these names) with its urge to you to come out of
your bunker. On the other fist there was the greatest Eurovision song we never had, Kincade’s "Dreams Are Ten A Penny," a huge hit everywhere in 1972 except in Britain. And, as First Class, he was able to make the well-worn template of "feel sorry for the lonely rich superstar" sound fresh and affecting in 1974’s "What Became Of Me," which, in between its Surf’s Up balladic structural peaks rapidly flicks through klezmer, heavy metal and Sousa marches as the protagonist regrets a wasted life ("What became of the girls I went for/And the same cheap scent I bought them all?").

But "Beach Baby" was the five-minute peak of Carter’s art. The lead vocal was not Carter himself, but his former Ivy League colleague Tony Burrows, he of Edison Lighthouse, White Plains (essentially a de-weirded Flowerpot Men) and the first incarnation of the Brotherhood of Man. Burrows’ faux-naif contralto (sounding exactly, and appropriately, like a British Mike Love) is ideal for a song which is about bewilderment, and also about imperfect perceptions of a reality which may never have existed.

"Or, better yet, Dumas does not exist; he is only a mythical being, a trade name invented by a syndicate of editors."
(J Lucas-Dubreton, La Vue d’Alexandre Dumas Pere, cited by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project – section: "The Streets Of Paris")

"Do you remember back in old LA?" asks Burrows, wherein follows a series of disconnected signifiers - "Chevrolet," "the boy next door," "The suntanned, crewcut All-American Male," "the high school hop," "the soda pop" - which don't so much signify Roy Lichtenstein as Philip K Dick, as is evident in the couplet "I didn't recognise the Girl Next Door/With beat-up sneakers and a ponytail," with the emphasis on the "beat-up." Life has beaten her up. We are now in someone's autumn.

In a desperate attempt to resuscitate dead memories, all the record's voices unite, propelling the music
forward like a subaquatic JCB digger trying to pull the Titanic out of the seabed - "Beach baby! Beach baby! Give me your hand! Give me something that I can remember!" - but note how the chorus oscillates between major and minor, ending on the ambiguously augmented major of "Surfin' was fun! We'd be out in the sun every day."

Four drumbeats, like the spluttering of a pacemaker trying to emulate a heartbeat, and then Burrows' voice lowers with the orchestration: "Oooh, I never thought that it would end/Oooh, and I was everybody's friend." Then, heartbreakingly, a distant Leslie Cabinet-modified high-pithced piano tinkles in the background, a remnant of psychedelia (but also an accidental precursor of Ultravox's "Vienna") as Burrows in choirboy mode considers "Long hot days," "Blue sea haze" (which on the record sounds more like "boozy haze") and "jukebox plays," before his voice doubles up in suppressed agony: "But now it's fading AWAY!" And there's one last desperate flourish from the piano before the Fairchild compressors and natural echo of '60s pop are swept away by the harsh, Mazda bulb-lit, two-dimensional reality of London recording studios in the mid-'70s. For this is an English fantasy on a concept of "America" known only through second-hand observations. The voices make one final C major harmonic foray before a cross-channel, tripartite "Do do do" (the third one of which seems to be swept away into the sky) gives way to a rhythm section stomp compatible with the Bay City Rollers which reminds us that, sadly, this is indeed 1974, before the tympani and orchestra re-enter to underscore the song's tragic final verse - "We couldn't wait for graduation day/We took the car and drove to San Jose"

("Do you know the way to San Jose? I've been away so long, I may go wrong and lose my way" - Bacharach/David, via Dionne Warwick)

("Didn't time sound sweet yesterday? In a world full of friends, you lose your way" - Scott Walker, "Big Louise")

"That's where you told me that you'd wear my ring."

Without a break or emotional collapse:
"I guess you don't remember anything."

What exactly happened to the Girl Next Door to make her lose, or deny, her memory? Of someone she was going to marry - at least from his perspective?

Or is there a more sinister cause?

"Take a walk along the beach tonight? I'd love to. But don't try to touch me. Don't try to touch me. 'Cause that will never happen again. Shall we dance?"
(Shangri-Las, "Past, Present and Future")

Four ascending string chords seem to cry on the singer's behalf. And then the music stops, and a solitary French horn plays the climactic thematic motif from Sibelius' Symphony No 5 - written in 1915, and a deliberate attempt by the Finnish composer to reinstate unapologetic Romanticism as a protest against a world then, as now, being slowly eaten up by war (it is significant that "Beach Baby," though an English record through and through, was a far bigger hit in America than it was in Britain - it reached #4 in Billboard in the summer of '74, and in that context seemed to symbolise reassurance for, or subliminal protest against, an America being rapidly gobbled up by Watergate and the ashen remnants of Vietnam). The lead trumpets take up the motif while Carter's harmonies multiply in a manner more akin to 10cc than to the Beach Boys (those bass voices especially are far closer to Kevin Godley than they are to Dennis Wilson) before another triple "do-do-do" fanfare announces a repeat of the Bay City Rollers rhythm, but this time with orchestral accompaniment, before the closing mantra of "beach baby" is, if Carter can manage it, set to repeat for eternity, luscious in its foregone decay.

And the single most heartbreaking and poignant moment of the record comes at 4:50, when the song is nearly over, and the same French horn comes forward in the mix and starts to play the tune of "Let's Go To San
Francisco." So Carter's intent is made explicit; this is a eulogy for a funeral, the burial of a future never realised, the optimism and good nature of 1967 dying to be replaced by the three-day-week, grey, bleak 1974. It's a reproachful goodbye to psychedelia - from a man who almost simultaneously nearly appeared in this list again with "Please Yourself" by the Tots, an expanded version of a TV advert for Rowntree's Jelly Tots - now you are on your own, preparing for the purgatory which punk will make necessary. Rationalism might never have seemed colder, as blank and as ultimately dead as the waves of radio static, with now indistinguishable words and syllables, into which the song recedes forever.

"’Then, what is Life?’ I said…the cripple cast
His eye upon the car which had now rolled
Onward, as if that look must be the last,
"And answered….’Happy those for whom the fold
Of"
(Shelley, The Triumph of Life, 1822-4, unfinished, as the author was drowned as compensation for failing to reach Hell. ‘Tis in the nurturing waters that we are thus, and thus)