I'm on my way to see ABBA Voyage and suddenly get a message from my Suede tour friends to keep the 5th and 6th free. Nobody knows why. Just keep those dates free.
Be in London on the 5th and/or Manchester on the 6th. Nobody knows why. Just be there. Brainstorm on the train home trying to figure out what I have on at work next week. Can I go to Manchester without having to take holiday. I get home and decide the answer is yes. Hotels and trains are procured.
I get out of the cinema and take my phone off airplane mode in the toilets. My phone has exploded with BABE HAVE YOU GOT A TICKET messages. I buy a ticket to see a band called Crushed Kid. My heart feels like it’s going to explode as I sit in the cubicle trying to remember my login details for a ticket site I haven’t used in years.
I bring forward my plans to dye my hair and make Suede-themed jewellery and finish embroidering Brett’s autograph onto my jacket. Everything is done by the end of the weekend.
Monday, I work an early shift so I can leave the office an hour early to travel to Preston. I can work from there, it’s only 35 minutes on the train to Manchester. I listen to four songs on repeat all the way - She Still Leads Me On, 15 Again, That Boy On The Stage, Shadow (of my former) Self. I spend the night unable to sleep in my crappy hotel room. I dream about Suede.
Tuesday morning, I get up early again and work another early shift so I can leave the office an hour early to travel to Manchester. I see photos and read reviews from London. It’s almost time.
I arrive at Piccadilly station in my Metal Mickey t-shirt. I am powerwalking to the hotel so I can drop my things and speed to the venue. In the station, I walk past an elegant skinny character with long hair and black leather jacket. I smile at Neil Codling and wonder if he noticed me.
I powerwalk from my hotel to the Piccadilly Gardens bus stops. I walk past a girl I was friends with a decade ago who I hoped never to see again. I’m going so fast that hopefully she didn’t have time to register me. The rain starts pouring as I approach the buses and I jump on the first one I see that is going my way.
There are a couple of people outside the Deaf Institute and a lot more outside the Sandbar, the pub across the road. I say hi to the people at the door. I find my friends - we’re reunited for the first time since the Autofiction film shoot.
Someone informs us that barriers have gone up outside the venue and we rush outside to join the queue. The rain starts again and we’re allowed inside to queue on the stairs. The toilets are wallpapered with Dolly Parton images and covered in graffiti. We’re all back together.
The doors open. The Deaf Institute auditorium is about the size of the living room in my parents’ house; there’s no barrier. My friend is pressed against the stage in front of Richard and I’m directly behind her, second row. The DJ plays 80s post-punk and I stare at Brett’s microphone stand five feet from me.
Technicians tape down setlists, put out little bottles of water, check the guitars are ready. We wait (im)patiently for 8:30pm.
Without stopping the music or dimming the lights, Simon, Richard, Mat and Neil saunter on stage. The crowd goes wild. Brett makes his own grand entrance. He’s wearing a white shirt. They launch into Autofiction.
She Still Leads Me On live for real, not mimed for a music video. Brett’s voice amplified through a microphone that’s turned on and not just heard from beside me in the crowd, although the place is tiny enough that we’d have heard him without.
Richard has four or five shirt buttons undone. Neil is dressed exactly as I saw him earlier. His hair is wavy at the front; he must have been caught in the rain too.
Brett and I make eye contact for a second during one of the songs I haven’t heard yet. Personality Disorder, perhaps. I gaze up at him, reaching out for him. I can see my hand with its Portobello Road Market rings and homemade bracelets reaching for him in fan photos the next day.
He kicks his bottle of water off the stage. It bounces off my friend’s face and lands on my chest. It stays between my feet for the rest of the set. Then in my bag for the rest of the night. Now it’s at home with me. After a couple of songs he complains to his technicians that they didn’t put enough water on stage for him.
15 Again, That Boy On The Stage, some new songs I’ve not heard before. Drive Myself Home is the most beautiful piano ballad, like By The Sea if it didn’t swell up into a pop song. Brett sings tenderly but keeps walking over and pointing at the monitor we’re pressed into. His pointing and facial expressions become increasingly angry. The cable is loose and he can’t hear himself.
Brett is drenched in sweat and his white shirt is translucent. I can just about reach him when he steps towards us. I can see every fleck of spit that comes out of his mouth when he’s singing passionately. He has been sticking his tongue out since he stepped on stage.
Shadow Of My Former Self becomes Shadow Self. The chorus sounds strange at its correct pitch after listening to the edited version so many times. This time next month, it’ll be the edited version that sounds strange.
What Am I Without You is a ballad in the style of theatre - an ‘I’m Going Home’ or a ‘People’ made Suede. Brett says he wrote the song for us, the audience, and that he’s also an audience, and that we want the same thing, he doesn’t know what it is but he knows we all want it.
Finally he steps close enough during the final song for me to put a hand on his thigh. The lady next to me ushers me into her spot so I can move it to his stomach, his ribs. He is soaking wet and his sweat coats my fingertips as I press my hand against his body.
The album ends and the band leaves. Richard shakes hands with a couple of fans in front of me. The smile on his face is a mile wide. Same goes for everyone else in the room.
We’ve filed out to the stage door, mingling. Justin Welch from Elastica is driving the van. I’ll never get to see Elastica live so it’s nice to spot him in this context.
Brett and Simon are mingling with everyone. Brett makes lighthearted conversation, asks if everyone is happy, offers to put his signature on setlists and t-shirts. We all huddle together for the customary group photo. He says he has a feeling it’s going to be a good picture.
We’re back in the Sandbar until closing time. Catching up on what we’ve just seen. Staring at each other wide-eyed, lucky, increasingly sleepy. Groups begin to split up - off to the hotel vs into the night. There’s McDonalds and Ubers and 5 hours of broken sleep.
Wednesday, I work an early shift so I can leave an hour early to get home. I’m sleepy, but happy. The Brett group photo appears in the morning, along with lots of other photos and reviews. My friend posts some of my photos and Suede share them on their Instagram.
I get to the train station and find that my train is delayed for an hour. I’ll miss the last bus home. I hop on another train that is due in on the same minute my bus leaves. The bus company slides into my DMs to promise they’ll delay the bus by a couple of minutes if I rush to catch it, and I make it home. There’s a ticket in my letterbox for next weekend’s Suede concert.
I'm firing up the record player to write about some 7"s from my own collection this week, rather than stealing from my parents again. These 5 singles all come from the back of the alphabetised box, where band names start with numbers rather than letters. That's right, I'm doing The 1975 again... sorry to the thousands of other artists in my collection. Note, I've written about almost all of these songs already in previous entries so check back through for my previous thoughts.
2516. Fallingforyou 🔵 The first thing I want to say about this is that The 1975 have a very distinctive and recognisable style to their artwork, particularly in the early days. This sleeve has their trademark shining white box glowing against a dark background, in this case a roadside garden with trees obscuring one side. It's an image they still project in some form when they play this song live. Fallingforyou comes from the band's 2013 IV EP but this single was released in 2015, probably for the annual London independent record label market that Dirty Hit Records go to with exclusive goodies (I bought this from the band's webstore). It's pressed on clear vinyl which I notice is yellowing despite being kept in a box out of the sunlight.
The song itself is a slow love song with a languid, droning synth, subdued vocals and drums that pulse like a heartbeat. It's simple, heartfelt and dreamy with lyrics like the chorus "and on this night, and in this light (which is etched into the centre of the vinyl) I think I'm falling for you". Even the big passionate moment, "I don't wanna be your friend, I want to kiss your neck", which sounds massive when a whole arena is yelling it back at the stage, sounds almost peaceful on the recording, low down in the mix as if recorded from a distance to keep things hushed. It's just 2 verses and 2 choruses but it delivers romance, hope, peace. Sometimes the mood isn't right for it - you need silence, preferably darkness, and some calm and concentration to devote to it - but when conditions are right, it's hard to beat.
b/w Haunt//Bed 🟢 The b-side comes from the same EP and is a bit more complicated, with electronic loops, duplicated vocals and less straight-forward lyrics which speak of death, mental illness, and the scene of a car accident described almost cinematically in abstract images. The chorus repeats "I'm not scared" to a series of looped beats and simple synth melodies, the layers eventually melting together one at a time to create one big discordant sound at the end. Where Fallingforyou is all about the words, Haunt//Bed is about the music. Songs like this one are a starting point from which you can trace a line to the grander experiments with synthesised dance and ambient sounds on their more recent albums.
2517 - A Change Of Heart 🔵 Released as a limited-edition single to tie in with a Q Magazine cover about 2016's 'i like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it', this is a piece of single-sided clear vinyl which feels like a wasted opportunity to me. The sleeve is very minimalist too, with the band's logo embossed in white on white card. I'd have put UGH! on the b-side since it already had a music video but didn't get the full single treatment; even an etching on the back would have been better than nothing at all. I've written about the song already - a catty, sarcastic break-up song, slow-paced with some of the band's best synth melodies and most biting lyrics.
2518. Milk 🔵 Another record fair special pressing, this time on milk-bottle white vinyl. Milk is a 2016 pressing of an EP hidden track from 2012 that became a fan favourite live, which I guess is why it was chosen to be issued as a 7". I've written about Milk already and it plays on both sides of this single - again, I'm sure they could have thought of something to put on the b-side. As I said previously, its a fun little song so I can cope with the déja-vu of playing it twice in a row. The Rothko quote etched into the centre is cool, if a little pretentious, but then what are The 1975 if not pretentious?
2519 - Loving Someone💜 The rainbow sleeve really winds me up - as I said when I wrote about Loving Someone last time, there is one line that you could argue alludes to gay rights in this state-of-the-nation song but was co-opted (more by the band/label than by the fans, I think) as an LGBT anthem. The rainbow capitalism of hoodies with this sleeve printed on the front doesn't sit well with me and makes the lyric about "celebrities lacking in integrity" a bit ironic (I know the band have donated money to LGBT charities which is great but some of their moves feel like missteps). Taking the song as a whole, it's a great exploration of the world's problems pre-Br*xit and Tr*mp - it's so easy to forget that things weren't perfect prior to 2016 - and I love the poem in the middle.
b/w Somebody Else 🔵 Again, I covered this break-up anthem before - it's the sincere brother to A Change Of Heart's wit. The full album version is on here rather than the shorter radio edit, which I would have thought they'd have picked as a 'single'. For some reason, Somebody Else became one of the band's biggest songs, the teen movie soundtrack pick. It's far from my favourite song of theirs (not that there's anything wrong with it but there are at least 20 that I love more) but I guess the lyrics chimed in with 2016's teens more than the ones about fame and cocaine addiction or post-natal depression.
2520 - Give Yourself A Try💜 I've gushed about this song twice already and I swear this is the last appearance it makes in my collection so I won't mention it again, but I love this song. The artwork breaks with tradition, switching out the monochrome box for technicolour cubes which match the frenetic energy of both songs on this record. I think this single was another Q Magazine exclusive but they did it right this time with a double a-side - this song about the private and personal, and the other about the public and political.
Matty Healy left social media in 2020 after trying to make this song into his statement about race and Black Lives Matter in the same way that he made Loving Someone about LGBT issues (i.e. it has one line about suffocating the black man) and people didn't stand for it. I think that says something positive about the progression of society. As a result, this song stands up better than Loving Someone, but I don't know if I can cope with a next instalment about cancel culture and coronavirus.
Aside from the last single, the band aren't great at picking my favourite songs to commit to 7" vinyl, but since all of their songs are good, I can live with that. Aesthetically I prefer the style of the earlier singles but there's still much to love about what they've been putting out more recently.
This week's pick is a CD that came free with the NME in June 2005 to coincide with Green Day's huge shows at the Milton Keynes Bowl that summer. It comprises 14 tracks apparently chosen by the band to represent the best of punk rock, past and present. This might be my favourite ever magazine freebie based on the amount of great music it introduced me to and I still play it on occasion. Lets dive in.
1. My Chemical Romance - Give 'Em Hell, Kid 🔵 What an intro - it races in like a motorcycle going at twice the speed limit. This would have been one of the first MCR songs I heard, as this came out a couple of weeks before I bought their album Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge. It's a really exciting song with its relentless pace, guitars which are almost heavy-metal-sounding, the effects on Gerard Way's voice... This is the shape of punk to come and it sounds amazing.
2. The Distillers - Drain The Blood 🔵 Brody Dalle is so cool and I love the combination of her voice with the buzzsaw guitar part. Drain The Blood is dripping with attitude - if this song was a person you would cross the street when you saw it coming towards you. I love this mood for a great punk record and it has a cool false ending too.
3. Generation X - Kiss Me Deadly 🔵 Here we have Billy Idol before he went to Hollywood. The clean guitar and vocal for the first verse, then the drums and distortion midway through verse 2, means this is a bit different from some of the identikit 70s punk that I've written about in the past. The lyrics paint a scene of young love, loitering, experimenting and fighting - it's really evocative and you can see how their storytelling influenced the likes of Jesus Of Suburbia. This song keeps building until it passes the 4 minute mark, where it slowly comes to an end again. The whole thing feels a lot like sitting on the night bus watching the scenes outside and the other passengers on your way home.
4. Operation Ivy - Knowledge 🎀 A Cali punk classic that Green Day covered on their first album and have been playing live ever since. It's a fast and furious ode to the pressure of being asked to pick a career in your teens, with yelled lyrics including the iconic chorus "all I know is that I don't know nothing". I love everything about this song, it's one of my favourite punk tracks and I'm glad Green Day put it on this compilation so I could hear the original version alongside their slowed-down cover.
5. AFI - The Days Of The Phoenix 🎀 I wasn't bothered about this song when I first heard it, but in the years that have followed it has become one of the first that spring to mind when I consider the contenders for my favourite song of all time. I love everything about The Days Of The Phoenix - the iconic guitar riff and bassline, Davey Havok's goth-influenced vocals, the massive singalong chorus... it's perfect. The spoken word interlude where Davey purrs about his dream of 'teenage death boys... teenage death girls...' might be my favourite bit, but honestly it's hard to choose. The lyrics are a recollection of going to punk shows at the Phoenix Theater - moshpits, punk kids - a dream of a place from Davey's youth that's now long gone. It gives me similar flashbacks to the magical underground world of the rock club I frequented in my early teens which sometimes played AFI for me on request. I love this song so much that when I saw the band play it live in 2017 I shed a single tear of joy.
6. Iggy & The Stooges - I Got A Right 🔵 The original punk. This sounds riotous despite it sounding like it was recorded in a tiny box. Iggy growls and screams the lyrics as if he's rolling around in broken glass (as he was known to do on stage from time to time). The song opens with a big messy chord and ends with The Stooges individually deciding to stop playing, as if they got bored and decided not to give the song a proper finish. The attitude of songs like St. Jimmy on American Idiot hold a mirror up to the likes of Iggy.
7. MC5 - The American Ruse 🔵 Next up, another set of punk pioneers. This has a 60s groove and speaks of the hippy struggle - protest, the draft, the overall shitness of living in the USA. In other words, it's American Idiot; the American Ruse, not the American Dream. Still, it's a far out song with a hip guitar solo and it's cool to hear something in this style that has the punk attitude.
8. Alkaline Trio - Back To Hell 💜 We come bang up to date - for 2005, anyway - with a cut from the contemporary Alkaline Trio album, Crimson. I wrote about them on the Kerrang Best Of 2005 entry and these aren't the only 2 magazine CDs I have with songs from this album, so I think Alkaline Trio's label were doing a big push to shift units (it's a great album though, I will get to it at some point). The drums are the focal point on this, so fast and chaotic, and like MCR the song hits you with a punch. It has a massive chorus paired with the band's trademark dark lyrics: references to pills, hell, sin, ash, bugs... you name it. Again it comes in under 3 minutes, a non-stop, heart-racing punk jam. Maybe one of their best songs, in my opinion.
9. Deftones - Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away) 💜 One of the less obviously punk tracks, this is like a metal band discovering shoegaze, with oppressive droning guitars and Chino Moreno's drawn-out vocals. It sounds like driving through a really heavy storm, the wall of sound washing over you like sheets of torrential rain. Be Quiet And Drive is one of my go-to songs if I want to listen to something heavy; it ticks all of my boxes, despite being another of the songs that I didn't 'get' when I first got this CD as a 12 year old. I've seen Deftones live twice - once at a festival with MCR where my main memory is being at the edge of a muddy moshpit and trying not to fall in, and the other time I listened to them from the floor at the back of a room, recovering emotionally from the AFI set I mentioned above.
10. Dead Kennedys - California Uber Alles 🔵 Time for some politics. The intro to this song has a sinister surf-rock vibe before Jello Biafra begins his tirade, comparing the Californian governor to the Nazi regime. The whole thing sounds really evil and frightening, as if that one Beach Boy who knew Charles Manson got the rest of the band into Satanism. Again, the influence on American Idiot is clear, both musically in that the riff sounds like the melody to Extraordinary Girl, and lyrically - Green Day cover similar subject matter on the b-side Governator.
11. Filter - Captain Bligh 🔵 This is pretty good, considering Filter are, I think, one of those post-grunge US alt-rock radio bands that I usually find pretty lame. The mix of layered guitar parts, pounding drums and dark lyrics keep up that relentless pace set by MCR and Alk3, and the chorus slows things down and gets more Deftonesy. In the second half of the song we get an electronic breakdown, a funk guitar solo, acoustic guitar, drum machine and piano fade out, which is a lot of elements to throw in and some work better than others. Again there are shades of Green Day's 9-minute epics from this era but Green Day do it much better.
12. Flamin' Groovies - Golden Clouds 🟢 We get one big messy chord to introduce this - the same as the Stooges used earlier, but I think this probably came first. I don't know anything else about the Flamin' Groovies aside from this song in this context but both the band name and harmonies are big clues to it being from the 60s. It's psychedelia mixed with a bit of a country twang and I can imagine hippies getting down to it at a Happening. I don't think it sounds really 'punk' aside from that intro but it's a groovy song and I quite like it.
13. Stiff Little Fingers - Tin Soldiers 🟢 After an almost entirely American compilation (I think Generation X are the sole British contribution), we draw to a close with an Irish punk classic courtesy of Stiff Little Fingers. They're political, like Green Day and some of the others here, but they're not singing about far-off wars in Iraq or Vietnam - their trouble is on their home turf. It has an army march rhythm with a chanted chorus and lyrics about young men giving up their youth to fight in a war they don't believe in. It would be better (and I'd probably have rated it blue rather than green) if the outro wasn't so long - clocking in at 2 minutes, it's longer than some of the other songs last in their entirety. Even still, it's a great political statement of a punk record.
14. Green Day - Letterbomb 🔵 The Kathleen Hanna 'nobody likes you' taunt that introduces this song is a tease, conjuring thoughts of the riot grrrl song that could and should have taken pride of place in this compilation (I think Brody Dalle of the Distillers is the only woman represented in these 14 bands). We end with an album cut from American Idiot with lots of punk hallmarks - urgency, political lyrics, huge drums all getting a look in. I always saw this as being tacked on to the end, a sort of encore after all of the other songs, but after thinking about how the last 13 numbers influenced American Idiot, it is actually good to hear Green Day at the end rather than opening with them. It's really hard for me to give a review of songs like Letterbomb because American Idiot has been part of my life for so long and I know every note of it inside out - it feels like it's as much a part of me as my fingers and toes.
For a free CD, the quality of this compilation is outstanding. Almost every song contained here still features in my playlists - some were immediate favourites, some have grown on me over the years, some acted as a gateway to discovering new scenes and bands who have become some of my most cherished. Until now, it hadn't dawned on me how much it functioned as a map to understanding where American Idiot came from too - that album changed my life and there are so many clues here to some of the less obvious influences that helped to make it. I also hadn't realised how many of the acts were American - it's a punk compilation without the Clash, the Pistols, the Ramones, the Buzzcocks... I think England has this impression that they invented and perfected punk with a token few US acts - a myth perpetuated by the NME - and here we have an alternate history which argues punk didn't explode from nothing in 1976 and die a couple of years later. I have a lot to thank Green Day and the NME for.
I'm covering some 7"s again this week and taking another trip back to the mid 80s. It's a mix of songs I know and songs I don't but I've at least heard of each of these artists, including one that I promised a few entries ago...
1266. Dead Or Alive - Something In My House 🔵 This sleeve is a goth masterpiece. It's got smoke, candles, crosses, and Pete Burns smouldering in an over-the-shoulder pose. The single opens with the roar of thunder before a hi-NRG gay disco banger cuts in. The combination of dance beat with campy goth lyrics about being haunted by an old flame feels like an innovative combination. I really want to go out and dance to this, it's a lot of fun. I hadn't heard it before but I plan to listen to it again.
b/w Hit That Button 🟢 Another big dance tune, not as catchy as the a-side but if you want big energetic dance-pop, it does the job. It has a sax solo that might or might not be synthetic, I can't tell. Pete Burns' gothic homosexual (threatening) style made Dead Or Alive so unique and it's a shame he was taken from us too soon - RIP Pete.
1267. The Smiths - Shoplifters Of The World Unite 🔵 Following their tradition of putting 50s and 60s (white) stars on the record sleeves, here we have a portrait of Elvis on the cover of this Smiths single. This must have confused older folks looking for new Elvis reissues. I can't make a connection between him and this song but it is the typical Smiths look. We crash straight into the verse, with Morrissey advocating shoplifting (not a riot, Smiths fans are much too soft for anything revolutionary). As far as Smiths songs go, I think this one is pretty average with no particularly special moments in either the lyrics or the accompanying music. Still, even when they're average, The Smiths are still good, and thankfully this is pretty light on terrible Morrissey opinions.
b/w Half A Person 🔵 Lyrically, I much prefer this song to Shoplifters, but musically it kind of wanders along without producing much excitement. I suppose Marr, Rourke and Joyce aren't doing anything exciting here in order to let the words shine and there are a few in here that I really like: "if you have 5 seconds to spare then I'll tell you the story of my life - sixteen, clumsy and shy, I went to London and I checked myself in at the YWCA" is my favourite but I also like "she said in the days when you were hopelessly poor, I just liked you more" which is paraphrased in the song My Sex by Elastica (along with another Smiths line from Reel Around The Fountain). Death to Morrissey but this is well-written. A more exciting Johnny Marr guitar part would elevate it though.
1268. Spear Of Destiny - Strangers In Our Town 🟢 Until now, Spear Of Destiny have just been a name to me with no sound attached. I associate them with goth but the sleeve looks a bit Red Wedge with its woodblock industrial town landscape across the front. Immediately I was surprised by the cowbell's tropical rhythm but layered over the top we have sweeping goth guitar chords, pounding goth drums and snarled goth lyrics, so I guess my initial assumption was correct. I can't tell whether it's about immigration and race as the title suggests, and if it is, I can't figure out their stance. They don't sound happy but surely you don't get goth-pop hits in lefty sleeves in 1987 with a song that's pro-xenophobia? Do you?! Politics aside though, it makes fine indie disco music.
b/w Somewhere Out There 🟡 The b-side is a clean guitar ballad, maybe an acoustic version, which I think is about God? I'm not sure about Christian goth, just like I'm not sure about Anti-immigrant goth. Like The Smiths' b-side the song is just a vehicle to convey the lyrics; unfortunately in this case the lyrics aren't that good.
1269. Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band - Fire 🔵 I was promised Springsteen last time I did a 7" review but missed him so here he is now to make up for it. He looks good on the cover but the composite of 2 photos is a bit weird, as if they couldn't pick one so settled for using both and ended up making less impact instead of more. I know Fire but only from the Glee cover which I expect is quite different to the original. This single is a live version and his crowd sounds much livelier than the Dire Straits crowd I wrote about a few weeks ago. The combination of bass, hi-hat and Bruce's hushed vocal is very sexy. In fact, the whole lyric and delivery of this song is very hot, which is a new side to Bruce for me - I'm used to him being big and anthemic whereas this is intimate and seductive. The song stays reasonably calm the whole way through; I wonder whether a big push would have made it better but maybe that would just sound clichéd. He did include a long pause in the middle which was an exciting touch for a live track.
b/w For You (Live) 🟢 I'm not sure why it's specified that this is live and not Fire, when they both come from the same live compilation album, but it is what it is. For You is more upbeat and traditionally Springsteen with the piano playing high notes, the saxophone and his storytelling lyrical style. It suffers a little in that it sounds like some of his biggest hits but it's not quite as good as them, but it's still a decent song.
1270. Ben E King - Stand By Me 💜 A classic record, dressed up in an 80s sleeve. There's a Levi's 501 logo on the front and a man in jeans looking over his shoulder, echoing Pete Burns' pose from the Dead Or Alive sleeve, but this time in a traditionally handsome, classic rock-n-roll style. Confusingly, the sleeve is all about jeans in the front, but promoting the movie 'Stand By Me' on the back - the song was on the film soundtrack, the advert, and celebrating its 25th anniversary all at the same time. All combined, it's full of symbols of rock-n-roll nostalgia, the same kind of looking back that The Smiths are aiming at with Elvis on their sleeve.
As for the song, what can you say about something this iconic? Led by the bass and King's soulful voice, it's so understated and simple. Even when the violins and the choir come in, it still feels intimate, as if it was being played to you on a porch under a starry night sky. The bass line remains steady throughout, the little riff keeping the pace and floating away to a fade-out at the end. Stand By Me is one of the greatest ever love songs.
b/w The Coasters - Yakety Yak 🔵 These two songs couldn't be more different - they're from the same era but this one is a fast doo-wop hit with loud sax and walking bass. The lyrics, about a teenager forced to do chores before they can go out dancing, are a lot of fun and the bass voice performing the "don't talk back" response of the parents is a great gimmick. It's great rebellious teenage good-time music and it's amazing that both this and Stand By Me were written by Leiber and Stoller since they're like night and day.
Not a bad batch of singles here - 4 out of 5 will make it onto my playlists (in fact, 2 were already on there). Dead Or Alive was the biggest surprise but hearing Bruce's version of Fire was cool too, and you can't go wrong with Stand By Me.
I wrote about 'I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it' a while ago and now it's time to cover The 1975 again. This time it's the follow-up, 2018's A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships'. I've already made it clear that The 1975 are one of my favourite bands and although I didn't immediately fall in love with this album, it has ended up being as beloved as the ones that came before. I definitely spent a lot of time getting excited about it, following the slow drip of singles between June 1st and the album's eventual release on November 30th, which I think caused my initial disappointment - they put out all of the most accessible songs in the build-up to the album so the first time I listened to it, I was looking for more hits and what I got was something else. That said, I quickly learned to love it and saw them about half a dozen times when they toured it. I own the album on CD, cassette and vinyl, and for reviewing purposes I chose to spin the record, seen below with the ABIIOR-era memorabilia that still hangs next to my turntable.
1. The 1975 🟢 The album opens very softly with Matty playing the piano and feeling his way in to the familiar intro piece. It's different to the first two albums, less formal, and feels less like a song than ever. My attachment to it is as a live show opener, lyrics projected on screen with an arena joining in with every word, including the (JUMP) backing vocal, and laughing at the sudden atonal chord midway through. It doesn't make sense outside of the context of album/show opener but I don't suppose it needs to.
2. Give Yourself A Try 💜 I've written lovingly about Give Yourself A Try already so I won't go into detail again but it makes me so happy. I'm writing almost exactly 3 years to the day since it debuted and I'm not bored of it yet. It's a rush of sugary pop punk joy, a perfect way to kick off the album. In the context of ABIIOR it introduces us to Matty Healy's mental state in 2018 - he's still a bit neurotic and his brain is bouncing from one thing to another in quick succession, but we have optimism and wisdom shining through alongside the drug references and self-deprecation.
3. TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME 💜
The closest The 1975 have come to a straightforward modern pop song, TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME has a tropical house beat and vocoder-drenched delivery, the sort of thing you expect to hear on a Drake album, not from an "indie band". It's one of my favourite songs of theirs, another that I've never gotten bored of no matter how many times I've played it. It's catchy and simple and colourful, I can't help but stop and dance whenever I hear it, counting along with my fingers to the 'one time, two times, three times, four times' chorus. It's a perfect pop song about cheating on your girlfriend in the digital age (as the album title suggests, digital life is a theme of this album).
4. How To Draw/Petrichor 🔵
This is a song of two parts, a George Daniel instrumental masterpiece in the vein of the title track of the last album. How To Draw was a b-side of that album that has been transformed from a little piano ballad into a big orchestral/electronic collision. After a tender moment of reflection where it feels like the song is over, the piano gives way to a dance beat. The band describe the Petrichor half of the piece as the sound of the radio when you're driving at night as a teenager and I think they've captured that mood really well. I love the short, heavily-processed vocal part that appears at the end before the dance beat fades out and the piece closes with piano chords. It's a journey, this song, and I like going on it. Unfortunately it didn't play so well live, but there was one show on the tour where a fight broke out in the seats and Matty broke it up by yelling at them through the vocoder - an iconic moment.
5. Love It If We Made It 💜 A calm intro to build up to Matty spitting out a list of everything that was in the news between 2016-18. The song is the sequel to Loving Someone that became a critical favourite rather than a cult one - Matty covers immigration, the Trump presidency, climate change, celebrity, racism... It's a time capsule of cultural horror with the hopeful chorus "I'd love it if we made it" to break up the relentless staccato beat and barrage of references, the aural equivalent of doom-scrolling. 3 years on, do I think we've made it? America changed presidents so maybe a little, but there's a still a lot of work to do.
6. Be My Mistake 🟢 In sharp contrast to Love It If We Made It, we move on to a little acoustic ballad, something intimate rather than world-spanning. This song features the hallmark of the modern 1975 sound that I like least - the ever-present tinkle of piano keys that don't seem to have any relation to the song itself, as if Matty is playing the song to you while someone else is noodling away to themselves in the background. I don't hate this song, in fact it's perfectly pleasant, but there are a few lyrics in it that I find horrible: "the smell of your hair reminds me of her feet", "you do make me hard, but she makes me weak"... I could do without those.
7. Sincerity Is Scary 🔵 Something jazzy next; a song with a trumpet part. Matty performs this live while on a treadmill so I associate this song with walking and his movements. The lyrics are mostly better here than the last song but that line about putting off conceiving isn't for me. Sincerity Is Scary is a sort of break-up song, a realisation that two people aren't compatible, but he's swapped the bitchy sarcasm of A Change Of Heart for an attempt at sincerity. I like the spoken bit at the end where Matty calls another girl a 'sket', the most Northern English insult that I can think of.
8. I Like America And America Likes Me 🎀 This, for me, is the highlight of the album. The way the beat bounces and Matty desperately throws out the lines as if performing an exorcism on himself, again through the vocoder effect. It plays like a stream-of-consciousness ramble, dancing vaguely around the concepts of youth and the future and fear. It sounds urgent and panicked and those are often my favourite The 1975 songs (see also: The Ballad Of Me And My Brain).
9. The Man Who Married A Robot / Love Theme 🔵 Here we have a combination of ambient piano with Siri narrating a story over the top. It's a vaguely sinister monologue about a life lived online, filled with jarring descriptions of things we perceive as normal, like the description of food delivery apps as "he would get him cooked animals" or online gaming as "playing games with children at home with their parents". Then there's the more worrying parts, like that the internet would "always, always agree with him. This was the man's favourite". Giving the tale to a virtual assistant is a more effective way to tell this story than simply having Matty sing about it - taking out the human bias makes the whole thing so much sadder. The instrumental part used to be played in the arena for 10 minutes before the band came on stage so I find it hard to separate it from the feelings of anticipation and the jostling for position in the crowd. If you can ignore that though, it's a nice soothing sound after I Like America.
10. Inside Your Mind 💜 This is the most underrated song on the album - I've never seen them play it live and it rarely gets talked about. Big, deliberate piano chords and drums provide a crisp contrast to the noodling heard earlier and Matty croons the lyrics without layers of effects. The lack of synthy experimentation lends this the air of a traditional pop song and as a result, it stands out. Lyrically it's about opening your girlfriend's skull to read her thoughts about you, which is less traditional, but I love it as a concept. The vocal line is delivered in a calm and measured way while delivering borderline psychotic lyrics like "maybe I will wait until you're fast asleep, dreaming things I have the right to see. Maybe you are dreaming that you're in love with me, the only option left is look and see inside your mind". There's something about this song, maybe the clarity of the sound, that reminds me of dusk on a crisp Autumn-Winter day in the city centre, the twinkling of Christmas lights in the windows of shops that are beginning to close for the day and the promise of a cosy evening ahead. It's one of my favourites.
11. It's Not Living (If It's Not With You) 💜 It's Not Living is the most traditional the 1975 song on the album, in that it's a big 80s-influenced pop song. It has a huge catchy chorus with dark themes (the 'you' is heroin). I love the guitar part, the vocal harmonies, the brightness that masks the horror - it's one of the first songs I would play to someone who loves classic pop music but hasn't heard The 1975 yet. And of course, it has one of their most meme-able moments in "selling petrol".
12. Surrounded By Heads And Bodies 🟢 Again with the acoustic guitar punctuated by random bits of noise, as if there's someone tuning up the other instruments in the studio while Matty lays this track down. I prefer Surrounded By Heads And Bodies to Be My Mistake; it's apparently an ode to a friend made in rehab rather than a romance. The bass and muted drums are a nice touch when they come in midway through. Again it's a decent song and I like hearing it, it just doesn't shine as much as the others.
13. Mine 🔵 The second jazzy song now, which opens with what sounds like a wood instrument trying and failing to get in tune - probably the worst sound on the album aside from those cringey lyrics. Soon enough though we get some luscious piano and a love song that sounds like something out of an old Hollywood musical. There's a little modernity - "I fight crime online sometimes", not wanting to get married - but it's the most classic and easy-listening they've ever sounded. It's very sweet.
14. I Couldn't Be More In Love 🔵 The bass and synthetic keys in this sound so 90s power ballad. I don't know the name for this keyboard sound - could it be emulating an organ? - but go listen and you'll know exactly what I mean. Matty can't sing like Céline Dion or Michael Bolton but this song still works, from the earnest lyrics to the guitar solo. It's retro, but in a totally different way to Mine. One thing that's noticeable here and elsewhere on the album is Matty's softness - he sings a lot of the songs in a timid, vulnerable soft voice now, compared to the confident and at times incomprehensible indie boy yodel of the first album.
15. I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes) 🔵 A poignant closing number that has shades of Busted - it's bordering on boyband, if boybands did big ballads about coping with suicidal thoughts. Again, it's soft, but it soars with strings and big drums and acoustic guitar chords. I think it's a good choice of final track for the album. It ends with a little string coda to close the curtain on A Brief Inquiry..., an interval between it and its sister album, 2020's Notes On A Conditional Form.
A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships is worthy of its Best Album BRIT and Mercury Prize nomination. The 1975 always drew on lots of genre influences but here they're more diverse than ever - there's pop punk, top 40, piano ballads, dance beats, easy listening, jazz, 80s and 90s sounds... if you can't find something you like, then you probably don't like popular music. The biggest flaw is the background noodling that floats around a few of the songs but overall, it's a great listen that says a lot about the personal and political landscape of 2018.
