100 reviews # 14. Skaldowie: Ty, Pretenders: Pretenders, Deaf School: English Boys, Working Girls

These three LPs came in the mail today from a Danish supplier. One reason I like getting records in the mail is the way in which it is very similar to someone curating albums I might like because of course by the time I get them I've forgotten what I have ordered. Pretenders is an outlier here because I have owned this album since it came out but I needed to replace my scratched up copy (but, a la Wild Planet, I still don't have, but really want, Pretenders II). 

NY Daily News 18 September 2005

I have been a big fan of Skaldowie for decades but only by dint of one album of theirs I bought probably more than twenty years ago at that weird second hand shop in Smith Street that then became a hairdresser. I can't understand why more people don't love them (I imagine if they had recorded in English that might have been a plus for their appeal outside Poland/ Polish speakers: the titles are translated, for no good reason, into English and that's what I'll be referring to henceforth). They did record in German occasionally, the only other record I have of theirs is a 7" EP in German. The album I have had all this time is Cała Jesteś W Skowronkach which google translate tells me means 'You're all in the larks', obviously I'm missing something there. This one is called Ty, which means 'you', I think singular 'you' (because it also means 'thou'). 

Knowing precisely 0 about the group except they are from Krakow, a city I have spent about 24 hours in and which I enjoyed greatly and would like to see more of one day, and speaking absolutely 0 Polish, I found myself rather regretful when wiping presumably 50 years of fingerprints off the vinyl before playing Ty, and thinking of course if only those fingerprints could talk about what the eyes of the people who bore the fingers who made them (the prints) had seen. However, in the meantime I will just be satisfied with the wonderful rich bass sound of this record, hollow and wandering not entirely unlike the sound Carol Kaye made her own on (for instance) Pet Sounds, and the solidly simple drums, and the virtuosity of a group with one foot in folk, no doubt hamstrung as far as what it could 'really' sing 'about', almost certainly hearing some music from the broader zeitgeist but, like the Australians of the period, getting on with their own thing and not letting anyone's perception of the supposed superiority of the Stones or Carnaby Street or, I don't know, Woodstock cow them. 

Side one is a fine bunch of pop songs in a late 60s style. Had anyone had the slightest imagination (actually it's not really a matter of imagination - more like, lack of imagination) they should have been translating things like 'Yearning', dreamy pop a la Jimmy Webb with a little bit of dour chanting to boot, and shopping it around to the aspirant next-gen Harry Nilssons and Glenn Campbells of the era. I daresay Tin Pan Alley, or whatever the LA equivalent was, had enough cheap 'n' cheerful songsmiths as it was, but then again, a hit's a hit and 'Yearning' had hit written all over it. Barbara Streisand would have done wonders with it. As for the soft-shoe silliness of 'Hymn of the Narrow-Gauge Railway Workers', well... to be honest musically it would have fit pretty nicely on something like the Bee Gees' Odessa, except probably better than most of that album, and the Bee Gees, whatever their strengths, would not have thought up something as dinky as the 'Girl from Ipanema'-style ending. 

Side two grabs me in greater detail. It starts with a piano-based pop song called 'A Man is Born' with a 'Hallelujah' in the chorus which makes me assume that it has a religious aspect to it. It also has french horn, chanting, organ, and the sound of a baby crying in it in which at first sounds like... something was really broken, which might be the point? Don't know. I get a little kick out of a group in cold war Poland getting away with what seems to be a song about Jesus, although at the same time, I am not very interested in regarding Christianity much less Catholicism as anything radical. Things pick up from here: 'You' i.e. the title track is a light jazzy pop song with a fabulous very punchy, balloony drum sound in the verse which I really think a lot of groups then and since would kill for. However, I have to say it's the funky 'At Railway Stations All Over the World' which really makes this side. It's not idiotic to describe it as evocative of a Monkees track I'll remember soon enough (um, possibly 'Tear Drop City') and perhaps a bit of 'The Beat Goes On'; clearly the verse is meant to evoke a railway train, an old trick (probably old even in 1970) but done well, the outcome is pretty grand, and these guys are clearly tight players as well - whoever plays the keyboards is really Keith Emersoning it up at the end and it's sensational, and just drums, bass and keys go for a bit of a crazy loop before the whole comes to the end. (In case I haven't made it clear, I'm not really saying that Skaldowie are imitating anyone, it's at worst the zeitgeist, at best their own creative genius). 'The Last Scene', a bit of a folk-rock opera, adds a massive slavic bass line to some gentle if disturbing harp and a classic example of Beach Boysesque balladeering which I have to say (viz mentions of Carol Kaye above) is a real element of the Skaldowie sound, and then, um, of course - a truck driving away (!?). The last track is 'Epilogue', which true to the times ends in mad tape-speeding-up craziness, is a bit of a frenetic bit of hilarity as is and you can sort of imagine this knockin' then dead at the Krakow clubs while smileless guards watch on from the surrounding dark corners. 

It seems that in the late 1970s Rolling Stone magazine supplied a syndicated column to newspapers, 'hence why' (as they say) when you search for Deaf School's third album on newspapers.com this same review appears a billion times, though only once I think (here, in the Ithaca Journal 27 May 1978) zanily crediting the record to 'Dear School'. 

To tell the truth, on early listenings (I will keep trying I think) English Boys/Working Girls is a bit of a disappointment after Don't Stop the World, which I love, having bought it on spec from a good record shop in Preston for cheap. EB/WG is the third Deaf School album (DSTW the second) and I guess by 1978 the band might have been thinking, well, who are we and what do we do exactly? There were way too many members (8) and probably also just too many ideas, if that's possible, and I think it might be, particularly when another big pervasive idea is 'crazy intellectuals can't new wave'. God it must have been difficult and I guess this is the kind of problem Split Enz had (but got over, somehow). 

Listening to English Boys/Working Girls you get a strong sense of the kind of showmanship that must have been a big part of Deaf School; a whole lot of guff going on at once, seemingly everyone doing their own thing, then sometimes they would click into unison and you'd realise it was all rehearsed. 

Songs like 'All Queued Up' are totally of the moment (the 1978 moment), and could be Blondie or, um, something off the Starstruck soundtrack or... well, the moment, and it was quite a moment. The sound of people who thought things were going to be better by now. Partying till they drop the atom bomb (I was talking to someone much older than me last week btw who mentioned how despairing his grandchildren were about the future because of the environment - I didn't quite say it right but I sort of said - jeepers, everyone who was sentient before 1990 had the same kind of despair re: nuclear annihlation I'm sure). (Actually both - the atom bomb and the environment). (And it's not like the atom bomb has gone away, but no-one thinks about it anymore except regarding Donald Trump and he's gone (for) now). 

'I Wanna Be Your Boy' is one of those songs that just goes everywhere, three directions at once like the Marx Brothers all in a huge suit. What Deaf School clearly 'needed' (though I'm glad they didn't get it) was a producer who took their songs apart and said no, don't do this bit, just concentrate on this amazing riff, and forget trying to make the song some kind of 3D hologram of an explosion. (Oddly enough the producer was Mutt Lange, who went on to work with people whose music wasn't complex, like AC/DC and Def Leppard). 

So that's my assessment of English Boys/Working Girls. Too many people in the band, too many ideas in the songs, funnily enough not a problem with Don't Stop the World. A long time ago I had an idea for a kind of, I don't know, studio group who would take whole albums that were considered problematic for significant artists (I guess things like Their Satanic Majesties), and remake/repair them (basically, rerecord them, but show how they could be made to work). A thoroughly 'academic' exercise that no-one would have time for in the real world, but it did appeal. If I were to do that to this album every song would be three songs. It would be a triple album. Tell you what though, the last song ('O. Blow') really tells you everything you need to know about where Madness found significant support for their sound/style. 

Which leaves us with Pretenders. Serious?! I don't want to listen to this album now. It does have four of the best songs of 1980 though, hands down: 'Precious', 'Private Life', 'Mystery Achievement' and 'Up the Neck'. Wow! Not to mention 'Brass in Pocket' which I guess 41 years ago for all I know today I spent a day going from radio station to radio station on a little transistor radio hoping one of them would play it. Maybe if I drink a bit more of this Salmiakki I'll play side 1 (but I'll yank it off before that fucking 'Space Invaders' track, what a dog). 

i am the cliche

I seem to recall that my first blog entry on Lorraine Crescent was about coffee, probably about my attempts to give up coffee which was an obsession of sorts in the first decade of the twenty-first century (why? Partly I think because someone had told me that coffee increased one's desire for carbs, and I wanted to lose weight without doing anything icky like exercising; also, living with an addict as I was, I wanted to prove that I could get by without any addiction to anything, and that was my one addiction) (and is). But I bet it wasn't long before my blog entry on cats. Also, dogs. So, coffee and pets, coffee and pets, and pop music, these are the things that move me. Oh, and shitty old television. It's sick, and worse, it's a sickness so many people of my generation/class have, maybe less so my gender but there's plenty of men who have this. Just not as many as nice middle class ladies. 

Coffee entered my life with my first girlfriend, Rachel. I was 15. She drank coffee, I am guessing probably instant, a lot, and so did I therefore. Her family also ate a lot of chinese cabbage, they relished it, but only one of those things have stayed with me (now I think about it, maybe I should try chinese cabbage again, just to see if it evokes anything e.g. the first time I ever saw/heard Duran Duran on Countdown, doing 'Planet Earth'). Coffee has been with me pretty much ever since and probably always will be, though I did successfully give it up for a couple of months some time - I forget when, it's been a long life, but I think I switched to decaf for a time either late 90s or early 00s, but of course like heroin you crave the rush. 

Pets were always there it's silly to even discuss. I have had times in my life with no pets, it's true, but seriously, why would you.

Pop music was always there, but I specifically remember a long drive with a family my family were close friend with, where they as a family sang 'Let it Be' in the car (now, obviously, that could have happened last year or ten years after 'Let it Be' came out, and if I was five I wouldn't have known whether 'Let it Be' was released in 1970 or 1850, but it was almost definitely before 1972, because we moved away from Kew at the beginning of '73 and I wouldn't have gone on a long drive with that family after that time). So that marks for me an early memory, my earliest memory, of contemporary pop music. By the mid-70s I was actually Beatles obsessed, when at school the divisions were clear: Beatles vs Abba. I switched to, or accommodated, Abba in 1976, via two sources: visiting my father in hospital I think when he was having a back operation, and seeing 'Mama Mia' on tv (extra interest because 'mama mia' was a thing kids - Italian kids? - said at school that was exotic enough to almost be swearing) but I was still not ready to be swept up in anything, but then a schoolfriend, John, described 'Fernando' to me on a school excursion, as being about the Swedish-Mexican war, and that made it stick in my mind. He also raved about it and I guess his taste had currency for me. However, I also vaguely remember mentioning it to him again a few months (a few days? who knows) later and he was entirely uninterested. I might be extrapolating false memories with that last bit. So by 1976 it was Abba vs Bay City Rollers, although some girls were still uncertain whether they were aligned with BCR or 'horses'. After the Abba thing crashed (1977?) I went into abeyance with pop music interest until around 1980 when I became heavily engaged. Rachel broke up with me and I had been saving money to buy her a nice impressive birthday present, so since I didn't have to do that anymore, I bought myself some albums (I already had the first Pretenders and B-52s albums, and I added The Undertones' Hypnotised, which I'd read about in the NME, the first Dexy's Midnight Runners album, Devo's Freedom of Choice and John Foxx's Metamatic: I actually still own copies of all of these). 

Bad TV was always good. If I am grateful to my parents for anything it is the way they encouraged me, leading by example, to regard mass media as always potentially idiotic, venal, etc. I recall at a very young age my father explaining to me that Reg Ansett misled the Australian public/government by claiming that if he was allowed his own television channel, he would produce high-quality local content, which of course he never did. I don't remember my father saying that Ansett had pals in high places who probably didn't care either way what happened, although if he had that might have gone over my head. I recall (as I have probably bored you in years past on this blog) holding uncritical attitudes to cartoons,* though on reflection, maybe having cartoons like Road Runner, or Secret Squirrel, was a chance to have something that was mine, and where my parents' hypercritical attitude didn't matter. Ditto Adventure Island. But at the same time, we would happily ridicule all stupid, obvious, mainstream television but in some instances also enjoy it because we could ridicule it. So, my sarcastic, unproductive, casual arsehole attitude was cultivated from an early age through my parents' own responses cultivated I suppose in the case of my mother, from her parents' highbrow attitude to popular culture and in the case of my father, his university arts degree removing him from his parents' lower middle class attitudes. It shocked me, as I got older and saw other people's lives, how uncritically they accepted mass media, though for all that, I am aware that my own response of trusting nothing mediated by (for instance) commercial television was/is as much a learned reaction. I wasn't taught to think critically, I was taught to always find a way to be critical. I had to unlearn that and enjoy (to pluck something from my brain's offering up of an immediate example, without thinking hard about it) 'Into the Heat' by The Angels, without wondering about who the fucking Angels thought they were or were trying to be or who they thought they were appealing to or what Doc Neeson's theatricality was supposed to indicate. I realise that's a weird example, it's just the first example I thought of, and so I went with it on the assumption that that would be more 'pure'. To problematise this, I guess we all liked older things better in our family on the understanding/assumption that artisans were more involved in the old days, and skill was more prevalent, there was some kind of talent recognition mechanism, whereas the 'present' (eg the 1970s) was more about trickery and faddishness - though if I had challenged my father, for instance, on this assumption I am pretty sure he would have happily reeled off 20 names of actors, artists, writers who were as shit as anything currently popular, and as popular in their day if not more so.  

Hence, by the way, the character of Elyse in Persiflage, who has an uncritical, base, positive response to a tv sitcom which she is too naive to even understand and on which she imprints other emotional ideals, but from which she filters through everything else in her waking life. Sorry to bring it back to my silly graphic novel but of course that's what that shit's about. I'm fascinated by the reality behind fiction/drama/play-acting and I'm fascinated by popular culture tropes and what they really 'mean' to an audience. I am also of course fascinated by the perceived background or underpinning or context to music, or to celebrity. 

To go back to Abba: they fascinated us as 12 year olds at Auburn South Primary. Two girls and two boys in our class (one of the girls was an absolute crush of mine at the time, and I was not alone) were allowed to use the classroom during lunch time to workshop a play they were formulating about the lives of Abba members. I think in hindsight probably more likely they were learning how to kiss, but what do I know (one of the boys later told me and other boys he had fucked the girl I had a crush on, which I accepted uncritically. The story went like this: 'she came to my house with her parents for a party, and I said do you want to come up to my room and she said yeah, and we fucked'. About twenty years later I thought - hey wait a minute - that actually is really, really unlikely, not least because I'm pretty sure the girl in question only had a mother not a father but also for class reasons - those people would never socialise, ever). Another Abba story, from a girl in I'm guessing grade 6: 'Abba all went into a sauna together naked, and the boys went out to roll in the snow and the girls locked them out of the sauna, naked'. This is actually much more likely than the local fucking story, but still that it was told at all shows how exotic and exciting Abba's lives were to us, as we modelled our understanding of what it was to be physically perfect and sexually active super-white adults. Boy were they a cultural manifestation as Australia got over White Australia. They were with us at exactly the same time as the first Vietnamese refugees started to be accepted (or not) as Australians. 

I don't know how to end this but it's not like I'm writing for The Monthly or something** so I don't have to have a neat ending, I can just end. 

*Also comics, which were however a very different beast to me, as different as novels are from films - of course. 

** They wouldn't have me