Taking a break from deep-dives and long essays. Since it is Halloween today, I’m writing this and publishing this on Halloween. Trying to stay topical and relevant at the same time, let’s see if I can do it. This also means, there will be little to no proofreading, editing, so you are getting me at my stream-of-conciousness best.

This post was inspired by some comment, I think where mentioned a Halloween-themed STUDS? Since I don’t have a list of identically titled songs for a Halloween theme, I decided to pick songs, that spooked me, scared me, and freaked me out. Either only when I was a youth, or still to this day. (Secret: most of them still scare me today).

What this is NOT. A Halloween playlist. So unfortunately it doesn’t contain Oingo Boingo’s “Dead Man’s Party”, which is a song I love and always have playing every 10/31. Nor does it contain Ministry’s “Everday Is Halloween”, or Siouxsie and the Banshee’s “Halloween”. (all amazing songs) I will pause here to let anyone stop reading if that’s a show-stopper.

Bauhaus - “Stigmata Martyr”

The definitive goth anthem or Halloween spooky track is undoubtedly “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” Yet, virtually everyone throws it onto their seasonal shudder playlists. The track that truly rattled my core was “Stigmata Martyr,” tucked away on their debut record, In the Flat Field.

It ratchets up the dread far past BLD. One could easily maintain that its plunging bass lines evoke a much deeper chill. The guitar work serves as a masterclass in channeling Kraftwerk’s signature Kling-Klang approach channeled through the guitar. Daniel Ash crafts a sonic score for an unmade horror film, mirroring the sensation of arachnids skittering across your spine. Scraping the metallic guitar strings and striking them with odd items.

Back when I was a kid, the lyricism unnerved me, instilling this eerie feeling that cinematic terror from films like The Omen or The Exorcist might manifest just by spinning the record.

Though it is Peter Murphy’s glossolalia that genuinely elevates the fright. Regardless of whether it’s authentic Latin or pure gibberish, it delivers sheer dread, especially when paired with Ash (or perhaps David J) bellowing matching frantic chants in a piercing upper register.

Skinny Puppy - “The Killing Game”

I ask myself out loud, in my most non-trolling voice. Has ever included these Canadian pioneers in one of his pieces? They are one of the most overlooked bands ever. Even now. At least The Velvet Underground got some recognition and even more as the years went on. But it’s a tragedy, that entire genres of Industrial music, Industrial Metal, Industrial Dance, or Industrial techno sprang up, and they never got any due. Ministry, or even Trent Reznor mentioned them as influences in interviews, but that’s about it.

Without going into details at a young and impressionable age I had a Skinny Puppy “era” which involved a subculture and dating habits…

Shock-rock theatrics?

Staging simulated vivisections live on stage?

Yet beneath the grotesque spectacle lay a genuine message: fiercely anti-vivisection, anti-war, and opposing human cruelty. They weaponized shocking imagery as a visceral artistic critique of those very evils. Regardless, their capacity to instill pure dread outmatches virtually any contemporary. Selecting just one track is daunting.

Ultimately, I went with a piece recorded while the group was actively unraveling, just prior to their bassist’s tragic demise. It stands out as their most accessible, conventionally structured composition, complete with decipherable vocal lines. I chose it because it functions like a Poe-esque lamentation, capturing that delicate balance of self-examination and societal critique while reclaiming their narrative. Defying critics who dismissed them as mere shock-value, misogynistic, or cruel. Rather than outright terror, this track carries an emotional weight so intense that it occasionally makes for a difficult listen.
For those of you unfamiliar, whatever you think this looks like or sounds like, Skinny Puppy came first.

Siouxsie and the Banshees - “Night Shift”

Much like the preceding groups, this band is inextricably linked with macabre aesthetics, sadistic imagery, and psychosexual terror. The conventional selections would be tracks like “Halloween”, or frankly anything off Juju, such as “Spellbound.” People also frequently point to “Christine,” despite the common misconception linking it to Stephen King’s tale. For this seasonal playlist, my selection is a track that thoroughly rattled me when I first stumbled upon them in my youth.

It started when my sister and I rented Nocturne from our local indie video shop. The film captured a live performance from the early eighties, right after guitarist John McGeoch departed and Robert Smith stepped in to assist with tour duties before contributing to a pair of studio records. Siouxsie’s dramatic stage persona simultaneously mesmerized and unsettled me.

Yet it is this song buried towards the end of Juju, “Night Shift”, that summoned a subtle, metaphorical dread: the very nightmare that Skinny Puppy would later unleash in explicit detail. Steve Severin’s basslines, reminiscent of Bauhaus, lay down a chilling foundation of pure atmospheric terror. Meanwhile, John McGeogh’s guitar work mirrors the shrieking string arrangements of classic horror scores, signaling an impending atrocity. The intertwined instrumentation maintains a suffocating anxiety, making the listener feel like a helpless spectator to some unseen cruelty. The sheer ambiguity intensifies the fright. Who exactly are these “nightly visitors..”? Are they brutal military forces in a camp, or spectral figures stalking a sleeping child?

“Fuck the mothers, kill the others... Fuck the others, kill their mothers...”

And then comes that chilling nod to Victorian serial murders: “A happy-go-lucky chap, all dressed in black....”
Only recently I learned the song was actually inspired by a contemporary serial killer in the UK who was on the loose at the time, the Yorkshire ripper. That knowledge is not necessary to enjoy the song or feel the dread. The lyrics are so beautifully terrifying, that they conjure up images of Jack the Ripper, as well as prison-camp/war-camp atrocities of the early 20th century, and any number of sexual crimes against women or any gender.

The clip I chose is not the one from Nocturne, with Robert Smith. But the earlier show with John McGeogh, playing the guitar parts he wrote.

The Cure - “Cold”

The record Pornography forever occupies an undeniable space among my top personal albums.

By the time I purchased the album, I had fully surrendered to the darkness, actively hunting down macabre atmosphere across literature and sound while devouring a relentless stream of Stephen King and Clive Barker fiction.

Few instruments channel sheer dread, sorrow, and unsettling gloom quite like the cello: a point vividly demonstrated throughout the haunting orchestral score for Joker. Hearing that ominous string instrument featured on a track by one of my essential acts was an absolute revelation. Exposition aside, the initial encounter with this piece thrashed my nervous system with immediate terror.

Approaching the full album requires a specific psychological posture; embedded in that journey, this movement slithers forward in exquisite, suffocating horror rather than functioning as a standalone item. It operates much like isolated fragments tucked into concept landmarks like The Wall or Dark Side of the Moon.
For this song I chose a rare live clip from Paris.
It’s cool to see both Robert and Simon doing multiple instrument duties, with Simon using both the bass and bass pedals, Geddy Lee style.

Naturally, omitting Joy Division from a thematic entry like this feels completely impossible. Yet, the group itself never truly unnerved me, nor did their catalog harbor inherently terrifying tracks. What genuine dread it summons stems instead from the severe physical ailments and suffocating psychological torment that haunted Ian Curtis, ultimately driving him toward his self-inflicted end.

While hardly comparable in severity, my personal confrontations with mental health turbulence make certain selections from their repertoire remarkably difficult to endure. They strike a raw nerve, awakening an unsettling vulnerability that genuinely frightens me from within.

Two specific tracks from Closer immediately surface, leaving me torn on which to select for this piece: “Twenty Four Hours” or “The Eternal.”

Ultimately, I must go with “The Eternal.”

Joy Division - “The Eternal”

It’s the autobiographical feeling of the song’s lyrics. Knowing that the narrator is leaving behind a wife and a newborn child. As a father, myself, the line “with children my time, is so wastefully spent…”, unnverved me and rattles me to the core even now.

My selection hinges on its eerie evocative imagery: a spectral presence reaching beyond the soil, an apparition quietly departing the cemetery grounds. Almost operating like a surreal Dickensian narrative, observing one’s own timeline of past, present, and future as a detached spectator.

The true horror settles over the listener with the devastating knowledge that this stands among the final pieces composed before its author ended his life; thus leaving one to decipher whether it exists as gothic fiction or stark autobiography.

Yet despite the overwhelming gloom, it remains undeniably, hauntingly beautiful.

It was difficult choosing the video for this, but I think in the end, Anton Corbijn’s (who knew him, took iconic photos of the band) clips from the movie Closer are the most appropriate.

Before You Go

Missed Last Week

The Church: Heyday at 40: Read my post celebrating The Church’s influential album, Heyday

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Welcome back Hi-Fiers,

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes

It’s been a minute, folks, and a long time coming. The last couple of months have been rough, and getting back to writing hasn’t been easy. pulled me out of the doldrums by inviting me onto his STUDS series, where we went six rounds on songs called “Crazy.”
Luckily, I also had this little gem in the oven and just needed to dust it off. So here goes…

Any time I sit down to write about The Church, I stop dead in my tracks. There’s too much in my head, decades of records, interviews, conversations, and opinions, and all of it wants out at once. So this time, I’m not going to tell the whole story. I’m going to tell you about one feeling.

This is about the band’s 4th studio album (if you don’t count the EP’s in between).

Forty years ago this January, Heyday landed in American record stores. The first time I heard it, I was sure I’d heard it before. I hadn’t. Maybe it was from hearing the songs live during the Starfish concert in ‘88.

Already Yesterday?

I can’t tell you exactly when Heyday came into my life. That was more than 30 years ago, and my memory isn’t going to settle it. What I do remember is the feeling.

When “Columbus” came on, I knew it. I knew that riff and the way it drives forward like it’s late for something. It felt like a song I’d grown up with, which was impossible, because I hadn’t.

I’ve spent years wondering where that familiarity came from. At 11 or 12, I watched a lot of MTV, so maybe the video slipped past me one afternoon and lodged itself somewhere in the back of my brain. Or maybe it was my older cousins, who were Church fans long before I was. On one of their visits, maybe the tape was playing in the car while I sat in the back seat, paying attention to nothing in particular.

Maybe neither of those things happened. It doesn’t really matter. Déjà vu doesn’t need a source to be real.

Part of it may have been the look of the thing. On the cover, the band wear paisley shirts, and the whole record carries a throwback, late-60s air. Then there’s the sound: chiming, jangling guitars with that Rickenbacker ring so many people have traced back to the Byrds. Heyday sounds like a record that was already old when it arrived, and I mean that as the highest compliment. It was built to feel remembered.

It took me a long time to realize the familiarity wasn’t only in the sound. It was in the story the album tells. We’ll get there.

Promises and Miracles

When Heyday came out, I was blissfully unaware of it. I was very aware of Simple Minds, though. “Sanctify Yourself” and “Alive and Kicking” were everywhere, and in my young mind, they were already a big band. By the time The Church’s hit album, Starfish came around, Simple Minds were huge, and I’d learned the name Peter Walsh, the producer behind their breakthrough, New Gold Dream.

What I didn’t know until much later was that The Church loved early Simple Minds too, everything up through New Gold Dream. Over the years, I’ve had the chance to talk about Heyday with Steve Kilbey and Peter Koppes, and the way they told it, their request going into the album was simple: get us Peter Walsh. And they got him.

Before he ever met the band, Walsh asked for their entire back catalogue. He wanted to understand what they were about before he touched a single fader. The band didn’t know what to expect from him, but the one thing they never expected was that he’d turn out to be a fan.

What Walsh did with that understanding was mostly get out of the way. He encouraged them to play live in the studio and to chase the spontaneity of the room, the happy accidents and found sounds that only happen when four people are playing at once. Above all, he made space for the thing that made The Church, The Church: the conversation between Koppes and Marty Willson-Piper on guitar.

Heyday is where that conversation peaks. The two guitars weave counter melodies around each other, chord against chord and line against line, and something strange happens where they overlap. Keen listeners have long talked about a phantom instrument on this record, a third voice nobody actually played. It’s the harmonics of the two guitars combining into a frequency of their own. Some hear a mandolin; some hear something they can’t name. Put on headphones and you’ll start hearing it everywhere. That ghost was born in Walsh’s studio, out of two guitarists playing together in real time.

Walsh also pushed the band toward a bigger palette, adding horns and strings. Not every experiment landed, but when one did, the result was cinematic, almost Beatle-esque. The two best examples come near the end of the album, and that’s where we’re headed.

Emerald Haunt in Overdrive

Because I started with Starfish, I spent years thinking its opener, “Destination,” was too slow a build. Some days, I found it boring. Time has been kind to that song, and I’ve come to appreciate how that album unfolds. Still, I love the contrast with Heyday, because it doesn’t build. It bolts. Enter the opening song for this album, “Myrrh”.

Think about waiting for a band to walk out on stage. The lights go down, the crowd starts buzzing, and the opener has one job: grab you. That’s “Myrrh.” It’s a show opener, a song version of horses out of the gate.

Then that opening line:

“Emerald haunt in overdrive”

It’s a very cut-and-paste, Bowie kind of line. Who knows what it means? But it conjures a team of horses bursting out of the gate in some extraterrestrial desert. I was deep in my T.S. Eliot phase back then, reading The Waste Land, and “Myrrh” conjured all of those visions for me.

And the song doesn’t just start strong; it goes out strong with a soaring e-bow lead melody on guitar to carry the song out on a high note.

The paradox of “Myrrh”

Myrrh is a gift, the stuff of merchant caravans and wise men crossing the desert. But listen to the line,

”nightmare descent into Jericho city”

That isn’t a friendly caravan. That’s an invading army. Something is coming over the horizon, and it ain’t bringing presents.

But that’s just one interpretation. It’s also a metaphor for the band at the time, flying to different corners of the globe for publicity, and filming music videos. Being on tour, arriving in a “nightmare descent” to an unknown city, and playing to a crowd. In such situations they can be the invading army, or prisoners of war on stage playing to an angry mob.

Let Me Lie In Here With You

I can’t remember if I read this somewhere, or if it was in conversation with Marty himself or Steve. But I recall reading that the riff for “Tristesse” turned up while Marty was noodling on his guitar outside the rehearsal room. Steve heard it, was mesmerized, and wanted to build the whole song around it.

You can hear why. The riff rings from start to finish, seductive and hypnotic, like a bell you can’t stop hearing. The rest is Kilbey’s lyric, which roams the whole planet, from Dodge City to Bombay to the melting polar ice caps. On the surface, it’s a love song. But a love song to whom? It could be something mythic, Saturn and Gaea, sky and Mother Earth. As with most of Kilbey’s writing, the listener has to decide.

Here’s my reading. Scattered through the verses, never stated outright, are images of a planet under siege.

I was working in an orchard

That grew the strangest fruit….

The children cannot hear you, they only want your loot…

You hold onto their essence, like a parachute.
They never believed you were in distress

And near the end, the elements come undone:

Waters inflamed
Fires burned out
Ice melting down

Conquistadores and Objectors

Which brings me back to “Columbus,” the song that started all this.

It’s the catchiest tune on the album, no contest, riding a riff that never lets up. But listen to what it’s about. The whole song turns on one line, “Oh Columbus, I never should have let you go”.

It’s sung like a lament.

And then comes the chill: “We don’t possess a single empty tear or furrowed brow”. Not a single tear for the people already living in the lands he “discovered,” and not a moment’s thought for the terror and erasure that came after. It reminds me of Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer,” only turned inside out. Young sings from the shore, watching in wonderment as the ships arrive. Kilbey sings from the deck, lamenting the horrors about to be unleashed.

I’ve always loved historical themes in my rock songs, and The Church have always gone there. Ancient Persia, ancient Greece, empires rising and falling; it’s part of their DNA. On Heyday, though, it starts to feel like more than scattered imagery. Look at the running order: an army on the horizon, a planet under siege, a conquistador sent across the sea.

Having studied many of the Church albums and songs, their songs are ultimately love songs. Abundance of, lack of, yearning for. So I’m not stating that this is a “war” album or a political album by any means. I just found a theme for my writeup to thread through the songs, and it’s more like a river that runs beneath the floorboards of the album.

“Already Yesterday” might be the album’s conscience. I hear it as a song about the people who refuse, or at least stop to look in the mirror while everything around them burns.

We don’t feel those locks and chains

We won’t listen to the lizard part of our brains
Giving us orders

That’s the oldest, most violent wiring we have, and someone is refusing its orders.

Then there’s

Mechanical bird of prey
Sing for your emperor…

And finally,

Disconnected, drift away, nobody’s questioning

Head silver, feet of clay, who is surrendering?

They fall in our heyday, I am remembering..

That old biblical image of an empire built to crumble, with a question hanging in the air about who will give in first.
One final anecdote on this. This is the second song in Church canon where Steve Kilbey makes a callback to a previous song. In the song “One Day” from the album Seance, there’s a throwaway line as the song fades out that’s lifted directly from “Bel Air” from their first album Of Skins and Heart.

In “Already Yesterday” it’s a reference to a song itself as a fictional location.

“Violet Town” is a song from Remote Luxury, the EP that preceded Heyday.

I’ve decided to include a clip of this song, recorded 25 years after the release of the album in the US. It was from a live broadcast on Seattle’s KEXP, and is a complete reimagining of the song, given a Beatlesque treatment. As much as I love the album version, this is my favorite version of the song.

Side one closes with “Happy Hunting Ground,” an instrumental that every band member contributed to and shares songwriting credit on.

It also contains one of Walsh’s string experiments that works beautifully. The song is almost a 2 parter, with the first almost 2 minutes being a Far Eastern sounding instrumental. It’s widescreen and swelling, a breath between battles. Then the strings, plucked staccato, and the guitars interplaying with them begins the 2nd half of the song. Paired with “Already Yesterday,” it’s one of the best stretches of music the band ever made.
This song has a sibling from the recording sessions that never made it on the album, but it’s worth an honorable mention, “Trance Ending”. It merges the themes of “Myrrh” and the sound of “Happy Hunting Ground”, and has a more Middle Eastern sounding flair to it. Later reissues of the album include it, luckily.

Bacchanalia

If “Already Yesterday” is the conscience, “Tantalized” is what happens when the conscience loses.

This is the frenzy, the horror after the city falls: the looting, the bloodlust, the bacchanalia the history books leave out. You can hear all of it in the arrangement. The drums are frenetic, the guitars are percussive and dissonant, and the horns and strings don’t soften a thing. They make it wilder. Everything careens, and somehow it all holds together.

The guitar approach sounds like both Peter and Marty were channeling John McKay from Siouxsie and the Banshees’ first album. Given Marty’s own account of the studio recording (linked below), I believe it was his approach. Approaching the guitar as a percussive instrument, the scratching of the strings up and down the neck. To give the song its glorious unease and sound of attack.

It’s the most punk rock song The Church ever recorded, and it has horns and strings on it. Think about how unlikely that is. Only Walsh ever got that out of this band.
Ironically, this was the most divisive song amongst fans when it came out. The first Church song, with horns front and center.
Since then, it’s the most requested song, and a crowd-pleaser live.
I had only two options I was going to share for the live video of this song. The Sydney Opera House version backed by a string orchestra (which would have matched closer to the live album version), or the 2010 ARIA (Australian Hall of Fame Induction). I went with the latter. To show the magic of Marty Willson-Piper and Peter Koppes guitar playing can conjour any soundscape they choose. Plus it kicks ass.

Venus Set Me Free

The last song on the album. “Roman” is the bands other great triumph with sound. There are no credited strings or horns. But the guitars make it sound like there is orchestration. The crescendos and swells are pure cinema, rising and falling like a camera pulling back over a battlefield at dusk. It’s the most Beatle-esque moment on the record, and it might be the most devastating.

Lyrically, there’s nowhere left to hide:

“what a feeling, baby, knowledge and brutality”

That’s an empire that burns the libraries before the villages. Then there’s the conquered man:

They’ve found another martyr, rather it was him than me

They took away his language, then his memory

And finally, a line as bleak as anything the band ever wrote:

“We have to kill them bastards, then compose an elegy”

That’s empire in a sentence: conquer, erase, then write the poem. The army that appeared on the horizon in “Myrrh” has finished its work, and now it’s writing the history.

Notice the shape of the whole thing, too. Heyday opens like a concert and closes like a film. In between, the songs don’t just follow the theme; they follow the peaks and valleys, the charges and the breathers, the way a good setlist does. Whether that came from Walsh, the band, or both, I can’t say for sure. But in 1985 and 1986, The Church had found a winning formula: a strong opener to grab you, and a cinematic closer to leave you staring at the ceiling.

Ornamental or Warm and Gentle

There’s one more chapter to this story.

For years, Peter Koppes and Marty Willson-Piper had been writing in the shade of Steve Kilbey’s greatness. By Heyday, both were coming into their own, and it showed. Each got a song on the record: “As You Will” from Koppes and “The View” from Willson-Piper. You won’t find them on the vinyl, but they’re on the cassette and CD editions, and they’ve ridden along on every reissue since.

Marty had already stepped out of that shade. On Remote Luxury, two of his songs, “Volumes” and “10,000 Miles,” made it onto a Church record. “The View” carries on down that path. It doesn’t really sound like a Church song; it sounds like a Marty solo song, and a strong one. It would make a good companion to “10,000 Miles,” though sonically, it wouldn’t have fit on that record either. It stands a little apart from Heyday’s theme, feel, and sound, and it’s great on its own terms.

“As You Will” was a first: the first Peter Koppes song on a Church record, and everyone’s introduction to his songwriting. It’s a great one, and it sits comfortably inside the world of Heyday.

It also started a tradition. From then on, every Church album carried a contribution from each guitarist.

I Heard the Sirens Play Just Like an Orchestra

That thing about déjà vu.

Maybe I did catch the “Columbus” video on MTV. Maybe I heard it at my first Church concert in 1988. Maybe my cousins did play the tape in the car. But I think the real reason Heyday felt familiar is that it tells the oldest story we have. Armies cross deserts. Conquistadores set sail. The earth takes the damage. A few people refuse, and the rest give in to the frenzy. Then someone takes away a people’s identity, land, and language, then their memories, and writes them an elegy.

We’ve all heard it before, and we’ll hear it again.

Even the songs I sometimes skip, like “Night of Light,” carry that same ache. There’s something nostalgic in its sound and its words, as if it’s remembering something on our behalf.

Forty years on, Heyday still sounds like a record I knew before I ever heard it. I used to think that was a trick of memory. Now I think it’s the point. Some albums capture a moment. This one captures something that keeps happening, which is why it never sounds dated. It always sounds like “already yesterday”.

Before You Go

Further Reading

Heyday recording liner notes. From ex-band-guitarist Marty Willson-Piper in his blog, giving an insiders view from the studio on what actually happened.

The Church in 10 Songs, covering the road from their first album through Remote Luxury, right up to the doorstep of Heyday.

Artist Spotlight: Simple Minds, from Glaswegian punk rockers to cerebral dance music, including the New Gold Dream era that made The Church want Peter Walsh.

The Church 27 albums deep Pt 1: my gargantuan undertaking of ranking every Church album ever. If this post has deepened your curiosity and you want to learn more about their music and where this album ranks for me.

The Church 27 albums reconsidered Pt 2: another person’s perspective and rating of the same albums.

Jack Frost The Supergroup That Almost Was: Lead singer Steve Kilbey’s side project with ex-Go-Between songwriter, Grant McLennan.

Missed Last Week

STUDS #13: Crazy : I was the guest on ’s Earworms and Songloops for his recurring STUDS series and we go “crazy”.

Thank you for reading this exploration. If this piece moved you, taught you something new, or reminded you why music still matters, please consider sharing or restacking it. These stories deserve to be told and remembered.

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Leave a like and tell me in the comments: Do you have a memory or connection with this album?

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Welcome back Hi-Fiers,

Every so often, something arrives that doesn’t just change its field; it changes what the field is. The Industrial Revolution did it to labor. Electricity did it to daily life. The computer did it to everything else. Music has had these moments too. Jazz disrupted classical, rewiring how audiences listened. R&B and rock shattered the crooners and swept the standards era off the charts. Then punk rock kicked the door in on navel-gazing prog, and on rock itself, stripping the whole enterprise back to first principles. These weren’t trends; they were extinction events, and the ecosystems that emerged afterward looked nothing like what came before.

In 1975, four musicians in Düsseldorf set off one of these events, and almost nobody noticed at the time. Kraftwerk had spent their early years making avant-garde music with traditional instruments: drums, guitars, flutes, orchestral arrangements. Then, on Radio-Activity, they did something as seminal as punk but more radical. They shed it all. No drums, no guitar, no strings. Where the technology they needed didn’t exist, they modified what did, reinventing sequencers to capture sounds no instrument could make. Radio-Activity wasn’t just an album; it was a blueprint, a demonstration to the entire industry of what could be done.

Here’s the part that still astonishes: they were doing this before the computer age, with what today we’d call analog hardware, yet they were thinking like a network. In computing terms, Radio-Activity was a ping, a transatlantic signal sent from Düsseldorf into the void: is anyone out there? In Los Angeles, David Bowie answered, an ARP reply (the internet protocol that turns an anonymous address into a known machine), and the signal now had a name on the other end. He folded the transmission into Station to Station and sent it back across the ocean: handshake, connection established. Two nodes were exchanging data years before anyone had a word for what a network was.

But a blueprint is not a building. Experiments prove concepts; they don’t settle into them. That’s what Trans-Europe Express is: the first stable release on the new operating system. The session is established, the experiments are proven, and now Kraftwerk builds on solid ground. This is the record where the future stops being a proposition and starts being a place, one with rail connections to Bowie’s Berlin, and eventually, improbably, to the South Bronx.

Smashing the System: Building on the Blueprint

Radio-Activity had proven the concept, and validation arrived from an unexpected direction. Bowie and Iggy Pop had already met Kraftwerk and shared their love of the album; Bowie had been absorbing its transmission into his own work. When Kraftwerk then heard Station to Station, they loved it: ten minutes of locomotive churn about travel, trains, and a man in motion, built partly from ideas they had broadcast from Düsseldorf. The circuit fascinated them. A British artist in America picking up a signal from Germany, an American picking up the same frequency, both eventually relocating to Berlin. Ideas were crossing borders faster than the people carrying them.

They were eager to double down on a fully electronic follow-up, and they wanted a new thematic direction. The previous album had carried existential dread alongside its themes of transmission and communication; the next record would be about connectivity, about bringing people closer together. They had a working title, “Europe Endless,” which survives as the album’s opening track. What they didn’t have yet was a center of gravity.

That arrived over dinner, and the setting matters. Their 1974 hit album Autobahn had made them the band that turned travel itself into music, and French journalists knew their universe well. So in 1976, the journalist Paul Alessandrini sat down with Hütter and Schneider at Le Train Bleu, the ornate restaurant inside Paris’s Gare de Lyon. It is one of the great railway stations of Europe, Paris’s answer to Grand Central, and Trans Europe Express trains departed from platforms just beyond the dining room doors. Alessandrini told them their music was something like an electronic blues, and that railway stations and trains were central to their universe. They should write a song about the Trans Europe Express. History was made in a single suggestion, delivered inside a train station, about the trains outside. It had been staring them in the face the whole time. Bowie had already made the railway record about them; now they could return the homage and package it the Kraftwerk way.

The synthesis ran deeper than homage. Inspiration was a two-way street. They borrowed the sound of a train leaving the station from Station to Station, which itself was lifted from Radio-Activity, and they closed the circuit in the lyric itself:

A signal that started in Düsseldorf had crossed to America, come home transformed, and been pressed into a record. It was not done traveling.

The Train Itself

The Trans Europe Express deserves its own moment, in the past tense, unfortunately. Its first service ran on 2 June 1957, the same year the Treaty of Rome created the European Economic Community. That timing was no coincidence of spirit: while half the continent sat sealed behind the Iron Curtain, here was free Europe stitching itself together with first-class international rail, fast enough to make a day trip to a city in another country, in another language, an ordinary thing. Borders that elsewhere in Europe meant walls and checkpoints here meant a dining car. And with the passengers traveled culture, commerce, and ideas.

By 1974 the network had reached its peak: 45 trains connecting 130 cities, from Spain in the west to Austria in the east, Denmark down to southern Italy. This is the moment the idea reached Kraftwerk. They caught the Trans Europe Express at its absolute height and immortalized it, a celebration of a continent where exchange was suddenly frictionless. Neither they nor anyone else knew they were also writing an elegy.

The decline came slowly, then completely. Through the late seventies and eighties, national high-speed systems absorbed the routes one by one; the Trans Europe Express brand gave way to EuroCity in 1987, and the last service ran on 28 May 1995. Here is the bitter irony: the Cold War ended, the Wall came down, Europe unified politically, and the grid fragmented anyway. What remains is a patchwork of national operators that occasionally shake hands at borders. The unified 130-city network, the one built as a statement of connection when connection was hardest, is gone. The dream outlasted the train by only a few years, and Kraftwerk’s tribute now preserves something the continent itself couldn’t keep.

Trans-Europe Express

The New Paradigm Song by Song

“The Hall of Mirrors”

Some songs reveal their influence slowly, over repeated listens; this one announced its descendants before it finished playing. It’s one of those songs as it came on in the car, I had to pull over and let it wash over. The cold, spoken delivery, a narrator reciting rather than singing, unhurried and unmoved: this is the genesis of a whole lineage. Joy Division are here, plainly. In the bridge of “No Love Lost,” Ian Curtis stops singing and simply recites, a detached voice narrating over the music rather than riding it, alluding to The House of Dolls, the Henrik Ibsen novella that gave the band their name. The essence carries into “Shadowplay” as well.

Bauhaus heard it too; “Terror Couple Kill Colonel” and “Spy in the Cab” run on the same chilled circuitry.

This song also influenced the sound and the music of Siouxsie and the Banshees who covered the song.

But the deepest debt belongs to Depeche Mode. Black Celebration does not exist without this single song. Not influenced by it, does not exist: “Stripped,” the “New Dress” material, the title track, all of it traces back to this one performance, and you can hear the inspiration reaching even further back into their earlier records. One song, recorded in 1976, quietly seeding a decade of darkness to come.

“Showroom Dummies”

This song and “The Hall of Mirrors” together mark the moment Kraftwerk broke out of conceptual ambience, the drifting, Pink Floyd-adjacent soundscape mode, and demonstrated something more valuable: here is the new paradigm, and here is how you structure a song inside it. Verse, hook, atmosphere, all rebuilt from electronic parts.

And they chose a sly subject for the demonstration. “Showroom Dummies” is self-aware pop iconography: what does it feel like to stand on a stage and be looked at? Are performers just mannequins for the crowd, doing karaoke of their own records? The irony compounds when you know what came later. At many Kraftwerk shows, robot replicas of each member stood out front with their instruments, moving in time to the music, while the actual band performed behind a screen. They wrote a song asking whether performers are showroom dummies, then built the dummies, then let them take the stage.

Side Two: The Opus

Back on Radio-Activity, Kraftwerk had begun experimenting with songs that bleed into one another, sounds at the end of one track carrying forward as connective tissue into the next. On Trans-Europe Express the experiment becomes architecture. “Europe Endless” opens the album and then returns at the close as “Endless Endless,” and nearly all of Side Two plays as a single movement: “Trans-Europe Express” into “Metal on Metal,” each track introducing the next through shared ambience, sonic callbacks building one continuous idea. Others had gestured at this before, Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” split across a record being the obvious example, but Kraftwerk made it a structural philosophy rather than a framing device, and countless alternative and new wave acts have borrowed it since.

Then there’s “Franz Schubert,” which might be the quietest flex on the album: a composition of genuinely orchestral character, built entirely from electronic instruments, as if to close the argument by proving the new system could honor the old world too. It echoes decades downstream, in the Pet Shop Boys’ stately synth romanticism and in Sparks’ Lil’ Beethoven era.

The Grid Goes Global

Consider the odds. In 1982, the most deliberately European record of its era, robotic, precise, sung partly in German, about a first-class train, found its way to the South Bronx, the borough where hip-hop had been born at block parties and park jams. Afrika Bambaataa, a founding father of that culture, and producer Arthur Baker, bonding over a shared love of Kraftwerk, rebuilt “Trans-Europe Express” (the song) from the ground up: its melody replayed note for note, fused to the drum pattern of “Numbers,” a track from Kraftwerk’s Computer World, hammered out on a Roland TR-808. The result was “Planet Rock,” and with it the electro foundation of hip-hop. No genre on Earth seemed further from Kraftwerk’s world, and no genre embraced them harder. The coldest record of its era became bedrock for the warmest music of the next.

In network terms, this was the packet nobody expected to be delivered. Kraftwerk had built their grid for Europe, for Bowie, for the art-school listeners tracing the connections. The South Bronx was a node running entirely different architecture, and it answered anyway. That’s how you know a protocol works: not when the intended machines connect, but when the unintended ones do. One branch of the transmission we’ve already traced, the pale one, through “The Hall of Mirrors” into the goth and post-punk underground. This was the other branch, and it was loud.

And crucially, it talked back. All of this still ran on analog hardware, machines you could touch, patterns punched in by hand, and the Bronx pushed that principle further than Kraftwerk ever had: DJs turned the turntable itself into an instrument, dragging vinyl backward under the needle, found sound sculpted by fingertips. Kraftwerk had removed the human hand from the drum; hip-hop put it back on the record.

Which brings us back to the train. The Trans Europe Express is gone; the last one pulled away in 1995, and the network of 130 cities dissolved into memory. But the other network, the one Kraftwerk built and named after it, never stopped running. It’s running right now, in every electronic record made anywhere on Earth. They wrote an elegy for a grid that died and accidentally built one that can’t.

Still, it’s worth sitting with the first grid a moment longer. The railway was built in 1957 by people who had every reason to believe connection was impossible, and they built it anyway, across a continent still sorting rubble. It thrived for four decades and vanished within a few years of the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain coming down, as if connection were something you only maintain while it’s hard. A unified Europe felt inevitable then. Nothing about it was, and nothing about it is. Kraftwerk understood what they were celebrating: not a train, but the choice a continent made to be reachable. Choices like that can be made again. They can also be unmade quietly, one schedule cut at a time, while everyone assumes the trains will always run.

Before You Go

Further Listening

Joy Division Unknown Pleasures
Ian Curtis was heavily influenced by Kraftwerk, and you can hear it on both studio albums they released. Real drums are engineered until they ring like metal on metal, and the starkness and space inside the songs

Joy Division Closer

In the song “The Eternal” the sound of a steam train, as an eerie backdrop, sounds like Kraftwerk and Station to Station.

Depeche Mode Black Celebration

Siouxsie and the Banshees Through the Looking Glass

Bauhaus In the Flat Field

Underworld “Born Slippy” and “Dirty Epic” two songs from 2 different albums that romanticize the London Underground. I always felt like that they were a sort of modern Trans Europe Express.

The Hip Hop homage

Afrika Bambaataa and Soulsonic Force Planet Rock

De La Soul “Ghetto Thang”

Dr Dre “Been There Done That”
Dr Dre feat. Jay Z “Under Pressure”

Further Reading

• Kraftwerk: Radio-Activity at 51

  • Where this story begins, with the disruption, the blueprint, and the first transmission.

• David Bowie: Station to Station

  • Kraftwerk’s signal received, handshake protocol established

Missed Last Week?

Read my post on Jack Frost

Coming Next Week

The first album of Bowie’s Berlin residency, Low

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Welcome back Hi-Fiers,

Finally completed the gargantuan task of the 27 album discography of The Church. In the meantime, I had this little nugget baking in the oven. For those who follow me closely, you know that I had a lovefest with Australian bands, one of them being The Go-Betweens, and a lot of loose ends and posts I never followed up on. One of them is this one. And it’s a good time to drop this, to remind everyone of The Go-Betweens, but also while I’m in a conversation about The Church.

For a brief stretch at the turn of the nineties, before grunge rearranged everything and Madchester and the rave scene pulled the rest of the oxygen out of the room, The Church occupied a real place in American alternative rock. Two songs from two different albums in regular rotation: “Under the Milky Way,” then “Metropolis.” You heard them in record stores and malls, in small towns in the midwest and in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles. They got played on 120 Minutes on MTV. For a few years an Australian band that had spent most of the eighties as a cult concern was, briefly, a band you could hear without looking for it.

There was another Australian band in that same period who never got any of it. No radio, no MTV, no free cassette on the cover of a magazine. I read everything: Smash Hits, Melody Maker, NME, Rolling Stone, Spin, Alternative Press, whatever else was on the rack. I do not remember encountering The Go-Betweens once. If someone had said the name to me in 1990 I would have stared blankly ahead.

So when Steve Kilbey turned up on a record with a songwriter named Grant McLennan, that name meant nothing to me at all. It sounded antebellum. Southern, somehow. I had no idea I was looking at one half of one of the best songwriting partnerships of the previous decade.

Found a silent movie star who liked to work at night

The version I assumed at the time was the obvious one: successful band’s frontman does a side project with some guy. The actual shape of it runs the other way.

What I did not know was that Kilbey was the fan in this arrangement.

The Church were on a break after Gold Afternoon Fix, everyone off making solo records, and I was doing my homework, working backward through the catalogue and sideways through the solo projects.

On a compilation of their videos, in between the singles, they spliced in home video from the Gold Afternoon Fix tour: the bus, backstage, the downtime. You can hear “Streets of Your Town” by The Go-Betweens playing in the background [on their tour-bus] of their own tour footage. At one point Marty is holding a cassette of 16 Lovers Lane; later the case is lying open on a table while the band talks and jokes around it.

Kilbey made the call. He got in touch about writing a song together, and Grant told him to come over and bring his 12-string, and offered to bake cookies. Grant, by his own account, was not especially familiar with The Church. Whatever else was going on between the two bands’ fortunes, that is where this actually started: one songwriter ringing another, and being offered “biscuits”.

The timing is the key. The Go-Betweens had just broken up, and they broke up at the exact moment things had begun to move: real traction on 16 Lovers Lane, buzz out of KCRW in Los Angeles, a US tour. A band that had spent a decade being right and being ignored finally caught a break and then stopped. That is where Jack Frost starts, with one writer walking away from the partnership that had defined him and another writer walking toward one for the first time.

Every Hour, God Sends… some luck

The debut self-titled album arrived in 1991 and it is a strange, uneven, beautiful record, and I mean all three of those as description rather than complaint.

Musically it is Kilbey’s world. Anyone who has spent time with his solo work knows the vocabulary: the experimental streak, the John Foxx-era Ultravox and early Simple Minds in the DNA, the willingness to let a sound sit there being odd without justifying itself. There is a drum machine on this album, and yet it plays like a full band record, real bass, real electric guitars, air moving in the room. There is a mysterious producer’s name Pryce Surplice. Is that really a person? Is it an inside joke, a name (like Echo of the Bunnymen) given to the drum machine?

The songwriting is the other half. Kilbey shares the writing here, in a way he never had before. And the joins show. One verse his, one verse Grant’s, each man given equal room and neither reaching into the other’s half. It reads as respect.

That courtesy also explains the coldness that hangs over parts of the record. Two writers being careful with each other is not the same as two writers merging. What you get instead is a kind of clarity, and on the best songs it is devastating. “Civil War Lament” is sung from the perspective of a dead soldier addressing the lover who keeps coming back to his grave. Grant’s voice in the background is haunting, like the ghost of the dead soldier. “And all you do is carry on…”

And then there are the textures. Sounds I could not place, unusual, quirky, not obviously serving the song, the kind of thing you either skip past or file under “he was messing about.” I filed them under messing about.

When Snow Job arrived five years later I stopped playing this record almost entirely. I kept “Providence” and let the rest go. Meanwhile Kilbey has spent decades in interviews saying the first album is the better one, which I took for a long time as the sort of thing an artist says about the record that came easier.

I have gone back. He might be right, and either way I was wrong about the messing around.

Some of that is just the depth of the thing. “Number Eleven” is buried far enough down the running order that I never reached it, and it is about dreaming of surviving a plane crash in the Tunisian desert. Steve and Grant’s metaphors keep unfolding on repeat listens, clues to something I still cannot name.

But the sounds are the real revision. Metallic backgrounds, found noise, dissonance pulled in from somewhere east of everything either of these men had done before. It took discovering [the band] Japan to recognize what I was hearing, cut from the same cloth, reaching for the same textures. Two people playing with drum machines and synthesizers, apparently goofing off, and actually doing something more daring than anything on the record I preferred for thirty years.

Sooner or Later They’ll Give You an Ambush

Here is the part that still bothers me, because there is no villain in it.

Arista had every reason to back this. The Church had given them Starfish and then Gold Afternoon Fix, two of the biggest records the band would ever make. When the band went on hiatus the label funded solo deals for the members, real budgets, real releases. And when Kilbey came to them wanting to make a record with an Australian songwriter no American had heard of, they said yes to that too, and then paid for videos and promos.

On 29 March 1991 the two of them turned up on Into the Night, ABC’s late-night answer to Carson and Letterman, playing “Thought That I Was Over You” acoustically on a bill with Alfonso Ribeiro and a Los Angeles Kings enforcer. The host that night was a young Brad Garrett, sitting in for Rick Dees, a few years before Everybody Loves Raymond made him a face people recognized.

Everything a label does when it thinks something might happen was done here.

Nobody saw grunge coming. Nobody saw the rave scene or electronica coming either, and inside of two years the American alternative audience was somewhere else entirely, listening to something that made all of this sound like it belonged to a decade that had just ended.

Into the Night was cancelled that October. No reruns, no syndication, nothing. The only reason you can watch that performance today is that somebody had a VCR running and eventually got around to putting the tape online.

That is the whole story of this band in one detail. Every door opened, and then the building moved.

Rigged With Some Hocus-Pocus

Five years later, and the difference is not incremental.

Kilbey came into these sessions from a band whose future was genuinely uncertain. Longtime members were gone. The Church still existed and still had a contract, but what it was going to be was an open question, and the two records around this period, Sometime Anywhere and Magician Among the Spirits, are the sound of a group working that out in public.

Snow Job is not the sound of that. Snow Job opens with “Jack Frost Blues” and it is balls to the wall: two electric guitars with exactly the right amount of fuzz, no hedging, no atmosphere to hide behind. My first honest reaction in 1996 was that this rocked harder than any Church album since The Blurred Crusade in 1982, and my second was irritation, because it meant the band had been holding something back.

It also suggested where that something came from. I never heard Grant rock out in The Go-Betweens; that band had its own division of labor and its own dominant voice in the room. Neither man is the dominant voice here. That may be the whole explanation. Two writers who had each spent their careers with someone else’s gravity in the studio, finally in a room with none.

Tim Powles is the other piece. He had come in as a session player on Sometime Anywhere and had become a full member by the time of Magician Among the Spirits, and on Snow Job he is playing real drums with real intent. Where the first album occasionally sounds like two people trying out a new toy, this one sounds like a band with a purpose. Discipline is an unglamorous word for what a drummer brings, but it is the right one.

The writing has changed too, and this is the part that matters most.

On the first record they traded. Here they converse. It is not call and response, which implies a structure and a turn-taking, one voice waiting for the other to finish. On Snow Job a line answers the line before it, and then the next line answers that.

On the first album I could tell you who was singing at any given moment; I knew the voices too well not to. On Snow Job I often cannot. Sometimes they swap each others singing style and registers. They are both reaching into registers their own bands never asked them for, and somewhere in that stretching the two voices stop being two voices. “Cousin/Angel” is the clearest case, in the writing and the guitar playing both, two players finishing thoughts that started in the other man’s hands.

And they harmonize. Both of them sang in bands with strong vocal identities and neither ever found a blend like this one. There is nothing in either catalogue that does what these two voices do together. “Aviatrix,” which they wrote after watching a documentary about Amelia Earhart, is the proof: a genuine tribute, and harmonies as haunting as anything Crosby and Nash or the Mamas and the Papas put down.

“Weightless and Wild” is my own indulgence, because I have a weakness for rock songs written as waltzes, and this one earns the 3/4. It is not a conversation song. Grant sits behind Kilbey, a low ominous presence, a Greek chorus warning about the rocks ahead, or the sirens waiting to pull the boat down.

It has a sibling further down the record. “Angela Carter” is the other waltz here, close enough musically that the two songs feel like one idea worked twice, and it is an ode to a writer they both admired. That is the register these two kept reaching for when they were not rocking out: literate, unhurried, entirely sincere about something neither of them had to write about at all.

What Was Left

There should have been more.

Snow Job is not a record that sounds like a conclusion. It sounds like two people who have just worked out how to do this, playing at the top of a game they only recently learned. Everything about it points forward.

And there is material. Not a rumor of material, but songs started and left, ideas in notebooks, things on tape. Enough, by any reasonable estimate, for at least another record, and probably more than one.

Grant McLennan died suddenly, in 2006.

Kilbey has spoken about him since as a brother, and he uses that word the way people use it when it is not a figure of speech. Rock history is not short of duos, actual siblings and otherwise, and almost all of them end badly. For two albums, these two gave each other space, then stopped needing to, and by any reasonable account they liked each other the entire time. That is rarer than it sounds.

None of that material is coming. Some of that is circumstance, and some of it is something better than circumstance: you do not finish a collaboration by yourself. Whatever those two made together in a room is going to stay in that room, and there is a kind of respect in leaving it there, even knowing what it costs the rest of us.

Providence

I want to leave you with one song, and it is from the first album, not the second.

“Providence” is the simplest thing on either record. One chord, D, held and returned to and held again. Nothing else arrives to rescue it, because nothing else is needed. It is one of the most beautiful songs I know, and I do not have a technical account of why. It goes straight past the part of you that analyzes.

It is also the one song I never let go of, through all the years I left the rest of that album alone.

Kilbey still plays it, and when he does, he dedicates it to Grant.

Which does something to the song that the song did not originally contain. Listen to it now, knowing that, and the voice coming through does not sound like a memory of someone. It sounds like Grant, somewhere else, singing back.

Included below is a rare and possibly the only clip of Steve and Grant playing a Jack Frost song live, together. It was for some radio appearance, please forgive the shaky-video. But this is the best example of the magic these two people had, with just their voices and acoustic guitars.

Before You Go

Last Week’s Post

The Church 27 Album Rating Part 2: my co-rater’s blind rating and rebuttals to my rankings.

Next Week

Kraftwerk: Trans-Europe Express - the album that gave birth to hip-hop

Thank you for reading this deep dive. If this piece moved you, taught you something new, or reminded you why music still matters, please consider sharing or restacking it. These stories deserve to be told and remembered.

Share

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Welcome back Hi-Fiers,

Back after a longer absence than I planned, and back to unfinished business: part two of ranking twenty-seven Church albums.

It can be said I’m as devoted to the Church as is to New Order, and it shows the same way his does: he never lets a New Order record fall below C. Building this list, I found myself applying his own instincts more than once. Kevin left New Order’s Substance off his list entirely, a singles comp, nothing new. I did the same with Jammed, two side-long improvisations, twenty and thirty-five minutes, no songs in any real sense, off the list before the ranking even started. But Parallel Universe I kept, even though ninety percent of it is remixes and outtakes from a band that never released a dance single in its life, because unlike either of those, half of what’s on it lives nowhere else in the catalogue. It stayed, and it’s the only record here that dropped to a D.

But as I promised, I handed this task over to a brother in music. Just as I did, he ranked all twenty-seven without help, no peeking at my tiers, same rubric. I asked him to rate them cold. Then, once we’d both finished, we swapped ratings, and I asked him to tell me where I was wrong.

What follows is his ranking, in his own words. I was not expecting us to disagree as much as we did. But that’s what makes activities like this interesting. He’s asked to stay anonymous, and I’m respecting that. After his ranking, I’ll close with my own final thoughts.

HIS RANKING

Where a line has no note, we agreed.

S-TIER

• Heyday (1985) — (HiFi Amateur: A)

• Starfish (1988)

• Priest=Aura (1992)

• Untitled #23 (2009) — (HiFi Amateur: A)

• Further/Deeper (2014) — (HiFi Amateur: B)

A-TIER

• Seance (1983) — (HiFi Amateur: S)

• The Hypnogogue (2023) — (HiFi Amateur: B)

B-TIER

• The Blurred Crusade (1982) — (HiFi Amateur: S)

• Remote Luxury / Persia (1984) — (HiFi Amateur: A)

• Hologram of Baal (1998) — (HiFi Amateur: S)

• Forget Yourself (2003) — (HiFi Amateur: A)

• Uninvited, Like the Clouds (2006)

• Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars (2024)

C-TIER

• Gold Afternoon Fix (1990) — (HiFi Amateur: B)

• A Quick Smoke at Spot’s (1991)

• A Box of Birds (1999) — (HiFi Amateur: B)

• After Everything Now This (2002)

• El Momento Descuidado (2005) — (HiFi Amateur: B)

• El Momento Siguiente (2007) — (HiFi Amateur: B)

• Man Woman Life Death Infinity (2017) — (HiFi Amateur: B)

D-TIER

• Of Skins and Heart (1981) — (HiFi Amateur: B)

• Sometime Anywhere (1994) — (HiFi Amateur: A)

• Magician Among the Spirits (1996) — (HiFi Amateur: B)

• Parallel Universe (2002)

E-TIER

• Beside Yourself (2004) — (HiFi Amateur: C)

• Shriek: Excerpts from the Soundtrack (2008) — (HiFi Amateur: C)

F-TIER

• Back with Two Beasts (2005) — (HiFi Amateur: C)

My rubric stopped at D. His didn’t. E is a track or two worth keeping and the rest you won’t go back to. F is nothing to salvage.

His Take

S-Tier Picks

Heyday (1985)

They fall in our heyday

Amongst our species, some are magnetically drawn to the jangly sound of Rickenbacker’s and 12-string acoustic guitars that marinate within haunting melodies. It’s something akin to the way bees are pulled toward flowers or hummingbirds to nectar. When I first heard the opening riff to “Tristesse” on Heyday, I discovered I was amongst this classification of homo sapiens.

Heyday was a Meet the Beatles introduction [for me] because it had all four band members looking great on the album cover. Paisley shirts standing in front of Persian carpets, like a welcome postcard. I heard several songs played on our college radio station and was struck like a bolt from the blue. The album was warm and bright. Steve Kilbey’s voice was rich and inviting like the clouds. The centerpiece for me is “Tristesse.” Incredible lyrics, guitar interplay, and harmonies. On “Already Yesterday,” when he liltingly sings

another morning we’ll be gone, I’ll start the car for 10-mile beach, or maybe Avalon… (“Already Yesterday”)

it produces a beautiful melancholic ache within. There are several other classics such as “Columbus,” “Happy Hunting Ground,” “Tantalized,” “Roman,” and the list goes on. If one has a fever, the only prescription is a vinyl edition of Heyday.

Starfish (1988)

The Face of Today, Just a Scalpel Away

What more can be said about Starfish? Ali described it perfectly. For me, the centerpiece is “North, South, East, and West,” which fits in the pantheon of great songs inspired by LA. This album is the motherlode of iconic guitar riffs and hooks, weaving brilliantly between Marty Willson-Piper and Peter Koppes, the Keef and Ronnie of our generation. The question is which one is Keef? Oh no, MWP would be Keef for sure, and PK would be Ronnie, or even better perhaps, Mick Taylor. Seeing “Under the Milky Way” late at night on 120 Minutes made you feel emboldened because you knew what musical tribe you belonged to. They were mysterious and cool, and did I mention the guitars?

Priest=Aura (1992)

You’re So Deluxe, You’re So Divine

Priest=Aura, S-tier. Ali already sufficiently expressed this. Nothing more to add.

Untitled #23 (2009)

Such a Charmer

Untitled #23 is so good that even the album title is cool, like one of many paintings left unnamed. The opening chords on "Cobalt Blue" are so unique and the chord progression so unexpected it's like intergalactic jazz. "Happenstance" is one of my favorite Church songs, and it soars Floyd-like into the ether with a great expansiveness. There are all kinds of gems and surprises like "Anchorage," "Operetta," "Sunken Sun," "Lunar," but what's even more incredible is that perhaps the best song from this period might not even be on the digital album version. On the Pangaea EP is a sprawling magnum opus called "So Love May Find Us" that clocks in at 17.5 minutes. It's among the best things they've ever done. [HFA agrees and thought about adding the EP to the list]

Further/Deeper (2014)

Majesty and Power

For any Church album, set and setting are very important. Likely my most controversial choice was giving an S-tier to an album called Further/Deeper. This is a layered, dense, and ominous album. If you are in a reflective mood with an hour and 7 minutes to yourself, please put this on with high-quality headphones or a great stereo speaker system apparatus. With so many great songs and hooks, you’ll feel transformed.

Where I Diverge From Ali’s S-Tier

I Don’t Want to Bring Up, a Delicate Matter…

But I do have some digressions from Ali’s S-tier choices.

The Blurred Crusade (1982) - B

I agree that the Clearmountain production was sublime, you can hear the guitar clearly chiming through like a bell in beautiful arpeggios. Most of the songs are great too, but I’m more critical of tunes like “Field of Mars” and “Life Speeds Up.” For context, my entry point to the Church was Heyday, where Kilbey’s voice was warm and rich. When I heard Blurred Crusade, it was somewhat jarring in that his voice was less expressive and more rigid. To me, it sounded like he was singing with a slight cold or congestion. I still gave it a strong B grade, but it wasn’t quite S-tier for me.

Seance (1983) - A

I agree with him that I don’t mind the production either, even though the band didn’t like it. This album has some absolute masterpieces. The opening song “Fly” is an incredibly theatric opening to any album. I love most of the songs and gave this an A instead of an S because I think songs like “Electric,” “Travel by Thought,” and “It Doesn’t Change” could have used better editing to bring them down to around 3 minutes. Besides those few moments, the album is stellar, and it even includes “Something Special,” a beautiful tune, in the Apple Music version. In my opinion, it should have replaced “Electric” or one of those other ones.

Hologram of Baal (1998) - B

Hologram of Baal means a lot to me on a personal basis. It felt like a rebirth after Sometime Anywhere and Magician Among the Spirits. I was slightly more critical of the album compared to Ali due to a couple of filler songs for me: “This Is It” and “The Great Machine.” Songs like “Anaesthesia,” “Buffalo,” “Louisiana,” “No Certainty Attached,” however, are all S-tier songs.

The Two That Kept Moving

Gold Afternoon Fix (1990) - C

Gold Afternoon Flummoxed

In what parallel universe does it make sense to have Waddy Wachtel from Steve Nicks produce your album instead of John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin? In a bizarre, spinal tap moment the band’s management committed musical malpractice by not letting them go with JPJ. This is fascinatingly recounted in MWP’s blog where he offered in depth reflections on the making of the album. In any case, I gave the album a C and Ali gave it a B. What draws my ire when relistening to songs from this period, is that the Russian Autumn Heart EP is better than half the actual GAF album.

In particular, the song the Feast has always been a masterpiece to me. Why isn’t this on the album? The song itself reminds one of a scene from a Russian novel, with the poignant, melancholic line at the end “if only you had been there.” In the liner notes to “A Quick Smoke at Spots” Steve Kilbey jokes that some of the songs on that archive album were better than the ones on the real album. That’s kind of how I feel about GAF, they had better songs they could have used. However, this band has more talent in their pinky fingers than most in the business so perhaps they believed they could whip up some magic in the studio by jamming out new songs. There are bits and pieces of bliss, but I still lament what JPJ could have done with “Terra Nova Cain”.

Sometime Anywhere (1994) - D

There are no bad Church albums, but in this exercise, I compared each to their heights and Sometime Anywhere, while a good album, pales in comparison to the magnum opus of Priest = Aura that came right before it or later with Untitled 23. I listened to SA all the time when it came out but somehow it fell into the dustbin of forgotten albums. Nothing pulled me back to it over the years as I had become more enamored with the work the band was doing in their common era, perhaps year 1 marked by Hologram of Baal and moving forward. I just listened to SA again and found it pleasant and at times, almost great, but for the Church that relegates it to a lower rating of which I gave it a D and Ali gave it an A.

While I don’t find the White Album in it like he does, there are still some amazing moments; “Dead Man’s Dream”, “Eastern”, “Loveblind”, “Day of the Dead”. “My Little Problem”…by all means some good tunes, but I’d call it a slightly Off-White or Beige album at best.

The Experimental Records

Finally, the other main area of difference

The other main area of difference was that I was harsher on their experimental albums: Shriek, Beside Yourself, and Back with Two Beasts. I give these albums E’s and an F, while Ali was more forgiving, grading them as C’s.

I have nothing against “deep space jams on an alien terrain” [“Terra Nova Cain”], but most of these tend to wander and go nowhere. That said, there are always some beauties you can find in the scrap heap

Beside Yourself (2004) - E

There is a song called “Crash Ride” that is one of the best Church songs ever. It’s hard to top lyrics like “I’m driving in a film down a French boulevard, I’m waiting in a café on South Head Road, I’m chopping up guitars with Nic Hard.” It’s an achingly beautiful song.

Back with Two Beasts (2005) - F

“Snowfaller” is excellent.

Shriek: Excerpts from the Soundtrack (2008) - E

“The Aan Tribal War” is really good and has some interesting hypnotic grunting.

Again, the majority of these albums wander aimlessly, with the rewards few and far between.

Hi-Fi Amateur: My Take

The Interdimensional Cruiser

Twenty-seven records, and here’s what I think holds them together.

From the beginning, The Church has been Steve Kilbey’s songs. In the golden age his was the only name on the writing credits, the words, the chord progressions, the worlds. And he has always had more songs in him than any album could hold, which is why the catalogue keeps spilling into companion records, Bastard Universe beside Hologram of Baal, Parallel Universe beside After Everything, Now This, Beside Yourself beside Forget Yourself, Back with Two Beasts beside Uninvited. Transmissions that came in too strong for one record to hold, so a second one had to catch the overflow.

The middle years opened the writing up, more collaborative, credits shared, and that period gave us some of the richest records here. But the reason the last four albums sound vital instead of tired, a band evolving rather than rehashing, is that they’re still locked on the same signal that started it all: Kilbey’s ideas, Kilbey’s chords, still coming through, no static, no drift.

There’s really only one other band that broadcasts like this, The Cure, where for decades the credits read Smith alone, every idea and arrangement pulled from one head. Those are the bands that stay vital across forty years: the ones with a single transmitter that never goes dark.

So take the tiers as two distinct listeners’ maps, not a verdict, coordinates for a trip you can take yourself. When the songwriter is this good, the signal this strong, the records buried down in C and D aren’t dead ends, they’re just farther out. Somewhere out there is a frequency that will find you. Go looking for it.

Before You Go

Previous Post

Read Part 1 of this series and my rankings of The Church’s 27 album discography

Coming Next Week

Jack Frost: The Supergroup That Almost Was. Steve Kilbey and Grant McLennan (The Go-Betweens) made two albums, and almost nobody noticed.

Leave a like and tell me in the comments: where would your tiers land? Which of these did we both get wrong?

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Welcome back Hi-Fiers,

The idea for this post came to me, when I read a few posts from and and a series they do when they rate albums using a letter scale their created (more about that later). So I thought, let’s tackle my favorite band The Church.

I thought this would be a week’s project. It’s taken two, and it’s still not one post, it’s two. Twenty-seven albums is a lot to hold in your head at once, and about halfway through I realized I was the wrong person to do it alone.

So I called in the person who got me into half this catalogue to begin with, the friend who handed me the back catalogue I mentioned above. An undertaking like this needs someone with a connection to this band as deep as mine, maybe deeper, and he’s spent as many decades with these records as I have. I gave him the same 27 albums, the same rubric, and asked him to rate them cold, no peeking at my list until his was done. By his own request for privacy he will remain anonymous, but the second post with his rating will be his own words.

Here’s the plan. This week is my ranking, top to bottom, my reasons, my history with each record. Next week is his, and where we disagree, which is often, and sometimes by a lot, he gets the last word on it. Think of this one as the opening argument.

My Origin Story With The Band (kind of…)

I got there the same way everyone else did. The video, the 12-string, the song about outer space that isn’t about outer space. I bought the cassette, played it to death, and mentioned it to my co-writer who was always a few records ahead of me. This was one of them. He had six albums I didn’t know existed, and he started handing them over one mix tape (or 2 albums) at a time.

That’s the thing about this band in America. There were always more records, and there was never a way to find out. The crowd that arrived with me in 1988 left, not because they lost interest, but because nothing showed them there was anything else. I stayed because I happened to know somebody.

I learned Starfish off the tab books, all of it, chords and solos and melodies, and it’s the reason I play a 12-string today. By the mid-nineties the band had no US contract, so a few of us did the job nobody else was going to: flyers for records we hadn’t heard, phone calls talking shops into stocking albums and telling them where to source them, in-store appearances. The rest ran on cassettes and dial-up.

This catalogue is longer than the industry intended. Some of these records exist because enough fans kept asking until asking worked.

How the Tiers Work

The format comes from and at On Repeat Records (mentioned above), whose discography rankings are the reason I wanted to try one. at Lavender Sound gets credit too, for the discipline of stating a verdict plainly and up front. But it comes down to two questions I ask of every record.

Do you skip anything? A record you play front to back, no reaching for the next track, has cleared a bar most albums never do.

Do you return to it, or just respect it? This is the one that does the real work. There’s a difference between a record I admire and a record I actually put on, and most of the sorting below happens on that line.

The tiers:

S: No skips. A record I don’t just admire, I live in.

A: Excellent, but with a flaw I can name: a track I skip, a decision I’d argue with. One thing short of untouchable.

B: Genuinely strong, but I admire it more than I reach for it. No shame in it; some of my favorite curiosities live here.

C: For the converted. A record the faithful will play front to back, that I wouldn’t hand a stranger as their first taste.

D: Half of it is worth your time. The other half is a document.

E: a track or two worth keeping, the rest you won’t go back to

F: nothing to salvage

My own list never reaches the last two. I’ll get to why at the end.

One honest caveat: the line between B and C is where I did the most agonizing, because it’s the line between “I respect this” and “I return to this,” and those feelings don’t always sit still. If you’d have sorted a few differently, good. That’s the point of doing it out loud.

S Tier

The Blurred Crusade (1982)

Their second album and they landed legendary producer Bob Clearmountain. And he did the thing the era’s big producers mostly didn’t: he stayed out of the way. The record doesn’t sound like the eighties. Put it on in any decade since and the production still reads as recent.

On an album that mostly leans bright and folk-rock, “Field of Mars” turns and goes somewhere else entirely, moody, atmospheric, almost goth. It’s also the rare time Kilbey let go of the reins, handing off a lead vocal and the writing of the middle section to Willson-Piper. He wouldn’t do that again until a few albums later.

Seance (1983)

The band has never liked how this record sounds. The production puts a scrim over songs that might have wanted air. That never changed my opinion that this was one of the best records ever written.

The second track on the album “One Day,” their most upbeat, most punk, a treasure trove of riffs, and underneath the drive the content isn’t upbeat at all. That paradox is the whole record: there’s more going on than the surface lets on. Play it enough and you stop hearing the production entirely. What’s left is the best writing on any of their first four albums, Kilbey no longer gesturing at mood but constructing it. Even “Fly,” two chords and a lyric nobody can decode, haunts the way the surreal lines in a Bowie song haunt. Nothing here is decorative.

Placed on songs and lyrics alone, which is the only argument that matters and the only one this album needs.

Starfish (1988)

The gamble, and it’s worth naming everything they bet. A new label in Arista. A move to Los Angeles. Waddy Wachtel producing. An American industry finally paying attention and expecting a return on it. That setup has flattened better bands than this one, and it usually flattens them the same way: the songs come back sanded down, aimed at a format, competent and dead.

What came back instead was the most disciplined record they ever made, and disciplined is not the same as tamed. Wachtel didn’t smooth the guitars out, he cleared space around them. The interplay that had been happening in a haze on the earlier records is suddenly legible: two players, two distinct jobs, neither one filling a gap the other left. You can follow both at once. That’s a production decision, and it’s the right one.

The record that broke them in America opens with “Destination,” not the hit. It buries the hit at track two and gets on with it. Side one closes on “North South East West,” side two on “Hotel Womb,” and neither placement is an accident. Both sides go somewhere and arrive.

Priest=Aura (1992)

The best record they ever made.

That’s the whole review, more or less, but it’s worth explaining what makes it hold. Everything here is slow, and slow is the hardest thing to do well. There’s no hook doing crowd control, no chorus arriving on schedule to bail out a verse that ran long. The songs are built out of patience: a bass figure that stays put while the guitars circle it, drums that decline to escalate, Kilbey delivering some of the best writing of his life at a volume that makes you come to him. Nothing on this album performs. It just is, at length, and by the fourth minute of any given track you’ve stopped noticing the running time. It features Jay Dee Daugherty on drums (from the Patti Smith band) and he joined as a full time member, and gets songwriting credit on a lot of songs on the album.

It’s also a hall-of-fame record that most of the world has never heard, which is not the same as saying it flopped. It never got a proper tour outside Australia. Never played in America at all.

There was one chance, in 2013. I didn’t take it, and then the lineup that made it was gone. That one still sits with me.

Play it end to end, in the dark, once. It’s not a record you dip into.

Hologram of Baal (1998)

By the late nineties this band had every reason not to exist anymore, and Hologram of Baal plays like it never got the memo. Koppes is back as a full member, writing, and armed with something new. Instead of the old two-guitar interplay, he turns his guitar into a sound-design instrument: controlled feedback and atmospherics that don’t read as guitar at all, on “Anaesthesia” something like a heart monitor, elsewhere a ship’s console or a signal tapping in the distance.

It’s the Radio-Activity trick, found sound as connective tissue, run on a guitar instead of a signal generator. The textures return, placed deliberately, even inside the tighter songs, so the record reads as one connected surface rather than ten tracks.

There’s an energy here that had gone quiet after Priest=Aura, some of it a lineup that’s finally settled, Powles no longer auditioning. A band this far in is supposed to be coasting. This one reaches back, pulls forward the ideas that got away on Gold Afternoon Fix, and sets them in tighter focus. Progression, not nostalgia.

A Tier

Remote Luxury / Persia (1984)

Full Bowie mode, and I mean that as the highest kind of compliment. This is the band reaching for texture as a lead instrument: E-bow, tremolo, delay, effects that, rumor has it, got there before Johnny Marr made the same sounds famous. Whether or not that’s literally true, the ambition is real and it mostly pays off. One track keeps it out of the top tier, “Maybe These Boys” is the one I’d reach past, and one skip is the difference between A and S. Everything around it is the sound of a band expanding its vocabulary in real time.

Heyday (1985)

This is the one that should have been as big as Starfish. The songs were there to do it, the Koppes and Willson-Piper interplay at its richest, lyrics reaching for T.S. Eliot and Lou Reed and Neil Young without embarrassing themselves in that company, “Tantalized” and “Columbus” as good as anything they’d write. It didn’t break them, but that’s a promotional failure, not a musical one, and it built the college-radio base Starfish cashed in three years later. What holds it at A rather than S is “Youth Worshipper,” which I skip, and a production job that doesn’t always serve the songs. A classic of their golden era all the same.

Sometime Anywhere (1994)

Their White Album, and I’ve called it that for years. Down to a duo, no drummer, the arranger gone, and none of that strain shows on the record, which is the point. Kilbey and Willson-Piper harmonize up front for the first time instead of one burying the other. Sequencers and drum machines arrive and don’t clunk. The improvisation is controlled, timeboxed, always finding its way back to the hook. It sprawls, and that sprawl is why it’s an A and not an S, a White Album is loved whole, not played airtight. But the writing outruns most of 1994, and it plays front to back.

Forget Yourself (2003)

This one walks into 2003 swinging. The band is still taking real swings this far in, restless and adventurous, and the songwriting hits with a force most of their contemporaries couldn’t touch that year. It also caught me at the right moment. The things that would eventually pull me away from music were starting to gather, and this record kept me afloat. Some of these songs still carry that weight for me. It doesn’t spin front to back every time, a track or two I’ll pass, which is the one thing keeping it out of the top tier. But it’s better than its reputation, and it mattered more than most.

Untitled #23 (2009)

The rediscovery record, the one that got Pitchfork and a new generation to look back. Kilbey and Willson-Piper co-writing, call-and-response vocals, a return to pre-Dark Side Floyd psychedelia rendered with three decades of craft behind it. It’s gorgeous and it’s assured. It stays out of the top tier for one honest reason: it isn’t quite a front-to-back listen for me the way the S-tier records are. But it’s the sound of a band being found again, and deserving it.

B Tier

Where the bulk of their albums fall for me.

Of Skins and Heart (1981)

The debut, and the highs are genuinely high. “The Unguarded Moment” put them on the charts and defined them for a decade, and a few tracks here hint at things they wouldn’t fully chase until decades later. The songwriting is strong from the start, no question, this is not a band fumbling to find itself.

But this isn’t the classic lineup yet, and the growing pains show. They hadn’t found their drummer, and Kilbey hadn’t found his voice. Lyrically the writing is already strong, but there’s something missing here that they’d lock into on the second record. High ceiling, unsettled floor.

Gold Afternoon Fix (1990)

This one moved around on me more than any record here, and that churn is the whole story of it. It’s the album I keep coming back to, and when I do, I play it start to finish, because every song has a story and the moment it threatens to drag, Marty or Peter steps in with some of the strongest writing either of them had put down yet, and the mood turns over.

It’s not my first pick to hand a newcomer, or my second. But it converted a whole cohort of people into lifelong fans, the way Starfish did me, “Metropolis” on 120 Minutes, a real US tour behind it. What keeps it here rather than higher is only this: it didn’t break new ground the way the records above it did, and 1990 was a wall, Violator, Heaven or Las Vegas. It doesn’t win that year. But no skips, real rotation, and a record I’d genuinely hand a stranger.

Magician Among the Spirits (1996)

The one I admire more than I play, which is the whole definition of this tier. Made after Koppes returned (for a song or two) and Powles came aboard for good, with violinist Linda Neil added to the palette, it’s ambitious in its percussion and vocal-effect experiments, closer to the sprawl of Meddle than to a tight songs record. Willson-Piper’s contributions, “Further Adventures of the Time Being” chief among them, anchor its strongest moments. It genuinely impresses me every time I return to it, which isn’t often. Reverence over rotation. That’s not a knock, it’s a category.

A Box of Birds (1999)

A covers record, but the opposite of a band buying time. Iggy Pop, Hawkwind, a deep-cut Harrison, John Foxx-era Ultravox, a buried Bowie, these are students of the form, not tourists, and nothing here is karaoke. Every song gets pulled into the band’s own gravity, Koppes standing in for whole string sections. No duds, real risks. But it’s homage, not their own vision, and part of what I love about this band is wondering where they’ll take me next. I admire it more than I reach for it.

El Momento Descuidado (2005)

The band reinterpreting and re-arranging its own back catalogue, hits and classics reworked from the ground up rather than dusted off. Members swap instruments, a few new songs sit alongside the old ones, and the whole thing sparked a real rediscovery, KEXP and KCRW airplay, a Radiohead-generation audience tracing the influence backward. I respect it more than I return to it, which lands it here. It beat most of 2005 and conceded, fairly, to Sufjan Stevens’ Illinoise.

Uninvited, Like the Clouds (2006)

This is the one that took me back.

I’d checked out of music entirely, for reasons that don’t belong in a ranking, and was only finding my way back when this arrived to remind me the Church still had something the new bands didn’t.

“Unified Field” is where it landed for me, the same triumphant charge and repetitive hook that made “One Day” work two decades earlier, except the punk guitar’s gone, phasers and space-rock in its place, the classic lineup playing like a single instrument. Willson-Piper’s “She’ll Come Back for You Tomorrow” and Koppes’s “Never Before” stand level with anything Kilbey brought, which almost never happens.

I won’t pretend I play it front to back. I go to four or five songs and they’re permanent. Not a record I put on whole, but one that holds tracks I’ll never be without, and I owe it more than its tier says.

El Momento Siguiente (2007)

See Descuidado: same treatment, more of the catalogue, a few new songs. Lost only to In Rainbows.

Further/Deeper (2014)

The first record without Marty Willson-Piper, and it had to prove there was still a Church without him. Ian Haug and Jeffrey Cain step in, and the answer is yes: strong songwriting, dense lyrics over the kind of soundscapes the shoegaze and dream-pop crowd have only lately come back to, Kilbey stretching into higher registers than usual. It isn’t in my heavy rotation, but that’s about Marty being gone, not the record. Strangers would love this, and they’d be right to.

Man Woman Life Death Infinity (2017)

Kilbey’s reported love of Bowie and Spacemen 3 always carried an aura of space-rock into the later-era Church. What this record does, with Ian Haug settled in, is lean all the way into it. The seeds were already down, in Forget Yourself, Back with Two Beasts, Shriek; this is the band committing to the direction rather than circling it. Kilbey’s writing anchors the sprawl, and the lineup sounds sure of itself.

The Hypnogogue (2023)

Both founding guitarists gone now, and by rights this should be where the band becomes a tribute to itself. It isn’t, and the reason is telling: Jeffrey Cain, a longtime collaborator, finally steps up as a credited writer, and the new players use their reverence for the old lineup as a foundation instead of a costume. The 12-string and electric interplay is still here, honored, but each of them brings his own flavor to it. Meanwhile Kilbey is doing what he’s always done, building surreal worlds and filling them with characters, and the guitars lift each song up into the stratosphere those lyrics already live in. A concept record with real ideas and a lineup that earns the name.

Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars (2024)

Still as ethereal as ever, this far in. The current lineup carrying the same songwriting and intricate playing as The Hypnogogue, with nothing to apologize for. It sits here rather than higher because the catalogue above it is deep, not because the record wants for quality.

C Tier

A Quick Smoke at Spot’s (1991)

A b-sides and rarities comp spanning the Heyday-to-Gold Afternoon Fix stretch, and for the converted it’s a real one. The hits are great, the misses aren’t embarrassing, and some of these deep cuts sit closer to the album material than you’d expect. It lands here for what it is: an archival collection, excellent inside the boundary it was built for, not the record you hand a stranger.

After Everything Now This (2002)

By no means a weak record. Where Hologram of Baal built its case on hooks and catchy songs, this one goes the other way, mood and ambience, a wash you sink into rather than a set of singles. I’d be hard-pressed to point you to a specific track, and that’s not a flaw, it’s the design. You put it on with headphones and disappear into it.

But it isn’t the record I’d hand a stranger, or the one I’d cue up for someone hearing the band for the first time. It asks you to already be here. For those of us who are, it’s a quiet immersion worth having.

Beside Yourself (2004)

A full album of Forget Yourself outtakes, and the parent record sets the ceiling. Some of it reaches the level of the sessions it came from, some is just an instrumental sketch, which is what outtakes are. Psychedelic without being a throwback, worth the trip for the faithful, but not every track survives the cut it originally didn’t make. Offcuts land below the record they came from. That’s the tier.

Back with Two Beasts (2005)

I didn’t know this was a legitimate album until I sat down to count the discography for this piece. A teaser from the Uninvited sessions, sold only off the band’s website and at gigs, and hard to run down even now. It makes you work, first to find it, then to like it. Outtake material by design, a taste of a better record rather than the record itself. Worth the dig, and only if you’re already in.

Shriek: Excerpts from the Soundtrack (2008)

I’ve said before that the Church spent years making records that sounded like soundtracks to films that were never shot. This is the one where they finally made the real thing. An instrumental score, no verse-chorus scaffolding, no hooks, just mood held for a full record. On its own terms it works. The catch is who it’s for: this rewards the already-converted, the listener who wants to sit inside the band’s atmosphere with the songs stripped out. It won’t turn a stranger, and it wasn’t trying to. The dream made real, filed where the faithful will find it.

D Tier

Parallel Universe (2002)

The only record in the catalogue that lands in the failing tiers, and it lands on the top rung of them. A remixed live cut that genuinely works, several experimental tracks that don’t, and then a run of strong After Everything Now This-era outtakes. Roughly half of it I skip.

Before the Argument Starts

One last thing about the bottom of this list. Twenty-seven records, and only one of them, Parallel Universe, lands in the failing tiers, and even that one is half keepers. There’s no F here, and that isn’t politeness. You don’t get a floor this high by accident. You get it by being a band whose worst day still clears the bar most bands spend a career chasing.

But that’s just me talking, and I’ll be honest, I was still moving albums around the morning I hit publish. Ranking a catalogue you love this much is a bit like stack-ranking your own kids: the closer you look, the harder it gets, and every listen threatens to undo a decision you were sure of a week ago. By the time you read this, I’ve probably changed my mind about two or three of them. That’s not a flaw in the exercise. That is the exercise.

Which is the other thing I love about the ranking posts that got me into this format, the ones Kevin and Sam do over at On Repeat Records: the pleasure isn’t the list, it’s being let into a conversation between two people who’ve loved the same music for a long time and still can’t agree on it. A ranking by yourself is a verdict. A ranking between two people is an argument, and arguments are more fun.

So these were my takes, wet ink and all. Next week is his turn, and we agree more than we disagree. But the disagreements are the good part, and some of them are wide. He put an album I love in a tier I’d never touch, and gave one of my untouchables a grade that made me put the record back on to check I hadn’t lost my mind.

That’s next week.

Before You Go

Missed Last Week?

Read my post on discoverying the soundscapes and music of Dead Can Dance

Coming Next Week

Part 2 of The Church’s 27-album discography, ranking S-tier to F. This time, my collaborator’s perspective and some friendly disagreements.

Thank you for reading my posts. If this piece moved you, taught you something new, or reminded you why music still matters, please consider sharing or restacking it. These stories deserve to be told and remembered.

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Welcome back Hi-Fiers,

This week I was supposed to drop my epic 27 album deep ratings post on my favorite band The Church. That turned out to be a Herculean task, so it’s still in the works, just not ready yet. Maybe next week.

The pivot? I referred back to a subscriber only chat from earlier this year. This post and last week’s post are pulled directly from suggestions that gave me. Posing the simple question, why haven’t you written about Bauhaus or Dead Can Dance yet. Honestly, I didn’t have an answer for him, not to myself. So I put my big boy pants on, and last week I released my Bauhaus post. Which can only mean, this week it’s Dead Can Dance.

I’ve spent years circling everything this band draws from. Celtic rhythm. Ritual chant. Modal drift. Music that sounds ancient no matter when it was actually made. I’ve heard the name Dead Can Dance for decades, felt the mystique, and never once crossed the threshold into an actual song.

So this week, I tried it.

Before pressing play, I logged a few guesses. A darker, gothier Clannad, chant and atmosphere with the new-age warmth scraped off. The ears I already had: improvisational jazz, Indian classical music, qawwali and Sufi devotional traditions, seeing Ustad Amjad Ali Khan live. The strange, expansive corners of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd through Atom Heart Mother. A week deep in Bauhaus, still fresh from last week’s piece.

A while back I wrote about hearing Japan for the first time too, though that piece grew into a full album-by-album deep dive. This one’s staying smaller: the reactions themselves, as close to real time as I can get them down.

The Door I Didn’t Expect

I went looking for the band’s strange, transcendent peak. What actually pulled me in first was the 1984 debut, the record closest to where my ear already lived.

“In Power We Entrust the Love Advocated,” “A Passage In Time,” “The Arcane.” All gothic rock, all post-punk, and Perry’s voice on these sits close enough to Mark Burgess of the Chameleons, and to early Sisters of Mercy, that the kinship feels real. Bauhaus had already broken up by the time this record landed in February 1984. Sisters of Mercy’s debut album was still a year off. The Mission didn’t exist yet. Dead Can Dance’s debut sits right in that gap.

Underneath the gothic surface, I kept hearing something closer to Kraftwerk. Kraftwerk were classically trained musicians who shed their acoustic instruments for machines. Dead Can Dance sound like the mirror image: cellos, timpani, unexpected metal-on-metal percussion, classical and orchestral tools building the same alien, mechanistic textures Kraftwerk got out of synthesizers. Same destination, opposite route.

This same debut era has a song called “East of Eden,” and Big Country released a song with the exact same title, on the exact same theme, the same year, on Steeltown. Both pull from Cain and Abel. Dead Can Dance’s version reads as existential and personal, a band that had just relocated across the world. Big Country’s is Thatcherite industrial Scotland. Same myth, two exiles, 1984.

The Arrival

If the debut was the door, Spleen and Ideal, from a year later, is where I walked through it.

“De Profundis (Out of the Depths of Sorrow)” opens the record like a liturgy, choral and Gregorian. “Mesmerism” pulls somewhere else: tribal drumming under vocalizations that, at different moments, land closer to Ofra Haza or to the great post-colonial Indian playback singers, Asha Bhosle, Lata Mangeshkar, occasionally drifting close enough to Portuguese fado to make you wonder how far the net extends.

“Enigma of the Absolute,” same record, Perry-led, timpani doing melodramatic work under a guitar tone that reached forward to Tortoise for me, a band I wouldn’t find for another decade.

Improvisational jazz runs under all of it, along with the wider world of music that never bothered adhering to Western pop’s chord changes or song shapes. Sufi music. Indian and Middle Eastern modal drift, meditative and repetitive. Unfamiliar instrumentation, sounds pleasant without being comfortable, sometimes genuinely jarring. Dread that is welcomed.

It’s on “Anywhere Out of the World,” the opening track of 1987’s Within the Realm of a Dying Sun, a Perry vocal that reads as pure atmosphere, chiming bells and a sense of vast space. It’s on “Cantara,” the same record, Gerrard, driving and percussive with those unmistakable Oriental overtones. And it’s all over “The Host of Seraphim,” from 1988’s The Serpent’s Egg, Gerrard’s vocalise doing more emotional work with zero intelligible words than most songs manage with a full lyric sheet.

The Cinematic Thread

A lot of this sounds like it’s scoring something. Sword-and-sandal epics, historical drama, fantasy. More than once I caught myself thinking of Game of Thrones, and specifically of Ramin Djawadi’s scoring instincts, the same weight and dread dressed in medieval clothing. “The Host of Seraphim” is the clearest example, one of the most film-placed tracks in the band’s catalogue.

By 1990’s Aion, something else clicked. This is the record where the band sounds most like a true duo, neither voice dominating. “Saltarello” is pure medieval instrumental, a fourteenth-century Italian dance form, no lyrics, gorgeous. “Black Sun,” Perry-led, is one of the record’s real highlights, the same Game-of-Thrones gravity, vocal passages that read as almost Latin in texture.

Four of the eleven songs that grabbed me hardest are Perry leads. The pull was never about who was singing. It was the same handful of qualities showing up again and again: atmosphere, medieval texture, chant treated as instrument, that improvisational, non-Western current underneath. Once I started listening for that instead of for a name, the whole catalogue opened up.

Where This Leaves Me

Eleven songs in, some of these are going to be permanent fixtures on my playlists. I’ve built a public Spotify playlist of the eleven that grabbed me hardest, in case you want to walk the same first pass I just took.

This isn’t a survey of Dead Can Dance’s career. I haven’t earned that yet. It’s a document of first contact, an ear that had been circling this band for twenty years finally finding its way in. There’s more catalogue left to hear, and some of it is going to take real work to land. I’m looking forward to finding out.

Unfortunately, time is not on my side, and I have arrived at this band much passed it’s due date. On further research I found out that Lisa Gerard has left the band. My entire journey here has focused on Lisa Gerard and Brendan Perry as the core duo. Much like Beach House, Everything But the Girl and XX. Without one there can’t be the band. But as the Beatles said after they broke up, “there’s always the records”.

Here is the playlist I created and sharing with all of you, of the songs that grabbed me on my maiden voyage, my first listen.

Before You Go

Further Reading

• An Outsider’s Guide to Japan is the last time I did this: a band, cold, first listen, written in real time.

• Bauhaus: Architects of Goth sets up a lot of the debut-era material here, and

• Kraftwerk: Radio-Activity at 51 goes deeper into the classical-to-machine transition I’m hearing in reverse.

Missed Last Week?

Read my post on Bauhaus: Architects of Goth

Coming Next Week

Fingers crossed: the full tier-ranked walk through The Church’s 27-album discography, S-tier to F. This time, for real. Probably.

Thank you for reading this deep dive. If this piece moved you, taught you something new, or reminded you why music still matters, please consider sharing or restacking it. These stories deserve to be told and remembered.

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Welcome back Hi-Fiers,

Before Bauhaus, there was a kid up too late, learning to love the good kind of afraid. Vincent Price on the midnight movie. Poe read aloud in that voice that makes a nine-year-old pull the blanket up. The televised spooky tales that taught me fear could be a pleasure if you met it on the right terms.

So when I finally found Bauhaus, it was less a discovery than a recognition.

The sealing moment came through Bowie. The Hunger opens on a caged stage: strobes, wire mesh, and Peter Murphy behind it, performing while the camera cuts between him and a lab animal in an actual cage that turns on its own kind. You cannot quite tell who is captive and who is watching. The song filling that scene is “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” and it did to me exactly what the midnight movies had done, only sharper. The film and the song collapsed into one moment. That was the door. I walked through it and never really came back.

This is Bauhaus in ten songs: the architecture of gothic post-punk, built by four art students who stripped rock down to its load-bearing beams and found the whole genre hiding underneath.

Deconstructing the Sound

The band took their name from a famous German Art and Design School, founded in 1919. They even kept the 1919 before finally trimming that off. The typography used for their logo was similar to the German School’s typography. It was famous for fusing disparate schools of thought. The school’s principle was function over flash: strip away ornament, let the structure speak. The band similarly had the idea to combine different genres, dub, funk, R&B, glam rock, post-punk, and romanticism, maybe even reggae.

What they did emulate though was minimalism. Although minimalism without simplicity. It was minimal the way a good building is minimal: nothing decorative, nothing that isn’t holding weight.

Start with the bass. David J played dub, not rock. His lines were the ominous constant, the mood set before a single other element arrives, functioning as lead riffs rather than backing. The low end carried the melody and the menace at once.

Then the guitar, which is where the unease lives. Daniel Ash did not play straight. He struck the strings with objects, scraped them, attacked them for texture rather than chords. Metal on metal, tearing, and then a chord breaking through like an electro-shock nobody warned you about. It is the same restless hand you can hear in John McKay’s guitar on the early Siouxsie and the Banshees records, all angular scrape and refusal to resolve.

Around those two, space. Room to be frightened in. Bauhaus understood that silence and restraint create more tension than noise ever could, and tension was the whole point. That is the mystique: not volume, not aggression, but the feeling that something familiar has gone quietly wrong.

These were art students applying a design philosophy to sound. The thesis of this whole piece and the band’s own founding idea turn out to be the same sentence.

10 Tracks

I want to walk these in order, because the story is in the sequence: a sound arriving fully formed, refining, evolving, and then ending before it could dilute.

“Bela Lugosi’s Dead” (1979)

My gateway, and theirs.

Consider what should have happened. Four men, a band for six weeks, walk into Beck Studios in Wellingborough on a January day in 1979. It is the first time any of them has recorded anything. They have one live take. The result runs past nine minutes, and no one sings a word until the three-minute mark. The whole session, which produced five songs, cost roughly eleven pounds.

By every rule of what a debut single is supposed to be, this fails. It is too long, too slow, too strange, with no chorus and no hook in the first third. It never charted. It came out as a standalone single on the tiny Small Wonder label, not even attached to an album.

And it detonated anyway.

What David J brought into that room was already whole: the lyrics written out beforehand, the dub-rooted bassline formed. Ash brought his objects and his scraped strings, so the sound architecture I just described was there in take one, on day one, nothing added later. Their engineer, Derek Tompkins, a man who worked in carpet slippers, caught it clean and let it breathe. The band called it their interpretation of dub, and that is exactly what it is: a vampire’s tomb rendered as space and echo, Lugosi’s Dracula turned into low-end dread.

It did not sell. It did something more useful. It earned an underground cache that no chart position could buy, and that cache is what convinced 4AD to give them a full album. A song that had no business connecting became the cornerstone of an entire genre. It shouldn’t have worked. Instead it created a whole new genre.

“Terror Couple Kill Colonel” (1980)

Their third single, and the first sign the architecture could travel. Bauhaus lifted the title from a newspaper headline and rebuilt it as something icy and Germanic, a cold little narrative riding a motorik pulse. This is the sound stepping out of the crypt: no vampires, no capes, just dread applied to a news clipping. It set them in the same austere, northern-European territory as Neu!, Kraftwerk, and Magazine, and it proved the method was portable. The unease was never about the subject matter. It was in the construction.

“In the Flat Field” (1980)

Here the band peaked, in my opinion.
Their debut album is one of my prized possessions, and I feel they never topped it. They evolved, they experimented, they got stranger and occasionally better in the parts, but they never again built a complete, perfect record the way they did here.

I am not being contrarian. When In the Flat Field arrived in late 1980, the first full-length release on the newly formed 4AD, the press met it with a shrug, and in places open hostility. History disagreed. The record is now understood as one of the foundational goth albums, the thing that all but invented the template: wracked vocals, moody and mysterious music, despair rendered as design. Steve Albini, called it a masterpiece. So the position is not a hot take; it is where the reappraisal eventually landed, reached from the outside by people (decades later) clearly heard what the industry missed.

The title track is the architecture at album scale: taut, jagged, refusing to resolve. Everything the early singles hinted at, now holding weight.

“Stigmata Martyr” (1980)

The album’s obsession with the forbidden, made flesh. A song about religious mania turned physical, the believer whose devotion erupts as the wounds of the crucifixion. Murphy does not describe the stigmata so much as become them, and that is the line between Bauhaus and every band that later borrowed the look. The horror is not decoration draped over a rock song. It is the performance itself. He inhabits the affliction until the distance between subject and singer disappears.

Watch this video and give this song a listen. Then you can see how Ministry built their entire post-Twitch persona, sound on everything embodied in this song. Then by the transitive property, I’d argue Nine Inch Nails at least the first few albums up through Downward Spiral.

“Spy in the Cab” (1980)

This one sits quieter in the mix, and it has never left my head.

It is the childhood game, I spy with my little eye, wired into something deeply wrong. That is the oldest move in horror: the music box winding down, the nursery rhyme sung a half-step off, the innocent thing that curdles while you watch. A detuned lullaby unsettles more than any scream, because it takes something safe and shows you the rot underneath. Bauhaus understood that dread hides best inside the familiar, and here they weaponize a children’s game. No aggression required, just the quiet suggestion that the ordinary world has turned.

The drum sounds on this song sound directly lifted from Kraftwerk’s patented drum pads from Radioactivity onwards. Combined with the one beeping drone sound.

The clip below is live from the groundbreaking UK TV show The Old Grey Whistle Test

“The Passion of Lovers” (1981)

By the Mask era the palette had widened: keyboards, color, a fuller and stranger production creeping in at the edges. The single stalled at number fifty-six, which the record books file as a modest showing. Read it the other way. This is a band refusing to remake its own hit, moving faster than the audience could follow, and paying the usual price for it. The chart position is a verdict on the promotional machinery, not on the song. The song is proving they could seduce as well as unsettle.

I have a love of the 12-string guitar, and love the use of it in this song. What I hear in this song is the birthing of twins. Sisters of Mercy and The Mission (UK), I can hear Wayne Hussy being influenced by the 12-string strumming in this song.

“All We Ever Wanted Was Everything” (1982)

The Sky’s Gone Out is where the band turns toward the studio and toward art-rock, and it was not an easy birth; the band was at odds with itself and its label throughout the sessions. The album became their biggest commercial success anyway, and the writing turned inward, more personal, less costume. “All We Ever Wanted Was Everything” is the clearest evidence of that shift: a genuinely tender thing, nostalgic, aching after innocence and naive yearning rather than dread. It is the sound of a band showing it could break your heart as readily as raise your hackles. The menace was always a choice, never a ceiling.

This is one of the only songs or very few songs, that featured Peter Murphy on acoustic guitar, especially live. This song transcends age and decade for me. It meant something to me as an angsty teenager, but also as a 50+ year old adult, it’s a tragic, melancholic look back at a life fraught with disappointments.

“Party of the First Part” (1982)

And then the piece that fascinates me more the longer I live with it.

Spoken-word fragments, spliced dialogue, found audio lifted and stitched into something quietly menacing. Now look at where it sits on the timeline: 1982. This is before the industrial wave made sampled voices and cut-up dialogue its entire signature. Before Ministry went to the abattoir. Before Skinny Puppy built whole worlds out of tape splices. Bauhaus were already there, using found voices to drag goth somewhere colder and more sinister, more collage than song. It sounds like almost nothing before it, and it has been imitated without end since. A blueprint hiding inside an album track.

“Slice of Life” (1983)

The end came quickly, and it came through circumstance rather than collapse. During the making of Burning from the Inside, Murphy was flattened by pneumonia and largely absent, leaving Ash and David J to carry the sessions themselves. “Slice of Life” is the sound of that shift: less the gothic architecture, more the melodic, textured direction the two of them would take straight into Love and Rockets. You can hear the next band being born inside the last days of this one, which is a strange and moving thing to catch on tape.

“She’s in Parties” (1983)

The late peak. A Top 30 single and one of their most complete songs, proof the well was nowhere near dry. Whatever cooling followed was the work of a singer sidelined by illness and a band worn down by fighting its label, not a group out of ideas. They split on the fifth of July, 1983, a week before the album reached the shops, and it would be a quarter of a century before they made another record of new material. They ended exactly as their design philosophy would predict: no long fade, no ornament, nothing extra. They stopped while the structure still held.

Bowie and Iggy

Ash and Murphy came up on a strict diet of early Bowie, T. Rex, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop, and it frames everything they built. Murphy has been described, fairly, as the lovechild of Ziggy Stardust and Iggy Pop: the cheekbones and theatrical cool of the one, the coiled physical threat of the other. The Bowie comparison trailed the band everywhere, usually thrown as an accusation.

For years I thought “Ziggy Stardust” was a Bauhaus song. The album and the persona didn’t exist for me yet; Bowie wasn’t cool to a post-punk kid, he was a crooner, and his early catalogue was a blank. The conversion would come later. So when Bauhaus played it, I had no reason to think it was anyone’s but theirs, and to my young ears it was the most Bauhaus-sounding song of all.

Which is the surprise, because they played it dead straight. It might be the most faithful version ever recorded; it barely deviates from the original. No gothic reinvention, no ironic distance, no attempt to remake it. That fidelity was the point. Critics had spent years painting them as noisy punks trading on a Bowie comparison they hadn’t earned, so they took one of the classics and played it, properly, and pulled it off. The message to the press was plain: these punks can actually play. It reached number fifteen, their highest showing in the UK, and put them on Top of the Pops, and it carried The Sky’s Gone Out to its chart peak behind it.

The Architecture Holds

What hooked me was never only the imagery, the capes and the crypts and Murphy’s undead stare. It was the tension underneath, the sense of a familiar world tilted a few degrees toward wrong. That tension was not a mood they stumbled into. It was built, deliberately, from David J’s dub low end and Ash’s struck strings and the wide cold spaces between them, and it was there in full on the first take of the first song.

They never made a more perfect album than the debut, and they never stopped refining the same blueprint: minimal, structural, load-bearing, frightening in exact proportion to how much they held back. Four art students borrowed the name of a design school and then built something to its principles. Function over flash. Dread over decoration.

The mystique was always the tension. And the tension, it turns out, was the design.

Check out all the songs in my curated playlist:

Before You Go

Missed Last Week?

Check out my post on Big Country’s third album The Seer

Thank you for reading this deep dive. If this piece moved you, taught you something new, or reminded you why music still matters, please consider sharing or restacking it. These stories deserve to be told and remembered.

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Welcome back, Hi-Fiers,

It’s been a minute. Almost three weeks off the grid, which is the longest I’ve gone without publishing since starting this thing, and I’m not going to pretend I didn’t need it. Most of that time was split between the Highlands of Scotland and the Irish countryside: a lot of driving on the wrong side of narrow roads, a lot of standing in front of scenery trying to find a word better than “beautiful” and failing every time.

I don’t have a drop of Scottish or Irish blood in me, but their music has pulled at me for as long as I can remember, traditional stuff included, the fiddles, mandolins, celtic drums and pipes and all of it. Being there made sense of that pull in a way records alone never had. You hear where it comes from when you’re standing in it.

We stopped in the hills one afternoon, the kind of scenery that makes you understand why people fight wars over a piece of ground. Our guide told us a story that had nothing to do with scenery. In 1692, the clan chief of Glencoe delayed swearing an oath of allegiance to the crown, not out of defiance, but because the paperwork sent him sixty miles out of his way in the worst weather of the year. He made it. Just late. Government troops arrived not long after and were housed by the MacDonalds as guests, fed and sheltered for nearly two weeks, before turning on their hosts at dawn. The betrayal of hospitality was the point. Dozens killed outright, dozens more dead of exposure fleeing into the snow.

It’s the kind of story that makes you want to believe it couldn’t happen now, that it belongs to some more brutal, more primitive past. Except it keeps happening, in different centuries, in different countries, with different names.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it in Scottish and Irish terms, which meant, eventually, I couldn’t stop thinking about Big Country.

A Left Turn Nobody Asked For

Big Country’s first two albums were enormous. The Crossing turned four guys from Dunfermline into an MTV fixture, dual guitars run through e-bows until they sounded like bagpipes, all of it built for open roads and driving fast. Steeltown followed it to the top of the UK charts. By 1986 the commercial math was simple: keep doing the thing that was already working, and keep winning.

They didn’t do that. The Seer is still recognizably Big Country, the same guitars, the same drive, but it turns inward toward the traditional Scottish sound the first two albums only gestured at. It became a concept record built on Scottish history: the collapse of the steel towns and mining communities and what that hollowing-out did to the people left behind, and, more quietly, the Highland Clearances, the forced displacement of Highlanders in favor of sheep farming that scattered families across Canada, New Zealand, and the American frontier.

I must leave this land
And the hunger that is here
But the place I stand
Is the one I love so dear (“Rememberance Day”)

“Remembrance Day” carries that history without turning the album into a history lecture. It’s there for anyone listening closely, and easy to miss for anyone who isn’t, which is probably how they wanted it.

“Red Fox” goes even further back, and further into a true story. Colin Campbell of Glenure, the government factor sent to clear Stewart tenants from confiscated land after (the battle of) Culloden, was shot dead in 1752 and known to this day by the same nickname Adamson used for the song’s title. That same killing, and the wrongful hanging that followed it, is the historical spine of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. Adamson took a story that already had a foothold in Scottish literature and put it back into the mouths of four guys with guitars.

Kidnapped in the dead of night
I did no wrong, I will not fight
It was not me, I will not run
But I believe in what was done
John, John, there's something wrong
The guns are found and the fox is gone
John, John, before too long
It will be me they hang it on

They had every commercial reason to stay bigger, louder, more arena-ready. They chose specific instead, and rooted instead. That choice is the whole story of this album.

The Duet and the Mix That Got Buried

The title track exists because Stuart Adamson wanted a woman’s voice inside the song, and he didn’t want just any voice. He wanted Kate Bush, specifically, and asked for her by name. Her camp wanted to hear the song first. She liked it, worked out her parts, then came into the studio and spent the better part of a day on them. By every account from the room, it was a genuine duet, not a guest spot tacked on for a name on the sleeve.

Producer Robin Millar built the album around performances like that one: dry, direct, unadorned. The label heard it and got nervous. It didn’t sound like 1986 to them. So Walter Turbitt was brought in to remix the whole record, gloss it up, add the reverb of the era. Kate Bush’s vocal, the thing Adamson had gone out of his way to get, came out the other side buried in the mix. The band hated it. They’ve said so, on the record, more than once.

Here’s the part I can’t get my head around. Robin Millar is alive. He’s talked openly about the mix he made and what happened to it. The surviving members of Big Country have all said, unambiguously, that his version is the one that should exist. There’s a documented decade-plus of fans asking for it, loudly, in the open. And as of this year, the fortieth anniversary of the album, it still doesn’t exist anywhere anyone can hear it. One rumor from a few years back had Millar offering to remix it fresh for release, with the label supposedly open to it. Nothing came of it. No explanation given.

I don’t get what there is left to protect. The people involved agree on what the right version sounds like. The only thing standing between that and an actual release is whoever currently owns the tapes deciding it’s worth the paperwork.

None of this happened in a vacuum. The label had gold in its hands and diluted it, then, when it underperformed in the US, needed an explanation that didn’t point back at their own decisions. The one that stuck was simple: too Scottish, too niche, too specific for anyone outside the UK to connect with.

That explanation hasn’t aged well. You could draw a straight line from the same well of Scottish history, betrayal, blood feuds, clan warfare, oaths broken in the snow, to some of the biggest cultural exports of the last two decades. Game of Thrones built an empire on exactly this material; George R.R. Martin has pointed to the Glencoe massacre itself as one of the direct inspirations for the Red Wedding. Braveheart won Best Picture off the back of it. Outlander spent over a decade turning Highland history into a global streaming phenomenon, one that just wrapped its final season this year to record viewership. Those are just to name a few. “Specific and Scottish” was never the problem. It never has been. What The Seer needed wasn’t a more universal subject; it needed a label that knew how to sell what it already had.

What Got Left Behind

Scottish history didn’t stay niche. It just took the rest of the culture a couple of decades to catch up. Braveheart, Outlander, Game of Thrones, all of it proved there was a global audience hungry for exactly what The Seer was built from, clan loyalty, betrayal, land, blood. Big Country just got there first, without the marketing budget or the timing to make it land the way it should have.

Stuart Adamson died in 2001. He never got to see how thoroughly the world would come around to the things he was writing about in 1986. That’s the real shame of it, not that he was ahead of his time, plenty of artists are, but that being ahead of your time only pays off if someone’s still around to cash in on it.

What he and the band were doing on The Seer wasn’t a gimmick or a marketing angle. It was four guys playing what they were proud of, what they’d grown up on, without the machine behind them that would eventually make Highland history a billion-dollar export. They just needed someone to sell it right. Nobody did.

I came home from the Highlands with that album stuck in my head for a reason. Standing in that landscape, hearing the stories that don’t make it into textbooks, it’s easy to understand exactly what Adamson heard when he wrote these songs. It’s the same thing I heard, an ocean away, with no Scottish blood in me at all: this place has stories worth telling, and someone finally told them right.

I leave you with this electrifying live rendition of The Seer. What really made me fall in love with Big Country were the full televised concerts MTV played of theirs. Even without Kate Bush their music is rousing and emotional.

Further Reading

If the Brahan Seer legend caught your ear, Brian Cox's (Succession, Wolverine) Beyond Explanation (2005) covers him in one episode alongside other Highland folklore, and the BBC's own Legends of Scotland archive and Brahan Seer radio documentary go deeper into the full run of prophecies. Unfortunately outside of Scotland and the UK these are not freely available to stream.
However, doing a quick YouTube search of “Brahan Seer” will get you some good results worth watching.

For the Highland Clearances themselves, John Prebble's The Highland Clearances remains the standard account.

Before You Go…

Missed Last Week?

Read my post on David Bowie's Station to Station. A different kind of left turn by another artist.

Coming Next Week

Bauhuas in 10 songs

Thank you for reading this deep dive. If this piece moved you, taught you something new, or reminded you why music still matters, please consider sharing or restacking it. These stories deserve to be told and remembered.

Share

Leave a like and tell me in the comments: is there an album you think got buried by bad promotion instead of bad music?

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This is the kind of engaging work I want to keep creating. Subscribe so you don’t miss future deep dives and music explorations.

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HiFi Amateur will always be free to read. But if you find value in these deep dives and curations, upgrading to a paid subscription lets me know this work means something to you. Think of it as a virtual high-five or a nod to the record store clerk—no pressure, just appreciation.

Welcome back Hi-Fiers,

Last week we explored Kraftwerk’s Radio-Activity, and the seismic shift it represented: the moment a German quartet from Düsseldorf quietly dismantled the entire blues-rooted architecture of rock and roll and replaced it with something colder, stranger, and more prescient than almost anyone could recognize at the time. If you haven’t read that one yet, I’d encourage you to start there, because what follows is, in many ways, its direct consequence.

I came to Station to Station through the back door. For most of my listening life I assumed it was part of Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, filed alongside Low and Heroes in my head as a coherent run of albums. Then I fact-checked myself. Station to Station has no Brian Eno, no Berlin, no official trilogy membership. The third album, the one that completes the set, is Lodger.

So I went to Lodger. And I was disappointed. Not just in the music, which felt thematically and sonically like a step sideways from the two albums it was supposedly completing, but in the reasoning behind the label. The album wasn’t recorded in Berlin either: sessions happened in Switzerland and New York. What it does have is Eno’s name on the credits. On Low and Heroes, that meant something visceral and unmistakable. On Lodger, it felt more like a stamp than a presence.

That disappointment sent me back to Station to Station with a question nagging at me. Because here was an album with the Berlin sound before Berlin. The Kraftwerk DNA, absorbed and transformed, without Eno’s hand guiding it. My original misconception, it turned out, was more right than the official version.

The Chameleon Before the Shed

To understand what Station to Station is, you first need to understand what Bowie was escaping.

By 1975, he had already cycled through personas at a pace that would have exhausted a lesser performer. The mod. The folk-rock oddity of “Space Oddity”. The gender-bending glam messiah of Ziggy Stardust. Each reinvention was total, and each one rooted, for all its theatricality, in the fundamental grammar of rock and roll: blues scales, R&B chord progressions, electric guitars doing guitar things.

His American years deepened that dependency. He chased his heroes to New York, Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol, and found the reception less warm than he’d hoped. But he bounced back fast, and his return to the United States as a fully formed glam icon brought the full reward: arenas, money, adulation, and Los Angeles. Then Young Americans, his Philadelphia soul album, where he gave a young, unknown Luther Vandross his first significant studio credit as a backing vocalist. By every conventional measure, it was a success.

But Los Angeles was doing something else to him entirely.

Bowie had developed a ferocious cocaine habit, surviving, by his own account, on a diet of peppers and milk. His weight dropped below 100 pounds. He rented a house in Bel Air with a mock-Egyptian interior, burned black candles, and claimed to see bodies falling past the windows. He became obsessed with the occult. The Alan Yentob documentary Cracked Actor caught him in this period, hollow-eyed in a limousine, barely coherent. He was also, in between all of this, finishing a film. Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth cast Bowie as a gaunt alien who arrives on Earth and is slowly destroyed by it. Bowie would later note that he wasn’t acting.

The Signal from Düsseldorf

Into this wreckage came a sound.

Bowie had been paying attention to Kraftwerk since Autobahn in 1974. But it was Radio-Activity, released in late 1975, that crystallized something for him. What he heard, in his own words, was:

He didn’t describe it as pretty, or fun, or even immediately accessible. He described it as the future.

Where the blues had always been the river that everything flowed from, Kraftwerk had simply redirected the river. Found sounds. Electronic percussion. The space between sounds as a compositional element in itself. Steam and static as melody. It was music that felt like it had been assembled rather than performed, and to Bowie, drowning in the most American city on earth, it felt like a rope thrown from the other side of the Atlantic.

Cherokee Studios, Los Angeles, 1975

The great irony of Station to Station is that it sounds like a European record, and it was made entirely in Los Angeles.

Recorded at Cherokee Studios in Hollywood between September and November 1975, the album was co-produced by Bowie and Harry Maslin, a journeyman who had worked with him on the “Fame” sessions. Tony Visconti was unavailable. Brian Eno was not involved. Robert Fripp was not involved. The Berlin era had not begun. What Bowie had was a rhythm section: guitarist Carlos Alomar, the anchor of the Young Americans sessions; Earl Slick on lead guitar; George Murray on bass; Dennis Davis on drums; and Roy Bittan, borrowed from Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, on piano.

Bowie would later say he remembered almost nothing of the recording. He was, by his own admission, strung out on cocaine for the entirety of it.

And yet.

The album that emerged is one of the most focused, purposeful, and quietly radical things he ever made. This is not the work of a man who had lost the plot. This is the work of a man who had found a new one, even if he couldn’t quite see it yet through the haze.

The Thin White Duke

By the time the album was finished, Bowie had a new persona to match it. The Thin White Duke: cold, aristocratic, stripped of the warmth and theatricality of Ziggy or Aladdin Sane. Waistcoat, slicked-back blonde hair, a character drained of colour in every sense. The Isolar tour that followed embraced the same logic: no vibrant costumes, no glam theatre. Just stark fluorescent white light against a black backdrop. He named the tour Isolar, a phonetic compression of ice and solar, two extremes that cancel each other out and yet coexist. The same linguistic instinct Kraftwerk had applied to Radio-Activity: a single word holding annihilation and energy in the same breath, intense heat and absolute cold collapsed into one thing. He took it on the road in 1976, playing Radio-Activity in its entirety over the PA as audiences filed into the venues.

Ten Minutes and Counting

“Station to Station”

The title track is where everything is staked, and everything is won.

At just over ten minutes, it is the longest studio recording Bowie ever made. In 1976, that running time would have signaled one thing to most listeners: progressive rock. Genesis. Rush. Extended guitar solos and concept suites. What they got instead was something that bore no resemblance to any of that.

The song opens with the sound of a train: metal on metal, steam and industrial percussion, a slow mechanical build that lasts nearly two full minutes before a note is played. It is an unmistakable homage to the locomotive sounds embedded in Radio-Activity, and to the found-sound philosophy that Kraftwerk had elevated to art. Bowie was not stealing; he was translating. He was showing that the same instinct, the use of the machine as instrument, the world as studio, could be applied by a human performer with a very different set of tools. But where Kraftwerk prioritized system and rigor, Bowie commandeered pure expressionism. He took their method and ran it through his own chaos: his drug paranoia, his half-formed mysticism, his occult obsessions. And out came something that sounded like neither Kraftwerk nor anything Bowie had done before.

Earl Slick’s guitar work on the track is worth pausing on. Bowie said of it: “I got some quite extraordinary things out of Earl Slick. I think it captured his imagination to make noises on guitar, and textures, rather than playing the right notes.” Carlos Alomar, meanwhile, provided the rhythmic skeleton that allowed everyone else room to breathe. These are not musicians who get cited enough. The Berlin era would bring Eno and Fripp, and those collaborations are rightly celebrated. But Station to Station is what Bowie built without them, from scratch, with a band of players who had no template for what he was asking.

The song’s second half erupts into something almost unrecognizable from its opening: a propulsive, slightly delirious groove that pulls in disco and funk without fully surrendering to either. The R&B roots Bowie was supposedly leaving behind ghost through the rhythm section, stubborn and irrepressible. He could not fully shed that skin, not yet. And the result is richer for it.

Watch Adrian Belew take the song to another level (on guitar) in this live clip from the Isolar tour:

“TVC15”

My favorite track on the album, and the strangest thing on it. Its origin is pure Bowie: Iggy Pop, deep in a drug haze at the Bel Air house, became convinced the television set was swallowing his girlfriend. Bowie filed that away and made a carnival out of it.

The instruction to Roy Bittan was to play it like Professor Longhair, the New Orleans barroom pianist. Loose, rolling, slightly drunk. Bowie told the band he wanted it “loose and stupid,” feel over precision. And for most of its running time, that’s exactly what it is: joyously unhinged, a B-movie fantasy about a man contemplating crawling into a TV screen to find his swallowed lover.

But then something happens towards the end. The “oh-oh-oh” chant locks in (lifted from a 1964 Yardbirds single), the guitars stop playing and start hammering. The piano, which sounded so warm and human at the start, gets absorbed into the rhythm. Everything narrows into a single driving pulse. What began as a New Orleans bar song ends somewhere else entirely.

That ending is Kraftwerk. Not in any technical sense: there’s no synthesizer here, no electronic percussion. But the philosophy is the same. Strip it back, lock it in, let the repetition do the hypnotic work. Bowie arrived there through chaos and instinct rather than design, but the destination rhymes. The machine swallows the music, just as the television swallows the girl.

To me, hearing this as a kid with no reference points, no New Orleans, no rock and roll history, no Philly soul, it sounded like nothing I had heard before. Jarring in a way that almost suggested punk without the aggression. Alien without being cold. It didn’t belong to any world I knew.

In December 1979, Bowie took it to Saturday Night Live, flanked by the extraordinary countertenor Klaus Nomi and performance artist Joey Arias, who dragged a pink plastic poodle with a television screen in its mouth across the stage while Bowie performed in a skirt and heels. For a generation of American kids, this was their introduction to Bowie: no MTV yet, no internet, just staying up late on a Saturday and suddenly the world looking completely different. The same jolt British kids described when they saw Ziggy Stardust perform “Starman” on Top of the Pops seven years earlier. Alien. Not from here.

One of those kids was Kurt Cobain. Fourteen years later, he covered The Man Who Sold the World at MTV Unplugged, acoustic guitar fed through a fuzz box, months before his death. Bowie said he was blown away.

An excerpt from the Saturday Night Live Performance

Other Album Tracks

“Golden Years” is where the R&B roots are most visible. Slinky, seductive, a genuine pop song: it sounds like it wandered in from the Young Americans sessions and decided to stay. It doesn’t fit the cold architecture of the title track or the deconstructed pulse of “TVC 15”, and that’s precisely what makes it interesting. Bowie’s past refusing to leave quietly. For a generation of European producers who heard it, that bass line and the shimmer between funk rhythm and synthesizer would wind through the DNA of British new wave for years.

“Word on a Wing” is the most startling track on the album's first side. Written from inside a cocaine-addled spiritual crisis during the filming of The Man Who Fell to Earth, it is a genuine, plaintive prayer. Bowie, a man who performed sincerity through layers of irony and persona, drops everything here and simply means it.

The following live clip is the full Thin White Duke persona

“Stay” is the album's most overtly physical moment: a locked funk groove that sounds like it was built to be played at volume in a room with no windows. Earl Slick's guitar is relentless, Carlos Alomar's rhythm work immaculate. But underneath all of it, almost imperceptibly, the synthesizers hold a constant ambient layer. Not melody, not structure: atmosphere. The space between the notes. It creates a fragile tension, a slight unease that doesn't resolve. The funk and the synth don't fuse here: they coexist uneasily, each refusing to give way to the other. The new wave and synthpop acts that followed, even Japan, would later complete that fusion more seamlessly. Bowie left the seams showing, and the discomfort is the point. You can hear the seeds of “Sound and Vision” in it, a track that was still a year away, waiting to be born in Berlin.

“Wild is the Wind” closes the album, and earns it. Inspired by Nina Simone’s version of the song, it is stark and almost unbearably tender. It sounds less like a conclusion and more like an exit. A man preparing to leave.

Even though the clip below is from Bowie’s Reality tour in the 2000’s, it features Earl Slick who played guitar on the original recording.

The Real Berlin Album

What is easy to miss, in all the mythology around the Berlin years, is that Iggy Pop was on the same journey, though he arrived separately. Bowie left Los Angeles first, forcing himself into seclusion in Berlin to detox from cocaine. Tony Visconti was there to help. The withdrawal was brutal, and the PTSD from it would show up in the studio: a rawness, an exposure that Bowie channeled directly into the work. Iggy followed shortly after, and soon the two were roommates in a city that had no interest in their fame.

The Isolar tour continued through Europe, and it was during a date in Düsseldorf that Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider came to the show and met Bowie and Iggy backstage. Kraftwerk were fans; the admiration was entirely mutual. The relationship deepened: Kraftwerk met Bowie again backstage after his Paris date, two worlds that had been orbiting each other from a distance finally in the same room.

A year later, Kraftwerk immortalized the connection. Trans Europe Express named Bowie and Iggy explicitly in its lyrics. The artists who had pointed Bowie towards his future had written him into their own. The circle was complete.

None of it happens without Station to Station.

That album is the proof of concept: that Bowie had understood what Kraftwerk were pointing at, not just aesthetically but philosophically. That the abandonment of American musical language was not an affectation but a genuine reorientation. That the future of his music was European, electronic, structured differently, and built from stranger materials.

He just had to survive Los Angeles long enough to get there. The album he made in the process, against all odds, broken down in a coke haze, with musicians assembled in a hurry and a producer who went on to make records for the Bay City Rollers, is the missing piece. The prologue written after the fact. The lost album of the Berlin Trilogy, in every sense that matters.

Further Listening

Radio-Activity — Kraftwerk (1975): The album Bowie played to his audiences before they took their seats on the Station to Station tour. The blueprint, and the provocation.

The Idiot — Iggy Pop (1977): The parallel journey. Bowie produces, Berlin beckons, and Kraftwerk’s shadow falls across every track.

Low — David Bowie (1977): Where the thread from Station to Station leads. Brian Eno arrives. The transformation completes.

Wild is the Wind — Nina Simone (1966): The version that brought the song to Bowie’s attention, and the one that makes his closing track make sense.

Quiet Life — Japan (1980): What happens when the tension Bowie left unresolved on Stay finally finds its resolution. Funk and soul fused completely with synthesizer, the seams gone, the future arrived.

Inspired

Real Life — Magazine (1978): The entire sound and aesthetic of Magazine is unthinkable without this era of Bowie. Howard Devoto heard the blueprint and ran with it.

The Scream — Siouxsie and the Banshees (1978): Cold, angular, and built on the same foundations. Their first two albums are Station to Station’s darkest children.

The Pleasure Principle — Gary Numan (1979): The synthesizer steps out from the ambient layer and takes over entirely. The logical endpoint of what “Stay” was reaching for. Although, Gary Numan drew from the same creative well as Bowie and named Kraftwerk as his main influence.

Remain in Light — Talking Heads (1980): Funk and repetition locked together until they become something else entirely. Bowie’s unresolved tension, resolved differently. Adrian Belew, who joined Bowie for the Isolar tour (Station to Station) and Lodger, played guitar on this album.

The Cars — The Cars (1978): The minimalism, the detachment, the pop song as a cold object. Bowie’s influence absorbed into American new wave without anyone quite admitting it.

Before You Go

Missed Last Week?

Read my post on Kraftwerk’s Radio-Activity, the album that influenced not only Station to Station but Bowie’s next 3 albums in Berlin.

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Welcome back Hi-Fiers,

Full disclosure: this post was supposed to be a 50th anniversary celebration. Then I discovered that a series of commemorative releases dropped in May, the same month as my birthday, and I got briefly, embarrassingly excited that I shared a birthday with one of the most important albums ever made. I do not. The 50th was last year. The reissues just arrived fashionably late, which, given that the music industry spent decades ignoring this album entirely, feels appropriate.

No matter. The album still deserves the celebration, anniversary or not. Because Radio-Activity, Kraftwerk’s fifth studio album released in November 1975, is one of those rare records that changed everything while nobody was watching. It didn’t chart in the US. It didn’t chart in the UK. The English-speaking music press largely couldn’t be bothered. And quietly, from a studio in Düsseldorf named after the sound of metal striking metal, four classically trained Germans proceeded to invent electronic music, synthpop, ambient, post-punk, darkwave, and the entire sonic vocabulary of the decades that followed.

They just didn’t get a receipt for it.

Werkzeug / Kling Klang

To understand Radio-Activity, you have to understand what Kraftwerk were leaving behind.

Hütter and Schneider had met as students at the Robert Schumann Hochschule in Düsseldorf in the late 1960s, deep in the German experimental music scene that the British press had taken to calling “krautrock.” The movement was born out of the radical student protests of that era: a conscious, political rejection of Germany’s recent past and, by extension, of the American and British cultural dominance that had flooded postwar Europe. That meant rejecting the blues-derived chord structures, the verse-chorus-verse formulas, the entire foundation on which Western rock and pop music was built. Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Can: these were bands that decided to start from somewhere else entirely.

Their early albums reflected that restlessness without yet finding its destination. Guitar, bass, drums, organ, flute, violin: the instruments were largely traditional, even if what they did with them was not. Florian Schneider’s primary instrument in those years was the flute. Autobahn, released in 1974, was the transitional moment: synthesizers and drum machines took over, though flute and guitar still appeared in the mix. By the time they walked into Kling Klang Studio in 1975 to record Radio-Activity, they had made a decision. The flute went in the case. The guitars went in the case. Nothing that had ever appeared on a rock or pop record would appear on this one. For the first time in their career, and for the first time in the history of recorded music, every sound on a Kraftwerk album would be entirely electronic.

They named their studio Kling Klang. English ears hear it and think whimsy: bells, something light, a child’s toy. It isn’t. It is the sound of metal striking metal. A forge. And that is precisely what the studio was: a place where raw materials were struck repeatedly until something entirely new emerged. The band’s own name follows the same logic. “Kraftwerk” reads to an English speaker as “craft work,” artisanal and careful. It means power plant. Heavy industrial infrastructure. Electricity generation at scale.

They named themselves after a power station and their studio after the sound of a hammer. Everyone was then surprised that they approached music like engineers.

The Instruments They Built

Where commercial drum machines and early rhythm boxes of the era were insufficient for their ambitions, Hütter and Schneider built their own. In 1975 they filed a patent for a custom electronic percussion instrument: a set of metal pads that triggered synthetic sounds when struck. Wolfgang Flür and Karl Bartos played these with metal sticks, closing an electrical circuit with each hit, producing beats with a precision nothing on the commercial market could match at the time.

Bands like Depeche Mode, New Order, Front 242 made entire careers out of using these same drum/percussion pads and their various incarnations based on those patents.

For live performances they went further still, constructing an experimental percussion cage in which sounds were triggered by waving arms through photoelectric light beams. The system was temperamental and frequently failed, which is its own kind of poetry: they were so far ahead of what technology could deliver that their own live rig couldn’t keep up with them.

The Sounds They Conjured

In the studio they recorded actual oscillators, white noise generators, and found sounds, splicing tape with razor blades to create loops and repeating textures. This process predates the tape loop experiments that would become fashionable in pop music by at least five years [ Bizarre Song Triangle]. They manipulated shortwave radio signals and raw sine waves to emulate the eerie, atomic-age soundscapes the album required. The human voice was fed through EMS vocoders and transformed into something robotic, disembodied, and clinical: an instrument rather than an expression. The Vako Orchestron, a Mellotron descendant acquired on their recent US tour, was modified and pushed well beyond its factory settings; its choir disc gives the title track its spectral, haunting vocal texture, not quite human, not quite machine, which was entirely the point.

The Chain Reaction

Radio-Activity was a number one record in France. Nowhere else in the world did it register. In the US and UK, the music press largely looked through it as though it weren’t there. The industry that would spend the following decades strip-mining its innovations for commercial product couldn’t summon the attention to review it at the time.

Florian Schneider, the co-founder who Hütter once described as the band’s sound fetishist and sonic compass, the man who had put down the flute and helped build a new music from scratch, died of cancer in May 2020, just days after his 73rd birthday. He never saw Radio-Activity receive anything close to the recognition it deserved in the English-speaking world. He never needed to. He knew what they had built.

What they had built was a methodology. And that methodology travelled.

David Bowie heard it first, or at least heard it loudest. He was playing Radio-Activity in its entirety through the PA system before his Station to Station shows, as audiences took their seats, using it as a kind of overture for what he was in the process of becoming. It worked on him as much as it worked on the crowd. The album was a direct catalyst for his move to Berlin, for the shedding of the cocaine-and-Los Angeles excess, and for the three records that followed: Low, Heroes, and Lodger. On Heroes he named the track “V2 Schneider” after Florian Schneider directly. It was a dedication disguised as a song title; Bowie’s way of saying: I know exactly where this came from.

Iggy Pop heard it too, specifically “Antenna,” and said so explicitly. The Idiot, his 1977 debut, carries the DNA of Radio-Activity in its bones: in the synthetic dread of “Nightclubbing,” in the cold mechanical pulse of “Sister Midnight.” Via The Idiot, the chain extends further still: into post-punk, into the New Romantics, into every artist who absorbed Iggy’s reinvention as their own starting point. The debt was not only sonic. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, released in 1979 with its now-iconic black cover, a radio wave readout of pulsar CP 1919 rendered as pure scientific imagery, no band name, no title on the front, nothing that looked like a conventional record, owed its visual language to the same aesthetic that Radio-Activity established four years earlier. An album that looked like a piece of laboratory equipment sitting in a record shop in 1975. Peter Saville made that aesthetic iconic. Kraftwerk invented it.

Then there is the methodology itself: the found sounds, the metal on metal, the noise treated as composition rather than accident. Watch Alan Wilder of Depeche Mode in the 101 documentary, taking the cameras through his process, recording industrial sounds, striking metal, building textures from the raw material of the physical world. It is precisely what Hütter and Schneider were doing in Kling Klang in 1975. Depeche Mode built a career on it and sold tens of millions of records. Blixa Bargeld of Einstürzende Neubauten, who took that methodology to its most extreme conclusion, scrapping traditional instruments entirely in favor of power tools, scrap metal, and self-built machines, names Kraftwerk explicitly as a formative influence. The industrial genre, from Einstürzende Neubauten through Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, and Rammstein, traces its foundational logic back to the same forge.

In the early 1980s, DJs and producers in the South Bronx were building a new music from whatever came to hand: breakbeats, found sounds, the physical manipulation of vinyl. When they encountered Kraftwerk, they recognized something immediately. The seeds had been planted on Radio-Activity; Trans-Europe Express was the gateway. Afrika Bambaataa built “Planet Rock” directly from that album, exposing Kraftwerk to a generation of kids from the Bronx who had never heard of Düsseldorf. DMC of Run-DMC later said, without qualification: “Kraftwerk created hip-hop.” Dr. Dre, DJ Shadow, J Dilla, Madlib: all documented inheritors. The artists who had spent generations being exploited by an industry that took their music and paid them nothing looked at what four Germans built in a forge in Düsseldorf and paid their respects voluntarily, publicly, and on the record. That is its own kind of verdict.

None of these artists necessarily heard Radio-Activity directly. That is almost the point. The methodology passed through intermediaries, through Bowie, through Iggy, through the krautrock scene, through producers and engineers who absorbed it without crediting it. By the time it surfaced as a platinum-selling genre, the origin was several removes away and largely invisible. The music industry is exceptionally good at this: taking something it once ignored and selling it back to the world without a receipt.

Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter built the power plant. The rest of the industry ran its appliances off the grid.

Track By Track

The album’s concept began, appropriately enough, as a joke. Touring the US in 1975 to promote Autobahn, Hütter and Schneider discovered that Billboard magazine listed its most-played singles under the heading “Radio-Activity,” the words almost separated on the page. The pun was too good to ignore. What grew from it was a concept album in two distinct halves: Side One built around the theme of radioactivity, atomic energy, contamination, and dread; Side Two pivoting to radio communication, transmission, signal, and the mechanics of how information travels. The title carried both meanings simultaneously, which was entirely deliberate, and entirely Kraftwerk.

Side One

Geiger Counter

The album opens not with a song but with a warning. A slow, metronomic clicking builds from near-silence, each pulse measured and deliberate, mimicking the sound of a Geiger counter sweeping a contaminated landscape. Our brains are wired to find patterns in rhythm and to register alarm when those patterns break. Kraftwerk knew this. The clicks stay steady long enough to lull, then accelerate into erratic, urgent bursts: the counter has found something, and the listener’s nervous system responds before the conscious mind catches up.

Underneath the clicking there are found sounds: scraping, scratching textures that sit just below the threshold of identification. The manipulation of recorded sound as a compositional tool, treating texture and noise as instruments in their own right, was the same instinct that would drive an entirely different revolution a few years later in the South Bronx, where DJs discovered that a record could be played not just for its music but for its grain, its surface, its physicality. The methodology was the same. The zip codes were very different.

Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon starts similarly but with a heartbeat in “Speak To Me”. Where Pink Floyd built toward rock catharsis, Kraftwerk built toward something that had no name yet.

The Geiger Counter doesn’t end. It accelerates into the next track and becomes its backbeat.

Radioactivity

The clicking from Geiger Counter doesn’t stop: it becomes the rhythmic pulse of this song, the counter having detected exactly what the album title promised. It is a remarkable piece of sequencing. The music itself is now the thing being measured.

What follows is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most startling songs of 1975. The Minimoog bassline arrives in steady eighth notes, then the synth chords, then the vocoded vocals, disembodied and spectral, and a listener in 2026 would be forgiven for needing a moment to verify the recording date. The synth piano carries a melodic sensibility that Depeche Mode would spend the better part of a decade refining. The bass synth has the cold, deliberate weight that Sisters of Mercy and Bauhaus would later claim as their own signature. The haunting choir texture, achieved through the Vako Orchestron’s choir disc pushed beyond its factory settings, gives the track its gothic atmosphere: not quite human, not quite machine. There is also a steam sound married to the synthetic drum beats that conjures a locomotive, which, given the post-apocalyptic undertow of the album, becomes its own quiet instrument of dread. Joy Division would return to that same sound repeatedly on Closer.

Running through the track in Morse code, near the beginning and again near the end, is a message. It spells out R-A-D-I-O-A-C-T-I-V-I-T-Y. In some live versions, it spells out K-R-A-F-T-W-E-R-K instead. That detail alone, for music geeks, is worth the price of admission.

The song also marks the first time the band made a deliberate decision to sing in English, on any album. One member had spent time in the US and had the clearest command of the language; the rest took turns on the German passages. It was a practical decision that opened an entire world. The bilingual structure of the album, German and English sharing the same songs, was not a compromise. It was a strategy.

I thought about adding the official video of the song. But I think it is more fitting that I show their live TV performance in France. One, to portray what that experience was like. Second, it is the only country that embraced the album, where it received its only commercial success and reached #1. Influencing the likes of the bands: Air, Phoenix, and Daft Punk.

Radioland

The menace recedes. What replaces it is something unexpected: beauty. Where “Radioactivity” was spectral and unsettling, “Radioland” is almost orchestral, the synthesizers arranged with a patience and melodic generosity that reveals the band’s classical training without announcing it. The vocoder vocals here are not clinical but almost tender, robotic in timbre but warm in intention. Close your eyes and strip away the knowledge of how it was made, and you could be listening to a chamber ensemble. Drones and robots sent in to investigate a contaminated landscape, going about their work without feeling, singing to themselves or to each other as they sweep the ruins for signs of life.

The song ends, as all the best tracks on this album do, by dissolving directly into the next one.

Airwaves

The mood lifts here, and the shift is startling. Where the first three tracks built dread and tension, Airwaves is almost joyful: the tempo accelerates, the melody opens up, and something genuinely danceable emerges from the static. This is, to these ears, the most important two minutes on the album.

Everything that synthpop would become is here in embryonic form: the drum machine pulse, the melodic synth lines carrying the full emotional weight of the song, the absence of any guitar or conventional instrument, and underneath it all, a groove. Pet Shop Boys, New Order, Depeche Mode’s entire catalogue of dancefloor moments, Sparks’ “No. 1 Song in Heaven”: you can draw a direct line from each of them back to this track. Berlin’s “Metro” borrows the bass synth line. Depeche Mode’s “A New Life” essentially lives next door.

In 1975, dance music meant orchestras, live drummers, bassists, the full apparatus of human musicianship assembled in a room. Airwaves suggested, quietly and without fanfare, that none of that was necessary. A machine could carry the beat. A synthesizer could carry the melody. And it could make you move.

Nobody noticed at the time. They would later.

Intermission

Exactly what it says. Fifteen seconds of tones that sit somewhere between a 1950s PSA and the five-note sequence from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It works as a breath, a pressure valve between the album's two emotional registers, and it is delivered with the same deadpan commitment Kraftwerk brought to everything else.

News

A tower of voices: overlapping news reports, spoken fragments, competing broadcasts layered until language collapses into texture. No single voice is intelligible. The effect is not chaos but saturation, the sensation of information arriving faster than it can be processed, which in 1975 was still a metaphor. The human elements that remained in the preceding tracks are dissolving here. Whatever signal the album has been tracking has now reached the surface of the world and fragmented into noise. Side One ends in static.

Side 2

Where Side One belonged to radioactivity, Side Two belongs to communication.

Antenna

The second side opens with one of the album’s strongest tracks and one of its most prescient. The Moog Micromoog provides the harsh, abrasive textures that drive the song; the overall atmosphere is one of cold, purposeful transmission. Something is broadcasting. The question the song poses, and deliberately does not answer, is whether the broadcaster is human.

The lyrics read like an excerpt from an Asimov novel: an intelligence announcing its function, declaring that it transmits, that others receive, that the circuit is complete. There is no warmth in it, no negotiation. The dread is not in what is being said but in the absolute certainty with which it is said. Iggy Pop cited this track explicitly as a blueprint for “Nightclubbing” and “Sister Midnight” on The Idiot. The Cure heard it. Every goth band that ever used a synthesizer to create a sense of mechanical dread heard it, whether they knew the source or not.

In 2026, a song about an intelligence transmitting instructions to passive receivers feels less like science fiction than it once did.

Radio Stars

The signal from “Antenna” has left the atmosphere. Kraftwerk venture here into genuine science fiction territory: radio waves travelling at light speed through space, reaching quasars and pulsars, the album’s pun on “radio stars” revealed to be entirely literal. The track has a floating, weightless quality that mirrors its subject. The transmission is no longer terrestrial. Whatever was broadcasting in the previous track is now beyond retrieval.

Uranium

The most ominous track on the album. Where “Radioactivity” opened with detection and dread, “Uranium” arrives at something older and more exhausted: the sound of consequence. The textures are heavier here, the mood resigned rather than urgent. If the album has a villain, it sounds like this. If it has a warning, this is where the warning runs out of time. There is a sense throughout of it being too late, of something harrowed and ancient trying to tell us what it already knows.

New Order would later sample the doomy choral voices of this track on “Blue Monday” (and b-side “The Beach”), one of the best-selling singles in UK chart history. The voices that the band built from synthesizers ended up at the centre of a record that defined a decade. Nobody mentioned Kraftwerk on the sleeve.

Transistor

A semiconductor device: the foundation of every radio and every microchip (in every computer and computerized device), used to control or amplify signals. In the album’s internal logic, this is the amplifier: whatever the antenna was transmitting, the transistor carries it forward. The song itself is not a crescendo but a denouement, repetitive and hypnotic, the classical training of its makers surfacing in synth lines that occasionally suggest an oboe or a flute without quite becoming either. It is, in the best possible sense, a requiem: not mournful but reflective, the sound of something beautiful winding down. Ruins in sunlight. Strange shapes dancing through shattered glass.

Ohm Sweet Ohm

The album closes on a pun and a meditation simultaneously. Ohm: the unit of electrical resistance. Om: the Sanskrit mantra, the sound of the universe at rest. Kraftwerk being Kraftwerk, both meanings are fully intended, and neither is diminished by the other.

The vocals are heavily processed through the vocoder, pushed to the point where the words dissolve into pure texture: you hear “ohm sweet ohm” the way you might hear a familiar phrase through a wall, present but abstracted. And then, unexpectedly, the tempo lifts. The album that opened with the eerie clicking of a Geiger counter and moved through dread, beauty, noise, transmission, and consequence ends on something approaching contentment. Not resolution exactly. But rest. The machines have done their work. The signal has been sent. Whatever happens next is no longer on this record.

Stop Radioactivity

The song that opened this album as a detached, conceptual meditation on atomic energy, neither endorsing nor condemning, simply observing, would not stay neutral forever.

In 1991, Kraftwerk re-recorded “Radioactivity” for their compilation The Mix. The new version dropped all references to radio entirely and rebuilt the song as an explicit anti-nuclear statement. The disasters at Chernobyl, Harrisburg, Sellafield, and Hiroshima were named directly. The central hook became “stop radioactivity.” Chain reaction and mutation had led to a contaminated population. It was, after all, still “in the air for you and me”.

On March 11, 2011, the most severe nuclear accident since Chernobyl occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan. Two weeks later, the largest anti-nuclear demonstration in German history took place, calling for an immediate shutdown of all nuclear power plants.

Kraftwerk had a friend in Japan. At their first Tokyo concert in 1981, they struck up a friendship with Ryuichi Sakamoto, the composer and Yellow Magic Orchestra co-founder who features in last week's post. It would prove to be a friendship of consequence. For the No Nukes 2012 event, held a year after Fukushima, Sakamoto wrote new Japanese verses for "Radioactivity," and the band overhauled the song around them: an entire verse sung in Japanese, with Japanese text on the screen behind them, and the song now declaring that radioactivity was in Japan today and forever, that it was in the air and water, and that it needed to stop now. The crowd sang along throughout, their voices rising hardest as the band named the country's two nuclear catastrophes: Hiroshima, and now Fukushima. This version, 'Houshanou,' was officially released in 2017

A song written in 1975 as a piece of atomic-age conceptual art had become, by 2012, a live political anthem performed in the shadow of an ongoing catastrophe. That arc spans 37 years and crosses every boundary the music industry uses to categorize and contain things. It is the full weight of what Kraftwerk built landing on a single song, long after the world had stopped paying attention and long after one of its architects had gone.

The power plant kept running.

Before You Go…

Leave a like and tell me in the comments: Which track on Radio-Activity hits you hardest, and did any of the connections in this post change how you hear it?

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Thank you for reading this deep dive. If this piece moved you, taught you something new, or reminded you why music still matters, please consider sharing or restacking it. These stories deserve to be told and remembered.

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Further Reading

• Bizarre Song Triangle: Kraftwerk's tape loop methodology, splicing recorded sound into repeating textures with razor blades, predates the songs covered in this post by at least five years. The engineers were in the forge long before anyone else knew there was a forge.

• Songs of War and Love: Several of the artists who appear in that post owe a direct debt to Kraftwerk’s innovations. More than one of the songs covered there also grapples with the horrors of Hiroshima and the Second World War, the same shadow that Kraftwerk’s krautrock generation were consciously writing against.

Further Listening

• David Bowie: Station to Station (1976), Low (1977), Heroes (1977)

• Iggy Pop: The Idiot (1977)

• Depeche Mode: Speak and Spell (1981), Some Great Reward (1984)

• New Order: Power, Corruption and Lies (1983), Blue Monday/The Beach (1983), Confusion (1983)

Missed Last Week?

Read my post on electronic music pioneers Japan

Coming Next Week

David Bowie Station to Station : Radioactivity influenced a drug-dazed Bowie to get clean and build his own sonic landscape.

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Welcome back Hi-Fiers,

I am doing something a little different this time. The band I am writing about is one I was not entirely familiar with until recently. Given my musical interests, given what I grew up listening to, I should have known them well. But so much of what enters our lives is determined by timing, by who we think is cool at a given moment, by what finds us before we can find it. I had heard of them for decades. I simply never had the bandwidth to sit down and really listen.

That changes now. What follows is the account of an outsider: someone who came to Japan late, listened without a safety net, and heard things that genuinely startled him.

How I Got Here

I did not arrive at Japan through Japan. I arrived through David Sylvian.

This was during a period of my life when I was trying to make music myself, melding my own Asian background with Western influences, looking for the artists who had already walked that border. That search led me to Peter Gabriel’s Real World label: Ry Cooder and V.M. Bhatt, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the many-faced Brian Eno. And then, inevitably, to the collaborations of guitarist Robert Fripp. That is how I encountered the trio of albums Fripp and Sylvian created together in the 1990s. I could easily write a separate post about that partnership. What I will say here is that it changed how I understood what Western music was and what it could aspire to be. It was Sylvian’s baritone, deep, unhurried, slightly removed from the world, that drew me in first.

What I did not know, until I finally sat down with the back catalogue, was where that voice came from. What it had survived. What it had shed along the way.

The New York Dolls connection is worth establishing up front, because it tells you everything about where Japan began. David Sylvian, born David Batt in Catford, South London, took his stage surname as a direct homage to Sylvain Sylvain of the Dolls. His brother and drummer Steve took the surname Jansen as a nod to the Dolls’ frontman David Johansen. They were not being subtle about it. The Dolls were the template: the makeup, the androgyny, the refusal to be tidy. Japan wore that influence openly, then spent the next eight years systematically outgrowing it.

Adolescent Sex: The Blueprint Nobody Credited

I made a deliberate choice when I started listening. I did not want to be seduced by any single album before I had heard the full arc. So I pulled up one of those “Essentials” playlists and let the songs arrive in whatever order they came.

What hit me first, like a bolt of blue, were the tracks from Adolescent Sex.

This was not the baritone I was expecting. There was angst here, and punk energy, and a raw, coiled sexuality that felt genuinely dangerous. My first instinct was to check the release date. The album came out in 1978. That means it predated Siouxsie and the Banshees, Adam Ant, Billy Idol, Simple Minds. I mention those names specifically because I heard their blueprints inside this record: not as influence but as source material. One song in, I was convinced this is where Adam Ant found his persona, his singing style, the pacing of his songs. A few tracks later, there it was: the DNA of White Wedding-era Billy Idol, that same cocked-hip swagger.

What made this even more remarkable was what was happening underneath the attitude. The early era of Japan drew on everything that was already in the blender in the early 1970s: Gabriel-era Genesis and their alternative approach to instrumentation; the early glam of T. Rex and Ziggy Stardust; Roxy Music, barely formed; Kraftwerk, already having shattered what music could be, but not yet melodic. Across the Atlantic, Malcolm McLaren was running his first experiment in glam-punk with the New York Dolls. Japan absorbed all of it and added something else: a deep, almost instinctive pull toward Black music.

This last point gets overlooked consistently, and it should not. Just listen to “The Unconventional” and you will hear Giorgio Moroder. On what is ostensibly a glam-rock debut, this song arrives and you think Donna Summer is about to start singing. What follows is funk and disco groove throughout several tracks: Japan drawing from the same well that Billy Idol, the members of Bauhaus, and countless other post-punk artists were quietly drinking from, while publicly distancing themselves from disco.

The album closer, “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” is a cover of a 1964 Funny Girl show tune that somehow sounds like an homage to Sparks in their early Kimono My House era. “Suburban Love” is bass-heavy funk, lyrically an open love letter to Earth, Wind and Fire. The title track synthesizes punk, reggae, and funk in a way that recalls the early ska crossover of The Specials and The Jam, while also fitting comfortably on Bowie’s Diamond Dogs or Aladdin Sane.

The opener, “Transmission,” not to be confused with the Joy Division song of the same name, though the magnetic pull toward that title seems unavoidable, is one of the great slow burns of the era. It does not explode. It builds to a tension, then holds it. There is a sexual coyness to it, a coquettish withholding. Listen to the cockney accent, the singing style: Robert Smith would later adopt something very similar in the early Cure, particularly on the lighter, poppier tracks. The Gregorian chanting that backs the song adds a horror-film unease beneath the glamour.

“Communist China” is the track that most clearly points toward where Japan would eventually go: a tongue-in-cheek homage to the New York Dolls that starts incorporating Far Eastern sonic textures, almost as a joke, and ends up meaning it. “Television,” the album’s closing track, is a dissonant slow dissolve, like an orchestra pit gently falling apart, the way a late-night television signal used to drift into static. Sexy, funky, brilliant.

With this single album, Sylvian established himself as a gifted lyricist: smart, sardonic, with the gift of compression. You cannot hear this record without thinking that Morrissey must have been paying attention.

Check out their debut on Top of the Pops below:

Obscure Alternatives: The Britpop Blueprint

Six months after their debut, and with a record company applying pressure, Japan released Obscure Alternatives. In a just world, this album would be studied as a missing link. It sounds, start to finish, like the Berlin-era Bowie trilogy: the space and minimalism of Low, the art-rock atmosphere of Station to Station. The album closer “The Tenant” could have appeared on either record without anyone raising an eyebrow.

“Suburban Berlin” is the most obvious nod to the Hansa Studios in Berlin that birthed Bowie’s most creative period. But taking a look at this video, one can’t help but think, that New Order’s “True Faith” video must have been inspired by this:

But what strikes me now, listening with the benefit of hindsight, is how precisely it maps onto the more cinematic, melancholy wing of Britpop that would not arrive for another fifteen years. The moody grandeur, the dramatic interiority, the sense of a band working in widescreen: this is the blueprint for Suede, for Pulp, the Divine Comedy, early-Radiohead, for the more literary end of the 1990s British rock scene. Nobody has ever credited Japan with that lineage. They should.

The album failed to chart. A successful US tour followed, and the band’s label had no idea what to do with the momentum. Ironically, the American audiences were more receptive than the British audiences back home. They would never return to the US to tour again. That is not an artistic failure; that is a promotional and managerial one, and it haunts the rest of Japan’s commercial story like a ghost.

Quiet Life, Moroder, and the Collective Unconscious

Quiet Life is where Japan fought for creative control and won. All four members contributed; the writing, recording, and production were genuinely collaborative. As a listener, you can feel the difference immediately.

My first instinct on hearing the title track was that it had been produced by Giorgio Moroder. It had that precise, arpeggiated quality, that synthetic warmth. I had to research it to confirm it had not been. What I found instead was something even more interesting: a theory about how musical ideas move through the air.

Moroder had just finished producing Sparks’ No. 1 in Heaven, released in March 1979, recorded the previous year in Munich. Japan were recording Quiet Life in the same general window, in a different country, with no knowledge of what Sparks were working on. Both albums arrived at synthpop independently. Both drew on the same Moroder-adjacent electronic palette. Before synthpop was a genre, before new wave had a name outside Germany and Kraftwerk, two bands on opposite sides of an ocean invented something eerily similar. The transistor radio was invented simultaneously in two places. So was flight, arguably. The collective unconscious has always been better at coordination than the music industry.

What confirmed Moroder’s actual presence in Japan’s story was “Life in Tokyo,” a non-album single produced by Moroder himself, recorded in March 1979. Sylvian has said openly that after hearing what Moroder had done for Sparks, the band wanted to try it. The result is pure Moroder: electronic disco architecture, Sylvian’s baritone riding above it all. Inadvertently, Moroder may have carried some Sparks DNA across to Japan in his back pocket.

Quiet Life is also where you can hear Sylvian beginning to separate himself from his influences. The Bowie specter still lingers, in vocal delivery, in structure, but it is fading. “Despair,” a track with four lines of lyrics and four minutes of pure instrumental, is deeply in the spirit of Low, but it also anticipates the meditative, lyric-sparse approach that The Cure would later explore on Faith. “In Vogue” deserves mention for Mick Karn’s fretless bass work alone, which is extraordinary. “Alien” is almost a signal flare: this is what David Sylvian will do after the band ends.

Gentlemen Take Polaroids: Finding Their People

Here is the irony that the music press never quite knew what to do with: Japan, a British band that struggled for years to gain any traction at home and had been effectively shut out of the American market after a single tour, found themselves, somehow, with a devoted following in the actual country of Japan. Nobody planned it. Nobody marketed it. It simply happened.

It was this following that brought them to Tokyo for a press event, which is precisely where the most important creative relationship of Sylvian’s career began.

Ryuichi Sakamoto, keyboardist and co-founder of Yellow Magic Orchestra, was sent by a music magazine to interview David Sylvian. To understand why this meeting mattered, you need to know what YMO were. Formed in Tokyo in 1978, they were doing things with electronic music that nobody in the Western world had yet attempted: blending synthesizers with Japanese scales, with African rhythms, with a structural playfulness that made Kraftwerk seem austere by comparison. They were not influenced by Western electronic music; they were building something adjacent to it, from entirely different raw materials. Steve Jansen had already been listening closely: YMO’s drummer Yukihiro Takahashi was a direct influence on his approach. Japan did not just encounter YMO; they recognized them as kin.

The interview itself, by Sylvian’s own account, was stilted. Neither man spoke the other’s language well enough for it to flow. But after the microphones went off, something clicked. Later that summer, Sakamoto joined Japan in the studio at Air Studios in North London, the two bands recording in the same building simultaneously, and began laying down tracks on the Prophet 5 synthesizer while the band watched. Sylvian took a tape home, worked through the night, and returned the next day with “Taking Islands in Africa” fully formed. It still sounds like it was made last week.

The over-production on Gentlemen Take Polaroids is not entirely the band’s doing. You can hear the label’s fingerprints on the gloss; the angst has been sanded away, everything polished to a high sheen. But the Eastern influences bleeding through that polished surface are the band escaping in plain sight. The last gasp of label interference, and underneath it, something genuinely new.

Tin Drum: The Masterpiece Nobody Named

Tin Drum is the one that broke through commercially: UK chart success, certified gold, the band finally reaching the mainstream audience that had always been within reach. It is also, I would argue, one of the unacknowledged founding documents of ambient electronica.

I am aware that is a significant claim. So let me make it carefully.

Brian Eno is rightly cited as a pioneer of ambient music. But when I listen to Tin Drum, released in 1981, and then listen to the ambient and electronic music I discovered in the early 1990s, the DNA is identical: the space between sounds, the starkness, the minimalism, the way silence is used as a compositional element. “Ghosts,” “Visions of China,” “Cantonese Boy”: none of these sound like 1981. They sound like 1993. “Still Life in Mobile Homes” has percussion and sonic texturing that I can hear directly in Depeche Mode’s Alan Wilder period; I can even hear it in some of Tina Weymouth’s bass work with Talking Heads.

Japan are not officially noted anywhere as pioneers of ambient electronica, they should have been. Their collaboration with Japanese musicians and their full embrace of non-Western scales, structures, and instrumentation was now total. The Western rock framework had been discarded. What remained was something genuinely new.

Internal tensions, long building, finally made the band untenable after the Tin Drum tour. They broke up in 1982, just as the commercial success they had spent eight years working toward was finally arriving. That was the music industry’s oldest and cruelest trick.

The clip below is of the legendary TV show from the UK, The Old Grey Whistle Test.
Featuring the song “Ghosts” with Ryuichi Sakamoto (the keyboard player on the left-hand side of the screen):

Followed by a live clip from their final tour, just checkout the fretless bass work by Mick Karn:

Rain Tree Crow: The Most Japan Epilogue Japan Ever Did

In 1991, all four original members reconvened. They did not call it a Japan reunion. They refused to, explicitly and emphatically, despite record companies and managers pushing hard for the commercial leverage of that name. They called themselves Rain Tree Crow instead. The main condition all four members agreed on: it would be genuinely collaborative. No hierarchy. No frontman. Everyone contributes.

The resulting album is quiet, patient, and elegiac: the sound of four people who know each other too well for anything to be easy, making something beautiful anyway. “Every Colour You Are” is one of its finest moments, with sparse percussion, pedal steel guitar, and infinite guitar textures layering over each other. Sylvian sings of a family man who puts a torch to his own home and warms his hands by the fire: an image of self-destruction as the only available form of self-preservation. The closing lines, read now like a farewell to the band itself. A man making peace with the burning.

The plan had been for Rain Tree Crow to continue, to become a long-term project. Old wounds, old differences, prevented it. They made one album and went back to their separate lives.

It is, in hindsight, the most Japan thing Japan ever did: resist the obvious commercial move, insist on their own terms, produce something quietly extraordinary, and then dissolve before anyone could properly account for them. Some bands matter more as an influence than as a commercial entity. Japan are one of those bands. The roll call of what they built and what they handed forward, post-punk, Britpop’s dark wing, New Romanticism, ambient electronica, the entire lineage of British art-pop, is so long that it became invisible. That is the paradox of being first.

Further Listening

They were listening to:

New York Dolls, New York Dolls (1973): The template for everything Japan started as; the makeup, the swagger, the refusal to be polished, and even the tongue-in-cheek flirtation with Chinese communist imagery that Japan would later make their own.

The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967): Japan covered “All Tomorrow’s Parties” and meant it; the Velvets’ drone and detachment runs through everything Sylvian would later become.

Brian Eno, Here Come the Warm Jets (1974) and Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) (1974): An alternative approach to instrumentation and songwriting that made Western rock feel optional; the fascination with Eastern subject matter on Taking Tiger Mountain could not have been lost on Japan.

Roxy Music, Roxy Music (1972): The album most credited with lighting the fuse for post-punk, new wave, and the New Romantic movement; Bryan Ferry’s vocal delivery and David Sylvian’s are so similar it stops being coincidence.

David Bowie, Diamond Dogs (1974) and Aladdin Sane (1973): The glam architecture and vocal style that shaped Japan’s earliest records.

David Bowie, Low (1977): The blueprint for the ambient, minimal direction Japan would fully inhabit by Tin Drum.

Sparks, Kimono My House (1974): Raw, off-kilter energy that inspired punk without being punk; the spirit of this record is all over Adolescent Sex.

Sparks, No. 1 in Heaven (1979): Less an influence than a co-innovation; Giorgio Moroder worked with Sparks first, then brought that synthed-out architecture directly to Japan.

They Left their Mark On

The Cure, Three Imaginary Boys (1979) and Faith (1981): On Three Imaginary Boys, Robert Smith’s cockney accent and detached vocal delivery echo what Sylvian was doing on Adolescent Sex the previous year; by Faith, the meditative minimalism Sylvian pioneered on Quiet Life arrives fully formed.

Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Scream (1978): The post-punk template Japan helped write, a year before Siouxsie did.

Suede, Suede (1993): The cinematic melancholy of Obscure Alternatives finally gets a chart position, fifteen years late.

Pulp, His ‘n’ Hers (1994) and The Divine Comedy, Promenade (1994): The literary, dramatic wing of Britpop that Japan seeded without credit.

Depeche Mode, A Broken Frame (1982), Some Great Reward (1984), and Black Celebration (1986): The Alan Wilder era of Depeche Mode sounds like Tin Drum given a commercial chassis; A Broken Frame is where that lineage begins.

Yellow Magic Orchestra, Solid State Survivor (1979): Listed here not as influenced by Japan but as the creative mirror that reflected Japan back to themselves; the meeting of these two bands changed both.

Steve Kilbey, Unearthed (1986), Earthed (1988), The Slow Crack (1989): The vocal delivery and register occupy the same space. Similar fascination with Eastern scales, and the minimalist approach to the soundscape and synths. Songwriting styles, stories about crimes.

Jack Frost, Jack Frost (1991): Grant McLennan of the Go-Betweens and Steve Kilbey of the Church, both incorporated some Japan-influence to the songs on this album.

Before You Go

Missed Last Week?

Read the true history of the song “My Way”, and how it was stolen from a glam-rock icon.

Coming Next Week

The 50th Anniversary of Kraftwerk’s Radioactivity and its legacy

Thank you for reading this deep dive. If this piece moved you, taught you something new, or reminded you why music still matters, please consider sharing or restacking it. These stories deserve to be told and remembered.

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Leave a like and tell me in the comments: Which Japan album or era surprised you most, and did you come to them through Sylvian’s solo work, or did you find the band first?

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Welcome back Hi-Fiers,

Last week I wrote about earworms that ended up being a socio-economic commentary, with three interconnected songs. This week, I want to focus on just one song. A song that spans two continents, two languages. Involves a curse to those who dare sing it, or a blessing to those shunned by it.

When do I get to sing “My Way”?

It’s the musical question Sparks asked in 1994 on their comeback album Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins. Not as rhetoric, but as genuine inquiry.

The parallel structure in those two choruses isn’t accidental. By the second verse, Sinatra’s been replaced by Sid Vicious, and suddenly the question shifts from aspiration to coin flip. Which version of “success” do you get when you finally earn the right to sing “My Way”? The triumphant legend, or the destroyed puppet? Because based on the evidence, those seem to be your only options.

Sparks never answered their own question. They wrote a song about singing “My Way,” asked when they’d earned the right, and then, crucially, never actually sang it. Turns out that might’ve been the smartest decision they ever made.

Because “My Way” isn’t just a song. It’s a battleground. A melody stolen, rewritten, aggressively protected, and selectively permitted. A song about autonomy that’s destroyed almost everyone who’s performed it. And the only artists who survived its gravitational pull? They’re the ones who got rejected, walked away, and made something better instead.

Let me show you what I mean.

The Almost-Famous Ask the Question

Ron and Russell Mael have spent five decades being almost famous. In the 1970s, they were at the forefront of glam rock, influencing bands that went on to become massive while Sparks remained critically acclaimed but commercially niche. By the 1980s, even during creative peaks, they were widely obscure. Chart positions tell the story: decade after decade, the highest they’ve ever reached is number two. Never number one.

They were rejected from Top of the Pops at a time when appearing on that show almost always catapulted a band to the top. They watched their influences flourish while they remained perpetual bridesmaids. And then, in the years leading up to 1994, they faced setbacks that would’ve broken most artists.

In 1988, their album Interior Design was a major commercial failure. On the heels of that failure, they entered what they thought was a dream project (Mai, the Psychic Girl): collaborating with filmmaker Tim Burton, whom they deeply admired. They poured all their savings, investments, and money into the project. Six years of work. Burton walked away, leaving them with nothing. They’ve gone on record saying it was the most devastating point in their careers.

So when Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins came out in 1994 and rewrote Sparks history, reaching number nine on the US Dance charts and charting highly in the UK, it was a genuine comeback. The kind of moment where an artist finally earns the right to look back, take stock, and sing about doing it their way. They didn’t know if the album would go anywhere. For all intents and purposes “When Do I Get To Sing My Way”, may have been their swansong, their “exit stage left”, to no applause or fan-fare. They wrote this song, when they were at their lowest emotional points, when financially they didn’t have the means to continue their legacy.

And that’s exactly what makes “When Do I Get to Sing ‘My Way’” so brilliant. Because Sparks understand that singing “My Way” is supposed to be a rite of passage, the cherry on top of a series of successes. It’s the song you perform when you’ve lived life on your own terms and have no regrets. But they also understand something darker: everyone who’s actually sung it has ended up in one of two places. Heaven or hell. Sinatra or Sid Vicious. And based on the body count, hell’s got a much longer guest list.

So they write the song, ask the question, and maintain just enough distance to see the trap. They never perform “My Way” itself. They create a meta-commentary that’s more insightful, more tragicomic, and arguably better than the original ever was.

But to understand why that distance matters, you need to know the stories of the people who didn’t keep it.

A Fool at the Gates of Versailles

Long before he became rock’s greatest chameleon, before The Man Who Sold the World, before Hunky Dory, before the glam theatrics of Ziggy Stardust, David Bowie (was Davey Jones) was a journeyman songwriter trying to make ends meet, working for a music publisher writing English lyrics to foreign language songs. It was assembly-line work: take a hit from France or Italy, bang out some English words, hope it catches on in the UK market.

One of those songs was “Comme d’habitude,” a French ballad by Claude François. But Bowie didn’t just write lyrics. He had to solve the problem every adapter faces: you can’t translate word-for-word because the meter won’t match, the beat falls apart, the phrasing doesn’t land in English the way it does in French.

So Bowie laid down the architecture. The chord progression, the rhythm, the rhyme scheme, how the verses and chorus would flow in English. He called his version “Even a Fool Learns to Love,” recording it at home by singing directly over the French original in the wistful, theatrical style of Anthony Newley, the performer who would serve as Bowie’s template for everything that followed: the theatricality, the multi-media ambition, the unapologetically British voice.

He turned it in. His publisher sent him to France to help procure the rights. To the French songwriters he was just some anonymous low-level for-hire songwriter who was just translating their pop hit.

And then everything fell apart.

Sometime later, Bowie was listening to the radio, and the English version of the song came on. But it didn’t have his lyrics. He called up his publishing company to ask why. They told him it was because the lyrics were shit, and so they’d hired Paul Anka to write some new lyrics.

Bowie was a complete nobody in 1968. No hits, no track record, probably walked into that French negotiation with more attitude than leverage. His own employer told him his lyrics were shit, acquired the rights to the song anyway for one dollar, hired someone else to rewrite it, and then Bowie had to hear the results on the radio. Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.” But it wasn’t just Anka’s words and Sinatra’s voice. It was Bowie’s structure. The framework he’d built for how “Comme d’habitude” would work in English. Anka just wrote new words into the blueprint Bowie had already created.

Bowie later admitted his lyrics probably were rubbish. The demo survives, and listeners can judge for themselves. But the bitterness didn’t go anywhere. He’d already started working on the music, sketching out ideas for what his English adaptation might sound like. When the rejection came, he didn’t scrap the work. He transformed it. That unfinished piece of music became the foundation for “Life on Mars?” on Hunky Dory in 1971.

Which means one of the greatest art-rock songs ever written exists because David Bowie got fired from “My Way.” And everyone who followed: Sinatra, Anka, Elvis, Sid, they’re all inhabiting a structure Bowie created, whether they know it or not.

His publisher thought they were upgrading by hiring Paul Anka. Instead, they forced Bowie to channel his anger and frustration into something genuinely transcendent. “Life on Mars?” is sprawling, surreal, and utterly his own. It’s not an anthem of autonomy; it’s a question mark, a refusal to provide easy answers. And it’s never been anyone’s karaoke closer, because it’s too weird, too vast, too Bowie to be reduced to a singalong.

Bowie didn’t escape the curse by being rejected. He set it in motion. And everyone else fell in.

A Dollar and A Dinner

Paul Anka didn’t set out to sabotage David Bowie. He wasn’t even thinking about “Comme d’habitude” when the moment came. In the late 1960s, Anka was having dinner with his close personal friend Frank Sinatra. During the meal, Sinatra dropped a bomb: he was retiring. From music, from showbiz, the whole thing. There was a hint of depression in the conversation, a weariness that left an indelible mark on Anka.

Back in his hotel room that night, Anka couldn’t shake what Sinatra had said. He started jotting down notes, pulling directly from Frank’s own words. The framework for what would become “My Way” was written that night, almost verbatim from their conversation. And as any good songwriter does, Anka needed a melody. That’s when “Comme d’habitude” came to mind.

Almost immediately, Anka took a flight to Paris. He walked into negotiations with something Bowie never had: Frank Sinatra’s name attached to the project. The French team would’ve been ecstatic. Sinatra was massive, the kind of artist who drove fans into frenzies, the precursor to Beatlemania. Women from earlier generations had been throwing their underwear at him for decades. Having him record the English version of their song meant global exposure, prestige, and money. The genre fit. The choice was obvious.

Anka acquired the exclusive rights to create an English adaptation of Claude François’s song. The price? One dollar. In exchange, François and his partner secured royalties in perpetuity. Their French descendants still receive those royalties today.

One dollar. That’s what it cost to create one of the most performed, most covered, most iconic songs in American music history. And it happened because Frank Sinatra was depressed about retirement and Paul Anka was good at his job.

What resulted was a song that Frank Sinatra made his signature, his retirement anthem, his final statement. Except Sinatra didn’t retire. He came back. And “My Way” stopped being a farewell and became an albatross, a song he’d be expected to perform for the rest of his life. He was anchored to it forever. Heaven, sure. But you don’t get to leave heaven once you’re there.

The King Who Couldn’t Get Permission

In 1971, Elvis Presley approached Paul Anka with a request: he wanted to record “My Way.” He felt a deep emotional connection to it. Anka aggressively dissuaded him. Elvis tried anyway, entering the studio to cut a version. Several takes, a demo recorded, but Elvis grew increasingly frustrated with how it was going and walked out. The session was never completed.

So Elvis did what he could. He added “My Way” to his live repertoire throughout the 1970s, performing it in concert even if he couldn’t release a studio version. Anka publicly expressed disdain for Elvis adopting it, claiming the song didn’t match his style. He also disapproved of Elvis’s demeanor, his drug use, his alcoholism.

Sparks captured it perfectly:

That was Elvis by the end. No souvenirs of the glory years, no autonomy, no way out. Just another night in Vegas singing someone else’s anthem of independence.

There’s something unbearably sad about watching footage of Elvis in those final years, barely able to stand, struggling through “My Way” as if the song itself was mocking him. He didn’t do it his way. He did it the Vegas casino’s way, the prescription pill bottle’s way. And he sang about regrets while drowning in them.

Elvis wanted the song badly enough to record it despite being denied permission. And in the end, he got the Sid Vicious route: destroyed by the industry, performing a song about independence while having none.

Anka blocked Elvis, but he didn’t block Sid Vicious. That’s where the hypocrisy gets truly bizarre.

The Puppet Sings His Way

By early 1978, the Sex Pistols were done. Their disastrous U.S. tour through the American South in January had ended with Johnny Rotten exhausted, Sid Vicious deep in heroin withdrawal, and manager Malcolm McLaren actively sabotaging any attempt at stability. Rotten had tried to keep Sid clean, traveling separately with him on a Greyhound bus, acting as nursemaid, trying to force a detox. McLaren undermined it at every turn. He didn’t want a functional band; he wanted a profitable spectacle of chaos.

On January 14, 1978, at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, Rotten closed the show with a question that doubled as an epitaph: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” Then he walked offstage and effectively ended the band. McLaren, Steve Jones, and Paul Cook flew to Rio de Janeiro. They left Rotten stranded in San Francisco with virtually no money and no plane ticket home.

With Rotten out of the picture, Sid Vicious was entirely unprotected. He flew back to New York, reunited with Nancy Spungen, and fell immediately back into heavy heroin use. And that’s when McLaren saw an opportunity.

McLaren was already in production on The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, a mockumentary framed as his personal masterclass on how to manufacture, manipulate, and exploit a rock band for money. He needed new content for the film’s soundtrack, so he flew a completely unstable, heavily medicated, drug-addled Sid Vicious to Paris in the spring of 1978 to record new tracks.

The centerpiece of those recordings was Sid’s punk cover of “My Way.”

When Sid stepped into the Studio de la Grande Armée, he was profoundly out of his mind. He didn’t know the lyrics. The crew had to write them out on cue cards. He sang the first half as a mocking, Dracula-esque ballad before the track exploded into a frantic punk tempo. The iconic footage of Sid in a white tuxedo, stumbling down a grand staircase, firing a prop gun into an audience of wealthy theatergoers, was filmed specifically as a centerpiece for McLaren’s film.

Sparks captured the grotesque theater of it:

That was Sid’s entire moment. The white tuxedo, the manufactured spectacle, McLaren’s puppet show. And when the lights went low, there was only one song he knew - because someone else had to write it on cue cards for him.

Here’s where the legal irony kicks in: anyone can cover a song under fair use laws as long as you credit the writers. The exception is if the cover version alters the lyrics or adds heavy profanity. Sid’s version included profanity. Paul Anka and Frank Sinatra had the legal right to block it.

They didn’t.

Instead, Anka and Sinatra found Sid’s version sincere. They appreciated the punk anarchy delivery as truly being “his way.” They chose not to exercise their legal right to stop it. You can see the version in the YouTube clip below. Sid is mocking Sinatra so openly that he changes his voice to a grotesque guttural spew. Which makes Anka’s and Sinatra’s acceptance of it even more disingenuous and absurd.

Which is a fascinatingly generous read of a performance that was anything but autonomous. Sid Vicious had zero agency. He was McLaren’s marionette, a drugged-out prop singing about doing it his way while being completely controlled by someone else. The song is an anthem of independence performed by someone who had none. And the people who wrote it saw it as sincere.

Less than a year later, Sid Vicious was dead. Heroin overdose, possibly murder, possibly self-inflicted. The circumstances remain inconclusive. But the irony is airtight: he sang “My Way,” and he ended up in hell.

The contrast is stark. Anka blocked Elvis, the king of rock and roll, citing style mismatch and disapproval of his substance abuse. But Sid Vicious? A heroin-addicted alleged bassist who couldn't play, needed lyric cue cards, and openly mocked the song in a grotesque guttural spew? That got Anka's blessing. None of Sid's behavior bothered him.

One ended up a Vegas tragedy. The other ended up dead. Both got hell.

The Ones Who Got Away

So when Sparks ask, “When do I get to sing ‘My Way’? In heaven or hell?” they’re asking a question with a pretty clear historical answer: probably hell. Sinatra’s in heaven, sure, but he’s also trapped there, anchored to the song forever. Everyone else who’s touched it has been destroyed.

Except for two artists. David Bowie and Sparks. The ones who got rejected or refused to perform it. And both of them made something better.

Bowie channeled his bitterness from being fired off “Comme d’habitude” into “Life on Mars?”, a sprawling, surreal masterpiece that’s infinitely more interesting than “My Way” ever was. Sparks wrote “When Do I Get to Sing ‘My Way,’” a meta-commentary that’s sharper, funnier, and more insightful than the original. The ultimate irony is: the only way to actually do it “your way” is to reject “My Way” itself.

But if you walk away, if you take the rejection and transform it into something new, you escape the curse entirely. Sparks saw the trap. They asked the question, maintained the distance, and never fell in. And on their comeback album, they sang about singing it. They stayed just far enough outside the blast radius to survive.

In the end, heaven or hell is not the real question. Bowie laid down the blueprint only to have it snatched away from him, thereby setting the curse in motion. Everyone who followed - Sinatra, Elvis, Sid - they’re all inhabiting the world Bowie created, whether they know it or not. Sparks, older and wiser, are the Greek Chorus, decades removed from the wreckage, telling us the cautionary tale, asking the question after everyone else had fallen in. The rest? Still singing someone else’s song.

Before You Go

Missed Last Week?

Catch up and read the post on 3 songs interconnected with 3 bands and one wizard, Bizarre Song Triangle.

Coming Soon

An outsider’s guide to Japan (the band).

Thank you for reading this deep dive. If this piece moved you, taught you something new, or reminded you why music still matters, please consider sharing or restacking it. These stories deserve to be told and remembered.

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Welcome back Hi-Fiers,

I am finally catching my breath after a long and rewarding run of posts. We spent weeks chronicling some of the most iconic singles compilations by New Wave pioneers, which were followed by an intensive look through two decades of the Pet Shop Boys’ brilliant catalog. It is a joy to dig into those expansive discographies, but it is time to shift gears.

We are pivoting today to an earworm piece. Of course, I can never make things too easy on myself. It looks like this time around, the random loops running through my head happen to tackle some incredibly weighty subjects. We are stepping away from the dance floor and moving into deep, atmospheric, and politically charged territory.

So buckle up, boys and girls.

Kitchen Earworm - “Listening Wind”

I was getting through some weekend chores with my headphones on, and I was letting one of those pre-made streaming playlists run. This was the kind of playlist that claims to be built “just for you” based on your listening habits. Surprisingly, on that Saturday of all days, the algorithm actually got it right by surfacing some of my favorite tracks that I had not spun in ages.

Right in the middle of it all, Talking Heads’ “Listening Wind” came on.

It is a track that sounds absolutely nothing like a standard American rock band. The instrumentation relies on a dense, multi-ethnic tapestry of sound, which includes wooden percussion, muted marimbas, lamellaphones, and a rolling bassline that evokes an indigenous Brazilian instrument rather than a traditional four-string Fender. The entire track delivers an entirely unexpected, foreign texture.

The Studio Disruptor

Enter Brian Eno, who co-produced Remain in Light in 1980. This era marked one of Eno’s definitive statements as a producer, which was a period where he completely eschewed traditional rock-and-roll recording conventions and treated the studio itself as an instrument.

To break the band out of standard American rock structures, Eno deployed his famous Oblique Strategies cards, and he pushed the musicians to swap instruments. This forced them to rely on an amateur, intuitive touch. The sonic palette became a complex fusion of African and Middle Eastern polyrhythms, which were built heavily on found sounds and loop architecture.

Chris Frantz’s drumming was run through physical tape loops to generate the track’s hypnotic, layered African rhythms. Jon Hassell’s trumpet was aggressively treated through the mixing desk until it sounded like a ghostly wind. To complete the eerie atmosphere, Eno and the band recruited experimental guitar genius Adrian Belew, whose radical, non-traditional playing provided the track’s strangest, most haunting background cries. Beyond the studio tracking, Adrian Belew became the physical bridge of this entire musical matrix. While touring with Talking Heads for the Remain in Light cycle, Belew's incendiary live playing caught the attention of David Bowie, who attended one of the shows. Suitably blown away, Bowie met the band backstage and essentially poached Belew right then and there, recruiting him to lay down his signature, fractured guitar pyrotechnics on his upcoming masterpiece, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps).

The Lyrical Horizon

Lyrically, David Byrne’s text strips away the comforting distance of Western journalism to look directly at the psychological anatomy of colonial oppression. The song functions as an intimate character study of a saboteur named Mojique, whose homeland is being systematically clear-cut by the invasive, transactional march of Western capitalism.

By centering Mojique’s internal world, the narrative rejects the lazy, modern terminology of Western power structures, which aggressively apply labels to individuals in marginalized or exploited nations. In imperial propaganda, that specific designation functions as a total moral and historical erasure. The minute labels are assigned, a person is stripped of their identity, their humanity, and their right to exist, which implicitly justifies any level of violence, displacement, or land theft committed against them by the dominant culture.

“Listening Wind” actively resists that dehumanization, forcing us to confront the deep, quiet trauma of displacement where a corporate empire concept encroaches upon an ancient civilization, erasing its history while staring its people directly in the face. The opening verse captures the heartbreaking reality shared by displaced and colonized people throughout history:

Mojique sees his village from a nearby hill

Mojique thinks of days before Americans came

He serves the foreigners in growing numbers

He sees the foreigners in fancy houses

He dreams of days that he can still remember now

Peter Gabriel - “San Jacinto”

Ghosts of the Frontier

That hypnotic, looping percussion immediately triggered my second kitchen earworm, which was Peter Gabriel’s track “San Jacinto” from his 1982 album, Security.

As a youth, this track always evoked a sweeping, cinematic, and mythic Midwestern landscape for me. The music fed directly into my childhood obsession with the romanticized American frontier, which included tales of Davy Crockett, Paul Bunyan, and the tragic stand at the Alamo. For a long time, the actual title of the song remained a mystery to me. Through later research, I learned that the Battle of San Jacinto was the final, decisive conflict where the Texan militia defeated Mexican forces to secure the independence of the Republic of Texas. Gabriel, who developed a deep fascination with this history during his American tours, actually visited both the Alamo and the San Jacinto battlegrounds, where the very first conceptual seeds of the track were planted.

However, the geographical focal point of the song shifts to California, where it explores a devastating culture clash between modern American consumerism and indigenous heritage. The lyrics explicitly contrast the spiritual connection to the land held by local Native American communities with the superficiality of Palm Springs, which is a resort town built directly over sacred spaces.

The Venom and the Ribbon

The narrative framework of the track was sparked by two distinct, real-world experiences. While touring the United States, Gabriel met a young Apache man who was working at a motel. After Gabriel drove him back home to his burned-out apartment, the two spent the night talking. The young man recounted his traditional, grueling coming-of-age initiation, which occurred when he was fourteen years old. A medicine man took him up into the mountains, allowed a rattlesnake to bite his arm, and left him alone to survive the venom and the subsequent hallucinations. Returning to the village alive was the ultimate proof of his status as a brave.

Later, Gabriel went climbing on the San Jacinto mountain range near Palm Springs. While hiking through the wilderness, he noticed sacred ceremonial ribbons tied tightly to the trees. Seeing these tokens brought the young Apache man’s survival story rushing back to his mind, which inspired him to weave the two elements together. The song became a profound metaphor, where the young man is not just surviving a physical ordeal in the mountains, but he is also metaphorically carrying his entire ancestry through a modern, plastic world that threatens to erase it completely.

The Sonic Architecture of the Clashing Mind

To construct this heavy, atmospheric environment, Gabriel and co-producer David Lord deployed an aggressive array of experimental recording techniques that mirrored the exact studio methodology Brian Eno was using with Talking Heads. This track became a masterclass in early digital sampling, tape manipulation, and found-sound field recordings. As I mentioned in a previous post regarding the production of So, Gabriel was the very first artist outside of Australia to acquire the revolutionary Fairlight CMI sampler, and he used it heavily throughout this track to manipulate organic sounds.

The song is structurally famous for its disorienting, clashing time signatures. Gabriel loaded a physical marimba sample into the Fairlight and played a pattern in a 5/8 time signature, which he then layered directly over a synthesizer part operating in a 7/16 time signature. These two independent loops played simultaneously over a more traditional, stabilizing beat, which lent a deeply hypnotic tension to the track.

Furthermore, keyboardist Larry Fast developed an incredibly deep, rich synthesizer environment by layering a Moog and a Prophet-5, running both instruments through vintage outboard effects processors. Adhering strictly to Gabriel’s famous “no-cymbal” directive, drummer Jerry Marotta completely abandoned the traditional rock drum kit. Instead, Marotta utilized a deep Brazilian surdo drum in place of a standard kick drum to provide a raw, tribal pulse. This specific choice directly echoes the non-Western textures Eno coaxed out of Talking Heads. Finally, the production team relied on exhaustive analog tape editing, physically slicing and pasting the magnetic tape to repeat complex phrases and construct the exact, shifting rhythmic loops that Gabriel demanded.

The True Spiritual Core

While the studio wizardry provided the framework, the true emotional engine driving the track is the devastating history chronicled in the book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. When I read that book in college, the sheer weight of the historical trauma left me in deep sadness for days. Gabriel was struck by the exact same grief when he discovered the text, and he littered the lyrics of “San Jacinto” with biting, tragic ironies that target how white America commercializes indigenous genocide.

The corporate landmarks mentioned in the song are direct, painful references to the book’s most prominent historical figures. “Geronimo’s disco” stands as a monument to the Apache leader whose surrender and subsequent exploitation were heavily documented, while the “Sit ‘N’ Bull Steakhouse” functions as a grotesque pun on the Lakota leader, Sitting Bull, who was killed shortly before the Wounded Knee Massacre.

When Gabriel sings the phrase “hold the line,” he is not just singing about a baseline of defense. He is singing about the enduring, painful struggle of Native American communities to preserve their spiritual identity against overwhelming odds. It is the ultimate expression of cultural dread, which is captured perfectly in the jarring image of the Hollywood elite vacationing in Palm Springs and their kids swimming in the resort wearing synthetic water-wings and drinking Coca-Cola on the graves of the Native ancestors.

Below I’m including my favorite version of “San Jacinto”, recorded live during a tour of the Midwest of the US around 1982.

David Bowie - “I’m Afraid of Americans”

The final, essential piece of this sonic matrix arrives via David Bowie’s 1997 industrial track, “I’m Afraid of Americans”. This era marked Bowie’s fourth grand incarnation, a period where he discarded the glossy, stadium-pop veneer of the 1980s to submerge himself in the dark, syncopated electronic textures of the late 1990s.

The initial framework for the song was conceptualized during the 1995 recording sessions for his avant-garde album, Outside. Working alongside Brian Eno, Bowie tracked an embryonic version of the song that featured a protagonist named Dummy and a repeating refrain of “he’s afraid of the animals”. Bowie ultimately felt the track did not fit the narrative arc of that specific record, so it was left on the cutting room floor.

The Jakarta Epiphany and the Industrial Overdrive

The true emotional catalyst for the song occurred when Bowie was traveling in Jakarta, Indonesia. While witnessing the rapid development of the city, he watched a massive McDonald’s restaurant being erected. Bowie was deeply disturbed by this homogenized cultural invasion, and he realized that the commercial globalization of the West was actively strangling indigenous identity. He noted with great irony that while America exported the corporate architecture of Disney, McDonald’s, and Coca-Cola, the mainstream culture simultaneously rejected America’s own vital, magical artistic triumphs, which included the Beat poets and Black American music.

Believing the track deserved another chance, Bowie re-imagined the song at Looking Glass Studios in New York City during the late 1996 sessions for his album, Earthling. Working with his legendary touring band, which included bassist Gail Ann Dorsey and keyboardist Mike Garson, Bowie completely restructured the composition. Guitarist Reeves Gabrels applied stacked fuzz boxes to the track until he completely ran out of pedals, which injected a heavy, fractured electronic-jungle grit into the spine of the song. To finalize the track for single release, Nine Inch Nails leader Trent Reznor was brought in to strip away the remaining classic rock elements, adding aggressive, industrial rhythmic patterns that amplified the song’s claustrophobic tension. Rather than creating a hateful screed, Bowie considered the track a sardonic, observational piece, noting that it was actually far less hostile than Bruce Springsteen’s complex anthem, “Born in the U.S.A.”

The Evolutionary Leap

This trajectory captures a profound technological evolution across two decades of alternative music. When Brian Eno worked with Talking Heads on Remain in Light in 1980, and when Peter Gabriel tracked Security in 1982, they were managing the physical limitations of early loop technology. To repeat a found-sound phrase or a polyrhythmic sequence back then, engineers had to physically slice magnetic analog tape with razor blades, and they had to manually paste the pieces back together into physical tape loops. Bowie and Eno had previously navigated those exact same tedious physical limitations during their own studio collaborations in the late 1970s.

When we fast-forward fifteen years to Bowie’s work on Earthling, we witness those exact same avant-garde loop practices operating inside a fully realized digital landscape. By 1997, the grueling physical labor of manual tape manipulation had been entirely replaced by computer software. Sampling had become infinitely easier, and cutting and pasting audio was now executed seamlessly on a screen. Bowie took the non-linear studio methodologies that had defined his generation of innovators, and he deployed them using the hyper-charged digital tools of the late 1990s.

Peter Gabriel and the Full Circle (2010)

Yet, the ultimate structural validation of this creative matrix occurred decades later. In 2010, for his orchestral covers project Scratch My Back, Peter Gabriel reached back through time and recorded his own version of Talking Heads’ “Listening Wind.” The creative handoff came full circle. Thirty years after David Byrne pinned Mojique to that hill, Gabriel, the man who had stood on the San Jacinto peak looking down at the corporate clearing of Palm Springs,directly stepped into Mojique’s shoes. Stripping away the frantic, uptempo electronic polyrhythms of the 1980 original, Gabriel re-imagined the track as a dark, swelling, and deeply mournful orchestral dirge. It was no longer just an experimental cover; it was a ghost story. By reclaiming Byrne’s lyrics, Gabriel pathologically fused the two worlds, using the orchestra to deliver a devastating, elegant elegy for an entire century of clear-cut cultures.

The Ultimate Lyric Handoff

When you step back and look at the entire landscape, these three songs form a literal lyric mirror across generations, which focuses on a singular corporate relic:

• Peter Gabriel (1982): “Kids wearing water-wings, drinking Coke.”

• David Bowie (1997): “Johnny’s an American, Johnny wants to suck on a Coke.”

Separated by fifteen years and completely distinct musical subgenres, both artists captured the exact same cultural dread. Through the physical link of guitarist Adrian Belew, the shared studio methods of digital loops, and the looming creative ghost of Brian Eno, these three acts mapped the exact same truth. They showed us a world where authentic global identities are systematically replaced by synthetic, commercialized dependency.

Before You Go…

Further Reading

If touu you are a music nerd like me and loved all the studio wizardry insider talk Read my post on the 40th anniversary of Peter Gabriel’s So. The unorthodox recording practices the antics and studio wizardry that created the groundbreaking album.

Missed Last Week?

Read my post on the last two decades of Pet Shop Boys

Coming Next Week

Stay tuned next week when I draw another thread between Frank Sinatra, Bowie, Sid Vicious and The Sparks.

Thank you for reading this deep dive. If this piece moved you, taught you something new, or reminded you why music still matters, please consider sharing or restacking it. These stories deserve to be told and remembered.

Share

Leave a like and tell me in the comments: Which of these three eras or studio configurations resonates most with your own listening habits?

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This is the kind of engaging work I want to keep creating. Subscribe so you don’t miss future deep dives and music explorations.

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HiFi Amateur will always be free to read. But if you find value in these deep dives and curations, upgrading to a paid subscription lets me know this work means something to you. Think of it as a virtual high-five or a nod to the record store clerk, no pressure, just appreciation.

Welcome back Hi-Fiers,

Last week, my newsletter highlighted five singles-compilation albums by 80s artists, including Discography by Pet Shop Boys. That post bridged a gap between my most-read newsletter to date, which chronicled the hugely successful debut album Please, and what comes next. For music fans in the US, Pet Shop Boys faded into obscurity after that. This post is here to set the record straight: not only did their output continue, it grew more ambitious, more adventurous, and more relevant with every decade.

They continue to set trends. The list of artists who have actively sought them out over the last two decades tells you everything you need to know:

• Madonna

• The Killers

• Lady Gaga

• Robbie Williams

• Jean Michel-Jarre

• Soft Cell

• Noel Gallagher (and the High Flying Birds)

• Philip Oakey (of Human League)

Albums of the Millennium

The 90s had been kind to Pet Shop Boys. They single-handedly orchestrated Liza Minelli’s comeback and co-wrote and produced album, Results, reviving her chart presence on both sides of the Atlantic. They wrote “Confidential” for Tina Turner, playing keyboards on the track themselves, with Neil providing backing vocals on her 1996 Wildest Dreams recording. And in that same year, they remixed David Bowie’s “Hallo Spaceboy,” then joined him on stage at the Brit Awards to perform it live. Not bad for a duo the US music industry had already written off. Entering the 21st century, the UK and the world held their breath. What came next surprised everyone.

Release (2002)

This was a band whose Chris Lowe had famously declared “burn the guitars”: keyboards are king. So when he was the one pushing for more guitars on the next album, fans had every right to be confused. PSB retreated from London to the countryside, recording at Neil’s home studio for the first time. They brought in friend of the band, Johnny Marr, who contributed guitar to seven of the album’s ten tracks. The result was their most stripped-down record to date: acoustic, live instruments, and strings instead of synths.

The NME called it their worst album. The charts disagreed. It charted high across the UK and globally, and hit number one on the US dance charts. Fans and the world accepted the change in mood, even if the critics didn’t.

“Home” and “London” are the standout tracks for me. It’s an album that bucks every trend they set for themselves, and that alone makes it worth having in the catalogue.

They kicked off the century with a 180 degree turn, and everyone came along for the ride.

Fundamental (2006)

Four years after the guitar-led detour of *Release*, PSB went back to their electronic roots and came back with full force. They brought with them a familiar name: Trevor Horn, the man behind “Left to My Own Devices,” and the production mastermind behind Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax” and ABC’s “Poison Arrow.” This was their first full studio album with the legendary producer.

The result was their most political album to date. Neil Tennant had things to say, and Trevor Horn gave him the orchestral firepower to say them. “I’m With Stupid” imagines the relationship between Tony Blair and George W. Bush: two leaders who took the world into a war in Iraq built on lies. Sharp, danceable, and cutting. “Psychological” and “Minimal” round out an album that announced, loudly, that PSB were back.

The album’s liner notes carry a dedication to Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, two Iranian teenagers publicly hanged in July 2005. Their case drew international attention and fierce debate; gay rights groups maintained they were executed for being gay, while Iranian officials cited other charges. PSB’s dedication said everything about where they stood.

The limited edition release included a bonus disc, Fundamentalism, featuring a re-recording of “In Private” as a duet with Elton John. The song was originally written by PSB for Dusty Springfield, who took it to number 14 in the UK in 1989. Hearing Elton John step into that role, alongside Neil Tennant, gives it an entirely different dimension.

Yes (2009)

After the orchestral grandeur of Fundamental, PSB made a sharp left turn. They handed production duties to Brian Higgins and his Xenomania team, the pop hitmaking machine behind Cher’s era-defining “Believe” and many of Kylie Minogue’s biggest hits. In fact, several of the songs that ended up on Yes were originally written for Kylie. When she passed, PSB kept them.

Honestly, by this time, I was not really sure if the Pet Shop Boys had another great album in them. This one was a creative renaissance. Johnny Marr was back to lend his guitar to a few tracks: “Beautiful People,” “Did You See Me Coming?,” “Building a Wall,” and “Pandemonium.”

The opening track, “Love Etc.,” resonated with me for so many reasons. The economic collapse of 2008, with its knock-on effects across Europe, juxtaposed against the rise of tech-bro billionaires: this song captured the excess of corporate greed perfectly. “King of Rome” is one of the best songs ever written.

It was on the b-side of the “Love Etc.” single that Philip Oakey collaborated with Pet Shop Boys, singing on “This Used to Be the Future.”

The Most Incredible Thing (2011)

Some time around 2007, Chris Lowe read a collection of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. One in particular grabbed his attention: “The Most Incredible Thing.” The story is about a competition to invent the most incredible thing, the winner of which would earn a princess’s hand in marriage and half the kingdom. Coincidentally, Neil Tennant had recently been approached by the Royal Ballet, who wanted to put together a show against a soundtrack of Pet Shop Boys hit songs.

The Pet Shop Boys instead suggested they create a new work inspired by the fairy tale. Thus, their first commissioned ballet was born. The ballet received awards and accolades. It highlighted, once again, the creative range and depth of this band.

Elysium (2012)

This is the band’s most difficult album and, by most accounts, their least loved. Both Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe acknowledge it alienated listeners; longtime fans largely didn’t come back for it. Opting for piano and string sounds instead of dance beats and synths, it was a commercial and artistic misstep. Even PSB completists tend to leave this one on the shelf. An album of slower piano and strings, in and of itself is not a death sentence. In a decade of hits, this one is just a dud.

Electric (2013)

If Elysium showed signs that Pet Shop Boys were flatlining, then Electric was a defibrillating shock to the system. It became their highest-charting album on the US Billboard charts since their debut, Please.

This does not sound like a band that has been making music for three decades. The music is not a throwback; it’s the future of synth-powered electronic music.

This was perhaps the beginning of PSB bursting out of the niche the US music industry had pigeonholed them into. A newer generation of marketing personnel and record company executives, with blinders off, finally saw Pet Shop Boys for the pioneers and iconic artists they were.

The record starts with a bang: “Axis.” My favorite on this album is “Love Is a Bourgeois Construct.” This was the soundtrack to my life during a period when I moved back to the UK with my family. The album also, surprisingly, features a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Last to Die.” Listening to it, it sounds like a Pet Shop Boys song.

Super (2016)

The longest break between albums led to Super, featuring the same producer as Electric, Stuart Price. It has a similar vibe: synth-heavy, danceable, and built for a room with a proper sound system.

Most every song on this album belongs in a nightclub.

“The Pop Kids” speaks to me: the nostalgia, the shared memory of growing up with this music.

“Sad Robot World” was inspired by Chris Lowe witnessing robots washing cars and assembling parts in a VW plant.

“The Dictator Decides” coincided beautifully with Trump’s first term. The band, by this point, could not hide their disgust. It’s equally aimed at Putin, Orban, Boris Johnson, and the US presidency.

The joke is I’m not even a demagogue

Have you even heard me giving a speech?

My facts are invented

I sound quite demented

Hotspot (2020)

Another four-year break, and the third and final album with Stuart Price.

This was the year Pet Shop Boys were scheduled to tour as co-headliners with New Order for the Unity tour. Then Covid happened.

Hotspot was recorded at the famed Hansa Studios in Berlin, where Bowie recorded his celebrated trilogy of Low, Heroes, and Station to Station, and where U2 found the inspiration that produced Achtung Baby and Zooropa.

Even though this is a synth-heavy album, it was recorded using the studio’s analogue equipment: a deliberate departure, since most of their albums had been recorded digitally.

The lyrical content through some of the songs is reminiscent of Elysium: deeper, more personal. Many themes were inspired by Berlin itself, books they read about the city, and films set there.

The standout for me is “Burning the Heather,” featuring Bernard Butler, Suede’s co-founder and original guitarist.

“Monkey Business” is their funkiest song to date, reminiscent of Donna Summer and Moroder but with the swagger of the 90s Madchester scene. I can hear Happy Mondays, Stone Roses, and Ian Brown in this song.

My Beautiful Laundrette (2020)

In the same year, Pet Shop Boys composed music for a stage production based on the 1985 British film of the same name. This one is very close to my heart, as a British-Asian expat living in the US. Writer and director Hanif Kureishi’s story is set in South London and follows Omar, a young British-Pakistani man, and his friendship and eventual relationship with a troubled Englishman named Johnny.

Naturally, this story spoke to Neil and Chris, one they almost could have written, so they did what only such seminal artists could. They realized it in their own artistic language.

Nonetheless (2024)

Now we arrive at the present. An aptly named album, and what I would argue is the best Pet Shop Boys album to date: the defining record of their 21st-century run.

If Nightlife captured PSB at the forefront of the 90s electronica renaissance, Nonetheless is its spiritual successor: not a sequel, but another book in the same series. The same characters, thirty years wiser. They have learned from the missteps of Bilingual and Elysium, leaning into their influences rather than indulging them. Bossanova, orchestral backdrops, ambient and atmospheric textures: all present, none overdone. This is PSB at their most mature, and paradoxically, their most fearless.

No topic is off limits here: Brexit, the rise of right-wing fascism across Europe, the struggles of the LGBTQ community. But it is handled with panache, wit, and just enough metaphor to make it sting without turning the album into a lecture.

“Loneliness” opens the album with a bang. In the tradition of Latin and South American music, famous for pairing euphoric, danceable grooves with heartbreaking themes, who could imagine dancing maniacally to a song with that title? You will. When you listen to it, you WILL dance like no one is looking.

“Schlager Hit Parade” is political satire at its sharpest. Using the warm, nostalgic glow of German schlager music as its vehicle, the song skewers Europe’s habit of humming along cheerfully while fascism rises in the background. Lines like “Gesundheit Europa” land like a punchline that isn’t quite funny. Generational amnesia dressed up in lederhosen.

“New London Boy” is the album’s emotional centerpiece. While bands like Bronski Beat and Erasure were openly gay and wore their activism on their sleeves, PSB spent decades being deliberately oblique: coded lyrics, third-person narratives, themes you had to lean in to catch. “Being Boring” hinted at a life lived on the margins. “New London Boy” comes all the way out. Thematically it is a sibling to “New York City Boy,” but where that song was ecstatic and ravey, this one is a confession. Tennant writes about a young man leaving home to unlock who he is, navigating a London of skinheads and gay bars and the slow, terrifying process of becoming himself. The defiance and the vulnerability share the same line. He is not an activist here; he is a witness to his own life. After four decades, that is more powerful than any manifesto.

“New London boys can’t afford to be scared

You take it on the chin and win in your head

Skinheads will mock you, call you a fag

Last laugh is yours, there’s a brick in your bag”

“Dancing Star” is an upbeat, danceable tribute to Rudolf Nureyev: the Tatar-born, Muslim-heritage ballet dancer who grew up in Siberia and became one of the most gifted performers of the 20th century. In 1961, knowing he faced imprisonment if he returned home, he broke from his KGB handlers at a Paris airport and defected to the West. The song captures that drama with characteristic PSB elegance. It also speaks to the band’s long and deep connection with Russia and its people: a relationship that has seen them speak out in support of Alexei Navalny and other activists, and stand openly with the Ukrainian people.

“New Bohemia” is another highlight: Beatlesque in structure, noir in spirit. A tongue-in-cheek portrait of Los Angeles as a faded silent-film starlet, glamorous and slightly deluded, whose best days are behind her. Affectionate and cutting in equal measure.

“Bullet for Narcissus” is a classic PSB dance track with a dark heart. The lyrical target is fanaticism and the cult of the despot: a song that casts its net across the current rulers of Russia, the US, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and beyond. Pointed, precise, and utterly danceable.

“Love Is the Law” closes with a noir meditation on the dark side of sex work. Atmospheric, shadowy, and quietly devastating.

“Secret of Happiness” rounds out a near-flawless set. Slower and more contemplative, it carries the bossanova and jazz influences that run through the album like a thread. In tone and lyrical mood it recalls “It Comes As a Surprise”: reflective, a little melancholy, and utterly beautiful.

For a band in their fourth decade, Nonetheless is an album that looks forward, not back. It is ahead of the curve for electronic and synth music, once again paving the way for artists half their age to follow. Anytime the US writes them off, they respond with something like this.

Most bands get one era. Pet Shop Boys are on their fourth.

Nine studio albums in twenty-two years. Ballets, film scores, stage productions. Collaborations sought out by Madonna, Lady Gaga, and The Killers. A catalogue that spans guitar detours and dancefloor bangers, political broadsides and deeply personal confessions. And a 2024 album that stands comfortably among the best records released that year, by anyone, at any age.

The Pet Shop Boys never chased relevance. They just kept making music on their own terms, and relevance kept finding them. That is a rarer achievement than any chart position. And if Nonetheless is any indication, they are not done yet.

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Welcome back Hi-Fiers,

After focusing on some important albums, this week I take a 50 foot view of the music scene and the industry that shaped my listening habits as a kid.

Growing up in the mid-to-late 80s, the music industry (radio, TV, MTV, pop culture) used marketing and advertising to forcibly influence people’s tastes. Yet, strong trends, subcultures, and followings still emerged that passively rejected those systems. There was music exploding elsewhere around the globe, and Americans who had exposure to that; mostly British and European post-punk, new wave, and synth-pop acts whose albums were expensive imports, would share it with their friends.

These bands and acts began to sell out bigger venues, not arenas, but enough to become a success against music listeners and buyers, despite being kept off the airwaves, not “hot enough” for MTV, or too strange for whatever metric radio had. There were a few outliers: KROQ in Los Angeles, DC101 in Washington D.C., KSAN in San Francisco, and stations like WNEW-FM in New York were championing the music that commercial radio ignored. Either by fluke, a single song hitting mainstream radio, or a movie director using the music in their film, a couple of these bands would get one or two hits. However, their albums would still not be distributed or sold in the major US market, forcing diehard fans to special order them and pay a premium for “imports”.

The Compilation Phenomenon: A Lifeline for the Fans

This lack of distribution created a phenomenon in the mid-to-late 80’s: the singles compilation. These were not “best of” or even “greatest hits” albums, as none of these bands had charted high enough on Billboard. In most cases, the bands were not involved at all. It was purely a commercial decision by a record label that didn’t want to risk purchasing the rights to an entire back catalogue but knew fans wanted the music. They would compile and release an album with chronological singles.
Many bands could have used this to their advantage, but didn’t (The Church), or when they did (The Church), it was too late, having passed the time they were in the consciousness of casual fans. For me, as a high school kid who couldn’t afford to special order a band’s entire back catalogue via import, these albums were essential to my music education.

Essential Compilations

New Order - Substance

More than any of the other bands in this list. This was one British, post-punk/new-wave/synthpop band that had established itself not only in the underground culture of US kids. But legendary on the dance-floor. They had already pioneered house music. They already had a legendary best-selling single of all time (“Blue Monday”), plus their last 2 albums, were inspiring Hollywood filmmakers, they were being heard in soundtracks.

This compilation was a genius play on many fronts.
New Order, since their Joy Division days, co-founded their own record label Factory. Had their own nightclub Hacienda, which was legendary, in the UK but instrumental in every Manchester music scene and genre to emerge during its existence.
Around this time, New Order had let down expectations with their previous album Brotherhood, their first album on the US (Quincy Jones owned) record label Qwest records. Their own record label back home was on the verge of bankruptcy due to their most volatile act on the label The Happy Mondays. The Hacienda was on the verge of collapse (financially). Joy Division / New Order patron, co-founder, manager, and primary investor of The Hacienda, primary investor and owner of Factory records, Tony Wilson had a brilliant idea.
Since their formation amongst the ashes of Joy Division, New Order were NOT an album band.
Their albums never sold well. Their albums never had a cohesive theme or concept. Their albums were anonymous. Cryptic, artsy covers, without any self-identification.
What had always worked for New Order were their singles. They exploded in nightclubs. The best example being "Blue Monday". But even before that, mourning the death of Ian Curtis, the band had released "Ceremony". Shortly after that, "Temptation" became a club hit, despite Movement being a colossal failure commercially. There was a pattern. In the same year, they’d release a single or singles, and they’d make waves. Yet an album released in the same year wouldn’t get any buzz.
Tony Wilson knew that New Order, at their best, was a singles band. The singles had already proven themselves in the UK and on the dancefloors and the nightclubs of the US. They had enough to not only fill one album, but a double-album. No one but Tony saw the brilliance of this. The band was ambivalent towards it, the record company didn’t care either way, and figured it was a good way to get the Factory back catalogue out there.
But Tony’s vision was that he was certain that if these singles were exposed to the mainstream music listening audience, it would be huge.
Tony Wilson, always felt deep regret that Ian Curtis never lived to see the success of Joy Division, and that the US was cheated (by his suicide) of ever seeing them live. So as a sister to this album he also curated a Substance album for Joy Division. It was not as extensive, I still wish he had realized his full vision, a 2 disc version like New Order. With a 2nd Disc of b-sides. Instead it was a single album, featuring all their singles. It’s legacy is having the extended single version with extra verse, for "She’s Lost Control". It also exposed a whole legion of kids in the late 80’s of hearing the song "Atmosphere" for the first time. When I heard it, it felt like it was a single newly recorded.
As always the cover art was by Peter Saville in his trademark minimalist style. The original concept for the album was the blue opening Peonie, and just the year 1987. This lent a mystique to it, the album as an art piece in a gallery. It was the first and only album, until many years later, to feature the band name on the front. This alone helped US fans who already knew about them find their music easier in record stores.
This album featured all their singles, but specifically the 12” dance versions or extended versions of all the song.
The CD was a double-disc. Disc 1 featured the singles, included re-recorded versions of "Temptation", "Confusion", along with a brand new single "True Faith".
Disc 2, was all the b-sides from the Disc 1 singles. For a kid in America, this was a real coup, because for the price of an album, you got 7 years worth of hit dance singles and b-sides. Which up until then had been near impossible to find in the US, and had to be special ordered, via import, and that would mean ordering 12 separate singles at a premium price, not to mention the very high import fees.
This album, for me, was the bridge during a crucial age. A bridge that I crossed, from mainstream pop music, pop rock, Top 40 music, to alternative, indie post-punk. By way of dance music. The first few tracks on Disc 1, were the most experimental synth, in the same vein as early Ultravox, early Simple Minds, early Icehouse, Kraftwerk, and even Sparks. These first few tracks, albeit synthpop, had the darkness of Joy Division, without the missteps of (debut album) Movement. You can listen to "Everything’s Gone Green", and "Procession", and there’s a dark Joy Division atmosphere about them, but you can clearly here the 90’s electronic scene. There are the embryonic seeds of 808 State, Orbital, Orb, and Underworld if you listen close enough. That and then my favorite early New Order song "Thieves Like Us", there was something about being an out of place freak, that made me feel that the song created a universe where I belonged somewhere.
Finally, the master stroke of adding their brand new single. Rather than add it to an extended version of Brotherhood, or even tie the single to that album. "True Faith", was the new featured single on this album. With a b-side, that is better than most bands’ album tracks "1963".
On release, this was New Order’s most successful album, making the Billboard Top 40. Unlike the past when they only ranked in the dance charts. Their new single "True Faith", also reached the Top 40, their most successful single to date.
Eventually this became New Order’s best-selling album in the US, becoming certified platinum.

Echo and the Bunnymen - Songs to Learn and Sing

When I was a kid growing up in the 80’s. Echo and the Bunnymen, were name-dropped if you wanted to sound cool. Usually it was the kids with older siblings or older cousins, that had the mystique of Christian Slater’s character in the movie Heathers. Long dark trenchcoat. Echo and the Bunnymen were the mysterious, long, dark, trenchcoat, British guys, with a deep baritone voice.

What was Echo. Who were the Bunnymen.
In 1985 the movie Pretty In Pink, exposed many of these British bands to US audiences and kids. Legend has it that Molly Ringwald had excellent taste in the emerging music scenes in England, and having a good relationship with the director John Hughes. She would share a lot of her music interests with him, and helped shaped his understanding of what the younger cool kids would want to listen to. A few of her favorite bands, that she played incessantly for him were, New Order, The Smiths, Simple Minds, The Cure, OMD, and Echo and the Bunnymen. Three of them, New Order, Simple Minds, and Echo and the Bunnymen, wrote and recorded songs specifically for the soundtrack. That is how the world got "Bring on the Dancing Horses". Just like "True Faith", was the newly recorded single released on Substance. "Bring on the Dancing Horses", was the only new single released on Songs to Learn and Sing.

The story of their lack of exposure in the US is almost identical to the New Order story above. I had older, cool cousins, which is how and where I would hear their name being dropped. But I could never find any of their albums, and as a 12 or 13 year old, I didn’t even know where to start, if I did ever find a record of theirs.
Once I saw Pretty In Pink, the only song that stood out to me was "Bring on the Dancing Horses", it was and is my favorite song on that soundtrack. Ian McCulloch’s voice and songwriting is very much in the vein of Leonard Cohen. He tells a three part story. Each verse is a different scenario. But the thread tying it all through, is that whatever relationship that is being described will fall apart.
This compilation was also my spirit guide into Echo and the Bunnymen’s discography. A post-punk band, with 2 minute songs, that didn’t sound like the Ramones. But rather like a cinematic piece, somehow. The Indian sounding strings in "The Cutter". The guitar part of "The Puppet", eerily sounding like U2 must have ripped them off when they wrote "I Will Follow". But the greatest gift of all. This exposed the world to the haunting brilliance of "The Killing Moon".
This album was the soundtrack to all my roadtrips in my early teens.

The Smiths - Louder than Bombs

There is a lot to say about this band. To sound disgustingly cliched, they saved my life. The music is in my DNA, the lyrics are in my blood. Feeling like I didn’t belong anywhere. My mother had just bought me my first guitar, and I bought a couple of books to teach myself. Learning chord fingerings and scales. I was probably in middle school, and my elder sister who was in high school had one of her friends come over who was carrying a plastic bag with several records. The one that stood out was an orange album with a lady sitting somewhere in a residential street somewhere in England. That instantly took me back to where I was from. I loved the aesthetics of the album, the gatefold sleeve, and just reading the lyrics. The song that immediately reached out and grabbed me was “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want…”.
Anyone can read that song title immediately connect it to their own personal circumstance. Lyrically, it’s up there with “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” (The Rolling Stones). A title just as long, and a theme just as brilliant. But the difference was, a mandolin in a rock song? In a post-punk, new-wave, alternative album? I wasn’t into my parents’ music back then. The Stone, The Beatles, Van Morrison, CSNY, that was music for people in nursing homes. I mean that is what my 13-14 year old self believed. But that mandolin plucked my heartstrings.
At the time, the other songs that grabbed me immediately were: “London”, “Panic”. I was into punk music at the time, and these were the most punk-rock songs on the album. But “London”, to this day, evokes all the nostalgia. Landing, arriving in London, or taking off and leaving, evokes the themes in that song to me.

“....really ragged notion that you’ll return home…. Do you think you’ve made the right decision this time?”

“Panic”, was iconic for me, “hang the dj” became my mantra.

“The music that they constantly play, says nothing to me about my life…”

That’s exactly how I felt, I hated the radio and the songs played on there.
“Ask” was my favorite song at the time. It was telling me to do what I was afraid to do. Living a life on the fringes, bullied, not fitting in. It was telling me to go out and live life without fear.

The brilliance of this album, is that hardly any song on here is an A-side of a single. This is an album of B-sides. Which in any other era would be an album of obscurities. However, this too exposed a legion of young kids my age in America, who would listen to this album (Brandon Flowers) and go on to become Alternative music icons. But this album was the only gateway to the Smiths at the time. Then set the scene for their final album Strangeways Here We Come to become more widely accessible.
Incidentally this became The Smiths’ most successful album in the US at the time, charting in the low end of the Billboard 200.
As time went on, the rest of the songs became my most favorite Smiths songs, and I learned guitar essentially by attempting to (sometimes successfully, sometimes still not) learn the songs that I loved on here.

Pet Shop Boys - Discography

This album entered my life at a time when I had adopted my most angsty, gate-keeping, and opinionated self. The Church obsession was fully in my bloodstream; Joy Division was the Alpha/Omega, and anything else was only "cool" if it was strictly punk, goth, or synth-electro-pop.
I was familiar with and a fan of tracks from their earlier albums, but I didn’t own any of their LPs. Although albums like Please had already gone platinum in the US, making their music widely available in stores (unlike the import acts), there was a different kind of barrier: a prevailing, toxic culture that policed what music was acceptable. My open love for British synth-pop bands like New Order and Depeche Mode often made me a target, and the Pet Shop Boys were at the top of the list for being branded with homophobic slurs. The danger associated with openly liking their music created a necessary hesitation.
Discography was the first Pet Shop Boys album in my house, and it immediately provided all the songs I knew and loved from Please, Actually, Introspective, and Behaviour. By fans as well as other music lovers, this stands as THE definitive Pet Shop Boys albums. At least in the US. As I mentioned in previous posts, it has been well documented that they were mainstream already in the UK and Canada. But through the years, even acquaintances who weren’t fans, per se, of the Pet Shop Boys, if they had only one album, Discography was it.

The brilliance of this album is that it picks iconic songs, whether calculated, by luck or by the sheer fact that, these just happened to be the singles. From each album, this picks the best and most iconic songs from those albums. To anyone, even the casual listener, if you were to own any Pet Shop Boys album. This is it.

The album charted well globally but struggled in the US, where the record label pigeonholed them into an underfunded sub-department for "gay" music, severely limiting their mainstream marketing and wider acceptance.
This compilation is important not just because it was widely available and inspired many casual listeners and kids, but because it exposed the absurdity of the US music industry's prejudice. In the decades that followed, the industry began to accept their influence, with artists like Brandon Flowers of The Killers publicly vocalizing the Pet Shop Boys’ contributions to music.

The Cure - Standing on a Beach/Staring at the Sea

For me, The Cure was a fluke discovery, a band the American corporate music machine seemed intent on blocking. My entry point was staying up late to watch MTV’s 120 Minutes, where I stumbled upon the video for "In Between Days". It was a pivotal moment: discovering music that resonated deeply, away from the Top 40 charts. The threat of being dismissed by the mainstream only deepened my commitment to the band, as the music became a secret source of emotional connection and escape, especially during the angsty years of middle and high school.
Like the other bands on this list, most of The Cure's back catalogue and singles were cost-prohibitive imports. The 1986 singles compilation Standing on a Beach/Staring at the Sea was a godsend. My sister or I purchased the cassette version, which proved to be a goldmine. The tape not only featured all the A-side singles from their 1979 debut up through 1986 but also included all the B-sides and tracks from their EPs; material that was otherwise nearly impossible to find in the U.S.
This compilation provided the full, chronological range of The Cure’s genius, from their early punk years to their iconic 80s synth-pop and goth incarnations. It was the essential collection that introduced a legion of American teens to the band. Eventually, The Cure became a staple on 120 Minutes, and their concerts began selling out without a single song played on major commercial radio, eventually packing venues like Madison Square Garden by the time Disintegration was released.

Further Listening: Honorable Mentions

Here are a few other compilations that were essential to my music education as a high school kid, even if they didn’t perfectly fit the import-only narrative:

• OMD - The Best of OMD: Another U.K. synth-pop band whose previous albums were difficult to access. This compilation was a necessary entry point.

• Depeche Mode - People Are People: Though the single was played on local radio, this compilation album was an immediate purchase that exposed me to classics like “Get the Balance Right” and “Everything Counts,” which remain among my favorites.

• Talk Talk - Natural History: The Very Best of Talk Talk: This compilation is controversial because it was released without the band’s input and was condemned by them. However, at the time I bought the North American CD with its bonus tracks, most of Talk Talk‘s back catalog was out of print. It exposed me to songs from Spirit of Eden and was my gateway to hunting down their rare material.

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Read my deep-dive into Peter Gabriel’s ground-breaking album So

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This year marks the 40th anniversary of several albums that formed the soundtrack to my life: my solace as a confused immigrant teen who didn’t belong anywhere, records that influenced and shaped me as a student of music and a wannabe musician.

I wore the album like armour. It shielded me from everything else, what other people said or thought. It became my private universe.

After purchasing the LP, I carried it to school in my backpack (in 5th grade) to share with a friend. I didn’t have many friends except for a couple who had wanted to hear the album. Some of the cool kids overheard us. Word spread, and suddenly other kids were following me to the A/V room to listen to it on one of those record players in a box. For a brief moment, I was a cool kid; there was a temporary detente in the bullying. Even now, the LP cover is dog-eared from being schlepped around in my backpack.

Listening to it on my Walkman, I felt invincibility and freedom, ready to shove every detractor out of my way like Richard Ashcroft in the “Bittersweet Symphony” video.

The beauty of Peter Gabriel’s lyrics is that they are incredibly personal yet universally accessible. They avoid specific regional or lived experiences, allowing anyone to feel that the songs are about them. Few artists can capture that.

In my piece Songs of Love and War, I briefly mentioned how far back my love of Peter Gabriel’s music went: a 6 or 7-year-old kid in the UK, transfixed by the video for “Games Without Frontiers” on TV, notably also the first time Kate Bush appeared singing backing vocals on one of his songs.

By the time I was 12, my family had emigrated to the US. My father’s job promotion brought us to Maryland, and this was arguably the worst period of my childhood: not for physical assaults or fights, but for the emotional cost of bullying, of not fitting in, of belonging in one group of friends and then suddenly not. Through that lens, as a 12-year-old, I was able to process Peter Gabriel’s music more deeply, reading into the metaphors and subtext of songs like “Not One of Us.” The album So landed at exactly the right time.

The Making of So: Production and Process

The album was elevated by producer Daniel Lanois, who had recently established his reputation through U2’s The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree.

Here’s a fact that reframes everything: Peter Gabriel was originally a drummer. Though most often associated with the piano, his rhythmic instincts became the structural blueprint for So.

As the first musician in the UK to own a Fairlight CMI, Gabriel had spent years ahead of his peers capturing and storing rhythms, building an ever-expanding library of percussion and texture. The Fairlight, developed by two Australian engineers in a Sydney garage, was the instrument that effectively invented digital sampling; it would go on to define the sound of an entire decade in the hands of artists including Kate Bush, Trevor Horn, and Thomas Dolby. What is less well known is that Gabriel was the conduit for most of them: he introduced the instrument to Bush, supplied machines to Horn and others through his own UK distribution company, Syco Systems, and effectively seeded the Fairlight revolution across British music. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, a fellow early adopter was doing the same for Australia: Iva Davies of Icehouse, who took the (Australian-made) instrument and made it the centrepiece of his own decade-defining sound. Bush’s Never for Ever in 1980 became the first commercially released album to feature the instrument; Gabriel had handed her the keys. By the time So was recorded, the Fairlight wasn’t a novelty for Gabriel; it was a compositional tool he had been developing a fluency with for nearly a decade, and the album grew outward from that accumulated rhythmic library.

“Red Rain,” for instance, wasn’t written at the piano; it was built from the ground up on the sampler, rhythm first.

The core recording took place in a converted cow barn on Gabriel’s estate in Ashcombe, Somerset, a setting that established the tone for everything that followed. Session players, musicians, engineers, and crew descended from around the world and committed a full year of their lives to the project. The atmosphere was collaborative and experimental, more commune than studio. Lanois later noted that one year was actually the shortest recording period Gabriel had ever managed, which for Lanois still meant a year away from his family in Canada.

Midway through, Gabriel hit a wall. Lyrics weren’t coming, and Lanois, sensing the sessions drifting, took matters into his own hands: disconnecting the phones, locking Gabriel in a room, and nailing the door shut. One of those rooms had a glass sliding door, which Gabriel spent considerable time systematically dismantling to break out. Food and drinks were passed through. He escaped more than once. The whole operation was conducted in a spirit of camaraderie, light hazing in service of the album, and Gabriel remained sanguine enough about it to continue working with Lanois long after So was finished.

The core trio of Gabriel, guitarist David Rhodes, and bassist Tony Levin had developed a rapport across many sessions, typically jamming and rewriting together until something locked in. On So, however, Gabriel made one notable departure from that dynamic. A longtime admirer of Larry Klein, known for his collaborations with Joni Mitchell, Gabriel had invited Klein to use his studios on multiple occasions. They finally connected in person when Klein was producing a solo album for the Cars’ Benjamin Orr. Klein went on to play bass on both “That Voice Again” and “Mercy Street,” bringing a different textural sensibility to those tracks and, in the case of “Mercy Street,” recording two separate bass parts: one fretted, one fretless.

It was during the extended jamming and experimentation sessions for “Don’t Give Up” specifically that one of the album’s most enduring innovations was born. Tony Levin and drummer Manu Katché spent long hours working through the groove together, trying to find the right muted, muffled bottom end. Lacking a traditional dampener, Levin improvised: he packed his bass strings with his newborn daughter’s diapers, producing a deeply tubby, softened tone that became known as the “Super Wonder Nappy Bass Sound.” What could have been a one-off studio quirk became something far more significant. Bass players have long cited it as a landmark in tone and technique, and Levin himself carried the approach forward into subsequent Peter Gabriel albums and sessions, giving an accidental solution a legacy well beyond the barn in Somerset where it was first discovered.

Essential Tracks: Lyrical Depth and Lasting Legacy

Red Rain

Most songs begin the same way: a melody at the piano, a chord progression on the guitar, a lyric scribbled in a notebook. Peter Gabriel had been quietly dismantling that convention since the early 1980s, guided by a philosophy he articulated simply: “Rhythm is the spine of music. If you change the spine, the shape of the body changes as a matter of course.” On So, that philosophy reaches its fullest expression, and Red Rain is the proof of concept opening the album.

The song didn’t begin with a melody or a lyric; it began with a rhythm stored on the Fairlight sampler, one of many Gabriel had been capturing and cataloguing over the years. From that rhythmic seed, everything else grew outward. It’s a compositional approach more common to hip-hop producers than art rock songwriters, and in 1986 it was virtually unheard of in this context.

The percussion arrangement is itself a small marvel. Gabriel specifically requested Stewart Copeland, whose mastery of the hi-hat he considered unmatched, to play that signature rain-pattering pattern that opens the track. But Copeland wasn’t the only drummer in the room: Jerry Marotta, Gabriel’s regular drummer, handled the full drum performance, recording eight separate takes for Lanois to choose from. Two drummers, two distinct roles, assembled into something that sounds like a single gathering storm.

The album opener grabbed me on first listen. That hi-hat: like rain pattering down fast, insistent and hypnotic. I wore that song out on so many listens that it became my immediate favorite. The vinyl developed a permanent skip, immortalised when I recorded it onto cassette, the only way to hear it on a Walkman. To this day, when I listen, I still hear those skips in my mind.

Don’t Give Up

The story behind “Don’t Give Up” begins with a photograph. Specifically, the Depression-era work of Dorothea Lange, whose images of poverty-stricken Americans in Dust Bowl conditions Gabriel encountered in a 1973 photography book titled In This Proud Land. The title alone must have landed with particular weight: Gabriel was living in Thatcher’s Britain, where unemployment had peaked at nearly 12%, leaving over three million people without work and the social fabric visibly fraying. He saw the same desolation in Lange’s photographs that he recognised around him, and felt compelled to write about it. The opening lyric, “In this proud land we grew up strong / We were wanted all along,” lands differently once you know that.

What makes the song’s origins more complex is that Gabriel was also drawing on his own interior landscape. He had experienced something close to a nervous breakdown in 1985, and the song was partly written to honour the support of his then-wife Jill, who would tell him “don’t give up” during his darkest periods. She later reflected: “I think the song is very much about us.” The personal and the political are inseparable here, which is precisely why the lyric reaches so far beyond its original context.

Writing it from a place of American roots music, Gabriel originally conceived the song as a duet and approached Dolly Parton to sing it with him. She turned him down. Kate Bush took her place, and Gabriel has since said he was glad Parton declined: Bush brought something he couldn’t have anticipated, and by all accounts, her arrival at the Ashcombe barn changed the entire atmosphere of the sessions, cultivating a commune-like energy that helped Gabriel break through his lyrical block. We should all be grateful; she possesses a unique ability to change the chemistry of every song she inhabits, a gift she first demonstrated on “Games Without Frontiers” and brought to its fullest expression here.

Beyond its creative history, the song carries immense cultural weight. Elton John famously credited it with saving his life during his struggle with alcoholism, singling out Bush’s lyric: “Rest your head, you worry too much.” On a personal level, it has guided me through several midlife crises.

That Voice Again

This is the album’s most elegantly deceptive track: upbeat in tone, quietly unsettling in content. Gabriel described it as being about “judgmental attitudes being a barrier between people”; the voice of the title is the internal critic that colonizes the mind at the worst moments. The lyric works on two levels; on the surface, social anxiety talking you out of approaching someone you’re drawn to, and beneath that, something darker: a running commentary that distorts everything and keeps genuine connection out of reach.

The song’s origins are unexpected. Gabriel began writing it after initial discussions with Martin Scorsese about scoring The Last Temptation of Christ, originally titled “The First Stone,” with lyrics drawing on John 8:7. He eventually stripped the religious references out entirely, redirecting toward something more personal. It took three attempts at the lyrics before David Rhodes, his co-writer on the track, helped him find the final version.

Musically, the song marked the return of the 12-string guitar to Gabriel’s solo work for the first time since The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway in 1974, with Lanois playing those parts while Rhodes handled electric guitar. L. Shankar’s violin and suspected vocal harmonies add a subtle melodic unease, and Levin’s bass does the rest: purposeful, slightly restless, hinting at tension without spelling it out.

One final layer: Gabriel conceived this as the closing chapter of a long-running narrative arc centered on a fictional character named Mozo, threading through his work since 1978. The film or stage production he envisioned never materialized, making this the quiet conclusion to an unfinished mythology.

Mercy Street

Peter Gabriel stumbled onto Anne Sexton by chance, picking up her collection To Bedlam and Part Way Back in a New York City bookshop. What he found there led him deeper: he went on to read her posthumous poetry collection 45 Mercy Street, published two years after her suicide in 1974, and saw her play of the same name, which had been staged in 1969. Sexton was one of the great confessional poets of the 20th century: raw, unflinching, and consumed by the darkness she wrote about so brilliantly. Gabriel drew from all of it, particularly The Awful Rowing Toward God, weaving her imagery, her father fixation, and her search for a mercy that never quite arrived into lyrics that feel like they were written from the inside of her experience.

The track’s origins are as unlikely as the inspiration. Gabriel had travelled to Brazil and brought back percussion recordings made by Djalma Corrêa. Working those rhythms into a song proved elusive until an accident in the studio changed everything: the entire track was accidentally played back ten percent slower, giving Corrêa’s percussion a grainy, spectral quality that became inseparable from the final sound.

Klein was in London producing a solo album for the Cars’ Benjamin Orr when Gabriel sought him out in person with the invitation to play on the sessions. What followed was an unexpected meeting of minds: Klein was a devoted admirer of Anne Sexton’s work, and when Gabriel and Lanois first played him the track, he recognised the inspiration immediately. He later recalled that the piece “just about brought me to tears.” He recorded two bass parts: one fretted, one fretless, the fretless oriented around the tenth scale degree, hovering and unresolved. It is one of the most quietly devastating performances on the album.

The song’s emotional power is something else entirely in a live context. Gabriel closed performances with a high-pitched wail intended to evoke Sexton’s death, a moment that divided audiences and haunted those who understood it. I own the videotape of the 1986-87 tour. The performance is gut-wrenching, and it remained equally powerful in a reimagined version I saw in the early 2000s, especially when David Rhodes, Tony Levin, and Gabriel harmonised a cappella.

This song still brings me to my knees anytime I hear it. But always, I must hear it alone, in the dark, lying in bed.

We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37)

I came from a lineage of conscientious objectors: people who spoke truth to power, activists in the 1970s. By the time I was 12, I already understood how ordinary people, placed in positions of authority, could commit atrocities against fellow humans and sleep soundly doing it. This song didn’t just resonate; it haunted me.

The subtitle was an enigma to me. Milgram’s 37. I had no idea who Milgram was. This was the pre-Google era, which meant a trip to the library, books, microfiche, the works. What I found was Stanley Milgram, a professor at Yale, and his landmark obedience experiment: the 37 refers to the number of subjects out of 40 who continued administering electric shocks to strangers simply because an authority figure told them to. Ordinary people. Blindly compliant. Institutionally absolved.

From my heritage, the mystical Sufi music and Qawwali of the Indian subcontinent are built on mantras, repeated phrases that accumulate meaning with each pass. I recognised the structure immediately: the song is almost entirely one line, repeated over and over. “We do what we’re told.” That’s it. Gabriel wasn’t just writing a lyric; he was enacting the very psychology the song describes: the numbing, hypnotic power of repetition as a mechanism of compliance.

Soon after So, Gabriel used his platform purposefully: he signed some of the most revered Qawwali singers to his Real World record label, bringing that music to the West and to the wider music industry. Most notable was Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, whose subsequent collaborations, including with Eddie Vedder on the Dead Man Walking soundtrack, would never have happened without that door being opened.

Big Time

“Big Time” is Peter Gabriel at his most farcical; this is where he edges closest to Sparks territory, deploying sharp satire to skewer the base human urges for fame, success, and materialism that defined the decade of excess. The same themes David Bowie explored in “Fame” and “Fashion” are alive here, and if you listen closely, all three share a similar funky groove: a deliberate departure from the signature sounds of both artists.

Musically, the song is a milestone. Tony Levin developed his now-trademark “funky fingers” technique here, using patented percussion sticks on the bass. He and drummer Manu Katché worked out the beat and groove together, and both have noted that earlier versions of the track were far more experimental. One can only hope a future extended edition of So surfaces those sessions.

Sledgehammer

“Sledgehammer” was another artistic leap, and again Gabriel ventured well outside his comfort zone. He wanted to channel the dance-rock and soul of 1960s Stax/Volt R&B, and more specifically, to emulate Otis Redding’s high-energy groove. The result is the only track on the album featuring Memphis horns, and Tony Levin once again brought his creativity to bear, playing fretless bass through an octave pedal to get that massive, slippery low end.

The stop-motion video became one of the most celebrated in the medium’s history, but the song itself deserves equal credit. These aren’t throwaways; they’re Peter Gabriel doing what he always did: funding his art by being brilliant at everything else.

So Good It was called So

By the time So was finished, it almost had a different name entirely. The album was originally titled Good: straightforward, unambiguous, and ultimately rejected. Gabriel’s response was characteristically oblique; he chose So as a deliberate anti-title, a word that meant nothing and everything simultaneously. The label wanted something marketable; Gabriel gave them two letters.

The cover nearly didn’t happen either. Peter Saville, the visual architect behind Joy Division and New Order, was brought in only after the original design had collapsed entirely. He drove to Bath, met Gabriel for the first time, looked at what had been produced, and said simply: “I don’t really like this. Can we just start again?” Gabriel said yes.

On the drive back, Wickens put on a cassette of the finished album. Saville resisted. Then “Sledgehammer” came on. They pulled the car over on the motorway slip road and said simultaneously: “That’s a number one single.”

With two weeks left, Saville and photographer Trevor Key arranged a portrait session. The standard tripod approach produced, in Saville’s words, “a middle-aged Wiltshire farmer.” He reached for a Polaroid instead. Two rolls of film later, they had the cover. The blue box framing Gabriel’s face was Klein blue. That image defined Gabriel’s public face for nearly a decade.

Notably, Saville was designing Brotherhood for New Order that same year. There, his minimalist instincts worked against the record; a cover so stripped back it was invisible on American shelves. With So he read the brief differently and delivered accordingly.

So topped the charts in seven countries, went five times platinum in the US, and lost the Grammy for Album of the Year to Paul Simon’s Graceland, perhaps the only album of 1986 that could have beaten it. Forty years on, it remains Gabriel’s most complete statement: the record where the weird went mainstream, and the mainstream was never quite the same again.

Before You Go

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Welcome back Hi-Fiers,

Last week, I took a break from deep dives and 40th anniversary album spotlights. The result was a “Band in 10 Songs” theme, which I may resurface again. This time, I want to highlight a ‘90s alternative-indie supergroup that most music fans in the US have never heard of.

Booth and the Bad Angel

Released in 1996, when Britpop was at its commercial peak, and Radiohead was rewriting the rules with OK Computer on the horizon, this dark, surreal, Lynchian fever dream of an album had a modest moment in the UK: a couple of tracks made the charts, TV airplay on Channel 4, and that prestigious Later... with Jools Holland performance. Critical acclaim. Devotion from fans of everyone involved.

But in the US? It wasn’t even a blip. A masterpiece lost in time, on the other side of the Atlantic.

The Web of Collaboration

Let’s start with the players, because this album is all about unexpected connections.

Tim Booth — frontman of James, known for his frenetic, almost possessed stage presence, his powerful voice, and lyrics steeped in spirituality and existentialism. By 1996, James was riding high commercially in both the UK and the US. Booth could have done anything. He chose to do this.

Angelo Badalamenti — composer, arranger, and the sonic architect behind David Lynch’s films. If you’ve ever felt the unsettling beauty of Twin Peaks, the dread and longing of Blue Velvet, that’s Badalamenti. His music doesn’t just score a scene; it creates atmosphere, mood, a sense that reality is always one degree off-center.

Bernard Butler — guitarist and arranger for Suede during their early, explosive Britpop years. Butler’s playing was never just accompaniment; it was architectural, melodic, and emotionally direct. He left Suede in 1994, right after their second album, and was figuring out what came next. Incidentally, that second album has since been hailed as a rock opera that never was.

Brian Eno — the wild card. Legendary producer and collaborator (Bowie, Byrne, Talking Heads, U2), Roxy Music alumnus, ambient pioneer, producer who had already worked with James using his signature unorthodox methods: challenging the band to step outside their comfort zones, throwing unexpected prompts at them mid-session to create something they wouldn’t have discovered on their own. Eno’s involvement here wasn’t front-and-center, but his touch is unmistakable.

The origin stories are pure creative obsession.

Booth was a longtime fan of David Lynch’s films and Badalamenti’s haunting soundtracks. During a live TV performance, he was asked who he would most like to collaborate with. His answer: Angelo Badalamenti. That single moment set wheels in motion. People in the industry started working to connect them. For two years, Booth and Badalamenti kept in touch by phone: Booth leaving poems, lyrics, and late-night messages on Badalamenti’s voicemail, building a creative relationship before they ever met face-to-face.

They finally met in person in 1992, when Badalamenti was in London. He came backstage after a James show, and the collaboration became inevitable.

Meanwhile, Booth saw Suede perform live and was transfixed, not by the band as a whole, but by Bernard Butler’s guitar work. He became determined to collaborate with him. According to interviews from the time, Butler even encouraged Booth to form a new band with him. But Booth ultimately returned to James.

What we got instead was this: a one-off album, a moment in time, a collaboration that would never repeat.

What It Sounds Like

Booth and the Bad Angel is indie rock refracted through a Lynchian lens. It’s surreal, sexy, and dangerous. Badalamenti’s dark, emotive soundscapes wrap around Booth’s voice like fog around streetlights. Butler’s guitar work adds both grit and grace. Eno’s influence shows up in the textures, the space, and the willingness to let atmosphere breathe.

There are echoes of Bowie, traces of T. Rex glam, but it never feels derivative. It feels like its own universe — one where David Lynch might direct a music video in a smoky cabaret, where existential dread and sensuality coexist without contradiction.

“Dance of the Bad Angels” opens the album with a slow-building intensity, Booth’s voice both vulnerable and commanding over Badalamenti’s lush orchestration.

“I Believe” became a minor UK hit, reaching number 25 on the charts. This is the most James song on the album.

“Hit Parade” this song rocks in the way 90’s Britpop rocked. It earned the duo a live performance on the acclaimed Later... with Jools Holland. It’s the most accessible track here, but it still carries that underlying unease, that sense that something beautiful is also slightly wrong.

“Fall in Love with Me” is pure seduction, but it’s the kind of seduction that might end badly. This song even made it onto a rom-com movie soundtrack of the day in 1998 or so. Since then, Tim Booth reworked it and has played it live often, as it is a crowd pleaser. The version of the song in the video is not the album version. I am in the minority, but I prefer the album version.

“Life Gets Better” features Badalamenti himself on vocals, sounding quite a bit like Peter Gabriel. One of the darker, cynical tracks on the album.

“Butterfly’s Dream” is where Bernard Butler brings the 70’s raunch/, dirty/sexy guitar sounds and inhabits this song. Where the subject range from orgies to one-night stands. But at the same time, with regret and a conscience. As someone whose lost their way, and it drifts into ambient reverie. There is a thread of spirituality that runs through all the songs.

“Old Ways,” this to me has a hint of some of that Celtic blood. Some of the earlier English/Celtic folkiness of James, some rockabilly of the Smiths. Evocative as in a callback, but not derivative. As a fan of the Manchester scene, it makes you want to dance as madly as Ian Brown, Morrissey, or Tim Booth himself.

This isn’t an album you put on in the background. It demands attention. It rewards immersion. My words can’t do justice to how the songs sound, so please listen to it and enjoy.

Why It Failed (And Why That Doesn’t Matter)

Despite critical acclaim and devotion from fans of Booth, Badalamenti, Butler, and Eno, Booth and the Bad Angel sold poorly. In 1996, the album didn’t fit anywhere. It was too cinematic for indie rock, too rock for film score fans, too dark and strange for Britpop radio. It existed in the gaps between genres, and the market didn’t know what to do with it.

There were talks of future albums. Booth and Badalamenti had found something rare in their collaboration, a creative chemistry that felt limitless. But Angelo Badalamenti’s passing in 2022 closed that door permanently. The future albums will never exist.

And yet, the album endures. It’s a cult classic in the truest sense: discovered slowly, loved deeply, passed along like a secret between those who understand. It’s the kind of album that finds you when you need it, not when the algorithm tells you to listen.

Why It Matters

This album represents something rare: collaboration as creative risk. Booth didn’t need to make this record. He was commercially successful, artistically respected. He could have played it safe. Instead, he chased an obsession: Butler’s guitar work at a Suede show, Badalamenti’s film scores, the idea that something stranger and more beautiful might be possible if he stepped outside the expected path.

In an era where we talk endlessly about “creative freedom” and “artistic vision,” Booth and the Bad Angel is proof of what that actually looks like. It’s not about commercial success. It’s about making something that didn’t exist before, something that couldn’t exist without these specific people in this specific moment.

The album failed by every conventional metric. And it succeeded by every measure that actually matters.

Before You Go…

Missed last week? I wrote about The Church in 10 Songs — tracing their evolution across four albums.

Continue the conversation. What’s your take on Booth and the Bad Angel? Ever heard it? Want to now? Drop a comment or share this with someone who loves discovering lost classics.

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Welcome back Hi-Fiers,

A few Substackers have written posts in the format of “A Band In 10 Songs”. To break my current trend of writing about albums celebrating 40th Anniversaries, I decided to try doing one. Plus, deep dives can be very time-consuming, so I wanted something fun to fill the gaps. Last time, I did an earworm post, and another I did songs following a war theme.

Now, many of you who follow me know that I keep dropping hints about my favorite band, The Church. But I have been reticent to do a post on them. Not because the story is difficult, though parts of it are, but because the opposite is true. I am too close to this band. I have been obsessed with them for most of my life. I collected everything: albums, singles, B-sides, bootleg cassette tapes traded through the mail before the internet made that kind of devotion redundant. I started fan groups. I joined fan groups. I met the band at various points across the decades.

This is something looser: ten songs, a few thoughts, a few stories. Chronologically, we move from their debut album, Of Skins and Heart (1980), through Remote Luxury (1984). In Australia and the UK, the latter was released as two separate EPs, Persia and Remote Luxury. In the US, they were combined into one album. I have that on vinyl.

This is the period before they made any waves in North America, and many years before their breakthrough hit “Under the Milky Way.” Artistically, I think it was their most fertile period; lyrically, musically, and in terms of sheer chemistry. It is also the period that shaped nearly everything that came after.

And by the way, I do have a full 40th-anniversary post lined up for them this year. But it’s not ready yet. Think of this as the prequel.

To fit some of the themes I have been drawing upon, I have chosen some not-so-likely songs to characterize their early career. What I hope to show is that they are a very lyrical, songwriter’s band, in the vein of Dylan, Nick Drake, Television, and Patti Smith. But dare I say they are also quite Beatlesque and Pink Floyd-esque.

Before We Begin

Two friends, singer, songwriter, and bass player Steve Kilbey, and guitarist Peter Koppes, formed The Church out of the ashes of a Bowie and Bolan-inspired glam and hard rock band called Baby Grand.

During an early gig, backstage, a young British kid walked up to them. He could shred on guitar, he knew it, and he had no interest in being modest about it. His name was Marty Willson-Piper, and he had made his way to Australia from his native Liverpool. What he said to the band, roughly, was this: “I can eat you all for lunch. You need me in the band.”

They liked his swagger. They agreed with him. He was hired on the spot.

Around the same time, the band’s original drummer, Nick Ward, punched out one of the bandmates; accounts vary on the specifics, but the outcome was swift and unambiguous. Nick was gone. He was replaced almost immediately by Richard Ploog, who would go on to play drums on every album in this survey. Ploog’s drumming: tribal, instinctive, occasionally thunderous, became a defining texture of the band’s early sound.

What nobody could have fully anticipated at that point was the guitar interplay between Koppes and Willson-Piper. Critics noticed it. Fans noticed it. Other musicians noticed it. The two traded melody and counter-melody, harmonized chords and feedback, in a way that sometimes sounded like a third, invisible instrument was playing in the room. For a long time, I assumed that quality was something they had developed gradually, over years of touring and recording together. It wasn’t. It was there almost from the beginning.

The Songs

1. Tear It All Away

The manager, Chris Gilbey, somehow convinced legendary rock producer Bob Clearmountain to work with a then-unknown Australian band on their debut album. That alone tells you something about the ambition in the room.

And then there is this song.

When I first heard it, it did not sound like 1960s or 70s psychedelia, though there is an undeniable Syd Barrett-era Floyd quality to it; married to something Byrdsian, jangled and bright. Yet the production does not sound dated or mired in 1980. When I heard it in the 90s, it sounded as current then as it does now. The Rickenbacker 12-string electric guitar intro sounds like the Beatles and the Byrds, without sounding like it was recorded in 1962. The lyrics are surreal and mundane in equal measure. The arrangement is immaculate.

This song foreshadowed everything the band was, could be, and would become. Subsequent songs would not always reach this height. Other recordings from this era had muddier productions. Some would sound dated. But on this debut album, on this song, the muse was fully present, and it sounds like nothing else around it.

The ingredients that would eventually produce “Under the Milky Way” are all here, a full eight years earlier.

2. The Unguarded Moment

The entire band has said publicly, repeatedly, and with some exhaustion, that this song became an albatross around their necks for years.

It peaked at #22 on the Australian charts and #19 in New Zealand. I challenge anyone aged 35 or older in Australia to claim they’ve never heard it. It appears on virtually every list of quintessential Australian alternative rock songs ever compiled. In that sense, it did its job almost too well.

The curse of early success is a familiar story. Playing gigs where people are only there for one song. The obnoxious shouts mid-set. The risk of being permanently defined and therefore limited by a single moment. It was their “Creep.” The band reportedly refused to play it live for years, which is either principled or maddening depending on where you were sitting in the venue.

That being said, it is not a bad song. It rocks. It is cynical. It calls out jerks, jocks, and creeps with a catchy efficiency. For 1980, it holds up. But the story of this song is less about the song itself and more about what it cost the band and what it says about how quickly an identity can be imposed on you from the outside.

For the Church’s story, it had to be here.

3. To Be In Your Eyes

Bob Clearmountain returned to produce The Blurred Crusade, and the result was an album that should have catapulted the band to international stardom. The songs are mature and fully realized, standing comfortably alongside the established mainstream rock of the era: Fleetwood Mac, Jackson Browne, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

It didn’t happen. But the album endures.

The genius of this particular song is restraint. It is essentially a one or two-chord song: G, or G and D. The Beatles understood this aesthetic. George Harrison certainly did. Think of the immersive, droning quality of “It’s All Too Much.” Less is more. Punk without sounding punk. Folk-punk, maybe. There is also something in here that gives me a strong Neil Young feeling, that particular combination of simplicity and emotional directness that bypasses cleverness entirely.

It is a sad song. Pining for unrequited love, plainly and without decoration. Sometimes that’s exactly what a song needs to be.

4. Field of Mars

A bit of history that matters here: across the first three or four Church albums, only Steve Kilbey received formal songwriting credits. This was a source of real tension and contributed to early fractures within the band. Peter Koppes and Marty Willson-Piper were both singer-songwriters in their own right. Their contributions: musical, structural, and melodic, were significant. The credits didn’t reflect that.

Field of Mars was the first crack in that wall.

Kilbey had the main chord progression and all the lyrics, but the song was unfinished; no bridge, no complete melody, no lead. He took it to Willson-Piper, who rearranged it, added the missing architecture, and elevated it to something neither of them could have arrived at alone. Kilbey’s response to what Marty brought to the table was to ask him to sing it. It was the first time any voice other than Steve Kilbey’s appeared on a Church record.

The music is haunting. The synth is eerie. The drum pattern carries something of the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” that deep, deliberate heartbeat quality. There is a Cure-like, Siouxsie-like presence in the atmosphere. Goth-adjacent without being goth. Shoe-gaze before shoe-gaze existed as a term.

For years, I assumed the song was about outer space. I thought the otherworldly, Bowie-and-Floyd quality was purely aesthetic. Much later, I learned that the Field of Mars is a cemetery in Sydney. I also learned that Steve Kilbey’s father died when Steve was relatively young.

Songs rarely get more loaded than that.

5. Fly

For many fans, Seance is the best album of the early Church era. I am not going to argue with that.

My first memory of this song is being somewhere between eight and nine years old, watching MTV, and seeing a black-and-white video: a woman in a hooded cloak, her face invisible, the hood so dark against the lighter fabric that her head almost resembled the face of a fly. It registered somewhere deep in my brain; surreal, haunting, not quite categorizable, and stayed there, even before I knew what I was looking at.

The song opens with a haunting Em chord on 12-string, harmonics layered over it on electric, tribal drumming underneath. It is the Church at its most atmospheric and elemental. The lyrics are among Kilbey’s most deliberately obtuse, surreal, and impenetrable in the best way. In that register, it sits in the same category for me as “The Killing Moon” by Echo and the Bunnymen. Not coincidentally, the two bands toured together and held each other in genuine mutual regard.

Throughout the song, you can feel the spirit of John McGeoch and the Banshees. It is not an imitation. It is a kinship.

6. It Doesn’t Change

The producer for Seance was Nick Launay, who had just come off Midnight Oil’s 10 to 1, an album generating real buzz in the UK and the US. The Church were fans, and were excited to have him on board. So they made the decision not to proceed with Bob Clearmountain for a third time.

By most accounts, the sessions were a disaster. Launay mixed the record without the band’s meaningful input. When they finally heard the results, they hated it, particularly the drums, which sounded, on even the softer songs, like machine guns. Unnatural, clipped, processed.

Except for this track.

Steve Kilbey was, at the time, a devoted listener of Joy Division. He was going through something, possibly grief over his father’s death, possibly a breakup, possibly both, and had been playing “Atmosphere” repeatedly. He wrote this song while listening to it, channeling that same quality of sustained, interior devastation. When it came time to record and mix it, he arranged for Launay to be elsewhere for the day. Locked the studio. Took full control of the production himself.

The result is the most haunting song on Seance, second only to “Fly.” And it sounds nothing like the rest of the album, because it was made by entirely different hands.

7. Constant In Opal

Wham bam! Goth and glam! Now we arrive at the twin EPs: Persia and Remote Luxury, released separately in Australia and the UK, combined into a single album in the US. I have that version on vinyl.

Something shifts here. Eastern themes begin entering the music: scales, melodies, and harmonic textures that carry a geographic imagination. There are nods to The Mission UK and Sisters of Mercy. Marty’s occasional collaborations with All About Eve around this period likely fed some of the gothic Banshees quality. Peter Koppes, always the subtler of the two guitarists, probably contributed the eastern modal sensibility.

The result is a song that sounds like nothing else any other band was releasing in 1984. Both guitars sound less like guitars and more like otherworldly synths, the E-bow wailing throughout, feedback sustained at the edge of melody. It is timeless in the way that genuinely strange things sometimes are.

And then there are the lyrics:

In hearts suspicion flowers

In hands numb with jealousy

Sleepwalking lightning showers

Transform effortlessly

Thinking of all that I left behind

Down in the shaft when my mind was blind

But you couldn’t even find yourself that way

Bowie-esque in their surreal confidence. Images that don’t explain themselves but don’t need to.

8. Into My Hands

This is their songwriter flex, which, given everything we have already covered, is saying something.

Lyrically and musically, it reaches back to the great singer-songwriters of the late 1960s and early 70s. The jangled 12-string arpeggios are unmistakably Church, but the feeling underneath is something warmer and more open, a simple, beautiful love song that doesn’t overthink itself. There is even a touch of Cat Stevens in the timbre of it.

Sometimes the most impressive thing a band known for complexity and density can do is this: strip it back to almost nothing, and make it work anyway.

9. A Month of Sundays

I sang this song, with guitar, to my wife, in front of friends and family, on our wedding night.

I don’t know how to explain what this song is, beyond that. It is like asking someone to articulate why they love “Losing My Religion” by REM. Some things resist analysis because the feeling is the whole point.

What I can tell you is the arrangement: mandolin in a rock song, paired with spacey electric guitars. Acoustic and electric interplay at its most perfectly balanced, which, across a career built on exactly that, is remarkable. And then the lyrics:

Just like the winter your memory thaws

Just like the ocean your memory pours

So many pieces to match or to find

So many doubts to have in one mind

There is one other lyricist I think operates at this level, the combination of wit, compressed imagery, and the perfect unexpected phrase. That is Matt Berninger of The National. The comparison is genuine, not hyperbole.

10. Shadow Cabinet

Finally, the closer. Persia and Remote Luxury are when the band is pushing themselves sonically and musically. With the songwriting matured and all the musical soundscape figured out. They would use these with precision, on their best-selling album Starfish, and go even further experimentally in Priest = Aura.

Speaking of one-liners.

This song is full of them. It is an ethereal, goth-adjacent banger, with a clear wink toward Sisters of Mercy, but what I keep coming back to is the writing. Lines like:

“That Eldritch bitch, must have muddled her spells

Tinges of Persia, hope that it sells....”

And then almost immediately:

“She offered her chaos to me

Proffered herself languidly”

The poetry in those lines is Wilde or Byron territory. It is showing off, and it earns every bit of it.

A perfect place to stop.

Why This Matters

I told you this wasn’t a deep dive and I wasn’t giving a history lesson. That’s still true. But I want to leave you with a few things that are not my opinions, because the band’s influence is documented, on record, in interviews.

Radiohead have said publicly that they studied The Church’s songs to learn songwriting structure. Sometime between 1980 and 1982, The Church played several gigs in Manchester. A young Johnny Marr was in the audience, watching Marty Willson-Piper play a Rickenbacker 12-string electric. That guitar subsequently became Marr’s instrument of choice throughout The Smiths’ career. REM and the Smashing Pumpkins have both spoken about the band with reverence.

They influenced many. They came close to mainstream success more than once, and more than once, circumstances or their own decisions pulled them back from the edge. The two co-founding guitarists and the original drummer have since departed. Steve Kilbey continues to make music, and what he makes is still relevant and still excellent.

The story is not over. And I am not done writing about them.

Further Listening

Listen to my spotify playlist of these songs (including the additional “further listening songs”):

Tracks Not Included:
Of Skins and Heart - “Bel Air” (storytelling is one of Kilbey’s superpowers), “Fighter Pilot Korean War”, click the link to see my post about war songs.

Sing Songs (EP) - The production is poor, and it sounds more like a bootleg/demo, but all the songs are solid. They cover Simon & Garfunkel very early in their career, “I am a Rock”, but all songs are worth a listen. Great songwriting and great music. My favorite on there is “The Night is Very Soft”.

The Blurred Crusade - I highlighted one or two songs, but the entire album rocks:

• “Almost With You”

• “Just For You” - sound effects of a song knocking at the door, and the writer letting it in, and the sound crescendos

Seance - I’m amongst those who rank this as one of the best albums ever.

• “One Day” - balls to the wall rocker, the Afghan Whigs covered it. Does a callback to the song Bel Air as it fades out

• “Electric” - ethereal

• “Disappear” - if you listen closely, you can hear the arpeggiating and chord progression sound similar to “Here Comes the Sun”. A nod to the Beatles without ripping them off

• “It’s No Reason” - their first sort of socially conscious song, but it’s beautiful nonetheless.

• “Now I Wonder Why” - a song full of the one-liners I spoke of.

Before You Go...

Missed Last Week? Check out the post on Australian indie legends the Go-Betweens

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Welcome back Hi-Fiers,

The legends that never were. Another band, virtually invisible to the US market, audiences, and listeners. Absent from radio and MTV, I never saw or heard them, or of them, on US radio or TV. I was an avid scavenger of anything underground, different, scouring the British magazines. Yet their DNA is everywhere in college music radio, in every indie rock/post-punk band from The Replacements, to REM, to Sleater-Kinney, to Modest Mouse, to Death Cab for Cutie.

Their story is a Shakespearean tragedy. There were two (maybe three) love stories going on at the same time that ripped the band apart at the end. There was drug abuse and the tragic, untimely death of one of the songwriters. I mean, this should be enough to put them in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, or at least get them more recognition than they do.

The band was Australian, and in the end, it was only Australia that gave them some due, albeit posthumously.

A Partnership Beyond Time

Some artists transcend their geography. Can’t be compared to their peers in the music scene. They are the bands that fall through the cracks. But they are also the bands or artists revered and adored by all the successful or more famous songwriters, artists of the time. Their music is picked apart, their lyrics dissected, and mined to provide inspiration or influence to legions of musicians and writers all over the world.

That band is the Go-Betweens. Australian by birth and blood, but that’s where it starts and ends. They are a timeless band, who could exist in any era or period, or century for that matter.

Most bands wear their influences openly. You can trace the lineage, connect the dots, hear what came before. But with the Go-Betweens, you can’t. Robert Forster and Grant McLennan belonged to a different era entirely. Could have been Renaissance-era bards with lutes as much as folk singers in the ‘60s. In separate interviews they’ve only clearly named the Beatles as an influence, but were careful not to name anyone else or draw any comparisons.

Now, peers and music lovers and critics and even music historians call Forster and McLennan the indie Lennon and McCartney. Not for the fame, not for the hits; they never had those. But for the partnership itself. Two childhood friends with acoustic guitars, writing obtuse lyrics, stronger together than apart. A brotherhood that lasted as long as either of them was alive. When Grant died suddenly of a heart attack in 2006, the partnership died. The band died. Irrevocably.

Building the Sound

Starting out as a trio, after one drummer didn’t work out in the beginning, they made a conscious effort to find a female. They recognized the toxic masculinity of the rock and punk scenes at the time, and felt that even their sound needed some diversity. Enter Lindy Morrison. A very talented and artistic drummer, who at times lent her backing vocals. But more importantly, laid down some of the most complicated time signatures and beats. You have to listen carefully and closely, and some of those time signatures can only be heard in prog rock bands.

The story of the Go-Betweens is mostly the story of a duo, of a songwriting partnership. They both wrote lyrics, they both played guitar, and wrote the music too.

Robert Forster was the poet, the Bob Dylan or Lou Reed of the band. Coming up around the same time as, and friends with Nick Cave of the Birthday Party. Robert, without having a grating voice like Dylan, had a Lou Reed-like spoken word aesthetic to his singing. But also similar to Nick Cave, without the deep baritone.

Grant McLennan, on the other hand, was a bit of the McCartney of the group. Catchy hooks, more of the overt love songs, melodies, and harmonies. But their voices also worked together. Robert Forster, when he wanted to, could harmonize with Grant.

They just didn’t follow any template, and by doing so, sounded like no other post-punk, synthpop, or new wave act. For that matter, they sounded like no other Australian act. Not as hard-as-nails or political as Midnight Oil. Nor the rock/sex/god aesthetic of INXS, trying to ride a tsunami to stardom. Nor even the harder punk or goth of Birthday Party or Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. They mainly played acoustic guitars, but they weren’t folk. Their electric guitars weren’t distorted, so they never “rocked hard.” Though there was a punk sensibility, they didn’t grandstand with complex lead guitar lines. It was more beautiful, little simple riffs and melodies.

My Accidental Discovery

I was blissfully unaware of the Go-Betweens during their most creative period. It wasn’t until after they had broken up and Grant McLennan formed a collaboration with Steve Kilbey from my favorite band, The Church. Jack Frost. When I listened to Grant’s amazing songwriting and music, I learned about the Go-Betweens.

It was more of an archaeological dig, and archival research into the greatest indie band I never knew about. Almost like discovering the Velvet Underground, and just as impactful.

There were other albums and songs that I loved or started listening to. Ironically, not this album that I am reviewing today.

This album slipped through the cracks completely. I am really only discovering it now, and it is quite simply a great piece of art.

Liberty Belle — The Album as Art

This isn’t a “singles album.” The album has a mood/feel/sound to it, and works cohesively as a whole. To research for this post, I just gave myself a couple hours of quiet, and pressed play. There was no desire to skip past, jump between songs. Individually, you can’t really say there is this distinct story that starts from one song and continues to another. It’s a feeling, it’s a sound. Musically, sonically, it feels like the album unfolds itself to the listener and tells a story through sound.

The video for Spring Rain, with Robert Forster on lead vocals

For this album, they had a full-time bass player and multi-instrumentalist, Robert Vickers. On many songs, a violin, or a cello, and oboe, or bassoon can be heard. String arrangements by Audrey Riley added depth and texture. Dean B. Speedwell contributed organ, piano, accordion, vibraphone, and bassoon throughout the record. It adds a deeper dimension, especially to Forster’s songs, which are abstract lyrically.

Once the album was recorded, to support the band live playing oboe, violin, and backing vocals, enter Amanda Brown. She joined the band to support live TV appearances and tour, especially at the Glastonbury Festival.

Contrast that with the actual video they produced for the song. Shows Robert Forster’s love of camp, of Bolan, Bowie and New York Dolls:

Bands like the Decemberists and Belle and Sebastian take their cue from what the Go-Betweens created with this album and expanded on in future works.

The album was recorded at Berry Street Studios in London during October and November 1985. Berry Street was a working studio in Clerkenwell that had hosted everyone from Freddie Mercury to Billy Bragg, and eventually Radiohead. In the 1980s, it was run by producer Dennis Bovell and had become known for British dub and reggae work. It wasn’t Abbey Road, but it had character and pedigree.

There’s an interesting story behind the recording: the band had signed with Elektra’s English branch, which closed two weeks into recording the album. As Robert Forster later said with characteristic dry wit, “Elektra pays for the record and doesn’t even know it.” The album was eventually released in March 1986 on Beggars Banquet Records.

Grant’s Gift for Complexity

Grant McLennan had the songs that fit more traditional pop-rock structures. Although he was the one who wrote the songs in the most peculiar time signatures. On the previous album that was “Cattle and Cane.” On this album, it is “The Ghost and the Black Hat.” The addition of the accordion really adds a nice element to it. There is also this sort of sway to the song that makes you feel like you have just walked into a pub or bar with music playing, and you come in to sit down. It has a connective but interlude feeling to it. The Church also did that on some of their early albums. When Grant collaborated with Steve Kilbey of The Church in their side band Jack Frost, they captured that same lounge feel in songs like “Geneva 4 am” and “Trapeze Boy.”

Also to be noted is Lindy Morrison’s exceptional drumming on “Cattle and Cane” and “The Ghost and the Black Hat,” changing time signatures without missing a beat and keeping those songs flowing.

The live in-studio TV performance of “Apology Accepted”, the Grant McLennan song. I like this song; it has sort of a Smiths’ melancholy to it, or even Leonard Cohen. But reading reviews of the album at the time, the critics and industry got it wrong. They described the song as upbeat, and it’s the song that gets added to the compilations. As beautiful a song as it is, that was a misstep also, the single, I believe they should have marketed for this album heavily, was “Spring Rain”.

Anyway, pay attention to the quirky beat and time signature. It’s what I love the most about Grant’s songs.

Forster’s Poetic Dreamscapes

Robert Forster, when he wanted, could do the traditional song thing. But his true strength lay in his prose and poetry. His songs were poetic dreamscapes, his delivery very Nick Cave and Nick Drake. He brought an angular, literary quality to the band's sound that balanced McLennan's melodicism perfectly.

The Cruel Paradox of Critical Acclaim

From Before Hollywood in 1983 through Liberty Belle in 1986, the Go-Betweens were on a remarkable creative trajectory. Musically and as songwriters, they were maturing, writing stronger and stronger pieces. This was their creative peak.

But commercially? They never broke through.

Here’s the paradox that defined the Go-Betweens: they played Glastonbury Festival in 1986. They recorded multiple sessions for legendary BBC DJ John Peel, whose endorsement was the gold standard for credibility. Their bootlegs got passed around amongst fans and spread the word back in the US, where college radio listeners became aware of them. They were generating loyal fans through their live performances.

Yet the industry failed them. Labels didn’t know how to promote them. Rough Trade had initially bankrolled their move to London, but then sidelined them in favor of The Smiths. Sire dropped them after Spring Hill Fair due to low sales. Elektra closed its doors two weeks into recording Liberty Belle.

The music was there. The talent was undeniable. The live performances connected. But the machinery of commercial success never engaged.

Critics loved them. Robert Christgau of The Village Voice called Forster and McLennan “the greatest songwriting partnership working today.” Mojo described Liberty Belle as “organic, homespun, with echoes of Australian country in its classicist rock novellas.” AllMusic noted how the album balanced “angularity and occasional claustrophobia” with “a new airiness and nervous romanticism.”

But critical acclaim doesn’t pay the bills or fill arenas.

Recognition, Too Late

It was only after Grant McLennan’s death in 2006 that the wider music world finally acknowledged what the devoted fans always knew. The Go-Betweens received more recognition posthumously than they ever had while making music together. Australia renamed a toll bridge in Brisbane after them. Tribute albums appeared. Music historians began placing them in the canon where they belonged.

The cruel irony: the partnership that created Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express had to end before the world would truly listen.

Legacy

As a music lover, I never tied the Go-Betweens to any sort of niche ideal or geographic location. They weren’t an “Australian” band to me. They sounded like “Alternative” acoustic/guitar-based rock. They were always a songwriter band to me. I hear The Patti Smith Group, Television, Tom Verlaine, XTC, Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, Nick Drake, The Replacements, Lemonheads, REM, Paul Westerberg, Billy Bragg, and John Wesley Harding.

But here’s the thing: none of those comparisons quite fit. The Go-Betweens existed outside of easy categorization, which is exactly why they fell through the commercial cracks and exactly why they matter.

Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express turns 40 this year. It deserves to be heard not as a curiosity or a cult artifact, but as what it is: a masterpiece of songwriting craft, arrangement, and vision. Two friends with acoustic guitars creating something timeless.

Give it the couple hours of quiet it deserves. Press play. Let it unfold.

Before You Go…

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