Yeah Yeah Yeah

by Bob Stanley

  In the States, Genesis were less than a sensation. Beer cans were thrown. According to Melody Maker, they were heckled with shouts of ‘Boogie!’ Mike Oldfield avoided this problem by never taking the stage. He recorded the almost entirely instrumental Tubular Bells on a borrowed ¼-inch Bang & Olufsen reel-to-reel tape recorder. A collection of pretty melodies strung together as a suite, it was a number-one album in 1974, selling close to three million copies. Parts of it were used in a milk advert on TV; parts of it were used for ‘interpretive dance’ classes in British schools; parts of it were used on the soundtrack of The Exorcist. It may have featured ‘The Sailor’s Hornpipe’ and Oldfield’s neanderthal grunts,5 but there was an overriding melancholy, and Oldfield’s folk roots (he had been in an acoustic act called the Sallyangie in the late sixties) meant he never lost sight of the album’s melodic thread. On the minus side, according to a review in Let It Rock, it had ‘no sex, no violence, no ecstasy; nothing uncontrolled, nothing uncontrollable’. Tubular Bells was high-class library music – it could mean whatever you wanted it to mean. The sequel, the less melodic, more elongated Hergest Ridge, was another number one, but still Oldfield hid himself away; by the time he appeared on the cover of Ommadawn (1976) he looked a lot like Jesus.

  Oldfield was chronically shy. Melody Maker’s Karl Dallas interviewed him, sprawled on a bed, apparently quite relaxed, in 1974. At the end of what Dallas felt had been a pretty amicable chat, Oldfield whispered, ‘I feel as if I’ve been raped.’ To overcome his problem, he did a course in exegesis in 1978, cut his hair off and transformed himself into a confident rock superstar. He’d taught himself to fly. He’d bought himself a Lear jet. He met Dallas again and told him, ‘I’m fed up being a romantic … I was determined to have a very bad time in order to work out a few things. I have now completed that process, and have chosen to have a good time.’ The result was Europop hits like ‘Guilty’ and ‘Moonlight Shadow’ (UK no. 4 ’83) – the new Oldfield sound was so different, friendly and bubbly, you half expected him to change his name to Micky Oldfield. Good for him. But most of his fans preferred the bearded, romantic, bad-time Mike.

  The only prog act to outsell Mike Oldfield was Pink Floyd. The rump of the post-Syd Barrett group had seen out the sixties with a low-key film soundtrack – for Barbet Schroeder’s More – that in part was the golden vision of Albion that Jon Anderson was striving for. ‘Green Is the Colour’, ‘Cirrus Minor’ and ‘Cymbaline’ used organ, acoustic guitar, flute and birdsong to paint watercolours of summer afternoons by the River Cam in the shade of a weeping willow. They had evicted their acid-fried singer in 1968, after his mental collapse, and replaced him with a somewhat calmer Cambridge boy called Dave Gilmour, who was just back from a spot of male modelling in France. Gilmour was also an old friend of Barrett’s, which made the regrouping guilt-edged and uncomfortable, but Floyd soldiered on and Barrett moved back in with his mum.6 Everyone felt embarrassed. Things were so bad, they almost talked to each other about it.

  Initially the new-look Floyd aped the departed singer’s style, to no small psych-bubblegum effect, on a couple of singles called ‘It Would Be So Nice’ and ‘Point Me at the Sky’ (both worth seeking out, though they are written out of official Floyd history), but neither reached the Top 50. Rudderless, personality-free, it was hard to see what else they could do or where else they could go.

  Visually, Pink Floyd had always gone for anonymity. They had never spoken on stage, played extended instrumental passages (not jazz, no real solos – they were the first to admit they didn’t have the ability), and drenched both themselves and their audience in a lightshow which rendered them largely invisible. Barrett had been their Tigger, bouncy and cute, as well as their songwriter, their singer and their pin-up potential. Without him they became entirely faceless. Without him there really should have been no Pink Floyd. So they decided to make this total anony mity their calling card. American arthouse act the Residents would make great play of their mystery line-up in the seventies, masquerading as giant eyeballs and developing a cult audience; Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason could have walked naked around Woolworths in 1973, as one of the biggest-selling pop stars in the world, and only been screamed at by traumatised shoppers.

  The first sign that things might somehow work out was when Pink Floyd were asked to improvise live, in the BBC studio, as Neil Armstrong and Apollo 11 were launched from Cape Kennedy in 1969. The horse-faced Roger Waters had now assumed control. He was a far less frivolous, hedonistic soul than Barrett, and the future of the group was signposted by an arresting line on More’s ‘Cymbaline’: ‘apprehension creeping like a tube train up your spine’. Musically, they became more of an obvious extension of pastoral English psychedelia than most of their contemporaries. 1971’s Meddle opens with the minor-key atmospherics and ground-shifting dubbiness of ‘One of These Days’, followed by the brushed-organdie pastoral ‘Pillow of Clouds’: ‘Sleepy time in my life with my love by my side.’ Other times, they echoed the booster rockets of Apollo 11 – ‘Careful with That Axe, Eugene’ was a long day’s flight into deep space; there was no aim, there was no captain of the ship.

  In fact, very little went on, and that was almost the point – this was a group who were perpetually adrift, diffused and sad. They were permanently in Syd Barrett’s shadow, and grew more racked with guilt over their lost friend with each incrementally bigger-selling album they released. Gradually, Roger Waters’s vision became more focused. The higher their record sales climbed, the greater Floyd’s fame, the more he felt a social and political responsibility. Waters spoke with a clear, deliberate voice about the things that inspired him, chiefly his father’s death in World War Two (‘a wrenching waste’) and childhood friend Barrett’s decline. No group wore the deep-blue cloak of rock’s new gravitas more heavily than Pink Floyd.

  Their British post-Barrett renaissance had begun with the 1970 number-one album Atom Heart Mother, which added a beered-up brass band and posh girls’ choir to their saucerful of secrets; 1971’s Meddle contained the twenty-plus-minute ‘Echoes’, a prog-rock high-water mark; American FM stations picked up on another of their soundtracks, for 1972’s Obscured by Clouds. When their eighth album, Dark Side of the Moon, was released in ’73, wrapped in a jet-black sleeve, it was Waters’s all-time statement and made everything thus far feel like an apprenticeship. The demos were recorded in his garden shed in Islington, but the finished album was a stereo surround-sound spectacular, a treat for your hi-fi, with effects flying from left to right, deeper and beyond. To the accompaniment of cash registers, plane crashes, banshee backing vocals and ticking clocks, it was also hard work, largely tuneless, with misery and paranoia to spare. There were no flutes. Dark Side of the Moon reflected the downer vision of large parts of British and American youth in the years of Chrysler crisis and Grunwick grind – ‘You’re older, shorter of breath, and one day closer to death.’ It sold forty-five million copies; Sgt Pepper, the Beatles’ eighth album and similarly cup-overflowing creative peak, sold a mere thirty-two million.

  When they finally laid Syd Barrett’s memory to rest with the karmic ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ in 1975, they lost their raison d’être for good. More rock theatre, ever greater, emptier extravaganzas, replaced their self-flagellating desire to drift, and the only way they could agree to go forward was by hiding behind pyrotechnics and flying pigs. It seemed that they hated being themselves.

  As Fairport Convention’s ale-sodden decline mirrored that of folk rock, so Pink Floyd’s mid-seventies – plateauing and then turning towards self-parody – traced prog’s failure.7 Its flame would be kept alight by a teenage Pink Floyd fan, nurtured by Dave Gilmour since she was fourteen, who signed to EMI while they were counting their profits on Wish You Were Here but didn’t release her first record until 1978. Everything about Kate Bush was English, autumnal and sensual, from her lyrics (‘Driving back in her car, watching the wipers washing the leaves away’) to the definitive photo of her head, shoulders and auburn curl
s entwined in ivy. She swooped and wheeled like a White Lady of legend, a ghost from a Kentish folk tale paying a visitation to the 1970s. Her best work combined the theatre of Genesis (‘Wow’), the folk melodies of Tubular Bells (‘The Man with the Child in His Eyes’), Jon Anderson’s search for ‘meaning’ (‘Running up That Hill’), Floyd’s anti-war leanings (‘Army Dreamers’, ‘Breathing’), even King Crimson’s ultra-tricksy rhythms (‘Sat in Your Lap’). All of these titles were Top 20 singles – her songs never outstayed their welcome.

  Concision aside, where Bush’s work differed from pretty much all progressive rock is that so much of it was about sex. What her breakthrough single ‘Wuthering Heights’ (UK no. 1 ’78) gave to rock’s progressive quarter was a woman’s perspective and sensuality in what was a very male, insular music; this, combined with her litheness, sense of adventure, mystique and melodic gift, meant Kate Bush alone was equipped to ride out the new-wave storm.

  There was almost nothing on the first three Kate Bush albums that couldn’t have passed for a 1973 recording, and yet she bloomed in the post-punk era as the progressive giants split (Moody Blues, Jethro Tull) or jumped ship – Genesis into pop funk, Yes into electro pop. ‘The essence of sensuality and child-like wonder or screeching wood nymph?’ asked the NME; the answer – which explained her influence on female pop and her elevation to the top of Sunday-supplement English Eccentric lists – was ‘Both’.

  While mid-seventies America was content to keep Jethro Tull, the Moody Blues and Emerson, Lake and Palmer on a permanent coast-to-coast tour, it strangely never developed its own strain of progressive rock. Overt cleverness was channelled in a slightly different way by Todd Rundgren. Ridiculously talented, he was like a one-man Yes and, similarly, wanted to take the music of the sixties groups he loved – chiefly the Beatles and the Who – and stretch it out as far as he could. At first his solo albums were indebted to Laura Nyro’s white-soul piano balladry; with the 1972 double Something/Anything? he perfected his blue-eyed soul shtick (‘Sweeter Memories’ and ‘Hello It’s Me’, which was a US number five) but also had a go at super-compressed power pop (‘Couldn’t I Just Tell You’), neo-Merseybeat (‘I Saw the Light’, a UK turntable hit that somehow only got to number thirty-six), Motown/bubblegum mash-ups (‘Wolfman Jack’) and tasteless odes to groupies (‘You Left Me Sore’). Its schoolboy grubbiness was easily overlooked, though, and when Rundgren discovered LSD relatively late in life, the result was 1973’s A Wizard, a True Star. No pussyfooting, he now took on all his musical loves (bits of Gershwin, Weimar cabaret and a fight between electronic dogs) and made a red-blooded synth stew. The first side crammed in a dozen tracks, squeezed and pulsing with gonzoid energy – it messed with your head, it felt like there was an electrical storm outside your window. There was even room for hankie-wringing soul covers on Side 2 (the Impressions’ ‘I’m So Proud’, the Delfonics’ ‘La La Means I Love You’, the Miracles’ ‘Ooo Baby Baby’), a necessary breather which reflected the Philly sounds on the chart.

  ‘There’s a reason I’m so erect!’ he squealed. The effervescent noise of A Wizard, a True Star predicted Prince in its playful R&B fizz, and a swathe of twenty-first-century electropop acts from the Avalanches to Hot Chip, but when it came out Todd Rundgren was on his own. ‘Todd does shine,’ said the sleevenote. ‘Go ahead and try to ignore him again …’ Like Bowie and Roxy in Britain, these were Technicolor sounds in an overcast age, and in 1973 Rundgren seemed geared for stateside superstardom. To promote ‘Hello It’s Me’, his first Top 5 US hit, he went on the soul show Midnight Special, introduced by the Four Tops, in sequin-strewn, green peacock plumage; the glitter above his eyes looked like shiny reptilian scales and his shoulders sprouted feathery wings. He looked like a cross between Ming the Merciless and a glam gecko. O’Jays fans were not won over. There was a reason why glam rock remained a UK-only flavour in 1973, and Rundgren’s outfit would have been too hot even for Mud’s Rob Davis. In the space of five minutes, he went from potential saviour of all our tomorrows to that most demeaning of tags, the quirky cult hero.

  Steely Dan were musicians more consummate and well schooled than the self-taught progressives in Britain. Their music came from a culture where high-end jazz had been common on radio and TV, one from which you could actually graduate as a musician in jazz (at Boston’s Berklee School of Music, which had been established in 1954). They were craftsmen, smart to the point of glib, and heartless in their jazz name-drops (‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number’ was based on a Horace Silver riff). An augmented duo of ex-session men Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, they ticked so many cred boxes it’s no surprise journalists loved them. Steely Dan had an intellectual layer that never really existed in the UK, highly professional but also knowledgeable, witty and subversive. They were part of a wisecracking, nonconformist New York tradition that dated back to Leiber and Stoller (who, by the seventies, were writing off-kilter show tunes like ‘Is That All There Is’), and would inform the air of CBGB in ’76 and Brooklyn in the 2000s: ‘I learned music theory and harmony at music college,’ said Donald Fagen, ‘even though I ended up with a degree in literature. When we met, we both realised we listened to late-night jazz shows and be-bop music. I hated rock and roll.’

  Steely Dan’s records were immaculately presented, heavy on the electric piano, not a hair out of place. It takes some major dude attitude to have a song on your debut album that opens with ‘Thelonius my old friend, step on in and let me shake your hand’, but they didn’t flinch. The question has to be why they didn’t just play the jazz they loved, and the answer – visible at the early, shaky shows – was that they weren’t good enough. So, throwing in a bit of pop to lighten the load, they were probably as surprised as anyone when it worked so well: they had hits in America (‘Do It Again’, US no. 6 ’72, ‘Reeling in the Years’, no. 11 ’73, ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number’, no. 4 ’74, ‘Peg’, no. 11 ’77) because they telegraphed to a demographic just as clearly as Grand Funk Railroad did with their fundamentalist blue-collar rocker ‘We’re an American Band’ (a Todd Rundgren-produced number one in ’73). What’s more, unlike the more po-faced British progressives, they clearly had a sense of humour. ‘People who take their clothes off [at concerts] are into rhythm,’ Fagen told Melody Maker in 1973. ‘We’re into that.’ Despite being intentionally unlovable, people really love them. I’ve tried hard. I think, as with ninety per cent of jazz, I might like them a lot more one day.

  They weren’t widely copied, but Manchester’s 10cc were as close as Britain got to its own Steely Dan. And 10cc had more hits – including three number ones – because they were more human, more fallible, and leaned towards the multi-part song structures and odd chord changes of ’66 Beach Boys rather than Horace Silver. ‘It’s hard to define what 10cc is,’ drummer Kevin Godley told the NME in 1973. ‘It’s our particular form of humour and I think it’s a reaction against the introverted “corridors-of-my-mind” stuff we’ve been getting in the last two or three years … it’s not just straightforward silliness or parody.’ They had been around the block: Eric Stewart (in the Mindbenders), Graham Gouldman, Kevin Godley and Lol Creme (in the Mockingbirds) were veterans of the Manchester sixties scene,8 while Gouldman had also done a stint as a session man for Kasenetz-Katz. In 1970 they built their own Strawberry Studios in Stockport, where they latched onto any passing trade, be it Neil Sedaka, Leslie Crowther or Manchester City FC. Once in a while they released singles under pseudonyms for fun: Doctor Father gave us the atmospheric, lost-in-Borneo yarn ‘Umbopo’; ‘Naughty Nola’, an instrumental that sounded like electrified milk bottles, was by Lol; and as Grumble they reheated ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ to no great acclaim. In 1972, as 10cc,9 they cut a doo-wop spoof called ‘Donna’ (UK no. 2 ’72), both tribute and novelty – it was smarty-pants stuff (‘Oh Donna, you make me break up, you make me break down Donna’), not a loving homage in the style of Wizzard, but simple and ultra-catchy.

  Analysing the success of ‘Donna’, Eric Stewart furrowed
his brow and declared, ‘We’ve decided that everything we’ve done so far has worked on its own terms, but we’re still only working within the limits that have been set up during the last ten years of rock and roll, from the Beatles to 10cc today. And it’s time to transcend all that, if we can.’ They could. Freestyling in their own studio, they peaked with ‘I’m Not in Love’, a UK number one in 1975, where all their cleverness was corralled into a lagoon of vocal harmonies and a sad puddle of a lyric: ‘I keep your picture up on the wall – it hides a nasty stain.’ It worked like a faulty mixer tap, alternating warmth and chilliness in its repressed yearning and subsequent bitterness. Though 10cc may have learnt their moves from Steely Dan, ‘I’m Not in Love’ was ever so English.

  By the mid-seventies it must have seemed to fans of Gene Vincent, or the Supremes, or Desmond Dekker, as if rock had been purloined and turned abstract by greatcoated students. Since the Teddy Boys adopted rock ’n’ roll, British pop’s progress had depended on its position as the core of male teen culture. But outside the cloisters occupied by Genesis, Yes and Gentle Giant was a teen subculture – the bovver boys – who rejected this tradition, feeling Tubular Bells said nothing to them about their lives. They didn’t feel remotely inspired to form a band. Eventually, this led to the dead zone of 1975 and ’76, a period when no vital new sound came along to replace glam and prog at the end of their cycles. It may have felt like the British pop era – essentially the Beatles era – was winding up.10 It was time to look abroad for new thrills.