Music – Page 11 – Consolation Champs

Great Albums: The Pretenders

The Pretenders – The Pretenders (1980)

I’m beginning a new and hopefully recurring feature on Consolation Champs. It’s called Great Albums. Does anyone remember what an album was? Do they still call a music “release” an album anymore? Well, back in 1980, when a band released an album, you bought an album, a piece of vinyl inside a paper sleeve slipped into a cardboard sleeve. I think I might have paid about $8 for this record when it came out in 1980. I was 15 years old. A bit of background may be in order.

My family came to Canada from Ireland when I was two. I grew up in a series of apartments even though my dad held a white-collar job. Part of the reason for that was that my mum didn’t work. She had dropped out of school when she was 13 to go to work to support her grandmother, and when she got married, she figured she didn’t want to work anymore. So, our one-income family lived among a lot of two-income blue-collar families. It gave me a unique perspective on things sometimes. Some of my friends didn’t finish high school. Most didn’t go beyond it.

Growing up in the 70s in that environment almost guaranteed that I’d be a rocker. In Canada, we’d say I was a bit of a hoser. From 1975 until about 1979, I wore my jeans tucked into unlaced construction boots and a jean jacket and carried my stuff to school in an Adidas gym bag. Hoser couture at the time. So my first musical forays were into stuff like Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Black Sabbath, and Rush. But I was a bit different, too. Among my hoser friends, I was the first (and maybe only) one to get into punk and then new wave. I didn’t want to grow my hair long and wear a lumber jacket. By 1980, I’d gotten into the Sex Pistols and the Clash, Gary Numan and Devo. And then The Pretenders came along. Or more immediately, Chrissie Hynde came along.

Like most 15 year-old boys, I was an awkward and volatile blend of hormones and energy, and Chrissie Hynde grabbed my attention right away. Just look at her on the album cover photo. A red leather jacket! She appealed to my rocker roots. And she sang like both a tough chick and a vulnerable older woman. Plus, the band rocked, but in a very English new-wavey way. Picking this up was a no-brainer, even if I wasn’t that keen on the radio’s choice of a single, the almost unintelligible “Brass In Pocket”.

The truth is, this is a great album from start to finish. Since it was their debut, it contained all the pent-up energy of a band waiting to explode, and almost every song sounded fresh. In my now 40 year-old opinion, they still do. Chrissie’s voice grabs your attention right away in “Precious”; it was the first time (alas, but not the last) I’d hear a woman say “Fuck off” (and “shitting bricks”!). This woman was tough! On “Up The Neck,” she just oozes sex, and she coyly plays with the lyrics, drawing out such double entendres as “the veins bulged on his…brow”. She continues to talk dirty on “Tattooed Love Boys” and her heavy breathing on “The Wait” still gives me chills.

But it wasn’t just Chrissie Hynde that made this album so great for me. Guitarist James Honeyman-Scott was an innovator and his guitar work has remained very influential over the years. I love the way the end of “Space Invader” runs into the galloping opening of “The Wait”. I love that they actually have a song called “Space Invader” (the console game was HUGE around this time). The Ray Davies’ cover “Stop Your Sobbing” may have been influential in Hynde’s later romance with Ray himself. They even had a child together. And “Mystery Achievement” may be the best last track on any album. Truth be told, “Brass in Pocket” may be one of the weaker tracks on the album. But it’s the poppiest and least threatening, so you still hear it on the radio now and then.

Tragically, within three years, both Honeyman-Scott and bassist Pete Farndon were dead of drug overdoses, and although Hynde soldiered on, the punch and guts of the band had gone. But twenty-five years on, this is still a thrilling listen. Go on, geezers, dig it out of your crates of vinyl. And you kids, track it down on your favourite file-sharing service. You’ll feel 15 again. Or just 15, I guess.

Track Listing

Precious
The Phone Call
Up the Neck
Tattooed Love Boys
Space Invader
The Wait
Stop Your Sobbing
Kid
Private Life
Brass In Pocket
Lovers of Today
Mystery Achievement

“Stop Your Sobbing” on Top of the Pops on YouTube
“Tattooed Love Boys” live from 1981 on YouTube

Great Albums is an occasional feature on Consolation Champs where I relate some personal stories about life-changing music in lieu of any proper music criticism. You’ll probably learn more about me than about music, so consider that fair warning. For more, click the Great Albums category tag.

Sigur Rós

Well, after a week in which I saw 15 films, I almost forgot we had tickets to go see Sigur Rós tonight. Even though we were pretty much exhausted, it was a great show. This is ambitious and challenging music, and it can be an emotionally draining experience. The best way I can describe it is that this music might help you believe in God.

Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick

Thanks to Neil, I’ve inherited a musical baton with which to beat you around the head and shoulders. Here we go:

Total volume of music files on my computer: 22.82 GB (5,419 songs) on my work computer, where I listen to the most music. (For the sake of completeness, 26.11 GB on my home system, which is 6,289 songs)

The last CD I bought was: Ooh, it’s been a while, but I think it might be Thank You Good Night Sold Out, by The Dears.

Song playing right now: I Smell Winter — The Housemartins.

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:

Rapture — Pedro the Lion
I Got A Right — Iggy & the Stooges
Bury Me With It — Modest Mouse
Aliens (Christmas 1988) — Rheostatics
Man-Size — PJ Harvey

Five people to whom I’m passing the baton:

For the statistically-obsessed, my Audioscrobbler page.

South African Object Lesson?

Back in the fall, Brooke and I bought tickets for tonight’s concert by the Soweto Gospel Choir as a sort of birthday present to each other. Tonight we were pretty excited about going. Even though we didn’t have the greatest seats (row YY, second from the back), we settled in expectantly. Then we heard her. Behind us, in row ZZ. An obnoxious Afrikaner woman. Before the concert even started, she was crowing about how this was HER music and she wondered how North American audiences would respond.

As the concert began, I let the music wash over me and I welled up a few times. South Africa has a long-established place in my heart. Back in the 1980s, when Nelson Mandela was still imprisoned, ANC head Oliver Tambo visited Toronto and I went to see him. He wasn’t a young man and I was impressed with his unflagging passion for his country. In fact, I was, and continue to be, deeply impressed with all black South Africans. Their pride in their country and their seemingly endless optimism are infectious, and that’s why I was enjoying the music (and dancing) so much. I was particularly looking forward to the end of the program, when they were going to sing Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, the South African national anthem. It’s a song that has made me cry ever since I first heard it in A World Apart, the little-seen film about the life of South African activist Ruth First. But something began to go horribly wrong about ten minutes into the show.

Miss ZZ began to sing. Any song where she knew even a snippet of the tune was fair game for her clumsy humming. If she didn’t know the song, she chatted loudly with her husband. Of course, by the time we got to Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, she was in full voice. It was as if she thought we were at a sporting event. Needless to say, the moment was spoiled for me, and probably for a few of my neighbours.

I chose to look at the whole farce as an object lesson. Here’s a white South African, trying desperately to hang on to and participate in a culture that isn’t fully hers, even from the back row, with a lousy voice and in a way that’s entirely obnoxious. Kind of sad and funny at the same time. But also very very annoying. The fact that her one off-key Boer voice was very nearly drowning out more than twenty beautiful voices singing in Zulu, Xhosa, Sotha, Swahili and English was a chilling reminder of the situation from which South Africa is trying so hard to escape. It’s incredible that South Africa recently celebrated ten years of democracy. I find it almost inconceivable that instead of revenge and bloodbaths, the government set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and that the country is trying so hard to forge its many cultures, even the often-brutal colonial ones, into a new South Africa.

Another interesting thing about tonight was that, so soon after my “milestone” 40th birthday, it brought a few different parts of my life together. In addition to South African independence being a particularly close cause to me, there was something else. Two of the major sponsors of the event were Tyndale College (formerly Ontario Bible College) and Wines of South Africa. I graduated from Ontario Bible College in the late 1980s, and in my current job, our company represents three South African wineries in the province of Ontario. I even ran into one of my old professors from OBC, the Zulu-speaking Dr. Ebenezer Sikikane, whom I haven’t seen in almost twenty years.

So in spite of all of that, or perhaps because of it, the concert was glorious. The choir are in the midst of their first-ever North American tour. If you get the chance to see them, take it!

Ska for the Skeptical

I’ve never been skeptical, but some of you might need a little nudge.

Here’s a great introduction to one of my favourite kinds of music, including MP3s. I got into the second-wave (ie. British) of ska music around 1980, listening to bands like The Specials, The (English) Beat, The Selecter and Madness. I generally despise the third-wave (ie. Orange County) ska bands like No Doubt and Reel Big Fish, but here’s a chance to check out the origin of the music as well as its evolution. When I describe it to people, I say it’s like reggae you can dance to.

(via boingboing)