LP - TL:DR (That's Long, DID Read)

The Dead Cannot Contradict: R.I.P. M.E.S. 1957 – 2018

There have been a lot of obituaries for the great Mark E. Smith in the last week. This will not be one of the better ones, but it is my one. In my experience, the bands you love in your teens are, although they have a special place in your memory, mostly not the same bands you listen to for the rest of your life (to date). But unlike most of my favourite artists from those long years between 16 and 20 or thereabouts, I never went off The Fall, I just didn’t listen to them very often. But whenever I did, they seemed just as strange and clever and funny and unique as they had the first time I heard them.

The Fall are legendarily supposed to be a hard band to like, or to get into, but I never found it to be so. The hard-to-like quality obviously has something to do with their spiky, unpredictable sound (and Mark E. Smith’s indomitable/hectoring voice) but is perhaps also due to the fact that – for the most part – their music doesn’t appeal to the emotions, it is not (hopefully) about you; nobody (as far as I know) wallows in The Fall, the way as an adolescent I wallowed in The Cure or The Smiths or the Cranes or whoever it might be. The first Fall song I heard was a snippet of then-current single ‘Telephone Thing‘ (a funky, catchy wah-wah-led pop song with a phone-tapping theme, which namechecks EastEnders actress Gretchen Franklin – i.e. as typically atypical as any Fall single) on The Chart Show, which was enough to make me buy its parent album, Extricate. As a reader of the music weeklies (Melody Maker was my favourite, but I often bought NME and Sounds as well) I was of course aware of The Fall, and specifically Mark E. Smith, at that point – as he was to remain – a figure who polarised the magazines’ writers, while – unlike say Morrissey or Robert Smith – having the (admittedly sometimes grudging) respect, seemingly, of all of them.

Extricate is in itself a classic Fall album, but it was intriguing in all kinds of ways. I liked. firstly, the tunes, but also the the mix of the un-selfconscious artiness of the abstract cover painting/assemblage by contemporary artist Anthony Frost, with the barbed humour of the lyrics (the album contains the classic ‘British People In Hot Weather‘as well as the aforementioned ‘Telephone Thing‘ and (I have the cassette version) ‘Arms Control Poseur‘). But one of the great things about coming to this – or I think any – Fall album as an introduction to the band, is that it hints at so much more than it contains. This, the reviews said, was an unusually accessible/conventional Fall album and indeed, Mark E. Smith’s sleevenote reinforced that impression:

There is no central track, as I’ve/we’ve tried to give out The Fall as it should be and not as it is perceived. Therefore, the first half of the disc reflects on things witnessed and/or sensed, while the second half is NOW. This means there’s a thin dish-up of stories and characters etc, but that format’s well flogged and pushed of recent, so hopefully EXTRICATE’s simplicity will confound all bores, imitators and anxiety mongers./ EXTRICATE! All the best from M.E.S.

This was odd. Mark E. Smith reminded me of nothing so much as Alex from A Clockwork Orange; sophisticated, articulate, menacing but not unfriendly. A few years later, when I began to read Wyndham Lewis I was reminded irresistibly of Mark E. Smith. And indeed the whole of The Fall’s early work is extremely Vorticist/BLAST-like. I didn’t know though until quite recently that Mark E. Smith was a fellow Wyndham Lewis fan (though I think MES often agreed with Lewis where I don’t) – it seems so obvious now. And the reference to stories and characters was intriguing; if this was The Fall gone normal then what did they sound like before?? I think the next album I bought might have been the essential compilation of early material Palace Of Swords Reversed; here were ‘Marquis Cha-Cha‘, a story about a Lord Haw Haw character stranded in South America which opens

“He can never go home
Stranded in South America, nothing to go home for
Just another Brit in the bar
Hernandez Fiendish comes over to me
Offers a job as broadcaster…”

who else was writing songs like that? Or ‘Leave The Capitol‘ (“exit this Roman shell!“) or, even more peculiarly, ‘Wings‘:

“Day by day
The moon gains on me
Purchased pair of flabby wings
I took to doing some hovering”

And that’s just the lyrics; another thing about The Fall that made an impression on me early on was that, although MES was incredibly fussy and perfectionist about the band’s music, he wasn’t snobbish in the usual way; no tune, if it was catchy, was too silly for Mark E. Smith. Think of the speedy but somehow miniature-sounding rock guitar on ‘Underground Medicine‘ or loping, bouncy beat to ‘Gramme Friday‘ or the oddly jaunty, countryish ‘Fit And Working Again‘. or the kazoo on ‘The North Will Rise Again‘– this was ‘angular’ (the definitive descriptive term for late 70s/early 80s UK indie rock) if you like, but it was not standard ‘post-punk’ music, nor was it (as it could easily have been) twee in that beloved ramshackle UK indie/C86 kind of way. Perhaps because Mark E. Smith was not (99% of the time) a melodic singer, the band could play anything behind him and it sounded right. When, at the beginning of one of my favourite songs, ‘Slates‘, MES shouts ‘this is the definitive rant‘ he’s nailing part of the charm of his work. As long as the rant was in place, no tune was too small, too jingly or too silly to make something worthwhile out of.

After Palace Of Swords Reversed I bought anything I could get my hands on. Luckily there was a lot of it, and it was mostly pretty affordable, especially the stuff from the band’s then slightly maligned, now justly celebrated mid-80s period of relative commercial success. In itself, that success was odd and underlined just how unique the band, and specifically Smith’s vision, was. I loved that Mark E. Smith saw nothing elitist or strange about working with a ballet company, or in writing for the theatre and working with ‘serious’ artists and yet the people I knew who derided Morrissey as being “poncy” never seemed to think that about MES. The fact that he refused to separate the ‘high’ arts from his work with The Fall was so powerful. Everyone knows, for example, that Brian May is an astrophysicist, but imagine if astrophysics had somehow been indivisible from his work with Queen; they would have been far a more peculiar and far less successful, but also (with no offence intended to the band or its members) probably more interesting band.

Although most of my favourite Fall albums are the early ones (especially Dragnet, Grotesque (After The Gramme) and Hex Enduction Hour) those 80s albums with the Mark and Brix-led lineup(s), especially The Wonderful and Frightening World Of The Fall are pretty unassailable and perhaps the least overtly commercial ‘commercial’ period of any band I can think of. The band stayed good though, and although I am not a Fall completist (a vocation rather than a hobby) I’ve found that any Fall record one picks up will have something great on it; and there aren’t many bands with a 40 year career you can say that about.

A few random but significant (to me) Mark E. Smith/Fall things:

my favourite Fall release of them all is Slates (1981); typically awkward, it is a brilliantly ungainly 6-track 10″ which Mark E. Smith was proud of as it was too long to qualify for the singles chart but too short for the album chart; not that it was likely to trouble either one. Plus, it opens with MES shouting “Pink press threat!
I must be impressionable; I think I got into Albert Camus because The Fall were named after one of his books.
I don’t remember which music paper it was in, but Mark E. Smith was a guest reviewer in one of the weeklies c.1992 and gave Morrissey’s Your Arsenal a surprisingly positive(ish) review. One phrase that stuck in my memory (perhaps incorrectly) and seems definitively MES-ish to me is “the guitar player has too much equipment”
When I first read (in the late 90s?) Christopher Isherwood’s autobiographical novel Lions And Shadows (1938) the idea of ‘The Other Town’, the sinister unseen parallel reality accessed through various apparently ordinary gates and doorways in Cambridge reminded me irresistibly of the band, especially the bizarre, creepy but also funny narrative songs like the (actually quite Lovecraftian) ‘Impression Of J. Temperance’ :

“A never seen dog breeder
This is the tale of his replica
Name was J. Temperance
Only two did not hate him
Because peasants fear local indifference
Pet shop and the vet, Cameron…”

when I finally listened to the classic German band Can it was because the Fall song ‘I Am Damo Suzuki‘ made me curious about them
one of the key things about The Fall’s music is its palate-cleansing quality; their music makes almost any other comparable popular music sound sentimental in comparison. And yet on the rare occasions (‘Bill Is Dead‘, ‘Edinburgh Man‘) when MES is sentimental the songs are among his best.
‘Edinburgh Man‘ was probably the first song I heard by a band I liked that was about a place I knew
I have been a Fall fan for half of my life, but I’ve only met maybe 4 or 5 other people who like them (though I realise they are quite popular)
I never particularly wanted to meet Mark E. Smith, but I’m very sad that he’s dead.

PS – the title for this piece is from an enigmatic line in the – obviously – highly peculiar song New Face In Hell:
The dead cannot contradict/Sometimes the living cannot

Album Review: Rachel Mason – Das Ram

Rachel Mason

‘Das Ram’

Cleopatra Records (LP) / Practical Records (cassette)

Release date: 18 November 2016

Rachel Mason has done so much work in so many fields (performance art/non-performance art/filmmaking/music/etc/etc – check out her website for a cross-section) that it’s easy to immerse oneself in her work. In music alone she has amassed a vast and varied discography within just a few years.

Where her earlier albums like the couldn’t-be-more-my-cup-of-tea work of towering genius Gayley Manor Songs (2015) were simple, home-made, stark, and direct and the conceptual The Lives of Hamilton Fish (also a film) was sprawling and dramatic, Das Ram is a full-blown modern pop-rock album, full of catchy songs with a flamboyant, very New York flavour, reminiscent at times of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Talking Heads or even (at its most pop) Lady Gaga.

photo by Chris Carlone

Opening track ‘Roses’ launches the album with a dramatic, lilting and atmospheric intro before kicking into gear with new wave-ish guitars and a rock/dance beat. It’s catchy and full of pop hooks, but Mason’s excellent vocal perfectly delivers the troubled, even mournful lyric (‘I sometimes think that life is evil/it’s just something that fills me with dread’) that uses the rose as a symbol not only of beauty and romance, but also of the pain and transience of life. As a lyric, it’s perfectly judged; as densely layered as poetry, while as simple and direct as the best pop music. ‘Heart Explodes’ by contrast feels less spontaneous, carrying on with the metaphysical preoccupations in a more theatrical, almost Kate Bush-like way, Mason’s expressive voice(s) bringing the song to a chorus that is a peculiar crescendo made from conventional romantic language, genuine wonder, exultation and distress.

Mason’s voice is again at its most powerful on the less-straightforwardly-satisfying ‘Sandstorm’ on which she winds together enigmatic images of miscommunication (‘I believe in lies about the world’) with escalating intensity over a prowling skeletal electronic funk that wouldn’t be out of place on a Grace Jones record, building tension but never quite releasing it. For a sense of release, the strutting electro-pop/funk cabaret fantasy of single ‘Tigers In The Dark’ follows; a kind of Talking Heads/Franz Ferdinand/Lady Gaga hybrid that, unlike her earlier folk/acoustic work feels 100% the work of a performance artist; the song is great, but the delivery, the theatricality is everything. As with Bowie (among others), the artificiality expresses the soul of the performer/character far more than something more apparently earnest would.

https://youtu.be/-Uw4oC9iouc

By comparison, the pulsating electro-pop of ‘Marry Me’ feels more like a vehicle for its complicated, beautifully detailed lyric and less an embodiment of it, although the contrast between the long, passing-of-time-obsessed verses and the simple, plaintive chorus (‘marry me/carry me over the hearth where a lost soul can hide’) grows more poignant as the song wends towards its end. A highlight of the album, it makes up in naked vulnerability what it loses to ‘Tigers…’ in glitzy disco-ness. ‘Queen Bee’ is one of the more penetrable lyrics on the album, using the image of the queen bee as a straightforward metaphor for loneliness, alienation and dependency (‘those friends were never real friends’) and the music captures the lyric in its stolid, regimented plod, with some very effective buzzing textures to reinforce the central image and some folk-inflected singing from Mason.

For a few dissonant seconds, ‘Cancer’ seems set to be the album’s darkest track, but then it unexpectedly breaks into a kind of rockabilly trot, albeit one spattered with peculiar squelches, squeaks and sound effects. Although not as grim as expected, it’s not the easiest-on-the-ear song on the album, sounding at times like two or three songs being played at once, and its chant-like vocal and slightly atonal chorus make it one of the more nerve-jangling songs in her catalogue.

Das Ram ends on a relatively more harmonious, if abrupt note with the angular funk verse/sweeping chorus of ‘Heaven’, which has a kind of early 80s, Ippu-do feel, before ending suddenly after the somewhat expected hedonistic refrain of ‘you and I are getting high.’

photo by Kerwin Williamson

Taken as a whole, Das Ram, is a bold, exciting and accessible album, utterly different from the acoustic/folk rock textures of Mason’s earlier works like Hamilton Fish…, Turtles or indeed the raw, homemade quality of Gayley Manor Songs. In fact it’s not like any Rachel Mason album I’ve heard (though I haven’t heard them all). Only a handful of artists have convincingly made a gesamstkunstwerk in the idiom of popular music without falling into the trap of overblown pretension – and most of those have spread from the music world outwards. With the confident, powerful Das Ram, Rachel Mason has become one of an even more select group – an artist who has learned to express herself with equal authority in whatever medium she chooses – and who seems to have fun doing it.

Ride On A Golden Wave: Uriah Heep’s …Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble

Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble (Vertigo/Mercury, 1970; Bronze shortly thereafter)

This year (2016), BMG begins an extensive reissue campaign of releases by one of the original Spinal Tap-influencing ‘rock dinosaur’ bands, the mighty Uriah Heep. Along with an anthology, the first of these releases is, logically enough, the band’s 1970 debut – one of my favourite albums of all time – …Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble. This album is probably not cool. Judging by the mostly negative reviews it got in 1970 (‘If this group makes it I’ll commit suicide’ and ‘it’s too loud, too repetitive, too predictable’ are representative quotes) it never was cool, but 46 years later it can stand proudly alongside any of the hard rock, blues rock, progressive rock or rock-rock albums of its era.

And it was an era of rock; bear in mind that that particular year also spawned Deep Purple In Rock, Black Sabbath AND Paranoid, Led Zeppelin III and many more and, while the mighty Heep are perceived to be a relatively underground cousin of Deep Purple & co, they too ponced around the US in Lear jets and limos in a way that few new rock bands do nowadays. Judged on those 1970 albums alone, the band were clearly up there with the best. Slightly less heavy (but who wasn’t?) than Black Sabbath, more jazzy and poetic than Deep Purple, more riff-centric and bluesy than (1970-era) Led Zeppelin, …Very ‘Eavy… is monolithic but nimble, straightforward but, except in its most bludgeoning moments, not at all simplistic.

Unlike most decades, the 60s is often felt, culturally, to have a clear and decisive ending; from the perspective of nowadays, the Stones at Altamont and the Manson Family in Death Valley ended the peace & love/flower power era that was already shaken by the revolutionary events and protests of 1968. But the pre-Uriah Heep story, that of a band called Spice, (essentially Heep sans organist Ken Hensley), talent-spotted while playing in ‘The Blues Loft’ in High Wycombe, could not be more redolent of the hippy era. To me, the best work of Uriah Heep always has a hazy aroma late 60s underground optimism and …Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble is a kind of time capsule of a world almost as distant and quaint now as the Victorian Age. This was a time when – as the great Charles Shaar Murray wrote (in a Cream magazine T-Rex article in 1972, just as the world moved into another cultural phase) – “Any gentle freak who believed that Nostradamus and King Arthur were alive and well in a UFO hovering somewhere over Glastonbury Tor, or who read Tolkien and Moorcock over his brown rice and apple juice, just had to own the Tyrannosaurus Rex albums...” It was these kind of freaks, one assumes, who in their less gentle moments, wanted to rock out to Spice. In High Wycombe. Incidentally, it may be this very hippy-hangover aura that prevented Uriah Heep from being as influential on the metal scene as their contemporaries, Black Sabbath (whose musical background in blues rock was very similar). Indeed, I can personally testify that the whole flared-trousers-and-moustaches vibe of the Heep (as well as the slightly bland rock they were putting out at the time) was enough to prevent some 80s metal kids from checking out their older work.

Anyway; Spice became a pretty well known band on the progressive rock circuit in the dying years of the 60s. In fact, their music as preserved on the first few LPs is very much ‘progressive’ in the late 60s blues rock sense (in which sense Led Zeppelin were also progressive), but not in the sense that ‘prog’ came to mean as the 70s wore on. Mick Box, founder, guitarist and, to this day the real heart of Uriah Heep, began as a jazz player and it was perhaps this more than anything, that coloured the heavy blues rock that Spice played; parallel to the British Blues boom but not really part of it, the band used elements of the blues, but they were never constrained by its structures.

The Band

Mick Box: guitar

(highly underrated as player, composer & all-round riffmeister)

David Byron: vocals

(a versatile, very English-sounding rock voice, equally at home with swaggering, earthy blues-rock vocalising and delicate fantasy

Ken Hensley: organ, guitar, vocals etc.

(Without Hensley Uriah Heep would have been far more like a standard late 60s blues-rock band)

Paul Newton: bass, vocals

(in the classic 70s tradition the bass is loud, clear & occasionally funky on this album; co-wrote lots of the songs.)

Alex Napier – drums (on half of the album)

(great, agile and subtle drummer, not as thunderous as some contemporaries, but for my money up there with the best; retired after leaving the band I believe)

Nigel “Ollie” Olsson: also drums, plays on a few songs

(another great drummer; went on to play with Elton John after his stint in the Heep)

THE ALBUM

1. Gypsy (Mick Box/David Byron)
The perfect opening track; after the busy little intro the simple, bludgeoning guitar/organ riff provides an excellent backing for David Byron’s authoritative vocal, establishing the Heep as a band of (for the time extremely) heavy sound and somewhat whimsical, romantic preoccupations; hippies in fact. Excellent organ and guitar soloing and harmony backing vocals by pretty much everyone make this a superb manifesto for the band’s approach. 70s heavy rock par excellence

2. Walking In Your Shadow (Paul Newton/David Byron)

An excellent funky drum intro which should be (has been?) sampled leads into a dynamic blues-rock song with another perfect vocal by David Byron. The song is a relatively understated version of the kind of pleased-with-itself blues rock swagger that Whitesnake were to excel in later in the decade, and it has an excellent Mick Box solo too.

3. Come Away Melinda (Hellerman/Minkoff)

A delicate and drama-filled version of the much-covered melancholy anti-war folk/protest song. Byron’s clear enunciation and expressive voice make the most of the (possibly slightly twee and pretentious) post-apocalyptic lyrics. Lovely mellotron-flute intro and lovely acoustic guitar; the key word is ‘lovely’. The great vocal is made even better by imaginative use of stereo.

4. Lucy Blues (Mick Box/David Byron)

A somewhat quizzical and sad blues-rock song, Lucy Blues is, despite occasional claims at the time that they were Led Zep clones, the closest Uriah Heep comes to Led Zeppelin on this album; not all that close. And with all respect to the iconic Robert Plant, David Byron managed the same kind of expressiveness without the melodramatic whimpering and screaming. As the original sleevenote remarks; ‘hardly unpredictable but rather pleasant’. Nice piano work adds to the barroom blues feel, far less epic than the usual Heep sound. Byron’s English accent gives the song a strange and unique flavour, as it tends to do on all of the more blues-based material – one of the features that makes early Uriah Heep so distinctive. Meanwhile, Ken Hensley proves himself master of the classic blues Hammond organ solo too.

5. Dreammare (Paul Newton)

Side two commences with one of the heavier songs on the album. Dreammare has an ominous organ intro, a strangely funky, reverby riff and a suitably feverish quality, enhanced by the speaker-to-speaker shimmer on the vocals. A nicely bad-tempered, squalling guitar solo too. This is perhaps the only song where the claims of sheer noisy unpleasantness could be deemed fair enough; for non-rock fans anyway.

6. Real Turned On (Mick Box/David Byron/Paul Newton)

Proto-Whitesnake swagger again (but even more so), Real Turned On is a cocky mid-tempo blues-rock tune with an angular riff, several good solos, tons of slide guitar by Ken Hensley and a good naturedly sleazy David Byron trying to lure a young woman with wine and so forth. Unreconstructed 60s freewheeling sexual (and arguably, but arguably not, sexist) revolution rock, it ends, oddly, with screeds of apocalyptic feedback.

7. I’ll Keep On Trying (Mick Box/David Byron)

Archetypically 70s flared-jeans hard rock, with organs, screaming guitar and an impassioned David Byron vocal. The tune skips between sinister-toned, portentious organ and wailing vocals and nimble-fingered fiddlyness during which every band member gets to show off, before settling into a heavy blues riff. There are tranquil interludes and dramatic, siren-like guitar and even a Zappa-esque wah-wah solo. If you don’t like this, you probably don’t like Uriah Heep; fair enough.

8. Wake Up (Set Your Sights) (Mick Box/David Byron)

The final track on the album is also the most ‘progressive’, jazzy one, which manages to encapsulate all of the facets of early Heepdom in six minutes. The intro has David Byron intoning ‘aaahhh’s over a bass and organ scales before a dramatic, grandiose verse about justice prevailing, before the music becomes a kind of hoppity, percussive jazz with some excellent bass playing and very understated guitars. As the song builds (with some enjoyably silly vocalising; ‘justice, justice, just-iiiice‘ etc) it breaks not into rock but another jazzy verse/chorus and then a lovely soft pastoral interlude before fading out. Byron’s vocal is highly theatrical and generally one of the best he ever recorded and it’s just an excellent, dynamic end to a superb album that people don’t like as much as I do; their loss.

As if all this wasn’t enough, the album is housed in one of the great rock sleeves of the era: a fallen warrior (David Byron in fact) covered in cobwebs, the darkness surrounding him only broken by the (superbly-fonted) logo and title. The gatefold features a photo of the band onstage.

The album was released in the US in a different and slightly inferior form (missing Lucy Blues, and featuring instead the great Bird of Prey from the band’s second album, Salisbury). The US album is simply called Uriah Heep and its cover – a kind of dragon/wyrm thing – is not one of the great rock sleeves of the era.

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Although …Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble is one of those rare perfectly formed albums that can only be marred by adding bonus tracks to, it is also one of those albums I have to own on multiple formats, and the 1996 CD release adds bonus tracks, thus:

Gypsy (single edit)
What is says; a shorter version, omitting the organ intro & so forth. Pretty great, though unnecessary

Come Away Melinda
An early version recorded by Spice before they changed their name to Uriah Heep. Interesting, not hugely different from the album version really, but Byron’s vocal has less feeling and it’s generally not quite as good.

Born in a Trunk
A rocking Spice tune, this features the kind of dynamics that early Heep excelled in, plus another strangely English David Byron vocal and some great funky drum breaks.

BMG’s latest version is in all regards superior to the 1996 version: wisely retaining the whole of the original album (but with beautifully remastered sound) as disc one of two, it adds an entire (and to be fair, slightly inferior) version of the album on disc two. These are unreleased (earlier or alternate takes) of most of the songs, plus the US mix of Bird of Prey and a nice Spice track called Magic Lantern.

Although the earlier versions are, naturally, mostly not quite as good as the finished ones, they are nearly there and, while Spice without Hensley can never equal Uriah Heep, that late 60s atmosphere, an indefinable (and you would think incompatible) mixture of unpretentious ‘let’s just get up and play’ attitude and love of airy, fantastical romance is present in its most concentrated form.

REAL-TIME REVIEWS: YAADON KE BAARAAT (1973)

Something of an experiment; reviewing an album while actually listening to it. As will be seen, the downside of this approach is that there isn’t much time for fact-checking and so forth and it leads to a lot of description rather than actual criticism, but I thought I’d leave it as it is to give the most immediate response to the record. In this case, a record I have heard lots of times before, which is helpful (and, if there were rules, cheating; but there aren’t). Anyway; the info:

Yaadon Ki Baaraat Original Soundtrack (Odeon Records, 1973) Composer/Musical Director: Rahul Dev Burman

Firstly; the sleeve for this record is a fantastic pop art design, presumably echoing the poster design. I haven’t checked to see what the story is about, but the cool guy with the guitar and the possibly less cool singer standing in front of a drum kit with ‘The Avengers’ written on it suggests a preoccupation with western pop/rock music, which is also evident on the soundtrack itself. Also worth mentioning is the lovely thick and heavy vinyl. But putting the record on now…

This amazing soundtrack suggests that for Bollywood, or at least for Rahul Dev Burman, whatever the calendar may have said, the year was really 1966; that heady period of spaghetti westerns, garage rock, late surf, early psychedelia, James Bond and Adam West’s (and Nelson Riddle’s) Batman. All of that is telescoped into the eighteen thrillingly eccentric minutes of side one; it may be (in fact the pictures from the sleeve suggest) that this for-the-time retro sound has something to do with the film’s storyline.

Side One
lekar ham diwana dil
Beginning with a roared ‘Hey!‘ followed by thumping, echo-laden percussion, fuzz and wah-wah guitars and a main theme which could be described as ‘Surf Munsters Go James Bond’ with added spaghetti western trumpet, this first track really has everything. There’s even what sounds like go-go dancer girls (how can it sound like go-go dancers? It just does!) singing a ‘shake-shake’ refrain, before Kishore Kumar sings the actual song with some classic Bollywood strings coming in for good measure. The verse is then sung again in the amazing unearthly high tones of (‘brimful of’) Asha Bhosle. There’s a great swinging beat – which in fact remains much the same for the majority of the album, and an expressive guitar solo and wah wah organ(!) This track sets out the basic texture of the album; distorted, strummed acoustic guitars (I think) with heavy percussion, all swimming in swimming-pool reverb. Kumar and Bhosle sing together, Bhosle groans sexily, there’s a bit of heavy brass and beat break with added ‘shake shake’s, lots of drama and then the track ends with a reverberating wah-wah-ed chord. One of the grooviest pieces of music you will ever hear.

aap ke kamre men The rest of side one is taken up by aap ke kamre men, a peculiar, live-sounding medley of song fragments linked with dialogue (with odd phrases in English) and lots of rapturous applause.
Beginning not with a ‘hey’ but with a guttural ‘HAA!!’ and some extremely piercing reverb/fuzz guitar and deep, churning percussion, the first part features an instrumental break strangely reminiscent of the Rawhide theme and then abruptly ends with an eruption of rapturous applause. There follows some dialogue (sounds like a compere of some sort), mostly in Hindi except that it begins ‘Ladies and Gentlemen…’ and ends ‘the song goes like this...’
The next segment of the (sort of) medley is one of the album’s best tunes and pops up again and again through the rest of the soundtrack. It’s the ‘Yaadon Ke Baaraat’ tune, which starts out as a haunting, atmospheric, (again) reverb-laden flickering guitar part and a singer (probably Kishore Kumar again) humming and then singing the tune. After a couple of minutes there’s a very odd interlude with strangely watery-sounding beat guitars and a guy singing ‘zoo zoo zoo zoo’ before dissolving into laughter and more applause. ‘Ladies and gentlemen…. ‘ some hindi dialogue and another great guitar intro and more humming with more rapturous applause. As the not-quite-medley continues, it wanders down some strange avenues, not least a strangely bare segment where a male voice, accompanied only by bass, percussion and a deep halo of echo sings a peculiarly wandering melody. Even the most haunting segments are brief though, brutally cut off by the applause-and-announcer and once by a brilliant reverb guitar break.

About half way through the track there seems to be some kind of audience participation section, where the crowd joins in on a section with a folky beat flavour. At eighteen minutes, the long medley isn’t really all that long; but it includes several resprises of the ‘Yaadon Ke Baaraat‘ theme, a minimalistic drum solo, lots of laughter, strummed acoustic guitars and more Asha Bhosle; it’s groovy.
Side Two
o meri soni
This moodily dramatic song is perhaps the most (to Western ears) typically ‘Bollywood’ track on the album and opens with soaring strings over richly textured acoustic strumming. Kishore Kumar’s impassioned vocal has a slightly sillly ‘I loooove yooou’ chorus, but the not-unlikeable cheesiness becomes something far more substatial (but still a bit cheesy) with a great bass/guitar/string break and ascending string. The melody wanders and Asha Bhosle joins in with her own piercing beautiful ‘I love you’s and another verse/chorus. The song ends as a duet, accompanied by organ and strings; it’s very cool and then fades out
yaadon ki baarat – This time Asha Bhosle sings the atmospheric tune acapella before the brilliantly shimmering guitar part is reprised. The mysterious atmosphere is enhanced by multitracked Asha Bhosles, strings and organ; and then it;s over all too soon.

chura liya hai tum ne – This is one of the most beautiful of Asha Bhosle’s performances on the album. The song has a slow beat and big jangling guitar part and even a hint of Spaghetti Westernish sounding trumpet. There’s also a lovely violin solo

yaadon ke baaraat – The theme tune appears one last time, now sung by three male voices. The tune is as lovely as always but lacks the Asha Bhosle magic. It’s very possible that (as with opera) I just prefer female Bollywood voices to male ones.

As will be obvious, I know very little about Bollywood musicals or their soundtracks. What I have learned from the five or six I own though, is that Rahul Dev Burman was some kind of musical genius and Asha Bhosle sings like an angel. Both of these factors are prominent on the Yaadon Ke Baaraat soundtrack, which is a masterpiece of slightly kitchy grooviness, brilliantly performed and recorded.