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

the end of all songs

A question occurred to me while watching a documentary about Joy Division ; is there any better ending to a song than Ian Curtis bellowing FEELING FEELING FEELING FEELING FEELING FEELING FEEEEEELING! as the music clatters to a halt at the end of “Disorder”? Lyrically, despite its explosiveness, it isn’t cathartic, but in a musical way it is – for the listener at least – because until that point, the tempo has been too fast and the lyrics too complex for Curtis’s voice to do whatever the deep, melancholy equivalent of ‘taking flight’ is. There’s an underappreciated art to ending songs and it’s not something that even great bands do infallibly or that all great songs feature. Not all songs need to end with a crescendo or flourish, and very few songs benefit from just grinding to a halt or being cut off mid-flow, but the sense of completeness when a song (especially a relatively short song) ends perfectly is one of the things that makes you want to hear it again.

“Decades,” the final song on Closer, the final Joy Division album, is one of relatively few songs (given their vast number) where fading out at the end doesn’t seem like a cop out. There’s nothing wrong with fading out a song, but often it just feels like an easy option taken in order to dodge the question of how to end a song properly. Which is fine, except in live performances, where it’s difficult to satisfactorily replicate a fade-out. Partly that’s because of the practicality of it – does the band all try to play more quietly? Do they just get the sound person to turn down the volume, which works, unless you’re close to the stage, which, in that situation is sub-optimal, since hearing the unamplified sounds from the stage (drums clattering, guitars plinking etc) is kind of a mood-killer? And if so, when do they all stop? There’s also the awkwardness of the audience reaction; the crowd might start cheering/jeering before the song is actually finished, or they might not start until someone in the band indicates that that the song is definitely over, which is also not ideal. Basically, it feels artificial – but obviously it has the appeal of being simple – haven’t thought of a proper ending for you song? Just keep playing and fade it out afterwards. But Closer needed to fade into silence and it does.

Another musical ending this week – a seriously clunky segue this but bear with me – was the death of Ozzy Osbourne, a week after what was explicitly intended to be his final performance, a different kind of ending and a very unusual one in the music world where ‘farewell’ tours can become an annual occurrence and no split is too acrimonious to be healed by the prospect of bigger and bigger sums of money.

On paper, any kinship between Ozzy and Joy Division seems unlikely to say the least, but the ears say otherwise. Regardless of the punk roots of Joy Division, the only real precursor to a song like “New Dawn Fades” from their 1979 debut album Unknown Pleasures is Black Sabbath. And it’s not only the oppressively doomladen atmosphere, though that’s important; Bernard Sumner’s opening guitar melody is remarkably like Tony Iommi’s melodic solo from “War Pigs” – a classic song, incidentally, which has one of the worst endings of any great song ever written. Presumably, Black Sabbath had no idea how to end it and so did something worse than a fade out; speeding it up until it ends with a comical squeak. Oh well. But anyway, there are many moments, especially on Unknown Pleasures, where Joy Division sound like a cross between Black Sabbath and the Doors, although I’m sure neither of those things were in the minds of Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris and Ian Curtis, any more than they were in the consciousness of the music journalists who lauded the band in ’79, who mostly tended to see punk as year zero, the new beginning from which the influence of anything pretentious or overblown had been erased.

That basic idea was one I also accepted without much thought as a teenage indie fan in the early 90s when Joy Division – by then defunct for a decade – became one of my favourite bands. With the honourable, weekly music paper-approved exception of the Velvet Underground, I was dubious about anything old or anything that I considered overtly commercial. Without giving it much thought I just assumed that mentality came from my reading of Melody Maker and the NME. I had definitely accepted their pre-Britpop genealogy of cool rock music that essentially began with the Velvet Underground and then continued via punk and post-punk into 80s indie guitar music, most of which existed firmly outside of the mainstream of the UK top 40. But reflecting on Ozzy on the news of his death, it seems my snobbery has older roots.

I don’t remember when I first heard Ozzy Osbourne’s name, but I do remember when I first heard his music. It was 1988 and I was about a year away from growing out of metal, but still immersed in it for the time being. Within metal itself I had fairly wide taste and my favourite bands included many of the biggest metal bands of the era; Iron Maiden, Metallica, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Helloween, Megadeth, Suicidal Tendencies, Queensrÿche, Slayer, Anthrax, plus many more. At that point I mostly discovered music via magazines (especially Metal Forces) and my friends. In addition to my modest collection of records and tapes I had many more cassettes that had been made for me by friends and I spent a good bit of my spare time making tapes for them; it was fun. And so; Ozzy. A friend had taped a couple of albums for me on a C90 cassette (the odd pairing, it seems now, of Mötley Crüe’s Girls, Girls Girls and Slayer’s Reign in Blood) and filled up the rest of the tape with random metal songs, among them “Foaming at the Mouth” by Rigor Mortis, “The Brave” by Metal Church, “Screamin’ in the Night” by Krokus and Ozzy’s latest single, “Miracle Man”. I pretty much hated it. I thought Ozzy’s voice was unbearably nasal and awful and the production really harsh and tinny (that was probably just the tape though).

Teenage metal fans were obliged to like Elvira in 1989

By then, I knew who Ozzy was, and was aware of his bat-biting notoriety, though that definitely seemed to be a bigger deal in the USA than it was in the UK (or at least in my corner of rural Scotland). At some point just a little later, Cassandra Peterson, or more accurately Elvira, Mistress of the Dark presented a short series of metal-related shows for the BBC. One episode included Penelope Spheeris’ fantastic documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years, which includes one of my favourite Ozzy interviews, but also concert footage of Ozzy during his ‘mad housewife’ era when his image seemed to be based on Jackie Collins’s style at the time. I love that era of Ozzy now, but at the time I thought it was laughably awful. It must have been around that time that I also became aware of Ozzy’s history with Black Sabbath, who I only knew in their then-current incarnation with Tony Martin, which again I now love but at the time thought irremediably middle aged and boring. The fact that Ozzy’s Black Sabbath was from the 70s meant that I pretty much dismissed them without needing to hear them. When Elvira showed a classic early Led Zeppelin concert in black and white I also found that tiresomely old and dull, especially in comparison with the Napalm Death concert she presented. It’s hard to relate to now, but in the 80s, for me – and I think for most people I knew of my age – the 70s was cheesy, embarrassing and possibly funny, but with no redeeming features. Actually, that’s how the 80s were for a good part of the 90s too; changed days.

Again, like most of the metal fans I knew, I loved metal, but I mostly didn’t like rock. Metal meant precision, virtuosity, heaviness and speed. Rock (to this kind of metal fan) was simplistic, old-fashioned and (worse) commercial. Oddly, I never thought to include the very glam-oriented hair metal bands I liked in the rock camp; which I can now see is where they really belonged. I loved bands like Poison, Faster Pussycat and Pretty Boy Floyd, despite the fact that their very obvious ambition was to be famous and that they wrote schmaltzy ballads. I made the same exception, mysteriously, for Guns ‘n’ Roses, who I loved. But I thought of them as metal, not rock.

Cliff Burton rocking like it’s 1974 (c.1986)

It was a distinction that my parents’ generation seemed simply not to understand. To them and their friends if you liked Metallica wasn’t that basically the same as liking Meat Loaf? But I was of the generation for whom, from the earliest days of primary school, the idea of being seen in flared trousers was the stuff of nightmares. That horror of the era we were born in was hard to let go of., which is no doubt partly why the legacy of punk was easy to embrace later. In 1988, when I first heard them, Metallica instantly became one of my favourite bands and …And Justice For All one of my favourite albums. A crucial part of that was that the band, as I first knew them, looked cool to me. When, probably later that year, I first heard Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets I loved those too, but the sight of the great Cliff Burton (RIP) in his denim bellbottoms with his middle-parted hair and little moustache, looking like he should have been in Status Quo circa 1974 was extremely cringe-inducing; that was not cool. Not in Scotland in 1988 anyway.

It took a while for that attitude to change. One of the gateway albums that led young teen me away from heavy metal and towards the indie/alternative world was Faith No More’s The Real Thing, which included a cover of “War Pigs.” And at that time the song still felt old fashioned and less good than the rest of the album to me. It was only after a few years of hardcore indie snobbery that my attitude really changed. As my adolescence got to the more painfully introspective stage I stopped listening to metal, having been introduced to things like the Pixies and Ride and simultaneously discovering slightly older music like The Smiths, The Cure, Joy Division and the Jesus & Mary Chain. The part of me that still liked loud and heavy guitars didn’t care so much about precision anymore and so alongside the typical UK indie stuff, I also liked grunge for a while, mainly Mudhoney, Tad and Nirvana, but especially grunge-adjacent weirdness like the Butthole Surfers and Sonic Youth. That would seem to provide an obvious bridge to the hard rock of the 70s, since virtually all grunge-oriented bands referenced Sabbath and Kiss, but no.

In fact, what happened was that in the Britpop era, I loved 70s-influenced bands like Pulp and Suede (I was never a fan of Blur or Oasis) and as Britpop became dull I started to get into the older music that Britpop referenced. At first it was mostly Bowie and Lou Reed, but after reading Shots From the Hip (referenced a million times on this website) by Charles Shaar Murray, I broadened my horizons to include 70s glam in general (Roxy Music, Eno, Jobriath, Raw Power-era Stooges, but also the bubblegum stuff) and other things that Murray mentioned, whether positively or disparagingly. The latter seems odd but I’ve discovered lots of things I like that way. And suddenly, Ozzy was inescapable (though less so than he is this week).

I bought the Charles Shaar Murray book because Bowie was featured heavily in it; but he also wrote about Black Sabbath. I bought a book by the great photographer Mick Rock, because he had photographed Bowie and Lou Reed and Iggy and John Cale; but who should be in there but Ozzy, looking uncharacteristically thoughtful. I bought old 70s music annuals from glam and tail end of glam era; Fab 208 maybe – because they had Bowie and Mott the Hoople and Pilot and whatnot in them, but inside there was also mention of Black Sabbat. I remember a paragraph about their then-forthcoming compilation We Sold Our Souls for Rock ‘n’ Roll being especially intriguing.

Birmingham in the 1970s by Peter Trulock

Anyway, one thing led to another and I spent a large chunk of the late 90s and early 2000s immersing myself in the music of the 1970s. At first it was primarily glam, but then all kinds of rock, pop, soul, funk etc. At some point it started including bands that I’d long been aware of and never liked; like Led Zeppelin, Kiss – and Black Sabbath. The first Black Sabbath album I owned was Sabotage, bought for 50 pence in a charity shop. The texture of the sleeve was, interestingly, the same texture as my LP of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, but the imagery was a little less classy, thanks to Bill Ward’s checked underpants being visible through his red tights; oh well. Ozzy sounded pretty much as I remembered from “Miracle Man,” but primed by Charles Shaar Murray’s description of Ozzy [caterwauling] about something or other in a locked basement and with a more sympathetic production and – crucially – the far more bare and elemental sound of Black Sabbath, so unappealing just a few years earlier, he sounded right. And then, when I heard the earliest Black Sabbath albums, Black Sabbath and Paranoid, both from 1970, one of the things they reminded me of, most unexpectedly, was Joy Division.

Black Sabbath in 1970 by Keef, Joy Division in 1979 by Anton Corbijn

Yes, the whole aura is different, Sabbath were surly and aggressive where Joy Division were solemn and withdrawn, but there’s something about the simplicity of the sound. Geezer and Hooky’s basses took up as much space as Tony and Bernard’s guitars. Bill Ward, like Stephen Morris, was a drummer who brought a strong dance/funk element into the band’s rock music without any sense of incongruity. Ozzy and Ian Curtis are worlds apart as vocalists, but both have a despairing intensity that makes them stand out, even within their respective genres. Both bands were from the grim, grey, hopeless industrial 1970s north of England, but whereas Joy Division were definitively a product of Manchester, with all the gritty coolness that conferred upon them, Sabbath were solidly of Birmingham, with all of the perceived oafishness and lack of credibility that entailed in the music press at least. Both singers were self-destructive too, but the same year that Ian Curtis tragically ended his life, Ozzy was reflecting on his self-destructive behaviour in “Suicide Solution”* and starting his life anew, launching a solo career which, against all expectations, made him an even bigger star and ultimately the icon who is being mourned today, far more widely than I’m sure he would ever have imagined. It was a good ending.

*Ozzy was always a far more thoughtful lyricist than he’s given credit for; I can’t think of any other artist from the aggressively cocky 80s hair metal scene who would have written the glumly confessional anthem “Secret Loser” from Ozzy’s 1986 album The Ultimate Sin

Hulme, Manchester in the 1970s, by David Chadwick

Because I’m a nerd, and not just a music nerd, writing this piece made me think of Michael Moorcock’s elegiac sci-fi/fantasy novel novel, The End of All Songs, published in 1976, the year that Ian Curtis, Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner met at a Sex Pistols concert in the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester, the year that Black Sabbath released their seventh album, Technical Ecstasy, generally agreed to be the one where the cracks started to show in the Ozzy-led lineup but one of my favourites. Moorcock took the title of his novel from a poem by the Victorian writer Ernest Dowson, which feels appropriate to end with, since fading out is kind of a hassle, text-wise.

With pale, indifferent eyes, we sit and wait
For the drop’d curtain and the closing gate:
This is the end of all the songs man sings.
Ernest Dowson, Dregs (1899)

time for a change; the death of a decade

Between the ages of 14 and 16 or thereabouts, the things I probably loved the most – or at least the most consistently – were horror (books and movies) and heavy metal.

These loves changed (and ended, for a long time) at around the same time as each other in a way that I’m sure is typical of adolescence, but which also seemed to reflect bigger changes in the world. Reading this excellent article that references the end of the 80s horror boom made me think; are these apparent beginnings and endings really mainly internal ones that we only perceive as seismic shifts because of how they relate to us? After all, Stephen King, Clive Barker, James Herbert & co continued to have extremely successful careers after I stopped buying their books, and it’s not like horror movies or heavy metal ground to a halt either. But still; looking back, the turn of the 80s to the 90s still feels like a change of era and of culture in a way that not every decade does (unless you’re a teenager when it happens perhaps?) But why should 1989/90 be more different than say, 85/86? Although time is ‘organised’ in what feels like an arbitrary manner (the time it takes the earth to travel around the sun is something which I don’t think many of us experience instinctively or empirically as we do with night and day), decades do seem to develop their own identifiable ‘personalities’ somehow, or perhaps we simply sort/filter our memories of the period until they do so.

“The 80s” is a thing that means many different things to different people; but in the western world its iconography and soundtrack have been agreed on and packaged in a way that, if it doesn’t necessarily reflect your own experience, it at least feels familiar if you were there. What the 2010s will look like to posterity is hard to say; but the 2020s seem to have established themselves as something different almost from the start; whether they will end up as homogeneous to future generations as the 1920s seem to us now is impossible to say at this point; based on 2020 so far, hopefully not.

I sometimes feel like my adolescence began at around the age of 11 and ended some time around 25, but still, my taste in music, books, films etc went through a major change in the second half of my teens which was surely not coincidental. But even trying to look at it objectively, it really does seem like everything else was changing too. From the point of view of a teenager, the 80s came to a close in a way that few decades since have done; in world terms, the cold war – something that had always been in the background for my generation – came to an end. Though that was undoubtedly a euphoric moment, 80s pop culture – which had helped to define what ‘the west’ meant during the latter period of that war – seemed simultaneously to be running out of steam.

“The 80s” (I actually owned this poster as a kid, which seems extremely bizarre now)

My generation grew up with a background of brainless action movies starring people like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, who suddenly seemed to be laughable and obsolete, teen comedies starring ‘teens’ like Andrew McCarthy and Robert Downey, Jr who were now uneasily in their 20s. We had both old fashioned ‘family entertainment’ like Little & Large and Cannon & Ball which was, on TV at least. in its dying throes; but then so was the ‘alternative comedy’ boom initiated by The Young Ones, as its stars became the new mainstream. The era-defining franchises we had grown up with – Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Police Academy – seemed to be either finished or on their last legs. Comics, were (it seemed) suddenly¹ semi-respectable and re-branded as graphic novels, even if many of the comics themselves remained the same old pulpy nonsense in new, often painted covers. The international success of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira in 1988 opened the gates for the manga and anime that would become part of international pop culture from the 90s onwards.

the 80s: book covers as faux movie posters – black/red/metallic; extremely non-psychedelic

Those aforementioned things I loved the most in the late 80s, aged 14-15 – horror fiction and heavy metal music – were changing too. The age of the blockbuster horror novel wasn’t quite over, but its key figures; Stephen King, James Herbert, Clive Barker², Shaun Hutson – all seemed to be losing interest in the straightforward horror-as-horror novel³, diversifying into more fantastical or subtle, atmospheric or ironic kinds of stories. In movies too, the classic 80s Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th franchises – as definitively 80s as anything else the decade produced – began to flag in terms of both creativity and popularity. Somewhere between these two models of evolution and stagnation were the metal bands I liked best. These seemed to either be going through a particularly dull patch, with personnel issues (Iron Maiden, Anthrax) or morphing into something softer (Metallica) or funkier Suicidal Tendencies). As with the influence of Clive Barker in horror, so bands who were only partly connected with metal (Faith No More, Red Hot Chilli Peppers) began to shape the genre. All of which occurred as I began to be obsessed with music that had nothing to do with metal at all, whether contemporary (Pixies, Ride, Lush, the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Jesus Jones – jesus, the Shamen etc) or older (The Smiths, Jesus and Mary Chain, The Doors⁴, the Velvet Underground).

Still; not many people are into the same things at 18 as they were at 14; and it’s tempting to think that my feelings about the end of the decade had more to do with my age than the times themselves; but they were indeed a-changing, and a certain aspect of the new decade is reflected in editor Peter K. Hogan’s ‘Outro’ to the debut issue of the somewhat psychedelically-inclined comic Revolver (published July 1990):

Why Revolver?
Because what goes around comes around, and looking out my window it appears to be 1966 again (which means – with any luck – we should be in for a couple of good years ahead of us). Because maybe – just maybe – comics might now occupy the slot that rock music used to. Because everything is cyclical and nothing lasts forever (goodbye, Maggie). Because the 90s are the 60s upside down (and let’s do it right, this time). Because love is all and love is everything and this is not dying. Any more stupid questions?

This euphoric vision of the 90s was understandable (when Margaret Thatcher finally resigned in 1990 there was a generation of by now young adults who couldn’t remember any other Prime Minister) but it aged quickly. The ambiguity of the statement ‘the 90s are the 60s upside down’ is embodied in that disclaimer (and let’s do it right, this time) and turned out to be prophetic; within a month of the publication of Revolver issue1 the Gulf War had begun. Aspects of that lost version of the 90s lived on in rave culture, just as aspects of the summer of love lived on through the 70s in the work of Hawkwind and Gong, but to posterity the 90s definitely did not end up being the 60s vol.2. In the end, like the 80s, the 90s (like every decade?) is defined, depending on your age and point of view, on a series of apparently incompatible things; rave and grunge, Jurassic Park and Trainspotting, Riot Grrrl and the Spice Girls, New Labour and Saddam Hussein.

That tiny oasis of positivity in 1990 – between the Poll Tax Riots on 31st March and the declaration of the first Gulf War on the 2nd August is, looking back, even shorter than I remember, and some of the things I loved in that strange interregnum between adolescence and adulthood (which lasted much longer than those few months) – perhaps because they seemed grown up then – are in some ways more remote now than childhood itself. So… conclusions? I don’t know, the times change as we change and they change us as we change them; a bit too Revolver, a lot too neat. And just as we are something other than the sum of our parents, there’s some part of us too that seems to be independent of the times we happen to exist in. I’ll leave the last words to me, aged 18, not entirely basking in the spirit of peace and love that seemed to be ushered in by the new decade.

¹ in reality this was the result of a decade of quiet progress led by writers like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Frank Miller
² although 100% part of the 80s horror boom, Barker is perhaps more responsible than any other writer for the end of its pure horror phase
³ Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, though dating from earlier in the 80s, appeared in print with much fanfare in the UK in the late 80s and, along with the more sci-fi inflected The Tommyknockers and the somewhat postmodern The Dark Half seemed to signal a move away from the big, cinematic horror novels like Pet Sematary, Christine, Cujo et al. In fact, looking at his bibliography, there really doesn’t appear to be the big shift around the turn of the 90s that I remember, except that a couple of his new books around that time (Dark Tower III, Needful Things, Gerald’s Game for one reason or another didn’t have half the impact that It had on me. That’s probably the age thing). James Herbert, more clearly, abandoned the explicit gore of his earlier work for the more or less traditional ghost story Haunted (1988) and the semi-comic horror/thriller Creed (1990)– a misleadingly portentous title which always makes me think of that Peanuts cartoon where Snoopy types This is a story about Greed. Joe Greed lived in a small town in Colorado… Clive Barker, who had already diverged into dark fantasy with Weaveworld, veered further away from straightforward horror with The Great & Secret Show while reliably fun goremeister Shaun Hutson published the genuinely dark Nemesis, a book with little of the black humour – and only a fraction of the bodycount – of his earlier work. ⁴ the release of Oliver Stone’s The Doors in 1991 is as 90s as the 50s of La Bamba (1987) and Great Balls of Fire (1989) was 80s. Quite a statement.