Air Keyboarding

 Watching the repeat of Heavy Metal Britannia a couple of weeks ago, I found myself thinking that the documentary could well be the last word on that era. None of the participants were getting any younger. And anyway, that period of time from 1970 to 1985 or so that forms a big part of my record collection now seems increasingly a remote, historical era, as any quick glance at YouTube of a Sweeney episode will attest. Jon Lord was part of the documentary, white-haired, but otherwise looking fairly healthy; I wasn't aware of his illness and was surprised and saddened when I awoke today to find out that he had passed away after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

Deep Purple were one of the first bands I loved. When we had to design a screen-printed T-Shirt as part of my first year art class, I chose the Purple Records logo. Burn was one of the first albums I bought with my own money, from a record shop in Rose Street in Edinburgh, when I was down visiting my brother who was at college there. That was 1981 or so and I still have it, one of the few vinyl records that I bought in the early 80s that didn't get purged during one move or other. It's a good album.

I've fallen in and out of love with Purple over the years, and I'm not sure what I really think of them these days. Of the "big three" of Sabbath, Zeppelin and Purple, they were the only one who released a decent live album during their lifetime, and also had the best producer in Martin Birch, meaning that their records tend to have the best sound of the three. But they couldn't write songs like Sabbath or Zeppelin, and Machine Head and Burn are their only albums that I can listen to the whole way through.

Yet when they were good they were great, and Jon Lord was a big part of that. The jazzy keyboard and guitar dueling in the middle of Speed King is wonderful, Space Truckin' is a rare example of a heavy rock song whose riff is played on the keyboard, not the guitar, while his keyboard-driven instrumental A 200 from Burn is one of my favourite Deep Purple songs.

One last memory. when I was at college in Brighton in the 90s, a friend told me about what happened one evening in Hungry Years, the local Heavy Metal disco. Apparently, Highway Star came on, prompting some mass air guitaring, which lasted until after the first chorus when Lord's keyboard solo came in. Then, at once, everyone stretched their arms in front of them, like drunken Frankenstein's Monsters and then started to air keyboard along to the solo.

Air keyboarding. RIP Jon Lord, and thanks for the music.

Axe Attack

 Whatever happened to K Tel? There was a time when TV commercial breaks were full of adverts for compilations with names like Disco Power, Keep on Truckin' and Music Machine. These were as ubiquitous as chimps sipping tea or martian robots mocking earthlings for eating fresh vegetables instead of dehydrated starch. Then, like Prize yoghurts and Just Juice, they disappeared from view, and are presumably now only seen in the great Woolworth's record racks in the sky.

Axe Attack was K Tel's attempt to cash in on the burst of interest in all things Heavy Metal at the start of the 80s. It used the same template as other K Tel records: it sported a cheesy cover, had cheap flimsy packaging and crammed lots of tracks onto the vinyl, sacrificing sound quality for perceived value for money. It ought to have been awful. Instead, it's arguably the best metal compilation ever, and may have done more than any other record at the time to introduce impressionable youngsters to the dark joy of spending your disposable income on records with devils on the cover.

Whoever compiled the songs played pretty safely: Paranoid, Bomber, Highway to Hell, All Night Long, Running Free and Breaking the Law were all present and accounted for (mind you, there was so much metal reaching the Top 30 in 1980 that there's a case for saying that even a tea-sipping chimpanzee could have compiled a great metal compilation). Aside from Maiden, the NWOBHM was represented by Girlschool's excellent cover of Race with the Devil, and the rest of the album was completed by some well-chosen Heavy Rock songs by folk like UFO, Aerosmith and Ted Nugent (whose Cat Scratch Fever contained the line "well I make a pussy purr with a stroke of my hand" which flew right over the head of your 10-year old author).

The album was advertised on TV and sold well, in fact well enough for K-Tel to come up with Axe Attack Vol II, which had a cover even worse than the first one but which kept pretty much to the same template. Anyway, it's exposure and sales meant that this was one of the most common entry points to metal at the time, and if anyone around the age of 40 tries telling you that their first metal album was Highway to Hell or British Steel, the chances are that in reality, it was this cheap devil. It was probably the first metal album I owned, and I'm not ashamed to say it.

One last point. A glance at the tracklisting of Axe Attack reveals the Achilles Heel of the NWOBHM, in the sense that it's full of songs by older bands like Sabbath, Judas Priest, AC/DC, Rainbow etc. Girlschool and Iron Maiden were probably the only acts under 30. And there's the sad thing about the Heavy Metal revival of 79-80: what it really did was revive the careers of the old acts. Only Iron Maiden and Def Leppard went on to really make it big, while acts like Girlschool and Angel Witch never really won the battle for pocket money against folk like Judas Priest or Whitesnake. It's all there, on the back cover. Available in all good record shops. While stocks last.

Remember the Coop

They've just released some mini LP CD editions of Alice Cooper's 70s back catalogue in Japan. They've also been digitally rejiggered (something that has been long overdue for these albums) and the ones I have sound great. But the reason I'm posting about them is that I've never seen CD reissues with such incredible attention to detail as these.

The picture above is the package for the School's Out album. Everything is there, from the folding out desk sleeve, to the tracklisting insert and even (and they're gilding the lily here) a set of mini nonwoven panties to mimic the notorious ones they used on the original vinyl one.

The Muscle of Love one is even more impressive. The cardboard sleeve is an uncanny replica of the one used for the vinyl album, and the inner sleeves are all present and accounted for. Note as well, how they have the correct versions of the Warner Label on the respective CDs. These guys haven't missed a trick.

Of course this just reminds you how much thought and expense went into the packaging on those albums when they first came out. Whether it was 1972 calenders, desks, billion dollar notes or LP sleeves as lunatic asylums, these records have some of the more memorable packaging of the time, and let's be honest, they probably contributed significantly to the band's success. Which in some ways is a shame because those albums didn't really need that much help. The four records that the band made with Bob Ezrin (Love it to Death, Killer, School's Out and Billion Dollar Babies) are all strong albums, especially the last one, which is stuffed to the gills with hits. Though to be fair, others, such as the patchy Muscle of Love needed all the help they could get.

If you know the albums, you'll know that - the odd bit of overproduction aside - they've aged pretty well. Killer in particular sounds as fresh as paint. In fact, it's a bit puzzling why the band isn't regarded more highly: they were undoubtedly influential - the group photo on the cover of the School's Out single (below) was the template for just about every band that hung out on Sunset Strip during the 80s. Come to think of it, maybe that's the problem.

Widow's Weed

I've long believed that there aren't many types of music that can't be improved by the addition of a Black Sabbath riff somewhere. A strategically-placed gonzoid riff is like Tabasco sauce or balsamic vinegar - it can transform the driest bowl of chips or the dullest plate of greens into a satisfying meal.

Which brings me to Folk Rock. Now, I should like Folk Rock, after all, Highway 61 Revisited and John Wesley Harding are two of my favourite albums. However, I find that most of what goes under the banner of Folk Rock these days is heavy on the Folk and light on the Rock; all those plaintive acoustic numbers strummed by scruffy young mean with beards don't do much for me. That sort of thing would be much improved by some Sabbath riffs.

I think Espers get this. The track below is from their second album, Espers II, which I've been playing a lot recently (the fact that they called their second album Espers II already endears me to them: not enough of that these days if you ask me). The album is Folk Rock that's not scared of electric guitars, and this particular track even has some Sabbath riffs to add an extra air of menace. I think it's great. They're on eMusic, if you're a subscriber; if not the album was going cheap on Amazon last I looked, and while you're there you could even pick up their third album, called - you've got it  - Espers III. How can you not like this band?

Recordshopper

The first single I bought was Beat the Clock by Sparks, which I bought from my local Woolies in 1979 or so. I still like Sparks and I like to think that having this as my first single indicates what great musical taste I had as a 10 year old. Actually, the reality is the charts in those years were so strong that you could have sent a chimpanzee into Woolies with a quid and a sign saying "I want a random Top 20 single", and the chances are he would have come out with something pretty decent. Unless he spotted the Pick n Mix counter first, I suppose.

For the next 8 years or so before I went off to college my record buying was mostly done in my local town's music shop (and it was a music shop, not a record shop; there was as much space given over to acoustic guitars, recorders and accordions as there was to Iron Maiden albums). There was nothing cool about the place, it was a family-owned shop that had a couple of racks for records, one of which had Scottish music albums (I hesitate to use the word "folk" here: mostly they were awful records with middle-aged blokes on the cover wearing chunky sweaters and kilts with titles like My Heart is in the Highlands), while the other was for rock and pop. The fact that it has such limited space meant that you soon ended up ordering most of your records, and my friends and I became well-acquainted with the shop's copy of the Music Master catalogue as we ordered such obscure recordings such as Meddle, Houses of the Holy and Master of Reality (before CDs came along back catalogue records seemed to be doomed to obscurity, especially the older ones. You would never see a copy of, say, Pet Sounds or John Wesley Harding in a record shop).

So, happy recollections of more innocent times? No, not really. Most of the time, the ordered records arrived within a week or two, but delays were common, especially if you weren't ordering from the majors. My copy of Black Sabbath's Sabotage, on the cheaper-than-chips NEMS label took seven months to arrive. Seven months! Plus, not everything was available and you would often arrive at the shop hoping to pick up your record only to hear the dread word "deleted".

I now realise that I was buying my records back then in essentially the same way as I buy the majority of my music these days - by mail order. The exception being that I was using the Music Master as opposed to Amazon (and if I could have accessed Amazon on my ZX Spectrum 48K, I would have).

I don't think the music shop is there anymore, not many of them are, having been bit torrented and amazoned to that great high street in the sky. And to be honest, I don't really mourn them. I thought I did, but the process of writing this post has made me realise that, if I'm really honest, I don't. Now on the other hand, I think second hand record shops should be goverment-subsidised, as they are effectively museums of popular culture where you can buy the exhibits. But that's a different post.

Anyway, as it's that time of the year, it's time to wish you all a good Christmas and post a picture of the record below, which may have been the first 12" single that I ever bought (I told you that my 10 year old self had good taste).