Category Archives: 42 records

The start point for 42@42 – 42 records for each of my (at the time) 42 years

Hey now, hey now now

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2. This Corrosion – Sisters of Mercy                                                         When: 1987

If there’s ever a competition to find the worst goth in the history of the UK then I will put my name forwards. I guess this could form the basis of my application.

My first forays into building my own record collection began, in earnest, from the age of around 15. I had a few bits of vinyl from late primary school – notably Abba’s “Super Trouper” LP – and had once traded a T-Rex 7” that had belonged to my dad with my Uncle Steve for… wait for it… Joe Dolce’s “Shaddap You Face”. In my defence I was 9. It’s still not a great defence. However, the arrival of adolescence signaled a renewed interest in music.

Initially it’s fair to say that much of my taste was borrowed, mostly from my parents. Quite a bit of this has stayed with me – Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, Queen, Neil Diamond, Cat Stevens, Meatloaf, Motown, early Rod Stewart – but it’s fair to say that none of it felt like it was really mine. In most cases it literally wasn’t mine – held on a set of old C60 cassettes that my dad insisted on using despite the fact that you couldn’t fit an album on one side. For a very, very long time I didn’t realise that Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” was a double album; the only up side of this was it made my first listen of “Comfortably Numb” even more jaw dropping. It’s also fair to say that, in the mid to late 80s, this was a collection of artists that was nobody’s idea of “cool”. Such vagaries aside, of course, I can now confidently state the case for any of them – although Meatloaf is a stretch (but a pertinent one given the song at hand, more of which later).

Ah, “cool”. A concept long past my understanding but one that would have greatly preoccupied my teenage self. At that time it probably would have meant owning a Lacoste cardigan, in some suitably pastel shade, and persuading Caroline from the Number 20 bus to see Top Gun with me. Cool, and Caroline, proved elusive. However, irrespective of what this slippery concept fully entailed, the notion that music, or specifically bands, could be a marker for how you presented yourself to the world seemed to be part of it. If adolescence is the time when you begin to build your own identity, and particularly the way in which that identity is shown to the world, then music was very definitely a set of bricks I wanted to use.

So if you’re thinking that we’re headed, inexorably, towards a declaration that my first, independent view of what was cool happened to be goth then you’d be right.

“This Corrosion” was the first single released by the second (arguably third) version of The Sisters Of Mercy. Rising to prominence – or more appropriately emerging from a heavy fug of dry ice – in Leeds during the early 80s the Sisters had basically imploded come 1985. Singer Andrew Eldritch, beginning a pattern that was to repeat through the band’s life, fell out with then guitarist Wayne Hussey and bassist Craig Adams. The latter two formed a new band called The Sisterhood but were thwarted in establishing their new outfit by Eldritch; concerned that the name was too similar to The Sisters Of Mercy he quickly put out a single under The Sisterhood name in order to legally claim it. Allegedly, though never substantiated, it ended in the civil courts with Eldritch suing his former brothers-in-black for £25,000, and winning. When he then put out the album Gift under The Sisterhood name the opening track, “Jihad“, begins with a female voice intoning two, five, zero, zero, zero. History may judge all of this petty but, regardless, one consequence of the ignominy and acrimony surrounding the split and resulting spat over band names was “This Corrosion”.

Hussey and Adams formed The Mission whilst Eldritch, having seen off the perceived threat to the Sisters’ name, picked up his old band moniker and pressed ahead, taking his music away from the guitar orientation of debut album “First And Last And Always”. The first fruit of the new direction was “This Corrosion”, an eleven minute electro-rock track, featuring a 40 piece choir, produced by Jim Steinman (of “Bat Out Of Hell” fame, hence the earlier Meatloaf reference). You don’t really hear a guitar until a solo break, almost four minutes in.

The song directly relates to the break up of Sisters mark 1. According to Eldritch the lyrics are largely a parody – aimed squarely at Hussey – and are deliberately not intended to mean anything; just to sound “cool”. In that, and to my 15 year old self, he very much succeeded. I had no idea what “kill the king when love is the law” or “give me siren, child, and do you hear me call” meant but they sounded amazing. Particularly in the context of a song that, musically, absolutely pummels the senses.

I’m not totally convinced that all of the lyrics are as much a pastiche as Eldritch claims. There are some fairly direct nods to his former band mates: “selling the don’t belong”, “do you have a word for giving away, got a song for me?”, and the final section could be read as Eldritch’s farewell address to them:

I got nothing to say I ain’t said before

I bled all I can, I won’t bleed no more

I don’t need no one to understand

Why the blood run hold

The hired hand

On heart

Hand of God

Floodland and driven apart

Run cold

Turn

Burn

Like a healing hand

Even if, to keep Eldritch at his word, that section is pure mockery, only intended to call Hussey on the (as perceived by Eldritch) meaningless nature of his lyrics, it’s still one of my favourite 30 seconds of recorded music ever. And it’s definitively the coolest.

What’s interesting, in retrospect, about my love of this song is how it bridged what I’d inherited musically and what I went on to seek out. As alluded earlier one of the records my dad passed on to me was Meatloaf’s “Bat Out Of Hell”; an utterly ridiculous, overblown pastiche of 50s American rock and roll. I think it’s fantastic. Bat is as much Jim Steinman’s record as ‘Loaf’s and his production job on “This Corrosion” – New York Choral Society, Wagner, £50,000 budget – followed the basic template he made plain in the title of a song on “Bat Out Of Hell 2”: “Everything Louder Than Everything Else”. Steinman’s orchestration and bombast made it easy to like the Sisters. At the very least you listen to the choir open the track and think: what the hell is that ? Well, you certainly did in a year that boasted Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” as its biggest record.

The song opened up “alternative” music for me, via Bauhaus and Siouxsie – goth opening up indie. It also, strangely, opened up folk music for me, via All About Eve who became associated with the late 80s goth scene (somewhat erroneously but that’s a story for another time). Unknowingly at the time it also primed me for Berlin era Bowie, undoubtedly an influence (musically and stylistically) on Eldritch.

Most importantly it was perhaps the first time I marked out some musical territory that didn’t belong to my parents, wasn’t inherited: was a free choice about my own tastes and how I saw myself. The fact that I was choosing to see myself as a very pale, very thin man, dressed all in black leather, picking his way through a post apocalyptic wasteland, with only a similarly clad female dominatrix for company perhaps says much about the plight of an average 15 year old boy growing up in Plymouth in the late 1980s.

And so here’s why I lay claim to being the UK’s worst goth. Whilst, in my head I stalked the West Country in a long dark trench coat, quoting Poe and Coleridge, my jet black hair lustrous beneath the full moon, in reality my only concession to being an actual goth was to buy a black shirt. A shirt which survived precisely one of my mother’s boiling washes before being forever rendered a washed out grey.

In my heart though I’d changed.

But except in dreams you’re never really free

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1: Desperados Under The Eaves – Warren Zevon.                        When: right now.

This wasn’t on the list. Just over a fortnight ago I’d never even heard it before. At last count I’ve now heard it 60 times. Listening to it over and over and over. Learning to play it, badly, on the guitar. Reading about it. Writing about it. That is why it now starts the list.

For me music never loses its capacity to surprise; there’s always something undiscovered, something unheard. The balance of this list, the other 41, are all rooted in a time, a place, framed by a particular point in my life. In many cases that’s why they’re on the list at all. Later in the 42 @ 42, when we get to The Posies’ “Dream All Day”, I won’t claim it’s the greatest song ever written but it, without fail, will put me down drunk in a field in Reading in 1996 throwing straw at my friends.

This is different because it’s new. Not actually new, it was recorded in 1976, but new to me. It arrived by chance. The result of a casual reading of a piece in The Guardian on Zevon which contained enough to make me think: why haven’t I heard this guy ? Time was someone might have passed you a tape, carefully curated selections of songs that they’d think you like (I miss that), but now everything you could ever want to hear is available within two clicks. So I started at the beginning – his debut, eponymous album – and there, right at the end, was this. The right song at the right time. A five minute rumination on being at your lowest ebb, poised between the abyss and salvation.

It starts with strings picking out the chords from the album opener “Frank And Jesse James”. Exact same sequence. A signal that we’ve come full circle; our titular outlaws no longer “riding, riding, riding” but now hunkered down and desperate. This gives way, via a brief guitar figure, to what, at first, sounds like typical 70s singer songwriter fare – vocals over piano.

First verse:

I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel

I was staring in my empty coffee cup

I was thinking that the gypsy wasn’t lying

All the salty margaritas in Los Angeles, I’m gonna drink them up

At salty margaritas I’m interested. It’s so specific. So vivid. And surely not an accident that of all the tastes to pull out of a margarita it’s the bitter one that we’re concerned with.

And if California slides into the ocean

Like the mystics and statistics say it will

I predict this motel will be standing

Until I pay my bill… 

Now I know something special’s going on. The mystics and statistics line – opposing sources of truth, deliciously united in their rhymic opinion – is lyrically arresting enough but then we get the pay off. Just as things threaten to get too serious, there’s the sardonic prediction. Our narrator’s entire world view encapsulated in four lines. The world’s going to shit and I’ll still have to pick up the tab.

Chorus

Don’t the sun look angry through the trees

Don’t the trees look like crucified thieves

Don’t you feel like desperados under the eaves

Heaven help the one who leaves

The chorus crashes in to the song – literally announced with a guttural “huh”, chords descending through Bb, Am, Gm, C. Glorious Carl Wilson harmony vocals echoing in the background, juxtaposing the message: it’s hell out there, I’m staying in here. My refuge in the hotel: under the eaves. The lyrics now are biblical in their ire, our narrator tormented by the sun, by images of nature turned to visions of crucifixion. And surely, in the context of LA in the mid 70s, amongst the musical circles Zevon moved in, “desperados” is a none too sly reference to the Eagles ? We digress.

I’m still waking up in the mornings with shaking hands

And I’m trying to find a girl who understands me

But except in dreams you’re never really free

Don’t the sun look angry at me

This verse (it’s almost a mirror of the chorus) lets us join the dots – from salty margaritas to shaking hands, with the sunlight too painful to bear. There’s a literal read with our protagonist as a washed up alcoholic, hiding out in a hotel in LA, lonely and unsure. By all accounts the literal read is also, most likely, the largely autobiographical read too. Zevon, pre fame, allegedly once jumped a window at a local motel to avoid paying a bill – returning once this record was out, only for the motel to refuse him trying to settle the account. They accepted a signed record apparently. He was also no stranger to booze and wound up in rehab.

However, I think there’s a route in to the song – and certainly my route in to the song – which plays to the underlying themes of uncertainty, of peering to the future, of trying to make sense of how you’ve arrived at this point, which makes the alcoholism somewhat irrelevant. It can be read as a symptom, not necessarily the diagnosis. As stated earlier this is a rumination on being down, maybe out, but with an ending that suggests there’s a way to pick up the pieces.

I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel

I was listening to the air conditioner hum

And it went mmm-mmm-mmm-mmm…

… look away, down Gower Avenue…

So. The end of the song – and the echoing refrain to “look away, down Gower Avenue” – is what finally elevates this from great to spectacular. First of all there’s just the sheer audacity, the gall, almost conceit, in referencing the hum of the air conditioner and then picking out the song’s melody in that hum. The first time I heard it I wanted to laugh; partly in delight but partly because it’s so unexpected. In the wrong hands it would be utterly ridiculous: I realise I’m perilously close to Spinal Tap “it’s such a fine line between stupid and clever” territory here.

It’s an astonishing moment and suddenly the whole song coheres – Zevon sitting in the hotel room, a moment of clarity arising from the thrum of the air conditioning, an optimistic melody forming from within the white noise, gazing down the street at the hills, at the Hollywood sign, at the hope it represents. It’s like the last two minutes of the greatest film about LA you’ve never seen.

This happens to me, for me, every couple of years – more if I’m lucky. Something completely unknown appears and I can’t imagine having never heard it before, can’t imagine now not hearing it again. Abba’s “Winner Takes It All” was maybe the first song that hit me like that (aged 10, more of that later) and this is the latest. It sounds melodramatic but it becomes an important part of my life. I’ve always used music as a means to express my inner life (“hey, why so many sad songs, Phil ?”) and still marvel at the capacity to convey the human experience a three or four minute pop song has.

If nothing else this was an attempt to share some of that feeling.