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Music25YL: David Bowie, Chili Peppers, Blur, and More

The Velvet Underground: Peel Slowly and See

An Andy Warhol image of a banana, with a white background and the words The Velvet Underground 1965-1969By Chris Flackett

It’s hard to imagine now, when albums come automatically with bonus tracks and anniversary reissues scrape the vault for every last dreg from the recording sessions, but in the mid-‘90s, premium boxsets—complete with lavish booklets and presentation and never-before-released tracks—were big business. I can still fondly remember devouring The Who’s four-disc Maximum RnB and The Jam’s five-disc Direction, Reaction, Creation boxsets over Christmas 2001, absorbing the history, released and previously unreleased, of both bands, whist obsessively studying the booklet’s images for new ways to stand, dress, live (plus Pete Townshend’s introduction to The Who’s booklet was particularly and appealingly spiky, I recall).

Peel Slowly and See was The Velvet Underground’s entry into the boxset market and came on the back of a financially successful but critically and inter-personally difficult reunion tour (Lou Reed was not at his most colleague-friendly by all accounts). While this only fed the myth of the band further, and brought the band into new focus, in 1995 the Velvets were still essentially a cult band, with more people having heard of the band than actually heard them. Peel Slowly and See functioned as a comprehensive introduction to the new and the curious, containing all four of the band’s studio albums, and a reward for the indoctrinated, offering various demos and live tracks for those fans who had not spent years trading bootlegs. Some tracks hadn’t even made it that far.

The earliest demos, which predate the first album, are the most fascinating. Recorded by Lou Reed and John Cale, the songs recorded here are more recognisable as a kind of hipster folk music than the avant-garde garage they would become.

“Venus in Furs” is transformed by the chiming acoustic guitar and John Cale’s stern Welsh Methodist minister’s oratory into a medieval folk song that just requires a lute to complete it. “Heroin” and “Waiting For The Man” are both a lot closer to their folk and country sources, while “All Tomorrow’s Parties” and the previously unreleased ”Prominent Men” sound uncannily like Bob Dylan outtakes circa-The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan! A big surprise, that, but it goes to show that The Velvet Underground’s genius was not just the result of Lou Reed’s efforts, but was a genuinely more collaborative effort. Maybe that’s where the tension of the music came from: all these different forces tugging at the songs, pulling them into wonderfully twisted shapes.

These shapes pushed the band into extreme territory at times, and the live excerpts of “Melody Laughter” and “Nothing Song” (since released in full) from a 1966 show give a taste of the overwhelming sensations that led audiences to make comments like “the flowers of evil are in bloom”. Well, of course. Take a look around you – music’s the least of your worries! Funnily enough, both “Laughter” and “Nothing Song” sound a little tame compared to what has come after it, but they’re a fascinating insight into how innovative the Velvets were.

Later demos like “Sheltered Life” and “There is No Reason” again betray that Reed’s song writing, as wonderful as it was, needed his bandmates to pull the songs further from their source genre, although these efforts do sound more “Velvety”. And in “It’s All Right (The Way That You Live)”, there’s a genuinely good song that, as far as I’m aware, was never recorded in full by the band. Definitely the one that got away.

At the end are a series of demos, some of which ended up being rerecorded for Lou Reed’s solo career (“Satellite of Love”, “Ride Into the Sun”, “I Love You”, amongst others) and some great Stones-esque RnB (“Oh Gin” and the later to be rerecorded by Reed “Walk It and Talk It”). These demos prove that Lou could make commercial records on his terms, certainly more so than Loaded, and that there could have been a great follow up to that album if Reed had just been able to stomach working with Doug Yule.

Alas, he could not, and the band, for all intents and purposes, was done (let’s not talk about Squeeze). But Peel Slowly and See paints a fully rounded picture of a band that worked harder to achieve their sound than is given credit for.

Prince: The Gold Experience

A spotted gold image obscuring Prince's face. His symbol is on the right side of the image.By Abbie Sears

The Gold Experience was an album released under the stage name of the love symbol, during Prince’s protest against his record label at the time. I often find that these albums get overlooked, but this album brought the single “Most Beautiful Girl In The World” which I consider one of Prince’s most popular pieces even 25 years later.

I discovered this beautiful album later on into my growing Prince obsession. It is a masterpiece made up of multiple new Prince experiences, genres ranging from rock to rap, and funk to slow soothing love tracks. Each song is uniquely sewn together by small skits throughout the album where the voice of a woman guides us through the magic we’ve just witnessed and often warns us of the sexy and, at times, almost pornographic music that is coming up in a subtle way. This album is very much focused around the feeling (and the act) of love and that’s a Prince theme we see often.

One of my most favourite funky tracks in the world is the first song from The Gold Experience “P Control”. It’s so easy to feel the passion in his music and this is the kind of album you can listen to alone with some cocktails and dance and really feel what he wanted you to feel when he recorded these tracks. Albums brought to us by The Artist Formerly Known as Prince were free to branch out from recent Prince work at the time, despite the artist labeling himself as a slave because of his dispute with Warner Bros. I think that part of his career did give him some unexpected freedom with music and I’m so glad we got this album out of that.

Blur: The Great Escape

a blue background with a boat on the bottom part, while two legs are seen as two people on the boat look astonished.By Matthew Mansell

The Great Escape is Blur’s worst album. It was the result of overwork and burn-out: released 15 months after Parklife made Blur the biggest indie band in the country, Graham Coxon had become an awkward alcoholic, Damon Albarn was part of a celebrity couple with Elastica’s Justine Frischmann, Dave Rowntree was starting a coke habit and Alex James had the reputation as the biggest caner at the infamous Groucho Club. In this whirlwind, it’s understandable that they didn’t notice how the Indie scene had changed.

Earlier in the year, Pulp hit number two with “Common People”, a song about a rich girl slumming it with the poor, while Oasis’s number one “Some Might Say” celebrated working class optimism. In contrast, Blur’s first teaser “Country House” was about a city boy’s existential crisis in his palatial mansion house; rather than wry raconteurs they now seemed arch and out of step. It was catchy enough to bag their first number one, but it was a hollow victory.

The main issue with The Great Escape is that Albarn’s affectionate pen portraits of Tory Britain had become bawdy picture postcards: the wife swapping of “Stereotypes”, the closet transvestite right-winger of “Mr. Robinson’s Quango”, the lad about town on “Top Man”. Whereas Jarvis rallied for those who lived with “no meaning or control”, the worst crime the “Charmless Man” commits is being boring. The Great Escape is an album that punches upward, but leaves only a superficial wound.

Blur still had a knack for tunes your grandma could hum, but the album overstretches itself: a third of the album is filler. The Great Escape only really soars when it escapes the Britpop ghetto.

The psychedelic fairground ska and pumping brass of “Fade Away” channels the playfulness of The Specials. While the post-punk “Entertain Me” lives up to its name with a cheeky back and forth between James’s flirty baseline and Coxon’s spluttering guitar. The phased out bliss of “Yuko and Hiro” is so intoxicating you forget it’s about the emptiness of loving a company.

At moments, you can see the band cautiously mapping out their future. “Ernold Same” reprises the guest-star-and-sung-chorus structure of “Parklife”, with Ken Livingstone in the Phil Daniels role; Albarn further experimenting with the formula that would make Gorillaz huge. Far more exciting is the alt-rock jam of “He Thought of Cars” which lurches forward with the menace of a drunk approaching you on the dance floor; its imposing sense of dread could have neatly fitted on Blur or 13.  While “Best Days” sets the template for the melancholic ballad that is Albarn’s default setting on his solo and Gorillaz material.

“The Universal” is undoubtedly the highlight and the spiritual cousin to “For Tomorrow”. It begins as a slow waltz before swelling to a soaring head-rush of a chorus — “when the days seem to fall through you, well, just let them go” —that extolls the joys of living in the present rather than the past. Appropriately, it is now the closing track of their greatest hits live set, proof that even at their lowest ebb Blur could write something transcendent.

Ultimately, The Great Escape is a transitionary album between the bands two masterpieces Parklife and Blur, as picture postcards gave way to introspection and new musical ideas. James had a few years partying still left in him but could still turn up on time and deliver the goods, while the rest of the band tried (to varying degrees of success) to rein in their addictions. Blur had been caught out once, they weren’t going to let it happen again.

 

Like what you’re reading? Be sure to check out more in this series!

Music25YL: David Bowie, Chili Peppers, Blur, and More

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Written by TV Obsessive

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