Review: 'The Light Pours Out of Me: The Authorised Biography of John McGeoch'

Siouxsie Sioux, Howard Devoto, and John Lydon were three of the most high-profile front-people of the post-punk era. They had something else in common. During their most creative periods, John McGeoch was invaluably assisting them on guitar. Side musicians in bands at the popularity level of the Banshees, Magazine, and PiL usually are not the subjects of their own biographies, but McGeoch was more than a side musician. His artful yet subtle colorings were essential to classics such as "Shot by Both Sides", "Happy House", and "Spellbound", and his influence on guitarists without a taste for Clapton's rote blues or Van Halen's showboating is immeasurable. Johnny Marr of The Smiths, John Frusciante of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien of Radiohead, and Mark Arm of Mudhoney are among the musicians who praise McGeoch as one of the greatest in The Light Pours Out of Me: The Authorised Biography of John McGeoch. 

Review: 'C87'

In mid-1986, the NME released a mail-order cassette mix of 22 samples from indie groups, several of whom (The Wedding Present, The Mighty Lemon Drops, Primal Scream, The Soup Dragons, etc.) would go on to bigger things. Last year, Cherry Red—that love-struck curator of eighties British indie—rereleased the influential C86 on CD and expanded it to include fifty additional like-minded artists.

Of course, 1986 was just one year in a lengthy and key pop era, so a fantasy follow up imagining what a C87 tape might have been is both logical and welcome. Like Cherry Red comps past, such as the expanded C86 and Scared to Get Happy, C87 shows how far beyond mere Smiths-worship late-eighties UK indie set its sites. Yes, there are a few Morrissey worshipers here, but there’s also The Sea Urchins’ sighing and swooning, The House of Love’s bluesy garage rock, The Bachelor Pad’s brain-busting Barrett psych, The Vaselines’ ear-bleeding bubblegum, The Inspiral Carpets’ lo-fi ambience, The Flatmates’ bouncing pop, I, Ludicrous’ straight-faced piss taking, etc.

All of those artists are featured on the gem of C87’s three discs. Its second disc moves in a somewhat more consistently mainstream pop direction (though it houses some truly standout tracks, such as Pop Will Eat Itself’s fierce “Sweet Sweet Pie”). Disc Three begins as an antidote to those slicker sounds with a full-wallow in dissonance and discordance. More adventurous listeners will welcome Dog Faced Hermans, Gaye Bikers on Acid, A Witness, and the rest as palette cleansers (in the same sense that lye is a palette cleanser). More melodically inclined listeners should not bale on C87, though, because beginning with 14 Iced Bears’ “Like a Dolphin”, Disc Three starts moving in more accessible territory again, and by Jesse Garon & The Desperadoes’ “I’m Up Here”, the set hits another lovely, jangly stride. Sometimes hard rocking, sometimes twee, sometimes pretty, sometimes skronky, sometimes Smithsy, C87 sums up the breadth of ’86/’87 British indie with Cherry Red’s inimitable knowledge of and sympathy for that era. You may not like it all, but you’re guaranteed to discover a lot you’ll love.

1,100th Post: Psychobabble’s 100 Favorite Songs of the 1980s!

Like, gag me with a spoonful of Mr. T cereal, my tubular valley Smurf! I’ve totally posted, like, 100 posts here on Psychobabble since my 1000^th post when I ran down my personal favorite 100 songs of the seventies. That means it’s, like, time to do the same for my 100 faves of the eighties! It’s gonna be non-stop Leon Neon references, Pee Wee Herman quotes, and close ups of Madonna’s navel as I bag your face through a massive mass of mint tunes! Where’s the beef? Probably somewhere in my 1,100^th post, Poindexter! So take a chill pill and bang your head to Psychobabble’s 100 Favorite Songs of the 1980s! Totally!

100. “Nasty” by The Damned

“Oh, you’ve got a video?” Only a total nerd would have answered this question in the negative in the eighties. There was nothing more awesome than going to the video store to rent some shitty movie from the horror section, but if you were English, that awesomeness hit a serious snag when professional prig Mary Whitehouse spearheaded the prosecution of 39 “video nasties,” including Flesh for Frankenstein, Driller Killer, and Cannibal Holocaust. As always, it was Rat Scabies, Dave Vanian, and the aptly named Captain Sensible who called for a little rationality amidst the witchhunt. They did so with three minutes of high-speed punk professing their romance with video nasties. That they recorded the track specifically for one of the best episodes of “The Young Ones” makes “Nasty” all the awesomer.

99. “Hungry for You (J’aurais Toujours Faim de Toi)” by The Police

One of the neat surprises of Ghosts in the Machine is how proficient Sting is with a horn in his mouth. Throughout the record, he fattens out the core Police sound with overdubbed saxophone arrangements. The chart on “Hungry for You (J’aurais Toujours Faim de Toi)” is particularly simple, but those two note blasts say more than a million over-bloated eighties saxophone solos. The songs message—mostly delivered in French—is equally fat-free: “No matter what I do, I’m still hungry for you.” That there is real lust.

98. “Automatic” by Prince and the Revolution

“Automatic” pretends to be a message of love, but I have a feeling it has something more akin to “Hungry for You” on its dirty mind. Like that Police song, “Automatic” derives its power from a mesmerizing beat, but it also builds a tangible world: the seventh circle of sex hell. Prince’s vision is kind of disturbing because of the explicit threats (“I’m going 2 have 2 torture U now”) and the robotic quality of it all (“A-u-t-o-matic”). Sexy, disturbing, futuristic, uncompromising. Prince in a nutshell.

97. “Kiss Off” by The Violent Femmes

Johnny Marr Loves The Who

Mojo Magazine recently posted its Top 50 Who songs--a jumble of choices daring ("Dogs" is on there), dopey (so is their cover of "Heat Wave, which at #30, ranks above such masterpieces as "Amazing Journey","Rael", "Naked Eye", "Happy Jack", and "A Quick One While He's Away"!), and dull (the top ten reads like the track listing of a budget Greatest Hits compilation). However, one really worthwhile thing came of this feature: Johnny Marr wrote the introduction to the print article and Mojo's online site features an interview with the former Smith in which the greatest guitarist to debut in the eighties totally swoons over the greatest guitarist to debut in the sixties. It's quite charming and you can read it here.

Review: 'Scared to Get Happy: A Story of Indie-Pop 1980-1989'

The British punk movement of the late seventies was just the thing to flush out pop’s veins. But as brilliant as it was, punk had its limitations, and the genre’s most enduring acts—The Clash, The Damned, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Jam, etc.—quickly went in interesting directions that led them far from their lo-fi, two-chord origins when the eighties began.

At that very time, a new movement was born in Britain, one that picked up on punk’s minimalism and lack of fidelity, but didn’t necessarily share its sneering attack. If it was sometimes as nihilistic as punk, it was a lot more resigned about it. In years to come, this movement would be known as indie-pop and its guiding light that never goes out was The Smiths (who, like the original punks, absolutely worshipped The New York Dolls). While The Smiths’ influence is very detectable in many of the 134 tracks on last year’s Scared to Get Happy: A Story of Indie-Pop 1980-1989, and that title certainly seems to suggest a rather dour affair, you’d be wrong to think this box set was just a great, big, five-disc mope. In fact, there is a thrilling variety of styles and moods dancing inside this wonderful sampler. “Getting Nowhere Fast” by Girls At Our Best! is punk by any definition of the term. “The Jet Set Junta” by the divine Monochrome Set has a spaghetti western under taste and is as danceable as the best of sixties garage rock. Jane’s a cappella “It’s a Fine Day” is a defining example of twee. There’s psychedelia, Latin rhythms, hypno-noise, loungey crooning, jangling, jingling, and jostling.

The selection is also smart because while the point of sets like this is always to turn you on to obscure artists like Girls at Our Best! Grab Grab the Haddock, Close Lobsters, Gol Gappas, and Bad Dream Fancy Dress (who may win the best track award with their insane, genre-hoping freak show “Choirboys Gas [Hack the Cassock]”), there are enough familiar artists—The Jesus & Mary Chain, Josef K, Everything But the Girl, Pulp, Aztec Camera, Television Personalities, Primal Scream, Stone Roses, Inspiral Carpets, The La’s— to provide numerous paths in. Even cooler, most of these groups are represented by obscure early, demo, and live tracks, so there’s always something to discover.

The only knock against Scared to Get Happy is its allegedly innovative packaging, which requires you to pull required a visit to a YouTube video in order to figure out how to get the discs out of the damn box. Make sure you watch that video, kids, and be very, very careful. These are discs you do not want to scratch.

Review: 'Songs That Saved Your Life: The Art of The Smiths 1982-1987'

The Smiths didn’t make a lot of records during their flashing five-year career, but the ones they made were sublime enough to intoxicate an enduring cult. And like so many groups with relatively few proper LPs—The Velvet Underground, The Clash, and Jimi Hendrix, for example—The Smiths have a rich enough reservoir of singles, B-sides, and outtakes to warrant Simon Goddard’s track-by-track analysis The Smiths: Songs That Saved Your Life. As first published in 2002, the book did not fully please its author, baring a few errors and a title altered by the publisher. A tick over a decade later, Goddard has nudged his tome closer to his original vision and Titan Books is giving it a fresh republication.

Psychobabble’s Ten Greatest Singles of 1985

The music scene had gotten pretty rough by 1985. Top-notch artists like Elvis Costello and the Attractions, The Rolling Stones, and Stevie Wonder were making the most appalling music of their respective careers, while Foreigner, Chicago, REO Speedwagon, and USA for Africa were otherwise shitting up the charts. Yet, as in every year since the dawn of Rock & Roll, great singles could still be detected amid the muck. Here are ten…



10. “Bastards of Young” by The Replacements

With Tim the constrictions of ‘80s pop production started to have their way with The Replacements, who had recently made the leap from small time Twin/Tone records to bigger time Sire. Well, you can gate Chris Mars’s drums all you like and you can shoot a spiffy MTV-ready music video (and the accompanying video was mighty spiffy), but you can never tame Westerberg’s whiskey yowl. It is in furious form on “Bastards of Young”, perhaps the most insightful teen anthem of the ‘80s.


9. “So Far Away”by Dire Straits

Some seven years had past since square British Blues combo Dire Straits had a hit in the US. As we all know, that changed most assuredly when they dropped the ultra-slick, DDD monster Brothers in Arms in ’85. That year you couldn’t blow your nose without having “Money for Nothing” blare out of your nostrils. However the truly great single from the band’s comeback triumph was its first. “So Far Away” barely sneaked into the top twenty, but it’s as hooky and alluring as anything Dire Straights ever did, their taut rhythm section pulsing beneath an utterly sublime guitar lick. Mark Knopfler’s six-string impersonates a Hawaiian pedal steel and fools me completely.

8. “Don’t Come Around Here No More” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

December 1, 2009: Psychobabble’s 11 Greatest Singles of 1984

As the year winds down, Psychobabble sweeps up the debris of 2009’s anniversary-related nostalgia. So, let us venture back 25 years, pull on our stonewashed nut huggers, follow Ronald Reagan’s lead by turning a blind eye to the mounting AIDS epidemic, and take a listen to 11 tubular singles that probably wouldn’t pass muster with Tipper Gore’s newly established Parents’ Music Resource Coalition. These are Psychobabble’s 11 Greatest Singles of 1984!

11. “Sunspots” by Julian Cope

An authoritative guitar lick launches this weighty slab of neo-psychedelia by former Teardrop Explodes frontman, Julian Cope. The song is utterly infectious because of (rather than in spite of) an awkwardly lumbering rhythm, although Cope’s wacky ejaculations of “Meeeeeeeeow!” don’t hurt.

10. “The Caterpillar” by The Cure

The Cure set their flanged guitars aside to deliver a wonderfully weird bit of rustic psychedelia that would have stirred Syd Barrett’s envy. Drums beat a tribal rhythm, acoustic guitars chime, fingers skitter up and down a piano keyboard like the many legs of the title critter, a fiddle flutters, and Robert Smith flickers.

9. “She Told Me Lies” by The Chesterfield Kings