This is why God invented YouTube: Roxy Music performing “Do The Strand” live in 1973. If I’d been in a band back then I would have quit and got a job sweeping roads after seeing this, no way you could top it. The band are rocking their glittery tits off, Brian Eno is doing all sorts of electronic jiggery-pokery over the top of it and – the icing on the cake – Bryan Ferry is wearing a white suit. Insanely great.
According to surveys one of the most common dreams that English people have is the Queen coming over to their house for tea while they’re in the rather mortifying position of being naked. What Dr. Freud would tell you is this shows that an English person’s greatest anxiety isn’t death or nuclear war but being embarrassed socially, as if we’d rather die than commit a social faux pas. Wrap this peculiar neurosis up in a bundle with the Queen and a nice cup of tea and you have a pretty clear picture of the English national subconscious. No wonder Morrissey writes the songs he does.
Like the great Moz, Pet Shop Boys are masters at mining Englishness in all it’s eccentric moods to make brilliant pop art. For “Dreaming of The Queen” they took this amusing little tidbit about having naked tea with the Queen and turned it into something quite beautiful. This is an elegant, haunting song about the death of love, not just from the perspective of the Queen and Lady Diana (she was still alive at the time) but it also becomes a personal and very moving song about losing a lover to AIDS.
I can’t say I’ve ever had that dream myself, mine usually involve scoring the winning goal for England in a World Cup Final while simultaneously snogging Elizabeth Hurley.
When I was at secondary school we did our sports at some playing fields on the western outskirts of London called Warren Farm. Every week the school buses would drive us out of town down the Western Avenue (aka the A40) and go past the Art Deco magnificence of the Hoover factory in Perivale. Teenage boys aren’t exactly reknowned for their alertness to architectural beauty but the sight of it was such a marvel it made me forget just for a moment that I was on my way to being terrorized by sadistic PE teachers. The snow white concrete and grand, sweeping facade made it stand out like a jewel in a traffic-choked, industrialized area that had seen better days.
It was built in 1932 and designed by the architects Wallis, Gilbert & Partners. That such artistry went into the design of a factory is an example of the optimism of the modernist era, with the then-new Western Avenue a vibrant symbol of an expanding city and an increasingly motorized society. Buildings like this were monuments to faith in a new machine age which would lift mankind from the drudgery of the past. That era has long gone of course, today the Hoover building is home to a Tesco supermarket which tells you plenty about how western nations have gone from producing things to consuming them. But it could have suffered a worse fate, it might have been demolished like the nearby and equally-beautiful Firestone factory was in 1980.
I used to think Elvis Costello’s song “Hoover Factory” was really about something else – you know, the usual rock song things: women, drugs, masturbation etc. – but it actually is about the Hoover building. Costello grew up in west London (Kensington and then Twickenham) so may have childhood memories of his own related to the building. It’s a very pretty, short, impressionistic song with lots of layers and vocal overdubbing that belies the fact that Elvis recorded the whole thing on his own in a cheap studio in Shepherd’s Bush. Songs about modern architecture are the sort if thing you’d expect from Brian Eno and Elvis seems to think it’s all a bit inconsequential in the grand scheme of things when he sings “it’s not a matter of life or death”. Maybe it isn’t, but I wouldn’t want to live in a world without beautiful buildings like the Hoover factory.
This was the b-side of his 1980 single “Clubland” and is now available as an extra on the reissue of “Get Happy” (which is a little odd as “Clubland” was off his “Trust” album.) But if you want to be really smart, hunt down a copy of “Ten Bloody Marys & Ten How’s Your Fathers” instead.
Even though I’ve been a graphic designer for nearly 20 years now I’ve never done a record sleeve (magazines are my business) but, as they say, I know what I like. The older I get the less impressed I am with over-cooked typography and trendy effects so I love the clean simplicity and understated beauty of covers like Peter Gabriel’s first solo album from 1977. It might just be my favourite sleeve ever.
This is the work of Storm Thorgerson and his studio Hipgnosis who are best known for their high-concept and elaborate sleeves for megabands like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. With their extravagantly-produced photography, shrink wraps, die-cuts, and fancy gatefolds I used to think those were the epitome of everything that was wrong with music pre-punk: bloated and not a little full of themselves. Now I’d kill for the kind of budgets and creative freedom they must have had back then. You won’t be able to see it at this small size (nor on the CD probably) but most of those water droplets are fakes, painted in by hand with the highlights created by scraping off the paint with a scalpel blade. One thing some of you kids might not realize is that there was no such thing as Photoshop back in 1977 – in fact, there were no computers in design at all! Imagine that – and designers had to actually create things by hand using paintbrushes, pens, paper and glue. Shockingly primitive I know, but somehow we managed. I can’t tell you how many manual skills I’ve lost in the digital age.
Gabriel had just left his high-profile gig as frontman of Genesis and was clearly desiring a modicum of low-key anonymity, hence the decision to name all his first four solo efforts simply “Peter Gabriel” (very confusing that) and not to have a conventional portrait of himself on a cover until the fifth one. On Solsbury Hill he sang about leaving Genesis – “I was feeling part of the scenery/I walked right out of the machinery” – but the ghost of the band seems to be hanging around the Proggy opening track “Moribund The Burgermeister” which is a rather bizarre song about a medieval plague driving a town to hysteria. It’s the sort of eccentric, character-driven thing he used to do a lot and if he had done this with Genesis no doubt there would have been a silly costume to go with it.
I’m throwing Gabriel’s second album in here just because I wanted an excuse to post the track “White Shadow” which I absolutely adore. Not that the sleeve isn’t very good too, it’s another powerfully simple idea executed with no fuss (Hipgnosis again.) The ripped paper could be a little reference to punk as the first single from the album “DIY” was seen as a salute to the indie sprit of the times – “When things get so big, I don’t trust them at all/You want some control, you’ve got to keep it small.” Unlike some of his Prog Rock peers Gabriel had open ears to what was going on in the late 70s and even got Paul Weller to play guitar on his new wavey third album.
“White Shadow” is a dreamy, floating mini-epic with some particularly obscure lyrics. God knows what it’s about but it sounds wonderful. The high point of the track is a fiery guitar solo by the album’s producer Robert Fripp who lets loose with the sort of Fripptronics he contributed to Bowie’s “Heroes”. Great stuff from an underrated album.
The sentimental musings of an ageing expat in words, music, and pictures. Mp3 files are up for a limited time so drink them while they're hot.
Contact me: lee at londonlee dot com
