Gareth's PDyssey
Gareth's PDyssey
Brave reviewer Gareth is off on a mission to listen to
all of Real PD's output in chronological order. Find out how he survived
in his ongoing voyage of (re)discovery, and download nuggets of (very) vintage
PD for yourself... if you dare!
I’m not sure I’ve ever listened to People Like These before, although half the songs were familiar enough. It’s pretty hardcore. Tunes aren’t in abundance. The orchestration (Christ knows what sort of orchestra this is, mind) is sparse and intimidating, all Spectrum bleeps and feedback drones (one of the extra tracks is even called Drone, I see). The tracks are all far too long. Have you ever listened to audios of lost 1960s episodes of Doctor Who? That was what it felt like to me, as though you’re only half-aware of what’s going on or why...
I wandered round a furniture showroom listening to the first few tracks on my mp3 player, dazed by the opening of the title track, sentenced to 30 years in prison. Man, this is bleak. You must have been an unhappy 13-year old. To be honest, I was disappointed by Life in Danger (I prefer the Size 42 version—and the 03 version is very funny—shades of Orbital’s Middle of Nowhere album, I thought, which was no bad thing), but enjoyed The Letter (it has a tune, somewhere) and Posters in My Home (the first time I’d heard it, I’m sure—an influence on My Friends Are On Television?). In fact, for me the disc came alive when the album proper was over and we got on to the punky stuff—Fighting Fires, Broken Home, Wednesday Afternoon — probably just because the production values are often so much better. Guy should have been born 10 years earlier, so that he could have been in the Sex Pistols. He snarls, he forgets the lyrics, he tells Mike Slemen (the ultimate authority figure) exactly what he thinks of him, and generally comes across as someone you’d cross the street to avoid, lest he smash you on the head with his cowbell.
The highlight of the disc? Viscous Drag I think, which sounds terribly modern with its rapping. The letdown? Aristocrats Only. Good title; terrible song. Appropriate that it was the first track I listened to in the gym underneath the House of Lords, though, which is where the majority of my Pdyssey will take place. Abiding memory? I think you can guess: the “cha cha cha” of Life in Danger — it’s like you’re saying, “Don’t even try to dance”.
Listen to Life in Danger '03 ¯
The sleeve notes jokingly describe Love & Stuff as a greatest hits package—well, not quite, but it has that feel, particularly the first half. It’s certainly the most colossal step up from People Like These. If using words like “accomplished” and “assured” might be laying it on a little thick, I’ll certainly say that Love & Stuff is absolutely never boring. There’s tons going on, both up front and in the background. It’s really entertaining, often very silly, and—I think it’s fair to say—generally much better than the next few PD albums. Some of the songs sound juvenile, yes—but is that really surprising? PD virgins should definitely start here.
The Videobox kicks things off in fine form with that weird, shimmery opening. Mark’s flat, nasal delivery lends it and some of his other songs an edginess that makes his tracks very different in feel from Alistair’s, which incline towards the stadium anthem—never more so than National Pride, which is a singalong (a screamalong) that goes on and on and on, presumably so that everyone knows it inside out by the end. It’s rather funny too. What is it really about? Was there someone in the CCF that you had a crush on? Greatest hit No. 3, Emigration, introduces that PD perennial, flowery piano (here it’s even so loud there’s some piano feedback). It sounds like Coldplay. No, that’s not a good thing. But as a specialist at indecisiveness, I rather like it as a hymn to half-desire after grand dreams that you can’t ever quite carry through, and the ending is hilarious.
Stay! and You Hurt Me have an early Beatles thing going on, with their simple lyrics and the former’s easy melody. But Stay!'s pratting around would have made it a smash hit, whereas You Hurt Me is an album track all the way; it’s quite interesting, with that (sampled?) heavy percussion and the PT50’s best cello setting, but it’s not much of a song. Chinatown has PD sounding surprisingly well drilled, even though Guy’s legendary “Oo-ahs” get the better of him once or twice. Why didn’t you use harmonica more? It sounds really good here. And you’ve obviously taken some pride in the keyboard arrangement (the twinkling notes in the verse).
The Plunge begins well—the audaciousness of that toilet flush is really rather exciting, and I love the “Always wanted” false starts—but never quite gets where it was headed. The percussive guitar in Welcome to Commuter City is fun, and there’s a confidence and energy here that, er, the song probably doesn’t warrant, with its twisted 2000 AD-style fast food dystopia. And Love & Stuff part 2 really works for me, all pulsing bass and uneasy melody, though it seems a shame part 1’s lyrics are so low down in the mix. Were they a bit racy? Or just not very good?
Highlight of the album: Mark’s “eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh” before National Pride finally runs out of road.
Listen to Stay! ¯
Ah, the difficult second album. I have to declare an interest in this one, as Paranormal's the only PD record where I can be classed as some sort of collaborator throughout—more a kazoo-playing hindrance, I think it’s fair to say. But I was rather pleased, listening to it after 20 years, as I thought it’d probably been ruined by me and Jenny messing around in the background. As it is, maybe there was never much to ruin… But PD’s willingness to make use of me and Jen is testament to the inventiveness that I think permeates early PD—whatever instrument is to hand, be it medicine bottle, flushing toilet, unbroken treble voice, tin of cat food, into the mix it goes.
Paranormal is marked by lots of really good introductions that are often the best bits of songs you wouldn’t otherwise write home about (the Madnessy-Imagination, the hi-nrg of England, the I’m-not-sure-what of Would You Like It?). I think Stagefright may be the worst song you ever recorded (and is the only one where Jenny and I do seem to be messing up the recording—is Adrian telling us a story to keep us quiet by the end?!). Sometimes I doesn’t even have a good introduction. The title track is totally bonkers. Um de la Que only has four notes and it still goes wrong.
But let’s not be too unkind. Like I hinted at before, it’s an imaginative and playful recording, marked more than Love & Stuff by the difference between Mark and Alistair’s songs. Mark comes out on top here: Lady Louise sounds as though it’d be great if only he could play it, while Hypocritic is in a different league from anything else on Paranormal, plaintive, weird and oddly affecting. It runs out of steam a little, but it also shows the best use of another of Paranormal’s quirks—someone (Guy and Adrian?) supplying falsetto backing vocals. They’re also heard to good effect in the opener, Angels Dancing on the Pinhead, another of the best tracks.
And then there is Deutschland, uber alles. The faux church organ! The French horn! The kazoo! The chanting! The guitar plucking! The Morse code! The lyrics (“Psychedelic toilets invade my mind’s eye”. Can this be another mishear?)! {nope, you're spot on, that's the lyric! - Alistair} The 10-minute variation on the theme of the German national anthem! Truly, the jazz odyssey that is Deutschland has to be heard to be believed. But, amazingly, it’s not boring.
Unlike Jonathan Osborne, I don’t think that Paranormal shows PD having improved marginally; quite the opposite, although some of the songs may be more fully formed (ie, they end properly rather than collapsing into screams). The whole affair feels more ramshackle than Love & Stuff, probably due to the nature of the recording—as Alistair says, it’s really less an album, more an impromptu happening.
Most interesting thing about Paranormal: I’m tempted to say the name check for Kwik Save—in the week of the supermarket chain’s demise, Stagefright makes a better historical cultural document than it does a song.
Listen to Deutschland (a Slip of the Tongue) ¯
3Gareth finds
himself transported to la-la land by a psychedelic toilet.
Michael Stipe’s always saying, “Don’t confuse the singer with the song”. Maybe, but it’s hard not to think that Sandwich in Motion seems more about the real lives of middle-class 16 and 17 year-old boys in the mid-1980s than anything we’ve come across so far. Living in the Middle Ages might be a better title for it, because it’s seemingly about staring down the barrel of adult life, and not being especially impressed at the idea.
Obviously, this thought process finds its greatest outlet on the astonishing eight minutes of Let's Play House. As a thirtysomething who’s just got his first mortgage and is constantly having conversations along the lines of, “Maybe we should put up some shelves” (though generally not, “Maybe we should utilise an electric toothbrush”), I admit that this song spoke to me in a way that most PD songs simply don’t. I love the xylophone scale and the manic percussion, and the song’s increasing psychosis is hilarious. Let's Play House may be derivative and in-jokey; it doesn’t matter—it’s still one of those moments when twisted genius is fighting to get out from under the PT50 bleeps and dodgy production.
Concern about inevitable aging and death abound on Sandwich in Motion, from Pity the Earthworm’s understandable anxiety about baldness to the banal lyrics of Far from the Western World and the worries about mental health of Living in the Middle Ages --and then of course there’s Make Up for Ghosts, PD’s first (and I think last) foray into Goth territory, the lyrics flirting with suicide, the “orchestration” full of spooky bells and chimes and church organ. In fact, as the sleeve notes mention, there’s a cornucopia of weird instruments on display on Sandwich in Motion; one of the more normal is the viola, but not the way Adrian plays it, especially the magnificent scratches on Pity the Earthworm. That track, the first on the record, is extraordinary—really odd, but done utterly confidently and, bugger me, it sort of works. I particularly like the Les Dawson keyboard splat-fanfares.
For my money, the other great song on the record is Physics and Chemistry. Yes, it’s far too long and Mark really is obviously at the height of his Talking Heads obsession, but it has not one but two great stadium chorus moments where you really think that 20,000 people should be leaping into the air and singing along. What’s especially brilliant is that the first one is nonchalantly ignored, pretty much (presumably no one could bother writing lyrics for it). I Just Want to Be Perfect is a silly breath of fresh air too.
There’s plenty of dross to balance the good stuff: let’s just not talk about Fair Play, all right?; the cover version of Can't Help Falling in Love is genuinely appalling; My Friends Are on Television is taking a risk with lyrics like “Set of tuneless melodies inside the radio”; Open Your Eyes is a terrible way to end the album; and Fingerprints is the single most annoying PD song yet, maddeningly catchy because it beats you over the head with its simple Brookside-theme melody for all of six minutes. Grrr.
In the end, listening to “songs” such as Lyrics and Let's Play House, it is almost impossible to think that Guy isn’t lurking somewhere behind a microphone, grunting, screaming or hitting tins with knitting needles or something.
Best thing about the record: probably the Let's Play House couplet: “And in the evening, we’ll watch TV/Have intellectual arguments about foreign policy”. Morrissey, as well as Elvis, is definitely now in the PD building.
Listen to Pity the Earthworm
¯
What’s in a name? And There Was Wine is the first recording under the name Real PD, as opposed to Potential Difference, and there is a feeling that, after some false starts, this is it. That combination of the cheap synths we’ve been hearing over the past few albums with Adrian’s blousy, theatrical keyboards on With or Without You (plus, of course, nervy, out-of-tune/out-of-time guitar plucking) feels like PD are suddenly in their groove—not that the band could have known it at the time, but this will really be the template for much PD to come. The song itself is bold and motors along grandly; Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now is visible in its rear-view mirror, but let’s not carp. Waterloo follows it up well too. Shame about the rap and the fact that the song goes on and on (“Just once more!” Alistair shouts; the listener groans) but you can’t argue with its winning enthusiasm. A big up to Guy, too, doing sterling work with his backing vocals to paper over the cracks.
It’s with
Radar that things take a turn for the strange, though it lets
Adrian have lots of fun bouncing around the piano while chaos ensues in the
background, Nutty playing the harp and that excellent radar blip coming at the
listener like Chinese water torture. Mark’s obviously keeping his powder dry
for the spectacular Amphisbaena later on the album,
though—disturbing, sort of unpleasant, funny, and something of an individual
triumph. It sounds like an almost completely different band to every other
song here, which is a) not surprising, and b) no bad thing anyway. I’m not
sure I’d pick it as a stand-out concert classic, though… Voice of the
Free, Mark’s final song on the album, passes the time, but not in the
ear-popping “What was that?” sort of way that Amphisbaena does.
Before that, though, there’s Tegan (is this supposed to be a direct sequel to
Emigration?), a song made memorable by its abrupt ending. It works
rather well, I think, though it does sound as though Alistair is phoning in
the chorus from a live satellite link-up; the duet is a nice variation, and
Adrian’s piano dominates again.
The Big Sea is a throwback to an earlier, younger PD, a band who didn’t care that their choruses had big, watery gaps in them. The barbershop, Housemartinsy acappella of I'll Never See You Again makes for a nice, different sound—it’s just three minutes too long. Ups and Downs is the funniest PD song so far, quite deliberately. And then, looming over them all, there’s Mount Vesuvius, with its dodgy adolescent lyrics and pathetic, plinky-plonky instrumentation. No wonder Alistair wanted to beef it up a couple of years later when he got the chance—there is a Def Leppard song trying to get out here—but this is the superior version. You’ll sing along, you’ll do the dance… it’s classic PD, simultaneously not working but endearing the hell out of you by trying so hard.
It’s an odd record to try to pull together thematically (I’ve failed); what it is, for sure, is the sound of people growing up, taking some steps in the right and some steps in the wrong directions. For me, it has two great moments: the first is in Amphisbaena when you can hear Mark, in perfect time, desperately shouting “Turn it off!” at someone who might be messing up the recording; the other is the piano note someone throws out to try to get I'll Never See You Again back in tune—too late, ‘cos it’s just taken off again for yet another out-of-key lap of bom-bom-boms and be-dom-be-dom-doms.
Listen to Waterloo ¯