There is a thing called the 2nd album slump. Generally what happens is bands have years of writing and playing before they get signed, so their debut album is great, it sells, it’s successful. Now suddenly they have 8 to 12 months to write, record and release their next album. A lot of bands fail to live up to the success of their debut.

Radiohead decided that was bollocks, and released an album leagues ahead of their debut, Pablo Honey. The Bends is an impossible album – impossible that a band could grow and evolve so fast in the space of a couple of years. It’s a tour-de-force of hit after, after hit.

My best friend and I were driving around one day in 1995, when he produced a sampler cassette – I have no idea where he got it, and I’ve never seen another one like it – but it was a short cassette with, two, or maybe four tracks from The Bends. He shoved into my car cassette player, and played Just and my jaw nearly fell off.

It was insane, it felt like someone had taken Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, then upped the intensity again, and again, and again, until the universe shattered under the strain Jonny Greenwood’s guitars and opened a portal into Grunge Heaven (would that be Nirvana?). The guitars, the vocals and the utter passion and intensity just blew me away.

Although I’ve remained a fervent Radiohead fan over all the years, and all the incarnations, I still return to The Bends again, and again. It is the rawest and most powerful of their albums, I think. I’ve heard it start-to-finish hundreds of times (there was a period of about 3 years where it was my waking up alarm – the whole album, I’d just lie in bed and listen from start to finish, and then get up), and it never gets old. It still surprises me, (the bassline on Nice Dream, Thom’s desperate vocals on My Iron Lung and Just, the fact the guitars are tuned wrong in Street Spirit). It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

I’ve never really known much about Dead Can Dance, other than they are comprised of Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry, whose voices ring out through the strange and mythical soundscapes of the music. They have been described by Australian music historian, Ian McFarlane, as “African polyrhythms, Gaelic folk, Gregorian chant, Middle Eastern music, mantras, and art rock.” If that helps at all.

To me at the age of 16/17 they were just wonderfully dark, and weird, and melancholic and beautiful. Songs sung in words that I always just assumed were Gaelic, though they could just as easily have been Elvish, for all I knew. The effect being that unable to understand the lyrics, the vocals simply became another instrument weaving together to create a musical tapestry.

Sometime in 1989, a good friend of mine and her brother were housesitting a lovely spot in Joburg, and they’d invited a few of us to come stay. We termed it ‘the house of no parents’ and much fun was had. One late night with everyone asleep, I awoke in the dark to the sound of strangely beautiful bells chiming above a deep orchestral thrum. I climbed out of bed and tip-toed through the house following the sounds. A woman’s voice joined the thrum of bells and cellos, “Cantara, cantara, cantara’ she chanted, in ever lower tones.
As I turned the corner to the lounge, there upon the couch, sat my friend’s brother, looking like a Bond villain, complete with cat upon his lap, as the operatic voice of Lisa Gerrard continued to belt out of the hi-fi. It was love at first hearing.

This was my introduction to Dead Can Dance, and Within the Realm of the Dying Sun.

Released late 1987, my best friend and I bought Bad as a going-away present for our mutual best friend who was leaving for the UK.

I think if we’d known how astounding this album was, we might have kept it for ourselves.
Bad was a stratospheric success for MJ. A ten track album with 9 singles, five of which were number 1’s. It debuted at number one in the US, selling 2.25 million copies… in its first week. It was the worldwide bestselling album of 1997 AND 1988! And it was the second biggest-selling album of all time, losing the number one spot to, you guessed it, Thriller.
Single after single after single, The Way You Make Me Feel, Smooth Criminal, Dirty Diana, Liberian Girl and on and on. I remember hearing a song from Bad on the radio for five years running. Man In The Mirror was still getting heavy rotation when I was moving into my college apartment in 1992!

Melodically, musically, vocally, there is no denying that this album blew the world apart. I still listen to tracks from Bad to this day. They still sound fresh, they still sound cool and they’re still rocking.
Love him or hate him, MJ truly was, and continues to be, the King of Pop.

20albumsin20days

Growing up with 80’s movies it was impossible not to hear the unmistakable new-wave ska-punk sounds of Oingo Boingo ringing out on (it seemed) every teen flick of the decade.

Starting with the obvious title track of Weird Science. But due to the internet not existing or access to very rare (and always import-only) soundtrack albums, it took me years to figure out the name of the band that was responsible for all those awesome songs. Film after film I’d hear Danny Elfman’s anarchic, almost theatrical, voice ring out: Gratitude (from Beverly Hills Cop), Dead Man’s Party (from Back To School), Flesh and Blood (from Ghostbusters 2), to name but a few.

Although a reasonably successful band in the US, Oingo Boingo’s albums were non-existent in South Africa. So it was only in 1994, a full ten years after I’d first heard them, that I managed to find the CD for Boingo. Their last studio album. Although a great album in itself, it doesn’t feature the songs that truly inspired and excited me when I was a kid. So to that end I’ve chosen Dead Man’s Party as the album of choice, which includes Dead Man’s Party, No One Lives Forever, Stay and, of course, that first song that blew me away, Weird Science.

It’s not an exaggeration to state that Peter Gabriel’s SO blew up the late eighties, not least due to the astounding Aardman animated music video for Sledgehammer.
But for someone more used to normal contemporary albums of the time, the song structures and tracks on SO really blew me away. They flowed from heavily melancholic songs to bounce up and down hits, with Peter’s voice guiding us, expertly through the journey.
A true masterpiece.