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Confessions of an Afterworder

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Today I listened to Brothers in Arms. There, I’ve said it. I had to program out tracks 2 and 3* but otherwise I listened to the whole thing. And you know what? It was much better than I remembered it. Shorn of the gloss of contemporaneity (was it ever contemporary?) and with fading memories of Mark Knopfler’s headband, my truncated version of this 80s behemoth was quite an enjoyable listen. I’ve always liked Knopfler’s more low key solo albums but BIA fits into that transition quite well if you listen without prejudice.

I know we’ve trodden similar paths before, but what have you listened to recently expecting aural embarrassment only to be pleasanty surprised?

*The execrable Money for Nothing with its appalling vocal intro by Sting should have been enough to have him banned from making further records by Amnesty International. Walk of Life remains, as ever, completely unlistenable.

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Comments

  1. Editing out track 2 and 3 is the correct solution. You’re Latest Trick is a bit lightweight, but there’s gold (or at least very shiny stuff) in them there grooves.
    The title track is a universal message that is still relevant.

    My confession: I listened to Bat Out Of Hell (at near full volume) yesterday. Bloody love that album

  2. Nowt wrong with Money For Nothing but Walk Of Life is … not his best moment.

    I stopped being embarrassed about my musical taste, life really is too short, so I can’t really help with a useful contrribution to this thread, sorree!

  3. Taking out Money For Nothing and Walk of Life is the correct way to go. They would have made a nice little novelty single together, but don’t fit the album. If you also remove One World, you get a great, brooding, classy 6 song album that’s a perfect 40 minutes in length.

    I can’t actually think of anything I’ve been pleasantly surprised by recently in the way you describe. Hmm. Will have a think.

  4. I sort of played this game the other day on the The Who thread. And what fun it was!

    So much so that I’ll play again:

    IIRC Peter Starstedt’s ‘Where Do You Go To My Lovely’ is has been derided on The AW. I don’t mind it. I’d rather listen to it than, say, anything by Robert Wyatt.
    Also IIRC Richard Curtis ‘The Boat That Rocked’ also got much derided here. I don’t mind it. I’d rather watch it than any superhero film.
    That’s not to say I’m a big fan of either. I’m just fessing up to not sharing some AW dislike. There’s loads of AW like that I dislike. Robert Wyatt for one.

    • Robert Wyatt’s slipping in and out of key is an acquired taste. His collaboration with Ultramarine was good, if not as good as United Kingdoms. Give this a go – it was given to me as part of a set of 40 songs for my 40th birthday and it sprung on me unexpected one day on random play. The first vocal by his wife adds much needed sweetness to a Wyatt tune, and when he drops in, it’s a gentle and fond response, swathed in jazzy loveliness.

      incidentally, my shortsightedness made me confuse you for Gatz, and I thought – someone who likes RT, not liking Robert Wyatt? That’s intriguing. A Pink Floyd fan, on the other hand…

      Back to Brothers in Arms now. “Turning all the night time into the day…”

  5. I did confess to owning and liking the first Right Said Fred album when we were all having a good old laugh at their expense t’other day. I will say it again. I’d rather listen to it than any of the plaid shirted bearded dreariness that the AW favours. I always think of them as The Beloved for Fast Forward readers.

    Their second album was called Sex and Travel. Good title, and the title a nice visual pun on the brothers’ naked bonces. I can’t speak for the musical contents.

  6. Am I the only person in the world that likes On Every Street? I listened to it on repeat years ago on a long car journey and I’ve had a soft spot for it ever since.

    In answer to the question, listened to Jean-Michel Jarre’s Oxygène during the week expecting it to sound really dated, but pleasantly surprised.

    Have I lost all respect in this forum with those two admissions?

    • I have a secret liking for On Every Street, which wasn’t highly regarded at the time of release but has mellowed with time into another album that transitions well into Mark Knopfler’s solo work. Needs a bit of pruning to remove Walk of Life-alike The Bug, which Mary Chapin Carpenter bizarrely recorded and made a much better job of.

    • I still enjoy Oxygène when I hear it, not least because it reminds me of my first weeks in my first flat, living on my own for the first time. I bought a new stereo system that had a CD player, so bought my first CDs to go with it. They were said JMJ album, Miles Davis Kind Of Blue, and a few classical recordings – I’d heard that the CD medium was only useful for very clear and crisp types of music so imagined that I’d keep buying my rock and pop albums on LP…that didn’t last long of course.

      This was in the early 80s and I thought that my new stereo with its blinking blue digital displays, my pleather armchairs, glass tables, colourful artwork on the walls and red blinds covering up my windows at all hours somehow made my dingy flat look like the cool loft in the French film Diva (it didn’t, but playing Oxygène made it easier to imagine that it did). 😀

  7. The other day Ken Bruce (confession one) played My Camera Never Lies by Bucks Fizz which lead me to seek out When We Were Young. Both are extraordinary pieces of bonkers 80s performance and production which I absolutely love. It may lead me to listen to a couple of Bucks Fizz albums from the era but I will keep my thoughts to myself..

  8. It used to be clear what you were supposed to like and not like according to the music press, not that I followed that always. Now it’s up in the air. What was naff is now cool. Your own idea of what is bad can come from those who influence you. You grow up and it matters less thankfully. I think documentaries like the one on Queen can have a favourable impact. I still don’t like most of their music but I sympathise with them as individuals. It seems churlish thereafter to hate them. I am ready to give everyone a chance.

    • My own ideas of what is bad are entirely my own. Even if someone whose taste I respect (i.e. not Gary) presents a compelling argument for why such-and-such a record is good – and this being the internet, compelling arguments aren’t often on the menu – it’s not going to make me enjoy that record. It’s an instinctive thing, and you should trust your own feelings. Nor do I care what musicians are like as people- their niceness or twattishness doesn’t affect their music nor my reaction to it. Nor am I going to reassess the stuff I didn’t like in the context of the very Millennial tendency to not criticise anything – “everything is as good as everything else”. As to giving everybody a chance – I gave Depeche Mode a chance, which is more than the ferret-faced little nerks deserved.

      • “Hating” something because it doesn’t fit your chosen aesthetic is rather juvenile, it seems to me.
        Hating is negative. It’s akin to psychic antimatter and best avoided, I find. It’s not the antonym for “Like”, which is “Dislike”. Disliking something can be acheived without necessarily harshing one’s mellow.
        That’s all folks.

        p.s. Depeche Mode are indeed nerks. I can’t recall their faces at all, so can’t say if they are ferret-like.
        I don’t hate them.

        • They’ve been called worse. These reviews are printed on the inner sleeve of their 1985 hits compilation.

          “What do you expect from this lame bunch of dickheads?”
          “I often wonder why God bothered with Depeche Mode.”
          “I’ve heard more melody coming out of Kenny Wheeler’s arsehole.”
          “Another hit – and only a rusty meat hook through Dave Gahan’s malformed cranium will prevent it”

        • “Hating” is a provocative word, but in the context of pop music it doesn’t mean quite the same thing as “hating Nazis” or “hating cruelty to animals”, does it? Can’t you make the distinction, Mike-H? And the way I hate (f’rinstance) Queen is enjoyable, makes me laugh, so don’t worry about my Kirlian Aura getting all tangled with toxic stress ions.

          Perhaps you’re knitting your brows a little too tightly over this, Mike?

      • All I mean is one can be more susceptible to the hip consensus when young and get rather serious and earnest about how awful much chart music is. Not that that was me really. I lightened up in the 80s for the most part. But I think when you are older you can care less. And I think the world in which we live in now has changed and youngsters appreciate music from all eras without the baggage we have.

  9. I was going to add my twopenn’orth but then remembered that not only do I quite like “twistin’ by the pool” but I actually bought the 12” single version which not only disqualifies me from commenting but will probably result in me being banned from the site.

  10. I’ve occasionally shared my more eccentric likes on here, to the deafening sound of tumbleweed. Who remembers my sudden enthusiasm for Home Free’s Man of Constant Sorrow? Or man of a thousand voices Dimash Kudaibergen?

    I still love Queen doing Somebody to Love live in Montreal, even though I got into trouble for accusing Saucepot of only pretending not to like it.

  11. I found myself quite liking what they used to call Hi NRG songs from the late 80s, including many Stock Aitken Waterman numbers. I assume that it’s Messrs Stock and Aitken that supplied the beats but Respectable, You Spin Me Round, Whatever I do, Never Gonna Give You Up are brilliant records.

    • I loved the almost brutish Hi NRG of those early Divine singles produced by Bobby O. Shake it Up and Shoot your Shot sounded like they had slithered out of some subterranean leather fetish club. And as for Love Reaction, it was the song Blue Monday could have been.

  12. I listened to The Joshua Tree for the first time all the way through last week. U2 CDs are cheap and ubiquitous, and I’ve been picking them up.

    It’s a really good album, I was surprised how much I enjoyed it. I don’t think its Kirsty McCall’s tracklisting though – surely In God’s Country was the obvious Track No. 5, but I reckon they wanted to close the first side of the vinyl with something quiet.

  13. It has been my practice over the years to periodically try, nay strive to enjoy King Crimson. Despite repeated efforts I rarely manage more than ten minutes of the aforementioned before I hit stop and consign them back into the outer darkness until the next time. Sure as eggs are eggs the periodic I really should like King Crimson vibe struck again a couple of weeks ago. I selected Larks’ Tongues in Aspic for my disappointment this time around. Well blow me I actually managed to listen to all of it from soup to nuts and get this enjoyed it. I was well shocked and feeling all smug and interlektual like I proceeded to Starless and Bible Black. I enjoyed that too! What da fu*k? I skipped Red thinking I’ll move onto Discipline remembering that someone had praised it rhapsodically to me at a mingle back in the days of yore.
    I didn’t like it. I found it thin and boring. It sounded like a poor facsimile of Talking Heads.
    I knew I was right all along. I don’t like King Crimson. The world has regained it’s former shape and the fever dream has ceased.

      • Different bands, Mr P – different sound worlds, different approaches. With the exception of the scarlet thread of Mr Fripp running through the whole tapestry, the early band bears no relation to the improvising band of Lark’s Tongues to Red – which in turn bears no relation to the “gamelan” sound world of the Discipline band. It’s not unreasonable to like one but not the other(s).

      • Apologies, I seem to have replied to Retro with an answer for Mr P.

        Chickpea, oat and lentil surprise – I assume that the element of surprise involved is the gamble regarding follow-through…

    • I struggle with KC too but the improvisational period of Lark’s through Bible to Red I can tolerate pretty well, alongside their recent live albums with three drummers. One thing for certain is that Red is not thin. It’s probably KC’s heaviest sounding album.

      • I’ll give Red a hearing the next time the I Should Like King Crimson Vibe rears it’s tedious head. On paper they tick a few boxes for me but they always disappoint. Even though I enjoyed listening to the two I mentioned above that enjoyment wasn’t of a depth that made me jones to hear either of them again in the near future.

        • It sounds like, in fact, you DO like King Crimson – just not everything they ever recorded and there’s nothing wrong with that position.

          However, if you REALLY don’t like King Crimson, just stop tryin’ (as the Home Sec might have put it), on the basis that there’s so much other music that you do like and only so many hours to listen to it.

          • Kinda. Sorta. A smidgen. I don’t wuv ’em like Tigg wuvs Jesus Christ Supermarket. Com. I have discovered I can at least tolerate a couple of their records. Maybe my quest is fulfilled after all these years. Maybe I need something new/old to baffle me. I shall have a ponder in my brown study.

                  • My had Mam had a friend with pretentions to poshness who had her catalogue enclosed in a leatherette slip cover. It smelt of cat wee. At least that’s my childhood memory of it but thinking about it now it could well have been my Mam’s mate that smelt of cat wee and her posh catalogue may have just smelt of plastic and desperation.

                    • I remember somebody – not my parents – having a leatherette cover for The Radio Times. It may have featured an embossed galleon. But the Radio Times never held the erotic charge of the ladies’ nethergarments pages of a mail order catalogue – nothing does, in retrospect.

        • Have you tried Polynesian Nose Resonator music? KFD has an amount of videos lined up. My favourite is perhaps the Papeete Postal Workers Nose Resonator Ensemble’s recording of Eye Of The Tiger. They seem to be having fun! Or how about Ahohako Fakahokotau’s stirring cover of the Cranberries’ Zombie? Not bad for a ninety year-old! [that’s enough KFD pisstaking – Ed.]

    • It’s interesting that Mr & Mrs Fripp are both separately responsible for some of music’s most unlistenable chunes. Too much to expect some sort of matter / anti-matter collision producing something wondrous when they make music together…..those Sunday Lunch things they did were proper awful.

      • Well, of course I disagree completely, with particular regard to King Crimson and Mr Fripp’s solo excursions.

        I mellowed a bit regarding the Sunday Lunch – er – performances when I read why Mrs Fripp had suggested them: I don’t think even they would claim them as a great body of music and musicality; just a bit of internet entertainment, as much for their own amusement as anyone else’s – but mainly to stop Mr Fripp getting too introspective and depressive during lockdown. Maybe he wouldn’t be the cheery chap we see today if he had been allowed to sink into his own head for two years…

    • I can speak with the zeal of a recent convert. I’m now a fully fledged fan of the Larks’ Tongues to Red trilogy. I originally was wary of Red because it sounded a bit grim – everyone calls it heavy and by this point there were only three of them left in the band. I was expecting a grunge-y, stripped down, power trio thing. But it’s not really like that at all. Most of the tunes have extra musicians adding things like violin and oboe and stuff, there is plenty of melody amidst the noise, and the closing track Starless is one of their most beautiful (probably my favourite King Crimson track of them all).

      So I say definitely have a listen if you like the previous two.

  14. Not so much confessions, as preaching to the converted, but music matters.

    I went to a wedding reception last night. DJ played Young Hearts Run Free, Band Of Gold and Too Much Too Young. Jeez. Great tunes, but perhaps he’d never listened to the lyrics before.

    The Fatback Band’s I Found Lovin’ came on and I’ve never seen a dancefloor empty so quickly. It’s not 1984 and this isn’t Essex.

    Plus points for kicking off the Motown section with Frank Wilson’s (no longer) rare Do I Love You (Indeed I Do).

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