Albums ahoy!

What ghastly times. “Dystopian” doesn't even cover it. Existential anxieties notwithstanding, I've been burying myself in new music. That might sound trite, but it's my release, my escape chamber in normal times, let alone when there’s a genocidal maniac bombing an otherwise peace-loving democracy into the Middle Ages. I know it seems wrong, with that context, to divert your attention to entertainment, but given the topic that dominates every conversation, every minute of television airtime, every Tweet, some relief has to be found.

First up, then, has been a diversion of unbridled guitar rock. That will be the Soho Dukes, a combo formed in the Surrey/Sussex borderlands and whose debut album, Bar Fights & Tuppenny Uprights, was recorded in Woking, the commuter-belt town best known for raising Paul Weller, the Pizza Express used in a dubious alibi, and where HG Wells’ Martians  landed first in War Of The Worlds before tearing up the place, a chilling foreshadow of events taking place right now in eastern Europe. 

From the outset, the Dukes’ don’t set out to be overly sophisticated, and that’s what works so entertainingly well. Having seen them live, in a small suburban pub where the enjoyably raucous boogie goes down well with a pint, their debut album takes the brakes off. There’s a sumptuous production to it, one that belies its suburban foundations. In fact, it’s a sound that would - I’m genuinely convinced - find a natural home on American rock radio and in truckstop jukeboxes. None more so than opening track Angel Walk, with its superbly polished sax break, and 5,000 Channels, Weekend Millionaire and Murdertown, with the kind of slick shifts of rhythm and lead guitar that wouldn’t be out of place in the canon of any classic rock outfit from the last 50 years. 

There is the odd misstep, such as the comically theatrical Bovver Boys, on which lead singer Johnny Barracuda strays into punkish cod-Cockney, but as Bar Fights & Tuppenny Uprights progresses, the ears warm to a superbly sophisticated sequence of grown-up guitar rock. For an act that, on paper is - and I hope they won’t mind me saying this - ostensibly a bar band, their recorded debut not only projects polished competence but also the sheer joy of playing this kind of music. Name your band - AC/DC, Pearl Jam, Van Halen, the Chilli Peppers, even Guns N’ Roses (Barracuda does bear an uncanny vocal similarity to Axl Rose...) - and you get some sense of where the Dukes are pitched musically, but moreover, it’s the degree of professional production and arrangement that makes the album work so well. The Dukes are not new - they’ve been gigging around southern London since the ’90s, honing their stage craft - but in the process, they’ve fine-tuned their songwriting, too, and the net effect of this album underlines it. COVID may have prolonged its production, but it’s been wholeheartedly worth the extra time and effort.

The Soho Dukes play London’s legendary Troubadour on Saturday 7 May - details at SohoDukes.com

Seven years in the making and an incredible 18 years after their last outing, which saw a tentative reunion (or was it reconciliation?) between Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith, Tears For Fears have returned with an album that provides the soothing tincture these ears needed as the world winces at the actual shooting war taking place in Europe. And, as an album title, The Tipping Point couldn't have any greater irony, given that the album was released the day after Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine. But in spite of that unfortunate timing, the record itself is a consummate pleasurefest, especially for those of my vintage. 

TFF were part of my teenage soundtrack, from the synthpop gloom of Pale Shelter and Mad World to the hits-a-go-go of the Songs From The Big Chair era. What I hadn't always appreciated, until I spoke to Steven Wilson about his surround sound remixes of that blockbuster album and its follow-up, The Seeds Of Love, was just how much Orzabal and Smith had a shared DNA with the progressive rock giants I grew up listening to. It’s what has always made their songwriting multi-layered: considered - epic even, in places (think of a song as topographically expansive as Woman In Chains, for example). 

Like the Soho Dukes’ effort in my previous review, protracted time may have helped Orzabal and Smith create a better product, one of assured songwriting, luscious studio work and perfectly balanced arrangements. That doesn’t mean an overly-slick throwback to the ’80s, but an album of exemplary songcraft. There’s a reflective maturity to it, too - not just the inevitable passing of time, but also Orzabal’s own widowerhood as he came to terms with the tragic 2017 death of his wife Caroline. There are other themes: “We felt the world was very much at a tipping point,” Smith recently told the BBC. “The rise of the right wing, Trump being elected, the Black Lives Matter movement, the pandemic, the climate crisis…”. Inevitably, though, the primary source of the album is Orzabal and Smith finding their own relationship again. 

Opening with the understated, Americana-tinged No Small Thing, the nine tracks that follow span the textural range of Tears For Fears records past (with lyrics informed by Orzabal’s mental struggles in mourning). This isn’t, though, a mournful album in sprit - even if the title track’s words are dark, direct references to death, the song’s bouncing rhythm drawing comparison to the similar uplift of Everybody Wants To Rule The World. “The ‘tipping point’ in the title track is a little bit more private and a bit morbid,” Orzabal revealed to the BBC. “The narrator is in a hospital ward looking at someone they've loved for a long time, knowing that they're going to die, watching their breath, looking at them and just wondering at what point are they going to pass from life into death.” Please Be Happy is equally as direct, addressing the alcohol abuse that tragically led to Caroline’s descent into premature dementia, while My Demons - with its semi-intentional Depeche Mode hooks - addresses surveillance society, though it, too could be a bleak appraisal of watching someone succumb to weakness. Gloomy as the lyrical premise of these songs might sound, the actual music itself paints a brighter background, one that ensures the album, from start to finish, is more than just comfort food, but one that warrants repeated listening to unlock the myriad layers encased within. 

The pre-publicity for Johnny Marr’s fourth de facto solo album goes back so far, it seems like I’ve had the release of Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 in my calendar for months. In fact, the Mancunian jangler has been  drip-feeding extracts from this ambitious double album since late last year, not that anyone’s appetites needed whetting. 

His previous solo release, Call The Comet was a triumphant exercise in guitar-based, electronic-enhanced indie rock by one of the masters of the art. Even now, I’ll never claim to be a massive fan of The Smiths, but the bits I did like were the result of Marr’s singular guitar playing. It’s a reputation that has quite rightly rendered him the last true British guitar hero. He might not share the blues-rock heritage of veteran axe-swingers like Clapton, Beck, Page and Gilmour, but Marr has what every teenage guitarist yearns for (and never achieves) - a signature sound. That has populated some of my favourite records of the last 40 years, namely The The’s Mind Bomb and Dusk, the 7 Worlds Collide supergroup project, and Electronic’s debut, not to mention a vast catalogue of guest appearances on everything from albums by Roxy Music and Tom Jones to Hans Zimmer’s No Time To Die soundtrack.

Marr is a musician’s musician, and despite the stratospheric adulation he commands - justifiably - lets the music do the talking. Thus, Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 represents a whopping hour-and-ten-minutes of mind-blowing electro-rock, cantering between guitar-stomping fare like Night And Day and the epic closer Human, and a more industrial wall of sound, such as The Speed Of Love. There is groove on Tenement Time and the relative bright pop of Counter Clock World. But it is to the most ‘Marr-esque’ songs, like Sensory Street and The Whirl, that bring the energy out of the Mancunian’s spirit most strongly. With such an expansive CV covering four decades, it seems weird to think of Marr as just hitting his stride with his solo career, but Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 is an epic product in every sense, and utterly enjoyable for it.

It's the vinyl countdown - Record Store Day is with us again

Picture: Creekside Vinyl

To some of us, buying records - and I mean the round, mainly black objects with a hole in the middle - is more than the fetish those who remain indifferent to physical music ownership might think it is. Each to their own. For everyone who maintains that Spain can't be beaten for a holiday (remember them?) another will insist on Greece. For Nike see Adidas. You get my point.

Music's digitisation, first with the CD and, latterly, streaming services, has undoubtedly set free consumption, and facilitated it into our busy, mobile, portable lives. However, it also abandoned the pleasures of opening a brand new record, removing it from the sleeve while still studying the artwork and liner notes, and then sitting down to listen. Well, at least, that's my justification. It's also why I'm one of those happy to be ensnared by Record Store Day, the normally annual vinyl-buying splurge designed to help out independent music dealers as they compete with the few remaining record chains, the Amazons of this world, the supermarket checkout impulse-buy points-of-sale, and streaming.

COVID-19 has forced RSD to this year postpone the regular April fixture into three smaller 'drops' - the first in August, a second today and the third next month. August's drop met with no shortage of custom, with record shops reporting brisk in-store business and the now-familiar queues forming at sunrise by punters keen to bag special releases and the odd rarity. It is, at the end of the day, a purely indulgent, self-serving frenzy, but the punters get something unique and the shops do a decent bit of business. Those that get it right, of course.

One emporium local to me, which didn't open physically on the day (unlike plenty who did), decided to do its RSD trading entirely online, with a clunky system by which you registered interest in a release in advance and then waited on the day for an e-mail at 6pm to say you could then go online and buy it. When this didn't work at the time when everything was supposed to be up and running everyone went to the shop's website and promptly crashed it, rendering Record Store Day a frustrating Saturday evening hitting 'refresh' a lot. For  RSD read RSI. Now, I appreciate that the shop in question may have stayed shut out of consideration for its staff, but it's the kind of experience that doesn't do well for customer loyalty. And makes me wish I'd been queuing up at the crack of dawn to spend my money somewhere that managed to get it right.

Perseverance, however, paid off in the end. Stupid or not, we got what we wanted from retailers who had got their e-commerce acts together: releases as disparate as The The's latest RSD-only single (a regular occurrence, but you wish Matt Johnson would do a new album, rather than these one-offs...) and a compilation of Memphis soul obscurities, the obligatory release from The Dame (BowieNowChanges) and a vinyl reissue of Peter Bruntnell's sublime Normal For Bridgwater. Happy days. Today's drop will be a little more modest (just 89 releases as opposed to August’s 345), but that may not be the point: whether you’re interested in a Two-Tone 40th anniversary compilation, Paul McCartney’s debut solo album, The Yardbirds classic Roger The Engineer or even Britney Spears’ Oops! …I Did It Again, it's sometimes worth taking a punt on RSD, buying something you've either never heard before, or haven't owned since you had it as a crudely taped copy back in the day. That’s half the fun of record curation in middle age.

“The real thing, the real joy, is in the tactile relationship, between you and the artist,” says Simon Tyler, who runs the splendid Creekside Vinyl in Faversham, Kent. He points to the physical object itself: “This square piece of cardboard with a 12-inch round record slipped inside," he says, “It's a magical object.” Not surprisingly, Simon says that the magic begins with the record shop itself, a point I wholeheartedly agree with. The imposition of lockdown on in-store retailing severely curtailed the pleasure of browsing and discovering something you didn't even know you wanted. Or in the case of shops like Simon’s, a natter with a friendly and knowledgeable proprietor. 

“Firstly,” he says, “you hear the shop as you walk along the street. The strain of music drifting out of the double doors turns your head. ‘What’s that? Is it? Oh God, yes! I haven’t heard THAT for years!’.” Once inside, the tactile experience draws you in further. “You see row upon row of albums calling to you like a siren,” Simon says, describing his own shop’s experience, in a calming corner of Kent's oldest and quaintest market town. “You walk across the threshold and let your fingers browse across the top of the records. You see familiar pictures and faces, and new images that offer a strange fascination. They tease you; they reveal and yet conceal the secrets within.”

Picture: Creekside Vinyl

Simon’s view is obviously biased, owing to running a generously stocked shop full of vinyl records, but he’s spot on. Some people can enter a fashion boutique and feel tempted to buy the place up; record shops, for me, hold the same appeal, such is my interest in buying something new or something worth hearing anew.

There is, as Simon says, a magical experience to opening up a freshly-bought record, but to me it is more about the listening experience. That, I recognise, sounds like I've swallowed the music industry's Kool-Aid and gone back for seconds. Records are, though, magical objects, which may go to explain figures from the BPI, the UK's recording industry body, earlier this year which revealed that many people who buy LPs never actually get round to playing them (and not just those like me who acquire too many and then struggle to find time to listening to them). 

Moreover, the BPI found that as many as a fifth doesn't even have anything to play their vinyl on. This reflects strangely in light of vinyl enjoying sales growth for 12 consecutive years in the UK, now accounting for one in every eight albums bought as a physical format. 

Over 4.3 million vinyl LPs were sold in the UK last year, a 4% increase on 2018. In the United States, vinyl sales have just surpassed sales of CDs for the first time since the 1980s, accounting for $232 million of music sales in the first six months of this year, as opposed to just under $130 million for CDs, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. That, the RIAA has revealed, is a 4% increase for LPs and a 48% decrease for the shiny silver discs. This might also reflect the times we’re in, but despite my love of vinyl I’ve still continued to buy CDs that I might want to play in the car. However, seeing as lockdown and all of that has meant I’ve hardly used my car since March, my listening has been largely done at home over the last six months. 

However, while all this love for vinyl is admirable, it can’t be ignored that physical sales continue to drop, and the pandemic isn’t helping. Industry figures have shown that overall physical music sales continue to drop exponentially as streaming has grown, both for ‘free’, ad-supported services as well as premium subscriptions. That, at the end of the day, is not good news for the artists themselves, who get a lesser cut of the action than they do with physical sales. For the so-called ‘heritage acts’, like Fleetwood Mac, who’ve re-released back catalogue material on vinyl to relatively healthy receipts, physical sales might offset lower income from streaming. For those in middling industry positions, now also denied the opportunity to play live - which, these days, is what makes them money, the virus has hit them hard.

Picture: Creekside Vinyl

Record Store Day, at least, will provide a momentary fillip for the artists who take part - even if their releases aren’t even taken out of the shrink wrap, a phenomenon identified by the BPI in its All About The Music yearbook. “A proportion of people are buying vinyl because they’re a superfan,” said Rob Crutchley, the book’s author, when it came out in April. “Even if they don’t actually have a turntable they’re still keen to support the artist and have the artefact itself."

"There is still a strong core of fans who also value the opportunity to acquire, own or gift recorded music on physical format,” Cruchley added, pointing to the custom of artists using Record Store Day to give fans something unique. “Sometimes it can be because they’re catalogue titles that are being re-pressed in a new edition - maybe a run on a different coloured vinyl - other times it might be a new title that has a limited press on a certain format.” 

This, then, points to the irrationality of consumerism overall. I’ll be the first to ’fess up - mainly to my partner - at buying albums that already exist in my collection. In some cases, it’s for new sonic experiences - remastered, refreshed editions on 180g vinyl that have improved upon recordings made many years ago and now benefit from modern studio and reproduction techniques. Or they’re albums bought on CD early in the day, often when the new digital discs were effectively crude transfers from analogue recordings. In some cases, they’re albums I’ve only ever heard on cassette tape, furtively 'borrowed' from my brother and recorded while my dad was out at work. 

“The joy of records is in the experience,” says Simon Tyler. “That joy is deeply personal, and long may it continue.”  Record buying is, then, one of the cycles of life. There is little real justification for buying an album again “because it sounds better”, but the same applies to replacing that VHS copy of The Godfather, with the DVD, then the Blu-ray Disc and ultimately the 4K Blu-ray version to play on your super-duper new flatscreen TV. And I know you wouldn’t buy a new copy of a classic book because it’s been given a new cover, but there’s a difference. There really is.