Pop music
Remixed feelings
Marcus Berkmann
Although singles sales have begun to rise again — Stock, Aitken and Waterman may not contribute much to the wealth of our national culture, but they do to the wealth of our national record industry — the modern pop charts remain increasingly inaccessible to all but 'pre-teen moppets and Ecstasy-crazed dance victims. Tried watching Top of the Pops recently? Cer- tainly epileptics, and anyone with an atten- tion span measured in more than fractions of a second, should not consider it. As children's television presenters you have never heard of (where is John Noakes now when we need him?) introduce endless obscure rap acts and Italian acid house groups who perform two-minute sound- bites of their hits to a hysterical audience of goggling nine-year-old nymphets, you find yourself remembering Boney M and even The Dooleys with sepia-tinged nostalgia.
The odd thing about all this new dance stuff is the shameless way its perpetrators ransack the past for their ideas. But then most singles buyers probably think that pop music was invented by Duran Duran, while the impossibly wrinkled old lags who actually make the records (the leggy black girls are usually hired at a later stage) have rather longer memories. Too long, in some cases.
For one recent hit, under the ingenious guise of yet another exciting new dance record, has disinterred ghouls from the past that sad Seventies acts like me had rather hoped were locked away and buried under a ton of concrete. Ben Liebrand's 'Eve Of The War (Remix)' may not sound familiar, but these days the remixer is so important a figure that his name sometimes supersedes that of the mere performer, who in this case was Jeff Wayne.
Remember Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds? A remarkable number of people bought it back in 1977, although perhaps few would admit it today. A lavish and expensively over-produced concept album, narrated portentously by Richard Burton, it instantly found favour with millions of mainstream rock fans who had yet to inure themselves to punk, and its gatefold excess adorned many a record collection — although even then most people had the wit to pretend that it had been bought for them by an ill-informed aunt.
But where are all those copies now? A dozen years later, it's rare to see one on public show. Most are presumably in the attic, along with Children's Favourites and the collected works of the Electric Light Orchestra. Airbrushed from communal memory, Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds has become a non-record.
Such has been the musical Stalinism of the past ten years — indeed, the concept album may well be the only Seventies artefact never to have come back into fashion. But even that could now be changing. Prompted by the success of the Liebrand remix, CBS have re-released the original album and are marketing it for all it's worth. It's oddly comforting to see it back on the racks, but do we really want to be reminded of our past indiscretions? And if one terrible old concept album has been dug up, can others be far behind?
Look out, then, for Yes's Tales From Topographic Oceans, an album so dull that no one I asked could remember anything about it — even those people who confes- sed under torture to having owned it at some indeterminate period of their lives. Also up for reappraisal: the works of The Alan Parsons Project, the most faceless band in rock 'n' roll history, and the only one yet known to have recorded a concept album about an architect; Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells ('slightly distorted guitar . . .'); and of course Pink Floyd, the kings of the concept. Dark Side of the Moon, for instance, was always supposed to be a concept album, although what that concept was supposed to be, other than 'if we make an album called Dark Side of the Moon, we'll be living off the royalties for the rest of our lives', was never entirely Clear. It'll be 'ye kids', of course, who decide, for it is they (or rather `vey) whose interests are paramount here. Whatever the Liebrands of this world decide to renux will be the next concept to come back and haunt us, so for once it may actually be worth monitoring the top 40. Unless some- one decides to do Rick Wakeman's Jour- ney to the Centre of the Earth. . .
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