february random music

Some more random shuffled music - 

 

“In The Clouds” from All About Eve. Brother Rob would be very happy with me! But this is a terrific track actually, really summery and cheery, and I’d forgotten what a lovely voice Julianne Regan has. Nice chiming guitars in a very 80s, almost Cocteau Twins way. 

 

“I Follow Rivers” from Scandanavian popster Lykke Li. Excellent and extremely catchy song, and an enjoyably unusual production too, with lots of percussion well to the fore.

 

“Secret Side” from Nico’s The End… very slightly mad, especially the hissing and wheezing of the harmonium, and with added white noise washes from Cale and Eno’s synth backings. Chilly stuff. 

“Endless Summer Of The Damned” – from Bauhaus’ last album Go Away White, an album that the band didn’t live to see released as they’d already fallen out and broken up, again, even before the sessions were complete. This one has a terrific glam riff and the Murph in full declamatory vocal mode. Rather wonderful actually. 

“The Apparent Chaos Of Stone” – Robert Fripp and Theo Travis live at Coventry Cathedral in 2009. This piece is more Theo than Robert as he noodles away on the flute for nearly ten minutes with the Venal One creating gentle wooshes and whirrs via the Lunar Module. This whole album is very good, the flutes really work well with the soundscapes, adding a warmth that the soundscapes can sometimes lack.

 

“Heroes” – Bowie live in Tokyo, December 1978. This was the very last show of the Stage tour and Japanese tv broadcast about an hour of the show, resulting in this excellent quality recording. Cracking rendition of “Heroes” with DB really going for it vocally. 

 

“Down Colorful Hill” – Cheer Up!!! Do Red House Painters ever smile I wonder? Or laugh? Having said that, this is a very lovely song. 

“I’m Not Satisfied” – from the Mothers Of Invention’s Cruisin’ With Ruben & The Jets – an album of doowop style greasy love songs. As the sleeve says, it was a last ditch attempt to fool DJ’s into playing the Mothers’ music on the radio. As with previous attempts it failed, as Zappa and the Mothers were seen by the upstanding moral guardians in radioland as being subversive, dirty and politically suspect. Can’t have them polluting the airwaves with their songs about how vegetables keep you regular (“Call Any Vegetable”), and songs about people with largish limbs - “Big Leg Emma” was actually on a list of banned records because, according to Zappa, a girl with a big leg ‘caused unease’ in the higher echelons of an LA radio station!

 

“Ali Click” – what a great song this is, lots of Enoid percussion and those weird almost nursery rhyme-like lyrics about Jolly Roger which are virtually impossible to understand but still, in Eno’s measured reserved English tones, somehow sound slightly rude.

  

“Flight Into Space” from the Moonraker soundtrack, which is one of the best soundtracks that John Barry ever did for the Bond films. This is quite an epic piece. 

"Sugar Hiccup” from the Cocteau Twins' second album Head Over Heels. This song, (and the equally excellent “From The Flagstones”) marks the exact point that the Twins moved from doing second rate Siouxsie knock offs with terrible drum machine beats, to giving us sprawling mini epics of full of reverb, spangly shimmery guitars and Elizabeth Fraser’s astonishing vocals. Musically “Sugar Hiccup” is almost a dry run for the following year’s “Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops”, but it’s a marvellous song in its own right. The only downside is that it very rapidly fades out halfway through a chorus, which gives the impression of someone saying ‘yeah, that’s long enough, next one please’ and just fading it out without any attempt to make it fit the song. 

 

“Everything” from Anathema’s superb 2010 album We’re Here Because We’re Here. This is a tremendous album, mixed by the ridiculously busy Steven Wilson. It’s a huge sounding record, every track is big and wide and sounds like it was meant for vast open spaces. This is a lovely ballad, starting off fairly intimately but expanding as the song progresses into another epic.

 

“Not A Young Man Anymore” in which Dean and Britta play a Lou Reed song far better than Lou and the Velvets ever did. Here, it’s not a bad song at all. The bootleg I have of the VU playing it in early 1967, well, it’s pretty awful. Lou’s singing is especially painful. 

“Reynard the Fox” – Julian Cope basically goes utterly loopy before your very ears. Yet, somehow, it’s still very entertaining. That whole Fried album is like that – clearly Mr Cope is a long way out of his tree (I mean just look at the album cover), yet the songs are cracking.

 

“Where Are We Now?” – I’ve not played this for a little while, but it’s still absolutely marvellous. I’m so excited about the new Bowie album. A couple of weeks to go now…

“Don’t You Get Me Down” – one of the brilliant set of songs that Charley recorded last year. Her tunes are very clever, slightly offbeat, some very unusual chords and stuff, yet the songs are nearly always incredibly catchy and very easy to sing along with. I wish she’d record more.

 

“Dominion” – the last part of Tangerine Dream’s Logos. Classic synth sounds. 

“Night School” – from Zappa’s Jazz From Hell. This was an all instrumental album that Zappa recorded on the Synclavier synth back in 1986. Just to satisfy the fans he added one guitar solo track. But this one is a jolly, very commercial sounding, tune that was originally intended as a tv theme for some late night educational programmes. The Synclavier sounds are horribly dated now, but it’s a fun little tune.

 

“Hong Kong Garden” – named after a Chinese restaurant favoured by the Banshees. What a song! This is just brilliant. And it was their debut single – it shows such confidence. Amazing. 

“Autobahn” recorded live in 1991 on The Mix tour. Not much else to say. It’s “Autobahn” – it runs for 11 minutes, it’s great. As always. 

“Neal And Jack And Me” – just the interlocking guitar parts, with some nice Frippian squeaky mouse overdubs. This must have been one of Dear Old Mr Stormy’s Monday Selections some time ago. These little snippets of rehearsals and workings are always pretty interesting. However some, the little 20 seconds fragments of Lizard tunes and such like are interesting once or twice and that’s it – but others, like this one, 2+ minutes long and recognizably part of a song, repay repeated listens and have thus made it onto the iPod.

“Pop Muzik”  - M's brilliant single which is of course one of the greatest ever pop songs in the history of the world. It’s also very cleverly produced: towards the end the stereo image suddenly expands – it starts off as a really tight little synth pop song but then suddenly it seems to cover the entire sky as everything is hugely opened up. I’d never really noticed this before and I would think you’d only really get this impression on headphones, but it’s very clever, and very effective.  

 

“Moss Garden” from Dave ‘n’ Brian. Love that Japanese Koto that DB plays, and the backing synths and atmosphere’s from BE are fab. 

“Black Metallic” from indie also-rans Catherine Wheel. They never really made it as big as everyone expected – this single and the accompanying album, Ferment, came out in 1992 and everyone seemed convinced that they’d be huge, but it never really happened and as far as I know they split some years ago. “Black Metallic” is however a monster of a tune and it sounded extremely good 20 years on. 

“Whole Lotta Rosie” from AC/DC. Rock doesn’t get much rockier than this! 

 

And finally - “The God Of Adverbs” from the recent David Sylvian collaboration with Jan Bang. We have DS’s calm, measured narration over some very odd squiddly backing ‘music’. “In Azerbaijan there are no adverbs, merely meandering circumlocutions. The God of Adverbs finds this deeply distressing.”

It's a really compelling record - and a strange one - but I love strange records...

 

random music again

Haven’t done this for a while but I shuffled the iPod recently and this was what it gave me –

 

“Fame” – classic Bowie to start us off, this was a live version from 1978, and darned fine it was too. 

“Instant Karma” – Peter Murphy’s cover of the Lennon song, from 2009. The Murph more than does the song justice. Great fun. 

“No Reply” – the Fabs from before I was born. What a great track this is.

“Jealous Guy” – again a live version, from Ferry’s 2007 tour. Always a popular live song, and Ferry always delivers on this one. The whistling is a bit of a show stopper too. 

And then I realized that the first four songs all had Lennon’s hand in them in some way! Weird or what. But we moved on from John and next up was –

 

“North Star” – lovely stuff from Robert Fripp and Daryl Hall. Gorgeous vocals and a lovely laid back guitar part, which comes about 3 years before the very similar and also very lovely “Matte Kudasai”. 

“Frozen Roads” from Brett Anderson’s 2009 album Slow Attack. This is a superb album from start to finish and is by quite some distance Brett’s best album – all tracks were co-written with and produced by Leo Abrahams. “Frozen Roads” is a stunningly good piano led ballad which seemed very appropriate with all the snow around.

 

”Distant Lights Of Olancha Recede” – a Harold Budd poem (these are always welcome – his well worn recitations are tremendous) was followed by another Budd track from By The Dawn’s Early Light – “Boy About 10”, which has that wonderfully mournful violin on it. This is one of my favourite Budd albums. 

“River Deep Mountain High” – the classic Ike ‘n’ Tina Turner song. Pretty epic stuff I think you’ll agree.

“Zannat” from the Hector Zazou and Zwara album – quite a contrast to the super high energy of the Spector production of the previous track. A marvellously atmospheric meld of modern and ancient. 

“Its-a-happening” from the Magic Mushrooms! This is from Nuggets and it’s charmingly loopy. Imagine what you think a song called “Its-a-happening” from 1968 by the Magic Mushrooms would sound like. And it does. It’s exactly like that. 

 

“Ohm Sweet Ohm” from a Kraftwek show just a few nights ago in Dusseldorf where Ralf and the boys are playing Der Katalog over eight nights with all the 3D gubbins (like they will at the Tate Modern later this year). I grabbed the Radioactivity show that appeared on Dime the other night. The quality is pretty good and having the full Radioactivity album played live is a real treat - new performances of tracks like “Antenna” and this one, the always good “Ohm Sweet Ohm” – a joke that surely only works in English?  

 

“Third Uncle” from the 801 Live album. Furious guitarwork from Phil Manzanera, and Eno belts out the vocals which he’s never done since. What a great track. 

“Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps Please!” the one and only hit from Splodgenessabounds. I’ve always liked this one – it still makes me laugh, the way that the singer is getting progressively more and more frustrated. 

“”Life Is A Minestrone” - 10cc – I have a handful of 10cc tracks, and they are terrific. Pity they got so dull after a while, but for a time between 1973 and 1977 they turned out some absolutely impeccably constructed pop songs.

And to end the iPod came up with –

 

“Upon The My-O-My” from the unique Captain Beefheart. This is one of his more commercial songs, from the Unconditionally Guaranteed album that most Captain fans dislike, but which I think has some cracking songs. And it’s not as willfully bonkers as something like Trout Mask Replica, or later albums like Ice Cream For Crow. He performed this one on the OGWT in 1974 and this clip often crops up on those Sounds Of The Seventies type programmes – the good Captain keeps leering at the camera and reaching out as if to grab the viewer through the television, and you feel that he could actually do it!

steven wilson - the raven that refused to sing...

I'm listening to a sneaky early download of Steven Wilson’s upcoming album The Raven That Refused To Sing (And Other Stories). I love the nicely pretentious title, and at times the music is like jumping back 40 years. Imagine Zappa’s early / mid 70s ensembles playing with the Mahavishnu Orchestra underpinned by Crimson’s Bruford / Wetton rhythm section (all that heavy thud work and monstrous complex drumming), and you are kind of approaching the density and sheer bonkers-ness of this music. 

But it sounds oddly modern too - the production is amazing, as you'd expect with SW, and it sounds so immediate; on headphones the band is all around you. 

There’s mellotrons and flutes too, which are clearly a nod to early King Crimson, but also some very pretty melodies as well as some heavy riffing and insanely complicated stuff too. It made me smile a lot too, which is always a good sign. The music is endlessly fascinating and actually quite exhilarating. The title track is uplifting and epic and claustrophobic and personal and downright emotional all at the same time. Quite a feat. 

I can’t think of anyone else creating this complex, yet still accessible jazzy, rocky, proggy, fusiony music like this these days. Wilson is absolutely in a field of his own. There’s even some seriously sharp guitar shredding courtesy of Chelmsford’s own Guthrie Govan, now a permanent fixture in Wilson’s band it seems. Whilst I’m doing fine with my MP3 download at the moment it’s very clear that the cd will sound incredible on a decent system.

ultravox! / john foxx

The first three Ultravox albums are very different from the band that hit the big time in 1980 with Vienna. Under the leadership of John Foxx, Ultravox! (with the ! apeing that of the German band NEU!) issued three albums between 1976 and 1978 which run the gamut of trashy glam, punk,  and eventually synth pop. It’s occasionally a bit rubbish, especially when they try too hard to be punks, and clearly they’re way too nice and middle-class to pull it off convincingly. But on the whole it’s a cracking mixture of the punk sensibility, the clear musical influences of Roxy and Bowie, and Foxx’s literary inclinations (especially his JG Ballard influences which see his lyrics peppered with lines about machines and liquids and stuff). Plus this band can play.

The first self-titled album sees all sorts of instruments thrown into the mix – wobbly synths, manic violins, incongruous acoustic guitar on the epic "I Want To Be A Machine", even some r’n’b style harmonica. It’s all a bit of a muddle to be honest, but in the same way that first Roxy album was a huge mess of ideas. It’s not as good as the first Roxy album, not be a long chalk, but the ambition is clear. The whole thing is a bit rough and ready, but the assistance of both Steve Lillywhite and Brian Eno helps pull the album together. Eno was at Island studios mixing some of this album when one of Ultravox took a call for him. Eno didn’t like being interrupted, but he was told it was an international call, and the guy on the other end says he’s David Bowie. Still thinking it was a prank, Eno reluctantly took the call, and by the end of the week he was helping Bowie record Low at the Chateau d’Herouville just outside Paris.

The second Ultravox album, Ha! Ha! Ha! was recorded in the first few weeks of 1977 and has an appealingly vital live sound. The songs are way more focused and tighter and display a far stronger commercial sense than on the debut. And the best ideas are those that clearly point the way forward – the closing track, the hugely electronic "Hiroshima Mon Amour" is an astounding leap forward from the opening punky thrash of "ROckWrok" (and check out that crazy spelling folks, and surely the title came from the not at all punk 801’s "RongWrong"?) But despite the chilly Germanic soundscapes of "Hiroshima" that song on this album that really sums up the Foxx era is "The Man Who Dies Every Day" – a stomping electronic beat, woozy keyboards, jagged guitars and a very English lyric which marvellously rhymes ‘a moment in the rain’ with ‘a gesture of disdain’, delivered in Foxx’s clinical croon. And it’s supremely catchy.

The third Foxx album, 1978’s Systems Of Romance, is more of a precursor to Vienna in terms of the overall sound, but apart from a few key songs, it seems to me to be rather confused as to what’s it’s trying to achieve. There’s still a number of guitar-led tracks that try to hang onto the punk sound even though it’s clear by now that Ultravox don’t do that very successfully. The more synth based songs are notably much better – the dreamlike "Slow Motion" is especially good and "When You Walk Through Me" is basically a psychedelic Beatles-type song (complete with phasing and Warren Cann playing the drum part from "Tomorrow Never Knows"). It’s a good album, but perhaps not as enjoyable as Ha! Ha! Ha!.

And then Foxx was gone, intent on becoming a Machine, delivering the astonishingly good Metamatic at the start of 1980. Gary Numan steals much of the Systems Of Romance sound for Replicas and The Pleasure Principle (and steals Billy Currie to help him achieve it) and has massive success with a sound and style that Ultravox had originated. By then of course Ultravox had basically split up, during the middle of 1979 (Warren Cann drummed for the Buggles for a while, and Currie played with Numan and then Visage where he met Midge Ure.) Ultravox then reformed with Midge in the winter of 1979 / 1980 and came up with Vienna. And they didn’t look back after that!

neil young & crazy horse live

I've downloaded a few recent gigs from Neil and the Horse but none are as good as the superb show they played I've downloaded a few recent gigs from Neil and the Horse but none are as good as the superb show they played just three nights ago at the Borgata Hotel in Atlantic City. It was part of a Hurricane Sandy benefit, but they didn’t change their regular set at all, so it’s just 13 songs... however, as some of these run for more than 20 minutes each you still get a gig lasting more than two hours. 

And, although I’m not sure it’s entirely appropriate, they encore with a 25 minute “Like A Hurricane” which does what Sandy couldn’t, and blows the roof off the Hotel. It's surely one of the best “Hurricane”s I’ve ever heard. The energy from the Horse is incredible throughout the whole show, and Neil is on fire, singing his socks off, and coaxing the most amazing sounds out of Old Black – how the hell that guitar is still going, after all the abuse it’s had over the past 40 years, is something that only Neil can explain, but I’m so glad that it is still functioning, as no other guitar sounds quite like it.

There are so many highlights - “Ramada Inn” is the best I’ve ever heard; lovely new song “Singer Without A Song” finds Neil at the piano with the Horse clustered round him helping out on harmonies. The show heads for the home straight by cranking up the Crazy Horse Time Machine - the always brilliant “Cinnamon Girl” is followed by the even older “Mr Soul” and then it's straight into a spirited but rather ragged “Rockin’ In The Free World” (rarely played on this tour) and then a stompingly good “Hey Hey, My My”. The encore is the aforementioned amazing encore of “Hurricane”. 

No UK dates so far, but Neil has just announced Australian dates for next March so he and the Horse are obviously planning on continuing this tour next year. I would LOVE to see them live, especially playing as well as they are right now.

neil young & crazy horse - psychedelic pill

The new album from Neil and the Horse is an odd one - loads of electronic wizardry, synths galore, lots of rapping, and beat box stuff, it’s like Neil has gone all Doctor Dre on us.

Actually no. Of course not.

It’s EXACTLY like you’d expect a Neil Young and Crazy Horse album to be, only just a bit bigger and longer than usual. This music really, genuinely, is timeless. It really could have been recorded at any point in the last 40 years or so.

The opening song "Driftin’ Back" kind of makes this point. It starts with Neil and his acoustic, strummin’ away, singin’ his ol’ song and then the Horse are faded in, rumbling along at full speed (which for the Horse isn’t actually that fast these days) – the effect is exactly that of remembering an old Crazy Horse song and it popping up in your mind, quite literally driftin’ back. Neil starts riffing on how MP3's only give you a tiny percentage of the actual music when you used get it all - the lyrics seem like random thoughts that pop into Neil's head - by the end he starts wondering if he should get himself a Hip Hop Haircut, but frankly it's not the words that really matter. The wistful, things used to be better, vibe is carried by the laid back but still urgent guitar work. The track lasts for nearly 28 minutes! That’s actually longer than the whole Neil Young and the Shocking Pinks album. By the 3 minute mark you know precisely how "Driftin’ Back" goes, and you’ve got another 25 minutes still to come. Yet it doesn’t get boring, at all. In fact I was really quite disappointed when it ended.

The album mixes a handful of really lengthy songs with a number of shorter tracks – such as the title song, which is swathed in phasing to an almost comical degree, or the jaunty "Born In Ontario", or "Twisted Road" with it’s namechecks for Dylan and the Dead. These slighter, shorter songs are terrific, and are arguably more directly emotional ("For The Love Of Man" is the most tender, being a delightful song for his son) but it’s the long ones which will, quite rightly gain most of the attention, and these are really what we all came for.

The bitter sweet "Ramada Inn" is a bit like an update of "Love And Only Love". Neil tosses out the lyrics like murmured asides, but he stil manages to paint an extraordinarily vivid picture (with such few words), of a couple in their twilight years. Once he's had a few drinks she barely recognizes her husband anymore, but they still, somehow, love each other.

"She's Always Dancing" has another classic Horse tune and a lovely chorus with some cracking harmonies from the four of them. In fact, one of the best parts about this album is the slightly wonky singing. The harmonies are just about there, the lead vocals are just about on track, but it's all a bit ramshackle and has a wry well worn feeling about it. The implication is that these guys still have it, but only just, but they are still gonna give you everything they've got.

The epic "Walk Like A Giant" carries on the album's main theme - a wistful look back at the past, when, as younger men, they were convinced that they could change the world. The cheery whistling that pops up at various stages is at odds with the sad sense of the words, that perhaps the optimism of youth doesn't actually change things after all.

Perhaps the only minus point on the album is the inclusion of the second, un-phased version of "Psychedelic Pill". It’s not that it’s bad or anything, far from it, but it seems wrong being tacked on the end after the massively drawn out ending of "Walk Like A Giant" which is the perfect conclusion to the album. So to stick a short track after that seems very out of place. And, what's more, the alternative version of "Psychedelic Pill" bizarrely fades out just before the end of the song, which makes it an even more inappropriate way to close the record. But that’s Neil for you. Even when you think you've got the measure of him and of this album he goes and does his own thing. Just when you don't expect it. Just because he can.

This album is very worthy successor to all the other Neil / Horse albums. It’s just like the very best of them, yet it’s still different, still fresh, still engaging and engrossing and I could listen to this sort of stuff for ever.

marianne faithfull - broken english

Marianne Faithfull was the darling of the 1960s. With her classic English rose beauty and her rock star boyfriend - Mick Jagger - she appeared to have it all. But her association with the Rolling Stones almost killed her. To many, it seems as if she was dragged into a mire of drugs and depravity by the Stones, although by all accounts Marianne didn't need much encouragement. By 1970 she was being haunted by the ghost of Brian Jones (she would actually see his face in mirrors), she'd attempted suicide and was a full blown heroin addict. Much of the 1970s would find Marianne homeless, sometimes actually living on the streets, moving from one filthy squat to another. There were a couple of attempts at resurrecting her recording career - in 1975, in conjunction with Joe Cocker's band, she recorded a number of country standards that weren't properly released until many years later.

But in 1979 she returned. Encouraged by her then boyfriend Ben Brierley (at the time a member of the Vibrators) she worked up a number of excellent new wave songs, the demos of which impressed Island Records enough to give her a 3 album deal. The resulting sessions were overseen by Mark Miller Mundy who managed to draft in some formidable musicians, including Steve Winwood, Morris Pert and Barry Reynolds (who was concurrently working with another new Island signing, Grace Jones).

Broken English is very 1979 in sound and production, and very English too. The drums have that peculiarly British dry crispness that many songs had at that time, and the undeniable funkiness of the band is played down rather than up as an American production would have done. It also rocks, hard. The title track has some excellent dynamics – a solidly pounding beat but with all sorts of guitar / keyboard clashes over the top, and Marianne’s cracked and rasping voice topping it all off. Marianne's voice had changed considerably since the 1960s; never a particularly strong voice it had now deepened and lowered, ravaged by years of nicotine and narcotics. But it suited the new material so very well, investing the songs with a weary, worn out quality that was perfect. 

 There are a couple of lighter songs, like "Brain Drain" or "What’s the Hurry?" but these are balanced by tracks like the darkly brooding "Guilt" or the snarly cover of Lennon’s "Working Class Hero". Side two opens with the delightful "Ballad Of Lucy Jordan" – one of Annie Nightingale’s favourite songs ever – which sounds like it was perfectly written for Marianne (but it wasn’t - it was, slightly alarmingly, actually a Dr Hook song from the early 1970s…). The album closes with one of the most vicious songs ever, "Why’d Ya Do It?", which still, even now, surprises me with the depth of bitterness and loathing in Marianne’s voice. A stunning performance.

Left off the album, but used as a b side, was a brilliant new version of "Sister Morphine". After all her troubles throughout the 1970s, homelessness, addictions of all sorts, near death illnesses, it’s here, ten years on from when the song was written, that Marianne invests the song with the level of gravitas that the slightly sensationalist lyrics require. Much as I admire the Stones version from Sticky Fingers, I can’t help thinking that Jagger is play-acting the role. I just can’t quite believe his version, but I can believe every word that Marianne sings on this recording, and it’s pretty damn scary too.

Interestingly the album nearly didn't sound as contemporary and as New Wave as it did. All the songs were originally recorded in a far more conventional AOR style, and it was only as the masters were being readied for pressing that Marianne and Mundy decided to remix the whole thing into a more synth / new wave style, and that's when they employed Steve Winwood to add a whole bunch of new keyboards. The original backing tracks sound not unlike Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac. Not a bad thing per se, but the reworked album was clearly better and more original and has stood the test of time rather better than the original version would have, as that sounds very late 1970s.

Having said that though there’s something very impressive about the original versions, mixing new wave musicians with straight up old school UK session men. The mixture works well and gives the songs both an edgy feel and also a strength and effortlessly commanding quality that punk musicians didn’t possess. Without the overbearing synths of the finished album we have saxophones and slide guitars taking centre stage. A track like "Lucy Jordan" is much closer to the Dr Hook original (yikes!!), with gentle guitars and an insistent shuffle on the drums, rather than the weirdly burbling synth dominated finished version (which had no drums at all, and apart from keyboards, virtually no other instruments at all, for that matter). The closing "Why’d Ya Do It?" is much longer in it’s original form, though not quite as scathingly harsh; there are more backing vocals too, across the whole album. Fascinating stuff. Marianne has said that she now prefers the original version, although she’d assumed the tapes to be long lost. But apparently the master had simply been sitting on a shelf in a store room marked DNU, 'do not use'.

The next couple of Faithfull albums – Dangerous Acquaintances and A Child’s Adventure kept to a similar new wave style as Broken English, but with more of an eye to getting a hit. No hits were forthcoming of course, and the albums were rather weedier and less impressive than intended, though both contain a number of excellent songs amongst the lesser numbers. Most notable is Barry Reynolds' brilliant "Times Square" which opens A Child's Adventure and which stands head and shoulders above the rest of the album.