The Sophomore Slump?
The Sophomore Slump?
To the memory of two rock stars who died young
Mea maxima culpa. I've been finishing a novel for the last decade or so and recently got selfish about completing it. Rokpool was one of the things that suffered so I was fiddling around with some ideas for a warm-up article and something lightly polemic for summer reading. It happened to be Saturday the 23rd of July, portentously the eve of my late and (by and large) lamented father's 80th birthday.
It must have been twenty years since I read a rare enough interview with Kate Bush, my immediate contemporary and my celebrity crush for a teenage year or two; Heathcliffe didn't do a lot for my self-esteem - I've always been more Waugh than Bronte, by nature not affectation. Kate Bush made the incisive remark that she took six years to complete "The Kick Inside", then the record company said, thank you very much, can we please have "Lionheart" in six months. Since then I've always been conscious that obsure contract-less artists can perfect their work in private while the newly launched artiste has the denizens of the company offering them cigars ... if you're bothering to read this you know the reference so forgive me if I don't trouble to work it in.
Difficult second albums abound. The Strokes' second album might as well have been called "Was That It?" and "The La's" was it, as was "Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols". The history of The Stone Roses' hubristically-entitled "Second Coming" rendered a good album a standing joke and even The Beatles and The Rolling Stones took a couple of albums to get into their strides after strong debuts.
It's something I think about a lot so, looking for a subject to get my hand back in, the theme of that difficuly second album came to mind. It's an issue I find hard to forget. One of my favourite examples is Grandaddy's "The Sophtware Slump". There is not title song; the spelling of "sophtware" plays on the album's concepts of machinery, computers, their peripherals, and robots breaking down, and the fact that it is indeed their sophomore outing.
I managed to scribble eight others fairly quickly and here they are:
Closer - Joy Division
The Bends - Radiohead
A Soucerful of Secrets - Pink Floyd
The Least We Can Do Is Wave To Each Other - Van Der Graaf Generator
(What's The Story) Morning Glory - Oasis
Space Oddity - David Bowie
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan - Bob Dylan
Music For The Jilted Generation - The Prodigy
So it was on the night of Saturday 23rd July I went to bed early with my balcony door open so I could hear and smell the wind rustling the wisteria wrapped around the railings. Lighting a candle, I smoked a Cohiba and watched my favourite film "If..." and induldged in the thought that this wouldn't be happening if I had a girlfriend. Neither would my daughters' visit for brunch on Sunday morning for that matter, and I was looking forward to seeing them, while sneaking off to watch England snatch a Lord's Test from India and Hamilton win the German Grand Prix, both satisfying if altogether rare events, not unlike an official state visit from my girls. Life seemed good, the only irritation being whether or not to include "White Light / White Heat" as one of the sophomore ten. There's no denying it's a seminal album but given that it followed up the most important album of all time "The Velvet Underground and Nico" it lacks the impact, the leap forward or sideways, or other noteworthy event of the others. In fact it is a more than useful contender as the band's critical foundations are as much "Sister Ray" as "Venus In Furs" while their current vogue is "Candy Says" - cue the fourteen millionth article on The Velvets.
I got up on Sunday morning and entertained my neighbours Rebekah and Becky along with Hanna and Kirsty for the midday fry-up and duly heard the desperately sad (and curiously unexpected) news that Amy Winehouse was dead. I had found the tenth album for my sophomore jigsaw - the quite divine, in fact probably Divine, "Back To Black".
Amy Winehouse was one of the most remarkable singers (male or female) and history will say that what set her apart was the range of her talent. Her near-namesake Scottish contemporary Amy Macdonald can spit out a protest song and a folk rock ballad but the truth is that the latter sets in relief the difference between the very good and the great. Sinatra could carry a tune but Winehouse elevated it. The good news is that "Back To Black" isn't a demonstration of what might have been; it's the vindication of a talent fulfilled. It was said of George Best that he wasn't only the best player on the park, he was the best in every position. Punk or Soul, Rock or Jazz, the same could be said of Amy Winehouse.
"Closer" was perhaps even more poignant in that it was posthumous appearing, suitably enough for one of the rawest and most tortured albums in the entire rock canon, barely two months after Ian Curtis' suicide. Of such stuff are legends made, as duly they were.
History has surprisingly enough diminshed Radiohead's "The Bends". "My Iron Lung" was claimed by the band to bury the memory of "Creep" and they were right to fear the latter becoming their "Whiter Shade Of Pale". Radiohead moved on from "Creep" but "OK Computer" has taken over and for many years threatened to be the album that defined the band. The problem for "The Bends" (listed as it has been as the greatest album of all time in many surveys) is that Radiohead have continued to defy gravity. Every album - with the possible exception of the enigmatic "Hail To The Thief" - is better than the last. It took "In Rainbows" to finally bury the memory of their third outing.
It's a miracle that Pink Floyd's follow-up to their stunning debut "The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn" "A Soucerful Of Secrets" ever saw the light of day. Arguably more groundbreaking than "The Velvet Underground and Nico" "Piper" is considered today even more important than its contemporaneous Abbey Road stable-mate "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band". It's hard to imagine the inauspicious circumstances surrounding the creation of "A Soucerful Of Secrets" as the band watched Syd Barrett disintegrating and they faced the pain of the exclusion of one of the greatest and most charismatic natural talents in Rock. In its homogenity of vision and execution, and the grandeur of its title track, if it isn't the Floyd's greatest album, "A Saucerful Of Secrets" is second only to "Piper" and despite the change in line-up the two remain essentially a double-album and for many years were marketed as such - the exruciatingly titled "A Nice Pair".
"The Aerosol Grey Machine" is too good a debut to describe Van Der Graaf Generator's second, "The Least We Can Do Is Wave To Each Other", as a leap forward, but many regard the sophomore as the group's first album proper. In fact it might have been but for the perennial branding issues surrounding Peter Hammill and his band. As is so often the case, advancing technology influenced art. Van Der Graaf Generator used every inch of the additional range offered and "The Least We Can Do...", the first ever album recorded with the new sixteen-track technology, remains one of the darkest, most complex and profound of all the Prog Rock classics.
Nothing should diminish the importance of Oasis, particularly the first three albums. Noel Gallagher has said that not only were all the songs on "Definitely Maybe", "(What's The Story) Morning Glory?", and "Be Here Now" written before they had a record deal, he'd decided the order and on what album they'd appear. The albums are sufficiently different to question the story but the first two are certainly genuinely important with the second shading it over the first for all but the most ardent of original fans.
Echoing the branding issues surrounding one of his original influences, Peter Hammill, David Bowie's career stuttered at first. His juvenilia may have been more completely forgotten but for the opportunism that saw "The Laughing Gnome" in the charts at the same time as the exquisite "Sorrow" in the mid-seventies. Bowie's first two albums were both originally eponymous, the first being "that London sound" now largely (although perhaps sadly) forgotten and the second being what we now know as "Space Oddity" after what was for many years Bowie's only hit. "Space Oddity" for all its charms, and it has seceral, cannot really be compared to Bowie's first masterpiece "The Man Who Sold The World" but what it did was move Bowie away from a false start and give us a hint of his range and vision.
Opening track "Space Oddity" itself is now perhaps only important for the post-modern self-referencing in "Ashes To Ashes" a decade later, but the rest of the album is good with "Memory Of A Free Festival" and "Wide Eyed Boy From Freecloud" flirting with greatness while "Cygnet Committee" is perhaps the grandest of all Bowie's pre-Ziggy Stardust work, a soaring baroque Prog Rock hammer-blow.
This leaves us just two albums of the top ten to consider, both seminal outings in their day, "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" and The Prodigy's "Music For The Jilted Generation". Both albums had enormous musical importance with cultural implications way beyond the music itself and giving Dylan and The Prodigy iconic status which would be hard to exaggerate.
So there we are. A contributing columnist warms up after a fallow period, and invites your thoughts on the greatest sophomore album of all time.
© JD Shanks July 2011
