Best of 1979

1979 was a remarkable year for albums and singles. I don 't think we've witnessed a year like that since. In the same year we got The Clash's London Calling, Pink Floyd's The Wall, Gang of Four's Entertainment!, Talking Heads's Fear of Music, Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures and Armed Forces by Elvis Costello and the Attractions. Over the course of the year my admiration for some albums increased, especially Unknown Pleasures, Wire's 154, Pil's Metal Box, Fleetwood Mac's Tusk and The Beat's debut which I wasn't familiar with at the start of the year. Other great discoveries included Tangerine Dream's Force Majeure and Gary Numan's Pleasure Principle, Joe Egan's Out of Nowhere, and the Toms album. 

Fave Albums 1979

The Clash London Calling
Gang of Four Entertainment!
Talking Heads Fear of Music
Joy Division Unknown Pleasures
Elvis Costello Armed Forces

Wire 154
PiL Metal Box
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Damn the Torpedoes
Graham Parker Squeezing Out Sparks
Fleetwood Mac Tusk

XTC Drums and Wires
The Beat
Joe Jackson Look Sharp
The Specials
Sparks No 1 Song in Heaven

Tangerine Dream Force Majeure
Robert Fripp Exposure
The Cars Candy O
Gary Numan Pleasure Principle
The B 52's

Fave Singles

Joy Division Transmission
The Clash London Calling
Wire Outdoor Miner
The Cure Boys Don't Cry
Buzzcocks Everybody's Happy Nowadays/Why Can't I Touch It

XTC Making Plans for Nigel
The Specials Gangsters
Talking Heads Life During Wartime
The Pop Group She is Beyond Good and Evil
The Ruts Babylon's Burning

Undertones Teenage Kicks
Blondie Heart of Glass
Nick Lowe Cruel to be Kind
Prince I Wanna Be Your Lover
Squeeze Up the Junction

Gary Numan Cars
Michael Jackson Don't Stop Til You Get Enough
Chic Good Times
Sugarhill Gang Rappers Delight
Sparks The Number One Song in Heaven

    On Social Media

Promoting this page on Twitter has been fun this year with retweets, likes and responses from Graham Parker, Eric Idle, The Mekons, Gang of Four, Bebe Buell, Mark Stewart of The Pop Group and these two, from Cher and Feargal Sharkey.

No Dark Sarcasm in the Classroom

Pink Floyd : Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2 

[Purchase]

On November 30, 1979 Pink Floyd released The Wall, four sides of dark, dismal and gloomy dread that spent 15 weeks atop the U.S. album charts. Sales have surpassed 20 million. One of those copies was purchased by my dad, who would play it in the car as he drove me up to boarding school. If there is one album you do not want to be listening to on a two hour drive wintry drive to a boarding school, it's The Wall. My dad thought it was brilliant. He was still buying  one album a year, and this was his purchase in early 1980. When I said the school master in "Another Brick of the Wall, Part 2" reminded me of Oliver Twist ("If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding"), he thought I was making fun of the Floyd, and him. And I could sense his anger building in the silence we shared.

With the exception of "Comfortably Numb" and a few others, The Wall was written and composed by Roger Waters. The spark that inspired the album began on the Animals tour. He began to feel alienated on stage and contempt for the people who paid to see Pink Floyd in concert.

Mojo Magazine sums up Waters' mindset in this way:

Waters, so disillusioned by stadium shows that he spat at a fan and fantasised about dropping bombs on the audience, said he would only perform again behind a wall.

The recording was fraught with tension. Producer Bob Ezrin, who made his mark with Alice Cooper and Kiss, was brought in as both a collaborator and as a bridge between Waters and the other members.  Keyboardist Richard Wright was dismissed during recording but stayed on as a salaried musician. David Gilmour and Waters managed to compose "Comfortably Numb" together but, again, almost everything else was Waters.

Adding to the tension was a deadline imposed by the record company to get the album out by the Christmas 1979 season. Waters cracked the whip, calling in band members from family vacations. Waters had his vision but he did allow Ezrin to suggest a disco beat be added to "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2".  He also recorded some school children to sing with a cockney accent. According to Ezrin, when he played the children's vocals to Waters, "there was a total softening of his face, and you just knew that he knew it was going to be an important record".Waters said: "It was great—exactly the thing I expected from a collaborator."  As a single, the song would hit #1 in the U.K., the United States and Germany, propelling more sales of the double album.

Reviews of the album were mixed at the time. Robert Christgau gave The Wall a B-, writing:

For a dumb tribulations-of-a-rock-star epic, this isn't bad -- unlikely to arouse much pity or envy, anyway. The music is all right, too -- kitschy minimal maximalism with sound effects and speech fragments. But the story is confused, "mother" and "modern life" make unconvincing villains, and if the re-contextualization of "up against the wall" is intended ironically, I don't get it.

The album would finish #40 in the 1980 Pazz and Jop Critic's poll.

From Kurt Loder, writing for Rolling Stone:


This is very tough stuff, and hardly the hallmark of a hit album. Whether or not The Wall succeeds commercially will probably depend on its musical virtues, of which there are many...Even Floyd-starved devotees may not be sucked into The Wall's relatively flat aural ambiance on first hearing. But when they finally are -- and then get a good look at that forbidding lyrical landscape -- they may wonder which way is out real fast.

And from Melody Maker:

I'm not sure whether its brilliant or terrible but I find it utterly compelling.