Oct
20
Written
10/20/2009 9:09 AM
By Clive Young.
For a few years now, Continuum Books has been publishing 33 1/3,
a cool series of pint-sized paperbacks, each one dedicated to exploring
a notable album of the last few decades. Weighing in at nearly 70
volumes now, the ongoing string of books blithely skips around between
the usual rock critic faves (Prince, Velvet Underground, Ramones); meat
n’ potatoes classic rock (Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin); Baby Boomer
singer/songwriters (Neil Young, Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell); and
Brooklyn hipster touchstones (Neutral Milk Hotel, Sonic Youth, Pixies).
[Full disclosure: I wrote a book for Continuum a while back, but not a 33 1/3; they won’t let me near 'em, actually.]
If
you haven’t picked one up, you might expect they’re typical “behind the
music”-type tomes--and a few are--but in truth, the series is pretty
wide-ranging. Carl Wilson’s book on Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love (subtitled A Journey to the End of Taste) is a meditation on why music can be so polarizing, while Joe Pernice’s take on the Smiths’ Meat Is Murder
dispenses with reality altogether, instead following a fictional
catholic school kid in the 1980s. Still, the series is usually at its
best when it follows the traditional narrative path of ‘How They Made
It,’ most noticeably with Dan Le Roy’s excellent history of the Beastie
Boys’ Paul’s Boutique.
The latest addition to the series
(number 66 for those keeping score at home) takes that road, too, as it
delves deep into the creation of One Step Beyond, the 1979
debut album by Madness. As playful as the LP it portrays, this speedy
read sports a great provenance: author Terry Edwards interviewed all
seven band members, legendary producers Clive Langer and Alan
Winstanley, label heads and others to get the full story of the album’s
creation, plus he’s been part of the band’s horn section for years. It
doesn’t get more ‘inside’ than this.
But who cares about
Madness? Well, it depends where you live. Here in the US, the band
was a one-hit wonder (“Our House”), but in the UK, Madness had a
scorching 20 Top 20 singles off six albums between 1979 and 1986,
spending a total of 214 weeks on the charts. Of all those LPs, One Step Beyond
is probably the best known to US audiences since many of its videos
were played to death on early MTV, especially the instrumental title
track with its famed “Don’t watch dat! Watch dis!” spoken-word intro.
While
the LP launched the band, however, it also did the same for the
production team of Langer and Winstanley, as the pair went on to put a
singular stamp on Eighties alt pop, producing the likes of Elvis
Costello, Morrissey, Lloyd Cole, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Hothouse
Flowers, They Might Be Giants and others. In Edwards’ book, they often
take centerstage (usually Langer), unveiling the studio tricks and
mishaps behind the album. Case in point: the instrumental title track,
which the Stiff label decreed would be the band’s first single. The
problem was that Madness had dashed it off with a running time of 75
seconds:
“When the decision had been made to
edit the recording to turn it into a single, it was already gone
midnight. There was a different mix set up on the desk (and this was
before computerized desks with total recall), so Clive and Alan decided
that the best plan of action was to make a demonstration tape of how
the edits would work, give it to Robinson for approval, then redo it
for real. As an indicator of how the sound could be doctored, the
duplicated sections of the tape had been put through a harmonizer (an
effect that artificially ‘thickens’ the sound by adding an extra
frequency or ‘harmony’). It was all very rough and ready. Clive posted
the demo through the letter-box at Stiff in the early hours of the
morning on his way home and waited for the go-ahead. When he got to
talk to Robinson later in the day, he was told that the record was
already being manufactured from the tape he’d dropped in as they were
speaking. Alan was mortified. “It was a quarter-inch tape running at 7
½ ips (inches per second),” that is, it wasn’t industry standard
quality. Too bad--it sounded great in Robbo’s opinion and that was
that. The end result is a cozy two minutes and nineteen seconds,
twenty-five seconds of which is taken up by Chas Smash’s introduction.”
The
tiny tome is full of great studio tales like that, told with more than
a few chuckles by those recounting them. I was going to close this out
noting that the only downside to the book, truly, is that the album
itself has been unavailable on CD or iTunes for a few years. As it
turns out, however,
One Step Beyond is getting the
30th Anniversary re-release treatment this fall, coming out in the UK with
bonus tracks, videos, a John Peel session and liner notes by Irvine
Welsh. The author of
Trainspotting may be good, but he’ll be hard pressed to beat a labor of love like Edwards’ book.