Heart Fanatic

I discovered the band Heart in 1986. Sure, they had been around for a decade by this point, but they had been pretty much ignored or overlooked by UK radio stations until 'These Dreams' came along and broke into radio playlists, if not actually the UK top 40 singles chart. I quite liked the song. Soon after this I discovered their 1985 self-titled album in my local audio library. I borrowed it. Nobody had recommended it to me, nobody had mentioned it, I had never heard a review, I had only heard one track on it.

From the first listen, I loved it. 

For a teenage boy in 1986 it was the ultimate rock album. It was perfectly of its time and virtually every song was great. By the time I had to return the album to the library I had probably listened to it about 50 times. I had become a Heart fanatic.

The next few months became a frantic search for other albums by Heart. Rumour had it that their earlier material was quite unlike this album and I might not like it. So I couldn't just rush out and buy the early stuff. And besides, funds were limited. But nobody in my circle of friends had heard anything before 1985. Eventually, it turned out that the big brother of one of my classmates (hello Andy Ketchin) had two tapes by Heart, so I finally got to hear the albums 'Magazine' and 'Dog and Butterfly' (both from 1978). I loved them too. Whew. I could take the risk and buy some of the earlier albums.

By this time I also had a bootleg concert of Heart live at the NHK Hall in Tokyo from 25th June 1986 so I knew a few songs from the early albums. Thus 'Little Queen' (1977) featuring the classic Barracuda was first on my purchase list. What an amazing album - it quickly became my 2nd favourite Heart album, a position it has probably retained from that day to this, despite the number 1 place having changed since then!

Over the space of the next six months I bought 'Dreamboat Annie' (1976), 'Dog and Butterfly' and 'Magazine' (got it really cheap at a record fair). Despite them being considerably more expensive than most LPs in my local record shops, I eventually gave in to temptation and bought 'Bebe le Strange' and 'Greatest Hits / Live' ( both 1980). Bebe le Strange was a disappointment. While its not a bad album, its not a great one either. Sure, it has some great tracks on it, but quite a few lower quality ones too.

I had heard tale, by this point, of an album called 'Private Audition' that came after Bebe le Strange, but all I had heard about it was that it was weird and not very good. You have to remember that this is all way before the internet, Spotify, Wikipedia, etc. The only way you could hear rock music back then was if someone you knew had it, or if Tommy Vance played it on his Friday night rock show (sigh, nostalgia). I also knew there was a song I really liked on the NHK bootleg called 'Allies' but it wasn't on any of the albums I'd heard of.

1987 brought the release of a new Heart album, 'Bad Animals'. I think I did buy it on the day of release. At the time it seemed great, but time has not been too kind to this album. However, the commercial success of Bad Animals in the UK meant that record stores started stocking all the Heart back catalogue. 'Private Audition' (1982) and a previously unheard of (by me, at least) album 'Passionworks' (1983) appeared in stores and were quickly bought by me. Private Audition wasn't as weird or bad as I'd been led to believe, but Passionworks was brilliant - here's where that song 'Allies' came from. Its basically the precursor to the 1985 Heart album, and pretty much in the same vein. For a while it became my number 1 favourite Heart album. When Heart toured the UK in 1988, I managed to get the sleeve of Passionworks signed by all three male members of the band, but sadly not by Ann or Nancy.

So by the time I left school in 1988, I had all the Heart albums on vinyl, most of the 12" singles, a few 7" singles, a wall covered in Heart posters and a well worn and much loved Heart tour t-shirt.

I have to admit things began to cool off between me and Heart from then on in. 'Brigade' (1990) came on the back of a couple of Mutt Lange written power ballads that I didn't much like, and which spoiled the whole album for me. The 1991 live album 'Rock the house: Live' was nothing special, so when 'Desire walks on' came along in 1993, I didn't even buy it. Besides, by then grunge had come along and killed big hair, big shoulders, power ballad rock. The obligatory post-grunge acoustic live album 'The Road Home' didn't interest me at the time. It looked like it was all over for Heart. And so it was...

... until 2004 when Heart returned with their best album so far. 'Jupiter's Darling' came with no expectations at all. I went to see them on the 2004 UK tour for a bit of nostalgia and came out from a fantastic gig absolutely desperate to buy the new album. 8 years on and it is probably still one of my favourite albums by anyone, certainly my favourite Heart album, and definitely my favourite album from the whole decade of the 2000s!

Their next release, 'Red Velvet Car' (2010) came with expectations and didn't quite live up to them. It is not a bad album. I'd go as far as to say its quite good. But the problem is, its only that, quite good.

So I was unsure what to expect from the brand new release 'Fanatic', which came out this week. I kind of expected a disappointment. I knew it couldn't be as good as Jupiter's Darling. I hoped it would be quite good. The cover art suggests an album that has been knocked out quickly, which is not a good start. The running time is short (39 minutes), which sent alarm bells ringing. And the guitarist who seemed to inject new life into Heart to help bring about the greatness that is Jupiter's Darling, Craig Bartock, was not involved with the album at all. But I bought it anyway.

I'm glad I did. It rocks. It rawks! Whereas Red Velvet Car kind of washes over you, Fanatic grabs you by various body parts and drags you into the midst of raw distorted guitars, heavy riffs, classic rock hooks and plain, simple and pure-distilled-essence-of-rock drums. This album wears its heart on its sleeve. Ann and Nancy have always admitted to being huge Led Zep fans, but here they do the classic imitation-is-the-sincerest-form-of-flattery thing and just put all their Zep fandom into song. They admit as much on the title track, which not only states that they are Fanatics, but it riffs on the Misty Mountain Hop riff, just in case you didn't get the point. Page and Plant should be proud of their illegitimate offspring.

But its not just classic rock, loud guitars, and Plantesque screaming. There's so much more. There's something for everyone here. How this album manages that in only 39 minutes is a mystery to me, but it does it. Ballads, acoustic bits, funky bits, loud bits, quiet bits, moving bits and soothing bits. On the first couple of listens 'Million Miles' stood out as the best thing in here, but on subsequent listens everything else seems to have risen up to the same level. Its all great.

So there you have it. Heart's best album since 2004, probably one of the top 5 of their career, and the most enjoyable album I've bought this year so far.

Listen. You'll probably like it.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of blah, blah, blah...

Once there was a time when the combination of George Lucas and Steven Speilberg could do no wrong. And during that period they made 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' - one of my favourite movies ever. This was the first film I ever saw multiple times at the cinema. I think I saw it on three consecutive weekends when I was 11.

Then they followed it up with 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom' a few years later. It was darker and not quite as good, but still great fun.

Then Lucas lost it. He went on to make 'Howard the Duck', the Ewoks movie and ultimately create Jar-Jar Binks; not a great career progression. Speilberg went all serious on us and lost the knack of doing a great blockbuster. The third Indiana Jones movie 'The Last Crusade' was quite good, but not as great as the first two.

And now, after a couple of decades of waiting, comes the fourth, and presumably final, Indiana Jones movie. Was it worth the wait? No. Was it an entertaining film? Yes. Was it another Indiana Jones movie? Not really...

Spoilers below. So watch out if you haven't seen the film...

The basic plot of Indiana Jones movies is that Indy has to get to some ancient religious (and generally magical) artifact before the bad guys (generally Nazis) get to it to use the power for their own evil ends. Along the way we get some whip-cracking, swash-buckling, fist-fighting, gun-toting, truck-chasing action.

But Indy is now 20 years older and we're now in the 1950s. So the bad guys can't be Nazis anymore (actually, I think they could have been, especially since the action mostly takes place in South America - I'm sure there were some Nazis hanging on there in the 50s...) and our hero can't swash his buckle in the same way he used to (actually, as we will see, he can, but the producers obviously thought we wouldn't believe that) so we have a younger sidekick who turns out to be Indy's son. OK, I have no problems with either of those changes.

But let's consider the ancient artifact... Its not a well-known, but lost, Judeo-Christian artifact like the Ark or the Grail in films one or three, its not a fictional Hindu artifact like in film two, its a completely fictional - and clearly alien - artifact from a completely made up religion. You see, from the very outset the rules of this film have changed - we're not in the realm of religious-fantasy, we're firmly in the realm of sci-fi. And that's not Indiana Jones territory.

I'm a big fan of Stargate (the original movie as well as the TV series it spawned), and the premise of this film is very much in Stargate territory. Then there are elements of the Mummy movies thrown into the mix (most notably the swarming ants scene). Then finally there are some elements of Indiana Jones movies thrown in for good measure: hating snakes, truck chases, clifftop fights, a bit of tomb raiding, melting faces, etc., etc. But they are not the starting point, they feel like they've been thrown in there to keep the punters happy. And some of the classic Indy elements are spoiled as they are brought in incorrectly, like the scene with all the natives swarming out of the temple - very much like the opening scene of Raiders, but there Indy only escaped because he had a hapless accomplice with a plane, here we had to resort to sci-fi crystal skulls to scare off the natives. Silly, and not very Indiana Jones.

So this fails as an Indiana Jones movie, and if I'd gone in armed with high expectations I'd have been quite disappointed. Thankfully I'd heard about the silly alien thing (although it pervades the entire movie, its not just the last half hour like some reviewers suggest) and had gone in with as few expectations as I could. And hence enjoyed it quite a bit.

You see, the character of Indy is still intact (even if he's in the wrong film) and Harrison Ford does a great job of making the ridiculous Lucas plot and dialogue seem real, or at least believable. I have no issues with the James Dean-esque son of Indy and thought he brought a new angle to the story. The baddies were a bit two-dimensional with Cate Blanchett behaving like the sort of psycho nutter who is usually second in command to some cat-stroking evil genius. But the cat stroker never appeared, so we were left with a slightly incomplete set of baddies. And Ray Winstone was rubbish.

So what we're left with is a load of quite enjoyable action scenes, a charismatic couple of central characters, a nice re-appearance of Marion from Raiders and some hints of social comment from Speilberg, all tied together with a ridiculous plot and premise.

I liked it. I will certainly watch it again someday. But it was not a worthy successor to Raiders.

Make an old style mix tape...

These are cool. They look like old fashioned tapes, like the ones we used to know and love in the 80s, but there's a little USB flash memory stick inside it instead. So you can still compile your 'mix tape' but do it in MP3 instead... and you still get to hand write the track listing, just like you used to.

I had planned on getting a couple of these for a laugh for Christmas gifts. But at £20 for a 64Mb memory stick, I think I'll give it a miss! Tapes used to cost less than a pound each, you know...

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

I have finally seen the 1982 movie "Fast Times at Ridgemont High".

You're probably wondering about the 'finally' part of that statement. I've wanted to see that movie for a long time. Probably about 21 years...

You see, in 1986 I had a minor obsession with guitar playing rock goddess Nancy Wilson of the band Heart. Perhaps it was more than minor. Well, I was 15 and Heart were briefly one of the greatest rock bands of the moment. The self-titled Heart album from 1985 is the pure essence of 1985 - if you want to know what rock music in 1985 was, that's the album to listen to. All power ballads, power chords, big hair and emotive vocals. Actually, I still think its a great album. But anyway. In 1986 I discovered that Nancy Wilson had a 'starring' part in this movie, Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I desperately wanted to see that movie.

But in 1986 things were a bit different to how they are today. No Amazon.com, no downloads, and (most importantly) in my house, no VCR! Add to this the fact that no video store in Edinburgh had the movie (Virgin could order it in for £25 - which was a lot of money in those days) and you see why I never saw it. By the time I actually owned a VCR my Nancy obsession had diminished and so I never tried to get it then.

But it was on Film 4 last week. So I watched it.

No, it wasn't worth 21 years of waiting. To add insult to injury it turns out that Nancy's 'starring' role lasts less than a minute and she doesn't even speak! Khah!

The film ticks all the boxes of the early 80s 'bawdy teen sex comedy' genre, without actually being particularly bawdy, sexy or comedic. And as usual in American movies, the high school 'teens' are mostly twenty-somethings.

But while it wasn't particularly funny, it was still quite watchable. The cliched characters all seemed actually to be reasonably real people and you were interested in what happened to them. There were some genuinely touching moments in there too, which I wasn't really expecting. But there wasn't actually too much of a plot. About 75 minutes in I found myself wondering when the real story was going to begin.

So it was OK, but not worth the wait.

So here's a clip of Nancy Wilson in her 1985 prime...

Don't believe the video, Nancy does all the singing here not Ann, her darker haired sister.

And here's the other single from the 80s with Nancy on lead vocals. Erm, I have no idea what they thought they were doing in this video...

Van Halen: 1984

Currently listening to Van Halen's 1984 album (actually released 1983, but hey...). I don't think I've listened to it in about 15 years (I have it on vinyl, not CD), but listened to it a lot in the late 80s.

I still remember all the lyrics and every note in the instrumental breaks! How much of a sponge was my memory when I was a teenager? And how come it doesn't retain half as much these days? Humph.

Good album though.

Kids today...

Kids today, eh?

You know, there's many, many cool things that kids have today that hadn't been invented when I was a kid, or were so overpriced that they couldn't be bought by anyone with a reasonable pocket money allowance. And in almost every instance, I don't wish they had been around or affordable when I was a kid.

It was fine growing up with only 3 channels on the telly (OK, so there were 4 by the time I was 12, but...), no video or DVD (I never had a VCR until I was a student), no iPods, no mobile phones, no handheld games consoles (apart from the occasional space invaders or pacman), no internet (i.e. no hotmail, msn, skype, bebo.com, etc.), and so on. I was even in that unfortunate generation that was slightly too young for skateboards when they were first popular and slightly too old for them when their popularity returned a decade or so later. But I had a great childhood. There's nothing kids have today that I would have wanted back then... except Heelys.

Why, oh why, were these not invented when I was eight? I would have loved a pair of them! I could have coasted around the streets pretending I was one of 'Bailey's Comets' (sorry if that reference was lost on anyone under the age of 35, it was a cartoon in the early 70s). How cool would that have been? Sigh.

A-Z of forgotten classic songs: A

I love Amanda.

No, I'm not having an illicit affair or anything like that, I'm talking about the song 'Amanda' by Boston. Track one on their fabulous (and frequently overlooked) third album, 'Third Stage' from 1986.

The song sounds like the mother of all 80s AOR soft rock ballads and is the perfect introduction to the album.

Despite being AOR perfection, the song is really quite understated and subdued. It starts with a gently strummed acoustic guitar and builds up by applying layers of vocals, melodic guitars, vocal harmonies and power-ballad hook lines, whilst still keeping its relaxed pace and mellow vibe.

The prejudiced ear will hear a typical AOR ballad with syrupy vocals and cliched lyrics. The open minded listener will discover one of the most beautiful, simple love songs in rock.

Go on, listen without prejudice.

---

For what its worth, I think the whole album is a masterpiece. In the great tradition of musicals and prog-rock concept albums, variations on the tune of 'Amanda' crop up several times on the album, and every time it is brilliant. Unlike many rock albums, this album really shows restraint - yes it does rock, but it carefully builds up to the big rock songs with several much softer songs first. Rather than thrusting the rock in your face it is held back until track 4, with the first three songs acting like a kind of gentle seduction before the... Erm, I could continue that line of reasoning to describe this album, but I think I'll stop there.