October 3rd
The
Passage-Shave your Head-For All & None album
I loved The Passage. Not only because
that they were an early offshoot of The Fall-Tony Friel, The Fall’s first
bassist left The Fall and formed The Passage-but because they produced music
that was intelligent, questioning, unsettling, uncompromising and different. It
was so different to anything else that came out of the late 1970’s and early
1980’s that whatever pigeonhole you tried to stuff The Passage in they never
really fitted.
I’ve just looked on Wikipedia and they’re described as “post-punk”
and “synth-pop”. Post punk I suppose, as that’s the period when they were
active, and synth pop, because they used synths. Maybe they could be described
as percussion pop because they used drums.
Nothing really fitted with The
Passage.
There’s quite a lot of music from the
1980’s that, at the time, sounded revolutionary and now, with the benefit of
hindsight and nearly thirty years, seems a bit naïve and even quaint. I’m
thinking of stuff like Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Adrian Sherwood’s On -U
Sound label; anything that used massed samplers and expensive studios. What was
crystal clear, powerful and brilliant, now appears to be a bit overblown,
obvious and blousey. It’s all got that sense of throwing the kitchen sink at
the wall to see what would stick and therefore sound impressive. (To (re)mix a
few metaphors).This applied to the “synth-pop/electronic” axis.
On the other
hand, listening again to a few guitar bands of the 1980’s and 90’s-and without
naming names (because I may have praised them elsewhere within the book and
forgotten about it)-I’m struck by the fact that a lot of what I really rated
back then sounds a little bit tinny and little bit wispy. It’s got that same
naivety as the synthy stuff, but it’s tame as well-in retrospect a lot of it could
do with beefing up, both musically and lyrically. It’s not as if I don’t like
it now (I do), but sometimes when I play what I anticipate to be a big, brash,
trashy, blow your ears off track, what I actually hear is merely a faint echo
of what I remembered.
This is why The Passage were, and are,
different. This is why The Passage are not just of then, but are of now as
well. Playing any of their four albums or assorted singles in 2012, what is
really revelatory is that the power and purpose of The Passage is undiminished
by the passage (pun intended) of time.
This track, from their second album,
“For All and None” is a prime example. It’s got one of those things that I love
in all songs-a split second of dead air mid-way through the track. But The
Passage did it a little bit more-the
track stops dead for over thirty seconds and you think it’s all over-then it
kicks off again at such a furious pace that it leave you breathless. That’s
just one reason why I love The Passage - they did something unexpected and most
of the time it worked so well. When they disbanded after just four albums I
thought it was far too early, and that surely there was more to come. However,
those four albums are just the perfect legacy to leave behind.
Sometimes it’s
best to know when to stop.
Get/see/read the rest of "Totally Shuffled" here:
Kindle e book
Paperback
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