Pure Punk Picks
Fear In The Western World – Ultravox
“Someone told me Jesus was the devil’s lover, while we masturbated on the magazine cover.”
Ultravox eventually became a lame, somewhat popular English synth pop band in the eighties. But in 1978, on their second album- “Ha!, Ha!, Ha!.” (Which took it’s name from a painting by a famous Dada artist.) They were cutting edge.
In the late seventies the art schools and punk music were firmly aligned. In the early Boston punk scene, there were few bands that didn’t have, at least one member, from one of the local art colleges.
I thought at the time- “Well, maybe this punk stuff won’t be popular but it may come to be known as “artist’s music” or music that artists can relate to.
This band was an English art school band whose first album clearly showed the influence of David Bowie and Andy Warhol and was produced by Brian Eno of Roxy Music fame, who then went on to produce so many bands, including several albums for U2, besides himself, inventing ambient music. (One of my favorite “musicians” of all time.)
Their first album was very good, but on their second release the spirit of punk was in the air and that influenced them accordantly.
Andy and I both consider this the best punk album of all time! Sure, The Ramones first, The Clash first album are great and have more historical significance and influence- but I don’t think there is an album that captures the energy and wild, creative spirit of the era as much as “Ha! Ha! Ha!”
This song, “Fear In The Western World,” starts with some squealing, guitar feedback- sounding much like a guitar being choked to death. The drums come in with a force and a feeling like it’s smashing away into the center, into the core of life. That so effective “one snare hit to the beat” will continue throughout most of the song.
As the guitar wails and moans and the drums beat hard, the vocals arise singing detachedly, the first lines of this review.
Soon a simple, sixties like guitar line chimes in sounding much like a braying cat in an alley way.
“Suburbia stumbles, the tides have turned. I can feel the fear in the Western world.”
Is this the uprising of the third world? Or a premonition of Islamic terrorist threats?
Either way the tension, the anxiety is built into this song along with an exuberance and passion that can’t be matched.
After the chorus- the guitar screams and careens along long, cold, empty corridors as the synthesizer erupts in sound colliding with long, stacks of sterile, shopping cats causing an electric, ecstatic display of noise and discord.
Soon a breakdown happens, (long before that term was conceived), the chorus is repeated by the singer along with the driving, decimating drums, creating intense anticipation of oncoming doom.
When the instruments come back in, the drums are bashing accents like a prize fighter boxer, while the guitar is cascading over a mountain top and falling into a deep valley of madness and mayhem.
The guitar and synth duel and battle against each other in dissonant screaming madness until, they both drop out again to let the singers’ voice and the drum beat be heard in solitude, once again.
“The party goes on before elevator doors, while the elevator plummets from the 69th floor. All the cars are lost in the scrap yards of paradise, the newspaper photographs have all come alive!”
Towards the end of this song the guitar spirals out like someone drowning, grabbing for a life saver or maybe, a madman grasping for a straw, a strand of sanity. The rhythm section holds steady while the drummer throws some neat, uppercuts. The synthesizer wails above with long streaks of sound, like a siren wailing in World War II, alerting all of a bombing raid.
The chorus is repeated, multiple times towards the end, until all the instruments collapse and crash together, perhaps, symbolizing the collapse of society- in a dissonant, discordant display- this song ends with a kind of exploding, anarchy of noise.
The ending is like a multiple car crash that is soon followed up with a nuclear bomb exploding.
This song contains all the nihilism, all the desperation, all the doomsday thoughts of- “We’re all gonna die, but just shortly, before the world goes up in nuclear holocaust,…So let’s just get blitzed out of our minds and have a good time,”- that thought was so common then.
The rhythm kicks ass and is so totally, in your face- the guitars and synths-so wildly, abrasive and unpleasant and great. The vocals spewing out how real and exciting this detached view of one own’s destiny and frailty, truly is.
I’m not sure how this seventies art school rock band, that went on to become a schlocky, sythn band, happened to record an album that makes me want to proclaim it as the best one of its era.
All I know is- they did.
And this is just one song, one part of my evidence.
This case is closed.
(Slimedog)
