The 120 Days of Shameless Bids for Publicity!

Brazen Hussies, 22 December, Kings Head Fulham. Surely round about then you'll need an excuse to get away from your loved ones? Or hell, bring them down too and torture them with this nonsense, whatever.

BTW, if you want a CD that's REALLY outside the canon, check out 'Tormato' by Yes. Currently even the notorious 'Topographic' gets some props as a magnificently mad gesture and time-capsule cred, but this 1978 item is utterly dismissed even by progsters! The thing starts off business-as-usual ("Future Times/Rejoice"), but you notice that Squire has this echo-flange-filter discotron thing on the bass, which to my ears is an improvement over that dry adenoidal midrange competing-with-Howe thing. Chris meets Bootsy! The next track is the eyebrow-raiser. First of all it's disco, second of all it's called "Don't Kill the Whale". First the lyrics, of course it's not exactly "Fuck tha Police", but considering both the theme and Anderson's previous (as in 'previous offences', non-Brits), it's done with a surprising amount of deft sarcasm ("In beauty, vision/ do we offer much?"), not cringeworthy at all! Also, Jon sounds like he's singing about something he actually cares about, which has got to be a first for this bunch, well done. I hope they opened and closed the set with it in Japan.
"DKTW" also offers an important clue into the nature of 'rockism', along with "Miss You" and "I Was Made For Lovin' You" - namely, how much of the auteurist stamp does the artist in question feel the need to impose on an 'alien' genre? I feel "DKTW" is the essence of 'rockist disco' - it's disco, but with endless chord modulations and a particularly abrasive if not grating (perhaps programmatic in light of the lyrics) schlock-horror kybd fluorocarbon emission from Rick Wakeman (who throughout the album is either crapping on the material or misguidely trying to define it). Is the essence of 'rockism' believing you can elevate source material by individualising it? (Compare to Donna Summer's "Hot Stuff", which REALLY rocked the disco, or "Another One Bites the Dust", which subordinated itself completely to black radio conventions and thus absolutely KILLED every other dinosaur disco attempt.) 'DKTW' is one of those experiments that failed big enough to give rise to its own self-contained 'ecosystem' (everything's gone green!), and incidentally, Wakeman's 'contribution' would have Add N to X or Throbbing Gristle reaching for the earplugs!
"Madrigal" is a Howe/Anderson mellow thing that I'm sure is very nice, but with "Release, Release" we're back aboard the Event Horizon, and unlike Laurence Fishburne we haven't seen nearly enough yet. This is a fast, rockin' number, and if not for Anderson and Wakeman (who present a musicological problem as great and complex as the 'problem of free will to do evil' has for theologians - maybe it's the SAME problem!) it could be Tool OR the Talking Heads in the engine room, using the Lottery machine to generate time sigs as they do - until it breaks down into this bizarre middle section where crowd noise is overdubbed, and there's an unnaccompanied drum solo then a guitar solo - and they're both REALLY SHITTY! What were they trying to say here? "This is what the idiots who come to our show will eat up"? "This is as good if not better than the complicated stuff and our audience (and maybe us!) are too pretentious to realise it"? Or, heaven forbid, "THIS IS NEW WAVE? WE CAN DO THIS!"? That's two in a row where they faced down Freddy's mob ("Sheer Heart Attack") and tripped over their shoelaces! FWIW, the lyrics are sort of "Going for the One pt 2" - remember that one? "I tink I'll try and write a punchline/ but they're so hard to find in my cosmic mind/ so I think I'll take a look out the window"? This one talks about "Lack of concentration" and "we're not moving". Bauhaus all the way. As in letting the plumbing and electrical wires show, not as in lame goth shite.
The second side is what launched a thousand haircuts, and I can't imagine what it must've sounded like in 1978, but..."Arriving UFO". Poly "Klaatu Niktu Barada" Styrene fans complained about this one? More Wakeman keys that are abrasive and actually physically painful DESPITE WAKEMAN'S PROBABLE INTENTION (although he was probably sleeping in a gutter at the time), which makes all the difference. "Circus of Heaven". Twee pseudo reggae, which of course they can't do straight, but this time they subtract the beats instead of subdividing them, and if you're going to be 'twee' then go all the fucking way and have your five-year-old kid talk in the outro, which is what Anderson's done here. I actually like this song a lot. As 'ingenuousness' goes, this makes Jonathan Richman sound like Chuck D. Onward to "Onward". "Through the long night...the long night...of my li-i-i-i-i-ife..." A wedding song, and here's what to blame for every shitty AOR cash cow produced by Ron Nevison. Starship stole their whole career from this thing. Not only that, but Metallica stole ALL of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" from an incidental Howe noodle, which places those thrashing Napster nemesii 'zackly in the Bay Area post-hippie AOR context I'd always feared they secretly had the secret handshake too. Then there's the last track, which sounds like a band trying to be Yes, but without a clue. Like they're trying to learn "Siberian Khatru" off some old sheet-music but the music has mistakes in it and they have to keep going over it. I love it when bands parody themselves, don't you? Especially unintentionally!
Which brings us back to the Shameless Bid for Publicity of course!