XTC - The Big Express (1984)

To promote their seventh album, 1984's The Big Express, XTC pieced together an episode of Channel 4's documentary series Play at Home, each instalment chronicling a separate band. Despite essentially being an extended interview with the odd music video, they wanted to show more of themselves than The Tube could pertain; you see Andy Partridge, Colin Moulding and Dave Gregory flaunt their passion projects in and outside the band and, per the title, explore their not particularly fashionable hometown of Swindon as it was going through the wars a bit. The railway town was to suffer a big loss when the Swindon Works, its historic steam train maintenance and repair centre, was given the call in '84 to shut down, and this sudden swipe at an identity that surrounded their community backlit the album. It's clear enough from the cover that, as with the emblazoned Uffington White Horse on 1982's English Settlement, they'll always think on the corner of England they're forever bound to, no matter how far they travel. As primary songwriter (Moulding always contributing a few songs too), Partridge envisioned the new record as one of 'industrial pop' in which to wallow in "the imagery and the sounds" of their old town. As he later explained, it's an album "that's riveted together and a bit rusty around the edges and is sort of like broken Victorian massive machinery." 

If using the fall of local industry as a launchpad for music seems like a 'folk' move, it wasn't a necessarily obscure one for Thatcher age pop; the week the album entered the charts at number 38, the new number one album was Big Country's Steeltown, which similarly takes "industrial music" rather literally and intimately, as a matter of heritage and pride and symbolic of decline, and again wears this on its (record) sleeve. But XTC had less communal factors at play too; they were stuck in their 'wilderness years', when their financial luck was down, the hits had run dry and Virgin Records were impatient for some sort of restart; the band were also still adjusting to their studio-based, rent-a-drummer set-up, live gigs firmly a thing of the past, and had not fully explored the advantages of what this could mean for their wildest dreams. So, with so much going on (in multiple senses), The Big Express sounds vital by necessity.

Hence, as what many consider their final post-punk move, it is coarse and abrasive, in that sense out of step with the Mummer and Skylarking around it but not unlike the later-day Oranges & Lemons in that its off-kilter production (David Lord) adds a dense intensity to what you know XTC albums are like. And so The Big Express continues their vigorous reworking of pop, a slightly cracked iron contraption of an album that (not unlike The The) makes fertile use of new sounds, every song at an abrupt relocation from the previous one until that wheel's circumference has been jaggedly circled (and guest drummer Pete Phipps, no stranger to beats that restarted pop, meshes with a steam engine Linndrum). Arguably it was just as much a break for Lord, whose productions were never so condensed (the closest thing, Peter Gabriel 4, still one of broad spaces). Yet they recorded at his former Crescent Studios in Walcot Street, Bath, a road I know very well and which is certainly no Swindon. So it was recorded on my doorstep, as startling a realisation as discovering a lot of old favourites were taped at The Wool Hall and Real World.

For me this closeness has always been there in a way it isn't with music from, say, Bristol, a closer place I know better than Swindon but which as a huge city feels relatively self-contained. Living less than an hour from Swindon in Wiltshire's county town, I'm the only fan I know who first discovered XTC because they were local. As a seven-year-old in the mid-00s obsessed with leucippotomy (as I still am) I spotted the English Settlement sleeve in a book of 1,000 record covers and couldn't believe it – my dad photocopied it, blew it up and used it to spraypaint the horse on the garden wall (it's still there). It would be years yet before, like Cardiacs, Blur, Disco Inferno and others, they became an important part in establishing my social life as it exists today (and in its longstanding role as my groupchat's icon, I have seen The Big Express' cover more than any other in my whole life, even if just in the corner of my eye), and it was surprising getting into the band properly to discover that where they're from wasn't a big deal to only me (it's not like, say, Crawley is deep in the Cure's legend). The way they turned their misunderstood town into an advantage inspires me as someone from a maybe more misunderstood one, and even if Swindon only makes a few direct appearances, this is music that shouts life at the world from our county. Yet this is just one facet of the album, so it feels most logical to individually consider where each song goes, or gets to. 

The record starts like mechanics at work on the railway tracks, Gregory's metallic chugs of guitar panning rapidly like sparks off an angle grinder, threatening to chuck you in the deep end after the relatively soft Mummer – XTC loved let-your-ears-adjust album openings, and this one was jolting enough for Cardiacs to pay homage with "Fiery Gun Hand". Thereafter, Moulding spends "Wake Up" warning you against, as the Manics later put it, living life like a comatose. As someone who hasn't much of a life myself I struggle with songs that tell you to sort yourself out like it's just so easy (Floyd's "Time", not so much the Cure's more jubilant "Gone!"), but "Wake Up" is much more engaged with its own advice as we learn that our Ernold Same figure has gone so far he "might be dead" now – a man in the street could be fighting for life but he'd stay detached from proceedings, the Greek chorus of "Who cares!" underlining how this is a choice for him. But even then it is never too late; Annie Huchrak, a local Bathonian drafted in by Lord, softly whispers in your ear to "wake up" (Hounds of Love a year ahead of schedule?), and it's almost a tug of war with Moulding echoing both the hopeful and the hopeless phrases (hence also the indecisive, on-off rhythm section). But does he wake up? The thought is left hanging, to be picked up later perhaps. The big iron wheel needs to roll a bit first as, for XTC, there are a few thousand things to be getting on with; this is truly an eclectic pop record in the Pepper it-all-sticks sense.

We first hear Partridge's voice on "All You Pretty Girls", casting rays of clarity through a Mellotron fog (not quite "Watcher of the Skies", but I note Gregory was and is very fond of Foxtrot). A skanking sea shanty that hints at mid-80s Madness-meets-The Mollusk but which could only be *this* band, its subject of sailors thinking of loved ones as a sign of shared optimism on choppy seas is Andy in bijou mode. It's unlike his other songs about women (say a "Down in the Cockpit" or an "Omnibus"), existing more as a playful way of continuing the band's ever-expanding penchant for the scenic – I note it's the first of two consecutive songs based on folk idioms, so it's down to the Linndrum, echoey keyboards (just as ice-rink as they are Celtic) and layered fade-out to bring out the required rough edges (perhaps too much so for the public, peaking as its lead single at number 55 despite its memorably literal video).

But those edges are very honed on "Shake Your Donkey Up", which puts the West Country into country-and-western and constantly teeters on the edge of disaster. Ostensibly about a deservedly dumped "jackass", its arguably the final in a particular strand of fast and jerky XTC avant-pop that goes back to "Cross Wires", a crooked hoedown where Phipps whacks buckets and scrap metal, bruised fiddles do their thing at odd angles and a demented Partridge howls with excitement and cracks a whip as wildly as Dave Dee on "The Legend of Xanadu" (the lineage of Moonraker art-pop madness is there if you want it, and note how "Xanadu" itself was a spaghetti western in a series of singles that constantly looked for styles to chew up and spit out in lovably skewed ways). The song's central breakdown is particularly high on invention – industrial yes, sounding like a diseased, intricate drum workout trying to invent breakcore, while Gregory decides now is the time to play like Nile Rodgers. I note how Meat Beat Manifesto would form in Swindon a few years later, and this is one moment on The Big Express (among others to come) that unexpectedly anticipates some of their Storm the Studio-era industrial-funk-breakbeat collages. What with the end of 1980's "Living Through Another Cuba" resembling an Aphex Twin record played underwater, the group's casual knack for predicting these kind of futures is underexplored.

The experimentation works so well because they instinctively know pop, what can make it move, and the seaside-postcard-gone-wrong "Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her", perhaps (perhaps) their greatest song up to this point (Partridge himself thought as much, and given that his later favourite XTC songs were "Rook", "Wrapped in Grey" and "Easter Theatre", he is a rare artist who knows what his best work is), is so sublimely executed you seldom consider how all that happens is a boy on the beach compliments his crush's coat and she thanks him. It's all about the madness playing out in his head, the constant hesitation and anxiety as he's heckled and prompted to make a move by impatient waves, seagulls and anything else in his eyeline, or so he thinks. He's pressured by the band too – it was among the first signs that their repressed love for psychedelia had grown too big to contain (you saw it in flashes beforehand, like the phasing in "Jason and the Argonauts"); its stiff, plonky (and almost bitonal) Mellotron motif makes the song – for 1984 – come across like inverted synthpop, an earthy euphonium part among the few things in the mix that aren't prickling the boy, with Tchaikovsky cannonballs (!) the chief culprit among those that are. All the while, the rhythm – always peeling and fastening up again – is his every almost kiss before he pulls back. But her sweetness is rewarding enough, so his surroundings can go back to just surrounding.

They're reinventing the insecure love song in a distinctly sideward way (in '84 terms think also of Prefab Sprout's "Cruel") and it's as brash as it is unavoidably pretty (Partridge is one of the pop melodists for all time, and knows a turn of phrase). No doubt it's clear by now that I consider The Big Express an album of great newness, a realignment of pop whose many routes and ideas were plotted as possible ways forward but which have not always been taken up by anyone else; something like "Seagulls", its imagination unceasing, could source another band's whole aesthetic (he says well aware an American-Japanese band are named after it). And not unlike 1986's "Another Satellite", which similarly masks itself with a tableau of linked metaphors, the song was apparently inspired by Partridge's first encounters with his future wife.

But if there's any autobiographic sentiment to "The Everyday Story of Smalltown" (yes, I'm jumping a song, but it'll make sense this way) or if it's all observation is probably irrelevant. By tapping into the heart of daily Swindon it is a sequel of sorts to 1980's "Respectable Street", but where that song gossiped on individuals and showed how many stories can be explored in one tiny place (knowing how to move a Ray Davies influence sideways, even in a literal geographic sense), "Smalltown" considers how the town as a whole is the composite of its minutiae. It chugs through Wiltshire's biggest settlement – trust me, with a 222k population, it is the polar opposite of a small town. I'm from Trowbridge and I consider us to be pretty big – at varying speeds as it veers on both its reliable and unreliable inhabitants. Yet the central line, as you'd expect, is the rejoinder of "Who would pull down Smalltown?"; the undercurrent, that the Swindon Works was the livelihoods of many, is between the lines. Think also of 1982's "Ball and Chain", where Moulding peered his eyes on the destruction of houses in Westlecott Place and celebrated that one resident who wouldn't move out. Swindon won't go down without a fight.

It's a needed riposte to Gilbert O'Sullivan's "I'm Leaving", in which his apparently barren childhood town can only thwart his horizons. Unlike Gilbert, XTC were always here and as Partridge himself says in Play at Home on the matter of never leaving, "I like the place and everyone's got to have roots." The use of bandstand brass (now that's pretty Gilbert) accentuates the sense of home in an industrial town – otherwise, the song (again like "Respectable Street") is (kazoos aside) like what they played as ambitious upstarts in this sleepy old place, necessitating the relative respite of "I Bought Myself a Liarbird". You suspect David Lord felt most in his comfort zone here (lest you forget he produced "Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime"), and any unpleasantness that could arise from it being a 'pesky ex-manager' song (cf. Queen's "Death on Two Legs") is offset by its careful versatility and engaging oddness – they almost resemble a (very cardboard-sounding) skiffle or jugband reprising their work song on a street corner, yet the hazy guitars partly recall the George Harrison of "Your Love is Forever", and all this space shows the dub in them is still kicking – but more typical is the chorus' lateral glance to somewhere dreamy (a way out?), a la 1992's "The Ugly Underneath", and an ending as happily resolved as 1999's "Your Dictionary" (which, similarly, makes all the right moves as a pop record to undercut the listener being too stung by the negativity). Already a future is being planned.

The titular pun (lyrebird/liar bird) presages Partridge's jolting of language on "You're the Wish You Are I Had". It's there in the broken name, in the way he falls into falsetto to deliver a melismatic "had" like he's spiralling away ("haaAaAaAd!") and in the flexible word "wish", halting each chorus by repeating it like an oscillator or – just like a helicopter – propeller ("wishwishwish"), or acting as a crash cymbal in the outro. All this 10cc-type linguistic mischief is because he's infatuated and can't get it across joyously enough. Brassy synths slope behind determined snares in the verses, his world turned upside down, and overall (and unlike his own re-recordings on the following week's Give My Regards boondoggle), the unconscious influence of 1967 Paul McCartney is put to new and inspiring use, his new muse (same as on "Seagulls") encouraging him to pull out all the stops, to keep scaling higher. Even the brief guitar solo is a big atonal shard of something (as with the middle-eight of 1979's "Day In Day Out", squint and it's Fred Frith).

For his second and final song, "I Remember the Sun", Moulding changes tack to sweetly reflect on his own North Wilts childhood. The aura is jazzy and a little dozy, perhaps reflecting – but probably largely outdoing – the New Jazz or "British jazz revival" sophisti-pop of '84 (Café Bleu, Matt Bianco, Everything But the Girl etc.), and in that sense pointing forwards to the likes of "The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul" and "Miniature Sun". Actually, it's arguably the exact changing of Colin's guard – the start of the album was the last time his social or socio-economic comment songs were his focus (there will be more to come, but as anomalies) and here is the start of his emphasis on introspective, serene numbers, often rhapsodising the joys of his own youth or even younger (say "Grass" or "Bungalow"), or looking at where he is now and smiling (like "My Bird Performs" and "Ridiculous Tonight"). By the time we get to Apple Venus Volume 1, the band nail the art of evoking the Marlborough Downs or the Vale of Pewsey to me, places I love, but "I Remember the Sun" doesn't make me think so much of anywhere I know and veils some murky uncertainty – the key change is a little alarming, Gregory's guitar is anguished but gets stifled by the superficial lightness, there is a brief dentist drill drone and the final chord is a tad menacing. Bear in mind he sings "Most of all I remember the sun," as if it wasn't shining so much anymore.

Which naturally takes me back to that spinning iron wheel, asking us to wake up. I have held back three songs because they bear the record's sharpest blades. Starting urgently at side one's end, before "Seagulls" has even fully faded, "This World Over" is Partridge's most brutal masterpiece. "Oh well, that's this world over," he mourns to himself before the music – sounding somewhat like the Police – fires in on a snare gunshot. The apocalypse has been and gone, life remains but at what cost? Children can't imagine what this "sea of rubble" marked London once was. This was not the first time that very 80s fear of nuclear wipeout clouded Andy's mind, but where earlier efforts like "Living Through Another Cuba" strutted nervously in the face of it (as did "Two Tribes", still in its nine-week stay number one when the album sessions were wrapped up), the aftermath and debris of "This World Over" – in the year of Threads – are chilling, especially coming from someone who was now a father (and boy does the piano-y synth, introduced at just the right point mid-way through and which sounds like its playing itself, make me Feel Things). The rhythm's subtle evocation of reggae (a final reminder that it was once among Partridge's biggest influences in writing XTC's drum parts) is undercut by Phipps punching holes in the song, whilst the permeating ambient drift is more the contaminated air of this radioactive New Britain.

And little in the band's catalogue sounds as contaminated as the super discordant "Reign of Blows", which grinds its teeth on regimes (the US invasion of Grenada was on his mind) and couldn't sound more violent short of being, say, the Wildhearts of "Anthem"; a few years later, Bono would tell the Edge to put El Salvador "through an amplifier", but here the idea is to put everything, even Andy himself, through barbaric distortion, to turn its almost every bone and ligament to white noise. I wonder if it was partly an attempt to mould their experimental 1983 B-side "Procession Towards Learning Land", an almost microtonal exercise, into something more pop-shaped. But ultimately it is just as inaccessible – as much a challenging listen on a 1984 pop album as Soft Cell's "Slave to This" – and its piercing harmonicas are its harshest weapon ("people have no place in their solution, so torture raises its hand").

All this severity has to atomise in one of the finest of all closing songs, an abrupt return to the days when their albums abruptly ended with loud, agitated avant-rockers like "Complicated Game" and "Travels in Nihilon". Partridge was aiming for "industrial pop" throughout but the terrifying "Train Running Low on Soul Coal", dissonant firebolts on pylons, is that in every sense, with bludgeoning beats that could easily be Tackhead or Test Dept. There is no smothering abandon with hopeless memories of reconstructed 'cheeriness' (the way More Specials, Combat Rock and The Great Escape all sinisterly end); instead (and as with "Nihilon") Patridge painfully tries accosting the dreaded end of his creative usefulness to those higher up, paralleling it with Swindon's engines being dashed at the wall in a double dose of turmoil, the 'soft' parts of the song only adding to the overall delirium. Just hear those shrieks masquerading as verse against those mechanised huffs and puffs, as he fears all is heading towards a brick wall and then extinction. And consolidating on what hid in "I Remember the Sun", an upfront 'guitar solo' spits like broken electric wires. Do they expect to get out of this?

As his helpless distress signal of a head voice ('actual' singing by now a blurred memory) reaches its final minute, the tempo slows, the train dies, its components fall off one by one. "Next stop, bad dreamsville", crash... But the very first thing you hear on the very next proper XTC album is the sound of crickets on a sunny morning. That was the album that some would say – especially if they want to draw such a line in the sand with this band – 'saved' their career. In death comes rebirth.

And what of old Smalltown? At the start of their Play at Home, Andy and Dave make it clear that "Soul Coal" is, essentially, folk music, despite its disjointed melody, by playing it on two droning acoustics (there is the precedent of Martin Carthy, who knows a thing about scary folk music). This is happening on a bandstand in Swindon and is intercut with scenes of where the town is now at. Clock the "Welcome to Swindon" floral display, cranes in action, scenes both sunny and grey (sometimes at once, the town's two proper skyscrapers sunlit as rainclouds pass) and the many murals still holding strong. You feel a sense of optimism, and I think of all the redevelopment projects in the town in the 80s and 90s, even the small ones (say for instance the West Swindon Sculpture Trail) and I think of how the only Swindon I've ever known is a lovely place. In 2019, I saw Colin reunited with Terry Chambers on stage for the first time in 37 years. It was the opening night of TC&I's short residency at the Swindon Arts Centre. Outside the entrance there is a sculpture, Mark Amis' Applause, two hands, one person praising the show, but you can see it as one's hand holding another's. The band and the town will help each other through.

McFly - Wonderland (2005)

In September 2005, on the eve of my eighth birthday, my mum took me, my sister and my best friend to see McFly at the Birmingham NEC. I had seen plenty of live music already, as I'd been going to local folk festivals annually since I was in the womb, but this? I'd never been to a proper concert before, and I'd never seen so many people gathered in one room. The furthest I'd ever gone to see live music at that point was a few villages over, rather than an arena that's some 115 miles away. It was a turning of the tide for little me, and after an opening set by a couple of bands, one some genuinely obscure bunch called Famous Last Words (I bought their EP!) (not the metal band), there they were, the biggest but better yet best group I'd ever seen in person. My favourite bands at that time were Green Day, Nirvana and them – I loved Room on the 3rd Floor, their 2004 debut album which I was gifted again when my first copy vanished, and had come to love the new one, Wonderland, released a month earlier. They played a setlist comprised entirely of material from those two albums, as well as a new song in "Silence Is a Scary Sound" (suitably only ever released in live form), so I knew and could sing along to basically everything. And so I did.

On their journey to this gig, or at least to one of their NEC shows, McFly were recording a tour bus interview for inclusion as a future B-side. Not that I have it to hand right now, nor can I find it online, but I remember them speaking of how Wonderland was not quite as boundlessly fun as the first album because of some serious life changes in the meantime, thus not as many songs about being dumped by girls and being young and daft. Of course, McFly were a pop band, or a boy band, if you must – I'm not interested in the politics of what does and doesn't count as a boy band; they wrote and played their own stuff (hope you have your Authenticity bingo card at hand) but they were essentially one as far as image, marketing, audience and so on went – so, and because of the agency they had as songwriters and performers, they naturally wanted their sophomore album to be the one where they get Taken More Seriously. Some naturally fear projects like these mean groups sabotaging what was so likeable about them in the first place in some aimless pursuit of approval (from whom? NME? classic rock fans?), but for a group like McFly it's as right a move as Headquarters was to the Monkees or "Crazy Horses" was to the Osmonds and so on. Irresistibly pop in other words. The fun hasn't gone, and instead there is a lot of joy is in seeing their wide young eyes try to meet their new, kid-in-a-sweet-shop ambitions.

But true, McFly weren't that popular outside their own fanbase, as far as 'serious' acclaim went. They could have caught attention in the rising poptimist thing, except they were too busy (rightly) proclaiming Xenomania's genius and what not so there was little to no time for this uninspiring Busted bunch (the amount of people who then dismissed them as imitation pop punk through their Busted links, despite their palette being completely different, is quite astonishing). What Room on the 3rd Floor had actually done was establish them as a little 60s surf-pop confectionary. Thirteen catchy songs quickly sweep by, almost all of them with enough instant bubblegum to still sound fab to me all these years on, even though the production is very gauzy (it may be the most top-heavy album to ever top the charts). "5 Colours in Her Hair" was to me and my friends what "(Theme from) The Monkees" must have been to my parents' generation, except it crams a thousand hooks into just three minutes (people will have different answers as to what they find most memorable about the song). But yes, for a band Room could work only once, and its unified sound and almost-unwavering theme of teenage heartache left open those other horizons for Wonderland, the classic 'jumping from A Hard Day's Night to Rubber Soul' dichotomy. Read the liner notes of their Wonderland Tour 2005 DVD, written by director Dick Carruthers, as he states their case (among a lot of rather sweet observations, there's how they "really rather rock... (just ask Roger Daltrey)").

Except Wonderland, produced variously by Steve Power and a returning Hugh Padgham (who in no way resembles his overdriven 80s/early 90s self), is still one of my favourite albums 16 years on, and I have no real need to think about this context (these "battles" are part and parcel for pop groups who fancy themselves as 'cool'), just as I never did then. Finally, with this record, their place in a lineage of great, tuneful pop rock was suddenly apparent, if you cared enough to see. Those new ideas of theirs are many, and they see them all eye to eye. Several songs even make genuinely inventive use of a large string orchestra conducted by the pop-familiar Steve Hale. And while Tom Fletcher and Danny Jones were never great singers, their sheer eager-to-please youthfulness constantly sees them through, and gives everything here an extra velocity that might not otherwise exist.

The de facto lead single “I'll Be OK” starts things with ringing Edge arpeggios over a throbbing Who’s Next (the Who were McFly’s then-favourites) organ, before the band snap into focus with a discharged rhythm – an album intro so assured they went about doing something similar next time round. The song proper is a caring reminder to remain hopeful when “everything is going wrong”, offering that helping hand, and sure such uncomplicated advice could come off as deceptive if you weren’t feeling it, but I have felt it, as others have. Platitudes schmatitudes… there is no side to what McFly are doing; like Kim Appleby and even the R.E.M. of “Everybody Hurts” before them, it offers comfort and realises the importance in that, and while it does try to be specific (“when your lover’s gone”, “all the alcohol in the world would never help me to begin”), loosening its universality a tad (while only increasing its grip on those who see themselves in that), there are no cynical U-turns a la the coda of “You Get What You Give”. Even when Tom sings of “your only friends all [having] better things to do” – much more pertinent to me now than when I was a kid – the gap gets bridged. “Everybody Hurts” was written for teenagers, “you’re not alone” it sang, and so this song does the same. The importance this can have, particularly for young people, cannot be underestimated, as a browse of YouTube comments will make clear, while in the context of Wonderland, it's something that was important to establish on the upfront, as McFly will be getting their own nails dirty later on.

As a record, it deploys casual musical smarts, locking back into that jolting introductory roll on cue; the guitars in the chorus are surprisingly pitched closer to BJ Cole than 80s Edinburgh (or the Edge, again, for that matter), while the delayed lines in Tom’s verse plot the music’s spaciousness. It is followed by a cloudless love song (they were ok!) in “I've Got You”, with none other than Graham Gouldman turning up to co-wrote and co-produce. Pop came so easily to Graham once, and it's fair to say that was long before GG06 was a glint in his eye (I wonder if he ever fantasized about a parallel universe where he could stick this on 10cc’s Greatest Hits… and More?), and yet here is effortless, breezy power pop that many before them would have killed for. Part of its modern appeal to some may be because, unlike most guitar pop which survives from the mid-00s on radio, it flaunts its easy appeal without making a song and dance about the superiority of pop (as per Dan Gillespie) or pretending that it is something better than pop (the attitude of, say, Razorlight); these sort of games don’t exist in McFly’s heads, nor those of their audience. So far, you’re promised a hooky-beyond-belief if relatively straightforward pop rock record.

But then the ambitions are raised. “Ultraviolet” is really splendid 1967 worship, its vigorous power pop sound and talk of 'summer girls' rubbing shoulders with sitar drones and a somewhat raga-like second verse. If it reminds me of anything in ‘boy band’ terms, it’s Robbie Williams’ early cod-psych hit “Lazy Days” (meant as high praise!), whose heavy guitar drones are closer to McFly’s than may be initially obvious. The band’s brush with psychedelic pop here is not quite Jellyfish (yet), and nor does it simply study The 1960s, reproduce that and be done with it. Rather, it takes delight playing with its incongruencies, from its non-sequitur lyrics (and we are not made clear who the dart-throwing Mrs Halloween, “drinking at the bar again in New Orleans”, really is) to the aforesaid musical pile-on – note the Cali guitar jangles of the intro have slowed into low, contemplative notes by the end (with the sitar still droning away like a question mark); may these drawn-out outros of Danny’s give themselves more annotation later on.

The other side of the '67 coin is “The Ballad of Paul K”, a charming, classically (but perhaps unintentionally) Keith West-esque exploration of one man’s mid-life crisis that in all honesty is funnier than many of Britpop-era Damon's character studies ("He doesn't like to mention, applying for his pension, so, his children don't know he heading... into a mid-life crisis, he can't afford the prices, for, the new kitchen floor he's buying"). Far from sneering, it was a genuine curiosity of theirs as they were seeing these things for real in their own fathers – Danny has referred to it discussing what parents try, and perhaps fail, to keep from their children when times are falling hard – which makes for a disarming record, even more so given the subject is a natural anomaly among the band’s songs. These two songs appeared together as their own double A-side, where “Paul K” was enhanced with some gentle but involved orchestration that adds further sympathy to the lyrics, as if pasting “She's Leaving Home” atop “When I'm Sixty-Four”; while I wish this version had appeared on the album, attention should be drawn either way towards the song’s gorgeous, unpredictable chords – the music's harmonic commentary emphasises the bumps and helps you wish for that happy ending that doesn’t quite come soon enough.

They’re back to singing about romance, or the want for it, with the symphonic Bo Diddley of “I Wanna Hold You”, which perhaps bears the contemporary influence of Girls Aloud's “Love Machine” (a record that invented its own 21st century skiffle sound) (and note also Will Young’s brilliant “Switch It On”, released several months after Wonderland). Dramatising unrequited love into something that causes a 'pulverizing' of the nation, the spry and unforced humour here may be the closest the album gets to the first one – certainly, this is the giddiest thing on the record, stop/start hiccups etc., and is even comparable to some of the less Steinman-ite of Muse’s orchestral rock dramas (although, “it’s like a neutron bomb explosion tearing me apart”? Come on, Jim would have had a ball with these lyrics!) Of course, for all its showiness, it’s also just three-minutes long – taking 50s rock and roll as a template allows it to burn up as quickly as it warns you it will. And it’s all dipped in exclamation mark strings worthy of Harry Robinson.

Admittedly, a break-up ballad does appear with “Too Close to Comfort”, but note how the guitar chugs that appear only from the second chorus onward are seemingly in tribute to another emotional fog of a pop song, Weezer's “Say It Ain't So”, complete likewise with a 'we wanna soar like our heroes' climax. It’s almost to McFly what “3AM” was to Busted, what with that deceptive cadence at the end, except it isn’t a Nick Cave murder ballad with Psycho strings like their effort – instead it considers matters from both sides of the story (“you must have your reasons”), and Danny’s periodic use of Space Echo helps with plotting the requisite, but never overbearing, bigness.

Another thing with McFly is that the hits which survive in the public memory are usually the ones which shy away from their Who/Jellyfish/Queen/etc. rock geekdom. So it stands with their joint signature song, “All About You”, originally released half a year earlier for Comic Relief. It’s so simple and obvious a love song that it sounds like the first song someone would write, and thus you're surprised wasn't released until 2005. But again, it reminds me of that golden year, and through the coupling of its smitten harmonies with the dynamic folk/baroque pop arrangement, its rather worthy of the greatest 60s toytown or sunshine pop. Furthermore, that its grandiose strings wrap such uncomplicated, all-you-need-is-love themes without panache calls to mind a chamber pop Sarah Records. It isn't short on surprises either; that flowery orchestral prologue could be setting the mic up for a crooner, and when the song could have jumped to its big, loudest moment, it instead weaves us through an interlude of woodwinds and Spanish guitar. Plus, like who knows how many classics (“God Only Knows”, “Birdhouse in Your Soul” etc.), the singers end up singing past and around each other in comfy rounds, Danny adding incomplete choruses to Tom’s complete ones. It’s at this point you’re really putting your arm back around it if you’re not immune to its charms.

But Tom really has spent the whole album building up to what comes next. That one song in him that breaks through to some place new that's perhaps a little scary. Hale’s strings have become bigger the further along we've gone, and with the two-part “She Falls Asleep”, the music becomes wholly panoramic. In fact, the first part is nothing but orchestra – and I suppose it’s remarkable that an album primarily bought by teenagers contains a whole piece of modern classical music (even if this first part is less than two minutes long) and a track without any of the band on it – and is patient but animated in its setting of the locus. John Williams was Tom's influence, and it makes one realise he could write a great Disney score, likewise as we settle into part two, which is pure baroque pop (or is Romanticist pop closer?) Strings, piano, voice. As a song and as an arrangement, I can imagine it in Paul McCartney’s hands.

But it’s also about a lover with heavy depression. This isn’t such an abrupt change of direction, given where the album has already gone, but Tom, just turned 20, is careful to get the balance right in writing what some may have assumed to be beyond his reach. As a lyric it’s a frozen moment, or a few, in time – working through things that have been said, trying to reach her in time to save her, maybe literally if that’s how you want to see it – meaning it neither focuses too much on, nor skirts too much around, its burning undercurrent. Instead there are momentary glimpses into weighty context (“she’s calling about her broken home”) if you want them. The gravelly orchestra keeps changing itself as his, or her, actions or thoughts affect, or correct, the next ones, or the previous ones, with the arrangement working through intensities and we-can-see-for-miles epiphanies. There’s a lot of dynamics at play here. There has to be.

And it's very affecting, the moment in which Tom exceeded himself. Hear how the slow “she’s not got that much more to give”, floating on a prematurely tearful bed, suddenly gets a jolt as “Eleanor Rigby” strings punctuate him now abruptly going over what must be done to help get her through. No defeatism, thanks. “Lying very still on the floor by the door but it’s locked ‘cause she was hoping...“, accuses Tom to himself, before a pause, “you would come back for more!” It's the natural struggling for clarity. But there are two particularly potent moments when she – perhaps literally, perhaps not – calls about having waited and ached too long, bringing back his focus. At first it’s a stagnant coo which is allowed to draw itself out, allowing the rushing refrain of part one to cycle back around with renewed determination (as there is no giving up). On the second instance, at the end, it is belted distantly, and just like that the chords come crashing dizzyingly down. Before, wait, a perfect cadence. That was something “Clover Over Dover” never did. There is precariousness and then there is a final retreat. It is a breakthrough for its writer comparable to “The Rain Came Down on Everything”, “No One Waits” or “Odessa”. It is perfect. 

It also means Danny needs his own moment, of course. Opening tentatively with some inscrutable, murky drones of synth and chopped-up noise – like he's testing the air before fully committing to what follows – "Don't Know Why", which oddly resembles Doves' "Caught by the River" but less ornate, was penned by Danny with his sister about their father's destructive attitudes to their family, with – hinted at almost in passing – him ultimately leaving for someone else (as if the innocuousness of "The Ballad of Paul K" wasn't concealing enough harsh truths). Some might pre-emptively sneer, again, about this potentially being an overreach (along the lines of 'didn't Good Charlotte do songs like this?' And so what if they did?) (and also, Good Charlotte's then latest-album, their own 'serious' move, opened with two minutes of orchestral music. You can find links anywhere!), but his emotional intelligence, if that's how you want to put it, sounds both hard won and fearlessly on cue ("I don't want to know your game, let alone her name. No matter what you say to me, we are not the same"). The somewhat eerie middle-eight, in which the faded "dreams we have as kids" are put away at last, seems to be a central pivot as thereafter the song's growing feeling of exultation becomes huge (hear that guitar solo, the catharsis blatant and powerful). He'd sung "I just wish you'd have tried" all along, but by the end it is followed by an ecstatic "yeah!" and the band pull together for a photo finish. They all sound so valiant. This weight has been lifted. There is only forwards to go.

But then, when you think it's all just about over, a few stray, plucked phrases from Danny's acoustic are heard. He is channelling Kelly Joe Phelps, shown to him in his upbringing, so one assumes by his father. Likewise, that offset middle-eight repurposes Isaac Guillory. I think of many guitarists and how the first time they pick one up as a child it can be partly as a way out – out of childhood, or a bad situation – and partly because they've breathed music as an environment. So the track's final moment may be one of private reflection after all that came before it, one tearful final message back to that time and place. Without all that music, those guitarists, would he be here doing this now? And he is, isn't he...

The re-energised, having-exorcised-the-demons McFly move swiftly on from this dual-peak to "Nothing", whose blast of power pop sunshine harks back to the first two tracks with its Blue Ash-sized chorus and another wobble of Riley/Who's Next keyboards in the middle-eight (interestingly, all the record's middle-eights are introduced in the liner notes as 'M8s', which as a kid was how I first came about them being a thing. Similar treatment is not given to any other parts of the songs). And yes, the Who influence works overtime here with the riff being a variation on "Substitute", but what I find really interesting is how the guitar, combined with Harry's skipping fills, put me (perhaps inexplicably) in the mind of skiffle, and not even for the first time with this lot, what with "Hypnotised" from the first album (although that song arguably sounds more like, of all things, the Coral's "Pass It On", itself derived from "You Like Me Too Much"). The lightness of the music here is such that you'd probably not realise they haven't really exorcised those demons at all ("Even words of sympathy mean nothing"), but this little existentialist moment is defeated by, of course, the realisation (to us as listeners at least) that Tom'd do better if he wasn't in this ill-fated relationship. Really, the band are on, or near, the right roads. He'll be ok.

And so finally it all has to come full circle. "Memory Lane" is a reminder (and a particularly useful one to idiots who'd wonder why these young chaps are singing about their memory lane) that teenagers have their own rigidly-defined past and present – certainly for me, so much has sadly changed since 2005 – and that the song was one of the first they ever wrote makes it even more aggregable. It uses lost love as its touchstone but the fact it closes two of their greatest hits compilations, despite never being a single, contextualises what it really means for the band. It does exactly what you want it to, i.e. deliver us a big cosy, self-assured "Hey Jude"/"Hot Love"-style coda/curtains close. "So much has changed" they repeat as enveloping strings pave their path into, or beyond, Wonderland, seeing these changes they speak of play out (Danny gawkily and loveably provides McCartney's Little Richard interjections, "so muuuch yeah yeah!"). The band's instruments eventually fade from the picture behind them, and a marching band snare adds to the feel that this is a procession into the new - for them, and their fans.

And that ultimately was what it was to me. It was the first album I owned that I felt some initial bafflement by – no, I was a bit taken back at first, I think by its relative slowness and tad moody cover (no one's smiling, although Dougie looks like he's struggling not to) – before falling for it quickly, and that initial 'oh???' to decisive 'oh!!!' is surely a rite of passage for pop fans. Wonderland is proudly, endearingly pop and for all who love it (so not just teenage girls. My friends were mostly boys and we were all kids), but ambitious in its own way and yet never exploring ideas above their station (or even entertaining the notion that such off-limit ideas could exist) (and generally, the closer McFly came to outré ideas the better they became; see for instance the 70s art rock worship of 2006's "Transylvania", their best ever song. And compare with the Sparks of 2006 and be amazed). The critics' reception to Wonderland – cautious references to imagined people comparing it to the Raspberries or whoever, rather than being honest upfront – does suggest that if McFly had been some other band, others would have drawn acclaim more confidently. It seems pointless to think on that fantasy, but the McFly of 2005 were much closer to K Records or Teenage Fanclub, in spirit and sound, than anything nominally indie clogging up the British charts at the time. The band themselves went onto discover Jellyfish and a lot of other great things (I'll try not to say too much about Motion in the Ocean in case I ever write about it). And quite a lot about me - the eight-year-old boy who began collecting CD singles of bands I loved and not just the albums, and the slightly older boy who had aspirations to one day try and put a great, overlooked record into some context - began with this album.

Introduction to Join the Dots

Oh that Moonraker air...

I'm Lee, a 23yo from Trowbridge who loves pop, and who needs a sandbox to write about it all in. Thus, this'll be the new place that when I feel I want to write about an album - which I suspect will be often - then I will. I've got a lot of things I've longed to try and contextualise (all in good time of course), so this is an experiment where I hope to do just that.

This isn't my first blog (although it's the first good one with any luck), and isn't the start of me as a music writer. But this is my big summer project (and beyond, hopefully), where I finally get my nails dirty and discuss music in a custom-made arena, trying to plot out some sort of continuum of me and who I am and what I like and where I am as I go. To make things easier for myself, the earlier pieces will be expanded, nay largely rewrites, of earlier things I did in other places which need to be updated. Thereafter I'll get more esoteric with myself, I think.

My main primary inspiration for Join the Dots - beyond the rather urgent one of needing an outlet for writing - was speaking to a friend about using songs as 'prompts' to encourage writing. Well I've gone one bigger, i.e. albums. And I'm hoping it'll all connect in its way. I'm also contemplating, in time, experimenting with the novelty of updating posts when need be, so they don't stay static and can keep connecting to ongoing posts, but I'm not so sure about this so far.

Due to the perils of university work, I won't really begin work until towards the end of May - really I'm jumping the gun by doing all this - but I've been wanting to start this for months. But it's a start! Hello!