60 ALBUMS @ 60 : #2

Magazine – After The Fact (1982)

That’s the problem with setting hard and fast rules – they inevitably come back to bite you in the backside.

The #2 position in this rundown should be occupied by The Correct Use of Soap, the album I reckon is as close to perfection as any that has ever been released  – and yup, JTFL, I include the cover of ‘Thank You…..’ in that assessment.   (Click here to be let in on that private joke).

The problem is that I didn’t buy said album in 1980.  As I’ve said before, and it has long been a source of immense regret, I didn’t pick up on Magazine until the band had broken up.

After The Fact was my first purchase. It is therefore, along with some later Magazine material including other compilations, box sets and a much later reunion LP, eligible for inclusion in the rundown, and I’ve decided, after careful and due consideration, that it is just as worthy as slotting it at #2 as ‘Soap’.

Controversial?  For sure.   But it’s my party, and I can ‘cheat’ if I want to.

The ten tracks across the album offer an overview of the band’s career.  Four of them had been released as singles, but at the same time, four other songs selected as 45s here in the UK were left off.  Each album is represented – Real Life (1978) and Secondhand Daylight (1979) both have three songs, while The Correct Use of Soap (1980) and Magic, Murder and The Weather (1981) have two.   The fact that my favourite record is relatively under-represented only added to the utter joy and elation I experienced when I finally bought myself a copy, which would have been just a matter of weeks after the compilation.

The back of the sleeve comes with a wonderfully-written essay from Paul Morley in which he reflects, in his usual rambling but engaging style, as to why Magazine were such an important, essential and always likely to be unappreciated part of the post-punk era. As you can imagine, the essay contains a number of magnificently structured phrases and sentences, but one of the more readily understandable is what really gets to the heart, as far as I’m concerned, about what made the group so compelling at the time and why they remain so relevant more than 40 years later:-

“Magazine took pop music in the direction of a new simplicity: that is, they sought to prove nothing, they were subtle, frank and alluring and there was every chance you would be amazed.”

All of this and more for this very impressionable late-teen.   They became the second group, in very short times, to emerge out of Manchester and make me fleetingly yearn to live elsewhere other than Glasgow.  Joy Division/New Order had been the first, and The Smiths would later prove to be a third.  I had yet to fully discover the wonders of The Fall….and I suppose it’s at this juncture it is worth confessing that Mark E Smith is conspicuous by his absence from this rundown.  I make no apologies and I make no excuses…it just sometimes works out that way.

For decades, I sneered at the idea of bands getting back together and reuniting after years apart.  I never wanted to entertain the thought of going along and seeing old heroes in their dotage doing everything possible to ruin their legacy with a substandard and embarrassing performance in front of fans who really should have been, in the words of Lloyd Cole, old enough to know better.

I did a handbrake turn after the events of 14 February 2009.  A Magazine gig, at the Academy in Manchester, after an absence of 29 years.  My first time seeing and hearing the songs in a live setting.  Two nights later, and I was in the audience in Glasgow.  Later in the year, at the end of August, I’d see them in Edinburgh, on a night when they played two half-sets, with a break in-between.  The first half, and I had no idea this is how it was going to pan out until about the third song in, involve playing The Complete Use Of Soap in its entirety in the same order as the record.  Needless to say, I couldn’t stop smiling afterwards for weeks.

mp3:   Magazine – A Song From Under The Floorboards

I wasn’t aware, when I first got familiar with Magazine, that this particular song was based on the novella Notes From Underground, written by Fyodor Dostoevsky back in 1864. Around the time that Magazine were undertaking the decades-later comeback, which culminated with the album No Thyself (2011), a piece in The Guardian newspaper suggested that basing on a song on a novel by Dostoyevsky was not the action of the typical pop group, but then again Howard Devoto was not a typical pop star. It was a sentence that made me wonder if Robert Forster had been thinking specifically of Howie when he penned these words in the song Here Comes The City, on the album Oceans Apart (2005):-

“And why do people who read Dostoevsky always look like Dostoevsky?”

I do have a quiet smile to myself every time I hear that line.

One more album to go, and the rundown is over. I’d like to think many of you might have worked out who is going to be responsible for it, and most likely the actual LP.

JC