The 100 Greatest Songs of the 1970s, Part XIII.

040. Magazine “The Light Pours Out of Me”
(Howard Devoto/John McGeotch/Pete Shelley)
Real Life, 1978

The best criminally ignored postpunk band in existence, Magazine is up there with Television, Wire, the Slits, and Gang of Four when it comes to pointing to new directions for rock to take after punk. Howard Devoto, the band’s mastermind, was the co-leader of the first version of the Buzzcocks (the ones that recorded the seminal Spiral Scratch EP), and he was the John Lennon to Pete Shelley’s Paul McCartney in a lot of ways. Whereas the Buzzcocks under Shelley grew progressively more spiky, amphetamined, and pop, Magazine was unafraid to be slow, crushingly heavy, or arty, using chillingly icy synth tones before the cool kids in Joy Division and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark had figured them out. This song, though, is almost brutal in its rhythmic force, with a huge numbing riff and several layers of jagged guitar noise overlaying one of the most powerful, trancelike drum beats in rock & roll. Its lyrics deal with the usual tortured spirituality that postpunk bands like Echo & the Bunnymen or Simple Minds (when they were still any good) delved, but it’s Devoto’s stentorian drone that sells them convincingly, and the relentless rhythm that will make you accept them as gospel. It’s one of those rare songs that will make you a devoted fan of a band on first listen (if you’re anything like me, anyway), even when squeezed into a random selection of other downloaded stuff — I’m pretty sure I first heard it sandwiched between Benny Goodman and the Bhundu Boys.



039. Fanny “Ain’t That Peculiar”
(Pete Moore/Smokey Robinson/Robert Rogers/Marvin Tarplin)
Fanny Hill, 1972

They never struck the charts, they’re decades out of print, they’re virtually forgotten by all but the most hardcore 70s rock-geek fetishists. And they’re the best band you’ve never heard. Everyone else will tell you that they were the first all-girl rock band signed to a major label, and while that’s true, it’s unimportant: what matters is that they sincerely rocked when the need struck, and made a superb pop group (on the level of Harry Nilsson or Fleetwood Mac) otherwise. Like most great pop bands, they often excelled on covers, and this very-70s update of the Marvin Gaye classic might be their finest moment — legendary producer Richard Perry often quoted it as one of his favorite productions. June Millington’s groove-busting slide guitar, Nicky Barclay’s honky-tonk piano, Jean Millington’s funky basslines, and Alice de Buhr keeping it all togther on the kit, plus whatever Perry wanted to throw in the mix, make for an intoxicating combination, especially if you’ve got it turned up loud enough; call it southern-style Motown-rock, with all the bursting melodic glory and rootsy jive that implies. They only put out four albums in five years before breaking up in frustration with the misogynism entrenched in rock culture — even after seeing them tear the roof off live, Led Zeppelin fans refused to believe that four girls could play those instruments so well. It’s time for a rediscovery.



038. Black Sabbath “Iron Man”
(Black Sabbath)
Paranoid, 1971

An obvious choice, perhaps, but even after hearing it on the radio hundreds of times (this and “Paranoid” are, natch, the only Sabbath that ever get played), I can’t possibly get enough of its heavy, metal thunder. And no, it’s got nothing to do with the Marvel superhero; if you must find a cartooning connection, it may be based on the same English childrens’ book that Brad Bird’s animated feature The Iron Giant was. But screw all that: it’s fucking cool. Iommi’s guitar is as slow, as heavy, and as dark as molasses, and the primitively mechanical stomp of the rhythm section makes me think of Miyazaki-mecha, or of steampunk robot armies. And Ozzy is appropriately melodramatic, wailing like some crazed hobo-prophet, a John the Baptist for the titular Iron Man, and getting surprisingly thoughtful about the monster’s emotional life. I don’t listen to a whole lot of metal, as you might be able to tell, and part of the reason is because Black Sabbath fulfills just about all my metal needs. But then I hardly think of them as metal; they’re just another great 70s band, like ELO, Thin Lizzy, or Parliament, that found an indelible, unmistakable sound that worked perfectly for them and plowed that furrow to rich reward, artistically as well as (presumably) financially. Oh, and they don’t exist after Ozzy left. (On the other hand, neither does he.)



037. Todd Rundgren “Hello, It’s Me”
(Todd Rundgren)
Something/Anything?, 1972

I could be wrong, but I don’t think there’s a song that screams “Nineteen-Seventies” more loudly or clearly than this one. Even the bass sounds five years older than I am. The fact that it was played during Topher and the redhaired girl’s first kiss on the pilot of That 70s Show only proves my point (and incidentally proves what a goddamn nerd I am). That bouncy, vaguely spacey piano line, the Bacharach-on-cocaine horns, the stomachchurningly wishy-washy “it’s important to me/that you know you are free” line, the black backup singers, Rundgren’s white-geek voice reaching for the highest notes he can: all very Seventies, very nice, very pop, very normal. Except, of course, that Todd was anything but. While “Hello, It’s Me” was on the one side (out of four sides) of Something/Anything? that was touched by hands other than the Rund-man’s, his cracked-prodigy fingerprints are still all over it. Holed up in a motel room for weeks on end splicing tape together, recording pianos, guitars, drums, everything he could think of, and high on any combination of whatever that famously illicit decade could provide, he produced what might be the greatest romantic pop song of the decade, managing in one swoop to beat the Beatles, Bacharach, Goffin/King, and the California sunshine factory at their own collective game, even while acknowledging the bittersweet letdown that the 70s was turning out to be. Not bad for a reclusive freak.



036. Siouxsie & the Banshees “Hong Kong Garden”
(John McKay/Kenny Morris/Steve Severin/Siouxsie Sioux)
single, 1978

Not many men can lay claim to having laid the foundations for an entire musical genre, let alone a lifestyle movement; and of course, the number of women who get a chance to do anything creative or individual at all in music is even fewer. But Siouxsie Sioux is one of those rare cases: not only the greatest female punk rocker (sorry, Patti Smith and Polly Styrene), she is also the single person most responsible (insofar as these things can be measured) for goth. Not that she’d take that as a compliment, probably — I’ve never met a goth who liked the word — but it’s also undeniable. As one of those people who reads all about an artist before actually getting a chance to hear the music, I came to this song ill-prepared years ago; I’d been told that the Banshees started out as a primitive combo, barely able to play their instruments in sync, and gradually evolved into one of the more sophisticated, elegant, and atmospheric bands in the world. That’s all kinds of rubbish: this, their first single, is just as sophisticated (those chopping guitars!) and atmospheric as it has any need to be. Elegance is simply off the table at this point; it is, after all, a song about Orientalism as both a hoary set of cultural stereotypes and as a point of living fact in the low-rent multicultural epicenter of London. I suppose if you really wanted to you could make an argument for this being casually racist (in the same vein as the Cure’s “Killing an Arab”), but why bother when you can just listen to Siouxsie’s deathless chanting?


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