Opal - Happy Nightmare Baby (1987) and Early Recordings (1989)

I once sat in a dressing room with Mazzy Star after they'd played a spellbinding gig at Manchester's Hop & Grape at the start of the first European tour to support So Tonight That I Might See back in late '93/early '94.

Despite having just performed what still remains one of my favourite gigs, they were a quiet bunch afterwards, close knit in the corner and keeping to themselves.

Many of best bands have a cult-like quality about them and the way they circled around David Roback brought that to mind.

I was there with the support band, who were old friends, and in contrast to the main act they were in a lively mood after playing in front of one of their biggest ever crowds.

Drummer Keith Mitchell was the only one who was happy to mix, explaining why he'd played such a dark venue in sunglasses by telling us that when he'd first auditioned for Green On Red, Dan Stuart had told him he could have the gig as long as he played in the shades he'd first turned up in - when he auditioned for Opal, Roback also insisted on the sunglasses. 'Looks like I'm stuck with f**kin' things,' he shrugged.

Another former Opal member, Suki Ewers, was also back in the band that night, playing keyboards and guitar despite not appearing on the album.

That chemistry between Roback, Ewers and Mitchell dated back in 1984 when they had first played in Opal together, the now largely forgotten precursor to Mazzy Star, who laid down much of the blueprint for what was to come in two curiously different albums.

Both are long out of print, including on CD, which is a great shame. Like much of the Paisley Underground stuff of that era, some reappraisal is surely due.

Happy Nightmare Baby was their only album while together, with the Early Recordings compilation following in 1989, two years after they'd split.

The big difference between Opal and Mazzy Star is Kendra Smith, the singer who Roback stole from The Dream Syndicate and wooed into his bed and new band after himself leaving Rain Parade following their debut album in 1983.

Early Recordings mainly comprises the first three EPs released by the new band, the first under the name Clay Allison.

One of the first things Roback and Smith recorded together was a cover of the Velvet Underground's I'll Be Your Mirror (not on either of these albums), which also featured Susanna Hoffs of future Bangles fame,  and it set a template for what was to come with Opal.

Their early efforts were dreamy and laidback, Roback mainly playing acoustic guitar with Ewers' keyboards given plenty of prominence and Smith centre-stage.

The VU's sweeter moments, including Sunday Morning, Femme Fatale and Jesus, come to mind, with blues and 1960s folk-rock influences mixed in, rounding out a plaintive, slightly naive sound.

My Only Friend (which those of a cynical bent could read as a heroin love song in the Lou Reed mould), Grains Of Sand and Northern Line are all gentle, lazy, subtly hypnotic and pretty much perfect.

Ewers provides two sweet and simple songs, Strange Delight and Brigit On Sunday, the latter of which she also sings.

Roback has a stab at lead vocals as well on Lullaby, a slightly gothic children's song. The final track, All Souls, is almost hymn-like.

Letting these hazy, entrancing songs wash over you is wonderful when you're sat on your sofa but you could imagine how they got drowned out by audience chatter when they played live.

You could certainly see how they came to the conclusion that turning up the guitars was the way to get noticed - which is exactly what they did on their long delayed debut album, Happy Nightmare Baby.

HNB arrived four years after the band had formed and seems determined to make its mark, opening up with Rocket Machine, which borrows heavily from T.Rex with its psychedelic swagger and almost exaggerated guitar riff.

The folk and blues influences have been traded in for The Doors, Television, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Buffalo Springfield.

Roback plays the guitar god like never before or since, overcooking it at times but anyone who enjoys the slowly unfurling fronds of psychedelic guitar he's trademarked will find much to enjoy here, particularly in Soul Giver and Siamese Trap.

Ewers is still very much central, also beefing up her sound and bringing to mind Ray Manzarek's organ style in the ways she plays off Roback.

The one song HNB shares with Early Recordings is She's A Diamond, which hightlights the new direction perfectly - a bluesy acoustic lament to start with, it's now a chugging slice of swaggering riffage.

Magick Power even comes over all mystical with its lyrics about 'electric children over the moon'.

Roback did a slightly dodgy job of producing, with everything sounding rather murky and the vocals too weak, which didn't seem to help sales, along with the general confusion caused among the band's small fan base by the change in direction.

Smith quit halfway through the following tour, while they were supporting the Jesus & Mary Chain.

She was rapidly replaced by a teenage Hope Sandoval, who also ended up replacing Smith in Roback's bed. This version of Opal didn't last long before they transformed into Mazzy Star and therein lies a while other story.

Years later, Sandoval would break up with Roback and end up with William Reid of the J&MC. There's a weird symmetry in there somewhere...

Smith later emerged with a mini album and a solitary full LP, both of which are patchy but interesting. The 4AD website claims she was last heard of living in a cabin without electricity in rural California. This cover of Joy Division's Heart and Soul from 1995 is the most recent sighting.

Tangerine Dream - Rubycon (1975)

Since the release of Julian Cope's Krautrocksampler in 1995, a host of German bands have been rescued from obscurity and given overdue praise for their wildly exploratory and fearlessly groundbreaking work of the late Sixties and early Seventies.

The likes of Can, Faust, Popol Vuh, Harmonia, Amon Duul II and Cluster are all now considered to be strikingly original innovators, with their influence to be found across a wide range of indie, rock and electronica acts.

Neu! have just been given the deluxe box-set treatment that would have seemed laughable when their third album was released to minimal public interest in 1975.

The disintegration of Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger's partnership in the wake of Neu! 75's dismal sales was in sharp contrast to the fortunes of their fellow Germans Tangerine Dream at the time.

Having signed to Virgin Records in 1974 in the wake of John Peel naming 1973's Atem as his album of the year, TD - then comprising Edgar Froese, Chris Franke and Peter Baumann - decided to explore a new sequencer-driven sound that resulted from Franke's experiments with the Modular Moog's control-voltage analog sequencer during live performances.

The following album, Phaedra, reached No.15 in the UK charts, sitting comfortably in record collections of those of experimental bent alongside the likes of Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Soft Machine and Traffic.

Strangely, the album bombed back in Germany, selling just 6,000 copies, which probably explains why the band were delighted to take up Richard Branson's offer to record the follow-up at his Manor studio, in Shipton on Cherwell in Oxfordshire, where Mike Oldfield had previously recorded Tubular Bells.

Surrounded by gothic splendour, looked after by those 'helpful ladies at the Manor' who get a mention in the sleeve credits, and on a high from their recent successes, TD rose to the occasion, quickly recording Rubycon during the month of January 1975, prior to its release on March 21. The record business moved faster in those days.

With just one track per side, Rubycon seems to draw together some of the strands from their previous five albums, ranging from the slowly creeping tendrils of sound that that open Rubycon part one, recalling the quieter moments of 1971's Alpha Centuri, to the grand swell of the rhythmic patterns that emerge to continue Phaedra's experiments.

Part two starts with a darker, howling atmosphere that recalls the Ligeti-influenced epics of 1972's mammoth Zeit double LP before returning a more sequencer-driven style.

The results must have been mindblowing when you were reclining on a beanbag in the glow of your lava lamp back in 1975, and they still sound suprisingly original now considering the endless acres of dreary and predictable trance that eventually emerged in its wake.

Listen to my 35-year-old vinyl version (£2.99 second hand from Sifters) closely now and the snap, crackle and pop of the format gently impose themselves during the quieter passages, but that just adds to the period charm for my money.

Virgin packaged Rubycon in a beautiful gatefold sleeve with pictures taken by Froese's wife Monica on the front, back and inside.

The bluey green 'splash' pictures on the front and back give the impression of a moment in time being captured, which seems apt considering the speed TD work at, having now reportedly released more than 100 albums during a career into its 43rd year.

The band's spell on Virgin alone, which lasted from 1974 to 1983, resulted in over 20 releases, including studio albums, soundtracks, live LPs and Froese's solo efforts.

Having been born out of a scene based around experimentation and improvisation, Froese has stuck with those principles, issuing albums as snapshots of where he or the band are up to.

By way of contrast, Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider released just 12 albums in their 40 years together in Kraftwerk up until 2008. Kraftwerk's decision from 1973 onwards to do their improvising behind closed doors and to perfect their ideas before releasing them has led to the band widely being seen as one of the most influential of the 20th century. Less clearly is more.

Tangerine Dream, it must be said, have released plenty of mediocre crap over the years, often stretching ideas to the point of tedium, resulting in their finest moments being rather neglected nowadays. Neu! and TD's critical standing seem to have reversed over the course of three and a half decades.

All the early TD albums are worth investigating, though, and their commercial high water - Rubycon reached No.10 in the UK charts - is also quite possibly their finest.

 

George McCrae - Rock Your Baby (1974)

This tale starts with a singer failing to show up for a session and ends with a neglected genius being crushed under his own bulldozer.

George McCrae only got to sing Rock Your Baby because his wife, Gwen, was held up elsewhere and TK Records employees Harry W Casey and Richard Finch were determined to make some use of the after-hours studio time they were allowed by their employers.

It turned out that moustachoed former US Navy serviceman George was the owner of a dreamy falsetto which perfect matched this blissful slice of proto disco driven by Casey's gospelly organ swells and Jerome Smith's funky, propulsive guitar.

Rock Your Baby reached No.1 on both sides of the Atlantic, along with 80 other countries, on its way to selling 11million copies.

It was only denied the title of the first-ever disco No.1 because The Hues Corporation's Rock The Boat had got there a week earlier in the US in July 1974. Rolling Stone still declared Rock Your Baby the best single of the year.

Casey and Finch obviously didn't waste any time getting an album out and wisely decided not to mess with the formula.

Starting with a 6:20 version of Rock Your Baby - twice as long as the single and essentially a 12-inch version before such a notion existed - the remaining three tracks on side one all mine the same ecstatically discofied vein.

What's interesting here is how stripped back it all is. Casey and Finch were already up and running with KC & The Sunshine Band, who came with an extensive horn section.

But there's no horns anywhere on Rock Your Baby - and hardly any lyrics either.

You Got My Heart has two two-line verses and apart from that it's McCrae singing the title, saying 'baby' a lot and whooping joyfully.

You Can Have It All is even more to the point, with two two-line verses, all four of which start with 'If you want...'.

McCrae serves more as verbal percussion than a frontman, adding to the hypnotic effect of the music with his blissed-out repetition.

Casey and Finch seem to have aimed these songs purely at the dynamic of a couple using a song to seduce each other on a dance floor.

When McCrae sings 'Look at you/sexy woman' over and over again on Look At You at the start of side two, it feels exactly like the sort of thing the local nightclub Casanova would mouth while busting out his best moves to impress his target.

The mood finally falters on halfway through side two with I Need Somebody Like You, a soulful stomper you'd expect from Diana Ross.

But I Get Lifted and a two-minute reprise of Rock Your Baby  finish off the album in style.

Rock Your Baby shifted massive units but it's now largely forgotten. The reason is probably because the public just don't see disco acts as album artists.

We dance to it at weddings, we may even stick on a compilation at home occasionally on Friday nights, but the perception is that it's not to be taken seriously.

Not that Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards had any such qualms when they lifted Jerome Smith's brilliant guitar sound and took it to the bank with Chic.

Smith transfered to KC & The Sunshine Band, underpinning hits such as Boogie Shoes, Get Down Tonight and Queen Of Clubs (the later also featuring uncredited vocals from McCrae).

Even Gwen got in the act, making up for her late appearance with the huge hit Rockin Chair, a response song to Rock Your Baby.

She and George also had another crack together - producing at least one overlooked nugget with The Rub before they parted ways amid accusations of marital violence.

It all went wrong for Smith when he was kicked out of KC&TSB for drug problems in 1979. He ended up working in construction before being crushed by a bulldozer while working in Florida aged 47.

Patti Smith - Horses (1975)

 I must confess a slight preference for Radio Ethiopia, the rougher-edged follow-up from 1976, but there were too many good reasons to go for Horses.

First of all, there's the Robert Mapplethorpe photograph of Patti on the front, all moody, androgynous charisma.

Like most album art, it's far more arresting at 12 inches across, rather than the measly 12 cms of a CD - you see the faint triangle of light to her left, the fraying cotton of her sleeves, the hint of moustache. No concessions here, her stare tells you - not hostile but simply strong.

Smith had to battle hard with Arista to ensure the photo was left unchanged and this refusal to prettify anything runs through the album.

Constantly pushing and stretching her voice, she chews through the songs while experimenting with tone and melody, dropping into whispered poetry, double-tracking over herself.

When she simply sings the final song Elegie in a gentle voice over Richard Sohl's piano in a style that would fit on any of Kate Bush's first three albums, it comes as a shock.

All of Smith's fascinating contradictions are present in the first song. Opening with the immortal couplet 'Jesus died for somebody sins/ But not mine', the former schoolgirl Jehovah's Witness sounds utterly iconoclastic before breaking into a rampaging version of Them's Gloria, a three-chord paean to teenage lust from 1964.

Snearing one moment, pleading and whining the next, delirious a second after, she's totally in the moment, living it all.

Dressing in braces on the cover, singing about girls (side two also starts with Kimberly), she obviously playing with the public's perceptions here.

Perhaps this was Mapplethorpe's influence - perhaps she just wanted to be one of the boys and sidestep how women were supposed to behave in rock'n'roll in 1975.

It's ironic that she later gave up music for most of the 1980s to play the dutiful wife and mother while married to Fred 'Sonic' Smith (of MC5 fame), who proved a woefully unsuccessful provider as they lived in suitably bohemian penury with their two kids in Michigan.

But then Patti never shied away from paying respect to her male heroes. Rimbaud gets a nod in Land, the sprawling epic that dominates side two and manages to bring to mind Camus's L'Estranger and The Doors' The End while taking a bizarre swerve into Land Of A Thousand Dances.

Jim Morrison and Van Morrison are also clear influences in Smith's shamanistic incantations on Break It Up and the glorious nine jazz-influenced minutes of Birdland, building from slow spoken-word passages to heights of delirium where the words spew out in an exhilirating babble.

Smith was 28 when Horses came out but the teenage spirit seems to still burn within her - on the punky cover of My Generation that was released on the B-side of the Gloria single, she finishes by shouting: 'I feel so goddamned young'.

You can't listen to Horses without feeling invigorated yourself.