Mojo - The Music Magazine

Whenever we have one of those "which was the best year in rock" conversations in the MOJO office (yes, we are that sad) I always like to throw in a word for 1985. Assessed objectively, it doesn't have the revolutionary cachet of a 1968, or the staggering variety of a 1975, but it was a coming-of-age for me, musically speaking, and though I am prepared to concede, if bullied, that better records have been made than The Loft's Up The Hill & Down The Slope, I secretly wonder if they can be, really, so much better.

1985 was not a year great cultural forces clashed or musical movements coalesced. Yet Psychocandy, New Day Rising, This Nation's Saving Grace, Fables Of The Reconstruction, Meat Is Murder and Steve McQueen* remain a part of me in a way that, for all their genius, Revolver and Blonde On Blonde do not. 1985 was also the year of this, the beginning of a journey, dead ends included, into the great hinterland of music.

1985 begat, also, Rain Dogs, my induction into the cult of Tom Waits (I went back to Swordfishtrombones, and the rest). A brawl of junkshop instruments, arcane dance-steps, and picaresque environments, these were not songs but evocations of worlds dead and buried, or surviving in another dimension, shipmates of Conrad's Nostromo or The Flying Dutchman, ghosts. Waits performed Rain Dogs' black-comic, jazz-chaotic Cemetery Polka on British TV's greatest ever pop show, The Tube, on October 16, 1985, wheezing along with his harmonium, and beguiled all who witnessed him. I read somewhere, probably the NME, that Waits had had a tracheotomy and the surgeon had left swabs and instruments in his larynx. I think I half-believed it.

Of course I knew little of Brecht or dada then, and nothing of Ken Nordine, and though I see the connections now, Rain Dogs is richer than the sum of its outré influences. There is merely hilarious pantomime, yes, in 9th & Hennepin's beatnik rap ("all the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes") and Singapore's clanking, rolling shanty ("the captain is a one-armed dwarf"), but everywhere, too, there is the real dirt and savagery and sadness of the human condition springing out, like the contents of a suitcase that won't shut, the melancholy inside Gun Street Girl's bum travelogue, the bleakness of life's filthy toil seeping through Diamonds And Gold.

While Rain Dogs is essentially "only" Swordfishtrombones Part Deux, the songs are on a par, and it is more musically varied: veering between the Bernard Herrmann craziness of Midtown's instrumental logjam and the searing blues-rock of Big Black Mariah, abetted by Keith Richards' slashing, piratical guitar. Then there are the ballads: among Waits' most beautiful and most exquisitely accompanied, G.E. Smith's spidery guitar rococo on Downtown Train just one triumph, Time a moment of limpid prettiness at the record's centre, aping the role of My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains within Captain Beefheart's Clear Spot, a comparable record in terms of shape and range, but surely not in terms of pure humanity.

I'm biased, of course. Clear Spot had the misfortune to emerge in 1972, Swordfishtrombones in 1983. But Rain Dogs came out in 1985, The Greatest Ever Year In Rock.

* ...and The Hounds Of Love, and Biograph, and Don't Stand Me Down, and Around The World In A Day, and Up On The Sun, and Low-Life, and Kings Of Rock, and Our Favourite Shop, and Rum, Sodomy & The Lash, and What Does Anything Mean? Basically, and This Is Big Audio Dynamite, and Love by The Cult, and even There Are Eight Million Stories by The June Brides.