Chris De Burgh - Man on the Line

Before cell phones, the big advance in telecommunications was the cordless telephone ... before that he who had the longest coiled cord ruled the world. If you could make it from the kitchen to an adjoining room you were just showing off. The long red cord is all over the album cover, and the insert. Certainly Chris was flexing.

Here we have Chris De Burgh's 1984 follow-up to his rather good 1982 album The Getaway, and this was so good. Man on the Line was again produced by Rupert Hine who also provided keyboards and the orchestral arrangements. I also assume he programmed the drums for most of the album. Phil Palmer was again present on guitar, and oh my stars and garters, he was ON FIRE throughout the album. The guitar solo on "High on Emotion" is jaw dropping. Speaking of the drums, this is how they should have sounded on The Getaway, oh I'm not trying to do Steve Negus dirty, the man is a premier pounder but his drums sound absolutely horrid on that album - which I lay at the feet of Mister Hine and Mister De Burgh. Heck, of the two songs attributed to drummers on this one, "The Sound of a Gun" with Trevor Moras, and "Transmission Ends" that had additional drums by Jeff Phillips sounded awesome.

Bassist John Giblin is only featured on one song, but his work is so good. Other guests included Howard Jones on piano on a track, and Tina Turner who provided backing vocals (bordering on spoken word) on "The Sound of a Gun" that closes out side one.

I'd recently listened to The Getaway and found it was far more enjoyable than I remembered. I had thought Man on the Line was even better. It's funny, maybe not "ha ha" funny, but more "Hmmmm" funny as I was certain I had Man on the Line in my collection. I went to put it on ... but it wasn't there. So I went shopping. It wasn't a hard album to find which made me happy.

I'm not going to get too deep into this one but I will say that there isn't a dud here. The balance between Mister De Burgh's propensity to tell an engaging story along with a moving ballad is so good here. His 12-string still rings out, but for me it was his under utilized rock sense that gets the biggest pops here for me.

After all these years, "High on Emotion" still ranks among his best songs. I'm not going to acknowledge "Lady in Red" as anything but one of those odd songs that incorrectly categorized Mr. De Burgh as the writer of shitty sucky songs. Oh wait, no that is accurate but the number of shitty sucky songs is in the minority. I offer as exhibit A here his ballad "The Head and the Heart" which is an exquisite song and Chris' voice is deeply moving. I wonder if this had become a monster hit if it too would have elicited the same vitriol as the unnamed song? I have to sheepishly admit that "Lady in Red" when I first heard it was a pleasant song, but I've long since suppressed any feelings I had for the song (never say never).

His weirdly defining moment was still a couple of years away when this one came out. He was still known more for Spanish Train and Other Stories from 1975, and these two '80s albums with Rupert Hine were for me his high water marks.

Incidentally, Man on the Line was even better than I remembered.

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

Old Enough to Forget

Search This Blog