Episode #17 - 1981
Hello once again, thrill seekers. Please follow the signposts to an era when record art was so kitsch it made the cover of Deathkorps’ Metal Tit look understated (go and have a look, we’ll wait).
Ask your mum and dad about records, kids … if you think being able to stream millions of songs on your phone is normal, then imagine trying to listen to a handful of tracks by playing a foot-wide plastic disc through a piece of equipment the size of a small industrial unit. It’ll blow your fucking minds.
Anyway, the point is that much like Katie Hopkins, 1980s-era sleeve art boasted absolutely no filter. Which is why no-one batted an eyelid at an album cover featuring a slightly overweight Brummie pantomiming his way through a mock Gothic castle in front of his long-suffering son. It also explains why a member of rock’s holy trinity of vocalists was portrayed doing the Hokey Cokey in front of Ming the Merciless and a man apparently trying to stab himself in the head with a television aerial.
Back in the old days, when the only way for your mummies and daddies to own the music they really loved was to go out and buy records by their favourite bands from a record shop, the album cover was an essential part of the marketing mix that sold a band and its music - at a time when mainstream radio played very little rock music, many people bought records based solely on the cover alone.
Well, everyone apart from Richard, that is - as we discovered in Episode 15. But we’ve strayed off-topic. Again. Suffice it to say, a good or striking album cover could mean the difference between a slot on Top of the Pops (again, ask your parents, kids) and a slot in the bargain bin at your local Woolworths. (Aw, c’mon! This is why Google was invented, people).
Episode 17 of the pod saw the boys get to grips with three albums with covers that were nothing if not striking. But was what occupied the 0.28 miles of groove on the 2mm-thick disc inside those covers any good?
Gillan - Future Shock (1981)
Bookface and Twatter didn’t exist in ancient times, and it just wasn’t possible to make serious money by gurning into a video camera or filming your own arse and getting a million people to ‘like’ it (apart from anything else, the postage costs and logistics involved in mailing out the VHS tapes would have been astronomical).
So in the absence of social media and John Peel, bands made their money by writing songs and then going into a record studio to record them. And assuming they managed to become popular, the more albums they released, the more money they made.
Which is how Gillan, the eponymously-titled band formed and fronted by the honey-larynxed former and now current-again lead singer of Deep Purple, came to pump out six of them in the space of four short years between September 1978 and September 1982.
Future Shock was the fourth of these - or the third if you ignore the self-titled debut (also known as The Japanese Album, as, for reasons long-since lost to mankind, it never received an initial UK release and was only available in the land of the rising sun).
It was also the album that finally gave Gillan (the band) the commercial recognition it deserved. Boasting two Top 40 singles in No Laughing in Heaven and a reworking of the old Gary US Bonds number New Orleans, along with styles as broad as the Mississippi, it was an album that saw Ian Gillan ride back into mainstream consciousness on the runaway train that was the New Wave of British Heavy Metal.
The questions, though, came thick and fast.
Could the boys get beyond a start that stuttered worse than Valtteri Bottas’ Mercedes at lights out? Has there ever been a more elegant and beautiful way to describe being desperately horny? And is there ever anything other than ‘a bad case' of rape?
Blue Oyster Cult - Fire Of Unknown Origin (1981)
Yes, we all know (Don’t Fear) The Reaper. Most of us know Shooting Shark. Then there’s Astronomy, brought to public attention to great effect through the Metallica cover on Garage Days Revisited. After that, it gets a bit hazy for all but most avid of BOC aficionados.
Yet, in Burning for You and Joan Crawford, Blue Oyster Cult’s eighth studio album boasts two singles that were absolute belters, the latter spawning possibly the most bonkers and awkward video you’ll see in many a long year.
What this album also boasts is the very first clean sweep of 10s in the 51-album, 478-song history of the Enter Sadmen podcast as the boys got bowled over by a track that flew in so far under the radar it could have been a guitar-shaped stealth bomber.
Much of Fire of Unknown Origin was born out of BOC being asked to contribute material for the Canadian-American cult animated film Heavy Metal, released in the same year as the album (we say ‘cult’, but the damn thing took $20m at the box office, rendering it less undiscovered gem and more cash cow for its makers).
Oddly enough, much of the album never made it into the movie, and the one that did - Veteran of the Psychic Wars - wasn’t actually written for it.
From death driving down the highway in his Sunday best to never knowing when it’s your turn to go, Fire of Unknown Origin certainly gave the boys a lot to talk about - but aside from all the debate about whether Side 1 closer Heavy Metal (Black and Silver) let the side down a bit, was this an album that needed just a little bit more cowbell?
Ozzy Osbourne - Diary Of A Madman (1981)
Ah, the self-styled Prince of Darkness serves up … well, what? Depending on how you view Blizzard Of Ozz, it’s either his debut solo album or the second album from what, for want of a better definition, you might call the Ozzy Osbourne band.
The departure of keyboard player Don Airey aside, the line up on Diary Of A Madman is the same as the one that delivered its predecessor, though Blizzard of Ozz as a brand concept, dreamed up by Ozzy’s old man and initially backed by the band’s label, Jet, had already been jettisoned by the time November ‘81 rolled around and Diary … hit the shops.
As the boys have observed before, sometimes it’s hard to take the Ozzman seriously. Christ, it’s not as if the man himself doesn’t make it easy for us. Biting the heads of live bats onstage aside, a long running reality TV show bearing his name, substance abuse that became more of a career than his actual career and having a wife who knows a commercial opportunity or two when she sees them pretty much ensured Ozzy was apt to get himself into a PR pickle at the drop of a hat - usually by virtue of being pickled himself.
But as the boys contemplated the impact of a sophomore solo effort that gave us the last recorded legacy of guitarist Randy Rhoads - the personification of Mrs O’s plans for her husband-to-be’s world domination - before he died in a freak plane crash during the US leg of the Madman tour, it transpired that whatever you think of the music, it’s hard not to feel a sense of love for the man himself.
How, then, did this stack up to the pod’s so far only other release to bear Osbourne’s vocals (the other being Paranoid, reviewed in Episode 3)?
The answer, it turns out, was much closer than Ozzy might have hoped for …