Episode #23 - Rock by Numbers

In the good old days, when we didn’t know very much about anything and were happy for it, we had to rely on old fashioned methods to build our knowledge of what lay beyond our front lawn.

These were the days when you could still buy something with a £1 note, a TV show with a red triangle was always worth staying up for (in all senses of the phrase) and 18.5 million people stayed up late to watch Steve Davis and Dennis Taylor take nearly 15 hours to complete a game of snooker* that even a sloth would have described as languid.

‘Internet’ wasn’t even a word and if you were a rock fan then you were pretty much reliant on either Sounds, Kerrang! or your best mate’s older brother to learn what was hot and what was not.

What Kerrang! and Sounds also taught you was what had been hot in ancient history, which to a acne-cursed 15-year-old in 1980 pretty much covered everything that happened before 1979.

Any new connoisseur of hard rock and heavy metal would have learned back then that 2112 by Rush was an absolute classic that any self-respecting metalhead should own, whereas in reality it was a complete waste of £3.99 of Mark’s hard-earned pocket money because it didn’t have any wailing guitar solos, throat-ripping vocals, or riffs that were heavier than Giant Haystacks on a fat day (look that one up, and be grateful for the world wide web).

Over the years, 2112 has become the musical equivalent of black pudding - something to be tried over and over again in the vague hope of understanding what all the fuss was about only to discover that, no, it really is just a glob of baked blood held together with suet.

So when the Tico Torres Tombola of Topics and Themes fired out Numbers as the theme for this episode of the pod, it took barely a nanosecond for Steve and Mark realised that, with uber-fan Rushard - sorry, er, Richard - in the room, something wicked was definitely this way coming.

Rush - 2112 (1976)

“Honestly, just keep an open mind. Side 2 is much more accessible than the first side,” he insisted. As sells go, this seems a little unconvincing; a bit like telling someone that if they can just get through the experience of having their kneecap shattered with a mallet, they’ll revel in discovering that the post-operative process is an absolute doddle by comparison.

Indeed, it was difficult for Mark and Steve to get beyond the notion that not shattering your keecap with a mallet in the first place might be a more sensible course of action.

Instead, they picked up the mallet anyway and stared down the barrel of a seven-part title track that was about to rob them of 20 minutes and 34 seconds of their lives without any guarantee that Richard hadn’t lied and a second mallet was waiting for the other kneecap on side two. Biting down hard on a piece of wood, they raised their mallets high and hit play …

Bon Jovi - 7800° Fahrenheit (1985)

So, anyway, after the terrible screaming stopped, the boys moved on to Bon Jovi’s second album - the hairspray-stiffened 7800° Fahrenheit. Not that the boys knew it at the time, because 1985 was also a mole-like part of the information dark age, but the album’s title is apparently the temperature at which rock melts. Which, if they had known it at the time might have seemed like a title of wizardly clever proportions, but now just seems a bit silly.

At the helm in the studio, Lance Quinn. Quinn had been responsible for the band’s breakthrough debut - the bubblegum-scented self-titled effort from the previous year - but whatever kudos that had earned him was quickly forgotten as 7800° perished on the sword of critical indifference and Jovi’s label, and the band themselves, let it be known just who was responsible for the apparent dog’s dinner that was served up to an expectant public in ‘85.

Fair enough? Perhaps not, because had you asked either of them before the episode began, both Mark and Steve would have pointed to this as their favourite release by the New Jersey hair metallers. And with that apparent shared ground established, it made the unholy row that erupted over the merits or otherwise of Silent Night even more shocking …

Q5 - When The Mirror Cracks (1986)

An entire generation of rock fans of a certain vintage - or maybe it’s just Mark - can’t think about Q5 without involuntarily bringing to mind a cutesy-cuddly space alien called Q Pootle 5 and his big planet friend, Dave. And no, we’re not on drugs, as your friend Google will doubtless testify. Anyway, moving on ...

Q5 were, at least in their initial incarnation, a hard-rocking but largely unknown band out of Seattle, Washington. Their debut, Steel The Light, was full of pretty decent tunes that were big on chunky riffola and speedy guitar, drum and vocal licks. It would have graced any edition of the pod.

Instead, Mark chose the follow up from a year later. By the time they released When The Mirror Cracks Q5 had morphed into a melodic-cum-AOR band with an emphasis on big hooklines and a surfeit of anti-dandruff and styling products, and when it came to debating the pros and cons of the new-sounding five-piece the first question the boys had to answer was why the producer had mixed himself out of the record …

*For the benefit of our American friends, snooker is a game that in many ways resembles pool, but differs slightly in the sense that every ounce of excitement and speed has been extracted from it