Into The Strange – when bands go weird and unexpected (Part one)

In this two part article focusing on the strange and unexpected, we take a look at some uncharacteristically weird diversions from otherwise conventional bands that have taken fans by surprise.

It’s not always the more consciously left field or avant garde artists that are renowned for releasing some of the weirdest and most defiantly unclassifiable music. We already know that many rock or pop acts can sometimes be partial to creating something truly extraordinary and unanticipated. So whilst the likes of The Beatles may well have been among the earliest to experiment and broaden their sonic palette to take in unusual (and later innovative) approaches such as hard-panning, back-masking, sound collages and suchlike, there are nevertheless countless others who have on occasion come up with intriguing – and indeed strange – diversions that have defied expectations and raised eyebrows among both their own fanbase and casual listeners.

In the examples looked at below (in a roughly chronological order based on year of original release), none of the acts can ever be considered as wilfully avant garde or experimental – in fact the majority of them are as conventional as can be expected, but in all cases, whenever the fancy took them, they veered off into directions that caused bemusement or bafflement at best, and outright shock and disgust at worst. Content to not simply rest on their laurels and churn out the same thing to a predictable formula, they at least should be applauded and feted for pushing the boat out and taking risks.

But what makes things all the more interesting is this: many of these strange(r) tracks share a common characteristic, in that most are hidden away on albums or B-sides, and it is without dispute that, given the opportunity, just about any artist can let their imagination and creativity run riot by doing what the fuck they like and to hell with what the record company demands of them. In fact, one of the bands touched upon later here were so enamoured of one of their experimental B-sides possessing more potential than even they initially realised that said experiment was promoted to the status of an official A-side, and, once unleashed upon the world, said A-side gave them one of their biggest hits ever in the process. See if you can guess which band it is!

So without further ado, let us embark upon the journey Into The Strange ….

THE MONKEES – Zilch (from the album Headquarters – 1967)

Not happy with being seen merely as Beatles copyists and forever destined to be remembered just as teen fodder, a couple of the Monkees (chiefly Mike Nesmith and to a lesser extent Mickey Dolenz) expressed a desire to start spreading their wings and creating weirder stuff just for the fun of it. Zilch was a minute long spoken word track featured on their third album Headquarters (where the bulk of the material was written by the band members themselves). Totally unaccompanied by any instruments, it relied upon the band’s overlapping voices repeating tongue-twisting phrases in relay, gradually become more chaotic (with members breaking into laughter at the sheer absurdity of it all).

The chief opening lines mention a character called Mr. Bob Dobalina – who was actually a manager of a department store in San Antonio. Mike Nesmith states that he simply liked the sound of the name when uttered in a rhythmic manner, almost mantra-like, and thus the rest of the band came up with similarly percussive sounding phrases all of which were spontaneous and improvised. The overlapping phrases speed up as the track progresses, getting more frantic, until the cacophony fizzles out into quiet whispers of the track title itself. Intriguingly, this track may possibly be the inspiration for another defiantly strange album track from a well known and hugely successful 1980s synthpop duo of which we will come to a little while later!

THE ZOMBIES – Butchers Tale (Western Front 1914) (from the album Odessey & Oracle – 1967)

Everybody remembers The Zombies as the quintessential 1960s Brit combo with a nifty line in soaring vocal harmonies, genius keyboard riffs and proto-soul inflected beat pop which hit the ground running with their scorching 1964 debut She’s Not There but then seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth (inexplicably never troubling the top 30 charts again) only to get their belated due, in the US especially, where they scored a huge posthumous hit Time Of The Season in 1968 long after the band had split. It’s indeed strange to relate, but their feted second album Odessey & Oracle, released in 1967, didn’t even chart in the UK either but has since figured regularly in those perennial lists of ‘great lost masterpieces’ of the 1960s and to this day is cited by many (musicians and critics alike) as one of the finest albums of the last 60 years.

Regularly reappraised and reissued in varying formats, it is a truly beautiful paradox – one of those records that sounds of its time and yet also one that transcends time – and its utterly gorgeous and stately baroque pop melodies and arrangements certainly left this writer so entranced by its evergreen magic (admittedly only belatedly encountering the album around the mid-2000s) that he has since bought up twelve different formats of it on CD, reissue CD, double remastered CD, DVD, live CD/DVD anniversary versions, vinyl LP, remastered colour vinyl LP, etc.

Among all of the lush angelic-voiced self-penned compositions that make up Odessey (often erroneously lumped in with the psychedelic genre – purely due to its album cover), one track, Butchers Tale (Western Front 1914), nevertheless, sticks out like a sore thumb so dramatically that it’s been likened to the lone black-clad party pooper who gatecrashes the otherwise joyful wedding reception. Whereas the bulk of the album’s tracks are sung by Colin Blunstone and/or Rod Argent, the task of vocalising the sheer horror of a WWI soldier having witnessed the harrowing bloody scenes on the frontline was handed over to Chris White, the track’s sole composer. It features an ominous and funereal sounding church organ (actually a pump organ – you can clearly hear the pulsing rhythm of the bellows as it plays) along with unsettling sound effects – sourced from an album by French composer Pierre Boulez but played backwards, and White intones the appalling scenes that greet the soldier in a keening register that soon touches on anxiety and sheer tremulous panic. It’s a complete volte face from everything that precedes and follows it, and all the more unsettling for it. The fact it was also released as a single in US (doing precisely nothing by way of the charts) also amplifies its strangeness quotient.

MANFRED MANN – There Is A Man (B-side of My Name’s Jack – 1968)

Manfred Mann were the very first band I ever owned a record by. Needless to say they were the very first band I liked as an infant (even before I knew who the likes of The Beatles and The Beach Boys were). Their late 1967 single Mighty Quinn – the last of their three UK number 1 hits – was the first single I possessed, given to me by my elder sisters when I was barely 3 years old. Their 1968 follow up, My Name Is Jack was a typically jaunty sounding number which evoked in me images of the Liverpool Show to which I was always taken to by my sisters and auntie back then when I was a mere nipper living off the famous Smithdown Road. The most curious thing about this particular Manfred Mann song is that to this day it still induces in me a sense of auditory-olfactory synaesthesia: by that I mean, I forever always associate hearing it with the smell of the candy-floss stall at the aforementioned Liverpool Show (then held at Wavertree Recreation Ground every year in July).

Much later on, around when I was about 8 years of age, I finally managed to cop an earful of the strange B-side There Is A Man (written by then bass player Tom McGuinness – later also of McGuinness Flint) from an old copy of the single one of my elder cousins had, and was pleasantly surprised. It comes across rather like a subversive take on a spooky children’s bedtime story, channelled through a kind of Syd Barrett-esque whimsy, but instead sounds quite menacing and claustrophobic. Deploying music box chimes, organs, and a disconcerting melee of indecipherable background babbling, the narrator’s deadpan recitation about a mysterious nocturnal intruder that only he can see is then interjected by a second, more sinister, sneering voice before he continues his doleful tale. It then eases into a mellow jazzy passage that continues towards its fade.

It’s pretty darned odd but if anything it actually harked back to Manfred Mann’s embryonic (pre mid-60s hits) period when much of what they were doing was jazz-blues influenced, and indeed after the band split at the end of the 1960s, a few members resumed pursuing the jazz-based sound. Nevertheless, this rather unconventional track still raises eyebrows to this day.

PINK FLOYD – Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict (from the album Ummagumma – 1969)

If there is an early award for the most preposterous and ungainly song title of them all, it would have to be this one by Pink Floyd (though in 1989 the legendary Leicester surrealist / dada-esque art rock quartet The Deep Freeze Mice would eclipse it by several furlongs on their final studio album The Tender Yellow Ponies Of Insomnia when they contrived a song title consisting entirely of a five-line limerick – with only the first word not contained in parentheses!!).

So what do you say to an album track that consists of very little (if any) music at all in the conventional sense but is merely an unrelenting sound collage of cross fading birdsong, animals (horses? pigs?) trotting about, electronically distorted noises from both human and animal mouths…..and to top it all a distant bellowing monologue from the track’s composer Roger Waters, enunciated in a hammy Scottish brogue? Is it a work of unbridled genius or is it one of those tracks that pub landlords would gag to whack on at full volume just after last orders to clear the saloon of unwanted drinkers who have all but outstayed their welcome? The parent album’s title is called Ummagumma after all……and if the cover art is anything to go by (the image receding into infinity using the Droste Effect but with each band member changing places until all four have occupied a different position), then this track is merely like the aural equivalent.

THE MOVE – Don’t Mess Me Up (B-side of Tonight – 1971)

Roy Wood is a musical genius. That is absolute irrefutable fact. He’s also – still to this day more’s the pity – criminally underrated and never given his due for his absolute mastery of songwriting, production, and clever musicianship across all areas. Remember that if it wasn’t for him, there wouldn’t be that annual 1970s day-glo glamtastic Christmas anthem that completely takes off Phil Spector by a factor of twelve (and counting), and there wouldn’t be Electric Light Orchestra with his old mucker Jeff Lynne either. More importantly, there wouldn’t be that string of brilliant singles he gave us with The Move – one of Birmingham’s greatest ever rock exports. Even more implausibly, there probably wouldn’t be Al Jourgensen or Rob Zombie ripping off his wild image (those shades / hats / Beelzebub facial hair combo being the dead giveaway in both cases).

Tonight was one of three Move singles I owned as a kid back in the early 1970s. I was 6 years old when this was a hit, and as a nascent vinyl record obsessive already at that very tender age (of course the blame for that lies with my two elder sisters – the Manfred Mann incident of 1968, remember?), I would play both sides over and over again until my parents started to get rather shirty with me (god only knows then what they made of me a couple of years later then, blasting out Slade’s Skweeze Me Pleeze Me at some unsociable hour of the morning when they were still yet to rise from their bed). I loved listening to all the B-sides of the singles we had back in the 1970s, as there was so much quality that it was unreal.

The flip of this single, on the other hand, initially confused the hell out of me. I actually thought it was a different artist altogether: specifically Elvis Presley, because the sheer magnitude of Roy Wood’s cunning was really something to behold. Being a clever bastard, he is perfectly capable of imitating anybody he so fancies (see also: John Lennon and Jerry Lee Lewis). Everything on this track is impeccably cribbed: the muffled lo-fi box-like production, the ‘bap-doo-waddy-waddy’ backing vocals, the piano, the handclaps, and above all, Wood’s uncannily accurate Presley vowels. Of course this is intended 100% as a tongue-in-cheek tribute, what the fuck else could it be? The tune is clearly derived and based on some of the King’s standards as well. So yes, on this evidence alone, Roy Wood is indeed a clever bastard, and he still hasn’t been afforded enough recognition to this day whilst fellow former Brum Beater Ozzy has been eulogised to the skies (literally now of course). There really is no justice in the world sometimes.

TODD RUNDGREN – Dogfight Giggle (from the album A Wizard, A True Star – 1973)

Well what do you know? Just like buses, I mention clever bastard musical geniuses, and suddenly two come along at once. Arguably rock music’s consummate master songwriter/producer-cum-precocious enfant terrible (but again – rather like with Roy Wood – someone who is still not as highly praised and critically rated as he deserves to be), Mr. Todd Rundgren (aka The Runt) has been at it for so long that you wonder how many regimes and civilisations had already collapsed by the time he was finally inducted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame in 2021.

The Runt’s undisputed twin masterpieces arrived in quick succession (again just like the aforementioned bloody buses) in 1972 and 1973. His first magnum opus – Something/Anything? – needs no further introduction here, except to say that it’s an eclectic smorgasbord of undiluted brilliance touching upon all imaginable musical bases. The follow up was created – written, arranged and produced – entirely under the influence of LSD, Rundgren’s newly chosen stimulant of leisure. And boy does it show. A completely head- and nerve- (and even ear-) frazzling hall of mirrors that left the listener gasping for their breath and their sanity as it flipped switches so many times within its first half of TWELVE tracks that they were left completely disorientated.

Among all of the musical insanity here which comprised sudden jump cuts and quick edits between the first eight tracks – none of which exceeded three minutes (with most being around a minute or so in duration), the track Dogfight Giggle sits right in the middle. As the title suggests, it’s a chaotic mash of vari-speeded, electronically processed and reversed dog yelps, barks, growls and pants – even – allegedly, the sound of two bitches on heat and two others copulating. Add to the increasingly frenzied cacophony some clearly human-simulated sounds of groaning and gasping, and the entire track starts to speed up to ridiculous levels only for a lone voice to cut in right at the death with the sign off ‘Don’t you think of anything but sex?’, and you have quite clearly the most deranged 66 seconds yet.

THE STRANGLERS – Meninblack (from the album The Raven – 1979)

The Raven was the first Stranglers album I purchased back then, simply because I loved the hologram cover art, but I also loved their music lots as well (I still think Duchess ranks among their five greatest singles ever). However, nothing prepared me for what came later on side two when Meninblack started. At the time, it was yet another of those ‘WTF?’ moments I had through initial total bemusement. Directly following on from the poptastic Duchess (one of three singles from the album – the other two being Don’t Bring Harry and Nuclear Device), it was a real shock to the system to hear this strange and unsettling electronic dirge with sped up Pinky & Perky vocals.

It later transpired that the band already recorded the backing track to this number for use on their following album – The Gospel According To The MenInBlack – whose concept would be entirely devoted to what was being tackled within the near five minute confines of this truly bizarre and unconventional Stranglers album track. On that latter album (released the following year 1980), the opening track to side two – Two Sunspots – was actually the backing track to this track Meninblack on The Raven – albeit played at normal speed, whilst on here it was slowed down to half its speed, giving it its unearthly trudging tempo.

Many diehard fans naturally took an instant dislike to this track (whose electronically treated vocal is that of bassist JJ Burnel) and unsurprisingly it was one most skipped when the album was played. However, over time, its insidious and decidedly sinister charms have become somewhat re-evaluated, and if anything, it vindicates the Stranglers for at least taking risks and messing with people’s expectations and preconceptions. One dimensional they certainly weren’t, and this of course has since become their strength, given their early beginnings as fearsome renegades that delighted in rubbing critics (and fans) up the wrong way.

BLONDIE – Europa (from the album AutoAmerican – 1980)

Almost contemporaneous with the huge commercial success of The Stranglers was that of Blondie. Like The Stranglers, Debbie Harry & co. were never averse to taking risks and changing their sound to take in a wildly eclectic realm of different and disparate styles. They were the quintessential New York entity in every respect – metro-cosmo-politan in outlook and attitude – absorbing any influences that took their fancy, and in so doing resisting becoming musically stagnant.

If their first two albums (Blondie and Plastic Letters) distilled the essence of street punk and new wave with pure feline snarl and suss, then their third (the global multi-million selling Parallel Lines) harnessed their pure pop credentials to potent effect. Their magnificently widescreen fourth album Eat To The Beat expanded their palette further to take in propulsive rock and anthemic pop as well as disco and reggae and indeed set a precedent for being the first ever album also released on videodisc – leading the way for countless other acts and, crucially, pre-empting the arrival of MTV.

Fifth album AutoAmerican, inevitably, pushed this eclectism and fearless experimentation to yet even more extremes, this time taking in calypso, jazz, big band show tunes, ethereal balladry, 50s jukebox rock, new wave power pop and most notably hip hop/rap. But nothing prepared the listener for the unexpected strangeness of the opening track Europa, simply because, to all intents and purposes, it was designed as a curtain raiser. And what a curtain raiser it was. If anything, it’s virtually unrecognisable as Blondie at all, as it opens with a foreboding atonal swell of doleful strings and woodwind, played in a minor key, as if serving as the preface to something dramatic, before seamlessly transforming into a stately passage of genuine beauty.

It’s effectively an orchestral overture entirely scored by Chris Stein (and arranged by collaborator Jimmie Haskell) and apart from himself on guitar and timpani, few other members of Blondie are even present, until the last 45 seconds or so after the instrumental crashes to its climax, when the general noise of the New York streets and police sirens are heard overlaid with all manner of electronic interference, and then Debbie Harry finally enters the fray, impassively intoning what sounds like a news journal critique of the American obsession with cars. It’s an ear opener for sure, and as I said earlier, it shows just how resolute and bloody minded Blondie were in trying to sidestep all listeners’ expectations, refusing to be pigeonholed.

YAZOO – I Before E Except After C (from the album Upstairs At Erics – 1982)

Synthpop duo Yazoo seemed almost too perfectly formed and crafted to be true, when they opened their account with a brace of stonking hit singles in 1982 : the wistful synth ballad Only You (#2) and the belting electro-blues stomper Don’t Go (#3) both of course showcasing Genevieve Alison ‘Alf’ Moyet’s incredibly versatile and soulful voice. I was very much into a lot of the synth pop and electronic acts of this period and had a fair few of the albums by bands such as OMD, The Human League, Heaven 17, Fashion, Ultravox, Visage, etc.  Now being a contrary sort of bugger, I never much liked any of what Yazoo founder Vince Clarke did with Depeche Mode (too wet for my liking, even their first album released without him – with Martin Gore taking over the songwriting – didn’t really convince me much) but once he teamed up with Alison Moyet, the synergy created was pure dynamite.

Upstairs At Eric’s for me was one of the greatest debut albums of the early to mid 1980s (I rank it alongside the likes of ABC’s Lexicon of Love and Propaganda’s A Secret Wish) and the entire album is a total joy from start to finish. Including the difficult fourth track. Yes, indeed: I Before E Except After C. Here’s what I would wager many fans were thinking: ‘What the fucking hell is that utter shit? There’s not even any tune! Just loads of jumbled stuttering voices! Have Yazoo totally lost the plot? Album filler! Take it off!’ And it makes me laugh like a drain, because I find it addictive, entertaining and all the more hilarious for that.

Of course it’s very likely that Vince decided to throw a spanner in the works. Whatever his motives will never be clear, but I’m sure he and engineer / co-producer E.C. Radcliffe (the eponymous Eric of the album title and the owner of the studio where the album was part recorded) had a good giggle about this experimental humdinger that was deliberately inserted to confuse and befuddle. And, oh boy, how many people’s backs did it get up eh? Even when the album was reissued on shiny new CD format in the latter half of the 1980s, Mute Records decided for whatever reason to omit this key integral avant garde trifle, presumably on the dubious grounds that it spoiled the flow of the album and that at least 90 per cent of fans hated its inclusion.

So what exactly is the track and why is it so universally skipped and loathed by so many (except me)? It’s just four voices reading some passages from instruction manuals or some such but edited and cut-up and looped to sound fragmented and disjointed. It’s Vince that starts off proceedings by reciting some nonsense, soon joined by – of all people – Eric Radcliffe’s mother (coming from the opposite speaker), then in fades Alison Moyet’s unmistakable voice, this time reading – totally live – instructions from a manual to either one of Vince Clarke’s gadgets or some studio apparatus. She can’t take the absurdity of this seriously and soon starts chortling. Finally some rudimentary music comes in: an eerie wailing high synth figure, then some burbling sequenced bass, over which the cacophony of voices continues unrelentingly, but Alison’s live recitation and her inability to keep a straight face throughout sees her bursting into more hysterical laughter, until near the fade, we hear her plead ‘Can we stop now?’ and the track duly starts to conclude except for the lingering voice of Eric’s mum, who signs off with ‘Yes, I’m all right….’ followed by an immense cackling laugh sounding like an unhinged asylum inmate.

I’ll be the first to admit that this track is definitely a Marmite moment: you either love it or hate it, and general consensus has always leaned toward the latter. Perhaps it was an experiment that went awry and lost its appeal all too soon? Maybe that was the reason it was omitted from many CD pressings of the album until the raft of Yazoo reissues that followed around 30 years later when the duo announced a reformation tour. Needless to say, the most recent remasters of Upstairs At Eric’s (and also their second, final, album You And Me Both from 1983) restores the entire original track running order intact, so now new generations of fans can finally hear what all the furore was about regarding this strangest and most polarising of tracks in the entire Yazoo canon.

Interesting notion: perhaps Vince Clarke subconsciously contrived this track in tribute to the Monkees’ Zilch (see earlier) as it kind of comes across rather like a more modern update on the latter? The resemblance, even if unintentional, is uncanny though.

If these still appear too normal, you can do no worse than to investigate THIS article from a few years back which touches on a similar sort of thing regarding truly strange songs, but features more consciously weird artists who can never be considered mainstream or ‘conventional’ in the slightest.

Part Two follows next.

All words written and edited by Martin Gray

Further musings, ruminations, and dissertations can be found on his profile here.