AUDIO: OK, This is the Pops

That band means the world to me, but discovering them was a gateway to my discovery of a group who has yet to receive the recognition they deserve. Tones on Tail were a side project featuring Ash, Haskins and Glenn Campling (a Bauhaus roadie) that essentially recorded during and just after Bauhaus's breakup in 1983.

Tones on Tail released a number of singles and one album (Pop) which garnered very little attention, and with the exception of the track "Go!", sampled by Moby (for his originally titled "Go!") and featured on various '80s compilations, a Starburst commercial, the More Grosse Point Blank soundtrack and a Mary Kate and Ashley feature (I died a little when I learned this), Tones On Tail remains a cult band more than anything, but based on what I witnessed at a Daniel Ash show in San Francisco (shirts, bras, panties all thrown on stage when Ash launched into "Go!"), what a following it is. I'm one of the most devoted fanatics of everything the band did during their short life. Of the several compilations of Tones on Tail's music, Night Music is the one that I hold dearest in my memory. Maybe it was the lurid dreams I had during the few weeks after I ordered it ($30 in 1987), the song order, the Elvis cover...or maybe it's just the naked girl on the front, posing like some new wave cheerleader, but I've kept Night Music in my personal top five for the last seventeen years. I've formed bands around the premise, "let's be like Tones on Tail", and most of my first four-track songs were attempts to create something as monumental as their work.

That said, when I'm asked, "What does Tones on Tail's music sound like?" I'm stumped. I've learned that it's best to burn a few choice songs (or loan out a copy of the disc if you're really nice to me) and recommend a late-night date with a dark room and headphones. Really, the only common thread throughout the disc is Ash's voice: apart from that, you need a map to trace Night Music's winding path. Opener "War" begins with a false start of guitar feedback, but quickly launches into a steady stream of hi-hats and Campling's signature picked bass-line ostinatos. The kitschy keyboard stabs scream '80s synthpop, but the raucous vibrato guitar and Ash's chant style vocals take the track to another galaxy. OK, does this mix of elements seem a bit skewed to you? It certainly through me off for a long time, but this mystique and my longing to understand how such disparate elements, pieced together with such a minimal aesthetic, is what keeps the album so intriguing after so many years. I mean, Campling plays pretty much the same riff over and over on each track, Haskins rarely rolls his snare, and often leaves the hi-hat up to your imagination, and you can count Ash's guitar chord repertoire on two hands -- but what Tones on Tail do, they do well.

As the disc unfolds, the squiggly line of continuity becomes thinner and the band's penchant for eclecticism shows no limit. The aforementioned "Go!" deserves first mention as far as innovation is concerned. The driving tempo, carried by a thumping bass drum and thunderous handclap, accented by a cowbell lick (?) and Ash's nonsensical "yah, yah, yah, yah, yah, yah, yah, yah, yahhhhh" was as much a model for club music as "Blue Monday". "Christian Says" lends credence to the "Goth" tag that perpetually smothered Ash and Haskins's music (talk of vampires, Lord Christian who desires "everyone to love him / you can be happy being this way"). Ash's e-bow work is legendary, and his melody lick is the most unmistakable hook in my collection -- it gives me chills. The production on the drums, vocals and acoustic guitars is stellar, and it makes you wonder why Ash's newer solo releases suffer from such muddy sound. "There's Only One" marries a post-disco guitar line with a twelve-bar blues form, propelled by cheap drum machine preset patterns and random guitar generated special-FX. "He wants two, he wants three, they want four...there's only one", paired with ideas regarding "popcorn chews", makes little sense, but this early display of Ash's lyrics shows the birth of his distinctive lyrical style. It's hit and miss on paper, but like the supermodel who can get away with not knowing the name of the current president, his sexy English croon turns even the silliest words into gold -- he generally writes lyrics ten minutes before recording sessions, so the fact that he comes up with what he does is pretty damn remarkable.

"OK, This is the Pops", my favorite song here, is probably the closest Night Music comes to a "rock" song. Ash's megaphone vocals and guitars cut through Campling's bass and Haskins's backbeat (your guess is as good as mine who brought back the cowbell...again). Innovative track number two is "Happiness". This is a jazz song/etude, but not the jazz you're used to. Rather, you might hear it in a cantina in a galaxy far, far away: gentle brush strokes over snare, timpani accents, slinky bass, whispered vocals and creepy synth organ lines? Well, whatever you call this, it was the reason I bought brushes that cost nearly as much as my $40 drum kit.

At this point, the disc takes a turn for the mellow. There's the instrumental "You, the Night and the Music", with its ambient drones and sax noises, makes my cat crazy; the bitter ballad "Burning Skies", with the classic line "I love you like you love me not"; the mysterious "Lions", based around a Yamaha organ Samba pattern and mandolin-style guitar picking. The lanky and lugubrious "Movement of Fear" was featured on Blair Witch Project soundtrack and sampled by the Fun Lovin' Criminals on their "hit", "Scooby Snacks". "Real Life" is a bi-formal exploration of a repeated lyric ("Give me something for nothing / give me too much too soon / I'm so damned sick of your stupid rules") and a rapidly repeated open-string guitar riff whose two sections are separated by stark silence and boldly a capella chants of "Real Life". I promise to stop using the word innovation after mentioning "Rain", but after skipping past this song for years, I finally realized how maverick and pioneering it was in 1984. The track begins in a lethargically evolving duet of synth drones, and eventually slips into a wash of arpeggiated bells. Bass guitar and a kick/snare drum make up the rhythm section, forming a five-note pattern that recurs for the next four minutes while tripped out vocals soothe you with messages about...rain. Seeds of post-rock, ambient electronica and minimalism can all be found within these nine minutes, but sadly, as could be said about majority of Love and Rockets and Bauhaus's albums, it simply fell to the side -- it was a bit too far ahead of its time.

A few more instrumentals (including what should have been the theme to Terminator 2, "When You're Smiling"), the tricky disco of "Twist" and the set closes with an odd choice, a live cover of Elvis's "Heartbreak Hotel". The quality isn't great -- it sounds like a bootleg from an audience member, captured on a portable cassette and later dropped in a toilet -- but the energy is still there. Instead of comping on the song's theme, Haskins and Campling plod along in a dirty groove while Ash merely strums the chords to "Movement of Fear" and growls the words. There's no trace of the original melody in sight.

Now that I'm a little older and a tad more educated about music, I guess I could label Night Music "Post-Modern", as it seems to follow some sort of model with roots in that movement (i.e. endings that leave a great deal to be desired). Or maybe it's a Modernist display of art, a rejection all that was going on at the time, musically. Or perhaps I could compare and contrast the influence of the Bauhaus movement (Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, Germany) on the ensemble or the album's form and function, or how the genius of its craft allows for it to fit any mood or scenario (car, home, picnic). However, I prefer to remember it as I did the first time I put it on: dreamy, enigmatic, fun, confusing and comforting.

-- Dave Madden