Nothing to do with intros. Not a favorite Madness tune either. Just to mark the fact that I passed my driving test. Finally.


Three and a half years after moving to a city where you really have to drive. 

And thirty three years after you're eligible to learn in the U.K.

intros #3

Postpunk, New Wave, New Pop...  the creeping return of "fancy music" (as M.E. Smith sneered it). So plenty of intros to choose from. Probably. Here's three:



Clive Timperley's delayed, echo-plex guitar - the missing link between Vini Reilly and Alan Rankine. (With a bit of that speccy git-arist in Flock of Seagulls thrown in too).

Talking of Rankine... 

This next one - competition's over, surely?



Now, the start to this is very nearly sublime.

 

Even the verse is rather lovely. It's the chorus where it craps  out utterly.

Intro semi-recurs with the breakdown at 2.17 which again is really rather wondrous (that gaseous billow of lead guitar). Dudes in the band wanted to be Level 42.

intros #2

A no-nonsense genre like punk shouldn't really bother itself with yes-nonsense stuff like intros.  Punk songs should slam right in. Most do. A few don't.

Phil's nominated "Smash It Up" by the Damned already, which I'd never heard (the intro, I mean: basically a completely different and rather wet song, nothing like the rousing, ridiculous anthem itself).  He also mentions Black Flag.

Here's three others:




Fanfare-knell-salvo, warning of tempestuous darkness to come.  The whole song is almost symphonic in its glowering grandeur, but that intro makes me think of Beethoven's 5th. 





Just back from Catalina, as it happens.

Were The Only Ones punk?  Not really, but "Another Girl Another Planet" belongs to that moment and it has one of the most thrilling ignition / take-off  bits of that or any other time, eclipsing the song itself (great as it is).