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).

intro inspection

Nominated by the Phil Zone as this year's topic. Seconded by Our God Is Speed. Ratified by the  throng. This year's theme is: Great Intros.

Can't be the clearing house for non-blog-owning entities just yet, owing to commitments over the holiday season. For now, a few suggestions of my own.

Lovely darkly shimmering bit at the start of this Roxy:

Aerosmith had a penchant for the unusual or dreamy-eerie intro:

  

There is a dubby-metal thing going on at the start of these near-contemporaneous MTV faves by Guns N 'Roses and Def Leppard: 

 But this time around, though, not going to stick to rock, or even hand-played music. 

 The Drum and Bass Intro could be one of the worst things ever, especially during the Intelligent Era -  every bleedin' track came with a long drawn antechamber of synth-pads and atmospheric flatus. Always for the same (excessive) number of bars too - such that you could look at the vinyl on the 12 inch and see how far it was before the track got going, the grooves looked different. 

But there were killer ones too, proper tension builders, and others that walked a line between daft 'n' deadly: 

 

(That is Japan's "Nightporter", that intro).

Many more from the world of dance to come I'm sure.

But for now, in closing, and before anybody else nabs it - from 2001, Osymyso's "Intro Inspection", a mash-up made of 101 intros....