Pretending To See The Future

Whilst on an OMD trip, I've coincided listening to their albums with reading their new book, Pretending To See The Future.

It's a history of the band, not as (auto)biography, but as a chronological collection of band, friends and fans memories. It's an entertaining, if sometimes frustrating, history of the band - one where I would've liked to have seen more input from the band with their thoughts on each single and album and more press cuttings of record reviews. The ones included give an insight into both the band and how they were viewed in the press at the time - how I would've loved to have seen that NME review for Pandora's Box that described the band as the missing link between Brian Eno and Hazel Dean.

Anyway, at the time of compiling the book I didn't send in my own memories of the band, so here's the one that has stuck with me the most, probably from around 1984/5...

Listening to a cassette copy of Dazzle Ships whilst playing Spectrum games with my brothers and cousins - we had to wait for the game to load in before we could use the tape player to listen to any music - he didn't pass comment until halfway through the final track, Of All The Things We've Made. At this point he chipped in, with a certain amount of scorn, "Well, this is boring, anyone could write this. It's SO easy to play - there's only one chord". Being a Queen fan, I sensed that music was of little merit to him if it didn't have enough chords chords or meet a certain level of virtuosity, so song containing one solitary chord, strummed with monotonous brilliance throughout the whole song, was never going to win him over. I steeled myself for an argument on the merits of the music, but then I realised - he just didn't get IT! Two chords would've been excessive.