Music Arcades: Jon and Vangelis: Short Stories

Anyone who went through Jon and Vangelis's recording career in reverse would be surprised, and just a little scared, when they arrived at the opening track of their first collaborative album. Musically it's not far from the fortnight of challenging listening that I summarised yesterday. Lyrically it's about being inside a television and trying to ignore a disgruntled cathode ray tube. Previously I quoted a 1980 Jon Anderson interview where he spoke of some off-the-wall song ideas he'd cooked up with Rick Wakeman. I wonder if this, and some of the other simple-but-striking song sketches, came from the same place and time.

Later J&V would settle into the template of gentle love songs first minted on I Hear You Now. But here they're still testing each other out, mixing the straight songs with dramatic flourishes. And, Vangelis's doof-doof doofus drumming aside, I think they all work. One More Time may sound like schmaltz to you, but I love it. Far Away in Baagad, meanwhile, is a fantastically original miniature. As I argued before, the years 1978-82 were Jon's golden period, and this comes from slap bang in the middle of that time. Not quite up there with The Friends of Mr Cairo.

One more thing. The credits say "lyrics by Jon Anderson inspired by Jenny", and the inner sleeve bears a couple of very watery watercolours by Jon, also dedicated to Jenny. Those dedications continued in the next couple of albums, but disappeared towards the end of the eighties. Then, in the nineties, the dedications were to Jane, not Jenny, though couched in very similar terms. It's absolutely none of my business, but, as a 16-year-old, those original public statements of marital commitment made a big impression — and I have to admit to being curious about what happened there.