The journey into the 80's

I was listening to Something's On The Move by Jethro Tull last night (from the Stormwatch album). It's a great song, probably the best on that album (which isn't a great Tull album by any stretch of the imagination). It was released in 1979, the end of the line for old-skool 70's production & musicianship values. From here on in technology would take over - becoming the fall-back resource for every rock band in the studio. Albums suddenly needed to take 4 years to be released rather than 2 (one year getting a good snare sound, one looking for fashionwear for the video etc). Tull managed to get around the worst aspects of this by letting technology take them over completely. No DX7 twiddling in the background - it was full on Linn drum & synth programming for the band that only a few years before had gone totally folk-rock (around Heavy Horses..). The Under Wraps album (1984) sounded so bizarrely un-Tull that I think it's really good. Broadsword & the Beast which came two years before sounds light years away by comparison.
Tull however were in a minority when it came to bands of the 70's finding their place in the 80's. Nearly everyone thought that the law commanded them to employ a synth programmer and that unless their drums sounded like they were recorded in a cathedral using a demon with parkinsons as a mixing engineer then they wouldn't get into the top 40.
The bigger chaps did find something to grab onto though. Yes somehow managed to make 90125 - mainly due to their employment of a younger guitarist (Trevor Rabin) - and the production of old vocalist Trevor Horn. Drama, the Horn album released three years before got to number 2 in the UK but was frankly crappy. 90125 however showed that synths & silky production could bring older bands up to date without making them sound totally out of water. It's a great album, I even love the follow up Big Generator but I guess that's just coz I was around at the time & it holds quite a few good memories in it's huge-snared grooves.
Rush embraced the tech too. Alex Lifesons guitar sound became a chorus-laden sonic cathedral, Geddy abandoned playing bass through half of the set to play of load of dodgy 80's keyboards and Neil's drum kit became even larger, in fact it became two drum kits. I like much of their 80's material. The first two albums Permanent Waves & Moving Pictures being their best ever. Then they seemed to lose track a bit, the playing & songs were still great but the studio technology seemed to take the edge off somehow. By the time it got to Hold Your Fire they really sounded weighed down by the chiming chords & lumpen sequencers. They've never really recovered & are now slowly drifting into greatest hits tour territory.
So there were winners & losers. I'm not sure there was anyone who really came though that period totally unscathed. It took the next generation (Talking Heads, Devo - well most new wave bands, dare I say it - Level 42?) to actually do something interesting with studio technology and the 70's bands did take notice - but age does tend to take it's toll on creativity......Wives, mortagages, car crashes, the tax man, they all take time out of the songwriting schedule.....