A whole buncha reasons why you should never turn your back on heavy metal pioneers Budgie, the primary one being (before I even get to the list!) you never know if the Welsh power trio are going to awe you with greatness or stick an unlistenable song in your back.
1. Budgie came up with some of the greatest song titles ever. “Breaking All the House Rules and Learning All the House Rules.” “Nude Disintegrating Parachute Woman.” “Crash Course in Brain Surgery.” “Hot as a Docker’s Armpit.” “Homicidal Suicidal.” “I Can’t See My Feelings.” Once you’ve seen vocalist/bassist Burke Shelley’s Coke-bottle-thick glasses, you’ll understand why!
2. You won’t find any of these songs on 1973’s Never Turn Your Back on a Friend. It was the third of the ten studio albums the band would release between 1971 and 1982, and unlike their eponymous 1971 debut, 1974’s In for the Kill, and 1975’s Bandolier, it did not make it into Chuck Eddy’s Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe. But that means nothing. As Eddy admitted to yours truly, he compiled his list using only the albums in his personal record collection, and I suspect he didn’t own a copy of Never Turn Your Back on a Friend. It also doesn’t mean much when you consider Eddy put Teena Marie’s 1986 dance record, Emerald City, at Number 9 on his list. Eddy’s a great writer, but he’s also full of shit.
3. Burke Shelley sings like a budgie. Budgies mimic human speech. Burke mimicked budgie speech. He kinda sounds like Geddy Lee with a bad cold. There are far more annoying vocalists out there, but maybe if Burke had seen better, he’d have sung better—he obviously couldn’t see what he was singing. Eddy, ever the poet, describes Burke’s vox as “squeaky, angelic as your long-lost cigar-chomping Serbo-Croatian grandpa.” No, I have no idea what that means either. To me, Burke just sounds like a simp, although he’s hardly the first simp to front a hard rock/heavy metal band.
4. Budgie definitely had their moments of greatness, which is what differentiates them from the pack of seventies metal also-rans like Bull Angus, Buffalo, Point Blank, Hard Stuff, Three-Man Army, Cactus, Dust, Highway Robbery, Bloodrock, Nitzinger, Silver Metre, Stray Dog, Head Over Heels, Boomerang, and Granicus, all of whom you’ll also find in Eddy’s book. I swear he compiled his list solely from metal LPs he found in the dollar bin.
5. Budgie had their moment of greatness, but Never Turn Your Back on a Friend is not a great album. I originally intended to write about 1975’s Best of Budgie, until I realized it included four tracks from Never Turn Your Back on a Friend. And several of those four tracks are not good tracks.
6. Evidently, Budgie has a strong cult following in Texas. But then again, so did David Koresh.
7. Metallica has covered the great “Breadfan” from Never Turn Your Back on a Friend. They’ve also covered “Crash Course in Brain Surgery.” This is quite the honor, or would be if I could stomach Metallica.
8. You can like Budgie or you can hate Budgie, but they gave the world the lines “I grow my mind inside my head/I grow my hair to keep it fed.” So show them some respect.
9. Never Turn Your Back on a Friend is a very uneven album. It has this in common with every Budgie album I’ve ever heard. For every “In the Grip of Tyrefitter’s Hand”—a very ‘eavy slice of Zepboogie on which guitarist extraordinaire Peter Bourge sounds like at least three guys and plays these gargantuan riffs that almost make Leslie West sound effete—there’s a “Riding My Nightmare,” which with a title like that you would think would be a total Stuka attack of a song but is instead a slice of acoustic guitar wimpitude on which Burke sounds like he’s trying to out-wimp the wimp who sang “Sometimes When We Touch.”
10. And the soft parade continues with the acoustic ballad “You Know I’ll Always Love You,” on which Shelley sounds like he’s singing from heaven and has an actual halo on his head. This one makes your average Journey ballad sound like AC/DC and is an indictment not just of Budgie but of the entire country of Wales, that is if Wales is an actual country. I’ve never been there, and I’m not entirely convinced it’s a real place.
11. Roger Dean designed the album cover. It depicts a guy trying to fight or lasso (it’s hard to tell) a giant budgie. Roger Dean may be this famous guy, but the cover of Never Turn Your Back on a Friend looks like bad fan art to me. Your average teenager could do better.
12. Budgerigars are native to Australia and are likely the third most popular pet in the world, after dogs and cats. They are the only domesticated pet that can legally own firearms. I suppose you could domesticate Budgie and keep them as a pet, but be warned they’re not house-trained.
13. Budgie’s cover of the blues standard “Baby, Please Don’t Go” has a shuffle beat and some truly awe-inspiring chug-a-lug guitar by Bourge. Unfortunately, while Bourge is ripping it up and tearing it up, Shelley is singing like a tiny domesticated bird. There’s this long mid-section that reminds me of “Radar Love” during which the rhythm section bounces and bops along while Bourge’s guitar tears off great chunks of meat and then spits them out. Then Burke comes back sounding like a lobotomized Robert Plant. I’ve never heard a song end so abruptly.
14. So I went online and googled “Budgie Songs” to see what I could find out, and I ended up on a site where people weighed in on what kinds of music their pet budgies enjoy. Bon Jovi was popular. Easy listening too. Not one single person said their budgie enjoyed listening to Budgie.
15. The almost ten-minute “You Are the Best Thing Since Powdered Milk” OPENS with a Ray Phillips drum solo. That goes for well over a minute-and-a-half. Who does that? No song should ever begin with a drum solo, and no way am I ever going to listen to a song that begins with a drum solo. But listen I did, and AFTER the drum solo this fantastic guitar riff comes in and B.S. commences to squawking, then the song goes through all kinds of changes, demonstrating why people are always calling Budgie “prog-adjacent.” Bourge does a lot of heavy-weight soloing, which is cool, and Phillips lays into the drums like John Bonham, which is also cool, and Shelley sounds like Robert Plant Jr., which is cool as well, but the twists and turns are ultimately fatiguing unless you’re prog-adjacent and enjoy such things, in which case crank it up!
16. And if it’s a long and winding road you’re looking for, you can’t beat “Parents,” which is a smidgeon over 11 minutes long and has so many great lines in it I don’t even know where to start. With this?
“Baby lying in a womb
Are you free or in a tomb
Let me in,
I feel I want to cry.”
Then there’s the part where Burke sings, “Wash your hands and up to bed/Mind your manners/Or you’re dead.” Is that great or what? Then there are the song’s opening lines, which go,
“When I was a little boy
They would say to me
Don’t go in the world and play
It’s bad company.”
As for the song, it opens with some almost jazzy guitar, then Shelley comes in sounding all smooth, and it’s all very relaxed and easy going until Bourge comes in with this huge riff, after which he plays a very thoughtful solo that lets you know his guitar is a deep thinker and a lover of jazz. But his guitar keeps getting louder and louder, I don’t know how they do that, and as it gets louder and louder, you actually get caught up in it, and the cool thing is it just keeps going and going. But Shelley finally comes back in, and it’s really kind of boring, and you find yourself wishing he’d shut up and let Bourge do his thing. Which Bourge finally does, and his playing gets wilder and wilder, and you hear the sound of birds and what could be the sea until the song finally ends.
17. From an AllMusic review of the LP: “Originally released in 1973 on MCA, Budgie’s third record, Never Turn Your Back on a Friend, was another slab of the band’s signature plodding metal sound.” Every time I read the end of that sentence, I crack up.
18. “The Rape of the Locks” from Budgie’s 1971 debut is the Welsh equivalent of CSN&Y’s “Almost Cut My Hair.” Shelley doesn’t say anything about letting his freak flag fly, but he does sing, “I’m gonna live a lot of life/With golden locks around my eyes.” Never fuck with a hippie’s hair!
19. Budgie’s “High School Girls,” from their 1980 LP Power Supply, is just as Spinal Tap dumb as you’d expect. But it does include the classic line, “She does all of her homework in bed.”
20. The reason (and perhaps the only reason) to own Never Turn Your Back on a Friend is the beyond-great proto-speed metal classic “Breadfan,” which comes out of the gate going about a thousand miles per hour. You get this great riff repeated over and over until Burke comes in singing cryptic shit like “Seagull, give it all away/Stay a bird, stay a man, stay a ghost/Stay what you wanna be” and “Breadfan/Finger in the pie in the sky/Put a guinea on the nose of a GG” until the band slows things down and there’s this pastoral acoustic passage where Burke says he don’t need money although I’m sure he’s lying. Then Bourge kicks things back into gear, and everything sounds twice as loud, and it’s no wonder Metallica covered the damn thing.
21. What do you think “Put a guinea on the nose of a GG” means? How is a person even supposed to put a grade on something like that? I’ll be damned if I know. So I tell you what. Grade the damn album yourself!
GRADED ON A CURVE:
?
