Applied to pop, this question – discussed at some length in the pub last night – proves surprisingly complex. “Dylan” was everybody’s obvious answer* but the more we thought about it the less sure we were about this. So I throw it open to the Freaky Trigger readership and wish them joy with it.
*why yes, it WAS an all-male party, why do you ask?
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Actual or proclaimed returns to form? If the latter, then unquestionably REM
maybe Sinatra? possibly Neil Young
Depends upon the definition of the term – oddly (or perhaps not) this topic came up in discussion about a year ago when I was in the pub as well, and I argued that the Bee Gees had more commercial returns to form than most artists, but whether they had critical favour on their side in each instance is something I’d question (although unlike most people who read “Freaky Trigger”, I do actually really like “You Win Again”).
The Fall always seem to have a “return to form” with every damn album according to at least one or two critics, and there are always disagreements about how many times Bowie has or hasn’t been off the boil… (I’d argue “Outside” was a return to form in his case, but it’s bloody hard getting anyone outside his fanbase to agree).
Shurely the real question here is: who has made the most STUNNING returns to form?
@4 – Johnny Cash?
Take That would be my choice.
Cheating, but Woody Allen. He makes a movie a year almost like clock-work and his fallow periods are full of stuff that’s unwatchable and makes one swear off him forever…. But every six years or so he becomes worth watching again (at least for a year or two). More fastidious established writer-directors would just not make a new film until they had a new genuinely good idea.
P!nk? Van Morrison?
I’d probably go with the Fall. But that’s proclaimed returns to form. I don’t think any of these acts ever really did return to form. (But then, I also didn’t follow them closely enough to really know.)
I do think Bowie on Station To Station and the Bee Gees starting with “Nights On Broadway” actually had changed form and gotten good again after what they’d been doing well earlier ran dry. Maybe the same is true with Max Martin on “Since U Been Gone.”
It’s not Dylan – I thought the critical consensus was that Dylan had one really long crap period followed by one relatively late period of being pretty good again, but with no serious suggestion that’s it’s as good as the good stuff. Same goes for Prince.
Seemingly every REM album is a proclaimed return to form by someone, even the really bad ones, to the extent it’s become a cliche and no one ever believes it. It’s that combination of hope, vague desperation and prolonged disappointment over several years – I suspect that the Arctic Monkeys are heading for mid-career like that for people who like that sort of thing. Jay-Z’s probably well into this kind of pattern as well.
I suspect Neil Young is the best answer to this question in that he genuinely does have periods of being dull as ditchwater or batshit terrible and will then suddenly release an album that’s as good as his best ones. But then the people proclaiming this probably hate Trans and are therefore NOT TO BE TRUSTED.
Certainly Woody Allen is frequently proclaimed to be back, although I suspect he hasn’t made a film that’s genuinely worthwhile since Sweet And Lowdown some 12 years ago. Can’t swear to that, because I haven’t seen all the films in between, but those I have seen have been mostly atrocious (hence my avoiding the others).
@Mark M, 10. You may be right, but I guess I regard Match Point (2005) as a significant uptick compared to the positively angering/unwatchables that came just before it, and I gather (it’s not out down under yet) Midnight in Paris (2011) is a lot more fun than anything else Allen has done recently.
Looking back over Allen’s filmography now, though, I do see that some of my memories are a little distorted: I *detested* Shadows and Fog (1992) at the time and it’s coded in my memory as being part of a huge slump for Allen. But Husbands and Wives (which I loved) was the same year, and Manhattan Murder Mystery (pretty good) was the next year so I’ve evidently misremembered. Similarly I tend to think of the mid/late ’90s for Allen as being a wasteland (‘The Deconstructing Harry Years’) before Sweet and Lowdown, but that leaves out Everyone Says I Love You which I remember thinking was pretty decent and occasionally great (the Goldie Hawn bits). There’s something about Allen’s bad films that makes the experience of seeing them loom inordinately large in memory!
Dottie West
Merle Haggard
LL Cool J
The Hold Steady
(Actually, the Hold Steady is something of a prediction. And I’m only including them ’cause Lifter Puller quoted LL.)
Adele
Cher Lloyd
OK, now I’m just making noise. But New Morning was definitely proclaimed a return to form in its day, and so was Planet Waves (though the proclamations were softer), then Blood On The Tracks was, with clamor, then even Slow Train Coming received some return celebration; after that there’s a decade where people forgot to decide Dylan was returning to form, then there was Time Out Of Mind, which was proclaimed the best since [choose a favorite previous return to form], which one P&Jer even said beat everything since Highway 61 Revisited.
(But I have a friend who fell for Dylan in 1987, “widely regarded as his worst year,” she says cheerfully. Her favorite all-time is Street Legal; she doesn’t care as much about the stuff prior to Planet Waves. I’m sure she’d have an altogether different account of his comings and goings.)
Yes, we said Dylan because he’s been making records for 50 years and making the occasional record generally received as bad for 40, so he has the scope for plenty of RTFs. But he’s never fallen into the “perpetual RTF” zone which REM or latterday Bowie have.
(Did any of the “Judas!” crowd feel anything he did was a return to form, I wonder?)
You forgot Oh Mercy, definitely proclaimed as a Return To Form in some quarters.
One person unmentioned here but mentioned in the pub is Elvis Costello – I don’t think his new records get paid much attention to now, but for a while he was a repeat Returner To Form, helped by having a variety of different forms he might conceivably return to.
Well, I’d say that Dylan ’71 through ’76 may be the gold standard in unrelenting returns to form that people can’t prevent themselves from intensely believing in or disbelieving, but yes, after that people didn’t care as much. So – to go meta here – I doubt that his later periods of returning to form ever returned to the form of that period of his returning to form. But I’m not sure anyone else’s did either, though I was too young to pay attention to Billie Holiday’s returns to form. Also never paid much attention to Radiohead after “Creep,” but perhaps they belong in this discussion. And we should certainly stay attuned to Lil Wayne.
I wonder if an average Idol/X-Factor season allows performers to act out the “return to form” form in miniature.
(So actually it isn’t only Dylan’s making records for fifty years that’s crucial, though that’s a help, but that people cared so much about Dylan 1965. And it’s not the occasional record received as bad but the perception that his talent rapidly walked off a cliff, with some people making various ongoing attempts at revisionism afterwards. Of course, other artists mentioned and unmentioned fit that walking-off-a-cliff category too, but not all of them got revisionists. Did Ray Davies? Jefferson Starship? Did anyone speak up for Elvis’s ’70s?)
Frankie Valli.
One of the things that Dylan, REM and Woody Allen* (and Neil Young) have in common is that they’ve kept cranking out material on a regular basis long, long after the period when they were widely perceived to have mattered. So that unlike, say, Scott Walker, the bulk of the work of these four belongs to what be categorised as their ‘late period’ (in that sense they’re a bit like Monet or indeed Picasso).
*If we’re talking prolific movie directors, then Robert Altman had his share of “ooh, he’s back… oh, hang on…” periods.
Woody Allen was the obvious film analog in the pub, though more about proclaimed return to form rather than actual. Prolific is important, and even directors who have gone significantly off the boil (say Scorsese, Coppola, Ridley Scott), are given enough kudos for their early work that a bad film is seen as an aberation rather than the norm. I think someone like Stephen Frears has less of a auteur tag, so his good ones could be tagged returns to form, but then an awful lot of his good films seem to end up being credited to anyone but him.
As with the Elvis Costello comparison, often starting off with patchy form is the way to go. I can see someone trying to RETURN TO FORM Tim Burton without really noting there wasn’t much form to start off with.
Robert Altman’s a very good call.
Great challenge – one in which I failed completely, although after looking at the comments I concur – the Bee Gees is a good call. (I’m with 23 Daves on ‘You Win Again’)
The longevity required to generate a number of ‘returns to form’ narrows it down and prompts the opposite question also: which artists have been given the most long-term leeway – based on great earlier works – without any noticeable ‘return to form’?
Bowie.
In answer to Jonny B’s question that is.
The secondary question is whether when people say ‘return to form’, they mean ‘going back to what we know they can actually do’. That’s certainly the case (regularly) with Elvis Costello – ‘at least if he’s back with the Attractions he’s not making another chamber music album’. Or indeed Lou Reed’s New York (an album title, indeed, that pledged a reversion to home territory in both the geographical and stylistic uses of the term).
Of course, this can be a false promise – there’s many a truly rotten album in the vague approximation of an earlier beloved style, and I’ll argue long and hard that The Aviator is a far, far better movie than The Departed.
Not with me you wouldn’t. Or at least we’d agree so we would probably move on to lacing daisies in each others hair.
In literature it seems a given that after a while people go off the boil a touch (or mine the same seam constantly). But even there people like Stephen King can get the return to form tag just for writing something that has a vague smell of horror, or sci fi. I always got the sense that John Updike books were often labelled as returns to form, which they often weren’t.
The other one mentioned on Friday not mentioned yet here is Morrissey and Bruce Springsteen. Which makes me think that artists, to be regular return to formers, probably need a large proportion of their fanbase to be obsessives willing to see the best in everything. And music reviewers to boot.
sheep from goats time: nick cave
Madonna. Kylie.
Rolling Stones? Beggar’s Banquet, Some Girls, Steel Wheels, A Bigger Bang at least – maybe every album since Steel Wheels.
Elton John maybe, as he’s cranked out enough records, often harking back to the ‘classic’ sound (re 20). A Single Man, Too Low For Zero, Reg Strikes Back, Made In England, Songs From The West Coast, The Captain and the Kid…
wld buy another Costello/Brodsky album ahead of any Imposters record
Nick Cave is curious bcz his only real “return to form” comes after one of his most critically acclaimed periods! Moatman’s Balls/No More Shall We Fart are horribly snoozesome up-his-arse tediumfests, that were wildly praised for the sensitive piano songwriting balladry. BOREdry, morelike*.
This, and his general longevity and lack of interest in stagnating, means that the Abattoir Blues/Lyre Of Orpheus double came out as a “return to form” in terms of using the Bad Seeds as a band, having interesting arrangements and whatnot, but his new audience didn’t give a rats and so it kind of disappeared.
The longevity and shifting audiences also interestingly mean that the Grinderman/Lazarus/Grinderman period hasn’t been met by a superannuated early-mid ’80s audience rapturously welcoming his RETURN TO angry, noisy music FORM, but more being bemused by this strange new direction.
*The Good Son? The bad album. The Ship Song? etc etc…
@9 Yes Prince has got a charge sheet as long as your arm in this area, to the extent that reviews of his albums (when they have been reviewed at all) over the past two decades almost always felt the need to acknowledge it, by saying something like “this is not the return to form we’ve all been waiting for….”
Prince is an interesting one, though, because the current critical consensus seems to be that he really has returned to form, but only in live performance. There have been a number of reviews along the lines of “I have’t heard anything since Batman, and I wouldn’t listen to the last five albums if you paid me to. But he does put on a fantastic show.”
has rod stewart ever had a return to form? he was suddenly all over the place as a lad icon [shudder] in the mid nineties and is kind of a national treasure these days but i’m prety sure no one was ever talking up his latest album much.