6 posts tagged “80's”

One day, back in 1992 or so, I was listening to the radio, and on came what sounded like a brand new song by Robert Smith and the Cure! Fun, jingly, and with an incredibly catchy chorus, I was surprised when the radio DJ announced it was in fact, a group called Presence!

Presence? Who the heck were these guys? And why did they sound so much like the Cure? Back in the days before the Internet, one couldn’t attain such information so easily! Then one day, after playing the song (which I had now known was called “Act Of Faith”), the DJ offhandedly stated that it was a song by a new group from a former member of the Cure! “So!” I thought to myself, “Robert Smith has split up the Cure, and formed a new group called Presence!” Right?

Well, no, not really.

I was to later find out by way of a magazine (ah, back when information was only found in the printed word!) that although it WAS a former member of the Cure, it wasn’t Robert Smith at all (who was quite happily still with The Cure, thank you very much) but Laurence Tolhurst, one of the original members, first  as a drummer, then later on keyboards, before leaving (under circumstances I still don’t know for certain) the group after the Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me Album.

 So it was Laurence Tolhurst’s group! Then I thought to myself, “Wow, I never realized how much he and Robert Smith sang alike! It must be all that time working together that did it! Right?

Well, no, not really.

You see, after his departure from the Cure, Tolhurst reunited with Michael Dempsey (he himself another ex-Cure member) to create an almost doppelganger sounding group to the Cure itself... As for the amazingly Robert Smith-ish vocals, they’d simply gotten Gary Biddles, a talented singer who sounded like a exact clone of Robert Smith, to fill Robert’s shoes!

Sadly, the group never really caught on, and their album Inside turned out to be their one and only release. But for what it’s worth, it’s quite a catchy record, and for light-hearted  pop tunes, it certainly satisfies, and is still a joy to listen to!

Sometime during the early eighties, a peculiar PV began airing on Night Trax starring a Lucille Ball-ish singer in a very kitschy retro-50’s style video called “They Don’t Know”. I’d later learn the woman was a popular British entertainer named Tracey Ullman.I was directed towards the video by a friend who knew my love of The Beatles, and one day the video came on and he told me, “Hey, you should check this video out- at the end of the song, her boyfriend turns out to be Paul McCartney!” Well, he was right, and I found the video, with Sir Paul as a country bumpkin truck drivin’ fool and bubbly Tracey as his lil’ lady, was so sweet and charming, I fell in love with the song in an instant!

Although no more significant singles came out of Tracey, she’d would later become a household name when she started her TV show The Tracey Ullman Show in 1987 (the skit show most famous for launching the careers of The Simpsons), and she'd go on to star in the award winning HBO shows “Tracey Takes On…” as well!

 Fast forward to the year 1994, where Britpop music had taken over my life. My favorite groups at this time were the usual suspects like Belly, Lush, Darling Buds, Sundays, etc, and I was a big collector of these giant CD collections called VOLUME (fill in the number) that featured new and unreleased singles of the latest Britpop outfit!

VOLUME 10 had just arrived, and I immediately snatched it up as it featured both Tiny Monroe and Echobelly as well as a new song from Lush. Listening to the CD, I was plasantly surprised to hear a group called GIGOLO AUNTS doing a VERY Beatlesy rendition of the Tracey Ullman song!! Their version was so jangly and poppy (rather Smithereens-ish in tone), I ran about, getting all of my friends to listen to it!

  It has since become one of our very favorite tunes, and the point was never clearer than when my friend Gerg found his copy of VOLUME TEN had oxidized(!) and wouldn’t play any more! He called me in a panic, first making me make sure that MY copy was okay, then begging me to burn him a copy so he could still have the song! I, of course, happily did so!

Fast forward again to around 2001, and I’m listening to a newly released greatest hits package of artist Kirsty MacColl’s work called “Galore!”, a collection I wanted for favorite tunes “Walking Down Madison”, “Innocence”, “I Can’t Stop Killing You”, and the catchy Smiths cover of “You Just Haven’t Earned it yet, Baby”, but was surprised to find what I assumed was another cover of “They Don’t Know”…and found out that the tune was originally written and recorded by Kirsty herself- Tracey Ullman and Gigolo Aunts had been covering KIRSTY all along!

  Listening to Kirsty’s version was quite stunning- to hear the “actual version” which sounded so sincere and melancholy really hit home with me.  But you know, in their own way, all the versions of the song are terrific, whether it be the Tracey Ullman version, the Gigolo Aunts one or Kirsty’s original song, so I decided to cobble together the three versions of Kirsty’s beautiful, upbeat and utterly unstoppable tune for everyone to lend an ear to- there’s no doubt in my mind that you will like at leat ONE of the versions of this song- it’s just TOO GOOD!

More Twelve Inch goodness from Peter Murphy, the man who, along with Tones-On-Tail (later: Love and Rockets) created the dramatic Bauhaus. These are a few of my favorite discs of Peter's years before he broke out with songs like "Cuts You Up" and the like.

While we’re on the subject of 80’s groups, there was this terrific locally-based band called Hat Makes The Man that me and my friends just loved. The band had a regular gig at Waikiki club Wave Waikiki that we checked out every weekend, but the group would pop up in other places too, and the bunch of us always made an attempt to see them wherever they happened to play. Merchant Street Block Party? Check! Mid-Pac Carnival? We’re there! Pearlridge Shopping Center Centerstage? Yep! We went to that one, too!

   But it was the Wave Waikiki gigs that we remembered the fondest- I remember, we’d sit outside before the club opened, and listen to Hat Makes The Man rehearsing inside. The great thing about that was that you’d hear the group playing songs they never did in their onstage repertoire, and I distinctively remember hearing them doing “Teenage Lobotomy” by the Ramones in their practice sessions, and wishing they’d do it in their set!

  Between the years 1984 and 1985 they managed to release two terrific albums, one their self-titled debut “Hat Makes The Man”, and a live album featuring new songs called “Searching…For The Fertile Fields”. The former was only available as a cassette at the time, although they did release “Fertile Fields” on Vinyl.

At some point, the band moved up to the “mainland” to try their luck, until, eventually, each member went onto different projects, most notably drummer Frank Quimby Orral with Poi Dog Pondering… ( a group that almost seems like a continuation of HMTM; several other Hat members have  helped on some of the early releases, and heck, the first album even featured different versions of Hat songs!)

  I  recently picked up this nifty little contraption that can rip vinyl albums into MP3 files, a must if you're gonna be listening to music in you car, walking around, etc... and immediately set about deciding where to start converting all those glorious albums in my collection that never made it to CD for one reason or another.

   Rummaging around through my old 12" dance singles, I came upon my collection of Vicious Pink records. Vicious Pink! Why, I hadn't thought of them in YEARS, and yet, once upon a time they were sandwiched right up there with Stephen "Tin Tin" Duffy and Book of Love for most played records of the day!

 

  After listening to the MP3 tracks, I was reminded of how awesome Vicious Pink were... the first song I ever got from them was "Fetish" (complete with a cover of the old Classics IV song "Spooky" on the flipside), but the song that really did it for me was the pounding dance beat of "Take Me Now" and the cool and catchy chorus of "CCCan't You See", and these songs sound as great as they did back then!

I believe the album versions of these songs may have been released on disc at some point, but to my knowledge, I never saw anything released on CD regarding these dance versions (the only TRUE versions, BTW!, at least in MY opinion!)

Thought some of you might enjoy taking a trip back with Josephine Warden and Brian Moss, the dynamic duo VICIOUS PINK!

 

  I remember back in 1988 walking into the local record store with my friend and seeing an LP of The Darling Buds for the first time- It was their first album “Pop Said”, and as we were both heavily into britpop/shoegazer music at the time, the very “4AD” style cover really caught our attention, with its very 80’s neon effects and beautiful lead singer Andrea Lewis fronting the group. But as MTV and the local college radio stations weren’t rotating the Buds with any regularity, we didn’t know a single thing about them.

   It wasn’t until their second album came out that I finally got to see just what the Darling Buds were all about. In a video collection I acquired called ROCKAMERICA (which I purchased for the Lush video “De-Luxe"), I was treated to the peppy video for their new single “Crystal Clear”. I finally got to see the group in action, and I was just mesmerised by Andrea- she was so sexy and spunky! The group sounded just like what I expected them to- catchy, jangly pop tunes with a distinct Beatlesy flavor, designed to make you get up and dance!

   Later on when I hooked up with my friend Gerg (who’d been with me that first day at the record store), I told him how much I dug the new single, and he told me that he’d just purchased the companion album to the Crystal Clear single, an LP called Crawdaddy, and that he’d be sure to throw the song onto a compilation he was working on for me.
   Well, in the end, he threw both Crystal Clear and another track off the album called “Tiny Machine” onto the mix he made for me. I loved both songs so much, that I quickly decided I needed to grab ahold of a copy of Crawdaddy for myself!

  As soon as the drums kicked in on the opening song  “It Makes No Difference”,  I already knew I wasn’t going to be disappointed! What an album opener! Then onto the aforementioned Crystal Clear and Tiny Machine before heading into the incredible bubblegum flavored “Do You Have To Break My Heart?”, a pure pop masterpiece!
   Then they cool things off with some laid back introspective songs like “You Won’t Make Me Die” and “Fall” before bouncing back with the drum pounding “Little Bit Of Heaven” and the awesome George Harrison Twangin’ melody “Honeysuckle”, which promptly floored me with its lush layered guitar riffs and vocal harmonies…Ahhh,…I was in Heaven! I listened to that album over and over again that Christmas, and over time, has become one of my favorite albums ever!

Roaming the web, I was puzzled to find that most Darling Buds fans considered Crawdaddy a lackluster album, preferring the Buds’ “Pop Said…” to the former. Of course, I had also ended up also purchasing that album, and could see how some fans might regard Crawdaddy as a rehash of the same tunes that Pop Said featured, but In my own personal opinion, both albums have great things going on for them, as well as the Darling Buds last release Erotica (which ironically was the first Buds album to rotate regularly on MTV), which showed a slightly more somber and different Darling Buds.

 But out of all of them, the one that will forever be the definitive Darling Buds album to me will be the one that brightened up so many of my days with its upbeat, jangly pure pop perfection, CRAWDADDY!