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a primer to music pop culture from the eighties to the noughties

Month: August 2022 Page 1 of 3

Their Dwelling

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On 31 August 2022

In 1982, 80ies

While the musical variety Ska is generally considered to be closely related to the Jamaican genres Reggae and Rocksteady there’s no denying many of it’s modern performers also draw heavily from Balkan roots – and maybe it’s no wonder the north-eastern London band Madness always had more followers in Europe than the United States, where only one of their hits really took flight.

“Our House” describes the feeling many young people had in the tough economics of the 80ies – enforced to keep living with their parents as they simply couldn’t afford to move out they were trapped between nostalgia and the knowledge that this period of life was supposed to be over.

They tripped me into not wanting to think about cultural appropriation thirty years before that was even a thing.

Immortalised Shredding

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On 30 August 2022

In 1997, 90ies, Girl Power Tuesday

Songwriters Anne Preven and Scott Cutler of the LA based band “Ednaswap” wrote “Torn” in 1991 together with Phil Thornalley, with Preven taking inspiration for the devastation chronicled in the song from her work in a mental hospital in New York that dealt with suicidal juveniles as a teenager. It was first recorded two years later in Danish and had its English debut by Ednaswap, but none of this recordings took off.

That changed when Natalie Imbruglia, who was known to a broader audience from the immensely popular Australian soap opera “Neighbours” started a second career as a singer and released a version of the song as her debut single in 1997. Not immediately though, at least in the US, where the song was proposed to a number of record labels and turned down repeatedly – only to have the same people bending over backwards to seal the deal when the song exploded on the UK charts.

Alison Maclean, who shot the video was able to create a very intimate feeling by combining acting (recreating a scene from the 1972 erotic drama “Last Tango in Paris”) with footage from breaks, where the actors were not aware that the camera was still rolling.

Extraterrestrial Weather

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On 29 August 2022

In 1985, 80ies, Must-See-Video

It was in the late 60ies, that Richard Anthony Hewson started his work arranging songs for other bands and he soon came up with quite a portfolio, working with such illustrious names as The Beatles, The Bee Gees, Herbie Hancock, Supertramp, Diana Ross, Chris De Burgh and many others. So we’ll forgive the sign of a slightly inflated ego that shines through when he named the band with which he was going to produce his own music after himself – RAH band – especially given that he was, in fact, the band’s only actual member.

Founded in 1977 the band’s first hit was “The Crunch”, an instrumental involving no synthesizers in which Hewson played all the instruments himself. Their biggest hit, “Clouds Across The Moon”, however, involved quite a few machine-generated melodies, as well as vocals provided by his wife, “Dizzy Lizzy”. Can’t stray too far, now, can we?

They obviously spared no expenses in the costume department, did they?

Back From The Void

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On 26 August 2022

In 1997, 90ies, Must-See-Video

When the Backstreet Boys, who had released their first album on an international market in 1996 and were already hugely successful in Europe told Jive Records president that they wanted to include a song called “Backstreet’s Back” – written by Swedish hitmakers Max Martin and Denniz Pop – on what was to be their debut album in the US, and even release it as a first single, he was having none of it. It was kind of hard to argue back from where exactly (the band argued back in the states, but didn’t get their way). And so the first million copies of the US album was produced without the track. Only when Radio stations close to Canada – where the song quickly caught on – started picking up the track and playing it, too, he relented and the track finally made it into the rest of the albums produced.

The song became a huge success in the states as well, but when it was time to produce the video (with director Joseph Kahn who so far had done mostly Hip-Hop and Grunge videos and wanted to diversify into pop) and it was decided to lean on Michel Jackson’s famous “Thriller” with a side-serving of the Rocky Horror Show, with their bus supposedly breaking down and them having to look for shelter in a haunted mansion, the label went through the same spiel again, arguing that MTV would not go for the concept. So the band funded the video themselves and had to fight hard to get reimbursed once the video – again – was quite successful after all.

It won “Best Group Video” in 1998’s Music Video Awards.

End Times at Low Tide

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On 25 August 2022

In 1979, 70ies, Guitar Gods

Climate Change, Covid-19, the Russian invasion of the Ukraine – we live in trying times and the four horsemen of the apocalypse are easy enough to assign. But then, they have been time and again. We’ve already covered a song handling the theme on a quite fictional basis; back in 1979 the Clash, key players in the original British punk rock movement, had done it much more literally. “London Calling” is all about the many different ways the world was going down the drain, from nuclear destruction over literal drowning in floods to police brutality. It’s somewhat disconcerting how many of these themes are just as much of an issue today.

The band very much lived up to their credo of punk rock, as demonstrated by their refusal to play for a seated audience when they were finally admitted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but also when they were tricking their own label into selling “London Calling” – the album, not the titular song – to their loyal, but often poor fans for a much lower price by proposing to the label to add a “free 12 inch single” – which they recorded at 33rpm, packed with ultimately nine songs and thus created a double-album for the price of a normal one. Considering they were quite opposed to commercial events it’s a bit dispiriting in just how many commercials, soundtracks and promotions the song has been used over the years.

The video, filmed on the Thames near Chelsea was directed by a close friend of the band, who was very much a landlubber. He could neither swim nor was he aware that the Thames has a tide – so when they started rolling the cameras were 5 meters lower than what he anticipated. And then the boat would start to float – who ever would have thought there was a current! Next thing you know it started raining… Well, the song is about the end of the world.

The album was released in December 1979 in the UK, but only in January 1980 in the US – where the Rolling Stone magazine would name it “best album of the 80ies” a decade later to the dismay of pedants.

Advanced Arsonist

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On 24 August 2022

In 1996, 90ies

There’s this great song from Arthur Brown, which doesn’t qualify for the blog, as we’re limited to seventies to noughties and it’s from 1968. It starts off with a terrifying threat: “I am the God of Hell-fire, and I bring you…” only to immediately switch to the cutest little melody. 28 years later, Keith Flint came over way more menacing when he – who at the time was a dancer for Prodigy, had never sung on a track and for whom the English language most definitely wasn’t his strong suit – decided to live up to his surname and added lyrics to what was supposed to be an instrumental piece.

The video, shot in black and white for budget reasons, was considered so grisly that fire brigades felt the need to compel what they regarded as an incitement to arson and the tabloids chastised it for frightening kids.

Flint was promoted from dancer to frontman.

He also owned a little pub in Essex that had an open fireplace. If you caught him lighting a fire there and brought up the song you had to donate a pound to charity.

What Girls Really Really Want

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On 23 August 2022

In 1983, 80ies, Girl Power Tuesday

In 1979 Robert Hazard recorded the demo for a little song he wrote about who lucky he was that there were so many girls who wanted to have some fun – with him… which wasn’t a big hit. But as the label, Columbia, owned the rights they asked producer Rick Chertoff to do something with the song. Which he did a few years later, by suggesting it to newly hired Cyndi Lauper, suggesting she’d edit the lyrics to a more feminist point-of-view. She was working on her album with his old bandmates of “The Hooters” at the time, and after experimenting with a number of different musical styles they together transposed “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” into what would become the anthem for female attitude in the 80ies.

The album, “She’s So Unusual” was a huge success and contained four top-five songs, the first debut by a female artist ever to do so. “True Colors” was another one of those and it evinced a strong theme in Lauper’s work even more: acceptance. While most videos at the time depicted staggeringly beautiful people rarely seen in real life, she insisted on having hers populated by normal gals and guys, leading regular lifes. And as “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” was to be an anthem for all women it was important to her that they all were represented in the video, irregular of race, body type or alleged flaws – what should go without saying these days took a long time in the making.

The video also features what at the time were mind-blowing never-before-seen computer generated images, produced by the brand new multi-million-dollar digital editing equipment bought for Saturday Night Live that they were allowed free access to.

The mother in the video really is Lauper’s mother, while the “father” is wrestler “Captain” Lou Albano, with whom she would collaborate on a number of occasions throughout her career.

Staggering Stuttering

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On 22 August 2022

In 1994, 90ies, Must-See-Video

The art of Scat singing – vocal improvisation with nonsensical syllables, vocables and other sounds produced by means of the human vocal apparatus – has been part of Jazz vocalists’ repertoire since at least 1911 and was popularised in the Roaring Twenties by the likes of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. Which is how a young John Paul Larking, a Californian child born in 1942, who had been suffering from a massive stutter ever since he began to speak, realised that there were means to communicate without having to go through what for him was constant humiliation: Music! He began to play the piano and became a proficient jazz pianist.

In 1990 Larkin moved to Berlin, where he found a thriving Jazz scene that welcomed him warmly and he became able to add singing to his acts as well despite the deep insecurities, receiving standing ovations. But when his agent Manfred Zähringer suggested to go one further and produce a song combining the modern jazz derivatives of dance and Hip Hop with scat singing he still was very apprehensive, fearing being laughed at and criticized again, as he was used to as a child. Luckily for us, his wife Judy was able to convince him to tackle the problem full frontal and speak about his struggle in his own way – through music.

He adopted a new persona along with it and Scatman John soon became a worldwide star at the age of fifty-three.

Sadly, he would contract lung cancer only four years later and died a month before the great party when we rolled over into 2000. Fsck Cancer!

Atrocious Magic

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On 19 August 2022

In 1982, 80ies

The Steve Miller Band started out as a blues band in the 60ies and evolved into a solid rock troupe by the 70ies. But when the 80ies came along with Punk and New Wave they started to feel like dinosaurs and as fewer and fewer fans turned up to their concerts they stopped touring altogether – at least until 1988, by which time they had transitioned into “Classic Rock” and were able to draw solid crowds again. But they did have one last big hit in 1982, even though their label, Capitol, did not believe in it and only came round when it was a number one hit all over the world: “Abracadabra” was a great piece of music with hideous lyrics.

Now, as we established, in the 80ies MTV had become a force and in order to sell records you needed to have a video to go along with your songs. Which was kind of a problem for one of the lowest-profile frontmen in rock. They had never done a video before and he just wasn’t going to be a video-star, so director Peter Conn did a little slight-of-hand of his own and made the video all about magic, with Miller – who was off touring Europe anyway – only appearing in photographs, incognito behind huge sunglasses and black bars.

They would perform their last show at Montreux in 2000.

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