As is well established this blog was founded in order to give some educational insight into those of yesteryear’s songs that one absolutely has to know about, after realising that some of my dear colleagues were not yet aware of some classics. But if you should somehow happen not to know about the song we’re talking about today then you must have spent your life under a very well hidden rock indeed.
Despite being constantly on air around the festive year-end season for the last 38 years “Last Christmas” by Wham! only made it to the #1 spot in the UK’s single charts in 2021, as although it was a huge success back in 1984 already it was topped then by Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas”, in which George Michael sings as well. As such, it long held the title for best-selling song never to reach top spot. Incidentally, Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill”, the original inspiration for our blog, only made it to number 1 after 37 years, one-upping Wham! by a year.
Despite the title and it’s yearly revival the song actually has very little to do with Christmas, but is about a failed relationship. It was written on a lazy Sunday, when George Michael and Andrew Ridgely were visiting Michael’s parents.
The video was shot in Saas-Fee and would be the last time George Michael was filmed without a beard.
George Michael died of dilated cardiomyopathy on Christmas Day 2016.
When I was twenty, I combined a couple of my favourite things, took a train to Paris and spent an afternoon or four in a cramped record store listening to the offered goods on trial. I do not remember how many records I ended up actually buying, but two of them still easily spring to mind to this day: Monsieur Dimitri from Paris’ debut album “Sacrebleu” and a collection of what were my favourite genres at the time: Two-tone; a fusion of Jamaican Ska with New Wave and Punk Rock elements and Rocksteady, the slower, more down-to earth successor of Ska and predecessor of what would become Reagge. Planète Ska went straight into my personal heavy rotation for the next decade or so.
My favourite song of the album was one I had never heard before and treasured all the more. When “Ghost Town” by The Specials featured prominently two years later in Guy Ritchie’s movie Snatch I got instant goose bumps in the cinema and would do so again in 2004 when Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright took the hallucinations of the main character from their short-lived but marvellous sitcom Spaced to the next level and used the song in Shaun of the Dead, the first movie in their Cornetto trilogy (which also features a brilliant use of Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now accompanying a Zombie-Hack-and-Slash scene, but I digress).
Jerry Dammers, keyboardist and band leader of The Specials – who had their breakthrough a few years earlier with their cover of Dandy Livingstones’ “A Message to You Rudy” – had somewhat alienated his fellow band members in the early eighties with his insistence on using elevator music elements in their œuvre and a long and tiring touring schedule. As a result, the song was really mostly about the imminent break-up of the band. But as Dammers did not want to be so blatant, he took up the hopelessness he felt about the split and projected it onto what happened on a political level in their domestic Coventry and other formerly thriving industrial cities at the time, which happened to be urban decay, racial discriminations and stop-and-search police tactics – and consequently civil unrest not seen in a generation. The song was recognised accordingly and went straight to Number One in the UK’s charts. It’s still considered one of the greatest pop records ever there – all the while remaining fairly obscure outside of Great Britain, where Two-tone was virtually unknown at the time.
However, Dammers’ feeling was correct and the success of the single would not halt the decline of the band. Three of the Specials’ members had enough and went on to found their own band, Fun Boy Three (who these days are best remembered for their cooperation with Bananarama on “It Ain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It),”). Among them was lead singer Terry Hall, who would later on found a couple of other bands and projects, but never really replicate the fame The Specials enjoyed.
Sadly, Hall, who was diagnosed with manic depression in 2004, died this Sunday at the age of 63. The cause of death has not been disclosed, apart for it being the result of a brief but serious illness.
British film-maker Alan Parker started his career writing and directing television adverts before he decided to go into proper movies and created Bugsy Malone, a parody on both gangster flicks and musicals using child actors only. The musical theme would stay with him throughout his career, with such gems as Pink Floyd – The Wall, The Commitments or Evita, but today we’re going to focus on 1980’s movie Fame.
Parker wanted to do a musical that was atypical in that it wouldn’t stop for the musical numbers at certain points in time, the music should just come out of real situations. It was also important to him that the film would depict real life at such a school, so he went out of his way to talk at great lengths to actual students from the High School of Performing Arts and he rewrote the original script, replacing some of the sheer joy of being able to perform with the typical angst and problems of people at that age. He was invited to a showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show by several of the students as well, an experience which consequently made it’s way into the movie. While he was not allowed to film at the actual school it does exist which over the years produced such famous alumnis as Robert De Niro, Jennifer Aniston, Liza Minnelli or Nicki Minaj. Originally named “Hot Lunch” the film was renamed to “Fame” after learning the former meant oral sex in New York’s slang of the time.
One of the dancers cast was Irene Cara, who previously had some minor roles in film and television, but also landed the title character in the 1976 musical drama Sparkles. When the producers and screenwriters heard her voice they realised they had a star in their hands, so they rewrote the role of Coco Hernandez as a main character. She sang on several tracks of the movie and was so exceptionally good at it, that she would write history at the Academy Awards: For the first time ever two songs from the same film, sung by the same artist were nominated for Best Original Song. “Fame” would win over “Out Here On My Own”.
Three years later Cara would win another Oscar for best song, this time for her own song. She had both written and sung “Flashdance… What A Feeling”, the title song of the musical movie by the same name. In 2002 she re-recorded that song together with DJ BoBo, to have a little Swiss-connection in here as well, but by that time the peak of her career had already come and gone.
Alas, “I’m gonna life forever!”, was always meant in the memory of people, not in the physical flesh. Cara died last Friday at the age of 63. R.I.P.
We’ve alreadytalked about the roots of Hip-Hop a couple of times. Throughout the 80ies and 90ies there were mainly two American Hip-Hop scenes: First the East Coast with bands mainly centred in and around New York City, particularly the Bronx, and later on West Coast hip-hop, with groups stemming mainly from Los Angeles. But in the late 90ies a third region began to establish it’s dominance: Southern hip-hop had it’s roots in the five cities of Atlanta, New Orleans, Houston, Memphis and Miami. An important moment of their rise were the 1995 Source awards. The East Coast – West Coast – feud was felt strongly when André Benjamin of Atlanta-based Outkast took the stage after winning the award for New Artist of The Year and made a statement: “The South got something to say, that’s all I got to say”.
It was the first award for Outkast, but it would not be the last. The group kept delivering sophisticated lyrics and catchy tunes. As in the second single from their acclaimed fourth studio album Stankonia: “Ms. Jackson” is an honest ode to the mother of Benjamin’s partner at the time, Erykah Badu, about the difficulties that may arise having children born out of wedlock. He felt he was being portrayed as a bad father and found it important that his side of the story was heared as well.
Badu’s mother (whose name is not Jackson, but who immediately new the song was about her when she heard it the first time) absolutely loved the song – so much so that she bought herself a “Ms. Jackson” license plate – and so did the general public.
Sometimes bands release a song that is just not like the others. And when that one happens to be the one that becomes hugely popular and people expect all their work to sound like that they might be in for a surprise. Think of Extreme’s More Than Words for example, or Frank Zappa’s Bobby Brown.
In the case of Beastie Boys and (You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party) it was not so much the music that was different. It was already the fourth single of their first album Licensed To Ill and they had well transitioned from the original hardcore punk the band was playing in the early 80ies into Hip Hop with that disc. But the irony of the song, which was supposed to be a parody on drunken frat boys only interested in making party, when the band actually had always cared deeply about political issues, was simply lost on most fans. And so it took a while for both the party-goers to realise the joke was on them (my money is on most of them still not being there) and die-hard rap-purists who were horrified by the lyrics (to the point where they were accused of being outright racist) to see the group for what they really were: one of the most important hip-hop acts of all time. Fortunately their career would go on for a good thirty years – plenty of time to set things straight.
MTV was certain that this was going to go down well with their young male clientèle, so they held a spot in the heavy rotation open for the video while it was being made. The budget of a whopping $20k unfortunately did not allow them to buy fresh whipped cream, so they used expired cans appropriated from supermarket trash bins, and as a result the set smelled so badly of rotten eggs that some of the actors had a hard time trying not to vomit.
As we have already ventured all the way back to the 60ies this week let’s have a quick look at the cover of Jimmy Hendrix’ third and last studio album, Electric Ladyland, which was released in 1968. The British cover, that is. Hendrix had quite explicitly asked for a specific picture taken by Linda Eastman (later McCartney) depicting the Jimmy Hendrix Experience sitting on the Alice in Wonderland sculpture in New York’s Central Park, surrounded by children. However, his American label, Reprise, used a blurry concert-picture of his head in yellow and red instead – and British label Track Records used a picture of 19 naked women. Hendrix was not amused and several record dealers did not sell the album or only wrapped in brown paper, calling it pornographic by nature.
The cover would be referenced a couple of times over the years, for example by German Punk-Rockers Die Toten Hosen, who used a similar cover for their 1993 Best-Of album “Reich & Sexy”. Or, earlier the same year, by the British New Wave band The Beloved, whose video for “Sweet Harmony” made quite a stir. Contrary to Hendrix’ album cover they used high contrast, over-exposure, hair and extremities to cover all private parts and singer John Marsh called it “as asexual as you can get”, but at least Beavis & Butt-head are on tape as liking it for all the “nude chicks”…
We might already have stretched our motto “from the eighties to the noughties” by including a song or two that actually hailed from the seventies. So let’s one-up this and go all the way back to 1965.
Or even 1963. That’s the year Frank Sinatra starred in the comedy-western “4 for Texas” and uttered the line “They tell me them boots ain’t built for walking”. Barton Lee Hazelwood, who was tasked by Sinatra to boost his daughter Nancy’s singing career quite liked the line and it inspired him to write These Boots Are Made For Walking. Originally he had planned to sing it himself, but Sinatra was able to convince him that sung by a man it would be perceived as brutish, while coming from a girl it was rather cute. He also made sure Nancy would lose the nice lady image and start singing in lower keys.
The song immediately became an international hit and so an accompanying movie was produced, to be played on Scopitones, jukeboxes capable of playing 16mm films – Music videos in the sense as we know them were not yet invented in the 1960ies. These days the short movie is considered the definition of what the “Swinging Sixties” looked like.
Sinatra and Hazelwood would produce a string of other famous songs, among them “Something Stupid” (a duet with her father) and “Summer Wine“.
Back in 1999 there was a big advertising campaign for Levis Jeans featuring “Flat Eric”, a nonsensical creature that the ad director Quentin Dupieux came up with and had made by Jim Hensons Creature Shop. It was constantly on air.
Since Dupieux, who is not only a film-maker but also a musician, had already created a piece of electronic music for the ad (in all of two hours) and it proved to be so hugely popular he decided to release it as well under his musician’s name Mr. Oizo (a corruption of the French word for bird, oiseaux, as he was called by his friends ever since they got really high a long time ago).
People craved for nonsense in those days and the song became a huge international hit.
There are many things one can do on a Tuesday night. Some people choose to do sports, others might be in a book club, and some have to do the weekly maintenance. In the early 1990ies, a group of musicians around Kevin Gilbert used the night to meet in Pasadena, California and casually write and play songs together. When Gilbert started dating singer Sheryl Crow the club soon turned into a means to develop her “second first” album – the first one had been scrapped, as both her and her label found it lacking – which when eventually completed was named Tuesday Night Music Club after the group.
Unfortunately the relationship turned sour when Crow claimed all songwriting credits for herself in an interview and disputes about copyrights broke out. The album had a slow start, with three singles released without gaining much popularity (among them Leaving Las Vegas, which later would become quite a big hit as well), until All I Wanna Do was released as the fourth one. Ironically, that song which finally helped the album to it’s breakthrough in itself is based on a poem by Wyn Cooper, who earned quite a bit of royalties for it – but faced a lawsuit of his own over the first line: “All I want is to have a little fun before I die”, the inspiration for the poem, happened to originally have been a line uttered by his friend Bill Ripley while they were out drinking…
Broken glass notwithstanding the song – and eventually the album – went on to be hugely successful and Crow would go on to have a string of hits. As well as famous boyfriends, among them Eric Clapton, Owen Wilson and Lance Armstrong.
We continue this week’s theme of “things that make boatloads of money although nobody admits to consuming them” with another cheaply produced golden goose: soap operas.
Being named after the detergent manufacturers who originally used to be the sponsors of this kind of shows (back when they were on the radio) they feature complicated interwoven never-ending stories and often have a very loyal fan-base. Some very successful representatives of the genre were “As the World Turns” in the US, that ran for a whopping 54 years, “Lindenstrasse” in Germany or “Neighbours” in Australia, which was very popular in the UK as well and made it to almost 9000 episodes before it was cancelled earlier this year.
One of the early stars of Neighbours was Kylie Minogue, who played a tomboyish mechanic and was already quite famous down under when she travelled to London in 1987 to work with the successful production team of Stock Aiken Waterman. Alas, that was not the case there and they in fact had forgotten about her arrival and therefore churned out “I Should Be So Lucky” in about 40 minutes while she waited in front of the building, and then had to sing it line by line. She was not a happy camper, to say the least, and when the song became a huge international hit and markets were asking for a follow-up Mike Stock had to travel to Australia and crawl a hundred yards on his knees, begging the actress for forgiveness.
In the coming years she would continually reinvent herself, becoming the best-selling female Australian artist and the first to have a top-selling album in the UK in each of the five following decades.
