Category: 70ies

Songs of the 1970ies

Butchering Aural Champions

On 28 October 2022

In 1979, 70ies

Trevor Horn had spent four years working as a producer for other bands making no money at all when he finally decided to just do it himself instead and formed The Buggles with Geoff Downes. It took them more than three months to record “Video Killed The Radio Star”, a song lamenting the impact of technology on the media arts over the last decades leading up to it’s 1979 release. As the song was quite successful in their native UK and they couldn’t make time for an appearance on “Top Of The Pops” they decided to create a video instead. Now, at the time most music videos were just a few shots of the band playing, so the fact that they hired Australian director Russell Mulcahy (who would later direct Highlander) and had an actual plot made it stand apart.

Then in 1980 both members of The Buggles replaced personnel in the hugely popular progressive rock band Yes, and when touring with them in the US Horn did not quite understand why the kids in the crowd appeared to recognize him, especially given that The Buggles were not known at all in the states. He found out only later that it was because MTV, who went on air on August 1st, 1981, had chosen their video to be the first one to be emitted and with it’s elaborate content it was on heavy rotation. The fact that sales of The Buggles in the US went through the roof quite prominently soon after proofed that MTV, initially only shown on a select few cable networks, was reaching audiences very quickly and successfully.

As Horn’s wife agreed with his assessment that he was looking rather dumb in the video she convinced him to change back to the production side of music – luckily for us, as he was so good at it that he ended up with the nickname “The Man Who Invented The Eighties”.

End Times at Low Tide

By vanElden

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.

Cohors Ex Machina

By vanElden

On 12 August 2022

In 1976, 70ies

To those of you accustomed to today’s practice of lip-syncing on TikTok it might come as a surprise that there was a time when this was badly frowned upon. So it was quite the scandal when the general public realised serial offender Frank Farian had been doing just that – hiring two attractive performers and having them lip-sync to the tracks he had recorded himself. So much so that millions of buyers of the records of Milli Vanilli successfully filed for fraud and were reimbursed. Albeit Farian had been doing the very same thing for almost two decades by that point, namely with his first big project: Boney M.

Farian had released a song under the pseudonym, but he soon figured out that no one wanted to see him perform – so he hired four artists from the Caribbean Islands as a front and had them perform in Germany’s discos, clubs and country fairs. The breakthrough came when they were invited to “Musikladen”, a popular music programme of the time in Western Germany.

With the original Boney M, at least two of the female singers added their actual voices to the tracks. Some versions of the band are still touring to this day, although after 1986 the actual line-ups began to change all the time, with different people acquiring the rights to the name for other countries.

The First 3rd World Superstar

By vanElden

On 5 August 2022

In 1975, 70ies, Around The World

We’re going to stray a little bit from our “famous music videos” path today in order to go with just the right bit of music for the gorgeous weather we’re having these days.

Robert Nesta Marley, better known as “Bob Marley” grew up in tiny Nine Mile and later Trenchtown, the ghetto of Kingston, Jamaica. He formed a vocalist group with his childhood friends Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh, and was encouraged to learn the guitar by the local popular artist Joe Higgs. It would take another decade, a few name changes and a label change to Island Records before they would gain international success, but in the end they were fired as opening band for “Sly and the Family Stone” because they had become more popular than the main act. The international breakthrough came with the live version of “No Woman, No Cry” (which is Jamaican patois for “Woman, Don’t Cry”, not what many people think namely “There is no reason to cry when there’s no woman”) in 1975, their first big hit outside Jamaica.

There is a Zurich connection as well: It was after a Bob Marley concert at the Hallenstadion in the end of May 1980 when fans coming from the concert joined forces with young people protesting against the city’s decision to let the Opera house use the “Red Factory” during renovations. The youngsters had tried to secure a cultural space of their own there for a long time, and that night they clashed hard with police at the first of what is these days known as the “Opernhauskrawalle”.

Marley died a year later from cancer.

I wanted a video from back then, which is why you’re seeing a recording from the Rainbow Theatre, London – performed the day after the release of his probably most acclaimed album “Exodus” – instead of the better known breakthrough version that received a much newer video two years ago.

Just A Jump To The Left

By vanElden

On 21 July 2022

In 1975, 70ies, Must-See-Video

So far, we’ve been presenting music videos that were specifically created for the song they were accompanying. Today, we’re going to deviate from that just a bit and have a look at an important bit of pop-cultural history where it’s kind of the other way around:

“The Time Warp” is the most well-known of the songs that make up the 1973 musical Rocky Horror Show, a tribute to horror B movies and bad science fiction by Richard O’Brien that worked so well on the stages of London that it was transformed into a movie, appropriately named Rocky Horror Picture Show two years later.

Alas, test screenings didn’t go well in most places. It did get a very loyal fan base at cinemas with traditional Midnight screenings though, such as the Westwood Theatre in Los Angeles or the Waverly Theater in New York City. The same crowd started showing up time and again, occupying the same spaces every viewing. And as they knew the movie in-and-out they started their own little performances, first by shouting quips at the actors on screen, such as “Buy an Umbrella!” at a soaking wet Susan Sarandon standing in the rain. Then others actually brought said umbrella, to be opened just before the tempest hits hardest. Other props followed, like rice to toss during the wedding. Then people started to dress up as characters from the movie, standing at the right position in front of the theatre screen and lip-syncing their lines…

And so from then on to truly experience the movie you’d have to watch it in a crowd of collaborating viewers with know-how. Generations of faithful followers have been putting up elaborate choreographies during showings to this day, making it the longest-running theatrical release in film history. And while the movie sports a fair number of references to earlier pop-cultural phenomenons itself, the attics of these fans of course have been depicted in other movies as well, with “Fame” springing to mind, or, more recently “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”.

We haven’t even started about the tremendous influence the film had on the long road to acceptance for the LGBTQ+ community… Turns out it wasn’t “just” a jump to the left.

The Mock Opera

By vanElden

On 14 July 2022

In 1975, 70ies

Yes, I started this blog as a means to introduce the younger generation to the videos (and eventually just the music) of pop culture that you simply have to know. Which kind of implies that you might not yet know them (as was the case for so many catchy tunes I could no longer leave that unchallenged). But… come on. You do know Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”, don’t you? If only from Wayne’s World? Or the guy who sang it in it’s entirety being hideously plastered in the back of a police car? The 2009 Muppets Version? Wikipedia features a whole page dedicated to cover-versions of this brilliant song.

It took Freddie Mercury more than half of a decade to figure out the song in his head and it took the band months to actually record it, in five different studios and with hundreds of overdubs, as the technology of the time allowed for a maximum of 24 concurrent tracks – the final piece features hundreds of them, collected from tape that became see-through in the process, as they were used so often.

When it was finally finished they were told by various executives in no uncertain terms, that the song at almost six minutes was “much too long” (it was highly unusual for songs to skid over the three minutes mark at the time) and that there was “no hope of it ever being played on the radio“. Well, Mercury’s friend DJ Kenny Everett did play it on Capital Radio, 14 times over the span of a weekend, to be exact. The rest is pop history.

By the way: While our first blog-entry might have been The video that would define a genre this one, having been released a decade earlier, was the video that made the industry recognise the medium as a marketing instrument. Originally recorded so the band would not have to perform live on the BBC’s “Top of the Pops”, where they would have had a hard time mimicking playing the song, it became pivotal in selling the single and others would soon follow suit. Still not the first music video by far though, that honour officially goes to “The Little Lost Child“, a song by Joseph Stern and Edward Mark, who set their recording to a slide show back in 1894…

Blowing With A Dull Roaring Sound

By vanElden

On 29 June 2022

In 1978, 70ies

As you hopefully are aware the pivotal reason for deciding this internal education is highly needed was “Running Up That Hill” by Kate Bush gaining so much traction in the charts worldwide due to it’s prominent inclusion in Stranger Things’ fourth season. However, while that is of course a great Kate Bush song, it is not the Kate Bush song.

Named after a 1847 novel by Emily Brontë Kate wrote “Wuthering Heights” at the tender age of 18. While she had been writing songs for seven years by then and was gaining traction as a protégé of Pink Floyd’s very own David Gilmour, this was the song that definitely catapulted her into the public spotlight, where she remains to this day even though she has been keeping unconventional and experimental throughout her career.

As we’re trying to educate: Read the book! I promise, you’ll understand Kate’s performance much better once you did so.