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.
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.
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.
While today’s on-line discussions about the countless micro-issues concerning the general theme of people’s gender, sexuality and “wokeness” might often be loud, aggressive and sometimes outright hideous at least in our western parts of the world (maybe excluding Trump’s America) for most people it’s not that big an issue anymore to come out as gay. But that is a relatively new achievement. While there were some gay couples in movies, for example, something always tended to go awry in these stories up until at least the noughties and if we go back even a little bit more coming out of the closet was often outright dangerous, especially outside of the big cities.
So while there was some representation in music, Jimmy Sommerville and his flatmates in London were quite unhappy with the inoffensive nature it tended to have as opposed to what they, being openly gay, experienced in everyday life and it was important for them that their band, Bronski Beat, addressed homosexual issues in a political context.
Their breakthrough song, Smalltown Boy, describes the struggles of a queer lad from the country, being attacked by a homophobic gang, outed to his parents by the police and consequently forced to leave the village where he grew up.
The commercial success was proof that the general public had long moved further than the loud bigoted minority.
The Hip-hop culture developed during the 1970s in the Bronx and as we already discussed consisted of four main pillars (we actually missed mentioning graffiti), one of which was of course rap. In the beginning, the Deejays were typically the stars of the show, but in time the Emcees became more and more important. Especially once their lyrics started to include political messages, as opposed to mostly praising their own skills and parties, as was the initial custom. In the early 80ies the subculture had started to become a thing outside the block-parties in poor neighbourhoods where it had all started, and songs were actually recorded and broadcast.
A driving force behind conscious Hip-hop were Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five. The trio of rappers were the first group to call themselves MCs (Masters of Ceremony) and one of them, Cowboy, actually coined the term Hip-hop when he used the sounds to mimick the marching of soldiers in a scat routine for a friend that had just joined the army.
“The Message” was written by staff songwriter Ed Fletcher of Sugarhill Records as a response to the 1980 NY City transit strike, but generally describes the tensions that come along with poverty in the metropolis. It was slower than the typical rap song of the time and ingeniously incorporated elements of various musical styles – funk, disco, dub, electro – while still transporting a loud, strong and clear political, well, message. Originally the group didn’t really want to perform the song, as they were more into party lyrics, but label boss Sylvia Robinson was finally able to convince one of the rappers, Melle Mel. Although the rest of the gang in time would ask to perform as well, they only actually join in for the skit in the end.
The song built the foundation for much of what Hip-hop would become.
Helen Folasade Adu – better known by her stage name Sade – was a background singer with the Latin Soul band Pride when she started performing her song “Smooth Operator”, co-written with Pride’s guitarist Ray St. John as a solo-performance during concerts. The renditions got such good feedback that she decided to split and form her own band, taking along half of the personnel of Pride. It was a wise move: When they played their first concert at the Heaven nightclub in London they already attracted so many aspiring audience members that about a thousand of them had to be turned away at the door.
Despite the honey-sweet melody the song is about a quite evil actor in high society, a playboy who’s breaking hearts left and right while taking on all sorts of facets of a criminal’s job-description: con-man, gun-fencing, pimping, you name it.
The song was a huge international hit and the stepping stone for Sade’s career as one of the most successful British women in history.
In the extended version of the video the perpetrator is chased over rooftops by the police and falls to his doom.
When Bruce Springstreen, aka The Boss, wrote “Born In The U.S.A.” as a title track for a film about the Vietnam war – the first war America ever lost – and the stark difference in how it’s veterans were treated to those coming home as winners, he did not anticipate how totally misunderstood the song would be for generations to come.
Springsteen had never shied away from expressing his strong political convictions, standing especially for working-class people but also gender equality, immigrant and LGBTQ rights and environmental issues. So it was a rather strange notion when Ronald Reagan, whose presidency started the downfall of the American middle classes and whose policies The Boss explicitly rejected, used the song to rally his followers, misunderstanding the song for a patriotic anthem instead of the bitter critique it really is. But people would still not get it 35 years later, when the song was heard outside the hospital where then president Trump was treated for Covid-19. While Springsteen considers the song one of his best, it does bother him that it’s so widely misunderstood.
True to his convictions he also turned down an offering of 12 million US$ to let Chrysler use the song in one of their campaigns. Springsteen never allowed any of his songs to be used to sell a product.
As he did not want the video to be lip-synched, he opted instead to use shots from some concerts, and for the sake of synchronity had to wear the same outfit for a number of consecutive shows. Interspersed with pictures from a Vietnamese neighbourhood in Los Angeles and factory workers, it was an effort to claim the song back from Reagan.
Incidentally, the Album was the first CD to be pressed on American soil.
It’s a rare occasion for a French song to get to the top of the charts in countries that do not speak the language, which might explain why Claudie Fritsch-Mentrop, better known by her stage name “Desireless” is kind of considered a one-hit-wonder outsider her native France. But “Voyage Voyage” made it to the top in several countries, including the UK and Ireland, West Germany (you do remember there used to be two Germanies, don’t you?), Norway and Spain. Ironically it only made it to second place in France itself.
Fritsch-Mentrop was originally in fashion design and started her singing career relatively late, after a trip to India. She created the androgynous and cold persona of Desireless and had a falling out with her label as they wanted too much influence in the character for her taste.
While she’s still performing and writing new songs she was never able to reproduce the fame outside France.
Probably the only music video featured on our blog that prominently mentions its director.
