Category Archives: Songs from 1979

Album: Metro Music, 1979

Justification: This date is significant to me for a couple of reasons, so to celebrate, I’m going to ignore it completely and talk about Martha & the Muffins. Who are still around, amazing though that may sound. The Canadian combo have been recording pretty consistently (with a few breaks) ever since this album emerged in 1979 – although they changed the name to M+M there for a while, possibly during the whole Atkins Diet fad. Boom! Take that, carbohydrates!

That's right, me hearties: the gold be buried at Echo Beach! Just near the price sticker! Arrr!

The Muffins have changed line up many times, but have always been built around the core of Martha Johnson and Mark Gane (who subsequently became a couple and have at least one daughter, incidentally). This song was written by Gane, based on his memories of a holiday at Sunnyside Beach on Lake Ontario and was a standard at pretty much every school disco I can remember.

That’s all well and good, but what’s perhaps a more interesting story is that of the cute-as-a-button keyboardist Martha Ladly – that’s her in the freeze frame above. She moved to the UK and had a bit of a solo career (and was in the Associates for a while, of all things), but it was as an artist that she really made her mark. In fact, there’s a decent chance that your own record collection has some of her in it: she supposedly named OMD‘s Architecture and Morality album, her ‘Factus 8′ painting is the sleeve to New Order‘s 1981-1982 EP (their second disc, the one with ‘Procession’ and ‘Everything’s Gone Green’ on it – for a while she and Peter Saville, Factory’s designer, were a couple), worked with Roxy Music and Robert Palmer, and was employed by Peter Gabriel with his Real World Design studio for over a decade, and she’s an associate professor at the Ontario College of Art & Design these days. Now that, friends, is a career.

Anyway: ‘Echo Beach’ was a huge Juno-winning success in the band’s homeland and also went top five in the UK, Australia and a bunch of other countries who would also never hear of the band again. But if you’re a Canadian band and you’re going to have a single worldwide hit, it may as well be utterly amazing – isn’t that right, Men Without Hats?

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: It’s been decades, and still the Sugarcubes’ debut single ‘Birthday’ sounds impossibly odd.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2011: Joe Jackson’s glorious why-can’t-we-just-get-along ballad ‘Real Men’.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

449. Divinyls: Boys in Town (28 Mar)

450: Pulp: Do You Remember the First Time? (30 Mar)

451: The Trash Can Sinatras: Obscurity Knocks (2 Apr)

452. I Monster: Daydream in Blue (3 Apr)

453. Doug Anthony Allstars: (I Want to Spill the Blood of a) Hippy (4 Apr)

Album: Machine Gun Etiquette, 1979

Justification: I suspect that if I let myself, I’d rather like the Damned. The problem is that by the time I learned of their existence they’d just released ‘Grimly Fiendish’, which marked the point that they’d really stopped being a punk band and leapt headlong into goth, and then of course there was their cover of ‘Eloise’ just around the corner. However, this single was and is a brilliant song – though I’d love to know how long it took them to rehearse all the changes. Not even the Offspring could ruin it, although god knows they tried.

It’s come back to mind thanks to a massive clean out of old records in the APS-owned garage during this family visit, which revealed the still-superb Shake Some Action compilation which includes this track, and which I suspect will be providing a lot of SYSRTBIIA entries to come.

Incidentally, the bassist in the band at this point was Algy Ward, late of the Saints.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: Eh, it’s the 1979 archive for you, pal.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

397.  Michael Penn: No Myth (7 Dec)

398. Yeasayer: O.N.E (8 Dec) 

399. Mint Royale: Don’t Falter (13 Dec)

400. Lloyd Cole: No Blue Skies (14 Dec)

401. Jean Michel Jarre: Oxygène (part IV) 

Album: Discovery, 1979

Justification: I was in a taxi and it was on the radio. That’s enough, right?

OK, fine: my feelings on Jeff Lyne are complicated. On the one hand he has undeniable songs like this, and a certain underdog cachet that comes from being the fifth most beloved Traveling Wilbury, but on the other hand… well, ‘Free As A Bird’. Oh, and there was a long time that I thought – as a lot of the internet apparently does – that ‘Livin’ Thing’ was an anti-abortion song, which Lynne’s gone on record as saying it’s not. Which is a relief, frankly, because that song gets in one’s head.

This song marked a major transition in ELO: the band had started as an 1970 offshoot of the Move, mainly under the stewardship of that band’s creative firebrand Roy Wood, but Lynne took full creative control of the name when Wood took half the band and formed Wizzard in 1972. The whole idea of the band – rock songs with strings, effectively – was the basis of several increasingly successful albums in the 70s, but this was the first single without them (and with a drum loop as the basis of the track – it’s the drums from ‘On the Run’, which appears two songs before ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’, with the tape slowed down. Lynne, you’re a studio prophet).

The album was a huge success in the US and the UK, and then ELO’s star started to fall – as did so many others – thanks to Xanadu. The ELO-heavy soundtrack did brilliantly, but that stinker of a film tarnished all that it touched. It was also Gene Kelly’s final film: and that’s no way for an honest-to-god screen legend to go out.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: Grant Lee Buffalo’s hauntingly beautiful ‘Mockingbirds’.

Album: Cool for Cats, 1979

Justification: I hated this song when I was a kid. I’m not sure why – knowing me aged seven it’s probably because my little sister liked it or something – but it wasn’t until I had an English penpal with whom I swapped mixtapes that I was reacquainted with (UK) Squeeze. Shamefully I can’t remember her name, although I did meet her when she visited Australia around 1990 (we didn’t hit it off in person), but her tapes were generally great: Stranglers, Kate Bush, Fat & Frantic (and, um, All About Eve) and Squeeze, and in exactly the same way that John Flansburgh from They Might Giants explained, the thing that made me go “…the HELL?” was the opening lines of ‘Up the Junction’: “I never thought it would happen/with me and a girl from Clapham”. Genius.

Anyway: like pretty much all Squeeze songs this was written by Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook, but it’s unusual in that it’s sung by Difford (who generally wrote the band’s lyrics, incidentally). Maybe that was what put me off the band for so long: I’d assumed they were very ows-yer-fahver cockerney until I heard Tilbrook’s honey-sweet voice and went “ah! TWO vocalists! I gets it now!”

It’s a damned infectious song. You’ll have the chorus in your head all day, I warn you.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: REM’s non-punctuated classic ‘Cant Get There From Here’.

Album: Repeat When Necessary, 1979

Justification: For years I’d just assumed this was an Elvis Costello song, because it sounded exactly like an Elvis Costello song. Also, it turned out to be an Elvis Costello song – though he didn’t perform it, at least initially: it was written for Dave Edmunds, who made it a major hit. It was clearly the cool thing to do in that group of people: Elvis was to do something similar with a song written by Edmunds’ bandmate Nick Lowe: ‘(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?’

Lowe and Edmunds were in Rockpile together very briefly after this single (all of Rockpile play on it, as they did on Lowe’s Labour of Lust), but the band split after their managers had a falling out. He went on to do stuff with Jeff Lynne from ELO and produced a bunch of people, most notably Shakin’ Stevens. Yes, someone was responsible for that.

He’s still around, but doesn’t play all that often outside of Ringo Starr’s All-Star Band, as far as I can see.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: Weekend, so have a dance through the 1979 archive, why don’t you?

Album: Labour of Lust, 1979

Justification: Despite this being Lowe’s biggest hit (at least in the US), I hadn’t actually realised this was his work. Then again, Lowe as always better known to me as The Person That Produced My Favourite Elvis Costello Albums (and wrote ‘(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?’). Anyway, this came to mind purely because the man’s touring next year and when knocking up a listing for him at work I rediscovered this song and thought it would be only fair of me to pass the magic on to you. You’re welcome.

Incidentally, the dame in the video is Carlene Carter, daughter of June Carter Cash and stepdaughter of Johnny, to whom Lowe was married from ’79 to ’90 – and that’s Dave Edmunds as a the limo driver. It’s an all star cast!

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: Phil Judd’s post-Enz high water mark with the Swingers and ‘Counting the Beat’.

Album: Fear of Music, 1979

Justification: Here’s a question: how were Talking Heads permitted to play this during their induction into the Rock’n'Roll Hall of Fame in 2002 without being arrested for treason?

Sure, it’s one of their best known songs, it’s one of their few big singles that they can play live (they stopped touring after 1985′s Stop Making Sense, the live film from which the above video is pulled as they never did a promo clip for it, as far as I’m aware) and it is, without a doubt, one of the best songs ever written in the entire history of mankind – but despite what it says on Wikipedia, despite various ludicrous internet interpretations, it’s crystal clear what David Byrne is singing about.

Put bluntly, ‘Life During Wartime’ is sung from the perspective of a terrorist.

Not only that, it’s a terrorist in deep cover (“We dress like students/we dress like housewives/we wear a suit and a tie/I’ve changed my hairstyle so many times now/I don’t know what I look like”) in a US metropolis – and given the references to Mudd Club and CBGBs, and the fact that the narrator has “lived in a Brownstone/I’ve lived in the ghetto/I’ve lived all over this town”, that city’s clearly New York. So: it’s 2002 and a band are singing about domestic terrorism in New York, and they’re not being wrestled to the floor? What the hell was the Patriot Act even for?

In any case, this song is freakin’ amazing. Byrne’s ability to write about the mundane and ignored had been well honed by this stage, which is one of the reasons why ‘Life During Wartime’ is such a surprising song: it has a clear narrative and a singular viewpoint – and keep in mind that this was recorded in 1979, making lines like “We’ve got computers, we’re tappin’ phonelines” seem impressively prescient.

I should also admit that I didn’t fall in love with this song until seeing Bryne and his band end their set with it at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre in whatever year he was there for the Adelaide Festival – 2006, I think, which would put it just before I upped stumps for Sydney. It was a great gig and all, but the moment late in the show when the intro to ‘Once In A Lifetime’ started up, security completely gave up trying to keep people in their seats. Glorious.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: Oh, what a classic: Magic Dirt and ‘Dirty Jeans’.

Album: Door, Door, 1979

Justification: This always-beautiful (if melodramatic) song’s been given added poignancy since the too-soon death of its writer, Rowland S Howard, of liver cancer in December 2010 (just after the release of the superb Love Crimes, which should have heralded his renaissance rather than been his swansong). He’d probably like that, since it always reportedly irked him that people thought it was the work of his band’s singer, Nick Cave. As most people should be aware, the Boys Next Door morphed into the Birthday Party when they relocated to the UK, where Howard and Cave had a falling out, the band split and most ended up as the earliest version of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds while Howard went on to form These Immortal Souls and play for a bit with fellow Party member Mick Harvey in Crime & the City Solution.

I discovered this song via the Dogs in Space soundtrack and I think it was the first thing I ever recorded when I first got a four-track recorder and was working out how to use it in 1989 or 1990. I did, however, get one line completely wrong – which the Screaming Jets also did in their hateful, hateful cover version. I have no idea why I didn’t realise that it was “alcohol and cigarettes”, since that’s very obviously what Cave sings, but at least Dave Gleeson got it more wrong than I did.

THIS TIME IN 2010: Tom Waits looked good without a shirt while ‘Goin’ Out West’.

Album: Tusk, 1979

Justification: Taking into account the Fleetwood Mac, at this point in time, were one of the biggest bands on the planet, how freakin’ weird is ‘Tusk’? It grew out of a soundcheck jam that the band had developed touring Rumours that Lindsay Buckingham turned into a song. But there’s damn near nothing there, except for the slow-building arrangement in which more and more marching band players get added (apparently this song set a record for most musicians on a single, but damned if I could find any actual record of this).

It’s also about the only FM song I genuinely enjoy because I am a sucker for things that feature thundering toms. And Mystery Science Theater 3000 used it as a vital element of their song over the end credits of Werewolf, which is still one of the funniest things I have ever heard in my life. Go on, check it out.

The video’s also hilarious, partially because it shows that Stevie Nicks was quite the little cheerleader with mad baton skillz, and partially because bassist Jon McVie couldn’t be arsed cutting his Tahiti holiday short for something as petty as a clip for their new single and is therefore represented by a cardboard cut-out. Genius.

THIS TIME IN 2010: Wall of Voodoo were tuning into ‘Mexican Radio’.

Album: New York • London • Paris • Munich, 1979

Justification: This, friends, is a genius song. It was the sole serious hit for M (basically a vehicle for singer/songwriter Robin Scott, though it also featured Phil Gould and, later, Mark King, who would go on to form Level 42 together) and is a perfect example of how, if you want something to sound otherworldly, it’s much more effective to process an organic sound (like, say, the backing vocals of Brigit Novik, who was to become Scott’s wife) than get a synth and program the heck out if it. That’s what Star Wars sound designer Ben Burrt did a lot of, by the way, which is why the cantina band* in the first Star Wars film sounded so weird: tuned percussion and woodwind with certain frequencies taken out sounds very odd to most people, much more so than if he’d jumped all over a Moog.

Anyway: M’s star burned bright and short – ‘That’s the Way the Money Goes’ was a minor hit, but basically this was it. Fun fact: he was invited to invest in Sex, the clothes store run by his old mates Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, but declined. So there you go.

Now: a certain amount of research has failed to bring this up, but I remember hearing the following tale: when Ray Parker Jr’s ‘Ghostbusters’ was a hit, Huey Lewis threatened to sue for plagarism for his remarkably similar (and earlier) ‘I Want A New Drug’. That’s been documented (and was settled without ever going to court), but I’d also heard that M had threatened to sue both parties for ripping off ‘Pop Muzik’. Maybe I dreamt it.

THIS TIME IN 2010: It was the 50th SYSRTBIIA, which was the Smiths’ glorious ‘What Difference Does It Make?’

*Figran Da’an and the Modal Nodes, if you want to be a complete nerd about it.