Category Archives: Songs from 1983

Album: single 1983, The Smiths 1984

Justification: Alrighty. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, that two-and-a-half years of a blog is probably plenty, and the nice confluence of two big fat round numbers both here (500!) and in my proper, chronological life (40!) would make for a perfect note on which to go out. A good time to begin a new chapter. To start afresh. To put away childish things and do something a little more meaningful, or a lot more lucrative.

And then I thought, “eh, nah.”

Jean Marais’ narcolepsy was a constant problem in his film career.

The reasons are twofold: first up, I’m Andrew P Street and things are never, ever that neat in my life – even in the heavily-edited version of it that gets written about on here, as you’ve possibly picked up if you’ve read any of the previous entries – and in any case I have no great idea to replace this with.

The other is that, well, this is fun. And if there’s one lesson that I’ve taken from 40 years on the planet it’s this: there are plenty of ways for things to go wrong over which you have no control, so it’s sane to enjoy the good things as much as you can. And music’s been pretty much the most important thing in my life for as long as I can remember, so any excuse to dive into it first thing in the morning is, by definition, a good one.

So, dammit, I’m just going to keep doing this. I might take a few days off over this weekend, and it probably needs a bit of a spruce up, and I think I’m going to put some of that music writing stuff that I’ve done over the last 20-odd years of my professional life up here since where the hell else are those pieces going to go, but let’s worry about that down the track.

Mainly, thanks for reading. I have no idea who you people are (outside of what Google analytics tells me, that is – an unexpected number of you are Canadian, it would appear) but I’m glad you’re out there. And hopefully you’ve started your mornings with some sweet tunes on occasion.

And this song? I’ve pretty much explained the importance of the Smiths to me elsewhere, but let’s face it: how many songs are better than this? Freakin’ few is how many.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010 AND 2011: Two of my other favourite tunes, for similarly self indulgent reasons: the Auteurs still-magnificent ‘Showgirl’ and Les Savy Fav’s jubilant ‘Let’s Get Out Of Here’, each of which nod to particularly significant women in my life who have moved on, but are fondly remembered.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

495. Health: Die Slow (12 July)

496. Metric: Monster Hospital (13 July)

497. The Bamboos feat. Megan Washington: King of the Rodeo (16 July)

498. The Charlatans: I Never Want An Easy Life… (17 July)

 499. The Hollies: Carrie Anne (18 July)

Album: Heartland, 1983

Justification: Yes, Real Life were a pioneering synth-pop band in a time when Australian music had little time for anything other than pub rock; yes, this single and ‘Send Me An Angel’ proved that Australian bands could compete on the world stage with the best of what the UK and US had to offer in the ’80s; yes, the video clip demonstrated that local filmmakers could be as nonsensically garish and horribly dated as the rest of the world – or, in the words of the inspired genius who wrote the song’s entry on Wikipedia:

At the beginning of the video there is a crowd in darkness with a luminous paint. The band performs the song in a bright room and then it is distributed among the members throughout the studio with some other people. In addition there are movie effects

However, not even the fact that paint is distributed among the members throughout the studio is the reason that this song is the four-hundred-and-fortieth Song You Should Rediscover Today Because It Is Awesome. That honour is for one reason and one reason only: it was the first ever song to which I danced with a girl.

"Slightly out-of-focus shot of a rusty weathercock? Sure, that'd be a fucking kick-arse album cover! No, there's no need for a second opinion, let's print this baby!"

The year was 1984. It was the year seven disco at Flagstaff Hill Primary School. I was a coltish lad of 12 – not a boy, as Britney Spears might say, but not yet a woman. I was undoubtably wearing something truly hideous – I can’t be sure but there’s a pretty good chance I was wearing quadruple denim (jeans, vest, jacket and natty little denim hat – and yes, not for the first time, I’m amazed I turned out straight too) and I can’t recall who it was with whom I was dancing. However, I do know that it was to this song, and it’s had an impossibly nostalgic hold on me ever since.

Fun fact: it was produced by prog-rock guitarist and occasional Gong member Steve Hillage.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2011: I missed a day, and I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that it was post-Mardi Gras party comedown. So let’s go for the entry from March 4 instead: it’s Camper Van Beethoven’s cover of ‘Pictures of Matchstick Men’.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

435. Trio: Da Da Da (28 Feb)

436. Five-Eight: Karaoke (29 Feb)

437. Lucious Jackson: Naked Eye (1 Mar)

438. Menswear: Daydreamer (2 Mar)

239. Vampire Weekend: Oxford Comma (5 Mar)

Album: single 1983, Welcome to the Pleasuredome, 1985

Justification: How much of Frankie Goes to Hollywood was the band themselves and how much was Trevor Horn‘s production is open to debate, but one thing that’s gloriously true is this: what turned the band from a Liverpool cult act to one of the most (initially) successful UK bands of the 80s wasn’t the fact they had good songs (though they did), or that Holly Johnson was a compelling vocalist (which he is), or even that the late, great John Peel was an early supporter (which he was, and was what made all the difference for bands like the Smiths and the Fall). No, the thing that turned them into stars was this: homophobia.

Allow me to explain:

‘Relax’ was the band’s debut single, produced by Horn who also signed the band. There were rumours floating around at the time that a) the entire thing was built by Horn on a Fairlight computer, and b) that the early sessions involved Johnson and no other members of the band, who were replaced in the studio by Ian Dury’s band the Blockheads – both of which have some truth to them (certainly, it’s more an Art of Noise track than it is a FGTH one). What’s definitely true was that on January 11 1984 Radio 1′s Mike Read took the song off mid-way through, declaring that he found the song, the lyrics and the band distasteful. The BBC banned the song from airplay – the band couldn’t appear on Top of the Pops when it subsequently hit number one, despite having already performed it on the show – although people like Peel and Kid Jensen played it on their shows anyway because they weren’t children.

That being said, Read walked right into Horn’s trap. He had deliberately courted controversy from day one with the band’s record sleeve, promo photos and advertising, playing on the fact that Johnson and Paul Rutherford were out gay men in a time when most gay popstars were either closeted (hi, George Michael!) or effeminate, unthreatening figures of fun (cheers, Boy George and Marilyn!). Mike Read, by being squeamish about bloke-on-bloke action, progressed the cause of mainstream acceptance of gay culture in the UK by years via one little on-air tanty.

Also, it’s worth nothing that this song is freakin’ great. They were to have two more number ones (‘Two Tribes’ and ‘The Power of Love’), but this was Frankie’s masterpiece.

The band reunited in a room in 2004, thanks to VH1, but didn’t play any music together. A Johnson-less version of the band subsequently toured for a bit but fell over in 2007.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: The Who’s magnificent ‘I Can See For Miles’.

Album: Blood Red River mini album, 1983

Justification: If you work at dB Magazine – as I did for almost seven years – it’s a given that you’re going to hear a lot of the Scientists. Our two shared computer servers in the early 00s were called ‘Happy Hour’ and ‘Swampland’, for freak’s sake. Publisher Arna Eyers-White and editor Alex Wheaton both dig the band with great enthusiasm, and the reissue of Blood Red River in the late 90s with singles and b-sides thereon got some serious thrashing in the office. Frankly, had there been a video for it, this song would be ‘Swampland’: how the hell Kim Salmon managed to make a slightly goofy couplet like “My heart is a place called Swampland/Nine parts water, one part sand” sound effortlessly cool and downright sinister still amazes me.

That CD also helped me understand why people worshipped Salmon, which I’d never quite gotten before. I mean, he does good work, but you do kinda need to see where he came from first, in the same way that Ed Kuepper‘s career is brighter and more dazzling if you have the Saints and the Laughing Clowns to give it context.

I saw the band play the Blood Red River album start to finish at the Enmore a couple of years ago, opening for Sonic Youth playing Daydream Nation. What a great night.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: Tears for Fears were being awesome with ‘Mad World’.

Album: single, 1983

Justification: When this was played on Countdown, the following thought went through my 11 year old head for the first time: “Hold on – they have bands in Japan?”

I think up until this point I had just assumed that all the world’s contemporary musicians were clumped in the UK, US and Australia, since those were the charts that were printed in the newspaper, and I might have surmised that there could be some in Ireland, Canada and New Zealand just through proximity. However, Sandii & the Sunsetz made me aware that there were probably bands all over the world, and furthermore that I should hear as many of them as possible. Which is why, 20-something years later, I was trawling through collectors stores in Osaka looking for Guitar Vader and Takako Minekawa discs.

S&theS were still operational until the 90s, and Sandii (aka Sandra O’Neale) now records pretty much exclusively in the hula genre, according to Wikipedia, and splits her time between Hawaii and Japan. So there you go.

If memory serves, Sandii & the Sunsetz played some huge outdoor gig on the Glenelg foreshore around the time of this record and there was a riot. I could be wrong.

Oh, and Anne and I found this second hand single when we were trawling the Myponga Markets, which was also where we bought the Angels’ ‘No Secrets’. That haul could yet form the basis of entire weeks of SYSRTBIIA, I tells you.

THIS TIME IN 2010: Belle & Sebastian’s mighty ‘Lazy Line Painter Jane’.

single, 1983; This Is What You Want… This Is What You Get, 1984

Justification: This was a strange time for the former Johnny Rotten. PiL had ceased to be a band by this point and become effectively John Lydon’s solo project: bassist Jah Wobble had left two years earlier, while guitarist Keith Levine had been sacked over his escalating heroin use and drummer Martin Atkins walked not long after. The spirit had changed too: the first few PiL albums had been inflammatory, powerful records (Metal Box, rightly, is cited by critics as a masterpiece of the period) but Lydon seemed to have drifted into one of his art-prank-over-music phases, as with the infamous May 1981 gig at the Ritz in New York where Lydon and hired hands improvised behind a screen while PiL albums played over the PA, leading the audience to tear the place up.

With the band in disarray and a couple of pretty scrappy records masquerading as PiL albums, Lydon dropped what was to be his band’s biggest hit, reaching #5 in the UK. The single was reportedly an answer of sorts to the Flying Lizards’ ‘Her Song’, which decried previously political bands who sold out by writing “songs of love”. Since the Sex Pistols’ cash-in reunion was over 15 years away Lydon was still able to sympathise with the Lizards’ position and sneer lines like “I’m inside free enterprise!” with sarcastic venom rather than as a statement of intent.

Ahead were a couple more PiL albums, the aforementioned Pistols reunion, a self-serving autobiography and a lucrative late career as tame Snotty Englishman for US reality shows. However, this comes from that wonderful period where Lydon’s muse was still firing out shards of righteous fury and making records that actually, genuinely mattered.

Album: Call of the West, 1983

Justification: Friends, I refuse to choose between the two periods of Wall of Voodoo. They are one of the very, very few bands that have ever survived changing their frontperson/main songwriter, by virtue of both of those people being astonishingly strong characters. The band began with Stan Ridgeway as its focal point, writing quirky yet catchy as hell tunes and delivering them in his ah-shucks speak-singing – of which this amazing song is the most well-known example – and when he quit for a solo career the band replaced him with Andy Prieboy, who was and is one my favourite songwriters on the planet and gave them their biggest hit in ‘Far Side of Crazy’. Both periods are amazing and both men have been unjustly ignored as solo artists, despite being stone-cold geniuses. There’s no justice in rock’n'roll, dammit.

Album: Soul Mining, 1983

Justification: I fell in love with The The pretty much because Johnny Marr joined the band after the demise of the Smiths. It was much later that I wen back through Matt Johnson’s pre-Marr days and discovered that he was pretty damn amazing and that a particular song I’d loved in the 80s and had probably assumed at the time was by Lloyd Cole was actually ‘This Is The Day’, a song which still brings a tear to my eye with its glorious impotence, having so often been the person declaring that this was the day my life would surely change. The song’s been used on a number of ads since, which has diluted its power somewhat.

Apparently Matt Johnson mainly does soundtracks now, although a new The The album is said to be in the works (though it appears to be Johnson getting bands he likes to cover him, which sounds kind of awful). Pity for anyone who tries to Google the band, though.

Album: The Pleasure of Your Company…, 1983

Justification: I can rhapsodise about Models more eloquently and tediously than I can about most bands, for no band had a larger influence on my musical taste. They were the first band that I identified as being deeply original AND Australian, and as ‘Out of Mind, Out of Sight’ topped the charts I enjoyed the giddy thrill, at age 13, of first expressing a sentiment that was to colour my entire subsequent life and career: that their old stuff was loads better than their new stuff, and that they’d totally sold out.

‘I Hear Motion’ was the lead single from the band’s damn-near-perfect album The Pleasure of Your Company…, and marks where singer/guitarist/leader Sean Kelly was floating in the Lagrange point between the enormous gravitational influence of his most important collaborators, past and future. In the ascendant there was new bassist and old friend James Freud, whose pop star good looks and sweet singing voice were to herald the band’s commercial breakthrough (a breakthrough, somewhat ironically, that was to see Kelly marginalised in his own band). The retrograde influence in this dance, however, was keyboard player Andrew Duffield. Duffield was the second-longest-standing member of the band, although he had an occasionally turbulent relationship with Kelly and had, by this stage, already quit Models twice.

While the previous Models albums had been resolutely art-rock, …Company was a sleek, danceable pop record thanks in no small part to the production of Nick Launay and the rock-solid drumming of newish drummer Barton Price. ‘I Hear Motion’ had begun life as a track called ‘Gag Bag’, written by Duffield while attempting to play Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition’ . By the time Launay was on board, however, it had taken on several new elements (including that genius key change bridge and gang-vocal chorus) and became the band’s breakthrough single while the 12” did very nicely in the clubs. The parent album was also successful, although the subsequent singles flopped (‘God Bless America’ and ‘No Shoulders, No Head’ – the last of which was a hypnotic percussion drone about brutal wartime casualties, and thus was hardly the most toe-tappin’ combination of style and content). But Oz-rock stardom was around the corner with ‘Big on Love’ and then the first Freud-sung single, ‘Barbados’ hitting #2 on the singles charts. By that stage, however, Duffield was gone and Models was increasingly the vehicle for James Freud: Leather Pant-Wearing Rock Superstar. But that’s another story.

Album: Whammy, 1983

Justification: I contend this is an enormously underrated B-52s song. Sure, everyone loves ‘Rock Lobster’ and ‘Planet Claire’ and ‘Private Idaho‘, but this little confection – with all five members a-singin’ away and presenting themselves, dating-video style – is the sort of thing that absolutely no other band could possibly have done. And now that Ricky Wilson’s no longer with us, it’s one of his most prominent moments on record. And that’s a fine little dance routine.

Apparently they’d do this live to a backing tape so they could all hit the front of the stage in their full singin’, dancin’ glory. Amazing. And Whammy‘s a massively underrated album, although it does suffer a little in comparison with the first two.