Category Archives: Songs from 1986

Album: Greetings from Timbuk 3, 1986

Justification: Like Devo and the B-52s and IRS labelmates Wall of Voodoo, Timbuk 3 are underrated as maker of darkly-weird music – and for the exact same reason. Like ‘Whip It’, ‘Rock Lobster’ and Mexican Radio’, they had one very popular song that cast a large shadow over everything else they subsequently did.

Pony!

See, ‘The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades’ was a huge hit all over the place, guaranteeing the husband-and-wife team of Pat and Barbara McDonald a place on a million One Hit Wonders Of The 80s compilations. And it’s a novelty song in the sense that it sounded like nothing else on the radio at the time, and it has a sense of humour but it certainly wasn’t a joke: if anything, it was a hollow laugh at the military-industrial complex and those who worked within without looking beyond the end of their own nose: “I study nuclear science, I love my classes, i got a crazy teacher who wears dark glasses, things are going great, and they’re only gettin’ better.”

The amount of money involved dates it, though. “Fifty thou’ a year” doesn’t get as much beer as you’d think these days.

They were around a lot longer than you realised too: they did six studio albums in eleven years until finally splitting in 1995 as the McDonalds’ marriage disintegrated.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010: Nothing for the 21st, but the 20th was the Hoodoo Gurus and the glorious love-song-that-is-actually-a-fuck-you-to-an-ex-bandmate, ‘I Want You Back’.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2011:Same, nothing for the 21st but the 20th was a piece of pure 80s shmaltz: it’s Johnny Hates Jazz and ‘Shattered Dreams’.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

 467. Paul Simon: The Boy in the Bubble (2 May)

468. 10,000 Maniacs: Candy Everybody Wants (7 May)

469. Starky: Hey Bang Bang (14 May)

470. Hefner: When the Angels Play their Drum Machines (16 May)

471. Sparklehorse: Happy Man (17 May)

Album: Gracelands, 1986

Justification: OK, if I had my way, this would be the Blue Aeroplanes’ version, which is loose and drunk and awesome. Which is not to say that this is not a great song – it is – but just that that accordion could be a bit more aggressive, which the Aeroplanes achieve by swapping it out for some chunky slide guitar. Just sayin’.

Perspective: it's what all the cool artists don't bother with.

But it is one of Paul Simon’s greatest tunes, and arguably another of my occasional Songs That Celebrate All Things Rational (like this, and this, and this). Although that might be because its a song that references technology arguably good (the long distance call, looking upon a distant constellation that’s dying in the corner of the sky, a baby with a baboon heart) and otherwise (a bomb in a baby carriage wired to the radio, loose affiliations of millionaires and billionaires), and reminds me of the Arthur C Clarke axiom that any technology suitably advanced is indistinguishable from magic – for medicine is magical, and magical is art.

I think the other reason I prefer the Blue Aeroplanes’ version is that it doesn’t have fretless bass in it. God I loathe that instrument.

The Graceland album was a firm favourite with my parents, blasting from the tape deck during a hundred family trips and journeys to and from our beach house down the coast. It’s also recently become a massive favourite of my girlfriend, who has made it the soundtrack of lazy weekend mornings. Her discussions about the practicality of diamonds being on the soles of one’s shoes have been powerfully enlightening.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2010 and 2011: I had another day off during both years? No stamina, that’s my problem. Fortunately there are loads and loads of songs in the 1986 archive.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

462. Redd Kross: The Lady in the Front Row (24 Apr)

463. Beulah: Emma Blowgun’s Last Stand (26 Apr)

464. Tom Lehrer: Poisoning Pigeons in the Park (27 Apr)

465. Weezer: Undone – The Sweater Song (30 Apr)

466. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: Heart in your Heartbreak (1 May)

Album: Kaleidoscope World, 1986

Justification: For a while there, dear God but I loved the Chills.

Cover art by Miss Peterson's year 6 class at St Indie of the Blessed Slouch

The reason I adored them wasn’t because they were unusually good, though – it was because my best childhood friend, Adam R Wigg, had responded unusually positively when I’d played him Submarine Bells, the NZ band’s 1990 commercial high water mark, and I was just really damn excited about Ads being into a band I liked. I mean, he was pretty catholic in his music tastes and hated very little of what I loved (although he used to tease me mercilessly about Scritti Politti), but it was rare for him to go nuts on a band the way I typically did. Basically, I loved the Chills because he did – and this album was precious to me less because it was a collection of all of the bands singles and EP tracks up until that point and more because Adam owned it and I didn’t, so it was something that I only ever listened to in his room. Which might explain why this song is always accompanied by an olfactory memory of Adam’s dog and, far more powerfully, sneakers. Look, we were teenage boys, our rooms all smelled terrible.

And this is a song about friendship too: specifically, about Martyn Bull, one of the Chills’ early drummers who had died of cancer and left his leather jacket to Martin Phillips. So it’s not just a rollicking good song, but a heartfelt paean to an absent friend. It was also the song that put the band on the worldwide indie map which lead them from beloved Dunedin cult act to Submarine Bells, great expectations, a disasterous US deal, Phillips’ debilitating smack habit and many, many years of diminishing returns. Still, Ads and I loved them the one time we saw them, playing at the Tivoli behind Soft Bomb.

I don’t see Adam at all these days, despite living in the same city, so I eventually bought my own copy of the album. It wasn’t the same.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2011: I took a few days off – I’ve no idea why – so let’s see how the hell I justify including the Bloodhound Gang’s ‘Fire Water Burn’?

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

426. Bluejuice: The Reductionist (13 Feb)

427. Absentee: We Should Never Have Children (14 Feb)

428. The Johnnys: Injun Joe (15 Feb)

429. Depeche Mode: Wrong (16 Feb)

430. Shonen Knife: Riding on the Rocket (20 Feb)

Album: Highlights of a Dangerous Life, 1986

Justification: This was a surprise that my brain dredged up under its own steam, since I found myself singing the chorus when I woke up this morning for reasons I can’t fathom. It’s another of those Australian music history lessons since this was the band that invented cow punk (country music played in inner city Sydney venues, effectively).

The Johnnys were formed by Roddy Radalj, aka Roddy Ray’Da, after he quit the band he’d formed with fellow ex-Perth boy Dave Faulkner, the Hoodoo Gurus. However he didn’t stick around in his new band too long either: by 1985 he had ceded frontman status to a recent blow-in from New Zealand named Spencer P Jones. Yep, this is where the future Beast of Bourbon/Paul Kelly sideman found an early home, and it is he singing this single – which I was massively grateful for at the time, thanks to the video’s handy inclusion of the chords which I, as a 14 year old trying to learn guitar at the time, found enormously useful. Thanks, the Johnnys!

And yes, that’s Mental As Anything/Dog Trumpet mainstay Reg Mombassa (aka Chris O’Doherty) as the preacher. We run into him at the supermarket sometimes, because we live in the oh-so-fashionable inner west, where the words of art, commerce and hipsterism collide. Insert something about Sydney being the, ahem, “City of Villages” here.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2011: The Cardigans were worming into your head and dissolving your brain with ‘Lovefool’.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

423. Feist: 1234 (6 Feb)

424. The Mavis’s: Cry (7 Feb)

425. Cheap Trick: Surrender (9 Feb)

426. Bluejuice: The Reductionist (13 Feb)

427. Absentee: We Should Never Have Children (14 Feb)

Album: Brotherhood, 1986

Justification: I preferred when my feelings about New Order were unambiguously ambiguous. I always felt I was a little too uncool for them, with their arty Peter Saville record sleeves that I collected judiciously (on 7″, because I wasn’t cool enough to get their 12″s), despite the fact that I’ve never loved a single one of their albums – thought their 1987 Substance compilation was and is one of the most perfect collections of songs ever created (and I’m just going to say it: the re-recording of ‘Temptation’ shits all over the original). I’ve generally thought they were deliberately snarky in interviews, that Bernard Sumner was an abysmal lyricist, that none of them were really much good as musicians, and that it was something between sheer luck and keyboardist Gillian Gilbert that made them just so happen to write incredible song after incredible song for the best part of a decade.

Nowadays I have the added difficulty that they lack the band’s most volatile personality in loudmouth bassist Peter Hook, who has enjoyed a running argument with Sumner since about 1989 which ended in his 2007 announcement that the band had split up, which lead to a war of words over who owned the name and what constituted New Order. I’d probably care a little bit more if either of the following two things were not true:

1. New Order’s post-hiatus material wasn’t exactly top notch (Get Ready is OK, Waiting for the Siren’s Call is bollocks), and
2. New Order are really not that great live, due primarily to the fact that Stephen Morris is a terrible, terrible drummer – which, for a dance act, is a bit of a problem. When they defer to the drum machines, as on ‘Blue Monday’, the problem is that Sumner can’t sing.

So I’m left in the situation where one of my favourite bands of all time is one I don’t even like. Do you appreciate how damn confusing that is?

Still, this song is amazing – and humanised the band a hell of a lot for me as it made me aware that they weren’t magical synth alchemists. This was down to my early 1987 acquisition of a Yahama DX-27 synth (the fiddlier younger brother of the DX-7), which revealed that New Order didn’t even create their own sounds – that bass sound that underpins ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’ is an off-the-rack Yamaha synth preset (bank B, voice 4 as I recall – and the bass sound from ‘Blue Monday’ is voice 2). I guess there’s an outside chance that the company’s synth wizards were using New Order as their inspiration for their 1987 range, but if so they were pretty damn quick off the draw. More likely the band were in the studio, fiddling with their new toys, hit a key and went “hey, nice sound, that’ll do the trick” – and bless ‘em for it.

Anyway, this was the single that made me fall in love with the band, just like ’60 Miles an Hour’ was the single that convinced me that we should see other bands.

SONG YOU SHOULD HAVE REDISCOVERED THIS TIME IN 2011: It was Canadian would-be power-pop in the form of Hot Hot Heat and ‘Bandages’.

AND HERE’S THE LAST FIVE…

406. Blur: Popscene (6 Jan) 

407. Murray Head: One Night In Bangkok (9 Jan)

408. Black Kids: I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You (12 Jan)

409. The Folk Implosion: Natural One (13 Jan)

410. The Kinks: Apeman (16 Jan)

Album: Graceland, 1986

Justification: This issue has been dissected at length by other music writers who also miss the days back when there was a music industry, but the era of the ubiquitous universal album seem to be gone forever. I don’t think it’s just nostalgia talking: as early as the 90s media and fashions had fragmented to the point where even massive, multi-million-selling albums like Nevermind and Definitely Maybe were not cross-generational international favourites, but in the 70s and 80s, when TV was limited and terrestrial and radio more generalist, albums could appear that everybody would buy as a shared cultural experience. I was genuinely surprised when my best friend’s family didn’t have a copy of Brothers in Arms, which everyone else on the planet appeared to have (it turned out they were waiting to get it when they bought a CD player, which they did soon after I made this discovery) and I’m pretty sure that every household was legally obliged to own a copy of Thriller.

However, the cassette that was in everybody’s family car in 1986 was Graceland by Paul Simon. Everybody. Had. This. Album. I didn’t realise the extent of it until this song was spun between bands at Golden Plains earlier this year and every single fucking person there got up and danced, followed by lots of delighted reminiscences of family driving holidays when this was the soundtrack (often doing double-duty with Billy Joel’s An Innocent Man or, in the case of the Street-Hockings, Geoge Harrison’s Cloud Nine). This, and the aforementioned Brothers In Arms, was an album bought exclusively by the nation’s dads – and you can see the effect that its popularisation of hi-life guitar and syncopated African rhythms had on music in everyone from Vampire Weekend to Cloud Control. I can’t think of a single album that’s had a more direct cause-and-effect influence on popular music.

It’s still a surprisingly good album, by the way, although I prefer the Blue Aeroplane’s somewhat messy take on ‘The Boy In The Bubble’. Which is superb.

THIS TIME IN 2010: The The were creating a classic in ‘This Is The Day’.

Album: Candy Apple Gray, 1986

Justification: I got into Hüsker Dü backwards, which means “I sought them out because I loved the Pixies” rather than “Pixies were totally just ripping off the Dü, man”. This was one of Grant Hart’s songs and is probably their best known single, which is where proper fans sniff and talk about how Bob Mould wrote all the best songs anyway. And then the Grant Hart defenders weigh in about how at least Hart knew how to write a good pop song, and that’s when I used to zone out the conversations that the other people working at Big Star Records in the 90s were having.

Anyway, it’s a hell of a song. And Hart’s solo album from last year, Hot Wax, is actually pretty damn strong (the closing track, ‘My Regrets’ is particularly great). Bob Mould’s solo work has been damned patchy, although now I think about it, there really should be some Sugar on this list. I’ll leave it for a while until you forget, though, then when you least expect it I’m going to SMASH IT RIGHT IN YOUR FACE.

Sorry. It’s been that sort of a week.

THIS TIME IN 2010: Lemonheads were creating indie-pop masterpieces like ‘Confetti’.

Album: Private Revolution, 1986

Justification: This was a moderate success in the UK, where Karl Wallinger was best known (if at all) as a former member of the Waterboys. However, it was a freakin’ huge success in Australia: it reached #4 in the national charts and seemed to hang around for pretty much the entire year.

And it was about the only success World Party had: while the home-recorded debut was a hit and his second album Goodbye Jumbo did OK, but Wallinger’s star declined in the years that followed until a brain aneurysm knocked him out for several years in 2000. He recovered, however, and was opening for Steely Dan on their 2007 Australian tour – and he’s working on new material even as you read this. But he’s got some standards to match: man, what a chorus this song has.

THIS TIME IN 2010: We were introduced to the magnificent talent of Aimee Mann with ‘Til Tuesday’s ‘Voices Carry’.

Album: London 0 Hull 4, 1986

Justification: Dear god, how I loved the Housemartins. Economical three minute pop songs with snide lyrics, a clear left-wing bent and buckets of harmonies. Yes, the whole Up With Jesus thing bugged me, which is why I ignored their biggest hit – their a cappella rendition of ‘Caravan of Love’ – and focussed exclusively on songs like this, in which Paul Heaton and Co lambasted the work-consume-die ethic of modern society, and did a nice little dance while doing so.

And in case you’re unaware: that bassist is Norman “Fatboy Slim” Cook, while Heaton and late period drummer Dave Hemingway went on to form the Beautiful South, whose first two albums are exquisite – and, since Heaton had become an atheist by that stage, also less lyrically annoying. Guitarist Stan Cullimore moved into children’s music and created Nick Jr’s show The Bopps.

The members are all still friends (and were photographed together in 2009 by Mojo), but have been adamant that they’ll never reform.

THIS TIME IN 2010: Hunters & Collectors were laying down the law with ‘Say Goodbye’.

Album: They Might Be Giants, 1986

Justification: It was their first hit, it was the first TMBG song I ever heard, and it’s got the highest word-to-apostrophe ratio of any song title in popular culture that I can think of right this minute. Like previous SYSRTBIIA entry ‘Birdhouse In Your Soul’ is was mainly written by John Linnell and has remained in the band’s live setlists for their entire career. And rightly so: there’s something wonderfully liberating about being part of a crowd bellowing “No-one in the world ever gets what they want, and that is beautiful/Everybody dies frustrated and sad, and that is beautiful”.

Speaking of liberation, it was my high school pal Libby Drew who first introduced me to the band via their self-titled cassette, which I believe she’d borrowed from Brighton Library in 1989 – so I came in a little late, but I fell hard. Lib was a major musical influence on me through high school, mainly because she has excellent taste and partially because she had access to the record collection of her super-cool elder sister Ally, upon whom I had a crush for most of my teenage years. Mind you, given that Ally was responsible for introducing Echo & the Bunnymen to the indie kids of Westminster School, I defy anyone NOT to have developed a crush on her.

When Linnell was asked what the meaning of the song was during a 2003 NPR interview, he explained that it was about “not let’s starting.” Touché.

THIS TIME IN 2010: Too late for shoegaze, to soon for Britpop: but still, Adorable, you gave us ‘Homeboy’.