Let There Be Music

Prefab Sprout will indeed release a new album in early september! "Let´s change the world with music" (not more not less) will be the first PS-album in eight years.


From what I gather the album was actually planned to be the follow-up to "Jordan: The Comeback" from 1990, titled "Earth: The story so far". Apparently the record company was bored by the spiritual tone of the material and shelved it.

Listening to the album opener "Let there be music" it appears that the whole record could have been put into the vaults, waiting for it´s release 20 years later. "Let there be music" is bonafide Prefab Sprout radio-pop (where it will never be played, of course). I am listening to it on endless repeat right now.
So are these actually only demos recorded roughly 20 years ago? It doesn´t really matter! It´s Prefab Sprout, it´s timeless (regardless of a gated snare and Paddy´s Vadder Abraham-beard).



I think the heroes of back in the day should do remixes for this: Frankie Knuckles, Mashall Jefferson, Justin Robertson... oh, I forgot: they were actually giving remix jobs to the Future Sound of London back then.

All You Can Eat

"I´m the pack-man, eat everything I can"! This harsh electro-funk track exploited the "Pac Man"-fever of the early eighties and became a classic of the emerging breakdance/electro scene of that time.
Produced by Bobby Robinson, who is in the music business since the mid-fifties, "I´m the pack man" was chosen as the opening track for the seminal compilation series "Street Sounds Electro 1" which rocked the world with the freshest electro and fantastic live-mixing.

Ming & Ping

Ming & Ping are identical twin(k)s from Hong Kong and their full on 80´s electro-pop is damned catchy.

Their second album "Causeway Army" was already released in 2007 but it seems they are trying to go for the international market now with a new video clip for "Legends of Nothing". With the right amount of exposure in all the relevant beach-clubs and sangria bars this could become a huge summer-hit.

Nothing New but Normal (and Robert Rental)

Rare footage of The Normal (aka Daniel Miller) and Robert Rental performing live during the Rough Trade Tour in 1979

Warning!

After Edgar Schlepper unpacked the new guitar-synthesizer he had ordered for his music-shop he immediately called his friend Hans Müller and they spend a drunken night toying around with this new device. Müller, who worked at a record company must have seen the potential of their experiments and the two formed Warning. They called themselves Ed Vanguard and Mike Yonder, put on black robes and Darth-Vader-esque masks and invented (and buried) death-metal-doom-disco.

The German producer duo hit it big when their bizarre and disturbing single "Why can the bodies fly" was used as the memorable soundtrack for a 1982 episode of popular TV-crime program "Tatort" (Crime-scene).


In the now classic episode "Peggy hat Angst" (Peggy is afraid), the killer listens to the song over and over while playing bongos. He terrorizes women by playing the song over the phone late at night. He finally kills one of his victims (a fashion-model) while she is on the phone talking to a model-friend. We only hear the music blaring through the speaker overlaid with the screams of the dying woman.

On the next day, people stormed the record-stores demanding the single which soon climbed to #11 in the charts.

This spooky novelty song with its totally disembodied voices and hilariously “dark” lyrics is a lost classic. Outside of doom-metal you won´t hear a voice like that and even today "Why can the bodies fly" sounds as strange as it did in 1982.
Check the cheap video and dig the backing-girls cooing "they killed it" over the simulated puking of the vocalist!

Take KISS in their disco-phase, bury with Italo disco and Munich Machine and witness the missing link between Amanda Lear and The Sisters of Mercy rising from it´s disco grave.



Warning released two albums which some goth-heads regard as very influential.

Today, Edgar Schlepper is producing audio-plays while Hans Müller died in 2004.

Tripping Round The Acid House

Here is a very interesting British TV feature, "A Trip Round Acid House" that mainly focusses on the media reaction (from demonization to exploitation) towards the exploding youth culture of the late 1980´s.


Part two and part three.

Memorabilia

Lyric excerpt "Memorabilia" by Soft Cell

Andy Time

Some pictures taken from TIME Magazine, showing Andy Warhol at various social gatherings. I feel that I have been to almost all those parties, since he told his diary about where he had been, who had been there and how much he had paid for the taxi to get there. Sometimes, when he was hanging with someone really rich, they would have a private limousine and Andy would be very happy.

Bob Guccione, Pia Zadora, Andy Warhol, Meshulam Riklis

Andy Treat: Andy and the delicious Treat Williams

Shooting Pia Zadora

When I visited the USA for the first time in 1990 I pretty soon found out that renting a limousine wouldn´t cost us much more than taking a taxi. I thought that Andy was such a child...

Andy walks with Nicki De Saint Phalle

with Laurie Anderson and something ugly on the wall

Andy was right, of course. Today it has become the ultimate tourist attraction to ride around with your small-town friends in a rented stretch limo (preferably a ridiculous, 12 meter Hummer). You can feel as v.i.p as you like as long as you don´t leave the car. After that you still have to queue up for the club and you´ll never know if they let you in. Feeling special because you ride in a limousine is still very, very childish...but you´ll always look better on photos.

Bette, Balloons, Ashtray

Barbie & Andy

Mathématiques Modernes

Mathématiques Modernes was a French synth-pop duo that was only active between 1980 and 1981. Edwige Braun-Belmore and Claude Arto hit the new-wave dancefloors with the amazing "Disco Rough", a nervous, angular synth-stomper that was just right for the time. Slightly chaotic and full of atonal bleeps, Edwige has full control over her detached and half-spoken lyrics. It sounds like The Normal with a super snotty attitude and/or French charm.

Their only full lengths album "Les Visiteurs du Soir", which shows them gazing over a post-apocalyptic Paris like they auditioned for a French re-make of "Village of the Damned" after they killed their Au-Pair, is full of short, hectic pop songs with titles like "Boy be my toy", "A+B+C" or "Athletical Mystery". I picked this up for small money many years ago and it seems to be a collectors item now.

Alor clicques le tiny arrow and get Disco Rough!

What Use?!

"Give me new noise! Give me new affection! Strange new toys from another world. I need to see more than just three dimensions. Stranger than fiction. Faster than light."

Listen: Tuxedomoon: What Use (1980)

Simon Reynolds did a very interesting interview with Steven Brown from legendary art-collective Tuxedomoon.

You Make My House Shine

Gee Mr. Tracy was a strange duo from Norwich, UK who had their very own idea of pop-music in the mid of the 1980s.
By 1985, the classic synth/vocal duo was on its way out. Soft Cell, D.A.F., Suicide, Sparks, OMD, had either disbanded, were on indefinite hiatus or were at low-points if their career.
Shortly before the Pet Shop Boys would seal this band model into a lasting time-capsule, Brick Smith and Vince Rogers took no prisoners with their minimal, electro-pop-punk.

At times Gee Mr. Tracy sounded like a parody of Suicide, with their monotonous, skeletal and very cheap sound. "Jet Girl" on their debut (and only) album was like a total piss-take on the Vega/Rev-sound and it could be seen as the missing link between Suicide and Sigue Sigue Sputnik (without the futuristic gadgets, the hi-tech production, the make-up and the hype).
The vocals were often shouted and apparently both band members liked to drink and singing about it.


In their short career as Gee Mr. Tracy (name refers to the "Tracy"-family of "The Thunderbirds") they actually wrote two fine pop-gems: "Permanent Swoon" and "Gee Mr. Tracy - You Make My House Shine", which I always wanted to hear in an updated house-remix.
What´s not to like in a song that has lines such as: "The doorbell plays Miles Davis, The biscuit tins are never empty, the milkman leaves us vodka (we drink it!)" and that starts with a dog barking in Japanese?!

Vicious Pink - Techno Psycho Poppers

I still can smell the vanilla-scented fog that would sweep over the dance floor when "Cccan´t You See" was played. As soon as the first, thinly sampled choir would come up, everybody made a beeline to the floor. Poppers, goths, the fetish-set and the riff-raff of every sexual preference. Vicious Pink united everyone for a few minutes.


Aptly named "Techno Psycho Poppers" by the press, Vicous Pink were catering first and foremost to the clubs. They started out as backing performers for Soft Cell and just went with the sleazy image. They had quite the imaginative merchandise for a club act.

Crushed by the Wheels of Industry

Syncopation for the nation now:


Heaven 17: Name borrowed from "A Clockwork Orange", young professional socialists with the latest technology, penthouse and pavement, crushed by the wheels of industry, dreaming of saturday night, buy this, unterzeichnen sie hier..., the luxury gap.

Kaufen sie diese:

Suicide! Horror! Shadazz!

Much confusion about Alan Vega´s alleged 70th birthday last year. Many sources claim that he was born in 1948, but since the release of a series of 10" singles celebrating 70 years of Alan Vega this question seems to be finally answered. Or is it?

I now managed to get my hand on the "The Horrors/Suicide" EP which features an amazing cover of Suicide´s "Shadazz" by Garage Rock band The Horrors.


Quite contrary to their usual sound they manage to perform the futuristic rockabilly rhumba original as if Suicide could sound today. The beat is full of clanging, cheap echo effects that turn the steady beat into a quite intricate polyrhythmic groove. The typical, minimal bass is also present, but it occasionally morphs into a sub-bass growl that nods to Jungle and Dubstep. There is even a half-speed, live drum break all the while lonely guitar chords are wailing away in the background. On top of all this we have the vocalist who sounds exactly like Vega. On first thought I actually thought it was a clever remix.
Click the arrow to listen to one of my favourite songs at the moment: The Horrors - Shadazz

The EP also contains another, very fine cover of "Rocket USA" by Nic Void and a re-mastered live recording of "Radiation" from 1984.

Here is the original for you to compare: Suicide - Shadazz.


Suicide´s second album from 1980, which contains "Shadazz", always stood in the shadow of their monumental debut. It was often called a sell-out because of it´s attempt at being a proper pop-album. Well, after they had atomised rock´n roll with "Rocket USA", "Ghostrider" and "Frankie Teardrop" they emerged from the fall-out with "Cheree", a song that paved the way to the future by looking back. In this regard, the second album was a logical progression from the first. "Diamonds, Fur coat, Champagne" and "Fast Money Music" are actually more influential and visionary than anything from their debut.

Go here for a dose of Diamonds, Fur coat, Champagne

Japandering Bananarama

Early Bananarama japandering their cuteness (and Boy George hair) to sell Canon cameras. Sweet in the first degree.

Design 8 Itself

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The Designers Republic announced last week that they have been forced to shut down due to several unlucky occurrences that all involve money.

Well, during the last years tDR has grown into a very large enterprise that had to run after corporate money in order to keep itself alive. It might have looked strange to their early followers that they were designing the international look of Coca Cola since 2006. According to founder Ian Anderson, he was also aware of this break in ethics and he plans to bring tDR back, probably on a much smaller scale. Design ate itself!

But anyway, If you look through some of their record sleeves (and other works in public spaces from the last 20+ years, it is safe to say that no other company (or single designer) has had such an enormous and lasting impact on graphic design as tDR.
There was Hipgnosis in the seventies, followed by heroes Neville Brody, Peter Saville, Russell Mills and 23 Envelope in the eighties. Designers Republic took all this, wrapped it up and ran with it. You can still spot a good tDR sleeve from one of the countless imitators that followed them.

Of course, thanks to tDR we now have loads of annoying graphic designers who like to have their photographs taken while holding up a fresh din a0-print, most likely sporting a stupid calendar-wisdom in a wacky type face.

Hee hee hee, yes! Wipeout!