1 post tagged “colour me pop”
Do you ever get a song in your head, that maybe you haven't heard for years, but it won't go away and you just have to dig it out and listen to it again? Sure you do. I've had this symptom this week for "Beat Me 'Til I'm Blue" by Colour Me Pop, an English band from the mid-80's who put out one single (on the misnamed American Phonograph label) and a few tracks on compilation albums. The song has several of my favorite ingredients: prominent slap-bass, bongos, both male and female vocals, and a nice (but short) breakdown:
That doesn't qualify as Gothic in and of itself, but its presence on a Gothic-heavy compilation LP, Breaking the Back of Love, makes the connection. And it's not far from some of the music that bona fide Gothic bands were creating at the time, most notably The Danse Society. Now that I've brought them up in a slap-bass post I have to present their slap-bass song, "Sensimilla." It was released as a bonus 12" with the club hit "Say It Again", in a gatefold sleeve. (A double 12" in a full-color gatefold sleeve; all that packaging cost for just four songs? That couldn't have been cost-effective, what was Arista thinking?) This is bassist Tim Wright's shining moment, laying down a rubbery, funky groove that won't allow you to sit still (and by "you", I mean me), and Paul Nash's syncopated rhythm guitar does a great job to accent the flow. The lyrics are on the embarrassing side (condensed version: "I love to smoke pot"), and I could do without the toasting from "Sooty" Brown (but I guess you have to have toasting in a marijuana song); but it's the funkiest song The Danse Society ever recorded, and therefore it's my favorite.
(I was all set to rip this myself, but it just turned up on New Romantic Rules, saving me the trouble. NRR is an incredible source of 80s music; many of the obscure singles I've been holding onto have turned up in Rambul's amazing 20-volume Lost Hits compilation series. Chances are if you have any favorite "lost" 80s songs, they're in there too.)
