15 posts tagged “new wave”

I've been saving up my Way of the West singles for eventual ripping; they were another English band who were a minor staple on the WHFS of the original new wave era, usually represented by their song "Don't Say That's Just For White Boys."  I always thought of them as like the Police, but better: Pete Carney's vocal melodies were similar to Sting's, and the guitarist (don't know which one is on which records) plays lots of weird unresolved chords like Andy Summers, but Way of the West got a better groove going.  They put out a total of five singles, but never released an album; I thought to put together a makeshift album from the records I accumulated (and mp3's of the one I never got, "See You Shake").  Once again someone has saved me the trouble, only this time it's from the artists themselves, or one of them at least.  Pete Carney, now Pete Kearney, has put together a Way of the West website which includes streams of all the songs, plus unreleased tracks!  He's preparing them for digital release on iTunes, which will fill in a big hole in the classic 80s reissue universe.  Here's a leech of "Don't Say That's Just For White Boys"; I hope it stirs up long-forgotten memories.

Staying with the 80s theme of the last post but traveling a couple hours up I-95 to Phildelphia, here's Pretty Poison from their 1983 4-song EP Laced:

More electronic toms, yeah!  In the fall of 1982 I was a freshman in college, and somehow I quickly got "in" with the campus radio rock DJs and scored my own radio show (3-6 AM!).  One weekend, at the last minute, the program director invited me to go to the 9:30 Club with him to see a band.  I had never been to a nightclub before--I had just turned 17--so I jumped at the chance.  The band was Pretty Poison, the PD was on the guest list and got me in free as well, he turned out to know the band from previous shows, he took me backstage to meet them, the singer was a beautiful little creature with teased hair and fishnets named Jade, and she kissed me!  "Oh, what a night!", as the song goes.  I remember thinking the show was spectacular, though I don't remember any details 25 years later.  I became a fan, I bought their EP when it came out, played it on my radio show several times, saw one more show of theirs, and never heard of them again until the late 80s and the infamous "Catch Me, I'm Falling".  The seeds of that fluffy synthpop are there in Laced, but so are the seeds of a darker sound, as heard here.  They were on a cusp and could have gone either way: in a gothic, Clan of Xymox direction, or the direction they ultimately took.  I would have preferred the former, but you can't have everything. 

Jade Starling is now based in Las Vegas; she continues to be thin and wear skimpy clothes, and makes what can best be described as "aerobics pop."  She has a MySpace page where you can hear some of it.  Her bio begins:

This award winning singer/ songwriter is best known for the ..1 platinum hit "Catch Me I'm Falling" on Virgin Records. Along with co-founder, musician/producer/ arranger Whey Cooler, they are the driving force of Pretty Poison. This ground breaking late 80's pop band helped pave the way for crossover acts such as Britney Spears, Christina Agulera and Pink.

And all those years I'd been thinking it was Madonna who paved that way!  Okay, she did say "helped."  Still, that's a dubious honor, I don't think I'd trumpet that about.  As I've said before about other bands: oh, what might have been.  Here's a little reminder of how it actually turned out, from that fine Jon Cryer film Hiding Out:

Hey, that's not bad for what it is!  I confess to tapping my toes while watching it.

My old chum Platters That Matter Records just had a great batch of records on ebay; it was unsold stock from legendary Rockville record store Yesterday and Today, much of which was in turn unsold stock from Baltimore's legendary Music Machine (which closed up first).  Y&T was owned by Skip Groff, who was also the man behind Limp Records, and who still runs a web-based record store under the Y&T name.  (Y&T also employed Platters That Matter Records for a while in the 90s; circle of life, etc.)  I never shopped at Y&T much, because I lived in Baltimore during my college years.  I did shop at Howie Horowitz's Music Machine religiously: every Monday I would pick up my weekly grocery check from my mom, cash it, and drive out to Howie's to spend it on British imports.  Howie was great, he took special orders and got just about anything I wanted, if not through his normal suppliers then on one of his regular trips to England.  Even so I couldn't buy everything I wanted, so I just picked up five records that I missed back then.  The first is A+B=C, a five-song EP from Baltimore-area "new wave" band Growing Up Different circa 1983.  I put "new wave" in quotes because they sound like AOR musicians playing AOR songs on synths and calling it "new wave," and that's exactly what they were.  After the demise of regional AOR giants Face Dancer, the rhythm section of Billy Trainor and Scott McGinn hooked up with keyboardist D.J. Long to form Growing Up Different.  It's not bad, it's probably typical of a lot of older (i.e. 30-ish) musicians in a lot of cities trying to adapt to a new musical style in those days.  "Stare Back In Silence" is certainly competent synthpop, cheesy electronic toms and all:

The Glory Daze AOR website has an exclusive three-part interview with Billy Trainor about the history of Face Dancer and its incarnations over the years, the most recent being in 2003.  Here's what he has to say about Growing Up Different:

After we put FD to rest, Scott and I started experimenting around with electronic music and had a pretty cool very 80's kind of band for a while.  It actually became quite popular, and we got a singles offer from a record company in England. Like the dumb asses we are, we held out for an album deal in the US which never came about.

A+B=C was released by CES Records, "A Division of CES Talent, Inc."  Locally only, I presume.  I did see Growing Up Different once, at DC's fabulous, now-defunct Wax Museum.  They were the opening act; I can't remember exactly who the headliner was, but I think it was either Men Without Hats or the Eurythmics.  (That's right, I went to a Men Without Hats concert.)  They were all right; they had some pretty cool equipment and played a tight set.  I'm glad to finally have this audio souvenir.

I rarely remember to search for my old favorites on YouTube, so it often happens that I happen upon them while blog surfing.  That's how I just turned up a couple lip-synching performances by Japan of the first song I ever heard by them, "Ghosts."  Having discovered New Wave and WHFS in 1981, it seemed there was a whole aternate universe of music to catch up on, and the only way to do it was to listen to HFS as much as possible, often long into the night.  It was late at night when I first heard "Ghosts"; I thought it was Bryan Ferry, but the arrangement was way futuristic, unlike anything I'd heard from him before.  I was fascinated with Bryan Ferry at the time (still am); I had always taken singers for granted before then, but his unique vocal style made me pay attention and realize that he was doing something artistic, and by extension, so do all singers.  Looking back on David Sylvian's career I see that his Ferryisms were just one stop in a long stylistic journey, and that he has always had a lot more power in his voice than Ferry.  Likewise, the weird synth burbles of "Ghosts" were the terminal point in Japan's evolution, their sound having started with glam rock and progressed through eurodisco, new romanticism, and dark balladry.  Hearing "Ghosts" again I think it sounds as fresh as ever, with lyrics that have stuck with me over the decades (despite my ignorance of lyrics in general):

Just when I think I'm winning
When I've opened every door
The ghosts of my life grow wilder than before
Just when I thought I could not be stopped
When my chance came to be king
The ghosts of my life grow wilder than the wind

Here are two choices of video, both to the album track, one from Old Grey Whistle Test, in color with some cheesy effects, the other in black and white from I-don't-know-where, focused almost exclusively on Sylvian.  In both videos he's wearing more makeup than a Maybelline man.

The whole "new wave of new wave" fad has been fun, with bands emulating the sounds of the Clash, Gang of Four, The Cure, Duran Duran, Joy Division, etc.  Brooklyn's Radio 4 is one of the best, putting forth a mix of the Clash and Gang of Four, sprinkled with electronics.  The raw energy and (faux?) DIY production values of their second album, Gotham (2002), have made it a fan favorite.  Their followup, Stealing of a Nation (2004), featured more mainstream production, increased synth presence, and a certain homogeneity among the songs, and thus it seems to be everyone's least favorite Radio 4 album.  But the sound is quite junior-high-friendly (it sounds like Hard-Fi), so it's gotten some play in the Veneer household and minivan, and it includes my favorite Radio 4 song of all, the foot-stomping "Dismiss the Sound"--

I especially like when the vocal comes in, at first it sounds like real heavy-metal wailing; it takes a few seconds to realize it's just a regular singing voice, heavily filtered.  And I love the guitar riff that skitters under the verses.  YMMV, of course.

I haven't thought of Standing Waves for 25 years, but they just turned up in a blog post on The Post Punk Progressive Party and took my mind back to 1982: I was a freshman at Johns Hopkins, and like many Hopkins males had started attending parties at all-female (back then) Goucher College in Towson, just north of Baltimore (this due to the approximately 2:1 male-female ratio at Hopkins).  At one such party I managed to score a date with a Goucher junior; for our first date I took her to Washington to see Minneapolis new-wave band the Suburbs at the 9:30 Club.  That was a big night for me: 17 years old and taking a woman nearly four years my senior to a nightclub!  And when we got there, we discovered that the Suburbs had canceled and been replaced by Standing Waves, from Austin.  Luckily she didn't mind, so I didn't either.  The band was passable and danceable, it was a fine night out, and we ended up dating for about two years; we were together longer than Standing Waves, who broke up in 1983.  That night was the only time I ever heard Standing Waves, but I couldn't resist following the download link from PPPP to hear them again.  I can't say I remember any of the songs from that concert.  They're rather stereotypically New Wave, and they all kind of blur together, but "Integrating Circuits" stands out a bit:

They were good for a memory blast, but it will probably be at least 25 more years before I listen to Standing Waves again.

Back in 2003, Radiohead fan Mrs. Veneer got me a little on board the Radiohead bandwagon by steering me toward a handful of songs that were near-perfect matches for my personal music receptors (Airbag, Electioneering, Idioteque).  So I picked up Hail to the Thief in its first week of release, brought it home and listened to it with Mrs. V., and we were completely underwhelmed.  She called it "unlistenable" and decided that Yorke and company had made it that way on purpose; I found it simply unmemorable, with not a single song calling out for a second listen.  I've just been revisiting it, though, and I've found a few songs to like on it, and one in particular that really grabs me:

The reason "Where I End And You Begin" appeals to me is its similarity to (or ripoff of, depending on your point of view) "Theme for Great Cities" by Simple Minds (from the Steve Hillage-produced Sons and Fascination): same beat, same warbling synthetic organ sound behind it all.  "Theme," a grand instrumental, was one of the handful of songs I would wait for on WHFS in the year of my New Wave conversion (academic year 1981-82); when the trumpet-synth comes in for the chorus, and the key turns major, it's a masterful release of the tension built up in the preceding passages:

I was lucky to find a used copy of Themes for Great Cities (at College Park's late, great Record and Tape Exchange), a best-of collection released by Stiff in November 1981; it became one of my most-played records.  The sheer muscle and modernity of Simple Minds in their early years was aesthetically intoxicating, and even now those early works retain much of their power.  They managed to capture in music society's struggle with the accelerating speed of technology better than anyone else except perhaps John Foxx's Ultravox.  The New Gold Dream album, with its lighter sound and Christian themes and imagery, was slightly disappointing but still enjoyable; I saw them on their tour for that album, at Ritchie Coliseum in College Park, with China Crisis opening.  (China Crisis ended their set early: it was raining outside and water was dripping onto the stage from the leaky ceiling, and when guitarist Eddie Lundon got a shock he took off his guitar and left the stage, followed by the rest of the band.)  Unfortunately Simple Minds continued their charge toward the mainstream, losing all artistic credibility once and for all by recording the Keith Forsey-penned "Don't You (Forget About Me)" for The Breakfast Club, thereby becoming yet another victim of The Curse of John Hughes.  Simple Minds closed out the 80s with so much bombastic dreck that few people even know about the forward-looking music they created between 1979 and 1981.  See Saltyka's blog for an excellent, comprehensive look at this heyday period.  Dikkii has some valuable insights as well.  Finally, Simple Minds' 1998 album, Neapolis, was touted as a return to their early sound.  No such luck.  Jim Kerr is still stuck on "big-issue" songwriting, and the rhythms sound like trite, run-of-the-mill late-90s loops.  It's not all bad news, though; the instrumental track "Androgyny," while no "Theme for Great Cities," could pass for a 1981 B-side:

The 80s arrived and Foghat realized they were dinosaurs; at least Lonesome Dave Peverett, the brains of the operation, did.  After 1980's forgettable Tight Shoes, featuring one of the worst album covers ever, they returned in 1981 with their stab at New Wave, Girls to Chat and Boys to Bounce.  I liked the radio track, "Live Now, Pay Later," with its Dave Edmunds-y twang:

Some nice chuckles in there about being broke, if I were doing a thematic radio set I'd play the Kinks' "Low Budget" next.  I said I liked the song, but I never bought the record, and neither did anyone else.  Foghat fans didn't want to hear new wave, and new wave fans weren't about to listen to Foghat, so they were screwed.  They fiddled with their sound on two more albums in 1982 and 1983, then broke up, but not really as they toured without Lonesome Dave, then Lonesome Dave got a new parallel Foghat together, then the original(ish) lineup reunited and resurrected their original sound for 1994's Return of the Boogie Men album, and bikers everywhere rejoiced.  A version of Foghat still soldiers on, minus Lonesome Dave and original guitarist Rod Price, who died in 2000 and 2005 respectively.  (I could've sworn I read a rant about geriatric rockers still playing concerts recently, and that it was Bob Lefsetz ranting, but now I can't find the rant to link to; but click on Bob's link anyway, it's guaranteed to bring up a rant about the music business.)  I think It's safe to assume that Foghat's 80s songs are not part of their live repertoire.  Oh, well, I'll compensate by putting up one more track from Girls and Boys.  The album opener, "Wide Boy," is even more new-wavey than "Live Now Pay Later," sounding almost like the Records:

Would you have guessed that was Foghat in a blind listening test?  Be honest...  Did I mention I saw Foghat on the Tight Shoes tour?  Well, I did.

Woo-hoo, I just got a new phono preamp, and a big old desk, so now I have my turntable hooked up to my PC and for the first time since 2002 I can rip tunes from vinyl again!  It took a bit of doing; apparently the RCA audio input jacks on my Gateway GM5472 are merely decorative.  So much for that selling point.  So I broke down and plugged the jacks into a Y-adapter and then into the sound card line in jack, and now everything's dandy.  For the maiden voyage of my new setup I've ripped "Water in My Eye" by Kissing the Pink (later just KTP), released on Magnet Records in 1982 as the B-side of the "Mr Blunt" single.  It was not included on the band's first album, 1983's Naked, because by that time the singer was no longer in the band, according to the band member I interviewed by telephone for my campus radio station.  Didn't actually record the interview, though... oops.  Too bad about the singer, her voice is like a platinum bell (or maybe that's just the studio effects, but I love that sound!):

So who was that singer?  I don't know, and I can't tell from Jeff Grote's otherwise exhaustive Kissing the Pink fansite. I wish they would have done more songs in this totally-synthesized vein.  "Water in My Eye," and the rest of the Naked album, was produced by one of the architects of the 80s new wave sound, Colin Thurston.  Thurston is best known for producing the first two Duran Duran albums; he also produced the Human League's Travelogue that I was just raving about the other day.  I was taken aback to learn that he died in January of this year.  Naked has been reissued on CD by Wounded Bird Records, who have an impressive catalog of fully-licensed reissues with original cover art.

The Human League was the first Sheffield band I ever heard: switching radio stations to WHFS in 1982 to check out the "new wave," "The Things That Dreams Are Made Of" is one of the songs that made me a convert.  That wacky synth playing under the lines "Everybody needs love and adventure, everybody needs cash to spend" (I'll try to transliterate it: reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet--- deeeowwwrrrr) lodged in the pleasure center of my brain and became my unconscious benchmark for new-waviness:

I was aware of Heaven 17 at the time (thanks to a younger and hipper girlfriend) and knew they were a Human League splinter group, but I didn't yet know that the best work of both factions was already behind them.  1980's Travelogue album is a monolith of analog-synth futurism, though it took me some years to find that out.  The schism occurred after that album; Phil Oakey retained the Human League name to pursue a more pop-oriented sound, the first result being 1981's Dare! album and the ultimate synthpop hit, "Don't You Want Me."  Was that a blessing or a curse?  The ubiquity of "Don't You Want Me" provoked a major backlash that took the League years to recover from; they never did catch that spark again (except for "I Love You Too Much," a minor gem that was completely overlooked), nor did they manage to leave the taint behind.  "Human"?  Blech.

One of the curiouser bits of Human League history is the early membership of Adi Newton, who soon left and went on to form ClockDVA: completely anti-electronic in its early incarnations, Newton reinvented ClockDVA as a "digital sorcery" band in the late 80s and picked up the thread of dark futurism begun by the Human League a decade earlier.  ClockDVA's Man-Amplified album sounds like it could be the evil twin of Travelogue...  but I'll stop my stream of consciousness there and save it for another day.

Update: less than an hour after I posted this, I discovered that the Human League are doing a short tour of England this fall, with a hometown gig at Sheffield City Hall on December 7.  Once again I am watching the Sheffield scene from thousands of miles away.  C'est la vie.