3 posts tagged “survival”

I first fell in love with The Music Lovers in 2003, when I was browsing on Darla.com looking for some new music.  I listened to the two-minute sample of "This World vs. The Next World" and I was instantly hooked:

I bought that first CD EP, Cheap Songs Tell the Truth, immediately, as I have rushed out (figuratively) and bought the two full-length CDs since.  Bandleader Matthew "Teddy" Edwards is a British expatriate, and The Music Lovers make their home in San Francisco.  They have yet to play on this side of the Continental Divide, though I remain hopeful.  I bring them up now because they have another album coming out soon, with a prerelease video directed by Margaret Cho:

Teddy's rich croon, dark lyrics delivered with a sunny melody, and 60s pop sensibilities put The Music Lovers squarely in Scott Walker territory.  ("Classic" Scott Walker, that is, not latter-day "difficult" Scott Walker.)  But there was another connection to be made that I just couldn't put my finger on until, by chance, I listened to the 1986 album The Wrong People by Furniture.  And thereon was a song I had forgotten about for two decades, but it all came flooding back immediately: "Love Your Shoes"--

"We're going to have the best time, the time of our worthless lives!"  How can you not love a lyric like that?  Jim Irwin was Furniture's singer; their first releases were on Survival Records, one of my favorite labels.  Survival was known primarily for minimal synthbeat music, and Furniture's cabaret style was a new direction for them.  However, after one album with Survival (The Lovemongers, with the original "Love Your Shoes"), the band jumped over to Stiff Records, rerecorded "Shoes" for their Stiff album (The Wrong People), and then got lost in the shuffle when Stiff was acquired by ZTT.  Most of that I learned on Wikipedia just now; I have some more Furniture music to track down, I'll report back if I turn up anything good.  In the meantime, if you liked Furniture, you will like The Music Lovers as well, and vice versa.

Update: Oops, I screwed up!  The song I meant to post was "This Little Girl," but instead I posted "Chasing the Sun," which is the instrumental version of "This Little Girl."  Both phrases are lyrics from the song, so I got confused.  I've corrected the entry.

Here's another song from the 80s minimal-techno label Survival Records (more background here), "Chasing the Sun" "This Little Girl" by Play.  Play was Wayne Kennedy's one-man band, joined on recordings by Drinking Electricity members David Rome (Survival's founder) and P.K. Edgely (Survival's designer).  Play's sole album, Red Movies, collected three singles and their four B-sides.  "Chasing the Sun" "This Little Girl" is the best, there is a stark grandeur to it that is unmatched by the other tracks:

  It took me a long time to find Red Movies; every time I asked my record dealer, Howie, to look for it on one of his trips to England, he always said, "Play Dead?  I've got some Play Dead here."  No, not Play Dead!  I know Play Dead, I like Play Dead, I have a bunch of their records, I just want PLAY, no Dead!  I eventually found it somewhere else, and for a good price, just $6.99 if I remember correctly.  It's never been reissued on CD, but a vinyl rip is available for download via Yarrost's LiveJournal.

Back in the 80s, the Survival Records label always seemed to do more with less.  Their releases were  mostly synthpop, a la Mute Records, but the instruments they used seemed even cheaper.  They still got great beats, melodies, and arrangements out of them, though, and the records would later become highly collectible to devotees of "minimal electronica."  One of the best tracks they released, and one of the most mysterious, is "Do It" by Do It, the final song in the four-song "Megamix" that makes up side two of the Mind & Matter/Megamix label sampler LP (1983).  Now that I've looked into it, the mystery begins to clear up.  Survival Records was founded by David Rome and Anne-Marie Heighway in 1980, presumably to release records by their band, Drinking Electricity.  The third member of Drinking Electricity was P.K. (Paul) Edgley (on bass), who also did photography and sleeve design for the label.  The label released two singles by Edgley's solo project, The Limit; "Do It" was the B side of the second Limit single, "Take It."  I assume that this is the same song that was placed in the Megamix as by "Do It" (the song credit is indeed P.K. Edgley), but it may be an alternate version, as the other Megamix songs are (I think).  On the other hand, "Do It" may be an alternate version of "Take It" in the first place.  Argh--just when I thought I would never have to buy another record, this nagging question pops up.  Here is "Do It" as by Do It from Mind & Matter/Megamix; the female vocals are by Anne-Marie Heighway:

I love that kick drum! Three years ago I was casting about for Cousteau-like music (during the dry spell between their second and third albums) on the Cousteau message forum, and someone pointed me to Scottish singer/songwriter James Grant.  I realized that I was familiar with James Grant already, in his previous incarnation as the leader of Love and Money, and before that as the guitarist for Friends Again.  I then bought his first solo CD, Sawdust In My Veins, and noticed it was on the Survival Records label.  I assumed it was a different label, but lo and behold, it is the same one!  As David Rome himself tells it:

When we started we specialised in electronic dance music, charting with Tik and Tok. Then in the mid eighties we moved more toward rock music finding success with The Quireboys, and then in 1990 we signed the Celtic band Capercaillie, and have been working with them both as a band and with their individual careers ever since.