99 posts tagged “uk”

My excitement that one of my favorite bands of the 80s, Medium Medium offshoot C Cat Trance, is playing a show on December 19 is tempered by the fact that the show is in Belgium and I can't possibly be there for it. BIMFest 2009 (Belgium Independent Music Festival) is being held at Hof Ter Lo in Borgerhout, Antwerp, with 11 acts performing. Leaetherstrip is the headliner, and veteran industrial dance band Click Click is also on the bill. It's kind of like those oldies package shows that play at state fairs, except the oldies are not as old. I hope this is more than a one-off performance, and that this reunion is more successful than the Medium Medium reunion of a few years back (which resulted in a new album recorded, apparently, but never released). I've featured two of C Cat Trance's extraordinary cover versions here and here, so today I will present some of their equally extraordinary original songs, featuring their distinctive melding of postpunk funk with Middle Eastern music:

It's been a year and a half since my last big post on soundtrack music; after gorging on Ghost Box albums last week, it's time for another one. The Ghost Box label purveys music in the style of "modern" 70s library music, a nouveau retro-futurism to succeed the old retro-futurism that looked back to the 1950s, the era of Mid-Century Modern and a zeitgeist of limitless technological possibilities. By the 1970s space travel was a reality (to the moon and back, at least); a greater cultural awareness of both the difficulties of space travel and the incredible reaches of outer space, coupled with advances in electronic music synthesis, lent "futuristic" music a new tone, both physically (synthesizers replacing big bands) and emotionally (an air of we-can-do-it determination replacing the we'll-all-go-zing-zinging-through-space giddiness of the first wave of Space Age Pop). Going back to my categories of soundtrack music as defined in that first post, here is an example of real library music from the 70s by Alan Hawkshaw, one of the giants of library music, from the 1978 Bruton Music library album Terrestrial Journey:

Vangelis' "Pulstar" from his 1976 album Albedo 0.39 was not necessarily written as soundtrack music, but it has been used numerous times as theme music for radio and television programs. Indeed, I first heard it as the intro music to the news segments on my college radio station.

Echoes of "Pulstar"'s melody can be heard in "Wildspot" by Belbury Poly, a.k.a. Ghost Box co-founder Jim Jupp, on the 2004 album The Willows. Ghost Box's interest in 70s futurism extends to their cover art as well: 

Though from 1982 and not technically the 1970s, the St. Elsewhere theme (by soundtrack hack veteran Dave Grusin) contains all the elements of 70s musical futurism and thus belongs in this survey. Would you believe I'd never heard this until my wife played it for me last week? (I wasn't much of a TV watcher in college. Nor am I now, for that matter.)

70s retro-futurism has crept into today's TV programming as well, with two series of the 70s popular-science show spoof Look Around You having been produced for BBC2 in 2002 and 2005. The theme music from the second series could be original to the period:

Interestingly, the program that was the most obvious target of Look Around You's satire, Tomorrow's World, did not use futuristic music in its 1970s opening sequences, but engaged in some retro-futurism of its own, looking back to the sunny, uptempo big band music that accompanied so many "world of tomorrow" featurettes in the 50s:

Welcome back to the future!

Spending seven hours in a car with a broken CD player on Wednesday and another seven hours today gave me plenty of time to survey the contemporary radio landscape, and what a dismal scene it is. There were a few bright spots (every one of them a college or public station), but they were emphatically not the stations playing current hits. I can't decide which is worse, Autotuned vocals (can't call it "singing") that sound like robotic mosquitoes, or country music, which has figured out how to mimic every other genre of music until the telltale plaintive twang of the singer comes in and drenches everything in bathos. But what it all has in common is that it's all overdone and overproduced; like our food, it's been overprocessed until most of the nourishment disappears. The song I happened upon that really pointed out all this excess was Free's "All Right Now." That has to be the cleanest, simplest production I've ever heard on a hit single, ample proof that you don't need 48 tracks and Autotune to make a great record:

Who is the Free of today?

Paul DiFilippo's recent post on wordless singing brought Claire Hamill's Voices album to mind, which I wrote a post about two years ago (so for background on my adoration of Claire Hamill, see that post). Poking around on the web for more Claire Hamill information, I was pleasantly surprised to find a wealth of her performances now online as streaming videos, and her audio back catalog available for free download from her website! Here, then, is a selection of those videos.

Claire's 1984 album Touch Paper appears to be an amalgamantion of new tracks and previously-released singles, several in the New Wave mode; "The Moon Is A Powerful Lover" was one of my treasured 45s in the 80s, and I always thought it should have propelled her to Kate Bush levels of popularity:

"Ultraviolet Light" features Gary Numan on synths, and was another favorite of mine:

Here is the song that first brought Claire to my attention, "Look Over Your Shoulder" from The Steve Howe Album:

I just learned yesterday that Claire had a short-lived rock band called Transporter in 1980, releasing just one single, "Kids on the Run":

And she's still at it! Here's a live clip from December 2008, singing "Londonderry Boy":

And another selection from the landmark Voices, because it's there:

Finally, there is a five-part interview with Claire spanning her whole career, called "The Claire Hamill Story", appropriately enough. Here is the first part; subsequent segements should show up as related selections:

Bernard Sumner is not looking so great lately, but his musical talents are undiminished, possibly even better than ever.  "Sink Or Swim" by his new band Bad Lieutenant has been lodged in my brain for a week now:

That is ten different kinds of catchy!  Sumner's reappearance set me off on a New Order listening binge, in which I was reacquainted with my favorite New Order song of all, the non-single "This Time of Night" from Low Life:

Perhaps you remember listening to Styx's Pieces Of Eight album, scratching your head at "Aku-Aku", the mellow instrumental at the end of the album, and writing it off as filler.  But I posit that young Robin Guthrie took it as divine inspiration, forming the basis of his guitar and composition style that would come to fruition in the Cocteau Twins.  Compare "Aku-Aku" with a representative track from Blue Bell Knoll:

What better song for a dreary First of October than "October Already" by melancholy 80s minimal-wave band A Popular History of Signs?  "October already and where has it got us?"

UK funk trio the Baker Brothers (Dan Baker, Rich Baker, and non-brother Chris Pedley) are generally a little too close to smooth jazz/disco for me (too much hi-hat, not enough snare), but "Aargh, Aargh-Aargh" would fit right in on my virtual mixtape of Badass Instrumentals:

 

Now that I've got tuned percussion in 80s music on the brain, I keep thinking of more examples, such as "Love My Way" by the Psychedelic Furs and "Change" by Tears For Fears.  I was beginning to think it was just a UK thing, but then I remembered "Gone Daddy Gone" by the Violent Femmes.  So here is a playlist of that batch:

Somehow it entered my mind this evening that the pre-chorus marimba ostinato in Japan's "Methods of Dance" sounds a lot like the background ostinato in Peter Gabriel's "No Self Control", then I started thinking about tuned percussion (marimba, xylophone, balafon, vibraphone, or their synthesized equivalents) in Japan's music in general, and how they often used tuned percussion for melodic motifs, and how Peter Murphy used nearly identical licks in some of his songs.  So I made a playlist to convey my point, but regardless of my point, they are all great songs to listen to: