arabchanter wrote:

Thanks also to Tek for allowing me to use his board as a vehicle to jot down my rabid mumblings, and of course all the people who have taken the time to join in (you know who you are,) and once again it's the same as any other thread on here, it's free to join in and I'd be very happy to see your contribution/thoughts.

No need to thank me Mr C (now, in the past or in the future). It's an excellent (and unique) thread on this Forum (and all others,for that matter).

A doff of the cap is instead extended towards your good self.

Though regards this tome.

TWO Siouxsue albums? Wtf?

When none appear from The Sound, well, i'll be...depressed (but not surprised, sadly).

Anyway. Keep on keeping on Sir. ✊
 

Album 482
Motorhead.................................No Sleep 'til Hammersmith   (1981)













After the success of the albums Overkill,Bomber, and Ace of Spades, Motörhead went on their Short Sharp Pain In The Neck tour.


Despite the live album being named after the Hammersmith Odeon venue (where Motörhead had opened for Blue Oyster Cult a few years prior), a majority of the tracks featured were recorded from shows played at The Queen’s Hall in Leeds and The City Hall in Newcastle.


The dedication on the cover is "to all the people who have travelled with, drunk with, fought with, and screwed with us on the roads of England and Europe for five years" probably sums them up pretty well.

Love this album.

ALBUM 481
The Go-Go's..............................................Beauty and the Beat   (1981)











This album was decent enough, to be honest I much preferred "Holly and the Italians" and of course our own "Bananarama" (who incidentally are in the Guiness Book of Records for the most chart entries by an all female band) who were both easy on the eye and my ears.


A happy bounce along album, nothing too controversial, but as for being punk which I've read several times,for me that's a hell of a stretch.


Anyways, I did especially enjoy "Automatic" "We Got the Beat" and of course my favourite on the album "Our Lips Are Sealed." My other half has a good CD with the better "all girl bands" ie,The Runaways,The Slits,Hole,with some Holly and the Italians and The Go-Go's thrown in for good measure, and thankfully no Spice Girls, so I have what I like covered, which means this album wont be going into my collection.





Bits & Bobs;



The Go-Go's formed in 1978, in Los Angeles, California. Front woman, Belinda Carlisle, had previously been a member of the influential punk band, The Germs.



 
Early on into their career, the Go-Go's played several seminal punk venues across LA, including Whisky A Go Go and The Masque. In our interview, the Go-Go's guitarist, Charlotte Caffey, spoke to us about the latter venue: "The Masque was incredible. It was filthy and dirty, it was incredible. There was a feeling…I don't even know how to explain it. It was electric. And, oh, man, it was a really great thing to experience."


 
In 1980, the Go-Go's bassist, Margot Olaverria, fell ill with hepatitis A and was replaced by Kathy Valentine. Alongside her illness, Olaverria decided to step down because she was unhappy with the band's transition from punk to pop. In our interview, the Go-Go's guitarist Jane Wiedlin told us why the band decided to make the move towards pop music: "We, from the beginning, were always kind of enamored with the pop/punk style, like our favorite band, the band that we always tried to emulate was The Buzzcocks, who had that great pop song done in a punky style. So that was kind of what we were going for from the beginning. And for the first few years when we were just learning how to play, I think we sounded probably a lot worse than we meant to, just because we didn't know what we were doing. And then, slowly as we learned to play, the songs started coming out more and more. It was always trying to sort of straddle the line between pop and punk."


 
In 1981, the Go-Go's signed to I.R.S. Records. In 1982, their debut album, Beauty and the Beat, topped the US charts for six weeks. The Go-Go's consequently became the first all-female band that wrote their own songs and played their own instruments to top the album charts. In 2003, Beauty and the Beat was ranked at #413 on Rolling Stone's "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time." Caffey told us the album remains close to her heart: "I have a very strong connection to the first record, because that record was written without any kind of pressure, and we were having the time of our lives back in Hollywood in that little punk scene, it was so exhilarating and fun."


 
Jane Wiedlin had an affair with The Specials' front man, Terry Hall. Wiedlin told us the Go-Go's track, "Our Lips Are Sealed," was inspired by the romance: "I met Terry Hall, the singer of The Specials, and ended up having kind of a romance. He sent me the lyrics to 'Our Lips Are Sealed' later in the mail, and it was kind of about our relationship, because he had a girlfriend at home and all this other stuff. So it was all very dramatic. I really liked the lyrics, so I finished the lyrics and wrote the music to it, and the rest is history. And then his band, The Fun Boy Three, ended up recording it, too - they did a really great version of it, also. It was a lot gloomier than the Go-Go's version."


 
Creative differences, personal conflicts and drug addictions lead to the disbanding of the Go-Go's in 1985. The Go-Go's drummer, Gina Schock, told LA Reader: "We really did try [to continue], but everybody was so f--ked up on drugs then." In 2010, Carlisle elaborated on the seriousness of her substance abuse to PopEater. Carlisle revealed she was hooked on cocaine for 30 years and only managed to get clean in 2005: "I made so many promises to so many people so many times through the years that I was going to stop and I couldn't keep it and I knew it deep down inside. I hit a lot of bottoms. I don't know why it took me so long. I guess I just wasn't ready. It was weird when I quit. I was struck. I just knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I would be dead if I continued. I just knew it came down to choosing life or death, and I chose life. I was at the end of a three-day binge. I remember thinking how humiliating it would be for my son to have his mom die in a hotel room of a cocaine overdose. That's pretty low. I knew if I didn't stop I'd be dead. You can't be my age and doing the amount of cocaine I was doing."


 
In 1990, the Go-Go's reunited to play a benefit concert for the California Environmental Protection Act. In 1994, the band released a retrospective, Return to the Valley of The Go-Go's, which featured three new studio recordings: "Good Girl," "Beautiful" and "The Whole World Lost it's Head." Wiedlin told us this latter track initially started out as a bit of fun between Valentine and herself: "We were sitting around just sort of musing about how nutty the world has become, and I think Kathy said, 'Well, what about this line for a title: The Whole World Lost Its Head?' And I was like, hmmm, seems kind of worthy. I was actually kind of unsure about it as a title, because it just wasn't that easy to say and stuff. But then we just started, for fun, writing all these silly lyrics - silly but true, and topical. The next thing you know the song was written and it was really just sort of an exercise in having a good time as writers. So we went back to it and said, 'Okay, well, this is actually a real song now. So let's hone it a little.' So we ended up taking out some of the silliest lines. Sometimes I regret it though, because I know we had one line - because I'm such a Star Trek fanatic - about plastic surgeons giving everyone Spock ears. And we ended up taking that one out, but now I wish we'd left it in. I still crack up when I think about that line."


 
In 1997, Schock sued her fellow band members. The drummer claimed she had not been received full royalties since 1986. The suit was resolved in 1999.


 
In 2001, the Go-Go's released their first studio album in 17 years, God Bless The Go-Go's. Green Day front man, Billie Joe Armstrong, co-wrote the album's lead single, "Unforgiven." The cover art for God Bless The Go-Go's sparked controversy, because it showed the Go-Go's posing as the Virgin Mary. The U.S. Catholic League president, William Donohue, criticized the band for resorting to "cheap ploys." At the time, a spokesperson responded on behalf of the Go-Go's: "These are all religious girls. They believe that God is giving them a second chance. They feel that they've been blessed." In our interview, Wiedlin elaborated on her spirituality: "I was raised Catholic. And then when I was a teenager, all of a sudden, my whole family just decided we really didn't believe it anymore. Including my parents. So I went from being a really spiritually and traditionally based religious person, to not knowing what the heck was going on. And kind of feeling probably agnostic, then I became atheist, because I was disillusioned for a long time. And then in the last 10 years or so, I sort of softened up my stance on that, and now I'm back to being agnostic. I really think in this day and age, there's no way to really know, spiritually, what the heck's going on. I am a person who has strong morals, and I believe in morality and being a good person. But as far as literal spiritual beliefs and religious beliefs, I don't see how anyone could know for sure."


 
In 2011, the Go-Go's embarked on the Ladies Gone Wild tour, to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the release of Beauty and the Beat. That same year, the Go-Go's received the 2,444th star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame. It is located where the punk club, The Masque, used to stand.


 
The Go-Go's have success individually as well. Belinda Carlisle had a string of hits throughout the '80s and '90s, including "Mad About You" and the #1 smash, "Heaven Is A Place On Earth." In 2009, she appeared on Dancing with the Stars and in 2010, released her autobiography, Lips Unsealed. Alongside a solo music career, Jane Wiedlin took up acting and appeared in several films, including Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. In 2010, she launched a comic book based on herself, titled Lady Robotika. Charlotte Caffey continued to work as a songwriter and session musician and composed the music for the rock opera, Lovelace: A Rock Opera, which is based on the life of porn star, Linda Lovelace. Gina Schock also remained in music and has wrote songs for the likes of Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez, while Kathy Valentine went on to form the blues band, Blue Bonnets.


 
Speaking to Spinner in 2013, Belinda Carlisle described what each member brought to the band. "Charlotte had a certain guitar sound," she said. "Kathy had a rock 'n' roll sensibility. Gina's a really solid drummer with a distinctive sound. Jane [brought] her songwriting and her quirkiness. And the blend of my voice, which isn't a great voice but it's distinctive."


 
Their songs inspired the musical Head Over Heels, named for their 1984 hit, which opened on Broadway in 2018.



From Punk Rock to Sugar Pop: Tracing the Music and Style of the Go-Go's
 Drugs, boys, over-accessorizing, and sweet sweet tunes: this is the Go-Go's story.

When I think of the Go-Go's I don't really think “Punk.” I think of pastels and America's sweethearts and puffy shoulder pads. Five young women singing about “having the beat,” which I think is what happens after the rhythm gets you—hey, GLORIA WARNED US, GUYS – who wrote songs called “Vacation,” the video for which saw them in lip-syncing in bathing suits on matching water skis doing choreographed arm movements. Wait, I feel like I'm being pithy and snobbish, let's start again.
  The Go-Go's are fucking amazing. As their Wikipedia proudly states they are the first, and, to date, only all-female band to play their own instruments and write their own songs to top the Billboard charts. Their first album, Beauty and the Beat was number one for six weeks and went triple platinum. It’s universally acclaimed. They've sold over seven million records. Their single, “Speeding,” off their second album was used in Fast Times At Ridgemont High, arguably the teen film that birthed the idea that teen films should show teenagers as they really are, a notion Hollywood still profits from to this very day. The Go-Go's reformed in 1999 and still tour. In fact they've played shows every year since 2010. You could have seen them this summer. I repeat, the Go-Go's are fucking amazing.


 But back in the 80s, in the midst of all that success and with their white picket fence public image, the Go-Go's were doing drugs and sleeping with male groupies and falling out with each other over and over again. As guitarist/vocalist Jane Wieldlin said, “We were cute and bubbly. We were also crazy twisted, drug addict sex fiends.” They were also wearing a lot of Lycra and they were wearing it well.


 Belinda Carlisle grew up fitting pretty perfectly into the blonde cheerleader stereotype, living in California's BBQs ‘n’ backyard pools suburbia, and spending a lot of time at the beach. But she was also the eldest of seven with a rebellious streak and like all good rebels she’s aid she tried to make life as hard as she could for her parents. She left home at 19 after seeing the cover of Raw Power by Iggy Pop, an album that introduced her to a whole other world, and the following summer she became a punk, wearing trash bags, berets, kohl, and band pins. She decamped to Hollywood—for the punk not the silver screen—and spent a short stint playing drums for The Germs under the name Dottie Danger.

 It was at a show in Hollywood that she met Jane Wiedlin, also a punk. They became best friends, whiling away two years on cocktails and clubbing, and then in May 1978 they decided to start their own band. Their motivation was mainly meeting boys—classic— hoping for little more than to be the coolest punks in the scene. At the time Jane had aspirations of working in fashion.

  “I was studying design and was working in a factory in downtown Los Angeles, in a sweatshop, basically, and I was a pattern maker. I remember taking my patterns and writing lyrics as they came to me, all over the patterns, which I wish I had today, because that would be a super thing, a piece of memorabilia to own.”


 Now I'm picturing clothes covered in writing, like Angelina's wedding dress, or Carrie Bradshaw's newspaper print dress, and I can't get those images out of my brain.


 They recruited their friends Margot Olavarria and Elissa Bello to play bass and drums and started the Go-Go’s (they almost called themselves the Misfits—wow). They had no idea what they were doing. Jane couldn't tune her guitar let alone play it, and Belinda couldn't sing. It was a rough, raw, hot mess. A journalist said of them at that time, “The Go-Go’s are to music what botulism is to tuna.”


 Their first show was at the Masque Club in Hollywood, the basement of a porno theatre, which was notorious for its crappy toilets that would break all the time and flood the place with foul-smelling liquid. Clothes-wise they were going for full on California punk. Belinda had short dyed black hair and wore a huge T-shirt on stage usually with patterned socks and high heel pumps, while Jane wore a lot of lime green and loved her pink Lycra trousers.


 Their memories of their first show aren't great. In an interview with VH1's behind the music Belinda said of it, “We played three songs, the second song twice and I remember people were either laughing hysterically or looked absolutely mortified.” Not that they were put off, they simply made it their mission to get better. They started taping their shows to learn from them, which was actually just sort of depressing: Belinda realized she sounded terrible and desperately needed singing lessons. In September of 1978 they asked Charlotte Caffey. who could actually play her guitar, to join the band. She said yes instantly, and they started to make the first signs of progress. They were still focusing on their partying though and they moved to a run down apartment complex called The Canterbury on the crappy side of Hollywood; it’s nickname was Disgraceland. They'd get drunk all the time and created The Booty Club, which was basically calling up boys just for their bootay.


 Jane reminisced about this time in an interview: “The Canterbury was completely filled up with punk rockers. The other people living in the building with us were people on SSI [which] was money you could get if you could prove to the government that you were crazy homeless people living on welfare… There was this bag lady, she was crazy, she had to be in her 80s or 90s. This is so awful, but it’s funny, too. When she died, I was sad that she died—I mean, she was this little old lady—but face it, people die. And as a punk rocker, I snuck into her apartment and stole some of her clothes. I still have one of those dresses.”


 Everything really started happening for them in 1979 when they sacked their drummer and replaced her with Gina Schock, pictured above with Jane, in a Go-Go's T-shirt. (Is it gauche to wear your own band t-shirt, or is it really, really punk?) I also like Jane's intense eyebrow shape and blingy necklace. Gina was an extremely skilled musician. She made the Go-Go's good, partly because she encouraged them to rehearse more than once a frickin' month. Seriously ladies, come on.


 Jane explained to The AV Club why Charlotte made so much of a difference to their sound. “First of all she was a real musician; she’d gone to musical college, studied piano, she knew how to read music, all this stuff that we didn’t know how to do. But she also brought with her a pop sensibility she wasn’t afraid to show. I’d grown up loving pop, but once the punk movement started, I was fully committed to punk, even though of course, there still was always that pop-punk blend like Buzzcocks, which we worshipped. Anyway, Charlotte comes in, and Charlotte and I immediately click on a writing level, and immediately start writing together.

  “The first thing we write is “How Much More,” which is still one of our all-time poppiest songs. After that, it became a mixture of pop and punk, and I think by the time we made our record… I mean, nowadays, everyone would hear those records and go, ‘There’s nothing punk about it,’ but believe me [Laughs.], at the time, it was still punky. Then the media came up with the term “new wave,” which described poppier but new music that came post the beginning of the punk phase.”


 Their sound was becoming tighter and faster and more structured, but they were still kicking around in their punk gear, Charlotte with her blonde bob, shirt and tie, Belinda with even shorter hair was still a fan of baggy jumpers and leggings. Meanwhile Jane had discovered Doc Martens. In photographs of this time taken backstage in shitty venues they look like rowdy kids, staring with dead eyes down the lens, messing around: They're a gang you want to be a part of.




Note the overalls on Jane, and the pedal pushers, and the now-blonde Belinda Carlisle. I feel like when she went blonde it was the end of their punk style profile. Here's a close up of her blonde bandana and jewelery because I know you're going to want to see that:
And look, Belinda really liked pedal pushers and peasant tops for a while.

 In December 1979 the Go-Go's went to the UK for the first time to support Madness and Busboys. They were excited about it till they stepped off the plane and realized what Britain was like, and how little their money was going to go. They were living on £2.50 a day, stealing milk from people's front steps in the morning, and drinking cough syrup because they couldn't afford beer. The shows themselves were pretty horrendous. They were playing to skinheads, who hated these Californian punk sellouts. They were constantly dodging bottles as they played, and every night Belinda would walk off stage drenched in spit.

 The tour lasted three difficult months, and they were obviously relieved to get home. Belinda described that time in an interview with The Arts Desk. “We quit our jobs, sold everything to come over to the UK, thinking we’d go back to the States big rock stars. We were living in a wreck of a house, with the Belle Starrs and some of the other 2 Tone bands. We lived on white bread and Nutella. Stiff Records did not like the Go-Go’s for whatever reason, but Madness pleaded with Stiff to release “We Got The Beat.” They did us a favor. We came back to the US a few months later and 50 pounds heavier, each of us, don’t know how that happened.”


 I love their style around this time, they were wearing T-shirts and shirts covered in cartoons—Daffy Duck and Batman, and oodles of glittery eyeshadow and glossy lipstick. Their bottom halves were all party too, stripy trousers, check skirts, and polka dots. Basically they were throwing as many patterns and random earrings at themselves and seeing what would stick. Answer: all of it.


 “We Got The Beat” went on to become a top 40 single in the US but they still couldn't get a record deal. They would go to meetings with label bosses who would explain, pathetically, “We can't sign you, you're all girls.” After months of this they finally got an offer from IRS Records, a small new label who fell in love with their energy, excitement, and their colossally massive hooks.


 Being on small label meant they had little money behind them and had to cut corners wherever they could. Perhaps the most famous and successful example of their thriftiness was their look for the cover of their debut EP. In the shot they're wearing towels and face masks—the classic sleepover wardrobe—but this was only because they couldn't afford to buy new clothes. They went out, bought the towels, put them on, took the photo and then returned the towels to the shop. Someone, somewhere, owns the towels the Go-Go’s are wearing on this cover. Here's the cover and an untouched photo from that shoot...
  
One thing that was always important to the band was to employ as many women as possible. Belinda explained to The Arts Desk, “We were a completely female operation, we didn’t have a Svengali, we were self-taught, we wrote our own songs, there were even female roadies, female management, we never sold out, actually, everything was totally authentic.”

 As they became more successful and people finally started to take notice of their songs they became frustrated with bassist Margot. Once upon a time she had given them attitude and punk credibility, but in this new dawn of family friendly Go-Go's there wasn't really space for that. Margot disagreed with where they were headed, and with the other members of the band burning with steely pop ambition, Margot had to go-go. They replaced her with Cathy Valentine, a woman who already had a hard rocking profile. Jane explained, “She had a lot of intrigue about her, she knew all these famous people when we were still little gutter rats.”

 Their first proper single in the US was “Our Lips Are Sealed” which was written by Wiedlin and Terry Hall of The Specials. The Go-Go's were playing at The Whisky on Sunset Strip and The Specials came to see them and asked them to be the opening act on their UK tour. Jane and Terry started a romance, despite him being engaged to another girl. After the tour he stayed in touch with Jane writing her endless tormented love letters, one of which contained lyrics to “Our Lips Are Sealed.” Jane finished writing the song in her childhood bedroom at her parent’s house and it became their first US single from their debut album, landing them a national club tour and a support slot with fellow IRS Records act, The Police. They were getting more and more radio play till pretty soon they were playing in front of 30,000 people a night.
  Their second US single was a re-recorded version of “We Got The Beat,” which was released in January 1982. This track was noticeably more poppy than anything they'd done before and it quickly became a favorite on the LA dance scene. At their first show, after it's release at the Starlight in LA, the line to see them wrapped round the block. Brian Wilson became a fan, and in March 1982 “Beauty And The Beat” became the number 1 album in America and stayed there for six weeks, scoring the band a Grammy nomination.


 The girls were keeping up a squeaky clean front, but in reality they were still foul-mouthed beer-guzzling girls. Their main priority was selling records, so in interviews, photo shoots and at shows they played it sweet, but shuddering analogue video exists as evidence of the real Go-Go's (a.k.a. normal women not the Perfect Pop Princesses they felt their audiences required). In it you see Belinda and Cathy backstage after a show in Atlanta, completely with a roadie and some male groupies, with Belinda instructing the viewers at home, “If you can't get sex then the perfect thing for you to do is jack off”.
  In an interview with The Gay UK, Carlisle explained how much easier it was to have a perfect public persona back in those days: “We couldn’t get away with now what we could back then. There’s just no way, there’s too many cameras around. There’s still lots of drugs but back then it was a bit more innocent and I thought I was invincible.”


 Fame caused them all to freak out. Majorly. Charlotte grew more reclusive: for years she was a hardcore heroin addict, while the other members of the band were somehow completely unaware. Born into Hollywood royalty, her dad was a director of TV shows including Chips and The Dukes Of Hazzard. Charlotte felt intense pressure to be someone and was doing drugs in her early 20s, long before the Go-Go's. By 1982 she was injecting and would try and balance out the heroin with cocaine. Perhaps the reason the other members of her band didn't notice is because they were also developing troublesome habits. In fact it became hard to distinguish who the one with the problem was because they were all doing it: Belinda had a $300-a-day cocaine habit and kept a shoebox of it in her wardrobe, even doing some on Christmas day before church with her family.


 The drugs didn't help with the in-band bickering over those classic famous people conversation topics such as “Who is earning more?” and “Who is more famous?” It started to bug them that Belinda was always the one people wanted to interview and slowly they began socializing with different groups of people. Their second album, Vacation was sorta slapdash. Charlotte wasn't really present for most its creation, and since she was a crucial factor in the band’s songwriting process her absence is keenly felt on this album. It was released in August 1982 and stalled at number 8 in the charts. At the time Jane was all, “Whatever, they just don't GET IT,” but she’s since said she thinks the album isn't very good. Nevertheless at the time they were so wrapped up in their private band dramas that they didn't realize, or care.
  After their manager told them they weren't allowed drugs on tour they ignored her and she quit, just disappearing from their lives one day. They began to hate their audiences, with Jane telling VH1, “Oh not another goddamn show for another god damned 10,000 geeky fans, who needs it? We'd be out there smiling but in our heads we were thinking I can't wait till the show is over so I can go get laid or go get chalk, or whatever it was.”


 Their on stage style around this time was more grown up, with Belinda trying out this spangly sequined t-shirt that I'm certain my mum wore to a New Years Eve party when I was two.



Jane was also exploring the exciting world of fabrics that shimmer, for instance this peachy orange metallic dress. The other women favored more classic “rock” looks: sleeveless vests and t-shirts and a nod to Nigel Tufnel with their haircuts. I feel like they were all experts in that famous hair technique known as “teasing.” It was the 80s; you had to be.


 Still, they look pretty wholesome. They were good at covering up their off-stage naughty behavior. “It was all one big outrageous moment blurred into another outrageous moment but I don’t have them any more so much. We were in our early 20s, we were famous, we were rich, we had no responsibilities, we weren’t married, so we went wild, as we should, and we took advantage of the circumstances,” Belinda Carlise told The Gay UK.
 During the filming for the video to the lead single of “Vacation,” you know, the jet ski one, they were pretty drunk. This is how Jane told it:

 “We were at the A&M sound stage, and it was a big budget video, because by that time we were really popular. It was fun, but it was a way of working that we weren't accustomed to. I remember it being a 14-hour day and about eight hours into it we all were getting really bored and restless, so we started drinking. But by the time they actually shot the scene where we're on the water skis, skiing one-handed and waving and stuff, we were all really looped. It's so funny, if you look at us, look in our eyes in those parts, we're all like cross-eyed drunk.”


In 1983 they went to the UK to record their third album, Talk Show.
 During the writing of the album Jane asked to sing lead on a song she had written and the rest of the group said no. DENIED. Belinda explained, somewhat insensitively, that she was the lead singer and that's just the way it was. Jane was enraged, although her anger was soothed slightly when she discovered that since she and Charlotte did most of the songwriting on the first and second LPs they had made the most in royalties. Gina called their accountant and asked how much each of them made in the band that year and on finding out she made less than Jane and Charlotte she was livid and asked the two big earners to divide all income equally.
 Jane said they would do it on the fourth album as Talk Show had just been finished and she'd written most of it. This lead to pretty violent physical fights and Jane left the band in October 1984. Charlotte was left lost and hopeless, missing her song writing buddy. She checked herself into rehab and finally managed to quit her darkest of excesses, inspiring Belinda in the process who also went into recovery.



The downside of their new drug-free clarity was Belinda realized the band wasn't going to work any more.Together with Charlotte she told the others that the dream was over. Kathy was pretty mad at the fact she'd had to put up with them being strung out all those years and now they were finally clean but the Go-Go's were finished.

 After the split Belinda had an insanely successful solo career, with several singles topping the charts worldwide, recording an entire album in French, with some of her music videos getting directed by Diane Keaton—all despite the fact she was back on drugs, including prescription pills, hallucinogens and, most damagingly, cocaine. In fact she was still doing cocaine well into her 40s, when she did her Playboy spread. She has said of it, ‘You don't have to be stick thin and blonde and in your twenties to be sexually viable. Some of the photos are really airbrushed.’ My friend said, ’God I wish I had a butt like that,’ I said, ‘So do I, cos it's not mine.’” Eventually she quit the drugs completely, discovered yoga and went to India a whole bunch. Now she lives in Paris and is sober and serene.


 Charlotte meanwhile wrote a hit song for Keith Urban, and a rock opera about Linda Lovelace, and Gina has written songs for Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez. Jane had a moderately successful solo career, but was pretty happy when the Go-Go's reunited in the 90s. She’s super keen that the public know the whole story: “We have always had a compulsion to try to make people aware we did exist before we became America’s sweethearts. We came from a very, very specific scene that we were an integral part of. People can call us pop wusses all they want, but basically, we started that band with no experience, no education, no hopes of getting anywhere. To me, it’s a real American success story that we got somewhere, and we like to honor our roots.”




"We Got the Beat"


 
The Go-Go's write their own songs, and along with the Bangles and The Dixie Chicks, are one of the most successful all-girl bands to do so. This song was written by guitarist Charlotte Caffey, who drew inspiration from some Motown beats, specifically one that mentioned the name of her group. Charlotte told Songfacts: "I thought it would be very clever to do 'Going To A Go-Go' I thought, Well, let's try working this out as a cover song. Which is really funny when I think about it. I was listening to it a lot one day, and later that night, the song came to me within five minutes. I don't even know if it has anything to do with listening to that song, but this whole idea came to me. It was one of those things that just went right through me and came out my hand; I wrote it down, recorded it a little bit, and then brought it into rehearsal a few days later."


 
An early version of this song was released as The Go-Go's first single in May 1980. It came out in England on Stiff Records, which was home to The Specials and Madness, both groups The Go-Go's toured with in England. In America, the group was signed to IRS Records by Miles Copeland, who managed The Police. In the US, "Our Lips Are Sealed" was their first single, followed by a new version of "We Got The Beat" in January 1982. This release was The Go-Go's biggest hit, spending three weeks at #2 behind Joan Jett's "I Love Rock And Roll" on the US charts.


  When Jane Wiedlin, Kathy Valentine and Belinda Carlisle put a band together in 1978, they didn't know how to play, but figured they could learn on the fly in the LA punk scene, where musicianship was not a priority. Charlotte Caffey was a few years older and knew how to play when Belinda, dressed in a garbage bag, asked her to join this new all-girl band called The Go-Go's. Charlotte took the offer, leaving her band The Eyes and becoming a key songwriter not just for The Go-Go's but for Belinda's solo material.



"Our Lips Are Sealed"

Go-Go's guitarist Jane Wiedlin wrote this with British musician Terry Hall, who was lead singer of The Specials. Says Wiedlin: "In 1980 we were playing at The Whisky on Sunset Strip, and The Specials were in town from England, and they came to see us, and they really liked us and asked us if we would be their opening act on their tour. I met Terry Hall, the singer of The Specials, and ended up having kind of a romance. He sent me the lyrics to 'Our Lips Are Sealed' later in the mail, and it was kind of about our relationship, because he had a girlfriend at home and all this other stuff. So it was all very dramatic. I really liked the lyrics, so I finished the lyrics and wrote the music to it, and the rest is history. And then his band, The Fun Boy Three, ended up recording it, too - they did a really great version of it, also. It was like a lot gloomier than the Go-Go's' version."




Speaking about her relationship with Terry Hall, Wiedlin adds: "Like I said, he had a girlfriend in England, and they were talking about getting married and all this stuff. So I don't know how I got in the picture. And, you know, that's something that I did as a teenager, maybe I was 20. That's something I would never do now, knowingly enter into a relationship with someone who was with someone else. I mean, it was completely screwed on my part. Although I think when people do that, you really have to look at the person who's in the relationship, and they have to take the burden of the responsibility as well. Anyways, it was one of those things with the tragic letters, 'I just can't do this.' You know, 'I'm betrothed to another.' All that kind of stuff."


 
This was the first hit for the Go-Go's, who started as a Punk band in the late '70s, but became Pop superstars with the release of their first album, Beauty And The Beat. Unlike most other female Pop groups, the Go-Go's wrote their own songs and were serious musicians. Despite their pure Pop sound, they had a confidence and attitude that gave them lots of credibility and set them apart from other bands on the fledgling MTV network.


 
Wiedlin: "We'd been together about two years when I wrote that. Some of the songs from the very beginning were songs that ended up part of our repertoire. Others fell by the wayside. I remember when I wrote it, I was really afraid to show it to the band in case they didn't like it and all this stuff. But luckily they did like it."


 
Wiedlin: "That was the first single in America. But before we got our record deal with IRS, we actually put out one single in England so that when we toured we had something to sell, and we had like a one single deal with Stiff Records, who were the record company that had signed The Specials and Madness, who also we toured with. We also toured with Madness in England. And then that single was a previous version of 'We Got The Beat.'" , she talks about another song inspired by a "Euro-guy," and what happened when she tried to be "The Good Wife."


 
Terry Hall's version with his group The Fun Boy Three hit #7 in the UK.

Album 484
Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark..................................Architecture And Morality   (1981)











Architecture & Morality is the third album by British band Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark (OMD), released on November 8, 1981.Its title is taken from the 1977 book Morality and Architecture: The Development of a Theme in Architectural History and Theory from the Gothic Revival to the Modern Movement by historian David Watkin. In the album’s liner notes, Martha Ladly, of the band Martha & The Muffins, is credited as the inspiration for the title.


   On the occasion of the album’s 2003 re-release, Andy McCluskey had this to say:



"I think one of the things we always tried to do, particularly in the early part of Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, was desperately try not to repeat ourselves. It seemed to be an essential part of our kind of method was to try to do something we hadn’t done before."


“So having done a first album of sort of garage punk electronic and the second album that was a lot more dark and gothic, I think we were looking for a new direction and found a lot of influence in the emotional power of religious music. Although not the actual religious content, but just the actual emotional power of religious music and to that end we started to try and write songs that had some of the kind of pomp and, if you like, bombastic (laughs) nature of large kind of choral pieces and religious pieces of music."


"We started sampling Gregorian chants, trying to find samples of keyboards and machines that would emulate choral sounds and of course got a Mellotron with the right choral sounds on it which became the mainstay of the songwriting on that album.”


 In a 2008 interview, Andy discussed his hopes for the album’s effect on society:



"It sounds strange, I know, but we had been trying to change the world. It was the naive confidence of youth, the idea that music is that important. The music we made had to be interesting and different. And somehow we believed that would change the world, the way people think. So when we sold 3m albums and the world didn’t change, we were scared."

That OMD album is fucking superb.

Album 484
Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark..................................Architecture And Morality   (1981)












This was a good solid listen, for me it wasn't a great album but it certainly had it's moments.I^ think the problem I have is not necessarily OMD's fault, it may have more to do being spoiled with the superb Soft Cell album coming up before this one, Soft Cell was a "get off yer arse and dance" kinda album, even in the darker moments the synth acted like a safety net to stop you getting too morose.


This album seemed like the more serious big brother to me, Where Soft Cell was snappy and quite the "ram raid" to the senses, this one seemed over egged, and too pragmatic in my humbles.The 7 minute "Sealand" was a perfect example of overdoing things,it just went on and on and on.


As I alluded to earlier it did have it's moments for this listener, the two Joan of Arc tracks were pretty decent, and I enjoyed "Georgia," but "Souvenir" was by far my favourite track (memories of moonies back in the day)


Who knows how I would have reacted if the albums swapped places in the book?


Anyways,although a good listen in parts, not enough for me to shell out on, this album wont be going into my collection.





Bits & Bobs;

A lazy but widespread criticism of the English synth pop scene of the early 80s was that it was soulless or lacking in human warmth. While there certainly were acts who came across as detached or alienated (Cabaret Voltaire, The Normal, John Foxx) if anything, the opposite was generally true. There is an almost baroque level of (exquisitely judged) romantic melodrama to Soft Cell's 'Say Hello Wave Goodbye'; despite Gary Numan's dead-eyed automaton image, Tubeway Army's 'Are "Friends" Electric?' is quite clearly a very fragile and keenly felt song about heartbreak; and the early releases of Blancmange, Depeche Mode and Eurythmics were torrid with the emotion expressed... no matter how affected the delivery was.


 Of course some of this was down to that old chestnut about how real music containing real soul and real emotion was played on real instruments such as guitars and drums. But this is also a confusion between form and content. Sometimes when listening to synth pop I automatically think of a Mancunian friend with a pacemaker who has the demeanour that is common among many of us who are born in the North Western rain shadow area. Once when out with a much more demonstrative European girl from sunnier climes, she asked him: "Is this why you have no emotions - because you have a robot heart?"



One group more than any other managed to successfully combine yearning, lovelorn, romantic content within a futuristic, 'European', supposedly 'cold' form however and that was Liverpool's Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark. Critics hold varying opinions on different stages of their career but OMD always made pop music of one kind or another. Look behind the austere design and photography (and the forbidding title) of Architecture & Morality and you will find a collection of three and a half minute long nuggets of pop gold. (Well, almost. The hypnotic, ambient wash of 'Sealand' written about the oil refinery on the banks of the Mersey, unfolds at a much slower, Eno-inspired pace.) It was no coincidence that John Hughes would go on to ask them to contribute to the Pretty In Pink soundtrack after hearing the album.


When you take this into account, they seem less like a geographical anomaly and more like another big-hearted Liverpool group with an ear for a timeless melody. Another bunch of Catholic lads with a Protestant work ethic in the extremely insular but creative musicscape of post-Beatles Merseyside. (The album track 'She's Leaving' is a subtle but knowing tip of the hat by the core duo of Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys to The Beatles, the band who had made their name in the Cavern on Mathew Street, just yards from Eric's, the club that spawned OMD.) This work ethic saw them release two albums in nine months and such startling early singles as 'Red Frame White Light', 'Electricity' and 'Enola Gay'. But it was their third album Architecture & Morality that really marked them out from the crowd. The duo had been signed briefly to the nascent Factory imprint in the late 70s, where they met feted designer, Peter Saville who created the austere artwork that still stands up (along with his sleeve for New Order’s 'Blue Monday') as one of the most iconic of the era.

 The sheer arrogance of the title and artwork are met equally by the music contained within. This cockiness suggests McCluskey and Humphreys knew exactly what they were doing, and nothing reflects this more than the conceptual joke of having two songs dedicated to a 15th Century French martyr, which in turn led to them releasing two consecutive singles called 'Joan Of Arc' - both of which came out within months of each other. In fact it was only due to bosses at Virgin panicking that they were differentiated from each other by the first by having the moniker Maid of Orleans added in brackets. The second of them, 'Joan Of Arc (Maid Of Orleans)' highlights the utterly berserk weirdness of OMD. It is at once highly experimental for a 7" destined for the upper reaches of the pop charts (an electronica piece in waltz time about a Saint who died half a millennia beforehand, featuring a Mellotron) but soulful and almost sentimental in its warmth for the subject. This feeling of religious fervour permeates the rest of the album through the use of austere synthesized sounds, Gregorian chant, choral singing and perhaps adds to the sense of timelessness.

 There isn't a note out of place on Architecture & Morality. From the panic-ridden, cold war paranoia and booming Numanesque synths of 'The New Stone Age' to the wistful 'The Beginning And The End' which sits somewhere between Japan and The Smiths (and is certainly more Hal Hartley than John Hughes), this is one of the finest 1980s pop albums. 'Souvenir' is perhaps the moment when they lay their cards on the table and say, 'Look, we're actually trying to break your heart.' It features Humphreys in only the second of his rare turns taking over vocals from McCluskey (the first being 'Promise' from Organisation). But even here, ethereal synths, tape loops of choral singing and the sound of distant war drums never let us forget the seriousness implied in the album's title. (This ominous nomenclature was suggested by Martha Ladley, of Martha and the Muffins, after reading David Watkins' Morality And Architecture textbook.) Perhaps the most progressive track on the album is 'Georgia' an eschatological bomb age hymn, utilizing tape loops of long wave radio synced perfectly with the music and berserk bursts of electronic noise. It certainly points the way forward to another astonishing album, 1983's Dazzle Ships.What attracted you to the figure of Jean D’Arc?


 Andy McCluskey: Well, it started innocuously enough. On the Organisation tour we were in France playing in places like Rouen and Orleans that were historically associated with Jean D’Arc. Our support band dubbed it the Joan of Arc tour. So I thought I’d learn about it when I got back home. I was terribly swotty and precious about my songs I’d read books on a subject before writing about it. I’m not sure if other people did that but I did. The more I read about her the more fascinated I became. She is a very politicized figure and she has been used by everyone. Anti-imperialist historians, feminist historians, Marxist historians, everybody has their own spin on her and what she means to them. For me I’m very fascinated by people who have the moral certainty that they are doing right because I’m not. I find it hard to commit to things. I was fascinated and wanted to write a song. Wrote one ('Maid Of Orleans') didn’t think it worked and thought bin that and write another ('Joan of Arc'). It was the guys in the band who said what about that 6/8 one why don’t we work on that before we go to the studio. We worked on it together and it really came together. So it was a case of two for the price of one really. You write these songs naively but you discover this stuff later.

 How do you remember the song being received?


 AM: There are plenty of mad women out there just like there are plenty of mad men. And in the same way that a lot of insane men think they’re Napoleon or Julius Caesar reincarnated. Top of the list with women is Cleopatra but Jean D’Arc is a very close second. The number of girls getting in touch with me saying thank you for writing that song about me... It was unbelievable.
 I thought is was a conceptual masterstroke putting two songs with the same name together on the album and then releasing them one after another as singles just to have them both chart...

 AM: I tried to get that one past Virgin. After the first one was a hit they said that they wanted to release the second one but could we change the name. I said ‘No. That’s the fun bit. That’ll really fuck people up.’ And they said ‘No, really, Andy people won’t get it. They’ll think you’ve released the same single twice.’ So I succumbed but I did quite like the mischievousness of it.
 With Architecture, I think the balance between the avant garde and your own innate pop sense is the most finely balanced. Was that coincidence? Were you actually aiming for one thing over the other?

 AM: I don’t think we had clearly defined aims. I’d imagine subconsciously they were finely balanced because we could write songs and knew we could. But really we’d done two albums where effectively we’d done whatever we wanted to do and had hits. The first one went gold and the second one had ‘Enola Gay’ on it and sold even more, so we’d developed this confidence which was like, ‘We do whatever we fucking want.’ So we carried on in the same direction. But the weird thing was that Architecture & Morality was so big we kind of blew ourselves out of the water. When you’re that young and you think that doing something radical with your music is the most important thing you can envisage and then you sell millions of records and at some point you sit down and think, ‘Have we changed the world? No? We were wrong.’ And what we chose to do was to go even more radical on Dazzle Ships. We abandoned a lot of the sweet melodic aspect of what we did and went specifically, lyrically radical. We fell off the cliff basically. We went too far for most people. You’re aren’t the only one who thinks we got the balance right with Architecture.
 I think that Dazzle Ships is as good a record if not better but you can cut this a number of different ways. There are big differences between critical and commercial success...


 AM: Well it had neither to be honest. It got panned and no one bought it. To be honest Architecture didn’t get rave reviews when it came out because it was a bit more ambient and gothic and God knows about Dazzle Ships. People who thought that we were supposed to be synth pop and all about 'Messages' and 'Enola Gay' stood back and went ‘What the fuck are you doing here lads; getting a bit too proggy eh?’ It’s kind of been reassessed a little bit now but quite a few of the journalists were not 100% keen on it.Talking of which, you’ve still got a lot of these old men who wear cowb
oy boots running the 'respectable' music press. Do you think synthesizer music will ever be treated as seriously as rock?

 AM: I think there are certain elements in the rock press – people of a certain age who were young enough in the late 70s and early 80s to be looking for something a bit different - who like ourselves saw the country and rock music as being old fashioned. Fuck off out of the way – there’s something new coming. And they were probably disappointed like we were in the 90s when the Britpop generation couldn’t find anywhere new to go so they went back and reinvented 60s guitar pop. For me it was gobsmacking. But you’re right there’s still that element there now: if it ain’t got a guitar it ain’t rock and roll and if it ain’t rock and roll it ain’t proper music.

 Did you see yourself as a pop band or an experimental band in this period?

 AM: I think during the first four albums we were a lot more weird and experimental than a lot of our contemporaries. We used to have arguments with Virgin all the time. They used to say ‘Will you make your minds up whether you want to be Can or Abba?’ But we wanted to be both.

 When you first signed to Din Disc OMD were an extremely prodigious band – why was that?

 AM: I think, more than anything else, it was because Paul and I had been writing songs together since we were sixteen so we’d built up a catalogue of ideas so when we finally got the opportunity to make albums and recordings it was like the flood gates opened. The first two albums were both released within nine months of each other. It was like, 'Bang!' Also just being given the opportunity to do it and enjoying doing it. There was nothing else more important to us than making music. When we weren’t in our own studio we were on tour and when we weren’t on tour we were back in the studio. And when you’re recording for the first time you haven’t exhausted all the possibilities. It’s all virgin territory.



"Joan of Arc"

 
In an interview in Beatmag, Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys were asked why their song lyrics were about such unusual topics as Enola Gay and Joan of Arc. This was their reply:


Paul Humphreys: "We really didn't want to do this traditional love lyrics. We always hated those kind of 'I love you' and 'You love me' kinds of songs. Kraftwerk always sung about really unusual things as well. Also, another influence on us was Brian Eno and he always sung about some very unusual topics. So, we kind of followed that line."


Andy McCluskey: "Again it was us wanting to do something new and not be clichéd and repeat things. I tortured myself. On the third album, the song 'Joan of Arc' has the word love in it and I kept thinking, can I use this word? But love here is kind of third party - it's not you or me, it's she. She fell in love, so I can get away with that. It's not a first or second love.


Paul Humphreys: "Because we thought love was such a cliché. There were so many love songs, particularly at that time. We just thought they became meaningless, really."

 
In the same interview Andy McCluskey describes the meaning behind the title of their Architecture & Morality (AM) album: "It was purloined from Martha Ladley who was the keyboard player in Martha and the Muffins who was the girlfriend of Peter Saville (a graphic designer who designed their album covers) at the time, and who suggested it as a great title. We could see it was a great title because it was a sort of metaphor for our own music: we have the electronic structure - the architecture, the inhuman machine; and we have the morality which is the warmth and the empathy and the vocals and the humanity. The tension created by the juxtaposition is where we saw the strength of our music being derived from."


 

Maid Of Orleans (The Waltz Joan Of Arc)

his was OMD's second successive single to be about the French heroine "Joan of Arc."


 
According to the Guardian newspaper March 7, 2008, when "Joan of Arc" got good reviews ahead of the album's release, OMD's Andy McCluskey told Smash Hits magazine: "That's nothing. Wait until you hear the next single - it's our Mull Of Kintyre."


 
The single release was titled "Maid Of Orleans (The Waltz Joan Of Arc)." However on the Architecture and Morality album the song was named "Joan of Arc (Maid of Orleans)."


 
This was Germany's best-selling single of 1982. It also topped the charts in Belgium, The Netherlands, Portugal and Spain.


 Andy McCluskey wrote on the official OMD website: "The intro was a problem for radio and we did do edited versions where it was shortened. The idea came about because we actually had the song recorded but thought the track started oddly and needed something else to announce it's arrival. At the time of A+M we were making a lot of music that was ambient soundscapes. The natural thing was to give the song an intro that set up the feel for the main themes to resolve out of the noises.It's not meant to 'mean' anything specific, just set up a feeling to let the track grow out of the strange noises. I think that it worked well! BTW.. for the sound anoraks... most of the noises are melotron vocal sounds slowed down/sped up and greatly distorted simply by completely overdriving the old Helios desk in The Manor Studio. Pink noise and snare drum in lots of reverb."



 

Both these last two are 'alright', although Tainted Love as a cover song mixed with a  cover of Where Did Our Love Go (not on the album) is often heard in my car, lasts about nine minutes.

See Depeche Mode mentioned there in the OMD summary, they're more of my choice of electronic music from a British perspective: I'm sure they'll come up sometime later.

Album 486
Black Flag..................................................Damaged (1981)









Black Flag’s debut studio album.This album was going to be released on Unicorn Records, an imprint of MCA Records, until MCA Records President Al Bergamo listened to it and called it “anti-parent.”

Damaged introduced the hard core/thrash/metal blitz that they wee to become famous for.

Album 488.
The Psychedelic Furs..................................................Talk,Talk,Talk   (1981)












One of the many bands in the 1980's to successfully bridge the gap between the underground art-rock scene and commercial acclaim.Their second album Talk,Talk,Talk is their finest moment.


Their influence can be traced across the spectrum, with elements of their approach appearing in everything from Ryan Adams to the vocal style of VNV Nation.






 

Last edited by arabchanter (06/2/2019 11:07 am)

Album 489.
The Human League....................................Dare   (1981)











Well that's weird (being today's album), if you consider the "Pawlett effect" by the way this is exactly the way it is in the book (on my kids lives) so a sign Pawlett will score the day? I'm gonna stick a couple a quid on it, but this by no means endorses the chanting of you know what.



The Human League were deemed all but dead when the ‘musicians’ left to form Heaven 17. But Phil Oakey’s trip to his local Sheffield nightclub proved to be a very good idea, as he recruited a couple of schoolgirls who’d propel the band to new heights. Within a year Phil, Adrian, Joanne and Susanne (and later Ian Burden and Jo Callis) were to become the biggest band in the country and number one come Christmas 1981 with one of the top-selling singles of the decade.



 Dare, released in October '81, showcased the band’s growth from sinister-sounding electronics to a triumph of the new pop aesthetic arising from New Wave. With a high-gloss cover (which cost 50p more to keep it perfectly white) stolen from a Vogue fashion piece, Dare was heralded by a trio of successful singles – the clanking boom-crash of The Sound of the Crowd, the utterly wondrous Love Action (I Believe in Love) and the intense Open Your Heart.

Last edited by arabchanter (06/2/2019 11:08 am)

Album 487.
X..........................................Wild Gift (1981)












Well this one was one of these rare finds that this book throws up,I've listened to this quite a few times now,and have to report that this is a mighty fine album.

Is there such a thing as "polished punk?"

These people seem to quite adept with their musical instruments,and the dual male/female vocals add that certain "je ne sais quoi" that fir me sets them on a genre quandary.Are they punk/..............well the lyrics and the chainsaw guitar in some of the tracks are pretty punk orientated,but you also have a bit of rock 'n' roll,a bit of surf guitar, a whole load of rockabilly or as I have been reliably informed psychobilly,which makes sure this album never becomes dull.


I really enjoyed all the tracks, but "Adult Books" sounding a bit like "Orbison" in parts,the upbeat "I'm Coming Over," "Some Other Time" and "Year 1" were probably the pick of the bunch fir me.


Although seemingly a punk album,I found this one crossed genres without losing any interest in the tracks,I liked this one that much I've just ordered an original off of ebay,this album will be going into my collection.

Give it a spin,I think you'll find it was worth the effort.





Bits & Bobs;


X Look Back on 40 Years of Punk Iconoclasm With a celebratory tour ahead and a Grammy Museum exhibition opening soon, the L.A. quartet reflects on their earliest days and what keeps them going

 “Right now is my favorite time in the band,” says Exene Cervenka, the L.A. den mother of punk poetry and singer for the band X. “I have this feeling of awe like I did when we started. I remember going to [L.A. punk club] the Masque and watching bands and feeling awe, bliss and gratitude at how amazing the scene was, even though there was pee on the floor and drunk people walking around. It was transcendent, and I feel that now. We are still alive. We’re still playing music. People are still coming to see us – lots of young people – and they tell us our music got them through bad times or their kid turned them onto us or their parents turned them onto us. Everybody that comes to see us has a story. … This is exactly how punk was supposed to end up.” 
 But it almost didn’t happen this way for X, whose members also include singer-bassist John Doe, guitarist Billy Zoom and drummer D.J. Bonebrake. Since 1977, they have ridden a roller coaster of hope and heartache as they’ve earned their status as one of punk’s most resilient bands. In recent years, Zoom has overcome two bouts of cancer, and Cervenka has learned to live with an undiagnosed neurological disorder. In addition to their health worries, they’ve endured the divorce of Cervenka and Doe, lived desperately in the name of art and weathered prickly personnel crises, only to return to the lineup they started with. It’s a story the L.A.-based quartet has told with aplomb on a series of records that presented punk through the lens of Americana, featuring country flourishes, journalistic lyrics spiked with sarcasm and jagged chord changes. Now They're celebrating their Ruby Anniversary with a tour, kicking off this week, and a Grammy Museum exhibit, which opens on October 13th and will feature artifacts like instruments, clothing and the typewriter they used to write lyrics.


 The reason they’re working so hard to mark this anniversary is because they understand the significance of it. Ahead of the tour, Cervenka posted a message to the band’s fans on its website: “We are still here! Just some friendly advice – you should probably come see us play while you still have the chance. Not that X is going away anytime soon! … Aren’t you glad X is still around? I am!” When she wrote it, she had been thinking about her son and how he’d seen many great bands but missed out on the Ramones because they’d retired by the time he was old enough. “I think I understand regret in life more than I ever did,” she says. “And I understand people have reasons not to do things, but you never know with people and with bands. There are so many people who didn’t see the Cramps or the Gun Club. They break up or go away, and what’s the excuse? None. We’re still around. It’s a miracle.”


 X formed in 1977 when Doe and Zoom both placed ads in the same issue of L.A. classifieds publication The Recycler saying they were looking to form punk bands and decided to meet up. “Billy looked like he was from outer space,” recalls Doe, now 64. “He had bright blond hair and a silver leather jacket.” Similarly, it was Doe’s look that struck Zoom first: “He had these blue suede shoes that were real pointy and had brass caps on the toes and heels. He looked really sharp and he had really good song ideas.”


 Zoom had moved to L.A. from Illinois in the late Sixties with hopes of doing session work and wound up playing sideman on gigs with the Drifters, Johnny “Guitar” Watson, Big Joe Turner and Gene Vincent, who “wasn’t very popular back then” but he says it was worth it for the fun of it. Largely, he was turned off to the “all the bullshit that popped into the Seventies, all those over-produced, super-processed, over-sensitive, ‘we’re so arty’ arena bands,” so he was ready for something new.


 Doe moved to the City of Angels because “it’s the place of dreams, my friend.” He was attracted to it because it seemed like people could reinvent themselves. “It was a visceral thing,” he says. “And I was a fan of the writers that came from L.A. and an old movie buff – the underside of Hollywood, and right after that, [Kenneth Anger’s scandalous] Hollywood Babylon book came out and that was just the best.”


 After settling, he enrolled in a writing workshop at a Venice bookstore, where he met Cervenka, another transplant who says she was just “trying to get out of Florida.” “The [other] people looked like what you would expect poets to look like in 1976,” he says. And what does that mean? “Um … frumpy or nerdy,” he says with a laugh. “Exene stood out ’cause she was really unique and beautiful and you could tell there was something deep in there.”


 “I was just sitting there and he came down and sat next to me,” she says. “We were talking and he said, ‘You wanna go next door to the jazz place and get a drink?’ So we did that and he told me about punk.” They started going to shows and before long they were dating and Doe was bringing her song “I’m Coming Over” (and her along with it to sing it) to X rehearsals  After playing with a few drummers who never fit their sound, they hooked up with Bonebrake – a Valley boy who’d impressed them by wielding a giant, loud parade snare onstage with the band the Eyes – and X’s classic lineup was complete by early 1978.


 Their first single, “Adult Books,” tumbled along with a calypso-esque beat as Doe and Cervenka sang about boys and girls with love lives complicated enough to fill a Valley of the Dolls sequel. Eventually, they crossed paths with Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek. “He came to the Whisky to hear another band we were opening for, and we started playing ‘Soul Kitchen,’ and his wife, Dorothy, had to elbow him like, ‘Look at that,’ and he’s going, ‘Huh?'” Bonebrake recalls. “He didn’t recognize it.” He became enamored with X and tried to get them signed to Elektra but to no avail.


 So they decided to do it on their own with Manzarek producing. Although they had enough unheard music for two LPs, they picked nine songs, including their raucous “Soul Kitchen” cover, for what would become their stunning 1980 debut, Los Angeles; the leftovers later became 1981’s equally brilliant Wild Gift. Both came out on the indie label Slash, after which Manzarek finally got Elektra to open its doors to X. The Manzarek-X collaboration would last another two albums – 1982’s Under the Big Black Sun and the following year’s More Fun in the New World – and provide the majority of the songs the band would play live over the next three decades.


 The songs X recorded for Los Angeles were the most typically punky they had in their repertoire – the Ramones-y opener “You’re Phone’s Off the Hook, but You’re Not”; the ominous “Johnny Hit and Run Paulene” with its “Johnny B. Goode” intro; the pure sludge of “Nausea,” offset by Manzarek’s organ. Doe based the springy title track’s sardonic lyrics on a friend who’d moved to London and subsequently had a nervous breakdown. “She’d just gotten fed up with it,” he says. “She had lived there for a couple of years and she became more and more racist and stereotyping people. And to be honest there was a lot of shock value in tended in the lyrics. I wanted to show the dark side or underbelly of Los Angeles. People like Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Nathaniel West did – the Doors did it – so it was time for an update.” 
 


The songs they reserved for Wild Gift were generally a bit more melodic, including a cleaner-sounding version of “Adult Books.” “I used to wake up writing,” Cervenka says. “My eyes would open and I’d already be writing. I’d go to parties, we’d all be drinking and drunk, and I’d go lock myself in the bathroom and use the back of the toilet as a desk and sit there writing. People are like, ‘Let me in,’ and I’m like, ‘Just a minute – I’m writing.'” At the time, Doe and Cervenka lived meagerly – the frantic lyrics of “We’re Desperate” and their scenes in The Decline of Western Civilization give a glimpse into X’s life then – but their love was strong and they made it official in 1980. “We’d played a gig in San Diego and just drove down to Mexico,” Zoom recalls. “They got married in Tijuana the next day in a little justice-of-the-peace office. I remember I hired a mariachi band to come over and play, and everybody drank a lot of tequila.”


 Although X were born in the Seventies and wrote most of their first two albums before the decade was up, they came into their own in the Eighties as they moved away from punk’s rigidity and embraced oppositional politics and self-reflective lyrics. Under the Big Black Sun, which came out in 1982, had bouncy rhythms (note the tom-tom section in “The Hungry Wolf”) and lyrics about the death of Cervenka’s sister, Mirielle, who had died when struck by a drunk driver in Hollywood, on three songs. The accident had shaken her up, but she poured her grief into her music and the band moved forward, putting out More Fun in the New World – the band’s cleverest and least punk album – the next year. Songs like “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts” (borrowing a title from a Native American mantra) and “The New World,” written during the middle of Regan’s first term, sound as though they could have been written today. “It was better before, before they voted for what’s-his-name?” goes “The New World.” “This was supposed to be the new world!” (Incidentally, the political interests of the band members cover the spectrum, as Zoom identifies as a conservative.)  A year later, though, X were having no fun in the new world. Doe and Cervenka divorced in 1984 but they decided to keep the band going. “I felt like our creative partnership was more important, so even though I was hurt and she was hurt, we kept going,” Doe says. “She was a friend before she was my wife. And she was still a soulmate when we sing ’cause we sung together for so long.”


 They went into 1985 with two projects. The more unexpected of the two was Poor Little Critter on the Road, a joyous alt-country record attributed to the Knitters that found them playing with Blasters guitarist Dave Alvin; they’d later reunite for a second album, The Modern Sounds of … , in 2006. The other was the critically panned new X record called Ain’t Love Grand!, which was a departure for X musically, since it featured big, synthesizer-tinged songs and overproduced drums on the single “Burning House of Love.” Zoom quit the band, and his slot was filled by the Blasters’ (and the Knitters’) Dave Alvin for a bit and then Tony Gilkyson (who appeared on the band’s last studio album to date, 1993’s Hey Zeus!). They recorded a cover of the Troggs’ “Wild Thing,” which earned them some rare – and weird – visibility via its inclusion in the 1989 movie Major League, and both Doe and Cervenka explored solo careers while still staying active with X.


 They drifted through much of the mid-Nineties until an improbable source, TV’s The X-Files, led them back to Zoom. The sci-fi show was gearing up for its first movie and a friend of the guitarist’s, who worked on the show, approached him asking if he and Cervenka would film ad spots for it. He was a big fan of the show and agreed to go to the shop where Cervenka worked, named You’ve Got Bad Taste, in L.A.’s Silver Lake neighborhood. “He showed up with his silver guitar, his silver jacket, sunglasses on and his amp, and I just pretty much started crying,” Cervenka recalls. When Zoom looks back on it, he says, “It was kind of fun.”


 He’d spent his time out of X getting off drugs, going back to college and starting an amp-repair business. Although he was game for some X-Files promo, he didn’t want to rejoin the band. So the band twisted his arm. When they put out the compilation, Beyond & Back: The X Anthology, in 1997, they began haranguing him to participate in a Tower Records signing. “X’s manager kept calling me and I said I’m really kind of busy,” Zoom recalls. “He said it would stimulate record sales. I said, ‘I don’t get paid royalties. Remember, you already screwed me out of the royalties. I don’t get anything.’ So I finally work out a deal where I think he gave me 50 copies of the box set and I took those back to my shop and autographed them and sold them for 20 bucks a piece. [The signing] generated a bunch of press and then people started asking if we were gonna get back together and then that got really annoying because I didn’t want to.” 
 So what was it that brought Zoom back to X? “They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” he says. The way Zoom tells it, X’s manager harassed him to the point that he made an offer he thought was outrageous and they agreed. Although he won’t explain what that means specifically, he says, “On that tour, I made a lot more than the rest of the band and got my way.”



 Regardless of such behind-the-scenes negotiations, the group has stuck together since then and none of the band members say they feel any friction with any of the others. When asked what it says about the band to be playing a 40th anniversary tour, Doe says, “It says fuck yeah.” He laughs. “The alternative sucks.” And as for why it’s working, he says the band members all “basically” like each other. “This is our career, so we have a vested interest in continuing,” he explains. “But it’s like a family, and I’m really grateful that everyone still wants to do it as well – and they didn’t die. I’m really grateful for that.”


 Although they’ve occasionally whipped out Ain’t Love Grand’s “Burning House of Love” and See How We Are’s title track live, they’ve mostly focused their set lists on songs from the albums they made with Ray Manzarek, since they want to play music that originally featured Zoom. They’ve also expanded the lineup to include touring musician Craig Packham, so Bonebrake can play vibraphone and Zoom can play saxophone on some songs. Doe says Packham’s addition has made playing concerts “doubly rewarding,” since they’re now able to play a multilayered, supersized version of “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts” that features both vibraphones and saxophone.


 They’ve also learned to adjust their personal lives to performing. Cervenka has spent a good chunk of the last two decades yo-yo-ing between doctors trying to treat an undiagnosed neurological disorder. Some doctors said she had multiple sclerosis; others said she was normal. “I didn’t have insurance and it was super fucking expensive,” she says of all the medications she had to take. Over time, she says she’s figured out a way to live with how she feels, even if she doesn’t know exactly what it is. “I realized I’m gonna be as healthy as I can ’cause I’m gonna be a better doctor to myself than apparently half these people,” she says. “That’s all you can do, right?” Although Bonebrake says there have been a few shows where she wasn’t able to do encores because of how she felt, opting to go to an emergency room instead, she’s always pressed on to the next tour date.  Meanwhile, Zoom has survived two bouts of cancer – first affecting his prostate in 2010 then his bladder in 2015 – the latter of which forced him off the road for half a year as the band toured with a temp. He’s now feeling better. “I’m cancer-free, but they’re still inspecting me every few months to make sure it doesn’t come back,” he says. “But it makes me wonder what cancer’s next.” Although the 69-year-old isn’t crazy about the wear and tear of touring – not to mention standing in front of audiences, which has long made him uneasy – he says he’s excited to be wielding wild, country-punk fury on his instrument once again.


 “[Billy] has been playing really well,” Bonebrake says. “I think he realized how much he wanted to play with the band, because Billy’s always complaining, like, ‘I like playing but I hate being on the road.’ And now he’s like, ‘I want to come back on the road.’ He’s enjoying playing again. I think that happens when you’re that close to death.”


 And while they’re happy to be celebrating their legacy on the road, that’s where their legacy will likely remain. The re-formed band has recorded only a handful of tracks, the most recent of which was a two-song Christmas EP in 2009 called Merry Xmas From X. (Though they’re currently raising money to release a live LP documenting their 2011 South American tour with Pearl Jam.) When asked why they never made a reunion album, three quarters of the band say they’re open to the idea but that it doesn’t seem to be in the cards. “Families are complicated,” Doe says, choosing his words carefully. “There’s certain … Yeah, I’m not gonna go there.” He laughs. “I wish we would and who knows?”


 Zoom, on the other hand, flat out says no way. “It wouldn’t work,” he says. “The chemistry wouldn’t be right. [Some band members] are in different places and stubborn, and I don’t want to go into detail, but it wouldn’t sound like an X record.”


 Despite this, he says, it’s “kinda cool” that the band has made it as far as it has. “I think we’ve got a couple of years in us,” he says. “Barring health problems and just getting old in general, we’ll probably keep doing it for a while.”  “You have to face reality: Eventually something will happen to one of us,” he says, “but maybe we’ll continue on. It’s rare for a band to be together this long. I think we all realize it’s a special thing. I’m not waiting for the shoe to drop, but I know something’s gonna happen eventually. We won’t be able to continue this forever.”

 “We’re like the guy who swings a sledgehammer,” Doe says. “Somehow the hammer is killing him, but it’s also keeping him alive. I wanna do it until we can’t. I see several more years, but not 40 more. That would be impossible.” 


 “We’re like country stars,” Cervenka says. “We’re never retired. You gotta keep working, gotta keep playing. We’re not businessmen; we don’t retire. In this business, the day you retire is the day you stop paying your bills. A lot of bands get back together for a tour and then they don’t do it anymore ’cause they can’t – they just don’t get along or whatever. Obviously that is not gonna happen with us. So you’re stuck with us for a while.”






While they were part of the original '77 run of punk bands, seminal California act X couldn't get a proper record deal until Slash Records came along and released Los Angeles in 1980. The one upside to this delay: By the time they hooked up with Slash, X started dropping records at a rapid clip. Just over a year after Los Angeles came out, X was back again the fantastic Wild Gift.



Los Angeles is where you go if you want to hear X at its most raw. The tunes sound dirty and threatening, and that goes double for the lyrics (See "Johnny Hit and Run Paulene"). Wild Gift, though, marks the band's progression towards a more rockabilly approach. Given that the tunes were either '70s leftovers ("I'm Coming Over," "It's Who You Know") or brand new reactions from the recently married songwriting team of Exene Cervenka and John Doe ("White Girl," "In This House That I Call Home"), it's about as literally a crossroads record as one can get.




Some of the tracks ("We're Desperate," "Adult Books") date all the way back to a 1978 single. "We're Desperate" probably could have been on Los Angeles, but "Adult Books" marks new musical territory for the band, as drummer D.J. Bonebreak and guitarist Billy Zoom rock out a Latin groove as Cervenka and Doe spin another yarn about urban destitution. Another shift can be heard in "White Girl." While Zoom's guitar is as menacing as ever, the band lets mood take precedence over a fast tempo.



Really, though, X's biggest change was in the lyrics. Writing about despair and desolation was always Cervenka and Doe's m.o., but here they start writing about each other. "Beyond and Back" covers their spats ("You took a lot from me / I forgot you were a thief"). "White Girl" expresses Doe's secret lust for another woman. "When Our Love Passed Out on the Couch" retroactively sums up the couple's whole relationship.



Ultimately, though, these differences are miniscule. Ain't Love Grand aside, there's a line that stretches through all of X's records. Wild Gift picks up plenty of the darkness heard on Los Angeles while laying the groundwork for the country leanings of Under the Big Black Sun. If anything, it's like a psychobilly record without any horror or sci-fi themes to hide behind, and it's that kind of grit that makes it one of the saddest and greatest punk albums of all time.




"The Once Over Twice"



 “The Once Over Twice” is the opening song on Wild Gift, the second album by Los Angeles punk band X. The song was written by lead singer Exene Cervenka.

 From the Wild Gift booklet, Exene says of the song:…basically it’s a song about men. Men didn’t like me very much – they were scared of me, as you can imagine, because men don’t like powerful women. They like submissive, quiet, stupid women.



"We're Desperate"


 “We’re Desperate” is the second song on X’s 1981 album Wild Gift. It was originally the B-side to their 1978 “Adult Books” single and was re-recorded for release on the album.From the Wild Gift booklet, drummer D.J. Bonebrake describes his rhythm for this song like this :I wanted it to have a tempo that combined the Ramones and Captain Beefheart.

 John Doe, songwriter and guitarist for the band, says the song is about “poverty, crummy apartments and burning the landlord.”




"Adult Books"

 “Adult Books” was originally released as a single in 1978. It was one of the first songs that bandleaders John Doe and Exene Cervenka ever wrote together, and one of their earliest attempts to create a more complex, nuanced punk song.

 It was later re-recorded for inclusion on their 1981 album Wild Gift.




"Universal Corner"

 “Universal Corner” is the fourth song on Wild Gift, the 1981 album by Los Angeles punk band X.

 From the Wild Gift booklet:“‘Universal Corner’ is about longing and taking the bus,” says John [Doe]. “I had a car when I wrote that song, but I took the bus intentionally to write it, although the bus doesn’t show up in the song. It’s about being away from home.”




"I'm Coming Over"


 “I’m Coming Over” is the fifth song on Wild Gift, the 1981 album by Los Angeles punk band X. It’s the first song lead singer Exene Cervenka claims to have ever written.

 From Exene, by way of the Wild Gift booklet: It’s about feeling lonely, unloved and unwanted – even though I wasn’t.



"it's Who You Know"
 “It’s Who You Know” is the sixth song from Wild Gift, the 1981 album from Los Angeles punk band X. The song was originally written in 1977, but hadn’t been recorded until the Wild Gift sessions.From John Doe, by way of the Wild Gift booklet:…it’s about wanting to be somebody. I came up with the lyrics, which include a line inspired by Ben E King’s "Spanish Harlem.



"In This House That I Call Home"


 “In This House That I Call Home” is the seventh song on Wild Gift, the second album by Los Angeles punk band X.

 From the Wild Gift booklet:  “In This House That I Call Home” could be described as the theme song for the house off of Santa Monica Boulevard that John [Doe] and Exene [Cervenka] lived in during the late ‘70s and early '80s… where a friend was always crashing on the couch, somebody always had a hangover, and nobody had any money. “This is my favorite song on the album,” says Exene. “It’s brilliant in that it’s a perfect marriage of humor and the hard-core reality of life in that house.”


 “Some Other Time” is the eighth song on Wild Gift, the second album by Los Angeles punk band X. Allegedly, Exene Cervenka wrote the song about Phil Alvin, lead singer of fellow LA band The Blasters


.

 pictured: Phil Alvin in 1980

 From Exene, courtesy of the Wild Gift booklet:  That song was a real breakthrough for me in terms of singing. I’ve always liked the way I sing – despite the fact that people were always telling me my harmonies were flat – but with that song I began to feel more control as a singer.



"White Girl"


 “White Girl” is the ninth song on Wild Gift, the second album by Los Angeles punk band X, as well as the only single released from said album. Lead guitarist/singer John Doe reportedly wrote this song about Lorna Doom, bassist for legendary punk band the Germs


.
From the Wild Gift CD liner notes:  So you were open with each other about crushes?
“We kinda were,” says Exene.
“Not really,” counters John. “If I wrote a song like ‘White Girl,’ there was an unspoken pact that this may happen, but I love you more. I think for both of us our primary commitment was to the music. Sometimes we wrote songs that made it sound as if we were having affairs, but that didn’t mean we were.”



"Beyond And Back"


Beyond and Back” is the tenth song on Wild Gift, the 1981 album by Los Angeles punk band X.

 The drum pattern in this song was inspired by the locomotive rhythms of classic train-based blues songs "Train Kept a-Rollin' and "Mystery Train"




"Back 2 The Base"


 “Back 2 the Base” is the 11th song on Wild Gift, the 1981 album by Los Angeles punk band X.

 From the Wild Gift booklet:



“‘Back 2 the Base’ was inspired by the Ramones,” says John [Doe], “and the lyrics are entirely based on things I heard a guy on a bus screaming as he was cracking up. He was holding a picture of Stevie Wonder above his head, as if to show everyone else on the bus how wrong rock ‘n’ roll had become, and he was screaming ‘Gotta get me back to the base, Elvis sucked on doggy dicks.’ They stopped the bus because the guy wouldn’t get off, and the last thing he said as he was being loaded into the police car was ‘I’m the king of rock and roll. If you don’t like it, you can lump it.” I didn’t write the song until a few weeks later when I was riding the bus to work at the Beverly Wilshire and was having comparably murderous thoughts."



"When Our Love Passed Out on the Couch"


When Our Love Passed Out on the Couch” is the 12th song on Wild Gift, the 1981 album by Los Angeles punk band X.

 “When Our Love…” was written early in the band’s career, and remains a favorite of lead singer Exene Cervenka’s. Exene says of the song (via the Wild Gift booklet):  I just love that idea of love passing out on the couch, which is a line I wrote.




"Year 1"


 “Year 1” is the final song on Wild Gift, the 1981 album by Los Angeles punk band X.

 From Exene Cervenka, by way of the Wild Gift booklet:  “Year 1” is a song I wrote because I was frustrated. I wanted a revolution and really expected one to happen, then I realized time was passing and people were losing it. There wasn’t gonna be the revolution I’d been dreaming of.

 John Doe adds:   For me, “Year 1” is about dropping all preconceptions about what should or shouldn’t be and starting over, and I think that’s what punk rock was trying to do. The most important thing about it was that it encouraged people to take their destiny into their own hands.

Album 488.
The Psychedelic Furs..................................................Talk,Talk,Talk   (1981)











Gonna keep this one short, I only ever knew The Psychedelic Furs through "Pretty in Pink" and "The Breakfast Club," and after listening to this album, I'm quite happy to keep that arrangement.


The album fir me at least seemed to take an awful long time to finish,which is never that good a sign.The songs all seemed to have rather samey feel to them,unless that was because the vocalist just droned on and on with no sign of variation to be found in his chanting, really was awful.


I tried listening to it again this morning,but only lasted 10 minutes (why put myself through it again.) If it wasn't the singer droning on it was the sax player,now this is probably just me, but I found it sounded of key quite a lot.


Anyways not impressed in the slightest,and if you haven't listened to this,give it a miss.


This album wont be going into my collection.  (although I did like the album cover)





Bits & Bobs;


The Psychedelic Furs were born amidst the chaos of the late-'70s Punk scene in England when bands like The Sex Pistols were chewing scenery and spewing vitriol to the delight of disgruntled teens. But the Furs, formed by brothers Richard and Tim Butler, resist the constant stream of labels thrown at them and their unique blend of sound. Tim explained "People for years have been trying to lump music into different categories. Music is just music. I can remember when we first came out, people were asking, 'How would you describe yourself? Punk? Or alternative? Or new wave?' Why pigeonhole people? It's just music."


 
The group is far more popular than their chart success indicates. Their most popular song, "Pretty in Pink" - forever linked to the 1986 John Hughes classic of the same name - made just #41 in America and #18 in the UK when it was re-released that year. "Love My Way" (#44 US, #42 UK) and "Heartbreak Beat" (#26 US, #79 UK) still get significant airplay, but were only middling hits.


 The Psychedelic Furs is an interesting choice for a band name, considering the band doesn't play psychedelic music. One of the prevailing stories is that the name is an homage to the Velvet Underground's "Venus in Furs." Tim Butler set the record straight in an interview with That Music Magazine: "It's a myth. We were getting drunk in a pub one night and were thinking of all of the punk band names we liked, such as The Clash and The Sex Pistols. There was an interest in the psychedelic and 'Furs' just fit."


 
After seven studio albums, the band broke up in 1991 but reunited in 2000. In the meantime, the Butler brothers found more success with their Alt Rock project Love Spit Love.


 
Tim Butler compares his brother's songwriting skills to that of the legendary Bob Dylan but admits that, even after more than three decades penning lyrics, there's no exact method to their madness. He explains their loose approach to Songfacts: "So I'll sort of jam around a bit more and he'll sing over it, and it goes from there. Basically, if something catches on to him really quickly, then we'll work on it. If it doesn't, then it's scrapped."


 
In the Furs' heyday, bands were breaking ground by rattling social structures and attacking authority, but Richard Butler wanted his band to ask relevant questions without forcing people to accept his answers. He explained in a 1982 Creem interview: "Society tends to place people in a structure, telling them what they're supposed to think. One of the big problems nowadays is that people tend to believe exactly what they're told without questioning it. That's what I find depressing and disillusioning. What I find optimistic are people who think for themselves and make their own minds up about things. That's what our basic message is all about – encouraging people to think for themselves. That's why I don't write lyrics that are obvious. I don't want to say, 'Here, take this because it's the right way to think' like the Clash or bands that assume a specific political stance. I prefer to work inside people's heads a bit more, and give them some credit for having a brain – working from the inside out. If you can make somebody think they're remotely intelligent, they can usually reach some conclusions of their own."


 
Before co-creating the The Psychedelic Furs, Tim Butler had never even picked up a musical instrument. In an interview with Ear Candy Mag, he recalled the night Richard had the idea of forming a band: "I was about 17 years old and my brother Richard and I were sitting around discussing music one night, and he asked me if I wanted to form a band. I told him I couldn't play anything. He said 'what do you want to play?' I told him, 'bass,' to which he replied 'then, buy a bass and we'll form a band.' Needless to say I did, we did, and here I am."


 
Tim was still finding his way around the bass when he nearly ruined an early gig at a Windsor Castle pub in London. He told Ear Candy Maghow a temperamental E string humiliated him: "We were playing a song when my E string broke. At that time I had no spare, no replacement strings and no knowledge of how to transpose to other strings. The band played most of the set with no bass. I think I drowned my sorrows at the bar, until our manager rushed in with an E string. Apparently he'd managed to find a bass player on the street and bought his string off him, so I made the encore."


 
Richard Butler is also a trained painter and has displayed his art at US galleries in New York City and Miami and internationally in Florence, Italy. In 2013, his "ahatfulofrain" exhibit was showcased at Freight + Volume in New York City. The press release describes the work as "at once mysterious and ambiguous, as well as deft and graceful - nearly surgical - in their depiction of emotion. Mostly focusing on renditions of his daughter and a few close friends, Butler creates an intensely private vision - dark and dreamlike, as well as stark and unapologetic."


 
Although the Furs' music has been memorably featured in '80s teen flicks like Pretty in Pink and Valley Girl, Tim Butler leans toward a different genre. He told That Music Magazine his favorite film from the decade is John Carpenter's The Thing. Unfortunately, there are no songs from the band in the horror movie.


 
Their first two albums were produced by Steve Lillywhite, who worked on much of U2's '80s output. Phil  who would later co-write the Natalie Imbruglia hit "Torn," was an engineer on these sessions. In an interview Thornalley credited Lillywhite for giving the band a much-needed boost. Said Thornalley: "Steve Lillywhite, he could take a band like The Psychedelic Furs, who weren't great musicians, and he could create such an atmosphere in the studio of kind of gung-ho, positive, we can do this, that it would raise their morale, like a football coach would. The sum of their talents, which was not great, would suddenly become something quite outstanding. And I saw him do that with a few bands."




"Dumb Waiter"


The phrase doesn't show up in the lyrics, which are written from the perspective of someone who seems to have a tenuous grip on reality ("Give me all your paper ma, so I can buy a train").


According to the group's guitarist John Ashton, he started writing the song with Rick Cooper, who was the bass player in a band called Roxy. "I had the tune and Richard wrote the words for it," he said in ZigZag. "It's a bit surreal – I think they tend to make people use their imaginations really. The way we never play a song the same. It never means quite the same. I guess people relate to it any way, make something out of it themselves."


 
A band composition, this song was packaged in a playable (at 33-1/3 rpm on a turntable) embossed sleeve to promote the band's second album, Talk Talk Talk. It contained sneak-peek excerpts of the tracks "Into You Like a Train", "I Wanna Sleep With You" and, what would become one of their most famous songs, "Pretty in Pink." On this version, singer Richard Butler even introduces "Dumb Waiters" with an album plug: "This is a Psychedelic Furs commercial. Buy Talk Talk Talk."


 
This was the first Furs single to break into the UK charts. It peaked at #59, while in the US it reached #27 on the Dance Music/Club Play Singles chart.




"Pretty in Pink"


Richard Butler explained the song's meaning to Mojo magazine November 2010: "The song was about a girl who kinda sleeps around, and thinks it's really cool and thinks everybody really likes her, but they really don't. She's just being used. It's quite scathing."


 
John Hughes named his 1986 movie after this song. Starring Molly Ringwald, Andrew McCarthy, and Jon Cryer, Hughes wrote the plot around the song's lyrics, but according to The Psychedelic Furs, he muffed the meaning. Richard Butler recalled to Mojo how this song got co-opted onto the Pretty In Pink movie: "We did the song (on 1981's Talk Talk Talk), and were very pleased with it. It wasn't that we were disappointed it wasn't a hit to begin with - at that point, we didn't know what was going on, or whether any of them were singles or whether we were that kind of band. A few years later, Molly Ringwald took it to John Hughes and said, 'I love this song, we should use it for a movie.' He took it away, listened to it, and wrote Pretty In Pink, which totally got the whole thing wrong. It was nothing like the spirit of the song at all. It's really hard to say whether it was damaging for us. I suppose we got tied in with the story of the film, and if that's what people thought the story was about, and didn't look much further than that, they were getting a very false impression."


 
The group recorded a new version of this song for the movie with producer Chris Kimsey. This version was re-released with the film in 1986 - five years after the original.


When the song was first issued in 1981, it hit #43 UK and did not chart in the US; the re-release charted at #41 US and #18 UK, but its American impact was far greater as the movie became a classic of the generation.


This new version was mixed to make the song more appealing to a pop music audience. The original includes much rougher, edgier guitar riffs, and the closing, barely audible lines are muttered by Furs lead singer Richard Butler as though he's ruminating in stream-of-consciousness style about Caroline while he's in a drunken haze. The remix has more polished, more upbeats riffs, and while the same lines are included in the trail-off, a louder riff plays over them to make them even less audible and make the overall effect more pop and less bitter.

 
This was one of the first "New Wave" hits of the '80s. Other British bands like The Pet Shop Boys, New Order, and Bananarama had success with the synthesizer sound that was catching on in the US.


 
The band was a six-piece when they recorded this song, and all six members got a songwriting credit on the track, which ended up being a big deal when it was used in the film and re-released. Here's the lineup:

John Ashton - guitar
Richard Butler - vocals
Tim Butler - bass
Vince Ely - drums
Duncan Kilburn - saxophone
Roger Morris - guitar


As for how the song came together, "We were in a studio for three weeks writing Talk Talk TalkTim Butler said. Some of the band had gone home; it was later in the day and I think Duncan and Roger, because they lived in the same area, they'd gone. It was just me, Richard, Vince and John. We were just messing around, and the initial riff of it came up. Usually, we'd play an initial riff and Richard would say, 'Wow, that's cool! Carry on. Do something else.' We would just work round and round it and experiment. That one came pretty quickly."


 
This was The Psychedelic Furs biggest hit in the UK. In the US, their only Top 40 was "Heartbreak Beat," which hit #26 that year.


 
The original version was produced by Steve Lillywhite and mixed by future Cure producer and pop songwriter Phil Thornalley, who said of the later mix: "I thought the later one was great. The main thing was that they finally had some worldwide success. I worked on the first two Psychedelic Furs albums, and I just didn't really ever imagine that they would achieve that kind of breakthrough to that type of success - it was a very arty kind of band. That new version of 'Pretty in Pink' probably did them really well in terms of making a living."
 

Last edited by arabchanter (06/2/2019 11:09 am)