Album 491.
Bauhaus.......................................Mask   (1981)










Mask is the second studio album by English post-punk band Bauhaus. It was released in 1981 by record label Beggars Banquet.

 Bauhaus expanded their style a bit on Mask, particularly by incorporating keyboards and acoustic guitar on songs such as “The Passion of Lovers”, and funk rhythms and saxophone on tracks like “Kick in the Eye”, “Dancing” and “In Fear of Fear”


The album cover is a drawing by guitarist Daniel Ash. The original artwork for the album was a gatefold sleeve with blue text on the inside and a stark black-and-white image of the band. On later editions this inside was replaced with white text and a montage from the promotional video for the song “Mask”.


 The original version of the album was only ten tracks, but it was later reissued to include five bonus tracks.

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

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











I've just realised that I think I like synth-pop much more than I ever thought I did.This is another superb album,every track is guaranteed to stick in your brain for life, I loved Oakey's hair ,but never had the bottle to copy it,I just went wi' the flow and had a wedge/mullet wi' highlights/lowlights like abbidy else instead o' saying fuck you this is me.


To be honest, living in Fintry it probably widnay have gone doon too well, highlights and lowlights was pushing it somewhat, there was two burds who lived in Fintry that were cool as fuck, they both had the Oakey cut and were good friends of Billy Mackenzie, obviously too good and trendy fir me and my mates which led to the assumption that they tended to "like to dine at the lady gardens," poor girls probably got kids and grandkids now, but them wis the rules in our daft heads back then.



This album hasn't got a dud track in my humbles,every one will be etched in my memory as good, fun,danceable music, now in saying all this, this album wont be going into my collection, the simple reason being I have this already on vinyl,cassette,CD and mp3, I've also got it believe it or not as a giveaway from a Sunday newspaper.



Another reason and most importantly is  "League Unlimited Orchestra" album, seeing Dare reminded me how much I loved this album,


This album has 8 tracks superbly mixed, in fact I've just ordered up an original copy, I like it so muc



Please do yourself a favour and give Love And Dancing by League Unlimited Orchestra a spin,I would like to think you wont be disappointed.


Please indulge me;











Bits & Bobs;


The name of the band was taken from a sci-fi board game called Star Force. One empire was called The Human League. The group was formerly called The Future.


 
The group split up after releasing their first two albums. Wright and Oakley formed the new Human League with a bass player and two school girls as additional vocalists. Ware and Marsh left to form the British Electronic Foundation which later became known as Heaven 17.


 
They've built protecting cages around themselves and their synthesizers after some bad experiences during live shows ("fans" throwing beer cans, etc.).


 
Phil Oakey first approached Joanne Catherall and Susanne Sulley to join Human League in 1980 when he spotted them dancing together on the dance floor. Neither had any experience of singing or dancing professionally. Sulley recalled to Q magazine in 2016:

"He came over, he was very serious and said, 'I don't know if you know but I'm Philip Oakey from the Human League. Our group has just split up but we're contracted to do a tour of Europe in three weeks and we're looking for a female singer. I saw you and your friend together and wondered if you wanted to audition."


 
Oakey was working as a hospital porter at the time he was approached to be Human League's vocalist. He recalled to Q Magazine: "I was a hospital porter out of absolute desperation. I'd worked at a book shop for two years where their wages were £9.50 a week; at least with portering I was earning £50 a week. That was the only reason I did it, I was finished otherwise."



THE MAKING OF DAREStudios with leaking roofs, trips to new romantic clubs in a little Hillman Imp, and a heavy metal single recorded between sessions. They’re all part of the behind-the-scenes story of the 1980s synthpop masterpiece that is THE HUMAN LEAGUE’s ‘Dare’ albumWords: NEIL MASON
This is quite a spot. Halfway up a hill in the picture postcard Berkshire village of Streatley, the view is spectacular. The River Thames snakes through its valley beneath us, while rolling hills stretch out as far as the eye can see, dotted with fizzing yellow fields of oil seed rape.


 To our right, on a tree-lined, winding country road, a huge pair of new-looking wooden gates screen what lies behind them. Peering over the top, you can see the six-bedroomed, seven-bathroomed carbuncle that occupies the plot. Apocryphal perhaps, but local legend claims it was built for Geri Halliwell. The fact it sits empty several years after completion, too brassy even for Ginger Spice, speaks volumes.


 What was here before the property developers showed up had more character in its tiled lav than this entire £5.9 million pad can muster. The ramshackle collection of buildings that used to be here made up Genetic Studios, where in the summer of 1981 one of the most important records of the last three decades came to fruition. This is the exact spot where The Human League’s ‘Dare’ album was recorded.


 The story of ‘Dare’ is the story of a handful of decisions leading to the creation of a record that swept away everything before it and laid down a marker for everything that was to follow. Had any of those decisions not been made, or been made differently, ‘Dare’ would not have worked out the way it did.


 But the story doesn’t start in Berkshire, nor as you might expect does it start in The Human League’s home town of Sheffield. The first key decision in the making of ‘Dare’ came in Edinburgh in 1978, when local music entrepreneur Bob Last signed the band to his fledgling Fast Product imprint. Last was a canny operator. The label, which went on to boast releases from The Mekons, Gang Of Four and Dead Kennedys, even gets a nod alongside the independent big boys in The Clash’s DIY scene tribute, ‘Hitsville UK’: “When Lightning hits Small Wonder / It’s Fast Rough Factory Trade”.


 Wow, this is a hit,


we’re going to put this out
’Bob Fast



 There’s a music world truism that good bands know good bands, so Last listened when Paul Bower – whose Sheffield outfit 2.3 recorded a single for Fast Product – waxed lyrical about his mates back home. A demo duly dropped through the Fast letterbox. Last’s pre-punk love of Parliament and Funkadelic was to be as much an entry point to what he was about to hear as the cold electronic landscapes of Kraftwerk. The demo was The Human League’s ‘Being Boiled’.


 “I listened to it once and when that bassline kicked in, that was it,” says Last. “I didn’t know anything about making hits, but I thought, ‘Wow, this is a hit, we’re going to put this out’.”


 Last was nothing if not ambitious, but when ‘Being Boiled’ came out in June 1978 it didn’t exactly trouble the Top 40. Subsequent versions were recorded and released and it eventually went Top 10 on the back of the success of ‘Dare’ in 1982. But bigger fish were frying. At the insistence of future DinDisc boss Carol Wilson, Virgin Records MD Simon Draper was dragged along to see one of the League’s London shows.


 “I remember being particularly taken with Phil Oakey, their cover version of ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling’, and the whole light and slideshow concept,” recalls Draper.


 By the time Fast released the band’s next record, ‘The Dignity Of Labour (Parts 1-4)’ EP in April 1979, the band had already signed to Virgin, with promises of creative freedom nailing the deal, and Last made the leap from label honcho to band manager.


 “The idea The Human League could be the new ABBA didn’t seem crazy to me,” offers Last. “From the first time I’d heard ‘Being Boiled’, I’d always thought this was about pop.”


 

They realised they weren’t actually getting anywhere
Simon Draper



 The band’s second album, ‘Travelogue’, was issued in May 1980. It entered the album charts at Number 16, but failed to produce a Top 40 single. By the autumn, The Human League Mk1 were crumbling. Last’s managerial mettle was about to be tested and he would soon be making another decision that would edge them close to ‘Dare’ – or, alternatively, see the whole thing go up in smoke.


 “They realised they weren’t actually getting anywhere,” says Simon Draper. “And the tensions in the group were such that they reached something of an impasse.”


 “Everybody was frustrated,” says Bob Last. “So I was proactively encouraging them to split. I knew somewhere among it all there were hits, but I didn’t know where. In the end, all sorts of things were negotiated in difficult circumstances. At one point, Phil didn’t want the name ‘The Human League’ and the other lot did.”

 The “other lot” being Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh, who left to form Heaven 17. Somehow among the acrimony, Bob Last ended up managing both bands. It solved the problem of where the hits would come from, but with a perception that the musical talent had left, this was an anxious time for Phil Oakey and his art school pal Adrian Wright, the other remaining original member of the band.


 “I’d had arguments internally,” admits Draper. “Because of the recession in the early 80s, we knew we had to cut back and Nik Powell [co-founder of Virgin Records] wanted me to drop The Human League. Richard [Branson] backed me when I refused and fortunately I was vindicated quite quickly.”

 “We couldn’t have got through all this and ended up with ‘Dare’ without someone at the record company who carried a lot of weight,” believes Last. “Simon Draper had complete faith from day one. Would I have blamed him for dropping us? It would have been a perfectly reasonable position. His faith was crucial.”

 “When Phil called me up and said he’d got these girls, I was… less than convinced”
– Bob Last


 Phil Oakey once claimed of The Human League Mk1 that “only lads in long coats liked us”. It was clear, to him at least, that they needed to broaden their appeal. How he did that is not only one of pop folklore’s most famous tales, it was a masterstoke of a decision. No matter how good their songs were, how great their records sounded, it wouldn’t have mattered a jot if the League had been fronted by boys.


 “When Phil called me up and said he’d got these girls, I was… less than convinced,” says Bob Last of Oakey’s trip to a Sheffield nightclub, where he found teenagers Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley and asked them to join the group on the spot. “I don’t recall what I said. I think there was probably an interesting silence.”


 Last admits they’d had a little road test with this direction before. The first single proper for Virgin, in July 1979, made good the label’s creative freedom promise and offered a glimpse of The Human League Mk2 with the release of ‘I Don’t Depend On You’, recorded by the band under the alias The Men.


 “Phil had these theories about how they weren’t going to use conventional instruments – no guitars, no drums,” says Simon Draper. “So they didn’t want it to be a Human League record, they didn’t think it fitted with their image. Listening to it now, you can hear what they would become. At the time, it seemed a bit of a red herring.”


 ‘I Don’t Depend On You’ is a remarkable song – a deep, rolling bass, punchy synths, a toe-tapping drum machine, a soulful, soaring vocal. “It’s cruel but it’s true / I don’t depend on you / Go back to the end of the queue” purr the female backing duo of Katie Kissoon and Liza Strike. The sleeve, featuring a woman in a suit with scraped-back hair and heavy kohl eyes, screams League Mk2 while the B-side, ‘Cruel’, is an instrumental re-rub, a formula that would eventually lead to the post-‘Dare’ album ‘Love And Dancing’.


 Funny thing is, this wasn’t the first time a seemingly innocent event doffed its cap to the future. The cover of the band’s 1979 debut album, ‘Reproduction’, appears particularly prophetic. It’s hard to look at it now and imagine those legs belonging to anyone other than Phil, Joanne and Susan.


 “I honestly don’t know where the idea came from,” says Simon Draper. “The legs belonged to two girls in the A&R department. It might have been the band’s idea, but I can’t believe they were thinking ahead in that way.”


 It wouldn’t be very long, however, before everyone discovered this was exactly what Oakey was thinking.

 “Phil understood what Sue and Joanne would bring – and it did prove to be crucial in respect of giving a wider audience a route in,” says Bob Last.

 They were due on tour soon after Mk1 split. So soon, in fact, the girls already had tickets to see The Human League in Sheffield. Now they were in The Human League.


 “I saw them on that tour,” sighs Draper. “Hammersmith Odeon… and it really was terrible. But because of the girls, I think they got away with it. I vividly remember [influential journalist/broadcaster] Charlie Gillett came to the drinks party afterwards and said, ‘This band’s going to be huge’. I remember being so encouraged.”


 “At the time, you were starting to see the emergence from the whole mess that Britain was in back then,” believes Last. “‘Dare’ was about saying aspiration was okay and possible. The video for ‘Don’t You Want Me’ really crystallised things, particularly round the girls. It’s this idea, before ‘X Factor’, that made you think these are people not that dissimilar from you, that you can buy into this glamour, because here are these two girls from Sheffield, and now they’re in this video as if they were movie stars.”


 What The Human League were doing musically was dramatically different, radical even, but on its most basic level, ‘Dare’ tapped into the cultural climate perfectly. It would be embraced by the high street, in particular by girls in slingbacks going to town on a Saturday night – a factor that proved pivotal to their success.

 ‘The Sound Of The Crowd’ – “Not good enough…”


 The Oakey/Wright-penned Mk2 debut ‘Boys And Girls’ failed to dent the Top 40 on its release in February 1981. In order to sustain interest, the band needed to re-establish themselves. And quick. But Virgin’s verdict on the demo of the song that the band wanted as their next single was inauspicious.


 “When ‘Sound Of The Crowd’ was delivered, it just didn’t sound good enough,” says Simon Draper. “It just seemed to me they had to make a more credible musical record and Phil suggested Martin Rushent would be the prefect producer. Based on what? I don’t know. It didn’t seem all that likely to me.”

 Martin Rushent had made his name as a producer working with the likes of The Stranglers, The Buzzcocks, Dr Feelgood and Generation X. He’d also produced 999’s ‘Separates’ album in 1978. More new wave than punk, 999 sounded properly tight: the drums were crisp and sharp, the bass deep and full. It turned out Oakey was a bit of fan. Asked who he’d like to work with, Rushent was top of his list.


 Martin Rushent, meanwhile, had been busy setting up Genetic Studios at his newly acquired Wood Cottage home in Streatley. He loaned Midge Ure and Rusty Eagan the fledgling studio to record the first Visage album. When Virgin called up to see if he would drop in for a chat, he’d already soaked up the lessons learned from watching Visage work and arrived clutching a record he’d made with Buzzcocks frontman Pete Shelley, who was about to return to the fray as solo artist with his electronic based debut, ‘Homosapien’.


 “Martin said you must come to my studio,” says Dave Allen, who engineered ‘Dare’ and who first met Rushent when he produced Allen’s band, Pinpoint. “We arrived expecting this amazing country studio, and it was a building site. The original studio was in this ramshackle bungalow down the hill from where the main studio was being built.”

 Allen’s band didn’t work out but, getting along well with Rushent, he found himself hired as an extra pair of hands in the studio, taking on everything from programming to heating up meals for the bands. Yes, along with the famous imported Linn Drum, Genetic also had one of the UK’s first microwave ovens.


 Work on ‘Dare’ started in Sheffield, with Phil Oakey and Adrian Wright joined by Ian Burden and Jo Callis. Burden came via Graph, a Sheffield band who had appeared on a Fast Product compilation. Callis was from Edinburgh and was a former member of The Rezillos, who had been managed by Bob Last.


 “It was this derelict building that at some point had been a veterinary surgery,” says Jo Callis of the League’s optimistically named Monumental Studio in Sheffield that they shared with Heaven 17.


 “It was mostly falling down and used to leak constantly,” confirms Last. “I still have a recurring nightmare about trying to fix the roof of that studio.”


 Callis was hired for his songwriting expertise, but he was essentially a punk guitarist masquerading as a glam rocker, and his knowledge of keyboards was patchy at best. But when he first arrived in Sheffield, the new boy was helped out by an unlikely ally.


 “Martin Ware of Heaven 17 actually showed me round,” says Jo. “He showed me the basics of how a synth worked, how to programme it, how to get different sounds out of it.”


 Once they had a few songs demo-ed, the band would decamp from Monumental to Genetic, where Martin Rushent and Dave Allen set about meticulously recreating the tracks. The first fruit of the sessions was a new version of ‘The Sound Of The Crowd’ that peaked at Number 12. With Rushent and the girls on board, The Human League finally had pop potency. Rushent’s PA, Carri Mallard, remembers the band’s regular trips to Genetic.


 “I used to pick Susan and Joanne up from the train station,” says Mallard. “They’d be sat in the back of my little red Hillman Imp, all northern accents. They were wonderfully down to earth and excited about the whole thing. We’d go off round the clubs in the area, the new romantic nights. They wouldn’t have been able to do that a few months later. ”


 “I still feel the girls weren’t appreciated enough for the sort of spirit and the input they provided,” offers Jo Callis. “It was just as important as anything anyone else did.”


 “The band used to stay in a pub called the Miller Of Mansfield in Goring, just across the river from Genetic,” says Mallard. “Philip would wander round the village with his asymmetrical hairstyle, no shirt, tight black drainpipe jeans, high-heeled women’s shoes and red lipstick. You can imagine. Philip was the most charming guy, but to the little old ladies in this sleepy village it was like, ‘Who is this person?’.”


 The last piece in the ‘Dare’ jigsaw, the very final decision, revolves around a song that, if it hadn’t been written, may have left the album flat on its face and the League’s career looking similarly deflated. As a single, it would be Number One on both sides of the Atlantic and a Top 10 hit in a dozen more countries, selling over 2.5 million copies.


 “It wasn’t like there was this big pool of material waiting to be recorded,” recalls Callis. “We were almost recording as we went. Adrian had this little book of instructions about how to turn all the equipment on and how to work the studio. So we’d get the studio working and kind of potter about. ‘Don’t You Want Me’ came from such pottering. I was thinking along the lines of Coati Mundi and Kid Creole & The Coconuts, strangely enough, and then Phil had the idea of the ‘Pygmalion’ lyric and it all developed organically from there.”


 “Phil was quite visionary in his own way,” says Dave Allen. “When we were doing ‘Don’t You Want Me’, we didn’t have a chorus, so we had to wait two or three days for Phil to knock one up, which is small beer in my subsequent experience. Eventually Phil came in and said, ‘I’ve got the chorus, I’ve got the chorus… “Don’t you want me baby, don’t you want me, oh-oh-oh / Don’t you want me baby, don’t you want me, oh-oh-oh-oh…”.’ Me and Martin both looked round and went, ‘You’re having a fucking laugh… fuck off’. And Phil was like, ‘No, no, no, it’ll be great’.”


 “We were the last to see it as a potential single,” says Callis. “It was just another track on the album to us.”


 Curiously, it’s the last track on the album too. This is in the pre-shuffle era, when people would put a record on and listen to the whole thing from start to finish. As such, artists thought hard about the sequence of tracks. It was important. So why was ‘Don’t You Want Me’ last? Depends who you talk to. Some say it was a deliberate sequencing choice, others say it was buried because Oakey didn’t like it. Whatever, you can’t deny the impact.


 “It was always going to be the really massive one,” claims Last. “But Phil was really unsure about it. There were many discussions where he took the position that ‘Don’t You Want Me’ wasn’t even worth releasing. For all I know, he was well aware it was a big hit and he was just testing to see if everybody else knew.”


 “It was Number One over Christmas 1981,” says Jo Callis. “To say thank you, Virgin Records bought everyone presents. Phil got this trials bike, the girls got expensive faux fur coats, Adrian got a state-of-the-art Nikon camera. When Richard Branson’s autobiography come out, he said that if it wasn’t for ‘Dare’, Virgin Records would have gone bust. In a way I helped save Branson’s company… so thanks for the fucking black-and-white TV.”


  “He always talked about revisiting ‘Dare’,” says Martin Rushent’s son Tim, sipping from a glass of iced water in The Bull, the pub at bottom of the road that leads up to where Wood Cottage and Genetic Studios once stood. “When dad worked with the League on ‘Heart Like A Wheel’ in 1988, he was talking about how he’d like to remix ‘Dare’ at some point.”


 Sadly, Martin Rushent died in 2011. His legacy is not only the work he completed during his time, but one unfinished project. For as long as ‘Dare’ has been around, there have been stories of lost out-takes and alternative versions. It’s relatively well known that there are two unreleased tracks from the sessions: ‘So Young’ and ‘Beauty’. Neither were completed to any standard, though. In recent months, there’s also been speculation that Rushent was working on a version of ‘Dare’ using traditional instruments when he died.


 “He realised another dub remix wouldn’t cut it,” says Tim Rushent, who is himself a producer. “He hated to repeat himself and was always looking to move productions forwards and challenge himself. There are some recordings, but they’re not what he settled on. The plan is for the first, last and only time, one take, ‘Love And Dancing Live’. It’s all mapped out, it’s all dad’s work. And dad being dad, it’s not as straightforward as it sounds. All we have to do is see that his final production happens.”


 Tim and his younger brother James, the frontman of Does It Offend You, Yeah?, are hoping to get the project off the ground at some point later this year. It promises to be a fitting tribute to Martin Rushent and to those who came together over the summer of 1981 to make that original, astonishing record.


 “When they finished ‘Dare’, dad said he played it though and thought, ‘Yeah, not bad’,” says James Rushent. “He never thought it would do what it did and he never thought people would still be talking about it 30 years later. It used to shock him the amount of attention it got, although he would never let on.”


 “Martin would always go home after the sessions and play the rough mixes,” recalls Jo Callis. “He’d say he was really enjoying doing it and was really inspired by it, but he couldn’t tell whether it was absolutely brilliant or utter rubbish.”


 So what was it about ‘Dare’? Everyone says the same thing. It was about the right bunch of people, in the right place, at the right time. Nothing more complicated than that.


 “It just naturally came out of everybody’s personalities,” says Jo Callis. “Maybe it’s that sort of Yorkshire thing – everyone was fairly down to earth, it was all cups of tea and fish and chips. For all the make-up and bizarre hairstyles, there’s a definite element of ee-by-gum about ‘Dare’. Which I love.”

 To quote the lyrics of the opening track, ‘The Things That Dreams Are Made Of’, “Everybody needs love and affection / Everybody needs two or three friends”. The Human League had all of those things.


  TERRIBLE LIZARDThe ‘Dare’ sessions also produced “the worst single ever made”.

 “We’d often finish sessions late and everyone would go home – apart from Jo,” recalls Dave Allen. “Jo was staying at the studio because he didn’t have anywhere else to go and after a while we had this idea to make a heavy metal ‘Stars On 45’ record. The beat isn’t difficult, is it? That took 10 minutes. And then it was, ‘OK, what songs have we got to do?’. ‘Smoke On The Water’, ‘Alright Now’, ‘Silver Machine’, ‘School’s Out’… It was a joy to get a guitar out and do a really terrible version of ‘Purple Haze’ over a ‘Stars On 45’ beat. It was relaxation.


 “Martin came home very drunk one night when we were trying to do the middle eight of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and we said,’C’mon Martin, we need a mad toms solo like that Led Zeppelin song’, and so he played this brilliant freestyle Linn Drum tom tom solo. In the end, the medley was called ‘Bang Your Head’ and released as a single on Island. The band was called Terrible Lizard. We had a meeting with a guy who said, ‘How are we going to do the promo for this?’. Andy Peebles called it the worst record ever made when he played it on his lunchtime [Radio 1] show. I was very proud.”



 WHERE ARE THEY NOW?The Human LeaguePhil, Joanne and Susan released their ninth studio album, ‘Credo’, on Wall Of Sound Records in 2011. They still perform a lot of live shows and aren’t averse to playing songs from ‘Dare’ every once in a while.Bob LastWorked as a music supervisor on films such as ‘Chocolat’, ‘Little Voice’, ‘Backbeat’ and ‘A Room For Romeo Brass’ before turning his hand to producing, where his credits include Oscar-nominated animation ‘The Illusionist’ and Terence Davies’ ‘The House Of Mirth’.Simon DraperRuns Palawan Press, a publishing house specialising in ultra-exclusive, limited edition titles. Selling for hundreds of pounds a pop, many of the beautifully crafted titles are histories of classic cars, such as Aston Martin, Mercedes and Ferrari.Dave AllenWent on to produce in his own right, with The Cure, The Sisters Of Mercy, Depeche Mode and Neneh Cherry among his credits. He recently bought the mixing desk that legendary German producer Conny Plank used to record Kraftwerk. Franz Ferdinand used the desk for their last album.Jo CallisWas playing with the reformed Rezillos until recently and is now working with singer Robert King, who was the frontman of Edinburgh long-lost post-punk band The Scars. Has started writing his memoires, which should be well worth a read.Carri MallardCarri went on to work for Big Country manager Ian Grant and then Alan Edwards, PR for The Rolling Stones and David Bowie among others, before becoming a press officer at RCA. She relocated the US in the late 90s, where she works as an interior designer.





"Love Action"

This song is a semi-autobiographical account of vocalist Phil Oakey's relationships. Oakey's lyric, "I've been a husband and a lover too" alludes to how he'd been unfaithful to his then-wife. He explained to Mojo: "It was a celebration of the hope that people could be more open about their sex lives."


 
The song is titled after Lou Reed's Rock and Roll Heart track "I Believe in Love". The lyric, "I believe what the old man said", is also a reference the former Velvet Underground singer. Oakey, speaking to Smash Hits in 1982 said, "no one ever asks me who the old man is... it's Lou (Reed)."


 
George Michael's 2002 political satire "Shoot The Dog " was based around "Love Action." The Utah Saints 1993 UK Top 10 hit, "Believe In Me" also sampled this song.


 
This was the second of three songs from Human League's Dare! album that was released in advance of the album itself in 1981. It was made available in the UK on July 27, 1981 and became the band's first Top 10 success.


 
Dare! was the very last album that the legendary music journalist Lester Bangs ever heard. The run-out grooves of side two were playing in his New York apartment when his body was discovered.




"Don't You Want Me"


This song is about a guy who meets a cocktail waitress and turns her into a star before their love goes bad. It was inspired by an article in a woman's magazine. Lead singer Phil Oakey claims this is not a love song but about power politics between two people.


 
With help from MTV, which launched on August 1, 1981, this opened a mini-British invasion of the USA. There were a lot of video shows in Europe, so when MTV went on the air, they were forced to play videos by many UK bands because that was most of their library.



"Don't You Want Me" was the first US single released by The Human League; it was issued in January 1982, entered the Top 40 in April, and thanks to the MTV exposure, hit #1 on July 3, 1982, where it stayed for three weeks. The song's rise mirrored that of MTV, gradually gaining attention and making a huge cultural impact by the summer of 1982.


 
In the UK, this was a monster hit, and the first #1 for Richard Branson's Virgin label. The song was released in the UK in November 1981 and hit #1 on December 12, where it stayed for five weeks; the group had three previous UK hits that year: "The Sound Of The Crowd" (#12), "Love Action (I Believe In Love)" (#3), and "Open Your Heart" (#6).




When the Official Charts company compiled a 2012 list of the all-time top-selling singles in the UK, "Don't You Want Me" landed at #24, with sales of 1.54 million.


 
The Human League was formed in 1978 by Philip Oakey, Adrian Wright, Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh. Wright - a non-musician - was in charge of the visuals, and created elaborate slide shows that were projected on stage during their songs. In 1980, Ware and Marsh left to form Heaven 17, leaving Oakey and Wright in charge of the group.



The female backup singer/dancers Susan Ann Sulley and Joanne Catherall were added that year, and various musicians were hired to work on the Dare album. Wright learned to play some synthesizer and contributed to the songwriting, but Oakey fronted the group. "Don't You Want Me" was was written by Oakey and Wright along with keyboard player Jo Callis, and was unusual in that one of the female backing singers took a lead role, as the song was structured as a duet. It was Sulley who got the call, and to many American listeners who only knew the group for this song, she appeared to be much more than a hired backup singer. At the time, Philip Oakey was dating the other singer, Joanne Catherall.



 
According to it's creator, Roger Linn, this was the first hit song to use the LM-1 drum machine. Introduced in 1980, the LM-1 was the first programable unit that sampled real drums rather than creating them synthetically. It became the basis for many hits of the era, with acts like Culture Club, Peter Gabriel and Gary Numan using it to make backing tracks. Its most prolific proponent was Prince, who used it on songs like "Little Red Corvette" and "When Doves Cry."


The Human League considered themselves very cutting-edge. They relied on electronic sounds and considered guitars "archaic and antique." At first, they didn't want "Don't You Want Me" released as a single because they thought it was too mainstream.


 
The Dare! album was recorded without traditional instruments. Its success prompted a call at the Musicians Union's Central London chapter to ban synthesizers and drum machines from recording dates and live work. The union feared that musicians were being put out of work. The proposed ban was defeated.


 
The Human League turned down an appearance on the American music show Solid Gold because they were asked to perform this song with the famous Solid Gold Dancers, and the band refused, since they had their own dancers - Sulley and Catherall. Solid Gold was a very influential pop music show, but "Don't You Want Me" still managed to continue up the charts and hit #1 without that exposure.


 
Phil Oakey recorded his vocals for this song in the studio lavatories. According to Q magazine August 2012, the recording was disrupted by Jo Callis reaching through an open window from outside to repeatedly flush one of the toilets.


 
The video was directed by Steve Barron, who did many of the most memorable early MTV clips, including "Money For Nothing" by Dire Straits and "Take On Me" by a-ha. He shot it on 35mm film, which was expensive, but gave the video a very cinematic look. The video was inspired by a 1973 French film called Day for Night, which is about a director struggling to make a film. Jacqueline Bisset starred in the movie.


 
Phil Oakey (From NME December 29, 2012): "The key to that song is that we didn't spoil it, I think. With most songs you think of a couple of nice tunes and some words and then you start working and you work until they're not very good. We happened to stop before, stop while it was still all right. So in a strange way, it sounds complicated but it's a pretty simple sort of song."


 
The guitar-synth melody that accompanied the chorus was the result of a studio accident. Producer Martin Rushent recalled to NME: "That came about because the computer screwed up and played the line a half-beat out of time. The moment we heard it, Jo (Callis, guitarist) and I went, 'Wow, that's amazing!'"


 
Virgin Records owned the rights to the material that Human League recorded over the period they were signed to them. When a parody version of this tune was used in 2001 for a Fiat Punto TV advert, the band fought a bitter legal battle. They ultimately lost the case to Virgin and Susan Sulley later complained: "Now even if we wanted to use the song for a more worthy company, we can't because it will always be associated with a particular brand."

  
Phil Oakey appreciates what this song did for the group, but doesn't think very highly of it. He told Classic Pop magazine in 2014: "'Don't You Want Me' might have shifted gazillions, but either I've heard it too many times or the rest of Dare! is just so far ahead that it puts it in the shade. Still, it made the band."


 
The Human League borrowed the concept for the Dare sleeve artwork from German Vogue. Phil Oakey recalled to Q magazine: "That concept they'd done 18 months before and I use to collect old fashion magazines. I thought we'll probably get away with it and we did. They never came after us. There was probably contemptuous of a crummy pop band."



 .

Listened to Dare again over the weekend for the first time since the 80s (probably).  Brilliant album. Definitely the bands peak.

Finn Seemann wrote:

Listened to Dare again over the weekend for the first time since the 80s (probably).  Brilliant album. Definitely the bands peak.

Good to hear from you Finn,it's good to listen to sometimes forgotten gold again, but hopefully some new gold too!
 

Album 490.
The Gun Club....................................Fire Of Love   (1981)












Never heard The Gun Club before,I'd heard the name but couldn't have told what type of music they played, and after listening to this for the the third time I still couldn't tell you.


I've read various pieces about them and they've been described as punk, rockabilly, country, bluesy, tribal psychobilly blues and a new one for me cowpunk, so I would probably say fir me they seem to bit of all these genres, which sounds like a mish mash of noise, but I think it really works, I like this one more and more the more I hear it.


This album is another one of those great albums I never new existed (Sorry shedboy but give it a few spins), "Sex Beat," "Jack on Fire," "Promise Me," were great tracks but "She's Like Heroin to Me" is the stand out, but I really did like all the tracks.



This album will be going into my collection.





Bits & Bobs.


The Gun Club is one of Los Angeles’s greatest bands. Lead singer, guitarist, and figurehead Jeffrey Lee Pierce fits in easily with the genius songwriting of Arthur Lee (Love), Chris Hillman (Byrds), and John Doe and Exene (X). Unfortunately, neither he nor his band achieved the notoriety of his fellow luminary Angelinos.


 From 1979 to 1996, Jeffrey manned the Gun Club ship through thick and mostly thin. Understandably, the initial Fire of Love and Miami lineup of Ward Dotson (guitar), Rob Ritter (bass), Jeffrey Lee Pierce (vocals/guitar) and Terry Graham (drums) remains the most beloved; setting the spooky, blues-punk template for future Gun Club releases. At the time of its release, Fire of Love was heralded by East Coast critics as one of the best albums of 1981. Unfortunately, Los Angeles didn’t see the album in the same light, accounting for much of the band’s time in New York. When brilliant, formidable bassist Rob Ritter (1955-1991) left the fold in 1982, the initial lineup was broken. A revolving lineup and the artistically successful The Las Vegas Story followed. The Gun Club remained dormant until a solidified lineup of Jeffrey Lee Pierce (vocals, guitar), Kid Congo Powers (guitar), Romi Mori (bass) and Nick Sanderson (drums) reconvened for their 1987 surreal masterpiece, Mother Juno. Soldiering on until 1994, this lineup (sans Congo Powers for the Lucky Jim record) released three full-lengths and an EP. Then the unexpected happen: Jeffrey Lee Pierce passed away due to a brain hemorrhage on March 31, 1996 at the age of thirty-seven. At the time of his death, Jeffrey was working on his autobiography (Go Tell The Mountain) and a new lineup of the Gun Club with musical soul mate Kid Congo Powers.


 What follows is a chronological oral account of those close to Jeffrey and various Gun Clubbers, whose playing was integral to the Gun Club’s artistic success. All of the following interviews were conducted between March and August of 2005. Some were conducted at the interviewees’ respective homes (Ward Dotson, Jeffrey’s sister Jacqui Pierce and brother-in-law Johnny Faretra), at Millie’s on Sunset (Keith Morris), via long distance telephone (Kid Congo Powers, Romi Mori and Terry Graham) and one by a quick email (Alice Bag). The closing lines belong to Leon Catfish, guitarist/singer of The Guilty Hearts and lead guitar player of my favorite current L.A. band, the Starvations. Leon and I were talking outside of a Guilty Hearts show about the usual—the Gun Club and Rob Ritter—when it struck me just how important the Gun Club are. Leon and I are clocking in at or under the quarter century mark and continuously discuss a band that hasn’t existed in over a decade. Leon plays his Telecaster in his own refreshing, unique manner, but in a style unmistakably influenced by Jeffrey. Just as Jeffrey took influence from Bo Diddley, Jimi Hendrix and Howlin’ Wolf, we today reach back into his rich catalogue for influence; proving the Gun Club is not ephemeral. Innovators are not forgotten.


 This piece is dedicated to Jeffrey Lee Pierce and Rob Ritter.Interviews by Ryan Leach

 Jacqui Pierce: My uncle Fred was a jazz musician, so we grew up with music. My Mom collected 45s—mostly R&B and soul. Jeffrey was ten years old and started taking lessons to learn how to play guitar, and he stuck with it. A lot of people don’t do that, but he really loved it. He practiced a lot in his room. He would play “Stairway to Heaven” over and over again. We knew he had a love for music and was set on learning how to play.


 Kid Congo Powers: I met Jeffrey in 1978. We were in line to see Pere Ubu and I had seen Jeffrey around a lot. We were always in line—this was during the punk explosion—and there were a lot of shows in Los Angeles that you had to go to. And on this particular night I was like, “Who is this guy anyway?” He was wearing a white vinyl trench coat with white girl’s cowboy boots and a polka dot shirt. We started talking and got drunk. That first day he said, “You should be in a band with me,” and I had never played in a band before. I had always been a music fan. I was like, “Well, okay, whatever,” and he said that I should be the singer. I told him definitely not. And he said, “You could be the guitar player.” I told him, “I don’t play guitar.” And he said, “Oh, that’s not a problem, I can show you some things.” And it happened really spontaneously. It wasn’t too long afterwards that we actually started playing around with some people and making a really terrible, terrible noise.


 Terry Graham: I started college here in Denton, Texas, but it was basically a seed store with a few cows—it was hideous. I had to go to Los Angeles. My cousin lived out there and I thought film school would be cool. But then you go to UCLA and USC and you realize you’re not going to get in just by walking in; it’s a little different than that. The next thing you know, I go to Kim Fowley’s New Wave Night at The Whiskey and the rest is history.


 Keith Morris: Jeffrey and I were living in Inglewood, right in the middle of the Bloods and the Crypts, but they never messed with us. There were probably only six white people in the neighborhood and we looked like a couple of freaks anyway. I walked around the neighborhood and I didn’t care. The gang members, if they think you’re insane, they won’t mess with you. And Jeffrey looked like a freak, too. He had bleached blonde hair.


 Kid Congo Powers: Jeffrey and I really hit it off because we had both traveled a lot—to Europe, around the United States, Jamaica—and he was writing for Slash magazine. He was really into reggae and we both had that in common. We were only nineteen or twenty at the time and a lot of people we knew hadn’t done that. We were also interested in New York music. I was running a Ramones fan club and Jeffrey was doing the Blondie one.


 Jacqui Pierce: Jeffrey was already hanging out at music spots because he was doing interviews. I think that was what drove him to be a musician, to actually get a band together, because he was interviewing people so much. And, he was around the scene. I’m sure he must have thought, “I can do that.” So he eventually formed his first band, the Red Lights. At that time, he was influenced by Blondie, Talking Heads, Television—big time Television fan, Tom Verlaine—some Bowie and Lou Reed.


 Pleasant Gehman: Jeffrey was the one who started me in music. He kept telling me I should have a band. I kept saying, “I don’t want a band,” and he goes, “Well, you would make a great singer.” And I would go, “I don’t know how to sing.” So he would tell me this every time he saw me. And then finally one day he said, “You should have a band and you should be the singer.” And I said, “I don’t want that. I don’t want to put one together,” and he said, “I already put one together for you.” We were called the Cyclones—this was before the Gun Club. Jeffrey played guitar and so did Johnny Nation. There was a guy named John on standup bass and Brad Dunning, who is now a really famous interior decorator, on drums and I was singing. We used to rehearse at Jeffrey’s mother’s house in Pacoima. We were horrible. There was no PA, so I was singing out of a guitar amp and basically screaming above the noise. A lot of people didn’t know how to play what they were playing, just like I didn’t know what I was doing. Jeffrey knew how to play, but Johnny Nation was just starting—he was really sucky—I mean, he went on to play with Lydia Lunch and the Reptiles and all these other things. Anyway, our first and only gig was at the one and only punk night at Gazzari’s. We were opening for the Last and the Go Go’s. I had been going out with the drummer and we broke up and weren’t talking to each other, even though we were rehearsing in a room that was six feet by ten feet. So he would say to Jeffrey, “Tell the singer that she’s not singing in tune.” And then I would say, “Tell the drummer that he’s not keeping time.” And for some reason before the show everyone got really drunk. I can’t remember why but Johnny Nation and Jeffrey got into a fistfight and Brad joined in. It was terrible! We sounded like a train wreck, there was a fight on stage, and everyone could hardly stand up. We were so horrible that Black Flag—God only knows why—was in the audience and thought it was amazing, that it was the most punk rock thing they had ever seen, and asked us to open up for them. But that was the only time we ever played because no one wanted to be together anymore. We were trying to be a pop-rockabilly band and we became the most crazy punk rock band—Jeffrey threw up in a bucket on the side of the stage. The whole thing was out of control. I think it was kind of concurrent with the Red Lights, but they only played a few gigs—maybe two or three.


 Keith Morris: I had compiled a list of band names. Jeffrey was playing in the original incarnation of the Gun Club called the Creeping Ritual. And he wasn’t really that excited with the name, so I came up with the name. We swapped the name of the Gun Club for the music that would become “Group Sex.” And if you listen to that song, you could also sing “It’s a Small World After All” along with it, and that’s where Jeffrey got it.


 Kid Congo Powers: A lot of people say “blues” and “country” when they think of the Gun Club, but it was more soul and reggae in the beginning.


 Terry Graham: I had known Jeff since day one, since he started hanging out. It wasn’t like we were close personal friends, but he was one of the people in the scene, and he was constantly blabbing, and I was constantly listening for some reason. So I knew of him and I knew about his first band, the Red Lights. I had seen the Gun Club somewhere, but I didn’t really pay much attention. And then I talked to Jeff, and he said, “Well, we might need some new people.” Rob Ritter and I went to the Hong Kong Café and saw him. I thought it was pretty cool. It was raw and different. It appealed to me because it was a little scary, a little slimy, and there were some roots music in there, which was interesting.


 Alice Bag: I kinda envied Rob Ritter because he was so smart. One day I was in Rob’s apartment waiting for him to get ready to go somewhere. I started looking through his bookshelf. He had the French philosophers with the text in French. I told him I didn’t know he could read French and he told me he had taught himself. I had taken two years of French in high school and thought I was pretty smart because I could order food and ask for directions in French, but Rob burst my bubble.


 Jacqui Pierce: Phast Phreddie was a music historian. Phast Phreddie really loved jazz and the Beat scene, not the Warhol scene, but the Beat scene from way back in the ‘50s. Phreddie worked at Rhino (Records), so it was so convenient. Jeffrey and Phreddie would meet up and chat, and play some great records.


 Pleasant Gehman: Phast Phreddie was the big maven for everybody. He did stuff for me, Jeffrey, and the Cramps. First of all, the Runaways first show ever was in his living room in Glendale. He had all these crazy records. We would always come over from a club or a night when there was nothing to do and we would go to Phreddie’s house or Phil and Dave Alvin’s house from the Blasters and everybody would bring over their records. And Phreddie had this unbelievable, expensive collection of records from every genre and he was always turning people onto the blues. I’m sure he played some stuff for Lux and Ivy that turned into later Cramps songs, covers I mean. He was a huge influence on everybody. He had really crazy jazz and blues records—all that kind of stuff.


 Terry Graham: We did a show pretty early on where Jeffrey came out with a huge bible and he had his Colonel Sanders outfit on. And he slammed his bible down on the stage and started beating it with a chain. Jeff wasn’t the most graceful guy on the planet earth, but it worked. I thought, “That’s pretty cool: Colonel Sanders and the Gun Club.” Some people got the point, but doing that kind of stuff and drawing on images and references from way back in American roots music wasn’t something that registered quickly with “punk rock.” And I was, and still am, a big fan of any and all new music, but this was something that was so different, and because I’m from Texas, it had a great appeal.


 Kid Congo Powers: I was in the Gun Club for about a year and a half. We had been playing and trying to figure out what we were doing. By that time we had written “Sex Beat” and “For the Love of Ivy”—not all of the songs of the first record, but a good deal of them. “For the Love of Ivy” was just a stupid, simple riff I came up with. Jeffrey redid some of the lyrics to make it a more blues-based song. We were a big fan of the movie, For the Love Ivy with Sydney Poitier, and it had a double meaning with Ivy from the Cramps. Then the Cramps asked me to join them and Jeffrey was like “Are you crazy? Of course, join them.” They were huge rock stars to us. At the time, the Gun Club hadn’t recorded anything. They were a band playing to a handful of people.


 Pleasant Gehman: Kid Congo was in a band with Jeffrey. That’s when Kid was living at Disgraceland (Pleasant’s house which, from 1978 to 1988, harbored numerous punk fans, musicians, and zine kids), and it was called the Creeping Ritual. Then he played in the Gun Club and that was when the Cramps drafted him. Kid and I had been living in New York in 1979, and Lux and Ivy were like our parents. We were always at Cramps gigs. It was a logical progression. Kid was in both the Gun Club and the Cramps for awhile and then the Cramps started touring so he went with them.


 Ward Dotson: Punk rock happened. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but it was close enough. The Ramones—it was faster and smart and stupid at the same time, if that makes any sense. It was simple. Louis Armstrong was asked once, “What is good music?” It was a terrible question, but he was so cool, he said, “Well, if you hear a song and start tapping your toe, that’s good music.” It’s not brain surgery. So punk rock was the closest thing and I liked bands like the Raspberries, the Who, and Badfinger. I was also really getting into rockabilly—the Johnny Burnett Trio and the more pedestrian stuff. And then bands like the Cramps, the Blasters, and X were already going, and I was into bands in that direction. So it makes perfect sense that I end up at a Billy Zoom rockabilly show—he did these shows once a year outside of X with DJ Bonebrake and two other rockabilly dudes—and I went to that and saw Jeff Pierce and said, “Hey, are you still looking for a guitar player?” I didn’t say, “I want to be in your band.” I just said, “Are you still looking for a guitar player?” Next day I’m in the Gun Club. Rob and Terry, when I joined the Gun Club, I went, “Fuck, man, you guys are great! That is a kick-ass rhythm section.” I’m playing along to Buddy Holly records in my living room one day, and the next day I’m in a shitty rehearsal room in Hollywood with a loud-ass rhythm section. These guys had been playing together for three or four years at this point. Being the bass player, you have to lock with the drummer—you have to know each other. And after being in the band for a very short while at the end of a rehearsal, I went to Terry and said, “You’re better than X.” Because I don’t think John and DJ locked the way Rob and Terry did. They were sexier, they had their shit together, and they wrote great songs, but they didn’t lock like Rob and Terry did.


 Terry Graham: Rob, Ward and I were a tight unit; we understood each other really well. We had to be able to do that in order to play behind Jeff. If Jeff wasn’t drinking a little bit —and he didn’t drink that much at first—he would still get on stage and push the envelope and put himself right on the edge. If we weren’t this tight unit, we couldn’t have played very well behind him. If we played a tight show, it was because the three of us back there were making sure that happened.


 Ward Dotson: Nine months after I joined the band, Tito Larriva from the Plugz, said, “Hey, I have this label, Fatima Records, and I’m putting out half albums. They’re not really EPs, they’re the same size a 33 1/3, only you guys would have one side.” And another band was supposed to have the other side—I can’t remember who. So we went into the studio one night after hours, like midnight to four or something, with this guy and we recorded five or six songs. And Tito produced it, if you could call it producing; it was just putting mics in front of the amps and pushing record. And that came out pretty good. And Jeffrey’s connection to Slash led him into that office. I think he had a crush on some girl that worked there, too. And he would go down there and play that tape, and it was like half of Fire of Love; whatever five or six songs—I don’t remember which ones they were. And Bob Biggs heard it, roaming through the halls and said, “What’s that?” And Jeffrey said, “That’s my band.” And the Fatima thing fell through somehow. It just went belly up and they decided not to do it, and Slash said, “Yeah, we’ll do it. Let’s record another five or six songs.” I had been in the band for a year, but nine months between me joining and that first recording, I was like, “I don’t think I could do this.” And Jeffrey, Terry, and Rob felt the same way. Terry and I were going to form some other band. We would play shows and get booed right off the stage. It was like these punk rockers—if we opened for a punk band—going, “Fuck you! Get off!” It just wasn’t fun and being around Jeffrey was tough, but we just sort of kept doing it. And there was good chemistry in Rob, Terry, and I and Jeffrey had that indefatigable spirit, a relentless self-promoter: “I’m going to do this no matter what.” Dump a bucket of shit on his head and he would just wipe it off. Whereas I’m able to take no for an answer, and Rob and Terry are that way too, so we kind of needed Jeffrey, as much as we hated him. I was watching some Beatles documentary the other day and John Lennon just said, “Yeah, we’re the best fucking band in the world!” And that’s what carried them and that’s kind of what carried the Gun Club.


 FIRE OF LOVE (1981)
Terry Graham: We only had a couple thousand dollars to do the record and we had time booked in one studio. Every song was a first take. We just went in there and laid it down, then came back and threw a couple more things on the first session—which was about half the songs—and then we went to another studio with Noah Shark and did the same thing. We just laid it down and ran because we just didn’t have the money to do much more than that. Whatever sound there was on there was really dependent on the room and its acoustics. There wasn’t a whole lot we could do to tweak that or manipulate it, but you can tell. Half the songs have a much more faint/clear sound, and the other half are a little bit muddier. And that’s the different studio—that’s all it is. It was really fun to do, but it was so fast; we were just in and out. We were really happy with the way it sounded, considering the time and money involved. For what we were doing and at the time we were doing it, we didn’t know what “sound good” meant. So we just kind of left it and let go.


 Ward Dotson: We made Fire of Love and everyone in the band went, “Wow! We done good! It sounds really good. I wonder what other people are going to think.” And immediately we went from this ass-wipe band to being on the front cover of New York Rocker. Boston, Minneapolis, Austin—all the college towns of the early ‘80s ate it up. It was nice to get recognized. Here, in Los Angeles, people in the scene already seen us and didn’t like us. They’re dumb out here or just less erudite. Once you’ve seen some fat, drunk asshole insult you, you’re less likely to pause and notice how good that record is, and that record is pretty good. It is head and shoulders above all other records—I’m not saying this because I was in the band—it’s just a fact. I didn’t write the lyrics, I’m not bragging. Jeffrey’s lyric writing was head and shoulders above everyone who was around at the time. Robert Palmer wrote for The New York Times—The New York Times does not review rock records—and he reviewed the Gun Club record and the Dylan album—I think it was Street Legal—and he said, “In with the new and out with the old.” Slash didn’t even promote it. They just did the basic send out—here’s a picture of the band and here’s the record. They pressed two thousand and sold them in two seconds.


 Terry Graham: I don’t know what happened to the bass on Fire of Love. I don’t know why on the first two records that the bass wasn’t emphasized in the mix. It’s a shame because Rob was so incredibly good. This guy could take anything, hear it once, and not just play it again, but play variations of it and it worked perfectly. It would be exactly what the music needed. It has always pissed me off that it just isn’t there. And if it’s not there, then it’s never there. It’s not like you can take the master and play with it, because it’s just not there. I don’t know why. It wasn’t anyone’s fault—they weren’t trying to do it. A band like Gun Club too, the bass should be a serious presence, particularly with Rob.



 

Knew nothing of The Gun Club, and some tracks I liked on that album. 1, 4 and 6 side one, and on side two, 1, 3 and 5. The shorter songs generally, and maybe not the Blues covers.

Will listen again. Probably ignored them because they were from the USA. 

I'm not sure I liked the singer's voice after a few songs.

Album 492.
Bobby Womack.....................................The Poet   (1981)













Have to agree with shedboy here,this was boring twaddle in my humbles it just didn't have any appealing facets to it,hum-drum to the extreme,there wasn't a single track that stood out or one I would care to listen to again,I think Boaby needs a kick up the arse to give his music a bit more oomph.



This album will not be going into my collection.





Bits & Bobs;


Bobby Womack started out in the 1950s with family gospel group The Valentinos, who were spotted by "King of Soul" Sam Cooke.


 
After playing guitar in Sam Cooke's backing group in 1960, Womack re-united with his brother as the Valentinos and signed with Cooke's SAR label in 1961.


 
After Sam Cooke was shot dead, Womack turned up at his funeral wearing Cooke's clothes.


 
He married Cooke's widow Barbara a few months after Cooke was shot dead, but the marriage ended after Womack had an affair with her teenage daughter.


 
Womack wrote "It's All Over Now," which was recorded by The Valentinos in 1964. It was covered by the Rolling Stones shortly after and became their first UK #1 hit. (I never knew that)


The passion for earthy R&B seemed to have dimmed as the 80s began. Synthesised confections abounded and veteran Bobby Womack, the Midnight Mover, was at a crossroads. His peers were either in the wilderness (Marvin Gaye, James Brown and Isaac Hayes) or otherwise indisposed (Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, Sly Stone), so it was left to Womack to fly the flag for down-to-earth, quality soul.  


 Womack had been a recording artist for best part of two decades when he made The Poet. After making his name with The Valentinos in the 60s, he cut a string of heartfelt, emotional albums for Minit, United Artists and Columbia throughout the 70s. The Poet was written with great optimism; Womack was out of contract and was approached by agent Otis Smith to set up on his new label, Beverly Glen.


 Working with Patrick Moten, Womack crafted eight songs that sounded breathlessly contemporary. If this material had been put in the hands of a soul crooner, it could have sounded perfunctory. The Poet works because of the juxtaposition of Womack’s feral growl with the album’s sweet, smooth, urbane soundtrack. This is grown-up, sensual music; from So Many Sides of You to its epic closer Where Do We Go From Here, this is a luscious collision of Womack’s soul mastery and slick musicianship. It rises and falls, with Womack sidestepping cliché thanks to his preaching, heartfelt delivery. For example, when he cries “I wanna dedicate this song to all the lovers tonight / And I expect that might be the whole world,” on If You Think You’re Lonely, it sounds honest, simple and sincere.


 The Poet put Womack back on the map, and gave him his first US R&B chart-topper and first mainstream top 30 album. It was adored in the UK, and sent many back to investigate his grittier 70s heyday as an albums artist. The album became the best-selling record of Womack’s career but sadly it didn’t end well. He and Otis Smith locked into litigation, and the optimism wore off. Eventually freed from his deal, Womack cut the equally sublime follow-up The Poet II, released in 1984.



10 Facts About Legendary Soul Singer Bobby Womack
1. Womack wrote and originally recorded the Rolling Stones’ first UK No. 1 hit, “It’s All Over Now.”


 2. At 10 years old in 1954, Womack was involved with his first release, “Buffalo Bill,” recorded under the name Curtis Womack and the Womack Brothers (Womack and his fours brothers, Friendly, Jr., Curtis, Harry, and Cecil).


 3. His song “If You Think You’re Lonely Now” was covered by Jodeci’s K-Ci Hailey of Jodeci and K-Ci and JoJo fame for the “Jason’s Lyric” soundtrack in 1994. K-Ci also covered Womack’s “A Woman’s Gotta Have It” in 2006.


 4. Womack was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2009.


 5. Sam Cooke discovered Womack and his brothers and signed them to his SAR Records (as The Valentinos).


 6. He signed with Minit Records in 1968 and “Fly Me to the Moon” was his first solo album.


 7. Womack’s 1991 album, “The Poet,” reached number one on the R&B album charts.


 8. On his 1984 album, “The Poet II,” he recorded three duets with Patti LaBelle.


 9. Womack was the middle child.


 10. He was featured on TV One’s “Unsung” in 2012.

arabchanter wrote:

Album 493.
Tom Tom Club................................Tom Tom Club   (1981)













Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth created The Tom Tom Club in 1981 as a personal creative outlet while working with Talking Heads. Their debut album quietly crept into the collective consciousness and struck a chord. It eventually became one of the earliest influences on the hip-hop movement, and the idea that everyone could be included in their musical "club" caught fire. Their obvious love of the groove and delight in exploring this new territory seduced their listeners.


The tunes on this album have been sampled by every hip-hop or rap artist of note.

Tried listening to this last night as I really like a lot of the tracks that have sampled from this album.  Hats off to those who have sampled it as I only lasted 4 tracks before deciding that it was pretty much unlistenable.  Maybe just my mood.  Was trying to work at same time so maybe that was it...

Album 495.
Abba.............................The Visitors   (1981)











The Visitors is the eighth and final studio album by Swedish pop group ABBA, released on 30 November 1981.

 With The Visitors, ABBA took several steps away from the “lighter” pop music they had recorded previously and the album is often regarded as a more complex and mature effort. The opening track, “The Visitors”, with its ominous synthesizer sounds and the distinctive lead vocal by Frida, announced a change in musical style. With Benny and Frida going their separate ways, the pain of splitting up was explored yet again in When All is Said And Done. The major hit single on the album, One Of Us also depicted the end of a love story. Elsewhere there were current Cold War themes—highly topical at the time—and further songs of isolation and regret.

  The Visitors album was one of the first records ever to be recorded and mixed digitally, and was the first in history to be released on the new CD format in 1982 on Atlantic.



Will try to catch up later tonight.

Good to see you posting again on this megathread. It must be exhausting.

Don't usually post on albums I don't particularly like, but the one plus on that Tom Tom Club album is the work of Adrian Belew, who has been involved with many artists who I enjoy.

PatReilly wrote:

Good to see you posting again on this megathread. .

Yeah, sorry about the break in service there, but a bit of bad news last week.


I don't know how many people seen it on the news or in the paper,but my street was cordoned off for a bit last week,we had the boys wi' the hazmat suits on and athing, done a' their tests then hit me wi' the results, and it was as I feared.............Man Flu!


I'd only gone and contracted the dreaded curse of the male of the species, so that was me stuck indoors in my scratcher, hoose sealed aff, and mrs chanter told in no uncertain terms to "make sure my life insurance was up to date" and to try and "make me as comfortable as can be expected in the given circumstances"


In the last week e've been tae Hell and back, now it was touch and go for a while, and to be honest "eh wisnae worth a penny" fir most of it, but wi' the help of loved ones and the generous Red Cross parcels launched over the fence wi' all sorts of extendable pole type o' gadgets from the neighbours, I can proudly say................I'm a survivor!


Got the all clear fae the hazmat boys on Monday, so back in the game the day.



 

Album 494.
Rush................................Moving Pictures   (1981)












This will be like my slaverings about the previous Rush offering 2012, short and maybe not so sweet.


This album ticked most of the boxes on things I don't like in music:

extended, wanky guitar solos..............check

extended wanky drum solos................check


Singer with his "Lionel Blairs" choking his "Albert Halls" making him sound like Orville on Helium  F'k'n' checkmate.


Not one minute did I enjoy,now remember this is just my personal opinion,you may like this shite,there's no accounting for taste,but having wasted 40 minutes of my life listening to this when I'd already had prior dealings with this band, I sometimes wonder if I need a check up,or is it a masochistic flaw that hides in most of us?


Anyways this album wont be coming anywhere near my album collection.




Bits & Bobs;


Have posted before about these jokers, post #1360 (if interested)



A review of the album (certainly a different viewpoint to mine, fir a wee bit of balance)



If you frequently visit blogs or social networking sites, you might remember numerous online posts about the progression of the common person's interest in 2-D Disney movies. If you don't recall, allow me to give you the rundown: a kid loves Disney movies and watches them religiously; he/she gets into the preteen and teen years, losing interest in the movies and becoming pretty cynical toward them; then later down the line once he/she is older, the person regains interest and starts loving the films again. The reason I bring this up is because it's the exact same relationship I have with Rush's music. I loved them and many other progressive rock bands when I was young (I was never one of those nu-metal kids, despite how popular the genre was), had an anti-Rush phase a bit later, and now they're one of my favorite bands because of both musical quality and nostalgia. In the middle of my Rush recollection, Moving Pictures was one of the albums I remembered most fondly. Listening to it again, I can also conclude that it has aged better than most other Rush albums and remains one of their best.




As with other Rush albums, Moving Pictures is a great example of how technicality, songwriting mastery, and a thoroughly emotional touch combine in an exceptional way. Lyrically, the album continues in the vein of its predecessor Permanent Waves in how it touches more on real-life subjects than the fantasy elements of previous works like Hemispheres or A Farewell to Kings. Due to drummer Neil Peart expanding his range of lyrical themes, we get songs about the price of fame ("Limelight"), the moods and lifestyles of different places ("Camera Eye"), and even automobiles ("Red Barchetta"). Geddy Lee's singing is improved and more varied range-wise on this record, establishing him as a more solid storyteller as he sings the tales that Peart is weaving. The instrumental work is, as usual, absolutely fantastic; the trio play off each others' contributions wonderfully and there's a great sense of unity that prevents anything from sounding like aimless noodling. Even in the sole instrumental "YYZ," the band know what time to devote to soloing and what time to devote to composition. The Morse Code-inspired 5/4 section in the beginning is still an iconic progressive rock moment and luckily the song just keeps on giving, with a trade-off solo segment and a synth-ridden slow portion keeping things interesting.




Even then, what's even more impressive about Moving Pictures is how it's so radio-friendly for Rush and STILL manages to be so damn good. The hard-rockin' radio staple "Tom Sawyer," the dynamically-varied "Red Barchetta," the fame-influenced fan favorite "Limelight" and of course "YYZ," were all big hits when they came out, and yet remain considered some of Rush's most beloved songs even by hardcore fans who love their underrated material. Going back to the "balance" argument, that really does seem to be the reason for this. Radio rock fans will instantly recognize and appreciate that iconic first note played in "Tom Sawyer," while the progressive rock crowd will appreciate the craftsmanship that went into the rhythmically varied guitar solo by Alex Lifeson. "Red Barchetta" will have the casual crowd enjoying the catchy melodies and Geddy's singing performance while musicians and hardcore fans will notice Neil Peart's varied drum fills going on in the meantime. Even lesser-known songs such as "Witch Hunt" and "Vital Signs" carry this sense of balance, the latter even using a combination of the typical Rush sound and Police-like reggae rock influences. While "The Camera Eye" and "Witch Hunt" are perhaps the weakest songs in the grand scheme of things, there's enough atmosphere and variation to let the listener know that they aren't bad tracks by any means, just a bit overpowered by the classics.




This is definitely one of the Rush albums I revisit the most. There's so much quality packed into the arrangements and such a sense of unity (despite complex instrumental work) that everything comes together superbly. In the end, that's what this album is: superb. It's commercial enough for radio audiences and varied enough for the progressive rock crowd, making it most likely the biggest fan-pleaser in the band's catalog. That's probably the reason why it's still the highest-selling Rush album (certified quadruple-platinum in the U.S. alone!); in any case, it definitely deserves that distinction.



There’s a reason there are few, if any, unreleased songs from Rush’s studio sessions.


“That’s not how we’ve ever worked,” says Alex Lifeson. “The album is what it is. ‘We’re going to do eight songs. So let’s do those eight songs and concentrate on them and devote all of our time to them.’ Why would you write 20 songs and pick the 12 best? Does that mean that the other eight are just bullshit? You were wasting your time!” 



 The uniquely formal language of some of Neil Peart’s lyrics (“one must put up barriers to keep oneself intact”) stemmed from his literary influences.




“It was because my reading was so broad and so precocious at the time,” he says. “I was reading John Dos Passos. And a big influence on me was John Steinbeck’s The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, which he never finished in his lifetime. It opens with a little preface that said, ‘Some people there are. . .’ I said, why? Strange turn of phrase. But he had obviously deliberately chosen it. And some of those formal phrasings were because I was very much driven by rhythm of words – and still am. A line will strike me just because of its drumming rhythm.”


 Peart says all three members of Rush had moments of partying too hard in the Seventies.



“Oh yeah, we all did,” says Peart. “And I wrote about that one time and used Winston Churchill’s quote. I said, yeah, we went through everything. But Churchill said, ‘When you’re going through hell, keep going!’ We were lucky we had each other to ground us a little bit. If anybody got out of control, they would be sniped at. But we all went through all that together and just kept going and moved beyond it. Drinking and drugs just made me throw up. So that’s a pretty good way to keep yourself in line.”



 Peart had trouble revisiting his Seventies playing on the band’s latest tour – because he’s a better drummer now.



“Doing stuff I would never do and with a clock that I have transcended now, it was hard. And then after having done it for a few days, when I came back to the modern me, I was playing along and I said, ‘Why can’t I settle into this? What’s wrong with me?’ And it was just that transition. I had immersed myself in the 40-year-old version of me and now when I come back to the modern me, it’s much more evolved – musically, time sense, touch, technique, emotion – all that stuff is so much better now. I look at the past with a tolerant smile now but it was unformed. Immature is the right word. I know I have a mature, hard earned mastery of the instrument now.”


 Rush sometimes make up songs about crew members in their soundchecks.



“I provide the lyrics,” says Lifeson. “We had one that was great a few tours ago, actually quite a while ago, called ‘Sex Boy.’ And it was this kind of cheesy, Euro-trash, electronic music.”


 Lifeson originally planned to give a real speech instead of his infamous “blah blah blah” moment at Rush's Rock And Roll Hall of Fame induction..



“I was going over my written speech on the way over,” says Lifeson, “and thinking, ‘My brain doesn’t remember anything. It’s going to be awful. Might as well get up and just go blah blah blah. Oh! Wait a second!’ We were sitting at our tables and everyone else was doing their thing, and I told my wife. I didn’t tell anybody else, And Quincy Jones got up and gave his speech, which was a very long speech, but sincere. She leaned over to me during that speech and said, “And you’re going to go, ‘blah blah blah?'” And I said, ‘Stop it, you’re making me nervous!’ When we were walking up on stage, that was really when I committed to it. I thought, “Ok, I’m going to do it. This could be terrible. But I’m going to do it.” I think it was OK. I don’t know. I’m glad I did it, though. It’s the fucking Rock and Roll Hall of Fame! You should be irreverent, rather than thank your lawyer and your accountant and all that bullshit.”



  Peart is not a fan of the movie Whiplash.




“There is no blood in jazz drumming, and there are no bullies in jazz drumming. My teacher Peter Erskine was saying he feels ungrateful because it’s great there’s a movie about drummers, but why is it so flawed humanistically and in small technical ways that didn’t cost anything? It wouldn’t cost anything to have a proper jazz drum set and to show the guy how to use his wrists. And the bloody ice cube jug or whatever? Absurd! There’s a Band-Aid on my finger right now – yeah, I bleed. But jazz drumming, no, there is no bleeding.”



 While Rush were recording 1989’s Presto, Peart announced that he was going to quit touring.



“It was still possible then to foster the illusion that you could make a living without touring,” says Peart. “So I came to the guys and I said, ‘You know what? Let’s make records, no touring, I’m done with all that.’ But then the more I thought about it, the true test of a musician and especially of a band is performing live. The band we are was made by live performance. We built our own relationship, we built our relationship with fans, we built our tightness, our chops, from touring. So after much wrestling in my own mind I came to the realization that if I’m going to call myself a musician, if I want us to be a vital band, then I’m going to have to perform live.” 



 Lifeson had three main influences as his style started to expand in the mid-Seventies.



“Steve Howe, Steve Hackett – and David Gilmour, although he’s more in that bluesy style, but how he uses spaces and creates those moods. Steve Hackett had such a great presence in the early Genesis music. He was up against a lot – strong drummer, strong keyboards, a very amazing vocalist, and he worked in all these tonal shades around the music that happening. Being in a three-piece, there’s lots of room. And then you’ve got to fill it up.” 



 Before they decided on their current tour, Rush considered recording a follow-up to Feedback, their covers album.




“We thought maybe we’d do another Feedback thing of cover tunes,” says Peart. “Never got motivated for that. And then when we started talking, it was about playing live.”



 Peart would love to turn 2012’s Clockwork Angels into a movie.




“To me, it would make an amazing movie and I thought it would happen organically – that by now somebody would’ve been at my door with a big bushel of dollars: ‘Let’s make this happen!’ And it hasn’t. But we’ve got the graphic novel done and we’re building the world and the vision of it. It’s astonishing to me, really, that somebody hasn’t come to me wanting it. I thought, what a great semi-retirement project for the three of us, ’cause Geddy loves cinema, Alex for the soundtrack and me for the story. But I was hoping that’s a project that the three of us would undertake at some point.”


 Geddy Lee sang in school choirs.



“I always was a singer somehow,” he says. “I never had a predominant role in the choirs, but I always was a soprano, of course. In bands, nobody wanted to sing, so they always said, ‘You do the singing.’ I liked singing, but I liked playing bass more and I still do.”


 Peart has vivid memories of recording Rush’s first live album, All the World’s a Stage.



“My snare drum broke in the middle of 2112 and my playing got so intense because I was so mad. I was just so beside myself. And I learned a long time ago that anger is an excellent inspiration. I remember that the window of my car was broken, and I had to cover it with plastic – it was parked outside Massey Hall. I remember so much of the time and what it was like.”


 Lee was reluctant to play the trippy “Jacob’s Ladder” on the band’s current tour.



“It sounded really naive to me,” says Lee, “and the lyrics are not our best. You could see Neil playing with alliteration, which is kind of an exercise really. And I really was afraid of doing that whole keyboard middle part. But when you start playing it, you start remembering what it was like when you wrote it, what you were thinking when you wrote it, and you can kind of get into it – because if we committed it to record it meant  we were digging it. ‘Cause we always said if there’s a song we write that we didn’t dig we wouldn’t keep it on a record. It reflected who we were then. That’s exactly who we were. We were struggling with trying to be more concise and yet still in love with the long instrumental passages.”  



Lifeson was disappointed after he spent some time listening to a college radio station recently.




“It was all this contemporary music geared for that audience, and it was so disappointing listening to it. Really weak songwriting, insipid vocals and productions. It was really discouraging. I was sorry to hear that. You’re waiting for something to happen, musically. You’re waiting for some great thing. Like every generation or every decade seemed to have that big thing that carried it through. There’s nothing now, at least in rock.”




 It was scary for Peart’s bandmates when he started traveling from show to show via motorcycle.



“It was nerve-wracking,” says Lee, “especially for our manager. But now we don’t even think about it because he always shows up and he’s there before us. He’s got it down. He’s really super careful. He won’t ride in any kind of dicey weather and his bus is never far away.”


 At least three singers helped inspire Lee’s vocal style.



“I was a fan of Steve Marriott who predates Robert Plant for that kind of singing. But Plant definitely was a huge influence ’cause I thought he was an amazing singer. And of course Jon Anderson also had a high voice but he didn’t have that kind of aggressive high voice.”


 Lee and Lifeson were “outsiders” growing up.



“We connected and we bonded,” says Lifeson. “We were friends in grade nine, for example, in a class of 30 kids, and we were not friends with anybody in that class, except the two of us. So we were outsiders, but not in that sense of being ostracized or shut out or something. We just kind of hung out, and we felt like everybody else was a jerk. We were doing our own thing, and then we had the bond of music and all of that stuff. And also having the same kind of background with our parents. Yeah, we connected right off the bat. It’s amazing. We’re still the same. We’re best buds. We’ve lived close to each other for the last 20 years.” 


 Lifeson wanted Rush to resurrect the long-unplayed “Fly by Night” on their current tour.



“I was rehearsing it,” he says. “I thought it would sound great, like a modern version that would be much heavier and more powerful. I think Geddy felt that he’d really have a problem singing it. He has a challenge with “Lakeside Park” as it is. “Fly by Night” was just in that range, and we didn’t want to drop the key on that one. So the consensus was, let’s just pass on that.”Peart didn’t enjoy critics’ early hostility towards Rush.
“It was shitty at the time,” he says. “I feel like we waited it out and the respect came around. It astonished me in the early Nineties to suddenly have musicians admit that they had been inspired and influenced by us. That meant a lot at that time. But of course, being human the. . . disrespect isn’t even strong enough a word, is it? The opprobrium was painful. Being popular and hated is not satisfying.


”There’s a reason for the mutated funk moments that slip into Rush’s music.



“When I started playing, I played in R&B bands,” Peart says. “I played James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding and all that. When we were growing up, blue-eyed soul was the thing in Toronto at the time. All the significant bands in the Sixties all had great drummers and they were all playing that kind of music. And so we grew up with it, and I still draw upon that resource constantly just because that was formative and that was the style that we grew up with and the bands that we saw.



Lee originally wanted to be a guitarist.



“I had this attitude that nobody chooses to be a bass player,” he says. “The rest of the band decides that you’re gonna be the bass player – and that’s how it was for me. I was playing guitar in a basement band and our bass player’s mother wouldn’t let him play in the band anymore, so we had no bass player. So they all looked at me and said, you play bass. I said, well I don’t have a bass. They said, well go ask your mother if she’ll lend you some money. My mom loaned me 30 bucks, I worked it off in her variety store on Saturdays and I bought my Canora bass and that’s how it started for me. And then I fell in love with the idea of being a bass player ’cause nobody wanted to be a bass player.”