ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN SINGLES : #008

aka The Vinyl Villain incorporating Sexy Loser

008 – B-MOVIE – ‚Nowhere Girl’ (Decca Records, ’82)

now, today I’m in a bit of a dilemma. Why? Because in my humble opinion, I am confident that the 7” version of today’s feature is inferior in comparison to the 12” version. Much inferior, in fact. But this series is about the 111 best 7” singles, it’s not a musical request programme – so I have to stick to my own rules, I’m afraid!

‘Nowhere Girl’ was first issued as a 12” on Dead Good Records in 1980, only 850 copies were pressed. Do me a favor, listen to this first version on youtube (it’s easy to find (“first version”)) and let me know what you think:

(JC adds……. Click here!)

I really don’t know if I like it or not. If you compare the 1980 version to the well known 1982 12” version on Some Bizarre Records, you will understand why I’m interested in your opinion. I really cannot make my mind up! But today we have the 7” version of the 1982 re-release, one which you don’t hear all too often, I would think! And the German pressing, too … which makes no difference at all, of course!

Inferior (version) or not, this tune has always struck a chord with me. And not only with me, apparently. Old readers may already know this, but when I was much younger and much prettier than I am now, I used to DJ regularly in two clubs in town. No big discotheques, for sure: at the end of the day the first one was just a bar, but a bar with DJs. And the second one was a ‘real’ club with quite a big dance floor. The problem with the second one was that no-one ever came there, by and large, because it was quite a bit off town center.

Still I had a handful of regulars there, and I played whatever they wanted (and what I had with me in my box full of vinyl, obviously. Back then, you had to carry all the stuff, which limited your playlist down quite drastically. When I see DJs nowadays with a fag in one hand and a USB stick with 10 million songs on it in the other hand, I could kick their head in, believe me) – consequently, all of us always had a good time there. I think there wasn’t a single evening on which ‘Nowhere Girl’ was not requested to be played, honestly. The people who came there just LOVED it and really everyone danced to it, always!

The first club though, the bar, was a very different beast. If it was crowded, and it very often was, there were only a few square meters left for you to dance on, but only very drunken girls did that occasionally. Mostly when attending a hen party, probably. But once a few girls danced, others wanted to dance as well, so pretty soon I had to take good care of what to play next.

In the beginning I often failed to succeed in finding the correct segue, it must be said: it was rather hard for me to understand that the students just wanted to party and by no means were interested in my brave attempts to ‘educate’ them musically. I was torn, you see, between dumbing down my turntable offerings to a degree I could still live with more or less proudly and a landlord who summed it up one night in saying: “Oh Dirk, can’t you just FOR ONCE play something with recognition value!?”. She was probably thinking of bloody ‘Sunday, Bloody Sunday’ or some similar atrocity …

Now, to cut a long story short: B-Movie’s ‘Nowhere Girl’ (the 12” version thereof, of course) always did the job. It pleased the crowd, it pleased me, and it pleased Lexi, the landlord, who, sadly, died last year, and she was just a few years older than me, bugger!

So this is for you, Lexi:

mp3 : B-Movie – Nowhere Girl

But will it please you as well? Oh, I hope it does …

Take good care, friends,

Dirk