Category: Colour Field

Blancmange, Colour Field, Divine, Echo & The Bunnymen, Everything But The Girl, Joe Jackson, Kane Gang

WHEN THE CLOCKS STRUCK THIRTEEN (July)

July 1984.  I spent most of the month inter-railing, myself and two girls using youth hostels en route to go from Glasgow to Rome, via London, Paris, Marseilles, Monte Carlo, Genoa and Viareggio where we realised we were running low on funds and so headed back via Venice and then overnight trains through Switzerland and Belgium before the boat back across the channel. As such, I can say with all honesty that I had no idea who was enjoying chart hits back home.

Thinking back to that trip, it’s unthinkable really to realise it was done without any sort of mobile technology and that all our cash was in sterling which was later exchanged at different times to francs and lira. We were also totally dependent on old-fashioned guide books and hostel info that we had borrowed from public libraries. Sadly, I’ve no photos at all from the adventure – I was in a relationship with one of the girls that later turned nasty, after which she destroyed almost everything that we collectively owned.

Anyways, back to the music.

1-7 July

Frankie Goes To Hollywood occupied #1 and #2 with Two Tribes and Relax. Nick Kershaw and Cyndi Lauper, sitting at #3 and #4, may well have been a tad upset that the mania engulfing the UK record-buying public prevented them hitting the top.

I do recall throughout my teen and youth years that the summer months were often quite barren in terms of new music and the first chart of July 1984 does nothing to distil such memories.   The Thompson Twins had the highest new entry at #28 with Sister Of Mercy, which I had to look up on YouTube to be reminded of. It’s an overwrought ballad whose subject-matter was domestic abuse, seemingly based on a real-life murder case in France.  Worthy but dull would be my verdict.

Ultravox were the next highest new entry, in at #33 with Lament, while the only other song to breach the Top 40 was State of Shock, a collaboration between The Jacksons and Mick Jagger.  I have no recollection of either of these hits.  The only two new entries further down that I can recall were ballads:-

mp3: The Kane Gang – Closest Thing To Heaven (#56)
mp3: Joe Jackson – Be My Number Two (#72)

The former would spend a couple of months in the chart, eventually peaking at #12 and is, by far, the one song most people of a certain age will recall when thinking of the Kane Gang.  The latter is not one that I’m particularly enamoured by, but it’s on the hard drive courtesy of a cheap ‘best of’ CD’ picked up in a charity shop quite a few years ago.

8-14 July

The top four were still the same, albeit Nik and Cyndi had switched positions. The highest new entry was a novelty comedy record; actor Nigel Planer had released an album in his guise as the character Neil from the sitcom The Young Ones.  The joke being that Neil was a peace-loving hippy, and the album was a mix of spoken tracks and 60s cover versions.  Hole In My Shoe, originally recorded by Traffic in 1967, came in at #5.  It would then spend three weeks stuck at #2 and if nothing else, we should perhaps be grateful that Two Tribes sold so heavily each and every week and prevented yet another novelty #1 single.

In among the dross was this at #26:-

mp3: Echo and The Bunnymen – Seven Seas

The Bunnymen‘s sixth successive Top 40 hit single and the third and final one to be lifted from Ocean Rain.  It’s decent enough albeit far from a classic, but it did lead to a stupidly amusing appearance on Top of The Pops which I saw on VHS tape, courtesy of a flatmate, on my return from Europe:-

Introduced by John Peel.  And there’s Bill Drummond down the front of the audience, looking geeky and awkward but ready to play his part in making waves.  The big question, though, is how did Les Pattinson manage to avoid being part of all this?  Oh, and just to mention…..my hair at this time was very much modelled on Mac’s look.

Keeping up the fun was this new entry at #38:-

mp3 : Divine – You Think You’re A Man

Bronski Beat were the serious side of gay culture in the pop charts. Harris Glenn Milstead, aka Divine, was the fun, cartoon-side of things back in 1984, with his drag-queen persona having long made him a film star prior to his pop/disco career. Divine brought his/her/their stage show to student venues in the UK in 1985, and I was lucky enough to see a performance at Strathclyde student union. It proved to be an outstanding night – the first time I realised live gigs delivered solely by backing tapes were not the devil incarnate!  You Think You’re A Man would eventually reach #16 and be the biggest hit for Divine, who sadly died in his sleep of a heart attack, aged just 42, in March 1988.

15-21 July

Just as it was looking as if the Top 40 this week was totally stagnant:-

mp3: Blancmange – The Day Before You Came (#39)

Neil Arthur and Stephen Luscombe‘s sixth Top 40 hit, but their first with a cover version, being a slightly unusual take on the Abba single released just two years previously.  Kind of hard to believe given how successful Abba were, but the cover version charted the highest of the two.  The Swedes peaked at #32, while Blancmange’s take climbed to #22, a chart position it held for three successive weeks.

Worth mentioning, perhaps, that two very old songs entered the singles chart this week, thanks to then being re-released.  A Hard Day’s Night by The Beatles came in at #54 (peaking the following week at #52) while Brown Sugar by The Rolling Stones was a #59 entry, peaking the following week at #58. It was also the chart in which Ben and Tracy enjoyed a second success of the year:-

mp3: Everything But The Girl – Mine (#58)

Fair play to the duo, and the record label, for not lifting a second single from the Top 20 album Eden, but my recollection at the time when first hearing it was that it was a bit of a letdown, not having too much of a memorable tune.  I’ve grown to appreciate it more over the years, but it really felt like an outlier back in 1984. #58 was as high as it charted.

22-28 July

Ridiculously slim pickings this week.  It’s A Hard Life by Queen was the highest new entry at #23, with the next best newbies being Hazell Dean, Rod Stewart and Tracey Ullman at 25, 42 and 51 respectively.  I know I’ve featured Tracey Ullman before in this series, but Sunglasses, the song with which she entered the chart this week is one I just do not recall and having just gone again to YouTube to see if my memory could be jogged.  Turned out that it couldn’t, and I only managed to watch about thirty seconds of the video before hurriedly hitting the stop button.

And just as I was to completely give up and write-off this week’s chart:-

mp3: The Colour Field – Take (#70)

The only week in which the band’s second single breached the Top 75.

Looking back over all of this, it does seem that I picked a good month to be out of the country.

JC

Colour Field, Colourfield

AN IMAGINARY COMPILATION ALBUM : #359: THE COLOURFIELD

the-colourfield-

Here comes an ICA from a short-lived band, with just two albums and seven UK singles to select from.   Despite this, it was still a bit of an ask to narrow it down to just ten songs.

First thing to sort out….the name of the band.   The first album and early singles were credited to The Colour Field.    Come 1987, with the release of the lead single from what proved to be the second and final album, they were known as The Colourfield.  Later compilation albums, whether encompassing Terry Hall‘s wider career or being solely focussed on this particular band, refer to The Colourfield.   As I’m now going to do from now on.

The demise of Fun Boy Three led to Terry Hall pulling together The Colourfield in 1984. The other two members were Toby Lyons on keyboards/guitar and Karl Shale on bass.   Toby had been part of The Swinging Cats*, a ska-influenced group from Coventry who had released one single on 2 Tone Records back in 1980, while Karl, also from Coventry, had played with a couple of new wave influenced bands who never quite made it.

Chrysalis Records, having been happy enough with the commercial success of Fun Boy Three, put a deal on the table, and as such, every Colourfield release in the UK would be via the label.

SIDE A

1. The Colour Field (single, January 1984)

It makes sense to start proceedings with the debut single, released in January 1984. Terry Hall promised that his new band would be taking a totally different direction to what had come before.  Some of those who had championed him since he had burst onto the scene weren’t impressed.  One journalist in a UK music paper, on reviewing the debut single, went as far as this:-

‘This lot have absolutely nothing going for them. No sense of humour. No glamour. No good melodies. No danceable rhythms. No excitement. No controversy. No emotion. Nothing whatsoever. They are, in short, ruddy awful’

Utter bullshit.   The problem was that such reviews and other less than fulsome praise, combined with the single not getting onto the A-list at Radio 1, meant it wasn’t all that widely heard and so ended up missing out on being a big hit, stalling at #43.

2. My Wild Flame (b-side, January 1985)

In terms of the chronology of the band, there would be an even bigger flop as the second single Take, released in July 1984, barely scraped into the Top 75.   The record company executives may well have been examining the fine print of the contract as 1985 rolled around, with the debut album scheduled for release in the spring/early summer.  In some ways, a reset button was pressed, and a big push was made on the third single, released in January 1985.  Thinking Of You was a hit, getting to #12.    I’ll get round to that later in this ICA….in the meantime, I’m offering up the poptastic and jaunty b-side for your enjoyment.  And yes, it is more or less a re-write of the debut single!!!

3. Things Could Be Beautiful  (single, January 1986)

The hit single had helped the debut album, Virgins and Philistines, reach #12.   It only hung around the charts for seven weeks, primarily as neither of the next two singles lifted from it made any dents.  The group went into the studio towards the end of 1985, with an additional member, Gary Dwyer (ex-Teardrop Explodes), behind the drum kit.  A very jaunty and upbeat 45 was recorded and released, assisted in no small measure by the production skills of Ian Broudie.    Sadly, it flopped, leading to Terry Hall spending a few months reassessing things. It also led to the record label deciding to have a bigger say on things.

4. Hammond Song (from Virgins and Philistines, May 1985)

A cover version.  The original dates from 1979 and was the work of The Roches, a trio of sisters from New York whose folk-like tunes leaned heavily on their sibling harmonies.   The Colourfield’s take on things sort of keeps these, although in a way akin to Kirsty MacColl‘s way of doing things, as it sees Terry harmonising with himself.  A song in which acoustic guitars strum gently in the background and provides something that all hangs together in a rather lovely way.

5. Thinking Of You (single, January 1985)

The one big hit for The Colourfield.  The third single, and one with a prominent co-vocal from Katrina Phillips.   A bitter-sweet love song which, in many ways, provided the template for The Beautiful South.   As I said in a previous post back in 2014 looking back at the debut album, I reckon its fair to assume the main reason no-one took the band seriously was that Terry Hall had forged a reputation as a representative of disaffected youth and having been pigeonholed in such a fashion, not too many were keen to allow him to carve a different and more lasting niche.  Thinking Of You might have been more a Radio 2 than Radio 1 sort of song, but it was still well worth a listen.

SIDE B

1. Miss Texas 1967 (from Deception, April 1987)

The second album was recorded in New York, with an American veteran producer, Richard Gottehrer, behind the desk.  The band was now reduced to just Terry Hall and Toby Shale, backed by session musicians.  The overall result is a bit of a mess, with the sound being very different from the first album and the Ian Broudie single.

Despite the mostly awful production, there are a few worthwhile moments on Deception, not least this lovely number which has a really intriguing title.  Intriguing?  Well, the actual winner of Miss Texas 1967 was 20-year-old Molly Grubb from Fort Worth, but the TV soap-opera Dallas would reference the contest as part of its scripts, with the winner being Sue Ellen Shepherd, a beauty queen who later married J.R. Ewing, the main heir to the family’s oil business (and an all-round bad guy!!).

2. Monkey In Winter (b-side, May 1987)

The original version of this can be found on Deception, an album which sold very poorly, spending just one week in the Top 100, reaching #95 in April 1987.   The following month, a single from the album was released.  She had been written in the mid-60s by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, one of many songs the duo had composed for The Monkees.   The Colourfield version failed even more dismally than the album, but tucked away on the b-side is a remake of Monkey In Winter, with the remix duties being taken care of by Gil Norton, whose work led to a much more sympathetic rendition of the tune.   But the key to everything was Terry deciding that the lead vocal would be better delivered by someone else, and he came up with the idea of having Sinead O’Connor come into the studio.  It might not sound like anything else The Colourfield ever made, but it’s very much attributed to them.

3. Armchair Theatre (from Virgins and Philistines, May 1985)

Remember how the critics had laid into Terry Hall for failing to be controversial?   He kind of thumbs his nose at them with this one.

I’m sitting on the fence again
Drawing straws and pulling strings
Demonstrations pass me by
This must be the age of something

And this was after he had written and recorded the next song on the ICA

4. Cruel Circus (from Virgins and Philistines, May 1985)

Khayem included this on his career-encompassing Terry Hall ICA (#277, February 2021), and in his words, “a biting commentary on animal cruelty, Terry’s lyrics and vocal delivery have lost none of their power and relevance in the subsequent three decades.”  1985 was the year of Meat Is Murder, and I often think that Terry’s contribution to the debate, which focussed on laboratory experiments and fox-hunting, sort of got lost a bit when it should have been the subject of many an article across the broadsheet media.

5. Sorry (b-side, January 1984)

And so we find ourselves going full circle, with the b-side to the debut single, and a track which was also used, more than 15 months later, to end the debut album.  If, like me, you’re a bit of a sucker for the bitterly honest and straight-from-the-heart break-up songs (the sorts that Elvis Costello and David Gedge have often specialised in over the years) then I hope you’ll agree that this is  up there with the best of them.

BONUS EP

Told you earlier that I couldn’t keep it down to 10 tracks.   So, here’s the limited edition 4-track EP, available only with the initial copies of this ICA.

(a) mp3: The Colourfield – Castles In The Air
(b) mp3: The Colourfield – The Windmills Of Your Mind
(c) mp3: The Colourfield – Goodbye Sun Valley
(d) mp3: The Colourfield – Your Love Was Smashing

(a) Another flop single, the follow-up to Thinking Of You.  Should’ve been a hit but stalled at #51.

(b) A b-side, to the second single, Take.  A cover of the song best known as the theme tune to the 1968 film, The Thomas Crown Affair.

(c) The closing track on Deception.  The session musicians earn their corn on this one with almost enough different instruments for its own ICA a la JTFL.

(d) Yet another b-side, this one being found on Castles In The Air.   I do think Terry Hall took a great amount of perverse pleasure in having some of his best songs of this era being quite obscure in terms of where they were released.

JC

* I’ve had this piece prepared for some time, just waiting on a gap in the schedule to slot it in.   Over the weekend, I received a guest posting which, by sheer coincidence, makes reference to The Swinging Cats.  Please tune in tomorrow when all will be revealed.