Category: David Bowie

David Bowie, Ian McCulloch, Prince & The Revolution, Smiley Culture, Style Council

WHEN THE CLOCKS STRUCK THIRTEEN (December)

2-8 December

It’s the run-up to Christmas, and I did the research, fully anticipating there would be little to look back with much fondness in terms of the new entries in the singles chart.  My worst fears were realised. It’s the Smooth Radio playlist from hell:-

Spandau Ballet – Round and Round (#23 – would spend 8 weeks in the Top 75, reaching #18)
Thompson Twins – Lay Your Hands On Me (#30 – would spend 9 weeks in the Top 75, reaching #13)
Queen – Thank God It’s Christmas (#36 – would spend 6 weeks in the Top 75, reaching #21)
Paul Young – Everything Must Change (#39 – would spend 11 weeks in the Top 75, reaching #9)
Foreigner – I Want To Know What Love Is (#67 – would spend 16 weeks in the Top 75, including three weeks at #1)

Two of the biggest selling male singers, who would later pass away within four months of one another in 2016, had new entries this week:-

mp3: David Bowie – Tonight (#58)

The second single lifted from the underwhelming 16th studio album, also called Tonight, that had been released in September 1984.  It’s a cover of a song originally recorded by Iggy Pop for his 1977 album, Lust For Life.  Bowie had written the lyrics for this one, and his take on these seven years later is reggae-influenced and has Tina Turner singing alongside him.  I’m not a fan….not many at the time were, as it stalled at #53.

mp3: Prince & The Revolution – I Would Die 4 U (#64)

The fourth and final single to be lifted from Purple Rain, and with the album now almost six months old, it can’t be too surprising that it did no better than #58 in the charts.  Worth mentioning that the b-side was a Christmas number, although not exactly the cheerful type you hear in the shops when searching for the last-minute gifts:-

mp3: Prince – Another Lonely Christmas

9-15 December 

This was the week when Band Aid came in at #1, where it would stay for five weeks.  This was the week when Last Christmas by Wham came in at #2, a position it would occupy for the next five weeks.

The next highest entry was a re-release.  I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday by Wizzard came in at #50, eventually reaching #23.   It had originally been a#4 hit in 1973.

After that, it was So Near To Christmas by Alvin Stardust at #54. It would later climb to #29.

But before you run off screaming into the abyss, here’s a couple of lower down entries that look really out of place among all the festive offerings:-

mp3: Ian McCulloch – September Song (#61)

Mac the Mouth’s first solo single.  A cover, dating from 1938, when it was used in the Broadway musical Knickerbocker Holiday. The music was composed by Kurt Weill and the lyric was the work of Maxwell Anderson.  The song had been written as the solo number in the show for the veteran actor Walter Huston, someone not exactly well known for his vocal talents.  A version by Frank Sinatra would chart in the 1940s and 1960s.  Mac’s take peaked at #51.

mp3: Smiley Culture – Police Officer (#66)

The then 21-year-old Londoner, whose real name was David Emmanuel, had a brief brush with fame in the mid-80s.  This was his biggest success, an urban tale of a black man who was arrested for possession of cannabis but was let go after the arresting officer recognised him as a famous reggae artist, in exchange for an autograph. Sung in a mixture of Cockney and a London-take on Jamaican patois, the song could be construed as a comedy number, but it did highlight the fact the black youths were far more likely to be unfairly treated and likely arrested than their white counterparts.

Here’s something I didn’t know till looking into the career of Smiley Culture.

David Emmanuel would die, at the age of 48, in 2011.  The official line is that it was suicide by knife wound, just a matter of days before he was to appear in a London court to face a charge of supplying cocaine.  His death came an hour-and-a-half after four police officers had arrived, with a warrant, to search his home. His family and friends have never accepted the suicide verdict, and the report carried out into his death by the Police Complaints Commission has never been shared with the family, far less been made public.

Tragic.

16-22 December and 23-29 December

I wouldn’t have thought that many new songs would make it into the charts over the last two weeks of the year, unless of course they were festive-themed.  Paul Weller, however, has always been a thrawn bugger.

mp3 : The Council Collective – Soul Deep (Part 1)

In at #37 on 16 December, it would spend five weeks in the Top 75, peaking at #24 the following week.  It was The Style Council augmented by three guest vocalists – Jimmy Ruffin, Junior Giscombe and Vaughan Toulouse, and two guest musicians, Dizzi Heights and Leonardo Chignoli.  The aim of the single was to raise money for the families of striking miners in the run-up to Christmas.

Worth mentioning that Weller’s profile was at an all-time high, what with him being asked to contribute to the collective vocals on the Band Aid single.

And with that, the charts version of this year-long series comes to its natural end.  I’ll be back in next week with a look at the very few non-hit/indie singles from the period, at which point it will be a farewell (for now) to the music of 1984.

 

 

JC

Big Country, Bronski Beat, David Bowie, Giorgio Moroder and Phil Oakey, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, Prince & The Revolution, Specials, U2, XTC

WHEN THE CLOCKS STRUCK THIRTEEN (September)

2-8 September

The month of August 1984 did offer up some gems, including what I have long held to be the greatest 12″ release of all time, William It Was Really Nothing/Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want/ How Soon Is Now?, issued on Rough Trade Records and which, in the first week of September 1984, peaked at #17 in the UK singles charts.  Turned out it would be another two years before The Smiths experienced another Top 20 single.

So here’s a few other things that were happening forty-one years ago.

The highest new entry was a re-release, and one that wasn’t all that old.  We Are Family by Sister Sledge had been a #8 hit in May 1979, and here it was, just five years later, coming back in at #32, and before the month was over it would peak at #4. It does seem the 1984 edition of the song was different from the original in that it was a remix by Nile Rogers.

The second and third-highest new entries at #39 and #43 are again examples of songs I genuinely cannot remember a single not of.  Torture by The Jacksons and Heaven’s On Fire by Kiss.  There’s actually only two new entries in the Top 74 worth posting here, and even then, the first of them, as far as I’m concerned, is far from this particular synth-pop duo’s finest 45s

mp3: OMD – Tesla Girls (#48)

The second, and I think I’m right in saying this, was the only hit single on which keyboardist and main songwriter, Jerry Dammers, took the lead vocal, and he does so with a falsetto.

mp3: Special AKA – What I Like Most About You Is Your Girlfriend (#72)

The former would reach #21 and give OMD a ninth Top 30 hit in four years. The latter, in reaching #51, was the last single released on 2 Tone to reach the charts.

9-15 September

Dare I post the highest new entry this week, knowing that it’ll be met mostly by sneers and snorts of derision?  Mind you, my young brother likes it, and he pops his head in almost every day

mp3: U2 – Pride (In The Name Of Love) (#9)

The lead-off single from the soon-to-be released album The Unforgettable Fire.  This, more than any of their songs, was the one which suggested their future lay in arena-rock. It would, in due course, reach #3, and remain their biggest hit single through till 1988 when Desire became their first #1.

The rest of the new entries really are like a roll-call of Smooth Radio computer generated playlists.  It was painful enough being reminded of them again without actually typing them out.

16-22 September

David Bowie’s new single was the highest new entry this week.

mp3: David Bowie – Blue Jean (#17)

1983 had been Bowie’s best year ever, in terms of the actual sales/success of hit singles with Let’s Dance (#1), China Girl (#2) and Modern Love (#2).  There had also been Serious Moonlight, a hugely successful world tour of arenas and stadia which brought on board millions of new fans, but had left fans of old wondering why their hero had sold out to the shiny pop world. This brand-new song won’t have done too much to put smiles on the faces of the older fans, while the newer ones might have been less than impressed, as it was nowhere near as immediate as the offerings from the previous year.  Time hasn’t been kind to Blue Jean, or indeed the parent album Tonight.  Blue Jean would climb to #6 the following week before experiencing a rapid tumble out of the charts.

Queen had the next highest new entry at #22 with Hammer To Fall, another song from 1984 that I can’t recall.  Unlike the song coming in at #22:-

mp3: Bronski Beat – Why?

An absolute floor-filler at the student discos, and quite possibly the discos where the girls in white stilettos danced around their handbags, but I wouldn’t know as I never went near such places.  Too many pounds, shillings and pence were required to gain entry, while the drinks were way more expensive than any student union.  Smalltown Boy had only just fallen out of the Top 75 after a 13-week stay, so it was great that Why? kept Bronski Beat’s name prominently featured on the radio and TV stations of our nation.  It would eventually reach #6 around the same time as debut album Age of Consent entered the charts at #4.

Another interesting song came in at #25.

mp3: Prince & The Revolution – Purple Rain

Not one of my favourites, but loved by so many others. This single, its parent album and the film of the same name truly made a superstar out of Prince.  This would also, like Why?, peak at #6.

I mentioned up above that Queen had a new entry at #22. The band’s lead singer, Freddie Mercury, saw his first ever solo single also chart this week. Love Kills came in at #27.  Two weeks later, it peaked at #10 which meant it had outsold and outperformed the band’s new 45.  I wonder if any tension was created from such an outcome.

And finally from this week’s chart, a prime example of a slow burner

mp3: Giorgio Moroder and Phil Oakey – Together In Electric Dreams (#74)

There is a very interesting and telling background to this one, as recalled by the director of the film Electric Dreams, for which this was written as the theme song:-

“Giorgio Moroder was hired as composer and played me a demo track he thought would be good for the movie. It was the tune of “Together in Electric Dreams” but with some temporary lyrics sung by someone who sounded like a cheesy version of Neil Diamond. Giorgio was insisting the song could be a hit, so I thought I’d suggest someone to sing who would be as far from a cheesy Neil Diamond as one could possibly go. Phil Oakey. We then got Phil in who wrote some new lyrics on the back of a fag packet on the way to the recording studio and did two takes which Giorgio was well pleased with and everybody went home happy”

The song would spend 13 weeks on the chart, taking six of them to reach its peak of #3, all of which made it feel as if the song had been around forever, and even worse, was never going to go away

23-29 September

Big Country had been one of the UK’s breakthrough bands in 1983, and the band’s willingness to be seemingly constantly out on the road was a huge factor in how their fan base continued to grow.  There had been one ‘stopgap’ single, Wonderland, earlier in the year which had provided a third Top 10 hit, and hopes were very high for the lead off 45 from what was soon to their sophomore album:-

mp3; Big Country – East Of Eden (#27)

To the consternation of the band and the record label, East of Eden would stall at #17, which was maybe an indication that the new material was less radio-friendly and a tad more rock-orientated than had come before.  The big consolation was that the album, Steeltown, would enter the charts at #1 in early October.

And finally, in what it has to be said, really is something of an underwhelming month in this series:-

mp3: XTC – All You Pretty Girls (#69)

XTC released loads of great singles over the years.  This, I’m afraid to say, wasn’t one of them.  It would peak at #55.

The good news is that Part 2 of this feature will have a bundle of non-hit singles that have proven to be absolute classics.

 

JC

David Bowie, Grace Jones, Heaven 17, Jam, Linx, Loose Joints, Material, Public Image Limited, Talking Heads, The Pop Group

HERE’S THAT RHYTHM AGAIN….

A guest posting by Fraser Pettigrew (aka our New Zealand correspondent)

The Smirks were a short-lived band from Manchester whose chief contribution to posterity was as leaders, indeed sole proponents, of the parodic ‘Smirks Against Travolta’ movement. In 1978, I sent away for one of their badges which showed a cartoon of the iconic Saturday Night Fever star, his head impaled through the ears by a big red arrow in obvious homage to the Anti-Nazi League’s Rock Against Racism campaign materials. The Smirks’ campaign had a semi-serious intent to defend live music venues against the progressive dominance of discos and the formulaic dance music records that fuelled them. The punk era seemed like a propitious moment of revolt against the mainstream music industry, and disco music epitomised its commercialised, mass-produced product.

In 1977 and 1978 it seemed as though the early punk and new wave hits were but far-flung islands in an ocean of disco. Every other single featured on Top of the Pops seemed to bounce along four-to-the-floor on shimmering hi-hat ripples backed by scratchy wah-wah guitars and alternating octave bass lines. And it wasn’t just American R&B acts that were doing it. Old timers like The Bee Gees and even The Rolling Stones were doing it, Abba were doing it, Bowie was doing it. If somebody wasn’t doing it they soon would – I’m looking at you, Rod Stewart. It’s easy to see how The Smirks could view disco as a malignant algae slowly smothering every other lifeform in the sea.

In 1978, I didn’t like disco. Disco was the enemy, it was the commercial mainstream, it was the antithesis of punk and new wave. Disco music was not the music of teenage rebellion, it was the music of flare-wearing bubble-headed conformists, obsessed with superficial personal attractiveness. Disco kids were socially acquiescent good-timers, not uncompromising and intellectually fearless iconoclasts intent on remaking the culture in a constant cycle of destruction and renewal, like what I was.

Ironically, however, the ‘anything goes’ eclecticism unleashed by punk was already in the process of spawning music that blended new wave experimentalism with the stylised sounds of disco and its elder sibling funk. It wasn’t properly until 1979 that this seemingly taboo musical miscegenation was born, but the seeds were sown by the end of 1978. Ever the pioneer, John Lydon’s Public Image Ltd filled out the last eight minutes of their first album with the disco-loop time-waster Foederstompf. Despite its explicitly ‘contractual obligation’ nature (at one point Lydon sing-chants the line “how-to-finish-the-album-with-the-minimum-amount-of-effort-necessary…”), the track sets up a style marker that was picked up in startling fashion six months later on their second single Death Disco. Did exactly what it said on the tin. One of the strangest things ever to appear on Top of the Pops.

A month after PiL’s First Edition, in January 1979, New York punk scene graduates Blondie released Heart of Glass and within a week it was at number 1. It’s well known now that the song started life some three or four years earlier, and before it acquired its eventual form and title (when recorded in June 1978) it was referred to by the band as ‘the disco song’. Blondie had earlier included disco cover versions in their live set, including Donna Summer’s I Feel Love.

The single that Heart of Glass bumped off the top spot was Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ own disco classic, Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick. In truth The Blockheads had always been a bit funky, and were never in any sense punk, but they surfed to prominence on the new wave, bearing an outsider affinity on account of Dury’s disabled skinhead Essex geezer persona and lyrical fondness for society’s nether parts.

Another of our favourite bands, Talking Heads, fellow alumni with Blondie of the CBGB school, had quite frankly been doing disco since day one. Talking Heads ’77 was a blueprint for blending slick, poppy dance rhythms with weirdo art-nerd lyrics, luring you onto the floor like the cutest boy in the class until you realised you were dancing with a bookworm, a civil servant, a psycho killer. More Songs About Buildings and Food delivered further explicitly disco tunes like The Girls Want to Be With The Girls, Stay Hungry and Found A Job, Frantz and Weymouth nailing the crisp tempos on hi-hat, snare and bouncing bass, Byrne and Harrison rubbing ‘chicken-scratch’ rhythm guitar straight out of KC and the Sunshine Band. There was a cover of an Al Green song.

The combined effect was to sand away the stigma associated with disco and funk. Did we disown Blondie? Had PiL sold out? No one complained, least of all me. Like everything else, my fearless iconoclasm was a pose, and though I genuinely didn’t like mainstream regurgitation, the appropriation and subversion of popular forms was obviously different, yeh? Also, music was supposed to be fun. Everyone wanted to party and the admission was grudgingly made that disco was 100% party music. Nobody was going to get up to The Bee Gees, but slap on Heart of Glass or Bowie’s Golden Years and we were on it. Something to do with the packaging.

Well away from the chart spotlight, other artists were taking funk and disco stylings and bolting them onto some distinctly uncommercial material. In The Smirks’ back yard, A Certain Ratio were beginning their rapid evolution towards icy, stripped down funk. In deepest darkest Bristol, The Pop Group compounded the irony of their name by confrontationally screaming agitprop over grooves that sounded like James Brown and George Clinton jamming in an abattoir.

So, in short order, my dislike of disco on purely aesthetic grounds vanished even faster than The Smirks. Just as well, since the following years saw a rapid diffusion of disco and funk throughout every level of post-punk music. You can hear it in the ‘Sound of Young Scotland’ in Orange Juice and Josef K, The Fire Engines, Boots For Dancing, in the Euro-disco of The Skids and Simple Minds, and in the warped pop of Associates.

New Order mashed up Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder to produce Everything’s Gone Green, following it up with Temptation, and eventually the monster techno-disco breakthrough of Blue Monday. The Pop Group never had a hit, assuredly for want of trying, but their former bassist Simon Underwood tasted success with Pigbag, whose James Brown-referencing Papa’s Got a Brand New Pigbag even inspired Paul Weller to jump on the bandwagon by ripping off the bass line for The Jam‘s disco song Precious.

By the beginning of the 80s, disco was as much part of the new wave as it was of the mainstream. And through the distinctive phenomenon that was Grace Jones, the new wave found itself infiltrating disco. In the late 1970s, the former fashion model had made a musical name for herself in the gay club scene with high-camp singles such as Do or Die and I Need a Man, but after teaming up with the Compass Point All Stars, her albums Warm Leatherette and Nightclubbing supplied a wider alternative club scene with some unexpected dance floor fillers. The former album’s title track could hardly be of more obscure origin, a cover of a proto-industrial synth pop single based on J.G. Ballard’s Crash, written and produced by The Normal, aka Daniel Miller, founder of Mute Records, the future home of all things alternative. Other covers followed, drawn from The Pretenders, The Police, Iggy Pop, Roxy Music and, most eyebrow-raising of all, Joy Division. When I occasionally frequented Edinburgh club JJ’s in the early 80s, Jones’s versions of She’s Lost Control and Warm Leatherette were staples, along with tracks like Bowie’s Stay, from Station to Station, and Material’s Bustin’ Out.

Bustin’ Out flags up another significant strand of alternative disco, the New York underground, propelled by experimentalists like Bill Laswell and Arthur Russell, ‘no-wave’ acts such as ESG, and the ZE Records stable that included Was (Not Was), Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Lizzy Mercier Descloux as well as Laswell’s Material. All of this fed alternative influences back into the disco club scene, ultimately influential in the metamorphosis of disco into house and techno in the late 1980s, a development further fuelled by post-punk electro-pioneers like Human League and Heaven 17, Depeche Mode, Throbbing Gristle and their offshoots Chris and Cosey, Yazoo and Erasure.

In parallel with all this painfully hip consumption, my musical tastes were being broadened to embrace some of the soul and funk originators like Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, Isaac Hayes and Marvin Gaye. Several of my friends expressed healthy respect for the danceable end of soul music. One of them only ever wore white socks. Not long after it came out, I bought Off The Wall, easily one of the best pop/disco albums of all time. The barriers were down. I am now unashamed to reveal that my record collection holds prized items by such as Shalimar and the Detroit Spinners, and Brit-disco acts like Linx, Imagination and The Real Thing. Whisper it, I even have The Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever tracks on a CD, and they’re great. As Funkadelic so succinctly and eloquently phrased it, “Free your mind and your ass will follow.”

mp3: PiL – Death Disco
mp3: Talking Heads – Stay Hungry
mp3: The Pop Group – She is Beyond Good and Evil
mp3: The Jam – Precious
mp3: Material – Bustin’ Out (12” version)
mp3: Grace Jones – Warm Leatherette
mp3: David Bowie – Stay
mp3: Loose Joints – Is It All Over My Face? (Single female vocal version)
mp3: Heaven 17 –  I’m Your Money (12” version)
mp3: Linx – Wonder What You’re Doing Now

 

Fraser

David Bowie

SONGS UNDER TWO MINUTES (13): BREAKING GLASS

An album track from 1977

mp3: David Bowie – Breaking Glass

Side 1, Track 2 of Low.  The eleventh studio album from David Bowie and the first of what is now referred to as the Berlin Trilogy, even though most of the record was  recorded in September/October 1976 at the Château d’Hérouville in France.

And yes, it is a short post today, but then again, that’s the nature of the Songs Under Two Minutes series.  Besides, I was tired after yesterday’s offering!

 

JC

Beat, Booker T & The MGs, Cabaret Voltaire, Clash, David Bowie, Lori & The Chamelons, M, Monochrome Set

SHAKEDOWN, 1979 (December)

79

The final part of what has been one of the most time-consuming series, in terms of research, referencing and cross-checking, that I’ve ever pulled together, with just short of 200 singles featuring, with the final 8 coming your way today.  As December’s releases are on the low side, especially on the non-chart side of things with the indie labels quite rightly steering well clear of the festive madness, I’m combining the usual Parts 1 and 2 into a single posting, starting with the Top 75 covering 2nd-8th December.

The highest new entry was at #56, an indication that not much was actually being released and that the record-buying public was happy to just shell out on the tunes that had been around for a few weeks, or indeed months.  I’ve picked up on three new entries at the very low end of the chart, one of which I have to admit I was really surprised to see.

mp3 : M – Moonlight and Muzak

Pop Muzik had been one of the biggest and best-selling 45s of the year. The fact it took more than six months for its follow-up to be released kind of gives the game away that nobody, including himself, really expected M (aka Robin Scott) to have enjoyed such success.  My memory may be playing tricks on me, but I’m sure that Moonlight and Muzak wasn’t actually written until after Pop Muzik had been a hit.  This one came in at #64 and peaked a couple of weeks later at #33.

mp3: The Beat – Tears Of A Clown/Ranking Full Stop

1979 was the year in which 2-Tone Records had come out of nowhere.  The first four singles on the label – Gangsters by The Specials, The Prince by Madness, On My Radio by The Selecter and A Message to You, Rudy by The Specials – had all been massive hits.   The 5th single came courtesy of another multi-racial band from the English Midlands, in this instance the city of Birmingham.

This 45 has been part of Dirk‘s superbly entertaining 111 single series, featuring back in January 2023. As he pointed out, The Beat would not only enjoy a few years of chart success from the outset, but there would also be a number of good bands that rose from the ashes of (former members of) The Beat: General Public, Fine Young Cannibals, Two Nations as well as the solo material from the late Ranking Roger.

The debut came in at #67, eventually climbing as high as #6 just after the turn of the year. It was the first of what would be thirteen chart hit singles going through to the summer of 1983.

And now….here’s the one which surprised me

mp3: Lori and The Chamelons – Touch

In at #70 and back out of the chart the following week in a ‘blink and you’ll have missed it’ style.   My surprise is that I would have bet a great deal of money that Zoo Records never had any chart success. OK, some of the band of their roster would become chart mainstays in future years, but that was after the label had folded, and they had signed elsewhere.

It was back in January 2015 that I featured all nine 45s issued by Zoo.   Touch was the label’s sixth single with the group being a trio consisting of label owners Bill Drummond (guitar) and David Balfe (bass and keyboards), along with vocalist Lori Lartey.    As I said, I had no idea it ever charted!

Moving on to the chart of 9-16 December.

There were three new entries in the Top 40, one of which was I Have A Dream by Abba, widely tipped to be the Xmas #1.  Spoiler alert….it ended up spending four weeks at #2, kept off the top by Pink Floyd!  One of the other new entries was a novelty number of the sort December charts no matter the year are full of, but the third, coming in at #23, was of some interest.

mp3: David Bowie – John, I’m Only Dancing (Again)

Originally dating from 1972, the song had been re-recorded in 1974 as David Bowie was keen to come up with a soul/disco hit for the American market.  It was slated to be included on the album Young Americans, and almost certainly as a single to be lifted from that album, only to be replaced late on by Fame.  Five years on, and the record label, RCA, decided to take advantage of the increasing interest in disco and issue it in the run-up to Christmas on the back of Bowie’s success earlier in the year with Boys Keep Swinging and DJ, as well as the album Lodger.

John, I’m Only Dancing (Again) spent eight weeks in the chart, peaking at#12, and in doing so, matched the chart position of the original 1972 version.

Just outside the Top 40 was this:-

mp3: The Clash – London Calling

The band’s ninth single, that’s if you include The Cost Of Living EP.    It was released on 7 December 1979 with the album of the same name hitting the shops seven days later.   The single came in at #43, and eventually reached #11, the highest ever 45 for The Clash during the time they were actually together.  The album came in at #9, stayed at the same position the following week, fell to #21 in its third week and then back up to #9 in week 4, no doubt benefitting from the spending power of Record Tokens given to young people as Xmas gifts from grandparents, aunties and uncles.

Also coming into the chart this week, another example of why 1979 was so special and different.

mp3: Booker T & The MGs – Green Onions

It might have dated back to 1962, but this was the first time the tune had been a chart hit in the UK, with the 2 Tone movement playing a big part in its success.  It came in at #74 in mid-December, but went all the way to #7 by the end of January, as part of a twelve-week stay in the Top 75.

There were just a handful of new entries in the Top 75 in the final two charts of 1979, none of which merit even a passing mention.  And with that, it’s time for one final flick through the big book of indie singles.

mp3: Cabaret Voltaire – Silent Command

Catalogue Number RT 035.  The release back in June 1979 of Nag Nag Nag has the number RT018, which just goes to show how active Rough Trade had been throughout the year. It’s not one I can recall from back in the day, and I’m not sure if I would have fallen for it, given how unusual and unorthodox a tune it is.

mp3: The Monochrome Set – He’s Frank (Slight Return)

The third single from the band in 1979. The previous two had been on Rough Trade, but this one wasn’t.  Well sort of…..

He’s Frank had been the band’s debut, a self-release on cassette only.  The interest in the band in recent times led to the decision to reissue it on vinyl, via a new imprint called Disquo Blue.  It was, however, a joint release with Rough Trade.  The next release on Disquo Blue wouldn’t be until 2012, when The Monochrome Set released their tenth studio album Platinum Coils, their first in nearly seventeen years.

And with that, Shakedown 1979 comes to a close.   I’m thinking I’ll re-hash the feature in 2025, looking in depth at the singles chart from one of the years that made up the 80s.

Thanks for all your views, opinions and thoughts throughout the series.  Much appreciated.

JC

Boomtown Rats, Buzzcocks, David Bowie, Police, Pretenders, Public Image Limited, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Sparks, Specials, Undertones

SHAKEDOWN, 1979 (July)

79

My summer of ’79 saw me enter the big bad world of paid employment.  I actually told a few lies to land the job, the vacancy for which had been advertised in the local job centre.

I was legally able to leave school, but I was always planning to return after the summer holidays to go into 5th year to sit the exams that would count towards university admission.  But I wanted to earn a bit of money, and so I applied for, and landed, a job in the city centre branch of Halford’s, the UK’s biggest retailer of cycling and motor products.  I told the store bosses that I had no intention of returning to school, no matter how good the results of my O-Grades, and, yes, I did see myself as being very interested if the chance arose to train as a store manager once I turned 18 in a couple of years time.

I started the job a couple of days after my 16th birthday, and so the month of July was when I really settled into it.  It was a shop where the radio played in the background all day long, and with most of the staff being lads aged in their late teens/early 20s, the station of choice was BBC Radio 1, which means my ears were exposed to a lot of what was in the charts.

As you’d expect, there was a fair bit of rubbish regularly aired, but then again Tubeway Army, Squeeze, Blondie, The Ruts and The Skids were all still in the Top 40, while some cracking disco/soul classics from Earth Wind & Fire/The Emotions, McFadden & Whitehead, and Chic were also capable of putting a smile on my face.  The highest new entry in the chart in the first week of July is not one I can recall hearing on Radio 1:-

mp3: Public Image Limited – Death Disco (#34)

Jaysus, this was really weird sounding.  The 16-year-old me had a difficulty with it.  I bought it, but I can’t say I particularly liked listening to it.  So much so, that I gave it away to someone who handed me two of the early Jam singles in exchange (Eddie didn’t like that they were a pop band nowadays). It took me a few years to really appreciate Death Disco… till 1990 in fact, when I bought a CD copy of a Public Image Limited singles compilation.  As I wrote on this blog previously, by this point in my life I knew that great songs didn’t need hooks or memorable, hummable tunes, and that a cauldron of noise in which a screaming vocal fights for your attention alongside screeching guitars over a bass/drum delivery that on its own would have you dancing like a madman under the flashing lights could be a work of genius.  This spent seven weeks in the Top 75, peaking at #20.

While researching this piece, I discovered, to my shock/delight, that Death Disco had appeared on a Top of The Pops budget compilation – these albums featured uncredited session musicians/singers replicating the sound of current chart hits. I think there were about 100 or so of them released between 1968 and 1982, and they were stupidly cheap in comparison to a proper studio album, and from memory weren’t all that more expensive than a couple of singles.  This is really strange:-

mp3: Top Of The Pops – Death Disco

I’m thinking that John Lydon pissed himself laughing at the very idea of this, and as such was more than happy to give his blessing to it.

The next one of interest in the chart of 1-7 July is another I can’t recall hearing in Halford’s

mp3: Siouxsie & The Banshees – Playground Twist (#47)

The third of the S&TB singles wasn’t a commercial offering by any stretch of the imagination, but it did sell enough copies to reach #28 in a six-week stay.

Coming in a bit further down the chart was one that I recall hearing loads of times in the shop:-

mp3: The Police – Can’t Stand Losing You (#60)

This had been a near smash-hit in late 1978, spending five weeks in the charts and reaching #42.  The Police had gone massive in the first half of ’79, and it was easy enough for A&M Records to press up more copies of the old singles to meet the new demand.  Where Roxanne had taken the band into the Top 20, this was the one that sealed the deal, getting all the way to #2 in mid-August.

The second singles chart of July ’79 was a strange one.  No ‘big’ entries, with the highest coming in at at #48, courtesy of Abba.  Many of other newbies are names I am struggling to recall – Chantal Curtis, Stonebridge McGuiness, Judie Tzuke, Vladimir Cosma, and Light of The World.  There was, however, one truly outstanding song which came in at #62:-

mp3: The Pretenders – Kid

It remains my favourite 45 of all that Chrissie & co ever put down on vinyl. Indeed, it is one of THE great records in what was, as this series is demonstrating, a great year for music; it spent seven weeks on the chart in July and August 1979, peaking at #33. Should have got to #1….but that feat for The Pretenders was just around the corner.

The third week of July saw an unusual song as its highest new entry at #15:-

mp3: The Boomtown Rats – I Don’t Like Mondays

Here’s the thing.  I more than liked the Boomtown Rats and owned copies of their first two albums.  I wasn’t at prepared for the new single…..it was all over the radio before it was actually released, and looking back at things now, it must be one of the first examples of a viral marketing campaign based on artificially creating a reaction to something that some folk declared to be ‘shocking’.  I can’t say that I cared much for the song, and it was conspicuous by its absence when I pulled together a Rats ICA back in October 2022.  The week after entering at #15, I Don’t Like Mondays went to #1, where it stayed for four weeks, and then another two weeks at #2. All told, it sold over 500,000 copies and was the 4th biggest selling single of 1979.

mp3: David Bowie – D.J.

Bowie followed up the success of Boys Keep Swinging with a second single from the album Lodger. This would have been heard in Halford’s but not all that often given that it came in at #29 in the third week of July but immediately dropped down the following week, and Radio 1 daytime DJs usually only gave spins to records that were on the up.

mp3: Sparks – Beat The Clock

This was very much all over the workplace radio….the sort of song that sounded great over the airwaves and made the individual DJs feel as if they were being a bit edgy.  A fantastic piece of disco-pop, thanks to the efforts of the brothers Mael and Giorgio Moroder.  A nine-week stay in the charts was the reward, with a best placing of #10.

mp3: The Undertones – Here Comes The Summer

Yup….July ’79 was the release date for this one.  Really doesn’t seem like 45 years ago, but there you have the facts presented before you, so there’s no denying it.  The other thing I’d have said about this was that it must have been a Top 20 hit, given how often I recall hearing it and that it lodged so easily into my brain.  But nope, in at #63 and peaking a couple of weeks later at #34, which was kind of a similar trajectory to this one:-

mp3: Buzzcocks – Harmony In My Head

The first 45 not to feature a lead vocal from Pete Shelley, the delivery from Steve Diggle made this just a little bit rougher round the edges than previous Buzzcocks singles.  But it was, and still is, a great listen.  In at #67 and peaking at #32…..and I’d have lost any bet offered on whether this or Here Comes The Summer had peaked highest.

And so, to the final singles chart of July 1979.

As with a couple of weeks previous, nothing came in fresh at any high position. #50 was the best on offer, and it was from Showaddyfuckingwaddy.  So no chance of it featuring here.

I was scrolling all the way through the Top 75 of 22-27 July, and just as I was concluding there wouldn’t be anything worth featuring, i noticed this was a new entry at #74:-

mp3: The Specials – Gangsters

One that I don’t so much associate with July 1979 and more about a period after I had finished at Halford’s and returned to school where I would take my first ever foray into DJ’ing.  It’s a tale I told when I wrote about Gangsters in the Great Debut Singles series:-

“1979/80 marked my first forays into DJing, if playing records on a single deck at a youth night in the school could be regarded as DJing. The senior pupils were encouraged to help the teachers at these nights, which were basically an effort to provide bored 12-15 year olds with something to do instead of hanging around street corners and picking up bad habits. There were three of us who brought along our own 45s to play while everyone ran around making lots of noise burning up all that excess energy. Very gradually over a matter of weeks, our little corner of the hall began to get a dedicated audience, and it was all driven by the fact they loved to do the Madness dance(s). In two hours of music, you could bet that more than half came through records on the 2-Tone label or its offshoots. And these kids were of an age when playing the same song two or three times in a night didn’t matter.”

Happy days indeed. Gangsters went on to spend 12 weeks in the charts, peaking at #6.

JC

David Bowie

THE BLURRED LEGACY OF DAVID BOWIE

A GUEST POSTING by flimflamfan

R-3215012-1600150017-9332

Be My Wife by David Bowie, was it the catalyst, the template for just about everything Blur achieved? It’s a thought…

Hardcore Blur fans will be aghast at the speculation and will no doubt have apparently reasoned arguments to foil mine. My argument is a simple one… listen to Be My Wife, m’lud.

mp3: David Bowie – Be My Wife

Apart from the lead guitar – which I’m not aware Blur have utilised in the same fashion – the jaunty piano, the vocal, the keyboard stabs it all adds up to a very convincing ‘cheeky-chappy-alright-geezers’ Blur.

Nay sayers, will nay say and that is their right.

It has long been discussed in my small circle that Blur did, in fact, pillage Bowie’s Anthony Newley period circa The World of David Bowie (quite the favourite of mine). Those discussions combined several songs to create an argument. An argument I agreed with. However, there is no need to combine songs when the singular Be My Wife presents its truth in such an obvious and powerful fashion.

I wonder how many songs out there cast a potential template for the musical direction of other bands? A song when you hear it you think “? based a career on that song?”

To Blur fans – the lineage is of pedigree quality.

To Bowie fans – you are now and have been unknowing Blur fans.

flimflamfan

Assembly, Aztec Camera, Blancmange, Care, David Bowie, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel, Julian Cope, Madness, Simple Minds, Smiths, Style Council, Yello

DON’T LOOK BACK IN ANGER (11)

11092687_0

Chart dates 30 October – 5 November

If you’ll recall the closing few sentences from last month, then you’ll know that the first week of November was likely to have some decent stuff kicking around the charts, with The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees and New Order still hanging around the Top 20, while PiL, Joy Division and Bauhaus were all a bit further down.   On the flip side of things, Billy Joel, Lionel Ritchie and Culture Club were still dominating the very top-end of things

It was also a week in which loads of new singles became eligible for a chart placing – 15 songs appeared for the first time in the Top 75 (20% of the total), although most of them were utter pish and/or unrecallable.  Here’s the full list of new entries

#75: Brian May and Friends – Starfleet
#73: The Danse Society – Heaven Is Waiting
#66: Imagination – New Dimension
#65: David Bowie – White Light/White Heat
#63: Major Harris – All My Life
#61: Aztec Camera – Oblivious
#47: Marilyn – Calling Your Name
#45: Eurythmics – Right By Your Side
#43: Rainbow – Can’t Let You Go
#34: Limahl – Only For Love
#26: The Police – Syncronicity II
#25: ABC – That Was Then, This Is Now
#24: Status Quo – A Mess Of Blues
#21: Madness – The Sun and The Rain
#19: Shakin Stevens – Cry Just A Little Bit

The Danse Society, one of the many goth-rock bands who were suddenly finding success )of sorts), were on a roll as Heaven Was Waiting was the second 45 of theirs to crack the Top 75 in 1983.  It would actually make it as high as #60, while the parent album of the same name, released just in time for the Xmas market in December 83, got to #40.  Wiki offers the reminder that the album wasn’t well by professional critics, with reviews such as “further plodding nonsense” and  “Heavy on gloomy atmosphere […] but short on memorable songs.”  The fact I can’t recall anything of them maybe bears that out.

David Bowie was having a stellar year in 1983, sales wise at least, thanks to Let’s Dance selling in millions and all his other albums enjoying resurgent sales (in July 83, ten Bowie albums could be found in the Top 100).  This live cover version of the Velvet Underground staple had been released as a single to promote a live album, Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture, which was hitting the screens that very month.

Aztec Camera had moved from Postcard to Rough Trade to Warner Brothers, and the promotional efforts of the major took them into the charts with the first ever time with a re-release of an old song.  Oblivious is a great pop song, and while I’m not normally a fan of re-releases, it was good to see this going on to do so well, eventually climbing up to #18 before the year was out, the first of what proved to be eight Top 40 hits for Roddy & co.

The Eurythmics might have burst onto the scene earlier in the year with the majestic Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) but the release of new album Touch, had seen the adopt a more commercial and mainstream pop sound that brought huge success all over the world.  Not a sound, however, that I recall with much love or fondness.

Talking of changing style and sound, ABC had gone down a different road from that taken with debut album The Lexicon Of Love.  It didn’t go down well with critics or fans but the first single from what turned out to be The Beauty Stab, did eventually reach #18. It proved to be their last ever Top 20 hit single. They had just one further top 20 hit, courtesy of When Smokey Sings, in 1987 (and thanks to the observant readers who spotted this error!)

Madness were enjoying their 17th successive Top 20 single.  The quite excellent The Sun and The Rain would eventually get as high as #5 which actually turned out to be the very final time they would make the Top 10.*

*in the 80’s, I should have added.  A re-released It Must Be Love was a hit in 1992, while a much later single, Lovestruck, reached #10 in 1999.  Again, my thanks to the ever-helpful readers…..)

Chart dates 6-12 November

It was inevitable after the previous week’s glut of new entries that things would slow down a bit.  The highest new entry came from the Rolling Stones, offering up something that was a bit more funk/dance orientated than much of their previous material. Undercover of The Night came in at #21 and later climbed to #11.  Who would ever have imagined back then that 40 years on, they’d still be going strong and having hit singles?

Some notes of interest from further down.

mp3: The Assembly – Never Never (#36)

It proved to a one-off collaboration between Vince Clarke and Feargal Sharkey, and this electronic ballad soon took off in popular fashion, hitting #4 just two weeks later.

mp3: Care – Flaming Sword (#58)

One of the great long-lost bands who really should have been much bigger than things turned out.  This was their second single, but the only one that cracked the charts.  Main songwriter, Ian Broudie, would have to wait a few years with The Lightning Seeds to enjoy commercial success.

Oh, and I almost forgot about this one.

mp3: The Smiths – This Charming Man (#55)

It would spend 12 weeks in the Top 75 all the way through to February 1984, peaking at #25 in early December 83.  It was the first of what proved to be sixteen singles from The Smiths that would crack the charts over the next four years, only two of which reached the Top 10 (and both peaked at that particular number).  Have a think and see if you can remember….the answer will be given as a PS at the foot of the post.

Chart dates 13-19 November

Fourth single of the year and a forth chart hit.  It was only a year since The Jam had split up, but Paul Weller was proving to be every bit as popular as ever.

mp3: The Style Council – A Solid Bond In Your Heart (#12)

I remember at the time being a bit let down by this one.  It certainly didn’t seem up to the standards of the previous three singles, but in some ways it was just a minor bumop in the road as the imperious pop phase of TSC was just around the corner. Oh, and a couple of years later, we would learn that Solid Bond had been demoed while The Jam were still going, so it could very well have come out as one of their later singles if they hadn’t disbanded.

mp3: Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel – White Lines (Don’t Do It) (#60)

One of the very best of the early rap singles, it sneaked into the bottom end of the charts in November 83 and then disappeared, only to re-emerge in the following February from where it would spend 37 successive weeks in the Top 75, the first 18 of which were outside the Top 40, before really being picked up on by the general public and hitting the #7 for two weeks in July/August 1984.  It was inevitable after the previous week’s glut of new entries that things would slow down a bit.  It’s the full 12″ on offer today, as that’s the one I have in the collection.

mp3: Julian Cope – Sunshine Playroom (#64)

I’d totally forgotten that this had been released as a single.  It was actually the first time that Julian Cope had taken solo material into the Top 75.   Again, it’s a quiz question with the answer at the bottom.  How many JC singles went into the Top 75 between 1983 and 1996?

Don’t be fooled into thinking that all was sweetness and light in the singles chart some 40 years ago.  The top 4 consisted of Billy Joel, Paul McCartney & Michael Jackson, Shakin Stevens and Lionel Ritchie.   Some of new entries and highest climbers this week included Paul Young,  Genesis, Tina Turner, Nik Kershaw, and Roland Rat Superstar – a grim reminder that the British public have always been suckers for novelty records.

Chart dates 20-26 November

A couple of the new entries were Christamas-related and readying themselves for all-out assaults in the month of December.  Yup, I’m looking at you The Pretenders and The Flying Pickets…..

There were some things worthy of attention.

mp3: Simple Minds – Waterfront (#25)

It was booming, bombastic and anthemic, and it was the beginning of the end of the cutting-edge Simple Minds.  But it was a song totally inspired by home city of Glasgow, and in pulling together the promo video for the single, the band hit upon the idea of opening up and using the Barrowland Ballroom for a live performance.  A huge debt is owed to them for that…..

mp3: Blancmange – That’s Love, That It Is (#43)

The duo had enjoyed a great 12 months, with the previous three singles (Living On The Ceiling,  Waves and Blind Vision) all going Top 20, as indeed would their next again single (Don’t Tell Me) in April 1984.  This is the one nobody remembers as it got stuck at #33 in mid-December among all the stuff that tends to dominate the charts in the month of the year.  Maybe, in hindsight, it should have been held back six or eight weeks.

mp3: Yello – Lost Again (#73)

This has long been a favourite of mine and I was disappointeed that it flopped so miserably.  The record buying public were seemingly far from convinced by the merits of off-centre electronica musicians from Switzerland.

And finally this month.

mp3: Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Relax (#67)

For the next six weeks, this single hung around the lower end of the charts, making its way up to #46 with steady but unspectacular sales.

It then eventually reached #35 in the first week of January 1984 which led to an appearance on Top Of The Pops….it wasn’t their first UK TV apppearance as they had already been on The Tube, broadcast on Channel 4, on a number of occasions. The TOTP appearance resulted in huge sales the follwowing week and it went all the way to #6.

A this point in time, long after the horse had bolted, Radio 1 DJ Mike Read announced he wasn’t going to play the record due to the suggestive nature of the lyrics.  He also felt the record sleeve was disgusting and amoral.  The BBC then decided Relax should be banned from any daytime play, but this didn’t stop the likes of David ‘Kid’ Jensen and John Peel having a bit of fun and airing the song in their evening shows. The ban was extended to include Top of The Pops.

All this only prompted a bit of mania among the record-buying public, and Relax initally went to #2 in the wake of the ban and then spent five weeks at the #1 slot through to the end of February 84, going on to spend 48 succesive weeks in the Top 75, including a rise back up to #2 when FGTH’s follow-up single, Two Tribes, went massive.

The BBC eventually relented and dropped the ban -it had become a joke in as much that the commercial radio stations and the non-BBC TV channels were more than happy to play the song or have it performed on programmes.

Who ever said there was no such thing as bad publicity was certainly right on this occasion.

One more month in the series to go.  It’ll appear sometime in late-December.

JC

PS (1): The two singles by The Smiths to hit the Top 10 were Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now and Sheila Take A Bow.

PS (2): Julian Cope had 16 singles reach the Top 75 between 1983 and 1996.  Seven of them actually cracked  the Top 40, with World Shut Your Mouth being the best-achieving of them all, hitting #19.

Altered Images, Aztec Camera, David Bowie, Elvis Costello, Orange Juice, Spear of Destiny, Yello

DON’T LOOK BACK IN ANGER (6)

11092687_0

I was obviously too busy getting drunk in June 83 to fully appreciate that the singles chart were particularly shite.  Either that or being totally despondent from the results of the General Election that had taken place on 9 June 1983 – the first in which I had been of an age to cast a vote.  Thatcher won in a landslide.  It was fucking grim.

The chart of 19-26 June makes for equally grim reading.  The Police were hanging on at #1 but Rod Stewart, with the atrocious Baby Jane, was poised to take over.  The Top 20 was awash with mediocrity – Elton John, Wham!, Michael Jackson, Buck’s Fizz, George Benson, Kajagoogoo and Mike Oldfield among the better known names, while Flash In The Pan, Shalamar and Shakatak were also up there.  So too was David Bowie, with his piss-poor cover of an Iggy Pop number, one that had become infamous thanks to a ‘racy’ video in which his bare arse was on display, along with the pubic hair of his Far Eastern dance-partner.

mp3: David Bowie – China Girl (#3)

Further down, likes of ELO, Imagination, Paul Young and Toto all had tunes that were airing regularly across the airwaves and shifting enough units to get mentioned in the Top of The Pops rundown.   Thankfully, there was some respite via a hard-hitting anti-war song:-

mp3 : The Imposter – Pills And Soap (#27).

Elvis Costello‘s angry songwriting talents had previously taken Robert Wyatt back into the charts after many years (see last month’s piece).  This time round, he penned another rant about the Tories in the forlorn hope that folk might hold a mirror up to Thatcher in the election.  But at least he tried. (the song had actually been in the Top 20 a couple of weeks earlier).

Just outside the Top 40 were a couple of songs from much loved acts round these parts:-

mp3: Orange Juice – Flesh Of My Flesh (#41)
mp3: Altered Images – Bring Me Closer (#42)

Neither are among their best 45s.

Further down, just about dropping out of the Top 75 but having peaked at #64 a couple of weeks previously, was another local pop combo

mp3: Aztec Camera – Walk Out To Winter (#73)

A radically different mix than had been included on the album High Land Hard Rain.

And since I’m looking way down for crumbs of comfort in the lower ends of the charts in other weeks during June 1983:-

mp3 : Spear Of Destiny – The Wheel (peaked at #59)

And I’ll finish off with a song that was actually slowly climbing the charts in the last week of June 83, eventually making it to #41 in the middle of the following month.

mp3: Yello – I Love You

This was the first time the electronic group from Switzerland had come to any sort of recognition in the UK, having been on the go since the late 70s.

Come back next month.  Things do get a fair bit better.

JC

David Bowie

(BONUS POST) : ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN SINGLES : #020

aka The Vinyl Villain incorporating Sexy Loser

#020– David Bowie – ‚”Heroes” (RCA Victor Records ’77)

bowie

Dear friends,

aaah … Berlin, summer of 1977 – an island of fun in a desert of boredom!! No military draft, a vibrant atmosphere, no cold war in sight yet, the Soviets taking real good care of their protégés with a solid wall helping them to keep Western influence at bay! Fun, fun, fun for everyone – and who was there in those golden days, enjoying the big party? Yes, David Bowie and his chum Iggy Pop! On a working holiday, as you would call it these days, with Pop recording ‘Lust For Life’, the album, and Bowie recording, well, ‘”Heroes”’, the album, in the famous Hansa Tonstudios, located a stone’s throw away from the Berlin wall – Köthener Strasse in Kreuzberg actually.

And this location is of some importance for the story the song tells us: ‘”Heroes”’ was a produced by a chap named Tony Visconti. Also recording in a different part of the studio was Antonia Maaß with The Messengers, some jazz-rock-combo. If you listen closely, you can also hear her singing in the background on ‘”Heroes”’, in fact. Now, every once in a while, Bowie would stop whatever he was doing, and stare out of the studio’s window a bit, thinking whatever pop stars have to think about. And quite often he noticed a couple caressing right at the wall, always at the same place, directly below an East German gun turret. What Bowie couldn’t understand was why on earth – with so many nice and certainly more romantic places within the city – this couple would always meet there: underneath the bloody gun turret, probably with the NVA border guards above them jeering foolishly whenever they kissed!

Either way, that’s where they used to meet, for reasons only becoming obvious to Bowie a bit later: first the couple was unknown to him, but being a clever bloke, he quickly realized that whenever he saw them kissing down there at the wall, his producer and background singer were always absent. So the famous protagonists which ‘”Heroes”’ tells us about, were – as you will already have gathered – Tony and Antonia. With Tony – surprise, surprise – being married to Mary Hopkin at the time: that’s Mary Hopkin who did the damn awful ‘Those Were The Days’ back in 1968. I’m tempted to say that the sheer abomination of this song, at least in my book, might even justify a bit of betrayal to Mary!

So, that’s the story behind ‘”Heroes”’, friends. As far as I’m concerned, by and large everything else that could be said about this song has already been said elsewhere. Apart from the fact that all of the inverted commas above, which most surely you have been wondering about all the time, are there for a sense: the idea behind them was to create some ironic distance to the rather romantic and/or pathetic lyrics. So there you are …:

R-3424001-1509020866-1263

R-3424001-1509020869-7331

mp3:  David Bowie – “Heroes”

And before you think: “Ah, no need to download this – I know it by heart!” … no, probably you don’t! Why? Because this is the radio-friendly 7” version, which you don’t hear all too often. Perhaps you have never even heard it, who knows, I mean: does radio-friendlyness still exist in the days of internet at all? Either way, this version here is cut down from 6:07 minutes to 3:32 minutes, which gives quite a new feeling to a song so well known. One of my all time favorites, this, in all of its versions!

Enjoy,

Dirk

Altered Images, Bananarama, Big Country, Blancmange, David Bowie, Dexy's Midnight Runners, Duran Duran, Jo Boxers, New Order, Orange Juice, Style Council, Wah!

DON’T LOOK BACK IN ANGER (3)

11092687_0

Y’all ready for this?

From the UK singles Top 10 of the last week of March 1993.

mp3: The Style Council – Speak Like A Child (#4)
mp3: Altered Images – Don’t Talk To Me About Love (#7)
mp3: Orange Juice – Rip It Up (#8)

Oh, and Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by the Eurythmics was at #5, well on its way to what would be six weeks in the Top 10.

There were also some other great pop tunes at the higher end of the charts….not all of which will be to everyone’s taste, but can offer an illustration that we were truly enjoying a golden age of memorable 45s:-

mp3: Duran Duran – Is There Something I Should Know (#1)
mp3: David Bowie – Let’s Dance (#2)
mp3: Jo Boxers – Boxerbeat (#6)
mp3: Bananarama – Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye (#9)

The other two places in the Top 10 were taken up by Bonnie Tyler and Forrest (no, me neither!!!)

Do you fancy looking a bit further down the Top 40?

mp3: Big Country – Fields Of Fire (400 Miles) (#13)
mp3: New Order – Blue Monday (#17)
mp3: Blancmange – Waves (#25)
mp3: Dexy’s Midnight Runners – The Celtic Soul Brothers (#36)
mp3: Wah! – Hope (I Wish You’d Believe Me) (#37)

Some facts and stats.

The debut single by The Style Council was the first of what would be four chart hits in 1983.

Altered Images and Orange Juice had both appeared on Top of The Pops the previous week on a show presented by John Peel and David ‘Kid’ Jensen, with both singles going up in the charts immediately after.

Is There Something I Should Know? was the first ever #1 for Duran Duran.  It had entered the charts at that position the previous week.

David Bowie would, the following week, supplant Duran Duran from the #1 spot, and Let’s Dance would spend three weeks at the top.

The debut single by Jo Boxers would eventually climb to #3.  It was the first of three chart singles for the group in 1983.  They never troubled the charts in any other year.

Bananarama‘s single would reach #5 the following week. The group would, all told, enjoy 25 hit singles in their career.

Fields of Fire had been at #31 when Big Country had appeared on the same TOTP show presented by Peel and Jensen.  A rise of 18 places in one week after appearing on the television was impressive.

Blue Monday was in the third week of what proved to be an incredible 38-week unbroken stay in the Top 100.  It initially peaked at #12 in mid-April and eventually fell to #82 in mid-July, at which point it was discovered for the first time by large numbers of holidaymakers descending on the clubs in sunnier climes.  By mid-October, it had climbed all the way back up to #9.

Blancmange were enjoying a second successive hit after Living On The Ceiling had gone top 10 in late 1982.  Waves would spend a couple of weeks in the Top 20, peaking at #19.

The success of The Celtic Soul Brothers was a cash-in from the record company.  It had touched the outer fringes of the charts in March 1982, but its follow-up, Come On Eileen, had captured the hearts of the UK record-buying public.  It was re-released in March 1983, going on to spend five weeks in the charts and reaching #20.

Hope (I Wish You’d Believe Me) was the follow-up to Story Of The Blues.  It wasn’t anything like as successful and spent just one week inside the Top 40.

JC

David Bowie, Johnny Cash, LCD Soundsystem

A WEEK IN THE LIFE OF YOUR HUMBLE SCRIBE (PART 2)

Friday

Wake up very tired thanks to a combination of four days of long walks, train journeys and a far higher than usual consumption of alcohol.

There’s a few domestic issues to be sorted out...Rachel (aka Mrs VV) has had to deal with a lot of things these past few days, not least trying to progress some major repairs to the property we have called home these past 27 years. In particular, we need a new roof….the building is over 100 years old and in a conservation area, so getting work of this magnitude done is time-consuming, especially with the need to agree the involvement of the owner of lower half of the property (we live in the upstairs part of a conversion). I’m filled in with the progress, kind of ashamed that it’s been left to Rachel while I’ve been gallivanting in Manchester. My gift of a Jarv Is t-shirt from the gig seems wholly inadequate. The paperwork is signed off and the timetable of initial patchworking will get underway soon, but the main contract not delivered until May 2022. The roofing company is swamped with work just now, unable to keep up with demand. But it gives me enough time to get my head round the fact that there’ll be scaffolding and all sorts to put up with next year. I hate chaos…..

I really should be staying in and spending a quality evening with Rachel, but instead I’m attending the annual prize-giving at my golf club. I’m having to do so as I actually won something this year, my first such triumph since 2013. I vow to keep it as a quiet night, home early and sober.

I fail miserably on all counts, but attach the blame entirely on the other folk at my table. I’m so easily led.

Saturday

I’ve scheduled missing the football today. It’s a two-hour train trip out of Glasgow down to Dumfries, but the decision is actually based on the fact that there’s no scheduled service for ages after the final whistle, which would mean me not getting back till almost 9pm and missing out on much of something very special scheduled for the evening.

Almost a full three years after the last one, Glasgow Little League is taking place from 7.15pm – midnight. Those of you who have been familiar with this blog for many years will be aware of how much the Little League events mean to me. They are organised by John Hunt, lead singer of Butcher Boy. They are the successor to events he first organised in 2001 under the guise of National Pop League, and indeed the event on Saturday 6 November is being arranged to mark the 20th Anniversary of the first NPL.

Aldo sorted out the tickets and there’s a group of us going, including some close friends of his from Northern Ireland whom he meets every year at the Indietracks Festival. It’s also going to be the first time I’ve been on a dance floor since COVID kicked in, and it’s going to provide an opportunity to finally see and talk to dozens of friends who have been sadly and unavoidably absent from my life for far too long. The one downside is that Rachel won’t be coming, as she spent her day at the 100,000 strong demonstration in Glasgow that was arranged as the people’s response to the lack of progress around climate change and this talking shop in my home city. I would normally have joined her, but I was exhausted from overdoing things these past few days.

I’m actually a bit apprehensive in advance about Little League, wondering if it would, or indeed could, live up to past experiences. There was also the fact of so many people getting together again after such a very long time…would we have the energy or inclination to actually dance, or would we be a wee bit self-aware and worry about the dangers still inherent of mingling and tingling. My fears were misplaced, and perhaps the best summary of the night comes from this Facebook message on the group page the following morning:-

“Thanks John for a brilliant night, what a playlist. It was such a joyful experience, great to see so many friends and familiar faces and everyone looked so happy. I felt really emotional at a number of points during the night, I’ve missed my friends, dancing and music. Thanks for bringing all three together.”

There’s a photo of the night illustrating this post.   It kind of captures all that is great about Little League, with folk just really enjoying themselves in so may ways. Here’s the playlist…the proviso was that all tunes aired needed to have been played at any of the NPL evenings between 2001 and 2007:-

NEU! – ISI
ESG – UFO
IVOR CUTLER – GOOD MORNING! HOW ARE YOU? SHUT UP!
VINCE GUARALDI – A CHARLIE BROWN THANKSGIVING
CHILLS – PINK FROST
ADAM GREEN – BLUEBIRDS
BELLE AND SEBASTIAN – STARS OF TRACK AND FIELD
AISLERS SET – ATTRACTION ACTION REACTION
SODASTREAM – TURNSTYLE
GO BETWEENS – LOVE GOES ON
SERGE GAINSBOURG – BONNIE AND CLYDE
DEAD KENNEDYS – MOON OVER MARIN
MULTIPLIES – MEGAFIST
BRILLIANT CORNERS – BRIAN RIX
LIFE WITHOUT BUILDINGS – NEW TOWN
MAGAZINE – DEFINITIVE GAZE
DELGADOS – PULL THE WIRES FROM THE WALL
10000 MANIACS – CAN’T IGNORE THE TRAIN
JONATHAN RICHMAN – NEW ENGLAND
POPGUNS – WAITING FOR THE WINTER
CAMERA OBSCURA – HAPPY NEW YEAR
FLATMATES – SHIMMER
LEFT BANKE – I’VE GOT SOMETHING ON MY MIND
SEBADOH – SKULL
MCCARTHY – WELL OF LONELINESS
MAGNETIC FIELDS – STRANGE POWERS
JOHNNY BOY – YOU ARE THE GENERATION THAT…
JAM – DOWN IN THE TUBE STATION AT MIDNIGHT
MY BLOODY VALENTINE – WHEN YOU SLEEP
RIDE – TWISTERELLA
SLEATER-KINNEY – GET UP
ROXY MUSIC – SAME OLD SCENE
DAVID BOWIE – ASHES TO ASHES
LOVE – ALONE AGAIN OR
CURE – JUMPING SOMEONE ELSE’S TRAIN
VOXTROT – THE START OF SOMETHING
BLUETONES – BLUETONIC
STEREOLAB – PING PONG
GO BETWEENS – SPRING RAIN
PJ HARVEY – DRESS
POSTAL SERVICE – SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS
SEA URCHINS – PRISTINE CHRISTINE
BEATLES – WE CAN WORK IT OUT
BELLE AND SEBASTIAN – THERE’S TOO MUCH LOVE
FELT – SUNLIGHT BATHED THE GOLDEN GLOW
LLOYD COLE AND THE COMMOTIONS – RATTLESNAKES
TINDERSTICKS – CAN WE START AGAIN?
HOUSE OF LOVE – DESTROY THE HEART
GO! TEAM – HUDDLE FORMATION
FIELD MICE – EMMA’S HOUSE
PAVEMENT – BOX ELDER
YEAH YEAH YEAHS – PIN
FALL – TOTALLY WIRED
JOY DIVISION – DISORDER
NEW ORDER – DREAMS NEVER END
ORGAN – BROTHER
ROYAL WE – ALL THE RAGE
BILLY OCEAN – RED LIGHT SPELLS DANGER
CSS – LET’S MAKE LOVE AND LISTEN TO DEATH FROM ABOVE
BLUE OYSTER CULT – DON’T FEAR THE REAPER
REM – RADIO FREE EUROPE
TEENAGE FANCLUB – GOD KNOWS IT’S TRUE
WEATHER PROPHETS – ALMOST PRAYED
ARCADE FIRE – REBELLION (LIES)
ASSOCIATES – PARTY FEARS TWO
DAFT PUNK – DA FUNK
PUBLIC ENEMY – BRING THE NOISE
VELVET UNDERGROUND – WAITING FOR THE MAN
LCD SOUNDSYSTEM – ALL MY FRIENDS
PIXIES – ALLISON
WIRE – OUTDOOR MINER
STONE ROSES – MERSEY PARADISE
OUTKAST – HEY YA!
HIDDEN CAMERAS – BAN MARRIAGE
DEXYS MIDNIGHT RUNNERS – THERE THERE MY DEAR
STEVE HARLEY AND COCKNEY REBEL – COME UP AND SEE ME (MAKE ME SMILE)
STROKES – THE MODERN AGE
MADONNA – INTO THE GROOVE
VIOLENT FEMMES – BLISTER IN THE SUN
JACKIE WILSON – HIGHER AND HIGHER
MCALMONT AND BUTLER – YES
ORANGE JUICE – BLUE BOY
ONLY ONES – ANOTHER GIRL ANOTHER PLANET
DINOSAUR JR – FREAKSCENE
LE TIGRE – DECEPTACON
BELLE AND SEBASTIAN – LAZY LINE-PAINTER JANE

You might now understand why I woke up a tad sore and stiff the following morning.

SUNDAY

It should have been a day of rest and recuperation, but there was one final outstanding thing to look forward to, and that was the very first Titwood City Limits event.

TCL is the brainchild of my friend, Basil Pieroni, the guitarist with Butcher Boy. Titwood is a residential area on the south side of Glasgow, and at the centre of it is a bowling club and pavilion, dating back to 1890. Basil lives very close to the club and indeed, during the COVID lockdown and subsequent restrictions, became a member. He’s now making use of the building to host what is hoped will be a weekly Open Mic session on Sunday afternoons.

It was a deliberately low-key opening, with not much in the way of publicity. It still managed to attract about 30 folk along, all of who were entertained by one man and his acoustic guitar, delivering all sorts of great songs written and/or performed originally by the likes of Johnny Cash, George Jones, Hank Williams, The Undertones, Gram Parsons, Patsy Cline, Elvis Presley, Orange Juice, Kenny Rogers, Butcher Boy, Willie Nelson and Nina Simone, among others.

It was huge fun, and Basil did an outstanding job, especially given he hadn’t performed live, other than on one occasion, these past two years. I can see me becoming a regular at Titwood City Limits. There are far worse ways to spend Sunday afternoons.

mp3: David Bowie – Boys Keep Swinging
mp3: LCD Soundsystem – All My Friends
mp3: Johnny Cash – Big River

First song is for the golf, while the third one was Basil’s opening number. I don’t think the second needs any explanation.

JC

David Bowie

WE ARE THE GOON SQUAD AND WE’RE COMING TO TOWN (BEEP-BEEP)

So……what’s it all about, Davie?

mp3: David Bowie – Fashion (7″ edit)

The Guardian, in March 2020, listed Fashion at #21 in its rundown of David Bowie‘s 50 Greatest Songs, with feature writer Alexis Petridis offering this summary

Brilliantly claustrophobic, reggae-influenced post-punk funk that casts a jaundiced eye over the ever-changing trends in the world of the hip. The ironic tone of Fashion seemed to be largely missed, possibly because the idea of David Bowie, of all people, protesting about ever-changing trends was frankly a bit rich.

It’s worth remembering that Fashion was recorded in 1980, and therefore one interpretation, as hinted at above by Petridis, could be that it was his sideways dig at a post-punk/new wave scene that many journalists, certainly in the UK, were predicting would change music forever.

Another line of thought that I’ve seen online is that the ‘turn to the left/turn to the right’ lyric was his commentary on the political landscape just a short time after the Tories, under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, had come to power.  Things hadn’t been great in the final couple of years of the previous Labour government, but Bowie was predicting it wouldn’t be any different with the sudden shift to the right. If this was indeed was the meaning of the song, then his warning didn’t go far enough given the social unrest across many parts of the country and the way that many traditional communities were more or less abandoned in the remainder of the decade.

But maybe it’s just best that we don’t read too much into things and just enjoy Fashion for what it is, A fabulously catchy, upbeat and jaunty pop song that sounds just about as good on the radio as it does when played through big speakers above a discotheque floor.

Fashion was the second single lifted from Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), and while it didn’t provide a follow-up #1 to Ashes to Ashes, it’s #5 position was more than respectable.

The b-side was another track lifted from the album, but with no edit or remix.

mp3: David Bowie – Scream Like A Baby

Both tunes are dominated by the guitar-playing of Robert Fripp, best known to the youngsters these days as the strange looking bloke playing the music as his wife, Toyah Wilcox, frolics in their kitchen. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, then check out this You Tube channel/playlist

JC

David Bowie

AN IMAGINARY COMPILATION ALBUM : #284 : DAVID BOWIE (LATER PERIOD)

A GUEST POSTING by MIDDLE-AGED MAN

Well it wasn’t going to be a single disc across his full career was it.

To me and I’m sure/hope many of you, Bowie is GOAT (Greatest Of All Time), I am not smart enough to even begin to describe how brilliant, awesome, (and every other superlative you can think of) he is/was.

I wanted to focus on his later albums , which continued to show an artist never repeating himself and always exploring new. I’m not going to claim that any of them are individually as strong as the masterpieces of the 70s and early 80s, but I do believe they hide some individual tracks that are as strong as those of his earlier brilliance……

I was surprised by two things whilst putting this ICA together, firstly how ‘hard’ almost harsh most of these songs are and secondly what an amazing vocalist Bowie was, you always know it’s him but the range and scope is amazing

Hallo Spaceboy  (Outside, 1995)

I’m not a true Bowie fan, in that I haven’t bought every album as soon as it was released, there have been ebbs and flows, but it feels as though a ‘Space’ track has always brought me back onside, from Starman, Ashes to Ashes and this track. After the pop albums and Tin Machine – Hello Spaceboy, was fast and futuristic, at his best Bowie was always futuristic and was there ever a more Bowie line than ‘Do you like boys or girls? Its confusing these days’

I’m Afraid of Americans (Earthling, 1997)

‘Earthling’ was described as his ‘Drum & Bass’ album, I was obviously already middle-aged by this point as I had and have no idea what ‘Drum & bass’ sounds like. What I do know is this is a pulsating keyboards driven song.

Cactus (Heathen, 2002)

A cover of a Pixies song and according to Wikipedia all instruments are played by Bowie except bass and features his only recorded drum performance and of course the drums are to the forefront and do not sound out of time/place at all. Starting with just vocal and acoustic guitar before bursting into a full band sound, I had to look the lyrics up online to find out that the word ‘cement’ is used frequently, Bowie’s pronunciation is unusual.

Reality (Reality, 2003)

Probably my least favourite of the later albums, I was fortunate enough to see the subsequent tour at Birmingham NEC ( sadly his final tour), although I managed to put one of my daughter’s off Bowie for life, by going as it was on her birthday which she explained to me was not acceptable parental behaviour, over 15 years later it remains a topic of conversation. The song itself always reminds me of the Ziggy album – high praise.

Battle For Britain (The Letter) (Earthling, 1997)

More ‘Drum and Bass’, with a great piano solo from Mike Garson and some classic cockney vocals from Bowie.

Looking For Water (Reality, 2003)

Guitar(ist)s have always been crucial to Bowie’s music and this is a great example with the guitar leading the way from the start.

The Stars (Are Out Tonight) (The Next Day, 2013)

Following his health issues on The Reality tour, Bowie disappeared for 10 years, the assumption was that he had retired and was living in married bliss in New York. And then without any advance PR a single was realised – such was the shock it was a main item on the BBC news. The album was joyously received. It is very much a pop album and this track (released as a single with a wonderful video) was the pinnacle,

Girl Loves Me (Blackstar, 2016)

Blackstar as an album is very difficult, given that it was released the day before Bowie’s death and was recorded during his cancer treatment, to assess objectively or to listen to purely as a piece of music, in a similar manner to Joy Division’s Closer. It is certainly completely different from any other Bowie album, with nothing that resembles pop or rock music. It’s a ‘jazz’ album, and to be honest is the only ‘jazz’ album I own or am likely to. I have regularly returned to the album over the past few years but with the exception of this track and one other I struggle to enjoy it, there is just too much jazz for my personal taste. ‘Girl Loves Me’ unusually for Bowie seems to have no guitar and is propelled by almost only drums and bass but not in a ‘drum and bass’ manner.

Outside (Outside, 1995)

The Outside album was to me a true return to form if you ignore the short spoken word interludes, which is easily done today. Bowie’s vocal is beautiful, managing to be calming, soothing and yearning at the same time.

Lazarus (No Plan EP, 2017)

With it’s opening line of ‘Look Up Here I’m In Heaven’ there could be no other album closer and listening again to the lyrics with the soulful saxophone backing – wow it really is an incredible way to end.

M.A.M

David Bowie

THE DISSENTING VOICE(S) IN THE ROOM

A few weeks back, the good folk at the BBC loaded onto their own dedicated digital channel something around 150 performances from bygone years at Glastonbury as a way of filling some space in the absence of the festival taking place in 2020.  A number of the headline performances stayed up for 30 more days which is why myself and Rachel were able to sit down a few days later and finally watch the David Bowie set from 2000.

Social media went absolutely crazy at the time the BBC was showing it ‘as live’; it was the first time the entire show had been seen as the agreement back in 2000 with Bowie was that only the opening segments and part of the encore could go out over the airwaves.  It’s regarded by many as the best ever Glastonbury headlining show and among one of Bowie’s greatest performances, with the setlist consisting of many of his best-known and best-loved songs, as well as a smattering of new tunes (new in 2000 that is).

But here’s the thing…..neither of us at Villain Towers were that blown away by it.

Rachel is, of course, spoiled by the fact that at the age of 14 she was present at the Green’s Playhouse (later the Apollo) in Glasgow in 1973 when Ziggy Stardust was being toured, and there’s nothing that can beat that.  She thought that the songs from that era, and indeed the rest of the 70s, as seen and heard at Glastonbury felt and looked as if they were being performed by a Bowie impersonator backed by a group of musicians who wouldn’t have been out of place at a swanky Las Vegas hotel.  And I’m not disagreeing.

She had been really looking forward to the show having read all the fawning comments across social media and within the mainstream media reviews, especially as so many had focussed on the fact the songs had come from the entire canon.  When the band left the stage after the final encore, she turned to me and asked ‘Is that it?’  The closing two songs of Let’s Dance and I’m Afraid of Americans was not what she was hoping for or expecting.

Glastonbury setlist

1. Wild Is the Wind
2. China Girl
3. Changes
4. Stay
5. Life on Mars?
6. Absolute Beginners
7. Ashes to Ashes
8. Rebel Rebel
9. Little Wonder
10. Golden Years
11. Fame
12. All the Young Dudes
13. The Man Who Sold the World
14. Station to Station
15. Starman
16. Hallo Spaceboy
17. Under Pressure
Encore:
18. Ziggy Stardust
19. “Heroes”
20. Let’s Dance
21. I’m Afraid of Americans

It led to us to recall the time we had seen Bowie in each other’s company, back in 1990 at the appalling Ingliston Showgrounds in Edinburgh – a venue that is just about the worst imaginable in terms of sound and yet managed to provide something really special on this occasion. The setlist from that night was the sort of thing that Rachel had believed she would now be watching from the comfort of the living room:-

1. Space Oddity
2. Changes
3. TVC15
4. Rebel Rebel
5. Golden Years
6. Be My Wife
7. Ashes to Ashes
8. John, I’m Only Dancing
9. Queen Bitch
10. Fashion
11. Life on Mars?
12. Blue Jean
13. Let’s Dance
14. Stay
15. China Girl
16. Ziggy Stardust
17. Sound and Vision
18. Station to Station
19. Alabama Song
20. Young Americans
21. Panic in Detroit
22. Suffragette City
23. Fame
24. “Heroes”
Encore:
25. The Jean Genie
26. Pretty Pink Rose
27. Modern Love
28. Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide

Looking back, it was something of a perverse ending at Ingliston with Pretty Pink Rose during the encore having folk scratching their heads as it was a duet with guitarist Adrian Belew that had been released as a single about six weeks earlier and very few knew it, followed by a well-known but not exactly highly-loved single. But what a way to rescue things and send the crowd home absolutely buzzing.

I know these things are subjective and the absolutely ideal set would have incorporated songs from both Glastonbury and Ingliston, but overall the vast majority would surely have been from those aired back in 1990 and not 2000.  I’d loved to have heard Wild Is The Wind, The Man Who Sold The World and Starman, but surely the Glasto audience deserved to hear Queen Bitch, Sound and Vision, Suffragette City, The Jean Genie and Rock’n’Roll Suicide– it was the absence of the last three on that list that really irked Rachel!

I asked her the next morning if she had changed her mind about being disappointed with the Glastonbury show. Her reply was that maybe she had overreacted a little but it was a response to feeling she had watched something that had over-promised and under-delivered. She also reiterated that the musicians on stage at Glastonbury had annoyed her – she knew they were incredibly talented and skillful but she couldn’t really classify them as a band – certainly not in comparison to the Ziggy tour or indeed the different and smaller number of musicians who shared the stage at Ingliston.

mp3: David Bowie – Queen Bitch
mp3: David Bowie – Changes
mp3: David Bowie – Rock’n’Roll Suicide

JC

David Bowie

AS THEY PULLED YOU OUT OF THE OXYGEN TENT….

I’ve previously admitted that I was a fan of David Bowie, but not a devoted one. As a teenager, I liked his music although it would take many years to realise that what I had liked, I should have loved.

The single Diamond Dogs was released just a matter of days before my 11th birthday. I simply had no ability to have an understanding of lyrics that told of Halloween Jack living on top of Manhattan Chase nor could my young ears really pick up some of the other big words that I didn’t know the meaning of. The only reasons I liked listening to the song were the very sing-able two line chorus quickly followed by a tune that somehow reminded my young ears of another song (which in later years I would identify as Brown Sugar by The Rolling Stones).

I knew nothing about Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane or any of the other complexities of David Bowie. He was just someone who made pop music whose stuff got played sometimes on BBC Radio 1 (247 Medium Wave) although I was more likely to hear him as I listened to Radio Luxembourg (208 Medium Wave) while pretending I was asleep, with a small pocket-radio under my pillow turned down as low as I thought I could get away with. Sometimes I would manage to stay awake till after 10pm……..

I didn’t like Diamond Dogs as much as The Jean Genie or Rebel Rebel, both of which were songs with memorable choruses and were my early favourites. It was OK to listen to, in the same way as Starman, Life On Mars and Drive-In Saturday had been but one thing for sure was that it was much preferable to the ghastly Space Oddity…..but before you judge me too harshly, just remember that the storyline of the latter and the way the song unfolds is the stuff of nightmares for a kid of my age with a vivid imagination. The very thought of a spaceman floating around out there and dying was the stuff of nightmares.

I didn’t buy any David Bowie records until Boys Keep Swinging while my first album would have been Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps). But not long afterwards, and with some money given to me at Christmas 1980, I went out and bought The Best of Bowie, a budget-priced compilation album on budget label K-Tel, that offered up 16 tracks, most of which had been hit singles:-

Side A

Space Oddity
Life On Mars
Starman
Rock’n’Roll Suicide
John, I’m Only Dancing
The Jean Genie
Breaking Glass (live)
Sorrow

Side B

Diamond Dogs
Young Americans
Fame
Golden Years
TVC 15
Sound and Vision
Heroes
Boys Keep Swinging

I wouldn’t call it an introduction to Bowie as most of the songs were known to me (Breaking Glass and TVC 15 were the exceptions) but it was a great way to finally have so many songs to listen to without relying on a radio. What I didn’t know was that a number of the songs had been edited down from the original versions, so as to fit all 16 tracks on two sides of vinyl. I didn’t have any sort of sophisticated record player either, so the fact that the songs had been crammed onto the vinyl with a subsequent dip in quality wasn’t apparent either. I just loved the idea of listening to a fantastic album time after time after time…..

For some reason, Diamond Dogs became my new favourite Bowie song. Maybe it was the fact that it sounded more new wave than many of the others or perhaps it was that the nonsensical lyrics now seemed so real, meaningful and intriguing to someone whose favourite new author was George Orwell…….

What I didn’t know was that Diamond Dogs was one of the most edited tracks on the K-Tel compilation, so for many years, this was the version I was most familiar with:-

mp3 : David Bowie – Diamond Dogs (K-Tel edit)

It comes in at just over three-and-a-half minutes, more than two minutes shorter than the original version that had limped to #21 in the UK singles charts in 1974.

Years later, and myself and Mrs Villain move in together. I bring an extensive vinyl collection, hers is much more modest but was of the utmost quality – she had he decided to leave much of hers behind when she left her marital home but among those that made the move were all the Bowie, T-Rex and Iggy Pop albums that she had bought on the days of their release throughout the 70s. As a result I got to hear the whole album in its full glory, while staring at the sleeve that had caused controversy back in the day.

mp3 : David Bowie – Diamond Dogs (LP version)

And for completeness, here’s the b-side to the single:-

mp3 : David Bowie – Holy Holy

JC

David Bowie

38 YEARS AGO TODAY

8 August 1980. The date for the release of the song which would give David Bowie his second ever #1 hit in the UK, a full five years after Space Oddity.

mp3 : David Bowie – Ashes to Ashes (single edit)

The 17-year old me loved this. I hadn’t been all that much of a Bowie fan up until this point, admiring him more than adoring him, but this came out just as the point when it all began to make sense. My interest in electronica was beginning to grow at a rapid rate as my tastes expanded dramatically beyond the cut’n’thrust of new wave/post punk guitars.

I began to borrow Bowie albums from the 70s from friends who had either latched on to him earlier or who elder siblings who had been apostles from the earliest days. I didn’t embrace everything fully and indeed didn’t at the time feel any of his previous albums were as good as Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) which had been the first purchase of my own, followed by a budget price compilation album which was released just before Christmas 1980. I’ve changed my mind since then…..

I didn’t care much for the b-side to the single. It mentioned that it was from the album Lodger, a record I had listened to thanks to a friend buying it and playing it, but other than Boys Keep Swinging hadn’t done anything for me.

mp3 : David Bowie – Move On

I haven’t changed my mind on it track or its parent album over the years.

The US release of Ashes to Ashes had an absolute belter of a b-side:-

mp3 : David Bowie – It’s No Game (No.1)

The opening track of the Scary Monsters album remains one of my favourite Bowie numbers of them all, probably for as much as it being such an astonishing and different introduction to his wider work beyond the singles.

One bizarre thing I learned in doing a bit of research for this post. David Bowie would only enjoy one more solo #1 single in the UK with Let’s Dance in 1983. His total of three has been matched by a further three on which he was a co-vocalist or contributor (Under Pressure, Dancing In The Streets and Perfect Day, recorded with a myriad of others for a charity single in 1997). That’s some good pub quiz knowledge there for you…..

JC

David Bowie

WHAM-BAM THANK YOU MA’AM

One of my favourites from the Ziggy Stardust LP, I hadn’t realised it has been a flop single a few years later in 1976 when it was issued to accompany the release of the Changesonebowie compilation.

mp3 : David Bowie – Suffragette City

I still love getting up on the dance floor if this ever gets aired at an indie-type disco…which doesn’t happen often enough if you wany my tuppence worth on the subject matter. The Little Richard-style boogie-woogie piano bit is courtesy of the multi-talented Mick Ronson.

The b-side of the 1976 single was an edited version of Stay, a track originally been released on Station to Station the previous year. Again, until looking it up for this posting, I wasn’t aware that the shortened version of Stay had been a single in the USA. It’s some three minutes shorter than the album version.

mp3 : David Bowie – Stay (US single edit)

JC

David Bowie

CHARGED PARTICLES (6)

A GUEST SERIES FROM JONNY THE FRIENDLY LAWYER

I’ve been a Bowie fan for ages. I got to see him as the lead in The Elephant Man on Broadway in 1980, and live at Madison Square Garden during the ‘Serious Moonlight’ tour. Goldie The Friendly Therapist teases me that her first ever concert was the legendary 1976 StationtoStation tour at the L.A. Forum, but only I got to see the man play one of the following three live. Guess which?

Fascination

Fashion

Repetition

Bonus: Zion. Also known as ‘Aladdan Vein’ and other working titles, ‘Zion’ is a favorite lost Bowie track for true devotees. Here’s the wiki info.

And here’s a youtube video with the somewhat completed track

JTFL

David Bowie, Tindersticks

DELIBERATELY LATE

 

There were many fine tributes paid to David Bowie a few weeks back on the first anniversary of his death and/or what would have been his 70th birthday. Some of the best could be found within the pages of the blogs listed over on the right hand side and knowing this would be the case I decided to hold off paying my own small tribute until now.

Many of the tributes rightly focussed on the incredibly diverse styles adopted by Bowie throughout his stellar career and it was fascinating to read so many lovingly crafted words paying homage to a fan’s favourite song or album. I don’t ever expect to see a David Bowie ICA in the long-running series as it genuinely is impossible to narrow things down to ten tracks to make up the perfect sounding LP. I was tempted to have a go myself and wait with interest what the likes of The Robster and Echorich (among others) would say in response, but in the end I came to my senses.

Instead, I thought I’d settle for posting a song that I’m rather fond of along with a reasonably rare cover version taken straight from my vinyl copy (albeit I’m willing to admit it is far removed from being one of the essential Tindersticks recordings).

mp3 : David Bowie – Kooks
mp3 : Tindersticks – Kooks

The well-known story behind its composition back in 1971 is that Bowie wanted to write a song especially for his new-born son, one which would capture his feelings of excitement and nervousness about becoming a dad. It seemingly ended up being a pastiche of the sort of songs Neil Young was writing and recording at that time for the simple reason that Bowie was listening to the great Canadian when he learned his son had been born. Now I appreciate that very few folk would say that Kooks is one of his greatest compositions in the grand scheme of things but there’s just something very touching about the lyric that over the years must have put smiles on the faces of many new sets of parents.

Enjoy.