Category: Divine

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

WHEN THE CLOCKS STRUCK THIRTEEN (July)

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

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

Anyways, back to the music.

1-7 July

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

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

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

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

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

8-14 July

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

In among the dross was this at #26:-

mp3: Echo and The Bunnymen – Seven Seas

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

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

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

mp3 : Divine – You Think You’re A Man

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

15-21 July

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

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

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

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

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

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

22-28 July

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

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

mp3: The Colour Field – Take (#70)

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

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

JC

Divine

THE NIGHT THE DJ FOOLED THE DANCERS

Strathclyde Students Union.  A Thursday night.  The DJ rarely said anything, preferring to let the music speak for itself.

But on this occasion he said he had an exclusive white-label remix of New Order‘s best known song.  The floor filled…..but it turned out he was having a laugh at the expense of us so-called cool indie kids who only realised they had been caught out when the vocals kicked in:-

mp3: Divine – Love Reaction

As our great friend and font of all knowledge, Post Punk Monk said on his blog back in 2014,

The development of Divine into a disco star was not an event that I ever would have predicted. But as sure as it happened, his initial brace of singles made with hi-NRG maven Bobby Orlando were enough to get him a club following where his notoriety was all of the publicity that his fans needed to give him a second career as a recording artist.

“Love Reaction” was an astonishing lift of the “Blue Monday” sound via what sounded like a slightly pitch-shifted sampling of the New Order record with Divine providing the rudimentary vocals and a cursory synth lead line providing a bolted-on melody to lend it its only differentiation from “Blue Monday.”

Love Reaction is bit of fun, not to be taken seriously in the slightest.  I’m only surprised that New Order didn’t sue, but I’m guessing that the Factory bosses all thought it was a fabulous tribute, given what they were trying to do with the Hacienda.

The instrumental b-side is even more of a homage:-

mp3: Divine – Love Reaction (instrumental)

Wiki advises that Love Reaction went Top 30 in the Dutch charts…….

JC

Divine, Vaselines

DIVINE THING

The dig into the memory bank for yesterday’s posting also got me thinking about some of the gigs that I saw at Level 8 of the Strathclyde Students Union in the early 80s. Just about all of the Scottish jangly pop bands would have graced the stage at some point or other, while it was also a stopping point for many new or emerging acts, often on the cusp of mainstream success. The venue was only ever used for live gigs on Friday and Saturday nights, putting it at a disadvantage to the Queen Margaret Union which was attached to Glasgow University, which meant that very few genuinely jaw-dropping names came through the doors, unlike the period just before I went to uni when the likes of The Jam, The Ramones, Talking Heads and The Cramps all graced the stage.

One gig that came back to me, for the first time in many many years, was from when the stage was occupied by the American singer, Harris Glenn Milstead…..or as he was better known, Divine.

Yup, the actor and drag queen once performed a show to an audience of students in Glasgow in 1984.

Divine had made a name for himself as an actor in the late 60s and throughout the 70s, primarily through notorious appearances, usually always as a female impersonator, in films directed by John Waters. The problem was that these films tended to be of the cult variety and Divine was never able to make much of a living from them. By the time the 80s came around, Divine was 35 years old and at something of a crossroads. He began to eke out something of a living from a stage show of his own devising in which he would perform as a drag queen and incorporating covers of well-known disco songs. It was in 1982 that he hooked up with a songwriter named Bobby Orlando was who beginning to make a name as a composer of hi-NRG music, a newish development in disco. A number of singles in 82/83 were hits in Germany and Holland where the more liberal attitudes to gay life and culture meant it wasn’t seen as being extreme or at the edges, with the music crossing over into some of the clubs here in the UK.

Divine and Orlando had a huge falling out over money, with the singer feeling he wasn’t getting his fair share of the proceeds from the sales. It all ended up in court and the contract with O-Records, the company established by the composer, was declared null and void. Waiting in the wings was a newly emerging British production team of Stock Aitken and Waterman (SAW) who got talking to Divine and persuade him to record a version of a song by Geoff Deane, a UK songwriter who had previously been part of The Leyton Buzzards, a punk parody band in the 70s, and later as frontman of Modern Romance, a cabaret/dance act who were mainstays of the UK singles charts in the early 80s.

mp3 : Divine – You Think You’re A Man

This was the first ever record in which SAW had worked and it proved to be a smash, eventually going top 20 in the UK and in turn exposing Divine to a wider audience thanks to what proved to a hugely complained about performance on Top of The Pops.

The promotional efforts around the single also saw Divine tour clubs and venues across the UK which is why he came to find himself on the Level 8 stage. As he was a chart act, the ticket prices were marginally higher than usual, maybe £1 or £2 higher, but given that the usual gigs cost £2-£3, it was regarded as a big mark-up.

The gig was something of a catastrophe. It was a packed venue and it became clear beforehand that a fair number were there to heckle and goad Divine. There was a highly toxic homophobic atmosphere and I do clearly recall a number of blokes justifying their behaviour by saying that it wasn’t real or live music given that it would just be singing over backing tapes. It didn’t make sense then and it just seems bonkers now all these years later. Divine took to the stage to mixture of cheers and boos, with the latter, shamefully, being louder. It all came to what seemed to be an abrupt end after no more than four songs which only led to the crowd getting angrier and edgier. The lights went up and the DJ went straight into disco mode from his booth at the back of Level 8 and within a few minutes, the venue was largely cleared.

It turned out that this was a typical Divine show/appearance with the gigs, if they could be described as such, lasting no more than 20-25 minutes, consisting of a small number of songs and provocative/confrontational dialogue from the stage. But nobody was seemingly aware of this in advance.

It was certainly one of the strangest things I’d ever been at. It was certainly the first time that I’d seen a drag act in the flesh, but, as a veteran of New Order gigs it was far from the first time I’d seen a huge use of backing tapes.

Divine’s emergence as a hi-NRG performer led to a greater interest in his previous career and he returned to acting, eventually reuniting with Waters in 1987 for the film Hairspray, which would go onto be a mainstream success, popular with critics and audiences alike. Sadly, this all came too late for Divine as he died in his sleep, from heart problems, on 7 March 1998, a mere three weeks after Hairspray had been released.

By this time, I was aware of a cover version of the big hit from a couple of years earlier, one that had been recorded by a Glasgow duo. I’m thinking they may well have been in the audience at Strathclyde University the same night as I was…..and no doubt, equally appalled by all that happened.

mp3 : The Vaselines – You Think You’re A Man

JC