Prince & The Revolution – THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN

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

Alison Moyet, Associates, Bluebells, Damned, Elvis Costello & The Attractions, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Human League, Mighty Wah, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, Prince & The Revolution, Scritti Politti, Working Week

WHEN THE CLOCKS STRUCK THIRTEEN (June)

June 1984. The month I turned 21 years of age. I wish I had a photo or two to show you, but it was an era when nobody bothered too much with cameras. There was no huge celebration to mark the occasion, mainly as my birthday fell on a Monday, but much drink was consumed and I ended up playing Girl Afraid by The Smiths on constant rotation back in the flat, grateful to be indulged by my flatmates in such a manner.

Having been out all day, we missed seeing the TV news, which would have been full of one-sided reporting of a shameful day for Britain.

The soundtrack to this state-sanctioned police brutality?

3 – 9 June

One new entry in the Top 40, courtesy of Spandau Ballet, in at #5, with the utterly forgettable Only When You Leave. I mean that, I cannot recall this one at all, despite it seemingly spending nine weeks in the charts and peaking at #3.

The next highest new entry was at #43, and is one featured previously on TVV:-

mp3: Scritti Politti – Absolute

The follow-up to Top 10 hit Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin) was released a couple of weeks before the band’s debut album for Virgin Records. Any initial disappointment at not cracking the Top 40 right away would have been dissipated quickly as Absolute spent ten weeks in the charts, peaking at #17 and getting Green & co another appearance on Top of The Pops where anyone who hadn’t been keeping up with things since the release of the scratchy Skank Bloc Bologna back in 1978 might have rubbed their eyes in astonishment:-

It is so 80s isn’t it? (and I don’t mean that as a bad thing!!!!)

The Damned were still doing there thing a full eight years after New Rose had lit us all up:-

mp3: The Damned – Thanks For The Night

They were never really a band for hit single. This was their 19th (by my reckoning) assault on the UK charts and only twice had they gone Top 40 (Love Song and Smash It Up, both in 1979). Thanks For The Night didn’t change things. In at #52 and peaking a week later at #43.

This week’s chart was responsible for the only time a single by Working Week ever made the Top 75:-

mp3: Working Week – Venceremos (We Will Win)

A jazz-dance band with something of a fluid membership, the single was a benefit record made to raise funds for the UK Chile Solidarity campaign, and had been inspired by the Pinochet junta’s brutal murder of political activisit Victor Jara (who had been namechecked by The Clash in Washington Bullets from the Sandinista! album). The vocalist are Claudia Figuerora, Robert Wyatt and Tracey Thorn. This came in at #66 with the 12″ version, which comes in at just over ten minutes in length, being the easier to find in the shops than the 7″:-

mp3: Working Week – Venceremos (We Will Win) (Jazz Dance Special 12″ version)

10-16 June

A new #1 to bring an end to Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go‘s two-week stay at the top. And a brand-new entry at that:-

mp3: Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Two Tribes

It’s worth recalling that there were some genuine fears that a nuclear war could erupt as the Cold War between the USA and the Soviet Union intensified, and FGTH’s take on things, including the controversial and violent video featuring a wrestling match between President Ronald Reagan (USA) and General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko, captured the zeitgeist.

Two Tribes would spent nine weeks at #1 and wouldn’t drop out of the singles chart until late October.

At the other end of the Top 40, a couple of TVV regulars show their faces:-

mp3: Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark – Talking Loud & Clear (#39)
mp3: Elvis Costello & The Attractions – I Wanna Be Loved/ Turning The Town Red (#40)

Worth mentioning that Locomotion by OMD was at #41 this week…..

Talking Loud & Clear is one that has grown on me a little bit over the years, albeit I wasn’t all that keen on it back in the day as mid-temp electro-pop wasn’t really my thing. It eventually reached #11, which illustrates I was out of touch with the record-buying public that summer.

Elvis’s record company went with a double-A sided single. I Wanna Be Loved was a cover version of an obscure 1973 b-side by Teacher’s Edition, a little-known US soul group, and seemed a strange choice at the time. A week or so later, the album Goodbye Cruel World hit the shops when it became clear that almost all of the Costello originals penned for the album were not exactly tailor-made singles. The flip side was a stand-alone song that had been written as the theme tune for Scully, a seven-part drama/comedy series broadcast on Channel 4 in May/June 1984, set in Liverpool and in which Elvis Costello had a minor but re-occurring part as the brother of the main character. It probably helped sales to some extent as the single, which is far from one of Costello’s best, peaked at #25.

mp3: Associates – Those First Impressions (#52)

Two long and difficult years had passed since the Associates had seemingly come to an end when Alan Rankine quit. Billy Mackenzie soldiered on under the band name, but to all intent and purposes, he was riding solo with a few session musician friends to help him out. The record label weren’t happy with what was being written and recorded, and Billy was utterly miserable. Those First Impressions got to #43. None of the subsequent singles ever got that close to the Top 40. The Top of the Pop era was well and truly over.

17-23 June

The height of summer. The single chart was a tad moribund. The highest new entry came from Pointer Sisters, in at #24 with Jump (For My Love). Urgh.

It’s a chart that saw the return of Gary Glitter after a number of years away as he and his band hit the university circuit , cashing-in on the fact that much of his original pre-pubescent audience were now propping up student unions up and down the country. I know this becuse he played Strathclyde a few times.. Urgh.

A couple of half-decent pop songs arrived further down the chart:-

mp3: The Bluebells – Young At Heart (#54)
mp3: Alison Moyet – Love Resurrection (#55)

Young At Heart was the second hit of the year for The Bluebells. It was radically different cover of a song that had originally been written and recorded by Bananarama for their 1983 debut album Deep Sea Skiving – Robert Hodgens of the Bluebells had helped with the writing having, at the time, been the boyfriend of Siobhan Fahey. The Bluebell take on things, which was credited soley to Hodgens and Fahey – went onto reach #8 in late July, at which point I don’t think anyone would have imagined that nine years later, having been used to soundtrack a car commercial, it would be re-released and reach #1.

Alison Moyet was embarking on a solo career after Vince Clarke had called it a day on Yazoo. It wasn’t anticipated that she would continue down the electro route, and it was no surprise that she was teamed up with songwriters whose main focus was the pop market, with a nod to AOR. I’m not actually that fond of much that she did, and indeed continues to do, in her solo career, but I’ve always had a chuckle that her debut single, which went Top 10, deals with erectile dysfunction.

24- 30 June

I mentioned last month how there had been a negative recation to the Human League‘s comeback single The Lebanon. The record label obviously felt that a rush-release of the follow-up might act as a bit of a distraction:-

mp3: The Human League – Life On Your Own (#29)

A bit more akin to the sound with which they had shot to fame and made much fortune, but there was still something of a muted response among the critics and the fans. In time, this would reach #16, but this was a long way short of what everyone was expecting, given the enormous bills run uop in various studios over the years. To illustrate how big the dip was in popularity, Dare back in 1981/82 sold not far short of 1 million copies. Hysteria, which had now been in the shops for a month by the time Life On Your Own was released, would ship around just over 10% of that number.

mp3: Prince & The Revolution – When Doves Cry (#44)

After many years of critical acclaim but next to no commercial success in the UK, Prince had made a breakthrough with the album 1999, which spawned two huge hit singles via the title track and Little Red Corvette. Two years down the line, and the industry was buzzing with what was coming next in the shape of an album/soundtrack to a much-anticiapted film, Purple Rain, based on the life and times of the musician and in which he would star. When Doves Cry was the first single to be lifted from the new album, and by late July, it was sitting at #4 while the album was Top 20. The film was released at the end of July – it had cost $7.2 million to make and it grossed $70.3 world-wide at the box office. The album would go onto spend 63 weeks in the UK charts, sellling 600,000 copies. Across the world, the album would sell 25 million copies, over half being in the USA.

It’s fair to say that Prince was a big a global superstar as anyone in the mid-80s, but he never was as big a favourite in Villain Towers as the frontman of our next song:-

mp3: The Mighty Wah! – Come Back (#53)

As mentioned earlier, Billy Mackenzie had gone through a misearble time with WEA Records in the mid 80s. So too, had Pete Wylie. He escaped to Beggars Banquet and wrote the sort of song those at WEA had been pleading for in vain. It was the proverbial two-fingered salute. This is another that Dirk has included in his 111 singles series, doing so last July. Click here for a reminder of what he had to say.

There was a ying to the yang that Wylie brought to this week’s chart.

Aga-fucking-doo came in this week at #66. It would hang around the Top 75 for 30 weeks, right through over Christmas and into early 1985, Maybe when people suggest that the 80s were among the worst decades for pop music, they are thinking of Black Lace. I know I have something of a mantra that there is no such thing as shit music, just a difference in tastes….but for Agadoo and ‘party/novelty’ songs of its ilk, I have to make an exception. It is music with any merits whatsoever.

My take on June 1984 is that I had a great time of it socially, and indeed I was gearing up to hit the railways of Europe over the summer months. Musically, the charts were a bit shit with the odd exception while politically, it was a shambles; astonishingly, on both fronts, we hadn’t reached rock-bottom.

JC

Prince & The Revolution

THE KIND YOU FIND IN A SECOND HAND STORE

Another thing which often causes surprise when I’m looking for some background on a song that I’m intending to feature on the blog is learning that it was either a much bigger chart hit than I ever recalled or, conversely, it was a comparative flop.

Prince really took off here in the UK in 1983/84, with a run of top ten singles lifted from the albums 1999 and Purple Rain. There was, inevitably and naturally, huge interest I what he was going to come up with next but very few were prepared for something as odd as this:-

mp3 : Prince & The Revolution – Raspberry Beret

By odd, I mean different. It was, unexpectedly, a pop tune, far lighter and less funky than many of the songs which had propelled him into the stratosphere. It was a happy, almost carefree song with a chorus that seemed not to be too far removed from a nursery rhyme. Prince had this reputation as a dangerous basdass mutha, with a raw sex on legs persona, who didn’t want to know what love is, but here he was writing and recording a song reflecting on the loss of innocence.

It was a tune that, more than anything else of the stuff I had heard up until now, convinced me that Prince was capable of living up to the hype. None of Little Red Corvette, Let’s Go Crazy, I Would Die 4 U and the afore-mentioned 1999 and Purple Rain had done anything for me and I wasn’t at all familiar with his back catalogue. The new single just oozed class and style right out of the radio with every play seeming to offer something new to the listening ears, such as the perfect interplay with the backing vocalists, the lush instrumentation that had a sort of world music feel to it or the fact that the lyric was, in places, just about as filthy as previous offerings – “They say the first time ‘aint the greatest / But I tell ya, if I had the chance to do it all again / I wouldn’t change a stroke.”

It’s a song written from the perspective of a hopeless romantic, with the sort of storyline that wouldn’t have been out-of-place on a Springsteen album. Puny little boy in dead-end job in a shop, with a boss who wasn’t fond of him, has his world turned upside down by the unexpected appearance one day of a confident female who is wearing an extremely bright and stylish hat….he knows immediately that she is trouble as she came into the shop through the out-door!

You can just picture the insecure and inexperienced boy cowering behind the counter as the girl in the raspberry beret makes a beeline for him – “Built like she was, she had the nerve to ask me / If I planned to do her any harm” – but his bravado leads him to call her out and the next thing you know, he’s got her on the back of his bicycle and he’s pedalling furiously to a barn on a nearby farm, trying hard to get there before the rain starts pouring down.

Next thing he knows, she has made a man out of him. And he’s fallen madly in love. He certainly will always remember his first time….with the overpowering image being the hat which doesn’t appear to have been removed throughout the tryst. It’s completely bonkers but at the same time completely brilliant.

For years, I only knew the 7” and radio version of the song. It was over on someone else’s blog (and apologies for nor recalling whose) that I was exposed to the 12” version in which the funk, and a nod to the blues, bookend the pop tune. It’s even more brilliant than the version with which we are most familiar.

mp3 : Prince & The Revolution – Raspberry Beret (12” mix)

Let me take you back to my opening gambit about the extent of chart success.

Raspberry Beret only got to #25 in the UK in August 1985. I wouldn’t have thought that.

JC

Prince & The Revolution

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY DOES IT

Prince Rogers Nelson gives Mrs Villain the creeps. So much so that she cannot bring herself to objectively give his music a fair hearing. There’s just something about him that she finds oily and repulsive.

She’s always felt that way. When I first met her at the end of the 80s, there was a lot of talk about music and shared tastes. She was very surprised that alongside my love for all things jingly-jangly guitars I would rave about some of the singles that Prince had released. We agreed to differ.

He’s not someone whose material has featured much on TVV but that in the main is down to the fact that the DMCA police are usually very quick off the mark when someone posts something by him. I expect this to be no different.

Picked up this classic single on vinyl for £1 the other week. If I had bought it back in 1986, instead of wasting money on the very patchy and underwhelming Parade LP, it would have certainly have found a high position on the 45 45s at 45 series all those years ago.

mp3 : Prince & The Revolution – Kiss
mp3 : Prince & The Revoultion – ♥ or $

One of the most memorable and finest bits of pop music ever recorded. Hasn’t dated a single bit after all these years. Just a pity that there have so many bloody awful cover versions.

(Originally posted over at the old place in February 2013)