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An Alternative History of "Pop" Music: Part 2, 1982 -

Started by jamiefairlie, January 20, 2021, 05:43:47 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

Oz Oz Alice

Sorrow - Forgive Me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_pm4qcx4L8

In another world, Rose would've seen sense and released this as a single; after years  ofbringing her pop sensibility to releases by Death In June and Current 93 and bringing some glamour to the post-industrial neo-folk scene (composed as it was of awkward looking blokes like Boyd Rice posing in military uniforms and trying to suppress the lob-ons they were getting from the naughtiness of it all) here, with her then husband Robert Lee, she made something that could easily in parts have been a follow-up to the one Strawberry Switchblade album. Of course as you can see from the artwork some of the occult trappings and runic imagery is carried over but that was there in Rose's work all along: before forming Switchblade with Jill Bryson she'd been making noisy post-punk as Poems with Drew McDowall (her first husband and later a member of Coil) and Switchblade started out playing vaguely folky Third Album Velvets material as you can hear from the Peel Sessions.

Alternate Universe: Rose switches on the TV and sees Anton Corbijn's Depeche Mode videos, thinks "I can do that" and gets in touch. Forgive Me is a smash hit and rather than years of silence post 1999 punctuated by the odd guest spot with a bunch of goths she switches to a decent manager, gets some placements in film soundtracks, stars in a buddy cop movie with Rose MacGowan called Witches Are Doing It For Themselves and me and her probably never meet in this parallel universe. But I'm fine with that as its best for everyone: especially great in this universe was when her celebrity launches the album of duets between her and Jhonn Balance only hinted at in this universe to Christmas Number One and the Love's Secret Domain dancers now in their 50s appear on TOTP Christmas 2012.

Oz Oz Alice

Anita Lane - The World's A Girl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TylcuxIYW2Y

From 93's Dirty Pearl, one of Anita Lane's only two solo records, this co-write with Mick Harvey demonstrates the considerable influence both had on Cave's songwriting: Mick Harvey gets the credit he deserves now from Bad Seeds fans like me but in terms of songwriting credits and publishing not so much. Not to get into a debate about arrangement vs writing but in the age of recorded music the two things are basically indistinguishable and the industry still relies on the image of the songwriter sat at a piano with a music stand painstakingly writing on a stave. The fact is that a lot of Bad Seeds records from the 80s up til the early 00s / late 90s would be half as good were it not for Mick Harvey. Nick comes in drunk or on smack, slumps at a piano and bangs out a song which Mick then virtually plays all the instruments on and still doesn't get a writing credit: doesn't sit well with me.

As for Anita's influence, I'm going to let Cave himself from his recent eulogy fill in that gap:
QuoteEveryone wanted to work with her but it was like trying to trap lightning in a bottle. Mick Harvey managed to corral her into the recording studio, but these precious offerings are a fraction of what she was.

She was the brains behind The Birthday Party, wrote a bunch of their songs, wrote 'From Her to Eternity', 'The World's a Girl', 'Sugar in a Hurricane' and my favourite Bad Seeds song, 'Stranger Than Kindness', but was much more than that.

How could something so luminous carry so much darkness?

Drank gin out of a baby's bottle.

Despised the concept of the muse but was everybody's.

The World's A Girl is such a savage song in all its surface delicacy, and the fact I can hear it so clearly in Cave's voice as much as Lane's is demonstration of how powerful an influence she must have been. I mean: "You said the world's a girl, and I'm taking her apart"? Jesus. As a songwriter I'd be unbearably smug if I'd written an opening line like that, it almost makes me flinch. Then this is set to the Mick Harvey sound: you can hear it on The Firstborn Is Dead, Tender Prey and Your, Funeral My Trial but also on his Gainsbourg cover records (more on which later); PJ Harvey's Let England Shake and Robert Forster's Danger In The Past. Its Dylan's Thin Wild Mercury sound stripped of the trappings of feigned authenticity and fealty to the blues. I cannot recommend Dirty Pearl enough, if only for this track and for the cover of Sexual Healing which I prefer to the original.

Oz Oz Alice

Shock Headed Peters with Lydia Lunch - Suicide Ocean

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW3jh6aNBQo

Fear Engine II: Almost As If It Had Never Happened is, as with everything Karl Blake has put out, criminally underrated and to me one of the highpoints (along with the 1993 re-recording of Hate On Sight which I can't find a streaming link for) is this version of Lydia Lunch's own Suicide Ocean which here is re-played by Karl Blake and David Knight. Karl's guitar playing is here a real standout, a missing link between Iommi and industrial rock. So this completes my trilogy of posts on this page about tracks by women in music who've been very influential to me creatively and in my own personal life and perceptions of the world. There will undoubtedly be more after I've given it a rest to let someone else have a go.

While the drum machine on this and the rest of the album sounds incredibly close to Godflesh's contemporary releases as they were both using the Alesis SR16, there's an almost live feel to it because rather than starting with the drum machine they would tweak the patterns to go along with the massed guitars. In a Quietus interview on this David Knight stated "We realised we could get very precise by step-programming the drum patterns on a sequencer, instead of internally on the SR16. Working with technology seemed a lot more exciting at the time." He also said "The instrumentals were mostly pieces I'd constructed with guitar loops played back at various octaves on an Akai S-1000 sampler – the inspiration was definitely Fripp and Eno, especially from around the time of 'Evening Star', and of course, our old favourites Faust.". The whole album is really worth listening to, sounding like some unholy mixture of King Crimson, Neu!, Godflesh and peak era Sabbath but with Blake's very intelligent lyrics. Check it out.

Greg Torso

Quote from: Oz Oz Alice on May 13, 2021, 02:36:06 PM
Anita Lane - The World's A Girl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TylcuxIYW2Y

I love this album. Not a bad track on it. The Sexual Healing cover was a mix tape favourite, back in the day when sad lonely boys still made tapes for girls that would never listen to them.

Greg Torso

Polvo - Lazy Comet



Polvo were one of those bands who just had a perfect aesthetic - the sound, the name, the artwork, all went together brilliantly. A complete one-off band with a sound informed by cheap, tinny guitars noodling away in odd Eastern-influenced flightpaths all over the burbling bass bollocks and drums trying to hang on grimly to the odd time signatures and repetitive strain locked grooves the band would get groundhogged in.
Named after a Mexican cough medicine, the band started in Chapel Hill, NC in 1990 and went on to release a whole load of great sevens and twelves. 1993's Today's Active Lifestyles is their best, I think, despite including two rather difficult, repetitive and apparently improvised tracks on either end of the A and B sides (the band supposedly didn't have enough material, hence 'Stinger 5 Wigs' and 'Gemini Cusp').
Today's Active Lifestyles was later reissued with an alternative cover without the lion image on it, because of a copyright lawsuit brought by the painter of the album, which is s fucking travesty - the wee horned lions in the corner make the whole cover!

Greg Torso

Little My - Chewing Gum



Not much online about this band but they were a three piece from San Francisco who existed from 1988-98 and released a few singles and an album. I;m sure they used to have a website with some info about them, but I can't find it now, so that's all you get.
Song taken from the 10" 'It's Food At Best' and features some nice brass band action towards the middle of it.

Norton Canes

The God Machine - Home b/w What Time Is Love?

Released January 1993





Alternative pop history: Highest chart position 29 | Weeks on chart 3 | Enjoyed a brief stay in the UK chart after its use in a commercial for the Halifax building society

Greg Torso

Yo La Tengo - Shaker



Possibly one for the PAST IT thread, but in the 1990s the Tengo could do. no. wrong. This is a typically beautiful blustery melancholic non-album track from Hoboken's finest. Their album from 1993, Painful, is a favourite, and I might end up posting something from it later. Like getting dumped in a snow storm. Or waking up on the bottom of a lake. Or your heart shattering inside your ribs like a frozen plum.

Greg Torso

eh fuck it

Yo La Tengo - Nowhere Near



One of the first records I fell in love with. Words don't mean anything. This song never loses its longing.

daf

Ian McNabb ‎– If Love Was Like Guitars



Reached #67 in the UK charts in January 1993

QuoteRobert Ian McNabb was born in Lourdes Hospital in Mossley Hill, Liverpool. In 1975, he auditioned and joined the young cabaret group Daybreak. The group played at men's clubs around the North-West of England during the mid-1970s. They auditioned for BBC's Opportunity Knocks but were unsuccessful. In 1976 he joined an all-male teen cabaret group called City Lights. In 1977 the group auditioned for ITV's New Faces but, again, were unsuccessful. McNabb began attending the Mabel Fletcher College of Music and Drama.

In 1980, McNabb became the lead vocalist and songwriter for The Icicle Works. The band's other members were Chris Sharrock on drums and Chris Layhe on bass guitar and backing vocals. The Icicle Works had success in the UK with the top 20 single "Love Is a Wonderful Colour" in 1983.

   

The original line-up of The Icicle Works broke up in 1988. McNabb put together a new "second generation" Icicle Works line-up in 1989, which released one album in 1990. However, the album was commercially unsuccessful and the band broke up the following year.

   

McNabb issued two solo singles in 1991 : "These Are The Days..." and "Great Dreams Of Heaven" - but neither dented the charts. He then resurfaced in 1993 with a collection of demos which would form the basis of his first solo album, Truth and Beauty. Recorded on a shoestring budget in Oldham, Greater Manchester, it won him a record deal with Andrew Lauder's new 'This Way Up' Label. The album's first single "If Love Was Like Guitars" became a minor UK hit in 1993.

   

Lard : "Theeeeee IAN MCNABB STOR-EEEEEYYYYY!!!"

Brundle-Fly

Time To Find Me (Come Inside) - Seefeel Released on Too Pure in 1993.





Providing glacial succour in my pokey bedsit. I'd go back there in a minute!

Seefeel are a British electronic and post-rock band formed in the early 1990s by Mark Clifford (guitar, programming), Daren Seymour (bass), Justin Fletcher (drums, programming), and Sarah Peacock (vocals, guitar). Bridging the guitar-based shoegaze sound with the production techniques of ambient techno and electronica, they gained recognition for their 1993 debut EP More Like Space and first album Quique, both on the British independent label Too Pure. The band signed with electronic label Warp Records in 1994 and released an album on Rephlex in 1996.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enanUvbi8HA

jamiefairlie

Slowdive - When the Sun Hits

https://youtu.be/HN-KHZ9NDVA



Taken from second album, "Souvlaki", critically mauled at the time but lauded now.

Quote from: Brundle-Fly on May 13, 2021, 07:42:52 PM
Seefeel

I was going to do a Seefeel, been listening to Quique & Pure, Impure again a lot lately and they still sound really good. I don't really listen to much outside electronic music, but I did like a bit of shoegaze back then and Seefeel really hit the spot for me.

Brundle-Fly

Quote from: Better Midlands on May 13, 2021, 08:15:33 PM
I was going to do a Seefeel, been listening to Quique & Pure, Impure again a lot lately and they still sound really good. I don't really listen to much outside electronic music, but I did like a bit of shoegaze back then and Seefeel really hit the spot for me.

I nearly picked Filter Dub from Quique but went for something off the EP in the end.

Oz Oz Alice

Pain Teens - RU 486

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8G-YWahu6k

Musically one of the poppier numbers off the fun loving popsters 1993 album Destroy Me, Lover bearing an image from the first edition of that jolly funster William Burrough's teenage romp Junkie. Particularly fun is the sitar sounding guitar solo and the incredibly self-loathing lyrics. Bliss Blood went on to guest with Swans surprising absolutely no one. The cover of Leonard Cohen's The Story of Isaac, shockingly for me at least, I prefer to the original. Usually Cohen covers come nowhere near the source but that's a rare exception. Great album, highly recommended.

Greg Torso

Mercury Rev & Robert Creeley - So There



B-side of a ten inch single in which Mercury Rev crash through a hectic kind of bar-room jazz number cut with radio static whilst the Black Mountain poet Robert Creeley reads his poem "So There" over the top of it. It works very well I think.

daf

Stephen Duffy (feat. Nigel Kennedy) – It Sparkles!



Opening track on the 1993 album 'Music in Colors', and featured on the Netherlands-only 'Holt End Hotel' CD single.

QuoteStephen Duffy : "The first two tracks are taken from the "MUSIC IN COLORS" album and are followed by their demo's. Recorded in my bedroom (like the last Lilac Time l.p. "Astronauts"). I played the bass and guitars to a drum machine and then took the tapes to RAK where we overdubbed the strings. I had to cut the demo's from an old DAT of rough mixes and ideas, as the master tapes were later lost."

Following the split of The Lilac Time in 1991, after the release of the album 'Astronauts', Duffy searched for some new creative energy. In 1993 He found it via fellow Aston Villa fan Nigel Kennedy. Together they constructed Music In Colors, a suite of solo songs linked with violin 'transitoires' that found Stephen out of the doldrums and reaching higher than ever.

   

Stephen Duffy : "I didn't want to make the small personal record, I wanted to make the big record. And that's what Music In Colors was. It's like an exact copy of Astronauts, but bigger. In fact, the title track is Astronauts' The Darkness Of Her Eyes but backwards – the two chords of the verse are the same chords, but the other way round.

Pretty much ignored on release due to Kennedy's proggy strings, it's proven to be one of Duffy's most solid albums.

Greg Torso

Job's Daughters - Cannibal



Job's Daughters were only around for two seven inches, both released on the excellent Nuf Sed label and both worth owning if you're a fan of Caroliner or Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, as this band contains members from both of those bands.
This is a cover from a fairly obscure Ennio Morricone musical, sung here by the mysterious "Livingstone Semakula" (obviously a pseudonym but I don't know of whom, although someone in the Youtube comments seems to be implying it's Grux from Caroliner) and it's just so great. It'll get under your scalp and burrow into your mind and you'll be singing "Call me cannibal, I won't die, kill me if you can, I will happily fly away" forever and ever.

jamiefairlie

Cocteau Twins - Summerhead

https://youtu.be/iq8TKMs6RLM




Taken from their seventh album, "Four-Calendar Café". Still making some great tunes but overall on the downwards slide now as internal relationships fracture.

jamiefairlie

Disco Inferno - Last Dance

https://youtu.be/36ihXBTVv5E



Their fifth single and a more straightforward indie style than some of their other output at this time. It was around now that I saw them at King Tut's in Glasgow and they were amazing. Cymbals making running water sounds, guitars playing bird songs and so on. Still never seen anything quite like it.

The Culture Bunker

Quote from: jamiefairlie on May 13, 2021, 07:52:23 PM
Slowdive - When the Sun Hits

Taken from second album, "Souvlaki", critically mauled at the time but lauded now.
Reminds me of when a few years ago, someone I knew saw this LP in a record store and was quite insistent the chap standing at the back on the album cover was me - and in some mitigation him being a bit out-of-focus does create some resemblance. I was only able to assure her it was instead (I think) a certain Nick Chaplin when I pointed out I was 12 years old when 'Souvlaki' came out. And also that if I had made an album that was going for sale in Fopp that I would hardly insist otherwise. Especially this one, which is one of my all-time faves.

Brundle-Fly

Ignorance Is Bliss - Jellyfish  Released on Charisma/ Virgin in 1993





We've covered the marvellous Jellyfish before but here's an extra track on a 1993 CD digipack double. It actually came out in 1991 but sod it, the track is going in because it's epic.

Ignorance is Bliss" originally featured on the compilation album White Knuckle Scorin' that Nintendo released in 1991, and is the only Mario-related song on the album. The song takes into the mind of King Bowser Koopa, who seemingly tells an imprisoned Princess Toadstool about how he wants to become an oil tycoon by getting rid of all of the Yoshis in Dinosaur Land, which along the way, he "explains" why brawn is more needed than brain.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xdwze-Wj6_4

Ballad of Ballard Berkley

Screamin' Jay Hawkins - Heartattack and Vine



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xLBQIWeAjI

A recording that resulted in Tom Waits suing Levi's up their blue jeaned wazoo. You will note that Screamin' Jay changes one of the song's most notable lines, presumably because you simply can't have blasphemy in a jeans advert (references to snorting coke are fine, apparently). I bet that pissed Waits off too.

QuoteScreamin' Jay Hawkins was an American singer-songwriter, musician, actor, film producer, and boxer. Famed chiefly for his powerful, operatic vocal delivery and wildly theatrical performances of songs such as I Put a Spell on You, he sometimes used macabre props onstage, making him an early pioneer of shock rock.

Hawkins' version of Tom Waits' Heartattack and Vine was featured in the Levi's commercial, Procession, directed by Michael Haussman. Waits sued in European court over this use of his music and won. The following apology from Levi's appeared in a 1993 issue of Billboard:

"Tom Waits is opposed to his music, voice, name or picture being used in commercials. We at Levi Strauss & Co. have long admired Mr. Waits' work and respect his artistic integrity including his heartfelt views on the use of his music in commercials. From January to June 1993 Levi Strauss Europe authorized broadcasting in 17 countries a commercial for Levi's 501 jeans called Procession. This commercial featured Tom Waits' song Heartattack and Vine performed by Screamin' Jay Hawkins. We obtained the rights in good faith and were unaware of Mr. Waits' objections to such usage of his composition. We meant no offense to Mr. Waits and regret that Heartattack and Vine was used against his wishes and that the commercial caused him embarrassment."

Norton Canes

Front 242 - Religion

Released April 1993





Alternative pop history: Highest chart position 3 | Weeks on chart 11 | Top of the Pops studio performance 22nd April 1993 | Video clips and interview Parallel 9 24th April 1993, with the three band members in character as fugitive criminals from the planet Zarb

Don't have time add all the links, but across two 12" singles this featured some utterly incredible remixes from Prodigy and J.G. Thirlwell, as well as remixes of a bonus track by The Orb. Well worth a search on YouTube.

jamiefairlie

East Village - Here It Comes

https://youtu.be/Vj7F08IJsR8



Formed in the mid-1980s in Princes Risborough, England by two brothers, Martin and Paul Kelly. This is from their only album, "Drop Out". the band had actually split up well before it was released.

daf

Pizzicato Five – Magic Carpet Ride



Featured on the album 'Bossa Nova 2001' - released in June 1993

Quote'Bossa Nova 2001' (ボサ·ノヴァ2001) was the seventh studio album by Japanese pop band Pizzicato Five. The band co-produced the album with acquaintance and fellow Shibuya-kei artist Cornelius. Following the house music-oriented 'Sweet Pizzicato Five' the previous year, 'Bossa Nova 2001' signaled a return to the band's 1960s and 1970s-influenced pop style, mixed with elements of alternative dance.



Bossa Nova 2001 is the last Pizzicato Five studio album to feature guitarist Keitarō Takanami, who quit the band in 1994. Several of the album's tracks were later featured on the band's Matador Records compilations Made in USA (1994) and The Sound of Music by Pizzicato Five (1995).

Ballad of Ballard Berkley

Sepultura - Refuse/Resist



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX7V3ReOI8c

For years I thought Max Cavalera was absolutely FURIOUS about budget cuts. Turns out the lyric is actually "bloodshed starts". Nevertheless, I think it's fair to assume that he holds no truck with swingeing cuts to local council funding.

QuoteSepultura are a Brazilian heavy metal band. They were a major force in the groove metal, thrash metal and death metal genres during the late '80s and early '90s, with their later experiments drawing influence from alternative metal, world music, nu metal, hardcore punk and industrial metal.

Elements of Latin music, samba and Brazilian folk and tribal music have also been incorporated into Sepultura's metal style, particularly on 1996 album Roots.

daf


Brundle-Fly

Mondrin - B12  Released on Warp in 1993.





B12 AKA: Michael Golding and Steve Rutter have provided the UK's intelligent techno and early electronica scene with both original material and also a home base for productions from Stasis to As One on the B12 Records imprint. After 3EP was issued on Warp in 1998, the duo retracted from the public eye until 2007, with a bevy of new releases.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v89vWccOIQ&t=2s

daf

Intastella – Point Hope



Released in 1993 - did not chart

QuoteLaugh were formed in 1980 by graphic designer Tim Gudgeon and medical student Simon Frampton. They wrote all the songs that the band performed in numerous gigs across Manchester and Liverpool until Frampton had to leave in 1984 to complete his medical training. Auditions to replace his distinctive voice produced the line-up of Martin Wright (vocals, guitar, keyboards), Ian Bendelow (guitar), Martin Mittler (bass guitar), and Spencer Birtwistle (drums).

Their debut release was "Take Your Time Yeah!", a flexi-disc included with Debris magazine in December 1985, with three further singles following prior to their only album, 'Sensation No. 1' (1988). The band had two placings on the UK Independent Chart with "Paul McCartney" (#44) and "Time to Lose It" (#19), and recorded two sessions for John Peel's BBC Radio 1 show.

   

In 1990 the band parted ways with guitarist Bendelow and discovered singer Stella Grundy and dancer Lil' Anthony, changing their sound to a more dance-oriented style and changing their name to Intastella. They signed to MCA Records and hit the lower reaches of the UK Singles Chart with their first release, "Dream Some Paradise".

 

Two follow-up singles, "People", and "Century", released in August and November 1991, fared similarly, and in late 1991 the band's debut album, 'Intastella and the Family of People' was issued.

   

The band's momentum was lost after Grundy broke her arm in a motorcycle accident, and they were dropped by MCA, returning in 1993 on the Planet-3 label with the 'Drifter EP', on which they worked with Shaun Ryder.

   

Stella : "I think we wanted to write pop songs but we were, as a group, too left-field in our tastes and attitude. Looking back it probably wasn't the best idea signing to MCA. Major labels were attracted on mass to Manchester bands around 1990. However, they also had entrenched ideas on how to market a female singer. Let's say we had our fair share of clashes and we definitely made mistakes. I am glad we did fight for our artistic freedom. We weren't commercially successful but we created original-sounding music that I am proud of."

In 1993, they publicised their new single, 'Point Hope', by claiming to have impregnated the sleeve with drops of LSD.

   

Stella : "Being linked to a trend as a band is a bit unhealthy unless, of course, you started that trend. I mean, I always try to do things differently, experiment, be unlike anything else. If the interest or lack of interest in your music is in relation to where you come from then it's flawed. I am proud to be northern, no doubt, but it was and still is easier to get attention if you're based in London. It's like, 'Yeah, we've had enough of travelling up to Manchester now.' I think there were a couple of occasions when I thought we were being critiqued or ignored because we stayed in Manchester."