1980s
bruce.dessau
The death of Steve Strange, aged 55, was both a surprise and not a surprise to me. His adult life in and out of the spotlight had been something of an unpredictable rollercoaster ride where anything could happen.I had followed his career since the late 1970s and the early 1980s when he was at the forefront of the New Romantic movement, minding the door and acting as general tastemaker at the Blitz Club in Covent Garden. Then in 2001 I was approached by a publisher to ghostwrite his autobiograply, Blitzed!. His contemporary Martin Kemp had just had great success with his book, True, and there Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Whether intentional or not, the third album by French chart-topping duo The dø is effectively a renewal of “Sweet Dreams”-era Eurythmics. The synth bubble-‘n’-pulse and vocal lines nodding towards the choral and gospel inescapably evoke what Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart fashioned in the mid-Eighties. Shake Shook Shaken’s third track “Miracles (Back in Time)” suggests so much of Eurythmics’ “Here Comes the Rain Again” that it’s possible Dan Levy and the Finland-born but France-dwelling Olivia Merilahti are actually paying tribute to Eurythmics.Shake Shook Shaken – with its bizarre sleeve Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Morrissey went beyond parody years ago. Titles on his 10th solo album such as "Kick The Bride Down The Aisle” or “Earth is the Loneliest Planet” could easily come from a Buzzfeed spot-the-send-up list. But barge your way past this initial obstacle and World Peace Is None Of Your Business is one of the venerable pop poet’s best albums in years.It is also one of his most stylistically eclectic. A change in band personnel seems to have prompted a broadening of his musical canvas. For someone frequently accused of Little Englander tendencies there are exotic trumpet solos and flashes of flamenco Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Millions Like Us - The Story of the Mod Revival 1977–1989A “testosterone-fuelled youth movement” is how the opening paragraph of the introductory essay of this box set tags the mod revival. Aficionados of the “clean-cut, neatly dressed younger sibling of punk” were members of “an often violently defined tribe”. Concerts are described as battlegrounds: “punches were thrown” at “live appearances by The Chords.” In the individual commentaries on the 100 tracks collected, there is talk of “boot boys in parkas” and, for the band Small Hours, “live appearances sometimes Read more ...
Matthew Wright
In 1984 Duran Duran were at the height of their fame. Seven and the Ragged Tiger, the band’s third studio album, became their first (and only) number one soon after its release in November the previous year, and announced a sharper, more dance-friendly, synth-driven sound. The world tour (apparently the band wanted to spend a year abroad to avoid tax), began in Australia, but was mostly spent in Canada and the US. It was the band’s first as major headliners.They played 51 shows to over half a million people, and were received with delirious abandon almost everywhere they went. It seemed at Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
With just over two weeks to Christmas, thoughts might be turning to which of the deluge of 2014’s reissues might be suitable as a gift, worth putting on your own wish-list for Santa or even merit buying for yourself. So if help is needed, theartsdesk is happy to provide a one-stop guide to the essential reissues covered so far this year.Normal service will resume next week with a look at John Grant’s old band The Czars. The week after we will consider Millions Like Us, a box set dedicated to, as it is helpfully subtitled, “the Mod Revival 1977–89”. Following that will be a collection Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Jon Hassell / Brian Eno: Fourth World Vol. 1 - Possible MusicsIts opening is exotic. The music shimmers like heat haze and incorporates a sing-song instrument which might be a treated trumpet, or a high-register bass guitar reverberating like water on distant rocks and pattering percussion. “Chemistry”, the opening track on Jon Hassell and Brian Eno’s 1980 album Fourth World Vol. 1 - Possible Musics, melded the ambient to serialism and what became both electronica and world music.Possible Musics is a stunningly beautiful album. Its reissue on album and CD brings an opportunity to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This will have brought a nostalgic tear to the eye of fans of The Sweeney (the TV show, not the Ray Winstone movie) or GF Newman's still-shocking 1978 series Law and Order. The producers had rounded up seven retired policepersons and got them to spill some of the beans about what policing was like in the Sixties and Seventies.The strange thing was, it was exactly like folklore says it used to be. There was plenty of rough justice including kickings and beatings, dousings in freezing cold baths and possibly even some electric shocks. Rule-bending was de rigueur, there was routine acceptance by Read more ...
Matthew Wright
In the time that Culture Club have been planning reunions, bands, movements, whole musical eras have come and gone. And still, once every couple of years, a rumour circulates, and a demo is aired. Generally, nothing comes of it, and those memories of dancing drunkenly to “Karma Chameleon” grow a little fainter. Now, with last night’s taster gig at Heaven (where the band gave their first big London performance in 1982), we can definitively say, they are back. A nationwide tour is booked, new songs are written, and the album (provisionally entitled “Tribes”, if I heard Boy George correctly) is Read more ...
Nick Hasted
You expect the tears, anger and pride, as NUM veterans relive Britain’s defining industrial dispute, 30 years later. The bafflement of a South Welsh ex-miner is more telling; the way his voice slows in disbelief at the level of violence the British state unleashed in the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85, and incomprehension as he still struggles to grasp how and why what he saw could have happened. Two miners died during the strike, as did a cabbie taking one to cross a picket line, and three children sifting the coalfields for scraps to survive on. Light casualties, really, for a strike Margaret Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Game Theory: Blaze of GloryThe news of the death on 15 April last year of Scott Miller was a shock. Although hardly a household name, he was one of pop’s great auteurs. The California-born songwriter may no longer be with us, but the music he made with his bands Alternate Learning, Game Theory and The Loud Family will forever testify to his originality, single-mindedness and, above all, way with a tune and a meaning-filled snarky lyric. The structure of his songs twisted and turned, but they were always melodic. He was clever, eloquent, sarcastic and, in person, always charming. All of Read more ...
David Nice
Lukas Moodysson caught the miseries and splendours of kids on the cusp of teendom in an early gem, Together (Tillsammans), but there they made up only one strand in the general trajectory of trouble to triumph. That difficult theme of very early adolescence, so easy to parody, so hard to keep truly affectionate, is the entire domain of We Are the Best!Maybe it partly rings true because the tale of first two, then three spirited girls embracing punk at the end of its natural life in 1982 is also the true story of Moodyson’s wife Coco, who novelized her early angsts and exuberance. But it Read more ...