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| Behind the scenes, Sirens. |
Another week, more tweaks to the format; the benefits of having a tiny platform never stops giving, really. Moving past that tiny pile of rubble...
Background
Learning a bunch of cool shit about Hall & Oates triggered a very specific and personal childhood memory. When that coincided with the recent passing of Ric Ocasek, the lead singer and public face of 1980s legends, The Cars, I decided to make this The Cars Week. Like most people, I comfortably karaoke at least a half dozen Cars songs, maybe even more, but I didn’t know much about them. There was the thing how googling “Ric Ocasek” reliably extends to “Ric Ocasek’s wife,” something that wouldn’t surprise anyone who knows anything about either Mr. Ocasek and Paulina Porizkova. (What so many failed to recognize: Ocasek had talent.) As for that memory…
Throughout my childhood, other kids, my older sisters, just society kept telling me that this band (e.g., Simple Minds for reasons I can neither recall nor explain) or that band (Split Enz?) started as a “punk band.” The angularity of The Cars’ sound (I borrowed that adjective, btw) made me wonder they fit that bill. The Cars arrived into the music world more or less fully-formed, as it turns out. Ocasek, along with the earlier departed Benjamin Orr, hit the ground running; some of their biggest hits – e.g., “Just What I Needed,” “My Best Friend’s Girl,” and “Good Times Roll” – appeared on their debut album. While I’m sure they have more ins, outs and points of interest than my cursory dip into them turned up, the only ones that feel worth mentioning are, 1) Orr and Ocasek starting in a Midwest-based folk act called Milkwood; and, 2) does anyone still represent for the band’s third album, Panorama. (For the record, I didn’t, but I also only gave it one, semi-distracted listen.)
So, ruined as I was by that Hall & Oates experience, I shifted to thinking about other bands. The time spent on The Cars wasn’t a total waste: I kept “Bye Bye Love” from their debut for the playlist plus the title track and “Let’s Go” from the follow-up, Candy-O. And The Cars are one of those bands that no one else really sounds like, and that’s admirable. Just not what I was after...
On Finding What I Wanted Across the Pond
Because I watched MTV from the get-go, I associate The Cars with a bunch of bands from the same time that got lumped under the label, “new wave,” most of them English. As happens with genre labeling, the filing gets complicated from the get-go, but I stumbled across a nice key-word definition in the Wikipedia entry on “new wave” that lays out a good, broad outline:
Background
Learning a bunch of cool shit about Hall & Oates triggered a very specific and personal childhood memory. When that coincided with the recent passing of Ric Ocasek, the lead singer and public face of 1980s legends, The Cars, I decided to make this The Cars Week. Like most people, I comfortably karaoke at least a half dozen Cars songs, maybe even more, but I didn’t know much about them. There was the thing how googling “Ric Ocasek” reliably extends to “Ric Ocasek’s wife,” something that wouldn’t surprise anyone who knows anything about either Mr. Ocasek and Paulina Porizkova. (What so many failed to recognize: Ocasek had talent.) As for that memory…
Throughout my childhood, other kids, my older sisters, just society kept telling me that this band (e.g., Simple Minds for reasons I can neither recall nor explain) or that band (Split Enz?) started as a “punk band.” The angularity of The Cars’ sound (I borrowed that adjective, btw) made me wonder they fit that bill. The Cars arrived into the music world more or less fully-formed, as it turns out. Ocasek, along with the earlier departed Benjamin Orr, hit the ground running; some of their biggest hits – e.g., “Just What I Needed,” “My Best Friend’s Girl,” and “Good Times Roll” – appeared on their debut album. While I’m sure they have more ins, outs and points of interest than my cursory dip into them turned up, the only ones that feel worth mentioning are, 1) Orr and Ocasek starting in a Midwest-based folk act called Milkwood; and, 2) does anyone still represent for the band’s third album, Panorama. (For the record, I didn’t, but I also only gave it one, semi-distracted listen.)
So, ruined as I was by that Hall & Oates experience, I shifted to thinking about other bands. The time spent on The Cars wasn’t a total waste: I kept “Bye Bye Love” from their debut for the playlist plus the title track and “Let’s Go” from the follow-up, Candy-O. And The Cars are one of those bands that no one else really sounds like, and that’s admirable. Just not what I was after...
On Finding What I Wanted Across the Pond
Because I watched MTV from the get-go, I associate The Cars with a bunch of bands from the same time that got lumped under the label, “new wave,” most of them English. As happens with genre labeling, the filing gets complicated from the get-go, but I stumbled across a nice key-word definition in the Wikipedia entry on “new wave” that lays out a good, broad outline:
“According to Simon Reynolds, the music had a twitchy, agitated feel to it. New wave musicians often played choppy rhythm guitars with fast tempos, and keyboards were common as were stop-start song structures and melodies. Reynolds noted that new wave vocalists sounded high-pitched, geeky and suburban.”
To tighten that up, new wave was a bit arty and effete, and I use both terms with affection, and that fills in the use of the word “angularity” above. With The Cars crossed off the list, I looked for bands based on two criteria: 1) their prime years hit during the first wave of new wave/synth-pop (1983 was my arbitrary cut off), which ruled out, for instance, The Cure and Depeche Mode; and 2) they had to have started with a different sound than the one that made them famous. The cattle-call I put out over twitter – and I appreciate all the responses, that was generous, and apologies for the narrow, unexplained criteria – and got….just a fucking deluge of artists – e.g., Human League, Yazoo, Squeeze, Tears for Fears, Spandau Ballet, Soft Cell, Kajagoogoo, Thompson Twins (oh, the story I could tell), Bronski Beat, Pet Shop Boys, Flock of Seagulls, and on and on. Turns out friends and associates from my youth made up some things. Still, I found two artists who met my criteria so cleanly that they fucking cleaved it in two: Ultravox and Roxy Music.
Ultravox
I remembered them for the song/brooding classily video, “Vienna.” Midge Ure had taken over vocals, the band, and played guitar by then and, listening to it now, nice audio washes create the right mood, great swelling sounds add the ache and passion, and Ure can hold a note like a boss. I hated that song as a kid, but I also remember feeling like a barbarian against all that sophistication. I stopped my search of the Ure Years with a listen through Vienna, the band’s crowning, 1980 release. It still leaves me flat, but, if you dig “Vienna” the rest should work for you. One song from Vienna did stick to the playlist: “New Europeans.” It sounded like they came from Ultravox’s previous life, aka, the John Foxx years.
Ultravox formed in early ‘70s London with Foxx (aka, Dennis Leigh) on vox, Warren Cann drumming, Chris Cross (aka, Chris Allen) on bass, Stevie Shears on guitar, and Billy Currie on violin (that I have yet to hear). Their early albums failed to chart, the singles languished, and I’d offer “I Want to Be a Machine” from their eponymous debut as a possible hypothesis that makes sense of that, but Ultravox’s first two albums rock and snarl rather appealingly. I rate the punkier Ha! Ha! Ha! over that debut, but that’s just taste. Fans with more new wave leanings will drift to Ultravox!, the debut album. “Saturday Night in the City of Dead” sets the tone nicely, and the slightly unnerving/slightly comic “My Sex” ranks as my personal highlight, more spoken-word than song, but a compelling listen for it.
I remembered them for the song/brooding classily video, “Vienna.” Midge Ure had taken over vocals, the band, and played guitar by then and, listening to it now, nice audio washes create the right mood, great swelling sounds add the ache and passion, and Ure can hold a note like a boss. I hated that song as a kid, but I also remember feeling like a barbarian against all that sophistication. I stopped my search of the Ure Years with a listen through Vienna, the band’s crowning, 1980 release. It still leaves me flat, but, if you dig “Vienna” the rest should work for you. One song from Vienna did stick to the playlist: “New Europeans.” It sounded like they came from Ultravox’s previous life, aka, the John Foxx years.
Ultravox formed in early ‘70s London with Foxx (aka, Dennis Leigh) on vox, Warren Cann drumming, Chris Cross (aka, Chris Allen) on bass, Stevie Shears on guitar, and Billy Currie on violin (that I have yet to hear). Their early albums failed to chart, the singles languished, and I’d offer “I Want to Be a Machine” from their eponymous debut as a possible hypothesis that makes sense of that, but Ultravox’s first two albums rock and snarl rather appealingly. I rate the punkier Ha! Ha! Ha! over that debut, but that’s just taste. Fans with more new wave leanings will drift to Ultravox!, the debut album. “Saturday Night in the City of Dead” sets the tone nicely, and the slightly unnerving/slightly comic “My Sex” ranks as my personal highlight, more spoken-word than song, but a compelling listen for it.
To back up and get at the big picture, Ultravox’s Wikipedia entry offered this to describe their sound and influences:
“Like many other bands that formed Britain's punk and new wave movements, Ultravox! drew inspiration from the art-school side of glam rock. Musically, Ultravox were heavily influenced by Roxy Music, the New York Dolls, David Bowie and Kraftwerk.”
Maybe those first two describe the Foxx era, while the latter cover Ure’s time; call your own shot there. The Foxx-led Ultravox lasted for two more albums, the already-mentioned Ha! Ha! Ha! and Systems of Romance – a nice bridge to the Ure era musically. There was no reason to believe the band would cross that bridge, by the way, because when Foxx left, Ultravox took off in all kinds of directions:
“Foxx subsequently signed to Virgin Records and released his album Metamatic in January 1980. By this time, Billy Currie had been recruited by the rising star Gary Numan in 1979 to do a performance at the Old Grey Whistle Test show with his band Tubeway Army. Numan had been a fan of Ultravox and Currie was also asked to play on Numan's début solo album, The Pleasure Principle, and its subsequent tour. Warren Cann went to work for Zaine Griff, while Chris Cross did some shows with James Honeyman-Scott (of The Pretenders) and Barrie Masters (from Eddie and the Hot Rods).”
Foxx had a good-sized post-Ultravox solo career (the suggested songs from an interview with Foxx were “Underpass” and “No-One Driving”) after the split, and, of course, Ultravox hit their commercial glory years. A week (or so) of listening to them cemented my appreciation for Ha! Ha! Ha! – I pulled three songs from that one to the playlist; “Young Savage,” which splits the difference between “Rockwrok” (punk) and “Hiroshima mon Amour” (synth-pop) – and that leaves me wondering how I would have responded to the release of Vienna in real-time. No enthusiastically, I imagine. Next.
Tubeway Army: An Interlude
A twitter associate (@richardmiller) mentioned this Gary Numan project to me a couple weeks back. It’s impressive. Synth-heavy, for sure, but with lots of rock-bite – see, “It Must Have Been Years” and “You Are in My Vision” (which The Cars could easily have written). “The Machman” puts a funk-spin on those same elements - and all of those come of Replicas, a damned solid album for fans of that sound. I’ll have to look into this one at some point – what with the Currie angle – but I’ll close out the big stuff with the other band I looked into.
Roxy Music
Pretty much the same story as Ultravox: with “More Than This,” Roxy Music delivered a warm and polished tune that felt more crooner era than most of what you’d hear on a rock-based outlet (e.g., MTV). That song and “Avalon,” between them, defined Roxy Music for me, and the definition wasn’t kind. Both of those are on Avalon, the band’s 1982, big-deal release, and, having returned to it this week, that’s a damned good album, even with all that polish. It’s more in the same vein as “Avalon” and “More Than This,” but the fast one they pull on “Take a Chance With Me” - a swing into a pop song after a cool-synth dramatic entrance - throws back to what I’d call their glory days. And, holy hell, are their first three albums glorious for a certain kind of person (me!).
Roxy Music started in Newcastle, England/UK (for as long as it lasts; #brexit) with Brian Ferry, the songwriter and vocalist, and Graham Simpson, who was the first of many bass players in a band that never had a steady one. Some solid anecdotes come out of how the entire group ultimately came together – e.g., drummer Paul Thompson joined on seeing an ad in Melody Maker that read “wonder drummer wanted for an avant rock group,” and the band’s eventual (and “most musically proficient”) guitarist auditioned, lost out to David O’List, became the band’s roadie, was surreptitiously re-auditioned after O’List left after a “confrontation” with Thompson before joining the band – but it was always Brian Ferry’s baby (the word “tyrant” comes up). Clashes of ego chased keyboardist/’treatment” contributor, and future legendary producer (including Ultravox!’s first album), Brian Eno from Roxy Music after the second album, For Your Pleasure. Eno did later admit that the next two albums without him – Stranded and Country Life - sounded quite good, and that Eddie Jobson made a fine replacement.
I never got to Roxy Music’s 4th album, Sirens (ft. Jerry Hall on the cover; the famous song, "Love Is the Drug"), but I spent the past week wordlessly repeating the words “holy” and “shit” over and over at my desk at work, and in different combinations. Roxy Music is the band I’ve always loved without knowing, per the teen trope, they even existed.
Their album covers arrest the attention, all of them featuring women, three of them in states of undress and one with a (healthy) whiff of a dominatrix to her (For Your Pleasure); they leave plenty to dissect with each of them. I can’t think of many album covers I’ve seen in my lifetime that match these for…I mean, is it provocation? Aesthetic mattered enormously to Roxy Music (the schtick helped with the stage-fright according to Ferry), and the band, as a project, presented a stylized front to its audience (Ferry, in particular, “the working-class miner's son from the north of England became an international rock star and an icon of male style”). The people who care slot it under “art rock” for a reason. A 2018 retrospective in The Guardian described the sound/approach pretty well here:
“…a collage of pop-culture nostalgia, hard-rock guitar, piano-driven melodies, stylised high vocals, strange musical structures and experimental sound pictures…Recorded in the first full flush of inspiration, songs such as Ladytron, The Bob (Medley), and Sea Breezes exist outside of their time: a radical synthesis that mapped the future at the same time as it plundered the past.”
Those notes describe Roxy Music’s impressively successful (No. 10!) eponymous debut album and “strange musical structures” jumps out when you listen to Roxy Music at their best. The first song, “Re-Make/Re-Model” opens with the white noise of murmuring voices and drops into a short piano break with no clear destination, before launching into a pop/not-pop, a flailing art-rock jumble of noise that makes you want to dance by throwing yourself around the room in the messiest way possible (opted for a live performance for that link, but here's the whole thing). Roxy Music carries that same chaotic energy through the rest of the album – e.g., “Virginia Plain,” “If There Is Something,” “Ladytron,” and, personal favorite, “2HB” (wherein "HB" equals Humphrey Bogart). Each of those numbers possess a specific tone/personality profile. I’ll flutter my eyes in the direction of any piano, and they use it a lot, but I’ve never seen a band as deft at subverting popular music conventions, incorporating elements of jazz (e.g., throwing the lead), singing atonally (listen to “Avalon” again, and tell me they didn’t do that deliberately), while still making popular music. And that only makes it less surprising how smoothly they shifted to utterly rarefied pop when they decided to on Avalon.
I fell ass over kettle into Roxy Music this past week, which led to them taking up over half of a 35-song playlist. To list the songs not yet linked to above: “Beauty Queen,” “Editions of You,” [LOVE!] “Grey Lagoons,” and the title track from For Your Pleasure; “Out of the Blue,” “If It Takes All Night,” and “All I Want Is You,” from Country Life; “Just Like You,” “Psalm,” and “Mother of Pearl” from Stranded. While there’s an aesthetic to all of them, the style and sound moves all over and it has the effect of being surprised over and over again in the short course of 45 minutes. I absolutely call it incredible. Old as they are, Roxy Music rates very, very highly among the bands I’ve listened to and loved lately. Call ‘em one of those “new to me” infatuations.
The Rest of the Playlist
For starters, a stray reference to Eno doing “King’s Lead Hat,” a song I knew The Dirtbombs covered, just not from where, meant I had to dig up and add that one. Next, I’ve always loved Squeeze’s “Tempted” enough to assume I’d fall in love with the rest. That didn’t happen – they left me stunningly flat, honestly – but “Goodbye Girl” is a cute, genre-specific tune.
And…holy crap! That’s all of them. Till the next playlist! Again, it’s gonna be weird…
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