Prefab Sprout

For some Wednesday morning sweetness, try the whimisical, jazz-steeped pop of Prefab Sprout. This is some of the best songwriting in 80s/90s pop, with many embedded dynamic changes (although not in the posted song) and unconventional tempos and rhythms. The vocal of Paddy McAloon and high, airy harmonies of Wendy Smith are also fantastic. Looking for Atlantis from 1990 is on the pure pop end of their spectrum. Enjoy.

In My House - Mary Jane Girls

While we're in this genre (sort of; I guess the 80s derivation of 70s soul/R&B), here's a song that got a large amount of airplay on Top-40 stations but because of this I thought never really got taken seriously. The Mary Jane Girls were a Rick James joint through and through (right down to their name, apparently). In My House (1983) is just a really well-crafted pop song, from its strong synth-breaks to the tight vocal harmonies, demonstrating that at the time, the Rick James orbit was a pretty good place to be.

Let's Dance - David Bowie

I fully stipulate that David Bowie is one of the most important and influential musicians of the rock era. However, a true Bowie aficionado would tell you that I am not worthy of being called a Bowie fan because my favorite Bowie album, in fact the only segment of his oeuvre that I listen to with any kind of regularity, is Let’s Dance (1983). My impression is that many Bowie fans view this as somewhat of an 80s pop sellout. (Admittedly, production by Nile Rodgers, who helped invent the Funk/R&B sound that would come to be called disco in the late 70s with his band, Chic, likely adds to this impression. But this is a feature, not a bug, in my view.) I view it as a genius pop album that never gets old even after massive radio overplay of its major hits (the title track, Modern Love, and China Girl – a remake of a Bowie/Iggy Pop tune). Bowie’s voice is all atmosphere, and that’s just the beginning here. The oblique lyrical references, excellent hooks, guitar work (including solos on several tracks by Stevie Ray Vaughan), mark this as possibly the best pop album of its era. Unfortunately, my favorite song from this album, Criminal World, is not on YouTube. So here’s an excellent live version of Cat People (used in the 1982 movie of the same title).

Men Without Hats

Some bands are so much better than their most well known song. Case in point, Montreal’s Men Without Hats, one of the quintessential 80s new wave pop bands/ The Safety Dance was of course a piece of pop genius. But that was just the tip of the iceberg of this band’s sound and ideas. I’m only really familiar with their material through 1987’s Pop Goes the World, but their first three albums ( Rhythm of Youth from 1982 and Folk of the 80’s (Part III), from 1984, are the other two) offer a complex landscape of pop songs that most bands can’t achieve in twice that many albums. There are a lot of interlacing themes among the songs (Pop Goes the World is a concept album with many refs between songs) which are hard to describe without many listenings (which are always fruitful). From a musical standpoint, the two most unique aspects of the M w/o H sound are the extremely atmospheric keyboards and lead singer Ivan Doroschuk’s voice, which has an extreme urgency to it, like he’s been to the top of the ferris wheel alone, seen the destruction at the edge of the universe, and knows there’s no way to describe it to you.

Here’s a live clip of their song Where Do the Boys Go off Folk of the 80's (Part III). Note the fans. This is exactly the kind of people who I remember were into M w/o H. Those are my people. And ya gotta love a band with two keyboardists. Ya just gotta…

The Sherbs

The Sherbs were an early 80s reincarnation of a very successful Australian rock band of the 70s, Sherbet. I’m not familiar at all with the Sherbet material (there's some on Youtube) and unfortunately there’s not much Sherbs material available online. I got to like them from a couple of songs (I’m Alive and We Ride Tonight) that got decent airplay on album-oriented rock stations. They can be loosely classified as a progressive rock band. Vocalist Daryl Braithwaite had a subtle but distinctive sound that was not falsetto, but still ranged up toward that territory, vaguely reminiscent of Steve Perry but much more restrained. The Sherbs sound was somewhat atmospheric, with synthesizers playing a prominent role. The songs were on the poppy end of prog-rock, but this was nowhere near Top-40 (at least not in America). Overall, the sound was of the same flavor as a lot of local progressive rock bands in the Rochester area at the time. Nothing earth-shatteringly novel, just a sound of its times and some interesting rock songs. Rock music took off for many distant lands after that time and has never returned to this rather simple, maybe slightly pretentious at times but not ostentatious, sound.

Here’s a song from the Sherbet era:



Here’s the 80s Sherbs manifestation (same personnel, according to their Wikipedia entry). Quite a bit different, but you can see where it came from:



I’m really glad that people are archiving all of these old TV show appearances of bands on Youtube. Of course, the bands in these shows are lip syncing these songs (or something close to that). But you get a flavor of their studio sound and what they looked like.

The Three O'Clock

Since the folks over at PowerPop posted the Conchords (excellent and hilarious) lampooning of Psychedelic rock, I thought I would blog about the Three O’Clock, my favorite psychedelic revival band from the Paisley Underground scene in LA in the early-mid 80s. Led by vocalist/bassist Michael Quercio, these guys brought a pretty unique hard-driving guitar edge to the sound (which seemed to be absent from the other bands of that scene that I have been exposed to, e.g. Dream Syndicate and Green on Red). Quercio’s high, lush vocals lent a sort of hyperactive plaintiveness to the sound. In terms of pure songwriting, this band was one of the best in the 80s, in my opinion. Every one of their albums is laden with novel pop music ideas and repays virtually continual relistening. I owe my love of this band to my friend Dave, who introduced me to a ton of alternative music in Durham, NC in the early 90s. Sadly, the Three O’Clock had broken up by that time.

I’m not sure exactly how influential the neo-psychedelic sound/aesthetics have been. Prince (whose Paisley Park record label put out the last Three O’Clock album, Vermillion, in 1988), the Bangles (part of the 80s LA neo-psychedelic scene), and the Church (see their 1986 album Heydey) all had mainstream success with the meme. This was one of many undercurrents in pop/alternative music that were percolating in the 80s, which give the lie to anyone who complains that 80s music was boring or monolithic.

Happily, there is a decent Youtube footprint for the Three O’Clock (ignore the first link). Here is the video for their song Her Head’s Revolving, from their 1985 album Arrive Without Travelling.

Message of Love - the Pretenders

In my post below on Pat Benatar, I forgot to list the Pretenders as a major female-led band at that time. American-expat-in-the-UK Chrissie Hynde can arguably claim to have become more legendary than any of the woman rockers I did list. I've liked the Pretenders' sound ever since Brass in Pocket hit the radio in the U.S. in 1980. Their first three albums, Pretenders, Pretenders II, and Learning to Crawl (my all time favorite album cover), are as good or better musically than the first three albums of any other artist in the history of rock.

Message of Love, from their second album in 1981 (was released earlier on an EP), exemplifies the rock solidity their songwriting. Hynde's completely unique vocals, combining passion with gutsiness, overlie a decepively simple guitar track that wrings extreme beauty out of its chord-rhythm work and fits perfectly over the classic, almost walking, bassline (not a little out of tune in the live clip below). It's poignant to realize that bassist Pete Farndon and guitarist James Honeyman-Scott both died of drug overdoses within two years of the release of Pretenders II. Hynde and drummer Martin Chambers added guitarist Robbie Macintosh and bassist Malcolm Foster for 1984's Learning to Crawl. After that, further personnel changes and less stellar material tended to drag the band down into the general mainstream rock/pop decline of the late-80s/90s, but nothing can tarnish how original, and absolutely trenchant for rock music, the Pretenders's early songs were.

Treat Me Right - Pat Benatar

No one made straight ahead rock in the early 80s better than Pat Benatar. There weren’t that many female artists doing this at the time (the pantheon included Heart and Joan Jett on the rock side and Blondie, Stevie Nicks, Quarterflash, the Go Gos, and later on the Bangles on the poppier side) but I’m not just talking about female artists here. Benatar’s songs and production were among the best stuff that any rockers were putting out. There was a very nice fusion between guitar and keyboards in these songs (also true of the first few Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers albums) that disappeared in the 90s and really has never come back. Things got way too guitar oriented (both toward electric/distorted/lead sounds and jangly/acoustic/rhythm work) and the production values got too bass/drums heavy and overorchestrated. Plus, at least in America, there eventually was a general reaction against 80s synth pop which led to an overall dismissal of keyboards and, in my opinion, an overall degradation of pop and rock sounds that inevitably affected the songwriting (and still does today). Anyway, I digress…

Treat Me Right, from 1981, is one of Benatar’s less well known hits, although it got a decent amount of airplay on rock and pop stations at the time. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the video of this on Youtube. So you’ll have to settle for this bizarre fan scrapbook of anime, Harry Potter, Capt. Jack Sparrow, and random other stuff that was set to the song (sound quality is pretty good, actually).

Weightless - Thomas Dolby

Thomas Dolby’s first two albums, The Golden Age of Wireless (TGAOW)(1982)and The Flat Earth (1984) are techno-romantic masterpieces and I could write about these songs for days. The thing that initially got me onto Dolby, like with so many other songs and bands, was a song that was in the Top 40 that virtually immediately, once I immersed myself into Dolby’s first album, became my least favorite song. This was, of course “She Blinded Me With Science” (SBMWS), which for most people, even many 80s music fans, is probably the only Dolby song they know. This is really sad, because Dolby is a master of pop atmosphere, which SBMWS hints at but does not really do a good job of exhibiting. SBMWS reflects one of three different veins or modes Dolby wrote/writes(?) in (don’t know what he’s up to these days). The least compelling of these I refer to as his “gimmicky” mode. The other song on Golden Age that is in this mode (somewhat) is “Commercial Breakup”, my second least favorite song on that album. The second mode is why Dolby is one of my strongest songwriting influences and is the quintessential New Wave Romantic mode. This mode encompasses all of the rest of the songs on Golden Age and probably all of the songs (except perhaps “Hyperactive!”, not co-incidentally the only arguable hit as well as my least favorite song on that album) on the Flat Earth, and, sadly, only “Budapest by Blimp” on Aliens Ate My Buick (most conspicuously the title track on that album). The third mode is a jazzy pop evident in “I Scare Myself” on The Flat Earth and motifs in various other tracks throughout his oeuvre.

Perhaps Dolby’s second most well known song is “One of Our Submarines”, also off TGAOW. I may blog about that song in the future, as it is another beautiful piece of atmosphere which could only have become a hit in the 80s, when the powers that be who determine which songs get airplay were not yet insidious enough to totally misapprehend musical value in songs (this happened in the late 80s, became complete in the 90s, and essentially is the reason why virtually 0% of pop music today is worth anything musically).

Dolby is of course famous for being a virtuoso of computer-aided music production (the only time I ever saw him was in the late 80s when he was giving seminars promoting computer software, on Apple Macintosh of course, for writing music). This was also part of the attraction for me and a lot of other lonely 80s romantic guys who also happened to be keyboard players. His high-ish, fragile, definitively modern British, vocals were another key element.

Although The Flat Earth is clearly Dolby’s master work, for my first blog post on his music I wanted to tip a hat to The Golden Age of Wireless both because I got attached to it first and because as his first album, it really signaled his pop genius in a huge way.

“Weightless” is a very unconventional song. It starts out with choral-esque vocals in a falling figure (long thematic figures, in either highish synth or in the bass line are a signature of Dolby’s songwriting) above large bottom-end symphonic synth and a cowbell striking out the beat. This builds for two phrases and then retreats to silence with a fading and pitchbending of the synth, like a machine running out of power. Then the verse comes in, which is jazzy.

Some nights he's weightless
he has to travel
his mouth is gravel
and there's an empty feeling within his heart...

This is very quiet, with only piano and bass and some a falling synth lines at the end of the stanza. Then the full combo comes in as jazzy pop with a bouncy rhythm track, but altogether still quite delicate:

Eye on the fuelguage
Westchester Thruway
that triple octane
won't contain the empty feeling in Dolby's heart...

Good romantic stuff. Guy alone driving, could be in England but it’s apparently Westchester NY (the NYS Thruway does go through there) because below he is in New Jersey. Then the bridge comes in and the delicateness builds into pop power:

Same old insecurity strap him into his carseat
and a sump started leaking all over New Jersey
gas stations everywhere -
not one drop to fill me.

Not sure what he’s talking about here. Houses have sumps, not cars, but maybe that’s why the gas stations are no good for him (actually going fairly deep into the web definitions for "sump" one finds, essentially, "oil pan", which must be it). But this quiets and goes into the heavily atmospheric “Fill me” section, with echoing harmonic (female) vocals. It’s total magic. Then we’re back to a double verse, again with the second of the two stanzas building some power. He’s talking about Lizzy now, the woman whom he wants to be with. The woman whom all of us lonely boys living Dolby’s lonely technopop existence vicariously through him want to be with:

Big hunk of carrot cake
blueberry milkshake
fistful of coldrex
won't fix the empty feeling in Lizzy's heart...
so she flicks on the TV
takes in a movie
but all those memories
won't erase the empty feeling from in her heart...

Then the bridge rebuilds:

Then a dog woke inside her head to watch the explosion
and a pipe started leaking as she bent to the basin
fruit juice everywhere -
not one drop to fill me

The amazing, soulful, “Fill me” chorus. Then Thomas croons:

'You could be the one' she whispered
'listen - love is all you've ever wanted
all you'll ever need.'

Then the finishing verse:

End of our summer
your body weightless in condensation
my heart learned to swim
and the feeling was gone again

Complete romance. Complete nostalgia. All of that bad stuff that Postmodernism told us was bad about Modernism. But screw all that. This song is one of my soundtracks. It’s been with me since high school. My sump’s been leaking since then. Not one drop (of anything) to fill me.

The Sign of Fire - The Fixx

The Fixx got quite a bit of airplay on both rock and pop stations in the early-mid 80s, starting with Red Skies from their 1982 debut album Shuttered Room, through their smash hit album Reach the Beach (1983), which had several songs that saw airplay, most notably One Thing Leads To Another and Saved by Zero, followed by Phantoms (1984), which contained the hit Are We Ourselves?. These last three songs essentially became permanent fixtures in the 80s pop canon. Their material after this period remained excellent but their mainstream popularity waned. I particularly like the album Calm Animals from 1988.

The sound of The Fixx is somewhat unique. Very tight but adept guitar work, the constrained high-end vocals of Cy Curnin (strangely he doesn’t have much of a web presence, although he is apparently still active, both with and without The Fixx), atmospheric synthesizer work, and somewhat minimalist drum and bass tracks. This was one of those bands who could only have achieved any kind of stardom in the 80s, when there were a huge variety of sounds within pop. The themes of the music were serious, running the gamut from politics to pop psychology to personal relationship stuff. The one mystery about the Fixx that I’ve never truly solved is why I have never met a female Fixx fan. The Fixx was music for introversion for myself and my (male) geek friends. I had female geek friends but this stuff was apparently lost on them. And no female 80s music fan I’ve met since high school has ever professed serious fandom of The Fixx. For whatever reason, there’s just a lack of appeal there for women…

Nevertheless, the atmospherics and unique musical sound of The Fixx is what has always attracted me. The Sign of Fire (sorry no Youtube video), off Reach the Beach, is a subtle song that managed to get a quite respectable amount of airplay (although it probably does not any more, now that “Classic Rock” seems to have taken over the formats of virtually all former rock stations).

This really is a masterfully written and produced pop song. After a very cold fade-in, the basic rhythmic sequence that defines the song breaks in. It’s a jumpy, mid-tempo, almost march-like composition, with the fragile and precise guitar so characteristic of The Fixx controlling the pace and a very spare somewhat stocatto-ey bass line. There’s a very nice guitar figure, impossible to describe, leading into the chorus. Again, it’s that fast, light, surgical, strongly-effected (phaser and/or chorus? I’m not a guitarist) Fixx sound of lead-guitarist Jamie West-Oram. The bass line bounces lightly during the chorus, in counterpoint to the guitar licks. I pretty much hate actual baroque music, but these are indeed the equivalent of baroque stylings for pop music. What other bands then or now did this and got on the radio? The break back into the verse from the chorus releases energy, but still maintains the precise Fixx control. In the second verse and thereafter there is some modulating synth in the background, adding to the disorienting atmosphere. After the second chorus there is a very atmospheric bridge (after the lyric “hot”; see below). Held synth strings in the background provide the atmosphere. But this is just a brief interlude before we go back to intro/verse music.

The lyrics are suitably cryptic. Here they are:

Heart of stone -- I tried to reach you
Of the altar stone -- I tried to warn you
But you were not alone -- you wouldn't take the call
You wear brimstone -- I tried to warm you
Always the same desire
After the tone -- they try to storm you
You are a voice alone and who dares to question
Forgotten at home - how do you live with
Do you wear brimstone -- give me the call
Always the sign is fire
I'm being drawn by the heat
Always the same desire. Hot
Through the telephone -- I tried to reach you
But if you're not alone -- I know your life is torn
I see your lover's tomb -- why don't you mention
To me whenever I call -- I'll try to warm you
Always the sign is fire
I'm being drawn by the heat
Always the same desire
You're not alone
Always the sign is fire
Heart of stone
Always the sign is fire . . . (repeat)

Not to jest about the lyrics – they fit the piece very well. It’s standard unrequited love stuff. The object has some complicated things going on. Wearing brimstone sounds pretty serious. And her (presumably it’s a she) lover has a tomb. Not good, one would think. The song fades out and we are left with unsettled angst. But it’s a very controlled and measured injection of atmosphere. A great soundtrack for many a lonely day walking around in the cold, I can attest well.