Neon lit psychotic synth punk biker boogie. This future has yet to arrive. Suicide were an entirely electronic duo. Martin Rev created one hell of a hypnotic, paranoid and insistent sound with just a broken farfisa and some homemade electronic effects. Lyric subject matter covered pop culture, love, sex, murder and the grim reality of urban/mental squalor. All this was sung by a reverbed to the max Alan Vega, who was an intergalactic rockabilly performance artist. Seminal.
Loved this when I was little too. Children are strange. The teacher who did the 2 The Langley Schools Project LPs in the 70s said that the kids responded much more to the strange and emotional songs than the straight ahead pop tunes.
It's funny how songs like this appeal to you as a child. I guess it was like a portal into what adulthood intensity was going to be like. Little did we know how painful such things were going to be and that we never really wanted to go through a scenario such as the one outlined in this song. Great songwriting but if you look a little closer this is actually quite a disturbing tune. In there somewhere seems to be a suicide threat.
I loved this when I would have been 10. Quite possibly the greatest heartbreaking tune of them all. It's all too much! That voice too.
I loved this when it came out. I would have only been like 8 but it got played to death on the regional radio station of my childhood 3MA when I lived in Buronga. Of course I wouldn't have realised the Stevie Nicks connection. Maybe I thought it was Fleetwood Mac though, I mean it's co-produced by Lindsay Buckingham. I think I actually only learnt that a year or two back!
This was on a hits compilation (Chartbusters?) when I was like 10. I wouldn't have realised who he was until at least 5 years later. I remember my sister thinking he was a bit of alright. I dunno though, he's stacked on a few pounds and isn't as cool as he was during the Rumours/Tusk era or even circa The Dance. Is this a good tune? I have no idea. I can't get it out of my head though.
Finally a book on Flying Nun written by the guy who started the label. Haven't read it yet. Here's a podcast from the other day with the author and a bunch of old film clips. Can't help but think this might be quite boring though, like that podcast. How sycophantic is that interviewer as well? Bruce Russell once hinted that Flying Nun's signings weren't necessarily based on aesthetics or great judgement but just whatever bands existed on the south island and other parts of NZ at the time. They were lucky there were so many good ones. This was further demonstrated in the late 80s when, after Flying Nun did some major label deal, a lot of the better acts started getting their work rejected. Anyway I hope it's good or do I?.........I wonder if the Axemen will get a mention?
I kind of liked it when you knew very little about underground music from NZ or Flying Nun. In the 80s I reckon there were only like 5 videos that ever got played on Rage. You'd see a small news article on The Clean or Verlaines in RAM back then plus the occasional review or bit on The Clean or The Chills in NME and Melody Maker. In Clinton Walker's 1983 (published in 84) book The Next Thing, which was about the current state of Australian rock, there was one paragraph at the end of the book mentioning The Clean, Victor Dimisich Band, The Chills and The Gordons. Walker speculated that perhaps there was something cool going on over there in the land of the long white cloud. He wasn't even sure if The Clean were still together! That's how little information there was at the time. Finding a Flying Nun record was like discovering treasure. Now all that fabulous mystique has gone and we're way too over informed more and more each day. I miss the mystery. I don't wanna know how much a Bats LP cost or how many copies they manufactured. It was all about these peculiarly beautiful tunes that seemed to come out of nowhere or maybe from a parallel time and universe. New Zealand seemed so mysterious and so far away then, even though it's just a short flight from East Coast Australia.
Whilst moving house recently a printed out image of the cover to this tape came out of one of my boxes. I'd printed it out a couple of years ago as I thought it was an incredible piece of pop art as previously mentioned. I'd only seen the cover and heard one of their tunes back then but a few months after that original post I found a cd in a second hand record shop in Melbourne. It was a little confusing though as it was credited to The Birth Of 5XOD. It was only like $6 so I bought it anyway. When I finally got home and did the interweb research I discovered it indeed was the same album Minimal Wave had reissued. I'd just never heard of 5XOD (or Five Times Of Dust) but I soon discovered they'd released 4 tapes in the early 80s and contained members Mark Philips and Robert Lawrence who were the original band Dadacomputer. Confused? Anyway it wasn't until blog Die or DIY? put up a file of 5XOD in 2014 that I ever heard them. Last year Johnny Zchivago of the aforementioned blog put up a whole lot of stuff from Mark Philips, Robert Lawrence and other associates of The Dadacomputer/5XOD and fuck that was like an avalanche of revelation.
Getting back to the original Dadacomputer tape from1981, it has since become a cult classic at my home, on the internet, amongst electro fiends and.....er... hipsters and continues to grow in stature by the minute. So much so that a tune from the tape has been included on the 4 CD compilation of UK electronic music from 1975 -1984 Close To The Noise Floor. In fact it's the first track on that collection, as if the compiler was trying to make a statement about the merits of the band. There's also a tune from 5XOD included as well. Anyway The Dadacomputer tape is a classic of it's ilk. The primitive melodic electronics are like an unholy union created in the interzone of Computer World and 20 Jazz Funk Greats except it is fabulously unique. Which makes that description kind of deceptive. The contents range from computer-y disco to proto-house to trippy journeys into sound to minimal pre-IDM through to the just plain weird/normal. The Dadacomputer are neglected alien space babies lost inside el cheapo computers from 1981. On the surface it seems sonically rudimentary but on closer inspection it is perhaps sophisticated. Had enough paradoxes, oxymorons, confusion etc? Well I'll stop there.
Eventually I'll do a post on Map 7 which is an epic 10 tape series by Map (ie. Mark Philips 1/2 of The Dadacomputer) from 1981 because it is awesome.
I will explain in this little post the reasons for the continuous interruptions to transmissions of my blog suffice to say health problems and a David Toop style dry patch have played roles in this. Didn't Toop retire from The Wire because he couldn't write about or listen to music anymore? Since last November there's probably been only 7 or 8 days where I've wanted to listen to music. This has made writing my blog a bit hard as it's primarily music based. Culture is a funny old thing, when you are really ill it ceases to have any meaning whatsoever for me. So in the past at least 7 months I've seen it as trivial and inconsequential. That could be the art of Rembrandt, Mike Kelley, Christian Marclay or whoever to music like Miles Davis, Love, The Fall, Omni Trio or Young Thug to beloved movies like Bring The Head Of Alfredo Garcia, Don't Look Now, King Of New York etc. I don't want to be disengaged by the things I admire artistically and time will tell if the passion can make a return. I mean I'm pretty much done with movies, particularly those of the last 20 or so years but also retroactively. Such as films I once admired as a younger person. I cannot imagine sitting through a Hal Hartley film now (or at any time in the last 10 years) but I once rated him very highly. So anything could happen with regards to me and culture high or low (like there's any distinction in my brain with regard to that anyway) in the future.
Had the 7" of the above back in the day but fuck I should have bought the 12" as it's way better and still so good.
One of Prince's great gifts to the world was his songwriting, producing and playing with women. In the case of the above Vanity 6 tune he plays a woman in the song. He wasn't going to be pinned downed by society's sexual conventions. I was going to write a long personal post about sexuality, hating aspects of my own sex etc. with reference to Morrissey, Robert Forster, Michael Hutchence and of course Prince but I thought fuck it the past is the past. I didn't want to write a self therapy session. Don't get me started on Therapy! What a load of shit. Anyway here's an article by Simon on Princehere.
