Music – Page 8 – Spirit of Dee

Gig Review: Tears For Fears at Leeds First Direct Arena, 9th February 2019

10 February 201910 February 2019 Dee Leave a comment

I’d been looking forward to this one for a long time.

I first became aware that Tears For Fears were doing a tour when they appeared on the Strictly results show during the 2017 series. To my disappointment, I couldn’t get tickets at the time (see my longwinded story about that here), but when the tour was postponed from 2018 to 2019, my ticket hunt had a happier outcome.

A major bonus was that Alison Moyet was supporting. I’ve loved her stuff since I was a kid, ’cause Mum and Dad had her Singles compilation and used to play it in the car all the time. As such, I made sure that Geth and I were at the venue promptly, ’cause I knew it would take a while to get in (security at big arenas has been understandably beefed up ever since the Manchester attack, so it takes longer to get into gigs these days).

(There was a bit of unintentional comedy thanks to Geth’s utter astonishment that this huge concert arena had ‘suddenly appeared’ in the middle of Leeds! He spent a lot of time in Leeds when living in York between 2000 and 2004, but the First Direct Arena was only opened in 2013.)

After grabbing a Tears For Fears badge pack from the merch stand (I love badges and have collected loads – I need to do something with them at some point) – we found our seats and settled in for the show!

Alison Moyet’s set had been advertised as an electronic set, but overall it was probably a fifty-fifty mix of Yazoo classics and her more modern blues-type tracks. I would have liked to hear more of her post-Yazoo ’80s electro stuff, but I really did enjoy the modern songs even though I wasn’t familiar with them, so I can’t complain.

My absolute highlight was obviously Only You. It’s one of my favourite songs of all time, to the extent that I walked down the aisle to it in 2012. Getting to see Alison Moyet perform it live was a really, really special thing for me.

Alison Moyet setlist:

I Germinate
Nobody’s Diary
Do You Ever Wonder
Beautiful Gun
All Cried Out
The Rarest Birds
The Sharpest Corner
Situation
Only You
Love Resurrection
Don’t Go

An interval and some more drinks later, it was time for the main event!

Tears For Fears were doing a shameless greatest hits set – signalled from the start when they came onstage to Lorde’s cover of Everybody Wants To Rule The World and then launched into the original version – and they have a lot of hits, so there were very few tracks I didn’t recognise. It was all enjoyable singalong numbers from start to finish, which was exactly what I wanted to hear.

It’s hard to choose a highlight, but I’m going to go with Mad World, which has been a favourite of mine for decades now (it was on the first ’80s nostalgia playlist I created back in the ’90s, and I remember in 2003 trying to convince my brother that the original was better than the Michael Andrews version). Again, it was such a nice moment to hear it live at long last.

Unusually, there was only one track played as part of the encore – but it was Shout, and it went on for ages, so it was a suitably epic finale!

Tears For Fears setlist:

Everybody Wants To Rule The World
Secret World
Sowing The Seeds Of Love
Pale Shelter
Break It Down Again
Everybody Loves A Happy Ending
Change
Mad World
Memories Fade
Suffer The Children
Woman In Chains
Advice For The Young At Heart
Badman’s Song
Head Over Heels
Shout

Overall a great gig to start the year’s live music, and it will take some beating. A bonus was that Geth was really impressed by the First Direct Arena, so he’s now very happy to join me in my endless ’80s musical indulgence when bands play in Leeds. We’ll be back there for A-ha in November!

Music Review: Pet Shop Boys: Agenda

9 February 20199 February 2019 Dee Leave a comment

There was a new Pet Shop Boys EP released yesterday, which is always a good thing! I’ve never listened to a Pet Shop Boys record I didn’t like, largely because they are extremely reliable and consistent in what they do (i.e. great synthpop tunes). The new release, Agenda, is no exception.

Let’s have a listen to the tracks.

Give Stupidity A Chance

Lovely happy synthscapes to kick off. Bit of a contrast with the doomy lyrics, but after the Specials last week I’m starting to get used to that!

On Social Media

Classic upbeat synthpop that was an instant earworm when I first listened to it on Thursday night. The rhymes are daft in an endearing way, and it’s a bit ‘old men ranting about modern technology’, but the tune is awesome and I’m going to be listening to it all week.

What Are We Going To Do About The Rich?

Great chant-along track! Another one for the daily playlist. The rhythm is fantastic.

The Forgotten Child

Something a bit slower, but gorgeously atmospheric, for the last track. Love the twinkly melancholy instrumental – it’s almost Christmassy for a minute, and then the beat drops. Gorgeous stuff.

Classic and classy as ever from PSB. Love this EP!

Music Video Monday: recent chart catchup

4 February 20194 February 2019 Dee Leave a comment

Another raft of current chart hits where the video’s only recently been released!

Jax Jones and Years & Years – Play

Daft, colourful, supermarket-checkout-themed video with lots of miniaturised people dancing on one of those motorised belts you put your shopping on. I highly approve of this one!

Calvin Harris and Rag ‘N’ Bone Man – Giant

Slightly trippy video with a nonsensical, unclear story. At first it seems to be a depressing tale about a young guy whose mother has a prescription pill addiction, and I’m going to guess that the rest of the stuff in the video is just part of his fantasy about escaping his life, because it’s all random shots of Calvin Harris living a secluded, self-sufficient life out in the woods with lots of fishing and campfire cooking, and then there’s some people riding horses, and then Rag ‘N’ Bone Man appears to be playing the role of some kind of nighttime forest dance cult leader, although he doesn’t actually dance himself. Anyway, some of the imagery is quite pretty, and I guess that’s the important thing in a music video.

Sam Smith and Normani – Dancing With A Stranger

The setting for this one is all very grey and minimalist, and I (obviously) love the ’80s-inspired grey leather sofas in Sam Smith’s otherwise empty living room, but it’s pretty bleak-looking until everyone starts dancing.

Back to the ’80s next Monday.

Music Review: The Specials: Encore

2 February 20192 February 2019 Dee Leave a comment

This album has been widely promoted as the first new music from the Specials since Ghost Town in 1981. It should be noted that it’s far from the original band lineup – the three original members involved in this album include two of the ones who went on to be in Fun Boy Three and the one who went on to be in General Public – but thirty-eight years is still a pretty notable gap in a band’s musical production.

Let’s have a listen!

Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys

Nice jazz funk intro, leading into an upbeat chanty vocal. Awesome beat, and I love the spiky accents in the background instrumentation. There’s a great funky instrumental in the middle too.

BLM

Another upbeat track with a politically charged spoken vocal over the top. It’s a little repetitive, but that actually works quite well for the storytelling that the track is trying to do. There’s also a nice atmospheric lift at the end of each verse, and a good rock instrumental in the second half, after which the funk guitar really kicks in.

Vote For Me

Great atmosphere on this one, with jazzy piano over a reggae beat. It’s exactly my kind of thing – a real classic sound that somehow manages to sound reminiscent of better modern music as well. That melancholy trumpet solo is just immense.

The Lunatics

Reworking of classic Fun Boy Three track The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum. More great piano on the intro, leading into another reggae beat and another nice trumpet solo. Good stuff.

Breaking Point

There’s a bit of a carnival feel to the background music here – it’s all very dark and jaunty. It makes everything very atmospheric and sounds as though it should be on a film soundtrack.

Blam Blam Fever

Some interesting things going on with the beat here, and it’s a bit more optimistic-sounding than the previous tracks – musically if not lyrically! I really like the juxtaposition of the different vocals, which is very classic Specials.

10 Commandments

Interesting intro, with military-band-sounding drums leading into electronic spaceship sounds, and a female spoken vocal over the top delivering to-the-point feminist lyrics. There are some great synthy atmospheric instrumental breaks as well.

Embarrassed By You

Warm, gorgeous melody, and another pleasant reggae beat. Like the rest of the tracks on the album, the lyrics are very politically critical, which makes for an interesting juxtaposition with the music.

The Life And Times (Of A Man Called Depression)

More spoken word, with verses broken up by atmospheric instrumentals with hints of ’60s lounge. I find the lyrical content of this one very powerful as it’s a topic that means a lot to me.

We Sell Hope

Gorgeous atmospheric intro that moves into a slow reggae beat. Another lovely melody, and a less angry but still important message in the lyrics. Great album ender.

Overall, I really enjoyed this one – it’s hugely refreshing to hear such nicely put together songs in 2019, and it’s important that political records are still being made in an age when there are so many things in the world that need to be addressed. Welcome back, Specials – I’d take this over the current chart fodder any day.

Music Video Monday: Tracey Ullman: My Guy

28 January 201911 February 2019 Dee Leave a comment

One of the things I love spotting in ’80s music videos is classic red phone boxes. You could probably have guessed that, if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time. The combination of ’80s music and the red phone box aesthetic makes a video several hundred percent better.

As I’ve discussed before, the UK started phasing out red phone boxes in 1985. The fact that so many are still standing thirty-four years later shows you how ubiquitous they were, and this was even more true in the ’80s, when they were still the standard UK phone box.

Tracey Ullman’s video for My Guy – her 1984 cover of Madness’ 1980 hit My Girl – is everything a 20th century telephone nerd could want in a music video. In addition to the aforementioned red phone box, there are classic phones a-go-go – none of them a GPO 746, sadly, but still very period-evocative. Let’s take a look!

At the start of the video, Tracey is dropped off at the bus stop in the rain by her boyfriend after an argument. This doesn’t involve telephones, but it does involve a super ’80s pimped-out car. Love that cadmium yellow colour!

Unlike many music videos to which I will be subjecting you all in the future, this video doesn’t actually contain a full-length shot of a classic red phone box. We get this close-up instead, where a cheery-looking individual is sabotaging Tracey’s phone call to her boyfriend with the help of some pliers. Those holes in between the red bars of the phone box are meant to have glass in them, incidentally (I believe this is known as a window). Music videos have never made any sense, and this one is no exception.

Back home, Tracey goes down to use the phone in the middle of the night, not realising that her mother has tampered with it. The phone in her mother’s house is a GPO 232, which was a type of GPO telephone issued between 1934 and 1957. You might wonder why the family still has such an old phone in 1984, but it’s probably for the same reason there’s still a ’70s-era GPO 746 sitting on the hall table in my parents’ house – i.e. it came with the house and it still works!

Again, no phones here, but I’ve always liked this girls-in-dinner-suits dance routine.

Of course, as I’ve discussed when doing my Now! marathon, the most notable thing about the video (assuming you don’t share my 20th century telephone obsession) is the Neil Kinnock subplot:

Neil first arrives at the end of the dance routine to partner Tracey in some kind of dance style that you don’t see on Strictly.

He then appears in a slightly more expected role, showing up to canvass at Tracey’s mother’s house. Side note: do party leaders actually go canvassing themselves during election campaigns? I know they at least sort of have to pretend that they’re still regular MPs in addition to spending a lot of time shouting at each other in the House of Commons.

Unfortunately, Neil’s bitten off more than he can chew with Tracey’s mother (also played by Tracey), who starts showing him all her photo albums. I love all the classic Labour slogan posters on the walls.

Neil shows up for a final time in the fast-food place where Tracey works, reading a paper. All the mosaic tiling and fancy plants look a little upmarket for a fast-food place. Maybe such places were just better in 1984.

Back to the phones! Tracey spends most of her work day waiting for the restaurant’s telephone to ring. I can’t place this model even after rummaging through a lot of databases on classic telephone sites, but it looks similar to a GPO 772 or 782.

The video ends without any resolution to the question of whether Tracey’s boyfriend is going to stop sulking and ring her back. They should have made a sequel.

Watch the full video:

Music Video Monday: Howard Jones: Life In One Day

14 January 201914 January 2019 Dee Leave a comment

I love music videos, so if you don’t mind, I’m going to babble on about them once a week from now on. Sometimes I’ll be discussing videos from modern chart hits where the video was released too late to be discussed on my New Hits Friday post, but usually I’ll just be banging on about the ’80s, when music videos, like everything else, were so much better. You have been warned.

I’m starting with Howard Jones’ Life In One Day (1985), which works on multiple levels and is a real hidden gem among ’80s videos.

The video starts out not looking like a music video at all. It looks like a Top of the Pops performance instead, complete with an introduction from a presenter (I think it’s Tony Blackburn, but the picture quality is so poor I can’t be sure) about how they’re not going to play the music video because Howard Jones is live in the studio. As the performance begins, there are a lot of jumps and scratches in the tape, like it’s from a dodgy old VHS copy that somebody’s had for years and has played over and over until it’s become degraded.

The original joke, of course, was that viewers would think there was something wrong with their TV picture and get up to perform percussive maintenance on their boxy mid-’80s TVs. A few commenters on the YouTube video describe doing exactly that back in the day.

But what’s so brilliant about the way the joke has aged is the accidental prescience of the way it works in the YouTube era. Here’s the thing: when you search for a music video for an ’80s hit song, YouTube will also throw up a whole load of contemporary performances of the song on music shows like Top of the Pops. Most of them are uploads of VHS copies that people taped off the TV when the show was first on, and so the VHS copy is thirty years old and features the exact kind of jumps, scratches, and other picture issues that were deliberately inserted into the Life In One Day video.

As such, the automatic reaction of a YouTube searcher to this video (it was certainly mine) will be: ‘oh, FFS, this is just the TOTP performance – where’s the actual music video?’ As such, modern viewers are fooled in a way that the video creators couldn’t have imagined back in 1985! Nothing makes this clearer than the fact that the top search on YouTube for the song is ‘howard jones life in one day official video’, which is exactly what you put in when you’ve just watched what you believe to be the opening few seconds of a Top of the Pops performance, shut the video in frustration and try to find the ‘actual’ video instead.

I think this is partly also due to the fact that the Life In One Day video is rarely shown on TV nowadays (I’ve certainly never seen it on any of the UK music channels on my TV package) – perhaps because the joke is (ironically) seen as dated now – and so people are more likely to hunt for the video online.

Anyway, the rest of the video is great too – the imaginary VHS-recording viewer starts to change channels, but the TV keeps flicking back to the performance, and then the song and lyrics start to seep into the other programmes – a newsreader’s words, the background music in laundry detergent adverts, the featured video in a record company advert. It’s all very cleverly done, but of course it’s the initial joke that I find to be the real standout feature of this video.

I noticed from the end credits that Godley and Creme were involved in the production of the video – they did some brilliant videos during the ’80s, so I’m sure I’ll end up discussing them again soon.

Another music video next week!

2018 Chart of the Year

4 January 20194 January 2019 Dee Leave a comment

The UK Top 100 of 2018 has been confirmed! Some thoughts:

I at least ‘sort of like’ thirty-eight of the songs, which is more than I expected. The rest are all at least ‘fairly awful’, with a handful actually being painful to listen to.
I am hoping that the 2019 chart will not be similarly filled with songs from the soundtracks of film musicals.
I am not exactly thrilled that Calvin Harris and Dua Lipa’s One Kiss was the top song of 2018, ’cause I find it extremely dull.
However, I do think it’s brilliant that the Killers’ Mr Brightside, which was released in 2004, is still sitting at #80! Apparently this is because people are constantly streaming it to play in the background at things like weddings and football matches. It was probably my second favourite track out of the whole Top 100 (5 Seconds Of Summer’s Youngblood was my favourite), which says something about how much the quality of chart music has declined even in the last fourteen years!
I am already looking forward to the ‘Top 100 of the Decade’ chart that will be released in a year’s time…

TV Review: Top of the Pops Christmas and New Year

31 December 201831 December 2018 Dee Leave a comment

I actually got around to watching the festive episodes of Top of the Pops this year! Since 2006, when the weekly show got cancelled after more than four decades, they only show new episodes at Christmas time – all other showings of TOTP are classic ’80s episodes on BBC4 (which, frankly, is better, but it’d still be nice to have a modern weekly show). However, presenters Fearne Cotton and Clara Amfo do a very good job of imitating the classic style of TOTP presenting, and thus make it come across like TOTP is something that happens all the time! If only it were true.

The Christmas episode had a good selection of artists performing various hits, although there were one or two artists doubling up, which breaks the DJing rule! The New Year episode (which was shown on the 29th of December for some reason), meanwhile, was more focused on new music for 2019 that’s not been in the charts yet. Most of it was a bit dull, but there were a few gems in there that I’ve added to my Spotify playlist – Girlfriend by Christine & The Queens was a particular favourite.

It’s a shame it’s only on at Christmas these days, but the BBC4 ’80s episodes will keep me nicely occupied until next December!

Mark Coney plays ‘La Bamba’

22 December 201822 December 2018 Dee Leave a comment

Context: due to the LadBaby parody version coming out of nowhere to be Christmas number one, I’ve had Starship’s We Built This City in my head periodically for the last twenty-four hours (which is an absolute blessing, ’cause I was terrified it was going to be the LadBaby version that would be the earworm). However, because I am the queen of misheard lyrics, my brain keeps singing the wrong words.

Earworm brain:

Mark Coney plays ‘La Bamba’
Listen to the radio
Don’t you remember
We built this city
We built this city on rock and roll

Logical brain (after about fifty repetitions of this):

Hang on a minute. Who’s Mark Coney?

Music lover brain:

Was he a DJ? That would make sense. I’ll go look him up on Wikipedia.

Logical brain:

I don’t think so. I think we’re hearing the words wrong.

General knowledge brain:

I think it’s actually ‘Marconi’. You know, the radio guy, who invented the radio, or something. I vaguely remember something about him from when we got Dad that book on amateur radio as a Christmas present.

Logical brain:

That would make sense.

Evidence-obsessive brain:

Let’s look the lyrics up online to be absolutely sure.

Google:

Marconi plays the mamba
Listen to the radio
Don’t you remember
We built this city
We built this city on rock and roll

Music lover brain:

…the mamba? Really?

General knowledge brain:

I was right about Marconi though.

Logical brain:

And it probably makes more sense if you factor in the time period of the song’s narrative.

Music lover brain:

I’m…I’m kind of attached to Mark Coney now. Whoever he is. And besides, I like ‘La Bamba’.

Evidence-obsessive brain:

But…but…but it’s wrong! Those are the wrong words!

Creative brain:

Nothing’s ever stopped me from making up my own words to songs before. I can name at least three songs where it’s always my own version of the lyrics that gets in our head rather than the official version.

Evidence-obsessive brain:

But there’s a difference between deliberately inventing alternative lyrics and getting them wrong because you’ve misheard them. The latter is wrong. And we’re never wrong, are we? We strive to be…not wrong.

Music lover brain:

…I suppose so.

Creative brain:

I’ll sit down and write a full set of alternative lyrics, then. Except…no, I can’t, because LadBaby literally just did that, and so it would be unoriginal.

Evidence-obsessive brain:

Good! So we’re all agreed, then. It’s going to be the correct version of the lyrics that gets in our head from now on.

Earworm brain:

Mark Coney plays ‘La Bamba’
Listen to the radio
Don’t you remember
We built this city
We built this city on rock and roll

Electric Dreams day 3

4 December 20184 December 2018 Dee Leave a comment

By Sunday, I was really starting to feel the effects of trying to do a music festival with a bad cold, and so I sort of staggered through the day powered by a lot of Lemsip Max Strength! I’d given up drinking by this point as well, which meant the drunks in the venue were even more annoying.

The Butlins cooked breakfast hadn’t done it for me the day before, so I went for a giant stack of pancakes on the Sunday morning, which was marginally tastier. Geth and I then went back to the hotel room and groggily took ages getting showers and things, so we were a little late into the Centre Stage for the Sunday afternoon session and the first band had already started.

Bands I didn’t see on day 3: nobody, because it was just stand-up comedy in the Reds bar on the Sunday, so I didn’t have to miss any bands!

Bands I did see on day 3:

Black Box

Black Box were mainly doing their late ’80s/early ’90s dance classics, but there was a good highlight where they did a mash-up of Sweet Dreams and Seven Nation Army with the vocals from the former over the bassline of the latter. They also (obviously) finished with Ride On Time, which was much appreciated by the crowd!

Big Country

Big Country get super major plus points for being the only band of the weekend with the balls to make a ‘Hi-De-Hi’ gag. Great stuff. I was also excited to tick off the first of the ‘message’ artists on my Band Aid baby bucket list!

Otherwise it was a very enjoyable hit-laden set – with Look Away, Wonderland, and Fields Of Fire (complete with an interesting interpolation of Whiskey In The Jar) all present and correct! In another example of the Butlins stage managers not being able to deal with bands trying to do encores, the band went offstage and the DJ launched into Heaven 17’s Temptation (at which point I expressed my surprise to Geth that the band hadn’t done In A Big Country and Geth shrugged and went off to the bar to get us another drink)…and then Temptation abruptly cut out and the band came back on. ‘We are Heaven 17!’ announced Bruce Watson wryly, before we finally got our rendition of In A Big Country. I have no idea what’s going on with Butlins and their aversion to encores.

We then had a good long break before the evening session, which gave us some recovery time to have a bit of a doze.

OOTD 2nd December 2018 — Sunday OOTD: still in my ‘ill at a festival’ uniform! Jacket unknown brand (estimated vintage 1990s, bought at vintage shop 2003), necklace Claire’s Accessories (2003), t-shirt Punk Masters (2018), jeans Levi (2018), boots Primark (2017).

Peter Hook & The Light

We’d already seen Peter Hook & The Light at Infest this year, but as I’ve alluded to, the crowd at Electric Dreams is a vastly different type of audience. As such, it was a subtly different show, with more of an end-of-term party atmosphere – Hooky, resplendent in a Christmas T-shirt, explained that it was their last gig of the year, and we got the first (but strangely not the last) of the evening’s Jimmy Savile jokes. Geth went down to the front of the stage while I kept the seats, and from where I was sitting, it just felt really, really weird when the crowd didn’t react at all to the band launching into Joy Division classics like Transmission (especially as I last saw the band at a goth festival with lots of other goths, a subculture in which the Joy Division stuff is absolutely sacrosanct). Geth reported after the set that from his viewpoint near the front of the stage, the band pretty much phoned in the first couple of Joy Division songs until they realised that there was a small group of people down the front who were actually fans, after which they did things properly.

The audience all went nuts for Blue Monday though, so that’s something! Hooky also did the gag about turning the lights up on the crowd and then immediately going ‘argh, no!’, which would probably have been funnier if Big Country hadn’t done the exact same joke earlier that day.

The set was pretty much the same as when I saw them at Infest, except for there being a couple of extra New Order songs – they did Regret, which is one of my absolute favourites (I had it on my Greatest Hits of 1993 album when I was eight). It was also great to hear Temptation again, because the music geek in me was thrilled that it was the first of two famous Temptations we’d hear that night…

Heaven 17

…because Heaven 17 were headlining, and they were hardly going to avoid playing their Temptation, were they?

Before the inevitable closing song, though, we got all the classics – (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang, Come Live With Me, Let Me Go – and a lot of very funny stage banter between Martyn Ware and Glenn Gregory, who’ve been doing this stuff for nearly forty years and have moved firmly into ‘old married couple’ territory. This included another Jimmy Savile gag (apparently he introduced their first Top of the Pops appearance) and some slightly risqué Morecambe and Wise references.

There was a cover of David Bowie’s Let’s Dance, which is another song that’s a bit of a theme for covers at the moment. They also played Being Boiled, which was the Human League’s biggest hit while Martyn Ware was still with the band – which meant that in the space of five days, Geth and I managed to see Being Boiled performed by both the Human League and Heaven 17! Geth preferred the Human League performance, while I gave the edge to Heaven 17. Both brilliant and very different though!

I enjoyed the performance so much that I was really surprised when they launched into Temptation to finish the set – it honestly felt to me like they’d only been playing for about five minutes. I’m so thrilled I got to see them, and not just because it means more artists ticked off my Band Aid baby bucket list! I’ll make sure to get tickets again when they’re next on tour.

Afterwards, Geth and I finished our drinks and sloped off to get some rest. All in all, it was a fantastic weekend of music and the bands were great…it was just a shame we had to go to Butlins to see them.

Updated Band Aid baby bucket list progress: song artists 4/37 (10.8%); message artists 2/7 (28.6%); total artists 6/44 (13.6%).