“Spring 1980. I first hear of a band called Joy Divison. Apparently, they’re like a new wave Doors. Which is all I need to hear. I head down to Quintessence Records prepared to pay big bucks for an import. Except, ‘Sorry,’ says the guy at the counter, ‘we’re sold out since the main guy killed himself.’ Ouch. Less than a year later, we start to hear New Order, the band that rose from those ashes – cool and eerie and sounding exactly like the future.” (Philip Random)
Everybody (or their big sister) had a copy of Cat Stevens Greatest Hits back in the day, and it was a darned good collection in a heartfelt folkie-poppy sort of way. But if you really wanted to know the depth of the Cat, you had to go to track one, side two of the album Catch Bull At Four, the song called 18th Avenue (Kansas City Nightmare) which managed in its less than four and a half minutes to cover all manner of mood and intensity, all of it cloaked in doom and shadow and, despite the obliqueness of its lyrics, definitely going somewhere.
Fleetwood Mac have been any number of different bands in their time, not just in terms of lineup but overall sound. 1970’s Kiln House may have offered a nicely benign album cover, but the back story was altogether darker, Peter Green, the band’s main singer, songwriter, guitar god having only recently gone psychedelically AWOL,never to fully return, leaving the rest of the band left to pick up the pieces. Which they did wonderfully at first, Kiln House being the best Fleetwood Mac release of the 1970s … until Lindsey + Stevie signed on and kicked things into cocaine supernova.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zfivq3Ou4_M
If you were there at the time (1984) and paying attention, Repo Man (the movie) was pretty much perfect, nailing all the right targets, scoring all the right points, and it all started with Iggy Pop cutting loose over the opening credits. Welcome to the so-called Winter of Hate, with Repo Man (and its punk-hardcore-whatever-you-want-to-call-it soundtrack) giving this long weird season (it lasted years) a fierce and virulent focus. Not that there wasn’t any love in the mid-80s. Of course there was. But you couldn’t really make sense of the times and your place in them (in North America anyway) until you owned your hate. Until you knew what to hate. Otherwise, you were just going to get eaten by hungry robots like everybody else. Or nuked. Whichever came first.
Midnight Oil’s politics have gotten most of the attention over the years, which makes sense. It’s not as if they weren’t wearing them on their sleeves, with U.S. Forces as good an example as any. But the music should also be noted, because here was an outfit that could rock every bit as hard as the Clash, while also working the sort of pop precision you’d expect from an XTC. And with lyrics like, “Everyone too stoned to start a mission, People too scared to go to Prison,” you had a pretty rich and relevant package with 1982’s 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 as good a place to start as any.
As the story goes, Jah Wobble‘s dream was to somehow hook up with Can’s rhythm section (Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit) and make a record, which he finally pulled off for Full Circle. Except he took the record company’s advance money, blew it all on drugs, alcohol, other stupid stuff, and neglected to pay his heroes, who he then avoided for years out of shame. But the album still stands, one of the best of 1982, or any other year for that matter. How Much Are They? was the single.
Randophonic 