Curious George were one of many solid (if messy) punk-hardcore-whatever bands slamming around Vancouver in those curious years of perpetual struggle (otherwise known as the 1980s), their cover of this rather tired Pink Floyd original driving home the point that it’s seldom the song that’s wrong, only the performance. There is nothing wrong with this performance.
The Buzzcocks being one of truer teenage bands ever formed, Orgasm Addict being one of the truer teenage records ever produced, short and sharp and spewing in all directions.
XTC were never quite punk; they were too pop savvy for that. Though they were there from the beginning, tearing up facades with the best of them. So maybe just call them a damned good band who, by 1982’s double-vinyl English Settlement, were taking off in a pile of different directions uniquely their own, with Ball and Chain reminding us that they still had the pop.
“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.
Randophonic 