Today’s guest poster is Eurotrash – who has over the last couple of years introduced me to some frankly brilliant music that would have otherwise passed over my head totally. Nine times out of ten, the nominations for the various Musical Jury Polls that come from Eurotrash are so brilliantly leftfield that I often spend hours climbing out of the rabbit holes that he has sent me down.
He also started his email with this line
“I’m always excited to have a new audience for these guys… They’re so far removed from the stuff I typically listen to, but isn’t that the whole point of this series?”
And the only answer to that is, yes, it’s totally the point of this series.
Here is Eurotrash, and folks, if you’ve never heard the Tikiyaki Orchestra before, your ears are in for an absolute treat.
Who had ‘Bachelor pad Lounge music with a crime and spy jazz swagger’ on their Bingo Cards? Anyone? Nobody? Ok you’re in for a treat then.
The Tikiyaki Orchestra describe themselves as being the house band of the tiki universe. But that isn’t some idle brag – they’ve got the skills and the sense of fluid timing to make it all sound so effortless. They know exactly what they’re doing and they do it better than anyone else.
Their fifth album ‘Tropika’ is a romp through warm water and Tropical islands. It’s like a soundtrack to that trip of a lifetime you’ve always been planning, but somehow never quite got around to booking. But as with the best of adventures (and many 60’s & 70’s TV Detective shows) there’s a smattering of danger and intrigue in paradise.
Beyond the typical instruments you’ll find the vibraphone, steel guitars, theremin and island percussion. Locked together they shift smoothly between the spy-cool strut of ‘Espionage-a-trois’, the languid shimmer of ‘Hotel St Serenade’ and the slow-burning menace of ‘The Outbreak’. Sure, you’re sceptical and it sounds like it shouldn’t work, but just pour yourself a fruity alcoholic beverage, plop a tiny umbrella into the glass, (optionally) slather yourself in coconut butter and play this album. And perhaps just maybe over the next 40 or so minutes you too can avoid thinking about Stoke-on-Trent on a wet Tuesday night.
Special bonus: there’s a stripped-down version of the band playing live and releasing music as Tikiyaki 5-0. It’s more surf than exotica, and they’ve done a kick-ass version of a Beatles track that segues into The Pyramids’ ‘Penetration’ — transforming the mawkishly sentimental original into a monster surf track.
The vocals and strings are thrown overboard and pristine surf guitar riffs and island percussion are bolted into place instead. Sure, it sounds like a terrible idea, but just play it — preferably loud. When the ‘5-0 play it live on stage it devolves into a seven-minute theremin-powered wig out. Which is the last thing you expect from a Paul McCartney tune.
The Tikiyaki Orchestra are the band playing in the lounge of the hotel where the greatest fruity alcoholic drinks with umbreallas plonked in them are served. Outstanding stuff.
Tomorrow, we have another guest post from a No Badger Debutant.
Welcome to the final week of our quick jaunt around a bunch of bands and albums that are underappreciated. This week we have three more guest posts. The first of which comes courtesy of the wonderful Khayem from the ever excellent Dubhed blogand is all about a band which – well let’s use Khayem’s exact words
“I’ll be gobsmacked if anyone else had picked this band to write about”
Here’s Khayem. Oh and any ***’s you may see, are my doing.
Bands you love that no one else does: The Dream Academy
The thing is, I didn’t fall in love with The Dream Academy when their debut single ‘Life In A Northern Town’ was a Top 15 hit in April 1985. I mean, it was a good single but there were plenty of good singles around at the time.
I thought they looked pretty cool and I knew Kate St. John’s name from the pages of Smash Hits, where they’d enthused about her time in The Ravishing Beauties with Virginia Astley and Nicky Holland (who I’d never heard) and playing on Julian Cope’s albums ‘World Shut Your Mouth’ and ‘Fried’ (which I had).
I didn’t know anything at all about Gilbert Gabriel and front person Nick Laird-Clowes, but I liked the look of them: immaculate hair, cool clothes and bone structure that could have been carved from marble.
The song that hooked me was the follow-up single, ‘The Love Parade’, and in no small part due to two things. The first was an advert in Smash Hits which proclaimed that formats included a 7” and 12” single as standard, but also a double pack gatefold 7” with a bonus single. The second was my local record shop, Sound Seekers, a bright spot in an otherwise dreary suburban high street, and a proprietor who was keen to foster this teen’s growing appetite for new music (and sell a few records along the way, of course).
A combination of the two meant that I was able to get my hands on the coveted double pack gatefold 7” of ‘The Love Parade’. Fortunately, I’d heard it a few times by then and liked it even more than ‘Life In A Northern Town’. This was the point that me and most of the UK began to diverge.
In later years, I was more likely to splash out on multiple formats but in the summer of 1985, I was 14 years old with a part-time job in my parents’ shop (Saturdays and holidays) and a Nan who still set aside an inflation-proof 20p a week pocket money, though I suspect that was more a way of tangibly demonstrating how many weeks that had lapsed since I’d last seen her, than setting me up for life, financially.
My record buying therefore had to be balanced with a similarly compelling comic habit, occasional bus fares into the city, and other social expenses. As such, I was partly responsible for ‘The Love Parade’ stalling at #68 in mid-September.
It was (excuse the pun) a lovely package, though: single and instrumental versions of ‘The Love Parade’ fronted each 7”; on the B-side was ‘Girl In A Million (For Edie Sedgwick)’ which I loved even though I had no idea who Edie Sedgwick was. The final song was ‘Things We Said Today’, a cover of The Beatles’s song from 1964, although at the time I wasn’t familiar with the original.
As winter 1985 approached, so did The Dream Academy’s third – and it transpired, final – attempt to crack the UK charts. This time, it wasn’t even one of their own songs, but a cover of ‘Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want’. Naturally, I was intimately familiar with the original, having pretty much worn out my copy of The Sm***s’ Hatful Of Hollow on cassette.
I had reservations about The Dream Academy doing a version, let alone releasing it as a single. I mean, the original wasn’t even two minutes long! And it was maudlin, even for The Sm***s!
Yet, it was that fateful combination of marketing and a canny record shop owner that compelled me to buy the single. This time, the 12” single came shrink wrapped with a copy of ‘Life In A Northern Town’, thereby enabling me to complete my singles collection in one fell swoop! The pragmatist-cum-cynic in me now recognises that this ploy was not only a way of attracting buyers who remembered The Dream Academy’ solitary hit single, but also shifting unsold copies of the latter.
My dealer at Sound Seekers had kept a copy to one side as he “thought I might like it”, having bought ‘The Love Parade’, and I was hardly going to say no. The thing is, I genuinely thought it was a great package. ‘Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want’ wasn’t nearly as bad as I feared it might be, good even, and there was an instrumental mix too. The other songs on the 4-track 12” were even better: ‘In Places On The Run’ and ‘The Party’, respectively an edit and an acoustic version of songs from The Dream Academy’s debut album, which had been released the month before.
‘The Life In A Northern Town’ 12” was equally great: the extended version was even better than the original (both included); there was ‘Poised On The Edge Of Forever’, another alternate version from the album, and ‘Test Tape No.3’, a non-album track.
I thought I’d got a bargain and looked forward to ‘Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want’ becoming a smash hit and returning The Dream Academy to Top Of The Pops. No such luck: it peaked at #83 and by the time of my 15th birthday in early December, the single was clinging onto the Top 100 for one last week before falling into the abyss… or the bargain bin, at least.
in early 1986, my birthday WH Smith voucher in hand, this was exactly where I found The Dream Academy’s self-titled album. Of course I had to rescue it from undeserved obscurity!
Given the stripped back, sparing production of songs on the three EPs that I already owned, I was surprised at how expensive (and expansive) sounding the album was. Poring over the inner sleeve, I saw that the album was co-produced with Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd, which explained a lot.
Whilst they’re still great songs, I prefer the simpler arrangements of ‘The Edge Of Forever’ and ‘The Party’ that I first encountered on the 12” singles. That said, I love the album for all of that it is very much a product of it’s time (and budget) and there is perhaps no better example of this than side two opener Bound To Be’s’ over the top, everything and the kitchen sink approach. And slap bass that would have given Mark King pause, for sure.
At school, I decorated my bag and exercise book covers with band names, lyrics and related images: The Dream Academy and flower screen print from ‘The Love Parade’ made it. Perhaps met with greater indifference and fewer quizzical looks than my parallel interest in Boo Hewerdine’s combo, in hindsight unfortunately named The Bible, the only convert to The Dream Academy was my girlfriend. Well, for the few brief tumultuous and thrilling months of our relationship. I suspect she may have ditched The Dream Academy mixtape when we split.
Nick, Gilbert and Kate must have been gutted that The Dream Academy spent just two weeks in the album chart in October 1985, and that ‘Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want’ hadn’t been the much needed shot in the arm.
And yet…their profile received a considerable boost when the song (vocal and instrumental versions) were used in the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Enough for The Dream Academy to be signed to Reprise for their second album, ‘Remembrance Days’, and presumably with a similar budget as they enticed Lyndsey Buckingham away from Fleetwood Mac to co-produce several songs. It was also an early credit for a certain Hans Zimmer, who went onto bigger and better things as a film composer.
I bought the lead single ‘Indian Summer’ on 12” single, and I liked it, but life had already moved on. I’d left school and started college and other music was vying for my attention. I didn’t buy the album and, to all intents and purposes, I forgot all about The Dream Academy.
In 1990, I was surprised to see that The Dream Academy were back. Not only back, but also getting down with the beat-laden, loved up cover versions that were beginning to permeate the charts. Nick and co. opted to reimagine John Lennon’s 1970 song ‘Love’ and got Poly Styrene from X-Ray Spec in to provide some accompanying chants, to complement the samples of the classic ‘Funky Drummer’ and (on the remixes) the contemporary ‘What Is Love?’ by Deee-Lite.
Unfortunately, where ‘I’m Free’ by The Soup Dragons had nailed the all-important radio and chart impact, The Dream Academy experienced the opposite and ‘Love’ was most certainly not all around for them.
I upped sticks and went to Australia for 12 months a few months later, so I managed to miss their third and final album ‘A Different Kind Of Weather’. Despite the return of David Gilmour and some great songs, though more ‘trad’ ‘Academy with Love’ being the stylistic exception rather than the rule, ‘A Different Kind Of Weather’ didn’t produce a different kind of outcome for The Dream Academy’s commercial success.
By the time I returned to the UK in late summer 1991, The Dream Academy has played their last gigs earlier in the year and were effectively over as a going concern. Over the next decade, I relinquished their first album during a necessary but reluctant vinyl cull, then bought all three albums on secondhand CD a few years later.
In 2016, Nick and Kate reunited as The Dream Academy for a few gigs in Japan and even played a one-off in 2017 at The Tabernacle in Talgarth, Wales. I wish I’d known, I would have made the three-hour round trip.
in 2024, Cherry Red released the 7-CD box set ‘Religion, Revolution & Railways’, which covered all of the albums but also pretty much replaced all of the crackly vinyl rips and dodgy edits that I’d acquired online over the years. I also kept hold of The Dream Academy’s first four singles on vinyl (some things I just wasn’t prepared to part with) and their music continues to be in regular rotation at Casa K or out and about.
What is it I love about The Dream Academy? It’s really hard to pin down, especially as other artists have arguably explored similar genres, styles and lyrical narratives with greater success, at least in respect of sales or longevity.
Maybe SWC put it best in his invitation to submit a contribution, to write about “The one who people look at you oddly whenever you mention them.” That was The Dream Academy for me and they more than delivered on that.
Excellent work Khayem. The Dream Academy completely passed me by – possibly because the peaked in the eighties when I was still figuring how Lego worked – but I’ve just spent a decent couple of hours getting to know their work.
Tomorrow sees another guest posting and another band who will be featured on No Badger Required for the first time.
Welcome to the fourth part of this series, which explores songs that are hidden within photographs. Today’s photograph shows a glass structure within the confines of the German Reichstag. It was taken in October 2023 on the day my daughter turned 11.
‘Barafundle’ is a record that relishes the simple, often forgotten things in life. Things like visiting your nan, going for a walk when the sun is out and sitting by a warm fire with a girl that you love. It’s also a record that is very delicate, both in the content and the way it sounds. The sort of record that feels like it could snap at any point, because its just so nice, and as we all know, we can’t have nice things for very long.
Over its sixteen tracks, ‘Barafundle’ gives us some wonderful times, a raft of acoustic driven songs that are complimented by faint wafts of brass, gorgeous melodies, and the occasional foray into eccentricity. It is a record that encourages you to breath and to dive into the harmonies and the spaces that they leave behind. Not many records do that, and even fewer do it as well as Gorky’s did here.
There are songs here that once you have heard them you will never forget them, not because they are necessarily banging earworms, although it is a record that is full of infectious choruses, the sort that bounce merrily before waving and heading off in a completely different direction, no, you’ll remember then because they are the kind of songs that just stick around and are the sort of song that you’ll find yourself whistling when you stick the washing out or you are waiting for a bus.
One of those infectious songs is the impossibly beautiful ‘Patio Song’, which should need no introduction to most of you, a track that starts in English, with a line about the weather and about boating on a Sunday with a girl and then following a frankly incredible break, finishes in Welsh with some lines about holding hands in the rain (I think, my Welsh is not great). How, ‘Patio Song’ was never a number one hit for like six continuous years, is utterly beyond me.
Songs like ‘Patio Song’ and the equally brilliant ‘Diamond Dew’ give the impression that ‘Barafundle’ is going to take you on a Belle and Sebastian style adventure into the realms of tweeness, but the almost childlike innocent of it allows for elements of darkness to creep it. ‘Sometimes The Father Is The Son’ for instance has a mournful violin zigzagging its way through the song, which hints at a troubled youth and elsewhere the almost rocky ‘Meirion Wyllt’ features distorted guitars and a rare yelped vocal from the excellent Euros Childs.
Today sees another guest post, and it sees another person making their debut on No Badger Required, so if you have a hat please doff it in the direction of Mike, who some of you may recognise from his occasional postings on the excellent Dubhed blog.
Here’s Mike,
For the love of F and M…
I love electronic music.
There ..I’ve said it – send me to EA why don’t you.. where we have to sit there in a circle and tell us what lured us back to listening to a 16th of John Foxx down a darkened alley. The trouble is that after the glory days of 1977-1985 (Kraftwerk, Numan, etc) the gruel has been thin…
Then in the noughties a new album from a ‘youngster band’ emerged and I fell for it hook line and synthesiser (groan..). It was entitled ‘Transparent Things’ and it had all those references from bands I loved plus a distinctive spoken word delivery from David Best. The other great thing – funny lyrics! I’ve never been a fan of a band that takes themselves too seriously.
So, as you do, you inform your mates of your new find and hope they will buy into it.
Nope.. natcha ..no way.
My theory at the time was stupid name for a band never helps.. Fujiya and Miyagi.. WTF.. everyone I have ever spoken to has said – ‘stupid name’. I think some of my friends heard the name and decided they didn’t like them straight away just because of the name. TBF I have been guilty of this before with other bands.
Therefore, I sloped off into Bristol to see this band. 26 people in attendance including me. (Indeed, the host of ‘No Badger Required’ has been to a gig with me where 26 people attended…it’s a thing! I also saw Claudia Brucken with 25 other people but that’s another story…I digress.)
Anyway, I loved them – even when the lead singer called somebody in the front row the rudest word imaginable as you could see he was so into the performance and this guy was putting him off.
Since then, I’ve bought all the albums but no-one else seems to see how good they are. New Order did as they had them supporting at the O2 in London. American film makers did as their music featured in an early episode of ‘Breaking Bad’.
Fantastic stuff, thanks, Mike, I have just spent a very enjoyable hour exploring the music of Fujiya and Miyagi, which I almost certainly wouldn’t have done if you hadn’t got in touch.
The opening paragraph of the email to the Musical Jury that asked them to think about this topic read as follows,
“Those of you who know me will know that this is just me trying to justify posting music by Death Grips ….”
Because to this day. This very day. I have still never met a single person, anywhere in the world, who has admitted to even liking Death Grips, let alone hold them in the iconic stature that I hold them in and every time I post music but them I can almost hear the frantic hammering of mouse buttons around the world as people rapidly send them their computer anywhere but here.
I’ve tried to make people like them. For instance, I DJ’ed at a wedding about eight years ago and I dropped ‘I’ve Seen Footage into my set – just after ‘Jolene’ by Dolly Parton had wound itself down – hoping that because people were drunk they would dance to anything, but no, even the grannies who could barely stand because they were so pickled on booze managed to sprint out of the room in the direction of the bar.
I’ve stuck them on mixtapes for mates, only to get messages back saying things like “Great mixtape (apart from Death Grips, that was terrible”). I’ve played them in the car and people have decided to get the train home instead. I’ve had barbecues at my house and as I’ve dished up the bangers and burgers, Death Grips have blared out of the stereo and people have wandered off up the garden “to look at the shed”.
You probably get the point – but just in case you are still reading because you have never heard them before,
Death Grips are an American experimental rap band from California. They are heavily influenced by hip hop, punk, electronica, noise and industrial music – you’ll hear that in any of their songs – the lyrics are yelled, the beats sped up to breaking point, the synths are distorted, the guitars are out of tune, the drums make no sense at all – they make Aphex Twin sound conventional – and yet somehow it works, because amongst that chaos, there is a dirty sort of beauty, the same sort of beauty that people see in brutalist architecture I suppose.
Live, the band are predictably unpredictable. There is footage of their drummer drumming in handcuffs, because the sound is more restrictive. There is footage of their singer MC Ride hurling himself into the crowd, arms flailing. Sometimes they don’t turn up at all, sometimes they smash their synths up before the end of song three and just walk off.
But despite all that unpredictability, there is still brilliance. And Punk Rock. Obviously.
A guest post from Walter who runs the ‘ A Few Good Times In My Life’ blog – again a place that comes highly recommended around these parts.
In 1979, I had to complete my basic military service. During that time, I shared a room with seven other comrades for 15 months. Back then, CDs didn’t exist yet, so we all brought our own cassettes. I was really into the emerging ska revival at the time, so I transferred The Specials’ debut album to cassette and played it for my roommates. To my disappointment, I was met with nothing but bewildered head-shaking. Even my attempts to explain why this music was great failed. So that cassette was rarely played, and in the living quarters, we continued to listen to ABBA, Pink Floyd, AC/DC, and Dire Straits.
The album came out at just the right time, as racism was becoming a hot topic in England and The Specials were actively involved in the anti-racism campaign. The band members were both Black and white, and they blended the energy of punk with the ska of the 1960’s.
About half of the songs were cover versions of Jamaican artists. Right from the album’s first track, “A Message To You, Rudy,” you get a sense of what’s to come. A smooth reggae groove and Rico Rodriguez’s trombone practically invite you onto the dance floor.
“It Doesn’t Make It All Right” shows that they can reconcile their political views with their lyrics and music.
“Just because you’re a black boy, Just because you’re white, It doesn’t mean you have to hate him, It doesn’t mean you have to fight.”
““Stupid Marriage” and “Too Much Too Young” are the best examples of what reggae/ska and clever lyrics should sound like. I can’t imagine a better ending to this masterpiece than the reggae ballad “You’re Wondering Now.”
You’re Wondering Now – The Specials (1979, Two Tone Records)
These are the reasons why this album is a regular visitor on my record player.
Thanks Walter, excellent stuff as ever.
I can almost picture in your army fatigues with a pillow over your head as Abba blares out of the quarters tiny quarters and your army comrades (almost certainly not dressed in sparkly sequins) disco dance around the barracks.
Right, its back to boring old yours truly tomorrow.
A Guest post from Rol – from My Top Ten Blog (which, comes highly recommended around these parts) – folks, you are in for a proper treat.
I never owned a skateboard.
And I never rode a skateboard through a small American town while hanging onto the back of a pick-up truck when I was late for school.
But clearly, when I was fourteen years old, there was nothing I would rather have done to assert my teenage cool… except possibly singing Danke Schoen followed by Twist & Shout on the back of a float in a parade.
If I’d been on that skateboard though, the soundtrack would have been something a little more contemporary…
Huey Lewis and the News enjoyed only limited success in the UK charts. The Power Of Love was a hit twice – #11 in 1985, and then finally cracking the Top Ten (only just) the following February, presumably when Back To The Future opened in the UK. That second time, it was released as a double A side, paired with their 1982 US breakthrough single…
‘Fore!’, the album containing The Power Of Love (in the UK, at least), did pretty well in the UK charts and spawned another hit, ‘Stuck With You’, but that was the last time Huey & co. troubled our Top 40. The biggest scandal of all is that their next single only reached #41… yet in my ears, it’s one of the greatest power pop songs of the 80s.
Across the pond, the band enjoyed far more success, throughout the eighties. ‘Sports’, the 1983 album that preceded ‘Fore’, spawned four Top Ten hits. And there were seven singles released from ‘Fore!’ itself – not including ‘The Power Of Love’, which they weren’t allowed to include on US pressings because it was also available on the Back to the Future soundtrack. I could have done a piece on either ‘Sports’ or ‘Fore!’ for this blog’s Nearly Perfect Albums feature… except there’s nothing “nearly” about either of them.
I’ll never understand why my good friends in Musical Appreciation don’t respect the glory of Huey Lewis & The News. Even among those who revere power pop as an artform, there’s a sniffiness. Is it because they had so much success? (Well, not in the UK, clearly.) Are they looked down upon because they’re lumped in with other big MTV bands of the era… I guess they were never going to get played on Peel, so are they too “pop”? I was surprised to learn that the band won the Brit Award for Best International Group in 1986… but then, I didn’t even know the Brit Awards were around in the 80s.
Part of me suspects the main reason I’m alone in my adoration (in these circles, at least) is that Huey Lewis & The News were having fun. And serious bands don’t have fun, do they? They suffer and scowl and sulk and solemnify. Hey, I like a lot of serious bands – like Rob in High Fidelity, a large chunk of my record collection mainlines the miserable. But sometimes I prefer not to wallow. Sometimes I want to feel good. And back when I was a teenager, life didn’t present me with many opportunities to do that. I wasn’t invited to any parties, girls wouldn’t twice look at me, and I never formed my own band. Yes, I had a few good friends… but they were often out doing teenage things like sneaking into pubs or hanging out and comparing record collections without me. I mostly stayed at home, read comics, wrote stories… and listened to records. And the songs that made me smile – they were even more precious than the songs that made me cry. They were the ones that saved my life.
Having fallen in love with Fore! in 1987, I went out to track down the first three Huey Lewis albums on vinyl, and found them all to be (not nearly, not nearly) Perfect. There’s not a bad tune on them. I bought a lot of records from the age of 15 on (I was late getting the bug, but when I did…), and spent many a happy hour sitting on my bedroom floor next to the hi fi, spinning discs, making compilation cassettes, reading lyric sheets. A few of those records might meet the approval of the intelligentsia, but many wouldn’t. When the distinguished gentleman in charge of this blog asked for my contribution to a series called “Bands you love that no one else does”, my first response was, “Jesus – that’s pretty much EVERY band I love!” Yet none of the others mean quite as much to me as Huey does. (I suppose I could have written about Springsteen, but whatever your personal take on the Boss, it’d be a stretch to say “no one else” likes him.)
The irony is that the first Huey Lewis album I bought on the day it was released was album #5, ‘Small World’, which marked the beginning of the band’s creative decline. I always wonder if that was an intentional thing – if the success of Fore! had been too much, if they no longer wanted the pressure of getting into the singles chart, if they just wanted to go back to their bar band roots and have fun. All the records they’ve recorded since have been smaller scale efforts, often focussing on a mix of more laid-back numbers and old rock ‘n’ roll covers, rather than pushing the big MTV pop rock songs. There’s still the occasional gem though…
In 1991, writer Bret Easton Ellis would make the world view Huey Lewis & The News in an entirely different way, by making them a favourite band of yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman in the novel (and then movie) ‘American Psycho’. Let’s pause for a moment and deconstruct what Patrick actually has to say…
“Do you like Huey Lewis & The News? Their early work was a little too ‘new-wave’ for my taste…”
This speaks directly to the superficiality of Bateman’s character. He only liked the band when they became big. How many of us know people like that? Conversely, how many of us have stopped liking a band when they became big? Is one position really more worthy than the other? We might tell ourselves it is… but it’s all just music in the end.
“…but when ‘Sports’ came out in ’83, I think they really came into their own – both commercially and artistically. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost.”
Of course, Bateman is going to like the “pop gloss”… but I’d argue that (unlike a lot of oversynthed 80s radio hits), the production on these records still stands up today. However, Ellis is using this speech to highlight what matters to Bateman – the commercial and the professional. Neither of which have anything to do with my own love of HL&TN… but it’s often the case that two people can enjoy the same band for entirely different reasons. It’s a lot safer nowadays to say you liked the Smiths for Johnny’s impeccable guitar work, nothing to do with that other bloke.
“He’s been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humour.”
This bit’s pretty weird. There are comparisons to be made with Elvis (and not just that a good part of The News were the backing band on ‘My Aim Is True’), but the idea that Huey is the cynical one… well, I don’t see how anyone could think that. Huey’s humour is good-natured, self-deprecating, tongue in cheek. Elvis, on the other hand…
Actually, I think the thing to highlight here is that Patrick Bateman doesn’t know what he’s talking about. There’s a clear Trumpishness to his pseudo-intellectualism – talk like you’re an expert, even if you don’t have a clue, but force people into believing you.
“In ’87, Huey released this, Fore, their most accomplished album.”
See? He can’t even get the release date right!
“I think their undisputed masterpiece is ‘Hip to Be Square’, a song so catchy most people probably don’t listen to the lyrics – but they should! Because it’s not just about the pleasures of conformity, and the importance of trends, it’s also a personal statement about the band itself!”
That last bit though… that’s pretty spot on. Except… well, there’s a huge dollop of irony in this song, irony which Patrick Bateman can’t grasp at all. And it’s doubly ironic that Christian Bale delivers this speech right before he takes an axe to Jared Leto’s head.
It doesn’t help my case that Patrick Bateman was also a huge Phil Collins fan… but I still have a lot of time for American Psycho. If only because Bale takes an axe to Jared Leto’s head. I mean, who wouldn’t want to take an axe to Jared Leto’s head?
Anyway, Huey got his own back on Patrick Bateman eventually.
In 2018, Huey Lewis was diagnosed with Ménière’s disease, a severe disorder of the inner ear which leads to incapacitating episodes of vertigo, tinnitus and hearing loss. At one point he lost his hearing altogether, but thanks to a cochlear implant, he has since regained it a little, though not enough to sing or make music anymore. Huey appears pretty stoic about this turn of events, but it makes me sad every time I think about it. Because… well, you know… I never got a skateboard. And I certainly never rode one through a small American town while hanging onto the back of a pick-up. But whenever I listen to this band, it doesn’t matter whether I’m one of the cool kids or not. I’m just accepted for who I am, and that’s enough.
A few days back Matt told us all about the Glasgow band Dancer and today he is back to tell us all about a band called Shrag. Whereas Dancer are very much still active, the same cannot be said for Shrag – but nevertheless, Matt still holds a torch for them.
Shrag hail from Brighton and is short for the Sussex Heights Roving Artists Group. They were supposedly formed after being the last revellers at a party at that location. Across 3 albums they evolved from the punky indiepop of ‘Mark E Smith’ and ‘Pregnancy Scene; from the first record (‘Shrag’), largely a collection of early singles, into a more muscular band with the bouncy bass often driving the songs like a later period Fall as ball of energy singer Helen King spins and yelps with increasing urgency on the final album ‘Canines’, from which single ‘Devastating Bones’ sounds like a glam-pop banger.
In between they produced the spiky ‘Life! Death! Prizes!’ from which the wondrous ‘The Habit Creep ‘provides a spoken word centre-piece. If the 2nd Elastica album had been any good it would have sounded like this.
Excellent words and an inspired choice Matt, thank you so much.
Here are two songs selected by Matt for your listening pleasure
Welcome to the third part of this series, which explores songs that are hidden within photographs. Today’s photograph shows a rather intriguing looking cave on Watergate beach down in Cornwall. It was taken last summer whilst my daughter had a surf lesson. You can walk into this cave and it goes back about fifteen metres into the cliff side.
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