George Best: Cleared for Takeover.

George Best was a major footballer beloved in Belfast in the eighties. After his death in 2004, he was honored when Belfast named an airport after him.

Best [Rediscovery] of 2007 (3) "With your head held high and your scarlet lies, you came down to me from the open skies..."

First

you hear a contrail echo in the sky. A distant flight. Then celestial chords. On heaven's own synthesizer. They are spread apart...even, paced, a majestically slow sequence; as if across a greater space. A void. Remote beauty. Cold. A major key’s inevitable descent down the scale. It could be the soundtrack for the stately elegance of humanity's great things collapsing in slow-motion. The booster rocket drops away, the capsule escapes the bonds of gravity for only a moment and then tragedy's televised burst of flame for eternal replay. Little rills of sequenced notes running alongside this; remoras swimming in a great white's rippling wake.

It's that quaint twentieth-century fear: civilization's eventual decay. That timeless teen-age preoccupation: the adult world is not going to be what I need it to be.

And then: a voice.

“Just on the border of your waking mind,
there lies another time
Where darkness and light are one.
And as you tread the halls of sanity
You feel so glad to be
Unable to go beyond.
I have a message from another time”

What is it about the vocoder? Ensnaring the sound of human speech in some mechanized parody of self? More importantly, what is it about the teenage male and robots? All those Transformers and RoboCops and Terminators and other clanking, lumbering, destructive, unlovable things? But when the robot is of a feminine gender...here's where you'll find the under-the-mattress dreams of pulp and porn: Cherry 2000, Blade Runner, Maria of Metropolis, Tin Lizzy. The design of desire.

Maybe some social psychologist can help me figure this one out.

“I have a message from another time”

1981 is not the year for concept album rock. Sure, Pink Floyd has rolled like a juggernaut into the new decade with their double-disc misogynistic bit of boomer self-pity. But it's the movie holding this one together, along with countless Laserium shows in all those science museums turned party zones for the night. (And what teenager isn't going to buy a song with a chorus in piss-poor grammar stating "We don't need no education?" How long did A&R kick that one around in marketing?)

Canny casting of New Wave lion Bob Geldof as "Pink" doesn't hurt either, and he delivers an exceptionally good performance as a self-involved rock star tortured by phone calls home to the wife who *spoiler alert* has this Alan Rickman sound-alike warming her sheets while our boy Pink passes his time in the States with his own 'dirty woman' complete with her American accent; a particularly dim groupie who seems to be unable to process the startling fact that a musician might own more than one guitar.

It's eerie, actually, how good Geldof does this role.

But a nation's worth of laserium nightshows only goes so far in this brave, new decade and the rock concept album is just another skeletal triceratops in the unlit Hall of Geology next door.

“I have a message from another time”

Also, 1981 is the year that cable television will alter the music industry’s landscape forever because it’s the year that...

“I have a message from another time”

By all standards, Xanadu should have been one of the greats. Starring red-hot Olivia Newton John, looking even better than she did during her term at Rydell High only two summers before. Music from one of the leading stadium/prog-rock bands so well known that all that sufficed to advertise their presence in town was an emblem of a jukebox-hued, chrome-fitted spaceship on the concert poster. Beautiful, bronzed, buff Los Angeles setting. A healthy, athletic cast ready for the 80s. New dance craze touted as disco's latest; disco’s best. Missing only the golden touch of producer Robert Stigwood, who previously defined an earlier decade with a single camera shot tracking John Travolta's hardware store-bound ass. Is that where it went wrong?

But, look, you really need to remember that Stigwood had misfired himself a summer or two before with his own voluptuous cinematic mess of Beatle songs and Bee Gee hairstyles. And if Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was the warning shot across concept rock's bow, Xanadu was the poorly mounted cannon that left its carriage on a long, lethal, careening path across all decks. Dragging broken main mast and tangled rigging on its final pitch overboard. Taking nearly all of the passengers and crew to the bottom with it.

How does a respectable rock band crawl back to shore from that?

“I have a message from another time”



and


Now


THERE’S

A

sudden freefall back into gravity's pull, asteroid swiftness, a fiery weight burning off in the thickening atmosphere...and none of this celestial chord business either. You get four solid notes. Three notes climbing and then a jump to the fifth in the sequence. Once. Then Twice. A third time. On the fourth repetition, the open sequence closes with a drop from that fifth to the fourth in the set. Once more on the full five to be sure it has your attention. Somewhere along the way you also get drums. Guitars. Rock and Roll.

The last of the great concept rock albums is underway.

"She's got it. Yeah baby, she's got it..."

A couple of years back at a friend's house for a BBQ, the women of the party decided to camp out in the rec room while the men grunted and postured around the Weber in a contest to see which one of them would invent fire. After driving the kids away from their gameplayers, we ladies decided to pop in a video of The Wedding Singer, which I hadn't seen.

It kicked off with a full-on shot of Adam Sandler in a narrow lapelled blue jacket, Johnny Cash coal-black hair standing up under a can and a half of mousse, and the world's skinniest black tie.

Then he started singing You Spin Me Round by Dead or Alive.

A dizzying thrill which was equal parts repulsion and the-years-drop-away attraction went right through me. I suppose you learn you've entered the long period of middle age, the first time you look back on a fashion once worn to strut and stalk the world's pleasures (day-glo fishnets, rosary beads as necklaces, acid-wash jeans, Members Only leather jackets, or, say, crushed velvet elephant loon pants) and you think "Did we wear that?"

And sometimes you think "Did we listen to that?" And with You Spin Me Round, we did. We don't need to annotate those lyrics or develop a fansite for it; we don't even think we own a copy. But we are not going whitewash our musical past by denying that the song -- during its brief moment of glory -- got the job done, just as it does in the Adam Sandler movie. You listened, you danced, you made eyes at the rest of the neon-lit crowd and you had a good time. And if the next song was Bananarama's Venus...well, you kept dancing.

Until yesterday, I had no idea that this wave of disposable pop that flooded the charts of the eighties had a backstory. But it does, and it makes for a wild read!

Right round. Like a record, baby
Right round round round

Return of the Hitmen

Initially, the trio specialised in a pop take on "hi-NRG", the electronic dance music that soundtracked early 80s gay clubs. Indeed, they were so closely associated with the gay scene that on their first meeting, Dead Or Alive frontman Pete Burns automatically assumed that Waterman was homosexual. Says Waterman: "I wore a red leather suit with a white stripe down the side, my hair was green and blue, and I had a great big golden ear stud. When Pete Burns came in, he thought Mike and Matt were my boys and I was the madam."

Despite the confusion, Dead Or Alive's spectacular You Spin Me Round (Like A Record) was Stock Aitken Waterman's first number one. The trio claim its success sparked their war with the press and the music industry. The press were horrified by their autocratic style of making records ("If you get too friendly with an artist," counsels Stock, "the next thing you know, they'll be asking to do their vocals again or change the lyrics or something") and their refusal to countenance anything other than low-budget pop aimed at an audience they proudly described in 1990 as "ordinary people with Woolworth ears". According to Waterman, the industry was "intimidated because we were independent, we had our own studios in south London, we started our own label [PWL] when no one would sign Kylie Minogue".

It's hard to tell how bothered the trio were by the constant criticism. They can quote 20-year-old reviews, deliver word-for-word accounts of conversations with record company bosses who dismissed Bananarama's 1986 hit Venus. Aitken points out that their 1989 version of Do They Know It's Christmas? has been quietly erased from Band Aid's history by Bob Geldof, Midge Ure et al: "The bastards." Waterman starts telling a story about Sonia's record label publicly disowning her first number one, You'll Never Stop Me Loving You (1989), and works himself into such a froth that he ends up comparing the chirpy scouse songbird to Jesus: "Please don't get me wrong, but it was like trying to deny you knew Christ when the cock crows."

And yet they positively ooze belligerent self-confidence. "We did a record with this band called Brilliant," remembers Waterman, "the reviews were phenomenal and it got to 58 in the charts. I remember saying to the guys, fuck that for critically-acclaimed music, you can't pay the fucking rent with that."

More at the link. And worth the read.