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sunjaesol · 3 years ago

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THE MANY CRUSHES OF LUKE PATTERSON... AND THE ONE THAT STUCK

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1982

Luke Patterson's first crush ever was Haley Martin. He adored the colour of her hair — like the clementines his mom bought — and the way she finger-painted, enough for his four year old eyes to stare at her in awe.

He watched her make mud pies in the sandbox from the monkey bars, only to ruin them to get a rise out of her. He couldn't understand why she didn't like him the way he did, so he nagged his mom to explain.

"Teasing girls should be fun for them too, sweetheart," she soothed. "This Haley clearly didn't like it."

He blinked. "Huh?"

Her smile stayed warm, similar to hot chocolate and whenever grandpa conjured candies from behind his ear. "Why don't you share your grapes with her tomorrow? I'm sure she'll like that."

His nose scrunched up. "Why?"

"Because it's sweet, Luke."

"I don't get that," he shrugged. "But I'll try."

The next day, he sat beside her during storybook time and that seemed to help a little already. By the time it was lunch, her mood was lifted, which excited him too, and urged him to offer the grapes.

It earned him a featherlight kiss on the cheek.

Luke squeaked in surprise, flushing a firetruck red, to which she giggled and plopped another grape in her mouth.

Three days later, his crush was gone from his mind and he began sharing his grapes with his new friend Reginald instead.

1986

"Can you ask Jessica what she thinks of me?" Luke hurriedly whispered, eyes flickering between Reggie and the girl from across the courtyard.

Normally, Luke Patterson exuded confidence. The resident class clown, always opening his jaw to react to the teacher without raising his hand, catching fights with stupid classmates, sneaking into dad's stationwagon to create mixtapes.

Fearlessness was his freaking middle name. (It was actually Beck, but whatever. He wished it was something cool like Duran Duran though.)

But when it came to girls... he got so nervous. Because they were girls! He didn't understand them! They hated rambunctious boys and only listened to stupid pop music and blabbered about how they stole makeup from their sisters.

Jessica, however, somehow made his heart flutter and his stomach twist up. She just looked cool in her dungarees and she had a pretty smile and she didn't wear that overwhelming, sugary perfume that was now popular.

Reggie snickered, in the way only eight year old boys could. "You liiiiiiike her!"

"No!" He scowled. "I–I'm just curious."

"Sure," he drawled, but then shrugged in agreement, the oversized leather jacket rustling on his shoulders. He stole it from his older brother after he saw him kissing (!!!) some girl and figured it held some magic to impress the ladies with.

"Just do it!"

With a dramatic flourish, the boy left their hiding spot, Luke lurking around the corner of the alcove to watch. Jessica looked up from her hard work of creating friendship bracelets and smiled at Reggie.

Oh, gosh. She was pretty.

A minute later, a sheepish Reg slowly crawled back to him, cheeks red and fiddling with the zipper of his jacket.

Luke grabbed his shoulders, urgent. "What did she say?"

"Uh... well..."

"C'mon, dude!"

Reggie sighed. "She... likes me, buddy. Sorry."

His hopeful face crashed into one of devestation, quickly covering it up with a laugh and a squeeze of the shoulder. Oh, man, what would Steven Tyler do?

"That– that's dope!"

In the end, Reggie and Jessica were boyfriend and girlfriend for a week while he wrote an angry poem about how stupid dungarees were.

Huh... it was surprisingly good.

1988

"Hey, Luke," Gwenn greeted, shy, tucking her hands in her Camp Wacky Rocka hoodie. "I really liked that song you made about your guitar."

Jumping from the tree branch to the ground, Luke dazzled her with an appreciative smile. From above, Reggie and their new friend Alex watched on curiously.

"Thanks!"

Who would've thought that summer camp would be the first time he made a real, girl friend! Gwenn was super cool and she played the saxophone and she liked Joan Jett and her hair was all curly and big and it reminded him of pretty clouds.

Looking over her shoulder, he noticed a gaggle of girls staring at them. Like they were waiting.

Gwenn stared at him. "Can you close your eyes?"

He frowned. "Why?"

"Just 'cause."

Whatever. Maybe she wanted to show him something cool and would stick it in his hand. Complying, he closed his eyes and impatiently waited, bouncing on his heels.

"So?"

Suddenly, he felt a light, warm touch on his mouth and — oh! She was kissing him!

Luke staggered back in surprise, gawking at a blushing Gwenn as she squeaked a sorry and ran back to the now giggling and screeching girls. They ran away like a flock of birds.

It was a dare! His first kiss, stolen by a dare!

His boys jumped down beside him, awed.

Reggie hollered. "You kissed Gwenn!"

"I don't get it," Alex muttered.

Luke's face twisted up in a sour expression. Camp Wacky Rocka should be all about the music and becoming legends and Gwenn ruined it!

He stuck his tongue out. "Whatever. Let's go to the mess hall!"

1989

When Luke turned eleven, he kissed someone for real.

His birthday party was at the arcade, loud chatter and robotic sounds clashing together in an amazing cacophony. His parents hated the place, which is why Luke loved it.

Of the twenty guests, Yasmine clapped the loudest after he finished his song with the boys — Math Is For Losers! — and grabbed his hand as they walked to a duel game.

Luke felt fuckin' giddy the entire time. (Freakin' in front of his parents, fuckin' with friends.) The swoop in his stomach, his cheeks stretched into a wide beam.

Freshly eleven and the king of the arcade, he boldly asked if he could kiss her.

She smiled, her purple headband glittering in the neon lights, and nodded.

It was short and warm and her lips tasted like pink lemonade and sour gummies and it gave him an entirely new buzz. It was exciting.

He kissed her a couple more times the days after, eager and curious, until she claimed she was now only interested in twelve year old boys.

Since Luke now held the record of most kisses between him, Alex and Reggie, he wasn't too bothered by it. They shook hands, complimented each other on the kissing, and that was that.

1992

"Are you or are you not my boyfriend?" Olivia bit, crossing her arms.

Luke sighed, lazy gaze drifting from her to his band waiting by their bikes. Damn, he thought having a girlfriend would be way easier. Why was she so tense?

"I am," he said. "Why do you think I'm not?"

"Because you ignore me, like, all the time!" Pouting, she fiddled with the hem of her tartan skirt. "And now you're going to be with your band!"

He shrugged. "You can come with us and listen, if you want."

Luke met Olivia this year as deskmates in French class. Her raven hair was long and thick and her lips were all shiny from lip gloss and maybe he got a little cocky, thinking he could be dating the hottest girl of freshman year, so he naturally asked her out.

Maybe he should've considered beforehand whether they had anything in common, but he'd always been the overzealous type. And besides... she was a good kisser.

She scoffed. "That's not any better. Whatever. I'll just hang with Tina and Priscilla then. Laters!"

Plopping a kiss on his lips, she turned around and stalked to her whispering friends. Luke puffed, adjusted the beanie and made his way to the boys.

Girls were confusing.

"I bet dating boys is easier," Alex mused. "Like, equally terrifying, but also... easier. I think. Maybe."

Bobby laughed. "How's the girlfriend, Luke?"

"Ha ha," he deadpanned. "Let's go. I got this new song, Crooked Teeth, and it's a fucking banger!"

Olivia broke up with him after Sunset Curve's first, official gig at the arcade with the explanation that he loved music more than her. He never loved her to begin with, so maybe that was the problem.

She made out with Bobby that same night.

Holy shit, man. He supposed that bitter feeling at the sight of them tasted like rock 'n roll, the one thing he actually craved.

What a funny, funny feeling. (He wrote a hell of a lot of songs about it after. He never quite looked at Bobby the same way either.)

1995

"Hey, Maisie." Leaning against the locker beside the girl, he shot her a million dollar smile. "You comin' to our gig tonight? It's at The Orpheum."

Maisie was fucking awesome. Always in short, flowery dresses and fishnet tights and thick eyeliner like a rockstar, always listening to something new on her walkman. She came from a rich family, but that didn't hinder them from becoming friends.

Her jaw fell slack in awe, him instantly gaining more confidence. Ducking his head to meet her eye, he leaned a little closer. He knew damn well what he was doing, and he got a thrill every time it worked.

"Really?" She gasped. "That's awesome! I'll so be there!"

"Sweet," he grinned. "And stay after too."

A brow quirked up, intrigued. "Why?"

He shrugged. "Just 'cause."

"Right," she drawled. "Nothing is 'just because' with you, Luke."

"And that's why you gotta stay," he teased, nudging her shoe with his. "To find out."

If they rocked that gig and he felt like a fucking legend, he hoped it would end with the two of them hooking up. He wasn't interested in dating — having learned his lesson after Olivia — and he knew she wasn't either, but she was fun.

And that was the most important to him: to have fucking fun. Luke Patterson was here for a good time, not a long time.

And if nothing happened between him and Maisie, then he'd still feel like a legend. In a couple of hours, he was going to play at The Orpheum! How gnarly was that?!

2022

Twenty-seven years later, Luke was still seventeen years old. While he preferred to not question the science behind ghostly activities — he flunked physics anyway — he was happy that he froze at this age.

Because Julie was seventeen, too.

And, man. He was madly in love with her.

He loved everything, from the babyhairs curling around her ears, to her voice and compassionate soul, to her beautiful smile, all the way to her cute, doodled sneakers.

Her epic music taste, her snark, the way she always found his gaze, the way she finished his lyrics, the way she always knew what to say to make him feel better.

His heart melted to a flickering candle whenever she hugged him, a raging wildfire erupting between every kiss. He was a fool for her.

"Stop moving," she giggled, one hand coming up to hold his chin.

He grinned, "Sorry, Jules."

Shifting closer, she dabbled more glitter on his cheeks. They were playing at a black-light club tonight, so Julie and Flynn bought all the glow in the dark makeup available at the store for the occasion.

They looked ridiculous in daylight, Julie's weirdly pink lipstick claiming all his attention, but he knew they'd look fucking cool once the lights went down.

"You want to watch a movie after the gig?" she whispered.

Luke rolled his eyes, playful. "You're gonna fall asleep."

"Yeah." With a bashful tilt of the shoulder, she leaned in closer. "But then you'll be with me."

"Julie! How scandalous," he teased, though his chest swelled at the thought of having some alone time, some cuddle time, with Julie.

"So?"

Murmuring a yes, he closed the little distance to kiss her, sealing the deal, only for her to chase after him — an attempt to wipe the lipstick stain off his lips.

"Nah, keep it." A smirk grew. "So the people know."

She tsked. "Idiot."

"You like it."

"I'm still taking it off though, seeing as you're supposed to be a hologram," she pointed out. "But... you can kiss my lipstick away after the show."

He sighed, dreamy. "I love you."

Finishing his glitter and removing the stain, she dazzled him with a satisfied smile. "Love you too."

She rose up from the couch and went to search for Reggie, the boy likely with Carlos. For a moment, Luke was alone in the studio, allowing himself to sink into that warm, fuzzy feeling.

No matter how many blunders he went through with girls — Haley, Jessica, Gwenn, Yasmine, Olivia, Maisie — they all prepared him, in one way or the other, for Julie.

To not only recognise when an awesome girl was standing right in front of him, but also how to treat her — because Julie Molina deserved the fucking world.

Even if that world now included the supernatural.

Whatever. They were all a little crazy.

💌💌💌💌💌💌💌💌

@bluefirewrites @blush-and-books @pink-flame @ourstarscollided @constantly-singing @unsaid-emily @willexx

#juke #jatp fanfiction #julie and the phantoms

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girlsbtrs · 4 years ago

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Me, Taylor, and The Search for Musical Legitimacy

Written by Lila Danielsen-Wong. Graphic by James Nida Grey.

As a child, whenever I took art classes, they were full of girls. I took group piano lessons with four other girls from my neighborhood. Any theatre I was involved in casted regardless of gender because there were never enough boys to fit a show. My middle school orchestra was about three quarters girls.

It came as a shock that when I started getting involved in any songwriting I could do, I was suddenly in the minority. The few all-ages open mics I could go to were set up by dad-types and primarily populated by their friends of the same demographic. Teenage rock band-type boys dominated the non-classical learning spaces.

However, this isn’t about them, this is about me, Lila Danielsen-Wong, a girl you��ve probably never heard of, and a girl you probably have heard of. Her name is Taylor Swift.

In 2010, I was a sixth-grade latchkey kid who spent a whole lot of time watching music videos on YouTube. Taylor Swift had just released her third studio album, Speak Now. Although many girls my age had been enchanted by Fearless, I was a pretentious and precocious preteen who was resistant to popular things, and was much more interested in niche Boston folk singer-songwriters like Antje Duvekot and Lori McKenna.

However, niche Boston folk singer-songwriters don’t really make lots of YouTube content geared at middle schoolers, so the YouTube recommendations led me from my folk corner, to The Band Perry, to a song called White Horse.

This snowballed into me listening to every Taylor Swift song on Youtube, to learning to play the piano chords to each of them, to writing complete songs of my own. Although I’d been writing simple piano melodies for years, songwriting now occupied every corner of my brain in nearly every free moment. When I learned Dear John, I decided it didn’t sound as good on piano, so I decided I needed to play it on guitar. I snuck into my mother’s room and learned to play an E chord. Soon, all I did was practice guitar and write songs. I wanted to write like she did, to articulate my feelings as well as she did, so precisely that everyone who listened understood not only me, but themselves better. However, I was not ready to publicly be someone who listened to Taylor Swift. Occasionally a YouTube comment would remove me from Taylor world and remind me “All of her fans are teenage girls.” At eleven I didn’t have the words or the context to understand why that so briskly discredited her. I knew it was an insult, and I knew it was an insult that worked.

Flash forward two years, I was one of the youngest writers at a summer songwriter lab geared toward teens that one of the local theatres held yearly. Remember the rock boys I was talking about? This is when we became acquainted. We had just come back from writing songs in our randomly assigned groups. I had a hard time contributing, being a not-quite-high-schooler who’d never tried co-writing. One of the older girls was talking to the rock boys and I remember the conversation word for word. One of the rock boys asked her how the session went. She responded “eh, it was all girls,” to which the boy said “mine too, a lot of just-singer girls, you know cause of like, Taylor Swift.” They laughed and went on to complain about the younger songwriter girls who “don’t even know what they were doing.”

The conversation they were having, “Taylor Swift, a frivolous girly artist, is encouraging frivolous girls to come into our serious artist spaces and making them frivolous,” stuck with me through my teen years, and it wasn’t until recently that I started to understand. Taylor Swift found success because she could connect with girls like me, and I found my absolute favorite thing, my life calling, because of Taylor Swift; but Taylor Swift was being discredited because of me, and I was being discredited because of Taylor Swift.

In older interviews, Taylor talks about how after the first time she went to Nashville to pitch herself to labels, she heard nothing. So she decided she needed to be different, and that’s when she started writing songs. At that moment, I realized that I was going to have to be (crucify me) “not like other girls” if I wanted to be taken seriously or have my ideas heard. The next day I came back to the young songwriters lab with my viola instead of my guitar, and managed to finesse my way into playing on nearly half the songs in the showcase.

I don’t need a list of MLA cited sources to explain that art geared to girls and young women is dismissed. It is not a hot take to say that art created by young women is often instantly devalued. Taylor Swift wrote music about girls and young women for girls and young women, and she didn’t have much interest in being a sex symbol. Not that there’s anything wrong with female artists who use their sexuality, but Taylor Swift gave the men who gate-keep musical legitimacy nothing they wanted from her. Still, she wrote Speak Now with no co-writers before she was old enough to legally drink. She followed it up with Red, a diverse transition album that showed off her songwriting range. 1989 broke records, started an 80’s pop revival and seamlessly transitioned her into pop. Taylor Swift was everywhere, and yet I heard the same things echo.

“She isn’t a real artist because she only writes about relationships.”

“Her audience is just rabid fans who don’t know anything about real music.”

“She’s just a pop star who won’t stand the test of time.”

I spent the tail end of 2015 writing songs that emulated the rhythmic lyrics of 1989, but if anyone asked who my musical influences were, I’d often omit her and stick with niche Boston folk singer-songwriters. Me and my music were not going to get pegged as a naive and shallow fangirl.

It was my freshman year of college. I was at my local state school because I couldn’t really afford to go to any of the music programs I wanted to go to, when I ran into a friend who I knew from the songwriting labs. She invited me to the guitar club that she ran, and of course I went. Although the rock boys weren’t the majority numbers wise, they dominated the room. They asked about my beat up Guild guitar. Impressed with how I inherited it from a rocker guy my dad works with, they encouraged me to play a song. I pulled out my most meticulously crafted coming-of-age ballad, and let them hear my line, “we’re all cynics and romantics, it’s semiotics and semantics,” to which they responded “cute song.”

With the release of Folklore and Evermore, there’s been a shift. After teaming up with Aaron Desner of the National and Bon Iver, Taylor got a bit of that male approval that she never really needed. Pitchfork commented, with surprise, that Folklore showed “some real signs of maturity.” Each album that an artist releases should probably be more mature than the last. Surprise at lyrical maturity from a 30-year-old songwriter who penned lines like “you come away with a great little story of a mess of a dreamer with the nerve to adore you” as a teen, comes across a little underhanded.

Much of the next generation of musicians have been influenced by Taylor. Conan Grey’s TikTok hit Heather was based on Last Kiss. Rising it-girl Olivia Rodrigo is a hardcore fan. Even Phoebe Bridgers, who has been memed as “Taylor Swift for girls with crumbs in their beds” or “Taylor Swift for people whose parents still love each other” lists Taylor Swift as an influence. Although this new shift is one for Taylor Swift and not a change in the ingrained biases against women and their art, I wonder if it’s going to trickle down to the artists she influenced.

My favorite line in Evermore, Swift’s latest studio album ft. sad dad rock, comes in the second verse of Coney Island. In this song, Matt Berninger of The National slides in and out, singing lines in less predictable blocks than in other Swift collaborations. Together, Swift and Berninger coo “do you miss the rogue who coaxed you into paradise and left you there/will you forgive my soul when you’re too wise to trust me and too old to care.” It’s funny to hear one of the world’s biggest superstars share a line so monumental to the album. I wonder if it’s because she knows how much louder it will be when a man is holding up the low ends.

#lila danielsen wong

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falleninlove-archive · 4 years ago

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(does a funky little dance) OFFICIAL! LEAN ON ME! TIMELINE! HERE WE GO

1986 - carly, the oldest of the ruro siblings is born and months later adopted by grace (a former broadway actress and manager of a small local cafe) and arthur ruro (a former guitarist who now owns a local music shop), a couple living in the tiny town of misky, arizona who can’t have bio kids but want a large family regardless

1987 - cameron, the second oldest of the ruro siblings, is born and months later adopted into the family

1989 - kayleigh and mary, fraternal twins, are born and adopted at two days old

general childhood information, spanning about 1990 thru 2000 - all of the girls receive musical education and are pretty much constantly surrounded by music, whether it be around the house thru their parents always having some kind of vinyl record on or helping out at their dad’s music shop

all the girls love it but kayleigh takes to it like a fish to water and starts learning violin at just age 4, and her mother begins giving her vocal training soon after

the girls discover alternative music and subculture through the magic of the fledgling internet, and carly, kayleigh, and cameron pretty much all become baby punks at like, 10-15 years old

2001 - kayleigh is invited to a music competition for Prodigious Youth at 12 years old. she is paired with Blue Scott, a shy, lanky kid from chicago who is also a massive music nerd like her. they win the competition and over the course of the week that they are working, they become best friends

over the course of the following years, they are constant pen pals, and see each other 2-3 times a year in person

2002 - when carly and cameron are teenagers, they decide to start a punk band, except in order to use all of their parents music equipment their parents FORCE them to include their younger sisters (kayleigh and mary). there is much griping and groaning about this

2003 - hey wait, that band is actually pretty good despite kayleigh and mary being only 15. they play their first show that isn’t at their local community centre without the knowledge of their parents and officially christen the band poison pop

carly graduates much to the chagrin of her parents, she gleefully declares she is not going to college

2005 - cameron, against her own better judgement, takes a gap year because the band starts recording their first album at home with their own equipment, and also starts playing more and more shows. at this point their parents know but are trusting cameron and carly to keep 16 year old kayleigh and mary in line and safe

blue introduces the girls to his friend ryka, a teenager a year younger than kayleigh and mary, who is shockingly good at guitar. she takes up kayleigh’s guitarist spot and leaves her free to do vocals only

they get lucky and happen to play a show at a large alt rock festival in phoenix, catching the attention of rising chicago-based label dissociation records who immediately offer them a record deal. they take it on the spot and dissociation flies them out to chicago a month later to sign the paperwork

2006 - they drop their first professionally recorded single, poison killed the prom queen. it shoots to the top of the charts, making poison pop one of the biggest bands in the nation overnight

they release their album of the same name that year as well, and with their continued success with the other singles, they cement themselves as the first truly household name in emo

2007 - they tour with another emo band called watch the skies, who quickly rocket in popularity, and immediately begin work on their next album. meanwhile, the girls are dealing with their first tastes of fame and they’re not dealing with it well <3

kayleigh and blue start fake dating to get the press off kayleigh’s ass about her love life. this..................is going to go exactly how you think it’s going to go. they move to LA together <3

2008 - batwings and crowbeaks drops to another massive success, and they continue touring. dissociation records, by this time, have taken almost complete control of their image and discography, so despite the record itself being quite good, it is nothing like what poison pop originally tried to make, and they’re starting to get fed up with it

not to mention dissociation has them on a near-constant work schedule, and they can’t take any significant breaks, abandoning their family and friends and almost any social lives they mightve had outside the music world

the only good thing to happen this year is mary getting married to her highschool sweetheart, mark. it is a nice wedding and probably the last time the girls will be happy together for a long time.

2009 - kayleigh and blue “break up” and stop talking to eachother completely. six months later, as they’re working on their third announced studio album bruises, the band (except kayleigh) decides to break up. upon hearing about this decision, kayleigh has a minor mental breakdown and cuts off contact with the entire band

bruises is never released, and the band is officially broken up by the end of the year, breaking out of their contract with dissociation through a legal loophole

2010 - kayleigh begins to find a life outside the band, and starts doing songwriting work with what remains of her connections in the industry, which she’s really good at and she really enjoys.

she finally fucking gets mental health help. jesus christ my gal. im so glad u are finally getting better

2011 - kayleigh makes up with pretty much everybody, including blue, but it’s a slow process. they spend their first christmas together as a family in 2 years

kayleigh and ryka discuss the fact that they still yearn for the stage, and an idea begins to form

2012 - ryka forms sparrow records, her own record label, and its first signee becomes half-dead, a two piece band consisting of kayleigh and her.

ryka moves to LA with her boyfriend rowan, and invites kayleigh to room with her. kayleigh, who knows blue is looking to move to LA and properly start his music career, invites him to room with them.

this is an idea that absolutely won’t backfire or dredge up any old feelings i’m sure

(just kidding. they’re dating by christmas <3)

2013 - half-dead releases its first album, at which point i have to admit i do not know anything abt half-dead’s release schedule fJSDKFHSDF.

what i do know is that they tour that year with long shot for speedy as their opening act and they instantly become band moms to them despite literally only being five and six years older than them at most. they just have that energy having been in the music industry for much, much longer than they have

2014 - blue releases his first album, wallflower, to shocking success!

2016 - half-dead is relatively successful, but kayleigh and ryka are not going to make the same mistakes this time round and they take a break in 2016. ryka n rowan move back to chicago, and kayleigh and blue buy their first house together!

2017 - the girls all get together on new year’s day and talk about poison pop. this discussion leads them to decide to finally bring back the band.

2018 - jetlag life, poison pop’s first album in over a decade, drops that summer, and they begin touring immediately afterwards with watch the skies!

2019 - blue proposes to kayleigh after 18 years of knowing each other and 7 years of dating. <3

2020 - blue and kayleigh FINALLY get married and nothing bad happens because this is my timeline

also poison pop, around the end of year, start dropping hints at another album.... 👀

#dakota originals #lean on me #WHAM BAM THANK YOU MAAM #IT ONLY TOOK ME NEARLY AN HOUR #honestly that's a record for poison pop timeline infodumps #there's so much that happened that i didnt even mention #carly has a girlfriend #cameron gets married at some point #mary has a baby #there's so much #SO MUCH #but i focused on kayleigh and the bands for this one #this thing is 1.3k words #it's full fic length #i go so fucking feral when i infodump lean on me man

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tiesandtea · 4 years ago

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The London Suede Come To America (1995)

"Some days I wake up and I feel absolutely bullet proof," says Suede mainman Brett Anderson. "When I wrote 'So Young' I wanted a song that was like that... pure raging excitement."

By Michael Goldberg, Addicted To Noise (ATN), San Francisco. Archived here.

ATN was founded by Goldberg, who previously worked as an associate editor and senior writer for Rolling Stone, in 1994. It was one of the first online music magazine that offered audio samples and video interview clips with its editorial content. The first issue came out in December 1994. (x, x)

In the midst of a February/March club tour of America, ATN caught up with Anderson in Detroit for a frank chat about naked men in dog collars, the New British Invasion, the Sex Pistols, and his drug(s) of choice.

Suede leader Brett Anderson is a wisp of a man, who claims not to court controversy despite provocative album cover art and such lyrics as "I want the style of a woman, the kiss of a man." Yet he's caused plenty of controvery. Consider his comment to Details that he's "a bisexual man who's never had a homosexual experience." Sexual ambiguity sells, as has been clear since Elvis appeared on the scene some 40-plus years ago.

Suede bring Bowie's Ziggy Stardust sound (and androgyny) into the '90s. These Brits know how to make hits. "So Young," "The Drowners," "Metal Mickey," and "Animal Nitrate" were brash, infectious pop confections that begged to blast from car radios. They flew up the charts in Britain upon release.

Dog Man Star, the group's second album, is a song suite, an hour of metallic bang-a-gong rockers and ethereal ballads. Anderson can sing as trashy as the late Marc Bolan, but he can also hold his own crooning with the likes of George Michael or, going back some decades, Bing Crosby. And he's not afraid to go against conventionin fact, he seems to relish it freely admitting that he liked Kriss Kross records and just can't understand the popularity of grunge rockers Pearl Jam and neo-punks Green Day and the Offspring.

Anderson and bassist Mat Osman grew up in Haywards Heath, a bland suburb located 40 miles south of London ("Quite a horrible little place," Anderson told one reporter). His father took odd jobs; in recent years he's driven a taxi. His mother died of cancer in 1989. His father was a fan of Liszt, going so far as to name Anderson's sister Blandine, after the composer's daughter. He first heard both the Beatles and the Sex Pistols playing on his sister's phonograph.

Anderson felt like an outsider from as early as he can remember. And he always wanted to be a rock star. In fact, he says he assumed everyone wanted to be rock stars, and was flabbergasted the first time he met someone who didn't.

Away from the raucous punk and post punk scene of the late '70s and early '80s (he was 7 years old in 1977, the year of the Sex Pistols), Anderson romanticised being in a band, and dreamed. Ask him his influences and he doesn't hesitate: the Beatles, the Stones, Bowie, the Sex Pistols, the Smiths, "and punk bands like Crass."

In 1985, at age 15, Anderson strummed an acoustic guitar and sang on the street for spare change. He says he played in "hundreds" of bands [clearly an overstatement] but eventually landed in London with Osman. They placed an ad in the New Musical Express which brought them guitarist/songwriter Bernard Butler, and some time later replaced their drum machine with Simon Gilbert.

By April of 1992, before they'd even had a record released, Melody Maker put them on the cover, declaring, "The Best New Band In Britain." Funny thing is, they lived up to the hype.

And they've managed to survive their 15 minutes of fame. Anderson expects the group to record another album following spring and summer tours of Asia and Europe, then return to tour America in the winter. The album won't be released until next year.

Addicted To Noise: I found it interesting that "So Young," off your first album, was about that feeling of invincibilty experienced when one is "so young," a sentiment more recently expressed in the Oasis' hit "Live Forever."

Brett Anderson: "So Young" came from our first flush of success and the desire of everyone around you to kind of settle you down. The desire of people to almost build a rock star career, and to actually take all the joy out of it, the pure joy you get out of being in a band that people love. It was one of those songs that I wrote with an audience in mind. There's certain songs that you have to hear sung back at you. One of the things that I loved about "The Drowners" [their first UK hit], it was written as a quite personal thing but the way the song works best is when you've got 2000 people singing, "You're taking me over." I did have in my head the vision of 5000 people singing back to me with "So Young." I love that. It was supposed to be quite anthemic, it was supposed to be quite stupid. I didn't want to be turned into some kind of intelligent, literate pop star, you know what I mean?

ATN: Why not?

Anderson: I don't think there's any place for intelligence in music. I can't see the point. Music's instinctive and it's natural and it's dumb. It's real dumb.

ATN: What were you trying to communicate in that song?

Anderson: There's just a feeling of absolute invincibility that you get sometimes, especially if you've been in bands a long time and it's taking you a while to actually convince people. Some days I wake up and I feel absolutely bullet proof. I wanted a song that was like that. That was actually almost pure raging excitement.

ATN: The cover of your latest album, Dog Man Star, depicts a young man lying naked on a bed. Who is that?

Anderson: The picture is from a book of photographs I've had for a long time. It's actually the husband of the photographer who took it and it was taken the day after they split up. It's a beautiful picture. It's something I've had for a long time and we've never made a record that really fit it, and then we did. It was one of those things where I took it into the band and everyone went "Ah, that's the one."

ATN: Both album covers are controversial in their own way.

Anderson: They're not meant to be in the slightest. You should see the original of the Suede album. The picture we used is actually cropped. The original full picture, the woman on the right is naked in a wheelchair and the other one is kneeling to kiss her. It's a beautiful picture. And we got the right to use it. But one of the things we did was to phone up the two models in the picture to check if they were all right with it because it's an image that's going to be seen all over the world and one of them didn't want it used. Which is fair enough. It's a twenty year old picture, or whatever. But I just liked the mood of it so we cropped it. But it wasn't intended to be controversial. I mean one of the things people always say is it's so androgynous. Which is really weird, cause in the original you can tell it's two women. But anyone who is shocked by two women kissing in 1995 is a fucking half-wit.

"If we wanted to be controversial we'd have called the album I fucked dogs," says Anderson. "It's fucking easy to be controversial and difficult to be good."

ATN: Yeah, but that's what's so interesting particularly about America. I've lived in San Francisco all my life and in San Francisco, as you know, is a very sexually liberated city. But you go to Kansas, or some of these places you go through when you tour, and it's like the Stone Age.

Anderson: I know. America is definitely like three or four different countries. No, there was no intention to be controversial. I'm not really interested in being controversial. If we wanted to be controversial we'd have called the album I fucked dogs. It's fucking easy to be controversial and difficult to be good.

ATN: In putting two women kissing on the cover of that album, what did you want to say?

Anderson: Nothing. It's a beautiful image. I don't give a fuck about things like that, what people will think. One of the funny things about that is you had all these people phoning me up going, "Yeah, we think we're offended by your album cover but we're not sure. Cause we don't know what it is." Oh, well it's a man kissing a woman. "Oh." Only kidding, it's two women. "Oh, we're offended then." No, no I was joking. It's actually a man and a woman. "Oh we're not offended then." It's the same fucking picture. It's not for me to think about. I'm not going to think about it.

ATN: But you got that kind of reaction to the first one and then you put out Dog Man Star. You're saying you weren't courting controversy with that cover?

Anderson: Not in the slightest. It's because we come from Britain where no one gives a shit. Really. And to think that a semi-naked man is in any way controversial is one of the great horrors of this century. You should have seen the original fucking cover for Dog Man Star, man.

ATN: What was that like?

Anderson: It's from One Hundred and Twenty Days In Sodom . You know that film? Passolini?

ATN: I haven't seen that.

Anderson: It's fantastic. It was the naked man in a dog collar snarling at the camera. That was a fucking brilliant picture but we couldn't get the rights to that. So perhaps we should have gone with that and then I could be discussing controversy with you. I don't think it's a big deal. There are people who are professionally outraged nowadays . That's their job. But no one's actually outraged. They just think they ought to be.

ATN: It's a position they take.

Anderson: Right. It's my job to be outraged by a naked man. And it's the woman over there whose job it is to be outraged by a naked woman.

ATN: Do you think there's a New British Invasion really going on right now? Can it be compared to what happened with the original "British Invasion" in the '60s? And do you think that that's what's going to happen?

Anderson: No I don't think so. It's all very well for a bunch of people in the media to get excited about it, but a British invasion is when British bands start selling a lot of records in the States, and at the moment British bands aren't selling any records.

ATN: It seems to me that some of the bands haven't been getting the kind of shot that they should get over here.

Anderson: We've certainly felt like that. It's always been quite strange for us 'cause the records have kind of leapt out everywhere else, all over Europe and Japan. The records just sell more and more each time. But we've found that American radio is pretty hard going. And radio and MTV are pretty much what make you over here.

ATN: You're over here, you're touring. Are you feeling like there's any kind of change yet in the reception?

Anderson: Absolutely. It's probably different for us because we've got pretty much a hardcore cult following over here. So we've never had a problem in the US. It's always been very comfortable for us. We've always had a very good time here. Whether or not that translates into anything kind of mainstream, we'll have to see. There's definitely a different musical climate in England and a different musical climate in America. I don't think the bands have ever been less connected. And I think that's a real shame. I think all the great music in the world has been universal music. I'm not really interested in flying the flag for Britain. I don't give a shit, really. I'd like to make records that turn the world on. That everyone wanted. I think the whole thing is a bit of a red herring.

ATN: What are you saying?

Anderson: The whole idea of British Invasions and American renaissances. It does away with the concept of people just making good records.

ATN: There are some really great English bands right now. Suede, Oasis, Bush, Elastica...

Anderson: I think definitely the British music scene has fucking woken up a little bit and realized that you can't just sit around and make cool records for your mates. But I think there's a long ways to go. And things are still pretty divided between Britain and the US. There's no way you could hear a record and say, "I'm not sure which country that comes from." That's quite a shame, I think.

ATN: One problem is that people in America aren't really getting exposed to the new British rock & roll.

Anderson: That's the frustrating thing. I don't mind being hated. There's loads of places we go where people have heard us and they despise us. Yeah, it's really frustrating to know that people just haven't heard of you. And the real divisions in American radio. For a while I spent 24 hours a day listening to alternative radio. I think it's horrifying [the way bands are pigeonholed]. I think it's completely un-American. And I think it's a real problem for a lot of British bands, 'cause a lot of British bands fall between the genres. I mean I don't think of us as an alternative band and we'd sound pretty exotic on alternative radio. But then if you try to get us on Top 40 radio, they say we're too alternative. The problem is if you don't immediately fit into something quite comfortable. American radio has become more and more compartmentalized, which is a shame because it's a totally un-American attitude. One of the things that Americans have always been respected for is the breadth of what they're into. America has been the place where people like Black Sabbath and they like Portishead. I think it's quite sad that it's actually being carved up, kind of like demographic radio.

ATN: Dog Man Star seems more introspective, with a lot more ballads and slower material than the first album.

Anderson: A lot of changes between this album and the first one are just to do with having the time and the money to make the record that we always wanted to make. The first record is filled up with live tracks and things we've been playing for a couple of years. And when you're starting out you write big storming rockers that actually grab people's attention. You're desperate to be heard. Whereas this one we knew people were actually going to listen to it. It's a bit more subtle. We wanted to do something that you could really just lose yourself in, that you could dive into. And we wanted to actually make an album rather than a collection of singles. We sat and wrote it as an album. You know, we wrote the songs in one batch and all of the songs are like little cousins of each other. And it's supposed to be a whole album that you can actually live in and from the minute it turns on you just get swept away by it. There are a lot of changes of mood in it and a lot of changes of pace. Like one long song with an introduction, verses and choruses and even an outro.

Anderson: But I don't think it's more introspective. I think it's less introspective.

ATN: Really?

Anderson: Yeah, I think it takes on the world a bit more. I think the record takes the world on, whereas the first one was probably what was happening in our heads. This one lives in the real world.

ATN: Give me an example of that.

Anderson: Something like "We Are the Pigs" or "The Asphalt World." They're not about just what's going on in my head. They're about the people around me and the world about me and the city around me and the country around me.

ATN: Did you go somewhere to write the album?

Anderson: I did. I was living in a place called Highgate. It's a very strange place. It's a beautiful little bit of London. It's like the 14th century or something. It's got like a village green and people have rabbit hutches in their gardens and it's between two of the fucking roughest bits of London. I basically just shut myself in a bare white room for about three months and I didn't do anything but just sit and write. It's quite an inspiring place because it's very quiet and very calm but you're seconds away from real degradation and squalor. I find it quite inspiring. I need a bit of calm to write. I don't need calm in any other part of my life. But to write, I like to just sit back and let it wash over me.

ATN: Talk a bit about the lyrics on this album, and the songs.

Anderson: I think a lot of it is very blank. A lot blanker than the first one. For the first one, I used to sit down and actually slave over them and change words and did like 50 drafts. But a song like "The Asphalt World" is really simply written and it's written about kind of what I did during the day. I wanted to write something that was quite simple, that was just about me and the people around me. Things like that and "The 2 of Us" are almost like reflections on the day before. Whereas something like "Daddy's Speeding," that pretty much came to me in a dream. I had a dream that I was sent back in time to save James Dean from the car crash. We ended up getting loaded together and I didn't bother. I could have saved him.

"Still Life" came from living in that kind of place, being surrounded by housewives and incredibly bored people. It's one of the strange things that people think our lifestyle is always quite frenetic but it's actually pretty much like a housewife's a lot of the time. You know, 23 hours a day it's pure boredom. And I was trying to write a song that was about me and about them. I pottered down to the shops in the middle of the day and would see these incredibly bored people actually become almost completely disconnected from life.

Kind of like fading alcoholic housewives. And "We Are The Pigs" is probably about the division between those people and fucking two minutes down the road, people living in Archways and the way there's no connection between the two.

ATN: I want to get your opinion on some of the other English bands. What do you think of Oasis?

Anderson: I think they're all right. Yeah. I don't know their music very well but I think they're quite exciting, which is good for a English band. I think they sound pretty natural.

ATN: You've heard "Live Forever"?

Anderson: Yeah, I think it's all right. A lot of the bands that people always ask me about I'm not particularly interested in.

ATN: What do you listen to?

Anderson: I like Beatles and the Stones. I like a lot of modern stuff, dance music, soul, rap. I like people who can actually sing. That turns me on. I like Prince. I like a lot of rappers because they've got kind of a hypnotic quality to them. There's too many people who are kind of singing essay writers. I'm quite turned on by people who have the power in their voice, whether I agree with what they say or not. Perhaps Jim Morrison or Nick Cave, who have a bit of authority, who have a bit of power to them. It doesn't matter what they say, it's the way they say it that's quite important to me.

ATN: Any particular rappers.

Anderson: Oh, Snoop Doggy Dogg.

ATN: Yeah, he's great.

Anderson: The thing is I don't agree with anything he says but you have to listen to him. I like Kris Kross as well. And people like Coolio. And who does that "Regulate"?

ATN: Warren G.

Anderson: I like a really smooth sound, I like people who can really sing, you know? That's almost disappeared. A lot of modern singing, a lot of rock singing and soul singing, it's all technique, all showing off. It's wailing and howling and hitting the high notes. I like people who can whisper in your ear instead of shouting at you.

ATN: Initially there was a lot of talk about Suede in terms of sort of reviving the glam thing and the Bowie thing? What did you think about that?

Anderson: I never, never understood it. I have no idea what was going on. I've always hated glam rock. I thought it was appalling. I'm not really interested in fake music and it was very fake music. I was a bit horrified by it all.

ATN: Did the Bowie references make sense?

Anderson: Oh yeah. I'm a massive fan. It frustrates me when people go over the top about it, but I think he's great.

ATN: What music influenced you when you were young?

Anderson: I suppose the punk stuff. If we're talking about what turned me on to music, what made me pick up a guitar. It was kind of like Crass and people like that. I like Sex Pistols and stuff, but I come a bit late to it.

"Anyone who is shocked by two women kissing in 1995 is a fucking half-wit," says Anderson.

ATN: And who else?

Anderson: A lot of tough punk. Real annoying your parents music, mixed with that, stuff my sister listened to: Beatles and Stones and Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd. And then after that, I suppose when I was old enough to buy records, it was the music of the day: The Jam and the Specials and Japan and people like that, just stuff you heard on the radio, basically. My musical education is not a list of cool, cult artists I spent years trudging around record shops to find. It's stuff you hear on the radio when you're having a tea on a Sunday night. That's where my love of music comes from, big pop music.

ATN: When things first broke for Suede, how old were you?

Anderson: About 23.

ATN: How did you handle it?

Anderson: It was easy, it wasn't that much of a problem. It really isn't. You can imagine what it's like being incredibly famous. [laughs] You can! It's like any other life, but you get recognized more often. You just have to wash your hair a bit more often, you can't buy as much pornography.

ATN: Look at the Kurt Cobain situation.

Anderson: That's a very different thing. He was a lot more famous than I was, and to his credit, one of the things that really saddens me about that is he spent a lot of time saying he was deeply unhappy with success. And everyone thought it was an image. That's one of the things that's sad about fakes in music. They actually ruin it for anyone who is telling the truth. Because if it wasn't for the fact that here's generations of people who have thought it's cool to be tortured, perhaps people would have taken him a bit more seriously when he said he hated himself and that he hated what he was doing. I look at like Sinead O'Connor now. I read something she said and I feel horrified for her, really sorry for her, because she's saying that she can't handle it and she's having a terrible time. And everyone thinks it's a joke, everyone thinks it's her image. And that really saddens me and that's why I've always tried to be blatantly honest in interviews.

ATN: Why did you call this album Dog Man Star?

Anderson: Its just three of my favorite words, really. It's just something that a lot of the songs are about. Almost like the three stages of man, the three things you can be. I feel very dog-like at the moment.

ATN: Sort of like the animal state to whatever state we are in at the moment to a spiritually enlightened state?

Anderson: Perhaps not a spiritually enlightened state, but I've always been attracted to people who actually think of themselves as stars, people who actually treat life like a film or a book. I don't mean in the sense of people who are actually in the public eye. There's a lot of people who have sold 60 million records who you see 50 times a day who don't have the faintest star quality to them, and then there's a lot of people working gas stations, they just have that aura around them? They just make things happen out of everyday life.

ATN: In the first song on the album, you make reference to Winterland, you make reference to introducing the band, which I took you to be talking about the Band, you know, Robbie Robertson's The Band.

Anderson: [Laughs] No.

ATN: That's where they played when they played their first performance.

Anderson: I was thinking the Sex Pistols' final gig.

ATN: But that's pretty wild. I was at that show at Winterland, actually.

Anderson: You're kidding.

ATN: It was probably the greatest show that I ever saw.

Anderson: I was watching it just recently. I've got bits of it on video. It's something I've seen about a million times. That bit at the end. [Starts to deliver lyrics in a monotonal Johnny Rotten voice] "This is no fun/ No fun/ At all."

ATN: People were throwing money and all kinds of stuff onto the stage. Rotten was just picking the stuff up. And the audience was just the most bizarre audience. It was a mixture of people that were totally into the band and people who had come to see the freak show.

Anderson: Yeah totally. I've always been fascinated by them and by that gig and just the way they managed to compress everything into a year. Or in the case of that show, anything you could ever ask for a gig in three-quarters of an hour. I just love the idea of a final moment. Of a band just being in the present.

ATN: The thing was, though, when you were there, the music sounded so great and so powerful. Some people tended to say, oh, the Sex Pistols couldn't play that good...

Anderson: Oh they fucking rule! We were listening to the album last night on the bus. If you listen to it now, it just sounds like the greatest rock album in the world.

ATN: Never Mind the Bollocks . . .

Anderson: Yeah. It's so completely almost like year zero it's ridiculous. It's like listening to Chuck Berry.

ATN: Exactly.

Anderson: Or the Rolling Stones. It's just a fucking absolutely great melodic rock album. All the things that people say about them are absolutely untrue. There's only one criteria for musicianship, as far as I'm concerned, and that's whether you can get across what you're saying with your instrument and with your voice. I'm not interested in any kind of technique or anything like that. To me, a great musician is someone that you understand what they feel when they pick up a guitar and there's people who can do that with three chords and there's people who can play entire symphonies and have never moved a human soul.

ATN: All these guitar players who can play scales up the wazzoo, but so what?

Anderson: The real problem is, you've got someone like Sex Pistols, they come along and people mistake it. People think that the way they played was what was important, people actually think that if they can replicate the sound as raw or amateurish as that, that they'll somehow be as great as them. And it has nothing to do with that, it has nothing to do with the level of musicianship. It has to do with the fact that they actually send an electric shock through you. And there's people who do that with incredibly complicated music and there's people who do that with incredibly simple music.

ATN: How old were you when you were exposed to "God Save the Queen" and "Anarchy . . . ?"

Anderson: That's the strange thing. I was just really too young. It was '76 when that happened, which is 20 years ago now. I was about 9 or 10, so I wasn't a punk. I couldn't get to any punk gigs or anything. So we just got these ripples in the suburbs, this incredibly frustrating feeling 'cause you knew you were getting everything like second or third hand and you knew you were missing out. Luckily they were one of the few bands where the records were so fucking powerful that it didn't make any difference, you could actually plug into it. Half of my life I've kind of lived the pop dream, wanting to be in a band, and it comes from that, it comes from being cut off from it and just having these little bits of vinyl which were my only connection to it. It's not like nowadays where any kind of fucking two-bit thing makes it, you see it everywhere. It was in the news. I can remember for a few weeks where that was the news. You know what I mean, the Sex Pistols.

ATN: Was it the Sex Pistols or what was it that actually made you make the decision, OK, I want to do this?

Anderson: It's one of those things that's always seemed completely natural to me. It's almost the other way around. I can remember the first time I met someone who didn't want to be in a band. And I can remember thinking it was the most bizarre thing. I thought they were making it up. I just assumed that everyone wanted to be in a band and a lot of people settled for something else.

I guess that punk was really important just because the first time you pick up a guitar, you're not going to be able to play "Brown Sugar," but you are going to be able to play stuff like "Bodies" and "Submission." I used to be in a punk band called The Pigs. We played these kind of like bastardized Sex Pistols and Fall songs about the countryside. I mean they actually connected you to music.

One of the big problems of coming from the kind of place I come from is there's no history, there's no music, you can't imagine yourself as a pop star. You couldn't say, "I want to be in a band." There weren't any bands. There wasn't a local scene or anything. The nearest big town is Brighton and that's never produced anything. One of the things about the Smiths I loved when I was growing up was just the kind of obvious ordinariness of them and the fact that they were making beautiful, important music and they were just obviously kind of like the square kid in the back of the class.

ATN: Haywards Heath is where you grew up, right?

Anderson: Yes.

ATN: But that's 40 miles from London. That doesn't seem that far to me, but it sounds like it felt like it was a million miles away from anything cool.

Anderson: Oh yeah, completely. It's near enough, I used to go up to London when I was 15, 16, but kind of as a complete tourist. I used to wander around the streets with my mouth open. I didn't get to do anything. I just went to wander around and soak it all in. I think that's quite important to be cut off from it, because you keep your romantic view of it intact.

ATN: You romanticize it.

Anderson: People actually from London, they're a bunch of fucking, cynical old farts, they really are. They've all seen it all before, they've all been backstage. They've already seen the downside of it and we never really had that. We still kind of actually believed in the band. And I think a lot of big city people just don't. They don't believe in the power of music.

ATN: About how old were you when you had The Pigs?

Anderson: The Pigs. I guess I must have been about 15.

ATN: Was that your first band?

Anderson: I've had hundreds. Bedroom bands. I was in a band called Suave and the Elegant. They did kind of Beatles covers. None of us could play. Just farting around. And then, when I met Mat [Osman], it was the same thing, we couldn't play. We had a drum machine in the bedroom and we'd do these dreadful fucking songs.

ATN: How come you parted ways with guitarist/songwriter Bernard Butler?

Anderson: He just didn't really enjoy being in the band anymore. There was just no point having anyone in the band who doesn't think it's the greatest thing on earth, you know what I mean?

ATN: So basically he got bored with it or frustrated with it?

Anderson: I think he wanted to do everything himself. He's very musical and he just wanted to sit and play guitar and write songs. And if you want to be in a big band, you actually have to work at it. You have to be singer and musician and businessman and politician and interviewee and all these things at the same time.

ATN: Do you worry at all that not having his musical input is going to affect things like coming up with material?

Anderson: Not in the slightest. We're working a lot faster that we ever have done.

ATN: And you like the material as much?

Anderson: Yeah, certainly. I'm really excited about it. The thing is, I'm writing stuff on my own and I'm writing stuff with [new guitarist] Richard Oakes and I'm writing stuff with the band. Richard is vomiting stuff out.

ATN: What makes you mad?

Anderson: I guess absolute waste. Just the realms of crappy fucking records. Piles of dogshit. You could get rid of 95% of the records that were ever released and no one would be any the worse off. I'd like to see MTV close down for an hour and go, I'm sorry there's nothing good to put on. Or a music magazine saying, we're not coming next week because nothing happened.

ATN: It seems like there's always been this classic tension between the creative sidesomeone trying to make great rock & rolland the record company's side, where it's a business trying to make money. And it's like they don't care whether it's the Sex Pistols or whether it's Journey.

Anderson: At the same time, it's very easy to just be purely musical and just sit at home all day and make beautiful records that no one hears. I can't get away from the fact that if we make a record now, because of record companies, 90% of the world's population can get a hold of it in a week and that's a fucking fantastic thing. That's technology being used in an incredible way. You can't knock it. If you're going to make a record to communicate to people, then you should make sure people fucking hear it. I think that's really important. I don't want to just sit home and say, we just write music for ourselves and if anyone else likes it, it's a bonus.

ATN: One of the reasons that there's so many crappy records is because the record companies don't know. They're trying to find something...

Anderson: They're doing a job. I'm very aware of that. Every single person you meet in the entire fucking rock-and-roll industry is doing their job and they're looking out for number one. It is a fucking industry and you've just to be completely aware of that. That's why you have to be quite a tight unit as a band because it's the four of you against the rest of the world. However much there's people around us who have our best interests at heart, at the end of the day we're the band and we know what's best. We have pretty much absolute control over Suede. We have more control than pretty much any band out there today.

ATN: Do you make the business decisions?

Anderson: Yeah. Everything follows from the records. Basically, when it comes to selling, we leave the record company to it. That's what they're there for. They're the salesmen. But we're one of the few bands where no one hears our record until we've finished it. And then we come out with a finished record, finished artwork. And we hand it over, we say these are going to be the singles, and we let them to the bits that I have no fucking interest in. Like marketing it.

ATN: When you handed a record over to them, have they ever come back to you and said, "Oh, we think you should do this or we think you should get that song remixed?"

Anderson: [laughs] They wouldn't fucking dare. I mean we listen to them. Every now and then the American record company will say, "I think this would make a great single in America." And we have listened to them in the past. But pretty much anything we actually care about, we do ourselves. No, no one's ever suggested that to us. No one's ever suggested remixing or anything like that. I think they know that it would be a terrible, terrible mistake.

ATN: You've toured America now, this is the third time?

Anderson: Yeah.

ATN: What do you think about this place, given that you've been here enough times that you have some sense of it?

Anderson: I love the place. I do love the place. There's a real openness to it that you don't get in lot in other countries.

ATN: What are some of the specific things that you like?

Anderson: I've had some of the best nights of my life kind of lost in strange American cities. Just being swept along. People are completely receptive to, I don't know, letting loose. Getting loaded and getting loose. Just because there's a kind of dumbness to the place. There is! Which I really like. Let's just see what happens, that kind of thing. England can be a very claustrophobic place, especially if you're vaguely well-known and I don't get that in America at all. I find the opportunities for getting yourself in trouble are vast here.

ATN: Can you be more specific?

Anderson: Not without perjuring myself at a later date. [laughs] I like the people here. I like the fact that people will actually try anything. And I like the way it's very fast moving. It really suits a band on tour. In Britain and Europe it takes kind of six months to get to know people so there's no point in meeting people. Whereas in America you meet people and they're like, "Hi, I'm Cindy, I was abused as a child and I'm a Gemini." And you're off, you know what I mean?

ATN: What's your goal for Suede?

Anderson: Just to make a string of absolutely great records. That was my goal for Suede when I was 12 years old. Doesn't change. One of the only things that doesn't change. To make just an absolute realm of fantastic records that people love.

ATN: Do you have aspirations of having the biggest band in the world?

Anderson: No. I want to be the best band in the world.

ATN: How did you come up with the name?

Anderson: It's just a beautiful, sensual word. It sounds really nice and looks really good. It's a sensual thing rather than intellectual. I've probably gone on many times about how Suede is the animal skin around a human body. But that all came later, when I was getting fucking [laughs] pretentious in interviews. It was just a sensuous, sensual word.

ATN: How did you feel about having to be the London Suede?

Anderson: It stank. I think it's shit.

ATN: What do you think of some of the American bands that have made it in recent years ranging from Pearl Jam to more recently, the Offspring and Green Day?

Anderson: I don't get it. I wish I did. I wish I could at least have understood it but didn't like it. But I just don't get it at all. I'm completely amused by it.

ATN: Are there any American bands that you do like?

Anderson: I like that Sheryl Crow record a lot. I like Perry Farrell, I think he's pretty cool. I like R.E.M.

ATN: You do?

Anderson: Yeah, I do like R.E.M. a lot.

ATN: What do you think of Monster?

Anderson: I think they got away with fucking murder.

ATN: Oh really?

Anderson: I understand it, though. I really understand it. It would be really easy to make another record like the last one and it's quite brave to make a record that you know is going to sell less. I don't think it's a particularly great album at all. I'd love to have been in the business long enough where people actually give you the benefit of the doubt whereas we're in the situation where people always assume the worst. We're always fighting for people to like our records. Whereas I think there are a few fucking statesmen in the world, like Paul fucking Weller in Britain, just because he's been around so long, if he makes a quarter of the way decent record, it's kind of like the second coming. Back to R.E.M., I just like the way they can be that big and that simple. I can't think of another band who've got that big and have actually used it to get simpler and more direct instead of turning into something enormous.

ATN: Speaking of the second coming, do you have anything to say about the Stone Roses' return after so many years of fucking 'round or whatever they were doing?

Anderson: Musically, it's great. They're probably some of the best musicians in Britain and they can actually fucking play. But one of the reasons I really liked the first album is I thought they actually had some songs. And I don't think they have on this one. But that's my personal taste. I like songs. And I don't think this is a very songy album.

ATN: How do drugs affect what you do?

Anderson: Apart from making me get up late for interviews, not very much. It's just something I do. It's not kind of a building brick in Suede, it's something I do personally.

ATN: Do you find it creatively stimulating?

Anderson: Very, very rarely. Not normally. When I wrote this album, I wasn't even drinking. I just locked myself in a white room for 14 hours a day. Pepped myself up with ginseng. Very occasionally I feel inspired by drugs, but not very often. And when we play live, it's funny, when we play live, none of us even have a beer before we go on. We played before 70,000 last year at a festival and we were the only people straight there.

ATN: So is it more a way of getting outside of yourself?

Anderson: I do it for exactly the same reasons that everyone else does. It's a good laugh. It makes me feel in different ways but that's no different from the reasons why millions of people who take drugs. I'd like to say it's some kind of creative elixir but to be honest, most drugs are incredibly uncreative. Cocaine is the least creative drug I can think of. Dope is fucking pointless. It's not a musical thing at all.

ATN: What's your drug of choice?

Anderson: What's the drug of choice? [laughs] I'll take anything, man. I don't really like slow drugs. I don't like drugs that slow you down. I don't like downers. I don't like anything that makes you fucking buzz off to a dream world. I like things that heighten....

ATN: In other words you don't like heroin.

Anderson: No, not particularly. I'm not really interested in dream drugs. I like things that light up your life, pep you up. Ginseng is my drug of choice. And Guinness. [laughs] Any drug that begins with "g," basically.

ATN: At certain points, do you sit back and say, this is amazing that I've been able to achieve what we have achieved?

Anderson: Regularly. Regularly I look in the mirror and say, I'm the luckiest man alive. Yeah, it hasn't lost its wonder for me at all. You can get worn away sometimes, but there's always the moment when you listen back to a track or the moment you play a great gig where you feel like Superman, actually feel like 500 feet tall.

ATN: In terms of the state of rock & roll right now, what's going on from your point of view?

Anderson: I think it's quite inspiring. I think it's quite inspiring in Britain and I think Americans seem quite inspired about the whole thing. I think Britain's producing some halfway decent records for once and I think people are actually astounded that Britain has risen and is beginning to get off its fucking ass. I think the American scene has totally been shook up by cheap bands and the fact that record companies are running around like headless chickens because money doesn't equal success anymore. I think that's great.

What I don't like at the moment is the kind of cult, alternative elements of it, the way everyone is playing to these tiny little demographic audiences and there's no kind of connection across any kind of cultures or even across a fucking big lake like the Atlantic.

ATN: When Elvis Presley died, Lester Banks wrote about Elvis and he said that Elvis was the last rock star that connected everybody.

Anderson: The really big problem is every band in the entire world is living in the shadows of the Beatles and there ain't going to be no more Beatles unfortunately because everyone knows too much and everyone has more access. So people can have music that completely fits them, and you end up with these bizarre musical sub-cultures that are just aimed at one percent of the population. And you never can have another Beatles and I find that incredibly sad. Because that is the blueprint, I think, for every band, for every decent band, to try and make records that turn the whole world on, records that anyone can connect with.

ATN: You really believe in the positive effect that a great rock-and-roll record can have on people.

Anderson: Certainly. Even if it's the most stupid record and it does nothing more for you than brighten up your day for four minutes when it comes on the car radio, it's still more powerful than the other art forms.

ATN: At its best, what do you think it can do?

Anderson: At its absolute best, I think it can totally empower people and totally make people feel like they're wearing a suit of armor and strengthen people and make people feel above the shit of the world. Even at its worst, it can be fucking great. I think a dumb-assed pop song, the dumbest of the dumb-assed pop song is probably more important than any fucking painting done since the war or any sculpture or anything like that.

ATN: Why do you feel that way?

Anderson: It affects people in a way that those things don't. It affects people in a totally natural, physical, emotional way. Not in an intellectual way. It's democratic. It's the only fucking democratic art form left. You can get it anywhere. One of the great things about music is it does belong to everyone and that great songs just come to live in the air. That's why I like the radio so much. That was my first introduction to music. Every now and then I turn it on and think, what a fantastic thing it is. Just that you can have these things all the time. You don't have to go to a fucking gallery, you don't have to pay anything. There just isn't any equivalent for any other art form and it's fucking cheap, music. It must be said. You can get yourself an original Suede for what, about $15?

ATN: Now, it seems like, in terms of a CD, it lasts for quite a long time.

Anderson: Oh, that's a typical fucking American attitude. They always want to know how long it lasts. It is. It's the only place I've ever been in the world where they come first and ask you at a gig, how long are you going to play? Who gives you a shit, you know what I mean?

ATN: I know what you mean. Like a shitty band could play for 3 hours, who cares and like 10 minutes of greatness....

Anderson: I saw The Jesus and Mary Chain when they played for 20 minutes and they were fucking incredible!

ATN: The first time they came to America they played at a little club called the I-Beam in San Francisco and it was amazing.

Anderson: I can just imagine in America someone going, "That was incredible, why don't you play longer?" People always want a fucking encore.

#brett anderson #suede #this is long AF but genuinely interesting!#the london suede #atn #addicted to noise

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keatondj · 6 years ago

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My Personal Ranking of Enya’s Discography

Before I really started getting into pop music and the music of today, before I was a true Little Monster or Arianator, before all of that, I had one true music idol: Enya. Enya is one of the most divine artists of our time, I think.

I knew many of her songs from dancing to them at ballroom concerts or gigs (such as It’s In The Rain, Dreams Are More Precious, and Wild Child), but I never took the time to listen to how beautiful they were. I dug out Watermark from my parent’s CD cabinet one day in my junior year of high school, and became completely enraptured. I wouldn’t go a day without listening to her; yes, I would even fall asleep to her music. I just think she has the most incredible ear for rapturous orchestration, otherworldly vocal arrangements and layering, and heavenly melodies. I always look for music that is just beautiful, and she is the epitome of that for me.

Certain albums speak more to me than others, but all of her work is just absolutely divine. I’d love to share my thoughts and express my gratitude for her incredible work.

Reminder: this is my opinion. Everyone has a different ear, and certain sounds and songs resonate with different people. I’m just sharing my personal thoughts and experiences with these albums.

8. And Winter Came... (2008)

Although Christmas is my favorite holiday and the holiday season is just a sweet time of year, I’m not terribly fond of holiday releases. Other than Mariah’s “All I Want for Christmas is You”, many modern holiday releases are not noteworthy, and can’t live up to the true holiday classic we know and love. This album, unfortunately, falls in that category.

As a whole, this album just falls flat compared to the majesty of the rest of her work. Certain songs just don’t gel with me like “One Toy Soldier” and “My! My! Times Flies”; the use of the electric guitar in the latter just sounds corny, and I don’t enjoy it.

The album has its moments: “Dreams Are More Precious” as I mentioned is one of my introductions to Enya and it’s also one of my favorite songs of hers, the title song follows the tradition of a killer title song on an Enya album, and the “Oíche Chiúin (Chorale)” is Enya vocal-layering at its best, and it’s wonderful to hear such a beloved holiday hymn in another language.

It’s not an awful album; it’s not just heavy in my Enya rotation, we’ll say.

Favorite Songs: “And Winter Came...”, “Journey of the Angels”, “Dreams Are More Precious”, “Stars and Midnight Blue”, “Oíche Chiúin (Chorale)”

7. Amarantine (2005)

This is another album that just doesn’t stand out too much for me. I actually think it’s quite a lovely album, and the fact that it has the first use of the Loxian language that Roma Ryan invented is exciting; “Water Shows The Hidden Heart” is probably my favorite song on the album from the use of the language and the fact that it’s just a really gorgeous song.

I don’t have a lot to say, really. It’s a fine album, but it just doesn’t resonate with me as much as her other albums.

Favorite Songs: “Amarantine”, “It’s In The Rain”, “If I Could Be Where You Are”, “A Moment Lost”, “Water Shows The Hidden Heart”

6. A Day Without Rain (2000)

This is an interesting album for me. It contains some of her strongest work and some of my most favorite of her work, but it’s not a favorite of mine either. I think the album artwork just speaks to quintessential Enya (and may be my earliest picture of Enya in my mind, I’m not sure), but it’s not my quintessential Enya album. The critics of the time absolutely hated it; I don’t necessarily agree with them, but I think I understand.

The album is incredibly top heavy, in my opinion. The title song is pure bliss, “Only Time” obviously took the world by storm for good reason (and unfortunately in the meme world as well, which I don’t appreciate), and “Deora Ar Mo Chroí” is one of the most beautiful and tragic songs I’ve ever heard. After “Flora’s Secret” (another song I danced to in ballroom), it really loses steam and power. I can hardly ever finish the album for this reason.

It’s musically one of her most gorgeous albums, but it’s not the most impactful or inventive.

Favorite Songs: “A Day Without Rain”, “Only Time”, “Deora Ar Mo Chroí”, “Flora’s Secret”, “Pilgrim”

5. Enya (1987) / The Celts (1992)

At first listen, I really did not like this album. I thought it wasn’t pretty enough, it didn’t have the key Enya elements, and it was too weird. Listening to it more and more, those are actually the reasons I really quite enjoy it now.

It’s nothing like the rest of her work, which makes it so unique. She was just starting to find her musical sound and sensibilities, and this involved a lot more experimentation on her part. It’s so musically interesting and diverse, and so wonderfully late 80′s. It is a compilation of songs used on the show The Celts, but the fact that it holds up so well as an album itself is remarkable.

This album was a perfect starting point for the rest of her career and it holds up as a great album now.

Favorite Songs: “Aldebaran”, “Deireadh an Tuath”, “Fairytale”, “Boadicea”, “Dan y Dwr”

4. Dark Sky Island (2015)

You have no idea how excited I was to be getting a brand new album from Enya after I started being a huge fan. I wasn’t sure if we would get a new one after And Winter Came..., and little 19 year old me was geeking out too much at the thought of a new Enya album. To say the least, I was not disappointed at all.

This is one of her strongest releases in a long time; 7 years break from releasing music really benefited her, and she came back more powerful than ever. This is such a solid album, and I definitely had it on loop when it first came out.

I will say that none of my favorite tracks stand out against her earlier work, and there is no true powerhouse of the album. It is a very cohesive album, however, and that is how it is so successful. It’s a pleasure to listen to from start to finish.

I sure do hope we get more records from her in the future. I would be so eternally grateful if she could bless us just once or twice more.

Favorite Songs: “The Humming”, “The Forge Of The Angels”, “I Could Never Say Goodbye”, “Dark Sky Island”, “Diamonds On The Water”

3. The Memory Of Trees (1995)

I got this album for Christmas a few years back along with And Winter Came..., and believe me, I was listening to this album non-stop. This is the album that solidified my status as a true Enya fan.

For a while, this was my favorite Enya album, and maybe my favorite album of all time. However, my opinion has shifted, and I realize that I was just devastatingly in love with a few certain tracks. Like A Day Without Rain, this album is very top heavy for me, with the last few tracks not carrying the power of the beginning of the album.

“Athair Ar Neamh” took my breath away when I first heard it; I think it is her most beautiful song to date. I was just absolutely ravished by the haunting nature of the song with the signature Enya production behind it. It’s a song I can always throw on to feel comforted.

All in all, this is an absolutely gorgeous album, and it’s part of the reason I’m so in love with her work.

Favorite Songs: “The Memory Of Trees”, “Pax Deorum”, “Athair Ar Neamh”, “Hope Has A Place”, “Once You Had Gold”

2. Watermark (1989)

This is the album that catapulted Enya into international stardom, and for good reason. This entire album is ethereal and blissful perfection. It really creates its own world and transports you on a journey filled with desire, contentment, and adventure.

It’s the first full Enya album I listened to, and I can always find joy and comfort in its gorgeous melodies, her haunting vocals, and the spectacular production on Nicky Ryan’s part. “Evening Falls” and “Na Laetha Geal M'Óige” were the two songs that established my sensibility towards Enya’s softer and slower songs, and I hold every other song to their standard, basically.

There is not a bad song on this album, and it definitely could take the number one spot. This is the perfect starter album for anyone trying to get into Enya, and it’s one of the most beautiful albums ever made.

Favorite Songs: “Watermark”, “On Your Shore”, “Exile”, “Evening Falls”, “Na Laetha Geal M'Óige”

1. Shepherd Moons (1991)

This is the quintessential Enya album in my opinion. It checks every mark, and then some. Everything about this album is just so perfect, incredible, powerful, etc. This is where she hit her stride, and delivered her most incandescent work. I can truly escape into another world when I listen to this album. It’s an album I need all the time; it’s one of the albums that really defines me.

Every song is just so good; there’s not a dud at all. The ones that impacted me the most are “Caribbean Blue” and “Marble Halls”; both epitomize the qualities I love most about Enya. They are my two most favorite songs of hers, but I’m going to say that “Marble Halls” takes the cake for the top spot. It’s not an original work of hers (funnily enough), but it’s just the most gorgeous song ever. Nothing else to it; it’s absolutely flawless, divine, and any other adjective meaning “perfection”.

I love this album so much, and I will forever be indebted to Enya’s brilliance and majesty because of this album.

Enya is an absolute goddess of music, and I hope she knows how much impact she has to all her fans around the world. She is just amazing, and I will love her and her art forever.

#enya #watermark #shepherd moons #the celts #the memory of trees #a day without rain #amarantine #and winter came...#dark sky island

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johnnymundano · 5 years ago

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Paganini Horror (1989)

Directed by Luigi Cozzi

Screenplay by Luigi Cozzi and Daria Nicolodi

Music by Vince Tempera

Country: Italy

Running time: 82 minutes

CAST

Daria Nicolodi as Sylvia Hackett

Jasmine Maimone as Kate

Pascal Persiano as Daniel

Maria Cristina Mastrangeli as Lavinia

Michel Klippstein as Elena

Pietro Genuardi as Mark Singer

Luana Ravegnini as Rita

Giada Cozzi as Sylvia (child)

Elena Pompei as Sylvia's mother

Donald Pleasence as Mr. Pickett

Paganini Horror is a terrible 1989 Italian horror movie set in a decrepit Venetian villa where a terrible (mostly) girl pop group film a terrible video for a terrible song based on the terrible idea of using cursed music by Paganini. The aural nonsense these tinsel wits conjure summons the cranky spirit of the deceased composer to dispatch them one by one in imaginative, but seriously underfunded ways. And probably to stop them screaming, because, hoo boy, do these ladies scream. If you are a massive fan of women screaming Paganini Horror is the movie for you, my unusual friend. Much of the running time of Paganini Horror involves neither Paganini nor horror but rather women running around what seems like one corridor and three rooms screaming. Occasionally they all meet up and scream at each other in the same room, or that one bloody corridor. I swear at some points they bounce up and down and flap their hands while screaming like overwrought teenagers at a pop concert.

Which is ironic since they are a pop group themselves. They are the kind of fantastically talented (mostly) girl band who do the female cause no favours at all; the kind who play their guitars by keeping their fingers immobile and flat on the strings while provocatively moving their hips about while pulling faces which suggest they are experiencing a sexy form of menstrual cramp. The singer, Kate (Jasmine Maimone), doesn’t have an instrument because she is too busy prancing about, trying to see which she can open wider, her eyes or her mouth. The token bloke, Daniel (Pascal Persiano), is stuck behind the drums because no one wants to see his exposed belly button. I think they sing Bon Jovi’s terrible “You Give Love a Bad Name” but it’s kind of hard to tell. Anyway, they are so bad the movie doesn’t give the band a name (I think; I don’t really care), so we’ll call them The Chilblains. Whatever song The Chilblains are excreting, it isn’t good enough for their producer Lavinia (Maria Cristina Mastrangeli) whose ears apparently work, so Kate and Lavinia shout at each other, and things get so heated that Kate almost pushes a stool over but Lavinia arrests its fall just in time. Rock and roll Babylon! The Chilblains need new material to get them another million seller, and fast!

Daniel, the male drummer, sources some groovy material which will get the band back on track by, apropos of nothing, meeting a twitchy Donald Pleasence in a disused warehouse and purchasing a lost Paganini composition. Apparently, actually writing some decent music fails to occur to Daniel. The girls go wild for the fab synthed up sounds of groovy Paganini, and Lavinia books them into a spooky old house Paganini once passed water in, now owned by Daria Nicolodi’s Sylvia Hackett. The idea is to get top horror director Mark Singer (Pietro Genuardi) to make a smashing pop vid and get The Chilblains back shifting millions again. Unfortunately the video is shit. Even more unfortunately the restless spirit of Paganini is so upset by his music being co-opted by talentless chancers that it starts knocking them off in unintentionally amusing ways. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a woman burned alive in a poorly constructed giant violin case, baby.

Niccolò Paganini (b.1782) was a real person who probably didn’t live to see a woman burned alive in a poorly constructed giant violin case, but he was a legendarily amazeballs Genoan violinist. While Paganini Horror is hardly a fit cinematic tribute, he is a good choice for a spooky killer. Much like Cher, he is purported to have consorted with the devil, selling his soul in return for prodigious talent. Back then, see, there were no video games or movies for unimaginative reactionaries to blame everything on, so in desperation bits of wood that could make sounds such as the violin were considered the “devil’s instrument”, indicative of poor moral character and likely to cause an excess of excitement. And so extravagant was Paganini’s talent that it was thought only a satanic source could explain it. Or, y’know, he was talented and practiced a lot. Your call. Paganini died in 1840, possibly from mercury poisoning from being treated for syphilis. Maybe from tuberculosis. I don’t know, what am I, a historian? Paganini’s spookiness survived after his death to the extent that he wasn’t laid to rest until 1876, when priests finished debating what they should do with him. Priests apparently had a lot of time on their hands back then. None of that matters since all Paganini Horror is bothered about is Paganini was very musical and a little bit eerie.

Unfortunately looking up Niccolò Paganini on The Internet turns out to be a lot more exciting than watching Paganini Horror. Particularly finding out that all his teeth fell out from his syphilis treatment. But if you are inclined towards terrible Italian horror movies Paganini Horror has the odd slender wisp of a delight. There’s the ever twinkly Donald Pleasence, being all sinister and stuff; and you get quite a bit more of him than I was expecting, which is nice. Unsatisfactory Italian horror movies form a magical late stage in Pleasence’s career, where he basically rocks up acting in a movie which exists only in his head, and ends up being the most interesting thing in the movie outside of his head. Although genre legend (and co-scripter) Daria Nicolodi is intermittently to be seen acting, mostly she just goes with the whole screaming thing. Michel Klippstein as Elena is the best thing in the movie, but not for her acting. Unfortunately it’s because for the bulk of the movie she wears a nasty green lycra jump suit studded with a nonsensical pattern of holes. It’s kind of fascinating in a wholly abysmal way. Paganini Horror isn’t always terribly interesting so you may often find your mind wandering, wondering just how sweaty Michel Klippstein’s get-up got. I bet they had to burn that outfit once the filming stopped. Ew! In the interests of decorum I shall draw a discreet veil of “mostly adequate” over the other performances.

About on a par with the less than impressive acting is Luigi Cozzi’s relentlessly apathetic direction which exacerbates rather than disguises the clearly near lethal budgetary constraints. But would any more money have helped a horror movie helmed by someone so determined to so cluelessley fart away every death scene? Probably not. Make no mistake, Paganini Horror is not only terrible but, worse, it is often quite boring. This is quite a feat since the killer wears a gold mask and looks like a low budget musketeer prancing about and, as comically awesome as it is regrettably underutilised, there is also a gold violin with a spring loaded blade in the base. It’s like Cozzi has accepted a bet to make everything as tedious as humanly possible. In theory Paganini Horror has some clever ideas and creative slaughter, in practice however it is a drearily slow crawl punctuated by tedious screaming and hilariously cheap-shit SFX shenanigans. The best (i.e. worst) example is “The Invisible Barrier” which elicits some fantastic (i.e. rubbish) mime action as our cast pretend to be pushing against something that isn’t there, it also has a car crash into it but…off-screen! and a character is crushed to death by it, which just means the crew press a sheet of glass onto her face to distort it. Eyerolling never had it so good.

Be warned, sensation seekers of all ages, sure, Paganini Horror all sounds very camp and cheesetastic, but it is neither campy nor cheesy enough. It takes some weird anti-talent to render dull a movie which has a record producer who can identify a fungus by sight as being one used in the 18th century to give Stradivarius violins their unique sound. (I believe Kanye West has the same ability.) Don’t be fooled if any of that sounds fun; Paganini Horror is fun, but not fun enough by far. This Italian mis-fire is fit only for masochistic die-hards like myself rather than your average horror punter up for a good time. Ultimately then, not so much a case of Paganini Horror, but rather Paganini Torpor.

#Paganini Horror #Movies #Horror #Italy #The 1980s #1989 #Luigi Cozzi #Donald Pleasence #Daria Nicolodi

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tkmedia · 3 years ago

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Daily Bread Mailbag: Lomachenko, Charlo-Castano, Stevenson-Herring, More

The Daily Bread Mailbag returns with Stephen "Breadman" Edwards tackling topics such as Vasilliy Lomachenko's big comeback win, the upcoming unification between Jermell Charlo and Brian Castano, the record of Artur Beterbiev, Shakur Stevenson vs. Jamel Herring, and more. I’ve asked you in the past about the best wins in boxing. You’ve gone on record stating you believe that Duran’s win over Leonard is the best win in boxing history. But I wanted to ask a slightly different question: What are some fights you think would’ve surpassed that win if it had gone the other way? I know that might be a very broad question, but I’ve been pondering it for a while. One that I can think of that might have an argument is Pryor-Arguello. If Arguello had beaten Pryor, he would’ve been the first four-division champ ever… am I remembering that correctly? Could that have been one of the best wins if it had gone the other way? I also wonder about Hopkins-Trinidad. I know Trinidad was the favorite for that fight, but what if he’d won that one? What are some other what-if big wins you think of? Greg K. Bread’s Response: If I said Duran W over Leonard was the best in history then I was typing too fast. What I meant was it could possibly be the best win in history. It’s high up there. It's among the best. As is Leonard over Hearns1. Ali over Foreman. Frazier over Ali1 and Armstrong over Ross. Along with Duran over Leonard 1, those are most likely the 5 best wins in boxing history. If Arguello would have defeated Aaron Pryor in 1982 he would have won 4 titles before Leonard in 1988, Duran in 1989 and Hearns in 1987. It would’ve been huge. To defeat and undefeated top 10 P4P fighter the caliber of Pryor in his prime would have been amazing and no doubt a top 10 win in boxing history. If Tito would have defeated Hopkins it would’ve been something. Tito’s “off night” vs Oscar would have dismissed as an off night. Hopkins had been champion since 1995 and considered an excellent fighter. It would’ve also been for 3 belts the WBA, WBC and IBF. I don’t know if it would’ve been bigger than Arguello over Pryor but it would’ve been huge. Because for as great as we view Hopkins now, in 2001 he had not received the respect he has today from the boxing community. Hopkins WIN over Tito is actually bigger than Tito’s hypothetical win over Hopkins. If Pernell Whitaker would have gotten the official decision over Julio Cesar Chavez then it would have simply been the best win of the 90s. It’s a shame Whitaker didn’t get the official verdict. I saw your comment about Sha’Carri Richardson and I can’t help but to think she was set up. Marijuana is legal in the state she smoked in and it shouldn’t be illegal to smoke by Olympic standards. I know you’re a fair dude Bread but we disagree on this. On another topic do fighters get tested for marijuana also? Bread’s Response: First of all yes boxers do get tested for marijuana. In fact there have been fighters who have had wins turned into NC because of positive marijuana results. Let me preface my comments about Ms. Richardson. I would love to see her compete and win. My daughter runs the 100m, 200m and 400m. Richardson is from the USA and I want to see her beat the Jamaicans who have had a strong hold on the sprints. Now what I said is the people are using the WRONG argument to defend her. I would love to see marijuana not be on the BANNED list. But the fact is, it’s on the list and the committee has their reasons why. They believe it slows the reaction time which can be dangerous on the track. They also believe it sets a bad example for younger athletes and it can be used as a MASKING agent for more powerful substances. These aren’t my rules. These are the rules of the testing agency. Ms. Richardson was well aware. The best argument that can be used is that marijuana should not be on the banned substance list. Period. The rule is archaic and it shouldn’t be in existence anymore. The arguments I keep hearing is “keep that same energy yall had with Michael Phelps.” And that Sha’Carri Richardson was SET UP. Those are ridiculous arguments. When you’re wrong. Ask for GRACE. Be accountable and hopefully things work out. First let’s address the Michael Phelps case. Phelps didn’t test positive for marijuana. A photo surfaced of him 6 months AFTER the Olympics smoking a BONG. Phelps was suspended for 3 months and lost sponsorship. He could’ve fought that but he didn’t. There would be no way to prove what was in the BONG despite us knowing and using common sense what it was. Remember it’s not what you know, it’s what you can prove. You can’t compare that to Richardson testing positive a month before the Olympics. It’s just not the same. Remember I want Richardson to win, but we look foolish making WRONG points. At least research before you say ridiculous stuff. When I first read that she tested positive I said to myself maybe she used a topical solution for muscle soreness and instead of having CBD in it, it had THC in it. I was literally making excuses for her because I couldn’t believe the press head lines. To hear her say, she knows what the rules were. She did it because of the stress of her mom dying, there was nothing I or anyone else could say. This wasn’t a MISTAKE, it was poor judgment. When you use the word set up you better be careful. I have seen black athletes put through hard times or be held to a higher standard than other athletes. I have seen injustice. In this case a young lady suffered bad news and she decided to smoke marijuana, despite knowing the rules. In order for her to have been set up the committee would have had to have a hand in her mother dying and/or know that Richardson would smoke to relieve stress. Do you see how ridiculous that sounds? Also illegal and banned have two different meanings. Marijuana is a banned substance. It can be legal in Oregon but it’s banned to use during or around competition. Please stop conflating the meanings. Let’s just hope they remove the ban all together and allow her run. But no it wasn’t a set up. And no this is not the same as the Michael Phelps case. It’s ok to support Sha’Carri Richardson and still hold her accountable. She didn’t use a steroid but unfortunately as of now, marijuana is banned. Hi Bread, Hope you and your family are doing well. My question to you is regarding Loma and his latest fight against Nakatani. During the week leading to the fight, Loma and his team let everybody know that he had an injury in camp, 3 weeks before the Teo fight. Loma's manager said that Papachenko wanted to postpone the fight (which Loma refused), and that Loma's right shoulder popped in the 2nd round after a jab (he only really used his right hand again starting in the 7th round, supposedly when he understood that he would lose otherwise).It was obvious that Loma chose Nakatani to send a message to Teofimo and the world, and God knows that the message has been received !Besides being a "vintage Loma performance", as Tim Bradley said, I have to admit that I've never seen Loma with that big of a chip on his shoulder from the get go (we've seen glimpses of it when he was hit clean/hurt by Linares or Campbell, for example). He started letting his hands go after only half a round of assessing his opponent. It was obvious that his objectives in this fight was to show that he could takeover early (proof that he's learnt from his loss), and to hurt and stop Nakatani. What is your analysis of this fight ? And what do you think are the keys to victory for each fighter in the Loma/Lopez rematch? Thanks and greetings from North Africa. Bread’s Response: I thought Loma looked excellent. But reoccurring injuries are part of the game. This is not the first time Loma has been hurt. I honestly felt he dug so deep in the Linares fight, he hasn’t quite reached that form again since that night. This last performance was very close but Nakatani is too slow and gangly to deal with Loma, so this may be a case of the perfect style coupled with a motivated fighter coming off of a loss. I think Lopez needs to do what he did in the their first fight. Put rounds in the bank and keep the fight at long range for as long as he can. It’s not just height and reach. Lopez is not that much taller and longer than Loma. But he has a more commanding presence from Long range and he has to build points before Loma gets in his groove. This match up could be a case of Jermaine Taylor vs Bernard Hopkins. Where as for some reason it took Hopkins time to break the range vs Taylor. Hopkins is clearly a better fighter than Taylor but Taylor who was excellent just gave him fits. We don’t know how good Lopez will be yet….but that comparison comes to mind. Loma can say what he wants but Teofimo’s sharpness and power bothered him. It takes his body and mind time to warm up to Teofimo. He shoulder probably was hurt. I don’t doubt that. But I also know what I saw. Teofimo came out sharp, mean and forceful. Loma needed time to adjust to that. He didn’t want to get clipped. In this rematch he simply has to find a safe way to break the range earlier and get in his rhythm. It’s not as easy as everyone says of “just start earlier”. Well Teofimo has something to say about that. I think Loma has to work on his quickness in camp and find a way to get his jab working a little bit more. A jab finds rhythms and breaks rhythms. Emile Griffith, not Griffin. Valdes was very underrated. He lost a few early because he had mono and went back to Colombia to get better. I feared him more than I feared Monzon even though Monzon was the better fighter. Valdes often fought to the level of his competition. Bennie matched up well with taller guys because of his jab, which was almost like a straight left and tall guys were not ready for it and had trouble getting accustomed to it. Valdes should have been in Canastota by now. There are guys in there who don't have his credentials but many of today's voters are imbeciles. Bread’s response: Thank you for the correction. The editor’s should have caught my mistake, lol. I love it when my old school readers write in to put me in my place and give me wisdom. I receive it with open arms. Let’s show some love for Rodrigo Valdes who is a top 2 or 3 middleweight of the 70s. I’ve watched a few of his fights and he could go! For some reason he had Brsicoe’s number the Philadelphia legend would have been champion if he could have figured out Valdes. Valdes beat Briscoe 3x and stopped him once. 2x with the title on the line. Hey Bread, Love your work mate and your knowledge and insight on the mailbag each week just a couple of questions firstly on Canelo, although I admire the guy as he is a tremendous fighter, it puzzles me why he has gone on record in several interviews stating he will not face other Mexican fighters in the ring again he obviously has the star power and right to choose to face who ever he wants but I cant work out why? Do you have any ideas? If an American or British fighter said they wouldn't fight one of their own countrymen anymore they would be laughed at. Is it a case of him not wanting to spill Mexican blood on the canvas or some sort of patriotic thing I don't know I think fights with the likes of Gilberto Ramirez or Munguia would be absolutely huge especially on the Mexican holiday weekends! Also everyone seems to think he's going to walk right thru plant if and when the fight gets made but I have my doubts I think this will be one or if not the toughest fight of his career to steal a quote of the first rocky movie This man is dangerous and I think the last piece of the puzzle for Canelo at super mw will be the most risky fight for him. Kind regards! B from Western Sydney Australia Bread’s Response: I never heard Canelo say that he wouldn’t fight a Mexican fighter. I know he’s fought a few in his career, Chavez Jr., Angulo etc. So I would have to read the context in how he said that. Munguia and Ramirez are nice opponents for him but the bigger opponents are Charlo, Andrade, Beterbiev and Plant. Then there is also David Benavidez who is Mexican American and wants the fight. If Benavidez beats one of the fighters I mentioned and earns a shot at Canelo, Canelo won’t be able to use that excuse. Let’s see what happens. I never read or heard Canelo say that. I also believe that Caleb Plant will be a tough opponent for Canelo. Plant is better than Saunders. He’s taller, longer, faster and I believe he’s mentally tougher. I also see that he’s a more dedicated athlete. When you have extreme dedication you are willing to go through more to get the glory because you know you haven't cheated the grind. A fighter who gives his all at all times. A fighter who restricts his diet. A fighter who does all of the little things, will fight through those moments of crisis harder. I believe Plant is one of those fighters. Obviously Plant will have to be better than he was vs Uzgategui and Truax. But I think he will be. Obviously he’s going to have to be stronger and not be bullied to the ropes. But I think he will be. Obviously Canelo has a serious heavybag routine where he punches THROUGH the target and Plant has to be aware of this. But I think he will be. I believe if Plant fights an ON THE MOVE fight. Oscar Valdez just fought one vs Berchelt but Plant has to be less violent than Valdez. Mayweather fought one vs Diego Corrales. Sambu Kalambay fought one vs Mike McCallum in their first fight. Muhammad Ali fought the best one in history vs Cleveland Williams. If Plant can punch on the move he will frustrate Canelo. He’s going to score points. And most importantly, he will force Canelo to burn loads of energy by having to use his OWN legs to track him down. Canelo fights an energy efficient fight these days. His pressure is not like Joe Frazier’s or Henry Armstrong’s. It’s been said that Canelo’s stamina has improved. Well if Plant fights this type of fight, then that theory will be put to the test. This fight will come down to what style Plant decides to fight. There are fights I can see. There are fights I have to wait and see and assess later. Plant’s best chance to win is Stick and Move and not try to hit Canelo with anything big. The harder you try to punch Canelo the easier it is for him to counter. Plant has to throw fast stick punches. Sort of like how Calzaghe punches but obviously in his own form and body type. Jab Canelo's gloves, jab to distract him. Feint him. Move him around. Stay off the ropes. When Canelo presses him if he can’t hold the center, move until Canelo stops pressuring then go back to the center. Forget about the crowd. Just win baby. If he fights that fight. People will be pissed but the WIN for this fight is HUGE. I give you props for telling your truth about the fallout with Jrock. I still think you guys are better together and not apart. The young brother may be lost and it’s going to take some pride swallowing to resurrect the relationship. My question is assuming you aren’t training him, do you think he has a shot at the Charlo vs Castano winner? I’ve always been a big fan of his. I’ve watched several of his fights and that wasn’t him in the ring against Rosario. Bread’s Response: Yes I do think Jrock has a shot at the winner. It basically comes down to a few things. How engaged he is with his new trainer. Traveling to train is a load mentally and physically. If he can find someone to run a productive camp and figure out his body he has a shot. People always say he’s too small for 154lbs which is ridiculous. He’s big for the weight. He may not be the BIGGEST but he’s big for the weight. He has big quads, broad shoulders and a wide back. He’s 5’10.5” with very long arms of over 73 inches. He walks around heavy just like the rest of the guys in the division and he has to cut 25lbs-30lbs just like everyone else. If he finds someone to learn his body and know when to peak him out right, he’s right with those guys. The key is learning his body. He has very low body fat and he hasn’t made 154lbs in a year and a half. He may not even be a junior middleweight anymore. Stylistically he matches up well with both guys. At his best he’s turned in a better performance than both ever have. So his high is higher than their highs have been. The issue is, is his low. He’s also turned in a lower performance than they ever have. The key will be his confidence and a trainer who is open to learning his body. It won’t be easy but far from impossible. Jrock would have been the favorite to beat both if the fights were made after he defeated Hurd. I was going to bet Jermell Charlo but then you brought up how good Brian Castano was an amateur. You were right. He did beat Spence and Devrenchenko. My question is how much do you think amateur success translates to pro success? Bread’s Response: I would say 75% of the time it has a bearing. Usually the best amateurs are the best pros. Over the last 10 years it hasn’t been the case as much but it still relevant. Let’s look back. People consider Sugar Ray Robinson the best fighter ever. The Olympics weren’t as big in boxing in the 1940s. But Robinson was either 85-2 or 85-0 as an amateur. Floyd Patterson was a great amateur. Our best in 1952. And he was one of our best fighters of the 50s. Muhammad Ali was our best amateur in 1960. Well it’s no need to get into what he was as a pro. Joe Frazier was our best amateur in 1964. We also know what he was as a pro. George Foreman was our best amateur in 1968. Again HOF as a pro. In 3 straight Olympics the Gold Medalist and the US’s best fighter turned out to be a HOF. In 1976 we produced 5 Gold Medalist. 3 won titles. 2 became ATG in Michael Spinks and Ray Leonard. In 1980 Donald Curry was best amateur. He went on to be a HOF. In 1984 Evander Holyfield, Frank Tate, Pernell Whitaker, Meldrick Taylor, Mark Breland and Virgil Hill were medalist and turned out to be champions and or HOF as pros. In 1988 Roy Jones, Riddick Bowe, Michael Carbajal and Ray Mercer all medalist all turned out to be champions. Carbajal, Jones and Bowe HOF. In 1992 Oscar de La Hoya was our best amateur. HOF as a pro. In 1996 Floyd Mayweather, Antonio Tarver, David Reid all won medals. All win titles as pros. 2004 we had one Gold Medalist. Andre Ward. HOF as a pro. 2008 Gary Russell, Demetrius Andrade and Deontay Wilder were the best fighters on the Olympic team. They still remain towards the top of their games today. In almost 100 fights as pros they have 2 losses. In 2012 Errol Spence was the best fighter on that team. He’s still the best from the team. In 2016 Shakur Stevenson, Gary Russell and Charles Conwell were the standouts. None of them have taken a loss yet. Stevenson the only medalist is the best so far as a pro. Historically domestically and internationally the very best amateurs have about 75% of the time been our best pros. You do have cases like Terence Crawford who was around the 2008 team. He’s our best fighter overall from that time. Read the full article

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pardontheglueman · 7 years ago

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The Lost Genius of The Go-Betweens

The next time you’re down the local boozer with your mates and there’s an uncomfortable lull in the conversation, consider striking up a discussion based on the following question - which is the best band never to have had a top forty hit? Now, obviously, this is a version of the hoary old chestnut that’s passed many a drunken hour for the sports fan down the ages - who is the best footballer never to have played at a World Cup? The answer to that is a rather obvious one, of course, George Best. The musical variation of this question may be more stimulating.

Whilst Robert Lloyd and the various re-incarnations of his Brummie post-punk combo, The Nightingales, would make any respectable critics’ short list, his guttural, sub-Beefheart squeal was aimed more squarely at the underground than at the mainstream. The same uncompromising mindset also undermines the case for New York’s Suicide and David Thomas’ experimental avant-garage group, Pere Ubu.

Soon enough, however, somebody will alight upon the only truly acceptable answer, at least the only answer acceptable to me, and a good number of other men and women of a certain age, who are each the proud possessors of a pair of rose-tinted glasses. It simply has to be those doyens of guitar pop, the Go-Betweens. The inexplicable absence from the singles chart of these Australian Indie-pop pioneers remains a mystery to this day. Not once, during their illustrious lifetime, 1978-2006 (allowing for a hiatus from 1989 to 2000) did their melodic epistles ever threaten to deliver them pop stardom here, or in America. Incredibly, they even failed to secure a top 40 hit in their native Australia. This, surely, constitutes the greatest miscarriage in the history of popular music since the time Al Jolson blacked up for The Jazz Singer, declared brazenly “you ain’t heard nothing yet” and shamefacedly went on to make his fortune.

Just how the Brisbane based guitar heroes, led by singer/songwriters Robert Forster and Grant McLennan failed to achieve even one solitary week in the top 75, despite crafting a plethora of heavenly pop songs that should have made them household names on both sides of the Atlantic, is a mystery that genuinely scrambles the brain. Indeed, it prompts the group’s longtime fans to ask the age-old question, the one that escapes from our lips every time we drunkenly stumble upon a recording of Barry Manilow’s ‘Bermuda Triangle blaring out of a pub jukebox; ‘why did you let this happen, dear Lord, why?’

Consider some of the flotsam and jetsam that has (dis)graced the charts since the advent of Rock ‘n’ Roll. In no particular order, I give you Vanilla Ice, The Bay City Rollers, Duran Duran, Milli Vanilli, Arthur Mullard and Hilda Baker, Black Lace, MC Hammer and Sting. And, that’s just the tip of a very embarrassing iceberg!

Even more puzzling was the regular presence on the chart of bands that might best be described as second-rate Go-Betweens. The very ordinary Deacon Blue springs to mind here, as well as the Trashcan Sinatras. And, how on earth do you explain the continued presence in the charts, throughout the eighties, of bands that made comparable music, both in terms of substance and style to the Go-Betweens themselves. Aztec Camera, for example, chalked up 12 hits and 74 weeks on the chart while Lloyd Cole, with or without his Commotions recorded 15 hits spread over 62 weeks.

After the band split up in 1989 Forster and McLennan each took a stab at solo stardom, in theory doubling their chances of a hit, but still, the record buying public remained unpersuaded. McLennan in particular, penned a succession of gorgeous ballads throughout the nineties, the best of which, ‘Black Mule’ (1991) and ‘Hot Water’ (1994) are arguably the finest of all his compositions.

Even the French, not exactly renowned for having their finger on the pop pulse, have made the Go-Betweens something of a cause celebre. A 1996 issue of leading rock magazine Les Inrockuptibles pictured the band on its front cover with the strap-line ‘Le groupe le plus sous-estime de l’histoire du rock?’ Which, broadly translates as - The Go-Betweens the most underrated band in the history of rock? The magazine also ranked ‘16 Lovers Lane’ in its list of the best albums of the period from 1986-1996.

Publié en novembre 1996.

The Smiths: The Queen Is Dead

Pixies: Doolittle

The Stone Roses: The Stone Roses

The Go-Betweens: 16 Lovers Lane

Portishead: Dummy

PJ Harvey: Dry

Tricky: Maxinquaye

Morrissey: Vauxhall & I

Massive Attack: Blue Lines

Beck: Mellow Gold

The Feelies: The Good Earth

REM: Automatic For The People

James: Stutter

The Divine Comedy: Liberation

The Smiths: Strangeways, Here We Come

My Bloody Valentine: Loveless

The La’s: The La’s

De La Soul : 3 Feet High And Rising

Bjork: Debut

Jeff Buckley: Grace

This re-appraisal of the band’s standing, together with an invitation to play at the magazine’s 10th Anniversary bash prompted Forster and McLennan to reform the group.

For a brief moment, true devotees of the group allowed themselves to believe that a great wrong might be righted. Perhaps the band might strike lucky and have a song included on the soundtrack of some mega Hollywood Rom-Com. There was a precedent of sorts. The Triffids, their compatriots from Perth and themselves a seminal indie band of the eighties, nearly managed to fluke a hit when their classic song, ‘Bury Me Deep In Love’, was chosen to play over the cheesy wedding scenes of Harold and Marge on the popular daytime soap, Neighbours. The band, profile duly raised, punched home their advantage; they’re follow up single, “Trick Of The Light”, spent a glorious week in the charts, at no 73, in early 1988.

Sadly, despite recording a batch of very fine comeback albums, particularly 2005’s ‘Oceans Apart’, with its standout tracks ‘Here Comes A City’, ‘Born To A Family’ and ‘Darlinghurst Nights’, a familiar pattern soon re-emerged - critical acclaim on the one hand and commercial indifference on the other. The Australian media wasn’t averse to chastising the band for their perceived failure either. ABC’S current affairs show The 7:30 Report announced their return to the stage in the following manner -

“The Go-Betweens have been described as the quintessential critics’ band. They made an art form of commercial failure. But as Bernard Brown reports, they’re happy to have earned the industry’s respect, even if the dollars didn’t follow.”

Good old Bernard concluded his report with “But the band’s influence far outweighed its record sales and they wear the tag of commercial failures”.

Any hope that the Go-Betweens could somehow turn the tide disappeared once and for all with the unexpected passing of McLennan in May 2006 at the age of 48.

Any discussion of great songwriting partnerships in popular music would rightly begin with the likes of Lennon and McCartney, Bacharach and David, Leiber and Stoller, or Jagger and Richards. You shouldn’t, though, have to look too far down the list before coming across the names of Forster and McLennan, probably bracketed right alongside Difford and Tilbrook or Morrissey and Marr.

McLennan and Forster, back in harness

Both were capable of writing supremely catchy songs and both had the propensity to pen an eye-catching lyric. Grant McLennan’s ‘River Of Money’, from the ‘Spring Hill Fair’ album (Beggars Banquet, 1984) whilst rather atypical of his output (it’s more of a prose-poem than a pop song) is such a unique lyric that it demands to be quoted in full.

River Of Money

It is neither fair nor reasonable to expect sadness to confine itself to its causes. Like a river in flood, when it subsides and the drowned bodies of animals have been deposited in the treetops, there is another kind of damage that takes place beyond the torrent. At first, it seemed as though she had only left the room to go into the garden and had been delayed by stray chickens in the corn. Then he had thought she might have eloped with the rodeo-boy from the neighbouring property but it wasn’t till one afternoon, when he had heard guitar playing coming from her room and had rushed upstairs to confront her and had seen that it was only the wind in the curtains brushing against the open strings, that he finally knew she wasn’t coming back. He had dealt with the deluge alright but the watermark of her leaving was still quite visible. He had resorted to the compass then, thinking that geography might rescue him but after one week in the Victorian Alps he came back north, realising that snow which he had never seen before, was only frozen water. I’ll take you to Hollywood I’ll take you to Mexico I’ll take you anywhere the River of Money flows. I’ll take you to Hollywood I’ll take you to Mexico I’ll take you anywhere the River of Money flows. But was it really possible for him to cope with the magnitude of her absence? The snow had failed him. Bottles had almost emptied themselves without effect. The television, a Samaritan during other tribulations, had been repossessed. She had left her traveling clock though thinking it incapable of functioning in another time-zone; so the long-vacant days of expensive sunlight were filled with the sound of her minutes, with the measuring of her hours.

Not the stuff of the three-minute hero, I appreciate, but the pair were equally comfortable writing the standard verse, chorus, verse pop song that chimed in at a radio-friendly 2.56 and wouldn’t have frightened the horses. From ‘Spring Hill Fair’ they released a trio of pristine singles. McLennan’s pop-by-numbers opener ‘Bachelor Kisses’ was the first to hit the shops (and stay there, in the bargain bin) followed by Forster’s heart-achingly sad confessional, ‘Part Company’;

“That’s her handwriting, that’s the way she writes

From the first letter, I got to this her Bill of Rights”

‘Man O Sand To Girl O Sea’, the final single from the album, found Forster in a more self- assured frame of mind;

“Feel so sure of our love

I’ll write a song about us breaking up”.

This sequence of starry-eyed singles should have seen the Go-Betweens clasped lovingly to the bosom of the pop establishment. Instead, they remained exiled in the wilderness, otherwise known as the John Peel show.

Still, at the time it seemed to be only a matter of time, before their streak of bad luck would break and the Brisbane boys would be basking in the sun-kissed glow of chart success. Two robust albums followed, ‘Liberty Belle And The Black Diamond Express’, (Beggars Banquet, 1986) and ‘Tallulah’, (Beggars Banquet, 1987) each spawned excellent singles in Forster’s ‘Spring Rain’, and ‘Head Full Of Pride’, as well as McLennans’ ‘Right Here’ and ‘Bye Bye Pride’.

The great British public, though, remained sceptical. Peel sessions, stadium tours in support of the band’s longtime admirers, R.E.M, contractual tie-in’s with a host of high profile record companies including Rough Trade, Postcard and Capitol, made not the slightest difference to the band’s outsider status. If a pop group can be described as persona non grata, then they were it! The frustration was beginning to tell, driving McLennan to comment that he’d;

“given up on the commercial success thing, which is very good for my state of mind”.

Forster, Morrison, Willsteed, McLennan, Brown - the line-up at the time of 16 Lovers Lane

The reality was, though, that their most “commercial” album, indeed their masterpiece, was still to come but in attempting to break into the charts the band would succeed only in breaking itself apart. The omens were not good from the outset. First off, bass guitarist Robert Vickers, who had been with the group since 1983, handed in his notice. His successor, John Willsteed, seemed the perfect replacement though, and his playing certainly brought a clarity and polish to the band’s sound, in keeping with their new direction of travel. He is credited by some insiders as having played a number of the more intricate guitar parts on ‘16 Lovers Lane’. Unfortunately, Willsteed was a somewhat disruptive personality who seemed to relish making enemies within the band.

Furthermore, Amanda Brown, recruited after contributing violin to the Servants sublime second single ‘The Sun, A Small Star’ began a relationship with McLennan. Suddenly, word leaked out that Forster and Morrison had been in a relationship of sorts for years. Battle lines had been drawn.

At the exact same time as the Forster/McLennan friendship, begun long ago in the Drama department of the University of Queensland, was starting to disintegrate, the power-brokers at the group’s management company were trying to push McLennan into the limelight at the expense of Forster. Author David Nichols, in his book The Go-Betweens, is clear about the re-alignment that took place “every promotional video from ‘Right Here’ onwards shows Forster completely back-grounded”. Seen today the video for ‘Was There Anything I Could do’ makes a toe-curling Exhibit A, with McLennan and Brown cavorting centre stage while Forster is stationed well to the rear. Morrison was deeply unhappy, particularly about the decision to draft in producer Craig Leon. In an interview with Sydney’s ‘On The Street’ she was scathing about the shift in emphasis;

“He was chosen to make this single accessible to people, to get us to crawl out of our cult corner.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGUxZvuRe9k (Exhibit A)

Despite the recriminations that would inevitably follow, the next five Go-Betweens singles would all be McLennan compositions.

On a more positive note, Forster and McLennan were working on the songs for ‘16 Lovers Lane’ together, rather than working individually. The spirit of collaboration instead of competition at least extended as far as the song-writing! Released in August 1988 (Beggars Banquet /Capitol) and produced by Mark Wallis, who’d worked with the likes of Marianne Faithful, Tom Jones and R.E.M, ‘16 Lovers Lane’ was a sublime collection of glimmering guitar ballads and sugar-spun indie anthems so glossy and sun-kissed that you had to wear dark glasses just to listen to it.

On the release of their debut single ‘Lee Remick’ back in 1978, Forster and McLennan had talked about capturing “that striped sunlight sound” which Forster later defined as being;

“A romantic phrase, but it is abstract. It could be the sun coming through blinds as you play a record. It’s the shimmer of a Fender guitar. It’s harmonies and tough-minded pop songs. It’s lying on a bed beside a window reading a book in the afternoon. It’s the sun on a girl’s shoulder-length hair. It’s Buddy Holly in the desert the day they recorded ‘Maybe Baby’. It’s t-shirts and jeans. It’s Creedence. It’s Bob. It’s Chuck Berry.”

On ‘16 Lovers Lane’, made twenty years after they first articulated the concept, they came closest to perfecting its meaning.

Opening with the McLennan’s unashamedly summery ‘Love Goes On’;

“There’s a cat in the alleyway

Dreaming of birds that are blue

Sometimes girl when I’m lonely

This is how I think about you”

and ending with Forster’s majestically romantic ‘Dive For Your Memory’

“I’d dive for you

Like a bird I’d descend

Deep down I’m lonely

And I miss my friend

So when I hear you saying

That we stood no chance

I’ll dive for your memory

We stood that chance,”

‘16 Lovers Lane’ (once voted 24th greatest album of the eighties, by none other than Rolling Stone magazine) could also boast another pair of McLennan classics in the ‘Streets Of Your Town’ - a song that should have occupied a place in the nation’s pop consciousness in the same way that The La’s ‘There She Goes’ or The Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me Baby’ have done, and the wistful, heart-breaking lament,’ Quiet Heart’.

“I tried to tell you

I can only say it when we’re apart

About this storm inside of me

And how I miss your quiet, quiet heart”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJfP6G0LSEA

‘Streets Of Your Town’ was such an obvious choice for a single that they had two cracks with it, releasing it first in October 1988 and then, refusing to accept defeat, the following summer. Sandwiched in between the twin versions of this neglected classic were two more ‘easy on the ear’ contenders, ‘Was There Anything I Could Do’ (McLennan) and ‘Love Goes On’. Both met the same miserable fate – they were steadfastly ignored.

The failure to impact on the charts, with such an obviously radio-friendly song as ‘Streets Of Your Town’, must have come as a crushing blow to Forster and McLennan and was probably the final nail in the Go-Betweens’ coffin. Broke and broken-hearted they went their separate ways.

That the Go-Betweens had swallowed their pride and danced to the tune of their paymasters, there could be no doubt. They’d flattened out the kinks in their song structures, planed off the angular edges and streamlined their sound until, with each passing record, they began to sound less and less like The Velvet Underground and more and more like Abba. Not that there is anything wrong with Abba or ‘16 Lovers Lane’ itself, indeed in parts it’s a breathtakingly beautiful record. It’s just that 3/5ths of the band didn’t really want to make that type of record anymore. The Go-Betweens sold their soul, but they still didn’t sell any records!

To make matters worse there wasn’t even the consolation of making their mark in the album charts, where more mature bands could be expected to have their egos massaged by a loyal fan base, successfully built up over a lengthy career. All the Go-Betweens could muster, though, was a week at no. 91 in June 1987 with ‘Tallulah’, and one week at no. 81 for ‘16 Lovers Lane’ in September 1988.

The Go-Betweens, however, did make minor inroads upon the UK Independent Charts. Before signing for Beggars Banquet the band had recorded for Rough Trade and Situation 2, qualifying them for inclusion in the Indie charts. Between 83 and 86 they had three entries in the top 40. ‘Cattle and Cane’, an autobiographical McLennan song voted by the Australasian Performing Rights Association in 2001 as one of the country’s 30 greatest songs of all time, reached no. 4 in March 1983, while ‘Man O Sand To Girl O Sea’ charted at no. 24 toward the end of the same year. A 12 inch only release of ‘Lee Remick’ peaked at no. 7 in November 1986. And there the trail runs cold.

To speculate, now, on the spectacular failure of the Go-Betweens is to set oneself an impossible task. Maybe, it was simply because they never really established a British fan base, maybe Australians appeared less cool than Americans or the dynamic duo just lacked sex appeal. It could be argued that both Forster and McLennan were not distinctive enough as singers, even that they sounded too erudite at times, for daytime radio. Maybe it was Forster’s controversial decision to play a Capitol Records promotional launch of ‘16 Lovers Lane’ in an olive green dress (the company scaled down the record’s promotional budget the very next day). Or, perhaps, it was just that fate was against them all along.

In September 1985 the band had signed with Elektra, hoping for better promotion and distribution of their work. Forster was in optimistic mood “We’ve gone with Elektra – start our LP in just over a week. Without any doubt the songs are our best, we are playing our best, and with ourselves producing this unknown masterpiece, it might be great.” Within weeks Elektra had gone belly up and the band was back to square one again, much to Forster’s chagrin;

“I do think we have a sense of anger – no one’s ever been able to present us to the British public in any sort of cohesive or intelligent way.”

One thing is for sure, they had a fistful of great songs and in Forster, they had someone who gave the band personality. His art-rock background led him to pay particular attention to his stage performance, although we can only presume his tongue was firmly in his cheek with this analysis of his ‘dancing’;

“Bobby Womack himself once told me that I am a soul man and that as far as modern music is concerned there are only three soul men left: himself, me and Prince. Prince came to Brisbane and took the colours, the moves, his whole act from me. It’s true! He’s seen my moves!”

Perhaps The Go-Betweens’ drummer Lindy Morrison, speaking in 1992 was nearer the truth than I, and others, would care to admit when she offered this overview;

“We might have been one of the most lauded bands in the country, but we sold bugger all records. That’s a shame. So let’s not go on about it being one of the most lauded bands in the country, cause who cares? We didn’t sell records, we weren’t a popular band, and I’m sick of hearing about the fact that we were so fabulous – because if we were so fabulous, why didn’t anyone buy our records?”

Forster managed a slightly more laconic response;

“It was quite freeing to realise, our group is so good, and we’re getting nowhere. After a while, the lack of recognition was so absurd it was funny”.

Following their initial break up, the compilation album ‘1978-1990’ was released and allowed the music press to pass their verdict on the life and times of the Go-Betweens. Melody Maker’s Dave Jennings could barely contain his anger; “The fact that the Go-Betweens never became massive is a disgusting injustice…..take the Go-Betweens to your heart, where they belong.” In 1996, writing for Select magazine Andrew Male wrote that “The only problem with listening to the Go-Betweens now is that they can’t help remind you of how crap the eighties were. The Go-Betweens produced records of quiet brilliance and got nowhere. Sting sang about a sodding turtle and became a millionaire.”

Even now, though, there isn’t exactly a critical consensus. Simon Reynolds in his definitive account of the post-punk years 1978-1984, “Rip It Up And Start Again”, devotes only one sentence to our Antipodean protagonists; “The Go-Betweens, who hailed from Australia but had a spare, plangent sound similarly rooted in Television and early Talking Heads”. It should be noted, of course, that at this stage The Go-Betweens only had ‘Send Me A Lullaby’ and ‘Before Hollywood’ under their belt. Bob Stanley in his widely acclaimed book “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah: The Story Of Modern Pop” (2013) omits them entirely from his 800-page anthology.

Any discussion of Literate Pop, though, if you are inclined to concede that the genre actually exists, if you believe great pop can be thought through, rather than instinctively felt, be cerebral rather than corporeal, would have to take into account the Go-Betweens’ collective body of work. Their singular form of romanticism, their shimmering chorus’s, their quirky, idiosyncratic lyrics and their wry pop sensibility all combined to make them one of the great post-punk pop groups. They made two albums, ‘Spring Hill Fair’ and ‘16 Lovers Lane’ that would lose nothing in comparison with Costello’s ‘King Of America’, Lloyd Cole’s ‘Rattlesnakes’, Scritti Politti’s ‘Songs To Remember’, Mickey Newbury’s ‘Look’s Like Rain’ or the Manic Street Preachers’ ‘Everything Must Go’. In this context, their work will be remembered long after their more commercially successful contemporaries have disappeared from the recorded history of popular music.

To end, though, at the beginning. In 1978, after the local success of their debut single, ‘Lee Remick’, Forster dreamt of setting sail for England. Given the torturous fate that awaited them on these shores, his words seem remarkably poignant now.

“England, I think, has the greatest acceptance of new music, they’re more open-minded. They write it in the NME and people buy your records. Any country that can accept Jilted John, X-Ray Spex and the Only Ones……there’s a place for the Go-Betweens.”

http://www.go-betweens.org.uk/

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timclymer · 5 years ago

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The Go-Betweens

The next time you’re down the local boozer with your mates and there’s an uncomfortable lull in the conversation, consider striking up a discussion based on the following question – which is the best band never to have had a top forty hit? Now, obviously, this is a version of the hoary old chestnut that’s passed many a drunken hour for the sports fan down the ages – who is the best footballer never to have played in the World Cup? The answer to that is a rather obvious one, of course, George Best. The musical variation of this question may be more stimulating.

Whilst Robert Lloyd and the various re-incarnations of his Brummie post-punk combo, The Nightingales, would make any respectable critics’ short list, his guttural, sub-Beefheart squeal was aimed more squarely at the underground than at the mainstream. The same uncompromising mindset also rules out the likes of New York’s Suicide and David Thomas’ experimental avant-garage group, Pere Ubu.

Soon enough, however, somebody will alight upon the only truly acceptable answer, at least the only answer acceptable to me, and a good number of other men and women of a certain age, who are each the proud possessors of a pair of rose-tinted glasses. It simply has to be those doyens of guitar pop, The Go-Betweens. The inexplicable absence from the singles chart of these Australian Indie-pop pioneers remains a mystery to this day. Not once, during their illustrious lifetime 1978-2006 (allowing for a hiatus from 1989 to 2000) did their melodic epistles ever threaten to deliver them pop stardom here, or in America. Incredibly, they even failed to secure a top 40 hit in their native Australia. This, surely, constitutes the greatest miscarriage in the history of popular music since the time Al Jolson blacked up for The Jazz Singer, declared brazenly “you ain’t heard nothing yet” and shamefacedly went on to make his fortune.

Just how the Brisbane based guitar heroes, led by singer/songwriters Robert Forster and Grant McLennan failed to achieve even one solitary week in the top 75, despite crafting a plethora of heavenly pop songs that should have made them household names on both sides of the Atlantic, is a mystery that genuinely scrambles the brain. Indeed, it prompts the group’s long time fans to ask the age old question, the one that escapes our lips every time we drunkenly stumble upon a recording of Barry Manilow’s ‘Bermuda Triangle blaring out of a pub jukebox; ‘how could you let this happen, dear Lord, how?’

Even more puzzling was the regular presence on the chart of bands that might best be described as second rate Go-Betweens. The very ordinary Deacon Blue springs to mind here, as well as the Trashcan Sinatras. And, how on earth do you explain the continued presence in the charts, throughout the eighties, of bands that made comparable music, both in terms of substance and style to The Go-Betweens themselves. Aztec Camera, for example, chalked up 12 hits and 74 weeks on the chart while Lloyd Cole, with or without his Commotions recorded 15 hits spread over 62 weeks.

After the band split up in 1989 Forster and McLennan each took a stab at solo stardom, in theory doubling their chances of a hit, but still the record buying public remained un-persuaded. McLennan in particular, penned a succession of gorgeous ballads throughout the nineties, the best of which, ‘Black Mule’ (1991) and ‘Hot Water’ (1994) are arguably the finest of all his compositions.

Even the French, not exactly renowned for having their finger on the pop pulse, have made The Go-Betweens something of a cause celebre. A 1996 issue of leading rock magazine Les Inrockuptibles pictured the band on its front cover with the strap-line ‘Le groupe le plus sous-estime de l’histoire du rock?’ Which, broadly translated as – The Go-Betweens the most underrated band in the history of rock? The magazine also ranked ’16 Lovers Lane’ in its list of the best albums of the period from 1976-1996.

Publié en novembre 1996.

1. The Smiths: The Queen Is Dead

2. Pixies: Doolittle

3. The Stone Roses: The Stone Roses

4. The Go-Betweens: 16 Lovers Lane

5. Portishead: Dummy

6. PJ Harvey: Dry

7. Tricky: Maxinquaye

8. Morrissey: Vauxhall & I

9. Massive Attack: Blue Lines

10. Beck: Mellow Gold

11. The Feelies: The Good Earth

12. REM: Automatic For The People

13. James: Stutter

14. The Divine Comedy: Liberation

15. The Smiths: Strangeways, Here We Come

16. My Bloody Valentine: Loveless

17. The La’s: The La’s

18. De La Soul: 3 Feet High And Rising

19. Bjork: Debut

20. Jeff Buckley: Grace

This re-appraisal of the band’s standing, together with an invitation to play at the magazine’s 10th Anniversary bash prompted Forster and McLennan to reform the group.

For a brief moment true devotees of the group allowed themselves to believe that a great wrong might be righted. Perhaps the band might strike lucky and have a song included on the soundtrack of some mega Hollywood Rom-Com. There was a precedent of sorts. The Triffids, their compatriots from Perth and themselves a seminal indie band of the eighties, nearly managed to fluke a hit when their classic song, ‘Bury Me Deep In Love’, was chosen to play over the cheesy wedding scenes of Harold and Marge on the popular daytime soap, Neighbours. The band, profile duly raised, punched home their advantage; their follow up single, “Trick Of The Light”, spent a glorious week in the charts, at no 73, in early 1988.

Sadly, despite recording a batch of very fine comeback albums, particularly 2005’s ‘Oceans Apart’, with its standout tracks ‘Here Comes A City’, ‘Born To A Family’ and ‘Darlinghurst Nights’, a familiar pattern soon re-emerged – critical acclaim on the one hand and commercial indifference on the other. The Australian media wasn’t averse to chastising the band for their perceived failure either. ABC’S current affairs show The 7:30 Report announced their return to the stage in the following manner –

Good old Bernard concluded his report with “But the band’s influence far outweighed its record sales and they wear the tag of commercial failures”.

Any hope that The Go-Betweens could somehow turn the tide disappeared once and for all with the unexpected passing of McLennan in May 2006 at the age of 48.

Any discussion of great song-writing partnerships in popular music would rightly begin with the likes of Lennon and McCartney, Bacharach and David, Leiber and Stoller, or Jagger and Richards. You shouldn’t, though, have to look too far down the list before coming across the names of Forster and McLennan, probably bracketed right alongside Difford and Tilbrook or Morrissey and Marr.

Both were capable of writing supremely catchy songs and both had the propensity to pen an eye-catching lyric. Grant McLennan’s ‘River Of Money’, from the ‘Springhill Fair’ album (Beggars Banquet, 1984) whilst rather atypical of his output (it’s more of a prose-poem than a pop song) is such a unique lyric that it demands to be quoted in full.

River Of Money

It is neither fair nor reasonable to expect sadness

to confine itself to its causes. Like a river in flood,

when it subsides and the drowned bodies of

animals have been deposited in the treetops, there is

another kind of damage that takes place beyond the torrent.

At first, it seemed as though she had only left

the room to go into the garden and had been delayed by stray

chickens in the corn. Then he had thought she might

have eloped with the rodeo-boy from the neighbouring

property but it wasn’t till one afternoon, when he

had heard guitar playing coming from her room and

had rushed upstairs to confront her and had seen

that it was only the wind in the curtains brushing

against the open strings, that he finally knew she

wasn’t coming back. He had dealt with the deluge alright

but the watermark of her leaving was still quite visible.

He had resorted to the compass then, thinking that

geography might rescue him but after one week in the

Victorian Alps he came back north, realising that snow which

he had never seen before, was only frozen water.

I’ll take you to Hollywood

I’ll take you to Mexico

I’ll take you anywhere the

River of Money flows.

I’ll take you to Hollywood

I’ll take you to Mexico

I’ll take you anywhere the

River of Money flows.

But was it really possible for him to cope with the

magnitude of her absence? The snow had failed him.

Bottles had almost emptied themselves without effect.

The television, a Samaritan during other tribulations, had

been repossessed. She had left her travelling clock

though thinking it incapable of functioning in

another time-zone; so the long vacant days of expensive sunlight

were filled with the sound of her minutes, with the measuring of

her hours.

Not the stuff of the three minute hero, I appreciate, but the pair were equally comfortable writing the standard verse, chorus, verse pop song that chimed in at a radio friendly 2.56 and wouldn’t have frightened the horses. From ‘Springhill Fair’ they released a trio of pristine singles. McLennan’s pop-by-numbers opener ‘Bachelor Kisses’ was the first to hit the shops (and stay there, in the bargain bin) followed by Forster’s heart-achingly sad confessional, ‘Part Company’;

“That’s her handwriting, that’s the way she writes

From the first letter I got to this her Bill of Rights”

‘Man O Sand To Girl O Sea’, the final single from the album, found Forster in a more self- assured frame of mind;

“Feel so sure of our love

I’ll write a song about us breaking up”.

This sequence of starry-eyed singles should have seen The Go-Betweens clasped lovingly to the bosom of the pop establishment. Instead, they remained exiled in the wilderness, otherwise known as the John Peel show.

Still, at the time it seemed only to be a matter of time, before their streak of bad luck would break and the Brisbane boys would be basking in the sun kissed glow of chart success. Two robust albums followed, ‘Liberty Belle And The Black Diamond Express’, (Beggars Banquet, 1986) and ‘Tallulah’, (Beggars Banquet, 1987) each spawned excellent singles in Forster’s ‘Spring Rain’, and ‘Head Full Of Pride’, as well as McLennan’s ‘Right Here’ and ‘Bye Bye Pride’.

The great British public, though, remained sceptical. Peel sessions, stadium tours in support of the band’s long time admirers, R.E.M, contractual tie-ins with a host of high profile record companies including Rough Trade, Postcard and Capitol, made not the slightest difference to the band’s outsider status. If a pop group can be described as persona non grata, then they were it! The frustration was beginning to tell, driving McLennan to comment that he’d;

“given up on the commercial success thing, which is very good for my state of mind”.

The reality was, though, that their most “commercial” album, indeed their masterpiece, was still to come but in attempting to break into the charts the band would succeed only in breaking itself apart. The omens were not good from the outset. First off, bass guitarist Robert Vickers, who had been with the group since 1983, handed in his notice. His replacement, John Willsteed, seemed an upgrade, though, and his playing certainly brought a clarity and polish to the band’s sound, in keeping with their new direction of travel. He is credited by some insiders as having played a number of the more intricate guitar parts on ’16 Lovers Lane’.

Unfortunately, Willsteed was also battling a massive drink problem and it didn’t take him long to make enemies of the rest of the band.

Furthermore, Amanda Brown, recruited after contributing violin to The Servants sublime second single ‘The Sun, A Small Star’ began a relationship with McLennan. Suddenly, word leaked out that Forster and Morrison had been in a relationship of sorts for years. Battle lines had been drawn.

“He was chosen to make this single accessible to people, to get us to crawl out of our cult corner.”

Despite the recriminations that would inevitably follow, the next five Go-Betweens singles would all be McLennan compositions.

On a more positive note, Forster and McLennan were working on the songs for ’16 Lovers Lane’ together, rather than working individually. The spirit of collaboration instead of competition at least extended to the song-writing! Released in August 1988 (Beggars Banquet /Capitol) and produced by Mark Wallis, who’d worked with the likes of Marianne Faithful, Tom Jones and R.E.M, ’16 Lovers Lane’ was a sublime collection of glimmering guitar ballads and sugar-spun indie anthems so glossy and sun kissed that you had to wear dark glasses just to listen to it.

On the release of their debut single ‘Lee Remick’ back in 1978, Forster and McLennan had talked about capturing “that striped sunlight sound” which Forster later defined as being;

“A romantic phrase, but it is abstract. It could be the sun coming through blinds as you play a record. It’s the shimmer of a fender guitar. It’s harmonies and tough-minded pop songs. It’s lying on a bed beside a window reading a book in the afternoon. It’s the sun on a girl’s shoulder length hair. It’s Buddy Holly in the desert the day they recorded ‘Maybe Baby’. It’s t-shirts and jeans. It’s Creedence. It’s Bob. It’s Chuck Berry.”

On ’16 Lovers Lane’, made twenty years after they first articulated the concept, they came closest to perfecting its meaning.

Opening with the McLennan’s unashamedly summery ‘Love Goes On’;

“There’s a cat in the alleyway

Dreaming of birds that are blue

Sometimes girl when I’m lonely

This is how I think about you”

and ending with Forster’s majestically romantic ‘Dive For Your Memory’

“I’d dive for you

Like a bird I’d descend

Deep down I’m lonely

And I miss my friend

So when I hear you saying

That we stood no chance

I’ll dive for your memory

We stood that chance,”

’16 Lovers Lane’ (once voted 24th greatest album of the eighties, by none other than Rolling Stone magazine) could also boast another pair of McLennan classics in the ‘Streets Of Your Town’ – a song that should have occupied a place in the nation’s pop consciousness in the same way that The La’s ‘There She Goes’ or The Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me Baby’ have done, and the wistful, heart-breaking lament,’ Quiet Heart’.

“I tried to tell you

I can only say it when we’re apart

About this storm inside of me

And how I miss your quiet, quiet heart”

The failure to impact on the charts, with such an obviously radio-friendly song as ‘Streets Of Your Town’, must have come as a crushing blow to Forster and McLennan and was probably the final nail in The Go-Betweens’ coffin. Broke and broken-hearted they went their separate ways.

That The Go-Betweens had swallowed their pride and danced to the tune of their paymasters, there could be no doubt. They’d flattened out the kinks in their song structures, planed off the angular edges and streamlined their sound until, with each passing record, they began to sound less and less like The Velvet Underground and more and more like Abba. Not that there is anything wrong with Abba or ’16 Lovers Lane’ itself, indeed in parts it’s a breathtakingly beautiful record. It’s just that 3/5ths of the band didn’t really want to make that type of record anymore. The Go-Betweens sold their soul, but they still didn’t sell any records!

To make matters worse there wasn’t even the consolation of making their mark in the album charts, where more mature bands could be expected to have their egos massaged by a loyal fan base, successfully built up over a lengthy career. All The Go-Betweens could muster, though, was a week at no. 91 in June 1987 with ‘Tallulah’, and one week at no. 81 for ’16 Lovers Lane’ in September 1988.

To speculate, now, on the spectacular failure of The Go-Betweens is to set oneself an impossible task. Maybe, it was simply because they never really established a British fan base, maybe Australians appeared less cool than Americans or the dynamic duo just lacked sex appeal. It could be argued that both Forster and McLennan were not distinctive enough as singers, even that they sounded too erudite at times, for daytime radio. Maybe it was Forster’s controversial decision to play a Capitol Records promotional launch of ’16 Lovers Lane’ in an olive green dress (the company scaled down the record’s promotional budget the very next day). Or, perhaps, it was just that fate was against them all along.

“I do think we have a sense of anger – no one’s ever been able to present us to the British public in any sort of cohesive or intelligent way.”

One thing is for sure, they had a fistful of great songs and in Forster they had someone who gave the band personality. His art-rock background led him to pay particular attention to his stage performance, although we can only presume his tongue was firmly in his cheek with this analysis of his ‘dancing’;

“Bobby Womack himself once told me that I am a soul man, and that as far as modern music is concerned there are only three soul men left: himself, me and Prince. Prince came to Brisbane and took the colours, the moves, his whole act from me. It’s true! He’s seen my moves!”

Perhaps The Go-Betweens’ drummer Lindy Morrison, speaking in 1992 was nearer the truth than I, and others, would care to admit when she offered this overview;

Forster managed a slightly more laconic response;

“It was quite freeing to realise, our group is so good, and we’re getting nowhere. After a while, the lack of recognition was so absurd it was funny”.

Following their initial break up, the compilation album ‘1978-1990’ was released and allowed the music press to pass their verdict on the life and times of The Go-Betweens. Melody Maker’s Dave Jennings could barely contain his anger; “The fact that The Go-Betweens never became massive is a disgusting injustice… take The Go-Betweens to your heart, where they belong.” In 1996, writing for Select magazine Andrew Male wrote that “The only problem with listening to The Go-Betweens now is that they can’t help remind you of how crap the eighties were. The Go-Betweens produced records of quiet brilliance and got nowhere. Sting sang about a sodding turtle and became a millionaire.”

Even now, though, there isn’t exactly a critical consensus. Simon Reynolds in his definitive account of the post-punk years 1978-1984, “Rip It Up And Start Again”, devotes only one sentence to our Antipodean protagonists; “The Go-Betweens, who hailed from Australia but had a spare, plangent sound similarly rooted in Television and early Talking Heads”. It should be noted, of course, that at this stage The Go- Betweens only had ‘Send Me A Lullaby’ and ‘Before Hollywood’ under their belt. Bob Stanley in his widely acclaimed book “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah: The Story Of Modern Pop” (2013) omits them entirely from his 800 page anthology.

Any discussion of Literate Pop, though, if you are inclined to concede that the genre actually exists, if you believe great pop can be thought through, rather than instinctively felt, be cerebral rather than corporeal, would have to take into account The Go-Betweens’ collective body of work. Their singular form of romanticism, their shimmering chorus’s, their quirky, idiosyncratic lyrics and their wry pop sensibility all combined to make them one of the great post-punk pop groups. They made two albums, ‘Springhill Fair’ and ’16 Lovers Lane’ that would lose nothing in comparison with Costello’s ‘King Of America’, Lloyd Cole’s ‘Rattlesnakes’, Scritti Politti’s ‘Songs To Remember’, Mickey Newbury’s ‘Look’s Like Rain’ or The Manic Street Preachers’ ‘Everything Must Go’. In this context, their work will be remembered long after their more commercially successful contemporaries have disappeared from the recorded history of popular music.

To end, though, at the beginning. In 1978, after the local success of their debut single, ‘Lee Remick’, Forster dreamt of setting sail for England. Given the tortuous fate that awaited them on these shores, his words seem remarkably poignant now.

“England, I think, has the greatest acceptance of new music, they’re more open-minded. They write it in the NME and people buy your records. Any country that can accept Jilted John, X-Ray Spex and The Only Ones… there’s a place for The Go-Betweens.”

Source by Kevin McGrath

from Home Solutions Forev https://homesolutionsforev.com/the-go-betweens/ via Home Solutions on WordPress from Home Solutions FOREV https://homesolutionsforev.tumblr.com/post/188064333480 via Tim Clymer on Wordpress

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homesolutionsforev · 5 years ago