John Peel Mixtapes #2: Peel 79-05

Another Peel mixtape this time from May 1979 when a lot of interesting new stuff was coming out. I've stretched it to a C90 this time and waived the one track per artist rule (Tubeway Army, Undertones) and there ar no sessions. As always, I'm limited to what is documented on the Peel Wiki and what's available on Spotty-fy. Anyway, enjoy!

SIDE ONE

1. The Undertones - Jimmy Jimmy
2. XTC - Life Begins at the Hop
3. David Bowie - Boys Keep Swinging
4. Minny Pops - Footsteps
5. L.K. Johnson - It Noh Funny
6. The Tourists - Blind Among the Flowers
7. Tubeway Army - Replicas
8. Tubeway Army - It Must Have Been Years
9. Elvis Costello - Accidents Will Happen
10. The Human League - The Dignity of Labour pt. 3
11. Lene Lovich - Say When
12. The Specials - Gangsters
13. Fischer-Z - Acrobats

SIDE TWO

1. Stiff Little Fingers - Gotta Gettaway
2. The Pop Group - Blood Money
3. The Undertones - I Gotta Getta
4. Gang of Four - At Home He's a Tourist
5. Skids - Masquerade
6. The Damned - Love Song
7. Magazine - Feed the Enemy
8. Iggy Pop - Don't Look Down
9. Devo - The Day My Baby Gave Me a Big Surprise
10. Steel Pulse - Babylon Makes the Rules
11. Shoes For Industry - Can't Help It/Falling in Love Again
12. The Adverts - My Place
13. Dalek I - Freedom Fighters
14. Capital Letters - Run Run Run

Further reading: 

• Smash Hits, May 3 1979 (Billy Idol cover) incl. Bitz: 'Idol Chat', Granny Pursey, Bowie in punch-up, Return of The Damned; Interviews: J-J Burnel; Lyrics: I'm an Upstart, Singles - reviewed by L. Lovich: Jimmy Jimmy, Say When, Boys Keep Swinging, Does Your Mother Know; Albums: Second Hand Daylight, Manifesto, Music for Aiports; Gigz; Back page: Squeeze.

• Smash Hits, May 17 1979 (David Bowie cover) incl. Lyrics: Say When, Boys Keep Swinging (incl. A pictorial history of David Bowie), Roxanne, Jimmy Jimmy, Love Song Bitz: The Police, Mike Oldfield, Angelic Upstarts; Features: Sex Pistols Past Present and Future (D. Hepworth), Singles: Accidents Will Happen, The Cost of Living EP, Sunday Girl; Albums: Black Rose, Life In A Day, Live at the Witch Trails (Fall); Gigz; Back page: the Police.

• Smash Hits, May 31 1979 (Debbie Harry cover) incl. Lyrics: Number One in Heaven, Life Begins at the Hop, Shine a Little Love, Capital Radio/I Fought the Law, Sheena is a Punk Rocker, Features: Undertones - Parka Power; bitz: Blondie, Mods, Gary Numan/Tubeway Army, Sparks, Damned, Ian Dury; Centrespread. Bowie; Singles: Getta Gettaway, Masquerade EP, Life Begins at the Hop, Are 'Friends' Electric?, Wake Up + 3; Albums: Voulez-Vous, Mission Accomplished But the Beat Goes On, Lodger; Gigz; Back page: Lene Lovich.

May 1980

Look, I know I've been through all this a thousand times before, but about this time of year in 1980 was when music started to get interesting for me. There were new records out by Gary Numan, The Human League and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, among others. Here's the evidence from Smash Hits (two editions in May 1980):

It's also the the time that Ian Curtis of Joy Division killed himself, which is a pity as I'm sure he would have appreciated some of this new music.

Summer Hits

Not much exciting news in the heady world of Smash Hits*-pop in the summer of 82, although this John Taylor cover , full colour Nick-pic and an interview with Duran Duran breaking the U.S. will have pleased many.
But fear not. Apparently in September there will be bringing exciting new albums from the likes of Simple Minds, Gary Numan, Depeche Mode and many many more!

.. for the record the number one single was Dexy Midnight Runners' Come On Eileen, which has proved to be a 'classic' of the 80s, with their Too-Rye-Aye album also doing well at no. 2. Sadly, Fun Boy Three's attempt at the summer market fared less well peaking at number 18.

* thanks, as ever, to Brian's tireless Smash Hits archive published fortnightly on flickr.

The Sound of The Future

(click for bigger)

Here's an interesting snippet from a feature in Smash Hits magazine of 30 years ago (as ever, thanks to the truly wonderful Like Punk Never Happened archive). A Beginner's Guide to the Human League who were just on the brink of becoming totally massive; in fact the feature/interview focuses on the imminent release of new album 'Dare', which has already been preceded by three hit singles, including the current Open Your Heart.
The 1981 section of the a.m. guide is of course incomplete for 1981 - perhaps not even the mighty League (and the immodest Phil Oakey) could have guessed what was just around the corner..
The question mark over 1982 is somewhat foreboding however, but fair-do's, they did manage a couple of great singles. More anon.



So open your heart, dare to feel and add your voice...

John Foxx - The Garden / Ultravox - Rage in Eden

I love 1981 pt.19
Hate to have to lump these two albums together but they are of course related in more ways than one, sharing more than just the vicinity of their "birthdays".
Warning: I'm going to say some unfavourable things about the Foxx album. Don't get me wrong, I'm (officially) one of the world's biggest Foxx-fans, but The Garden just didn't do it for me, and thirty years on still doesn't. "There's a difference between creating your own distinctive sound and doing the same thing over and over again. John Foxx falls the wrong side of that line" : Ian Cranna said that in Smash Hits, not me but I couldn't have agreed more.

"I'd grown tired of being a frozen electrician"

After the ground-breaking revolutionary and utterly stupendous Metamatic, issued at the very dawn of 1980, John Foxx had gone to Italy to "thaw out", rubbed shoulders with the likes of film director Antonioni, tasted a bit of la dolce vita and came back to create what was essentially a re-working of his previous sound with Ultravox. Even the title of the the album's second track 'Systems of Romance' is re-cycled from his third album with the group, and who is to say he hadn't already written the track for the band. Tracks like When I Was a Man and You Were a Woman, You Were There and Walk Away may as well have had former band-mates Chris Cross, Warren Cann, Billy Currie as well as Robin Simon, who was in fact brought in on some tracks, playing their respective instruments on them, so close they are to the 1978 Ultravox sound with Foxx on vocals.
The fountains, squares and colonnades of Italy had rubbed off efficiently only in the opening Europe After the Rain and the post-Metamatic walking tours around England reflect in the closing title track, two songs which are essentially the album's saving grace. True, Foxx had already anticipated his move from the Ballardian underpasses and concrete jungle dystopias of Metamatic with the interim single Miles Away (there's a new man at the edge of me..making new plans for the rest of me), but few followers expected such a sharp turn-around in the underpass as they got with The Garden. OK, Ballard was still there with the images of overgrown cities and buildings and churches the like, but the warmer and more organic sounds seemed less suited to Foxx as he had established himself as a solo artist.  "After 1981 everyone and his dog went electro, so I became Max Ernst dressed as Lord Lost, exploring the overgrown and abandoned city of London. To a psychedelic ecclesiastical disco soundtrack." Shame really. Nice booklet though.

 John Foxx & friends perform Systems of Romance live in 1983

The new eighties Ultravox on the other hand  rarely looked back on their Foxxy past and together with Midge Ure, Messrs Cann, Currie and Cross continued their rise to popularity and household name-ness with Rage in Eden, released two weeks before The Garden. Smash Hits, this time under the pen of Johnny Black, was equally scathing in their review stating that the album "was too bland to satisfy", favouring instead Numan's Dance, but this time they were wrong! Ultravox had good songs, Conny Plank at the helm to make one heck of an album. The Thin Wall had already announced it's tougher, edgier feel vis à vis Vienna, yet it was stomping tracks like The Voice, We Stand Alone and I Remember (Death in the Afternoon) (singled out by Black, to his merit) which push Rage along and we our attention is even maintained during the 7 minute long Stranger Within,and the closing, agonising angst of Your Name (Has Slipped My Mind Again).

At the time I don't think there was no real sense of competition between the two artists and their respective albums, but in retrospect it was Rage in Eden which had the upper hand. True, Ure-vox were pompous and just a tad pretentious in form and style yet they somehow managed to carry it off, at least for now. For the moment they were the ones who were taking electronic music into some sort of mainstream audience, and arguable "merit" in itself but it got them lots of radio play and onto Top of the Pops a lot and we loved that.  RAge in Eden was quality new-music in huge quantities, adequately packaged by Peter Savile, the perfect match to their neo-thirties-cum-futuristic style.
No Ultravox album would be as good as this ever again, proof of that being the amount of tracks from Rage that are played live to this day - Thin Wall, I Remember, We Stand Alone, Rage in Eden and not least The Voice with its spectacular burundi-esque 4-man drum-pad finale.

Ultravox perform The Voice live in 1984

all the hits

The new this-week-in-1981 issue of Smash Hits is out now, as ever thanks to the tirless collecting, scanning and posting of Brian McCloskey's Like Punk Never Happened blog/flickr page.

With features on Gary Numan, Simple Minds, Heaven 17, and,er, Meat Loaf it's a bumper issue, not least for the adverts for albums which are almost as exciting as the rest, and in some cases more so.

Here's a few for you to check out:

NB interesting to see an early picture of Boy George on p.13 where he's referred to as 'clothes seller George'! The article in question is a not-so-light-hearted dig and the spate of 'medley' singles which were all the rage at the time.

Dreaming of Me Two

Just as a quick follow up to earlier post on Depeche Mode's seven-inch debut, here's a clip from all-important music mag Smash Hits of 30-years-ago-this-week, as ever thanks to Brian McCloskey's Smash Hits archive.

In what must have been one of the dizzy Dep's first press appearances, tucked away in the 'Independent bitz' section, here we see three quarters of the Basildon boys fresh from the hairdressers giving it their all on stage. Awww..bless! And quite a promising young band they are too, according to Red Starr. Pasadena Rose Bowl..here we come!

(click for the bigger picture)

I Love 1980 - 23

John Foxx - My Face (flexi disc)

Not so much a tribute to the song (you've had your share already John Foxx!) more a homage to the format itself. Smash Hits, and others, occasionally gave a way a free coloured flexi disc with their fornightly magazine, which was a pioneer publication in covering music trends in a unique style. The Foxx track was released in such a format 30 years ago this week.
Smash Hits flexis seem to have been mostly by artists on Virgin - Squeeze, XTC, Skids, OMITD; Foxx - a label which, as already mentioned, was particularly aware of new sounds and new means of distributing music to the kids., although later other labels took up on the idea and occasionally issued pieces of wobbly plastic via SH and other mags too. The Flexi-Pop! magazine was lanched in 1980, and had a free flexi disc each issue, often with exclusively recorded songs by bands of the moment (Soft Cell, Depeche Mode, The Jam, Haircut 100..)
The sound quality of the track(s) on the discs were never excellent of course, even by vinyl standards, and more than often you had to put a 10p piece on the needle or on the centrre of the disc itself to make sure it played properly on yer record player. But this was 1980, we didn't worry too much about scratches and, hey, they were free!


This particular track by Foxx remained exclusive to this release right up until the year 2000 when it finally saw the light of day in non-flexi form on the Modern Art compilation. Its total electronic style was in keeping with the year's Metamatic, although according to SH blurb the song "is just one of the forty or so tracks that the man has been working up while preparing for his second solo album". Ironically it was his last 'electronic' song to be released before moving on (or back) to a more 'organic' sound with drums and guitars with The Garden and susbequent 80s albums. Foxx would return to electronics some ten years later with the Nation 12 project with Tim Simenon in 1991 and again from 1995 with Louis Gordon. He is currently working on electronic music with producer and all round analogue geek Benge as John Foxx & The Maths.



read Ryan Foley's History of the flexi disc here.
flexi-pop facebook group here
thanks, as ever, to Brian McCloskey's SH archive

Listen: John Foxx - My Face

electric blue for me...

from this week's Smash Hits -
Brian McCloskey's Smash Hits archive

OMITD - Electricity (Dindisc 1980 version)

Coming soon....

Smash Hits scan by Brian

Smash Hits is back!

I am indebted to my friend Martin Birdsong for helping me discover a wonderful new(ish) blog and its sister-flickr site featuring full editions of near-legendary pop/rock fornightly Smash Hits, appropriately from 30 years ago.
Brian McCloskey has taken on the mammoth task of adding a new issue of Smash Hits to his fab blog Like Punk Never Happened every fortnight, with all the pages on the flickr site, on the thirtieth anniversary of the original publication date. So that means I get to (re)read Smash Hits all over again as in 1980! Hurrah!
I was an avid reader until about end '83/84 (when music went a bit cr*p) taking in every single word, picture, review, advert in every issue. Oddly, or perhaps not, browsing through the pages on flickr I seem to have every single one of them imprinted on my brain somewhere. I was particularly glad to see the amount of favourable attention given to John Foxx with the launch of his solo career, and to Gary Numan from Tubeway Days onwards (before the backlash..)
Anyways I shall be updating some of my I Love 1980 posts with Smash Hits pages and thanks to Brian I shall be able to follow that magic year as chronologically as possible (is that English?).
Cheers.
The thoroughly modern Skids adorn the front cover of SH in late 1979. Sadly Big Country was just around the corner..