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Level 42, 1981
People either loved or hated Level 42, and I always felt they suffered from a complete misunderstanding of context, largely because their music was not derived from the politics and aggression that drove punk and New Wave in the late 70s. Punk had already emasculated the mainstream rock scene, and funk was certainly drawing away more than a few rock fans, mostly those who wanted it loud, fast, not particularly soulful and definitely not disco. In the early 80s British soul/funk outfits like Level 42 and Light of the World were on a completely parallel track to the rest of the UK music scene, and apart from UB40 I probably did more Level 42 gigs than any other band in the early to mid 80s, my first encounter with them being on their home turf of the Isle of Wight in 1979. They were always excellent live, and Mark King's slap-bass technique instantly had him hailed as one of the best bass players in the world, he was that jaw-droppingly good. I was hanging around with plenty of good Reading musicians at the time, guys who were serious enough about music that they could see much in the healthy diversity of music that was all around us then. We particularly kept an eye on the British funk scene because it was probably the future: the diluted punk sensibilities of New Wave and the New Romantics needed to borrow a few good ideas from somewhere and they were looking to themes more commonly associated with dance music (cf. the slap-bass of The Style Council's 'Money-Go-Round' or Spandau Ballet's 'I Don't Need This Pressure On'). So all this is a very roundabout way of saying what a wake-up call this album was to the (dare I say it, but many would back me up) eclectic end of British music scene in 1981. And hell, with these guys being only just on the safe side of 20 it was both highly impressive and totally intimidating. King later went on to perfect the kind of bland commercial dance music that filled their most successful album Running in the Family. I never listen to Level 42 now, but oh how they shaped me then.
Haircut One Hundred, Pelican West, 1982
Haircut One Hundred may have been all autumn colours, cuddly sweaters, sports cars, girlfriends and cricket, but Pelican West was that archetypal summer album. I'm sure (well, I hope) there must have been more to them than the little we got to hear; their musicianship for one: nobody has played guitar like Nick Heyward before or since, and their horn section was almost as good as that of Earth, Wind and Fire. They were more fun than ABC, possibly less than 50% manufactured and could do no wrong in their brief fifteen minutes of fame, until Nick Heyward quit the band just before they were turned into the next Monkees, TV show and all. The rest of the band disappeared almost overnight, and Heyward's solo career dived after just one single. I still listen to Pelican West once or twice every summer just to give it an airing and recall some good times in my early twenties for which this album tries hard to provide a soundtrack. It's still fresh, certainly, but the fun is beginning to sound forced and Pelican West is slowly losing its appeal... until the depths of the next winter when I'll inevitably look forward to digging it out again the following summer.
David Bowie, Let's Dance, 1983
By the 80s Bowie was almost a rock dinosaur, true enough, but his knack of reinventing himself saw him shaking off those alienating personas, shedding the angst, walking onstage simply as 'Bowie the pop star' and telling us he was ready to get all happy on us. I'm convinced he made this album after falling victim to the 80s belief that you had to compete, as motivated by money as he ever was. This may have lost him his edge for many fans but again this latest transformation worked for him, and he also milked four hit singles from this album. This new Bowie was (notwithstanding parts of his 1975 album Young Americans) mostly unfamiliar even to him, and he threw himself in with the top end of America's session musicians, like drummer Omar Hakim, to get the sound he needed. These were people he barely knew but had to trust, and included the unlikely combination of guitarists Nile Rodgers and Stevie Ray Vaughan, who wasn't used nearly enough. Despite the rather stale smell of cash that has gathered around Let's Dance over the years the music itself can still sound fresh, though on his next album Tonight Bowie thankfully went back to sounding rather less polished.
Tears For Fears, Songs from the Big Chair, 1985
I only saw Orzabal and Smith once and that was when they toured the UK supporting Judie Tzuke in 1979, under the name Graduate. Both were very competent on both guitar and bass, though you could see then they took their rather mediocre 2-Tone music with deadly seriousness, even on that dreadful single 'Elvis Should Play Ska'. That their first album as Tears For Fears, The Hurting, didn't even vaguely resemble the music of Graduate led me to believe they'd jumped firmly on the New Wave bandwagon, but in truth it was actually a far more honest breed of music than what had gone before. Things then moved on so fast for them, and the title of just their second album re-established that whiff of the arrogance for which they were often vilified: if ever a couple of pop star's egos grew so large to the point they felt they could grandstand the entire world with their angst-ridden conscience, then Orzabal and Smith have to be guilty as charged. Nevertheless, on Songs from the Big Chair they crafted a very fine tune or three, in fact this album is mostly one long list of memorable stuff along with more than their fair share of late 80s-defining hits, before they slipped into argumentative obscurity for the next four years.
Thomas Dolby, Aliens Ate My Buick, 1988
Aliens Ate My Buick shows what moving to LA does to the head of someone who once occupied the cerebral end of the Britpop scene. Actually it's a mostly superior pisstake of the trashier end of American pulp culture, and the American musicians Dolby uses (calling themselves The Lost Toy People) are all very much in on the joke, often riffing on Funkadelic and George Clinton to the point of complete adulation. This album also spawned one chart single, 'Airhead', a sharp and cynical hit about trust-fund girls – there must have been more than a few who danced to this without realising that it's actually all about them. Most of the rest of the album was actually far too intelligent, sexy or fun for daytime airplay; if on the first hearing it sounds like pure trash, listen again and it becomes completely post-modern. Still brilliant now.
Level 42, 1981
People either loved or hated Level 42, and I always felt they suffered from a complete misunderstanding of context, largely because their music was not derived from the politics and aggression that drove punk and New Wave in the late 70s. Punk had already emasculated the mainstream rock scene, and funk was certainly drawing away more than a few rock fans, mostly those who wanted it loud, fast, not particularly soulful and definitely not disco. In the early 80s British soul/funk outfits like Level 42 and Light of the World were on a completely parallel track to the rest of the UK music scene, and apart from UB40 I probably did more Level 42 gigs than any other band in the early to mid 80s, my first encounter with them being on their home turf of the Isle of Wight in 1979. They were always excellent live, and Mark King's slap-bass technique instantly had him hailed as one of the best bass players in the world, he was that jaw-droppingly good. I was hanging around with plenty of good Reading musicians at the time, guys who were serious enough about music that they could see much in the healthy diversity of music that was all around us then. We particularly kept an eye on the British funk scene because it was probably the future: the diluted punk sensibilities of New Wave and the New Romantics needed to borrow a few good ideas from somewhere and they were looking to themes more commonly associated with dance music (cf. the slap-bass of The Style Council's 'Money-Go-Round' or Spandau Ballet's 'I Don't Need This Pressure On'). So all this is a very roundabout way of saying what a wake-up call this album was to the (dare I say it, but many would back me up) eclectic end of British music scene in 1981. And hell, with these guys being only just on the safe side of 20 it was both highly impressive and totally intimidating. King later went on to perfect the kind of bland commercial dance music that filled their most successful album Running in the Family. I never listen to Level 42 now, but oh how they shaped me then.
Haircut One Hundred, Pelican West, 1982
Haircut One Hundred may have been all autumn colours, cuddly sweaters, sports cars, girlfriends and cricket, but Pelican West was that archetypal summer album. I'm sure (well, I hope) there must have been more to them than the little we got to hear; their musicianship for one: nobody has played guitar like Nick Heyward before or since, and their horn section was almost as good as that of Earth, Wind and Fire. They were more fun than ABC, possibly less than 50% manufactured and could do no wrong in their brief fifteen minutes of fame, until Nick Heyward quit the band just before they were turned into the next Monkees, TV show and all. The rest of the band disappeared almost overnight, and Heyward's solo career dived after just one single. I still listen to Pelican West once or twice every summer just to give it an airing and recall some good times in my early twenties for which this album tries hard to provide a soundtrack. It's still fresh, certainly, but the fun is beginning to sound forced and Pelican West is slowly losing its appeal... until the depths of the next winter when I'll inevitably look forward to digging it out again the following summer.
David Bowie, Let's Dance, 1983
By the 80s Bowie was almost a rock dinosaur, true enough, but his knack of reinventing himself saw him shaking off those alienating personas, shedding the angst, walking onstage simply as 'Bowie the pop star' and telling us he was ready to get all happy on us. I'm convinced he made this album after falling victim to the 80s belief that you had to compete, as motivated by money as he ever was. This may have lost him his edge for many fans but again this latest transformation worked for him, and he also milked four hit singles from this album. This new Bowie was (notwithstanding parts of his 1975 album Young Americans) mostly unfamiliar even to him, and he threw himself in with the top end of America's session musicians, like drummer Omar Hakim, to get the sound he needed. These were people he barely knew but had to trust, and included the unlikely combination of guitarists Nile Rodgers and Stevie Ray Vaughan, who wasn't used nearly enough. Despite the rather stale smell of cash that has gathered around Let's Dance over the years the music itself can still sound fresh, though on his next album Tonight Bowie thankfully went back to sounding rather less polished.
Tears For Fears, Songs from the Big Chair, 1985
I only saw Orzabal and Smith once and that was when they toured the UK supporting Judie Tzuke in 1979, under the name Graduate. Both were very competent on both guitar and bass, though you could see then they took their rather mediocre 2-Tone music with deadly seriousness, even on that dreadful single 'Elvis Should Play Ska'. That their first album as Tears For Fears, The Hurting, didn't even vaguely resemble the music of Graduate led me to believe they'd jumped firmly on the New Wave bandwagon, but in truth it was actually a far more honest breed of music than what had gone before. Things then moved on so fast for them, and the title of just their second album re-established that whiff of the arrogance for which they were often vilified: if ever a couple of pop star's egos grew so large to the point they felt they could grandstand the entire world with their angst-ridden conscience, then Orzabal and Smith have to be guilty as charged. Nevertheless, on Songs from the Big Chair they crafted a very fine tune or three, in fact this album is mostly one long list of memorable stuff along with more than their fair share of late 80s-defining hits, before they slipped into argumentative obscurity for the next four years.
Thomas Dolby, Aliens Ate My Buick, 1988
Aliens Ate My Buick shows what moving to LA does to the head of someone who once occupied the cerebral end of the Britpop scene. Actually it's a mostly superior pisstake of the trashier end of American pulp culture, and the American musicians Dolby uses (calling themselves The Lost Toy People) are all very much in on the joke, often riffing on Funkadelic and George Clinton to the point of complete adulation. This album also spawned one chart single, 'Airhead', a sharp and cynical hit about trust-fund girls – there must have been more than a few who danced to this without realising that it's actually all about them. Most of the rest of the album was actually far too intelligent, sexy or fun for daytime airplay; if on the first hearing it sounds like pure trash, listen again and it becomes completely post-modern. Still brilliant now.
