there aren't many bands from the postpunk /80s-pop zone that haven't been dug up and celebrated on some blog or other.... all kinds of third-raters and stuff that was barely known at the time is subject to cult-love... every last lesser effort (why only the other day i saw How Men Are, the third, flop LP by Heaven 17 shared on a blog) gets its moment

every so often, though, i'll remember a band from that time that has completely slipped through the cracks... often a band that had quite a substantial following, or sizeable success, or at least some kind of expectation gathered around their name

one such figure, completely forgotten now, is Toyah... an Adam and the Antz scale cult ("Sheep Farming in Barnet") before (mirroring Adam's path) crossing over big-time as a sort of notch-above Hazel O'Connor plastic punk popstar

another one is Dead Or Alive

i don't remember hearing anything by Dead or Alive before "You Spin Me Round" but i remember seeing their picture here and there (were they ZigZag cover stars?), and sort of surmising their sound from their look and from the (mostly dismissive) reviews

before they fell into the clutches of Stock Aitken Waterman, Dead or Alive operated in the overwraught interzone between Goth, New Romanticism and the Big Music (Echo/Simple Minds/Wah Heatetc)

Peter Burns = the lovechild of Boy George and Kirk Brandon (with a little bit of Ian McCulloch sperm mixed in)
















Goth -- well until i looked them up I didn't know that Wayne Hussey had been the creative mainstay of the band pre-SAW

Goth/New Romanticism -- the line between the two was only wafer thin really, glam damaged andro-boys all -- Boy George and Andi Sex Gang lived in the same squat at one point


other bands that were quite big but are unremembered...

The Farmers Boys
Red Guitars
Indians in Moscow

who else?