HARDLY BAKED: December 2018

Monday, December 31, 2018

p+p

who knew there was a video for this?

but not for the other singles off P+P? - like 'Play to Win' ?

or the two that preceded - "Fascist Groove", "I'm Your Money"

the next video is "Let Me Go"

true, there was something unpop about them, something un-videogenic

there wuz no vids at all for their Music of Quality and Distinction project either even with starpower and capital F Faces like Tina T involved

a disappointing record, that

loved P+P, hated "Temptation", didn't even bother checking out The Luxury Gap I confess

cruel, fickle youth - and short of funds

this was good though

this was not

i don't remember this one being a single at all

i had a big argument with my girlfriend over who was the better singer - Phil O or Glenn G

she said Glenn, I said Phil

it's an odd thing - very much in the syndrome of Vince Clarke after Yazoo replacing Alf with a soundalike for Erasure - getting in Glenn, cos he's very close to Phil's in pitch and timbre and phrasing

but then again, wasn't he once mooted as the original singer of the Future (or Human League as it came to be)?

so that means Phil is in a sense a replacement for Glenn?

either way I prefer the wooden-ness of Oakey (ooh an accidental wordplay there!) to the wooden-ness of Glenn, but I'm not sure why (i suspect my girlfriend, being grade 7 piano and in a musical household of piano teacher and former cabaret singer dad, may have been technically correct about who was a superior vocalist)

i remember the singer from Kajagoogoo on some Eighties nostalgia program saying something perceptive about Phil O's singing - that he used very little vibrato. "Almost no / vib-rat-o" he said, archly, in a sing-song way.

Interviewed H17 around this duffer - nice chaps, bit forlorn by this point...

The album where they dropped synths altogether for completely 'real' instrumentation and playing

a not-shrewd move

Martyn Ware, bless him, is a diehard Corbynite - i've appended "like" to many of his tweets

Batty

(via Mars by 1980)

mouth music (i can't go on... i'll go on)

early departure from the northern blob

Wednesday, December 26, 2018

plastic punk

they got Pure Mania out really fast - June 1977 - must have been among the very first punk long-players

my brother Tim brought home the second LP, V2 - released less than a year later - but even I (punk-ignorant and indeed rock-ignorant at that point) could tell they weren't the real deal

this, their self-announcing debut single "We Vibrate", sounds like something Lawrence from Denim could get behind

talk about punksploitation and bandwagon-jumpage!

Chris Spedding another (enjoyable) faux-punk i was going to get to later

the first flurry of singles being on RAK records is the giveaway (it was Spedding recommended them to Mickie Most)

so were they (like Slaughter and the Dogs) glamsters who turned punk? Pure Mania co-produced by Robin Mayhew, sound engineer for Bowie's Ziggy Stardust shows. Later Vibrators backed up Ian Hunter.

An odd little mini-tradition in rock (there are other examples I think) - having the title track of your first album actually appear on a later album

How well I remember that cover - seemed striking, different kind of graphics - lying around in my brother's room.

presumably this what Stiff Little Fingers named themselves after

more "legacy" - as later covered by The Exploited

this title sounds like a Ramones-ish song come up with for some comedy show punk spoof