Fly the flag

Very briefly something strange happened in the album charts in New Zealand in 1982.  Let’s watch it happen. 

The week before it happened:

If you’re not from New Zealand then there is a chance you think I’m going to make fun of DD Smash and their album Cool Bananas, but this is not going to happen because DD Smash were awesome.

Elton John Jump Up!  Now there’s something to make fun of (I have already, here).  By far the most risible though has to be the number four and number five double whammy of pap.  On the other hand, when you’re trawling youtube to find something to mock Kamahl with you might find this and see him in a whole new light:

So.  Are you ready?  Here it is.  The week I was talking about:

I know, right?  AMAZING.

Translation for rest of planet: the top three places on the album chart in New Zealand on the 2 May, 1982 are held by New Zealand or Australian bands.

Explanatory notes for people living in Britain or the USA: until some time in the mid 90s mainstream New Zealanders didn’t really like New Zealand music.  In Britain and the USA you are used to having music from your own country all over the charts.  In New Zealand we are not.  Aside from the fact we are too small to have enough quantity to fill up the charts, we also suffered from cultural cringe.  Mostly we thought of New Zealand music as being worse than British and American.  Which, to be frank, it often was – it wasn’t all the fault of New Zealand public – but sometimes it wasn’t, sometimes it was really, really good, and just needed a little love.

This chart then is a really remarkable feat.

It didn’t last.  One week later we have this:

Richard F&%king Clayderman as I like to call him.  Man he was popular with middle-aged New Zealanders in the early 80s.

Split Enz were a very good band and (for the three people who don’t know) had Tim and Neil Finn in its final line up.  Neil, of course, went on to Crowded House, but Tim has also made a lot of good music since.  Actually all the tracks I like on Time and Tide are either by Tim or the band rather than by solo Neil.

I’m not sure which track to play for Split Enz.  Six Months in a Leaky Boat is pretty fantastic, but I have always loved Dirty Creature.  Mental illness sounds great with a good bass line.

Cool Bananas is harder to get a video for.  The only things I can find have a very low volume, and the big song from this album – Devil You Know – really needs to be played loud. 

Dave Dobbyn (the DD in DD Smash) really deserved fame outside of Australasia.  Such a fantastic musician (well, until he stopped drinking).  Totally implausible as a rock star.  I mean, check out this outfit from the Radio With Pictures gig:

I can’t tell you how cool Adidas, stirrup leg pants were in New Zealand at this time.  Dave would have been rocking it a bit more if his pants had been black.  (Incidentally, I am aware of how funny the phrase “stirrup leg pants” sounds in England).

Dave was never a man who was ever going to rival Elvis, for example,  in the sex-appeal-o-meter stakes and, as we have seen, he wasn’t a snappy dresser, but he wrote great songs and, at this point in his career, there was a lot of fantastic stuff to come.

Maybe, then, we’ll save a Dobbyn clip for a little later.

1982: First quarter review

Seeing as March is all gone I think it is time for our first quarterly review: Jan-March, 1982.  What have we learned about New Zealand in 1982 so far in our exhaustive piecemeal study of culture from the first three months of that time 30 years ago?

Well, I actually sat down and calculated how much popularity top five songs had over the first eleven weeks of the year in New Zealand, and here is the top ten for January-March, 1982.

1. How Great Thou Art – Howard Morrison (32 points)
2. Down Under – Men at Work (39)
3. Hands Up – Ottawan (43)
4. It’s My Party – Barbara Gaskin and Dave Stewart (48)
5. Trouble – Lindsay Buckingham (54)
6. Physical – Olivia Newton John (56)
7. Girls on Film – Duran Duran (56)
8. Tainted Love – Soft Cell (56)
9. I Can’t Go For That – Hall and Oates (57)
10. Good Thing Going – Sugar Minott (61)

Let’s turn these songs into facts about New Zealand. 

Popular in New Zealand in Jan-March, 1982:

1. Sucking up to Britain/Maori/God/Wearing white
2. Vegemite/Australia/Reggae
3. Inanity/Synthesisers
4. Synthesisers
5. Old fashioned rock
6. Fitness Gear/Sweat bands/Pastels
7. Sexism/New Romantics/Girly boys
8. Girly boys/Synthesisers/Wearing white
9. Synthesisers/Pastel suits
10. Reggae

Which can be represented this way:

Or this way:

Child: Daddy, what was the start of 1982 like in New Zealand?

Father: It was a time when we thought synthesisers sounded cool, and we liked to wear pastels, be sexist, and a lot of dudes looked a bit like girls.  It was the age of awkward suck up songs to God/the Queen that simultaneously advanced and embarrassed Maori culture, while a lot of white people pretended they were Australian.

Child: What?

Or this way:

Which I think means that it was fairly important to have a lot of volume in your hair on the top of your head, and not too much happening on the sides (“pile me up like a meringue”).

Or this way:

Of course there is some controversy about how you define good and bad love.  Let’s look at the songs again.

1. How Great Thou Art: Loving God = Good (traditionally)

2. Down Under: Being Australian

3. Hands Up: Love me or I’ll shoot you = Good (traditionally)

4. It’s My Party: Ex comes to party with new girlfriend but I am still single = Bad Love

5. Trouble: I’m in love I think I better do a runner = Bad Love

6. Physical: Let’s talk horizontally = worst chat up line ever = Bad Love

7. Girls on Film: Watching porn = “solo love” = one of the many, many bad kinds of love

8. Tainted Love: It’s love, but it’s tainted = Bad Love

9. I Can’t Go For That: Male prostitute draws line at giving soul to customer = Bad Love

10. Good Thing Going: Love is exciting = Good Love

Summary: New Zealand was into love, but had a pessimistic outlook on the emotion(unless you were brown – brown people appeared to be a lot more upbeat about love than white people in 1982).

The Poetry of: Midge “This Means Nothing To Me” Ure

I was lucky enough to catch up with the “artist” Midge the other day, and ask him about his latest collection Rage in Eden (1981).

Hammy: Thanks for meeting me today.

Midge: No problem.

H: I’ve been a fan since Vienna.

M: Thanks.

H: But I never really understood what that song was about.

M: (laughs)

H: (singing) “The image is gone, only you and I, this means nothing to me, Oh Vienna.”  Vienna?

M: “Alone in the night as the daylight brings a cold empty silence.”  Sounds cool ay?

H: Uh-huh. So, I was wondering if you could talk me through the meaning of some of your latest work?

M: Sure.

H: Let’s start with the single The Voice.  What’s that about?

M: The words speak for themselves.

H: Really?

M: Sure, listen to them…

H: And that’s about…?

M: Changing contours of decay drawing on the crying lines I once lost.

H: Sure.  How about the title track Rage In Eden?

M: What about it?

H: Well, is it about… let’s say, the garden of Eden?

M: (snorts) Of course not.  Listen.

H: Is mumoured a word?

M: Keep listening, the meaning becomes clear in the second half.

H:

M: See?

H: What the f&%k does that mean?

M: (singing) ”We raised our glasses and drank to times we had but’d see no more”

H: But’d?

M: (still singing) ”A different light that’s cast upon this gigolo and gigolette”

H: GIGOLETTE!?

M: “Their heavy perfume of the night sucked them down in red tide.”

H: (standing) Right, I’m leaving.  Whatever you do, never, ever write a charity record.

Orange Juice Anyone?

Orange Juice achieved minor celebrity when their song Rip It Up reached the top ten in the British charts.  The song would have gone higher in the charts if attention had not been diverted away from the band to the half-naked guy gyrating behind the Top of the Pops presenter when the group made their appearance on that show.

Sadly Orange Juice were a band torn apart by problems foisted on them by their unscrupulous label, Domino Records, probably best illustrated by this poster from 1982.

Their lead singer might have been able to write clever lyrics,

I do profess

That there are things in life

That one can’t express

You know me I’m acting dumb-dumb

You know this scene is very humdrum

And my favourite song’s entitled ‘boredom’

But these three Glaswegian boys just couldn’t seem to get rid of a strange African man who kept hanging around and even appeared in videos and performances.

Well, it turns out that the African man was in fact Zeke Manyika, and that both Orange Juice and Manyika were involved in an elaborate cost-cutting exercise by their record label.  Zeke Manyika was a solo artist trying to build a following with his cutting edge solo drum, spoken word, tea cup performances.  The record label however  – fearing that Zeke might not have huge mainstream appeal – realised that if they sent him to all of Orange Juice’s photo shoots and performances they could promote two acts for the price of one.

Here is the same poster shot shown above but used to promote Zeke.

If only someone had told Zeke and Orange Juice.

Shame on you Domino Records.  Shame on you.

Visage

In the early 80s there was a small club in London called the Blitz Club.  Boy George was the coat check boy and the bouncer and the DJ made a band called Visage.  The Blitz Club was, for a while, dreadfully fashionable and cool, and attracted all the New Romantics (who were called about five other things, but New Romantics seems to have stuck).  Visage weren’t much chop really, but they did have one stonkingly good track called Fade to Grey.

The lead singer was called Steve Strange.  He liked to dress up.  Before Visage he had been in Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes video.  I think it would be fair to say that Steve was a touch influenced by Ashes to Ashes when he created his own look.

Although Steve pushed the envelope a little further,

and then still further,

Until the director took some sensible action, and created this look for Steve:

Which I think works really well.

One sequence in the video strikes me as both hilarious and as a possible new version of the lyrics.

Instead of: “ahhhhh, ahhhhh, we fade to grey, fade to grey”, we could have “ahhhh, ahhhhh, we paint ourselves as snakes and go insane, go insane”. 

You may laugh, but haven’t we all known someone who has faced this problem at some point in their lives?  For several dark years I painted my hand as a badger.  This was mostly alright, until the mating season.

Naturally for someone as insanely silly as Steve Strange Smash Hits magazine were there covering all the moments that mattered:

It is pretty irritating when you talk about sleeping and clothes and pierrot dolls and climbing coconuts, and people just don’t take you seriously when you say the rioting poor should open nightclubs.

But, let’s be frank, no one was really interested in what Steve had to say, they wanted to look at him, and it’s easy to see why.

You may have noticed that some of the words to this song are in French.  This was Steve’s contribution to the song.  Not writing the song, or writing the French, but saying “hey, you know what would be cool?  Some hot French chick saying stuff in French.”  It is cool, but it’s also odd to see him in a documentary complaining that no one gives him credit for helping to “write” the song.  Which he didn’t.  Which is why no one gives him credit for it. 

Still it explains something about the French words which I have loosely “translated” for you below:

That stupid git with the daft hair cut

didn’t write this song.

Dude your face is melting off!

You think you’re hot stuff now, but:

we fade to grey

(dickhead)