Tight Fit?

The Lion Sleeps Tonight.  I think the worst hit version ever recorded of this song was by Tight Fit, a manufactured British group who took their recording to number one in the UK (as well as the heady heights of number three in New Zealand in May of 1982). 

In America the best known version seems to be by The Tokens who had a hit with it in the 1960s.  Nowadays it might be the version in The Lion King that has the most fame.  The original song was composed and recorded in South Africa as Mbube (lion) in 1939 by Solomon Linda and The Evening Birds.  The trail from Solomon Linda to The Lion King ends in a lawsuit, and royalties eventually heading back to Linda’s descendants.

I want to talk about other crimes.  Not copyright crimes or crimes like the one committed by the Tokens’ guitarist below:

(No man should ever have a beard without a mo.  Ever.  Unless they’re in a fundamentalist religious group of some kind.  I’m always unclear on why it is that some religious extremists shave above their top lip.  I digress.)

But crimes like this from the original Tight Fit video:

Explanatory Notes

A. Tarzan with a blonde on a vinyl sofa deep in the heart of the ten pot plants the BBC could afford to rent for this shoot in the Sound Editor’s spare room

B. Two African guys who the Director bumped into down the pub one night and promised stardom to (and a packet of crisps, “I insist, any flavour you like”).  My favourite part in the whole video is the last five seconds when these guys clearly think the cameras have stopped rolling, stop bobbing their heads, and begin to think about what’s for tea.

C. I’d like to call these guys the Africa-is-not-a-country-honky duo.  What the hell are they wearing?  Are these two sketchily dressed Egyptians crossed with some Zulu warriors neither of whom come from jungle country, but then neither do lions so what the hell is going on, but never mind because it all came out of the fevered imaginings of some 18-year-old BBC lackey probably making 2p an hour anyway.  If you follow.

D. Just departed: the saucy winking brunette and a gorilla.  Even with a DNA match in the 90th percentile I feel like this relationship won’t work (“We’re just too different”).

Did I mention that I loved and still love this song, and this version of this song?  No?

What’s not to like?

Baby Makes Her Blue Jeans Talk

At number six on the charts in New Zealand on 6 June 1982 was Dr Hook and Baby Makes Her Blue Jeans Talk.

I’m pretty sure that this video can be summarised by watching this for about three minutes:

Again, like the previous video, I don’t want to charge in like a herd of kittens and ruin a sophisticated metaphor, but what is being suggested here, by Mr Dr Hook, is that the blue jeans the young lady in this video is wearing are “saying something” to the gentleman who observe her passing by.

Although it is hard to translate denim on bottom I think the following messages might be evident:

1. high waisted jeans don’t really go out of fashion if you’ve got an ass that won’t quit

2. the human capacity to admire the body parts of other human beings is pretty weird if you, say, fixate on a bottom for three minutes in a pop video.

Bottoms seem to have been pretty big in June of 1982.  At number nineteen on the chart in New Zealand was the (thankfully) little heard Queen song Body Language.  Aside from being awful, it is a song that features a lot of wet bottoms.  For a song so transparently about sex this is a video very unlikely to light your flame (well, maybe it does, and – if it does – please don’t tell me).

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Ebony and Ivory

Let us take a moment to be thankful for the demise of Hands Up by Ottawan from the top of the New Zealand charts.  After two long months Ottawan were finally toppled by the awesome might of the Human League… “don’t, don’t you want me”.

Must be time then to review the charts in June  of 1982 in New Zealand.

Coming in at number two on 6 June, 1982 was Ebony and Ivory by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder.

Sorry, that was a bit unclear:

That’s better.

I think this is a song that must be a contender for the title of most-pitiful-attempt-at-world-peace-through-flimsy-metaphor-award ever (hard to beat “War, war is stupid, and people are stupid…” by Boy George).  Check out this head scratcher:

Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony
Side by side on my piano keyboard, oh Lord, why don’t we?

This clearly had a profound effect on the dude in charge of filming the video.

I think that the director did an admirable job of overcoming the subtlety of the original metaphor in his video although I have added some titles in case you’re not sure what is happening here.

WOW.

…so many levels…

THE BLACK GUY IS WEARING WHITE WITH A BLACK JACKET AND THE WHITE GUY IS WEARING BLACK WITH A WHITE JACKET AND THEY’RE SITTING ON A KEYBOARD OF WHITE AND BLACK KEYS SINGING ABOUT BEING WHITE AND BLACK!

Somehow this whole exercise is made even better by the fact that Stevie Wonder is blind.  It makes we wonder (no pun intended) how the original pitch to Stevie went.

The video is ok overall I guess.  If you like to be beaten to death with your metaphors (as I do).  Paul seems like he’s not sure how to exchange meaningful glances with Stevie (the director probably told him to do this), and Stevie isn’t sure what to do with his hands when his keyboard is taken away.  My favourite thing about Stevie’s awkward hand drumming on the massive black “key” between his legs is that Paul can’t help but glance down awkwardly not once, but twice.

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Arise, Sir Paul.

Penis jokes at this point would be totally inappropriate

Japanese-Chinese-Whatever

I’ve been trying to think of a good title for a series of posts I want to write.  As you may have noticed, I have been reliving 1982 month by painful month, but the problem is that whenever you start any kind of history, even one as laughable as mine, there are always the things that have just been popular and influential lingering in the background.  For example if you started a history of America in 2002 you would probably need to refer back to 9/11.  Likewise, starting a potted history of pop culture in 1982 there are a few people who were pretty big in 1981 who really deserve a mention because everyone in 1982 was still thinking about them. 

After careful consideration I have decided to call this series The Fart in the Empty Room.

One of the smaller farts in the room in 1982 were a band called Japan.  Smash Hits reports on them quite a lot, and I think it is mainly because their lead singer, David Sylvian, was an attractive piece of eye candy with silly hair cuts and just a touch, the merest smidge, of make up.

Here is the album cover of Japan’s final 1981 album called Tin Drum.

Tin Drum is a pretty cool album.  You gotta love a band that writes a song called Still Life in Mobile Homes.  It is quite an arty little album.  The bass player sounds like he dropped his fretless bass in a tub of vaseline at times (he’s also a whiz on the African flute and Dida apparently), and two of the band members are credited with playing the tapes (a two button instrument featuring the notes “play” and “stop”), but they still manage to make something that isn’t nauseatingly pretentious (although it definitely is not the party album of 1981-2).

It’s the album cover that really intrigues me.

Probably I am extra-sensitive to Japan-China confusion because I lived in Japan.  Also, of course, people routinely say that Australia and New Zealand are the same.  Actually, if you’re talking about Australian and New Zealand Europeans then I think we are so similar it doesn’t matter too much if we get mixed up, but it must be annoying to the Maori and Aborigines who are totally distinct cultural groups (not to mention the flora and fauna but they so rarely get asked for their opinions).

Quite often we have Japanese exchange students at our school.  At some point there is usually a conversation like this:

New Zealand Student: Do they speak Chinese?

Me: They’re from Japan.

NZ Student: So?

Me: So they speak Japanese.

NZ Student (irritated): Japanese, Chinese, whatever.

I think we can see the Japanese-Chinese-Whatever Effect in the album cover which features a number of things Chinese.  Of course, just because Japan was called Japan doesn’t oblige them to have Japanese things on their album covers, and apparently they were actually pretty popular in Japan, but it made me wonder what would happen if a Japanese band called, say, France, released an album called Tin Drum that looked like this:

V.A.M.U.C

As the proud former president of the Viennese Anti Midge Ure Collective it gave me great pleasure to read some of the comments in Man of Errors’ previous post.  The ignorance of two of the commentators about Midge Ure and his work shows that VAMUC had considerable success in stopping the spread of this man’s work in the 1980s when he was the leader of the infamous band Ultravox.

Perhaps a little background first.

When Vienna first came out we here in Austria were quite pleased that such a wonderful, slice of synth pop named our capital city in its chorus.  And then we saw the video and we realised what was being implied.  We were outraged and appalled.  As we watched it go to number one in Belgium, and Ireland, all we could hear was the laughter of our European cousins at our expense.  I decided to take action.  I called a meeting at my Volksschule and quickly had three or four members.  Our goal was to stop the spread of this song and its insidious video around the world.

In case you are confused I will briefly explain our initial problem with the video.  In short, it is a video that implies that Viennese people like to have sex with horses.

The video begins with the guilty couple separating on the streets of Vienna after their torid roll in the hay.

As the horse canters off screen (I presume he is called Vienna) he gives us the knowing , leering look of the Casanova.

Moments later the tawdry scene is completed when the horse’s pimp takes money from the woman.

Later at a party of taxidermists

Amid the sophisticated chatter of being stuffed and mounted,

The woman’s husband is informed of his wife’s “indiscretion”

The woman realises her shame has been revealed

And takes the only course open to her: brutally murdering the horse pimp.

Almost equally as offensive as all this was Midge Ure’s mustache.

Understandably we in Vienna were disgusted by this representation of our society.  Although the shame had already spread throughout Europe, we were determined the song would remain unknown in North America.  One phone call to Tipper Gore insured success, and Vienna barely managed to chart in the top 200 in the USA.

Since this triumphant success VUMAC has gone on to stage many successful campaigns against ambiguity-in-pop-songs-leading-to-distasteful-sexual-images.  Of course once we branched out we did have to change our name from VUMAC to VAAIPSLTDSI which is a bit of a mouthful but can also be said as fuktig in Swedish apparently.  Our PROUD TO BE FUKTIG badges are hot sellers I can tell you, and our headquarters at my family farm Pferd-lieben is a hive of anti-ambiguity activity.  If Mr Errors permits I may tell you about some of these campaigns in the future.