Finally my favorite band of all time comes back with some more material. Naturally, it's all old material, since they've been broken up for, oh, 12 years or so now. But they've given me a 3-CD collection that satisfies my hunger for interesting new Spandau discoveries, slakes my thirst for nostalgia and proves that they really did have a place in the legacy of the '80s.
The collection is broken up into different sections. The first disc contains the most unusual stuff -- demos, a couple of live tracks, some of the overlooked album tracks, etc. The second disc is a 10-track live disc from mid-1983, the height of their popularity. Somewhere I've got the video of this concert and I remember hooking my dad's stereo VCR up to the tape deck and recording it straight to cassette tape. The tape is lost now, but no matter; I've got it all on CD now. The third disc is all remixes, including what in my opinion is one of the greatest '80s dance tracks ever recorded and one of few 12" mixes that I feel totally outshines the original, the obscure track "Glow," and the archetypal '80s club remix, "Communication."
And now a few words about the band themselves. I got into them long ago, but long after they were past their peak. I latched onto them at first because of the mega-hit "True," which was just about ominpresent on the adult-contemporary stations I was exposed to in the mid- to late-'80s. But it was the stark, daring post-punk electronicized dance music of their early career that most grabbed me.
Looking at it now, I can intellectualize it as the escapist glamorizing of working-class Londoners who needed something with a good beat that was easy to dance to and an image that exotically evoked the lavishness of past eras without slavishly imitating. Too, they reveled in the homoeroticism inherent in wanting to be, sound and look glamorous. The aesthetic was evidenced by the cover of Journeys to Glory, which featured a Greek-looking statue of a male nude in relief and in the video for "Paint Me Down," which featured the band in loin cloths and smeared with paint (really quite tame, to look back on it, but banned from the BBC for its shameless depiction of male flesh, some time before Duran Duran could claim BBC-banning honors for "The Chauffeur."
But at the time the music simply grabbed me by the gut and wouldn't let go. And their look changed seemingly from month to month, a fast-forward fashion culture that was completely alien and fascinating to me.
The band released the first 12" dance remix (for their first single, "To Cut a Long Story Short) outside the reggae and funk worlds and the rest of the world followed suit. They set the trend for filming their videos in wild, adventurous and exotic locations that Duran Duran later became known for. Duran Duran's manager, early on, asked Spandau's to let his band open for Spandau at a club in London. He refused and to this day regrets it, wishing as he does that he had a poster that proclaimed in large letters "Spandau Ballet" and in smaller letters "special guests Duran Duran." Duran Duran became the best-known exponents of the New Romantic movement (though they, like everyone else, abandoned it around 1982 or early 1983), but they were neither the first nor the best.
Spandau Ballet's members weren't the most talented musicians (though Tony Hadley has the coolest voice imaginable and Gary Kemp's unusual guitar rhythms, chord voicings, but they captured the spirit of a specific time and place (Britain, end of the '70s, start of the '80s) better, perhaps than any other band save Visage. They followed the musical zeitgeist of pop in the '80s till it totally abandoned punk and moved more in the direction of Sade, Simply Red and Roxy Music. The result, of course, was the album True and the title track (which appears here, newly remixed, with the original intro restored in place of the syncopated guitar stabs of the chorus that replaced it and helped make the song a hit).
I didn't realize how much I missed these guys. Every word of every song, every hit of every drum, every sax solo, every wash of reverb is etched permanently in my brain, as I discovered when I had to forcibly stop myself from humming instrumental bits and singing all the words at the top of my lungs (including the hyper-edited 'ccccccccc - communic -communic - communication, woo-oo-hoo-oo-hoo-oo-hoo) even when working on other stuff and no longer consciously paying attention.
Three discs. 39 tracks. Thousands of good memories. 12 pounds 69p from amazon.co.uk. A bargain.
The collection is broken up into different sections. The first disc contains the most unusual stuff -- demos, a couple of live tracks, some of the overlooked album tracks, etc. The second disc is a 10-track live disc from mid-1983, the height of their popularity. Somewhere I've got the video of this concert and I remember hooking my dad's stereo VCR up to the tape deck and recording it straight to cassette tape. The tape is lost now, but no matter; I've got it all on CD now. The third disc is all remixes, including what in my opinion is one of the greatest '80s dance tracks ever recorded and one of few 12" mixes that I feel totally outshines the original, the obscure track "Glow," and the archetypal '80s club remix, "Communication."
And now a few words about the band themselves. I got into them long ago, but long after they were past their peak. I latched onto them at first because of the mega-hit "True," which was just about ominpresent on the adult-contemporary stations I was exposed to in the mid- to late-'80s. But it was the stark, daring post-punk electronicized dance music of their early career that most grabbed me.
Looking at it now, I can intellectualize it as the escapist glamorizing of working-class Londoners who needed something with a good beat that was easy to dance to and an image that exotically evoked the lavishness of past eras without slavishly imitating. Too, they reveled in the homoeroticism inherent in wanting to be, sound and look glamorous. The aesthetic was evidenced by the cover of Journeys to Glory, which featured a Greek-looking statue of a male nude in relief and in the video for "Paint Me Down," which featured the band in loin cloths and smeared with paint (really quite tame, to look back on it, but banned from the BBC for its shameless depiction of male flesh, some time before Duran Duran could claim BBC-banning honors for "The Chauffeur."
But at the time the music simply grabbed me by the gut and wouldn't let go. And their look changed seemingly from month to month, a fast-forward fashion culture that was completely alien and fascinating to me.
The band released the first 12" dance remix (for their first single, "To Cut a Long Story Short) outside the reggae and funk worlds and the rest of the world followed suit. They set the trend for filming their videos in wild, adventurous and exotic locations that Duran Duran later became known for. Duran Duran's manager, early on, asked Spandau's to let his band open for Spandau at a club in London. He refused and to this day regrets it, wishing as he does that he had a poster that proclaimed in large letters "Spandau Ballet" and in smaller letters "special guests Duran Duran." Duran Duran became the best-known exponents of the New Romantic movement (though they, like everyone else, abandoned it around 1982 or early 1983), but they were neither the first nor the best.
Spandau Ballet's members weren't the most talented musicians (though Tony Hadley has the coolest voice imaginable and Gary Kemp's unusual guitar rhythms, chord voicings, but they captured the spirit of a specific time and place (Britain, end of the '70s, start of the '80s) better, perhaps than any other band save Visage. They followed the musical zeitgeist of pop in the '80s till it totally abandoned punk and moved more in the direction of Sade, Simply Red and Roxy Music. The result, of course, was the album True and the title track (which appears here, newly remixed, with the original intro restored in place of the syncopated guitar stabs of the chorus that replaced it and helped make the song a hit).
I didn't realize how much I missed these guys. Every word of every song, every hit of every drum, every sax solo, every wash of reverb is etched permanently in my brain, as I discovered when I had to forcibly stop myself from humming instrumental bits and singing all the words at the top of my lungs (including the hyper-edited 'ccccccccc - communic -communic - communication, woo-oo-hoo-oo-hoo-oo-hoo) even when working on other stuff and no longer consciously paying attention.
Three discs. 39 tracks. Thousands of good memories. 12 pounds 69p from amazon.co.uk. A bargain.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home