Saturday Clubs

 

In the early 1980s, clubs were still called discotheques. It was only later that the term “club” became established here too. One of these clubs was the Oz in the center of Stuttgart. The Oz was more of a meeting place than a dance temple for goths and wavers. It was a relatively small space for about 250 visitors, most of whom were dressed in black, wore Doc Martens, and had heavy kohl eyeliner. It was a meeting place for the subculture, and we often went there because there were few venues that played Siouxie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, or Joy Division.

I also witnessed King Kurt throwing eggs and flour sacks on and off the stage and Anne Clark performing her poetry to electro dark wave for the first time. I didn't get to hear a new, unknown electronic band because the hall was completely overcrowded. So I had to listen to Depeche Mode with many others on the stairs leading to the event room.

One highlight was definitely Big Country's performance when they were promoting their debut album, The Crossing. It was a wonderful concert where I met a colleague who took me backstage, and I had the opportunity to exchange a few words with Stuart Adamson and the band.

In the nineties, the club underwent a transformation and dark wave was replaced by techno. I went there a few more times and the music was okay, but I wasn't ready for that sound yet.

Singles Released This Week Years Ago

 

Another week another journey through decades of music. Today some well known and some tracks we might have forgotten.

1966: The Four Tops

1968: The Rascals

1997: Foo Fighters

1983: The Motels

1965: The McCoys

1965: The Barbarians

1965: Barry McGuire

1971: The Doors

1979: Bob Dylan

1982: Africa Bambaataa and The Soul Sonic Force

1984: Depeche Mode

´1961: The Dovells

1967: Sam and Dave

1971: Janis Joplin

1976: The Stills-Young Band

1984: Sade

1978: The Jam

Happy Birthday King of Synthpop

 

Today Vince Clarke turns 65 and it is time to pay tribute to his work here. Born in Essex he studied violin and piano. Influenced by Sparks, Human League and Fat Gadget he formed with a schoolmate a short lived band which became Depeche Mode after Martin Gore and Dave Gahan joined the band. Clarke wrote the most of the songs for their debut album Speak & Spell, a record that changed everything in synthpop. Not only that they were an all-synthesizer band, they were clever enough to write songs with great hooks.

Shortly after this album he left the band, because the sound of them got a darker touch and he formed with Alison Moyet, another schoolmate, Yazoo. They released two albums and with Upstairs at Eric's they reached the charts. Since then, it has become clear that Clarke's songs need a great voice to come to full fruition.

As erratic as he appears, he dedicated himself to a new project after the second album and founded The Assembly. But not much more than Never, Never, in which Feargal Sharkey is allowed to sing, remained.

With his next project he found a destination for the next years. In Andy Bell, he found a voice that would shape the sound of Erasure through an advertisement in Melody Maker.

In 2003 Erasure released Other People's Songs an album with cover versions in which the cover version by Steve Harley stands out above all (because it is also a great song).

Happy birthday Vince

Singles Released This Week Years Ago

 

Another journey through releases of songs that made me fun listening again.

1970: Detroit rock and blues band Rare Earth released a cover version of Temptations hit Get Ready. Although the single is pretty good I prefer their long version.

1981: Vince Clarke prepared the sound of electronic pop music with Depeche Mode. I Just Can't Enough was the first of many upcoming melodic hymns.

1987: Prince released his best album for me with a statement of what was going on these days.

1991: REM release Losing My Religion, not their best song but the one that made them super stars.

1984: Bananarama was probably the first British girl band that brought us in the 80'sna lot of classic pop songs like this.

1980: Squeeze should be named if someone asks for a band formed in the post-punk days and later turned into pop-rock hymns.

1973: Bruce Springsteen released his debut and Blinded By The Light was one of his early highlights of the great storyteller.

1979: From the ashes of the latest pub-rock band The Motors Bram Tchaikovsky showed how great power-pop could be.

1979: It takes a lot of chutzpah to record cover versions of soul classics at a time when music was in upheaval. But the two comedians Aykroyd and Belushi did it very well.

1980: Atomic by Blondie is too good to remain unmentioned here.

Queen Of The 14th Street

 

Today DECIUS will release their second album Vol. II /Splendour  & Obedience). I'm not sure if I can call them a band or more a project by members of Fat White Family and Warmduscher. Anyway, it took a longer time to get into their music since they released their first album two years ago. Not that their music has a lot of charm but it took a longer time to see the beauty of their combination of acid house, disco and techno. Most of the songs are stamped with a reduced rhythm and the spectacular voice by Lias Saoudi. It is one of those albums that grows the more you listen to. Sometimes I think it is the kind of music Depeche Mode try to make.

New Song On Sunday

 

If the press is to be believed, the next big thing is coming from south London. Fat Dog is the project of Johnny Hutchinson, who likes to perform in latex masks and makes a chaotic mixture of electro-punk, rock ‘n’ roll and industrial pop. 

He is not afraid to incorporate borrowings from Bicep, Kamasi Washington and Depeche Mode into a song. Certainly not the future of rock, but energetic songs that fit the times and who knows, maybe the song will help end the wars around us.

Monday's Long Song

Sometimes I notice a new name in music and only because of the name I go for further investigations. This happened the last time when I first got aware of Hunterbräu. As far as I know Hunterbräu is an electronic music artist from Manchester. His music is some kind of merging of 80's synthesized rock/pop and acid house from years later. I have to admit that I didn't listen to Depeche Mode's original for a long time but this version with it's reduced electronic rhythm, cautious synths and the vocals shifted in the background is coequal to me.

 

Better Looking Brother

 

The new year started with a new discovery. Lust For Youth is a two piece Copenhagen based darkwave project by Hannes Norrvide and Mathe Fischer and their first album Compassion from 2016 was re-released a few days ago. Their music is not groundbreaking but their own definition of a sound inspired by early Pet Shop Boys, Depeche Mode and New Order combined with a bit of post-punk is more than notable. It is good to see that young people know their idols and make something new.

Miss You

How does a good cover version go? Most cover versions are unnecessary. Are well suited as a B-side or as valuable one for a live concert. One can destroy the original on purpose, filter out only the essence and breathe own interesting mind into the song or try to come close possibly to the origin.

Carla Bruni is known before all things beside Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford or Claudia Schiffer as one of the great model models of the glamorous 90s years and as a wife of the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy. However, she makes long already also to music, successfully and anything but the worst one. Mostly is the gentle tastefully jazzy folk pop with acoustic guitar, for boutiques, lounges and Philippe Starck designed rooms. From time to time I listen to her songs and I can still enjoy them. I was surprised that she offered a new record filled with cover versions. She covered on French Touch songs by Depeche Mode, The Clash as well as songs by Lou Reed or The Rolling Stones. Miss You is from the RS era when they tried to take the disco-route. Carla Bruni charges the song with gentle grooving and Latin air, lays string player underneath and whispering cryptically. And, nevertheless, just then there a big art lies: to stay close to the original, besides, nevertheless, leave clearly own perfume and draw out of a 1000-fold heard song new puzzling magic.

Where's The Revolution

Never thought that once in my life I would listen to a political song by Depeche Mode. A song against Brexit, Trump and right wing populism is not the main thing when we think about the band. This shows once more that many artists think in the right way what happens these days.

This remix was done by Algiers, another political band from Atlanta, Georgia. They make a very unique mixture of different genres like Afrobeat, industrial, no wave and jazz inspired by XTC and PIL

The Foreign Correspondent Returns - Stories About German Rock Music # 44

Spliff (I know what synonym it is for) came from Berlin. What is in it so particularly? Berlin about which it is here does not deal with today's any more overmuch. Berlin an end of 1970s was, not least because of the island situation within the Western Germany, a special case. Crowds of the young men who wanted to escape the service in the armed forces moved there and by the geographical bulkheading quite an own cultural scene which worked magically engagingly on all kinds of outsiders also originated. Pop dimensions like David Bowie, Iggy Pop or Depeche Mode made this Berlin for for some time her native country. The band is very successful during those days in Berlin. Stylistically in the political rock the seventy-year-old roots, however, one cannot hold a candle overpowering Ton Steine Scherben (another German left wing band from the 70s). When Nina Hagen from the GDR is expelled, she joins the four one and completes the Line Up of Nina Hagen Band as the troop is called. After only two albums the combo separates. From the remains arise in 1980 on the one hand the solo artist Hagen and Spliff. They had their most successful years throughout the New German Wave but their were much better than this foolish stuff.

And as Nina Hagen Band:

And the German version of White Punks on Dope by The Tubes:

Look What You've Done

This photo was taken in Milan, Italy in the 1950s and could be titles of the Italy way of life. Absolutely no more than one snapshot, however, one with a lot of mood. I would have been present with pleasure in. Todays song is from Karin Park, a Swedish singer and producer. She comes up with a kind of industrial disco that remembers me when I hear the main theme on the early Depeche Mode and Fat Gadget as well.

The Foreign Correspondent Returns - Stories About German Rock Music # 33

The correspondent is again back with a new story about a German rock band. One of the internationally most successful however also most controversial groups of the last decade from Germany came were with certainty Rammstein. Successful because of the wall of sound they made. Heavy guitars, some great riffs and a singer with a voice that might came out straight from hell. From their early days - and sometimes today as well - they had to deal wit the reproach of the right-wing extremism. On account of the ambiguous texts and the hard style the volume was often accused in the early days on the part of the media of following radically right-wing trends. The criticism increased, after in 1998 the video to the cover song Stripped – the original is from Depeche Mode – appeared, the film material of the Summer Olympics in 1936 from Leni Riefenstahl included. In spite of the distance of anti-constitutional symbols from the video material the volume the spreading of fascistic body of thought and the unthinking idealisation of national-socialist aesthetics was accused. A ban of the radiation of the music video for transmitting times before 22 o'clock was the result. Singer Till Lindemann explained later, one has crossed a border with this provocation what he would do not once again.

The tape members of Rammstein call their music style "dance metal"; other ones call it New German Hardness. Typically for the music the volume it are of guitar reef which are played by distorted E guitars, and easy percussion rhythms. Often the pieces are built up on easy, continuous patterns. Music differs Rammstein from classical Heavy Metal type, as for example Iron Maiden, by the massive application of electronic sounds – as for example electronically to simulated piano or violins voices with quiet ballads, or techno sound– as well as by the rarer application of percussion breaks. Though also guitars and keyboard sound seem, however, are rarer and as a rule are held easier.

I followed the discussion about Rammstein in their early days and sometimes I stood alone when I told some folks that I like theirs sound and their songs. Many have rejected the group, even if it was a matter for them only of being politically correct and music in connection with the third empire could be basically to decline. I'm really not much into Heavy Metal but I love sometimes the bombastic sound of Rammstein. A few years ago I saw them live in Stuttgart and first it was a phenomenal performance with all the pyrotechnics and second it was maybe the most powerful Heavy Metal concert I've seen (except Motörhead). It's great when you sit in the train to work and you can hear the full loud sound of this music.

Rammstein - Kokain
Rammstein - Engel
Rammstein - Du hast
Rammstein - Ich tu dir weh
Rammstein - Du riechst so gut

Let's face the rest of the working week

Here's a track that I can't get out of my head for hours. I remember when this song was published in 2003 it was one of the favorite tunes I heard all summer long. Most of the songs for Depeche Mode was written from Martin Gore. Because songs from Dave Gahan had no chance to get on records like 'Ultra' or 'Exciter' he decided to make a solo record. Not the greatest record that year but still a catchy tune.

Enjoy and have a good week
Dave Gahan - Dirty sticky floors