When I was fifteen a friend gave me a tape featuring a fair mix of punk bands, including three Misfits tracks (Astro Zombies, I Turned Into a Martian, and something else I can’t remember). I ran the hell out of those three songs, but unfortunately the tape came sans info about who did what so it was about six years before I realised who the Misfits actually were.
I suspect that many lads of a certain age who read this journal will have just had a sudden moment of “oh, yeah, I remember then,” before wandering off to youtube one of their other videos. I say this because I spent about two years with Transvision Vamp’s first album on the tape-deck of my car in my mid-twenties and every male friend who got a lift would hear the opening bars of I Want Your Love and get an immediate flash-back to their adolescence. And yet once you get past the gratuitous objectification of Wendy James, there still something fascinating about Transvision Vamp. I have a moderate fascination with Andy Warhol and his relationship to celebrity that was heavily reflected in the band’s first album (Pop Art, which included a song about Warhol’s death). I’m intrigued by the number of former punk musicians who ended up playing pop-rock in the background (including former members of the X-Ray Specs and the Partisans).
Proof that there are people out there who do murder-ballads era Nick Cave even better than, well, Nick Cave. If you want a real insight into how scary Tex Perkin’s truly is, try listening to the Elvis Costello version of the song first. One of these is a gentle ballad sung by a punk-rock balladeer. The other gave me nightmares for a week the first time I saw it on Rage.
90’s Flashback Edition
Today is one of those “living in the future is damn cool” kind of days. Case in point: Y Can’t Tori Read (aka the eighties incarnation of Tori Amos) – I saw this clip on Rage once, in the very wee hours of the morning, and found it amusing given the direction Amos’ career took in afterwards. Today marked the second time I’ve seen its entirity, but I looked for it for a long time when I was a Tori Amos fan in my early twenties. The closest I got, after catching it on Rage, was seeing the vinyl single when I was walking past an intimidatingly cool record store in Fortitude Valley (I didn’t go in). Then I saw the new Tori Amos album in the shops this week, remembered the existence of the eighties Tori, and thought “I bet that’s on youtube.” And lo, there it was. I would have killed for youtube in my early twenties.
Yesterday I was driving around and I heard the new Regina Spektor single on the radio (not the song, “On the Radio”, that I’ve elected to post here. A different song. On the radio). That means a new Regina Spektor album’s on the way and this brings me joy.
I’ve been thinking about my obsessive love of cover-versions this week, and near as I can tell this was the first cover I ever recognized as both a) a cover and b) far more awesome than the original.
Because, seriously, how are you living your life without a regular injection of the Spazzys?
It is Friday. I have a hankering for some Sonic Youth. I blame the Gilmore Girls. And, no, that’s not a random non sequitur – for a fluffy, family-friendly show the Gilmore Girls is loaded with Sonic Youth references (and occasional guest stars).
Because it’s the day for it, really.
One of those days where I changed my mind at the last minute, and thus shot myself in the foot when it came to actually having something to say about it. What needs to be said about the Sisters of Mercy apart from “sometimes you just need go get your goth on”?
I’d kinda made a promise to myself that I’d stop posting Amanda Palmer/Dresden Dolls clips on Fridays, since I’m aware that I do it quite a bit. It isn’t really intentional so much as a reflection of my tendency to be very focused on one band for a few years – there’s a period in my late teens where I had the same kind of thing going with REM and the Cure, a time in my early twenties where there was ungodly amounts of Primus and Korn*, and now I seem to have caught the Dresden Doll’s bug (although it may yet turn into a long-term obsession, in much the same way that I never quite lost my obsessive fanboyishness of Nick Cave). Anyway, yes, I keep telling myself to hold back on the Amanda Palmer clips. I think, by now, you’ve all more-or-less caught onto the fact that I regard the band as awesome wrapped in greatness and delivered
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