“An amazing group called… Jam!!”

I guess famous pop stars with their own TV show don’t have to bother with the definite article.

*The couch actually.

Please excuse Lee from posting this week as he has a nasty eye infection and won’t be able to go to work where he keeps all the music files and pictures he needs to blog on his computer.

Yours sincerely,
Mrs. LondonLee

Great montage of Pan’s People routines, though this makes them seem a lot more raunchy than I remember them being. Could do with more of Sue Menhenick though, she was always my favourite.

I’ve made some minor changes to the links over on the left, added a few new ones and got rid of some others. The main thing I’ve done is move Popular to the top because that’s where I’m spending a lot of online time these days. If you’re not reading Tom Ewing’s herculean and brilliant effort to review every UK Number One hit single then you should be, particularly as he’s up to 1980 now which is smack dab in the middle of what I consider “my” era, and probably a lot of yours too.

I couldn’t be so common as to post a song that got all the way to Number One on the charts, so instead here’s one from 1980 that only managed to get as far as #16. What a bloody great year it was, but I would say that wouldn’t I?

Download: You’ll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties – Jona Lewie (mp3)

I think that as a teenager you have a duty to play music that annoys your parents but my mother got off pretty lightly with me considering what I could have been listening to in the post-punk years. I played my fair share of noisy records but I think my tastes were relatively conventional compared to some of the more extreme and atonal stuff you’d hear on John Peel in the evenings which often sounded to me like someone dropping a piano on a cat. Even 30 years later the discordant din made by bands like Throbbing Gristle, Einstrzende Neubauten, The Pop Group and You’ve Got Foetus on Your Breath (what a delightful name that is) still sounds completely deranged and makes you go “What the fuck was that?” If I was blasting that sort of barmy racket out of my bedroom stereo I think my mother would have called for the men in the white coats to come and take me away. Though to give her credit one time I was playing “Atmosphere” by Joy Division very loudly and she stuck her head round my door and said “This is nice, who is it?” – but I guess “Atmosphere” is a very pretty record when you think about it.

But lest you think I was some nancy boy who couldn’t take the hard stuff I did occasionally dip my toe in the deep end of the post-punk pool like when I bought the hair-raising 1980 single “The Friend Catcher” by Australian terror noise merchants The Birthday Party. It opens with a wall of eardrum-splitting feedback and a monster guitar riff that sounds like the gates of hell opening, over which lead singer Nick Cave growls and yelps like someone who’s just escaped from the loony bin. Cave, of course, later had a very succesful solo career and made a record with Kylie Minogue. It’s completely batshit but brilliant and a record I still like today, something I can’t say about a lot of the weirder stuff I bought all those years ago. Not that I’d play it when my little girl was in the house, hearing this might scar the poor little lamb for life.

Download: The Friend Catcher – The Birthday Party (mp3)

I’m not sure who or what this Johnny Reggae bloke was supposed to be, with the lines about how he’s “grown his hair a bit but it’s smooth, not too long” and his “two-tone tonic strides” I’ve always pictured him as a Suedehead, but they didn’t wear “big white basketball boots” far as know, so maybe this is some other offshoot of Mod that I’m unaware of. But English youth cults can be hard to pin down sometimes, especially the whole Mod-Skinhead-Suedehead continuum where the differences between them can be measured in the width of a Ben Sherman shirt collar.

Download: Johnny Reggae – The Piglets (mp3)

For those that don’t know this was a famous one-hit wonder from 1971 and “he’s a real tasty geezer” became a popular phrase for years, at least round my way.