Oh 1980s, how I miss you sometimes. You were so silly and pretentious it’s a shame we had to part.
On the Wikipedia page for “Vienna” I read that it is “often performed live by Midge Ure in solo performances, most recently at Butlins in Skegness on Sat 8th May 2011″ which is, you know, both funny and sad.
This is the 1985 remix version of “London Town” which isn’t as good as the original but it’s still a sublime ode to the greatest city in the world. Not sure about those backing singers though, they look like they’ve wandered in from Brotherhood of Man or something.
Bloody marvelous record this was and I think it sounds even better now than it did back in 1982.
The fact that the lead singers of Echo & The Bunnymen and The Smiths were on the cover of a glossy teen-pop weekly just shows you how bloody marvelous the music scene of the early 1980s was. Perhaps if he’d lived Ian Curtis would have made the cover of Smash Hits.
Though with that headline and the flowers it looks a bit as if they are “rivals” for some young girl’s affections and are both giving her their most soulful and smoldering looks. Maybe there was a photo romance story inside featuring Ian and Steven in a love triangle with Siouxsie Sioux.
Download: Show of Strength – Echo & The Bunnymen (mp3)
Don’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of the group Spelt Like This before, they were a male trio who released two singles back in the mid-80s neither of which troubled the charts with their presence and then they broke up never to be seen again. It wasn’t through lack of effort by their record company either, they were given a massive promo push with lots of big ads in all the music weeklies for their 1985 debut single “Contract of The Heart” which I noticed at the time because they were very “designery” with the same sophisticated and enigmatic minimalism used by Pet Shop Boys and New Order in their marketing.
The ads must have worked on me though because when I saw a copy of the 12″ going cheap in a sale at Our Price I bought it without having heard it before. Being a designer (or design student as I was at the time) makes me far more likely to buy a record (or book) if it has a good-looking sleeve and it almost physically pains me to buy one that looks ugly. Call me superficial but I’d walk a million miles for some good typography and nice paper stock and the sleeve of “Contract of The Heart” really lays on the designer effects with a trowel: yards of white space, obscure icons, trendily spaced-out lettering, a tiny duotone photo of the band on the back, and on the inner sleeve some arty photos of pubes, a man on one side and a woman on the other.
They must have spent quite a few bob on this (the 7″ had an even more expensive die-cut), and with such sophisticated packaging you might expect the record to be another “West End Girls” or “Temptation” but “Contract of The Heart” isn’t much more than half-decent Scritti-esque pop that probably should have done better that the lowly #91 it struggled to reach but doesn’t really live up to the promise of its sleeve and marketing. When I first listened to it I felt as if I had been lied to by the graphics, rather than being another Pet Shop Boys, Spelt Like This were in reality basically a boy band managed by pop svengali Tom Watkins (who was actually also managing PSB too at the time) who later gave the world Bros and East 17. So I’ve always seen this record as a 1980s “designer decade” triumph of style over substance and the belief (which was rampant back then) that trendy design could sell anything from a beer to a bank to a pop group no matter what the actual product was like.
The most interesting thing about “Contract of The Heart” now is that it’s an early Stock, Aitken and Waterman production done before they became the producers that ate the pop world and they do quite nice job with this, it’s a whole lot better and more inventive than the tinny Hi-NRG beats of their later work.
So, did it flop because the marketing was all wrong or because the record wasn’t good enough? You decide.
