Well, this was a real find. For years there was a grand total of one Pauline Murray & The Invisible Girls video on YouTube which was frustrating for someone like me who adored Ms. Murray and the album she made with that lot. So finding this clip of them performing three songs was like discovering the Holy Grail, the lost city of Atlantis, and those keys you dropped behind the couch years ago.
I saw her live in 1980 with the Invisible Girls and it’s still one of the best gigs I’ve ever been too, and not just because I had a huge crush on Pauline. They played the entire album and when the audience shouted them back for a third encore Pauline said “we’ve run out of songs” so they played them all again.
I’ll let someone else do the sleeve talking this time, and who better than Mr. Peter Saville (who, as usual, looks like he’s been up all night.)
I had an Unknown Pleasures t-shirt and badge back when Ian Curtis was still alive but I would have thought a tattoo was a bit excessive even at the age when I lived and breathed for the bands I loved. A mate of mine had a Theatre of Hate tattoo on his arm, something he thought was stupid the minute they broke up. I wonder if he still has it now that he’s nearly 50.
I first saw this clip over at Dangerous Minds and seriously think it might be about the most brilliant music video ever made. The story goes that Hall & Oates were a bit cheesed off about having to lip-synch their latest hit “She’s Gone” for some local television station so they filmed this piece of hysterically fucked-up magnificence which takes the piss in rather epic style. It also looks like large quantities of drugs might have been involved too. Apparently the station never broadcast it, I wonder why.
(The girl walking across the screen is Daryl Hall’s girlfriend Sara Allen who he wrote Sara Smile about.)
Not had anything by Dame David here for a while and this is a corker. This clip from TOTP was thought to have been lost for years, one of the many tapes that the BBC wiped, and hadn’t been seen since it was first broadcast in 1973. Then last year the cameraman came forward with a copy he’d had made at the time, not realizing that it was the only one in existence — “I just couldn’t believe that I was the only one with it. I just thought you wouldn’t be mad enough to wipe a tape like that” he said. Makes you wonder what else has been lost.
The Grim Reaper continues his May sweep through the pop world, now he’s taken Robin Gibb.
Though I think the Bee Gees have gained some appreciation and even cred in recent years, some people still regard them as being a bit naff. I saw them live in the late 1980s and it was a terrific concert, they really were excellent, but the other week I told someone that and he said “You saw the Bee Gees???” with the tone of someone who thought I was a bit soft in the head. It makes you wonder how many great hit songs a band has to write to be considered serious artists, I certainly don’t have a problem saying that the Gibbs are up there with Lennon & McCartney as the best pop songwriters that England has ever produced.
Though Barry’s falsetto was the sound most people associate with them, Robin’s voice was no less distinctive. His quivering tone often sounded like a fragile little boy on the verge of tears which added an intense, melodramatic sadness to early ballads like the ones below. As Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne says in his tribute here, his voice “sounded like no one else before or since.”
And spare a thought for Barry, that’s all his brothers gone now.
The sentimental musings of an ageing expat in words, music, and pictures. Mp3 files are up for a limited time so drink them while they're hot.
Contact me: lee at londonlee dot com
