Do you gesang?

Here we probably got one of the best band from the subterranean italian new wave music scene. This was i'm gonna write about is one of the few notable dark-synth act coming from Italy, more precisely from Milano, more or less 30 years ago. There weren't much infos about the story of band or if they played live alot... but there's been a lot of talking in the recent years about this band and their "coldwave" sound. I remember them playing my hometown Torino in a dark rainy night at The Big Club, but sincerely I was not so impressed by them at the time, they played like millions of others and they sang with very terrible english pronounce... So the question was and still is, do they deserve all this posthumous fame the world of blogging bloggers tribute them? What about other hundreds of bands that never surfaced here in Italy from the beginning to the end of post punk era? Boh, sometimes history changes the facts and what we believe to remember is not what exactly happened... listening once again to their records and their live tapes they do no seem so bad and I must admit I really like them now... anyway, also here in Italy we now have our little "joydivisionesque phenomenon", Weimar Gesang (who?) of course! As I told before, more than three decades have passed since they hardly tried to emerge from the minor cultural rubble of italian's wave to a kind of darkly propulsive post punk anthems. The band consisted of four members: Donato Santarcangeli, Fabio Magistrali, Giuseppe Tonolini, and Paolo Mauri, a few of which went on to play in various other Italian bands over the years. Their base was the historical label and record shop Supporti Fonografici. With their atmospheric soundscapes "a la cure" Weimar Gesang tried to demonstrate a personal kind of glacial grandeur, maybe never seen before here in the land of the sun & spaghetti. It was not easy for them, mainly because their derivative post-punk  sound, in the new born wave italian movement, was not immediately known. But now they had their revenge. In the last years it seems that anyone around the blog involved in coldwave things have a word for them, and many have cited Weimars and their works as "seminal" and influential...they certainly weren't, but now they are, stars...

In the Bridgehouse again

Wasted Youth were arguably one of the greatest lost London band of the post-punk years. Rarely mentioned, if at all, in the era's music history books, they were heavily influenced by the dark narcotic glamour of the Velvets and Transformer-era Lou Reed. The Only Ones were their myths and also Peter Perrett produced them, as did Martin Hannett some years later. It seems very far nowadays but I remember they were hugely popular as the Eighties dawned with punks, looking for something more sexy and sophisticated. As many others, Wasted Youth looked set to become much more than the cult band they became. They pre-dated Positive Punk and Goth and are still remembered as quietly-influential and a superb live band by fans.  They only had a three-year life but even more than others they were acknowledged as one of the bands which really influenced the darkwave & gothic band scene. Their records were released through Bridgehouse Records, a label set up by the bass player's father in the pub he owned in Canning Town (The Bridgehouse, the first pub in the world with its own record label!!!). There is also a one and only wonderful album, even pressed on CD, titled "Wild & Wandering", one of my favourite record of that times. Guitarist Rocco had some fame after they split forming Flesh For Lulu but this story is not so much interesting. In the late eighties the Bridgehouse pub became a sort of club, later also an hotel with a restaurant... Wasted Youth original singer Micks Atkins leaved us in 2008 and recently came the sad new that also the bass-man, Darren Murphy, died after a battle with cancer... anyway, if anyone wishing to find the missing link between The Only ones, The Psychedelic Furs & Manic Street Preachers should search no further than this overlooked great band!

Goodbye Toulouse

Whoever Vic is, wherever Vic is, he can't take the credit for inspiring a very, very fine record. Written on the strength of a phone-call that turned out to be a wrong number, 'Is Vic There?' is the first single by some bunch calling themselves Department S. It's good, alright, and so are they. But you needn't take my word for it: in the recent NME Winners Poll, being chosen as a fave new act by Paul Weller and Bruce Foxton, with an additional 'best single' nomination by Weller as well. I'd last seen four of the London five piece just as they were emerging from the ruins of a group called Guns For Hire, at a Rock Garden debut which singer Vaughn Toulouse was later to sum up as "A drunken bloody mess" - not a million miles from my own impression of the event, as it happened.

Department S aren't used to the interview game yet and they discuss themselves with a succession of reluctant shrugs and mumbles, unwilling to try and define their music too closely, and partly suspicious after Vaughn had found himself grotesquely misquoted in a Hot Press piece last week. (But then you often find that the most eager, articulate talkers, who'll theorise about their work until the cows come home, are the ones least capable of delivering where it really counts: in the music itself.) Toulouse, incidentally, has only recently finished a stint as a critic himself, contributing reviews to The Face.

Anyway, the facts are these. The quartet which made its chaotic debut in London last July, soon grew to five-piece with the introduction of synth player Eddie Roxy - who left soon after to form his own synth-oriented group. His replacement is Mark Taylor, who doubles between synth and guitar: "Because the synth isn't important enough in our sound to warrant a full time player. The main reason we got it in the first place was just to fill out the sound - not to get all Gary Numan." Apart from Taylor and Toulouse, there's Michael Herbage on guitar, Tony Lordan on bass and Stuart Mizon on drums...

Having recently struck up an association with Jake Riviera, the Department S found themselves with the chance to put out a 45 on Riviera's Demon label - resulting in the enigmatic and tense 'Is Vic There?', backed by a knockabout version of Bolan's 'Solid Gold Easy Action', both sides produced by ex-Mott The Hooplers Overend Watts and Buffin, who the band met through friends The Nips. It was a rather unadventurous choice for a B-side, though the band themselves are less than happy with it, putting it down to running out of studio time and lack of control over mixing. "We did it for a joke in the first place, cos we didn't have enough songs. None of us was there when it was mixed. I really don't like that song", Vaughn explains. "It's about the worst song Bolan ever wrote. But all the best ones have been done, like the Banshees did 20th Century Boy".

The follow up single will be 'Clap Now' which they describe, pulling faces, as "Psychedelic Funk….with glam-rock drums". And if that sounds confused, it's meant to. "We're all different people really, all of us are having our own say".

Two of the group's bigger breaks so far have come with support slots for Toots & The Maytals ("except the crowds wouldn't listen cos we were different. I remember these kids at Cardiff shouting 'C'mon, skank it up boyo' and I just thought 'Aw, fuck off' ") and, more successfully with The Jam ("the only headliners to give us a decent sound check"). What remains to be seen is whether Department S can ever create a sizeable audience of their own. "Short hair music" is the definition that Vaughn Toulouse favours, but he stresses that their main aim is to find and provide an alternative - both to the elitism of Spandau Ballet & Co. and to the bootboy boredom of present punk. Not that the band are ready to make any great claims for themselves. The reckless abandon of their stage act contrasts with the cautious reserve they display in other areas: "We haven't signed anything. We haven't even got a manager. We don't want to jump in until we know what we want to do. We're all fairly inexperienced in group things".

At the same time, they repeatedly assure me they're not taking it seriously, that "it's still a laugh". So can they succeed? I think that they can if they can find the will, they'll find there's a way.

Between Boots and Ballet Shoes/ Paul Du Noyer - 'NME' - 21st February, 1981

Decadence and pleasure towns

Simple Minds showed how it should be done. They attain the kind of elegant, outlandish falmboyance Wasted Youth and Martin Dance long for, without resorting to the tempting deviations the others use. There's no sign of visual distractions, the musicians are unobtrusive to the point of visual insignificance, with the exception of Jim Kerr, frontsman and actor, who with the whole of his face and form mirrors the frantic and flickering lines of thought in the lyrics. The rest of the band's energy is channelled into the music, and the result is an unnerving, rich sound, bursting with the inward tension and intensity of the music and jarred by the sporadic, unconnected imagery which leaves you, the voyeur, feeling as if you're clinging to the edge of the centre of a whirlwind, temporarily avoiding being sucked in by the atmosphere, watching the iamges and film clips pelting lunatically around. Over the solid, marble-like foundation the synth lays, Jim Kerr's voice, the fourth and most extravagant instrument, soars in neo-operatic arrogant melodrama. The guitars are confined to the background in most part, consistent but never stagnant, subtly enhancing the vigour of the vocals and keyboards. They started with 'Capital City', a grandiose parade through alien streets, portrayed by the promise-of-something-worse wail of guitars and keyboards with Kerr's voice soaring haughtily and lugubriously over. This filtered into the wonderful 'Factory', which has the vocals and guitars hiccoughing over the gorgeously rounded keyboard melody, until it all coheres and climaxes into a pealing, church-like refrain. "A certain ratio we know have left us..." The next song, 'Thirty Frames' with its chaos of hopelessness and euphoria, celebration and confusion was the most wildly subversive song of the night. Here, Kerr's despair ("I lost my job / Security / Self confidence / Idenity") is set against a whirling background of pulsating disco guitar and zooming keyboards. This sent the audience into a roar of unanimous approval. Pause for identification: stage left, Charlie Burchill, sweet-faced boy, guitarist. Centre, Jim Kerr, vocalist, all burning eyes and pale expressive face. Derek Forbes plays bass, a languid, feminine sort of person, and a tiny bit self-aware, with it. And Michael MacNeil, invisible behind his synthesisers, but a keyboardist of immense ability. Of course they played their single, 'I Travel', recently demolished on 45, but here taken faster and unabridged, a glorious and hedonistic tide of instrumentals, with Kerr being swept along indifferently, making observations in his haughty grandiloquence. Simple Minds played for nearly an hour and left me still dancing to the echoes of 'Fear Of Gods' while a hall full of exhausted people bellowed for more and more.

Terri Sanai - 'Sounds' 8th November 1980 (UK)

New Year Special - The legend of gaznevada!

Gaznevada represented "the real & only new thing in Italy" in the last 40 years. For those who still do not know anything about them, it was more or less 1979... after the unfamous Bologna Rock Contests they signed a contract with the indie label "Italian records" formerly Harpo’s Music, hosting the likes of Skiantos, Windopen, Sorella maldestra, Luti Chroma, Confusional Quartet, The Stupid Set etc.  They worked with this company until 1984. Their sound was strongly influenced by Contortions, Ramones, Velvet Underground, Talking heads and Brian Eno. They had songs, irony & rage. No need to say more. When nowadays I listen to their "Pornovisione" track from their first Harpo's demos I still believe they're incredible! Imagine that in those years they were playing live in clubs and italian rock contests between melodic bands like I Cugini di Campagna & Homo Sapiens (!!!), more or less the best bands in Italy at the time. They vrtually had no public at the time. But their underground legend grew and Gaznevada became the first post punk cult band with fans all over Italy. Then the sound of the band changed to be too commercial and they lost soon their real identity... but this is another story. Gaznevada's absolute legendary and classic live tapes are very rare nowadays. This my gift for the new year, two old rotten recordings that incredibly survived the time as their legend...

where did the ordinary people go?

Everybody knows that XTC are loved by fans, musicians and critics. Like many others they were such a terribly overlooked band as they've produced some of the best pop music ever written. Exceptional song-writing and arrangements, sounds so easy and out of time and even their stage fright just adds to the mystique. On 2 April 1982, a Friday night, XTC were scheduled to play at the Santa Monica Civic Theater in Santa Monica, California, but did not appear. The audience milled about the open festival floor for a long 45 minutes/hour after opening act Oingo Boingo departed the stage, and then finally it was announced that XTC would not take the stage due to the "illness" of one of the band members (later revealed as Andy Partridge's ongoing fight with stage fright in Chris Twomey's book XTC: Chalkhills and Children). XTC never played another tour date. We are still missing them so much! Please hear them once again playing live with Barry Andrews at the peak of their powers, here recorded for BBC Radio 1 and broadcast on 25 March 1978...had we today bands of this level?

Model Citizens 80-83

Polyrock deserved better, but timing is everything in music. This artsy sextet made intelligent, original, agitated music that threw giddy melodies into the boiling stew of atonal angst and restless rhythm.Strongly influenced by minimalism, the group was produced by the composer Philip Glass and Kurt Munkacsi. They were absolutely great, in my opinion, one of the best new wave post punk band coming from new York in the early eighties. The band, led by singer/guitarist Billy Robertson (formerly of the group Model Citizen), had a keyboard-heavy, pattern-based sound strongly reminiscent of Glass’s work; in fact, Glass performed on their first two albums. Polyrock’s lineup also included vocalist Catherine Oblasney, guitarist Tommy Robertson, drummer Joseph Yannece, keyboard player Lenny Aaron, and Curt Cosentino. The group signed with RCA by 1980, and delivered their debut album that same year. Great music, great feeling. But this seemed to be just the beginning. Another album followed in 1981 and it was a masterpiece: "Changing Hearts" i still one of my favourire album of all the times, full of unforgettable songs like the epic instrumental "Slow Dogs".  Absolutely fascinating in its extremity, Changing Hearts follows the same basic pattern of their debut but it was even better, a journey thru an austere dance music to a taste of straightforward pop. Polyrock was perhaps the greatest band of the early new wave era that didn’t “make it,” and the fact that they never broke through to at least some cult level of success in the early 80s has always been a mystery to me. Listening once again to their last official recordings, the mini "Above the fruited plain", they sound absolutely incredible, a perfect combination of dance-friendly new wave and dissonant, minimal no wave. Here's their 1982 Radio special; the focus is shifted to Billy Robertson, the vocalist and guitar player for the group. He talks a lot about what exactly “new wave” means,including many Polyrock's complete songs. So if you’ve never heard of Polyrock there’s still something here for you to check out if you love new wave, because Polyrock was one hell of a new wave act.