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?

Post-punk before punk!

Over the past 40 years, Franco Falsini, a real italian underground legend, has embraced progressive rock, disco, post-punk, acid house and even psychedelic trance etc. His 70s group Sensations' Fix were (un)considered the Florence's answer to Krautrock but they've been too soon forgotten. At the time, and it was more or less 1973/74, here in Italy we had a lot of Cantautori (some kind of Dylan alias 20 year later...), a bunch of Genesis/Crimson/Santana clones but really no original bands!  Falsini's Italian label Polydor was freaked out by this group of longhairs called Sensation's fix. "They thought we were a bunch of drug addicts to be kept at a distance," he told the It's Psychedelic Baby blog earlier this year. "We were kept out of the studios with the excuse that 'the smoke was hurting the machines'." Falsini lightened a little in the early-80s, producing Electra's frisky aerobics anthem Feels Good (Carrots & Beets) – played by everyone from Horse Meat Disco to Aphex Twin – and knocking out a fantastic album of new wave pop in 1983 as the Antennas (check out Just Your Love). Throughout the next decade he produced hours of mind-expanding acid-trance for his Interactive Test label. Now an excellent compilation focusing on the earlier, more ethereal side of Sensations' Fix, called Music Is Painting In The Air (1974-1977), is released by New York's RVNG Intl, home to recent albums by Julia Holter and Sun Araw. And it's not another derivative progressive album, nothing to do with italian prog, nothing to do with jazz rock and floydesque symphonies. In my opinion, this is  an absolute classic masterpiece of italian wave, a sort of Eno-esque album with millions of influences, from classic rock to pop, from ambient to cosmic music. Sensation's fix music is a unique journey through fluid italian version of krautrock, space-age minimal synth work and yes, post punk before punk were created. Please listen to the fantastic Sensations' Fix last album in seventies (it was 1978's and it was called "Flying tapes") and don't forget to discover them once again in their metaphysical meanderings!

A teenage high

It all began with a stupid free cassette that came with issues of the NME in 1986 featuring a slew of up and coming indie and less established acts. Were C86 a cassette alone, it wouldn't merit much note now. But it became more than that. Although not all the bands featured on the compilation were stylistically similar, enough of them shared the same shambolic sound for C86 to quickly become identified as a particular genre, a movement, in independent rock. That sound is arguably twee, part Orange Juice, part The Smiths and definitly jangly as the Marychains could even be. Cristics discussed a lot to understand who were the best amongst those obscure bands often coming from John A. Rivers Leamington studios. I personally still have a doubt between the "soontobe" stars Primal Scream and a bunch of perpetual teenagers and perennial losers named The Pooh Sticks. According to their site, The Poohs were ..."Formed by Hue Williams (vocals) in late 1987, the line-up was completed by Trudi Tangerine (tambourine/piano), Paul (guitar), Alison (bass) and Stephanie (drums)...The early sound was a bizarre genre-hopping hybrid of two-minute jangle pop, 'enthusiastic' harmonizing, three-chord punk, girl-group cuteness and, beneath it all, a sharp wit aimed squarely at the po-faced indie scene of the time." Their first single is still a masterpiece, an opener in every twee playlist, the kind of song so simple that could be wrote by your son.. but you will never be tired to listen to the crudely not produced "On Tape"... oh yes, later they wrote a lot of other minor classics as "Indie Pop Ain't Noise Pollution" or "I Know Someone Who Knows Someone Who Knows Alan McGee Quite Well". Notwithstanding, success in Europe and even in the States obviously eluded them, and with a UK scene in transit between Manchester and Seattle, things proved no better at home. Some great albums (Formula One generation, Great white wonder & Million Seller, a minor last one ironically called Optimistic fool) and then another inevitable falling to anonimate... No doubt they were genuine pop genius. They also recently played again the uk stages with twee star goddes Amelia and they still have that magic touch ... Thanks Hue, I'm going back to the girl who made me smile...

In the days of our lucky days...

Hey my friends, what about the most original italian music of the eighties... no, i'm not talking about post punk amenities and joydivisionesque songs, no cure whispers and no bunnymen guitars... what i'm talking about are vocoders, computers big as a car & cheap synthetizers, great chorus and build-up, bad English accents, and cheesy synthesized melodies to give you an idea. This was Italo disco. N.o.i.a. were the champions of this style,  born out of the ashes of us disco music in the late 70s and probably a natural evolution of disco dance music.  They collected some interesting recordings in the eighties, starting with strong Kraftwerk influences but learning the Moroder lesson about dance music. No one understood that they were a great group just because they were quite ironic with their "summer tourists on the beach" look, fresh and funny at first sight, but good musicians at last... for those who loose this golden period (yes, they have a little commercial success too!) of italian wave, here's a "journey to the center of love" with their classic songs we're still dancing to... 

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.