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.

hungry buddisht monks

Along with up and coming post-punk bands like Orange Juice, the Scars and Josef K, the Fire Engines were part of a burgeoning Scottish music scene that erupted in the late 1970s and early 1980s that was epitomised by the releases on Postcard Records. Formed in Edinburgh in 1980 from the ashes of The Dirty Reds, the Fire Engines line up of Davy Henderson (guitar / vocals), Murray Slade (guitar) Russell Burn (drums) and Graham Main (bass) were, although very different in style, still very much part of a thriving Scottish post punk scene that featured Orange Juice, Josef K, Scars, Aztec Camera and The Associates. Inspired by the Voidoids and James Chance, their live shows were frenzied affairs, short sharp shocks, chaotic, unpredictable and never more than fifteen or twenty minutes long. Pure aggression, it was passionate and exciting - jagged guitars clashed with Burn's frantic drumming while Henderson randomly screamed and yelped undecipherable lyrics over the whole glorious noise. Their sound was so raw, angry and extreme. i'm not sure if someone really love this kind of chaos but one thing is for sure, they were really unique! And what a great style too... Hear them playing live in 1981 at Valentino's, with their  fuzzy guitars, distorted vocals and a mighty rage... all the elements which characterised the Fire Engines' music and tones of bands years later... even today, the band's early songs are still striking and inventive... not only was the music radical but so was the format they were released on. Don't forget them!

Psychedelic Cold Furs

It was 1980 or maybe it simply was "our" 1977... anyway, those were the years! Italian new wave scene was growing lazy but fast and definetly interesting to my ears. Frigidaire Tango were one of the first talented band influenced by post punk sounds and they recorded a first demo soon to be sent to the newborn Mariano Barbieri's Young Records. They came from Bassano, a place really far from the urban wave scene of cities like Florence, Milan or Tiurin...They came also from prog& jazz and once finally converted to punk they mixed a bit of Comsat Angels, a bit of Urban Verbs and strong doses of traditional rock, all blended in a very personal convincing way. Not a lot of originality maybe but this is not the point... it was some kinda fist through the glow of italian sleeping rock scene. "The Cock" was their first album, produced in 1981 by George Button, still their masterpiece after more than 30 years. Then there was an interesting 1984 ep titled "Russian Dolls", a very mature work, with their music offering an hypnotic, multi-layered guitar driven sound which came along in the good old tradition of classic uk band but also echoing the us paisley underground scene.... then the band had live gigs in Italy and abroad and shared the stage with important names of the European New Wave and Post Punk scene. Then everything disappeared as always been for our new wave forgotten heroes. But it not ended there, not this time, not for them. After marking Italian rock history, nowadays Frigidaire Tango is still one of the most active band in 80's Italian alternative scene, with a quite interesting new album in the stores ("L'illusione del volo", yes, now they sing in italian...) with more or less the same mixture of sound, the one which made their style a unique 80's cultural dream's specimen. Long live to them!

Fools, never learn...

After Penetration split up in 1979, our beloved Pauline Murray was very active in the new born post punk scene. She played a lot with our hero Peter Perret and finally got together with the John Cooper Clarke band, The Invisible Girls. They were great musicians and a solid backing band for Pauline: Dave Rowbotham (guitar), Vinney Reilly (guitar), Robert Blamire (bass), Steve Hopkins (keyboards), John Maher (drums). Their sound was fantastic, an evolution of the best Penetration tunes to a new sort of pop punk. Sadly this co-operation didn't last long - little more than an year - but it was a great year! Their music was (is) a brilliant and disconcerting journey through a murky post-punk world. Listen to their eponympous album, one of best of those years, produced by Martin Hannett... someone said it was the greatest record Factory never released. Its format is standard - two sides of 3-minute pop songs – but that's about as close to convention as it dares to drift. Murray shows a surprising willingness (given her back catalogue to that point) to engage with melodic vocals – breathy and urgent on Time Slipping, wide-eyed and credulous on the first tremendous single Dream Sequence 1– but, while there are any number of odd-pop gems, they’re shrouded in post-industrial, nigh-on-apocalyptic arrangements. Pauline played also live with The invisible girls and they toured together germany & somewhere else in Europe. It was 1981... don't know how extensively they gigged but, in my opinion, this was the best of Pauline Murray and an unforgettable document of the emerging sound that would come to dominate the post punk era.

A fist thru the glow

The Urban Verbs were at the center of a small but burgeoning music scene in Washington DC in the late 70’s.This band was born out of a city which was a cultural desert in the late 70's. A place where the suits went home at night leaving a ghost town till dawn. Like a comet streaking through the musical stratosphere the Urban Verbs were picked up on the sonar by such legends as Eno (recording two demos with him!) and Miles Copeland who was at the Corcoran to sign the B'52's and add to his stable of new artists including the comparatively disingenuous band Police. Perhaps it is a weird irony that the Verbs somehow evaporated into the night and were left to those of us that can call them our very own. But as John Foster wrote in 2008, "The Urban Verbs are not a tale of missed opportunities (although there were plenty) but rather a screaming success story". The band’s practice space at The Atlantis building was arguably the center of the DC scene. In 1980, the Atlantis Club became the 9:30 Club, which is widely regarded as one of the best independent-run venues in the country. Urban Verbs played their first official show in January 1978 and had a reputation as a must-see live band. But they also made concerted effort to reach a wider audience by playing punk shows. Traveling to New York to become the first DC band to play CBGB’s, luck would strike The Verbs in a big way. Sessions for their self-titled debut, produced by the legendary Mike Thorne, were underway. So the Verbs were signed to a two record contract with Warner Brothers in 1979 by Bob KrasnowThings seem to be coming together as the group travels to Toronto to open the fourth show in North America for an intense and highly hyped group. That band is Joy Division. In an event that seems unthinkable in today’s information age, they arrive to find the club closed. Apologies are passed out, as the club’s staff informs the band that Joy Division’s lead singer has just committed suicide and the tour has been cancelled. This tone would continue with a challenging second album recorded with Steve Lillywhite. The more challenging material and loss of a pop flavor left the band hopeful a breakthrough critically and commercially was around the corner. They wouldn't have to wait long to get the answer. Warner discarded them soom. With no label support, there was little to propel the band forward. It didn’t end in some big argument but rather just sort of stopped. Momentum was lost. But no one sounded just like The Urban Verbs during their time and no one has since. Unique and challenging music is something that never goes out of fashion.

In peppermint dreams

1985.The Dentists were a much beloved UK indie-pop band that was neither dour and introspective enough to fit in with the c86 crowd, nor interested in the sort of costumes that would have endeared them to the retro-60s clique. What they did have was a singer who sounded like he believed every word he sang no matter how ridiculous the concept, rushed tempos that added excitement, and some great hooks. Even though they were English, I hear them having a lot in common with the New Zealand Flying Nun type bands. There's a lot of frantic strumming, scrappy drumming, simple lead guitar parts and catchy melodies with well-deployed harmonies: basically your well-worn mix of Velvet Underground (as in What Goes On), Beatles (as in She Said, She Said) and garage rock. When I think of that trio of influences I always think of the Feelies, but the Dentists were much looser...anyway If you're looking for jangly guitar-pop in its purest sense, look no further than the Dentists & Dressed, a compilation of their earliest ep's, is as good as any release from the entire genre, and criminally overlooked for far too long. Smart, crisp, and bright, the Dentists deserve (again) your attention.