Our Notepad #1

James Greene Jr's crate diggin' for Crawdaddy is fruitful :URGH! A Music War

Urgh! That’s the noise a sweat-streaked baby boomer makes as he desperately thrusts on the dance floor with his daughter’s friends, praying respect comes before the heart attack. Urgh! is the sound a chubby teamster sarcastically emits while moving an empty box five minutes before the end of his shift. Urgh? Why, that’s what you hear when small, ignorant children attempt to impersonate the Frankenstein monster, not realizing in Mary Shelly’s original book the monster was perfectly fluent in English (why are America’s schools failing our children?).

Of course, Urgh! is also the title of an epic 1982 concert film directed by Derek Burbidge that rounds up a music nerd’s wet dream of cutting edge new wave acts. The Police, the Go-Go’s, Wall of Voodoo, OMD, Echo and the Bunnymen, Magazine, XTC, Jools Holland, Gang of Four, Klaus Nomi—and that’s just scraping the surface. Each of the 40-some odd groups perform a song apiece in Urgh!, except for the Police, who perform three because, even by this time, they were The Police. They already had “Roxanne”, “Message in a Bottle”, “Walking on the Moon”, and that “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” mess to their name. Also, Miles Copeland, owner of IRS Records and brother of Police drummer Stewart Copeland, originally produced Urgh! I don’t want to cry nepotism, but… Well, let’s just say the tables may have been turned had Klaus Nomi’s brother produced this film.

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Josh Rotter interviews The Church for Crawdaddy!

Starfish mainstreamed the Church back in the late ‘80s, but according to the band’s singer Steve Kilbey, the making of the album, which eventually soared to the top of the charts on the strength of the hit single “Under The Milky Way”, wasn’t as stellar. In fact, the LA recording sessions, set up by major label Arista Records and dominated by big-name producers back in 1987, were quite tense.

“It was a bit of a shock,” Kilbey said during our phone interview earlier this month. “All of our other albums were made in Sydney, where we’d sort of wake up and catch the bus into the studio. We’d work in town, so our friends dropped in. The recording process felt friendly.

“In LA, the studios were miles away from where we were staying,” he continued. “Some of the producers were kind of hostile and some just disinterested. We were kind of hippie characters flown into all this, and we didn’t like it.”

Read the whole interview on Crawdaddy!  The Church on CD  The Church on vinyl

Συχνοτικής Συμπεριφοράς αφιέρωμα στον David Sylvian

Ο Στυλιανός Τζιρίτας (που έτσι όπως το πάει θα μου αλλάξει γνώμη για τον David Sylvian) βρίσκει την ευκαιρία και απόντος του Χάρη Συμβουλίδη αφιέρωνει μια ώρα στον David Sylvian.

Ακούστε την εκπομπή Στο Κόκκινο 105.5    David Sylvian on CD    David Sylvian on Vinyl