Elton Motello et al

I'm talking about messy Stiff-records-ish borderline novelty song no- hit wonders that sound like the buzzcocks with a beer bellies, not red-leather-pants-wearing king-kan-swilling noisy neighbour-rock.

Somebody must know of which I speak.

maybe i do not even know of which I speak, but it's out there I know...

Look back at Prog Rock and we can debate whether to put Wishbone Ash or Uriah Heep into that category. A debate that wouldn't have made much sense at the time. Go to C86 and debate if the Membranes get included, or Britpop and discuss the inclusion of Pulp, Sleeper or Echobelly.

If you really want to sub-categorise the above list I'd put them in different sub categories, they dont really have much in common.

Motello / Plastic are comedy-novelty music (who was Motello by the way? I know that his version of Jet Boy preceeds Betrands) A band called King also covered it.

Wreckless seems to sit happily in the pub-rock category along with his early stiff cohorts(the music was mainly blockhead produced after all).

The Rezillos can go in whatever category we put Devo, B52s and The Cramps in.

Incidentally I once saw Wreckless Eric supporting the Rezillos in the Kinema Ballroom Dunfermline. Eric was drunk and incapable, the Rezillos were in no way 'too raggity'.

I guess I'm just talking about New Wave with a sense of humour, and The Dickies, Devo, B-52's & Cramps fit...

Trio?

The Monks?

I just remember discovering them at 12 or 13 (well after the record's original release), loving the sexy nun on the cover, and giggling with other nerdlings over their "incisive satire". It's like Benny Hill or something. Stupid comedy for 12 yr old boys.

Now I despise the current stuff of that ilk - Bloodhound Gang for instance. I probably would have loved it at 12.

I've never seen the "Pop Art" LP (just read on a website that it was "serious"), it sounds fantastic even for the cover alone. "Victim of Time", the first one has a great cover too - Elton with a noo-wave mullet in flood-level white pants and beatle boots pushing a babydoll in a carriage. The doll is disturbingly dressed as a hooker on the back.

I think it's the thin-line-between-clever-and-stupid that I find fascinating by these groups - Elton/Plastic tottering right on the line, The Monks within gobbing distance of clever, Devo so clever they had to dumb themselves down to mongoloid level in order to communicate, etc.

The Monks & Motello, I think, were session-musician type guys simultaneously parodying early new-wave/punk, but really getting off on it at the same time. It must have pissed the real punx off aplenty.

There was also a group called The Pork Dukes who wrote three chord punk ditties of Roy Chubby Brown style vulgarity (e.g. bend and flush) who I recall were actually some of Steeleye Span. They weren't funny or interesting or anything at all either.

There is an album I have called 'Dada For Now' which features some recordings (and re-creations) of sound-experiments from the Dada Cabaret Voltaire. One of the tracks is a Hugo Ball tonepoem which is very similar to the Trio song (ich leibe nich dich etc).

Apart from the Casio VL 1 drim bit of course.

Unless, of course, they remind you of Hugo Ball tonepoems???

and hey, maybe Hugo Ball tone poems are punk-pop anyway...

Hmm, can I knock out two books worth of sloppy thinking based on this premise and get a book deal out of it?

Maybe if I worked in an obsession with the Delta 5, Au Pairs, The Flowers, Mo-dettes and Girls at out Best for good measure?

Also thinking about humour/novelty in music - Trio's absurdism works for me esp. since its tempered/informed by a deep melancholy. You could dismiss them as "novelty music" or praise them as conceptual artists. Klaus Voormann of The Plastic Ono Band produced them, they recorded a Yoko Ono composition, they sold advertising on their record sleeves, used weird instrumentation (bassless yrs before J. Spencer/Gories/Oblivians/White Stripes), pulled bizarre stunts in performance (2 members would play pingpong while the guitartist playeds along to casio beats)... "Da Da Da" is dada. But they also had a great pop sense about them. And they wrote love songs.

Tell me a bit more about the bands mentioned at the end of your last post - I've only heard of the Modettes and the Au Pairs.

Who else was labeled as a novelty act but transcends that tag?

The Flying Lizards, at the start, might almost qualify, though they quickly were far too experimental.

Another great name is Neon Hearts (old British punk band; excellent!)

Jet Boy Jet Girl = GAY ROXY MUSIC PROPHECY FULFILLED

Wazmo Nariz = Chicagoan, not Canadian.

the one elton motello album i had was EXCELLENT! really top-notch stuff. kinda wish i still had it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDa8Soy5Hes

It's basic power pop / new wave stuff, listenable.

Adding 9 years later a note to explain why I started wittering on about The Au Pairs and Delta 5, it was supposed to be a joke about Greil Marcus's book 'Lipstick traces' in the book he connects Dada with Punk which would have been interesting if he'd actually focused in on the absurdist end of punk. Of course it would be a much poorer book covering the least interesting novelty punk chancers.

Looking for additional mp3's of The Monks as I have a bunch now from 'Bad Habits'. Does anyone know if they produced any more albums of have any more mps's. Will trade.

― Greg Moulds

FWIW, The (new wave) Monks released a second album - maybe only in Canada? - which makes the first one look like Abbey Road or something; it's unlistenably awful, even if you like the first one (which I kinda do - can't help it - grew up on Weird Al and Dead Milkmen - and still like fart jokes).

Doug and the Slugs might fit in this category. They kind of straddled pub-rock and punk/new wave - their first two albums were like Huey Lewis meets The Buzzcocks. The next two were more like Huey Lewis meets The News. The last two are better not spoken of. They maintained a career, of sorts, for many years after they stopped making records, touring the bars and roller rinks of Western Canada, playing to those Loverboy fans mentioned in the third post. However, I maintain that the first side of Wrap It! is a stone classic for anyone who likes jumpy, clean and quirky power pop. There's a real Devo/dada quality to some of it that presses all the right buttons for me: "Ooh, I've been to those rooftop jamborees, living in the wrong key / spent some time as an urban mastermind, took a little chemistry / All by myself I learned that crowds are only good for hiding / Could I be a part of another time?" or "Do it up right / Climb a telephone pole with a pail of pelican bait / Take a promissory note from a corpse at an Irish wake / Aw, we'll just hang around and wait." Plus there's some great playing on those records. And I'll shut up now.

By strange coincidence this was my spotify listening yesterday.

Would 'Part Time Punks' by The Television Personalites fit the theme?

here we go two three four...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxL9dHStGdM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c37GdAzgQo&feature=related

Awesome video!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FA6b1EXEvko&feature=related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u76_YFFgtC8&feature=related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkYyG1GOETc

The Riptides - 77 Sunset Strip

Here's a Jet Boy Jet Girl playlist I made for Rhapsody last year. (Unfortunately couldn't include Two Man Sound's "Bad Boy Bad Girl," which wasn't available via the service):

http://www.rhapsody.com/playlistcentral/playlistdetail?playlistId=ply.29305278

I've never actually owned the Elton Motello album with "Jet Boy Jet Girl," though; guess it was always too expensive. But this thread inspired me to pull out my copy of his Pop Art LP from 1980, for the first time in a bunch of years, and turns out it really holds up. He's got lots of assorted modes on there, obvious fallback one definitely being nervous high-tempo early Roxy Music (c. "Virginia Plain") herky-jerking, with Bryan Ferry type histrionics on top. Also probably some Sparks, some new wave ska ("Night Sister" and the Who cover "Can't Explain"), an outer-space surf guitar instrumental ("Out Of Limit"), a kind of punk prog that mixes Devo with a sound Rush would pick up in the early '80s ("20th Century Fox," about the ever-popular skinny-tie new wave topic of being a "modern man.") Spaciest slowdown stretchouts (again, plenty of Roxy in these, sax included) are "Falling Like A Domino" and "When Are The Boys Are English," the latter also a sequel to Motello's big hit due to the part that goes "I don't want to be straight again/A jetboy has to play the game." Catchiest and most furious electro-pogos are "Pocket Calculator" (another popular new wave topic, a year before Kraftwerk's song of the same name) and "Panic In The Class Room" (about schoolgirls in short skirts causing havoc); maybe "Pop Art" and "In the Heart Of The City" (about nightclubbing in NYC and LA etc.) after that. Noisiest track by far is "Queen," which sounds nothing like Queen but more like a really crazed Roxy cut, lots of bleating sax -- actually not sure Roxy ever got so free-jazzy themselves. And "Pay The Radio" is a complaint about payola (the radio being one more subject new wavers couldn't resist talking about).

Good God, there have been so many copies of that he must get a royalty check once a month.

You're really missing a bit on the first album. It's more rock 'n' rolling than the follow up.

"Victim of Time" is turning out to be the soundtrack to my return to Ventura. Fucking great record.