Death Disco : Songs from under the Dancefloor...

(and didn't we have a thread on this recently and someone said "where's Magazine?" then as well)

when does the early 90's house pop revival start again?

It means that despite some of these songs being timeless classics, there has already been quite a bit of attention focused on the post-punk dance thing over the last couple years. My bitchy critique is aimed at the compilers and the company releasing this. If you're enjoying these songs for the first time, or if there's something unique about the tracklisting or sequencing, then by all means enjoy it free of my meta-commentary.

Maybe I should put out a Norwich Funk CD.

Anybody ever hear a comp called "Touchdown" w/ the Higsons, the Farmer's Boys, Pinski Zoo, Maximum Joy, Dislocation Dance, Design for Living, and others, including some really cool tracks by bands I've never heard of/from again? Some of this stuf f was really cool before the bands started thinking they were real funk or jazz musicians and not skinny british white dudes with names like Baz and Frog and Stan.

There's one track on that comp, I think it's Red Ribbon Day by Design For Living? That's is just so fantastic in that early 80s post-punk faux-jazz way. The comp also features Soft Drink by the Farmers Boys, with it's drum machine disco/funk beats may be their funkiest/danciest song. Most of the other stuff I've heard is just decent to great guitar pop, except the single More Then a Dream, which is on one of Cherry Red's Seeds comps, and is one of my all time favorite singles.

anyway.

Details here:

http://www.thefarmersboys.com/

(and scroll down a bit)

Just found out about this, but it looks pretty essential.

Mike...you know I feel you, it happens so often to me, spending years telling people they should listen to the music I like and they laugh at me and then they get into it and then they say "you still listen to that?" OK, so I'm a bit paranoid. The post-punk thing got crazy and don't even mention the phrase "italo-disco," anyway just repeat the mantra "I like good music because it's good and it'll always be good regardless of trends and fashion..."

exactamundo! that's why i get so exasperated by comments such as 'so very retro 2002'.

i've got that 'touchdown' comp somewhere. i'd totally forgotten about it. thanks for the reminder.

Well then you should also be exasperated that this compilation is out at all. I think you're misunderstanding me. I have loved many of these songs since they were released - there is nothing in my statments about the music being anything other than timeless - that's why I'm commenting on it at all. I'm only poking fun at the 'compilation' itself and the compilers who are releasing it (and rather cynically using Alan McGee's resurrected terminology).

you hit the nail on the head. that said, i occasionally do get a little twinge of "where the hell were you?" when a revival has come and gone and i see someone just picking up on it now. it's a shit attitude, i know, but i forget that not everyone inhales music with the vigor that i do.

heeeelp! i love this music too, but i find these sorts of comments pretty scary.

the music was good because of its timelyness. because of where and why and whatever.

And it's important to realize it's timelyness is/was completely lost on most people. i.e. when I discovered any number of the songs on the above list, the context meant nothing, which doesn't make them any less powerful. I wasn't in england in 1979. I was in New Jersey in 1989 when I first heard Throbbing Gristle.

and somehow the act of looking back at(and promotion of) "timeless classics" strikes me as a bloodless and "inauthentic" way to experience music or think about music. i'm not saying thats what you do, and linking the music into an experience of contemporary music is precisely the kind of "timeliness" i'm talking about.

And the fact that Throbbing Gristle could have meant as much to me in 1989 as it may have to some kid in 1979 england, or some kid on a moon colony in 2031 means something.

i just wonder what would have happened if you'd heard TG under different circumsatnces, at a different age.

You've got to be kidding.

It's not especially clever to me because it's what Alan McGee has been calling his Poptones club night and radio 1 show for quite a while now. It seems like a bit of a rip-off of that as far as reappropriated terms go.

Could it somehow have something to do with having been included on Ladytron "Softcore Jukebox"?

Who's keith?

The Norwhich bands came up a few years ago when I first got into them in discussion on the Typical Girls mailing list, and a mysterious woman named Sarah Jane, who was there, drew clear lines of seperation between say The Pop Group and the Fire Engines on one side and the Higsons and Farmers Boys on the other. I'm not saying they're the same, they don't even sound the same, but to us they can be seen as variations of theme, i.e. post-punk funk. I just read the Allmusic guide write-up on Farmer's Boys and it says the same thing

"The innocuous guitar pop and warm harmonies of the British band the Farmer's Boys were barely acknowledged by the U.K. charts in the early '80s; however, in the late '90s, a generation of indie rock connoisseurs too young to remember the group's glory days revived interest in the band, causing their work to be reissued on CD"

To me, maybe others, after years of "rock" music basically being hardcore punk or hair-metal, then grunge, getting exposed to all that british stuff, good and bed, in the late 90s was incredibly refreshing.

wots this like?

x=post. yeah dan i can see that. at the time some bands were maybe not considered top drawer, but i would have still rather the higsons than whatever was the mainstream consensus at the time.

Another famous inter-continental record of this sort is Night Moves' Trans Dance, a british new wave band involved with Gary Numan who's Trans Dance received a "New York" mix that was big in NY and huge in the chicago proto-house scene of the mid 80s.

And thousands of italodisco records were picked up, many not very far off from the british new wave records that inspired them(and they, in turn, inspired) licensed, remixed etc for the US, but that's a whole other thread...

Yes, I guess I'm guilty of this sort of thinking. Bands from London, Manchester, Bristol, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Sheffield, Leeds all had a 'scene', either real or imaginary, to slot into - giving that all important instant cred factor. I guess from thousands of miles away all this doesn't matter as much. Also by the time the FB's hit their stride it was post-Blue Monday and things had moved on from scratchy guitars and cheap trumpets.

You're right about 'Cool As Ice' - LTM are doing a part 2 later this year 'Twice As Nice'. Maybe 'Wheels..' will make the cut. Just how great are the two 52nd Street singles? Should have been monster hits.

It may be the fact that I grew up in the sticks, but I've always been quite attracted to acts who generated their own awkward, uncool scenes away from the metropolitan centres.

And I'm gtrateful to this thread (and that link) for reminding me of the Farmer's Boys "pig disc" shaped vinyl issue of "Muck It Out".

Looking forward to Twice as Nice. I love those 52nd Street records. Do you know what will be on Twice as Nice? If they go more for the scene and less for the specifics of having to be produced by New Order members, there's the Streetlife 12", tons of Paul Haig, Lavvi Ebbel or whatever it's called, I wonder what else.

What's really great though, is the bootleg DVD of the two Factory Shorts videos on Ikon, which feature the video for 52nd st's Can't Afford to Let You Go, as well as stuff like Cabaret Voltaire's No Escape, 2 Stockholm Monsters videos(watch 18 year old kids in dorky sweaters play in the snow!) Durutti Column, Section 25 etc. And let it be known, watching a video of a mulletted Crispy Ambulance performing 'The Presence' and hearing the song come out of a little TV speaker does great damage to it's mystery and appeal!

Great moments :

1) Section 25 "New Horizons" - a Pennine scene with lots of sheep walking about on the hills during the long synth intro. Camera focuses in on a sheep which has the numerals "25" painted on it's side.

2) Cabs play "No Escape" outdoors. Camera keeps zooming in on Mal's gob.

3)The Crispys (yes, with mullets, and Gary Madeley with Hitler/Chaplin/Ron Mael moustache) inspect statues very, very seriously.

4) Durutti - Bruce Mitchell gurns grotesquely at a field full of Dutch people during "The Missing Boy"

All wonderful stuff.

I think 'Twice As Nice' will be more Be Music productions. Someone who knows J.Nice asked him.

best moment on either is when the title comes up for The Fall and you're like, hey the box doesn't say the fall, then another title comes up and says "the fall couldn't make it, instead we present the Names" and they cut to a video for Night Shift!

That was the Factory vid I had.

The bootleg I have is:

IKON 3
VARIOUS ARTISTS: A Factory Video
Sep 82

Contents:

VHS: UK 1982 (IKON IKON 3) [PAL/NTSC]
BETA: UK 1982 (IKON IKON 3) [PAL/NTSC]

5:57 SECTION 25 - New Horizon
?:?? NEW ORDER - Ceremony *
?:?? A CERTAIN RATIO - Forced Laugh
?:?? ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES IN THE DARK - Electricity *
?:?? CABARET VOLTAIRE - No Escape
8:24 DURUTTI COLUMN - The Missing Boy *
?:?? KEVIN HEWICK - Ophelia's Drinking Song
?:?? THE NAMES - Nightshift
?:?? CRISPY AMBULANCE - The Presence
?:?? NEW ORDER - In A Lonely Place *
?:?? STOCKHOLM MONSTERS - Soft Babies

* Live performance.

Additional Notes:

Equivalent to Factory FACT 56.

AND:

IKON 12
VARIOUS ARTISTS: Shorts
Jul 85

Contents:

VHS: UK 1985 (IKON IKON 12) [PAL/NTSC]
BETA: UK 1985 (IKON IKON 12) [PAL/NTSC]

3:18 DURUTTI COLUMN - Prayer
?:?? STOCKHOLM MONSTERS - The Longing
?:?? THE WAKE - Talk About the Past
?:?? ROYAL FAMILY & THE POOR - British Empire
3:19 SECTION 25 - Back to Wonder
4:37 SECTION 25 - Looking From a Hilltop
?:?? KALIMA - The Smiling Hour
?:?? JAZZ DEFEKTORS - Hanki Panki
?:?? QUANDO QUANGO - Tingle
?:?? 52ND STREET - Can't Afford (To Let You Go)
?:?? NEW ORDER - Blue Monday *

* Original "Blue Monday" promo video.

Additional Notes:

Equivalent to Factory FACT 137.

Ikon did some great stuff. I have the Joy Division, Fall and Birthday Party vids. It's cool they licensed that Severed Heads stuff. Just FYI, I totally want to do Acute DVDs if I can get good enough stuff and the rights. I've talked to Weasel Walter about it who was going around with these No Wave videos someone else had compiled, but the sources were all too questionable. I have some ideas, though.