rare 80's synthpop: Moral Support (anybody heard of them?)

Poor old tapes nobody else loves any more! They are one of my few disposable income "luxuries". They get practically thrown at me when I go garage saling every weekend, in between working at the porn store and selling books. Upstate NY has great garage sales- that's a good thing about everyone moving away from this decaying hole. Garage sales are fun and can be very lucrative for used books, movies, music and other things I sell. This week I picked up about 75-100 tapes of 80's music for about $5 (also, 100 LP's for free,) and got some real finds!

Early friday morning, I scanned the classified's at work and mapped a route, drove to the suburbs, parked the trashy van, and got the bike out to cruise around various streets. I dropped by a yard sale along the route which was full of baby junk, and I wasn't expecting much until I uncovered a little cabinet of 36 tapes buried under grubby teddy bears. The seller guy noticed me drooling on Adam Ant "Kings of the wild frontier" and told me, "take that whole case for $2.50". I was ecstatic since it was full of classics- the Cure, the Cult, Berlin- as well as some misc. things I had never heard of.

Later, I got back to the van, loaded new purchases out of my crusty army bag, and loudly played "Beat My Guest" to the annoyance of waddling sidewalk ladies in pastel pants and dogs. Then I tried a couple mystery tapes. I pulled out Moral Support's album "Insanity" and thot "dumb name, bet it's crap." The first song immediately changed my mind. It's a lost synth-pop Classic. Their sound had the glorious synthy washes, stacatto guitars, and hooky pop tunefulness of Midge-era ultravox, without the histrionic-ness and with much more interesting production. Some of the dancier songs had a more kraftwerkian/moroder-style cold-wave electronic sound, based on a very repetitive riff punctuated by laser-blast bleeps and rumblings. It is really originally produced for 80's stuff. I was impressed by one lead-in of an electronic-filtered scream. My favorite song is probably "Strange Days for Dancing" which feels a lot like "I feel love."

A bunch of googling turned up only 1 reference anywhere. Apparently they were quebecian contemporaries of Rational Youth, very similar except the production is way better, the hooks are better, and the vocals are way more tuneful and less weak. This is a killer page here too-

http://www.nerocam.com/MP3/index.asp

Moral Support was a Canadian group formed when Sandro Durante met closet musician and avid keyboard synthesist Richard Cranford in 1982. After experimenting and jamming together, they really liked what they were coming up with, and decided to get serious about putting an act together. Richard was brilliant with electronics, modifying all of his keyboards and effects devices and controlling everything by computer. When they went to the studio to record, nobody could understand Richard's setup, so they ended up producing themselves. "Strange Day for Dancing" was nominated for a 1984 CASBY "Single of the Year" award, and was also released as a video. Moral Support called it quits shortly afterwards in 1986.

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- SO that night, around 3Am I had to play it again in the porn store. It was time to put away yesterday's midget movies from the theater and pick new ones for tomorrow. The other girl says "do you want to pick the normal movies or the weird ones?" and then, "man, that singer sounds a lot like Bowie." I say "yeah, it's this little 80's synth-pop band nobody ever heard of. I'll pick the wierd stuff, where's the pissing section?" Naturally after Moral Support was finished, the best follow up was Berlin, "Sex (I'm a...) and they went well together.