Midweek Mix: EOS Radio (Liner Notes)
A special edition of Midweek Mixes focussing on my show for Frankfurt’s EOS Radio. Consider these the liner notes for a mix I’m very proud of.
You can listen to the mix here. Paying subscribers will receive a download link shortly.
00m00s Amii Stewart – ‘Friends’ (RCA, 1984)
04m25s Mike Francis – ‘Features Of Love’ (Club, 1987)
The mix opens with a one-two punch of Mike Francis productions taken from the sleazy final parts of Mark Seven’s Salute To The Men Of Vauxhall and Salute 2: Reach Out & Touch Your Dream! mix CDs. Those recordings from Horse Meat Disco have been such an inspiration to me over the years that this was my little ‘salute’ to them.
I can’t hear Amii Stewart without thinking of the drag performance we saw in the NYC Downlow tent hosted by HMD at Lovebox 2012, which included a madcap lip sync to her hi-NRG version of ‘Knock On Wood’ that I still think about to this day.
Amii herself was a Performer with a capital P, as this video of ‘Friends’ from TOTP in 1985 attests. What ‘friend’ could possibly turn down Amii’s advances?
10m25s Quest For Life – ‘Baby Don’t Stop Me’ (Sea Bright, 1986)
11m00s Lena d’Água – ‘Tao’ (CBS, 1986)
I include half a minute of tripped-out drums from Bruce Forest’s dub mix of ‘Baby Don’t Stop Me’ (read more about Bruce in this post), partly because they sound so good but mainly because they serve as a handy way of speeding up slightly before the beatless lilt of ‘Tao’.
At the start of the 80s, Lena D’Água was perhaps the most prominent female lead singer in Portugal, for the band Salada de Frutas. She went on to release a series of ambitious solo LPs, including Lusitânia and Terra Prometida, which combine mythology, romanticism, social commentary and more than a little nonsense into something fanatastic. I know opinions on her are divided here (as they are for Ban, further down this tracklist) but after watching performances like this one I don’t see how one can’t be a fan.
‘Tao’ is a perfect example of a certain brand of orientalist 80s synth pop that I absolutely adore. The fact that it’s in Portuguese only increases the opportunities for problematic exoticisation, as any non-Portuguese-speaking listener may imagine Lena is singing pure poetry. Spoiler: she’s not. Think of any stereotype of ‘the Far East’ and you’ll be able to find it in this song. Climbing mountains in search of gurus! Sitting naked under a tree just like a Tibetan monk! Swaying in the wind like a bamboo plant! And that’s without even mentioning the pentatonic ‘Oriental riff’ played by an array of harps, strings and so on.
I love it unreservedly.
15m25s He Said – ‘Pump’ (Mute, 1986)
This vamp from Wire’s Graham Lewis is perhaps best experienced via the extraordinary video clip, above. Lewis’s lyrics manage to be significantly more cryptic than Lena’s while actually feeling like they have something meaningful to say.
21m00s John Foxx – ‘Metal Beat’ (Virgin, 1980)
23m35s Cassie - ‘Me & U’ (Bad Boy Entertainment, 2006)
John Foxx’s ‘Metal Box’, a sparse machine ballad composed on synthesizers and drum machines (or ‘rhythm machines’ as they’re listed on the sleeve), is a take on ‘Showroom Dummies’ that’s even more Ballardian than Kraftwerk were. Lyrics about shatterproof glass and vinyl seats surely refer directly to 1973’s Crash.
Is it too much of a stretch to imagine the protagonists of that novel – and the 1996 film adaptation by David Cronenberg – vibing with the deadpan message of Cassie on ‘Me & U’, seductive and frosty in equal measure? Or to draw a parallel between the extent to which both Ballard and Cassie were pioneering, each in their own way anticipating by some years subsequent cultural trends?
26m10s Twilight - ‘My Mind’ (Accord, 1985)
Much of the appeal of ‘Me & U’ lies in its slippery harmonies, so finding a suitable match for its descant outro was a considerable challenge. Step in Roman trio Twilight with ‘My Mind’, a chuggy piece of italo-paranoia that opens with the lyric “I’m drowning in my tears” and doesn’t get any more cheerful from there. Somehow the harmony between the two tracks works for just the length of time needed for Cassie to sing herself out as the opening chimes of ‘My Mind’ come in.
I pushed the pitch on ‘My Mind’ by about +5 over the course of its play-time, a sin I don’t usually like to commit but that in certain situations becomes an unfortunate necessity – like this one, where I was trying to get to the next record on -8. If your ears are sharp enough to notice it, I apologise. If they’re not, forget I ever said anything.
32m35s Willesden Dodgers – ‘116 B.P.M.’ (Jive, 1982)
A b-boy group that named themselves after their home borough of London, Willesden Dodgers seem unlikely players in the birth of electro in the early 80s. Jive Rhythm Trax and More Jive Rhythm Trax were released in 1982, a mix of original compositions and imitations of contemporary bangers like ‘Planet Rock’ and ‘Tainted Love’. These tools became popular with hip hop DJs across the pond. It’s important to note that the Dodgers didn’t use samples but painstakingly recreated the original sounds using then-poorly-understood studio gear.
To capture the importance of this particular moment, I’ll quote discogs user rodrigobreak writing about ‘Planet Rock’:
The way that music can start to sound completely detached from a particular time is one of the things that most excites me when DJing, these interfaces between organic and synthetic, popular and alternative, playful and serious, original and imitation - and I hope this comes through when I play.
‘116 BPM’ is (I believe, though let me know if I’m wrong) one of the original compositions on More Jive Rhythm Trax and it’s a tune that on the level of personal listening history connects the hedonism of early 1980s gay Seattle - as heard in this live recording of Dana Andrews at The Monastery - to my own experience discovering DJing and house music through people like Prosumer - for example in this BIS mix.
That a stripped-down drum track - made by a b-boy crew from Willesden no less - can hold such meaning is one of the things I find endlessly fascinating about dance music.
34m05s Escape From New York - ‘Save Our Love’ (Polydor, 1983)
37m55s Ban - ‘Irreal Surreal’ (EMI, 1988)
Two-hit-wonders Escape From New York were apparently actually British, but their combination of European synth-driven post-disco and American boogie was a big hit over in the States - and still is to this day with people like DJ Harvey. ‘Fire In My Heart’ was the EP selling for three figure sums before it was repressed by Adelaide’s Isle Of Jura, but the one I reach for more often is their debut ‘Save My Love’.
And yes I am smug about the sychronisation of the Willesden Dodgers’ outro vocal (“Don’t stop now / Can’t stop now”) with this song’s pre-chorus (“Do you really wanna stop?”). I’m also smug about the beatless key change that brings in ‘Irreal Surreal’, a Portuguese classic from the 80s that (as far as I can tell from reactions here) is a real love-or-hate choice. ‘Irreal Surreal’ is for sure an acquired taste, especially João Loureiro and Ana Deus’s strangled vocals, but the tense psychedelia of the middle section makes it.
Loureiro, incidentally, went on to be president of Boavista FC for many years, and more recently was back in the spotlight when he caught a plane leaving Brazil for Portugal with 500kg of cocaine on board (apparently it had nothing to do with him).
42m10s Kashif - ‘Movie Song’ (Arista, 1985)
45m45 Umo Vogue - ‘Just My Love (Demo)’ (Dark Entries, 2018)
Aside from being a total babe, Kashif was one of the greatest producers that ever lived. Just have a read of his bio and listen to some of the classics he produced for Evelyn King (‘I’m In Love’, ‘Love Come Down’, ‘Get Loose’), Melba Moore (‘Take My Love’, covered here) and Whitney (‘Thinking About You’).
‘Movie Song’ is an epic instrumental that gained Kashif one of his many Grammy nominations. It has a ‘distant-lands’ vibe to it that recalls ‘Tao’, but smoothly dodges pastiche, sounding more futuristic than most of the other tracks in this mix. I couldn’t resist a smash-cut from Ban into that huge opening fill.
What Umo Vogue share with Kashif is a love of absolutely mammoth drum sounds, which on the demo version of ‘Just My Love’ are given free rein, especially in the frenetic mid-section. The contrast between that percussive barrage and Debbie Marlow’s soft vocals is one of the things that lifts this track, though I actually had to reduce the volume of some sections because it’s so intense.
48m50s Déjà - ‘Serious’ (10, 1987)
55m10s Steven Dante - ‘Give It Up For Love’ (Cooltempo, 1986)
This extended version of ‘Serious’ was made by Timmy Regisford, who, working with Boyd Jarvis, Tony Humphries and Herb Powers Jr. (see here) in the early 80s, was instrumental in the development of proto-house/garage via projects like Visual (‘The Music Got Me’) and Chocolette (‘It’s That E Street Beat’).
Déjà themselves had some history, being formed from the disco band Aurra, which itself had spun-off from the supergroup Slave. I’ve done a slowjam on ‘Serious’ by slowing it down to -7, a speed that brings out the sleaze without (in my opinion) making it plodding. It just grinds away satisfyingly and Starleana Young’s “I can never stop” refrain harks back to the earlier exchange with Escape From New York.
Our closing tune is an astonishing record from another producer making waves in the early 80s: Steve ‘The Scotsman’ Harvey. Born in Aberdeen, Harvey played in local funk bands until making his irresistible debut EP ‘Something Special’ (perhaps a reference to the NYC Peech Boys, whose ‘Life Is Something Special’ was out the same year?). He was promptly picked up by London Records and put to work writing and producing Total Contrast’s debut album. Later he would work with Nia Peeples and LaToya Jackson.
This production for British soul singer Steven Dante predates the singer’s work with Jellybean (‘The Real Thing’) and, uh, The Lighthouse Family. It’s better than those of course, that fat bassline walking up and down without a care in the world while Dante sings of love-as-war (a metaphor that always makes me think of Rainbow Brown’s ‘Til You Surrender’). This is a record that has given me huge pleasure every time I’ve played it out - people dance and smile and ask what it is, and I smile as I remember it was made by a man from Aberdeen.