“It’s Christmas Eve, babe / In the drunk tank.” Find me a better opening to a holiday song than that.
I usually use this segment to pimp new stuff, but ’tis the season, etc. (plus the labels don’t release anything of major importance after the middle of November), so I present to you my all time favorite Christmas song. Have we mentioned lately how awesome Kirsty MacColl was, and how much we miss her? We should just rename this site iheartkirstymaccoll.com. ‘Cause we do. Big whole bunches.
After tumbling down the remix rabbit hole in the mid to late ’80s, the unthinkable happened: the scene changed on me. By the early ’90s all hell was breaking loose in the clubs. House music pretty much wiped my favorite kinds of dance records off the map (mostly dance oriented rock, or DOR as they once called it). That, combined with my remix hero Shep Pettibone’s sudden retirement, left me in no man’s land. EMF producer Ralph Jezzard made some nifty mixes, but he didn’t make enough of them. I slowly stopped paying attention to remixes at that point.
Then one day my old DJ buddy Paul MacDonald sends me a dozen cassettes with assorted remixes and such on it. One of them was called Techno Mixes. Techno, at one point, meant New Order and Nitzer Ebb. By this point it meant Orgy and Moby. This new techno frightened and confused me, but I pressed on. Most of the tunes were pretty harmless, really. They stole lines from movies, TV shows, educational films, what have you, and surrounded them with shrieking synthesizers. There was a tune called “Sesame’s Treat” that amused me. “LSD is the Bomb” had a cool drum track, and someone even sampled the theme to “Halloween” for a song. Meh.
And then I heard “It’s Grim Up North,” and my jaw hit the floor.
Officially credited to the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, “It’s Grim Up North” is the KLF in disguise (though not really in disguise). Released in late 1991, the band had made some inroads on the American charts earlier that summer, but “Grim” was playing a completely different sport than their Top Five hit “3 A.M. Eternal.” Those songs were bouncy: “It’s Grim Up North” was industrial grit, complete with screaming steam whistles. Bill Drummond’s lyrics are nothing but lists of cities in northern England (you can find a list on the song’s Wikipedia page), spoken in bleak monotone. And then, after pummeling and pounding the listener for eight minutes, the drums give way to the hymn “Jerusalem,” steam whistles still screaming in the background. Hell, yes.
The song didn’t convert me to the then-new techno scene, but it did serve as one hell of a last hurrah to my golden age of dance. “Sesame’s Treat,” on the other hand, hasn’t held up so well.
Rare is the girl that has been able to positively school me on music — no offense, ladies, but most girls simply don’t have the passion for it that I have — so when one comes along that can teach me a few new tricks, the lessons have been memorable ones. It is with this piece that I salute Jen Mueller, a onetime college sweetheart who made me one of the best mix tapes I have ever received. Yes, it was an actual tape. Hey, it was 1987. We didn’t even have CD players back then. No, we didn’t add using an abacus. Shut up.
Anyway, to make things even more interesting (for her, anyway; frustrating as hell for me), she covered the track listing in blue marker so I could not read the names of the songs or the artists. Listen and learn, that was the lesson. Luckily, I knew most of the songs or artists — The Cure, Echo & the Bunnymen, Tears for Fears, World Party, Paul Young, Dream Academy, The Stranglers and a killer Thompson Twins mix spring to mind — but a couple of them left me positively baffled. There are songs called “Dark Intentions” and “Deep Blue Sea” that I’m still trying to track down 20 years later, but I was able to weasel the artist name out of one of the unknowns: The Bluebells. Never heard of them. Little did I know, they had broken up two years earlier, though the song she gave me, “Will She Always Be Waiting,” sounded light years ahead of its time. Big, technicolor strings, lotsa jangling acoustic guitars, and harmonies by the pound. It was wonderful. Still is, in fact.
I recently came across a copy of the record that “Will She Always Be Waiting” called home, the 1984 album Sisters. It’s clearly a vinyl transfer — I’m pretty sure there’s even a small skip towards the end — but that actually makes it sound even better to me. Thanks, Jen. My life’s a little better for having you in it, even if for a brief period. I hope you’re doing well.
I’ve had the soundtrack to “Once” sitting on my desk since about May, but I refused to listen to it before I saw the movie. It’s not your typical soundtrack, and in fact some people (wrongly) consider it a musical. In truth, it’s somewhere in between a soundtrack and a musical. It’s really a movie about music. A couple scenes are shot in musical style, but that’s about it.
This, for those who don’t care if I totally spoil the movie’s finest moment, is the movie’s finest moment. Guy (not his name: the two leads don’t have names, they’re just Guy and Girl) finally gets into a studio with Girl and some fellow Thin Lizzy-loving buskers, and proceed to bang out a song that just builds and builds and builds until it explodes. How can someone with Glen Hansard’s talent go so long without anyone knowing his name? Dunno, but in an interesting side note, he was a guitar player in the Commitments as well. Gotta go and watch that again.
We at Bullz-Eye are planning two massive lists of our favorite albums of the ‘80s and ‘90s. The ‘90s list is nearly finished – I’m only waiting on managing editor Jamey Codding to stuff the ballot box with Pearl Jam albums – and it looks pretty much the way I thought it would, with one great exception. My #3 album, Tomorrow the Green Grass by the Jayhawks, is not going to make the cut. And I’m mad as hell about it.
Hot damn, I thought at least one other person would vote for that album. Didn’t happen. I mean, I expected some of my big picks, like Pulp’s Different Class and the Trash Can Sinatras’ I’ve Seen Everything, to go overlooked by the rest of the staff. But come on, the Jayhawks? How do you not love the Jayhawks?
Apparently I bet on the wrong horse. The band’s 1992 album, Hollywood Town Hall, received several votes, but not enough to crack the top 90. Clever, huh? Top 90 albums of the ‘90s? Yeah, um, hmmm.
Anyway, I submit Exhibit A in the case for the Jayhawks: “I’d Run Away,” a soaring pop song that still pops on the occasional mix disc. Yes, I still make mix discs. Shut up.
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