images from the invasion day march 26 january 2016

Late 1979, the wrap up

Ultimately my feelings about Summer Gold and late 1979 are mixed and colourful (you can have colourful feelings, right? Well, you can’t tell me I don’t). I do feel that you can sift out the album in all kinds of weird and wonderful categories, if you’re of a mind, into for instance disco pop, rock (there’s not much of that really – maybe three tracks), novelty (if you count ‘Up There Cazaly’, you’ve got at least two; except you might also count ‘Money’, although as we saw this was regarded as a ‘disco’ track at the time of its release at least in some quarters; you might also count ‘Twist A Saint Tropez’, I don’t know, you tell me). Then there are sublime ballads – about three of those – and, well, some outright shit that should be destroyed, but not much. I’ve made much of how surprised I am by the extensive lack of hits on the album, despite the extensive provision of artists who just had hits and/or were just about to have more, but not this time. So weird. That, in itself, doesn’t speak to the quality of the work. No album that features ‘Who Were You With in the Moonlight’ could ever actually be a bad album. And that song wasn’t a hit in Australia (by the way, I bought ‘Who Were You With in the Moonlight’ on iTunes a few days ago so I could play it on the radio, and I just want to say the rerecorded version of that song is one of the poxiest pieces of succulent pox I have ever had the displeasure of vomiting in response to. What a turd of a record. An absolute and utter turd. It’s always so strange when people don’t realise the value of what they’ve done, and seek to remake it for no good purpose whatsoever. Of course it's the fact that it's so good the first time, that makes it so bad the second time).

What kind of culture were we looking at in late 1979? I suppose the first thing to realise, and yes this was ‘my day’ in the sense of (whether I was listening to radio or not) there were very few songs in the top 40 at this point that I’m not extremely familiar with, and in various ways pretty positive about. There are a lot more drum machines and synthesisers in use than we were necessarily aware of in the moment, and a lot more studio experimentation on various records than was acknowledged. The lyrics were often highly dodgy, sticky stinky brown dodgy, and the sentiments and assumptions within and amongst them were shockingly awful, oppressive and dunderheaded garbage.

My high school, John Gardiner HS. A truly disgusting place and time. Photo credit: Fuck Off

I was 14 in late 1979, it was a highly horrible time to be growing up in Hawthorn going to the really, really bad high school and doing neither poorly nor well academically and essentially just wanting to get it over with. I may or may not have been listening to the radio 1979 but it wasn’t long before I really embraced pop music, at the edgy end. I note that the Pretenders’ ‘Brass in Pocket’, which I adored (and still have a super soft spot for) was a hit in early 1980. I spent a whole day willing that fucking song to come on the radio. I was so thrilled when I bought my copy of that single.

So maybe 1979 is not inherently interesting but interesting only to me. It seems like so much more! Probs not. That’s OK too. In fact, I sort of prefer it not being so perfect. Not least because it’s all dead and over now.

To finish up, a song that has nothing whatsoever to do with Summer Gold but which came out at the same time, I bought it a couple of weeks ago entirely on spec. Mick Drennan made a record and disappeared. Why couldn't more people do that?!*

* Perhaps even without the 'made a record' bit

Summer Gold: Two Man Band, 'Up there Cazaly'

I can't tell you how tempting it was to completely omit this, the last track on Summer Gold, from this overview. Not because I hate the song (at least, I recognise its genius) but just... because.

It's plain that whoever put together the track listing for Summer Gold, the artist formerly known as as muggins, threw zher hands in the air when it came to this track: it just has to go on the end, if for no other reason that a lot of people are likely to want to take the needle off the record at this point (or perhaps to try, with a hot pin, to make a new track right through this one to the label). Whatever it musters in catchiness, 'Up there Cazaly' is also a frustratingly irritating stadium chant that everyone knows and few would seriously want to sit down and listen to like, on a record. Apart from anything else, it's in most (I'm going to guess 70-80%) Victorians' and many (30-40%?) Australians' brains and cannot be purged, even with a strong dose of 'C'Mon Aussie C'Mon'.* 

With the subtitle 'Seven's Footy Theme' (this is omitted on the Summer Gold sleeve) this song was, essentially, a clever bit of doggerel calculated to generate a rush of blood to the head/penis at the mention of aussie rules football, a sport that apparently someone in 1979 thought needed a bit of promotion (not sure why). There are a few things that I do find amusing here, mainly lyrical; the suggestion early in the piece that football spectatorship is something a man does as a, well, turn on or mind-clearing (what's good about that?! Should I try it?) experience. I also recall the slightly askew way Mike Brady sings 'Me, I like football' as I recall a fellow student at my high school at the time this song was popular, singing this particular line many, many times as a kind of absurdist pop culture quote during the school day, and then proving it was true by going to have a forty year (so far) career writing about football in the media. 

To their credit, although Two Man Band (also known as 'Two-Man Band' - don't get confused) released five singles between 1979-1984 each with a song aside, they never tried to cobble together a cheap and nasty album out of their ten extant songs. Respect that. 

* Kudos to Mike Brady and Peter Sullivan for actually going into the studio and recording a fully crafted song here. The Mojo Singers' 'C'mon Aussie C'mon' is a shoddily-edited tape loop, in which someone has just said - 'put this... on a record? This... on a record? Well, ok, I'll just run it a few times till it fills up a side.' 'Up There Cazaly' is actually structured and smart, a bold pop culture (if not outright pop) statement. 

Summer Gold: Mona Lisa and Terry Young 'I Wanna Make It With You Tonight'

As mentioned a few days ago, Karen Dewey's Marcia Hines biography gives Ooh Child pretty short shrift but does mention tension generated by Robie Porter's attempts to put Mona Lisa and Terry at a comparable billing to Marcia. This went as far as the unusual step of putting at least one song featuring the duo on Marcia's album and then releasing it under their names as a single, released mid-79 and hitting the top 20 (this youtube clip says number 19, my source - the Barnes/Scanes Top 40 Research - says 14).

I note without interest that the wikipedia entry for the album omits the single's chart status.

Apart from the odd politicking behind its release, what can we say about the song? Only that it cunningly combines two things every teenager in 1979 adored - sex and drugs - in a confusing metaphor that produced symptoms of dizziness and bafflement not dissimilar to a toke backstage at the blue light disco. I wonder if they ever done it. Terry's enigmatic smile suggests maybe yes.

Summer Gold: Precious Wilson 'Hold On, I'm Coming'

You will note from the cover of Summer Gold that it’s got a few song titles but no artists – which is the kind of thing you do when you don’t actually have the license to the tracks by the original artists, isn’t it. Yet here we have the original artists and no real recognition of the star factor involved. It’s odd.

Relatedly, the 16^th and 17^th tracks on Summer Gold have something in common which is most peculiar. Although both were singles, the first by Precious Wilson and the second by Mona Lisa and Terry Young, the albums both songs originally appeared on were actually released attributed to different artists: Precious Wilson’s cover of Sam and Dave’s ‘Hold On I’m Coming’ appears as a track on Boney M’s fourth album, Oceans of Fantasy and Mona Lisa* and Terry Young’s ‘I Wanna Make it With You’ is a track on Marcia Hines’ Ooh Child. Go figure. Go fuckin’ figure.

Precious Wilson – her real name is Precocious** and her middle name is Pearlina*** – worked her way up through the ranks in the British group Eruption (from backing singer to front left and centre for a couple of big hits with sixties covers). Notwithstanding that her 'Hold On I'm Coming' is a cover of a well-known and pretty superior song, it's not a bad piece of disco pop and better than most of the stuff Boney M were generally credited with (btw Wikipedia suggests that Oceans of Fantasy was the only Boney M album which shocked fans by revealing, through some numbskull's accidental track-by-track listing of vocalists, that only two of the four BMers actually sang on the records; and, you know, two of the songs were also sung by Precious Wilson, so... everyone was scratching their head about what actually constituted Boney M, I guess). 

Precious Wilson has a big eastern bloc (is it still called that) following as is revealed on her website which is worth a read if only to see what constitutes a blog post in her world. Discogs tells us additionally that she is also known both as Gracious Wilson (really?!) and as Прешъс Уилсън. I think we should forget about the hype, and just enjoy a great rendition of a great song, greatly. 

* Or Monalisa, I can't keep track
** Untrue at time of writing
*** Apparently true

Summer Gold: Ruth Waters 'Never Gonna Be The Same'

What can I tell you about Ruth Waters? That she sometimes goes by the name Ruth 'Silky' Waters, that she can be directly emailed at silkywaters@aol.com? Both of those things, I suppose... also that she has a Facebook fan page which 44 people like and 46 people follow. 

It would appear (other information is scant to be honest) that 'Never Gonna Be the Same' was Waters' biggest hit, and it's a vibrant, upbeat beefy bit of beltin' that, like the Dollar video mentioned a few days ago f'rinstance is crazily happy for such a sad story. 

Not a hit in Australia but goes to making Summer Gold one of the sharpest and sassiest disco collections around. 

Summer Gold: Andy Forray 'Drac's Back'

Now this is a fascinating piece of work. I note that it was a hit in Australia, after its appearance on this album (so, early 1980 - it was something like the 52nd biggest selling single of that year)  God life was so much more complicated back then, in a less innocent time! It was a hit in Victoria and it was on the 3XY chart but it was totally not a national hit in Australia (at least not according to the Barnes-Scanes Top 40 Research book). OK back to normal service... though I for one don't remember it at all, and I even suspect it might not have got much radio airplay because of its suggestive nature (though also I don't recall how much I was listening to the radio in 1979/80 tbh). There also doesn't seem to have been a video made - which is so ridiculous, given the way the song begs to be played out in a video, with Forray of course starring because he was primarily an actor (and an early cast member of Hair but perhaps more importantly for this kind of thing, a comedy actor for instance he was 'Second Christian' in Up Pompeii - don't laugh!)

The weirdest thing about 'Drac's Back' I guess is that when we hear it now it sounds like, well, AIDS comedy. We got very used to the idea of vampires and gayness (possibly via The Fearless Vampire Killers, I'm not entirely sure) and then much later tropes about AIDS and blood and nightclubs. This record came out two years before the first actual AIDS diagnosis, and so any interpretation along those lines is with hindsight. There are probably other associations that are just so much part of pop culture I can't see them anymore. What We Do in the Shadows was following the same kind of schtick though (and is a really, really funny film - if you didn't know that)

It's a clever little record, a lot of satisfying punchlines and on the whole a good music hall spirit to it. I'd like to find out more about Andy Forray but I've lived this long knowing very little so I suppose I can keep going without the knowledge.

One thing that bothers me. Drac's back. I want to suck your oooh... Dracula WHAT? What is that last word? Driving me crazy.

Something else occurred to me after writing the above: I wonder how many people used albums like Summer Gold for cover. If you thought your parents (for instance) or friends would deride you for having a song like 'Drac's Back' in your collection, but you really wanted it, you could purchase it on Summer Gold and say that you merely tolerated it because it was inalienably a part of the collection. I'm thinking about 'Drac's Back' in particularly because it is pretty darn gay, or at least, pretty sexually suggestive, which I'm sure stopped it being played on 2SM in Sydney, for instance. 

23/1/18 MORE MORE MORE: The redoubtable Paul Fleckney has suggested this is 'a song about the recreational drug Mandrax (aka Quaaludes or ludes). He points out that Drac's victims are left 'feeling like a wreck' and 'wake up all wasted' and that his 'drinks are all free' ('During the '90s,' says Paul, 'many clubs complained that ecstasy was killing their business because no one drank any more. I imagine there was a similar reaction to Mandrax in the 70s' He also notes that of course the second syllable of 'Mandrax' and 'Drac's' are, um, the same thing: 'I wonder if this song is a bit of an advertorial announcing Mandrax's return to the dance floor in the late '70s?' 

I think so. In fact, I'm sure so. It makes Forray - who as far as I'm aware never wrote another song - a particularly clever lyricist, particularly as the tiredness Drac's victims feel is as easily ascribed to having your blood drained as it is to taking disco drugs. (That said, he could have made a play on words between 'lewd' and 'dude', couldn't he? Do I need to write this guy's schtick for him?!). 

Summer Gold: Lori Balmer 'La Booga Rooga'

Lori Balmer was 23 years into her career as an entertainer and 29 years old when her cover of Andy Fairweather Low's 'La Booga Rooga' was released (under the name Lori Balmer and Short Notice, some sources say) and did not become a hit. I can't help but a hear something very Benataresque and I guess once again it was the zeitgeist as this record was released almost simultaneously to the first Pat Benatar hits (Benatar was seven years older than Lori Balmer, I don't even know why I'm pointing that out, it's irrelevant).

I note that Balmer herself comments on the above clip and that's funny but I kind of disagree - not a great song in the scheme of things but a great performance, not just Balmer's vocal but also the fresh new wavey protometal guitar. Not a dud, at all, but not a hit, bizarrely. (Also, I note with interest that Discogs, where they always get everything totally right all the time, don't list this single as having been released. I guess it might not be by some po-faced dude regarding a silver sphere or something).

Summer Gold: John St Peeters, 'You, You're the One'

John St Peeters is one of those guys: he sometimes (well, twice) tickled the charts’ arse, had his fans, kept his options open, still works, he’s only 61 FFS. Born Johnny Lo Piccolo, the child of Richmond greengrocers* back when Richmond’s population was totally (well, it seemed that way) Mediterranean, he was an entertainer as a child performing mainly on accordion. I can imagine (I won’t say I’m imagining right, but I know you’re imagining what I’m imagining). He toured the world and made his mark, then as a handsome adult came back to Australia to be a different kind of star. He was sufficiently ubiquitous that one of TISM’s members took the name ‘Jon St Peenis’; TISM had bigger hits than John St Peeters, but less of a sustained career (but they were much, much MUCH funnier).

* Without going into great detail I would like to add there is a heartwarming story in the Melbourne press in the 1960s re three deaf and dumb adult Lo Piccolos and their parents, allowed to migrate to Australia sponsored by their brothers, all Richmond greengrocers. It was charming. 

Summer Gold: The Three Degrees' 'Jump the Gun'

OK, this is ostensibly the 7" version but it is NOT what this song sounds like on Summer Gold. I mean, the version on Summer Gold is a different recording, absolutely, and it's not just 40-year-old-cassette-in-a-20-year-old-cassette-player -in-a-28-year-old-car different. I guess there's something I will have to figure out there. The 12" version sounds a lot more like the Summer Gold version though obviously not as long (discogs does say it is an 'edited version' - so, an edited version of the 12"? Some cut-up getting three minutes out of the 8-minute 12" version? It's certainly not just the first three minutes... OK, I don't care.)



The song is a Giorgio Moroder-Harold Faltemeyer gem, with all the guitar muscle the Village People thought they had on 'Sleazy' but totally didn't. It goes nowhere fast and has a lot of fun getting there. As do we, the listeners.

The Three Degrees have been putting out records as long as I've been alive, which is not that long a time really. They performed at Charles and Diana's wedding or something, I wonder if they did 'Jump the Gun'? I hope so, inasmuch as I give a flying fuck that people there had a good time. Cheers!

Summer Gold: Village People, 'Sleazy'

And once again, muggins gets egg on his/her face when trying to predict the hit sound of late '79, but who could possibly blame muggins!? 'Y.M.C.A' had been a huge hit for the Village people (number one no less) in November '78, and 'In the Navy' only got to number 9 but that was mid-'79. 'Sleazy', eh? Well, why not. It's sure to go a long way.

It died a death (the Village People were actually only to have one more hit in Australia, with 'Can't Stop the Music' in June 1980; still, the success of that movie in this country, one of the territories where it was a surprise hit I gather, probably huge in Flanders, shows that the Village People still had currency at this time). Possibly one reason for the flagging interest was the departure of main guy Victor Willis, who left at the end of '79, but on the other hand, how many members of the Village People can you, or could you ever name? You're more likely to go 'um, Construction Worker, Indian, um, Salvation Army guy? Businessman? WAF? Traffic Cone?'

As it happens, 'Sleazy' was sung by Construction Worker, David 'Scar' Hodo, I think his only go at a single A-side (but I stand to be corrected and also to not give a loose root). The song is a double bummer, firstly because it is possibly the first time the facade cracks in terms of 'well, guys, we sing about being macho or in the navy or at the YMCA, but it's not just fun and games, we do these things with a sexual mindset' (not just that of course - a homosexual mindset). But perhaps worse than that, I'm not sure, it's hard to take on the mentality of 1979 pop fan/person in the street, it's about being sleazy but if you didn't know what 'sleazy' meant you'd have a bit of trouble figuring it out from the song.



Unless I'm the naive one and there is actually a definition of 'sleazy' which involves playing loud music and I mean REALLY LOUD.

Looking back you (I) have to assume that things like 'Sleazy' are the VP and their handlers trying to address criticisms of the disco scene as shallow and all about studio trickery (this song appears on a double album of live and studio material called Live and Sleazy) by showing that the Village People could do it onstage, loud and mean if need be. It wasn't a hit, in any case, and unlike many tracks on Summer Gold boy oh boy it really did not deserve to be one.

Summer Gold: Dollar's 'Who Were You With in the Moonlight'

Definitely one of the album's highlights in a sea of 'em. To go back to earlier documented interests, the song features 40 seconds of otherwise unconnected/unrevisited intro, in which DJ can bung in a very long discussion about stealing knickers off the line, sniffing them, wearing them, and the weather, then say something about mysterious oft-referred to, never evident, running joke cohost 'who were you with in the moonlight, Mrs Terrapin?' etc.

The song sounds so modern, and yet alien as all get out. There are a few ideas put forward: you were with someone in the moonlight; you deny that I (singer) have any right to know/any right to you; you are (or the experience was) 'making me so sad'. I think that's about it. As I mentioned a few days ago, what really freaks me out is how happy Dollar look as they sing this awful, horrible story to each other. Thereza Bazar might well feel a little out of place in this, essentially a David Van Day solo outing, although she had her moments in other times and places so fair's fair.

This record was top ten in the UK but didn't get a sniff in Australia, despite the fact that it was released on the notably exciting* Acrobat label and also, apparently, as a picture disc!

Dollar seem so often to be relegated to a footnote in other stories, for instance, the story of Trevor Horn's ascension and the employment of Horn to work with ABC on Lexicon of Love. Well that is important but I want a copy of The Dollar Album please. This matters.

* Not notably exciting at all, sorry.

Summer Gold: Telex's 'Twist A San Tropez'

You can read about Telex in their wikipedia entry. Belgium has done so much!!!

I can see how one might imagine Telex to be the poor man's Kraftwerk or perhaps the poor man's Flying Lizards if it comes to that. The song is a cover of a 1961 track by the French group Les Chats Sauvages, written by Andre Salvet, Guy Lafitte and Martial Solal, who weren't in the band and I don't know who they were/are. I remember this record from when I was 14/15 and I remember finding the video in particular to be absolutely dazzling:



It was funny and preposterous in equal measure and I loved (love) that. Listening to it in the car I note also there is a percussion sound which bounces around the stereo spectrum in a highly amusing manner. Well done, everybody.

Summer Gold: Marcia Hines 'Dance You Fool, Dance'

Probably one of her best records, and that is saying something.

It's a track from Hines' fourth album, the execrably titled Ooh Child, one which - according to Karen Dewey's Diva: the Life of Marcia Hines - brought to a head the terrible tussle between Hines and her producer/ record label owner, Robie Porter. Dewey says Porter 'found two black backing singers in the US called Terry and Monalisa, the latter of which was capable of sounding exactly like Marcia.' Dewey quotes Tony Hogarth, the managing director of the label Wizard, as saying that Porter's extensive use of these backing singers (of whom more later in this series! Thrills) was to 'increase his power and lower Marcia's by saying, "I can re-create your sound without you"'. Dewey notes that the back cover of Ooh Child features a picture of 'Monalisa and Terry in the foreground and Marcia in the background.' (pp. 151-2).

Following the Ooh Child debacle Hines and her manager Peter Rix entered litigation with Porter and Wizard and Dewey doesn't really go into detail so who knows. The main thing for us to console ourselves with is that 'Dance You Fool, Dance' is immense.

Summer Gold: Midnight Oil, 'Cold Cold Change'

An absolute outlier on this collection, 'Cold Cold Change' was not a hit (actually, that makes it less unusual in context) and it sticks out like dog's balls. Midnight Oil were a big enough name by 1979 that there might have been reasonable expectation that they'd hit the charts with this record, but they didn't. Of course it's a complete classic, though.

As mentioned, my copy of Summer Gold is a cassette, and while I don't know precisely what the mastering requirements were for a cassette as opposed to vinyl (obviously, packing a whole lot of songs onto a side of a vinyl record made them quieter - but audio quality wasn't the point of course - either on vinyl or cassette, which were known to be inferior sound quality) there is some weird shit going down when this song comes on - it sounds quieter than everything else, and the opening seconds which should by rights be a cataclysm sound like a bedroom demo and not in a good way. It's also, I'm pretty sure, edited curiously: not only does it fade out on the Summer Gold version but I have a feeling that there is about 15 seconds of instrumental section removed before the stop-start 'No!' part. Whether this is the 7" single edit, or a special edit for Summer Gold, I don't know.



This is the greatest period of Midnight Oil in my opinion (the first, self-titled, album,* Head Injuries album and the Bird Noises EP). Maybe not the greatest? But my favourite. I wonder if the band was more annoyed by the editing of the song or being jumbled together with a bunch of disco tracks (Peter Garrett reputedly lit a bonfire of disco records somewhere in Sydney's western suburbs around this time). Ha, ha, ha, sucked in. Corporate cock. ETC

*I have spent the last few days listening repeatedly to this album, which I found my cassette copy of recently. It's a treat, and forty years old this year! 'Surfing with a Spoon' is a particularly remarkable piece of work because, call me naive, I think it does effectively evoke an ocean feel. They must have felt pretty smug about that, but for all I know - it's not a genre that's engaged me a huge amount - this marks them as adherents or the latest iteration of that surf rock scene of the early 70s. 'Surfing with a Spoon' has excellent cheesy organ reminiscent to me of ELP, and some fab dynamics. I don't know why this album gets such a bad rap, it's got it all (admittedly the song about being arrested at 'the demonstration' is a bit too Skyhooksy).

Summer Gold: Edwin Starr's 'H.A.P.P.Y. Radio'

Edwin Starr was best known of course for the million-selling (Vietnam) war protest song 'War', and so he should be. This is a remarkably fine pop record, however, particularly for its economy and drive. I particularly like the repetitive one-note horn (?!) line that is on the go when this fragment begins:


Just as the first ten seconds of 'If It's Love You Want' were, I'm almost certain, meant to make the song radio-playable, the whole of 'H.A.P.P.Y. Radio' is a record contrived to sell itself on radio, and to  briefly take DJs away from banter about stealing knickers off the clothesline and into reveries about how much their listeners love listening to the radio. To do so they must play it, and in playing it they make people want to buy it.

Starr had been living in the UK for half a decade when he made this record, which to my mind explains its tightness and fullness (am I getting too technical here lol) and also why, in the clip, the 'girls' behind Starr are white girls, which would have brought the army out in the USA or at least the Klan. They're two girls twice over, right? And the whole thing has been constructed so Starr can be bigger out in front, creating depth. Anyway I'm not here to talk about videos, but songs, and this is a fine little number that says nothing and therefore most things.

Unbelievably because it's so fucking hot, this record did not chart in Australia, but it was top ten in the UK.

Summer Gold: Edith Bliss 'If It's Love You Want'

Edith Bliss, born in 1959 wikipedia tells us, is a classic case of a woman people now find funny because (1) she was a woman who dared to presume we wanted to see her perform and (2) because she is of an era (late 70s/early 80s) and a place (Australia) many of us regard with affection as 'naff'. Also, I guess her surname sounds strangely flashy and fake, though apparently it's her first name that was a concoction, and then only adapted from Eda (which I think is about fifty times better personally).

It's amazing how common Bliss' narrative is amongst celebrities: she attended a singing audition purely to support a friend, and was herself successfully auditioned. It seems she had hoped to take on the world of banking prior to this and also ran a shoe store (she'd just turned twenty when this record came out) but instead was, firstly, a mildly successful pop singer and secondly (and much more successfully) a reporter on Simon Townsend's Wonder World, a show I always felt slightly too old for, oddly enough (I was 14/15 when it started and it lasted long enough that a boy I went to school with, Phillip Tanner, was a reporter on it late in its life).

'If it's Love You Want' was released in November 1979 and was a minor hit, her only hit, though arguably her follow up 'Heart of Stone' was better, because it sounds like someone wrote a song after they heard 'Heart of Glass' once. 'If it's Love You Want' was written by Allan and Brian Caswell; I gather Allan also wrote the excruciating but enthralling 'On the Inside', the theme to the original Prisoner series (Caswell, via Prisoner, must be the reason the single was released on a Reg Grundy-related label). (I SIMPLY CANNOT WAIT to read his autobiography My Version of the Truth, or indeed any autobiography with that title).

I have to get her album Sheer Bliss as I am particularly intrigued by the production here (I should start by noting that this record sounds fuller, faster and altogether much more exciting on my car cassette player than it does in this youtube clip, which does no-one any favours: more below). The opening ten seconds intrigued me on the album, because it is so completely disconnected from the rest of the song but once I saw this clip it made perfect sense: it's for a male DJ (because they were all men then) to talk over the top of, introducing the song or making some comment about stealing knickers off the clothesline or saying rain should clear for a lovely day (of stealing knickers off the clothesline). It leads me to further fascinated thoughts about how, when the first ten seconds reputedly sell the song, the first ten seconds will often have been radically different on commercial radio and infused in some way or other with a unique meaning each time.

I don't want to go extensively into this thoroughly bland Countdown clip. I would say EB was a very inexperienced performer at this stage and for all we know someone gave her five minutes' instruction on hand gestures ten minutes before she recorded this mime. The disco balls, the dress Holly Hobby said was too prissy, the ingenuine facial expressions (I will have something to say, unless I forget, later about Dollar's clip for 'Who Were You With in the Moonlight' and the amazing weirdness of people smiling so cheesily through a desperately sad song) all seem to suggest 'fodder'. But actually the song resonates with me on a number of levels, because of that inherent sadness and hopelessness, that I also feel sometimes, and so do you. Put this up against John St Peters' 'You, You're the One', which I'll get to in a few days, and you get a very interesting pair of perspectives on submission and desire.

I would also posit (not that I listen regularly to contemporary pop) that any song on similar lines today would have to make some concession along the lines of: 'I know I sound like a saddo, but...' This song is kind of saying 'I'm a saddo. A smiling, simpering saddo. Women are.' But I think it's an incredible song, and doubly incredible in the context of 'On the Inside', by the way. Put those two together as two sides of the same coin. Whew.