“Walkman On” (1983) – SSQ * Written and produced by Jon St. James * LP: Playback * Label: Enigma
Jon St. James’s band SSQ very much resembled Berlin, another Orange County group whose Pleasure Victim EP he had worked on as an assistant engineer. Both combos had four guys handling the programmed instrumentation with a petite female singer out front. Terri Nunn of Berlin and Stacey Swain of SSQ could have been sisters, and the cover art for SSQ’s debut album seemed inspired by the cover art for Berlin’s 1979 debut single. But SSQ were in good hands with St. James, a film and TV placement radar machine whose Casbah Recording Studio accommodated plenty of project traffic. He’d eventually guide Swain to a hitmaking career (as Stacey Q), manage and produce a number of artists such as Anything Box (“Living in Oblivion”) and Candyman (“Knockin’ Boots”), and compose for the big and little screen. If tracks on the SSQ Playback album show their age in celebrating defunct technology, much of the music itself streams comfortably retro in the 2010s (cf. Kraftwerk, Computer World (1981)). Five out of the nine titles refer to machinery that jibes with the record’s overall sound, with the true timepiece being “Walkman On,” referring to the portable audio cassette player that Sony first made available to consumers in 1979. It’s digital music about analog listening, but the Walkman concept lives on and so does this song. (Stacey Q’s electro-dispassion works so well here, but it’s an approach she’d abandon for her chirpy late ’80s Billboard chart assault.)