Category: 1980-1984

“In a Big Country” (1983) – Big Country * Written by Stuart Adamson, Mark Brzezicki, Tony Butler, and Bruce Watson * Produced by Steve Lillywhite * LP: The Crossing * Label: Mercury * Charts: Billboard Hot 100 (#17), UK Singles (#17) (numerologists take note)

Amid the foggy synths and posh vocals American radio listeners heard in those days, it was likely the guitar bagpipes of Scotland’s Big Country that declared with highest certainty that a British Invasion was on. So distinctive were the twin skirls of Stuart Adamson and Bruce Watson, as showcased on their radio hit “In a Big Country,” that they could have copyrighted the approach. (What is Adamson shouting throughout the song? “Shout,” apparently. But it always sounded to me like “Ciao, hot shot.”)

Theirs was an era when male pop and metal bands alike attempted to out-girl each other in appearance, but Big Country, in their plaid button-downs, offered up a comparatively blokey and earnest middle ground. Their sound was big, too—producer Steve Lillywhite’s extended version of “In a Big Country” was less a dance mix than a muscle mix, ultimately receiving the most airplay and being the one they included on their debut album. 

Big Country’s widely viewed music video, which presented the band giving chase to a young woman across pastoral, cottage-dotted landscapes, attempted to undermine any of the music’s muscularity with visual tweeness. Image example 1: The band riding three-wheelers with helmets—sensible and safe but not rock and roll. Image example 2: All four of them getting knocked over like bowling pins by one female. Image example 3: The band darting across the water in an air-pump boat. 

The outdoorsy video images would have worked fine, say, for a Hamm’s Beer “Land of Sky Blue Water” ad campaign. And listeners didn’t need to listen closely to the lyrics to surmise that a positive evocation of well-being was at work. But a close listen reveals them to be rather poetic words of encouragement having the power to ease pain and change a life.

Stuart Adamson sang these in 1983, but ended his own life after struggling with alcoholism and depression in 2001, a tragedy that gives “In a Big Country” a poignancy that one hopes will continue affecting people for the better.

As part of the song’s ongoing legacy, I offer up my own experience of seeing Big Country playing live at a small-ish venue in 2013 with Mike Peters (of The Alarm) handling lead vocals. This was a remarkably big-hearted performance, after which all band members passed the mic around to express personal thanks. (Joining guitarist Bruce Watson on the twin guitar attack was his son Jamie.)  Peters is a survivor of lymph cancer and chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and it wasn’t until I heard him deliver the “stay alive” refrain as an outright exhortation (“Stay alive!”) that I fully grasped the song’s power a full thirty years after I first heard it. 

“Love Goes Down the Drain” (1980) – The Monochrome Set * Written by Bid * Produced by the Monochrome Set * LP: Strange Boutique * Label: Dindisc

The notion of college rock sprouted out in a jiffy from punk as a better-read, more culturally observant version of the new rawness. London’s Monochrome Set were a good example, with their color wheel of ideas filtering through their eponymous conception of limited tone. It served them well: Their first few singles (“He’s Frank,” “Eine Symphonie des Grauens,” and “The Monochrome Set”) are clear attention-grabbers amid the era’s ocean of independent UK vinyl. Group leader Bid (Ganesh Seshadri) sings his weird words insouciantly with little raga curves while guitarist Lester Square maintains strict, sharp angles to modular and moody effect. 

After 1980, the sharpness dulls, although their first album, Strange Boutique, holds on to portions of it, especially during the three-song stretch of “Love Goes Down the Drain,” “Ici Les Enfants,” and “The Etcetera Stroll.” The LP version of “Love Goes Down the Drain,” which should have been a single, is post-punk college rock 101 – an articulate, culturally literate, good-humored statement of self-loathing. The John Peel version that appeared on the B-side of their 1983 “Jet Set Junta” is more sluggish than this one. 

“Do You Wanna Hold Me” (1983) – Bow Wow Wow * Written by Matthew Ashman, Dave Barbarosa, Leigh Gorman, and Anabella Lwin * Produced by Mike Chapman * 45: “Do You Wanna Hold Me” / “What’s the Time (Hey Buddy)” * Label: RCA * Charts: UK (#47); Billboard Hot 100 (#77)

Bow Wow Wow started out as an agitpop project for Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, who oversaw releases rife with record biz flouts, provocative album covers, and lurid lyrics. By 1982 the four young Londoners had coalesced into a more self-contained musical prospect. Teenage singer Annabella Lwin, with her soaring voice and pow wow dance moves, possessed a “too old to be so young” (and vice versa) persona that was as crucial as it was troubling; guitarist Matthew Ashman had a flair for whammy statement riffs on his big Gretsch guitars; Leigh Gorman summoned thunderstorms on bass; and heartthrob drummer Dave Barbarosa, with his red melting kit, was rock’s high chief of Burundi drums.   

With “I Want Candy” (their hit Strangeloves cover), Bow Wow Wow found American audiences in the summer of ’82, via alternative radio formats and MTV. The video showed them surfside and looking convincingly So Cal, a half-clad conflux of mohawks, sandy hair, and brown skin. The following year they delivered an album called When the Going Gets Tough the Tough Get Going, produced by the customarily band-sensitive Mike Chapman, and it couldn’t have been any better of a showcase for the four members’ strengths. The leadoff single “Do You Wanna Hold Me” joshed around with Californiana and Sergio Mendes vocals, finding a spot of eternal exotic sunshine in the pop ether with nothing but the essentials of hooks, voices, guitar, bass and drums.

We’re dealing with pop music, though, where full-realizations so often wreak full dissolutions, and that happened with Bow Wow Wow. They didn’t make it past the big tour, with its ritualized tests of a band’s mutual commitment. The three males tried a short-lived hiphop rock vehicle called Chiefs of Relief, while Lwin dabbled in the dance market. Ashman died young, reunion configurations came to pass, and “Do You Wanna Hold Me” sounds ever more poignant in retrospect. Who else was more qualified to deliver the opening line of “children I wanna warn ya,” than Annabella Lwin, a seventeen-year-old who, by then, knew a thing or two about exploitation and “illusions” and whose big moment was moments from fading?

“New York’s Alright If You Like Saxophones” (1981) – Fear * Written by Lee Ving * Produced by Fear and Gary Lubow * LP: The Record * Label: Slash

As mentioned in the previous post, saxophone sounds had a seventies heyday as signifiers of slick New York urbanity, and the Saturday Night Live theme song, with its riffing tenor, reinforced this. Because punk rock’s mission was to overturn all apple carts (and apples, for that matter, big and little), the antagonistic LA group Fear made fun of both New York and saxophones right there on SNL, smack in the middle of the sketch comedy institution’s living room. (“It’s great to be here in New Jersey,” said singer Lee Ving.)

This was on the 1981 Halloween night episode, a slot the band secured with the help of John Belushi, who had swooned over their anarchic shtick when he saw them in the Decline of Western Civilization movie documentary the same year. Their performance reeled with chaos and danger and transfixed American viewers. Appropriately enough, the guest host was Donald Pleasence, who had played the hapless US President who oversaw the devastation in Escape from New York that same year.

Fear’s notorious appearance was likely the direct catalyst for the reassuring 1982 CHIPS episode where Erik Estrada beats a menacing punk band not with a billy club but with vocals and dance moves in a talent show. The album version of “New York’s Alright if You Like Saxophones” is below, but you might as well just watch the SNL clip, which includes it as song #2 and features some surprisingly servicable skronk from band member Derf Scratch. 

“Adventures in Success” (1983) – Will Powers * Written by Lynn Goldstein and Sting * Produced by Lynn Goldstein * 12″ single: “Adventures in Success” / “Adventures in Success (Dub Copy)” * Album: Dancing for Mental Health * Label: Drag City/Palace

Pseudonymous and hypnotic, “Adventures in Success” cleared some space in alternative radio playlists with its New Thought messages of self-affirmation and slinky, stealthy beats. Although most listeners probably recognized it as a spoof, positive mind exercises have a way of prevailing over problematic origins and changing lives anyway. It was rock photographer Lynn Goldstein who hatched the idea of Will Powers, whose full album Dancing for Mental Health didn’t quite mesmerize the way the leadoff single did (and who had no connection to the late ’80s Will to Power duo). She sent her voice through a down-pitched vocoder and got famous friends such as Sting and Robert Palmer (who helped with side B’s dub version) to give it musical palatability. Video director Rebecca Allen devised the 3D talking faces video that upped the track’s trance factors even further. Certain questions undermined the record’s premise: Can an ultra-mechanized piece of mass culture really help to enhance a human being’s uniqueness? If one’s singular existence is the first law of success, why should the endeavor to become something different from that serve as laws two and three? But there again… all roads do lead to Rome. 

 

“Flight of Icarus” (1983) * Written by Adrian Smith and Bruce Dickinson * Produced by Martin Birch * 45: “Flight of Icarus” / “I’ve Got the Fire” * LP: Piece of Mind  * Label: EMI (UK) / Capitol (USA) * Charts: UK (#11); Billboard Rock (#8)

A few things about Iron Maiden’s 1983 “Flight to Icarus”: It was the UK metal institution’s highest charting track in the US (#8 on the Billboard rock charts); its ending features an irrefutable demonstration of metal vocal majesty; and it found disfavor with band captain Steve Harris, who resented singer Bruce Dickinson’s insistence on keeping the tempo out of the full gallop zone. He thus banged his gavel and forbade live performances of it for the span of thirty-two years. Another thing: it uses the monotonous metal chord changes of Im-VII^b-IV in a way that doesn’t sound monotonous, and gives an alternate treatment of the Greek myth of Icarus, in which the hero’s journey to the sun is a teenage rebel’s willful self-destruction.  Although the lyrics do leave room for interpretation, Dickinson made his intended meaning clear in his 2017 What Does This Button Do autobiography.

What other pop songs have an Icarus theme? Duncan Browne’s “Death of Neil” and Scott Walker’s “Plastic Palace People,” both from 1968, come to mind as the best ones worth mentioning, each of them fairly ambiguous tales about boys with wings and both of them clearly tragic. The B-side of “Flight of Icarus” is a worthwhile, thematically consistent non-album cover of Montrose’s 1974 “I Got the Fire.” (You can hear the genesis of the “Icarus” chorus melody in “April” by Dickinson’s heroes Deep Purple.)

“I Hate My School” (1981) * Written by Jeff McDonald * EP: Red Cross * Label: Posh Boy

It’s quite a story: The two McDonald brothers, Jeff and Steve from Hawthorne, California, released their debut EP full of unserious pop culture punk in 1981. Shortly after, the serious legal team for the International Committee of the Red Cross informed them that they would have to rebrand. The moral, possibly, is that every band starting out should choose a problematic copyright name just to see if they can at least get arrested. “Annette’s Got the Hits,” a goof on Muscle Beach Party and its ilk, would be the one that got the attention of KROQ up the road in L.A., but the key track was “I Hate My School,” in which the McDonalds flip a minute-plus-seventeen bird at the “rah rahs,” surfers, jocks and bookworms at Hawthorne High. This happens to be the very institute the Beach Boys had drawn inspiration from in 1963 (the year Jeff was born) for “Be True to Your School.” Things change, or maybe not. In The Lost Beach Boy (2007), Jon Stebbins reports how David Marks and Dennis Wilson would have to deal with the ongoing sneers and assaults of the surfers and jocks back then. Red Cross would become Redd Kross and would work for decades in boiling down pop-rock to its essence in their mass kitsch kitchen.

“Canary in a Coalmine” (1980) – The Police * Written by Sting * Produced by the Police and Nigel Gray * LP: Zenyatta Mondatta * Label: A&M

A song like this, where the singer expresses exasperation over someone’s environmental hyper-sensitivity, someone you imagine wearing a surgeon’s mask at the grocery store as standard practice, would have sounded woefully out of step only five years previous, when environmental consciousness still made for relevant pop music subject matter. Sting likely drew from Dave Edmunds’s 1977 cover of Bob Seger’s “Get Out of Denver” for the wordy Chuck Berry-like cadence in “Canary in a Coalmine,” an ideal match for their brand of sped-up ska. And what an appropriate source song, implying an exit from a fresh-air Rocky Mountain environment or an era where singers like John Denver used to sing about it.