Welcome back, music lovers. This week is one devoted to obscuroid artists from roughly the 1980s who seemed like they should have had a hit single or two, but never quite managed. Perhaps they were too acquired of a taste. I am not aware of any pop band that can come up with quite the lyrics this one managed to create back in the day.
I’ll recycle on that Neon Vincent has posted before as a start. Shriekback was a band I became familiar with thanks to their Oil And Gold album, and especially the video for Nemesis. I may add the video for that later, but let’s try something a bit mellower first – what may be the first Zen pop song
Gunning for the Buddha was off 1986’s Big Night Music LP. The video itself is enjoyable. Staging it as a live performance was a nice touch. The whole album was wonderful. But it never really caught on. That said, they’re still around, and still making music and occasionally touring. If they ever get back to the US and I’m even remotely near enough, I’d love to see them. If not, I’ll gladly settle for anything new they’d like to release. Here’s a taste:
And they maintain an active website.
This was the video that made me a fan:
Nothing quite like that in 1985.
Here’s another band that certainly got some promotion (I was still seeing promo adverts for their first album almost exactly 33 years ago, although the album had been released in 1984):
Stay was a lovely single. The Blue Nile were notorious for their lengthy intervals between new LPs/CDs. Hard to keep an audience that way. Somehow I did end up with their first three albums, even if that meant waiting well into the 1990s to get the third. They’ve been unofficially disbanded since their last album was dropped in 2004.
I couldn’t find a Blue Nile cocktail, but I was able to find a White Nile Martini.
A Blue Nile drink is something that should exist, but apparently doesn’t. Maybe I should create one.
I’ll be looking for a Buddha drink next. Wish me luck. In the meantime, the bartender is taking requests.
Good to know you are gunning for a Buddha drink. 🙂
I was gunning for a Buddha drink and I found several. Today’s target is The Happy Buddha – Cocktail.
I’ll have another one tomorrow.
Keep ’em coming. Ingredients are sparse in my household at the moment, but I can’t complain. A glass of Merlot is quite nice on its own.
Here’s today’s target, the White Buddha Cocktail.
Don Durito noted the rare ingredients in the last recipe. This one seems to have even rarer ones. Sorry about that.
I have pretty fair supermarkets within minutes of me. Not hard to track down most ingredients. Worst case is a drive about an hour away. Towns housing flagship universities tend to have all the bells and whistles as it were.
Here is one last Buddha cocktail video, Fat Buddha | Cocktail Offer.
This is the promo vid for their last single, which appeared on a 4AD sampler in 1987. And that was the last we’d hear of them. They are sometimes classified as post-rock, which really did not become a thing until the mid to late 1990s. These guys were just a bit ahead of their time:
This was always a band that marched to their own tunes. In the 1970s, they got lumped in with the punks, even if they were more art school than anything else. They disbanded at the end of the 1970s, embarked on a bunch of solo projects, and then got back together in the mid-1980s. The production values changed, but their quirkiness remained intact. Not too many bands would write a song called Kidney Bingos, let alone release a promo video that was a bit out of left-field. But Wire were the sort who would:
They’re still around. Added a new guitarist after the original decided to call it a day. At the start of the decade, this promo vid was released:
They also have a current website: Pink Flag
Another one of those bands I’d gladly see live if the opportunity avails itself.
It is common in between Wire albums for Colin Newman and his wife, Malka Spigel to collaborate. Lately they have been working as a duo, reviving Immersion in the process. Immersion dropped three albums in the 1990s, and began releasing new material in 2016, and a couple months ago or so. Here’s a vid from their latest album:
The music seems to draw on German progressive (both artists would have been just starting out at the peak of that wonderful era), but is definitely of this decade.
Another relatively recent Wire track – this one from a decade ago. Malka Spigel (frontman Colin Newman’s wife of over three decades now) was the video artist for this one. Low budget and fun to watch.
Since this is still on the rec list, I’ll keep on adding encore vids. Apparently there is interest in recording artists who never really made it, but never quite failed either and who somehow manage to have something new to say.
Cabaret Voltaire has been featured in this series of diaries from time to time. They started as a trio in the 1970s, became a duo right about the time they started doing well on the UK alt-rock charts, and then they split in the mid-1990s. Stephen Mallinder would go on and get a PhD in musicology, and still DJs in Australia. Richard Kirk DJs and drops new recordings every now and then – sometimes under his own name, as well as Sandoz, Electronic Eye, and even borrowed the Cabaret Voltaire name earlier this decade. He’s explored a good deal of electronica and world music in the process. His more recent efforts are something of a revisit to the stark musical statements of his old band’s early work, with more contemporary production values. Given the times we live in, there is a sense of urgency in something that harkens back to the paranoia and sense of impending fascism that characterized early industrial music. Here’s a bit of his newer stuff:
Jah Wobble has traveled a long way since is stint with PiL back in the late 1970s. He actively recorded as a solo artist and in collaboration with a number of progressive artists in the early 1980s (including former members of Can). Toward the end of the decade, he formed Invaders of the Heart, which has been a near constant ever since. Their sound has evolved, but the basic vibe is recognizable. A taste, from some of their earliest work to something more recent:
This was his new band’s first single from 1989.
That was The Sun Does Rise, featuring Dolores O’Riordan. She had a lovely voice. This one did make the US alt-rock charts.
And that was something a bit more recent. As I said, the sound evolves, but the vibe is very much recognizable. Most of this stuff never gets near the charts, but there is still an audience and Jah Wobble does occasionally do a bit of touring – nothing in the offing at the moment though.
Richard H. Kirk under one of his numerous pseudonyms right around the time that his band, Cabaret Voltaire, imploded. Fits in pretty nicely with a lot of “intelligent techno” from around that period.
More Richard H. Kirk from around the same era.
808 State had some club hits around the end of the 1980s and into the early 1990s. They almost never record these days, but apparently remain active as DJs. Here is their current website.
I am quite amazed that in the wee hours of Saturday, we are still on the rec list. I love putting together these video sets, and Neon Vincent puts great care into curating and posting drink mix vids for the bar. We make a lot of choices in life. Finding time to relax and enjoy the human species’ enormous capacity to create should be one.
I have some ideas over the next few weeks of sets to put together. Next week will probably be devoted to the Gorillaz, who recently dropped a new album. That’s something one of my kids turned me onto a number of years ago – correctly predicting that my general interest in electronic-tinged pop, occasional interest in anime, and mildly dark humor would pique my interest. It did. Can you really make a band out of cartoon characters? Is their universe connected to that of Powerpuff Girls? Let’s find out next Wednesday.