The Replacements and Johnny Thunders in the late 1980s.

In the spring of 1989, Johnny Thunders opened a couple of shows for the Replacements. For those of you who don’t know, Thunders was a founding member of one the best glam bands, the New York Dolls, and when he and drummer Jerry Nolan quit the Dolls in 1975, they promptly formed the proto-punk unit, the Heartbreakers. Both groups influenced the Replacements, but it was the Heartbreakers’ rousing blend of energy, attitude, slop, and catchy tunes that impacted the ‘Mats’ early development the most—perhaps more than any other group. The Heartbreakers only released one studio album, the essential L.A.M.F., but it was another record of theirs that made the biggest impression on the young Replacements. When the Replacements were experiencing their first hint of mainstream success in the spring of 1989, it made sense they’d invite Johnny Thunders to be their opener and then bring him up on stage with them—but it nearly didn’t happen.

In late 1979, Paul Westerberg brought a handful of records to the first rehearsal of the band that would eventually be named the Replacements, including the New York Dolls’ debut and the recent Heartbreakers release, the rowdy and fiery Live at Max’s Kansas City ‘79. During this initial jam session, the new four-piece played “I Wanna Be Loved” and “All by Myself,” which they learned from the Heartbreakers live album. On July 2nd, 1980, the first Replacements gig took place; their eighteen-song set contained three Heartbreakers covers.

The young ‘Mats blazing through “I Wanna Be Loved” in 1981:
 

 
By the dawn of the 1980s, Johnny Thunders was already a legend, but not always for the right reasons. His loose guitar playing style had loads of character, and he wrote some good songs, but he was also a notorious drug addict, who frequently appeared out of it on stage. In late July 1980, Thunders came to Minneapolis for a couple of gigs with Gang War, the group he formed with Wayne Kramer from the MC5. The Replacements really wanted to open the shows, but the slots went to Hüsker Dü. The night of the first concert, Westerberg and ‘Mats drummer Chris Mars were in the audience. When, after a delay, Thunders finally came out, he was obviously a wreck, and Westerberg took notice.

[Westerberg:] “The moment he walked on . . . I saw it.”

The look on Thunders’s face—imperious and desperate all at once—struck Westerberg: “He was frightening and beautiful and mean at the same time,” he said. “Like a child.”

Physically struggling through the show, while battling an audience hurling brickbats, Thunders had been rendered a prisoner of his own addictions and cult infamy. “When Johnny was playing, it looked like he was walking dead,” recalled Westerberg. “It was pitiful, like watching a guy in a cage.”

That image of Thunders lingered with him. The following morning Westerberg sat at home with his guitar, rejiggered the chords to the Heartbreakers’ “Chinese Rocks,” and turned out a haunting ballad, a requiem called “Johnny’s Gonna Die.”  (taken from Bob Mehr’s Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements)

 
Much more after the jump…

 
In 2017, we told you about the time when David Bowie was in Iggy Pop’s band, specifically the final concert of The Idiot tour. But that’s not the last time Bowie and Pop performed together in public—there would be two additional times. Both moments had the element of surprise.

During the 1979 recording sessions for Iggy Pop’s album Soldier, David Bowie dropped by the studio. Initially there just to offer his moral support, he ended up co-writing the song “Play It Safe,” and singing backing vocals on the track. Iggy’s spring 1980 European tour in support of Soldier included an April 27 club show at the Metropol in Berlin. The city had been the stomping grounds of Iggy and Bowie for a couple of years; the two shared a Berlin apartment, and embraced the city’s culture, frequently attending area bars and nightclubs, as well as art shows and museums. It was an intense period of creativity for them, with Pop’s The Idiot and Lust For Life (both with significant contributions from Bowie), and DB’s Low and “Heroes”, all coming out in a single calendar year (1977).
 

David Bowie and Iggy Pop in Berlin, 1976.

In April 1980, Bowie traveled to London to finish up Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps). Knowing Iggy was in Berlin, Bowie then made his way to visit his friend and colleague. During Iggy’s set at the Metropol, Bowie stunned everyone by jumping on stage to play keyboards, sitting in for two songs.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
When Marty Feldman met Francis Bacon drink was involved.

Before he became internationally famous for his performance as Igor in Young Frankenstein, Marty Feldman was a very successful and hugely influential comedy scriptwriter with his long-time writing partner Barry Took.

One night in London, sometime during the almost swinging sixties, Feldman and Took had been working late finishing off another episode of their hit radio show Round the Horne. It had been a good day, a productive day, and now Feldman was on his way home to see his wife, Lauretta. As he walked through the city he heard jazz coming from an art gallery. The band were playing “Night in Tunisia.” It piqued his interest. Feldman had started off as a jazz musician when he was fifteen playing trumpet with his own band and occasionally filling in with other combos. He wandered towards the gallery. A small crowd stood around clinking glasses. Ah, jazz, art, and free booze.

Feldman snaffled a couple of cocktails and had a look at the paintings. Not bad. Interesting. Certainly different but not really to his taste. Against one bare white wall there stood a man who looked like he was losing his battle to keep himself or the building up. He had the look of an aged choirboy gone to seed. A round turnip head, with dyed hair slicked back, and just a hint of rouge on his cheeks. He wore a leather jacket, a white shirt (top button undone) and blue paint splattered denims. Feldman thought he looked familiar but wasn’t quite sure where from?

What was said, we can only imagine, but it apparently began with the man against the wall commenting on Feldman’s distinctive face.

“I could use that face,” he might have said
“Well, I’m using it myself at the moment,” Feldman replied in our imaginary dialog.
“Your eyes,” returned the first.
“Yes, they’re my eyes.”
“You don’t understand, I. Have. To. Paint. You,” almost like Edith Evans’ “handbag” in The Importance of Being Earnest.

The man against the wall leaned towards Feldman as if attempting to capture something invisible between them.

“I,” he continued, “must paint you. You look the sort of man I could do something with.”

Feldman thought what sort of things this man might want to do with him then decided this strange character was trying to pick him up.

“Here, take my number,” the man said. He wrote something down on a scrap of paper. Feldman took the paper and watched the man who was no longer holding up the wall stagger off into the night.

The next morning, over breakfast, Feldman told his wife Lauretta about the man at the gallery who had tried to pick him up. “He wanted to paint my portrait, ” he added.

“Who was it?” Lauretta asked.

“Dunno. He wrote his name down.”

Feldman retrieved the slip of paper and said, “Francis. That’s all it says.”

Lauretta asked Feldman to describe this painter. He did. Lauretta then suggested her husband had met Francis Bacon.
 

Francis Bacon in his studio.
 
Moving forward a few months: Feldman spent the day writing with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in a local pub. It was a long day’s writing and drinking into the night. Eventually, the threesome were “poured out of the place hammered” trying to remember who they were and where they lived. Somehow they got lost and ended up (surprise, surprise) at another art gallery party.

Once again, Feldman tucked into the cocktails, this time joined by the equally drunk Cook and Moore. And once again, there was that man Francis holding up a wall. As Feldman recounted the incident in his autobiography eYE Marty:

I spotted my old pal Francis standing at a distance and pointed him out to Peter, who knew my story because I had become obsessed with what-ifs. Bacon’s work was fetching high prices and it would have been fun if he’d painted a portrait of me and I hadn’t told Lauretta, just inviting her to a gallery and pretended it was no big deal.

Cook told Moore about Bacon’s offer to paint Feldman’s portrait.

Without hesitation, Dudley went up to Bacon and told him that Marty was now ready to be painted.

Unfortunately, the temperamental Bacon told Moore that he had “never seen or talked to [Feldman] in his life.”

Though Bacon may not have known Feldman, he was bound to be at least acquainted with Cook and Moore, as he had often visited Cook’s Establishment Club, and had been at parties also attended by Pete ‘n’ Dud. Perhaps, as Feldman suggested, Bacon saw the state the trio were in and thought they were just “a bunch of drunken wankers.”
 

Pete ‘n’ Dud.
 
More shenanigans from Feldman, Bacon, and co, after the jump…
 

Paul Stanley of KISS.
 
KISS recorded their 1976 album Destroyer at Electric Lady Studios in 1975 with a little help from Alice Cooper guitarist Dick Wagner (who filled in for Ace Frehley, a chronic no-show to KISS’ sessions at Electric Lady) and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. It also featured contributions by Juno Award-winning producer Bob Ezrin’s children, who can be heard making background noise on the song “God of Thunder.” Ezrin was fond of wearing a whistle around his neck which he used to help “motivate” the band during the sessions, described  by Paul Stanley as a kind of “musical boot camp.” According to Stanley, Ezrin always had the “final vote” when it came to how the songs on Destroyer should sound. This came into play several times while KISS was recording their fourth album, including “God of Thunder,” a song as synonymous with Gene Simmons as fire-breathing and spitting up blood.

According to Uncle Gene, the song was inspired by a rag session he had with Stanley during which Simmons accused the guitarist of only writing “monster songs like ‘God of Thunder’” and “stuff like that.” Stanley then chided Simmons saying all he was good for was writing songs like “Christine Sixteen.” If Simmons is to be believed, both he and Paul went home and re-wrote each respective song in the style the other would normally have employed. Stanley’s demo version of the song sounds like it belongs on KISS’ disco-tinged 1979 album Dynasty—and hold on to your hair—it’s really fucking good, something you already know if you own the massive KISS box set released in 2001.

Ezrin didn’t necessarily disagree but upon hearing Paul’s demo made the executive decision to have Gene take over the vocals. Here’s more Ezrin from a 2016 piece published in Rolling Stone on his choice to have Gene sing the song which would become his musical calling card:

“That decision was made not based on sound, but on the fact that these guys were playing characters. To me, Paul was the band’s romantic lead, if you will. So he’s the guy who sings “Do You Love Me.” And Gene was both the monster and also the cocksman of the band. So Gene gets to play the “God of Thunder.”

Much more after the jump…

 
Despite the fact that he is said to have sold 40 million records and his albums sit atop the Italian pop charts for half a year, every year, going platinum five times over, outside of Italy, few people have heard of camp superstar Renato Zero. In some respects, Zero could be said to be the inventor of glam rock. He was, you know, just being himself even before Bolan or Bowie put on eyeliner or platform heels.

He even had a punk nickname long before Sid Vicious or Johnny Rotten!

So flamboyant that he makes Freddie Mercury (or even Jobriath Boone) seem positively macho, Zero has steadfastly refused to either confirm or deny that he is gay throughout his now five decade long career (as if there would be much speculation.) From what I can tell, his lyrical themes are matters like “don’t give up on your dreams,” “fight to live the life you want to lead” and so forth.

Often called “The Emperor of Rome,” Renato Zero is still a huge star today, performing spectacular diva-like concerts that would make Lady Gaga jealous to a devoted fanbase. Ladies and gentlemen, take a look at pioneering genderbending Italian mega-performer, Renato Zero!

Below, Renato Zero as Mephistopheles, seller of happiness, singing “Vendo Felicita” in the pioneering Italian rock opera, Orpheus 9
 

 
More after the jump…

 
Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt were a wife and husband partnership briefly famous in Germany during the early 1920s for their wild, expressionist dance performances consisting of “creeping, stamping, squatting, crouching, kneeling, arching, striding, lunging, leaping in mostly diagonal-spiraling patterns” across the stage. Shulz believed “art should be…an expression of struggle” and used dance to express “the violent struggle of a female body to achieve central, dominant control of the performance space and its emptiness.”

In his book, Empire of Ecstasy—Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935, author Karl Toepfer notes that “Husband-wife dance pairs are quite rare on the stage; in the case of Schulz and Holdt the concept of marriage entailed a peculiarly deep implication in that it also referred to a haunting marriage of dance and costume.”

The couple created dances and costumes together and at the same time, so that bodily movement and the masking of the body arose from the same impulse. Schulz was a highly gifted artist whose drawings and sketches invariably startle the viewer with their hard primitivism and demonic abstraction, but Holdt assumed much responsibility for the design of the costumes and masks; for most of the costumes deposited in Hamburg, it is not possible to assign definite authorship to Schulz. The mask portions consisted mostly of fantastically reptilian, insectoid, or robotic heads, whereas the rest of the costumes comprised eccentric patchworks of design, color, and material to convey the impression of bodies assembled out of contradictory structures.

According to Toepfer, these costumes “disclose a quality of cartoonish, demonic grotesquerie rather than frightening ferocity.” The couple gave these designs descriptive names like Toboggan, Springvieh, and Technik, which they also used as titles for their performances. Their designs sought something pagan, pre-Christian, that tapped into the “redemptive organic forms of nature and the animal world.”

Little is known about Holdt. What is known about Schulz could be written on a postcard. Born in Lübben in 1896, Schulz studied dance and performance in Berlin in 1913. She became associated with the Expressionists who rebeled against the rigid, traditional forms of art in favor of a more subjective perspective. In dance, this meant abandoning the austere, mechanical, and precise choreography of ballet for more expressive, fluid, and personal interpretations. Schulz moved to Hamburg, where she married Holdt in April 1920. The couple had a tempestuous relationship. Schulz has been described as possessive and jealous, while Holdt was considered “untrustworthy” which I take to mean he played around a lot. The difficulties and emotional insecurities in their relationship fed into their work. According to Toepfer:

The Schulz-Holdt dance aesthetic does seem to embed a powerful masochism, not only in the marriage between dancers but in the equally passionate marriage of mask and movement. But the dances of this strange couple were also a kind of bizarre, expressionist demonization of marriage itself, the most grotesquely touching critique of pairing to appear in the whole empire of German dance culture.

The couple moved away from Expressionism and sought inspiration from the supposed purity of pre-Judeo-Christian, Aryan-Nordic culture—which kinda almost sounds vaguely National Socialist. They lived an austere existence in direst poverty. Their home was basically one room with little in the way of amenities or even a bed—they slept on straw. They wanted to live without money and desired a society where everyone was given an equal share on the basis of their needs. Between 1920-24, the couple performed their dance routines to the bewildered and often antagonistic audiences of Hamburg. Though some critics appreciated the pair’s talent and startling originality, this praise was never enough to pay the rent.

In 1923, Schulz gave birth to a son. In 1924, the couple were photographed in their costumes by Minya Diez-Dührkoop. That same year, on June 19th, four days before her birthday, Schulz, no longer able to withstand Holdt’s (suspected) adultery, shot her husband in a jealous rage several times at point blank range before turning the gun on herself. The couple were discovered dead lying on their bed of straw with their infant son between them.

Schulz and Holdt would have been long forgotten had not their designs and costumes been gifted to the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MKG) in 1925. These precious artefacts were rediscovered in 1989 and are available to view online in the full glory of color.

Below are some of Diez-Dührkoop’s original photographs from 1924 of Shulz and Holdt’s costumes.
 

‘Toboggan.’
 

 

‘Technik.’
 
More expressionist delights from Shulz and Holdt, after the jump…
 

 
With any longstanding musical career, fans tend to favor one particular era of a band or performer’s back catalog—the years that provide your go-to albums—and this is usually at around the point where you came in. Early Fall? Brix-era Fall? Post Brix-Fall? We all have a preference. Will you only ever bother with the gloomy first four Cure albums, or do you prefer their poppier late 80s/early 90s albums after they broke through in America? Sixties Zappa or Joe’s Garage? When faced with a choice of thirty albums to choose from the same source, we almost always tend to stick with our top two or three favorites, the cream of the crop. Who wants to listen to the 29th best Rolling Stones album, the 22nd best Kinks record or god forbid middling Jandek?

The Residents are a group whose fans have strong opinions about when the band was at their best. After all they’ve put out over a hundred releases. For me, it’s the run of albums that goes from 1977’s Fingerprince to 1980’s Commercial Album. I recently expressed this to a friend of mine who opined that once the Residents reoriented what they were doing in service to their live performances and starting incorporating MIDI into everything, that there was a noticeable drop-off in musical quality. I think this hits the nail pretty squarely on the head.

The album that is, to me at least, the very apex of the Residents singular art form, is their 1979 album Eskimo. Although quite different to everything that preceded it and all that came after, too, Eskimo is an album that stands tall among the classic post-punk albums released that year (Metal Box, Cut, Fear of Music, Unknown Pleasures, Secondhand Daylight, 154) and one that stands apart from all of them as well. It’s also when their famous eyeball costumes debuted. There is literally nothing else like it. Not by the Residents, not by anyone. Eskimo is the Residents’ avant-garde ambient poetic masterpiece.

If you’ve never heard it before, Eskimo is a purported (it’s totally fake) ethnomusicological “documentary” study of the lives of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic Circle, as if it’s assembled from phony field recordings. Each track is paired to a loose narrative in the liner notes which is “acted out” sonically with sound effects, howling winds, nonsensical chanting, grunts, whistles, homemade instruments, seal and walrus sounds. What you hear on the album is the product of the Residents working in the studio alongside of Henry Cow’s Chris Cutler on percussion, former Mother of Invention Don Preston on synthesizers, and Snakefinger on guitar. It’s not exactly “music” but it’s close enough.

In the context of the Residents’ ongoing Cherry Red pREServation series, Eskimo was recently re-released along with bonus tracks like the “Diskomo” single, the 20-minute long “Eskimo Acappella Suite,” the Residents’ songs from the classic Ralph Records compilation Subterranean Modern as well as unreleased demo recordings from the Eskimo period and later related rehearsal and live recordings from the 80s. It’s excellent and obviously comprehensive.

But what comes next seems almost unprecedented for musicians who have so seldom offered any insight whatsoever into their creative process. Eskimo Deconstructed (available only on vinyl) is a two LP set that basically provides Eskimo‘s component parts in a manner that allows the listener to discern exactly what went into the making of this oddball concept album. In other words all of the layers of Eskimo, the chanting—listen for “Coca-Cola adds life,” “Don’t squeeze the Charmin,” “Are we not men? We are DEVO,” “You asked for it, you got it” (a mid-70s Toyota tagline) and “You deserve a break today” (from a McDonald’s campaign)—the tape manipulations, conversations in gibberish, the ship’s mast creaking in the wind, splashing water, crying babies and other sound effects are laid out like an autopsy. There’s even a CD of synthetic wind sounds that, being a fan of Don Preston’s Filters, Oscillators & Envelopes 1967-82 album, I’m going to guess is Preston making an hour’s worth of howling wind noises on a Minimoog to serve as a sound bed for the work. He’s so adept at achieving this sound that for some time it’s impossible to tell if it’s an analog synthesizer or someone holding up a microphone in a particularly vicious snowstorm. Cutler’s and Snakefinger’s key contributions, laid bare as such, can also be appreciated for what they brought to the party.

Continues after the jump…

Rob Halford pictured on the front cover of the single for Two’s “I Am A Pig.”
 
In 1996, after calling it quits with his excellent post-Priest project Fight, Rob Halford had a conversation with a rock journalist friend while attending Foundations Forum—a heavy metal convention held in Los Angeles from 1988-1997. At this point, Halford was looking to start up something new and his pal suggested he get ahold of Marilyn Manson guitarist John 5 (John Lowery). Halford and Lowery hooked up for several days in LA collaborating on riffs, melodies, and lyrics. According to Halford it was a case of “synchronicity at work”.

His meeting with Trent Reznor, which led to Reznor’s participation in Two, came much later in the band’s development and most of the music Halford, Lowery, Bob Marlette, Phil Western and Anthony “Fu” Valcic had already been recorded and were “well past the demo stage,” per Halford. While visiting New Orleans during Mardi Gras, Halford simply walked up to Reznor’s former funeral home, Nothing Studios and knocked on the door. (Of interest is the door itself, taken from Reznor’s former residence—the Manson Family murder house once occupied by Sharon Tate and her husband, Roman Polanski.) The door was answered by another inhabitant of Nothing Studios, former Skinny Puppy member and producer, Rave Ogilvie. Ogilvie and Halford had never met, but when Rob Halford knocks on your door, the only right thing to do is to let him the fuck in—which Ogilvie did without hesitation.

A short time later as Ogilvie and Rob were hanging out listening to a cassette with some of the music from Two’s album, Voyeurs Reznor showed up, and Trent asked Halford if he could listen to his new tunes. He and Reznor hung out for a few more days in New Orleans, as Reznor was scheduled to appear in a few Mardi Gras parades. Halford returned to his home in Phoenix and a few months later Reznor called Rob and offered Two a record contract which, though Reznor and Rob had vibed musically, still caught the metal god off guard. Here’s more from Halford on that:

“When he called me up after listening to the album, a few months later, he said, ‘Do you want a record deal?’ I was like, ‘Ahhh… yeah… that would be great.’ But I couldn’t understand why? And then he told me that he had been listening to the music and he had a vision. He could hear them (the songs) in a different way. And could we take them and break them down and build them up again, with his interpretation.”

Reznor would take Two’s recordings and re-engineer them, though Halford had “no idea” what Trent had planned and was just really excited at the prospect of Reznor’s (as well as Ogilvie’s) participation in the project, and how his influence would impact the sound of Voyeurs. The album was already a diverse piece of work, and once Reznor was finished applying his sonic touches, it was released on March 10th, 1998, though the first single, “I am A Pig” started circulating late in February. And this is where we finally get to talk about one of the best things to come out of Rob and Reznor’s collaboration—the porn-star studded video for “I am a Pig” directed by Chi Chi LaRue, a prominent porn director and drag queen based in Los Angeles.
 

Two.
 
As it turns out, some of Halford’s friends had recently worked with LaRue, and this got Rob thinking that a video visualized and directed by LaRue would be just what Two needed for the “I Am A Pig” video. According to the story told by Halford, he really clicked with LaRue, who was also a massive metal fan. LaRue was totally into the idea of shooting a video for Two featuring all kinds of S&M action, a litany of adult actors of various sexual orientations, and, of course, a shirtless Rob Halford suspended from the ceiling with a gag in his mouth. While this sounds like a slice of fucking heaven to yours truly, it also went over big with Nothing Records and Interscope which supported the concept of the video completely. Before you take a look at the very NSFW video below, here’s the infinitely wise Halford breaking down the porntastic video for “I Am A Pig”:

“The song itself lyrically contains the idea that what we see as we are now is something different from the potential to be. Like whatever skeletons you have in the closet or whatever. We all carry two sides to our personality, one where we’re in the public domain, a really different person from what we are in private. So that’s the element of what the song is about. The video is just taking sexuality, physical sexuality, and using that as a metaphor to describe the feelings of the song. So we have all these different scenes going on in the video, of different people doing different things with each other. And collectively, it comes up as the boundary lying between being a pig and being a voyeur.”

If you’ve never heard anything by Two, I’m here to tell you “I Am A Pig” sounds just like you’d likely expect—kind of like NIN but with a metal edge and Rob Halford on vocals. Even with Reznor’s industrial influence, the song still reflects Halford’s style. That said, it is very hooky, and at this stage of Halford’s style evolution, he was cultivating a major goth vibe with a jet-black goatee and outfits that looked like they were ripped off from the future set of The Matrix. So yeah, the album might not have been well received initially, but as it has aged, opinion on the merit of Voyeurs has changed drastically, and now it resides somewhere in the realm of cult classics.

More after the jump…

 
In addition to their fabulous full-length records, the Pixies issued a number of great B-sides during their original late ‘80s/early ‘90s run. One of their lesser known—but still totally awesome—non-LP tracks was an unlikely remake.

During the 1980s, the United States government’s “War on Drugs” was in full swing. In 1986, Ronald Reagan signed into law the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which established mandatory minimum sentences for certain drug crimes. Incarceration rates for nonviolent drug offenders also increased dramatically under Reagan’s watch. It was in this era of “Say No to Drugs” that a new video game emerged.

In 1988, NARC debuted in arcades across the country. The game pitted law enforcement against individuals involved in the distribution or consumption of illegal drugs. Coming across as some sort of far right-wing fantasy, the object of the game was to apprehend or kill (but mainly kill) anyone associated with unlawful drug activity. NARC was one of the first ultra-violent games, and it raised the eyebrows of parents concerned about its display of graphic violence.
 

 
It’s been reported that during the recording sessions for Trompe Le Monde (1991), Pixies singer/guitarist Black Francis became obsessed with Nintendo’s home version of NARC. The Pixies were by no means an anti-drug band, and it’s unclear how their frontman became hooked on NARC. Perhaps he played it during repeated lulls in the studio, or absorbing himself in a violent video game was a way to blow off steam (tensions within the group would lead to a break up in early 1993). Regardless, we know that Black Francis definitely was drawn to one element of NARC—its music. There’s a brief quote that circulates online, said to be from the fanzine, Rock a My Soul, in which Francis talks a bit about the video game’s theme.

“Theme From NARC” doesn’t really have a chorus. I thought it was pretty cool, because the chord progression in it is completely fucked up. It isn’t a standard rock ‘n’ roll progression.

Continues after the jump…

 
In 1983, Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ frontman Kevin Rowland managed to get his band booted off their prestigious support gig on David Bowie’s Serious Moonlight tour. Dexy’s were riding high as a ragamuffin band of “Celtic soul rebels” who had scored big with their single “Come on Eileen.” Despite the plum role on Bowie’s show-bill, Rowland was no fan of the Thin White Duke. Unfortunately, he made his antipathy public during one gig at the Hippodrome d’Auteuil, Paris, when he told the audience David Bowie was “full of shit,” before adding:

“I don’t know why you are so fussed about Bowie. Bryan Ferry has much more style.”

To be fair, Rowland had a point—well, half a point. Bryan Ferry has always been stylish, while Bowie often latched onto trends, characters, and talented collaborators (like Mick Ronson, Tony Visconti, and Brian Eno) to find his style and further his career. Ferry always seemed to know exactly who he was, what he was about, and where he was going.

A baby boomer born into a working class family in Washington, County Durham in 1945, Ferry inherited his obsession for music from his mother. Music was just noise to his father, but for his mother it was a passion. From the age of ten, Ferry was obsessed with rock and jazz. He preferred American artists like Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Charlie Parker, rather than the homegrown sounds of ‘50s skiffle. He got a Saturday job delivering newspapers and magazines so he could read up on all the new record releases and any reviews or interviews with his favorite artists.

Ferry said he never quite fit in at school and always felt a bit of “an oddity.” While his classmates argued about the differences between Bill Haley and Chuck Berry or Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele, he chose to follow the artists on the Stax and Tamla Motown labels. It wasn’t just the music he liked but how these artists presented themselves—synchronized dance routines, sharps suits, and beautifully coiffed hair styles. It was show business where the image was as important as the sound.

The confirmation that he was on the right track came when he started studying fine art at Newcastle University. Under the guidance of noted British pop artist Richard Hamilton, Ferry became more confident in his own nascent talents and began writing songs. These were at first influenced by Hamilton’s pop aesthetic, best heard in songs like “Virginia Plain” which was inspired by a painting Ferry had made of a packet of cigarettes (Virginia Plain was then a brand of cigarette).

His musical ambitions were brought into sharper focus after he hitch-hiked to London to see Otis Redding perform in concert in 1967. It was then that Ferry knew he had to become a singer.
 
Watch stylish Bryan Ferry in concert, after the jump…