Three weeks ago I posted a clip of Echo And The Bunnymen promoting their then new single Bring On The Dancing Horses on early evening entertainment and chat show The Wogan Show. Ian, Will, Les and Pete got away with it with their customary cool and casual indifference to their surroundings. I said it might make a good idea for an irregular series, Bands Performing In Places They Shouldn't Be (or rather Bands Being Booked Onto Inappropriate TV Programmes By Their Record Companies To Sell Their Wares). There were quite a few suggestions on the comments and I've got a few of my own so we'll work our way through them over the summer.
Firstly, and I've posted this before but it definitely stands up to repeat posting, before we leave Terry Wogan and his shiny studio environment we should recall that in 1986 Pete Wylie appeared on The Wogan Show to lip sync Sinful.
It's magnificent stuff, Wylie in black leather, Josie Jones (also in black leather) on Paul Weller's pop art guitar and three dancers dressed as nuns/ three hot nuns dancing. Sinful is a superb record and one of this blog's theme tunes and signature songs. Miming on Wogan does not diminish it at all.
In July 1987 Spear Of Destiny's press officer had the brilliant idea of booking them on a kids show called Get Fresh, live from Fistral Beach, Newquay, Cornwall. The single they were promoting was Never Take Me Alive, epic guitar rock from their Outlands album. The appearance on the beach at Newquay is bizarre and hilarious, something the band have cottoned on to. Kirk Brandon smirks and laughs his way through the brief interview and the performance. At one point they are surrounded and then joined by a group of Medieval knights, some of whom mime guitar with their swords.
Trying to mime the words 'Mother I killed someone/ It wasn't that I hated him/ You see he was trying to stop me/ But he found out/ I've gone the whole way... They'll never take me alive' with any kind of post- punk menace under these circumstances is all but impossible.
Pebble Mill At One was a long running BBC TV programme, early afternoon light entertainment broadcast from the foyer of the BBC's studios in Birmingham. In 1983 Aztec Camera had the privilege of performing Oblivious to the studio audience. Oblivious is wonderful obviously. Roddy is resplendent in fringed buckskin, Western shirt and 60s mop. They make the best of it.
Three weeks ago The Swede left a comment saying that Ian Dury made several appearances on Pebble Mill. Really Glad You Came was a 1983 single, sans Blockheads. Ian manages to style it out, making lunch time TV in the early 80s look like a good place to be.
I came across this clip recently and thought it might make a good starting point for an irregular series- bands performing in places they really shouldn't be. This is Echo And The Bunnymen in their 1985 pomp, miming to their then current single Bring On The Dancing Horses on The Wogan Show.
In 2023 this maybe doesn't seem so odd, a big alternative act taking advantage of early evening television to sell their new single to a wider audience. In our post- irony world Terry Wogan is looked back on fondly, the man with the chuckling commentary at Eurovision. In the mid- 80s Wogan had no cool at all. The show was as mainstream as you could get. The Bunnymen approach it with customary insouciance, Mac all in black and miming his croon through his fringe, pale, beautiful and with those legendary full lips. Will, also all in black but with leather trousers and customised guitar. Les looks like James Dean with a bass guitar. Pete, again all in black, playing to the side not at the back, as they often set themselves out. Dry ice gathers round their ankles and the BBC's Wogan set flashes behind them. They do give the impression that they'd be somewhere else.
Bring On the Dancing Horses is a shimmering single with tons of hooks, Ian's vocals gliding on top of the synths and Will's gorgeous guitars. It's a real favourite of mine, a tug at the heartstrings song, one they still play live today. Some Bunnyfans are less enamoured with it- too poppy for some, too covered in Laurie Latham's slick production. The 12" version add two extra minutes, extending the intro with more guitars, more synths and FX.
I woke up recently with Pete Wylie's single Sinful running through my head. Sinful came out in 1987, a hit that saw him return to Top Of The Pops with Josie Jones and three backing dancers dressed as nuns.
Ace isn't it? The song, the Zeus B. Held production, what looks like Paul Weller's pop art Rickenbacker, the performance, the presenters (John Peel and Janice Long), the sheer Wylie spirit. I've posted the Top Of The Pops clip before but shockingly, and in a clear breech of the bloggers convention that all music blogs must post Wylie or Wah! at least once in any given calendar year, there hasn't been any Wylie or Wah! to date in 2019.
Here the same line up perform/mime on Wogan. Magic.
I've got an uneasy feeling that we're all going to wake up on Friday morning in a very unpleasant state. There isn't anything I've seen over the last few weeks that makes me feel optimistic about the result of the election and I think we going to be saddled with five years of Tory rule with a lying, racist, homophobic and vacuous Prime Minister.
In 1982 Pete Wylie, then operating under the name Wah!, wrote a song called The Story Of The Blues. It was partly in response to the then Conservative government and the portrayal of life and unemployment under that government in Alan Bleasdale's series The Boys From The Blackstuff. The Blues of the title can be interpreted as the Tories. The first part of Wylie's song is an exhortation to people who are about to give up, who have been kicked and kicked again, to be positive and strong, to organise and resist.
'First they take your pride
Turn it all inside
And then you realise
You've got nothing left to lose
So you try to stop
Try to get back up
And then you realise
You're telling the story of the blues'
Wylie was also expressing his frustration with his record company and the way they were trying to market Wah! and reduce the multi-faceted, rough edged group down into a single, shiny marketable product. Everyone hated their record labels in the 1980s didn't they? It was par for the course for those inspired by punk to sign to a major for the advance and the distribution and then face battles in everything they did.
Wylie and Wah! recorded an extended version which took the pop single, full of female backing vocals and violins, further with a long spoken word section- The Story Of The Blues (Talkin' Blues) and they run as one song on the 12". In this section Wylie blasts the news media for selling Thatcher's economic policies and for criticising people, young people especially, for being unemployed, as if being in the dole made you less of a person. These were all big issues in the early 80s- unemployment, the right to work, the destruction of manufacturing industry and the jobs that went with them, the throwing of people onto the scrapheap.
'...well that's my story and I'm sticking to that. So let's have another drink and let's talk about the blues. Blues is about dignity, it's about self-respect, and no matter what they take away from you - that's yours for keeps. I remember how it was, how every medium - T.V. and papers and radio and all those people were saying: 'you're on the scrap-heap, you're useless', and I remember how easy it was to start believing that. I remember how you'd hear people take it for granted that it was true - just 'cause someone with an ounce of power said so. And that's a problem now, too many oddballs, too many pocketbook psychologists and would-be philosophers with an axe to grind. But there's a solution, it's not easy, but it's a matter of coming to terms in your heart with situation you're in, a matter of choosing how things go for you and not having things forced upon you. There are plenty of forces against you, forcing you against your will, your ideals - you've got to hope for the best, and that's the best you can hope for - you've got to hope against hope... I remember something Sal Paradise said, he said: 'the city intellectuals of the world are debauched from the full body blood-of-the-land and are just rootless fools'. So listen, when the smile, the condescending pat-on-the-back comes and says: 'we're sorry, but you're nothing, you've got nothing for us and we've got nothing for you', you say: 'No', and say it loud: "NO!", and remember, people who talk about revolution and a class-struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love, and what is positive in the refusal and constraint...since people have a corpse in their mouth..." In 2013 the I'm A Cliche Edit Service website presented an unoffical re-edit of The Story Of The Blues, credited to It's A Fine Line (Tim Paris and Ivan Smagghe). This is a killer re-working of Wah!'s original with a long looped opening section, the backing vocals fading in behind the violins and then Wylie's words. The last few minutes are quite heady and when you get to the end it's very easy to just click replay and listen to it all over again. Several times. Even better, it's still available to download for free.
I was going to go full Pete Wylie and post Come Back and Imperfect List as well but maybe we should come back to them another day. Come Back is a political love song, an anthem and call to arms and Imperfect List a purging, a shitlist of all the things Wylie and Jones hated (two versions, one in 1990 and one in 2013). But I think I'll come back to them another day.
