— Johnny Black
I first began this project by going through Brian McCloskey's fantastic Smash Hits archive and making a list of the Singles of the Fortnight. I hadn't yet come up with the idea of blogging every SOTF at this time, I just wanted to have them all jotted down. I soon noticed some peculiarities: some acts received way too many best new record honours, others not nearly enough; there were plenty I'd never heard of before and a few I'd forgotten about completely. Some songs titles also intrigued and/or puzzled me and one I had to double check because it had to be wrong.
I first imagined "It Takes a Muscle to Fall in Love" to be about sex and the male member having to exert its muscle(s) in an amourous clinch. Perhaps, I reasoned, it even harks back to adolescent boys sporting partials and misinterpreting them as feelings of love. (I'm not the only one, am I?) Sex, sex, sex, eh? Listening to it for the first time, it quickly dawned on me that it actually refers to strength and that it really ought to be "It Takes Some Muscle..." or "It Takes Muscles...". (Spectral Display members Michael Mulders and Henri Overduin are Dutch and so the indefinite article may be down to a small error of the non-native English speaker) Love requires you to be strong: not the most original of thoughts but no matter.
"It Takes a Muscle..." isn't for everyone. If you don't like synths then you don't like synths and there's little I can do for you. I could point out that this song could easily be reinterpreted as a heart-wrenching gospel number or a tender country lament or a grand operatic piece but I suppose that will only strengthen your antipathy towards the electronica here. Effective as those potential covers could be they'd likely struggle to interpret the harrowing loneliness of the original. Continental types, such as Kraftwerk, Jean-Michel Jarre and Jan Hammer (not to mention the Berlin-period Bowie-Eno), had long been using synthesizers to depict a Cold War industrial town smokestack terrain; Spectral Display take this approach but apply it to individual despair, something that British acts like Black and The Blue Nile would soon be taking up.
Delicate and sparse, the musical arrangement is so perfectly suited to Overduin's vocal, which manages to stray oh so close into melodrama while maintaining a shred of distance. Though mired in pain, the lyrics aren't totally bogged down in the singer's own personal trauma. The song's first verse reads like he's giving advice to a close friend but the remainder delves into his own feelings of loss. He offers a faint degree of hope to his troubled confidant ("You're gonna live tomorrow, if you don't die today") which he contrasts with his own far bleaker state ("Feels like I'll break down tomorrow, if I don't die today"). Yes, he appears to be making someone else's troubles all about himself but what he lacks in compassionate friendship he makes up for with a shimmering tune that puts the listener in the position of being adviser and advisee.
With so many studio boffins of the age using synthy pyrotechnics to wow the listener, it's a refreshing change to hear electronics serve the song — a point somehow missed by M.I.A.'s atrocious cover. Whatever can be going on in Holland? I don't know but I'd love to hear what other Dutch groups were up to if Spectral Display is anything to go by.
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Also of some cop
Rip, Rip + Panic: "Beat the Beast"
With jazz dabblage being all the rage among post-punk indie types in the early-eighties, it's only right that the stepdaughter of a cog in sixities avant-garde would be in an improvisational mood. Not so much like the work of Don Cherry on Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come and Free Jazz (in addition to Cherry's own excellent free jazz-waltz Symphony for Improvisers), this is more like Lester Bowie's dixieland-meets-big band-meets-bop-meets-modern craziness style. The song could easily be something recorded by Cab Calloway but Neneh Cherry and her RRP cohorts — appropriately — rip it apart with some wickedly demented soloing that wouldn't be out of place with Bowie's extraordinary unit the Art Ensemble of Chicago. And despite what I said above about dabblage, it sounds as if they were more willing to commit themselves to jazz than some of their contemporaries. A part of me wishes this this constituted the real Bristol sound.
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