Tom Tom Club: "Wordy Rappinghood"

25 June 1981

"The funk comes thick and medium fast."

— Tim De Lisle

This entry finishes completes the eighties on this blog. I started off just over four years ago with "Skin Deep" by The Passions which was the Single of the Fortnight at the beginning of July, 1981 and Tom Tom Club's "Wordy Rappinghood" finishes things off — except that from this point on I am going to go about revising those early posts, beginning with (you guessed it) "Skin Deep" by The Passions. Full circle or something.

The occasion is an appropriate opportunity to take stock. From Philip Rambow at the start of 1980 all the way through to Neneh Cherry at the end of 1989 there have been over two hundred acts who have taken at least one SOTF. Many are notable, some have been largely forgotten over time and a few weren't even very well known back then. Other groups and singers who were popular at the time — some of whom even grace the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — missed out entirely. For example, New Order failed to get a single top new release honour (though they will be appearing eventually). Neither did Phil Collins. Also Spandau Ballet. And Talking Heads.

The "Psycho Killer" band were critical darlings and they still have a very loyal fanbase, one that would be overjoyed in the unlikely event that they ever reform and go on tour again. Yet they weren't exactly chart regulars, their sole British Top 40 success up to this point being "Once in a Lifetime" earlier in 1981. (Subsequent 45's like "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)" and a live "Slippery People" came up short while "Burning Down the House" somehow missed the charts completely) This probably didn't bode well for a single by side project headed (PUN!) by rhythm section and longtime couple Chris Franz and Tina Weymouth.

Yet somehow or other "Wordy Rappinghood" became a Top 10 in the UK hit that summer. Being far more fun than anything Talking Heads had released to date no doubt helped and I imagine it struch a chord with the British who are typically suckers for catchy novelty pop. Fair enough and well done to them but it grates at least as much as it charms. Weymouth is no one's idea of a brilliant vocalist (she manages to sound child-like on the Tom Tom Club's cover of "Under the Boardwalk" but her rapping on this track has a faint drawl of an old lady with a smoker's cough) and the song doesn't have the flamboyance of ver Heads' best work. I suppose "Wordy Rappinghood" is clever to an extent but the joke wears thin before its four-and-a-half-minute playing time is even up. David Byrne has a gift for making his intelligence and quirks seem compelling but there's nothing that comes close that on here. But she does a verse in French! Yes, and Talking Heads were doing that back in 1977 on the famed "Psycho Killer". If Franz and Weymouth were happy to remain in the shadow of their more acclaimed day job then they succeeded.

Byrne was said to have been cool towards the Tom Tom Club being so commercial and I can sort of see his point. (Assuming this is how he actually felt: Franz and Weymouth have been critical of the singer but he's been largely silent about them; he evidently didn't despise them enough to prevent their American hit "Genius of Love" from being included in their famed Stop Making Sense concert film and soundtrack) Talking Heads would go a little more mainstream over the course of the eighties — "Road to Nowhere" would finally break them in the UK Top 10 and there's no denying the pop bona fides of "Burning Down the House" — but their records never sounded cheap. Tom Tom Club records have their charms but all too often they fell into the They Might Be Giants trap of smart people deliberately making disposable music. Before long, people begin to dispose of it — often well before they've ditched the genuine bubblegum pop in their collections.

I as mentioned above, Franz and Weymouth have spoken bitterly about Byrne over the years. They clearly still admire his talent but she has stated that he is "incapable of returning friendship". For his part, Byrne didn't refute this, claiming that "bad blood" remains and that musically speaking they're "miles apart". "Word Rappinghood" only suggests that this has always been the case even if Talking Heads were all the better off because of it.

~~~~~

Also of some cop

Robert Palmer: "Not a Second Time"

Another one without a SOTF to his name, Robert Palmer had his ups and downs over the course of the eighties. He would later butcher classics by both Bob Dylan ("I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" along with fellow cover version fiends UB40) and Marvin Gaye (a very lame, very depressing medley of "What's Going On" and "I Want You") but he and his backing group give the Lennon-McCartney cut from the With The Beatles album the respect it deserves. Rob even added a verse ("You say you spoke too soon / And now you want to change your tune...") that doesn't sound out place. Tim De Lisle hopes it will be a "massive hit" but it disappeared without a trace, either suggesting that (a) the British were done with Beatles/Lennon product six months' after John's horrifying murder and subsequent deluge of product or (b) Palmer was right to have a go at better known rock hits of the past that he could lay waste to and score hits with. The Power Station's ghastly cover of "Get It On" was just right around the corner...

Glass Torpedoes: Someone Different

26 July 1979 (and here)

"Liverpool will rise again!"

— Red Starr

What I previously said: 
The spidery riffs and a hard-plonking beat make this an easy to like if kind of underwhelming first SOTF. The ghostly, expressionless vocals and minimalist atmospherics put it very much in the context of late-seventies new wave. It seems they were very young at the time — the fact that they were on a label known as Teen Beat sort of gives away their age — and, thus, were a promising bunch. Or so it seemed.

Cliff White and Red "Ian Cranna" Starr switched places this fortnight. It seems it was something they agreed to do just to spite all the youngsters who had been writing in to complain about their awful reviews. This fortnight's singles begins with a short message which reads as follows:

Well, it's what you wanted, wasn't it? No Cliff White on singles and no Red Starr on albums? What do you think of it so far? — Ed.

And there we all were thinking that Tom Hibbert ushered in the era of trolling-merriment to ver Hits.

Being in the middle of 1979, it's strange to think that Liverpool was having an especially tough time of it. Their Bob Paisley-era football squad was at its zenith with a high-powered offence and a stingy defense (just sixteen goals allowed all season!) that once again put them comfortably atop the old First Division. (Inevitably to be outdone was Everton coming a respectable yet underwhelming as ever fourth) In terms of pop music, this was hardly The Beatles rockin' The Cavern Club but there was probably a good deal more depth to be found in Scouse post-punk than during the Merseybeat boom.

Not leading the way and not forging a future was Glass Torpedoes. For a nice debut single by a young act, there was every reason to expect they had a bright future. For whatever reason, it didn't happen but it says a lot that Starr would nevertheless see big things for their hometown in general on the evidence of this one record. Well, not really. He's nearly as impressed by "The Pictures on My Wall" by Echo & The Bunnymen, yet another new act out of Liverpool. Listening to the pair of new releases back to back it's difficult to spot the group who would carve out a nice career and the group that would ultimately go nowhere. They're both solid examples of post-punk but neither is particularly notable beyond speculating where they'd be headed next, if anywhere. Quite what did a Glass Torpedo think when Ian McCulloch claimed that his group could have been U2? "Yeah, and we could have been Echo & The bloody Bunnymen".

While it is very much a period piece, it didn't occur to me how ahead of its time Barbara Donovan's vocals are. She anticipates many of the riot grrrl acts of the nineties with her monotone delivery. It's impossible to say if the likes of Sleater-Kinney or Babes in Toyland knowingly cribbed from her but there's always the possibility of a domino effect. I certainly hope so since it would be nice if there was a bit more to them than just a proto-Single of the Fortnight.

Finally, in my original write up from March of 2018 I seem unaware that this is an E.P. we're dealing with. I guess I didn't examine Starr's review very well since he brings it up himself. The other two tracks are all right and further evidence of their promise. If only they'd been able to deliver on it.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Talking Heads: "Take Me to the River"

There's been some backlash of late towards David Byrne. His old bandmates, it would seem, object to the fact that a self-centred, socially awkward geek doesn't seem to care about them. Curious. While it's always worth going back to see just what a wondrous foursome they were forty years ago, it's also important to acknowledge that not everything they touched turned to gold. Underrated songwriters, they attempted a rare cover here that they were fond enough of to keep as a part of their concert setlist for the next five years. I'm happy for them they like it so much but the results are grim. Nothing beats ruining a perfectly good soul classic like sucking all the life, religiosity and sexiness out of it. But don't just blame David Byrne.

Bim: "Factory"

18 March 1982

"Much of the chart music of recent months has been exciting, good for dancing, well-produced but very little of it has been powerful. "Factory" is all four things at once".
— Tim De Lisle

Day 1
Feeling somewhat dissatisfied with the entry on "Party Fears Two", you decided not to bother linking it on Facebook. Did anyone even notice? You promised yourself that you wouldn't get obsessed with page views and the number of times friends clicked on the like button but it's virtually impossible to avoid. You were hoping that PFT would be something of a breakthrough for your blog, the one where you finally began to grasp the nuances of critiquing an eighties pop song but it didn't quite work out that way.

But "Factory" represents a fresh start. You find the link on YouTube, play it a couple times and jot down any thoughts that crop into your head. Your only real goal today is to come up with some sort of theme that can act as a basis for the upcoming entry. You eventually think up a half-baked thesis that might work and you begin to feel confident that you've got a bite on it. Maybe this will be the breakthrough.

Day 2
Set aside some time in the morning for further note taking but you fail to do so in any meaningful way. The thought begins to gnaw at you that there may not be much of any real substance to say. Bim hardly being a successful, well-remembered group of the time, you resort to relying on Wikipedia for the bulk of your research. There's not a whole lot even there so you scribble down some random stuff about how both singer Cameron McVey and bassist Stephen Street would later go on to careers as producers of Massive Attack and Blur respectively. You then decide to write about the role that studio boffins played in mythologising pop music in your mind. Their names — alongside those of Stephen Hague and John Leckie and Steve Lillywhite, among others — you would take note of while leafing through album liner notes and they became curious musical heroes despite the fact that (a) you knew nothing about them and (b) you still aren't exactly sure just what producers do. You like all this but question its relevance to the blog post and decided not to bother including it.

Day 3
Nothing gets done. You make yourself work on it but you keep procrastinating in favour of crap on YouTube. You hate yourself and begin to think that you'll never make it as a real writer.

Day 4
A change of atmosphere might do the trick so you decide to work on it in a cafe. YouTube still manages to mess with you but you do get a couple pages worth of notes written in spite of your best efforts to get as little done as possible. (Just how much of it you bother using is another matter) You find yourself in agreement with Tim de Lisle that "Factory" is indeed exciting, good for dancing, well-produced AND powerful but it still doesn't do that much for you. Too bad, then, that such a trite observation has already been done on this blog. Or has it?

Day 5
When you aren't either fretting about this blog's future or ignoring getting any real work done on it you can be quite productive. Too bad, then, that you spent the whole day either fretting about this blog's future or ignoring getting any real work done. On a positive note, you've really begun to enjoy the whistling solos that follow the first two choruses of "Factory". Right up there with other great whistling pop songs such as "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" and "Cornflake Girl" — and way better than bloody "Joyride".

Day 7
Well, it's time to get this sucker posted. You're not especially well prepared but you've always managed to get something done on previous deadline Wednesdays so you aren't too worried about it. Desperate for information, you do a Google search for 'Bim Factory lyrics' but tracking down the words proves elusive. The best you're able to come up with is some stuff about how while, yes, this single has a lot going for it, it feels like a flop. Whereas The Passions' "Skin Deep" could have easily attained a middling Top 40 position but ended up falling short, this smacks of never having had a chance. It's getting late and you're worried about that writer's high keeping you up and so you give up on trying to explain why.

Resigned, you publish the post and are just glad to get it out of the way. You begin to think about "Anyone Who Had a Heart" by B.E.F. presents Sandie Shaw: maybe that'll be the breakthrough you've been hoping for.

~~~~~

Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Talking Heads: "Life During Wartime (live)"

Day 6
Realising all of a sudden that you've been neglecting the other song you're supposed to pick, you make the hasty decision to write about Talking Heads, a group you used to enjoy listening to — Remain in Light was your favourite album about sixteen years ago — but have since moved on from. Still, it's an easy choice. Taking the easy way out from covering something genuinely left field like Mathematiques Modernes' "Disco Rough" or maybe Bill Wyman's "A New Fashion" just for a laugh, you opt for a live rendition of "Life During Wartime" from The Name of the Band Is Talking Heads. De Lisle points out that it's not as good as the studio version from their seminal Fear of Music album but LDW sounds pretty much as it always did. You used to wonder why ver Heads stuck with being a quartet on their records when they had become a nine-piece while on tour but now you've realised that it makes little difference. It does remind you, however, of the first time you watched Stop Making Sense with a couple friends and you observed that it would make a fantastic aerobics workout video (only to discover later when you got round to watching it with the DVD commentary that one of them — was David "swotty swot-swot" Byrne or one of the others? — made a similar remark at about the same moment. "Life During Wartime" remains reliably the same in any setting and the rhetorical "why stay in college? / why go to night school" line still makes you chuckle just as it always did.