PICTURES CAME AND BROKE YOUR HEART

Trouser Press, May 1982
The Buggles
Fade Away/On TV



There are one-hit wonders, and then there are one-hit wonders...

The Buggles are of course best known for Video Killed the Radio Star.

I've always thought of fellow one-hit wonder Pop Muzik by M as an aural twin of Video Killed the Radio Star.

Both songs burble along with bleeps, bloops, bubbles, and highly processed vocals.

They are crisp, cool New Wave Lite in colorful aluminum cans.

But where Pop Muzik is a reverie, Video Killed the Radio Star is a lament. It is Helen Twelvetrees cursing the dawn of the talkies...

Another key point of divergence for the two songs is their performance on the 1979 US charts. Pop Muzik made it all the way to number 1, while Video Killed the Radio Star just scraped into the top 40.

But two years later, the iconic status of the latter song would be sealed when it became the first video played on MTV. (And somewhat shockingly, Pop Muzik was not even among the first 200 videos aired by the station.)

This clear flexi contains two songs by the Buggles that are not Video Killed the Radio Star: Fade Away and On TV. Both tracks play like the intersection of synth-pop and prog that they are-- kind of like Heaven 17, if Heaven 17 were unconcerned with making you shake your groove thang...

TRYING TO TAKE THIS ALL IN

Trouser Press, April 1982
XTC
Blame the Weather/Tissue Tigers (The Arguers)



What better way to start 2012 than ecstatically...

This flexi is a plumb pretty piece of clear red plastic.

Both Blame the Weather and Tissue Tigers (The Arguers) saw the light of commercial day as B-sides of Senses Working Overtime. They are very strong tracks, and only when measured against something as transcendently great as their A-side do they sound like B-sides.

Back in the summer of '83, I took a job doing landscaping work. I was truly awful at it-- I had none of the practical sense to clean a yard efficiently, nor the strong back and clear lungs to do it for any meaningful stretch of time.

I drove my '73 Ford Maverick to the job each morning. The car didn't have a radio, so I'd sling my boombox across the back seat and let it suck down D batteries. I wore out a copy of XTC's Waxworks cassette that summer, many times reaching over the seat to hit auto-reverse so that I could hear Senses Working Overtime again.

The foreman kept me on the job for a month or so as a favor to my brother, but ultimately we all came to our senses and I moved on...

COLUMN INCHES

Saw a headline today that Scorpions are calling it quits, which reminded me of my '05 interview with the band's Rudolf Schenker...

Halten rocking, mein dudes. Halten rocking.

FLEXIDISCOVERING JAPAN

Trouser Press, March 1982
Japan
Life Without Buildings



David Sylvain: We're well chuffed that you're doing a Japan flexi, but we just had a couple of small requests.

Trouser Press: OK, shoot.

DS: Right. First, could you make the disc roughly the same color as David Bowie's eye makeup in the “Life on Mars?” video?

TP: Done.

DS: Second, we'd like the track to be the almost entirely instrumental, six-plus minute long, cod-Asian, sub-Joy Division B-side to our UK single, “The Art of Parties.”

TP: No prob.

DS: Finally, we'd like it to appear in an issue that features a cover story on Abacab-era Genesis and carries a photo of Mike Rutherford, Phil Collins, and Tony Banks wearing a set of natty '80s sweaters.

TP: You're in luck!

TO BE A MUSICIAN SHE GOES TO SCHOOL

Trouser Press, February 1982
Holly and the Italians
1. Poster Boy
2. Medley (I Wanna Go Home/Miles Away/Tell That Girl to Shut Up)



There was a time when it was the ultimate insult to call a band “faceless.”

The appellation was generally reserved for your Foreigners and your Styxes and your Kansases. You know-- bland, colorless, corporate rock.

But I have to admit, I couldn't pick Holly and the Italians from a sassy power-pop lineup of themselves, the Waitresses, Josie Cotton, and say, Martha and the Muffins.

Probably the signal characteristic of Holly and the Italians was the one that was shared by the others of their ilk: a single, defining song.

In the case of Holly and company, that song was Tell That Girl to Shut Up, and it's included on this bright, opaque lipstick-red flexi as part of a medley with two lesser songs.

It is Rip Her to Shreds writ sideways, and awesome at that.

Transvision Vamp covered it in the late '80s, adding a British accent, booming late '80s drums, and a face.

But I'll take the brilliant anonymity of the Holly and the Italians original every time...

PLACE COIN HERE IF SOUNDSHEET SLIPS

Trouser Press issued its first flexi disc bound into subscriber copies of the January, 1982 issue.

The discs were manufactured by Evatone Soundsheets out of Florida, who had apparently introduced flexible records to the consumer market back in 1960. Evatone closed up shop fairly recently, after declaring bankruptcy back in 2008.

Trouser Press issued these flexis over the next couple of years, alternating between basic black and a rainbow of different colors.

My goal here is to do a quick survey of the color flexis. Or more specifically, the color flexis that I have in my possession.

That very first flexi from back in January of 1982 was this one-sided, canary-yellow disc that contained two songs from Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark: New Stone Age (or more properly, The New Stone Age) and Bunker Soldiers, which appeared on their third and first albums, respectively.



If all you know of OMD is If You Leave from the Pretty in Pink soundtrack, you might be surprised at the industrial post-punkiness of the music on this bright yellow sheet...

IN YOUR HEAD

I have not read The Walking Dead graphic novels, but I'm enjoying the series on AMC well enough.

This year's season premiere had one quick scene that hinted at the subversive potential of the show.

The protagonists were searching for a missing member of their party, and they came across a church. When the group entered the church, they found three or four zombies sitting in pews staring up at a crucifix.

The zombies were dispatched quickly, and the church setting then became a tableau for the various crises of faith among the living.

But I really hope the show gets back to exploring that whole resurrection/zombie angle at some point...