SOUND OF THE BREAKERS

Trouser Press, August 1983

Insect Surfers, Barricade Beach

The Source, Workin' on a Dream

This is the last of my full-color Trouser Press flexi discs, and we're going out on a somewhat obscure note.

It's a split affair, containing a track each by Insect Surfers and The Source.

The Source were from Akron/Cleveland. Not sure if they knew Pere Ubu or Devo growing up, but they were definitely on a similar post-punk tip.

I can't find a copy of the song featured on this flexi, but see below for a video of the excellent Keypunch Operator. These guys were Gang of Fouring the Gang of Four before Franz Ferdidand ever soiled a nappie.

Insect Surfers started in DC back in the summer of 1979, and are still around today (!)-- they bill themselves now as “Planet Earth's longest running modern surf band.”

Their track on this lemon-yellow disk is called “Barricade Beach” and it's kind of redolent of Blotto. Except for the fact that you don't feel the overwhelming urge to punch Insect Surfers in the head, which was the only sane and reasoned response to Blotto...

DOWN UNDER

Trouser Press, March 1983
Divinyls
Boys in Town/Science Fiction

Divinyls were the antipodean Blondie-- a slightly rough-edged New Wave band with chickfactor style to burn.

While Debbie Harry had a studied New York aloofness, Divinyls' Christina Amphlett struck a petulant pose, all angular bangs, garters, and wrinkled plaid skirts.

Blondie's seminal pop-culture moment was Heart of Glass, a masterstroke that furrowed brows with its Studio 54 sheen. The marriage of disco and punk seemed unlikely at the time, but it would prove to be an enduring match...

Divinyls are best known in the states for 1991's I Touch Myself, and if you subscribe to the notion that every generation gets the female masturbation song that it deserves, you'll recognize I Touch Myself as the perfect precursor to the Clinton era. There is no Reagan-age She-Bopian angst over the act here, just “When I think about you, I touch myself.”

I honestly do.

The two early '80s songs featured on this clear flexi were hit singles in Australia, and it's easy enough to see/hear why.

If you don't have the patience to sit through both songs, I would urge you to at least skip ahead to the 1:21 point of Boys in Town, where Christina does something I've never heard before in the history of recorded music...

POSITIVE, NEGATIVE

Trouser Press, October 1982
Positive Noise
Get Up and Go!/End in Tears

OK, I ain't gonna front: To my knowledge, I've never heard Positive Noise.

So I'm coming at this with fresh ears, 30 years after the fact.

They were apparently a Scottish synthpop band, and Get Up and Go! was released as a single in 1982. End in Tears was a B-side from that same year.

Get Up and Go! doesn't quite earn that exclamation point-- it's bright and mannered like ABC, but without the oily style of Martin Fry. There's a chance that JoBoxers took some notes from it, but you'd have to ask them to know for sure.

End in Tears is by-the-numbers New Wave guff, punctuated by a springy bass line that I admit makes me smile a bit every time it sproings...

FRUSTRATION, HEARTACHE 

Trouser Press, September 1982
David Johansen
Personality Crisis

The New York Dolls were one of my gateways to punk rock.

I started listening at 16, and it was then a short line to the Clash, the Sex Pistols, X, etc.

Soon enough, I was 17 and red spray painting “Kill someone, kill yourself!” on the mustard brick walls of JFK HS.

(I believe it was Howie who then added “DWI:” as a prefix to my handiwork, thus turning a perfectly good act of nihilistic teenage vandalism into a Public Service Announcement with the stroke of a can.)

Former Dolls lead singer David Johansen released Live it Up that same summer, and an Animals medley from the album was all over the radio and MTV. It earned him a spot along with the Clash opening for the Who at Shea Stadium, where I watched from a distant blue loge seat as he belted out Personality Crisis to a largely disinterested crowd...

BANGING LIKE CHARLIE WATTS

Trouser Press, June 1982
John Hiatt
Doll Hospital/Some Fun Now



I'm afraid I have to admit that I don't know much about John Hiatt, subject of this sky-blue flexi.

I know he's been at it since the mid '70s, and continues to this day.

I imagine that if he came to your midsize town, he'd probably sell out the local. You'd go on the advice of a friend who swears by him, maybe have a couple of domestics and something off the bar menu and have a great time that you'd remember for a week.

Hiatt's impact on my listening life has been limited to Drive South, Slow Turning, and Perfectly Good Guitar, of which Slow Turning definitely takes the prize.

It's a (w)ry, Stones-referencing reflection on growing old/up that sounded swell in 1988 and still does today...

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...

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...

LET'S BEGIN AGAIN

So, the end of R.E.M. sent me scurrying down to the sliced tongue vault in search of artifacts from the early days. Here's some of what I dug up.

The earliest review I could find was a quick and complimentary write up of the original Hib-Tone Radio Free Europe single. This appeared in the "America Underground" section of the April, 1982 issue of Trouser Press:



The December, 1982 "Green Circles" column in TP contained a favorable review of Chronic Town:



The same issue also contained a flexi disc of Wolves, Lower, the other side of which featured one of the two good Lords of the New Church singles (Russian Roulette).



I realize that these black flexis don't scan particularly well. Someday soon I'll do a more comprehensive post on the Trouser Press flexis, which came in a rainbow of cool colors beyond basic black...

Finally, here's a Creem profile from October, 1984, just for kicks:

MARKS THE SPOT

It’s amazing what’ll stick in your craw…

I have held a grudge against Ira Robbins for years, because he referred to X once as “appalling noise.” I assumed it was in an issue of Trouser Press, even though their old rekkid guide treats X generously.

Well, I was looking through the July, 1986 issue of Creem the other day, and there it was in a review of Green on Red/Rain Parade: “A reassuring antidote to even the appalling noise of X.”

And I was pissed anew. Watch where you’re casting those appallings, bitch…