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Post by Jeff Leach on Jan 7, 2015 12:07:04 GMT
Oh Shelley - please don't class Curiosity with Brother Beyond and Big Fun. I always liked their singles and they did have some credibility with their association with Andy Warhol Interesting recent interview with Ben from earlier this year www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p022shnv
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Post by Richard Marple on Jan 7, 2015 13:13:31 GMT
Interestingly I heard CKTC's Down To Earth being played in a shop last week, the first time in over 20 years I had heard it away from my chart tape from early 1987.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 7, 2015 16:17:09 GMT
Ben Volpierre-Whatsisname had Mick Jagger as a godparent or something. He was Very Well Connected indeed. I remember reading about them in one of the Sunday supplements back in the 80's and a couple of fans had told the feature writer that they really liked the band's sound and their image. The writer put it to them that maybe the image was just that, the band weren't, in reality, anything like their image. The fans then gushed about the band's having such wonderful and savvy marketing managers ... I thought that was very revealing. Fair enough, they had the chops ... I was in a pub in Peckham one time, early 1987 with a friend. It was one of those awful disco pubs and this one was unique: the DJ had a twin brother. They both wore baby blue overalls and whilst one spun the records, the other danced. Then they swapped round. Hideously bad. I saw the pair of them later on that year on TOTP: it was the Bros twins. EDIT: So, Jeff, substitute Bros for CKTC
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Post by Alan Turrell on Jan 8, 2015 8:51:50 GMT
I forgot to mention Crowded House as another of my favourite 80s/90s bands.
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Post by Jeff Leach on Jan 8, 2015 14:56:28 GMT
Hi Shelley Appreciate the amendment, I know what you mean though about bland non entity boy bands - we certainly have enough of them now.
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Post by Tony Walshaw on Jan 13, 2015 9:07:03 GMT
I drifted out of watching TOTP in the winter of 1987-88. Machinery had taken over music, it was all very processed and bland. I didn't watch again until the mid 90s by which time music & TOTP had been invigorated once more . P.S. I recall Curiosity Killed The Cat being quite good. Maybe they suffered from being around at such a dull time, it brought them straight back down to earth . 'Blandness Killed The Cat' I think.
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Post by Alan Turrell on Jan 13, 2015 11:59:50 GMT
I drifted out of watching TOTP in the winter of 1987-88. Machinery had taken over music, it was all very processed and bland. I didn't watch again until the mid 90s by which time music & TOTP had been invigorated once more . P.S. I recall Curiosity Killed The Cat being quite good. Maybe they suffered from being around at such a dull time, it brought them straight back down to earth . 'Blandness Killed The Cat' I think. Yes i agree with you there Tony that period of the 80s was very poor musically i don't think iv'e actually sat down and watched a complete TOTPs from this period but as for Curiosity Killed The Cat not my kind of music either.Agree with you again about the mid 90s although i wish the brit pop period could have lasted a bit longer than it did. But what really concerns me is have we really seen the the last of the era of really good pop music , because i can't see any light at the end of the tunnel , what we have now just seems to be never ending.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 13, 2015 12:47:12 GMT
Oh Shelley - please don't class Curiosity with Brother Beyond and Big Fun. I always liked their singles and they did have some credibility with their association with Andy Warhol Interesting recent interview with Ben from earlier this year www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p022shnvAndy Warhol liked Bananarama too! Curiosity Killed the Cat = bland complacent Tory pop (in my opinion)
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Post by Tony Walshaw on Jan 19, 2015 9:20:20 GMT
It might have been Maggie's fault then Peter Can we blame her for Stock, Aitken & Waterman as well....? Yes i agree with you there Tony that period of the 80s was very poor musically i don't think iv'e actually sat down and watched a complete TOTPs from this period....Agree with you again about the mid 90s although i wish the brit pop period could have lasted a bit longer than it did. But what really concerns me is have we really seen the the last of the era of really good pop music , because i can't see any light at the end of the tunnel , what we have now just seems to be never ending.
I also thought that 'Britpop', and the general wider indie-dance music of the 90s, was popular and could have had a longer innings on its own merits. Instead, around 1997-98 the corporates took over the most popular parts of it (retaining a dumbed-down Oasis, Manics etc), and discarded the other elements, removing the vibe.
Which meant that artists such as the Super Furry Animals, Supernaturals and Mansun never reached the heights that they could/should have. Other artists like Robbie Williams, Texas and Travis were adapted to be a kind of mainstream-friendly indie.
Some people (& I am inclined to agree) think that the 90s was a 'last party' - a high jinks at the end of term, or a 'drink me dry night' at the old pub. It was a gathering of popular music of previous decades into a heady stew, to be enjoyed before it all went forever into the global wilderness....
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Post by Alan Turrell on Jan 19, 2015 11:40:23 GMT
Spot On Tony.
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Post by markg on Jan 20, 2015 23:06:44 GMT
No, check the SFA's chart list, they didn't do badly. Mansun suffered from overambition which was fairly unique for Britpop, and the Supernaturals? Umm...
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Post by Tony Walshaw on Jan 24, 2015 9:55:06 GMT
SFA did have a good chart run. So did others like Ocean Colour Scene, The Charlatans, Supergrass and The Bluetones.
But from 1998 such acts were regarded as passé. Low profile with singles creeping into the lower reaches of the chart for a week or two.
The way things were in 1994-97, such artists were rubber-necking with Blur, Oasis and Pulp and were top 20 regulars with memorable songs receiving airplay.
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Post by Chris Barratt on Jan 24, 2015 10:39:41 GMT
SFA did have a good chart run. So did others like Ocean Colour Scene, The Charlatans, Supergrass and The Bluetones. But from 1998 such acts were regarded as passé. Low profile with singles creeping into the lower reaches of the chart for a week or two. The way things were in 1994-97, such artists were rubber-necking with Blur, Oasis and Pulp and were top 20 regulars with memorable songs receiving airplay. In some respects it was a slow death - some bands scored hits into the 00's (Ocean Colour Scene for instance) but they were not getting much airplay by that stage. SFA peaked commercially in 2001 with Juxtaposed For You which, regardless of chart run, was all over Radio's 1 & 2, but I understand the point you're making. People often deride the 'Britpop years' as being all Blur, Oasis & third division retreads - but it was a time of great diversity and eclecticism in the chart. 'Trip Hop' (Tricky, Portishead etc), Jungle (Goldie, M-Beat) and the second wave of House (via the DJ set/mix-tape scene) all thrived during that time, and there is no way you can class the likes of Super Furry Animals & The Divine Comedy as commercial 'dad rock', but I cannot imagine any other year other than 1996 when they could have broken into the mainstream in the way they did. Come the end of 1997, very few artists continued the wave of 'breaking through' - Catatonia, maybe? (I'll defend Mulder & Scully as one of the greatest songs ever written about 'this thing called love') - and most acts had either imploded or retreated to niche-ville not long after. In February 1999 I recorded the "NME Premier Review 1999" from Channel 4 and it made/makes for very interesting viewing. The mainstream 'saviours' were seen to be Stereophonics & Travis, but the artists other than those were, as in 1995/96, genuinely leftfield. The commercial impact of Mercury Rev, The Beta Band, Add N To (X) and UNKLE was never what it would have been just two years earlier though - and the show smacks of something being simultaneously commercialized and being 'put back in its box'. Mercury Rev, The Flaming Lips etc still got playlisted on Radio 1 (which didn't really start to go downhill until circa 2003) in 1999, and other good music was also championed post-Britpop (Air, for instance - Moon Safari probably my favourite album of '98) but ultimately the cherry-picking nature of playlisting that the ILR stations adopted (wall-to-wall Texas, Robbie Williams, Travis, Natalie Imbruglia plus lots of pop/dance-lite singles) ultimately pointed the way things were heading
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Post by Alan Turrell on Jan 24, 2015 11:15:19 GMT
Then there was Kula Shaker another of my favourite bands from around 95 - 99 i bought their debut album K this period gave me real hope that good music was coming back after the blandness of the late 80s .
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Post by Tony Walshaw on Jan 27, 2015 7:48:31 GMT
Agree with all of your post Chris: In some respects it was a slow death - some bands scored hits into the 00's (Ocean Colour Scene for instance) but they were not getting much airplay by that stage.... It suggests that these artists had much more to offer, and this was recognised in some quarters. But they were associated with a trend that had passed, so couldn't be promoted too much. They were talked about as 'cool', but kept in the background, and not allowed to be unleashed into high chart positions and a mainstream audience. Kula Shaker particularly suffered from a backlash and you don't normally hear of them now. Perhaps one legacy of them is that, via prime-time TV, they re-introduced Arthur Brown to mainstream audience
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