Video Affects - Irene Cara 'Flashdance ..What a Feeling' (April 1983)

"She makes me feel kinda funny, like when we used to climb the rope in gym class." Garth Agar,Wayne's World

I am twelve and my life is entering the turmoil of adult change. Oh yes, on the inside it's all bubbles, toils and trouble. Thankfully, on the outside things are a little more calm. The nights are drawing in, and my brother and I have jumped on the domestic technological wave and are attending Saturday night computer club at the home of a local man who has a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. It's a wonder of technology I think, but though we'll have succeeded in hauranging our parents and will have a Spectrum of our own in our home within a year, the computer is not going to be My Thing. I enjoy the games and have a stab at graphics (Sinclair's BASIC programming is ridiculously intuitive at least), but my problem is a lack of patience and my brain. It's simply not a mathematical one, and is more of your frustrating right-side model. This means, though, that music videos have a profound effect on me. The Human League have released in this same month '(Keep Feeling) Fascination', a brassy continuation of their ascent into pop from those brief and early industrial singles I'd discover years later (I still like Being Boiled!) So for the League it's a move away from the sequenced programming of their early sound and into something more organic and, well, human. The video's good too. Of course it's nothing on Irene Cara's second movie tie-in (her first being for Fame of course.)

Cara's video heroine spends almost the first minute of the video cycling through her industrial city home, back to camera or in silhouette before the camera closes in on a figure welding (or not), androgynous until her industrial mask is raised and there she is - Jennifer Beals in all her striking beauty. It's an easy trick in retrospect, and as much-used as this video has been lampooned in future videos and ads, but it surprised me at the time, as assured as the rest of the piece in its smooth movie-style editing, not greatly different (intentionally so) from the movie it's welded to.

The editing is slick here - the use of a body double for Beals' dance scenes seems so much more obvious to me now, but it's still a stylish package (though Michael Sembello's follow-up soundtrack single Maniac boasts a video that with a smaller source tape cuts and fetishises its subject to an even more surgical degree). To the uncoordinated, the physically awkward or untested - the young adolescent in other words, it's an intimidating spectacle. I felt much the same way seeing (ahem) 'Kevin Bacon's assured floorwork in Footloose - surely also the work of a more athletic double, but that's the illusion of movies, and it fooled and beguiled me. Once I worked out that the disciplined world of dance and movement were as much for me as Human League's early digitised, robotic anthems, as reliant on a small, precise sequential actions as computer programming or music video editing, the writing was on the wall. I stuck with the breakdancing meetings to third form, and that was it shortly afterward. I remember my heart sinking as I read a quote from Sting once: "music is simple, really. It's just mathematics."

There's artiface behind all art. The audience is only hoodwinked when it's made to look easy.

GAZ: It's Flashdance. She's a welder, isn't she?
DAVE: A welder? I hope she dances better than she welds. Look at that. Her mix is all to cock.
GAZ: What the fuck do you know about welding, any road?
DAVE: More than some chuffing woman. It's like Bonfire Night.That's too much acetylene. Them joints won't hold fuck all.
(The Full Monty)

Video Affects - Shriekback Nemesis (1985)

A rare example of "I know where I was when I first saw this" applied to music videos, my first encounter with Shriekback's Nemesis took place at the house of my friend Derek, during the holidays near the end of 1985. We had been watching his music videos, particularly those of Sting, whom we both were into at the time, and Derek remembered that he'd videoed (ahh, nostalgia) the previous night's Radio With Pictures. So it was obviously a Monday. Probably the first Monday of the summer holidays, a gloriously languid and sun-drenched day as they all were at the time, the air buzzing with wildlife and the footpath outside his parents' architecturally-designed home almost ticking in the heat. I digress. We fast-forwarded idly through the videos - was ZZ Tops' Legs in among them? Unlikely. How about Neil Young's This Bud's For You? Possibly. But the last clip of the night, the last episode of RWP for the year, was reserved for presenter Karen Hay's favourite video of the year, and it was Nemesis. After a few blasts of Synchronicity II we definitely favoured Shriekback's offering in the end, and must have played it until we could remember the whole thing (although it would take years before I could decipher its bizarre lyrics.)

Nemesis represented a curious and infectious collision of worlds in our heads; though I speak for both me and my friend we were very much alike in interests and obsessions. With shaven-headed singer Barry Andrews purring his way through a melange of odd images, looking for all the world like Robin of Sherwood's latter-day villain Gulnar, the clip promised more - a Bacchanalean feast, weird masks of wood and feathers, black glassy eels and most thrilling of all, the Arch-Deviant himself, Pat Mills' comic creation Nemesis the Warlock as a slow-mo phantom swathed in red mist. Shriekback's lyrics are, it turned out, nonsensical, but contained wonderfully arch vocal triggers that caught our young ears - "In the jungle of the senses/Tinkerbell and Jack the Ripper"..."We drink elixirs that we refine/from the juices of the dying"…"Call in the airstrike/with the poison kiss". The music itself is harsher than the band's earlier, dreamlike and more avant garde efforts, with guitars and real drums to the forefront, and Sarah and Wendy Partridge's shrill screamed vocals matching the synthetic strings during the choruses. That it makes no sense either visually or lyrically has opened the song up to various interpretations - is it about the comic strip? Probably not. Is it about mankind's destructive urge? Maybe. Is it about the postulated 'death star'? Some (not me) think so. It doesn't matter though, Nemesis is three minutes and forty-three seconds of sensoral wonder set adrift in the mid-Eighties and in one moment changed my musical tastes from pop to something more askew (ironically, its parent album Oil and Gold is regarded as Shriekback's most commercially succesful). I returned briefly to Sting and the Police, but never let go of Shriekback and still have three of their albums in my permanent collection. And every time I hear Nemesis I return to that day when my mind met something quite recognisable and alien at the same time.

Just Take a Seat They're Always Free - no surprise no mystery.

[I promised I'd start my blog off with this review. Two years late to the day, but here it is, Paul!]

Foreword: On 'Safari'

In 2003 having not attended a single Big Day Out or UK festival I promised myself I'd focus my efforts on a Big Game Hunt, or 'Safari' of acts reaching NZ. To wit: in order of the Big Five game animals of the African safari, select five sizeable acts of significance I wanted to see before they disbanded. After some shuffling and surrogates I've seen three. The gig below was a surrogate for The Who, who did reach New Zealand in 2009, but no further south than Auckland.


The Police, WestpacTrust Stadium, Wellington 17/1/08

Setlist:
Message in a Bottle
Synchronicity II
Walking on the Moon
Voices Inside My Head /When The World Is Running Down
Driven To Tears
Hole In My Life
Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic
Wrapped Around Your Finger
De Do Do Do De Da Da Da
Invisible Sun
Can't Stand Losing You
Roxanne
King Of Pain
So Lonely
Every Breath You Take

Next To You (encore)


When I was in my late teens I was a pretty big Police fan - as big as I could be with what limited resources I had in a small NZ town pre-internet. I bought all of their albums - and Sting's - scoured second hand bookshops for biographies on the members and bought the best music book of their songs I could find in an attempt to replicate the layered material that packed their five studio albums and almost posthumous Best Of. In point of fact I was a fan of the band a good while after the band had ceased to be - word was that by then they pretty much hated each other, and the name of the remade single off their greatest hits album, Don't Stand So Close To Me was a pretty apt byline for the state of things in Policeland. And for what it was worth I moved on too, having left town for Uni and discovered more local, accessible bands, or at least bands that were still making music. I didn't think the Police would reform let alone launch a world tour on the back of it. If they had, would I have gone along to a concert? Probably not.

As it turned out all of the above took place, and they even did a two-city tour of New Zealand as well. Here's Paul's entry on the Auckland gig, the second of the two, and the Stuff.co.nz review.

Oh okay, here's the Stuff review of the Wellington gig. I had to go over it to remind myself of what it was like, and it pretty much ties with my impressions. So... casting my mind back, what did I think of the gig?

Going on safari teaches you a few things about your idols, the main one being that they age, and furthermore they're never going to sound like they did twenty or so years ago on vinyl. The Police proved that - Sting's not hitting the high notes he used to, but that's par for course on long tours, and New Zealand is usually the bum end of those tours, so expectations must be tempered with that in mind on most occasions. I should say that Mr Sumner's range is still quite impressive, and the short-cuts taken are the usual ones a singer makes in a live context, allowing for breathing and the movement of being on stage and so forth. Message in a Bottle was a good and likely opener, and as Paul says, the appearance of a bewhiskered Sting singing/speaking it as an overture seemed strangely apt. The big visual kick was with second song Synchronicity II and the opening up of the stage monitors, giant LEDs that drove the song as much as the band on stage - it was a good rendition for a track that demands a fair amount of pace and energy. Things settled down a bit after that. Walking on the Moon was okay, and to be honest the familiarity of the setlist worked against my appreciation of the event; a risk you have to take if you've stuck so closely to a band's output, and as this tour was essentially a greatest hits set instead of a launchpad for new material I'd have been a fool for expecting anything else.

That said, given the breadth of songs on the list there were some surprise inclusions - Hole in my Life not a song I really loved from Zenyatta Mondatta, sounded great with its shambling bassline, as did the medley of Voices/When the World is Running Down, which given a longer, more improvised sound and jazz diversion that would have been lost on me twenty years ago, but made a bigger impression year later. The biggest impression on the night however was that of the individual band members on me. Andy Summers was aloof, existing in his own part of the stage and frankly didn't surprise - he's the quietest member of the band and the novelty for me was seeing that, despite my expectations, this guy still holds all the guitar work together single-handedly - no session or backing instrumentalists, just a virtuoso and his effects pedals. For the oldest member he had a surprising energy, and the music wouldn't have been lost without it. Sting was similarly distant, his banter slightly too rote and he didn't engage or connect with the audience. A bit of a missed opportunity, really, though the audience who'd stayed past support act Fergie were happy enough, being at least in their late twenties, but for the most part the bad side of thirty and upwards to fifties. During (I think) Walking on the Moon one portly silverback close to us got up and rocked out some air guitar by himself in the aisle - it was that kind of gig and set the mood for the evening. So with the rest of the band in their own space the star of the night was Stewart Copeland, band leader and a man clearly happy in his element behind the drums and percussion set. His skill was the revelation of the night, and I spent Wrapped Around Your Finger just watching him move about his instruments, working what was one of a couple of demonstration pieces of the night, but what a show. During So Lonely Sting seemed to acknowledge this in a set bereft of any significant band banter with the modified "All dressed up and nowhere to go/welcome to the Stewart Copeland show".

So as far as a safari went, that was my trophy - Sting disappointing, Summers cool, but Copeland, the member I'd not paid too much attention to over the years the man of the moment. he'd done the press for the NZ leg as well, so that swung things in his favour as well.


Best Song: Wrapped Around Your Finger, though I still loved singing along to Every Little Thing...
Least Best Song: Invisible Sun/King of Pain. Paul's right on the former - the slideshow didn't match, unlike the closing shots of Copeland's past tour snaps - including Wellington Harbour from 1984, hooray!
Missing in Action: Walking In Your Footsteps (inessential), Don't Stand... (baffling)

Most Missed: My favourite album is Ghost in the Machine, so something more off that would have been nice, especially something written by Summers or Copeland, so Omega Man would have been welcome, or from Regatta de Blanc Copeland's On Any Other Day. As that's rather novelty and throwaway, No Time This Time perhaps, if only to have 'stolen it back' from Anthrax.