Click on image to treat yourself to this audio track at YouTube, Masked Moods (Long Version)
❚ MOST OF US have fond memories of Blue Rondo a la Turk, the seven-piece jazz/salsa band created by Chris Sullivan in 1981 and their first album Chewing the Fat, which I still consider the most original album of 1982. This yielded two chart singles, Me and Mr Sanchez and Klactoveesedstein. But after the band split and reformed as a trio named Blue Rondo who eventually released a second album in 1984, Bees Knees and Chicken Elbows, not many of us can recall many of its singles apart from Slipping Into Daylight.
Deep breath… Tonight Sullivan throws a party in Soho to celebrate this album’s re-issue by re-release by Cherry Red Records in a two-CD box, the second CD featuring Rondo’s previously unreleased tracks.
❚ ONE OF THE GOD-LIKE SHAPERS of the new music of the Eighties was playing live in London this week and afterwards we met again for the first time since 1981. He is August Darnell, aka Kid Creole frontman of the Coconuts, and when I remarked on what a vital conduit he had provided between New York, London and Paris assisting the exchange of new indie bands, no-wave dance music and other strange flavours on Michael Zilkha’s ZE Records label, he was flattered to be remembered that way. Yes they were fertile times, he agreed, as post-punk pop, disco, funk, dub and Latin all collided with artsy pretension spiced with irony. He loved that rules were being broken.
In 1980 Darnell became a producer at ZE and his collaborations boosted the careers of James Chance, Cristina, Was (Not Was), Don Armando’s Second Avenue Rhumba Band and Material, while introducing the category of “Mutant Disco”. The edgy compilation album bearing that name distinctly helped to make ZE “the most fashionable label in the world” in the opinion of The Face magazine by 1982. Woodwork squeaks and out come the freaks!, according to Was (Not Was).
Click any pic to enlarge in slideshow:
Kid in full swing in London… with his dancers Roos Van Rossum, Charlotte De Graaf, Kristina Hanford
Lounge lizard Kid in London: turning on that bazzazz. (Photos by Shapersofthe80s)
Onstage by invitation: a queue of London fans joined the Coconuts line-up
Backstage after the London show: Animal Nightlife’s singer Andy Polaris meets August Darnell to thank him for so much inspiration
Darnell had set out in 1974 writing lyrics with the funky Dr Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band in which vibraphone player Andy Hernandez was known as his “trusty sidekick” Coati Mundi. Hernandez served as Darnell’s on-stage comic foil, as well as his musical director and arranger. Their first hit single on RCA was Cherchez La Femme with Cory Daye the lead vocalist. The album went gold and the band was nominated for Best New Artist in the Grammy awards.
In 1980 he formed his own band as Kid Creole and the Coconuts, his style as lounge-lizard vocalist being defined by a Latinised Cab Calloway type in a zoot suit and broad-brimmed hat, alongside “Sugar-Coated” Coati Mundi in a line-up of instrumentalists and singing dancers. Sire released the Coconuts album, Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places, in June 1981, while the next album in May 1982 was boosted by its instant appeal in the UK under the title Tropical Gangsters. The LP hit number three, and three singles – I’m a Wonderful Thing Baby, Stool Pigeon and Annie I’m Not Your Daddy – made the Top Ten.
As a dynamic live act with unique visual appeal, the Coconuts toured the world, confirming Darnell as a respected composer, arranger and producer. They recorded 11 albums and scored more hit singles including Dear Addy, Endicott, The Sex of It, and My Male Curiosity.
And now here were many of those familiar strains being given brilliant new life on-stage at the Boisdale restaurant in Canary Wharf this week, thanks to a powerful seven-piece band and three slinky dancers. Of course August Darnell was showing his age – heavens, aren’t we all these days? Despite which, his generous set was driven by his own rich voice and every ounce of sheer bazzazz. There was no beating Don’t Take My Coconuts!
Michael Zilkha and Michel Esteban: in 1978 founders of the record label combined their initials to make ZE and based themselves in both New York and Paris
Gary Kemp at 61: new suit too on his taster for the solo single
“Don’t you love it when your heart isn’t making sense? Running on the power of innocence…”
❚ TODAY WE GOT TO HEAR Ahead Of The Game, the new single from singer-songwriter Gary Kemp who goes solo more than two years after his pioneering 80s band Spandau Ballet last performed live. At the age of 61, Kemp describes the song as a love-song for his wife, inspired by Yacht Rock – previously known in the 1970s-80s as West Coast AOR – in other words yuppy escapism with a lush orchestral presence. “I wanted to write a big feelgood song. I unashamedly love elements of Yacht Rock. I don’t like writing songs unless I feel they’ve got a hook in there somewhere so they’ve got hooks. There is a big sound on the album.”
The single was premiered today before Kemp was interviewed by Steve Wright during In The Afternoon on BBC Radio 2 (fast forward online to 2h40m). An album titled InSolo follows on in July on the Columbia label, only Kemp’s second since Little Bruises in 1995.
LISTEN HERE TO Ahead Of The Game
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TWEET FROM CRITIC NEIL MCCORMICK
❏ That was a really lovely dive into Gary Kemp’s very long awaited forthcoming sophomore solo album (just 26 years after the first). Shades of Steely Dan, Pink Floyd & Gary Moore mixing it up with the smooth Spandau prog soul. Lush.
In a Marks & Spencer window: Father and son Martin and Roman Kemp model shirts
In the Waitrose Weekend magazine: Gary Kemp at home in his library
Posted on 21 June 2021 ❚ FROM HUMBLE WORKING-CLASS BOYS to self-made taste-makers. . . Above, we see Martin Kemp looking snappy in the window of Marks & Spencer with his Capital Radio deejay son Roman, while their own unique double act finds other outlets advertising Volkswagen cars, chatting on their Weekend Best show for ITV and Channel 4’s Celebrity Gogglebox. . . Further along the high street Mart’s brother Gary Kemp marks his 60th year with an intensely personal solo album and this interview in the current Waitrose Weekend magazine, pictured here at home in his library. . . Onwards and upwards.
GARY KEMP SEES HIS SOLO ALBUM AS SEVERING THE PAST
Gary Kemp today: “If I write lyrics first then they’re for me”
Posted on 7 July 2021 ❚ INTERVIEWED ON TODAY’S BBC Breakfast show Gary Kemp – essentially promoting his new album InSolo – explained why it’s been 25 years since his last solo album:
“ I didn’t feel the need to do that… I always felt connected with Spandau Ballet, and even though we went through all those troubles and fights then getting back together, everything I was writing was put away for them. And it wasn’t until I started working with Nick Mason from Pink Floyd that I really felt I could sever the past and while on that tour I started writing lots of lyrics and if I write lyrics first then they’re for me and they were about me. Then when I got back from tour I set them to music. I wasn’t going to make the album but when lockdown came it was, Right I’d better finish this.
I was at home working remotely and getting in touch with artists which no one had ever done before – Roger Taylor from Queen said Yes I’ll play on one of your tracks. So I worked remotely with him and other bass players and started to build the album and when the studios reopened in the summer we managed to get in and do a lot of stuff for real. ” ➢ Watch today’s nine-minute interview with
Gary Kemp on BBC Breakfast
❚ THIS WEEK IN 2011 Duran Duran’s album All You Need Is Now was released as a 14-song CD in Europe and North America. Shapers of the 80s gave extensive coverage to Duran’s glorious comeback tour of North America and their 30th anniversary party for the same week in 1981 when their debut single Planet Earth entered the UK Top 20 where it was to reach No 12. Relive these highlights on the album’s tenth anniversary…
Duran live on YouTube, 2011: a choice of three camera streams and “Lynchian effects” smothering John Taylor’s performance on All You Need Is Now
❚ WHAT RUM NIGHTMARES DAVID LYNCH must have in bed at night, but then, he did direct Eraserhead after all. For the best part of two hours, today’s much vaunted Duran Duran live web concert in the Unstaged series kept making you want to hurl virtual cabbages at the screen, enraged by a director whose intent was to obscure the act from view with his relentlessly potty toy-box full of widgets. From 2am UK time till almost the dawn chorus, the band onstage in California had no idea what web audiences in 22 overseas territories (432,000 channel views by 6.30am) were enduring as they pushed on through 18 numbers… / Continued inside
John Taylor and Nick Rhodes at SXSW in Texas, March 2011: Rhodes claimed to have 100,000 photos in his personal archive he’d like to get published somehow
Still hungry after all these years —
Adrian Thrills writes in the Daily Mail: “ The band’s 13th album is much better than most of us could have anticipated. The nine new songs benefit from a diverse cast of special guests. Ana Matronic of the Scissor Sisters adds a seductive rap on Safe (In the Heat of the Moment). New York soul diva Kelis impresses on The Man Who Stole A Leopard. But if Mark Ronson’s input provides a creative spark, the most impressive thing is Duran Duran’s return to form as songwriters. The frontman, to his credit, also supplies some wonderful, multi-tracked vocal harmonies, superbly augmented by Rhodes’ clever electronic prompts and the urgent grooves of the rhythm section ” … / Much more inside
Spandau Ballet answering my question at their own reunion press conference
❚ EVEN AS A UNIQUE CD COMPILATION of Spandau Ballet’s landmark hits was set for massive free distribution with The Mail on Sunday, Duran Duran announced a global concert live online at YouTube, along with their own album release on CD. It could be the 80s all over again when the two arch-rival bands vied for the title of leaders of Britain’s New Romantics movement. So which veteran band scored the bigger hit in 2011?… / Continued inside
Duran Duran earlier in 2011, a year of US and European tours, plus a streamed concert
“No one does small-hours heartbreak quite like Sade”: The singer photographed in 1990 by David Graves
From aching soul to minimalist funk, Sade and her band don’t make many records but their quality has never waned. As a career box set is released, in today’s Guardian critic Alexis Petridis ranks their 20 best songs…
No 1: By Your Side (2000)
There’s a compelling argument that Lovers Rock is Sade’s masterpiece, a collection of deeply affecting meditations on parenthood, loss and race on which they simultaneously pared down and broadened out their sound: its tracks subtly encompass everything from hip-hop to reggae to singer-songwriter folksiness. And, in By Your Side, it has Sade’s greatest song: its hushed atmosphere not a million miles removed from Bob Marley’s No Woman No Cry, its melody so perfectly formed it feels instantly familiar, its lyrics simple but moving. How it isn’t the kind of modern standard that gets regularly murdered on The X Factor is an enduring mystery, although the 1975’s Auto-Tune-heavy cover is nice enough.
➢ Choose “View full site” – then in the blue bar atop your mobile page, click the three horizontal lines linking to many blue themed pages with background article
MORE INTERESTING THAN MOST PEOPLE’S FANTASIES — THE SWINGING EIGHTIES 1978-1984
They didn’t call themselves New Romantics, or the Blitz Kids – but other people did.
“I’d find people at the Blitz who were possible only in my imagination. But they were real” — Stephen Jones, hatmaker, 1983. (Illustration courtesy Iain R Webb, 1983)
“The truth about those Blitz club people was more interesting than most people’s fantasies” — Steve Dagger, pop group manager, 1983
PRAISE INDEED!
“See David Johnson’s fabulously detailed website Shapers of the 80s to which I am hugely indebted” – Political historian Dominic Sandbrook, in his book Who Dares Wins, 2019
“The (velvet) goldmine that is Shapers of the 80s” – Verdict of Chris O’Leary, respected author and blogger who analyses Bowie song by song at Pushing Ahead of the Dame
“The rather brilliant Shapers of the 80s website” – Dylan Jones in his Sweet Dreams paperback, 2021
A UNIQUE HISTORY
➢ WELCOME to the Swinging 80s ➢ THE BLOG POSTS on this front page report topical updates ➢ ROLL OVER THE MENU at page top to go deeper into the past ➢ FOR NEWS & MONTH BY MONTH SEARCH scroll down this sidebar
❏ Header artwork by Kat Starchild shows Blitz Kids Darla Jane Gilroy, Elise Brazier, Judi Frankland and Steve Strange, with David Bowie at centre in his 1980 video for Ashes to Ashes
VINCENT ON AIR 2024
✱ Deejay legend Robbie Vincent has returned to JazzFM on Sundays 1-3pm… Catch Robbie’s JazzFM August Bank Holiday 2020 session thanks to AhhhhhSoul with four hours of “nothing but essential rhythms of soul, jazz and funk”.
TOLD FOR THE FIRST TIME
◆ Who was who in Spandau’s break-out year of 1980? The Invisible Hand of Shapersofthe80s draws a selective timeline for The unprecedented rise and rise of Spandau Ballet –– Turn to our inside page
SEARCH our 800 posts or ZOOM DOWN TO THE ARCHIVE INDEX
UNTOLD BLITZ STORIES
✱ If you thought there was no more to know about the birth of Blitz culture in 1980 then get your hands on a sensational book by an obsessive music fan called David Barrat. It is gripping, original and epic – a spooky tale of coincidence and parallel lives as mind-tingling as a Sherlock Holmes yarn. Titled both New Romantics Who Never Were and The Untold Story of Spandau Ballet! Sample this initial taster here at Shapers of the 80s
CHEWING THE FAT
✱ Jawing at Soho Radio on the 80s clubland revolution (from 32 mins) and on art (@55 mins) is probably the most influential shaper of the 80s, former Wag-club director Chris Sullivan (pictured) with editor of this website David Johnson
LANDMARK FAREWELLS. . . HIT THE INDEX TAB UP TOP FOR EVERYTHING ELSE
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