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Picture sleeve painted by vocalist Chris Sullivan, 1982
❚ TWO VINTAGE MUSICAL GEMS appeared online this week, casting a fresh magic spell. They are two tracks from Chewing the Fat, the debut album by the image dance-band of 80s clubland, Blue Rondo à la Turk. In the view of Shapersofthe80s, the 9-track stereo vinyl LP was then and remains now the standout pop album of 1982 for sheer verve and originality. Chris Sullivan, the band’s driving force who went on to run Soho’s Wag club for 19 years, has been remixing the Diable Noir masters which became available only a few months ago.
This week we heard the sparkling Change Club Mix 2, an original Poncioni-Sullivan composition tagged as “Afro-Latino funk”, and only released previously on the album. Sullivan says we can download the remix as a 58MB Wav file from Soundcloud so it plays right away through iTunes. “We’ll leave it up for downloads for a week,” he said. “Blue Rondo recorded this over 30 years ago and remixed it this year… Still shakes it.” At Facebook, Rondo fan Michael Feasey agrees: “Good stuff Chris – love that samba percussion coming up to 4:00 and the gritty sax. Hell, it’s all good.”
Picture sleeve painted by vocalist Chris Sullivan,1982
The band’s second chart single was the witty Klacto Vee Sedstein. (“It’s got to mean something, it can’t be a dream” – Well, the title was inspired by Charlie Parker’s 1947 number, if not the tune itself.) Rondo’s track enlivened the top 100 for nearly six months, and its “mutant funk” has now emerged from the glitz of Godley & Creme’s 80s production. As Sullivan says: “This is how we’d have liked to have done the song initially but all we’ve done is clean it up a bit and take it back to the original idea… This was recorded 31 years ago.” Verdict at Mixcloud from Mark Huxley: “Lovely stripped down mix!”
Best revelation from Sullivan also came this week: “Expect a digital re-release of our album Chewing The Fat in the spring. I’m quite shocked by how well it’s aged.” He’s not wrong there.
♫ Listen to Klacto Vee Sedstein 2012, as it was meant to sound
First published in New Sounds New Styles, August 1981
Michael Zilkha and Michel Esteban: label founders combined their initials into ZE
♫ Sullivan also offered an hour-long Mutant Disco mix for a recent Mark Jones show on BBC 6Music – The party kicks off with Contort Yourself (August Darnell remix from the 1979 US 12-incher) by No Wave pioneer James White & The Blacks on ZE Records, the boutique label based in Paris and New York which recharged the disco genre with edge and credibility while Manhattanites pursued dance-oriented rock and Euro-disco wandered its own byways, both folkloric and electronic.
Launched in 1978 by British-born old Oxonian and Mothercare heir Michael Zilkha, and French graphic artist Michel Esteban, ZE selected style-leading eccentrics of the day to redefine upfront New York disco. The Sullivan mix includes ZE artists such as Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Kid Creole & The Coconuts, Was (Not Was), Coati Mundi, Material, though alas no Cristina. The title of ZE’s witty vinyl cocktail of acts tagged “A Subtle Discolation of the Norm” put the term Mutant Disco into the language in 1981, and acted as soundtrack to the first Blitz invasion of the US that spring.
Sullivan explains, Dec 3: “Here’s a live mix straight off the decks I did for Mark Jones Back to the Phuture show on BBC 6Music. Kinda all that early 80s electro Ze records stuff we loved and still do … They’ve edited some of the mixes but still it’s a bit of a gas … With a few exceptions this is what I played at Hell” [the Blitz crowd’s breakaway club of 1980].
The reviewers said: “A gorgeous history of 80s London clubland” (Alex Petredis, Guardian) … “fascinating and definitive” (Robert Spellman, Sunday Express)
❚ TOMORROW SEES ANOTHER launch party, this time at 1980’s breakaway New Romantics nightspot St Moritz in Soho to celebrate publication of the second (unlimited) edition of the 320-page coffee-table photobook that chronicles the creation of 80s clubbing through Graham Smith’s eye-witness photography, and racy commentary from Wag club host Chris Sullivan. Read the full background to the characters behind the book We Can Be Heroes at Shapersofthe80s. On sale for £35 from its publisher Unbound, or discounted to £25.50 at Amazon (an even cheaper pre-publication offer has finished).
➢ More 80s yarns on video from Robert Elms
➢ Catch-up list of links to all last year’s publicity shenanigans
Making up the rules of 80s clubbing: Robert Elms, Phil Dirtbox and Chris Sullivan at last year’s exhibition of Graham Smith’s nightlife pictures. Photograph by Shapersofthe80s
Posted in Clubbing, London, Media, Pop music, Youth culture
Tagged Books, Chris Sullivan, Graham Smith, interviews, photography, Robert Elms, Swinging 80s, Video, We Can Be Heroes, youth culture
◼ STARMAN: HOW DAVID BOWIE LIT UP THE 1970s is the title of a two-session course coming up next month at London’s premiere adult-education institute, the City Lit. But you will have to get out of bed on two Sunday mornings to attend. The course costs £41 and its tutor, the music writer Toby Manning whose specialist subject is Pink Floyd, aims it at “music lovers generally” who will find out “how David Bowie’s songs, persona and style broke with 60s values and aesthetics and largely ‘invented’ the 70s”.
Toby promises lots of videos and says: “Watch how, through constant reinvention, Bowie’s relentless creativity set and reset the agenda for rock music throughout the 1970s and beyond.” Test your tutor’s mettle by viewing the stupendous Young Americans video from 1973 [above] and asking why Bowie is wearing those fabulous shoulders and what agenda did they set?
Afterwards, Toby promises, you should be able to “hold your own in any discussion about David Bowie”. So you’ll be ready to impress Mastermind’s 1.74 million viewers. Howzaboutthatthen!
➢ Details of the City Lit’s FE course in Bowie-ana and many more
Daily Telegraph: “David Bowie after collecting food from a cafe, bearing little resemblance to the fashion icon of the 1970s” (© Splash News)
➢ Update Oct 18, 2012 — “David Bowie: singer’s pale appearance reignites health fears” … Relentlessly downbeat report at The Telegraph online about “the polymorphic rocker’s” health beneath this genial paparazzi pic taken after picking up a takeaway lunch from the Italian Bottega Falai Café in New York.
Daily Mail: “A grinning David Bowie has a wide smile as he joins Coco Schwab for lunch at Sant Umbroeus in New York” (© Splash News)
➢ Update Oct 19 — Reclusive David Bowie heads for lunch in New York… and he’s smiling again … Today’s Daily Mail follows up with five more pix from Splash News showing a very relaxed Bowie heading off to lunch: “Judging by the wide grin on his face, Bowie was feeling great.”
Between the two national newspaper reports accompanying these snaps of Bowie as a “hoodie”, neither offers one new piece of information and all the pix are completely undated. Eagle-eyed fashionistas will notice in the first “takeaway lunch” shot without his zebra print scarf he sports different shoes from today’s pix taken en route to a restaurant. So either David has scoffed two lunches, or, let’s guess, they were taken on different days.
Posted in Culture, London, Pop music, Youth culture
Tagged 1970s, adult education, City Lit., David Bowie, education, FE courses, New York City, paparazzi, Toby Manning, Video
Are we going to die next Wednesday? Brian Cox talks of “a new golden age of physics” while lampooning idiot coverage by the press. Click picture to open video in a new window
❚ SCIENCE’S TV SUPERSTAR effortlessly passed his audition last night to become a stand-up comedian. After receiving a deeply serious medal at the Institute of Physics, Prof Brian Cox OBE made a highly intelligent yet laugh-out-loud speech attacking rubbish journalism and various politicians, while pouring scorn on homeopathists and other dreamers in la-la land.
The 44-year-old particle physicist has spent the past few years building a media career, explaining the universe from the tops of mountains in a string of TV series including Wonders of the Universe, plus The Infinite Monkey Cage on Radio 4 and as a live stage show, while popping up on 6Music’s breakfast show. Cox’s prodigious and wide-ranging efforts to popularise science persuaded People magazine to include the former the keyboard player for the pop group D:Ream in their list of Sexiest Men Alive. Last night’s speech also threw down an epic challenge to the British government to wake up to the needs of education in science and technology.
➢ Professor Brian Cox’s own website
➢ View Cox’s webcast at Institute of Physics website
➢ Q: If you put your hand in the beam of the Large Hadron Collider what would happen to your hand? A: “It would hurt quite a bit” — Boffins respond at the Sixty Symbols website
Posted in Culture, London, Media, Social trends, Technology
Tagged Brian Cox, education, Institute of Physics, journalism, science, Video
✱ Deejay legend Robbie Vincent has returned to JazzFM on Sundays 1-3pm… Catch up on Robbie’s JazzFM August Bank Holiday 2020 session thanks to AhhhhhSoul with four hours of “nothing but essential rhythms of soul, jazz and funk”.
◆ 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
✱ 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
✱ 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
➢ Search for all on Bowie here
at Shapers of the 80s
✱ “I’m not a rock star” Bowie often said – No, David, you were a messiah – Obituaries and key videos about
the godlike one
✱ Prince Rogers Nelson RIP: ‘A funny cat’ and ‘sole authentic genius’ of the 1980s
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