B*O*B Podcast #3 - The Sealand Issue

Featuring music from Tom Tom Club, Art Brut and Metronomy

Tracklist:

1. Tom Tom Club - Genius Of Love

2. Camera Obscura - French Navy

3. Art Brut - Alcoholics Unanimous

4. Metronomy - Fascination Street (The Cure Cover)

5. Danny Boy & The Serious Gods - Castro Boy

6. Bullion - Time For Us All To Love

7. Micachu & The Shapes - Had Enough

The Gayest Record Ever Made

I think I've found the gayest record ever. And no it isn't "YMCA", because, well, it isn't really that gay, a bit of limp innuendo rather than a clenched fist in-your-end-oh. I thought I had quenched this query for good with "Munchausen" by No Bra. But then I found "Castro Boy" over at 20JazzFunkGreats.

"Castro Boy" is a truly remarkable track, a killer Italo-flecked HI-NRG floor shaker that screams shapes and sweat, mirrors and filth, intimacy and debauchery. It laid the blue-print for a decade of chart dominance by electronic dance music artists. It's arpeggiated synths and clever-clever dyanmics sound oh so contemporary.

And that's before the vocal kicks in, a "nelly" voice spewing laugh out loud, crude, vivid lyrics. But with time and hindsight it's the backing vocals that have taken the limelight. The chorus "He's a Castro boy and there is no cure" now holds a grim new significance since they were originally written in 1983. Castro Street was the centre of San Fransico's gay scene before the scene was ravaged by Aids in the mid 80s.

"Castro Boy" is a track that has a sense of time and place yet doesn't sound dated. It is danceable yet not funky. It is bloody funny yet incredibly sad.

"Castro Boy" is a true lost gem.


mp3---> Danny Boy & The Serious Gods - Castro Boy

mp3---> No Bra - Munchausen

Pro Evo Boom Banger

A lot of stuff has been written about Micachu & The Shapes but no one has mentioned that they name-check the opiate that is pro evo, pretty sure the first track to do so right? Anyway they're playing Buffalo in Cardiff on April 8th

mp3---> Micachu & The Shapes - Had Enough

A Number Of Names - Shari Vari

When I heard this in February last year, I was struggling to finish my dissertation in the library in Falmouth, head dribbling through florescent lighting, cheap coffee and staring at the same document for 8 hours.

Then I found this track over at The Ill-ec-tron-ic. The world became a good place again. The best new track I heard last year came out in 1981.

This is proto-techno, proto-electro, proto-everything. It is primal yet ahead of it’s time. Shari Vari still sounds like the future. A future I want to in on.

Bursting from the juice-bars of Detroit, where there was no booze, no drugs, no need for stimulants as the music was intoxicating in itself. The extraction of soul from boxes of wires seemingly an act of alchemy compared to what was to come by the end of the decade.

mp3---> A Number Of Names - Shari Vari
*Proper non-skippy version*

The Future

The godfathers of Donk have started the charge down the M6 by putting a donk on southern elecwrongica star and Rough Trade favourite Metronomy.

It’s not big, it’s not clever, it’s not very good but this is the future. This is the 21^st century’s punk. Thank you Vice.

mp3---> Metronomy – A Thing For Me (Blackout Crew remix)

Obscure Sub-genre #4 - Wine Rock

Punk dominated British music between 1978 and 1980, over shadowing all forms of new music in the press at the time and blinding pop-historians looking back.

Wine rock not punk is the real link between Roxy Music, the primitive pre-punk pub-rock movement and the explosion of new romanticism around 1981.

New romanticism is often seen as a direct reaction to punk’s celebration of filth and decay. The make-up and flamboyancy allied with the DIY ideals of punk are taken as gospel. But this wasn’t a sudden reaction; it had been fermenting in London’s Wine Rock scene since 1977.

Bands like The Vintage Boys and The Merlots took there influences, both sound and image from Roxy Music and The New York Dolls. Seeing the sprouts of sophistication emerging in the transformation of traditional pubs to wine bars around London, they realised that the music they played had to become more sophisticated too. They pre-empted the mindset of Thatcherite Britain.

Although visually and ideologically distinctive they couldn’t quite reflect this in the music they made. Seemingly unable to fully unshackle from the lumpen pub rock that existed before this movement and the way punk dominated the limelight, the evolution wine rock tried to instigate did not truly occur.

Without the added technological twist of synthesisers that new romanticism utilised, wine rock is, sonically speaking, easily overlooked yet it should be remembered how in incorporating fashion, consumerism and narcissism they formed the outlook that new romanticism appropriated and ran away with.

For better or for worse, wine rock was instrumental in the form pop music took in the early 80s and that should not be forgotten.