Y is for Yazoo

Yazoo, not to be confused with a search engine or a scandal 200 years ago in Georgia, were a British synthpop duo from Basildon, Essex who enjoyed some success in the early 1980s.

If you thought Swindon was bleak make a point of not visiting Basildon. It's basically a new town which means it was built in the 1960s so it's like the nasty bits of England without the old parts to redeem it. I have vague memory of its concrete precincts, blurred by the rain on the windscreen, as I killed time waiting for God know's what; or maybe just God.

Yazoo was formed Formed in late 1981 by former Depeche Mode songwriter Vince Clarke (synthesiser) and Alison Moyet (vocals).

Yazoo's first single Only You was released in 1982 and, although its sound was clearly rooted in the synthesizer obsessed eighties, it was an impressive debut, that launched Moyet's big voice on a big stage. She's certainly the sort of gal you'd want right by your side - at least if you found yourself in a fist fight.

The single was followed by Situation and Don't Go in 1982. Which was another excellent single that did well in the charts at the time. It brings back those crazy plastic nightclubs in the 1980s with expensive watery drinks when Yazoo were about the only promising thing on the turn table.

The second album You and Me Both also contained some great tracks like the single Nobody's Diary. I had totally forgotten how good this track was, albeit in an eighties context. We love this song because it is so much about love and loss and raises an important question that goes to the route of modern existence; namely does anybody keep a diary anymore? New hair-oos in this one and Vince stuck his finger in a powet socket.

Yazoo never made it big in the US. Sadly Yazoo split up in 1983, although unusually both elements of the band had some degree of success - Moyet on her own and Clarke as one half of Erasure. Moyet had a Number One hit with Invisible and another major hit with Love Resurrection. Here Moyet does an impression of Lawrence of Arabia minus his motorcycle.

Ultimately Erasure were bigger and better becoming one of the most successful groups of the mid 1980s and early 1990s. This is Ship of Fools.

Curious fact about Yazoo - The band was called Yaz because a band called Yazoo already existed. This is also the name of a birth control pill.

X is for XTC

I always associate XTC's Senses Working Overtime with the smell of chips and the English seaside. Not what Americans call chips but what they call French Fries. Except British chips taste better than American fries as they are cooked in lard and wrapped in newspaper and drenched in vinegar and served with a heart attack on a plate.

The place was Charmouth, Dorset. The year was 1982 and we were on a geology trip. Senses Working Overtime sounded from the cafe as we headed to the fossil encrusted cliffs.

A light rain fell from a heavy gray sky. The Golden Cap, England's highest cliffs drifted in and out of sight. Someone suggested going in the sea, which was crazy because it was probably about 50 degrees and the sea was much colder. Heavy brown waves with white heads sloughed into the shingle beach.

Gingerly we went into the sea, tasting the brine in the air, shivering in the wind. But after a few freezing minutes an exhilaration took over. After a while the sea didn't seem so cold. We were buffered around, at one with the elements, the swirling rain and the frowning sky. It was spontaneous fun. Not something you often associate with geology field trips.

I think that was the last time I went in the sea. In England, at any rate.

All of which puts off the duty to described XTC. I don't know a lot about the band. Apart from the fact they begin with X.

Wikipedia, states the band is "even better known for their long-standing critical (rather than commercial) success." I'm not sure I know what this means.

The band came together in the early 1970s, the creation of Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding.

Andy Partridge should not be confused with Alan Partridge but, as I am a big fan of Alan, this is surely the chance to post a video that's totally irrelevant to this post. Here Alan talks about Wings "the band the Beatles could have been."




Many bands appears to have been formed in unlikely places and XTC were no exception coming from Swindon, England, a city best known for an unusual traffic roundabout.

They performed a lot live in the late 1970 and early 1980s until Andy Partridge's breakdown, which led to chronic stage fright, reportedly precipitated by his wife throwing away his supply of Valium. The band's biography said the drug was prescribed to him as a teenager when his parents divorced but he was never withdrawn from the drug and became dependent on it. Concerned about her husband's dependence Partridge's wife threw his tablets away—without seeking medical advice.

The result was the band only performed in studios from then on.

The band's biggest hit was the 1979 song Making Plans for Nigel which was apparently big in Canada. Quite what plans were being made, it's not clear but the single has a distinctive sound of the so-called New Wave bands.

XTC's 1984 album The Big Express was one of their lowest selling but Partridge rates tracks such as Smalltown and Train Running Low on Soul Coal as his best. I'm not totally convinced by the later but at least it showcases Swindon in all its ugliness.



Later in 1984, the members of XTC created their alter-ego, "The Dukes of Stratosphear" (a suggested band name that the group had considered when they first formed). I'm not really clear why.


Although XTC were active until they broke up in 2005, their heyday was clearly the late 1970s and early 1980s when songs like Senses Working Overtime threatened to make them big.I still question what constitutes 'biscuit shape' as biscuits can be many different shapes.

Curious fact about XTC - one of their singles Statue of Liberty was banned by the BBC because of its supposedly "lewd" reference to the famous statue ("in my fantasy I sail beneath your skirt").

A-Z blogging challenge failure - hits but few new followers

Just a quick observation before I scour what's left of my challenge-fried brain for any decent groups beginning with X.

This challenge has led to some strange things happening to my blog Brits in the USA. The number of daily hits has risen dramatically from about 200 a day to more than 500. I wish the same thing would happen to my salary.

On the downside my rather modest aim of gaining 200 followers looks likely to fail. At the onset these challenges tend to attract a lot of blog hoppers but toward the end of the month, the enthusiasm wanes. And my blog hopping has been erratic to say the least. I know I have missed tons of great blogs. I have been an unreliable follower.

Why do we do this in the first place? Probably because our laptops have stolen our brains and reduced us to stat obsessed automatons a long time ago.

But there's a silver lining. I've gained some fantastic new followers and friends. And, at the final reckoning that's a lot more important than the empty science of stats which warbles away in the darkness like Rain Man counting matches.

W is for Waterboys

I have always felt an odd nostalgia for the Waterboys song All the Things She Gave Me which gives me strange flashbacks of dew drenched Welsh parks and the ragged mosaic on the pathway of my old student house, although I don't know quite why.

During a rather tempestuous relationship with a girl called V, I was keen on this track and I like the emphasis on burning love tokens. While I'm all for harmonious break-ups, there's something wonderfully cathartic about burning belongs, although I can't say I've done it. For a start V never gave me anything to burn.

The Waterboys are a curious Scottish, Irish rag tag of style and substance. I saw them once in the very un-Celtic surroundings of Milton Keynes, when they were blasting out This is the Sea and The Whole of the Moon.

At the time in the early 1980s they were associated with the Big Music sound and were often spoken of in the same breath as bands such as Big Country and Simple Minds, the band they were warming up for at Milton Keynes.

The second album A Pagan Place was rather awesome, and underrated, containing tracks such as All the Things She Gave Me, A Pagan Place and A Church Not Made of Hands, which was a rather ambitious attempt to depict spirituality in nature.

The band never received the commercial success it deserved, although, after an initial outing at number 26, The Whole of the Moon, returned to the UK charts to reach Number 2.

Founder Mike Scott, a Scotsman, was accused of selling out by some critics, when the band's fourth album Fisherman's Blues in 1988, took on an Irish folksy theme.

The band has always been anchored in literature. Recently Scott set 20 W.B. Yeats poems to music in an enterprise that evolved into a show entitled An Appointment With Mr. Yeats.

Although the Waterboys have been labelled as Christian rockers this is not entitely accurate. Thier influences, state Wikipedia, are romantic Neopaganism and esotericism of authors such as Yeats and Dion Fortune, which can be observed in the repeated references to the ancient Greek deity Pan in both "The Pan Within" and "The Return of Pan".

This relieves me no end. I am always in favor of a spot of Neopaganism to liven up a wet Thursday afternoon.

Curious fact about the Waterboys - the band has had dozens of members. More than 50 people have been Waterboys at some time or another.

V is for Vega

Suzanne Vega seemed to be high profile in the late 1980s and then she was gone; wispy and thin with a pale voice and pastel skin that reflected her Swedish, German, Scottish, English, Irish roots. No Latin blood in Suzanne Vega or hint of the Salsa.

Her songs brought to mind urban parks and brownstones and the wind buffeting leafs along a chilly sidewalk somewhere near Central Park in November as the last of the light scuttled for cover.

Her voice was as crisp as her lyrics such as those in Freeze Tag.

We go to the playground

In the wintertime
The sun is fading fast
Upon the slides into the past
Upon the swings of indecision
In the wintertime

There are allusions to Dietrich and Dean, Bogart and Bacall, but we know the great movie lovers are specters, for the characters in the park who are more interested in a cold fumble on the swings than a great romance.

Vega seemed to be keen on Marlene Dietrich, the German actress, as evidenced by the song Marlene on the Wall.

Vega wrote the song about coping with loneliness. She had a poster of Dietrich on her wall and found comfort by looking up to it. She explained in SongTalk magazine: "That was a truthful song. The lines came out of my life."

It was her first hit, and while it was big in Britain it didn't register in the US. But the 1987 album Solitude Standing made Vega a household name for a while on both sides of the Atlantic. It's most recognizable single was Luka, a song about an abused child.

Vega later said in an interview in Sweden. "A few years ago, I used to see this group of children playing in front of my building, and there was one of them, whose name was Luka, who seemed a little bit distinctive from the other children. I always remembered his name, and I always remembered his face, and I didn't know much about him, but he just seemed set apart from these other children that I would see playing."

Although the song was about an abused child the real life Luke was just different.

Tom's Diner became Vega's biggest hit in 1990. It was a quirky song with an a cappella voice, an unusual candidate for a mega hit. Rather bizarrely Rapper Tupac Shakur later sampled the track in "Dopefiend's Diner".

Vega is still recording. In retrospect her heyday in the 1980s seems brief and fleeting and yet Vega's songs were a contradiction in many ways - light and pleasing to the ear but at the same time weighty in their themes such as loneliness and child abuse.

Curious fact about Suzanne Vega - Tom's Diner was set at Tom's Restaurant at 112th Street and Broadway in New York City. Exterior shots of the same restaurant appear in the television sitcom Seinfeld as Monk's, the eatery where Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer hang out.

U is for U2

A lot of people tend to be dismissive about U2. Perhaps it's because the band became too successful to be cutting edge or because they have been around for so long.

But it's impossible to leave out these mega stars from Dublin from the musical odyssey of the last three decades even if they have been through a bewildering number of changes in styles.

The band's first album was Boy in 1981 and it wasn't a bad debut. It spawned the single I Will Follow that gave U2 their first hit in the United States.




The video is notable for not very much apart from The Edge's attempt to look like a somewhat unpretty version of a member of Duran Duran and lead singer Bono's leather trousers.


U2's next album October has a rough and ready style and a spiritual theme. About this time The Edge and Bono almost left the band due to a spiritual crisis.  Bono, The Edge, and Larry Mullen had joined a Christian group in Dublin called the "Shalom Fellowship", which led them to question the relationship between the Christian faith and the rock and roll lifestyle.

Tomorrow remains my favorite track from this album. It's a haunting song that encapsulates all of the sad uncertainty of Ulster for me, although I still don't know if it was about Northern Ireland at all.





War followed in 1983, a powerful album that made peace a crusade. U2 certainly knew how to churn out albums. It was around this time that everybody seemed to wake up to U2 as a force. The album included two mega hits - Sunday Bloody Sunday, describing the British massacre of Catholics in Derry's Bogside and New Year's Day. I can't find the official video so this is something to do with the Battle of the Bulge.




Then in 1984 U2 abruptly changed course in a move that left many of my high school friends shaking their heads in disbelief. Under the influence of producer Brian Eno, The Unforgettable Fire was dreamy and ambient. It's biggest hit was Pride, devoted to MLK. It's title track was more intriguing.




The 1986 album The Joshua Tree marked another change in style, as the influence of artists such as Bob Dylan and the wide open spaces of America were brought to bear. Bono travelled to places such as El Salvador to see first hand how a ruthless US backed regime was treating the population in a dirty little war. Yet while the track Bullet the Blue Sky is a scathing attack on America The Joshua Tree also illustrates U2's fascination with its wide open spaces. Red Hill Mining Town is one of the most underrated tracks.




The Joshua Tree was a hard act to follow. The live album Rattle and Hum had mixed reviews. In 1991 U2 turned in a different direction to Germany where the Berlin Wall had recently come crashing down. They embraced a European industrial sound in Achtung Baby which contained hits such as One and The Fly.

So Cruel is one of the album's more obscure tracks but one of the most powerful, in its own way. Apologies for the Spanish subtitles but I liked this footage of intense looking folks wearing woolly hats.




And then after the highs of Achtung Baby and The Joshua Tree, U2 seemed to lose some of their direction and became more pop-like as Bono became increasingly sanctimonious (that may have happened earlier actually).

After a couple of disappointing albums U2 appeared to be close to their best with All That You Can't Leave Behind, a 2000 album that featured the single Beautiful Day. There's not been a lot worth a mention since.
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Rolling Stone ranked U2 at number 22 in its list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time.

Curious fact about U2 - The Band was originally called Feedback and then The Hype. The band decided on U2 because it was the least objectionable of a the names on a shortlist.

T is for Talking Heads

My A-Z series on bands has probably been just a brit Britcentric and has bypassed some great American artists such as REM, The Eagles, Bruce Springsteen, Nirvana and The Smashing Pumpkins.

But my 'T' entry Taking Heads is American, although America never really appreciated the band as much as Britain.

One of the band's most well known hits Once in a Lifetime, failed to register much stateside while it made it big in the UK. In fact, Burning Down the House was the only top 10 hit Talking Heads achieved in America.

Maybe America simply did not get their quirky brand of The New Wave  punk, art rock, avant-garde, world music and pop funk.

I once knew a girl who was keen on Talking Heads but it worried me that her favorite track was the 1977 number Psycho Killer. As soon as the taut lyrics "I can't seem to face up to the facts. I'm tense and nervous and I can't relax," started, a strange far away look would come over her features as if she'd just received a calling from God and she'd disappear into the kitchen that, like many kitchens, contained a lot of sharp knives.

At this point I'd disappear out of the window which was a tad unfortunate given that she lived on the fourth floor.

David Byrne, the lead singer of Talking Heads, said of the song.

"When I started writing this (I got help later), I imagined Alice Cooper doing a Randy Newman-type ballad. Both the Joker and Hannibal Lecter were much more fascinating than the good guys. Everybody sort of roots for the bad guys in movies."

That was the kind of guy Byrne was.

Talking Heads were formed in 1975. Byrne, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth were alumni of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island. I don't know a lot about Rhode Island but I assume it's not large and wonder if they are the only famous artists to ever come from the place.

A cover of Al Green's Take Me to the River brought the band to national conciousness in the late 1970s.

The band was big in the 1980s for a while when the album Little Creatures (which featured the hit singles "And She Was" and "Road to Nowhere, were released. They broke up in 1991.

 In a 2011 update of Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Artists of All Time", the band was ranked 100.

There were some tentative efforts at a reunion in the early 2000 but Byrne spoke of "bad blood."

Weymouth was also scathing of Byrne describing him as "a man incapable of returning friendship."

Curious fact about Talking Heads - The band chose their name from a TV guide that contained a description of a person talking.

S is for Siouxsie and the Banshees

The late Seventies that saw the arrival of Punk rock must have been an exciting and chaotic time. The sudden appearance of Punk is associated with the Sex Pistols, an anarchic band that was essentially a creation of the Machiavellian marketing and fashion guru and impresario Malcolm McLaren.

The Sex Pistols were all about noise and outrage rather than talent. But they went down in history as one of the most controversial and influential bands of all time.

Siouxsie and the Banshees were formed in 1976 by vocalist Siouxsie Sioux and bassist Steven Severin. Siouxsie was initially a Sex Pistols hanger on who took her distinctive appearance from the Punk era. She's later credited with being a pioneer of the Gothic movement and the band gained a deserved reputation for innovative experimentation.

The 1970s were certainly strange and anarchic days in England, although I was too young for them to really register.

John Lydon of the Sex Pistols said of the era: "Early Seventies Britain was a very depressing place. It was completely run-down, there was trash on the streets, total unemployment—just about everybody was on strike. Everybody was brought up with an education system that told you point blank that if you came from the wrong side of the tracks...then you had no hope in hell and no career prospects at all. Out of that came pretentious moi and the Sex Pistols and then a whole bunch of copycat wankers after us."

If Siouxsie and the Banshees were copycats at least they were talented. They were cited as major influences by Morrissey, U2, Radiohead and The Cure.

The Times cited Siouxsie and the Banshees as "one of the most audacious and uncompromising musical adventurers of the post-punk era.

Some of the band's most well known tracks include Spellbound, Happy House, Kiss Them for Me and Dear Prudence, a haunting cover of the Beatles song.

The band later broke up in 2004, crippled by Siouxsie's face powder bill. Siouxsie pursued a solo career. The band made some impact in the US with the hit Peek a Boo.

R is for Radiohead

R is going to be on the the fly. I am conscious that the A-Z blogging challenge is coming to an end with even my modest aim of gaining 200 followers now looking beyond reach. It doesn't bother me too much because there's a hollowness in numbers. Richard told me this. He told me about the maths whizz at his university who would steal scraps of food from students' tables and tare angrily into space. Then one day he didn't show up at the lecture he was meant to be giving. He had killed himself on the railway line. I digress.

So R will be hurried, which is a shame because R offers so many possibilities. Roxy Music were so sexy, the Rolling Stones were about as sexy as Keith Richards' cigarette end, but wildly crazily talented. But I was really torn between R.E.M.and Radiohead - Seattle cool and somewhere near Oxford cool.

I guess the Brits win because I'm biased. But Radiohead have always struck this great big chord with me, even if it was a misericord, which s really nothing to do with being glum but it a minimalist kind of seat in a Medieval church.

But Radiohead lost out to my desire to walk round the vaguely emerald waters of a lake in which turtles lined up on their logs. Then there's the small matter of the writer's group and breathing some life into the novel that's lapsed again.

Radiohead formed in 1985 and they were from Abingdon in Oxfordshire, another unpromising suburban setting. Their first major hit was Creep in 1992 which was frankly creepy and, from the outset, established Radiohead as a very different kind of outfit from the photogenic boy bands of the 1990s such as Take That.

It's safe to say Radiohead's lead singer Thom Yorke lacks the classic good looks of an Elvis Presley or a John Taylor. Hell, he lacks the classic good looks of Boy George, resembling a mole who has been dragged unwillingly into the light from his hole.

Creep failed to register at first and then became big, particularly in places like Israel. The 1995 album The Bends marked the band's arrival on the big scene, with hits such as Fake Plastic Trees and High and Dry.

Street Spirit remains my fave, even if's it's irredeemably dark. Street Spirit was described by Yorke as "the dark tunnel without the light at the end."

The 1997 album OK Computer with its experimental sounds made even bigger waves than The Bends and has often been described as one of the top albums of the 20th century.

Then, just as Radiohead stood on the verge of mega stardom, they did the opposite thing to Oasis and retreated. Their next album Kid A, was more obscure with fewer obvious hits. Some critics liked it, others dubbed it a "commercial suicide note."

Yorke, who had been suffering from serious depression around this time, may have deliberately intended to downplay Radiohead.

Radiohead have not faced out like Street Spirit, although they haven't had such a high profile as in their heyday in the 1990s.

The band have embraced the rapidly changing nature of the music industry. Radiohead's seventh album, In Rainbows, for instance, was released through the band's website in October 2007 as a digital download for which customers could make whatever payment that they deemed appropriate.


Radiohead-Karma Police by pghj2005


Karma Police is probably Radiohead's most famous hit. The video still confuses me but it seems to have a message that can be technically described as "shit happens."

Curious Fact about Radiohead - Thom Yorke almost died of carbon monoxide poisoning from the car he was in while filing the video for Karma Police.

Q is for Queen

Ugh. I just said it. It's an understatement to say there aren't many bands beginning with 'Q' and because no elderly women have yet started a tambourine troupe called Quilters, I'll have to go with Queen.

Queen may have been a massive British success story but I never really warmed to them. I'd rather go to a concert featuring last year's A-Z for Q entry Q is for (the) Queen and see her play a flute with her corgis howling in the background.

Queen were formed in 1971 and soon became one of the biggest stadium rock bands in the world. While I'm not a huge fan of their material I have to concede they could put on a great live show and clearly stole the show at Live Aid in 1985.

They could certainly rock you, if you were feeling remotely like being rocked. At least they changed their name early on from Smile, which strikes me as a very lame name for a band.

Thir biggest hit was Bohemian Rhapsody which was the third biggest selling record in British history and somewhat bizzarely became Number One at two separate Christmases. I'm actually fairly partial to a bit of Bohemian Rhapsody which is a good song to sing along to after about eight beers, although not as good as Fairytale of New York by the Pogues and Kirsty McColl.

But I really don't go in much for We Are The Champions, We Will Rock You, Crazy Little Thing Called Love... blah blah.

The 1978 album Jazz with the singles Fat Bottomed Girls and Bicycle Race, was accompanied by a strange marketing campaign in which 65 naked women were persuaded to get on bicycles rented from Halford's cycles and sent racing around Wimbledon Stadium. This has given me a moment of pique because I am recalling my new bicycle from Halford's that was callously stolen. We are actively seeking video of this marketing campaign that is probably even stranger than Pink Floyd floating an inflatable pig over Battersea Power Station.

Queen were fronted by the ever exuberant Freddie Mercury (real name Farrokh Bulsara) who tragically died of pneumonia linked to AIDS. His death raised the profile of AIDS tremendously in Britain and the UK. Mercury remains one of the consummate showman in rock and a legend on both sides of the Atlantic.

Curious fact about Queen: Lady Gaga was a big fan of the band and their hit Radio Gaga inspired her name.

P is for Pink Floyd

When I was at university I befriended a girl called C. She was a big fan of The Wall by Pink Floyd. She'd invite me to her room and cook for me at times. She may have had designs but she wasn't very happy.

In the end she dated my best friend, although I always find the American term "dated" a curious term for relationship. She still wasn't particularly happy. When he broke off the relationship she was even less happy. She'd dart out suddenly in front of cars, although it was unclear if it was a play for attention or a genuine suicide bid.

By the second year C. became less relevant. She lived in a house on another street with some almost equally unhappy people. It was like visiting the House of Usher. Just grimmer.

Sometimes she'd come to our place and watch The Wall. We'd all watch it and by the end even the most upbeat soul would feel at one with C. All those scenes of flying coffins that became crosses, people with jellied faces and Bob Geldof lying on a filthy floor with his hand down the toilet, tended to negate against spontaneous happiness. There was a wall between us and the undergraduate world which is supposed to be jovial and hedonistic.

Jeff was certainly hedonistic. He'd come up to me in the law faculty common room and tell me about the exploits of Jeff and his girlfriend Vikki, which was the last thing I wanted to hear about given that I'd spent the previous night alone nursing a tin of baked beans.

"Man. I got wasted with a capital W," he'd tell me. "Smoked some stuff, Shoved on Dark Side of the Moon and woke up two hours later thinking I was on the moon."

Ah. Floyd again.

I'm not sure that I can even attempt to sum up Floyd in their progressive and psychedelic awesomeness.

The band was formed in 1965 by  university students Roger Waters, Nick Mason, Richard Wright, and Syd Barrett, the latter who took too many drugs and went loopy.

As a kid the massive hit Another Brick in the Wall affected me. I thought it subversive with its anti schooling message and depiction of Gradgrindesque Scottish school masters, while the part with the kids being fed into meat grinders appalled me. Kids of a certain age tend to be conservative and I was no exception.

The film The Wall was based on the central character of Pink, drawn from Waters' childhood experiences, the most notable of which was the death of his father in World War II.

This first 'brick in the wall' led to more problems; Pink became drug-addled and worn down by the music industry becoming a fascist megalomaniac, a development inspired partly by the decline of Barrett. At the end of the album the increasingly fascist audience would watch as Pink 'tore down the wall', once again becoming a normal caring person.

Comfortably Numb is very powerful in The Wall and is perhaps one of the best Floyd songs.

The album The Dark Side of the Moon was apparently an allusion to lunacy rather than the moon. Floyd were those kind of guys; probably safer to listen to than to hang out with.

Curious fact about Pink Floyd: Shooting for the cover of the album Animals featured The a 30 feet pig-shaped balloon that was floated over Battersea Power Station in London. Bad weather delayed filming and the balloon broke free in strong winds, and landed in Kent where it was recovered by a local farmer, reportedly furious that it had apparently scared his cows.