Released today in 1983: China Girl

EMI America EA157

A Broadway run in ‘The Elephant Man’, appearances on the small screen in the Bertolt Brecht play ‘Baal’ and on the big screen in cult German movie ‘Christiane F.’, much-hyped British film ‘Absolute Beginners’ and alongside Jim Henson puppets in ‘Labyrinth’: what a strange decade David Bowie had in the 1980s.

Well, it was no more strange than the two previous ones or those that followed, I suppose. It began with the resurrection of the character Major Tom from the 1969 album Space Oddity, who was name-checked in both Bowie’s first #1 single in the UK (the title track of the 1969 album, re-issued in 1975) and his second, Ashes To Ashes, which, complete with an innovative promo video clip, topped the chart in the summer of 1980. By the middle of the 1980s Bowie had had three further UK #1s, including a collaboration with Queen (Under Pressure) and one with his 60s contemporary Mick Jagger (Dancing In The Street, recorded to tie in with Live Aid). Nothing strange about any of that, but some of the other collaborations were surprising to say the least, Bing Crosby and Pat Metheny Group among them. Strangest of all, this was also the decade in which Bowie would temporarily abandon his solo recording career, there being nothing further from him in the 80s under that name after 1987. Instead, he formed a group called Tin Machine.

The creation of Tin Machine followed the poor critical reception for his albums Tonight (1984) and Never Let Me Down (1987), the latter of which Bowie himself described as “an awful album”. The over-indulgent and elaborate Glass Spider tour also failed to win the critics over, with accusations that Bowie was out of ideas. 1989 marked 25 years since the release of his first single so he could be forgiven for that if it were true. In fact the ideas were still there, but he was stretched thin with dual careers in music and film making demands on his time and talent. When he concentrated on the day job, the results were excellent. His most successful album of the 1980s, Let’s Dance, was released in 1983 with the title track being one of the aforementioned UK #1s and also a US #1. Co-produced with Nile Rodgers, it also included Modern Move (#2 UK and #14 US) and Bowie’s own version of the song he wrote for Iggy Pop in 1977, China Girl (#2 UK and #10 US). Another minor hit in the US was Without You, but this was not issued in the UK. The album also contained amongst its remaining four tracks a re-recording of Bowie’s earlier single Cat People, from the 1982 film of the same name.

Despite the strong singles, opinion of the album as a whole was mixed in the British music press. The review in New Musical Express was particularly enthusiastic. Referring to the three-year gap between its release and that of previous LP Scary Monsters, it stated the album was “utterly worth the wait” and offered this challenge to the naysayers: “You should be ashamed to say you do not love it.” It went on: “Despite the expectation that the combination of Bowie and Rodgers would result in the kind of immaculately tortured but immaculately daft angst-funk that seems in vogue in certain quarters, the actual result is something quite different – some of the strongest, simplest and least complicated music Bowie has ever made.” Melody Maker was more reserved, saying that “like most of Bowie’s records, this one says absolutely nothing while recognizing precisely the time, date and circumstances of its creation.” At times, it seemed like the papers had been listening to different records. NME, for example, thought Bowie’s interpretation of China Girl was the antidote to the rage and pain of Iggy Pop’s version, making the focus of the song “relief from pain”. Melody Maker: “It’s hard to deny the pained (melo)drama of Bowie’s voice”.

Although it had its reservations, Melody Maker concluded that Let’s Dance was “frequently persuasive…and would make a good soundtrack for some fairly expensive thrills.” The voice of greatest dissent came, unusually, from Smash Hits: “WOWWWW!!! The new Bowie album! Quick, put it on! Listen to that title track … brilliant! And Modern Love – great! Corny title, though. Never mind, China Girl is good … well, pleasant anyway. Mmmmmmmm. Richochet – really quite … um … interesting. And the other four tracks, well they’re … er … very … um … oh, alright then, they’re dull. Dull, dull, dull! So what? Everyone makes the odd dull album.”

NEW SINGLES on sale from May. 31
1983
David BOWIE China Girl (EMI America EA157)
1985
ABC Vanity Kills (Neutron NT109)
1988
IMAGINATION (Leee John) Hold Me In Your Arms (RCA PB42057)
EURYTHMICS You Have Placed A Chill In My Heart (RCA DA16)
MORRISSEY Every Day Is Like Sunday (HMV POP1619)

Released today in 1980: Could You Be Loved

Island WIP6610

Bob Marley was already ill when this single, from the Uprising album, was released. His death at the age of 36 came just under a year later. In July 1977 a malignant melanoma had been found under the nail of his toe; Marley chose not to have the toe amputated but underwent surgery to the affected part. The melanoma later returned and spread to other parts of his body by 1980. This didn’t stop him and The Wailers completing a major tour of Europe as part of a planned world tour in the same year, but by the end of the summer Marley was too ill to continue and a date in America in September would be his last concert.

NEW SINGLES on sale from May. 30
1980
BOB MARLEY AND THE WAILERS Could You Be Loved (Island WIP6610)
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES (Siouxsie Sioux) Christine (Polydor 2059 249)
1988
The COMMUNARDS (Jimmy Somerville) There’s More To Love (London LON173)
1989
BANGLES Be With You (CBS BANGS6)
CHINA CRISIS Red Letter Day (Virgin VS1188)
Jason DONOVAN Sealed With A Kiss (PWL PWL39)
SOUL II SOUL (Jazzie B) Back To Life (10 Records TEN265)
UB40 I Would Do For You (DEP International DEP32)

Released today in 1981: All Stood Still

Chrysalis CHS2522

Ultravox had been around for some years in the 1970s without having a charting record, but everything changed in the 1980s. Midge Ure was now fronting the band as well as being chief songwriter, second keyboardist and guitarist, and they had signed with a new record company. Vienna, their first album of the 80s, was the one that changed the group’s fortunes: following its release in the summer of 1980 it would feature on the album chart on-and-off for the best part of two years, this long run helped by timely releases of four singles of which All Stood Still was the fourth.

The first two Ultravox singles of the 80s, Sleepwalk and Passing Strangers, had given them their first chart hits and initially, the album made #14 – a perfectly respectable placing for a band who hadn’t charted in the past. It had stopped selling in sufficient quantities to make the albums Top 100 after October 1980. However, the release of the grandiose but irresistible title track as a single in January 1981 propelled it back on to the chart and this time all the way to #3. Vienna the single almost gave them a #1 but they were kept at #2 for an extraordinary (and for the band, frustrating) four consecutive weeks; the track’s presence in the Top 10 for a total of eight weeks was, nevertheless, great publicity for the album which remained in the Top 50 for over three months.

It fell out of the Top 50 in the week ending 30th May 1981, just as All Stood Still was being released as a single. The radio airplay for the single sent the album back into the Top 20 after an absence of six weeks. Thereafter, it sold well enough to appear on the Top 100 until the spring of 1982.

NEW SINGLES on sale from May. 29
1981
The BELLE STARS (Jennie McKeown) Hiawatha (Stiff BUY117)
DEPECHE MODE A New Life (Mute MUTE014)
EURYTHMICS Never Gonna Cry Again (RCA RCA68)
ULTRAVOX (Midge Ure) All Stood Still (Chrysalis CHS2522)
1984
DEAD OR ALIVE (Pete Burns) What I Want [Re-issue] (Epic A4510)
SPANDAU BALLET Only When You Leave (Reformation SPAN3)
1989
BANANARAMA Cruel Summer ‘89 (London NANA19)

Released today in 1985: Touch Too Much

Jive JIVE91

Steve Lambert came to join Roman Holliday when he answered an advert in a newspaper placed by founding member Brain Bonhomme, who needed a singer at a time when his band was “looking for [a] new direction”. At the time of this ad, Bonhomme described the type of music that Roman Holliday were playing as ‘pop/rock’, but the influences had expanded rather when he and the rest of the group were interviewed in Smash Hits shortly before the release of their October ’83 album, Cookin’ On The Roof. “Early ‘50s Bebop, R&B and Rockabilly fused with ‘60s type pop songs and ‘80s production,” he said, in reference to having a 7-piece band with a drummer into funk, a brass section dedicated to swing, and himself and the others favouring rock ‘n’ roll. (Lambert listed John Foxx-era Ultravox, another Midge Ure band Rich Kids, and Buzzcocks as his musical heroes.) “We’ve just got to find some common ground,” Bonhomme admitted. And for a while, they did. Their single Don’t Try To Stop It was a hit in the UK and the US in 1983.

How long it could last was the question. They had already dropped the sailor caps they all wore at early gigs, realizing that they seemed gimmicky; their musical style was also subject to the same charge. What they would do next though was up for debate. “I know what’s going to happen. Steve’s gonna leave and form a supergroup with Limahl and Nick Heyward,” Bonhomme speculated in the same interview, in reference to Limahl’s sacking from Kajagoogoo and Heyward’s departure from Haircut One Hundred.

He was joking of course, but in fact he wasn’t wide off the mark: Lambert did go on to work with another well-known name. Roman Holliday, as it happened, lasted another two years and Touch Too Much turned out to be their last single. When the group split, Lambert teamed up with Jon Moss, soon also to be out of a job with the collapse of Culture Club. They formed Heartbeat UK but unfortunately that project lasted just one single in 1987. Lambert moved to the US and for some time gave up any ambitions in pop music at all.

NEW SINGLES on sale from May. 28
1982
BOW WOW WOW (Annabella Lwin) I Want Candy (RCA RCA238)
WHAM! Wham Rap! (Inner Vision IVLA2442)
1984
FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD Two Tribes (ZTT ZTAS3)
1985
MADONNA Crazy For You (Geffen A6323)
ROMAN HOLLIDAY (Steve Lambert) Touch Too Much (Jive JIVE91)

Released today in 1983: Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home)

CBS CBSA3371

The PAUL YOUNG Story Part 2

Despite a loyal following ensuring decent receipts at live shows, Q-Tips failed to score a charting single in the UK and in 1982 front man Paul Young left for a solo career. Retaining only keyboardist Ian Kewley (now known as ‘The Rev’) from Q-Tips, Young set about assembling a new backing band to support him. The Family, as the band was to be called, was a fairly loose collective of musicians and singers, the only permanent members of which between 1982 and 1984 were The Rev and drummer Mark Pinder. Closely associated with them was another constant, producer Laurie Latham, who wasn’t credited as part of The Family but occasionally contributed percussion to some of their recordings.

Young’s first two post-Q-Tips singles were credited to Paul Young & The Family, but neither charted. First up in October ’82 was Iron Out The Rough Spots, with Matt Irving listed as The Family’s bass player. Also part of the line-up were Kim Leslie and Maz Roberts, two backing vocalists credited as ‘The W.T.’s’. (This, it was later revealed, stood for ‘Wealthy Tarts’, the name they gave to their vocal partnership.) Joining in time for Love Of The Common People in early ’83 was Rico Rodriguez on trombone, but this would be his only single with the band. By the time third single (and breakthrough hit, going to #1) Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home) was released, there had been a number of changes. Young was now billed as a solo artist and his backing band, which had undergone both name and personnel changes, were listed only on the reverse of the single’s sleeve. Now known as The Royal Family, Irving had been replaced on bass by new member Pino Palladino. Kim and Maz were not mentioned by name as they didn’t perform on this song, but they did receive ‘thanks’ in the sleeve notes; at the time, they were attending sessions for the recording of Young’s debut solo album.

That album was No Parlez (CBS CBS25521, 22 July 1983). As the choices for singles had indicated, it was chock full of cover versions of archive and recent material, but the performances from The Royal Family, the vocal improvisations of Kim and Maz, and skilful production from Latham, gave the album a polished, contemporary sound and allowed it to flow smoothly. The three singles to date had been tracks written in the 1960s (Love Of The Common People had been recorded by several acts in 1967, including The Everly Brothers; Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home) was an old Marvin Gaye song), but they rubbed shoulders comfortably with covers of recent compositions by Joy Division (Love Will Tear Us Apart) and Jack Lee (three songs).

One of Lee’s songs, Come Back And Stay, was chosen at the fourth single. Kim and Maz were now calling themselves ‘The Fabulous Wealthy Tarts’ and Steve Bolton, a recent recruit to The Royal Family, provided ghost guitar. Young ended 1983 with a reissue of Love Of The Common People, remixed to include contributions from Palladino and Bolton who hadn’t played on the original recording. (The contributions of Rodriguez and Irving weren’t removed from this mix of the song, but as they were not members of The Royal Family the sleeve noted that the song was ‘featuring’ them.) In between these two releases (which scored Young a further two Top 10 singles), No Parlez made the first of four visits to #1 in the album chart. It topped the chart for the first time in the week ending 17 September; returned for the first two weeks of October, then for a week in November, and finally for a fifth and final week in the week ending 14 January 1984. The first seven months of its 99 consecutive weeks on the album chart were spent in the Top 10 and it returned to the lower reaches of the chart several times in the winter of 1985/1986, bringing the total number of weeks on the chart to 119 and in the process earning triple-platinum status from the BPI for sales of close to a million copies in the UK alone.

NEW SINGLES on sale from May. 27
1983
IMAGINATION (Leee John) Looking At Midnight (R&B Records RBS214)
Nick HEYWARD Take That Situation (Arista HEY2)
ORANGE JUICE (Edwyn Collins) Flesh Of My Flesh (Polydor OJ4)
Mari WILSON Wonderful (The Compact Organization PINK7)
Paul YOUNG Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home) (CBS CBSA3371)

Released today in 1987: Love Bomb

London LON134

On February 5th 1989, Fat Tulips went into the studio to record a song which asked the question, Where’s Clare Grogan Now?. Bit cheeky. Why, if they had tuned in on their television sets over the past couple of years there’s every chance they’d have seen where she was.

After her band Altered Images split in 1983, Clare Grogan decided to concentrate on acting for a while. She had already launched her acting career while still a member of Altered Images (see earlier article in this blog), and as C.P. Grogan (the actors’ union, Equity, which she was required to join to work in film and television, already had a Claire [sic] Grogan so she could not use her birth name) she made a handful of appearances in some notable projects. She appeared in the film ‘Comfort and Joy’ in 1984, and had a small but memorable role as a somewhat insolent hotel receptionist in the BBC comedy based on the Tom Sharpe novel ‘Blott On The Landscape’ the following year. The year after that she appeared in an episode of another BBC hit, ‘The Monocled Mutineer’, before originating the recurring role of Kristine Kochanski in the cult sci-fi comedy ‘Red Dwarf’ in 1988.

But she hadn’t left music behind altogether, as demonstrated by the image at the top of this article. Unfortunately Love Bomb, um, bombed, and album Trash Mad was shelved. At the end of the 80s she was singing in a new band, Universal Love School, with former Altered Images band mate, and future husband, Steve Lironi.

NEW SINGLES on sale from May.26
1986
The HOUSEMARTINS Happy Hour (Go! Discs GOD11)
SIGUE SIGUE SPUTNIK 21st Century Boy (Parlophone SSS2)
STRANGE CRUISE (Steve Strange) Beat Goes On (EMI EMI5564)
1987
BOY GEORGE Keep Me In Mind (Virgin BOY101)
BREATHE Jonah (Siren SRN35)
Clare GROGAN Love Bomb (London LON134)
HEARTBEAT UK (Steve Lambert, Jon Moss) Jump To It! (Virgin VS972)
RADIO HEART featuring Gary NUMAN (Gary Numan) London Times (GFM GFM112)
T’PAU Intimate Strangers (Siren SRN52)
U2 I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (Island IS328)
Mari WILSON Don’t Get Mad, Get Even (Nightmare MARES39)

Released today in 1984: Thin Line Between Love And Hate

Real ARE22

Which was the best singles band of the 1980s? There are plenty of contenders and several of the bands releasing singles on this day in the 30 to 35 years ago could be on the shortlist. The Smiths often come top in music press reader polls or critics’ choices, but they were active for less than half the period in question. ABC debuted in, and were active throughout, the 80s, but the quality of their material varied. Siouxsie and The Banshees’ most productive period was the 80s; they kept the hits coming but were too divisive. (You either “got” Siouxsie Sioux or you didn’t.) All things considered, then, my nomination would be Pretenders.

The case for

For broadness of appeal, consistency of effort and quality of material, Pretenders deserve more recognition than they usually get in rock histories: a band who were not too heavy but not too soft (and were therefore unlikely to be found objectionable by anyone), who balanced original material with sensibly selected cover versions, and who released a string of attractively packaged singles throughout the decade – in short, they never released a bad single, and produced the occasional classic along the way.

The first of those classics was Brass In Pocket, the first single to climb to #1 in the 1980s in the UK. The only member of the line-up on that track still in Pretenders ten years later was chief songwriter and singer Chrissie Hynde, who was ruthless in pursuit of the perfect team: she had fired both Pete Farndon and Martin Chambers by the middle of the decade. But regardless of the personnel on the records, it was the Hynde House of Hits that was the essence of Pretenders: another classic from her pen was 2000 Miles, a Christmas favourite since its release in 1983. She was also responsible for the memorable singles Back On The Chain Gang (1982) and Don’t Get Me Wrong (1986), very different songs which showcased the versatility of her writing. She could produce a good song when she co-wrote too, either inside or outside the group: Brass In Pocket was co-authored with Jim Honeyman-Scott (who died in 1982), and an original song for the Bond film ‘The Living Daylights’ which Hynde composed with John Barry (If There Was A Man) was released under the name The Pretenders For 007 in 1987.

She had an ear for other people’s tunes too. Her version of similarly-named group The Persuaders’ Thin Line Between Love And Hate, released as a single 31 years ago today, was one of several covers Pretenders recorded which were respectful to the originals but at the same time brought something of Hynde’s identity to them. Her most haunting and sensitive vocal performance to that date, it is still able to send shivers up the spine. A particular favourite writer of hers it seems was Ray Davies, whose Stop Your Sobbing was chosen to be the first Pretenders single in 1979, and whose I Go To Sleep they covered in 1981. (Perhaps her favourite singles band of the 1960s was The Kinks.) Two covers Hynde recorded under her own name with UB40 were also sizeable hits. Then in 1988, it was a Bacharach and David song, Windows Of The World, that Pretenders issued as a single from the soundtrack from the film ‘1969’.

The case against

Unfortunately, Hynde has only ever been as good as her next single. Windows Of The World flopped and it wasn’t the first time this had happened: a re-mix of their second single, Kid, released to promote the The Singles, a compilation album which celebrated their success as a singles band, was an ironically-timed failure. (For some reason the track was issued as a single again in 1995 but once again failed to improve on its original chart peak of #33.) Other singles, such as Middle of The Road also (undeservedly) fell short of the hit parade. Pretenders never achieved the sort of fanatically loyal audience who would go out and buy every single, just because it was them – and groups who turn up on lists of the ‘greatest singles bands’ do tend to have established this type of following.

NEW SINGLES on sale from May. 25
1984
Nick HEYWARD Love All Day (Arista HEY6)
MADONNA Borderline (Sire W9260)
PRETENDERS Thin Line Between Love And Hate (Real ARE22)
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES (Siouxsie Sioux) Dazzle (Wonderland SHE7)
The SMITHS (Morrissey) Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now (Rough Trade RT156)
1987
ABC When Smokey Sings (Neutron NT111)

Released today in 1985: Laura

Arista HEY8

It all seemed to happen at once for Haircut One Hundred: in a period of something less than a year, they had Top 10 hits with all four of the singles they released and the album they were taken from, Pelican West, earned them a platinum disc and came close to topping the LP chart. There was success outside the UK too, and to help sales abroad two American tours and one European tour had been completed in the first half of 1982. By the end of the summer, the band members had barely had a day off in the past year. And before the end of the year, they had a second album to record and British tour dates to play throughout November and December. And there was a plan to visit Japan and the Far East in the New Year.

No wonder Nick Heyward wanted a break. Back in the UK in August 1982 to promote that fourth Top 10 single, he spoke to Record Mirror (11 September 1982) to explain why he had changed the band’s plans to record album number two in France: “I cancelled it. I decided we just weren’t going to Paris. I got so sick of going abroad to work that I decided that we would make the new LP in Britain. It may sound corny, but there’s nothing I like more than sitting in my house watching television and making cups of tea. I don’t even want to go out!” The band were now having a few weeks’ holiday before the sessions for the new album began, and that was as much as anyone knew at the time. But Record Mirror would follow the band’s progress closely over the next few months, and as the rest of the year progressed, so would most of the gossip columns in the music and tabloid press: the rumour was that Haircut One Hundred, despite the hits, was about to break up.

In an interview for the free newspaper Metro on 26 January 2011, two days before a Haircut One Hundred reunion where they performed the whole of Pelican West at the Indig02 in London, Heyward gave more detail about that point in the group’s career. “We came back to Britain and decided to be a four-piece again, chucked out Mark [Fox, percussion and backing vocals] and Phil [Smith, saxophonist], went into the studio. I started to get ill as I’d worked a year without sleeping properly and was feeling really depressed. I felt suicidal and went into hospital. While I was there Mark and Phil came back into the band and started writing. I went back to rehearsals, heard what they were doing, said, ‘Is this the new stuff I’m singing?’; they said, ‘No. Mark’s singing,’ and I said, ‘Well, there’s not much for me to do then, is there?’”

This was not common knowledge at the time. In the issue of 20 November 1982, Record Mirror reported that those previous planned live dates in the UK were to be postponed due to difficulties with the recording of the album, which no one was satisfied with. “‘We want to make an album with 12 hits on it, not just three or four good tracks,’ said one member this week,” the magazine stated, without identifying which “one member” had spoken. The UK tour was moved to February and March 1983, but it was hoped that the dates between Christmas and New year would still go ahead. In the event, they didn’t, but press interviews were set up for January in anticipation of a new single.

In the issue of 29 January 1983, though, the headline in the news section was “The full story behind the split!”. The story said that Heyward “couldn’t face up to meeting his fellow band members before finally quitting the band last week. Since Record Mirror exclusively revealed that the group’s studio work was in shambles back in November, he had recorded just three songs with the band. The heart-throb singer was said to be suffering from severe nervous strain at the end of last year with the pressure of being at the top. ‘It seemed like a total lack of confidence,’ said sax player Phil Smith this week. ‘Most of the band had finished the album tracks and we were just waiting for Nick to finish the vocals. We started the album way back in September, and we kept saying to him that he should get in there. We’ve only seen him intermittently over the past couple of months. It’s been very frustrating and very expensive to keep waiting for him to put down the vocals.’”

The report confirmed that Haircut One Hundred was continuing with Fox taking over lead vocals, but that the UK tour dates were now cancelled. “I think Nick found it hard to get on with Mark. It was particularly noticeable as they both do vocals,” Smith said. For his part, Fox said: “Nick’s departure is a timely exit for us. We are basically glad he’s left, because the rest of the band couldn’t get anything together.” A separate piece in the same issue confirmed recent press speculation that Heyward was going solo and quoted him as saying, “I’m really excited about my new project. The single is just me with session musicians. It is almost finished and it is going to be very different – you’ll see what I mean when it comes in February.”

This turned out to be Whistle Down The Wind, which was rumoured to be the cancelled Haircut One Hundred single from January. It was the first of three Top 20 singles from Heyward, all of which appeared on his Top 10 debut album North Of A Miracle. Haircut One Hundred had a less successful 1983: they just made the Top 50 with their first post-Heyward single and thereafter, there were no further hits. Paint And Paint, their 1984 album, flopped, and by the time Heyward released today’s featured single Laura, Haircut One Hundred was over. But Heyward’s career was also suffering by this point. Laura made #45, which was representative of the type of chart placings he could command for the rest of the Eighties.

NEW SINGLES on sale from May. 24
1985
BON JOVI In And Out Of Love (Vertigo VER19)
Nick HEYWARD Laura (Arista HEY8)
The JESUS AND MARY CHAIN You Trip Me Up (Blanco Y Negro NEG13)

Released today in 1980: Simon Templer

Deram BUM1

The character Simon Templar was created by British writer Leslie Charteris in the 1920s. Often referred to a ‘modern day Robin Hood’, Templar has a strong but sometimes dubious moral code and makes it his mission in life to right the wrongs he perceives are done by “the ungodly” (typically, corrupt officials), taking money from them and giving it to parties he considers deserving (i.e., those who have suffered in some way due to the influence of adversary of Templar’s in question). He makes his presence known to those involved by leaving a calling-card featuring a picture of a stick man with a halo, a reference to his nickname of The Saint.

Charteris wrote around fifty books featuring Templar between 1928 and 1963 and his series was continued by other writers for a further twenty years, with Charteris either co-writing or taking an editorial role in those; considered ‘canon’ are those first published in the UK by Hodder and Stoughton. There were also nearly one hundred Charteris short stories featuring the character, published in various periodicals including a photo play in Life magazine, in which Charteris himself portrayed Templar.

In fact, it seems the only medium that this versatile character hasn’t been resurrected in is computer gaming. In the middle of the twentieth century there were several radio shows starring Templar; numerous feature films have been based around him (although the screenplays have usually been original storylines, rather than based on events from the books and stories); he has appeared in a long-running strip cartoon in newspapers, initially written by Charteris, and in comic books which either contained new drawings or collected the previously published strips; Charteris even co-wrote a stage play starring Templar although this was never performed.

But it is the television series that inspired Max Splodge’s deliberately mis-spelled single Simon Templer, which musically borrows heavily from the theme tune of ‘Return of The Saint’ which was airing at the time of the song’s composition. (Starring Ian Ogilvy, this was not a continuation of the 1960s series ‘The Saint’ with Roger Moore, although it is the same character Ogilvy and Moore were playing. Ogilvy’s fame peaked in the early 1980s due to his performance in ‘Return of The Saint’ and he was briefly tipped to replace Moore as James Bond as well as Simon Templar.) In most of the media in which he appears, Templar is intelligent, sophisticated, seemingly independently wealthy, an exposer of corruption and a champion of the oppressed, an amateur poet and songwriter, a wit and a charmer, but Splodge is not impressed by him. “Could this be Mr Simon Templar?” he asks before listing some of the character’s qualities, only to conclude “Well, I think Simon’s head is large,” and ending with the assertion, “I think Simon’s a bit of a bore/Ian Ogilvy and Podgy Moore.”

Splodge could afford to be dismissive. It was one of this single’s two B-side tracks that got him more attention than Mr Templar. Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps Please received far more radio airplay and was probably what the punters who took the single to #7 were buying it for anyway, a theory supported by the fact that The Official Charts company now has it listed as a double-A-side.

NEW SINGLES on sale from May. 23
1980
The PROFESSIONALS Just Another Dream (Virgin VS353)
SPLODGENESSABOUNDS Simon Templer (Deram BUM1)
UB40 My Way Of Thinking (Graduate GRAD8)
U2 Eleven O’Clock Tick Tock (Island WIP6601)
1983
KAJAGOOGOO Hang On Now (EMI EMI5394)
1986
TEARS FOR FEARS Everybody Wants To Run The World (Mercury RACE1)
1988
FIVE STAR Another Weekend (Tent PB42081)
SADE (Sade Adu) Paradise (Epic SADE2)
TIFFANY I Saw Him Standing There (MCA TIFF3)

Released today in 1989: Express Yourself

Sire W2948

The promotional clip for Madonna’s Express Yourself was the most expensive of the 1980s. With a budget nearly five times that of Michael Jackson’s classic Thriller (admittedly, his money went further as there were some seven years between the two videos), Madonna’s $5 million bought her lavish sets on a huge soundstage, the best in hair, make-up and costume, crane- and tracking-shots, director David Fincher – and just about anyone else she wanted to involve on the project. “This one I had the most amount of input,” Rolling Stone quote Madonna as saying in an article where they name the clip as her very best ¹. “I oversaw everything — the building of the sets, everyone’s costumes, I had meetings with make-up and hair and the cinematographer, everybody. Casting, finding the right cat — just every aspect. Kind of like making a little movie. We basically sat down and just threw out all every idea we could possibly conceive of and of all the things we wanted. All the imagery we wanted — and I had a few set ideas, for instance the cat and the idea of ‘Metropolis’ [ground-breaking 1927 expressionist sci-fi movie]. I definitely wanted to have that influence, that look on all the men — the workers diligently methodically working away.”

The video was shot in April 1989 at Culver Studios in California. The Fritz Lang-inspired industrial imagery, with giant machinery being operated by powerfully-built men rendered vulnerable by the sheer scale of the sets, was combined with the ambiguous styling of Madonna herself: one moment she was a power-suited ‘80s businesswoman with shoulder-pads and a monocle, every inch the chairwoman of the board – the next she was clad in a corset or submissively chained to a bed. What all this might mean has generated much analysis, and with Madonna both the objectified and the objectifier during the course of the clip, the video did seem to be offering a comment on gender politics. Slant magazine later summarized it as “a bombastic masterpiece that heralds Madonna’s uncanny ability to use her consumer-driven image to code her feminist politics,” ² which seems as valid an appraisal as any. Certainly she bore a striking resemblance to Marlene Dietrich in the scenes where she wore the black trouser-suit, an actress who made use of androgyny in some of her film roles. Returning to the ‘Metropolis’ influence, Express Yourself also explored the relationship between the body and the mind, and hinted at class warfare propaganda with its depictions of manipulated manual workers and a controlling elite. And there was that stuff with the cat and a bowl of milk too.

Using as its soundtrack a special Shep Pettibone remix of the song, the Express Yourself video got its premiere on 17 May 1989 on MTV and was aired on the channel every hour for about three weeks. At that year’s MTV Video Music Awards, it was nominated in the categories of Best Female Video, Best Editing, Best Cinematography, Best Direction and Best Art Direction and (a little surprisingly given the push the channel had given it) it won (only) in the last three categories. Its most significant win in the same year was probably being Billboard magazine’s video of the year at their Music Video Awards. Since then, it has appeared in the Top 10 of a number of lists of the greatest music videos of all-time compiled by some prestigious institutions. Despite not awarding it Best Female Video in the year of its release, MTV included it in the Top 10 of their 100 Greatest Videos Ever Made (1999); Rolling Stone magazine placed it similarly in its The 100 Top Music Videos (1993); as did Time magazine in their The 30 All-Time Best Music Videos (2011).

¹ Weingarten, Christopher et al. “The Making of Madonna’s 20 Greatest Music Videos”, Rolling Stone, Wenner Media LLC, 25 February 2015.
² Cinquemani, Sal et al. “100 Greatest Music Videos”, Slant, slantmagazine.com, 30 June 2003.

NEW SINGLES on sale from May. 22
1980
Hazel O’CONNOR Writing on The Wall (A&M AMS7530)
1981
The JAM Funeral Pyre (Polydor POSP257)
1986
The SMITHS (Morrissey) Bigmouth Strikes Again (Rough Trade RT192)
1989
GUNS N’ ROSES Sweet Child O’ Mine [Re-issue] (Geffen GEF55)
Howard JONES The Prisoner (WEA HOW14)
MADONNA Express Yourself (Sire W2948)
SHARPE AND NUMAN (Gary Numan) I’m On Automatic (Polydor PO43)
SINITTA Right Back Where We Started From (Fanfare FAN18)
TRANSVISION VAMP (Wendy James) The Only One (MCA TVV7)