I’ve had Guns of Brixton stuck in my head off and on ever since reading this post. One of the few rock drummers who could pull off a kickass reggae beat.
Strange lyric that. I know that this is what is on the liner, but I never hear the "the." And 18-year old me and my friends, well, we argued about that at length. Yeah, we were the music nerds from "High Fidelity." The biggest argument we had, pre-internet, were the words from a Martha and the Muffins song, Echo Beach. (and there were no liner notes for this album: A building in the distance, surrealistic sight Surrealistic makes more sense, but man, it sounds like "it's a realistic." Aah, the things kids with nothing better to do can argue about...
Yeah he definitely takes a pause over the "the", especially singing live. I must've listened to that track a thousand times. I never debated lyrics though, only cause I really didn't know anyone who was listening to that kind of music. As Yoss' mentioned, college radio was also my lifeline. Later on I started going to he city to see bands. Great time to be there.
I was lucky I suppose in that I had a core group of like-minded soccer players hipster doofuses (of the time) who listened to indie music in high school. We argued about R.E.M. lyrics all the time.
It was a few of us and skaters who were more into hardcore. Maybe a handful of girls who liked The Cure & Depeche Mode. I remember the girls soccer team loving Blister in the Sun for some reason. We could kinda get WLIR in North Jersey plus WFDU, WFMU, WFUV, WNYU. AKA Left of the Dial.
At school it was swapping CDs and tapes with likeminded mates - centre of that universe was the independent record store I got into college radio a bit later, and that was literally the only place you could hear techno / electro in those days - like couple of shows a week The scene really depended on those 2 or 3 guys who had been to london and learned about the scene there, then they would import the records via the record store, then play them on student radio so we could all record them It was almost impossible to get stuff on vinyl them. The store would have a big shipment in, and you'd check in daily to see if it had arrived. But most was on pre-order so there was a window of 2-3 days when the bins had good new stuff, but after that it was just all picked over and only the leftovers remained. Or you could order stuff on a list, sound unheard As late as '96 i remember ringing central station records in sydney and they would play you the tracks over the phone so you could pick stuff out. I remember in the 80s my cousin was into stuff like Suicidal Tendancies, Anthrax etc - there were probably 100 people in the country who had listened to it
The whole west coast, skate/surf scene was really exciting to us but you almost could not get hold of the music. I remember at one stage wanting to wear a baseball shirt etc like I'd seen in one of the music videos but you couldn't buy any of the look. The same thing happened with Rave where streetwear didn't exist so we all just wore strange op shop clothes like an army of vagabonds and bums. The photos of those early 90s parties are totally bizarre. Ironically the Cure look you could pull of because there was no shortage of grandads dinner jackets in the op shops. At high school everyone had an op shop black dinner jacket - seems odd now
Pitchfork did a 40th anniversary Combat Rock retrospective. I have Straight to Hell in my Top 10. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/album...ook&utm_source=facebook&utm_social-type=owned Because the internet has everything, this guy went to Bangkok to search for the Combat Rock cover photo location. https://12xu.com/combat_rock_album_cover_location/
I would have sworn the chorus of "Radio Free Europe" was "crawling out in the trenches" Turned out it was "callin' out in transit." Man, that changes everything!
Guns of Brixton was all Paul! But yes, Topper could play everything and was a pretty decent songwriter to boot.
Yeah, I heard that back then. Now try comprehending Cocteau Twins lyrics. Maybe the easiest is Bluebeard.
Try just reading Cocteau Twins lyrics while the songs are playing. At best, I can usually pick out every 5th word or so, with the lyrics right in front of me.
Living in northern NJ at the time it wasn't bad at all. WFMU, WNYU, WFDU. All manner of music to keep me entertained. I lived without a TV for much of the latter half of the 80's. I'd no idea what was going on in mainstream music.
Nah, one of the most easy going bands around, ego-wise. The lyrics were just whatever Michael remembered they were that night. After a while, you start to figure out most of them. And there's actually a consensus for most as well now. But not 9-9. Still have no clue what he's saying in about 50 percent of that song.