30 years of twee sounds

Ah the C86 years, full of little diy bands playing like The Smiths with no Johnny Marr on guitar, shouting like Orange Juice with no Edwyn singing... and what about those wonderful Sarah small packets on my po box coming from another planet or it was just a dream? I usually listen to C86 bands, often labelled as 'twee' just because they remind me of my teen years and those type of bands usually speaked out my mind, whether lyrically, whether instrumentally I don't know for sure. But tere must be a good reason if I spent those years exchanging mixtapes and twee badges with my penfriends from abroad (where are they now?) and drinking a lot of milkshakes instead of beers...The Pastels speaked out my longing for lost freedom as a teenager, like in 'Automatically yours' (from 'Up For A Bit With The Pastels') for example. And also they played some of the loveliest love songs around at the time. They were not dramatic as post punk heroes I usually love or talk about riots and revolutions, but about a love I kind of wish I had: genuine, spontaneous, simple, young and... boh, the typical teenage love we all dream about even when we grow... 'A Million Tears' is quite the perfect example to it: 'If I can't have you then I don't want nobody else, I'll tear myself apart and cry a million tears...'. So simple but so true. Thanks Stephen if I dreamt of trucks, train & tractors as it was me driving in the green fields. "Please don't think of us as an 'indie band' as it was never meant to be a genre, and anyway we are far too outward looking for that sad tag" said once Stephen Pastel. Sad tag or not, I viewed The Pastels and the C-86 phenomenon at the time as an intelligent reaction to the opulence of the Big League indie bands. And while U2, The Cure and Simple Minds filled their stadiums and sold billions of records, The Pastels reminded us that there were bands still recording in small rooms with their mummies in the kitchen and their papas watching tv...More sounds from Leamington please and buy SLOW SUMMITS immediately!!!
Hear them playing live some times ago and enjoy them once again...

Do you gesang?

Here we probably got one of the best band from the subterranean italian new wave music scene. This was i'm gonna write about is one of the few notable dark-synth act coming from Italy, more precisely from Milano, more or less 30 years ago. There weren't much infos about the story of band or if they played live alot... but there's been a lot of talking in the recent years about this band and their "coldwave" sound. I remember them playing my hometown Torino in a dark rainy night at The Big Club, but sincerely I was not so impressed by them at the time, they played like millions of others and they sang with very terrible english pronounce... So the question was and still is, do they deserve all this posthumous fame the world of blogging bloggers tribute them? What about other hundreds of bands that never surfaced here in Italy from the beginning to the end of post punk era? Boh, sometimes history changes the facts and what we believe to remember is not what exactly happened... listening once again to their records and their live tapes they do no seem so bad and I must admit I really like them now... anyway, also here in Italy we now have our little "joydivisionesque phenomenon", Weimar Gesang (who?) of course! As I told before, more than three decades have passed since they hardly tried to emerge from the minor cultural rubble of italian's wave to a kind of darkly propulsive post punk anthems. The band consisted of four members: Donato Santarcangeli, Fabio Magistrali, Giuseppe Tonolini, and Paolo Mauri, a few of which went on to play in various other Italian bands over the years. Their base was the historical label and record shop Supporti Fonografici. With their atmospheric soundscapes "a la cure" Weimar Gesang tried to demonstrate a personal kind of glacial grandeur, maybe never seen before here in the land of the sun & spaghetti. It was not easy for them, mainly because their derivative post-punk  sound, in the new born wave italian movement, was not immediately known. But now they had their revenge. In the last years it seems that anyone around the blog involved in coldwave things have a word for them, and many have cited Weimars and their works as "seminal" and influential...they certainly weren't, but now they are, stars...

In the Bridgehouse again

Wasted Youth were arguably one of the greatest lost London band of the post-punk years. Rarely mentioned, if at all, in the era's music history books, they were heavily influenced by the dark narcotic glamour of the Velvets and Transformer-era Lou Reed. The Only Ones were their myths and also Peter Perrett produced them, as did Martin Hannett some years later. It seems very far nowadays but I remember they were hugely popular as the Eighties dawned with punks, looking for something more sexy and sophisticated. As many others, Wasted Youth looked set to become much more than the cult band they became. They pre-dated Positive Punk and Goth and are still remembered as quietly-influential and a superb live band by fans.  They only had a three-year life but even more than others they were acknowledged as one of the bands which really influenced the darkwave & gothic band scene. Their records were released through Bridgehouse Records, a label set up by the bass player's father in the pub he owned in Canning Town (The Bridgehouse, the first pub in the world with its own record label!!!). There is also a one and only wonderful album, even pressed on CD, titled "Wild & Wandering", one of my favourite record of that times. Guitarist Rocco had some fame after they split forming Flesh For Lulu but this story is not so much interesting. In the late eighties the Bridgehouse pub became a sort of club, later also an hotel with a restaurant... Wasted Youth original singer Micks Atkins leaved us in 2008 and recently came the sad new that also the bass-man, Darren Murphy, died after a battle with cancer... anyway, if anyone wishing to find the missing link between The Only ones, The Psychedelic Furs & Manic Street Preachers should search no further than this overlooked great band!

A children's board game

The greatest punk rock band ever or the most overrated band of all time? One thing is for sure in my opinion, the Huskers were not as successful as some of the countless bands the trio influenced – from Nirvana to the Pixies or Green Day – but they bowled over pretty much everyone who ever saw them play. Me too, it was 1987 and they played my hometown Turin, Italy with an astonishing set including the whole Warehouse masterpiece. Though I never suffered the angst of youth that attracted so many guys to the Huskers back in the day, I still love their crystalline metal pop powerblast nowadays. And though I'm not exactly the prototype of world's biggest 'hardcore' fan I definitely can't deny the immense talent these Minneapolis guys had. From their beginnings in the late ‘70s to their bitter demise in 1988, Husker Du played with a sort of emotional ferocity that made almost every band before or since sound tame. I even saw Pixies & Nirvana playing in "those important years", there was really no comparison with the Husker Du "true punk rock fury". For sheer emotional intensity, it was quite impossible to top them and it's still hard to think of anyone who will make it better.

Husker Du " Spin Radio FM Concert 1985".

Heart and the glory and me

After all these years, I don't know why I love you ... and yes, The House Of Love are still one of my favourite bands ever. They were not particulary original and their work is quite "derivative" to be honest. i know I know I know. But in my opinion, they had (have) the touch of the true rock (?) legends... must be be the way Guy sings or must be the way Terry plays guitar. Must be the songs or... anyway, thanks to Guy & Terry reunited again, they recently made a quite triumphant return as the legendary combination of Chadwick and Bickers still proves that time hasn’t diminished their chemistry at all. Their new album "She paints the world in red" is really fantastic and I'm not joking... no Bauhaus in whites, no Bloody Valentines covering themselves and no Primal Screamaedelica sequel... Having listened to this album many, many times in these days and it seems that times never passed for them. I'm absolutely astounded by the consistent high standard of the songs and performance. No Retromania this time, no vain attempts to relive past glories or dragging out a reunion story a little longer. Like they made before, they're still playing in heaven (in italy we say "paradiso"): those melodic traits that characterized the House Of Love’s eighties and nineties are finally back and time waited for them as we were still living the golden Creation era... and just like Christine, they're still walking at me and still talking at me...

The banshees design

from their site:
Style Sindrome began to play in Rome in 1980, inspired by the new wave and post-punk music scene pioneered in the United Kingdom by such giants as Joy Division, The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees. Anna and Stefano came from TM Spa, a rock band that had been among the winner of the First Italian Rock Festival in 1980, whereas Giorgio had been part of Electroshock, a well known Italian rock band in the late ’70s. When Massimo and Raimondo joined in, the band emerged with the final line-up. The music of Style Syndrome is characterized by an unconventional and well-balanced mixture of dark sensibility and psychedelia, as well as an evocative alchemy of sounds which creates a rarefied atmosphere. The band self-produced a couple of demo tapes in the years ’81 and 82. In 1982 RAI produced a videoclip featuring Style Sindrome for the show “Mister Fantasy”.Later on in the same year, Style Sindrome participated with the track “Waving in the dark” to the compilation “Gathered”, edited by Rockerilla and released by Electric Eye Record. Recently restored, “A mysterious design” cd collects 7 original tracks from the band’s two self-produced demo tapes recorded in Rome in the years ’81 and ’82, which had largely remained unreleased and gone lost over the years.  After a 30 years absence, Style Sindrome returned also on stage with a memorable concert in Rome (Init) on 9th November 2012, in which they celebrated with an enthusiastic audience their long-awaited reunion.

The keys to the future

David Ball had no doubts that synthesizers have finally arrived in 1979. 

"When electric guitars were first used I'm sure people were saying, 'Do you really think this is gonna last?' Electric guitars have been with us for years now, and I think it will be the same with synths. People have accepted it as a conventional instrument rather than a freak of science.'' "I think synthesizers are here to stay, regardless of what they're playing now. A lot of things I thought were gonna happen a few years ago have happened." England has a basis for synthesizer music. I don't think it's a fad, because it's lasted. Since Gary Numan there's always been synthesizer music in the English charts. It's gone through all the different fashions and it's still there.  "The synthesizer's such a flexible instrument. You can play anything on it. It's not a kind of music; it's a way of making music." Synthesizers now have the potential to become the next classic rock 'n' roll instrument. Keep your ears open. Who knows-in a few years the sequel to this piece may even star you! 

Trouser Press, May 1982