In My Life — Fay Fife & Eugene Reynolds

Here’s an old documentary on the Rezillos I found on Google video.

I was a big Rezillos fan back in the late seventies, and I've seen them a couple of times since they reformed. If anything, I'd say they were now even better: Faye & Eugene's singing voices are certainly more powerful, and richer, too. And I'd forgotten what a good guitarist Jo "Luke Warm" Callis is, in that lead-and-rhythm-together style of, I dunno, erm, Mick Green? Wilko Johnson? (music journalism hat falls off).

And —swoon— I got to stand next to Faye & Eugene in the audience at the last Bis Christmas show at Oran Mor. Too starstruck to actually say anything, though.

Anyway here they are being interviewed in 2001, before they reformed, talking about the band's history, including their intermediate "Revillos" project. With some hard-to-find archive footage.

To watch in a bigger window, or download it, go to Google video here.

Go Raj!

The Pop Music from my area is superior to the Pop Music from your area in every way.

Perhaps I’m a little biased, but I’ve always been aware that Scottish Pop Music is the best in the world. Not to mention our choreography, costume design, and television production. Too prove it, here’s Lulu making a guest appearance on Shang-a-Lang, the Bay City Rollers’ astonishingly good TV show from the mid-seventies.

Zigzag 86—August 1978

Back at my folks’ house a few weeks ago, my Dad gave me a box: inside were various bits of paper, notes, magazines, fanzines, and concert programmes from the late seventies: the last kibble left behind when I left home.

Among the gems (more later) was this Zigzag. Founded by Pete Frame in 1969, this well-respected British Rock Journal had, by 1978, come thoroughly under the Punk Spell, thanks to new editor Kris Needs.

The layout is a curious hybrid: text is mostly properly typset (which in those pre-DTP days meant professional) but the subject matter and the then-current DIY aesthetic meant that layouts also included felt-tip scribbly headlines, rules and page numbers, giving a more fanzine-ish feel.

Like everybody else, I know in my heart-of-hearts that the music being made when I was in my teens is the absolute, ultimate, best ever. So if you’re in your mid forties like me, you’re sure to enjoy these articles on The Raincoats, Suicide, John Otway, Steel Pulse and The Human League. Even the piece on cover stars The Rich Kids is an interesting bit of “Slik-Pistols-Vox-Visage-Pistols-again” history. And there’s a column by the great John Walters to boot.

But the best piece has to be the interview with my then-favourite band, The Rezillos, by Cramps Legionnaire Lindsay Hutton. Here’s the Rezillos piece (click for bigger, readable pages):

...and here’s the whole magazine, rapidshared:
In Acrobat format
In Comic Reader format
As a ZIP archive of JPEG pages.

Susan Cadogan — Hurts So Good

I must have heard this song on the Radio in the early seventies, when I still had that child’s thirsty cultural-vacuum-cleaner brain: and for years later the chorus would leap back into my mind at odd moments, though I couldn’t remember the title or artist. Before I’d even heard of double tracking (recording a lead vocal twice to beef up a weak performance) I would think of it as that “hurts-so-good” sound. Until I eventually found it by accident on one of those cheapo reggae compilation LPs, in the eighties. And the reason it had stuck became clear: it was a Lee “Scratch” Perry production.

Listen:

Download it at rapidshare.com

But then I found out that it was actually a Millie Jackson song. Of course I should have known: Millie is, after all, the queen of the I-Love-You-You-Bastard genre. Here she is singing it on Soul Train, in 1973 at a guess:

Millie Jackson - Hurts So Good Uploaded by soulpatrol

Conway Twitty – How much more can she stand

I first heard this classic example of the “Cheatin’ Song” in a brief clip on Hank Wangford's A to Z of C & W, Channel 4's eighties documentary series. Before that Conway Twitty didn't mean much more to me than his late-fifties faux-Elvis international hit It's Only Make Believe.

But he went on to a long successful country singer career, from the sixties through to the ninties, including this minor hit from 1971.

“There's a devil in my body, that I just can't satisfy...”

Conway's dead now, and I'll never get the chance to visit his gloriously tacky theme park, Twitty City in Hendersonville, Tennessee: it's been converted into a Christian music venue owned by the Trinity Broadcasting Network. All things must pass.