Tag Archives: 1990

WIS Presents: The Boston Years VII

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This is about when I really started being consistently broke. Money I’d made from the media center job that went into my checking account went right back out again whenever I went record shopping. The problem was that there were at least six record stores within walking distance of my dorm that I could visit: Nuggets and Planet in Kenmore Square, Tower Records, Looney Tunes on Boylston, and Newbury Comics and Mystery Train on Newbury.

A dangerous thing, indeed.

If I wasn’t going to get along with my roommate or any of the cooler-than-thou indie hipsters here — and there were a lot of them — I suppose I’d better just embrace my own level of alternativeness. I didn’t quite fit in on either end…not hip enough for the hipster crowd, and not normal enough for the normals. So it was like senior year in high school all over again, really. Become the friendly oddball to everyone. Just be myself and let them deal with the inconsistencies, yeah? And it worked out reasonably well.

Yo La Tengo and Daniel Johnston, “Speeding Motorcycle” single, released 1 March 1990. Johnston was a delightful oddball musician with a childlike voice, and a favorite of the indie crowd in the 80s with his wonderfully naive yet flawless DIY ethic of recording music on cassette at home and handing them out to friends and fans. During an in-studio performance on WFMU by indie band Yo La Tengo, Johnston joined in for a live-via-phone rendition of his song “Speeding Motorcycle.” It somehow caught on, got released as a single, and got played on college radio all over the place, reaching Boston and getting played heavily on MIT’s WMBR that spring.

Jesus Jones, “Real Real Real” single, released 1 March 1990. Just before the band dropped what would become their longest-lasting and biggest hit, Jesus Jones dropped this poppy single that would become their sound for their second album Doubt. The rough edges found on Liquidizer might have been smoothed over a bit, but they never lost their bite.

The Chills, Submarine Bells, released 1 March 1990. Nothing like a super catchy song about writing super catchy songs to guarantee radio play, yes? Martin Phillips’ lyrics always had that keen sense of comedic irony, and this album puts it front and center. It’s also a slight change of sound, the band now given a sleek production that makes their songs shine.

Inspiral Carpets, “This Is How It Feels” single, released 1 March 1990. The Carpets’ single — a song about the ennui of living on the back end of Thatcher’s frequently jobless England and the inability to do much about it — became a huge UK hit and paved the way for their debut album Life, which would drop in a few months’ time.

Robyn Hitchcock, Eye, released 12 March 1990. After the success of 1989’s Queen Elvis with his band the Egyptians, Hitchcock returned with a solo acoustic record full of lovely balladry and quiet introspection, temporarily putting his off-kilter humor on the backburner for the time being.

Renegade Soundwave, Soundclash, released 12 March 1990. “Biting My Nails” is one of those songs you have to play LOUD AF, which is of course what I did whenever it came on the radio. RS was one of those indie-dance hybrid bands from the UK that never quite hit the charts here in the States, but this track remains a favorite of the era, and one of mine as well.

Chickasaw Mudd Puppies, White Dirt, released 12 March 1990. This Athens GA duo was a critic favorite but a relative obscurity (even despite cheers by REM’s Michael Stipe). Their lowdown cowpunk noise could fit in easily with similar bands like Meat Puppets.

The Lightning Seeds, Cloudcuckooland, released 16 March 1990. Ian Broudie, more known at the time as a producer and songwriter favored by many musicians, brought his irresistible sunshine pop into the forefront with the super cheerful “Pure”, which would be his calling card for years to come.

Lloyd Cole, Lloyd Cole, released 16 March 1990. After the breakup of the Commotions in 1989, Cole released his self-titled debut which became a critic favorite. The quirky and clever lyricism of his previous band might have left to be replaced by maturity and moodiness, but it only proved that he could write a damn fine song. The single “Downtown” got a feature in the otherwise forgettable Rob Lowe-James Spader movie Bad Influence.

Depeche Mode, Violator, released 19 March 1990. DM’s crowning achievement was an instant success with both fans and critics and is still considered their best album of all. Martin Gore is on top of his songwriting game here. The industrial samples aren’t center stage this time, but instead cleverly layered and integrated into the songs to make them even more complex. The band could only go higher from here on in.

Sinéad O’Connor, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, released 20 March 1990. O’Connor’s long-awaited second album can sometimes be a tough listen — there’s a lot more heartbreak and heartache here than on her previous album — but it’s her most accomplished. It also contains her biggest hit, the Prince-penned “Nothing Compares 2 U”.

Urban Dance Squad, Mental Floss for the Globe, released 23 March 1990. Laid back sun-drenched grooves and hard-crunch punk-funk hit you broadside on this debut album by UDS, featuring far too many catchy vibes that’ll keep you moving the entire time. It’s a super fun album that you should definitely have in your collection.

Social Distortion, Social Distortion, released 27 March 1990. This LA punk band that owes a lifelong debt to Johnny Cash was never the biggest draw in their hometown, and the few previous albums and singles they had came out on several different labels, until major label Epic signed them. The sad ‘I’m a fuck-up and I’m sorry’ punk balladry of “Ball and Chain” was so quintessentially Cash that it caught on with the indie crowds immediately, and became a radio hit, starting a long and successful career for them. [I knew they’d hit the big time when, a month or so later, I heard five or six kids down the hall from me singing along to it. Heh.]

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I know somewhere along the line here, I started seeing shows in and around town. I saw The The at the Orpheum for their Mind Bomb tour. I also went to a few all-ages shows on Landsdowne Street just outside Fenway Park, which back then was the main college nightclub scene with multiple stages. (Many had a number of names, depending on the era: Spit, Axis, Avalon, and Citi, for starters. I’ve forgotten which ones were which at this point.) I got to see a number of big names cheap and just before Nirvana came and blew alt-rock out of the water and brought the genre to larger stages. I didn’t go often (again, due to being broke most of the time), but when I did it was a super fun time.

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Coming Up Next: Sliding towards spring and thinking of summer plans!

WIS Presents: The Boston Years VI

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When most people think of music in the early 90s, usually they either mention the slow rise and dominance of the Grunge scene, or they think of the popularity of Britpop with the UK and American anglophiles. What’s often forgotten is that there was a brief time where straight-ahead alternative rock — the kind one often links with radio friendly bands like Collective Soul and so on — started making its presence known as well. It wasn’t as harsh or as emotional as Grunge and not as freewheeling as Britpop, but it was still full of strong melody and musicianship. [These bands, sadly, would be the first to feel the pain of losing label support and the goalposts of success shifting quickly out of their reach.] Still, it amazes me how positive most of this stuff sounded at the time. Perhaps it was the hope of a new decade, or the influence of uplifting pop, but either way, it brought about many new and exciting sounds.

Tribe, Here at the Home EP, released 1 February 1990. Tribe is one of my all-time favorite Boston bands, because they were such amazing songwriters. They embraced that autumnal post-punk sound — a collegiate pop, in a way — and always put on a great show. This EP was a local release that got the attention of Warner/Slash Records, who released two further albums from them before their breakup.

King Missile, Mystical Shit, released 1 February 1990. John S Hall is that guy down the hall in your dorm that was quiet and unassuming yet a little bit…odd. His music was simple and often repetitive, but it was the lyrics you had to listen to, because they were often hilarious (and not safe at all for work). A few years before his unexpected radio hit with “Detachable Penis”, he came out with a wonderful ode to the Son of God that became a college radio favorite.

The House of Love, The House of Love, released 1 February 1990. Not to be confused with their 1988 album of the same name (different album altogether), this one helped bring them into the conscience of US modern rock radio with hits “I Don’t Know Why I Love You” and “The Beatles and the Stones”.

Depeche Mode, “Enjoy the Silence” single, released 5 February 1990. A follow-up to their preview single “Personal Jesus”, this became a worldwide hit and remains one of their most famous songs ever. Hearing this for the first time, I remember thinking that they’d not just written a song better than any one of the tracks on 1987’s Music for the Masses, they’d just dropped their best song ever. [I also remember that my hipster roommate hated this song because it was popular.]

Midnight OIl, Blue Sky Mining, released 9 February 1990. The Aussie band’s follow-up to the mega-popular Diesel & Dust didn’t quite hit the same heights, but that really was never their intention in the first place.

The Fall, Extricate, released 19 February 1990. The Fall’s studio follow-up to I Am Kurious Oranj took them in an unexpected direction: catchy, radio-friendly pop. Mark E Smith might still have been growling about the frustrations and crankiness of British life, but there was a groove to it now, and it made songs like the super catchy “Telephone Thing” memorable.

Primal Scream, Loaded EP, released 19 February 1990. A year before the phenomenal and universally beloved Screamadelica album, the band dropped an odd EP featuring a song that was really just a hazy dub remix by Andrew Weatherall of their single “I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have”. Tack a Peter Fonda movie sample at the beginning, and you have a ridiculously popular Britpop anthem that gets airplay to this day.

The Beloved, Happiness, released 20 February 1990. This electronic dance band had been around for quite some time in the UK, originally as a new-wave band, and you can still hear evidence of their origins on this relentlessly positive, groove-laden album. It’s one of my favorite albums of this period and you should definitely give it a listen.

Del Amitri, Waking Hours, released 20 February 1990. Quite a few years before their Beatlesque “Roll to Me” became their popular radio hit, this band was a favorite of AOR and Adult Alternative stations with their slightly-countrified-blues rock. “Kiss This Thing Goodbye” became their first big hit and got quite a lot of airplay in the early 90s.

The Church, Gold Afternoon Fix, released 22 February 1990. Even this band sounded rather chipper this time around, having dialed back the moodiness and heavy reverb a bit. This album definitely has that early 90s crisp production sound, which in fact worked in their favor, helping the single “Metropolis” get considerable airplay.

Lush, Mad Love EP, released 26 February 1990. This second EP brought out the band’s best qualities — the jangly guitars and off-center melodies — and made them shine even brighter, leading their label 4AD into a new chapter of dreamlike noise rock.

Listen in Silence III: The Singles mixtape, made 28 February 1990. My first mixtape of the 90s might look like it was basically WFNX’s playlist of the same era, and you’d be right. As much as I loved college radio, Boston College’s WZBC was just a bit too leftfield most of the time and my own college’s FM station a little too committed to ticking all the genre boxes. ‘FNX was my go-to station on my stereo, on my Walkman, and even on the radio at the library Media Center. There are a few quirks and deep cuts here, however, most of them either recent used record store purchases or favorite album tracks. Not one of my favorite mixtapes, but it did its job at the time.

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So. Despite withering grades and annoying roommates and distant girlfriends, I was in a much better place by the time spring semester rolled around. I realized that the worst I could do is fall into yet another moody spiral. It was about this time that I’d started a new composition book for my lyrics and poetry, and being a bit less restrictive about it. A lot of the writing from this time came out in shards, sometimes a few lines and sometimes a full piece. The style had changed a bit from my gloomy Cure-influence phase into something just a little bit more worldly. I still felt terrible half the time, but I’d figured out a few workarounds by then.

Next Up: High weirdness and the birth of several alt-pop hits!

WIS Presents: The Boston Years V

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After a somewhat disastrous first semester at Emerson, I came back from Christmas break with a clearer mind and a better idea of what I needed to do to avoid repeating the same mistakes. I reconnected with the new friends I’d made near the end of the first semester and started hanging out with them more, realizing I had a hell of a lot more in common with them than I did with my roommate, who I pretty much avoided and ignored from there on in. I may have been a bit let down that I didn’t connect with them on a musical and intellectual level like I had with the Vanishing Misfits gang, but really — who was I fooling, anyway? Try as I might to hide it, I was a blue-collar dweeb that had no further plans to attempt nonconformist hipness. Better to be myself than try to fit in, yeah? [To date, I am still in contact with two of those friends from then, and the only two from my college years that I still speak with. As for everyone else I’d meet those five years I was there…? For a college that focuses on mass media, I’ve somehow found it ironically impossible to locate any of them on today’s social media.]

I was still broke most of the time and could barely pay our phone bill whenever I wanted to talk with my long-distance girlfriend, yet somehow I did manage to find the pocket change to buy the occasional cassette at Tower Records up the street (or used at Nuggets in Kenmore!) as well as stock up on blanks to record tunes off the radio. I may have still been in a bit of a grumpy mood, but things were looking up. During this second semester I’d finally get my radio show: the 12AM to 3AM shift on WECB AM, and who the hell knew if anyone actually listened, but it was experience!

Peter Murphy, Deep, released 1 January 1990. Murphy’s third album dusts off a lot of the post-punk of his first album and the darkness of his second, leaving an extremely bright sheen. But it was also his breakthrough, with single “Cut You Up” hitting all the major radio stations and even getting airplay on daytime MTV. In my opinion it’s his most commercial, but also his most cohesive record, and it’s a joyful listen.

Inspiral Carpets, Cool As **** EP, released 1 January 1990. Another Mancunian band shuffles out of the club scene and onto American alternative radio, this one leaning heavily on a sixties garage band vibe complete with Farfisa organ. Not as sleek and groovy as The Charlatans UK, but just as danceable and fun.

The Telescopes, To Kill a Slow Girl Walking EP, released 1 January 1990. This British band took the burgeoning noise-rock sound that was gaining a following in the UK and went in all sorts of weird places with it, becoming one of the most loved yet least heard bands of the decade. Each release went in unexpected directions, so one never knew if they’d have a blissed-out groovy dance song, a J&MC-like wall of feedback or some spaced out jam.

John Wesley Harding, Here Comes the Groom, released 5 January 1990. Wesley Stace, under his JWH stage name, burst onto the scene in late 1989 with a few singles and an EP (which featured a quirky acoustic rendition of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”, which got some airplay). His early songwriting was smart, funny, and intelligent and damn catchy, gaining a considerable fanbase in Boston. I’d see him play live twice, both times for free, while I lived in the city. He still records now and again, and is currently an author of four books. His 2014 novel Wonderkid was an inspiration for my own novel Meet the Lidwells.

Big Audio Dynamite, “Free” single, 5 January 1990. As the original BAD lineup began to splinter, Mick Jones recorded and released a final single for the soundtrack of the Keifer Sutherland/Dennis Hopper film Flashback. The movie itself got mixed reviews, but the song did get airplay on WFNX at the time.

They Might Be Giants, Flood, released 5 January 1990. TMBG’s third album literally bursts onto the scene with a bright and sunshiney opening theme (“Theme from Flood”, natch) before haphazardly switching to yet another fantastic earworm they’re known for, “Birdhouse in Your Soul”. Like 1988’s Lincoln, this album does feel a bit overlong and straining in places, but it also contains some of their absolute classics, including the ridiculous “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”, the goofy “Particle Man” and more.

Various Artists, Super Hits of the 70’s: Have a Nice Day, Volumes 1 – 5, released 5 January 1990. And just like that, listening to cheesy AM classic radio is hip again. This series, which would stretch to a staggering twenty-five volumes, made it hip to hear those same songs you thought were corny and cringey just a few years previous. A few years later, Quentin Tarantino would take a page from this and insert 70s hits into his breakthrough movie Reservoir Dogs.

The The, “Jealous of Youth” single, released 19 January 1990. Before it showed up on the Solitude mini-LP in 1994, this outtake from the Mind Bomb album sessions had a standalone single release that couldn’t have come at a better time. Matt Johnson’s desperation to recapture a youth that’s not so much out of his grasp but perhaps already tainted by the pain of adulthood is stark, painful, and an absolute stunner. A perfect song for a Gen-Xer entering the last decade of the century.

The Black Crowes, Shake Your Money Maker, released 24 January 1990. The Crowes were always bluesy and gospely and they wore their influences for everyone to see. They did sound a bit 80s in their production but that didn’t stop them from becoming wildly popular for nearly the entire decade, always churning out great songs.

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Next up: The year moves on, Britpop starts encroaching on US alternative radio, and something about the coolness of a certain deity.

Favorite Albums: Think Tree, ‘eight/thirteen’

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I never really got along with my freshman year roommate in college for various reasons and we rarely had anything in common except certain tastes in music. We both leaned heavily towards college radio and things alternative. He was quite a bit more into the indie scene than I was — he went to all the shows whereas I was just fine sitting alone on my bed with the headphones on listening to it — but occasionally our paths crossed and we introduced each other to different bands.

Think Tree was one of his favorites that he foisted upon me pretty early on, and I loved them immediately. They were a local Boston band that defied any easy description; they seemed to embrace the same gloomy semi-industrial sound of Nine Inch Nails (but without the apocalyptic nihilism), the off-kilter humor and weirdness of Butthole Surfers (but without all the body-horror jokes) and maybe even a bit of the musical ubernerdiness of Wire (but without getting too arty about it).

“Hire a Bird” was their first official single, dropped at the tail end of 1989, and it was a huge favorite of the college radio stations, as well as both WBCN and WFNX, who had always gone out of their way to champion any local band with pride. It’s definitely a weird song but it’s catchy as hell. Singer Peter Moore delivers his vocals with an affected hillbilly grampaw lisp (something he’d do for most of their first album and live sets), over a bed of Will Ragano’s acoustic guitar, Jeff Beigert’s popping percussion, and the samples and synths of Paul Lanctot and Krishna Venkatesh. The resulting din is so off-kilter yet weaves around itself so perfectly that it works. And surprisingly, the song is a highly poetic sermon about the dangers of environmental disaster, with a semi-hopeful ‘at least we’re trying to fix it all’ chorus. The final sample that ends the song, lifted from the football game scene in Robert Altman’s MASH and taken completely out of context to underscore the song’s theme (‘we are our own enemy’), was the icing on the cake.

It took nearly a full year for the band to finish off and release their first album eight/thirteen, but it was highly anticipated by the local fans and stations. Record delays are always a dangerous thing, because when they are finally released, the scene that the record would easily fit into often no longer exists in that form. There are so many excellent albums out there that never quite reach their full potential due to fans having moved onto the next sound or scene. [This, alas, would happen to Think Tree themselves when they spent nearly two years between this and their second album Like the Idea, which is great on its own yet failed to find interest in a scene now obsessed with grunge and Britpop.]

The songs of eight/thirteen feature the best of their live set of 1988-90, hitting all their heights and highlighting their car-crash style. Sometimes it’s serious and gloomy, other times it’s funny and poppy, sometimes it’s both at once. Songs like “The Lovers” are goth dance, while songs like “Memory Protect” hint at the sample-heavy clang of Einsturzende Neubauten or Test Dept.

I got to see Think Tree a few times live during my college years, and I firmly believe that was their best platform, as they put on a raucous, hilarious, and completely bonkers show every single time. You never knew what was going to happen, or what the hell Moore was going to sing or chant about next (he had a brilliant ability to riff a wild fire-and-brimstone sermon like a demented Elmer Gantry, especially on songs like live favorite “The Word”). They would sing about prehistoric monsters (‘Iguanodon’), strong women of the wild west (1992 single ‘Rattlesnake’) and the strangeness of religions (‘Holy Cow’, another live favorite with its wonderful chorus “you worship the thing that goes moo!”) and whatever else they could think of and make it sound both freakish and fun at the same time. It was like watching a band that would have fit perfectly on The Adventures of Billy and Mandy. Album closer “The Moon” (formerly the b-side to the “Hire a Bird” single) is a perfect example of this.

Moore has recently dropped a few Bandcamp releases from the band over the years, with two live rarities albums in 2020 and a demos-and-b-sides rarities album this year (fittingly, all of them dropped on August 13). eight/thirteen is still available for streaming and downloading elsewhere, though Like the Idea is still a bit harder to get due to it having been released on Caroline Records. Most of their songs are available on YouTube, alongside a few interesting rarities like a Dutch TV appearance. Moore would continue his musical career (and his musical oddness) under the name Count Zero and even popped up as a bandmate for Blue Man Group! This album does remain quite the oddity but it’s still one of my favorites from my college years.

More on the 90s

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So yeah, I’ve still been contemplating expanding the Walk in Silence series to include the 90s.  I’ve started listening to the decade chronologically, much as I did with the original series and going through the 80s, and once again it’s been an interesting ride.

Presently I’m listening to Living Colour’s sophomore album Time’s Up, which came out in late August 1990.  It was the back end of summer, and I’d chosen to take the last two weeks off between my summer job (second year at the DPW) and starting my sophomore year at Emerson.  Chris and I got together to reform the Flying Bohemians as a duo, and recorded a few tracks in my parents’ garage.

I spent those last two weeks doing not much of anything: made a pretty decent compilation that I still listen to in 2016, did a bit of poetry, lyric and journal writing, a lot of Solitaire playing, and met up with all my friends who’d come home for a brief time.  For the most part, most of them had taken root in their college towns and gotten local summer jobs or were taking summer classes, so there was only a narrow window of time that we could meet up.

Me?  The only reason I’d come back home for the summer was that I hadn’t prepared myself for any summer position or an apartment to sublet for a few months.  It had crossed my mind, of course, but I hadn’t the time or the money to plan it out sufficiently.  I figured the summer of 1991 would be when I’d stick around.

That, and I’d wanted to spend more time with T, as well as distance myself from the frustration of freshman year.  Summer 1990 was time to start over again.

WiS: We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It!!

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I’ve been wanting to write this post since the two remastered cds came out in the middle of last year, and now I can finally do so! We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It!!, aka Fuzzbox here in the states, was a cute and punky quartet out of Birmingham UK, and one of my first music crushes when I started listening to alternative rock. They’d been brought to my attention right about the same time as Sigue Sigue Sputnik in the glossy music mag Star Hits, and upon seeing their crazy-colored and spritzed hair and Goodwill-chic punky fashion, I was completely hooked–which in all honesty wasn’t really hard, considering it didn’t take much to rebel in a small town like mine. They made me realize punk wasn’t just about rebelling against society, like American punk had suggested–it was also about doing your own thing, however out there it might be, and not giving a shit about what other people thought about it.

Fuzzbox was only together for a short time, releasing only two albums and a handful of singles (like most punk bands were wont to do during the 80s, it seems) before going their separate ways, but they were just so damn fun to listen to that it didn’t matter.

Credit: last.fm - l-r, Tina, Vix, Magz & Jo

Credit: last.fm – l-r, Tina, Vix, Magz & Jo

Fuzzbox started sometime in 1985 with four friends who’d decided to start a band. And like any punk band worth their salt at the time, mastering your instrument wasn’t exactly high on the list of priorities. Consisting of Vickie Perks (aka Vix) on vocals, Tina O’Neill on drums and sax, and sisters Maggie (aka Magz–vocals, keys and guitars) and Jo Dunne (bass, guitars and keys), they immediately jumped in on the occasional open mike night at the local bars and learned their chops onstage. It’s said Maggie was the creator of the band name, announcing that they did in fact have a fuzz distortion guitar pedal they were about to use.

Their debut single was the gritty and poppy “XX Sex”, with shockingly direct feminist lyrics about exploitation and sexism in the media. They followed up with a ridiculous and silly summer single with labelmates The Nightingales and Ted Chippington with “Rockin’ with Rita”, and by summer’s end they were given a spot on the highly influential NME C86 compilation with “Console Me”. They prefaced their debut album that October with a jittery and bass-heavy single about unrequited love, “Love Is the Slug”, my musical introduction to them via MTV’s 120 Minutes.

Credit: fuzzbox.angelfire.com

Credit: fuzzbox.angelfire.com

Bostin’ Steve Austin (released as a self-titled album here in the states, but with the same cover) was released in December of 1986, featuring a dozen gems about the girls’ life in Birmingham–not just containing the teen heartbreak of “Love Is the Slug” and “Jackie”, it also contains the confrontational “XX Sex” and “What’s the Point” (their follow-up single released in January of 1987) and “Preconceptions”, as well as a weirdly hypnotic cover of Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky”. The quality of the music here is surprisingly tight, even when it hints at sounding on the verge of disintegrating into a distorted mess. Vix’s lyrics alternate between playful, angry, and emotional, and despite the simplicity of the melodies there’s a lot going on musically. The stop-start of “You Got Me”, the building tension in “Love Is the Slug” and even the 60s-girl-group pastiche of “Hollow Girl” works perfectly.

Bostin’ Steve Austin got a ridiculous amount of play on my tape players between early 1987 and mid-1989–this was the side of punk that I gravitated to, the revelation that I didn’t have to try fitting in with the in-crowd anymore. I didn’t really need to do much, of course–wear some of my college rock tee-shirts, my grandfather’s green trenchcoat, and let my hair grow out of its quintessentially 80s spiky ‘do (but not to the point of longhaired metaldom), and start writing music reviews for albums hardly anyone else in my school listened to.

Meanwhile, Fuzzbox disappeared for a short while, and would reappear in early 1989 with a completely new and unexpected look and sound. I admit I wasn’t entirely sure how to approach it at first, having twitched and thought “oh god, they’ve become Jem and the Holograms.” But there was something about it…something about the slick late 80s production, the chart-ready poppiness, that called to me. I began to realize that this was the forbidden candy for me as a fan of college rock, the ultimate test: do I dare admit that, after labeling myself an alternative music nerd and a nonconformist, that I actually enjoyed this admittedly catchy music?

Credit: www.independent.ie - clockwise from top left: Vix, Maggie, Tina, Jo

Credit: http://www.independent.ie – clockwise from top left: Vix, Magz, Tina, Jo

Gone was the thrift-shop fashion as well, replaced by glitz and glamour. The fuzziness of their sound was also gone, replaced by shiny synthesizers and sequencers. They now had an outsider as a cowriter of songs in the form of session musician/producer Liam Sternberg. And yet…

…and yet, there was something about this new album, Big Bang, that I just could not give it up. I was older and now in college, and yet the music hinted at the readymade poppiness of 80s Top 40, the kind that was throwaway and yet catchy and likable at the same time. The Brummie humor was still there, hiding in the lyrics of lead single “International Rescue”, a loving ode to the Gerry Anderson tv classic Thunderbirds (and, in the video, a humorous nod to Jane Fonda’s Barbarella as well).

Credit: musicstack.com

Credit: musicstack.com

Big Bang kicked off with the irresistibly poppy “Pink Sunshine” (and also released as the second single) and my immediate reaction was to wonder where the hell my punk goddesses had gone off to…but I soon understood what they were doing. This wasn’t about rebelling, not anymore. It was about being an adult now, having gotten over the teenage growing pains. These were the Brummie girls stuck in their jobs, dealing with the drudgery of the real world and letting it all loose at the end of the working week.
There’s a lot of flirting and emotion going on with this album, and that’s part of what makes it so irresistible. There’s the rocking sci-fi of “Fast Forward Futurama”, the heartbreak of “Self!” (featuring the guitar work of none other than Queen’s Brian May!), and the gorgeous dancefloor bliss of “Versatile for Discos and Parties” (quite possibly my favorite track off the album). There’s even a brilliant cover of Yoko Ono’s “Walking on Thin Ice”, retaining the song’s mystique but giving it additional emotional beauty. The album ends on a very somber yet lovely note with a track called “Beauty”, which sounds like nothing else they’ve ever recorded.

Big Bang‘s shameless pop wasn’t shameless at all–it was a loving tribute to the dance pop of the decade, one that was about to come to a close. The sound of 80s pop would age, and often not for the best, but when it was done right, it was still fun to listen to. A few years later, once I discovered anime movies and series, from Urusei Yatsura and Silent Möbius and later to the Gall Force series and Sailor Moon, I began to realize that, thanks to Big Bang, I now had begun a long-lasting love affair with Japanese Pop (aka J-Pop). I began seeing the album as an unintended but spot-on paean to the J-Pop so prevalent in the credits and montages in anime, and that made me love the album even more. It’s pure pop, but it’s still irresistibly fun.

In 1990 they would release a final single, “Your Loss My Gain”, written for a never-realized third album, and while it seemed they were progressing in a more mature pop direction, they soon split up. They all went their separate ways. Only Vix remained in the music industry, recording under various band names including Vix n’ the Kix. Three compilations would surface a bit over a decade later: two albums of demos and outtakes called Fuzz and Nonsense and Rules & Regulations to Pink Sunshine: The Fuzzbox Story, and a greatest hits collection amusingly titled Look at the Hits on That (a very Fuzzbox-worthy pun title). And in 2010, Vix, Maggie and Jo reunited with the help of Vix’s backing band for a one-off single, a cover of M’s classic track “Pop Muzik”. Sadly, Jo would pass away from a cancer-related illness in 2012, but a year later, Vix decided it was time to rerelease the band’s 80s discography. Bostin’ Steve Austin would finally have its debut on compact disc, and Big Bang would contain all the remaining 80s tracks, including the “Your Loss My Gain” single.

We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It!! was a band that influenced not just my listening habits but my way of life when I was growing up in the late 80s; it was a refreshing view of punk-as-freedom rather than punk-as-anger, and helped me realize that the music I listen to, then and now. My tastes still lean towards the alternative, but I’m not above the shamelessly pop, especially if it’s done well. In relistening to Bostin Steve Austin I now hear a lot of the intelligence and fearlessness in the lyrics, which makes me appreciate it all the more. And as an added bonus, they’re there if all I want is some great and fun music to listen to.

Check it out:
Bostin Steve Austin: Splendiferous Edition, at Amazon.co.uk
Big Bang!: Orgasmatron Edition, at Amazon.co.uk
“Pop Muzik” single on iTunes