Sorry for the unplanned absence here – I had all sorts of nice posts lined up for the Christmas period which either never quite got posted or never quite got written. There’s always next year, I suppose. These next couple of months will probably be unpleasantly busy, so don’t set your expectations too high for the time being – I’ll post more when I can.
Amusingly, if you search for this song, the first result you get is a video which has no sound. Oops.
You may have already been familiar with the sad story of Flowered Up – I was not. I had heard of them vaguely thanks to some of their labelmates, but I hadn’t read much about them, and I certainly hadn’t heard anything they had recorded.
That’s a shame, because as you’ll see, they’re an interesting band. One of the more precocious of the “baggy” scene that grew out of Manchester in the late 1980s and went mainstream in the early 1990s, this London-based band managed just six hit singles and one album, but all of them charted, and several were decent-sized hits.
Formed in 1989 and overwhelmed by illegal narcotics, their story is better told by others, such as this piece from 2016. The sad irony seems to be that following those initial successes, drugs got the better of this promising group and effectively led to them missing out on most of the 1990s. An abortive attempted comeback in 2001 fell apart with only an album full of demos, a 2005 reunion concert ended badly, and a 2007 attempted reunion never managed to get all the members back together in the first place.
Two years later, the lead singer died from a heroin overdose, tragically also followed by his band-mate brother three years after that. It’s not hard to see why Flowered Up have been said to be cursed. To me, it’s also a sad illustration of the way that fame tosses people aside if they don’t quite play the fame game or manage the longevity that’s required.
In their time, though, they appear to have created plenty of great stories, such as the party with a name (Debauchery), so it’s little wonder that a band who barely broke the top twenty have been immortalised in a book and a film.
It’s worth checking out the highly influential video – which became a short film – for their thirteen-minute smash hit Weekender, and wondering (a) whether their criticism of people partying only at weekends is really fair given the circumstances, and (b) what they could have been if they had managed to stay sober.
Well, that was a long break, wasn’t it?
While this blog was never really officially cancelled, it does seem to have been on hiatus for quite a long time. So it’s high time we brought it back! Hello!
What have I been up to since we last spoke? Well, mainly caught up with the real world, which has been very entertaining indeed, as I imagine everyone knows. I’ve had a lot less spare time in general, but in what little I’ve had, I’ve recorded two more albums (more on that to come in future posts) and done a lot of research about charts (which means that a lot of what I said about them previously can be proven completely wrong).
I know we’ve lost a lot of readers in the meantime, and I don’t just mean “David”, who, never having posted before, got very upset that one time I posted about Steps. (Sorry, David – I just did it again! Oops… Oh wait, that’s someone else, isn’t it?) I understand – I would have wandered off to pastures new in the meantime too.
Well, anyway, I do have one draft post that I started writing three years ago, as well. Exciting stuff. I definitely won’t be able to post quite as often as I used to, but I’ve got a few things that I want to say, so do stay tuned! Or become tuned, at least.
Well, it’s been very quiet around here, recently, hasn’t it? My big secret is that I used to write most of the posts during my commute, and… well, thanks to the pandemic, I haven’t had one for a little over two years now, so it’s been harder and harder to keep up. I’m sure there will be a reboot one day, but for now, I’m sorry – we’ll stay in this holding pattern for a while longer.
I even managed to miss the tenth anniversary of this blog! Just by a few days, and it seems a slightly bitter milestone given that the ninth anniversary was only a few posts ago, but there you go. Time to celebrate a decade of, er, Decadence on this blog, with this lovely collaboration between Pet Shop Boys and Johnny Marr from 1994.
Well, I’ve been away for a while. Obviously not really, but I haven’t been posting here, mainly because I’ve been busy with home life and other personal projects. I had intended that I would start posting again when my commute started once this whole pandemic thing died down a bit, but I still haven’t commuted for nearly two years, and while I’ve still got plenty to say for myself, I’ve run out of backlogged posts. So anyway, things will still remain pretty quiet, I’m afraid.
Did you miss me? No, I didn’t think so…
I thought I would pop my head around the door with a couple of recent discoveries. First up, thanks to Adam Buxton‘s podcast I discovered this beautiful work from Laurie Anderson, which most of you had probably heard before, but for some reason (maybe because I wasn’t entirely sentient when it came out) I never had.
It’s fascinating to listen to, because there’s obviously an element of this where Anderson is just messing around with a sampler and a vocoder. I’ve got tapes with these kinds of experiments too, but they’re nowhere near this evocative. Excuse the superlatives, but it’s rare these days that I hear something quite this exciting.
Then there’s this. Bad dance cover versions were all the rage in the nineties (that might be an unintentional pun actually, because it was Rage who recorded this passable cover of Bryan Adams‘s Run to You in 1992, complete with house piano (good) and unnecessary rap section (bad):
But then there’s this. The Connells‘ ’74-’75 is a decent pop-rock song, which apparently some people called Hands of Belli and a singer called Nanci Edwards decided needed turning into this monstrosity:
And that, I’m sure you’ll agree, is quite enough of that for now. Bye.
Firstly: happy ninth birthday to this blog!
Secondly: sorry that you find us in the middle of a quiet period! Trying to continue blogging through a pandemic and with a growing family turned out to be chaotic, to say the least. You’ve still seen about 140 posts since the first lockdown hit this part of the world, and some of those even have some interesting content, so we’ve done OK.
I’m working on a number of projects at the moment, and unfortunately the blog isn’t quite getting the attention it deserves. That will start to change over the next couple of months, so we’ll be back soon – with actual content, as well, such as reviews! But for now, please be patient, and continue to…
There are no shortage of good early OMD tracks that we could feature on here, and this week the random jukebox has selected Bunker Soldiers for us, so here goes:
It’s always good to hear a bit of Wolfsheim, so here’s Once in a Lifetime:
I can never quite remember which randomly-selected method has picked out the selection each week for the random jukebox, because it tends to get a bit muddled up in the mix anyway, but it’s great to hear this from Metroland again:
Testament to the randomness of this jukebox, here are Doves. While I’d really rather like to see them performing Ain’t No Love (Ain’t No Use) for old times’ sake, Here it Comes is a perfectly acceptable replacement:
Music for stowaways 