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.
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:
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:
We don’t do nearly enough of this kind of thing on this blog – in fact, I think this is the first time I’ve even featured this artist. From Angst, here’s Klaus Schulze with the dramatic Pain:
Music for stowaways 