Was there ever a band more influential than Siouxie and the Banshees? Bands as diverse as Depeche Mode and Jane’s Addiction have expressed their admiration. And no less an iconic figure than Billy Idol has written about how awestruck he was the first time he saw the Banshees play live.
Not only were they one of the most important bands of the 1980s, they were one of the hardest to pigeonhole. Post-punk. Alt-rock. Alt-pop. Glam-rock. Goth-rock. All these labels have been applied to them.
All I know is that I always loved them, and still do.
Not surprisingly, my first exposure to Peter Murphy was from a movie. It was his face and music that are used in the first frames of Tony Scott’s great and underrated horror masterpiece, The Hunger. At the time, Murphy was of course the lead singer for the archetypal goth band Bauhaus, and it is their archetypal song “Bella Legosi’s Dead” that is featured in the opening. Ever since I saw that movie and heard that music, that voice, I was hooked on Peter Murphy.
This was in the early 1980s and, needless to say, goth music wasn’t getting much air-play on the pop-rock radio stations that I and my high school friends all listened to. Still, there was something afoot. Some of my cooler, English-nerd friends started wearing T-shirts with the Bauhaus logo on them.
As I soon learned, goth was, almost literally, an underground movement. Goth clubs starting appearing in basement-bars and old, converted warehouses. The one in Gainesville was called The Vatican, and it’s still of a legend with people my age.
I am by no means an expert on goth music, but one thing I do know is that it is not depressing. Rather, goth’s appeal comes from a paradoxical combination of melancholy realism and romantic defiance. Both of these impulses are wonderfully evoked in Murphy’s most successful solo work, “Cuts You Up”. It’s still my favorite of Murphy’s songs.
The 1990s had so many great, iconic bands–Nirvana, SoundGarden, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, and on and on–that it’s easy to forget that there were lot of other, damn good bands around that were scrambling for attention. Third Eye Blind was such a band. They broke through a few years after the grunge wave had subsided, and their pop-inflected, rap-inflected brand of rock almost seems like a response to grunge. A reaction. A means of cleansing the sonic palatte.
I didn’t really listen to much Third Eye Blind at the time (the late 1990s and early 2000s), but thanks to the magic of Pandora and its sublime algorithms, I’ve been getting them in my play list quite a bit. And that’s a good thing. I was shocked to realize how much I liked them, then and now.
Unfortunately, they only had two big records–Third Eye Blind and Blue–before fissures between lead vocalist Stephan Jenkins and lead guitarist Kevin Cadogan caused them to partially split up. Even so, the band has a great legacy. This is my favorite of their songs.
Back in the late 1990s, every guy I knew under the age of thirty had a copy of The Prodigy‘s Fat of the Land album. This was the case even though there was nothing particularly new about the record itself; Big Beat had been around for years, and some of the songs on the album itself had come out on previous albums. Nevertheless, each song is more than the sum of its parts. Each one comes together into a delierously wicked electro-dance mash-up that remains unrivaled.
Back in the day, my favorite song off the album was the problematically entitled “Smack My Bitch Up”. (As far as I’m concerned, the title is camp, if not actual satire in the Spinal Tap mode.) But these days, my favorite The Prodigy song is probably this little gem, “Firestarter”.
Back in the 1980s, The Psychedelic Furs were one of those bands that were so good, everybody had a roommate who loved them. I was that roommate. Rock on…
I have written about the band Collective Soul before. They were one of my favorite bands of the 1990s, and not just because they hailed from my part of the country (Atlanta isn’t too far from Gainesville, after all).
I remember when their first big singles hit the radio back in the day, and how their sound struck me as both rooted in a deep tradition of Southern Rock but also entirely new and current (grungy, even). Band mastermind Ed Roland’s great voice and edgy lyrics were complimented by Jesse Triplet’s brilliant guitar work. On FM radio (yeah, there was still radio then), they stuck out a mile from all the other hard-rock knockoffs of the age.
This is one of their best songs.
Rock on…!
BONUS: Here is a great inteview of Ed Roland by Rick Beato…
Ah, how the tide turns. Back in the 1990s, The Dave Matthews Band bestrode the music world like a colossus. With their incredibly inventive and fresh jazz-rock stylings and bewitching lyrics by frontman Mathews, they were one of the most popular bands in the world, and deservedly.
Now, for reasons I can’t quite understand, they are considered passé, even ridiculous. The Nickelback of the soft-rock world. Oh, well. I have a feeling that DMB’s popularity will enjoy a resurgence soon. Here’s my attempt to get the ball rolling with “The Last Stop,” one of the darkest and most menacing songs I’ve ever heard.
I recently found myself in the so-called “green room” of a TV studio in Biloxi, Mississippi, waiting to be interviewed about a book-reading I was doing that week. The interview was to air live on a local current events show, and another guest waiting for his spot was a musician for a band called The Molly Ringwalds. He was friendly and very smart, and we began to chat (I did so to relieve my nervousness; he was just being nice).
In the course of conversation, he explained that The Molly Ringwalds (as I should have guessed, but didn’t) is an 1980s tribute band that covers all kinds of hits from that by-gone era, which I also love. I asked him if they did any songs by The Smiths, and he said they did.
“Which one?” I asked.
“‘How Soon is Now?’ What else?”
What else, indeed. “How Soon is Now?” is not only The Smiths’ greatest song, it’s one of the greatest rock songs ever. It’s also one of the most complicated. From its famous guitar overture, warbling and full of dark menace, to its anguished lyrics by the brilliant Morrisey, “How Soon is Now?” is both a dance song and a dirge. It’s also a cry of rebellion against conformity, prejudice, and alienation.
Since it first hit the clubs in 1985, the song has been taken up as an anthem by the LGBTQ community, and rightly so. But I think it resonates equally well with any introvert, outcast, or general freak who just, well…needs to be loved.
The 1990s gave us two great, new genres in popular music. The first was Grunge, and the second was Big Beat. I’ve written a lot about the first but hardly anything on the second, even though it represented some of my favorite electronic bands like The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers.
So, as a small acknowledgement of this fact, I’m doing this week’s Friday Night Rock-Out on Fatboy Slim. Specifically, his remix of “Brimful of Asha” by Cornershop. I’ll admit that I’ve never heard the original release, but the remix is pure genius.
People love tag-teams. It’s in our nature. Have you noticed that almost every work of epic literature across the world has not one but two main heroes. The Gilgamesh epic has Gilgamesh and Enkidu. The Iliad has Achilles and Odysseus. The Authurian legends have Arthur and Lancelot. DC has Superman and Batman.
In all of these examples, the two heroes have much in common, but they are also different in some fundamental and defining way. They not only compliment each other, they contrast each other.
More importantly, they make the story a lot more fun.
I think of this dynamic whenever I hear “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie. Together, the band and the singer represented a group of pop titans of the 1980s. But there were huge functional and artistic differences between them. Bowie was probably the greatest musical artist of his generation, known for inventive and experimental works that never failed to surprise or thrill his fans. Queen was a great rock band, constructed around the epic voice of Freddie Mercury and the epic guitar skills of Brian May. The idea of bringing these two forces together might have been disastrous. That is, they might have canceled each other out.
But no. Instead, their talents together to create one of the best rock songs ever recorded. From the amazing bass riff (whose author is disputed) to the colossal bridge near the end, it’s still one of my favorites.
Enjoy…!
BONUS: Here is a great live performance of the song by Bowie and Annie Lennox.
Ash Clifton, Writer 