When I was in college in the 80s, there was only one dance club in town that didn’t play the usual top 40 pop music. It was a little joint called My Friend’s Place, and it wasn’t actually in town, but rather out in the county between Gainesville and Hawthorn. We called it MFP, and every Friday and Saturday night around 10:00 we would make the long drive down Hawthorn Road to where alone sodium lamp marked the entrance. MFP was really just an old warehouse that some enterprising folks had converted into a club, and the dance floor wasn’t much bigger than a squash court. But my friends and I whiled away countless hours doing our best Alt-Rock dance moves, (weight on the heels, shoulders tilted back, smug expression on the face, arms doing the wavy thing down by the waist, etc.; ahhhh, it was great). The Smiths, The Cure, The Violent Femmes, ABC, XTC, Killing Joke, The English Beat and even a little U2 were blended into the mix by the unseen DJ.
It was an important era in my life, and the most iconic song from it was Lips Like Sugar by Echo and the Bunnymen. The Bunnymen were so cool, so slick, so melodic, and so dark that they weren’t just a Great Alt-Rock Band. They were a Great Alt-Rock Band’s Great Alt-Rock Band. I think that Lips like Sugar, along with The Smith’s How Soon is Now, are the two greatest songs of the genre.
Anyway, Happy Friday, and rock on…
Ash Clifton, Writer 