Visage - "Fade to Grey" (1981)

Speaks for itself

The Glove - Blue Sunshine (1983/2006)

The process of recording and touring for their fourth and darkest album, Pornography (1982), took a huge toll on The Cure. The band's increasing drug abuse and in-fighting led bassist Simon Gallup to quit outright (although he would return 18 months later) and Robert Smith to jump ship temporarily in order to moonlight as a guitarist for Siouxsie and The Banshees (a job he had held briefly in 1979) after the brilliant John McGeoch was jettisoned due to severe alcohol abuse. Robert Smith: "The Cure disintegrated in its entirety. Concerts became nothing but an excuse to drink ourselves senseless. Inevitably it meant the end of all my ideals. During the Pornography tour I realized The Cure weren't any better than any other band on tour. I was actually doing everything I swore once I wouldn't. We even had rows back stage; it was horrible really! We were all stuck in a crazed trip, and I really wanted to get away from all that! Especially Simon threw himself into it, and eventually I became some sort of father telling him not to, you know? I just wanted to stop. I had to stop! Simon quit, and I got away. I didn't touch a guitar for 4 months. I had to become sane again. In interviews I was always talking about how The Cure were different from other bands; we weren't though. There was never enough time to really be different from other bands. We traveled all around the world and as soon as we got back there was another album that had to be recorded! During Pornography, I realized we had to break that cycle. I got to the point where I could only see myself as someone who was in The Cure; I stopped seeing me being myself actually!" In many ways, taking over lead guitar duties in The Banshees was an ideal remedy to Robert Smith's growing discontent with the direction of The Cure. Signing on for the second leg of the Kiss the Dreamhouse tour, Smith was able to retreat from the pressures of fronting his own band by embracing a supporting role for one of the few figures in post-punk who could outshine him at the time: Siouxsie Sioux. It was during a break between legs of this tour at the beginning of 1983 that Smith and Banshee bassist Steve Severin hatched the idea to write and record a single as a one-off collaboration, but five months later, this idea had escalated into a full-fledged side-project with the goal of producing an album.

Smith & Severin decided to name their project The Glove, after a giant flying glove called the "murder mitten," which belonged to a corrupt policeman called the "Blue Meany" in The Beatles' 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine. However, just as the recording sessions began, things took a surreal turn when it was revealed that Smith's recording contract with The Cure prevented him from singing on any non-Cure releases, so in a pinch, Jeanette Landray, the girlfriend of Banshee drummer Budgie and a dancer on Top of the Pops who had no previous singing experience, was recruited to provide the lion's share of the vocals. Steve Severin: "Robert was prevented from singing on any of the Glove material by Chris Parry (Head of Fiction records) although we eventually struck a deal were he could sing two tracks under the proviso that they weren’t to be released as singles. Therefore we had to audition for a singer. Neither of us wanted another male involved and after some aborted sessions I was pestered by Budgie’s then girlfriend, Landray into giving her a go. As she says herself she was in a strange position because it was clearly our project. She did a good job under awkward conditions, really." Jeanette Landray on her experience in The Glove: "Basically, because it was so clearly Robert and Steve's project I had a strange role, involved but not with any real say in the way things turned out, almost like a session musician really. I don't know what I'd actually expected but if I was offered something similar again I'd have a much clearer idea of the problems involved. I'm not bitter about it, but I have had to fight to get this far and it did get me some very useful exposure but I just underestimated how little expression I'd have in the promotion of the album. I still feel like a faceless voice to some extent."   By most accounts, the sessions were a hedonistic affair, with everyone involved ingesting copious amounts of LSD and speed, and watching film after film with the purpose of capturing "after-images" in the music itself. One of these films was Blue Sunshine, a 1978 cult film about a new form of LSD that causes baldness and homicidal behavior, whose title Smith and Severin would re-purpose for the title of their album.

Not surprisingly, the sound of Blue Sunshine is a volatile cocktail of goth, neo-psychedelia, and eccentric pop, which Smith variously described at the time as "cultivated madness" and "a mental assault course." And while it is certainly hard to deny that Smith's distinctive vocals are missed throughout most of the album, Landray does do a respectable job, though it's hard to overlook her similarity in tone to Siouxsie Sioux, a comparison in which Landray comes up considerably short. On "Like an Animal," one of Landray's best performances, Steve Severin's bass takes the lead to great effect, as cheesy keyboard washes and frenetic percussion keep the song from moving too far into darker territory. Where Blue Sunshine gets really interesting is on songs such as "Orgy" with its Middle-Eastern aesthetic and quirky twists and turns. It's all so vaguely Cure, but ultimately unlike anything else in Smith's considerable discography or The Banshees' for that matter. Severin: "The idea that The Glove could get away with anything vanished very quickly because it became a real responsibility to get it to sound not indulgent. I think what I wanted was for it to have more of a specific personality than, say, The Banshees or The Cure. I mean, The Banshees have a set, almost concrete image that, no matter what we do, we're kind of stuck with on a very superficial daily paper 'ice-queen and doom and gloom' level."

The Glove - "Punish Me with Kisses" (1983)

A taste of things to come....

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - "Electricity" (1980)

Why are you into all the best things? Remember?

John Foxx - Metamatic (1980/2007) / The Garden (1981/2008)

Despite being a seminal figure in the rise of experimental synth-pop during the late 1970s, John Foxx has never received the level of notoriety lavished on fellow synth-pioneers Kraftwerk and Gary Numan.  Nevertheless, Foxx's uniquely detached vocal style as well as his consistently challenging approach to electronic music, both of which he progressively developed during his tenure in Ultravox(!), were clearly major influences on Numan as well as any number of lesser new wave artists who littered the musical landscape throughout the early 1980s. In fact, aside from David Sylvian's mature work with Japan, it would be hard to find a more trailblazing figure in post-glam electro-pop. Foxx (then known as Dennis Leigh) spent much of the mid-1970s in a marginal glam band called Tiger Lilly, but in the aftermath of the rise of the punk movement, he, along with violinist Billy Currie, formed Ultravox! whose first three albums, Ultravox!, Ha!-Ha!Ha!, and Systems of Romance, trace an increasingly experimental progression from glam and krautrock-inspired post-punk to a more lush yet minimalist, synth-dominated sound that points ahead to Foxx's even more groundbreaking solo work. Perhaps due to Ultravox's unselfconsciously experimental nature, the U.K. press was always dismissive of Foxx's version of the band. John Foxx: "Very early on, we decided to investigate and develop lots of what had then been declared ungood and which we felt were manifesting themselves and were worth recording. These included psychedelia, electronics, cyberpunk, environments and elements suggested by the likes of Ballard and Burroughs, cheap European music and modes, and strange English pop, such as some aspects of The Shadows and Billy Fury which seemed to relate to a sort of English retro-futurism. We were interested in a sort of ripped and burnt glamour. I was also taken with a detached, still stance."

Ostensibly, Foxx's decision to go solo after Ultravox's brilliant third album, Systems of Romance, had to do with the band's increasingly difficult circumstances, which included being dropped by their label, Island, on the eve of a U.S. tour. However, Foxx has suggested his departure was inevitable given his desire to pursue his own muse without interference: "The band thing is a phase- like being in a gang. You can't really be part of a gang all your life; it begins to feel undignified and it stunts your growth, unless you want to be a teenager forever. Some do. Some don't. The benefits were the Gestalt- where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, a very powerful experience- and working in a closed society with people who have the same aim. Of course, the aims almost inevitably diverge as you all grow. The point of view I've always worked from is that of a ghost in the city- someone who is a sort of drifting, detached onlooker- but still vulnerable and trying against all odds to maintain a sort of dignity in the face of all the static." Foxx would take this "ghost in the city" approach to a new level on his inimitable debut LP, Metamatic, quite possibly the most important electro-pop album of the eighties. Recorded in a small studio in North London, which Foxx once described as "an eight track cupboard [...] Very basic, very scruffy, very good," the album represents quite a departure from his work with Ultravox, as it completely dispenses with conventional instruments (and in the process, Foxx's punk origins), instead relying entirely on synthetic textures, and in doing so, achieving a chilly, mechanized aesthetic that is both aurally challenging and artistically compelling.

Foxx: "I lived alone in Finsbury Park, spent my spare time walking the disused train lines, cycled to the studio everyday and wobbled back at dawn, imagining I was the Marcel Duchamp of electropop. Metamatic was the result. It was the first British electronic pop album. It was minimal, primitive technopunk. Carcrash music tailored by Burtons." Both lyrically and musically, Metamatic conjures dystopian images of isolated individuals navigating cold landscapes populated only by architecture and machines, with a recurring theme being disconnection. For example, on the stunningly strange opening track, "Plaza," Foxx's dis-attached vocals are surrounded by several synths all sounding as though entirely isolated from each other. This gives the song an eerie dislocated feel that contrasts sharply with the rather straightforwardly descriptive lyrics. The most recognizably pop-oriented song on the album is "Underpass," an electro-pop masterpiece that manages to be minimalist and incredibly catchy at the same time; it's melodramatic synthesizers and Foxx's heavily treated robotic vocals create another dark tale of unbridgeable distances, but the tension is undercut by the song's inherent danceability. While Metamatic ultimately proved to be the least outwardly accessible of Foxx's 1980s solo albums, it also proved to be his greatest, as its follow-up, The Garden, though a fine piece of synth-driven pop in its own right, signaled a step toward a more conventionally melodic sound that Foxx would continue to explore, despite diminishing returns, for the remainder of the decade until dropping out of public view in 1986; however, it did not take long for his considerable influence to be felt. Foxx: "All the same sounds surfaced again after 1987, reanimated with beautiful new rhythms, as the beginnings of acid. I recognized the vocabulary immediately. A new underground at last. Adventure was possible again after the double-breasted dumbness of the mid-eighties."

John Foxx - "Underpass" (1980)

It's a crime how little-known John Foxx is. After three incredible records with the original incarnation of Ultravox (the last of which, Systems of Romance, is a masterpiece), he made one of the most important synth albums of the eighties, Metamatic. In fact, it's really too cool to be called a "synth album." If you've never heard it, stay tuned, because I will be posting it along with his second album, The Garden (both deluxe editions), in a few days. Everything about this song makes me long for the cold concrete edges of 1980...