Another year of this #x-daysofmusic challenge set up by @backinblackdevil.
In late 1986 I got a job as a runner (delivery boy) for a video production company. By the end of the year I was working for early satellite TV Super Channel and had left home! I had a bedsit in Shepherd's Bush. All of a sudden I had a decent income and access to 2nd-hand record shops. And no social life or television. Records and books and records and books and more records. Happy days!
Super Channel had a lot of music shows - they had previously been the pan-European Music Box channel (before that new-fangled MTV arrived), and I was introduced to all sorts of artists...
France Gall - Ella, Elle L'a
A nice little French pun there. France Gall was a Eurovision Song Contest performer, winning for Luxembourg before I was even born. I'd never heard of her until this video, and I bought the album. It was all far too pop for my tastes, but this song still takes me back.
The Hooters - Johnny B
Coming from Philadelphia, 'Satellite' was The Hooters' biggest hit, although this song was big in Germany. The album is solid, but with horrible 80s production. They were very big in Europe and appeared on the 1990 Berlin performance of The Wall, with this bloke:
Roger Waters - Radio KAOS
Floyd had split into a series of lawsuits, and after the frankly dodgy Pros & Cons of Hitch-Hiking Waters got fully into his ongoing Armegeddon-scenario-as-musical groove with this fabulous album.
Guns 'n' Roses - Paradise City
This and 'Sweet Child of Mine' changed commercial heavy metal. For the better. But you already knew that.
Broken English - Comin' on Strong
This is an obscure single by an obscure band, but it got a lot of play on the channel and the band did an interview on the live show with Nino, er, thingy. The leader was (and still is) in a Rolling Stones tribute band at the time, so this was a side project that didn't take off.
Grateful Dead - Touch of Grey
Because of this, I bought a 6-CD box set of the Dead's Arista output, and never looked back. Literally: carrying it out of Virgin Records on the corner of Oxford Street & Tottenham Court Road, a shoplifter used me as a decoy and I got grabbed by security, carrying £200 of legally purchased CDs. This was in the days when the CDs were tucked away in the basement because they were an obscure format and cassette tapes ruled the roost, thanks to Sony Walkmans.
The Dead had signed to Arista having been promised a hit single. This was it. Many Deadheads cite the hit as being what ultimately killed Jerry Garcia because he couldn't cope with being the leader of a stadium band.
Not all the videos were by new acts - many were established artists dipping a toe in the technological waters. Thus I re-discovered...
Robbie Robertson - Somwehere Down The Crazy River
Robertson had retired to soundtrack hell, but put his head above the parapet for this lovely album. One of the few Daniel Lanois productions I like and built for CD players.
The Cross - Cowboys & Indians
I liked this album. I may be alone in that. Some of the production is ludicrous and the songwriting is not up to Roger Taylor's standard with Queen. But, I have a soft spot for it. A blue-monochrome video with singing models and ripped jeans. Ah, the 80s...
XTC - Dear God
A Todd Rundgren production which didn't make it on to an album. XTC had come a long way from their punk roots and were by now a studio band as Andy Partridge wouldn't tour. The single tanked and predictably generated complaints in the more sensitive parts of the US.
Aerosmith - Dude (Looks Like A Lady)
They don't make them like this anymore, for a very good reason. Permanent Vacation is great album, but this song is pretty much all people remember from it, despite the whale calls and the killer blues of 'Hangman's Jury'. Somewhere in America, Liv Tyler was growing up and about to become a video star on their next album Pump (and then go on to ruin Lord of The Rings through the medium of collagen lips).
My days of music: 1967 - 1968 - 1969 - 1970 - 1971 - 1972 - 1973 -
1974 - 1975 - 1976 - 1977 - 1978 - 1979 - 1980 - 1981 - 1982 - 1983 -
1984 - 1985 - 1986
The french one sounds familiar, but not sure I've heard it in the last 30 years. still like P&C of HH. I think it has some of Clapton's best playing on it, but what do I know? ;) I hadn't seen the KAOS video before.
Thanks for the interesting selections, and for making me laugh.
I think Touch of Grey may have been the first I really heard of The Dead, but I just never got into them. You obviously did in a big way.
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You're right about Clapton on P&CoHH - the intro to the song of that name is brilliant - especially considering what he was releasing under his own name in those days. Pros & Cons is just not as good as 'Radio KAOS' or 'Amused to Death'. I tend to think of 'Final Cut' as a Waters solo album as well, even though it's Floyd. The latest album is a bit weak, though.
The less said about 'Ca Ira' the better.
My main point about '87 is that it was one of the years I got to change myself. Happened again in the early 90s, when I left the UK for Hong Kong. In '87 it was about being independent; there's still something about that bed-sit year that I look back on with nostaligia.
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Every time I cycle along the Goldhawk Road, I hear this:
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