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(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang by Heaven 17 (1981)

Recent events in the United States, particularly the sight of marines on the streets of Los Angeles to enforce Donald Trump’s draconian slew of migrant deportations in the teeth of huge civil protest and the horrific murders of a Democrat state politician and her husband in Minnesota, brought to my mind the tremendous track by early 1980s synth-pop band Heaven 17, (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang. The group, one of an insurgent wave of serious outfits who had dropped post-punk guitar sound for synthesiser-led tunes and which incorporated the Human League, New Order, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark and Yazoo, released this postmodern disco anthem as a protest against what the songwriters (Glenn Gregory, Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware) saw as an incipient fascism on the rise in America driven by the election of Ronald Reagan as President in 1980. By labelling Reagan as ‘fascist god in motion’, Heaven 17 saw the track, their debut single, banned by the BBC and greeted with a general reluctance to play it by other British radio media. Despite this, Fascist Groove Thang still made no 45 in the U.K. singles chart.

The track also bestowed on the band an aura of political cool that propelled the resultant album, the critically-acclaimed Penthouse and Pavement to much greater chart success than the single later in 1981. This success allowed Heaven 17 to become a leading light in the so-called “alternative dance” music of the early 80s which saw hip British musicians embrace American black dance vibes and re-invent them for a U.K. audience who hated Thatcher but who had tired of the po-faced politics-on-your-sleeve of punk. Given that where the US leads, sadly much of the western world follows, and with Reform U.K. mixing its toxic brew of divisive rhetoric and easy populist lies, Fascist Groove Thang has never felt more prescient or relevant.

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A track I can relate to!

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Time by David Bowie

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Time by David Bowie/ Holy Holy (1973)

I went to see Holy Holy at the weekend, a band rather unfairly termed on Wikipedia a ‘David Bowie tribute band’. To be fair to this group, they are a little more than that. Their core consists of Tony Visconti, David Bowie’s long-term collaborator, friend and producer (and bass player on The Man Who Sold The World album); Heaven 17 vocalist Glenn Gregory, and the original drummer from Bowie’s iconic backing band, The Spiders From Mars, Mick “Woody” Woodmansey. These guys are as much Bowie fanboys as the audience and what, at times, they lacked in finesse, they made up for in passion, soul and a palpable love for the music of the maestro’s 1970s heyday.

One of their best versions of the many Bowie tracks they covered when I saw them was the burlesque anthem Time, from the Aladdin Sane album. This is a song that has increasingly grown on me over the years. It can be fairly accused of being overwrought, and Bowie’s performance as melodramatic, but its sweeping melody and Mick Ronson’s superlative guitar playing, to my mind make Time one of Aladdin Sane’s stand-out tracks (out of in truth many on that album). But what raises this track to being one of Bowie’s best offerings is the lyrical content towards the end of the song, which shifts it away from ruminations on the inexorable passage of time towards one of the most affecting and heartbreaking set of break-up lyrics I’ve heard. The passage is worth replicating in full:-

Breaking up is hard, but keeping dark is hateful,

I had so many dreams, I had so many breakthroughs,

But you, my love, were kind, but love has left you dreamless,

The door to dreams was closed, your park was real but dreamless,

Perhaps you’re smiling now, smiling through this darkness,

But all I have to give is guilt for dreaming…

This is Bowie at his most poetic, the lyrics and his vocals aching with regret, fondness and guilt at the end of his doomed affair. Gregory’s singing and the band’s playing at the concert more than did justice to this epic and the intensity of the delivery brought prickles to the nape of my neck. The experience reminded me of the beauty of Aladdin Sane but most of all brought home the emotional power of Time itself.

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Evita, the Motion Picture Music Soundtrack (1996)

Evita was my guilty pleasure in the late 1970s - I loved the tunes, was intrigued by the politics it described and Eva Peron was a genuinely fascinating figure, if somewhat suspect. However for someone who fancied himself as something of a punk/New Wave aficionado, to let on that you liked Andrew Lloyd-Webber could have been social suicide at the time. To be fair, I like all the Lloyd-Webber/Tim Rice collaborations and I was particularly drawn to the 1978 recording of the West End cast’s version of the musical, particularly David Essex’s nuanced portrayal of Che. Evita is a genuine curiousity though - it possesses neither the pop exuberance of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat; the tragic fatalism and funk/rock punch of Jesus Christ Superstar, or the MOR bombast of Lloyd-Webber’s later productions. In fact musically it’s all over the place, veering from the Latin phrasing of Oh What A Circus, the faux cabaret of On This Night Of A Thousand Stars, through the classicism of Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, to the salsa dance rhythms of Buenos Aires. The show never settles into a consistent musical style, unlike its predecessors, but, for me, this makes it hugely listenable and, in many ways, really quite timeless.

It was however with some trepidation that I went to see the cinema version of the show starring Madonna as Eva and Antonio Banderas as Che when it was released in 1996. Madonna seemed too much of a superstar to avoid dominating proceedings and Banderas was no Essex, but I ended up being blown away. I must have watched the movie so far at least half a dozen times. What I love about it, apart from its faultless production and sound, is the way that Alan Parker captures Madonna’s angular beauty perfectly throughout, making her a highly credible Evita, and the extent of the research that must have gone into the production, given the accuracy of its depictions of 1940s Argentinian politics. Parker brings the world of the Perons to life in a way beyond the means available to a stage show, providing context and drama along the way. My sole gripe is the gifting of the melancholic song of female exploitation, Another Suitcase, Another Hall, to Madonna, instead of leaving it to be performed by Peron’s 17 year-old mistress as intended, for whom the lyrics make far more sense.

As spectacle, the film is magnificent, exulting in the glamorous fashions, the luxury and the dramatic set pieces that were the hallmarks of Juan and Eva’s essentially vacuous and self-absorbed regime, for all its pretensions of fighting for the people. The movie also includes a new song, specially written for the film, You Must Love Me, with Madonna’s poignant delivery making what could have been just another love song, extraordinarily moving in the context of the story. So the film is a joy, but it would be nothing without Lloyd-Webber’s wonderful melodies and Tim Rice’s clever and insightful words, that has always been the hallmark of their relatively short-lived collaboration. It was this combination which, at the height of the U.K. punk rock era that made Evita a not-so-guilty pleasure. It still is.

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RIP Clem Burke (1954-2025). There's only one video to post. Always thought Dreaming was mainly drums with some other people singing and playing in the background. Clem is reported to have said he thought this song would have been a bigger hit had he not played so 'enthusiastically' on this. Personally I think it's his drumming that makes this song.

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RIP Clem Burke (24th November 1954 - 6th April 2025).

Clem Burke perhaps wasn’t the greatest drummer in the world, but he was very good and was absolutely the right man in the right place in the late 1970s and early 1980s to propel Blondie from new wave also-rans to pop superstardom. His frenetic energy on their most successful album (and arguably the band’s best), 1978’s Parallel Lines, was simply indispensable to that record’s power pop energy, and his solid backbeat as Blondie became unlikely pioneers of nouveau disco and white hip hop a couple of years later, was perhaps the most crucial aspect of the band’s new 1980s sound. And speaking personally, as a drummer who grew up with punk and new wave, Clem’s crisp rhythms were as essential to my listening pleasure as were those of the also recently-deceased Rick Buckler of The Jam. Clem’s passing marks an unwelcome personal milestone as yet another drumming hero of my youth passes on.

Perhaps ironically, Clem’s arguably finest hour was his playing on Blondie’s first major hit single, Denis, a recording dominated and powered by his fat drum sound. The 1978 Top Of The Pops video of the track posted above, lives on in my memory, obviously for Deborah Harry’s sophisticated punk sex appeal, but also for Clem’s enthusiastic mimed drumming - someone clearly having the time of his life. Denis was perhaps this lost talent’s finest hour.

See ya, Clem: sleep well.

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I Could Be Happy by Altered Images (1982)

In a fit of nostalgia, I recently put together a playlist of tracks I remember my friends and I listening to in 1981-82 when we lived as students in Hulme, Manchester. That period was the peak of post-punk/New Wave pop cool, and one of our then faves was the 12 inch version of Altered Image’s hit, I Could Be Happy, defined by elfin punkette Claire Grogan’s winsome childlike vocals. Seasoned by the late 70s muscular rock of the Pistols, The Clash and the Tom Robinson Band, this track, and the band’s Pinky Blue album in its entirety, always seemed to me to be unbearably twee, despite the song’s enticing hook and impressive production by Martin Rushent. My more hip pals loved Altered Images and the track, taken in particular with the beguiling sexiness of Grogan and the effortless Glasgow cool of the male members of the band. For me however, the superficiality of lines like ‘I would like to climb high in a tree/ Or go to Skye on my holidee (sic)’ or ‘Maybe swim a mile/ Down the Nile’, seemed to symbolise the essential silliness of early 80s “alternative” music as the po-faced social realism of punk gave way to a New Romantic clubbing aesthetic and its urge to dance. In short, in my leftist impatience with style over substance, I disapproved.

But listening to the track now, more than 42 years later, I’m struck not just by I Could Be Happy’s freshness and glorious melody, but by the desperation of the lyrics, which entirely passed me by back in 1982. The reason why Grogan is coming up with childhood memories and adult fantasies of escape, is not due to some form of pastoral whimsy, but because the happiness of the title depends, in what sounds like an existential fashion, on getting away from someone or something. ‘All of these things I do’, she sings ‘To get away from you’. The killer line, repeated twice at the end of the song, carries with it a definite hint of implied fear: ‘How do I escape from you?’ By running far away, apparently. I Could Be Happy therefore is less a song of urban teen angst and more one of survival. What or who is the singer fleeing from? Domestic abuse? Financial debt? A toxic relationship? The song, written collectively by the band, doesn’t let on, but what is for sure is that there is a lot more to this apparently pretty exercise in disposable dance-pop than meets the eye.

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The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars by David Bowie (1972)

Ziggy Stardust is not actually my favourite David Bowie album, but without doubt it is his most significant and the most complete. Following on from the peculiar mix of Dylan, glam-pop and New York sleaze that made up the confusing brilliance of Hunky Dory, Bowie’s 1972 space-mythological tale of the original alien who fell to earth is both self-consciously grandiose, but also gently mocking of its own conceit. The album’s themes are genuinely epic. The opening track, Five Years, sets a terrifying context for the album - a world coming to terms with the fact it has ‘five years left to cry in’, and society disintegrating accordingly. Into this doomed cityscape (the album, unlike its occasionally pastoral predecessor, is profoundly urban), appears the rock-god Starman from another world, the eponymous Ziggy Stardust arriving on earth not only to provide hope and optimism, but to ‘let the children boogie’.

But this is no tale of spiritual or physical redemption. The alien saviour soon falls into the darkness and dismay of bohemian rock star life, so brilliantly observed by the heartbroken narrator of Lady Stardust, and the fellow-traveller who charts the destruction of the Spiders From Mars in Ziggy Stardust. It all ends with the inevitable demise of our would-be saviour in Rock’n’Roll Suicide, despite the chorus assuring Ziggy that he is in truth, not alone.

What then to make of this weird mix of sci-fi, rock’n’roll angst and glam pride? Some of the songs are quite pedestrian - Soul Love is a story of hopeless urban teen romance; It Ain’t Easy a slightly jarring cover, and Suffragette City a predictable tale of hassling groupies that seemed to obsess the rock groups of the time. But the core of the album speaks to existentialism, tragedy and the superficial nature of fame with a lyrical power which remains utterly timeless. Add to this to the superlative playing of a backing band reaching their peak, the record’s clean production and brilliant arrangements, and its killer melodies, then you have an album that made Bowie a superstar, launched a movement and made some telling observations on the human condition. In short, a masterwork. Pretentious? Absolutely. Self-serving? Without a doubt. A work of precocious genius? Need you ask…

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The Wanderer by Dion and The Belmonts

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The Wanderer by Dion and the Belmonts (1961)

I have always found the song The Wanderer, released by American rock’n’roller Dion and his backing band The Belmonts in 1961, a lot more ambiguous than its freewheeling and somewhat misogynistic lyrics imply. There is a sadness behind the machismo lyric ���With my two fists of iron/ But I’m going nowhere,” and despite its assertion of male independence, I think there is loneliness present when Dion sings about hopping into his car to “ride around the world” when he finds himself “falling for some girl”. Dion’s voice, although growling along with the bragging lyrics nonetheless betrays an uncertainty, at least to these ears. Even the title of the song carries a hint of regret about it.

But what a groove he and The Belmonts lay down…

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Nightshift by Bruce Springsteen VEVO video

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Nightshift by Bruce Springsteen

Nightshift by Bruce Springsteen (2022)

I heard Nightshift by Bruce Springsteen again the other day. It is one of several singles from The Boss’ 2022 Only The Strong Survive album of 1960s and 1970s soul covers. The original - a moving tribute to the deceased Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson written by Walter Orange - was released by The Commodores in 1985, and was a big hit but is not generally considered a “soul standard”. Springsteen however clearly loves the track, because his voice is delicate and yearning throughout without ever falling into performative emoting. I think it is a better version than the original.

Only The Strong Survive is a remarkable album in itself. A labour of love by Springsteen for sure, but who could have believed that so late in life, the blue collar gruff “rock” vocalist could so train his voice that he could produce credible versions of some of the most powerful and evocative black soul songs ever made. Nightshift however is his tour de force.