Spurs Music Forum

With all keyboard play, the sound is more important / widely
remembered than the technical competence of the player themselves ...

 

Bloody show off...

 

Greenfield and JJB were the driving sound of the Stranglers, dug out my copies of Hanging around, walk on by and 5 minutes , another one gone RIP DG

 

Dave Greenfield's a terrible loss. His sound was unmistakable and he was still out doing his thing and sounding great. Nobody sounded like him and for me too, he and JJB were the sound of The Stranglers.

I've spent the evening playing my favourites of their work. Here's my pick...

Thanks for the music and the memories...

 

Always had a laugh when radio 1 played peaches and they had to bleep out a certain word in the song

 

I forgot this...

 

A special memory from The Captain...

 

Good call, brilliant song that was largely ignored by the media should have been a massive hit. I remember that appearance on the tube like it was yesterday, they were really at the top of their game and JJ was fabulously menacing.

 

Bands like The Damned, Stranglers, Siouxsie and others were doing great stuff in the early '80's but couldn't get arrested if they tried...until they covered some 60's hit...because the ****s on the radio would only play that stuff. The original work, with far more worth was just ignored.

Rant ends.

 

When I read this, two instances came immediately to mind. Unsurprisingly, the first is The Damned and The Captain's 2 fingered keyboard parts on Machine Gun Etiquette. Beyond basic but they fit the mood and are iconic above and beyond later work by Roman Jugg and Monty (to those of us who study such things).

The other has to be Al Kooper's hauntingly wonderful keyboard work on 'Like a Rolling Stone'. The bloke was a guest spectator at the session and a guitarist and one deemed not good enough to play on the session. Even his mate, the producer Tom Wilson, laughed at his keyboard skills but when Kooper said "I think I've got something that might work..." he didn't stop him and.....what he played makes the song. If you took the keyboard part out, it wouldn't be anywhere near the same...and Dylan immediately called for it to be to the forefront of the final mix.

He wasn't wrong..

 

So you know the pain of Cliff Richard then. And Status Quo.

 

Yes but they continued to make TOTP well, well after having something relevant to offer (with Showaddywaddy and a few others)...

"...and here at No.64...Status Quo..."...with the same sound that they've been making for 15 years because we like that and them.

If you're trying something new...you're all out of luck...unless you're the flavour of the moment.

 

Top of the pops was a closed shop and the pretty much the only 'all music show' on main stream TV until 1982. It truly had the influence to make hit records as an appearance pretty much guaranteed an increase in sales, but you could only get on if you had some sales to start with and that was down to radio airplay which the BBC also had an enormous influence over, with playlists and backhanders all over the shop. Which is why some record companies looked to distort the charts by buying back records from chart return shops hopefully get on TOTP and then sell them again ligitamitally

It also why I never really understood John Peel doing TOTP I know that he did it slightly ironically and generally only with other people that he liked (mainly David Jensen and then Janice Long), but he was ever really comfortable introducing mediocre pop music like a Tony Blackburn was. The only person who ever really said what he thought on TOTP was Roger Daltrey during the ill fated period where they had a 'guest' presenter and given the job of introducing The Village People he did so before offering the advice 'Backs to the wall lads'!

 

If you're going to try and use litigation to stop people telling the truth about you, you'd better not miss

Because this is what happens when you miss...

 

I've been a bit remiss in posting The Damned Show episodes...although I'm sure that you're all up to date and don't need me to post today's episode, where Monty regales us with the tale of how punk saved him from a life of ELP and similar horrors...

I've just looked him up on wiki and found out that he's only a year older than me. Maybe I'm not ageing as badly as I feared...?

 

Just learned of the death of Kraftwerk's Florian Schneider age 73 another sad loss ,some ****er is working their way through my record collection

 

Another one...

In completely random news, today I learned that Channel 4's Tour de France theme was by Pete Shelley, even though the end credits always said it was Kraftwerk

 

Sad news R.I.P

 

After the news of Dave Greenfield's passing, Mrs B said to me..."We'd better not lose any members of The Damned. I could cope with losing most of my family before losing Dave Vanian..."

Dressing up and going to see The Damned with friends is what we do. Losing that would be like football being cancelled forever.

 

i'll never forget the first time that I heard Autobahn. It wasn't a hit and I was in a record shop. It was so strange to my ears that it was like aliens had landed on earth and brought it with them.

I can't think that there have been more than 10 or so records to have done that in my lifetime.

RIP.