CULTURE CLUB – "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?"

Nothing here for me, I’m afraid, not even on either an ironic level at the time or on a retrospective level today.

encore (and The Wedding Singer) notwithstanding i rather like it these days. a happy 8.

now about this story that one night George was out drinking and in walks Rod Stewart. the two decide to spontaneously cover each other’s most famous question songs to see if the hilarious audience responses would be different. they were not. but the story is true. IT IS true.

Yes it was the last such “everyone talking about the previous night’s TOTP at work or school” moment (there’d been plenty before just about every week in the Glam rock days, Sex Pistols doing ‘Pretty Vacant, etc).
Like Erithian I had seen Boy George in pop magazines for the previous few weeks but I remember for most people the day after Culture Club’s first TOTP appearance it was a case of “…yes it was a a bloke!”
I think 1982 was possibly the final year when possibly the whole country generally watched TOTP – coincidentally it was the Autum of 1982 when after years of only 3 channels we got another one with the start of Channel 4 so the start of the fragmentation of national viewing habits gained its first hairline crack this month.

First time I saw this, I thought it must be some sort of Hayzee Fantaysi spin-off! (It was only quite recently I discovered they were actually friends!). I have to say I loathed this with a passion and if I’d been making an “answer record” at the time it would definitey have been called “Yes”. It strikes me now that Boy George and this song paved the way for later “soul whiners” like Mick Hucknall so I dislike it doubly!

Number 32 watch: Abba’s sublime The Day Before You Came, not quite their last single but surely one of their best.

I am often struck in retrospect by what a dreadful band Culture Club were, though I would have to admit that this tune had a certain “OMG is that a boy or a girl?” astonishment factor when it first appeared.

sleeve design malcolm garrett and assorted iMaGeS: this is the first “style-qua-style” design-era* sleeve to clothe a no.1 i think — certainly the first one that’s jumped out

*i guess i mean garrett/saville/brody… anyone else? (obviously b.bubbles already popped up some time back but he’s from a difft era): garrett was maybe the most “pop art” of those three, which naturally means the one i’m likely to like most — brody’s often too busy for my tastes and saville too glib

yellow/orange magic marker jungle scribble, exotic (meaningless) glyphs, typography that has a hint of punky rubber-stamp make-do to it… it’s a long way from the acid-sharp dayglo simplicity of the buzzcocks sleeves (which makes sense: the club are a long way from the ‘cocks), it’s looser (almost slapdash), and not so direct and contained– boy g’s play was, for a long space, his almost diffident confidence he could play you; that the just-strange mix of the stuff he was throwing at you — more on the record itself tomorrow (which i love love LOOOOVE and always have) — would be held together by the can’t-help-itself strength of the reaction you projected back, good or bad, fascinated or threatened or lustful (?) or disdainful or _______ or _______; he was giving you this STUFF and you would make a whole of it… he’s not the first pick-and-mix artist by any means, but i can’t think of another one who could give this impression that he knows he could have grabbed up half a dozen other ideas (of look and move and sound and …) at random, and held you with them too

(i don’t, incidentally, think he could have: but the sense of his sheer nerve — his certainty he would pull this off — well, without that working you, the rest, you wouldn’t even see any of the rest as being part of a whole)

(this is a bit cryptic cz i’m tired and not bein specific, cz i wanna talk abt the record separately)

Two memories that are so precisely “I heart the eighties” I can’t believe they’re real:

1, My sister’s friend Paul Whiteman (not the jazzer) seeing George in Just Seventeen and going “phwoarrr, she’s alright in’t she?” Yes, that’s exactly what he said.

2. Watching the fabled TOTP appearance with my sis. Dad walks in. “What the bloody hell’s that?”

(snigger)

“… eh?”

(more sniggers)

“Well, I don’t know what you’re laughing at. You wouldn’t be laughing if I came home dressed like that.”

(raucous laughter)

Also an earlier ’82 memory, and a fickle fame signifier: the cover of Record Mirror with the headline “club country”. Kids at school peeking over my shoulder expecting an Associates feature and being disappointed that it was this bunch of unknowns.

The most exaggerated Home-Counties-American accent since Elton John rather irritated me. “Give me Tam to realise my cram” was presumably shorthand for “give me Thomas to realise my crommus”. Or “Mike Roberts”.

Otherwise, I’m really quite fond of it for the same reasons as Tom – an unguarded lightness (hey, I was 17, of course it worked for me) which I don’t think Boy George ever came close to again.

I was once in love with a girl who reminded me of Boy George (the Boy George of 1982, not the troubled present day model). One I’d realised this similarity, it was a bit distracting. I never told her this.

re #13 & 14 the sleeve design is based on the textile prints of Sue Clowes whose clothes Culture Club wore. They feature in the Hard Times issue of The Face that I mentioned back in the Stand & Deliver thread.

I enjoy this the most out of Culture Clubs hits. It’s lightness and delicacy suits George’s voice best – he doesn’t have much of a range but he does have appealing quality to his phrasing. When they started boosting Helen Terry’s role the music lost something. He matches and betters the delicacy on the Jesus loves you single: ‘After the love’ from the other end of the decade. Check out the video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwgQ0ZUdX34&feature=related

it’s the the distance from the beginning of the 100 Years War to 73 years before it ended

Re 21: Point of order… it’s actually the same distance as the beginning of the 100 Years War to 89 years before it ended! (And it makes me feel VERY old remembering THAT!) …though it was a good gag none-the-less!

I might have said it before on here but it seems sort of sobering that it’s now the same interval from the first Summer of love (1967) to the 2nd (1988)as it is from 1988 to now…and in 1988 I remember 1967 seeming like the dawn of time…

Or maybe the prevailing music genres of thirty years ago are getting better reception from tastemakers and the young than their equivalent in 1979.

Two more perspectives on this: Mike’s “Which Decade” series this year featured an oddity of a top five hit in 1969 from Donald Peers, then 60. A friend remarked that he was the same age as Bruce Springsteen will be this year, and there was no danger of him headlining Woodstock.

And the mid-point between the end of the Second World War and the present day is now June 1977. So those of you who are around my age, our memories of the Pistols’ “God Save The Queen” are as vivid as those of VE Day to those who were that age in 1977.

Another aspect which occurred to me last night is that the difference between a 10-year-old and a 20-year-old is more extreme than that between a 30-year-old and a 40-year-old. It has often struck me that the growing up of popular music has been quite like that of a person and as such it has experienced “growth spurts” over the years. Any period in a life which included the moment of adolescence is going to seem longer than one which didn’t – and for me, it seems that music’s adolescence came during the 1960s, the loss of innocence, the flirting with different styles and substances. By contrast, the last few decades of pop music have had the “been there, done that” familiarity of a 30/40-something. I can’t think of very much contemporary music which couldn’t have existed 10 years ago, but there are other points in time (eg after the advent of psychedelia) when this was not the case.

Regarding the point at No26 – there was of course a swing revival in the mid-70s started at some of the more underground (soul/funk clubs) which resulted in some minor chart hits although the music played was approx 1938-about 1945 so the gap was actually a slightly longer gap. And of course one of the main figures in the swing era was Glenn Miller whos music also featured on at least one of the big Jive Bunny hits.

I know from personal experience (of admittedly not mainstream pre-house dance clubs)that Glenn Miller and other often more black swing bands could still pack the floor when they were sometimes dropped in amongst the more up to date sounds.

And all the above is in spite of the fact that Radio One has always had an embargo on playing anything from the pre-rock era deciding in its usual unimaginative/never quite getting it way that the world started with Bill Haley.

Yes, I remember “Loving You Has Made Me Bananas” – and I thought of some other examples from yester-year of music from a previous yester-year becoming popular again… a cover of the Ink Spot’s 1940 hit “Whispering Grass” topping the charts in 1975… the Rooftop Singers taking a 1929 jug-band song to the top of the U.S. charts in 1963 when they recorded “Walk Right In”… Marvin Hamlisch’s soundtrack for “The Sting” in 1973 helping to repopularise Scott Joplin compositions from as far back as 1900!

BUT… (and I really don’t think I’m kidding myself here) all of the above were examples of quaint old sounds which had a nostalgic novelty appeal when they enjoyed their resurgances – and it genuinely didn’t seem as though the appreciation I witnessed being displayed by a relatively young crowd for a vintage Madness song from ’79 fell into that category. Unlike the previous examples, there are contemporary artists (such as the Ordinary Boys) who have enjoyed recent success with a very similar sound.

To put it another way, if a current artist chose to cover “Bohemien Rhapsody” I don’t think many would see it as an attempt to resurrect a quaint old style from a byegone era – it would be very possible to rerecord it in a way that was faithful to the original and yet still sound contemporary. And yet, that would be the modern equivalent of the Rooftop Singers having covered a 1929 jug-band song in 1963!!!

#29 “I can’t think of very much contemporary music which couldn’t have existed 10 years ago, but there are other points in time (eg after the advent of psychedelia) when this was not the case” – the accelerated development of recording technology 50s-70s & its use in pop/rock specifically meant that whatever the musical content recordings from the 40s sounded impossibly ancient by the 70s, in a way that 70s recordings don’t, now; Its hard to imagine even the most diehard swing enthusiast in the 70s arguing that 40s recordings sounded ‘better’, in the way that people enthuse over the analogue lushness of 70s music now. (though I’m sure the crackly primitiveness of early blues recordings is part of their appeal for some people but that seems like a distancing, archaeological appeal rather than a purely sonic one)

Re #33: Other examples of this phenomena from this time would be; Art Garfunkel’s ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’, Gary Shearston’s ‘I Get A Kick Out Of You’ and Bing Crosby and Glenn Miller getting Melody Maker covers in 1975.

wildheartedoutsider @ 26

Um, I wonder where we’d all be if it wasn’t for Robert Johnson, Lightnin Hopkins, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker…

Or doesn’t that count?

RE:39 I think that very much DOES count! Strangely enough I’ve been thinking about the influence of vintage blues on late 60s/early 70s artists like Led Zeppelin or Cream and I think it’s the best counter-argument that anyone could come up with. After I’d posted the bit about jug-band music I remembered the Lovin’ Spoonful having recorded some songs in that style in the mid-60s and realised that it sounded quite contemporary despite its age!

I guess the question that leads me to ask is whether it is just that Blues has hit upon a formula which is more timeless than others or if it’s just that because several iconic artists re-embaraced the form, popular music went down that avenue. Music only sounds ahead of its time if other artists eventually take that style on board!

wildheartedoutsider @ 41

More to the Popular point, I think, would be the influence of vintage blues on earlier 60s artists like the Animals, the Stones, Them, etc.

What I meant was that if anything imaginative was done using anything from the pre-rock template I’m pretty sure that Radio 1 would be the last to know just as they have been with just about any non-electric guitar/rock format development of the last 40 years (ie reggae, funk, disco, hiphop, house, rave etc). I can still hear boring old farts like Paul Gambaccini and Mike Read missing the point and slagging of any of those types of music as I type…

And for a whole sector of British youth from the mods>(original) skinheads>soul boys etc onwards wouldn’t they have seen ‘Rock Around The Clock’and the rock it heralded as starting a thread of music from which their own tastes immediately diverged and rarely had anything in common with again…

andy, as a matter of interest, when do you feel the mods> skinheads>soul boys line begins?

i know that christine keeler film tried to make a thing of blues parties as part of the “scandal” — viz politicans plus prostitutes plus black people — which locks in 1963

(and i seem to recall a piece by pioneer mod penny reel telling of the first time he saw so-and-so wearing bright green suede shoes in 1962, this being some kind of landmark moment — but my memory for the date might be letting me down)

(colin mcinnes talks abt stuff in 1957-8, but i’m not sure if the line had coalesced yet) (and i’m not a big macinnes fan, actually…)

i think the mods vs rockers battle was 1964 (big pitched battle, anyway)

the teds and razorboys go right back into the 40s, but i don’t know what their music was

That’s Chris Barber’s band in Momma Don’t Allow (somewhere in Wood Green); the film’s a C21 window on why UK kids went Trad mad – it sounded grrreat and was amazing to dance to.

Pre rock Teds were into the big bands with a rhythmic emphasis: Ted Heath (his version of Tequila isn’t half bad), The Kirchin Band (Basil going off in a decidedly non-rock direction when it broke up circa 62), and Ken Mackintosh who wrote specially constructed, mildly threatening dance tracks like The Monster and The Creep (a biggie, covered by Stan Kenton). He covered Bill Justis’s Raunchy when R&R broke and according to his obit “he was never afraid to embrace contemporary sounds. When he opened at the Empire Leicester Square, some big band purists were aghast to see his line-up had incorporated an electric bass and a Hammond organ”.

So I’m guessing there was no line drawn in the 50s. Early mods were into modern jazz, no? Beatles obviously were down-the-line rockers but dug early Motown and what retrospectively became solid mod material. I reckon this stuff’s all pretty liquid.