Before writing this entry, I spent a while researching Paul Hardcastle’s later career as a highly successful figure in the land of Smooth Jazz. I cannot tell you how long this actually took, as time can have no meaning in a world where tracks are called things like “Visions Of Illusions” and “Constellation Of Dreams”. But what this voyage of illumination showed me is that “19” is a very odd fish indeed: even Hardcastle’s prior output, if YouTube is any guide, sounded like the on-hold music for a flotation centre. What happens when such a man decides to make a cut-up electro record?
As a lesson in recent history, “19” is a phenomenal success: if there’s one thing any 1985 schoolboy could tell you about the Vietnam War it’s how old the poor bastards shipped out there were. As a pop record it’s half-triumphant, half-awkward, and the triumph and awkwardness are indivisible. If that rent-a-soul chorus hadn’t been on there – with its “those who remember won’t forget” clanger – the record wouldn’t be as memorable. But the way that chorus gets chopped and diced – “d-d-d-d-d-destruction!” – undermines any seriousness “19” might have reached for, takes its indictment of Vietnam into goofy Max Headroom territory.
But then again, if it had been a wholly serious record, would it have been any better? It is possible to give this kind of quick-cut documentary pop weight without sacrificing its groove – check out Steinski’s fantastic “The Motorcade Sped On” for a dramatisation of signal becoming noise in the white heat of a massive event. “19”‘, though, is slick, glib, in love with its own techniques and surface and beat. But I think if it hadn’t it would have been even clumsier: judging by his other work, I wouldn’t trust Hardcastle with intentional resonance or nuance.
And as it is, “19” manages unintentional resonance really well: the post-Vietnam generation working out, in public, what they thought and felt about the war. Hardcastle was part of a great spasm of mid-80s ‘Nam references, a door opening in history and things never resolved rushing back into currency. And the barrage of different impulses you get in “19” – this was awful! But so visual! But horrific! But pop! – gives a better feel for that working-through than some of its more considered and famous products.
Score: 6
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I have a (very) vague memory of the stuttering technique being appropriated for an advert for Just Seventeen magazine.
i have a much less vague memory of travelling on a coach to oxford to see smiley culture, which the ENTIRE FEMALE STAFF of just seventeen and no one else but me — not that that has anything much to do with this record
19 works on me – for one thing, I’m a perfect sucker for choppy electropop, and for another, the information in the vocal is powerful stuff on its own. But it’s ten years too late to be a protest record and feels a lot more like a way of turning shock and pain into effect. Which it does, but not completely enough to kill off the feeling of exploitation. So it makes me feel excited and also a bit sick with myself, which isn’t my favourite mood for pop music.
**EDIT** My sister had the HORRIFIC Morris Minor And The Majors parody, which made me sicker.
Things I had forgotten about the video: it has a wee little bit of naughty-naughty brand appropriation as the “19” seems to come directly from the old “Product 19” cereal logo; also, just how grotesque the final video-toaster effect (face folding up into a star) was.
To my mind, this song IS a video–the song had no life beyond it. Like, I can’t imagine people actually dancing to the song in a club minus its visuals, though I’m sure people must’ve.
This song did my head in at the time, incidentally. It was also playground crack, everyone was imitating it and continued to do so even after Rory Bremner had ruined the fun.
All the other examples of political/newsreel cut-ups I can think of (like the Steinski) are AFTER this – I may well be missing some obvious ones, but was this the first…?
I should’ve loved this more than I did but I remember being really annoyed that it was still on top after a couple of weeks (an impressive 5 in total). I hadn’t actually heard a lot of pop specifically derived from Electro at that time but the sonic novelty here didn’t excite me any more than on ‘I Feel For You’. I don’t remember being particularly dazzled by the concept of a record led more by sampled speech than singing either, unaware perhaps of just how unusual it was for a song like that to be this successful. Certainly I didn’t go for this on quite the same level as a similar albeit apolitical record a couple of years later.
If I’d been a few years older maybe ’19’ would’ve led me directly to the brilliance of Hashim’s ‘Al-Naafyish’, Cybotron’s ‘Clear’, Newcleus ‘Automan’ and similar tunes which I didn’t hear until at least ten years after they first surfaced, and in some cases over 20. I find those low stabby bass notes (the Roland SH-101 I presume) irresistible.
Still I DID like this and Hardcastle himself and probably thought ‘I want to be like this guy’ despite the relative anonymity ha. On the TOTP chart rundown you’d see a photo of him before they showed the video.
And soon after I found Rory Bremner’s version (‘N-N-Nineteen Not Out’ as The Commentators) hilarious – in hidnsight probably the closest I ever got to liking cricket.
I was 14 when this came out and it’s one of those records that really stood out at the time. I’ve still got it mentally filed in a small band of the wtf records I remember from growing up, Laurie Anderson’s Superman being another.
It’s probably hard to imagine how amazingly different this sounded now. It was like nothing *I’d* ever heard before, and to 14 year old ears, living in the shadow of impending nuclear war, the anti war message was classy not corny. It was like a real world A-Team and that video of the recruits having their heads shaved, that’s one of the things I remember the most about it.
But having said all this, despite the fact that it made me sit up and pay attention at the time, I hated the record. It was dance. It was pop. It was number fucking one. This made it contemptible. This wasn’t music. Where were the guitars?
It’s dated badly but it was special. Very special.
#5 – wouldn’t My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts count?
Oh very good point, yeah, it would.
As you noted, this came in the midst of a Vietnam revisionist wave, esp. in the US–the Rambo films, the A-Team (all Vietnam vets, remember, as was most of “Magnum PI”), Platoon, and so on. Plus we had just won a glorious victory in Grenada, so the States were finally “back” and could start mulling over what went wrong in the earlier war. (There’s a rancid Clint Eastwood film from this era–Heartbreak Ridge, I think–which actually equates Grenada with Korea and Vietnam–“one win, one tie, one loss,” the win being Grenada, natch).
With that backdrop (a lot of the revisionist arguments were that we could’ve won in ‘Nam if only the politicians had let us), a moderately realist record (& nicely catered to adolescent self-absorption) like this was welcome enough. Still seems odd to imagine people dancing to this thing, though–“Vietnam! V-v-v-Vietnam!” 6 sounds right.
This record should not receive a heroes’ welcome. Staff Sgt Barry Sadler would have shot the pinko!
@ #5 Tom. Aren’t all the two tribes remixes important antecedents, as well as, yeah, the (superior) Eno/Byrne ‘Jezebel Spirit’ track? Anyhow, this record just never did much for me, and still doesn’t:
5
Would be a 7 if mashed together with:
Otto: You know your problem? You don’t like winners.
Archie: Winners?
Otto: Yeah, winners.
Archie: Winners, like North Vietnam?
Otto: Shut up! We didn’t lose Vietnam! It was a tie!
Archie: [Cowboy-like drawl] I’m tellin’ you, baby, they kicked your little ass there! Boy, they whooped yer hide real good!
Otto: No they didn’t!!
Archie: Oh Yes they did!
Otto: Oh no they… SHUT UP! Goodbye Archie.
Archie: Gonna shoot me Otto?
Otto: Er Yes. Yes ‘fraid so old chap sorry.
I’m glad you didn’t link the copy of the video someone has posted with the tagline “Produced by Mike Oldfield”, which made me slap my virtual forehead… this track was notorious among Oldfield fans (cough) for its fairly blatant rip-off of Tubular Bells in its main melody. Oldfield ended up with a co-writer credit, which is as close as he’ll ever get to bothering us at Popular, although Marcello will meet him a few times at Then Play Long. Ironically, some of Oldfield’s later work harks back to this kind of ’80s electronica when he isn’t snoozing in the bath of chill-out.
Hardcastle’s track hasn’t been served well by its own imitators; a lot of amateur and minor chart performers glommed onto those keyboard sounds and wore them out in the following decade. But in 1985 it certainly did sound new. I’m not sure whether to mark it for its initial impact or how it sounds to me now; I think I’ll have to go with now and call it 5.
Tom, on Twitter you wondered whether there was a surge of interest in Vietnam in the mid-80s: very much so, I’d say, at least in popular culture. As well as this we had Platoon (1986), Full Metal Jacket (1987) and of course Rambo: First Blood Part II, released 30 August 1985 in Britain (but perhaps already making waves from its 22 May 1985 release in the US?): all surely tied up with the Reagan years, with movie-makers either re-fighting the war as winners (Rambo) or critiquing 1980s U.S. sabre-rattling by proxy. In Australia this all found a ready audience, as we had sent a generation of young men to Vietnam too, and so “19” resonated strongly; what’s curious to me is that “19” was made by an Englishman. So how much of it was driven by a desire to make a political statement, and how much by a desire to show off some new musical tricks? And if the former was significant, why Vietnam? No handy soundbites where BBC newsreaders mentioned the average age of soldiers sent to the Falklands?
[I see that col124 has now got in a mention of Rambo etc., but I’ll leave mine rather than rewrite in the remaining few minutes of the edit window.]
Here’s an earlier electro/history cut-up – Keith LeBlanc and Malcolm X, from 1983
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK6KhR7meqQ
Remarkable how much of the same ground they covered. Except No Sell Out was all over Peel, and 19 was all over ToTP. Because it had a chorus.
Charts-of-countries-that-sent-soldiers-to-Vietnam-watch: this peaked at number 1 in New Zealand, Germany and Italy, number 10 in Australia and number 15 in the US and France. (I’ll have to leave it to someone else to dig up the chart info for the Asian countries involved; my Google powers are limited to pages in English.)
re paul hardcastle’s later career and what happens when tries for gravity, something that has stayed with me for twenty odd years is a lyric of his i once saw quoted in a review that goes “if there’s one thing that i find so strange/it’s the theory of a limited nuclear exchange”. now, i’ve never heard this song, but i can’t help feeling that it’s not going to be much good.
not just cut-up, is there any case to be made for this as the first UK house hit? i sort of think not based on my contemporary reactions (19 was easily assimilated into my world (and was of course a massive playground hit) whereas the unarguable (i think!) house record we’ll be getting to to in a little bit initially left me utterly baffled, (though more of that later)) – but i’m less sure why this is, an awful lot of the elements do seem to be there. mind you, i’m relying on memory, and the mention of mike oldfied suggests that it’s actually more prog than i’m thinking.
I rediscovered this a while back and still put it on reasonably often – there’s something in the vocal editing that really works (“thousands of men are still fighting … the Vietnam war”). I was really surprised to find it was *so* electro, actually – does anything else under the ‘electro’ banner come even close to being this big?
It’s just strange all round. Notwithstanding your efforts so far, I can’t think of any reason why this should have become popular. Even the Vietnam film boom seems to have followed this, rather than the other way round. As that’s the point of the blog, I’m hoping for a long thread of enlightenment.
All the other examples of political/newsreel cut-ups I can think of (like the Steinski) are AFTER this – I may well be missing some obvious ones, but was this the first…?
Well, it’s probably not what you mean, but there’s Simon And Garfunkel’s “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night” from 1967 (which I thought was profound at age 14, but my mother considered it old hat, so there was probably lots of precedent for it). (Also, “Scarborough Fair/Canticle,” the first track on Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, is something of a mashup, albeit one where S&G sing all sides of the mash themselves. Presumably also not an original idea, but Simon does have something of a DJ and dancer’s mentality underneath a lot of the singer-songwriter sappiness.)
tom and jonathan – possibly enhancing the byrne connection further, the chorus of the song bears more than a passing resemblance to the verse melody of “life during wartime”, no?
edit: scratch that. it’s “girlfriend is better” i’m thinking of.
The first ever ever ever sonic cut-up in some fashion is by John Cage: a couple of the Imaginary Landscape series, Fontana Mix etc… the musique concrete people were on this also, in principle, but I don’t think they used radiosources this way (probably some of the 60s 2nd-gen MC-foax did). Steve Reich’s early tapes pieces. AMM were using radio-bleed into their live performances from 1966; possible MeV also, I’d have to look that up. Does Zappa? There was a ton of it by 68. So Simon and Garfunkel might be the pop pioneers here…
It’s also worth mentioning The Enemy Within’s similar “Strike” from 1984: another electro cut-up by Keith LeBlanc, this time in support of the NUM, with Arthur Scargill (“the most gorgeous redhead since Rita Hayworth” – Julie Burchill) cast in the Malcolm X role.
As for “19” – like “Candy Girl” before it, this was a track which had enormous impact, but next to no after-life. Paul Hardcastle was a minor league jobbing Brit-jazz-funker, whose bland instrumentals (“Rain Forest” springs to mind) always seemed to end up as padding on Morgan Khan’s “Street Sounds” compilation albums. So it was a surprise to observe him getting alll Fresh and Contemporary and Relevant – just as it was when fellow Brit-jazz-funkers Freeez went all electro two years earlier with “IOU”.
“19” was super-super-hot on pre-release for a few weeks, notching up loads of plays on pirate radio and specialist shows; it might be a false memory, but I’m sure I heard even it played on Tim Westwood’s show. (LWR?) It’s strange how some dance tracks can shift from total top-of-every-buzz-chart ubiquity to oh-God-not-that-old-thing again untouchability in the space of a couple of months – this is where I trot out that old Grandmaster Flash term “used grooves” again – and in that respect 19’s trajectory reminds me of what happened to Crystal Waters “Gypsy Woman”, six years later.
Hardcastle’s star continued to shine just long enough for a TOTP theme revamp commission, but he blew his good fortune with the awful follow-up “Just For Money”: a Great Train Robbery cut-up, featuring original spoken word contributions from Bob Hoskins and Sir Laurence Olivier, if you please. There was also a somewhat pointless remix of D-Train’s “You’re The One For Me”, which had me spitting “Sacrilege!” at the time…
Yeah, “No Sell Out,” the Malcolm X cut-up from ’83, really sounds like a direct inspiration for “19” after listening to it again..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK6KhR7meqQ
and I just see someone else put this up already! Apologies. well, it’s good enough to hear twice.
I was kind of eager to see what you thought of this one, considering this is a song whose description sounds so much interesting than the real deal. It is very much a product of its time; Art of Noise, Thomas Dolby, Timelords… As a matter of fact, it does sound like The Timelords minus the wit (which is, of course, 90% of Doctorin’s charm). Hardcastle was trying too hard here, this sounds too much like overreaching. But I suppose trying too hard is better than being lazy, and good intentions can make up for the lack of brilliance.
Further to the surge of Vietnam references: the mid-’80s weren’t the beginning of them in post-Vietnam-war popular culture, because nobody compiling a list of relevant movies could omit The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now from the late ’70s, but there was definitely an early-’80s lull. I guess that was because the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis, followed by Reagan’s election and ensuing US-USSR brinkmanship, temporarily diverted everyone’s attention. By the mid-’80s, though, we were all watching Central American politics (Grenada, Nicaragua), which had clearer (jungly) echoes of Vietnam. It’s noteworthy here that the Oliver Stone film preceding Platoon was Salvador, which I preferred at the time, thanks to James Woods’s stand-out performance; and for the Rambo-esque action-movie equivalent, there was Schwarzenegger’s Commando from 1985. At the time it felt like a logical progession from a cynical teenage point of view: 1984 was the year of Russian commies, 1985 was Central American commies, and 1985-6 was timely reminders of Vietnam commies to ensure we were sufficiently focussed on the aforementioned 1980s commies.
Another mid-’80s jungle-commies reference point: the David Puttnam-produced The Killing Fields from 1984, with soundtrack by… Mike Oldfield. (Two separate mentions in one thread! We shall never see the like again.)
Some of which might help answer your question, Izzy @17. Jungle commies were very much in the news in 1985 and had been creeping back onto movie screens (in camouflage and/or black pyjamas), so “19” made sense even without the movies that came after it.
The real crime behind 19 is it set Simon Fuller on his way. Without 19, there would be no Spice Girls.
bunny alert re discussion of fuller’s future: esp.as it will be VERY HOTLY CONTESTED, so let us contain ourselves and all opninions of upcoming no.ones till due time!
One of the mixes of “The Wildstyle” (1983), an early single by Time Zone (an Afrika Bambaataa project), uses talk samples, mostly movie clips, but a news clip of the Munich meeting between Chamberlain and Hitler shows up near the end.
did the “i wasn’t really sure what was going on” sample ever end up in any ‘ardkore records? if not, it surely should have.
My mother wouldn’t have been thinking of Cage or musique concrete; I can imagine radio in the ’20s through ’50s playing montages of spoken words over a song, the song making ironic comment on the words or vice versa, and that equivalent stuff would occur in movies and on TV, the idea being so obvious (though none is coming to mind at the moment). A couple of friends and I mashed up some songs (well, played bits in succession) and spoken word as the soundtrack for an Earth Day slideshow that we presented at a school assembly 1970, and we certainly didn’t have the idea that this had never been done before. Maybe we had no idea we were innovators. We thought this was normal!
Maybe it’s the TOTP synonomy but I am v fond of ‘The Wizard’ – definitely the third best TOTP theme tune ever ha ha.
This is either a fantastic, searing indictment of the Vietnam war and the treatment of its veterans, rendered unforgettable by its adaptation into a style never heard this high up the chart before; or it’s a crass cash-in of extremely dubious taste. Even now I find myself wavering between these two viewpoints. Certainly it was a handy subject with which to promote this kind of sound collage, totally unlike just about anything heard at number one before, and the subject matter of a protest record sits rather uneasily with a female chorus going “di-di-di-di-dis, di-dis, di-destruction!”
But on the whole I’ll let him off that, because it’s a superbly effective record in terms of getting the message across. Hardcastle was (according to Songfacts) inspired by an ABC documentary titled “Vietnam Requiem” made in 1984 and screened late that year by BBC2. You can readily imagine him being outraged by that statistic which gives the record its title, sufficiently so to contact Peter Thomas, the narrator of the documentary, who sent him some taped vocal samples from the programme.
Other Hardcastle record worthy of mention – I did like the sparky “Don’t Waste My Time” with Carol Kenyon.
Sarah #3 – yes, of course it’s ten years too late to be a protest about the war itself, but by the mid-80s concern about the treatment of those who’d come home from the war was reaching a crescendo – hence the movie “Born on the Fourth of July” later in the decade, and of course Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” the previous year. Springsteen had recorded a quietly angry acoustic version of this song for the “Nebraska” album in 1982, but held it back to form the centrepiece of his biggest album two years later.
Unfortunately the tone of the reworking made it all too easy to misinterpret, as Ronald Reagan famously did. The day after Michael Jackson’s death the New York Times revealed that in 1984 a Presidential correspondence aide drafted a letter for Reagan to send inviting the Jacksons to the White House, only to receive a stern rebuff from a senior official named John Roberts – now US Chief Justice and the bloke who fouled up Obama’s inauguration oath. Roberts wrote back, “Such a letter would create a bad precedent… why, for example, was no letter sent to Mr Bruce Springsteen, whose patriotic tour recently visited the area?” Full story at http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/from-the-white-house-files-a-fight-over-michael-jackson/
I can imagine radio in the ’20s through ’50s playing montages of spoken words over a song: how though? By which I mean, what recording surfaces are the different elements captured on, and how was the mix effected? Useable — ie editable — recording tape didn’t exist till the mid-40s; there was certainly no mixing equipment before the mid-50s. Playing two records simultaneously on two phonographs is possible, but it’s VERY lo-fi — and the only people who had disc recordings of news broadcasts and so on would be the stations that broadcast them.
Radio before the mid-30s was 99% live anyway, music trasmitted via pick-ups equipment from the dance-club: Martin Block’s “Make-Believe Ballroom” began in 1935; generally considered the first programme to make a thing of playing records on air — doubtless this had happened before on a one-off basis, but I think you needed the arrival of relatively hifi disc recording for it to be remotely practicable, in terms of not just driving listeners away… ie an electronic signal that could go straight out on air, not just a mike stuck near an acoustic phonograph!
The early musique concrete technique was basically transferring from records to records — if anyone was doing this kind of montage before them, they certainly didn’t know about it!
The one technology I can think of which might have allowed this kind of montage playfulness is the synched-sound on celluoid for movies… where voice and music were routinely heard together. This arrived in the late 20s.
What radio culd and did do a lot, is have LIVE voices over recorded music — but that doesn’t let really you play news-broadcasts against the wrong kind of music, except on comedy shows.
This has had exactly the inverse historical effect on me that ‘Move Closer’ has;
1985 Billy reaction to Phyllis: “Making looove!” – How hideously uncomfortable and embarrassing.
2009 Billy reaction to Phyllis: This is a really touching and thoughtful evocation of what it means to be grown-up.
1985 Billy reaction to 19: “D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-DESTRUCTION!” This is the coolest thing ever! The combination of science fiction cut-ups and a powerful anti-war message, make this sophisticated and thrilling adult pop about serious things! I find this really quite frightening.
2009 Billy reaction to 19: “D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-DESTRUCTION!” This is incredibly embarrassing, vapid, and really quite distasteful.
I always get irritated when I read Paul Hardcastle complain that 19 never gets played on oldies radio because people still can’t handle his anti-war message, man. Not that it never gets played on oldies radio because most listeners would find it risible these days.
One for the footy fans – a reworking of “19” by the one and only Attila the Stockbroker (Brighton fan, need I add):
“Tuesday September 8th 1989 began like any other day in the footballing calendar – but it wasn’t… At Anfield the final score was Liverpool 9, Crystal Palace 0. Liverpool 9, Crystal Palace 0. N-n-n-n-nine nil, nine nil. N-n-n-n-nine nil, nine nil… And when the Palace players got home, obviously in need of moral support and counselling following their torrid n-n-n-nine nil experience, none of them received a hero’s welcome. None of them. None of them received a hero’s welcome. N-n-n-none of them… The long term effects of such an unbelievable n-n-n-nine nil annihilation are hard to predict, but it seems likely that many of the Crystal Palace squad may have been be so demoralised that they may have been forced to leave professional football and sign on. S-s-s-sign on. Sign on. S-s-s-sign on….”
Number two watch: Three weeks of Duran Duran’s ‘View To A Kill’, much approved by all of us first year boys, The John Barry flourishes seeming to our ears to add a new element of sophistication and dynamism to the Duran sound.
#35 AGREED. This was a big part of my distaste for 19, actually.
Hitchcock was one of the pioneers of “ironic” movie soundtracking — like the rising fairground music when someone’s being strangled (in “strangers on a train”? that’s 1951)
Ah that may be why ’19’s reign irked me. I was obsessed with ‘A View To A Kill’. I remember telling a friend at school that it had been my favourite song for the entire Summer – I’m pretty sure I was writing down a little top 10 most weeks at this point and, well, for many many points after.
Such was my 19mania at the time, that when I was kept in the classroom for extra lunchtime handwriting lessons, I wrote out the 19 lyrics instead of the approved primer text. When the teacher saw my handiwork she told me “What a strange boy you must be”
Mark, you know way more about it than I do. But if they could do it on film, why couldn’t they do it on tape? (You could probably do a reasonable job broadcasting it “live” if you’re not needing an exact sync – if the voices aren’t part of the rhythm.) Anyhow, my mom did think it had been done many times before, whatever she meant by that. I wouldn’t bet on her remembering now what she meant in 1968, though I could try her. I need to call her today anyway.
not much to add to what’s already been said – this seemed like a slight return to the martial themes of the previous year. I don’t know how much of the appetite for Vietnam in music and movies was refracted concern over other conflicts such as the Falklands – or whether sufficient time had passed. It makes me wonder what impact the Iraq/Afghanistan war is having on popular culture – it seems more evident on TV – but that probably reflects the ignorance of my old age.
Other sampled songs around this time included ‘Five Minutes’ by Bonzo Goes to Washington and Malcolm McClaren’s use of opera on his ‘Fans’ album.
Earlier there had also been those 50s novelty singles where a DJ had included snatches of lyrics from hits of the day to produce ‘hilarious’ results.
N-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-not sure what to make of this one.
It is of DEEP personal significance by dint of the fact that it was in the middle of its run at Number One when, one balmy May Saturday evening a major personal threshold was crossed…
but I didn’t really like it at the time mainly because it stopped Duran Duran’s A View To A Kill from reaching the summit (three weeks at No. 2 I think) – the last peak-era DD hit
Today, I quite enjoy some of what PH was trying to do. It doesn’t excite me particularly, not in the way say Brainfreeze or other Steinski, or Cut Chemist/Shadow cut-ups do, but it has a primitive kind of charm.
Best Ronald Regan sampling of the 1980s is to be found on the first Was (Not Was) album – “Can we deny (…) control?”, etc.
I really don’t know what to think of this record, the beats are nifty and it was great to see some electro on top of the charts, but when I hear “V-V-V-Vietnam” I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It’s like some parody of a clueless hipster DJ making a “protest” record.
“F-F-F-Falkland Islands” would have been much better anyway and it’s not a patch on the “I-I-I-Ian McGregor” spoken by Scargill in ‘Strike!’
In the US, there was a show in the 80s called “Puttin’ on the Hits” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puttin'_on_the_Hits) where auditioners would lip-sync/perform to the top hits at the time. Arguably the most memorable Puttin’ On The Hits performance ever was a guy who called himself “3-D” performing “19”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdOX6nihPo4
What’s striking about this video is that the song is editing to concentrate on the samples, which was obviously done to showcase 3-D’s lip-synching/stuttering abilities, but it also made the song even politically rawer than any other remix did. And the audience reaction is nuts, nonetheless!
As far as the electro + stutter precursors, speaking as a big Tackhead/Sherwood fan, while I like “No Sell Out”, “19” is clearly more in debt to Arthur Baker’s work with New Order, isn’t it? “Confusion” is the obvious example here. (And “Shellshock” too, however “Shellshock” was released after “19” I believe)
Despite 19’s claim to the contrary, I believe that the average Vietnam soldier’s age has not actually been verified.
Mike at 21: but Paul Hardcastle had always been “fresh, contemporary and relevant” – he’d made soul/disco (only white bloke in a band of black Londoners)in the late 70s, then jazz-funk with First Light in the early 80s (when these genres were what you heard on the “street”).
Then he did the COVER version (not the later remix) of “You’re The One For Me” (which everyone gave big props too because Hardcastle knew the score and it was a labour of love to apparently try to get the composition the commercial success he felt had been denied in 1982)
Then he made stuff like “Rain Forest” which you dismiss as inconsequential when that track was on just about every b-boys ghetto blaster at the time and was along with ‘Chief Inspector’ was inescapable on the pirates for months (and it crossed over to even the mainstream clubs where the shopgirls loved it)and was probably the only British track which ever got near the status of such classics as Tyrone Brunson’s ‘The Smurf’ or the Extra T’s ‘ET Boogie’.
It was obviously this pedigree and the fact he HAD the funk and the soulboys/early hiphoppers knew it that got his tracks accepted by the black music scene whilst white chancers like New Order and the Clash’s attempts to cash in on contemporary black styles whilst appealing to the rock press never had a chance of being anything but derided in the black music community…
I should have added to the above an answer to someone’s question about why this hit was so big.
Probably not a complete answer but in a move that became the default option post house this was played as a white label on the London pirates for what semed like weeks before it was officially released.
Solar Radio in particular (from where I recorded my copy)seemed to play it every few records. The buzz on the early hip hop (and even soul/funk scene) was as massive as I ever remember on a dance track pre-house and I know everyone presumed it would cross over to the very top of the pop charts.
A very similar feeling on the pirates accompanied Shut Up And Dance’s “Raving I’m Raving” years later and the only reason that didn’t replicare the success of this track and we’re not going to talk about that is because it was withdrawn before it could get the the very top…
Worth mentioning that as this was Simon Fuller’s first and last proper discovery for Chrysalis, he seems to have taken it as his good-luck charm: the company he formed immediately afterwards is called 19 Entertainment, and it’s through it that he runs his empire, and manages many people that we will see later, and Annie Lennox.
Thanks Andy @ 47. That gets me half the way there I think – a recurring feature of my formative years was amazing, weird, mindblowing dance tunes appearing in the upper reaches of the charts from nowhere: ‘Beat Dis’, ‘Charly’, many many others. I never understood where they came from because I’d never hear them on the radio before they landed and blew everything else away for just a moment. I’d subconsciously put it down to the clubbing population being far larger than I’d ever dreamt of, backed up by that ridiculous stat of 1m Es dropped a night – but then who ever hunts down the names of tunes while they’re out clubbing anyway? Some kind of pirate radio network in other parts of the country makes a lot more sense.
The other half of my bewilderment is: why *this* record in particular? ‘Planet Rock’ is about the biggest electro record I can think of (at least with hindsight – I wasn’t there and have only really started getting to grips with electro retrospectively) and it didn’t even chart. I know it came out a couple of years earlier, but I’m just not aware of any great electro wave building up to ’19’.
PS I’m hopeful that ‘Raving I’m Raving’ might get a sympathy review here when the time comes. I like to think that Popular might have a small role in redeeming those no.2s only denied by a deus ex machina – sadly my attempt to get ‘Last Christmas’ in recently was unsuccessful.