PAUL HARDCASTLE – "19"

I have a (very) vague memory of the stuttering technique being appropriated for an advert for Just Seventeen magazine.

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.

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.

This record should not receive a heroes’ welcome. Staff Sgt Barry Sadler would have shot the pinko!

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.]

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.)

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.

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.

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…

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.

The real crime behind 19 is it set Simon Fuller on his way. Without 19, there would be no Spice Girls.

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.

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!

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/

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.

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.

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”

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.

Best Ronald Regan sampling of the 1980s is to be found on the first Was (Not Was) album – “Can we deny (…) control?”, etc.

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)

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…

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.