A couple of DVDs:
Live at the Hacienda by
Blancmange. The tracks here are from the
Happy Families period, in fact just around the release of their second single,
Feel Me . It's a great set and I can't believe that
I Would and
Running Thin have been left out of the remastered
Happy Families .
Neil Arthur is a great vocalist, once earmarked for one of the tracks on the unfinished
The Assembly album. He's on a flow on
Wasted , which is my favourite track on this live set and on the album. It should have been released as a single at some point.
Interesting to note that Stephen Luscombe used, what looks like, a Jupiter-4 on this album plus effects of course. The Linn Drum provides the rhythm here. Stephen then moved on to use a Jupiter-8 on
Mange Tout. The David Rhodes, a well known session guitarist, provides the electrics with occasional strumming by Neil on what he describes as an Australian guitar. It has this Hawaiian guitar effect which when fed through an effects unit (echo and delay) can provide an electronic sound. An example of this is the track
Sad Day.
Moving on to the bizarre, is
David Bowie 's
Love You Til Tuesday . Produced somewhere between his childish eponymous debut album and the more serious follow up
Space Oddity . David comes out here as a comical Cliff Richard.
It's all really funny. However, one has to focus on David's craftmanship for pop melodies and his mime and movements on stage, courtesy of Lindsay Kemp's training. All this was later to crystallise with the addition of the final ingredient, Mick Ronson's electric guitar. The rest as they say is history...
Chris
or 