Un tema inicialmente de los “The Jackson 5″ pero que ha conocido muchos intérpretes. Esta es una versión de los 80.

For the last week, all we’ve heard in the office is “Because I’m Leaving!” belted out at the top of SoStylistic’s voice.  

In a vain attempt to keep the noise down, and as the rather vocal lady in question is moving on to pastures new, it seemed only fit to dedicate this week’s The Fashion Office Recommends to Songs About Leaving.

So, Miss Stylistic, here are your tracks the office have chosen to send you and your fabulous new watch (a.k.a “Because I’m Leaving” present) off in serious style…

Sostylistic sums it up herself with: Aerosmith – I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing.

Sartoriology has questionable taste with Basshunter and Please Don’t Go.

A Work In Progress suggests: Everything But The Girl – Missing.

Ellie opts for: Eagle Eye Cherry – Save Tonight.

Frankie chooses: The Temptations – ‘Ain’t To Proud To Beg.

Stevie picks: The Communards – Don’t Leave Me This Way.

Emily selects: Chicago – If You Leave Me Now.

Soldiersailor recommends: Gladys Knight – Midnight Train To Georgia.

And just for fun…

Don’t miss the girls recommendations from last week in Songs Inspired By Colours.

“På den lilla öppna slätten hjorten orädd dröjer kvar, följer långsamt dig med blicken, som han vetat vem du var”

01. Lustans lakejer – Djuret inom mig
02. Danny Wilson – Aberdeen
03. Björn Skifs – Säj, vad gör du med mig?
04. The O’Jays – Love & trust
05. The Wonder stuff – Some sad someone
06. Flo & Eddie – Keep it warm
07. Luther Vandross – I wanted your love
08. The Communards – Never can say goodbye
09. Matt Bianco – Don’t blame it on that girl
10. Heaven 17 – Come live with me
11. The Bluetones – Slight return

It occurred to me last night that I have a few on my hard drive.

Bobby Shad & the Bad Men – I Want You Back (I’ve posted about this before; if you love jazz, download this!)

K.T. Tunstall – I Want You Back

Speak Low – Thriller (instrumental funk version)

The Communards – Never Can Say Goodbye

And for kicks, The Jackson 5’s cover of Jackson Browne’s Doctor My Eyes

80’s song classic
Jimmy Somerville (The Communards)
Song : Never can say goodbye
Album : Red
Year : 1987

This NEW video clip is a wonderful and kooky rendition of The Doors “People Are Strange”, from the forthcoming acoustic album “Suddenly Last Summer”. It will probably shock both Doors and Somerville fans but I’m already a fan of this one!

EDIT 13th April 2009: Just started my new Jimmy Video Collection Blog:
http://jimmy5.wordpress.com/

I got watching 80s videos on VH1 earlier. It was the business.

Here are some of the quality stuff that featured.

Lionel Richie for the win. This video is the funniest thing ever. Not as good as his Hello video but it’s still awesome. Plus, it’s the most feel good stuff around! You can’t go wrong with this.

Next up is Erasure with A Little Respect. This video is so good. It was definately made with a budget of 50 quid or something which makes it even more golden.

Mel and Kim also featured. I think their style is amazing in the video! I was definitely impressed anyway! They look awesome in the alley shots.

The strange and amazing Cameo made me laugh so hard. Ruth has promised to dress up in the exact outfit he wears in this video for Halloween. I really hope it happens. You’d look sweet in those shiny red panties Ruth! Hahaha.

Last but definitely not least, my favorite of the night went to The Communards with Don’t Leave Me This Way. Mostly because the dude with the sweet haircut is high waisted pants that go further up than mine! I reckon he looks awesome. If you’re not into this, I don’t think we can be friends!

The embedded code wouldn’t work for me but here’s the link. It’s pure gold. Check it out!

All in all, it has been an awesome, 80s cheese filled night. I’m happy

x

Some artists occupy an irreplaceable space in your heart without you realising it. Music your folks used to dance round the living room to while you screwed up your face in embarrassment on the sofa. Songs that take you right back to the days of just-ten-more-minutes before bed. 

There are so many amazing ways to discover and connect to music these days but the records of your childhood have the ability to reconnect you. They possess a time-travelling power that reunites you with moments, feelings and places your mind had previously lost down the back of the sofa sometime in 1989.

Listening to last.fm radio sent me on this musical memory trip. Strong female singers like Alison Moyet, Joni Mitchell, Chrissie Hynde and Tracy Chapman were a big presence in our living room. That’s my mum and dad bopping in the corner…

The Pretenders ‘Don’t Get Me Wrong’
Joni Mitchell ‘Come In From The Cold’
The Communards ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’
Thompson Twins ‘Hold Me Now’
Suzanne Vega ‘Marlene On The Wall’
Erasure ‘A Little Respect’
Alison Moyet ‘Weak In The Presence Of Beauty’
Joni Mitchell ‘My Secret Place’
Tanita Tikaram ‘Good Tradition’

Further perusal of the most keenly-sought-after Christmas Presents from the year when Robert Elms went on and on and on about Anita Baker and BBC’s Juice served up more Huey Lewis And The News than ought to have been legally permissible…

NOW! THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC… 8

Nowadays we’re all more familiar with the Now!… series of compilations as a long unending string of shoddy cash-ins collecting thirty-odd recent dull as dishwater tuneless hip-hop meanderings, but back when the concept was first launched, it seemed new and exciting to be able to get that many chart hits for minimal financial outlay. Plus in those days they couldn’t convince every record company or pop star to play ball, meaning that there were often hefty gaps where massive chart hits should have been that ended up plugged with all manner of straight-in-at-number-twenty-six obscura.

Adhering to the usual vague thematic approach that it sort of loosely took in the age of vinyl, tape and four sides to every double-album, Now! That’s What I Call Music 8 – which by then had jettisoned its baffling ‘pig with headphones’ motif in favour of oh-so-eighties cover designs based on silk, satin or in this case some strangely warped chrome – started off with a strong collection of what could be loosely termed I Got Yer Catchy Radio-Friendly Big Pop/Rock Hits Right Here.

Duran Duran’s unexpectedly ace comeback single Notorious, Pet Shop Boys’ dog bark-equipped Suburbia, The Communards with their mysteriously politically subtext-laden video-accompanied Don’t Leave Me This Way, Aerosmith and Run DMC’s urban myth-inducing Walk This Way, and the incomparable Breakout by Here’s Swing Out Sister Mrs rubbed shoulders with Steve Winwood’s quite good but a bit out of place in such company Higher Love, OMD’s boring Forever Live And Die, and Genesis’ frankly awful In Too Deep.

Side Two, however, took on a dance/soul approach and was therefore duly mentally marked as The One To Fast Forward To The End Of. It starts off well enough with Cameo’s TOTP viewer-infuriating Word Up and the almost Krautrock-like minimalism of Mel & Kim’s Showing Out (Get Fresh At The Weekend), a song that was pretty much The Clothes Show made music, but soon tailed off with overly repetitive offerings from Jaki Graham and Janet Jackson, Boris Gardiner’s ear-offending I Wanna Wake Up With You, that We Don’t Have To Take Our Clothes Off rubbish, and Grace Jones’ I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Perfect For You), which barely even qualifies as a song. For some reason, The Human ‘Mangue’ League’s Human is plonked in the middle of all this too.

Side Three, almost equally skippable, is the muso-friendly one. Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Big Country, Huey Lewis And The No Not The Nine O’Clock News… they’re all there in full-on dreariness mode, mercifully interrupted by The Housemartins, Madness, Status Quo’s only good record post-1968, and the most unlikely inclusion on a Now! album ever, Billy Bragg’s Greetings To The New Brunette.

Finally, Side Four is a bit of a White Elephant Stall, yet all the same manages to pretty much sum up 1986 in eight tracks flat, key highlights being Kim Wilde’s ridiculous cover of You Keep Me Hangin’ On, Dr And The Medics’ flop revival of Waterloo, It Bites’ Calling All The Heroes, and two date-specific television spinoff singles par excellence – Paul Hardcastle’s one-time TOTP theme The Wizard, included here with runout groove message from Geoffrey Bayldon intact, and Nick ‘Have You Got Any Cheese For Me?’ Berry’s Every Loser Wins.

It was the best of Now! albums, it was the worst of Now! albums, and on hearing it more than a few decided to finally throw in the towel with chart music take the plunge and see what that NME mail-order cassette C86 that everyone was raving over was all about.

ON THE THIRD DAY OF CHRISTMAS… it’s popular Mickey Pearce-endorsed item of soft furnishing, Mercer! Mercer The Chair! Everyone Sing His Name!

Auden: the most accessible of voices, the most forbidding of minds. Even when he dodges and evades, his voice hits from far, like love. Aloof, he touches, even, especially with his plainest phrases. Want a love poet? He’s your man. But don’t expect to love in the same way after you read him. Want a compass? He directs, but only into solitude. Gentle, inconsolable, terrifying, his words have such reach that he can change you without you realising that he’s at work. Look on this place you’re living in and you will not know it. Look on yourself and the mirror will not say your name.

Or so I realise, now I see how he’s been at work in me all these years, ever since that time in my adolescence when I didn’t know poetry even mattered. Perhaps he was the one who started to make poetry matter to me. Let me tell you how.

1987, and I bought an LP by The Communards. Buying it was rebellious, listening to it and loving it even more so. Those were the days leading up to the introduction of Clause 28. Busy with grief, the gay community fought two enemies: the Thatcher government’s increasingly homophobic stance and the terror of HIV. In the midst of this, Jimmi Sommerville and Richard Coles released Red, The Communards’ second album. Part of the ‘Red Wedge’ movement that drew together artists such as Billy Bragg and Paul Weller, The Communards seemed to my fourteen-year-old mind even more radical. Anger, sadness and sexual freedom characterised their music, and they promised a liberated sexual identity that, as a straight, straight-laced private school teenage girl, I could never have imagined without their help. But when I bought their record that year, I hardly knew that this precious sexual liberty that they had written about owed so much to the man who wrote the lyrics to the standout track on the album, a man who had a beautiful name, beautiful even in the small print of the liner notes: W.H. Auden.

The song in question was a setting of Auden’s villanelle ‘If I Could Tell You.’ Long after I had ceased to think of the other songs on Red, the words to this song continued to blossom in my mind. ‘If I could tell you I would let you know.’ How much dumb pain lies here in this simplicity? ‘There must be reasons why the leaves decay.’ A wall you didn’t see coming lies in that word ‘must.’ No answer, no answer. ‘The vision seriously intends to stay.’ No one wants an ending to that sweetness; not even the glory of it wants to go. ‘Because I love you more than I can say.’ How often has that sentence been on our lips, and when has it ever meant more than here, when Auden says it for us? And again the villanelle turns round: ’If I could tell you I would let you know.’ Every time it returns, we are in a little deeper.  Every time the words face us, we yearn to see our own face.

See? This is Auden, doing what he does best, going on ahead. On Red, Auden’s words lead the way. They lead Somerville and Coles into courageous truth-telling about what was then happening to their ‘lovers and friends.’ And I wish sometimes that I could take Auden by the hand and tell him how those words led me into thinking and feeling. Not immediately, I hasten to add: it is not easy to hear Auden. It is harder still to follow on behind. But once heard, the words themselves lead, and Auden does nothing.  No-one else I know has quite this ability to stand up for language and to stand so cleanly outside it. But in doing so, he gives us the best of ideals: to love words so that we leave ourselves behind.

J’ai grandi en l’écoutant à la radio, le voyant à la télé, l’entendant sur la platine familiale et cette voix… comment dire… comment trouver les mots justes (copyright je sais plus qui (ou quoi) )… je la trouve magnifique, touchante et marquante. J’ai toujours aimé et dès qu’il a sorti un album avec ses meilleurs titres, toutes périodes confondues, j’ai foncé l’acheter. Que du bonheur.

Petite entorse… parce que vous savez quoi ? Ben moi, ce que je préfère chez Bronski Beat, c’est Jimmy Somerville… alors quand il change de crèmerie, je fais pareil :

I ripped the above vinyl, which includes some of the house remixes of Thelma Houston’s take on the Gamble, Huff & Gilbert written “Don’t Leave Me This Way”, most recognized when it’s performed by Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes. This 12″ is from 1994 and I can’t say I’m going crazy over all the mixes when I listen to them today but Joe T. Vannelli’s dub is pretty nice. Right here:

Here’s also the vocal house club mix:

But, as “Don’t Leave Me This Way” is like one of the best tracks ever made I decided to post some other versions as well. Dimitri From Paris used a fantastic re-edit he made of Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes’ cut on his mix CD “After The Playboy Mansion” in 2002. First time I heard it, at an old house club in Stockholm called Guidelines, it knocked me off my feet. It was also released on a white label 12″.

Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes – Don’t Leave Me This Way (Dim’s Re-edit)

And here we have two other really good ones: Jimmy Riley’s lovely reggae take from ‘78 and the 80’s hit cover by The Communards, I just had to include these.

Jimmy Riley – Don’t Leave Me This Way

The Communards – Don’t Leave Me This Way

A veces es bueno darse un buen masaje con el carnet (cédula de identidad) y recordar viejos tiempos.

Esta canción me gusta hasta hoy (y la conocí el ‘86 de la mano de The Communards, aunque el original es anterior y de Thelma Houston) y justo hoy la escuche otra vez al tiempo que me abastecía de tabaco…

Son pocos los que me han visto bailando; pero este tema me lo van a ver bailar…, siempre.

The Communards – Red

“There’s More To Love Than Boy Meets Girl” should be considered one of the most political songs of the 1980’s. Written at a bleak time for gay men (clause 28, media hysteria about AIDS, family values being pushed..), Jimmy Sommerville is suffocating inside with his emotions aching for freedom..wanting to shout from the highest mountain but admitting “All around there’s violence and laws to make me think again..maybe one day they will understand”. The chorus is an assualt on the ears of those who were deaf to all gay men during that era. And the theme of hurt and being seen as an outsider in the 1980’s is constant thoughout. The Communards were not taken terribly seriously at the time..partly due to Jimmy’s falsetto vocals and strong political views, but it’s easy to forget just what a good band they were. The delightful HI-NRG version of “Never Can Say Goodbye” treads similar ground to the huge smash hit “Don’t Leave Me This Way” but there’s more to them than catchy dancefloor hits. “For A Friend” still sounds heartbreaking and tender tracks like “If I Could Tell You” and “Lovers and Friends” melt with sensitivity and quiet reflection. A wonderful album that has dated remarkably well. 8/10

Terence Trent D’arby – Introducing The Hardline According to Terence Trent D’arby

This is one of the finest debut albums of the 1980’s. Cocky young singer Terence Trent D’arby burst on to the scene with an album that brought us one of the finest soul and pop voices in years. His big voice was matched by a gigantic ego that rubbed people up the wrong way but gave the media great value. Big hit single “Sign Your Name” is perhaps slightly twee now but the wonderful cover of Smokey Robinson’s “Who’s Lovin’ You” is still wonderful. The brilliant funky pop of “If You Let Me Stay” is infectious and joyous, “Rain” is still slightly bonkers and “I’ll Never Turn My Back On You” is cute and soulful. You can’t help listening to this and thinking that D’arby should have been a huge international star and every bit as big as the soul greats who inspired him. He could never quite shake off the ‘poor man’s Prince’ tag. 8/10

Happy Mondays – Pills, Thrills ‘n’ Bellyaches

The Mondays were perhaps the most loveable of all the Madchester rogues and ‘Pills, Thrills ‘n’ Bellyaches’ is the sound of a band having the time of their lives. The indie/pop smash “Step On” still raises a smile with its glorious “call the cops” lyric and tuneless whistling. The epic “kinky Afro” is still ace and has that wonderful “I only went with yer mother cos she’s dirty” line. Elsewhere and there’s no shortage of great tracks on offer. “God’s Cop” is a brilliantly sneering attack on ex Manchester Police Chief James Anderton and “bob’s Yer Uncle” manages to find Shaun Ryder actually sounding quite sultry and seductive. The equally chilled out “Harmony” and “Donavon” chill pleasantly in the background offering some rest after the party. And the party never got better than this for the Mondays. “pills..” is a great rock n roll moment. 10/10

The Beloved – Happiness

Happiness is a warm bed of synths that sparkle gently like crystals, all warm, soothing and delicate. Who said electronic music lacks feeling? What “Happiness” by The Beloved does in the mood and tone of this glorious album is paint a permanent picture of that exciting and carefree period. Aside from the fantastically atmospheric chill out anthem “The Sun Rising”, The Beloved themselves were always too poppy to make a defiant and significant impression on the rave scene itself but what they did manage to do was broaden its appeal and give their own take on that summer with a blend of highly infectious, dreamy pop/dance tunes. “Hello” is busy name checking the sad, the glorious and the surreal – zippy from rainbow to Jeffrey Archer and even cult ex Crystal Palace footballer Vince Hilaire. It’s beautifully enchanting and Marsh even cheekily throws in a bit of eco-politics into the mix by asking “Can you spot the difference that lies between the colour blue and the colour green?” before realising we are very much in the middle of a Tory grip and a lack of action on environmental issues and thus the line soon after of “Sometimes I feel that the whole world’s going mad!”. The music, the gentle whispery vocals, the melodies..they all convey the feeling that everything is fine, if you allow it to be. “Wake Up soon” is a cry for individuality, for example. The lyrics expressing the need to live your life with you being the ultimate responsibly “Oh, so many people tell you what to do/ And you believe them, that’s the trouble with you/ Just think for yourself!” before perhaps being aware that beyond the raves, behind the partying and the dreams is a reality we all must face – “There’s a whole world out there waiting for you/ if you’ll just stop dreaming”. “I love you more” could even qualify as the most tuneful joyous pop song ever written! no mean feat. It literally bounces around the speakers with excitement and joy and the lyrics – just as the title implies – look at the state of feeling intense happiness but never quite being able to communicate it to a partner. “Up Up and Away” takes the whole party vibe that one step further with such utter devotion that it will make hippies and pacifists of us all yet. It is hugely infectious and rather like “wake up soon” before it, displays messages of realising full spiritual contentment. “Happiness” is wise enough to know that the best drug of all is love. An album made to be loved and one that offers many soothing cuddles in return. 10/10

Errare humanum est, perseverare diabolicum: you only die once – Never Can Say Goodbye.

The Jackson 5, 1971

Gloria Gaynor, 1974

The Communards, 1987

dedicado à minha ex-chefe

The Communards, Don’t Leave Me This Way

[ouvido na voice2cool. todos os dias, das 21h às 22h, mais uma vocação escondida da bioquímica...]

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