Explanation

Picking out a record from my collection at random and making myself play it. It's too easy to go directly to the ones you love most!

Tuesday 18 December 2012

#11 Go-Go's - Beauty and the Beat LP

This one takes me way way back to being a 13 year old in my mum's car listening to American radio stations and constantly switching over to hear anything interesting. It was a steady diet of garbage, with a few 'new wave' hits that occasionally crept through. Joe Jackson's 'Stepping Out', Devo's 'Beautiful World', and The Go-Go's - 'We Got The Beat' & 'Our Lips Are Sealed' were a few that would crop up with some regularity.

We had escaped recession hit England for a few years in the US. My dad had had enough of the grim British 70's. As The Fall sang, "O'er grassy dale, and lowland scene
Come see, come hear, the English Scheme.
The lower-class, want brass, bad chests, scrounge fags.
The clever ones tend to emigrate
Like your psychotic big brother, who left home
For jobs in Holland, Munich, Rome
He's thick but he struck it rich, switch".

The US in the early 80's was a much more positive place than the UK, but this reflected badly in the music. The UK was still reeling from the kick up the arse of punk, and had moved on to 2-Tone, Antmusic, post-punk, and the like while The Jam & The Clash still ruled most young male's record collections. The coal miners were fighting the police on a daily basis, while Thatcher was deep into the process of cutting entire sections of society off from the rest of Britain. Things were pretty grim. In the US, however, everything seemed fairly peachy, at least on the surface, and the radio reflected it with unlimited AOR. (Of course, something was certainly stirring in the US musical underground but this was still too underground for a little suburban kid to know about - yet)

Anyway, this was my soundtrack to getting to Little League baseball games, and going to spend money earned on my paper route, so I bought this vinyl copy of the album years later as an excercise in nostalgia. It's not one I've put very often, as I'm not really much of a pop person. The Go-Go's did have a degree of West Coast credibility, though, coming out of the LA punk scene. Belinda Carlisle used to be known as Dottie Danger when she was in the Germs. Not much evidence of punk in this record, to be honest, and the best songs are the singles, with the exception of 'This Town', which is probably the highlight of the album. The whole thing just rolls past in about half an hour, so it's really not a hardship listening to this new wave slab.

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