replacing Hardly Baked whose feed is broken for reasons unknown. Original Hardly Baked + archive are here http://hardlybaked.blogspot.com/
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^"Really awful is more interesting to listen to than pretty good" - Eno
I remember when I was first looking at music papers seeing the name Gruppo Sportivo and being faintly intrigued, in the same way that Brand X adverts were faintly intriguing. Couldn't get a fix on what either band would sound like.
I don't remember ever hearing Gruppo Sportivo then although they got quite a bit of exposure in the UK. And they were pretty big on the Continent, or parts thereof.
A Dutch group - basically a Dutch bloke, as there's this one central, recurring figure, Hans Vandenburg - who take Anglophilia to an extreme. They basically seem to want to be The Members.
Although I think they started before The Members.
Actually what they are really like is a Netherlands version of Deaf School. I believe Bette Bright sang with Gruppo later on.
Well this is None New Wavier to the power of I don't know what - Gruppo Sportivo covering Wall of Voodoo
Like Fabulous Poodles, like Jona Lewie, like Costello and Joe Jackson and Graham Parker, they represent that side of New Wave where it is a time when funny-looking blokes have a chance at being pop stars. People who in most other eras would not get a look-in for not being a looker - too ordinary-bloke unmemorable, or actively mis-shapen.
No funny-looking or even ordinary-looking women of course - in New Wave, it's still expected that you are pretty. At least when it comes to fronting a band. (So not so "New" after all).
You can be quirky and wacky and easy-on-the-eye like Lene Lovich but the beauty double standard still applies.
Gruppo have good looking backing singers, who jig about a bit like the girls in Squeeze's "Cool For Cats", to offset the bald gnome-like central geezer.
Eeuw the mohair makes it look he has horribly hairy shoulders.
Design wise you can't get much more None New Wavier than this cover below
Mouth music, although there's barely any sense of mouth or throat or any physical mechanism of breath shaping here, so pure and airy are these bodiless tones
Claire Thomas & Susan Vevey turn out remarkably to be an alias of Philip Sanderson of DIY microlegends Snatch Tapes
The first track - which appeared on Cherry Red's 1981 Perspectives and Distortion comp - reminds me of this other Cherry Red etherealism
Which led to this
and this
and this
this too
Interesting facts about Kirsty Hawkshaw the voice of Opus III via a mutual friend
- once engaged to Mark Pritchard of Global Communication
- now married to Adam F
- daughter of Alan Hawkshaw, the library music legend (as Adam F is son of Alvin Stardust)
Reminded also of the "sexy psalm" action of One Dove and of Slowdive
They done it live in a place called St. Augustine's Ampitheatre - sadly it turns out not to be an actual ecclesiastical building converted for live music, a veritable Sonic Cathedral
What is it about "purity" and the erotic?
Something about the primness (c.f those secular nuns: nurses and their uniforms), the constraint, and what might burn beneath...
Deborah Kerr's clear complexion framed by the nun's coif in Black Narcissus
Sultry Sister Ruth, delirious with repressed desire
How did Joey Ramone come up with this strange stage stance - left knee flexed and thrust forward, right leg straightened and tensed? It looks kind of athletic - like the starting position of a sprinter or hurdler - and creates this effect of him almost poised to vault into the audience. But it's also like a freeze-framed stride. His incredibly long legs and praying mantis physique accentuate the startling effect of this stance. He also angles the microphone stand dramatically so that it spears towards the audience. Or perhaps it's for support, like those sticks that hikers carry....
Somewhere I saw a TV studio clip or promo that shot the Ramones from the side, so Joey's stance looked really aberrant - you could see what the right foot was doing, at times it was tensed at tiptoe. This below is not the video in question - the camera is shooting the band's front - but it has the best footage I could find of the stage stance, especially around 34 seconds when Joey leans in for the chorus, and again at 2.15.
There is a good view of the leg stride-splay in this Top of the Pop clip at 2 mins, and passim.
Oh and this one has some good knee-splay shots - seen switched angles from 44 seconds - and nicely accentuated by the holes in his jeans at the knee
I should imagine long term the strain on the left knee and the tendons and muscles in the right leg might have led to problems.
Then again he doesn't seem to have kept it up for the whole of the set - sometimes he'll jump up for more perpendicular stances.
Johnny Ramone is notable also for extremely widely splayed legs and a low-slung guitar posture.
Combo of splay and squat
Here Johnny has semi-adopted the left knee forward thrust and tensed right leg of Joey - whereas Joey is in a more perpendicular mode, really using his gangly height, with a stance that somehow seems to combine correct posture and slouch
My one sighting of Joey Ramone in the flesh is from when he was quite decrepit, in the late '90s. He used to live near a well-regarded cheese shop in the East Village. I remember being in there one time and he shuffled in, looking a bit disoriented, still dressed in pyjamas. I think he was looking to get a bagel (they had other stuff apart from cheese - the bagels were good and incredibly cheap). Or did I see him on the sidewalk immediately outside, while I was queuing inside? At any rate, he definitely looked worse for wear and a little dazed and confused.
Strangely, not five minutes later, striding purposefully down the street past the cheese shop, wearing some kind of rock'n'roll-flavored cowboy hat, came another CBGB-era legend: Marty Rev.
The Ramones - an odd one for me. If I hear them on the radio, which would be a vanishingly rare occurrence these days, I'll always turn it right up. But I can't imagine ever listening to a whole Ramones album. Their music has a combo of basic undeniable excitement and shallow inanity. Historical importance versus purpose-served-so-why-would-you-listen-now?
I seem to remember liking End of the Century. And "Don't Come Close". Those seemed to have a bit more feeling behind them.
This is the Top of the Pops performance I can remember from the time - first time I ever did hear the Ramones.
There's a bit of the leg-stance going on here but because it's shot from the front, you can't see the back leg and it looks like he's crossing his legs like a 4 year old who really really needs to do a wee.
One of the songs on End of Century where the team-up with Spector really works
Daniel Clowes video! From the '90s! With knee-stance displayed from multiple angles
I don't know why but on this turf I just find The Descendents more affecting
Not so much this song but Milo Goes To College era
One of the great anti-suburbia songs, all the more amusing for being so generic and pro forma in its complainage
What on earth is Elvis Costello doing with - and to - his ankles in this video?
Throughout, but there's a particularly alarming sequence of bends from 2.41 seconds through to the end of the promo.
I wonder if in later life Costello suffered from having done these ankle bends, in the same way that ballerinas who do pointe work - dancing not so much on the tips of their toes as the ends of their toes, putting incredible pressure on the nail - can be left with permanent damage....
No information about that I can glean but I did find something about how EC developed this party trick:
He does it a bit in this video, but not as often and not quite as twinge inducing in the viewer
Also in this one
The ankle bends, but the whole repertoire of Costello moves, is a prime example of New Wave's performative rhetoric - announcing that Verily We are In a New Era of Rock. C.f. Devo's herky-jerks, Fay Fife's hand-jive in the Rezillos and body posture, Pauline of Penetration, et al.
Yet it also seems to hark back vaguely to rock'n'roll and the Fifties - the kind of foot work done by Elvis Presley. With EC's bug-eyed speccy image, there's also the ghost of Buddy Holly.
In this video, the Performative Rhetoric is mostly done with the face.
The My Aim Is True album artwork points to ankle stress but is not enough to pain the viewer
"Can't stand up properly? Well, it's hardly surprising, given how you are treating your feet" - lots of alarming looking fool's splay in this video
The extreme bends in "Pump It Up" reminded me of this classic wince-maker of an album art image from around the same time
In the tradition of the Mr Jones song about worker drones commuting, having heart attacks, wasting away in an office cubicle etc ("Echo Beach", "Cardiac Arrest", "Solitary Confinement", "The British Way of Life", etc)
Despite a Top of the Pops appearance and the support of Radio 1 deejays who liked that sort of thing, "The Worker" was not quite a hit, loitering just outside the Top 50
But Fischer-Z enjoyed more success in Europe, apparently selling a couple of million albums over a long career
And they're still going, all ready to celebrate in 2026 the 50th anniversary of the band's formation
Still plugging away into the Wide Brim Hat era
Clever, perhaps even clever-clever - but are they Clever Dick?
The almost obligatory ironic New Wave cover of a Sixties classic
He looks like a more feral-demonic version of that hirsute fellow who fronted Supergrass
Would you believe despite once being such an obsessive Birthday Party fan - and indeed later on doing an encyclopedia / comprehensive albums guide entry on B.Party / Cave + Bad Seeds + offshoots - I have never yet listened to The Boys Next Door?
I just took Cave at his word that it was best not listened to...
"We made the unpardonable error of playing to the thinkers rather than the drinkers" - Nick Cave on the disgusting skinny-tie start of The Birthday Party as The Boys Next Door
You can just begin to hear something special in Rowland S's shrill scrapy guitar and Cave is starting to get a little hammy in his anguished tones
But there's still that choppy, Vapors-ish element, the damped rhythm guitar chug...
This one is more like a foretaste of Nick Cave who loves "entertainment music, what some call 'corn'" - the epic ballads of Gene Pitney / Glen Campbell / Tim Rose
Like he could skipped the Shaman stage (B. Party) and just gone straight to Showman.
Transition from arty New Wave to something more primal and hacked and Ubu-Beefheart-addled is detectable in the shift across the record artwork
I wonder if this hand scrawlage was influenced by The Fall's record sleeves
via Andrew Parker, a vintage interview with Boy Next Door Rowland S. Howard, wearing a classic New Wave tie
