New Wave Eyecandy - Unexpected Irruption in the Present

Was watching the hotel TV in NYC, a news channel with a report on the markets freaking out about the tariffs... and suddenly this figure materialized that seemed to be beamed straight from an early Split Enz or Oingo Boingo video... or perhaps an old VHS of a Cardiacs concert

Scott Shellady... some kind of MAGA-aligned financial pundit!

Decisively breaking with the smart, dark-hued business suit look you would expect from someone in the financial world, in favor of a parodic "this is showtime" look that is very New Wave

The Buggles style specs and the garish bow tie and the clashing colour scheme - that lime shirt! -  it all does remind me of the nexus of glam, prog and New Wave identified here

Shellady looks like he should be manically pounding a Farfisa while grimacing like a loon

Apparently the gimmicky look has something to do with cows...  he's known as the Cow Guy... 

Shellady also touts a line of merch

Race Invaders

 

The Greater London Council put on a ton of these cause-related music festivals, rallies-with-bands-playing, etc as a part of its big push to build a socialist culture in London. 

Back then, wild horses couldn't have.... 

(despite my political sympathies... and liking some of the artists.... perhaps this is a great failing, this flinching from the public demonstration of solidarity? Well, I've made up for it in the MAGA era - no squeamishness at all now about chanting along to "this is what democracy looks like" or singalonging with ol' Neil as he (and Joan Baez!) rasped "take America back" at that Bernie-AOC thing the other week here in LA).

But back to the GLC rally of 1984.... I must say I am mighty mighty curious about this "anti-racist computer game" advertised on the flyer.

What on earth can it have been like? 

What was the thinking? "We've got to reach the youth where they live..."

Apparently the GLC declared 1984 to be the Anti-Racist Year

The International Network for Hate Studies actually commemorated the 40th Anniversary of GLC's project only a month ago with some lectures

One of the peculiar things about the Tory party nowadays is that it has, I believe, more high-ranking Black Britons than Labour - including the Leader of the Party / Leader of the Opposition

However I think I am right in saying they are all of African ancestry as opposed to Caribbean... 

Well, and then if you make that people-of-colour, the Tories have already had a non-white Prime Minister and  a non-white Chancellor and a non-white Home Secretrary (two of them, in fact)

música de boca

 Well there was I,  thinking I'd heard pretty much all of the mouth music out-thereness worth hearing - and then I stumbled, in a second-hand record shop in the East Village, yards from where we used to live, on an artist I'd never ever come across before: Carles Santos. A real polymath, it appears. But this particular album Voice Tracks, from 1980, contains a "Starsailor"-level voicescape titled "Autoretrat". 

Now I'm kicking myself I didn't pick up the LP.  It wasn't even insanely priced. 

It can be found at YouTube and on the streamers. 

Another fab repository of mouth music is 1989's Five Voices - an abstract-vocalese quintet involving vaguely recognised names like Ann Homler, Shelley Hirsch and David Moss as well as Santos. 

This next one ultra-sibilant and edging into avant-asmr territory

This next one is madcap - ludic yet alarming

Bit of recitative amid the crone babble here

Voice-only stuff crops up again in his variegated output

Old Wave Eyecandy - the final SPLATDOWN (actually penultimate)