Proficiency of the musicians - and the prowess / power of the singing - suggests an Old Wave into New Wave makeover.
And indeed...
Before Angletrax, the singer Wendy Herman was in Sadista Sisters, an all-female confrontational cabaret troupe who made a fairly feeble record in 1976 for Transatlantic Records
Their Brechtian agit-prop approach went over well in Germany and Holland though
In the UK probably big among a certain Time Out reading contingent
Although Sounds put them on the cover
Then the Sadistas dropped the soft rock stylings for something a little more arty and angular for one last single
Somewhere between Peter Gabriel and Pink Industry
Probably they heard a Judy Nylon record and thought 'oops better change it up sharpish'
‘This company aimed to explode myths about the female psyche and challenged the notion that women are there to serve as ciphers for male protagonists in theatre. This music/theatre company – eclectic, savage, funny, tender and populist exploited everything from performance art to punk – and carried on in many incarnations for 14 years. It was a marriage of many styles’ - from http://sadistasisters.blogspot.com/
Jude Alderson on Sadista Sisters first show at the Hard Rock Cafe, via Unfinished Histories, a website documenting alternative theatre in the UK
"The thing at the Hard Rock wasn’t a show, the thing at the Hard Rock was a sort of event… it was a happening. The first show was…the opening, the set was a pair of female legs and a heart shape, in the centre, which I don’t need to tell you what that was, with a cellophane covering, and Teresa and I in pink cat suits with these amazing masks that were across here [indicates across face], that were like with cheeks and dummies on them and we had pink swimming hats on. So we looked like babies or foetuses or whatever, and we tore our way out of this heart, and then we sang this song ‘Baby Doll’, so we turned immediately into…desirable… nubile, Barbie doll baby women."
These continuities are fascinating. Moving from Brechtian cabaret to New Wave/post-punk makes a certain degree of sense.
ReplyDeleteIt feels a bit odd to say this about one of the acknowledged greats of the 20th century, but doesn’t it seem like Brecht (and Kurt Weill, the Richards to his Jagger) have completely faded from the popular consciousness? In the 70s and 80s, Brecht and Weill were everywhere: Bowie in Baal, the Happy End big band, the Hal Wilner record, countless cabaret performers, Tom Waits. A whole album from the Young Gods.
ReplyDeleteYou would quite often find a Lotte Lenya album, or some other orchestral recording, in the collections of people who were mostly rock or jazz fans. ‘Stratas Sings Weill’ was a big album. These days, Brecht and Weill don’t even seem to be in the Classical repertoire much.
Yeah Bertolt & Kurt have dropped off the map - they were a big thing in the UK 1970s radical theater world. Gang of Four were influenced, possibly directly (Hugo Burnham was a drama student, I think) and possibly mediated via Godard (Gill and King running the film society at their university).
DeleteJim Morrison was early adopter in rock terms, with the cover of "Alabama Song" on the first Doors album.
Intellectual fashions - or left-field culture fashions - are fascinating to me, the way things that seem central and crucial at one moment inevitably fade out. I was quite surprisedthat my niece who is in her freshman year at a liberal arts college in the US came back talking about Roland Barthes - I had imagined all that French stuff that seemed so exciting to me in the 1980s was totally off the menu, displaced by later waves of theory.