New Wave eye candy - video special (Kim, Feargal, Toyah)

 

The archetypal New Wave grid pattern

The Home Counties Blondie-ersatz

New Wavey nervous excitation: Feargal's jerky body moves at the chorus enacts the jolting Event that the song is about  - albeit opaquely (what is this song about?) while the rhythm guitar chordage chops against the flow

Did they bring in the horns after seeing Dexys?  The brassy up-ness suits the chorus, and there's that odd, quite-clever bit when the horns slow everything down, before it all revs up again.

And then this - this song, this artist, really deserves a post to itself 

The pogo-stick / Jack-in-a-box boisterousness of the non-dance dancing.

The lyrics!

I'm bored

Don't want to go to school

Don't want to be nobody's fool

Want to be me

Don't want to be sweet and neat

Don't want someone living my life for me

Want to be free

I'm going to turn this world inside out

I'm going to turn suburbia upside down

I'm going to walk the streets, scream and shout

I'm going to crawl through the alleyways, being very loud

Don't want to be told what to wear

As long as you're warm who cares

Want to be me

So what if I dye my hair

I've still got a brain up there

And I'm going to be me

I'm going to be free

Tear down the wallpaper

Turf out the cat

Tear up the carpet

We've got rid of that

Blow up the TV

Blow up the car

Without these things

You don't know where you are

Pull down the abbatoirs

And all that's obscene

Everything in life

Should be totally free

We should live and let live

And all live our dreams

It  has the effect of making all of rock's utopianism and breaking-loose seem like the silliest of playpen tantrums - a fist-shaking sideshow to the real action of people getting on with building the world (or actually destroying it rather than play-acting destruction) 

My favoritest of these very very favorite lyrics:

I'm going to crawl through the alleyways, being very loud

Don't want to be told what to wear

As long as you're warm who cares

So what if I dye my hair

I've still got a brain up there

It's Rik from the Young Ones - but she means it, maaaaan!

So unfathomably bad it must be shown thrice! 

Four times, even 

This was the bigger (s)hit though

Last dregs 

Somewhere between the Antz and Classix Nouveau 

One of the more mystifying cults of all the cults of that time. 

I suppose "I Want To Be Free" is only a rewrite of this

Mind you, that might be my least favorite Sex Pistols song - out of the songs sung by Johnny Rotten, at least 

But it's still about 1000% times realer than the hammy histrione 

Some kinder comments I made about la Toyah Wackson in a post about shrieky females of the New Wave era:

And then the warrior-chieftainess of suburban postpunk - Toyah Wilcox, whose band  - Toyah - were originally a sort of distaff Adam and the Antz (when the band had a 'Z' on the end) with indie-chart big seller Sheep Farming In Barnet -

Then she followed the trail blazed by Adam and the Ants (with a S on the end now -- less cultic and underground in vybe, more open for teenybop business)  into pop and the UK hit parade

Revealingly, she was originally, and remained primarily an actress  - Derek Jarman's Jubilee and The Tempest,  films, big theatre roles in stage productions by cutting-edge street-raw playrights,

A sort of thesped up, lisping Siouxsie

Once the missing link between Boadicea and Kirk Brandon.... nowadays she's a charming, oh-so-English, matronly-but-sexy figure, married to Bob Fripp, and what a lovely couple they make