Showing posts with label NEW WAVEST. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NEW WAVEST. Show all posts

Sunday, November 17, 2024

New Wavest (#3 of ??)

Clock DVA  -  a name one associates with industrial music. 

Well, they were actually on Industrial Records, weren't they? Put out a cassette via them, White Souls in Black Suits

Then Clock DVA were on Fetish, an imprint started by TG associate and ultra-fan Rod Pearce (he rereleased Second Annual Report and various other Gristle records). 

On Fetish, DVA were label mates with 23 Skidoo. 

DVA singer Adi Newton was into Burroughs and Gysin - cut up, dream machines. 

So all told, archetypally industrial. None more industrial. 

However, if you listen to their best-known tune, "4 Hours", from 1981.... 



... beneath the shrill wail of the horn and the doom-boom baritone (Adi bridging the gap between Ian Curtis and Andrew Eldritch), the song sounds like the Cars or The Undertones, something of that ilk

It's got that damped-strings (or is the term palm-muted?) rhythm guitar chug.

The breakdown couldn't be more archetypally New Wave. 

The lyrics, though, have something to do with the four hours of dream sleep, lucid dreaming, etc - i.e. typical industrial-style esoteric research. Sexual entanglements, stained sheets, etc.



After Thirst, Clock DVA actually briefly went New Pop, signing to Polydor for the album Advantage - an episode that seemed to embarrass Newton later.



The outcome somewhere between Lexicon Of Love and Floodland

After that Newton went back to the industrial left-field with The Anti Group


....  and then from 2011 a reformulated Clock DVA. 

They are still going strong - indeed they put out an album this year. 







Friday, February 9, 2024

New Wavest #2

When I first started getting into music, this chap was all over evening Radio 1. Particularly Peel, but all the homework-shift deejays. 


His gimmick, which doubled as shoot-your-own-career-in-the-foot gambit, is that each year he would change the group's name to a new variant involving the word "Spizz" 

Spizzenergi, Athletico Spizz 80, Spizzles, Spizzoil, I'm probably missing one or two.

Spizz being his own personal alter-ego. 

(Jim Thirlwell did the same thing with all the Foetus-based aliases, but it didn't seem to undermine his rise to renown to the same extent). 

What makes All That Spizz so archetypally New Wave - alongside the daft name + various musical attributes (choppy damped-strings rhythm guitar in some songs; the not-conventionally-good-voice-but-high-energy singing), is  this thing where the song-subject or song-scenario is absurd / inane / kitsch, but the urgency of the vocal delivery lends a certain intensity. Thinking of B-52s songs like "Planet Claire" or "Rock Lobster"... Lene Lovich...  

Moments in "Where's Captain Kirk?" remind me of Tenpole Tudor, another singer who threw himself into the rousing idiocy of his song-scenarios with a fanatical commitment. 

Perhaps Adam and the Ants in both pre-pop and smash hits phases fits here too. 





A not-bad-at-all stab at "Virginia Plain" finds the proto-punk in the original. 





interview with Spizz in Bongo News fanzine 1980























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