Girls just wanna have fun

A lot of Post-punk music tended to be rather on the gloomy side, painted in shades of grey with maybe the occasional splash of blood red. It was the soundtrack to the dismal fag-end of the 1970s played by alienated boys from grim Northern council flats or Anarcho-Marxists in communal Notting Hill squats. They all wore drab colours and sounded as if their tea had gone cold, wailing unhappily over dissonant guitars and shuddery beats. It produced some thrilling music but no one ever skipped down the road happily whistling "Death Disco".

But in 1979, at the height of all this heavy — and fairly male — gloom and doom, a perky single called "White Mice" appeared on the indie scene by an all-girl group called the Mo-dettes. Packaged in a powder pink sleeve with a romance comic parody on the back it had a decidedly girly and pop vibe and, compared to the wrist-slitting ditties of Joy Division, was as fluffy as a marshmallow, with a bouncy beat and the heavily-accented vocals of Swiss-born lead singer Ramona Carlier (I've still no idea what she's singing about) giving it plenty of sexy ooh la la. There were other all-girl bands around at the time but The Raincoats and The Slits were more confrontational in attitude while the Mo-dettes seemed quite friendly, the sort of girls who didn't make you feel like a patriarchal oppressor just because you fancied them. They had attitude too but it was in a sweeter wrapper. It certainly brightened up an evening's John Peel show and was very popular, getting to #1 on the indie chart.

Looking back, its shambling DIY charm is one of the earliest examples I know of what became the "indie pop" sound, particularly the cute/twee end of the spectrum as played by boys in anoraks and girls in polka dots and Dr. Marten's. I don't know if it was a zeitgeist-y sign that the 70s were ending and we all wanted to lighten up a bit, but hard on the Mo-dettes high heels came the frothy sounds of Dolly Mixture and Girls At Our Best!, and a year later saw the first Postcard single release so maybe there was something in the air. Happy days were here again.

Download: White Mice - Mo-dettes (mp3)

In an interesting bit of trivia I picked up while writing this, Dolly Mixtures' brilliant "How Come You're Such A Hit With the Boys, Jane?" is supposed to be about Mo-dettes' bassist Jane Crocker, and not in a very nice way either. Ooh, cat fight!

Download: How Come You're Such A Hit With the Boys, Jane? - Dolly Mixture (mp3)

Lucky Dip

Download: Homburg - Procol Harum (mp3)

I have no idea what this song is actually about but somehow I don't think it's about a hat, either way it's a beaut though. The lyrics have always reminded me of Elvis Costello, especially the shabby sadness of "Man Out of Time."

(Posts may be a little light and sporadic this week, work has reared its ugly head again.)

You can't put your arms around an mp3

When I moved to the States I stored all my records in my Dad's basement and it was 10 long years before I finally had them shipped over. When those battered cardboard boxes landed on my doorstep it was like being reunited with my lost self, as if someone had just dug up the dusty artifacts of a past life that had been fading into the distance after spending a decade in a dark room thousands of miles away. As I flipped through those old albums and singles for the first time again I was hit by a flood of memories which were just as much to do with the physical, tactile reality of the records themselves as it was the music they contained. These records had sat on the shelves in all the flats and houses I had lived in over the years, bought from record stores that don't exist anymore (by a person I wasn't anymore either), and every scuffed sleeve and worn spine, every scratch on the vinyl, was like an mark left by the past. Here was the album that got covered in beer at a party and I washed under a tap, the 12" I bought in New York the first time I went to America, the single with a message from an old girlfriend written on the sleeve. Even the faint dark stain left on a sleeve by the peeled-off price sticker was like a ghost trace of where and when it was bought. It wasn't just the soundtrack of my life, it was the actual concrete evidence of it.

What I felt even more strongly was a pang for what was missing, all the records I'd sold over the years, particularly at one point in the late-90s when I was temporarily back in London flat broke and flogged some of my most valuable ones. It was like several chapters in my life story were missing. Who, I wonder, now has the copy of "You Can't Hide Your Love Forever" that my first serious girlfriend bought me? And what had happened to Queen's "Sheer Heart Attack" album? Not the rarest record in the world by any means but it was the first album I ever bought. Surely I wouldn't have sold that too? That one really bothered me, a big milestone in my life and the evidence is gone.

Records are vulnerable, fragile things, the way they can scratch and warp gives them a human quality that cold, perfect CDs lack, you can feel the patina of age on a vinyl album just as much as you can a human face. But now with even the CD becoming obsolete it seems like music formats are shrinking out of existence, from twelve inches of vinyl to little silver discs to... well, nothing really, a sequence of digital ones and zeroes downloaded off the web with all the tangible reality of a cloud. It's like music stripped of all the lovely touchy-feely pleasures, there's no there there and how can you be that emotionally invested in something that doesn't exist? I have a whopping 45GB of mp3 files on my computer but if they all got deleted tomorrow it would be a pain in the arse but I wouldn't be all that upset about it because I could just replace them with ones that were literally exactly the same. You can't say the same about records, I've been slowly replacing some of the ones I either sold or lost over the years (the ones that aren't too expensive anyway) but the "new" copy will never be that one, the one I bought when I was 16 with the scratch on the last track I sometimes still hear in my brain even when I listen to a pristine mp3 of the same song.

So in twenty or thirty years time will someone who is a teenager now relate to their mp3 collection the way I do my records even though it just a track name on a glowing screen, still exactly the same as the day they downloaded it with no physical substance or texture they can hold, feel or smell? Will they get all sentimental about their beaten-up old iPod instead? I have no idea, I'm just one of those sad old gits with an emotional attachment to objects, particularly the circular black plastic kind.

Of course, one drawback of vinyl is that you can't download it off the internet, it's too big to fit down the tubes. So an mp3 will have to do.

Download: Some Of Them Are Old - Brian Eno (mp3)
Buy: "Here Come The Warm Jets" (album)

Down the 'Pool

When I was at college I shared a house with a lad from Cheshire who was a Liverpool supporter, but despite that terrible character flaw he was a good bloke and we're still friends today. Back then one of our favourite tv shows was Alan Bleasdale's Liverpudlian comedy/drama "Scully" whose expression "DOUBLE YESSS!!" became a bit of a college-years catchphrase for us (ah, students). The show had a really terrific theme song by Elvis Costello — who also had a bit part in it as Scully's retarded cousin — which ended up on the b-side of "I Wanna Be Loved" even though I think it was a much better record.

Pity it's about a Liverpool supporter though. Come on you Blues!!!!!!!

Download: Turning The Town Red - Elvis Costello & The Attractions (mp3)

In case you've forgotten all about "Scully", here's a reminder.

Seasons come, seasons go

Though Spring officially started last week it's still a bit nippy here, but you can feel the season's change in the air. The sky is bluer, days are longer, lawns are turning green again, daffodils are sprouting, and everyone is waiting for that moment when they can shed their coats and jumpers and feel the sun on their faces again. Long, cold winters are tough but I wouldn't miss that feeling of renewal for the world, it's good for the soul and makes you appreciate the wonders of life and the passing of time even more.

For a change, here's something fresh, new (-ish) and Spring-like from one of my favourite albums of last year.

Download: Blackbird - Rachel Unthank And The Winterset (mp3)
Buy: "The Bairns" (album)

Lucky Dip

Download: Maybe Tomorrow - The Chords (mp3)

I wouldn't exactly call this a "forgotten" single but there were so many other blistering classic singles released in 1980 this one got lost in the crowd and only got to #40 so it's probably one of those records you had to have been there at the time to remember.