Tag: UK

Thomas Dolby | Radio Silence

“In popular culture, the term ‘renaissance man’ can often be overused or even misused, but in the case of Thomas Dolby, the term has a lot more validity than the casual fan could ever imagine,” (PopMatters).”His (2016) memoir, Speed of Sound: Breaking the Barriers Between Music and Technology, goes a long way in making a case for Dolby to adopt this title.

In the early ‘80s, Dolby was an inescapable fixture of MTV’s playlists, with his novelty techno-pop hit ‘She Blinded Me With Science’ ruling the video airwaves and pop charts.” Setting the scene for his later career, the UK native saw early gigs by “everyone from the Clash to Elvis Costello to XTC” as a teen. He later played keyboards with the Camera Club, Lene Lovich, Herbie Hancock, and George Clinton; co-wrote and produced the first platinum 12” hip hop single, “Magic’s Wand” by Whodini; was chosen by David Bowie as the keyboardist at the UK half of Live Aid; created original music for feature films produced by George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Ken Russell; and his keyboard work was a central feature of Foreigner’s smash hit album IV (most notably the single ‘Waiting for a Girl Like You’).

Illustrating Dolby’s bleeding-edge vantage point in terms of 1980s tech, “while riding his tour bus through the Nevada desert, (he was) forced to pull over and use a gas station phone booth as a primitive modem for uploading demo files to Michael Jackson.” Dolby was “an ‘80s pop culture Zelig, dropped into the zeitgeist with a bit of a deer-in-the-headlights attitude.” After retiring from the pop music business, he founded a company which was pivotal in the early days of the development of cell phone ringtones; served as the Music Director for TED Talks for over a decade; and is now a professor of Music for New Media at Johns Hopkins University.

“Radio Silence,” a track from The Golden Age of Wireless (1982), pivots around in terms of its tonality throughout. Meanwhile, the video treats us to a neighborhood tour of decades-old radios as we hear synthesis that was state-of-the-art for its time: retrofuturism sets Dolby’s stage here as usual. The harmonic shifts are perhaps the clearest during the outro, when the panoply of shiny synth textures has settled down a bit. 2:59 is in F# mixolydian, shifting at 3:12 to D mixolydian; the two keys alternate as the track fades.

PeakFiddler | Tam Lin (Glasgow Reel)

Regular contributor JB writes: “While the production values of this video are nothing to write home about, the musicianship is top notch. There are places where you would swear that the performer dubbed in a second violin track, but it’s a single track, with very skillful (and unobtrusive) use of double-stops and aural illusions (your ear hears a given element of a chord as continuing even when it’s not).  

The same performer also recorded the guitar and banjo parts, but since he apparently views them as mere backdrops for the fiddle, he didn’t bother to use the ‘Hollywood Squares’ style of video. If you can listen to this tune without your heart rising and your pulse quickening, you’re probably deceased…”

PeakFiddler has no website, but does maintain some of the usual social media channels, all furnished with the same videos of live performance. But there’s no accompanying bio information to be found anywhere — other than that he’s “a musician living in the Northwest of England.” After a start in D minor, the tune transitions to A minor at 1:50.

Joe Jackson | Jamie G.

“In 1990, Joe Jackson had just signed a spiffy new deal with Virgin Records after spending 10 years and 11 albums under A&M,” (Popdose). “Many bands use the first album with a new label as an opportunity to make a fresh start and try new things (or, perhaps, sell out) … Jackson, however, had no interest in changing, diminishing returns be damned.”

After his 1982 album Night and Day, featuring the hit “Steppin’ Out,” was certified Gold in the UK, the US, and New Zealand and Platinum in Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands, it would likely have been difficult to achieve anything other than “diminishing returns.” But Jackson has seemed most interested in following his own muse rather than sustaining stardom, wrapping insightful and often cutting lyrics in musical styles ranging from edgy pop to jazz-inflected cabaret ballads, from textbook New Wave to uptempo salsa. “In his 1999 memoir A Cure for Gravity: A Musical Pilgrimage, Joe Jackson writes approvingly of George Gershwin as a musician who kept one foot in the popular realm and one in the classical realm of music,” (AllMusic). “Like Gershwin, Jackson possesses a restless musical imagination that has found him straddling musical genres unapologetically, disinclined to pick one style and stick to it.”

Although Jackson, a UK native, has often toured with smaller bands — at times even paring the instrumentation down to his trademark piano/bass/drums trio — this larger band format shows the effortless precision that Jackson is known for. The spirited “Jamie G.” features a late unprepared half-step modulation at 2:03.

Kiki Dee | Star

English pop singer Pauline Matthews (who uses the stage name Kiki Dee) released “Star” as a single in 1981. Dee performed frequently with Elton John and has released 12 albums. This tune was written by Doreen Chanter, a member of the English singing duo The Chanter Singers. It alternates between G for the verses and A for the choruses throughout, with a final modulation up to B at 2:41.

Genesis | Taking It All Too Hard

“Moments of Genesis (1983) are as spooky and arty as those on Abacab — in particular, there’s the tortured howl of ‘Mama,’ uncannily reminiscent of Phil Collins’ Face Value, and the two-part ‘Second Home by the Sea’ — but this eponymous 1983 album is indeed a rebirth, as so many self-titled albums delivered in the thick of a band’s career often are,” (AllMusic).

“Here the art rock functions as coloring to the pop songs, unlike on Abacab and Duke, where the reverse is true. Some of this may be covering their bets — to ensure that the longtime fans didn’t jump ship, they gave them a bit of art — some of it may be that the band just couldn’t leave prog behind, but the end result is the same: as of this record, Genesis was now primarily a pop band. Anybody who paid attention to ‘Misunderstanding’ and ‘No Reply at All’ could tell that this was a good pop band, primarily thanks to the rapidly escalating confidence of Phil Collins, but Genesis illustrates just how good they could be, by balancing such sleek, pulsating pop tunes as ‘That’s All’ with a newfound touch for aching ballads, as on ‘Taking It All Too Hard.’ It has a little bit too much of everything — too much pop, too much art, too much silliness — so it doesn’t pull together, but if taken individually, most of these moments are very strong testaments to the increasing confidence and pop power of the trio, even if it’s not quite what longtime fans might care to hear.” Released as a single during the summer of 1984, the track got stuck at #50 on the pop chart but reached #11 on the Adult Contemporary chart.

“Taking It All Too Hard” starts in E major, with the chorus placed first in the lineup. At 0:36, the verse starts in E minor, but features unprepared shifts to A major via a syncopated kick at 0:51, C major at 1:02, and Ab major at 1:11. The bass line moves down a half step for the next verse. Collins’ vocal delivery on the verses is quieter, almost to the point of sounding like so much interior monologue. But then he shifts to a louder, more agitated sound as the chorus returns at 1:20. The patterns persist throughout.

Il Divo | Caruso

“Caruso,” written by Italian singer/songwriter Lucio Dalla, is featured on the 2006 album Siempre by the classical crossover group Il Divo. “Their phrasing on…Caruso is excellent, drawn out to pull as much emotion as possible,” AllMusic said in their review of the record. The album sold over a million copies in the United States, and was the #2 classical crossover album on the Billboard charts for the year.

The track begins in C minor, modulates up a half step to C# minor for the second verse at 1:26, and then dramatically rises up another half step to D minor for the final chorus at 2:44.

Rick Astley | Whenever You Need Somebody

“(Rick Astley is the) British baritone behind some of the most impeccably crafted pop hits of the ’80s, including ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ and ‘Together Forever.’ Wielding a rich, deep voice, Rick Astley became an overnight sensation in the late ’80s with his well-crafted dance-pop,” (AllMusic). “… (While) Astley’s often captivating debut album, Whenever You Need Somebody (1987) … (featured) high-tech production (that) is very ’80s, Astley’s soul/pop/dance music approach is very much a production of the ’70s — sort of the Average White Band meets Philly soul/disco meets Tom Jones … this CD proved Astley to be a welcome addition to the British R&B scene.”

“Whenever You Need Somebody” is the second track on Astley’s 1987 debut album of the same name; it was the album’s second track, appearing after the smash hit “Never Gonna Give You Up,” the song that much later launched a thousand “RickRolls.” The track wasn’t released as a single in the US, but went top 10 through much of Europe and reached #1 in Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Switzerland. However, on the importance of the US to his career, Astley reports ” …a lot of my favorite singers came from America, and I use the term ‘taught me to sing.’ But I think I’m not alone in saying a lot of R&B and soul records, like Luther Vandross, James Ingram, those records were what I was trying to emulate in my way. I was doing it in a northern English, red-haired, freckly sort of way,” (USAToday).

After a intro in Bb, the verse follows a mini-AABA format, dividing its time between B minor and Db minor (for the “B” section, 0:35 – 0:43). The chorus moves back up to Bb major at 0:52 and stays there during the bridge. The pattern continues from there. Astley’s towering, nearly vibrato-free vocal is utterly unmistakable from the first few notes.

Thunderclap Newman | Something in the Air

In the late 1960s, talk of revolution may have seemed credible. The antiwar movement, the Civil Rights movement, and of course, popular music were changing society in significant ways. The Beatles could sing “Revolution,” even if you could “count them out.” But here we are in 2023, where, as journalist George Monbiot points out, paraphrasing Rousseau, “man is born free, and is everywhere in chain stores.” At least we got some cool tunes out of the era.

One such tune is 1969’s “Something in the Air” by the short-lived English band Thunderclap Newman. The members were drummer “Speedy” Keen, who wrote the song, guitarist Jimmy McCulloch, later of Paul McCartney’s Wings, and the eponymous Andy Newman on piano. The group released one studio album Hollywood Dream, produced by Pete Townsend, who also played bass guitar on the recording. “Something in the Air” was a #1 hit in the UK, and reached a respectable #37 on the US Billboard chart.  It’s been included in the soundtracks for several movies, including The Magic Christian, also released in 1969, and Almost Famous. The lyrics asserted “you know it’s right”, and in those times, you may not have detected any irony.

There’s a whole step modulation from the original key E major to F# major at 1:04; the saloon-style piano bridge starting at 1:58 passes through a few tonalities; lastly, when we land at the final verse at 2:55, we’re in G# major, two steps up from the original key.

Culture Club | Miss Me Blind

“For a time England’s biggest pop sensation, heralded in America as leaders of a second British Invasion, Culture Club capitalized on Boy George’s outrageous nightlife cross-dressing and aimed-to-shock intelligence to slip their mushy mainstream soul-pop into respectable homes the world over,” (Trouser Press). “Phenomenology aside, the foursome never sounded anywhere near as bizarre as they originally appeared …

Dropping the silly “white boy” crypto-sociology that threads through the first album, Colour by Numbers gets right to the business at hand, which is the creation of irresistible pop hits in a variety of molds. And in that regard, the album is a real success … prominently features singer Helen Terry, who provides a powerful foil to George’s smooth crooning.”

One of the band’s most successful singles was 1984’s “Miss Me Blind,” a soul-inflected, danceable pop hit. With songwriting credits split among all four members of the band, the track hit #5 on the US Hot 100 and #6 on the Canadian pop charts. Built in G minor overall, the early bridge (2:14 – 2:30) shifts to E minor before returning to the original key. Culture Club seemed to largely avoid over-indulgence in synthesized textures, instead maintaining a focus on the human voice (both George’s and Terry’s). As a result, many of the band’s tunes seem a bit less dated than others of the same vintage.