Jumping someone else's train

A wall in Verona
Originally uploaded by The Salaryman.

Christmas and the run up to it is a great time for yesterday’s peddlers of sonic dried candy floss residue for the charts to put together yet another ‘best of’ or ‘ultimate collection’ of some sort as a stocking filler for people whose cultural landscape is less evolved than that of a bit of plankton grooving along to the vibrations of defecating mackerel. The tunnels and pathways of commute Hades have received a plastering of related promotional announcements, most of which are so far beneath contempt as to breach the very limits of gravity. One very well promoted one deserves special recognition for odium as those responsible have somehow escaped sufficient critical censure throughout the years. I stared at the thing and noticed several periodicals pimping the same in between my periodic questioning as to whether the Northern Line’s signalling system is comprised of fag ends, chewing gum and a stolen ‘AAA’ battery. The no-so-recent revival of the electro sound and interest in 80s retro by those that crawled the carpet during its early days has offered a tardy commercial opportunity to a tired couple of chancers who made it far bigger than deserved.

Eurythmics. A name like that screams modernity, an international outlook or at least some kind of relevance. Not in this case. 1983- get anyone with passable musical nous into some London studio with some analogue synth gear, chemical inducement and some fucking time on their hands and you will get one notable single. ‘Sweet Dreams (are made of this).’ is one such record. Fine – credit there but lots of good electropop was made back then by duos of wankers who at least had the decency to go away after they had burned out their three minutes of possible creativity. The living cartoon that is Dave Stewart and faux soul foghorn Annie Lennox were too clever for that. Further hits came like a periodic hailstorm of frozen mucus, most notable being ‘There must be an Angel, playing with my heart as I spew predicable O-level couplets in a stupid wig, yeah, etc.’ the ‘arty’ video for which involved men arsing about in unicorn outfits. A maelstrom of artfully packaged MOR followed on. And on and on. Lennox even created a solo record that forever will be on ‘repeat’ for suburban emotional cripples and corporate events organisers.

In the same era, Soft Cell merged synths rather more convincingly with Motown (rather than Dusty Springfield, the sozzled sound of best avoided wedding receptions) and the queerer side of Soho. Yet this more artful and dangerous duo were painted as the one hit wonders that Stewart and Lennox should have been. The culture market is a strange place indeed.