Earlier this year, while on a YouTube nostalgia tear through NBA highlights from the late ’70s and early ’80s, I made the following observation on Twitter after watching a live performance of Grover Washington, Jr.’s “Let It Flow (For ‘Dr J.’)” set to vintage hoops footage: “The sound of my early childhood is ineluctably a Fender Rhodes electric piano”…
Though sometimes dismissed as a disappointing compromise between the two phases of Chrome’s musical output—the delirious, expressionist SF punk cut-ups of Alien Soundtracks (1977) and Half Machine Lip Moves (1979) and the more “traditional” LPs that followed, like Blood on the Moon (1981) and 3rd From the Sun (1982)—Chrome’s fourth LP, 1980’s Red Exposure, could scarcely sound more uncompromising…
This atmospheric piece, which would later be given the name “In London,” was part of an improvisation session featuring Greek synthesizer musician Vangelis and Spanish electronic group Neuronium. Filmed in 1981 for Spanish TV program Musical Express as part of “Serie Amigos” (the “Friends Series”), the performance was recorded at Nemo, the London recording studio that Vangelis had established in 1975 and where he would continue to work until 1983…
By The Mutants
Okay, so we were originally going to do a Peter Gabriel album (or the Shock the Monkey video) in this slot, but, after hearing you guys worship at the altar of Phil for the last two weeks, I no longer want anything to do with the man or his musical relations. We each get two songs to rescue from a shameful obscurity, so here goes…
When you first suggested we look at Moonwalker (which I literally knew nothing about at the time), I figured it would be a fairly anodyne collection of Michael Jackson music videos. Do you remember back when artists would release their last couple of albums’ music videos on a single, hour-long VHS? Those were great times. Moonwalker? Not great times…
One of the best parts of starting We Are The Mutants (nearly two years ago now!) has been becoming friends with my co-editors and learning about all the things that they find interesting. So when Richard and I first started talking about our shared, unabashed mutual love of Phil Collins, it was like I’d finally found a kindred spirit…
In 1972, actress Marlo Thomas, who’d made her name on the hit ’60s TV series That Girl, along with a team of entertainers and the support of the newly-founded Ms. Foundation for Women, of which Thomas and pioneering feminist Gloria Steinem were founding members, released an album of songs and skits titled Free to Be… You and Me…
For reasons which are not immediately apparent, it is difficult when speaking of the late Mark E. Smith to avoid a descent into cliché. Ironic, given that an aversion to cliché was among Smith’s defining characteristics; yet predictable, given the efforts a sizeable portion of his admirers and media interlocutors consistently made to reducing him to a caricature…
Brian Bennett’s career started in grand fashion; while barely out of his teens, he became the drummer for one of the UK’s biggest pop groups, Cliff Richard’s backing band, The Shadows, taking over from original drummer Tony Meehan. Bennett’s 1978 solo effort, Voyage (A Journey Into Discoid Funk), marked his first solo effort…
By The Mutants
As the end of the 1970s approached, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the space-age fantasies the West had been nurturing for twenty years led nowhere real, or at least nowhere permanent, and that terrestrials were seeking some kind of emotional repository for the dreams they had been dreaming, as well as a pressure valve for their multiplying tensions…
