Haircut One Hundred - Pelican West

The year was 1982 and my nineteen year old self was still a couple years away from getting into the European tinged pop that would start expanding my musical palate. Hair Cut One Hundred is a band I appreciate a lot more than my younger self would have. The catchy "Love Plus One" appears on a lot of 80s compilations for good reason, it's a great song. I'm saying this now, but if you asked me other day I'd have drawn a blank.

I'd gone in to the record store looking for a specific album (still can't find it) and got to chatting with the staff and we got on the subject of British new wave. He asks me if I had any Haircut One Hundred. I say I know the name but can't recall any of their stuff. "What about Nick Heyward?" he asks. Again I knew the name, but was drawing a blank on anything specific. I know he's on a compilation somewhere in the library in the studio but knowing and knowing aren't the same. So he pops out from behind the counter and comes back a few minutes later. "Here, you have to get this." Dagnabbit, it's more than a dollar, but not stupid expensive either so I figure why not? After all he was quite insistent, and generally when we chat about stuff we agree on a lot of things.

What I find amazing now is how talented these kids were. Yeah kids. Geez Louise Nick Heyward the principle singer and songwriter was 21 when this came out, and all the guys look like they just used their high school yearbook photos for the back cover. The level of maturity is rather astounding. The arrangements are pretty danged sophisticated - you have to love a band who can create complex pop that leans heavily on percussion and an amazing horn section. When I was 21 I was writing songs about how much I hated smurfs.

I had mentioned new wave earlier, and I guess these guys were sort of in that group of bands coming out of the UK at the time, but I'm not sure that's the label I'd use. Then again as I often say I'm not really good with genres.

Man, 40 years later and to my ears this sounds fresh. I love the fact that on the back cover there's a picture of a rotary phone. That's probably the most dated thing on the album.

Comments

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the 90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984 my (dearly departed, and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy that had a bonus track of " Get It On (Bang A Gong)" that when I bought the album didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read just go back and skim it, I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off and on again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. However, at the time all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the first cut "Baby Come Back" and proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another and closed out the album (sans any...

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock, almost progressive at times who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , "Don...

Lighthouse - Sunny Days

Bin diving at my local record store where there were more than a few choices to make. After picking out a half dozen treasures, I figured I'd stop looking and leave before I caused myself trouble at home. Lighthouse was one of those ridiculously large bands in the early 70s I didn't understand. I mean really, BTO was just four guys, The James Gang was three, until they weren't, what in the world do you do with a dozen guys in a band? Of course I had a radio — it was the first significant purchase I made with my money from cutting lawns. I think at the time it cost about 35 bucks, and had FM and other high frequency things I never got to use living out in the suburbs away from the reach of the big city FM signal. "Sunny Days" was a great song. I remember thinking it was cool and didn't switch to the other AM station when it came on. A few years later, when I got my first record player, the obligatory K-Tel anthologies would feature a myriad of cut up and edited...

Old Enough to Forget

Search This Blog