Doctor & the Medics - Laughing at the Pieces

Um.

I couldn't help myself, it was there in a clearance bin and I did like their cover of "Spirit In The Sky" which was a pretty spot on version of Norman Greenbaum's classic.

I picked this up fully expecting to have a field day and make a lot of pithy comments, and more of less beat a dead horse.

This was a band I didn't know what to do with at time. Looking at the cover images now I can't tell if they were going after a Boy George vibe or exaggerating Robert Smith from The Cure but with more make up and a lot more hair. Listening to it now, I actually feel kind of bad as I missed out on a pretty solid '80s album that was a lot more than it appeared to be. I've played this through a couple of times now, and this really is a solid album. I'll still single out "Spirit in the Sky" as the best song on the album, but it's not a case of killer and filler. They set 'em up and knocked 'em down.

I had to go to the ever reliable and accurate internet to look up the credits, as the album I got didn't have any. The band, appeared to be an actual band who played actual instruments, and aside from the lone cover, the songs were written by the guys in the band:

The Doctor (Clive Jackson) - lead vocals, hair, Steve McGuire - guitar, Richard Searle - bass guitar, Steve "Vom" Ritchie - drums and Wendi and Colette Anadin - backing vocals.

The album was produced by Craig Leon a guy who produced a shit load of great artists from Blondie, Moon Martin, The Ramones to Chilliwack - yeah, look him up. I had no idea. "Miracle of the Age" was produced by Andy Partridge of XTC. By all accounts just based on the who they had help helm the album IRS Records was putting some muscle behind the band.

You'd have had to be living under a rock in '86 to not have heard, or seen their video of "Spirit in the Sky" which was a blessing and a curse. As good as their version is, it's still a cover, and a faithful cover at that. This sort of buried the rest of the album, I know it did for me. If I'd been aware that these guys were so much more than just a wacky looking dude with especially goofy hair and were actually a power pop band that I'd have put up against just about anything else out there at the time.

The sequencing of the album is different depending on where you were in the world. Here the album charges out of the gate with the big hit, and then keeps up the momentum with another '60s tinged new wave track "Lucky Lord Jim" and keeps up the heat and showcases the band's backing vocalists Wendi and Colette Anadi. Yeah, it's good. I'm more or less jotting down my thoughts as I play the album, and it's the second time through. I'm going to stop listing the tracks in order and they come up and just allow myself to me immersed in their sonic dreamscape.

The whole album '80s pop cornucopia. I'm not trying to be dismissive - I mean it in the best way as the album pushes all the right buttons. It really is too bad I missed out on this the first time around.

Oh well, live and learn. I guess I shouldn't have just the album by it's cover.

Better late than never ...

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...

Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

"Cars" was really the only song I knew by Gary Numan. I knew the name of the album the song came from. Over the years bits and pieces of trivia are accumulated, but in terms of his music it was still distilled down to one song ... It would be too easy to write Mr. Numan off as a one hit wonder, and I suppose in terms of actual chart hits this was his defining moment as a solo artist. Of course this really means nothing, as Gary Numan would drop an album a year pretty much through to the end of the '80s. He'd then slow down a little but continues to make music. While The Pleasure Principle was Gary Numan's debut solo release in '79, he actually cut his teeth on a couple of albums in a band called Tubeway Army, first with the band's self titled release in 1978, and then on Replicas that came out in April of '79. By the end of Tubeway Army's run most of the band would follow Gary into his solo career. Paul Gardiner who had been with Gary from the beg...

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 treasurers 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, what in the world do you do with a dozen guys in the 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 classics, among them Sunny Days and other golden nuggets that...

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