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, make a lot of pithy comments, and more or less beat a dead horse.

This was a band I didn't know what to do with at the 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 makeup 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
Wendi and Colette Anadin - backing vocals

The album was produced by Craig Leon, a guy who produced a shitload of great artists, from Blondie and Moon Martin to The Ramones and 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 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 both 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, and 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, I might have paid more attention.

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," while showcasing the band's backing vocalists Wendi and Colette Anadin.

Yeah, it's good.

I'm more or less jotting down my thoughts as I play the album. It's the second time through. I'm going to stop listing the tracks in order as they come up and just allow myself to be immersed in their sonic dreamscape.

The whole album is an '80s pop cornucopia. I'm not trying to be dismissive - I mean it in the best possible 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 judged the album by its 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 it 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, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I 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. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

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...

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...

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