Skip to main content

Platinum Blonde - Alien Shores

Platinum Blonde

Platinum Blonde was a short blip on the landscape. Between 1983 and 1987 they released a trilogy of albums, with Alien Shores being their biggest. On their debut they were a trio comprised of Sergio Galli on guitar and backing vocals, Mark Holmes, who fronted the band, sang lead vocals, and played bass and keyboards, while Chris Steffler laid down the beat. It was a solid release and sold a couple of hundred thousand copies, which is a lot in a small-market country.

When it was time for a follow-up, the band brought in Kenny MacLean to take over bass and keyboards so that Mark could focus on being a front man. It worked. Platinum Blonde were a band who were very image conscious, and taking a page from the Duran Duran playbook, they were video friendly as well. The combination of a few really great songs and accompanying videos took the band to another level.

When the little girls took a liking to the band, suddenly they were pariahs to the fans who liked their debut. Platinum Blonde lost their street cred - at least that's how us cool kids who liked "real" bands felt. Or at least that's how I felt. Street cred or not, those funny little girls had access to money, and Alien Shores would sell over 500,000 copies here in Canada. They did manage to score a minor hit with "Somebody Somewhere" in the US.

Now, if I'm being honest, I did buy this album when I realized Alex Lifeson played the guitar solo on "Crying Over You," and I really liked the haunting "Somebody Somewhere." Even when it wasn't cool to like Platinum Blonde, I still bought the album. My rationale was they were cool when they first came out, Standing in the Dark was a really solid album, and the band toured with Bryan Adams, and later Billy Idol when he was promoting Rebel Yell. So what if this was being dismissed as a teenybopper album? There are some wicked songs on it.

Now I do have their best of on CD, as well as the very disappointing Yeah Yeah Yeah (1990), which they released as The Blondes. I was thinking about the band the other day, so I was on the lookout for their debut, but as fate would have it, it was their big album I managed to find in the dollar section. It looked to be in decent condition, and aside from the ever-missing album liner, I figured it was worth a buck. Ten songs for a buck, which is a dime a track (sorry, I'm just showing off my math prowess. Follow me for more obvious observations).

I paid my buck, I took my chance - and I got an album with a skip on it. It turns out what looked like a pristine copy was hiding an ugly secret near the end of "Animal," which actually caught me by surprise. I mean, really, this was the second-to-last song on the album and there's a skip.

I have a lot of records. This is the only album I have that has a skip on it - and I've picked up some questionable stuff for a buck. Now I've had to throw out a couple that were unplayable, but none that actually skipped. It's funny how irritating this was to me. I mean, I only paid a buck and I'm being pissy about a skip on one song, on the second side of the album, the side I don't play as often, as I really like the first side best. So from a pragmatic perspective, I'm out a dime.

I know I just shit on the second side, but I still have to give it up for a band who dedicated the second side to a concept album. It was all sci-fi themes wrapped in tight pop songs. It's good stuff.

back cover

Alien Shores was supposed to be the album that positioned the band for great things, as they seemed poised to conquer the US market. After all, here was a band who managed to score what was essentially an RIAA Gold-level album in Canada, where a Gold record was 50,000 copies. I mean, this was impressive stuff.

So what happened? Contact dropped in 1987, and while it was a logical progression musically from Alien Shores, the album didn't catch, but the lead single "Contact" was decent and did okay. The band's once fanatic fan base was now two years older, and most of them had moved on to the latest shiny thing. The band still managed to move over 150,000 copies here in Canada, which was still massive ... but comparatively a massive disappointment. This is sort of like going from Hotel California to The Long Run.

I have to admit I really enjoyed the album, both sides - skip and all (no, I didn't enjoy the skip, I lost ten cents on that skip) - and frankly, if I find another copy I'll snag it (again, with the stupid skip, it will cost me more than a bloody dime). Meanwhile, I'm looking for the band's debut, the one album I actually didn't have back in their heyday.


 


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 band, 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 , ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...
5 comments
Read more