Old Enough to Forget

Thanks to my friend Carol, who was travelling in Australia, I was able to snag a copy of Love an Adventure from 1985, and it's sort of an eye-opener. It was a used copy with just a plain insert, so no real credits, but the back cover showed a slightly different line-up than the later RCA reissue. Brian Canham and James Leigh are pictured, as is bassist "Pierre Pierre," which was a pseudonym for Pierre Gigliotti. Then there was drummer Anthony Argiro, who is pictured here, but on the RCA version James's brother Vince is credited. Even the wiki on this isn't clear, as it doesn't list Anthony at all, so who knows? Maybe he recorded the parts but by the time it was released was out of the band. Regardless, this is a bit of a conundrum, as I'm listening to this one and it is an earlier pressing that doesn't include the dance mix of "Funky Town," a song that frankly isn't missed here. However, if it was to be shoehorned in, coming after "...

Pseudo Echo has everything that was awesome about '80s synth music. These guys were right in the same wheelhouse as Ultravox, Simple Minds, or OMD, or ABC (sort of) - well, a lot of bands, even Depeche Mode but not really, more like Psychedelic Furs. I find it strange that when the big dump of acts from Australia that overwhelmed the airwaves here by bands like Icehouse and The Church happened, Pseudo Echo wasn't in that mix. They were really good. Sure, one could argue they were a little derivative. I'd argue that when hair metal was a thing, that was the height of derivative rock - and I loved an awful lot of it. Apparently their version of "Funkytown" was big in Canada, but I don't remember it - at all. At the time I didn't realize the original album was released in Australia in 1985 with a different track order. By the time this was released here in 1987, it suffered the same fate as Angel City's Face to Face -  it was a cobbled-together effort to...