Old Enough to Forget

Spoons were never a band that was on my radar back in the day. I knew who they were, "Nova Heart" was a pretty great song, but there were a lot of great songs that never made it into my collection. Talkback  was produced by Nile Rodgers. Bowie's Let's Dance  was the other project Mr. Rodgers produced in '83. Oddly enough Nile passed over Culture Club who were hotter than something that was really hot to produce Talkback by Spoons. You'd have thunk that this would have helped secure Spoons a decent distribution deal ... but nope. Talkback would only see the light of day in Canada. Good for us I guess, bad for them and everyone else. Like the band's previous album Arias & Symphonies , Talkback would go gold in Canada, but the band's subsequent releases wouldn't fare so well. The big single was "Old Emotion" which is a song I sort of like and am sort of irritated by. The whammy bar dives never worked for me. It's not like Gordon Depp...

I had no intention of getting a copy of Here's to Future Days ... but here we are. Thompson Twins were a band who by 1985 managed to shed half of their North American audience compared to their previous release. Oh the album would be certified platinum here in Canada and the States, but this was the end of the band's commercial run. For Here's to Future Days the band enlisted the ever reliable Nile Rodgers to assist with production, and honestly the album makes a game effort. However I was at best a cursory fan and while I really, really liked "Lay Your Hands on Me" the rest of the songs I could take or leave ... although I was curious to hear what they'd do with The Beatles "Revolution" and now I'm not curious anymore. I'd rather not shit on the album because it's hardly fair. I wanted one song, and I got the song I wanted and it is still an amazing piece of music. To commemorate the occasion I danced by myself in the basement with my f...

In 1983 David Bowie ruled the world. After years of flirting with mainstream success, he was suddenly the flavour of the day. It was the latest strange turn from one of rocks most durable and creative voices.  I'll also freely admit I was not a fan. At all . Not at first. To me he was the guy who did "Space Oddity" and that song weirded me out as a kid. I didn't like it, and thought it sounded terrible. It didn't help that when I was in my teens there was a young Bowie singing a duet with Bing Crosby on a Christmas Special where he mashed up some ridiculous counterpoint "The Little Drummer Boy." I hated it. Ick, phooey. Somehow I'd gotten it into my head that Bowie was unlistenable. He was a dinosaur who kept desperately throwing whatever he could against the wall trying to make anything stick to make so that  his 15 minutes would last a little longer. It didn't matter that there were quite a few of his classic songs that were pretty amazing. I h...

1986 was a great year for music, and the summer soundtrack was particularly good that year. There were two album in my collection that were joined at the hip, Peter Gabriel's So , and Steve Winwood's Back in the High Life . As the summer cooled down Bon Jovi would drop Slippery When Wet , followed closely by Paul Simon's mesmerizing Graceland . Those are just the tip of the iceberg, and are stories for another day. Still when I think of Winwood, I think of Gabriel, I don't know why - they're really nothing alike other than they were a couple of Englishmen who reached their commercial peak at the same time. I'm not going to go back and list off Steve Winwood's other accomplishments with bands like The Spencer Davis Group, Traffic, or that lone Blind Faith album ... the guy had laurels he could have rested on. Heck with all that he was still only 38 (which seemed ancient back then) when he dropped Back in the High Life . By comparison, Tom Petty was 36 and...