Enjoy the Silence is one of the first vinyls I ever bought, still have it in my collection somewhere........ Aside from the fact that Depeche Mode is IMHO one of the great bands of the 80's, Anton Corbijn's black and white video's made them into classic 80's style icons.....
It shows the influence mood and atmosphere (and television) can have on the perception you have from a song. When it comes to Depeche Mode, I guess I first heard a lot of them through videoclips on television. Whenever I hear them on the radio or CD, I undoubtedly still link them to images from those vids.
Mood setting counts for a lot when you listen to music. Maybe it's just me, but when I listen to songs (especially Wave, Goth or even stuff like The Smiths, Cranberries, Leonard Cohen, ....) my favorite setting is the darkness of night with just the small blue Neon lights shining from the Equalizer or Winamp's metallic/blue dashboard on the computer.
When I bought my new computer, I made sure to choose one with blue neon's just for that reason.
I love the extra atmosphere it brings...... it makes me wander back in time, drift between memories, ....... but as I said, maybe that's just me.......
To end today's post, another one of those Smith's songs.....
This clip is probably the one I prefer, cause it's very close to the pictures on the album covers..... and that blond girl is intriguingly beautiful.......
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. Aldous Huxley - Music at Night
The Sisters of Mercy - Walk Away
Never saw the clip of Walk Away until I discovered Youtube/Myspace. It's just amazing the stuff you can find there: Clips, TV fragments from series of the 50's to now, interviews, ..... it's just endless.
And the amazing part is that you can find almost anything you're looking for! I was searching for footage of several obscure New Wave bands and actually found it. From clips from the Virgin Prunes, over Grauzone (Eisbär) to The Fields of the Nephilim.... it's all there.
Guess this means there are other nutjobs like me who actually like this stuff and collect it.
The clip above reminds of those 70's clips with stroboscopes and laser tunnels (a bit like Bowie's Heroes video). Always great to see the Sisters singing in smoke with dampened blue lights, black clothes and sunglasses.....
He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it. Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Jeff Buckley - Grace
Grace...... just thinking about that song does something to me.......
I was 21 or 22 when I discovered Jeff Buckley, more or less around the time he died actually. A couple of friends had seen him live some time before and told me I really had to listen to his music, I remembered his name when I was looking in the CD boxes of a second hand shop and grabbed it more or less by hazard, since I just wanted something new to listen to. It was just incredible...... not a single weak song on the entire album. From Grace to Hallelujah over Mojo Pin...... I probably bought the CD 7 or 8 times since, giving my copy away to friends who've never heard of him, such as to make them discover his music.
Another one of those artists who died way before his time and became part of music legend..... I can still kick myself for not having gone to his live performance in Belgium.....
If you don't know Buckley's music, just look at the clip, listen to the lyrics and the sound and remember he drawned a couple of years after he wrote this song.....
The Sundays - Here's Where The Story Ends
Another one of those end-of-the-'80s tunes. Most people will know the song, but don't ask them who'se singing it.
The Sundays actually had a couple of hits, and the album (Carved in Sand) is pretty decent. But this song really stands out.
Great voice, great lyrics and hypnotising music.... The Cranberries avant-là-lettre if you want....
The Stranglers.... you can probably get high by simply listening to some of their songs. I'm not going to talk about the lyrics of Golden Brown or try to explain the influence of "mind broadening substances" on music.... Suffice it to say The Stranglers made the most of their personal experimentations and were able to put part of their experiences into music.
First time I heard Strange Little Girl, it gave me shivers (a bit like the first time that I read Jeanie's lyrics (Falco) or when I started to figure out what Emma was all about). It's a wonderful song, full of emotions and feelings which are hard to describe, but which we all recognise....
First time you hear songs like this, thoughts that go through you're head: "That song really reflects how I feel", "Nothing gets me like this song does" and a whole bunch of similar stuff...... Thing is, there are actually quite a few songs that seem to have the same effect on the same individual, whilst being totally uncomparable. For me, The Girl with the Far Away Eyes (The Rolling Stones), Max (Paolo Conte), Johnny & Mary (Robert Palmer), Dear God (XTC), We've Only Just Begun (The Carpenters), Against All Odds (Phil Collins), Halo (Texas) .... and dozens of others literally make me plunge back in nostalgia and melancholy.
Since the end of the '80s, a lot of contemporary artists have covered a lot of those songs, with mitigated succes. More often than not, the cover versions tend to emphasize on the nostalgia aspect (the fact that people recognise some of the tunes and are automatically attracted to them, thus boosting sales), but without creating the same effect on our other senses. There are of course many exceptions (The Sisters of Mercy their version of Emma is just wonderful, Eloïse by The Damned, Everything's Gone Green by Razed in Black, ....), but the majority remains very pale, often even shameful versions of the originals.
Tori Amos - Strange Little Girl
I was rather amazed that Tori Amos (whose music I like a lot) made a remake of this classic Stranglers' song. Don't know why she did it, but a gut feeling says she probably had very strong emotions about the original version. I'm still not sure whether I really like it or not, but it's definitely something special.....
Not all of us might have a future, but we all have a past...... That's one of the few certainties in life.
I have a tendancy to live in my past, to think about times gone by over and over again..... Not always a good thing to be honest, cause I remember sad moments very vividly, whereas the good moments in life often loose a lot of their importance over time. There are, however, a few exceptions to this rule. I guess in my case, the defining moment of joy in my life has become the birth of my son, Alexander. Compared to him, everything else, including myself, has become meaningless........
That doesn't mean I stopped living or that there aren't any other memories and persons that matter a lot to me, it just means that I would do anything I can .... anything... to make him happy...... He is the most important thing in my life. He is my past, present and future.....
Joy Division....
Love will Tear us Apart is just an incredible song...
It becomes even more gripping when you know that Ian Curtis' wife (Deborah) used the title as an inscription on Ian's grave after he committed suicide at age 23.....
I don't know the facts behind his suicide, but his epilepsy attacks, depressions and impending divorce probably played a major part in it. Those things probably also shaped his music.....
By dying the way he did, he joined a cast of others whom would probably never have reached cult status if they were still alive today, which is a tragedy in itself.
It was fun for a while There was no way of knowing Like dream in the night Who can say where we´re going No care in the world Maybe i´m learning Why the sea on the tide Has no way of turning
Roxy Music - More than this
Tubeway Army - Are Friends Electric
1979..... The year The Cure released Boys don't Cry...... The year Apocalypse Now was showing in theatres.....
Has it been that long, was I so young at the time.......?
Gary Numan / Tubeway Army's Are Friends Electric is an anthem for that period. When you look at both clips, I just wish I had been 19 in 1979...... Those images, that style, the atmosphere,.... I was too young to realise it, but it was the beginning of an era when everything that still matters to me, was shaped and imagined. Sounds and musical/lyrical combinations that were never heard off. The upcoming of New Wave and the demise of Punk Rock, the availability of home computers like the Commodore 64 and the Amiga 500. Atari's uprise and the popularity of Arcade games. The creation of Apple/Microsoft/.....
Things that seem prehistoric nowadays where top of the line back then. One thing remains though: the music they created then is still withstanding the test of time and a lot of these songs are still being covered at this time. Whenever I hear any of Numan's classics, they seem to withstand the test of time. I don't know how he feels about his music, but his songs are more "art" than music if you ask me. He kind of opened the way for many other styles and groups like Kraftwerk and an entire Goth/Wave/Synthesizer scene discovered new paths to explore.
There are a lot of Tubeway Army / Gary Numan songs I like: We are Glass,Dark, ... but Cars and Are Friends Electric remain the ones I like the most and which I relisten to quite frequently.
