Love is a Stranger

My Dad was an Eurythmics fan. I don't know how it is he took a shine to their music, but not to that of any of the other synth-pop duos of the day, but there it is. He had copies of the Sweet Dreams and Revenge LPs. I'd been a fan too, since falling for their song 'The Walk', which I'd long assumed had been the lead single from Sweet Dreams, but no, wikipedia tells me it came out after 'This is the House'.

It's hard to believe in retrospect that the immediately seductive 'Love is a Stranger' was only the third single from the album (only to be re-issued anew in the wake of the great success of 'Sweet Dreams' (the song)). It sounds fantastic given the room to breathe on a 12" single. I've always loved the video for the song, too.

Of the two tracks on the B side, the first 'Let's Just Close Our Eyes' is a synth-heavy reworking of 'The Walk' which I like much less than the original. The second track, 'Monkey, Monkey' features those words chanted out (along with some other distorted, indeciperhable vocals) over a hypnotic electronic beat.

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All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

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Onslow

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...

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