Skip to main content

Friends

I distinctly recall seeing Jeffrey Daniel's famous 1982 appearance on Top of the Pops promoting 'A Night to Remember': which introduced "body-popping" to a fascinated British public. The song, and the three other hit singles that followed it ('I Can Make You Feel Good', 'There It Is' and 'Friends') were very often on the radio and TV that year - and I found them pleasant enough, but my musical attention (such as it was, when I glanced up from my new Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer) focussed more on the likes of Madness, Soft Cell, The Fun Boy Three, XTC and Yazoo.

Why then should it be that on picking up a copy of Shalamar's Friends at a charity shop six months ago, seeing those song-titles in the track-listing should provoke such a heady surge of affectionate nostalgia? Snippets of the music began playing in my head, and I thought that for the £1 asking price it was well worth taking it home to see how I'd enjoy the album. I liked it very well indeed - and it's found its way back on to my turntable a few times since. I can't say I've formed a considered opinion of the "other" tracks yet, but the album flows together nicely as a well-crafted unit, and there are no duds on it.

The copy I bought is a German-made one with a nicely-designed gatefold sleeve featuring fine pictures of this photogenic group: on the front, Howard Hewett is shown holding a bass, and Jeffrey Daniel a "Flying-V" style guitar - I don't know why Jody Watley couldn't also be furnished with an instrument. As it was, the three of them only contributed vocals to the album, with Hewett and Watley also getting a few co-writing credits between them.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4.  An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Influencías

In my original blogging days, I would occasionally run giveaways to offload unwanted books or CDs to whomever claimed them. Sometimes the recipients would offer to send me something in return. It was in this way that, ca. 2007, a Catalan correspondent sent me Influencías: a CD of perfomances by the Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals. The CD begins with Maurice Ravel's renowned string quartet: I hadn't known the piece before receiving this disc, but I was sold on it by this fresh & bright performance. Next is a quartet called 'Vistes al Mar' by the Catalan composer Eduardo Toldrá. Its evocative maritime movements are prefaced by recitations of poems by Joan Maragall, a Catalan author whose works directly inspired the piece. Lastly there's an arrangement of Joaquín Turina's atmospheric 'Oración del Torero', originally composed for a lute quartet. I'm on the fence about the cover photo: it's a well-composed picture & not a bad idea, but with 2...
Post a Comment
Read more