leftovers

The year was 2002. My favorite band, The Human League, was part of a retro concert package in the UK (the Here and Now Tour) which included many other 80s bands. One of them I had never heard of, but was getting rave reviews from my overseas friends who were able to attend. The band was Altered Images and they were best known for a song called "Happy Birthday," which I didn't think I had ever heard before. I was record shopping at Aron's in Hollywood one weekend while they were having a parking lot sale. At this time, I was DJing two nights a week at Gold 9, so I was buying a lot of albums, especially when I could find them for cheap! I found Altered Images "Bite" at this sale and shortly thereafter began to play it quite a bit in my apartment, where I had my turntables set up as kind of my own little nightclub. I was immediately drawn to lead singer Clare Grogan's voice, and the lush pop of "Don't Talk To Me About Love." From...

The Thompson Twins. They were my very first favorite band. I've been with them through the ups and downs, and the fall before last I finally got to see their songs performed by Tom Bailey, the frontman who was most responsible for the band's actual music anyway. Of course I would have preferred to see the whole band live, but it was really more than I ever imagined would happen anyway and was an amazing experience. Collecting these albums was a journey for me, the first of many similar journeys as I found and fell in love with other bands throughout my life time, but the Twins will always be the one that started it all! 10. Ether (Babble) 1996 The second and final release by Babble, the band the Thompson Twins eventually morphed into, is not really a bad album per se.  It's very chill and ambient and therefore easy to throw on in the background, but as a result it's just not that memorable. The only songs that stand out for me are "Hold the Sky," ...

My first favorite band was The Thompson Twins. I don't know how or why. When I was at the age where someone decides that they have a favorite band, something about the Twins spoke to me and I just became obsessed. While many people quickly move on from the bands and artists they liked as a child, I am not one of those people. Thompson Twins are still a favorite of mine, but over the years, other bands have replaced them in the top spot. One such band, The Human League, has been with me for almost as long. They had been one of my favorite bands since I was about 12 or so, but they moved in to first place probably around the summer after my senior year in high school, when they released "Octopus." Here are all their studio albums ranked from least favorite, to favorite! 10.  HYSTERIA 1984 The dreaded follow up Considering they are my favorite band, I obviously wouldn't say Human League have ever made a totally awful album, but this one is definitely the closest t...

A couple of weekends ago, I had a true '80s flashback, with the release of the new Duran Duran album, the Belinda Carlisle show at the Fonda Theatre, and ending the weekend with the Fireworks Finale at the Hollywood Bowl with the B-52's! I discovered the B's the summer before my 8th grade year, when the video for "Channel Z" was getting airplay on MTV. I thought they were a new band (I've told this whole story before here ) and they quickly became my favorite band for a few years! I loved going record shopping and finding their older albums and singles. For a band that has been around for so long, they really haven't made any bad albums (of course, they have not been all that prolific), so this list was very hard to rank. I do love every album of theirs, but for the sake of this blog I am going to have to make some tough decisions to rank them from least favorite to favorite, so here we go! 8. GOOD STUFF 1992 Let me be clear: I love ALL of the B-52...

Duran Duran's 14th album came out last Friday, so in honor of their amazing career I thought I'd rank all of their studio albums! Duran Duran has been one of my favorite bands since I can remember. They were at the height of their popularity just as I was starting to become aware of pop culture and listening to the radio. Their songs were played on the radio all the time when I was around 8 years old, and they were the favorite band of my cousin, Travis, who I idolized. So naturally I became interested in them and followed their career through the highs and the lows. I remember being in my cousin Scott's wedding when I was a junior in high school, and on the drive there, the DJ announced that "Ordinary World" was #1, and that song was from what has become known as "The Wedding Album" which was very fitting and special for me on that day. Several years later, in college, is when I went from being more of a superficial fan (I really only had known their si...

On August 15, 1998, after convincing my brother and our friend Randy to drive with me from Hays to Chicago, I saw The Human League live for the first time. It was the first time I had been to Chicago, the first time I saw one of my favorite bands live, and the first time I went to a concert by myself. It was one of those life changing experiences. Before that, I had just bought records, tapes and CD's of my favorite bands and hoped that I might catch their videos on MTV or see photos of them in Rolling Stone or some other magazine. With the Internet came the ability to find out even more about these bands, and when I found out that The Human League, a band I had been collecting records of since I was about 10, was going to be touring the US I just had to go. I've blogged about this journey previously so I won't go into details about it again. Before the past weekend, I had seen the band five times since then. August 17, 2003 at House of Blues in West Hollywood, CA (al...