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...

For my recent 30th birthday, I received a gift for which I had pined for quite a long time - "Downside Up", the B-Sides and Rarities box set from Siouxsie and The Banshees. Apparently, I had mentioned this to my bandmates Amy and Brandon, and they had somehow remembered this and went out and purchased it for me, much to my surprise! As a result, I am now presenting my tribute to this great band, one who tried to reach out to me several time before finally taking hold. This is the story of how I fell in love with Siouxsie and her banshees. When I was first starting out in the world of musical obsession and pop record collecting, I would get all these different mail-order catalogs, magazines, flyers, etc, because I lived in the middle of Kansas, and the internet wasn't around yet. I had to mail order everything. And, being a farm kid with a budget of $30 a month, I wasn't able to order much of anything, so the big thrill was just looking through those pages and deci...

My college years were not a time where I discovered a lot of new music. With the internet going from a strange mystery to a daily addiction all within my freshman year, I was spending a lot of time researching the bands and artists I had been listening to since childhood, discovering new facts about them and even some unknown albums. I remember sitting in the computer lab in Tomanek Hall at Fort Hays State University and discovering that Tiffany had an album released in Asia called "Dreams Never Die" that I knew nothing about, and that the Thompson Twins had gone on to form a new band called Babble which had put out an album called "The Stone." So, with all this excitement and the fact that I was pretty much completely busy with school and work during this time, it's no wonder that I mainly stuck with what I knew throughout this period. A few notable exceptions of bands that I discovered while in college include Garbage, Whale, and the band that I'm going t...

It is with no small amount of restraint that I attempt to tell this tale without going completely overboard and writing a full-fledged novel. It was, after all, The Thompson Twins who became my first "favorite" band. Although I had dabbled in collecting beginning with Tiffany (I collected all her cassingles and kept them in their own separate carrying case), the Thompson Twins are what started a lifetime of hunting and gathering pop music relics. My earliest, haziest recollection of the Thompson Twins takes place back when my cousin Travis and his family moved out to a very large ranch house and I was helping him unpack, or more likely just obsessively snooping through his belongings. I remember being particularly interested in his "Dynamite" magazine collection. "Dynamite" was one of those full color pop-culture/eductational rags that cool grade schoolers ordered from one of those Weekly Reader type book club pamphlets. Although the magazine was s...

This post goes out by special request of Brandon, so even though this memory is a little fuzzier than others, it's no less important to me. Just forgive me if the chronology is way off. Not that anyone other than myself could really ever know. First, let me say that The Dream Academy is a different type of band than many that I have grown to love over the years, and is also one of the few that I've never had the opportunity to experience live. Whereas most of the bands I like tend to be in a new wave/dance/rock vibe, The Dream Academy is more classical, ethereal and mellow. Of course, Dream Academy takes those elements and applies pop sensibilities to them, as evidenced in their (only) massive hit, "Life In A Northern Town." The way in which I was introduced to this band is still part of one of my fondest childhood memories. Growing up in a relatively poor household on a farm, money was very limited and although I never really felt it was much of a constrain...

I saw Scritti Politti live for the first time last night. In fact, it was their first North American show ever. Back when I was a kid, my family and my mom's sister's family lived very near each other and we would always have separate family vacations in the summer time. We would go to Wyoming or Colorado or South Dakota or somewhere not too far away but at that age still felt like very exotic places. The thing I hated the most about these vacations was being away from my cousins. I was always wishing we could go on vacations together. Anyway, it was 1988 and my cousins were away on their vacation. I took it upon myself to watch MTV and compile a report for my cousin Travis on any new bands coming up while he was gone; as if he was really that concerned. I took my self-imposed task very seriously and, upon his arrival told him about two bands I had seen. The first was Erasure with a video called "Chains of Love." The second was Scritti Politti with a video f...