Letting it out: My 80ies Guilty Pleasure ...

[Dave W]

[chromium]

Funny, that's one of the '80s bands I DID like!

You aren't the only Men Without Hats fan. There's even a Facebook group dedicated to finding the identity of the girl in the Safety Dance video.

The keys player from Men Without Hats bought one of my synth (ribbon) controllers a while back.  It looked like the one below, but in a whitewash finish to match his Moog Voyager.

Nice guy (apparently has a dental practice in Canada, IIRC), and I had no idea they were still around as a band

[chromium]

I still occasionally listen to Iron Maiden, the early Metallica stuff, Judas Priest, Ratt, and some of the other hair bands...

Still enjoy some of the new wave stuff:


...and some other things I'd listen to back then:

[4stringer77]

I remeber the 80's. and the 90's and other instances in the 90's reminiscing about the 80's like on Beavis & Butthead.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ct8Unbdxk3E&playnext=1&list=PL413D8795D99CC56A&feature=results_main
Daryl Hall's doing a nice job on his Live at Daryl's house.

This is one of the first harder rock videos I remember. Why's the lead singer look so effeminate?


Every time I hear this tune I remember the smell of feet, swamp ass and butered popcorn from the Roller skate rink that used to always play it.

[ack1961]

Some pretty great memories dug up from this thread.
I wore that Romantics album out when it was released. I got a chance to see them at  small club on K St. in DC - that was a fun night.  Saw the Psychedelic Furs there that night as well.
I still listen to Men Without Hats and am not entirely ashamed of it at all - there's a few really cool tunes on that album.
I fell in love with X, Social Distortion and The Cult in the 80's  - Spy V. Spy, Echo and the Bunnymen, Flash and the Pan...some great stuff.

There are some 80's bands that a lot of people love that I'll never figure out:
The Thompson Twins - I never got it - not for a second.
John Taylor is one helluva bass player - I've always thought so, but the number of Duran-Duran tunes I can stomach is pretty limited. I love the bassline in Last Chance of the Stairway.  I was just trying to play it about 20 minutes ago. I don't look or play like John Taylor.
..and all the wannabe bands: skid row, poison, crue, bon jovi, etc...some bad juju by all those guys - they made the 80's a laughable decade by comparison to the previous 2.

Have some Echo - great bassline in Crocodiles:

[gweimer]

And, squeezing into the '80s in '89 is this band.

[gweimer]

[Granny Gremlin]

Daryl Hall's doing a nice job on his Live at Daryl's house.

Maneater grabbed me on first listen in my mom's kitchen and I still love that track.  

This was a one hit wonder (I checked them out a  little, everything else by them is just as mushy cheesey, but without the redeeming quality of having just about the most brilliant chorus you could expect from such a bunch of closeted modernist art school preppies) I first heard in the dentist's office (but got a lot of rotation at Chez My Mom's Kitchen):



... that one (official vid) isn't embedding for some reason, so lets try this TOTP one (I am really tickled by how they put them on right after a particularly gothfetished-out Banshees; British humour at it' finest or just recycling Monty Python gags?):



... and speaking of Siouxsie, JuJu is one of the best albums ever. Easily more consistently solid than it's most similar competition (and incestuous cousin): The Cure's Disntegration.  Despite a few things I said about the openning track earlier, I am rather fond of The Cure, and that record is pretty good, but I don't agree with the cult of it.  It's not that consistently good to me, with just Lullaby as a really solid standout track (honourable metion to Pics of You which most likely got Smith and Gallup inundated with panties, and certainly helped a lot of the rest of us common sods out a bit too, but don't even try to raise Fascination Street with me; can't stand it).  My fave of theirs is Boys Don't Cry (not the title track in particular, the entire record is solid front to back, as is Wish, with just the forgivable lowpoint of Friday I'm in Love).

[Dave W]

The keys player from Men Without Hats bought one of my synth (ribbon) controllers a while back.  It looked like the one below, but in a whitewash finish to match his Moog Voyager.

Nice guy (apparently has a dental practice in Canada, IIRC), and I had no idea they were still around as a band

I found this from last month. Seems the current Men Without Hats is Ivan and younger hired musicians. And the interviewers didn't say a word about Ivan wearing a hat now. 

[Granny Gremlin]

The vid for Sideways (one of my fave songs by MwoH) has all of them wearing hats; it's running joke (and not a very good one).

LOL, one of the new bandmembers - the Asian Skrillex fan (I ain't one to talk these days, though I maintain my current haircut is based on what the older skater kids were wearing in grade school/Nelson's bully henchman from the Simpsons), messed up the annoying keyboard bit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=fvwp&v=mySv0PLANyU

[gearHed289]

The FIXX were pigeonholed as another "haircut band", but there was SO much beyond the hits (Stand or Fall, Red Skies, One Thing Leads to Another, Saved by Zero, Are We Ourselves?, Secret Separation). I always thought of them as a prog rock band without the overplaying. Dan K Brown is a great bass player, and between him and Sting, I learned a lot about making creative use of empty space. They remained active long after the 80s faded, and just this year put out a great new record called Beautiful Friction. Cy Curnin is damn near David Bowie and Peter Murphy as a singer in my opinion. Missing Persons was another fav. I didn't get into Duran until after the fact, but I really like a lot of their stuff now. John Taylor was a pretty inventive guy, often slightly changing up his bass lines from one verse to the next.

[TBird1958]

I think The Fixx were totally underated as well, I really enjoy a lot of their music - Great stuff.

Somewhere on my computer I have an isloated track of John Taylor's bass for "Girls on Film" - It is genius.   

[Granny Gremlin]

My last post in the Mcartney/Nirvana thread reminded me that I forgot to mention the Poppies.  These guys perfected the art of pop culture sampling:





but you probably know them more for Wise Up Sucker or Ich Bin Ein Auslander.

... and some of the samples in that remind me that Paul's Boutique blew my mind repeatedly (I think it was KRS-One that said he could have ripped 15 records off of the material on Paul's Boutique).... and also confirmed that the Beasties were wittier than everybody thought and Licensed to Ill totally flew right over everyone's head.

[Highlander]

It has to be a guilty pleasure, right...? lots of stuff sneaked in...



The outro "solo" always made me think Taylor had been listening to early Neil Young stuff...



Hebridean roots always leant me to favouring this one... not their best, but...



Guilty as charged... just stood stunned when they played this live and watching the NASA sponsored big-screen video...

[westen44]

I've been looking back at some of the stuff I listened to in the 80s.  I think my taste really wasn't very good.  It's like I was listening from the perspective of a non-bassist, too.  Golden Earring is the only band I listened to in the 80s that I still listen to on a consistent basis now.