This week’s Mystery Date is courtesy of a Townsperson in good standing.
Let’s review the ground rules here. The Mystery Date song is not necessarily something I believe to be good. So feel free to rip it or praise it. Rather the song is something of interest due to the artist, influences, time period… Your job is to decipher as much as you can about the artist without research. Who do you think it is? Or, Who do you think it sounds like? When do you think it was recorded? Etc…
If you know who it is, don’t spoil it for the rest. Anyone who knows it can play the “mockcarr option.” (And I’ve got a hunch at least one of you know this one.) This option is for those of you who just can’t hold your tongue and must let everyone know just how in-the-know you are by calling it. So if you know who it is and want everyone else to know that you know, email Mr. Moderator at mrmoderator [at] rocktownhall [dot] com. If correct we will post how brilliant you are in the Comments section.
The real test of strength though is to guess as close as possible without knowing. Ready, steady, go!
[audio:https://www.rocktownhall.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Mystery-Date-032612.mp3|titles=Mystery Date 032612]
I hear a low-rent version of the Police circa 1980. Well, that narrows it down to a few thousand possibilities, doesn’t it?
Did Todd Rundgren do a new-wavy type album?
I know that vocalist from somewhere. This sounds like a band that would’ve been featured on SCTV’s “Fishin’ Musician.”
I don’t know if that’s right (not knowing the identity of our Mystery Date myself), but that seems spot on!
Yeah they are really trying to work the Police angle but I think it’s a few years later. That sounds like the sax from Sting’s first solo album or that big INXS album. Since these guys appear to be working so hard at sounding like someone who has already done the heaving lifting of establishing a commercial sound, I’m going to say this came out in 1986.
“That voice is so familiar…Pass.”
– Austin McGrath, Headline Challenge
I think it sounds a lot like The Motels would have sounded without Martha Davis, i.e. bad.
Yes, this song is probably not so hard to pin down in terms of date and country of origin, but it is a band everybody knows, thus I’m curious to see if anybody nails it.
I would love to learn that this is some band like Dead Kennedys.
I think Tonyola is pretty spot on with the date. I believe the recording was released in 1981.
I’m going to email Mr. Mod a mockcarr option guess since I think I recognized the vocal characteristic right away, and it does fit with the musical time frame.
Guess I’d better tell Mr. Mod who it is, then!
I await your offlist notification. trigmo just played what seems like a reasonable mockcarr option.
Geezus, this is driving me crazy! I have this feeling that this singer — and perhaps also this band — scored at least one massive hit in the early 80s. Maybe it was just a big MTV hit? I KNOW I’ve heard this guy before. It’s on the tip of my brain-tongue!
I kind of like the song itself, except for what’s either backing vocals or some kind of reed instrument that pops up around the :45 mark.
The general New Wave With Horns sound reminds me most of like an Oingo Boingo kind of thing, in as much as I could imagine this song playing over a brief party scene in a lesser ’80s college movie. The singer does have the sort of self-strangled singing voice that Elfman, Andy Partridge and others were using around that time that I often associate with New Wave, but the production doesn’t sound right – at least on my tinny work speakers – to throw Elfman/Oingo Boingo out as a guess. It’s got to be some kind of contemporary, though, like pre-Wang Chung Wang Chung?
It also occurs to me listening to this that Billie Joe Armstrong from Green Day is a bit more unexpectedly indebted to the singer here and Elfman/Partridge types as far as his vocal phrasing, yeah?
Is this some kind of radio session or something? It sounds too rough to be a studio recording, but there’s no audience noise.
Australian?
I’m with alexmagic and guessing Wang Chung.
Alex and ladymisskirroyale – Yup! It’s an early recording of Wang Chung, when their name was Huang Chung. Congratulations?
That voice is very “distinctive.” I had heard that he needed pitch control when he recorded.
One of the more esoteric records in my collection, that song is from a compilation of live performances at the “101 Club,” which was apparently in Clapham (sp?). I happened across mp3s of this album at this blog, which has some fun things to peruse:
http://www.lostturntable.com/?p=1483
I’ve not played this record in eons, but I remember thinking that the songs by a band called “Fay Ray” were the best of the lot. But then, all things are relative.
Well done! I never would have come up with it, but once Wang Chung was thrown out there I more or less convinced myself it must be so, based on the voice.
Growing up, my mother used to frequently invoke, “This is like Clapham Junction” to refer to places or times that were very, very busy. The first time that I sat on a train at that junction (South London), I just about died. It wasn’t very busy at that moment, but does have multiple rail lines running through it.
Huh, I kinda backed into that one. I wasn’t convinced it was them, never having heard the “Hunag Chung” stuff, I just couldn’t think of any other band besides them who it could have been.
I was going by era: thinking who had horns in their music (as in “Dance Hall Days” and “Everybody Have Fun Tonight”, the only songs by them I really remember anyway) yet wouldn’t have had slick production at the time that you’d associate with all the New Wave/MTV bands who did have horns at the time, which means whoever it was wouldn’t have “broken” for another year or two. So I had it down to being either Wang or an alternate universe Haircut 100.
As I said above, it’s not too bad, but I also don’t think “Dance Hall Days” is terrible, either.
Hey, I did guess right! The voice was instantly familiar, and by the end of the verse I’d placed it.
I find their first album Points on the Curve quite good. Their second album, the soundtrack for To Live and Die in L.A. is 50% instrumental, a very good mix of driving synth bass and drums, and songs that capture the frantic / white knuckle, dreary twilight moods of the movie.
Thanks for the plug.
Thanks for the rip of the theme song to “The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh,” I’ve been torturing people with it for days now!
Hey — I ripped that years ago for Thrifty Music!