Tag Archives: thejacksons

The Stanley Clarke Band: Find Out @ 40

Posted on by

Like several other jazz/rock heroes of the 1970s, Stanley had a distinctly dodgy 1980s.

But the decade had a decent beginning (Rocks, Pebbles And Sand), middle (Find Out, released 40 years ago this month) and end (If This Bass Could Only Talk).

Circa 1989, this writer found a vinyl copy of Find Out in a weird (long-gone) record shop on Hammersmith Broadway called Trax, having no idea that it had ever been released.

As it turned out, the album was a fresh (but false) start for Stanley, arguably his best funk/pop record and a last shot at stardom, complete with ingenious ‘Born In The USA’ cover.

His bass playing could still knock your socks off but here it took a back seat to well-crafted, commercial songs plus a few decent instrumentals, all utilising top LA-based players/engineers/songwriters.

The liner notes reveal all. Many of the keyboards were played by Patrick Leonard, who had just finished a stint as musical director for the Jacksons’ Victory tour and was rehearsing for Madonna’s first US tour during the recording. He also had a hand in several compositions.

Stanley had also recruited his best drummer since Simon Phillips: Rayford Griffin. Their duels match anything he did with Steve Gadd and Gerry Brown during the ‘70s, and Griffin brought great grooves and arrangement-smarts too.

Then there was the presence of teenage soul prodigy Robert Brookins, a fine vocalist and keyboard player who had toured extensively with George Duke in 1983. Finally the album sounds great, helped by superstar engineers Chris Brunt, George Massenburg, Mick Guzauski and Tommy Vicari.

It’s full of catchy, easy-on-the-ear pop/soul tracks like ‘Don’t Turn The Lights Out Yet’, ‘Psychedelic’, ‘What If I Should Fall In Love’, the title track and ‘The Sky’s The Limit’. His Springsteen cover pushes the envelope, opening with a nod to John Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’ and turning into a neat mash-up of rock, electro and old-school hip-hop, with mad bass solo thrown in for good measure.

The two synth-heavy instrumentals are a blast and the album closes with a kind of ‘School Days’ for the ‘80s called ‘My Life’, complete with superbly over-the-top Raymond Gomez guitar playing and Griffin drumming, much-imitated by yours truly back in the day.

Sadly Stanley followed up Find Out with the dismal Hideaway and his solo career arguably lost momentum. He mainly moved over to movie soundtracks in the ‘90s though made a partial return to top solo form in the mid-2000s. But if you want to mainline mid-1980s synth-funk heaven, you could do a lot worse than this.

The 12 Worst Music Videos Of The 1980s

Posted on by

Billy Squier doing his ‘thing’

When MTV launched on 1 August 1981, it was estimated that only 150 music videos were in circulation.

So if the round-the-clock station was going to succeed, it needed new content, and fast. But, mired in the middle of a recession, record companies were initially sceptical about the commercial clout of videos.

That period was short-lived; as record exec Mick Kleber put it in the hilarious book ‘I Want My MTV’, ‘Once Duran Duran started selling records in Oklahoma, it opened everyone’s eyes.’

Suddenly the video department of the major labels was the ONLY department that was expanding. In the rush to fill MTV schedules, production went into overdrive. The likes of Toto, Christopher Cross, Journey, Stevie Nicks, Van Halen, Steve Miller and Chicago – still-big-selling acts from a different generation – were forced to ham it up in front of the camera.

And thank goodness that some of their lamest, most ill-advised attempts are preserved for posterity, and for our delectation. We are pleased to present 11 of the worst clinkers. Here you will find a strange parade of transvestites, mullets, models, douchebags, disco line-dancers and little people. What were the directors thinking? Who knows. And interesting that Andy Summers features in two of these…

12. Robert Fripp/Andy Summers: ‘I Advance Masked’ (1982)

Just a snippet, but a snippet’s more than enough. Fripp reportedly came up with the concept on the spur of the moment for a joke, but was then astonished to turn up for the shoot and find that his idea had been taken seriously. His expression says it all.

11. Chick Corea Elektric Band: ‘Elektric City’ (1985)

From that weird sub-genre of ’80s music video: the jazz-fusion artist looks for a hit. One has to feel particularly sorry for sh*t-hot guitarist Scott Henderson (who didn’t even play on the track!), looking like Screech from ‘Saved By The Bell’, hamming it up against his better judgement, and brilliant jazz dance troupe IDJ.

10. Hall & Oates: ‘Private Eyes’ (1981)

After an unforgivable snare-drum-in-the-wrong-place opening, one of the most unimaginative visual documents in pop history, fronted by an anaemic, manic, clearly uncomfortable Hall. It didn’t stop the single from getting to #1 in the States, though.

9. Billy Joel: ‘Allentown’ (1982)

Actually, Russell Mulcahy’s homoerotic curio would make a pretty good musical. Just putting it out there… (Billy’s appalling ‘The Longest Time’ clip also almost made the cut.).

8. The Police: ‘Wrapped Around The Finger’ (1983)

Directors Godley and Creme’s instructions to the lads seem to have been: look as much of a pr*ck as possible…

7. Billy Squier: ‘Rock Me Tonite’ (1984)

Apparently our Billy was aiming for a homage to ‘American Gigolo’ but ended up with this slightly deranged, camp classic. ‘Directed’ by Kenny Ortega, later famed for ‘High School: The Musical’ and Michael Jackson’s ‘This Is It’.

6. Steve Miller Band: ‘Abracadabra’ (1983)

Boring, boring, boring, boring, boring…

5. Toto: ‘Waiting For Your Love’ (1982)

We’ll leave aside that this is a very ill-advised choice of single off the back of ‘Rosanna’ and ‘Africa’. According to guitarist Steve Lukather, the video was so bad that even MTV wouldn’t play it.

4. Journey: ‘Separate Ways’ (1982)

Could it have been any more unflattering to poor singer Steve Perry? And whose ideas was it to have the guy playing air keyboards? Not to mention that the preyed-upon, obligatory ‘sexy woman’ is obviously a drag queen, when seen in long shot…

3. The Jacksons: ‘Torture’ (1984)

The clue is in the title. Michael obviously got wind of the impending disaster – he didn’t even turn up for the shoot. They used a Madame Tussauds dummy in his place.

2. Chicago: ‘Hard Habit To Break’ (1984)

Great piece of music, horrible video. Lots of ‘sensitive’ men of a certain age longing for a succession of scantily-clad model/actresses.

1. Van Halen: ‘(Oh!) Pretty Woman’ (1982)

Short people? Tick. Transvestite? Tick. Questionable antics? Tick. Ridiculously cheap production values? Tick. Definitely a case of too much bourbon and not enough brains. Roy Orbison’s views on this monstrosity are not recorded…

Are there other stinkers from the 1980s? Of course. Let us know below.

The 5 Creepiest Music Videos Of The 1980s

Posted on by

Peter_gabriel_31081978_02_400In the 1980s, big-name directors generally had no qualms about helming pop videos: Landis, Scorsese, De Palma, Fincher, Peckinpah, Demme, Friedkin and Sayles all brought their visual sense to bear on the medium.

But if you weren’t tying the song in with a movie, you had to interpret the sometimes fairly nonsensical lyrics somehow (begging the question: were ’80s lyricists ever inspired by how their words would be interpreted in a song’s video?).

Given an almost blank slate, it’s fair to say that some directors’ imaginations ran riot; sometimes the storyboards got – how shall we put it kindly – a bit out of hand, riddled with disturbing symbols, disconcerting imagery and creepy concepts.

Here are five of the strangest clips of the decade:

5. David Bowie: ‘Underground’ (1986)
Legendary director Steve Barron (‘Beat It’, ‘Take On Me’) helmed this curio which accompanied David’s appearance in the movie ‘Labyrinth’. The song (which clearly influenced Madonna’s ‘Like A Prayer’ a few years later) seems to be about a young girl’s alienation and initiation into the adult world (‘No one can blame you for walking away… Daddy, daddy, get me out of here!’), echoing the movie’s plot. But the video goes off into very odd tangents: David dissolves into the floor, has a flashback to all his previous personas and then moves into a murky underworld where he becomes an animated character. The disembodied ‘helping hands’ from the movie mime to the gospel backing vocals and David dances with muppets before he rips off his ‘real’ face and becomes a cartoon character forever. Albert Collins’ earthy, raunchy blues licks seem a bit out of place alongside this surreal stew…

4. Laura Branigan: ‘Self Control’ (1984)
‘Exorcist’ director William Friedkin was in charge of this expensive curio. Words are hard to come by. This excellent analysis says it all really. Was the video an influence on Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’?

3. Bonnie Tyler: ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’ (1983)
Directed by another future Hollywood helmer Russell Mulcahy, this expensive weirdorama was filmed at the Holloway Sanatorium, a large, unused Victorian mental hospital in Surrey. It was a very apt choice of location: virginal boarding-school teacher Bonnie seems to be either dreaming or fantasizing about her students participating in various activities including swimming, karate, gymnastics, football, fencing, singing and dancing. As you do. Apparently there’s an urban legend that the boy who shakes Bonnie’s hand at the end is Italian footballer Gianfranco Zola. Let’s hope it’s true.

2. Peter Gabriel: ‘I Don’t Remember’ (1983)
This forbidding track, remixed from Peter Gabriel Plays Live, was never going to get a happy-clappy ‘Sound Of Music’-style vid, but it’s still pretty out-there. There are echoes of Bowie’s ‘Blackstar’ in its conflation of poverty, physical threat, trance-like states and religious reverence. ‘I Don’t Remember’ is certainly one of the most distinctive vids of the mid-’80s but seems way too menacing for wide appeal.

1. The Jacksons: ‘Torture’ (1984)
The track seems to be about the ‘torture’ of relationship breakdown but director Jeff Stein and designer Bryce Walmsley (hi, Bryce!) over-egg the concept something rotten here. It pretty much comes on like a manual for trauma-based mind control. Both Michael and Jermaine refused to appear in the video, which ran over time and over budget, driving its production company into bankruptcy. Almost unbelievably, a wax dummy of Jacko was rented from a Madame Tussaud’s in Nashville and appears in three sequences including the tragic and really quite sad final salute. Stein recalls the shoot as ‘an experience that lived up to the song title’ and says it was so stressful that one of his crew members lost control of her bodily functions. Vigilant Citizen has put together an excellent analysis of the video.

Any more for any more? Let me know below.