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| From | "Stewart Mason" <craigtorso@verizon.net> |
| Subject | Re: one hitter |
| Date | Fri, 10 Jun 2005 16:21:46 -0400 |
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----- Original Message -----
From: "kcronin" <fiatluxury@yahoo.com>
>> I absolutely LOVED "It Must Be Love."
>
> I did too, but it was because it was a minor club hit
> in the punkrock juice-bar teen dance places in Chicago
> - Medusa's and McGreivie's, specifically, but also the
> short-lived Student Body and the more metal-oriented
> Thirsty Whale - they'd play it as a breather between
> The Cure, Siouxsie, Hazy Fantazy, The Cult, New Order,
> Smiths, etc...I don't remember it on the radio at all,
> though I wouldn't doubt it made college stations. I
> also very much loved "wings of a dove," but again, was
> only introduced to that because i knew them from "Our
> House." (Oh, you know, now I'm thinking of it, I think
> "House of Fun" had a video too.)
This is just further proof of how subjective things are, but more
importantly, of how you used to have regional hits. Madness were very
big in Boulder, Colorado: earlier singles like "One Step Beyond,"
"Night Boat To Cairo" and "Baggy Trousers" got a lot of airplay on
KBCO, the local freeform-shading-into-new wave station, which jumped
on "Our House" when it was still a UK import single off THE RISE AND
FALL, months before the bastardized MADNESS compilation ever came out.
They were also in regular rotation on FM/TV, the local public TV
station's late-night video show. There were a lot of fervent Madness
fans in my junior high circa 1981-82, me among them. As a general
rule, if you were into Madness, your other big bands were the Jam, the
Vapors and, above all, the Beat.
In Boulder in the early '80s, Madness were big, but the English Beat
were friggin' superstars: they sold out a three-night stand at the
Rainbow Theater in Denver in the fall of '82, and two days before U2's
big career-making concert at Red Rocks, the Beat sold *that* huge
venue out (with Bow Wow Wow in the middle slot and some unknown baby
band from Georgia called R.E.M. as the openers). I was at both. The
Beat were better. Sadly, they broke up about three weeks later; I
have no doubt that their next album would have busted them nationwide.
S
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