The Jags. Evening Standards.

I have this fantasy that the sleeve for this album got made first and then handed to the band with instructions to make an album that would fit inside it. Because nothing else could have produced the synesthetic mesh of image and sound found here. It may not be an unjustly overlooked classic of new wave power-pop, but it may have unintentionally created its iconic apotheosis. Four nattily dressed lads stand looking studiedly aloof in front of the clean lines of a bauhausian office building beneath a romantically airbrushed turquoise sky. Sort of a cross between The Cars portraits on the back of Candy O and The Feelies Crazy Rhythms. The Jags themselves sound (a lot) like early Elvis Costello, and were in fact dismissed by critics as unworthy imitators when this was released in 1980. I was actually never a big fan of Costello, so this doesn't bother me, as I don't consider him terribly sacred. Their song Back of My Hand made the Top 40 and is occasionally resurrected on power-pop comps, but they never quite equaled it or scored another trip to the mainstream. It is undoubtedly the catchiest song on the album, but the rest of the songs are strong, punchy bundles of crisp, nervous energy, and to the people who encountered them, they're very fondly remembered.

Here's the problem, though. Either someone in the Jags had very recently been dumped, or they were just generally misogynist pricks (could be both/and). It seems like eighty percent of the songs on here are about how women are this stupid, sadistic alien species with the single-minded goal of breaking men's hearts, fucking with their lives, trapping them into bourgeois marriages and—of course—doing all this with men who aren't them. I know, I know...these sort of attitudes towards women are so common in popular music that if I had to edit out all the bands that weren't perfectly feminist, there would be precious little left to listen to. I'm hoping to get a copy of Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music for my birthday. Writing of the Sex Pistols' Bodies she said

It was an outrageous song, yet I could not simply dismiss it with outrage. The extremity of its disgust forced me to admit that I was no stranger to such feelings---though unlike Johnny Rotten I recognized that disgust, not the body, was the enemy. And there lay the paradox: music that boldly and aggressively laid out what the singer wanted, love, hated---as good rock and roll did---challenged me to do the same, and so, even when the content was antiwoman, antisexual, in a sense antihuman, the form encouraged my struggle for liberation. Similarly, timid music made me feel timid, whatever its ostensible politics.

They Jags may not be political in their stance, but the feathery-haired guy who sort of looks like Bruce Campbell on the cover is a pretty sharp songwriter and clearly has a vision he wants to communicate. It's the typical vision of nice guys turned bad boys due to not being given the pussy they so clearly deserve, but at least he owns it heart and soul. If guys start bands to be more attractive to women, I will never understand why they then go on to write songs insulting women and generally calling them heartless sluts for dating guys who weren't them before they had their own stage. Especially when you consider that (at least in the 80's) women were the primary audience for and consumers of new wave and power-pop music. Who did The Jags think their audience was? Who were they writing to?

Their saving grace is that the music is really catchy and choosing pleasure is its own kind of rebellion. Also, without the lyrics sheet I rarely know what the singer is singing about. It's just that...when you do read them—jeebus they can be pretty bad. Woman's World outright states in the chorus that It's a woman's world we live in / And a woman don't think straight, handily pointing out the confusing, oppressive, and flighty pussyarchy white male rock stars are forced to live under.

Then there's their one hit, Back of My Hand. Pandagon was talking about giving out fake phone numbers to get creepy guys to leave you alone at bars, and how women aren't entitled to the space to just be out with their friends. It was in response to this post at The Hairpin about how stalkery guys can be in those situations, and it made me think of this song, which sounds at first to be about getting a woman's phone number, but is actually full of thinly veiled threats of violence. With the double meanings of "I've got your number" (I have your phone number / I know what kind of person you areand what sort of sneaky thing you're up to) adding "written on the back of my hand" makes it pretty clear that he's threatening to hit the woman in question for the sin of not calling him for dates. Savor this run of lyrics and see what you think:

You only call me if you're feeling blue
You tell me I don't pay attention to you
But if you only knew just what I'm going through
You wouldn't phone those guys who mess around with you girl
...
You're not unreadable, you're not unbeatable
I know just what you are, don't push your luck too far
You're not untouchable, not just another girl
I get in touch with you, I only wish you knew...
I got your number written on the back of my hand
I got your number...

The weird thing is that I remember there being a lot of masculine gender panic over insufficiently manly new wave acts in the 80's, which was coupled with anxiety/resentment that this style was supposedly being driven by sexual young women having the hots for this new, androgynous version of the male. So to find this kind of sexual push back—a warning to women to know their place—in the songs that helped inspire that panic is odd to say the least. It seems like for every gain women achieve in regards to freedom and pleasure, there's a backlash—even within the cultural items that women's choices have helped make successful.

Evening Standards

Girls at Our Best. Pleasure.

Teen sexual health and information website Scarleteen is starting a new project to help young people find or recommend quality doctors. It’s called Find-A-Doc. Scarleteen founder Heather Corrina explains:

We all know one of the best ways to find quality sexual healthcare and other in-person care services is by asking people we know and trust for a recommendation. But that can be difficult, especially for young people: so many are either ashamed about sexual healthcare and other related services, or are afraid that disclosing they’ve had care will result in a breach of their privacy. Many young people don’t even get care they need in the first place, so don’t know anyone to refer someone else to, especially in areas where services are limited or where seeking out services presents a profound personal risk.

We know you can’t always get a good recommendation in-person, so we’re aiming to build the next best thing

Readers can use our new online tool to find out who Scarleteen users around the world have gotten great care from that they’d personally recommend, and see listings of care services our staff, volunteers and allies know to be bonafide. Or, you can enter your own review to help others find services they need from providers you know are great, or add your review of a provider or service to an existing listing. If you’re a service provider, you can enter information about your clinic, center or practice and it will be published for review. Any of the above can be done anonymously, so no one has to worry about privacy.

The project covers doctors and health facilities that provide sexual and reproductive healthcare, STI/STD testing and treatment, birth control and emergency contraception, pregnancy testing and all-options counseling, abortion services, pre-natal care, obstetrics and midwife services, counseling, therapy and support groups, trans gender and gender-variant services, LGBTQ services, teen specific services, rape/abuse crisis services, and shelters and crisis housing. You can also target your search for non-English speakers, disability access, and cost. The plan is to make this worldwide, so if you need a doctor or have one to recommend, head on over there.

And now on to the album at hand.

An unjustly forgotten classic, Girls at Our Best’s sole album falls somewhere between post-punk, twee pop, and new wave—combining elements from Siouxsie-style artiness to Gang of Four’s punk-funk to general power pop, with the occasional nod to disco, music-hall, and surf rock thrown in to boot. It’s a delightfully fun romp from a period when young bands were willing to try on whatever random sound struck their fancy.

Formed in Leeds in 1979, the band (actually featuring only one girl) played the scene without much success and were about to break up when they saw an ad for a recording studio offering half-off rates. Their resulting single was released on Rough Trade and managed to go to the top of the indie charts, as did their follow up. In 1981, the singles and b-sides were collected together as an album (reissued here with some additional tracks, and available again as an expanded album from Cherry Red) after which the band wandered off, never to be heard from again.

It’s punk/new wave with a light touch. Their sunny exuberance and choir-girl falsetto clearly set the tone for later C-86 bands like Talulah Gosh, Flatmates, and the Siddeleys. Like the Au Pairs, a lot of their songs can be read as humorous, somewhat feminist critiques of politics, pop culture, and capitalism, but they don’t have as coherent a philosophy and they’re putting more of their energy into writing pogo-riffic melodies.

Just a note of warning: The lead single, Getting Nowhere Fast is intentionally cut off before the end of the song. It kinds of bugs me when bands do that, but whatever.

Pleasure

My Favorite. The Happiest Days of Our Lives.

The ghosts of dead teenagers sing to me while I am dancing.

Speaking of nostalgia, I was a total classic rock snob in high school. If the band hadn’t existed prior to 1970, I wasn’t interested. There were occasional cracks—an REM tape inherited from a friend, an abiding love for The Cars (who I still think were highly underrated, despite being popular)—but for the most part, I listened to The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Simon & Garfunkel, and Buddy Holly. I considered dance music the bane of my existence. Groove Is In the Heart was wildly popular during my senior year, and I wanted to stab it in its shiny, happy face. As a teenager with insufferable hippie pretensions, there was nothing I hated more than mindless happiness. I reveled in miserabilism and wanted my music to do the same. If it wasn’t whiny, depressive navel-gazing then it wasn’t about anything, maannnn. So fuck you guys coping through communal ritual and physical ecstasy, because I’m going to my room where I am a rock, I am an island. (I’m reminded of Robyn Hitchcock’s line that “It’s the privilege of youth and beauty to hate themselves”).

Thankfully, Fuchsia introduced me to all sorts of 80’s alternative, goth, and college rock, and eventually the power of a good beat was more than I could resist. It was a revelation—I could dance and be depressed! Now, of course, all the best dance music carries sadness in its heart, even at its most escapist. My Favorite understood this dichotomy perfectly and crafted an elegiac love letter to those intense days when it felt like everything in the world could break your heart, but you still really wanted to dance and get laid. So now I’m nostalgic for a band creating meta nostalgia for a scene that I had no interest in when I was actually living through it.

Michael Grace lives in a scintillating twilight world of gray New Order melodies and Andrea Vaughn has the sort of cool, clear, schoolgirl voice you used to find on Sarah Records releases. They understood the comfort of being sad, but they also found the humor in it. Their lyrics are positively littered with throwaway couplets of bitter wit: Loneliness is pornography to them but to us it is an art. They won’t read your biography , these men, they will only break your heart…Your darkness is brighter than all the lights in the disco tonight…The streets were crawling with vampires, because after your shelf life expires you’re not a kid, you’re a monster…I spent five years in the infirmary but he never sent me letters. He only sent me dirty polaroids…I wear her dreams like a badge, pinned upon the wrong uniform...

The standout is the devastating Homeless Club Kids (especially the Future Bible Heroes remix on the second disc). Over a beautifully melancholy melody, Andrea eulogizes the lost kids trying to escape the daytime world through a new type of family on the dancefloor. The kids see themselves as “indivisible”, but Vaughn can see their eventual doom (whether through actual death or the eventual death of all youthful dreams). Like a less jaded version of Pulp’s Sorted for E’s and Wizz, Homeless Club Kids can’t help but wonder: Are you a shimmering, transcendent beast moving as one organism, or just a bunch of awkward kids in a warehouse basement? Well, both probably, just as Vaughn both mourns their loss while wishing she were one of them. As the song fades out, she’s walking home with their voices still in her ears, “and they’ll be sad and young forever, and I cry until I throw up.”

CD 1
CD 2 (remixes)

Datblygu. The Peel Sessions 1987-1993.

From the BBC biography:

A highly influential post-punk band, Datblygu dabbled in everything from dub to rock.

Formed by schoolboys David R Edwards and T Wyn Davies in 1982, Datblygu were joined in 1985 by Patricia Morgan. By then four cassettes had been released by the group, Amheuon Corfforol (Body Doubts), Trosglwyddo'r Gwirionedd (Transferring The Truth), Fi Du (Me Black) and Caneuon Serch I Bobl Serchog (Love Songs For Lovers).

At worst the songs are a product of a mind incensed by circumstances. I make no apologies for them.

Datblygu's music was, as their name suggests, often experimental. In their time they played in such diverse styles as disco, country, nursery rhymes, rockabilly, crooning and just about anything else. The NME described them as "Kraftwerk with a hangover". Their debut EP Hwgr Grawth-Og was released in 1986 on Anhrefn. The following year they recorded the first of five John Peel sessions.

The band's attitude towards the artistic bourgeoisie and politicians in Wales liberated a whole generation of bands who certainly owe a debt to the pioneering work done by the band. They were, in their own words, "non conforming non-conformists".

Datblygu were one of the first bands to record modern music in their native Welsh tongue; a language they were forbidden to speak in their own schools. Both Gorky's Zygotic Munci and Super Furry Animals have cited them as a major influence.

This is just one CD, but even at a low bitrate it was too big for mediafire, so I went ahead and split a high quality copy into two parts.

Peel Sessions

Datblygu on myspace

Datblygu fan site (in Welsh)

Kitchen and the Plastic Spoons. Best Off.

Wonderfully manic, deranged, tightly-wound, minimal, cold-wave synth band that sounded like a Teutonic Siouxsie fronting Liliput covering Devo. Fantastically barking mad in all the right ways. This was out of print for a while, but I believe you can buy a copy from the band on their myspace page.

Now is the time on Sprockets vhen ve dance: Happy Funeral, Liberty, The Poet (kind of bauhaus-y), Filmen, Polska Korridoren, Instrumental

Best Off

K&TPS on myspace

K&TPS official website