The true importance of 1981 may not be realized by most folks anymore, given the extremely sorry state of "popular music" these days...
Scotsman Donovan Leitch started his career as a Bob Dylan imitator and then seemed to ingest a huge quantity of mind-altering chemicals, resulting in his subsequent self-reinvention as the Celtic Bard of Psychedelia.
Although most of the original UK glam and glitter bands flopped in the US, they struck a nerve with hardcore fans who mixed the glam attack with more conventional memes from affiliated bands like Kiss and Alice Cooper and concocted a new strain of bubble-glam metal for the Material Age.
As with The Police’s Synchronicity and Michael Jackson’s Thriller, it’s impossible to talk about the early 80s without talking about David Bowie’s multi-platinum LP, Let’s Dance.
Shoegaze gurus Catherine Wheel hopped aboard the grunge-lite red-eye with their 1995 single, "Way Down." The song's commerciality puzzled their original fan base, but I still think this single and video are '90s highlights.
The tune and the album it was taken from (Happy Days) were clearly designed to "break America." But even though "Way Down" and the album's other single, "Judy Staring at the Sun," hit the upper reaches of the modern rock charts, the album itself petered out at a paltry #163 on the Billboard Top 200.
That said, do note that Catherine Wheel singer Rob Dickinson is the cousin of Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson, who was also the writer and producer of Chemical Wedding, a sci-fi horror film about a scientist looking to resurrect the Great Beast 666 Aleister Crowley.
Today marks the 42nd anniversary of the release of The Crossing, an album that didn't come to my attention until late September of that momentous year. Still and all, it came to rule my autumn of 1983, so much so that I had a little ritual where I'd give it a spin every year whenever the first chill of fall set in.
