It must have sucked to be a non-Boy George member of Culture Club. Well, except for Jon Moss, who was actually sucking a member of Culture Club. Okay, cheap shot. But seriously, here you are, finally realizing your dreams of being in a hugely popular rock band and, to paraphrase Roy Hay in the group’s Behind the Music special, you’re stuck in the middle of a gay soap opera.
Besides the lead singer and drummer having screaming fits in hotel hallways, you’d also have to deal with the pressure of your label demanding a third album of original material in as many years. And to top it all off, your singer and visual focal point of the band has become a raging coke head. Is it any wonder your third album was a comparative failure to the first two?
Culture Club’s Waking up with the House on Fire was aptly named, since the band was in a shambling mess of an emergency. After their first two multi-platinum smashes and several hit singles, expectations were extremely high for the third and the only place to go was down. The album’s first single really set the tone, as “The War Song” was a simplistic, jingoistic, embarrassing attempt by Boy to be political. “War, war is stupid” – shock! Thanks to the chart momentum from the last two years, it still made the Top 20.
While the U.K. and other territories got “The Medal Song” as the album’s second single, Epic made the wise choice of picking “Mistake No. 3″ (download) to be the follow-up single in the States. I’ve read that the song was about Boy George warning young couples against marriage, that being the titular mistake number three. I’m not quite sure what the first two mistakes are supposed to be. Shagging your drummer and snorting coke, perhaps? (more…)
Punk legends in Los Angeles before they could legally drink, Jeff and Steve McDonald spent most of the ’80s as a cult sensation, loved as much for their pop culture references (name-checking everyone from Linda Blair to the Brady Bunch to Charles Manson) as they were for their thrashy brand of bubblegum-laced power-pop. As the ’90s dawned, the band entered a new phase, signing to Atlantic Records for their major-label debut, Third Eye. You may recognize the title, since, despite being a killer album, it filled cutout bins nationwide almost immediately after its release, and Atlantic dumped the boys. It was a matter of bad timing, since two short years later, a little trio from Seattle named Nirvana would take that same Knack-goes-to-a-Black-Flag-show concept and change alternative music forever.
The late ’80s and early ’90s saw a strange trend of UK power-pop bands fronted by blond bombshells: Transvision Vamp, the Primitives, and one of the more criminally ignored, the Darling Buds. Fronted by drop-dead knockout Andrea Lewis, the Darling Buds drew upon influences from Blondie to the Smiths and packed them all into manic, three-minutes-or-under, hook-filled gems. It was dangerous to drive to their debut Pop Said – you were sure to get ticketed for speeding.
I realize I’ve sort of hit upon a theme lately when it comes to LIT70s, but I don’t think it’s fair to limit 
or on 
The most rock-radio acceptable of the new-wave acts (with the possible exception of the Cars and the Police), the Fixx were always unfairly slammed as a producer’s band, the mere playthings of Rupert Hine, who buffed their angular, jagged sound to an airwaves-friendly sheen. I never quite understood how this was considered an insult — why should the Fixx feel slighted because they found a great producer who knew what to do with them? Isn’t that the point of a producer?
In 1988, Leslie Phillips turned her back on a successful career as a Christian Contemporary artist, changed her performing moniker to “Sam,” and recorded her first mainstream pop album, The Indescribable Wow, with producer and soon-to-be husband T Bone Burnett. It was a bold move that paid off critically, if not commercially. The album sold a fraction of Phillips’ Christian work, but her inventive songwriting and unique voice won her a new cult of fans.
It’s amazing to even consider now, but once there were debates on who’d be the bigger band – U2 or Big Country?
Of all the artists who jumped on the disco bandwagon in the late ’70s, one of the most unexpected (and unwelcome) this side of 
In 1984, famed disco producer Giorgio Moroder got it into his head that Fritz Lang’s silent 1927 masterpiece Metropolis needed to be restored with colored tint, a new edit, and heck, a new soundtrack filled with the hottest pop and rock artists of the day. And who else to produce that soundtrack than, say, Giorgio Moroder?
The Sundays began the ’90s by combining the best of the previous decade’s indie rock – The Smiths and the Cocteau Twins – with a wall of guitars courtesy of David Gavurin topped with the exquisite vocals of Harriet Wheeler. Tasting near-immediate success with their debut, Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, and its single, “Here’s Where The Story Ends,” the group traded in atmospheric, jangly guitar pop heavy on the reverb. A similarly flavored follow-up, Blind, followed in 1992, best known on these shores for featuring a dream-pop reading of the Stones “Wild Horses.” Budweiser commercials beckoned, both albums went Gold, then the Sundays – vanished.