I can still remember stumbling upon the CD for Voice of the Beehive’s Let It Bee for the first time. I guess you could argue that it stood out because, comparatively speaking, there just aren’t that many artists filed under “V” to catch your eye, but, no, I’m pretty sure it was the combination of the bluish tint of the cover photo and the glistening lips of the two really cute girls in the band. I mean, the blonde was blowing me a kiss, for God’s sake! How can you forget that? Granted, it wasn’t until the group started to score airplay on “120 Minutes” that I realized that they were more than just looks, but it would be a lie to suggest that the looks of Tracey Bryn and Missy Belland - they’re sisters, you know - weren’t directly responsible for bringing me into their orbit for the first time.

Although they scored some college radio hits in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Voice of the Beehive were never as huge in the States as they were in the UK. Maybe it’s because they had a slightly kitschy look about them (the Brits love a gimmick), or maybe it was their vaguely retro, harmony-laden sound, but I’ve always figured it was something to do with the fact that they had two former members of Madness - Woody and Bedders - in their line-up. Whatever the reason, they ended up with two top-20 hits (“Don’t Call Me Baby” and “Monsters and Angels“), had three more enter the lower half of the Top 40, and even made it to #12 in Australia with their fun cover of The Partridge Family’s “I Think I Love You.”

Unfortunately, after the requisite support for 1991’s Honey Lingers, the band went into stealth mode…and stayed there for half a decade!

When the third Voice of the Beehive album, Sex & Misery, emerged in 1995, a fair amount had changed. For one, the band had shifted from London Records over to the Warner Brothers subsidiary label, Discovery Records. More importantly, though, the sisters were now doing it for themselves, as it were. Bedders had been gone for awhile (he came quick and didn’t stay long), but now so was Woody; also MIA were Mike Jones and Martin Brett, who’d also been stalwarts within the group. Tracey and Missy now had a new songwriting collaborator: keyboardist Peter John Vettese, who also produced and arranged the album. Vettese had some impressive pop credits to his name, having contributed keys to The Adventures’ Sea of Love, The Bee Gees’ One, Simple Minds’ Real Life, and a trio of Jethro Tull albums (The Broadsword and the Beast, Under Wraps, and Rock Island), but was he a good fit for the sensibilities of the Belland sisters?

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As God is my witness, I had already planned to write this column before Jeff dropped the news in his column, Freshly Unwrapped, that Morten Harket was scheduled to release a new album (Letter from Egypt) this week. I’m a little embarrassed that this is the first I’m hearing of this record, given that I thought I was enough of a fan to have had this pre-ordered for weeks. Damn. I’m just not the a-ha obsessive I used to be, I guess.

a-ha’s one of those bands I discovered late. Like everybody else, I paid attention to the video for “Take On Me,” and possibly not like everyone else, I actually liked “The Sun Always Shines On TV” better than their signature song. But while my younger sister, Jenny, was thrilling to the sounds of Hunting High and Low in 1985, I just couldn’t be bothered. Actually, that’s almost certainly why I couldn’t be bothered. After all, who wants to admit that their little sister discovered something cool before they did? Still, I must’ve at least been paying a little bit of attention, since I distinctly remember seeing the video for Scoundrel Days‘ “Cry Wolf” on MTV in ‘86 and thinking it to be pretty cool. It still wasn’t enough to sway me into the band’s camp, though. That wouldn’t happen until their third album, Stay On These Roads, when they contributed the title track to the 1987 James Bond flick, “The Living Daylights.” By this point, however, America couldn’t be arsed to keep up with a-ha anymore, and although the song itself proved to be a minor hit, the album most certainly was not.

Predictably, this is exactly when I came on board and decided to champion the underdog, asking, “Are you people crazy? This album is great!”

Obviously, I’d soon come to discover that it was the weakest of their three albums by a considerable margin, but as it turns out, this was the perfect time to latch onto a-ha, as they were preparing to embark on a reinvention of their sound, leaving behind the more obvious pop songs and transitioning into a more moody and melancholy sound. This, too, would fail to captivate Stateside listeners, which is why East of the Sun, West of the Moon (1990) and Memorial Beach (1993) remain seriously underrated classics, at least to my ears. It’s also why I had to spend the big import bucks to score a copy of Wild Seed, the debut solo album…well, in English, anyway…from a-ha frontman Morten Harket.

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Jeff Giles, God love him, is directly - if accidentally - responsible for inspiring this week’s column. Awhile back, he thought he was just offering up a snarky one-liner in his Cutouts Gone Wild! piece about the second Katrina and the Waves album when he referred to SBK Records as having the motto, “Wilson Phillips and some other acts,” but what he actually succeeded in doing was making me think of one of my favorite of those “other acts”: Loud Sugar.

Now, mind you, I’m not entirely sure how many other people share my appreciation of the band. In fact, I’m not even sure if the former members of Loud Sugar do. I tried and failed to get a response from keyboardist and songwriter Eddie Bydalek, who’s served as sound mix technician on many a film since the group disbanded, and when I sent a MySpace message to The Fizzies to confirm if their lead singer, David Grover, was the same David Grover who fronted Loud Sugar, I got no response…but after you’ve checked out some of the below Loud Sugar MP3s, hit up the Fizzie’s MySpace page. It clearly must be the same guy. Look, if it were me, I’d be the first to admit to having some mild embarrassment about the hippy-dippy look I was sporting back then, but it wouldn’t be to the point of ignoring someone who’s actually out to praise the music I made at the time…uh, with the possible exception of “No Ozone.”

Wow. That just has not held up well. But, thankfully, it’s an isolated incident.

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If there’s anything more deadly to a band’s career in the States than being pegged (however briefly) as the next big thing in the British press, it’s having a bit of a dodgy name. This problem was particularly bad for the band Dodgy, but given how politically correct America likes to think it is, you can imagine how well they responded to a group who called themselves Dogs Die In Hot Cars. (And, yet, it could’ve been so much worse: the band’s bassist, Lee Worrall, assured Designer Magazine that “you really don’t want to hear the suggestions we came up with before that, but the one that sticks out is Robert Plant in Poo Poo Land.”) Despite their decidedly non-PETA-friendly moniker, however, Dogs Die in Hot Cars - henceforth to be referred to as DDIHC - still managed to earn a certain amount of buzz in the U.S., with MTV2 picking up the video for their song “I Love You ‘Cause I Have To.” Unfortunately, it wasn’t nearly enough. The band and their fine debut, Please Describe Yourself, soon disappeared into the same abyss which houses 95% of the Britpop artists who’ve managed to eke out a Stateside release, but if you were one of those who dared to investigate the record, then you know already what a great piece of pop it is.

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Let it never be said that we here at Popdose don’t unabashedly cannibalize each other’s ideas…and our readership’s ideas, too!

After I posted my all-covers edition of Mix Disc Friday, which included the Judybats’ take on Gary Numan’s “Cars,” Reader Rich observed that “someone should do a ‘Why You Should Like’ on them,” and our man John Hughes…sorry, John C. Hughes…accepted the gauntlet that Reader Rich had thrown down. In less than a week’s time, Mr. Hughes had indeed produced such a column, providing an exemplary look back at the band’s major-label work. I was crestfallen, however, when he offered almost no mention of the band’s last recorded effort, Judybats ‘00. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like he ignored it altogether, but he simply said this:

The Judybats dissolved after Full-Empty, only to half-heartedly reunite for a final album under the Judybats name in 2000 (this version only featured Heiskell and guitarist Johnny Sughrue).

Actually, it doesn’t even include Sughrue…or, at least, he’s not mentioned in the credits. In Mr. Hughes’ defense, however, the album is out of print and almost impossible to come by, its independent release occurring so far under the radar that it’s not referenced in either their AllMusic.com profile or their Wikipedia entry, so maybe he was just going from a word-of-mouth report. But according to my copy of the disc, Heiskell was the only original member of the band to carry over, with the new line-up featuring Rob Bell (bass), Doug Hairrell (guitar), Mike Hairrell (drums), and Reed Pendleton (guitar). In fact, I remember noting this at the time, finding myself torn between being totally psyched about a new Judybats album and thinking it was a little misleading to release what essentially a Jeff Heiskell solo album under the Judybats moniker. If you’re in the same camp, you’ll leave this piece with considerably more understanding about why things went down the way they did with Judybats ‘00…but, first, let’s check out the album itself.

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Is there anyone who doesn’t like George Burns?

No, there isn’t. And if you say that you don’t, I refuse to believe you.

Even if you don’t think he’s funny, it’s kind of hard to resist the guy’s bigger-than-life persona as the old man who’s only slowing down because his body can’t keep up with his mind. You could believe him when he played God because, well, that’s kind of how you’d like God to look and act. (Well, okay, maybe a cross between George Burns and the picture that Elvis Costello paints in “God’s Comic” would be my perfect deity, but the strictly Burns-ian take certainly isn’t one I’d complain about.) Of course, even before he started making with the jokes about being old, Burns had already been made a legend by his invaluable wife and partner, Gracie Allen, to whom he never failed to give credit for his career. If you’ve never read Burns’ memoir about his life with Gracie - Gracie: A Love Story - you should hunt it down immediately, but you should also have a box of tissues at the ready before you embark upon the final chapter.The two had a hilarious radio show and an equally funny television show, the latter most often remembered for George’s decision to regularly break the fourth wall and speak directly to the audience; he certainly didn’t invent the technique, but he inspired a lot more people to use it on television, that’s for sure.

In his later years, Burns hosted many a variety special…so much so, in fact, that they recently released a box set of them on DVD…so it’s not exactly a secret that the guy was prone to crooning a tune once in awhile. It’s also common knowledge that he was not exactly Sinatra. So why is it, then, that his 1980 album, I Wish I Was Eighteen Again, transcends the usual actor-turned-singer effort and proves so darned charming?

Because because the man knew his limitations.

Burns loved to sing, but he knew he wasn’t a singer. He was a talker. So either he had someone write songs that he knew would match his limited range, or he selected existing compositions that he could talk his way through. Either way, if you like the guy, then as soon as you hear his familiar voice on “The Arizona Whiz,” you’re hooked.

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I’ve spoken before of ESDMusic.com, one of the blog sites connected to my full-time employer, Bullz-Eye.com, to which I contribute. These days, ESD Music exists predominantly as an alternate haven for Bullz-Eye’s quick-take CD reviews, but once upon a time, we tried valiantly to make it into a regular stop for music fans a la Popdose; it never really took off the way we wanted, which is why it’s currently little more than a ghost town, content-wise, but we did occasionally produce work that caught the eye of ‘net surfers. I continue to remain surprised by one of my postings, however, if only because it was an entry from a short-lived feature called “Lost Bands.” I mean, you’d figure that something about a lost band wouldn’t score much love. But I wrote it in September 2006, and as of last month, it was still getting the occasional response from people who were accidentally stumbling upon it as a result of an internet search.

It just goes to show you: just because a band is perceived as “lost” doesn’t mean they don’t still have fans out there…and that’s clearly true for the Gunbunnies.

Here’s what I wrote of them at the time:

Like so many disaffected teens with a jones for new music, I spent some time working in music retail…and one of the many bands I discovered during this era (1989 - 1994, with some time off to attend college) was the Gunbunnies. Signed to Virgin Records back in the days when the label was flooding stores with promotional copies of albums by their new artists, we scored both cassette and CD promos of their debut album, Paw Paw Patch, and it’s clear Virgin had high hopes for these guys. Their single, “Stranded,” was picking up quite a bit of college radio airplay, and the critics were loving the fact that the album was produced by the legendary Jim Dickinson (Big Star, the Rolling Stones, the Replacements). Plus, the band’s lead singer and songwriter, Chris Maxwell, had put together 10 songs that could hold their own with bands like Guadalcanal Diary, House of Freaks, and the like…and although he had a highly competent band behind him, Maxwell was practically a one-man band; he played guitar, harmonica, trumpet, and electric sitar on the album! Poised for success…? Yeah, not so much. The Gunbunnies disappeared after Paw Paw Patch…and I mean really disappeared. Not only was there no follow-up album on Virgin, there was no follow-up, period. Maxwell didn’t even go solo; he just vanished. Well, okay, he didn’t vanish vanish; if AllMusic.com can be trusted (and they usually can), he left music altogether for about five years, then returned to play bass for They Might Be Giants and to do some production work for artists like the Lunachicks…but, of course, that’s if this is the same Chris Maxwell. Can anyone confirm or deny…?

Okay, first off, I was younger and more naive in 2006, because I feel quite strongly now that AllMusic.com is no more trustworthy than IMDb.com, which is to say that it’s only as accurate as its researchers. But even now, their entry on Chris Maxwell is sorely lacking. Don’t bother writing in to say, “Didn’t you know that he was in Skeleton Key?” And don’t waste your time asking, “Don’t you know that he and Phil Hernandez make up the production duo known as The Elegant Too?” Granted, I didn’t know either of these things when I wrote that piece, but I certainly do now. Indeed, I actually found Mr. Maxwell via The Elegant Too’s MySpace page, where he thoughtfully answered a few questions for me. But before we get to those, let’s talk about the album itself a bit more.

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Forgive me for another column without a Q&A, but if it helps, I’ve tried to make this one interesting by filling it with several really embarrassing stories about myself.

When it comes to the great moments of making a fool of myself in my journalistic career, I suppose you could say it’s a testament to what I’ve learned over the years that almost all of them took place in the ’80s and ’90s rather than in recent years. For instance, I learned not to go from memory when you’re writing a record review after I wrote a review of the soundtrack to “Athens, GA: Inside/Out” for my high school newspaper and suggested that R.E.M.’s live version of “Swan Swan H” was better than the studio version - which I’d only heard once and didn’t own - because this acoustic version wasn’t overwhelmed by the orchestration on the original. (Interestingly, no-one called me on this. I knew nobody read that thing.) I also learned not to believe everything your interview subject tells you after Sean Kelly, lead singer of the Samples, fed me a bunch of bullshit about what he and his fellow bandmates did when they weren’t touring - gourmet cooking, bird watching, casting mirrors - and me being a naive kid doing his college internship, I saw no reason not to believe him and let it get printed. (This is why I got so pissed off when Jack White mocked journalists who foolishly believed a “joke” the White Stripes had printed in one of their press releases about how none of their studio equipment was made after 1963.)

Really, though, it’s just one lesson that has served me the most: if you sense you’re about to say something stupid, keep your fucking mouth shut.

I can’t begin to tally up the retroactive embarrassment I still feel at my insistence of asking the infamous “if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be, and why” question during phone interviews because I thought the artists would remember me when I met them at their shows. I asked this of Gillian Gilbert of New Order, and when I did indeed meet her and remind her that I was “the guy who asked the tree question,” and she replied, “Oh, it’s you,” but it wasn’t in what you’d call a good way. Still, she signed my Low Life poster, anyway. But there are three moments in particular, however, where I never recovered from stupid comments.

3. I interviewed Roddy Frame in connection with the release of Aztec Camera’s Dreamland album, and I casually mentioned how I saw him do a solo acoustic performance in his stint as opener for Edie Brickell & The New Bohemians, observing that half the crowd left the venue immediately after he finished. He immediately went into protective-big-brother mode and said - hand on heart, this is the exact phrase - “Don’t diss Edie.” I try to explain that all I meant was that the area’s Aztec Camera fans were so diehard that they were willing to pay to see him in any capacity, even that of opening act. He didn’t really care why I’d made the comment, though, instead simply saying, “That’s fine, but don’t diss Edie.” The interview never truly got back on track after this…which was bad, as it took place in the opening moments of our conversation.

2. I’m backstage at a Little River Band show. Peter Beckett, late of Player (”Baby Come Back”), is touring as a member of the group at this time, and he’s also preparing to drop a solo album, featuring a cover of Stories’ “Brother Louie.” He makes an offhanded comment about how he’s hoping to get loads of airplay. As someone who’s grown sick of repetition on the airwaves, I echo his hopes but, in a well-intentioned manner, also offer to keep my fingers crossed that it doesn’t fall victim to oversaturation. He shoots me a withering look, says, “Frankly, I’ll take too much airplay over not enough. If you’ll excuse me,” and he walks away.

1. The industry standard of embarrassment, as far as I’m concerned. I got backstage to meet Elvis Costello after his performance on the Mighty Like A Rose tour in 1991. At this early point in my career, I’d never been backstage before, so I was a little nervous. He comes out to greet those of us in the backstage area, and someone says, “Hey, Elvis, that was a great show.” He modestly says, “Thanks. Thanks a lot. It was a little bit hot, though. I probably should’ve taken off my jacket.” Having been paying no attention to what he’s just said, I choose this moment to praise him by saying, “You’re a genius.” Within the context, it sounds suspiciously like I’m saying, “Nice work on not taking off your jacket, dumbass.” He chooses to move on to another group of fans. I hang my head in shame.

There’s one other moment of embarrassment from the ’90s that I still remember vividly, but the reason it stays with me is because, despite being arguably the stupidest thing I’ve ever said in an interview, it did not permanently derail the proceedings…and I don’t know why, because based on how prickly I’ve seen this gentleman be in interviews with other journalists, I can’t believe he didn’t either go off on me or hang up outright.

That man…was Robin Gibb.

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Have you ever found yourself sucked into an episode of ‘Behind the Music’ or ‘Bands Reunited’ and, even though you didn’t necessarily like the artist in question (or maybe didn’t even know who they were), you still found yourself enthralled just because the story itself was interesting? If so, then believe me when I tell you that, whether you’re familiar with the dance-pop duo known as Blue Mercedes or not, you owe it to yourself to read this week’s column.

I have to be honest: by the time I became familiar with Blue Mercedes, their brief flirtation with the American charts had come, gone, and made precious little impact on me. Despite my ignorance, however, the duo of David Titlow and Duncan Millar proudly sat atop Billboard Dance Charts from February 20 through March 12 of 1988 with their hit single, “I Want To Be Your Property.” The song also found its way to #66 on the Billboard Hot 100 as well, which wasn’t half bad for a first crossover attempt. Too bad it was the pair’s first and last placing…which might explain why, some two years later, I came upon the band’s lone studio album, Rich and Famous, in a cut-out bin in a Camelot Music in Danville, VA.

Listening to the album now, I’ll be the first to admit that it hasn’t all aged well…but, really, the same could be said of rather a few albums from the ’80s. It’s all about approaching the material from the mindset of the time in which it was recorded and released, and when one does that, several instant classics emerge.

It’s obvious why the aforementioned “I Want To Be Your Property” was both the opening track and the album’s first single, with its infectious chorus and the instantly memorable line, “I want to live like Cyd Charisse.” (More on that later.) Titlow’s voice sounds like an amalgam of Martin Fry of ABC, Tony Hadley of Spandau Ballet, and…I dunno, maybe 10% Rick Astley? Nah, I’m probably mistaken about that one. In fact, it’s probably only the influence of Pete Waterman on the music - it was produced by Phil Harding and Ian Curnow for PWL - that even makes such a ludicrous comparison come to mind.

“Your Secret Is Safe With Me” is another strong number, sounding vaguely like Sade’s “The Sweetest Taboo” as it progresses along with its jazz-pop groove, asking the rather odd (at least in this musical context) but definitely unforgettable question, “Would you like a knuckle sandwich?” The single best song on the album, however, is “Crunchy Love Affaire“…and, yes, the spelling of “affaire” is correct. As I told both Titlow and Millar themselves, it sounds like the best single Spandau Ballet never released, with a sweeping string arrangement that’s downright gorgeous, and even if you don’t buy into the metaphor within the title, which suggests that the love affair in question comes “with a soft inside,” there’s one simple line in the song which is delivered with melancholy that no less a mope than Morrissey himself would be proud to have written it:

Forever to be
Inevitably
Alone

Whoa.

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As I wait for another fine, upstanding artist to find time in their busy schedule to provide me with answers to the Q&A I’ve sent their way, I thought I’d tackle one of my favorite obscure various-artists collections.

Alvin Lives (In Leeds): Anti Poll Tax Trax isn’t by any means what you’d call the most consistent compilation, but I’m a huge fan of cover songs, and I always find it fascinating to listen to how some artists play it safe and do straight-up Xeroxes of the originals while others have the balls to switch up the arrangement or even the melody to make a song their own. This 12-track compilation came out on Midnight Music in 1990 as a reaction against the so-called Community Charge, which was instituted by good ol’ Maggie Thatcher in 1989 and proved so tremendously unpopular that it led directly to her departure from office. Her successor, John Major, alleviated the problem by replacing the Community Charge with the Council Tax system, but Brits can still relive their painful memories by revisiting this CD and remembering just how up in arms they got about it back then.

I stumbled upon this compilation when I was in the UK for the first time, back in 1992, and was scouring through every CD store that crossed my path, looking for all the obscurities I could possibly fit into my bag. This mission ultimately proved so successful that I needed to mail an entire box of CDs home, which was a pricey endeavor, but I don’t regret it for a moment, as just about everything I purchased on that trip remains in my collection to this day. At the time I purchased it, I was familiar with less than half of the artists, but it really only took six words for the disc to find its way up to the cash register:

Robyn Hitchcock does “Kung Fu Fighting.”

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