Entertainment For Lively Minds
The most thrilling sound in pop is....
Posted by Dave Amitri on 12 November 2011 - 12:59am.
Billy MacKenzies soaring vocal at 3:10 on this TOTP clip of "Party Fears Two" unless you know different......
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Great track Dave,
but I can't help but be intrigued by Billy's frequent looks to his upper left - either there was someone up there he knew or he was under the impression he was being filmed from there ;-)
Who knows
what was going through his head, even then. I've been catching up on his post Associates stuff, if you haven't heard it Dougie I can Highly recommend it, try this
Billy MacKenzie "Winter Academy"
I always imagined
it was a monitor screen, and he was enraptured by his own performance - which somehow makes him even more endearing...
I reckon ...
... it's Betty and Jessica.
What a great track,
What a great track, strangely off kilter and passionate account of going to a party and getting blutored, but sung in the most eloquent and mischievous way, and then ending on: "what's wrong is the wrong that always around".... Billy, we miss you.
For me it's Lemmy's "AAAARRGGHH"...
at 0.26 on Motörhead's The Hammer.
We've been Simply Red...
Thank you and goodnight.
Seems
a good point to remind all that Tom Doyle's excellent book on Billy MacKenzie's life, "The Glamour Chase" has recently been reprinted, and apparently updated.
http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/tom+doyle/the+glamour...
I remember catching him and Alan Rankine
doing Party Fears 2 (or maybe "Country Club") on some Friday night TV program dressed as 1960's pilots.
They were perched on a couple of Dave Allen bar stools, Billy singing and Alan playing his big semi acoustic guitar in the same weird fashion he did on this clip: as if the instrument was heating up and he was involuntarily having to bring his hand away to stop it getting too burny.
The 19 year old proto punk/prog casualty that was I, in knackered trainers, scabby denims and a ripeningly pungent T shirt thought "fuck me, thats cool". It was defining. Within a year I was spending more time thinking about my trousers than my studies.
All too sadly this was their highlight, as far as they ever went, when they seemed to offer so much more. But I still consider them the harbringer of much of what became the early 80's poptacularity that others profited form, especially the likes of Ultravox and Visage.
The "soaring vocal" moment that you refer to ..
.. in the Associates track, that you very generously attribute to Billy what's-is-name, is clearly a fake.
I suspect, unless he had the talent of Keith Harris, ...
... he was miming.