Great article in the Guardian about the demise of the single and the new frontier of downloadable music. In the spirit of the article the first single I ever bought was Eyes without a Face by Billy Idol that I picked up in it in a shop when staying with my grandparents at their home in Yorkshire, England. Coming from album- centric North America I was accustomed to singles being relegated to a dusty bin in the corner of the record shop the whole single format seemed alien and exotic to me. And it says a lot about the North American single market that no obvious attempt was made to market them, they all featured the same generic sleeves; a duo- coloured imprint of the record label logo repeated across the sleeve. Only by reading label itself could you differentiate "When Doves Cry" from "Born In The USA". In contrast the single section seemed to be the focal point of the British record shop, and the majority of the singles featured great photos and cool graphics. Well, they were great for a 12 year old who sincerely believed that Billy Idol was the vanguard of Punk fashion.

The Two Tribes single by Frankie Goes to Hollywood was another pop-hit I picked up that summer, and it's an interesting coincidence that the author of this essay, Paul Morley, was involved with these singles:

Some might say my contribution as promotional director to the big-selling Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and the numerous versions of then songs Two Tribes and Relax, triggered this desperate need to hype singles using accessories and extras.

What Morley makes out to be a slightly hollow attempt to revitalize the single had its desired effect on me, and gives those early singles I picked up the same kind of magic shine the single of Ride A White Swan had for him more than a decade earlier.

The drab US Single vs the superior British Singles:

I spent a long time that summer sitting on the couch in my Grandparent’s tobacco-infused living room staring at the images on the singles, fantasing about how great it would be to have a leather outfit like that and pondering nuclear genocide (Two Tribes has tables on the back comparing American and Us stockpiles of nuclear weapons). Back home I'd watched Hal Lindsey inspired televangelists provide great detail about how this inevitable event was to take place; they'd used biblical allegories and terrifying images of red whores on top of multi headed dragons to provide the unquestionable proof that Armageddon was at hand. I also seen the technical specifics of Global Thermo-Nuclear War edelaborated in gruesome detail by expert guests of Phil Donahue. I had nightmares of Mushroom Clouds appearing outside of my kitchen window, and had several discussions with my father about stocking the basement fruit cellar so we might be able to survive in a nuclear winter. Thinking back, a lot of the stuff that I'd been listening to was about, or seemed to me do be about, the threat of global extermination. Two Tribes was one, and I took the flip side of Eyes Without a Face to be another; it was a creepy, echoey number called The Dead Next although, reading over the lyrics again, this interpretation seems much less self-evident than I remembered. Now that the threat of Global Extermination has seemingly dissipated, I wonder if any 12 year olds derive some cathartic solace by downloading mp3s about global terrorism?

posted by Alan
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1:36 PM

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