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(Roddy Frame - Aztec Camera - made the 80s worth listening to)

Getting into a 1980s frame of mind tonight - Aztec Camera from their first album High Land, Hard Rain - the opening track, and a favorite, Oblivious. Strangely, Aztec Camera really never caught on in the States. Only doing modest sales and occasional airplay. The only reason I can think of is the flood of albums and new bands coming out of the UK at the time caused a lot of worthy music to get lost in the shuffle. The early 80s saw a gradual shift from Punk to New Wave with Indie coming in through the back door. Once again, radio stations were also going through the shift, with less independent stations on the air and the growth of the corporate mergers - loosely translated: less experimenting and breaking of new acts and more concentration on the tried and true and the highly commercial acts (i.e. Madonna). Not to mention the introduction of MTV nationwide.

It was an interesting period of transition for the music business. But as is often the case, a lot of good music went unnoticed and it was frustrating not only for the bands, but for the audience as well.

Seems to still be that way.

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(The Stone Roses - Suddenly, music got jettisoned out of the doldrums)

I can't believe it's been 20 years since The Stone Roses released their first album. Up until that time music was going through a period of ennui. The 80s were coming to a close and things were getting a little complacent, musically. The Reagan Years could have something to do with it. MTV was busy converting the taste of most mainstream music into who was pretty and who was not - and that determined who would get a video made and who would languish in musical limbo. Radio saw the writing on the wall and playlists became tightly regimented, as corporate takeovers and mergers made freeform a thing of the past.

But then things took a brisk change. Seattle started pumping out Grunge and the UK started pumping out Madchester. And music suddenly took a turn for the better and The Stone Roses appeared.

As movements go, this one didn't last all that long. But it's presence and influence have been felt even to this day. And the first Stone Roses album, from which this cut This Is The One, is featured tonight, has become a classic, and is still fresh twenty years later.

You know you're on to something when you can make it sound timeless without much effort. And The Stone Roses are timeless.

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(Telephone - huge in Europe. Over here? Well . . . )

I recently ran across a French Radio station online (Oui FM, which you should check out) that plays some fascinating stuff - old and new - French and non-French. During one of their sets they slipped in Dure Limite by the French punk/post-punk/new wave/hard rock group Telephone. They were enormous in France and throughout Europe in the late 1970s up to 1986, when they disbanded and went separate ways. They hardly made a dent in the States (again, that language thing), but I remembered the band pretty well, having been familiar with them since their first album, but I really hadn't played anything by them, or heard anything about them until the other day when Dure Limite came on. Not a massive seller at the time, it was produced by Bob Ezrin, who was responsible for a lot of memorable albums in the 70s - Doctor John and Peter Gabriel are two that come to mind. According to a website, the band did reunite in 2003. But what has happened since then is a mystery.

Still, it's nice to be reminded of the not-so-obvious 80s every once in a while.

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(Dr. Walter Heller - tried to save Reagan from himself - didn't work)

With word about the latest recession being "over", I was reminded about the last time we had a deep recession in the 1980s and how we all became familiar with the phrases "Reaganomics", Supply-Side and Voodoo-Economics.

Back in the 80s there was 10% unemployment (on paper) and it felt like it lasted forever. Former Kennedy and Johnson Economic adviser Dr. Walter Heller had a few observations to make when he was interviewed on Face The Nation in 1982.

Dr. Walter Heller: “Had the Carter program, and unfortunately it was rather forgettable, but had the Carter program been enacted, we would be in much better shape today. People seem to forget that Carter, in October of the last year of his presidency proposed a tax program that made just excellent sense. It was much smaller than the President’s program, and it concentrated more of its tax cuts, and this is what people forget, on the supply side, so to speak, on true stimulus of government investment. Instead of having enormous deficits that scare the public and Wall Street, we would have had much more moderate deficits, we’d be much better off today.”

Perhaps hindsight is 20/20 but it's interesting to speculate what might have happened had the Carter program been enacted.

But no, The Great Communicator had a better idea . . or so he said.

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(The Jags in 1979 - Catchy and hook-laden, but not sustainable)

A bit of late 70s UK Power-Pop this time. The Jags were one of the mainstays of KROQ here in L.A. around 1979. Not really considered Punk or New Wave, but not really mainstream either - sort of falling into that miscellaneous category that just sounded good, played catchy memorable songs but didn't last more than a couple albums. They broke up in 1982.

There were a lot of those kinds of bands from the late 70s to early 80s, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with them. They were not destined to change your life, but rather go along with it and provide the soundtrack to places, times and people.

Here is a live concert, recorded by the BBC at their Paris Theatre in London in 1979. A lot of familiar material.

And for some reason, I remembered exactly where I was when I first heard each of those songs.

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(Flop in 1993 - Sony was clueless)

Another fine example of a band, after years of struggling, gets signed to a major label who releases their album to weak initial sales and then dumps them like a bad habit a few months later.

Sound familiar? It's what major labels do, especially the past twenty or so years when it stopped being about music and artists and cultivating talent in favor of profit-and-loss statements and bottom lines.

Flop were a combination punk/pop/grunge band that came out of the Seattle area in the early 90s. They had a good local following and a few singles and eps put out by indie labels.

Since Seattle became something of a mecca for all things grunge (with the astounding success of Nirvana) in the early 90s, every major label sent A&R people to scour the streets, clubs and rehearsal rooms in search of the next Kurt Cobain.

Sony found Flop and signed them for their 550 imprint and teamed them with Martin Rushent to co-produce. The results became their second album Whenever You're Ready, a turbo-charged package of 17 cuts of which this track Woolworth is one of them.

It's a great album - loud, fast and out of control. Like a lot of albums should be, but sadly aren't.

Unfortunately, after the Sony debacle there was a personnel change and they recorded one more album for another indie label before calling it quits.

It does however beg the question that if Sony/Epic were an actual record company, would they still have gotten the same fate?

One never knows.

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(UB-40 - One of the plus sides to the 80s)

UB40. From the Little Baggariddim album. "Don't Break My Heart" - it sounds like it's got Sunday night written all over it.

If you don't consider the politics, the 80s weren't so bad after all.

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(Ace - 1974's up-and-coming band and purveyors of Pub-Rock)

Back over to the BBC Transcription Service this week. A performance by Ace from 1974. Probably best known for their hit and uber-shag tune "How Long Has This Been Going On", Ace also featured the multi-talented Paul Carrack, who not only wrote that hit, but also went on to score highly with Squeeze in the early 80s and then go on to Mike & The Mechanics in the early 90's, not to mention a pretty good and thriving solo career.

Anyway, this concert was recorded just at the time "Five-A-Side" came out and pretty much captures the essence of the band. Pub-Rock was a legitimate genre in the early 1970's and many bands established solid careers from it.

Ace were at the right place at the right time.

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(The Telescopes - Psych, Shoe-gazing, Space-rock, Noise-rock - just about covers all the bases)

One of the frustrating things about the Indie movement in the 90s was how quickly things were released and vanished. It was worse if you were a UK band and your discs were imported into the States. Unless you saw something and bought it right away, chances were you'd never see it again in your lifetime.

That was my experience with The Telescopes. Forming in the late 80s and disbanding, morphing, re-grouping, changing labels -it was hard, not only to pin them down style-wise, it was hard to pin down their releases. What little I heard of them I liked - they were, for me an extension of the Psychedelic stuff I'd been listening to since I was a teenager and they hit a distinctive chord with me from the get-go. The problem was, getting their stuff before they sold out.

Throughout their careers they've released a lot of material on a lot of different labels. A very small percentage of it I managed to get.

But I did get an ep that has been a favorite ever since. "Celeste" came out in 1991 during their stay with Creation Records and the track "All A Dreams" (not a typo) was glued to my headphones for several years after first hearing it.

Come to think of it, it still is.

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(Madder Rose - overlooked and under-appreciated)

I don't think any decade can lay claim to the one where the most music was the least appreciated. Sometimes it's just rotten timing. I could understand a lot of 60s bands being lost in the shuffle since, let's face it, every time The Beatles or The Rolling Stones released something it overshadowed just about anything else on the charts at the time. And I can sort of understand a lot of 90s bands getting lost in the shuffle - as I said last night, radio was falling down huge flights of stairs in their commitment to break acts, or even say who they were. But the 70s and 80s had their fair share of overlooked acts (we'll get into the 80s soon, I promise)as well. So it just makes for a lot of interesting discovery, since the world is crammed full of it.

So tonight I thought I would put up a track by the New York band Madder Rose, who released a string of albums from 1993 to their breakup in 1999. Most of their material has faded from view, for absolutely no good reason. They were a good band with some great music.

This track, Roland Navigator doesn't appear on any of their albums, or their singles. It was issued on a CD Magazine in the 90s called Volume in the UK, probably one of the more adventuresome and well written publications to come and go in the fickle world of publishing, and certainly one that turned a lot of people on to some great music they would never normally know about. It wasn't widely available in the U.S. - just showing up at Tower, Virgin Records and a couple of hardcore music stores.

At any rate - Roland Navigator appeared only on this compilation in 1994 and, apart from a few spotty downloads, isn't available anywhere else.

It's a nice tribute to a band who left before their time was up.

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(Henri Salvador - rumored to have introduced France to Rock n' Roll, but later denied it)

Okay, I promise - next week we're going back to the 60s 70s and 80s. But here we are, Sunday night - everything bordering on mellow. So why not pay a little visit to the art of Chanson Francaise and one of its most well-known practitioners Henri Salvador?

Henri Salvador, a native of French Guyana started out as a nightclub guitarist accompanying other artists in Paris in the early 1930s. In the late 1940's he turned to singing and established a major reputation for himself in France. He was hugely popular all through the 1950's and 60s. It was said he had introduced France to American Rock n' Roll (recording under the pseudonym Henry Cording) and later disavowed any knowledge of diving into a musical form he really couldn't stand.

Nonetheless, Salvador enjoyed a long career, surfacing in later life to do voiceovers on film before his death in 2008.

Ciel de Paris is from 1953, during his early period, recording for Polydor in France with the orchestra led by Jo Boyer.

The record is a little worn - no doubt it provided background music to a lot of romantic evenings.

Just guessing . . .

Berlin was and is a perfectly good band, but by no means in the top tier of 80s acts. Regardless, the tiny beat, keyboard hook, and simple evocative imagery of the lyrics make "The Metro" my favorite 80s song, hands down.

What's your favorite of the Me Decade 1980s (which having been born 45 days prior I clearly have misnamed)?