MUSIC: RoMo No-No

In the fall of 1996, on one of our many (OK, one) transatlantic phone calls, Neil Tennant (lead singer of Pet Shop Boys) and I discussed the current state of UK pop for a newspaper interview.

"How do you feel about this new New Romantic revival?" I asked.

"You mean RoMo? Neil asked, with a laugh. "You know, that never even really happened."

"You mean it was just a press thing?" I asked.

"It wasn't even a press thing. It was only in the Melody Maker!" he laughed again. "But it would have been nice to have a counterpoint to the whole Britpop thing, which is getting a bit 'laddish' at the moment."

[Reminder: find someone who can transfer audio cassette to either a CD or MP3 audio file. It's a great 45 minute interview]

'RoMo' (short for 'Romantic Modernism' - how pretentious, right?) was a short-lived fad in the mid '90s that was a reaction to the 'everyday lad/bloke' look of Oasis and their sound-a-like children. No more jeans and hoodies. RoMo was the first musical retro look back to the '80s.

Taking cues from early Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Soft Cell and Human League, among many others, RoMo celebrated synths and boys in make up. Club nights sprung up in London to play these early '80s synthpop hits. But dancing to records wasn't enough and soon RoMo bands sprouted up; a few of the bigger names were:

Orlando

Sexus

By 1996 it had gone mainstream, with a piece about RoMo on Sunday TV in the UK:

By then the fleeting interest had dissipated. By 1997, RoMo was another footnote. All hype, no hits. Some thought that RoMo was just a precursor/think tank for the more successful Electroclash movement that bubbled up three-to-four years later. The Electroclash looks may have been more subtle, but the music was better.

MUSIC: Re-evaluating 'Morning'

I seem to be on a '90s Britpop kick. After indulging my Pulp obsession yesterday, I decided to give A New Morning (Suede's much maligned last album before originally splitting) another shot.

I hadn't listened to it in ages but was shocked at how much I enjoyed it, or my edit of it anyway (see below). Suede are one of those bands (mainly later in their career) where a lot of their copious b-sides could be swapped out for some of the clunky, minor tracks on their later albums. There are always hidden gems among their many b-sides, so many in fact that they released a double album of b-sides only three albums into their career. Must have been all the uppers in Suede's sordid past that kept the workflow frantic.

Slammed as being "un-Suedelike" and "too gentle and soft," 2003's A New Morning has the band's most acoustic and pastoral material. After the cold, workmanlike sheen of 1999's Head Music (and battling a pretty serious drug addiction), lead singer Brett Anderson wanted to leave some of the dark Suede lexicon behind him. Can we fault him for that choice?

I love playing "rework the playlist" games with previously released albums. In the age of iTunes playlists and simple deletion, one can create the album the fans really wanted, a project unavailable in Suede's heyday, unless you're a fan of making a hodgepodge cassette tape of a CD. Thankfully it's not 1996 anymore.

The revisited A New Morning; deleting two middling album tracks, reshuffled tracklist, and three superior b-sides added:

1. Positivity
2. Obsessions
3. Lonely Girls
4. Lost in TV
5. One Hit to the Body
6. Morning
7. Astrogirl
8. When the Rain Falls
9. You Belong to Me
10. Instant Sunshine
11. Simon
12. Cheap
13. Oceans

MUSIC: His n' Hers 20

2014 sees the 20th anniversary of Pulp's major label debut album His n' Hers (but they had been carrying on as a band for over a decade before that). The investment of major label Britpop cash would polish up Pulp's visual image, but the band were already well on their way of hitting a stride of classic indie pop tunes.

Pulp jumped leaps and bounds from the lo-fi student film vibe of the original 1992 video of 'Babies.' This shiny, glowing new video for the singles' major label re-release in 1994 ushered in their 'pure pop stars' period.

Candy-colored objects and pretty young models on a stark white backdrop make for a striking scene. And then there's Jarvis Cocker, the thinking-man's frontperson, a smart-ass spokemans for mid-'90s Britpop youth culture (although he was already over 30 at the time).

Tall, pencil-thin, sharp suit, floppy fringe. I wanted to be Jarvis in 1995, but so did a lot of us. After disbanding in 2002, Pulp played a few one off gigs in this decade. Could it be time to see a potential new Pulp album (their first since 2001) anytime in the near future?

Their critical and commercial zenith, 1995's Different Class is just around the corner from it's own 20th anniversary. Hopefully we're not left with just Cocker's mediocre 2nd solo album, 2009's Further Complications as the last musical output of Pulp's core. It's got to be better than that, right Jarv?