Catmachine

The other week I was delighted to discover, via the medium of a #FollowFriday tweet , that Claudia Brücken was on Twitter. Claudia Brücken! One of my favourite singers from the 1980s. Now whilst any regular readers of this blog may already have noticed from earlier entries that during the 1980s I was a big fan of Toyah Willcox, there were of course many other bands that tickled my fancy during that era. One such band was Propaganda . Picture the scene. It was 1984 and the pop world was in thrall to Frankie Goes to Hollywood as they bestrode the charts like Liverpudlian colossi thanks to the skilled media manipulation of their label, ZTT Records .  It was impossible not to be aware of the furore and whilst I as a 19 year old goth might have liked to scoff at the blatant commercialism, I couldn't help but be caught up in the hype. Despite what people now might remember, Frankie were not the only band signed to this cunning outfit.  Propaganda were also on the roster and...

" Burn up The Sun and all magazines / Pull down the abattoirs and all that's obscene... " I'd never bought The Sun and was uncomfortable about doing so now. It held all sorts of negative connotations for me. Recently I'd been supportive of the successful campaign to get its sale banned from the campus newsagent but it ran deeper than that. In my head The Sun would always be associated with The Fuckers at school, the bullies. They'd bought it regularly, imagining this made them adult and daring. They'd subsequently sellotaped an endless parade of monochrome newsprint breasts inside their desks and - on one memorable occasion - to the blackboard during an RE lesson. So I was in a quandary. Tom had sold his story to The Sun and I was curious to read it. You'll have to take my word for this - and some of you may be cynical - but it wasn't in a lascivious " I'm going to get to read all Toyah's secrets " way. I just wanted to k...

I didn't like what I was hearing. I was speaking to fellow Angel and Demon Bob on a payphone in a corridor at The Portland pub in Portland Road, Hove in spring 1985. He'd just played me Toyah's new single down the phone. I didn't like it. It was the chorus that did it. It sounded too poppy , too commercial. Too major key. The verses were OK. But the chorus... It was the kind of chorus I could have imagined Cyndi Lauper having in one of her songs and that didn't sit well with me. Bob and I spoke in hushed tones, it felt like the end of the world.  Listening to us, anyone would have thought that somebody had just died. Whilst a lot of this extreme reaction was due to the glossy production and "chart hit" nature of the song, I'm sure part of it was down to a change in my own taste as well. I was now coming up for two years at university, two years out on my own, and had been exposed to a vast range of diverse influences.  In those days Sussex Uni...

Ironically 1984 would see less Toyah than I'd ever had for a very long time. I was hoping that her release from the five year contract with erstwhile record label Safari  and signing to Portrait Records would result in more music quite soon - after all she'd been releasing albums at a rate of one or two a year since 1979, surely any record label worth its salt would be keen to take their new signing for a spin around the charts? If nothing else I felt it was high time that the music journalists gave her another chance; by the close of play in 1983 virtually everyone in the music press had their knives out for her, even Smash Hits . This was a problem. As self-styled arbiters of coolness, the music papers often dictated what people "should" like, meaning that in an attempt to appear with-it people would stop liking whatever it was that the NME , Melody Maker and Sounds had decided was on the way out at the moment, whatever its merits. If enough people stopped l...

"There was a group of kids who started to call themselves the Angels and Demons who'd wait outside the stage door every night from me arriving at about five to me leaving at about eleven. Every night for five months. They'd wait at the door, getting pissed as newts. They'd nick tables from local restaurants and have street parties. No end of phone calls from the police complaining about them. They now have reunions every two weeks at the pub across the road. I got very inspired by them. Most of 'Love is the Law' was provoked by them." Toyah interview by Mick Mercer in Zig Zag, February 1984 As has been documented elsewhere , I went off to university. It was quite odd really. There I was having just made a load of new friends in the Angels and Demons (we'd already started having our reunions at various central London pubs every weekend after Tanzi had finished) and all of a sudden I had to leave all that behind and begin a new life as a student in Br...

Even before the car had pulled over I could see that Toyah had clocked me. She continued looking directly at me as it stopped, opened the door and marched directly towards me with single-minded intent. "I've just realised," she said "You're the same Chris Limb I used to write to YEARS ago!" It was the summer of 1983 so I suppose at a stretch it could have been described as years ago (two to be precise). She had written me a handful of letters (probably nothing compared to the reams of drivel I used to send her) but even so... Still, it sounded good. It sounded very good. Everyone else must have felt more than a little impressed and perhaps somewhat jealous. However, paranoid soul that I was my main thought was Oh no - I hope she doesn't remember those bits where I wrote that I loved her! Or still worse bring the letters along and read them out so everyone laughs at me! But how had I managed to reach the point where she not only knew me but was...