Du venin qui me fait mal au cœur

Thursday music corner: French avant-garde pop duo Les Rita Mitsouko burst onto their national pop scene in 1985 with their number 2 single Marcia Baila, the video for which featured exemplary 1980s choreography and a myriad of stunning costumes from Jean-Paul Gaultier. Their stylish, jagged 1980s art-pop was augmented by another impressive video for 1986’s hook-laden single C'est comme ça ('It's like that'), which later won Music Video of the Year for director Jean-Baptiste Mondino at the Victoires de la Musique. (Mondino's other well-known music videos include Don Henley's Boys of Summer, Open Your Heart by Madonna, and Neneh Cherry's Manchild). C'est comme ça was the second single from their second album, The No Comprendo, which was recorded with legendary producer Tony Visconti in both London and Paris. It reached number 10 in the French charts. Les Rita Mitsouko played together until the death from cancer of member Fred Chichin in 2007; his partner Catherine Ringer then continued with a solo career.

Les Rita Mitsouko – C'est comme ça (1986)

Mangere Mountain

 

Ruapehu summer

 

Mt Ruapehu from south of Waiouru, 24 December 2021

When you come back home and you find me waiting there

Thursday music corner: Don McGlashan and Harry Sinclair's The Front Lawn was a musical theatre duo formed in 1985, and who released two albums, one in 1989 and the second in 1993. By the time their first album was recorded they had been joined in the group temporarily by Jennifer Ward-Lealand. 

Their first album, Songs from the Front Lawn, features the classic New Zealand single When You Come Back Home as its opening track. The album also features the ebullient Tomorrow Night, which featured in a karaoke scene in the Wellington pool-playing caper film Stickmen (2001), and Andy, which was written in memory of McGlashan’s late brother. Andy appears in the APRA ‘Top 100 New Zealand songs of all time’ list. In the 1989 New Zealand Music Awards the Front Lawn won three awards for Most Promising Group, Best Film Soundtrack/Compilation, and International Achievement.

Don McGlashan, formerly of punk outfit Blam Blam Blam, went on to found the Muttonbirds, which achieved great success in the 1990s and early 2000s. He has performed solo since 2003. Harry Sinclair has directed three feature films: Topless Women Talk About Their Lives (1997), The Price of Milk (2000) and Toy Love (2002). He directed the TV series ‘90210’ in 2009 and 2010, and in his acting career gained a place in history as the ancient king Isildur in the opening sequences of The Fellowship of the Ring.

The Front Lawn – When You Come Back Home (1989)

No longer riding on the merry-go-round

Thursday music corner: John Winston Ono Lennon (1940-80) moved to the US in 1971. In 1980 he released his fifth album with Yoko Ono, Double Fantasy, which was his return to recording after five years on hiatus in New York, spent raising his son Sean. The album featured Lennon numbers (Just Like) Starting Over, Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy), Woman, plus the track Watching the Wheels as the opening number on Side 2. Yoko Ono’s compositions also featured, alternating with Lennon’s. He had started writing Watching the Wheels in 1977, and over the years its title evolved from Emotional Wreck, to People, and then to I’m Crazy, before settling on the final title. Three weeks after the album was released in November 1980, Lennon was murdered outside his Dakota apartment building in Manhattan. Watching the Wheels, which had coalesced into a proudly sweet statement of familial self-content, was released as a poignant posthumous single. It reached number 10 in the Billboard chart, and number 30 in the UK singles chart, but only number 44 in New Zealand.

John Lennon – Watching the Wheels (recorded 1980, released 1981)

See also:

Blog: The last time Paul saw John, 20 September 2015

Blog: There was a kind of mischief about her, 5 December 2013

Blog: John, your little friend is here, 10 February 2010

The itinerant life of a tramp steamer

By contrast with liners, tramps were the maids-of-all-work among steamships. They made up two-thirds of the British merchant fleet - and perhaps of all ocean-going steamships. By the end of the [19th] century, the vast proportion of bulk goods that travelled by sea would have crossed the ocean in tramps. Liners ran to a schedule with fixed ports of call. Tramps went wherever they could find a freight contract. A large proportion of British-owned tramps plied in the 'cross-trades', returning but rarely to Britain. Their freights were usually 'rough cargo' of the kind avoided by liners: coal, rails, grain, rice, metal ores. They had to accept the great fluctuations in freight rates as the price of sailing with a holdful of cargo.

The voyage of the Bengal in 1880-81 was not untypical. It sailed from Cardiff in September 1880 for Port Suez at the head of the Red Sea with a holdful of coal. From there it went on to Jeddah (the captain having wisely obtained a chart of the Red Sea), carrying pilgrims for Mecca. There it took on returning hajis bound for Penang and Singapore, where it stopped to refuel. By February 1881 the Bengal was at Yokohama and then Kobe in Japan for a cargo of tea to New York. Rather than sail home round Cape Horn, the captain looked for additional freight, calling first at Shanghai and then at the emigrant ports of Amoy and Hong Kong. There he found a 'cargo' of 'deck-passengers' heading for Singapore, the great migrant destination in South East Asia. By late March the Bengal was at Aden, whence it sailed for Gibraltar via the Suez Canal, and from there to Halifax and New York to deliver its tea. It finally reached London, loaded with American grain, June 1881.

- John Darwin, Unlocking the World: Port Cities and Globalisation in the Age of Steam 1830-1930, London, 2020, p.148-9.

See also:
Blog: And after shipwreck driven upon this shore, 7 October 2015
Blog: Repairing the Kaitaki, 23 June 2013
Blog: The lifeblood of a young colony, 12 June 2009

It's gonna take patience and time to do it right

Thursday music corner: Youthful R&B artist James Ray first recorded as Little Jimmy Ray because he was just five feet tall. After a period of poverty and homelessness, he attained his first success in 1962 with his release of Rudy Clark’s waltz-timed song If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody, which was a top 10 hit on the Billboard R&B charts and made number 22 on the Billboard Hot 100 pop charts. That song would soon enter the Beatles’ repertoire after Paul McCartney heard it playing in Brian Epstein’s NEMS store in Liverpool; it later charted in the UK thanks to a version by Freddie and the Dreamers.

Got My Mind Set On You, another Clark composition, was first heard by Beatle George Harrison on his 1963 solo visit to the US, six months before the band’s culture-redefining Ed Sullivan Show appearances. During a visit to his sister in rural Illinois Harrison discovered Ray’s album, which features the song. Ray’s career was sadly cut short by his death in New York from a drug overdose in 1963, aged only 22. (Rudy Clark would go on to write The Shoop Shoop Song (It's In His Kiss), a major hit for Betty Everett in 1964 and Cher in 1990).

Twenty-four years later Harrison recorded his own version of Got My Mind Set On You, which became his third and final solo number-one single on the US charts. Harrison’s cover also topped the pop charts in Australia, Belgium, Canada and Ireland, and in New Zealand it reached number 4. The song was kept from the number-one spot in the UK charts by T’Pau’s China In Your Hand. Reflecting its ubiquity, Harrison’s version was parodied by Weird Al Yankovic’s 1988 song (This Song’s Just) Six Words Long. Ray’s version returned to prominence in 2021 with its inclusion in Edgar Wright’s soundtrack for his swinging-London horror film, Last Night in Soho, featuring Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy and Dame Diana Rigg.

James Ray – Got My Mind Set On You (1962)

Baby don't you know it makes me blow my mind

Thursday music corner: Los Angeles band Fenwyck recorded this Keith and Linda Colley-penned, genially psychedelic pop gem for the Challenge label. Fenwyck’s recording failed to trouble the charts when it was released in the northern summer of 1967, but the song did attain greater prominence when it was covered on the B-side of The American Breed’s hit, Bend Me, Shape Me, which reached number 5 in the US charts in early 1968, and topped the Listener's pop chart in New Zealand.

Challenge Records was most famous for The Champs' 1958 hit Tequila. One of Challenge's two co-founders in 1957 was cowboy singer Gene Autry, although he sold his share the following year.

Fenwyck – Mindrocker (1967)