Hg's Curious Old Box - 1
Bow Wow Wow - C30, C60, C90, Go! (1981)
To celebrate reaching the hundredth tune presented in his regular Troubled Diva's Old Curiosity Box feature, Mike opened up his singles collection to the great unwashed and asked for requests. I had every intention of contributing, but faced with such an embarrassment of riches I um'd and ah'd and procrastinated and eventually caught a cold so I could go home sick and skip my homework.
Maybe my illness stemmed from guilt, because over Christmas one of the few blog-related thoughts that I remember entertaining was something along the lines of "Mike's Old Curiosity Box is a damn great feature and I'm going to brazenly steal it for Hydragenic dot com in the New Year". So, having left a comment the other evening saying "oops, sorry I didn't vote" and suggesting which tune I might have picked had I got my arse into gear, it strikes me that now might indeed be the appropriate getaway vehicle for the crime...
Hg's Curious Old Box won't be restricting itself purely to vinyl (frankly, because it's too much of a faff to have to connect the stereogram up to the PC) so for this inaugural opening of the lid I'm making my selection from the much-maligned (and probably rightly so) "cassingle" market. Yes, as if it wasn't bad enough that record companies released whole albums on cassettes (with poor-quality audio, crappy artwork and the inability to ever find the beginning of a song), they also tried releasing singles in this format for a while.
My chosen song is Bow Wow Wow's C30, C60, C90, Go!, which is obviously more than a bit self-referential. I realise, with a touch of envy, that there might be people reading this to whom those obscurely divisible numbers mean nothing, so I guess I'd better explain that cassette tapes could be bought in different lengths: 30, 45, 60, 90 and 120 minutes. A 90-minute tape was probably the one that people used most, giving 45 minutes per side; generally - though not always - long enough to record your favourite vinyl album.
Bow Wow Wow was the first trendy group that I became interested in, around the age of thirteen. They were masterminded by Malcolm McLaren and so they were always about more than just the songs. Their lead singer was the photogenic Annabella Lwin, who was only two years older than me. The fact that she posed naked for their debut album's Manet pastiche cover (the fantastically titled See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang, Yeah, City All Over! Go Ape Crazy!) only added to the appeal.
Backed by a trio of musicians who had been the original Adam's Ants, dressed in McLaren/Westwood pirate chic and borrowing heavily from African tribal drumming, in July 1980 the band issued C30, C60, C90, Go! as its debut single. It was the world's first ever cassette single and the record company took the bold step of not releasing it on vinyl. They followed up with Your Cassette Pet, another cassette-only release that sat mid-way between the single and album format.
C30, C60, C90, Go! was topical in 1980 and its theme remains relevant in 2003. The recording industry was becoming concerned about the potential for personal cassette recordings to affect its revenue streams adversely and thus had initiated its "Home Taping Is Killing Music" awareness raising campaign. Sounds familiar? Of course it does, because we're stuck in one of those timewarp things at the moment and it seems to be the early 1980s all over again. Mad dictators are brandishing nuclear arms, every guitar band sounds like Joy Division and the music industry's knickers are still in a twist, only this time it's MP3s that are the(ir) problem.
C30, C60, C90, Go! prematurely danced on the grave of the traditional vinyl music industry, advocating a level of piracy that harmonised with the band's outlandish costumes: "It just a-break my heart when I went in your shop and you said my records were out of stock, so I don't buy records in your shop, now I tape them all off Top Of The Pops, yeah!" The lawless aspect of their message was underlined by lyrics that presented the issue in a "Robin Hood" context: "If you're rich enough to have a record collection, I'll bring my bazooka [tape deck] round for an inspection"
Like all of Bow Wow Wow's early material, it's notable for its "recorded in a cardboard box" ambience, its "isn't this naughty!" irritant factor (the McLaren influence) and its general joie de vivre. The chart success of Go Wild In The Country ("where snakes in the grass are absolutely free") a couple of years later was probably their high point, after which things deteriorated in favour of the more polished, commercial (over-produced?) sound of I Want Candy. They disbanded in 1983, though they got together again for a US tour in 1998 (without founding member Matthew Ashman, who had passed away a few years previously).
It's all so appropriate, isn't it: a song about the pirating of the fruits of other people's creative labour, in a feature pirated from the fruits of another person's creative labour. Well, enjoy the first item of treasure from the chest and don't expect future installments to be this well thought out.
Oh, and cheers, Mike! The best form of flattery, and all that...
[Postscript: On reflection, knowing how the weblog community rightly dislikes overt plagiarism, I should mention that I'm actually much too cowardly respectful to do something as brazen as stealing the "Box" idea without permission. I asked Mike yesterday whether he'd mind if I did this and he kindly said that he wouldn't.]
Posted by Hg on Friday 24 January 2003 at 07:57.
Received 2 comments so far.
Excellent, thanks for that one. Never owned it or indeed any cassingle (and, as you imply, if you're going to have a cassingle then this is the one to have).
Yet I remembered it perfectly on playing the MP3. So it had hidden itself secretly in there for all these years without my knowledge.
The album cover I did know I'd remembered. When I saw "Dejeuner sur l'herbe"(?) in Paris earlier in the year it looked like a pale imitation without Anabella and the boys.
Which probably just emphasises how little I know about art.
Comment by Nic on Saturday 25 January 2003 at 16:37.
I loved this album! Of course, I'm much younger than you....
Comment by sasha on Sunday 26 January 2003 at 02:19.
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