Rousers – "Susan's Day" (1980)

She used to feel down, down

In this dormitory town

The Netherlands is a lot closer to the U.K. than it is to the U.S.  

Perhaps that explains why the Rousers – who are Dutch – use “dormitory town” rather than “bedroom community” in the lyrics of today’s featured song.

An English dormitory town

Both terms are used to describe places that people leave every morning to go to their jobs and return to each night to eat dinner, watch a little TV, and then hit the hay.  But “dormitory town” is a British term while “bedroom community” is an American term. 

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“Susan’s Day” is two and a half minutes of pure power-pop pleasure that I would have missed out on were it not for Steven Lorber, who played it on his “Mystic Eyes” radio program back in 1980.

It’s not the only great song that the Rousers released.  But for some reason, no one bought their records – or at least no one in the U.S. and U.K. did.

I suspect their music didn’t sell that well in the Netherlands either – there’s almost nothing about them on the Internet, and their music isn’t available for purchase from Amazon or the iTunes Store.

Go figure.

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“Susan’s Day” is about a married woman who seems to lead a pretty dull life.  She makes her husband’s morning cuppa, does a little shopping after he leaves for work, and spends the rest of the day home alone:

As your only company

You’ll have your cream sherry

  

That’s another clue that the Rousers were influenced more by British culture than American culture: no self-respecting American housewife would while away the hours getting sloshed on cream sherry.

Click here to see the Rousers lip-synching to “Susan’s Day” on a Dutch TV show. 

Rousers – "Magazine Girl" (1980)

I found my girlfriend

In some porno magazine

The Latin poet Ovid wrote about the sculptor Pygmalion, who created an ivory statue of a woman that was so beautiful and lifelike that he fell in love with her.

According to Ovid, Pygmalion asked Venus (the Roman goddess of love) to send him a woman who was as beautiful as the statue.  But Venus did him one better – she transformed the sculpture into a real woman named Galatea. 

“Pygmalion and Galatea,” an 1890
painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme

Pygmalion promptly married Galatea, and the two of them lived happily ever after.

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The singer of today’s featured song is a latter-day Pygmalion who falls in love with a beautiful work of art.  The object of his desire is not an ivory sculpture but a hot chick who is featured in a porno magazine.

Sadly, no deity transforms his two-dimensional photo into a living, breathing woman.

Worse yet, his mother finds the magazine and throws it away.  (“That’s no good for you!” she tells him.)

According to Shakespeare, “The course of true love never did run smooth.”  Truer words were never spoken – especially when you have a mother who gets all up in your business.

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When it comes to pop music, the Dutch absolutely poned the French, Germans, and Italians.

We’re talking the Shocking Blue (“Venus”), the George Baker Selection (“Little Green Bag”), Golden Earring (“Radar Love”), Focus (“Hocus Pocus”), Gruppo Sportivo, and – last but certainly not least – the Rousers, who gave us “Magazine Girl” in 1979.

I remember hearing that song and a number of others from the Rousers’ first album, A Treat of New Beat, on Steven Lorber’s “Mystic Eyes” radio show in 1980.

I’m trying to track down Jan and Cocke de Jong, the two brothers who formed the Rousers, so I can interview them for 2 or 3 lines.  I haven’t had any luck so far, but I’m going to keep trying.

Click here to listen to “Magazine Girl.”

Lyn Todd – "Buy Your Love" (1980)

I don’t want to buy your love

With diamond rings

I wish I knew more about the late Lyn Todd, who recorded today’s featured song in 1980.

“Buy Your Love” was originally recorded by the Victims, a New York City punk band, in 1979.  It was written by the band’s frontman, Richard Reilly.

Lyn Todd covered the song the next year.  It was released on her only album, Lyn Todd, which was produced by Bobby Orlando:

Orlando – also known as “Bobby O” – produced and performed on hundreds of “Hi-NRG” records.  (Hi-NRG music is an uptempo disco/EDM genre – Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” is a good example.)

Most of the tracks on the Lyn Todd album – including her covers of the Who’s “Pinball Wizard” and David Bowie’s “Rebel, Rebel” – are pure hi-NRG in style.

But “Buy Your Love” is very different.  It’s classic New York City-style punk.

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It appears that Lyn Todd died in December 2010.

I’ve been unable to find anything about what she did in the thirty years between the release of the Lyn Todd LP and her death.

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Lyn Todd’s cover of “Buy Your Love” would have escaped my attention entirely if Steven Lorber hadn’t played it on his “Mystic Eyes” radio show in the summer of 1980.

Click here to listen to Lyn Todd's cover of “Buy Your Love.”

Click here to listen to the original recording of the song by the Victims.

Squeeze – "Farfisa Beat" (1980)

Everybody's dancing

To the Farfisa beat

Farfisa was an Italian electronics manufacturer best known for its line of compact electronic organs.  

Farfisa – the name is an acronym for Fabbriche Riunite di Fisarmoniche, which can be translated as “United Factories of Accordions” – began to manufacture electronic organs in 1964.  Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs – whose first big hit, “Woolly Bully,” was released in 1965 – were one of the first bands to record with a Farfisa.  

A vintage Farfisa organ

The Swingin’ Medallions used a Farfisa on “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love)” in 1966.  

Strawberry Alarm Clock’s Mark Weitz played a Farfisa “Combo Compact” organ on “Incense and Peppermints,” but he later switched to a Vox Continental.

The Vox Continental was also used by the Animals, Dave Clark Five, Doors, Monkees, and many others.

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By the seventies, synthesizers had largely replaced compact organs like the Farfisa on pop records.  But the Farfisa was used by a lot of eighties New Wave groups who were looking for a more retro sound – including the B-52s, Talking Heads, and Squeeze.

Today’s featured song – which I first heard on Steven Lorber’s “Mystic Eyes” radio show in 1980 – uses a Farfisa organ.  It was released as a single in Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland, but not in the UK or the U.S.

“Farfisa Beat” was only one of the great songs on Squeeze’s Argybargy album that  Lorber played.  I immediately went out and bought that album.  (Earlier this year, I sold it to Steven.)

Like almost all of the songs on Argybargy, “Farfisa Beat” was co-written by Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook.  In a 2004 book about Squeeze’s music, Difford had this to say about it: “The song’s crap.”

I beg to differ.

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Click here to listen to “Farfisa Beat.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Squeeze – "If I Didn't Love You" (1980)

If I

If I

If I

If I

If I

If I

If I

If I didn't love you, I 'd hate you

[NOTE: I originally wrote about this song – which may have the first Squeeze song I ever heard on the "Mystic Eyes" in 1980 – on May 15, 2010.  Here's a lightly edited version of my original post.]

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Squeeze is yet another band I first heard on the "Mystic Eyes" program, although they were popular enough that I later heard their music elsewhere as well.  

This song is from their third LP, Argybargy, which is a new wave masterpiece – it has a number of very memorable tracks, and it's impossible not to sing along when you listen to them.  (I was singing along to this one today while on a bike ride, and got a number of admiring looks from the walkers and joggers that I passed while singing at the top of my lungs.)

I have to disagree with Squeeze when it comes to love and hate – love and hate aren't always mutually exclusive, either-or emotions.  Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel wasn't talking about romantic love when he said "The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference," but I think that principle applies to romantic love.  

The French writer, Marcel Jouhandeau expressed a similar sentiment: "To really know someone is to have loved and hated him in turn."  (Jouhandeau also said "The heart has its prisons that intelligence cannot unlock," which may be as good as any explanation why love and hate can go together.)

Love most often turns to hate when it is not reciprocated, or when the beloved is guilty of deception or betrayal.  Perhaps Squeeze should have said Because you don't love me, I hate you, or Even though I love you, I hate you.

In any event, no one wrote songs more clever than Squeeze's Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook.  More importantly, no one wrote songs that were more convincing when it came to portraying real people in real situations.

Click here to listen to "If I Didn't Love You."

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Peter Sarstedt – "Take Off Your Clothes" (1969)

My daddy is a priest, you know

And I am not a beast, you know

Many years ago, my daughters applied for admission to a local Catholic girls’ high school.

The application form asked the applicant to explain briefly why she wanted to attend a Catholic high school instead of a public high school.  One of my daughters responded to that question by stating that that religion had always been an important part of her upbringing – in part because her grandfather (my father-in-law) was a priest.

I’ve offered wondered what the sisters who ran that school thought of that answer.  (It’s true that my father-in-law was a priest, but he was an Episcopal priest – and unlike Catholic priests, he was not expected to be celibate.)

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The singer of today’s featured song has one thing on his mind, and he uses every trick in the book to persuade the young lady he is addressing to give it to him.

He’s a sneaky bast*rd, and he’s patient – rather than put off the object of his desire by coming right out and asking her to go to bed with him, he takes baby steps.

First, he asks her to take off her clothes, claiming that all he wants to do is look:

Take off your clothes

Let me see what it is that your hiding . . .

I just want to look

I just want to look

As a demonstration of his bona fides, he offers to take off his clothes as well:

So take off your clothes

And stand naked as nature intended

And I’ll take off mine

Just to show you that I’m in good faith

Once he’s got her nekkid as a jaybird, he invites her to lie on his bed with him – just to have a little chat:

Now you can see

That it isn’t as bad as all that

So lie on the bed

And I’ll talk of my unhappy childhood

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I’m sure you’ve heard the expression, “Give him an inch and he’ll take a mile”?  The singer of this song is a textbook example of what that old saying was talking about:

It will not hurt you

I promise you that, cross my heart

The first time is always the best

You can ask anybody

At long last, his siege is successful and he breaches the castle wall.  But it seems that he’s bitten off more than he can chew:

How does it feel

Now that you are no longer a maiden?

What do you mean? You want more?

And you want it right now?  (Oh, my God!)

Our modern-day Casanova has had enough:

I just want to sleep

Yes, I just want to sleep

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If you’ve been waiting to buy irony until it goes on sale, wait no more – the irony in “Take Off Your Clothes” is as cheap as any irony you’ll ever find.

“Take Off Your Clothes” is sort of a mirror-image of “Blagged,” the Peter Sarstedt song that was featured in the previous 2 or 3 lines.  The two songs contrast sharply when it comes to tone, but the premise – that men want only one thing from women, and that women surrender that one thing at their peril – was trite 50 years when those songs were recorded, and it’s even triter today.

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Peter Sarstedt – who was born in India to two British civil servants in 1941, but moved to London in 1954 – wasn’t the only pop star in his family.

Peter’s older brother Richard, who recorded under the name “Eden Kane,” had five top ten singles in the UK in the early sixties, including “Boys Cry,” which I heard more than once on Steven Lorber’s “Mystic Eyes” radio show.  (I wonder if Steven knows that Peter Sarstedt and Eden Kane were brothers.)

His younger brother Clive recorded several albums and had a #3 hit with a cover of the Hoagy Carmichael song, “My Resistance Is Low.”  (Clive released that song as Robin Sarstedt – Robin being his middle name.)

Click here to listen to “Take Off Your Clothes.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Peter Sarstedt – "Blagged" (1968)

And as I walked outside and closed the door

I wondered if I'd won or lost

Peter Sarstedt was kind of a big deal in the world of pop music in the sixties.  His 1969 single, “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely),” was a #1 hit in the UK and won an Ivor Novello Award (which is the British equivalent of a Grammy).

“Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)” tells the story of a poor girls from the mean streets of Naples who grows up to become an international jet setter.  (Some believed that the song was inspired by Sophia Loren, who grew up in poverty in Naples.  But in 2009, Sarstedt revealed that the song was really about his first wife, Anita Atke, a Danish dentist.)

The song’s lyrics drop the names of Marlene Dietrich, Picasso, the Aga Khan, and the Rolling Stones, and also make reference to fashionable resorts (St. Moritz and Juan-les-Pins) and Parisian landmarks (Boulevard Saint-Michel and the Sorbonne):

I've seen all your qualifications

You got from the Sorbonne

And the painting you stole from Picasso . . .

When you go on your summer vacation

You go to Juan-les-Pins

With your carefully designed topless swimsuit . . .

And when the snow falls you're found in St. Moritz

With the others of the jet set

And you sip your Napoleon brandy

But you never get your lips wet

Sarstedt described “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)” as a “romantic novel in song.”  I would describe it as a “so-full-of-sh*t-that-its-eyes-are-brown song.”   

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I would never have heard of Peter Sarstedt if Steven Lorber hadn’t played a couple of his records on his “Mystic Eyes” radio show on WHFS in 1980.

Today’s featured song was the B-side to “I Am a Cathedral,” the Sarstedt single that preceded “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)” and failed to chart.

“Blagged” is based on a fictional (presumably) conversation between a man and a woman who have just had sex.

Peter Sarstedt

The female member of the couple is clearly suffering from a bad case of post-coital tristesse – also known as “post-sex blues.”  When her partner nonchalantly asks her for a post-coital cigarette, her response is less than gracious: “You got what you came for,” she says.  “Now leave the way you came!”

The male shrugs off her snarkiness, replying thusly:

“I am but a man,” I said

“I do what I can,” I said

Which is a truthful answer, but a bit lame.

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The man should have put on his pants and skedaddled at that point, but he can’t resist asking her a hypothetical question before he exits:

What if I said that I love you?

Would all your morals then be pacified?

The act of love be then more true?

His lover doesn’t fall for that, and comes back with a question of her own:

“Oh yes, you are smart,” she said,

“But where is your heart?” she said

That shuts the dude up, and he leaves without another word.

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But once our wannabe Casanova has departed, he has a moment of doubt:

And as I walked outside and closed the door

I wondered if I'd won or lost

And if the status quo was still intact

And was it worth the time it cost?

Who’s kidding who here?  I don’t believe for a minute that he really thought those thoughts as he left his lady fair’s boudoir.  After all, he got what he came for – right?

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I’ll tell you more about Peter Sarstedt and his talented brothers in the next 2 or 3 lines.

Click here to listen to “Blagged.”

And click on the link below to order the song from Amazon: