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It’s been an especially hectic week in non-free-Substack-land, so this edition of “Keeping Up” is off the cuff stuff, and focused on the first thing that came to mind as I sat down to type, which is:
This exuberant 1986 live performance by US pop-rock group The Bangles of their song “Going Down To Liverpool”, filmed at the somewhat misleadingly named Syria Mosque Arena, which was actually a music venue in Pittsburgh, PA once described as “a fine example of Exotic Revival architecture”. The performance has got everything you could hope for: the drummer (Debbi Peterson) on lead vocals, a euphoric, shred-heavy middle eight, and lots of absolutely gigantic hair bouncing around.
I’ve often wondered why The (extremely Californian) Bangles were singing about Liverpool, so I looked it up. Turns out the song was originally written and performed by a British musician named Kimberley Rew for his indie band The Waves in 1982. It’s melodically and rhythmically identical to The Bangles’ version, but distinguished by Rew’s reedy, oikish, unmistakably British delivery; it reminded me of Wreckless Eric’s charmingly shambolic cult hit “The Whole Wide World”.
In Rew’s vocal treatment, the song’s wry sociopolitical comment on Thatcher-era unemployment hits home just a tad harder than it does in The Bangles’ 1984 video for the song, a stilted, unintentionally Lynchian affair featuring Dr. Spock actor Leonard Nimoy as the band’s inexplicably furious chauffeur. (The video was directed by band member Susanna Hoffs’s mother, Tamar Simon Hoffs, who later went on to helm 2010’s alarming-sounding Pound of Flesh, starring Malcolm McDowell as “Noah Melville, a popular college professor and confirmed sensualist [who] provides scholarships for gorgeous college girls through an escort service.” I haven’t seen it.)
But wait—there was yet another version, recorded in 1985 by the band that Rew’s Waves would become: Katrina and the Waves, who are best known for their irrepressibly jaunty, Rew-penned new wave hit “Walking on Sunshine”, and for winning the Eurovision Song Contest (for the UK) in 1997 with the pleasant if cloying gospel stomper “Love Shine a Light”. (Or at least they were until MSNBC news program Countdown with Keith Olbermann—unbelievably, but actually—dubbed its coverage of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 “Katrina and the Waves”.)
Katrina and the Waves’s version doesn’t do a great deal differently, musically speaking. It’s more heavily produced and reverb-slathered, but the big departure is American singer Katrina Leskanich’s bombastic, hyper-enunciated vocals. Unlike Rew’s impassioned yet fragile empathy, or The Bangles’ airy, jangly remove, Katrina’s delivery—initially at least, until the lyrics take an explicitly introspective turn—conjures up the image of an American woman chasing an unemployed man down a Toxteth street and shouting at him for being poor.
Anyway, I wasn’t expecting to go down this rabbit hole—I haven’t thought about Katrina and the Waves or, for that matter, The Bangles, for a very long time, until “Going Down to Liverpool” popped into my head. Like many people, I suspect, I most closely identify The Bangles with three absolutely indelible singles: the sublime, instant lump-in-throat ballad “Eternal Flame”; the Prince-penned earworm “Manic Monday”; and the deeply silly, but essentially perfect pop product “Walk Like an Egyptian”, a song further enshrined in my memory as a key source text for an unbeatably puerile game initiated by my old pal, the prolific and talented film critic Mike McCahill, the aim of which was to replace the word “Walk” with the word “Wank” in as many song titles as possible.
That game has provided me with hours, if not years of fun, so I’ll leave you now to play with yourself:
Until next week!
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Wank in my Shoes
Thanks for the fun!