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Hi, and welcome back! This week’s quick rec is a short and very fun video from the MTV archives. It’s a clip from 1991 in which a pre-superstardom Queen Latifah, then just 21 years old, takes host Tabitha Soren on a tour of the video store that she owned in Jersey City. “Why did you decide to buy your own video store?”, asks Soren. “Well it was either a video store or a grocery store,” responds Queen Latifah. Fair enough—can’t mess with the entrepreneurial spirit! Watch the video here.
The composer, arranger and songwriter Burt Bacharach, who died recently at 94, was responsible for an amazing number of classic, indelible popular hits. This long list of his songs serves as a pretty staggering reminder of just how frequently Bacharach delivered the goods, whether solo or in collaboration with other artists like Hal David and Carole Bayer Sager. (I got a surprise while scrolling through: I had no idea that he and Bayer Sager co-wrote Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald’s 1986 duet “On My Own”, one of the decade’s great romantic ballads, the supremely overwrought music video for which surely deserves its own newsletter one day.)
One of my favorite Bacharach-composed, David-written songs is “Walk on By”, first performed by Dionne Warwick in 1963. Crisp, insouciant and classy, yet full to the brim with pain, it’s a perfect pop song, peerlessly constructed and performed:
“Walk on By” has been reinterpreted many times—and very well, too—by myriad disparate artists from Isaac Hayes to Gloria Gaynor, D-Train to moody Aussie synth act Jo Jo Zep. I think my personal favorite cover, though, is one that probably shouldn’t work at all: a brutal assault on the song by Guildford pub-punk band The Stranglers, as stiff-backed and hostile as Warwick’s version is nimble and sultry.
Released as a non-album single in 1978, The Stranglers’s “Walk on By” was later repackaged with expanded editions of the band’s third LP “Black and White”. It’s twice as long as Warwick’s version, but gets most of the lyrics out of the way in half the time. Singer/guitarist Hugh Cornwell spits out the lovelorn words like a man hunched over his fifth pint, while his bandmates wail backing vocals—a blokey and tender sound that’s a precedent for the now-classic video of football hooligans singing Savage Garden’s “Truly Madly Deeply” in the pub. Just under a minute-and-a-half in, Cornwell contemptuously advises his former lover to “just go for a stroll in the trees”, a distinctly non-Bacharach/David line which always makes me laugh.
Here, the song transitions into a full-on punk-prog instrumental odyssey. An outrageously florid keyboard solo from Dave Greenfield dances all over the place, while Jean-Jacques Burnel’s genuinely evil-sounding bass scampers up, down and around like a red-eyed dachshund at your ankles. Soon, Cornwell’s lead guitar comes to the fore, and the section builds to a fearsome climax, driven by the muscular thudding of (recently deceased) drummer Jet Black (best ever drummer name). It’s a properly thrilling sound, especially turned up loud in your headphones. I could spend all day trying to describe the song, but you could listen to it, or watch the video, which is based on Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up, and was even filmed in the same location, Maryon Park in Charlton, southeast London.
I’ve never fully dived into The Stranglers’ back catalog, and writing this post might be the push I need. I’ve only ever really heard the hits, including 1977’s “Peaches”, used to unforgettable effect in the opening moments of Jonathan Glazer’s fantastic crime film Sexy Beast (2000), and their biggest ever single, the harpsichord-tastic ballad “Golden Brown” from 1981. As “Walk on By” shows, The Stranglers were an eclectic and unpredictable bunch, but it must have been a real shock to hear this one for the first time—it’s a bizarre and brilliant song that sounds like nothing else that was in the charts at the time, or ever has been since!
I don’t have too many regrets in life, but here’s one: My beloved late granddad was a big fan of “Golden Brown”, which received lots of airplay on his favorite radio station, London’s Magic 105.4. As a teenager, I’d read in one of my music mags that the song was actually (at least, in part) about heroin, and not just a beautiful, willowy woman. So of course I went and told my granddad this the next time it came on the radio. His face fell, he looked disgusted, and it was obvious that he’d never be able to listen to the song in the same way again. I instantly felt like a proper dickhead, and resolved to never do anything like that again. If you, reader, find yourself in a similar position, take it from me: let your granddad enjoy The Stranglers!
Before I go: it’s been a little while since I’ve shared an Italo Disco banger. My apologies. Let me put that right this week by serving up 1989’s “Rich in Paradise” by FPI Project [video here—and I do recommend watching], which opens with the deathless sound of a heavily-accented Italian man sternly intoning in English: “Hey you… hey you, don’t be silly / Put the condom, on your willy! Rich in paradise!”, before the stomping piano house reverie kicks in. Enjoy!
Until next week!
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Walk On By is definitely in my all time Top 10 songs. A masterpiece. I'm also partial to Aretha Franklin's version of the song, which I think she recorded before Warwick did.