RADIO LONDON

“Everyone’s an Exit”

(Mississippi 1984)

Familiarity Breeds Contempt might be the best album title ever. In most of America, it was an absolute struggle to be an underground band in 1980. If there were any new wave kids in your town, their music absolutely had to come from England. Nothing good came from America, except maybe Talking Heads.

1984 in Mississippi = 1980 everywhere else.

Big Monkey Records made this compilation to establish the Jackson scene as a worthy rival to Athens or Nashville. The Windbreakers were already well-known but their songs here had been released on other records. Beat Temptation actually managed to make it to play in NYC once or twice, but all the rest of the bands here promptly disappeared.

The album came with no insert and zero band information.

Jeff Lewis fronted Radio London after he quit the Windbreakers. There’s supposed to be a 45 out there somewhere but I never found a copy.

• Download “Everyone’s an Exit”

(Familiarity Breeds Contempt - Big Monkey Records LP 009)

THE ROYAL COURT OF CHINA

“It’s All Changed”

(Nashville 1987)

This is a rough one. Radio was wrong. The cool kids were wrong. And I just missed it.

“It’s All Changed” is a magnificent record, a genuine candidate for Lost Hit of the 80s.

The Royal Court of China signed to A&M without first getting their college-rock credibility. There were no profiles in MATTER magazine, no EPs on Twin/Tone or Coyote and no showcases at the New Music Seminar. Their manager pissed off lots of people in Nashville when she proclaimed that she had come to town to teach the locals how the music business really worked. The scene was still small enough in 1987 that, absent an immediate radio hit, indifference from the Right People could doom your record.

Of course the band made sure that the immediate radio hit wasn’t coming by insisting on a one-minute intro. Forget getting to the hook by the one-minute mark, we don’t hear a vocal until 1:09 and the chorus doesn’t finally show up until two minutes in, long after most programmers would have turned it off.

But what a chorus it is. Leaving aside that the b-verse would have been a fine chorus all by itself, the real hook is a stone killer, the kind that’s pushed everything else out of my head for the last month. I’m sure there’s a well-supported label story as to exactly why “It’s All Changed” wasn’t the most dominant rock song of the year, but no real-world circumstances can really explain how both the scenesters and the industry completely screwed up this time.

Still, A&M had the good sense to let the band record themselves (maybe they learned something from the Dream Syndicate Production Disaster of 1984) and they made an album that sounds great twenty years later.

Historical note: 1987 was the last year when CDs were considering an audiophile specialty item and lots of unproven bands didn’t get one. A&M did made CDs for everything they released but artists like The Royal Court of China got such tiny pressings that it’s almost impossible to find one now. I ripped this from a promo copy of the LP, still available for $1.99 at finer used record stores).

• Download: It’s All Changed
• Watch the video on YouTube
• The band has an excellent website

(A&M Records SP-5174)