New Toy by Lene Lovich

Many New Wave bands struggled to make the transition from twitchy pop eccentrics to serious recording artists in the early eighties. The skinny ties, scratchy guitars, loopy organs, and amphetamine-driven vocals seemed increasingly irrelevant compared to the seriousness of purpose evinced by the Post-Punks. Next to the unflinching emotional honesty of a band like Joy Division, The Cars or The Go-Gos seemed to belong to some Saturday morning cartoon on television.

Lene Lovich's first album, Stateless (1978), was virtually a template for the New Wave sound. Its stripped down, sixties garage band vibe served as the perfect backdrop for Lovich's strikingly dramatic vocals. "Lucky Number" and her cover version of "I Think We're Alone Now" were break out hits, just edgy enough to appear fresh and new, but not so edgy as to put off radio programmers. The album's follow up, Flex (1979), attempted to repeat the formula, but with less commercial success, leaving Lovich in artistic limbo as the eighties opened.

Enter Thomas Dolby, who shared Lovich's taste for all things off beat, and admired her distinctive vocal style. For 1981's "New Toy," he crafted an expansive, almost cinematic soundscape to showcase Lovich's voice, the twangy guitars of her earlier efforts giving way to a heady mix of synthesizers, chiming pianos, and taunting male backing vocals. The lyrics alternately celebrated the pleasures of conspicuous consumption ("I got to have your car / I got to have your stereo / I got to have it all"), and painted them as a kind of nightmare, a cycle of need that seems as inescapable and relentless as the song's chorus. It was not only Lovich's finest moment, but one that perfectly caught the contradictions of life in the market economy, where everyone and everything is something to be bought and sold, and a new toy is the best we can hope for.

The ep was filled out with five other tracks, all fine displays of Lovich's eccentric talents, but none quite capturing the spirit of the age as does this one collaboration with the mad scientist himself.

-- Crash The Driver

Lene Lovich - New Toy

01 New Toy
02 Savages
03 Special Star
04 Never Never Land
05 Cats Away
06 Details

Canada 12" EP Stiff, Epic [5E 37452] 1981

Live Wireless by Thomas Dolby

Thomas Dolby was always the odd man out. Odd in the sense of unusual or not fitting in, but also odd in the sense of not making a pair. Singular. Like the so-called New Romantic groups of the period, his vision of the future was inflected by a sense of the past. But where Visage, Ultravox, and Spandau Ballet espoused a moody grandeur that evoked what Bowie called the "European canon," Dolby was decidedly the English eccentric, pottering about in his shed, stringing up an aerial for his homemade crystal set. More Heath Robinson than Richard Wagner.

Dolby put the mad scientist persona to good use in "She Blinded Me With Science," an international hit in 1982, going to Number Five on the Billboard Hot 100, and soon becoming an MTV favourite. But the antic goings on of Dr Magnus Pyke and his nubile assistant, Miss Sakamoto, could not entirely obscure the hint of anxiety concerning the rise of a world given over to machines and their operators. The Golden Age Of Wireless, Dolby's debut album from the year previous, mixed slick, up-beat synthpop with deeply nostalgic tales of childhood lost, songs about fuel gauges, garden gates, and fading radio signals. It was a distinctly personal album in an era of masks and mask wearing, a quietly introspective album in an era of glitter and gold. And it was brilliant, from start to finish. Even when they repackaged it to include "She Blinded Me With Science," the novelty hit couldn't diminish the impact of these carefully crafted, emotionally precise musical miniatures.

Dolby toured The Golden Age of Wireless in 1983, and made what was then an audacious decision to release a live video tape rather than a live album. Entitled Live Wireless, this overlooked curio features Dolby as a projectionist working in an aging movie palace, projecting the performance film we are watching. All very postmodern for its time, and the soundtrack, ripped here, stands up particularly well, with several selections from both the debut album, two otherwise unrecorded tracks ("Puppet Theatre," and "Samson and Delilah"), and a guest appearance from Lene Lovich on "New Toy." Singular. And perfect.

-- Crash The Driver

Thomas Dolby - Live Wireless

01 Intro
02 Europa And The Pirate Twins
03 Windpower
04 One Of Our Submarines
05 Radio Silence
06 New Toy
07 Urban Tribal
08 Flying North
09 Jungle Line
10 Puppet Theatre
11 Samson and Delilah
12 She Blinded Me With Science
13 Airwaves

UK Video Cassette EMI Video [2042] 1983