Bangs alive, I totally want to hear this record again. How could I have given it only a 2, even in mock-seriousness? I must have been way hungover and cynical that day. I have long stated that ‘Starry Eyes’ is one of the great lost pop songs of the late 70s. I’ve been playing it every other day for about three months now. Let’s find a link to it, NOW! Ah, here it is. Gorgeous!
THE RECORDS
The Records
(Virgin, 1979)
All right, so it’s The Byrds! It’s so The Byrds, we’re embarrassed. We’d never heard of The Byrds in 1979, OK? Fuck you. We had no time for your rock history. We were too busy being young and having fun (as if). We had cigarettes to pretend we smoked, girls to be ignored by, crap jobs to do. On reflection, this album sounds incredibly wimpy, too — but hey, that’s no crime. Being wimpy and whiny are the two national characteristics of the Brits. It’s so wimpy and whiny, it makes us feel we probably could’ve kicked any New Waver’s ass across the board. It makes us feel that the whole movement was promoted by wimps whose only notion of sex was seeing leather-clad girls in neon-lit record stores across the way, record stores where torn posters of The Records fluttered on the wall. Which, oddly, is what the sleeve of this is like. We have a special part of our record collections set aside for album jackets featuring the band’s name written in neon — The Tubes, Lou Reed, John Lennon, Slippery When Wet, Foreigner. This album features the band’s name written in neon twice, on the front cover and in the gatefold. Nuff said.
Cost 92 cents. Bargain value: album 2, slip cover 1
July 29, 2009 at 11:46 am |
(From Facebook)
Alex Wisgard
Man, I heard “Starry Eyes” in the basement of the Notting Hill Music and Video exchange last summer, and became promptly obsessed, but never thought much of looking into their other stuff. Maybe I’ll have to now… What a song.