Category: Music

Bonus Game Included (on c-side)!

April 13, 2017

Back in 1983, Pete Shelley (ex-Buzzcocks) released his second solo LP called XL1. Despite having great success with his first album, mostly due to the hit single Homosapien, this followup wasn’t very successful. And yet it was a bit of a landmark album for a very unusual reason: the album came with a piece of ZX Spectrum computer software.

For those unaware, games were often distributed on tape in those days. Rather than using digital media, computers often input data via an audio signal, which therefore meant using cassettes or (much less commonly) vinyl records to distribute software. This was the heyday of the 8-bit games industry, and more cassettes containing software were being sold than containing music. It was a natural idea for a band to include software on a record… but Pete Shelley was the first to do it.

While the program was nothing more than a visualizer, it may have been the very first visualizer! The idea was you’d load it up on your spectrum and start it playing at the same time as the record, and then watch the pretty visuals play out on the screen while you sang along with the lyrics. Here’s the whole thing on Youtube (remember the software itself was silent):

Here is a fascinating account of the production of the software by the guy that made it. I particularly like how they put out a lock-groove on the vinyl version to save speakers (and ears!) since the raw audio of the code is just screeching white noise. Amusingly, in researching this post i found a forum post where someone described returning the cassette to swap it for the version without the game since he hated having to fast-forward through the screeching sound of the software every time he listened to the album 🙂

I can’t find any reports on whether this was a success, or even made a ripple in the games/music industry. I’m sure it was a novelty, but I wonder how many Pete Shelley fans made use of this even in those days? Either way it hardly set a precedent, and I know of no other examples of a band including visualizers on their albums…

In the early 1980s text adventures were a big deal, and successful enough that there was even a ‘do it yourself’ program called The Quill that allowed anyone to make their own game. One such person that did was Dave Greenfield, member of the band The Stranglers. He wrote a game called Aural Quest that was included at the end of side two of the (cassette only) versions of their 1984 album Aural Sculpture:

It’s a long-ish game (for a text adventure) in which you play the manager of the band as they tour around the world (starting in the UK, via Europe to Tokyo and eventually Brisbane) and get into misadventures. It was apparently quite challenging and since it was mostly ignored by the gaming press in those days players must have had a terrible time beating it without assistance. Here’s a video of a playthrough:

As best I can tell, this was the first and quite possibly only game actually included on an officially released album. Certainly it was the only game released on an album in audio format; if software was ever included these days it would be as a digital file on the CD. (Let’s ignore for the fact that even CDs are mostly dead…)

As a last curiosity, how about the Thompson Twins game? They were a synthpop band from the early 1980s, and in 1984 a ZX Spectrum game based on their single Doctor Doctor was released on flexi-disc only as a promo attached to a computer games magazine:

The game was a graphic-adventure, quite short and apparently quite bad. It lives on via emulation and you can see a full playthrough of the c64 version on Youtube:

This release is remarkable for many reasons:
– The fact that it was ever made in the first place
– The fact that it was only distributed as a free magazine promotional item
– The fact that it was distributed on vinyl disc rather than cassette

This last fact is notable: users would have had to record the disc onto cassette first before being able to load it into their computers. This wouldn’t have been difficult, but is just an unnecessary step and is probably what led to flexidisc software distribution never catching on! (Wikipedia has a good article on this game including the development, and additional research suggests the oft-delayed c64 disc version is extremely rare these days.)

I was a Thompson Twins fan in those days. I would have played this! I suspect the flexi was stripped from magazine covers in Oz though, and I can barely believe any Australian readers sent off for the c64 disc? Adam… did you?

And that’s that. I became curious about the idea of 8-bit band-related software-on-albums a while ago and this post has been percolating for some time. But despite my attempts this is all I can find. There were of course unofficial items (such as Jethro Tull and Beatles adventures written on The Quill) and actual games based on bands (Frankie Goes To Hollywood) but none of these were distributed by the band or on vinyl record.

However… there was another unusual method of software distribution in the 1980s, in some ways even stranger than including code on vinyl albums. Maybe that’ll become a future post…

Icehouse

April 26, 2016

It’s always cold inside the icehouse
Though the rivers never freeze
There’s a girl inside the icehouse
I can see her clearly through the trees

And now she’s dreaming of a new love
And she hopes he’ll be there soon
But she’s got so long to wait for him
Because he needs another year to get there

There’s no love inside the icehouse

The devil lives inside the icehouse
At least that’s what the old ones say
He came a long time ago
He came here in the winter snow
Now it’s colder every day

She’s still dreaming through the summer
And she’s hoping through the spring
She says she’s got no time for winter nights
She doesn’t notice as the days grow darker
She can’t remember getting any older

There’s no love inside the icehouse

Words (c) Iva Davies

Singles

April 19, 2016

When I arrived in the USA almost 23 years ago, I was strip searched at LA airport. They had me down to my daks, going through my clothes and shoes looking for something that wasn’t there. Part of the process was a thorough luggage search, and I can only imagine how surprised the guy was when I opened my (only) suitcase to reveal this:

This isn’t a post about that experience, it’s a post about what a 21 year old man that emigrated to the US thought valuable enough to pack with him. My suitcase that day contained a tiny amount of clothes, one extra pair of shoes, a few important documents, and hundreds of CDs and 7″ vinyl singles. Looking back on it now I can’t imagine how heavy it was (I had to use a cart in the airport for a single large hard-case suitcase) or how I wasn’t charged extra baggage. Those were the days, I suppose.

I’d always loved singles, and bought them religiously for all the bands I followed. I treated them well, and still have almost all of them today. To get them here I bundled them up in bubble wrap (in other words, inadvertently made them look as much like drug packages as possible!) and packed them tightly in around the similarly packed CDs. I don’t recall any of them getting damaged, and ever since arriving here they have lived in the comic box shown in the above photo.

I’m reasonably sure the first 7″ single I ever purchased was this one, probably bought in 1982:

In those early days I owned very few since I didn’t have my own record player. I bought them every now and then (Homosapien by Pete Shelley, Rockit by Herbie Hancock) but mostly bought cassettes of new albums. It wasn’t until maybe 1983 that Bernard and I started buying vinyl like no tomorrow, and by 1986 I had my own record player in my room and bought new records (often singles) almost weekly it seemed.

Here’s another one from those early days:

I bought the above because of Michael Hutchence (!!) recommending Nick Cave in an interview. I remember liking it, and thinking he looked like Julian ‘Zzap64’ Rignall on the cover 🙂

But enough history, let’s look at some highlights from the big box of 7″ vinyl that lives, mostly ignored, in my house today:

That’s the first ever Mute records release! I was a fan of so many bands on the label, when I saw this guy for sale used at Rices it was an instant buy. To this day I can’t imagine how it got there (much less to Australia) given it was released it such limited quantities. A treasure of my collection to be sure.

That’s Depeche Mode’s first single Dreaming of Me (on top, released in 1981), and there last wide-released 7″ single from 2009. I remember having trouble finding it, but eventually did in Japan a couple of years later. In those days vinyl was almost completely dead, and 7″ singles in particular hadn’t been seen for years. You may be aware of the big vinyl resurgence in the last few years, but 7″ singles aren’t exactly coming back.

The box is about 40% Depeche Mode singles (including three copies of many – UK, USA, Australian), about 30% Erasure and the rest Nick Cave, Sisters of Mercy, Mission, Fields of the Nephilim and a few random ones thrown in. As you may imagine of a collector as crazed as myself, many of these collections are complete (for instance, I have all known Mode, Nephilim and Erasure 7″ vinyl). Getting them entailed many trips to the import stores in Sydney (I used to go monthly), as well a semi-regular purchases from UK shops for which I used ‘international money orders’ and would wait months for the package to arrive. I also had a penpal (!) in The Netherlands that helped me get some of the harder to find European releases during the early 90s; I even still have one of the ones he sent me still in the bag it was purchased in!

Here’s some of the attractively-designed Sisters singles:

And the Nephilim stuff, which includes multiples since KLS & I merged our collections:

There’s a large amount of limited editions in the box as well, and in fact towards the last years of the popularity of 7″ vinyl, many releases were only available in limited or unusual versions. For instance many singles are pressed in coloured vinyl:

Or transparent vinyl:

Or picture discs:

Or – and this one is quite special – silver vinyl:

I’ve also got quite a selection of bootleg singles (which were very popular with the ‘goth’ bands):

And even several flexi discs (pressed on acetate so they could be included with magazines):

I hadn’t looked through the box of singles for many, many years and it was a bit like opening a time capsule. While I still have a working record player, I didn’t actually play any of them yesterday since every song on every one of them has since been made available on CD or for download, so their more curios now than essential possessions for the diehard fan.

But I had fun buying them back in the day, and used to listen to them over and over again. I’m happy I’ve still got these things; they’re one of the few possessions from my youth I still own today.

Robot Claw

Words (c) Iva Davies