Let's Active - Every Word Means No

Here's an eighties US college radio classic, from one of Mitch Easter's rare forays out from behind the scenes in the recording studio. This is from their 1983 debut EP Afoot, which sounds incredibly dated now but is still a pretty nice little collection of the mildly jangly power-pop so popular at the time.

REM - Time After Time

From the 1984 Reckoning album. A nice, late night, mellow, relaxing-at-home sort of song. If you're going to smoke stuff to REM - not that I'm necessarily endorsing that, mind - this is the song to do it to.

REM - South Central Rain

I dreamed about this song last night. Well, to be precise about it, I dreamed this song. From start to finish - even the moany bits at the end. Except that it was me singing instead of Michael Stipe. I think I was about to start singing "Seven Chinese Brothers" when I woke up.

I'm not sure exactly why I had this on the brain. REM have been in the news recently for breaking up, of course, but that's not something I took much notice of. To be honest, I lost interest in them around 25 years ago, and wasn't even really aware they still existed.

But I suppose I'll take the dream as a sign that I ought to post this song, so here it is. Not with me singing though. Trust me, that would give you nightmares.

The Three O'Clock - The Girl with the Guitar

Here's a wonderful little treasure: an acoustic performance of one of the Three O'Clock's loveliest tunes, from their last really good album Arrive Without Travelling (1985). As I said in another recent post, they were twee before "twee" existed.

The clip is taken from IRS's Cutting Edge which was a programme broadcast on MTV USA in the mid-1980s. I would murder someone for DVDs of the series.

This song, by the way, is allegedly about Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles, who the Three O'Clock's Louis Gutierrez was going out with at the time.

Let's Active - Lowdown

Mitch Easter will be best remembered for producing just about every American jangle-pop band in the '80s, but he did put out some of his own music too.

The appallingly-named Let's Active - they took it from an article about Japanese people's English grammatical errors - made a bit of a splash with their debut EP Afoot, which was all cuteness. They even made a video that had them all playing with puppies. I kid you not. They followed this up with the full-length Cypress in 1984 which showed their more serious side; unfortunately it turned out cute was more their forté. Still, not a bad record by any means.

The Go-Go's - Vacation

Yes, Cinnamon Songs will be on vacation for the next couple of weeks. See you in August!

The Three O'Clock - Her Head's Revolving

On an overview of the Salvation Army/Three O'Clock's recording career, there's a fairly straight trajectory from their psychedelic-punk-pop origins to the feeble new wave slush of their final album. 1985's Arrive Without Travelling was their fourth release out of six and soundwise, it's more or less in the middle as well: although the punk element is pretty much totally gone, there's still plenty of psychedelic pop here, but it's much keyboard-heavier and more slickly produced than its predecessors. Some of the lyrics also continue the band's unfortunate journey towards the mawkishly sentimental. I liked this album a lot at the time - hey, I was 15 - but I can't say I was really surprised when it turned out to be the last Three O'Clock album I liked.

This was Arrive's first single and one of its few tracks to retain elements of their... I don't want to say "harder" early sound (it would be vaguely ridiculous to describe anything they ever did as "hard") so let's just say that it rocks a bit more than most of the rest of the album. I seem to recall from somewhere that the video was banned from Canadian MTV for its alleged drug references.