There are certain things that the musicians of the 1980s did really well, and others that completely account for why it is frequently referred to as ‘the decade that taste forgot’. Take, for instance, New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ or Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ (and D’s perennial playlist populator) ‘Come On Eileen’. As an aesthetic, it’s perhaps the very garishness of the arrangements that came out of these years, the sheer ballsiness of their experimentation and new ways of treating old sounds that renders the ’80s so interesting to many contemporary pop musicians. When Huey Lewis sang ‘If this is it, please let me know…’ he wasn’t kidding. Those gigantic drum sounds, echoing snares and gloss were really as far as anyone though things were going to go. In some ways, then, the decade was perhaps the most forward-thinking, especially if you take a long view of history and realise that most of the success stories of the ’90s and ’00s just cribbed convenient parts of it and derided the rest in public. And then we arrive at now, where some French guy has decided to make music that doesn’t so much try to be ’80s synth-pop as it just inherently is.
You can never tell with the French. Seriously, one second they’re all for writing bangers that destroy your eardrums with crunching eargasms (see: SebastiAn, Justice) and the next they’re trying to serenade the fuck out of you (see: Sebastien Tellier). The idea of getting oneself laid by evoking the Knight Rider heyday of spandex Los Angeles is not exclusively the terrain of David Grellier, the man behind College. M83, who released the superbly excellent double album Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming earlier this year and who I’ll be writing about soon, also did this very effectively. Turns out he’s also French. So while we’ve got Woody Allen writing entire films based around Americans getting lost in the smoky romance Paris, there’s a whole swag of Frenchmen pining for the sexual smog of Hollywood. Seriously guys, get a room.
College was tapped by the director of Drive to be the film’s theme after discovering it in his sound mixer’s music collection. I like that idea, particularly that a song which seems to have had such a visceral effect on so many people (just check the love blogs have given it since the release last month) was stumbled upon by accident, down a rabbit hole if you will. It sits well with the One A Day ethos. So yes, this is a song that sounds decidedly ’80s but was penned three decade after the fact. It’s a slow-burner that relies as much on the specific tone of the quaver synth bass line – which is excellent – as the breathy vocals care of Electric Youth who seem to be co-conspirators in the Valerie collective the guy has going on. Delve a bit further and you’ll see their influences include Fleetwood Mac, Miami Horror and…M83. In fact, I have little doubt that this is a conspiracy. Here we have a song which by rights should be uncool, so uncool that not even Ryan Gosling stomping on some dude’s face while Carey Mulligan looks on could save it, and yet it’s just so great. There might be others stuff than the chorus, but let’s be honest, absolutely nobody is paying attention. What amazes me about it all is that the drums are the softest part of the entire thing. It’s like some weird anti-New Order movement, or an anti-George Michael homage to the music of his generation. Wonderful.
So curl up baby. It’s going to be a long, slow ride back from Bordeaux in the Cadillac.
College – ‘A Real Hero’ (ft. Electric Youth)
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