Five years before they scored their biggest U.S. hit with “You Sexy Thing”, the band Hot Chocolate, after a brief fling with the Beatles’ Apple label (which put out a 45 of the group’s cover of “Give Peace a Chance”) made their first trip up the British charts with this single “Love Is Life”, a song that marks the intersections between R&B and bubblegum, the Carribean and the spaghetti Western, with its dramatic arrangements of winds and strings over a calypso-inflected beat. Though it became a top 10 hit for the group, they would have trouble following it up; and in the meantime their songs were becoming bigger hits on the other side of the Atlantic – only for other artists. Stories hit #1 with their cover of Hot Chocolate’s “Brother Louie” and Canadian hard rockers April Wine hit the Top 40 with “You Could Have Been a Lady”. So inconsistent was their singles performance that it wouldn’t be until 1974 that they released their first full-length album Cicero Park. In the last couple of years, the British 7ts label has put out some really wonderful reissues of the band’s heyday records. The reissue of Cicero Park includes a second disc compiling their early singles starting with “Love Is Life” (sadly – no “Give Peace a Chance”).
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The Daily Awesome 8/24/10: Elastica “Connection” (1995)
To me, one of the sexiest songs ever. Led by singer Justine Frischmann, Elastica‘s self-titled debut album was loaded with bite size chunks of new wave and punk – riffs stolen in broad daylight from records by the likes of Wire and the Buzzcocks, then stripped, refurbished and amplified for the post-grunge mid-90s. It was a perfect antidote for the bloated dreariness that the Seattle sound had become, and it was accompanied by this video full of stuttery editing and nude bodies sitting in formation. (A goofier, more kid-friendly video for the song features the band playing on the screens of toy TV sets. This one fits the song better though.) The song landed some regular rotation on MTV and even charted to #53 on the Billboard Hot 100; lately, it can be heard in commercials for Chase.
Though Frischmann had links with two other titans of 90s brit-pop – she was a founding member of Suede but split from them before they got famous, and she dated Blur’s Damon Albarn for several years – Elastica proved unsustainable. Five years and several personnel changes later, the band released their second and final album The Menace in 2000. Frischmann has since established herself as a painter.
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Keith Murray Threw Hands With Tupac?
Well, who really knows, though according to Keith Murray, he’s promising on his dead mother’s grave.
In this three minute video (for whatever reason, the fade to black goes on forever) of RugahTV, Keith Murray goes off talking about a fight with Tupac and hitting Dame Dash in the head with a bottle.
The man’s had a violent history, so if it did happen, no one would be surprised. I guess the only revelation in this entire thing was that The Most Beautifullest Thing In This World came out a very long time ago and that I am old.