“You don’t have to be Prince if you want to dance! You just have to get down to the Age of Chance!” In honor of hump day, this deliciously strident industrial dance-punk cover of Prince’s deliciously minimalist R&B classic, from the British group’s 1986 EP Crush Collision. The song got a lot of airplay on MTV for awhile, but it was the first and last most of us ever heard of the band.
Age Of Chance – Kiss
Uploaded by EMI_Music. – Watch more music videos, in HD!
More side project than supergroup, Arcadia was the band formed by the members of Duran Duran that didn’t run off with Robert Palmer and the Chic rhythm section to briefly become The Power Station. It’s Duran Duran enough, though – enough to warrant inclusion in EMI’s ongoing series of 2-CD/DVD deluxe edition reissues of the Fab 5’s heyday catalogue. Rightly so. Though it only yielded one bona-fide hit in the form of the glammed out synth-funk single “Election Day”, Arcadia’s only album So Red the Rose is a surprisingly enduring collection of slightly over-ambitious pop. The core group of singer Simon LeBon, keyboardist Nick Rhodes, and drummer Roger Taylor were joined on the record by a flock of session players, along with numerous high profile guest stars, most famously Grace Jones doing that psycho monologue in “Election Day”. On the epic (and epically underappreciated) ballad “The Promise”, the trio is joined by none other than jazz-great Herbie Hancock on keyboards and (wh-wh-what?) Sting doing back-up vocals on the chorus. In 1986, the video was striking (in 2010 strikingly cheesy) – a black-and-white interplay of forebodingly grainy stock footage and the band performing on what looks like a regurgitation of the set of their previous video “Is There Something I Should Know?” Yeah, I suppose it jumps the shark a bit when Simon whips out those pan-pipes, but the song stands up, regardless.
The James video last night got another great song lodged in my head – this one by the Manchester synth-pop supergroup of New Order’s Bernard Sumner, The Smiths’ Johnny Marr, and (for a time) Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant – collectively known as Electronic. Their debut 1990 single “Getting Away With It” applied classicist songwriting to a house music sound, and even briefly hit the U.S. Top 40. 20 years later, it still sounds sweet.
Electronic – Getting Away With It
Uploaded by Tunashaker. – Explore more music videos.