Egg City Radio

NANA LOVE – “DISCO DOCUMENTARY FULL OF FUNK” (1978)

Strap yourself in — are you sitting down?

I was IN LITERAL TEARS as I was biking home earlier this afternoon while listening to this one. Passersby in their autos must’ve thought I looked certifiable as I was wiping away giggling tears of joy while in transit.

The lady depicted on the cover is indeed Nana Love. If James Brown and Su Tissue (from the Suburban Lawns) got together and had an Ghanian love child, it’d be this ridiculous lady. This slab o’ wax is total song-poem/Songs In The Key Of Z/American Idol auditions time, albeit with an incredible rhythm section.

When I first downloaded it from the excellent blog Experimental Etc. (from which I’ve been siphoning many, many GB as of late), I knew it was either gonna be a masterpiece, or a horrorshow, based upon the title alone. I had no idea it was a little of both.

The five tracks on this 25-minute mini-album are full of fantastic, tight ‘n dirty funk, apparently arranged by Nana herself. The opening 11-minute epic track “I’m In Love” starts out just fine, with a whipcrack backing band, and some great synth work — and then it’s time for the vocals. Nana delivers her lyrics like she’s either blackout drunk, or merely unaware that she’s mewling and shrieking like some mutant stillborn from some gooey, gore-drenched horror flick. The backup singers are occasionally off-key as well, resulting in even more gilded delirium.

The other tracks are not quite as nuts, but every once in a while, Nana lets rip her laser-like caterwaul, and it’s pure entertainment. Inexplicably, the final track (which sounds like it fades out before any kind of logical conclusion) is a mostly instrumental dub reggae cut that doesn’t appear to have Nana’s singing on it. Whatever!

Nana Love – “Disco Documentary Full Of Funk” LP (ZIP file)

M – “NEW YORK – LONDON – PARIS – MUNICH” & “THE OFFICIAL SECRETS ACT” (1979/1980)

You know M, or have at least heard their famous pop single “Pop Muzik”. For ages, I’ve been curious to hear what their albums sounded like. I’d originally guessed they sounded something like the Buggles. I was kinda half-sorta right.

The first LP from ’79, “New York – London – Paris – Munich”, gives way to off-kilter disco right after the perfunctory “Pop Muzik” intro. Not exactly straight-ahead disco, but a slightly mutated UK variation. A little like The Buggles crossed with Rick James and Roxy Music (don’t get too excited, it isn’t that good.)

The reason this post happened is because of the second album, 1980′s “The Official Secrets Act”, easily one of the strangest follow-ups of its era. “M” was the pseudonym of British vocalist/musician Robin Scott, and the huge success of “Pop Muzik” must’ve made Scott seriously self-conscious about wanting to stay out of the spotlight, for “The Official Secrets Act” seems like a very willfully uncommercial affair. As in a potential career-killing one.

Tapping into a rich vein of Cold War paranoia, “Secrets” is a concept album of sorts, features almost no pop/disco beats, and in fact seems heavily influenced by the era’s edgy post-punk rather than dancefloor shenanigans. One song sounds almost exactly like The Residents, another features Scott shouting in a Lydon-esque growl, and yet another is one of the album’s few concessions to the “New York – London – Paris – Munich” sound, except that its wonderfully off-kilter structure is based around a 9/4 time signature. I liked this album a lot.

Anybody out there have a rip of M’s third LP from ’81, called “Famous Last Words”? I’m kinda dying to hear it. (Not to be confused with Supertramp’s 1982 LP “…Famous Last Words…”, of course.)

M – “New York – London – Paris – Munich”, 1979 (ZIP file)
M – “The Official Secrets Act”, 1980 (ZIP file)

VARIOUS ARTISTS – PORNO 8-TRACKS (197?)

I forget which other blog I originally got this from (an increasingly common phenomenon with me, since I’ve long since stopped keeping track of which blogs fold and which ones have newly cropped up), but suffice to say it was the find of the week, whichever week it was!

I like to picture the writers of these things as perpetually hunched over a Smith-Conora, their greasy hair matted down to their bulbous skulls, cigarettes dangling from their parched lips, their Coke-bottle glasses hanging perilously at the tip of their sweaty schnozzes, feverishly banging out these scripts in one pass over the course of a dismal, fetid evening in their scuzzy cold-water tenement flats. It’s either that, or they’re young, handsome, and reclining at poolside whilst lazily dictating the smutty dialogue into a microcassette recorder for their secretary to later transcribe.

Porno 8-Tracks! (ZIP file)

BOULE NOIRE – s/t (1976)

Caught wind of this one somewhat randomly, as I was doing some research accompanying my ever-growning fascination with Canadian films. For fans of funky smoove grooves!

Boule Noire was the nom de plume of the late Georges Thurston, a Quebecois artist who gained some pretty heavy Canadian success in the late ’70s with an album called “Aimer d’Amour”. Of course, you and I had never heard of this fellow, as most French Canadian music acts’ success tends to stay strictly within the confines of Quebec, with not even a lick of French European crossover (a French friend recently revealed to me that most Gallic people think the French Canadian accent is “nasal and goofy”, much in the same prejudiced way that Americans think the English Canadian accent is off-kilter in that “Fargo” kind of way.)

I can very easily see Boule Noire’s first album here as the soundtrack for a breezy night’s worth of Montreal nightlife, complete with wide-lapeled leisure suits, fine wine and possibly the bristly hairs of a moustache tickling the sensitive inner thighs of a jeune fille who’s just peeled out of her cameltoe wardrobe.

Boule Noire – s/t LP (ZIP file)

PETER WYNGARDE – “WHEN SEX LEERS ITS INQUISITIVE HEAD” aka s/t (1970)

Wyngarde is most well-known for the two British spy TV series “Department S”, and “Jason King” (a show which provided a hefty amount of inspiration for Mike Myers’ “Austin Powers” character.) Given the opportunity by RCA in 1970, at the height of his popularity, to record an album, Wyngarde chose not to go the easy listening/pop route, instead bizarrely delving into lurid and sometimes flat-out stupid spoken word interludes.

This album caused enough controversy upon its release to get it yanked by the label, quickly turning it into a massive collectors’ item throughout the ’70s and ’80s. The cause of the trouble? Oh, just a little three-minute ditty entitled “Rape”, in which Wyngarde not only seems to extolling the virtues of rape, but also executes a handful of wheedling barf-bag racial stereotypes that would make even Jerry Lewis blush. It must be heard to be believed — so believe it! Another highlight is “The Hippie And The Skinhead”, an inexplicable romp into the particulars of being a filthy free-love layabout.

Fun fact: predating George Michael’s Hollywood public toilet arrest by 23 years, Wyngarde was apprehended in 1975 at a bus station commode for an act of “gross indecency”. He was framed, I tell ya — FRAMED! Or not.

Peter Wyngarde – “When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head” aka self-titled (ZIP file)

PIERO PICCIONI – “THE 10TH VICTIM” soundtrack (1965)

“La decima vittima”, aka “The 10th Victim”, is one of the coolest films from one of the coolest decades, and is an Italian variation on the “Most Dangerous Game” story. You could also call it a proto-version of “The Running Man”, as it too features a human-hunting-and-killing game as a popular dystopic future mass entertainment.

A heady mixture of frantic jazz, kooky vocal spirals and tinkly piano ballads, this is just what I needed after a three-day-long Mercyful Fate/Celtic Frost bender.

Piero Piccioni – “The 10th Victim” soundtrack (ZIP file)

GUIDO & MAURIZIO DE ANGELIS – “ATLANTIS INTERCEPTORS” 12″ (1983)

This is the funniest shit I’ve heard all week. See the cover of the record, how it says “Black Inferno”? Picture that phrase being said during the song about 50 times. Italo-disco at its most stupendously cracked!

I just love the mental image of two brothers (probably mustachioed) arguing fiercely with each other in Italian while trapped in a cramped music studio control booth — perhaps getting so overheated and enraged that they start throwing things at each other.

BTW, the film in question that this song is taken from is by Ruggero Deodato, the same boundary-pushing fellow who directed “Cannibal Holocaust”.

Guido & Maurizio De Angelis – “Atlantis Interceptors” 12″ (ZIP file)

NEKTAR – 3 key albums (1971-80)

Recently did the discog of Gentle Giant, and wasn’t as thrilled with most of it as I’d hoped. I then turned my sights onto English-born, Germany-bound Nektar, another band that ran the entirety of the ’70s, produced many an album and evaporated right at the point when most proggy veterans gave up the ghost in favor of either: a) solo careers; b) “real” jobs; c) raising families; or, d) creative bankruptcy.

I found that three albums really stood out, while the rest were either middling or disappointing. Most online prog resources point towards their second album, “A Tab In The Ocean” (1972) as being their greatest, but it’s really two side-long excursions into murky, mostly-forgettable, slightly modulating tunelessness. Sounded like they were trying for “Close To The Edge”, and only got a third of the way there.

Their debut LP, however, “Journey To The Centre of the Eye” (1971) is KILLER. True psychedelic phased-out repeat listening.

One needs to skip ahead to their sixth album “Recycled” for evidence of truly memorable off-the-wall uniqueness. A concept album about environmental disaster (with side one being a suite of songs about recycled energy being the only energy left on Earth).

Finally, their swan song (before their mostly redundant 21st-century reunion material), “Man In The Moon” (1980), released at a time when all ’70s survivors were busy mutating their sound into more commercially viable and/or pukey directions. This is no exception, but it is a shining example, much like Yes’s “Drama” or Rush’s “Moving Pictures”, of a band actually trying not to wuss out when going in the aforementioned “brighter” place.

Nektar – “Journey To The Centre of The Eye”, 1971 (ZIP file)
Nektar – “Recycled”, 1975 (ZIP file)
Nektar – “Man In The Moon”, 1980 (ZIP file)