Chart entered : 16 April 1988
Chart peak : 45
Number of hits : 10
I spoke too soon when I suggested Bros were the last act to have the majority of thei hits in the eighties. I'd forgotten all about this lot
Transvision Vamp were formed in 1986 by singer Wendy James and her boyfriend ,guitarist Nick Christian Sayer who had met in Brighton and started working on a kitsch sci-fi screenplay. According to Nick, Universal Pictures showed some interest then stalled , so the duo decided to get the music out first. They moved to London and recruited a couple of veterans from the punk scene to fill out the band. Anthony Doughty ( aka Tex Axile ) had been in The Moors Murderers with Steve Strange and Chrissie Hynde and joined as keyboard player. Bassist Dave Parsons was in the last line up of The Partisans, a Welsh punk band active from 1978 to 1984. He played on their last single, the EP "Blind Ambition" which sounds like The Adverts, not a very commercial proposition in October 1983. The sleeve says it was recorded and mixed in Alaska which I suppose is a joke although you could well believe it from listening to the record. The album "The Time Is Right" in 1984 offered more of the same. Drummer Pol Burton completed the line up.
It wasn't long before they were snapped up by MCA. With Wendy playing up the sex kitten image the band offered a mixture of punk and glam rock with sci-fi references. They released their first single "Revolution Baby" in August 1987. Like all their material it was written by Nick and offers a reasonably attractive melange of Bolan references ( it's surely not a coincidence that its release coincided with the tenth anniversary of Marc's death ) Sigue Sigue Sputnik twitchy synths and a half-decent chorus. It does outstay its welcome with a long rant at the end encompassing drug taking, housing allocation and the Bomb which really aggravates. If you're going to celebrate trash and yet be political in the same song it sounds like you're just taking the piss. It's also obvious from the first verse that Wendy didn't have a singing voice that could match up to her bravado and her limited vocal range was always going to limit what the band could achieve.
Record Mirror received it favourably and put Wendy on its front cover but elsewhere the reception was pretty hostile both to the music and Wendy's provocative persona. The single just missed out on the charts first time round but got to number 30 on reissue the following year.
"Tell That Girl To Shut Up" was the follow up single, a cover of Holly and the Italians' garage rock near-hit from 1980 ( it probably sold enough to go Top 10 in 1988 terms ). It was a smart choice, a song with proven appeal but not too familiar and a title that chimed in with the critical response to Wendy. The Vamp don't do anything particularly interesting with the song, speed it up a bit, add a few power chords and subject it to an eighties production from Zeus B Held to disguise the fact it's being delivered by an inferior vocalist. The Brill Building melody and teen jealousy lyric survive so it's never less than listenable.
No comments:
Post a Comment