The Byrds . . . a Postcard Records connection . . . pop cynicism . . . the nugget compilations (which I haven't listened to in the longest time) . . . and 1981, which is still my favourite year for pop music . . . this quote has everything for a Monday morning:
“We were all wound up in the Rough Trade Conditioning Syndrome, whereby you’re told that everyone on Rough Trade is ethically sound and morally very, very good; and that the people in the big corporations are evil ogres, bureaucrats and capitalists, bourgeois pigs. But once you meet those people you realize that they’re exactly the same as the people at Rough Trade—it’s just that their Kickers are newer… It’s stupid to stick to the sort of independent ideas that we had about 18 months ago. We can’t do it ourselves. I want to be able to sit back and say, well here’s 40 percent of a hit record – a decent song—and have someone else arrange it, produce it, get it played… That way you end up with ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. Only one Byrd actually played on it, but so what? It still stands up today as a great record. And if The Byrds had played on the single the way it had been written, then it would probably just have ended up as a track on the Nuggets album.” Alan Horne (NME, November 1981)
From Simon Reynolds Rip It Up and Start Again: The Footnotes blog. Hat tip to Brian over at the Like Punk Never Happened blog.
2 comments:
1981? Must be Plan B or Show Me I guess, but Reynolds wouldn't go for that.
Kara has Reynolds book on the shelf. According to the index, there are 21 separate mentions of Dexys in the book. (Only 3 for The Jam!)
Though, at a glance, Reynolds does suggest that the band's 'communiques' to their fans in the music press at this time was verging on the paranoic. ;-)
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