They are saying that the music you want if you’re 14 is the music you like for the remainder of your life – that nothing ever sounds higher.
The identical doesn’t apply to films.
The Breakfast Membership was launched 40 years in the past this week, which suggests I used to be 14 when it got here out. And even after I was 14 I knew The Breakfast Membership was a load of corny previous bollocks. It aggravated me for a great deal of causes, however largely for the best way it ruined Easy Minds.
Once I’ve introduced this up prior to now, some individuals – utilizing like, information and stuff – have cunningly proposed a counter-argument that goes one thing like this: “Killed them? C’mon! It made them!”
And, OK, if we’ve got to sully ourselves with a visit to Wikipedia, that is true in a way: (Don’t You) Overlook About Me went to no.1 within the US and Canada, most likely earned them a spot on Dwell Assist, and their subsequent album As soon as Upon A Time, went high 10 within the Billboard charts. It was their most profitable album.
However that is simply the information, buddy – and who wants them in the course of an web rant?
Here is a truth for you: The ten singles that Easy Minds launched earlier than (Don’t You) Overlook About Me had been considered one of the most spectacular runs in 80s music. The American, Love Music, Sweat in Bullet, I Journey, Promised You A Miracle, Glittering Prize, Somebody, Someplace In Summertime, Waterfront, Velocity Your Love To Me and Up On The Catwalk – these songs had been ice-cold classics.
Individuals speak about Easy Minds now like they had been all the time naff, with their pleated trousers, slip-ons and messiah complexes, however actually they had been superb — Roxy Music, The Skinny White Duke and Krautrock funnelled by punk, underpinned by a few of the funkiest basslines round — after which The Breakfast Membership got here alongside and fucked all of it up.
Till that second, Easy Minds had been like Ally Sheedy within the film. Bizarre, surly, trendy, distinctive, unimpressed by the jocks and the squares — and in no temper to try to fit-in both.
After which The Breakfast Membership got here alongside. Director John Hughes — a boy-man with a very suspect crush on Molly Ringwald; a Reagan-era Republican setting up an idealised imaginative and prescient of a protected white America — waving his huge cheque at Easy Minds, providing up some grubby bullshit that had already been turned down by Bryan Ferry and Billy Idol. The author, Keith Forsey, was the go-to-guy for soundtrack cheese. Forsey had penned disco hits like Sizzling Stuff for Donna Summer season and by the 80s was churning out the hits for Hollywood: Glenn Frey’s The Warmth Is On (Beverley Hills Cop), Irene Cara’s Flashdance… What A Feeling, Limahl’s The By no means-Ending Story.
You realize, all of the greats.
Everybody of their proper thoughts hates the ending of The Breakfast Membership – Ringwald’s character taking every part loveable about Sheedy’s and remodeling her into one other compliant wannabe – but it surely stands as an ideal visible metaphor for what the film did to Easy Minds too.
Hughes’s inference was that inside each punk child was an All-American conformist ready to be unleashed. He had Sheedy’s character made-up and made-over after which served up like a simpering Stepford spouse for Emilio Estevez’s Alpha-male jock.
It’s straightforward accountable Ringwald’s character for that make-over, for her presumption that Sheedy’s quirky outsider secretly wished to be similar to her. However, actually, it’s Sheedy’s character’s fault. She lets it occur. (The ladies I went to high school with would’ve ripped Ringwald’s posh-girl hair out of her lily-white head.)
Easy Minds let it occur too. With that one tune they slipped off years of Caledoni-Krautpunk cred, and let Hughes powder their faces and slip them right into a camisole. (Don’t You) Overlook About Me simpered for the frat boys like Sheedy, and also you couldn’t have a look at them the identical means ever once more.
MVP bassist Derek Forbes left and subsequent album, As soon as Upon A Time, was Minds-by-numbers: vapid enviornment rock tailored for the stadiums it’d be shopped in.
Easy Minds weren’t the one act sabotaged by having a tune in a John Hughes film. The March Violets went from topping the indie charts with Snake Dance and Stroll Into The Solar to 2 songs on Some Sort Of Fantastic and… nowhere. Ferris Bueller had Flesh For Lulu posters on his wall and the band recorded I Go Loopy for Some Sort Of Fantastic. It wasn’t their huge break, it was the start of the tip. Echo & The Bunnymen recorded Convey On The Dancing Horses for Fairly In Pink. Their subsequent album – launched three years after 1984’s Ocean Rain – was their worst but they usually break up the 12 months after.
The Psychedelic Furs scored their largest hit with the re-recorded film tie-in Fairly In Pink however then claimed to have been rushed into the studio to document 1987’s Midnight To Midnight album. Even they described it as “hole, vapid and weak”.
The producer of their final good album? Keith Forsey – yup, the man who wrote (Don’t You) Overlook About Me. The 80s had been Keith’s world: we simply lived in it.
