Madonna - Confessions on a Dance Floor (WEA)

In a 1998 edition of DJ I referred to ‘Ray Of Light’ as “a great William Orbit album that just happens to have Madonna signing on it.” The same could almost be said of this new one, in which Stuart Price a/k/a Les Rhythmes Digitales packs a big, throbbing, non-stop punch disco while Madonna surfs the wave and interrupts the occasionally genius house with tales of New York city freaks and, ahem, domestic bliss in Wiltshire. Aside from the lead single ‘Hung Up’, the Chicane-esque ‘Get Together’ and the Mirwais reunion for a Moroder-sampling ‘Future Lovers’ are the main highlights.

Eyeless In Gaza - No Noise, The Very Best Of… (Cherry Red)

A 22-track, 25-year anniversary compilation is a fitting consolation prize for a band that were for so long ‘almost… but not quite’. As pure target market for eighties experimental pop I saw them on the fringes all the time (Smash Hits was great in those days, all you needed was an interesting idea or picture to get in their pages). But they never went one stage further into radio play territory – which is where the disappointment lies. If only they had they would – and I am 99% certain of this – been huge.

All the right elements were there but, before you think I’m labelling them as a sort of B-division Talk Talk, it’s worth remembering that Eyeless In Gaza weren’t copyists or chasing after other people’s glories. They had a unique sound, of which Martyn Bates’ Joe Strummer-esque howl was the centre point. “Martyn is one of the great white soul singer voices,” Alan McGee says on the sleeve notes, “by soul I mean Ian Curtis, not Jamiroquai…”

If the E’s in your collection include Eno, 808 State, Einstürzende Neubauten and Echo and the Bunnymen then there’s a place for this alongside them. It’s just a pity that a compilation subtitled The Very Best Of comes with such a measly eight-page booklet!

Various - This Is Not Retro, This Is The Eighties Up To Date (TINR)

The best website for eighties music is by far remembertheeighties.com, which has been a labour of love for Richard Evans for several years. It remembers the decade from a British perspective for a start, and has tracked down many singers and bands that time might have otherwise forgotten.

So it’s only right that he gives a platform for some of them and the new material they’re working on today. So where are they now? Well Howard Jones is in euro trance territory. Kajagoogoo have bought a drum machine and headed a long way off from Ellis Beggs and Howard. Peter Cox is sitting firmly in the middle of the road. The Alarm, though, are exactly where you last saw them, and haven’t dropped any quality control. Perhaps most impressive is a delicate and melodic new one from Pete Coyle of the Lotus Eaters.

You can’t help but skip on with a sense of browsing a ‘Friends Reunited’ for your record collection - and find out what everyone else is up to these days. My only worry about this album is commercial – would a Sigue Sigue Sputnik fan really be interested in something with Modern Romance on it? Either way, if you want to catch up with everyone from Nik Kewshaw to Heaven 17 to Toyah, this is the place.

Various – GRLZ, Women Ahead of Their Time (Crippled Dick Hot Wax)

It’s the stories behind the songwriters that makes this album an artefact. As Vivien Goldman says in the liner notes, “Most of the voices here blossomed, bloomed, then flared out into free-fall like bright fireworks.” Which makes hearing stuff like The Slits’ I Heard It Through The Grapevine and Anna Domino’s Zanna even more important.

There really were a lot of breakthrough female artists in the early eighties, writing and presenting pop music in truly new ways. But have things really changed if you’re new and exciting and female? Or are we stuck in a compromise where the path to success – and we should ask Jem – is just to be the new Dido? “There was a high turnover among these girl groovers who,” Goldman writes as if ’83 was ’06, “found touring a hard combo with motherhood, or the pressures of eternal infancy thrust upon female pop performers just too much of a pain.”


This review also published in: Record Collector