What happens when four relatively well-known musician friends decide to start a band together?
Chaos? Maybe.
Hilarity? Absolutely!
Buzzworthy effervescent pop music? No doubt.
Well, Dodie, Greta Isaac, Orla Garland and Martin Luke Brown did exactly this. They are four best friends who happen to be independent musicians that made themselves into a supergroup.
FIZZ's debut single came out three weeks ago, and their album drops in September. Go preorder it if you want. No pressure. The song is about... well, getting high. In Brighton.
So, this is so new, there's no way there's any live performances, right?
It is SO RARE that we get to hit a song when it's still a hit. It happens maybe twice a year.
This is the CURRENT, as we write this, #1 song in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, and #2 in the UK - and a big hit in a lot of other countries..
Of course, the version of the song that's a huge hit doesn't include the word "famefucker", but we don't restrict bad words here.
And it is good. REALLY good. It's like a mini rock opera, and the video has three acts just like your traditional rock opera. No Olivia Rodrigos were harmed in the making of this video.
This far, it being such a new song, she's only performed the song (which she co-wrote, like most of her stuff) live one time.
But she did it on piano, and it hits so much different - maybe even a little angrier! - so stripped down
My sister is going to be very happy with this post. You see, she was part of a generation in thei 1980s who were the perfect age to see The Monkees reunited (without Mike Nesmith) and a revival of their show by Nickelodeon(!), so she became a really big fan of The Monkees at an early age, and I mean a really big fan.
It's because of her that I even know to write this post, because, before her, I didn;t know of the existence of Head, a somewhat satirical musical adventure that served as an epilogue to the band's popular television series. Co-written by Academy Award winning actor Jack Nicholson - yes. THAT Jack Nicholson - the movie was... well, it was a little trippy.
It opened with this song (and accompanying visual - this is the opening of the movie, complete with mermaids saving Mickey Dolenz), written by the great songwriting team of Gerry Goffin and Carole King. It is something of a deep song - and includes not only the band playing the song, but actual porpoise clicks and clacks.
The Monkees took a lot of shit for being a band for a television show. Yeah. I said it. It was undeserved. They were a real band, with a lot of talent, who toured together for as long as they possibly could. Here are three surviviing members (Davy Jones having passed earlier that year) performing together - and I do mean together, and well - in 2012.
Of course, at this point, three of the four Monkees have passed, but the vocalist on this song, Mickey Dolenz, has not, and still tours in tribute to the Monkees More than fifty years after this song was originally released, he still delivers it in the same huge, theatrical, emotional manner.
We're eleven years into this blog - more than! - and we've never, as far as I can see, posted a song written by Diane Warren. I'm not quite sure how that's possible - she was a huge hitmaker, especially during the 1980's and 1990's, and still writes for top pop artists to this day.
As much as we usually talk about the artists - and we'll get there - the songwriter is the hitmaker in this case. She's written 32 top 10 US hits, been nominated for 14(!) Academy Awards (winning none but finally recieving an honorary one in 2022, during a year she was also nominated for an award), 15 Grammys (winning one), and two Emmys (winning one).
She's a well-respected songwriter who has written a lot of hit songs you know well. This is one of them. Originally intended for Stevie Nicks, it was given to Belinda Carlisle, who took it all the way to #2 on the US charts, only being kept from that top spot by one of the most enduring songs of all time.
The video was directed by Diane Keaton. Yes, that Diane Keaton.
I've mentioned the worst show I ever saw - September 10, 1995, Hartford, CT. Live, with special guests PJ Harvey and Veruca Salt. I didn't have high expectations of the headliner - I was there for the two openers. Veruca Salt were truly disappointing.
I had high expectations of PJ Harvey, and Polly Jean let me down. I'm sure it was an off night, because she had already released three great albums of material and has consistently done so since.
And the show wasn't all bad. She did perform this song and it was the highlight of the show.
This song, her third single ever, came from her second album Rid of Me. It was a huge hit in the UK, but she never got the commercial success stateside that she had enjoyed in Europe. Is it her best song? No. It is a rockabilly punk masterpiece, but she's got better songs lyrically and musically. But it's a FUN song. It's an in-your-face, dick-measuring masterpiece by a woman who previously wrote a song about her childbreaing hips.
I KNOW I caught her on an off night, because this performance, and other songs from this performance, rocks. From 2003, you can see the song isn't hard to play on guitar, but it is simplicity that makes it a masterpiece.
Someday, I am going to stop being surprised at musicians who are still touring 30 years into their careers. This is from 2016, and it STILL rocks. Polly Jean has given up the guitar, but that makes for a more dynamic performance.
The Pandoras were an all-girl garage band that got their start in LA in 1982 and had a great run until 1991, when front woman Paula Pierce passed away. The band didn't break up (they're STILL together, despite also losing bassist and background vocalist Kim Shattuck in 1991 to The Muffs (Melanie Vammen also went to The Muffs) and again in 2018 to ALS), but their glory days were behind them.
This performance, from 1990, was probably their pinnacle. They were a garage band and a good one at that, with a bunch of great musicians who all happened to be women making great music.
Oh, they also made a video for the song. I just wanted to feature something that WASN'T such obvious 1980s record label objectification right up front.
The second you saw the name "Luis Buñuel" in yesterday's post, you should have known this was coming.
"I am un chien andalusia" is literally a line in this song.
"Slicing up eyeballs" is literally a different line in the song.
Can we look at the title of the film, though? Un chien andalou is a mishmash of French and Spanish already. The film is really about nothing. It's a surrealist collaboration between Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. It was, at points, stomach-turning, debasing the standards of art and morality.
Ahhhh, there it is. The title. That last sentence paraphrases Black Francis a.k.a. Charles Thompson IV, the writer of this song and leader of the Pixies, the Boston-based post-punk band that broke through the US consciousness with their 2nd full length album, Doolittle, which opened with this bombastic song.
Never released as a single in the US, this song hit #23 on the UK charts. More personally, it's possibly my favorite song by a band that I count among my favorites.
The Pixies did break up in the mid 90s but reformed about a decade later, and are still together and still making music. Kim Deal did leave the band in 2013 to devote herself to The Breeders full-time, and was replaced on their 2013 tour by Muffs frontwoman Kim Shattuck - who was amazing as a fill-in.
Shattuck was replaced the next year - by most accounts, because her personality (which had been very frontwoman-y and outgoing) didn't mesh with what was a mostly introverted band, which is a shame because she was incredible. She was replaced by Paz Lenchantin, who, to be fair, is also incredible.
