Welcome to yet another Mixtape Monday here on The Hideaway! For those of you playing along at home, today's featured tape is V and like all the other tapes in the alphabetical series of my Eighties audio courtship with my future ex-wife, V is a TDK SA90, as pictured below. Let's pop it in the ol' JVC TD-W222 deck and see what's on it because no one took the time to fill out the j card with songs or artists so its really anybody's guess as to what we're gonna hear.
- Side A opens with "15 Storey Halo", still my favorite track from ABC's How To Be A Zillionaire album. It's all synth drums, bouncy synth basslines and blaring synth horns with Martin Fry counting by tens
- Friend or Foe is my favorite Adam Ant album with or without the Ants and "Something Girls" is one of my least favorite tracks from it which is high praise if you get my drift. On those days when Prince's 1999 or ABC's The Lexicon of Love are not my absolute favorite albums from 1982, Friend Or Foe takes the prize
- I heard Nona's 1983 album Nona one night in an empty record store and have been a fan ever since. "Revolutionary Dance" was the lead-off track from her 1985 album The Heat and I guess it made an impression on me as well to make it on this tape
- "Free World" was another "heard it in the record store" find and remains my second favorite Jesse Johnson track behind "Crazay" his 1986 duet with Sly Stone
- Michael Jonzun and his Jonzun Crew held my undivided attention with their first album Lost In Space so I picked up their second disc without a second thought. It's really bad with "Time Is Running Out" being the lone bright spot
- Next up are three tracks credited to Malcolm McLaren. The first track is the original unedited version of "Buffalo Gals" featuring the World's Famous Supreme Team. The track later appeared on the Duck Rock album with the World's Famous Supreme Team radio intro edited out
- "Double Dutch" is the next track on the tape and it is taken from the very first Now That's What I Call Music album from 1983
- The third McLaren track is "Eiffel Tower", a great tune from the No Small Affair soundtrack though it was later included on McLaren's Swamp Thing, an unlistenable album that rounded up stray tracks recorded between 1982-1984
- Sheila E follows with the lead single from Romance 1600, the follow-up to The Glamorous Life, "Sister Fate"
- "Yellow" from the same album - if you listen closely, you can hear Prince saying a few lines - closes out Side A
- Side B begins with "So Wrong" by Patrick Simmons, another track I've always liked that just gets no love elsewhere
- Jan Hammer's single length "Miami Vice Theme" follows
- Then there are eight tracks dubbed from the first three Yellowjackets albums: Yellowjackets, Mirage A Trois and Samurai Samba
If I had to guess, I'd say V was dubbed off in mid-September. My guess is an educated one as the first track on Side A is from an album I bought on September 19th according to 1985: A Vinyl Odyssey, a blog based on my vinyl journal from that year. As to why I went nearly all Yellowjackets on Side B, I would say I was really into the Yellowjackets at the time and wanted to share them.
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For those of you playing along at home, today's second featured tape is W and like all the other tapes in the alphabetical series of my Eighties audio courtship with my future ex-wife, W is a TDK SA90. Let's pop it in the ol' JVC TD-W222 deck and listen along because someone took the time to fill out the j card with songs and artists.
We don't even have to guess when the tape was dubbed as it was dated:
Yellowjackets FTW! Samurai Samba was a disappointment after Mirage à Trois, but the group bounced back nicely with Shades in 1986. To my teenaged ears in 1983, it didn't get much better than Mirage à Trois and while that album's synths have somewhat dated it, I still enjoy it. I need to give that one a spin today.
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