I Am Not The Beatles

Click above for big pictures, click below to play me…

Turquoise Blue are two inoffensively nice looking chaps : Brian Rydell on vocals and Michael Robinson on bass. What a line up, eh? Initial band rehearsals must have been the very essence of postmodern minimalism. Lets take a look at the back cover - which one is which do you think ? I could be wrong, but I reckon Brian’s the blonde be-quiffed one - he has that funny smile peculiar to vocalists down to perfection.

Songwise, their record is a fascinating surprise in just about every way.

Sure, there are better songs here, but this is certainly the most thoughtful… although I tell you now, the production really does its best to try and convince you otherwise. For a record supposedly mastered at Abbey Road, it’s all a bit of a mess - from the REALLY LOUD cheap electronic bass drum that should be about 25 times lower in the mix, to Brians initially unintelligable vocal - every part of this record takes time to love.

The intro kicks off this confusing process neatly, as it has almost nothing to do with the rest of it. One second you’re dreamily imagining a nice Bontempi-styled La Isla De Bonita then, before you know it, you are crashing into a song that bounces along like a badly produced Lloyd Cole and The Commotions on helium.

Brian’s sincere warbling comes over like a pigeon version of Lassie. “I think he’s trying to tell us something,” you want to say, “ but I can’t… quite… make it out. “

Stick with it though, after a good few listens you may find yourself utterly charmed by this song - this does come with the caveat that it took me 6 listens before it started to make any form of sense though…

“I used to think my life was planned”, begins Brian. I agree with this. So did I. It bloody isn’t though.

“Life should be like in my dreams”, he continues. I don’t agree with this bit at all. Either Brian has very boring dreams, or he is a tremendously sick individual - if my dream last night about Ozzy Osbourne and some giant chickens is anything to go by.

Then, after a strange Smiths-like allusion to “ladies hands who captained rugby football teams”, we get to the immediate heart of the story. Brian, it seems, has met a man and

” Since that day my life has changed

My childish thoughts turned to a sigh.”

I am happy to be corrected, but with the exception of Jimi Somerville and - if you were paying close attention - Neil Tennant, were many other people trying to push openly same sex love songs into the mainstream in 1987 ? For this alone, Turquoise Blue surely deserve some recognition.

I know this record was released a good few years after we were all hit in the face by Holly Johnson’s ’laser beams’ (not a thought that causes me to Relax, I can tell you) but this record is talking about the breathlessness of falling in love, not the stickiness of doing the sex.

This was 1987 don’t forget, when George Michael was still pretending to cavort with female supermodels in his ‘I Want Your Sex’ video, Morrissey was trying to convince the world he was a lifelong asexual, and Elton John was still married to female sound engineer, Renate Blauel.

Popstars positively thrive on the imperceptibility of their sexuality. Entire careers can be kept alive by excitable are they/aren’t they debates… which usually end up being cynically dull, of course, because they usually aren’t - and then everyone feels a bit let down for some reason. But Turquoise Blue ignore this, performing a plaintive love song about a single life changing emotional event, and the attendant hopes and fears it creates.

“To tell the truth I feel afraid

It was so easy in the crowd

And when my friends find I have changed

I wait for them to beat me down…”

However, he hasn’t really changed, of course, he has discovered - and he notes this in the chorus, making a beautifully phrased political point about nature, not nurture :

” We are lost - from the moment we gasp…”

Lovely.

Anything I Shouldn’t Be Doing Whilst Listening To This Song ?

Yes.

Under no circumstances should you suddenly realise that Brian’s voice actually sounds just like Tweety Pie - and that in many ways this song is really just ‘I Tawt I Taw A Puddy Tat’ , transposed to humans.

It really ruins it.

Where Are They Now… Are They… Lost ?

Well, I can tell you that Brian and Michael obviously had some musical differences about a particularly nifty bass line or something, as Brian released a solo single immediately after this one, on the same label with the not remotely Carry-On title : ‘The Passage’.

Apart from that, the problem with calling your band Turquoise Blue is that when anybody tries to track you down years later, they find lots of nicely designed webpages offering very tasteful Man At C&A type pastel sweaters - but very little else.

In other words : I cannot find anything.

Except the sweaters.

Money Update

Cost : 8 pence

Current Value : Gosh. I hadn’t really noticed this until now… but this is a ‘New Mix’, which makes it about seven times more valuable than the original version… This takes it to a really very healthy £7.42 and is now the second most valuable single on the board. That’s about right, I think. It’s interesting… but it’s no Love Flight 109. Up until now, Luba was quietly holding second place for reasons I didn’t really understand, and - excellent new haircut apart - I didn’t think she really deserved it.

Current Profit : 44 pounds and 56 pence. The thirties are so over - we are now aiming for fifty. Hurrah!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 3:18 pm and is filed under A Bit Camp, Brilliant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.