A New Wave of 80’s Trivia
As a child of the 80’s raised on MTV (when the ‘M’ stood for music videos) with an enduring love of the decade’s new wave gems, I consider myself pretty knowledgeable of the times. However, it recently became clear that my knowledge is about as thin as one of Ric Ocasek’s ties. While I am well versed in all of the hit songs and videos, it turns out that I didn’t know much about the groups and songs themselves. To save your search browser the same workout I gave mine, the following is some of the best bits of trivia I surfaced. Test yourself on how many of these things you already knew before using them at your next pub trivia challenge.
Bang a gong and let’s get it on…
First off, a lot of hit songs were covers.
· Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Want to Have Fun was not only written by Robert Hazard (of Escalator of Life fame), but he actually released the song first. It was not good.
· Soft Cell’s Tainted Love was written by Ed Cobb with Gloria Jones bringing some real soul to the mix. And if you were weirded out when several stories of famous people who are Satanists referenced singer Marc Almond, he debunked those claiming it was a theatrical joke.
· Animotion had a one-hit wonder with Obsession which is much better than the no-hit original version by Michael Des Barres and Holly Knight.
· Naked Eyes had a hit with (There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me, a Burt Bacharach and Hal David composition from the 60’s. It was first recorded with Dionne Warwick, followed by versions from Lou Johnson, Sandie Shaw, Eddy Mitchell, and eventually Naked Eyes.
· Kim Carnes made Bette Davis Eyes a hit in 1981, but it was originally performed by Jackie DeShannon in 1974.
· Naked Eyes’ other hit was Promises, Promises which many might not know or remember had featured Madonna on one of the remixes.
· It is common knowledge that Falco did the German version of Der Kommissar before it blew up in America with After the Fire’s English take. What might not be so well known is that prior to the After the Fire version being a hit, Laura Branigan had recorded Deep in the Dark, a different song using Der Kommissar’s melody and arrangement.
· Toni Basil’s Mickey was originally recorded by a group called Racey and was called Kitty in reference to a girl. Toni changed the gender, added in the cheerleader chant, and named it Mickey because it rhymed with Kitty.
· Joan Jett and the Blackheart’s I Love Rock n Roll very closely mirrors the original by the Arrows. Coincidentally, her first try at making it a hit wasn’t the one you heard. She also recorded a version with the Sex Pistols which you can learn more about in this documentary about the song.
· Starship’s We Built This City sounded much more new wave and Buggles-like when Martin Page built the structure for the song with his initial demo. Martin, by the way, was in Q-Feel, who brought you Dancing in Heaven (Orbital Be-Bop).
· The basis for the chorus of Duran Duran’s Rio was the song Stevie’s Radio Station from the band TV Eye. TV Eye was a group that featured Andrew Wickett who left to become Duran Duran’s lead singer on their original four song demo prior to Simon Le Bon. That demo had a song called See Me Repeat Me which had elements later used for the verses in Rio. If you didn’t know about Wickett, then hold onto your fedora, since he wasn’t even the first Duran Duran vocalist. That was Stephen “Tin Tin” Duffy of Kiss Me fame. With Duffy, Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes and John Taylor recorded an album’s worth of songs, but these tracks were never released back in the day. In ’99, Duffy unearthed a live recording of the songs from ’79 and re-recorded them for a CD called Dark Circles under the name The Devils. Big Store is the most Duranish song on it.
Beyond cover songs, there were other fun facts from the era.
· Men Without Hat’s Safety Dance was inspired by the singer being kicked out of a club for pogoing (it’s when you aggressively hop up and down and was a precursor to slam dancing…Debbie Harry from Blondie explains it better than I can). As disco was on the way out and new wave was on the way in, bouncers frowned upon pogoing. They probably still do.
· The guy who wrote the hook for Pat Benatar’s Hit Me With Your Best Shot came up with the line when he was in therapy. To deal with hostility, they had him punch pillows. Speaking of Pat, everyone knows that Video Killed The Radio Star was the first video to air on MTV…the second video was Pat’s You Better Run. In terms of firsts, her video for Love is a Battlefield was the first video to incorporate spoken dialogue mixed in with the music.
· Video Killed The Radio Star was popularized by the Buggles, but Bruce Woolley, one of the song’s writers, also released it with his group The Camera Club (which featured Thomas Dolby on keyboard!). Looking at the dates of both versions, technically this is a late ‘70’s, not an ‘80’s song.
· Queen’s Radio Ga Ga was the inspiration for Lady Gaga’s name long after she was on The Boiling Point. The song was originally going to be called Radio Caca based on Roger Taylor’s kid referring to music on the radio as crap. I guess it’s a good thing they changed it, otherwise we would be stuck with Lady Caca.
· Toto’s Africa was written by a guy who hadn’t been to Africa at the time. While the movie Wizard of Oz first jokingly sparked the idea of naming their band after the dog, it wasn’t until they found out that “in toto” is Latin for “in all” that they decided to run with it.
· Spandau Ballet got their name after a friend of the group saw the phrase written on a bathroom wall in a club and they thought it sounded cool. Turns out it was Allied Forces’ slang for how soldiers looked either when being shot with the German’s Spandau machine gun or how prisoners moved after hanging themselves in West Berlin’s Spandau Prison.
· Billy Idol’s Dancing with Myself was first released by Generation X, his former band before he went solo and re-recorded it. The name of the song was inspired by when he was in a club in Tokyo and saw some teens dancing with themselves in the mirrored walls. This is alluded to in the lyrics as well: “On the floors of Tokyo…with a record selection and a mirror direction, I’m dancing with myself.”
· Bryan Adams wrote Run to You for Blue Oyster Cult, but they rejected it (as did 38 Special after them). If you were curious what Bryan Adams would sound like if he were in a glam rock band, you’re in luck. At the age of 15 before he went solo, he was in a group called Sweeney Todd.
· Robert Palmer originally recorded Addicted to Love with Chaka Khan, but her label wouldn’t allow her to be on his label, so she was erased from the track. Also, the models in the video didn’t know how to play their instruments which is why they all are moving to their own grooves. This was actually by design. In Palmer related news, The Cure once played an extra long version of A Forest punctuated by yelling out “Fuck Robert Palmer” when they were told to hurry off stage so he could go on.
· The Karate Kid soundtrack put Joe Esposito’s You’re the Best on the map, but it was originally slated for Rocky III before being replaced by Eye of the Tiger. Flashdance also rejected it in favor of Maniac. Since all three songs were hits, none of them took a crane kick to the face on the charts.
· Want to do a pilgrimage to Joshua Tree National Park to take a picture with the iconic tree from the back cover of U2’s The Joshua Tree album? Too bad sucker, since the photo was actually taken in Zabriskie Point in Death Valley National Park. To make things worse for Bono heads, the “fabled tree died and toppled over years ago, its massive trunk and gnarled, desiccated branches outstretched on the desert floor.”
· I don’t recall where I was sitting when the Culture Club performed God Thank You Woman on an episode of the A-Team, but watching it now, I’m hoping it was in another room. Only Boy George could win over a redneck bar with his soothing pop songs. The real kicker is when Boy George kicks in a door.
· The Smith’s Strangeways, Here We Come album title is in reference to Strangeways prison.
· The song I Know There’s Something Going On off the solo project from ABBA’s Frida was produced by Phil Collins who also played drums on it.
· In Madonna’s La Isla Bonita she sings “Last night I dreamt of San Pedro” and that she “fell in love with San Pedro.” The dream part is apparently more accurate since according to her, San Pedro wasn’t a real place and she has no idea how she came up with it. San Pedro might not be real, but Benicio Del Toro is if you jump to 3:14 in the video where he is sitting on a car in the background. Also, while everyone knows her Papa Don’t Preach video, I’m betting people weren’t aware of Danny Aiello’s response track called Papa wants the Best. He created it because he didn’t agree with how papa was portrayed in her video.
· When John Hughes used the song Pretty in Pink to inspire his movie of the same name, he didn’t really grasp its meaning. Psychedelic Furs’ Richard Butler noted in an interview that “the song was about a girl who kinda sleeps around, and thinks it’s really cool and thinks everybody really likes her, but they really don’t. She’s just being used. It’s quite scathing.” Also, the version of the track used for the movie in 1986 is a much more poppy version of the original song taken from their 1981 album Talk Talk.
· Speaking of John Hughes films, the German version’s title for 16 Candles loses a lot in translation. Das darf man nur als Erwachsener means One May do That Only as an Adult. Also, if you watch the TV version, there is actually a scene that doesn’t appear in the theatrical release.
· Rick Springfield’s Jessie’s Girl was based a girl he met when he took a stained glass class, but her boyfriend was actually name Gary. He changed the name to Jessie to make it flow better and because he was a fan of Ron Jessie from the LA Rams. It wasn’t until the song was released that he realized ‘Jessie’ should’ve been spelled ‘Jesse’ since it’s the more common girl’s name. In recent years they tried to track her down, but the guy who owned the stained glass store had passed away so there were no leads.
· Although Men at Work’s Down Under is packed full of Aussie slang, such as chunder (throwing up), the most timely one is when Colin sings “head full of Zombie.” Zombie refers to a type of marijuana the locals called “Zombie Grass.”
· A-ha’s Take on Me originally had slightly different lyrics and definitely cheesier music when it was called Lesson One. This can’t be unheard.
Surprisingly, Lesson One wasn’t even the earliest version. Before that, the group was called Bridges and the first incarnation of Take on Me was a punk version called the Juicy Fruit song. Kind of cool, actually.
· The spoken word phrase “Good heavens Miss Sakamoto, you’re beautiful” that appears in Thomas Dolby’s She Blinded Me With Science (at 2:49) was added to the song so he could purposefully cast a Japanese woman in the shoot. Beyond his own music, Dolby was a session musician, including playing keyboards on Def Leppard’s iconic Pyromania album. Because of label-related restrictions, he is credited under the alias Booker T. Boffin.
· OMD’s If You Leave plays during the prom scene in Pretty in Pink, but the song they were actually dancing to is Don’t You Forget About Me by Simple Minds.
· Human League got their band name from a science fiction board game called Star Force. According to Martyn Ware, “There were all these scenarios in the back for various wars in the future, and one of these, for a stage ‘round about 2180, where there were two main empires — The Pansantient Hegemony and The Human League. The Human League centered around Earth and the scenario was called The Rise Of The Human League. So we stole it.”
· ’Til Tuesday’s Voices Carry was originally written by Aimee Mann to be sung to a woman, but the label was unhappy with the lesbian angle because they wanted it to have more mainstream appeal. John Cougar Mellencamp’s label also played the mainstream card by having him change Jack & Diane from being about an interracial couple to making Jack a football star instead.
· The opening beat in Michael Jackson’s Beat It is taken from The Incredible Sounds of Synclavier II, a record that accompanied the Synclavier II synthesizer to illustrate the different sounds it could make. Speaking of openings, Vincent Price’s monologue for Michael Jackson’s Thriller had an entire verse cut: “The demons squeal in sheer delight / It’s you they spy, so plump, so right / For though the groove is hard to beat / Yet still you stand with frozen feet / You try to run, you try to scream / But no more sun you’ll ever see / For evil reaches from the crypt / To crush you in its icy grip.”
· The “I’m on a Mexican Radio” chorus in Wall of Voodoo’s Mexican Radio refers to what singer Stan Ridgeway would say to the other band members in his car whenever he found a Mexican radio station when searching for them on his car stereo. Bob Casale from Devo is the guy cooking the beans in the video. Devo’s Whip It, by the way, has nothing to do with sadomasochism.
· In the original 1984 version of Pet Shop Boys’ West End Girls, this song about the East and West side of London is oddly sprinkled with some Russian seasoning. First there is a line about Stalin (“All your stopping, stalling and starting/Who do you think you are, Joe Stalin?”), but it was stripped from the more popular 1985 mix of the song. A cryptic Vladimir Lenin reference made the cut though with the line “From Lake Geneva to the Finland Station” which refers to the train route Lenin took when he was smuggled by the Germans to Russia during World War I. David Tennant of Doctor Who fame is actually the stage name for David McDonald. He chose Tennant based on Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant.
· Peter Schilling’s Major Tom— which is an homage to the character in David Bowie’s songs — was originally recorded in German before it was eventually released in English for the US.
· The line at the end of Tears for Fears’ Mad World sounds like he is singing “enlarging your world” (as many lyric videos reinforce), but he is actually singing “Halargian world.” ‘Halargian’ was a word coined by the song’s producer as part of a running joke about a fictitious planet and catch phrase, such as ‘Oh, that’s so Halargian.’ He put it in the song since it sounded right. Prior to Tears for Fears, the members of the group were in Neon with both of the guys from Naked Eyes, so it’s two bands for the price of one.
· The chorus for Van Halen’s Jump was inspired by a news report about a man threatening to commit suicide by leaping from a building. Roth envisioned one of the onlookers saying “go ahead and jump” which he thought would also make a good song. When he ran it by one of his roadies, the guy agreed it had a good ring to it, but they changed the theme to refer to an invitation to love instead of a suicide threat. Speaking of Van Halen, the late great Phil Hartman is the voice of Waldo in the Hot for Teacher video.
· Based on these early photos of The Cure, there was obviously a period that Robert Smith didn’t have all the stylistic trappings of a Goth. So when did the change happen? Peter Murphy claimed in this SPIN article that after his band Bauhaus arrived on the scene, “the Cure were obviously losing their cache — and suddenly I see pictures of Robert Smith with high black hair, lipstick, and badly applied eye makeup with black clothes. I’m thinking, Okay, all right, so he’s now Goth, right?” Pretty tough words from a guy who appeared in a Maxell commercial.
· Def Leppard’s Rock of Ages starts with the Germanic sounding “Gunter gleiben glauchen globen,” but according to producer Mutt Lange, the words were made up as a substitute for the tired practice of a standard 1–2–3–4 countdown.
·Don Dokken initially did vocals on several of Scorpions’ songs on their Blackout album when Klaus Meine had to have surgery during its production. Since Klaus was able to sing afterward, those demos were never released (and Don has no plans to release them in the future).
· Depeche Mode’s name is commonly mistranslated as being French for “fast fashion.” This is because it is what Martin Gore thought it meant. The more accurate translation is either ‘fashion dispatch’ or ‘fashion news’ in reference to a magazine of the same name that was out at the time. They chose the name because they were put on the spot to provide one for a gig they had lined up and the magazine was on the table in front of Dave Gahan. Prior to Gahan joining the group, they were a trio called Composition of Sound.
· I couldn’t find anything notable about Kajagoogoo who did the one-hit wonder Too Shy, especially since lead singer Limahl left after the first album. I then noticed that his real name is Chris Hamill, leading me to crack the code that his nom de plume is basically his last name spelled backwards with the extra “l” staying at the end.
· Prior to joining the Go-Go’s, Belinda Carlisle was briefly with The Germs (yes, the founding fathers of the LA punk scene in the late 70’s). While it’s common knowledge the Go-Go’s sound was originally edgier before it was given a poppy sheen in the studio for their debut, it is eye-opening to know Belinda had this added layer of punk cred.
· ABC started out as a group called Vice Versa which actually sounded pretty cool. And if you are into video vixen trivia, the woman in ABC’s Poison Arrow video is Lisa Vanderpump from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
· R.E.M.’s name was taken from a dictionary, which is much better than the names they actually came up with for consideration, including Cans of Piss and Negro Eyes.
· The Bangles were originally called The Bangs and released some music under that name, but had to change it because another band had the name already and threatened to sue them. Also, the chorus for Walk Like An Egyptian was inspired by witnessing people struggling to keep their balance on a ferry boat given the way their arms moved.
· It’s no revelation that Prince penned the hit Manic Monday for The Bangles, but few have probably listened to the earlier version he produced for Apollonia 6 (it only appeared on a pre-release cassette version of their album).
· While most folks only know Murray Head’s One Night in Bangkok as a stand alone single, the song’s origins are related to a concept album and musical created by two members of ABBA called Chess. Here is a Norwegian clip of the musical being performed live.
Also, while the Murray Head version is what took off in the US, there was a version by Robey that was a hit in Canada.
· For Goth fans, the music from Sisters of Mercy’s Black Planet was taken from a song written for the group by Wayne Hussey called Dance on Glass, but SOM’s Eldritch didn’t care for the original lyrics. When Hussey left the group to form The Mission, he later released a song called Dance on Glass, but it doesn’t sound like the earlier version.
· Bonnie Tyler had a hit with Jim Steinman’s Total Eclipse of the Heart which was originally called Vampires in Love. This is because it was intended to be for a Nosferatu musical. Give the song another listen and you can hear how it applies to vampire love.
· In the original British version of The Office, Ricky Gervais’ David Brent character is into playing music and he even does a music tour in Life on the Road, the movie that followed the series. The music is actually pretty good but that shouldn’t be a surprise if you knew about Seona Dancing, his 80’s new wave group.
· Apparently, there are a lot of underground 80’s groups that didn’t make it to MTV.
And in more modern pop culture…
· No Use For A Name does a great medley of 80’s songs on a hidden track on their Leche Con Carne! CD, while Goldfinger got creative with their cover of Rio by segueing into a song about Dio, including using the melody from Rainbow in the Dark.
· The song Easy Street used to torture Daryl in The Walking Dead by being played on repeat was inspired by the equally tortuous Walking on Sunshine. Okay, I made that up, but it sounds credible, right?
· This isn’t trivia, but the best homage to the 80’s new wave scene in terms of music is the movie Sing Street, specifically the song Riddle of the Model.
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If you like exhaustively researched stories, be sure to also check out my article on the best and worst in modern day post-apocalypse survivalist cinema.
