The day I got to program 'Rage'... for an hour

Back in 2010, Rage held a competition to program an hour of music videos.  To enter, you had to guess the missing songs/videos on a playlist, using cryptic clues from a playlist published on their website.  Each video was related in some way to the videos coming before and after it (e.g. a 'Choose Life' t-shirt appears in both Wham's 'Wake Me Up Before You Go Go' video and Queen's 'Hammer To Fall' video).

After many hours of using google, wikipedia, and youtube to assist with deciphering the clues, I submitted my entry.  It was generally very difficult; even if you guessed the right artist, there wasn't always a clear way to tell which song/video of theirs it would be.  Thankfully, entrants into the competition could submit multiple entries.  I think I only guessed 7 or 8 correct out of the 12 missing videos, but it was enough to win the competition.  I was quite pleasantly surprised when one of the staff at rage called me to inform that I'd won.  It was a long-time dream of mine to program an episode of Rage.  Although I would have liked to choose the videos for a full episode, I couldn't turn my nose up at an hour.

The videos I chose weren't necessarily my favourite songs or videos.  Sure, I like them all, but I had to be strategic with my selections.  Firstly, it was no good choosing videos that Rage were unlikely to have, so most (but not all) of the videos I picked I had seen on Rage before... but not for a very long time.  I chose videos that hadn't aired on Rage for some time, also because what's the point of picking something they always play?  Several of the videos I chose were also in the hope of obtaining better quality versions of the videos than I currently had in my collection.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to see Rage's 'big red book', which guest programmers normally get to see, listing all of the music videos currently in their library.  I did receive a call, however, from someone at Rage a few days later, asking if I could choose two additional videos, because some of the selections I made (Yazz's 'Where Has All the Love Gone?', Voice of the Beehive's 'Monsters and Angels', and Sabrina's 'Sexy Girl' - though they've since located that one) could not be readily located in their library/archives.  I asked the woman I spoke to if she could tell me what videos they had in the library by particular artists, and she looked this up on a computer while I was talking to her... so an electronic catalogue exists.  In their place, I chose Yazz's 'Never Can Say Goodbye' (a song I don't mind, though not a favourite - but the only other non-common video of hers listed) and Deee-Lite's 'Runaway'.

Here's some of the videos I chose that went to air:

Transvision Vamp 'Revolution Baby':

I always liked this song, and hadn't seen it on Rage since it left the top 50 in March 1989.  An aunt of mine bore (and probably still bears) a resemblance to Wendy James... in both looks and clothing choices, ha ha.  I remember telling her at the time that she reminds me of Wendy James, which I think she was flattered by.

Mel & Kim 'That's the Way It Is' (version 2):

Much better than the 'dancers' version of this video (which doesn't feature Mel & Kim at all).  I remember seeing this video on TV when it was in the charts.  I didn't realise at the time (probably because 'Respectable' was the only video I was then familiar with, though I'd seen 'FLM' once, and part of 'Showing Out' in a TV ad) that the video just re-used footage from previous Mel & Kim videos.  I read in Smash Hits a few weeks later that Mel was ill with cancer, and this was the reason they couldn't film a proper video.

Bananarama 'Love In the First Degree':

I hadn't seen this one on Rage either since 1988, one of my favourite years in music.

Bangles 'Hazy Shade of Winter':

Another clip from 1988 that I hadn't seen on Rage since.  I also chose this video because it's not on the Bangles 'Greatest Hits' DVD (presumably because they couldn't clear, or didn't want to pay for, the 'Less Than Zero' movie footage featured in the clip).  I remember taping this off the radio when it was a new release. 

Nik Kershaw 'I Won't Let the Sun Go Down On Me' (version 2):

I hadn't seen this one on Rage before.  I was hoping they had the original 1983 'concept' version of the video, but alas, 'twas not to be.  Still, it was good to get a copy of this video with the original audience cheer/sing-a-long (which was edited out on Nik's DVD)... er, I think.  Yes, it kind of detracts from the song a bit.  This song reminds me of when I lived in New Zealand for a few months as a kid.

Deborah Harry 'Strike Me Pink':

An unusual video (Debbie watches by as a man 'drowns' in a tank of water) that I wanted a digital copy of.  I also like the song.  I remember seeing the video as a new release on Rage, just before going on a trip to Hong Kong.

Yazz 'Never Can Say Goodbye':

An OK, if not a tad... bland, cover of 'Never Can Say Goodbye'.  It was great to get a better copy of this than my second generation VHS copy from Rage in 1997 (which was also missing the last 7 seconds of the video, as it was edited out).  I remember catching the video on Rage once - probably its only airing, in May 1997, and being surprised that a new Yazz single was being released in Australia, as the previous one released here was in 1990 (Treat Me Good).  Not surprisingly, it flopped.  You would never have guessed that this was the same peroxide blonde spiky hair Yazz from 'The Only Way Is Up' in the video.

Nina Hagen 'Smack Jack':

I caught this once or twice on Rage in the early-mid 00's, and remember thinking 'WTF is this?!'  It was crazy... in a good way.  I think the second time I caught it I was half-asleep on the couch, and it woke me up.  I'd nearly wondered afterwards if I dreamt the whole thing, as the vocals and the video were just so out there!  I'm glad this got an airing at about 10:45am on Saturday morning as part of my playlist.  As someone later said to me, "I'm sure a few people spat out their Cornflakes watching that video on Saturday morning Rage".


The other videos I chose, but haven't linked here (as blogger won't allow them to be embedded, I haven't uploaded them to youtube myself, or I have uploaded them but youtube has blocked them worldwide):

Oingo Boingo 'Stay'
Eighth Wonder 'I'm Not Scared'
Monaco 'Sweet Lips'
Coldcut featuring Yazz & The Plastic Population 'Doctorin' the House'
Youssou N'Dour 'Undecided'
The The featuring Neneh Cherry 'Slow Train To Dawn'
Deee-Lite 'Runaway'

A few people on the Rage facebook page and website forum expressed an appreciation for my selections... but only a few, ha ha.

UK Chart Attack

OK, 4 posts in one day, I'm getting a bit carried away...  But something I just found via google prompted this one.

Back in the early 90's, Fox FM in Melbourne used to air a radio show called 'UK Chart Attack' on Sunday nights, at 9:30pm or thereabouts, following American Top 40.  Although I listened to American Top 40 sometimes (usually not the whole show though), unfortunately I didn't discover UK Chart Attack until May 1992.  I've always generally liked UK/European music the best, and the UK Chart Attack radio show aired an hour's worth of new releases from UK/European acts, as well as singles charting in the UK that hadn't yet been released/become hits in the US (for whom the show was primarily designed).

Back in those days, singles by UK/European artists (particularly the more obscure or less successful ones) were not released in Australia until usually 3, and sometimes 6 or more, months later (if at all for the less-successful/well-known artists).  So there were many tracks I heard via UK Chart Attack months before they were released here, and also quite a few that didn't ever get a local release.

One of the first new tracks I heard on UK Chart Attack was the single version of Shakespears Sister's 'I Don't Care', which was completely re-recorded and radically different to the album version on the 'Hormonally Yours' album I already owned:

Eventually I'd have my blank cassette tape ready to record any new tracks that I liked from UK Chart Attack.  I still have that cassette somewhere.

Another track I heard first on UK Chart Attack (in September 1992, ahead of its December 1992 release here) was Tasmin Archer's 'Sleeping Satellite'.  Not yet having seen the video, I assumed Tasmin was white.  I was quite surprised when I first caught the video on Rage as a new release 3 months later:

I also heard Utah Saints' 'Something Good' on UK Chart Attack for the first time, and was pleasantly surprised when it became a #10 hit in Australia a few months later.

Unfortunately, Australia was still in the grip of 'classic rock' on FM radio at the time, and to hear music such as this on the radio outside of the top 40 was a rarity.

And one track I probably never would have heard if not for UK Chart Attack was Ambassadors of Funk's 'Supermarioland' (another one I have to link here, as only duplicates of my upload appear in the embedding search results... despite my video being the first search result for the track on youtube iteself - what's up with this?!) - yes, heavily based on the Nintendo game music.  Eighteen months earlier, someone at school had dubbed me 'Nintendo Nath'.


Like all good things, UK Chart Attack's broadcast on Fox FM unfortunately came to an end in January 1993, to be replaced with Dr Feelgood's 'Pillow Talk' radio show.  Sure, while I also listened to this sometimes, I was gutted that my favourite radio show wasn't coming back.  As usual, there was no announcement that the last UK Chart Attack show to air on Fox FM would be the last.  Coincidentally, I encountered someone who worked behind the scenes as an audio engineer on the 'Pillow Talk' radio show (among other things), earlier this year at work.  He had some interesting tidbits to reveal on how the show was put together and broadcast.

Ioni 'Sentence of Love'

I mentioned in the first post on this blog that I am (was) an ardent chart follower.  Besides the Australian chart, I've also had a long interest in the UK singles chart, which I always thought was more interesting than our own, as it tends to be faster-paced (or used to be, pre downloads being included in the chart), and nearly everything that deserves to chart, does... somewhere; even if it's just scraping the top 200 (compared to the paltry Australian top 100 singles chart).  However, prior to 1994, the only readily-available UK chart information online is the top 75.  But, if you know where to look, you can search the 76-100 UK singles chart positions (by artist, since the full charts were removed from the site).  Well, for between 1983 and May 1991.

Recently, I discovered a thread on the UKMix Chart Analysis forum which has positions 76-100 from between September 1992 and February 1994.  Browsing through the list, I checked to see if I had the videos for some of the singles that peaked between #76 and #100 in the UK from this period, and lo and behold, I do.  A number of these weren't already on youtube, so I uploaded a couple last night.  Among them was this track:

I found this video on a VHS tape I acquired and converted to DVD in 2009.  I liked the song, and wrote it down on my 'to download' list of songs.  I keep this list, as often I'll think of a good song to download randomly, and then forget it by the time I get around to doing so.  But as I only watched the video once, I quickly forgot how the song went, and didn't end up downloading it.  I remember seeing it on my 'to download' list some months later, and wondering how the song went.  It seems that Ioni (that's 'ioni', not 'Loni') was a rather obscure artist (the only information I can find online is that this was a Dutch/UK dance 'project'... but I don't even know if 'Ioni' is the name of the singer or if this is a group).  This track spent a solitary week in the UK top 100, at #94, in February 1993.  Subsequently, an mp3 of the track isn't easy to come by... so I've just bought the CD single online.  I love love love this track, and have listened to the video file about 15 times in the past two days.  Criminally underrated.  As someone once posted on a youtube video of mine: "Diamonds sink; shit floats" (in reference to that song's chart placing).

Where it began...

Although I'd been a 'casual' music follower for a few years (e.g. watching Countdown from age 5), it wasn't until 1987 that I started to follow music more intently... perhaps inspired by listening to my sister's various artists 'hits' compilation cassettes on my Walkman.  '87 Hots Up was the first one I bought myself, though; then Smash Hits '87 a few months later (A$16.99 at my local K-Mart).

 
I didn't realise that Smash Hits was a magazine as well until visiting a relative of my parents' friends' in January 1988, where their daughter had a copy (the local Australian version).

Of course, I soon began buying Smash Hits myself.  The first edition I bought featured Michael Hutchence on the cover, and retailed for A$1.75 from memory.  I continued to buy Smash Hits until 1994 (even though I thought it had gone downhill from '92 when it started to focus more on TV shows, and ones I didn't watch such as 90210).  I threw them all out though during a house move in 1995.  Initially, I was most interested in the section where they printed a copy of the top 50 singles chart, and soon after became an avid chart-follower.  I wanted to know how well the songs I liked performed on the charts.

I soon discovered the Take 40 Australia radio show, and began writing the list of songs down each week.  Around the same time, I also discovered the local music video shows Video Hits, and Rage - which played the videos for the top 50 songs each week.  Eventually, I noticed that Rage played the chart a week before it aired on Take 40 Australia, and so switched to using Rage for my weekly chart fix.

Just after Christmas 1988, while visiting a cousin's house, we watched some music videos she had recorded from Rage.  I remember thinking 'what a great idea!' at recording music videos to watch later on.  Even though I had been watching Rage for almost a year, somehow I'd never thought to record the videos I liked.  It probably didn't help that I didn't yet own any of my own blank VHS tapes (which were quite expensive at the time, especially for someone still relying on pocket money).

The first music video I recorded was Enya's 'Orinoco Flow', from the Rage top 50 in early February 1989.  I also recorded the top 5 songs from that week.  I still have that 4-hour video tape today, though converted it to DVD in 2005.  Some other videos I recorded onto it were Neneh Cherry's 'Buffalo Stance', Tanita Tikaram's 'Twist InMy Sobriety', and Paul Kelly's 'Dumb Things' (yes, that video is a direct upload from this VHS tape).  Quite diverse tastes for a 10 year-old ;)

And so I've continued to record/keep music videos I like ever since... and er, even a few I don't like so much.  My interest in new chart music severely waned though towards the end of the 90's, and hasn't recovered since.  But there's still lots of 'old' new music I missed the first time around that I'm discovering now, and finding new, obscure-ish music videos on VHS compilations from the 80's/90's I acquire helps with that.  "When you can't find the music to get down and boogie, all you can do is step back in time" indeed.  I do find some new music that I like, but it usually requires effort to find it.

I've always tended to like the less-successful artists/songs the most.  Through youtube and this blog, I hope to give some of these tracks exposure to a new audience.  I always get a buzz from reading comments on my youtube videos from people who've liked the song for years but have never seen the video before; or from people discovering an 'old' song they like but didn't previously know.  I try to upload videos for songs that aren't already on youtube; or better-quality versions of videos that are already there.

Hello (turn your radio on)

Inspired by some other music-related blogs I've been reading recently (e.g. Chart Beats), I decided to start my own.  I've used youtube as an outlet for sharing music videos from my collection since April 2007, when I discovered that the only Yazz music video on youtube at that time was 'The Only Way Is Up'.  Unfortunately, I was still on dial-up at the time, and it took something like 4 hours to upload each video; even after compressing it beforehand.

My first youtube channel was OhNoItsNathan (no apostrophes were allowed in the username back then), inspired by the 1996 Shakespears Sister (coincidentally, no apostrophe either) b-side 'Oh No, It's Michael' (which doesn't seem to be on youtube).  Yes, Nathan is my name.  Unfortunately, the channel was suspended some time in January 2008, due to repeated copyright strikes.  So I dusted myself off and started a new channel, this time OhNoItIsNathan (couldn't use the previous channel's username), eventually clocking up 440+ uploads and several million views... only to suffer the same fate again in October 2009 (hello copyright strikes).

Gutted at the prospect of re-uploading several hundred videos (which still take nearly an hour each to upload, thanks to Australia's 3rd-world internet speeds and my aversion to compression) - only to lose them all again if my channel gets suspended, this time I decided to create multiple channels with a limited number of videos on each.  This way, if I lose a channel again, I only need to upload about 20 or so videos.  Each of my current channels is a variation of ohnoitisnathan (now using the more humble lower-case), e.g. ohnoitisnathan3, except my MelAndKimVideos channel.  I was toying with the idea of using some channels for uploading specific artists' videos (hence the artist-specific username of that channel), but later abandoned the idea.

The strategy of having multiple channels has worked, and I haven't yet lost another channel since.  However, the trade-off is that my videos don't always get the same number of views or comments that they once did - though when I last did a tally in May 2013, my channels at that point had a combined view total of ~7.8 million ($ucce$$!).  It's a pain, though, having to log into 30+ accounts (so far) once a week to check for new comments/messages etc.  First world problems ;)

Anyway, that aside, I aim to use this blog to share my uploaded music videos from youtube in one location... and to occasionally add some of the 'back story' behind my decision to upload certain videos.

For anyone wondering, the title of this post is drawn from the Shakespears Sister song linked in the video above.  It was also the first CD single I purchased, in December 1992.  A steal at A$7.99 (from memory) in my local Brashs.  After seeing the video on Video Hits on Oct 25th 1992, I searched under 'S' in the singles section of every local record store every weekend, trying to find the damn thing (the single version was different to the album version I already had on their 'Hormonally Yours' CD).  I'd almost given up, until finally they had it a mere 6 weeks later.