There's a bit of revisionism going down in relation to the 1980s. Both Scissor Sisters and Franz Ferdinand are doing their best to convince that some aspects of the decade's musical output were worth salvaging and passing off as new 20 years later. But just when you think it might be OK to work through your issues with the decade, an appalling vista of Curiosity Killed The Cat, Simple Minds and Kid Creole & The Coconuts (what were we thinking?) manifests itself to ward off any attempts at rehabilitation, writes Brian Boyd
Perhaps the only thing worth saving from that benighted era is the wondrous 12-inch single - or the 30cm single as the decimal fascists would have us call it. The 12-inch may have come out of disco music, with DJs wanting to get a bit more of a groove going than allowed by the standard three-minute tune, but within a few years you were nobody unless you could tweak and twiddle your seven-inch into an extended mix - on coloured vinyl.
A fantastic new three-CD release - bluntly called 12 inch/80s - has just been released to coincide with the fact that an unprecedented number of Eighties revivalists are currently cluttering up the charts. Sadly, because of the digital nature of music now, the art of the 12-inch has been lost, but there's evidence aplenty on this album that we would gladly take the 12-inch over the remix any day.
In these days of stupid names for remixes - the DJ Fuckface remix etc - there's something quaint about looking down the tracklisting here. The songs are either credited as "12-inch mix" or the beautifully prosaic "Long Version". No techno-ambient- industrial gabba here.
The collection opens with The Cure's A Forest, a 12-inch that convinced many dour rock bands that a Long Version of their song need not be a vacuous disco version but could indeed improve considerably on the original without damaging the song's integrity. This is quickly followed by the inspired Soft Cell 12-inch which saw them seguing from Tainted Love into Where Did Our Love Go. Obviously, after that, you're just waiting for ABC to make their presence felt, and they turn in a great Long Version of Tears Are Not Enough.
Probably because of all the legal/copyright cases that blighted their career, there is no Frankie Goes To Hollywood here, which is disappointing because, whether you were a fan or not, they were the kings of the 12-inches during their short but imperial reign.
It's not all retro heaven, though: for every Scritti Politti (Wood Beez), Tom Tom Club (Wordy Rappinghood) and Fun Boy Three (Our Lips Are Sealed), there's a Simply Red, a Blow Monkeys and a Hipsway.
Some of the tracks are instructional: The Jam's 12-inch of Precious was really just a precursor of what was to follow with The Style Council while, hilariously, Lloyd Cole's My Bag is called, as if we didn't get the message, a "Dancing Remix".
Oddly, what is often described as the world's first 12-inch single - The Who's Substitute from 1976 - isn't included here, which is a real oversight by the compilers of this collection. While The Who were the first rock band with a 12-inch, previously Jamaican reggae artists, soul and jazz acts used the format extensively.
The 12-inch is still around, mainly in dance circles, and there is an argument that the Long Version of songs such as A Forest paved the way for the increased role of the producer in popular music. Ignoring disco, producers were, until the 1980s, invisible forces who barely warranted a credit. The 12-inch made them a fifth member of a band, and then, in the 1990s, with the rise of dance, they became the most important people in the recording process.
And on this collection you'll hear where a number of today's name producers got their bag of twiddling tricks from.
bboyd@irish-times.ie
