Landscape - European Man

(Edit on 3 Oct: It would seem that the YouTube user has suddenly disabled embedding on this one, so go here instead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpRjbl3pX-Q)

Much has been heard about a revival of eighties production values in the last few years, but it's worth reminding ourselves that, like all retro-celebration, only certain parts have been shaved off and repackaged for our enjoyment. When Britpop revived the sixties in the nineties, it was very careful to only dig out the most credible of reference points - The Kinks, The Beatles, The Who and The Small Faces all got a look-in, but there weren't many jolly, smiley suited bands out there doing their best Freddie and the Dreamers or Herman's Hermits impressions. It was exactly like Friday Night at the London Palladium had never happened (although I for one would have killed to see John Powers out of Cast doing a Dave Clark Five footstomp, or perhaps Digsy out of Smaller doing a Freddie Garrety dance).

Selective memory when it comes to referencing previous decades is an ongoing phenomenon, and here we are again, giving nods of respect to Gary Numan (whose past output actually, contrary to any lazy off-the-cuff remark you've heard just about anywhere, really doesn't look especially dated these days) and Duran Duran, but politely ignoring pioneers such as Landscape who seem rather more like a Not the Nine O'Clock News parody of New Romanticism.

Landscape, you see, were one of the first British bands out of the traps to fiddle with synthesisers, had one member (Richard Burgess) who supposedly invented the term "New Romantic" - although I'd wager that's something a few others would also lay claim to - and were so utterly Now at the turn of the decade that they blew my little infant mind. The trouble is, of course, that their vision of the future was so about-cock that it lead to goofy videos like the one above, which is a messy visual salad of arch campness and techno-angst. Like many bands of the period, they also thought that the use of digital pocket calculator fonts in their videos and packaging meant they were being forward-thinking, and thought nothing of putting out album sleeves designed on cheap eight-bit computer interfaces. Even by the time the decade closed they looked like peculiar relics, the sorts of chaps who probably thought we'd all be consulting Ceefax in the 21st Century on special mobile teletext headsets, rather than using the Internet on mobile phones.

To be fair to them, they did release one bona-fide classic single along the way which now never seems to crop up on anything other than Eighties compilations with Rubik's Cubes on the sleeve - "Einstein a Go Go". Besides that, there was also the vicious and marginally disturbing "Norman Bates" which has a much more convincing video below.



Less famously, all the members of Saint Etienne once argued that the Landscape album "From the Tearooms of Mars to the Hellholes of Uranus" was the 'worst ever made'. This is a little harsh for an album that has a few prime pieces of early electronic pop on it, but generally speaking, I would offer the advice not to bother with it unless you see it really cheap. Unless of course instrumental tango tracks played on synthesisers are your bag. Like I said, for a supposedly futuristic band, they weren't particularly gifted at understanding what the future might bring. Perhaps in a parallel universe somewhere there's a world that matches exactly with their predictions, although I'm not sure I'd want to visit it.