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keith a wrote: IanB wrote: Daniel wrote: Kosmischeboy wrote:
Ooops! Julian was far more sexy ascending that mic stand. Ha!
Yeah great clip.
Cope is fantastic but in TTE he was a bit Pat Boone to Devoto's Little Richard - the acceptable (pretty) face of Post Punk for Smash Hits and the BBC. Solo as an artist he is/was a whole other proposition but how big could Magazine have been if Devoto looked more liked Jim Morrison? IanB wrote: Daniel wrote: Kosmischeboy wrote:
Ooops! Julian was far more sexy ascending that mic stand. Ha!
Yeah great clip.
Cope is fantastic but in TTE he was a bit Pat Boone to Devoto's Little Richard - the acceptable (pretty) face of Post Punk for Smash Hits and the BBC. Solo as an artist he is/was a whole other proposition but how big could Magazine have been if Devoto looked more liked Jim Morrison?
He might have been prettier, Ian, but good looks and talent aren't necessarily exclusive of each other which that Boone / Little Richard comparison might suggest. Lest we forget, despite having the odd hit, the Teardrops could be pretty damn weird in their own way so I don't get the bit about the Cope the solo artist being different proposition.
By the end of 1981, which was the Teardrops most successful year, they were playing new stuff in a small Liverpool club at night (despite the latest LP only being a couple of months old), nipping to London to record the Xmas TOTP the next day, then getting back to Liverpool to play another small club date later that evening that resulted in Cope losing it and walking off half way through. It wasn't just some slick commercial act. You can't go back in time to view these dates, but you only have to listen to the b-sides of the hits to hear that was definitely more to them a Pat Boone comparison might suggest.
As for Devoto, well as much as I love Magazine I do get why some of those singles weren't hits. Sure Sweetheart Contract for one should have done better, but so then so should Tiny Children.
Actually, I'm not sure that Devoto's image/looks held him back. He had his own image and it was one that suited him and the music. I'd say that if anyone missed out in this respect it was Adrian Borland.
But for all their influences, both Cope and Devoto managed to make music that was genuinely distinctive and their own.
Well argued but we are never going to agree on this particular issue as I thought TTE were pretty frightful apart from Treason. Actually nothing much that Cope did on record before Peggy touched me to any major degree though I did enjoy the bravado of that whole I-like-cunnilingus-acid-&-vintage-leathers persona that he cultivated. I always checked out his records to see if the music had caught up with this wonderfully contrived uber hetero but non-sexist rock star shaped image that he built for himself. Cope to me was like Jim Morrison put through boot camp by the Au Pairs. So I am possibly viewing the whole thing through an odd shaped telescope compared with most JC fans of our vintage. Devoto meanwhile was to my ear the closest thing we have ever had to Lou Reed at his best. He may have read it in books too but if he did it was somewhere in the middle not the back of the jacket.
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