You just saved me a long post by including
Sex Dwarf and
Louis Quatorze.
I have to add Berlin's
Sex. God Terri Nunn was hot! The most beautiful female pop star of the 80s, no question. This is one of the best 80s dance songs. It's made for strobe lights, lasers, and fog machines.
I'm going to have to write more about Bow Wow Wow. They're ridiculously influential considering they were a designer band. I have to add, their bassist, Leigh Gorman, was the sexiest guy. All my friends were lusting after Annabella Lwin (who it turned out really was 14 when she sang
Louis Quatorze and a host of other sexually suggestive songs) but I secretly had the hots for Gorman. There's a great shot of him on the back of one of their albums with him sitting in a bubble bath with a pleasantly furry chest. Mmm!
I would have preferred
Sexy Eiffel Towers, but it's not on either YouTube or DailyMotion, so I "settled" for
Louis Q
And the original
Sex Dwarf video, with chainsaws, pig blood and little people is still considered too risque to allow on YouTube (fucking weenies). I always thought it was one of the dirtiest songs ever recorded, and I was a big fan of CriscoDisco and PornoPunk the first time around.
My first exposure to Bow Wow Wow was on college radio in Boston with
Sexy Eiffel Towers (basically three minutes of her aurally simulating masturbation and orgasm after having jumped to her death off the Eiffel Tower) in 1981 or 82. When I went to the one place in Boston where such music might be available for purchase (Newbury Comics), I was shown a yellow plastic tape called "Your Cassette Pet" behind the counter. It was an import and ridiculously expensive, but I had to have it and wore it out.
After several other singles (
W.O.R.K,
Sun & Sea & Piracy), they released
See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang, Yeah. City All Over! Go Ape Crazy! (maybe the longest album title in history?) which was totally different. Instead of a raw, scratchy sound with sexually provocative lyrics, they came out with the closest approximation to PunkOpera that I can imagine. Yet
See Jungle! retained all its street cred and snob appeal by still being unplayable on commercial radio. Here's
Prince of Darkness . Tell me if you can imagine any commercial application whatsoever!
Their third album,
When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going was a complete disaster for me: trite and cutsie. It was a total sell-out, but by 1983 the music had pretty much died, anyway. The marketing of New Wave was complete with Cyndi Lauper's
She's So Unusual, which I wouldn't appreciate until
True Colors made me re-appraise her artistically. But, really by then everything was different.