I feel like doing things on this blog tonight a la my good friend Anthony, who posts multiple blog posts each and every day without titling any of them. Well, each day save for the few days when he just cannot get to a computer. I admire his dedication.

Anyway, I've been trying to work out a feasable playlist order for the aforementioned proposed playlist on New Wave (I know L. would have a problem with me using that term, but it's the term I'm most comfortable with) instrumentals, and it strikes me as odd that the only instrumental that stands out is the one by the Scars, and that's because it's the only instrumental in the lot that does not have a lick of synth sound in it. If it had even a tiny amount of synthesized sound permeating the background, I could transition it very well either into or out from the Blancmange "Sad Day" instrumental, perhaps also being bookmarked by the slow version of Duran Duran's "Faith In This Colour", because the two instrumentals are the only other two that place as much of an emphasis on guitar sounds as does "Little Boy". And then it started to dawn on me that perhaps my ideal slice of musical heaven should not lie directly in the path of breathy keyboards and swirly synths, but rather a melange of those sounds and the classically rockier, guitar-heavy post-punk sound as evidenced by the Scars and their Scottish contemporaries.

In other words, basically what I've noticed are the descriptor marks for Duran Duran's debut album. Their most guitar-heavy work of the '80s, the debut album provided a logical, only slightly more refined extension of what they were previously doing as that little club band from Birmingham that had tried to shop around its demo tape just two years prior and with a different lead singer (Andy Wickett, even more royally screwed by history than Stephen Duffy). At that time, the West Midlands bleak industrialness shone through in the band's music, while the band itself were largely products of this setting. (Nick Rhodes's father was a heating engineer, while Roger Taylor's father was employed as a sheet metal worker. John Taylor's father was a comparatively posh "sales manager". Wickett's father's employment is unknown.) From that atmosphere combined with the band's shared love and interest in glam rock came the ideal environment for a sound that was strongly post-punk in its leanings. Listen to any song off that demo tape, now being hawked by Wickett on his personal site, and see.

So anyway, I'm sure you're tired of me going on about That Band, but when they have played as important a part of my life as they have, to where they are the focal point for a lot, if not virtually all, of my contemporary musical interests, they're bound to always swirl around in the deep recesses of my brain. And I think I am going to have an easier time of this playlist project if I can find an instrumental that fits that aesthetic really well.