Queue the heavenly music mixed with stone silence…

The request line has been shut down like all those 1-900 numbers from back in the day, and The Nest’s homepony is back on the switchboard like Lily Tomlin!  It’s Monday, and that means it’s time to pick up the old school receiver and turn that rotary dial to call up another great song that got disconnected from that phone booth of lost his we like to call the Dusty Vinyl Archive!  You can always call up DJ Scratchy for a good time, while the Sponkies are calling everyone asking for Prince Albert in a can.  It’s time to get busier than a busy tone!  Beep, beep, beep, beep….

New wave is one of the messier labels that’s been given to music, ultimately coming to describe almost any kind of pop that was coming out in the late 70’s and early 80’s.  When I think of new wave, I think of bands with more synthesizers than they had members, those awesome sounding electric drums that were already being put into permanent storage by the late 80’s, gloves with the fingers worn out in them, and music videos that had so many graphical gimmicks that you wondered if your old boob tube was going out on you…

Thanks Duran Duran!

New wave was originally meant to categorize a more commercially acceptable brand of punk music that emerged from the British Isles, and unsurprisingly, most of the acts we consider to be “new wave” today came from the UK, while many of the rest were from America or continental Europe.  So of course, when I think of the song and music video that best epitomizes my notion of new wave, it naturally comes from a band completely on the other side of the world from where it was all going down…

In 1983, Australian band Real Life ensured themselves a slice of 80’s one hit wonderdom with their epic synth pop masterpiece “Send Me An Angel.”  The song was a big hit in their homeland, as well as Canada and a few select European countries.  In the US, it only reached #29 on the Hot 100… but its video, fitting for the song’s eerie fantasy feel, got a lot of play in the glory age of MTV.  I might remember this song more than I should given its stay on the American charts in early ’84 coincided with when I listen to Casey’s countdown every Sunday morning, and the video’s heyday with when we first got MTV.

You may kiss my hand now for bringing this earworm into your (real) life.

For some reason, the band remixed the song without the awesome hand claps and a few of the other new wavey sounds and released it a few years later as “Send Me An Angel ’89.”  That version only did well in two places, New Zealand and, shockingly, a hair band obsessed America… where “Angel ’89” outdid the original by three chart slots!  Luckily, I have absolutely no recollection of that travesty…

Come back next Monday as The Nest will again send its angel with a blue mane to give you another lost hymn!