I suspect that many lads of a certain age who read this journal will have just had a sudden moment of “oh, yeah, I remember then,” before wandering off to youtube one of their other videos. I say this because I spent about two years with Transvision Vamp’s first album on the tape-deck of my car in my mid-twenties and every male friend who got a lift would hear the opening bars of I Want Your Love and get an immediate flash-back to their adolescence.

And yet once you get past the gratuitous objectification of Wendy James, there still something fascinating about Transvision Vamp. I have a moderate fascination with Andy Warhol and his relationship to celebrity that was heavily reflected in the band’s first album (Pop Art, which included a song about Warhol’s death). I’m intrigued by the number of former punk musicians who ended up playing pop-rock in the background (including former members of the X-Ray Specs and the Partisans). I’m freakin’ amazed that James’ post-Vamp solo-album was written by Elvis Costello, and moderately bummed that I never actually tracked it down in a record store. I’ve spent years trying to work out whether they were a punk band who got coopted or an experiment in controlled branding that used capitalism against itself, and I’ve never realy come up with an answer.

I really do need to go find a copy of Pop Art on CD though.

PeterMBall

PeterMBall

Peter M. Ball is a speculative fiction writer, small press publisher, and writing mentor from Brisbane, Austraila. He publishes his own work through Eclectic Projects and works as the brain in charge at Brain Jar Press.
RELATED POSTS

Leave a Reply

PETER’S LATEST RELEASE

RECENT POSTS

SEARCH BLOG BY CATEGORY
BLOG ARCHIVE