The 80's Through A Series of Tubes (redux for the summer): Dolly Mixture

Just in time for summer, I've found a clip of one of my favorite obscure girl bands from the 1980's. I know I've been promising to keep posting about krautrock, but the warmer weather (amongst other things) has made me desire more pop-oriented music and Dolly Mixture certainly delivers when it comes to pop, but don't be turned away by that label. They're certainly not "mindless pop!"

I actually came across a track ("Everything and More" which you can listen to on this myspace page) from this band on a random blog almost two years ago and put it on a few random mix cd's I made at the time and sort of forgot about them until I lucked into (again, randomly) stumbling upon a download of their 1984 release The Demonstration Tapes - A Double Album. There's a lot of information about the band on this site (http://punkmodpop.free.fr) but I am going to summarize some of it here for my readers that just come for the youtube clips (not that there are a lot of you actually reading this thing, anyway!)

Supposedly, the girls were girlfriends of members of The Damned, but obviously that noteriety did them little good, because most people at least know of The Damned and little have heard of Dolly Mixture. When I've tried describing their sound to people, I like to say they're kind of like Liliput meets The Go-Gos. As far as releases go, the band put out four singles prior to The Demonstration Tapes on a few scattered labels (this included the single "Everything and More" and the song "Been Teen" which is what they're performing in the above youtube clip) and then after the double album, they put out a few singles on their own label and a final EP (called The Fireside EP) but I've yet to be able to track down the later stuff, unfortunately.

Anyway, I don't have a lot of love for most 80's girl-pop bands, or girl-pop bands in general (unless they're Swedish in origin. That's quite another story!) but I find Dolly Mixture to be endearingly competant with their songwriting. With songs like "Shonay, Shonay" ("Do you remember that time on vacation when I left you crying at the station?/I was excited by the hurrying crowd/By all that was busy and bright and loud." and later in the song "And you ought to know that I really did care/I try to think of things that I should be doing/But all that comes is that I've been losing you") the band finds themselves a lot more self-reflective than their sugar-pop counterparts. But they're also not afraid to have fun and this is also evident with songs like "How Come Your Such A Hit With The Boys, Jane" and "He's So Frisky."

So try to track down their album and give the youtube clip a watch and the myspace songs a listen. I promise you'll enjoy it and if you don't....well, I don't know what's wrong with you!