I have a Statcounter on my site that only I can view – mostly because I don’t want anyone else to know how few visitors I have – and I’m constantly amazed at the variety of people I get here. While most of you are in the US, it seems that quite a few of you are in Canada (as far north as the Yukon!) Ireland, England, Norway, Lithuania, Croatia, Kuwait, Japan, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Brazil and Australia. Its nice to see my unique message of obscure 80s music and random hate-filled ranting is making its way around the world.

Echo & The Bunnymen – Rollercoaster
Echo & The Bunnymen are the patron saints of The Lost Turntable. I’ve featured them three (or four) times already, and have repeatedly declared them to have ‘The Best Band Name Of All Time” (the worst, in case you are curious is a tie between Hoobastank and Hot Tuna). I recently picked up an awesome limited edition version of the single to ‘Lips Like Sugar’ that came in an oversized box and was packaged with awesome postcards! ‘Rollercoaster‘ was the B-side, and since the only version I had of that previously was off of a shitty floppy record, I re-recorded it and am offering it again for you hardcore Bunnymen out there.

Yaz
Situation (The Agressive Attitude Remix)
Situation (Deadline Mix)
Although I had heard ‘Situation’ and ‘Only You’ before, my first real recognition of Yaz was on LCD Soundsystem’s hipster-reference-laden single ‘Losing My Edge” in which James Murphy yells, “I hear you’re buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and are throwing your computer out the window because you want to make something real. You want to make a Yaz record.“

For some reason I had Yaz mixed up with Yello – and the reference made little sense to me. When I picked up Future Retro, a remix album of 80s tunes, I heard ‘Situation’ again and suddenly it all came together. I didn’t know until today, however, that it was primarily the work of Vince Clarke of Erasure and early Depeche Mode fame. Between all three of these acts I think it can safely be said that synth-pop probably wouldn’t exist without him.

These remixes of ‘Situation’ come off the three-track EP of the same name.

Toyah
IEYA
The Helium Song
Toyah was an post-punk/new-wave band of the early-80s that had some success in the UK, mostly due to the unique look and voice of lead singer Toyah Wilcox. Toyah broke up in the mid-80s and Toyah tried to go solo as Toyah Wilcox, releasing a mediocre pop album that was widely ignored by everyone. Ever since then she’s toured under the name Toyah. So, that’s a little confusing and a lesson to everyone not to name a band after your lead singer, because unless you are the lead singer it’ll probably end up screwing you over later.

Toyah’s known for readers of this blog because of her involvement in Urgh! To people who aren’t unhealthily obsessed with 80s new-wave, Toyah Wilcox is a b-level celebrity who has recently sunk to the level of reality star ‘celebrity’ in the UK – appearing on shows like “I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here” and “I’m Famous And Frightened!” Considering her penchant for reality TV and her amazingly history of tragically awesome hair and makeup choices, she should seriously consider doing a team-up with Flava Flav.

These two songs were taken of of the IEYA single. IEYA is available on quite a few Toyah greatest hits packages, but ‘The Helium Song’ is a bit harder to find. And after you listen to it you will hear why…it’s an ear-full.

People keep telling me I’m angry, and I usually tell them to fuck off. But they may have a point. Here are some selections from some of my older postings:

• September 18th:
• “…the record industry is run by batshit crazy jackasses.”
• August 31st:
• “Sting Is A Pussy”
• This entire post
• July 7th:
• “(Dashboard Confessional are) dickless emo fuckers.”

Meh. Whatever, being nice happy is totally overrated.

Originality is highly overrated too, so all the songs on tonight’s post are covers. Actually, I’m posting covers because these are some of the only songs I have left on my hard drive that I can turn into a quick post. I haven’t gotten around to recording all the vinyl I bought this week. They say necessity is the mother of all invention, but I think laziness is its father. It’s hard to tell though, because necessity was totally a slut.

Sonic Youth – Touch Me I’m Sick
This is off of a split single Sonic Youth did with Mudhoney – it’s never been put out on CD as far as I know. I was thinking it over and this record was probably one of the first LPs I bought as an adult – God, what does THAT say about me? I’ve always dug this song. It’s one of the only songs I can play on bass and sing at the same time – proving once again my amazing musical prowess.

System Of A Down – Metro
This cover is up there with Evergreen Terrace’s remake of ‘Mad World’ and In Flames’ take on ‘Land Of Confusion’ as one of the best hardcore covers of a non-hardcore song. Berlin (my fav 80s synth band) originally did it, and this cover is off of the Dracula 2000 soundtrack. That, my friends, was a shitty movie.

The Vines – Ms. Jackson
Man, what the fuck happened to these guys? I remember checking them out live right before their first album came out. It was at a dive in Detroit that held about 50 people. They were utterly amazing and tore the shit out of that place. Less than two years later I caught them again and they were the worst band I have ever seen live (and I’ve seen Hootie & The Blowfish, so that means something). Even worse, their past two albums have been awful and forgettable (in that order.) What a shame – these dudes had some serious talent. This is a cover of the Outkast classic that they’ve routinely performed live ever since they first formed – this is the only studio version of the cut I could ever find though, it’s off some lousy compilation celebrating Rolling Stone’s anniversary.

I pride myself on posting a wide variety of music, but I think this is the weirdest selection of shit I ever put up.

Wolfmother – The Earth’s Rotation Around the Sun
I saw these guys live a few days ago and sweet holy Jeebus do they bring the rock. A lot of people describe them as an updated Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath, but with this b-side they’re are obviously trying to channel the spirit of Saucerfull Of Secrets era Pink Floyd.

Run DMC
It’s Tricky (Club Mix)
It’s Tricky (K-Rec Remix)
As many of you may know, The Knack is suing Run-DMC for copyright infringement because Run-DMC illegally sampled ‘My Sharona’ on this song. As my friend Tony put it “Color me 20 years late.” Here are two good mixes of ‘It’s Tricky.’ The first is off of a 12-inch single and the other is off of the soundtrack to SSX Tricky. Want to know what you think of The Knack’s decision to sue Run-DMC? Here’s their Myspace page!

Sparks – Marry Me
Sparks is totally the best European band from America ever! Yeah, I know that makes no damn sense but that’s the only way I can describe their sound. Lost In The 80s seems to share my obsession with Sparks, so if you want more Sparkage check them out. This was a bonus track to the European re-issue of Propaganda.

Pet Shop Boys – Rent (Extended Mix)
This is easily one of the most beautiful songs of the 80s – and simultaneously one of the most depressing. I don’t know if this track was a hit when it first came out, but it’s a song you never hear on the radio during “80s flashback weekend” the only Pet Shop Boys track they ever dig up is ‘West End Girls’ – which I hated when I first heard it and I can’t fucking stand it now. Anyways, this extended version of ‘Rent’ clocks in at around eight minutes, so the sorrow lasts even longer!

Music From Mathematics
Every now and then I find an album so odd and so amazingly bizarre that makes me happy I still own a record player. Dick Hyman’s Moog was one, the Urgh! soundtrack was definitely one, and so is Music From Mathematics. This incredible recording is an amazing piece of musical (and technological) history.

This album came out in 1962, and if it wasn’t the first ‘electronic’ album ever to be released, it was damn near close. Made by two electric engineers that worked in Bell Labs computing department, they created it under the idea that anything, including musical notes and song structure, can “be described mathematically by a sequence of numbers.” They did this by figuring out which numbers specified the sounds they wanted to make, punched thousands of punch cards with this information and fed them into and fed them to the computer. They then had to made a second set of a few thousand punch cards to tell the computer to register these sounds on tape. Think about how long that took. Clearly computer geeks of the 1960s had far greater patience than the computer geeks of today.

One of the most interesting things about the record is that it features one of the first examples of speech synthesis. The end of the third track ‘Bicycle Built For Two’ features the computer ‘singing’ a verse of the song. Strangely enough, Arthur C. Clarke happened to be in the lab the day this happened, and he was so moved/disturbed by it that he incorporated it into the book and film versions of 2001.

Above is a zip file containing the entire album. To be perfectly honest the music isn’t that great, I doubt it was considered great music when it first came out, but I guarantee you’ve never heard anything like it. Before this album came out the technology to do this didn’t exist, and shortly after it came out better technology showed up. It is truly a product of its time and its time alone.

Listen to it and think about that time. Imagine hearing this in 1962. Think about what it must have been like to sit in a sterile lab surrounded by giant, emotionless computers and having one of them sing to you.

Run – Praise My DJs (Washington Remix)
You know how when you’re a kid and you scribble some lines down on a piece of paper and you show your mom and she’s like “Wow honey that’s really…interesting?” Well, I’m a huge fan of Run from Run-DMC and this dance track by him and his wife Justine is really…interesting. I picked this up off of a two LP set, that featured six remixes of the song – this is the only one that was close to being good.

Sugababes – Round Round (Soulwax Remix)
Now, this is a great dance song. For some strange reason the album that featured the original mix of ‘Round Round’ never came out in America – further proof that the record industry is run bybatshit crazy jackasses. These girls have amazing voices (especially for teen-pop stars) and Soulwax , as always, makes an even better song better by remixing it in their signature style. Prepare for this baby to bore its way into your ear for a least a few days.

Faye Wong – Cold War (Silent All These Years Cover)
I love me some old-school Tori Amos and I love me Chinese people – so I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone. I asked my roommate (who is from Beijing) to track down this song for me and he gave me a look he hasn’t given me since I asked him if they have fortune cookies in China. If anyone out there can translate Cantonese I would really appreciate it if they took a go at this song.

Billy Idol
Heroin (Overlord Mix)
Heroin (Nosebleed Mix)
I think I am the one person in the known universe that actually kind of likes this song. When people bring up the worst career moves of all-time, they usually bring up this cover of The Velvet Underground classic and the album it came off of (1993’s Cyberpunk). I can’t speak for the album, I’ve never managed to find it anywhere – but this cover isn’t nearly as bad as people make it out to be. I think people were so offended by the idea of anyone (let alone Billy Idol) covering any song by Lou Reed that they just bashed it on principle alone. These are two remixes off of some strange white vinyl I picked up a couple of days ago. I really dig on these, but I’m a sucker for any dance song that throws in those cool trash guitars.

Pete Townshend – We Won’t Get Fooled Again (Live)
This is the B-side to ‘Face The Face’ a relatively boring Pete Townshend solo track. What’s really cool is that this live version features David Gilmour on guitars, making this his second guest appearance at The Lost Turntable in one week.

Flock Of Seagulls – I Ran (Live)
The band with the best hair of all time – that’s all I gotta say.

The Sugarcubes – Motorcrash (Live)
I wonder what happened to that annoying guy from The Sugarcubes? It’s probably hard to find work when your previous job involved you ruining perfectly good Bjork songs. This is off the “Motorcrash” single.

Velvet Revolver – Bodies (Live)
This is from their first ever concert from what I can gather, and was commercially released as the B-side to ‘Slither’ their breakout hit off their first album. It’s a cover of the classic Sex Pistols tune, and Scott Weiland’s faux-British accent is really impressive.

Flaming Lips – Seven Nation Army (Harry Potter And George Bush’s Severed Head Army Mix)
I had a nice “all-live” theme going on here – leave it to The Flaming Lips to fuck it all up. I wanted to post the cover of this song that Audioslave did live during their first tour, but I couldn’t track down my bootleg of that. This is weird (duh, its The Flaming Lips) but its a good substitute. This appeared on their mix CD “Late Night Tales.”

Someone pointed out to me that the MP3 of ‘The Puppet’ from The Urgh! Soundtrack was gone. It’s back now. I don’t know what happened, maybe it hopped away. I’ll have a real update later tonight/early Friday.

In celebration of Lucas finally getting off of his bearded ass and releasing the original version of the Star Wars Trilogy on DVD, I present these classic Star Wars-inspired songs. If you want to hear more crazy Star Wars music, buy anything by Meco. All of these have some tiny skips in them – but I’m not picking these because of their audio quality, I’m picking them because they are a lot of fun.

(Also, I’m not claiming that I created that image on the right, but I do know it’s the greatest fucking picture ever put on the internet. If you can’t see it, click on it for a better view.)

The Story Of Star Wars
Return Of The Jedi – Side 1
Return Of The Jedi – Side 2
This album features dialogue and music from Return Of The Jedi and adds narration to it, telling the entire story of the movie in about 40 minutes or so. They’re kind of silly but I loved these kinds of records when I was a kid. I had a few Star Wars ones and I’m pretty sure I had the Tron one too. What’s really cool about them is that they usually came with a nifty book that had pictures and stills from the movie in them, which is really cool when you’re five and can’t read all the words next to them.

The Electric Moog Orchestra
Star Wars Main Title
Imperial Attack
Moog is nerdy. Star Wars is nerdy. Collecting LPs is nerdy, so combined this is probably the nerdiest thing I own. Actually, it’s one of the best Moog records I own (which, sadly, really is saying something) and its not just because the source material is outstanding – it’s actually a really fun album. It’s one of the few Moog records I don’t just listen to because of the novelty factor.

Patrick Gleeson
Star Wars Theme
Catina Music
To see how Star Wars music can be done WRONG with electronic instruments, check out these tracks. Actually that’s kind of mean, while the Star Wars Theme is pretty awful, the Catina Music still manages to retain its charm even in this version. Patrick Gleeson was a pretty good synth musician, and even worked with Herbie Hancock once. Read about him (and see some of his amazingly bad album covers) here.

Duran Duran – Save A Prayer
It’s weird how I managed to stumble upon all three Secret Policeman’s Ball records in the course of a couple of weeks. These amazing concerts (which were charity events for Amnesty International) featured some amazing performances from Eric Clapton, Sting, Bob Geldof and Pete Townshend. The third one was probably the most pop-friendly of the bunch, featuring tracks by Erasure, Nik Kershaw and other 80s pop stars. 80s pop stars don’t get much bigger than Duran Duran of course and this slow acoustic version of one of their best songs is probably the highlight of the third album.

Kate Bush (With David Gilmour) – Running Up That Hill
Scratch that, this is the highlight of the third Policeman’s Ball album. Kate Bush has one of the most beautiful voices ever to grace this tiny insignificant planet. She’s like some short of little British siren. I’ve heard her voice has a four-octave range and I believe it. As if a live recording of one of her best songs isn’t great enough, David Gilmour (of Pink Floyd) plays guitar on it. I read that she joined him on stage for his last tour and together they performed Comfortably Numb. If anyone out there knows where a recording of that is available let me know and I’ll repay you…with something. Maybe I’ll beat someone up for you or something (I’ve always wanted to break into the hired goon business after all.)

There’s a small skip in the beginning of this one, I did my best to get it out but there’s still a few seconds missing, it’s before Kate starts singing though and its barely noticeable.

Herbie Hancock – Megamix
I tend to shy away from ‘Megamixes’ because in their attempt to capture the great moments from 4 or 5 songs they usually just end up creating one really bad song (the same goes for medleys too). This is the exception to the rule. Also, since most of it consists of ‘Rockit’ (the best electronic song of the 80s) its all good.

David Kubinec – Another Long Ranger
Yet another track from that insane Propaganda compilation album. I have no idea who David Kubinec is and I don’t think any of his albums are available on CD. If his other songs were of this quality then that’s a big bummer.

Garyn Numan – Radio Heart
This is a real oddity. The song was only available on a single, which was credited to ‘Radio Heart featuring Gary Numan.’ From what I all intensive purposes this is a Gary Numan track, and the name trickery might have been an attempt to counter Numan’s decreasing popularity at the time. The song is alright, but is not one of Numan’s best.

Granati Brothers – Go Crazy (Live)
Another live track from the Propaganda (previously mentioned here) compilation album. I never heard of these guys before and I’m having a hard time finding anything else by them other than an album from 2002 (which sounds pretty damn good.) Anyone got any info on these guys?

Bob Geldof & Johnny Fingers – I Don’t Like Mondays (Live)
This is from The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball, the second Policeman’s Ball concert that was set up to help Amnesty International in the early 80s. While this one was sadly Pete Townshend-less, it’s still pretty good and anything with ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ is okay in my book. I have no idea who Johnny Fingers is, however.

Sting – Roxanne (Live)
Okay, I usually fucking hate this song, but this version (also from The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball) is actually pretty good. It’s just Sting and his guitar stripping the song to its bare bones. There’s a skip in here about 45 seconds in, but I could not get it out no matter how hard I tried, it’s only one line.

Meco – Ewok Celebration
This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard and I absolutely love it. I’ve talked about Meco before and considering how many Meco albums I’ve managed to collect through the years this probably won’t be the last time either. His big hit was a disco take on the Star Wars theme and he continues to milk that to this day. What really makes this funkyfied version of the Ewok Celebration stand out is the absolutely batshit INSANE Ewok rap that closes it out. This album also has a surprisingly faithful version of ‘The Theme to Simon & Simon’ on it. Please don’t ask me why, I have no fucking clue. I do know, thanks to this AMAZING Meco fansite, that Kenny G contributed to this album, making it the best thing Kenny G has ever done by default.