'Cause not everything is uniform

[sovay]

Last night as an ironic side effect of falling through a bunch of Welsh-language folk-rock, I discovered the Pipettes, whose retro-bubblegum I had completely missed at the time it was going through its polka-dotted shape-pulling moment in the disco lights. It turns out that I have about the same aural tolerance for the retro style as the historical stuff, which means that I can enjoy the equivalent of an LP before I start wanting something with a pencil stuck through its speaker cone, but I am deeply charmed by the early single from their short-lived original lineup, "I Like a Boy in Uniform (School Uniform)" (2005), which plays at first like the teen-pop version of Anakreon fr. 358 before pivoting into a jubilant discovery of its narrator's bisexuality: And now I know that all it is / Is plenty more that I can kiss / And when I think about the bliss / Of looking at the girls, looking at the girls, looking at the girls . . . Her cheerfully, climactically all-encompassing attraction to her classmates reminded me of the opener of Dorothy's "I Confess" (1980): I like boys in Beatle boots / And tall slim girls in well-cut suits, which is how I discovered that since the last time I checked, there had been a remastered resurrection of Rema-Rema, the abrasively art-rock band for which Dorothy Max Prior drummed before lending her vocals to some unrecognizably breathy, boppy pop. So I listened to their ear-snarling feedback and was satisfied. It is not lost on me that since recovering the archive of Bertie's music, I am just listening a lot more.

Comments

[sovay]

Ha! That was bouncy and fun. ... I feel like I've seen the woman on the right. I wonder if I've seen a different Pipettes video at some point. (But who would have shown it to me except you? And you've only just discovered them. Hmmmm.)

They were quite popular in the mid-2000's! You may well have picked them up from someone else! I am just arriving late to the retro-party.

(Their second and most prolific lineup included Gwenno, is how I got here. I knew her from a single from her debut album in 2015 and the soundtrack of Enys Men (2022), but had never listened extensively to her catalogue. I am going to need a CD of Le Kov (2018), which is the all-Cornish one.)

I'm recalling something with a wedding and a murder? I'm probably confabulating.

I'd love to know what the wedding and murder combo was!