The Culture Club’s 88 Miles Per Hour Stolen Plutonium Megamix

The Triple J Radiophonic Workshop presents a time-travelling adventure in sound, featuring music from TZU, Peaches, Prince, Kanye West, Cut Copy, Kraftwerk, The Human League, Daft Punk, Justice, Giorgio Moroder, Salt and Pepa, The Presets, Run DMC, Royksopp, Ladyhawke, La Roux, LL Cool J, Steinski, Yello, Hall and Oates, The Art of Noise, Calvin Harris, Kurtis Blow and many, many more. Imagine Girl Talk with a copy of Marshall McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride in one hand and a key to the Triple J vinyl library in the other. Okay, now stop imagining, hit ‘play’, and find out why Zan Rowe is calling this “cultural theory you can dance to”.

Download from Triple J (41mb).

Complete Track Listing

Part 1

TZU – Computer Love

Kanye West – Stronger

ELO – Twilight (Intro)

Art of Noise – Beat Box

Gil Scott-Heron – Re-Ron

MC Miker G and DJ Sven – Holiday Rap

LL Cool J – Radio

Shango – Zulu Groove

MARRS – Pump Up The Volume

Calvin Harris feat. Dizzee Rascal – Dance Wiv Me

Kraftwerk – Musique Non-Stop

Passion Pit – The Reeling

Daft Punk – Robot Rock (Rockapella)

DST – Mean Machine

Grandmaster Flash – Beat St

Art of Noise – Close to the Edit

The Juan McLean – The Future Will Come

ELO – Ticket to the Moon

Hall and Oates – I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)

Steinski and the Mass Media – We’ll be Right Back

Public Image Limited – The Order of Death

Mark Stewart and the Mafia – Anger is Holy

NWA – Quiet on the Set

Queen – Radio Gaga (Instrumental)

John Cage – Radio Music

Public Enemy – Terminator X To The Edge of Panic

Kurtis Blow – The Breaks

Beastie Boys – Shake Your Rump

Beastie Boys – It’s the New Style

West St Mob – Let’s Dance

Justice – DANCE

David Bowie – Let’s Dance

Part 2

Eric B and Rakim – I Know You Got Soul

Kim Carnes – Bette Davis Eyes

Mylo – In My Arms

MC Miker G and DJ Sven – Holiday Rap

Midnight Juggernauts – Into the Galaxy

INXS – What You Need

Roxanne Shante – Go On Girl

Salt and Pepa – Spinderella’s Not a Fella

Neneh Cherry – Buffalo Stance

Was not Was – Walk the Dinosaur

Aston Shuffle – Do You Want More

Shango – Zulu Groove

Young MC – Pick up the Pace

Daft Punk – Harder Better Faster Stronger

Art of Noise – Close to the Edit

Big Daddy Kane – Raw

West St Mob – I Can’t Stop

Flying Lizards – Sex Machine

Chromeo – Needy Girl

Madonna – Hung Up

Hot Streak – Bodywork

Prince – Housequake

Prince – Gonna be a Beautiful Night

Prince – Controversy

Tangerine Dream – Love on a Real Train

New Order – The Perfect Kiss

Peaches – Lovertits

Adam Ant – Ant Rap

Quando Quango – Atom Rock

Madonna – Holiday

Run DMC – It’s Like That

Coldplay – Clocks (Royksopp Remix)

Van Halen – 1984

Soul Sonic Force – Planet Rock

Cut Copy – Future

New Order – Confusion

Royksopp – The Girl and the Robot

Tears for Fears – Head over Heels

Huey Lewis and the News – The Poer of Love

The Pet Shop Boys – Opportunites

Eurythmics – Sweet Dreams

Part 3

Flying Lizards – Money

Eurythmics – Sweet Dreams

Ladyhawke – Professional Suicide

Dire Straits – Money for Nothing

Salt and Pepa – Push It

The Human League – The Things That Dreams Are Made Of

Midnight Juggernauts – Tombstone

Flying Lizards – Sex Machine

Mylo – Destroy Rock and Roll

Presets – Kicking and Screaming

Kraftwerk – The Telephone Call

Adam Ant – Ant Rap

Tiga – Far From Home (DFA Remix)

Franz Ferdinand – Do You Wanna?

The Flying Lizards – Money (b)

La Roux – Bulletproof

Depeche Mode – Get the Balance Right

Simian Mobile Disco – Audacity of Huge

Giorgio Moroder – Night Drive

Yello – Bostich

William S. Burroughs – The President

Justice – Tttthhheee PPPaaarrrttyyy

PIL – This is Not a Love Song

Calvin Harris – Acceptable in the 80s

Prince – Gonna be a beautiful night

Jonzun Crew – Pac Jam

Mstrkrft – Work on You

Crystal Castles – Air War

Frankie Goes to Hollywood – 2 Tribes

Bonzo Goes to Washington – 5 Minutes

Infusion – 2 Player Game

Kraftwerk – Home Computer

Dukes of Windsor – It’s a War

Hot Streak – Bodywork

Presets – My People

Def Leppard – Armageddon It

Vangelis – Blade Runner

The Juan Mclean – The Future Will Come

Kanye West – Stronger

Gil Scott-Heron – Re Ron

Art of Noise – Beat Box

Hall and Oates – I Can’t Go For That

Thanks to our friends at Triple J’s ‘The Culture Club’ for permission to republish material from the ‘Acceptable in the 80s’ series, presented by ‘The 80s Are Back’ guest curator Craig Schuftan.

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‘Acceptable in the 80s’ Part 6: Taking elements from the past which you enjoy

“That’s what music is about”, said Calvin Harris in 2008, “you’re taking elements from the past which you enjoy, and putting them in a modern perspective for the youth of today”. Is music really that easy? The answer depends a great deal on which century you happen to find yourself in.

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Thanks to our friends at Triple J’s ‘The Culture Club’ for permission to republish material from the ‘Acceptable in the 80s’ series, presented by ‘The 80s Are Back’ guest curator Craig Schuftan.

‘Acceptable in the 80s’ Part 5: A time to think about the past

“It’s not a retro record” said TZU of 2008’s Computer Love. “It’s not even an 80s record. It’s just that we all grew up in the 80s”. Find out what the difference is in the Culture Club’s pocket history of nostalgia in art – from Marcel Proust to Mylo (via Morrissey).

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Thanks to our friends at Triple J’s ‘The Culture Club’ for permission to republish material from the ‘Acceptable in the 80s’ series, presented by ‘The 80s Are Back’ guest curator Craig Schuftan.

‘Acceptable in the 80s’ Part 4: Work is never over

Life is tough. Listening to music can make us feel better about it, but if you think it’s going to bring about any real improvement in the conditions of everyday life, you’re kidding yourself. Pop music is part of the problem. It’s like this…

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Thanks to our friends at Triple J’s ‘The Culture Club’ for permission to republish material from the ‘Acceptable in the 80s’ series, presented by ‘The 80s Are Back’ guest curator Craig Schuftan.

‘Acceptable in the 80s’ Part 3: Come as you aren’t

The 90s was a decade full of bands who sounded great, but looked terrible. It was either plaid shirts and jeans, or alien futuristic bondage-wear – with not a lot in between. But sometime between 2002 and 2005, bands started looking… better.

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Thanks to our friends at Triple J’s ‘The Culture Club’ for permission to republish material from the ‘Acceptable in the 80s’ series, presented by ‘The 80s Are Back’ guest curator Craig Schuftan.

‘Acceptable in the 80s’ Part 1: Everybody Talk About Pop Music

Musing on the future of music in 1986, former Van Halen singer and 80s party dude David Lee Roth was certain of nothing, except that the art of tomorrow would be nothing like the art of today. “It won’t be like anything we’re familiar with, I know that”. So, why, now that we live in the future, does everything look and sound a bit like it’s from 1986? Has the fabric of time been altered somehow? Have we run out of new ideas? Or does our new-found fondness for synth-pop and shoulder pads have some deeper significance?

Craig Schuftan dons a pair of stupid 80s sunglasses, soups up his sports car with one of those flux capacitor things, and risks further damage to the space-time continuum by traveling back to the original point of the current crisis – the 1980s. There, he finds himself in a strange world – a world where people listen to futuristic robot-pop while spending money they don’t have on ridiculous clothes so as to take their minds off the impending apocalypse. Yes, all very strange – and yet at the same time, eerily familiar…

Everybody talk about pop music

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It used to be that when you asked your favourite artists to name their favourite artists, it was all Nick Drake, Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen. Now, you’re just as likely to hear names like Madonna, Prince, Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, Hall and Oates, and Giorgio Moroder. It seems that these days, more and more musicians are coming out of the closet, and admitting that they love… pop music.

Thanks to our friends at Triple J’s ‘The Culture Club’ for permission to republish material from the ‘Acceptable in the 80s’ series, presented by ‘The 80s Are Back’ guest curator Craig Schuftan.

‘Acceptable in the 80s’ Part 2: Machines Can Do The Work

Playing music is hard work. It’s just as hard as doing the dishes or working in a call center or welding car parts together, or any of those other boring, repetitive tasks we’ve long since outsourced to machines. So the invention of robot rock in the 80s shouldn’t have come as a surprise – but that doesn’t mean it didn’t annoy people.

Thanks to our friends at Triple J’s ‘The Culture Club’ for permission to republish material from the ‘Acceptable in the 80s’ series, presented by ‘The 80s Are Back’ guest curator Craig Schuftan.

TZU’s 80s mix-tape

TZU are an Aussie hip hop group with Joelistics, Count Bounce, Psao Bionics and Yerock. Apparently they met Michael J Fox and asked for a ride back through the space time continuum to the 80s so they could reshape the future. They told him, “In our present day, the fashionably hip illuminati are obsessed with this particular decade and yet they focus on the wrong elements”. So what do you think, did they manage to set things right?

Download the mix featuring:

1. Slice of Heaven – Dave Dobbin & Herbs
2. Me, Myself & I – De La Soul
3. Goonies Are Good Enough – Cindy Lauper
4. Sign ‘O’ The Times – Prince
5. Super Freak – Rick James
6. Rappers Delight – Sugar Hill Gang
7. Run DMC – My Adidas
8. Public Enemy No. 1 – Public Enemy
9. Beds Are Burning – Midnight Oil
10. London Calling – The Clash
11. Under The Milky Way – The Church
12. Love Is A Battlefield – Pat Benatar
13. Rocker – Herbie Hancock
14. Tainted Love – Soft Cell
15. Cars – Gary Numan
16. I’m Only Shooting Love -Time Bandits
17. I Can’t Go For That – Hall & Oates
18. Blue Monday – New Order
19. Don’t Bring Me Down – Electric Light Orchestra
20. Take On Me – A-Ha

*Please note: The track, ‘Me, Myself & I’ by De La Soul, is not available for purchase on i-Tunes, so could not be included in the i-Mix. Shame, I know!).

Sarah Blasko’s 80s mix tape

Dear Curator,

In 1980 I turned four. The first song I remember appreciating in my entire life was ‘Bright Eyes’ by Art Garfunkel. It was a song from the animated film ‘Watership Down’ and I don’t know, somehow it spoke to me. It was as if woken from a dream! So, I have included ‘Bright Eyes’ here in my 80s mixtape, ‘The 80s As I Remember It’ even though it was released in 1979 because of its significance. After all, it took me a good year to hear it as a child living in Australia who didn’t exactly have their finger on the musical pulse.

This is a compilation of the songs of the 80s that stand out most in my memory. I remember really specific times listening to each and every song, specific fashion choices, pool parties and sleepovers, But, more significantly I remember Sunday night sessions transfixed by the radio, waiting to hear a song I had been waiting for all week and ready to hit the record button on my tape deck as the weekly Top 40 rolled on. Here, some of my mixtape gold could be found. Ends of songs cut off, tape hiss and that wonderful warping sound that could only happen when the record button was hastily and too lightly pressed. Ah, the memories!

So, I send you this letter along with this mix-tape also as a type of disclaimer as I find it necessary to reiterate that in the 1980s I was a mere child. I’m sure now that there were some cool musical things happening, yet I was not aware of them at the time! Yet, formative years they were, and so I cannot detach these musical influences from my adult life any longer. I cannot pretend! So here you have it: Wham, Cyndi Lauper, The Eurythmics, Boy George & the far uncooler periods of Paul Mc Cartney, David Bowie, The Cure & The Beach Boys were my first musical influences.

And so, at the ripe old age of 33, I finally admit to one and all that I wrote my first poem at the age of 10, inspired by Boy George’s ‘Karma Chameleon’ and I won the dancing competition at my Year 6 farewell to ‘Kokomo’ by the Beach Boys. There, I’m out!

Yours Sincerely,

Sarah Blasko.

Download the mix-tape featuring:

1. Bright Eyes – Art Garfunkel
2. Say Say Say – Michael Jackson & Paul Mc Cartney
3. Karma Chameleon – Boy George
4. Beat It – Michael Jackson
5. Sara – Jefferson Starship
6. Wake Me Up Before You Go – Wham
7. Physical – Olivia Newton John
8. Like A Virgin – Madonna
9. Time After Time – Cyndi Lauper
10. Take On Me – A Ha
11. When Doves Cry – Prince
12. China Girl – David Bowie
13. Love Cats – Cure
14. Love Is A Battlefield – Pat Benatar
15. Hello – Lionel Ritchie
16. Who’s That Girl? – Eurythmics
17. Smooth Operator – Sade
18. Flashdance – Irene Cara
19. When Will I Be Famous – Bros
20. Kokomo – Beach Boys

Back to the Future – Craig Schuftan on the neo-80s revival

‘The 80s revival has almost exhausted itself’ warned the editors of an Australian fashion magazine in 2004, ‘get ready for the 90s revival’. We know now that this advice was a little premature. The 80s revival has turned out to be very much like an unstoppable robot assassin in an 80s sci-fi blockbuster – every time you think it’s dead, it comes back, looking weirder and scarier.

Last year, Australian hip hop crew TZU released an 80s electro-styled single called ‘Computer Love’. over a loping breakbeat and vocoderised chants, MC Joelistics made his way through neon game-grids ‘like a modern day blade runner’. in the video, Joelistics was unexpectedly ‘scanned’ into the hard drive of a 1980s portable computer. We saw him having lo-res adventures on spaceships, visiting alien planets, and trading rhymes with ET.

But while they were happy to enthuse over Michael J Fox’s hoverboard in interviews, the members of TZU were also at pains to point out that they were no nostalgia act. ‘It’s not a retro record’ Joelistics told Triple J. ‘It’s not even an 80s record, it’s just we all grew up in the 80s’. It might seem like a fine distinction, but it’s one worth making. Having grown up with Spielberg movies, Mattell toys and Commodore 64 computers, the members of TZU are as little able to avoid their cultural heritage as Dali was the Catalan coastline or Kurt Cobain the 70s soft-rock he grew up hearing on the radio. But their music is much more than the sum of its influences. listen again to ‘Computer Love’, try to pick one artist or track from the 80s it resembles, and you’ll soon find that you can’t. It seems to refer to something, but the original is impossible to locate.

This is the case with a great deal of music in the charts and on the radio today. Like their labelmates Cut Copy and The Midnight Juggernauts, The Presets are often described as an 80s-influenced group. But try to imagine them playing at a blue-light cisco in 1985. No doubt, some moments on their 2008 album Apocalypso might go down well. But others – the heavy 90s rave sounds, the unsettling mix of pub-rock dynamics with distorted synth-pop textures – would clear the dancefloor in a flash. We can imagine the motionless crowd staring open-mouthed at Julian Hamilton as he mumbles, apologetically – like Marty McFly in Back To The Future – ‘I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet…’

In Back To The Future Part II, Marty and Doc Brown travel from 1985 to the 21st century. Marty walks into a themed restaurant – the café 80s. ‘one of those nostalgia places’ explains the Doc, ‘but not done very well’. we see what he means – everything in the Café 80s looks familiar, but none of it looks quite right. Marty is terrified. He’s suffering the vertigo of having aged 30 years in a day – of finding that the stuff of his childhood is now old enough to be considered retro-chic. But far worse is the feeling he gets, looking at this mismatched assortment of 80s
paraphernalia – that his memories have been tampered with.

For those who lived through the decade as adults, the 80s revival inspires exactly this sense of temporal panic. They watch 21-year olds dancing to synth pop in high-waisted jeans, feeling that they have been teleported back to a parallel 1985 which – despite some familiar reference points – is nothing like their memories. That’s because the 80s revival is not really a revival at all. It’s a giant junk-sculpture made from the fragments of a lost civilisation, undertaken by artists and musicians who are old enough to have had the music and films of the 80s form part of their upbringing, but young enough to treat this heritage with a healthy combination of disrespect and curiosity.

But why should it be necessary to look to the past at all? Some critics believe that the existence of the neo-80s – and of pop revivals in general – proves there are no new ideas in rock and roll today. They forget that some of the most important and moving works of art in history have come to us from artists who wanted to turn back the clock. The Gothic revival was retro. The Pre-Raphaelite movement was retro. Tolkein, Star Wars and Phil Spector were all retro. Even punk was retro. It began with Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee and Tommy, and their mission to destroy the bombast and boredom of the 70s by drawing on the power of an earlier, simpler era of rock and roll.

in many cases, the neo-80s begins from exactly this premise. Australian synth-rockers The Galvatrons named themselves after a character in Transformers: The Movie – which came out in 1987, when singer Johnny Galvatron was four years old. When he saw it again a few years ago, Johnny realised that this film contained an antidote to the crippling illness which threatened the life of rock and roll in 2007. He saw that everything 21st century pop lacked – ambition, imagination, synth-pads and shoulder pads – could be found in the music and movies of the 80s.

UK singer Elly Jackson – who blends Vince Clarke-style electro-pop with spooky Siouxsie vocals on her group La Roux’s self- titled debut – feels the same way. ‘There’s too much normality at the moment’, she said, speaking of the present state of pop. That’s why she looks beyond the ordinary stars of today, to the extraordinary stars of the 80s – Annie Lennox, Grace Jones, Prince, Bowie. Here, the past is a stick to beat the present with – to correct its excesses and make it admit to its failings.

For La Roux, as for Cut Copy, The Killers, Daft Punk, The Midnight Juggernauts, Ladyhawke and many more of the artists featured in the Powerhouse Museum’s The 80s are back exhibition, history is exactly what it has been for artists through the centuries. it’s a yardstick by which we can measure our own achievements, and a reminder of what we may have left behind in our hurry to get to the next big thing. artists today understand – as Doc and Marty did back in the real 1985 – that sometimes you have to go back to the past in order to save the future.

Craig Schuftan
Originally published in Powerline, Summer 2009