Shot By Your Own Side

Excellent music blog, Spinster's Rock,' is currently posting the entire Magazine singles discography on their blog.

Come on: it's late 70s/early 80s post-punk; Howard Devoto had the best cameo in Michael Winterbottom's '24 Hour Party People'; and I currently can't get the Magazine album track, 'Suburban Rhonda', out of my head. I'm obliged to link to the posts.

Mmm, wonder what Simon Reynolds said about Magazine in 'Rip It Up And Start Again'?:

"On the brink of the Top 40, Magazine were invited to appear on Top of the Pops. At first Devoto refused. Asked again the following week, he buckled to pressure from Virgin and agreed. But he remained extremely uncomfortable about miming to the song ['Shot By Both Sides'] on television. 'It was very artificial. The whole thing seemed absurd . . . and scary.' At the last minute he decided to make a gesture that would indicate his disdain for the corny charade. 'I didn't want to jump around in an obedient, "here's your entertainment" way. I wanted to be bloody-minded, but in a fairly understated way.' He got the BBC make-up girl to do him up in whiteface, but instead of a striking glam alien, 'he looked like Marcel Marceau', recalls Paul Morley (who was glued to the TV because seeing a band like Magazine on Top of the Pops was 'so rare' in those days). 'And then Devoto decided, because his mind was racing so quick, that he was far ahead of the game and he'd just be still. Very, very still. And thid great song was playing, but Devoto stood stock-still. And the next week the record went down the charts - possibly the first time that's ever happened in the history of pop, that you get on Top of the Pops and the single goes down the next week. And from then on, everything shut down. Killed stone dead.'

*Nips over to YouTube to try and locate the car crash tv clip.*