Thursday 6 August 2009

The Power Station - Harvest for the World


My brother Alphonse and I grew up on a farm in the arse of the world. Alphonse is twelve years my senior, and should be the head of all Razors siblings (my sister, Ethel, is in the middle), but he suffers from drastic assertion problems and the buck was passed to yours truly upon manhood. When I was contemplating school, Alphonse was a teen looking for kicks (albeit tentatively), as the coloured vinyl discs of each individual member of Bananarama on his bedroom wall would attest. Personally, I loved Siobhan, even more so when she became a goth. Although Alphonse and I never explicitly discussed the matter - I was but a babe in arms after all - I think he favoured Keren. Nobody likes Sara.


Alphonse reinvented himself as the East Midlands answer to Nik Kershaw, and I believe it bought him pussy, but in the tribal world of 80s subculture he had to shed a few skins in order to distance himself from his former life as a teenybopping square. By default, I inherited a cache of Alphonse's old tapes, and became instantly aware of his proclivity for Duran Duran side projects. Arcadia interested me little, a lifeless and hopeless crystallisation of everything one expects from the likes of Nick Rhodes - a cadaver in lipgloss.


The Power Station was a whole different story. I once shared a lengthy conversation with a renowned bass player from a popular 90s krautrock group, and he confided in me that John Taylor's basslines are among the most complex and abstract in modern music, and try as hard as he might, he couldn't replicate them. Who was I to disagree?


More than this, I find Andy Taylor's sheer arrogance mesmerising. His disdainful mistreatment of this Isley Brothers standard - replacing the inoffensive acoustic guitar pattern with a wash of digital, brash, faux-blues riffing - is reminiscent of a hooliganism not witnessed since Stephen Stills fucked Neil Young's The Loner right where it needed it. Glorious revenge.
Harvest for the World by the Power Station at Spotify

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