Rattle and hum

Somehow, someday
We need just one victory
And we’re on our way
We’ve been praying for it all day
And we’re fighting for it all night
Give us just one victory
It will be all right

When I was growing up, we didn’t have cable TV, just broadcast. When I got to university, I heard my friends talking about the early years of MTV, which I missed totally. I knew “Video Killed the Radio Star” not as the first video broadcast by MTV, but as a song by Asia’s keyboard player.

Anyway, for reasons that I don’t really remember - probably lack of choice - I found myself renting a videotape (renting! VCRs! I am a fossil!) called “An Evening with Utopia,” Utopia of course being the band project, of Todd Rundgren. A wizard. A true star. The producer of XTC’s Skylarking, which is one of my favorite albums of all time, and frankly, that’s probably why I rented the videotape. That and lack of selection.

Anyway^2, I quite liked the tape, even though the harmonies were almost always a little bit off and the lyrics corny (“There’s a hammer in my heart/Pounding out your name”), I watched it over and over. The late fees were probably enough to buy the damn thing, but it was worth it. (Well, not so worth it that I went out and bought any Utopia albums, because they were clearly kind of corny.) The songs all sounded vaguely familiar, even though they weren’t (although maybe they were - who knows what I heard on AM radio growing up), and even if it didn’t sound so easy that I ran out and started a band, it sounded pretty easy.

Buried somewhere in the second half of the show was one of those songs that sounded particularly familliar. This was it. But my favorite was this one, which was even older, I found out a decade later. (And I just saw the Eno-influence video tonight, that had nothing to do with it, I swear.)