Squeezing Out Sparks by Graham Parker and the Rumour (1979)
The Rumour didn’t last all that long, but by the time they called it quits in 1980, they were as tight a modern pop-rock band as you could find. Squeezing Out Sparks, the fourth of their five studio releases, was their masterpiece.
Fronted by Graham Parker, who could write hooky rock songs with very best of them, the Rumour also had Brinsley Schwarz on guitar, as well as the rhythm section of Andrew Bodnar (bass) and Steve Goulding (drums), who had provided the rhythm for Elvis Costello’s song “Watching the Detectives.”
SOS gallops out of the gates with a potent trio of modern pop – “Discovering Japan,” “Local Girls,” and “Nobody Hurts You.” Then Parker slows everything down with “You Can’t Be Too Strong,” a song that would become his most divisive, due to its sensitive subject matter.
I won’t get bogged down here, other than to say that it is a song about abortion that is subject to multiple interpretations, as befits a complicated subject. Then we return to jangly guitar hooks and proto-new wave keys.
The Rumour split up after one more album
The Raincoats by the Raincoats (1979)
If you were lucky enough to get Rough Trade’s original pressing of the Raincoats’ self-titled debut, the first thing you would have heard was Vicky Aspinall’s maniacal violin, playing what sounds like a hoedown as performed by the devil from that Charlie Daniels song.
It’s really the punk gem “No Side to Fall In,” and it actually turns out to be a maniacal girl group glee club song with Aspinall being joined by Palmolive’s drums and Gina Birch’s thumping bass.
However, if you buy the album today, you get the anthemic “Fairytale in the Supermarket,” which is sung to the teeth by vocalist Ana da Silva. The entire album plays with those layered call-and-response vocals, over simple offbeat rhythm lines and even more offbeat guitar and violin flourishes. It climaxes with da Silva’s deadpan delivery of the Kinks’ “Lola,” which bounces along between soaring and understated.
The Raincoats were one of several outstanding punkish female-fronted groups pouring out of England in the late ‘70s, including X-Ray Specs, the Slits, and Young Marble Giants. All were niche acts in their early days, and most broke up within a few years.
That sort of happened to the Raincoats, too, but they proved the most resilient, eventually reforming and playing well into the new century.