Sweet peas and Electricity

A day of baking, of rain, and of 80s electronica!

I made g-f apple muffins, apple and beetroot soup, and my version of pastry-free homity pie, with mushrooms. The rain tipped down in a last-weekday-of-the-holidays manner.

To lighten the mood, I played my new (!) Ministry of Sound 3-CD set of electronic anthems of the 80s. £3 is what I paid for it. Was it worth it? To begin with, I loved the old favourites: Vienna, Cars, Enola Gay, Tainted Love, Fashion, Planet Earth. I could see all the posed videos and self-conscious coiffures in my mind's eye. By track 10 I was wondering how much more there was to come, and by 14 I had decided that this would be a good form of torture, if accompanied by a cell (not a Soft one) and a video player, with no control over the settings.

I also remembered a really quite good little programme I'd seen on BBC4 about electronica, years ago. Wondered if they'd ever show it again.

To backtrack a little: this was my era, the early 80s for dancing at parties at uni and having spiky hair and jumble-sale clothing. If I'd been a man, I'd have worn a Very Long Coat. I have to say that I embrace most genres when it comes to music (though jazz isn't my favourite) and I don't listen to one type, but this was a trip down the lanes to my Edinburgh years.

Link to OMD (Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark) a pretentious band that is the only type of electronic music that I can now listen to without finding it same-y and pop-y.

I walked to town and snapped these sweet peas in our street; came back for more cooking and music (managed 47 electric tracks in all, because my iPod had been full and not able to take all 60!). We ate the Homity pie very late and watched documentaries about Blondie, and viewed her 2014 performance at Glastonbury. When that ended on BBC4, up came an continuity announcement:

the next programme will be about the electronic music boom of the early 1980s

Wow! the very programme I'd been thinking about only a few hours earlier. As a result, I was very late to bed, even later than usual, but I fell asleep instantly, and had no electric dreams.