Professor Eddy

Pexels Enjoy this eighties part of Sunshine Radio ! Again I used some authentic jingles and air checks to recreate the feeling of the decade. In the beginning of the 1980s a whole bunch of new kids on the block came around with a fresh, mostly electronic sound. They ruled the air waves for quite some time, but by the end of the decade all kinds of new genres popped up and new wave suddenly wasn’t so new anymore. The musical landscape completely changed with house, hip hop, Britpop and grunge, to name but a few. Only one electro pop band survived in the 1990s and kept on having hits in the US, UK and Europe: The Human League. Tracklist: Kissing The Pin k – One Step (1985) Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers – Even The Losers (1980) Soft Cell – What (1982) Alan Gorrie – The Girl Upstairs (1985) The Mood – Passion In Dark Rooms (1982) Associates – Heart Of Glass (1988) China Crisis – King In A Catholic Style (Wake Up) (1985) Tears For Fears – Mad World (1982) Kim Wilde – Cambodia (1...

Pexels Enjoy the Billboard Dance/Disco Top 20 from 20 to 1, dated on May 12, 1984! The name of this chart is a bit misleading, though, For instance, the tracks by new wave/electro pop bands Culture Club, Wang Chung and Talk Talk on this chart cannot be categorized as dance or disco. A better name for this hit list would have been “Disco, New Wave & Electro” chart.  The electro artists certainly dominated this week’s top 20 in 1984. Personally I love that specific mid-eighties sound, but it is hard to discover any other instruments than keyboards, synthesizers and electronic drums. So aren't there any guitars in it at all? Oh yes there are, exactly 18 seconds into this mix you hear the first one, a fantastic guitar solo in the intro of Laura Branigan’s Self Control . Luckily there are some others great guitar solos on this chart as well. Just check out Coming Out Of Hiding by Pamela Stanley! Tracklist: Laura Branigan – Self Control Womack & Womack – Baby, I’m Scared Of ...

Pexels I like that upbeat, electronic eighties pop sound a lot and that’s what I wanted to catch in this new part of my imaginary station Sunshine Radio . I used some authentic jingles and air checks to recreate the feeling of the decade. The Calypso Drip FM intro is from an album about a fantasy station with the same name by retro wave artist Gryff. Enjoy! "I knew I wanted a project that reminded me of radio stations of decades past... especially the type you would have on GTA: Vice City. The accessibility and discovery of lost music to the new generation deeply resonates with me." (Gryff) Paris Is One Day Away by British band The Mood stalled at number 42 on the UK singles chart in 1982. Two places higher might have got them a slot on Top Of The Pops and might have catapulted these three good looking guys to world fame, but they did not have the same luck as Wham! Their Young Guns (Go For It) sold badly upon its initial release in November 1982, reaching just number 42 as...

Unsplash We all fade to grey, that is what this mixtape is all about! 😊 The tracks by Plastic Estate and Reeve Stimpson are brand new, but they recapture the 'new pop' sound of the eighties wonderfully. You have to watch Reeve Stimpson’s accompanying video on YouTube as well. The songs by Weekend and Chas Jankel are from the compilation Heaven Sent - The Rise Of New Pop 1979-1983 . The term ‘new pop’ was coined by NME journalist and co-founder of record label ZTT, Paul Morley. According to him it was any forward-thinking British music of the early 1980s that was anti-establishment in outlook and not ‘rockist’ (macho men with guitars) or clearly punky. I broadened his definition a little bit by adding some eighties (and new!) indie pop that sounds exactly like the music that Paul Morley originally had in mind. Peter Godwin started as one half of Metro in the 1970s (the other half was Duncan Browne, known for his classic The Wild Places ). The next decade he became a frontrunne...

Unsplash My latest cloudcast is inspired by the music in the John Hughes movies of the 1980s: a mixture of pop, indie and new wave. He made the perfect soundtracks to stories about big and small troubles in the lives of teenagers. Well-known films from this director were The Breakfast Club , Weird Science , Pretty In Pink and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off . One of the tracks I selected, If You Leave by OMD, sounded during the famous prom scene in Pretty In Pink . Steve Harley, who passed away earlier this year, had quite a few hits in the 1970s, but when the decade came to a close his sales dropped dramatically. In 1982, when he tried to pick up his career, he teamed up with Midge Ure, the front man of Ultravox who were very popular at the time. He produced Steve Harley’s single I Can’t Even Touch You and played an amazing guitar part on it (a bit similar to the one on Dancing With Tears In My Eyes , a later hit single by Ultravox). Unfortunately I Can’t Even Touch You was not successf...

Unsplash Enjoy music mostly from and otherwise inspired by the 1980s! The majority of the tracks can be categorized as “sophisti-pop”. Many popular artists of the genre incorporated sweet pop-soul into their sound, which made it fit smooth jazz radio formats. The synthesized sound of sophisti-pop made it a typical product of the 1980s and by the beginning of the next decade, it had largely faded out, leaving us with quite a few really enjoyable songs. Electro pop band The Human League were very successful during the first part of the 1980s, but they seemed to have taken a dead end street in the mid-eighties. To get a fresh sound the record company hired R&B producers Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis who had just finished Janet Jackson’s album Control . The collaboration did not go well, because Jam & Lewis mainly used their own musicians and replaced vocalists Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley in favour of their studio singer Lisa Keith. The album Crash was based on two ideas t...

@joansmalls Instagram Enjoy the 1980s inspired episode of Smooth Sailing ! Sophisti-pop or sophisticated pop was a smooth, jazzy style of mainstream pop/rock that appeared during the mid-1980s. In addition to jazz, many sophisti-pop artists incorporated sweet pop-soul into their sound. The dominant synthesizers that usually polished the arrangements marked sophisti-pop as a product of the 1980s. With its slick production and mellow, urbane feel, sophisti-pop fit both adult contemporary and quiet storm radio formats, but it never became an established trend. By the beginning of the 1990s, when house and hip hop became big, it was pushed out of the market. Simply Red and Sade were probably commercially the most successful exponents of sophisti-pop. Other important representatives were Matt Bianco, Curiosity Killed The Cat, Hue & Cry and The Blow Monkeys. Synth-wave was the electronic variant of new wave. The bands were young DIY artists with cheap keyboards that knocked on the ...

I’m a huge fan of disco music, but what kind of disco do you play when your life seems to go downhill? Most of the dance songs are about having fun, feeling good and making love. That's why I put together some dark (post) disco tracks, personal favourites and a few brand new tracks that will surely make you feel good, even when you're feeling as lucky as Kylie Minogue ;-) Don't worry about the lyrics, the songs have rays of hope as well, because of the uplifting beats and empathic words. The music makes you dance the heartache away, or something like that... The woman on the left is the multi-talented Ronika , who just released her great debut album 'Selectadisc: “She heavily mines eighties freestyle, disco-boogie and pop (and rocks a look that combines glam and dishevelment in a perfect balance evoking early, new wave Madonna), but there’s an immediacy and force of personality to her songwriting – and a club-honed directness to her production – that blows all that...

Picture: The Boombox Project “When I look at the boombox, it really symbolizes a very pure time before big business and money were interested, before it was on anybody’s radar. Even parents. It was something that we shared as a small youth based community. And until the rest of the world was aware of that, it was something very pure.” Cey Adams, Graffiti Artist Enjoy this 7th part of Boombox ! Tracklist: Scritti Politti – Perfect Way (1985) 7 Days Of Funk – Faden Away (2013) Jeffrey Osborne ‎– She's On The Left (1988) M-People – Don’t Look Any Further [Satin Jackets & Chris Jylkke Haircut Remake] (2010) Ellis, Beggs & Howard ‎– Big Bubbles, No Troubles (1988) Broken Bells – After The Disco (2014) Drizabone Soul Family – New York City Nights [Disco Remix] (2012) Muzart – The Party After [Reel People Remix] (2013) Mayer Hawthorne – Reach Out Richard [Mitzi Remix] (2014) Gavin Turek – Remember (2014) Eternity – Disco & Henny (2013) Patrice...

Unsplash It's sunny in the Netherlands (at last!), so this cloudcast is all about that star at the center of the Solar System! It's a variation on the ‘ Groovy, sexy & soulful ’ series. One of the most remarkable characters in recent pop history is Green Gartside from Scritti Politti. He started Scritti Politti as a political punk band, but changed his style after hearing 'Off the wall' from Michael Jackson. He became more R&B orientated and developed a very distinctive way of singing. It comes close to some kind of natural auto-tune! He became very successful in the mid eighties with electro pop hits like 'Wood Beez', 'Absolute' and 'The Word Girl'. But he was very unhappy being a superstar and after a string of hits he disappeared for almost ten years from the music scene. In the 1990s Green visited his local pub frequently and bought loads of hip hop records. By the end of the decade he returned as a hip hop artist, looking q...

The wonderful tracks in this mix from Gavin Christopher and Ann Peebles are from a recently released compilation album called 'Soul a la mode'. The tracks on that very nice album are selected by dj and radio presenter Ian Dewhirst. I threw in the superb song 'Angel eyes' (in a slightly extended version) from the sophisticated rock band Roxy Music. The visual concept of funk band Chic ('Le freak') was completely copied from Roxy Music, as guitarist/co-founder Nile Rodgers told in a Roxy Music documentary a few years ago. Even their cover of their first album was inspired by the art work of Roxy Music. Later on Chic began to influence Roxy Music, as you can hear in 'Angel eyes', which sounds quite funky. In the 1980s band members of Chic played on 'Avalon' that was probably more a solo project from charismatic front man Bryan Ferry than a Roxy Music album. Nowadays Nile Rodgers is a guest musician on most of Ferry's solo albums, like his late...