“Mirror Star,” the first song on this album,
was the single and maybe the only song
I’d heard from this British pre-new wave
power pop band in 1978. It’s a song about a
young man who pretends to be famous, a kind
of Walter Mitty of rock and roll. It’s a damn
catchy tune. However enticed I may have
been by the song and the wacky fractured
art photo of the band on the cover, I didn’t
have this album until I found it in a used
bin for a single dollar decades later. Low risk
purchase, high potential value. It’s mostly just
a dumb but quirky rock record with some witty
lyrics. Nothing to write home about, really, but
worth a single dollar, and I don’t feel bad
afterwards for losing forty minutes of life
for one more listen. I can hear in their music,
though, hints of some of the things I would
grow to love in my favorite 80’s bands, a certain
goofy nerdiness, a tendency toward satirical lyrics,
and a high-octane level of energy. Whether
that stuff originated with these Fabulous Poodles,
or if they were just part of the same cultural
stew, only less masterful, I couldn’t tell you.
But man, I sure could do without the harmonica
and the fiddle.
Notes on the vinyl edition: Mirror Stars, Epic Records, 1978, black vinyl.
In case you don’t already know: I’m listening to almost everything in my vinyl collection, A to Z, and writing at least one, sometimes two or three long skinny poem-like-things in response for each artist, and on a few occasions, writing a long skinny poem-like-thing in response to more than one artist. As a poet and a student of poetry, I understand that these things look like poems, but they don’t really sound much like poetry, hence, I call them “poem-like-things.” I’ll admit that they’re just long, skinny essays that veer every now and then into the poetic or lyric.
michael jarmer 