Ultravox - Ultravox!

In 1982 a bad, cult, sci-fi, porn movie was released called Cafe Flesh. The premise revolved around a post-apocalyptic future where the majority of people could no longer engage in sex themselves without becoming violently ill. Instead, they do so vicariously through shows at clubs where they stare, zombie-like, at the remaining few who can still fuck and not puke. The stars of these "acts" attain a celebrity status and are much sought after for productions of increasing complexity. The best line in the movie comes as an established star bemoans the up and coming new blood: "Every stud that comes down the pike thinks he's Jack Lord." I always thought this album would have been the ideal soundtrack to the movie.

The final nail in the coffin of Glam. The first shot fired by the apocalyptic New Romantics. The crest of the Punk movement. John Foxx, et al, mainlined it all into this firey little beast of a record that swaggers through the ruins and rubbish as if the smell wafting up was cologne and not the odor of decaying flesh.

Big swinging dicks, indeed.

amg:

Depeche Mode claimed to be punks with synthesizers, but it was Ultravox! who first showed the kind of dangerous rhythms that keyboards could create. The quintet certainly had their antecedents — Hawkwind, Roxy Music, and Kraftwerk to name but a few, but still it was the group's 1977 eponymous debut's grandeur (courtesy of producer Eno), wrapped in the ravaged moods and lyrical themes of collapse and decay that transported '70s rock from the bloated pastures of the past to the futuristic dystopias predicted by punk. Epic tales of alienation, disillusion, and disintegration reflected the contemporary holocaust of Britain's collapse, while accurately prophesying the dance through society's cemetery and the graveyards of empires that were to be the Thatcher/Reagan years. "Saturday Night in the City of the Dead," "Wide Boys," "The Wild, the Beautiful and the Damned," "Dangerous Rhythm," and "Slip Away" all simultaneously bemoaned and celebrated the destruction of Western culture; "I Want to Be a Machine" and "My Sex" warned of and yearned for technology's triumph. And it was these apposites and didactic emotions that so pierced the zeitgeist of the day, and kicked open a whole new world of synthesized music.

Hear

I should note that the actual soundtrack to Cafe Flesh was composed and produced by Mitchel Froom and wasn't bad.