When “Banana Split” was remixed in the 90s, famed French photographers Pierre et Gilles did the cover image

In 1979, a year before Kim Wilde’s similar-sounding “Kids in America” and three years before Missing Persons released “Words,” the gorgeous teenaged Belgian singer Lio racked up a multi-million-selling hit record with the infectious and cheeky double entendre “New Wave” pop smash “Banana Split.”

My French is barely high school-level proficient, but I can still figure out about how the banana has a whipped cream “avalanche.” You don’t really have to be Sigmund Freud to get this one.
 

 
Give it one listen and you’ll probably just think that it sucks—if that’s the right word here—but give it but two spins and it’ll be stuck in your head for the rest of the day, if not for the rest of your life. I’ve always had a soft spot for this record in the same way that I still love Betty Boo...
 

 
But the pretty and iconic 80s star—now 53—was no one-hit wonder and she actually has a super cool musical pedigree: After “Banana Split” (which came out when she was just 17) Lio—just Lio, like Cher—went on to work with Ron and Russell Mael of Sparks recording their rather freely translated English versions of her French hits for a Canadian-only release, Suite Sixtine, in 1982. She would also work with the Velvet Underground’s John Cale. In America, Lio was signed to the famed “mutant disco” underground label, ZE Records and married to Michel Esteban, one of the label’s founders, who also produced Lizzy Mercier Descloux.
 

 
Lio has acted in films directed by the likes of Catherine Breillat, Diane Kurys, Chantal Akerman and Claude Lelouch. In recent years, she has been a judge on the French American Idol-type show Nouvelle Star and a judge/coach on The Voice Belgique.
 

 
More Lio after the jump…

 
Truly great jazz is rhythmic enough to lure you in but chaotic enough to make sure you don’t get bored…or too comfortable. Truly great funk is rhythmic enough to keep your body moving and your senses tighter than a trucker on a yellow-jacket binge. Cross these mighty twin forms together and you land somewhere near the county of James Chance. Even then, like any artist worth their salt, simple categorization is not only uneasy but also ill advised. And that’s when things get truly exciting.

Emerging during the late 1970’s quick-flash but potent No Wave movement, Chance, by way of Brookfield,Wisconsin, arrived in New York City and would go on to make a musical mark that initially defined and defied the very scene that he would be associated with. He first came to recorded prominence with an appearance on the Brian Eno-produced compilation, No New York, which also featured greats like DNA, Mars and Teenage Jesus & the Jerks. (A band Chance helped create along with lead singer/force of nature Lydia Lunch.)

However, it was 1979’s album Buy, Chance’s debut along with his band, The Contortions, that changed multiple games and is a rare example of a work that is simultaneously of its era and yet aggressively repels dust and art-mold. Its sonic punch and bone-rattling kinetic rhythm is the kind that cracks buildings at their foundations and runs off all the right people from a party. Arriving on the scene with internal influences ranging from Thelonious Monk to The Stooges, it was a no brainer than the man’s creative thumbprint was going to be unforgettable.
 

 

“Contort yourself one time! Contort yourself two times! Contort yourself three times!....”

Buy was and forever is, a powerful work. Upon first listening, the instant vibe is chaos. Truly great music can either cause a riot (i.e. Stravinsky) or calm a riot (i.e. James Brown) and with James Chance the potential for both is thriving and waiting. Atonality collides with a jazz-blues-funk permutation, with Chance, in key moments, coming across like an angular, honky James Brown. The second wallop is what the man does with the sax. It’s the spiritual heir apparent to jazz godheads like Ornette Coleman combo-ed with the throbbing pulse of a city full of crime, despair, drugs, dirt and living defiantly while nodding your head to the less than pleasant reality that surrounds you. In short, one James Chance sax solo makes up for a multitude of sins committed against this noble instrument all throughout the 1980’s in popular music.

From the opening track, “Design to Kill” to the tiki-guitars-from-Hell work on “My Infatuation,” Buy is an unrelenting ride. If a punch can feel like an act of mal-love, this is it. There’s the crime-tinged jazz of “Twice Removed,” featuring lyrics like “...been washed up and left to dry” and “I only like things twice removed.” The big barnstormer of the album, however, is “Contort Yourself.” The song plays out like a battle cry for the entire work.
 

 
“It’s better than pleasure, it hurts more than pain. I’ve got what it takes to drive you insane.”

It’s a big, bold statement that not only can be backed up, but Chance himself knows that he can back it up. Seeing footage of the man even further backs it up, since once you witness Chance suited up and coiffed like the bastard son of Chet Baker and a lounge lizard, it hammers the point home. Then there’s the scream. The yowl that Chance lets out in “Contort Yourself” is piercing and possesses all the wow factor of a steel mill combusting.
 

 
Continues after the jump…

 
Thanks to the oft-repeated (but totally incorrect) factoid holding that the rate of people opting to end their own lives spikes during the winter holidays, many of us associate Christmas with suicide, but I don’t think this is what anyone has in mind: the assaultive, proto punk, electronics-and-misanthropy duo Suicide released not one, but two Christmas songs. Sort of. We’ll sort out the messy details in a bit.
 

 
In 1981, the great no-wave label ZE Records—home to the eardrum-hurty likes of Lydia Lunch and Arto Lindsay—decided that the label would release A Christmas Record, a compilation of original Christmas music by its deeply underground artists. It seems, and was, pretty ridiculous, but that album yielded an actual enduring holiday season classic in the Waitresses’ “Christmas Wrapping.” Other artists who contributed were Material with Nona Hendryx, Cristina, and Was (Not Was). It was and remains deeply regrettable that Lydia Lunch contributed no Christmas song, but there was one by the equally malevolent Suicide, and another by that band’s singer Alan Vega. (Here’s the “sort of” alluded to above: both the Suicide track and the Vega “solo” track bear the songwriting credits and synthesizers of Suicide’s other half, Martin Rev. So I completely don’t get how the Vega song isn’t a Suicide song in reality if not in name. If it waddles and quacks…)

Here’s the Suicide cut, “Dear Lord.” It’s pretty messed up. I especially dig the chimes.
 

 
Vega’s “solo” track, “No More Christmas Blues,” featured the same music bed, with somewhat different dithering, moaned lyrics. When A Christmas Record was re-pressed in 1982, this was left off in favor of James White’s “Christmas With Satan,” but it was restored to the 2004 CD reissue, Xmas Record Reloaded.
 

 
No Wave singer Cristina, AKA Cristina Monet-Palaci, was a Franco-American Harvard drop-out, lingerie model and writer for the Village Voice when she recorded her legendarily cynical version of the Peggy Lee standard “Is That All There Is?” in 1980. The witty, sardonic remake was produced by August Darnell (better known in his guise as Kid Creole) and released on ZE Records, the label run by her boyfriend/later husband Michael Zilkha.

On “Is That All There Is?” Cristina emotes like a world-weary debutante on a coke jag. One reviewer wrote “If Jackie Kennedy had made a record, it would sound like this.” True, but a slightly more decadent Jackie O… this is not middling boredom on display, this is ennui deluxe!

Celebrated songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were so furious when the original lyrics of their 1969 Grammy-winner: “Then I fell in love with the most wonderful boy in the world. We would take long walks by the river or just sit for hours gazing into each other’s eyes. We were so very much in love” became “And then I met the most wonderful boy in Manhattan. We used to walk by the river, and he beat me black and blue and I loved it. I could kill for that guy,” that they had an injunction against the recording that lasted for 24 years.

This 12” record used to be so difficult to find that when you could locate it, it would sell for $100 bucks. It was practically a requirement for serious record collectors to have a copy. Despite the relative scarcity of the vinyl, the song became a cult hit in New York clubs and was a signature tune played frequently during Rodney Bingenheimer’s early 80s “Rodney on the Roq” radio shows. To this day, it is apparently still the record holder of the top requested song title on BBC Radio 1.
 

 
Legendary post-punk performer James Chance (aka James White, aka James Black, best known for the classic “Contort Yourself”) features on a fetching new tie print by Vivienne Westwood.

If you are a fan of late 70s No-Wave skronk AND snazzy ties, then this is may be of interest (here’s looking at you Richard!) However, to purchase this tie you’re going to have to hunt for it, as it is not featured on the Westwood website’s “Men’s Accessories: Ties” page.

And while we are on the subject, here’s a clip of the re-formed Contortions playing live in Poland in 2008:

 
Via Michel Esteban.

 
Are there any readers of Dangerous Minds in France? If you do live there, then I would recommend getting your hands on the next edition of the well known rock magazine Les Inrockuptibles, which comes with a free cover mount CD featuring the best of the renowned post-punk and mutant disco label ZE Records.

ZE has been a longtime favourite label of mine, since I first started getting deeper into collecting disco and realised not all of the genre was dripping cheese with a boner for a chart placing. The releases were smart, weird, original, sleazy, camp, funny and funky as hell. The records came in a distinctive sleeve featuring the label’s iconic logo and a graphic featuring a New York City taxi cab. You didn’t even have to listen to tell that they were dripping in the atmosphere of that place and that time - hell, it may not even have been real, it may just have been the disco/punk New York of my imagination, but it sure did sound great.

Founded in New York in 1979 by British entrepreneur Michael Zilkha and the French publisher Michel Esteban (hence the name), ZE specialised in releasing both “Mutant Disco” for the uptown set, and more downtown experimental sound of “No Wave”, both co-existing side by side in a way that kinda made perfect sense. What united them was an attitude born of not giving a fuck. ZE acts spanned the gamut, from the noise-fests of Mars to the ground-breaking Lydia Lunch, from the proto electro of Suicide to the more rock output of Alan Vega, from the twisted dance punk of James White & Blacks to the sassy boy-baiting of The Waitresses, from the new wave Euro pop of Lio and Garcons to the veteran Velvet drone-meister John Cale, from the geeky freak funk of Was (Not Was) to the dancefloor experiments of Bill Laswell and Material.

My favourite ZE associated act is one August Darnell, better known by his stage name of Kid Creole. He worked with many different acts and under a variety of different names, including Cristina, Coati Mundi, Gichy Dan, Don Armando’s Second Avenue Rhumba Band and Aural Exciters, not to mention being the driving force behind two other seminal disco acts, Machine and Dr Buzzard’s Original Savanah Band. He brought to the music a heavy influence of golden era jazz and Cab Calloway. And it wasn’t just a a sly wink to the past - beneath his sometimes quite strange arrangements lurked classic Broadway songwriting chops and killer one liners (check “Darrio” below). I feel August Darnell has been overlooked in the history of popular music, and I hope to cover him more in depth in the future.

We have already covered a couple of ZE Records acts in the past few months here on Dangerous Minds, namely Cristina and Lizzy Mercier Descloux. it seems only right now to introduce the label to people who may not have heard of it, and/or to remind others who have of just how good it is. As I have mentioned before, it is worth signing up to the label’s mailing list to keep abreast of what they are up to (the next release is a remastered re-issue of John Cale’s Sabotage/Live LP recorded at CBGB’s in 1979 and featuring the Animal Justice EP). To sign up, visit the label’s official website. The entire ZE catalog (with info on how to obtain what is available) is on Discogs. This is the Les Inrockuptibles cover mount CD streamed from the ZE Records Soundcloud page - a pretty good summation of the label’s vast and influential output:
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Is That All There Is?’: No Wave cult singer Cristina covers Peggy Lee in 1980
From Heaven With Love: Download the best of Lizzy Mercier Descloux for free

 
Lizzy Mercier Descloux was a multi-talented French recording artist who made waves in the New York underground in the 1980s. Perhaps best known for her early 80s no wave-meets-funk output, she found more commercial success later in the decade with a world music inspired sound. The girlfriend and sometime business partner of the entrepreneur Michel Esteban, she was signed to his uber-hip ZE Records, also home to Was (Not Was), Kid Creole & The Coconuts, James White, Suicide and many more. She released three albums and a bunch of singles for the label, before moving on to CBS in 1984.

Unfortunately Lizzy Mercier Descloux passed away in 2004. Since then the re-established ZE Records have been doing a cracking job at re-releasing her older material. Her sound was distinctive - sometimes abrasive, sometimes energetic and always exciting. Now ZE are giving away a twelve track compilation of the best of Descloux’s work called From Heaven With Love, available for the next seven days only from the official ZE website. The only catch is that you sign up to the record label’s mailing list, but really you should consider doing that anyway as their catalog and roster of acts is immense. This is a taster of what is on the comp:
 
Lizzy Mercier Descloux - “Wawa”
 

 
Lizzy Mercier Descloux - “Hard-Boiled Babe” (what a beat!!)
 

 
Lizzy Mercier Descloux - “Slipped Disc”
 

 
To download the 12 track From Heaven With Love compilation, go here.