Dead or Alive, "You Spin Me Round"
Last weekend I bought a vinyl reissue of Tangerine Dream’s second album, Alpha Centauri. The record came with a bonus disc, and Side B of that second disc has two tracks on it: the A- and B-sides of Ultima Thule, a single Tangerine Dream released in 1971. Around that time Tangerine Dream was transitioning from mad-for-it psych rock titans to space rock. “Ultima Thule, Part 1” (the A-side) (Apple, Spotify, YouTube) is the last photonic blast of guitar and drums Tangerine Dream ever gave us, and when I played it for the first time on Friday, it blew my freaking mind. When it finished up, I picked up the needle, yanked it back, dropped it again. I did about six or seven rounds of this, playing that single song over and over. Then I went and found the same track in Apple Music and sent it out to friends.
Rewind thirty-seven years. (Jesus Christ: I just typed the words thirty-seven years.) Our family had just recently moved houses. I had a new stereo system in my bedroom: turntable, AM/ FM radio, and cassette player/ recorder. In the cassette player was a recording of, I dunno, maybe the last 80% of “You Spin Me Round” by Dead or Alive (Apple, Spotify, YouTube), which I’d dubbed to tape from radio.
I’ve found over the years that my memory misleads me. Facts get overwritten whenever they’re recalled. Some new, errant information creeps in, like mutations do when DNA folds and replicates. Or to choose a metaphor that’s more on-point: I’m recording again and again over the same tape, and the medium is deteriorating. All this to say that I’m pretty sure I recorded this Dead or Alive song from Casey Kasem’s Sunday Top 40 show, but I could be wrong.
Sometimes my memory fails me outright, and there’s just a gap: no good information, no bad information—just no information. No-information failure happens less often, I think, than bad-information failure, but it’s gaining in the overall standings. An example of something I can’t remember at all is why I missed recording the first thirty+ seconds of that song. There are two possibilities:
Casey Kasem queued up Dead or Alive, I heard it for the first time in that moment, it caught me completely by surprise, and I had to rummage frantically in my desk drawer to find a cassette tape to throw into the tape recorder. By the time I hit the Record button, I’d missed a fair chunk of the song.
I had a specific plan to record this song. Maybe I’d heard it on the Top 40 show a week before, and I was fairly certain it wasn’t a one-and-done appearance in the charts. I had the tape ready to go: I’d even gone so far as to hit Record and Pause, which was a trick you’d use back in the day to start a recording faster—the Record-Pause setting had the motor already going, so that unpausing could start the recording one to two seconds quicker than a straight-up press of Record. (This was the shit we had to concern ourselves with in 1985.) Problem was, I didn’t know when the song would come on. Radio was unpredictable, and who knew whether “You Spin Me Round” was on the climb from the previous week, or dropping down? So as I continued to wait, my attention lapsed, and I got preoccupied with other things: drawing cartoons, reading a comic book. Hell, maybe I was in the bathroom when Dead or Alive finally came on. So notwithstanding all the advance planning, I was asleep at the switch.
I think there’s a case to be made for either option. I can imagine that I never heard “You Spin Me Round” before the very day I recorded it. I can imagine it coming on and hitting me like a ton of bricks—like “Ultima Thule Part 1” did five days ago—grabbing my full attention and sending me scrambling to find a blank tape so I could lock it down and spend the rest of the afternoon playing it over and over. And I can imagine, too, that I’d heard the song a week earlier and had decided I would set my cassette trap for it, assigning a full Sunday afternoon to the project of bringing it into captivity from the wild expanse of radio.
Whatever it was that condemned me to my truncated recording of “You Spin Me Round,” I do remember that I played that song over and over and over for the rest of the day. Play through fade out, Stop, Rewind, Play through fade out. Something about that song gripped me. MTV most definitely played a role in this, softening me up for synth pop generally, and especially for what I found here. The breakneck drum machine beats: machine-gun bursts of bass, hand claps, snare drums, and cowbell each taking their turns. The synths worked overtime, too: it was only last year my friend Sean, a lifelong electronic musician, explained to me how sequencers work. And of course, Pete Burns. I was at age eleven, and am still, a sucker for vocals sung with English idioms, in English accents. All this added up to full-on sensory overload, of the most pleasurable kind available to a kid at that age.
You spin me right round, baby, right round, like a record baby, right round round round … Funny, now I think of it, that when I think of this song, with this chorus, I think of a cassette tape.
Does it hold up? It’s not the best or the brightest 80s synth pop. But Dead or Alive weren’t aiming to create great art, either. This was a song to be played in London dance clubs at 1 AM Sunday morning to overserved sweaty people who were in no fit state to evaluate its relative contribution to rock culture. This was the logical endpoint of the outright war Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer had declared on high-hat backbeat Chic-guitar disco music six years earlier (Apple, Spotify, YouTube). The insurgents were now the incumbents, lining up to knock off Boy George, but with minor variations so you could just tell apart Culture Club from Kajagoogoo from Dead or Alive. For his part, Pete Burns wore a (purely cosmetic) eye patch. Years later he’d pump quarts of Botox into his lips for more of a Ripley’s Believe It or Not vibe. He died of a heart attack at age 57.
Today, in the Year of Our Lord 2023, I’ll take “Ultima Thule” over Dead or Alive in a heartbeat. In fact, I’ll go so far as to wonder out loud to my wife why musicians who rocked this hard and this well would chuck guitars and drums and burn the next thirty years of their careers twiddling knobs on synthesizers. But on that day in 1985, “You Spin Me Round” was perfect. In my bedroom I danced and danced and danced, and I rewound and rewound and rewound. 2023 Me may be more discerning in his musical choices, but I would give anything to get back in that room again on Springwood Trace, with my stereo, just for one Sunday afternoon.