Japanese children’s TV show, KURE KURE TAKORA (1973).
Title cards of horror anthology series.
These are pretty much what I was thinking of when creating my blog. I’ve always considered my blog a late-night show, an after-hours thing. A place with a buzzing neon sign.
ALICE IN WONDERLAND (1985).
Leaders, logos and the like of Dutch TV show, TOPPOP (1970-1988).
It was the one music TV show in those days—the one that mattered. It was weekly. I grew up with it: whenever you see music stuff from the 70s and 80s here on my blog, and that’s often, TopPop is where I first saw it. It had a catchy title tune that everyone my age knows.
The earliest music I can remember: “Lost in Music” by Sister Sledge, “Funkytown” by Lipps Inc., “Run Too Fast” by Janis Ian, “Street Life” by The Crusaders, which featured Randy Crawford, who sang the beautifully aching “One Day I’ll Fly Away”, a song that always makes my eyes well up. Chic, Musical Youth, Village People, Pointer Sisters, Michael Jackson, Eddie Grant, Diana Ross: “Upside Down”, “My Old Piano”, “I’m Coming Out”, and of course The Wiz—I hear this music and I’m in front of our bulky TV set watching TopPop, intrigued by all these fluid silhouettes, the glittering silver of that late 1970s astro-fashion, the laser beams cutting through the smoke, the colored spotlights high up above, like exotic planets. The allure of it all. But I’m not just back in front of that old tube TV set, I’m back in that dark amorphous state of feeling and not knowing that exists somewhere between your birth and the first day of school. I hear this music, and I don’t hear music, I hear the echoes of my prehistory, when the world was made up of alien sounds and shapes and not yet of words, definitions, laws, meaning.
Later on, when TopPop had become an institution of sorts, newer and edgier music shows cut in and took its place, until they in turn were shoved aside by MTV. Then MTV too faded away. TopPop now has its own YouTube channel: whenever I watch the old performances—all those artists: they are ghosts, and they don’t know it—I find myself looking at the decors especially, which are as familiar to me as our old living room, and the bulky tube TV in it.
Title cards from GHOST STORY/CIRCLE OF FEAR (1972-3).
