‘Nostalgia is much more than reminiscing. It’s a feeling’, so say Gateshead duo Take the Night (Tom Homan and Dave Charlton). With their new single Last Days they have captured the feeling of mainstream Eighties synth-pop to perfection. In fact, when Halfway 2 Nowhere editor Adam, sent it to me I thought it was a test. So authentic is the eighties synth, sequencer, and electronic drum sound of Last Days that I considered looking through the soundtrack albums from Flashdance or Top Gun to check I hadn’t been set-up.
In the notes accompanying this release the band say the song is about ‘marvel, imagination, youth, innocence, lust and love. It’s impossible to listen and not feel nostalgia running through your body’. I’m not entirely sure about the first statement, but the second is categorically true. Take the lyrics of the chorus for example – ‘Dreams feel real and they wake us up like thunder in the rain, and we play this life like a video game.’ Those lines would not have been put of place in something like the Oakey Moroder hit Together in Electric Dreams.
There does seem to be a real desire among a number of new artists to reject the standard indie-guitar set-up and revisit the the synth driven sounds of the mid-eighties. This influence can be heard in current music being produced by bands like Reclaim Vienna and Apollo Junction. These bands are not dealing in imitation or pastiche, they are taking elements of music that meant something to them, using those influences, and creating something new and interesting. That’s what Take the Night have done here. Last Days will be released on June 17th . You can watch the video on YouTube, an entertaining three minutes that looks look a trailer for Patrick Swayze’s 1989 movie Roadhouse!
Ian Dunphy
Halfway 2 Nowhere 