Adam and the Ants - Kings of the Wild Frontier

DAD SAYS:- I first heard this record at my friend Giles' house. We scrutinised the cover and read the lyrics that are printed on the inner sleeve. We danced around Giles's house in the same way we'd seen Adam dance on Top of the Pops just like the kids we were. Adam and the Ants were a pop band and we were behaving as fans.
As far as we were concened in the early 80s this was pop and nothing else. It would be many years before I knew about Adam's punk past, about his earlier bands that became the Monochrome Set and Bow Wow Wow, his links to Malcolm McLaren and The Sex Pistols. I don't think as a kid I even considered that he had a life before he made this record.
Songs such as Dog Eat Dog and Kings of the Wild Frontier are forever pop music in my mind. But when I put this record on for my daughter I was amazed at the other songs. These are not pop and my adult self can't believe I could ever have though that this was pop! Crunchy guitars stolen from Link Wrey and the Kinks, lashings of spaghetti western references and some pretty straight forward drumming on most tracks. This is a rock record - possibly even a rock and roll record!
I still love it.

TALLULAH SAYS:- The cover is odd and the man on the front looks freaky.
I like the song Feed Me To The Lions. Lots of it is pop or heavy metal music.
Most of the songs are really catchy. I think the main instruments are the drums, guitars and piano.
The song Ant Music is familiar because my mum likes this song and plays it in the car.
In some of the songs there are sound effects like whistling or bangs.
I like this record a lot. I think it is fun and different to what we listen to nowadays.
It is quite dark music.

Madness - Complete Madness - My First Record

DAD SAYS:
When I was about 13 I began to listen more carefully to music. Up until then I'd really only been exposed to my parents' tastes. The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel and Coleman Hawkins seemed to be all they liked!
In those days Radio 1 played non-stop pop. It seemed that everyone listened to it, even my parents! And that's where I first heard Madness
If I'm honest my first pop music love was Adam and the Ants who combined the music and the clothes of pure fantasy.
But I would never dream of dressing like Adam while Madness, as crazy as they looked, were clearly real people who lived on the same planet as me - in fact in the same city!
As a young teenager I knew nothing about punk other than images of guys with Mohicans and dog collars so I didn't know that punk had been the catalyst for Adam and Madness, albeit it in very different ways.
For me Madness were about fun. Their music was upbeat and catchy, their words were stupid and hinted at things I didn't understand but somehow knew were part of the adult world and what was more important they seemed to be everywhere.
Buying a record - an album at that - was an important moment. I'd previously bought a cassette of Pink Floyd's The Wall but it had been scarcely played once I found out the Another Brick in the Wall was a bit of an anomaly on the album.
This time I wasn't going to make the same mistake twice. I went with my mum to Woolworths and led her to the music section. I don't know how I knew that there was a 'best of' Madness record available but I did know most of the songs and I liked all those I knew.
I'm sure that if you are reading this you already know all of the songs so I won't review the record except to say that when I played it for my daughter for this blog the music seemed as fresh and fun as when I first bought it.

TALLULAH SAYS:
The cover is quite cool with the people it with weird facial expressions and odd clothes.
The music is jazzy and has odd lyrics and the piano is hard.
I recognise the song Baggy Trousers. My Dad loves it and I think it is quite fast and funny
I quite enjoyed it a lot.
I like the song Baggy Trousers and It Must Be Love.
The beat in most of them is fast and the words are quick and snappy with lots of nonsense sentences.
In One Step Beyond I like the talking bit at the beginning. It reminds me of when Neal Armstrong said 'One step for man, one giant leap for mankind.'