Tonight's ADWH Soundtrack

Two tunes from 1985 or thereabouts.  First... Simple Minds:

The above is almost an afterthought, mainly because we were listening to Pandora's Roxy Music station this evening... and only because we had a yearning to hear this tune:

We were NOT disappointed; even though it was late into the evening before Avalon began wafting forth from the Evo.  The timing was exquisite because the night sky had just about gone all black and the stars were making themselves known... and there's no finer music by which to watch the stars come out.  I'm speaking mainly and specifically of Yanick Etienne's ethereal back-up vocals... which are guaranteed to raise the hair on my arms no matter HOW many times I hear the tune.  About which, this:

“Bryan and I could hear this girl from the Haitian band next door singing, and we thought, ‘Wow! What a voice! We've got to get her singing some backing vocals on “Avalon.”’ That was Yanick Etienne, who didn't speak a word of English. She came in with her boyfriend/manager and we described to him what we wanted and she sort of sang the choruses and the [word] ‘Avalon’ — the great sound that is on there. Then we said, ‘Can she try and do something free at the end?’ and we ran the end of the track and she did absolutely nothing. So I said, ‘No, we want her to sing anything that she would want to sing, totally free.’ So the second time we ran the tape, she sang exactly what you hear on the record at the end.

“Bryan then went straight out and re-sang his vocal properly, because he was so inspired by Yanick's singing. I remember Bryan's manager walked in the room and Bryan was just finishing his vocal. We were doing the playback and I'd never seen the look on his eyes before. He went, ‘Jesus f****** Christ! That is incredible!’ Well, we knew it was a really high point of the evening. I remember going, ‘Wow! We have really created something special here.’ That is how I felt. Then we mixed it the next day with Bob.

“It was one of those turnaround things, where the original track was just about to be thrown in the can. And then suddenly, we did a completely different version of the song that just made the record for me,” Davies concludes. “I thought, ‘That's it. That completes the record!’ I remember we had dinner a couple nights later, and I asked Bryan, ‘What are you going to call the album?’ and he said, ‘I'm going to call it Avalon,’ and I thought, ‘Yeah. Of course.’”

Of course.

Avalon, the album, came out in 1982 but I bought it on CD around the time I retired from the Air Force in 1985, which is also the year I bought my first CD player; the two events went hand in hand.  The CD has since gone missing and I have a feeling The Second Mrs. Pennington took it with her when she walked out of my life in 1998.  She took a lot of my/our music... including about two-thirds of the classical music inventory... but that's another story entirely and one that won't be told here.

The Simple Minds album, OTOH, was current in 1985 and was high on our personal play list at the time, especially "Don't You (Forget About Me)".  That was a Good Year, 1985... one of the best.