The Space Race?

Rip It Up, Issue 35, 1 June 1980, Page 6

The Space Race?

Duncan Campbell

Mi-Sex would have to be just about the hardest working band in the southern hemisphere right now. Having just completed an exhaustive 25-date American tour, nearly all one-night stands, they're now starting a world jaunt which will take them through Australasia, Europe and the United States by the end of this year.

Their confidence and determination to succeed looks like paying off, with a warm reception from American and Canadian audiences and handsome airplay for Graffiti Crimes (retitled Computer Games for the American market). Their new album, Space Race, looks certain to repeat the success of its predecessor. Rip It Up spoke about the album to guitarist Kevin Stanton, who was in Canberra at the time, ready to embark once more on the Australian gig circuit. Stanton is a major contributor to Space Race, having had a hand in all 11 tracks and writing most of the lyrics. We asked him for his track-by-track impressions. The title track appears to have a strong UFO influence, reinforced by the outer space creatures which adorn the cover. Which shows just how wrong you can be. "Not at all," says Stanton. "Contrary to that opinion, it's absolutely earth-borne. It’s a new race of people on earth, really, kids in cities, mainly. Especially in America, their actual anatomies are changing because of the food they eat. They’re not eating natural food anymore, everything is processed. That’s one part of space race. "The other thing is the way people are programmed, by the media and television and computers and things. That’s the space race on earth.

“ 'Pages And Matches’ relates to a personal experience. A few years ago in New Zealand there was a big spate of school arson, kids burning down schools. That’s the basic theme behind that track, with a few extra twists thrown in. Also, I find fire quite exciting.” "Living In September" casts images of despair. An end-of-the-line song perhaps, but not quite as personal as it first appears. "If you listen very closely, the keyboard melody in the beginning and the middle is actually the New Zealand national anthem. It’s actually based on a newspaper article I read, written by a New Zealander living in Melbourne, who said that by September 1982 or something, New Zealand would be completely broke. It’s an impressionst view of that, it’s not really serious. " 1 Don’t Know’ is about confusion. It may be about someone else, it may be about myself.

" ‘Slippin’ Out' is just about slipping out of society. Doing what we do is really quite radical, and a lot of people find it’s a dream. What we do is our reality, and yet we have hardly any part of society. We don’t conform to anybody's rules." "It Only Hurts When I’m Laughing” is lyrically one of the most intense numbers Mi-Sex have ever done. A song filled with welling loneliness, it's Stanton’s personal favourite. "It’s kind of a personal thing, really. It was half taken from a poem that I wrote quite a long time ago, called ‘Loneliness’, and Steve wrote the other half of the lyrics. Murray wrote the chords behind the lead break and apart from that I wrote the whole thing. I’ll just leave it at that. It's just a personal feeling, really." Space Race, as mentioned before, marks a very intense creative period for Stanton personally. His songwriting output seems greater than ever. I write a couple of songs a week, it’s a compulsive urge. Now I’ve got a tape recorder with me on the road, so I can write every day if I want to." "People”, the single, needs no further ex-

planation from its co-author. With the world’s first test tube baby nearly a year old and cloning already an established scientific practice, the song's point is all too clear "Good Guys Always Win” sees Stanton back in the movies, as with “Kamera Kazi" on the first album. "No matter how many movies you watch, probably 10 out of 10, the good guy always wins. It’s a very light-hearted observation, which is why “satire” is printed in brackets after the title. " ’Ghosts' is based on an experience that I had I’ve told the story so many times I thought I'd write a song about it. It’s actually about a house in Mt Maunganui, that I was born in, which had a heavy ghost problem.” "Burning Up” will be well known to those who’ve attended Mi-Sex concerts in the past. It was dropped from the Graffiti Crimes sessions in favour of "2120", and has previously only appeared as the B side of a single. "It’s such a popular live song and we wanted to get a really good recording of it. It didn’t really work on the first album and this time the recording is much better.” “Ice Cold Dead” performs the same function that "Stills” did on Graffiti Crimes. It's Space Race's epic work. “It’s actually about the Jennifer Beard murder. I wrote a poem about it and I’ve added lyrics to that. It’s a stealthy kind of homicide song.” The Space Race has already begun. Ready, steady ...