Halloween Music Break

 

I've never had much time for Halloween parties and such. (It's just not a thing in England; or at least, it wasn't in the time of my childhood...) But over the past several years I have become a big fan of the zestful Spanish cover band Broken Peach (as soon as you see them, you think they're a band you'd like to hire for a private party!). And they've made it a tradition over the past dozen or so years to put out a special video every Halloween, in which they all don the kind of ghoulish skeletal costume and make-up associated with the Mexican Día de los Muertos (two days after Halloween, on Monday), and perform eerily frenetic and jerky dance routines while playing a classic song (I suspect there must be a little bit of video trickery involved in enhancing this effect, because it just doesn't seem humanly possible to do such rapid and such precise twitches!). This year they've finally got around to producing a hard rock version of Michael Jackson's Thriller. But the one above from a few years ago, a wonderfully manic and snarly rendition of Soft Cell's Tainted Love (with a little bit of a mash-up with Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This by The Eurythmics near the end!) is my favourite of the lot.

If you check out their Youtube channel, you can find a full playlist of all their Halloween songs, and also a 'live' anthology concert of them, and an excellent half-hour - continuous one-take - concert of some of their own material.

I confess, I grew to love Soft Cell's version (although I'm glad I only ever listened to it, rather than having to endlessly endure the rather cringey video that accompanied it). You sort of had to, back in the early '80s, resistance was futile: it was the most massive hit of my college years, remaining the most played song on the jukebox in my college beer cellar for five straight years. Here's a great live version with Jools Holland's Rhythm & Blues Orchestra on the Hootenanny six years ago (a long-running New Year's Eve special of Later with Jools Holland.... the best music show on the BBC, and quite probably in the entire world). And, in my usual spirit of completeness, here's where it all started, the 1964 Motown recording from Gloria Jones.