It's always the quiet ones. More Liverpudlians, bedroom dreamers China Crisis arrived in 1981, to no great fanfare, with African & White, probably the best thing they ever did. Proper, dark Pop, at a point where a lot of people were doing it well. Early OMD and early UB40, before both bands ditched their darkness for something a little bit lighter, more commercially successful but far less interesting.
China Crisis remained decent and staked out a solid chart career for a few years. This, Christian is one of their bigger hits, and showed the value of not shouting when you have something to say. It dares to be quiet, swimming against the prevailing Post Punk tide in the way that others, Young Marble Giants, Tracy Thorn, Lotus Eaters, Durrutti Column, Pale Fountains, Prefab Sprout and more were also doing at the time.
That China Crisis did so while having a string of consistently good Top Forty hits is to their credit. They're probably little remembered now but I'd direct you to their debut album Difficult Shapes & Passive Rhythms Some People Think its Fun to Entertain, ( yes, people called their records things like this in those days and no-one so much as shrugged ). I listened to it again yesterday for the first time in years, sand it still sounded terrific. Grab that and also a Greatest Hits and then tell me that the band are not a very good thing. Oblique, assured, overflowing with buoyant and incredibly imaginitive melodies, great song titles and lyrics.
They probably never made the front cover of the NME or John Peel's Festive Fifty or were a name that the cool kids wrote on their pencil cases at school. Were they actually an influence on aybody? Possibly not. But they were damned good at what they did and another reason why this era was such a fascinating and fertile one.
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