Sounds of typewriters in music

hang on, is it GE or is it "telegraph"? it might be the latter, although in that case i've no idea what noise he thinks he's doing. hmmm.

the clip's on the iMac at home: home is somewhere i wish i was, but shan't be for ages. at some point this week, gerard, i shall YSI you the clip (and post the link here too. why not? rock and roll).

that and REM were the first things I thought of

the way i remember this video clip, MC is definitely rattling away at a typewriter: there's a fairly good shot of it. but i'm becoming more addled and confused by the second (i'm at work, trying to do ten things at once, and i'm still hungover from the weekend).

anyway: yes, whatever it is, it's awesome all the same :)

(x-post: heheheh, having gone to the trouble of typing all that, i'm not deleting it now!)

shame they stopped short of doing the expanded remastered thingys before Dazzle Ships, I was really looking forward to it. But I have the lovely finyl version with the color coded time zone map inner sleeve picture

grimly, do you know if they're ver going to continue with the remasters? i'm assuming they didn't sell too well which is why they stopped.

i have the original vinyl too. i used to have it on CD (and before that on tape!) but when i was going through my obsessive OMD completist phase in the early nineties i sold all the CDs and picked up the vinyl from record fairs instead. i would love a remastered CD: i've MP3d the vinyl, but a completely crackle-free version would be bliss itself.

it's probably worth hassling andy mcluskey via www.omd.uk.com: i haven't looked at the site for ages, but i think he's quite good at answering people's questions etc. and although it didn't sell well at the time, surely it's been reclaimed as a classic; the most experimental pop album of the eighties, etc etc. i'd have thought there'd be a few bob for virgin if they released a remaster.

well: about 18 quid if you and i each buy a copy, at least.

Is that the one that has really fast violin playing during each phrase, punctuated by a loud and emphatic "DING!" at the end of each line? I seem to remember Max Miller or Spike Milligan or someone acting this out.

the typewriter action is in "genetic engineering" and is indeed the chucka-chucka-chucka sound i thought (although paul does, er, "play" a telegraph switch in "telegraph" too). for most of the song, martin (stage right, green shirt) plays a keyboard; right at the end (after the slightly embarrassing bit with the notepads), he turns to his left and plays a typewriter. there's a close-up in the last few seconds if you want to zoom there straight away.

i just spent five minutes hunting through some of my vinyl for "dazzle ships" so i can check the instrument list to see if it mentions a typewriter: i can't find it (seriously: it would take me the best part of an hour to search all the records) so if anyone else can check, that'd be appreciated. IIRC they listed *everything* they used on the record, so i'd have thought a typewriter would be on there if they'd used it.

Grimly, the typewriter is indeed listed on the instrumentlist on Dazzle Ships! I've found several sites who mention this in their review, in such similar words that it's probably out of a bio (Lotsofgifts.co.uk: "Any album that lists among the instruments used on it a Sanyo short wave radio,a typewriter and a Texas Instruments "Speak and Spell" machine has to be something different").
Unfortunately, I can't seem to save the video-files you linked to ("forbidden"), but found the album on slsk, which in itself made my home a happier place tonight, hearing after such a long time.

fuck. two minutes.

Sibsi, I most definately should, but it looks like a real hard one to find on the net, let alone a copy of the cd. I don't suppose you can help me out? :-)

Sibsi: Done!

Really though I usually loathe the sound of typewriters in songs

"Gonna Type A Letter" - Billy Fury

Cornelius - Typerite Lesson

Brutum Fulmen has a lot of recordings which use typewriters as the sound source. Search the "Flesh of the Moon" album.