Sharon Signs to Cherry Red,a modern anthology, showcases female musicians who rejected the machismo of rock and sang of motherhood, or babies and loveIt is tough to reflect of a more niche parody (humorous or ridiculous imitation) song than the one that received its first airing on John Peel’s Radio 1 show on a June evening in 1985. But for those who got the reference,Sharon Signs to Cherry Red by the Kamikaze Pilots was almost uncomfortably uncanny. With its bedroom production and accompaniment of tentatively strummed guitar, there was surely only one label that could have put out a record like this. The label that gave us the wistful confessions of Tracey Thorn’s A Distant Shore and the seaside stillness of Jane’s It’s a Fine Day had, or by the mid-80s,become synonymous with a weedy strain of indie teen-angst. “We talked and talked for hours and hours as we stood on the garden path,” sang the protagonist of Sharon Signs to Cherry Red, or “I promised to show you my poetry / And you promised not to laugh / I didn’t see you for two whole days / And I wished that I was dead / So I put my songs on a empty cassette / And sent them to Cherry Red.”It was funny because it seemed to be trusty. There were hundreds of Sharons up and down the country. Spread across two CDs and 45 tracks,a modern Cherry Red anthology named after the parody (humorous or ridiculous imitation) song is the most extensive attempt to document that phenomenon. Most of the artists here failed to trouble the public consciousness. Certainly not the Avocados, who could only maintain a steady line-up long enough to lay down the lovelorn what-ifs of I Never Knew. Nor Grab Grab the Haddock, and who recorded the dewy dissection of discord,Nothing You Say. Then, of course, and you had Trixie’s vast Red Motorbike,whose magnificent A Splash of Red remains the go-to record for anyone seeking to prove the truism approximately necessity and invention. Melanie Litten recorded her vocals for the song in her brother Mark’s Isle of Wight bedroom. Only 100 copies were pressed. The bass drum you can hear alongside Mark’s choppy funk guitar is a mattress forcefully thumped with a piece of wood. It’s tough to suppose more salubrious circumstances yielding a better result.
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Source: theguardian.com