The Whole Sire Thing
You might not know Seymour Stein by name, but you know his label. Sire Records in the late seventies was punk and power pop and new wave all at once — not because Stein was chasing trends, but because he just kept signing bands he believed in. The Ramones. The Undertones. Talking Heads. The Rezillos. The Searchers, somehow. What follows is ten songs from that run. Some you’ll recognize. Some you won’t. All of them ended up on the same label because one guy had a very good ear.
-
01
Ramones — “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend”
Everyone starts with “Blitzkrieg Bop.” That’s fine. But this is the one that tells you what the Ramones were actually about — bubblegum with the treble cranked all the way up and the sentimentality completely intact. Tommy wrote it. It’s two minutes of pure crushed-out pop, and it sits on the same debut album as “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.” That combination is the whole thing.
▶ Watch on YouTube -
02
Flamin’ Groovies — “Yes It’s True”
Everyone talks about “Shake Some Action” — and it’s great, we used it in an earlier post — but the Groovies put ten good songs on that album and most of them never get mentioned. “Yes It’s True” is one of them. Chris Wilson on vocals, Cyril Jordan doing what Cyril Jordan does, the whole thing produced by Dave Edmunds so it sounds like it was recorded in 1966. Sire signing the Flamin’ Groovies is probably the first sign that this label was going to be different.
▶ Watch on YouTube -
03
The Paley Brothers — “Come On Let’s Go”
Andy and Jonathan Paley recorded their self-titled album for Sire with Earle Mankey producing — one of the most underheard power pop records of the decade. This one’s a Ritchie Valens cover they cut with the Ramones for the Rock ‘N’ Roll High School soundtrack, both bands on the same label, sharing a microphone. The Paleys mostly slipped through the cracks. This song didn’t. It’s a rocket.
▶ Watch on YouTube -
04
The Rezillos — “Destination Venus”
Sire flew the Rezillos to New York and put them in Tony Bongiovi’s Power Station studio, which is either the most obvious or least obvious thing you could do with a band this cartoonish. It worked. Can’t Stand the Rezillos sounds enormous, and “Destination Venus” is its peak — Fay Fife delivering the whole thing like she’s simultaneously hosting a kids’ TV show and trying to start a fight. There is genuinely nothing else like this.
▶ Watch on YouTube -
05
The Undertones — “Get Over You”
Their second single. Everyone always goes to “Teenage Kicks,” which is correct, but this one hit differently. There’s something more urgent about it, more tangled — Feargal Sharkey sounds genuinely confused about whether he wants to get over the girl or not. It peaked at #57 in the UK and then got mostly forgotten, which is exactly the kind of injustice this blog exists to document.
▶ Watch on YouTube -
06
The Searchers — “Hearts in Her Eyes”
Here’s the part most people don’t know: this song was written by Will Birch and John Wicks of The Records, who handed it to the Searchers before recording it themselves. The Searchers — who had their hits in 1964 — signed to Sire in 1979 and made a straight-up power pop record that sounds completely at home on this list. Seymour Stein signing the Searchers in 1979 is either a crazy move or the most logical thing in the world, depending on how you look at it.
▶ Watch on YouTube -
07
Boomtown Rats — “Like Clockwork”
Before “I Don’t Like Mondays,” before Live Aid, before Bob Geldof became whatever Bob Geldof became — this. Their debut single, tight and slightly sneering, pub rock with better shoes. It went top ten in Ireland and the UK and then got buried under the weight of everything that came after. Worth dusting off. It holds up.
▶ Watch on YouTube -
08
Dead Boys — “Ain’t Nothin’ To Do”
Their second album, We Have Come for Your Children, produced by Felix Pappalardi — the Mountain guy — which is a combination that shouldn’t work and kind of doesn’t, and somehow that makes it better. Stiv Bators sounds genuinely at the end of his rope here. Where the first album felt like a statement, this one feels like the day after. Cleveland to CBGB to Sire to this. That’s a whole story in one song.
▶ Watch on YouTube -
09
Tuff Darts — “All for the Love of Rock and Roll”
The Tuff Darts wrote this and were playing it live in 1976 before they had a record deal. Ram Jam — the “Black Betty” guys — heard it and put out their own version in 1977, which came out first on record. So Ram Jam technically beat them to it on vinyl. None of that matters. This is the right version — rawer, more desperate, from the CBGB floor up. Robert Gordon sang for the Darts before going solo. Everything about this band is a footnote that deserves to be a chapter.
▶ Watch on YouTube -
10
Talking Heads — “I’m Not in Love”
From More Songs About Buildings and Food, Brian Eno producing. You can hear it — the arrangement is cooler, more skeletal, a little alienated. Tina Weymouth’s bass runs the whole thing, Jerry Harrison’s guitar is barely there, and David Byrne singing about not being in love sounds like a man trying to convince himself of something he already knows isn’t true. It’s Talking Heads at their most controlled and their most uneasy at the same time. A good place to end.
▶ Watch on YouTube