Kate Fagan – I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool // Waiting For The Crisis (Disturbed Records) 1980. Not to be confused with a current folk singer of the same name, Kate Fagan released this awesome 7inch in 1980 in Chicago. At the time she was a backup singer for the local ska band Heavy Manners but I guess she just wasn’t able to fully realize her promise in that capacity. So she recorded these two tracks of wacky, new wave goodness and then like so many other things on this site, she just faded into obscurity. The A Side of this doesnt sound too different from New Wave pop of the era like Josie Cotton or The Flirts. It sounds like the kind of music that may have been on the Valley Girl soundtrack or something. The B-Side is a little weirder and I personally like it even more. The lyrics are oddly still relevant today and Kate’s deadpan midwestern delivery just makes it all the more enjoyable. There is a whole world of cool one-off Chicago singles and bands from before the advent of the mid-80s Chicago sound like Algebra Suicide or Immune System that are all but forgotten today. Kate belongs with that group. If you can listen to this 7inch without cracking a grin, I feel sorry for you.
A Very Special Story- Salut les zinzins September 8, 2010En ce moment quand je suis épuisée, (ce qui est assez fréquent puisque j’ai un nouveau travail qui consiste à dire « taisez vous » 100 fois par jour) en rentrant chez moi je regarde des clips RELAX de zinzins potentiels. 1/ … Continuer la lecture → […]admin
- Salut les zinzins September 8, 2010
- Acute Records
- VIVA RADIO-TOO MANY SHOWS TO NAME August 11, 2010Yet another Viva-Radio Pyjamarama show catch-up. Seems like I’ve got 8 more shows, starting with three silly ones where I chose a word and picked all songs with that word in the title, then a bunch more awesome shows. Some of these show up in the Pyjamarama archives, some will stream live again during my usual […]Dan
- VIVA RADIO-TOO MANY SHOWS TO NAME August 11, 2010
- KBD Records
- Voodoo Idols – S/T E.P. 7″ September 5, 2010First of two excellent 7inches by Voodoo Idols from Tampa/Florida. Second one has the better known We dig Nixon etched into the grooves. Nixon is great but I think Do the Kirk here is one inch(the size of my supermans cock) better. Rough and stomping with a great bass sound, pretty sax and a singer […]Ted Frat
- Voodoo Idols – S/T E.P. 7″ September 5, 2010
- Lexicon Devil
- Untitled August 29, 2010TOUCH AND GO: THE COMPLETE HARDCORE PUNK 'ZINE '79-'83 (547 pages; Bazillion Points/2010)This has been waaay too long in coming. Touch and Go - the fanzine - had already reached mythological status by the time the 1990s rolled into gear. By last year, I figured that the periodical once known as Touch and Go was a myth. In all my years of being […]Dave
- Untitled August 29, 2010
- Noise Pollution Records
- Trophy Wives release digital live album September 9, 2010Trophy Wives' set at their seven inch release show a couple weeks back was recorded for posterity. The band liked it so much they have made it a live album available for digital download at their bandcamp page. It's 17 songs for $5. […]NOISE POLLUTION
- Trophy Wives release digital live album September 9, 2010
- One Base on an Overthrow
- These Cookie Crumbs Are Making Me Itch September 6, 2010For whatever reason, I still have the original Beastie Boys "Cooky Puss" 12-inch that was released on Ratcage (the same label that put out "Victim In Pain"), which I first bought back in the mid-80's. I used to own almost all of the early Beastie Boys stuff back then, which put all together would probably worth about 10 bucks now: […]Brushback
- These Cookie Crumbs Are Making Me Itch September 6, 2010
- Pig State Recon
- Caught In My Eye September 4, 2010THE GERMS – Live at The Starwood, Dec. 3, 1980 (Rhino Handmade, 2010) There was always something incredibly severe about the way THE GERMS sounded, playing together. Pat’s guitar, so trebly and screee-producing, took an unholy joy cutting broken shards of riffs into Lorna’s dumpy bass runs and Don’s frequent rhythmic change-ups. Darby’s animalistic howl [... […]mrowster
- Caught In My Eye September 4, 2010
- Small Takeover
- Sound from down unda September 8, 2010Here's some New Zealand rap from Christchurch duo Dark Tower. On this 1995 Ep, these guys didn't rap about how hard they were or how many bitches they went through. However like all hip-hop there is an American influence but instead these sons of the south rap about blackberry picking and coming from a rural background. The jam packed kiwi geograph […]Chris
- Sound from down unda September 8, 2010
- Son of Eet U Smakelijk
- THIS IS ROTTERDAM, NOT THE MISSISSIPPI September 5, 2010OK, so tell me which town the following bands are from: 10CC, Barclay James Harvest, Sad Cafe. Any idea? Now tell me which town these bands are from: Joy Division, Buzzcocks, Fall. Got it in a micro-second?In the immediate pre-punk era, there was no way of telling where a certain band was from; all local peculiarities were wiped out in favour of a generic Tr […]Niels
- THIS IS ROTTERDAM, NOT THE MISSISSIPPI September 5, 2010
i never got into the new wave/art punk thing. to me punk isn’t art. thanks but this doesn’t do to much for me.
What a fantastic single – thanks so much for this one!
Awesome cover too – I don’t s’pose you’ve got a bigger scan of it? Y’know, just for my pointless archive of cool stuff in jpg form…
First heard of this on Fatty Jubbo’s blog, where we learn that she sometimes still plays with Heavy Manners:
http://cakeandpolka.blogspot.com/2006/05/kate-fagan.html#comments
Is this an edited version…the version i had mentioned in the lyrics….”I dont shop at Wax Trax…..”…….was there two versions put out???
@Chicago new wave – I am suprised to hear there may be multiple versions of this track pressed. Weird.
I dig it. Also, Josie Cotton is a fan of The 75s. Seriously.
hi joe,
long time ago since the last comment i left you in this your amazing blog. recently i was a little bit ‘disconnected’ from LDME, but i see you keep posting top notch stuff – kudos for that. by the way, it is really nice to see the kate fagan single posted in your blog!
as for punk not being considered art, i would like to say i do believe just the opposite. to me, punk is ART in capital letters: only to think of people playing in their garages/bedrooms/basements making noises while not caring about if they are enough experienced to play an instrument, while having fun, singing about anything they really want to, and trying to find a way of expressing themselves through complete freedom, that is, to me, the meaning of art. plus the power this has on people should not be underestimated. but it’s just my opinion…
keep doing so ace blog.
all the best,
edu
punk for me is about destruction of music. it’s a form of antimusic just like grindcore was and noisecore (real noisecore not the cybergrind shit) is. okay maybe that is art. but i don’t like new wave. i like old punk and hc.
okay now that i’ve listened to it again it’s pretty good. i was wrong.
It is on the same label as the great MEATY BUYS 7″ and the many C*NTS records (which is that bands´own label,I guess).
What a great find. I never knew Kate did anything outside of Heavy Manners. I’m really impressed with this. Thanks so much!!
Your website is GREAT! Just added it to my blogroll….
There are 2 versions of the single with different cover art. Kate Fagan was not a back up singer, she was the lead singer. She currently is living in a small town in Indiana and has on several occasions played with her other band mates as the Heavy Manners.
I don’t want to be to cool was a great 45. I still smile to myself when I think of some of the lyrics-I don’t go to Neo, I don’t go to Park West, I don’t smoke the good stuff, I’m just not impressed. I smile because after becoming the primary singer of Heavy Manners she turned heads in all of these clubs whenever we played them ….. and she could have smoked all the good stuff she wanted if she wanted to.