My mind describes them to me
Our Daughters Wedding — Lawnchairs
(Design Records 45, 1980)
Our Daughters Wedding (for some reason, they always omitted the apostrophe) were a synth-pop trio from San Francisco who managed one EP and one full-length album on EMI America Records in the first flush of the synth-pop boom. “Lawnchairs” was their one hit, and this pre-major label 45 is the definitive version. The major-label version is okay, but it lacks the tightly-wound nervousness of this take.
What was the deal with EMI America Records, anyway? EMI was one of those label groups that was absolutely a mess during the ’80s. There was Capitol, which was still the flagship label in America, but there were United Artists and Liberty, former indies that EMI had long since absorbed, which had bands like the Buzzcocks and the Vapors. (I seem to recall that the first Vapors album was on UA and the second was on Liberty, in the US at least.) And Harvest, the progressive rock imprint, was still sort of around because Duran Duran and Thomas Dolby were both signed to Harvest in the States before their albums were reissued on Capitol. And then there was this other sort of catch-all sublabel called EMI America, which as far as I could tell had no particular identity or aesthetic, aside from having a remarkably ugly logo, simply the then-current blocky EMI logo with a blah “America” stripped underneath. (Actually, am I misremembering this, or did EMI America later on take over the Statue of Liberty logo after Liberty Records was shut down?) On the one side, EMI America was like the adult contemporary imprint, because they had Sheena Easton and Kim Carnes and Cliff Fucking Richard, and on the other, they were the rawk label, because they had J. Geils and George Thorogood and Little Steven, and then on the third hand, they were totally the new wave label, because they had Kim Wilde and Kajagoogoo and Naked Eyes and Talk Talk and the Stray Cats and Kate Bush and David Bowie and the Pet Shop Boys. I guess what I’m saying is, if you’re going to have multiple imprints under the EMI umbrella, why not sit down and say, “Okay, United Artists: you’ve got the adult contemporary and easy listening stuff. Liberty: you’re the AOR label. Harvest: you’re gonna do like Virgin Records did and transform from being a progressive rock label to a new wave label.” Why start a new catch-all label that does them all, but not very well? And for that matter, why not put them all on Capitol, which at the time was still a perfectly viable record label with a lot of cred? And don’t even get me started on that misbegotten EMI Manhattan thing later, where they took the EMI America roster and the soul/R&B label Manhattan Records and tried to make one big label out of it all.
And this has been another edition of “Jeez, Stewart’s a geek.”
–Stewart Mason
