Altered Images

It is hard to believe that it is 45 years since 80s indie new wave popsters Altered Images burst onto our radios, and out of our televisions on Top of The Pops, with Happy Birthday, a song that went on to become the first serious challenger to 1912's Happy Birthday To You when it came to lighting the candles at children's birthday parties (although, a year earlier, Stevie Wonder had also released 'Happy Birthday', a song written to promote Martin Luther King Day as a public holiday in the US). Indeed, I lost count of how many times I heard Clare Grogan's voice playing from the Tannoy during the chaperoning of my own children to a seemingly endless round of Macdonalds / Burger King / Pizza Hut birthday parties in the years that followed.

In an Outline interview with me back in 2019, Grogan gamely referred to 'Happy Birthday' as 'the song that keeps on giving'. Now, to celebrate the sapphire anniversary of both that song, and the album that it spawned, Clare Grogan is back on tour, and performing the album in its entirety. The Adrian Flux Waterfront in Norwich was party night number two on a sixteen date tour, and she admits to being nervous performing songs that she has not sung live on stage since the 1980s. Not that she needed to worry. The individual members of the four piece backing band probably had not even been born when the album first came out, but as the familiar sounding guitar riffs, the pounding bass lines and the thumping drum beat all kicked in, and the classic ‘Happy Birthday’ intro gave way for the opening line of ‘Love and Kisses’, it was as if Altered Images had never been away. Replicating the sound of those original Steve Severin produced tracks, Crogan’s vocals float over the audience with exactly the same charm and charisma as they did all those years ago, and I remember just how much I loved tracks like ‘Legionnaire’, ‘A Day’s Wait’, and of course ‘Insects’. It is an album that managed to convey its slightly dark and sinister undercurrent with a youthful air of innocence and naivety, and tonight’s re-creation was absolutely spot on.

A brief interlude sees Crogan return to the stage having changed from her opening-half Lycra ensemble into a sparkling party frock for a lively romp through some of the most memorable songs from both ‘Pinky Blue’ and ‘Bite’. We get the big hits – ‘I Could Be Happy’ and  ‘See Those Eyes’; we get the slightly sinister ‘Dead Pop Stars’ (the 1981 non-album track that got pulled just after the shooting of John Lennon); and we get ‘Mascara Streakz’ (the title track off the band’s 2021 comeback album, which still made the Top 30 almost thirty years after ‘Happy Birthday’). We get a cover of Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’ – included as a tribute to The Slits, whose own cover of the song featured on the B-side of ‘Typical Girls’ back in 1979. The set concludes with a further three songs from ‘Bite’, finishing (of course) with ‘Don’t Talk To Me About Love’.

What a night of pop nostalgia and cracking 80’s tunage. What a treat to see Susan from ‘Gregory’s Girl’ and Kristine Kochanski from ‘Red Dwarf’ live and in person, and again fronting one of my favourite post-punk pop bands of all time.