To be in England in the summertime with my love

Whoops, just realized I scheduled this post for 7 pm rather than am.

For the next few weeks in June and early July, the Crusty Curmudgeon is celebrating, as I often do, the Summer of Nostalgia: reliving my fleeting youth with the music I listened to in high school and thereabouts. For this week's theme, I decided to go with instrumental dance or electronic singles. With synthesizers, samplers, sequencers, and MIDI becoming commonplace, there were a fair number of such tracks, as you can well understand.

Since I closed off last week with a Prince cover by The Art of Noise, it seemed fitting to kick off this week with their second single and the one that brought them to prominence: "Close (To the Edit)." The name is apparently a pun on the Yes album Close to the Edge, and the track itself samples the drum sounds of a later Yes single, "Leave It" (not coincidentally, both the Art of Noise and Yes singles were produced by Trevor Horn).

This video was one of the weirdest things I had ever seen when I first saw it aired on TV (anyone in Canada remember Video Hits with Samantha Taylor? She loved it). Needless to say I loved it, and it's still my favorite music video. It was not without controversy: it was banned in New Zealand for supposedly promoting violence against children, a clearly false accusation as the little girl in punk clothing is clearly encouraging the destruction of the musical instruments.