Has any music format fallen further out of favour than music on VHS cassette? Barely, I reckon. Even esoteric things like 8-track cartridges or reel-to-reel tape are immensely more cool than clunky, plastic-y video tapes. Not to mention the fact that videos are played with VCR machines, those terminally unfashionable "mum and dad" bits of kit that nowadays sit neglected in faux-wood cabinets beneath towering, disdainful flat-screen TVs. Oh um. Anyway, never mind all that, yesterday I splashed out 99p on a VHS of Luxuria's Beast Box, may god forgive me. Yes, Luxuria! Howard Devoto's un-missed final outfit before he checked out of the music world in a not-at-all-sulky manner and went to work in a photo library or something. Obviously I'm quite a rich person so I can afford to spend sums like this whenever I feel like it, but why did I buy this near-obsolete VHS monstrosity? Answer: dunno. Or maybe I do. It's the sheer oddness of it. First of all Luxuria: who ever comes across their stuff in secondhand record shops these days? Not me, for sure. And also: a video tape! Not a vaguely-respectable secondhand album being flogged off for £6.99 by a knowing Shoreditch record shop. Or even a CD being cleared for £1.99. A video! Irresistible, in a way. Secondhand daylight indeed ... And just to make the whole thing odder, this apologetically-priced video was one of only a handful that this well-stocked shop had for sale. Music on video really is the poor relation these days.
Smoking kills, but Beast Box sounds better with a fag
Beast Box is from 1990, which, I guess, is somewhere near the high watermark of the mass market success of the VHS format. A few years earlier, I was working in a high street record shop and remember the first few music videos turning up in the stock room - stuff on 4AD or Factory (those IKON releases that almost nobody bought, kino for the cognoscenti ...). I never bothered with them myself. As a record shop assistant I was bunged a few three-minute promo tapes for bands like Talking Heads or the Cure (both in their pop-orientated periods). I just put them on a shelf in my bedroom for a few years then ... chucked 'em out. Anyway, now I've got my fabulous Beast Box video. And it turns out there's a receipt inside the box - from Red Eye Records in Sydney. This video seems to have cost somebody 80 Australian dollars in 2002, with 16 dollars of this post and packing. Maybe someone in the UK ordered it from Australia (or even vice versa)? A not-inexpensive addition to somebody's slightly obsessive post-Magazine music collection? And anyway - what is even on this 47-minute video? Is it a series of specially-made videos for each of the distinctly uninspired songs from the album? Or is it a sort of long concept video for the whole suite of songs? The back of the video box just says "from an original idea by Luxuria". (Hmm.) I guess I'll just have to wait until I get over to my mother's house and hit the now-never-used VCR player. Oh, the excitement. But what was Luxuria all about anyway? Like a lot of people, I was a fan of Magazine - albeit slightly after the fact (to coin a phrase). And Jerky Versions Of The Dream wasn't bad. But the strained melodrama of Luxuria? Not Howard's finest hour. I saw Luxuria live in Manchester once during the Unanswerable Lust period and now remember very little other than the fact that Devoto wore a tux and tail coat (conductor style) and bounded onto the stage with a knowingly camp joke about how he'd "always been the pretentious type". Nice one Howard! All these years later, I can't recall whether they even did a Magazine cover as an encore (though probably they did). Yes, though I've long been an admirer of Devoto's best work (Buzzcocks' sardonic bite, Magazine's fantastically ornate post-punk angst), the light doesn't exactly pour out of Mr Trafford with Luxuria. I've had Beast Box on constant play as I've bashed out this little blog and nothing is really working - bits of The Beast Box Is Dreaming, I've Been Expecting You and the title track Beast Box are ... OK, but that's about it. No, not even a Devoto devotee (ahem) could pretend that Luxuria was up to much. But nevertheless, I have my very own little VHS beast box now. Maybe when I slam that chunky plastic brick into my mother's neglected VCR in a few weeks it'll all make sense. Luxuria on the luxe format. A song from under the plastic cogwheels ...
My favourite album of all time
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