Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Vicious Pink

Even in a genre largely populated by ephemeral one-hit wonders, the U.K. duo Vicious Pink were a mere blip on the synthpop radar, playing exactly one live show (at The Ritz in 1984) and launching a couple of spaztastic electrodance classics up the dance club charts before vanishing as quickly as they had appeared.

Made up of keyboardist Brian Moss and statuesque singer Josephine Warden, Vicious Pink remains almost entirely unknown outside of the dance underground because their music was far more explicitly aimed at clubs than concerned with success on the pop charts. To that end, their work tended to have a quirky and more extended feel than mainstream radio would tolerate ("8:15 To Nowhere" would sound perfectly at home on the soundtrack to Ferris Bueller's Day Off, for example). Despite the odds stacked against them, though, Vicious Pink were able to briefly attain a cult-level of success without ever breaking through to bigger things.

Although they had started releasing music professionally as early as 1982, Vicious Pink failed to attract much attention until the release of "Cccan't You See" and its instrumental b-side "8:15 To Nowhere" in 1984. Over the next two years, both sides of this single accrued some substantial airplay in clubs on both sides of the Atlantic as multiple versions were serviced to clubs over the timespan, keeping it "fresh" for far longer than would have been likely under normal circumstances. Also popular, but on a significantly lesser level, was the rather startlingly electroclash attack that was "Fetish." About as likely to garner mainstream airplay as Soft Cell's "Sex Dwarf" or Berlin's "Sex," "Fetish" was a wonderfully trashy dry-humping synth epic that eventually found a rather appropriate promotional platform years later as HBO used it during their popular series Real Sex II.

Only one album was ever released by Vicious Pink ... actually, it was released by their record company in 1986, after the duo had already ceased recording. Vicious Pink, therefore, was merely a collection of their previously released singles more than it was a cohesive "album" in the usual sense of the word.