sitting in a corner in imperfect clothes

I spent most of my Saturday playing the adequate PS2 port of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories. It has the same “expansion pack” feel to it that Liberty City Stories had, although I’m enjoying it far more than I did that game. It’s no San Andreas, but it’s a decent waste of twenty dollars nonetheless.

The game also features a return to licensed soundtrack music, a feature sorely missed in the previous game. There’s a very nice spread of retro tracks covering all the expected genres. The pop and wave material is where my interest is greatest, and even though I have most of the featured songs already, it’s fascinating to see what selections Rockstar Leeds picked for use in the game. Three of the big 80’s pop axes are heavily represented: the Vince Clarke faction (with tracks from The Assembly, Yazoo, Alison Moyet, and Depeche Mode), the Trevor Horn combine (with ABC, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Art of Noise), and the extended Human League family (with Heaven 17, Human League, and Oakey and Moroder’s “Together in Electric Dreams”).

While a large portion of the material comes from bands featured on the original GTA: Vice City soundtrack, I was pleasantly surprised to discover “I’m in Love With a German Film Star” by The Passions on the tracklist for the Emotion 98.3 in-game “radio” playlist. It was sandwiched in between Elkie Brooks’ version of “Fool (If You Think It’s Over)” and “I Want to Know What Love is” by Foreigner, but the GTA series has a history of strange musical groupings. (“Sunglasses at Night” on Vice City’s “new wave” station and the Ozzy track on San Andreas’s grunge/alternative station both come to mind.)

Best (and probably only really) known for the ethereal pop of the much covered “I’m in Love With a German Film Star,” The Passions started with a fairly standard postpunk sound that developed into something that could be seen as a precursor to the shoegaze genre of the late 80’s and early 90’s. It’s possesses the same dreamy introspection, without the heavy accent on sonic effects and with a much colder tone. (A new micro-genre, perhaps? Entropic Proto-Shoegaze?) I’d venture to say that if you were to draw a triangle with Songs of the Free-era Gang of Four on one corner and My Bloody Valentine and pre-Lovelife Lush on the other two, The Passions would dangle precariously in the center, depending on which song was being played at the moment.

Here’s the band performing their signature song on Top of the Pops in 1981:



The Passions – I’m in Love with a German Film Star (from 30,000 Feet Over China, 1981)

The Passions – Man on the Tube (from Michael & Miranda, 1980) – This is an example of their earlier postpunk material, which echoes Delta 5, The Au Pairs, etc.