A Track A Day:
Luxxury

With the current circumstances and the weird, turbulent times all over the globe, we asked our friends to choose a favourite track or an album for these isolated days, and share it with us along with a photo. A track a day keeps the bad vibes away. Stay safe.

Today we welcome our beloved Los Angeles-based producer and edit maestro Luxxury, who always delivers the goods. Known for his disco/house signature sound, Luxxury has also contributed a great, piano-driven sun-drenched cover of Raf’s 1984 classic “Self Control” to LAGASTA’s 10 years anniversarycompilation. For our “A Track A Day” series, he shares with us one of his favourite tunes from the 80s, the Giorgio Moroder-produced hit “Love Missile F1-11” by British band Sigue Sigue Sputnik, released in 1986.

In his own words: “When I was in middle school I used to get all the UK music rags, not just the indie ones like NME and Sounds but also the pop ones like Smash Hits. I remember seeing a cover of the latter with these crazy looking futuristic pseudo-punks with giant pink mohawks and Japanese game show graphics and deciding to buy the 12” without ever hearing it (“Ferris Bueller” hadn’t come out yet). “Love Missile F1-11” is an insane, bouncy Giorgio Moroder produced song with barely sung lyrics about space cowboys and El Salvador.

It was way too fast to properly dance to (194 BPM!) and filled with ripoffs of the original samples of dialog from Terminator and Blade Runner cuz they were too cheap to clear the originals. On the whole it meant nothing but it meant everything to me, because I was the only person in mid-80s San Francisco who understood it (or at least that’s what it felt like). It meant that I was connected to a pop cultural event that was bigger than my stupid school. The energy, the image and my sense of belonging to this tribe, thousands of miles away, trumped the idiocy of the song’s content.

And I loved the fact that the band was completely manufactured: Tony James from Generation X (Billy Idol’s first band) decided to pull a Malcom McLaren but went one step further: not only did he piece together a bunch of good looking kids but they were 100% talent-free, because he knew he could put them in front of the camera and let the backing track do all the work. Sigue Sigue Sputnik were like BTS or Backstreet Boys of the mid 80s, but with a post-punk indie twist. Oh and for the full length album they sold advertising in between songs! (I still think about it to this day when I’m at the store: “…Studio Line from L’Oreal: Fixing gel, strong hold: Be Bold!…”)

Listening to it again now the music actually holds up – the whole project was so ahead of it’s time!”