History
After touring and promoting in the United States, Divinyls came back to Australia to begin the follow-up to Desperate, with Mark Opitz producing again. They produced three songs including "Don't You Go Walking" and "Motion" but Amphlett and McEntee were not satisfied so they returned to the road, replacing drummer Richard Harvey with J.J. Harris, and wrote more songs. A year later they again tried recording, this time with the producer Gary Langan who was the founding member of the band Art of Noise. He brought a sophisticated, high-tech edge to Divinyls' sound, but a full album failed to get done. Recording stopped once more.
Eventually, Amphlett and McEntee made a journey to Los Angeles, where they asked pop producer Mike Chapman to come back with them to Australia and finish their second album. Chapman ended up producing only two songs: "Pleasure and Pain" (which he also co-wrote with Holly Knight) and "Sleeping Beauty". The album was released almost two years after recording began. It reached No.4 in Australia and No.91 in the US, while "Pleasure and Pain" hit No.11 in Australia and the lower reaches of the Top 100 in the US. Two later singles, "Sleeping Beauty" and "Heart Telegraph", charted moderately in Australia but did little in the US. Despite its Australian success, Chrysalis declared the album a failure.
Read more about this topic: What A Life! (album)
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the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
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asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)