Last night was supervenusfreak’s and my Valentine’s Day date night, since one of our favorite specialty groups, The Puppini Sisters (warning: Flash-heavy, auto-play music…Wikipedia entry as an alternative), were performing at the American Music Theater in town.
We love these women! We were first introduced to them when a friend burned a Christmas CD for us several years ago that included their version of “Jingle Bells”. That intrigued me enough to look them up and discover their website, which I then sent to supervenusfreak. Instant fans, seriously. When we discovered their website, we looked for tour dates, but they are an English group and didn’t have any American dates at the time.
Well, supervenusfreak caught an item in the paper about them coming to Lancaster about two months ago and there was no doubt whatsoever that we were going.
Their music is very retro, in the vein of the Andrews Sisters, but with a modern gloss. They can be pretty risque (a song about infidelity with the refrain “You got the right key, but you stuck it in the wrong keyhole”), and extremely fun. One thing they’ve done in both of their albums is take a modern (or recent (60s, 70s, 80s)) song and “backdate” it…sing it in a retro 40s close harmony style. They’ve done this with “Wuthering Heights” (which I actually like better than Kate Bush’s original), “I Will Survive”, “Heart of Glass” and others.
It was a wonderful show and I was just smiling through the whole thing. For you straight guys…they’re pretty hot, too!
My sister sent me a link to their video for Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy and I was an instant goner. My coworkers still look at me slightly askance when I play Betcha Bottom Dollar at the office, so I chalk it up as a guilty pleasure. I’ve seldom found a more fertile source of WTF reactions than to play (without warning or prelude of any kind) the Puppini Sisters’ swing-flavored cover of I Will Survive.
others, like the Smith’s “Panic” - Panic on the streets of London (doop-wee-dah)
I heard them first on Radio 4’s Loose Ends doing Wuthering Heights and went out first thing next day and bought the CD. This is something that never happens.
Something that I noticed on Googling them is that professional critics all seem to really hate them, what is that about?
Probably because a lot of their stuff IS cover work. Betcha Bottom Dollar didn’t have many (any?) original songs at all. Ruby Woo, on the other hand, is about half original. Plus they don’t fit into any of the music genres that are currently in vogue…most critics seem to dislike things they can’t pigeonhole.
That was it - THANKS!! I’ve taken to skipping the intro part of Wikipedia articles and going right to the outlined bit. So I totally missed that reference.
I’ve got it on i-Tunes, but I’m not as fond of it. I think that the odd twist on the familiar was part of the initial attraction, and Ruby Woo has a lot less to offer in that regard. Not that it’s a *bad *album – it just gets less play in my office.
