Song of the Week: Some Kinda Fun

My memories of high school concerts—which I feel is unreliable—includes Teenage Head, and I think—but am not certain—that I had the single “Let’s Shake.” I am on much firmer ground with “Some Kinda Fun.”

I have to give props to my sister who was a big inspiration on my early musical interests. That “Let’s Shake” single may have been hers. She had pretty eclectic tastes, but they were informed by the pretty eclectic Top 40 radio of the day. The copy of The Monks’ “Bad Habits” album that saw regular rotation on the turntable in the basement was completely hers.

However it was that I stumbled on Teenage Head, it’s really interesting going back and listening to their first few albums. It’s a scene that I was too young to be part of and only connected with at a distance, but it’s a fascinating snapshot of the punk and post-punk landscape in the backwater of the Toronto-London-Hamilton triangle of Ontario.

I can hear rockabilly and straight-ahead rock (a la Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers) in a lot of the Teenage Head’s songs. There’s a kind of spectrum in each of their first three albums that I would imagine reflects a wide-range of influences that I was too young to fully grasp but had been exposed to from AM radio. I definitely don’t think they would have had the same sound without the arrival of punk, so I’d say this is definitely part of my post-punk collection.