ROUGH TRADE: Crimes of Passion 7″ PROMO 1985. Special promotional case, 4 marvellous songs! Check videos. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

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Crimes of Passion EP – promo – 7″ – FM
4 track EP:
Crimes of Passion / All Touch / Grade B Movie / High School Confidential

A1 Crimes Of Passion
A2 All Touch ROUGH TRADE
B1 Grade B Movie ROUGH TRADE
B2 High School Confidential

33.3rpm. Housed in die cut company sleeve.

The two B side titles play in reverse order from that listed on the label, i.e. “High School Confidential” (which is the original version rather than the censored-for-radio one) before “Grade B Movie”.

Rough Trade was a Canadian rock band in the 1970s and 1980s, centred on singer Carole Pope and multi-instrumentalist Kevan Staples. The band was noted for their provocative lyrics and stage antics; singer Pope often performed in bondage attire, and their 1981 hit “High School Confidential” was one of the first explicitly lesbian-themed Top 40 hits in the world

“High School Confidential” is a song by Canadian band Rough Trade, from their 1980 album Avoid Freud. The bands breakthrough Top 40 hit in Canada, it remains their most famous song.
The songs producer was Gene Martynec, who won the Juno Award for Producer of the Year for his work on “High School Confidential”.
It was written by the bands main songwriting team, Carole Pope and Kevan Staples. Some references incorrectly credit Jerry Lee Lewis and Ron Hargrave as the songwriters, but the Rough Trade song is not a cover of the Jerry Lee Lewis song of the same name.
Although the song uses the title of the 1958 film High School Confidential, as well as references which suggest that the song is set in a similar time frame, the lyrics do not strongly resemble the films drug-related plot. Instead, the songs narrator is a student observing a sexy female classmate, a “cool blonde scheming bitch” whose activities suggest that she may be having sexual relations with adult men, including the high school principal. The narrator compares the classmate to sex symbols of the era, including Mamie Van Doren, Anita Ekberg and Dagmar, and reveals her own unrequited lust for her: in one of the most famous lyrics from the song, Pope sings “It makes me cream my jeans when she comes my way”.
The lyrics never explicitly state the narrators own sex, so they may be read either as Pope speaking from a male perspective, or as a reference to lesbianism. In a 2000 interview with Eye Weekly, Pope confirmed that while she intended the lyric from her own perspective as a lesbian, the ambiguity was intentional: “The general public didn’t get that I was gay if you were gay you did and when I wrote love songs, I wanted them to be interpreted however. The thing is, I really, really love men straight men are very sexy as long as, you know, they don’t try and I think that comes across in my songs. Rock ‘n’ roll is about desire and passion, and I’m singing to both sexes.”

Popular impact:
At the time of its release, it was one of the most sexually explicit songs ever to reach the Canadian pop charts, and despite the sexual ambiguity, the first with such strong lesbian overtones.
Although controversial, the song was a Top 20 hit, peaking at #12 nationwide on the RPM singles chart (#1 on their CANCON Chart) on June 20, 1981 and at #8 on the CHUM Chart in Toronto on May 30 of the same year. However, some radio stations refused to play the song, and others played a censored version with some of the most controversial lyrics removed. CHUM-FM paid for the band to record a cleaned-up version that avoided the line, “She makes me cream my jeans when she comes my way.” (The bands subsequent hit “Crimes of Passion”, which included an explicit verse about a gay male couple, also faced similar controversy.)
k.d. lang was apparently inspired by seeing the band perform the number on the televised Juno Awards presentation that year, “seeing [Carole] set a tone for me that I could be out, no question”. Merrill Nisker (now known by her stage name “Peaches”) covered the song on her 1995 album Fancypants Hoodlum.
In 2004, the band Lesbians on Ecstasy released “The Pleasure Principal”, a response song in which the high schools principal calls Pope to the office to discuss Popes obsession with her classmate.
In 2005, “High School Confidential” was named the 38th greatest Canadian song of all time on the CBC Radio One series 50 Tracks: The Canadian Version.

Queer as Folk:
In 2000, Pope recorded a new version of “High School Confidential” for the television series Queer as Folk, with the lyrics altered to reflect a gay male perspective: “Hes a cool blond scheming trick…Hes a combination Tom Cruise-Zack O’Toole”. (Zack O’Toole was a fictional porn star in QAF, played by Matthew G. Taylor.) This version appears on the shows first season soundtrack album.


Similar to Platinum Blonde, Harlequin, and Toronto.

 

Additional information

Weight 0.09 kg

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