This morning I was listening to the US version of the debut album by Divinyls. It’s a great Australian rock album with New Wave touches and a no-compromise singer in Christina Amphlett. I originally heard Divinyls probably when I saw bits of their early videos on Night Flight from this album. Intrigued, I first found a copy of the German LP, but Chrysalis worldwide had pulled another “Icehouse” gambit in making sure that this Antipodean rock classic would be forever altered outside of its native Australian habitat.
The preface to the story back home is that the 1982 movie “Monkey Grip” featured not only Amphlett in an acting role, but her band performing the full soundtrack EP.
WEA | OZ | EP | 1982 | MONKEY 1
Divinyls: Monkey Grip OST OZ EP [1982]
- Boys In Town
- Only Lonely
- Elsie
- Elsie [Reprise]
- Only You
- Gonna Get You
- Girlfriends
The band’s debut album dropped later that same year in Australia with no tracks carried over from the soundtrack EP.
Chrysalis | OZ | LP | 1982 | RML 53029
Divinyls: Desperate OZ LP [1982]
- Make You Happy
- Science Fiction
- Casual Encounter
- Victoria
- Siren
- Motion
- Ring Me Up
- Take A Chance
- Sahara Rock
- Don’t You Go Walking
Sadly, this version of the album only ever got a vinyl release, back in the day. It never made the leap to CD, but the band’s US/Worldwide edition of the album did, as seen below.
Chrysalis | US | CD | 1983 | VK 41404
Divinyls: Desperate Worldwide Edition/US CD [1983]
- Boys In Town
- Only Lonely
- Science Fiction
- Siren Song
- Elsie
- Only You
- Ring Me Up
- Victoria
- Take A Chance
- I’ll Make You Happy
This was identical to the German LP I first bought and as one can see, the running order was carefully cobbled together between the material spread across the OZ “Desperate” and the “Monkey Grip” OST EP. “Monkey Grip” did make the leap to digital in OZ but I can’t seen any issues of this album on CD apart from the US copy from 1988 and a US “kami” release by Caroline Records in 2008. That means that eight tracks from this period of the band are still lost in the ether. Given that the second and third albums by Divinyls were diminishing returns to me, I’d be interested in seeing a DLX RM that collected all of ’81-’83 period Divinyls. I never heard the fourth Divinyls album, but millions of others did. It contained their unseemly hit, “I Touch Myself.”
– 30 –
Post-Punk Monk 