Carsten Bohn's Bandstand, 3 albums, limited time only

Look at that gorgeous artwork for Mother Goose Shoes!  My god, I miss those beautiful records...

He was in the 1975 Dennis Hypothalamus album well known to all prognoscenti, he was in Frumpy which for me was utterly forgettable krautrock of the most generic I-IV-V variety, in an experimental album in 1978, but for the most part his creative energy served him well in the trilogy of albums under the Carsten Bohn Bandstand moniker.

I love this music with all my heart, it's emotional, sexy, funky, and at the same time very interesting, never ordinary, stuffed with great hooks and pretty melodies.  I presume Carsten wrote all the music as it seems he performs not only on percussion but also on piano, guitar, and vocals.  Not sure why he even needed a band.  The late-seventies pop-rock or art rock sound recalls some of David Bowie's Young Americans-era music and luckily he doesn't sing like David with all that exaggerated 'emo' intonation, which was so direly and inexplicably copied later in the eighties and onwards.

The first album as you might expect is just filled to the brim with beautiful, warm songs.  The one called Now What I've always loved dearly, the baritone vocals with the sustained chords on the organ,and acoustic guitar just kill me:





The subsequent track Pretty Formal Normal Instrumental also indicates how progressively fusionary his thinking was at this time:





Track 4 from the middle 1979 album, Do Me No Paradise is such a lovely and sexy song, would've been a shame had it not been a radio hit in the era at least in Germany, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't:





Inevitably by the 1980 final album here with its homage to CB Radio-- does "Smokey and the Bandit" ring a bell?-- the inspiration has slacked somewhat, as per the LPDP (Law of Postseventies Declining Progressiveness), it even starts with the old atari-like video game digital sounds, the first track off the second side is the best I can muster: