By Crispin Sartwell

"Blue Angel" by Blue Angel is, for my money, the best rock album ever made. The vocalist is Cyndi Lauper; the year, 1980, the style, rockabilly. Cyndi had yet to record as a solo artist and make it big. Surprisingly, even after she did, there seemed to be no real revival or recognition of the idea or the album.

I got it because I was competing with this guy named Charlie McCallum (?), who was the rock critic for the Washington Star, where I was a copy boy. I was trying to find obscure "new wave" bands to review and I bought Blue Angel at Discount Books and Records down on Wisconsin Avenue. I played it every day for perhaps the next five years. I play it still.

Every song is fucking perfect. Cyndi's singing is unbegoddamnlievable: the only parallel I can think of would be Janis on "Cheap Thrills": intense beyond the saying of it. "Maybe He'll Know," which I just listened to again, is both a summary of and advance in the rock form. The songwriting and playing is simple, but deep as the fucking ocean.

Never has simplicity and intelligence combined to such perfection. Blue Angel understood the essence of the form and put it down beneath one of the most transcendent voices in human history.

I interviewed Cyndi in England a couple of years later for Melody Maker. She was in a day of an interview every half hour, you know? But she was the sweetest person, with that Brooklyn accent thick as a brick, and when I mentioned that I loved Blue Angel she actually shooed away the makeup dude and just beamed. And beamed.

Anyway, most of the time pop does actually grab the stuff it should, bizarrely, or at least it once did. Billie Holiday or James Brown: they didn't manage to labor in obscurity. But the world has left Blue Angel unheard. Fuck me, babies.