Zippy T Doodar

Hello, I cannot comment on that as I only had a quick look through the book and bought the Mark Radcliffe book instead as that was ‘signed by the author’. I think I will wait to see if there is a signed copy of “17” in another branch of Waterstone’s, as when I met Drummond at his ‘film premiere’ [of burning the money] he would only sign £20 notes and being a student I needed that money for ‘50p a pint’ night. On the other hand, Gimpo did sign my rare promo copy of “America: What Time Is Love” and even though he is not known to music fans like Mark Manning will be [as Zodiac Mindwarp], at least Gimpo is known as a KLF-associate by obsessive fans of the band. Loz

Hello I have just been reading the previous discussion and even though the following line of questioning will not be relevant to the chart posted at the beginning, I think it might be best to ask now whilst you are discussing timeframes in relation to the ‘period of interest’. Does anybody else know of a website called “Remember The Eighties”? I think that there might be a few people here who could be frequent users of the site or may have bought their book. If you have seen the site in question then you will know that it is all about artists of the 1980s, but rather than focusing just on the output of the 1980s, there will also be updates about their current tours and recording projects. Now Howard Jones has just released a new album and it is supposed to be very good, getting ‘4 stars out of 5’ in one review that I saw. Even so, I doubt that most of the teenagers using this site would be interested in Howard Jones [though some of the older students may have had a dance to “New Song” whilst being drunk over the last few weeks] and therefore I was wondering, if a new album by an artist such as Jones needed to be discussed, would it be best to do so in here, even though it would only have been recorded and released recently? Loz

Hello, I do not know if anyone else has perused the latest issue of the Radio Times, but someone here might be interested in a show, that is to be broadcast by Channel 4 next week. The show is all about the song “Blame It On The Boogie”, which was [in]famously recorded by S/A/W trio Big Fun and written by a gentleman called Michael Jackson. However, this ‘Michael Jackson’ was not the one who had a massive hit with “Blame It On The Boogie” when he covered the song with his brothers, nor was he the guy who used to run BBC Two, but another songwriter who released a number of records under the name Mick Jackson. Even though I doubt the documentary will be made to the standards of BBC Four’s Latin Music, Skippy and Legends shows [as it will be most likely shot by a presenter-director on a small digital camcorder], I think it may still be worth a viewing. If not, then the coincidence of the artist and writer’s names being the same will still be a great bit of pub trivia to remember. Loz

I do not think that The Teardrop Explodes would only be remembered for “Reward”, in fact when I read their name, the first song that came to mind was “Treason”. I do not know why this was but I think it might have been the last song of theirs that was played on the radio recently. “World Shut Your Mouth” is also a great song and as a child I used to pretend I was ‘St. Julian’, as I thought Cope was very cool especially when he clung on to that microphone stand of his. “Trampoline” was good song too but I think my favourite single of his has to be “Charlotte Anne”. “Charlotte Anne” was another song I saw recently, alongside all those hits by The Christians, whilst watching my Chart Show video from the late 1980s. It was a good job that Cope’s video compilation [“Copeulation”] got re-issued onto DVD a few years ago, as half of “Charlotte Anne” was missing when the video tape re-round itself as I had pressed stop at the end of the song. In those days my father would tell me off if I used the ‘pause’ facility for a long time during advertisement breaks. He would tell me that I would damage the ‘heads’ on the machine and as it was his video recorder I had to comply. Once I got my own VCR I would always use the pause facility and I am guessing that the video recorder that I was bought in the early 1990s would probably work better now than some of the hard disc machines I have bought in the last few years, even with a decade of ITV Chart Shows recorded on my old VCR. In regards to this list, I think “World Shut Your Mouth” would be the most obvious single that Absolute would play during their 80s Hour, though critically, I doubt that any albums from this mid 1980s period would feature in any magazine’s ‘Essential Cope’ list. Unlike his early 1990s work I would say that these albums would mainly end up in the ‘Good’ or ‘Worth A Try’ sections. Over the weekend I was in Waterstone’s, looking for a book to buy that would be portable enough to take with me on the train into work, when I picked up the Bill Drummond book called “17”. I opened the book randomly at a section called ‘Pete Waterman – The Genius’ which mostly documented the time when Youth and Jimmy Caulty’s band Brilliant recorded their album with S/A/W for release on Food Records [some interesting opinions that you may like to read by Drummond about The Specials here as well]. Now I mention this here because this Brilliant album, which I still own on vinyl, was one of the first albums released by Food Records, a label set up by former Teardrop Explodes man David Balfe. I had forgotten about Food Records links to Liverpool, just regarding it as EMI’s Britpop label, which was perhaps run by people who frequented The Good Mixer in Camden a lot. I also forgot how important a figure Drummond was in the Liverpool music scene and how he was involved with bands such as Echo and The Bunnymen, before he was part of The KLF. Even though in the end I bought a book by Mark Radcliffe, I would like to continue with discussing about various figures in the Liverpool music scene in regards to this ‘One Song Wonder’ list. I think another person perhaps suited to this discussion would be Pete Wylie, who will be mostly remembered for his hit single “Sinful”. Obviously I think people on this site will know other songs by him or his bands, but then again, it could be the case that all the various amendments he has done to his ‘Wah!’ band name have just confused a lot of people who are just casual fans of 1980s music. I doubt the majority of people will have bothered to remember whether he was in ‘The Mighty Wah!’ or ‘Wah! The Mongrel’, though I think he will be easily remembered for “Sinful”, especially since it was a hit a couple of times in the 1980s and 1990s. “Sinful” was also another important song from my childhood ‘playtime’. When I was little, my friends and I used to make up our own ‘groups’ and ‘write’ our own songs. Most of the time, these songs were actually based on the tunes of other hits, though at the time we did not realise it. Whereas one of the songs used the verses of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Relax” and the chorus of Yazoo’s “Don’t Go”, another co-opted the whole of Pete Wylie’s “Sinful” with the lyrics of the chorus changed to something else. It was a good job that we were children who did not understand the workings of copyright law, as if we were older and had recorded these songs no doubt we would be in court now, signing away our royalties just like Colin Hay and the rest of Men At Work. By the way, before I move off the subject of Wylie, does anyone know what the phrase “Fourelevenfortyfour” means? Is the title of the song a football reference or is it a meaning that only people from Liverpool would know? As this is quite an obscure reference to a Pete Wylie single that charted outside the Top 75 in 1988, I would not think it would be the kind of question that would crop up normally in a pub’s pop quiz or be asked as part of Ken Bruce’s ‘Popmaster’. I do not know if anybody here regularly listens to ‘Popmaster’ or has actually been a contestant, but I would guess most people on here would be high scorers, depending on what questions have been selected for the bonus record round. Generally I only listen to the show in the car where I cannot receive 6music and this is quite infrequent as I am normally in work at that time in the morning. As I was not in work on a number of days last week, I happened to hear a show where a contestant was being quizzed on a clip of Let Loose. Now I would have guessed that the contestant would have known Let Loose as the song was a big pop hit in the mid 1990s and perhaps would be the only song remembered by that band. However, the contestant failed to give the answer correctly, guessing that it was in fact [‘Absolute Classic Rock’ types] REO Speedwagon. This surprised me as if any wrong answer was to be given I would have expected it to be 2wo Third3 or Chesney Hawkes, the former as it was a boyband of the same era, the latter because Nik Kershaw was also involved at some point with Let Loose as well [i think he wrote “Seventeen” with Richie Wermaling]. Not only that, but the other day, somebody else failed to identify Phil Collins from a clip of his “Dance Into The Light” single. This is probably more surprising as even though it was not one of his biggest hits I would have said that Collins still has quite a distinctive voice. Now where this relates to the previous discussion, as obviously Collins has had many other hits that people can remember, is actually in relation to another gentleman with the surname Collins, this time Edwyn Collins of Orange Juice fame. Now earlier in this discussion I read that that Edwyn Collins would be only remembered for one solo hit and for one hit with Orange Juice, though as the examples from ‘Popmaster’ have shown it is hard to know if he will be actually remembered at all [though certain ‘indie’ fans, perhaps those who think Morrissey is far too mainstream, will probably know a song like “Blue Boy” which I have heard quite a few times on the radio, on shows such as Jarvis Cocker’s]. I would say that of the two Collins, Edwyn has got the more distinctive voice but casual pub quiz players [those playing for fun, not those who have spent hours revising all the answers from the Hit Singles Book] would be more likely to distinguish between Phil solo and Genesis, rather than Edwyn solo and Orange Juice. I can imagine Edwyn Collins being given as the answer to a ‘mystery clip round’ when “Rip It Up” is played and I guess most of the time the quizmaster will not be too pedantic, at least giving any team half a point when the quiz is played just for fun. Now, I have a number of albums by Edwyn Collins and have recently seen him play live too [it was post-stroke and from his performance I think he should be an inspiration to us all], so I think I would probably be able to distinguish between his solo and group recordings if it came up in the quiz. Generally, when my friends and I were quizzed on 1980s music we did alright, though I remember once when I was a student my team was caught out by an overly pedantic quizmaster. He would not allow our answer to a ‘mystery clip round’, a round that nobody had won outright for more than a year. This time we were a team that had come close to guessing all the clips correctly and actually we knew what all the songs were called, that were being played. The only problem was that with one answer we had correctly identified the singer but put him down as part of his rock group, not as a solo artist and therefore the quizmaster would not accept our answer. Whereas today in my local pub this would not matter, as the winnings would only be a few pints, back in my student days the prize for getting all the artists in the mystery clip round correct was £150. That was a lot of money in those days, especially for students like we were, who would normally go out midweek and have a drunken night out for only £10 [which would equal be to 20 pints at student night prices]. It has been many years since I last went to a student nightclub and even though I doubt the prices will still be set at 50p, I am guessing the music will still largely be the same, as in ten years of frequenting those kinds of student indie nights the music policy always remained very similar, but with whatever was the more modern equivalent of The Mock Turtles, being played in later years instead of “Can You Dig It”. Loz

I did not know that “Torn” was covered in the Danish language. Now that is a concept that I can not imagine being done and I can not see how it could work, though having not heard the record, I would not like to dismiss this recording completely. I briefly went out with a Dane a few years back [think of Finlay Roberts more than Whigfield] and from experience, I do not think that you could ever call Danish a ‘language of love’. I do not think that Danish would ever be a language that could improve the recording of a song if the record you were listing to was not the English version. I would not say that is true for all languages, in the case of “Der Kommissar” by Falco, I think the original German version should have been better known in English speaking territories, though I would not want it to be the only song he would be remembered for. When After The Fire recorded the song into English they got a big American hit, but I thought that something got ‘lost in translation’ as it was not as good as the original version. As a child, I think that I would have had not as much fun singing “Rock Me Amadeus” if I knew what Falco was actually singing about. I remember trying to imitate those German lyrics, as I guess most children would have done at the time, with random harsh sounding ‘noises’, as this is what the German language sounded like to me. To this day I do not know what Falco was actually singing about though I think I heard something in the lyrics about there being “no plastic money anymore”. Maybe the theme of the song was quite ‘apocalyptic’, maybe it was just innuendo, though I doubt that it was just a song about the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Even though I have never seen a translation of “Rock Me Amadeus”, I remember that Smash Hits once translated the lyrics to “Joe Le Taxi” by Vanessa Paradis. Once it was translated into “Joe The Taxi”, the appeal of the song was slightly spoiled for me, as the original hit did not seem that it could be simply about a French taxi driver. As the song featured many other exotic words alongside all the French, I thought that maybe Joe was not just a regular taxi driver, but a driver more like a chauffeur, transporting ‘glam’ film stars to the festival in Cannes or taking fabulous creatures on a ‘fantastic voyage’ across Northern Africa [on the other hand, I do not recall Smash Hits ever translating “Voyage Voyage” by Desireless, and as I do not know what that is about, maybe that song is about doing this]. Whereas I know and like many songs in the German and French languages, I do not think I would be able to tell you the title of a single Danish language hit. I am not sure if any of the Danish acts that I know well would actually sing in their own language, but out of all of the ones that I have heard maybe the ‘Efferrklang’ group would, though I suppose they could be the type of band who would probably make up their own language in a Sigur Ros type of way [‘Efferrklang’ were one of Radcliffe & Maconie’s Record Of The Week picks a few weeks ago with a record that sounds a bit like Coldplay, but are supposed to be more ‘avant-garde’ than this record would make you believe]. It is quite funny that I am talking about Danish artists to you today as on my way back to work from lunch, a clothes shop was playing Brother Brown’s “Under The Water” on their in-store system. You may remember this hit record from the lyrics about growing a mermaid’s tale and from the shuffling house music beat. It was this rhythm that caught my attention, even though for a moment I thought that the store was actually playing another old record called “Ride The Rocket” by Lithium & Sonya Madan [Echobelly]. Even though these records were Top 40 hits, I am guessing that most people would regard them as being quite obscure, that is unless there are some devoted Echobelly fans on the site which could be a possibility. I think Marie Frank, the singer of that Brother Brown track, may have reverted to singing in Danish as her British album career sunk without trace. I bought her album for about 50p in a second hand shop but can not remember anything about it, apart from the ‘bonus’ track, the aforementioned hit “Under The Water”. I think she was trying to be a sensitive singer-songwriter and this is why she was credited as Frankee on the hit, to distinguish the dance music collaborations from her normal career. Perhaps in her solo career she was supposed to be like a Danish Dido, but as it was a long time ago I would not know, at least “Under The Water” still sounds great and at least she was not quite a one hit wonder as she managed to get another smaller hit with the group. A few years ago, I used to buy Billboard magazine quite frequently as a shop I knew sold it. I remember reading the Charts Of The World section every other week and if you think the charts are slow in the UK, now that downloads have been introduced, well it was a good job that you did not live in Denmark at that time. Every time I looked at the Danish chart I was amazed that it always looked the same with at Number One each week, a record by actress in a popular TV show called Trine Djerholm. That record must have been at Number One non-stop for about two years, as it never seemed to move and even when other songs, that had been big international hits, were featured in the Danish chart, it was still at Number One. I cannot remember seeing another chart like this, which had a record like this stuck at Number One for so long [Elton John may have been Number One in Canada for a year but that was a charity tribute, the world’s biggest selling single in a country where you can be Number One having sold just 49 copies in the previous week, whilst Trine’s record was just a normal hit]. I was also informed at the time that Trine Djerholm’s single was not actually a new record and had been first recorded in the late 1980s, but I can not be sure how true this is. Therefore, I think we should be grateful that Wet Wet Wet and Bryan Adams were only Number One for a few months back in the 1990s. If everybody on here was complaining back then at those records being Number One, I would not like to imagine how people would feel if Journey moved to number one next week and stayed there for another 730 days. I guess there might be a few people who would like this to happen, but I would guess it would annoy the majority of the people on this site [though obviously it will be Simon Cowell’s Haiti single next week, unless MacGowan & Cave’s alternative charity single for Haiti can be rush-released and pushed to Number One by a Facebook campaign instead]. Loz

I heard about this, though unlike Kylie covering “It’s A Fine Day” by mistake, you would have thought that the other Australian song would have become part of the public domain by now, especially with all the worry in the press about The Beatles’ recordings and the ‘50 year rule’. I do not know all about the legalities surrounding the case and I think the ‘50 year rule’ is just to do with recorded music in the EU, with different timeframes for published music to become public domain in each territory that has copyright law [i would expect some ‘failed’ states still to have none] but it still seems slightly unfair as none of the people who wrote either songs will benefit. I read in the press that the publishing of the earlier song had been sold to another company and it was these new owners who had decided to take Colin Hay the courts. I do not think the previous publishers or the songwriter will actually see any royalties, especially since I think the copyright was bought out by this new company on the death of the writer. I am unable to make a comment of the similarities as I cannot see or hear the link you may have embedded into the post, as I have turned off all the ‘added’ interactivity just to have the site function at the most basic level over lunch. I think that it would have been a good discussion on Paul Gambaccini’s show, I never listen but I should because he is a very good broadcaster, though I normally listen to Absolute 80s/Classic Rock on Saturday nights and I am not too keen on all the TV personalities who have shows prior to Gambaccini on Radio 2 [excepting Dale Winton with Pick Of The Pops]. As for Men At Work, I prefer “Overkill” and “Who Can It Be Now?” as well and have got their hits collection on CD, but as far as ‘Antipodean’ music goes, now I have finally finished the Greatest Hits of Mental As Anything on DVD [which turned out to be about three hours long], I think I will be moving on to a Split Enz collection next.

I used to like The Christians back in the 1980s and last week, I was actually watching an old VHS which had few of their videos on it. These videos were recorded in the days when The Chart Show used to be on Channel 4 and had a “Back To Back” feature half way through. In regards to The Christians sharing Henry Priestman with It’s Immaterial, I do not think that was true, well at least I do not remember him being a member of both bands at the time they had their hits. I just remember It’s Immaterial as a duo, with The Christians initially being a quartet before Roger left for a solo career [though he died at the end of the 1990s]. I did not know anything about Priestman’s previous career until many years later, though the fact that a former member went on to form another chart group was mentioned as a possible link on the show, but in the end it was linked to The Blue Nile’s “Headlights On The Parade”. You may be old enough to remember seeing an advert featuring It’s Immaterial in Smash Hits or Record Mirror, advertising the synths that they recorded the album on. From memory, I think the advert stated that the duo had recorded “Life’s Hard…” using a Yamaha DX-11 keyboard and an 81-year old banjo player. If I were to have submitted an idea for The Chain I would have tried to reference this fact, but I think the link would have been an easy one from ‘car driving’ to ‘car headlights’. I can not be sure as I was watching “Paul Merton In Europe” by then, but nevertheless The Blue Nile’s “Headlights On The Parade” is a brilliant record to play, from one of my favourite albums of the 1980s. Actually, the version of “Driving Away From Home” of which I know, may have been re-recorded by It’s Immaterial, as the initial release date given by Radcliffe & Maconie was 1980, but then again, they may have already started drinking their ‘miniatures’ by then and just misread the ‘six’ for a ‘zero’. I do not know if you listen to 6Music as well, but they were playing some good music this morning. I think that they played Furniture’s “Brilliant Mind” very early this morning, another great song from the same period as “Driving Away From Home”, though I cannot be sure if I dreamt it or not, as I was not fully awake at that point. On the other hand, I know that they did play the Pizzicato Five just before 7am today, which was a brilliant way to get going for work, if they had played something ‘glum’, I may well have just stayed in bed. Loz

Thank you very much, it is greatly appreciated that you took the time to read my post. Loz

Hello, In regards to Kate Bush I would say that it would be “The Hounds Of Love” that would be remembered by those ‘fans’ who are not really into that kind of music, mostly due to the song being an 1980s hit and one of which The Futureheads covered to great success. I am, of course, making huge generalisations about music usage based upon the type of people that I think download the majority of pop music today and the kind of media they might be using. The assumption I would make, based upon a number of ‘youth culture’ stereotypes, is that younger listeners will be spending their time on ‘hip’ American music blogs discovering all about bands from Brooklyn, listening to R&B on their iPods or playing computer games. I would not expect many of these types to be regularly reading Record Collector or Mojo, magazines generally purchased by older readers like me. These are the people that I would expect to be mostly interested in the recordings of Kate Bush. At this point I have to say that I, myself would probably not fit into this generalisation if I was a teen, as I first got Q magazine as a child and therefore was about 15 years to young to be part of their target market [my first issue was either Q3 or Q4, had The Human League in it and from then I have collected all the other issues, even though I was not a fan of most of the acts promoted on the cover]. Personally I did not like Kate Bush as a child, I think it was due to that spoof I had seen on television where Kate Bush was portrayed as a mad woman waving her arms about going “Whoa Whoa Whoa” all the time. I cannot remember if it was Kenny Everett or Pamela Stevenson who originally did the sketch [i think it was the latter], but that image has stayed in my mind, and therefore I tend not to be bothered about the earlier stuff as much [My favourite songs of hers are “Experiment IV” and “The Sensual World”, a gorgeous song especially suited to late night listening]. I would like to have a compilation of her videos on DVD, but I guess it will be unlikely for some time unless “The Whole Story” is re-issued as a ‘Sight + Sound’ release. On the other hand I was happy that EMI recently issued Thomas Dolby’s singles on DVD, as I missed buying all those videos on VHS the first time around and EMI will be re-issuing Duran’s Arcadia project as a 2CD/DVD set too. In regards to your list of 1980s Electro-Pop albums, it is generally a list that I would not mind buying again as Special Editions, if the re-issues were priced right. The only one that I do not already own is 'The Anvil', as I just have their singles collection on CD. By any chance, do you own their DVD? It has a black cover and I think it was a re-issue of a VHS from the early 1980s. From what info I have got about that release [which is next to nothing, though to be honest, I am not one who will spend hours on the internet at home] I cannot work out if all tracks will be recorded in concert or if it was a ‘video album’. I would guess it could be latter as there were a lot of those released in the early 1980s [see also Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams” and ABC’s “Mantrap”] but I do not want to chance buying it online without knowing what I should be getting first. For a long time I thought that Visage was just an Ultravox[!] spin-off group fronted by a couple of people that Ure and Currie had found down at The Blitz Club, but Mojo magazine has the group dating from 1978, which was few years before “Vienna” was released [when John Foxx was the lead singer of Ultravox!]. Actually it turns out that Visage was mostly a mixture of people from post-punk groups such as The Rich Kids and Magazine, with Strange being a kind of replacement for Glen Matlock. It looks like Ure would have not become the lead singer of Ultravox without doing this project first, as it seems like he would have met Billy Currie here at this point. Another band who were mentioned in Mojo recently are Timbuk 3, who turn up in the ‘One Hit Wonders’ feature with their song “The Futures So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades”. Now I think a copy of that magazine made have found its way into the offices of BBC 6Music as they played it early in morning the other day. It is another great record that I have not heard in years [as my Timbuk 3’s album is also in the loft] and I am pleased that it has been getting some airplay lately on the radio. Similarly last night, Mark Radcliffe played “Driving Away From Home” by It’s Immaterial as part of The Chain. Obviously as a ‘One Hit Wonder’ you may not care to know about any other songs from the band, though I thought there were a lot of other great tracks on the LP that should have been Top 40 hits, such as “Rope” and “Ed’s Funky Diner” [though I could never remember the full title and always thought the record was called “Ed’s Funky Diner (Covered In Sin)” though this is actually a reference to the “Eve’s Volcano” single by fellow Liverpudlian Julian Cope]. In the days of my youth, it did not seem that Virgin Records would just drop an act if the first album failed to sell, as a second album by It’s Immaterial came out in 1990. This album was called “Song” and is supposed to sound like late period Talk Talk mixed with The Blue Nile. I remember seeing it for sale in Andy’s Records, but decided that I would go back and buy it next time. As the record failed to sell it was deleted not so long afterwards and I never got my copy, becoming one of those albums I spent most of the 90s looking for. Thankfully in the last few months I have discovered that it has been re-issued alongside a lot of old Virgin recordings and therefore I will be buying it once I have finished listening to a Greatest Hits album that I have bought by Mental As Anything. Loz

Another good example is Kylie’s “Confide In Me” which, as you will remember, was her first single after leaving Pete Waterman’s company to go to sign with BMG’s ‘trendy’ dance label ‘de/Construction’. Even though at the time, the fact that Kylie was working with ‘hip’ production groups such as The Brothers In Rhythm was triumphed as a fresh beginning, it was soon found out that the song was based upon an old Opus III song, which was coincidentally released by none other than her ‘former masters’ at PWL. Loz

Will Rhino be putting out a new CD of the album? Loz

I do not think that this is actually a ‘proper’ cover version, more an ‘alternative’ version. I remember a few years ago there was a ‘mini-scandal’ where there were two versions of one song that had been released in the UK and Norway. However rather than being an obvious cover version, it was actually the same recording with the vocals of the Scandinavian singer wiped off and replaced by that of the new singer. I cannot remember if the record in question was actually “Torn” or not, but I am quite suspicious that it may have been, as I know for sure that “Torn” was also recorded by a Norwegian female singer [such as Sissel or Silje] as well as Imbruglia and Ednaswap, with all three versions being recorded by the same producer. Even though I would not expect this type of recording process to be such a rare occurrence in the music industry, especially when thinking about people like S/A/W and the Funk Brothers at Motown, it does make you wonder to what extent records created in this way are really cover versions. Another area you may like to discuss is when a record has an ‘interpolation of’ credit as the artist has based their new hit on the tune of another person’s work or, as in the case of “My Sweet Lord”, is found to be ‘too similar’. For example, even though these records will not have the full ‘interpolation credit’ as with many American hits, would The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony” and Rest Assured’s “Treat Infamy” be seen as covers of the same record as both would have the same main ‘Jagger/Richards’ credit with an additional sub-credit in regards to the lyrics? Also another point you may like to dwell upon, is this thought. You may or may not be a fan of the band yourself but please imagine, just for a moment, that you have gone to see the New Beautiful South play live. Even though Dave Hemingway and Alison Wheeler may have sung on the original recordings, would they be actually covering songs by The Beautiful South, if Paul Heaton was the person who wrote them in the first place? Loz

I thought Davina being in the house, with all the animal costumes, was perhaps the worst bit of television I had seen for a while. If this sequence had happened at the start of the series I would not have bothered with the rest. It would have been better if Baldwin had gone back in as the show is not the same without him. As for Davina, maybe she should have been dressed as a shark, as if the show has not already ‘jumped the shark’ it surely has now. Loz

This would have been my opinion as well, though I guess out of all the ‘outlets’ that were mentioned, I would think that it is advertising would play the largest part today. If I was the person who had made this comment initially I would also have made the generalisation that I would have expected young radio listeners to all be listening to stations like 1xtra and Galaxy, if any at all, rather than “The 80s Hour” on Absolute. I remember when I was younger in the 1980s it was seen as being very ‘uncool’ if you liked the same music as your parents [which for me would have mainly been the music of the 50s & 60s]. I guess there will be many teenage music fans whose parents grew up with the music of the 1980s and perhaps there will be only a certain amount of 1980s music they can get away with listening to ‘ironically’. On the other hand I know quite a few music fans aged in their early 20s who largely listen to older music [including 1990s Grunge as well as 1960s or 1970s tracks] and I would say that I was at this [mainly University-based student] age when I started fully discovering music made before the era I grew up in. I noticed earlier in the discussion that Heaven 17 were mentioned and I was wondering whether if it would have been the original version of “Temptation” that was being remembered or the remix from 1993. I may be wrong but I would like to have a guess at the latter, especially with Heaven 17 performing with La Roux tonight on BBC 6Music I would expect more people, especially those of a student age, to be buying those 1980s albums now in a way similar to the Britpop/Baggy [my student] era when I would have started to be interested in 1960s and 1970s music. Looking at many of the recent discussions on the site I see that there are a lot of passionate music fans contributing their opinions and knowledge to the site. I suppose if many of the people contributing here grew up in 1980s Britain like me, then they probably would know a wide range of Heaven 17 hits, whether from radio, TV or “Now Music” compilations. Even though it was never a big hit I would guess that “(We Don’t Need That) Fascist Groove Thang” would be well known by the contributors posting here. This is one of my favourite Heaven 17 tracks and features on many 1980s collections that have been recently released such as the “Ashes To Ashes” TV soundtrack and that EMI 80s Hits compilation which had the 1993 re-recording put on the disc instead. “(We Don’t Need That) Fascist Groove Thang” was also from “Penthouse and Pavement”, an album that does not actually include “Temptation” but would normally feature in any ‘Greatest Albums of The 80s’ list, in fact this album features in my “1001 Albums To Hear Before You Die” book, the only Heaven 17 album to do so. I will guess that if anybody is a true connoisseur of early 1980s artists then you will probably have this album in your collection alongside “Dare” and “Sulk”. Skipping a few years to the mid-1980s now, I think the first Amazulu record that would come to mind for me would be “Montego Bay”, probably as Zulu and Jamaica would be subconsciously associated together in my mind as some kind of Afro-Caribbean mnemonic device. To be honest, unless you were an 80s music obsessive, I do not think a lot of people would bother to remember who Amazulu were and I can image many people in pub quizzes getting mixed up with The Belle Stars and The Mint Juleps at that point. The only other record by Amazulu I could remember would be “Mony Mony” but only because of the Billy Idol version that was in the Top 10 around the same time. I remember reading either Smash Hits or Number One magazine at the time, and like the Thompson Twins they were one of those acts who ended up with only a couple of members after losing about 6 or 7 other people during the 1980s. I think the Thompson Twins would be another band people would like to forget. I guess that most people would only think about that phrase in relation to Thomson and Thompson from the Tintin comics. I liked the group as a child and was actually playing “The Saint [of the Sonic Groove]” a couple of weeks ago, but generally they seem to be filed under the “Best Forgotten” label by most reviewers of their re-issued works. I suppose if any critics wanted to remember any of their songs it would be the original version of “In The Name Of Love”, recorded in their punk-funk days when I suppose they would have looked more like the Ozric Tentacles or Back To The Planet, than the trio of which they became. I may never get around to buying their re-issues on CD but I think I may want to play my old Thompson Twins video when I get home, that is, once I have listened to Glenn Gregory and La Roux on the radio. Loz

Well thank you for reading. I may not want to listen to everything they have produced, such as Sonia & Big Fun, but there are a lot of records I would have disregarded at the time, that are better than I once thought [early Kylie for example]. I think that S/A/W were not only an easy target because they produced ‘cheesy’ pop and had a number of hits, but because of Pete Waterman’s personal ‘celebrity’. I think he is a target of criticism because whereas other pop producers are normally anonymous and stuck in studios, he was known as much as a ‘TV personality’ as the soap stars he was involved with producing, and it was the fact that he was presenting “The Hitman and Her” at the time, that has to be taken into consideration as a factor to why people hate him as well. Loz

Hello, I signed up for this site a couple of years ago but promptly forgot about it as I moved jobs to a place where I did not have access to the Internet. Nevertheless a few weeks ago I got a Christmas reminder in my e-mail box and decided to follow the link, so this may actually be my first ever post in the many years that I have been registered. Since then I have been reading this discussion which I have found very entertaining and to be honest, over my life I would have generally shared the same opinions that the majority of contributors have been expressing previously on this site. In regards to Stock, Aiken & Waterman [s/A/W], I do not think that they have ‘ruined’ music as it is such a vast subject area and I do not think their influence is much in evidence today. Actually, after listening to Dale Winton’s “Pick Of The Pops” on Saturday [and also hearing Rick Astley’s “Together Forever” on “Celebrity Big Brother” this week] I think that far from completely ‘ruining’ music they may, to an extent, have actually ‘saved’ [pop] music for a while. The chart featured on Saturday was 1987 and featured “Something In My House” by Dead Or Alive alongside a number of those ‘blue-eyed soul’-pop records that were very popular at the time and in my opinion I think that particular production by S/A/W has aged quite well. I also thought that the production of the Dead Or Alive record could be considered as a far less ‘cheesy’ than Iggy Pop’s “Real Wild Child”, a record that was a few places higher on the chart and one that I have not played for a while. This is mainly because my copy is on a vinyl LP in the loft, alongside albums by people such as Habit, Hipsway and The Senators. Now, whilst there are acts from that period that I still enjoy listening to, such as Love & Money and The Blow Monkeys, I doubt that I will be playing any albums by Halo James or Breathe any time soon. As far as ‘cheesy’ 80s chart pop goes I think the majority of people will agree with me, that acts such as these two are far worse than a lot of the acts S/A/W produced. Then again, if you think that all acts are of the same musical quality then please assess the concept of all those late 1980s ‘girl/boy next door’ popstars produced by S/A/W [that is, not Pete Burns] against all those ‘white sock’ wearing jazz-pop-soul acts, the majority of whom looked like they have just come from a middle-aged business man’s board meeting. These are probably not the kind of acts that kids should really should be interested in or have pictures of upon their walls and maybe should be left to a “Housewives’ Choice” show on “Magic FM” [please note that I would not categorise the early 1980s besuited B.E.F./Heaven 17 as a cheesy pop act]. Even though, as a child I never had pictures of Halo James or Breathe on my own wall [as I am male], I was influenced enough to wear some dreadful Breathe-style waistcoats during that period, of which I hope any photographic evidence has now been completely destroyed. The late 80s S/A/W acts may have been dreadfully cheesy but at least they provided some kind of ‘accessible fun’ to the pop market. It may have been production line pop that all sounded the same [the common criticism] but generally at least the acts seemed to be more human and less like a bunch of Daleks, which is a problem I have with many of the Americanised ‘autotuned robots’ on the current ‘same sounding’ production line of pop today. Now, even though in the mid 1980s I liked Dead Or Alive and Bananarama, by the late 1980s I had become very anti-S/A/W [and against white American pop-rock as well]. This anti-S/A/W stance was no doubt influenced in part by the NME and Melody Maker, publications of which I had just started buying [before then it was Smash Hits, Look-In and Number One] as well as my peer group. At the time I had a younger sibling who received at Christmas, albums by Kylie and Jason. I remember that I used to tease him endlessly about it and insult him by saying he had listened to Kylie so much that he had started to look like Dannii Minogue [i suppose this was even more insulting than saying he looked like Kylie, as Dannii was known then as the fat Goth from “Home & Away”]. I suppose the ironic thing is that yesterday I was in HMV actually thinking of buying Dannii’s Greatest Hits video, noticing that there were a great number of tracks on it that I liked. I cannot remember if I actually liked or disliked Kylie and Dannii at that time when I was a teen, I suppose in the late 1980s/early 1990s I was at that age where it was not really about what I liked or disliked, it was more about what other people liked and what I should listen to in regards to their opinions [both peers and press], which to be honest is a bit daft, but I guess a normal occurrence of people’s teenage lives. By the way I find it slightly odd how culture has developed over the last 20 years, as all the types of people who would have criticised that kind of cheesy pop in days gone by are now the people who seem to be very critical of [non-American] ‘Landfill Indie’. There are probably a lot of different reasons why this almost general cultural opinion has been formulated over the last few years, but personally I preferred previous ‘Indie scenes’ like Britpop [though I was very anti-Oasis and OCS when they became huge] as for me the music seemed so much more ‘accessible’ than the majority of ‘Indie’ music celebrated now in the alternative music press, though my age may have something to do with it as well. As far as 1989 is concerned [as that seems to be the year S/A/W are mostly criticised for being omnipresent in the charts], in relation to ‘Landfill Indie’ and the celebration of weird bearded wonders of the current Indie-Folk scenes that ‘alienates’ me, maybe we should point the finger of criticism at some one like The Stone Roses instead. They may have been a great band, but if ‘Landfill Indie’ is the main problem in music today, maybe it is The Stone Roses that have ‘ruined music’ rather than S/A/W because it is their legacy that has resulted in all those bands that nobody seems to like but nevertheless gets the radio play and sells quite well. It is only a suggestion and maybe others would like to elaborate on the thought, but from what I remember The Stone Roses/baggy broke through in late 1989 and I would probably regard that as the first instance of that kind of [‘Britpop’/’lad-rock’] Indie breaking through into the ‘mainstream’. I have my reasons why I will keep Morrissey ‘out of the picture’ for now, but from personal experiences, I remember that even at school there were loads of bands formed in the early 1990s that were directly influenced by The Stone Roses and probably would be all seen as ‘Landfill’ today, the type of ‘baggy janglers’ who were not even good enough to become part of Northern Uproar let alone Oasis. Well thank you for taking the time to read this comment and I hope there was not too much for you to read. Loz