- Enya: Orinoco Flow
- Kylie Minogue: Je ne sais pas pourquoi
- Yazz: Stand Up for Your Love Rights
- Milli Vanilli: Girl You Know It's True
- Robin Beck: First Time
- Robert Palmer: She Makes My Day
- The Art of Noise featuring Tom Jones: Kiss
- Brother Beyond: He Ain't No Competition
- Gloria Estefan & Miami Sound Machine: 1-2-3
- Deacon Blue: Real Gone Kid
- D Mob featuring Gary Haisman: We Call It Acieed
- Bryan Ferry: Let's Stick Together '88
- Whitney Houston: One Moment in Time
- Erasure: A Little Respect
- Chris de Burgh: Missing You
- The Christians: Harvest for the World
- Royal House: Can You Party
- INXS: Need You Tonight
- Wee Papa Girl Rappers: Wee Rule
- Kim Wilde: Never Trust a Stranger
- Bobby McFerrin: Don't Worry Be Happy
- Salt 'n' Pepa: Twist and Shout
- Tanita Tikaram: Twist in My Sobriety
- Guns N' Roses: Welcome to the Jungle / Nightrain
- Jolly Roger: Acid Man
- Prince: I Wish U Heaven
- The Beatmasters with P.P. Arnold: Burn It Up
- Phil Collins: Groovy Kind of Love
- Inner City: Big Fun
- Rick Astley: She Wants to Dance with Me
- Womack & Womack: Teardrops
- Barbara Streisand & Don Johnson: Till I Loved You
- Kraze: The Party
- All About Eve: What Kind of Fool
- Level 42: Take a Look
- Mica Paris: Breathe Life Into Me
- Traveling Wilburys: Handle with Care
- Simon Harris: Here Comes That Sound
- Jason Donovan: Nothing Can Divide Us
- Marc Almond: Bitter Sweet
~~~~~
Several months prior to our departure for England, my sister did a student exchange to Kelowna, B.C. She wasn't away for long, probably just three or four days - long enough for me to remember her being away but not so long that her absence around the house was all that notable. I don't recall a great deal about her being away but I vividly remember her coming back. We were sitting in the TV room in the basement and she was telling me about her experience. At one point she scoffed at the music tastes of junior high students in the interior of B.C. "Everything that's popular is so old," she sniffed, "They're all still listening to Tiffany and they haven't heard Get Out of My Dreams, Get Into My Car." I was aghast. How on earth did those kids cope not knowing about Billy Ocean's latest hit?
Fast forward to 2012. I was working at an exhausting English Summer Camp for kids at my Korean university when one of my co-workers mentioned a Korean music video that was getting hundreds of thousands of likes on youtube. By the time the camp crawled to its conclusion, Gangnam Style was a worldwide sensation, the like button having passed the million mark several times over. A couple months later I was dancing to it at a wedding in England with some little kids. Has there ever been a more obvious example of the instantaneousness of pop?
These two anecdotes illustrate just how much music has changed over the years. Of course it's radically different in terms of content, presentation, style and production but nowhere has pop transformed more than in terms of technology. A song is a hit in one part of the world and has every opportunity to do so all around the globe just as quickly. The days of hit singles taking their sweet old time trying to break in other territories is long gone.
INXS were superstars in some parts of the world in 1988 and bit players at best elsewhere.. In Canada - even prior to the ascension of Billy Ocean's last major hit in Alberta (I have no further information as to if it ever managed to take off in B.C.) - they were massive. Their blockbuster album Kick seemed to lodge itself at the top of the charts for months on end (it seemed like it and John Cougar Mellancamp's The Lonesome Jubilee were lodged in the Top 5 for so long they'd become part of the chart's security council) and almost every track seemed to be a hit. In England, on the other hand, their influence was at a minimum. Their run of unbeatable mega hits on the other side of the Atlantic barely troubled the UK charts (Devil Inside, my own personal favourite of their's, was complete flop; New Sensation, Never Tear Us Apart and the like didn't fare much better). Then, suddenly, Need You Tonight was released - it went nowhere the first time round - and INXS had arrived - a year or so late but they arrived nonetheless.
"This is so old," my sister and I shrieked. We weren't impressed. Now, this wasn't a slight on the record: Need You Tonight was (and still is) a fabulous record, sexy but not overly sleazy, unsettling in the best possible sense and, above all, catchy as all hell. Michael Hutchence's vocal is a that of a frontman we'd all been waiting for: confident, in control and just begging for stardom. Yet why did it take so long for it to become a hit? We weren't aware of it but pop's global immediacy was something we all assumed existed, there just wasn't a youtube with which to launch it. Need You Tonight was hardly alone in this regard: the likes of Gloria Estefan and Guns N' Roses were similarly having hits with numbers that were several months old. (We weren't to know it, of course, but the reverse was also occuring: the current hits by Enya, Erasure and poor, old Milli Vanilli wouldn't chart back in Canada for quite some time, no doubt garnering similar complaints from British expat kids)
Grandma Ella and Grandpa Bill's visit to England was drawing to a close. As if we'd completely run out of ideas at this late stage, we spent our last Sunday with them in Southend. Grandpa Bill was always an enthusiastic walker - something I like to think I've inherited, albeit in a much less disciplined fashion - and so we marched the entirety of Southend Pier. Said to be the world's longest pleasure pier, the walk was a painful mile and a bit, not least due to the monorail that glided effortlessly by us every couple or minutes or so. Only the enticing smell of fish 'n' chip vats and the chance of catching a glimpse of Kent across a misty, soupy Thames gave me much interest. I did, however, enjoy the monorail ride back to Southend's shabby beach.
A night later and we at my grandparents' hotel dining room having a farewell dinner. It was bad enough that my beloved grandma and grandpa were on their way back to Calgary the next day but for our goodbye meal to be a bland and rubbery steak was almost too much to take: the gods couldn't have made me more homesick at that moment if a TV screen suddenly started showing nothing but hockey games, Four on the Floor sketches and those classic Hinterland Who's Who nature shorts.
But you get over such things, especially when you're an eleven-year-old boy. Grandma Ella and Grandpa Bill's visit was kind of a turning point in our year: I began missing home far less and started making the most of my time in England. Crucially, it was also the point where we began taking more and more weekend trips, typically further a field as well. That following Saturday we went up to York, the first in a long line of mid-sized British towns and cities - Lincoln, Norwich, Torquay, Bath, Inverness, Durham, St Albans - that I would have a fondness for. Whereas trudging down Southend Pier on a pleasant enough Autumn day was something of an ordeal, I was suddenly more than happy to embark on a lengthy city walking tour on a much chillier day in an ancient northern town. And it certainly helped that we were visiting a city with more than its fair share of spots worth exploring. The Jorvic Viking Centre was an enjoyable and informative trek through the city's Norse past. Even the York Minster was a highlight: a few weeks earlier, Blue Peter had reported on renovations to the cathedral that had taken place following a lightning strike several years earlier and the viewers who had chosen to design its new bosses. I was keen to see them for myself. (We liked the Minster so much that we were back the next day to climb its two hundred and seventy-five narrow steps so as to get a glimpse of the city from on high)
"This is so old," my sister and I shrieked. We weren't impressed. Now, this wasn't a slight on the record: Need You Tonight was (and still is) a fabulous record, sexy but not overly sleazy, unsettling in the best possible sense and, above all, catchy as all hell. Michael Hutchence's vocal is a that of a frontman we'd all been waiting for: confident, in control and just begging for stardom. Yet why did it take so long for it to become a hit? We weren't aware of it but pop's global immediacy was something we all assumed existed, there just wasn't a youtube with which to launch it. Need You Tonight was hardly alone in this regard: the likes of Gloria Estefan and Guns N' Roses were similarly having hits with numbers that were several months old. (We weren't to know it, of course, but the reverse was also occuring: the current hits by Enya, Erasure and poor, old Milli Vanilli wouldn't chart back in Canada for quite some time, no doubt garnering similar complaints from British expat kids)
Grandma Ella and Grandpa Bill's visit to England was drawing to a close. As if we'd completely run out of ideas at this late stage, we spent our last Sunday with them in Southend. Grandpa Bill was always an enthusiastic walker - something I like to think I've inherited, albeit in a much less disciplined fashion - and so we marched the entirety of Southend Pier. Said to be the world's longest pleasure pier, the walk was a painful mile and a bit, not least due to the monorail that glided effortlessly by us every couple or minutes or so. Only the enticing smell of fish 'n' chip vats and the chance of catching a glimpse of Kent across a misty, soupy Thames gave me much interest. I did, however, enjoy the monorail ride back to Southend's shabby beach.
A night later and we at my grandparents' hotel dining room having a farewell dinner. It was bad enough that my beloved grandma and grandpa were on their way back to Calgary the next day but for our goodbye meal to be a bland and rubbery steak was almost too much to take: the gods couldn't have made me more homesick at that moment if a TV screen suddenly started showing nothing but hockey games, Four on the Floor sketches and those classic Hinterland Who's Who nature shorts.
But you get over such things, especially when you're an eleven-year-old boy. Grandma Ella and Grandpa Bill's visit was kind of a turning point in our year: I began missing home far less and started making the most of my time in England. Crucially, it was also the point where we began taking more and more weekend trips, typically further a field as well. That following Saturday we went up to York, the first in a long line of mid-sized British towns and cities - Lincoln, Norwich, Torquay, Bath, Inverness, Durham, St Albans - that I would have a fondness for. Whereas trudging down Southend Pier on a pleasant enough Autumn day was something of an ordeal, I was suddenly more than happy to embark on a lengthy city walking tour on a much chillier day in an ancient northern town. And it certainly helped that we were visiting a city with more than its fair share of spots worth exploring. The Jorvic Viking Centre was an enjoyable and informative trek through the city's Norse past. Even the York Minster was a highlight: a few weeks earlier, Blue Peter had reported on renovations to the cathedral that had taken place following a lightning strike several years earlier and the viewers who had chosen to design its new bosses. I was keen to see them for myself. (We liked the Minster so much that we were back the next day to climb its two hundred and seventy-five narrow steps so as to get a glimpse of the city from on high)
The walking tour concluded with a visit to one of York's many pubs. We left and I began to notice Christmas lights among the lovely Shambles district. While plenty may resent the sight holiday decorations in early November, it provided me with something to look forward to. There were also rumblings that my folks were toying with us taking a trip to Greece for Easter. They may have been behind when it came to some killer music and they clearly hadn't mastered the art of cooking a half-decent steak but there was something to this place.
~~~~~
young Paul's favourite: She Makes My Day
older Paul's retro pick: Need You Tonight
~~~~~
young Paul's favourite: She Makes My Day
older Paul's retro pick: Need You Tonight
Oh how different people have different "highlights" from the same trip. It may not have been significant to Paul, but the drive to the B and B in York on a market Saturday with one way roads sticks with me. The only other experience quite like it was trying to return a rental car in Lille some years later. Detailed maps would have helped in both cases, but as Paul's blog has pointed out how music has changed, so to has car travel. GPS (okay, if there are any Brits reading this, SatNav) has totally altered our means of finding our way around. Get me started and I may rant on how banks have changed since our Lost in Laindon year.
ReplyDeleteDad
I hope the banks have imprved since '88 given how one particular financial institution who shall remain nameless (although their name rhymes with "fat test") told you to take a hike soon after we arrived. (Was it especially galling considering they'd been recommended by the exchange league?)
DeleteI do sort of recall some hassle in the car in York that Saturday but how can it compare with the Jorvic Centre, the Shambles and Blue Peter bosses?
I was stunned to hear The Style Council (still one of my favourites from back then) playing in the Gap yesterday while I was shopping for pyjamas. I guess they've finally made it main stream in North America. :(
ReplyDeleteWas it 'You're the Best Thing', Julie? I remember once hearing it playing while at the dentist a year or two after we came back from England. Did it get occasional rotation on Lite 96 or whatever it was called? There's a small grocery store near Dongshin that has played 'Nothing's Gonna Change My Love for You' and 'Come On Eileen' much to my astonishment.
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