- Kylie & Jason: Especially for You
- Erasure: Crackers International
- Neneh Cherry: Buffalo Stance
- Inner City: Good Life
- Angry Anderson: Suddenly
- Kim Wilde: Four Letter Word
- The Four Tops: Loco in Acapulco
- Fine Young Cannibals: She Drives Me Crazy
- Duran Duran: All She Wants Is
- Will to Power: Baby I Love Your Way/Freebird
- Status Quo: Burning Bridges (On and Off and On Again)
- Boy Meets Girl: Waiting for a Star to Fall
- a-ha: You Are the One [remix]
- Freiheit: Keeping the Dream Alive
- Phil Collins: Two Hearts
- Gloria Estefan & Miami Sound Machine: Rhythm Is Gonna Get You
- Mike + The Mechanics: The Living Years
- Cliff Richard: Mistletoe and Wine
- Marc Almond featuring Gene Pitney: Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart
- Michael Jackson: Smooth Criminal
- Bros: Cat Among the Pigeons / Silent Night
- Climie Fisher: Love Like a River
- Rick Astley: Take Me to Your Heart
- Roy Orbison: You Got It
- Petula Clark: Downtown '88
- Londonbeat: 9 a.m. (The Comfort Zone)
- Tiffany: Radio Romance
- New Order: Fine Time
- Cookie Crew: Born This Way (Let's Dance)
- Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock: Get on the Dance Floor
- Roachford: Cuddly Toy
- Milli Vanilli: Baby Don't Forget My Number
- The Darling Buds: Hit the Ground
- Natalie Cole: I Live for Your Love
- U2: Angel of Harlem
- INXS: Need You Tonight
- Bomb the Bass featuring Maureen: Say a Little Prayer
- Robert Howard & Kym Mazell: Wait
- Royal House: Yeah Baby
- Adeva: Respect
~~~~~
Back in this blog's infancy - August and September in case you'd forgotten; at this point it's nudging oh so close to middle age - I kept tabs on the gradual purge of hits that predated our arrival in England. It was as if I couldn't quite appreciate the goings on of the Top 40 until its residents were as fresh-faced as I was. And now it's 2017 and I'm looking back at 1989 and I find myself performing a similar task: when will the new year be rid of last year's leftovers?
Judging by just the second week of January, it doesn't look like it will take too long. Last week's rebounding hits proving a one-off, we've got a trove of newcomers as well as a few making big leaps up the listing. But as my old prof Barry Baldwin used to say about my essays, they're a bit of a curate's egg.
For many '89 is a year that goes someway towards redeeming the musical wasteland that was the eighties. Needless to say, I'm not one of them. There's a certain slickness about the decade's final year in hits such as Boy Meets World's Waiting for a Star to Fall and Will to Power's seventies medley Baby I Love Your Way/Freebird that marks an apogee from even the breezier AOR cuts from the likes of Belinda Carlise and Eric Carmen from just a year or so earlier. The former kind of works and has even managed to age reasonably well largely due to being almost annoyingly catchy. The latter, however, takes a pair of lame pieces of soft rock from fifteen years earlier and backs them with a drum machine and superfluous synths. Will to Power's main drawback, however, was its vocalists: while the female singer does a passable job on the Baby I Love Your Way lyrics - even if her vocal is as overwrought as any power ballad of the age - her male counterpart on Freebird is appallingly nasal and whiny. If the fusion of Peter Frampton and Lynyrd Skynyrd's signpost hits is meant to be a John Lennon-Yoko Ono-esque heartplay then it is poorly thought out: does she seriously love his way when he's crying about being so damn free?
For the past several months I had been glued to my parents and sister. We were never a every-third-Saturday-is-family-fun-night kind of family but during our year in England we became attached. It was never a conscious thing. Back in the fall, our form room teacher Miss Mitchell tried to organize a day out for our class to go rollerskating. There was probably something already preoccupying our weekend but I didn't want to go anyway. School was fine but all I really wanted to do was go home and be with Mum and Dad and Julie. (And, you know, listen to some music)
During this week, however, things began to alter a bit. First years had lessons cancelled as we piled into coaches heading for London. We were off to see a play at what I've always assumed to be the Royal Albert Hall. (Thinking about it now it feels like it can't possibly have been there; I'm quite sure I just told myself we were going to the RAH because it gave an air prestige to an otherwise mundane outing) The show was a chaotic affair about some sort of competition or Olympics, the details of which likely began to slip away while on the coach journey back to Billericay. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it and came away from it with my customary goofy looking smile that made clear my approval. I was aghast, then, to discover that my mates considered it to be "childish" (from Richard's review), "silly" (Neil's) and "rubbish" (Sean's). I tried going back on my gushing levels of praise but they saw right through it. And, of course, they were right to do so: I liked the stupid play and should have been man enough to stand by it.
I like to think that this experience was enjoyable as much for the excitement of going to London without my family, which it certainly was at the time. In addition, it marked the beginning of my love for attending plays. It was brilliant to be able to get out of school to go see a performance such as this. We never went to see plays at Highwood.
Imagine my disappointment, then, that in my dad's records of our year in England he has marked:
Fri Jan 13 Battlefield Band in Basildon
Sat Jan 14 Train to London, meeting Debbie and John, National Gallery
Julie attended Bros concert
But "Tue Jan 10 Paul way too impressed by a bunch of kids running around on a stage; I fear my son may be simple" is nowhere to be seen. Plays, it would seem, aren't quite as important as Scottish folk and teen idols.
~~~~~
young Paul's favourite: Four Letter Word
older Paul's retro pick: Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart
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