30 April 1989: The Fun Is Gonna Start with Me 'Cause I'm Bringing It Back

1. The Bangles: Eternal Flame
2. Kylie Minogue: Hand on Your Heart
3. Simply Red: If You Don't Know Me by Now
4. Transvision Vamp: Baby I Don't Care
5. London Boys: Requiem
6. Holly Johnson: Americanos
7. Natalie Cole: Miss You Like Crazy
8. The Beatmasters with Merlin: Who's in the House?
9. Midnight Oil: Beds Are Burning
10. Fine Young Cannibals: Good Thing
11. The Cure: Lullaby
12. Morrissey: Interesting Drug
13. Inner City: Ain't Nobody Better
14. Metallica: One
15. Kon Kan: I Beg Your Pardon
16. Poison: Your Mama Don't Dance
17. Yazz: Where Has All the Love Gone?
18. Bon Jovi: I'll Be There for You
19. Cookie Crew: Got to Keep On
20. Paula Abdul: Straight Up
21. Debbie Gibson: Electric Youth
22. De La Soul: Me, Myself and I
23. Chaka Khan: I'm Every Woman '89
24. Jason Donovan: Too Many Broken Hearts
25. Madonna: Like a Prayer
26. Roxette: The Look
27. U2 with B.B. King: When Love Comes to Town
28. Edelweiss: Bring Me Edelweiss
29. Donna Summer: This Time I Know It's for Real
30. Swing Out Sister: You on My Mind
31. INXS: Mystify
32. Simple Minds: This Is Your Land
33. Soul II Soul featuring Caron Wheeler: Keep on Movin'
34. Jody Watley: Real Love
35. Duran Duran: Do You Believe in Shame?
36. Coldcut featuring Lisa Stansfield: People Hold On
37. Stevie Nicks: Rooms on Fire
38. Pat & Mick: I Haven't Stopped Dancing Yet
39. Stefan Dennis: Don't It Make You Feel Good
40. Guns 'N Roses: Paradise City

~~~~~

I like to think that I was growing. From our arrival the previous August, my interest in music was based around pop at its most disposable. Bros, Kylie, a bit of Jason: such was the UK mainstream of the time. At some point, however, the tide began to change. Bros were seemingly always touring but they were no longer releasing singles and the backlash that would prove their undoing was underway. Kylie was still on Neighbours - although we began to hear whispers that she was already off the show back in her native Australia making her something of a lame duck soap star - but she, too, had been on a Top 40 freeze (until this week). Left to his own devices, Jason seemed a bit lost: liked, admired, desired but not quite the star and maybe, we began to wonder, he really couldn't sing. This void began to be filled by more sophisticated artists. I was (thankfully) still a long way from yammering on about authenticity and vaunting those who write their own songs but my tastes were becoming more refined.

It's no wonder, then, that week's such as this one began to make me look askance at the charts. Gone from the listings since February, Kylie was back with a brand new single, though it was hardly something I was eagerly awaiting. When I finally did hear Hand on Your Heart I was ambivalent and surprised to be encountering a number of her's that I wasn't crazy about. I don't think I thought about it at the time but listening to it now it's clearly a case of more of the same - not a terrible record by any means, just far too much like her previous work. It probably didn't help, as well, that her image seemed equally stuck: in the accompanying video, she's doing her typical big-sister-giving-advice shtick all the while being dolled up with the same hairstyle, same make-up and same outfits. Clearly an image change was needed. (Her second album came out in Canada in early 1990 sporting a cover which led me to assume she was heading in a hippie/granola direction; I didn't expect SexKylie)

Hand on Your Heart is far from the nadir of this week's Top 40. Coming in as the lowest new entry is Kylie's Neighbours co-star Stefan Dennis with the moment that the Aussie phenomenon had gone to far. It's one of those tunes that attempts to be tough but ends up sounding feeble as a result. His fellow stars from Ramsay Street had gone in the throwaway pop direction but it was easy to see through Don't It Make You Feel Good. It was probably the first song I tried my best to like but eventually had to face the fact that it sucked. Still, Paul from Neighbours' foray into the charts gave us a so-bad-it's-good moment and a catchphrase from the cringe-worthy chorus that still brings a smile to my face.

We might have laughed at it but at least we were laughing which is more than can be said for Bring Me Edelweiss. Novelty pop songs are seldom much cop but I figured this one might have retained some of its initial charm (assuming it had any to begin with). Far from the delights of Mouldy Old Dough - still the standard for novelty songs as it inches closer to its half-century - or even the light catchiness of Doop, Bring Me Edelweiss is embarrassing, all crass yodelling, over-relying on samples and brazenly ripping off ABBA's S.O.S. Eurotrash before I'd ever considered the existence of such a concept, the fact that it's fully aware of just how naff it is doesn't save it from the rubbish heap of lousy comedy records. A pity, then, that no one told me at the time even though I mainly liked it because I was such a sucker for DJ record scratching.

A duff chart but what did it matter when we were taking such nice trips? Our weekend on Jersey began to wrap up and for the first time since our week up in Edinburgh I felt genuinely sad to be leaving a place we were visiting. It may have been the lovely weather or the pleasant scenery or the hermitage that you could walk to only when the tide was out or the fantastic yellow vanilla ice cream with a Flake bar sticking out of it or the brief glimpse of France from the island's southern tip or the feeling that we were both in Britain and outside of it at the same time but Jersey left its mark on me and I even began fantasizing about one day living there. (I guess I should have gone more towards the route of the offshore banker instead of the good-for-nothing ESL teacher)

Monday was May Day and we spent the bulk of the bank holiday returning to Laindon from the Channel Islands. Our ferry trip once again gave my sister and me the opportunity to see an on-board movie, this time settling for Short Circuit 2. We enjoyed spotting familiar sights of Toronto where it was filmed but little else. Afterwards we met up with Mum and Dad who were amiably chatting with Diane and Graham, an Australian couple also on exchange. I liked them a lot and envied the fact that they were doing a two year tour of duty in Britain. As the eighties wound down and the nineties got going I occasionally thought of them, wistfully imagining what my life would have been like had we had tacked on an extra year.

The following Saturday we headed up to the town of Mansfield to see Bill and Pat, a retired couple we had met during our Christmas in Torquay and who my parents bonded over due to them having a daughter who was practically a neighbour of our's in Laindon. (You may recall from a December entry that Bill was the first person I'd met who sported a tattoo and wasn't a scary thug; he was also inked long before it became such a tired cliché) The town was nice - although I can't recall anything about it now save for the off licence across the street from where we were staying - but being up in Nottinghamshire meant doing the Robin Hood tour and so we inevitably took in Sherwood Forest, which I kept calling Sherwood Planet since my main reference point with the great English folk hero came from watching Rocket Robin Hood.

At one point my dad took a photo of Pat, my mum, my sister and me. I would see this pic for the first time a few weeks or months later and I was excited to discover that it provided proof that I was now the same height as the female members of my family. (Little was I to know that it wouldn't be long before I sprouted past Dad as well) As I said, I was growing.

~~~~~
young Paul's favourite: Baby I Don't Care
older Paul's retro pick: You on My Mind

23 April 1989: People Think They Dis My Person

1. The Bangles: Eternal Flame
2. Simply Red: If You Don't Know Me by Now
3. Transvision Vamp: Baby I Don't Care
4. Holly Johnson: Americanos
5. The Cure: Lullaby
6. Kon Kan: I Beg Your Pardon
7. Fine Young Cannibals: Good Thing
8. The Beatmasters with Merlin: Who's in the House?
9. Morrissey: Interesting Drug
10. Inner City: Ain't Nobody Better
11. London Boys: Requiem
12. Midnight Oil: Beds Are Burning
13. Metallica: One
14. U2 with B.B. King: When Love Comes to Town
15. Simple Minds: This Is Your Land
16. Paula Abdul: Straight Up
17. Cookie Crew: Got to Keep On
18. Madonna: Like a Prayer
19. Donna Summer: This Time I Know It's for Real
20. Jason Donovan: Too Many Broken Hearts
21. INXS: Mystify
22. Soul II Soul featuring Caron Wheeler: Keep on Movin'
23. De La Soul: Me, Myself and I
24. Natalie Cole: Miss You Like Crazy
25. Coldcut featuring Lisa Stansfield: People Hold On
26. Poison: Your Mama Don't Dance
27. Yazz: Where Has All the Love Gone
28. Pat & Mick: I Haven't Stopped Dancing Yet
29. Swing Out Sister: You on My Mind
30. Bon Jovi: I'll Be There for You
31. Duran Duran: Do You Believe in Shame?
32. Guns 'N Roses: Paradise City
33. Debbie Gibson: Electric Youth
34. Yello: Of Course I'm Lying
35. Jody Watley: Real Love
36. Paul Simpson featuring Adeva: Musical Freedom (Moving on Up)
37. Barry Manilow: Please Don't Be Scared
38. Bobby Brown: Don't Be Cruel
39. The Blow Monkeys: This Is Your Life
40. Roxette: The Look

~~~~~

Rap has a message. This was something I heard a lot when I was teenager and it never failed to make my blood boil and bring up the urge to vomit. Implied, of course, was that rap was important, serious and had something to say while, crucially, other genres of music didn't. Now, I'm all for music capturing the imagination of kids and if it just so happens to be from a style with which I'm generally lukewarm then so be it. But the self-righteousness of rap and its message was just too much for me to take - not to mention the maddeningly steadfast refusal to ever divulge just what the hell its message was.

Happily, it was the spring of 1989 and I was in Britain and rap has a message meant precisely nothing. This was still the era in which hip hop was dominated by boastful, uber-cocky types who used their platform just to talk up themselves and little else. I wasn't especially fond of this strand at the time but it wouldn't be long before I'd begin to miss it. Rap songs about rappers. The American scene of Eric B and Rakim and Public Enemy had slowly begun to move away from it but the UK still had its Wee Papa Girl Rappers and Cookie Crews purveying this lighter, less messagey brand of hip hop. One of the latest to make the charts was Merlin who, along with renowned DJ/production team The Beatmasters, took Who's in the House? into the Top 10. It was a track I liked at the time but I have to wonder now if that was more to do with his collaborators' house music touches than the rapping itself. 

More memorably, this was the time when De La Soul began to emerge. Ahead of their time in using rap to play around with language, they were also happy to take on hip hop's already apparent clichés. I'd like to say that Me, Myself and I captivated me and finally won me over to rap's side but it didn't happen. For one thing, I didn't understand it - and I still don't. De La Soul seemed to speak in code among themselves and I wasn't quite at the age in which I could happily go along with their gibberish. The lyrical oddities also made it seem like they'd written a paean to selfishness and, again, this was the kind of thing I harboured little patience for back then. They did, however, seem like cool guys and I wanted to like them but could never quite make that leap. Even the best rap was destined to be at a safe distance from me.

Back in September, I mentioned the exchange between my dad and one of his maths teacher co-workers. Dad was telling him about our busy weekend, to which his colleague wondered if we had already run out of places to see. Well, he couldn't have been more wrong: we subsequently took in Scotland, Wales, Irelands Republic and Northern, the Lake District, the Midlands, East Anglia, Land's End, Liverpool, Manchester, Windsor, Oxford, Cambridge, Brighton, Stratford and we even managed to find parts of Essex that we didn't find repulsive. Yeah, you might say my parents were making the most of our year in the UK.

It was now April, however, and I have to wonder if we were at the point where they beginning to run out of ideas. (Perhaps with that in mind, my parents started off the week by booking our flight home. I guess I had taken this thing about us being in Britain for a year literally as I assumed we'd be staying until the 18th of August - or, really, the 19th, considering we didn't arrive until the 20th; I was, thus, aghast, to discover that we'd be heading back on the 4th. It still felt like a long way off but, still, it seemed like my mum and dad had scammed me out of a couple extra weeks in a country I was feeling at home in) Belfast was much more pleasant than we were expecting but Ulster in the late-eighties was hardly on most travel itineraries. Rochester, too, was a place that I ended up liking but there's a reason I didn't expect much from it. And, finally, the month draws to a close with our trip to Jersey.

Getting to the land of good-natured cows and tax loopholes was itself an experience. We started by taking the train into London late on a Friday afternoon. Going the opposite way of the commuters from Laindon to Fenchurch St was nice but we quickly caught the wrath of London Underground rush hour hell. Switching at Embankment from either the Circle or District Lines to the notorious Northern Line, we got jammed into an absolutely insanely packed car and endured a hot, body odor-ridden, utterly disagreeable journey to Waterloo. Good thing we were only on the train for one stop. We then had a long ride to Poole. It was well into the evening by the time we were ready to board the ferry to Jersey.

Once we were on the boat, however, things began to look up. My sister and I made a beeline for the ferry movie theatre where we enjoyed the Bruce Willis action masterpiece Die Hard. For their part, Mum and Dad hit the pub. The movie ended and we made our way to our room. I'd never slept on a ship before and, what with the excitement of John McClane finally kicking Hans Gruber's ass and my uncanny inability to fall asleep while on a moving object, I still haven't. Actually I probably did gulp back a bit of sleep during the voyage but it sure didn't feel like much. The sun had just come up and our ferry was docking at Guernsey which I was more than happy to take a peak at. I then climbed back up to the top of the bunk bed and put a tape into my walkman. No sleep till Saint Helier.

Our first day on Jersey gave me my first taste of a travel experience with which I have become all too familiar in my adulthood: arriving in a place first thing in the morning on very little sleep and having to get through that first day without passing out. It's something I've coped with better in some places than others: I've managed it okay on recent trips to Seattle, Osaka and Jeju but did less well when in Scotland and Singapore when I was seventeen and twenty-seven respectively. As far as this trip goes, I have no idea how I managed and that's probably because much of the day was a blur. I kind of remember checking into our hotel but I think we were off with our exchange teacher tour group soon after.

I perked up somewhat after lunch when we visited Hohlgangsanlage 8, Jersey's famous German Underground Hospital from the Nazi occupation. Sleepless though I was, I wasn't about to forget visiting a cave replete with old-fashioned medical supplies and swastika flags. The locals aren't exactly proud of being the sole British subjects to have had to live under Hitler's iron fist and so it's appropriate they keep their only throwback to that time buried under ground. I was still young enough to count this hospital as a neat place, not once thinking of all the nasty experiments that must have taken place there, and came away smiling. But maybe I was just delirious from a lack of sleep.

~~~~~
young Paul's favourite: Baby I Don't Care
older Paul's retro pick: You on My Mind

16 April 1989: Searching for a Perfect Ending That We'll Never Find

1. The Bangles: Eternal Flame
2. Simply Red: If You Don't Know Me by Now
3. Transvision Vamp: Baby I Don't Care
4. Holly Johnson: Americanos
5. Kon Kan: I Beg Your Pardon
6. U2 with B.B. King: When Love Comes to Town
7. Paula Abdul: Straight Up
8. Madonna: Like a Prayer
9. Fine Young Cannibals: Good Thing
10. Donna Summer: This Time I Know It's for Real
11. Jason Donovan: Too Many Broken Hearts
12. The Cure: Lullaby
13. Simple Minds: This Is Your Land
14. INXS: Mystify
15. Coldcut featuring Lisa Stansfield: People Hold On
16. Soul II Soul featuring Caron Wheeler: Keep on Movin'
17. Cookie Crew: Got to Keep On
18. Metallica: One
19. Guns 'N Roses: Paradise City
20. Inner City: Ain't Nobody Better
21. Midnight Oil: Beds Are Burning
22. Pat & Mick: I Haven't Stopped Dancing Yet
23. The Beatmasters with Merlin: Who's in the House?
24. London Boys: Requiem
25. Paul Simpson featuring Adeva: Musical Freedom (Moving on Up)
26. De La Soul: Me, Myself and I
27. Bobby Brown: Don't Be Cruel
28. Yello: Of Course I'm Lying
29. T'Pau: Only the Lonely
30. Duran Duran: Do You Believe in Shame?
31. Jody Watley: Real Love
32. The Blow Monkeys: This Is Your Life
33. Then Jerico: What Does It Take
34. Aswad: Beauty's Only Skin Deep
35. Barry Manilow: Please Don't Be Scared
36. Swing Out Sister: You on My Mind
37. The Reynolds Girls: I'd Rather Jack
38. Ten City: Devotion
39. Natalie Cole: Miss You Like Crazy
40. Fuzzbox: International Rescue

~~~~~

One of the key aspects of late-eighties popular music was about getting back to basics by rediscovering the roots. If this wasn't exactly apparent at the time - even though there were hints of it - it certainly became clearer as the early nineties progressed. The dawn of MTV Unplugged signaled that the guitar was once again king and that there was plenty of older music for everyone to get into if the current stuff just wasn't doing it for them. (My own discovery of The Jam, The Clash and The Smiths represented my first dabblings with the old stuff and there would be plenty more to come from there on in) In '89, however, modern music wasn't quite ready to be swept away and the roots had to creep in without anyone noticing. (The most obvious example at this stage being the U2/B.B. King collaboration When Love Comes to Town, a song I find myself liking a lot more than I remember)

There's something a bit distasteful about the term roots. Implied is a working class, poverty-stricken world of southern boozed-up men spinning yarns and picking blues and hillbilly licks on their beat up old guitars. Now, I have nothing against this world, only the notion that all popular music comes from it - or, worse, that all music that matters comes from it. Swing Out Sister had enjoyed an international hit a couple years earlier with the almost annoyingly addictive Breakout but they were now going about their own attempt at digging into the roots. These roots, however, were drawn from Burt Bacharach, Scott Walker, Motown and Françoise Hardy rather than Jimmy Rogers and Robert Johnson. You on My Mind, the result, is a gorgeous, beautifully sung number that is impossible to dislike. What it failed to do, mind you, is attract much attention and that may have been partially down to its old fashioned style. It has aged well precisely because it doesn't have sell by date but that also works against it: few knew it then, and even fewer are aware of it now because it can't be pinned down to a specific period. But if one wants nothing more than three-and-a-half glorious minutes of perfect pop then they could do far worse. It's just a shame its rootsiness didn't catch on.

I studied ancient and medieval history in university. At one point I fancied my chances of going on to grad school even though I had very humdrum grades and a complete inability to master languages that aren't my own. The real sign, however, that my academic future was limited was my choice of reading. (I bought many Penguin Classics during my undergrad days: some I devoured cover to cover while others I hardly touched - or, at best, I made the most of their indexes so I could pick out the bits I needed for papers or exams while spurning the rest) I had a habit of enjoying spurious, unreliable sources - Herodotus, Livy, Procopius - while I grew increasingly bored with purveyors of genuine historiography - Thucydides, Polybius, Bede. No, I didn't seem possible for me to do a master's degree in history as written by those who just make shit up - although, thinking about it now, it seems like an absolutely brilliant field to study.

During the summer of 1997 I read The History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth. (Yes, this was my summer reading: it says a lot that (a) this was something that I chose to read for fun and (b) it was such a dubious account that my professors didn't want to have anything to do with it) A twelfth century history of pre-Saxon Britiain, it told the tale of the likes of Brutus, Lear, Vortigern and Arthur. The book probably ought to have brought back memories of our medieval experience outside of Colchester or the time we drove past Hadrian's Wall or the Viking Centre in York but, instead, my mind kept wandering back to Rochester - and, more specifically, Rochester Castle.

Not a whole lot stands out from our Saturday day trip to the old city in northern Kent. I don't recall much about the town - I probably went into a Woolworths or WH Smith's to browse the records and cassettes but such visits by this point had completely blended into one another - and I've lost all memory of taking in the Dickens Museum. But one aspect that I can't separate from our visit to Rochester is the weather. The lovely English spring that I've already mentioned had clearly taken the weekend off and in its place were grey clouds and a cool wind. Now normally miserable weather can ruin a trip but I think it benefited Rochester Castle. Blue sky and sunshine would have made the day much more pleasant but I suspect they would have undermined the Castle's impressiveness. 

The Castle wasn't simply a ruin. It didn't just feel like a well-preserved, centuries-old relic meant for attracting tourists but it felt like it would continue to stave off sacking attempts (I guess that's why they call it a keep). I can't say it got me into history - even though I did buy a replica medieval coin which I subsequently lost - but it did leave an indelible impression on me that the past is there for us to take in. Not learn from, I've never cared for the concept of learning from history (which reminds me of a line of mine that always amused me but consistently failed to impress anyone else: those who do not learn from the lessons of history class are bound to repeat them) but just taking it in and doing what one wants with the results - even if it comes from the history-by-those-who-just-make-shit-up school.

~~~~~
young Paul's favourite: Baby I Don't Care
older's Paul's retro pick: You on My Mind

9 April 1989: Can You Still Walk Back to Happiness When You've Nowhere Left to Run?

1. The Bangles: Eternal Flame
2. Simply Red: If You Don't Know Me by Now
3. Madonna: Like a Prayer
4. Paula Abdul: Straight Up
5. Kon Kan: I Beg Your Pardon
6. Jason Donovan: Too Many Broken Hearts
7. Transvision Vamp: Baby I Don't Care
8. Donna Summer: This Time I Know It's for Real
9. Holly Johnson: Americanos
10. Soul II Soul featuring Caron Wheeler: Keep on Movin'
11. Coldcut featuring Lisa Stansfield: People Hold On
12. U2 with B.B. King: When Love Comes to Town
13. Guns 'N Roses: Paradise City
14. Pat & Mick: I Haven't Stopped Dancing Yet
15. Bobby Brown: Don't Be Cruel
16. INXS: Mystify
17. The Reynolds Girls: I'd Rather Jack
18. Fuzzbox: International Rescue
19. Fine Young Cannibals: Good Thing
20. The Cult: Fire Woman
21. Cookie Crew: Got to Keep On
22. Paul Simpson featuring Adeva: Musical Freedom (Moving on Up)
23. Yello: Of Course I'm Lying
24. Brother Beyond: Can You Keep a Secret? [remix]
25. The The: The Beat(en) Generation
26. Gloria Estefan & Miami Sound Machine: Can't Stay Away from You
27. Roy Orbison: She's a Mystery to Me
28. T'Pau: Only the Lonely
29. Ten City: Devotion
30. Alyson Williams: Sleep Talk
31. Aswad: Beauty's Only Skin Deep
32. Chanelle: One Man
33. Midnight Oil: Beds Are Burning
34. Then Jerico: What Does It Take?
35. De La Soul: Me, Myself and I
36. Jody Watley: Real Love
37. Bananarama/Lananeeneenoonoo: Help!
38. London Boys: Requiem
39. The Blow Monkeys: This Is Your Life
40. Barry Manilow: Please Don't Be Scared

~~~~~

No matter the era, genre or artist, nothing guarantees a hit single like a love song. And, typically, they make for massive hits. Career defining hits. Quite whether their popularity translates into quality is, however, another matter. Somehow or other there are people, overwhelming numbers of people, who prefer ABBA's I Had a Dream to Lay All Your Love on Me, would take Elvis Costello's Allison over Oliver's Army and reckon U2's With or Without You beats the pants off of Even Better Than the Real Thing. Of course, there's no accounting for taste but the numbers favouring a love song to a standard pop song are frequently overwhelming.

(Quite what to call them can be an issue I might as well get out of the way at this point. Many call them ballads but I refuse to accept that lexical bastardisation. Love song, which I opened the previous paragraph with, is better but still not satisfactory; implies gentle, slow moving weepy but there are uptempo rockers and lively disco anthems that have also been about love so that one doesn't quite work either. In Junior High we called them slow songs and that's my preferred label to this day: it gives them the gravitas that can only come from finishing off a teenage dance. Slow song it is then!)

This week's top two spots are occupied by two of the most popular and better remembered slow songs of the age: The Bangles' Eternal Flame and Simply Red's If You Don't Know Me by Now. I don't dislike either, in fact I have such a soft spot for the former that I chose to have it played at my wedding party a couple years ago, but they make me wonder why they did so well while other numbers were swiftly forgotten. It's telling that neither was the lead-off single from their respective albums: The Bangles had barely squeaked into the Top 40 with their previous hit In Your Room while Simply Red managed a respectable but underwhelming placement for It's Only Love. In both cases the slow songs had to wait.

Eternal Flame was the kind of thing I could go either way on. It was nice enough but meant nothing to me. Being much older and more experienced in the world of loves found and lost now, it's touching in a way it could never be to a preteen who was just hoping to find a girl who might give him his first snog. (Yeah, the girls weren't exactly lining up for that task) For its part, If You Don't Know Me by Now doesn't manage to hold up so well, even though I was similarly lukewarm towards it at the time. Mick Hucknall's vocal quirks, particularly his penchant for speaking many of the lyrics, grate and give it the feel that he's trying to have it both ways: he wants to stake claim on the morally superior high ground in the song's verses yet he acts so pathetic and so defeated when he gets to the chorus. Maybe the thing with slow songs is that they're the ultimate tunes that command the listener to relate to them. The audience must decide if they can relate to them or if they're even interested in doing so.

...the I.R.A. has claimed responsibility for the attack...

"Dad," I inquired as the CBC Radio News continued, "why do they always claim responsibility for bombing people?"

I could never wrap my young mind around the I.R.A.'s tactics. I was a strange kid who liked watching the news and I understood that killers always denied what they'd done. Colin Thatcher went to prison for murdering his wife and everyone was certain of his guilt but he claimed he had nothing to do with it. That's what they all said. But the I.R.A. was a different breed: a bomb would go off and the next thing you know they were admitting their guilt. I didn't get it. Dad said they were taking responsibility because it was part of their fight to get England out of Northern Ireland. I still didn't get it. And I never dreamed we'd end up in such a place.

Living in England and having already taken in Scotland and Wales, we were just one territory away from completing a clean sweep of visits to the Home Nations. Our first trip to a place that felt scary, Northern Ireland was one of the world's most notorious regions and place names such as Belfast, Ulster and Derry were all synonymous with terrorism, religious division and sectarian violence. Still, as we boarded our British Midlands flight from Heathrow, I didn't feel apprehensive. It probably helped that my parents were doing their level best to keep their concerns to themselves, assuming they had any to begin with. Mum may have been a bit worried but Dad didn't seem to care all that much; the way he must have seen it, if it was such a dangerous place they wouldn't have organized an exchange teacher conference in the heart of Belfast.

The taxi from the airport confirmed that it wasn't so bad. One small truck filled with armed soldiers passed us which we all took note of but it says a lot that we only saw the one; naturally, we would have been far more alarmed had they been all over the place. Our expectations for Belfast weren't especially high so the fact that we were pleasantly surprised should be taken in the light of context. Nevertheless, Belfast had a rough stateliness to it that was not unlike the lovechild of Dublin's grimy, street savvy glamour and Edinburgh's noble importance.

Unfortunately, this was lost on my sister and me as we were placed with a kind woman who took us, along with a pretty annoying but kind of nice brother and sister from New Jersey, skating, bowling, to the new Arnold Schwarzenegger-Danny DeVito picture Twins, while the adults were, uh, getting their convention on and visiting local schools. We didn't get to do much sight seeing the first couple days but the chance to try my hand at ten-pin bowling for the first time in my life was a treat. (One of the great oddities of being Canadian is our steadfast devotion to five-pin)

Saturday the 15th was that rarest of Ulster days: it was sunny with plenty of blue sky to spare. Our tour bus took us outside the grit of Belfast towards to serene yet rugged County Down to the southeast. Somewhere en route we stopped at a wooded area and went pony trekking. While others on our group had less than reliable steeds, I enjoyed myself and found it to be a much more agreeable experience than when I went horseback riding a year earlier on the muddy Alberta plains and was still feeling it in the crotch for the next three days. We then headed to the seaside town of Newcastle where we walked along the beach, with a cool, refreshing breeze from the Irish Sea hitting our faces.

It's one of those memories which is both clear and vague. Lots of people were out enjoying the beautiful afternoon. At some point a hubbub began to build, although it feels like my mind has invented that scene in order to magnify the impact. I think we were still on the beach - although we may have been just about to board the bus - when someone told us that something terrible had just happened at a football match in Sheffield. We didn't get many details but we were already hearing that some fans were killed. 

Hillsborough. Britain's last and greatest football disaster. I thought of seeing the horrific footage of both the Bradford City stadium fire and the Heysel Stadium incident which I had seen on the Saturday afternoon news between Stampede Wrestling and Hockey Night in Canada. Hillsborough, however, seemed different - and not simply because we were now much closer to the scene. It's interesting to observe how differently we take things based on whether we see it occur or hear about it. I may have been far away in Canada in May of 1985 but I became aware of England's other great football tragedies of the age by seeing the footage; with Hillsborough I heard about it and I think I made myself not watch the news from that point on. I didn't want to see what happened. Our bus glumly made the trip back to Belfast and, once back at our hotel, I put a tape into my walkman as if to ignore the awfulness. 

We had dinner that night and shared a table with a very polite guy on exchange from - I think - The Bahamas. We had a moment of silence for the victims of Hillsborough. I was just a kid, still just eleven, and, of course, I could only make this thing about myself. I thought about the brief human jam I experienced with my mum and dad at Oxford Circus while Christmas shopping, as if this came remotely close to the hundreds of unfortunate Liverpool supporters crushed to death or serious injury. I thought about how only two weeks earlier I had attended a football match in Wimbledon with my dad and my uncle and how much we enjoyed being in the standing terrace and how it had been such a lively, joyous environment.

Slow songs and disasters: it's often about how we relate to them.

~~~~~
young Paul's favourite: This Time I Know It's for Real
older Paul's retro pick: Keep on Movin'

The Lost in Laindon EMSAQ: So Who's Gonna Give Us the Answer?

The utter lack of questions my readers have been posing about this blog has continued well into 2017. "A good teacher answers all questions before they have a chance to be asked", said someone feigning philosopher-speak. A welcome side effect of this disinterest is that I can put together my own batch of questions that I want to answer, rather than having to deal with queries that either don't interest me or are too damn difficult to answer. I like to think that such a task helps to sharpen my mind for future posts as we approach LIL's autumn (which happens to be in the spring and summer). With a little further ado, here's the EMSAQ - Even More Seldomly Asked Questions. As with last time, please do post any questions you may have in the comments below. Either that or don't bother and I'll just continue to come up with my own.

Any chance you might keep this blog going in some form after this August?

As meaningful as those twenty page views and three likes on Facebook a week are, I don't have any plans to see this bad boy through my first year back in Canada (and, presumably, on from there). Aside from the fact that I was no longer taking trips with my family on a weekly basis, I no longer felt captivated by the music and I was soon to fall into my melancholic teenage years, a time I have no interest in revisiting. I'll probably finish up with an afterword post going into some detail about my post-England life but that's about it.

I like the fact that there's an end point to it.

That's not a question. But, yes, there's nothing worse in the world of blogging than witnessing your favourite blog peter out before your eyes. I've had blogs before and I got into them and posted regularly but eventually lost interest - and I'm far from alone in that regard. I was initially worried that something similar would occur here but I soon realised that having an eventual finish line would help motivate me to see it through.

What gave you the idea for Lost in Laindon?

Mostly from Popular. Music writer Tom Ewing has spent the better part of the last fifteen years rating and reviewing every UK number one single and his batch covering the chart toppers from '88 and '89 were, naturally, of particular interest to me. We don't necessarily have the same tastes - is ABBA's The Winner Takes It All really that great? - but I very much liked the format and his writing and I soon began to want to get back into blogging. (Unfortunately, he seems to be falling prey to what I said above about losing interest in a blog with no end in sight. Still, he has an extensive archive which I would highly recommend you explore if you have the requisite free time, as I clearly do)

In addition, I read a lot of music books and many of my recent favourites - Stuart Maconie's Cider with Roadies and David Hepworth's Never a Dull Moment: 1971 The Year That Rock Exploded, just to name the two I can think of - manage to fuse critcism with memoir, something I would quite like to try myself. This is my first shot in fact.

Do you have any future blogs in mind once this one's done?

Wow, it's like I read my mind! I am committed to starting up at least one new blog this summer once this one's in the can and I'm toying with a second. I don't want to give too much away - that and I haven't really prepared much at this point - but the one I'm sure of will be about being a lazy, dilettante English teacher abroad and the other might be about music though I'm struggling to come up with a theme. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Are you going to try to turn this into a book?

Probably not. I did think about it early on but I don't think my memory has held up well enough for this to be fleshed out fully into book form. The very fact that I've struggled to go into detail about the house I lived in and the school I attended speaks volumes as to my shortcomings - and, indeed, I wasn't particularly happy with my most recent entry about Mayflower's eccentric staff.

Also, it kind of feels like this blog will be enough: I've covered some memories and I've elaborated on some inconsequential theories about pop music, what else is there to be said? I do want to write a book - and then several more - but not on this topic.

I would like to point out, however, that this blog has been a useful way of testing if I have the mental fitness for writing a book. The jury's still out on that one.

Why didn't you wait a couple years so this could be a thirtieth anniversary blog?

Aside from the fact that I feel a bit sorry for years that don't happen to be divisible by fives and tens, at one point last year I discovered that the 1988-89 and 2016-17 calendars match up perfectly (well, apart from Easter falling three weeks later for whatever reason) and figured I might as well start it off twenty-eight years to the day after we left Canada. I came up with the idea for blogging my year in England about a year ago and I was initially going to start it right away, thus having posts from August being written in April and so forth, but the idea of having to write about Mistletoe and Wine in the midst of the summer seemed dispiriting - it's hard enough to have to listen to it around Christmastime - so I decided to wait a few months.

But mostly it involved not wanting to wait on an idea that I really liked.

How much of this comes from your own memories?

Lots. I still remember my class schedule from Mayflower and can tell you the names of the vast majority of my teachers. Most of the anecdotes are also my own although I have used a couple from my mum's letters home to my grandma as sources. Obviously the chart info isn't my own but that's about it.

Don't you wish you could be writing about a different era of pop music?

No, not particularly. I realise the late eighties aren't quite everyone's cup of tea but I have a soft spot for it. It was when I got into music so it has that going for it for a start. It was also a time when music mattered to people. Oh, I know there's a thriving indie hip hop scene in France and there are plenty of up and coming quirky singer-songwriters for me to explore on youtube but it has become divorced from a shared experience. Kids don't talk about pop videos on the school bus, no one invests their money in it 

The eighties weren't perfect but they offered up a lot of diversity which people could easily get exposed to. Kids could get into songs dealing with issues that also sounded good (I always think of Fast Car by Tracy Chapman and Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears as examples), few cared about nonsense like "authenticity" and throwbacks such as The Beatles and punk may have been respected but they weren't revered.

Finally, who else bothers to write about this period? You might say I've cornered the market. You know, assuming there is a market for late eighties music blogs.

What can we expect from the next few months from Lost in Laindon?

Well, there are several more trips in store - including pair of visits to continental Europe - as well as coping with a brutal heat wave, my birthday and coming to terms with having to return to Calgary. I'm still yet to go into detail about our tiny, uninspiring home but I will get round to that soon enough. And then, of course, there's the music which is beginning to get a bit too 1989 for my taste.

Don't you know what a comma is for?

Does it look like I know what a comma is for?

2 April 1989: Don't Pay It Any Mind If It Seems Like I'm Acting Cool

1. Madonna: Like a Prayer
2. Jason Donovan: Too Many Broken Hearts
3. Paula Abdul: Straight Up
4. Donna Summer: This Time I Know It's for Real
5. The Bangles: Eternal Flame
6. Soul II Soul featuring Caron Wheeler: Keep on Movin'
7. Guns 'N Roses: Paradise City
8. Kon Kan: I Beg Your Pardon
9. Pat & Mick: I Haven't Stopped Dancing Yet
10. The Reynolds Girls: I'd Rather Jack
11. Fuzzbox: International Rescue
12. Coldcut featuring Lisa Stansfield: People Hold On
13. Bobby Brown: Don't Be Cruel
14. Holly Johnson: Americanos
15. The Cult: Fire Woman
16. Transvision Vamp: Baby I Don't Care
17. Gloria Estefan & Miami Sound Machine: Can't Stay Away from You
18. The The: The Beat(en) Generation
19. Simply Red: If You Don't Know Me by Now
20. Alyson Williams: Sleep Talk
21. INXS: Mystify
22. Brother Beyond: Can You Keep a Secret?
23. Chanelle: One Man
24. Bananarama/Lananeeneenoonoo: Help!
25. Paul Simpson featuring Adeva: Musical Freedom (Moving on Up)
26. Sam Brown: Stop!
27. Roy Orbison: She's a Mystery to Me
28. New Order: Round and Round
29. Roachford: Family Man
30. Michael Ball: Love Changes Everything
31. Michael Jackson: Leave Me Alone
32. Yello: Of Course I'm Lying
33. S'Express: Hey Music Lover
34. T'Pau: Only the Lonely
35. Kym Mazell: Got to Get You Back
36. Living in a Box: Blow the House Down
37. Cookie Crew: Got to Keep On
38. Then Jerico: What Does It Take?
39. Ten City: Devotion
40. Aswad: Beauty's Only Skin Deep

~~~~~

April's only just getting kicked off and I'm already looking ahead to heading back home. I mean, looking back now I can certainly see the signs that things were beginning to wrap up, even if I wasn't especially aware of it at the time. Dave headed back to Calgary and so we saw off our final visitor (even though both he and Grandma Ella and Grandpa Bill paid second visits in the summer it wasn't quite the same as I'll probably get to eventually). There was also increasing talk of booking our plane tickets home (Mum was all for us leaving the day after school finished, I was keen on extending our stay indefinitely). Finally, the weather was looking up as we were slowly entering an early and prolonged summer.

There's also a feel of coming to the autumn of our year in England in the charts. Though I recollect the vast majority of this week's Top 40 - hard cheese, Paul Simpson featuring Adeva - I must confess that I've misremembered when they came out. Take Transvision Vamp, a pop group posing as punk metallers led by raspily, nasily voiced Wendy James. They had their first run of hits just as we arrived in Laindon the previous summer and I assumed their second (and final, as it would turn out) burst of success took place just as we were on our way out the door. Yet here they are, winter barely in the can, belting out the simple and laughable but nonetheless charming Baby I Don't Care. James isn't the singer - nor the pinup - that she thinks she is, her band aren't the rockers they think they are but it works, possibly in part because she honestly doesn't care. Of course it just seems silly next to the real ale rock of Guns 'N Roses but that's precisely the point. GNR's Paradise City rocks it's balls off and is accompanied by your typical heavy metal video of the group pretending to perform the song in front of thousands of head banger fans (of all the things that irked me about metal - the dirt bags, the t-shirts, the cliches - nothing bothered me more than their boring and pointless videos, so wonderfully spoofed by New Order) but the group are so caught up in their ludicrous mythology of hard rockin', hard partyin' dudes who live for life on the road that it's impossible to take seriously. 

"GET OFF MY GRASS!" Hopey shouted. He wasn't so much angry as hysterical. His voice was piercing and could shake the windows. He shouted it every day, he shouted it long before I came to Mayflower and he no doubt continued to shout it long after I left but it never failed to rattle me. If we all sniggered as Hopey galloped away then at least he we all feared him as he approached. And, yes, we ridiculed old Hopey. I always imagined him being a John Cleese character come to life: his upright gait and prance-like march, coupled with the ever-present basket he carried around,  made him a comical sight.

"What was their problem?" I used to ask myself whenever I would think back to the staff at Mayflower Comprehensive. They constantly seemed pissed about things that didn't matter. Who the hell cared if a few third years had cut across part of the lawn behind the library as a shortcut - and, thus, giving birth to Hopey's catchphrase? What did it matter to Mr Lawrence if some boys were playing football on the playground? (And, speaking of which, considering there wasn't any playground equipment and playing was looked down upon, why was it even called the playground to begin with?) What was Mr Shaw going on about during his moralistic assembly rants? Why did my classmate Francis have to be pulled out of French class because he was wearing a jean jacket? Who could possibly care?

There were two kinds of teachers at Mayflower: those who taught classes and those who made their presence felt elsewhere. It was impossible to imagine Hopey or Lawrence or Shaw in the classroom, their world was in the hallways, on the playground or in the assemblies. Lawrence was the first teacher I ever encountered who walked with a swagger: I was never completely sure if I was afraid or in awe of him. We never saw Shaw except for when he'd emerge for assembly. His lectures never ceased to be dull and rambling but he always acted as if what he had to say was of the utmost importance.

My own teachers were more of a mixed bag. Pountney seemed perpetually cheesed off - some second years had pushed a pile of books behind a bookshelf during playtime one Friday afternoon and he spent our entire Library class in an especially pissy mood - while Larkin and Wickens just threw themselves into fits of rage whenever something didn't go quite as planned. Templeton seemed to take it as an insult that we weren't as into art as she was - while doing as little as possible to get us to appreciate the subject. The rest were actually pretty level headed but my thin skin took minor clashes with my Science and P.E. teachers as major personal vendettas that took ages for me to recover from.

This experience was hardly a Dickensian nightmare but I was genuinely intimidated by the staff at Mayflower. Coming from the largely happy-go-lucky halls of Highwood Elementary School in Calgary, I'd grown accustomed to kindly, nuturing types in the classroom. Prior to England I would never have given thought to disliking or being afraid of a teacher, it was simply a matter of how much I liked them. So to then be thrown into this environment of bitterness and intimidation was a change that I needed to get accustomed to but never really did. This is a pity since Mayflower was a bastion of old school English eccentricity. One of my favourite TV programs of the time was Grange Hill, a venerable series about a north London school. While I enjoyed the antics of Gonch and Ziggy and their chums, I also guffawed at the crazed, oddball staff, especially the maniacal Bronco. Strange, then, that I couldn't enjoy Mayflower for similar reasons.

~~~~~

young Paul's favourite: This Time I Know It's for Real

older Paul's retro pick: Keep on Movin'