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