- Kylie Minogue: Hand on Your Heart
- The Bangles: Eternal Flame
- Queen: I Want It All
- London Boys: Requiem
- Natalie Cole: Miss You Like Crazy
- Midnight Oil: Beds Are Burning
- Edelweiss: Bring Me Edelweiss
- Chaka Khan: I'm Every Woman '89
- Transivision Vamp: Baby I Don't Care
- Holly Johnson: Americanos
- The Beatmasters with Merlin: Who's in the House?
- Simply Red: If You Don't Know Me by Now
- Poison: Your Mama Don't Dance
- Roxette: The Look
- Debbie Gibson: Electric Youth
- Yazz: Where Has All the Love Gone?
- Fine Young Cannibals: Good Thing
- Bon Jovi: I'll Be There for You
- Inner City: Ain't Nobody Better
- Metallica: One
- Stevie Nicks: Rooms on Fire
- Stefan Dennis: Don't It Make You Feel Good
- Kon Kan: I Beg Your Pardon
- The Cure: Lullaby
- De La Soul: Me, Myself and I
- Cookie Crew: Got to Keep On
- Madonna: Like a Prayer
- Swing Out Sister: You on My Mind
- Hue & Cry: Violently
- Soul II Soul featuring Caron Wheeler: Keep on Movin'
- Paula Abdul: Straight Up
- Morrissey: Interesting Drug
- Diana Ross: Workin' Overtime
- Jason Donovan: Too Many Broken Hearts
- Donna Summer: This Time I Know It's for Real
- Shakin' Stevens: Love Attack
- Jody Watley: Real Love
- Cappella: Helyom Halib (Acid, Acid, Acid)
- Alyson Williams featuring Nikki D: My Love Is So Raw
- U2 with B.B. King: When Love Comes to Town
~~~~~
I once worked at bookshop which, rather strangely, was dominated by music talk. The manager was a country music buff, my section head was into metal and the Scottish guy who was in charge of magazines was an old time punk scenester. It was like we all had wanted to work in a record shop but we had to settle on books due to sheer geekiness. Daniel, however, wasn't so much into music as he was into U2. He was absolutely fanatical about them. Once, he strode over to me while I was shelving travel books and proudly shared his latest theory about the Irish quartet with me: U2, he reckoned, are the world's biggest cult band.
I think I tried to look like I cared - and, considering I'm retelling this anecdote nearly twenty years on, I guess it left some impression on me. At first I didn't like it: U2 didn't need to tread on the territory of real cult acts like Pavement or Gomez, groups that enjoyed a small but devoted following that bought up every CD single and followed them around on tour. But then I thought about it and realised that Daniel was right - but that wasn't a good thing. Cults are exclusionary, cults alienate, cults foster mindlessness
Cult acts abound on the 14 May '89 chart: The Cure's Lullaby, Morrissey's Interesting Drug, U2 (Biggest Cult Band in the World) in cahoots with B.B. King on When Love Comes to Town. All were scooped up by loyal fans but largely ignored by everyone else - although it must be said that everyone was astonished by the deeply unsettling video for Lullaby - and they all made an initial splash in the Top 10 before quickly dropping. Which brings us to I Want It All by Queen.
I'm not much a Queen guy. I think this surprises a lot of people but it really shouldn't. I hate hard rock and I hate anthems so you can probably imagine how I feel about anthemic hard rock (their stock in trade) but I was never convinced by their dabbling in other genres either (Crazy Little Thing Called Love? Crap. Another One Bites the Dust? Garbage. Under Pressure? I'd sooner listen to Ice Ice Baby). I've often remarked that they might have been pop's most erratic group of all time but even that seems to be giving them too much credit: beyond Bohemian Rhapsody, the number of Queen songs I'm not against hearing - though I still wouldn't choose to listen to myself - is pretty thin (maybe Killer Queen? Somebody to Love? I guess those two are about as good as you can get in an I-couldn't-care-less kind of way).
I Want It All was the first Queen song I ever heard (or heard knowing it to be Queen, I'm sure their tunes appeared on reruns of WKRP in Cincinnati without me knowing) and it wasn't much of an introduction. I needn't go into too much detail as to why considering I've already mentioned my dislike for anthemic hard rock. But even in that realm it doesn't come across especially well. It has the feel of that ghastly and slick light metal you'd hear a lot of in the eighties, the sort of thing favoured by the likes of Heart and Whitesnake. But I'm sure I wasn't alone in my tepid assessment and it likely didn't win over any new fans. Queen were by this point a cult act - it's just that their cult seemed to be all over Britain.
The popularity of Queen in Britain seemed like something I couldn't quite grasp as a foreigner. I assumed that they were largely a UK curio which didn't translate abroad (little different from Cliff Richard) but how wrong I was. A little over two years later and Freddie Mercury had died of AIDS and Bohemian Rhapsody was in a stupid Mike Myers film I've still never seen and they were bigger than ever. Here in Asia where I live, they probably rank just below The Beatles and ABBA in terms of Western acts who simply refuse to go away.
Anyway, we're into yet another sub-par Top 40 and I'd rather not go into another rambling diatribe. (Too late) And why should I when we continued to take memorable weekend trips?
Continuing on from our recent practice of visiting places we'd never given any thought of going to, we ventured down to Southampton not long after school on Friday. This was yet another exchange teacher's event and my sister and I were hoping to meet up with some kids we might get along with. I've written previously about some positive encounters with fellow exchange kids but we also met a few that we didn't care for too much - and exchange events forced us into awkward, reluctant conversations. In (I think) Norwich we got into a hopelessly dull conversation with a large girl with long stringy black hair and her even more forgettable brother who couldn't stop going on about the US and how much they hated England. We really wanted to see some of our chums from early on who just never seemed to show up to the same exchange events as us.
We'd checked in to our hotel in Southampton and I think managed to get a peak at a list of people attending - either that or my mum or dad managed to find out about who else was going to be there. In any event, we knew that Andy and Kelly, our friends from the Medieval Experience in and around Colchester back in September, were coming. We greeted them as soon as they arrived and we were immediately thick as thieves again. While Julie and Kelly went off somewhere together, Andy and I based ourselves on the second-floor landing overlooking the foyer where we made cracks about guests and dared each other to spit on the front desk.
The next day, we took a ferry from Southampton for a day trip to the Isle of Wight. We sat with Andy and Kelly at the back of the tour bus and we were all so distracted by getting caught up that we doubtless missed some pretty choice scenery. At one point, we all got off and began a lengthy trek through a small forest and up some winding paths. Andy and I posed for a picture in the stocks that we came upon at one point - his feigned grimace did a decent job of looking like he was being tortured while my long face was probably more the result of the heat than playing up for the cameras. Pleasant though the Isle of Wight was, it was simply a backdrop for getting reacquainted: I can't remember anything else from our day there.
We never saw Andy and Kelly again after that weekend but I always expected to bump into them somewhere (I think I once thought I saw them at the Calgary Stampede but I think that was just my mind playing tricks on me). It's strange that people you encounter so briefly can make a mark. We bonded over being in the same situation and had a few laughs. They were the friends we never saw but that also meant they were they friends we never argued with and never neglected. I would try to look them up but I wouldn't want it to spoil our friendship.
~~~~~
young Paul's favourite: Electric Youth
older Paul's retro pick: You on My Mind
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