- Soul II Soul featuring Caron Wheeler: Back to Life (However Do You Want Me)
- Jason Donovan: Sealed with a Kiss
- Prince: Batdance
- Sinitta: Right Back Where We Started From
- U2: All I Want Is You
- Cliff Richard: The Best of Me
- Cyndi Lauper: I Drove All Night
- The Beautiful South: Song for Whoever
- Guns 'N Roses: Sweet Child o' Mine [remix]
- Madonna: Express Yourself
- D Mob featuring LRS: It Is Time To Get Funky
- Natalie Cole: Miss You Like Crazy
- Double Trouble & The Rebel MC: Just Keep Rockin'
- Fuzzbox: Pink Sunshine
- Donna Allen: Joy and Pain
- Donna Summer: I Don't Wanna Get Hurt
- Transvision Vamp: The Only One
- Neneh Cherry: Manchild
- Bananarama: Cruel Summer '89
- Gladys Knight: Licence to Kill
- Clannad featuring Bono: In a Lifetime
- Lynne Hamilton: On the Inside
- Tone Loc: Funky Cold Medina
- Placido Domingo & Jennifer Rush: Til I Loved You
- Karyn White: Superwoman
- The Bangles: Be with You
- Holly Johnson: Atomic City
- Tom Petty: I Won't Back Down
- Kylie Minogue: Hand on Your Heart
- Paula Abdul: Forever Your Girl
- Malcolm McLaren & The Bootzilla Orchestra: Waltz Darling
- London Boys: Requiem
- R.E.M.: Orange Crush
- Gerry Marsden, Paul McCartney, Holly Johnson & The Christians: Ferry Cross the Mersey
- Public Enemy: Fight the Power
- Bobby Brown: Every Little Step
- Living in a Box: Gatecrashing
- M: Pop Muzik '89
- Joyce Sims: Looking for a Love
- Waterfront: Cry
~~~~~
The summer of 1996 was a pleasantly nondescript time of my life. I had just finished my first year of university and celebrated this very modest milestone by randomly choosing ancient and medieval history as my major, I found myself on the hook of a girl who, to the surprise of precisely no one who wasn't me, was not the least bit interested in me and I did a few odd jobs in lieu of finding real summer employment. It was also about the time that I began to notice people opting for movies over music.
Growing up in the eighties, movies were always around but I think I always knew just how inessential they were. My parents got a VCR - or "the video" as the English would call it - when I was about six and that became our preferred medium for movies for the next decade but we were hardly renting genre-defying masterpieces. I saw and enjoyed several flicks that could capture the imagination of any kid from that age - Star Wars, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future - but there are also plenty I missed out on - Goonies, Gremlins, The Never-Ending Story - that never ceases to astound contemporaries. Then, there were those movies I did see but whose details have been wiped from my memory - The Princess Bride, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Beetlejuice, Labyrinth - that apparently defined whole childhoods. I was almost exclusively a comedy kid and it's those pictures - the first two Vacations, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Summer School - that left a mark. Seen or unseen, remembered or forgotten, however, they were just movies at the end of the day. Dirty Dancing, for its part, seemed to matter far more simply because it's soundtrack was omnipresent - and this carried over well into my adolescence as Go West's The King of Wishful Thinking and Chesney Hawkes' The One and Only meant far more to me than the films that accompanied them.
It was at the tail end of my teens, however, that I began to notice that people really, really, REALLY love movies - and, almost consequently, didn't care so much about music. Now, the charts only had themselves to blame for such an apathetic public: '96 was the heyday of horrible American frat rock which reached its nadir with Deep Blue Something's wretched Breakfast at Tiffany's (an all-too appropriate song to chronicle pop's decline at the expense of movies) and UK Britpop was rapidly shifting from cool and fresh to dull and tired. At the cinema, however, was Independence Day and Mission Impossible and that was all anyone seemed interested in talking about.
It's nice, then, to look back to 1989 and a time when our culture wasn't so obsessed by films. This week's Top 40 includes three numbers from upcoming movies although at least two of which felt as though the film was promoting the single, not the other way around. Prince was no stranger to soundtracking celluloid although much like Elvis and The Beatles before him it was clear he was using pictures to advance his music career, not to make a permanent transition into film (as opposed to more recent stars who seem to see pop music as a stepping stone to Hollywood). Batdance is not one of his more beloved singles though it's always felt like vintage Prince to me. I've always respected and admired the Purple One but I've never especially liked his music and the Tim Burton Batman theme is no better, no worse than the stuff that established his superstar status in the mid-eighties.
Climbing into the Top 20 this week is Gladys Knight's Licence to Kill from the Bond film of the same name. The movie came out at about this time to many indifferent shrugs but its theme was a bit of an underrated cracker, lacking the melancholy dramatics of a-ha's The Living Daylights but harking back to old school Shirley Bassey/Carly Simon-esque divas, Bond girls on record. I never gave any thought to seeing Licence to Kill - still haven't in fact - perhaps because I knew the best part was the single.
Finally, we get to Public Enemy's Fight the Power, which I had completely forgotten was from the Spike Lee's overrated Do the Right Thing. A bit of a drop in quality from their earlier work, it nevertheless added a much needed dose of energy to such a boring vehicle. Not that this mattered at the time considering it wasn't even out in Britain. Just like Prince and Gladys Knight - and they were soon to be joined by Bobby Brown's On Our Own from Ghostbusters 2 - Public Enemy helped build a film but didn't let themselves get bogged down by it.
My grandparents had apparently been in the UK for a couple weeks at this time. I say apparently since they were on a coach tour with my great aunt and uncle and we hardly saw them. Their previous visit had been something we looked forward to, it was exciting having them around - particularly when we were up in Scotland together - and we were sorry to see them go when they finally left in early November. This time, however, was a letdown - or it would have been had we been in a similar place as the previous autumn. Their first visit, we were only just off the plane from Calgary ourselves; now, we were just starting to think about heading home.
Their coach trip finished, Grandma Ella and Grandpa Bill, along with Don and Betty, spent their last few days in Britain with us in Laindon. I had school so, again, my contact with them was limited but we did take a day trip to London on the penultimate day. It was a gorgeous but viciously hot day as we made our way to Greenwich. Grandpa was always a dedicated walker and I wasn't about to let the heat stop me from joining him. Fortified by several cans of ice-cold Coke, I managed to keep up okay as we took in the botanic garden. The capital was beset by a tube strike at the time and we ended up wandering through some of the East End's less-than desirable areas to get back to Fenchurch St. Station. Grandpa Bill often gave me a hard time about being lazy but I hope he was proud of me that day.
~~~~~
young Paul's favourite: Back to Life
older Paul's retro pick: Back to Life
Growing up in the eighties, movies were always around but I think I always knew just how inessential they were. My parents got a VCR - or "the video" as the English would call it - when I was about six and that became our preferred medium for movies for the next decade but we were hardly renting genre-defying masterpieces. I saw and enjoyed several flicks that could capture the imagination of any kid from that age - Star Wars, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future - but there are also plenty I missed out on - Goonies, Gremlins, The Never-Ending Story - that never ceases to astound contemporaries. Then, there were those movies I did see but whose details have been wiped from my memory - The Princess Bride, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Beetlejuice, Labyrinth - that apparently defined whole childhoods. I was almost exclusively a comedy kid and it's those pictures - the first two Vacations, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Summer School - that left a mark. Seen or unseen, remembered or forgotten, however, they were just movies at the end of the day. Dirty Dancing, for its part, seemed to matter far more simply because it's soundtrack was omnipresent - and this carried over well into my adolescence as Go West's The King of Wishful Thinking and Chesney Hawkes' The One and Only meant far more to me than the films that accompanied them.
It was at the tail end of my teens, however, that I began to notice that people really, really, REALLY love movies - and, almost consequently, didn't care so much about music. Now, the charts only had themselves to blame for such an apathetic public: '96 was the heyday of horrible American frat rock which reached its nadir with Deep Blue Something's wretched Breakfast at Tiffany's (an all-too appropriate song to chronicle pop's decline at the expense of movies) and UK Britpop was rapidly shifting from cool and fresh to dull and tired. At the cinema, however, was Independence Day and Mission Impossible and that was all anyone seemed interested in talking about.
It's nice, then, to look back to 1989 and a time when our culture wasn't so obsessed by films. This week's Top 40 includes three numbers from upcoming movies although at least two of which felt as though the film was promoting the single, not the other way around. Prince was no stranger to soundtracking celluloid although much like Elvis and The Beatles before him it was clear he was using pictures to advance his music career, not to make a permanent transition into film (as opposed to more recent stars who seem to see pop music as a stepping stone to Hollywood). Batdance is not one of his more beloved singles though it's always felt like vintage Prince to me. I've always respected and admired the Purple One but I've never especially liked his music and the Tim Burton Batman theme is no better, no worse than the stuff that established his superstar status in the mid-eighties.
Climbing into the Top 20 this week is Gladys Knight's Licence to Kill from the Bond film of the same name. The movie came out at about this time to many indifferent shrugs but its theme was a bit of an underrated cracker, lacking the melancholy dramatics of a-ha's The Living Daylights but harking back to old school Shirley Bassey/Carly Simon-esque divas, Bond girls on record. I never gave any thought to seeing Licence to Kill - still haven't in fact - perhaps because I knew the best part was the single.
Finally, we get to Public Enemy's Fight the Power, which I had completely forgotten was from the Spike Lee's overrated Do the Right Thing. A bit of a drop in quality from their earlier work, it nevertheless added a much needed dose of energy to such a boring vehicle. Not that this mattered at the time considering it wasn't even out in Britain. Just like Prince and Gladys Knight - and they were soon to be joined by Bobby Brown's On Our Own from Ghostbusters 2 - Public Enemy helped build a film but didn't let themselves get bogged down by it.
My grandparents had apparently been in the UK for a couple weeks at this time. I say apparently since they were on a coach tour with my great aunt and uncle and we hardly saw them. Their previous visit had been something we looked forward to, it was exciting having them around - particularly when we were up in Scotland together - and we were sorry to see them go when they finally left in early November. This time, however, was a letdown - or it would have been had we been in a similar place as the previous autumn. Their first visit, we were only just off the plane from Calgary ourselves; now, we were just starting to think about heading home.
Their coach trip finished, Grandma Ella and Grandpa Bill, along with Don and Betty, spent their last few days in Britain with us in Laindon. I had school so, again, my contact with them was limited but we did take a day trip to London on the penultimate day. It was a gorgeous but viciously hot day as we made our way to Greenwich. Grandpa was always a dedicated walker and I wasn't about to let the heat stop me from joining him. Fortified by several cans of ice-cold Coke, I managed to keep up okay as we took in the botanic garden. The capital was beset by a tube strike at the time and we ended up wandering through some of the East End's less-than desirable areas to get back to Fenchurch St. Station. Grandpa Bill often gave me a hard time about being lazy but I hope he was proud of me that day.
~~~~~
young Paul's favourite: Back to Life
older Paul's retro pick: Back to Life
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