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'

26 March 1989: I Bring Up the Topic, You Push It Away

1. Madonna: Like a Prayer
2. Jason Donovan: Too Many Broken Hearts
3. Donna Summer: This Time I Know It's for Real
4. Paula Abdul: Straight Up
5. Soul II Soul featuring Caron Wheeler: Keep on Movin'
6. Guns 'N Roses: Paradise City
7. Gloria Estefan & Miami Sound Machine: Can't Stay Away from You
8. The Reynolds Girls: I'd Rather Jack
9. Bananarama/Lananeeneenoonoo: Help!
10. Kon Kan: I Beg Your Pardon
11. Fuzzbox: International Rescue
12. Sam Brown: Stop!
13. The Bangles: Eternal Flame
14. Bobby Brown: Don't Be Cruel
15. Coldcut featuring Lisa Stansfield: People Hold On
16. Pat & Mick: I Haven't Stopped Dancing Yet
17. Alyson Williams: Sleep Talk
18. Michael Ball: Love Changes Everything
19. Chanelle: One Man
20. Michael Jackson: Leave Me Alone
21. S'Express: Hey Music Lover
22. The Cult: Fire Woman
23. Living in a Box: Blow the House Down
24. New Order: Round and Round
25. Roachford: Family Man
26. The The: The Beat(en) Generation
27. Womack & Womack: Celebrate the World
28. Holly Johnson: Americanos
29. Kym Mazell: Got to Get You Back
30. Paul Simpson featuring Adeva: Musical Freedom (Moving on Up)
31. Texas: I Don't Want a Lover
32. Simple Minds: Belfast Child
33. Transvision Vamp: Baby I Don't Care
34. Brother Beyond: Can You Keep a Secret [remix]
35. T'Pau: Only the Lonely
36. Poison: Every Rose Has Its Thorn
37. Goodbye Mr. Mackenzie: The Rattler
38. Roy Orbison: She's a Mystery to Me
39. Dusty Springfield: Nothing Has Been Proved
40. Yello: Of Course I'm Lying

~~~~~

"Yo Paul!" Dad baritoned. He must have known that I hated him using "yo" to get me out of bed. I never used "yo" and it never failed to irk me whenever he used it - which was damn-near every morning until I started university by which time he must have figured I was old enough to get myself up. But it was effective. As always, his "Yo Paul!" knocked me out of my slumber.

"Happy Easter," he said using his regular speaking voice. He handed me a biggish chocolate egg inside a brown ceramic mug. A Smarties mug. My very own cup for consuming coffee and tea (though to this day I've heeded my mum's advice not to bother with the latter: black tea, she claimed, never turns out well in dark mugs) and I still have it. It was my preferred conduit for hot beverages during my awkward junior high years, those up and down days in high school, my drunken, desperate university period and those bouts of un(der)employment between flights of fancy to Asia that was my twenties. It's been with me on three continents and in about a dozen different houses and flats that I've lived in. And I hold it in particular esteem ever since a barfly I used to drink with offered to buy it off me for a pretty hefty price. (It's a pity, then, that the companion Wispa mug my sister got didn't enjoy a similarly full life: just a few months after we returned to Calgary, I jammed it in the dishwasher and it came out clean and chipped; Julie did hang on to it for a number of years after but it was never the same, just trotted out for the odd pity coffee)

"Oh, by the way," Dad said just as he was about to head downstairs, "Oxford won the boat race."

Our second week of the Easter holidays was a unique time for us: it was block of days off yet we spent every night at our tiny place in Laindon. With Dave visiting it was decided - not by me, mind you, but given how weary I'd grown of our endless weekend/holiday overnight trips (with some big ones still to come) I wasn't about to complain. It was nice to be able to take some day trips - and we did plenty of them over the last week of March. Easter Sunday was spent up in Essex's famed Constable Country, while the day after we took in Southend, as if we were out to show Dave that our adopted county was equal doses pristine and tacky. A lengthy, tightly-packed car ride to Stratford followed. Shakespeare's house was nice and the town in general quite lovely but it was let down somewhat by our first disappointing pub lunch - even though I wasn't expecting much from The Slug & Lettuce, which doesn't exactly evoke fine dining.

Back in Laindon, Dave was my roommate. I'd spend a couple weeks on a cot in my parents' room during Cookie and Meghan's visit in February but now it was Julie's turn. Dave continued to be easy going almost to a fault. As my mum later wrote to Grandma Betty: "Dave said that Paul never wanted to go to sleep, just wanted to talk all night". Following a trip to the beautiful village of Finchingfield we took a detour that took us close to two hours out of our way; while Mum, Julie and me complained and Dad berated his rotten luck in being unable to find a turn off, Dave took it all with good humour.

A busy week but just as Dave's visit was wrapping up, we found ourselves with a free Saturday. I emerged for breakfast and Dad and his brother were plotting a football match for the three of us. Wisely opting out of taking in the Tottenham-West Ham clash at White Heart Lane, they chose to take the longer trek to the decidedly safer environs of Plough Lane for Wimbledon-Nottingham Forest. 

Like most North Americans, my knowledge of Wimbledon began and ended with tennis. I was still too young and naive to know that all stadiums and arenas are specifically designed to be in the dodgiest, most unpleasant parts of any given town and had imagined that the world's most famous tennis tournament (even though I've always been more of a Roland Garros man myself) would be situated in a gorgeous, upscale, leafy part of London. Turns out I was right about the leafiness but little else. Plough Lane was just another rundown dump of a stadium set in another rundown dump of an area. We paid our two quid apiece - an advantage of the days when teams played in shithole venues was that it at least it was cheap - peed on the wall of the men's room (since that was all there was) and had a sausage on a bun before claiming our spot in the terrace.

Dad and I had spent our first live football experience envying the mob in the standing terrace and this was our chance. We got there early and chose the very back. The terrace began to fill up and it was bumping by the time of the kick off. An Ipswich, a Norwich and a Spurs supporter thus became temporary Dons fans. I knew nothing of Vinnie Jones - nor, indeed, Wimbledon's Crazy Gang - but we immediately took to him. He was a bad ass on the pitch, fearless, tough and in control. He fully lived up to his hard man reputation, he was a football Dennis Rodman but not the headcase, a Brian Bosworth who wasn't in awe of the Bo Jacksons (as the iconic photo of him grabbing Gazza's lunch box aptly demonstrates), a Jim Peplinski who people had heard of. If he wasn't the best player that day then no one dared tell him otherwise. Years later whenever I would see him in Snatch or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels or X-Men: The Last Stand, I would remark that I once saw him play soccer, much to the utter disinterest of whoever I happened to be with.

Vinnie's performance was a highlight of the day but it was being in the terrace that really stands out. I remember wondering how we could enjoy the action at such a poor vantage point but it hardly mattered. Our adopted team played an inspired game and the fans went nuts. Early on I felt silly rooting for a squad I knew nothing about but as the goals came it got easier and easier. The atmosphere was boisterous but not intimidating. The loyal Dons supporters were a well-behaved lot and made the whole thing seem like one big party. The game ended and we took the train back to Laindon, contented by our nice Saturday afternoon taking in the football.

Wimbledon's opponent was Notts Forest, who'd been on a roll since New Year's and were still in the race for the League. To lose, then, to the middling Dons must have been a blow for Brian Clough's side. (It's no wonder, then, that our mates in the standing terrace were so jubilant that their team prevailed) Nottingham continued to do well after the loss to Wimbledon, vaulting over the once first place Norwich City into third. Three days after trouncing Southampton at home they headed up to Sheffield for a crucial FA Cup semi final with Liverpool. A good thing we had our standing terrace experience when we did.

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

19 March 1989: Why Do People Choose to Live Their Lives This Way?

1. Madonna: Like a Prayer
2. Jason Donovan: Too Many Broken Hearts
3. Donna Summer: This Time I Know It's for Real
4. Paula Abdul: Straight Up
5. Soul II Soul featuring Caron Wheeler: Keep on Movin'
6. Bananarama/Lananeeneenoonoo: Help!
7. Gloria Estefan & Miami Sound Machine: Can't Stay Away from You
8. Guns 'N Roses: Paradise City
9. Sam Brown: Stop!
10. The Reynolds Girls: I'd Rather Jack
11. Michael Ball: Love Changes Everything
12. S'Express: Hey Music Lover
13. Fuzzbox: International Rescue
14. Living in a Box: Blow the House Down
15. Michael Jackson: Leave Me Alone
16. Chanelle: One Man
17. Kon Kan: I Beg Your Pardon
18. Alyson Williams: Sleep Talk
19. Texas: I Don't Want a Lover
20. Womack & Womack: Celebrate the World
21. New Order: Round and Round
22. Simple Minds: Belfast Child
23. Tyree featuring Kool Rock Steady: Turn Up the Bass
24. Coldcut featuring Lisa Stansfield: People Hold On
25. Poison: Every Rose Has Its Thorn
26. Dusty Springfield: Nothing Has Been Proved
27. Bobby Brown: Don't Be Cruel
28. Deacon Blue: Wages Day
29. Roachford: Family Man
30. The Four Tops: Indestructible
31. Elvis Costello: Veronica
32. Kim Wilde: Love in the Natural Way
33. The Bangles: Eternal Flame
34. Pat & Mick: I Haven't Stopped Dancing Yet
35. Kym Mazell: Got to Get You Back
36. Bobby Brown: My Prerogative
37. T'Pau: Only the Lonely
38. Depeche Mode: Everything Counts [live]
39. Goodbye Mr. Mackenzie: The Rattler
40. Paul Simpson featuring Adeva: Musical Freedom (Moving on Up)

~~~~~

At some point in the eighties pop music began to mean something again. Now, the whole notion of the entire decade being one great big yacht leaden with yuppie hedonists in pastel suit jackets freebasing coke to the sounds of fairlight synthesizers and ultra slick alto sax solos has been largely overstated, it must be said that the Kajagoogoos and Duran Durans did provide an all-too appropriate soundtrack to the age of Reagan and Thatcher. Happily, it wasn't to last. The sea change could well have been the Ethiopian famine and Band Aid and Live Aid which were spawned as a result (and, from there, USA for Africa and Northern Lights). Some acts were galvanized into a campaign of good works with Amnesty International benefit concerts for Nelson Mandela, the Red Wedge movement and saving the rainforest. Others may have recognized the folly of the do-gooders but nevertheless attempted to make their songs have a say about what was going on at the time.

While rock looked to the heartland as a means of salvation and pop dabbled in trying to topple Thatcher (it didn't take but it was worth a try!), hip hop, house and soul took the issues in their own direction. While a number American rappers adopted an aggressive, militant stance, there was a certain positivity behind a number of acts at the time but the results were frequently mixed. The pioneering hip hop trio De La Soul managed to pull off their idealism by dispensing with earnestness in favour charm and playfulness. Others had more vague intentions, which could lead to fumbled attempts at the zeitgeist but not in the case of a landmark hit from March of 1989.

Soul II Soul's Keep on Movin' was a fresh and exciting single as England began to enter a lovely though melancholic spring. Though few knew it at the time, it was to become remarkably influential. Festooned with strings, it seemed like the very first house record not to topple over due to the weight of all its samples; at a time when rock was beginning to get obsessed with getting back to basics, this was sparse, warm and every bit as honest to goodness and downhome as a Tom Petty record. Keeping with the spirit of economy, Caron Wheeler's vocal is restrained and, in places, almost whispered. But what was it about? The title makes it seem like it's just another dance record about dance records but the lyrics brim with world in flux and lives that have to keep up. "Why do people choose to live their lives this way?" Wheeler asks. Is she referring to people who stop movin' or those who keep on? The ambiguity here is attractive. Just as restrained as the music and vocal, the lyrics are about something and feel important but refuse to spell it out for the listener.

(Coldcut's People Hold On attempts a similar tactic but the lyrics' kumbaya, make the world a better place sentiment lets it down a tad. Nevertheless it was similarly astonishing at the though for very different reasons. Lisa Stansfield's elastic voice could shape-shift its way around a lyric and it seemed like she was going to be a star for many years to come (well, she did all right). The music seemed to find a middle ground between synth-pop and house that works well enough but it doesn't impress me as much as I expected. I'd say it hasn't aged well but I had not dissimilar reservations about it at the time too)

It was a nice surprise to discover that we were going to have two weeks off for Easter. The itinerary for the first week was less than welcome since my sister and I were still bitter that we wouldn't be going to Greece and had to make do with Liverpool, Manchester and the Lake District instead. Sensing wisely that the famed/notorious industrial towns were worth a visit but not the sort of places to spend the night in, my parents decided that we'd base ourselves in the charming walled city of Chester. While the Beatles and Liverpool FC and Coronation St. were a part of our visits (this being the closest I'll ever get to traveling like an obsessed Japanese fan), the main attraction of our jaunt up to the Northwest was meeting David and Julie and their daughters Helen and one who shall remain nameless due to my unreliable memory. Mum had joined a tracing your ancestors class in Billericay months earlier and had managed to get in touch with the son of her grandmother's brother in Salford. I tried to dump on it by pointing out that they weren't the ones who were long lost since, you know, they stayed in England and we left but no one listened - and who can blame them?

From there we were off to the Lake District where we were greeted by the novel sight of snow. I never read Beatrix Potter as a boy and was a few years away from discovering how gifted yet horribly dull William Wordsworth could be so I was out of my element when it came to the area's icons. Having spent a few summers camping the the Rocky Mountains, this bit of rugged England seemed like small potatoes but it was picturesque enough to lend its vistas to many a postcard, cross-stitch and TV tray. All right, that's glib but it just wasn't my kind of place. It probably would be now because cafes have taken over from record shops in my esteem of town attractions.

Back in Laindon as the first week of the Easter break began to draw to a close, we began to get ready for the arrival of my uncle Dave. On Good Friday my parents drove to Gatwick to meet him. He was probably every bit as exhausted as we were back in August but he didn't show it. He downed a cup of coffee, made it clear he didn't care about having a nap and seemed enthusiastic about going for a ride to some of the more welcoming spots in Essex. I didn't make a mental note of it then but it's something I think about from time to time when travel gets to be a bit much. Dave is happy to roll with it while on vacation and so should I. (I can't say I've been entirely successful in trying to emulate my uncle's laid back approach but I've tried)

Saturday was the famed boat race between Oxford and Cambridge and we were there by the side of The Thames with a supply of turkey sandwiches and cans of Coke to witness a crew in light blue defeat a crew in slightly lighter blue (or was it the slightly lighter blue side that won?). For whatever reason, we were rooting for Cambridge and, thus, quite pleased by the result.

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

12 March 1989: Over and Over and Over and Over, the Radio's on but I Don't Hear a Song

1. Jason Donovan: Too Many Broken Hearts
2. Madonna: Like a Prayer
3. Bananarama/Lananeeneenoonoo: Help!
4. Donna Summer: This Time I Know It's for Real
5. Sam Brown: Stop!
6. Paula Abdul: Straight Up
7. Gloria Estefan & Miami Sound Machine: Can't Stay Away from You
8. Michael Ball: Love Changes Everything
9. S'Express: Hey Music Lover
10. Living in a Box: Blow the House Down
11. Michael Jackson: Leave Me Alone
12. The Reynolds Girls: I'd Rather Jack
13. Simple Minds: Belfast Child
14. Texas: I Don't Want a Lover
15. Soul II Soul featuring Caron Wheeler: Keep On Movin'
16. Tyree featuring Kool Rock Steady: Turn Up the Bass
17. Dusty Springfield: Nothing Has Been Proved
18. Poison: Every Rose Has Its Thorn
19. Womack & Womack: Celebrate the World
20. Deacon Blue: Wages Day
21. Guns N' Roses: Paradise City
22. New Order: Round and Round
23. Fuzzbox: International Rescue
24. Depeche Mode: Everything Counts [live]
25. Chanelle: One Man
26. Bobby Brown: My Prerogative
27. WASP: Mean Man
28. Alyson Williams: Sleep Talk
29. The Wonder Stuff: Who Wants to Be the Disco King?
30. Vixen: Cryin'
31. Elvis Costello: Veronica
32. Kon Kan: I Beg Your Pardon
33. Rick Astley: Hold Me in Your Arms
34. Hue & Cry: Looking for Linda
35. Tone Loc: Wild Thing / Loc'ed After Dark
36. Kim Wilde: Love in the Natural Way
37. New Model Army: Vagabonds
38. The Four Tops: Indestructible
39. Marc Almond featuring Gene Pitney: Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart
40. Holly Johnson: Love Train

~~~~~

An Aussie soap heartthrob, a girl group and their comedic doppelgängers, a faded disco-era legend and a pair of hopeless sisters: the Stock Aitken Waterman stable in all its glory. The songwriting/production trio had racked up an awful lot of hits over the previous half decade but by 1989 represented their commercial apogee. It also just so happened to be when the wheels were beginning to unhinge off their enterprise.

I've written previously that I admired Jason Donovan at the time and, judging by some footage on youtube, it's not exactly difficult to see why. He looked great, seemed like a friendly and genuine chap and the ladies simply worshiped him. Crucially, though few discussed this element at the time, he didn't encourage young males to resent his popularity with the fair sex the way we would with the likes of Bros and New Kids on the Block. Smug teen idols of yesterday and today all give off vibes that only they can score the choice womenfolk; Jason, by contrast, made guys feel like they too could get the girl. All he lacked was decent singing and good material but, lacking in those ingredients though it was, Too Many Broken Hearts was still insanely catchy. The thrill of its first week on the top spot, however, had worn off by week two and it was beginning to look like a lame duck number one. We all knew that Madonna would not be denied.

Red Nose Day had come gone and Bananarama's rendition of The Beatles' Help! was the Comic Relief single. They do a passable job of it but, in truth, that's largely down to the efforts of Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French and Kathy Burke as wannabe Bananas Lananeeneenoonoo. Their comedic interjections ("round, round, round" "daaaa-aaa-aownnn" - I've never been able to hear the original without adding ) and sassy yet apathetic attitude in the video make it memorable. Minus the French & Saunders touches, however, it comes across as Karen, Sarah and the other one just going through the motions, which is something they'd grown accustomed to as the eighties began drawing to a close. While it wasn't obvious at the time, Bananarama were pretty much done as far as their significance was concerned while their comedic cohorts would only become more successful into the nineties. Bananarama would be aspiring to be more like Lananeeneenoonoo before long.

Donna Summer's This Time I Know It's for Real is yet another SAW number that had climbed its way into the Top 5. It would soon be a big favourite of mine as I began to tire of Too Many Broken Hearts but it's slighter than I remember it being back in the day. It was great that a legend of the disco age could have a renaissance but those old enough to remember her early work must have known that this just couldn't compare to Hot Stuff and I Feel Love. 

And, finally, we come to the nadir of Stock Aitken Waterman, the moment that their empire began to crumble. I'd Rather Jack by Merseyside sister act The Reynolds Girls was conceived as an attack on DJ's and critics spurning their records but the results merely come across as cheap and whiny. The tune nicks some squelching from the once burgeoning, now faltering acid house scene which made it seem almost as dated as Pink Floyd and the Stones who are lampooned in the lyrics. If it didn't manage to alienate those who dug their Dire Straits just as much their Yazz then the naff presentation and amateurish dancing on the part of the Reynolds Girls proved a further turn off. Ironically, a year later SAW were having Kylie remind people to "remember the old days, remember The O'Jays" in the much better single Step Back in Time.

Happily, there was an antidote to the SAW shitshow. Unfortunately, The Wonder Stuff's Who Wants to Be the Disco King? only hit the chart's lower end and wasn't something I was aware of at the time. It wouldn't be until I was an awkward, frequently cheesed off fourteen-year-old that I had the opportunity to get into loudmouth laureate Miles Hunt and his fellow Stourbridge urchins but while Caught in My Shadow and The Size of a Cow were perfect tunes for my angsty teens (I always felt that because I had The Wonder Stuff I had no room in my life for grunge), I might have done well to hear someone rail against all this phony, manufactured pop at a younger age.

Still, I could very well have been fodder for one of Miles Hunt's blisteringly snide attacks for I was off to hob-nob with royalty this week. The 13th being Commonwealth Day, my dad took any excuse possible to get out of work - and get Julie and me out of class - by signing us up to attend a service at Westminster Abbey along with very special guest HM Elizabeth II, ver Queen. The itinerary for the day in London didn't seem especially promising but the chance to get out of an afternoon of making peppermint creams in home economics and composing my own private creed in religious studies really made me see the bright side of dressing up to see a royal. Not that I went all out with dolling myself up for the occasion: I wore my school uniform with my green and black sweater in place of the blazer and, judging by the photo taken either right before or just after the ceremony, it was yet another day in which I'd neglected to drag a comb through my hair.

The service was neither short nor long. We sat in our alloted seats for a little while but not so long that I got fidgety. Suddenly, everyone stood up and a procession began to, uh, proceed past us. In the middle of a group of very important looking people I spotted the Queen. She seemed appropriately regal but had the look of ever-present boredom that doubtless comes with having attended a lifetime's worth of Commonwealth Day ceremonies. Though impressive in its own way, it was still one of those things that really isn't such a big deal at the time and in retrospect. It's something I typically forget to even tell people and, having just typed the the first half of this sentence, I'm not sure why I've bothered telling it to anyone.

The service over, we then ventured over to Covent Garden to visit The Maple Leaf Pub, London's Canadian tavern of choice - though that's probably due to it being the only game in town in that regard. It was the kind of place that can only attract the rabidly homesick so, naturally, we were smitten. I enjoyed my Montreal smoked meat sandwich so much that I vowed then and there to return. In subsequent years I've been to a few equivalent joints - pre-fab Irish pubs in Bangkok, Singapore and even on the tiny Indonesian island of Gili Trawangan, dive sports bars in Jakarta's Blok M and Seoul's Itaewon - and am now resigned to both their functionality and just how depressing they can be. The ham and cheese baguette might be decent, it might be a cool novelty to see a hockey game for the first time in months or years and there's always a good chance you can strike up an agreeable conversation with a fellow expat. But the beer is no better than anywhere else in the area, the prices are astronomical, the atmosphere isn't really all that Canadian or Irish and that expat will soon get on your nerves. Even if that expat you were chatting with was me.

~~~~~

young Paul's favourite: Too Many Broken Hearts

older Paul's retro pick: Who Wants to Be the Disco King?

5 March 1989: I'll Give You Ten Good Reasons to Stay

1. Jason Donovan: Too Many Broken Hearts
2. Michael Ball: Love Changes Everything
3. Bananarama/Lananeeneenoonoo: Help!
4. Sam Brown: Stop!
5. Michael Jackson: Leave Me Alone
6. Simple Minds: Belfast Child
7. S'Express: Hey Music Lover
8. Gloria Estefan & Miami Sound Machine: Can't Stay Away from You
9. Texas: I Don't Want a Lover
10. Living in a Box: Blow the House Down
11. Donna Summer: This Time I Know It's for Real
12. Tyree featuring Kool Rock Steady: Turn Up the Bass
13. Poison: Every Rose Has Its Thorn
14. Bobby Brown: My Prerogative
15. Paula Abdul: Straight Up
16. Dusty Springfield: Nothing Has Been Proved
17. The Reynolds Girls: I'd Rather Jack
18. Deacon Blue: Wages Day
19. Rick Astley: Hold Me in Your Arms
20. Marc Almond featuring Gene Pitney: Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart
21. WASP: Mean Man
22. Depeche Mode: Everything Counts [live]
23. Hue & Cry: Looking for Linda
24. Womack & Womack: Celebrate the World
25. Tone Loc: Wild Thing / Loc'ed After Dark
26. Holly Johnson: Love Train
27. Vixen: Cryin'
28. The Wonder Stuff: Who Wants to Be the Disco King?
29. Mike + The Mechanics: The Living Years
30. Fuzzbox: International Rescue
31. Yazz: Fine Time
32. New Order: Round and Round
33. Def Leppard: Rocket
34. Edie Brickell & The New Bohemians: What I Am
35. Roy Orbison: You Got It
36. Chanelle: One Man
37. Ten City: That's the Way Love Is
38. Elvis Costello: Veronica
39. Alyson Williams: Sleep Talk
40. New Model Army: Vagabonds

~~~~~

The night of March 5, 1989 saw our own little Beatles-Stones, Blur-Oasis chart battle. We had just finished dinner and Bruno Brooks was getting down to the nitty gritty of his weekly Top 40 rundown. Simple Minds were at number six and, thus, we knew there would be a brand new chart topper. Michael Jackson was also falling and Sam Brown was standing pat in fourth place. Radio 1's Bruno Brookes then announced that Bananarama and their comedic doppelgängers Lananeeneenoonoo were up to number three with their cover of Help! It was an appropriate number to get the bronze medal since it was one both sides could agree on: my sister and I liked the 'Narns' distinctive in unison vocals and the amusing touches courtesy of French and Saunders, my mum appreciated a Beatles cover that wasn't utterly wretched.

Help! began to come to a close and we waited. We all knew the next two singles but we didn't know who would hit number one. Mum was convinced it was Michael Ball's Love Changes Everything that had the top spot sown up; Julie and I were equally sure that Jason Donovan's Too Many Broken Hearts was destined for number one. No one placed a bet on the result, no one thought to do so; all that mattered was who would coming in first. Finally, Brookes came back on to resolve our little household impasse: Michael Ball was at number two. My sister and I enjoyed a satisfactory bout of gloating while Mum looked severely annoyed.

This all seems so wonderfully quaint now, doesn't it? A tedious and overly lush Andrew Lloyd Weber tune from the already massive flop musical Aspects of Love competing with a catchy yet moronic piece of fluff by a heartthrob Aussie soap star. Hardly what one would call a murderer's row of classic pop. But I love the fact that my mum cared so much about that week's UK number one and that we were all so invested in it. (For his part, my dad didn't try to ignore all the hullabaloo even if he did fire off a few cynical remarks our way) Does anyone these days care about the charts the way we did on that Sunday night in March? (Fond as I am of that little anecdote it's also a sad reminder of how I now live at a time when hardly anyone cares about music anymore)

Windsor was just another town in a country and in a year filled with towns. The B&B was crap, the weather wasn't especially good and even browsing the records at WH Smiths tiresome. Sunday morning in the drizzle wandering around the park adjacent to the Castle (and, I gather, oh so close to the hallowed halls of Eton; not that I cared at the time seeing as how we were already surrogate Old Harrovians) was nice but I spoiled the mood by trying to look clever in the photos taken by my dad. Okay, the Safari Park was pretty good, I definitely enjoyed that, even though I can't help but look back on it knowing that it was soon to become a Legoland.

This week's entry features a double dose of torpor. At the time I was getting sick of spending damn-near every weekend away and now I look back on places like Windsor with ennui. A rot was beginning to set in during these mid-period months of our year in England. This may have been the time to have dialed back on the weekend day and overnight trips since the novelty had definitely worn off. It's also the point where blogging about such trips gets to be too much. What more can be said?

Well, one thing actually. The trip to Windsor concluded with an impromptu decision of Dad's. Perhaps also feeling the mundanity of all this travel, he got in the car and announced that he fancied cutting through London on the way home rather than taking the mammoth M25. As if justifying it to himself as much as the rest of us, he claimed that it might be our last chance to do so. He was talking as if we had only a few days left in our trip, not several more months. But it triggered something in me: we now had more time behind us than ahead and our return to Canada was on the horizon. Our car edged slowly through the north of London and I began to think about how much I wanted to stay.

~~~~~
young Paul's favourite: Too Many Broken Hearts
older Paul's retro pick: Who Wants to Be the Disco King?