One of the very few things I enjoy about my commute down to That London is that I can stick my Apple Music app on shuffle (other music apps are available, I’ve never really ‘got’ most of the online world’s obsession with Spotify, for what it’s worth), be treated to some songs I’ve not heard for ages or never heard before, of which I own many. Doing this provides inspiration for this place, and I can drop each song into a playlist I have for each of the series I write here. As you can imagine, since they’re the ones I write most regularly, the Friday Night Music Club, Sunday Morning Coming Down and Late Night Stargazing playlists get added to most frequently.
Which leads me to tonight’s selection, an 80s classic which popped up the other day, and which I had always thought to be by a one-hit wonder act, but on researching this post, I found that they had in fact had three hits. (This of course depends on your definition of the term “one hit wonder” or, more broadly, on your definition of what constitutes “a hit”? For me, a hit is a record that made the UK Top 40, although others rather generously extend that definition to the Top 75, some even to the Top 100.)
It’s a subject that comedian Dave Gorman touched on in his wonderful and much-missed TV show Modern Life is Goodish (I have a sneaking suspicion I’ve posted this link before, but what the heck, it’s worth revisiting, as I’ve found when I came to finish this sentence some 45 minutes after I started writing it):
But I digress. As you may have guessed from the slightly cryptic gif at the top of the page, tonight’s 80s classic is Zoom by Fat Larry’s Band. Fat Larry had to beat off some stiff competition from the likes of The Beta Band, Daft Punk and Radiohead to feature tonight (and, in case you were wondering, innuendo very much intended there):
Not indie-cred enough for you? Fair enough. Here’s The Boo Radleys doing a rather faithful version, which originally appeared as an extra track on the CD single of 1994’s Barney (…and Me):
More soon.
A History of Dubious Taste 