It may have escaped your attention, although I doubt it, the recycling of all things 80s continues apace with the release of The Fall Guy movie.
For those annoyingly young enough not to remember it, The Fall Guy was a TV series following the fortunes of Colt Seavers, and his chums Howie Munson and Jody Banks, who were all stunt performers who moonlighted as bounty hunters. In practice, the stunt performaces barely got a look in, the show was all about their bounty hunting exploits. That, and as many gratuitous shots as possible of Jody Banks (played by Heather Thomas) wearing as little as possible.
Here’s the opening credits, from which you will get the giste of the show:
*Sighs*
Sorry, where was I?
Ah, yes. Back then Colt Seavers was played by Lee Majors, formerly known as Mr Farrah Fawcett and also Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man. Time for some more opening titles:
There’s not much of a theme tune to that, so let me take you back to The Fall Guy, because that’s the thing that’s missing from all of the trailers for the movie.
Those of you in the UK will probably remember a recurring sketch on Little Britain where a tiny Dennis Waterman would visit his agent, be offered a role in a TV show, film or some such, but would decline it because he couldn’t write and sing the theme tune:
There’s a point to this: Majors sang the theme tune to The Fall Guy, and that’s this morning’s tune:
And, of course, it has been re-recorded (and re-written, to remove them leading ladies from the lyrics) for the film, but doesn’t feature in any of the trailers that I’ve seen:
Yup, I couldn’t be bothered with writing any of the three options listed in yesterday’s post.
Instead, this:
In 2022 Billie Eilish headlined Friday night at Glastonbury.
At the time, I knew who she was, but knew precious few of her songs.
I watched her (on the telly), thought she was brilliant, vowed to check out her back catalogue (not a euphemism), downloaded everything I could find, and then promptly forgot all about listening to any of it, distracted by somebody else I’d caught on the BBC footage that I’d also thought was brilliant, vowed to check out their back catalogue (still not a euphemism) etc etc etc.
Anyway, the only good thing about having to travel into London and the office, is that I have few hours where I stick my iTunes on shuffle and whenever it tosses something into my ears of interest I add it to one of the many playlists I have set up.
And so it was on Friday, when this little beauty caressed its way through my lugholes:
It appears to be Friday again, which can only mean it’s time for another mix (yes, another one, stop groaning at the back!), and we’ve got a right mixed bag for you this week.
Yes, from the 80s disco-soul of Jocelyn Brown, a bit of Basement Jaxx for a Friday night (at least one person out there will get that reference), through the indie-guitar pop of The Soup Dragons and Girls At Our Best, through to the fantastically named Beyond the Wizard’s Sleeve via some shouty Swedish rock courtesy of Whale, some shouty Scottish indiepop from bis, some shouty Noo Yawk rap courtesy of the Beastie Boys, some not-very-shouty-at-all French dance dudes, a Bowie classic, Soulwax remixing The Chemical Brothers, a couple of other bits which just sounded good thrown in, and the long overdue return of Half Man Half Biscuit…you’re in for a fun 62:15 tonight, tomorrow, whenever you listen to it.
Half Man Half Biscuit – I Was A Teenage Armchair Honved Fan
The Chemical Brothers – Hey Boy, Hey Girl (Soulwax Remix)
Simian Mobile Disco – Hustler
Bedrock – For What You Dream Of
Dr Kucho! & Gregor Salto – Mr Martini
Phoenix – If I Ever Feel Better, I’ll Go To The Disco
Beyond the Wizards Sleeve – Don’t Cry Girl
I’ll be back tomorrow, with either the next part of my review of the Now… albums, maybe something a bit Eurovision-y, or maybe I’ll just have a bit of a Rant. We’ll see what kind of mood I’m in later once I’ve had me an end-of-week tipple.
This morning’s tune comes to you courtesy of social media.
Anyone who uses it would probably agree that since Elon Musk bought Twitter and pointlessly changed its name to X, it has slid downhill and become a cesspit of racists, homophobes, sexists, sex workers and scammers. If it weren’t for the nice folk who have remained and refuse to allow it to be just those sorts, I’d have quit it a long time ago.
But I persist with it, as every now and again something great, good, funny or interesting gets posted, and such is the case with today’s tune.
For a couple of months ago, a clip of today’s artist, Luke Combs, performing today’s song live with the original artist, Tracy Chapman, at this year’s Grammys was posted, and Combs looked so incredibly chuffed to be performing the song with her, it was quite charming. Chapman looks thrilled to be there too, mind, and she still looks and sounds pretty great too. Taylor Swift seems to be enjoying it too.
The original came out in 1988, the opening track on the artist’s eponymous debut album, and, to use the PR vernacular, was a world-wide smash. It’s a wonderful and truly moving song, telling the story of a poor working woman trying to escape the cycle of poverty, so, y’know, a nice cheery topic for a Sunday morning. The NME described it at the time as being “…a typically well expressed lament, not for those who have suffered extraordinary circumstances, but for those who escape one form of dead end existence only to fall into another, relative material success without the consolation of dreams for the future. It’s a keenly felt depiction of the impossibility of escape, rendered tastefully and gracefully, charming in its simplicity.”
Here’s Combs’ version, from his 2023 album Gettin’ Old, a title which I feel a lot of empathy with:
As I mentioned in a recent post, Friday night was Wedding Present night for yours truly, and so off I ventured to Cambridge’s Junction 2 to catch David Gedge and the gang for the umpteenth time. Since I first saw them back in October 1988 – the first band I went to see after I left home and went to college – I’ve seen them pretty much every year that they’ve been a going concern and in all of those occasions, I cannot think of a single time when I left one of their gigs feeling disappointed.
I’ll probably write more about the gig later in the week, but until then, here’s the song they finished the night with. Lifted from their second album proper, Bizarro, it’s one of their quiet, brooding ones which suddenly erupts into a glorious cacophany of noise; on Friday night, you could have heard a pin drop in the venue, as the music got quieter and quieter and the crowd waited for the moment when it all comes crashing back in again.
Welcome back to our wander down memory lane, where we revisit all of the records in the Now That’s What I Call Music series (until I get bored of writing it, that is). Many thanks too all who left much kinder comments after the last instalment, and especially to JC who flagged to me that former regular Chain contributor The Great Gog, who, if memory serves, had a blog but hadn’t actually gotten round to writing anything back then, is currently writing about old issues of Smash Hits he bought back in the day. If you’re enjoying the nostaglia-fest I write here, you might want to check out his blog Wasting Time in the Study. At the time of writing this, he’s on September 20 – October 3 1979, so I suspect at some point there may well be some synchronicity between his blog and this series.
Since he’s far too modest to self-publicise, I also wanted to flag the Shakedown series JC writes over at his ever-wonderful blog The (new) Vinyl Villain, where he takes a month-by-month “look back at the 45s that were making all the noise in 1979” He’s currently on April, having previously completed the same task for 1983.
Enough with the plugs, although it’s perhaps better if we all promote our peers blogs than when, say, former Prime Ministers attempt to big up their new book (wait for it…):
Let’s get going, shall we? As always, feel free to reveal which of these you bought back in the day via the Comments section, and remember, we’re not here to judge you (although we may take the piss a bit).
Now if ever a song deserves to be described as an era-defining greatest hit, it’s probably this one. Relax first entered the UK Top 75 singles chart in November 1983 but didn’t crack the Top 40 until early January 1984. It reached #1 at the end of January, and remained in the Top 40 for 37 consecutive weeks, 35 of which followed a ban by the BBC, following Radio 1 DJ Mike Read getting his knickers in a twist over what he considered to be some rather fruity lyrics. Halfway through playing the single, Read suddenly turned the record off, denouncing the lyrics as ‘obscene’, an account which Read denies, claiminghe only had a copy of the longer 12″ version in the studio, and that his interruption of the record was purely for timing reasons. Whatever the truth is, he is forever associated with it, credited with instigating the ban which the BBC swiftly enforced shortly afterwards.
The lyrics seem rather tame now – certainly I find it less offensive than Read’s own 2014 single UKIP Calypso, which was rightly criticised for being racist, and which Read subsequently withdrew it from sale and apologised – but back then the words “Relax, don’t do it/When you want to sock it to it/Relax, don’t do it/ When you want to come.” were considered shocking. Head Frankie… Holly Johnson contends that the lyric was misheard: the line wasn’t “When you want to sock it to it”, it was “When you want to suck, chew it”, which I’m not sure helped appease those offended, and I’m pretty sure wasn’t meant to.
The BBC ban wasn’t restricted to the radio waves, but to TV too, which led to the farcical position when it reached #1 where Top of the Pops resorted to simply showing a photo of the band at the culmination of the chart rundown, before airing a performance by a non-number one artist.
When follow-up single Two Tribes followed Relax to #1 a few months later, Relax the single re-entered the Top Ten for a further nine weeks, including two spent at # 2, only kept off the #1 slot for a second time by Two Tribes.
Relax eventually amassed a whopping 70 weeks in the uk Top 100 and sold a reported two million copies in the UK alone, easily ranking among the ten biggest-selling singles in the UK.
By the time this came out in January 1984, Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart were well-established regulars. This was their tenth single, and their fifth to reach the UK Top Ten, peaking at #8.
Eurythimics are one of those bands I’m pretty meh about to be honest. There are some of their singles that I quite liked at the time (only one which I ever purchased), there are some – such as this, and all that had bothered the charts before it – which I hated at the time (the old “no guitars…!!” bias kicking in again) but which I now feel great affection for, and there is one which I hate so much I have to turn the radio off whenever it comes on. Doubtless they will reappear in this series, so I’ll not elaborate further. This is, of course, a painfully transparent attempt to build some tension about which singles I’m referring to.
3. Howard Jones – What is Love?
Second appearance of the 80s synth-pop icon in the series, this was the follow-up to New Song, it fared better in the UK charts than its predecessor, peaking at #2. Jones once said of it: “”I didn’t want to write songs about, ‘I love you, baby, you’ve hurt me and I’m sad.’ I didn’t want to write songs about co-dependency. If I was going to write about love, I wanted to say what do we mean by love? What is it, really? You can’t be dependent upon another person for your happiness. So you’d better question this idea of romantic love pretty soon, otherwise you’re going to be pretty miserable. So that’s really what that song is”, which somehow manages to make it sound even duller than it actually is.
This is more like it, although despite it having a unique and fabulous guitar-riff courtesy of Johnny Marr, I still didn’t buy it at the time because I, sadly, subscribed to the notion that Morrissey was a miserable sod. I took me a few years to finally “get them”, at which point they promptly split up. I don’t believe these two facts are linked.
I caught an old rerun of Top of the Pops on BBC4 the other week, and it kicked off with Sandie Shaw covering Hand in Glove, with The Smiths, sans Morrissey, as her backing band, and I suddenly felt like Seah Hughes used to when The Smiths came on the radio in his sit-com Sean’s Show. I was particularly struck with just how cool Marr looked at the time; no less so when they opened the show with What Difference... (warning, this clip contains image of The Hairy Cornflake and as such should be approached with great caution):
This lot were Scottish one-hit wonders, the band reaching #6 in January 1984 with this one, then never bothering the Top 40 again. The (Feels Like) Heaven line and refrain ws nicked and remodelled to advertise mobile phones back in the late ’90s/early 2000s, the “Feels Like” replaced with the word Carphone, if I remember correctly (and I add that caveat as I cannot 100% remember what product was being advertised, which shows how effective advertising can be).
A song the title of which I recognise, but do I remember the song itself? Nope. I’ve just listened to it. Still, nope.
The band’s keyboard player and song-writer Paul Fishman said the song “… is really about the power of when people come together and express themselves through dancing and letting go. During the ’80s, it was in its very early days but in the latter part of the decade the rave scene was pretty much the message in a nut shell. No, I don’t think people generally understand messages but some get it so that’s alright.” So, that’s him taking credit for the rave scene, whilst calling lovers of pop music thick.
This reached the giddy heights of #28 and then, just like Fiction Factory, their 15 minutes of fame were over.
I should, I suppose, commend the compilers of the Now… albums for not just picking the obvious singles, and trying to include some succesful singles by less well-known acts. Not that they would have known they wouldn’t have continued success at the time, but you get my point.
This was the second of two hits by Dolby, although as I write this I find that the first, She Blinded Me With Science, had been released twice previously, reaching #49 the first time, and #56 the second, so not, strictly speaking, a hit going by my definition (a hit = Top 40).
Hyperactive!, however, managed to get to #17, but nearly wasn’t a Dolby single at all: he initially composed the song for Michael Jackson, following a meeting in 1982, but decided to record it himself when he never got any feedback from Jackson after sending him a demo tape. Maybe if he’d put some pictures of young boys on the cover it might have got his attention.
Hailing from Kirby, near Liverpool, this was the band’s China Crisis 5th single, but the first to bother the Top 40, peaking at #9. More was to come from the band (including two singles I bought at the time, more of them another time, I imagine) but this, I’m surprised to find, was their biggest hit. I say that not because it’s a bad record, but simply because I thought at least one, if not both, of the singles I bought by them were bigger. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
I don’t think that, in March 1984, I really understood how important and great Bowie was, my opinion of him somewhat tempered by my dislike of Let’s Dance, which I remember mocking for the suggestion of putting on red shoes to dance the blues.
I loved Modern Love, though. Not enough to actually buy it, mind, but it went a long way to my recognising that maybe this guy was a genius after all, as did the single sandwiched between it and Let’s Dance, China Girl, which like Modern Love got to #2 in the UK Charts, prevented from hitting the top slot by Culture bloody Club’s Karma sodding Chameleon, which you may recall from the first instalment of this series, I hate. Maybe this goes some way to explaining that.
Yet another that falls into the category of ones by Boy George and the boys that I quite like, and which I can’t think of anything interesting to say about it, other than that it reached #4 in the UK Charts, and that’s not really very interesting at all, is it?
Unlike Bowie, I was very aware of the history and significance of The Stones back in 1984, and this was don to three things: firstly, my brother owned a greatest hits double album called The Story of The Stones, which, of all the Best ofs and Greatest Hits album put out in the band’s name is, for my money, the best one (and when I say ‘for my money’, I meant it, as when I started replenishing my vinyl a few years ago, it was that one which I bought); secondly, some kids at my school put a band together, they performed at a school assembly once, and played Jumpin’ Jack Flash and I thought it was ace; thirdly, as a family we would pick records from my Dad’s collection to play of a Saturday evening, and when the one 7″ single he had by them was selected, my Dad would do a terrible but very funny impression of Jagger along to it. He denied all knowledge of for years, until photographic evidence was finally located and presented to him.
Anyway, Undercover of the Night is no Jumpin’ Jack Flash, but it’s not bad and it did reach #11 and in the UK Charts, and, if memory serves, the accompanying video caused quite a stir at the time, although watching it back now that must have been because of Jagger’s terrible false moustache:
I could have sworn that I owned this, not on 7″ single, but on their 1983 album The Crossing (which I no longer own, I probably flogged it with a load of other records in a moment of madness/skintness); however, on putting this together, I learn that it wasn’t on the album at all, but was released as a stand-alone single in 1984, reaching #8 in the UK Charts. It absolutely sums up Big Country’s signature sound, which is no bad thing in my book.
Given the mention of Simon le Bon in that Viv & Bob/Slade clip, it seems appropriate that this lot appear next. Let’s be honest, though, this, which reached #9 in the UK Charts, isn’t their finest moment, although it has proven to be their most culturally significant, given it has an occasional series on some blog or other named after it.
Another somewhat anti-climactic ending to the compilation, I assume this was placed here to make the songs message of peace more powerful, As with the last two songs, this UK #1 is by no means a classic from Fab Macca Wacky Thumbs Aloft, perhaps best remembered for its video, depicting that moment in World War 1 when peace briefly broke out on Christmas Day, and British and German soldiers put down their weapons and played a game of football in No Man’s Land. Germany won on penalties, I’d imagine.
So, after encouraging you all to share which of these records you bought at the time, it turns out I bought exactly none of them. Ho hum. Maybe next time.
Answer: a weekend that has a Bank Holiday Monday right after it.
Question: what’s better than a weekend that has a Bank Holiday Monday right after it?
Answer: a weekend that has a Bank Holiday Monday right after it, where I’m going to see The Wedding Present play live at the start of it.
Well, whaddya know, that’s what we have here, for as this is getting published, I’ll be singing along with Gedge and the gang, with my old mate Richie by my side.
So, I’ll keep things brief: this week’s mix contains some Britpop-era belters, some super 60s songs, a particularly fine mash-up (and regular readers will recall I’m not generally a fan of the genre), a Morrissey song performed in the best way a Morrissey song can be performed (that is: not by Morrissey, but in a foreign language (to me) with a mariachi band parping along behind it), one of the finest guitar riffs in the last *checks notes* twenty-five years (blimey, I feel old), a guitar cover of a dance tune from 2002 which is perhaps most *ahem* fondly remembered for having a video featured a bevy of scantily-clad ladies using power tools, before, in case you were wondering why Dancing Darth has made a reappearance at the top of this post, we wrap things up with a couple of space-related tunes, given that tomorrow (May 4th) is Star Wars Day (as in “May the 4th be with you”, but you knew that, right?).
Oh, and that dance tune cover contains a bit of what Simon Bates, whilst pervily licking his lips, used to refer to as “sexual swear words” as he killed the vibe/heightened the excitement (delete as applicable) at the start of movies released on video in the 80s, so we’d better get the old Effin’ & Jeffin’ warning out again:
My apologies for the absence of any posts last weekend: I took a couple of days annual leave and was over at my folks house, helping my Dad celebrate his 84th birthday (which was on Tuesday) and simply didn’t have time to write everything I’d hoped to before I left home.
I’ve mentioned many times on these pages before that my love of Country music comes from Dad, one of many things I’m eternally grateful for, so I figured today I’d post one of the many songs he introduced me to. By which I mean, this song has featured here before, but it’s so good it deserves having the dust blown off of it occasionally.
When me and my brothers were kids, Dad worked away a lot, often overseas, something I know troubled him later on: he once asked me: did we resent the fact that he was away so much? (We’re not good at talking about feelings and stuff in our family, so we’d both had a few drinks when this subject was raised). Of course not, I replied. Sure, it would have been great if he’d been around more, but that was the norm for us. As we’ve got older, we know and appreciate he was doing what he had to do: providing what was a a very comfortable life for his family. Angela’s Ashes it wasn’t.
Tonight’s song reminds me of when he was around. Saturday afternoons would be spent driving to visit family: my grandparents on my mum’s side (if Gramps wasn’t in the pub, then he’d be sat in front of the wrestling on the TV, and was not to be disturbed!), then my grandmother on my Dad’s side, and then over to visit my great-grandmother, also on my Dad’s side, where we would be greeted with a hug and a kiss followed by a Crunchie bar. We’d endured the former, knowing the latter would be the pay-off.
Then the drive home, and we’d invariably stop off at The Chequered Skipper, a beautiful pub in Ashton, now sadly closed, as so many are. Look at how gorgeous it was:
What you can’t see from that is the vast expanse of greenery that lays in front of it, a beer garden like no other, where parents could sit at a bench and watch their kids could kick a ball around, or, as my parents did, wonder where I had gotten myself to (I had a habit of wandering off) only to find I’d gone to the furthest away trees where I was pretending to be Dr Who battling the Zygons, out of sight from prying adult eyes.
Somewhere in the family archive there are photos of my brother and I sitting at one of the benches, posing with an old-school pint poised to our lips. Sadly, I don’t have those pictures here, so here’s one of me looking impossibly cute and my brother looking impossibly disgruntled (you’ll work out which is which, I think…):
But I digress. As the night went on and darkness descended, my brother and I would be sent off to the car with a bottle of lemonade and a packet of peanuts each, whilst Mum & Dad retired to the warmth of the bar. We’d sit, slurp, munch, invariably argue and fight, whilst listening to whatever tape Dad had prepared for the day’s excursion.
The soundtrack to the whole day would usually be a couple of Kris Kristofferson albums, occasionally something by Johnny Cash, and even more infrequently an album by today’s artist, inevitably including today’s song. Although both my brother and I refused to acknowledge it for years, eventually we succumbed and admitted to loving all of those songs.
Especially this one, a classic Country tale of the singer leaving their partner cos they done them wrong. As an aside, you’ll note the amount of time both artist and label spent thinking of a title for the album it sits on. Peter Gabriel, eat your heart out:
Recently, I found myself thinking: What has Nina Persson been up to since The Cardigans stopped being a thing?
(I didn’t think that. That’s a false construct I made up simply to have a reason to post tonight’s song.)
Well, in 2023 she teamed up with James Yorkston and The Second Hand Orchestra to release The Great White Sea Eagle, a collection of songs which are beautiful, as you’ll hear for yourself if you listen to this:
A History of Dubious Taste 