I’ve done my best to clear the decks for a good break this Christmas, so I’m trying to do as little as possible. Hope everyone reading has a lovely festive season!
Pleased to say I survived Whamageddon for the first time ever! This was largely due to a noble act by Geth at parkrun on Saturday morning – someone was playing the song on the start line, he recognised it and dragged me away before I could hear it (his hearing is a lot better than mine), sacrificing himself to Whamhalla in the process. In future years I’ll be taking myself out of the game by playing the song in the early hours of 1st December – the last few days have been a bit unexpectedly stressful! I did really enjoy playing the video on YouTube at 2am this morning though!
A lovely early run with my headtorch this morning to start the day, and soon we’ll be having breakfast and presents with the family.
I went back to dance class for the first time in about a year and a half tonight, and I’m (not) looking forward to an awkward few weeks where I struggle to keep up ’cause I’m still learning the routines. I thought I’d motivate myself by looking at some videos where everyone knows what they’re doing!
10. Kelly Marie – Feels Like I’m In Love
I can never help but smile at this silly, kitschy video in which Kelly Marie and her two sailor friends go dancing around Central London for a bit of shore leave sightseeing.
9. Lionel Richie – Dancing On The Ceiling
Lionel and his fabulously-dressed ’80s friends decide the floor is not good enough and go stamping all over the walls and ceiling, causing a disturbance on the next floor up! The ceiling dancing effect is a bit hokey nowadays (you can tell the exact angle to which the set has just been spun when the dancers awkwardly clamber from wall to ceiling), but it’s still a highly entertaining watch.
8. Wham! – Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go
A lot of colourful dancing here, mainly from stalwart Wham! backing singers Pepsi and Shirlie plus a couple of extra friends, but it’s the day-glo UV lights sequence (long before it became trendy in videos of the early ’10s!) complete with dancing feet that I love about this video.
7. David Bowie and Mick Jagger – Dancing In The Street
I still see a lot online, strangely, about how this video is OMG SCANDALOUS for some reason and not becoming of such musical luminaries (mainly from American commentators, it has to be said; Brits tend to be more ‘meh, it’s just a couple of mates pissing about having a laugh, what’s the issue here?’). Either way, you can’t have an ’80s dance video list without it, and I want to give a shout out to Mick Jagger’s Reebok Freestyles here. Freestyle wearers represent.
6. Duran Duran – Wild Boys
No dancing from the band members here (Duran Duran do not dance, apart from that bit at the end of the New Moon On Monday video that they’d like you to forget about). The dancing is instead provided by the eponymous Wild Boys, a tribe of body-painted hostiles who have kidnapped the band (or something – like most music videos, the plot’s not very clear), and was choreographed by one-time Strictly judge Arlene Phillips.
5. Adam & The Ants – Prince Charming
There’s a lot to like in this classic video – Adam as the male Cinderella, Diana Dors as the fairy godmother, that fancy sports car that substitutes for the pumpkin carriage – but it’s the daft dance routine that will be remembered till the end of time. Ridicule is nothing to be scared of!
4. Elton John – I’m Still Standing
Elton John’s I’m Still Standing video is the gift that keeps on giving. The entire video is basically one long dance routine, ably led by Strictly judge Bruno Tonioli and his extensive collection of skimpy beachwear. The dancers lift each other in the air! They spin effortlessly on stairwells! They fall over on the beach! I could watch it a thousand more times and I’d probably still be picking up extra details.
3. Bananarama – Love In The First Degree
Bananarama are the ’80s queens of not-entirely-serious dance routines (their brilliantly half-arsed shuffle in the café in Really Saying Something is another of my favourites), and this cartoony prison-set video, complete with striped prisoner garb, balls and chains, and obvious stunt double backflips, is a shining example. Bonus points for the song being on the legendary Now! That’s What I Call Music #10 compilation.
2. Kim Carnes – Bette Davis Eyes
Another wonderfully odd early ’80s dance routine where the dancers spend a lot of time artistically slapping each other and then rhythmically slamming their palms against the floor in some kind of apparent protest. Great video.
1. Michael Jackson – Thriller
Come on. What else could it have been?
When I became a horror film buff in the late ’90s/early ’00s I was utterly fascinated with this video and the way it homaged so many horror tropes. Vincent Price’s narration in the middle of the song over the zombies crawling out of their graves is a highlight, but there’s a reason why the dance routine is still taught in Zumba classes all over the world every time Hallowe’en rolls around. It’s an absolute classic, and I love the story of how director John Landis insisted on the dancers having two weeks of rehearsals (not the norm at the time) so that they would be absolutely in sync with each other and therefore creepier. No video will ever better this one.
To my great surprise I found myself sunbathing at the beach this weekend (in the north-east of England! in April!), hence this week’s music videos are all beach-themed as I dream of the summer ahead and the summers from thirty-odd years ago.
10. Belinda Carlisle – Circle In The Sand
A nice near-literal video for this pretty 1988 track – there’s a lot of sand but not a lot of circles.
9. Don Henley – The Boys Of Summer
It was perhaps inevitable that the ultimate ’80s summer anthem would have a beach scene in the video. The black and white film makes it a bit gloomy, but that’s consistent with the pessimistic feel of the song.
8. Boy Meets Girl – Waiting For A Star To Fall
The video for this late ’80s cheesefest starts off with a suitably cheesy beach running scene. Love that epic sax solo!
7. Fleetwood Mac – Big Love
This is a more familiar sight for a British beach! Fleetwood Mac huddle in coats and scarves on a night-time beach in one of the many sequences of this brilliant video.
6. Blondie – Call Me
Bit of a seasonally-confused video here, as the beach shots of Debbie Harry are interspersed with her in a coat looking cold in New York City. Maybe she goes on holiday somewhere for the beach scenes.
5. Erasure – Ship Of Fools
The beach in this video is all made up of rocks and shells and therefore not at all suitable for sunbathing, although Andy Bell gives it a good go.
4. Wham! – Club Tropicana
Most of this ultimate summer holiday video is poolside, but George Michael does take a brief trip to the beach halfway through. It looks a bit overcast, though, so I don’t blame him for heading back to the pool.
3. The Bangles – Eternal Flame
A nice sunset beach scene here among the floaty images of Susanna Hoffs and co singing along to the song.
2. Duran Duran – Rio
Duran Duran made pretty much all of their videos on beaches during the jetsetting Rio era, but this one for the album’s title track is the most colourful and fun. The yacht scenes are the most iconic, but the beach scenes are blue-skied and beautiful and make me want to book a holiday.
1. Elton John – I’m Still Standing
I love everything about this ridiculous Cannes romp, from the ostentatious outdoor piano to Elton’s comedy glasses to the pre-Strictly Bruno Tonioli dancing his way through Cannes in a succession of ’80s leotards. The best bit, though, is when Elton lines up the dancers on the beach and pushes them over in a chain of human dominoes.
It’s starting to grey over here in Newcastle, so I suspect I won’t be taking any more trips to the beach for a couple of months now. I’ll have to make do with ’80s videos in the meantime!
If you’re lucky, there’s something special about the song that was number one when you were born. Maybe it symbolises something about your life, or your interests, or the person that you ended up growing up to be. Maybe it’s just a really awesome song.
If you’re unlucky, you end up like Geth and get Theme From M*A*S*H (Suicide Is Painless) (UK number one from 25th May 1980 to 14th June 1980, fact fans!) as your birthday number one. It’s not bad as TV theme tunes go, but it’s not special to Geth – he didn’t grow up to be a soldier, or an expert on the Korean War, or even much of a M*A*S*H fan, really.
I was lucky, and my birthday number one is special to me. I love it as a Christmas baby, as an ’80s throwback, as a chart geek, and as a lover of music in general. It’s an extremely well-known Christmas song – one of those tracks you hear constantly from the middle of November until early January. It held the record for the best-selling single in UK chart history for more than twelve years, only ever being overtaken by Elton John’s Candle In The Wind ’97 after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in September 1997.
My birthday number one is Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas?, one of the most famous recordings in music history.
I was born on 3rd January 1985, the twenty-sixth day of the thirty-five day period (9th December 1984 to 12th January 1985) that Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? spent at number one in the UK. From the 1984-1985 UK birthrates available online, I estimate that I share my birthday number one with approximately 71,000 other Band Aid babies, including Georgia Moffett, Lewis Hamilton, and Newton Faulkner. (I would love to be able to work out the exact number, but the internet is not forthcoming at the moment!)
Due to the ubiquity of the song, I grew up with it, and it became my favourite Christmas song long before I realised that it was my birthday number one. I pored over the upside-down answers to Smash Hits quizzes that challenged readers to name all the artists involved in the song, and memorised names that were unfamiliar to me in the context of the early ’90s pop music landscape. I dutifully learnt to sing the song with my primary school class in preparation for our Christmas performance at the local old folks’ community centre. I waited excitedly for it to come on as soon as my brother and I were allowed to play the family’s Christmas compilation CD (That’s Christmas) on the 1st of December every year. It’s one of those songs that you hear hundreds of times every year, and so it never really goes out of your mind. That’s not something you can say about Theme From M*A*S*H (Suicide Is Painless).
The finer points of Bob Geldof’s project to put together a charity supergroup and the song’s recording on 25th November 1984 are well known, detailed in a hundred different BBC4 documentaries and summarised fairly well on Wikipedia (though I highly recommend the Smash Hits coverage of the recording day included in the collection book The Best Of Smash Hits: The ’80s for a bit of period flavour – it has a great group photo of all the artists involved except for Boy George, who infamously didn’t show up till six o’clock in the evening due to oversleeping in New York and having to get on a Concorde back to London).
I’ve been to a lot of concerts in my life, including a lot of concerts by artists who were big in the ’80s due to it being my favourite music era and favourite era in general. But the other day, it occurred to me that I had never gone to see a single one of the thirty-seven artists who performed on my birthday number one. I had never even seen any of the additional seven artists who couldn’t make it to the recording and so sent recorded Christmas messages to be used on the B-side of the single.
This is the part of the post where I get to the point.
I will never get to see every single one of the artists involved in my birthday number one. Sadly, two of the musicians who contributed to the song (George Michael and Rick Parfitt) and two who recorded B-side messages (Stuart Adamson and David Bowie) have since passed away. But I have decided that I will make a concerted effort to see as many of the rest of them as possible. After all, I have more opportunity than some. My brother’s birthday number one is Ben E King’s Stand By Me (a re-entry at UK number one between 15th February 1987 and 7th March 1987), which means that since King’s death in 2015 he has no longer had the possibility of seeing his birthday number one artist. People who were born between 14th December 1980 and 20th December 1980, when (Just Like) Starting Over was number one following John Lennon’s assassination, have never had the chance to see their birthday number one artist.
Enter the Band Aid bucket list!
For most of my bucket lists, I reckon that if I’m lucky enough, I’ve got another fifty or sixty years left to get them completed. Time is not so much on my side for this particular list, given that all the artists on it are now in their fifties and sixties and won’t be performing or alive forever. As such, rather similarly to the huge hoard of ’80s vintage clothing I’m collecting while it’s still cheap and plentiful, I aim to get the bulk of this project achieved while I’m still in my thirties, and so I’m targeting >50% list completion by my fortieth birthday on 3rd January 2025. That gives me six years, one month and fourteen days as of this post to see as many of the following artists as possible. I’d better get a wiggle on.
Jon Moss (Culture Club) – not performing with Culture Club on 2018 UK tour (which I was really annoyed about when I saw them on 17th November 2018!) – may have to track down separately
Steve Norman (Spandau Ballet) – still performing with Spandau Ballet
Rick Parfitt (Status Quo) – sadly passed away on 24th December 2016, just a few hours before George Michael 🙁
Dennis Thomas (Kool & The Gang) – still performing with Kool & The Gang, and the only person on this list who doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry, strangely!
Current progress: song artists 11/37 (29.7%); message artists 2/7 (28.6%); total artists 13/44 (29.5%).
I have arranged to find out about future performances by all of these artists using the extremely lazy 21st century method of following them all on Twitter!
I’ll keep updating this post as I see more artists. I’m looking forward to this project!
We’ve been doing this for a whole week. Doesn’t time fly?
Day 7 takes us to 11th August 1986.
Let’s see what might have been blaring on the radio while I was toddling around that balcony.
Track 1: Peter Gabriel – Sledgehammer
Great start! Awesome upbeat song, a real classic (doing the chair dance right now). The video won lots of awards but I’ve never been a fan of it, though I’m sure it was groundbreaking at the time.
Track 2: UB40 – Sing Our Own Song
I do like the almost MIDI-videogame-music-esque instrumentals that run through this song. Nice tune too.
Track 3: Sly Fox – Let’s Go All The Way
Nice beat, but the tune’s a bit dull for me.
Track 4: Level 42 – Lessons In Love
And with the awesome guitar intro to this song, Level 42 are reminding me that I really should buy tickets to that show I was talking about yesterday. I love this track.
Track 5: Pet Shop Boys – Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money)
I’m so glad Pet Shop Boys have caught the eye of the Now! compilers! I love pretty much everything they’ve ever done, and this brilliant track is no exception. Love that slow synth intro that bangs into the chorus – awesome.
Track 6: Pete Wylie – Sinful!
Repetitive beats, lack of melody, boring samples, not really my thing. It does get slightly more interesting as it builds.
Geth arrived home while this was playing and thought it was by James. I’ve not asked how many drinks he had at his work’s wine reception, but it looks like a few.*
Track 7: Stan Ridgway – Camouflage
I do like this jaunty tune, though the vocals annoy me. If I can find an instrumental version, I think I’ll be adding it to my regular playlist.
Track 8: The Art Of Noise and Max Headroom – Paranoimia
Like the synth at the start of this, like the sampling, love Max Headroom. Fun track.
Track 9: Chris De Burgh – Lady In Red
Blurgh, far too much cheese here. I don’t dislike everything he’s done, but this one is a real eye-roller.
Track 10: David Bowie – Absolute Beginners
Lovely song, up to the usual Bowie standard. Nice video too, featuring a red phone box (though it’s filmed in black and white).
Track 11: Genesis – Invisible Touch
I really like the Genesis singles of this era. Great catchy chorus, great instrumentals.
Track 12: Simple Minds – All The Things She Said
It’s bad that when I see that title my mind automatically goes to the 2002 Tatu hit, right? I think that’s pretty bad.
This song, meanwhile, is a great upbeat track from Simple Minds, no male-gaze lesbianism in sight.
Track 13: The Housemartins – Happy Hour
Happy hour, happy song, happy Dee, quite literally. This one always cheers me up.
Track 14: Big Country – Look Away
One of the Big Country songs that irritates me for some reason. I think it’s the tune.
Track 15: Furniture – Brilliant Mind
I’ve always really liked the atmosphere of this one. It builds beautifully.
Track 16: Midge Ure – Call Of The Wild
Nice pop tune, but it’s a bit forgettable.
Track 17: Wham! – The Edge Of Heaven
Were Wham! still going at this point? I lose track. Great catchy song though.
Track 18: Owen Paul – My Favourite Waste Of Time
I’m going to call this a guilty pleasure. Should I feel guilty about it? I’m not sure.
Track 19: Amazulu – Too Good To Be Forgotten
Unfortunately this song does not do what it says on the tin. It may be unforgettable, but that’s due to the irritating tune that threatens to become an unwanted earworm if you hear it too often.
Track 20: Doctor & The Medics – Spirit In The Sky
Never been sure about this cover. It’s very nearly a pointless ’80s cover in my book, as there’s little to differentiate it from the Norman Greenbaum original other than the harder guitar and interesting synth hooks, but I can’t help but love the video.
Track 21: Bananarama – Venus
My favourite Bananarama song! Perfect piece of pop.
Track 22: Bucks Fizz – New Beginning (Mamba Seyra)
I do quite like a lot of Bucks Fizz’s stuff, but I’m not hugely keen on this one. It’s a bit dull.
Track 23: A-ha – Hunting High And Low [Remix]
I quite like this one, even though it’s one of A-ha’s slower tracks. There’s something quite epic about it.
Track 24: Simply Red – Holding Back The Years
Nice ballad, though I’d have to be in a pretty sleepy mood to put it on.
Track 25: Billy Ocean – When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going
Love this classic soundtrack song! Though I’ve never seen The Jewel In The Nile (or Romancing The Stone, come to think of it), which I should sort out at some point.
Fun fact: Boyzone did a pointless ’90s cover of this in 1999 (well, I shouldn’t really call it pointless, seeing as it raised a lot of money for Comic Relief, but you know what I mean).
Track 26: Jaki Graham – Set Me Free
Nice upbeat pop song, though I’m not hugely keen on the vocals.
Track 27: Nu Shooz – I Can’t Wait
With a band name like this, what can go wrong?
I do like that jingly bit at the start. I also just realised that Mann sampled this for Buzzin’ in 2010 and now I’m annoyed on Nu Shooz’ behalf.
Track 28: The Real Roxanne and Hitman Howie Tee – Bang Zoom (Let’s Go-Go)
The rap bit’s all right, but the sampled tune irritates me. Not a fan.
Track 29: Lovebug Starski – Amityville (The House On The Hill)
‘Not on Spotify’ Type 1: lazy tribute version substitute.
Nice cheesy horror-themed track, very ’80s. One for the Hallowe’en party playlist.
Track 30: Midnight Star – Headlines
Argh, that irritating vocal! Not a fan of this one.
Track 31: Aurra – You And Me Tonight
Lot of spoken samples in the intro, repetitive backing track, dull vocals. Not my thing.
Track 32: Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald – On My Own
Pretty dull ballad, though the tune on the chorus is nice.
Now! #3 was released on 23rd July 1984, so hopefully its summer release means that there won’t be any Christmas music on this one.
Review time!
Track 1: Duran Duran – The Reflex
What was it I said yesterday? Yeah. Insert daily ‘I love Duran Duran’ statement here. This one, as ever, is brilliant from start to finish – the backing vocals, the slightly mad lyrics, the chant-along bits on the chorus. Love it.
Track 2: Nik Kershaw – I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me
I find this one a bit repetitive. Not Nik Kershaw’s most exciting song.
Track 3: Sister Sledge – Thinking Of You
Not hugely keen on the disco stuff that was still kicking about in the ’80s anyway, and this one’s not even danceable in my opinion.
Track 4: Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark – Locomotion
Love me some OMD. This one’s a bit bouncier and dafter than their usual stuff, but that’s no bad thing.
Track 5: Ultravox – Dancing With Tears In My Eyes
Good song – that short guitar intro is great, as is the tune in general – but the nuclear-war-themed video is really depressing!
Track 6: Howard Jones – Pearl In The Shell
Nice upbeat intro, nice synth line, nice vocals, and I do love a sax solo! Fairly standard Howard Jones.
Track 7: Blancmange – Don’t Tell Me
Great synthpop track – and I would expect no less from Blancmange.
Track 8: Phil Collins – Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now)
Track 10: Grandmaster Flash and Grandmaster Melle Mel – White Lines (Don’t Do It)
A good head-nodder, with a great vocal, but not really my kind of thing. I do quite like the fact that ostensibly anti-drug songs were a big thing in the ’80s (especially in comparison to the endless, boring and crass drug references in modern-day chart music), though I’m not sure how tongue-in-cheek this song’s message was.
Track 11: The Specials – Nelson Mandela
Another one that was used to good effect in Britain’s Got The Pop Factor. This one always makes me think of the time in 1989 when my parents took me to the ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ march on Glasgow Green (I still have the badge).
Track 12: Womack & Womack – Love Wars
I wasn’t familiar with this one, but I like the atmosphere of the verse, before the chorus gets a bit haphazard.
Track 13: The Style Council – You’re The Best Thing
I find this one pretty dull, and the chorus annoys me for some reason.
Track 14: Bob Marley & The Wailers – One Love/People Get Ready
Classic sway-in-your-chair track. Love this one!
Track 15: Bronski Beat – Smalltown Boy
Wonderful synthpop – that stunning intro! A favourite, and also a regular feature of Geth’s DJ setlists.
Track 16: Queen – I Want To Break Free
I’m not going to call this one a ‘guilty pleasure’, ’cause I don’t feel guilty about loving it at all. Everything about it is awesome, from the epic intro to the Coronation Street homage in the video.
Track 17: Cyndi Lauper – Time After Time
Now this is a good ballad – nothing dreary about this one. Beautiful tune, lovely instrumentals.
Track 18: Alison Moyet – Love Resurrection
This one reminds me of long car journeys as a kid with my dad’s Alison Moyet CD on the car stereo (I found out last Christmas that my brother vehemently hated that CD, but I really quite liked it). I love Yazoo – as I mentioned yesterday, Only You is my all-time favourite song. I’m not quite as keen on Moyet’s solo material, but it’s still good stuff.
Also, nowadays whenever I hear the lyric ‘show me one direction, I will not question again‘, I always think of One Direction. Thanks, 21st century, for ruining things yet again.
Track 19: The Bluebells – Young At Heart
Another song (following Relax yesterday) that was re-released in 1993 and hence ended up on my Greatest Hits Of 1993 compilation! Maybe it was 1993 that was the first true era of ’80s nostalgia. I don’t blame people for wanting to get going with that as early as possible.
Track 20: Bananarama – Robert De Niro’s Waiting
I quite like this one, but then I’ve never come across a Bananarama track I didn’t like. I remember knowing the title of this song for ages before I actually heard it, ’cause it’s mentioned in the blurb for Love In The First Degree on Now! #10 (we’ll get to that a week from today).
Track 21: Propaganda – Dr Mabuse
I wasn’t familiar with this one, but I like its dark, epic atmosphere and lyrics.
Track 22: Tina Turner – What’s Love Got To Do With It
Not my favourite Tina Turner song, but I do like the epic vocals on the chorus and the snatches of synth during the bridge.
Track 23: The Flying Pickets – When You’re Young And In Love
It’s no Only You, but still a nice a cappella cover.
Track 24: Wham! – Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go
A classic! A perfect party tune, and then there’s the colourful video, which was one of those videos that really defined the ’80s, with the neon clothing and the Katharine Hamnett t-shirts (appropriately, I’m wearing her more recent Choose Love design today!)
Track 25: Thompson Twins – You Take Me Up
The harmonica instrumental annoys me, and I usually like harmonica. I’m not a huge Thompson Twins fan anyway, but I’m really not keen on this one.
Track 26: The Weather Girls – It’s Raining Men
We’re at a wedding reception, and I’m on the dancefloor again! You can’t go wrong with this fabulous party track.
There have been various pointless ’90s and ’00s covers of this one. I’ll forgive them, as it’s always a banger no matter who covers it, but the original is far and away the best.
Track 27: Gary Glitter – Dance Me Up
Um, I’m quite surprised that I’m actually able to stream Gary Glitter on Spotify given what we know about him now, but I’m guessing he doesn’t actually get any of the streaming royalties. Um, right? I should probably look into that.
The song itself isn’t much to write home about, certainly not compared to his early ’70s glam rock stuff.
Track 28: The Art Company – Susanna
The Art Company, in contrast, haven’t put their stuff on Spotify, so I’ve done the uber-lazy ‘tribute version on the playlist’ for this review.
It’s a good song, actually. Maybe I’d better give the actual Art Company version another listen sometime!
Track 29: Madness – One Better Day
Bit of a slow one for Madness! Nice tune though.
Track 30: David Sylvian – Red Guitar
I was only previously familiar with David Sylvian’s stuff with Japan, not any of his solo tracks. This one’s a bit dull, but the instrumentals are nice.
*In my terminology (and, I imagine, that of quite a few other people), a ‘pointless cover’ is one that doesn’t change enough things from the original track to make it worth recording a new version, and is hence just a shameless cash-in. The ’90s were absolutely terrible for this, but it’s happened frequently in other decades as well.