A Walk Down Memory Lane; The Music of My Youth

Music Music: Chat / Discussions
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Now that I’m hurtling with unstoppable force towards sixty, I’ve started waxing nostalgic, so here is where I’m going to feature and talk about the music that was, if you will, the soundtrack to my life, or at least, the music that was on the radio, on the telly and in the charts when I was growing up, and also the records I bought once I started earning money. This period covers the late 1970s, when I would have been around twelve or so, up to the mid to late 1980s, with perhaps a little on either side, as some songs/albums from earlier periods were in vogue at the time, music that was in the charts or on the radio, but which had been recorded some time earlier. The only real criterion other than the years will be that it will be music I either liked, hated or at least was to be heard when I was of that age. I’ll ramble on about whatever I can pertaining to each track, and generally I will concentrate on one song, either single or album track, in each post. Comment is invited and by all means share your musical memories too if you wish.

I’ll also be taking the opportunity to try, if possible, to look at the tracks with the eyes of age/wisdom, to see if my opinion, good or bad, has changed about it over the course of the intervening years. I find that a lot of the scorn I had for your average pop band or even certain genres has mellowed as I have not, and a sort of defensive posture I maintained in my late teens and early twenties, as I jealously guarded my metal, AOR and prog rock and consigned all other music to the level of crap, has if not vanished at least been challenged, and sometimes grudgingly and sometimes not, it’s been possible, even necessary for me to re-evaluate the way I approached much of the music that surrounded me as I grew up into the failure I am today.

So, completely at random, the first song up is this.

From the album

Title: “I’ve Been In Love Before”

Artist: Cutting Crew

Writer(s): Nick Van Eede

Genre: Pop

Year: 1986

Highest chart position (if applicable) 24 (UK) 9 (USA)

Album: Broadcast

Did I own it? Yes

Album, single or both? Single

Opinion then: Positive

Opinion now: Positive

These days: You might hear it on the radio very occasionally, it may crop up on the odd love songs compilation album, but generally I think it’s been forgotten about, which is a pity.

It’s perhaps odd that an English band should make a larger impact on the Billboard chart than they did at home, but that’s exactly what happened with Cutting Crew’s second single from the debut album Broadcast. After scoring a huge hit with their first, “I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight” (a song, FYI, apparently about premature ejaculation: bet the BBC wouldn’t have had them on Top of the Pops had they known!) everyone suddenly knew Cutting Crew. Oddly enough, even now I keep thinking they were Australian, don’t ask me why. But for their second single, it seems the UK public weren’t so interested, which I find really strange, as it’s a beautiful ballad with a lovely midsection that just builds up into a hell of a release (yeah, I know: memories of the lyrical matter for their first single) and though I liked “I Just Died In Your Arms Tonight”, I was not as blown away (um…) by it as I was by the follow-up.

Nobody seemed to agree, or still does. If you mention Cutting Crew these days, anyone who still remembers them remembers the first hit single - not that surprising really, as it did get to number 4 here, and all the way to the top in the USA - but there are few if any people who can tell you what their second single was, and in fact the larger percentage of people, I would be prepared to bet, probably think Cutting Crew were a one-hit wonder. And yet they wrote a sumptuous ballad which was criminally ignored here (okay, top thirty is not exactly being criminally ignored, fair enough, but it’s hardly top five, is it?) and let sink down into the depths of musical history, to be forgotten forever. Meanwhile, “I Just Died” continues to be occasionally played, while DJs no doubt grin and opine “That’s Cutting Crew, from 1986, with their only hit single. Wonder what happened to them?”

Well, the answer is that they had four more albums, with over ten years between their third, fourth and final, not a single one of which even touched the charts on either side of the water, and indeed even their “breakthrough” album, the aforementioned debut, barely dented the British top 40 (coming in at 41 and going no further) while it did respectable business in the USA, reaching number 16, going Gold there and Silver in the land of their birth. No more singles were ever released, or if they were, there were certainly no more hits, and I guess in many ways you could say their first Broadcast was their last.

Or, if you want to be really smart (and who doesn’t) you could also make the case that in the end, they just died in your arms tonight. None of which takes from the splendour and majesty of their second single, which will forever remain for me the superior of the two, even if it is now completely forgotten and ignored by everyone.

Welcome to my world!

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More or less a one hit wonder. This one’s on my playlist since forever but then again, most 80s music is on my playlist!

Do you think that you may have associated them with Icehouse or Crowded House perhaps?

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It is possible. Crowded House/Cutting Crew sounds more likely. I’m really not sure though. Maybe it was just the “crew” bit, or maybe it was that time zombies ate my brain. Still recovering from that one. I tell ya, you let one of them in and they all pile in! Very rude!

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Zombie apocalypse!

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I dont remember them , but it is easy listening to.I was married in the 70s and had my first child so maybe i was to busy…

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A bit harsh but that could be the Welsh rugby team.

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From the album

Title: I’m in the Mood for Dancing

Artist: The Nolan Sisters

Year: 1980

Writer(s): Ben Findon/Mike Myers (presumably not that one!) /Bob Puzey

Genre: Dance/disco

Highest chart position (if applicable) 3 (UK)

Album: The Nolan Sisters

Did I own it? Dear god no I did not!

Album, single or both? Neither

Opinion then: Positive

Opinion now: Positive

These days: You’ll hear it from time to time; it was used - partially - when the girls guested on the anarchic British comedy TV series Filthy, Rich and Catflap and it crops up from time to time, having been their biggest hit. I said HIT!

There’s absolutely no doubt that every teenage boy who saw the Nolan Sisters, and every one who bought this single, was led by hormones. I mean, for us, this was the first real girl group. The Spice Girls were still ten years away, and though we had the likes of Suzi Quatro (Rowwr!) and Kate Bush to keep us, ahem, engaged, there weren’t really any bands at this time consisting only of girls. And young ones at that. And pretty ones too, at the time. Well, to us anyway. Add in the fact that there were Irish and you could see how suddenly every Irish boy of hormonal age had a poster of them on his bedroom wall.

If ever a song sold on sex appeal alone, this was it. I mean, listen to it: it’s hardly ground-breaking, is it? But the close harmonies, the dancing, the tight costumes… er, excuse me a moment, would you? This all fed into a media push to raise (sorry) these girls to the status of superstars, and for a while it worked. The song is catchy and dancy, happy and upbeat, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but you can’t tell me that anyone who remembers it does not see five beautiful females gyrating around in tight spandex, rather than considering the song on its own merits! It’s a fun song, but for guys my age (17) in strict Catholic Ireland it was perhaps the first real introduction we had to what you might call raunch on Top of the Pops, though there may have been others - were Girlschool around at this time? Possibly. Nevertheless, the Nolan Sisters remain a part of my early adulthood, and I can’t help but smile whenever I hear this song. It just brings back such… pleasant memories.

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A couple of good reasons for being “De-Progged”, a lot of good run of the mill stuff late seventies - mid eighties, strange how the ladies dislike (or lack of understanding) of Prog Rock, can alter and influence a guys musical taste, also, Prog Rock can never be solely the soundtrack to a life, lets have a bit of Spandau Trollheart.

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I’ll get right on it.

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From the album

Title: “Through the Barricades”

Artist: Spandau Ballet

Year: 1986

Writer(s): Gary Kemp

Genre: New-wave/Pop

Highest chart position (if applicable) 6 (UK)

Album: Through the Barricades

Did I own it? Yes

Album, single, both or neither? Single

Opinion then: Positive

Opinion now: Positive

These days: Widely regarded as one of Spandau Ballet’s great songs, it nevertheless remains overshadowed by hits such as “True” and “Gold”

See, here again my memory lets me down. I could have sworn this was the B-side to one of the band’s other singles, that I had, and that I sort of “discovered” it when I was doing my radio show on local community radio, many moons ago. Wrong! It was a single in its own right, and indeed a hit, and indeed the title track from Spandau Ballet’s fifth album. Shows what I know. Anyway, it’s nevertheless a beautiful, understated, powerful song of love triumphing against adversity and in the worst of times. Inspired by the death of one of their road crew in Northern Ireland, it’s an acoustic ballad sung with heart and soul by Tony Hadley, and featuring a haunting sax solo from Steve Norman.

Here’s what songwriter Gary Kemp had to say about it: “We had a guy called ‘Kidso’ (Thomas Reilly), who worked for us on merchandise during the True tour. He went back to Belfast after the tour and was killed. Kidso’s brother, Jim, who played drums for Stiff Little Fingers, subsequently took me along to see his grave and the song was inspired by walking down the Falls Road. I got to experience some of the emotion of that first-hand and it just stuck with me. I didn’t expect it to come out in the shape of a [Romeo and Juliet sort of song, but it did."

And you can’t argue with that.

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I never knew the back story, guessed it and was quite close, but the Birds just saw the girlie hair styles so, what does that mean musically?

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Great Thread, i always watched top of the pops but hardly bought the singles after 1979. That’s when I had my first and only baby, mainly because i wasn’t working. But before then i liked Moody Blues and had a few albums, this was the first, i was a bit disappointed because of all the music from the orchestra but got to like it.

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From the album

Title: “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)”

Artist: The New Seekers

Year: 1972

Writer(s): Roger Cook, Roger Greenaway, Billy Davis, Bill Backer

Genre: Pop/Folk

Chart position (if applicable) 1

Album: um. We’d Like to Teach the World to Sing

Did I own it? No

Album, single or both? Neither

Opinion then: Positive

Opinion now: Positive, though slightly angry at its being co-opted by a corporate giant

These days: Only really ever remembered from the bloody advertisement, damn them.

While I retain my righteous anger, of which I will write more in a moment, I read now that this was not in fact the original song, and was itself created from the tune of a commercial radio jingle called “True Love and Apple Pie”. It was then rewritten not once, not twice, but (as Monty Burns would say) thrice! Technically, four times. The first time was by the songwriters themselves, the two Rogers, Cook and Greenaway, along with another songwriter, Billy Davis and an advertising executive (of course) with the very appropriate if funny name of Bill Backer. They turned the song into “Buy the World a Coke”, and therein lies my long-seated frustration with it, which now turns out to have been misplaced, if still righteous.

The thing is, I had always assumed, having heard the New Seekers song first, that it, being a number one hit here, had been copied and used by Coca-Cola based on its popularity, a song everyone would recognise but which they would shape to their own advertising agenda. Not so: the reverse, in fact. “Buy the World a Coke” was released in 1971, and it was due to its popularity that the New Seekers re-recorded it, taking out any references to Coke, replacing the words “buy the world a Coke” with “teach the world to sing”, in my opinion, a far better and more worthy message. I mean, what self-respecting drug dealer wants to buy his clients their merchandise? And buy it for the world? He’d go bankrupt in a week!

But I digress. The New Seekers, now, it would appear, latching onto the coat-tails of Coke, rewrote and recorded the song, which got them a number one hit. In the meantime, the original singers of the song, the ones who had sung “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke”, a band called the Hillside Stranglers, sorry that’s a movie, Hillside Singers (who had, incidentally and not at all I’m sure coincidentally, sung the song on, well, a hillside) re-recorded it, dropped the Coke references too, and consequently had a hit of their own stateside, though not a number one (it reached number 13). The New Seekers had been approached by Billy Davis to record the original “I’d Like to Shove a Coke Up the World’s Ahhhh sorry it’s just getting on my nerves now. But anyway, he wanted them to record the song for Coke but they were too busy. When they saw how popular both the ad and the subsequent version by the Hillside Singers was they realised they had missed the boat and jumped on the bandwagon and yes I know I’m mixing my metaphors and no I don’t care.

They subsequently reproduced, and in fact exceeded the chart performance of the American band, and the song enjoyed success both here and there, reaching number 7 in the USA, one year after the Hillside Singers had already taken their version into the chart. Got to wonder how people were prepared to buy two versions of what was pretty much the same song? It is a popular and cheerful theme though; all the world living as one, as some guy from Liverpool had once imagined (!) might happen, and you know, credit where credit is due: rather than dig their heels in about it being their song, it seems Coca-Cola actually waived the royalties to the song (about USD 80,000 at the time, equating to over half a million today), and gave the proceeds to UNICEF. Even I can’t argue with that.

I guess it’s because the Coca-Cola ad was only seen on this side of the water after the New Seekers had had their hit that I jumped to the conclusion that the global conglomerate had robbed the idea from them. Well, I suppose it’s never too late to say you were wrong, even if it is fifty years later.

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The New Seekers started by Keith Potger of The Seekers when they broke up because Judith Durham (one of the best voices in pop) decided to do cabaret with her husband Ron Edgeworth.They never achieved the success of the originals of course.

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When this came out in 1969 and it was the first song that the carpenters did, i thought that they could have done their own instead. It was a few years before i realised how good they are and now i have all of their songs.

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