Alright, tonight’s the night, we can’t wait any longer, we’re turning out the light and locking up that door! You might put up a fight, but you’ll be crying out for more, when you get given what you really came here looking for… the legendary proto-London-Boys-dancers-whose-heads-stay-in-the-same-place-while-their-bodies-move-around Top Of The Pops performance of Shakin’ Stevens’ inexplicable excursion into Hi-NRG (shortly before, lest we forget, his equally baffling Motown Phase) A Little Boogie Woogie (In The Back Of My Mind), a song that was famously laughably condemned by ridiculous eighties rentaquote comedy politician Geoffrey Dickens who wanted it banned for being “a bit near the knuckle”, and which still enjoys wide exposure despite raking in the readies for its composer, a certain Mr Paul Gadd…
I don’t mind this, neither do I mind the original, which I remember on release was widely ridiculed not least by Noel Edmonds who, after playing it on his breakfast show, left a few seconds of dead air and then said: ‘Oh sorry, I was just having a little boogie woogie in the back of my mind, there’.
Ah, Shaky. He has deserved his recent rehabilitation as a good pop star.
I thought he was the bollocks when I was a child, and that’s the point. He was a pop star for small children and for older parents, the ones who appreciated the rebirth of songs from their own youth. He didn’t target the core pop audience in between those two demographics and therefore they shouldn’t have ever had to criticise him.