Dear Father Christmas, I Would Like The Following (In 1986)… Part 4

More from the list of most desireable presents from the year when you might have seen Phil Cool impersonating Al Capone dancing the Charleston on top of a flagpole…
COOL IT!
“Get up them Pennine Hills!”. From the neon suits and is-he-alternative-comedy-or-isn’t-he? positioning of its rubber-faced star, to the Housemartins-like theme tune and accompanying pastel shaded semi-animated [...]

2008! Time For The Guru!

Well, that’s put the so-called ‘mockers’ on that, then. For a couple of weeks, there’s been a half-finished post lying around on the subject of Guru Josh, that peculiar post-acid house Keyboard Wizard type who appeared when everything suddenly went all pastel-hued-tie-dye-hooded-top-psychedelic for about three minutes at the dawn of the nineties, had a huge [...]

Christie On

…because Alec Christie, TV’s Tolly From The Children Of Green Knowe and thus forever tied in with an age of rubber-faced impressionists and uninspiring orange-flavoured carbonated drinks no matter how many awards he may have won in the interim, has made a rather unexpected comeback in the form of a self-made online sketch show. And [...]

For America (And For The Rest Of The World Too!)

Break out the Citrus Spring-flavoured champagne – after too many years in the Reissue Wilderness fetching £ohyoumustbefuckingkiddingmeareyouanoilbaronorsomething? on eBay, Red Box’s fab 1986 album The Circle & The Square, featuring in Lean On Me and For America two of the best singles of the entire decade, is finally back out on CD and with loads [...]

Stuart Maconie’s Brain Unspooling

Over at TV Cream, a couple of years back there was an attempt to compile the definitive list of ‘The 50 Most Nostalgic Things’, those lost-in-the-mists-of-time defuncteries that best embodied the Cream Era. That list was whittled down from an initial one of 350 suggestions, and here (more for reasons of having found it in [...]

Pick Of The Lazy YouTube Embedded Pops: Tommy James & The Shondells ‘Crimson & Clover’

A rather splendid ‘Squares Jump On The Psychedelia And Beat Jefferson Airplane At Their Own Game’ effort, from the Mony Mony hitmakers, which topped the US chart for weeks on end but inexplicably bombed over here (and indeed did so again, or to be more accurate did not so again, when Joan [...]

Pick Of The Lazy YouTube Embedded Pops: Red Box ‘For America’

You remember it, don’t you? That sarcastic rejoinder to inherent reverence of all things American that hit the top ten during the closing months of the epochal time for pop music that was 1986? No? Oh alright then, have a watch of the video:

OK, so it’s hardly the epochal appearance on [...]

“We Could Sing American Pie…?” – “Go On, I Deserve It”

Don’t you just hate American Pie?
No, not those sub-Porky’s teen comedy film things (though they’re pretty hateful too, now that you come to mention it), but the perpetually busker-endorsed song by Don McLean. Far from being the poignant portrait of post-adolescent disillusionment that it’s so often portrayed as, it’s actually more like intolerable whingeing from [...]