A Song a Year: 1994, American Life in the Summertime

Ah 1994. An interesting year for me. It was my first year post university, and thus my first year of being unemployed.

I had finished an Honours degree in Economics the year before (just finished paying that HECS debt off this year!), and of course the job offers just flew my way. Alas I got down to the last two a couple times (one, a dream job as a research assistant at Flinders Uni they gave to someone else because they said they thought I’d get bored) but I seemed destined to be caught in that wonderful Generation X nexus of too qualified to do normal jobs (like work in a bank), but not qualified enough to do what I was qualified to do (work in an investment bank).

I remember going for one job interview as a kitchen hand at some restaurant on The Parade in Adelaide, and the guy looked at my CV and said, so do you really want this job? I had to admit I hadn’t grown up wanting to be a kitchen hand.

So it was a year of buggering around, drinking coffee, writing out job applications, doing some meaningless work (I worked as a courier for a couple months). All in all it was a lot like uni, except there wasn’t any study. The dumb thing was I could have been studying. I had deferred an Honours in Politics course so I could do the Economics course, and I promptly forgot about the deferment until I received a letter around Easter informing me the deferment had lapsed.

This was one of those mistakes which probably altered my life, as had I, in some Sliding Doors style way remembered the deferment and done an Honours in Politics, I am sure things would have turned out rather different – mostly because I was much better at politics than economics (where I struggled to comprehend the mathematics of the statistics in the econometrics). It was no surprise that the only subject I scored Distinction in my Honours year was Political Economics, in the tutorials of which I fought a lone hand of the Keynesian against the money hungry Milton Friedman worshipping Monetrists. But some of them knew what they were talking about – one of my ex-colleagues is now director of investment at a pretty large private bank, and is no doubt earning a tad more than I.

But I digress.

Music that year was pretty 1990s:

1. LOVE IS ALL AROUND  - WET WET WET
2. I SWEAR - ALL 4 ONE
3. ALWAYS - BON JOVI
4. IT'S ALRIGHT - EAST 17
5. THE SIGN - ACE OF BASE
6. POWER OF LOVE - CELINE DION
7. I'LL MAKE LOVE TO YOU - BOYZ II MEN
8. PLEASE FORGIVE ME - BRYAN ADAMS
9. TOMORROW – SILVERCHAIR
10. ALL FOR LOVE - BRYAN ADAMS, ROD STEWART & STING
11. 100% PURE LOVE - CRYSTAL WATERS
12. SLAVE TO THE MUSIC - TWENTY 4 SEVEN
13. GIVE IT UP - CUT 'N' MOVE
14. MMM MMM MMM MMM - CRASH TEST DUMMIES
15. SHOOP - SALT 'N' PEPA
16. WITHOUT YOU - MARIAH CAREY
17. SWAMP THING - THE GRID
18. RIGHT IN THE NIGHT (FALL IN LOVE WITH MUSIC) - JAM & SPOON
19. BABY, I LOVE YOUR WAY - BIG MOUNTAIN 
20. BREATHE AGAIN - TONI BRAXTON

Lots of songs by bands that aren’t the best they did; lots of songs that you struggle to remember (“100% Pure Love”??), bands that you can’t recall (The Grid???), and great one hit wonders (“Mmm mmm mmm mmm”). It’s almost the 1990s music encapsulated.

My song of the year didn’t make the top 50 of the year, in fact it peaked only at number 18, but it was a song that got a lot of play on my and my friends’ tape players. It was perhaps the greatest beer drinking song of the 1990s (heck it has the line “let’s go drink till the beer runs dry”). My friends – some still at uni, other just finished, were still young and carefree enough to sit around on Wellington Square in Adelaide, play a bit of touch footy, drink Coopers Pale Ale, and just generally enjoy fun Saturday afternoons.

We didn't do it a lot, and I’m not sure if this song was playing when we did it, but when I hear this song now, it sure as hell feels like that was the case. It is also a great driving song. I have it on a few mix CDs, and went it comes on, it’s time to crank the volume up, pretend I’m driving some convertible, and feel young. I think its only match for a great driving and summer and drinking song is the classic 80s hits, “Boys of Summer”.

The best music is music which stays with you as you age – music that doesn’t care if you are now closer to 40 than 20. This song is one of those. I don’t feel stupid singing along to it in the car or shower in a way that I would feel stupid should I ever catch myself singing say Silverchair’s “Tomorrow”. It was an ok song, but very much targeted at kids who weren’t quite old enough to be Nirvana fans; and when compared with Silverchair’s more recent outputs, it comes across as the juvenilia that it was.

“American Life in the Summertime” thus does the two things a good song must do – it transports you back to when you first heard it, but remains relevant even without those memories.

After this year I left Adelaide, and moved to Cairns (as you do), so this was in many ways the end of a chapter year in my life.

Music after this time would begin to have less resonance, and I lost access to decent radio stations, and thus depended more on my own CD collection.

So this song is not just summer and drinking and relaxing and laughing. It is also perhaps the last song of my uni years (which of course is intractably linked with drinking and relaxing and laughing).

The official video isn’t available on youtube, but I found this rather clever amateur one done by someone using the Sims 2 game to link with the song; it fits quite well:

A Song a Year: 1993, Aunty Raelene

When you are at uni, you need a band that is yours through hell or high water. If you were at uni in the early 90s it could be Nirvana (if you were a bit of a sheep), The Pixies (if you really wanted to pretend that you were cool), U2 (if you wanted to be middle of the road – like I guess I did), My Bloody Valentine (if you thought The Smiths were just too damn cheery) or perhaps Living Colour (if you wanted to be funky radical).

Now all these choices were good, and you had to make one; but to be really in the groove, to be a true uni student, you had to have a local band that you followed, went to see play at dingy little pubs and were prepared to argue with others that with just a bit of luck they could be the next Lemonheads or Happy Mondays.

For me that band was Aunty Raelene.

Aunty Raelene were a four piece band made up of three blokes and one chick (she played bass). Two of the blokes were brothers – Basil and Derek Shields. Basil played lead guitar and vocals, Derek played violin in a manner that bore much lineage to John Cale of the Velvet Underground. They all went to Adelaide Uni and were out on the edge, sticking it to the man, protesting about the things that mattered, and doing it all while dressed in frocks.

That was the gimmick – they all wore dresses bought from op-shops and they wore them workers boots. I once asked Basil why they wore them, thinking perhaps there was some deeper statement being made, he looked at me weirdly, and said “Why do you reckon? It’s a gimmick”. “Oh,” I said, feeling rather stupid, but also somewhat disappointed that there was no deeper context.

Aunty Raelene were an odd mix – their songs were all protest and anger, yet also full of humour. The songs were great to sing along to (not so good to dance to), and the band themselves were laid back and funny during the set. They had songs like the great “Lionel Long Rap” which was written in the context of the first Gulf War and contained the following lyrics:

“Well my name is Lionel Long
And I want to go to war
’Cause I’ve heard they’ve got a lot of oil
And I think that’s worth dying for.”

Or “Mozambique”:

“Down in Mozambique
They don’t eat Mars Bars
And there’s not much to do
If you don’t like burnt out cars”

(admittedly my memory is bit faded, so the lyrics there might be a bit skewiff)

and “World Bank”

“If you are poor
You need a loan
So get the World Bank on the phone
666 and triple 5
You’re lucky if you stay alive”

Ok maybe they were a bit more self righteous than they needed to be – but bugger that, why not be more self righteous than you need to be, when you’re young and at uni? And they also had a cool T-shirt – a black one with an “A” and an “R” with the picture of a kangaroo between (or was it a dog? I didn’t know then, don’t know now) This pic –is the only photographic evidence I have of me wearing it – the T-Shirt, alas, has long since disintegrated.

I got to know Basil through his connection with my boarding college. For a year or so he was going out with a friend of mine who boarded there, and so for perhaps the only time in my life I was able to go back stage after a concert. Except given they only performed at pubs, back stage pretty much meant standing out the front of the pub after the gig trying to look cool, but not to look too cool or too desperate nor too desperately trying to look cool (I failed, I was easily the least cool person ever to hang out with a band after a gig).

The place I most saw them play was at The Crown and Anchor in Adelaide. My favourite gig was one which had me and my pretty straight laced friends mingling with the most wacked out weirdos going. One guy had dreadlocks, which wasn’t so weird; that he had a mouse crawling around in his hair however did perhaps cause one to look at him and then elbow your mates to say “check out that weirdo”. As this was the early 90s and their fans were all broke uni students and we were in the midst of a recession, they also used to do things like raffle off a meat pack – an odd thing given I’d wager more than a few of their hard-core fans were vegan (and given the smell in the place they certainly were taking a stand against deodorant).

In 1995, Aunty Raelene brought out their only album – they were pretty much splitting up and it was done more as a reminder of what they had done, than in the hope of really scoring it big (though they did send it off to Triple J accompanied with an over the top media release). The album was titled New Dork Nation in reference to George Bush Sr’s phrase about a New World Order. I don’t know if it ever got played on Triple J – no doubt the Adelaide Uni radio station gave it a few turns – and I am sad to say I never bought a copy – I think it cost $20 and I was too skint at the time to buy one. I dubbed it off a mate, and sad to say I have lost that tape. (And obviously it’s not on itunes.)

The wonder of things about the net is however that you can find the most unusual things. After they split up, Derek and Basil kept performing together, first as the Raelene Brothers, and after they moved to Alice Springs, The Super Raelene Brothers. They are still going strong, and in October are performing at “The Concert” in Alice Springs, supporting Jimmy Barnes and The Cat Empire.  They have a myspace page where you can download a few of their more recent songs – “Wombo Lombo” sounds great.

Unfortunately the only existing Aunty Raelene song is “World Bank” being sung in the mid-late 90s by the Raelene Brothers – and it’s embedding has been disabled for some reason, so I can’t post it here (but click on the link – it’s a good representation of the band’s music).

If I had their CD now, would I still listen to it? Probably not; though I have occasionally found myself humming some of their songs which have come into my head for no good reason. But does that mean they weren’t worth following back then? Hell no; they were great – they captured the moment, they captured my moment at uni. And at least for a small, brief moment of time felt like I was one of a select few who were in the know of the coolest band in the world… or at least the Arts faculty of Adelaide Uni part of it.

A Song a Year, 1992: Everything’s Alight

When I looked at the Top 50 songs of 1992, I realised that hardly any had any real connection with me. It was an interesting year in music:

1. ACHY BREAKY HEART – BILLY RAY CYRUS
2. NOVEMBER RAIN – GUNS N' ROSES
3. END OF THE ROAD – BOYZ II MEN
4. TO BE WITH YOU – MR. BIG
5. AMIGOS PARA SIEMPRE – JOSE CARRERAS & SARAH BRIGHTMAN
6. THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE ARE FREE - LUTHER VANDROSS & JANET JACKSON
7. PLEASE DON'T GO - K.W.S.
8. THE DAY YOU WENT AWAY – WENDY MATTHEWS
9. UNDER THE BRIDGE – RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS
10. HAZARD – RICHARD MARX
11. SAVE THE BEST FOR LAST – VANESSA WILLIAMS
12. JUMP – KRIS KROSS
13. AS UGLY AS THEY WANNA BE (EP) – UGLY KID JOE
14. SALTWATER – JULIAN LENNON
15. RHYTHM IS A DANCER – SNAP
16. TAKE IT FROM ME – GIRLFRIEND
17. I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU – WHITNEY HOUSTON
18. DAMN, I WISH I WAS YOUR LOVER – SOPHIE B. HAWKINS
19. TOO FUNKY – GEORGE MICHAEL
20. ORDINARY ANGELS (CLUNK EP) – FRENTE

Now I am tempted to choose “Under the Bridge”, but to be honest I remember it more for the parody done of it by the D-Generation on The Late Show than the actual song. I know I would have heard it more than any other of the top 20 songs, but it doesn’t take me, like some audio madeleine cake, back to a moment in my past. Looking at this top 20, I’m quite glad that none of the other songs on the list do either. Achy Breaky Heart? My God, what was it with the 90s and gimmick songs? I recall “November Rain” was once voted the greatest song of all time on a SAFM countdown, but it did nothing for me other than make me think “Layla” did the whole coda thing much, much better.

The rest of the top 50 is not much of an improvement – “Way Out West” by James Reyne and James Blundell? “Accidentally Kelly Street” by Frente? Actually the more I look at the list, the more I am reminded of parodies done on The Late Show than the actual songs themselves.

In fact that year, my third year at uni, was one where I was listening to just about anything but songs on the radio. Perhaps the album that reminds me most of 1992 is Peter Gabriel’s soundtrack to the Scorsese film The Last Temptation of Christ. I had his album “Passion” on almost constantly while swotting for my mid-year exams that year. It also is special because one of the best friends I have ever had gave me the tape, so it always reminds me of her.

But that album is not a 1992 album, so it misses out.

One song from 1992 Top 50 does take me back to a particular moment of that year, in fact a particular place – the refectory of the Lutheran Seminary. The song was “Everything’s Alright” (number 40) from the soundtrack of the Australian revival of Jesus Christ Superstar that toured around that year starring John Farnham, Kate Ceberano, John Stevens and John Waters.

I have to admit to being a bit of a musicals fan. It is something that my parents can be blamed for, as my Dad seemed unable to go on a holiday without having some Rogers and Hammerstein tape playing in the car. That I can even now sing all the words to “Kansas City”, despite not having seen a performance of Oklahoma! for about 30 years, is testimony to the number of times my Dad had the choice of listening to the radio or putting in the Oklahoma! tape and chose the latter. So when this revival of Jesus Christ Superstar came out, it was something of a shock to me to discover that I really didn’t know many of the songs. I could vaguely recall seeing the movie one Easter years earlier, but it seemed to me to be the ropiest bit of post 60s hippiedom that had ever made it to the screen (it still does). So when I first heard “Everything’s Alright” sung by Ceberano, Stevens and Farnham, I have to admit to being quite pleasantly surprised by it.

But the memory it takes me back to is of mopping the floor of the refectory at the Lutheran Seminary where I was boarding. I had taken the job of kitchen-hand there the year before. There was a crew of 4 or 5 boarders who had the job, and we worked on a rotational basis cleaning the kitchen and serving the dinners to all the borders. I don’t think it paid much – beer money most likely – but it was good for the soul, as let’s face it all uni students should do some sort of menial labour. The work also gave me the advantage of knowing what meal was to be served that night, and when I took my break, my friends sitting out on the lawn would seek this knowledge from me in order to allow them to decide whether to stay for dinner, or head down to the Blue and White Cafe for a hot dog with the lot.

In between memories of the food being served out to an unappreciative audience, the dishes being washed in the industrial dish-washer, and the sweeping around the stoves with huge vats of gravy simmering away, what I recall is how we always had Adelaide’s easy-listening FM station, 102.3 5AD-FM (now Mix 102.3), playing on the radio. As an easy listening station, it was naturally pretty enamoured with “Everything's Alright” (in fact with just about anything John Farnham related), which means for what seems like half the year, without fail, every time I started mopping up the floor of the kitchen on would come this song. And, like all oft played songs on the radio, it went from “oh cool, I like this song”, to “geez, they play this a lot” till inevitably we arrived at “not this bloody song again”.

I did see the concert performance later that year, and the one thing that sticks in my mind of the night was that musicians cannot act. Farnham, Stevens, Ceberano and Angry Anderson all tried hard to convey emotion (and failed), but when John Waters walked on the stage, even without opening his mouth, you knew he was an actor (he also was a damn good singer – but then I knew that from seeing him on Play School!).

So here’s the video of the song (and I have to admit I had never seen this until I searched for it on Youtube); a song forever linked for me with mops, low quality food, dishwashers and the joys of being a uni student.

A Song a Year: 1991, That Ain't Bad

It's easy in this post Triple J Hottest 100 of All Time world we now inhabit, to think back to 1991 and ponder, ah yes that was the year Nevermind came out, oh how glorious it was to listen to the mosh pit wonder of sweaty druggie shirt excess that was "Smells Like Teen Spirit". And yet, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" really only hit the Australian scene right at the end of 1991. Nevermind entered the Aussie charts in November, and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" entered the charts at the end of December before peaking at the somewhat unamazing place of Number 5 in March of 1992.

So, much as it is a song that reverberates in my mind when I think back to my largely not misspent-enough youthy days at university, it isn't a song of the year for me. Nope, in 1991 there were other much more resonant songs for me.

Another song that came out in November of that year, U2's "The Fly" had a pretty big impact - massive U2 fan that I am. But that wasn't it. Neither was Julee Cruise's "Falling" from Twin Peaks, even though for at least the first 6 months of 1991 that was the show to be known to be watching (ok, bugger all of it made sense, but you just had to watch it because it was bizarre, sexy, fun and well because if you didn't the other kids might not think you were cool).

But no, for me the song that year was one that didn't even get released as a single - it came out on an EP, "Tingles", an EP that sold out in Adelaide by the time it got to Number 1 - a good 3 months after I bought it. The song was "That Ain't Bad" and the band was Ratcat.

Looking back, some 18 years on (oh geez, that is a long time ago) it is easy to forget that Ratcat were a Triple J band. They were a full-on indie band that triumphed over the crap being played on commercial FM radio. Just how bad was music back then? Take a gander at the top 25 songs that year on the ARIA charts:

1. (EVERYTHING I DO) I DO IT FOR YOU - BRYAN ADAMS
2. TINGLES (EP) - RATCAT
3. GREASE MEGAMIX - OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN & JOHN TRAVOLTA
4. THE HORSES - DARYL BRAITHWAITE
5. YOU COULD BE MINE - GUNS N' ROSES
6. READ MY LIPS - MELISSA
7. MORE THAN WORDS - EXTREME
8. I'VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT YOU - LONDONBEAT
9. JOYRIDE - ROXETTE
10. THE SHOOP SHOOP SONG (IT'S IN HIS KISS) - CHER
11. DO THE BARTMAN - THE SIMPSONS
12. UNFORGETTABLE - NATALIE COLE WITH NAT "KING" COLE
13. I'M TOO SEXY - R.S.F. (RIGHT SAID FRED)
14. LOVE... THY WILL BE DONE - MARTIKA
15. I TOUCH MYSELF - DIVINYLS
16. RUSH - BIG AUDIO DYNAMITE II
17. FANTASY - BLACK BOX
18. RHYTHM OF MY HEART - ROD STEWART
19. RUSH RUSH - PAULA ABDUL
20. BETTER - SCREAMING JETS
21. I WANNA SEX YOU UP - COLOR ME BADD
22. ICE ICE BABY - VANILLA ICE
23. SADNESS PART 1 - ENIGMA
24. HERE I AM (COME AND TAKE ME) - UB40
25. 3AM ETERNAL - THE KLF

I mean, let's be honest, there's a fair few tracks there that would make it onto anyone's list of "Songs I'd be forced to listen to in Hell" CD. That I am here now humming "Read my lips and take dictation... if you want to wait till later/ hands of my detonator" is beside the point.

As an aside seeing "Rush", makes me think of how cool I felt when I first heard Big Audio Dynamite's other hit that year, "The Globe" and I mocked it for sampling "Should I Stay or Should I Go" by The Clash. I felt less cool when someone pointed out to me that the lead singer and guitarist of Big Audio Dynamite was Mick Jones who was also the lead singer and guitarist of The Clash. Oh well, it was nice few minutes of cred that I had.

I first heard part of "That Ain't Bad" on the bus back from Flinders University (the glorious 222 - Flinders Uni to Gepps Cross). For a good week or so I kept hearing parts of it on my walkman on the bus. It seemed to always be the song that Triple J was playing just as I turned on my walkman, or would be the song that they would play at the precise moment I would decide to listen to another station.

I only heard them name the band once, and couldn't remember if it was Ratcat or Catrat or Ratcatcher or something along those lines - either way I thought it was a totally cool name, and very quickly they were becoming my band.

You see there's something rather thrilling about being at uni and coming across a band that no one else really knows. It's why the indie rock scene is so beloved by uni students, and why they hate it when "their band" becomes popular. When you are young and trying desperately to be unique in this world, you are desperate to find something that is your own little secret; something that even if you mention to others, you will only be greeted with a blank look (so you can roll your eyes and ponder how anyone could be so behind the times). And thus you listen to Triple J, because they'll play music that Triple M or Nova will never so much as spit on.

The only problem is that by and large, a good 70-80 percent of what gets played on Triple J is total crap (was then, is now, will be in 20 years time - that's ok that's the whole point, you don't want people listening, in case they hear your music and it becomes popular). And so when you find something in that sea of unlistenable music, you cling to it as tight as you can. And so it was with me and Ratcat.

The song "That Ain't Bad" was a kind of grungy number that anticipated the sound somewhat of "The Fly" It had a great running guitar lick that was made for some excellent air-guitar moves, and an incessant drum beat that just got your head rocking back and forth. The lyrics were easy; the chorus, simple (wasn't hard to remember "you...ew..ew..eww... I love you"). It was just a great bit of pop, that because it was only being played on Triple J, was ok to listen to around uni halls - and at my boarding college a good number of times I had it blaring out of my room window across the lawns to us sitting around benches chillin' - because of course I was the only one who owned the actual tape.

And yet it didn't last. Simon Day, the lead singer was far too pretty, and the band itself didn't know whether it was a grungy indie band or the next INXS. It actually supported INXS on its Australian tour in 1991, and well the young girls then just went mad for them. They brought out their first album - Blind Love, with the very poppy single "Don't Go Now". They went Number 1, they were played on Triple M and SAFM. And well that was it really.

No more were they to be heard on Triple J, and while I did buy Blind Love, no longer did I cling to them tightly, no longer did their songs blare out from my dorm room window. Was it because they sold out? Perhaps. Was it because they were now posters on the walls of teenage girls? Maybe. Was it because they never actually wrote another decent song? Who can say.

But for a few bright early months of 1991, Ratcat were cool, and so was I for liking them before everyone else. And "That Ain't Bad" still rocks even though the unis now have students who weren't even born when it was making the charts.



And just to remind you of how bad things were musically, here's Melissa Tkautz singing "Read My Lips". Good luck getting through it all.

A Song a Year: 1990, "Black Velvet"

When I think back to 1990, to be honest I don't think of any song in particular. It was an odd year - as often is the case with a year at the start of the decade, it still wasn't ready to let go of the previous decade.

Here's the list of the Top 20 selling singles of the year:

1. Nothing Compares 2 U - Sinead O'connor
2. U Can't Touch This - M.C. Hammer
3. Vogue - Madonna
4. It Must Have Been Love - Roxette
5. All I Wanna Do is Make Love to You - Heart
6. Opposites Attract - Paula Abdul
7. How am I Supposed to Live Without You - Michael Bolton
8. Unchained Melody - Righteous Brothers
9. Girl I'm Gonna Miss You - Milli Vanilli
10. Love Shack - The B 52's
11. Hold On - Wilson Phillips
12. Don't Know Much - Linda Ronstadt featuring Aaron Neville
13. Black Velevet - Alannah Myles
14. Ride On Time - Black Box
15. Mona - Craig McLachlan & Check 1-2
16. Joey - Concerte Blonde
17. I Need Your Body - Tina Arena
18. Crying in the Chapel - Peter Blakeley
19. Janie's Got a Gun - Areosmith
20. Blaze of Glory - Jon Bon Jovi

There's a nice smattering of fading 1980s acts, one hit wonders and 80s hair bands.

An odd year. And let's be honest, any year that has Milli Vanilli, Craig McLachlan and Michael Bolton in the charts is not a year you really want to revisit.

1991 was when the 90s really started for music - that would be the year of Nevermind and Achtung Baby. But 1990? A bit of a black hole really.

It was also my first year of university. I was living in a boarding college in North Adelaide, and the charts were not that important. When you start university, and you've come from the country, you don't want to listen to music that you could hear on your local 5MU radio station. Going to uni is about broadening your mind. And so when I think back to 1990 it is more about the music I really got introduced to that had previously passed me by - bands like The Clash, Neil Young, Violent Femmes, The Doors, Living Colour, REM. Even Simon and Garfunkel are more emotive of 1990 for me than say, Black Box.

Most of the music from that year that I can recall is that which was heard at nightclubs, but again, it was all rather ephemeral, and I was never induced to buy any CDs. I only recall them now because I downloaded the list, and had lots of "oh yeah that song" and "nup, can't remember that one... oh that song - never knew it was called that". I mean does anyone ever stand in the shower and sing "Ice Ice Baby", or "Pump Up the Jam", or (God help you if you do) "How Can We Be Lovers"?

So 1990 didn't do it for me musically. But there are still some connections. I knew a girl who every now and then used to sing for no discernible reason a couple lines from "Groove is in the Heart" in a high pitched voice, and "Unchained Melody" is hard to forget - especially because Ghost was one of the first movies that I saw with my girlfriend (and now wife) (the first movie was Pretty Woman... the things you do when you're young and in love). And a couple friends also at uni used to like reworking the words to "It must have been love" from:

"It must have been love, but it's over now"
to
"It must have been f*cked, that's why it's over now". (ah such joys of undergraduate humour)

I have picked Alanah Myles' "Black Velvet" as my song of the year for a couple reasons. Firstly my wife owned the tape and so it got a fair bit of play in her room or car, and also at the end of the year she and I with a group of other students from the college went on a houseboat trip on the River Murray and "Black Velvet" for some reason seems to be linked with that trip.

Alannah Myles is also a nice example of the link with the 80s. She is a great one hit wonder. In the US her first song "Love Is" got to number 36; this, her follow up, made it to Number 1. She never made the charts again.

Her style is also much more 1980s than the 1990s - she is more Melissa Etheridge than Alanis Morrisette. She has the big hair that was as favoured by the male singers as much as the women in the 80s; and it is a song that is not too bad, but hardly one that has you wishing there were more like it today - pretty much my feelings of just about all music from 1990.

A Song a Year: 1989, "The Look"

Whew, finally we can leave 1988 and High School behind. 1989 was a big year for me. I spent the year in Japan on a student exchange, and perhaps for the first time started looking elsewhere for music than the Top 40.

Sure up till that point I was into some older stuff, but by and large my music came from the radio rather than a record collection. In Japan a big thing at the time was CD rental stores, which meant you could rent out a CD, copy it onto tape and thus within a short period of time I had a pretty wide collection.

But this is about songs linked to that year, so while The Who's Tommy is indelibly linked for me with 1989 it hardly is a 1989 album.

I did listen to a lot of radio that year as well - mostly the Armed Forces radio Network that the US has in Japan to be listened to by all those on the many Army bases they have there. The AFN played a number of programs from US radio, and the one I listened to pretty regularly was Rick Dees Weekly Top 40.

Now back in those dark ages, music rarely got released in Australia at the same time as in the US, so it meant I was hearing songs about 5 months before my friends back in Australia. In my letters back home I would give tips of songs to look out for, and one tip I distinctly remember writing was to look out for a Swedish band called Roxette, and the prediction that their song "The Look" would be huge.

When it did become a big hit, none of my friends of course could recall me telling them so, and thus my career as a guru of the pop music industry came to a halt. Probably just as well given my magical predictive powers were based purely on seeing what was a hit in America.

But be that as it may, Roxette, that funky duo from Sweden get my Song a Year, in competition form other worthies as Paula Abdul's "Straight Up", Fine Young Cannibals, "She Drives Me Crazy", Skid Row,'s "18 and Life" and anything by Tone Loc. What a year!

Roxette of course would actually be a band that would go on to bigger and better things. The singles off their "Look Sharp" Album were pretty infections - Dangerous, Dressed for Success and Listen to Your Heart, and then in 1990 they had a huge hit from the Pretty Woman soundtrack, "It Must Have Been Love".

You'd never die in a ditch for Roxette - they weren't that kind of band. But for a good while in the early 90s you could scarce go into a pub or nightclub without hearing at least one Roxette song. And generally they were pretty decent listening.



One other song is 1989 for me. In the middle of the year, my sister sent over a tape of one morning of the SAFM Morning Zoo (hosted by the recently dearly departed John Vincent). It was a very treasured tape for me at the time - back in the days long before the internet and live streaming. On the tape, just before the 7:30 news break was played a song I hadn't heard before. I was sure it was by U2, but the DJ's didn't mention the name or the band. It certainly wasn't on any of the U2 albums, so I assumed it was a B-side.

I played the tape over and over, and especially this myseterious U2 song. That year for my birthday I was given by my host parents a walkman that was amazingly small compared to the big clunky ones available in Australia. In truth I think I didn't see the type available in Australia for another 2-3 years.

It was my most treasured possession (there it is on the right wih a tape of Madonna's Like a Prayer" for scale).

Then I went on a school camp to Nagasaki (amazing experience). In the bus as we toured around I would put in the Morning Zoo tape and try and get it in sync with the actual time, and thus was able to feel like I was for that 60 minutes, back home.

On the Bullet Train home however I decided to put the Walkman in a small carry bag I had. When I got off the Bullet Train, I left the Walkman in the bag on the seat and thus forever had to say goodbye to my most treasured Walkman, and the wonderful SAFM tape with the great mysterious song by U2. (I think I cried a bit).

When I got back to Australia, I discovered the song was the B-side of the "All I want is You" single (do they even have B-sides anymore?) - "Everlasting Love". I quickly bought the "cassingle", and the song to this day makes me think of how I dopily left that bag on the Bullet Train, and I pine a little for that great Walkman. (It's also a damn fun song):

A Song a Year: 1988, Run to Paradise

Sometimes a song that sticks in your head is not a song you particularly like. It can be an annoying ditty that worms its way into your skull despite your best efforts to delete it from your cerebrum. When I heard Britney Spears' "Piece of Me" I thought "My God that's a horrible song", and then proceeded to hear it every time I switched on FM radio and found myself actually knowing the damn lyrics.

Apparently the usual reason you find yourself with a song running through your head is because you have only heard a part of it, and your brain subconsciously keeps trying to complete it.

But when it comes to a song being associated with a year, you have to have heard that song completely, and much more than once. You still don't have to particularly like it.

And so it is with my 1988 song, The Choirboys "Run to Paradise".

1988 was when I did Year 12, and in the first week the entire class went on a camp to bond. This was about as dumb an idea as you could ever come up with given I went to school in a small country town where 97% of the class had been together since Grade 1.

We'd spent 11 years bonding, and had well and truly worked out who we did and did not wish to bond with. We knew who had gone out with who since Grade 5. We knew who had beaten up who in Grade 6. We knew who had got busted for smoking in Grade 7. We knew more about each other than we did about our families.

However, our teachers thought we really needed to get to know each other, and thus were forced to spend a week together doing "trusting games" (if memory serves me right a few people hit the floor instead of falling safely back into the arms of their team mates) and group activities that required completing a task without the use of one of our senses.

This served to ensure that when we got back to school the next week we would definitely continue to bond only with those people we had previously wanted to bond with, and were able to set our previous thoughts on other people in the most rock solid concrete. Nothing like waste of time to start Year 12, I guess - though it did help set the pattern for the rest of the year for me.

We also had to answer questionnaires that attempted to reveal things about us. Fortunately there was one new kid, so all 45 of us had an answer to the question "Who do you want to get to know better?". (And of course at least 42 of us didn't bother).

We were staying at a youth camp-site on the Murray River, with everyone sharing a cabin with 5 others. The cabin next to mine was full of guys who had ensured at least one had brought along his boom box. It was pretty cool - a double tape deck of the type that had a soft eject, it had high speed dubbing capacity, and a 5 band graphic equalizer. It also required about eight D size batteries than ran out pretty quickly if anyone dared use the fast forward button.

Unfortunately the most favoured song by the lads in that cabin was "Run to Paradise". And so like most 16 year olds, they played their favourite song over and over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over.

And over.

You see the owner had cleverly taped the song back to back on one whole side of a blank tape. So for 45 minutes without pause the Choirboys could be heard blaring out across the camp ground.

I liked the song for the first 5 or 6 listens.

By the end of the week I was ready to kill every person in the entire camping ground should the initial shout of Mark Gable singing "Baby!" be heard coming out of any speakers.

And thus despite the fact I liked other songs in 1988 - "Desire" by U2, "Got My Mind Set On You" by George Harrison, "Never Tear Us Apart" by INXS or the sadly underrated "She's Like the Wind" by Patrick Swayze (ahem...ummm err...ok people, move along nothing more to see here), when I think of 1988 it's the damn Choirboys, and even 21 years has done little to dull the memory.

A Song a Year: 1987, I Think We're Alone Now

I haven't done a "Song of the Year" for a while, most likely because 1987 was next, and I wanted to put off admitting that for most of that year, and a goodly portion of 1988, I was madly besotted with teen pop "sensation" Tiffany.

Tiffany and I were meant to be. Ok I didn't write her name on my pencil case (a bit too girly a thing to do really) but I did have a poster of her on the inside of the door of my school locker.

The reason is pretty simple - she was the first pop star who was roughly my age. Madonna of course was decades too old, even home grown Kylie Minogue was 4 years older. Tiffany on the other hand was the same age (for part of the year) and thus it was no mere pipe dream; all that was needed was for me to somehow meet up with her and bada bing bada boom... ah geez, youth. You gotta love it.

Fact is, I liked the song as well. A cover of a song by a band no one had ever heard of (Tommy James and the Shondells??), it was reworked into a perfect late 1980s beat, with a video that screams late 1980s louder than someone standing on the top of a hill wearing legwarmers over her acid wash jeans with about a hundred bracelets on her wrists and wearing a jumper over the top of a shirt that isn't tucked in with a ponytail on the side of her head screaming at the top of her lungs, while looking at the time on her Swatch watch, "I am from the 1980s!!!"

Tiffany loved the mall, and the mall loved her back.

Sadly the love was short lived (for those few fly by night fans). I lasted through to her second album, featuring such great hits as... err... "Hold an Old Friend's Hand" anyone???. OK it wasn't great. And perhaps I should have been awake to her limited ability given the worst ever cover of a Beatles song "I Saw Him Standing There" on her first album.

But still, when you're 16 you're allowed to fall in love with a bad pop star. Could've been (now there is a great song) worse - I could have liked Debbie Gibson.

In 2002 she belatedly answered my teenage boy wish and posed in Playboy. And with the sounds of J Geils Band going through my head, I went into the newsagency to sneak a look. Sigh, sometimes it's best not to try to return to your youth.



The great thing about Tiffany and her video is like all good things from the 80s, it is ripe for parody. The great show, How I Met Your Mother, came up with the fantastic Robin Sparkles singing "Let's Go to the Mall (Today)". It is perfect - almost as good as the parody videos from the Hugh Grant film Music and Lyrics.

A Song a Year: 1986, Russians

There comes a point in every earnest wannabe angry-young-man's life when he decides the time has come to be political and think about issues affecting the nation and the world. By 1986 I certainly was thinking about the world most deeply, and it was influencing my music tastes. Sure INXS's Listen Like Thieves was a nice fun album, or possibly I could have gone for Mr Mister, or Peter Cetera, or Lionel Ritchie Dancing on the Ceiling, but when I went out, and for the first time ever bought a tape with my own money, it was Sting's Dream of the Blue Turtles that I chose.

The reason was based on the song "Russians", and the fact that a guy in my class told me it was great and that I had to buy it (and so I did: Grog the individual 0 - Peer Group Pressure 1).

Listening to "Russians" now seems impossibly quaint - can you really remember a time when we were worried either Russia or the USA might start a World War and use nuclear ICBMs to blow the crap out of each other and any other innocent nations who merely happened to have a secret listening post out in the middle of a desert somewhere?

It is hard to recall that in October of 1985 Reagan and Gorbachev met at Reykjavik to discuss nuclear disarmament - and what's more the world waited with interest to see what they decided - according to Wikipedia they "agreed in principle to eliminate all nuclear weapons in 10 years (by 1996)". Whew, glad it's now 2009 and we can celebrate 13 years of not having to worry about such weapons...

The song was accompanied by an equally earnest video - black and white, so you knew it must be very serious. At the time Sting was the go to guy for anyone wanting to be serious about world issues. Bono would quickly take his mantle, but in 1986 Sting was the singer you would most likely see sitting at a press conference next to some guy from the Amazon with a big disc in his bottom lip talking about deforestation or some such.

The lyrics refer somewhat incorrectly to a statement made by Nikita Kruschev that he made at the United Nations; Sting sings:

"Mister Kruschev says he will bury you/ I don't subscribe to that point of view/ Would be such an ignorant thing to do/If the Russians love their children too".

And while it sounds pretty sinister, what Kruschev was saying was that Communism will bury capitalism (yeah, ok not the greatest prediction), and not in a "we will kill all of you" kind of way, but bury you as in "outlive you" - the meaning of the phrase that is often used when talking to an elderly relative complaining about his ailments: "Oh Grandpa Simpson, you'll bury us all".

But still, minor issue. Sting was making a point that nuclear war was bad, and I was fully in earnest, serious agreement, and the rest of you frivolous people could go listen to Michael Hutchence "Kissin' the Dirt", or Falco rocking Amadeus, but in 1986, it was time to worry about the world (and be sure in the knowledge that one day you would be able to change it!).

(and by the way peer group pressure can still be good - the album was great)

A Song a Year: 1985, Man Overboard

In 1985, I got serious about music. Every month meant buying another copy of Countdown Magazine (infinitely superior to Smash Hits - though I bought that as well), and Take 40 on Saturday and Sunday mornings was a must see, and the Top 8 at 8 on the local AM station was a must listen.

Music meant so much to me that I wrote an essay for English about responding to Pat Boone's criticism of Duran Duran's "A View to a Kill" (apparently he thought it was satanic - you know the whole "dance into the fire" lyric). Now you have to be fairly well into music to get steamed up about Duran Duran, and I don't think I need to produce any further evidence to demonstrate the hold pop music had on my life.

It was also around this time that music started seeping into my subconscious. From this year my life began to have a soundtrack. I was on a bus in Perth going from the airport to an athletic competition (I was into athletics in high school) and playing in the bus was Cold Chisel's "Saturday Night". Why do I remember that? I don't know, but I do know that on the flight home one of the songs I heard on the in-flight music channel was Phil Collins "One More Night".

Music does this to you; it seeps into your life and produces memories like the smell of a madeleine biscuit in In Search of Lost Time. A song can remind you of a person; an album recalls a moment, a break-up a reunion.

For me 1985 was a year full of Madonna singing Crazy For You, George Michael being 1005 heterosexual while wearing fluorescent fingerless gloves in the video for "Wake Me Up Before you Go Go" - I played table tennis that year and I recall doing an impersonation of George one night while wearing my friends yellow fingerless gloves - the important thing is the eye movement right when you sing the lines "it's cold out there but it's warm in bed" (laughs were pretty easy at table tennis nights).

1985 was perhaps the only year where girls could write I love Morten on their pencil case; but A-ha gave them that ability. I was friends with a couple girls (who also played table tennis) who were absolutely devoted to Morten Harket and the other Norwegian lads, but who probably knew better and thus would react to my renaming him as Morten Carked-it with faux howls of disgust and a few laughs (yes, the laughs at table tennis were very easy to get).

But enough reminisces of my trying to charm girls with humour (they always go for the funny ones don't they?). 1985 was also for me the time I picked a band to be my band (no not U2, though they were there). Nope, for me the band to live and die by was Go West.

Yep.

Well look, in my defence "We Close Our Eyes" is a damn catchy song... and hell they did get voted Best New Band in the 1985 Countdown magazine readers poll.

And so while it was definitely my favourite song of the year, it's not the song I choose to be my song of the year for 1985. That pick goes to Aussie band, Do Re Mi, and their one hit (of sorts) Man Overboard.

There was something about the song that just got me. It was adult - the lyrics were pretty edgy for the mid-80s. The video was also intriguing. To this day I have no idea what the images have to do with the song, but it just got under my skin. The start of the video with the camera walking down a run down inner city street got the interest of me, the young country town boy. I wanted to know the street; I wanted to feel urban. I had reached a point in life where I knew without doubt my life was destined to occur outside the parameters of a little town. I wanted to live in a city teeming with every type of people.

I hadn't seen the video for well over a decade when a couple years ago I saw it on youtube, and it was amazing how the first minute of the video brought back the feelings I had back in 85. The fact that I now don't wish to live in "the big city" - or at least Sydney - and am comfortable in suburbia, rather than some bohemian inner city apartment is irrelevant. Music takes you straight back to where you were; and so I was taken back to 1985 to when I dreamt of being so many different things, that it was hard for me to watch the video without feeling some moments of regret, without sighing and wondering of what might have been had not a thousand separate moments that led me to where I am now not happened.

Oddly I had had a copy of the song for years, and while it always took me back to Year 9, it was the video that really brought the memories flashing through my brain. And for the first time I realised the scenes of the men drinking was taken on Anzac Day (at the 1:30min mark you can see a guy who is a Vietnam War veteran on account of the medals he has on his suit - still don't know what it has to do with the song).

The band also interested me. They and the song they were singing weren't the standard easy listening pop. These guys (especially Deborah Conway) looked 'arty' -they seemed like people who would laugh derisively at the fact I listened to AM radio; that I thought George Michael was straight; that I only had a mono speaker tape player to listen to music. They and their song were city; and I wanted to be them.

When I did get out of the country and got to go to uni in the city, I was lucky enough to be around when a few of my friends were going down to Elder Park where Deborah Conway was singing at a free concert (not sure why - it may have been Australia Day), and when she announced the start of this song, I have to say it felt pretty good to be able to feel like I was now one of those who could laugh derisively at country AM radio and mono speakers, if only because I was able to turn to my friends and say "I loved this song in Year 9", because let's be honest, it's a lot cooler than if I was making that statement after hearing "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go".

A Song a Year: 1984, 99 Luftballoons

By 1984 I was starting to really take an interest in music. The unfortunate thing is my taste was horrible. I had no idea what was good or bad or plain awful. Though a quick look at the top 10 selling singles in the USA for '84 suggests that taste probably didn't matter:

1. When Doves Cry, Prince
2. What's Love Got To Do With It, Tina Turner
3. Say Say Say, Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson
4. Footloose, Kenny Loggins
5. Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now), Phil Collins
6. Jump, Van Halen
7. Hello, Lionel Richie
8. Owner Of A Lonely Heart, Yes
9. Ghostbusters, Ray Parker Jr.
10. Karma Chameleon, Culture Club

I mean, geez! That is a bad list. Let's be honest 1984 was not a music highpoint.

My song of the year was to be Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl". I can recall spending the summer that year at my cousins. They had a tennis court and on new year's eve we were out playing on the court listening to Casey Kasem do the year's countdown (why this was on the local AM radio station I have no idea, but when you're dealing with country AM radio you are in beggars can't be choosers territory). I can recall confidently predicting that the Number 1 song would be "Uptown Girl". I was close: it came 39th.

It was a good song for its time, though the An Innocent Man album has probably fallen in standing over time - it's a bit gimmicky. The video featuring Christie Brinkley was lots of fun - especially for any teenage boys who had seen her driving the red Ferrari in National Lampoon's Vacation.

But all the videos of it on YouTube have had their enabling disabled, so I'm not able to put it on this blog. So Billy Joel, bad luck you miss out.

I was tempted to go with Wham! 'Freedom', which was also one of my favourites of that year, but for me, the song which screams 1984 is Nina's 99 Luftballons.

In 1984, I started High School. At our school the foreign language choice was between German and errrr well actually there was no choice (until you got into Year 9, when you could choose between German and Ag Studies - amazingly there was a very high correlation between those who felt no need to know a language other than English, and those who enjoyed learning about farming).

Now teachers, being who they are, search for anything going around in the public culture to link to their subject. When I was studying Economics at uni, one lecturer, while we were studying International Finance, pointed out that much of what we were learning about was what the Richard Gere character in Pretty Woman did - ie buy up companies, and them sell them off in little pieces at a huge profit. Sad to say it didn't really grab us (though the fact I can recall this lesson 18 years later perhaps suggests he was smarter than I give him credit). However, if you are a high school German teacher, and suddenly a song sung in German becomes the most popular song going around, well now that be all your Weinachtens come at once.

It also was helped by the fact that the song's lyrics were topical - talk about educational! A German lesson and a world studies lesson all wrapped up in 4 minutes and 6 seconds.

It is amazing at this distance to think about the Berlin Wall. When I was younger I badly wanted to get to Berlin to see the Wall. Die Mauer was pretty well etched into my consciousness as a young political aware teenager. The Cold War seems now to be so remote, so otherworldly - did we really worry that the Soviet Union and America would actually destroy the entire world?

The fall of the Wall is one of those "I remember where I was moments". In 1989 I was in Japan on a student exchange. On the day I found out (Nov 11 - though the Wall actually came down 2 days before) a Canadian exchange student friend of mine and I were going into Tokyo for a bit of a night out. I met him at the train station in my town (he lived 20 minutes further down the line). He had a copy of The Japan Times - the best English language newspaper in Japan. I asked him what was the news. He said... oh not much.... Gretzky scored again (I was into Ice Hockey - as you must be if you have a Canadian friend)... oh ... oh yeah, the Berlin Wall came down...

The two of us - as young politically aware teenagers are want to do jumped up and down in the train screaming about this moment in time. (You have to realise we were the type of guys who would talk about Glasnost while drinking beer...yes... so serious, so self important).

And yet I was also somewhat chagrined, because now I would never get to see the divided city (a fact which I guess the people of Berlin no doubt were able to live with).

'99 Luftballons' is a song the like of which we won't see again. Germany is no longer the political consciousness of the West. The events of importance have moved decidedly to the east. But for 1984, if you were young and wanted to grasp the importance of the Cold War, well it was all there in a nice heart felt pop ditty.

And if you were a German teacher, it meant you had a good two weeks of lessons planned for you without even trying. I don't know about any other school in Australia; but if you were studying German at mine in 1984, you sure as heck were doing a translation of Nina's words.

I can recall some of what it means, but rather oddly, I can still remember all of the German, which proves I guess, that a good song doesn't need to make sense, it just needs to make a connection.



***
My previous post on the 2001 Oscars left out a mention of the amazing Australian film Lantana.

I actually thought it came out in 2000, and so was going to mention it in my next Oscars entry. For mine, it is the second greatest Australian film of all time (my number 1 will get a mention later). The plot involves the intertwining lives of people in Sydney, and of all the many, many films with multiple plot lines, I believe it is the best - better than Short Cuts, Magnolia, Nashville (and definitely Crash).

It is an incredibly adult drama - not for children, and not for the immature, because at times this film is utterly shattering in its intensity.

The acting is just amazing. Kerry Armstrong should have also got nominated for Best Actress (though I'll stick with my pick of Naomi Watts), but perhaps they could have nominated her as Best Supporting Actress - she would've been a better choice than Marica Gay Harden in Pollock (good though she was).

Anthony LaPaglia in the lead role as the detective trying to solve a murder while his marriage and life is falling apart is better than he's ever been (though I'm looking forward to Balibo due out next year). Geoffrey Rush as the husband whose daughter was murdered, and now whose wife is missing is absolutely breathtaking. How can a guy play that role and also be so brilliant as the buffoonish theatre producer in Shakespeare in Love (or for that matter also be the villainous Walshingham in Elizabeth AND the great cartoon villain in Pirates of the Caribbean)? If there is a better character actor going around today I don't know him.

Perhaps best of all is Paul Kelly's haunting score - though unfortunately I couldn't find a YouTube clip featuring it.

This clip of the final 4 minutes of the film (which doesn't actually give much away) features a dance song (Te Busco) - some of the couples in the film are taking dancing lessons. I could just about write a thesis on the final scenes of Armstrong and LaPaglia dancing. Such acting by the pair! With no words, and in an embrace the whole time they let the reader into their minds - Armstrong seems to almost be running away, while LaPaglia desperately clings to her, hoping against hope that she will stay, and things will be like they once were.

The film ends without resolution, and it is all the better for it.

I don't know whether I would give it Best Picture - I still love Mulholland Dr - but I'd put this as runner up.

A song a year: 1983, Bop Girl

I really only started taking a particular interest in music in 1983. Before that I was aware of songs on the radio, but I wasn't personally involved with any songs or bands. In 1982 for example I knew of "Ebony and Ivory", or "Physical" and "Up Where We Belong", but I wasn't living my days by the Top 8 at 8 on the local AM radio station, and I certainly didn't have any posters on my wall.

But in 1983, perhaps because I was in my final year of primary school, music started to take hold. Rather than just knowing of a few songs in the charts, I knew all the songs. And it was a great time to become involved with music - bands such as Culture Club singing "Karma Chameleon", Kenny Loggins getting "Footloose", Deneise Williams singing "Let's Hear it for the Boy", and Stevie Wonder reaching the high point of his career with "I Just Called to Say I Love You".

Ok, maybe it wasn't such a great year, but who cares? When you're young every song that you think is the best is axiomatically also the best song ever. It took me a couple years to realise the correlation between Number 1 song and quality was pretty low, but it probably wasn't until I was in my very late teens that I stopped paying full attention to the charts.

In the great music-lovers' novel, High Fidelity, the main character rearranges his LP collection autobiographically. Which, when you think about it, is the only way to think of music.

Music matters because of when you heard it, and the memories it invokes. Music that is very good but which has no connection to your biography will never be considered great. It's why The Beach Boys Pet Sounds is listed in the greatest all time albums, but Brian Wilson's Smile album which was made around the same time and is just as technically brilliant, but which was only released in 2003, will never be a truly great album - ditto Bob Dylan's Live From Albert Hall - perhaps one of the best live albums ever, but which will never hold the affection that his albums released in the 1960s have.

Now, the usual case is that a song will invoke a time or place, and thus throughout a year numerous songs will invoke numerous memories, which makes it pretty hard to limit one song to encapsulate one year. But what the heck I shall try. And bear in mind these songs encapsulate the year for me, not the year for everyone.

Why does "Bop Girl" remind me of 1983? I have to admit there were a few runners up for the title - among them Taco "Puttin on the Ritz", which sticks in my mind because my sister had a gotten the great compilation tape "1983 Summer Breaks" for Christmas, of which that was one of the songs, and it was the one that stuck in my head the most. Also close to being my song of 1983 was the fantastically bizarre number from New Zealand band Monte Video & The Cassettes, "Shoop Shoop Diddy Wop".

But as great as those songs were (geez what a year for music!), it is Pat Wilson's "Bop Girl" that takes me back to 1983. My Year 7 teacher that year had it stuck into her head that the class should do dancing for PE instead of, geee I don't know, PE! And thus instead of playing soccer or basketball or learning how to play volleyball, she choreographed some moves for the class to learn to perform. Some were horrible folk dances, but two were for modern songs. The entire class had to learn to do dance steps to The Nolans' "Gotta Pull Myself Together", and a select few girls (a favoured six, I recall) got to dance to "Bop Girl".

It was essentially a preamble into music for me. I was at the crossroads of liking music because I liked it, and liking it because my friends liked it. I can also remember watching Countdown around at a friend's house and "Bop Girl" was the Number 1 song that week. I think it was the first time I had watched the Countdown Top 10 and known all the songs and even been able to guess the Number 1. From there I never looked back.

Like a lot of songs in the early 1980s, "Bop Girl" is incredibly stupid. It makes no sense; it's beat is inane, and the video not even remotely connected with the lyrics. The video is now of note only for the fact it features a very young Nicole Kidman (no doubt coming off her win in the Dolly Covergirl competition). She was 15 and in the video she sits around smoking and looking very stuck up. It may be her best role. (Ok that is harsh. She was damn good in BMX Bandits).

But, be that as it may, the song has its hooks into me, and should I ever need to invoke the feelings of what life was like for me in Year 7, I need only hear the opening few bars, and I am right back in class, sitting down watching the girls perform some bizarre robotic type dance to this classic 80s One Hit Wonder song.



Of interest for those who were teenagers during the 80s is this absolutely fantastic blog, called The 80's Tapes which features all the compilation tapes of the era (and lots of other great stuff). It was a time when a compilation tape couldn't be called Video Hits 27, or Hit Machine 22. Nope, it had to be "1982 Up in Lights", or "1981 Over the Top".

If you ever had a mono tape player and you got a tape for Christmas that featured such classic songs as Billy Field's "You weren't in love with me", or Kajagoogoo singing "Too Shy", then check out the site and spend a hour or so looking at the covers of those tapes and shaking your head as the song lists come flooding back.

Oh and bugger it, here's "Shoop Shoop Diddy Wop", because it so perfectly captures early 1980s weird.