yikes. fixed

- but not linked to other Popular posts…

1. The Smiths – Panic
2. The Mission – Serpent’s Kiss
3. The Jesus & Mary Chain – Some Candy Talking
4. Peter Gabriel – Sledgehammer
5. Prince – Kiss
6. The Housemartins – Happy Hour
7. BAD – E=MC2
8. The Smiths – Bigmouth Strikes Again
9. The Age Of Chance – Kiss
10. Bon Jovi – Livin’ On A Prayer

1. The Smiths – Panic
2. Prince – Kisss
3. The The – Heartland
4. The Smiths – Ask
5. Billy Bragg – Levi Stubbs’ Tears
6. The Housemartins – Happy Hour
7. The Jesus & Mary Chain – Some Candy Talking
8. Elvis Costello & The Attractions – I Want You
9. Sonic Youth – Into The Groovey
10. The Age Of Chance – Kiss
11. The Shop Assistants – Safety Net
12. Cameo – Word Up
13. The Smiths – Bigmouth Strikes Again
14. The Fall – Mr Pharmacist
15. Primal Scream – Velocity Girl
16. PiL – Rise
17. Julian Cope – World Shut Your Mouth
18. Run DMC – Walk This Way
19. Peter Gabriel – Sledgehammer
20. The Weather Prophets – Almost Prayed

Note that the 25th ann. of the release of the Go-betweens’ Tallulah must be sometime in the next few weeks. That record had a nuclear impact on a generation of smartie undergrads down under…

Re the Waterboys, I didn’t get much further than the single either; the parent album is okay, but Fisherman’s Blues didn’t really float my boat.

I quite like TWOTM but have always found the Waterboys a bit too wide-eyed.

Midnight Oil, Species Deceases (EP), 6 weeks (2 in 1986)
Starship, “We Built This City”, 2 weeks
Whitney Houston, “Saving All My Love for You”, 2 weeks
Feargal Sharkey, “A Good Heart”, 2 weeks
Dionne Warwick with Gladys Knight, Elton John & Stevie Wonder, “That’s What Friends Are For”, 1 week
Billy Ocean, “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going”, 6 weeks
Diana Ross, “Chain Reaction”, 3 weeks
Cliff Richard and The Young Ones, “Living Doll”, 6 weeks
Robert Palmer, “Addicted to Love”, 2 weeks
Samantha Fox, “Touch Me (I Want Your Body)”, 3 weeks
Whitney Houston, “Greatest Love of All”, 1 week
Madonna, “Papa Don’t Preach”, 6 weeks
Bananarama, “Venus”, 7 weeks
John Farnham, “You’re the Voice”, 7 weeks
Pseudo Echo, “Funkytown”, 7 weeks (2 in 1986)

Robert Palmer, Bananarama and John Farnham are the most noteworthy differences, and Samantha Fox’s single could also have made for a good Popular discussion around ’80s tabloids and the page three phenomenon. (One of our local record reviewers at the time: “Why does Samantha Fox want my body? She seems to have a perfectly adequate one of her own.”)

But if I were to name one single that encapsulated 1986 for me it would be the Waterboys’ “The Whole of the Moon”, which was first released in late 1985 in the UK and reached number 12 in Australia in 1986. It instantly brings back memories of sitting in the Sound Lounge of the student union during my first year at uni, a place where I discovered all sorts of weird stuff in its tape collection. (A lot of ’70s prog, mainly, which mercifully didn’t take.) The twelve-inch singles of that and Midnight Oil’s “The Dead Heart” were two treasured purchases that year.

That “The Whole of the Moon” wouldn’t chart strongly in the UK until five years later says something about how out-of-step my tastes were becoming with your and our charts. Apart from the Pet Shop Boys, a-ha and “Living Doll”, I don’t own any of the 1986 UK number ones (“Papa Don’t Preach” might be buried on a tape from a friend somewhere, but Madonna has largely been a blind spot for me, with one or two exceptions). Nonetheless, I seem to have given 6 or more to eight of them – all of those plus George Michael, Falco, Berlin and Jackie Wilson – which seems too generous for what felt like a dud year at the top, then and now.

Loving the house discussion on here – I was really hoping to spark a bit more with the next entry but it’s not going to happen this side of next week, I’m afraid: I’m writing a conference paper, already overdue, and it’s slow going…

Cheers

In 1986/87 house was originally just looked on as a more starkly electronic version of the disco-ey funk that you’d hear in the average mainstream club surrounding the blatant pop.

Some of the more adventurous djs in the specialist funk/soul/hiphop clubs would drop a bit and it started to appear amongst the standard stuff on the pirates too. Although Jazzy M had the first house only show other tracks could still be heard on more old style shows occasionally. But if you wanted to hear it in a club environment you just went to you mainstream club and you could guarantee hearing something like “Jack Your Body”, or something by Raze, Nitro Deluxe, Jack n Chill, House Engineers etc.

But by mid-1987 after the initial influx of house hits it did begin to look like as far as the UK was concerned it had just been the latest dance craze – now on the wane.

It was only the a certain set of circumstances the next year that made it the progenitor of so much more.

Paradoxically despite my point above about mainstream clubs.
1986/87 was also the time when in this country Afro-Caribbeans still made up a significant proportion of its listeners (via the pirates and inner city blacks dominated clubs) – I had first hand experience of this through a black bloke I worked with at the time who used to go on about “Let’s Get Brutal” when I still knew it only as the commercial UK 12 inch I had called “This Brutal House” (bloody hell did I think that one was an extreme track at the time!).

Aside from a few djs and an influx with Hardcore for some reason British blacks were virtually uninterested by the time Acid House started in 1988.

Arcadia – Election Day
A-Ha – Take On Me
Via Verdi – Diamond
Eros Ramazzotti – Adesso Tu
Joe Cocker – You Can Leave Your Hat On
Madonna – Live To Tell (10 weeks)
Tracy Spencer – Run To Me
Madonna – Papa Don’t Preach
Spagna – Easy Lady
Gianna Nannini – Bello e Impossibile
Duran Duran – Notorious
Europe – The Final Countdown