The sound of an eighties summer. If you hailed from a household given to descending on your local Thomas Cook round about October the previous year demanding to be booked on an all-inclusive package holiday to Tenerife, Bahrain, Mallorca, Menorca or whatever that year’s unimaginatively one-upmanship mass-adopted sun-scorched island du jour was, chances are that your bafflingly breathlessly related accounts of sitting around on a sun lounger doing the square root of precisely fuck all would have been accompanied by – as Top Of The Pops round about a week before everyone went back to school would all too vigorously confirm – the Europe-straddling chart-conquering likes of Modern Talking, Spagna, Desireless and of course Sabrina, who attained additional points by inspiring countless conveniently unverifiable lurid tales of what purportedly went on in the ‘version’ of her ‘video’ that ‘they’ have in Europe. If, however, your family preferred to embark on interminable car journeys commencing at stupid o’clock in the morning in the vain hope of ‘beating’ ‘the traffic’ – invariably thwarted from the outset by everyone else who had resolved to set off at a similarly Gordon Honeycombe-prefacing hour with an equal ambition to ‘beat’ ‘the traffic’ under the baffling delusion that it would somehow be different that year – in search of such exotic destinations as Criccieth, Cleethorpes, Anglesey and Barry Island, the sound of your summer would prove very different indeed, ringfenced as it was by rained-off afternoons in a locale where to be honest you may as well have just stayed at home with blaring radio rotation for the never-explicably seasonally advantaged in the UK stray hits for classy American soul-funk acts made entirely out of satin such as Champaign, Levert, Midnight Star and, of course, The Mac Band Featuring The McCampbell Brothers, whose epochal assertion of devotion Roses Are Red incorporated a pledge to be your ‘adrenaline’. This was what ‘the charts’ had decided you were listening to in the interminable stretch between after you had switched off the cricket when Soul Limbo faded out and before The Garden Party started, and – as was wearily recalled by Georgy Jamieson and Bob Fischer in Looks Unfamiliar here – that was pretty much that.
Although it wasn’t quite that. Radio 1 and Independent Local Radio alike still had to find something to go either side of Atlantic Starr sappily sighing about how you’re like the sun chasing all of the rain away and when you come around you bring brighter days, and the usual and indeed somewhat obvious solution was to reach straight for the nearest collection of fully certified ‘summer hits’. The only problem with this stratagem was that, no matter how enthusiastically the presenters may have insisted as such with a determination so overwhelming that it was evident they were all wearing Hawaiian shirts and aviator shades in the studio even in sound only, none of said ‘summer hits’ ever seemed to sound particularly like each other. Unlike Christmas songs, where there was at least some variety of a boughs of holly-decked common musical and indeed lyrical template to work from, ‘Summer’ songs appeared to simply follow whatever structure, melody, theme and arrangement the composer felt like whilst jotting down a few lines about how seasonably warm it purportedly and probably not realistically was. Do those lazy sunkissed summer days sound like George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley trying to be heard over a chorus of indistinct conversations and wasps playing vuvuzelas, the Farmer Barleymow sliding down the street languidity of The Young Rascals, Haircut One Hundred singing about not having to get a train to a cunning rewrite of the Camberwick Green theme and hoping nobody notices – especially not ‘Clown’ – or The Lovin’ Spoonful effortlessly capturing the downright sodding annoyance of still having to go to work on a scorching hot day? Should its lyrical fixations mirror ‘The Voice Of’ Scott McKenzie exhorting all and sundry to go around looking like they have been dragged through a garden centre backwards whilst on a pilgrimage to see Merrel Frankhauser And His HMS Bounty performing at a ‘free festival’, whatever it was about going where the sun shines brightly that provoked Cliff Richard and company into inflating Hank Marvin with a bicycle pump or Bobby Goldsboro describing the individual facial features of some woman he’s hoping to get into the pants of with disconcerting prominence? Should you just try to make everything sound like KC And The Sunshine Band playing through a tinny seaside tannoy hanging hazardously off an equally hazardous-looking metal pole and hope for the best? Nobody was ever quite sure, although pretty much everyone could agree on one solitary detail – none of it should in any sense resemble Island Girl by Elton John.
Quite what variety of paradoxically heat-untroubled heat haze delirium caused me to attempt to decipher the logistics at work behind the wilfully eccentric and seemingly entirely randomly assembled tracklistings of both Now – The Summer Album and Summer Chart Party – both of which, it should not be overlooked, appeared to have an entirely different concept of what constituted a ‘summer hit’ to each other – can presumably only be attributed to the ‘summer madness’ that Will Smith was so keen to rap about despite it apparently constituting, as Georgy so memorably outlined here, little more than a quick hot dog, a dance with his auntie and then fucking off. Nonetheless, you can find them both in this collection of highlights from the archives alongside the otherwise not specifically summer-adjacent sounds of a look at that episode of Mr. Benn where he took part in a balloon race and Melanie Williams on Looks Unfamiliar, and if you would like to show your appreciation at the same time as finally putting that Network Chart-branded Nescafé Frappé to some practical use, you are more than welcome to buy me a coffee here. Anyway, let’s start at the, erm, end…?
Hang On A Minute Lads, I’ve Got A Great Idea…
I’m not entirely certain of whether this was originally provoked by yet another smartarse postgrad student proudly announcing to a press who then omitted to bother printing their photo that they had ‘solved’ the cliffhanger from The Italian Job despite it having been ‘solved’ by Troy Kennedy Martin back in 1969 in anticipation of a sequel that never happened – they never seem to get round to doing flashy equations to work out how big that nasty splinter at the end of Blackadder Goes Forth would have to have been, do they? – or yet another columnist churning out eight million words about how they were the best at finding the finale of yet another ‘streaming hit’ that they watched but nobody else did ’emotionally satisfying’ no arguments despite it neither answering anything nor understanding why the viewers who followed it actually did so in the first place, but either way it led to this exceptionally enjoyable to write rundown of a handful of the comparatively few occasions on which I felt that someone had signed off and not necessarily for good and actually managed to judge it just about right. This Life and Avengers: Infinity War probably attracted the most agreement, Time And The Rani and Tin Machine definitely attracted the most dissent, and there were some surprising omissions, notably Sapphire And Steel which I did at least acknowledge and Pipkins which I would later have a good deal more to say about elsewhere; the penultimate image, incidentally, is Kevin Eldon as The Fake Rod Hull in This Morning With Richard Not Judy, haplessly willing the phone to ring (“no… it’s fully operational”) in a moment that felt a little too downbeat to include in the feature proper but merited recognition nonetheless. Now you may have your jelly. You can find the original version of Hang On A Minute Lads, I’ve Got A Great Idea… here and an expanded version with even more Lee And Herring references in Keep Left, Swipe Right here.
You Can’t Imagine Summer Without It
The Now That’s What I Call Music! compilation series, and in particular the earlier instalments with their determinedly eighties branding with optional Brian Glover-voiced ‘cool dude’ pig, are frequently scrutinised for their remarkable value as a cultural snapshot of their times, but there is one particular aspect of this otherwise deftly explored context that such analyses tend to either overlook or to struggle to adequately recapture – the excitement of spotting that inaugural double-page tracklisting-toting advert in Smash Hits and fervently plotting how you might contrive to obtain the latest double-album collection of mid-chart hits for Christmas and/or your birthday. On account of its distinct lack of proximity to either and indeed its unexpected seasonal incongruity, few if any of said compilations were ever more inextricably linked for me with chancing upon the in this case beatifically-coloured beach-themed promotional splash and wondering what all of these evidently classic summer hits that it was clearly presumed I would be instantly familiar with actually were than Now – The Summer Album, and a deep rifle through the original corresponding issue of Smash Hits duly formed the foundation of this attempt at working out what exactly they were trying to achieve with this ill-fitting and bafflingly sequenced mish-mash of almost entirely unrelated sounds and why; Wella Shockwaves, adverts for mail order pop star posters of distinctly dubious-looking quality and the Upper Bubblington Village Fete were and indeed are as much of a part of the story of this bewildering compilation to me as the fact that it somehow managed to bag the rights to a whole two Beatles numbers. They may well not have quite succeeded in capturing the ‘sound’ of the ‘summer’, but when it came to capturing the essence of a bored and boring afternoon leafing through a magazine in the sun-deficient Citrus Spring-hued summer of 1986… well, you can be the judge of that. You can find the original version of You Can’t Imagine Summer Without It here and an expanded version with further attempts at determining exactly how ‘summer’ sounded in the mid-eighties in Keep Left, Swipe Right here.
Party To 18 Of The Hottest Summer Hits
Although Now – The Summer Album and Summer Chart Party were only separated by four years, they may as well have come from different centuries. By 1990, we were well into the dawn of the age of the Compact Disc, when there were still so few releases available on the brand spanking new format that not only did it seem somehow possible to ‘rationalise’ your collection – an idea that would be rendered laughably obsolete within more or less twelve months – it also meant that more or less everyone who owned a CD player owned the exact same CDs. This was very much true of Summer Chart Party, a collection that appeared to have confused ‘summer’ with ‘stuff that was hanging around the top twenty at assorted points over the past eighteen months’ and was genuinely inescapable for a couple of weeks; indeed the various anecdotal details about overhearing it at unwelcome and inopportune moments are all too genuine. Having taken a look at what can probably be assumed by default and association and thematic appropriateness of contents to be the ‘best’ summer-themed compilation, it seemed only right and proper to afford similar attention to one that displayed not even the slightest shred of an obligation to fulfil its self-imposed brief, and let us just say that while it is always a pleasure to renew your acquaintance with Kylie Minogue, Candy Flip and Rob’N’Raz Featuring Leila K, it is somewhat less of a pleasure to have to listen to Don Pablo’s Animals again. In fact you may just pick up on that if you read between the lines. You can find the original version of Party To 18 Of The Hottest Summer Hits here and an expanded version with additional Smash Hits-style Pop ‘Facts’ in The Camberwick Green Procrastination Society here.
Looks Unfamiliar: Melanie Williams – She Was Just Completely Expunged From The Girl-Verse
One of the joys of Looks Unfamiliar is that it allows experts in one particular area an opportunity to apply their discursive talents to subjects in which they are not necessarily recognised as such. Melanie can more normally be found writing and presenting thought-provoking and rigorously researched commentaries on trends in and aspects of British Cinema History, but here we instead took the opportunity to chat about Kellogg’s Rise And Shine, pleading to be allowed to ‘stay up’ to watch Kelly Monteith, Children’s ITV orange blob cartoon man Aubrey and more; so much more, in fact, that we kept diverting into additional chatter about the likes of Mr. Rossi Looks For Happiness and Battle Of The Planets that I eventually siphoned off into an additional ‘extra’ mini-episode. This was an incredibly fun edition and in fact one particular listener was so taken with the section on Rimmel Coffee Shimmer that they made a discreet enquiry about the possibility of appearing as a guest at some point, but more about that in due course. You can find the full show here and the ‘extra’ here and the chat about Rimmel Coffee Shimmer in a collection of Looks Unfamiliar highlights here.
This, He Thought, Is How The Clouds Must Feel
Everyone probably has their own favourite episode of Mr. Benn, although admittedly in the overwhelming majority of cases it’s more than likely the spaceman one because ‘space’. I’m almost certainly in an overwhelming minority but mine has always been the balloonist one, not least on account of a certain piece of music that appears as an interlude halfway through the episode in which essentially nothing happens for all the right reasons and which transfixed me from a very early age, and this look at The Balloonist was as much an attempt to celebrate it and point out that it and so many other similar compositions for children’s television which somehow transcended their intended shelf life had never had any form of commercial release as it was any kind of an excuse to talk about Mr. Benn itself. Despite having been previously assured by a record label I was doing some work with that they had made some enquiries and the tapes no longer existed, I was convinced that they had to somewhere and probably somewhere nobody had thought to look at that. Without giving too much away just yet, I am happy to say that this feature eventually played its own small part in securing a long overdue full release for the Mr. Benn soundtrack. In fact you could almost say it appeared as if by magic. You can find the original version of This, He Thought, Is How The Clouds Must Feel here and an expanded version with more on the possibly not as long-lost as they once appeared musical scores for various Watch With Mother shows in Keep Left, Swipe Right here.
If your idea of summer fun was the Radio 1 Roadshow, there might not be much I can do to help but you may well enjoy Fun At One, available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.
Mystery Link! If you want to just go straight to a surprise page completely unrelated to any of the above, click here.
© Tim Worthington.
Please don’t copy this only with more italics and exclamation marks.
