Big Country was formed in 1981 by Stuart Adamson, Bruce Watson, Tony Butler and Mark Brzezicki in Fife, Scotland.
'Step back in time' was released in October 1990 as the second single from Kylie Minogue's third album 'Rhythm of love'. The lyric is about how modern music can never beat the swinging disco music from the Seventies ('Remembering the old days / Remember the O'Jays').
If you think you're suffering from deja vu, you're almost right. I did write about Martika's 1989 single 'Toy soldiers' once before, right in the first month of this blog's existance. But this single is different: for one, it has a diferent sleeve, and also, it contains an edit of the track, cutting it short by a full 37 seconds.
Taken from their 1984 album 'Tempo Doeloe', 'Geboren voor het geluk' was an ill-fated single. Despite the humorous lyric and the strong music, the Dutch audience was no longer interested in the group, it seemed.
Seal Henry Olusegun Olumide Adeola Samuel was born on February 19, 1963. As a son of Nigerian parents, he was adopted because his parents were unable to support him financially. He was raised in London and studied architecture. In the Eighties, he joined a funk band, before meeting Adamski, with whom he recorded 'Killer', which became a huge hit in 1990.
Malcolm McLaren achieved notoriety as the 'brains' behind the Sex Pistols and Bow Wow Wow. In the Eighties, he started recording his own tracks. After the New York-influenced 1983 album 'Duck rock', he turned his attention to electronic music, recording the unique single 'Madam Butterfly', which was released in 1984.
'Wheel of fortune' was originally the debut single by Swedish pop group Ace of base. It was released on a small Danish independent label in April 1992. It failed to reach the chart on its first release. The first re-release was also unsuccessful.
'Close to me' was released in 1985 as a single from the Cure's album 'The head on the door'. On its original release, the single peaked at number 24 in the UK singles chart. In the Netherlands, the single reached number 21. It was accompanied by an interesting music video, featuring all members of the band locket up in a wardrobe, which falls off of a cliff into an ocean by the end of the song.
'Waiting for that day' was a track from George Michael's 1990 album 'Listen without prejudice'. Although Michael wrote the song, the chords and rhythm are very similar to Rolling Stones' 'You can't always get what you want'. George Michael actually sings this title near the end of the song. A co-writer credit was given to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
'One more night' was written by Michael Cretu, Klaus Hirschburger and Frank Peterson. It was a ballad, taken from the album 'Paintings in yellow', released as its third and final single. The 7" single included a unique track on the B-side: an 2'42 edit of the album track 'The journey'. The cd-single and 12" single featured the original full length version of that track, clocking in at 7'27.
Errol Brown and Tony Wilson wrote 'Emma', a song that became a number 3 hit in both the UK and the Netherlnads in 1974. It was an unusually dark song for the band, who were known for their lightweight pop songs.
'You little thief' was the fourth single taken from Feargal Sharkey's successful debut album 'Feargal Sharkey' (1985). It followed up the UK and Netherlands number 1 hit 'A good heart'.
The title of this 1985 hit single is taken from the 1972 non-fiction book, 'The boys of summer' by Roger Kahn. Kahn's 'boys of summer' are the 1952 Brooklyn Dodgers, a team that Kahn covered as a sportswriter for the New York Herald Tribune. The book is about how the lives of the former ballplayers had changed between the time he covered the team and the time he tracked each of them down twenty years later.
Toto's debut single was the 1978 track 'Hold the line', taken from their self-titled debut album. The song peaked at number 5 in the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, number 14 in the UK singles chart and number 25 in the Dutch Top 40.
Del Amitri formed in Glasgow in 1980. The band consisted of Currie, Iain Harvie, Bryan Tolland and Paul Tyagi. The 1989 album 'Waking hours' proved to be their international breakthrough, containing their biggest hit, 'Nothing ever happens', which reached number 11 in the UK singles chart in January 1990.
'De vuile zeeballade' ('The ballad of the dirty sea') is a parody of the Dutch song 'De zuiderzeeballade' ('The ballad of the Zuiderzee'). The original song was an ode to the Zuiderzee, a lake in the Netherlands. The parody was all about environmental waste and people dumping oil and nuclear waste into the sea.
'Look out, there's a bonsai tree on your head!', that's what I always think when I see this sleeve. Why some artists choose to look so strange from time to time is beyond me. Besides all that, 'Together again' is actually quite a serious song. It was a tribute from Janet to friends who had recently passed from AIDS, as stated on album booklet of her 1997 album 'The velvet rope'. Originally written as a ballad, the track was re-arranged as a dance song.
Clannad consists of siblings Máire and Ciarán Brennan and their twin uncles Noel and Pádraig Duggan. They started making music together in 1970, initially having only some success in Ireland, where the band was based. In 1981, the other sibling Enya left the band to pursue a successful, if somewhat monotonous solo career.
The innovative music video for the Cars' 'You might think' is what prompted me to remember this song for years until I finally bought it in 1989, five years after its release. It was a single from their fifth studio album 'Heartbeat City', produced by Mutt Lange and the Cars. The music video was one of the first videos to use computerized effects. The video features band leader Ric Ocasek and model Susan Gallagher in a series of encounters. Ocasek appears in her bathroom mirror, in her mouth, as a fly, and as the Robot Monster, among other incarnations.
'Wuthering heights' was Kate Bush's debut single, released in January 1978. She'd written the song in 1976, aged just 18. The song came to her after watching the last ten minutes of the 1970 film version based on the book by Emily Brontë on television. Lyrically, 'Wuthering heights' uses several quotations from Catherine Earnshaw, most notably in the chorus - 'Let me in! I'm so cold!' - as well as in the verses, with Catherine's confession to her servant of 'bad dreams in the night.; It is sung from Catherine's point of view, as she pleads at Heathcliff's window to be allowed in. This romantic scene takes a sinister turn if one considers the events of the book, as Catherine may well be a ghost, calling Heathcliff to join her in death.
The guitar solo at the end of the song is played by Ian Bairnson, best known for his work with Alan Parsons. It is often mistakenly said that David Gilmour played the solo. It is placed rather unobtrusively in the mix, something engineer Jon Kelly now regrets.
The single became a huge success, peaking at number 1 in the charts in the UK, Australia, Belgium, Italy, France, Ireland and New Zealand. It reached number 4 in the Dutch Top 40. It was a phenomenal start of a career that fortunately continues to this day - although the gaps between albums have been increasingly hard to bear.
As an avid fan of Kate Bush, I ended up owning several copies of 'Wuthering heights'.The first copy I bought was a sleeveless one for 2 guilders, which is not the most beautiful item of my collection, so it is not shown here. A few years later, I bought a Belgian copy in Brussels. Then a few years after that I found a flawless copy from the UK in a standard EMI sleeve. Since it was made in 1977, it must have been one of the earliest copies of this single. Then I found a Dutch copy, with a sleeve printed in only a few colours. And finally, in 1992, I found a Spanish copy with a totally different sleeve. The classic Gered Mankowitz photograph was a good reason to buy that copy.
