Entertainment For Lively Minds
Mick Jagger - That bloke who sang Dancing In The Street with that other bloke
I was thinking about this song recently. I was 5 years old going on 6 when it was in the charts, and at the time I loved it. I loved it so much that I asked my mum to get me a shirt like the one Mick Jagger wears in the video (she got me a shirt that was a different colour and less baggy. I still called it my "Mick Jagger shirt" and would happily dance round the living room to this song while wearing it and doing my best Mick moves).
Skip forward many years later: I have a few Rolling Stones albums, have got nearly all the Bowie albums (except a couple of eighties stinkers) and have been to see him live...and I absolutely love Tamla Motown. Yet if you asked me back in the eighties: Mick Jagger was simply that man who sings Dancing in the Street, David Bowie was the man who sang Dancing in the Street, and shortly after became the man who was also in one of my favourite films - Labyrinth (this guy was on a roll!). I had no idea who Martha Reeves was - as far I was concerned for many years 'Dancing in the Street' was an original composition by Jagger and Bowie.
Anybody else have any similar odd/awful introductions to people you later found out were music legends?
PS. Paul McCartney was of course "that man who sings the Frog Chorus". And I loved that too.
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I have told this before...
... but as a teenager I was a big Red Hot Chilli Peppers fan. Which meant that my intro to both Stevie Wonder and Bob Dylan was via them, shamefully.
These are pretty bad, but they introduced me to some good stuff so what can you do? There was no internet and Cumbernauld wasn't a hive of musical activity in the eighties.
HELP ME JESUS
I'd not heard that cover of Subterranean Homesick Blues before. I now desperately need to un-hear it.
With the exception of Maroon 5, I can usually pass over music that I don't like without experiencing visceral physical pain. Thanks to this I now feel like I have been possessed by a malevolent and putrid demon that rots the core of my being even as I breathe.
You have just raised my level of hatred towards this already despicable band to the Mark Chapman end of the scale.
Fortnightly funk night at my local nightclub, 1993
The live act had just finished a blistering set, the DJ (who, to be honest, was a bit of a ponce) put Stevie Wonder's "Higher Ground" on, and the atmosphere was great.
Then he killed the record around a minute-and-a-half in and announced to the crowd that "the bloke over there in the white chinos has just told me to turn that off because it's crap and put the Red Hot Chili Peppers on instead. After 3: 1, 2, 3..."
The crowd then erupted into a chorus of "You're a cunt, that's what you are, you're a fucking cunt" before the DJ put Stevie Wonder back on.
Evidently a regular thing at that particular haunt. It alarmed me as a naive 17-year-old, though (and no, I wasn't the bloke over there in the white chinos. It certainly dissuaded me from ever requesting a hot tune by Pearl Carr & Teddy Johnston, though.)
'My Ding A Ling'
You know the rest..my introduction to the art of Chuck Berry.
Also, now that folk-rock Albion is all in fashion, I should say that having to listen to the likes of 'All Around My Hat' and 'Streets of London' as an impressionable child detracted from what folk music could be about.
Nowt wrong wi' Steeleye Span
young lad...
Sisters of Mercy
At the very beginning of my teens I thought the Sisters of Mercy were very good indeed. So much so that I had copies of loads of bootlegs. On said bootlegs could be found staggeringly great versions of, among others, Gimme Shelter, Gimme Gimme Gimme, Jolene and Hot Chocolate’s Emma. If you’d asked me my favourite song of all time it would have been a toss up between their versions of Gimme Shelter and Emma both of which shat upon the originals from a very great height – despite, if I’m honest, never having heard said originals. Of course, with hindsight, not even the originals are the greatest song of all time but are clearly superior to Eldritch and chums efforts. Same goes for Dolly and Abba. Whatever happened to Andrew Eldritch?
I was never a goth
but 'This Corrosion' ( 'Hey now-Hey now. now') was a lot of fun.
I am watching