And, to top it all off, it ends with the sound of someone puking their guts out – always the sign of a killer party.Edwyn Collins and co bagged their first, and last, Top 10 hit when ‘Rip It Up’ was released as a single – and it’s easy to see why.
Although Tennant was not openly gay at this stage, hindsight reveals what that perpetual “sin” was. This surreal mix – Colourbox and AR Kane, Dave Dorrell and CJ Mackintosh – produced a record that was clever enough to woo the purists, pop enough to top the singles charts and cheeky enough to get torpedoed by a writ from Stock Aitken Waterman.Between the 1986 vaudeville funk of ‘Parade’ and the following year’s state of the cosmos address, Prince had ditched The Revolution – in name at least – and set about taking full credit for his new clear-eyed vision.
‘Velocity Girl’ was a great slice of vintage eighties jangle pop – a style and sound that the band would distance themselves from with ‘Screamadelica’ , but from the teen-misfit of the title to the energized bolt of the music, this was a perfect moment of 80s indie Britpop.The Triple X-rated nature of this track should not overshadow how absolutely As a storyteller, Springsteen is unsurpassed and so it was with 1982’s ‘Atlantic City’, with this particular tale pairing a musical sparseness with lyrical complexity.
The Valentinos version entered the Billboard Hot 100 on June 27, 1964, where it stayed on the chart for two weeks, peaking at number 94. The result was indie gold.http://players.brightcove.net/19012535001/default_default/index.html?videoId=1490891848001http://players.brightcove.net/19012535001/default_default/index.html?videoId=1414932997001Though New Order’s dancefloor fillers were far removed from Joy Division’s bleak nihilism, there was a no nonsense approach to both that united Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris’ two ventures in direct and uncompromising brilliance. Contemplating his life post- divorce from Carrie Fisher, the song meshed afro-pop with his wonderfully literate, singer/songwriter songwriting style and the results were typically unforgettable. So why pretend. Well is it now?" Here the punk poet tackled Vietnam, immigration and gentrification. Here, however, we whittle down a decade of societal decadence and political decay into the 100 tracks that defined it. Still groovy as a hepcat, ‘Sign ‘O’ The Times’ is stripped back like Sly Stone’s ‘Family Affair’; all the better to focus on a lyric that bemoans drug addiction, HIV and the damned space race.Grace Jones’s fusion of funk and reggae, a perfect blend for the Island label, was smoothed considerably by rhythm section Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, who slipped comfortably into the musical melting pot of the new wave scene. “Cameo had been around for donkey’s years, even occasionally sidling into the UK charts with the ultra-smooth funk of ‘She’s Strange’ and ‘Single Life’, but it took an enormous red codpiece and silly twang to make Larry Blackmon a true star. But Arctic Monkeys didn’t namecheck ‘Rio’ in ‘I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor’ for naught – they knew that, despite the horrowshow haircuts, it’s still one of the sexiest and sunniest synthpop singles of the 80s.Now that they’re the punchline to a million stadium-rock sized jokes, it’s easy to forget what made everyone first fall in love with U2 many moons ago – namely, big ol’ emotional rock ballads like this. The purists may grumble it lacks the blackened romanticism of The Cure at their most cutting edge, but it’s nice to hear old Bob sounding so utterly besotted – even if his paramour does, admittedly, go AWOL by the time he’s done.Splutters into life with the wheezing strains of a dusty harmonica before exploding into a full-blown yarn of a dwindling country economy in which times are hard and work is scarce to find. Yet there’s something about The Boss’s masculine-yet-balmy vocal that’s immensely comforting; dreams are dashed, the river runs dry, but somehow, everything is gonna be alright.A worthy first UK Number One for Messr Weller, ‘Going Underground’ will forever be one of The Jam’s finest cuts. Here, they struck gold with this searching, rap-pop gem which sampled ‘Multiplication Rock’.Originally offered to a host of artists including Bryan Ferry, The Pretenders and Billy Idol, it fell to Simple Minds to take this track and turn it into Top 40 gold on both sides of the Atlantic. All the more kudos to hip-hop pioneer Melle Mel, then, who used the catchiest of R&B grooves and street-smart rhymes to make the whole Just Say No message sound a lot more exciting than it had any right to be.Nirvana became one of the biggest bands on the planet in the 90s, but Kurt Cobain was already proving himself as a master craftsmen before that.