I was about to embark upon one of my regular "timeslip moment" posts, focusing on this week in 1991, when I realised that - apart from being the year of the first Gulf War, the new Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, the IRA mortar attack on 10 Downing Street, Boris Yeltsin, the World Wide Web, Jeffrey Dahmer, the collapse of Cold War-era political structures including Yugoslavia and the USSR, the "Birmingham Six", the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, and "Sonic the Hedgehog"; the births of Ed Sheeran, Pixie Lott and the National Gallery's new Sainsbury Wing; and the deaths of Serge Gainsbourg, Robert Maxwell, Freddie Mercury, Graham Greene, Margot Fonteyn, Coral Browne and Lee Remick - this was the year that the godawful Everything I Do, I Do It For You took over the world!
Bryan Adams's song from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is still remembered with a shudder, yet it knocked Jason Donovan and his Joseph show-stopper Any Dream Will Do off the top in July twenty-seven years ago, and began its "The Black Hit of Space" run for four whole months! During its uncomfortable stranglehold at the top - even Radio 1 DJs began referring to this as "The Bryan Adams Years" - this behemoth saw off the likes of Guns & Roses' You Could Be Mine (fom the Terminator soundtrack), Heavy D & The Boyz and their heavy-on-the-rap version of the O'Jays classic Now That We Found Love, the karaoke favourite ballad More Than Words by Extreme, House/rave classics Move Any Mountain by The Shamen, Charly Says by The Prodigy, Insanity by Oceanic and Things That Make You Go Hmmm by C&C Music Factory, the Right Said Fred sing-a-long I'm Too Sexy, Ibiza chillout number (and Spandau Ballet True-sampling) Set Adrift On Memory Bliss by PM Dawn, Prince's Get Off, Let's Talk About Sex by Salt-n-Pepa, Wind of Change by The Scorpions, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life by Monty Python (which was actually re-released by popular demand in an attempt to unseat Mr Adams), and Get Ready For This by 2 Unlimited, before (finally) being knocked off the top slot by (of all things) The Fly by U2.
During that interminable sixteen weeks, in addition to the cavalcade of contenders above, Mr Adams also managed to see off not one, but two hits by one of our fave bands here at Dolores Delargo Towers, Erasure! And here they are, dear reader...
Much better...
That is much better. Thank you. I never realised that Andy Bell had such big hair back then?
ReplyDeleteChorus was my favourite Erasure album for a long, long while, until I'd listened to their self-titled follow-up about a thousand times and then it became (and still is) my favourite.
It is difficult to pin down a "favourite" among Erasure's output as - much like Pet Shop Boys - all their albums have at least a couple (if not an entire selection) of enduring delights... Jx
DeleteThey wuz robbed !
ReplyDeleteSo many good songs were... Jx
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