Classic Pop - UK (2019-11)

CRY JUST A LITTLE BIT SHAKIN’ STEVENS

(EPIC)

You’d have to have a musical microscope to locate any rockabilly in this school disco-

like number from the Welsh Elvis. Still, even if Cry Just A Little Bit

may have scared off his

quiffs-and-sidies fans, used to his chart-tickling brand of vintage rock’n’roll, this perky pop nugget would certainly have won him new ones. The song would be Shaky’s highest charting single of 1983, and, though his most successful days were by now behind him, he’d still score another No.1 two years later with the festive fave,

Merry Christmas Everyone

.

Though

Cry Just A Little Bit

remains one of

Shaky’s lesser-remembered hits, it was loved enough by 80s pop-country fl ash-in-the-pan Sylvia for her to cover it on her 1985 long-player,

One Step Closer

.

SAY SAY SAY PAUL M

CCARTNEY AND

MICHAEL JACKSON (PARLOPHONE)Whereas 1982’s

Thriller

cut

The Girl Is Mine

was essentially Paul McCartney guesting for Michael Jackson,

Say Say Say

is more Macca

than Jacko, not least for being produced by the

peerless George Martin and engineered by Beatles sound maestro Geoff Emerick. One of two Jackson tracks recorded for McCartney’s

Pipes Of

Peace

album, it’s

undeniably an earworm, even if its lyrics won’t win any literary gongs. Although

Rolling Stone

readers voted the song the ninth best collaboration of all time (though they had Boyz II Men and Mariah Carey at No.1, so what do they know?), the magazine itself called it “instantly hit-bound froth-funk that tends, after all, toward banality”. That’s gotta sting.

ALL NIGHT LONG (ALL NIGHT) LIONEL RICHIE (MOTOWN)Sorry, Russ Abbot, but when it comes to effervescent party bangers, this Caribbean-seasoned number from Sir Lionel of Richie beats Atmosphere

hands down. So sun-kissed you can

almost taste the piña colada, it was a radical departure for Richie at the time, moving his sound away from the silky soul of his Commodores days into more dance waters.

If you’re wondering what African language the

“tom bo li de say de moi ya, yeah, jambo jumbo” bit comes from, well, it’s gibberish, Richie having made the words up. “Somewhere in that made-up language, I am actually saying something,” he said later, “because even to this day, we’ll play India, and someone will tell me, ‘Yes, you’ve touched on certain words in [our language].’”

The joyfully memorable music video,

incidentally, was produced by former Monkee Michael Nesmith and directed by big-screen bigshot Bob Rafelson (

Head, Five Easy Pieces

).

UPTOWN GIRL BILLY JOEL

(CBS)

With a video that gave hope to every facially-challenged stubster that he could pull a glammed-up supermodel,

Uptown Girl

is, to date, Billy Joel’s most successful single in the UK, having netted the Bronx-born singer his only No.1 (though, bewilderingly, it only made No.3 in the US). Famously, the promo has Joel’s grubby gas station mechanic fl irting it up with the impossibly leggy Christie Brinkley, which may have elicited a general, “yeah, right!” from audiences had the improbable twosome not got it together in real life soon after. Interestingly, the song was written when the 5’ 5” Joel was dating another way-out-of-his-league supermodel, the 5’ 11” Elle Macpherson. How does the man do it?

BILLY JOEL SNAGS A SUPERMODEL, LIONEL RICHIE

MAKES UP A NEW LANGUAGE, THE CURE DISCOVER THEIR JOYFUL SIDE AND MACCA

AND JACKO BUDDY UP AGAIN

STEVE O’BRIEN

WEEK ENDING

13 NOVEMBER 1983

a

01

(1)

UPTOWN GIRL

BILLY JOEL

(CBS)

7TH WEEK ON CHART

02

(3)

SAY SAY SAY

PAUL M

CCARTNEY AND MICHAEL JACKSON

(PARLOPHONE)

6TH WEEK ON CHART