Classic Pop April 2019

You Take Me Up THOMPSON TWINS (ARISTA)Despite being Thompson Twins’ biggest chart hit (it made No.2 and spent a total of 11 weeks in the Top 40),

frontman Tom Bailey remains fairly dismissive of

You Take Me Up

, calling it “almost

forgettable in a certain sense, but behind it, the subject matter is really important.”

The inspiration for the track came from the

spiritual songs that black slaves would sing in the cotton fi elds, only reimagined for modern day factory workers (“I cry in my sleep (cry boy, cry boy)/ Just makes me weep when I try, how I try/ Know what it means to work hard on machines/ It’s a labour of love so please don’t ask me why”). Afterwards, while performing live and staring out at a sea of Thompson Twins T-shirts, Bailey had an epiphany that their merchandise was being made by the kind of person he’d written about. “You think, ‘This is what this song is about,’” he refl ected. “So the whole thing kind of comes rushing home to you.”

A Love Worth Waiting ForSHAKIN’ STEVENS (EPIC) Penned by Stuart Leathwood (former axeman of Merseybeat combo The Koobas) and Gary Sulsh

(sometime jingle writer) and produced by Richard Hewson (who, as an arranger, worked on The Beatles’

The Long And Winding

Road

), this was the fourth cut off Shaky’s

1983 long-player,

The Bop Won’t Stop

.

A frankly forgettable and rather bilious love song, it felt a universe away from Shaky’s rockabilly beginnings. The video, shot over two days in Farnham and Chiddingfold (oh, the glamour), featured Shaky’s son, playing the singer as a kid, as he wistfully remembers a long-lost love, who reappears, all grown up, at the end. Yeuck.

People Are People DEPECHE MODE (MUTE)“People are people, so why should it be/ You and I should get along so awfully?” asks a clearly concerned Dave Gahan in this fi rst cut off Depeche Mode’s fourth waxing,

Some Great

Reward

. One of the quartet’s most crackerjack

HelloLIONEL RICHIE (MOTOWN)If you ever fi nd yourself face to face with Lionel Richie, resist the temptation of greeting him with the words, “Hello, is it me you’re looking for?” He may well plaster on a smile, but, trust us, he gets this tunes is sadly let down by Martin Gore’s artlessly on-the-nose lyrics, with the songwriter joining his bandmate to ponder, “I can’t understand/ What makes a man/ Hate another man/ Help me understand”. Gore himself remains red-faced by the track, lambasting it as “too commercial” and “too nice”, and they’ve not sung it live since 1988. Still, if you want to see the group performing the song while larking about on HMS Belfast, well, the video’s still out there. And listen out for some unusual, kitchen-based percussion. “We used to go into studios,” Gahan told Entertainment Weeklyin 2017, “and the fi rst thing we’d do, we’d ask where the kitchen was – literally for pots and pans and things that we could throw down the stairs.”

all the time

. Also, best not to caress his

face, in the way the blind woman does in this video. He defi nitely doesn’t like

that

. This is a song where

the promo is as well-known, if not more so, than the track itself, with Richie starring as a theatre teacher who’s fallen for one of his students. Richie never liked the video, telling its director Bob Giraldi that it had nothing to do with the lyrics. Giraldi simply told the singer, “You’re not creating the story, I am.” And when it came to that fi nal shot, where the girl unveils a bust she’s sculpted of her teacher, Richie complained it looked nothing like him. “Lionel,” came Giraldi’s response, “she’s blind...”

SHAKY GETS SLUSHY, LIONEL SAYS ‘HELLO’, THE WEATHER GIRLS ISSUE THEIR WEATHER REPORT,

THE SPECIAL AKA CAMPAIGN FOR THE RELEASE OF

NELSON MANDELA AND MORE...

STEVE O’BRIEN

WEEK ENDING

8 APRIL 1984

a

1

(1)

Hello

LIONEL RICHIE

(MOTOWN)

6TH WEEK ON CHART

2

(2)

A Love Worth Waiting For

SHAKIN’ STEVENS

(EPIC)

4TH WEEK ON CHART