Said to be the most successful duo of all time, Daryl Hall & John Oates nonetheless seemingly make little impact upon the general consciousness. Selections and words by: Jimmy Martin, Rory Gibb, Sophie Coletta, John Doran, Luke Turner, Laurie Tuffrey, Dale Berning, Petra Davis, Dan Barrow, Mat Colegate, Wyndham Wallace, Barnaby Smith, Matt Evans, Joel McIver, Andy Thomas, Nick Hutchings, Julian Marszalek, Nick Reed, Aug Stone.
Flock of seagulls i ran lyrics full#
Listen to the full list via the Spotify playlist below, and click here to read Robert Barry's Black Sky Thinking from last week, on camp, cheese, and why we should enjoy guilt-free pleasures A world, indeed, where the 'guilty pleasure' is a thing of the past, and we can enjoy all these absolute monsters entirely on their own merits, with alacrity. A world where 'cool' means gleaning glory from the racket emanating from the speakers, no matter how primitive, simplistic or shameless. A musical landscape without the eternal ball-and-chain of spurious notions of 'high' and 'low' art.
If there's a future for our tangles of vinyl, playlists and plastic in this irony-polluted and second-guessing era, surely it's with us looking forward rather than forever over our shoulders. Slowdive - a band considered a joke even by their own label and forced to split up in the face of complete indifference- reform twenty years later to joy, adulation and sold-out shows, having been discovered in the interim by electronic and metal fans unencumbered by the 90s indie fashion agenda that devoured them. Spurious notions of 'cool' have warped and buckled over the last thirty or forty years, and guilt has followed in their wake metal bands considered unconscionable by the hipster demi-monde in the 80s and 90s gain kudos either through fashion-mag irony or underground word-of-mouth, while their glorious din resonates at the same velocity regardless. The malign influence that leads to moans of 'manufactured pop', as if the Motown and Brill building scenes that spawned so many timeless classics weren't exactly that. The same mentality that leads to spurious talk of 'real' music, and to the bogus impression that a conservative and predictable mainstream rock band like Foo Fighters or Kings Of Leon is somehow more acceptable than a blast of iconoclastic mayhem by Carly Rae Jepsen or Spice Girls. These forces lead to the kind of warped logic that allows Jake Bugg to garner headlines attacking the X Factor as all that's wrong with modern music, as if his brand of luddite gruel isn't just as contrived and joyless as anything it's produced. Somewhere in the unfortunate morass of personal confusion that looms in the slipstream of an aural epiphany, there are two phantom bogeymen, and their names are 'credibility' and 'authenticity'. Yet last week, this triumph of camp menace and unselfconscious chutzpah placed sixth on Spotify's 'guiltiest pleasures' list collated from listeners' streaming habits, thus effectively relegating a masterpiece to a canon of 'cheese', of songs only enjoyable through a veneer of self-conscious irony.
A vicious, technicolor collision of a glamourous bruiser from Liverpool and three backroom boys with a commendable passion for the most fierce, garish and out-of-order Hi-NRG on the dancefloor as stupid as hell and four times as catchy. There can be few more perfect examples of a stone cold classic tune than Dead Or Alive's 'You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)'.
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