The Scotland World Cup Football Squad - We Have A Dream - Guilty Pleasure #4

It’s Friday, and despite our promise on our Twitter that Breaking More Waves would be a Jabulani / football / soccer / vuvuzela free zone, we really can’t help ourselves. It’s an absolute age since we posted a guilty pleasure, and in amongst all the debate about what is the greatest football song ever (answer = it has to be World in Motion by New Order of course, if only for that hand on hip 'rap') we’d like to bring you this gem. If you haven’t heard it before you really are in for a treat - of sorts. Or should we say of Scots ?

This evening if you’re from England, grab your space on the sofa, get the beers in the fridge, perfect your "Ingerland ,"shouting at the TV and bring out all those 1966 clichés. It's a once in four year ritual. If not, please support us, we need all the help we can get. Come on England Come on England. Come on England. Oh......

Normal new music service resumes next week. But for now, your country is needing you.

Bronski Beat - Smalltown Boy - Guilty Pleasure #3

This (very) occasional series may be called Guilty Pleasures, but we’re beginning to wonder if it should actually be called ‘Classic Pop We Love.’ Whilst our previous two choices (t.A.T.u and Kylie ) could quite possibly fit into the former category, there is a school of thought that says that Smalltown Boy by Bronski Beat is not a song to feel guilty about at all. So, let’s put this in a cultural context. In 1984 being gay was still something that a person could feel easily stigmatised about - it was, in a way, something that was a guilty pleasure to be. Of course the prejudice and ignorance regarding homosexuality that Jimmy Sommerville sang about in his song Disenchanted with his later band The Communards now seems like a distant memory. Just a blot on the receding landscape. Doesn’t it ? Oh, actually hello Jan Moir, maybe we’re not there yet.

But in the mid 80’s the debut single from Bronski Beat seemed like a revelation. They were one of the first glad to be gay pop bands. Here were fresh, honest, politicised young men playing disco danceable electronic pop music. Smalltown Boy was one of their defining moments, telling a tale of discovery - a young man leaving the parental nest because the “Answers you seek will never be found at home.” It’s accompanying video saw three men cruising for boys in a swimming pool. It was so openly gay that in the 80’s it was quite remarkable. With this single Bronski Beat brought gay men and their feelings to the mainstream and with it formed the way for a lava flow of hot gay danceable pop that started with Culture Club and Soft Cell and continued with amongst many others including Dead Or Alive and Erasure.

Looking back now, this openness of sexuality in pop seems to have almost regressed. How many mainstream outwardly gay bands are there in the UK charts right now ? How many flamboyantly honest and unique acts are there ? Will Young anyone ? Doesn't quite fit the bill does he ? As lead singer Sommerville says in the sleeve notes to his Very Best Of compilation “Culturally we’ve become so homogenised. We have a new generation of pop stars, of artists; except they’re not artists, they’re just fodder for production teams and stylists. They come from stage school and they can dance, they can hold a note, they can act a bit, they look nice - but they don’t have anything that goes ‘bang!’ I can still enjoy some trashy pop, but once upon a time it shared a stage with other stuff, it didn’t dominate. Now it dominates because it’s a safe bet, and that’s sad.”

Smalltown Boy is a lonely moving song with a beautiful melody set to a wonderful electronic rhythm. It hit number 3 in the charts and the album Age Of Consent reached number 4. Sommerville himself went on to have considerable success with his next band The Communards, as well as solo.

Bronski Beat - Smalltown Boy - The funniest home videos are here

Kylie Minogue - I Should Be So Lucky - Guilty Pleasure #2

“In my imagination there is no complication, I dream about you all the time.” So starts the words of one of the greatest pop songs of the late eighties - I Should Be So Lucky by Kylie Minogue

When we last wrote about a guilty pleasure (see here) we suggested that many such delights are one hit wonders. Far from it with Kylie Minogue. Not only has she had hit after hit but she went on to produce one of the greatest pop songs and videos of this decade in Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. We wrote about this song for another blog (here). Can’t Get You Out Of My Head was no guilty pleasure though. It was a classic piece of throbbing robot pop. I Should Be So Lucky however has a big whiff of mature cheddar about it that was served up with a musical toast by three pop waiters who dominated the charts in the back end of the eighties. Stock Aitken and Waterman allegedly wrote the song in forty minutes and then recorded it with Kylie an hour. It went on to be a worldwide hit, topping the charts in Australia, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Switzerland and the UK, where it was the third biggest selling single of the year.

Stock, Aitken and Waterman are one of the most successful song writing and producing teams of all time, having scored over one hundred UK top forty singles. It can also be argued that they have produced some of the greatest guilty pleasures known to man. Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astely, You Spin Me Round (Like A Record) by Dead Or Alive, Too Many Broken Hearts by Jason Donovan, and Venus by Bananarama were all conceived by these three pop dukes. Their template was simple - high energy dance synth pop that sounded good in mainstream clubs and on the radio, with a production line output. It worked time after time.

Stock Aitken and Waterman were the springboard for Kylie Minogue in the UK. Her first splash came with this song. Years later however, in a vastly different form, I Should Be So Lucky showed that it has longevity as a song, that Kylie Minogue is a performer of the highest order and that Kylie is a far far sexier performer than the firework nipple spouting Lady Ga Ga or the whoops I've just shown my minge Britney Spears. (See video below). Kylie we salute you. Hardly a guilty pleasure at all really.

t.A.T.u - Guilty Pleasure #1

When Sean Rowley began his Guilty Pleasures night in a working mens club in Hammersmith in 2004 he could have barely envisaged the success story that it would become. A TV show, a series of compilation CD’s, DJing at festivals and a sold out residency at Koko in Camden lead to Guilty Pleasures becoming a hugely popular brand. Suddenly the shamelessly cheesy tunes which he championed, from The Nolans I’m In The Mood For Dancing to Jump by Van Halen no longer seemed pleasures to feel guilty about - Koko became a youth club for thirty year olds, where everyone was genuinely enjoying themselves. As the tunes kept on rolling, the audiences got even bigger. One of our most enduring memories of 2006 was watching 10,000 people frug madly to The J. Geils Band song Centerfold in broad daylight as the Guilty Pleasures DJ’s sliced up the musical cheddar in between bands on the main stage at Bestival.

Then as the brands popularity increased the term Guilty Pleasures started to be deconstructed by journalists. Why did so many people enjoy a night singing and dancing along to Hanson, Toni Basil and The Bee Gees? Were people enjoying the nights in some odd smug wink-wink knowing irony or was it just that people genuinely liked these songs? It seems that Rowley had hit upon a simple answer. Once people let their hair down, uncool music makes them feel the happiest.

Which leads us onto to the subject of this blog, the first in an occasional series where we look back rather than forward at some of the bands that gave us those guilty pleasures. Sometimes we intend to just recall the originals, and wax lyrical about their greatness. Other times, such as today, we will look at the bands more recent material as well as the old classics. Don't worry, the blog is not going fully retro, but it's nice to take a breather now and then, and put a smile on our faces.

Guilty Pleasures are often one hit wonders or a single standout song. For example, can anyone remember another tune by The New Radicals except You Get What You Give ?

For Breaking More Waves t.A.T.u are one such pleasure. Remember them ? The Russian fake lesbians ? All The Things She Said swept across Europe like swine flu. With Trevor Horn bringing masterful glossy pop production to the tune, his best since Frankie Goes To Hollywood, it was a thundering chart bound triumph. Of course mention t.A.T.u now and people’s minds will invariably wander to the video rather than the song, which is a shame, for in terms of huge commercial pop tunes All The Things She Said was as big as they get. It’s one of our guilty pleasures, but actually we’re not even guilty about it. We love it. It probably helps that we missed the whole furore about the so called controversial video, having first caught the song on the radio without any preconceived ideas.

In the UK t.A.T.u weren’t strictly a one hit wonder, Not Gonna Get Us, which was almost as good hit number seven in the charts, but after that as far as the majority of the public were concerned t.A.T.u were over. However in Russia t.A.T.u have continued to have success, the song Snegopady (translated as Snowfalls) spending nine weeks on rotation on Russian MTV this summer.

However on October the thirtieth of this year, t.A.T.u showed that they don’t consider themselves as just a going concern in Russia, putting out an English language version of their song White Robe on You Tube, even although the single is a couple of years old in their home country. Whilst the song isn’t a patch on All The Things She Said, it’s still a quirky piece of synthtopia with lyrics about “Flying bullets hit the targets, wings and halo’s five to seven, in this white robe, through the darkness, paragliding back to heaven.” However if anyone in the mainstream UK media clocks the Russian version of the video for the song, T.A.T.U controversy could kick up all over again. In terms of exposed flesh it puts Lady Ga Ga to shame. Sex sells. So, if you’ve been forgotten about, why not both take your clothes off completely (yes all of them) and then add a really controversial ending to your video. Watch the whole thing by clicking on this link here and you’ll see what we mean. Desperate ? Or art ? You decide. In the meantime, here's the classic All The Things She Said.