Sunday 30 April 2017

25 Years Since....April 1992

It's the end of the month so its time to look at a few tunes I was enjoying this time 25 years ago:

Mr Big - To Be With You

We were still in the era when I genuinely cared how records I liked performed in the charts. This record entered the charts in March and was at it's peak of number 3 at the beginning of April. Shakespear's Sister had been number one for several weeks, people were starting to get sick of it and it looked like this was ready to take it's place at the top of the charts.

Unfortunately that honour went to Right Said Fred with "Deeply Dippy" whilst this dropped down a place to number 4. I was angry and had a real grudge against Right Said Fred at the time and was glad to see their next single only reached 29 a few months later.

As for Mr Big, well just one more hit for them in May that year with "Just Take My Heart" which reached 26 and was nowhere near as good.

Still, this was the sort of music that Nirvana had apparently killed off in 1991...

SL2 - On A Ragga Tip

What I loved about this record at the time was that I had absolutely no idea what was being sung. Were they words or just noises? doesn't matter, it's something you can sing along to whether you know the words or not.

SL2 were Slipmatt and Lime and after becoming a raver I would acquire many Slipmatt tapes. It was remixed in 1997 and I bought the single. Included on it was a hardcore mix which also appeared in many sets on the tape packs I was buying at the time. It also included this original version and was probably the first time I'd heard it since 1992. Because rave music had gotten much faster I was amazed how slow this sounded, but nowadays its more a case of 1997 rave music sounding fast.

Kym Sims - Take My Advice

Kym Sims followed up her best known tune "Too Blind To See It" with this, which sounds very similar. Still, it's a great tune to sound similar too and as such I like this too.


Altern-8 - Evapor-8

If you asked back in April 1992 which rave act would go on to have number one hits, sell out arenas across the world and still have a huge following 25 years later, I would have said Altern-8.

What I didn't realise at the time was this wasn't the follow up to the hugely successful "Activ-8", they had released a single in between called "Frequency" which didn't make the top 40.

They had just one more single and just the one album and were finished by 1993. At the same time the Prodigy were enjoying the huge success from the debut album which came out at the end of 1992.

Marc Almond - The Days of Pearly Spencer

This was the third Marc Almond tune to have an impact on me, the others being "Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart" and "Jacky". What I didn't realise at the time was that all three were covers.

I've since heard the original of this, and I do think this cover is better. A tip though, just listen to the first 3 minutes of this, it's just a very lengthy outro that's a bit pointless and something they would miss out when on Top of the Pops etc as I recall.

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